Comic Strip of the Day Editorial cartooning

CSotD: Pot Pourri (That There’s French)

Skip to comments

Mike Peterson Published: October 10, 2025 Updated: October 10, 2025 1 minute 13 comments

We’ll start with an obvious news story that tells a lot about the depths to which we have plunged. As Alcaraz notes, this year’s Super Bowl gains a special regional flavor as the halftime show features an American performing in Spanish.

As Margulies points out there are a lot of lightly educated bigots who have a problem with that, and there’s no better way to personify it than to have this nitwit thinking surely there must be something in the Constitution to make performing in Spanish illegal and unAmerican.

Now, granted, Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican and not a Californio, but as far as I know, the Super Bowl had never required its halftime entertainers to come from the city of record. In fact — and you may find this hard to believe — but many of the players themselves do not actually come from the cities where their teams are located.

But what makes Margulies’s cartoon particularly funny is that, when the Constitution was written, Santa Clara, where the game will be played, was a decade old and part of New Spain. Americans weren’t even allowed there: When Jedidiah Smith and a group of fur traders visited California in 1826, it was part of Mexico and they were arrested.

And there wasn’t even a wall, though I’m sure Mexico would have paid for it if they’d wanted one.

I’m also reasonably sure that, when Smith and company were being charged, jailed briefly and then released (Mexico being a civilized nation), they needed a translator. And Bad Bunny hadn’t been born yet.

Anyway, the Californians, Arizonans, New Mexicans, Texans and so forth didn’t make a law forcing people there to speak Spanish and perhaps they should have. Or they might have made signing required, since there were many indigenous languages spoken there.

But English wasn’t one of them, so chill out, pendejo.

Speaking of people who have no idea how things work in California, here’s a cartoon by a native Californian who doesn’t understand the concept of democracy.

Before having a mid-decade redistricting rammed down their throats the way the Tejanos did, California is having what is called an “election,” or, more specifically, a “plebiscite” or “referendum” in which the people will choose whether to have redistricting.

A more accurate cartoon might show them lining up to vote in a free society. Or shift the focus to Texas and have voters bound and gagged by elephants.

Not that democracy and the will of the people have much of a place in American politics at the moment, but in the latest poll, Californians favor redistricting by a 54/36 margin.

We may be a deeply divided country, but Byrnes takes an optimistic view, pointing out one issue upon which we can all agree, except for the people who are in those files.

That could go up for a vote in Congress, but for some reason it just doesn’t seem to. Curiouser and curiouser!

We’re playing the blame game, in which, as Ramirez says, everybody says everybody else is to blame. This would be more accurate if the elephant were holding a slingshot, however, since the entire mess seems to be hung up on a single item and Democrats have said they wouldn’t mind discussing some kind of compromise, while Republicans refuse to enter discussions.

Seems a pity that the doubling of health care premiums won’t hit until just after the midterms, which brings to mind this

Juxtaposition of the Day

Walters depicts farmers as idiots, while Fell suggests they may be realizing that supporting Trump was a suicidal move. Guess which one lives in Nebraska and is married to a farm girl?

Will ag workers switch sides? There is that “team loyalty” factor, which keeps people showing up for Cleveland Browns games. In 2016, coal miners voted for Dear Leader because Clinton offered retraining and Trump promised coal mining jobs, which didn’t happen, but they voted for him again anyway the next time around.

Similarly, soybean farmers were gutted by Trump’s trade wars in his first term and, instead of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,” they went with Bullwinkle’s “This time for sure!” in 2024.

Meanwhile, I’ve heard unpersuasive “solutions” that mostly prove the speaker has never seen a field except from an airplane and thinks Green Acres was a documentary.

A little respect could go a long way.

Speaking of people popping off about things they don’t understand, Dear Leader solved the Israel/Gaza war just in time to win the Nobel Peace Prize, as long as the committee was sitting around wondering who to award it to up until 48 hours before they had to make the announcement.

In any case, if Dear Leader decides to go out to Portland and see if it really is a flaming bomb crater, he’d better take off that dove costume or his thugs will plaster him with pepper balls and tear gas.

I understand why Dear Leader thinks Portland is war-torn and that the Nobel committee hasn’t decided about the Peace Prize yet, given that he appears to have the focal powers of a cocker spaniel and leaps from opinion to opinion. There is an old political gibe, “If you want to know what he thinks, find out who he spoke to last,” but it’s rarely been as directly applicable as it is in this case.

And while Luckovich has him listening to Stephen Miller, he seems to have been listening to Little Bobby lately, because the latest astonishing theory is that circumcision causes autism, which I’d never heard of, or at least that giving babies Tylenol after circumcision causes it, which I’ve also never heard of, but which came up at a Cabinet meeting yesterday.

Then again, it’s a pretty good topic on which to take medical advice from a schmuck.

An Important Announcement

Don’t forget to buy your prom tickets before next Wednesday, and come by the cafeteria tonight after school to paint posters!