In a global sense, the hardest part of human existence is finding the balance between yearning for more and accepting what we have. People who simply settle are considered lazy or unambitious. People who constantly yearn for more are considered selfish or too ambitious. Somewhere in the space between there is a place where we should reside.

Donald Trump is never going to jail. Yes, he has 91 charges. Yes, he has committed any number of unspeakable crimes and there is probably another 100 he hasn’t been charged with and we can’t prove. Ken Paxton is never going to jail. Yes, he has been charged with crimes in federal court, but that was nearly a decade ago. The wheels of justice just roll differently for some people. Or don’t.

The Supreme Court recently decided to hear oral arguments on the claim that Donald Trump had absolute immunity to do whatever the hell he wanted as president of the United States. That doesn’t mean they agree mind you. I can’t think of any legal or historical justification for it, but I am only a mere political science major. I’m sure more learned legal and constitutional scholars could weigh in, but the notion that a president can be above the law is ludicrous on its face.

The Trump phenomenon is both fascinating from an academic sense and infuriating from a real life sense. Trump has managed to tap into everyone’s hate, fear, and insecurities all the while being the embodiment of that hate, fear, and insecurity. We have a two-tiered justice system. Everyone knows it and everyone feels frustration by it. How else could we explain someone getting charged 91 times and not going to trial for any of it? Yet, he is allowed to prattle on about it in his speeches and somehow the MAGAs see him as their warrior against it and not the ultimate recipient of it. It’s both fascinating and infuriating at the same time.

If this is normal then we have some serious problems. The truth of the matter is that it hasn’t been normal up until this point. Even if we take the Supreme Court and all of the lower courts at their word, they are treating this like it was business as usual. Yes, under normal circumstances we would want to delay criminal proceedings when those proceedings are political in nature. The trouble is that Trump presents a clear and present danger to the welfare of the United States. He clearly ran for president to avoid legal responsibility. It’s transparent. It’s disgusting. It’s incredibly demoralizing to watch it actually work.

Someone smarter than me once said that the universe bends towards justice. I can’t debate that eternal wisdom, but I doubt it every single day. I have no doubt that Trump will someday pay the piper, but it will likely happen in the history books. His children will be left with the bill. I’m sure there is some culpability there, but you have to wonder if that’s justice at all. I suppose in some sense it is and I suppose it is the best we can possibly do. Somewhere between the world we have and the world we want is a world we can strive for. Maybe someday that second tier of people that evade justice can finally reap what they sow. At least we can hope.

Author’s Note: I know many of you have expressed concern about Juanita. I got in touch with her yesterday. She is experiencing some health problems that she would not get into. They are not life threatening but she is taking a break from writing for awhile. I and the others will do the best we can to give you something to chew on until she feels up to giving us the same great content she has always given us.

I don’t know much. I studied political science in college, but as I am fond of saying, I have slept since then. However, I remember the concept of political parties and how they are supposed to work. Every party polices themselves and I suppose that’s the main problem. Politics works in fairly simple and predictable ways. Parties have platforms and they use those platforms to govern their solutions to our problems. At least, those are the problems they identify as our problems. Conservatives have identified border security as a problem. Obviously, we can get into any number of discussions as to how true that actually is, but let’s keep things simple.

James Lankford (R-OK) helped broker a deal on immigration reform in the senate. It is about as conservative as any deal anyone could imagine, Remember, the senate is Democratic. There was no reason for the deal to be as conservative as it was except for the fact that Democrats want to make a deal. It included aide of Israel, Ukraine, and Gaza, but otherwise there was very little most Democrats would want. Obviously, the House is more conservative in the Senate. It is where the so-called Freedom Caucus lives. They could take the bill and delete things they don’t like and add things they would like, but they have chosen to kill it instead. Why? Their fearless leader has told them to do so. We can’t solve our nation’s problems because if we solve those problems then we can’t campaign on them.

It is what happened next that kills me. The Oklahoma GOP voted to censure Lankford On the one hand, that means virtually nothing. A censure has all the weight of Barney Fife yelling stop in downtown Mayberry. It is the story it tells to all of us and their party members. He helped negotiate a deal and it was a favorable one to them. He is essentially being punished for governing. You may not like the deal he made. I get that. In that case you either simply vote no or you get involved and make the changes you think you need to be made. We don’t punish and scold people for governing. At least we don’t if we are a functional political party.

This is a good news and bad news kind of thing. We won’t have a deal on immigration. From the Democratic side, we can say at least we won’t have a bad deal. On the bad side, it means we will hear all kinds of crap about open borders, catch and release, fentanyl, and terrorists flooding over the board. It is all Brandon’s fault. We know better and we hopefully can get most voters to know that. Even if they believe the malarkey about the border being the wild west, they can at least get the idea that the Republicans killed their own bill. They would rather have a problem to point to than solve it. This is not how things are supposed to work, but then again I have slept since my political science classes.

I was reading an article last night that talked about family estrangement. The whole idea of estrangement has always been foreign to me. Certainly, there are some family members that you talk to more than others. Obviously, there is a natural dividing line between family we would consider to be close and family that is extended beyond what is reasonable to expect a regular connection with. The folks talking about family estrangement aren’t really talking about that.

In particular, the article I read was focused more on the relationship between adult children and their parents. According to one article, as many as one and four Americans and one in five Europeans reports they are estranged from at least one family member. Again, I’m not sure how that is defined. The focus of the articles seemed to be on parent/child relationships but even that figure in Europe seems high much less the U.S. figure.

Estrangement is a unique thing. It means ties are severed forever. They become persona non grata and that just seems like an extreme measure. Yet, it is not difficult to see why it is on the rise. The politics of the last five or so years have gone from bad to downright frightening. I can’t relate in my own family and yet my wife is estranged from some of her extended family. It has always been the case as long as I’ve known her and as far as I know it isn’t political in nature.

Everyone likes to put this at the door of one man and I suppose that seems natural enough. Yet, that cannot account for the fact that this is happening in Europe as well. I have no idea if it is happening on other continents as well. I suppose that research would be easy enough. There has always been tension between the generations. Go back far enough and you will see quotes about how the new generation just doesn’t get it. They’ve become soft. They’ve become entitled. They’ve become fill in the blank. At any point in history they could have been talking about our own generation.

So, it isn’t that either. Our daughter honestly feels like things will get better when her generation takes over. They weren’t the ones to muck it up. I had to point out that Generation X says that about the Baby Boomers. Yet, enough of us (Generation X) are in positions of power that we now get to own whatever it is that has gone wrong. I also had to point out that the people in her classes that she calls idiots, jackasses, and whatever else will some day be in charge.

Again, that’s all natural and has always been there. This is something else entirely. This is finding out that someone in your family has become so vile and so toxic that we cannot associate with them anymore. I suppose we could say they’ve become that which we loathe, but chances are they always were that and we didn’t notice. Chances are we even saw it and told ourselves we could live with it before. It’s just another brick in the walls that divide us and goodness knows if those walls will ever be torn down.

The funny thing about fear is that it is all a part of the same conversation. Women are afraid that their rights will be taken away after 48 years and that is the big news item of the day. Protesters from the summer and before were finally standing up to rogue law enforcement forcing people of color to live in fear of their lives when they encounter law enforcement. The fear I’m thinking of today is a lot closer to home.

It’s sad when you see that fear first hand. It’s heartbreaking when you see it in your own children. Our daughter’s school had a couple of days of bomb threats this week. Social media is doing what it does and managed to spread all kinds of rumors about what might happen. So, more than half the school decided to stay home yesterday. The principal said those absences would be excused. She obviously understood the impulse.

My wife and I sat there as our daughter cried when we discussed her coming to school today. We left it up to her. Forcing her to go seemed somehow cruel. Yet, she talked a long time about the guilt of avoiding a possible event. It didn’t make sense and yet it made perfect sense. She decided to go and yet the fear she is feeling is unavoidable. We can only hope it dissipates before it becomes a permanent thing.

The source of this fear is the same. The abortion ban, Rittenhouse, our hometown domestic terrorist, rogue law enforcement, and isolated gun nuts all look the same. They are all virtually the same. None of them look like the people they want you to fear. They all look like the people pointing the finger. Funny how that all works out. No one knows the identity of the kid making threats at the school, but the good money says it’s a white male. It almost always is.

Animal behavior can teach us a lot. We have a 100 pound Rottweiler, 16 pound ginger cat, and a ten pound tabby cat at home. The tabby cat has an overactive sense of fear. She somehow channels that fear and turns it into rage as she lashes out at the other two. The dog doesn’t want to be within ten feet of her. Here is this huge and physically imposing animal cowering in fear of something one-tenth his size. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Perhaps it’s personification instead. A relatively small group of people are so activated by fear that they induce real terror in the rest of us. We often expect them to look in the mirror and attack the reflection. The opportunists among them somehow manage to take a fear they created and turn around and offer protection from it. When you see it happening in general it makes you angry. When you see it happening to your own family it breaks your heart. When you see a little jackass using the exact same tactics as one of the two major political parties it makes you incredibly sad. The monsters are indeed hiding under the bed and they are pointing the fingers at everyone else. I guess it’s time to sleep with the light on.

Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot 3 people, killing two, was acquitted yesterday by a jury in Kenosha Wisconsin. Taking almost 30 hours for deliberation, the jury showed careful diligence in arriving at its verdicts, yet those verdicts were not only unjust; they exposed the raw and tragic truth that when it comes to gun violence, our justice system can no longer actually deliver justice.

The killings and the resulting verdicts defy logic.  An underaged teenager illegally possessing a firearm that was illegally bought by a straw purchaser crossed state lines to join an illegal police action by an unauthorized self-styled “militia”.  He then left the group that was “guarding” businesses and wandered into the crowd that was protesting police brutality.  Rittenhouse, displaying the maturity of a 17-year-old, walked into an angry crowd protesting a police shooting and was then shocked at those people’s reaction.  Had he walked into the crowd without an AR-15 strapped to his chest, probably nothing would have happened; with an AR-15 he almost guaranteed to provoke a response, and he got it, in spades.  Rittenhouse fired a number of shots, hitting three people and killing two of them.  But for him toting an AR-15 in plain sight, this tragedy would not have happened.

Let’s go through the crimes committed by Rittenhouse and his compatriots.  First, the straw purchase.  Rittenhouse’s friend, Dominick Black, aged 20, bought the gun for him because he was too young.  That purchase violates federal and state laws, and Black has been charged, but not tried.  Second, Rittenhouse was charged with minor in possession, but just as final arguments began in his trial, the judge, citing a ridiculous reading of the statute, ordered the charge dropped.  The technicality he cited? An inconsistency in the law that said minors can’t carry a weapon unless it has a long barrel.  The defense had argued this technicality, and the judge bought it, effectively rendering the entire law toothless and unenforceable.  The remaining charges were first degree reckless homicide, two counts of first degree recklessly endangering safety, first degree intentional homicide, and attempted first degree intentional homicide.  The defense argument was simple – self-defense.  They painted Rittenhouse as a good intentioned teenager who was attacked by vicious rioters while trying to protect property and provide medical aid.  The judge, acting more like defense co-counsel rather than the trial judge, went along with this argument, banning the term “victim” or “victims” for those who were shot, but allowed them to be called “rioters”, “looters”, and “arsonists”.

But worse than the judge putting his foot on the scales of justice is the idiocy of today’s gun laws in most US states.  Many states, like Texas, have undone two centuries of common-sense gun laws by perverting the meaning of the Second Amendment through decades of junk law that now permeates federal and state case law.  Intended as a protection for the newly founded US government by providing for a citizen army made up of militias under state and local authority, the Second Amendment has been turned on its head from providing for the common defense to enabling any idiot to own and carry a gun in public.  This effort, driven by gun manufacturers and their lobbyists, with a big assist from Antonin Scalia and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, is virtually complete. Just this year, Texas joined nineteen other states that eliminated all licensing requirements for the open carry of guns in public.  It already allowed open carry of guns, but eliminated all licensing and training requirements, falsely calling such a radical practice as “constitutional carry,” which is nonsense.  All but a handful of states now allow the open carry of firearms in some form or another.  What could possibly go wrong?

Guns are now a fixture in political rallies and protests.  This practice is almost exclusively on the right wing of the political spectrum where outrage is fueled by systemic disinformation which drives the outraged to show up in body armor, helmets, and toting loaded firearms.  Guns and politics don’t mix, have never mixed, and will never mix, but now threats of physical violence and actual violence is commonplace during protests.  Troublemakers often pose as legitimate protestors for the sole purpose of starting destruction and violence, like they did during the George Floyd protests of 2020.  They then use the trouble they caused as an excuse to carry firearms to “protect” businesses and property, mostly owned by white people.

And now, after the Rittenhouse acquittals, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.  The lesson learned in this trial is that self-defense is a winning argument even when the person claiming self-defense actually started the incident.  The fact is that, but for Rittenhouse wandering into a protest with a locked and loaded AR-15, no one would have died that night in Kenosha.  HE provoked the protestors by openly carrying a weapon of war into a political protest that was already very tense.  When people responded to his provocation, he then shot them, killing two, and then successfully defended that action in court by pretending that the incident began at the moment protestors responded to his provocation.  We have a very similar argument going on right now in Georgia, where three white men chased, confronted, and threatened an unarmed black man, Ahmad Aubrey, who was simply jogging through a neighborhood.  After pulling out a shotgun, one of the defendants then murdered Aubrey.  Their legal justification?  Self-defense.  As ridiculous as that sounds, the trial is in Georgia, and the jury is made up of 11 white men.  I have virtually no expectation that justice will be done in that case either, and I’ll bet you a dollar to a donut that the defense cites the Rittenhouse acquittals as precedent.

I quit the NRA in the 1980s when it went nuts and Charlton Heston started screaming, “From my cold dead hands!” at every meeting.  Being a gun owner, I have been actively opposing for well over a decade the radical gun culture that permeates Texas.  Our politicians have totally failed us, even failing to protect other Texans from gun nuts in the goddam state capitol, creating the necessity of installing panic buttons in every politician’s office to summon state troopers in the event a gun nut gets upset.   Death threats against anyone that gun nuts don’t like is commonplace.  Outrage from disinformation has created an alternative reality where up is down, left is right, the earth is flat, and the sun rises in the west.  Gun nuts even bring guns to protests against science based public health policy.  Career health officials are being driven from office by these threats, and now school board members and their families must be protected by police.

This is insanity that cannot be altered by reason, so I’m changing tactics.  Tomorrow I’m trotting my happy ass down to Guns ‘r Us and buying myself a nice AR-15 with all the trimmings – a couple dozen boxes of ammo, a pile of 30 round mags, and body armor and a tactical sling.  I’ll guarantee that if a couple hundred of us protesting for social justice, fair elections, and racial equality start showing up armed to the teeth, especially those with non-white skin, the politicians will change their tune in a hurry, calling for protection from “radical leftists”.  Nothing else has worked, maybe this will.  After all, we can’t depend on elected officials or even the courts to protect the common good; it’s time to use some of the same tactics as the other side to level the playing field.

There is always positive momentum every time a major piece of legislation passes. It takes so long to get those things done. You have to corral your own caucus and make sure everyone gets what they need out of it. Then, you have to overcome the filibuster on the other side. I think you get the idea.

Congress passes legislation all the time. We often refer to Congress as a “do nothing” Congress and somehow assume they can only do one thing at a time. I think deep down we know this isn’t true, but when it comes to major issues this is certainly true. Now, the Democrats in Congress and the Justice Department have a choice they have to make.

How do they use this momentum? The positive feelings from passing a major piece of legislation like the infrastructure bill probably buys you only so much. You can push one thing forward and time is running out. The closer we get to the 2022 midterm elections the less that’s going to get done. We probably have time for them to do one other great thing.

As Yogi Berra once said, “when you reach a fork in the road. Take it.” Naturally, many of you are wondering what our choices are. We can certainly add to the economic impact of the infrastructure bill with items that were left out. Democrats initially wanted a much bigger package. They could damn the torpedoes and go for that.

The Democrats could take the momentum and go after the voting rights bill. I think this is the legislative direction most people want to go. If such a bill passed it would nullify the voter suppression bills passed in individual states and would add protections that could safeguard our democracy moving forward.

The last possibility involves the Justice Department. Congress has subpoenaed numerous officials from the Trump administration to answer for the big lie and the January 6th insurrection. How much did they plan? How much did they incite with their rhetoric? Can we prove they helped plan that event and that they knew the big lie was obviously false?

If they appear the simple answer would appear to be yes on all counts. We get two divergent questions from this point forward. The first question is how hard we pursue them to compel them to appear? The current strategy appears to be for them to just skip the appearances and let Congress and the Justice Department pursue them. If you play their game you could end up spending that entire momentum on getting them to admit what most rational people already know.

The second question is what to do once they admit what we already know. Do you throw them in jail? Do you simply use the material in campaigns moving forward? Do we make a huge effort to educate the public? All of this involves using pretty much all of that momentum we described earlier.

The upshot is that as long as the Democrats make a choice they will create some positive synergy for the next election cycle. Some choices are better than others, but the key is to get off the pot and make one. The alternative is paralysis by analysis. Factions bicker about what to do and you look up and it’s November 2022. The unfortunate part of opportunity costs is that you have to choose something. The clock is ticking.