Okay, it’s not everyday that I can tell you about two Texas Republican (cringing already, eh?) Congressman making money out the backdoor. And, lucky for really, really rich people, they are from districts close enough to rub elbows.

First up: Dan Crenshaw (think eye patch guy from the Houston metro area) spouts off on Twitter and then dashes to his checkbook to make money doing the exact same thing he just smashed on Twitter.

For example, here ya go. On November 29, 2021 Crenshaw attacked Secretary Pete Buttigieg as being out of touch for promoting electric vehicles. But, I’ll be damned if he didn’t make five separate transactions in Tesla stock earlier that month.

Then to finish out the year on a tidal wave of double talk, on December 13, 2021 Crenshaw sent out a tweet attacking Democrats for providing tax incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles. The very next day, he bought stock in Rivian.

Crenshaw is on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over legislation affecting electric vehicles, while he trades their stock. That just don’t seem right.

And in the #2 spot, we have My own congresscreep, Troy Nehls, who is the only man I know who can strut sitting down.  Buy, hey, you gotta give him credit for asking around with a haircut that makes him look like Baby Huey.

So he’s got the attention of the FEC. Bless his heart, he thinks secret people can funnel money into his campaign if he just lists the conduit instead of the donors. That would be like if Act Blue collects money for me and then I only list Act Blue as the donor and refuse to let you see that my donors are actually the entire front line of the Green Bay Packers, which automatically disqualifies me to hold any office of public trust in Texas.

I was kinda hoping Louie Gohmert would do something outrageous today so I could have a threesome, but the day is young and Louie has several more hours of daylight to chop cotton and the English language.

“The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how.”– Stephen Marche

Today’s quote comes from the jacket in Stephen Marche’s new book. I hate to spoil everyone’s fun. I haven’t read it yet. The topic seems interesting enough, but I have a backlog of books on my nightstand that I got for Christmas and I haven’t broken into those yet.

Marche is a Canadian. He can certainly opine from a safe distance about the coming destruction of America. My sense is that this is somewhat similar to the collective works of Karl Marx. Everyone is familiar with his “Communist Manifesto”, but I was thinking more along the lines of Das Kapital. It was always my understanding that he felt the revolution was what would be and not necessarily what should be.

What he did not see is that other forces would rise up to prevent the inevitable revolution between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Unions and progressive politicians prevented his revolution and brought the change needed through more peaceful means. We certainly can hope that something or someone intervenes before we go down that road.

Of course, the tag line above is what Simon and Schuster sees as the money line. There is no official definition in literature for the money line. English teachers may call it a theme statement or the main idea. It is the one line people remember. I don’t need to know how this will happen. There are any number of ways it can happen. The real question is who would be involved in such a civil war. Unfortunately, that doesn’t fit so nicely into a tag line we can use to sell thousands of books.

Our last civil war was the north versus the south. That seemed easy enough. The battle lines were fought over slavery, but what is so fascinating from 64,000 feet is seeing how people have tried to distort and deflect that over the intervening decades and century. Slavery became “states rights.” A simple fight over the “right” to own other people turned into some high-minded affair over the exact understanding of federalism.

So, where are the fault lines in this coming civil war? I suppose geography could come into play. Cities and rural areas seem to vote radically differently these days. However, the fault lines don’t seem to be fraying on those lines alone. It could be right versus left. That would make a lot of sense as the political parties seem to be moving further and further away from each other.

Yet, when compared internationally, the parties are not nearly as far apart as we are led to believe. Plus, there are examples that the difference in parties is not necessarily the only thing to consider. Sometimes there are coalitions between the parties that can be a positive or negative force. At any rate, preventing a civil war can be daunting when we can’t identify where the fault lines actually are.

It isn’t as easy as vaccine versus not vaccine. It isn’t as easy as racist versus not racist. It isn’t as easy as progressive versus conservative. It’s not as easy as fact versus fiction. However, there are commonalities between all of those things. At the end of the day we could simply label one side as individualistic and the other side of pluralistic. Yet, even those terms are not absolutely precise. Labeling one side as selfish and the other as selfless is a little self-serving. It might be just that easy. Either way, the who is far more fascinating than the what.

Peter Doocy, yet another example of nepotism being alive and well at Fox “News” is the White House “correspondent” for the propaganda network, and is the son of “Fox and Friends” talker Steve Doocy.  Like his father, he has made a career of making a fool of himself on national television, carrying the water for the network and the party of Trump.  Doocy, not that smart himself, always tried to catch Joe Biden out with leading questions from the “Do you still beat your wife” genre, and tried again yesterday shouting at the President if inflation is a liability to him.  Biden responded appropriately.  You can see the exchange here.

The network went into full on Karen mode, led by Sean Hannity, moaning and whining about how terrible Biden’s behavior was, while missing the irony that they worship a guy who has spent a lifetime engaging in childish behavior and public profanity.  Don’t remember?  Here’s a little reminder from Time about Trump’s language, and keep in mind this was over 4 years ago, less than a year into TFG’s infestation of the Oval office.

In 2018, Ari Melber of MSNBC did a piece on the hypocrisy of Fox and the evangelical right’s endorsement of TFG’s constant stream of profanity in private and public, when historically offended at that very same language from other politicians.  It’s a 6 minute segment, but a good listen.

Meanwhile, Biden has called Doocy to “clear the air” between them, something that TFG would never do, and who indeed banned from the White House any reporter challenging him or asking tough questions.  Personally, I thought Biden’s response to Doocy’s idiocy was pitch perfect and accurately described him, but that’s just me.

Y’all, she has Covid.  I am not kidding.

Just as she was set to go to trial in her defamation suit against the New York Times, she got the fake disease.  I’m sure she won’t go to the hospital because that would mean she might have to take real medicine, and worse yet, somebody might feed off of her.

She is suing the Times for damaging her reputation.  How exactly would that be possible?

In one of the best reports I’ve read in a long time, Texas Tribune reporter James Pollard writes that Sid Miller filed the lawsuit as a private citizen in order to prevent Black Texas farmers from receiving debt relief from the USDA. The debt relief is part of the reckoning the USDA is attempting to resolve after a century of excluding Black farmers from aid offered to white farmers nationally.

Miller’s complaint against the U.S. Department of Agriculture says the definition in the program fails to include “white ethnic groups that have unquestionably suffered” because of their ethnicity, such as those of Irish, Italian, German, Jewish and eastern European heritage.

Sid Miller, the Texas Agriculture Commissioner is suing in his capacity as a private citizen to block aid for Texas farmers. I try to say it and write it in different ways and there is just not any way that isn’t racist AF.

Really, the report is worth reading. I’ve included a small excerpt pertinent to the main point but the background information included in the article is top notch. The whole piece is well researched and well written. Pollard can’t call Miller a nasty sumbitch, but he provides all the facts anyone will ever need to prove it to be the truth.

For Black Texas farmers, Sid Miller’s lawsuit increases mistrust | The Texas Tribune

Nationally, Black farmers have lost more than 12 million acres of farmland over the past century, according to the Washington Post, due to biased government policies and discriminatory business practices. In 1920, there were over 925,000 Black farmers in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But by 1997, their numbers had fallen to just under 18,500.

Recent data suggest the USDA continues to disproportionately reject Black farmers for loans. According to a CNN analysis, 42% of Black farmers were rejected for direct USDA loans in 2021, more than any other demographic group.

As agriculture commissioner, Miller leads an agency tasked with “advocat[ing] for policies at the federal, state, and local level” beneficial to Texas’s agriculture sector and “provid[ing] financial assistance to farmers and ranchers,” among other duties. In a statement to The Texas Tribune, Miller called the debt relief program “facially illegal and constitutionally impermissible.”

This sumbitch thinks if you challenge a law with big words and invoke the constitution you can just be as racist and discriminatory as ever. The fact that he filed the suit as a private citizen tells you all you really need to know. He’s campaigning 100% on being a good ole’ boy racist and shame on Texas for electing this scum.

My favorite unit in Government classes isn’t taught anymore. I don’t support too many Social Studies classes these days. For some reason, someone in the school seems to think I know how to teach writing. Goodness knows what gave them that idea. However, I have supported classes in World Geography, U.S. History, Government, and Economics. None of them addressed rights and responsibilities.

I certainly did when I taught Government. I found that it was the only unit the students were actually interested in. They were particularly interested in the fourth amendment because many of them had already had run ins with law enforcement. Either that, or they expected to have run ins. That’s largely part of the populations that I have taught over the years.

We have an epidemic where people seem to misunderstand both rights and responsibilities. It’s really very simple. Every right that we have comes with adjacent responsibilities. Speech is really no different and in fact speech brings the most important responsibility of all. Goodness knows too many people seem to think they have speech rights that they simply don’t have.

Aaron Rodgers seems to be relishing his new role as a sports villain. His shots at Joe Biden seem to be a great example of everything we are talking about. Free speech does not mean that you have an absolute right of having that speech amplified. It also does not mean that you have the right to have everyone see that speech as beautiful and perfect. Freedom of speech means everyone has the right to respond to your speech as well. Sometimes they aren’t going to like it and sometimes you won’t like their response.

However, the part which gets completely missed are the responsibilities that come with free speech. This is usually where I started talking to my classes about slander, libel, and hate speech. Those are legal responsibilities and encompass the bare minimum of what is required from us as citizens. If we are going to do more than merely pass citizenship we are expected to actually contribute to the marketplace of ideas.

This is often where we delve into topics that we would cover in a basic philosophy class. I taught that one as well in high school, but they aren’t being taught at most schools. The fundamental question is what is the difference between facts and truth. The obvious difference is that facts are verifiable and truth isn’t. Naturally, any good philosophy teacher would go beyond that obvious statement to more complex questions, but we can stop there for today.

The responsibility of citizens and speech is simple. We take available facts and we try to arrive at our own truth. People can take a set of facts and reach any number of conclusions. That’s normal discourse. What isn’t normal is making up facts and poisoning the body politic with a barrage of bullshit. Yet, that seems to be exactly where we are.

Too many people start with the statement that I have the right to and then simply stop there. Living in a society comes with rights, but also comes with responsibilities. We have to at least coexist with those around us and ideally we would do more than that. Of course, if no one bothers to teach that in civics classes anymore then it makes perfect sense that people would not know these things.