It’s time for Wedge Issue Bingo!  In a desperate effort to stay in power, Republicans invent new wedge issues lies every two years designed to piss off the base and drive them to the polls.  AND, they invent these divisive issues while howling about how Democrats are being divisive.  The really amazing thing is that it works like a charm election after election.

So, let’s list all the wedge issues that republicans have conjured up in the last 20 years or so.  Feel free to add to my list.  I’ll start with the Golden Oldies, then add newer issues:

God
Guns
Gays
Christian Nation
Death Tax
Wedding Cakes
School Vouchers
Welfare Queens
Deficit Spending (only when Dems are in office)
Gun Grabbers
Tort Reform
ACORN
Planned Parenthood
Abortion on Demand
Partial Birth Abortion
Gang Wars
Government is the Problem
Government Takeover of Healthcare
Death Panels
Voter ID
Vote Harvesting
Voter Fraud
Hillary’s Emails
Transgender
Public Bathrooms (related to Transgender)
Boys Playing Girls’ Sports
Concealed Carry of Guns
Open Carry of Guns
Unlicensed Open Carry of Guns
Rioters (Only Non-White)
Immigration
Open Borders
Taco Truck on Every Corner
Illegals Vote and get Welfare
Vote by Mail Fraud
Massive Voter Fraud
Anthony Fauci
Vaccines will Kill You
Science Isn’t Real
Mandates are Equal to the Holocaust
Critical Race Theory
Critical Thinking is Bad
White Replacement Theory
Books are Actually Porn
Parental Control of Education
January 6th was “legitimate political discourse”

That’s my list, but I’m sure I’ve missed some.  Ready, Set, Go!

February is Black History Month with some wondering why we spend so little time on diversity. Others wonder why we are spending any time at all. Racism exists or doesn’t exist in the eye of the beholder.

Situations always come up that make us wonder and we had another one crop up in New Jersey. Obviously, news organizations cover these events in their own way and it can vary some depending on the source. As you might imagine, social media responses run the gamut. At the very least, it demonstrates the need for a continuance of the national conversation.

For those that don’t care to go down the rabbit hole, two teenage boys got into a fight at a shopping mall in New Jersey. Police appeared to respond very differently to the two boys. The white participant is allowed to sit on a sofa until the confrontation was over. The black participant didn’t get nearly the same treatment.

Obviously, such videos create just as many questions as they do answers. What happened before the video began? Is one boy more responsible than the other for the fight starting? Did witnesses provide the police with their own perceptions that might have impacted how both boys were dealt with? Were they harder on the black boy because he appeared to be winning the fight? The coup de grace is the question of what happened immediately after the video abruptly ended?

These are all pertinent questions and I’m sure they will come up in an investigation. In many ways that will be unfortunate. I seriously doubt we will hear the results of said investigation. That’s especially true if they find other mitigating factors that can explain why the two boys were treated so differently.

The social media reaction is very telling. Those outside the country don’t necessarily understand the baggage that comes with another event like this. For what it’s worth, the white participant told authorities he didn’t understand why they were treated differently. Maybe that was a moment of honesty. Maybe just maybe there is a little hope for the future.

As for the here and now, it is another very visible example that we aren’t where we need to be. Whether those two officers were wrong or right, the video is proof that we are not equal. If Critical Race Theory can be defined as “systems laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race” then we could credibly argue that this video is proof that these systems are real and need to be studied and debated.

Of course, many states (including Texas) don’t want that to happen. At least, they don’t want it to happen in school. We aren’t racist anymore. We can all gather around the camp fire and sing “Kumbaya” and hold hands. Whether something makes our kids feel bad is not the standard we should be using. We know it exists. The video above is proof enough for most people.

The funny thing is that those two particular officers can credibly claim that they are not racist. They may even be able to prove that they reacted appropriately in that situation. That’s not really the point. The point is outcomes. If the outcome in situations like that seem to consistently create unequal treatment then that would be evidence of the very thing that CRT opponents want to sweep under the rug. Welcome to Black History Month. May these conversations not cease once the calendar strikes March 1st.

I am comforted to announce that the Sandy Hooks families have settled their lawsuit with the Remington Arms Company for $73 million.

It won’t bring their children back, but it might save someone else’s child.

My helpful solution to the gun horror is to require all gun owners to carry liability insurance on their guns. I am required to carry liability insurance on my car. I have liability insurance on my property if you get hurt on my front porch or on my child’s swing set.

It seems to me that if you’re stopped by the police, you have to show a driver’s license and proof of insurance. If you have a gun, you have to have a license but no insurance.

Congratulations to everyone involved. For those wondering, my son was not on this case. His  involvement is for the families suing Alex Jones in Texas.  A couple of weeks ago, the Judge in the case was rightly perturbed that Jones’ eighth – yeah, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, bingo! – new lawyer showed up at court blatantly unprepared and asked, as did the other seven,  for more time.

Sometimes it pays to pay attention to what is going on around the world. Many people that think of Haiti probably consider in the same category our ex-president considers them in. When we get wrapped up in our daily lives we often don’t give places like Haiti a second thought.

We probably remember the earthquake that rocked Haiti back in 2010. Twelve years later and I don’t give it a second thought. At least I can say that was true before watching a video in the World Geography class I support. Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic and those countries couldn’t be more different.

The obvious result was droves of Haitians leaving Haiti searching for somewhere to go. A number of them came here and in the United States. So, few if any of us thought to consider the Dominican Republic. We probably just assumed they would do the neighborly thing. In some cases they did, but their reaction also showed the dark side of these events.

It’s hard to view their collective reaction as anything other than racism. Of course, we are only viewing it from the Haitian perspective. The Dominican Republic had been a relatively well run country and they didn’t want a human tragedy to take them down with them. Of course, there were a number of horrible events that led up to that moment.

A bunch of 9th graders probably can’t appreciate all of the implications of such a video. They may think of Haiti as one of those places where you can sponsor a child like Sally Struthers used to do. Just 72 cents a day can feed and educate a Haitian child. However, the deeper you look, one cannot possibly avoid seeing parallels to our situation here.

Those huddled masses yearn to breath free. Haitians wanted a better life. On an individual basis it wasn’t their fault that life was so brutally tough in their home country. Collectively things are never that simple. They were victims of things out of their control, but they also did plenty to create their own problems.

The Dominican Republic’s collective response was to render some aid but ultimately to block as many people from coming as possible. That by itself has some justification. If we allow your crappy country to export all of its citizens to our country then our country becomes the crappy country. At least, that’s the thinking behind it.

Xenophobia has rarely been so fully on display. The ties that bind is the notion of “not in my backyard.” That was a phrase coined by George Carlin years ago in his comedy act. The general idea is that we want what’s best for people and we don’t want anyone to suffer. We see the constant barrage on television of the plight of abused animals, polar bears without ice to stand on, or children with cancer. We see the plight of poor children on the other side of the world.

We will give anything to erase those images from our brains. 72 cents a day (or whatever it really is) doesn’t seem like a lot. Maybe if we all chip in we can really make a difference. That line of thinking stops when the problem comes closer to home. I’m really sorry you are going through so much, but if you could go through it somewhere else that would be great.

So, at the end of the day we really can’t shame the Dominican Republic. They did what we do. They just put an official stamp on it and called it a name. Sometimes, other people far away provide us with a window into our own soul. Looking at life through that window hopefully evokes at least some level of shame. That is the case if we have any ounce of humanity left.

So a financial firm cut ties with Trump and retracts financial statement. It’s a fun read.

What Mazars USA is actually saying: This is to inform you that the financial statements we helped prepare for the Trump Organization “in accordance with professional standards” from 2011 to 2020 are pretty much bogus. There is a lawsuit bearing down on us like an oncoming freight train and this is the only off ramp we could think of. Please don’t treat us like you did Arthur Anderson.

Best Valentines Day present ever.

Greg Abbott released another ad where he regaled us with Joe Biden’s supposedly open border policy and how Abbott was protecting Texans from the big, bad Mexican cartels bringing over drugs from south of the border. These ads are littered all over sports talk radio these days.

When the show returned to its regularly scheduled content, the deejays were talking about the theory of sunken cost. In this case, it referred to whether a team should let go of a player they had invested heavily in. The organizations that do the best are the ones that realize their mistakes early on and pivot effectively.

The fallacy of sunken costs is basically our tendency to double down on a belief, strategy, or endeavor because pivoting would be an admission that we were wrong and that we’d wasted time, money, and/or energy on a bad idea. The concept is really a two-pronged concept. First, there is the reluctance to give up because of the previous time, money, and energy wasted. Second, there is a reluctance to give up because we would have to admit that we made an error in judgment.

So, let’s take a look at the ads being played on the radio as an example. The ad focuses on three belief structures that are more or less untrue. The first is that illegal immigration is on the rise. We can see when we look at the numbers that it has been in steady decline in recent years.

The second portion of that fallacy is that undocumented immigrants are somehow inherently dangerous. The ads focus on law enforcement and how Abbott is protecting us from the big, bad immigrants. Yet, when we look at numbers from the same source as above, we notice that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate than legal immigrants and natural born citizens.

So, that obviously plays into the third fallacy of the commercial. Violent crime rates are on the rise nationwide. There is an assumption that this means that the borders have become more dangerous. Yet, they seem to be in decline on the southern border. Multiple reports and studies demonstrate that a border wall would not effectively reduce crime at the border or in the country at large.

The question is how we free a subset of the population that seems to be wrapped in fear and free them from the clutches of red herrings and misinformation? Pundits have long known that when you can sell the country on daddy issues (defense, crime, safety) then conservatives usually win. When mommy issues are the most dominant (education, health care, human rights) then the progressives usually win.

However, this goes beyond that. It goes to a group of people that have obviously backed the wrong horse. They’ve watched that horse come in last in nearly every race at the track. He talks about protecting them and he clearly doesn’t do that. He talks about how corrupt his opponents were and he is clearly the most corrupt politician in the history of the country.

It’s clearly not about stopping the steal or draining the swamp anymore. Those excuses died a long time ago. It is very simple. The longer people hold on to their love and adulation of a thoroughly evil man the harder it becomes to give up on that love and adulation. They would then have to admit that the love and adulation was misplaced. That’s admitting that they’ve wasted time, money, and brain power. That’s admitting they were duped. The greatest con anyone can pull is the con of getting you to accept being conned because it’s just too painful to admit you were conned.