I went over to have coffee with Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen this morning and he told me a very weird story.

A local small town West Virginia reporter wanted to find out if Republican Representative Alex Mooney had set up a legal defense fund. Legal defense funds are allowed in a separate account to use for any legal expenses while running for office or if they get sued over their official duties or they get criminally charged with crimes.

Friends of the congress members can donate up to $5,000 to these funds.

Congress people who have created such funds have to file quarterly reports with the House Legislative Resource Center in the basement of the Cannon Office Building.  When the reporter called the Legislative Resource Center to confirm the existence of the legal defense fund this is what he was told:

“Legislative Resource Center officials said those who wish to review trust documents filed there must contact their local House member’s office so it can arrange to provide an escort for entrance into the Cannon House Office Building that houses the center.  Document copies cost 10 cents a page.

In other words, scrutinizing Mooney’s trust documentation requires a chaperone provided by Mooney’s office – a policy made by the House Office of the Clerk in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  The center is a division of the Office of the Clerk, which performs administrative functions for the House.”

If that’s accurate the Legislative Resource Center may be holding a treasure trove of secrets.  Unlike every other type of financial document Members of Congress must file with the Clerk of the House, legal expense fund reports are not available electronically.  The only way to review them is to go the Legislative Resource Center.

Well, ain’t that just something real special? So, to see my congressman’s records, I’d have to drive to Washington, DeeCee, and ask pretty please for a chaperone to take me to see something that my congressman really doesn’t want me to see. Plus, I’m willing to bet a fresh ten dollar bill that every member of his staff has a real festering case of the cooties.

Since the pandemic began in March 2020 and access to the Capitol was restricted, the Office of Congressional Ethics has referred reports regarding nine members of the House to the House Ethics Committee for investigation.  Did one or more of them other than Rep. Mooney also create a legal defense fund?  We don’t know.  Who is contributing to them? We don’t know.

In addition, dozens of members have been found to have violated the STOCK Act by not disclosing stock purchases or sales.  Have any of them created a legal defense fund? We don’t know.  Who is contributing to them?  We don’t know.

If this restricted access policy by the Clerk of the House has been in effect for all of this time it represents a shocking loss of transparency for the media and the public.  It’s especially egregious for local reporters trying to report on Member of Congress to their constituents.

Perhaps that’s the point. That, my friends, I do know.

A few days ago I talked about the death of the Republican party. I see Republicans everywhere. What in the hell am I talking about? Obviously, what you are seeing could be classified as political zombies. So, it becomes important to provide just one example of how the lack of a viable conservative alternative is impacting citizens on a regular basis.

The economy has done better under Democrats than under Republicans since World War II. You could probably go further back than that, but if we go back beyond FDR we run into problems of how we can define Democrats and Republicans. Part of that can be in how we even look at problems. One of those problems has been the rising costs of college and the college loan debt in the country. Conservatives seem to have the same outlook as they do on big business. That’s because college is big business. In Texas, they lifted caps on tuition. Not surprisingly, those costs have gone up to what we see now.

If you compare that with trends in education overall you can’t help but notice the gap. For those that don’t want to look at the data too hard, I would simply point out that Texas spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 per student each year. Obviously, exact figures fluctuate, but it is fairly staggering when you think about all that includes.

I’m officially not a classroom teacher. I am a support facilitator. I go into other teacher’s classrooms. Our campus doesn’t even have anyone that is profoundly disabled. Other campuses have to include support facilitators and those that provide more invasive support. These are things that most colleges and universities don’t provide. That all factors into that cost per student.

If you take a look at the costs for people to attend college in Texas you will notice that only one school came in below 23,000 per year when all expenses were considered. Multiply that four or five times and you’ll see the total cost of a degree. As you might suspect, the number of people that have 92,000 dollars lying around is between slim and none.

So, keep in mind that the cost of college is more than double that of public schools when they don’t even include special education services in most instances. They don’t provide free and reduced lunch. There certainly aren’t nearly as many guidance counselors and they really don’t employ assistant principals. The battle over student loan debt seems to be ignoring the most important element in most instances. Why in all holy hell is college so damn expensive in the first place?

A vibrant conservative party could provide some answers to this dilemma. Instead, they stoke passions amongst the old and inspire them to go into one of those “back in my day” kind of diatribes. I paid off my loans. Why in the hell should they simply erase the debt now? Well, we could start off by pointing out that college costs have skyrocketed over the past 50 years.

You lose your conservative card if you give anyone anything (unless they represent big business). So, it is not surprising that they would push back against retiring college debt. Yet, there seems to be no effort to actually provide any solutions to the problem. Instead, they let the “free market” decide and the free market is what ballooned costs in the first place.

The question is whether higher education is something worth investing in or whether it should continue to go to the highest bidder. Some people might consider free tuition to be a bridge too far. That’s certainly a reasonable opinion, but those that shoot down ideas should be coming up with some of their own.

I am very thankful for Carl. He looks for dirty things all over the internet so we don’t have to.

Hudson mayor thinks ice fishing leads to prostitution! Put your poles away boys!*

*Same guy who thinks creative writing classes are child pornography. pic.twitter.com/9N0R2tVri6

— Amanda Weinstein (@ProfWeinstein) February 9, 2022

Honey, if it’s too cold to fish, it’s too cold to take your pecker for a ride on the nickel train.

I love the part where he’s sincerely taken back that everybody isn’t following his line of thinking.

“Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstanding all you see.” — John Lennon

The time of death is fairly easy to report. The patient had been clinging to life on life support, but finally decided to pull its own plug when the RNC decided to censure Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. That by itself was horrific news for any fan of democracy.

Mind you, the simple act of censuring a politician is almost completely symbolic. It can be loosely defined as an expression of official disapproval. So, what exactly are they disapproving? Kinzinger and Cheney were the lone Republicans to participate in the House January 6th committee.

It wasn’t for lack of effort. One thing Democrats are always guilty of doing is reaching out in the interest of fairness. In a process that took nearly three months, they tried to get more Republicans on board. It was never going to happen. Republicans can only say no at this point. They’ve somehow regressed into the mind of a two year old.

Mind you, the commission itself is not the cause of death. There are dozens of plausible reasons for not participating. Often, these things become more political than useful. The death officially came when the RNC declared that January 6th was legitimate political discourse.

This is not one of those play on words. I’ve heard these before on the other side. I’ve had people tell me the Democrats are dead in terms of electoral politics. They said this back in the Bush administration. Ironically, Bush have been the only Republican politicians to win a popular vote in the presidential elections since 1988.

Yet, this isn’t some dramatic postmortem that will turn out the other way. Conservatism is not dead. It is alive and well. Patriotism certainly isn’t dead. There are still more than enough people that love their country. The zombie version of the party has managed to rig enough elections to send the undead in the halls of Congress for generations to come. The bodies will be there, but something will definitely be lacking.

Cities perform autopsies when the cause of death is undetermined or material to a criminal case. Countries should do the same when one of the major political parties dies. We should pour over all of the relevant information to determine if a homicide has occurred. It would either be a homicide or a suicide depending on your point of view.

The outlook on that largely depends on whether you believe the forces that took over the party were ever conservative in the first place. They said they were. They still insist they are. Yet, all of the available evidence suggests that they have abandoned every principle they held dear. That is ultimately the cause of death. It was essentially self immolation.

Believing things that are plainly untrue is a sign of mental illness or denial on a galactic level. When you force fealty to that delusion you cease to be a party. You become a cult. The Republican party isn’t a democratic party anymore. It’s a death cult dedicated to the rule of one man minus the law. Democracies don’t die in a blaze of glory. They atrophy when people honor the man over the mission.

Okay, I’m sorry but this is going to take a while to tell because it has a lot of pieces.

I’m gonna start with this.  Ginni Thomas, the wife of Clarence Thomas is just one teeter or totter (either one) away from being of questionable brain balance.  She sent a letter to Rick DeSantis’ scheduling people and wanted them to know right off the bat how important she is.

She wanted  DeSantis to join one of her secret rightwing groups.

Emails we obtained, reported on by @politico, suggest that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is in regular contact with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

In a June 2021, Ginni Thomas said DeSantis should be familiar with her because “my husband has been in contact with him[.]” pic.twitter.com/R8Sj3thLgC

— American Oversight (@weareoversight) February 4, 2022

Now, it’s all pretty damn silly but right up there in the first paragraph she drops a bomb. This is in June, 2021. She writes, “my husband has been in contact with him too various things of late.”

Kaboom! In trying to make herself look important, she made her husband look, I dunno, like an idiot. What the hell has a supreme court justice been doing chatting with a Governor – a highly political one, at that – “about various things.”

They begin and end the meeting with a prayer, and try to break no less than 5 or 6 of the commandments in between.

Twice she mentions a Cone of Silence. I like to consider myself a well educated and fairly worldly woman, but I had no idea what a cone of silence is. I have been to a meeting or two where they say “what’s said here, stays here,” but there was nothing about a damn cone.

I can work the Google. So I did and the very first thing #1 you get is that it’s a device from the 1960’s comedy Get Smart.  And if you go to Wikipedia, you get more.

If you’re nostalgic, You Tube comes to the rescue. Or, here ya go.

Oh Ginni Thomas, the meetings are on Zoom, which is the exact opposite of Cone of Silence. Some 9th grader will have full transcripts of the meeting on TicToc in 48 hours, less if she doesn’t have homework.

The story of the day is the continuing saga of Joe Rogan and the cheap calls of censorship on the other side. Yogi Berra originally coined the phrase Deja vu all over again. He was good for the zany one-liner. Right wing media and other social media commenters are caught in a loop.

The online dictionary defines censorship as the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, or news that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. I’ve said this a few times in these parts, but the first amendment guarantees no one access to a platform. So, people lobbying Spotify or applying pressure to Spotify has no bearing on whether Congress passes a law to ban Joe Rogan’s speech.

Now, the social media warriors have unleashed the hounds of war on Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. That’s their right. As you might suspect, they have played on the fact that Young’s audience trends on the older side of the ledger. Some of them are quite humorous, so I’ve reluctantly tipped my cap to some of their attempts of humor. Again, it is an example of people exercising their free speech to counteract others exercising their free speech.

Spotify chose to pull episodes of Rogan’s podcast. It started off with 70 and then it was pushed to 110 as the article above suggests. By the time you read this it could be more. These episodes were pulled based on liberal use of the “n” word during those episodes. There could become a point where his place is just too toxic to keep around.

Again, I will keep repeating myself until people get it through their thick skulls. You do not have a right to a platform. No really, you do not have a right to a platform. You can say what you want to say. You can record it so other people can hear it. Spotify and other platforms have the right to say no. Of course, this wouldn’t be so maddening if many of the same people that were up in arms about Joe Rogan were also not the ones in favor of banning books from school libraries across the country. The irony is palpable. Some day someone needs to explain the difference to me.

In this instance, a student in Grandbury ISD said it far better than I could. She told the school board that no government has ever banned books from public consumption and ever been seen in history as the good guys. At first blush, it would appear that banning a book from a school library and pressuring a platform to drop a podcast are the same thing. If you squint hard enough and close one eye it is exactly the same thing.

Except that isn’t reality. Rogan’s podcasts have been available on a number of different platforms. So, if Spotify were to drop Rogan you could easily see another platform adding him. People that want to find Rogan on their virtual radio dial will find him. No amount of snark, feaux outrage, or false equivalencies will ever change that fact. You do not have the right to a platform. School libraries aren’t really platforms. They aren’t making money off of your kid. They are there for their enrichment and therein lies the difference.

We live in a world of shoulds. It has been common for a people to mix up their coulds and their shoulds. Can Spotify pull Joe Rogan’s podcasts? Of course they can. Can your local school library decide not to carry certain books? That one is a little harder, but the answer is yes. The question is whether they should do those things. That’s the only question that matters.