I am watching the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing this morning.  I can bet you at least a glimpse of raw unfettered racism before this is over.

I’m not saying Brown is more qualified than Amy Coney Barrett, but damn she is more qualified than Amy Coney Barrett and a sober Brett Kavanaugh combined.

And, of course, you knew this was coming …

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has raised concerns about Jackson’s record on sentencing in child pornography cases. Hawley said on Twitter last week that there is “an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children.”

Ya know, they bring it up so much that they have to be doing it much more than we’ve caught them at it.

Y’all, I can’t help myself. Every morning I wake up and feel so happy that Donald Trump isn’t president now.

Here’s a plenty good reason.

“It was my personality that kept us out of war,” he said, addressing a crowd of rallygoers at the American Freedom Tour in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “I was the only president in four decades who did not get America into any conflicts, except I totally defeated ISIS.”

His personality? He has a personality?

I dunno, maybe it’s just that I speak English, but I would think that defeating Isis would, by definition, involve conflict of some sort.

And I think he totally forgot about Afghanistan. American service members did die in combat under Trump.

Still lying. He can’t help it.

Some things in life seem counterintuitive. The headline above provides one of those dilemmas that seems like a semantical argument, but really it’s not. It’s one of those things that we know intuitively, but it took my wife to put it in phrasing that made sense. Some people are so worried about doing the correct thing that they don’t do the right thing.

It takes a wise person to know the difference and I am ashamed to say that I didn’t know the difference for most of my life. Even in the moment, it can be difficult to tell the difference. However, this seemed like a good jumping off point from my last piece on Saturday. It created some interesting conversations online and offline as it turned out.

The debate there was whether journalists are required to give every viewpoint equal consideration. It was a debate over what it means to be fair. Most of us were taught at a very young age that fair does not necessarily mean the same. Fair means everyone gets what they deserve. It is a distinction with a very clear difference.

There is also a distinction between right and correct. There is a distinction with a very clear difference. The problem with moral authority is that it is often predicated on what is correct. There is a very clear right and wrong and if you stand on the side of right then you are always correct. The problem is that you are sometimes wrong.

Understanding that paradox is the key to wisdom and happiness. Thus, we get the debate over what to do when the other side lies, cheats, steals, and bullies to get their way. It is tempting to respond in kind. There is a delicate balance between being a doormat and just being a different version of a bully. The space between those two can be wide or narrow, but the space between is the space between being able to stand on moral authority and just being another asshole.

Finding that space is hard. Finding that space is the key to moving forward. Machiavelli told us that the ends justify the means. The problem is that it is easy to confuse the two. For some, the means become an end to themselves. It brings a perverted joy to inflict pain on others. It brings a perverted joy to win no matter how hollow the victory might be. Fight like them and you become them. Sure, the results may look different, but what does it profit someone to win if they lose their soul?

Again, being a doormat isn’t the answer. This is a tough and difficult road. It means constantly checking ourselves and looking in the mirror to see if we remain someone we can love and be proud of. We can’t let the monsters win, but we also can’t allow ourselves to become a monster to win. If that happens then what have we really won?

The New York Times is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of journalism. They were a beacon of light throughout the TFG presidency bravely calling balls and strikes. That’s ultimately what the free press is supposed to do. Their recent staff editorial on free speech certainly caused a stir for all of the wrong reasons.

The staff editorial made two huge mistakes in logic with their screed. First, one of the beacons of the free press misunderstood what free speech is and therefore misunderstood what censorship is. Aa you might suspect, they got quite a bit of push back on their opinion. The editorial presents two distinct problems plaguing journalism and the marketplace of ideas.

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism. I don’t get to broadcast my truth free and clear of any push back from anyone else in the marketplace of ideas. There are ideas worth shunning. There are ideas that demand shunning. Shunning horrific and grotesque ideas is not censorship. If cancel culture is even a thing, it has been a thing for an eternity.

However, it is the second problem that is perhaps even more alarming. The NYT seems to think it is their job to be fair and balanced. Fair is a four letter word. To borrow from the baseball analogy, fair and balanced seems to indicate calling balls and strikes as they come. Yet, the NYT seems to think that if there isn’t an equal number of balls and strikes then they haven’t done their job.

Some pitchers have impeccable control while other pitchers occasionally hit the mascot. The free press cannot treat them equally. A ball in the dirt is still a ball in the dirt. It does not become a strike because you’ve already called a bunch of balls on that particular pitcher. Some ideas are just wrong. Some schools of thought are not to be taken seriously. Bad ideas don’t get equal consideration because we are supposed to give all ideas equal air time.

That also means that some people are wrong and are not to be taken seriously. We don’t give them equal air time because we have some new fangled idea of what it means to be fair. It also means that we don’t take them seriously because we are afraid that crazy people will consider us to be biased.

Calling balls and strikes means that you report facts. Calling balls and strikes means that you present ideas and report on all ideas. It doesn’t mean giving them an equal amount of support. It means that when an idea is not supported by the facts then you say so. It shouldn’t matter that you also said this yesterday and the day before. We don’t give credence to stupidity because we gave airtime to the other side.

Someone has to be the arbiter of what is true and what is not true. In a free society we want an independent source to do this. If the government is left to do this then we wake up one day with our neighbors being bombed and somehow believing that isn’t happening. We somehow believe they are bombing themselves and the guy doing the bombing is somehow the good guy. We somehow end up believing things that are clearly not true. In many ways, we are nearly half way there. That’s especially true when the NYT refuses to tell people they are wrong. They told them they were wrong yesterday. It wouldn’t be fair and balanced to do it again.

I worked in journalism most of my life and I have done my fair share of set-up questions but I rarely saw someone knock it out of the park like this. I wanted to make sure you saw it.

Russia claims its only hitting military targets. What does the Kyiv Mayor say to that? "BULLSHIT!" he spits. A former boxing champion, Vitale Klitschko delivers knockout sound bites that get straight to the point. Feel free to share #Ukraine #Kyiv pic.twitter.com/GvFs7ZWIUz

— Chris Reason (@ChrisReason7) March 16, 2022

By the way, in case you were wondering, bullshit is not a dirty word in Texas. It is an agribusiness term. Hell, we even sing and dance and about it.

Greg Abbott is not taking this teacher shortage business lying down. He’s a man of action. Like any other man of action, he is commissioning a committee to tell him why there is a teacher shortage. He recently changed the task force when it shockingly held only two teachers.

The 30 person panel included all kinds of central office administrators whose median salary was $170,000. In fact, it was rumored that one of the two teachers actually had their office in the central administration of their district. However, our crackpot team here could not confirm or deny those rumors. If they indeed add enough teachers to make it equal representation then that’s a good start, but it’s still much ado about nothing.

It is fairly easy for classroom teachers to simply say that they need to be paid more. That seems to be the standard response and without consulting teachers it is likely to be the only real answer you will get. That’s a good response. We could all use more money, but you need to be able to dig deeper.

I’ve seen any number of teachers that have left the profession and have come pretty close myself. I think I speak for many of them when I say money really wasn’t a factor in my decision. Teaching is a difficult job. You are more or less on an island and it took me a long time to find my niche. I’ve found it as a support facilitator. There were a lot of bumps and false starts along the way.

So, I would begin with how we train teachers and how we support them. Classroom management is always the most important thing and it is the one thing we are the worst at teaching new teachers. Schools reward experienced teachers with the more sought after assignments. They give younger teachers the more difficult ones. It’s pretty much sink or swim from there.

The job is just too difficult and it is getting much harder. We are adding paperwork demands and making teachers jump through more hoops. As soon as teachers feel like they have their sea legs under them, we change the landscape and force them to start from scratch. Teachers get less support from home and less support from their school’s administration and central office when dealing with difficult student populations.

Asking a central office administrator why teachers are leaving is somewhat comical. Those are people that escaped the classroom. I have no problem with most of them, but it is fairly straightforward. The further removed you are from the classroom the harder it is for them to remember what it was like.

Add to that the recent politicization of teachers and you get a perfect storm. We are expected to make white children feel better about being white. We are expected to avoid anything that might be controversial. We are expected to inform on students that might be transitioning. There are even whispers of doing all of this with cameras installed in our rooms so that administrators and parents can watch in real time.

Abbott doesn’t want to hear about any of this. So, what is he going to hear? He will hear that teachers want more money. He will be able to posture about how greedy we have become. I’ve seen too many teachers leave teaching and none of them left because of the money. They’ve left for all of those other reasons. Those are the reasons he isn’t likely to hear anything about.