Apparently, Greg Abbott couldn’t get enough volunteers so he had to hire people to campaign for him.
It did not work out as well as he suspected.
WATCH THIS:
"Everybody's gotta have a job, sir."@GovAbbott has to pay canvassers who don’t even support him due to no one volunteering.
pic.twitter.com/KJTph0kalG— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 4, 2022
Enjoy!
Others have commented on the police response in Uvalde, but I have not. I have been waiting for facts, but there have been so few up to this point. We know a few things. First, we know that the shooter went in through a back door, we know parents begged officers to go in, and we know they did not go in for over an hour. We should probably take each of those points one at a time because each has been a huge part of this story. It was initially reported that the shooter went through a door that had been propped open by a rock. As it turned out, she closed the door and naturally assumed it was locked to those outside. Apparently, it wasn’t.
As an aside, I went through this exercise with our daughter. We had her mentally track how many doors students could legally enter at her school and settled on four. We then asked her how many total points of entry there were and settled on fourteen. Keep in mind that there are around 130,000 documented schools in the United States. That’s not counting universities and community colleges. Could you imagine the expense and manpower it would take to guard each of those doors (even just the legal ones) and to secure the rest?
Let’s pretend that your junior highs and high schools have two points of entry and exit and all the rest are successfully locked down. Let’s go with what Ted Cruz suggested and have one point of entry at the elementary schools. Mind you, this would violate fire code and present other possible dangers, but can you imagine the manpower we are talking to have an armed guard at each of those doors? We are talking about over 200,000 people.
The second fact we know is that parents begged to save their children and cops refused. Did they do the right thing? I obviously wasn’t there, haven’t had any combat training, and certainly haven’t game played through any hostage negotiations. Would there have been more dead had the police breached the school and engaged the shooter sooner? Would they have saved more lives doing that? We will never know on both counts.
What is true in this light is how absurd an idea it is to arm teachers. I can count far too many reasons why this is an absolutely horrible idea. Let’s assume that the teacher is trained to fire their weapon as those on the right have suggested. That alleviates only one concern. The second concern would be storage of the weapon. Do you want them to store it on their person or keep it secured somewhere in their classroom? What happens if they or that location is compromised?
Then we move onto the actual gaming of the mass shooter scenario. They may be trained to shoot, but are they trained in that specific scenario? What does SWAT do when they see an armed intruder AND armed teachers? What happens if a teacher has a mental breakdown and become the shooter themselves? Even in the best of cases we encountered a situation where trained police felt powerless to do anything. Whether they were negligent or justified is important but also very telling when you consider what you are asking untrained teachers to do.
There is always a non-zero chance the worst will occur and there always will be a non-zero chance no matter what we do. We start with the most obvious thing and move are way down from there. Restricting the gun is the most obvious thing. Door control, armed teachers, and armed soldiers sounds lovely but ultimately ineffective without doing the obvious thing.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Now that Johnny Depp’s trial is over, maybe we can spend a few minutes on other issues not as important as celebrity mud slinging on national television. A classified intelligence report is being talked about now in the press and it concerns Vladimir Putin, and it’s not pretty. Intelligence officers who’ve read the report and who are talking to the press about it say this:
I’ll bet that TFG is a little nervous at the prospect of losing his handler. The new guys may not be as nice to him as Putin has.
This guy can’t die too soon, but it will be dicey when he finally does.
There are any number of things missing from modern society. Just listen to conservative commentators long enough and you will hear a long list. There’s the broken homes, there’s the lack of God, and then you get into the really offensive stuff. If we believe them then all of these things are to blame for all of the problems we have today.
So, speaking of shame is certainly ironic. It is ironic because we spend a great deal of time talking about how all of these things are just red herrings and then we land on the shame. Yet, this is different. It is nearly impossible to articulate, but we will give it a try. Defamation of character is a serious deal. It causes someone to experience shame when they shouldn’t. We certainly feel for Depp if that is the truth, but unfortunately, some people are taking the wrong lesson from all of this. I bet you thought Kyle Rittenhouse went away, but apparently, he has been inspired by Depp. I know you thought he went away. I know you thought his 15 minutes of fame were up. I know you thought he would at least have the presence of mind to keep quiet until everyone had forgotten who this little son of a bitch was. I was right there with you. He apparently never learned anything from that experience.
As complaints go, this is a relatively minor one. After all, three people and their families never got justice for what happened to them. They were gunned down in the street and they were treated like the criminals. Hell, you had the judge in the case refuse to call them victims and then turn around and allow the defense to defame their character in open court.
That judge doesn’t feel shame. He should, but he doesn’t. Obviously, Rittenhouse has been robbed of this experience as well. It definitely impedes his moral development. At the very least, we had hoped that he would realize deep down inside what he had done. We are robbing people of that experience. We have robbed Rittenhouse of that experience.
Shame is the thing that keeps you from seeking the limelight after something like this. Shame is the thing that makes you realize you need to seek forgiveness or some sort penance even if your privaledge somehow exonerates you. Shame is the thing that aids in moral development. It’s the thing that tells you that you’ve done a horrible thing when you’ve killed three people.
Shame is the thing that tells you to go away. It is the thing that is missing all too often. It’s missing in this case because too many people have called this jackass a hero. It’s missing because that’s what he’s internalized and so he doesn’t understand why the mainstream media would say anything different. The best defense against defamation is the truth. The MSM has that in spades. Shame would have told him to leave well enough alone. Sadly, that shame wasn’t there.
Sarah Palin sued the New York Times, claiming they defamed her in 2017.
Okay, I will give you that it’s particularly difficult to defame Sarah Palin. If Game Change didn’t do it —
… nothing can.
Palin lost her libel case against the New York Times yesterday. To win a libel case, you have to prove that the person you are suing either knew or should have known that what they said about you is false, and that they recklessly disregarded it. Malice is the word lawyers use.
She lost. And I think the New York Times didn’t gloat as much as we all wanted them to.
It’s a little thing. But with the way the world is spinning now, little joys seem bigger.