If you are reading this, I am sure you are aware of the latest school shooting in Tennessee. Of course, this time was the dream scenario for social conservatives and their excessive need to keep fighting culture wars. The shooter identified as transgender. Of course, we should immediately ignore the overwhelming statistics that indicate that school shooters and/or mass murders are usually cisgender white males.

Six people perished in this shooting (not counting the shooter). Three of them were school children and three were adults working in the school. One of those adults was a substitute teacher. While conservatives will love the transgender part of the story, there are other parts of the story they are likely to gloss over. For one, it happened at a private Presbyterian school with maybe 200 students. For another, the shooter didn’t go through an unlocked side door.

Of course, we are just talking narratives at this point. The numbers on mass shootings are overwhelming. Every individual situation is different. In this case, you had a former student at the school that obviously had some sort of psychological trauma that motivated them to do this. No sane person does this. Naturally, this talking point will be exhausted. Just once it would be nice to hear people actually make suggestions of what to do about it rather than just land on easy platitudes.

I wish I could be angry about this. I wish I could be moved to tears by yet another seemingly tragic and preventable event. I wish I could have some hope that maybe another one of these in the news would spur on enough people to mobilize and do something about it. It won’t and they won’t. We’ll talk about door control. We’ll talk about arming teachers. We’ll talk about stationing at least one police officer on every campus in America.

On the one hand, you have the evil and horrible scourge that is transgender and LGTBQ+ rights and demands. The common conservative plank establishes the idea that anyone that is transgender is really just mentally ill. While that notion is disgusting and hateful, it also murders their own point. If someone that is transgender is truly mentally ill then why are they allowed to have a gun much less multiple guns?

We know what causes this. We have known since the very first prominent mass shooting event at a school before the turn of the 21st century. We knew at Columbine. We knew way back when the shooter at the UT bell tower terrorized the Austin community. We knew at Sandy Hook. We knew at Santa Fe and Uvalde. We knew at Newtown. We are the only country in the world that has these events on a regular basis. It’s a simple enough thinking exercise. How is our country different from the rest of the world?

At this point, no serious politician is talking about confiscating any guns. No serious politician is talking about repealing the second amendment. Those thoughts had occurred to me once or twice though. No one believes you could do that safely or that it would completely eliminate these events. We know better. We know that common sense gun control measures would reduce these events drastically without infringing on most individuals’ rights to own a firearm. Of course, we know that none of these things will happen. When you can’t laugh and can’t cry you are left numb. It certainly isn’t a comfortable feeling.

I am told, and I believe, that if we had seen the bodies of the children at Sandy Hook, this nightmare would be over.  We would have banned AR-15s immediately.

This is an unsurvivable weapon. It is good for nothing except exploding the human body with one shot anywhere on the body.

I remain passionate about this killing machine.

The Washington Post gives us a glimpse of what the AR-15 does.  Seeing this, you will understand why a hundred fully armed, trained, and wearing combat level protection police officers cowered in the face of one teenager with one weapon in Uvalde.

Please don’t look away.

The Texas Observer, Texas’ first and only liberal magazine, is closing its doors this week and silencing a helluva ride for rambunctious people in Texas.  For 68 years it was the handbook for liberal, and some would say damn socialism, thinking in the reddest state that has a couple of first class universities.

I was blessed to be a tiny, tiny part of this endeavor that featured the likes of folks like Ronnie Dugger, Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, Kaye Northcutt, Jake Bernstein, and a host of other weirdos, storytellers, and committed souls doing the Lord’s work.  Just having a group lunch with some of them made me feel like Dorothy Parker. Although I clearly had the lowest IQ at the table, it was just barely high enough to understand the jokes, they were very kind to me. Most of the time. The price of admission was that you could not only dish it out, you had to be able to take it.  They are people who took what they did very seriously but they didn’t take themselves seriously at all – my favorite kind of people.

I wrote for them a little, but it was more  often I was written about, because they knew I was always good for a punch line. Even in a long stories about something like water shortages, I got quoted just to keep people from committing suicide from the desperation of it all.

Robert Leleux, author of Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, a hysterically funny story about growing up gay in Texas with a flamboyant mother, and the tender, funny, and tear jerking, The Living End, introduced this “non-blog” to Texas.  He called me a damn firebrand. Robert and I had an adoring relationship that he took everywhere he worked.

It was almost as if Texas Liberals had a secret underground profane network of like minded folks. It was also a launch pad for young writers who could take a month to research a topic and produce some of the best investigative reporting being done in the state.

I will miss it dearly.  I will also miss the great merch.

There is a famous bit in the Peanuts cartoons that probably best describes what many of us are feeling at this point. Lucy Van Pelt repeatedly convinces Charlie Brown to try to kick a football. Each time she promises that she won’t move the football at the last moment. Every time he barrels full speed ahead and every time she moves the football. Charlie Brown will lose his balance and land on his backside.

On a seemingly weekly basis we are told that Donald Trump is about to be indicted. He has been sued well over 100 times in his lifetimes. Sometimes he is forced to pay a minimal amount, but he has never been held truly responsible for any his financial crimes. He has committed fraud, treason, and has been credibly accused of numerous sexual crimes as well. As we sit here, he has a grand jury looking at his “perfect” phone call where he blatantly tries to interfere in an election and strongarm the secretary of state into falsifying the results. Then, there was the theft of hundreds of documents he had no rights to. The Justice Department could charge him with illegally possessing those documents, obstruction of justice when he refused to return them, and probably much more. Then, there was the illegal campaign expenditure where he paid off a porn star and former playmate.

Of course, because he is a brazen jackass he didn’t stop that. He released a post on social media showing himself holding a bat next to a picture of the district attorney. Legal experts have said that this broke an additional four laws by itself. Obviously, apologists will argue that he really wasn’t being serious. That’s what they all say before someone actually attempts to harm the district attorney. He did the exact same thing when he called for his followers to storm the capitol. It wasn’t serious until it was.

Here in Texas we know this story all too well. Our attorney general has been under indictment every day of his term. He then was able to run for reelection and was given another term. He will never go to trial. Donald Trump will never go to trial. We know this too. In this situation we find ourselves being the sucker and shill. Yet, every week we see the reports that an indictment is imminent. The mainstream media is playing the role of Lucy Van Pelt and Charlie Brown at the same time. Even if indicted, there will be no perp walk. There will be no jail time. There will be no justice.

This is where we need to reframe and readjust. Partisan media will frame this as a right vs. left issue. Fox will point out all of the crimes that the Bidens have supposedly committed. MSNBC will continue to tell how a Trump indictment is imminent. Whether the Bidens have done anything wrong is not really the issue. The issue is that there has always been a two-tiered aspect to our justice system. Some are able to buy their way out of facing justice. The rest of us must face the music when we screw up. If the mainstream media focused on that and admitted what all of us know to be true then they could simply outline the crimes that the rich and powerful commit and just move on. They could look at the disparate results that depend on how much any one person has to shirk their culpability. Don’t cry wolf. Don’t hype up a possible indictment we know isn’t coming. It never does. That’s more the point.

I do not believe Ted Nugent owns a mirror.

He was the major “talent” to come speak at The Former Guy’s rally.  He called Ukraine President Zelensky a “homosexual weirdo” only because that was the worst damn thing he could think of.

Ammosexual Inteligencia

I don’t think Zelensky is homosexual because if he were, Glen would be drooling over him instead of me.  On just a personal note, it kinda would matter to me because I think he’s a hunka hunka burnin’ love and I hate losing men to Glen.

Anyway, when “homosexual weirdo” is the worst insult you know, you’ve been hanging out with TFG way too long.

Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Oksana Markarova, dropped by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s “office suite” last week.

McCarthy said he did not meet with her, but that she came by to drop off a book about Ukraine.

Yo, Little Guy, that’s a really polite way to tell you that she thinks you don’t know diddle squat about Ukraine. It’s called, in the parlance of today, “dropping shade.” She attended the University of Indiana so I suspect she knows more English words than you do. Okay, maybe you know more words but I can assure you that you don’t know what most of them mean.

So, enjoy your book, Kev. According to a rumor I’m, starting right now, this is the book she got you but you’re on your own finding your crayolas.

I’m kinda suspecting that your enormous box of crayolas were part of your deal with  Majorie Taylor Greene to support you for speaker. Well, that and your manhood.

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