I was wrong. It is just easy enough to start there and fill in the blanks later. I was wrong. When I was being brought up, I was taught that the default position on every politician was to start from the assumption that everyone was a patriotic American. They wanted what was best for America and we simply disagreed with them on what that looks like. Therefore, political prosecutions were generally bad because it would devolve into a tit for tat game and nothing would ever get done.

I was wrong. Then again, I wasn’t wrong about all of it. I wasn’t wrong about how the other side would react. At the end of the day, all of this stems from a misunderstanding about what this is ultimately all about. One side is interested in the rule of law. The other side really isn’t. Oh sure, they say they are interested and no one would ever say they are against the rule of law, but that’s not what this is all about and it never has been.

Buried in all of the Trump nonsense was the death of Pat Robertson. I’m not for making even idle talk about what happens to other men’s souls. That’s not for me to decide and it never has been. However, legacies are something else entirely. The religious right swallowed the Republican party whole and turned it into something even Richard Nixon wouldn’t recognize. Niccolo Machiavelli wrote his now famous words in “The Prince”. “The ends justify the means.” Now, we see the ultimate intersection of warped faith and craven self-interest wrapped up into one simple line.

The right is entitled to lead. They are entitled to lead because they are “the party of God.” Obviously, this label is self-appointed, but they have browbeat the general public into believing it is true. So, people of God have three very distinct choices. They can acquiesce and become a member of the religious right, they can fight back and try as best they can to maintain their faith and their political truth, or they can shun God. The battlefield of the last 40+ years tells the tale. Church attendance is down. Faith professions are down. At the same time, the makeup of the church and the church itself doesn’t jive with the church many of us experienced in our youth. Pat Robertson was not the only one to bring this forward, but he definitely is one of the leading suspects.

When the ends justify the means it doesn’t matter what your guy (or gal) does. It can’t be illegal if it is done to forward our political ends. Nothing we do is illegal because we were born to lead and anything in the furtherance of this leadership is righteous. Meanwhile, anything you do is the opposite. That one phrase (the ends justify the means) ultimately separates us and explains our divide. They threaten investigations of Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton as if we care. They talk about locking her up or locking him up as if it matters to us. It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding about the rule of law. We use the rule of law because HOW you do things is just as important if not more important than WHAT you do. They use the rule of law as a means to power. Power is the end. The end justifies the means. I was wrong. I just don’t know how many people on the other side even grasp the concept here.

Oh y’all, it ain’t pretty.  At all. Republicans are fifty pounds of giant mad insane in a ten pound bag.

This is an actual screenshot from Fox News. I am promised that it has not been altered in any way.

It was only 7:00 Mountain time, but it was most assuredly Rocky Mountian high.

And then the guy you thought had disappeared, Marco Rubio, decided to go after Joe Biden’s family. Cool move considering how Trump’s offspring are Eagle Scouts and military veterans.

And there’s this one.

The person they were attacking wasn’t even on teevee yesterday.  Because, you know, he hasn’t broken any laws.

But, I gotta admit that my favorite rolling thunder blades of knives dumb was Kevin McCarthy explaining how the top secrets files were perfectly safe in the trashy bathroom at Trump’s house because “bathroom doors have locks.”  That’s not just dumb, Honey, that’s stoopid.

Okay, Happy Indictment Day!

This is just a wild ass guess on my part but I suspect the rowdy lawless sumbitches ain’t gonna show up in such big numbers this time.  Here’s my guess as to why: we were smart enough to prosecute them for January 6th. They truly believed they were above the law. They were not.

Over 1,000 people were charged with criminal indictments the sentences were stiff for white boys and girls who believed they were invited to overthrow the government with force by the damn president.  It’s a stunning record for the justice system working effectively.

Check in when you have time and we’ll see if I am right.

Okay, so I was going to wait until it was official on Tuesday before I opened the champagne that’s been in my refrigerator for a couple of years.  I dunno if Trump is gonna make it until Tuesday. He’s giving himself a snot nosed hissy fit that generally ends with a heart attack.

But this has been a fun night for crook fighters.  I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow but, after years of fighting them personally, it appears I will finally be vindicated with True the Vote and my neighbor Catherine Engelbrecht.  The story broke yesterday and then exploded tonight.

And then, and then, holy cow, Texas AG Ken Paxton’s best beau is in federal custody tonight.

BREAKING: Nate Paul, the real estate investor accused of bribing Attorney General Ken Paxton, is in Travis County jail on an FBI hold for a felony crime, according to jail records that do not indicate the charge he faces. https://t.co/wKfhtxgAWc

— Houston Chronicle (@HoustonChron) June 9, 2023

So, if the Astros had won tonight, it would have been a pretty perfect day.

Two types of people typically read these. Both groups could be labeled somewhere on the liberal to progressive spectrum. Occasionally, someone else might stumble in here and this is really more meant for them than the regular readers. I honestly don’t know what to call myself. Some people might say liberal. Others might say progressive. There might be others that go with leftist. The rest would say none of those things. Simply put, none of us quite fit the orthodoxy completely for any of those terms. We might be out of lockstep with the base on an isolated issue or two. Then again, the whole point is that labels have ruined our politics.

At the heart of it all is a battle over the term “woke”. Wikipedia says it means “an adjective from African-American vernacular English meaning alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.” However, it is probably the expansion of this to women, other ethnic minorities, and the LGTBQ+ community that has flummoxed people on every side of the ideological divide. In short, it is one thing to support and dignify individuals born into groups that they can’t control. It is another to support and bolster individuals that may or may not choose a group they were not necessarily born into.

When I was coming of age back in the 1980s, it was explained to me back then what it meant to be gay or lesbian. We also had bisexuals at the time, but transgender was not really a thing. Crossdressing certainly was. Obviously it was all a thing but some people were still forced to live in the closet. The debate back then was whether it was an inherited trait or whether it was a learned trait. It seems we have not quite gotten past this point.

Half Empty’s piece got me thinking. In particular, the part where the government official asks why they wanted to celebrate a pedophile. The official was speaking of Harvey Milk. Who or what someone is attracted to really isn’t a choice. The decision to act on said attraction is a choice. Gay and lesbian people are attracted to men and women. Pedophiles are attracted to children. Most pedophiles publicly identify as heterosexual. Certainly, if we look to our politics we will notice that the rates of sexual abusers is higher in the Republican party than in the Democratic party.

Ultimately, we can argue about whether any of these conditions are learned or natural. On top of that, one can choose to accept or not accept someone’s lifestyle choice if it is indeed a choice. A Wikipedia study showed that 7.1 percent of the population identify somewhere on the LGTBQ+ spectrum. An estimated 0.6% identify as transgender. Naturally, that jives with everything I have said. What is interesting is that when MAGA people have been polled on this point they seem to think that 20 percent of the population is transgender. Thus, we get to the heart of the matter. It is ignorance. If I believe that one in five people are transgender when that wasn’t true before then I also believe that something must be causing people to become transgender (or gay, lesbian, or bisexual).

Yet, when we look at the obvious facts on the demographics, we see the demographics absolutely have not changed. Two things immediately become true. First, no one is trying to convert people to be something they are not and even if there were, no one could convert you to be something that you are not. Secondly, this is yet another situation where proportionality gets the best of us. We are told about all of these people doing this or that and they are mere phantoms. They are figments of our imagination. So, we can choose to accept the seven percent or not. What we can’t do is treat them as any less of a human being than what anyone else is. One can tolerate anyone and still not agree with their choices. That has not changed and never should change. So, I say let them fight over pronouns, skunky beer, and chicken sandwiches all they want. The rest of us can live our lives and be the best humans we can possibly be.

A few years back, I retired from the teaching profession in Texas. Surprisingly, I was handed the mic at the end of term luncheon to say a few words of farewell. I felt obligated to explain my destination, Southern California. “To be with my people” was my story.

And I meant it.

I wanted to end my days on this mortal coil being with people who thought and voted like me. Unfortunately, California is a patchwork quilt and not a solid blue monolith, and I ended up living 10 miles north of a conservative/libertarian nightmare known as Temecula Valley.

The political powers-that-be in Temecula stand out in their intolerant attitudes toward any one of our present-day alphabet soup of celebrated causes, whether it’s BLM, DEI, CRT, ESG or LGBTQIA+.

So it’s against this backdrop that brings us to the current book adoption controversy raging in the Temecula Valley Unified School District.

I’ve participated in a book adoption. As part of that process, teachers meet and discuss the merits and demerits of a wide array of materials presented by school book publishers. Not just the textbooks themselves, mind you. All materials including the TE (Teachers Edition) and supplemental materials that students don’t necessarily ever get to see. Teachers then make their recommendations to the district, and generally those recommendations are accepted.

But not this year in Temecula.

A new school board majority was voted in just recently at Temecula Unified, and on a 3-2 vote, the board rejected a new social studies textbook recommended for the 4th grade curriculum by teachers on the adoption committee.

It seems that the textbook (or more specifically, the instructional supplements) in question contained an enrichment suggestion to the classroom teacher by proposing a discussion of former San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk who was shot and killed by a City Supervisor colleague. Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to this important office, and Milk’s assassin was famously homophobic.

In a recent school board meeting where textbook adoptions were being discussed, the president of the Temecula board remarked “my question is why even mention a pedophile,” referring to Milk. California Governor Newsom subsequently opined in a tweet that the board president was “ignorant”.

But for that reason, and that reason alone, the “new” board rejected the textbook and its supplements.

With no other text materials being offered, that leaves nearly 2000 4th grade students without a social studies textbook for the next school year.

In protest, a rally was held yesterday by the Temecula Valley Educators Association. Another one is slated for next week, June 13th, just before the governing board is to meet again.
I attended the rally yesterday. I was with “my people” even though the rally was held in the heart of Temecula.

There were between 150 and 200 very vocal sign-bearing participants. The vast majority were classroom teachers. My people.

However, one rally participant, being baby-sat by a plainclothes member of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, was this gentleman whose moral objection is

clearly noted on his hand-held sign. Why, oh why, dear God in heaven, do the anti-transgenderists think that their issue is germaine to a textbook adoption controversy? At any rate, upon hearing his rants, anyone could conclude that this guy left the takeout window with one taco short of a combo.

Enough about him.

So here’s a question: how does the mere suggestion that a teacher could bring up the Harvey Milk history, printed in supplemental material that no 4th grader will ever read, disqualify an entire textbook package from adoption?

Here’s another. How does the Temecula Unified School board think it can get away with not providing a social studies textbook to any 4th grader in the district? It’s a violation of a California law known as The Williams Act. Among other things, the act stipulates that a student must be provided a textbook that can be taken home or used at school. Photocopied sheets are not adequate.

So it appears that the “new majority” on the Temecula Unified School board have gone awry of the California Education Code, and Governor Newsom and State School Board President Tony Thurmond have begun to weigh in.

As for “my people,” having spent an hour or so among them, I have no doubt that this issue isn’t going away anytime soon.

They are a feisty bunch.