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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.

Chuck Todd, that’s who.

Todd was not a journalist, reporter, or fact finder.  He let both sides say outrageous things, lie, and deny reality and then congratulated himself on presenting both sides.

Vanna White could have done a better job.

Chuck Todd wasted the slot supposedly intended for truth-finding and replaced it with letter turning.  “Okay, there are 2 Ms in the puzzle.  Do you want to take a guess?”

You know, I screamed obscenities at him but he just kept breathing and that’s about all he ever did.

I wonder if Vanna is looking for work.  I think she could be trained.

Chuck, don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.

Some years ago, Jack Black was cast in a comedy called “Shallow Hal”. The idea behind the movie was that Tim Robbins met him in an elevator and hypnotized him so that he would see someone’s inner beauty on the outside. He famously met Gwyneth Paltrow and saw who we normally see. In the movie, she was playing someone that was morbidly obese. One of the more interesting scenes had him viewing a woman that looked hideous to him, but to everyone else looked beautiful. They really didn’t explore that portion of the story that much. It seems that his altered perceptions went both ways.

The movie was a low budget comedy and wasn’t really meant to be a huge philosophical treatise on the world around us. It would seem that Kimberly Guilfoyle is beginning to look like that other woman in the film. There seems to come a time when what is on the inside and outside match. It is a fascinating thing for someone my age. She isn’t much older than me and I expect to see a number of women like her at my 30th high school reunion this summer.

If there’s ever a need for a warning about the long term effects of heavy drinking and drug use on a person’s face, this is it. pic.twitter.com/4Ll6Qq4noW

— Sgt Joker (@TheSGTJoker) June 2, 2023

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t enjoy this as much as it looks like I enjoy it. Schadenfreude is shameful as we noted in an earlier piece. There is the very real consideration that enjoying something like this too much makes you an ugly person on the inside. The whole point of the exercise is that the ugly on the inside eventually makes it to the outside. I typically enjoy these types of events because you get to catch up with people you liked in school but also get to take a look at the road not travelled. In my case, there were obvious road blocks on those roads so that a part of me enjoys seeing that life turned out better because I wasn’t allowed to travel down that road.

Guilfoyle has lived an interesting life. She was once married to Gavin Newsome, then became a very popular and appealing face on Fox News, and finally wound up with Donald Trump Jr. Obviously, that arc could be seen as pointed up or pointed down based on your perception of those events. I imagine most people here see that as a pointedly dissenting arc from the top shelf to something someone might kick into the dustpan of history.

So, I leave this with only a few jokes and comments. Someone wise once said a picture paints a 1000 words and far be it from to me add a ton of words to that picture. As people around here know far too well, I could write 1000 words about just about anything. So, I stop and leave this for everyone to enjoy.