There are always moments that leave me speechless. As much as I am able to throw more than enough words on a page, I struggle to speak when someone does something so brazen that it defies explanation. The right makes up stuff all the time, so that really shouldn’t be a shock, but I still find a way to come away surprised at how low they are willing to go.

Nevada happens to be the place we are talking about today. A unassuming elementary teacher passed away in 2017, but was never removed from the voting rolls. That became a problem when she somehow cast a ballot in the 2020 election.

Fox News does what Fox News does. This seemingly isolated case became proof that the election was stolen. Now, we probably shouldn’t talk about the mental gymnastics necessary to take one case and somehow extrapolate widespread fraud out of it. Hyper-partisan hacks will certainly take logical leaps in the interest of a good story. Heck, they’ll even make conclusions without all of the evidence.

That’s not the part that gets me. The part that gets me is how they put on the husband to talk about how peculiar it was that his wife’s absentee ballot was submitted. He went on talking about how it proves there is fraud. He should know about that because he’s the one that submitted it. After all, he is seen looking dead into the camera expressing how dumbfounded he is that someone would do this.

I suppose we tell ourselves lies all the time. It’s all a part of the mental gymnastics it takes to get through the day. Sure, I’ve only had one cup of coffee. Sure, it wasn’t me that ate the last of the cookies. Sure, I’m going to work out today to work off some of these extra calories. We might even speak those lies out loud to our loved ones.

What we don’t do is go on television and offer bald-faced lies in the interest of a national narrative. The makers of South Park have always had ways of stripping down our malarkey and leaving us naked before the world. They poked fun at families that did this when some of them are probably guilty of murder. Those people blamed it on a random Puerto Rican guy. It’s the same concept. It’s not enough to say I didn’t do it. They had to actively point the finger at someone else.

One can hardly blame right wing blowhards for jumping on something before getting all the facts. Sure, their explanations defy logic, but we’ve done that before. Maybe we haven’t broadcasted those assumptions to the world, but most of us don’t have that opportunity. What’s unfathomable is being the guilty party and being brazen enough to go on camera and point the finger at someone else. I’d be doing good to find a bunker and stay put until everything blows over. I guess some people are more shameless liars than others.

Oh y’all, now that we’ve found out that Republican Congressvarmints were in on the planning of the January 6 Insurrection, a name appeared on that list that kinda stunned me.  Louie Gohmert.

Are you telling me that somebody, anybody, asked Louie to be part of a group?  No, that can’t be right. Nobody is that stoopid.  Wait, oops. I forgot about that crowd of misfits, losers, and thumb suckers.

Along with Greene, the conspiratorial pro-Trump Republican from Georgia who took office earlier this year, the pair both say the members who participated in these conversations or had top staffers join in included Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

There ain’t a triple digit IQ among the bunch of them.

I give them two weeks until they start stabbing each other in the back. Et tu Lou?

“With a photographic memory
I could live in a time that used to be.”– Greg Ham

October seemed like a perfect time to go back and visit the alma mater. It just so happens that the weekend I picked was also homecoming weekend. It just so happens that the weekend I picked happened to be the 25th reunion for my graduating class.

That in of itself is a long story since I graduated in December. So, I was class of 1996, but I really wasn’t. It should have been 1997, but these things are complicated. I caught myself doing the same thing everyone else does when they see people honored at halftime of the football game. My first thought was, “who are all of those old people down there.” That thought process quickly switched to, “gee, do I know any of them?”

As I was pointing out landmarks to my wife and daughter it hit me like a ton of bricks. There was more different than there was the same. It’s then that you can’t really control the flood of emotions. It’s an unholy mixture of nostalgia, jealousy, and lack of connection. I could say the same of the new high school that sits on the same plot of land as my old one. I know people of my age and older can relate to these feelings.

I never knew why older people behaved the way that they did. The usual sentiment when someone wanted to renovate a school or make additions was to utter that “it was good enough for me so it should be good enough for you.” So, why do we need that new gym or that new addition with new science classrooms? Why do we need to spruce up the library? Why do we need to invest in new infrastructure so the kids can use their technology in the building? We didn’t need any of that crap.

If you don’t check yourself it is fairly easy to find yourself going down a different rabbit hole. It’s easy to find yourself talking about how unfair it is that these kids have it so nice. Why do they get the nicer dorms? Why did they get the new student center? It’s not fair that they got all of this new stuff. Think of what we would have done with all of this new stuff.

Give into those feelings and you become “get off my lawn” guy. It’s a slow but slippery descent that can creep up on you seemingly overnight. One minute you feel like a progressive kind of guy (or gal) that seems to know what’s hip and what’s going on. The next you’re just lost in a haze and wondering what the kids are doing and how they got to be so young.

Get off my lawn guy is bitter and hates change. Get off my lawn guy doesn’t want to spend any tax dollars improving things because they were good enough for him (or her) and they should be good enough for you. Get off my lawn guy is the one that starts every story off with a “back in my day…” Get off my lawn guy is the guy (or gal) that we all swore we would never become when we were young.

Some of us have become get off my lawn guy. Some of us haven’t. The deciding factor is how we deal with change. I never quite understood how people became stick in the mud conservatives when I was young. Now that I’m not so young I understand. It’s equal parts jealousy and equal parts nostalgia. The trouble is that it simultaneously was never as good as we remember it and it was also better than our parents had it. That’s the conundrum that get off my lawn guy can never reconcile.

“Life’s greatest comfort is being to able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.”– Chuck Palahniuk

Today’s idea is more or less half idea and half social commentary. My daughter and I went to a youth group event where one of the youth painfully described a customer he had to deal with. Seems she wanted to get cash back at the store and was repeatedly unsuccessful at the extra maneuver. She was belligerent to the teen and holding up the line behind her. What she needed was a “difficult flag.”

Think in your lifetime. How many times have you been in the store and tried to find the shortest line only to find yourself behind the person with 47 coupons (29 of which have expired) and trying to pay with a check from the bank of communicable diseases? Maybe it is the person buying 13 scratch off cards that also wants a certain pack of cigarettes behind the counter. Perhaps it’s the old person loudly complaining to the manager because the last time they went shopping they remembered T-Bone steaks selling for 69 cents and they can’t believe prices have gone up that much.

Yet, the difficult flag could also go to the cashier that never took typing in school and so they peck away at the register one key at a time. Maybe that same cashier has mastered the intricacies of calculus in school, but is somehow incapable of counting up correct change without the help of the machine. More often than not, they are just new to the job and are doing the best they can.

In either case, we need the difficult flag. The difficult flag serves two distinct purposes. First, it warns everyone about to enter a line that they definitely want to avoid THAT line. Secondly, it alerts managers that they need to hover by that line because they definitely will be needed.

Take the situation with the kid from church. He was just trying to do his job and he got an earful of verbal abuse because the woman could not get her cash back. The manager eventually came to the rescue, but how much better could it have been if the manager had seen a difficult flag and come over immediately? It certainly would have turned out better for the woman, the cashier, and the customers behind her.

Obviously, the way this works is that everyone would be installed with a difficult flag. For most of us, this flag rarely flies. Most of us were born with self-awareness and know to get in and out as quickly as humanly possible. However, occasionally we need more service. Maybe we have to deal with a return or an exchange and that has created a protracted discussion with management. Maybe we just need someone to answer questions or give us a hand.

Naturally, the flag would need to operate independently of us. It would need to sense when a situation was going to become difficult. After all, difficult people rarely know they are being difficult. It’s just a natural state. Perhaps stores could organize one of their stations to be the difficult station. So, if you see your flag flying you can make your way to that station and leave the rest of us to shop and pay in peace.

It should be noted that difficult flags would not be necessary if more people had an ounce of self-awareness. It wouldn’t be necessary if people took a quick inventory of their surroundings and noted the people waiting on them in line. Maybe when people are waiting we shouldn’t buy our lottery tickets or challenge the cost of the grapples. Maybe we can have our coupons organized in advance as to make the whole process a little more efficient. Maybe it’s just a sign that more and more people are selfish these days and our entire society is breaking down. Maybe we just all need difficult flags.

I still meet with Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen for breakfast, and he’s curious as to how Dan Crenshaw spent so damn much of his campaign contributions on security since he’s on the political side of those causing all the security problems.

But, first there’s this.  Remember when we got tickled over RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel having to undergo $500 in makeup application when she went on tv?  Yeah well, apparently that’s not just a girl thing.

I guess they gotta start by scrubbing that guy with a Brillo pad and there’s a $150 uncharge for that.

And here’s some of the ones that tickle me. There’s about a million event security charges this guy ran up for 5 events.  To get the full picture, please watch of this video he made for the Georgia Senate race.

And now here’s is just one page of his expenditures for “event security”.  You know how he says at the end of the commercial, “bring everybody?”  Yeah, he did.

So what’s he planning on doing, is he gonna storm Omaha Beach?  Good Lord, Sherman marched through Georgia with fewer troops than that.

So I went to page two and was too damn tired to copy all those so go look for yourself.  I did a rough adding of the expense numbers on the second page and it came in just short of $10,000 worth of “event security” that you ain’t even seen yet.

This guy is a pussy.

I’m not finished yet.  Mr. Rambo has paid a Washington Dee Cee law firm about $32,000 to defend him against a sworn ethics complaint to the House Ethics Committee because he tried to smear a fellow vet.

I’ve got another story about him getting ripped off for $5,000 because when you lay down with dogs … you know how it ends. But, I’m exhausted and there’s baseball. Y’all know how I am in October. So, I’ll save it.

Well, according to the United States Department of Justice Jeff Fortenberry, an alleged member of congress, took illegal campaign contributions and then lied about it to federal investigators.

Fortenberry, 60, of Lincoln, Nebraska, was named in an indictment that charges him with one count of scheming to falsify and conceal material facts and two counts of making false statements to federal investigators. Fortenberry has served in Congress since 2005.

The indictment alleges that Fortenberry repeatedly lied to and misled authorities during a federal investigation into illegal contributions to Fortenberry’s re-election campaign made by a foreign billionaire in early 2016.

These crimes can carry a prison sentence of five years, which ain’t enough.

There’s also a little interesting item in the DOJ press release. Gilbert Chagoury is a foreign national and snitch.

Chagoury entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the United States Attorney’s Office in 2019 in which he admitted providing approximately $180,000 that was used to make illegal contributions to four different political candidates in U.S. elections. Chagoury also agreed to pay a $1.8 million fine and cooperate with federal authorities.

He made the case against Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, but I can find no reference to the other two. Maybe three because LaHood isn’t technically “a candidate.” So, could some more be going down?  I dunno, but I hope so.