Oh y’all, Louie is making the rounds.  Speaking to a Texas youth group, he hates on the Covid vaccine and lets people know that Trump was right all along.

I don’t know if y’all saw, but a month after President Trump left office, the American Journal of Medicine came out with a great article that they had discovered a regimen of medication that when taken together early in Covid that–you may have heard of it: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, a Z-Pak azithromycin, zinc.

Next month, Louie will be quoting the American Journal of Veterinary Vitamins.

I really didn’t want y’all to miss Louie’s choice of men’s business wear – gray pants with a brown sport’s coat, or maybe it’s a suit jacket he picked up at Goodwill.

"Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, a Z-Pak … a steroid nebulizer" — Rep. Louie Gohmert is giving a speech at the Texas Youth Summit in which he's giving terrible Covid-related medical advice to huge cheers pic.twitter.com/NnTe3bAXIo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 28, 2021

Just when you think Louie has gone away, pop! he’s back. Just like that.

And, to make you grin – a real sign in a real real feed store.

I think people will take horse medicine because the horses seem smarter.

Welcome to Mississippi, where the Governor explains why they ain’t afraid of no damn Covid.

After Mississippi became the world’s No. 1 hotspot for COVID-19, Gov. Tate Reeves told attendees at a Republican Party fundraiser in Memphis, Tenn., on Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021, that Mississippians “are a little less scared” of COVID-19 than other Americans because most share Christian beliefs.

“When you believe in eternal life—when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen, then you don’t have to be so scared of things.”

So, you gotta wonder why they were so scared of the terrorists of 911 that they willingly gave up their “freedoms” at the airports, over the telephones, anywhere outside of a free speech zone, and pretty much entering any sports arena.

Tate, 2,996 people died on 911. That was pretty much the first hour of Covid.

You’re gonna need to come up for some better excuses for incompetent governing.  This one is dumber than bean dip.

So, here’s the deal.

Wisconsin Republicans own the State House so they are passing, without any hearings, a bill that allows them to spend $680,000 to investigate the 2020 election in Wisconsin.  This will be the second 2020 election investigation that they have funded with taxpayer money.

Kooky thing #1: They will not say how the money is being spent until after the bill is passed on Monday. There has already been numerous recounts in the largest counties in Wisconsin but Trump still lost every damn time. Trump has lost Wisconsin more times than a blind mapmaker.

Kooky thing #2:  The My Pillow guy, Mike Lindell, is egging this on. I hear that Lindell is losing money on his business because he has discovered that predicting when Trump will ceremoniously replace President Joe Biden is not making as much money as he expected. Right off the top of my head I know the predicted March date made a whimpering sound as it passed by and the August date could be heard belching. The next one Lindell is betting on is sometime next January and I predict the screeching of lost souls will accompany its passing.

Kooky thing #3: The Republicans want to hire former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to run the investigation.  I know that Wikipedia is just slightly more reliable than my Aunt Thelma, but according to them Gableman knows about investigations because he has been personally involved in so many, one of which determined his decision to not run for reelection.

So, they are having themselves a wingdinger of a waste of taxpayer money in Wisconsin and they will have nothing to show for it, just like every other Republican attempt to prove we voted dead people.

We recevied an email yesterday from our daughter’s school. We’ve received an email every day from our daughter’s school. Each email has revealed new positive cases amongst the student body. Sometimes it’s three or four cases. Sometimes it has been as many as seven cases. These are all new cases. Last year, we got maybe one of those emails a week. When we got them there were usually only one or two positive cases.

Now, if we were to act like a scientist (crazy thought I know) we would make a mental note of all of the differences between this year and last. The first major difference is that virtually all of the students have returned to school. Last year was really a 50/50 proposition. My child’s district offers a stay home option, but they cease to be students at their neighborhood school. That means they can’t participate in any extracurricular activities at that school. So, that’s a non-starter for nearly 99 percent of the families around these parts.

The second major difference is that extra curricular activities were severely curtailed last year. Sports schedules were drastically reduced. There were virtually no clubs or organizations. Field trips dropped to zero. There were no pep rallies or other events that schools of all levels often take for granted. Even schools like mine that have few of those things canceled stuff like our Fall Festival.

The third and last major difference was a universal mask mandate. Now, a few large districts are requiring it, but otherwise it has become optional. I still see a majority of students and teachers wear masks, but there is obviously enough of a percentage that don’t to where we notice a difference. Of course, I could be getting ahead of myself here. Technically, any of those three differences (or all of them) could be the reason why we saw fewer cases last school year.

This begs a very simple and straightforward question. How many additional positives are acceptable? How many additional hospitalizations are acceptable? How many additional deaths are acceptable? We have some smart readers around here (a lot smarter than me) but if anyone new stumbles in, it might be good to talk about the difference between natural freedom and political freedom.

We aren’t covering new ground here. Yet, it hit me hard last night as I watched our daughter play volleyball. We watched dozens of students for the other school have a blast as the girls played a long and tough match. The school required everyone to wear masks. A few broke the rules, but most complied. It didn’t seem to curtail their fun at all and both sides gave fist bumps to each other as the girls walked to their bus. They all had fun.

To put this as simply as I can, we know what the human costs are of having half of the students at home. We know the lack of human interaction causes damage to the psyche and we saw its effects academically. We see the tangible and intangible effects of skipping out on those activities that we all used to take for granted. We saw it in reverse last night when we saw how much fun everyone was having.

Masks don’t enter into that equation. Kids can go on field trips and wear masks. Kids can go to football and volleyball games and wear masks. Kids can go to pep rallies and wear masks. Kids can go to homecoming and wear masks. Kids can all go to class and wear masks. Obviously, it’s too early to tell whether masks, social distancing, or curtailing activities was the most responsible for limiting cases. We do know that there are more cases. So, we return to our basic question. How many additional cases are acceptable? More importantly, if we don’t want kids to miss out on those experiences and we still want those numbers to stay low, can’t we just try requiring everyone to mask up?

I scarcely have spent any time opining on Afghanistan. I certainly feel awful for the soldiers that have lost their lives in a quagmire that we all should have known was coming. What’s always peculiar is that we decry the ones most recently lost. Those are somehow more tragic. I suppose when you can see the finish line it is that much more bitter to come up short.

There is a clip from George W. Bush that has been making the rounds. It came from 2002 where he was describing past efforts in Afghanistan. He mentioned initial success followed by ultimate failure. It was hard to tell whether he was simply be ironic or if he had powers of clairvoyance.

This is a basic pattern of history that also goes along with a law of human behavior. For lack of a better term, I call it the law of sunken costs. I could be a jackass and simply say I made it up, but unlike certain ex-presidents, I’m almost certain someone before me has stumbled onto this concept. I’m certainly not taking credit for it either way.

Imagine you’ve bought a car. It’s a vintage car, but it hasn’t run in years. You think to yourself that with a little hard work and a little investment you could get the car running again. So, you pour hundreds of dollars into parts, but nothing seems to be working. Hundreds turn into thousands, but there’s no change in the prognosis.

We all know eventually we will run out of money. We all know eventually we will run out of time. We all know eventually we will run out of patience. We know all of these things and yet we continue to throw good money after bad. We do this because we are all thinking the same thing. We are thinking that we’ve invested far too much to give up now.

We do this in relationships. We do this with our time. We might do this at work with an employee that just doesn’t seem to get the job done. The psychological mechanisms at work are portable across the spectrum. It’s happened before in Vietnam and Korea. It’s happened before in Afghanistan itself with the Russians. In fact, we are a product of it here in the United States. The English fell prey to the same sunken cost syndrome.

This is a historical law. Occupying countries eventually leave. It is only a question of when and under what circumstances. I’m sure the Bush administration knew this day would come. They simply hoped for the best and hoped you wouldn’t remember that it was them that got us into this mess in the first place.

The current situation has millions of Americans blaming Joe Biden. There have been mistakes and hiccups to be sure, but I’m not sure how this thing was supposed to go. If Trump were still president it would be the same deal. Sure, we could say he shouldn’t have freed the prisoners. Sure, we can say Biden should expedite the red tape and get out more refugees. We can say a lot of things. This was always how this thing was going to go down.

Afghanistan is devolving into a world where religious extremists (that represent a minority of the people) have a stranglehold on the country at large. I have no idea what that’s like. That statement couldn’t possibly describe any other situation right under our nose. Let’s ignore that and just keep whistling past the graveyard.

We can continue to finger point at different administrations over the past 20 years. All of them deserve blame in this moment. All of them perpetuated this mess. All of them contributed to the sunken cost. No one is happy when more Americans lose their lives. There’s more than enough blame to go around.

Congresscreep Dan Crenshaw filed his financial disclosure statement this morning and that’s a good thing, because it was due on the 13th and today is the 25th.

Oddly, he also filed an amendment to his financial disclosure statement this morning adding … tada, you guess it, his book royalties.

Now, why you would file an amendment – which is kinda like an oppsy – on the very same day you filed your statement is a totally mystery to me.

It looks like Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen was right. Dan The *Almost* Man included his missing royalties off a book that apparently only the RNC bought, but they did buy 400,000 worth.

By the way, as far as his California Boy properties, if you’re pretty damn good at snooping, you can find them. The one in San Diego is here. And here ya go look at Imperial Beach, where the water is more polluted than your average Republican convention goer, you can see what the beach boy is only getting between $15 to $50 grand in rentals.