Guess who else is taking private jets?

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry took a chartered jet to Ohio last week, according to an airport management company, the day before fellow Cabinet member Tom Price resigned over his use of private charter flights for government business.

The day before Price resigned?  Price resigned on Friday, September 29th.  Headlines the day before, you ask?  Tom Price needs to resign for taking private jets.

Monkeys – they are a barrel of monkeys.  Screw the swamp.  We need to set fire to the barrel.

What Can We Do About Gun Laws?

There is only one remedy: Get power. If you are as fed up as I am, then register someone to vote or run for office yourself or donate money to someone running to replace these cowardly legislators with a majority for common-sense gun laws. This is about raw power, not persuasion. And the first chance we have to change the balance of power is the 2018 midterm elections. Forget about trying to get anything done before then. Don’t waste your breath.

Just get power. Start now.

From Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times

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Folks who have been around here for a while know that politics is my second love.  My first love is baseball.  It’s been that way since I was 4 years old and Grandpa Duke took me to my first baseball game in what became a friendship that lasted until he died when I was in college.  Some of the best hours of my life were spent sitting beside this large Creole man with giant hands and enormous feet who taught me how to keep score at a neighborhood ball park.  He loved me deeply.

Instead of doing my homework, I made countless score cards so I would be ready at every game.  It really didn’t matter that I skipped homework because I learned math at baseball games. I could figure ERAs and batting averages.  I understood how geometry works because it was happening right in front of me.  Grandpa had played a little semi-pro ball and got to meet the big boys of summer as they were coming up.  He taught me to tell stories by telling me stories.

I hear his voice every time I sit down at a typewriter, “A good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Now tell me the beginning of your story.”  I became a reporter.  Screw homework. The best teacher I ever had smoked cigars and drank beer while showing me where to watch on the field as a play developed.

Forgive me this memory today.

I started watching the Houston Astros when they were the Colt 45’s.  We would always find a way to get to the game.  “Hold on to my pants leg, Cher, because I can’t reach down that far to grab your hand,” he joked at me, the smallest little girl in town, as we waked into the park.

I have tickets to the ballgame today and tomorrow for the playoffs.  Every year the Astros break my heart. Every year I think this is the year. Then they break my heart, dammit.  We’ve won a few pennants along the way, but we’ve never won the World Series, so every season opens a new possibility that maybe this year … because my story needs an end.

All this is to say that I will open a few threads today and tomorrow because I will be at the game both days.  You can talk about whatever you want and I’ll have someone approve comments when they get a chance.

Go Astros!

Paul Ryan.  I gotta tell you, just saying that name gives me the creeps.

Today I learned that Paul Ryan and a small group of Republican congressmen used to meet regularly to plot the GOP agenda.  They called themselves the Jedi Council.  Oh. Lord. Help. Me.  These guys are Darths-in-Training.

Horribly disgraced Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was a member of the Jedi Council. I suspect this is where Price got help to come up with his plan that he only reimburse the taxpayers for his seat on an airplane when he made us pay for the whole damn airplane.

I do not want to obsess on this before I get to the important part of this story but you cannot look like this and be a Jedi.  I’m sorry, that’s just how it is. I don’t make the rules but I certainly follow them. You can be small, green, and wrinkled and be a Jedi, but a Jedi does not look constipated all the time.  Or that they have a rash they can’t scratch in public.  Additionally, Jedis cannot be mean sumbitches. I just want to set that straight.

But, here’s the important part.

Speaker Paul Ryan last week urged the White House to reconsider ousting Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, his longtime friend who had come under fire for often using taxpayer-funded private jets for travel, according to two people with knowledge of the call.

Ryan urged Kelly to reconsider and touted the Georgia Republican’s experience in Congress and work in the administration, one of the people familiar with the call said.

Okay, when Ryan runs for president again, and he will, let’s make sure people know that his Jedi Council has a very, very high bar for ripping off the taxpayers for your own personal pleasure.

If you live in Oklahoma, flights of mental fantasy are the only way to entertain yourself.  Well, that and drinking too much, which is my theory about Republican Senator James Inhofe.

Okay, read this and try your damnest to tie it in a bow.

Two days after a lone white American gunman killed more than 58 people in Las Vegas, what is now considered one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern US history, Inhofe said the country is “inundated with permissive laws” — like those in “sanctuary cities” where local law enforcement doesn’t enforce all federal immigration laws — perpetuating the “cultural problem” behind mass shooting.

“That has a lot more to do with [mass shootings] than gun owners laws,” Inhofe told me. “You can go ahead and break a law and you can come to a sanctuary city, and they wouldn’t enforce the laws.”

So sanctuary cities cause mass murder?  Because the shooter thinks he can run somewhere where mass murder is legal?  Like, say, I dunno … Ohio?

He drinks too much.  Waaaaaaaay too much.

Okay go here and watch a little of the Equifax hearing in congress.

Hint: Look to the right.