Okay, I admit it. I have a little bitty crush on Congressdreamy Eric Swalwell. He’s funny.
Damn. Rupert gonna be pissed. https://t.co/i3Hki8tvK1
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) July 20, 2022
Okay, let me think about this. George Soros came to America in 1956. Murdoch came in 1974. As well as other Republican billionaires, Peter Triel and Elon Musk.
But, of course, none of them are Jewish. You know he wanted to say Jewish instead of foreign born.
For a guy who looks like he just walked out of a Huey, Dewy, and Louie cartoon, my congressman is extremely vain. He is a short guy with a big curl in the middle of his forehead surrounded by more forehead. He put up “full sized” campaign signs during his last race but the signs were taller than he is.
And for a guy who graduated from Liberty University, he thinks he’s practically Einstein.
And for a guy whose voice sounds like a teaspoon caught in the garbage disposal, he thinks he’s Cicero.
This guy, Republican Troy Nehls, is my congressman. This was a hearing featuring Pete Buttigieg before a congressional committee
For several hours, lawmakers and Buttigieg discussed road and rail safety, the cost of electric vehicles and rising energy prices amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, among other topics. But four hours into the hearing, after asking a question about restrictions on the airspace over Disney amusement parks, Nehls switched gears …
I love Pete Buttigieg. After his first sentence, Nehl’s was not going to let him say another damn word. But, Pete got it in anyway.
Yesterday I was able to complete all of my training videos for work. They released them earlier this year so that we wouldn’t have to do them in August when we should be setting up our classrooms and getting our offices together. These videos don’t change. You have your sexual harassment video, bloodborne pathogens, bullying, suicide, diabetes, seizures, and all of those videos. This is important stuff, but the videos are the same every year. So, you put it on in the background and wait for the short quiz at the end where you already know all of the answers.
They added a new video this year. It may have been there before, but this one was twice as long as all of the others. It was about human trafficking. Immediately, my mind went to a conversation that I had with one of my wife’s family members. He has been taken in by the Q folks and it was all too predictable. He fits the demographic perfectly. He’s struggling economically. He’s undereducated and he has a whole host of personal problems. Yet, here he was rambling on about human trafficking.
So, I stopped him and asked him if he knew anyone that had been trafficked. He said no. Then I asked him if he knew anyone that knew anyone that had been trafficked. He said no. However, before I could finish the obvious point I was making, he went on to tell me how he had been abused as a child. I didn’t know him as a child. There is no way I could verify his story. In fact, my wife couldn’t verify it. I suspect it was a crutch to explain his personal failures but I certainly couldn’t react that way. So, I expressed an appropriate level of concern and condolences and the conversation ended.
That’s ultimately the goal in these situations. I call it the conservative cover charge. Whether it’s migrants dying in the back of a van, faceless kids involved in human trafficking, and potential babies being aborted by “thoughtless” liberals, there is a cover charge for entering the conversation. You must express the requisite level of concern or you won’t be invited to continue with the conversation. You take your two drinks and leave. They certainly don’t want a conversation about who exactly is being trafficked, why they are being trafficked, and what could actually be done to curb it.
My wife told me another tale about how men at her university decided they were going to form a new group to pick up chicks. The group would be called “Men Against Rape.” It would somehow impress girls because they are sensitive. It obviously didn’t work because the vast majority saw through the whole thing. After all, how many points do you get for announcing that you are against something that no sane person could actually say they are for?
This isn’t to say that rape isn’t a problem. It isn’t to say that human trafficking isn’t a problem. Yet, this is a part of that cover charge. We have to come out and say something that should be obvious to all functioning adults and most children. The problem is that we say it’s a problem and then sit back and throw up our hands. No one wants to talk about how big (or small) the problem actually is and things we can do to actually stop it. No, that would take actual brain power.
No one is being abducted from the HEB parking lot right in front of their family. Very few if any are being abducted on their way home from school. The thought of a trafficker allowing someone they are trafficking to actually come to school is laughable. Having us watch a 60 minute video in case one in ten thousand actually comes to school is a testament to how much of a hold Q has on this whole society. These kids definitely exist, but they aren’t going to school or being abducted in broad daylight. They aren’t being held by Hillary, Democrats, or Tom Hanks. These things are always more seedy and tragically real than that. Yet, that doesn’t fit in a 60 minute video.
I realize that being a big target has it’s risks, but Ted Cruz butt probably doesn’t need that much protecting.
Just as a reminder, Senators make $174,000 a year. Which just barely covers Cruz’s expenditures for “security” for three damn months.
Cruz spent over $115,000 on personal security in three months.
I know some of you like to look at the whole report, so have a ball! (Personally, I’m trying to figure out what happened on 4/14 where he needed a whole damn bunch of limos.)
I’m glad to tell you that his fundraising is down.
He raised less than $50 million, which looks especially weak compared to a senate race raising $25 million – yeah, Beto.
And in other good news for our side: Republican FEC commissioners tried to ram through an advisory opinion with little to no public comment that would allow Google to launch a pilot program to have political e-mails bypass the Gmail spam filter.
The public isn’t having it. The FEC released 1000 new comments about it. You can read them —
Way to go, Americans! If you want to read unsolicited emails from politicians you’ve never heard of, go look at your spam filter and leave me alone.
As we move through these tricky times, we find people picking and choosing which bedrock principles they will choose to follow. These choices are based on fear. They are based on things that aren’t real and have never been real. Some of these choices are based on bedrock principles that are invisible.
Keep in mind, these were the jackasses that saw a group of protesters walking down their street. None of them actually came on the property, but what the hell, the second amendment saved their lives. Those protesters kept going after the McCloskey’s were standing on their porch with their ridiculously huge guns. Someone might take their guns from their cold dead hands, but it will be after they’ve accidentally shot each other.
Listen to any second amendment fanatic long enough and you will hear two inevitable “truths”. They need those big guns to protect them in case of a home invasion. They need those guns to protect them when the government goes rogue. Lost in the translation is the extreme unlikelihood of either of those things actually happening.
Lost in the translation is the near complete cancellation of portions of the first amendment. In particular, movement conservatives now want to cancel the establishment clause and want to tear down the walls between church and state. This isn’t rumor. This isn’t innuendo. They are saying this explicitly out loud.
We’ve discussed gun control and gun rights before. Certainly we can produce commentary from the framers that would seem to indicate a desire for unfettered access, but a broader look at history doesn’t back it up. Boil it all down and it’s all pure fantasy. It is about as meaningful as the need to protect ourselves from a rogue government or rogue home invader.
What we haven’t touched on is the seemingly randomness of holding some rights sacrosanct while others are ignored. Freedom of speech, religion, expression, and assembly is at the very heart of our political culture. The ability to travel freely and unfettered is there too. But by all means let’s have those big guns so we can protect ourselves from our neighbors and “others.” By all means, let’s protect us from a rogue government that would attack us while opening the door for them to take away our privacy and dominion over our bodies.