Thank you guys for all your kind words about my son. If you have any memes or stuff I just must read or things you want to say to Mark, you can do it here.
Yes, I am proud of Mark but I am equally proud of his big brother, Bryan the librarian, who not only found the clip of Jones calling Neil “slow” on his broadcast while Neil was testifying but also got it to Mark within minutes, clipped and ready to go. Bryan goes to work every day to push back frontiers of ignorance and he loves it.
We will all wait semi-patiently for the jury verdict, but the team at Farrar & Ball are taking comfort in the realization that they followed this case for almost four years and did their best. Sometimes hard work pays off in getting lucky.
Hey, I am also proud of my daughter-in-law for ordering this mug for her husband. I was there when he came up with that line.
UPDATE: Mr. Jones’s attorney filed a motion for a mistrial this morning due to the fact that he screwed up. That wasn’t a real starter with the judge. I just asked Mr. Bankston for a clarification before I told you this: I did, in fact, hear that there are text messages between Mr. Jones and Roger Stone in the data dump and that he has heard from the J6 committee.
The defense filed an emergency of protection regarding #AlexJones' attorney F. Andino Reynal accidentally sending Jones' cellphone record to plaintiffs' attorney Mark Bankston. The defense asked for a mistrial but was denied. pic.twitter.com/Tj8eoZRiV9
MORE UPDATE: The jury came back with $4.1 million in compensatory damages. Tomorrow they will decide punitive damages – ie., the damages to punish Jones.
A friend sent me a picture of Mark on tv after the verdict. He’s pleased.
Last night in Kansas the voters spoke up about the right for women to make their own healthcare decisions without interference from politicians. Turning out like never before, voters struck down Republican efforts to strike abortion rights from the state constitution and impose a strict ban that would cost lives. This election was the bell cow for other states that were trying to do the same thing. Had pro-choice efforts failed here, it would have cast a dark cloud over vast areas of the entire country as ideologues imposed their religion and dogma over tens of millions of women and their families.
More significant, Republican legislators cheated their asses off to get the result they wanted, making their loss even more sweet. Kansas Republicans had already put this measure onto the ballot for the PRIMARY election where no Democrats were running, hoping that they could ban abortion under the radar in a low turnout election. After the SCOTUS stupidly and wrongly struck down Roe, that strategy went out the window, and Kansas became the focus of national attention. That attention drew a turnout estimated at 54%, almost 20% higher than typical primaries, and more important, the measure was struck down in red areas of the state by almost 20% higher than Trump received in 2020. What this tells us is that not only are abortion rights strongly supported by those who vote Democratic, it’s also supported by Republicans.
What happened last night is the logical result of gross overreach which always happens when politics are dominated by one party. The Republicans should learn a lesson from this (but they won’t) that overplaying your hand can be costly. With issues as important as Constitutional rights under threat, Americans who are normally asleep at the wheel wake up and actually vote. We saw that during the Viet Nam war, after Watergate, after Bush’s foray into Iraq, with veteran’s healthcare just this week, and now women’s right to choose.
Hopefully this motivation to the polls sticks for the November mid-terms and beyond. The only way our government works is for elected representatives to be held accountable to the voters for corruption and power grabs. The GOP has proven itself to be irresponsible and callous to the needs of its voters. It’s long past time for local, state, and federal governments to be brought back to actually representing the people. ALL the people.
As is want to happen every now and then, I got into a debate over the PACT Act with a high school classmate of mind on social media. I’m sure many of you have been following this story. I’ll leave a little video below to catch people up in case they have missed it. Suffice it to say, my conversation with the former classmate was brief because he simply parroted the same talking points as Ted Cruz and Pat Toomey. It was easy to dispense of.
The conversation quickly went to term limits. I find this is a normal go to response when conservatives know they’ve lost an argument. They throw this out because they think it is something we can all get behind. They throw it out because they have a definite picture in their head of what that looks like. The see Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. We obviously see different people.
I know this will be an area of disagreement amongst people on both sides. We have a perfectly good mechanism for limiting someone’s time in Washington or Austin. They are called elections. Serving in Washington for too long doesn’t cause the level of cruelty and mendacity that John Stewart is describing. Ted Cruz has not effectively changed fundamentally. Those that knew him back in the 1990s have said he’s a jackass. I’d assume Pat Toomey has been the same guy all along as well.
The specific mechanisms that keep someone like Cruz in office are the same mechanisms that got them there in the first place. Term limits don’t prevent assholes from representing you. It just means it has to be a different asshole after 10 or 20 years. Fixing the mechanisms is something the Democrats in Congress have tried to do but have been unsuccessful because the Senate is where good legislation goes to die.
We can get a lot of change if we simply have computers draw congressional districts instead of political parties. What has been created has been a gap where only jackasses and extremists can slide in. According to the chart in the link, the vast majority of races are decided by more than ten points. If you draw those districts out then a lot more of them are competitive. If they are competitive it is a lot easier to defeat jackasses and carnival barkers.
However, the biggest responsibility is on us. Republican voters don’t like Ted Cruz. They know he’s full of crap. So why do they keep voting for him? Maybe it is to own liberals, but I also suspect they don’t want to do the homework to catch him when he is obviously BSing them. This is simple. If you don’t like the job Greg Abbott has done then don’t vote for him. If you think Ted Cruz is a lying sack of excrement then don’t vote for him. It’s really just that simple.
Okay, I have a little break, so I’ll tell a couple of stories.
Jones’s lawyer goes by the name of Andino Reynal. On the second day of what appears to be a two week trial, Andino doesn’t get his hour long clips of Jones talking on the radio introduced because he did not introduce them prior to trial. That’s very normal. What is not normal is that he then turned on Bankston and tried to claim that Bankston “said” he could do it and called Bankston a liar. Oops. The judge stops this and said to Reynal, “if you impugn the honesty of another lawyer in my court, you better to be ready to prove it.” She was raising her eyebrows in that way that says, “back off, buddy.”
Reynal waits until the judge leaves the room and gets up in Bankston’s face calling him a liar. Reynal apparently forgot that there’s about 40 members of the media in the room and most of them have cameras. And that HBO is taping everything. Bankston looks out at the audience and says, “Hey, can I get some affidavits from anyone about what he’s doing to me?” It was funny but Reynal doesn’t have a funny bone. But …. he does have a middle finger.
I am not kidding. Reynal’s middle finger is in every newspaper in the country.
Here’s Mark asking the reporters for a affidavit:
And here’s Reynal’s response seen in every damn newspaper in the country. I betcha his mother is damn proud.
But wait, there’s more.
I want to introduce Alex’s protege, Owen Shroyer. Owen is a shock jock on Jones’s network. In this trial, after a witness has testified, the judge lets the jury go in the jury room and writes any question they might have the witness. They are to do it alone without consulting with other jurors.
Owen’s testimony was so weird that this happened …
The Judge reads out questions from the jurors to a shock jock Infowars host, Owen Shorley
I was going through social media yesterday minding my own business when I came along this little nugget. As most people know, OAN is basically Fox News if Fox were underfunded, less talented, and somehow even more extreme. Well, it seems Verizon has decided to cut ties with them which means they will not be on any cable packages and they currently don’t have anyone to stream them. What comes next is truly bizarre.
OAN host makes an urgent plea to liberals to help save the network after Verizon dropped them: “It is absolutely crucial that, for once, we defy the powers that be, we all come together, set aside our differences in a unified effort.” pic.twitter.com/JifUTD5PCI
Listen, I could go in any number of directions here, but I suppose I’ll play the straight man for now. Exactly what do we get for this assistance that we would give? I would have to assume this would be somehow transactional because you honestly aren’t making the “the world is a better place with all of us in it” argument are you? Are you talking détente? Is this a truce? Exactly how long would that last?
What you are seeing above is this same Steinberg having a meltdown over a pride flag in Huntington Beach. Yeah, I suppose she can claim it was when she was young and naïve. She’s matured now and is ready to reach across the isle. The picture from this video came on June 22, 2022. It happens to be the Carraway’s anniversary and it wasn’t that long ago. I could add more here, but you get the idea of who we’re dealing with.
A couple of years ago they found a gator in the green space behind our house. Fortunately, it never came close enough to us for us to see firsthand, but we do know that we’ve lost three cats since we’ve moved here. Maybe it wasn’t the gator. Maybe it was one of the owls. It could have been the wild pigs, armadillos, raccoons, or possums. These things deserve to exist on their own and I won’t go out of my way to get rid of them. I’m also not inviting them into our backyard. Wild animals don’t reciprocate or change their nature because you are nice to them. I wish Ms. Steinburg and her colleagues the best in the same sense that I don’t wish death and destruction on anyone. I’m not going to go out of the way to help those wild animals. Those wild animals would surely kill my other cats, dog, and my family if given the chance.
The former president and his children have done their part to attack public education and those that work in the industry. Everyone knows I’m one of those people. His son called us losers and the former guy said no one should let us watch their children for 20 minutes much less teach them anything. We’ve heard all this before and the important thing is understanding why. It is also important to understand exactly why U.S. public schools don’t outperform their counterparts in Europe and Asia and why most private schools outperform their public counterparts.
See, that’s the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to make public schools so unpalatable that most people won’t have a choice but to go private. So, we allow pay to lag for teachers, we insult them and belittle them, and then when there’s a teacher shortage we begin to water down the qualifications teachers must have. Both Arizona and Florida have announced that teachers don’t have to have a Bachelor’s degree.
Most red states are not far behind. Our very own governor threw a commission together to see why there’s a teacher shortage and initially included only one teacher. We could have saved him the money. All of this is by design. They know very well what they are doing. They can offer vouchers and school choice, but that will end up being a band-aid for a gun shot wound. Of course, given the recent mass shootings in our schools, such an euphemism is a little on the nose.
Private schools work for one reason and one reason only. The schools get to choose who goes to school there. It’s the same reason that schools in Europe and Asia outperform our public schools. When you get to choose who takes the test it is remarkable how well they will perform collectively. Imagine an English class where the teacher can pick 20 percent of his or her class to be exempt from the test. We’d have nearly 100 percent passing rate. Boy would we look great.
Simply put, the minute you tell a private school who they have to take is the minute you negate their primary advantage. Plus, a 5000 dollar voucher does little when the average tuition in Texas is over 10,000. Many of the top parochial and Catholic schools can cost more than twice that amount. A lower middle class family can’t afford to send even one child to such a school much less multiple children.
Even if you subsidized the entire tuition costs, the child still has to meet the admission requirements. What happens if they have intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, or physical disabilities? What happens if they have behavioral problems? A private school can simply say no. As a former private school teacher, I can attest to this. Some of their margins are so thin that they can’t afford to pay specialists. If your kid needs extra help he or she will need to go to public school.
Yet, we will be stripping those same public schools of crucial resources. We will be flooding their classrooms with only those students that were too poor or somehow not fit enough to be accepted to one of those schools. They can’t explain what happens to them and they don’t particularly care. I’ve also been in schools that were the last choice in a school choice district. Someone has to care about these kid
Welcome to The World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.
My name is Susan DuQuesnay Bankston. I live in Richmond, Texas, in the heart of Tom DeLay's old district. It's nuttier than squirrel poop here.
I am honored and privileged to know Miss Juanita Jean Herownself, hairdresser extraordinary and political maven. Since she does not have time to fiddle with this internet stuff, I type her website for her and you can read it if you want to. If you don't, she truly does not give a big bear's butt.
A lot of what I post here has to do with local politics, but you probably have the same folks in your local government.
This ain't a blog. Blogs are way too trendy for me. This is a professional political organization.
Yes, I am proud of Mark but I am equally proud of his big brother, Bryan the librarian, who not only found the clip of Jones calling Neil “slow” on his broadcast while Neil was testifying but also got it to Mark within minutes, clipped and ready to go. Bryan goes to work every day to push back frontiers of ignorance and he loves it.
