I am comforted to announce that the Sandy Hooks families have settled their lawsuit with the Remington Arms Company for $73 million.

It won’t bring their children back, but it might save someone else’s child.

My helpful solution to the gun horror is to require all gun owners to carry liability insurance on their guns. I am required to carry liability insurance on my car. I have liability insurance on my property if you get hurt on my front porch or on my child’s swing set.

It seems to me that if you’re stopped by the police, you have to show a driver’s license and proof of insurance. If you have a gun, you have to have a license but no insurance.

Congratulations to everyone involved. For those wondering, my son was not on this case. His  involvement is for the families suing Alex Jones in Texas.  A couple of weeks ago, the Judge in the case was rightly perturbed that Jones’ eighth – yeah, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, bingo! – new lawyer showed up at court blatantly unprepared and asked, as did the other seven,  for more time.

 

 

Sometimes it pays to pay attention to what is going on around the world. Many people that think of Haiti probably consider in the same category our ex-president considers them in. When we get wrapped up in our daily lives we often don’t give places like Haiti a second thought.

We probably remember the earthquake that rocked Haiti back in 2010. Twelve years later and I don’t give it a second thought. At least I can say that was true before watching a video in the World Geography class I support. Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic and those countries couldn’t be more different.

The obvious result was droves of Haitians leaving Haiti searching for somewhere to go. A number of them came here and in the United States. So, few if any of us thought to consider the Dominican Republic. We probably just assumed they would do the neighborly thing. In some cases they did, but their reaction also showed the dark side of these events.

It’s hard to view their collective reaction as anything other than racism. Of course, we are only viewing it from the Haitian perspective. The Dominican Republic had been a relatively well run country and they didn’t want a human tragedy to take them down with them. Of course, there were a number of horrible events that led up to that moment.

A bunch of 9th graders probably can’t appreciate all of the implications of such a video. They may think of Haiti as one of those places where you can sponsor a child like Sally Struthers used to do. Just 72 cents a day can feed and educate a Haitian child. However, the deeper you look, one cannot possibly avoid seeing parallels to our situation here.

Those huddled masses yearn to breath free. Haitians wanted a better life. On an individual basis it wasn’t their fault that life was so brutally tough in their home country. Collectively things are never that simple. They were victims of things out of their control, but they also did plenty to create their own problems.

The Dominican Republic’s collective response was to render some aid but ultimately to block as many people from coming as possible. That by itself has some justification. If we allow your crappy country to export all of its citizens to our country then our country becomes the crappy country. At least, that’s the thinking behind it.

Xenophobia has rarely been so fully on display. The ties that bind is the notion of “not in my backyard.” That was a phrase coined by George Carlin years ago in his comedy act. The general idea is that we want what’s best for people and we don’t want anyone to suffer. We see the constant barrage on television of the plight of abused animals, polar bears without ice to stand on, or children with cancer. We see the plight of poor children on the other side of the world.

We will give anything to erase those images from our brains. 72 cents a day (or whatever it really is) doesn’t seem like a lot. Maybe if we all chip in we can really make a difference. That line of thinking stops when the problem comes closer to home. I’m really sorry you are going through so much, but if you could go through it somewhere else that would be great.

So, at the end of the day we really can’t shame the Dominican Republic. They did what we do. They just put an official stamp on it and called it a name. Sometimes, other people far away provide us with a window into our own soul. Looking at life through that window hopefully evokes at least some level of shame. That is the case if we have any ounce of humanity left.

So a financial firm cut ties with Trump and retracts financial statement. It’s a fun read.

What Mazars USA is actually saying: This is to inform you that the financial statements we helped prepare for the Trump Organization “in accordance with professional standards” from 2011 to 2020 are pretty much bogus. There is a lawsuit bearing down on us like an oncoming freight train and this is the only off ramp we could think of. Please don’t treat us like you did Arthur Anderson.

Best Valentines Day present ever.

Greg Abbott released another ad where he regaled us with Joe Biden’s supposedly open border policy and how Abbott was protecting Texans from the big, bad Mexican cartels bringing over drugs from south of the border. These ads are littered all over sports talk radio these days.

When the show returned to its regularly scheduled content, the deejays were talking about the theory of sunken cost. In this case, it referred to whether a team should let go of a player they had invested heavily in. The organizations that do the best are the ones that realize their mistakes early on and pivot effectively.

The fallacy of sunken costs is basically our tendency to double down on a belief, strategy, or endeavor because pivoting would be an admission that we were wrong and that we’d wasted time, money, and/or energy on a bad idea. The concept is really a two-pronged concept. First, there is the reluctance to give up because of the previous time, money, and energy wasted. Second, there is a reluctance to give up because we would have to admit that we made an error in judgment.

So, let’s take a look at the ads being played on the radio as an example. The ad focuses on three belief structures that are more or less untrue. The first is that illegal immigration is on the rise. We can see when we look at the numbers that it has been in steady decline in recent years.

The second portion of that fallacy is that undocumented immigrants are somehow inherently dangerous. The ads focus on law enforcement and how Abbott is protecting us from the big, bad immigrants. Yet, when we look at numbers from the same source as above, we notice that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate than legal immigrants and natural born citizens.

So, that obviously plays into the third fallacy of the commercial. Violent crime rates are on the rise nationwide. There is an assumption that this means that the borders have become more dangerous. Yet, they seem to be in decline on the southern border. Multiple reports and studies demonstrate that a border wall would not effectively reduce crime at the border or in the country at large.

The question is how we free a subset of the population that seems to be wrapped in fear and free them from the clutches of red herrings and misinformation? Pundits have long known that when you can sell the country on daddy issues (defense, crime, safety) then conservatives usually win. When mommy issues are the most dominant (education, health care, human rights) then the progressives usually win.

However, this goes beyond that. It goes to a group of people that have obviously backed the wrong horse. They’ve watched that horse come in last in nearly every race at the track. He talks about protecting them and he clearly doesn’t do that. He talks about how corrupt his opponents were and he is clearly the most corrupt politician in the history of the country.

It’s clearly not about stopping the steal or draining the swamp anymore. Those excuses died a long time ago. It is very simple. The longer people hold on to their love and adulation of a thoroughly evil man the harder it becomes to give up on that love and adulation. They would then have to admit that the love and adulation was misplaced. That’s admitting that they’ve wasted time, money, and brain power. That’s admitting they were duped. The greatest con anyone can pull is the con of getting you to accept being conned because it’s just too painful to admit you were conned.

I went over to have coffee with Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen this morning and he told me a very weird story.

A local small town West Virginia reporter wanted to find out if Republican Representative Alex Mooney had set up a legal defense fund. Legal defense funds are allowed in a separate account to use for any legal expenses while running for office or if they get sued over their official duties or they get criminally charged with crimes.

Friends of the congress members can donate up to $5,000 to these funds.

Congress people who have created such funds have to file quarterly reports with the House Legislative Resource Center in the basement of the Cannon Office Building.  When the reporter called the Legislative Resource Center to confirm the existence of the legal defense fund this is what he was told:

“Legislative Resource Center officials said those who wish to review trust documents filed there must contact their local House member’s office so it can arrange to provide an escort for entrance into the Cannon House Office Building that houses the center.  Document copies cost 10 cents a page.

In other words, scrutinizing Mooney’s trust documentation requires a chaperone provided by Mooney’s office – a policy made by the House Office of the Clerk in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  The center is a division of the Office of the Clerk, which performs administrative functions for the House.”

If that’s accurate the Legislative Resource Center may be holding a treasure trove of secrets.  Unlike every other type of financial document Members of Congress must file with the Clerk of the House, legal expense fund reports are not available electronically.  The only way to review them is to go the Legislative Resource Center.

Well, ain’t that just something real special? So, to see my congressman’s records, I’d have to drive to Washington, DeeCee, and ask pretty please for a chaperone to take me to see something that my congressman really doesn’t want me to see. Plus, I’m willing to bet a fresh ten dollar bill that every member of his staff has a real festering case of the cooties.

Since the pandemic began in March 2020 and access to the Capitol was restricted, the Office of Congressional Ethics has referred reports regarding nine members of the House to the House Ethics Committee for investigation.  Did one or more of them other than Rep. Mooney also create a legal defense fund?  We don’t know.  Who is contributing to them? We don’t know.

In addition, dozens of members have been found to have violated the STOCK Act by not disclosing stock purchases or sales.  Have any of them created a legal defense fund? We don’t know.  Who is contributing to them?  We don’t know.

If this restricted access policy by the Clerk of the House has been in effect for all of this time it represents a shocking loss of transparency for the media and the public.  It’s especially egregious for local reporters trying to report on Member of Congress to their constituents.

Perhaps that’s the point. That, my friends, I do know.

A few days ago I talked about the death of the Republican party. I see Republicans everywhere. What in the hell am I talking about? Obviously, what you are seeing could be classified as political zombies. So, it becomes important to provide just one example of how the lack of a viable conservative alternative is impacting citizens on a regular basis.

The economy has done better under Democrats than under Republicans since World War II. You could probably go further back than that, but if we go back beyond FDR we run into problems of how we can define Democrats and Republicans. Part of that can be in how we even look at problems. One of those problems has been the rising costs of college and the college loan debt in the country. Conservatives seem to have the same outlook as they do on big business. That’s because college is big business. In Texas, they lifted caps on tuition. Not surprisingly, those costs have gone up to what we see now.

If you compare that with trends in education overall you can’t help but notice the gap. For those that don’t want to look at the data too hard, I would simply point out that Texas spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 per student each year. Obviously, exact figures fluctuate, but it is fairly staggering when you think about all that includes.

I’m officially not a classroom teacher. I am a support facilitator. I go into other teacher’s classrooms. Our campus doesn’t even have anyone that is profoundly disabled. Other campuses have to include support facilitators and those that provide more invasive support. These are things that most colleges and universities don’t provide. That all factors into that cost per student.

If you take a look at the costs for people to attend college in Texas you will notice that only one school came in below 23,000 per year when all expenses were considered. Multiply that four or five times and you’ll see the total cost of a degree. As you might suspect, the number of people that have 92,000 dollars lying around is between slim and none.

So, keep in mind that the cost of college is more than double that of public schools when they don’t even include special education services in most instances. They don’t provide free and reduced lunch. There certainly aren’t nearly as many guidance counselors and they really don’t employ assistant principals. The battle over student loan debt seems to be ignoring the most important element in most instances. Why in all holy hell is college so damn expensive in the first place?

A vibrant conservative party could provide some answers to this dilemma. Instead, they stoke passions amongst the old and inspire them to go into one of those “back in my day” kind of diatribes. I paid off my loans. Why in the hell should they simply erase the debt now? Well, we could start off by pointing out that college costs have skyrocketed over the past 50 years.

You lose your conservative card if you give anyone anything (unless they represent big business). So, it is not surprising that they would push back against retiring college debt. Yet, there seems to be no effort to actually provide any solutions to the problem. Instead, they let the “free market” decide and the free market is what ballooned costs in the first place.

The question is whether higher education is something worth investing in or whether it should continue to go to the highest bidder. Some people might consider free tuition to be a bridge too far. That’s certainly a reasonable opinion, but those that shoot down ideas should be coming up with some of their own.