One of the principals I used to work for had a motto: it matters. Ultimately, what that meant is that everything matters. Unfortunately, that can’t literally be true. If everything matters then nothing really matters. This governing philosophy impacts so many things. It impacts our political priorities. It impacts our priorities in education. It impacts our priorities individually as we run through life.

Occasionally, the world of sports and the political world collide. Star basketball player Brandon Miller is a perfect example. For those that don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, he was involved in a fatal shooting in January. He did not pull the trigger, but the gun was supplied by him. From here we get into the normal rigmarole of whether he possessed the gun legally, knew how the gun would be used beforehand, or even if he knew the gun was in possession prior to the shooting. What we know is that the shooter asked him to bring the gun via text message before he arrived. He may not have read the text before leaving or didn’t realize he was actually bringing the gun.

This case is interesting for any number of reasons. For one, he is still playing basketball and has since the incident occurred. The university, his coach, and the athletic department presumably knew about the incident after it happened in January. We are in damn near March and he is still leading his team in scoring and driving them to a number two overall ranking. He hasn’t been charged with a crime, so I guess they legally can do that. However, as we have discussed before, there is a huge difference between whether we CAN do something and whether we SHOULD do something.

This is where we ask a few common sense questions. If your best friend calls you up or texts you after midnight and casually says, “oh, and can you bring the gun?” you would think just about everyone would ask some very pointed questions. After all, very little good can come of that situation. His attorneys will obviously argue that he couldn’t foresee what would happen. Maybe he didn’t know that a murder would occur, but he should have known something.

I’d be remiss not to point out the similarities between Miller and Kyle Rittenhouse. No, he didn’t bring an AR-15. He wasn’t protecting property. However, the language surrounding it is similar. Maybe he legally could possess the gun. Maybe he was returning the property to his friend. Maybe Rittenhouse could legally bring an AR-15 over straight lines. Maybe he had a legal right to defend himself. Maybe a lot of things. What we know is that neither of them should have been doing these things.

There is a difference between legal culpability and moral culpability. More importantly, notice the difference between the groups of people that make excuses for each of these young men. I guarantee that the intrinsic circle in the Venn diagram will be very small. As an educator, I can’t help but think that we’ve failed these young men. We’ve made excuses for both of them for different reasons. One can run, jump, and shoot better than most of us. Another fit a narrative of the good guy with a gun. In the not so distance past, both would feel some level of shame that would cause them to withdraw for at least a time so they could rebuild their image. March Madness is just around the corner. Sadly, the time for culpability or personal responsibility will have to wait.

Okay, it’s finally, damn finally, time that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s antics are going national.  I gotta tell you that he’s been a thief and a liar since before he took office and the entire Texas Republican Party seems very proud of that.

Paxton knows he can get away with anything so he gets more brazen as the days, months, and years pass.  It is not going to get better until he gets national attention and even then George Santos is living breathing proof that even that doesn’t work all the time.  Republicans have turned illegal shenanigans into an art form surrounded by pride.

Stock fraud isn’t sexy. So, he’s walked around with that stinky crawfish in his back pocket for seven – 7! – years without ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.

But, finally we have sexy.

"The allegations are, over time, is that Ken Paxton took a number of different steps to potentially aid this investor." @tplohetski breaks down the controversies surrounding Texas AG Paxton #SaturdayShow pic.twitter.com/aGFU0Sd6H8

— The Saturday/Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart (@weekendcapehart) February 25, 2023

So, now it’s up to the taxpayers to finance his crime.  We have gone into cahoots with the Texas Attorney General to finance his crime syndicate.

Rumor has it – and I emphasize rumor – that Paxton has used the investigative branch of his office to gather dirt on both the Governor and Lt. Governor, mainly hanky panky with the power grid, and they know it.  He can walk on water at this point.

Sadly, we could have beat him this election but Texas Democrats totally screwed up in the primary and elected a candidate who had no chance of winning in November instead of a candidate who had a damn good chance.  Sometimes I want to take Texas Democrats down by the river and baptize them in the holy name of good sense.

Well, that’s my say for today.

Okay, all you free speechers out there just calm the hell down.

I am just gonna bounce in here and say something to you before you bust the twine holding your brain together. Please do not equate defamation lawsuits with having anything to do with the First Amendment.

Most important: The First Amendment says the government cannot deprive people of free speech, except under certain circumstances.  Since 1969, the government can and will deprive you of free speech only if it is intended, and likely to produce, “imminent lawless action.”

Defamation is a whole ‘nother ballgame.  A lawyer I know defined it this way: “Speech is free; lies you gotta pay for.”  That’s simplistic but it’s pretty true.  To sue somebody for defamation you have to prove not only that it was a lie, but that it was a malicious lie. It can’t be an accidental lie.

Under New York Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court ruling that has guided libel and defamation claims for nearly 60 years, a plaintiff like Dominion must show that a defendant like Fox published false statements with “actual malice” — meaning that it was done “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

Which brings us to Dominion Voting Systems’ billion and half dollar lawsuit against Fox News.  Fox trashed Dominion and accused them of purposefully cheating and stealing an election.  The hard part is proving that Fox didn’t do this because they are dumb because, you know, they truly are dumb.  And even supporting Trump isn’t proof of malice. But, do you know what is proof?  Lies about the lies, and you gotta pay for lies.

Dominion said the emails and texts show that Fox’s hosts and executives knew the claims being peddled by then-president Donald Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell weren’t true — some employees privately described them as “ludicrous” and “mind blowingly nuts”— but Fox kept airing them to keep its audience from changing channels.

Dominion is sitting pretty now since Fox’s internal emails are public.

Personally, I don’t think the emails will hurt Fox at all with their viewers because their viewers knew all along that this stuff is crazy.  Legal experts are declaring, however, that Fox’s internal emails are “incredibly damning.” Wait for more lawsuits to follow.  Now individual people they lied about will be able to get lawyers. And, that is a good thing.

Okay, if you’re freezing your patootie off or sweating like me, here’s some weekend entertainment while you wait the weather out.

Alex Jones had a court date on Friday.

Alex Jones tonight says that DOJ appeared at his bankruptcy hearing today and told the court that they believed Alex bought this cat to hide some of his cash, and says they want to seize his cat for the Sandy Hook families. pic.twitter.com/vG9q5BponZ

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 24, 2023

I’ll take Things That Never Happened for $1,000, Alex.

Sitting at home all week in covid quarantine gave me plenty of time to read In between naps. Newspapers, magazines that were piling up, books…I even read BOOKS! I’m so far behind with books that my compelling reading has been Bill Browder’s Red Notice (2015) followed by Freezing Order (2022). Back to back. Thanks to my sister for recommending them. If you want the inside scoop on Money Laundering, Murder and Putin, look no further. Not fiction and terrifying.

But this morning, while reading my morning digital news, I came across this gem from one of my favorite young opinion writers in the WaPo. When I say young, it’s because I’m OLD. She’s my daughters’ age, middle 30s with a wicked wit. I don’t know about you, but when GOP legislators started showing up at work with AR-15 lapel pins, it about did me in. Now they’ve totally jumped the shark. Congress critters Barry Moore (Aladambama,), Andrew Clyde (GA gun shop owner), Lauren Boebert (COrazy) and the inimitable shapeshifter George Santos have banded together to sponsor Bill HR 1095 making an AR 15 the National Gun of the United States. I have no more words for this insanity. I think I’ll knit today. Reality is too much.

One of the hallmarks of a fascist state is controlled mass media. In totalitarian states this becomes comical. Supposedly, Kim Jung Un played an entire round of golf and had a hole in one on every hole. Supposedly, he doesn’t ever go to the bathroom. These were ridiculous claims and most people with a pulse can simply set it aside as ludicrous. Yet, if you don’t have access to the internet or to independent news sources you will probably believe a lot of it. Whether the dictator of North Korea is a great golfer or not really doesn’t matter. However, if we look at what is going on in Russia and Ukraine then it becomes deadly serious. Vladimir Putin is apparently taking on Nazism. For 90 percent of the world this notion is ridiculous. It is the ten percent that aren’t getting access to straight news that don’t understand the truth.

People often focus on mass media and the problems with mass media, but we have a bigger problem with smaller media. Print news is a dying business. There are tons of reasons for that. For one, they just have not managed to find a way to maximize new media sources like the internet to their advantage. Moreover, there were some bad business practices that they couldn’t correct. The Houston Chronicle for years could not consistently get us a paper. I’m not sure why. We moved a few different times and had different distributors, but the problem was the same. We subscribed to the Sunday New York Times and the Washington Post, but they couldn’t get that to us either.

We dealt with customer service and they didn’t seem to care until we threatened to unsubscribe. Finally, we did. In addition to the Chronicle there were tons of smaller newspapers that would cover local events. Sometimes it was local sports. Sometimes they were school board meetings and other smaller organizations. This has been noted before. The world really doesn’t change much on top. People can watch C-SPAN and the mass media outlets will always send people to Washington to cover what’s going on. The same is likely true of Austin and other statehouses. When the Chronicle and other papers shut down it means that no one is going to those school board meetings. When no one is there to watch then suddenly almost anything is possible. After all, who is there to stop them?

This is how things happen. It rarely ever starts off big. It usually starts with the grass roots. Small communities rail against critical race theory. Small communities call for the banning of certain books. Small communities call for curriculum to be changed to meet their worldview. When there is no one there to cover it then there aren’t enough people that will know what they are doing. You get the small minority and the small minority is almost always skewed one way or another. So, maybe it isn’t primarily a mass media problem. Maybe it is a local media problem. Democracy dies in darkness.