Emily Solberg

This whole $1.776 BILLION dollar slush fund is an insult to and an assault on our democracy. Maybe now the GOP will stand up and say WTF? Are we really going to allow millions to be paid out to the J6 terrorists who attacked our Capitol on 1/6/21? They deserve to be still in jail. Trump says the J6 terrorists were treated "so badly" by Biden. Well, fuck yeah, they tried to overturn the 2020 election. And obviously Trump belongs in jail too, but the entire machinery of the government has been taken over/captured by this gang of criminals aka the Republican Party.

Ya know, I didn’t think it could get much worse than a ballroom.

Using OUR taxpayer dollars for a G-D ballroom when people can’t afford gas or groceries is Marie Antoinette-level egregious, but I think this may just take the cake.

Now we have a president who sued his own IRS, then negotiated a deal with his own DOJ and dropped the charges, but only on the condition that they NEVER investigate ANY tax claims related to him, his family, or his businesses up to the date of the settlement. Lest we forget, this is the same guy who was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. But hey, nothing to see here!

Oh—the attorney general who oversaw this entire charade? Just the president’s former personal lawyer. Totally unbiased and nonpartisan. 

As part of this deal, the president also gets a formal apology from the United States for hurting his feelings ANDDDDD—*drumroll please*—a $1.776 BILLION slush fund for victims of “lawfare,” aka, allies and loyalists, including but not limited to the darling insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

How patriotic.

Roughly 1600 people faced federal charges for their involvement on January 6th. If every one of those people files a claim, that amounts to what?

Only a smooth $1.1 MILLION per person.

For some perspective, wanna know how much the federal government pays in a death gratuity for service members who die on active duty?

$100,000.

So you’re telling me the people who sh*t all over the Constitution (literally, they spread feces all over the Capitol building) are rightfully entitled to TEN TIMES the compensation allotted for service members who sacrificed their LIVES defending the same Constitution??

Raise your hand if, instead of ballrooms, and shady deals, and AI data centers, and tax cuts for billionaires, and senseless wars, and million-dollar immigration ad campaigns with horses and make-up, and road trip reality shows, and private scuba excursions in Hawaii, and locker room Olympic parties, and steak and lobster for cabinet members . . .

You want YOUR hard-earned tax dollars to go to healthcare, national parks, cancer research, science, clean air and water, food for the hungry, veterans, education, mental health initiatives, social safety nets, and more amazing NASA moon missions.

And raise your hand if you are sick and tired of the most corrupt, incompetent, nepotistic people in this country getting to make the choice for you.

from Facebook

Molly Ivins

I ran across this piece from last summers Texas Observer. Every now and then they pull up a piece from Molly Ivins, who was a big supporter of the Texas Observer until she passed away in 2007.

This piece, on school vouchers was originally written by Molly in 1997, but, needless to say, things have gotten worse in Texas. The voucher program is now running and shipping lots of money to people that don't need it, in accordance with the unwritten rule that Republicans will always try to benefit the wealthy.

MOLLY IVINS ON SCHOOL VOUCHERS (1997)

Another bad idea whose time has come in the Texas Legislature is upon us...

by Molly Ivins

Editor’s Note: The Observer published this column in its April 11, 1997, edition under the headline: “Texas: Laboratory for Lunacy.” That year’s private school voucher proposal narrowly died at the Lege.

Three strikes and you’re out? Watch Texas spend more on prisons than it does on schools. Thinking of making your tax structure more regressive? Come to the Lone Star State and see how it’s done.

The latest brainstorm to afflict our friendly pols in Austin is school vouchers. Consider the beauty of this nifty scheme as it might eventually be worked out under the guidance of the Texas Lege. To improve the public schools (I swear, that’s how the advocates are advertising this lunacy):

• We give vouchers to all the students who are already in private or religious schools around the state. Right there, before anybody else even gets a voucher, we will have taken, say, $1 billion out of the budget for our public schools. Shrewd move, eh?

• We also give all the kids now in public school a voucher, thus theoretically enabling these children to attend the schools of their parents’ choice: Unfortunately, private schools might find themselves under no obligation to accept any of our kids; they could be rejected because of their religious affiliation, their disabilities, on the grounds that they’re not bright enough, because the school administrators don’t like their looks—any reason not specifically excluded by law. The Texas Freedom Network, a normally sensible group of good guys, is running around like Paul Revere, trying to alert the citizenry to this dread downside of the school voucher idea. “Proposed voucher legislation would allow private schools to recruit the best athletes and students at taxpayer expense.” Folks, we’re talking football now! I knew you’d be concerned. Quel horrifying thought: The whole high school football tradition is in dire peril. Stop the madness now!

THIS CONCEPT IS SO BAD THAT IT HAS AN EXCELLENT CHANCE OF PASSING THE LEGISLATURE.

On a more sober note, the good private schools we’d all like to send our kids to already have waiting lists a mile long. No public school kid is going to St. John’s in Houston or St. Mark’s in Dallas with a voucher clutched in his or her little hand; those schools cost $10,000 a year, and our little school voucher won’t cover half the cost.

Now maybe, just maybe, some upper-middle-class folks might be able to afford a fancy private school with a voucher to help, but working-class and middle-class kids are going to be stuck just where they always were. Why should we spend public money to help just that one thin slice of the population when it won’t improve the public schools?

The rural kids are really going to get burned by this idea. As you may have noticed, almost all private schools are in cities. Hundreds of rural school districts don’t have a single private school, but because of the way state education financing works, they’d still lose thousands of dollars from their budgets for the public schools without a single kid going to private school.

I realize this means nothing to our Legislature, but it should be mentioned that the whole idea is rankly unconstitutional.

All in all, this concept is so bad that it has an excellent chance of passing the Legislature. Much as we would like to help the rest of the nation by demonstrating once more just how stupid ideas work out in practice, couldn’t we give this one a miss?

In case you’re wondering who is pushing this dingbat notion, it’s the religious right, the same charmers who helped elect the right-wingers who now grace the state Board of Education. If you haven’t checked in on the state board lately, you really should. It’s a lot of fun—fruitcakes unlimited, flat-Earthers, creationists, all manner of remarkable specimens. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that there’s even a bill in the Lege to replace it with an appointed board again.

You may recall that we’ve had this fight before. In keeping with my Theory of Perpetual Reform, I now favor an appointed board. Last time, I favored an elected board. What I really favor is the idea that no matter what we try, in about ten years, it’s always a mess again and we need to try something else.

Molly Ivins (Alan Pogue)

Speaking of matters educational, let me take on a sacred cow that is long past its prime: local control. Have you noticed that the people who consider local control of the schools a sanctified arrangement are the same people who are always complaining about how terrible the schools are? If local control is such a great idea, then how come the schools are so bad? Have we considered the possibility that maybe local control is the problem?

A truism of the everlasting education debates is that someone somewhere has already solved whatever the problem is. Someone somewhere is always doing a brilliant job of teaching physics to inner-city kids, or teaching music to a bunch of rural kids in the 4-H who have heretofore considered Loretta Lynn classical music, or getting bored suburban brats excited about Herman Melville.

The problem is that we can’t seem to replicate the successes in the schools across the board because there is no across the board. Instead, there’s local control. Sometimes it’s superb, granted. But often, it’s hopelessly knot-headed. Ask the folks in Dallas—they’ve had some lulus lately. It seems to me just possible that maybe what we need to do is take education out of the hands of insurance salesmen, Minute Women, and other odd ephemera of the electoral process and put it in the hands of… well, educators.

Molly Ivins, co-editor of the Observer from 1970 to 1976, was a stalwart advocate of the magazine until her death in 2007. Her irreverence and irrepressibility continue to help define the Observer today.

red v blue states

Here's a good one from Allen Clifton re red vs blue states. I'm not surprised that the GOP wants to eliminate the Department of Education. They would prefer that people don't even bother with "education." Take some vocational education, instead, because we'll still need plumbers and electricians. Reading books (usually) makes you smarter (Rush Limbaugh and similar books excepted). How are they gonna control you if you are well-educated? Rich people, like Elon Musk for instance, like Texas because there is no income tax, and if you're rich, Texas will fall all over itself to make you wanna move here. Tax abatements, tax incentives, tax cuts, all for the wealthy. California already got sick of Musk's shit and basically booted him out.

Here are a couple of facts conservatives need to understand about “red states” and why some of their brags — such as “it’s more affordable” and “more people, especially rich people and big businesses, are moving here” — aren’t necessarily the flex they think they are.

For starters, many “red states” are more affordable because most people don’t want to live there. There’s a reason there’s a direct correlation between population density and the cost of living. I live in Texas, and in major cities like Houston, Dallas, and Austin, it’s a lot more expensive to live there than it is in Brady or Abilene — because more people live in those major cities.

Trust me, if Mobile, Alabama, had the same population density as, say, Los Angeles or New York City, it would be a heck of a lot more expensive to live there.

It’s also more affordable because most “red states” are poorer, have shorter life expectancies, higher infant mortality rates, much lower wages, and tend to rank near the bottom when it comes to quality of education.

Which, again, is a big part of the reason fewer people live there — thus making it more affordable.

As for this big brag that a lot of businesses and rich people are leaving “blue states” to come to “red states,” yeah — they’re doing it to exploit tax breaks that ultimately in the long run make life worse for the vast majority of people living there.

When states like Texas or Florida give massive tax breaks to businesses to move there, who do you think ultimately ends up paying more?

Regular citizens, via higher property taxes, sales taxes, and other local taxes.

When rich people come to a “red state” to claim a “home,” even though they’re probably rarely ever there, so they don’t have to pay state income taxes in places like California or New York, who do you think that screws over?

All the regular people in the state who are now likely paying more because rich people are essentially using these “red states” as tax havens to save themselves a lot of money while driving up prices for everyone else.

Do you think these billionaires really want to live in these red states? If so, why didn’t they start their businesses there instead of in states like California, New York, Washington, and other “blue states”?

Notice it wasn’t until they made it big and built their wealth empires that they found their way to these “red states” to protect their money.

And again, the ordinary citizens of those states are the ones who get screwed.

Are “blue states” perfect? Of course not. No place is. They all need work.

But these rich people and big businesses aren’t leaving states run by Democrats because they genuinely want to move to Republican-run states. They’re going there because the GOP is doing at the local level what it’s been doing at the national level: passing legislation that benefits the top 1% at the expense of everyone else.

For example, look at recent pushes in states like Texas and Florida to eliminate property taxes. Sounds great, right?

Except when you discover that, at least here in Texas, the plan to offset that lost revenue is by increasing sales taxes. So the rich get massive tax breaks on their multi-million-dollar homes, while these states replace that revenue with a regressive consumption tax that will almost always lead to the vast majority of people shouldering more of the tax burden.

Always remember this: any tax system based heavily on consumption taxes (typically sales taxes) is highly regressive and favors the rich while placing a larger burden on the other 99% of people.

That said, this boasting I see from Republicans and citizens of states run by the GOP because they’ve seen population increases — especially from wealthy individuals and big businesses relocating there — isn’t the flex they think it is.

That just tells me your state and local governments are selling out the citizens who actually live in these places by passing tax policies and legislation that benefit the wealthy and big businesses at the expense of everyone else.

Allen Clifton on Facebook

James Hodge

If Facebook's algorithms are supposed to be steering us one way or another, I have to say I like the way it has been steering me. So far, at least. I keep getting new writers in my feed that are not MAGA. This one below is from James Hodge, a comedian, who appeared on my feed recently. If Facebook is trying to turn me into a conservative, it sure as hell ain't working.

This one from Hodge gives you some tips on how to deal with MAGA dolts.

James Hodge

When MAGA responds to obviously terrible things you point out Trump is doing they:

1: hit you with a ridiculous strawman argument.

They take your argument and replace it with something you never said and then they argue against that. Don’t get dragged into their stupidity. Stick to your point and ignore their nonsense.

Criticizing Trump for his failures in Iran doesn’t mean you think Iran should have nuclear weapons. You never said it and a nuclear armed Iran can be avoided without a war, but they have to invent it because they can’t intelligently argue against your actual point. When they create strawman claims it’s because they can’t process and refute your actual argument. They aren’t trying to be right. They just want to convince themselves you’re wrong.

2: whataboutism

You point out Trump is causing hyper-inflation with his horrible tariff policies and foreign military interventions.

They go, what about Joe Biden’s inflation? Joe Biden screwed up the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

They can’t defend Trump on the merits of his actions so they just rant about something Biden or Obama or Hillary Clinton supposedly did. It’s not an argument against your point. It’s just a defense mechanism. Ignore it. Argue your point. Don’t let them change the subject. A whataboutism is a weak person admitting they can’t actually argue against the point you are making.

3: ad hominem attack

You point out the GOP controlled Senate is giving Trump a billion dollars of tax payer money to spend on a ballroom he said a few months ago wouldn’t use any tax payer dollars and they say you have Trump Derangement Syndrome and you hate America. This is another accidental confession on their part that they can’t actually argue against your point. Now it’s just them saying, you’re crazy so they can climb down their cognitive dissonance hole and protect their stupid faith in trump’s idiocy. If they can convince themselves you have no credibility they can ignore your point. You’re just a crazy lib who wants to let (insert nonsense social issue here) so you hate Trump and have gone crazy. Again this is just another way they are confessing they can’t actually refute your point.

4: slippery slope

You say ICE agents shouldn’t be murdering people.

They say if ICE isn’t given free reign to do whatever they want America will be overrun by illegal aliens. This is nonsense. They’re predicting a future easily avoidable without doing whatever horrible thing Trump and Stephen miller are letting happen this week. They’re just trying to creat fear because they can’t refute your actual argument. They need fear because fear is the fastest way to shut off reason and replace it with a fight or flight instinct.

In conclusion:

These people aren’t smart. They’re just repeating the same nonsense they see all day from Newsmax, Fox News and right wing social media influencers. They don’t even know what they are doing. It’s just the way their mind has been brainwashed to deal with irrefutable arguments the same way they’ve been trained to do by right wing media.

Original.

Michael Jochum

Michael Jochum on the randomness of life.

The Butterfly Effect Wears Combat Boots

Riders of Justice snuck up on me this afternoon. I took a little time away from the relentless churn of the world and landed in a film I somehow missed, despite the fact that Mads Mikkelsen is one of my favorite actors working today. I’ve seen damn near everything he’s done. The man has that rare ability to say more with silence than most actors can with three pages of dialogue. Riders of Justice appears, on the surface, to be a revenge film. A soldier loses his wife in what appears to be a random train bombing, and the machinery of vengeance begins to turn. But like all worthwhile art, it’s not actually about what it first appears to be about.

It’s about grief, coincidence, fate, trauma, and the stories we tell ourselves so the chaos makes sense. What struck me most was not the violence, though there’s plenty of that, nor even the dark humor, which is beautifully Danish in its deadpan brutality. It was the strange, accidental therapy taking place between these fully realized, broken human beings. None of them set out to heal one another. None of them would describe what they’re doing as healing. And yet, that’s exactly what unfolds. A soldier shattered by loss. A statistician obsessed with patterns. Damaged men trying to make mathematical sense out of emotional catastrophe. Human beings doing what human beings do when reality becomes unbearable: trying to impose order on disorder.

And isn’t that what we all do? The film toys with the idea that nothing is random. That every event is preceded by another event, and another before that, a vast interconnected web of causality stretching backward into infinity. A dropped sandwich. A changed seat. A delayed train. A conversation. A decision. One microscopic shift, and an entirely different life emerges. The butterfly effect wearing combat boots.

As someone who has spent years studying yogic philosophy, consciousness, and the strange dance between ego and awareness, that landed hard with me. Not because I think life is pre-written in some rigid cosmic screenplay where free will is merely decorative, but because the film asks a far more interesting question: how much control do we really have, and what do we do when we realize it may be less than we imagined? The ego hates that question. The ego wants authorship. Control. Blame. Credit. Villains. Heroes. Certainty. But life rarely offers certainty. It offers circumstance.

Which, naturally, dragged me right back to where my mind so often goes these days: America. Because if you look at our current political reality through that same lens, Donald Trump stops being the entire story and becomes merely one grotesque expression of a much longer chain reaction. A symptom, not the disease. A consequence, not the cause. The billionaire class didn’t accidentally discover Donald Trump like archaeologists unearthing some golden orange relic. They recognized utility. A television personality with no ideology beyond self-worship. A man infinitely malleable because he believes in nothing except his own reflection. Perfect clay for oligarchic hands.

But if it hadn’t been Trump? It would have been someone else. That’s the unsettling part. Because this didn’t begin on an escalator in 2015. It began decades earlier, in boardrooms and think tanks, in deregulation schemes, media consolidation, union busting, religious extremism fused with political opportunism, and a long, patient cultivation of grievance as political fuel. Trump is not the architect. He’s the loudest billboard.

And yet, that doesn’t mean surrender. Because if life takes us in strange and often brutal directions, the one variable still left to us is response. We may not control the storm, but we absolutely control whether we become monsters inside it. That’s what Riders of Justice ultimately got right. Life will hand us absurdity. Tragedy. Coincidence. Apparent injustice. Loss so random it feels cosmically insulting. The question is never whether suffering arrives. It will. The question is what story we build around it. Do we weaponize our pain? Do we invent enemies? Do we retreat deeper into ego, certainty, vengeance? Or do we allow even the strangest companions along the road to help us become something less broken?

That’s the real work. Not avoiding life’s peculiar detours. Learning how to travel them without losing our humanity.

—Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.