Category: Politics

  • SCOTUS and VOTING

    With the January 6th Hearings, and the SCOTUS rulings, this is the reminder that we all need to vote.

    We are now living in the consequences of the 2016 election. Trump got to put three justices on the Court, and we are now watching our right s and protection get stripped away. Miranda got gutted, and you can carry a gun anywhere now, and I have a good feeling Roe will be overturned tomorrow.

    VOTE VOTE VOTE!

    When I was a little kid, I always felt that I was so lucky to be born an American. We aren’t a perfect people, and as a nation we have made a lotta mistakes, but I always felt in my gut that we, all Americans, believed in justice for all.

    I see now that this belief was a hope, and not guaranteed for any of us.

    We must vote, but we must also, as Frederick Douglass said, agitate!

    Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!

    Agitate for justice in the country.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Summer, Dragon Warrior, and Louie Gohmert is a Coward

    (Get in loser…)

    The kid still has about a month left to school, but Summer is here. I have broken out the air conditioners due to a couple of eighty-degree days, and one awful ninety-degree day. The shorts are out as well, and so is the talk of going swimming. Nothing says Summer more than a kid wanting to get in the water and swim. For me, I’m not a huge fan of Summer heat – I did grow up in Texas so I have suffered under enough hot weather to last three or four lifetimes – but I like the feeling of freedom that summer creates in one’s mind. Summer means plans, and vacations, and projects, and also being a little lazy and watching tv all day. Also, Summer means that I will get to spend a great amount of time with the kid. I would like to take her to museums, and maybe a road trip out to the Pollock/Krasner house in Springs, Long Island. There are only eleven weeks to cram a lot of fun in.

    I have got it in my head that I want to play Dragon Warrior. If you don’t know, it was one of the first RPG for the NES back in 1986. (Yes, I am aware that the original name was Dragon Quest but was changed for the North American market, but we’re talking about a 45-year old’s nostalgia here, so I would like to keep calling it Dragon Warrior.) I have looked up the game, and I can buy a version to play on my iPad or iPhone, but both versions look updated, and clean. What I am looking for is the 8-bit original to play. It would be great if I could get that on my devices, but I feel what I’d have to do to make this happen is buy an old NES and blow on the cartridge hoping that it will load, and then hope beyond hope that it still can save my game. (Hey other 40-year-old! You know what I’m talking about.)

    And let’s not forget that @LouieGohmertTX1 is a coward that wants to make it easier for mass murders to get their hands-on semiautomatic guns as fast as possible. Thanks @LouieGohmertTX1 maybe you can club some puppies and baby seals before you walk out the door?

    (Say, don’t forget to like this post, or share it, or leave a comment. I got bills to pay, you know.)

  • ODDS and ENDS: Kids are Back, Doomsday DJ, and Protect Kids and Not Guns

    (Is that a flying pig in the sky?)

    I have started watching The Kids in the Hall’s new season in Amazon. As with all of these nostalgia reboots of stuff from the 80’s and 90’s, some fall rather flat, and leave you wondering why it needed to be rebooted in the first place. (Looking at you Fresh Prince.) First of all, I don’t think The Kids in the Hall are a reboot, as it feels like a solid continuation of the original show. Second, The Kids are just as biting and internal as they have ever been. Yes, they are older, but that alt/punk subversive vibe is still there. Their humor was never topical, and their best stuff always had to do with the relationship between characters.

    Which brings me to “Doomsday DJ” a darkly humorous bleak sketch with just Dave Foley and Melanie’s 1971 hit “Brand New Key.” Though the sketch, which is in three parts and the clip is only the first, takes place in a world where DNA bombs have fallen and destroyed just about everybody on the planet, it has an eerie present feeling to it. Was the sketch’s creation influenced by the Trump years and Covid isolation? Clearly, yes. But man, Foley’s expression of desperation and loss with his eyes becoming unfocused, only to snap back to reality to do his “job” on the radio. I think everyone can relate to a similar feeling during the lockdown, watching tv on the couch, and wondering, “Is this really how it will all end?” The Kids tapped into a zeitgeist in the culture that I don’t think anyone has been able to express correctly. I know I said above that they don’t do topical jokes, and I hold to that, because the joke here is the internal struggle of the character to continue in the face of ultimate doom. Amazingly, we all know what that feels like, and now we see you can make fun of it.

    Protect Kids and Not Guns.

    Protect Kids and Not Guns.

    Protect Kids and Not Guns.

    (Say, don’t forget to like this post, or share it, or leave a comment. I got bills to pay, you know.)

  • Nothing Changes, Except the Names

    I have been pretty pissed off for the past two days. And now, as well. The shooting in Uvalde, Texas has been on my mind, as I know it has been for just about all of us. I grew up in Texas. I spent one Summer in San Antonio, and so I knew where Uvalde was. I knew it was a small west Texas town, in all the good ways that a town could be small, and in west Texas. When I heard where the shooting had taken place, I knew, heartbreakingly knew, that everyone in that town knew everyone who had been killed.

    And as a parent, with a child about the age of the kids who were murdered, my soul is just wounded for the parent in Uvalde. I drop my kid off every morning. I hold her hand as we cross the street, and kiss the top of her head as she walks away from me to get in line for class. And I stand there watching her walk into school. And yes, the dark, evil, depressing thought does cross my mind that this might be the last time I see her.

    I don’t have that thought because of Uvalde. I have had that thought since I first started dropping her off at school, over a year ago, because I live in America.

    I could use logic to point out the odds of a school shooting, or the likelihood that my daughter would even be involved in one. I could use logic and be rational, and come up with a well-reasoned argument for or against gun control.

    But I’m tired of that.

    I’m tired of all of it.

    I’m tired of nothing changing.

    I wish I was a better writer, because a really good one summed up how I am feeling. Roxane Gay touched on how after these tragedies, there is a call for civility, but she is right; who is served by the people being civil in an uncivil situation?

    This is what I think we should do; read their names. When you get in an argument over guns, take out your phone, find them, and then read their names. Don’t make this an abstract discussion, make it personal. Read the kid’s names and their ages.

    No screaming, or yelling, but forcefully; read the kid’s names. Interrupt them if you have to, but keep reading the names.

    Read the names.

  • The Loss of Rights

    I hate to say it, but I think we all need to come to terms with the fact that we are about to live in a country where abortion will not be legal for the majority of American women. I don’t want to admit it, but this, I fear, is the country we are about to live in for the next 50 years.

    And it will be a domino effect. See, if the 14th Amendment was used to as the rational for Roe in the first place, then it just stands to reason that every ruling after Roe that used the same reasoning of the 14th Amendment is also in jeopardy. As we have seen in American history, the Supreme Court can throw out precedent anytime they want; for good or for ill, but it is the Courts prerogative to do that.

    What is more depressing than losing all of these hard-fought rights, is that Liberal and Democratic leadership is letting it happen. I’m sorry but holding a vote in the Senate that we all knew was doomed, and produced nothing is not a symbolic win; it’s meaningless. I won’t go as far as to say that Democrats show up to the gun fight with a knife, they show up with a guitar wanting to sing songs. All of these rights are doomed because Liberal leaders don’t know how to fight and win. They just know how to complain and hope someone else closes the deal. That is why the Democrats will lose huge in the midterms even though they have been given this gift of a rallying cry to motivate their base and independent votes. They could win this thing if they try to do things different, but they won’t. They will fuck it up by doing the same old stuff that doesn’t work.

    The only thing giving me hope, that maybe things can still change for the better is Chris Smalls, leader of the Amazon Labor Union, and the workers at that facility on Staten Island. Chris and his team were able to beat Amazon at their own game. How? By talking to workers, having a cookout, finding common ground, and focusing on the issue at hand. He and his team created a sense of unity and shared experience, and it got everyone to work together. If you haven’t been to Staten Island, it’s the Trump Country of NYC. There aren’t fire brand liberals out there, it’s conservative working-class people. If Smalls can get that group of people to unionize, then he knows something just about every Democrat politician doesn’t know.

    It’s close to the same point that Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward try to make in their book Dirt Road Revival, which is about liberal Democrats in Maine going out and winning rural conservative voters back. They wrote an essay about it, and Chloe Maxmin was on Bill Mahar last week talking about her experience. In a nut shell, Maxmin’s point is that Democrats have to engage and listen to conservatives, and stand up for common values first, issues second. In other words; get ‘em to care, then you get ‘em to think.

    And the issue to care about is rights. This is all about rights. Women’s right, reproductive rights, healthcare rights, privacy rights, the right to live free. One party grantees rights, the other party takes them away. Which side are you on?

    Besides, in the whole history of the world, have you ever known a regime that took away a right from the people, and then stopped taking away rights?