Quote for today: Be yourself – everybody else is taken. – Oscar Wilde…………………………………………….
From MSNBC:
America’s Christian right is taking direct aim at secular public education, but let’s not forget that it is also after the money. The U.S. spends over $700 billion on public K-12 schools every year. – Me: You bet they want some of that money! I have ranted about vouchers before and that might well be the easiest way to shift public money into church schools, and subsidize tuition at private schools as well.
Update Jan 26: The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether states may reject religious charter schools from receiving public funding, agreeing to hear arguments in an appeal out of Oklahoma involving the first such school in the nation.
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If you follow baseball, you know that the Dodgers, already full of expensive stars, have added many in the off-season. As ESPN puts it, “Armed with immense wealth from their owners and buoyed by the largest local television contract in the game, the Dodgers have spared no expense in trying to win.” Baseball does not have a hard salary cap like some other sports, and that is a problem.
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Peanut butter can help maintain a healthy blood sugar level since it is low in carbohydrates and can be made without added sugar. Provided by FactRetriever.com. That’s good because lately I have become addicted to pretzel bites with peanut butter inside them.
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I still say that on J6, if the Capitol Police, and Metro, had been given the OK to use deadly force, and subsequently shot a few of the rioters, we would not have had all this spectacle, injuries for over 100 cops causing the deaths of some, or an invasion of the building. One of my best memories of the video that day is of Republicans who had encouraged the mob, running for cover once they got into the building. Any citizen being beaten with clubs has the right to shoot, why not the police? The one plainclothes cop in the House who did fire is a hero to me. And if you noticed, after that, no one tried to get in the House chamber, where many Reps were, including R’s.
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They’re not even trying to hide it anymore:
On the heels of the backlash to his gestures (the Sieg heil salutes) at a Donald Trump inauguration event and his attempts to make Nazi-related jokes on X, Elon Musk told supporters ofGermany’s far-right party on Saturday that there is “too much of a focus on past guilt.”—MSNBC
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How my cataract surgery went:
Incredibly well. One day later, in my follow up, my right eye tested as 20-20! I am practicing without glasses. The old ones would not have the right prescription now anyway.
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This: Elon Musk Says $1M Election Giveaway Wasn’t Illegal
Elon Musk on Friday asked a federal judge in Austin, Texas, to dismiss a proposed class-action lawsuit against him and his political action committee, arguing that his $1 million daily giveaway to voters in battleground states wasn’t an illegal lottery because the winners weren’t actually chosen at random. – Huffpost. So, he admits it was a fraud, then . . . if it wasn’t random. So, he is saying it can’t be illegal because it was crooked to begin with???
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Trump’s attempt to freeze spending on things he does not like is illegal. He knows this. But I fear the goal is to get it to the Supreme Court and have them vote his way. He and Mitch McConnell loaded the court for things like this. That Judge Cannon in Florida did him a favor (gee, she got a lifelong cake job), and got his obviously illegal possession of classified documents case dismissed!
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A GOP lawmaker is defending Trump by describing poor kids as freeloaders
The debate over Trump’s federal freezes exposes the GOP’s hostility toward the poor.—MSNBC headline online.
Well, no news here. Always pick on the group least able to defend themselves. Well, I have always known literally that a “rising tide lifts all boats,” and I have come to believe it figuratively, as in, “rich people do better when we all do better” . . . .
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College conferences and realignments – well, Stanford U. is in the Atlantic Coast Conference, although its campus is 22 miles from the Pacific Ocean! And the Big Ten conference has 18 teams!
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Trump has a long history of not paying people . . . . who have worked on a building project, a chauffeur, others . . . . as Huffpost had it: “Contractors who’ve worked for Trump and Trump’s companies have frequently reported struggles getting paid. In 2016, USA Today reported on some 3,500 legal actions against Trump over pay disputes with contractors and others.”
He will spend money on lawyers . . . and sometimes tries to stiff them! He owed over $2M to one lawyer and he tried to pay him with a horse! T said the horse was worth $5M. the lawyer told him it was not the wild west and he could not pay him with a horse.
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Our health care? No one in Canada or Britain or Norway or Sweden, for example, has to stay in a job they hate because of fear of losing their employer health insurance. No one in these countries stays in a bad marriage for fear of losing their spousal health insurance. No one grieving for a dead parent has to spend half their life on the phone arguing about unpaid hospital bills. But all of these things are routine parts of American life. Me: one way or another, (Medicare for all maybe) we need to get the profit motive out of heath care. Yes, that means doctors should be well paid, but . . . why is Medicare so cost effective compared to private insurance? No profit motive, for one thing.
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Tweet of the day? “40% of parenting small children is just saying ‘wow’ and ‘cool’ when you don’t mean it.”
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RFK Jr is not just wrong, he is dead wrong: In 2019, Kennedy visited Samoa, where he lent credibility to anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. A few months later, Samoa had a measles outbreak, which killed 83 people, most of them children.
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In the “Good News” Dept.: llinois Gov. JB Pritzker has directed his state’s hiring authority to prohibit the employment of anyone who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol, saying their “infamous and disgraceful conduct” violates the state’s personnel code.
Of course, that is in the US Constitution too, making Trump ineligible to be prez again. At least I thought that was clear . . . as clear as birthright citizenship . . .
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Didja know that you once could order a pre-fabricated house from Sears and Roebuck? It was delivered by train. You brought your wagon (later truck) to pick up the pieces. Whatever happened to Roebuck, anyway? I am suspicious! Where was Sears when he disappeared? What kind of alibi does he have? Do I watch too many Perry Mason reruns?
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Enough for today. It might be obvious, but my usual goal with the blogs is to write about 1200 words, about the length of an op-ed style editorial. So, even an average reader, who reads about 240 words a minute (silently) can read it in 5 minutes. I took a speed-reading course once, perhaps I’ll make some comments on that sometime in the future.
All take care,
Kevin Z.
Blog: If I understand this 