Recent Posts

Yes. Should you ever own a home in a very popular area or an area that is up and coming (like for flippers), you will be inundated with those texts and voicemails. Sorry. Even long after you sell the home. Companies buy lists of homeowners from local property tax companies and don't necessarily update them every year. We owned a rental home near Phoenix for several years. Sold it in 2021 and still get calls about it today.

Y’all admire the wrong things. Beautiful looks don’t make a person with a character worthy of admiration.

Yes. Our state appointed superintendent is owner of a chain of charter schools. That’s exactly what he’s doing here.

You have got to be kidding. We’re being punked.

We're getting a preview here in Houston of what public education will look like under Republican rule: factory-style "teaching" of slides and worksheets all day, every day, focus on test prep to the exclusion of all else, AI-generated lessons and grading done by AI, no professional teachers - just minders as kids work online or do worksheets and a small cadre of lesson presenters who are prohibited from modifying lessons to meet their students' diverse needs.

None of this prepares students to have the independent thinking skills and problem solving skills that will be needed for jobs now and in the future. Treating kids like widgets in the classroom will produce workers who perhaps could have spent 40 hours a week installing widgets at the car factory, but who will have no idea how to program and troubleshoot in a robotic manufacturing environment. They will not know their accurate history because they weren't allowed to learn it. They will never have read a novel or book in school (short passages only) so they're not prepared to fill in the gaps in their learning by reading. They will have had little/no exposure to the arts and humanities, which is how you end up with soulless monsters who view their fellow human beings as acceptable collateral in the latest culture war.

Families with means will switch to private schools, some of which will be excellent, and some of which - the lower cost ones that take vouchers (these will be a replacement for publicly funded charter schools) - will be mediocre or poor and will refuse enrollment to kids with special needs that are more expensive to accommodate.

This isn't conjecture. It's happening right now in real time in the 8th largest district in the country. Coming soon to all of Texas, I have no doubt. 

No, this is a good thing. Meadows wanted his case transferred to federal court so that when he's convicted Trump can pardon him. Trump can't pardon a conviction from the state of Georgia (nor his own conviction from the state of NY).

Yup, I got it on cassette around that time and listened to it endlessly.

Yes, I think we as women tend to put ourselves last and defer to others' needs before making time for ourselves. Once we have that time, we are often too tired. Now that my kids are grown and gone, I'm really making a point of prioritizing myself.

This will seem like a little thing to some of you, but a couple of weeks ago DH was mad because he was on an important work call and the dogs were bothering him. The dogs are trained well enough that he can tell him to leave them alone, but somehow that wasn't enough and he needed me to make sure I didn't leave the house while he was on work calls so I can manage the dogs.

I told him no. This happened to blow up while I was at the gym and I told him that I had confidence in his ability to manage the dogs in any number of ways while he works without relying on me to be his unpaid assistant during the day. He doesn't necessarily hang around to manage the dogs while I'm teaching students. And that I would go to the gym when I felt like it, as he has done literally all our married life.

That was a big deal for me. So yeah, the message that we deprioritize ourselves resonates with me.

Sarah McLachlan Wintersong is still my favorite.

I mean, are you disagreeing with them on some point of policy or are you disagreeing with them getting to live freely as themselves in public, getting to benefit from equal protection under the law, and to generally enjoy the privileges of adult citizenship in the US? Are you trying to have people like them erased from children’s books and public libraries?

The first is disagreement. The latter ones are hate often disguised as “disagreement.”

He’s been so invisible that one wonders if he’s even making these staffing choices, or if his handlers in Russia are doing so.

So, Republicans, I have some questions about Trump's new border czar, Tom Homan, and the coming mass deportations. (Did someone say that wasn't actually going to happen?)

www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/trump-tom-homan-texas-border-deportation-19906670.php?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=copy-url-link&utm_campaign=article-share&hash=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG91c3RvbmNocm9uaWNsZS5jb20vcG9saXRpY3MvdGV4YXMvYXJ0aWNsZS90cnVtcC10b20taG9tYW4tdGV4YXMtYm9yZGVyLWRlcG9ydGF0aW9uLTE5OTA2NjcwLnBocA%3D%3D&time=MTczMTM2MTQxNTg1OQ%3D%3D&rid=YTY3YzQ1OTYtODAzMC00N2RhLWE0ZjgtODhlNWQ2OTAwYzBh&sharecount=Mg%3D%3D

1. Trump wants a blank check to execute mass incarceration/deportations. He doesn't care what the cost is. One estimate says it could cost as much as $315 billion and no cost study analysis has been done by the Trump folks to see what the long term economic effects may be with the loss of tax revenue and worker productivity. Is that kind of reckless and unstudied government spending cool cool with fiscal conservatives now?

2. The new border czar says, "You have the right to claim asylum. You have the right to see a judge. And we make that happen," Homan said. "But at the end of that due process, if the judge says you must go home, then we have to take them home."

I'm super confused here. Because we've got Trump surrogates and people on this board saying that all the folks Biden "let in" are "illegals," but now you've got *Trump's* new border czar acknowledging that immigrants have a legal right to stay while their asylum case works its way through the courts. How can that be? Didn't you all vote for Trump in part because he promised to round *all* the currently undocumented immigrants up and deport them? And if your answer is that asylum seekers are not here illegally and not the problem, why have you been throwing a fit about them for the past ten years?

3. Oh, and several here have assured us that Trump has nothing to do with Project 2025, and Trump himself said that those folks would have nothing to do with his administration, but it seems that Tom Homan was a contributor to Project 2025. And now he's going to play a major role in the Trump administration and has been slotted in in such a way that he doesn't even require Senate confirmation.

So here we've (a) already caught a Trump lie about project 2025, (b) proven that Trump and P2025 are and will be intimately connected through this administration, despite what some of his voters seemed to think, and (c) noted that he's happy to circumvent the Senate confirmation process (supposedly one of the checks and balances on his power) to appoint someone to a job that didn't previously exist. 

Can anyone riddle me that? Are you going to stick with the refrain that Trump isn't connected with Project 2025, or are you all going to twist in the wind now and come around to the position that P2025 is great and you fully support it? Are we good with asylum seekers still awaiting a court date like the Border Czar is OK with them? And you're OK with Trump having a blank check of our tax money to do all this, without any research whatsoever on the economic impact to our country/

Yes, we'll be super united because Trump will have imprisoned everyone who speaks out against him. Fascist style. He's got a whole list, apparently.