Curtis Rhodes, are you really that thickheaded?

Courtesy of Vice, a piece about a Houston, TX school district superintendent, Curtis Rhodes, who is threatening to punish any of the district's students who participate in the walkouts proposed by high school students in the wake of the Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School massacre.

Piously Rhodes proclaimed that "every choice has a consequence whether it be positive or negative". The richest line, though, has to be this: "A school is a place to learn and grow educationally, emotionally and morally."

Perhaps it has escaped your notice, Mr. Rhodes, but life also is a place to learn and grow educationally, emotionally and morally. Everyday life is a great place to observe authority figures with blinders on, for instance — authority figures who are so invested in their own fiefdoms that they can't see past the ends of their own noses.

You're so bent out of shape by a "disruption" to your precious district that you can't see that the reason for the disruption is to protest the deaths of young people — just like the young people in your schools.

That you would go out of your way to view the walkouts as "a political protest" and not as a cry of anguish by young people who see themselves in the dead students from Parkland, FL is solid evidence that you have no aptitude for your job as a district superintendent. You don't understand the students in your charge, not one little bit.

What the hell is wrong with you, Curtis Rhodes?

If you don't support more gun control ...

In the wake of shootings like the one two days ago at a Florida high school, the standard response of Republican lawmakers to calls for stricter gun control is to assert that (1) mental health is really the issue, (2) the gun control laws on the books are enough but they aren't being enforced vigorously enough, and/or (3) such shootings are the price of a meaningful Second Amendment.

If you embrace #3 in spite of the possibility of your own or other loved ones' kids dying, I don't know what to say.

Reasons #1 and #2, though, are possible to answer objectively. Or at least, we could answer them objectively if Congress didn't forbid the government to do research into gun violence!

Yes, that little provision got tucked into legislation a while back at the behest of, who else, the National Rifle Association. It's a restriction that makes abso-fucking-lutely no sense unless you are the nuttiest of gun nuts, and it's way, way, way past time for us to stop letting those nuts dictate the terms of our gun laws.

So how about we stop threatening the Centers for Disease Control with loss of funding for merely investigating gun violence as a public health issue?

It's nothing short of abject cowardice to forbid this research.

Enough with abject cowardice. Tell your Congressional representative to end this stupidity.

Setting fires

Dear Leader called Congressional Democrats treasonous.

Not because they were "levying War" against the U.S., as the Constitution defines treason.

Not because they were working with an enemy foreign power, which is also how the Constitution defines treason.

No, he accused Congressional Democrats of treason for failing to applaud his State of the Union address.

It's tempting to focus on his unbelievable childishness. He comes off like a five-year-old whining that Mommy and Daddy weren't paying attention.

However, that's the merest distraction. The issue, of course, is that he accused fellow Americans of treason.

Their actual "crime"?

Failing to adore him.

Let that sink in for a moment.

His defenders will paint his remarks, at a putatively official presidential visit to Ohio that looked a lot like a campaign stop, as mere bluster. They will say that he was riffing on a remark from the crowd, just playing to the audience for laughs.

They are wrong. He was smiling, yes, but at the thought of jailing his political enemies. For Dear Leader, being his political enemy is treasonous.

But suppose for a moment they're right, that it was all a joke. Here's the problem: you don't joke about treason.

Repeat: you do not joke about treason.

Not when you're the president of the United States.

The president does not have the same license to joke on such matters as ordinary citizens. From the man in charge of the Department of Justice, such remarks read less as jokes than as threats. Especially when that same mouth has repeatedly pronounced his belief that the only loyalty he honors is to him — not the Constitution, or the nation.

If Dear Leader wants to make such jokes, let him leave office. He can then make all the jokes he wants.