Bobservations

Y’all know I’m childish, right? I mean, you may say child-like, but it’s really childish.

Case in point: after taking a long hike along the river last weekend, as we were driving home I was tormenting Carlos as a childish person does, and he … well, I posted this on my phone to remind me:

“On Saturday August 31, 2024, and I am going to spot him a half hour starting at 11AM, Carlos Divid Harris said he was not going to speak to me for twenty-four hours. I laughed and said he wouldn’t last twenty-four seconds. He said he would not speak again until 11AM on September 1, 2024. We’ll see how that goes; I am writing this down so that when he fails, and he will, I will have proof.”

Carlos began speaking at 11:35 AM which means, with the half-hour I spotted him, he stopped speaking for about 9 minutes. And to be fair, that was longer than the twenty-four seconds I thought he’d last.

This Tuxedo Memory is from May 2019 and is entitled: Another Scorcher In Smallville ... Tuxedo Has The Right Idea

That cat always picked the most interesting positions in which to nap … he was just a chalk outline away from playing the role of roadkill on some animal show!

Well, roadkill or some totally adorable boy!

Here’s proof that just because you’re a relatively slender model, it doesn’t mean you can have the most delightful cakes.

Melanie has unveiled the cover for her upcoming memoir and despite its minimalist design, some critics claim it's a blatant act of plagiarism.

What? Melanie? Plagiarize? Like Michelle Obama’s DNC speech years back?

Melanie's book cover is an all-black with simple white text reading 'MELANIA' in all caps … and looks suspiciously like the iconic Chanel Catwalk book.

I haven’t read it, and won’t read it, but I’m told it’s the story of Melanie’s life on Chicago’s South Side and working hard to attend both Harvard and Princeton before marrying the love of her life and giving birth to Sasha and Malia.

Just sayin’.

In Camden, as it is in many small towns across the state, we have an opera house. Of course, it fell into disuse many years ago and when we moved here only the ground floor was being used as a secondhand store. Sad, really, for such a beautiful building. And for years there was talk about recreating the opera house interior but then a couple of years ago the talk turned toward making  the opera house a boutique hotel, and that’s apparently going to happen.

That photo up there is the opera house and its clock tower that chimes on the hour and the quarter- and half-hours. And down there are the renderings of what the hotel will be: four floors and 50 rooms, with a restaurant in the lobby and called The Haigler Hotel, so named for a noble Catawba Chief who befriended Camden’s pioneers. The clock tower, though not seen in the renderings will remain and still chime the hours each day.

Our little town is growing but it’s keeping its sense of history, and I am here for that!

You’ve heard of Weekend at Bernie’s but this true story is more Weekend at Wells Fargo.

There’s an investigation underway in Tempe, Arizona after a Wells Fargo employee—and I won’t post her name so as not to embarrass her family—died while on the job and no one noticed.

A timeline released by police suggests her body was there for four days before being discovered.

How does that happen?

The Venice Film Festival has been going on for a couple of weeks and here are some style icons, clockwise in no particular order … Angelina Jolie, Cate Blanchett, Eva Green and Nicole Kidman. Stunning, but there’s always room for a thirst-seeker and this year’s was Eva Herzigova wearing … God Only Knows™.

Last week I mentioned that one school district in Oklahoma was refusing to follow the order of State Superintendent Ryan Walters and his demand for Bible Study in all public schools.

Now, out of about 540 public districts and charter schools in the state, 54 superintendents responded to the survey and, when asked if their district was requiring educators to teach on or from the Bible, 46 said ‘No’ and just two said ‘Yes;’ others were unclear on the guidelines.

Taking a stand … even in Oklahoma.

This is Stefano Tomadini—sounds like a Delicious pasta dish—an Italian model. But this isn’t about food or models, it’s about a simple question: Would You Hit It?

This Is The GOP & Why You Need To Vote Blue

There are a lot of reasons to vote Blue in November, and I will share some of those with you, but first, let’s take a look at the reason to Vote Blue.

Project 2025 

Under a GOP president this plan, would:

• Eliminate the Department of Education
• Use public funds to pay for private religious schools
• Encourage Christian indoctrination in public schools … Ten Commandments in every classroom was the start.
• Dismantle Civil Rights and DEI [Diversity, equity, and inclusion] in all levels of government.
• Eliminate no fault divorce.
• Total ban on abortions, regardless of viability or health of the mother.
• Ban all contraceptives.
• Ban African American and Gender Studies in all levels of education.
• Tax cuts for major corporations and the 1% while increasing taxes on everyone else.
• Eliminate unions and all worker protection
• Raise the retirement age.
• Eliminate Social Security for the elderly and the disabled.
• Promote capital punishment and the speedy “finality” of such sentences
• Condemn single mothers and only recognize “traditional” families by overturning Obergefell v Hodges in attempts to eliminate the LGBTQ+ community.
• Dismantle the FBI and Homeland Security.
• Use of military to break up protests
• Eliminate Head Start and Free/Discounted school lunch programs
• Ban books and curriculum regarding slavery.
• Force immigrants to be deported or held in camps and end birth right citizenship
• Ban Muslims from entering the country
• Dismantle the Food and Drug Administration [FDA]. The Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] and more.

This is the plan of the GOP and we know it’s the plan because The Felon says it’s not their plan and he’s a pathological liar. Here’s more:

THE FELON

Top advisers to The Felon have begun to discuss draft language for the 2024 Republican platform that antiabortion leaders expect will abandon the party’s decades-long call to amend the US Constitution to extend personhood protections to the unborn.

The escalating behind-the-scenes disagreement over the abortion language has become so acrimonious in recent weeks that some social conservative leaders have issued public warnings. The Felon’s advisers, in turn, have been angered by the public pressure from antiabortion activists.

Listen, the man is a pathological liar who promised to appoint anti-choice judges to the Supreme Court and then did that; and when they each, after first saying under oath that Roe was settled law, overturned a woman’s right to choose.

Do not believe The Felon; he’s saying these things to get women to vote for him and most women are smarter than that.

The Felon also revived one of his go-to lies about his record on veteran policy during a Fourth of July message to supporters this week.

Veterans Choice, a program that allows veterans experiencing long wait times in the V.A. medical system to seek care at private facilities, was actually signed into law by former President Barack Obama in 2014.

NORTH CAROLINA

Mark Robinson, the extremist GOP nominee for governor apparently endorsed political violence in a bizarre and extended rant delivered in a small-town church:

“Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”

Robinson’s call for the “killing” of “some folks” came during an extended diatribe in which he attacked an extraordinary assortment of enemies, like Democrats and liberals, the LGBTQ+ community and migrants.

Kill them, he said.

OKLAHOMA

Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters says educators who refuse to teach students about the Bible could lose their teaching license.

Walters issued a memo last week instructing all Oklahoma schools to teach students in grades five through 12 about the Bible’s influence on the nation’s founding and historical American figures. Schools will also be required to stock a Bible in every classroom.

They’re trying to force Christian Nationalism on America’s children, proving, again, that the GOP is the group grooming children.

GOOD NEWS:

UTAH

Representative John Curtis won the GOP Senate primary last week over a Felon-endorsed candidate to replace outgoing Senator Mitt Romney.

Curtis won the primary easily with nearly 52% of the vote and is considered to be a moderate Republican, as shown by his vote for the Respect for Marriage Act codifying the Obergefell Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. He is a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and the moderate Republican Main Street Caucus.

SOUTH CAROLINA

Sheri Biggs, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and Air National Guard Lt. Col., beat out Felon-endorsed “pastor” Mark Burns in South Carolina’s 3rd District Republican runoff.

Burns is a Death to Gays pastor so this is Good News.

Please note, that we are beating the GOP in a lot of unusual places [Utah and South Carolina] just as we beat them in 2020, 2022, 2023, and here in 2024.

Stand tall, speak up, and …

This Bitch: Ryan Walters

Out there in Oklahoma, the state’s far-rightwingnut superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, wants the schools in his state to teach students about the Tulsa Race Massacre, as long as they don’t teach that it was about white supremacist murdering Black people for EWB … existing while Black.

If you haven’t heard about the Tulsa Race Massacre, maybe take a gander here … Tulsa Race Massacre: We Can't Fix Racism If We Don't Learn From It  … at one of the vile parts of American history.

This post isn’t about that necessarily though it is about teaching about the massacre, but it’s mostly about Ryan Walters, who took office in January, and who is, big surprise, anti-CRT [Critical Race Theory] because the right believes that if you teach white children about racism and white supremacy you’ll make them feel bad about themselves.

Here’s the deal: I’m a grown-assed man and I was never taught about the Tulsa Race Massacre, though I learned of other examples of racism in America … Slavery … Emmett Till .. Rosa Parks … church bombings … Medgar Evers … Martin Luther King … Selma … and so much more.

And yet how many of these topics aren’t taught in school, save for the obligatory hour or two spent on slavery, or a couple of classes about Civil Rights; if we fail to learn from history we’re doomed to repeat it and we are on that precipice again thanks to people like Ryan Walters who doesn’t want it taught lest white people get their feelings hurt. So I will say this once more:

I don’t feel bad about being white in America because I had nothing to do with that massacre or any of those other events; I feel horrible for what was done to Black citizens of Tulsa, who had their homes and businesses destroyed and those who lost their lives because of hate and I loathe the fact that much of that still goes on today, but how can we teach our young people, any people, that hate is wrong, that hate kills, if we don’t teach them  the history of hate?

Ryan Walters recently held a public forum at which someone in the crowd asked him how teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre doesn’t violate his ban on CRT and he said:

“I would never tell a kid that because of your race, because of the color of your skin, or your gender or anything like that, you are less of a person or are inherently racist. That doesn’t mean you don’t judge the actions of individuals. Oh, you can. Absolutely, historically, you should … But to say it was inherent in that because of their skin is where I say that is critical race theory. You’re saying that race defines a person.”

You are not a racist because you’re white; you’re a racist because you’re a racist and never learned any better and yet Walters does not want children to be taught that; but the Tulsa Race Massacre was all about race, hell, it’s been called the Tulsa Race Massacre for over a hundred years!

The Tulsa Race Massacre occurred because a young Black man may have, or actually may not have, brushed up against a white woman in an elevator. And because a Black man might have touched a white woman, he was arrested, and a mob gathered at the courthouse demanding the right to lynch that young man. When the crowd of white men, many of whom were deputized before the massacre began, didn’t get their wish to lynch that young man, they marched to the Greenwood District in Tulsa, a thriving Black neighborhood also called Black Wall Street, and destroyed it, burned it to the ground, set private homes on fire, leaving 100,000 people homeless, and murdered some 300 Black people; it was all about race.

It was all about a Black man allegedly disrespecting a white woman in the eyes of white men, and if we don’t teach that to our children they will never learn. And we’ll see it happen again.

Lastly, let this sink in: Ryan Walters has no problem teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre as long as you don’t mention race.

 The Republic