Appomattox Day

 Former army sergeant Daniel Perry was just convicted of murdering Garrett Foster at a Black Lives Matter event in Austin, Texas, in 2020.  (Foster was a white Air Force veteran.)  Not to worry, though, Greg Abbott is on the case, just itching to pardon Perry.  He claims the jury tried to nullify Texas's self-defense law.  In the days leading up to the murder Perry's Facebook page contained such messages as "I might go to Dallas to shoot looters" and "I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex."  Even a stone racist like Abbott could let the appeals process play out, but events in Nashville may have convinced him to raise his game.  Oh, yes, he's running for president. 

If Abbott wants to snatch second place away from Ron DeSantis, he should familiarize himself with the case of Mansoor Adayfi, a former inmate at Guantanamo, America's 21st century Ellis Island.  When the US started offering cash bounties Adayfi, a Yemeni security guard who had enrolled at university in Afghanistan, was kidnapped and sold to American troops, who were told he was an Egyptian bigshot in al-Qaeda.  During the fourteen years he spent in Camp X-Ray, Adayfi was repeatedly force-fed to the amusement of a young JAG officer named DeSantis.  There's your competition for the Trump base, Greg.  Now get to the border and start waterboarding some Honduran asylum seekers!  Start with the women and children.  They're probably MS-13.

Here's what I mean:  The North Dakota legislature declined to provide free school lunches to poor kids, clearly a result of what one Republican state senator called "parents being negligent."  Five days later they approved a bill which increases the meal allowances for senators and their staffs.  Check out Colonel Sanders impersonator Mike Wobbema (R-Gluttony) getting some side-eye from the young man on his left:

Harlan Crow doesn't only buy Supreme Court justices -- he has an impressive collection of dictator memorabilia.  By "impressive" I mean it even startles his friends.  One visitor to the house reports a statuary garden of dictators, including Mussolini and Stalin, and a wall of paintings by George W. Bush, Norman Rockwell and Adolf Hitler.  The signed copy of Mein Kampf must have cost him a packet.  Whatever happened to art collectors like J. Paul Getty and Henry Clay Frick?  They were bastards, but bastards with taste.  Or at least art historians to advise them.

Squeaker McCarthy led a Congressional delegation to Taiwan to meet President Tsai Ing-wen, and China has now retaliated by sanctioning the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, presumably because President Tsai made a speech there and picked up an award.  Does this mean the Library will no longer be supplied with cheap Chinese busts of Ron and Nancy and American flags to sell in the gift shop?  Who the hell knows?

The Indian River chapter of "Moms For Liberty" (yes, there are two Moms) got Anne Frank's Diary:  The Graphic Adaptation pulled from Florida school libraries because of "obscenity" and certainly not for any other reason, why would you even go there?  In a sadly related story Ben Ferencz has died at 103.  He was the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg tribunals.  I hope he didn't die thinking it had all been a waste.

Elsewhere in Florida Jeffrey Keene, psychology teacher and wise-ass, was fired for asking students to write their own obituaries.  He said it was an exercise in examining their lives and deciding what was most important but obviously he's one of those gun-hating radicals.  How is this different from Texas collecting children's DNA in case the AR-15 (God save it!) makes them hard to identify?

Steve Phillips reminds us that the Civil War ended on April 9, 1865.  He wants to know why we don't celebrate it.  Unless, of course, it didn't really end.