People refer to a gay or homosexual lifestyle and say we must prevent schoolkids from being groomed for it. I wonder if they also think there is a straight or heterosexual lifestyle that schoolkids are groomed for. And I wonder, is there more gay sex or heterosexual sex between students and teachers?

Concessions were made so that Kevin McCarthy could become Speaker of the House of Representatives. I have not followed this closely, but I know that many of the Kevin cave-ins have been derided and are now fodder for comedians. However, I heard that one of the demands is that Representatives have at least three days to review legislation such as the omnibus budget bill. Isn’t that a good thing?

Some Republicans who claim they want less government spending have said that the defense budget should be examined. I was surprised because I associate Republicans with assertion that our military is weak and is underfunded. Perhaps, however, this is a time for the now seldom-seen bipartisanship. I would think the wing of the Democratic party labeled “progressive” might want lesser defense spending. Shouldn’t they approach Jim Jordan on this project?

The defense budget of the United States is the largest in the world. In fact, it is larger than the defense budgets of the next nine most prolific spenders. But still, according to most in Congress, we should increase our military budget.

Before Kevin McCarthy had groveled sufficiently to get the speakership, Representative Byron Donalds received enough votes to prevent McCarthy’s needed majority. I had never heard of Donalds. My three minutes of online research discovered that he was elected to Congress in 2020 and was reelected in 2022. I guess to some, that two years was enough congressional experience to qualify as Speaker. I assumed, however, that those voting for him did not believe he would win the speakership and were merely grandstanding. However, I thought it would have been amusing if all the Democrats had voted for Donalds and got him elected.

An online source said that Donalds was arrested for marijuana distribution when a teenager, but that those charges were dropped as part of a pre-trial diversion program. This did not seem out of the ordinary, but a source also said that a few years later he had pleaded no contest (which is a conviction) to a felony bribery charge “as part of a scheme to defraud a bank. His record was later sealed and expunged.” This struck me as more out of the ordinary, and I would have liked to learn more about that scheme, plea, and expungement.

However, I was most interested in his initial election to the House. His district is considered a safe one for Republicans so the most important election is the Republican primary. In 2020, in that primary, he was one of eight or nine candidates. He won the Republican nomination with 22.6% of the votes, which was 770 votes more, or O.7% more than his nearest competitor. The average House district has a population of over 700,000 people. Donalds got fewer than 24,000 votes in the election that essentially made him a congressman, the 2020 Republican primary. Ah, American representative democracy is great, or so I have heard.

“It’s as tall as the Empire State Building.” “It’s as big as a football field.” These are familiar phrases for describing something large, but in a Florida parking lot a man used a phrase to describe a capacity I had not heard before. He was pointing to the space in an SUV and told two other men, “There is enough space in there for three dead people.”