Today, we’re re-visiting and updating a few stories Curmie
has posted this calendar year. The First
Felon’s antics are too predictably heinous to bother to mention, but his
minions are still fair game.
Pete
Hegseth. Back in January, Curmie wrote that “The reason not to confirm Hegseth is that he is spectacularly
unqualified for the job. It’s not all the negatives; it’s the utter
absence of any positives.” Curmie stands
by that statement; certainly any competent President, even one stupid enough to
have appointed him to begin with, would have fired his ass after the Enola Gay kerfuffle and especially that Signal chat business. Still, the fact that he remains the perfect storm of arrogance and stupidity seems pretty relevant, too.
The
Cortland Standard. Back in
March, Curmie mourned the demise of the daily newspaper in the small city where he went to high school. A couple months later, on Curmie’s
anniversary, as it happens, came the story that the paper had been bought out of bankruptcy and would be back in business
on a Tuesday through Saturday schedule, effective May 17. This matters little to the overwhelming
majority of readers of this blog, but it may portend a trend… we can hope.
Sarah
Inama. March was also when Curmie wrote about Ms. Inama,
an Idaho middle school teacher who ran afoul of racist morons school
administrators for a poster that proclaimed “Everyone is welcome here.” Yes, really.
She is now in a new district, where administrators rejected the “guidance” of the state Censor in Chief Attorney General,
who asserted the poster was political and therefore prohibited; instead, they declared in
a memo sent to all staff that “‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ is the law. It is not a political statement.” We’ll see how this all plays out.
Melissa
Calhoun. Ms. Calhoun is believed to
be the first Florida teacher fired for referring to a student by their
preferred name without explicit parental permission. Curmie described her case,
up to that point, in April. She was,
indeed, de facto fired for the offense of having some respect for a
student. She claims she knew the student
before the stupid law went into effect and used the offending appellation out
of habit, “an unfortunate oversight.” This may or may not be true, of course. Over the summer, there seemed to have been a
settlement by which Calhoun could keep her teaching credentials for a year of
probation, but the district won’t rehire her or even allow her to volunteer for this academic year. Calhoun is
apparently looking for work outside education, and there is speculation that a
lawsuit may be forthcoming.
Kilmar
Abrego-Garcia. It’s unlikely we’ll
ever get to the truth about what crimes KA-G may or may not have committed
years ago. As Curmie wrote in April,
the first round of this ever-evolving brouhaha was about due process, period,
the end. The feds didn’t have a case,
but they sent him off to a Salvadorean gulag, anyway. The Trump administration then dawdled when SCOTUS
unanimously demanded his return. He did eventually
arrive back in the US, but was almost immediately under investigation related
to that traffic stop in Tennessee in 2022.
We’re now hearing the feds claim that he was smuggling illegal aliens because he was in MS-13. Previous attempts to show such gang membership
have been laughably inept, but now there are “co-conspirators” ready to testify
against him… in exchange for something, no doubt. Anyway, now the government wants to send him
off to Liberia, of all places. And right
now. Don’t ask why, Gentle Reader, you
probably don’t want to try to track the tortured logic. The chances are pretty good that literally
everyone involved in this case on either side has told at least one egregious
lie. But once again, due process is the
issue.
Boy My
Greatness. Back in September,
Curmie wrote about the suppression of a student-directed production of Zoe Senese-Grossberg’s play at the University of Central Oklahoma. The university decided to blame the utterly
unwarranted censorship on the theatre department. Curmie commented, “Gentle Reader, if you
believe the decision was de facto made by the theatre
department, Curmie has some ocean-front property in Kansas he’s willing to sell
to you for cheap.” No, this level of
stupidity could only be perpetrated by administrators.
UCO juniors Maggie Lawson and Liberty Welch might have been
a little staggered by the abrupt (and stupid) cancellation of their play on
campus, but it didn’t take them long to recover. They told their cast that they had the option
to leave because trying to produce it on their own was going to be more complicated
than a production at school. Curmie,
with decades of experience in such matters, knew exactly what the response
would be: “rock on, we want to do it.”
The company started a GoFundMe, hoping for $2000 but expecting
“like, $200 and, like, a high five. Like, ‘you go girls!’” They brought in just short of $10,000. And they found a venue. And they opened their show on October 23, two
weeks after they were originally scheduled to go up at OCU. Word is, it went well. Of course it did. Those extra barriers just added another layer
of incentive. Curmie is proud of those
students, even if he does hope they’ll get the hell out of Oklahoma so they won’t
need to go through this crap every time they want to do something more
controversial than Harvey or You Can’t Take It with You.
Scams
and Things That Smell Like Scams.
Curmie wrote in particular about the barrage of letters pretending to be from an insurance company
with which Curmie was already affiliated (they weren’t, of course), and an ad
for the UpSide app with an absurdly exaggerated claim. Well, Curmie heard that same UpSide ad just a couple
of days ago, and yes, they’re still making shit up. He also got another scammy letter about his
car insurance… and last week one about his homeowner’s insurance. At least they
But the commercials for various gambling apps and “you must
act now” crap aimed at folks on Medicare are getting annoyingly ubiquitous. Back in the days when there was a functioning
Consumer Protection Bureau, there’d be a chance to get the objectively false
claims off the air. The Trump
administration is taking notes for their own next scam.
The Compact
for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. The good news is that none of the nine
universities contacted by the DOE signed on to that absurd document. Seven, including Curmie’s undergraduate alma
mater,
rejected it outright; the other two supplied comments but didn’t agree to the terms. Another trio of universities, including
Curmie’s doctoral alma mater, were contacted after the first nine
schools had made their decisions.
Exactly how specific things got is unclear—university officials say they
were not asked to sign the document, but made it clear they wouldn’t do so,
anyway. It remains to be seen if the Trump
administration is willing to listen to what university leaders are saying or if
they’ll keep up the blustering and bullying tactics.
The Short-Lived Truce in Palestine. Last month, Curmie credited Donald Trump for his efforts in bringing about a ceasefire and prisoner exchange in the Mideast. He did warn that “There is too much animosity, too much destruction, too much history, to be overly optimistic.” Sometimes Curmie hates being right. The peace lasted less than a week, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of optimism for the future, although we can but hope that Trump and others will keep trying. At least the hostages on both sides were released…
New topic next time!
