January 26, 2023

Wondering on Wednesday 1/25/23

 

Ready... Set... Wonder!

Tonight, I'm wondering how many lawyers out there are experienced with classified documents, and how many of them have been retained by current or former government officials? I mean, even former President Jimmy Carter had classified documents found in his house once - and if it can happen to him, is anyone really in the clear?

According to the Associated Press, 

It turns out former officials from all levels of government discover they are in possession of classified material(s) and turn them over to the authorities at least several times a year, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of classified documents.

And sometimes, the folks in charge of handling them correctly are guilty of allowing the documents to be mishandled, which leads me to wonder which group should be under investigation: the handlers or the mishandlers? 

One thing I don't have to wonder about? Whether the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability will be asking for Mike Pence's visitor logs. I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen - but I wouldn't be surprised at all if they asked for Jimmy Carter's. 

I will never stop wondering about mass shootings - they've become a familiar fixture here (and only here.) We've had school shootings, Walmart shootings, and house of worship shootings. We've had medical office shootings, entertainment venue shootings, and grocery store shootings. And this month alone, California has seen three mass shootings, with nearly 30 dead. 

You probably didn't hear much about the third one; it was likely gang- or drug-related, which means, you know, "it was their own damn fault" that young mom and her baby were executed along with several other family members. I wonder why the media doesn't talk about that kind of mass shooting so much? Is it because they wouldn't have time to tell us about storms headed for the I-95 corridor?

I also wonder why Democrats rarely mention that kind of shooting? They're very quick to mention 'hate' and 'racism' whenever a shooting involves people of color, even before details are available. Some did that with the Monterey Park shooting; there were no retractions after we learned the shooter was a septuagenarian Asian man. I'm sure they were tempted to do the same with the Half Moon Bay shooting, where another Asian man was behind the killing of Hispanic and Asian farm workers.

Republicans will always mention Chicago when they're in front of microphones, as Rep. Mike McCaul did on CNN's State of the Union, suggesting that red flag laws and strict gun laws aren't the solution. Why don't Dems mention Chicago more, I wonder?

One last thing on guns and another part of my wonderment on all of this. The Virginia teacher who was shot by her six-year-old student is planning on suing the school district for its failure to act on multiple concerns raised, by teachers and staff, that the child who did have a gun might have had a gun.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — Concerned staff warned administrators at a Virginia elementary school three times that a 6-year-old boy had a gun and was threatening other students in the hours before he shot and wounded a teacher, but the administration “was paralyzed by apathy” and didn't call the police, remove the boy from class, or lock down the school, the wounded teacher's lawyer said Wednesday.

“On that day, over the course of a few hours, three different times — three times — school administration was warned by concerned teachers and employees that the boy had a gun on him at the school and was threatening people. But the administration could not be bothered,” Toscano said.

Among the reasons the warnings were ignored? He had little pockets, presumably too small to hold a gun, and it was almost the end of the school day, so there was no need to look harder for the weapon - even though he had threatened another child on the playground. I wonder why, and how, after Uvalde, any school district employee could have such a dismissive attitude about this.

Finally, we learned Pope Francis said that "being homosexual is not a crime" even though "Catholic teaching holds that homosexual acts are a sin." He said the Church "should work to put an end to" laws criminalizing homosexuality. Importantly, he also

stressed the need to distinguish between the two, and said, for example, that lack of charity with one another is also a sin. 

I can't help wondering if anyone will take that part to heart. 

What are you wondering about?

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