A bit of rational exuberance from David Rowe as the FBI executes a search warrant on the Trump residence at Mar A Lago.
I’m impressed by the number of cartoonists who leapt into the saddle last evening after Trump announced that the feds were picking on him, but Rowe gets the award for not simply featuring the gold toilet — several picked up on that — but making it stand for all of Mar A Lago, with the Constitution as toilet paper, the golf club over his shoulder and a whine to his personal lawyer a bit more frank than the whine he delivered to the rest of us.
His usual corps of defenders also responded quickly, with Kevin McCarthy — who previously said Trump should resign after Jan 6 — now threatening to indict Merrick Garland for thinking the law applies to high-ranking Republicans.
Fox News rounded up “some legal scholars” to explain why the FBI should have asked politely for the stolen classified documents to be returned.
And David Cohen explains why they didn’t, which, given the number of phone texts that have disappeared since January 6, suggests that showing up without a reservation was probably a wise choice.
Several people have reported that serving a search warrant on someone that far up the ladder not only requires convincing a judge of what you want to find and where you expect to find it (as always), but would likely require Merrick Garland’s signature and approval.
Beavis Trump confirmed to Sean Hannity that they were looking for stolen documents, but we still haven’t seen the actual warrant. I wouldn’t expect the feds to release it until they’re much further along in the investigation, if then, but Trump could show us his copy, assuming it doesn’t compromise his narrative.
When I interviewed a “person of interest” in a murder, he showed me the search warrant and it sure compromised his narrative. From it, I could reconstruct not just the crime but the trail of clues that led the police to his doorstep.
Which is a pretty good reason why I wouldn’t expect either side to be playing Show-and-Tell right now.
And what good would it do? We’re well past shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, and there’s little you could reveal about Trump that would make anybody on either side think less of him.
Today’s Dogs of C Kennel (Creators) is only coincidentally relevant, but it is relevant, to which I would add that you might want to temper your irrational exuberance with the knowledge that people drove out to Manassas to watch the first battle of Bull Run, expecting the war to be over nearly at once, while, as Britain planned for World War I, only Kitchener projected that it would last for more than a few weeks.
Buckle in.
Elsewhere in Our Crumbling Nation
Kevin Siers notes that schools — not just in North Carolina but nationwide — are on the verge of opening without enough teachers.
It’s not unusual for a bit of hiring panic to set in about now, because, at the end of summer, a teacher may accept a job at another school, creating a vacancy at the previous school, and these things can cause a cascade that sometimes seeps into the first week of classes.
The problem, however, is a great deal larger this year, in part because, as Joe Heller illustrates, classroom teaching has been going through some rough times over the past couple of years.
It’s a demanding job to begin with, and it’s been becoming more demanding over the past few decades. I began to get a teaching degree at midlife, but the more I heard from working teachers in my classes, the more I realized that, while I have always gotten along well with kids and would do well in the classroom itself, I was not cut out to deal with the administrative and bureaucratic interference.
And that was mostly coming from inside the building. Once the tax resistors realized that they could express their rage by interfering with school budgets, it was game over for my desire to teach.
Things haven’t improved.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The path to mass resignations is paved with good intentions, and, beyond disaffected sociopaths who take out their rage on local schools, there are those who sincerely believe their recommendations will cure the problems.
Unfortunately, they also seem to believe that having eaten in a restaurant qualifies you to be a chef and that having been a student means you understand teaching. Or at least one of those.
Arming teachers not only demonstrates ignorance of their work but ignorance of what people with experience in live-fire situations think. It’s an idiotic, impractical, unworkable idea, but, of course, that doesn’t matter if you’ve larded your local school board or your state legislature with enough Ramboneheads.
Unfortunately, however, even Handelsman’s well-intentioned reform misses the bullseye, if not the entire target. Certainly, schools, teachers and students would benefit from all the things he recommends, and shame on us for not offering them.
Still, they’re Band-Aids in a world in which a principal orders a third-grade teacher to cancel her free-reading period and use it, instead, to have the kids practice taking standardized tests, or in which a “Decision Making Team” of teachers and students recommends two of three candidates for principal and the Board promptly hires the third.
What is happening now is that the interruptions Heller refers to have given teachers a moment to stop and reflect.
If you’re going to constantly pester, micromanage and interfere with your workforce, the last thing you should do is give them a moment to stop and reflect.
That management advice applies beyond the schoolyard, as Jen Sorensen points out. “Work From Home” during the pandemic demonstrated that people could be perfectly productive without Bill Lumbergh dropping by periodically to ask about their TPS reports.
Which leads to all sorts of disloyal thoughts.
First Dog on the Moon is, predictably, less polite about it than Jen Sorensen, but the message is the same.
And Paul Fairie took to the newspaper archives, then Twitter, to answer the fat cats who still don’t get it.
Back when I was in the workforce, my union occasionally used “work to contract” (I.e. do only what you’re paid for) as an alternative to a walkout or strike. It was quite effective, since it inconvenienced management, but they had to pay us anyway.
There’s a variation called “Work to Rule,” which is where you carry out every freaking detail of your assignment no matter how petty and unnecessary.
I remember when the Canadian customs agents held a “work to rule” strike that had trucks lined up literally for miles down the road from the border crossing.