Porch Council, It’s Time to Choose Again

Well... it’s Sunday.

Which can mean only one thing. It’s time for me to hand y’all three more questions and find out what kind of trouble I’m going to be in by tomorrow night.

And before we even get into this week’s choices, I would just like to remind everybody of something I said TWO Sundays back.

I said I was giving y’all easier topics.

Remember that?

Because I do.

I had just survived the Pentagon Bible verse write-up, which somehow turned into more than two hundred years of constitutional history, and I specifically said I was trying to avoid having to earn another degree before I could finish the next one.

Then y’all picked the Supreme Court.

And lord have mercy. I started with a Gallup poll showing Supreme Court approval sitting at 33 percent. And that was supposed to be the story. Does anybody trust the Supreme Court anymore?

Except 33 percent was approval, not trust, which sent me looking into the difference between the two, and that’s when I found something called Supreme Court fatalism.

And off we went.

By the time I finally crawled out of that rabbit hole, I had gone through years of polling, Dobbs, precedent, Merrick Garland, Amy Coney Barrett, the shadow docket, Supreme Court ethics, congressional power, the Justice Department and research into whether Republicans and Democrats actually see the power of the Court as differently as I assumed they did.

They don’t. At least not on everything.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this I was passing a kidney stone.

So I would like the record to reflect that I DID try to give y’all an easier week.

Y’all declined.

And y’all wanna know the really funny part? Some of the questions you were asking in the comments were basically describing Supreme Court fatalism before I even knew there was a name for it.

So when I tell y’all not to just drop an A, B or C and run, this is why. Tell me what made you pick it. Hell, ask me something I haven’t even thought of yet because apparently that’s how we ended up with Supreme Court fatalism last week.

Now, having apparently learned absolutely nothing from any of this, I have three more choices for you.

Option A started with the IndyCar race in Washington, D.C.

Y’all already know I have questions about this thing. Hell we just dropped our latest Southern Punk musical “The Grift 500” because of it.

The idiots in DC in their infinite wisdom decided IndyCars flying through the streets around the National Mall at nearly 200 miles an hour was an excellent idea. More than 200 manhole covers had to be welded shut. There were flyovers. And y'all know the man in charge had to take his lap around the track in The Beast.

So somewhere between UFC at the White House and finding out the Beast is taking a lap around an IndyCar track in D.C., I started thinking, what the hell are we doing here?

And look, I know Trump isn't the first president to go to a sporting event. I'm not saying that. But UFC at the White House? IndyCars flying through D.C.? The Beast taking a lap? At some point I'm sitting here thinking, is this normal and I just never noticed it before?

And then that got me to thinking about Rome. Which is never a good sign.

So Option A is:

WHEN DID THE PRESIDENCY TURN INTO THE COLOSSEUM?

Is this just entertainment, or does the Man in Charge think he’s Caesar?

Option B came from something we’ve actually been talking about around here for a while.

All of this earthquakes and volcano activity as of late.

Because good Lord, there have been a lot of them.

And every time another big earthquake hits or another volcano starts making news, somebody inevitably shows up talking about the Ring of Fire. Now I’m seeing people go even further and claim there could be another Ring of Fire forming.

And I have absolutely no idea if that’s true.

Actually, from the little bit I looked at before putting this on the ballot, it is looking plausible.

And now I wanna know what the hell is actually true. Because it sure FEELS like the Earth has been throwing a fit lately, but is it?

I wanna know if there really have been more earthquakes and eruptions than usual, and if any of this stuff can actually be connected. Like can some massive earthquake on one side of the world really set something else off thousands of miles away or is that not how any of this works? And what the hell is this “second Ring of Fire” people keep talking about?

For all I know we’ll get into this and USGS will basically tell us everybody on the internet needs to calm the hell down.

I don’t know.

So Option B is:

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON UNDER OUR FEET?

Is the Earth actually getting more active...

Or does it just look that way?

And then there’s Option C.

Oopsie.

Enter Darline Graham who was asked about Taiwan and the South China Sea during the Senate race and hwr response was “not that informed on national security.”

Ma’am. I have said it before and I will say it again. You are running for the United States Senate. You aren't taking over the PTA.

Now listen, I don’t expect somebody running for office to know every answer to every question somebody throws at them. I don’t know every damn thing about national security either.

But I’m also not asking South Carolina to send me to Washington so I can vote on wars, military spending and some of the biggest national-security decisions this country makes.

So when I heard that, my first thought was basically...

How much ARE we supposed to expect somebody to know before we hand them that kind of power?

And okay, obviously senators have people around them who know this stuff and they're going to get briefings. I'm not expecting somebody to walk into the Senate knowing every damn thing there is to know about national security.

But surely there has to be a floor somewhere.

Right?

So Option C is:

“NATIONAL SECURITY ISN’T MY THING.” OOPSIE.

How much should you know about national security before we hand you a Senate vote on it?

That’s Option C.

Surely ONE of these can stay simple.

I probably shouldn’t have said that out loud.