To Comfort The Afflicted
And Afflict The Comfortable

To Comfort The Afflicted And Afflict The Comfortable

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Observercast

Four Months In Purgatory With No Possibility Of Parole

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For this, a so far unnamed crime in our state, the punishment is a minimum of four months flat time; no credit given for good behavior – because there won’t be any good behavior – and the sentence, if applied to you, could even be longer than the flat four months.

What makes this crime as listed in Title 22-19d of the Oklahoma Criminal Code so repugnant and clearly unconstitutional is the fact you will serve the time for the crime, not the perpetrators or creators of it.

So how can that be? This is how…

The Oklahoma Legislature will adjourn NLT the last Friday in May and it convened on the first Monday in February or four months. During that disgusting timeframe in our lives we not only have been mostly locked in our homes, putting up with spouses and children, maybe even an in-law or two due to COVID-19, and of course boredom soon permeated our living spaces. So after what seemed like years worth of watching Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO, Crackle, Paramount Plus, Disney Delight and Acorn TV [when in reality it was only four months] we occasionally jumped our traces and tuned into the Legislature’s streaming services to watch our elected leaders do their business, and supposedly do ours as well.

And that is how We The People are in violation of Title 22-19d because it is a crime to watch a crime being committed and fail to report that alleged criminal behavior to an alleged efficient and knowledgeable law enforcement person … like a district attorney, sheriff, the narcs, the cops, the judges and the under the cover types that keep the rest of us in between the legal lines of Title 22-19d.

And worse, us merely politically addicted watchers of our 149 lawmakers, failed to report to the authorities the repeated law breaking by our newly elected, just last year with a 36% pay raise to boot, career lawmakers/lawbreakers and for that we catch a long four months in purgatory, which runs annually from about February to May in Oklahoma and can be found on the fourth floor of the state Capitol building. [Need to rewrite this paragraph. Don’t have time. Got to go to court.]

Legislative proposals not just talked about but actually passed and signed into law this year have dominated the lawmakers’ limited time and even more limited gray matter. Titles for bills such as “No Gun Control Here, Not Now, Not Ever” or “No Abortion For Her, Not Now, Not Ever” or the very popular proposal titled “How To Close All Public Schools In Oklahoma Without Really Trying In Less Than Three Years” by K. Stitt, are all clearly unconstitutional but we just sat and watched the disgusting, repetitive lawlessness and did nothing.

Proof of our collaboration with the collaborators? Did we call our senator or representative to complain? No. The gumshoes we think are supposed to stop that crap from happening at the Capitol? None seen out there except on “Law-n-order Day”; and the working press? There’s only about two Capitol reporters left and they are mostly looking for jobs with state agencies. Well it has happened!

It’s as though when folks up there in OKC “term out” or leave early to draw a pension they don’t tell the next bunch what’s legal and what’s not and so the new ones have to just guess which is a really a bad way to make new laws. It sounds almost illegal.

But since us addicted watchers know better, we get popped with the punishment found in Title 22-19d which is the four-month gig when we keep doing it year after year and don’t do anything about it.

For examples, we don’t have to vote for the same morons just because their names are on the ballot over and over and they all have the letter R after the name their folks gave to them; or crazily re-elect to the most important Okie job, that of governor, men and women who proved their ineptness after just one four-year rodeo; and other things like that.

But we do; so therefore we catch the confinement every year, as ordered by Title 22-19d, to four months in purgatory due to the behavior of others.

I’ll bet that if we ordered the lawbreakers we call lawmakers to hang around in OKC every year – all year long – and we had to watch them even more than we do now, then we’d get some action.

New York, whose legislature meets all year long, got some action when both the Republican leader of the Senate and the Democratic Speaker of the House were sent to prison for being both a lawmaker/lawbreaker at the same time. Shouldn’t do that, and for awhile those ninny New England numskulls who thought the laws they wrote in Albany didn’t apply to themselves back in their districts behaved themselves and wrote mostly legal laws, not the other kind.

However, due to that pesky third branch of government, a federal judge who is serving a life sentence as a federal judge overturned those convictions of those powerful people and they were let out of prison, so guess what?

S.N.A.F.U. returned to New York and maybe it never left Oklahoma, but I know what to do about. From now on I’m going to watch only Fox TV because it says our Legislature never does anything wrong and that’s good enough for me. I hope it will be for the DA, too.

P.S. That Tucker Carlson at Fox. I’m really impressed with him. He says making tiny children wear masks is just like whaling the crap out of a little one at Walmart and that folks that see either activity, which “Tuck” says is child abuse, dang sure should call the police.

I reckon folks down here in the boonies agree with Tuck because I’ve seen a bunch of the latter but none of the former. The kids act up bad at Wally World when the parents make the mistake of driving the cart down the candy aisle. Well, who wouldn’t, but you don’t have to make a federal and felony case out of it. Or do you?

P.S.S. That thing about Title 22-19d? It doesn’t exist yet. I just wanted to think about the legal beagles grabbing their Title 22 statute book to look it up instead of a real .22 pistol before heading out the door for court. I hope they don’t try to stuff the book down their pants instead of the real thing. Depending on who the judge is might cause a question or two.

“Yes, Your Honor. No, Your Honor. I can’t explain that, Your Honor.”

Cal Hobson
Cal Hobson
Cal Hobson, a Lexington Democrat, served in the Oklahoma Legislature from 1978-2006, including one term as Senate President Pro Tempore.