I can’t think of what to say.

This was bound to happen when the Christian rightwing took over the Texas Railroad Commission – where oil and gas are regulated, or not.  Their Public GIS viewer —

Click the little one to get the big one.

Lord, y’all.  I gotta get outta here.

Thanks to Lydia for the heads up.

I suspect you’ve heard by now that Texas has decided that Fort Knox cannot be trusted what with all these United States Armies and Walmart and underground tunnels and Barack Obama roaming around Texas and whatnot.

So the headline is that Texas “will repatriate $1 billion of gold bullion from the Federal Reserve in New York to Texas.”  He’s gonna call it The Texas Bullion Depository.  Abbott says the reason he wants to do this is so that the storage fees can stay in Texas instead of going outside the United States.

That’s hogwash.  We are currently paying $1 million a year to store the gold belonging to the University of Texas.  Bringing it here increases the storage rate to $7 million a year.

What Greg Abbott is scared of – along with his rich friends – is that Obama is just a step away from Roosevelt’s executive order in 1933 make gold hoarding illegal.  Seriously.  They want to take it with them.

Weird Fact #1 – Texas does not have a billion dollars in gold.

Indeed, Texas has no gold bars in the Federal Reserve’s New York vault. And what the state has is not worth a billion dollars. Instead some 4,200 gold bars bought in 2011 by the University of Texas’s endowment fund (the second largest in the country after Harvard’s) are stored in the basement vault of HSBC’s headquarters at 450 5th Avenue in New York City, just south of the New York Public Library. For the last four years, the endowment has paid an estimated $1 million per year to store their gold there. (If it had been at the New York Fed the cost would have totaled about $15,400 over that period). And the new depository law does not require the university’s endowment fund to relocate the gold to Texas.

Weird Fact #2 – So why does the University of Texas have gold bars?

Governor Rick Perry did everything he could to destroy the University of Texas.  Thank God he was only semi-competent at that, too.  The Board of Regents is a bunch of old white guys who share the Perry paranoia.  One of those guys is Kyle Bass.

Bass isn’t just a casual metals speculator. When he believed nickel was undervalued he bought 20 million nickel coins to prove his point (they’re stored on a pallet in a Brinks vault). A brave new world mix of country club and prepper compound, in a Michael Lewis profile, Bass revealed that he’d prepared for a collapse of the government and economy by accumulating – in his words – “guns and gold.”

I do not know where he has stored the university’s guns.

Weird Fact #3 – who the damn hell is a nickel hoarder?  Has the tooth fairy filed a complaint?

Weird Fact #4 – The bill to set up the Texas Depository was introduced in 2013 but died when “analysis showed that the state would be on the hook for $14 million in the first two years due to the costs of setting up a state-run depository guarded and administered by people on the public payroll.”

So, this time they fixed that.

This time his bill outsourced the expense to private industry so … it doesn’t show up as an actual expense on the budget.

It’ll cost the same – probably more, because private industry has to make a profit.  But, it doesn’t show up as an actual expense.

Weird Fact #5 – Because it is held by private industry, that means the State of Texas really doesn’t own it – private industry does.  Of course, private industry is always trustworthy.  I’m sure those Enron Boys are looking for something to do.  I am practically certain that Greg Abbott’s college roommates are setting up a “Butch and Bob’s Neighborhood Gold Storage and Fried Catfish.”

Weird Fact #6 – Nobody steals gold.

As of yet, Capriglione doesn’t know where the bullion depository might be located. But he dismissed a suggestion that a building known as a the “Texas Bullion Depository” will attract criminal masterminds. “You don’t need as much security because gold is incredibly heavy and hard to liquidate,” he said. “There aren’t many heists of gold bullion…nobody’s going to be able to steal 80,000 pounds of gold.”

One word:  backhoe.

Plus, we don’t think a criminal mastermind will steal it.  We think old white men will.

I suggest we put it all in Greg booth’s (On edit: Abbott’s – damn autocorrect) head – that’s empty and totally safe from intrusion.

Y’all, I am damn certain that there’s a dozen more weird facts.  I am also certain that the reason this is happening is so Greg Abbott and his paranoid friends can sit around a nakkid in a gold bouillon depository and count their money.

Thanks to everybody and their Aunt Matilda for the heads up.

Remember back in the Benghazi hearing with Darrell Issa cut off Congressman Elijah Cummings microphone like the squirrelly punk he is?

Well, Miss Karma Honey just walked in the door.

Former House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) tried to crash former Hillary Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal’s deposition before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Tuesday.

Issa marched into the closed-door deposition and remained inside for about a minute before he was escorted out by the panel’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).

Poor Issa looks like a dandy fool over his Benghazi obsession.

He was so mad over getting kicked out that he “stormed off, throwing an empty soda can into a nearby trash bin.”

You know what’s a real shame?  That we weren’t all there to snicker at him.

Thanks to chloe bear for the heads up.

Customers who have been around here for a while know that I love baseball as much as I love politics.  And I love the Astros, even though they break my damn heart year after year.

So here’s some news.  The FBI is investigating baseball.

Investigators have uncovered evidence that Cardinals officials broke into a network of the Houston Astros that housed special databases the team had built, according to law enforcement officials. Internal discussions about trades, proprietary statistics and scouting reports were compromised, the officials said.

Hey, Cards, you don’t need to do that.  Just call me and I’ll tell you that George Springer is so hot right now that you can fry eggs on his butt.

Grrrrrrrr … sumbitches.

Don Trump and his hair have entered the Presidential race “to make America great again.”  Yeah, like when women couldn’t vote.

UPDATE: I will admit that this is real Inside Politics and not of interest to normal people. But sometimes keeping tabs on what goes on in the smoke filled backrooms can explain what happens later in public view.

Back in March Rick Perry announced that former FEC Chairman Don McGahn will be counsel to his presidential campaign.

Former Texas governor Rick Perry is set to announce that Margaret Lauderback will serve as his national finance director and that Don McGahn will serve as his campaign counsel.

That was kinda a big deal until last night. Last night in the Washington Post —

Trump’s longtime financial advisers and Donald F. McGahn, a partner at Jones Day, have finalized the report about his finances in recent weeks as Trump has moved closer to jumping into the 2016 contest. Three people briefed on those discussions Monday requested anonymity in order to talk about the process.

Whoa, even Rick Perry’s financial advisor is two-timing him.

Then, to add some intrigue, the Washington Post dropped McGahn’s name from subsequent stories.

Trump’s longtime financial advisers have finalized the report about his assets in recent weeks as Trump has moved closer to entering the 2016 contest. Three people briefed on those discussions Monday spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about the process.

So it pretty much looks like McGahn was one of the three anonymous sources. Oops.

Honey, when your big name campaign advisors become sources working for another candidate, you just might be a joke.

Thanks to Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen for the heads up.