Y’all remember the Dixie Chicks, don’t you?  Republicans tried to run them out of business after they said that they were proud of Texas but not so proud of George W Bush.  Why, the Republicans accused the Chicks of being unAmerican for poor-mouthing the President.

Well, Honey, they are back with a vengeance.  And ho boy they can sing and sell out shows all over Texas.

But they are still not ready to make nice.  Good on ‘um.

The crowd wasn’t just enjoying the music. They were communing, absorbing, welcoming back old friends who still have plenty to say.

The message was clear during revenge anthem “Goodbye Earl,” which earned one of the night’s biggest responses. Scenes of women in peril from black-and-white films were interspersed with images of Chris Brown, O.J. Simpson and Donald Trump as a cartoonish devil (which earned the loudest roar).

Welcome home.

 

I have friends who live in Missouri who let me know that maybe, just maybe, Missouri is trying to beat Texas in the political division rankings.  They send me all the information I need to know that bean dip dumb is contagious.

However, this comes close to being the sweetest thing that ever happened.  Anywhere.

Missouri’s Governor Jay Nixon, who is a damn Democrat, has repeatedly withheld funding for the public defender’s office.  The public defender’s office asked for a $23 million increase in funding.  The state legislature gave them $4.5 million.  The Governor is withholding $3.5 million of that because he thinks they don’t need it.  They do.  Badly.

So, the guy who is the head of the public defender’s office, Michael Barrett, has found out that he has authority to appoint any lawyer to a client in the public defender’s office.

Michael Barrett made me the happiest woman on earth when he appointed Governor Jay Nixon to defend a client in the public defender’s system.

“… given the extraordinary circumstances that compel me to entertain any and all avenues for relief, it strikes me that I should begin with the one attorney in the state who not only created this problem, but is in a unique position to address it.”

Well done, Barrett, well done.

Thanks to everybody for the heads up.

 

Guys, you did amazingly great.  Glen is still working on the final numbers but it appears that you raised between $5,500 and $6,000.

That will do some damn good.  We covered all the counties we needed to cover and also helped us target some state representative races for people who need just a little extra help.

For example, you helped my my friend Cecil Webster, who is running for the state house.  Cecil and I have been friends for a decade and even went to the national convention together in 2012.  When we told Cecil that we had covered his district, he sent me this.

First, let me tell you a little about Cecil.  He is a retired Colonel in the United States Army and taught at West Point.  He is witty, smart, and determined.  Cecil is a gentleman farmer/rancher about 100 miles up the road from me on the way to Austin. Cecil’s lovely bride, Marsha, keeps him in line.

Juanita Jean,

I cannot thank you and your readers enough for your support of Texas voters, especially those in rural counties who are 65 and over and who are eligible to vote by mail.  Due to your very generous support, the senior citizens in the HD-13 counties in which I am running for state representative (Austin, Burleson, Colorado, Fayette, Grimes, Lavaca, and Washington) will now receive an application for vote by mail ballot.  This is great news for them, and for my campaign to ensure veterans have a real voice in the Texas Legislature.  For more detailed information about my campaign, please see my website at www.websterfortexas.com; to see what is going on day-to-day in my campaign, visit me on Facebook at “Cecil Webster for Texas State Representative.”  Again, thanks for making it possible for the voices of senior citizens to be heard in this election.

Cecil

Yeah, ya did good, folks.

Now we sit back and wait to see who wins the lottery.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

 

If you’ve been having your hair done here for a while you’re very familiar with Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.  He’s so crooked that they are gonna have to screw him into the ground when he dies.  He’d have to study-up to be an imbecile.

Not only that, he’s a cow short of a herd.  You know, like the time he wanted to bomb “Muslim” like we did Japan.  Or when he wanted to add guns and ammo to our state’s back-to-school tax-free weekend because, get ready for this, kids can now carry guns on college campuses. He spent taxpayer money to go to Oklahoma to get a “Jesus shot.” He wants to form a posse and fight the “invasion” from Mexico. He compared Syrian refugees to rattlesnakes. He threatened to slap people who say, “Happy Holidays” to him. And merrily signed up Ted Nugent as an advisor.

And all that was before sunrise.

So what does Ole Sid do to top all that?  Well, Honey, there’s nothing else he could do to put his unique skill set to valuable use.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said Friday he is working with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign to help lead an agriculture team.

“Of course my emphasis will be carrying Texas for the ag industry for Trump,” Miller told Hasty. “Personally I think Donald Trump will be great for agriculture.

I do not know what “carrying Texas for the ag industry for Trump” means, not do I want to because I am certain it has something to do with Snakes on a Nuke.

Thanks to Donna for the heads up.

It’s hard to classify Donald Trump according to standards most of us would easily recognize. As a trust fund baby, he’s a work-a-holic. As a builder, he has mostly stopped building.   He was a bust as a casino owner (the “house” lost!).  The Republican candidate for the Presidency eschews Republican orthodoxy. He flouts more GOP leaders, pundits and lawmakers than he does Democrats.

Some people might see these as the signs of an iconoclast. Some might see them as the characteristics of an incipient strong man. Some might see them as the standard foibles of a poor little rich kid. Some might see them as marks of genius. Some might see them as symptoms of a deeper, darker pathology. Some might see them as GOP SOP to the Nth degree.

All of those are true.

Whatever set of circumstances led him there, Donald Trump has such a fragile ego, he is so beset by his own shortcomings, that he has spent a lifetime trying to convince himself and others that there ARE no shortcomings. Rather than being sub-average, or just average, or even slightly-above-average in anything, Donald Trump must be SUPERLATIVE in everything. His every pronouncement reads like a 4^th-grader’s MadLib of self-congratulation: “I [am/have] the [superlative adjective] [personal characteristic] ever.   My [noun] is the [superlative adjective][noun] of all time. You will be so tired of [superlative adjective][verb+”ing”] you will ask me to stop. Believe me!”

In order to build himself up, he must tear others down. Striking back at anyone who criticizes, hurts or bests him is not just a base strategy, but an autonomic reflex. It is literally a self-defense mechanism, because the crystal palace he’s built in place of a healthy ego is made of brittle, brittle glass. One small crack, and the entire edifice complex comes tumbling down.

The only compliments he reserves are for people, places or things (nouns) that he sees as complimentary to him, or as extensions of himself. This is the deepest reach of his pathology, his narcissism: the value he attaches to anything is only as an extension of his ego, as a part of himself.   It’s why he slaps his name on anything that sits still long enough. It’s not possession; it’s assimilation.

With this as a foundation, all the rest of it follows. Any institution or sacred cow that is not the Donald must be torn down: iconoclast. Anybody not me must be weaker than me or beaten down: strong man. I deserved to be born to privilege, and I deserve even more, and I will pound my spoon on my highchair until I get it: poor little rich kid. I may be an idiot in most things, but I can fake my way past most Americans and bullshit, bluster and browbeat smarter people into making me look good, to the point where they give me a TV show and pay me for the use of my name and even nominate me for President: savant syndrome.

But none of this would have been possible if the GOP had not laid the groundwork for just such an empty suit. If you begin with the premise that everything that is “us” is good and everything that is “them” is not just bad, but an existential threat to “us” and then design a political strategy around it, you end up with the Republican Party of the past 30 years. It doesn’t matter what policy we promote, so long as it is the opposite of “them.” It has grown over the years to proportions that would be laughable if they weren’t so sad. The well-known meeting on the night of Obama’s first inauguration to plan the obstruction that would limit him to one term merely formalized a strategy that had been in place for years.

Each aspect of this strategy – the anti-minority legislation, the anti-immigration stance, the anti-gay hatred, the anti-science rhetoric, the anti-education antipathy, the anti-democracy suppression – is designed to empower and cajole a certain segment of the electorate to provide an unreasoning, unreasonable “base” that will vote for them without looking too closely at what’s going on, certainly without dispassionately reviewing two sides of a policy issue.

But now it’s become not “liberals stand for everything I hate” but rather “I hate everything liberals stand for.” And that is the end of discussion and compromise. It’s why you have the cognitive dissonance of Obamacare and Cap and Trade – both born of Republican ideas – being anathema to the very party that bore them. It’s why Donald Trump can know nothing about an issue and take both sides of it in the same conversation, and not leave his base voters scratching their heads and wondering if this guy has a screw loose or something.

Donald embodies all of that and takes it far beyond the pale. “Not us” is bad, not from the tribal sense that they are “not us” but from the Trumpian narcissism of “us” just being an extension of “me.” These things are not an existential threat to the hegemony of “us” but an actual existential threat to Donald’s rickety glass house of a soul. It explains why his policies do not settle somewhere to the right of center or to the left of center. Because a policy becomes good as soon as Donald likes it, and bad as soon as he doesn’t.   The Democratic Party is not “them;” they’re “not me.” The Republicans who refuse to play ball are not erring members of “us;” they’re just “not me.” It’s why his children are so extolled and trusted by him: literally half their DNA is his; they are actual physical manifestations of Trump’s “ME.” Of course he’d date his daughter: it’s the closest he can come to actually dating himself!

If the man got breast implants, I doubt he’d ever leave his room.

Seen through this lens, then, the Republican half of the Trump phenomenon makes so much sense. But this construct was lost on virtually everyone, most especially the media. They treated him like a rational actor in the political game.   But he’s not playing by the same rules, he’s not searching for the same outcome. Trump wants to be President not so that he can rule the world.

He wants to be President so that, once and for all, he can say he is the greatest winner of all time. Once and for all, everyone will have to give him respect and take him seriously. Once and for all, his fragile ego will have Secret Service protection.

Donald Trump wants to be President so that, once and for all, his false sense of superlativity will feel true.

I’m not saying that all Republican elected officials are perverts, but … oh hell, the odds are in that favor.

Meet the Mayor of Stockton, California, Republican Anthony Silva.  Silva is a Super DeLux Brand New and Improved Christian.  In fact, he gave the key to the city to God.

Look, I’m not trying to be disrespectful here, but it seems to me that God doesn’t need a key.  I think God has a holy spirit that can just walk right through doors.  I also have heard, but can’t prove, that God is omnipresent so giving him a key is a nice but totally unnecessary gesture.

Personally, I think the mayor made that gesture to make people think he’s something he ain’t.

The mayor of Stockton, California, was arrested on Thursday on a felony eavesdropping charge stemming from a strip poker game he is accused of surreptitiously recording at a summer camp he hosts for disadvantaged inner-city children, prosecutors said.

Mayor Anthony Ray Silva, 41, was also charged with three misdemeanor counts – contributing to the delinquency of a minor, child endangerment and furnishing alcoholic beverages to individuals under the legal drinking age of 21, according to a criminal complaint filed in court.

I don’t suppose he gave God a key to summer camp.

In all fairness, Silva’s lawyer says he’s not guilty and that this is a political set-up.

Asked whether Silva was playing strip poker with youths from his camp, Reichel replied, “I highly doubt it.” Reichel added, “I can’t wait to fight them in court, so we can expose the epidemic of kids at summer camp playing strip poker.”

Yeah, I had to read that twice, too.

The mayor was trying to “expose the epidemic of kids at summer camp playing strip poker.”  Yep, their defense is that the mayor is the Dudley DoRight of strip poker right there in his own cabin.  Praise Jesus for Republican men and their investigations.

Thanks to everybody for the heads up.