I want you to meet my neighbor, Thomas Bartram. He’s 21 years old and doesn’t have near enough to do with his time.  He lives with his father in Greatwood, an upper middle class community about 2 miles from my house.

He has harassed at least two of my friends  at vigils and another one in a parking lot because of her bumper sticker. His pickup has a large banner portraying Donald Trump as Rambo, a Ted Cruz sign and bumper stickers for the far-right conspiracy website InfoWars.  I’ve seen the pickup. You can’t miss it.

An armed Trump supporter was detained and released by police Wednesday outside a community space for immigrants in El Paso, Texas, days after a mass shooting that killed 22 people at a Walmart in the border town.

Witnesses said they called police after Thomas Bartram, 21, made threatening comments to people and brandished a knife while sitting in his truck outside of community center Casa Carmelita.

He had a gun, a knife, a bag of white powder, and was wearing latex gloves.

Police detained him and then released him because it was determined that no criminal offense had been committed.

Seriously.

Reached by phone, Bartram said he often went to Trump rallies, but said he tried to be respectful of the high tensions in El Paso following the shootings—though he said he could not rule out the possibility that the massacre had been a “false flag” perpetrated by the government.

Bartram acknowledged he was legally carrying a pistol but denied waving it around, and said the gloves and knife could be explained. “I was eating prickly pears,” he said. The white powder was a protein supplement Bartram said he takes along with other Alex Jones’ branded nutritional supplements.

Witnesses at the community center said that people at the community center are still “terrified” and “frustrated.”  They added that “El Paso police officers were confrontational with the witnesses and eventually told them Bartram hadn’t broken any laws.”

Last anybody heard, he was headed to Portland for a rally there.

Bartram’s brother, Alex Bartram, 27, told NBC News in a phone interview that his brother had gone to El Paso with a group of Trump supporters he had been hanging out with lately.

“He’s not a violent person,” Alex Bartram said.

I ain’t turning my back on him, that’s for sure.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, where Democrat is a naughty word, is going after Trump’s economic policy.

“Economic expansions don’t end on their own,” the paper’s editorial board wrote. “They almost always end due to policy mistakes. Mr. Trump’s willy-nilly trade offensive could be the mistake that turns a slowdown into the Navarro recession.”

So White House economic adviser Peter Navarro shows up on Fox News pretty damn peeved.  He tells Maria Bartiromo that “The Wall Street Journal is a like a Chinese Communist Party newspaper.”

Of course they are because anybody who doesn’t agree with you is a Communist.

Thanks to SGray for the heads up.

Here’s the weather for Austin this week:

But that ain’t nothing compared to the temperature inside the state capitol building.

This is a very complicated story so I’m gonna level it off so that everybody can understand it and not giving up on reading it.

There’s two main characters in this story- both of them are Republicans: Dennis Bonnen, speaker of the Texas House, and Michael Quinn Sullivan, a rotten ass sumbitch who heads a group called Empower Texans.  Needless to say, Empower Texans means empower rich white men and screw everybody else.  They raise tons of money and attempt to take over government, steal every dime, and then overthrow it.

Now I’d like to say there’s a good guy in the story but like every story involving two Republicans, there ain’t.  If there was a boxing match, you’d hope they knocked each other out.

So the story starts like this. For some damn reason, MQS (which is how everybody refers to Michael Quinn Sullivan because it’s too damn hot to type all that out) wanted press passes for his PAC Empower Texans.  So he goes to see Speaker Bonnen. Bonnen is not a friend of Empower Texans, so I have no idea what he was expecting.

Anyway, MQS gets there and Bonnen must have been hitting the bottle pretty hard that day because things went whacky.  MQS, who is such a crook himself that he trusts no one, secretly recorded the meeting.  So, when Bonnen sobered-up and backed out of the deal, MQS went turkey wild.

Holy cow, he blew the top off the capitol dome yelling that he had a recording of Bonnen saying that if EmpowerTexas targeted ten Republican – yes, Republican! – House members, Empower Texans would get their pass.  Yes, he tried to get Republicans to get rid of Republicans.

Needless to say, the ten Republicans on the hit list are a tad pissed off.  But, here’s the catch.  MQS won’t release the tape.  He says it would be too destructive to the GOP for the general public to hear it.  He’s only letting his friends and the ten targeted House members hear it.

But Bonnen knows what’s on the tape and he is crawling on a bed of nails with an elephant on his back begging forgiveness.

Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen apologized Tuesday to members for taking a meeting with hardline conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan that has since thrown the lower chamber into chaos — and he’s facing mixed reviews from both Republicans and Democrats in the lower chamber over his apology.

“I was stupid to take a meeting with an individual who has worked hard to divide our House,” Bonnen, an Angleton Republican, wrote to House members in an email. “I said terrible things that are embarrassing to the members, to the House, and to me personally.”

Meh.  He’s embarrassed.  Some stinkin’ apology.

Neither side is releasing the tape.  Wanna know why?  Not because of embarrassment, but because they both may have violated state law by making a quid pro quo.

So, Texas Democrats are making sure nothing happens to that tape.

We don’t want the tape floating down the Comal River without an inner tube.

I’m sorry this took me so long to sort out.  If you want to read more, just Google Bonnen and Empower Texans and you’ll get a thousand local stories.

It’s a damn mess and it doesn’t help Texas Republican one damn bit.

On Tuesday, Mike Pence was speaking before a meeting of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian-liberty organization anti-gay group, and was giving advice about being a Christian in today’s world.  While discussing his beliefs, his advice was, “Spend more time on your knees than on the internet.”  Yes, he really said that.  Predictably, Twitter and other social media lit up mocking Pence, and, none other than Monica Lewinsky joined right in when someone asked who was going to tell him Tweeting, “def not me.”

Should somebody tell him?  Nah, we’ll let Mother do it.  LOL.

Hey Guys, if the website gets wacky over the next few days, that’s because Anna the Geek is doing a major overhaul of the stuff in the background that I believe is magic.

Please be patient while she gets everything fixed and working properly.  We might get lucky and never even notice.