There was a Trump Parade in New Braunfels, Texas.  I spent many happy days of my childhood in New Braunfels tubing the Comal River and taking my own children back to build memories of their own.

New Braunfels has officially become the nastiest place in Texas.

They had a Trump parade that they call The Trump Train. That’s a thing in Texas, these parades. But this one was way beyond simply a thing.

The lead truck in the parade pulled a Black Lives Matter flag off the back bumper through town.

Why this is outrageously offensive is because in June of 1998, three white men in Jasper, Texas, tied the feet of James Byrd, Jr., to the underbelly of their pickup truck and drug him 3 miles on an asphalt road just because he was black.  After 3 miles, they hit a culvert and Byrd’s body was brutally dismembered.  They dumped the body parts in front of a black church. They were members of the a white supremacist organization.

Somebody in New Braunfels didn’t want black folks to forget. You know, like James Byrd, Jr. is something you could forget.

I believe in free speech and dragging that flag was free speech. But, with free speech comes much responsibility.

This is Trump’s America. These are the people who want to rule.  And do not tell me that this was just one person. People stood on the side of the road and cheered. There were at least 100 other cars in the parade and not one of them stopped this or dropped out.

It is not enough to just vote. We have to sweep the board. We have to overwhelm them, shame them, and make it uncomfortable for them to do crap like this.

I will never fully understand what it is to be black in America, but, dammit, I will stand.

Thanks to Martha for the heads up.

I wanna be realistic here and let you know that HD28 is a pretty safe Republican District, so it was no shocked that when there was a special election in that district earlier this year, a Republican won a resounding victory.  The only shocking thing was the Republican man who won it.

He lives in the same county as I do. At least that’s what I thought.

Gary Gates has done everything he can do in one lifetime to be controversial. He’s been accused of child abuse and certainly was not repenting of emotional abuse of foster children in his care.  He’s a developer who has made millions from building and maintaining low end housing (read slum landlord).

Gates has run for office before.  Seven times he’s run for most everything from school board to state senate, and he spends a boatload of his own money every time he does.

He’s some political consultant dream job.  He seems to have a different one every time he runs and they are dandy at spending money.  He’s very fond of putting out expansive endorsement list that include dead people, unregistered to vote people, tenants in some of his properties, people who walked by his booth at the county fair, and names of the voices in his head.  He’s just a damn mess, and that’s what Republicans say about him.

Well, something new has come up.  Come to find out, Gates doesn’t even live in Texas.  Maybe just the voices in his head live here, I dunno.

Get a load of this.  Gate Hisownself has an Oh Help Me, Jesus website called the Colorado Citizen’s Coalition.

No, seriously, go look around.

Do not miss this, of course.

But here’s the real interesting.  Here is a man serving at a state representative in the Texas House.  But, he spends at least half his time in Colorado.  And I know that because Gary Gates tells me that.

Click here for the big one.

“Gary lives about half his time in Crested Butte, Colorado.”

Now I am certain that to qualify for government loans to build “affordable” housing, you probably don’t have to live at least half your life in the state you’re asking for a permit.  I know a good Christian man like Gary would not lie about that and that … uh, the terrorists wrote that in Gary’s website.  Yeah. yeah. terrorists.  That’s it.

I am certain the the voices in Gary’s head live in Colorado and he really lives here.  I suspect in January when the legislature meets we’ll figure out if it’s the other way around.

Social media is still laughing about the Trump boat parade turned mass shipwreck Saturday on Lake Travis.  The memes are making the rounds and some of my favorites are Poseidon For Biden, Klan overboard!, Lake Travesty, and Make America Sink Again.  The real irony of the day, though, were the metaphors for Trump’s America…it was the perfect Libertarian event; poorly organized, and poorly managed.  No one knows how many boats participated, how many where swamped, and how many people went into the water.  The clearest metaphor, though, was how people acted – the wealthy, in flag festooned boats as long as 60 feet sped through the water with no regard for the every day folks in smaller boats in the parade.  The resulting wakes are what caused heavy swell that engulfed those smaller boats, sinking at least 4, and swamping an untold number.

The wealthier people did what they wanted, without regard to their effect on others.  Those others lost, but no one knows how many because, Freedumb.   Just like today’s economy under Trump.

One of the best videos of the day, though, was by comedian Brent Terhune, who plays a MAGhat of the first order.  Here he tearfully describes the loss of his beloved boat, the SS MAGAritaville.

Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen wrote this.  I couldn’t improve on it.

Ten years ago the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC fundamentally changed the way American elections are funded when it found that corporations, unions and individuals could spend unlimited amounts to make independent expenditures to support or oppose candidates.  The D.C. Circuit then found in SpeechNow.org v. FEC that political committees could be created that could also accept unlimited amounts from corporations, unions and individuals as long as these committees only made independent expenditures and did not make contributions to candidates.  The technical term for these political committees is independent expenditure-only committees, but they were immediately dubbed Super PACs.

The cases giving rise to the Super PACs were premised on majority’s belief that campaigns and Super PACs would indeed act independently of one another and that the FEC would aggressively enforce the separation required by Citizens United and SpeechNow.

Ten years later the FEC finally did – but only because it had been presented with irrefutable evidence of coordination between a presidential campaign and a Super PAC.

The FEC just announced that it has fined the Cruz for President campaign $13,000 because a campaign fundraiser illegally solicited contributions to a Super PAC supporting Cruz’s election.

How was the FEC able to prove that a fundraiser for the Cruz for President campaign illegally solicited contributions to his designated Super PAC?

Someone who attended the Dallas fundraiser recorded the event and then posted it on You Tube.

Click here and see footnote 5 and accompanying text.

Listen carefully boys and girls – this is how campaign finance works in the real world.

The Cruz campaign held a joint fundraising event with two tables – one table where you could make a contribution to the Cruz campaign and a separate table where you could make a contribution to the Super PAC.

This was not an anomaly.  These joint fundraisers happen all the time.  There will be many this holiday weekend.

This is how our campaign finance system works ten years after Citizens United.  Super PACs are now created to support candidate at every level – down to local school board elections.  Many of these Super PACs are fully funded by relatives of the candidates – parents, brothers, sisters and even in one case the candidate’s spouse. Complaints were filed against all of these family Super PACs and the FEC turned a blind eye in every case, willing, instead, to believe the legal fiction that Super PACs are operated independently of campaigns.

The problem with legal fictions is . . . they’re fiction.

The FEC would probably have deadlocked in MUR 7048 with at least two commissioners willing to accept the Cruz’s campaign’s argument that the fundraiser really didn’t meet the definition of an “agent” of the campaign.

Except for that You Tube video.

That You Tube video exposed the liability of the Cruz campaign . . . and the fallacy of Citizens United.