Must read this morning from Dana Milbank – We’ve finally found the fraud in the 2020 election – It’s Ron Johnson.  Milbank describes the Senate hearing shit show Johnson held this week.   It was a parade kooks, Trumpists, and, of course, Ron Johnson spewing a mountain of lies and innuendo about the non-existent massive fraud.  Completely missing the irony that this clown show was actually destroying our democracy, he spewed lies about non-existent massive fraud that supposedly is destroying our democracy.

Milbank hits Johnson hard in this piece which make for good reading.

This morning on Fox Business, Rand Paul blurted out his concern about more people voting:

Rand Paul rails on how Georgia was supposedly stolen — “but probably most importantly” absentee ballot applications being sent out for the Senate runoffs.

“I’m very, very concerned that if you solicit votes from typically non-voters, that you will affect and change the outcome.” pic.twitter.com/J1TPaN02Us

— Eric Kleefeld (@EricKleefeld) December 17, 2020

Heaven forbid we have more people voting – right?

Every year, Texas Monthly publishes their Bum Steer Awards, naming the worst of the worst statewide.  It’s not a list anyone wants to make, much be Bum Steer of the Year.  Past winners include an ugly cast of characters like Dick Cheney, Rick Perry, Jerry Jones, and none other than 3 time winner Tom DeLay.  Ugh.

The 2021 Bum Steer Awards came out last night and the Bum Steer of the Year? None other than our own Texas Democratic Party; management of the Salon agrees.  Worse, they beat out COVID-19 and Ken Paxton for Worst Honors.  In granting the award, Texas Monthly had some choice words like these:

“Since 1992, their fortunes have been in decline, and since 2002 they’ve been kept at arm’s length from control of both the Texas House and the Texas Senate, as well as from the Governor’s Mansion and any other statewide office. The party has a long history of launching failed comeback attempts, but all of them have either failed disastrously or come up short in a way that seems designed to demolish morale and crush hopes.”

The TDP is a textbook example of insanity – for 30 years, they’ve done the same thing over and over, with the same consultants, same party officials, and same pecking order. The results in each cycle have been predictably disastrous.  There was a bright spot in 2018 when Beto came close to taking out Cruz, and it was so close it felt like a win to Texas Dems.  It was still a loss, though, but the TDP didn’t take it to that way.  Magical thinking once again set in, and here we went for 2020.  Beto even got WAY out in front of himself, thinking that an also ran for Senate qualified him to run for President.  THAT was stupid.

Democratic politics in Texas is a lot like golf…you hack your way from water to rough to bunker, but then on the 16th hole, you hit that beautiful lofted draw that lands the ball softly right in the center of the green.  Then you 4 putt the hole for a double bogey. On 17, you hit it in the water again, and on 18 you lose your ball out of bounds.  BUT, that beautiful shot on 16 keeps you coming back time after time.

In 2020, the TDP kept going for that great shot, but because of the euphoria over Trump’s waning influence in Texas, they got over confident, believed the polls, and then couldn’t get the ball off the tee.  Dems have believed for decades that turnout is everything, fantasizing that new voters will automatically vote for them; but that certainly didn’t work this year.  The Biden campaign didn’t spend as much time or money here that they should have, and the state party didn’t stick to fundamentals, especially in South Texas.  South Texas is one of those areas where politics are extremely local and it requires a lot of contact and money to get the turnout and then to get those turning out to vote for Dems.  With the elimination of straight ticket voting it requires even more contact not less.

Dems here assumed that Trump was such an idiot that people would do the right thing and automatically vote against him and other Republicans.  But it didn’t happen that way.  Sure, way more people turned out, and many voted for Biden, but down ticket they stuck to the familiar.  On top of the bumbling and overconfidence, the TDP swatted away all opinions that disagreed with the statewide lack of focus and scattergun approach.

The result was predictable to anyone who was objective.  The TDP lost 8 out of 9 targeted state house races that were winnable, lost the Senate race, lost a House seat, and got pummeled in the Railroad Commission race despite $2.6 million cash injection from Bloomberg.  They gained one seat in the state Senate but none in the state House.  What this means is that, once again, the GOP will control redistricting AGAIN, and will continue their radical gerrymandering started by DeLay in 2002.

Once again, the TDP did what the TDP always does – pour money into the pockets of the same losing consultants, with the same losing strategies, lost focus, and shot way too high without playing the ground game that the GOP has down so well.  And they got rewarded for all that bungling by getting slaughtered at the ballot box and now slaughtered by Texas Monthly.

It was well deserved.

We have a guy here in Houston who goes by the name of Steven Hotze, because the name Satan T. Devil was already taken.

Hotze

Hotze is a rightwing activist and bears more than just a little responsibility for the increase in marketing for tin foil hats. Hotze is also famous for being armpit deep in anti-homosexual hubbub.

Hotze got it in his head that there was all manner of illegal voting scams going on in Houston. The problem was, he had no proof. So he hires a former Houston Police Department Captain to “investigate” all these rumors he’s hearing.  The investigator’s name is Mark Aguirre.

Then the damnedest thing happened.

Mark Aguirre is accused of running a man off the road and threatening him at gunpoint. The ex-cop was hired as a private investigator by a group whose CEO is GOP activist Steven Hotze.

Mark Aguirre put a surveillance team on the air conditioner repairman (and we’re not going to use his name because … we’ll get to that) for four damn days, watching him 24 hours a day.  Then, finally, he pulls the guy over and points a gun at him.

.[Aguirre] believed the technician was behind a huge voter fraud scheme in the Houston area. Aguirre told police that he believed the technician to be transporting fake ballots in his vehicle and to have as many as 750,000 in his possession.

I think we might have noticed an extra 750,000 ballots arriving on election night.

“There were no ballots in the truck,” according to a Harris County district attorney’s office press release. “It was filled with air conditioning parts and tools.”

The head of the WH security office, Crede Bailey, in the hospital for 3 months with what’s described at an extreme case of COVID-19, has survived, but required amputation of his lower right leg and big toe on the left foot.  He is now facing staggering hospital bills and a Go Fund Me page has been started.  Apparently a big Trump supporter, Bailey’s family has refused to talk to the press about his case and the WH press office declines to discuss his case.  I wonder where he could have possibly been infected.

When Trump was infected, he received an anti-viral treatment only ten other Americans had received.  He then bragged about how easy it was to overcome the virus.  When Giuliani was infected, he was given similar treatment.  Now Trump and his circle are jumping the line to get these treatments and the vaccine.  Let’s be clear here.  Between Trump, Giuliani, Pompeo, and many other in his inner circle, their carelessness has  exposed thousands of people to the Coronavirus infecting an unknown amount of people because of his resistance to any viable contact tracing protocol.

Even as this line-jumping is occurring, his sycophants now want Biden to “unify the country” by giving Trump credit for the vaccine.  In the Washington Post this morning, former GWB speech writer Marc Thiessen demanded just that, saying that Trump deserves credit for Operation Warp Speed, which never participated or supported the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine developed in Germany.  While providing funding for some manufacturing, this vaccine was developed with no US participation.  In fact, Trump’s incompetence put the US at the back of the global line for the vaccine since they refused to buy vaccine for more than 50 million people (yes it takes TWO doses to vaccinate, so the 100 million doses Trump touts only vaccinates half that number).   There are about 275 million people in the US over the age of 16.  The Pfizer vaccine will only cover less than 20%.

Trump has spent the better part of a year downplaying the virus, holding super spreader events, firing staff and insulting science ands scientists and now to “unify” the country we should now give him credit for the vaccine?  Fuck that.  We’re finally going to see him flee to Mar a Lago sometime between now and January 20 to continue inflicting damage on our society by tweeting his grievances.  It will take the Biden administration an untold number of months to begin repairing the vast damage Trump has inflicted on us.  The LAST thing he deserves is praise for anything.  It’s time to give Trump what he deserves – anonymity and criminal charges.  We can start by disabling his Twitter account.