Written by Nick Caraway

As most folks around here know, I work as a teacher. To be more specific, I work as a support facilitator and case manager. That basically means I work with special education students. Half of my job is taken up helping students prepare for the STAAR exam. I make sure they have the right accommodations and help their classroom teacher tutor them.

As much as I enjoy tutoring students for a state test they struggle to pass, I think I speak for almost every teacher when I say it’s beyond time for the state to cancel this year’s test. Of course, they can cancel it forever as far as I’m concerned, but that’s mainly because of how it effects my students.

Beyond that, we know most districts half been split between distance learning and brick and mortar learning. Most lost this past week and will likely lose part of this next week as well. Add to that lost instructional time during the fall when hurricane season was in full swing. So, this is a plea for TEA to have a heart. We are barely holding on here as it is.

Nick

General Russell Honore is one of my heroes. I saw what he did cleaning up Bush’s mess after Katrina. And everything he did during Rita.

When Nancy Pelosi appointed him to investigate what happened at the capitol, I knew he was one of the few people in the world willing to jump into a pile of poop and dig around to find the pony. I have just been given more reason to trust him – Republicans are squealing like stuck pigs.

Why?  Oh, you didn’t know Honore is a “dedicated partisan.”

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, tweeted Wednesday: ‘General Honoré is an extreme partisan and should be the LAST person to head up an investigation of what happened at the Capitol on Jan 6th.’

Ron Johnson doesn’t believe there was an insurrection that day because not everybody had a gun.

Yeah, they are scared. It’s Honore.

• Tweeted days after the riot that Hawley ‘should be run out of DC’ and called him a ‘little piece of s***”
• A number of PACs said they would refuse to donate to Hawley after he sought to overturn election results after the riot
• Hawley called Honore’s comments ‘very disturbing’

Disturbing to Hawley maybe.  Honore made the statement in response to Professor Lawrence Tribe, head constitutional law professor at Harvard Law, who said Hawley should be removed from the senate.

Honore also suggested that the Sergeant of Arms and the capitol police “may have been complicit.”  Well, let’s find out.

Thanks to SGray for the heads up.

Yeah, he’s still alive and dumber than ever.

You wanna know whose fault our crisis of energy was?  Joe Biden. That’s right.

Perry, like other conservatives, blamed Texas’ renewable energy sources for the outages, and alleged the Biden administration’s focus on decreasing fossil fuel dependence would make this happen again.

Okay, so that was proven 110% wrong, wrong, double dog wrong. So, he took another viewpoint.

“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Perry is quoted as saying. “Try not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off of having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically, and strategically.”

Yeah, well, it turned out to be 5 days but I suspect even if it were three, the majority of Texans would rather smoke some brisket over Rick’s body than go without energy in 12 degrees with icy streets even for one night. I know I would, except I’d enjoy it more than most people.

You mark my words. Rick Perry is gonna have blood all over his hands in a major way if it ever gets nut crackin’ time.

My county has three state representatives because we’re gerrymandered to East Paris France and back.  Our newly elected state representative, Republican Gary Gates, fled the state when the going got tough.

Gates went to Orlando, so at least he was unlike Cruz who crossed the Mexican border in search of a better life.

However, like Cruz, Gates has conflicting stories about why he left.

Gates acknowledged the frustration of his critics, but stated that the decision to leave Texas was based on the needs of his family. His pipes burst, he said, and 30 percent of his home was flooded, leaving his sick wife and special needs daughter at risk.

“My wife is still recovering from an illness she has been battling for two weeks, and the room of my adult daughter, who is mentally handicapped and still lives with us, flooded,” Gates said.

He said that things started to mold. Yeah, oddly science works everywhere, not just Gates’ house.  So everybody else in the whole damn state – sick or well – was battling science. However, he left on Wednesday, the day after the first hard freeze so he must have some dandy super mold or something.

Then come to find out, he was meeting with vendors in Florida about his apartment buildings in Houston. Yeah, he’s a multi-millionaire landlord of apartment complexes so business meetings always come first.

“Since arriving in Florida, I have had functioning internet and reliable mobile coverage,” he said. “I have been able to monitor the power restoration process, correspond with constituents and direct the recovery efforts at our apartment complexes.”

And you weren’t cold, or, one to think of it, actually helping anybody. Most importantly, he’s talking about the apartment complexes where he evicted 100 families last September in the middle of the Covid crisis, so I imagine they’d just as soon he leave the state.

Note:  Yesterday, I dubbed him Cancun Ted, but social media’s name, Fled Cruz, is better and seems to be sticking, so what the hell, I’m going to use that, too.

Politico is reporting this morning that the quaint tradition of shaming misbehaving politicians seems to be returning.  That’s pretty much amazing coming out of the last 5 years of Donald Trump’s malfeasance and immorality out in plain sight.  When caught at something awful (kids in cages, bribing porn stars, screwing porn stars, extorting foreign leaders, inciting insurrection, etc, etc.) Trump would just say, “Hell, yeah, I did it, and there’s nothing you can do about it.  Up yours.”  He did it repeatedly, numbing many Americans’ sensitivities, and pleasing the hell out of millions of his supporters who cheered him on.

Well, with the Felon in Chief back at Mar a Lago beating the crap out of the little white ball all day, things are changing, if only a bit.  You’re already up to speed with Fled Cruz’s stupidity in taking the family to Cancun in a trip conjured up by his wife.  Characteristically, he lied that it was his daughters and their friends who wanted to go, then lied again to cover that up, lied again to cover up that lie, and then finally came clean.  Texans, normally very tolerant of Republican malfeasance and gross negligence, weren’t that tolerant this time, and I would posit that when his supporters are the ones suffering and not just the little people who don’t count 99% of the time, they get narrow minded.

Cruz is getting crucified on every social media platform.  The memes are just writing themselves, and if his arrogance wasn’t so perpetually galling, this whole episode would be funny.  This time, though, when people are freezing in the dark, bodies are now being discovered, and millions still don’t have power, water, or both, he’s actually paying a price for acting like a dumbass.

This is what happens when you elect people who don’t believe in government to manage your government.  Three of our four most visible politicians in Texas have made fools out of themselves this week.  Abbott blamed the nonexistent Green New Deal for gas fired power plants shutting down. Rick Perry crawled out from under his rock to stupidly assert that Texans would rather freeze in the dark rather than be subject to big, bad, federal regulation.  And then there’s Fled Cruz, who was doing Jack Shit sitting around his house while other politicians were out working the phones assisting with food and water distribution and checking on senior citizens.  The only one of these four, John Cornyn, while being virtually invisible, at least didn’t show is ass to the entire world.

We’ve talked about it before.  What we’re seeing here is the logical result of failed Libertarian ideology.  Libertarianism doesn’t work, has never worked, and never will work.  Period.  Yet we continue to elect politicians who spout Libertarian nonsense and make policy around it.  That’s how you get public policy that establishes voluntary compliance with clean air and clean water regulations.  That’s how you get the PUC to establish voluntary weatherproofing and maintenance requirements for power generators.  Voluntary standards for industrial safety and health are just as stupid as the SCOTUS actually saying that money equals speech and that money doesn’t corrupt when it destroyed limits on political spending in its idiotic Citizens United ruling in 2010.

Perhaps we’re finally turning the corner here on response to malfeasance.  I’m not all rainbows and unicorns here, but we had moved so far away from those quaint times when politicians like Gary Hart and Al Franken had their careers completely destroyed for really obscure and/or overblown misbehavior that a return to shaming that works is a breath of fresh air.  As we’ve said before, Fled Cruz, doesn’t care if you live or die.  He doesn’t give a shit about doing his job as a US Senator.  He doesn’t even believe in a federal government.  He didn’t give one single thought to how it looked for him to jet off to Cancun during a power crisis where people are actually dying.  The ONLY reason he came back to Houston was that social media blew up when pictures of him on a United flight exploded on millions of feeds on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.  When it hit mainstream media, even his tin ear could hear it.  That’s when he scampered back to Houston lying all the way.

Maybe we do have a light at the end of the tunnel, but we’ve got a long way to go.

Ted Cruz. Oh yeah, there’s more …

This FEC advisory opinion has been controversial and there’s no guarantee that the FEC will allow campaign funds to be used to pay for personal bodyguards.

Ted Cruz didn’t wait. He used campaign funds to hire a security firm last fall and they are guarding his home right now.

“Is this Senator Cruz’s house?” the reporter asked a man who stepped out of a vehicle parked in the driveway.

The man, who identified himself as a security guard, said it was and that the senator wasn’t home.

When asked who was taking care of the lonely mutt in the presumably chilly house, the guard said he was.

And if you know where to look, you can find how much money Ted’s donors are paying for this very special service.

Atlas Glinn even has Ted’s picture on the front page of their website. (Scroll to the almost bottom.)

Yep, Ted and his family flew off to Cancun, which is bad enough, but y’all, he left his little tiny poodle at home, alone, standing at the door, crying.

Look closely and see that dog has something around his neck.

I know, I know, it’s real hard to tell, but bygawd it sure the dickens looks like a security guard badge to me.

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