Louis DeJoy, Trump’s appointee to Postmaster General is pretty much the last person who should be in that position except for maybe Screwy Louis Gohmert, who has his own issues.  Here’s why:

• DeJoy is a GOP mega donor and fundraiser, and in recent years gave $1.2 million to Trump’s campaign and $1.3 million to the RNC.  His wife is also a big donor and was state finance chair for GWB in North Carolina.  She landed the US ambassadorship to Estonia for her contributions during that time.
• DeJoy has serious conflicts with the Post Office.  He is heavily invested in businesses that compete with the Post Office, holding as much as $75 million in the stock of competitors, one in particular being the company that bought his own logistics company for over $600 million.
• DeJoy is being investigated for possible illegal political donations where he extracted large donations to Republicans from his employees, then reimbursed them through bonuses.

So it’s no surprise that he’s under fire after being nominated by Trump and then confirmed by a board of governors that is dominated by Trump appointees.  Historically, the Post Office was strictly non-partisan, including the board of governors, since it served all Americans.  In recent years, though, boards have been hyper-partisan, including the FEC and others.  Not to be naive, many mega donors are given cush positions in both Dem and Repub administrations after writing big checks; they get ambassadorships, committee seats, even cabinet positions, BUT, and it’s a big BUT, they all go away when their President vacates the WH.  Hence the problem.  Trump attempted, and in the case of DeJoy succeeded, in appointing partisan supporters to permanent staff positions.

Let’s be honest here; the Post Office has been a target for privatization by Republicans for decades.  Where else could you find a multi-billion market that has over 300 million Americans held hostage to it?  The independence of the Post Office has been whittled away for years, and the last nail in the coffin was driven in 2006 when the Congress required it to pre-fund 75 years of retiree health obligations.  There was no reason to do that except to make it permanently lose money so Republicans could demand that it be privatized to fix it after they broke it.

The problem here is that demanding that the Post Office be cashflow positive is just as silly as demanding that the defense department turn a profit.  It’s not set up that way.  Unlike Fedex and UPS, the Post Office is mandated to serve ALL Americans, which include those in sparsely populated areas of the country.  In fact, if you order anything delivered by Fedex or UPS and you live in a rural area, it’s most likely the Post Office will deliver that package.  Just try to drop off a Fedex package in Valentine Texas, population 217.  You can mail it, but you can’t Fedex it without driving over 35 miles to Van Horn.  Why?  Fedex can’t make money having a presence in Valentine.  The Post Office doesn’t (and shouldn’t) have that luxury.  The amazing thing, though, is that Valentine, and much of rural Texas, is serious Trump country.  They rabidly support the guy and his party who’s actively sabotaging their way of life.  Go figure.

The worst part of DeJoy being postmaster general is that he’s actively sabotaging the Post Office.  During the election, he slashed spending, shortened hours, took out sorting machines in busy hubs, and slashed personnel.  Add that to the challenges of the COVID outbreak, and within 3 months the Post Office was delivering over 80% of the mail late, much not at all.  Millions of packages were delayed, destroyed, or just plain lost.  I believe this effort was to undermine confidence in mail in voting, and in large part that worked.  Like many, I decided to return my mail in ballot and vote in person to make sure my vote counted.

There’s simply no excuse for a radical partisan like DeJoy to be within 100 miles from the Post Office, much less running it while shooting the finger to the Congress.  He’s cemented in, though, until Biden can get enough governors on the board to fire him.  That’s not good enough.  DeJoy should be immediately removed for conflicts of interest and gross mismanagement.  The fact that Biden (who, unlike Trump, plays by the rules) can’t fix this problem shows just how broken our government is, and it’s long past time to fix it.

Larry Harris had to come all the way to Texas from Arizona (okay, so it’s just a border but it’s a wide border) to run three National Guard vans in a convoy off the highway out in far west Texas. The truck were transporting Covid-19 vaccines to Matador, Texas.

Larry did some damn fancy driving to run them off the road and then spun his truck around and got out with a gun. He told them he was a police officer and wanted to inspect the vans. All 11 guardsmen were being detained by Larry when the Idalou police department responded to the situation.

They don’t have a staff psychologist at the Idalou police department but the officer on the scene said that Larry “appeared to be mentally disturbed.”

It does not appear the vaccines were what Harris was after, officials said. He told police that he thought people in the vans had kidnapped a woman and child, Williams said.

Thank goodness that someone drove by and thought maybe one kinda rickety old guy holding 11 national guardsmen at gunpoint might be odd even if it is Texas.

The vaccine got to Madador and Larry is staying in jail for the night with legal problems.

There are at last half a dozen versions of this story online. They all tell the same basic story but with different highlights.

Thanks to everybody for the heads up.

Start at about 3:15.  He wants to ban assault weapons and close the loophole in the background checks.

Now. He wants to do it now. Thanks, Joe.

So come to find out, there was a sleeper in the 5,500 page appropriations bill under the last year of Donald Trump.  One small stipulation slipped past prying eyes.

The stipulation mandates that the director of national intelligence work with the secretary of defense on a report detailing everything the government knows about unidentified flying objects — known in agency lingo as “unidentified aerial phenomena” or “anomalous aerial vehicles.”

I would expect some paragraph or two saying “what UFOs?” but anything else seems unlikely.

I would be wrong.

Written by Nick Caraway —

We will be hearing a lot of things over the next couple of days in regards to the mass shooting in Boulder. Maybe it will be in the mass shooting in Georgia. Heck, it could be any of the seven mass shootings we have had over the past seven days in this country. The conservative playbook is well-documented at this point.

1) It is too soon to talk about this.

2) Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

3) It’s a mental health issue.

4) Thoughts and prayers.

Get out your bingo cards. You’re going to win with that combination in any order. The one variant that sticks in my craw is how the right always tries to poke holes in the argument to install background checks or ban automatic weapons. The gamut they use to point out the isolated cases where those provisions wouldn’t have helped. In other words, the enemy of good is perfect.

If there is no perfect solution then we shouldn’t use it because it’s not perfect. It would be like striking down all traffic laws. See, not everyone follows speed limits. stop signs, or  traffic lights. There isn’t always a police officer there to write a ticket for those offending. Occasionally, someone dies because someone broke a traffic law. Texas alone has seen 611 deaths this year due to automobile accidents. Therefore, traffic laws don’t work because they haven’t addressed the problem perfectly. Therefore, they should be abolished.

The arguments against gun control make about as much sense. If people are going to wait around for the perfect solution they won’t get anything. Of course, we know that’s by design. The goal here is to make the world a better and safer place. We cannot make it perfectly safe. Perfect doesn’t exist. If background checks will prevent some of these events from happening then we need background checks. If banning assault weapons will prevent these events from being larger then we need to ban assault weapons.

The enemy of good is great (or perfect). Often times good is the best we can do. There are more deaths every year due to handguns than assault weapons. We likely won’t see an end to handguns and it’s debatable as to whether we should. Assault weapons and background checks are low lying fruit. The vast majority of people agree with those measures and it won’t severely limit people’s freedoms. If you need an Ar-15 to hunt I’d suggest taking up golf.

Nick

Frisco is a little town 0f about 200,000 right outside of Dallas known for uppity white people.  They are rich, they are white, they hate taxes, and they vote Republican.

Not only that, they appear to be a large coven of Q witches.

Hope for Trump’s return is fervent in Frisco and across the north Dallas suburbs, an area of rapid growth and rapidly increasing diversity. Nineteen local residents have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to federal authorities, one of the largest numbers in any place in the country.

They are growing, being pushed by social media and mega churches that preach what borders on white nationalism.  By the way, all depictions of Jesus show him with curly blonde hair and blue eyes in those churches. The Kingdom Life Church is lead by Brandon Burden, who took to the pulpit and said …

“We ain’t going silently into the night. We ain’t going down. This is Texas,” Burden preached.

Prophetic voices had decreed Trump would remain in office, he said.