Here, right here, is what I do not understand about Republicans.

Why does every damn thing have to revolve around taxes?  Here is an article from my local newspaper that publishes 3 or 4 times a week.  This was on the front page and got itself a blue background so everybody could see the hard work of one of the last remaining Republicans in the county is doing in Austin.  I’ll let you read it because it ain’t long.

Whoop-de-damn-do.

First of all, why do teachers have to buy school supplies?  That’s crazy.  We don’t expect government judges to buy their own computers, expect nurses to buy their own syringes, nor do we expect garbage men to buy their own tires for the truck. I know teachers who carry a second job just to be able to afford being a teacher.  We seem to find plenty of money when the Governor wants something.

How ‘bout we pay them a wage commensorate with their education?  Then if you expected them to buy their own supplies, I wouldn’t get so mad.

Sales tax in Texas is $8.25. So yeah, whoop-de-damn-double-do.

Jetton, you are not helping teachers. You are sending yet another message that things do not need to get better for them. 8.25%? Hell, they are supposed to give their church 10%.  I’m talking to you, Jetton, you fund schools or you give teachers a raise but don’t give an 8.25% tax break on spiral notebooks and expect me to tap dance for you.

And by the way, Dude:  How is this “putting more money directly into the classroom?” You’re expecting them to spend more of their own money?

My mailbox is filled with Ted Cruz complaints this morning from all over the country and elsewhere.

The major complaints seem to deal around his book writing hanky-panky.  Ted writes books, uses his campaign funds to advertise those books so people will buy them, and then personally pockets from the profits of those books. You can’t profit from your campaign account.  But, he does. Turns out being a U.S. Senator is a well-paying day job while you actually spend your time working on your writing career.

And, as only the criminal mind of the Zodiac Killer could plot, he may be profiting off a “shadowy” company by using his campaign funds to actually buy his own books and then pocketing the 10 – 15% royalty himself.

One day before the Georgia Senate runoff elections — and two days before the Capitol insurrection — a leadership PAC attached to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a mystery company that had previously bought copies of Cruz’s book, according to recent filings with the Federal Election Commission. The expenses raise questions about whether the controversial conservative senator (and Cancún frequent-flyer) used those political campaigns, and Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the democratic process, to raise money for himself.

And this ain’t no chump change.  We’re talking $1.2 million.  That pays for Cancun vacations.  The Salon article is long and you might want to keep a pencil and pad close at hand to make notes so you can follow along, but it’s a fascinating look into the minds of people who scam for a living.

And then there’s our friends in Canada —

Thanks to everybody for the heads up. 

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has played Greg-in-the-Box, jumping up and shouting about anything he can think of, to distract from his incompetence during the polar vortex.

His first distraction was to suddenly and unexpectedly “open” Texas by erasing mandatory masks, social distancing at restaurants and bars, and threatening local authorities who felt like it was way too soon.

Well, when he did that his base was happy, but nobody else was.  Even the state’s conservative newspapers shook their finger at him.

And, the attacks on Biden were falling flat.  Biden is a nice guy who can talk in complete sentences even though he stutters, so making fun of him seems almost cruel.  And I think they finally figured out that Obama and Hillary aren’t coming to take their guns, so now the enemy is “the Democrats.”

This Sunday, Abbott went on Fox News and asserted loudly and talking all fast, that Democrats were going to steal votes with cocaine.  Cocaine. Is that still a thing? Maybe it is among Republicans but Democrats can’t afford it.

Now, I’m gonna give you his exact words but when you read it, you have to talk so fast that little spittle things form at the edges of your mouth and occasionally fly off to make a life of their own, and loud. Be loud.

Describing his time as Texas attorney general, the governor then recalled an “amazing story” about vote-buying. “It was Barack Obama himself who knew about the dangers of ballot harvesting in the state of Texas,” he told a credulous Bartiromo. “Because under his administration, he sent his U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas as well as the FBI to south Texas to arrest and to prosecute people who were involved in ballot harvesting that were using cocaine to buy votes through the ballot harvesting process in the state of Texas. It is a way to commit voter fraud and it cannot be allowed.”

Bartiromo exclaimed in response: “This is absolutely extraordinary, governor!”

No, that’s not extraordinary. It’s caca del toro, that’s what it is.

Never happened.  He just made it up because it sounds bad.

I don’t think he’s gonna get much better. Keep your eye on that sucker because he’s gonna try to holler his way to the White House.

Texas Senator John Cornyn’s anti-environment lifetime of achievement for the petrochemical industry is a thing of blood-curdling awesomeness.

It is always fun to watch Cornyn’s political contributions match his axing of environmental regulation.

Example: American Air Liquide Holdings, Inc. PAC got so carried away that they exceeded the contribution limit.

You’ll notice that they gave him money in 2016 when he wasn’t even running for office.  That is standard in senate races – it’s not unusual for PACs to make contributions years before the Senator is actually up for re-election, but the limit is still set for his/her upcoming election.  But, I’m just wondering if these contributions were just priming the pump or maybe an investment.

In May of last year, the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas energy companies got a break from monitoring chemical leaks during the pandemic.

From March to May, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality gave more than 100 exemptions to environmental monitoring including dangerous chemical leaks.

And …

Air Liquide, a French chemical company with a U.S. subsidiary in Houston, received an exemption from performing quarterly monitoring of leaking chemical emissions from pressurized equipment until the end of June at its Freeport chemical plant.

Throw some money at John Cornyn, y’all.

John was also at the grand opening of this company at their new plant in LaPort, just a few miles east of Houston.

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

A new study conducted by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina has concluded the obvious – states with Republican governors had higher COVID case rates and higher death rates from COVID.  In the report, study senior author Sara Benjamin-Neelon, PhD, professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health, Behavior and Society stated,

“Governors’ party affiliation may have contributed to a range of policy decisions that, together, influenced the spread of the virus.  These findings underscore the need for state policy actions that are guided by public health considerations rather than by partisan politics.”

I know this is like concluding in an academic study that gravity makes things fall down, but it’s good that they quantified in a peer reviewed study what we all knew to begin with – politicizing public health policy gets people killed.