This morning, Greg Abbott banned vaccine passports in Texas, falsely claiming that they “reveal private health information”.  That’s the dumbest goddam thing I’ve heard since Trump recommended consuming bleach.  Protecting “private health information”?  For God’s sake I’m telling EVERYBODY.  Abbott’s confirmed once again that he’s a complete moron.

Texans shouldn't be required to show proof of vaccination & reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives.

I issued an Executive Order that prohibits government-mandated vaccine passports in Texas.

Don't tread on our personal freedoms. pic.twitter.com/weTbz4FKyH

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 6, 2021

Arlington must have Republicans taking care of the drinking water, y’all.

Lets go back in time, just a few months, to December of 2020. Representative Ron Wright (R), infamous for complaining that there is no federal protection for the ever-persecuted white American male, is the U.S. Representative for the 6th Congressional District of Texas. He believes that the 2020 election was fraudulent and votes against certifying the election results on the day of the Capitol riot, January 6.

Not long after Rep. Wright made it back to Arlington, he tested positive for COVID. And died. He had spent the entire last year battling lung cancer and tweeting that businesses and schools should re-open because COVID-19 isn’t all that dangerous.

Moving forward, 23 people have filed to run for his seat. Texans will be voting in a special election May 1. One of the candidates, former wrestler and current carpetbagger Dan Rodimer, has already had himself gossiped about at the beauty salon for being a fool. Not to be outdone, let me introduce y’all to one of the ladies running for Wright’s seat.

Sery Kim is Korean. Last week, there was a forum for the GOP candidates where they could out-stupid each other to try and win the Republican votes. Kim decided to play the race-card.

On the subject of Chinese immigrants, “I don’t want them here at all,” Sery Kim said. “They steal our intellectual property, they give us coronavirus, they don’t hold themselves accountable.” She said the racist part out-loud. Trump voters love that.

“And quite frankly, I can say that because I’m Korean,” she added.

She has refused to apologize, saying it’s the big bad liberal media’s fault and that she “will not back down from speaking the truth.” She lost the endorsements of the two Korean Republican Representatives in the House: Young Kim and Michelle Steel.

In a political climate where you’ve got to be a giant jack-ass to get on the ballot, she just might have a shot.

As I was writing this, I saw some more political news out of Arlington. Governor Abbott has turned down the offer to throw out the first pitch at the Ranger’s game this week, citing Major League Baseball’s opposition to Georgia’s restrictive Voter ID law. I’d wager three jars of El Jefe’s South Texas Pucker Up & Slap Yo’ Knee Bread n’ Butter pickles that Abbott expects to be boo’d out of the stadium by Texans still pissed off about last month’s power grid failure. Besides, no one watches the Rangers anyway. Go ‘Stros!

We always start with what we know. We know Matt Gaetz is guilty of something. We know that he played up the Q conspiracy on his own ends and for his own ends. We know that he is likely guilty of the same things that he was accusing others of doing. It makes no sense to write an entire post about these things we know. We already know it.

These things are troubling and yet it is not these things that trouble me. Eventually we get to the point where we recognize that evil exists in the world. We may even get to the point where we recognize evil in certain people before the world acknowledges it. In fact, psychologists tell us that most sexual assault victims had an uneasy feeling about their attacker  before the attack. For whatever reason, they chose to ignore that feeling. I can only assume that same intuition exists beyond immediate predators and those we just see on television.

The fact is that most people are better judges of character than what they think. Reports have come out now that even Republicans refused to have their picture taken with Gaetz. They knew something like this was coming. Of course, when he’s busy showing off naked pictures of girls he knows and playing Harry Potter inspired sex games then it isn’t difficult to see something horrible coming down the pike.

The question for today is how we teach all of our children these important life lessons. I promise we try to teach students about the importance of choosing good sources for information. I’ve sat in the room when teachers have gone over the difference between heavily biased sources and sources that are more reliable. I’ve watched as we have identified left leaning sources and right leaning sources. Wikipedia and YouTube were never suggested as reliable sources.

Yet, years later you see many of these same people quoting these same dubious sources when they talk about the widespread sex trafficking problem. Some of that is to be expected. I still remember getting my sources from the card catalog. Our English teachers made us write down the quotes from each source onto index cards and then wrote down all of the pertinent information about the source as well so we could build a bibliography from scratch. It’s easy to imagine people from this generation propagating crap from the internet.

Unfortunately, we are still far too busy teaching the STAAR test to spend time making sure kids understand the differences between biased and unbiased sources. In science classes we don’t spend nearly enough time helping students be on the lookout for junk science. Not enough students take basic statistics. Don’t even get me started on social studies and what we are doing in there. Yet, conservatives have the audacity to accuse of us indoctrinating students. Again, we accuse others of what we do ourselves.

The state curriculum is built on what the test tests for. The test doesn’t test students based on these skills. So, these skills only get taught if teachers are determined to teach it on their own. Many of the teachers I know do that, but I certainly can’t speak for everyone and I won’t even try to vouch for the majority. I can only hope each generation becomes more internet savvy than the last. Otherwise we are in a lot of trouble.

Trump is a crook – we all know that (at least normal people do); he played his supporters from chumps and they fell for it.  A television game show host who wears heavy makeup, a weird hair weave, and has 5 kids from 3 wives, is accused of 2 dozen incidents of sexual assault, has 4,000 lawsuits against him and who’s being investigated by the NY AG, NYC DA, and the feds for everything from financial fraud, to tax fraud, to cooperating with foreign powers, and even inciting insurrection is not the ideal guy to lead the free world.  His followers, though, were actual chumps and we all paid for it with economic disaster, half a million pandemic deaths, and being labeled a pariah on the world stage.

As bad as all that is, it actually hit Trump’s supporters directly in the wallet, and I’m not talking about just the economy. During the 2020 campaign, Trump’s fundraising actually grifted his most loyal followers.  Trailing far behind the Dems in fundraising, Trump’s campaigned CHANGED the giving option on its website to default to recurring rather than one time.  What that meant was that if a donor wasn’t paying attention, whatever donation they made to Trump, the same amount was charged each week until the election, draining thousands of people’s bank accounts and running up credit card bills.  The only way to opt out was to wade through all the fine print and then check the box for one time donation.  That’s right, folks, Trump actually drained the bank accounts of supporters, using the money to pay for his campaign.

AND, if it’s even possible, it got worse.  Late in the campaign, the opt out box was made more opaque, and even buried another pre-checked box that DOUBLED the contribution. This scheme snagged scores of people including retirees, military veterans, and people couldn’t afford to donate thousands of dollars to anything, much less Trump.  One veteran donated $900, only to have his account drained by $8,000.

The effort was clearly intentional.  Trump grifted money from loyalists in the waning days of the campaign to prop up his spending.  Even worse, after his election loss, Trump’s disinformation campaign where he falsely claimed massive election fraud raised tens of millions of dollars that he then used to refund the money to donors he had defrauded before the election.  The total he had to refund?  Over $122 million.

As if anyone needed more evidence of Trump’s criminality and utter disregard for anyone but himself, this is it.  By deception, Trump shook down his unwitting loyalists for over $122 million to fund his own charade to cling to the presidency.  I’m just thankful the effort ultimately failed.

It’s all so clear, now, ain’t it?

Matt Gaetz has been the loyalist of the Trump loyalists. No matter how low Trump went, Gaetz stood there with a grin on his face and a shovel in his hand to help dig a deeper hole. It all makes sense now that we know the latest accusations about Gaetz and his inability to keep it in his pants.

Here is what they have in common:

Daddy’s money

Don Gaetz made his fortune by convincing the government to allow Medicare and Medicaid to cover hospice services – that his non-profit provided. Once the government started covering these hospice services, he switched the company to for-profit and built the largest hospice company in the country. He made millions using government health care. He then used those millions to buy his son a seat in Congress, which the son is now using to rail against government-run health care. Now he’s using those millions on getting his son a lawyer.

We all know, of course, how Donald Trump’s daddy made his money. Real estate, including government-subsidized housing, like this building in Brooklyn that still nets the Trumps $5 million a year.

Being a Giant Windbag on Twitter

The night before Michael Cohen testified before Congress, Gaetz sent this tweet, meant to intimidate a federal witness:

“Hey @MichaelCohen212 – Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…,”

There are about a million other examples of Gaetz being a horses ass on Twitter for you to read if you’re a masochist, and I certainly don’t need to prove that Trump is a giant windbag.

Multiple Accusations of Sexual Impropriety

This Wikipedia page lists 26 credible accusations against Trump, most of which you’re already aware, no doubt.

The best proof on this Earth of a devil is that Donald Trump gets away with literally everything he does with no repercussions ever, and the only way that this is possible is that he sold his soul to El Diablo.

Of course, it is this week that the Gaetzgate scandal began to unfold. In my estimation, he just finally pissed off the wrong person. Mr. or Mrs. pissed off leaked the investigation that had been secret from the media for half a year. For six months, the Justice Department has been investigating whether Gaetz flew a 17-year-old child across state lines and paid her for statutory rape. Within hours of the story breaking, GOP Congressmen and women lined up to give the media anonymous accounts of Gaetz sharing naked photos of women on the floor of the U. S. House of Representatives.

He is accused of having a sex contest when he was in the Florida state legislature involving . . . Harry Potter. Lawmakers got points for sleeping with married women, sorority girls, and virgins. The ultimate prize of this contest was one specific woman who they nicknamed “The Snitch” – as in Quiddich, whoever got her to sleep with them won the game outright.
Alright, alright, the Daily Mail reported the last bit there but it’s too damn juicy not to talk about at the beauty salon.

They each have a Creepy Predator Wingmen

Trump’s long documented and often photographed friendship with Jeffrey Epstein allowed him free and full access to many of these women who later accused him of sexual assault. Epstein died in prison after being indicted for running a sex-trafficking ring wherein he abused dozens of underage girls, flying them on his private plane to his private island where they could be abused without the fear of authorities coming to the aid of the children.

Gaetz’s Epstein is named Joel Greenberg. Joel Greenberg is under indictment for a whole host of unbelievably nasty crimes, from posing as a student and writing a letter that he hoped would disgrace his political rival, to using Florida state government offices to print Fake IDs for the underage girls he was sleeping with so he could fly them across state lines. That sounds familiar.

There sure is an awful lot of smoke around these folks.

Alright, jury, I’ve presented my case. Gaetz is Trump’s biggest defender because they’re the same guy. Given every advantage in life, able to purchase anything they’d ever want from women to political office, they openly flaunt their crimes and laugh at the dummies around them that play by the rules and don’t have nearly as many followers on social media as they do. They’re both full of horse shit. We can only hope that the Feds take down Gaetz before he becomes the next President Trump.

Yesterday, MLB made a terse announcement that the league is moving the All Star game AND the MLB draft out of Atlanta as a response to Georgia Republicans passing its voter suppression bill which included voter suppression tactics like stricter ID requirements and shortened absentee voting periods.  The worst provisions, though, included giving the legislature authority to reject county voting results, removing the Georgia secretary of state from the state elections board voting members, and the cruel criminalizing of giving water and food to voters standing in line.

In a statement, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said,

“Over the last week, we have engaged in thoughtful conversations with Clubs, former and current players, the Players Association, and The Players Alliance, among others, to listen to their views.  I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft.

“Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box. In 2020, MLB became the first professional sports league to join the non-partisan Civic Alliance to help build a future in which everyone participates in shaping the United States. We proudly used our platform to encourage baseball fans and communities throughout our country to perform their civic duty and actively participate in the voting process. Fair access to voting continues to have our game’s unwavering support.”

Joining Atlanta based Delta Airlines and Coca Cola, along with other companies, MLB is ratcheting up the pressure on the GOP to stop its massive voter suppression efforts in a desperate effort to cling to power as its demographic shrinks.   It worked in Indiana years ago when then governor Mike Pence signed the anti-gay bill that explicitly allowed private businesses to refuse service to people they didn’t like under the guise of “religious choice”.  After massive backlash against businesses and sports in Indiana, the state legislature “clarified” the bill by adding that, notwithstanding why the bill was written in the first place, it couldn’t be used to deny service to anyone.

That’s not good enough for Georgia, though.  The GOP must be stopped in its tracks in Georgia because it’s doing the same thing in 42 other states.  If companies, sports leagues, activists, and Americans stand against this anti-democratic and anti-American effort to consolidate power, this effort can be stopped.