A great piece yesterday in the Washington Post talks about how a snake oil salesman, Russell J. Ramsland Jr, from Addison, a suburb north of Dallas, pushed the Big Lie as early as 2018, trying to recruit politicians to his narrative that there was as much as 68% error rate in electronic voting systems.  He gained traction in 2020 with none other than Trump and his deplorable cronies, including Rudy, Sidney Powell, and others.  HE’S the one who pushed the unfounded Venezuelan story.  The story will leave you shaking your head.  It’s a good read, highly recommended.

Must see.  Former Obama speechwriter David Litt owns the arrogant morning Newsmax anchor today.  It’s hilarious.

Having found nothing in their sham “audit” of 2020 election ballots from Maricopa County, they’re now using 5g cameras and black lights searching for bamboo in the paper of the ballots.  Because presence of bamboo is the smoking gun that the ballots came from China, right?  The Arizona GOP is hanging their entire Big Lie premise on the unfounded conspiracy theory that China flew in 40,000 fraudulent ballots on a Korean airliner on election day and then smuggled them into polling places all over Maricopa County.  No matter that China LIKED Trump being president since he handed them Pacific Trade dominance, international markets because of his idiotic trade war, and allowed them to run rampant in the South China Sea during his entire infestation of the WH.

Not only is the Arizona GOP’s efforts to overturn the election dangerous, it makes them look like idiots.

Green; rookie; smartass; ignorant; arrogant; hypocrite; incompetent beneficiary of radical gerrymandering.  Those are all descriptors for Texas’ newest tadpole swimming in the sewer that is Texas Republican politics, Briscoe Cain.  Cain is one of those cases of shape shifting; he grew up in Deer Park, and was a high school cheerleader.   In subsequent years he underwent a complete transformation from cheerleader to smart mouthed, gun toting, presidential candidate threatening, manly man hyper focused on bathroom legislation, voter suppression, providing guns to idiots, and ignorant of Texas’ own racist roots.  His political stunts include not only threatening to shoot Beto O’Rourke; he even crashed a Fort Worth Democratic Party convention armed and passing out yard signs that said, “This house is a safe gun free zone”.  He was ejected, only to return again.  He was finally escorted out by police.  He got away with it, of course.

A good example of Cain’s total ignorance of said racist history was when he walked headlong into a historical ambush laid by Democratic Rep. Rafael Anchia, who questioned Cain’s use of the term “purity of the ballot box” in his drafting of HB 7, the latest voter suppression law.  It’s pretty entertaining.

https://twitter.com/morethanavote/status/1390782212380012550?s=20

Anchia owned Cain, revealing to the public just how poorly reasoned HB7 really is.  This embarrassing episode (for Cain) was a textbook example of what happens when a Texas Republican is confronted by someone not inside his echo chamber and carpet bombed with history and facts.  It didn’t do the slightest bit of good legislatively, though.  The bill passed anyway, with minimal amendments.

That is the tragedy of Texas which continues to stagger under unfettered single party rule where protecting criminals from gun safety laws, dictating public bathroom policy, and keeping people from voting take precedence over funding education, lowering barriers to healthcare, and making the state’s crumbling infrastructure usable.  Texas is now led by the most corrupt, ignorant, and incompetent party in Texas history, and Briscoe Cain exemplifies everything that’s wrong with Texas. It ain’t pretty.

God bless them. Every once in awhile you catch them saying the quiet part out loud. That’s what happened to Justin Lafferty in the Tennessee legislature when he tried defending the three-fifths compromise. According to the mangled synapses in his brain, the compromise was a way forward to ending slavery. It just took 78 years and a bloody civil war to do it. Sometimes it is hard to fathom that people can be this stupid. Then, they open their mouths and end all doubt.

The gambit is akin to those that try to find ways to defend Adolf Hitler. Sure, you can enter any qualifier you like, but you are almost always better off stopping before you start. The results of both end up being the same. We are left wondering whether you are the biggest jackass south of the Mason-Dixon line or whether you are an ardent racist. The answer is usually yes and furthermore we often are left wondering whether the distinction matters. That’s all the commentary I can waste on that one. Everyone enjoy their weekend.