No, I didn’t fire the staff in a fit of anger.  I’m not Governor Greg Abbott. It just appears that everybody has gone on vacation at the same time.  I’ll stop by when I can to at least give you something to talk about.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott decided to do away with the state legislature because Democrats walked out to avoid passage of a horrible voting bill.

Gov. Greg Abbott followed through Friday on a threat to veto a section of the state budget that funds the Texas Legislature, its staffers and legislative agencies.

Dude, that’s some pettiness. So, here we’ve got a guy who starts doing wheelies over the thought of fixing the Texas electrical grid but truly believes he can raise enough donated money to build a wall on the Texas border.

And he hates dogs.

And after promising rural broadband, has a brain fart and vetos it.

Remember now – everything that comes out the legislature is a Republican bill because they own both houses of the Lege.  And then the Governor vetos it.

Hell yeah, Texas.

Black Lives Matter

The Beauty Salon’s foreign correspondent in DeeCee has reported sitings of Stephen Miller in fancy-pants restaurants, clouding the atmosphere with the odor of smoldering morals.

We were wondering why the creep was hanging around DeeCee other than scaring the beejesus out of little girls, reporters, and zombies.

Well, come to find out —

Cue the tiny violins. It appears Stephen Miller, noted white nationalist and architect of Trump’s child-separation policy, hasn’t been able to unload his luxury condo at CityCenterDC.

He’s asking a million two for it. It’s been on the market twice and not even a nibble.

My favorite line from the story is this one. When explaining why it hasn’t sold when the market is hot …

But we’d wager the high-profile seller (who once claimed a DC bartender followed him into the street and flipped him the double birds, prompting Miller to throw away $80 worth of sushi) isn’t exactly reeling in local interest.

He and his bride have moved to Arlington.

We here in Fort Bend County elected the sheriff to go to congress, making our newest congressvarmint a dumb guy but this time it’s a dumb guy with a gun.

Troy Nehls, with his mail order degree from the prestigious Liberty University of fallen Jerry Falwell fame, is a Trump Republican. Yes ma’am, he does have some goofy looking hair and he’s so short that you can see his feet on his driver’s license photo.

Well, you send a dumb guy to DeeCee and he generally doesn’t stand out much.  But, this guy has distinguished himself as “not a mathematician” and “poorly defined ethical limits.”

He hasn’t been there long enough to hatch an egg but he’s already in trouble with the FEC.  Among his reporting problems.

Illegal and excessive contributions and failure to report major contributions

Embezzlement of campaign funds

Inability to do arithmetic

Inability to read previous report

Failure to report conduit contributions correctly

Okay, so that’s a pretty long list.

Here’s the person suspected of embezzlement or at best he ‘accidentally’ used campaign funds for personal expenses.

There is no Daniel living at that address but seriously, how drunk do you have to be to make illegal charges on the campaign account of a guy who’s sheriff?  I’m saying so drunk that you have to hold onto the grass to keep from falling.

So let’s be crystal clear about this issue.  Ashli Babbit, brainwashed by bullshit from Trump and his sycophants, was part of the mob that unlawfully stormed the US Capitol to stop the Electoral College count, violently confronting police who were defending the buildings, the politicians, and staff who worked there.  She was part of the lead group of extremists who was attempting to smash there way into the Speakers’ lobby where US Representatives and their staff were trying to escape.  These extremists smashed the doors to the lobby, and when the windows were broken, Babbit was the first one to attempt jumping through  to pursue those representatives.  A security officer just behind the smashed door fire one shot, killing Babbit.  Babbit was violently breaking the law, endangering herself and everyone around her.  She was killed for that, because the security personnel had one job, and that was to protect the Congress and the Vice President.  Unfortunate, certainly, but she bears 100% responsibility for the consequences of her violent criminality.

There are several videos of the incident and all of them show Babbitt being shot while breaching the door of the Speaker’s Lobby her actions were unquestionably criminal and endangering federal officials.  Shortly after the shooting, though, The Noise Machine cranked up, and has been slowly building momentum to recast Babbitt as a “martyr”.  I even ran across a right-winger on social media last week who said that Babbitt was “executed” for “doing nothing”.  There’s a lot of words for what Babbitt did that day, but “nothing” isn’t one of them.  Trump co-conspirator, Paul Gosar, has gone out of his way to defend Babbitt, even saying last week that officers were “lying in wait” to kill her.  Setting aside the fact that he and other Teabagging Q Republicans should be brought up on insurrection charges, Gosar is playing with fire by repeating Fox  Noise-OAN bullshit, and it’s all part of the orchestrated effort by Republicans to downplay the actual insurrection and felony violence committed by Babbitt and thousands of others that day.

It’s important that everyone else relain clear-headed and focused on bring all these people, including the Inciter-in-Chief to justice.

It’s hard to get away from grief. I’ve seen and heard it everywhere. I am involved in a makeshift Zoom support group that covers topics on mental health. Our next assigned topic is grief. Then, I read John Pavlovitz’s last piece on grief and of course you get inundated every day with others’ grief on social media. It’s not a bad thing necessarily. People feel better when they share. It just forces us to deal with our own stuff. I think what hits me more than anything is the grief over what has happened to us as a country. If one were to define grief, they would define it as something we’ve lost. Most of the time that is a person in our life. It is a family member, a friend, or someone we work with. A lot of the time it is death, but it could simply be the end of a relationship.

We grieve other things as well. We grieve the end of a chapter of our lives. That could be childhood in general. It could be the end of a career or a particular job. It could be watching the end of a particular stage in our children’s lives. With loss comes change and change can be a scary thing. Sometimes it is for the better, but it often brings unique challenges we might not be prepared to face.

Today, I find myself grieving the loss of a nation. No, the United States hasn’t gone anywhere technically. Yet, many have called it the greatest country in the world. No, I’m not going to launch into a “we used to be the greatest country in the world” tirade like on HBO. After all, what we rank in math, science, literacy, or anything else has little to do with why we were the greatest country in the world.

We were the greatest country because we had some of the greatest problems in the world. We had the greatest problems and we were always willing to tackle them. Sometimes we won and sometimes we lost, but we never backed down from a fight. Moreover, we usually found the better angels of our nature. Goodness knows it was never easy, but we found it within ourselves to fight.

Whether it was the battle over all types of equality, suffrage, or simply getting a handle on our own limitations and prejudices we managed to overcome for the most part. Unlike most wars, these battles are never over and the job is never complete. Yet, some people want to declare victory and move on.

We used to be the greatest country in the world. We aren’t the greatest country anymore. We aren’t because we are no longer willing to even try to tackle the problems before us. It isn’t even so much whether we solve those problems necessarily. We aren’t even willing to try. We deny they exist. Out of sight and out of mind.

Grief is a deeply personal thing. When one grieves a loss that is not tangible it becomes especially difficult. Do we hang on with quiet desperation? Do we find ourselves living in the past and reminiscing on better times? In the case of grieving the loss of a nation we can choose to bail or we can refuse to admit defeat. We can shout from the rooftops that the job is not yet done. We can vote out those that refuse to even address the real problems we have. That will be my choice. The rest is up to you.