Greg Abbott, well known for doing everything wrong, is already sitting in seat 1A on the Crazy Train to 2022.  Because he has primary opponents to his right (if that’s even possible), he’s desperately trying to get farther right and has already targeted women, minorities, women who are minorities, children, the poor, the sick, and anyone not in perfect health.  As part of this targeting, Abbott had the great idea of taking immigration at the southern border away from the feds and empowered local law enforcement and state police to arrest anyone they suspected of crossing the border and being on private property.  The charge?  Trespassing.  The scheme includes not bothering with constitutional rights by quickly convicting, then jailing the immigrants.  When their sentences are served, they are then sent to the Border Patrol for deportation.  It’s illegal as hell, and Abbott knows it, but doesn’t care.

About 1,300 people have been prosecuted under Abbott’s scheme, and apparently that’s not enough, so apparently what’s happening is that when local law enforcement finds someone crossing the border on federal or federal land, the walk them to a ranch or other private property, THEN arrest them for trespassing.  The Val Verde County prosecutor just dropped trespassing charges against 11 men who claim they were apprehended, marched to a private ranch and ordered to climb a fence onto the property when they were promptly arrested.  Conveniently, there was no police body cam video from any of the officers involved in the arrest.  The case was so sketchy that the prosecutor determined the arrest was not prosecutable.

As anyone who is paying attention knows, the problem here is not fixed at the border.  It’s fixed in countries south of the border by forcing (and funding) countries in Mexico, Central and South America to root out corruption and crime as well as providing economic opportunity in these people’s home countries.  We also simply must stop allowing immigration to be a once every two years wedge issue and reform the system of entering the country into a workable system rather than allowing chaos to reign.  There is a solution to this problem, and politicians like Abbott are the wrong people to find it.

This morning, way too early, I got a text from my librarian son. It said for me to see the attached, get up and put on my house shoes and laugh my morning away.

Here’s the attached:

Fat Wolverine? I’ve never heard him called Fat Wolverine. Have you ever heard him called Fat Wolverine? I know I’m going to ask everybody I know if they have ever heard Ted Cruz called Fat Wolverine. I’m just doing my research. You know, on Fat Wolverines.

If you can get past the headline, and admittedly it took me a while, there’s a pretty good story about the NBA and vaccines. Not as good as Fat Wolverine, but certainly readable.

(By the way, my research led to me know that Fat Wolverine was trending on Twitter.)

Washington Post reporter Annie Linskey got herself into some hot water this weekend with one of those jokes that went over like a pregnant pole vaulter. For those that don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, she essentially poked fun at Joe Biden’s trip through the cemetery to visit the graves of his family. Instead, she claimed he was visiting his domestic agenda.

According to Linskey, she did not know he was actually visiting his son’s grave. In the process, she learned two key things as it pertains to social media. First, once you hit send on a tweet it’s going to be out there. Sure, you can go back and delete the tweet, but someone has made a copy and will produce it on the ready.

Secondly, the urge to be first is strong, but an enterprising journalist has to remember it is more important to be right. Being first with a joke is even more pathetic. Exactly how many points does that get you? If she had taken the extra few minutes to figure out why he was there this could have been avoided. If she had taken the extra few minutes to realize she is a Washington Post reporter and not a comic at the local improv this could have been avoided.

As you might suspect, the outrage machine started up in full force. If Twitter is good for anything it is good for a nice ratio. The ratio is where numerous commenters and strangers get to pile on after an ill-advised tweet. So, hundreds of people commented with some saying they were canceling their subscription to the Washington Post. As of now she is still employed with the Post, but it doesn’t take a huge effort to see that changing before this story cycle ends.

As for Biden, he hardly reacted at all. If we can count on Biden for anything it is that he will always maintain his dignity. He will occasionally fumble through words or offer the occasional gaffe as any president would. Some of that is the stuttering. Some of that is a lifetime of not necessarily being a great orator. Heck, maybe some of it is age. What we do know is that he won’t do or say anything excessively mean. The last guy would have jumped at that opportunity.

We should keep that as our guide on what to do about Linskey. While it can seem fun to put someone through the ringer for a horrible mistake, we do have to remember she is human. We have to remember we all make mistakes. We have to remember that she has likely done 100 good things for every one bad thing she has done. While we can say that none of us has ever done THAT, we all can say we have done something awful that would have been ridiculed in public if any of us had a higher social media profile.

So, here’s hoping that Linskey learns something valuable from this experience and that she has the opportunity to demonstrate to us that she is a better person for it. Destroying a reporter for a bad joke doesn’t seem appropriate. At least it doesn’t seem any more appropriate than the bad joke she attempted to take back.

Besides the decades long morphing of the GOP into the “Stupid and Proud of It Party,” Republicans have also become known for the mobster tactic of hostage taking.  The latest example is Moscow Mitch’s cynical filibustering of Democratic efforts to raise the debt limit to pay for Trump’s $7.8 TRILLION spending spree during his 4 year infestation of the WH.  While smirking and speaking with the weight of a law school professor while peddling manure to an eager press, McConnell has said that the Democrats must solve the debt ceiling crisis by themselves while preventing from just that by filibustering their efforts.  Of course, because it can’t be put on a bumper sticker, the press is unable to explain to the public exactly what McConnell is doing, so they report that the Dems are “split”, “in disarray”, and “bear the responsibility” for the problems that were created exclusively by Trump, McConnell, and the lockstep marching GOP caucus in the Congress.

This is not the first time this has happened, and won’t be the last until the idiotic “debt ceiling” fabrication is killed, dead and buried.  In 2011, 2013, and 2015 McConnell, with the aid of our own Ted Cruz, threatened the good faith and credit of the United States by taking the economy hostage with debt ceiling battles and government shutdowns to blackmail the Obama administration to stop Obamacare and other programs that actually help people.  The 2011 shenanigans caused S&P to downgrade the credit rating of US debt for the first time in history.  Since then, they’ve taken immigrants, women, racial minorities, children, the aged, and the environment hostage every single time that a Democrat dared tried to do something positive for the American people.

McConnell and his enablers are no better than petty mobsters playing confidence games with small neighborhood business people by threatening to destroy their businesses unless they pay up.  “Nice economy you have there; it would be a shame if something bad happened to it.”

Facebook is broken.  Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy.

Ya gotta wonder if they tried unplugging it and then plugging it back in.

And then Twitter owned them —

And there’s this handy suggestion from Deb T. —

And then my eight year old Keurig coffee pot died today. Damn, that sucker made good coffee. Which brings me to — do you know of any terrifically good coffee I need to try?

Okay, there’s more than one way to have a captive audience.

https://twitter.com/LUCHA_AZ/status/1444729925408153601

I’m gonna go in every bathroom in Arizona and write, “I’m going to come from Texas and campaign against Sinema,” on every roll of toilet paper.

A real leader would have talked to those kids.  They have something to say and it’s important, not only to them personally but to the country.  The least – and I mean the very least – she could have done is listen to them.

She’s a creepy crawly thing, ain’t she?