Okay, so you’ve heard that Texas Republicans want to secede and, best I can figure they want to elect Ted Cruz as President of the Republic of Texas so he can run a revenge war against Donald Trump for saying that stuff about his daddy and his unpleasant wife.

That’s not how this is gonna work, Buddy.  First of all, Texas doesn’t have the right to secede.  That’s just a another myth brought to you by Republicans.  Texas does have the right to fly our state flag at the same height as the American flag but that and ten bucks will get you a frozen Margarita at any participating Bitchin’ Betty and the Sequined Backhoes at a beach along the Gulf Coast.

According to an Act of Congress in 1845, Texas would need congressional approval to divide into 5 states. But, and here’s the fun part, if we do secede we could give ourselves approval to into 5 states.

I’ve got a plan.  We could have —-

1. The Republic of Houston
2. The Republic of Dallas
3. The Republic of Austin San Antonio
4. The Republic of Hildago
5. And everything else can be Texass and they can have it.

They could put their Capitol building in Waco, Odessa, or Lufkin. I don’t  give a damn.  The whole thing.  They can have everything else but here’s the deal — no foreigners from Texass will be allowed in the Republics.  They can have every damn Waffle House in the state.  We’ll have the oil, the money, the culture, and hot sauce.

Yeah, they’ll get most of the armadillos but we get the baseball and football teams so it’s  a wash.  They can take the Baptist but we’ll get the Methodist so one point for us.

See?  This is a great idea.  They get pines, poverty, and Pentecostals.  We get NASA.

They just ought to let me do the figuring out with stuff like this. The Righteous Army of Rightwing God and Old Bloated Bigots don’t scare me.

You’d think a Senate candidate accused of spousal and child abuse by his ex-wife — to say nothing of the accusations he sexually assaulted and blackmailed his former hairdresser — might consider a less violent appeal to voters. Especially following an elementary school massacre.

That’s what you’d think.

But, here we are.

https://twitter.com/EricGreitens/status/1538876823978713089

Republicans – they’re gonna shoot you.

A lot of you probably remember when Saturday Night Live comic and strange person Pete Davidson made fun of Texas Republican congressslick Dan Crenshaw by saying Crenshaw looks like “a hitman in a porno.” And then the following weekend, he had Crenshaw on to apologize to him in person. You can find it on YouTube if you’re interested.

Okay, so let’s skip ahead to the Texas GOP Convention this weekend.

Oh, Honey, you never saw such carrying on in your life.  First they kicked the Log Cabin Republicans out and told them they could not have a booth at the convention.  The Log Cabin Republicans said they were being divisive and exclusionary. Okay, they actually have not teaching CRT in schools, which is also divisive and exclusionary, but the Log Cabin Republicans don’t appear to be able to look beyond their own noses.

They booed John Cornyn. In all honesty, I boo him, too.

And then there was a group of people who followed Dan Crenshaw around calling him “Eyepatch McCain.” They also called him a Globalist and think he should be hung for treason.

Oh good Lord, rightwing Republicans really do need to put away those ropes.  We remember what they did with them the last time they had them.

But my soul is at peace.  Slick Dan put himself as star in a video getting other Republicans to run.

For the rest of his damn life he has to live with the fact that his tryout tape for Captain America was ridiculous and I’m snickering.

I’m kinda looking forward to seeing what platform they come up with.

Before my daughter was born, I taught at a school fairly close to my house. In fact, it was my alma mater’s rival school. The principal there used a cool slogan he wanted everyone to memorize. It was easy enough. “It matters” was that slogan. It matters was a way to tell us that everything we do matters. There is nothing too insignificant to get attention. Every detail must be important.

The problem there is that he was absolutely wrong. It really is no surprise. I did not last on that campus and neither did he as it turns out. However, it took years for me to discover that. If everything matters then nothing really matters. Such a statement is kind of a paradox, but if you game it all out then it starts to make perfect sense. You can’t focus on everything because if you focus on everything then nothing gets done.

I had a golf swing instructor basically tell me the same thing as a kid. I couldn’t possibly think about everything while swinging. I had to focus on one or two things and do the best I could. It’s the same for basketball players shooting free throws, hitters at the plate, and kickers about to make the winning kick in a football game. If you bog yourself down with too many thoughts you’ll fail every time.

The worst thing we tell children is that something matters when it really doesn’t. In the case of our campus it is dress code. It really doesn’t matter. We have kids showing skin in all kinds of places we never would have dreamed of doing. We have boys with full beards and students with visible tattoos. These things are all against the dress code, but we have collectively decided that it just doesn’t matter. We never said as much, but our actions (or lack of action) indicate that it doesn’t matter. The worst thing we could do is tell kids that it does and let them learn quickly that it doesn’t. Just let it go.

We bring all this up to show how much of an uphill climb progressives have. We care about a lot of things. We care about gun control. We care about the environment. We care about fair elections. We care about education. We care about the wealth gap and making sure everyone has a fair shot. We care about black lives. We care about LGTBQ+ rights. We care about women’s rights. We care about health care and our access to it. We care about all of these things and more.

What we run into are people that have either figured out that it all can’t matter or they just don’t care about all of those things. They care about one or two things. They want to keep their guns. They want to make abortion illegal. They want to make sure girls are the only ones playing girls sports. Each of those things have a dedicated group of their own that are always there to scream their point of view. The rest of us scream for a week or two and then shift to one of those other issues. We switch when something happens that outrages us and pulls our attention from the other things. So, our opponents just have to wait us out.

We must be more organized. We must manage our forces a little more wisely. In short, we have to forget the idea that it all matters. Yes, it all matters. However, we can’t have everyone focused on an issue for a week or two. We have to have fewer people dedicated to an issue all the time. We need others dedicated to those other issues. If we apply constant pressure across the board then we have a chance to get movement on these things. That’s what the other side is doing. They either figured that out a long time ago or they literally only care about their guns, abortion, or the other stuff.

The media is tripping all over themselves calling Pence a hero because he did his job under great pressure from his boss and the people around him.

You know what?  That’s caca del toro.

Okay, how is that any difference than a teenager working at McDonalds working in the hot kitchen with his boss screaming at him about making burgers faster, even if it means not putting a pickle on it and the kid decided that if people pay for a pickle, they ought to get a damn pickle.

Is that kid a hero?  Nope, he’s just doing his job.

I know doing your job is unexpected in Trumpculture.  But that’s all Pence did.  He’s not a hero. He’s just a guy who went to work and did his job.  And the deal about not getting into the car to leave the capitol? That’s not hero. I also wouldn’t get into a car with an armed man I didn’t know.

The cops who charged the crowd or lead them astray are far closer to heroes than Mike Damn Pence.

For four damn years, Pence stood beside Trump nodding his goofy head up and down. He knew Trump was totally insane but Pence just stood there, nodding.

Hero?  My patooie.

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Sorry I fell down on the Toons this week.  I’ll make up for it. I’ve been huddled up all week on a little political project for the November election.  I’ll let you in on it when we get the kinks worked out.