For the past week I have been trying to find the time to tell you about Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General who has been under felony indictment for securities fraud since 2015. His defense is delay until everybody dies or they change the law. So far, so good.

Then his entire upper staff all quit one day.  Then he got ousted for having an affair.

Well, he got his ample butt subpoenaed by a women’s choice group. Needless to say the last place on God’s green earth that boy wants to be is on a witness stand. So, when the man delivering the subpoena arrived at Paxton’s door … (long read but worth it).

The federal court affidavit alleges that Paxton fled process server Ernesto Martin Herrera, who attempted to subpoena Paxton at his home on Monday morning.

Herrera writes in his sworn affidavit that he knocked on the Paxtons’ door at around 8:30 a.m., and a woman identifying herself as Angela answered the door. When he said he was there to serve Paxton important legal documents, the woman said Paxton was on the phone. Herrera offered to wait until he got off the phone, but Angela said that he was in a hurry. So Herrera said he left his business card with her, and went back to his car and waited.

Almost an hour later, Herrera testified he saw a black Chevrolet Tahoe pull up to the driveway, and then 20 minutes after that, Paxton left his garage and approached the Tahoe. Herrera got out of his car and approached Paxton. “As soon as he saw me and heard me call his name out, he turned around and RAN back inside the house through the same door in the garage,” Herrera wrote, emphasizing “ran” in all capital letters, and underlining the word.

A few minutes later, the woman who called herself Angela came out of the house and got into the driver’s seat of a different Chevrolet truck in the driveway and started it; she also opened the rear door behind the driver’s side and left it open. Herrera said that a few minutes later, Paxton “RAN from the door inside the garage toward the rear door of the driver side.” Herrera alleges he “loudly” called Paxton by name, and said he had important court documents for him, but “Mr. Paxton ignored me and kept heading for the truck.” Herrera said he then told Paxton he was serving him with legal documents and leaving them on the ground beside the truck. Herrera said Paxton got in the truck, left the documents on the ground, and both Chevrolet vehicles left.

Okay, so that doesn’t look good, right?

Watch Paxton put lipstick on a pig.

 

I’m the victim! I’m the victim! I’m the victim!

Okay, that means that the first time he RAN away from his wife’s car and back into the house, he left his wife there to die at the hands of a “strange” man.

The strange man was there for an hour and half and Paxton didn’t call the police?

And how did this all turn out, you ask?

The judge in the case decided Paxton didn’t have to show up after all.

Texas, Land Of The White Man Put Upon Victim.

 

Apparently, the 1/6 committee has evidence that someone from the White House actually placed a call to one of the rioters on January 6th. The call lasted for nine seconds and while the committee knows who the recipient was, they do not know who in the White House actually placed the call. The call was placed to someone named Anton Lunyk. This is how I envision it going down. Feel free to throw your own scenarios in the comments.

Donald Trump: Hey, Anton are you in yet?

Anton Lunyk: Yes sir, we are about to…

Mark Meadows (to Trump): Use the burner phone dammit….

DT: Click

Of course, we are limited by the relative brevity of the conversation, but I figure there are any number of permutations we could come up with for a nine second conversation. Either way, the idea of using an actual phone in the White House that can be tracked is the criminal equivalent of walking into the bank and your bag has a hole in the bottom. I’ll let everyone else do the heavy lifting from here. Everyone have a great weekend.

A hurricane is currently bisecting Florida, crawling along at 7 miles per hour from landfall at Fort Meyers, and is projected to emerge south of Jacksonville on Thursday.

The Feds are all over this and Floridians will see a massive emergency response. Damage will easily be in the billions of dollars.

That’s because most Americans are sympathetic, caring, and maybe would like to visit Disney World someday. What we are not hearing are words similar to those spoken by then-Congressman Ron DeSantis 9 short years ago regarding the devastation visited upon the Northeast Coast by Hurricane Sandy.

”I sympathize with the victims of Hurricane Sandy and believe that those who purchased flood insurance should have their claims paid. At the same time, allowing the program to increase its debt by another $9.7 billion with no plan to offset the spending with cuts elsewhere is not fiscally responsible.”

Much the opposite. And now Governor DeSantis is asking for a 100% federal reimbursement for damages.

What?

Guess when the shoe is on the other foot it makes you very generous with other people’s money, and totally irresponsible in raising the public debt.

The sad thing is, DeSantis will not emerge from this disaster with a clear understanding that it is global climate change that brought Gulf of Mexico surface temperature to 90° F, putting this storm’s ferocity into the all time top 5 of storms to hit Florida.

DeSantis’ plague of lies and climate denial is apparently incurable, and there is no sign of a vaccine on the horizon.

A thought occurred to me when I heard the third version of the Greg Abbott attack ads against Beto O’Rourke. It seems he is too extreme on gun control. They played what was obviously an abrupt cut of him saying he would confiscate everyone’s AR-15. Then, they went on to talk about how he has an F rating according to the NRA in terms of his voting record.

I could say a lot of things here and did when I was in the car by myself. A few of those things are words that shouldn’t be said around young children or anyone of a delicate nature. I could also say a few choice things about the NRA and have before. If I ever run for office they will be data mined and I’ll have to explain them off somehow. That’s kind of the point. This is the world we live in now.

If I translate my inner thoughts in the most delicate way possible, I’d say I couldn’t care less what the NRA thinks of me or my stances on gun control. I’m not looking for NRA approval after all. I’d rather be a good human being and promote policies that support life and public safety. If they would like to abrupt cut that and infer that I am saying they are not for supporting life or public safety they can go ahead. Hell, I’ll even underline and bold it for them.

As much as I or anyone else would like to call them domestic terrorists or people that sponsor domestic terrorists it wouldn’t be responsible for me to do that. After all, most people don’t make complex distinctions between sane and responsible gun owners and those that are insane and unreasonable.

The point is that when we advocate something we have to consider the feasibility of it getting approved and whether it would actually work. There are any number of ways of taking guns off the streets that don’t involve going door to door and taking it from their cold, dead hands. The unfortunate reality is that if you used the door to door method you would likely invite that outcome more than a few times.

Few things in this world make me more angry than gun violence. When I hear the stories of dead children, scared children, or frightened multitudes in any public place it makes me want to scream at every Republican politician and anyone with an A grade with the NRA. I’d like to say they can take their A grade and thousands in PAC contributions and shove it up their backside.

As Democrats, liberals, progressives, leftists, or caring moderates we must agree on one thing and only one thing. We want to make the world a better and safer place. I think all of us can agree on that. We may not agree on how to completely do that or what lengths we need to go to so that can happen. We need to focus on what we do agree on and move from there. In terms of gun control, we agree on background checks, waiting periods, and the ban of certain weapons. We agree that other weapons shouldn’t be legally owned or wielded by teenagers.

We need to enact these laws on things we do agree on and put our heads together on the rest. Confiscation is way too controversial and likely too dangerous to enact. Let’s think of other ways to regulate behavior without punishing responsible gun owners. We are smart people, so we can make this happen.

And it’s headlines:  Pennsylvania lawmaker introduces bill modeled after Florida ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law: ‘Mine goes further’

Further?  What? You can’t even think gay?

Borowicz during a news conference at the state capitol building in Harrisburg last week said her bill “goes further” than than the Florida law because it bans instruction related to sexual orientation and gender identity through the fifth grade.

Florida’s goes to the third grade, which as we know, obviously causes hurricanes. So, we’re two grades further along to complete, total, and inequitable butt ignorant.

And then just in case you want to argue that Pennsylvania’s plan is a slippery slope, she lends you a big ole helping hand.

“It needs to really be protected all the way up to twelfth grade,” she said. “We need to go all the way.”

Well, not all the way to the governor’s office. The Republican candidate for governor is ten points down.  Which I kinda think was the cause of this in the first place.

 

We take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to take a look at a couple of commercials from the Texas governor’s race between Greg Abbott and Beto O’Rourke. As it stands, I only hear pro-Abbott commercials. Three things have struck me from these ads.

Beto O’Rourke is for defunding the police

All Democrats and progressives please read the following sentence carefully. For the love of everything good and holy, please stop doing this. You come up with these slogans you think are winning slogans, but the other side just uses them against you.

Most people don’t understand nuance. I know you don’t literally want to eliminate police departments. I know you are not literally for anarchy. The average voter doesn’t understand the idea of spreading resources around to other agencies that would be in a better position to handle certain issues. They just see a hoard of criminals coming to your door.

Of course, Abbott has to throw in a reference to Black Lives Matter. Again, they have successfully linked BLM with crime and anarchy. Is it fair? Of course it isn’t. Are most of them lawless thugs? Of course they aren’t. People don’t stick around long enough for a lengthy explanation. So, being for BLM and being for police reform means you are pro-crime and for the forces that are bringing crime to our neighborhoods.

Beto is for Open Borders

Clearly he isn’t. He has said this multiple times. What he is for is streamlining our immigration policy and process so that people can enter the country safely and we can identify the bad guys quicker. He has talked about tearing down the wall because most experts agree the wall is virtually useless. Of course, most people only hear the first half of that particular statement.

So, this argument came down to two statements. First, hoards of drug dealers and mules are bringing over fentanyl. That’s oddly specific. That statement is both true and misleading. China actually produces the most fentanyl, but Mexico is seeing an increase. The one that got me was that the border between Mexico and the United States is the most dangerous border in the world. I almost pulled off the road into a ditch laughing. It is the most dangerous border in North America.

Beto is too dangerous for Texas

As we teach our students, pathos (emotion) is the most effectively logical appeal there is. To hell with facts or credibility. We just want you to believe that Beto O’Rourke would somehow kill thousands because he’s inherently dangerous. What happens if you are dangerously incompetent or reckless? A simple Google search on COVID showed that over 90,000 Texans have died from COVID since March of 2020. Most of those came in the first year when our beloved governor decided to lift protocols and keep local governments from imposing their own.

Remember the great freeze? You know the one where our grid virtually shut down statewide because we were in a hurry to deregulate everything that moves. Yeah, this is the one they still haven’t fixed and came close to having more blackouts this past summer. Yeah, THAT freeze cost 246 Texans their lives.

If you count the period when Greg Abbott was attorney general in Texas, we have had a rash of mass shootings in Texas. Take a look at the timeline. Most happened under his watch as governor. Yet, he and the legislature have hurdled head first into policies that would virtually give anyone unfettered access to any weapon they might want. Yet, we cannot predict or control what might happen at our schools and are just dumbfounded when these shootings happen. So tell me, isn’t Greg Abbott too dangerous for Texas?