I love to vote. I have voted in every election, including off-off year school board elections. And I have been an early voter since it became a possibility. Yet despite its liberal reputation, California’s early vote arrangements are atrocious and I am a vote by mailer now.

So today I drove myself to the local post office and put my ballot in the mail receptacle inside the lobby, as I have since the pandemic began.

No muss. No fuss.

Not so in my state’s immediate neighbor to the east. In Arizona, specifically Maricopa County (home of the Cyber Ninja “forensic audit”), there are armed, masked and bullet-proof vested individuals making sure that the right sorts of people are voting, as they record videos of voters inserting their supposedly secret ballots into official ballot drop boxes. They also video the license plates of vehicles that the voters arrive in.

So if you were curious what voting in a police state was going to be like if TFG has his way, look no further than Maricopa County, Arizona.

Well, come to find out, Louie Gohmert is going out with a whimper.

James Cowart is a CPA and tax preparer in Tyler, Texas, Louie’s home town.

Now why would Louie, after all these years of having a friend file his finance reports, would he go out and hire a professional just as he is leaving?

I dunno, but if I was a betting chick, I’d say — Unless, of course, he was under investigation. Like for moving money through his campaign account to pay for the January 6^th Insurrection.

Anybody who knows Louie knows he was somedamnhow involved in January 6th.

Republican politics is just a more tightly wound ecosystem than anything on the left. There are a couple of things you can expect from Republicans during election season. They will complain about how extreme Democrats are on gun control. They will complain about how much Democrats spend with the added benefit of blaming inflation on them. However, one thing you can count on is the fact that high crime rates are the fault of the Democrats and being soft on crime.

So, let’s talk about crime. First, let’s take a look at national trends in crime. From 1990 to 2020, the crime rate went down and went down considerably. The two biggest dips in crime occurred during Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidencies. Does this mean they were responsible? What we know is that crime remained fairly flat under George W. Bush overall and went up under Donald Trump.

If we focus on Texas we would see that Texas ranks 11th in the nation in terms of being dangerous on a per capita basis. Republicans have controlled both chambers in the Texas Legislature, the governor’s chair, and the lieutenant governor’s chair for nearly 20 years now. However, this hasn’t stopped them from blaming the Democrats for crime.

The big target in Texas are undocumented immigrants. Naturally, that might be something we would want to study. Sure enough, undocumented immigrants actually committed less crime than their native counterparts. In fact, it’s not particularly close. However, that just doesn’t feel like it’s true. The fact that red states are more dangerous than blue states doesn’t feel like it’s true. After all, isn’t New York, Portland, and Chicago a war zone? In actuality, when you look at crime rates (and not total crimes) the exact opposite is true.

Are Republicans to blame for crime? I’m not necessarily going there. I do think we need to start acknowledging some common sense facts about crime before we lose our collective heads. First, does anyone think real hardened criminals really think about sentencing before committing a crime? I was going to rob that store, but this Republican judge would give me 20 years instead of 10. Does anyone really believe that criminals actually think that way?

So, if harsher penalties don’t deter crime then what can we attribute an increase of crime to? Obviously, the first thing we need to do is acknowledge whether there is an increase in the first place and what that increase means in context with the data over a longer period of time. Is it statistically significant?

However, statistical significance and other high brow terms like that obviously confuses people. Their eyes glaze over. So, let’s set that aside and assume it is happening. Why? There are more Republican judges nationwide and in Texas than Democratic judges. It’s not sentencing. Our police departments have actually expanded during that time as well. Sure, we could double the police force, but I suspect that isn’t it either.

One thing conservatives seem to think is that allowing everyone unfettered access to guns will lower crime rates. Ask yourself this question: does that make any logical sense? However, I would suggest something else. People commit crimes when they are angry or anxious. They commit crimes when they think they need something they don’t have. They commit crimes because they are desperate. That points to the economy more than values, stiffer penalties, and even easy access to guns. Maybe that’s why crime goes down under Democrats. Maybe that’s why we saw a spike at the end of the last presidency. Of course, all of that doesn’t fit into a 30 second or 60 second television commercial. So, just be afraid. Very afraid.

Texas is now distributing DNA kits to schools.  Abbott signed the law to do so at the end of the 2021 legislative session, feigning that they were to be distributed to identify children who were kidnapped and trafficked.  The occurrence child kidnapping is tragic, but rare.  What is more common, especially in Texas, is mass shootings by deranged young men who are legally allowed to purchase assault rifles and unlimited ammunition that can kill dozens of kids in just a few minutes.  The law was passed after the mass shooting at a public school in Santa Fe.  The state says the kits are to be used in the event of an “emergency” and are trying to make it about kidnapping, but since bullets fired from an AR-15 cause massive injuries, including decapitating 6 year old school children, the kits are necessary to identify the bodies of victims of these now commonplace shootings.  In Uvalde, some of the children’s bodies were so mangled that they had to be identified by their shoes.

The answer to mass shootings is unbelievably “complicated”, and only 32 of 33 advanced countries around the world have figured it out.  The only way we stop these shootings is banning these weapons and the ammunition shot from them.  We can only do that with brave leadership.  Because Americans don’t vote like they should, that brave leadership will never materialize and the problem won’t be fixed.  The gun and DNA kit manufacturers are perfectly happy with the status quo.

Texas has been in the iron grip of Republicans since 1995.  The results are obvious – total corruption of state leadership including a talk radio host and bar owner on the verge of winning yet another election for lt. governor, the top law enforcement officer who’s been under felony indictments for over 5 years headed for re-election, and hyper gerrymandered state house and senate districts that are non-competitive.  In the 27 years of GOP leadership in the state we have slid from US leadership in personal rights, education, science, healthcare, and livability to 49th, according to CNBC’s latest livability study.  Not surprisingly, Texas was ranked as 5th for business.

And, if people don’t turn out to vote, it’s going to get worse.  Texas Republicans, like those in over 30 GOP controlled states, have passed dozens of laws to suppress the right to vote and even take away the votes of millions if the party doesn’t like the result.  Using The Big Lie as an excuse, they’ve enacted crushing laws that make it harder to register, harder to vote, both in person and by mail.  In Arizona right now, armed thugs are “guarding” ballot drop boxes intimidating voters and following them home.

Texas won’t be saved from actual fascism if they don’t start voting.  I really don’t give a damn if they vote Dem or Repub, but they need to vote.  Single party control has never worked, and never will.  Texas and the US will never survive without a vigorous democracy that includes lively debate based on facts.  You can’t reason with radicals.  You have to just beat them at the polls.

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