Elon Musk is demonstrating live online how to make small fortune owning a social media company – start with a HUGE one.  Making the rookie mistake of believing you can cut your way to success, Musk has wrought havoc at Twitter since acquiring it, firing half of the staff, making unreasonable demands of remaining employees, and slashing costs, even the ones that keep the platform running.  In addition to these mistakes, he’s run off billions of advertising dollars with TFG-like behavior and erratic decision making.  His full on MAGA management style and allowing white supremacists and hate merchants back on the platform has driven millions of normal people away.  Add that to banning any journalist who dares publicly criticize him, Twitter has become the North Korean photonegative of the the company he spent $44 billion to buy.

His most recent accomplishments are stopping paying the rent in some offices, closing data centers, and even firing janitorial staff, forcing employees to bring their own toilet paper to work.  He’s demanding that employees sleep at the office, and continues to run the company by online polls where millions of bots infest his platform, obviously voting in favor of his worst ideas, like allowing TFG back on.

Like others, I kept thinking that Musk is some kind of evil genius with a long-term plan to remake Twitter into a new payment platform.  It’s become apparent that this was either a pipe dream or a myth – he’s now facing a serious turnaround situation with no apparent skills to actually lead a turnaround.  Add his sociopathic behavior to this situation and he’s only making matters worse, not better.  To fund all this, he’s been dumping his Tesla stock which has contributed to its price plummeting 70% in 2022.  To be fair, blue chip and tech stocks have been pounded this year, but Musk’s goofy behavior and selling has greatly displeased investors.

All this is to say that behavior of companies’ senior management matters and the being wealthy doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart.  This multi-billion dollar soap opera is far from over, and it remains to be seen if Musk is going to be one of the surviving members of the cast.

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the first election that I ever voted in. It was the election where I was introduced to Lena Guerrero. She had a promising political career for awhile. She served in the Texas Legislature and had been on the Texas Railroad Commission. She was now running to be the head of the Texas Railroad Commission. It’s not an insignificant position. It involves a whole lot more than just trains. She was a Democrat and therefore seemed destined to get my vote.

Unfortunately for her, the news dropped before the election. She said she had a honors degree from the University of Texas. In fact, she had no degree at all. It would be the only race where I explicitly voted against a Democrat. The funny thing is that this is still true to this day. I don’t know what makes people do these things. It’s not like she simply said she had a degree. She could have listed any institution or none at all. She could have simply said she had a degree and left the rest of the details purposefully vague. Nope. She had to say it was a degree and a degree with honors from the University of Texas.

As everyone knows, George Santos is the latest to get caught up in a web of lies. Of course, to call it a web would likely be generous. His lies haven’t even been all that coordinated. The explanations haven’t been that coordinated either. He didn’t get a degree when he said he did. His background in terms of ethnicity and religion has been either falsified out of thin air or tremendously exaggerated. His work history was also falsified. Even the details of his personal life are a work of fiction. His mother died twice. As works of fiction go, his lies have been whoppers.

I mention Guerrero for what should be obvious reasons. She was a Democrat. She lied about her education. She had attended UT. She just didn’t graduate. She not only lost the election, but she never participated in politics again. It is easy to make the point that one party lies more than the other. Maybe that’s even true, but that’s not the point of this particular screed.

The people that represent us in city hall, county court, the state legislature, state offices, and in Washington should be the best among us. They should be made from the finest parts of our national character. It isn’t necessarily about degrees, past positions, or anything else. We should be able to trust that whatever is on that resume is something you’ve actually done. We should be able to trust that what you say you know and what you say you are good at you are actually good at.

George Santos perpetuated a fraud on the people of his district. Nothing substantive that he has told the voters about himself has turned out to be true. Now, maybe he still wins. We know full well that most voters pull the lever (figuratively) for the party and not the individual. Yet, occasionally something so shameful occurs that people don’t. I didn’t vote for Lena Guerrero and I still wouldn’t.

It isn’t simple enough to simply redo the election. Sure, voters probably would vote differently now that they know the truth, but that sets up a dangerous precedent. When exactly do we know that a fraud has occurred and that it is so egregious that another election should be held? Who decides that? Sure, Kevin McCarthy and the GOP shouldn’t seat him. Yet, they have a very narrow majority and losing even one seat is a bitter pill to swallow. I don’t know the answer for them. I know the status quo is untenable. Maybe they simply don’t give him any committee assignments. The likely result is they just hope we forget. I’ve never forgotten Lena Guerrero. I’m not likely to forget George Santos anytime soon.

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Newly-elected congressional representative George Santos is a lying sack of shit.  There’s no other way to say it. He’s lied so much about his background that it’s probably easier to find what he didn’t lie about, but here’s what we know he did lie about – his family, ethnic background, his family in the Holocaust, his religion, his education, his work history, his business (it doesn’t exist), his finances, his residential status, and his sexual orientation.  He doesn’t even live in the district where he got elected.  During his interview on Fox Noise, Santos admitted to all of his lies and making excuses for his lies like “I didn’t say I was a Jew, I said I was Jew-ish,” whatever that means.  The Noise Machine, including him, have started calling these easily disprovable lies “embellishments”, as if embellishments were Okey Dokey.  And apparently to the RNC, it is.

The response from Kevin McCarthy and the RNC about their latest shitbag making the headlines? Crickets. Based on the deafening silence from the party, there is zero doubt that McCarthy is going to seat this guy in Congress and let him get away with massive lying.  It’s no surprise that’s going to happen, because power is more important than legality or democracy, but it just confirms yet again that the GOP is now the GLP (Grand Liars Party).

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I’m obviously late to the party with this one. As everyone knows, Governor Greg Abbott sent his own version of a Christmas gift to Kamala Harris when he sent upwards of 50 migrants in a bus to her Washington D.C. residence. I can easily go in any number of directions here and most of them are visceral emotional reactions to the story. Most of these visceral responses are the kind of responses that MAGA folks want us to say. It’s almost like a Pavlovian response. They do something outrageous and we respond with outrage, Mission accomplished.

So, where I choose to go from here is to a place where I am going to assume that one or more of them might stumble to this place and actually read these words. The regular readers already know this stuff, so you can treat this as more of a tutorial for other people. However, it is something I feel I need to say because I’ve seen the responses from both sides. Progressives respond with outrage as I suppose they should. Conservatives usually say something to the effect that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden need to solve the problem.

Let’s start with the outrage. All of us know about trolls. Essentially, mainstream conservatives are becoming an endangered species. In their place are what I lovingly call performance artists. If you think back to the scandals concerning the National Endowment for the Arts you will remember the different exhibits that caused so much consternation. There were sculptures of Jesus made out of dung or Jesus being submerged in human urine. These were all designed to create a visceral reaction. All forms of art are created to elicit a reaction. So, these maneuvers by Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are created to elicit an emotional response. Again, mission accomplished.

Performance artists aren’t interested in solving any problems. Problems exist to be exploited. They exist for fund raising. They exist for sound bytes. They exist so that you can frighten your base by expanding and distorting the truth. Greg Abbott has no issue in solving immigration. He has no interest in helping migrants. He has no interest in adjusting policies so that the strain on our institutions and budget are alleviated. Of course, it could be credibly claimed that many progressive politicians aren’t interested in solving the problem either. They can fundraise against Abbott and DeSantis as easily as those two can fundraise themselves.

This brings us to the second point. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can’t solve this issue on their own. It’s a problem with the low information voters. This is an issue that must be addressed in Congress. So, you can send these people to the White House or to Kamala Harris’ private residence, but the stunt doesn’t provide them any additional incentive to solve the problem. Harris literally has very little real power to do anything beyond helping those exact people. This is where you call or write letters to your elected representative asking them to work with other members of Congress to actually pass comprehensive changes to our immigration policy.

Whether one considers this just performance art or an act of cruelty, the end result is just the same. Someone decided that jerking these people around was better than actually helping them. At this point, I’m not going to judge if someone decides they can’t help them. I understand. We can’t help literally everyone that needs help and it can be hard to decide where that cut off should be. They are human beings. They deserve better than this. If we can’t help them then the least we can do is not hurt them. It’s one thing to have a sculpture made out of dung to enrage the masses. It is something else entirely to use actual living and breathing human beings for your performance art.