Please allow me to introduce you to Jonathan Allen Frost, a 24 year old who lives just a few miles from where I live.  Jonathan is in a mess of trouble.

A Katy man was sentenced to spend five years in federal prison Friday over his role in a white supremacist plot to attack U.S. power grids.

In 2019, Jonathan Allen Frost, 24, planned an attack and recruited, trained and equipped other men with a gun and a “suicide necklace” containing fentanyl as part of the plot, the Justice Department said.

Jonathan is not your typical trailer trash insurrectionist. Jonathan lives in a house on a golf course currently valued at between $1.5 – $1.8 million.  I highly suspect it’s his parent’s house because two other people in their 60s are registered to vote at that address.

The parents have voted in every election and every Republican primary since they moved into the house 15 years ago.

Jonathan is not that consistent in voting as his parents.  But he votes presidential years and even voted in the 2022 Republican primary.

Under sentencing guidelines he could have gotten 15 years but he reached an agreement of five years, which means he’s white and lives in a ritzy house.

I think we should have let him know that he doesn’t have to mess with the power grid in Texas or fret over taking it down. The Governor does that for us in Texas. I do think that’s why his parents vote Republican.

We all know that George Santos (or whatever his real name is) is a lying shitbag who has no business being anywhere near the seat of government, much less occupying a seat in the US House of Representatives.  To be fair, there are a lot of lying shitbags in Congress, but this particular shitbag is singularly accomplished in his volume of lying about everything from his ethnicity to his education to…well, just about everything.

But he’s worse than that – he’s a dog napper and abuser, and that’s where I draw the line.  We already know how he raised money to save a veteran’s dog that had cancer and then absconded with the money while bragging about “saving 3,000 dogs”.  It doesn’t stop there – in the Washington Post this morning there is a story about how Santos stole 5 Labrador Retrievers from an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania.  He promised to “wire $5,000” to him, but vanished.  He finally wrote checks to the farmer that bounced.  According to the farmer, he filed charges against Santos, but the charges were later dismissed after some kind of settlement.  Santo apparently did this to several breeders, writing over $15,000 in hot checks and then putting the dogs up for “adoption” and pocketing the money.

So, Santos screwed over a lot of people before lying his way into Congress; that makes him a shitbag and shame on those people for believing him.  But doing it to dogs?  That’s unforgivable and the last straw.  This guy has to go.

NOW.

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.

As we wail and moan over election results in the Lower 48, I want to direct your attention to Alaska’s single congressional race.

Mary Peltola, the at-large congressman from Alaska has been re-elected to a full 2-year term despite the fact that her two Republican opponents together got more votes than her mere (+ or -) 47% of the popular vote.

I think this is a possible glimpse at our future. Let me explain.

Alaska has adopted a ranked-choice primary system that makes California’s “jungle primary” look like a stroll through the zoo.

In Alaska, candidates are ranked as to preference, and receive votes not only by a earning a voter’s first choice, but also by their 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th choices.

They say that this is experimental, and is a way to negate a tendency toward extremes in typical primary voter choices. The narrative goes that typical primary voters are from the extremes of each party, so successful candidates tend to be from the extremes of the Left and Right. Moderates are often trapped behind the door among the also-rans.

It is this system that gave Alaskans the choice between two Republicans and one Democrat, splitting the Republican vote between TFG-endorsed Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, a candidate whose family legacies include a former congressman, a state Senator and a US Senator.

In short, Alaskans were offered a choice between a Democrat, A MAGA Republican and an establishment Republican.

In the other 49 states, only one of the Republicans on a primary ballot go on to compete in the General.

If it is true that America has evolved from a two-party state to a three-party one, Alaska has given us a view of a possible future where elections show the true cross-section of American politics through “Plurality Rule”.

Either that (and remember, this is Half Empty writing here), or the ranked-choice system will be rapidly dismantled by a still-shocked Alaskan electorate by a 50.9% majority vote.

Last night in Texas was disappointing, but not surprising.  All statewide races were lost by Dems.  100%.  And the spreads were predictable, all double digit losses but for the race for Ag Commissioner.  Susan Hays lost to the worst Ag Commissioner in Texas history by a mere 7 points.

Who to blame?  Leaving out for now the radical gerrymandering in state and US districts, the statewide blame for this kind of loss lay with the Texas Democratic Party and the candidates it produced, period.  Sure, Republican voter suppression, intimidation, and misinformation shaved 2 or 3 points from turnout, but it didn’t shave over 10.  The TDP did in 2022 what the TDP always does, just expected a different result.  In the governor’s race, the polls here were pretty clear and surprisingly close to actual results.  Real Clear Politics averaged Abbott + 10.4, and he won by 11.  A lot of the blame, too, needs to be laid at Beto’s feet.  He had a promising future when he came within 2 points of Cruz for Senate in 2018, but starting to believe his own bullshit, throwing it all away with his disastrous run for president in 2020.  That was stupid.

The lessons here are clear and need to be learned.  First, the TDP needs a serious housecleaning and fumigation.  Old assumptions need to be thrown out the window, especially the longstanding myth that Texas is getting more blue just because demographics are changing.  GOP messaging and ideology plays well with some groups like the Latino community, especially since the Dems have taken them, and African Americans, for granted for decades.  The party always plays to these demographic groups in voting years and then underserves them until the next election.  That’s got to stop.

I know this is hard to hear, but the GOP in Texas has outplayed, outworked, and out strategized Dems for years, and the asymmetric performance at the polls is the result.  Starting in the 1960s, Repubs went after school boards, precincts, city councils, and county offices.  Over this time they’ve built a huge base with a bench a mile deep.  The Dems have done the opposite; the Dems are every person for themselves until election season, and then try to build a strategy around a standard bearer who elbows their way in, be that for president or governor. (See Barack Obama, 2004 to 2008.)  They then vehemently resist change, leaving petrified party leadership in place for decades, stiff arming all new comers and those with opposing opinions.  Doing this discourages younger leaders because there’s no opportunity for leadership roles and stultifies policy.  What you get then are losers like Beto and Mike Collier.  In Beto’s case, you can’t build a statewide strategy on a standard bearer who acts like a teenager and says stupid shit in public.  Lastly, and this is not just a Texas problem, is that the Democratic party needs to stop counting noses.  I’ve been to meetings where the majority of the time is spent doing math to make sure every possible demographic is in the room before the meeting can start.  I’m not saying the party needs to be less inclusive; I’m saying the time for inclusivity is at the beginning, not at the end. There needs to be an obsessive focus on inclusion of demographic groups at the micro local level, not only at state conventions and statewide campaigns.  Being inclusive at the start would negate the necessity of nose counting at the end.

The textbook example of party failure in 2022 is not Beto, it’s Rochelle Garza.  Dems overwhelmingly chose Garza and rejected a very experienced and well known attorney, Joe Jaworski.  Let’s be frank – Ken Paxton is a deeply flawed, dishonest, embarrassing, and weak AG.  He was ripe to be picked off.  The Dems snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by overwhelmingly nominating a less experienced, less well known candidate who didn’t have a prayer of beating Paxton; her nomination was a vote for diversity, not for a win.  Another example was Lupe Valdez in 2018.  Dems overwhelmingly chose her as the standard bearer over Andrew White, son of former governor Mark White.  Valdez ran a terrible campaign, had low name recognition, and then lost to Abbott by over 13 points.

Before you say it, I am actually all about diversity and inclusion.  But diversity and inclusion doesn’t get you a goddam thing unless you WIN.  Not winning has a lot worse negative consequences than winning every time.  The TDP (and all Dems) can actually do more than one thing at a time.  They need to be strategic, not just inclusive, because what the Dems are doing, and have been doing for decades, is a loser.  I know this opinion, just like the one I hold about Hillary, will piss a lot of you off, and I accept that.  But until the Texas Democratic Party and Dems in general start operating strategically they’ll keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result.  And we all know what that’s called.  Until they start working strategically, there will be no joy in Mudville.

Oh, and Beto?  I love ‘ya, bro, but please go back to El Paso. Run for mayor or even the House again. Do some maturing.  You’ll have another chance at some point, but you need some years of growing up.

Today, the dam holding back all political challengers, critics, and investigators of TFG cracked.  And it cracked big time.  The RNC responded to his non-announcement announcement the other night where he said he was “…very, very, very probably” going to run.  Obviously, that non-announcement announcement pissed off the committee, especially since it is just a few days before the mid-term elections, and uncharacteristically, the committee pushed back hard, stating publicly that if he announces for president, they’ll stop paying his legal bills.  Up until today, the RNC has had its nose so far up TFG’s ass they couldn’t see daylight, and they have continued to use donor money to cover these bills, even two years after he left office.  The RNC’s rationale to keep paying, which is complete bullshit, was that they were for the investigation and subsequent lawsuit from NYAG Letitia James calling it “political”, and not for the fact that he and his entire family of arrogant shitheads who have been engaged in questionable shenanigans for years, cheating on everything from taxes to financial accounting.

For over 6 years now, the RNC has been all in for TFG, understanding clearly that he controlled their base of mouth-breathing, gun-toting screwballs who see a dark skinned bogeyman behind every corner and who are worried to death that their kid is going to be indoctrinated with nonexistent CRT propaganda and books about kids getting along with others.  Apparently, they see him (what took so goddam long?) as weakened by the mountain of the scandals, especially the federal document theft case, which clearly holds a whole raft of felonies that have in the past sent a lot of people to prison for a long time.

Is the TFG dam of intimidation finally going to break?  Clearly the RNC no longer sees him as the all powerful Oz (no pun intended), and this is a brush back pitch to tell him, “Not so fast, buster, we have an election, and then primaries for 2024.”  TFG pissing off Ron DeSantis yesterday didn’t help his case.  DeSantis is the GOP’s greatest hope to take back the White House in ’24, and he wants TFG out of the way.

This one will be a real soap opera to watch.  I’m popping popcorn.