After 9 years of incendiary rhetoric, inciting actual violence, and personally threatening dozens of perceived enemies, TFG has certainly demonstrated that he can dish it out, but sure can’t take it.  He has spent years vilifiying everyone from Haitian immigrants to Dems to Taylor Swift, but when someone starts shooting at him, he’s shocked and appalled when the tables are turned.

Let’s be clear – violence is NEVER appropriate in any instance, political or otherwise.  But this monster of escalating violence has been wholy created by TFG and his sycophants repeating his vicious lies about everything from “the deep state”, to immigrants, and to anyone who happens to disagree with him.  He’s even inciting violence against schoolkids in Springfield, Ohio, FFS.  His social media accounts drip with hate, authoritarian declarations, threats, and lies against millions of people and entire classes of society, fabricated from whole cloth.  He even incited thousands of knuckleheads to attack the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the US government.

I find it pretty rich that TFG and Vance are now denouncing the very violence they’ve been inciting, but only because that violence has been turned on him.  If they want a reduction in violence they need to start that at home and turn down the heat, but I’m not expecting any of that.  A little self-awareness would be useful right now.

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.

Gym Jordan was on MTP this morning babbling about how law enforcement has been weaponized, but only when it comes to conservatives being investigated.  He’s all over the “weaponized” FBI trying to protect school board members whose lives are being threatened, but completely blind to the tsunami of blatant law breaking on his own side.  When Chuck Todd brought up the fact that the NY Assistant US Attorney, Charles McGonigal, has been charged with taking money from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, Jordan stated he was going to investigate that, but brushed Todd off when he pointed out that Paul Manafort was Deripaska’s primary contact between the TFG campaign and the Russians.  He wants to investigate the Steele dossier, but is not interested in investigating whether the US Attorney’s office in NY was suppressing the dossier and leaking other stories to the press intended to damage Hillary during the 2016.  The new conservative House majority has only a few goals for this term – cementing in their own power, hamstringing the federal government, and exacting revenge for TFG’s loss in 2020.  That’s it, period.  They don’t give a flying shit about their country or their constituents; their only tools are retribution and disinformation.

When asked about the George Floyd act and reforming policing in the US, Jordan took the usual position of conservatives today, saying that the US government has no role in policing reform and that it must be handled at “state and local levels”.  This is the strategy now followed by most Republicans who shirk responsibility to avoid being blamed for the consequences.  It’s also the SCOTUS’s normal response to all issues of privacy, individual rights, civil rights, and voting rights.  The Court, under Roberts, has now taken the position of taking no position on critical issues like privacy, gun safety laws, campaign finance, radical gerrymandering, and systemic voter suppression, punting all those issues to the state level which in 35 states is under the iron fisted control of minority Republicans cemented into power by…wait for it…radical gerrymandering and voter suppression.  The Court has also gone so far as drawing the idiotic conclusions that money doesn’t corrupt and that magically the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed.

At the state level, DeSantis and Abbott are the poster children for shirking their duty.  They both habitually override local county and city officials who are trying to protect their own citizens by grabbing power at the state level to hamstring them, but then take no responsibility for massive failures like the 2021 Texas power failure that killed 700 Texans.  By keep a “free market” ideology where free markets don’t exist, they avoid blame when their own constituents suffer from their negligence.  By hiding behind idiotic libertarian ideology that has never worked anywhere on the planet, they can blame faceless villains rather than doing their goddam jobs to improve the lives of their constituents.

This is the biggest fraud that’s been committed against the American people, but they retain power through two strategies – using disinformation to blame non-existent bogeymen for their own failures, and radical gerrymandering that creates a base of voters who believe their destructionist rhetoric and bullshit.  AND, it’s getting worse, not better.

I write about gun violence on occasion knowing full well that it’s an exercise in futility.  Why?  Easy; our elected representatives, our law enforcement organizations, and now the courts have been overtaken by weirdos and ideologues who have morphed the powers of local, state, and federal government from “law and order” to an alternate reality believing that overturning over 200 years of legal precedent and history and putting guns into the hands of everyone is somehow sane public policy.  We’re 24 days into the new year and have already had 40 mass shootings in the US, killing 74 and wounding 170.  In that same period of time, over 2,800 people have died from guns and over 2,100 have been wounded.  Gun violence has overtaken car accidents and drug overdoses as the leading cause of death in children in America.

There has been an unrelenting effort by the gun lobby to rewrite the Second Amendment from its original intent into a gun-humper’s dream.  The amendment that provided for a citizen army to protect the newly formed government in the late 1700s has been turned onto its head with junk law and fake “studies” to turn the amendment into a Guns for Everyone ideology.  In unwinding 200 years of case law, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito have relied on bullshit and junk law to justify their politically motivated rulings which included gutting Washington, DC and New York gun safety laws.  They’ve relied on a doctrine of  “originalism” which, translated from Bullshit to English, is an excuse to turn everything on its head forcing 21st century technology into an 18th century framework of law.  The Heller case was the death blow to sanity by declaring that an amendment that provided for a citizen army lead by state and local authorities was actually enumerated a person right for any idiot to carry a firearm anywhere he/she damn well pleased.  Using this insanity, even more insane state politicians use the same junk law codified by the SCOTUS to unwind centuries of gun safety laws all over the country.  As Michael Waldman, Director of the Justice Brennan Center at NYU Law, said after the Court struck down the NY gun safety law,

“The ruling Thursday says that all these judges got it wrong. Instead, the majority said, courts must assess gun rules especially focusing solely on ‘history and tradition.’ Don’t look at public safety; search for analogies to past laws from a very different time.”

Waldman has written extensively about the history of the effort to rewrite the Second Amendment.  The gun lobby did it in plain sight, pumping out bullshit and fake studies while at the same time paying Republicans to kill federal funding into gun violence for almost 40 years.  Add that to decades of gutting the ATF and attacking any authority trying to curb gun violence, and the takeover of America by gun nuts is complete.  SCOTUS has already communicated that the gun safety law debate is over and insanity won.  The Congress won’t protect us, the President can’t effectively act alone so he can’t help; red state governments have completely unraveled what gun safety law we had left, and ideologues sue local and state governments who dare try to protect their citizens.  This war is lost.

Until the Court was bought by the multi-billion dollar Federalist Society, we had a chance.  But that was lost with the triple assist from TFG.  The SCOTUS is now a zombie court that has asserted that it has no authority to protect Americans from massive gun violence, radical gerrymandering and unlimited money that has completely corrupted our elections and destroyed democracy from within.  This war is lost so we have two choices – give up and go arm ourselves and join in the chaos and carnage; OR fight back.  Grass roots is all that’s left and the job is massive.

The only solution to this dystopian alternate reality is to get rid of the Second Amendment.  I know that sounds crazy, but we’re already up to our eyeballs in crazy, so we have nothing to lose.  In 2018, Justice John Paul Stevens proposed just this in an op-ed in the NY Times.  He was right then, and remains right today.  Let’s stop niggling over definitions of assault weapons and semi-auto firearms.  The solution is to start – and win –  a new war that takes back the safety of our citizens away from the gun nuts and zealots.  I know that by no means is this going to be easy, but it’s the only solution left.

Luke Bowen.  Never heard of him?  Well, you will now.  Luke Bowen is was political director of extreme anti-choice activist PAC Texas Right to Life.  He’s also apparently been a blogger for the Texas GOP.  David Lowe, a Republican candidate for the Texas State House, tweeted last night that Bowen, trying to help Lowe’s primary opponent, had smeared him by spreading a rumor that he is a human trafficker.  Nice, huh?  Well, justice and extreme irony collided a couple of weeks ago when Bowen was arrested in Conroe on charges of…wait for it…online soliciting of a minor for sex.

Texas Right to Life says they fired him the same day.  SubStack blog Current Revolt has all the juicy details including the arrest record.

What is it that they say about those who scream the loudest?  I think it has something to do with the most guilty.  The irony is a bonus.

Luke Bowen of @TXRightToLife helped spread a rumor that I was a part of human trafficking on behalf of the @StephanieKlick campaign. Today, we find out that he was arrested for solicitation of a minor. Disgusting.
https://t.co/RmmCxtlcFj

— David Lowe for Texas (@DavidLowe4Texas) August 25, 2022

I was writing for one of my paying jobs earlier this week and made the comment that no matter what dumb butt thing the Texas Governor does, it will be blamed on the border and the lack of a wall.

In case anybody thinks I was wrong or overstating the situation, the boys who write at my local newspaper decided to give me a hand and prove my theory.  I appreciate their help but What The Fried Okra were they thinking?

Try your damnest to read this.

In all my years, I have never heard of a Smoky and the Bandit chase through Odessa. Odessa is 250 miles from Del Rio and 290 miles from El Paso.  It’s almost closer to Fort Worth than the border.  It’s desert and snakes.  Odessa is not a border city and a lockdown is a lockdown. Schools in the inner city have lockdowns all the time, thanks to guns in the area.

Governor Abbott looked the fool for his handling of the press after this horrific event.  His supporters need to distract from that fact and blame someone else.

Dudes, we need to talk to this “investigator” who believes that repetition of facts and actions is not a factor in learning.

You wanna know what another “factor” might have been?  Letting a teenager with mental health problems buy a weapon of mass destruction.  Not coming to their aid for over an hour.  Police who are are not brave or leaders.  I dunno, but practicing did not cause this event.

Newspaper Boys, the absence of a wall is not what’s making Greg Abbott stoopid. He was born that way.