UPDATE: Politico is reporting that the DHS is taking the August reinstatement conspiracy theory seriously in terms of stepping up efforts to follow discussions of extremists on social media, concerned about potential violence caused by disinformation pouring our of right wing media and lunatics like the Pillow Guy and other nonsense peddlers.  This story is coming from those who are familiar with a private briefing by DHS to members of Congress.

ORIGINAL POST: Seth Abramson, a defense attorney and author, has been after Trump for years.  His latest work is digging into how Trumpland planned and directed the insurrection on January 6, but he also has posited the only theory I’ve heard that makes any sense about one of Trump’s most outlandish lies, and that is how he’s going to be reinstated to the presidency in August.  Now, you know, and I know that there is simply no mechanism to restore someone to the presidency, even if an election was stolen, which this one most certainly was not.  Once the Congress certifies the Electoral College vote from the states and the new president is inaugurated, it’s over, game, set, and match period, end of story.  No one outside of the line of succession to the presidency can become president unless he/she is elected in the next national election.

So what the hell is Trump and his loudmouths doing?  Why is he repeatedly asserting he will be reinstated?  Abramson says that is all a dodge to avoid indictment in NY.  Abramson says that Trump believes that with his rallies starting back up and his incessant repeating of The Big Lie, he can keep his insurrectionist based whipped up and the threat of violence would be so great that prosecutors wouldn’t dare indict him for fear of major social unrest.  This is the only thing that makes any sense to me, that Trump believes he can keep the grift going long enough to run and win the presidency again in 2024, which will hold back the prosecutorial wolves from the door another 4 years.

https://twitter.com/sethabramson/status/1400470960587816961?lang=en

Sounds crazy, right?  Of course it’s crazy and I don’t think the NY AG or NY DA give a good goddam about Trump’s fantasies.  If they can nail him, they will, and they most certainly owe it to all of us Americans who suffered through over 4 years of the Trump Shitshow to protect our democracy by prosecuting that son of a bitch.  I do think Abramson is onto Trump, and having written about him for years, most certainly knows him well enough to have an informed opinion.  Besides that, NOTHING else makes the slightest bit of sense.

UPDATE: Just yesterday, the Texas House made it mandatory for professional sports teams to play the National Anthem before all games.  This pressing issue was a legislative priority of Radio Disc Jockey Dan Patrick, along with voter suppression and bathroom access supervision.

ORIGINAL STORY: This year, Texas has faced historic challenges – the global pandemic, the Big Freeze, and The Big Lie.  Add that to existing problems like a teetering education system, a failing healthcare system, crumbling infrastructure, and now a housing crisis, the governor and TXLege had their plates full.  So let’s have a look at that they did to address these issues:

• The Global Pandemic – Abbott, urged on by the Know Nothing wing of his party, played down the risk.  Abbott took away the authority of local leaders to protects their citizens, lifted science driven guidance for social distancing and quarantine recommendations way too early, and slashed recommended unemployment payments to Texans who were suffering.  He also dumped distribution responsibilities for PPE, and later vaccines, on local authorities in his own version of The Hunger Games, making cities/counties compete against one another.  All this caused untold sickness, suffering, and death.  What did the TXLege do this session?  Nothing.
• The Big Freeze – Over 20 years ago, Texas decided it was a good idea to have a “free market” for powering its grid, so the TXLege unwound the state’s regulatory framework, making the power regime in Texas “voluntary”, with no deliverability requirements and no penalties for failing to deliver power.  State air quality standards were also made voluntary.  This system was put in place on a grid that was already mostly disconnected with the grids in other parts of the country, so when it failed in February, no one could come to our aid by delivering power.  Over 200 people died and billions of dollars were lost.  What did the TXLege do to solve the problem and prevent it from happening again?  Nothing.
• The Big Lie – We all saw what happened after months of Trump’s ridiculous lie that an election that he had decisively lost was stolen from him.  When the US Capitol was stormed, hundreds of people were injured and 5 people died.  Trump actually attempted to overthrow the US government in order to stay in power.  Everyone with a hint of insight knows The Big Lie is false is corrosive to our democratic system.  What did the TXLege do to address The Big Lie? They amplified it, repeated it, and used it to pass the most restrictive voter laws in the US to make it harder to vote and to protect their minority power.
• Failing Healthcare System, Crumbling Infrastructure, Teetering Education System– Texas ranks 48th among the states in access to healthcare. Our education ranking is similar. Our crumbling roads, and poor public transportation systems rank among some of the worst in the country.  Under more than two decades of single party rule, our state has steadily declined in a number of measures, but especially healthcare.  Today, race, economic standing, and geographic location are predictors of healthcare outcomes, and the suffering from the pandemic followed these predictors.  The poor and minorities suffered greater infection rates and worse outcomes from the virus which compounded the other issues caused by lack of access to competent healthcare.  What did the TXLege do to address these inequalities?  Nothing.

So, what did the TXLege spend its time on this session? Here’s its list of accomplishments:

• As stated above, pushing the most restrictive voting measures in the US supporting Trump’s Big Lie.
• Passing a new abortion law that bans virtually all abortions, ignoring health, rape, or incest.
• Pushing criminalizing healthcare treatments for transgender kids.
• Passing unqualified carry legislation, making it legal for any idiot to carry whatever firearm said idiot wants to carry, making it virtually impossible for law enforcement to protect citizens from mass killers.
• Abbott criminalized mask requirements which imposes a $1,000 fine on any public official requiring masks, no matter local health conditions.

This is what you get when a minority party has cemented itself into power, taking away accountability to the public.  The GOP has had an iron grip on Texas for over two decades, aided by radical gerrymandering, lack of term limits, lack of spending limits, and lack of ethics laws.  The governor and the TXLege are now totally corrupt and pledged fealty to a criminal who so far has evaded prosecution and continues attempts to overthrow our democratic system of government.  Until The People wrest power away from such corruption, this state, among many other red states, are lost for the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: Mayor Sylvester Turner and County Commissioner Rodney Ellis have decided to take no shit from P.  They’ve written a joint letter to HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge requesting she “…halt all GLO actions associated with the current State Action Plan pending HUD’s review for appropriate and equitable distribution of funds to protect our city and region and build resilience as we adapt to an uncertain future.”  Looks like P overstepped here, and hopefully he’ll get sent to the woodshed for being a partisan asshole.  More to come.

ORIGINAL STORY: No, “P” hasn’t announced his run for the WH, but he’s most certainly started in that direction.  Since April, he’s been floating a run against criminally indicted Ken Paxton, who has somehow avoided trial for the last 5 years for securities fraud.  A demonstrated weirdo who has managed to be on the wrong side of every issue, Paxton has become weakened by scandal and become a target for being primaried, and it looks like P has him in his political sights.  P’s also been trying to shore up his conservative creds, even now pandering to the Texas GOP base which is all in on Trump, The Big Lie, and wishing death on everyone who disagrees politically.

P’s latest allocation of federal emergency funds for flood control in Texas counties is the hard evidence that exposes his pandering to the base.  In a $1 billion flooding mitigation grant from the federal government, Houston, which experienced 50% of the states’s damage from Harvey, received exactly…wait for it…zero.  That’s right, Houston which went for Biden in 2020 and continues to vote Democratic, was punished for voting against those who are supported by P’s base.  P has joined the deplorable wing of the GOP, happy to inflict suffering on fellow Texans, just to burnish his image for being an asshole for his base.  They think its funny.  Those who are suffering don’t.  Oh, and his spokesman lied, saying that they followed federal guidelines for distribution, but that’s bullshit, just like everything else coming out of P’s office.

The Bush’s are carpetbaggers, being New England bluebloods, but they’ve not generally been destructive to their adopted state.  W was stupid, manipulated by the corruption of Dick Cheney and others who duped him into invading Iraq.  HW was a milquetoast, but was a traditional diplomat who accomplished getting Saddam out of Kuwait. Jeb, also a milquetoast, got bulldozed by the Orange Menace.  What P is doing is more sinister…he’s playing to everything that’s bad about Americans, especially those who are all-in on Trump bullshit and corruption.  Urinating on the shoes of everyone in Houston is just a start.  It’s going to get worse.

Trump, even as late as this weekend, repeated the lie on his blog that the election was stolen from him by non-existent voter fraud.  He bragged that 80% of Republicans believed that lie as he desperately tries to keep his iron grip on the party that he wants destroyed.  Trump is nothing, if not obsesively vindictive.  What’s telling, though, have been his actions.  How do we know?  Trump tried to wreck as much of the US government as he could on the way out the door.  I don’t think he would have done that had he truly believed he won.

On November 9th, John McEtee, aide to Trump, told Douglas Macgregor, new acting defense secretary Chris Miller’s senior advisor, that Trump wanted full military withdrawal, by Inauguration Day,  from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, all of Africa, and…wait for it…Germany.  Recall that Miller had just taken on the defense job after Trump fired Mark Esper by tweet just a few days earlier.  This, as you would imagine, was an impossible task, and worse, it was from out in left field.  A written order followed two days later that commanded the Pentagon to withdraw troops  from Somalia by December 15th, and Afghanistan bay January 15th.  It was personally signed by Trump in his idiotic scribble.  The order sent shockwaves through the Pentagon as leaders realized that this was an “off the books” operation with none of the usual planning, table top simulations, or alternatives.  This was just Trump being Trump, and luckily the Pentagon held the line, slow walking the order to run out the clock.

At the same time, Trump tried to wreck the CIA and dig dirt on his enemies by installing loyalists at the top of the agency trying to get the director, Gina Haspel, to resign.  Mercifully, that effort also failed as Pence and WH counsel Pat Cipollone came to Haspel’s defense.  Switching tactics, Trump then installed a Nunes staffer and Trump loyalist, Michael Ellis, to the general counsel position at the NSA, a position difficult to terminate by the new administration.  In an appropriate end to his short career, Ellis resigned in April after he had been sidelined by an IG investigation into his role in the handling of classified information and placed on indefinite leave.

It’s now just coming out that Trump’s DOJ tried to get the courts to unmask a Twitter user who had gotten under Devin Nunes skin with a parody account @NunesAlt.  Barr’s attorneys sought a grand jury subpoena of Twitter to reveal the user’s actual name, and Twitter had fought the subpoena until the demand was dropped after Biden took office.

These are just a few examples of the lengths to which Trump went in the waning days of his infestation to wreck as much of the government that he could, install loyalists as his spies, and punish his supporters’ enemies.  Luckily the actual public servants in these agencies kept their oaths to the Constitution, and repelled Trump’s attacks.  Next time (if there is a next time) we might not be so lucky.

Mother Jones published a leaked video yesterday of the head of Heritage Action, the activist affiliate of the Heritage Foundation, which acts as a propaganda delivery mechanism for Republicans while masquerading as a “non-partisan research organization”.  The Heritage Foundation’s “research” consists of twisting up facts in order to justify conclusions paid for by self serving right-wingers and businesses.  In the video, the head of Heritage Action is bragging to big donors, taking credit for drafting the voter suppression laws that have swiftly been passed in GOP controlled states all over the country.  Here’s the video:

This is how oligarchy works.  Wealthy donors get government to work for them by doing the work of politicians who’ve been corrupted.  The only difference between the Republicans (and their owners) and Russians is that they haven’t killed those who stand in their way (yet).

About an hour ago, House Republicans, on a chickenshit voice vote chose to oust Liz Cheney from leadership for her failure to embrace The Big Lie.  In doing so, they have chosen fealty to a criminal former president over the people they represent. In a fiery speech yesterday, and apparently again this morning, Cheney is unrepentant and continues to blast Republicans for their embrace of Trump and his lies.  As you would expect, the caucus actually booed her.  That’s right, on the House side of the US Capitol, Republicans actually loudly booed one of their own as she chose to speak truth to lies.

When she came out of the meeting, Cheny told reporters that she was going to do “everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets near the Oval Office.” She went on to say, “We must go forward based on truth.  We cannot both embrace the big lie and embrace the Constitution.”

I’ve never liked Liz Cheney or her war criminal father; but in this particular case, I admire her strength and steadfast principles.  I don’t agree with most of her principles, but in this case she’s done the right thing, and I personally applaud her for it.