In a not at all shocking development, Ted Cruz is a grifter who once again did something shady to benefit himself while showing no remorse, respect for the law, or any interest besides enriching his own pockets or getting in front of a TV camera.

I know that’s a hell of a long run-on sentence but I am just so mad that I could spit.

We have all seen this grift before. It’s an absolute cottage industry in the world of Boring Books Conservatives Didn’t Even Write by Themselves. They find a publisher to give them a big advance, and they put out a book. Next, their Super PAC, full of anonymous donations, buys about 50,000 – 100,000 copies of the book. This helps the sumbitch in several ways.

One: For conservatives to believe that their ideas are more mainstream than they actually are by getting the book on some bestseller lists. Fortunately, the New York Times now puts a dagger symbol to denote that the book is only a best seller because of bulk buys like this. Recently, Donny Jr and other conservatives have gotten many social media views with “PROOF THAT NYT IS A LIBERAL RAG THAT HATES CONSERVATIVES.”

Two: The money used to purchase 50,000 -100,000 copies of Fled Cruz’s books has now been laundered. Of course, the publisher has to withhold royalties from these book sales, or they have to at least publicly say that they do. But Ted Cruz is no idiot. A charlatan? Yes. Idiot? No.

Instead, his PAC, using donated funds, purchased “sponsorship advertising” from a company called Reagan Investments, LLC. Reagan Investments, LLC, then purchased his books with those same dollars, netting him his 15% royalties, and effectively laundering political donations into his pocket. How do I know for sure? Well, they wrote “BOOKS” under the “sponsorship advertising” part when transmitting the money. Here’s the full article: Now Ted Cruz may be buying his own books through a mystery company | Salon.com

Are you with me?

Cruz puts out book —-> Voters and Anonymous people give Cruz millions in a PAC ———-> Cruz gives the PAC money to Reagan Investments ———> Reagan Investments buys books, and since they aren’t a PAC the publisher doesn’t have to withhold royalties ——> Cruz personally pockets 15% off the top.

But yall, that isn’t even what this complaint is about. There’s more.

In a completely separate grift, this sumbitch spent campaign dollars on at least $18,000 in Facebook ads urging his supporters to go buy his book. There’s no ability to trace how much campaign money he spent on other ads because that’s not available to the public. So he takes $18,000 in campaign money, runs ads for people to buy his book, and each dupe that buys it nets another 15% back into his pocket which is a violation of FEC rules. 

Of course, nothing will happen because he’ll use his campaign money to pay for a big fancy lawyer and his good ole’ boy buddies way up high will get him out of trouble because even though they hate him as much as we do, they all do the same thing and they like the system the way it is.

It’s hard to explain, of course. But do you know what happens when you piss off a broad with a nice tall glass of sweet tea, steel-toed boots and a love for graphic design? Infographics.  You get infographics.

Matt Gaetz is spinning so fast he’s going to fall down.  After deny, deny, deny didn’t work, he’s now saying that the DOJ investigation into sex trafficking and crossing state lines with a minor for sex is all a Democratic plot to take him down.  The little detail he left out?  The investigation was begun last year when Trump and Bill Barr were still in office.  Oops.  Oh, and it gets worse.  While Gaetz continues to dig a deeper hole for himself, the NY Times is reporting that he had petitioned the Trump WH for a blanket preemptive pardon for himself a some unnamed associates for crimes they may have committed during his term in office.  Mercifully, WH counsel determined that request to be a non-starter.  Apparently, he did not disclose to the WH that he was under federal investigation at the time of the pardon request.  Oops, again.

Louis DeJoy, Trump’s appointee to Postmaster General is pretty much the last person who should be in that position except for maybe Screwy Louis Gohmert, who has his own issues.  Here’s why:

• DeJoy is a GOP mega donor and fundraiser, and in recent years gave $1.2 million to Trump’s campaign and $1.3 million to the RNC.  His wife is also a big donor and was state finance chair for GWB in North Carolina.  She landed the US ambassadorship to Estonia for her contributions during that time.
• DeJoy has serious conflicts with the Post Office.  He is heavily invested in businesses that compete with the Post Office, holding as much as $75 million in the stock of competitors, one in particular being the company that bought his own logistics company for over $600 million.
• DeJoy is being investigated for possible illegal political donations where he extracted large donations to Republicans from his employees, then reimbursed them through bonuses.

So it’s no surprise that he’s under fire after being nominated by Trump and then confirmed by a board of governors that is dominated by Trump appointees.  Historically, the Post Office was strictly non-partisan, including the board of governors, since it served all Americans.  In recent years, though, boards have been hyper-partisan, including the FEC and others.  Not to be naive, many mega donors are given cush positions in both Dem and Repub administrations after writing big checks; they get ambassadorships, committee seats, even cabinet positions, BUT, and it’s a big BUT, they all go away when their President vacates the WH.  Hence the problem.  Trump attempted, and in the case of DeJoy succeeded, in appointing partisan supporters to permanent staff positions.

Let’s be honest here; the Post Office has been a target for privatization by Republicans for decades.  Where else could you find a multi-billion market that has over 300 million Americans held hostage to it?  The independence of the Post Office has been whittled away for years, and the last nail in the coffin was driven in 2006 when the Congress required it to pre-fund 75 years of retiree health obligations.  There was no reason to do that except to make it permanently lose money so Republicans could demand that it be privatized to fix it after they broke it.

The problem here is that demanding that the Post Office be cashflow positive is just as silly as demanding that the defense department turn a profit.  It’s not set up that way.  Unlike Fedex and UPS, the Post Office is mandated to serve ALL Americans, which include those in sparsely populated areas of the country.  In fact, if you order anything delivered by Fedex or UPS and you live in a rural area, it’s most likely the Post Office will deliver that package.  Just try to drop off a Fedex package in Valentine Texas, population 217.  You can mail it, but you can’t Fedex it without driving over 35 miles to Van Horn.  Why?  Fedex can’t make money having a presence in Valentine.  The Post Office doesn’t (and shouldn’t) have that luxury.  The amazing thing, though, is that Valentine, and much of rural Texas, is serious Trump country.  They rabidly support the guy and his party who’s actively sabotaging their way of life.  Go figure.

The worst part of DeJoy being postmaster general is that he’s actively sabotaging the Post Office.  During the election, he slashed spending, shortened hours, took out sorting machines in busy hubs, and slashed personnel.  Add that to the challenges of the COVID outbreak, and within 3 months the Post Office was delivering over 80% of the mail late, much not at all.  Millions of packages were delayed, destroyed, or just plain lost.  I believe this effort was to undermine confidence in mail in voting, and in large part that worked.  Like many, I decided to return my mail in ballot and vote in person to make sure my vote counted.

There’s simply no excuse for a radical partisan like DeJoy to be within 100 miles from the Post Office, much less running it while shooting the finger to the Congress.  He’s cemented in, though, until Biden can get enough governors on the board to fire him.  That’s not good enough.  DeJoy should be immediately removed for conflicts of interest and gross mismanagement.  The fact that Biden (who, unlike Trump, plays by the rules) can’t fix this problem shows just how broken our government is, and it’s long past time to fix it.

That’s right, folks, even as Greg Magical Thinking Abbott proclaimed the Coronavirus pandemic over and rescinded all statewide restrictions, the pandemic continues to rage and continues to take lives.   Our positivity rate is 13.5% this week, nearly triple the rate the CDC recommends before opening.  On top of that, Texas ranks 48th in vaccinations, with less than 7% of Texans vaccinated.  The positivity rate now is about the same as last October when the pandemic was beginning its holiday spike that killed thousands of Texans.  What Abbott is doing is stupid.  The real tragedy is that he’s smart enough to know it’s stupid, but having now lost a lot of the center after letting millions of Texans freeze in the dark, his only path to keeping his job next year is to take the Trump path, whip up the extreme right mouthbreathers.

This is classic right-winger response to crises, just like the Great Blackout of 2021 – break the system, make sure it doesn’t function properly, take huge risks while falsely boasting about how great we are, don’t do anything when obvious problems show themselves, then pretend it’s someone else’s fault and throw a staffer under the bus when the system fails.  During the blackout, Abbott threw wind farms, the PUC, and ERCOT all under the bus even though the responsibility for the disaster lay right in his lap and that of the state legislature.

Everyone needs to brace for the next big wave that is certain to come, extending the misery in Texas even longer. Texas’ response to the pandemic has been nothing more than piss-poor.  For comparison, let’s look at a country with similar populations with much better results: Taiwan.  Texas has 29 million people.  Taiwan, 24 million.  Deaths in Texas? 44,000.  Taiwan? 9.  That’s right, 9.  Taiwan did it right.  They never locked down, but implemented strong quarantine rules, contact tracing, and most important, PAID their people to stay home.  Like most of Europe, Taiwan took the financial stress out of the equation.  By contrast, Abbott and the idiots in the legislature added to people’s misery by providing little to no assistance.  He then re-opened the economy in May just as the pandemic was starting to rock.  Realizing his blunder in July, he then implemented stronger shut down measures and a statewide mandate, but kept the state purse strings tied tight.   The result was predictable.  Add Abbott’s blundering to Trump’s gross negligence and incompetence, and you get some of the worst COVID response on the planet.  Thanks for nothing.

Oh, and one last tidbit.  Abbott made this announcement from a Mexican restaurant in Lubbock which, by coincidence, is not connected to ERCOT and didn’t experience the blackouts most of Texas suffered.  Apparently the places in Texas he won’t get booed off the stage are getting a lot smaller.  Asshole.

Right now, I’m typing this on my iPad sitting in front of my fireplace in my house with no power, no heat, frozen pipes in one bathroom and wearing the warmest sweater I own.  I’m one of those 60% of  Houstonians who got randomly picked to not have power this week because some idiot arbitrarily made that decision. Oh, and yes, my next door neighbor does have power.  If you don’t have power and are looking for someone to blame for that condition, I have one question for you.  Who do you vote for on Election Day?  If your answer is Republicans, then my answer is to light a candle, walk into your iced up bathroom, hold up the candle to the mirror and look.  The person in the mirror is who’s responsible for you freezing in the dark.

There are three major power systems in the US – the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and…wait for it…Texas.  Why?  Texas didn’t want those big, bad, federal bureaucrats telling it what to do.  It’s been that way all the way back to WWII after the Federal Power Act was signed to provide regulation for interstate power transmission between states.  Under that act, all power that is transmitted over state lines had to conform with federal regulations for safety, measurement, and pricing.  Texas said no thanks to that, preferring to keep everything intrastate and telling surrounding states to kiss our big red butt.   The big NY blackout in 1962 provided more impetus for Texas to emphasize that independence, forming ERCOT in 1965.  Ironically, that acronym stands for Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is most certainly not.

During the deregulation craze of the late ‘90s, the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) issued several rules, including Rule 2000, which provided for the deregulation of the production, transmission, trading, and selling of electricity.  ERCOT took that opportunity to go full “free market” becoming a hub for trading, selling, and buying electricity, designing a system that brought IPPs (independent power producers), local utilities, and industrial customers together.  The problem?  No one was put in charge or held accountable for reliability.  All that works fine in normal times, but in weather events, system upsets, and growth in demand, it’s perfectly set up for Fingerpoint City, which leads us to the clusterfuck that is the week of February 14, 2021.

A little information about how power is generated in Texas – about 50% of our power it generated by natural gas fired generation; 20% comes from coal; 20% from wind, 10% from nukes, and the rest from other renewables including solar, which is only about 1%, which, in my opinion, is unacceptably low.   Also, the Texas Public Utility Commission, which has been a Republican lap dog for decades, has rules that are not enforced.  For example, we’re supposed to have 15% excess capacity for peak demand, but they NEVER enforce that requirement.  In fact, that number has hovered in the 7 to 8% for YEARS.  Worse, we had a wake up call in 2011 when we had a big freeze.  The problem is that ERCOT, Perry, and Abbott have all ignored that wake up call, increasing demand and reliability issues.  Add that to Texas silly anti-federal government dogma, and you get this slow motion disaster that we’re all living.

Abbott woke up from his stupid coma today, and declared that “reforming” ERCOT is now on his emergency legislative agenda for this session.  That’s a laugh, since his last “emergencies” were non-existent voter fraud claims and fretting over who uses which public bathrooms.

Abbott’s had his chance, Perry before him, as has the TXLeg which has been populated by mouth breathers and morons for two decades.  Texas, just like the federal government, can’t survive without an actual functioning government.  Abbott has gotten away for way too long with his cavalier “let them eat cake” strategy.  His cynical “local control until I disagree” strategy hasn’t worked and will never work.  Abbott, Patrick, and all the mouthbreathers and morons have had control long enough.  Texas deserves better.  We deserve a government with adult supervision run by leaders who focus on reliable power, stable government, dependable healthcare, and appropriate education, not the libertarian fever dream that Texas has become.

Impeach Abbott.  Impeach Patrick.  Vote the rest of the bums out.  Maybe millions of Texans spending a week freezing in the dark might just change their votes.

The Washington Post is reporting that the Army has lied for two weeks that Lt. General Charles Flynn, brother to disgraced and pardoned felon Mike Flynn was involved in the calls from Capitol Hill Police for help to repel the insurrection of Trump’s criminals who attempted to overthrow the government on January 6th.  The Pentagon has now confirmed that Flynn’s brother was indeed in on the calls, and he is now denying that he influenced the decision to delay National Guard response.  Sure.  That’s believable.