I’ve run out of colloquialisms about how mad I am at the Texas Government. Y’all give me your best in the comments if you don’t mind me using them in the future. I’m madder than ….. (fill in the blank)

The Texas Observer ran this story. I’ll do my best to sum it up but y’all go read the details over there- it’s good work.

Let’s review the facts:

• Texas power grid fails and hundreds of Texans die
• Texans who live suffer billions of dollars in damage from broken pipes and water damage (My personal number was $3,544.00)
• Kelcy Warren’s company, Energy Transfer Partners, makes $2.4 Billion in that same week
• Greg Abbott assures Texans all that can be done to fix the grid is done (you be the judge – here’s what they did)
• Kelcy Warren donates a cool $1 million dollars to Greg Abbott’s re-election campaign.

I assumed it was some kind of violation of election finance law for any one person to donate such a huge sum to a campaign. I checked and sure enough, as of May 2015 an individual can make a donation of any amount to a campaign. (Who was governor in May of 2015? Greg Abbott).

The blatant corruption is exhausting. I’m more tired than a one-legged woman in an ass-kicking contest.

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.

Millions of Americans have known for decades that our government was broken, but I don’t think any of us realized just how badly is was broken.  The Trump infestation of the WH has exposed the manifest weaknesses in our system of government which cynical career politicians have exploited for personal and ideological gain.  When the Framers established our Constitution and supporting laws, the assumption was that that those who governed would uphold the public trust; if an elected official betrayed that trust, they provided a provision for impeachment and removal from office.  They didn’t envision a time that the majority of representatives would be abjectly corrupt.  We’re there.

The most shocking feature of the Trump regime is the amount of damage one president can inflict with virtually zero accountability.  In three short years, Trump took over the Republican party, the Congress, the courts, and even the Justice Department.  He has pardoned criminals, unilaterally withdrawn from longstanding treaties, started trade wars, attacked countries, disbanded entire agencies that blinded us to massive threats like the Coronavirus pandemic, has undone decades of environmental, education, employment, and safety regulations, wrecked dozens of alliances, sidled up to murderous dictators, and ceased funding global efforts that support healthcare, security, and human rights.  He illegally extorted a foreign leader for to damage a political opponent.  He is actively trying to whip up a scandal in the Obama administration which is invented from whole cloth with zero basis in fact.  He personally profits from his presidency on a daily basis, and makes public policy to advantage himself and his family.

Worse, anyone who gets in his way is either fired, slandered, or both.  He’s now fired an FBI director, two Attorneys General, and five Inspectors General.  He continues attempts to illegally out the whistleblower in the Ukrainian extortion effort.  His current AG is violating the public trust and the law by covering up major crimes and participating in smearing Trump’s political opponents by initiating “investigations” of non-existent crime. As he does this, he willfully ignores the tsunami of actual crimes being committed by Trump and his cronies.

How did we get here?  In a word, corruption.  The US is no longer a functioning democracy and the majority of our elected representatives no longer actually represent Americans.  Over the last 4 decades the money has gotten so big for congressmen and senators that making money has taken over from representation.  To avoid responsibility, congress has steadily ceded authority to the president.  For example, Article 1 of the Constitution specifically authorizes the CONGRESS to determine international trade policy, but for years that authority has been delegated to the president under “expedited” rules.   Trump has run wild with that authority, starting and inflaming global trade wars while the Congress (especially the Senate) just sits there doing nothing.  The Constitution also assigns authority to declare wars on other nations, but through legislation has also delegated that to the president, leading to never ending war and deadly attacks on other countries without so much as a “Go to hell” to the Congress.  It goes on and on, from selling off federal land to private interests to unwinding decades of environmental protections to shutting down agencies and engaging in abject corruption which lines the president’s and his children’s pockets with zero oversight.  Add all that to a now hands-off anything political judiciary and we don’t even remotely resemble the federal structure envisioned by the Framers.

The Framers designed a system of checks and balances to prevent rule by one branch and corruption.  Over the years all three branches have altered that design and what we now have is a zombie version of the federal system.  Add a profoundly corrupt president with evil enablers and you get what we see today, a president unilaterally wrecking the US government, the economy, the healthcare system, the federal safety net, anti-corruption legislation, international treaties, global alliances, and even the rule of law.

The system is broken.  Even when we rid ourselves of the Trump infestation, massive damage will have been done chances are remote that anyone left in authority will have incentive to fix it.  Yeah, it ain’t pretty.

Sometimes, the New York Times gets it wrong.  Take their unabashed support of GWB’s invasion of Iraq based on the blatant lie about Saddam’s possession of non-existent WMD.  In that case, the error was caused by poor or even dishonest reporting by individuals; in other cases it’s the Times’ effort to show “both sides” of an argument, even when there is actually only one side that is true.  Their problem, though, is that (especially with the current occupant of the White House) when there is no factual “other side” of an argument, they turn to opinion pieces manufactured by paid “analysts” at think tanks to present an alternative opinion, even when that opinion is either a blatant lie or twisted up exaggerations.  Such was the case this week when the Times published a remarkable piece of fiction written by a pair of fine fellows employed by the Hudson Institute, and The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Both of these think tanks claim to be non-partisan, but, just like the Heritage Foundation, nothing could be further from the truth.  Both organizations are part of the billionaire-funded cabal of right wing messaging shops peddling bullshit as scholarship.  The Hudson Institute casts itself as mainstream thought on domestic policy, but is funded by the Kochs and other right wingers; the FDD is a pro-Israel think tank started originally in the ’60s, but transformed after 9/11 into a hawkishly anti-Saudi Arabia/Iran mouthpiece.

The Times piece, published Wednesday, came to the remarkable conclusion that Trump (even though crude) is right on Saudi Arabia, over looking the butchering of Washington Post columnist Jamal Kashoggi because Saudi Arabia is the only thing standing between Iran and WWIII.  The piece is full of nothing but manure and whataboutism, even calling Trump’s defense of Saudi Arabia “clear-eyed and right”.  This piece actually tries to frame Trump’s wild thrashing about as actual foreign policy and strategy.  They go after the Obama administration’s Middle East policy in Iran and Syria and raise the ugly head of an unbridled Iran torching the region while pursuing nuclear weapons (which Trump just unleashed by backing out of the international Iranian nuclear pact).  They try to equate Trump’s political weaving like a drunkard to Obama’s clear policies.  You may disagree with those policies, but they were clearly actual policies based on academic and diplomatic work, not random tweeting while sitting on the toilet.

The most remarkable argument they make is that Trump’s tweet storms and ranting on television are somehow some thoughtful set of principles and policies.  That notion is simply laughable; Trump’s Train Wreck is as random as the weather, with the only common thread being his hyper focus on his own ego and financial gain.  NOTHING else matters, not Saudi Arabia, troops deployed around the world, healthcare, human rights, constitutional rights, or security.  NOTHING.  Trump’s support of MBS and Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with Iran or Middle East tensions any more than it has to do with the price of bagels in Brooklyn or wildfires in California.  Trump’s “policies”, if you want to call them that, are all about filling his ego and wallet and shoring up his base so he can keep filling his ego and wallet.

Along that vein, the authors of the Times piece fail to even mention Trump’s financial ties to the Saudi royal family, including it buying millions of dollars of apartments from the Trump Organization, pouring millions into Trump hotels, or even prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bailing Trump out in the mid-90s by buying a 51% interest in the Plaza Hotel making a debt restructuring possible, saving Trump’s financial ass.

Think tanks like the Hudson Institute and the FDD are nothing but propaganda outlets using the likes of Newt Gingrich and other right wing talking heads to peddle manure as filet mignon.  The Times does no good by giving such manure a megaphone just to project “balance” where no true balance actually exists.  The Times should be ashamed of itself.

Culberson is in serious trouble for the first time since he started his decades-long camping trip on Capitol Hill.  Culberson, known for being a smartass on social media and for his pet projects that do nothing for Houston, is being challenged by practicing attorney Lizzie Fletcher whose calm voice (completely devoid of nonsensical talking points) is giving Culberson a real run for his money.  Culberson is a horrible congressman who has not yet been held to account for killing mass transit funding, ignoring our massive flooding problems (until a good part of his own district went underwater during Harvey), taking money from special interests like the NRA and big pharma and voting for their profits rather than his constituents.

Welp, ol’ John got a wake-up call this time.  He’s finally realized that his idiotic support for Cheeto Jesus, and his own name brand deplorable ideas is not helping.  Fletcher has taken the fight right to Culberson, shaming him for his own lame record of pet projects, voting against FEMA funding and infrastructure projects.  She’s taken advantage of Trump’s unpopularity, successfully branding Culberson as a clueless partisan, completely out of touch with his own district.

Lizzie’s strategy is working.  Culberson is backing away from Trump so fast that he needs flashing lights and a beeper tied to his backside.  Perfect example – Trump is coming to Houston on Monday to infest the Toyota Center in support of Ted Cruz Grandpa Munster, and suddenly Culberson has an urgent need to attend a neighborhood meeting about flooding.  Culberson has been smeared with the filth of Trumpland, but his problem is that it won’t wash off.  Because of that, he’s trying to stay as far away from Trump as possible, while hurling invectives at Lizze like, “Lying Lizzie Fletcher”, and “Liberal Lizzie Fletcher” from dark money PACs trying to run interference for him.

Nothing cleans like sunlight.  Finally the Dems have a bright ray of sunlight in Lizzie Fletcher.  That’s why Culberson is cowering in the corner, afraid of his own record.  If nothing else, the entertainment value is pretty high.

UPDATE:

There has been a question from one of our readers about how a toad like Culberson can be re-elected so easily.  It’s called gerrymandering, which the Republicans have raised to an art form for the last 20 years.  Gerrymandering either packs minority or similarly situated groups into one district, or more often spreads them out to dilute their voting influence.  It’s classic voter suppression, taking away people’s Constitutional right to vote (or more accurately, makes voting useless).  Culberson’s 7th district is one of the worst gerrymandered districts in Texas:

This district dilutes the urban vote, which tends to lean Democratic, by a torturous path through distant suburbs and even rural areas.  According to fivethirtyeight.com, the 7th district gives the Republicans an 88% likelihood of winning.  On average Texas gerrymandering is designed to for R+10, which means to win, you have to beat the Republican by 10% to overcome the gerrymandering advantage.  Texas is one of the worst states for gerrymandering, born out of one-party rule and corruption since the late 1990s.

Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department announced on Monday that political advocacy groups like the NRA no longer need to report the sources of their money to the IRS.  This policy undoes a decades old regulation that shined a light on political non-profits and the source of their money.  Mnuchin said,

“Americans shouldn’t be required to send the IRS information that it doesn’t need to effectively enforce our tax laws, and the IRS simply does not need tax returns with donor names and addresses to do its job in this area.”

There is a place for anger, and THIS is it.