Y’all, Glenn Beck is hinting that something pretty damn colossal and important is fixing to happen.

And he needs you to pray for him.

I beg you for your prayers because I will pray for you and you please pray for me, because this is the time. This comes every 70 years, there is a time when giants are made. And I don’t know if they’ll ever remember any of our names. What I know is at some point, I am going to be standing in front of God himself and I demand of myself that he says ‘job well done.’

Giants?  Honey, I do not know what comes every 70 years but I’m hoping for Beck’s sake that it has something to do with mental health.

I looked up what happened in the summer of 1945 and I seriously doubt there’s another Potsdam’s conference happening this year or that we’ll whip Japan again.  However, the Cardinals broke a 29 game losing streak that year, so that’s a possibility.

I disagree with the President.

I am against the TPP.  Paul Krugman, my pretend boyfriend, says it’s not as bad as labor suspects but it’s not all that good either.

And you have to wonder why the President would break with his base at a time when Democrats need to tend to their base more than ever.

I have heard some spirited takedowns of the TPP but the President has yet to give me a reason to support it.  Am I missing something?

I know this ain’t funny, but making global free trade funny is harder than it looks.

Texas Democrats in the state house are subjected to all manner of conspiracy theories and science fiction.  Bless their hearts, for the most part they have been kind and kept their noses to the grindstone.

But every now and then, they just lose it.

Joe Pickett, a Democrat from El Paso wanted to give the security detail at the Federal Reserve Bank limited power to arrest people.  You know, bad guys who might try to steal our federal reserve.

Republican Rep. Jon Strickland of Bedford was having none of that because, you know, it’s the FED!  We don’t like the fed and we certainly don’t want to give them arrest powers.

So, Strickland drew him a picture.

Thanks to Larry for the heads up.

 Oh yeah, it gets better.  Through the miracle of modern journalism, we can bring you a report from cub reporter Glen Maxey in the actual capitol of the actual state of Texas and saw all this stuff.

Check the comments from Glen in the appropriately named “comments” section.

There’s even a spiffy YouTube of Pickett whacking Stickland a second time.

Lesson of the day:  do not needlessly hack off the chairman of a committee where you have a bill pending.  Addendum to Lesson of the Day:  do not commit a felony to make your bill look popular.  

Thelma says those two need to kiss and make up.  I imagine that asses will be involved.

The whole story is here.

I know that being on the security detail of Mitch McConnell or John Boehner has to be where the chief of security sends you because we don’t have gulags in Siberia, but holy cow guys, don’t try to quit by leaving your weapon in the toilet.

When a member of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s security detail left his Glock and magazine stuffed in the toilet seat cover holder of a Capitol Visitor Center bathroom stall, a CVC worker found the gun, according to a source familiar with the Jan. 29 incident and two other disturbing instances when Capitol Police left loaded firearms in problematic places.

Boehner’s security detail did the same thing.

A member of the security detail for John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, allegedly left the firearm in the bathroom of the Speaker’s Suite on March 24.

Y’all unless Clemenza is hiding guns for Michael Corleone to shoot Sollozzo and McCluskey, I can’t see any good reason  for this to be happening.

By the way, the first Glock was found by a 7 or 8 year old boy visiting the capitol with his parents.

Thanks to Maggie for the heads up.

By Primo Encarnación y Hachecristo

Those of us of a certain age remember well the counter-culture caveat “Question Authority.” The concept is in no way new: it is the basis of empiricism and baby-daddy to the Enlightenment. But in modern political terms, the toppling of the most powerful nutcase in the world, Richard Nixon, horrified the authoritarians in America and, since then, they have whispered soothingly to the “silent majority” to stay silent. “Relax. We got this,” they coo. “Vote for us, and you’ll never have to think hard again.”

Or, really, start thinking in the first place.

Authoritarians leapt for joy when it turned out that all the authority questioners a.k.a. liberals were wrong, Wrong. WRONG! and owed a collective apology to everyone who knew right off the bat that Freddie Gray was a criminal who committed suicide in the paddy wagon, just to make the authorities look bad.

Hannity’s rage-gasm as the pro-authoritarian leak made its way into the lazy mainstream media is only the most egregious example of someone who is just fine leaving the thinking to his “betters,” so long as that thinking agrees with his prejudices. A rumor from authorities reprinted by the “liberal” media as “news” (as opposed to, you know, “fact”) is precisely the confirmation his bias needed to fully justify disconnecting his brain lo, these many years ago.

Confirmation bias – it’s mothers’ milk to the right wing nutjobs. Without it, not a one of them could get elected, and President Gore and his liberal Congress would have solved global warming a decade and a half ago.

When the WaPo leak came out, we liberals knew exactly how many holes there were in that particular story about suicide by paddy wagon. We questioned the motives of the leaker. We questioned the rigor of the reporter. We questioned the veracity of the witness account. We questioned the details of the leak. We questioned the plausibility of that wound happening in that manner.

We questioned authority.

And we were right to do so. The leaker’s beneficiaries are now defendants. The witness claims that was not what he heard, saw or said. The details of the leak were wrong. But the reporter, and Sean Hannity, still have jobs and fame and honor, as do so many other people who have lied us into war, lied us into climate catastrophe, lied us into insolvency, lied about Obamacare, lied about immigration, lied about poverty, lied, lied, lied, lied, lied and then lied some more.

But the comfort of non-logic, the peace of letting someone else do the thinking, the satisfaction of confirmation bias, the appeal to authority, so long as that authority tells us what we want to hear, has brought this country to the brink of madness and death.

Question authority. It’s our only chance.

Republicans in the Texas Senate just okayed a tax-free weekend on guns.

Yeah, guns.  Just what Texas needs – more guns.  We need gun to fend off the US Army, y’all.

We have tax-free weekends for school clothes and school supplies to help working families.  Now we have tax free gun weekends for … freedom.

The proposed tax break — which Creighton calls a Second Amendment tax holiday weekend — would come one week ahead of hunting season and one week before a similar weekend in Louisiana. Texas would lose $3.6 million per year in tax revenue under the proposed legislation, according to an estimate from the Legislative Budget Board.

Yes, $3.6 million.  We are second to last in education.  Our health care and treatment for mental illness is lower than dirt.  But we have $3.6 million to subsidize hunters.  And criminals.

Next will be a tax free weekend on yachts and golf clubs.

Thanks to Sam for the heads up.