This is local stuff but it’s kinda fun.  What makes it fun is that the Tea Party made a mess of things in city government.  I have not hung up my professional big time media investigative skills and it paid off.

The fine city of Rosenberg is having a municipal election.

Over to the right you have a list of the single member district slots that are up for election.

You will notice that all slots have two candidates but District 3 has three candidates.  That means that if no candidate in that race gets more than 50% of the vote, we have to have a run off and run offs cost money.  I know you cannot put a price on democracy and I would be the first to shout that, but this case is kinda unusual.

Let me tell you why.

In that race, candidates Lisa and Joe are moderate Republicans. So, a local rightwing Republican precinct chair and current member of city council goes out to recruit a Tea Party candidate.  He finds Sergio J. Villagomez.  All the Tea Party is just wild about Sergio because, and I am quoting one of them here, “He’s all about liberty!”

Liberty.

Well, I guess so.  If you click right here, you will find a PDF showing that Sergio was arrested for possession of drugs in a school zone in 2004 and placed on probation.  In 2008, Sergio violated that probation and was sent to the pokey.  I do not know what he did to violate that probation but it must have been a doozy.  Liberty, for sure.

When you run for office you sign a statement saying that you are eligible to run for that office, which is amusing since Section 141 of the Texas Election Code says —

… have not been finally convicted of a felony from which the person has not been pardoned or otherwise released from the resulting disabilities;

A nice person I know informed Mr. Villagomez that he was not eligible to run for office in Texas until he gets a pardon, which may be forthcoming since Mr. Villagomez proudly voted in the Republican primary in 2014 so I imagine he’s on Governor Abbott’s screen.

While Mr. Villagomez can vote, he cannot run for public office.

Now here’s where this gets funny.  We didn’t discover this information until it was too late to have Villagomez’s name removed from the ballot.  That means that if one of the other candidates doesn’t get at least 50% of the vote, we have to have a run off because … Liberty.

This run off will cost the city money.  I personally think that since the Tea Party is all about the government saving money, they should pay the thousands of dollars this will cost.  That only seems fair.  They broke it, they should fix it.

And this is what I do with my time.  Holy cow, it’s great to be me.

There’s some real fun stuff happening with Indiana’s Don’t Feed The Gays law.

Best line all morning: A pizza parlor said they would not cater gay weddings.  Robert S. replied on their Yelp! page, “in all my queer life, I’ve never known a gay to cater their wedding with pizza.”

And then there’s Sean Hannity and Dinesh D’Souza discussing the issue.  Yeah, sure.  I really want to know what a convicted felon and a slickosexual think about this issue.  And they do not disappoint.

Duck!  Incoming Sharia Law!

Hannity speaketh —

“Gays and lesbians, they might disagree with me on gay marriage, or they might disagree with somebody — a religious person as it relates to their Christian views, but why are they so silent on the bigger issues of the day, which would be taking on radical Islamists?” Hannity asked, noting that gay people and women are mistreated under Sharia Law.

Wait, no Benghazi?  Sean is losing his touch.  A few years ago, he could have tied Benghazi, Hillary’s emails, and Obamacare to gay marriage.

The fella is slipping.  But Mike Pence comes to his rescue.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence swung back again Monday at critics of the state’s controversial “religious freedom” law, writing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that Obamacare had made it imperative to ensure that “religious liberty is fully protected under Indiana law.”

Yep, Obamacare.

Thanks to Belle and Scott for the heads up.

It will certainly come as no surprise to you that Indiana has had an “unexpected” outbreak of HIV.

Scott County, Indiana, the center of an exploding HIV outbreak, has been without an HIV testing center since early 2013, when the sole provider — a Planned Parenthood clinic — was forced to close its doors. The clinic did not offer abortion services.

The Scott County clinic and four other Planned Parenthood facilities in the state, all of which provided HIV testing and information, have shuttered since 2011, in large part due to funding cuts to the state’s public health infrastructure.

Appropriately enough, Mike Pence pushed legislation while he was in congress to defund Planned Parenthood.

Now where are those death panels Republicans were always talking about?

Sumbitches.

Thanks to Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen for the heads up.

Y’all, you knew it was just a matter of time.

INDIANAPOLIS – Paperwork for the First Church of Cannabis Inc. was filed Thursday – the same day Gov. Mike Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law.

Church founder Bill Levin, who filed paperwork with the Secretary of State’s office to register the church as a non-profit, posted to his Facebook page that church and its “cannataerians” would seek “love, understanding and good health.”

Thelma’s church, Our Lady of Perpetual Virginity, also wants to open a branch in Indiana.  I think it’s semi-important to say that Thelma’s church here used to have a member but then she attended a VFW dance and … well, let’s just say she no longer qualifies for membership.  And Dirt Janochek is a member but hardly qualifies since (1) he ain’t a damn virgin and, (2) not getting laid often enough is not the same as virginity.

Anyway, I wish the folks at the new church in Indiana lots of love, understanding and good health.

I suspect if you’ve ever been here before you know that there are two groups of people who own the shiver to my spine:  developers and political consultants.

We’re gonna talk about political consultants today.  I don’t like ‘um and always will.

It seems like every time I turn around some Republican political consultant is getting in trouble.  This month it’s a mess in Colorado where a political consultant literally broke every one of the Ten Commandments at once.

The political consultant appointed last year by the Colorado Republican Party to run its independent expenditure committee pleaded guilty last week to illegally coordinating contributions between a political action committee he ran and a campaign he managed in a 2012 congressional race in Virginia.

If this consultant put even half as much thought into curing insomnia as he did moving this money around to benefit himself, the whole damn country would get a good night’s sleep.  But no, we have to stay awake to fret about one Republican stealing from another Republican.  No, wait.  That’ a good thing, right?

So here you have the party of greed and un-virtuous morality being baffled that they cannot trust each other.

Bless their hearts.

Thanks to Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen for the heads up.