Steven F. Hotze is a medical doctor in Houston who makes Ron Paul look liberal and sane.  He’s the evangelical minister of medicine. He practices a kind of magic medicine where no actual science is involved.  When the COVID epidemic started he announced it was no worse than the flu and if you’d come to his wellness clinic you won’t get it.

When people staring dying, he countered with the well known and highly understated fact that some people die of the flu.  He sells books and lotions and cures and all manner of crazy. But he keeps his medical license.  He is a major rightwing political activist, too.

He was totally convince that Democrats were stealing elections. So, he started his own investigation. First he hires a retired cop named Mark Aguirre to snoop around.

Aguirre becomes convinced that there’s a guy hauling off ballots in an air conditioning repairman van.  So, in mid December of 2020, he purposefully rear ends the guy at 5:00 am one morning, pulls a gun on him, makes a citizens arrest, and then proceeds to search the back of his van where, tada!, he finds air conditioning repairman tools.

Hotze funded the operation through his group called Liberty Center for God and Country, paying Aguirre — a disgraced former police captain fired in 2003 — more than $266,000 for his efforts.

Aguirre had arranged for some of his friends to drive up and witness this moment of rightwing glory, when an HPD officer pulled over to see what was going on. The driver is fine and most of the city almost drank every bar in town down to the last drop with spectacular schadenfreude.  Of course the guy is suing and criminal charges were filed against Aguirre. You can read about the whole horrifying event here.

Hotze’s attorneys long have claimed Hotze was unaware of the encounter between Aguirre and the repairman until he saw it on the news after the episode.

But then, something pretty cool happened earlier this week. It became known that —

Two days before a private investigator looking into a voter fraud conspiracy theory smashed into an air conditioning repairman’s truck and pulled a gun on him, far-right activist Steven Hotze called then-U.S. Attorney Ryan Patrick and told him about the plans to have “a wreck,” court documents show.

The US Attorney recorded the call.  Hotze was asking for US Marshalls to help with the stop. Hotze then went into detail about the rear ending and the US Attorney said he had another call and hung up.

Last Friday, a Harris County Grand Jury indicted Hotze on charges of unlawful restraint and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Another damning piece of information?  Hotze wrote the check for $266,000 two days after this incident. So, ya know, he had to know about the rear ending when he wrote the check, right? Hell, it was all over the news.

Okay, so I have a real problem with all these people who let Trump act like a banana chomping dictator who put three generational-lasting tools on the Supreme Court while they knew full well that Trump was insane and wanted to get us all killed.

And the first time they open their mouths about it is when they think they could make a damn dime off writing a book.  The towers of whiney little self-important twits started with Bob Woodward and then the latest – and there’s bunches in between – is Mark Esper.

Esper’s tell all for some dollars book could make your spine replace an ice machine with Trump’s ideas of smart use for the military, all of which are unconstitutional. You know what ought to be unconstitutional? Covering for a president who wants to shoot protestors or bomb Mexico.

Why the fool tarnation didn’t you guys tell us this stuff while he was president?  Oh, they come up with a collective conditioning rinse of “I would get fired and the person after me could be worse.” No, you are worse. You. You are the bottom of the barrel of worse. You should be fired. And maybe shot.

Trump’s answer to Esper?

“Mark Esper was weak and totally ineffective, and because of it, I had to run the military. I took out ISIS, Qasem Soleimani, al-Baghdadi, rebuilt the military with $2.5 trillion, created Space Force, and so much more.”

Looking at the level of courage Esper had, Trump might be right. I dunno.

I’m sick of all of them. And I’m not even counting the guys who knew damn well that Trump was going to try to overthrow the government with violence. Oh, there’s a special place in hell for those guys.

Okay, I’ll try to calm down.

Or maybe not.

Honey, he may be finished with the Federal Elections Commission , but they ain’t finished with him.

.

See, here’s the deal: when you finish being a congressman, you can’t just take any money you have left in your campaign account and have a party. There’s rules about this stuff.

For those of you who lost track of Louie Gohmert, he got tired of being a congressman and decided he wanted to be attorney general of Texas. Best I can recall, four Republicans ran in that primary and Louie came in fifth.

Nah, I just made that up.

He came in fourth.

But, it was a cliff hanger for fifth place most of the night.

So, we have a winner in the Indiana Republican primary …

A Lebanon man accused of killing his wife in March and dumping her body in a creek is among the candidates to advance in a local election after Indiana’s primaries Tuesday.

Andrew Wilhoite, who’s suspected of fatally striking his wife with a gallon-sized concrete flower pot, secured a spot Tuesday as one of three Republican candidates in the race for a seat on the Clinton Township Board.

And then the next day he dumped her lifeless body off the side of a bridge. Wanna hate him some more? She had just completed her last chemotherapy.

Keep in mind that Republicans knew this before they voted. It happened in March and .

Here’s my question.  What the hell did the other two Republican primary candidates do that made Republican voters prefer a wife killer?  Suggest that Donald Trump couldn’t beat Abraham Lincoln at Wordle?

The number one comment this week has been a rebuke of sorts. It seems I still hold onto my faith in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary. Oddly enough it seems in these moments when people are the least kind that is when faith is the strongest and most necessary.

The conundrum comes when it is those people of faith that are the most cruel. I harken back to a religious counseling class I took when I was getting my masters degree. The whole idea of the course was to be able to speak a common language no matter who your client was and what religious background they came from. A large part of talking through issues like abortion is speaking a common language.

I’ve heard a number of defenses of the pro-choice point of view and one main defense of the pro-birth position. Until you can interpret and mimic that language it will be next to impossible to convince anyone of a position. Even then you are fighting an uphill battle. It is much like the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelites. There is only one that can control their holy land and it is both of their holy lands.

In order for a moral law to exist, it has to exist universally. The preservation of life is a moral law and yet is not universally followed in all circumstances. Freedom of choice is a universal law in the social structure of our society. Yet it is not followed in all circumstances. Here you get the ultimate collision of moral laws. Which one wins out in the end?

Is life universal when someone goes to bed without a warm meal? Is life universal when they have to lay their head down on the cold concrete of the street? Is life universal when they have committed the most egregious acts our mind can imagine? Is life universal when cancer ravages their body and they have no insurance? Whatever the source of our morality, that morality demands some consistency.

Similarly, is choice universal when someone makes a choice we disapprove of? Is choice universal when one or more of those choices could become dangerous to those around us? Can the pursuit of one’s happiness infringe on the rights of someone else? In the spaces between our intellect, our most animal urges, and conscience, we find the logical limitations of life and choice. It is in these places where our collective cultural language and traditions seemingly take over. It is in these places where agreement and understanding are the most necessary. It is in these places where our sacred honor has left us.

As you know, it was been disproven that The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), has diddle squat to do with either electric or reliability. Winter before last, most of Texas suffered below freezing temperatures for 3 to 5 days without electricity.

I know you yankee people are snorting and giggling, but Honey I don’t even own a heavy coat. I have a sweatshirt and a couple of sweaters.  That’s it.

You know how many coats you own? That’s how much air conditioning I own.  At least for now.  Scorch is coming to Texas.

That’s a little toasty for mid May.

So EPCOT is so busy butt covering that their friction alone is raising the temperature 3 degrees.

ERCOT said in a statement Tuesday evening they will “deploy all the tools available to us to manage the grid reliably.”

ERCOT said they are coordinating with the Public Utility Commission, generation resource owners and transmission utilities to ensure they are prepared for the extreme heat.

Yep, that’s exactly what they said before the freeze.

Greg Abbott knows that even 5 hours without electricity during a heat wave will cost him the election, so I suspect he’s bought a bunch of new hamsters to turn the wheel.