I know y’all have had a very hard time forgetting Ken Cuccinelli and now that you’re like 80% over him, I’m gonna push you back to square one.

Cuccinelli was Acting Director of Homeland Security under Trump because everybody knew he could never pass senate confirmation, mainly because he’s a far right weirdo. In 2020 a federal judge ruled that he was illegally acting as acting director which didn’t even seem weird under Trump because so damn many people were acting at some damn thing.

Well, he’s back.  Now he’s a lawyer.

Okay, remember back in February when Louie Gohmert of Texas and Andrew Clyde of Georgia were both fined $5,000 because they tried to enter the House chamber without going through a security check?  Well, they have decided to appeal it.  No, seriously.

So, they have hired Ken Cuccinelli. Well, in all honestly, I use they term “they” very loosely. Although they both hired him, only Clyde has paid for it.

Louie hasn’t paid his share yet and, gee, he probably never will.  He’s well known as the biggest moocher in Washington.

This will be a fun one to watch.

Now, here’s the fun part.  I wonder if either Cuccinelli or Clyde has realized that they just made Cuccinelli’s home address a part of the public record?  Hell, a fifth grader can now take a picture tour of both the inside and outside of the Cuccinelli home. I’m sure you can figure it out for yourself.

And this guy was Acting Director of Homeland Security.  Dude, if you’re going to work out of your house, get a post office box.

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.

We’ve covered this ground before, but three separate incidents this week came together in my mind to solidify one point. Essentially, the pro gun crowd loves to separate people into a good guy with a gun as opposed to a bad guy with a gun. Supposedly, the good guy with the gun will negate the bad guy with the gun.

Well, I was perusing through HEB the other day and minding my own business (a personal favorite phrase of mine) when I strolled down the periodicals aisle. I noticed eight different magazines dedicated to guns and ammo. That was more than fashion magazines. It was more than the football, basketball, and baseball magazines. It was more than the bridal magazines. It was more than the Texas themed magazines or magazines about food. Apparently, guns are more popular than just about anything else.

While it wasn’t immediately related, I thought to our experience this past weekend an earlier in the week. My wife’s cousin came down to vacation in Galveston. We are only 30 miles away, so we decided to join them for a “quick” dinner. We left the house with plenty of time to spare. An hour and a half later we had travelled three miles.

The same thing happened when we took our daughter to a summer camp. The same thing happened on a different highway when we returned. The delays weren’t as heinous, but the fact that they were occurring on three different highways and different points of the highway was telling.

The coup de grace came when her cousin (we will call him Eugene) announced at dinner that he had built his own AR-15. Eugene is what you might call a computer geek. He has always been socially awkward. He also bragged that he had not connected with one target since he had gone out target shooting with his work friends. Yup, he’s the guy I want having an AR-15.

This isn’t to say I would perform any better. It never occurred to me to try. We’ve discussed abortion in the salon. We’ve discussed voting rights in the salon. We have also discussed guns in the salon. It took my wife’s cousin Eugene to crystallize the slogan we need moving forward. Yes, there are bad people with guns. Yes, there are good people with guns. Unfortunately, there are also idiots with guns.

Eugene is not an idiot in the literal sense. He is somewhat educated and has a professional job. He’s an idiot because he has no idea how to use a gun or how dangerous they can be. His reasoning for doing it is also idiotic. It’s not about protection, sport, or even hobby collection. He wants to belong. He wants other men to see him as manly. The sad thing is that possessing that AR-15 doesn’t change anyone’s opinion. It just makes him seem more pathetic.

In a similar way, posturing about guns, walls, bathroom bills, and voter suppression laws don’t make Greg Abbott seem like a stronger leader. Fixing our roads, schools, and energy grid would do that. Yet, here we are in crumbling schools, inadequate roads, with promises of a useless border wall. It isn’t even so much that he wants all these stupid things. It is that he wants them before fixing the stuff actually broken. We might freeze to death next winter but at least Eugene will have his AR-15 to keep him warm at night.

The National Center for Health Studies just issued it’s life expectancy report for 2020.  Not surprisingly, life expectancy in the US fell in 2020 fueled by COVID-19 deaths.  The shocking thing is how much in fell, by 1.5 years from 2019, from 78.8 to 77.3 years.  75% of those deaths were directly attributable to COVID-19.  This is the largest single year drop in US life expectancy since WWII. Trump’s incompetence, repeated all over the country by Trump Mini Me governors, caused millions of unnecessary infections and hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.  The US has 4% of global population, but over 20% of COVID infections and deaths.

There’s simply no excuse for it, but the predictable result of the election of incompetents to high office.  Electing Donald Trump to the presidency was the single largest mistake made by voters in our entire history, and we have paid for it in treasure and deaths; even worse, we will continue to pay for this bumbling for generations to come.

The FBI arrested Thomas Barrack today, who is a 30-year ally of Trump and chairman of his inaugural committee.  They got him on lobbying for the UAE without reporting it, then lying to the FBI about it.  The cover up is always worse than the original crime.  Apparently the indictment is well documented and damning.  They’ve got Trump on tape repeating Barrack’s rewrite of his speech about stopping Middle East terrorism (which was just a cover for filling Barrack’s pockets).

This one is going to be good, and signals that the DOJ is getting closer and closer to His Orangeness.

Huh. Well, you can’t just believe everything you read on Twitter. I’m going to fact check this. It is far too ridiculous to assume that this is true. I mean, we all know they’re racists and they know we know that they know we know but they don’t think that we have any real proof because to them it isn’t racist if you don’t say the N word out loud. So they certainly wouldn’t, just a few weeks after Juneteenth, suggest that teachers must not tell their students that the KKK is morally wrong.

Anyway, I found a Huffpost link that links directly to the bill. So here’s the bill, hosted at capitol.texas.gov. 

Sure enough, “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong” is listed under things teachers “may not” do.

Since I started writing, they’ve removed the offensive language. It was absolutely true – they wanted our civics classes to NOT provide the context of racism when discussing the KKK. Which is like trying to discuss the composition of water without mentioning the two Hydrogen atoms.

Left in the bill is something just as ridiculous, just in case you thought this improvement made it better:

 

an individual, by virtue of the individual ’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;**

an individual should feel discomfort,
guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual ’s race or sex;

It all comes down to the poor snowflakes who can’t stand to learn the facts: an economic system based on race-based slavery inescapable by birth was perpetrated by people with the same skin color as them. I’m not sure why the state of Texas wants children to be taught that their actions won’t have any impact on future generations since they clearly want to teach that the actions of the past have no effect on our current situation. Generational poverty, racism, and oppression? Naah, throw that out and pull yourself up by your bootstraps!

I find it blatantly hypocritical that they’re giving the teachers the ability to tell children the facts of what happened but forcing them to not talk about any type of shame or guilt that a child might feel over what their ancestors did, and yet they didn’t want those same teachers the room to teach the context of what the racists did and why they did it. This is the same reason half of the deep south believes with all their hearts (bless them) that the civil war was fought over state rights.

Recently, I discovered a newspaper article where my husband’s 3rd great grandfather was named as a stop on the Underground Railroad. I showed the genealogical evidence to my husband and children and they were all proud and happy that they come from a long line of abolitionists. We have no slaveholders in our history. We have no more control over that than anyone else and who they are born to, yet I feel pride in these facts.

Either way, let’s leave education up to the educators and allow them to teach context where it is appropriate.

In the 10th grade, my history teacher taught me that slaves were better off with their “masters” because they had nowhere to go when they were freed. That’s a statement that was missing a LOT of context. Funny that the Texas legislature never made sure teachers didn’t teach that to their students.