Since Dems went to DC to air their grievance over voter suppression laws, Texas Trump Republicans are twisting themselves into knots trying to vilify them.  There’s talk from everyone from Abbott down to Brisco Big Hat Cain talking about vacations, fundraising, “cushy private jets”, so on and so forth, but the one that takes the cake is Trump Republican strategist Corbin Casteel, who said, “[The Democrats are] walking out the door right when they have an opportunity to get their staff paid when they’ve been complaining about it.  It’s a double-edged sword. They may be able to hold off on the voter integrity bill but they’re also screwing their own staff.”  Casteel is referring to the legislative staff, who’s paychecks stop on August 31 due to Abbott’s pocket veto of funding as retaliation for not getting his top priority bill passed in regular session.  That priority to fix the power grid, you ask?  No, silly, the voter suppression bill that makes it harder to vote in that state that is already the hardest in the nation to vote.

So, Abbott and the GQP are resorting to the same mob tactics as Trump – break something and then threaten the victims who don’t cave in to their demands.  Abbott could fix the problem he created with the stroke of a pen, and pressure will mount on him because he’s punishing Republican staffers with the same mob tactic.  We all know, including the Republicans pushing The Big Lie, that the whole “election integrity” issue is bullshit.  This entire issue is a desperate effort to cling to power.

So let’s be clear who the villains are – Abbott and his enablers in the statehouse, who are taking unprecedented actions to pander to their Trump base and keep people from voting.  It’s anti-democratic, unAmerican, and most certainly unTexan.  They must be stopped, and that will only happen at the federal level.

As was widely reported this morning, Texas Democrats have decided to take their big blue butts to Washington, D.C. today. This will deny Texas Republicans the quorum they need to pass restrictive voting legislation that they were unable to pass in the regular legislative session, earlier this year. Whether they can be arrested outside of the state is unclear, but the House rules about the arrests are as follows:

“All absentees for whom no sufficient excuse is made may, by order of a majority of those present, be sent for and arrested, wherever they may be found, by the sergeant-at-arms or an officer appointed by the sergeant-at-arms for that purpose, and their attendance shall be secured and retained. The house shall determine on what conditions they shall be discharged.”

It’s a ballsy move by the Democrats and I am glad they are doing it. In terms of whether their reason is “sufficient” or not, the sergeant-at-arms will have to travel quite a long way to find them. They’ll have to stay gone for a while, as Abbott can continue to call a special session at least through the end of the summer.

Now, if the special session addressed the power grid or some other substantive legislation instead of Abbott’s campaign materials, I’d feel differently. This entire special session is a waste of the state’s time and money. There’s no reason to restrict the distribution of mail-in ballots. My granddaddy’s been voting by mail since he retired from the postal service in 1986 and he always gets an application mailed to him.

During the pandemic, my shero and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo successfully implemented drive-thru voting and 24 hour voting. Hidalgo allowed both Democrats and Republicans to vote using both of these options so I don’t know what the Republicans are so pissy about. Instead of trying to block Democratic counties to vote, they should be working on turning out their own voters. Instead, they call a special session to try and eliminate any voting technology or innovation faster than you can say “Varmint.”

Of course, for the last twenty years, the Republicans have made their tent so small that Greg Abbott might be seen as too liberal to govern in the upcoming gubernatorial primary, so it seems that winning more voters isn’t going to happen. All they’ve got left is meanness and trickery. If we don’t vote these schmucks out we get the legislature we deserve.

It started innocently enough. My daughter was attending a retreat at the church. As a part of the retreat the participants were encouraged to attend reconciliation. Before you attend confession you go through an examination of conscience. That’s a rabbit hole by itself.

She got hung up on several things that alarmed her and I can definitely see why. One of them alarmed me. The examination of conscience said that voting for pro abortion candidates was a sin. So, in other words, voting for Democrats is a sin. Where can I even get started on that?

Okay, I know where. There is no such position politically. I’ve never heard of any politician being pro-abortion. I’ve never met a single person that would classify themselves as pro-abortion. I can’t say the viewpoint doesn’t exist because it is impossible to prove a negative. However, I can assert that the Catholic Church is distorting the truth in a document about truth. The irony is palpable.

The truth is that some people are pro-choice and some people are anti-choice. Anti-choice is a negative term, so we can use the pro-life substitute. The point is that they believe in the sanctity of life. That is not a wrong viewpoint. However, the pro-choice viewpoint is not the 180 degree opposite. It is a belief in privacy and the rights of self-determination over each individual’s body. Most pro-choice people are privately against abortion in most circumstances, but simply leave it to the individual to decide.

That might seem like splitting hairs, but the truth is far different and one of the reasons why the distortion is so hurtful. Truth is a four letter word, but one of the things that pro-choice politicians do is seek other ways to lower abortion numbers. If we follow the facts then we would see that abortion rates have been lower under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents.

Admittedly, one cannot directly attribute any of that to a single policy or decision. It is impossible to definitively say that Democratic policies had anything to do with it. However, it should be telling that when you go back to the Reagan administration you see rates remaining level while they went down under every Democratic president.

There is a difference between posturing and actually doing something. The best way to limit the number of abortions is to limit the demand for abortions. You do that with contraception. You do that with sex education. You do that by financially assisting young families to take off the financial pressure. The church even had a program called “The Gabriel Project” that did this very thing.

However, all of this is just a cursory irritation. The real problem is calling voting for a person a sin. Voting is a choice. It’s a decision that calls for hard choices for anyone that’s a committed Catholic or Christian. Sure, it is hard reconciling our church’s teaching on abortion with a pro-choice position. It should be hard reconciling the church’s stance on life in general with a party pushing the death penalty, wars of choice, and are more supportive of police departments that kill so many unarmed suspects. Wouldn’t that also be a sin?

Wouldn’t it be a sin to support candidates that call for treating refugees as less than human? Wouldn’t it be a sin to support a candidate that places children in cages? Wouldn’t it be a sin to support a candidate that so cavalierly handled a pandemic that over 600,000 Americans died on his watch? We can play this tit for tat game forever as I’m sure Republicans reading this can rattle off a similar list of sins.

The overwhelming point here is that if voting for any particular candidate is a sin then voting for any candidate is a sin. They all commit sins. We all commit sins. We either weigh which sins we can live with or we turn that part of our brain off and pull the lever. Either way, I’m not taking responsibility for what a politician does. Either way I vote they will do something objectionable. I choose to vote for the candidates with the least objectionable positions. That’s what responsible citizens do.

Let’s hear it for Utah.

A 19-year-old woman was charged Friday with a hate crime accusing her of stomping on a pro-police sign and throwing it in the trash — all in front of an officer who had just given her friend a speeding ticket.

And in Utah, Honey, that’s a hate crime.  And the officer filed charges against a 19 year old girl and swore on a stack of Bibles that  …

“I observed one of the friends … stomping on a ‘Back the Blue’ sign next to where the traffic stop was conducted, crumple it up in a destructive manner and throw it into a trash can all while smirking in an intimidating manner towards me,” the deputy wrote in the affidavit.

She smirked. He felt intimidated. Okay, so who’s the snowflake now, Wilbur?

I gotta tell ya this – if it had been a Black Lives Matter sign, they would have given her a medal, an AK47, a cute camo hat, and a free license to hunt liberals.

I guess I need to study Utah law to find out if rolling your eyes is considered a terrorist threat.  If so, I’d have to go there with a bag over my head.

Okay, read this.  It is English and has not been translated from any other language, meaning you should take it at face value.

Yeah, I had to read it twice, too. Then I spurted coffee on the table.

Thank you, Mike Pompeo, for making my day.

Governor Abbott, who is slimier than a bucket of snails, has called a special session of the Texas legislature. It is well within his right to do – as a Texas Governor can call a special session for any reason she wishes just so long as she states a reason. In this case, he has outlined 13 reasons that are so important that the Republican majority legislature failed to pass them in a regular session. I suggest you wipe your rear end with that memo and read my list, because it’s a hell of a lot more honest.

Reasons for calling a special session:

1. Democrats denied the legislature a quorum, and ain’t no way the GOP is gonna accept the fact that they lost a battle. See: Trump 2020 election.
2. He wants to distract from the power grid disasters of 2021 – there is no mention of doing any legislative work on the power grid or ERCOT, despite the fact that it’s the real elephant in the room – even bigger than Allen West running for Governor.
3. Texans must perform genital checks on children playing tee-ball.
4. One-upping his Republican primary opponents Huffines and West by using state funds to build a wall. He never seemed interested in doing so until he was up for re-election against GQP candidates crazier than him.
5. He needs to dog-whistle the racist voters by using the words “Critical race theory.”
6. Make it somehow harder for brown people to vote.
7. – 13. He’s campaigning for re-election. 

We all know that Abbott called this session to rile up his base. In his list of thirteen priorities, there is not one single mention of the energy grid or ERCOT. Notably, there is no mention of vaccines or COVID-19, either, because his base is still pissed off at him for being somewhat responsible and making some businesses reduce capacity or close during a pandemic that killed 52,715 Texans as of today.

Texas Republicans don’t care if you fail at legislating so bad that thousands die unnecessarily from disease or freezing to death, they just want to make sure you can be really mean.

Abbott is doing his damnedest, isn’t he?