Green; rookie; smartass; ignorant; arrogant; hypocrite; incompetent beneficiary of radical gerrymandering.  Those are all descriptors for Texas’ newest tadpole swimming in the sewer that is Texas Republican politics, Briscoe Cain.  Cain is one of those cases of shape shifting; he grew up in Deer Park, and was a high school cheerleader.   In subsequent years he underwent a complete transformation from cheerleader to smart mouthed, gun toting, presidential candidate threatening, manly man hyper focused on bathroom legislation, voter suppression, providing guns to idiots, and ignorant of Texas’ own racist roots.  His political stunts include not only threatening to shoot Beto O’Rourke; he even crashed a Fort Worth Democratic Party convention armed and passing out yard signs that said, “This house is a safe gun free zone”.  He was ejected, only to return again.  He was finally escorted out by police.  He got away with it, of course.

A good example of Cain’s total ignorance of said racist history was when he walked headlong into a historical ambush laid by Democratic Rep. Rafael Anchia, who questioned Cain’s use of the term “purity of the ballot box” in his drafting of HB 7, the latest voter suppression law.  It’s pretty entertaining.

https://twitter.com/morethanavote/status/1390782212380012550?s=20

Anchia owned Cain, revealing to the public just how poorly reasoned HB7 really is.  This embarrassing episode (for Cain) was a textbook example of what happens when a Texas Republican is confronted by someone not inside his echo chamber and carpet bombed with history and facts.  It didn’t do the slightest bit of good legislatively, though.  The bill passed anyway, with minimal amendments.

That is the tragedy of Texas which continues to stagger under unfettered single party rule where protecting criminals from gun safety laws, dictating public bathroom policy, and keeping people from voting take precedence over funding education, lowering barriers to healthcare, and making the state’s crumbling infrastructure usable.  Texas is now led by the most corrupt, ignorant, and incompetent party in Texas history, and Briscoe Cain exemplifies everything that’s wrong with Texas. It ain’t pretty.

God bless them. Every once in awhile you catch them saying the quiet part out loud. That’s what happened to Justin Lafferty in the Tennessee legislature when he tried defending the three-fifths compromise. According to the mangled synapses in his brain, the compromise was a way forward to ending slavery. It just took 78 years and a bloody civil war to do it. Sometimes it is hard to fathom that people can be this stupid. Then, they open their mouths and end all doubt.

The gambit is akin to those that try to find ways to defend Adolf Hitler. Sure, you can enter any qualifier you like, but you are almost always better off stopping before you start. The results of both end up being the same. We are left wondering whether you are the biggest jackass south of the Mason-Dixon line or whether you are an ardent racist. The answer is usually yes and furthermore we often are left wondering whether the distinction matters. That’s all the commentary I can waste on that one. Everyone enjoy their weekend.

Okay, so the vote counting in Arizona continues. They might have some results by Christmas but I wouldn’t count on it.

Apparently, it’s not going well for the QKids.  The first thing I want to say is that I have been to AARP meetings with twice the energy and a much spiffier dress code.  These are people who don’t need to be buying any green bananas.  Hell, Honey, most of them have 20 years on me and I don’t remember why I walked into a room, much less what I was looking for. Did you ever go looking for coffee and come back with a donut, a comb, and a map of Illinois that you thought was lost?  That’s this group.

And the second reason I know they aren’t finding all the “illegal” votes is that they have started something new.  They are scanning the ballots with UV lights.  Nobody knows why and the culprits aren’t saying.  Some surmise they are looking for a watermark on the ballots. The printer of the ballot says there are none because he didn’t put any on it.  Plus, they’ve been counting for a while now and they just started this.

But, there’s  closely held little secret that the QKids are leaking.

The Maricopa County vote recount has taken a surprising turn, with UV lights and high-tech cameras being deployed as workers comb through ballots, checking for traces of bamboo fibers in the paper.

The reason? To investigate a new theory that 40,000 ballots for Joe Biden were flown in from Asia and smuggled into Arizona’s polls.

Slate has more for the terminally curious.  And those who think bamboo is only in China is welcome to come hack their way through Thelma’s backyard where her lovely bamboo fence now covers the entire backyard.

Bamboo ballots. This is getting fun.

One of the more interesting aspects of U.S. history was getting to the bottom of what exactly the whole “no taxation without representation” cry was about. It was something we learned in our college history class that we didn’t necessarily learn in school. Part of that is just the nature of how everything is broken down. At least that is true in Texas. The first half of U.S. history is taught in 8th grade and 8th graders don’t necessarily understand the concept of virtual representation. The concept of the rotten borough was one of the more interesting ones and it seemed far-fetched then, but maybe now not so much.

It’s kind of an important distinction to make. If nothing else, it helps explain the frustration from the colonists in what would be the United States as well as later in Canada, India, and other colonies around the globe. They were all English subjects and yet had no real say in their government. Many would wonder what this has to do with anything, but it becomes pretty clear when you look at the U.S. Senate and how representation is broken down. The framers of the constitution in their “infinite wisdom” decided each state should be equal.

I seriously doubt they foresaw the kind of population disparity we have currently. Even if they did, they specifically wanted the needs of the states to be represented. They didn’t have well developed parties back then and even if they thought the federalists and anti-federalists were parties, they didn’t represent the same constituencies as today. The combination of these two factors cannot be understated and certainly is stark when set against the backdrop of the first revolution.

The top five states in terms of population contain around 38 percent of the overall population in the country. I suspect the GOP has been fighting so hard in Florida and Texas for voter suppression laws because they know what will happen if those states turn blue. Most will focus their attention on the obvious effects on the electoral college. Yet, the impact on the Senate is what might be most concerning. A 50-50 Senate would only become a 54-46 Senate assuming no other changes. Yet, the five most populous states would suddenly become dominated by the Democratic party.

The bottom 20 states would account for approximately 15 percent of the overall population and would account for the majority of Republican representation in the Senate. So, while voter suppression is about the White House and Congressional control, it also about the threat of revolution itself. Sooner or later, people are going to figure out that the Senate doesn’t reflect the will of the people. It is broken down by land and not people. We could hope that somewhere along the line a majority of people would recognize that one party represents people and one party represents land.  That may even be the case now nationwide, but enough pockets in enough states have managed to subvert the will of the majority. That can only happen so long before major changes are demanded.

Mike Lindell, the founder of My Pillow, which sells ripped up foam in a bag, has been banned from Vimeo for posting content from another banned user, Trump.  Being de-platformed from other social media and cut off from major online sales outlets, Lindell is presiding over the Titanic of pillow companies.  His biggest problem is that he enthusiastically embraced the Big Lie, and is now paying the price, having to defend against a $1 billion plus lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for perpetuating Trump’s lie, along with facing plummeting sales.

He’ll never learn, though, and will be just more cannon fodder for Trump’s reputational funeral pyre of formerly respected people who made the wrong choice.

File under Gravity Makes Things Fall Down:

Stating the obvious, federal judge ruled this week that former AG Bill Barr misled her, Congress, and the American people about the Mueller report, using an internal DOJ memo as the excuse to not charge Trump with obstruction of justice in the investigation.  Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the DC Circuit ordered the DOJ to release the memo saying that it was more of a strategy memorandum and not a legal opinion protected by attorney client privilege.

I would say there’s a good chance that Barr’s going to get his for letting Trump off the hook, lying in public, and then politicizing the DOJ to protect Trump and punish his enemies (and career staff).  This is long overdue, and I’ll be popping popcorn for this show.