Some of our Salon customers believe I’m a conspiracy theorist, so to fuel that conclusion here’s another one.  Hear me out…There have been rumors flying around for over a year that Trump was going to replace Pantywaist Pence with Nikki Haley.  That’s been fed by weird tweets from Haley herself and recently commentary by Paul Begala predicting Trump is going to do just that.  Everyone in Trumpworld has been lamely trying to slap that one down, but I’ve never been convinced that Trump is NOT going to take Pence out.

It’s no secret that Pence is a toad of the first order, adding no political capital to Trump’s dwindling account.  He’s a Yes Man of the worst order, complete with his longing looks of Trump adoration and his aggrieved voice whenever he’s burdened with explaining Trump’s latest soiling of the carpets in the WH.  Now, Trump has put him in charge of the Coronavirus response, a job that he is totally unsuited (not to mention unqualified) for.  Pence’s response so far has been predictably awful, from mixed messaging to photos of a room full of white men deciding the fates of over 300 million Americans.  The effort is going to fail, and, in fact, has probably already failed.  There is almost certainly going to be an rapid increase in cases and bad news of larger outbreaks.  When that happens, guess who’s going to be the patsy?  That’s right, Mike Pence.  Trump will have “no choice” but to remove him as VP for incompetence and get a more “beautiful” and “fantastic” and “best qualified ever” candidate which will just so happen to be Haley.  It will be a cynical effort to save his suburban mom voting block.

Call me crazy…

Bloomberg is out and he’s endorsed Joe Biden.  Let the Bernie whining begin …3…2…1

I want to remind everyone that Bernie agreed to the rules this time prior to anything starting and that everyone has followed the rules.

Do you ever wonder why none of the other candidates endorsed Bernie?

And yes, I think Elizabeth Warren should stay in to provide a third voice.  And yes, I am disappointed that it’s two old white men. But either of them is preferable to Trump.

The NY Times is reporting that Bloomberg just dropped out of the race.  Super Tuesday proved to be anything but super, and apparently he paid something like $11 million for each of his votes and for bragging rights in American Samoa.  NOW we have a race.

In Harris County yesterday, lines of voters were long and the wait was up to 5 hours.  Why?  There are two primary reasons:

• Since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act Texas has closed 542 polling places, most in historically black and Latino areas.  If you include 2012 closings, that number rises to 750.
• In Harris County at least, the Republican party refused to allow a joint primary with Dems.  What that meant was that the voting machines were divided in 2, half for Repubs, half for Dems.  Since Trump essentially had no opponent, turnout in the GOP primary was very low so HALF of voting machines remained essentially unused.

Both of these moves by Republicans made it harder for Texans to vote, which has been their goal for over 20 years as demographics started moving against them.  I got to experience their strategy yesterday since my polling place was one of those closed.  It took me three attempts at two different polling places to finally cast my vote, and I had to drive 15 minutes from one polling place to another to accomplish that.  After discovering my polling place was closed, I drove to my old polling place only to find the line out the door and down the block. I went to have some lunch and returned about an hour later to find the line almost as long.  A nice young poll worker for Ben Rose had information on other polling places, so I drove all the way out to Buffalo Speedway to vote at a church there.  The line there was about half an hour (and it was air-conditioned) so I waited it out.  When I got into the polling place, HALF of the voting machines were being unused while Republican poll workers twiddled their thumbs.  On the other side, Dems were forced to wait in multiple lines to access the other half.  Total time not including lunch was about two hours of waiting and a lot of driving just to vote in a goddam primary.

It’s shameful that the Republican party has been allowed to continuously and increasingly restrict access to the Constitutional right to vote.  Their rationale, of course, is based on lies since their actual goal is voter suppression not “election integrity” which is one of their standard lies.  Texas Republicans are perfectly happy to make the lives of their fellow Texans miserable simply for political gain.  This reason alone should be enough to vote the bastards out.

Sources are saying that Bloomberg is rethinking his run after his poor showing tonight.  I also expect Warren to finally throw in the towel.  About time.

Tonight there will be an open thread.

If you live in one of the Super Tuesday states, you are now the official foreign correspondent in that state.  When you report in please say what state you’re in and what the hell is happening.

If you don’t live in one of those states but if a good thought jumps into your head, please type it.