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.

Kirstin Gillibrand, once a strong voice for women’s rights, both military and civilian, quietly ended her run for president yesterday after failing to qualify for the next debate to be held in Houston.  After she took Hillary’s seat in 2009, she became a firebrand in the Senate, and grew into a possible candidate to be our first woman president.  The talk started early and gained momentum as Gillibrand became known for speaking out in hearings about justice and civil rights.

Then she made a gigantic mistake that pissed off a whole bushel basket full of progressives including yours truly…she aided conservative trolls by amplifying a coordinated attack and kneecapped Al Franken, another strong voice in the Senate who was voraciously anti-Trump.  Franken was also well known for speaking out in hearings, dismantling the likes of Jeff Sessions and other Trump apologists.  He was hated by rightwingers like Steve Bannon and Sean Hannity.  AND, Roger Stone, who we’ll talk about in a moment.  This is when talk of Franken running for president in 2020 also started.

When Leeann Tweeden made her accusation against Franken on a rightwing radio talk show, anyone paying attention knew it was bullshit.  Tweeden, a rightwing talker herself, is famous among the testosterone set as a semi-nude model whose USO performances and magazine photo spreads have always been sexually suggestive, to put it mildly.  As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker, Tweeden blatantly lied about Franken’s behavior and about the photograph of him supposedly  “groping” her in an obviously posed photograph with others in the room during a USO tour in 2006.  The entire attack was Trumped up (pun intended), but the damage was effective, and in those days of Me Too, sensitivity to these kinds of allegations was extremely high.  Others piled on, and Franken was under withering attack.

Many people didn’t catch on (or ignored) the evidence of obvious coordination of Tweeden’s attack on multiple fronts including Roger Stone tweeting about Franken’s “time in the barrel” BEFORE Tweeden’s accusation.  Yeah, THAT Roger Stone.  Alex Jones also got in on the act, “predicting” a Franken sex scandal.  In the following days, rightwing media everywhere blew up the accusation into a full blown scandal.  Keep in mind that all of this was activity was on the coattails of an actual scandal, Roy Moore’s 40 year record of pursuing and abusing young girls.  He lost his race for Senate, with Alabama voters electing a Democrat for the first time in about a thousand years.

This is when Gillibrand blundered.  Seeing an opportunity to eliminate a possible 2020 primary opponent, she jumped on the conservative bandwagon on national television, calling for Franken’s immediate resignation.  Pass go, pass investigations, pass an ethics hearing, go straight to home.  Under pressure in the growing din, many other senators, men and women, jumped in, demanding Franken leave.  With little support and the rightwing noise machine at full volume, Franken capitulated and resigned.  In the cold light of today, though, almost all those senators, except for Gillibrand, admit their haste calling for Franken’s head was unwise and unfair.  Conservatives, of course, remain giddy that their attack worked like a charm, hurried along by Gillibrand’s complicity.

Unfortunately for Gillibrand, though, millions of Democrats were turned off by her attack.  She violated the peoples’ trust, using a serious accusation against Franken as a political tool.  It IS critical that women be believed when they go public with stories of abuse both recent and long past.  It is just as critical, though, that these accusations be truthful, and especially in the case of public figures like Franken, investigated and fair.  Gillibrand denied Franken fairness for her own gain.  That’s obvious.  In doing so, though, she seriously damaged the Me Too movement and ended up dooming her own prospects of becoming the first woman president.  Now she’s dropped out, failing to get out of single digits or raise enough money.

Good riddance.