After yesterday’s news that Ken Paxton has been referred to the full Texas House for impeachment, my only question was, which crime was finally bad enough to finally tip the scales of justice against him?  Did Republicans finally awake from an 8 year coma?  Did they finally turn on the news?  Identifying crimes and conduct that have been obvious to normal Texans for years, the House General Investigating Committee filed 20 articles of impeachment against Paxton listing crimes and corrupt conduct such as bribery, misuse of funds, abusing employees, using the power of his office to help a friend in a private lawsuit, lying on the record, and dereliction of duty, among other acts not generally associated with a state’s top law enforcement officer.  Paxton’s defense?  It’s rich – you can’t impeach me for any crimes I committed BEFORE the last election.  His argument is that each election washes away any prior misdeeds from previous terms.  This  claim not the only issue, though.

Paxton has been under felony indictment for securities fraud, among other crimes, FOR EIGHT YEARS.  He has successfully buried that case for that extended period after the legislature passed a 2015 law at Abbott’s urging to dismantle the Public Integrity Unit run by the Travis County DA and move cases against statewide officials to the Texas Rangers and local prosecutors in officials’ home jurisdictions.  Paxton’s felony case was moved from Austin to Collin County and was buried and remains bogged down to this day.  In fact, since that law was enacted, prosecutions of state officials have virtually disappeared.  90% of investigations result in no charges, and the people who are charged are generally low level employees.  This is not a flaw in the law – it’s a feature; the legislature and Abbott successfully blunted the only tool Texas had to prosecute corruption by taking away the only independent watchdog in the state.  Paxton’s unchecked corruption and criminality is the logical (and obvious) result of dismantling the existing justice system.  And it’s not just Paxton – high level officials in Austin can pretty much do what they want as long as their local DAs protect them, and that is exactly what’s happening.

What kicked off this entire episode this session was a request by Paxton that WE, the taxpayers, pay $3.3 million to settle one of the lawsuits against him that had been filed by his former employees for abuse and retaliation.  House speaker Dade Phelan had opposed the payment and the investigation into this settlement was begun.  That investigation then turned into an impeachment inquiry as the evidence against Paxton became so mountainous that not even Republicans could ignore it.

So the question is, which crime tipped the scales of justice?  Was it one crime, or did the collective weight of them all finally do the deed?  In my view, any of these well known crimes should have resulted in Paxton’s removal and jailing years ago.  That it hasn’t happened is a direct result of Republican corruption and the Texas Rangers looking the other way while local prosecutors selectively charged other low level officials.

I’ve believed since Rick Perry that Texas was lost.  It’s still lost, but have we finally reached bottom after 30 years of decline?  I’m a long way from popping champagne and tossing babies in the air, but maybe we’ve finally gotten there.  There’s no way but up from here.

Last night in Texas was disappointing, but not surprising.  All statewide races were lost by Dems.  100%.  And the spreads were predictable, all double digit losses but for the race for Ag Commissioner.  Susan Hays lost to the worst Ag Commissioner in Texas history by a mere 7 points.

Who to blame?  Leaving out for now the radical gerrymandering in state and US districts, the statewide blame for this kind of loss lay with the Texas Democratic Party and the candidates it produced, period.  Sure, Republican voter suppression, intimidation, and misinformation shaved 2 or 3 points from turnout, but it didn’t shave over 10.  The TDP did in 2022 what the TDP always does, just expected a different result.  In the governor’s race, the polls here were pretty clear and surprisingly close to actual results.  Real Clear Politics averaged Abbott + 10.4, and he won by 11.  A lot of the blame, too, needs to be laid at Beto’s feet.  He had a promising future when he came within 2 points of Cruz for Senate in 2018, but starting to believe his own bullshit, throwing it all away with his disastrous run for president in 2020.  That was stupid.

The lessons here are clear and need to be learned.  First, the TDP needs a serious housecleaning and fumigation.  Old assumptions need to be thrown out the window, especially the longstanding myth that Texas is getting more blue just because demographics are changing.  GOP messaging and ideology plays well with some groups like the Latino community, especially since the Dems have taken them, and African Americans, for granted for decades.  The party always plays to these demographic groups in voting years and then underserves them until the next election.  That’s got to stop.

I know this is hard to hear, but the GOP in Texas has outplayed, outworked, and out strategized Dems for years, and the asymmetric performance at the polls is the result.  Starting in the 1960s, Repubs went after school boards, precincts, city councils, and county offices.  Over this time they’ve built a huge base with a bench a mile deep.  The Dems have done the opposite; the Dems are every person for themselves until election season, and then try to build a strategy around a standard bearer who elbows their way in, be that for president or governor. (See Barack Obama, 2004 to 2008.)  They then vehemently resist change, leaving petrified party leadership in place for decades, stiff arming all new comers and those with opposing opinions.  Doing this discourages younger leaders because there’s no opportunity for leadership roles and stultifies policy.  What you get then are losers like Beto and Mike Collier.  In Beto’s case, you can’t build a statewide strategy on a standard bearer who acts like a teenager and says stupid shit in public.  Lastly, and this is not just a Texas problem, is that the Democratic party needs to stop counting noses.  I’ve been to meetings where the majority of the time is spent doing math to make sure every possible demographic is in the room before the meeting can start.  I’m not saying the party needs to be less inclusive; I’m saying the time for inclusivity is at the beginning, not at the end. There needs to be an obsessive focus on inclusion of demographic groups at the micro local level, not only at state conventions and statewide campaigns.  Being inclusive at the start would negate the necessity of nose counting at the end.

The textbook example of party failure in 2022 is not Beto, it’s Rochelle Garza.  Dems overwhelmingly chose Garza and rejected a very experienced and well known attorney, Joe Jaworski.  Let’s be frank – Ken Paxton is a deeply flawed, dishonest, embarrassing, and weak AG.  He was ripe to be picked off.  The Dems snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by overwhelmingly nominating a less experienced, less well known candidate who didn’t have a prayer of beating Paxton; her nomination was a vote for diversity, not for a win.  Another example was Lupe Valdez in 2018.  Dems overwhelmingly chose her as the standard bearer over Andrew White, son of former governor Mark White.  Valdez ran a terrible campaign, had low name recognition, and then lost to Abbott by over 13 points.

Before you say it, I am actually all about diversity and inclusion.  But diversity and inclusion doesn’t get you a goddam thing unless you WIN.  Not winning has a lot worse negative consequences than winning every time.  The TDP (and all Dems) can actually do more than one thing at a time.  They need to be strategic, not just inclusive, because what the Dems are doing, and have been doing for decades, is a loser.  I know this opinion, just like the one I hold about Hillary, will piss a lot of you off, and I accept that.  But until the Texas Democratic Party and Dems in general start operating strategically they’ll keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result.  And we all know what that’s called.  Until they start working strategically, there will be no joy in Mudville.

Oh, and Beto?  I love ‘ya, bro, but please go back to El Paso. Run for mayor or even the House again. Do some maturing.  You’ll have another chance at some point, but you need some years of growing up.

Texas is now distributing DNA kits to schools.  Abbott signed the law to do so at the end of the 2021 legislative session, feigning that they were to be distributed to identify children who were kidnapped and trafficked.  The occurrence child kidnapping is tragic, but rare.  What is more common, especially in Texas, is mass shootings by deranged young men who are legally allowed to purchase assault rifles and unlimited ammunition that can kill dozens of kids in just a few minutes.  The law was passed after the mass shooting at a public school in Santa Fe.  The state says the kits are to be used in the event of an “emergency” and are trying to make it about kidnapping, but since bullets fired from an AR-15 cause massive injuries, including decapitating 6 year old school children, the kits are necessary to identify the bodies of victims of these now commonplace shootings.  In Uvalde, some of the children’s bodies were so mangled that they had to be identified by their shoes.

The answer to mass shootings is unbelievably “complicated”, and only 32 of 33 advanced countries around the world have figured it out.  The only way we stop these shootings is banning these weapons and the ammunition shot from them.  We can only do that with brave leadership.  Because Americans don’t vote like they should, that brave leadership will never materialize and the problem won’t be fixed.  The gun and DNA kit manufacturers are perfectly happy with the status quo.

Abbott and DeSantis are cynically doing election year stunts to keep their base whipped up to drive them to the polls in November.  Abbott bussing families to DC and New York, and DeSantis flying them to Martha’s Vineyard violate more than a few state and federal laws against human trafficking, crossing state lines with undocumented immigrants, misappropriation of taxpayer funds, and  others.  Clearly, both governor’s believe they are above the law (like TFG) and are thumbing their noses at immigration and law enforcement agencies.

I say, fine.  Don’t go after the governors’ lawbreaking (yet), but cut off access to the services they’re using to illegally dump immigrants around the country.  Let’s use the same tactics that anti-choice politicians use…get some our own pawns to use.  Go after those who are enabling this unprecedented cruelty, the drivers and owners of the buses and the pilots and owners of the aircraft being used.  They KNOW they’re transporting undocumented immigrants (or should know), so federal authorities should go after them and indict them for trafficking.  Pilots convicted of crimes lose their licenses.  Drivers may not lose their license but will certainly lose their jobs.  Both will certainly face jail time.  If we do that, no bus company or air charter company will touch this business.  Problem solved, at least until the governors get prosecuted.

The only way to fight fire is with fire.  The hallmark of TFGist Republicans is cruelty and dickishness.  The only way to stop them is to cut off their resources and make them pay personally.

One thing Abbott said right after the shooting yesterday caught my attention and I’ve looked into it since.  In his first update, Abbott said the shooter, who shall remain unnamed, entered Robb Elementary School with a handgun and “may have had a rifle”.  It later came out that he didn’t use a handgun, but an AR-15 that shoots a 5.56 MM round, a standard caliber for an assault rifle, of which he had just bought 375 rounds.  He carried a bag with 7-30 round magazines which totaled 210 rounds, not counting what was already loaded.  He had another AR-15 in his truck.  There is no report that I’ve seen that he had a handgun.

I doubt seriously that Abbott doesn’t know the difference between a handgun and an assault rifle, so I can only assume that Abbott was trying to misinform/play down the fact that the weapon of choice for mass shooters was also used in this shooting.  You certainly call AR-15s rifles, but there is little resemblance between this rifle and the .22 bolt action rifle I pinged tin cans with when I was a kid being taught to shoot by my uncle.

Abbott leads Texas in gun nut insanity where it’s beyond comprehension that at age 18 you can buy an AR-15 and whatever amount of ammo you want, but you can’t buy a handgun.  This is the stupidity causing the deaths we endure in Texas today.

Mexico’s economic minister announce last week that a new railway from Mexico to Canada for international trade is no longer going to come through Texas, but will cross into New Mexico, 20 miles west of El Paso.  The reason?  Texas is no longer considered “a reliable trading partner” after Abbott’s idiotic stunt last month that caused weeks of chaos at US/Mexico border crossings, costing Texas about $4 billion in lost trade and spoiled produce.  Now Abbott (Mini Trump) has cost Texas billions more by losing a rail line that’s going to connect the port of Mazatlan in Mexico to Winnipeg in Canada.  Laredo and Dallas were scheduled to be on the route, but no more.

Thanks for nothing, Shithead.