We’ve covered this ground before, but three separate incidents this week came together in my mind to solidify one point. Essentially, the pro gun crowd loves to separate people into a good guy with a gun as opposed to a bad guy with a gun. Supposedly, the good guy with the gun will negate the bad guy with the gun.

Well, I was perusing through HEB the other day and minding my own business (a personal favorite phrase of mine) when I strolled down the periodicals aisle. I noticed eight different magazines dedicated to guns and ammo. That was more than fashion magazines. It was more than the football, basketball, and baseball magazines. It was more than the bridal magazines. It was more than the Texas themed magazines or magazines about food. Apparently, guns are more popular than just about anything else.

While it wasn’t immediately related, I thought to our experience this past weekend an earlier in the week. My wife’s cousin came down to vacation in Galveston. We are only 30 miles away, so we decided to join them for a “quick” dinner. We left the house with plenty of time to spare. An hour and a half later we had travelled three miles.

The same thing happened when we took our daughter to a summer camp. The same thing happened on a different highway when we returned. The delays weren’t as heinous, but the fact that they were occurring on three different highways and different points of the highway was telling.

The coup de grace came when her cousin (we will call him Eugene) announced at dinner that he had built his own AR-15. Eugene is what you might call a computer geek. He has always been socially awkward. He also bragged that he had not connected with one target since he had gone out target shooting with his work friends. Yup, he’s the guy I want having an AR-15.

This isn’t to say I would perform any better. It never occurred to me to try. We’ve discussed abortion in the salon. We’ve discussed voting rights in the salon. We have also discussed guns in the salon. It took my wife’s cousin Eugene to crystallize the slogan we need moving forward. Yes, there are bad people with guns. Yes, there are good people with guns. Unfortunately, there are also idiots with guns.

Eugene is not an idiot in the literal sense. He is somewhat educated and has a professional job. He’s an idiot because he has no idea how to use a gun or how dangerous they can be. His reasoning for doing it is also idiotic. It’s not about protection, sport, or even hobby collection. He wants to belong. He wants other men to see him as manly. The sad thing is that possessing that AR-15 doesn’t change anyone’s opinion. It just makes him seem more pathetic.

In a similar way, posturing about guns, walls, bathroom bills, and voter suppression laws don’t make Greg Abbott seem like a stronger leader. Fixing our roads, schools, and energy grid would do that. Yet, here we are in crumbling schools, inadequate roads, with promises of a useless border wall. It isn’t even so much that he wants all these stupid things. It is that he wants them before fixing the stuff actually broken. We might freeze to death next winter but at least Eugene will have his AR-15 to keep him warm at night.

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.

Texas in the national news yesterday:

• Ken Paxton’s lawsuit to attempt ONCE AGAIN to repeal the ACA was tossed by Scotus.
• Greg Abbott commits $250 million of Texans’ money and then begs for donations to build Trump’s wall that takes private land to create a solution that doesn’t work.  Ask the Chinese about that.
• Abbott signs SEVEN bills that unravel 150 years of gun safety laws allowing any idiot to carry a firearm in public with no license, no background check, and no training.
• ERCOT asks us to reduce power usage due to normal summer weather.  This is after Abbott smugly announced that laws that he signed that will do nothing to fix our state power grid has fixed our power grid.

Like one person posted on social media yesterday:

“We are flying electric helicopters on Mars, but Texans can’t run their dryers.  That’s because scientists are in charge of Mars and Republicans are in charge of Texas.”

Over the weekend, the outrage machine cranked the volume up to 11 over Biden’s new climate change requirement to cut red meat consumption by 90%. Upon hearing the news, right wing social media, fed by Fox Noise, went to DEFCON 4 and began launch sequence.  All the usual characters threw wall-eyed fits including Greg Abbott:

Not gonna happen in Texas! pic.twitter.com/zqYS9kH8CU

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 25, 2021

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert both followed suit with Greene even calling Biden the “Hamburgler”.  The only problem?  The story is complete bullshit, fabricated by the London rag The Daily Mail, which then metastasized into a trending story on social media.  Snopes did a full report on the claim and rated it False. I wish these clowns would spend the time spent on fake outrage on more important things like education, Medicaid expansion, and avoiding power blackouts, but that’s way too much too expect.

This speaks for itself.