Donald Trump is a dumbass.  We all know that.  He’s also narcissistic, cruel, self obsessed, and utterly devoid of human emotion.  We’ve come to expect the worst in him through pure personal experience.  Now let’s look at Greg Abbott; he graduated from UT and Vanderbilt Law.  He served on the Texas Supreme Court and as Attorney General of Texas.  Greg Abbott is smart.  His problem is that he’s also a partisan hack.  He sued a tree trimming company after a tree fell on him after a storm, paralyzing him from the waist down resulting in an insurance settlement that pays him for life, though he can freely practice law.  After he got his, of course, he spent years trying to undo the very system that supported him when injured.  That makes him a hack, and a hypocrite.  But he’s worse than that.  As governor since 2015, he’s continued Rick Perry’s dismantling of Texas reputation for good education and a fair government.  He’s participated in the culture wars and even sicced the Texas State Guard on the US Army after goofy conspiracy theorists raised hell about how the military exercises are going to “take away their guns”.  It was stupid, and he knew better, but still pandered to screwballs.  He’s now continued that pandering all the way through Trump’s disastrous presidency, and now Texans are actually dying because of that pandering.

Against all common sense and medical experts, Abbott ordered the reopening of businesses and government agencies even though no criteria for reopening had been met.  Trump called for immediate reopening to save his reelection bid, and Abbott happily complied.  He even overruled safety precautions put in place in cities all over the state.  The result?  COVID-19 cases have overwhelmed the hospital systems; medical staff is either exhausted or sick themselves.  People are dying waiting for a hospital bed, or at home, terrified to come to a hospital. Yesterday, Texas hit a new record of over 11,000 new cases and 131 deaths, overwhelming the previous death record by over 100%.  Total deaths since the beginning of this disaster now total over 3,000.

This catastrophe is all on Abbott, period the end.  When he overruled adults like Sylvester Turner and Lina Hidalgo, he took the entire responsibility on himself.  The real tragedy?  Unlike Trump, Abbott is not a dumbass; he knows better.  He’s just a corrupt and cynical politician, and this year should spell the end of his political career and a place in polite society (if that even exists anymore).

As we’ve already reported, the Texas Medical Center halted reporting all COVID-19 data after some kind of agreement with Greg Abbott to continue allowing elective surgeries even after his statewide order that shut down those elective surgeries to free hospital capacity for infected patients.  TMC halted that reporting just as it reached 100% base capacity and forecast overrunning surge capacity in days.

Well, TMC started reporting the data again last night, but OMITTED ICU and hospital capacity data.  A before and after example is below.  Doctors in

Before and After

TMC have been ringing the alarm bells for weeks, and management was accurately reporting data and also sounding the alarm until everything stopped Thursday.  The Houston Chronicle has now picked up the story as well as other local media.  Frankly, this entire episode is shameful; corruption has moved from Austin and the governor’s mansion to the largest medical center in the world.

Our legacy will be determined by how we respond to this crisis.  I’m not hopeful as the cancer of Trump has metastasized from Queens to Houston.

In an alarming turn of events, management of the Texas Medical Center in Houston has halted the reporting of real time COVID-19 data.  They haven’t reported new data since Thursday.  That’s right, folks; as COVID-19 new case rate goes almost vertical and ICUs are being overrun, TMC has halted real time data reporting.  Why, you ask?  Apparently, the heads of TMC cut a deal with Greg Abbott.  As we know, Abbott awoke from his Stupid Coma on Thursday and shut down all elective surgeries in the state to relieve the load on hospitals in the state.  He also ordered bars throughout the state to close again after he had stupidly allowed them to reopen starting in May.

Doctors within TMC have been ringing the alarm bells for weeks as new case rate increased.  Leadership also provided public warnings about capacity, reporting that they were going to exceed surge ICU capacity by the first week of July.  Late Thursday, though, TMC management reversed themselves, saying they had plenty of capacity.  What happened?  I’m hearing that Abbott built in a huge loophole in his shutdown policy to allow elective surgeries in TMC and affiliates as long as the hospitals have “enough capacity”.  Apparently “enough capacity” is pretty damn vague.  Methodist Hospital even sent out a “don’t worry, be happy” post on Thursday that they had plenty of room and elective surgeries (translated “very profitable”.  As I’m sure is a complete coincidence, TMC simultaneously halted realtime reporting of COVID-19 case rates and ICU capacity utilization in Houston.  Hmm.

All of this is going on as ICU capacity at TMC and other is overrun.  TMC hospitals are even moving adult patients into Texas Children’s hospital, turning kids away.  It’s like we’ve fallen down the rabbit hole into the Greg Abbott version of Trumpland.  I continue to shake my head at the willful ignorance and magical thinking coming from our elected leadership.  It’s an alternate reality where Abbott/Patrick/Paxton & Company run us into a brick wall at 100 miles an hour only for them to say, “Oops, that didn’t work.”  My jaw is aching from dragging on the floor.

Jesus.

Today, in a leaked audio of a call with Republican representatives, Greg Abbott admitted that opening up the economy will increase the community spread of COVID-19.  At the same time, he offered up his strawman argument that, since we’ll never get to zero spread, we should open up anyway.  Of course, NO ONE has EVER set the standard of zero spread.  The standard is 14 consecutive days of diminishing new cases, which we are most certainly not experiencing.

This is the same argument that Abbott and other Republicans have used to not do immigration reform.  They keep saying that reform can only happen when undocumented immigration is brought to zero.  They KNOW it will never be at zero, so by default immigration reform will never happen.

If you want to get really aggravated, listen to the leaked recording:

Greg Abbott is a small government, local control, free trader.  Until he’s not.  Abbott is the worst kind of politician, one who doesn’t really believe in anything but his own power, who shifts his ideology to fit the situation that always advantages himself and his largest donors.  Texas has always been very independent where local control has been sacrosanct, and the governor’s office was designed to be a weak position.  No more.  It started under Rick Perry, but Abbott put consolidation of power on steroids aided by a state house full of ideologues who are either stupid, corrupt, or likely both.

Abbott has seized power away from municipalities and counties on everything from oil and gas development to environmental regulation to even trimming trees.  In good times the consolidation of broad local authority to a central point is bad policy.  The US Constitution recognized the role of the states in limiting the power of the federal government.  Abbott and Perry quoted that loudly and often with Barack Obama occupied the White House.  No more.  Now, Abbott cherry picks what he wants to control, like tree removals for some weird personal reason, and has done so again by abruptly ordering the reopening of thousands of businesses in Texas over the orders of municipal and county authorities all over the state.

What Abbott is doing is stupid; it’s not only stupid, he’s also doing it for precisely the wrong reasons.  He’s not rushing to reopen the state’s businesses because he believes it’s the right thing to do, he’s doing it to kick hundreds of thousands of workers off of state unemployment rolls.  The Texas Workforce Commission has already announced that if a business reopens and employees do not work ALL of the hours required by that business, the employees lose their unemployment benefits. Cisco Gamez, a Texas Workforce Commission spokesman even said that if an employee doesn’t feel safe working, they must refer their concerns to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, governed by the US Labor Department currently run by…wait for it…Eugene Scalia.  Yes, that Scalia, the son of Antonin Scalia.  The younger Scalia who’s made his career and is well known for undoing worker and safety regulations, was appointed by Trump to head the agency tasked with protecting workers’ rights (Yes, it’s a drinking game.)  Since Gamez’s statement, the Texas Workforce Commission “clarified” the policy that the state “may” allow some benefits to survive if a worker doesn’t feel safe to go to work.

The dangerous feature of Abbott’s idiotic orders is that he’s going to damage the programs that adults, like Lina Hidalgo and Sylvester Turner, have been implementing round the clock to protect those in Harris County.  The result is reduced cases here, but according to latest data from Johns Hopkins COVID-19 tracking program, Harris County new cases are still growing at an average weekly rate of 13%, which is low compared to other counties like Tarrant County, location of Fort Worth.  That city is governed by Trump supporter Betsy Price, who has already ordered that churches can begin holding services and bars and restaurants can open.  Their case growth rate? 51% this week.  That’s right, THREE times that of Harris County.  And those are just the cases we know about.

Abbott, like Trump, is literally getting people killed.  And he’s covering it up.  To keep the numbers low, I’m convinced Abbott is dragging his feet on broad distribution of testing.  Like Trump, Abbott keeps promising millions of tests that never materialize.  Texas has tested just over 200,000 people or less than 1% of the population.  Every medical expert advises not to reopen businesses and public buildings until testing and contact tracing is massive.  Abbot clearly doesn’t want that because then it would be hard to justify what he’s doing right now.

Abbott’s plan is dangerous.  Overruling local officials who are actually listening to medical experts is nothing short of gross negligence.