That didn’t take long. From the NY Times:

Texas officials have begun investigating parents of transgender adolescents for possible child abuse, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, after Gov. Greg Abbott directed them last week to handle certain medical treatments as possible crimes.

Among the first to be investigated was an employee of the state protective services agency who has a 16-year-old transgender child.

My Texas trans child is 15.

According to the lawsuit, the state’s investigator told the parents that the only allegation against them was that their transgender daughter might have been provided with gender-affirming health care and was “currently transitioning from male to female.”

As Mr. Abbott described in his letter, the order would mean that “all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children” would be required to report to state authorities those that they believe are receiving gender-affirming treatment, or face criminal penalties.

This puts me in a precarious position. The mama bear in me wants to hop in the car with some poster board and sharpies and head right on down to the Attorney Generals’ office and protest. I want to pick up my son and take him AWAY from here. But here is our home. Our friends, our family, our community – and it’s a great community. These people don’t want the government taking perfectly healthy, happy kids away from their parents.

Abbott wants “all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children” to report ME to child protective services. For all I know, my kid’s dentist, doctors, teachers, school administration, music teachers, even his therapist – may believe they are mandated by law to make this call. He is at school right now. I have assurance from one teacher that they would never, ever make that call. That leaves about a dozen other people who could.

When will they come to my door, demanding my son’s medical records?

What do I do, then? What if I refuse to cooperate and they take my son?

The dictionary provides two definitions for integrity and both of them are really revealing. The first talks about honesty and strong moral principles. The second is the state of being whole and undivided. I’m sure the second refers to structural integrity such as the structural integrity of a bridge. However, the concept of being whole and undivided is fascinating as it pertains to human integrity.

In 1984, Greg Abbott was paralyzed when a tree struck him. He was jogging through the neighborhood. The event is obviously the most significant event in his life. It is hard to put a price on such things. How does one put a price on their ability to walk, run, or get around? How does one put a price on the happiness they cannot have due to permanent injury?

The facts are that Abbott availed himself of the system to compensate him following his accident. On some level, it is a completely understandable response and one no one would begrudge him. Except, Abbott would. Abbott spent most of his early political career working to limit others from benefitting from the system the way he did.

To date, it is perhaps the most comprehensive example of the fact that Abbott doesn’t have the integrity to lead. There are others. In 2015, a group of idiots became convinced that the military were going to kidnap citizens and stash them away in Wal-Marts in Texas. That was their explanation for military exercises that became known as Jade Helm.

Abbott’s response was telling as it usually is. He could have ignored it. He could have come out and eased tensions and simply told people there was nothing to worry about. He could have called them out as a bunch of paranoid kooks. Instead he asked the Texas State Guard to monitor the military. At the end of the day it didn’t really interfere with the exercises, so what exactly is the harm?

The harm is that it gave credence to the crackpots. It was a signal to them that the governor heard them and was on their side. Abbott knew it was all nuts, but couldn’t bring himself to say so. After all, he needed their vote. He knows the ex-president was full of crap as well. He knew the whole notion of a border wall was a bunch of window dressing. It didn’t stop him from leaning into that whole line of crap.

Finally, we see him threatening transsexual teens and their parents. We see him question green energy and blame it for the debacle last winter. Yet, we know Abbott was okay with the energy companies profiting from disaster. Thus, we finally see the real reason why Abbott is dangerous and a poor fit for the position of dog catcher, much less governor.

He isn’t a danger because he’s a conservative. True conservatives aren’t inherently dangerous. He’s a danger because he isn’t truly conservative. He isn’t truly anything. Greg Abbott’s only true constituency is Greg Abbott. He will do anything, say anything, and believe anything he needs to get ahead. If one believes in nothing they will eventually fall for anything. We’ve already seen it in Abbott’s case.

There are moments when I simply have to put a story down and come back to it at another time. It seems in the estimation of our illustrious governor that I and my colleagues are regularly committing crimes against humanity. At least that was the implication of his latest letter.

I have to suspend disbelief for a moment and dedicate mental bandwidth to something that doesn’t deserve it. Essentially, the thought process is that children do not have the mental capacity to determine that they want to become a boy or girl. Therefore, a parent has to consent to any procedures that they may have.

If we further suspend disbelief we would have to come out and say what all of this means. It means that being transgender is a crime. So, what the governor expects us to do is to call Child Protective Services and tell them about the transgender students in our school.

This includes students that have nearly completed their transition and students in the beginning of the transitioning process. It assumes a world view where kids (or parents) wake up one day and just think, “I’d like to be a girl today.” Maybe dad was tired of watching John come in seventh at his track meet every week, so we’ll make John Jennifer and she will win the blue ribbons we’ve been expecting.

It ignores the truth about the transgender experience. It trivializes the transgender experience. I wouldn’t even begin to speak for anyone on this regard, but I can’t imagine it would be easy. It certainly isn’t something you dream up on a Tuesday and then go have the surgery on Thursday. It’s a difficult and painful process.

You spend more than ten years developing an identity of your child in your own mind and experience. You see them as a boy or girl. That identity comes with certain assumed experiences and they tell you they don’t see themselves the way you see them. It ignores the grief that must come when a parent comes to grips with the fact that their child needs to go through this transition to be happy. Your conception of them must die and rise up out of the ashes as something different.

So, what the governor and his cronies want us to do is to tell a government agency that what they’ve just done is a crime. We are supposed to report that student because their parents obviously don’t know what’s best for their child. We are calling another human being a crime. In case that didn’t sink in, it needs to be repeated. We are calling another human being a crime.

I hope I don’t have to spell this out, but I’m not doing that. Even if I for one second believed that being transgender was wrong or even somehow a sin against God, I wouldn’t dream of telling a kid that. Doing so would be absolutely cruel and would be antithetical to everything we should be about as human beings.

Of course, when we stop suspending disbelief we start to understand what this is really about. It’s about scoring cheap political points with a base that doesn’t need it. They don’t need their ego massaged. They don’t need to feel better about their bigotry. These kids deserve the love, respect, and kindness that Abbott is showing to his base. I’m sorry that they feel uncomfortable with the idea of transgender people. I don’t say this lightly, but they can go to hell if they think I’m about rat out a transgender kid just to make them feel better.

Greg Abbott released another ad where he regaled us with Joe Biden’s supposedly open border policy and how Abbott was protecting Texans from the big, bad Mexican cartels bringing over drugs from south of the border. These ads are littered all over sports talk radio these days.

When the show returned to its regularly scheduled content, the deejays were talking about the theory of sunken cost. In this case, it referred to whether a team should let go of a player they had invested heavily in. The organizations that do the best are the ones that realize their mistakes early on and pivot effectively.

The fallacy of sunken costs is basically our tendency to double down on a belief, strategy, or endeavor because pivoting would be an admission that we were wrong and that we’d wasted time, money, and/or energy on a bad idea. The concept is really a two-pronged concept. First, there is the reluctance to give up because of the previous time, money, and energy wasted. Second, there is a reluctance to give up because we would have to admit that we made an error in judgment.

So, let’s take a look at the ads being played on the radio as an example. The ad focuses on three belief structures that are more or less untrue. The first is that illegal immigration is on the rise. We can see when we look at the numbers that it has been in steady decline in recent years.

The second portion of that fallacy is that undocumented immigrants are somehow inherently dangerous. The ads focus on law enforcement and how Abbott is protecting us from the big, bad immigrants. Yet, when we look at numbers from the same source as above, we notice that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate than legal immigrants and natural born citizens.

So, that obviously plays into the third fallacy of the commercial. Violent crime rates are on the rise nationwide. There is an assumption that this means that the borders have become more dangerous. Yet, they seem to be in decline on the southern border. Multiple reports and studies demonstrate that a border wall would not effectively reduce crime at the border or in the country at large.

The question is how we free a subset of the population that seems to be wrapped in fear and free them from the clutches of red herrings and misinformation? Pundits have long known that when you can sell the country on daddy issues (defense, crime, safety) then conservatives usually win. When mommy issues are the most dominant (education, health care, human rights) then the progressives usually win.

However, this goes beyond that. It goes to a group of people that have obviously backed the wrong horse. They’ve watched that horse come in last in nearly every race at the track. He talks about protecting them and he clearly doesn’t do that. He talks about how corrupt his opponents were and he is clearly the most corrupt politician in the history of the country.

It’s clearly not about stopping the steal or draining the swamp anymore. Those excuses died a long time ago. It is very simple. The longer people hold on to their love and adulation of a thoroughly evil man the harder it becomes to give up on that love and adulation. They would then have to admit that the love and adulation was misplaced. That’s admitting that they’ve wasted time, money, and brain power. That’s admitting they were duped. The greatest con anyone can pull is the con of getting you to accept being conned because it’s just too painful to admit you were conned.

Much has been written about the “Let’s go Brandon” phenomenon. In the show “The Simpsons” there was an episode where Homer joined a barbershop quartet. They wanted to come up with a name that would be hilarious at first and then lose its edge with each passing mention. They came up with the B Sharps.

Let’s Go Brandon is the political equivalent. It’s absolutely juvenile on any number of levels and demonstrates a kind of lack of respect that we have come to expect from conservatives. Leave it our state’s leadership to join in on the fun.

Abbott is now playing the role of the prodigal son. Of course, that would only be true if Abbott, Dan Patrick, and the rest of the Texas leadership were a little more respectable. At least the prodigal son from the Bible didn’t punch his father in the face or knee him in the crotch on his way out the door the first time.

See, we didn’t need any of these mask mandates, quarantine rules, rapid testing supplies, or anything like that. We are big, rugged Texans that love being on our own figuratively and literally. We have our own electricity grid. We have our own science when it comes to the pandemic. Just stay the hell out Brandon and let us live our own lives.

Oh wait a minute. Not so fast Brandon. Did I say I wanted you to get the hell out of Texas? I meant that we needed you to come save us from ourselves. It seems Abbott has come back and asked Brandon to save us. Sadly this wasn’t the first time and if he is reelected in 2022 it likely won’t be the last. Hell, if we have another winter storm like we had last year we might be going back to the well again.

In fact, Texas leadership did little to nothing to prevent that from happening. Thus, we see the pattern with Abbott’s leadership style. Insult everyone around you, do nothing to avert disaster, and then come crawling back when times of desperate. Except Abbott is incapable of crawling whether we are being literal or metaphorical. He seems too obtuse to realize the predicament he has put himself in.

This time it is in regards to Omicron variant of the corona virus. We didn’t need to be careful with this stuff. It was always a hoax until it wasn’t. So thanks for your help Brandon. I’ll stop insulting you long enough to accept it and then we will go right back to insulting you. I think I’d rather hear the B Sharps in concert.

This week Texas Monthly announced its 2022 Bum Steer Awards and the ones you expected were winners.  The only question was who was going to be the Top Bum Steer.  You won’t be surprised that it is none other the National Embarrassment of Texas, Greg Abbott.  The magazine ripped him a new one with these choice quotes:

“From the beginning, Abbott was attuned to the 4 percent of Texans who decide Republican primary elections and that group’s many peculiar priorities.”

“This has been a hard year for everyone, and no governor in the U.S. has had it easy. (“At least we don’t have Andrew Cuomo,” Texans could say.) But every step of the way, Abbott has made it harder for nearly everyone, rendering life more difficult, the death tolls higher, and the experience of being a Texan more demoralizing.”

About the blackout: “Who was the responsible party? Two days into the crisis, Abbott took the time to appear on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and blame renewable energy—a field in which Texas has been a leader, thanks in large part to his Republican predecessors—even though the blackout was caused mostly by problems with the distribution of natural gas.”

About COVID-19: “And Abbott’s handling of the situation was comically erratic. He ordered a lockdown and then, under pressure from his right, crusaded to free Texans imprisoned by his lockdown.”

“But Abbott had other priorities. With his approval, the Legislature passed voter suppression legislation that rivaled the worst in the country as well as a law placing bounties on the heads of those who help others get abortions.”

And finally, “Over the course of 2021, Texans learned that Greg Abbott was not so colorless after all—somewhere along the line, he learned to be ruthless. ”

The article is a must read.  Close runners up were Ted Cruz for obvious reasons, and 25 Texans who participated in Trump’s effort to overthrow the US government and steal the presidency from Joe Biden.

After 26 years of single party rule where the GOP has controlled the governor’s mansion, both state houses, and virtually all the courts including the Texas Supreme Court, our state has become a cesspool of corruption, weirdos, felons, and fascists.  I have little hope that much will change as long as the federal government and courts are tolerant and complicit with Texas’ post-democracy fascist regime.