Dannie Goeb, a carpetbagger and radio talk show host from Baltimore, known in the Lone Star State as Dan Patrick, has gone all-in on stupidity in his effort to keep his Numero Uno spot with TFG and his crazy base for the 2022 election.  Goeb is already a walking public policy disaster and craven power grabber who’s cowed every Texas Republican office holder in Austin including Greg Abbott who’s also racing him off the far right edge of the Flat Earth.  In that race to the edge, Goeb’s being challenged by 5 Republican opponents who look less like serious political challengers and more like the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  They are campaigning on MAGA priorities such as ending all property taxes, outlawing all abortions, and seceding from the United States.

Goeb has responded to his challengers in kind, proposing idiotic policies such as ending all tenure for new professors at state universities and taking tenure away from professors who might dare to teach concepts that he doesn’t like.  Defending himself against massive backlash to this declaration, he tweeted, “I will not stand by and let looney Marxist UT professors poison the minds of young students with Critical Race Theory. We banned it in publicly funded K-12 and we will ban it in publicly funded higher ed. That’s why we created the Liberty Institute at UT.”  Talk about Cancel Culture with two capital Cs.  That tweet caused even greater backlash from academics all over the state who were already wary of the institute, especially after he lied that it was the idea of UT faculty, which it was not.

BTW, he’s starting the Liberty Institute with financing from billionaires Bud Brigham and Bob Rowling.  How much money these two have donated so far is unknown, but we do know that the state budgeted $6 million so far and the UT Board of Regents kicked in another $6 million.  Texas Monthly reported that the eventual annual budget could be as high as $100 million, 75% of which will be made up of your tax dollars and 25% billionaire pocket change.  Among banning university faculty tenure, and banning teaching of actual history, the institute is also intending to promote the ideas of “individual liberty, limited government, private enterprise and free markets”.  Apparently, these ideas have to align with Goeb’s own political positions, no matter how bad.

Capping off his big backlash week, Goeb also blundered with a mail in ballot scam that was carved out of the voter suppression bill that went into effect last September.  You’ll recall that the bill made it a felony for local election officials to mail unsolicited ballot applications or even suggest for people to vote by mail.  The carve out allows political candidates to mail out these ballot applications to their voters even pre-filled out.  Goeb did just that, but then shot himself in the foot again by having the return envelopes pre-addressed to the Texas Secretary of State instead of local county voter registrars.  This has caused a delays of thousands of mail in ballots because of the forwarding necessary from Austin to local counties all over the state.  Interestingly, when the story broke the Secretary of State website was suddenly scrubbed of a policy statement that all applications received by the office would be rejected.  When Goeb’s blunder was publicly reported, he said that he had ordered the applications be sent to Austin to protect voters from “blue county” registrars, who, like it or not, have to process all applications in that county.  It’s very possible thousands of Republicans may not get their ballots in time to vote.

That would be hilarious and a faint glimmer of justice.