As a mere special education teacher, I am not in a position to advise candidates. I’ve thought about running locally before, but definitely don’t have the money to do it. If I were to advise Democrats (since I’m definitely not a Republican) is that they should run on a platform of “competence in government.” The planks are fairly simple and have been on full display here in Texas the last two plus decades.

I vividly remember Bill White (then mayor of Houston) and Rick Perry standing on stage following Hurricane Ike. Perry was fumbling about and was told live on camera that it was his job to take federal funds and distribute them to localities that needed them. You could see the urge to kill on White’s face as he realized the governor was sitting on cash and didn’t know what to do. Both men walked off stage. Only White returned.

We’ve seen the electrical grid crumble before our very eyes. We’ve seen senators flee the state during the ice storm. We’ve seen a governor do nothing and be out of all ideas. At the national level we have seen a pandemic completely mismanaged. We’ve seen the economy bungled time and again. Each time Democrats have to be elected to fix these things.

This is not to say that every Republican is an idiot. Ed Emmet did a good job as county commissioner when he held the post and worked well with other county and city officials. Lina Hidalgo might be doing an even better job. In general, Democrats just do the job better. We aren’t talking policy here. We can have policy debates and certainly we always do. This is simple barebones work that government must do on a day to day basis.

A hurricane has hit the gulf south. Over a million people are without power as I write this. Governor Abbott doesn’t seem interested in getting the work done. How do I know this? He’s not even in the country right now. He left on July 5th when everyone knew the storm would land somewhere in Texas. We didn’t know who would be effected, but we knew it would be Texans. Thanks Governor.

So, when will the rest of the folks get power? Would they get power faster if state officials actually gave a shit about doing their job? We will likely never know. What we do know is that Republicans are more interested in getting the job, keeping the job, and enriching themselves off of the job than they are actually doing the job. This is practically a universal truth.

In Washington, representatives and senators certainly write bills, attach pork for local projects, and grandstand with great regularity, but there are hundreds of things they do for constituents that no one ever hears about. That is unless they are too busy grandstanding and ass kissing to do that job. Beyond the policy debates and ideological nonsense is the simple day to day responsibilities of being in state and national government. This stuff matters and it matters now for people in the gulf south. It sure would be nice if people in Austin cared about doing it.

The problem of gun violence, especially mass shootings, is not all that complicated.  The solution for it has been figured out by every other industrialized nation on the planet.  The US has CHOSEN to not solve it.  Those reasons are also simple – power.  As long as the gun culture has an outsized voice with the electorate, namely the Senate, nothing will happen.  That doesn’t mean the answer is complicated, but money and power wont allow it.  To avoid talking about the real solution to gun violence, politicians and the gun lobby repeat bullshit every time there is a mass shooting, which is now a weekly occurrence.

Let’s review said bullshit:

1. Good guy with a gun – the most common, yet one of the most false.  Almost no mass shootings are stopped by an armed citizen, and in fact, armed citizens are generally killed or wounded trying to help, like the security guard at the Tops Grocery in Buffalo New York a few weeks ago.
2. An armed society is a polite society” – this one is as stupid as it sounds.  Name me an Open Carry Texas member who is a polite member of society and I’ll show you a fictional character.
3. More guns equals more safety – if that were true, we’d be the safest society on the planet.  As it is, our gun violence death rate is 4 times that of industrialized nations.
4. Crime decreased as we loosened gun laws – which equals, “I ate ice cream yesterday, then it rained.  Eating ice cream causes rain.”  Correlation does not equal causality, but I can say now that the states with looser gun laws have greater per capita gun deaths than those with strict gun laws.
5. What about “shall not be infringed” do you not understand – which is one of the silliest arguments.  All historic documents, including James Madison’s own notes, showed that the Founders were terrified of standing armies, (especially the British) and decided to defend the new US government with citizen militias under local authorities federalized during times of war.  That history is well documented and easily studied for those who read past the NRA’s propaganda.  In the early days, firearms were kept at home, but ammunition and gun powder were kept in local armories for safety.  Our founding generation was not populated by idiots.
6. Criminals don’t follow the law – again, an idiotic argument which supports the notion that, if this is true, we shouldn’t have stop signs, traffic lights, or speed limits.  Laws aren’t written for people to obey, since responsible citizens do that.  Laws are written to establish a framework of enforcement and punishment for those who don’t follow the law.
7. We should harden our schools and have armed law enforcement guarding the schools – again a stupid argument.  First, making every school in the nation a fortress is impossible.  Second it doesn’t work.  Case in point, just YESTERDAY, there were armed police at the school in Uvalde when the shooter got there.  They shot at him, but he was wearing body armor and was returning fire with an AR-15.  Even though there were armed officers at the school, he got in anyway, then killed 19 children and two teachers.  The cops got him only after SWAT arrived and blew him away with comparable weapons to what he was using.
8. We should arm the teachers – Ted Cruz made this idiotic statement many times including yesterday. This is the dumbest goddam suggestion of all.  See number 7 above.  If police couldn’t stop him, how the fuck is little Ms. Perrywinkle, the second grade arithmetic teacher two years out of college going to do it?

Ted Cruz, pull your head out of your ass.

The race for the nominations of the two major parties are moving closer and closer. Normally, when the midterm elections end then the two sides come out swinging at each other. Governors, prominent senators, and cults of personality collide on stage and on the roads of Iowa and New Hampshire. One often wonders why those particular states get such a prominent position, but we can set that down for the moment.

The Democratic side has some intrigue. Joe Biden will be 80 before the campaign for the nomination is over. One can’t help but wonder whether he has the energy to do this again. Obviously, the right would like nothing more than to see him step aside. It opens the door to Kamela Harris and other potentially more progressive candidates.

If we assume norms for a moment (I know, I know) we would assume that past presidents will move on into the sunset (or an eight by ten room with bars) then the Republican side has a handful of challengers that would seem to be ready to run. Most of them are governors, so we should probably take a moment to look at the latest.

The headliner just might be Ron DeSantis from Florida. It’s a populous state and he finds himself in the news often enough. We can go with the free version or the pay wall version. It’s the same basic story. Recent data has them third in current COVID cases. Being behind California and Texas is par for the course. They are bigger states. The fact that they are ahead of New York and Illinois is perhaps more telling.

In all fairness, that was the past. Newer data would seem to indicate that they are not the most egregious offenders in the past month. Great. They still have had more than 70,000 people die from COVID-19. That number could become 80,000 by the time campaign season gets here.

Not to be outdone, Greg Abbott in Texas has been at the helm when nearly 90,000 Texans have died from COVID. He will be one of the other major contenders for the nomination. Of course, Abbott is an equal opportunity to killer. If he doesn’t get you with lax regulations and mind-numbingly stupid belligerence then perhaps he will freeze you to death.

Both DeSantis and Abbott have postured their way into the former guy’s good graces. I’m sure the hope there will be that he will step aside (or step inside) and will tab one of them as the heir apparent. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. In this case, freedom could lead to the loss of more life.

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem should not be forgotten. Her track record is a double edged sword. She set marks for positive COVID cases per capita, but was also part of a response that turned the tide. I’ll just let the charts do the talking.

I’m sure the usual suspects like Lyndsay Graham and Ted Cruz will throw their hat into the ring. Why vote for a senator who may lead thousands of people to their death when you can elect someone that’s actually done it? Let freedom ring all the way to the cemetery.

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” — William Shakespeare

If the Texas GOP political delegation were a cast of characters they would almost certainly come from the Wizard of Oz. Louie Gohmert would almost certainly be the scarecrow in search of a brain. Dan Patrick would play the role of the Tin Man searching for a heart. That would place Ted Cruz as the lion searching for courage.

Whether he’s bailing the state when the freeze comes, buckling under to Donald Trump even after Trump insulted his wife and father, or assuming the position with Tucker Carlson, Cruz has long established that he is far from being the king of the jungle.

One could analyze his statements about the insurrectionists and then his overwhelming desire to somehow take it back. Psychologists could analyze the whys and what fors until the cows come home. I think what we know and what we suspect are not all that far away from each other. Cruz was a part of a plan to delay the certification of the election. I’m sure they trusted him with the parliamentarian side of the plot. No one ever accused Cruz of being dumb.

The less you know in a conspiracy the better. I’m willing to guess he didn’t know about the violence before January 6th. Goodness knows what he would have done with that information had he known. Maybe he would have assumed the position. Maybe he would have blown the whistle. My guess is that the human part of him was horrified at what transpired.

That’s the part that came out and called the participants terrorists. It is one thing to steal an election through parlor tricks and slight of hand. It’s another to steal it on the tip of a sword. As per usual, his first words spoke the truth before he forgot who was in charge.

This brings us to the real scary part of this dilemma. The story is not that Cruz was groveling, but who he was groveling to. We would expect him to grovel to Trump. Having him grovel to a prime time talking head is a cross between bizarre and unsettling. How did Carlson get this much power and who exactly is Carlson accountable to?

A number of folks have thought Carlson could make a run for president. I suppose it makes sense. He has money. He has name recognition. He has a brain. He can match being an outsider with his knowledge of the key players on the inside. However, this would involve him getting in the game. He can snipe from the outside and wield much more power. Power and a lack of responsibility is a dangerous combination. No one on the left has this kind of power. It could be about Carlson, but it really isn’t. Democratic politicians don’t grovel to the talking heads. As long as the wizard denies Cruz and others their courage people like Carlson will be in total control.

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.

In a not at all shocking development, Ted Cruz is a grifter who once again did something shady to benefit himself while showing no remorse, respect for the law, or any interest besides enriching his own pockets or getting in front of a TV camera.

I know that’s a hell of a long run-on sentence but I am just so mad that I could spit.

We have all seen this grift before. It’s an absolute cottage industry in the world of Boring Books Conservatives Didn’t Even Write by Themselves. They find a publisher to give them a big advance, and they put out a book. Next, their Super PAC, full of anonymous donations, buys about 50,000 – 100,000 copies of the book. This helps the sumbitch in several ways.

One: For conservatives to believe that their ideas are more mainstream than they actually are by getting the book on some bestseller lists. Fortunately, the New York Times now puts a dagger symbol to denote that the book is only a best seller because of bulk buys like this. Recently, Donny Jr and other conservatives have gotten many social media views with “PROOF THAT NYT IS A LIBERAL RAG THAT HATES CONSERVATIVES.”

Two: The money used to purchase 50,000 -100,000 copies of Fled Cruz’s books has now been laundered. Of course, the publisher has to withhold royalties from these book sales, or they have to at least publicly say that they do. But Ted Cruz is no idiot. A charlatan? Yes. Idiot? No.

Instead, his PAC, using donated funds, purchased “sponsorship advertising” from a company called Reagan Investments, LLC. Reagan Investments, LLC, then purchased his books with those same dollars, netting him his 15% royalties, and effectively laundering political donations into his pocket. How do I know for sure? Well, they wrote “BOOKS” under the “sponsorship advertising” part when transmitting the money. Here’s the full article: Now Ted Cruz may be buying his own books through a mystery company | Salon.com

Are you with me?

Cruz puts out book —-> Voters and Anonymous people give Cruz millions in a PAC ———-> Cruz gives the PAC money to Reagan Investments ———> Reagan Investments buys books, and since they aren’t a PAC the publisher doesn’t have to withhold royalties ——> Cruz personally pockets 15% off the top.

But yall, that isn’t even what this complaint is about. There’s more.

In a completely separate grift, this sumbitch spent campaign dollars on at least $18,000 in Facebook ads urging his supporters to go buy his book. There’s no ability to trace how much campaign money he spent on other ads because that’s not available to the public. So he takes $18,000 in campaign money, runs ads for people to buy his book, and each dupe that buys it nets another 15% back into his pocket which is a violation of FEC rules. 

Of course, nothing will happen because he’ll use his campaign money to pay for a big fancy lawyer and his good ole’ boy buddies way up high will get him out of trouble because even though they hate him as much as we do, they all do the same thing and they like the system the way it is.

It’s hard to explain, of course. But do you know what happens when you piss off a broad with a nice tall glass of sweet tea, steel-toed boots and a love for graphic design? Infographics.  You get infographics.