Front page of the Houston Chronicle this morning: Budget Cuts

This ain’t gonna improve none at all.

Despite a two-year budget of $2.4 billion, the Texas Department of Public Safety, with little notice, has reduced office hours at 11 of the state’s busiest driver’s license offices and plans to lay off more than 100 full-time employees to deal with a $21 million funding crunch.

The statewide police agency’s primary function is to patrol state highways and issue driver’s licenses, but in recent years has spent hundreds of millions on security operations along the 1,200-mile border with Mexico.

That ain’t your job, DPS.  Patrolling the border is Donald Trump’s job.

The last time I renewed my driver’s license, I had to go in person. I had to wait in line for 3 hours. Now it’s going to get worse. Yippee!

Thank you, Republicans.

All of our glorified politicians and Chamber of Commerce representatives continually crow about Texas being a “free market” state with a “light touch” when it comes to regulations.  But is that really true?  Actually, no.  It’s only free market for those who pay for it.  To wit:

• You can’t buy a Tesla directly from the company in Texas.  You have to buy it online and have it delivered from California.  Bills to allow direct sales have died 3 times since 2013, killed by big money from the powerful auto dealers lobby to protect their own dealer franchises.
• Under the same Byzantine laws promoted by Texas auto dealers, Warren Buffett was prevented from keeping his chain of auto dealers in Texas because his company happens to also own an RV manufacturing company in Indiana. Buffett tried to fix the problem, but Teabaggers shut him down and the bill never made it to the floor.  In Texas, manufacturers cannot sell cars.  I know, weird, right?
• You can’t buy wine online in Texas like you can in most other states.  The powerful liquor lobby controls the governor’s mansion and both houses in the legislature, and has had enacted more Byzantine laws that are inconsistently applied.  These laws treat beer, distilled spirits, and wine differently, with complicated permitting requirements.  A national online distributor, Wines Til Sold Out, recently received a cease and desist letter from the State of Texas and has shut down sales to the state.  Texas consumers lose again.
• This year, the powerful beer distributor lobby, which has doled out over $11 million to Texas elected officials (Greg Abbott got $1.4 million, and Dan Patrick got $688,000), got a roll back of the beer law passed in 2013 which encouraged small craft brewers to invest in Texas by lifting insanely low limits on how much beer can be made by small brewers and allowing in-brewery sales directly to customers.  That law was so successful that small brewers increased by 3 fold since 2011 drawing the ire of the beer distributors who don’t like competition.  They hate it so much that they got a new law passed this year that limits the size of brewers who can sell directly in their own taprooms.  The limit is a production size of 225,000 barrels in all of their facilities regardless of whether those facilities are actually in Texas.  This shuts down craft beer company Oskar Blues of Colorado, who just spent millions opening a new brewery and tap room in Austin, and also affects Deep Ellum Brewing which is near the 225,000 barrel limit and has already announced that, because of this law, it will now seek to invest in other more friendly states.  Oh, and BTW, mega brewers like Anheuser Busch, Heineken, and Miller-Coors were all given carve outs to the size requirement.  I’m shocked, just shocked, I tell you.  Well, not really.  Oh, and for reference, Anheuser Busch produces about 125 million barrels a year.
• But it gets worse…In this same law, small craft brewers must pay a per barrel fee to local beer distributors for beer they sell in their own facilities and that is never actually touched by the distributor.  That’s right, folks, the Great State of Texas is so “free market” that it has made a law that allows huge multi-billion dollar distributing companies to freely extort money from small brewers for the privilege for selling their own beer in their own taprooms.  You’re welcome.  This bill is on Abbott’s desk, and if he doesn’t veto it, will become law on June 18th.  With $1.4 million of beer lobby money in his pocket, what do you predict he’ll do?

By now, most of those paying attention know that Texas is not a “free market” state, not in the slightest.  It has been turned into a corrupt banana republic that benefits the wealthy and powerful while trampling on the small businesses all over the state it claims to promote.  But the really weird thing?  Those same business people and consumers who are hurt by this corruption are the very people who support and vote for those who participate in it on a daily basis.

You can only draw one conclusion from these clear facts – voters in Texas are stupid.

There’s a newspaper in England called the Daily Mail Online.  They like to report American goings-on because we’re so damn entertaining.

Today they did a story about how Louisiana is the most corrupt state in America.  They have charts, graphs, and big ole pictures.

So the cutline under this graph says, “The states with the most public corruption convictions per 100,000 population.”  So, what you have here is not the most corrupt states, but a list of the states actually doing something about corruption.

Texas heads up the bottom quarter on that list only because we don’t indict or convict our crooks. And if we do, they just keep putting off their trial until everybody dies or the law changes.  Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton has been under felony indictment since July of 2015 and from all appearances, he’ll be going to trial after Jesus comes again.

And if we don’t ever get around to indicting them, it’s just easier to send them to Washington, DeeCee to be a congressman or Secretary of Energy or something.

The University of Texas at Arlington (think Dallas, Fort Worth) was a little stunned to find that redneck white people still live in Texas.

These fliers were found on campus yesterday.

I dunno if America is a white nation but I do know for a certain damn joyful fact that Texas is not a white state.  Only 40% of Texans are classified as white and I suspect that some of them are lying just so they can attend Klan meetings.

How you can tell if someone who is brown has a birth certificate involves magic and alchemy way beyond my intelligence level.

They have a really scary website, where they smear their faces out instead of wearing a hood.  By the way, “blood and soil” has its origins in Nazi Germany.  Here’s the outline of what they call “The Texas Offensive.”

By the way, I make it a rule in life not to go places where I have to hide my face.  But then again, I am especially beautiful and I kinda suspect those guy are anything but.

Texas Republican Congressmess Smokey Joe Barton had himself a time at his his town hall.  One thing you will learn right here is that one does not question Joe ByGawd Barton.

Some of his constituents were hacked off that Smokey Joe voted against the Violence Against Women Act.

If you can’t hear it, here is a transcript.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Now given your voting record opposing legislation protecting women from violence, will you make a commitment to us today, make a promise, that you will reach out to Congresswoman Jackie Speier and work with her to see this bill successfully through Congress?

BARTON: Let me comment on a number of things that you’re – on the first bill that I voted against, that’s a true statement, and I voted against it because I think that’s a state issue not a federal issue, there are –

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Boo! No!

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Civil rights don’t go to states.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It’s violence against women, that’s a national issue. That is an issue that impacts everyone everywhere, not only in this country but everywhere.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Civil rights.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You represent Texas first.

BARTON: You, you sir shut up.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: [jeers] You don’t tell anybody to shut up, you work for us.

Do not question The Joe.

Gerrymandering has been blood sport in the US almost since the founding where partisans established districts that favored one party over another.  Both sides did it for decades up until computer modeling raised it to an art form in the early 2000s.

Starting in 2002, pushed by good ol’ Tom Delay, Texas Republicans rammed through a mid-decade redistricting that turned state politics on its head to take control of the state house and delegation to Washington.  The result has been a slow death spiral of our state by almost every measure causing declines in education, health care, and infrastructure lead by screwballs like Louie Gohmert, Dan Patrick, and Blake Farenthold.

To make matters worse, Republicans, knowing that their constituency of white angry people is aging and shrinking, have continued to tighten their grip to maintain power as the demographics of Texas push them into the minority.  When they yet again gerrymandered Texas districts in 2011, using computer technology and a technique called “packing and cracking”, people who tend to vote Democratic were either packed into small districts or spread out so much that their votes didn’t count.  These techniques discriminate against not only white Democrats, but disproportionately affect Hispanics and African Americans.

Friday, the story began to change when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the redistricting plan of 2011 saying,

“The record indicates not just a hostility toward Democrat districts, but a hostility to minority districts, and a willingness to use race for partisan advantage.”

The court also noted the “strong racial tension and heated debate about Latinos, Spanish-speaking people, undocumented immigrants and sanctuary cities.”  Finally, a federal court has spoken the truth about those who lead Texas – that they’re racists.  The record of open hostility to minorities convinced the majority that this wasn’t just simple gerrymandering, which is bad enough, but actually a strategy to keep the votes of racial minorities from counting.

This judgment will very likely end up in an appeal to the Supreme Court.  In the meantime, Texas has to go back to the drawing board.  It’s about time.