How Republicans Want Justice: For Themselves Alone

Update: Many thanks again to Batocchio for adding me to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Please take the time to look at the other articles on this site, and please support the pro-choice groups out there as the wingnut Republicans take away women's rights, especially here in Florida as the idiot governor sneaks in around midnight to sign a restrictive anti-abortion bill without media fanfare while Ft. Lauderdale floods, the bastard...

You want to see the real weaponization of the American justice system?

It's not from state district or federal attorneys going after donald trump for illegal misdeeds he's openly committed (and in the case of the stolen classified documents, something he still brags about).

Watch as the Republican Texas governor openly - HAPPILY - plans to pardon a Far Right shooter who killed a Black Lives Matter protestor right after a jury convicted that shooter for murder (via Bill Chappell at NPR):

One day after a jury convicted U.S. Army Sgt. Daniel Perry of murder for shooting and killing Garrett Foster at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he wants Perry to receive a pardon.

Perry, 35, hasn't been sentenced yet, but the state pardons and parole board is already starting to review his case, at Abbott's request.

"I am working as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry," Abbott said over the weekend, via Twitter...

The governor didn't go into detail about why he believes Perry should be pardoned, but he cited Perry's attorney's explanation that Perry shot Foster in self-defense.

"Texas has one of the strongest 'Stand Your Ground' laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney," Abbott said...

The thing is, that jury weighed the evidence presented in court, and didn't believe Perry's claims of self-defense because eyewitnesses testified that Foster wasn't threatening Perry in that moment. It didn't help Perry that he bragged before going to the rally that he "might have to kill a few people." The jury did its job, and yet Abbott declared it 'nullification'.

One of the things I've heard and read about the legal system is how sacrosanct jury decisions are (just Google "juries are the bedrock" and see the results). The appellate system is loathe to overturn jury rulings unless there's proof the jury was tampered with or didn't receive the full facts of the case, and even then it's like moving mountains for the higher courts to do so. 

The matter has barely been settled in a court of law, and already Abbott wants to overrule the whole trial. It's not the jury committing nullification (the refusal to accept the legal facts of the matter and rule in contravention to what the court instructed), it's the state governor. 

Abbott is essentially guaranteeing a "Get Out of Jail Free" card for Perry, and signaling that he will offer the same deal to any other Far Right gunman eager to disrupt any protest or rally that offends their extremism.

Abbott isn't doing this because the trial was unfair, or because Perry is suffering any form of injustice (or requires some form of mercy due to medical emergency or personal loss). Abbott is doing this for partisan reasons, for pandering to the rabid Republican voting base convinced there's a shooting war between themselves and the dreaded Other (liberals, Blacks, immigrants, women, college students, and more). Abbott is doing this to "own the libs," and to make it clear that any protest - even peaceful ones guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution - can become a shooting gallery for MAGA wingnuts.

The Far Right meme of "Librul Hunting Licenses" just got real.

Abbott is doing this because Republicans don't believe in justice for all: Republicans want a skewed legal system that protects only them and punishes everyone else.

Gods help us.

Blood on the Streets of Uvalde

No other country outside of an actual goddamned war zone has to go through this shit.

YET ANOTHER SCHOOL SHOOTING.

This time in Uvalde, Texas. This time with 19 elementary schoolkids and 2 adults shot to death by another angry guy with fucking guns (via Vanessa Romo at NPR): 

The number of people confirmed killed in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has risen to 20, according to Sgt. Erick Estrada of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Estrada told CNN that 18 children and two adults are among the dead... (Note: death toll updated to 19 children by 10:47 PM)

The suspect allegedly shot his grandmother before he entered the school. Thursday was meant to be the last day of the school year, according to the school's website.

In a brief news conference hours after the shooting, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo confirmed some of the details offered by Abbott. Arredondo called the bloodshed a "mass casualty incident" but did not specify the number of dead. The chief also told reporters that the gunman acted alone and is deceased...

The school year for those kids was going to end this Thursday. Now for 18 families those kids will never come home. All because of an angry guy who, when he recently turned 18, went and bought military-grade firearms and decided to use them on children.

ON CHILDREN. 

WHO NEVER HARMED ANOTHER SOUL. WHO NEVER GOT THE CHANCE TO LIVE, TO BREATHE, TO GROW UP AND GROW OLD.

GODDAMN THE SHOOTER WHO KILLED THEM.

AND GODDAMN THE SONS-OF-BITCHES WHO MANUFACTURED THE WEAPONS, AND SOLD THEM TO HIM AND HUNDREDS OF OTHER ANGRY GUYS WHO GO ON SHOOTING SPREES.

You know something? This is a goddamned rigged game. This is a goddamned setup. The National Rifle Body Count Association has its hands all over the gun-making industry, and so they make money off of every gun sale, and every mass shooting is like an advertisement to the gun nuts to go and buy more guns which is more money to the NRA National Body Count Association.

It's a hell of a racket. Even organized crime mobs aren't this evil. At least the Gambinos and the other Families don't make money off of school massacres.

I swear, we need to go after the NRA National Body Count Association for Racketeering, for criminal conspiracy to commit murder, because these motherfuckers KNOW that every gun - especially the assault rifles - they're selling there's a decent chance it'll get used in a mass shooting.

THEY ARE MAKING MONEY OFF OF MURDER, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

THIS WILL NOT STOP UNTIL THE GUNMAKERS CAN'T MAKE MONEY OFF OF OUR DEATHS ANYMORE.

Voting out the pro-gun politicians won't be enough (although that needs to happen too). These sons-of-bitches need to pay for all the blood spilt in the glory of their rich lives while they mock our existence.

Goddamn them. Every dead child not just in Uvalde but all across America, all across the last 30 years of their fanatical worship of their God of Death, is on them.

Her Wings Are Cut

Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Welp, the Republican War on Women jumped up a notch this morning when the Supreme Court in its infinite cowardice refused to stay or even comment on the law passed in Texas that pretty much denies every woman (in reality every poor and ethnic woman) her right to have an abortion.

If we can go into some detail about what Texas' law actually does, let's refer to Sarah McCammon at NPR:

The law allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone else who helps a woman obtain an abortion — including those who give a woman a ride to a clinic or provide financial assistance to obtain an abortion. Private citizens who bring these suits don't need to show any connection to those they are suing.

The law makes no exceptions for cases involving rape or incest...

It bans abortion as soon as cardiac activity is detectable. That's around six weeks, which is before a lot of people know that they're pregnant. Other states have tried to do this, but those laws have been challenged by abortion-rights groups and blocked by federal courts again and again...

Anyone who successfully sues an abortion provider under this law could be awarded at least $10,000. And to prepare for that, Texas Right to Life has set up what it calls a "whistleblower" website where people can submit anonymous tips about anyone they believe to be violating the law.

"These lawsuits are not against the women," says John Seago with Texas Right to Life. "The lawsuits would be against the individuals making money off of the abortion, the abortion industry itself. So this is not spy on your neighbor and see if they're having an abortion."

In a federal lawsuit challenging this, a coalition of abortion providers and reproductive rights groups said the law "places a bounty on people who provide or aid abortions, inviting random strangers to sue them..."

When I heard the bit about the $10,000 bounty, I immediately flashed onto the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which also issued bounties on anyone deemed an escaped slave (which punished free-born Blacks) and penalties on Northerners who refused to help bounty hunters (which punished law officers into betraying their Black neighbors). This isn't the first time I made that analogy.

But this is appropriate analogy after all: This Texas anti-abortion law basically turns women into property, unable to have a say in their medical care or their ability to have families on their own terms.

The so-called Pro-Lifers, I've noted before, are not about the sanctity of life: If they were, they'd be foremost against the death penalty and wars of occupation (and they're not). The so-called Pro-Fetus people, I've noted before, are not about the fetus: If they were, they'd be pushing for more financial aid and improvements in pre-natal care, maternity leave from work, child care benefits, and increased food benefits to schools and families so that children won't starve (guess what, they're not).

No, the anti-abortion crowds have always been Pro-Judgment, willing to shame any woman they deem impure, eager to promote their own rage and anger towards other humans. Willing to promote a society where women earn less in wages, suffer more domestic violence, and are viewed mostly as breeding cattle stuck in generational cycles of poverty.

By passing a law that restricts abortion past an arbitrary deadline that no woman can keep - most women won't know it until they miss a menstrual cycle (four weeks at the most), and by then it would be too late to find a provider who would help - the Far Right are looking to deny women any say at all what happens to their own health. Pregnancy is NOT perfectly safe, and a lot of women could suffer - even die - if they're forced to carry a pregnancy their bodies can't handle.

By passing a law that refuses to respect rape / incest victims, they are forcing those victims to carry on a traumatic experience that would break their spirits if not their sanity.

By passing a law that allows ANYONE uninvolved in the direct affairs of that woman's life to earn monetary awards by simply snitching on them - even if the woman suffers a legitimate miscarriage, or even isn't pregnant - guarantees an abuse of that bounty system to where innocent women will be investigated and punished while assholes rack up easy payouts. That bounty system also punishes anybody pro-choice trying to help these women find ways to get out of state to where they could get the abortion they need to save their health and/or their sanity: a lot of social workers and doctors are going to become targets of unjustified persecution so that a greedy few stuff their wallets with false claims (and given the sadistic mindset of the state government enforcing all of this, the overseers of this system will likely ignore those false claims so they can "juke the stats" on their War Against Women).

This law - passed in the name of Christian morality - flies against the religious belief of Jewish, Hindi, non-religious, and liberal Christian churches. Who speaks for their First Amendment rights in this matter? Certainly not the Texan Republicans who pushed this law, or the rest of the Far Right Republicans nationwide who will look to craft similar laws in their own states to ensure their women suffer as well.

The only women who won't suffer in all of this are the ones who can afford to leave Texas (or any other Red state) for a place where abortion isn't restricted, and can afford to stay there for a year with family/friends so that nobody back home can accuse them of anything. In short, upper-income women (who tend to NOT be Black or Latina, hint hint).

To all the women in Texas about to suffer injuries to your persons because of a corrupt patriarchy that devalues women, these Far Right Bible-thumping hypocrites are trying to cut your wings.

Everyone else out here needs to fight back against those judgmental monsters. Every woman has a right to spread her wings to fly. 

Brief Notes On the Price of Political Pandering July 2021

It's become clear in 2021 that the Republican Party still kneels and begs for table scraps at the foot of the eternal Shitgibbon known as trump.

As the near-unstoppable cycle of election campaigning kicks up for 2022, a number of high-profile Republican candidates at the state and Congressional level have spent a lot of effort playing to trump's unstable world-views and conspiracy rants. Noticeable among these sycophants is George P. Bush, son of... one of the Bush brothers, hold on let me check the Wikipedia biography oh yes it's JEB! - who is entering the political stage by running for state-level office in Texas. Specifically for State Attorney General, running as a challenger against the incumbent Ken Paxton.

Normally, intraparty challenges are rare outside of the purity-test extremists taking their shot at the office-holder they deem insufficiently RINO. It's kind of hard to paint Paxton as a RINO given all the crazy-ass stuff he's done as AG... and that's just the legal stuff. Another big reason for Bush's challenge is that Paxton is currently indicted on corruption and securities fraud charges, something that ought to have driven an honest crook to resign for the good of the party. It's just with this modern Republican Party, corruption charges is now a goddamned badge of honor to these guys.

In order to win, George P. has spent his early days campaigning even further to the right than Paxton, going so far as to openly worship at the foot of trump (party kingmaker) himself. All of this in spite of the open contempt the Bush family itself has towards trump, whom they view as destroying a Republican Party they built and once dominated themselves.

But hey, one of the things about the Bushes, if you ever watched them from Bush the Elder from the 1960s on through to Bush the Lesser in the 2000s to weak Fredo uh Jeb! the Exclamation Point: A Bush running for office will pander and debase themselves as much as needed to win that office.

So where did all of George P.'s love affair for trump lead him?

trump still went with the openly (allegedlys) corrupt Paxton. Why not? trump must figure Paxton will cut him into Paxton's piece of the action...

Ergo, to this bit of schadenfreude:

Donald Trump just endorsed incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) over the GOP primary challenger, George P. Bush—who sold out his own family to kiss Trump’s ass. No hero in this tale, just a reminder that there’s no honor among thieves—and a deal with the devil can backfire. https://t.co/sRUg0qQpg4

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) July 27, 2021

I wonder what George P. will do now. Probably crawl back to the Bush Family Compound and convene a session with their current elders to decide the next step of revenge against Paxton. I wonder how many judges in line to handle Paxton's indictments still owe a favor or three to the Bushes... 

Texas Is Broken Part II: Electric Boo-Boo

It wasn't too long ago (February this month) I wrote about the GREAT STATE OF TEXAS - home to the second-most number of Americans - killing itself in a deep freeze due to serious mismanagement by their current Republican-dominate state officials.

Well, here's the other side of the coin with regards to the Climate Change Extremes everybody has been screaming about the last 30 years: As of now, Texas is killing itself with a severe heat wave that's draining their broken electrical grid (via Erin Douglas at Texas Tribune):

Texas’ main power grid struggled to keep up with the demand for electricity Monday, prompting the operator to ask Texans to conserve power until Friday.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said in a statement Monday that a significant number of unexpected power plant outages, combined with expected record use of electricity due to hot weather, has resulted in tight grid conditions. Approximately 12,000 megawatts of generation were offline Monday, or enough to power 2.4 million homes on a hot summer day.

ERCOT officials said the power plant outages were unexpected — and could not provide details as to what could be causing them...

Here's a possibility: the likelihood that inaction by the political and corporate leadership for the past 20 years to expand or update the power grid to handle the growing population and energy demands that go with all that (it doesn't help that in the past 20 years, our reliance on electronics has increased) has created too much demand and not enough reserves. Anyway, back to Douglas:

The conservation request comes at a time of heightened anxiety around electricity after the state’s catastrophic February power outages left millions without power for days. Those outages, which were prompted by a severe winter storm, may have killed as many as 700 people, according to an analysis of mortality data by BuzzFeed News...

Of the plants offline, about 9,600 megawatts of power, or nearly 80% of the outages, are from thermal power sources, which in Texas are largely natural-gas-fired power plants. That’s several times what ERCOT usually sees offline for thermal generation maintenance during a summer day. Typically, only about 3,600 megawatts of thermal generation are offline this time of year...

The article comments how in April they shut down plants to handle repairs from the February freeze-out, but questions should remain that the power stations in Texas have not fully recovered from all that damage done.

Just to include here for comment, follow this link to see Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice doing us a solid by collating all of the Twitter comments noting how the inept GOP leadership for Texas is pretty much letting the state boil away. 

For all the schadenfreude the political attacks provide - aimed at a group of self-satisfied Republican leaders who keep proving their unwillingness to ACTUALLY LEAD their state - this is again a very serious problem for Texas.

Heat waves are nasty and lethal: Thousands can die in a prolonged heat wave, and Southwest United States - Texas included - is facing one of the most severe ones in years. 

As a Floridian, let me tell you: the difference between living in an air-conditioned room at 76 F over a room heated up to 82 F - which will happen at the least when the power goes - means being able to breathe normally (for starters). Opening the windows won't help if the outdoors is hotter than being in the shade, and if humidity is there to make it worse. Without power, without even ceiling fans to help circulate the air to cut down on humidity, people won't just feel uncomfortable... people will collapse and suffer heat strokes.

That ERCOT council - encouraging people to raise their thermometers just a tad - is overlooking how many of their residents won't, because they'll only worry about their own comfort and risk any blackouts that might roll along at any time of the day. It does not help that the way things are going, the amount of power left to share is so minimal that blackouts are unavoidable... And what happens then???

All because the powers that be that have run the GREAT STATE OF TEXAS - not just the modern Republicans but the conservative Democrats of yore - have been libertarian-driven anti-federalism nightmares who refused to properly regulate their state's energy needs and who obsess over culture war politics over actual governance.

Governor Abbott just promised to spend millions on continuing trump's ill-advised and foolish border wall project, all the while failing to spend millions on upgrading the state's power grid or even connect themselves to neighboring states to help manage power demands. The latest "reforms" that Abbott passed did not do anything to ween the state away from natural gas, which proved unreliable during the February freeze and is proving unreliable now.

And given how Bitcoin mining seems to chew up electricity like tasty gummi bears, Abbott's recent call to promote cryptocurrency in Texas could be what's causing the power shortages of the past few weeks. 

The Republican leadership of Texas - beholden to oil and gas corporations above all others - does not want to make the hard choices that the residents of Texas need right now to save their own lives.

And it's going to be the elderly, and the young, and the poor, who are all going to be hurt by this.

Can't wait for Part III of Texas' next big disaster, which is an upcoming hurricane season that will not show mercy on anyone.

Gods help them. 

Because the Republicans really won't.

Texas Is Frozen (w/Update)

(Update: Thanks to Infidel753 for adding this entry to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Just remember to help out any Texans you know and to be ready for any further GOP bullshit dodging of accountability over this. P.S. please check out the rest of my blog, thank ye!)

Well, a winter vortex thingee swirled across the United States and apparently the entire state of Texas got wiped out in the process. Via Jaclyn Diaz at NPR: 

As the state deals with piercing cold, roughly 4.4 million Texas customers were without power as of midday Tuesday after the power grid failed.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced late Monday that the Texas National Guard was being deployed to help get people to heating centers. He said state agencies are sending additional resources and personnel to help local officials clear roadways and to assist essential workers...

Attempts to keep the heat and lights on at the onset of the severe weather failed. Rolling blackouts scheduled early Monday to conserve Texas' energy supply turned into extended blackouts that are now expected to last well into Tuesday, and possibly longer, energy company officials said.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said the grid lost some 34,000 megawatts of power. Energy sources powering the grid were knocked offline, most of which were powered by natural gas, coal or nuclear energy, according to Houston Public Radio.

The state grid was already facing some shortages because of frozen wind turbines and limited gas supply...

In the meantime, Republicans are doing Republican things by helping their communities survive the harsh cold blaming Democrats and liberals and Green energy policies that have nothing to do with the busted things Republicans failed to fix. Notice Diaz's article mentioning the major parts of the energy grid were gas, coal, and nuclear? Republicans promptly attacked the wind turbines instead (via Kate Aronoff at New Republic (paywall)):

Within a few hours of grid horror stories percolating out beyond the Lone Star state, outlets like Breitbart and the Wall Street Journal began to publish grisly tales of a green revolution: that an abundance of wind turbines in Texas had been rendered practically useless by a chilly day and posed a danger to state residents. “The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died,” said Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Yet a surprising number of mainstream media outlets also adopted the narrative. Reuters, for example, mentioned offline wind resources in the first lines of its story about the outages—illustrated with a picture showing a field of turbines. “Frozen wind turbines contribute to rolling power blackouts across Texas,” ran CNN’s headline. The New York Times led with it, too...

But here's what failed:

As of Monday afternoon, 26 of the 34 gigawatts in ERCOT’s grid that had gone offline were from “thermal” sources, meaning gas and coal. The system’s total installed capacity in the system, Power magazine’s Sonal Patel noted, is around 77.2 GW. Wind and solar power, meanwhile, produced near or even above planned capacity, according to energy analyst Jesse Jenkins, as only small amounts of wind and solar are utilized in peaking conditions. Wind turbines did indeed freeze, and did eventually underperform. But so did natural gas infrastructure, and to a far greater degree. That proved to be a much larger problem since it makes up such a huge proportion of the state’s power supply in extreme weather. And frozen power lines and equipment were a far bigger cause of outages than generation shortages.

And there's other factors at work here involving the poorly designed infrastructure, as Aronoff points out:

About 90 percent of Texas’s grid is part of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Save for a few lines, ERCOT is largely cut off from power in neighboring states. That’s because back in 1935, the state government was eager to avoid being regulated under the Federal Power Act. The Federal Power Act was passed to regulate interstate electricity sales, in the wake of massive scandals involving utility holding companies. It established what’s known today as the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission. To this day, Texas exists outside of FERC’s jurisdiction.

In short: Texas is screwed up this winter thanks to about two decades worth of Republican state-level misrule that failed to do anything to upgrade an aging power grid, and a Texan anti-federalist states-rights mindset that denied themselves the chance to plug into neighboring grids in case of emergencies.

And speaking of how their carbon-based energy resources are failing Texas, one of the reasons the state is getting caught unprepared for this severe shift in weather is because of the ongoing Far Right dismissal of climate change being real. For all the talk about global warming - and the constant Republican talking point of "oh look it's snowing outside, global warming is a myth!" - what's happening with climate change are the extremes getting deeper and catastrophic: The hot days are getting hotter and the cold days are going to get colder. That's what this "winter snap" represents.

What's happening now is a tragedy, compounded by the ongoing pandemic, with millions of lives at risk well into the rest of this week (depending on if any further cold fronts show up).

What should happen after all this passes is a reckoning: The state of Texas is going to HAVE to do something - and yes, it will involve spending public funds - to upgrade their broken energy resources system and prevent future disasters like this.

This should also mean every Republican official and every conservative pundit eating crow and getting drummed out of office in shame for their failures to serve the public trust and report the facts.

Texas may be frozen in ice now, but that state has been frozen in a self-serving self-destructive mindset for decades, going into centuries. That mental glacier is what's causing the deaths and tragedies now, and it needs to go.

The Game of Demographics 2020 Season

What has trump and the Republicans so terrified about 2020 to where they are threatening to disqualify entire ballots across battleground states?

Because it still all comes down to the Electoral College, and too many large-sized battleground states are basically toss-ups in the polling. Especially the large-sized states that leaned Red for the last 20-40 years.

It's telling that for 2020, the biggest states that went for trump - Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina - are either reliably Blue for Biden now or technically within margin of error (say, 3 percent) of going either way. There are good chances that Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan are going for Biden. Pennsylvania could go Blue but there are signs it's one of the states trump is trying to trash hundreds of thousands of ballots. The polling on Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida keep fluctuating. 

Also, trump's attempts to flip Minnesota do not seem to be going anywhere at the moment (Biden has a +10 lead on trump as of 9/24).

If we just count the states with double-digit Electoral Votes, and only count the ones we pretty much know are going for Biden or for trump, the map looks like this:

It used to be that the Republicans - the party of conservatism - had claimed Texas as theirs since the 1980s, along with strong holds on North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida all as part of their grand Southern Strategy. That was also true of Ohio and Arizona, both as part of Ohio as a centerpiece of traditional Republican origins and Arizona as part of the western conservative movement that held sway in California.

But a lot had been changing, especially by 2008 when it became clear that a demographic shift was happening, coinciding with a collapse in Republican dominance due to mismanagement, corruption, and foolishness under the Dubya regime. Florida, due to its ethnic and economic diversity, was no longer reliably Republican at the national level (going for Clinton twice in the 90s and for Obama twice in the 2010s). Virginia's cultural conservatism lost its grip and the state is pretty much Democratic Blue since 2010, and that shift is starting to drift into North Carolina.

What's shocking is the shift in voter turnout in once-reliably Red states like Texas, Arizona, and Georgia. These were cornerstones of Republican dominance, and yet they're now close enough to flipping Blue that Democrats are noticeably campaigning in them where they once avoided wasting any previous efforts in them.

For all the gerrymandering, voter suppression, and gamesmanship, the Republicans are losing to a generational shift away from Boomers (aging Far Right who are dying out) and Gen Xers (half -divided between Reagan worshipping believers to jaded Dem centrists) to Millennials and Aughts (rising in age to vote, and vote more aggressively than Gen X) who are more Progressive, burned out by failed Republican agendas (more of them are poor and in debt in larger numbers than previous generations at their age, and a lot of that due to Republican policies), and ethnically-mixed.

Also in the mix is the unintended consequences of California's housing crisis of the last ten years: where California had become a jobs Mecca drawing many young adults (mostly liberal-leaning) to the state in the 1990s and 2000s, the insane cost-of-living and overvalued house properties - mostly due to the conservative Prop 13's tax-limiting requirements to keep values overinflated - have driven Cali residents elsewhere... to places like Arizona and Texas. And those ex-Californians did not shift their political views when they moved, meaning they are shifting those states further Left than ever before.

Losing Texas in the Electoral College at the least would be catastrophic for Republicans: Where Democrats can rely on California, New York and Illinois to provide a foundation for Electoral success, Texas was the big one for the GOP. Florida may be almost as big on the counts, but unreliable. Ohio had been that way for both Obama elections. The next largest populated state that Republicans could rely on when (not if) Texas goes Blue would be Tennessee at 11 Electoral Votes. Just look at the battleground map above: If Texas can't be counted on, Republicans are starting with a guaranteed 32 EV compared to Democrats' 174. And there aren't enough small state Electoral Votes to catch up.

Combined with the noted shift in suburban voting habits, states like Florida and Ohio and Texas and Georgia and North Carolina - where most of their largest metros are suburban landscapes - are now honestly up for grabs for the Democrats to win or lose, not the Republicans. Granted, the Republicans can try again to gerrymander those states even more to retain control of their state legislatures and congressional delegations, but they are running out of room and running out of time.

This was a demographic shift expected to kick in by 2040 at the latest, 2028 by the earliest (I had hoped in 2016 that it was sooner than that, ah well). trump's toxicity with suburban families (women in particular) is accelerating the shift.

This explains the openness of trump's war against the voting methods like mail-in balloting, and his blatant call to dismiss ballots and delegitimize the results in the battleground states. This is desperation, not just for him but for the Republican Party as a whole. They can't solidify the corruption of their minority rule without a second trump term to complete the destruction of federal norms.

This is why it's so important for Democratic voter turnout in the states, especially the battleground states. Everything is at stake this 2020 cycle. The fate of state legislatures, Senate seats, census-based redistricting, everything.

Republicans may have the money and the guns, but Democrats have the numbers. And the future. They can win the future this November.

Must Read Post-Election Article NOT Written By Me

I warned Ed. I warned them ALL.

I said I was gonna steal this from Gin And Tacos.

I KNOW WHY YOU'RE SAD. About the post-2018 Election Blues.

Click the link.

Read in full.

Don't forget to check my LINKS tab above to follow other Reasonably Sane blogs across the Intertubes.

The First Amendment Is Dead Along With All the Dead in Our Churches and Schools

Here's the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Anybody notice where the National Rifle Body Count Association creates a conflict here?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

We can no longer practice our faith in this nation because our churches are getting shot up. Congress - thanks to their gun lobby overlords - refuses to do anything to regulate gun ownership to ensure our churches don't turn into target practice. By inaction, Congress is interfering with our First Amendment rights to go to church.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

We can no longer as a People assemble peaceably. We can no longer go to movies, or shopping malls, or church services, or schools, or even more church services, or nightclubs, or Sikh religious services, or workplaces, or country music concerts, or baseball games, or public rallies, or anywhere at all because we live under the threat of an Angry Guy with guns just showing and opening fire with military-grade rifles with high-capacity ammo clips that can wipe out 200 to 500 people in a matter of minutes.

For God's sake. EVEN THE AMISH GET SHOT AT.

All because the National Everybody Else Gets Shot Association has the gun as their Golden Calf, and their profit margins as their Holy Scripture.

We can never be safe in public. We can never go to school or church or work without the nagging dread that we will get killed because an Angry Guy with enough firepower to kill hundreds in a single minute gets to express his rage and his bloodlust.

The First Amendment is dead. Shot to death on the streets of America by a Second Amendment that no longer has any merit or value to us.

You wanna know how to stop the next mass shooting, America? If we can't set up gun laws to perform universal background checks as 80 PERCENT OF US WANT DONE, if we can't set up gun laws to limit the size of ammo clips to reduce the number a single gunman can fire within seconds, if we can't pass legislation to limit ownership of military-level assault rifles that serve no other purpose than to clear out entire buildings within a minute?

Here's how we stop the next mass shooting:

Stay home.

Stop going to school. Stop going to church. Stop going out in public to shop, or attend concerts, or view movies. Close down the stock markets. Stop going to work.

Stay home.

Don't give Angry Guys with Guns any targets to shoot at.

Sure. We're killing off the entire economy if we do this.

But if it means ending the gun manufacturers' profits and bankrupting the NRA, so be it.

There is nothing else we can do. The First Amendment is Dead, why should we try to adhere to its principles of peaceful gatherings in public?

Anniversary: The One That Started It All

Today is August 1st, and I've been reminded that today is the 50th anniversary of a major tragedy in our nation's history.

From the memorial website - Behind The Tower - that has popped up to recount the tragedy:

On August 1, 1966, a twenty-five year old University of Texas student named Charles Whitman went up to the observation deck of the UT tower armed with guns, ammunition, and canned food. For 96 minutes he held the campus in a state of terror. Whitman killed 14 people that day and wounded more than 30. One of the wounded died a week later and one died decades later of injuries connected with his bullet wounds. Austin Police officers Houston McCoy and Ramiro Martinez (and two other men) made their way to the top of the tower, without knowing who or what they would find. They cornered Whitman and then shot and killed him. Later it was discovered that Whitman had murdered his mother and his wife in the early hours of the morning before his rampage. The shooting was broadcast on the radio and on television and it became a major national and even international news story.

This isn't the first mass shooting in our nation's history. There was actually a mass shooting in Philadelphia back in 1949 that the Smithsonian points to as the first. And if one considers them, we've had massacres and lynchings throughout our history that could fall under this rubric.

But the University of Texas shootings seemed to hit our nation's psyche in the worst way. It was a harbinger of a growing trend towards violent gun deaths in our nation where a singular person could go on a shooting rampage with little reason (well, we've figured out there is a reason: a shitload of anger at the world and access to rifles to start a body count). It happened at a moment of political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s, and added to the chaos of the day.

When we count mass shootings today, 1966 is the starting point, because Whitman's rampage is so memorable and still relatively recent - even at 50 years! - for survivors to still be among us to document the horror. When you ask someone about a campus mass shooting, you may get Virginia Tech or Columbine High or Umpqua Community College if you ask in the Northwest or even Ecole Polytechnique if you ask in Canada. But the odds are pretty good you'll get someone saying "Well there was that one in Texas with the tower, was that in Austin?"

Yeah, it was. And that was 50 years ago. And we've been counting the mass shootings ever since.

July 1st, So Many Things To Say

I was going to just focus on the fact that today is the 150th anniversary of the First Day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

But there's a ton of stuff happening in the world, which I gotta mention:

In Texas, the people are up and protesting against the Far Right Republican push to restrict access to abortion - and basically making it impossible for women to have decent health care in the process - using another special session of their legislature to circumvent a good number of procedural rules normally part of the regular sessions.

In North Carolina, the people are up and protesting against the Far Right Republican push to, well, destroy everything that's not a corporate tax cut.  Not just the pro-fetus agenda, but that the state GOP has killed off unemployment benefits (RAAAAAAGGEEEE!) in order to push their austerity agenda.  And this is in face of the facts that this has been one of the worst employment markets ever, and the fact that the unemployment benefits help the unemployed look for a job... any job...

In Egypt, they don't have Far Right Republicans to protest against... they do have the Muslim Brotherhood and their self-serving President Morsi, who have basically mismanaged the nation in its first year of supposed democracy into bringing out protests LARGER than the ones that pushed out Mubarak.

In fact, it's been a really busy week in protests.

More on Gettysburg for Day Two.  That is the one with Little Round Top. (fanboy squeal)