I Guess We're All Communists Now

 

Trump repeated the word Communist so many times yesterday -- with the four granite-faced Presidents above him, averting their eyes -- that you might have thought it was 1950. On February 9th of that fatal year, Sen. Joseph McCarthy held up some pieces of paper in front of the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, and whined in that reedy, unpleasant voice of his, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Women cringed. One of them fainted. There were dropped salad forks all over the room.

The witch hunt was on!

The suspicion of Communism crept through the American bloodstream, or rather raced like a fulminating virus, fanned into white-hot intensity by the John Birch Society. Birchers were all over the Panhandle of Texas. By the time I was in the 7th and 8th grades in the late '50s, popular fright-sayings about Communists and Communism, preached relentlessly by members of the Society, had reached my level of pre-social-media gossip. The Birchers were particularly good at ferreting out school textbooks with "Communist propaganda." What in particular was Communist propaganda? Any acknowledgement of a struggle for civil rights among America's Blacks.

I was a very religious kid to boot, so I could fall prey to a pamphlet that appeared in 1960 warning of a likely "Catholic takeover" if John F. Kennedy became President. The anti-Catholic thing was closely allied with the anti-Communist thing -- Baptists predominated, and there ain't no Baptists like Texas Baptists. There were plenty of Texans who didn't mind saying out loud, and loudly, as Texans sometimes speak when provoked, that Kennedy was an N-word-loving goddamn Communist. That's why Texans of a gentler nature so rued the terrible event in Dallas. Why did it have to be Texas! Poor dumb, damn Texas.

To the Communist-baiting Texans in the Panhandle, one of the worst things the Catholic President Kennedy did in his short presidency was the diplomatic breakthrough called "the Chamizal Conventions," a land-exchange between the U.S. and Mexico that Kennedy successfully negotiated. The Chamizal "situation" had been a sore point since 1864, when a particularly severe flood changed the course of the Rio Grande and stranded over 600 acres of Mexico on the north side of the river. This led to a history of incursions and takings and dyspeptic relations between countries. Kennedy resolved it quickly, agreeing to give back to Mexico some 366 acres of the original Chamizal tract and an additional 264 acres near the adjacent Cordova Island, while taking for the U.S. the other 193 acres of Cordova Island. That international boundary still stands today.

Kennedy negotiated the agreement, but it fell to President Johnson to carry it out in stages, and those stages included some Texans' getting mighty exercised that their land was being unfairly, unconstitutionally, and communistically taken from them. I remember reading up on the history at the time and writing a letter to the editor of the Plainview Herald supporting the Mexican position. I was being a very fair-minded little Christian and budding historian to reach that conclusion. I was told later by a classmate of mine who also worked as part-time receptionist for an insurance agent that her boss had a file folder labeled "Suspected Communists" and that he had instructed her to put my letter to the editor -- which he had patiently clipped from the Herald -- into that file. Apparently, I've been a Communist since I was 18.

We label what we fear, and so does Trump. He doesn't fear Communists. That's just the scare-word he remembers from his own childhood -- he and I are the same age, give or take. What Trump fears and chooses to label with an old insult is the surge of voting enthusiasm for the men and women who have been winning elections on the Democratic side and sometimes upending apple carts of more conservative members of their Party -- the brave and outspoken "progressives," the sometimes self-described "socialist Democrats." That's what he fears, being charged and tried by new politicians who have power because they have followings.

 

I'm for Requiring the King James Version in Schools. No Other Translation Will Do

 

I just love Texans for their eternally stubborn naivety. Members of the Texas state board of education just decided that five million Texas school kids, from first grade to seniors in high school, will be required to read selected Bible stories in school. Last year, the same board decided to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Naive and bossy. The 15-member board are all elected to staggered terms from distinct geographical districts. Currently, the board consists of 10 Republicans and five Democrats. 

I got a.i. to assemble the approved list of required readings:

Old Testament

• Genesis
  • Noah's Ark
  • Tower of Babel
• 1 Samuel
  • David and Goliath
• Book of Jonah
• Psalms (including Psalm 23)
• Ecclesiastes (Chapter 3, "To everything there is a season")
• Job
• Lamentations

New Testament

• Gospel of Luke
  • The Parable of the Prodigal Son
  • Luke 14:7–11 (the teaching on humility)
• Gospel of Matthew
  • The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–12)
  • Matthew 6:25–34 ("Do Not Be Anxious")
• Acts of the Apostles
  • The Road to Damascus (conversion of Paul the Apostle)
• First Epistle to the Corinthians
  • Chapter 13 ("Love is patient, love is kind")

 

I have no problem pushing the early 17th-century prose of the King James Bible on every student as one important ingredient of being truly educated. I'm not so sure about modern translations. The much simplified New International Reader's Version that Texas prescribes for the youngest kids takes away all the magic language of the King James, and so what's the point? The simplified language means you're no longer teaching language arts; you're teaching bullets of cultural mandates and signaling virtue. For me and for the sake of the children, it has to be the King James or nothing. I consider that translation's Book of Isaiah a towering masterpiece of elite philosophy. I go to the Book of Amos for bug-eyed intensity. I can certainly settle down for an hour or two with Psalms, and I recently reread the Four Gospels to see if I could detect any traits in Jesus that would attract the likes of Samuel Alito. 

What we now refer to as the Holy Bible was the literature of a specific monotheistic religion and the culture of a place that arose along the Jordan River. That literature became dogma all over Europe and spread from there all over the world, including to America. How the book has evolved most recently in the hands of political preachers and grifting presidents should and does ignite an opposition to the Texas Bible requirements. The selections favor an evangelical Protestant approach to the biblical text rather than a broadly ecumenical or academic one.

The devil in me wants to make fun of the Texas school board for its attempt to bring all the children to obedience through the Book of Job, but I won't. I think I'd like to be one of those Texas teachers that got to build a lesson plan around what happened to Job and why. There's no Isaiah on the reading list, nor Amos, but yes the Book of Job. Glad to see First Corinthians, but no Revelations? Who would miss that druggie trip!

I was in the 5th Grade in a small, rural Texas public school in the mid-'50s when all the classrooms got wired up for a new P.A. system, and we began to hear from the principal at the start of every day, followed by Bible readings and little sentence prayers, the last two offered by students selected for their good behavior. I was never asked. But, then, I already knew the Bible better than most of my classmates, because of my Pentecostal background. We read the Bible. The King James Bible.

The language gets in your head, becomes a muscle for the way you see the world, see yourself in the world and how you order the universe. Yes, it's culturally specific especially for Anglo Texans, and I air one of those. Which makes me actually sympathetic to the sweet idiocy of the Texas School Board.

 

In Texas, It's the Context, Stupid!

 

Reading about the 5th Circuit's decision in the Texas 10 Commandments case, sent me into reveries about my own experience with religion in Texas public school classrooms. 

ME AND MY SHADOW

I was a student in Texas public schools from 1st grade through high school graduation -- the 1950s through the election of John F. Kennedy. Of course I was indoctrinated. In grade school, first thing of a morning we had Bible readings and prayers blasted into every classroom over a speaker system -- pious little moments to start the school day. They were probably majority Southern Baptist in hue and flavor, if I were betting, but at least pointedly Protestant, not that theology meant squat to me at that age. The Bible readings and prayers -- "devotionals," they were called -- were meant to make us "mindful," quiet and observant, tamed for classroom decorum by Protestant doctrines of sin and punishment. I'm sure those devotionals were tactical for teachers and administrators, who probably preferred their children guilt-ridden and docile.

Though I learned the 10 Commandments at church, not at school, I'll be honest here and say out loud that I don't think the display of the 10 Commandments in every classroom of my upbringing would have hurt me. Actually reading them now could start a lot of arguments, or at least a lot of wide-ranging thought, like when did "Remember the Sabbath day" become "Your butt better be in a pew on Sunday"? The Protestant text of the commandments -- which is actually quoted in the 5th Circuit majority's opinion -- gets me asking all sorts of questions -- like, did the original author of the Commandments -- looking at you, Jesus -- know nothing about human nature? To outlaw coveting things your neighbor has, including his wife and his slaves, guaranteed a pretty universal participation in sin, don't you think? And I have other questions about just exactly what "land" God has given us -- or who is the "thee" he gave it to if not us? And what does honoring father and mother have to do with keeping that land? 

I concur with the 5th Circuit majority in the need to review the actual text: 

I AM the LORD thy God.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.

Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land
which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his
maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor's.

The Commandments are a somewhat quaint, historically resonant, very culturally specific document that every kid should know, but having it forced on kids' -- and their parents, not to mention teachers unwilling to be conduits of partisan thought-control -- by state legislators and Ken Paxton, whose motives have little to do with education but a great dealt to do with the winds of conservative orthodoxy and the wielding of power -- that is the context that made SB 10 a threat. 

  

BACKGROUND TO THE LAWSUIT

1. Gov. Greg Abbott signed Texas SB 10 into law in 2025, which mandated the "conspicuous" display of the Protestant 10 Commandments in each and every Texas classroom, from 1st grade to 12th, with "a typeface visible from anywhere in the room." The posters were mandated to be at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall. Schools were not required to purchase the posters. They were ordered to accept donations of them. (And if that doesn't sound like a bag job of ulterior motives, I don't know what would!) SB 10 was part of a much broader conservative push since God put Trump in the White House as 2nd Son to censor library books, clamp down on "deviance," and "infuse Christianity into public schools."

2. Some 15 parents of school-age children in certain Texas school districts became the plaintiffs in an ACLU challenge to SB 10, and the parents won in two different Federal District courts, which first halted the law in the specific 15 school districts represented by the plaintiffs and then enjoined it statewide, ruling it was likely, on the face of it, that SB 10 violated the "establishment of religion" clause in the US Constitution. 

3. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, that scourge of God who appears to have been behind much of the push for the 10 Commandments law, appealed to the 5th Circuit in January, and the 17 active judges on the Circuit heard the case en banc. They decided 9-8 that the Texas law is not coercive because it does not require students to learn the Ten Commandments nor does it give teachers authority to undermine students’ religious beliefs. 

But the best reading in the 118-page 5th District ruling are the several dissents appended by the eight judges who know a stinkbug when they see one. 

Cornyn Shoots the Moon in Texas

 

Holy mackerel! I just saw this commercial attacking Ken Paxton, paid for by a proud Senator John Cornyn. Talk about a frontal assault! That's how mean and personal the Republican Senate primary run-off has gotten in Texas between the bland Senator Cornyn and the poisonous Attorney General Ken Paxton. Cornyn, not so bland after all. He's had to go very negative after Trump failed to endorse him, which according to the entire world of political punditry, Trump promised he would do -- to save Texas from born-again James Talarico, because most Texas Republican operatives think Paxton's baggage is as deadly as a suppressed sulfur fart. The very heavy ethical baggage that Cornyn has just aired in this minute commercial.

Talarico, Shaking Things in Texas

 

I've written about Texan James Talarico, the young Christian progressive running as a Democrat in the primary for US Senate, the John Cornyn seat. Talarico charmed even Joe Rogan. Rogan said to him on air, "You ought to run for president."

So I got a kick out of the Talarico campaign making hay out of something Cornyn said that was supposed to ring alarm bells. It's an old campaign trick to take your opponent's negative jibe and make it a positive.

Davy Crockett Also Surrendered at the Alamo

 

Kate Rogers, The Alamo Trust

What happened to the Republican woman appointed to oversee the historic renovation of the Alamo in San Antonio:

Kate Rogers didn’t know it at the time, but Oct. 13 would mark the beginning of the end of her four-year tenure leading the $550 million renovation of the Alamo.

On that day, two posts appeared on the X account of the famous San Antonio historic site. One celebrated Columbus Day. The other, which has since been deleted, celebrated Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a holiday ​recognized by President Joe Biden in 2021 that honors Indigenous populations in the United States.

Yep. You saw it coming, right? Prominent Republicans immediately yelled "Woke!" -- parroting Donald Jethro Trump and his war on the Smithsonian for telling historical truth -- and started calling for Kate Rogers' head on a pike. The Texas Land Commissioner, a fellow Republican with jurisdiction over the Alamo, announced an investigation of her. Facing an emergency board meeting, Rogers admitted she didn't write nor post those tweets, but she offered to resign anyway. She was baffled and non-plussed by the uproar because those tweets were wholly innocent pro forma recognitions of national holidays -- probably posted by an intern. But to prove their trumpist brainwashing, the majority on her board needed to roll somebody's head out the door, so they chose to fire the Communications Director rather than accept Rogers' resignation.

According to the WashPost, eight days later Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a known bully, had gotten hold of Rogers' 2023 Ed.D. dissertation, which unpacked the ways that museums can influence how history is taught in schools. Lt. Gov. Patrick called Rogers directly, read aloud to her a short passage from page 80 of her dissertation, and demanded her immediate resignation. The passage Patrick read to her:

“Personally, I would love to see the Alamo become a beacon for historical reconciliation and a place that brings people together versus tearing them apart, but politically that may not be possible at this time.”

You see the blistering idiocy of Patrick for demanding that someone resign for speaking the actual stark truth: "politically may not be possible at this time." 

At first Rogers refused Patrick. The lieutenant governor, who loves to bully people he perceives as vulnerable, immediately went public on how crypto-liberal the woman boss at the Alamo really was, calling out the dogs to hound this woman out of office. And Rogers quickly caved. Now she's suing. Earlier this week she sued Patrick, the land commissioner, and the board of The Alamo Trust in federal court in the Western Dist. of Texas for wrongful termination.

I'd probably tag her as a country-club Republican, moderate and sensible and imminently practical, which makes her highly effective and also unwelcome in MAGAland. Her long history of executive management of corporate organizing and image-building gave her access to the highest circles of the Texas Republican establishment, and her treatment at the hands of Dan Patrick may become a rallying point for moderate conservatives. Her Linked In profile:

Motivated executive with experience in campaign development, change management, public relations, advertising and communications. Winner of multiple Addy and other industry awards. Established reputation as a change agent with consistent results, with a knack for building a high performance team focused on strong innovation.

New Texas Senate Candidate: We Need a 'Mindset Shift'

[This young new candidate in Texas for US Senate] disagrees with fellow Democrats who have been campaigning on “defending democracy” against Trump. “I am not interested in defending this broken political system,” he said. “I’m interested in transformation, not preservation, and I think that is a fundamental mindset shift that has to happen in the national Democratic Party."

--James Talarico, 36, announcing he will run in the 2026 Democratic primary for US Senate in Texas, in the WashPost

Stop saying "Defend Democracy"? Stop marching in parades carrying signs? For energized Democrats right now, that's heresy, and it's shocking to hear it come out of the preacher's mouth -- for Talarico is studying to be a pastor. He's also one of the heroic "Texas absconders" who fled the state and exposed the gerrymandering corruption. Talarico's media exposure made him a kind of instant political sensation, a devout Christian and a Democrat whose policy views are stubbornly progressive, who speaks clearly and forcefully while looking so young, so scrubbed, so righteous, so (frankly) Republican. It's kind of surreal. That's a face you might expect to see leading an anti-abortion protest.

But really -- "defending Democracy" translates in many working-class ears to "defending the establishment," "preserving the status quo." In short, condoning the corruption of money and power that has the working world in its claws (and always has?).

I can see the need to think like MAGA, admit that the whole system is fucked and needs major renovation, and doesn't it? Starting with that whole Electoral College deal, with its lopsided obeisance to maps, with equal numbers of senators whether your map is largely empty of permanent residents or is crowded with big cities. There's something just basically unfair too about a president who couldn't win the popular vote but won the electoral college.

I'll be watching Talarico. He's a former middle school teacher who has served in the Texas House since 2018 and is studying to become a Presbyterian pastor. "With appeals to the Christian faith, he has gone viral for his impassioned speeches against Texas Republicans’ policy priorities, particularly their recent proposals for school vouchers and the required display of the Ten Commandments in public schools." His grilling of the Republican sponsor of the Texas Ten Commandments law shows him sharp but respectful, like a good Christian should be:

Talarico appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast. Rogan came around in the conversation and offered that Talarico should run for president. I believe he was sincere.

Here's the rub: Talarico enters a primary that already includes former congressman Colin Allred, the party’s 2024 nominee for Senate in Texas. According to WashPost, Allred lost by 9 percentage points, "but he attracted the national Democratic support that Texas Democrats have long craved and outperformed the party’s presidential ticket in the state." Allred's been campaigning all this year, raising money and forming a team. Talarico is going to look like a spoiler coming into the race right now, and the Party establishment in Texas may punish him. I want him for our side.

Those Texas Democrats Started a Fire

 

“It takes an act of defiance like this to wake up the country and let them know that our democracy is being stolen right in front of our eyes. If we’re going to be the spark that lights that fire, then we’re doing our jobs.”

 --Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, Democratic member of the Texas legislature from San Antonio, about the Texas quorum-break

The Texas Democrats currently in Illinois and a handful of other friendly states had a larger goal than stopping what everyone agrees is inevitable: the mid-decade re-gerrymandering of Texas to give Trump five more votes. They strategically saw their absconding as the only way to start a wide resistance movement of citizens willing to risk great personal cost to save the Republic from a blooming tyrant. And every progressive in the nation must thank them for the gesture.

Texas Democrats staged a walkout before, in 2021, and they learned some things from that. They were out a month before some of the members cracked and decided to return, the quorum was restored, and the Republicans passed a new voter restriction law. There's more resolve now, and a greater theatrical flare for getting in front of cameras with microphones, and now the whole nation is galvanized for the Gerrymander War (we're going to remember for all time who started it and why).

US Congressman Marc Veasey of Fort Worth celebrated the change of tone and tactic: “As Democrats we have shown up to a gunfight with nothing but good intentions and dull knives, and that era is over. We are not going to unilaterally disarm, and that is what’s different this time around.”

TexasDems Shall Lead You

 

CBS asked Texas Rep. Ann Johnson if Democrats “ran from the fight.” Her response was epic: “No, abandoning your job is going to Cancun during a deadly freeze.” Then she went nuclear: “When Trump asked Georgia GOP to ‘find 11,000 votes,’ they said no. When he asked Texas GOP to steal 5 seats - they said, ‘Does July work for you?’ ”

 --@CallToActivism

It's all-out warfare over gerrymandering, the abuse of gerrymandering and the ironic but concomitant use of gerrymandering. Those absconded Texas Dems are heroes for standing up against the abuse part, the flagrant abuse. The TexasDems took the small power they had -- their required presence so that the Republican majority's business gets done  -- and broke the rules to break the quorum, at possibly great personal cost to themselves (if threats become reality). Now as for the use of gerrymandering, as the only poetic response to Republican corruption, by states like California and New York -- "You gerrymander. We can gerrymander too, damnit!" This is the knife brought to the knife fight recently celebrated by the new Chair of the DNC, Ken Martin. Yesterday Martin, joining Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and a host of other Democratic leaders, got feisty while meeting with the Illinois refugees:

I have expected zero of Ken Martin and have given him an equal amount of attention, so I kind of dig this new guy who's willing to take the nuclear option: "This is not the Democratic Party of your grandfathers, which would bring a pencil to knife fight. This is a new Democratic Party. We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight, and we’re going to fight fire with fire."

Hope he means it. Hope he has leadership qualities. Hope he has follow-through.

NOTE: Gerrymandering as retaliation makes it hard for some progressives who've advocated for years for "redistricting commissions" shielded from politics, an end to the political tool of the gerrymander. Progressives like moi.  But hell! I'm practical. You get practical when survival itself is threatened.

When You're Up Against the Wall, You're Probably Texas Democrats

 

NYTimes:

Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives left the state on Sunday in a last-ditch attempt to stop Republicans from adopting an aggressively redrawn congressional map. Their absence is expected to prevent the House from reaching the quorum needed to hold a vote this week.

The walkout was a sharp escalation in the bitter partisan clash over a mid-decade redistricting in Texas that was requested by President Trump. Republicans in the State Legislature were rapidly moving forward, with the map — drawn to flip five Democratic congressional districts to favor Republicans — being passed out of two committees over the weekend.

@mullershewrote.com commented on Blue Sky, Aug 3, 2025 at 5:18 PM:

"Good! They've done this twice before. Ultimately, it doesn't work, but it calls attention to the fact that Republican policy is so bad that they have to cheat to win"

Unwelcome News On a Friday

 

Susan Bankston, a.k.a. Juanita Jean

Juanita Jean, a.k.a. Susan DuQuesnay Bankston, owner of "Juanita Jean's -- The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.," a mandatory blog stop every day for those of us who appreciate smart-alecks and their snark and especially for us displaced Texans who have known other Tough Mamas of the Plains and appreciated their no-sacred-cows shit detectors. "Juanita Jean's" dishes the buffalo dust of Texas politics, especially the piles left by both the corrupt and the inept in the Texas Republican Party. Susan Bankston has been a regular contributor to the famous Texas Observer and to other leftwing rags, but "Juanita Jean's" was special in its own way, described by Robert LeLeux at the Observer as "sort of like what King of the Hill would have been, if it had been written by Molly Ivins." "Firebrand" often shows up in the same descriptive sentence with Bankston's name.

Bankston lives in Richmond, Texas, in Fort Bend County, southwest of Houston, a little beyond Sugarland, made famous in Steven Spielberg's prison-escape movie, The Sugarland Express (1974). Fort Bend is one of the reddest counties in Texas, and nurtured "the hammer" in the U.S. Congress, one Tom DeLay who was rising to power in the early 1980s at the same time that Susan Bankston and her husband were relocating to Fort Bend from Houston. DeLay belongs to history now. He was part of the whole '80s surge of Ronald Reagan Republicanism, the conservative tide that eventually produced Newt Gingrich and his Contract on America.

Bankston made Tom Delay her pet project: She told LeLeux,

“When my family first moved to [the Fort Bend town of] Richmond from Houston in 1983, it was like paradise. The schools were racially diverse. There were no fast-food restaurants. You could see the stars at night. But then, you did have to put up with Tom DeLay .... He had no table manners. He picked his nose in public. He stayed drunk all the time. Of course, there are those who would argue he was a much more likable person then.” 

Bankston nicknamed him "Hot Tub Tom" for his rumored behavior at al fresco get-togethers. She nicknamed him in the Fort Bend Star, and the name stuck. Won't go into the whole Tom DeLay history, and how it ended, ignobly, except to say that Susan Bankston's project of exposing him helped.

She announced yesterday that she's closing "Juanita Jean's" for good. She'd actually mainly disappeared as a frontline contributor to it much earlier. She had gone through the trauma of losing her lifelong partner and husband, whom she called "Bubba" on the blog. "I was 25 years old when I married him and 50 years later, I lost him." Bankston had in the meantime turned "Juanita Jean's" over to three new dominant writers/voices, none of them as talented as Bankston. The loss of Bankston as a regular contributor was bad enough, but the loss of the whole blog is just tragic. Bankston has been publishing it for some 14 years.

Bankston's parting advice for progressives: Pay attention to Gen Z.

I could be wrong. I have been wrong before and it didn’t kill me, so here goes. I think we need to be listening to young people. I think we shouldn’t even give a big bear’s butt about who is the new leader of the DNC because screw ‘em, they are not viable any longer. They spent 1.5 Billion dollars and lost. They lost to Trump twice. I guess they’re waiting for three’s the charm but, frankly, I don’t have that kind of time.

I’m making an effort to pay attention to young people about politics. For example, I listen to David Pakman https://davidpakman.com/ because he’s young, progressive, and while he takes his reporting very seriously, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. I also subscribed to You Tube to hear what the young progressives are thinking.

 

What's the Matter With Texas?

 

National Ranching Heritage Center
Lubbock, Texas

I just returned from a week-long pilgrimage to the places I grew up in the Panhandle of Texas, and I'm full of both nostalgia and regret for what was once and for what yet lingers -- the best food in the most unlikely places, unfailingly friendly and accommodating people with great senses of humor, straight roads with unlimited visibility, and an economy dependent on the Oglalla acquifer which they've been pumping dry for over 100 years. When the water's gone, everything's gone.

I love the people individually. Every old friend and every new acquaintance, instantly welcoming, accommodating, and best of all, funny. But here's my problem -- really since I went off to a Baptist college and started learning things -- why did the collective that is Texas decide that what it needed was a Governor Gregory Wayne Abbott, who wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution more his way with a "Convention of States" and who thinks the best way to keep out undesirables is to embed saw blades in the Rio Grande, and Attorney General Warren Kenneth Paxton Jr., who once threatened to sue any school district that required masks on students during the height of COVID and who offered support to any county clerk of court who defied the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. The voting majority of Texans seems to enjoy this level of political meanness -- especially against women -- or they wouldn't keep reelecting this caliber of public official.

Both Abbott and Paxton are obnoxious supremacists, backed up by lots of agreement at every political level of elective office under them, agreement about all sorts of grievous liberal tendencies, especially regarding the bodies of women and the activities of people who like sandals better than boots. You get my drift. Texas went for Trump (though it was by only 52%, so there's always bright hope for a turnaround). The whole state of Texas, collectively, has decided to act like the worst preachers we used to know as teens.

It doesn't make sense. 

The Panhandle of Texas is littered with place names that speak the dirt-truth about the landscape: Plainview, Levelland, Shallowater, Bushland, Lakeview, South Plains, Littlefield. Or names representing necessary objects for simple living (at least as it evolved among the first white Anglo settlers in the late-19th Century): Earth, Muleshoe, Spade, Cactus, White Deer. These were weather-beaten, knowledgeable, and enduring people of the soil whose descendants individually practice kindness. Why should their current collective identity as a state resemble a cat-'o-nine-tails.

Why, in 1948, the citizens of the tiny town of Monroe in Lubbock County, smack in the middle of the Panhandle, petitioned to change its name to New Deal, which was done and lives still on sign posts as a reminder that once upon a time these people of the plain soil really liked the socialism of FDR. But today, Lubbock itself, the 6th largest city in Texas with some 40,000 university students, is also among the most consistently conservative large cities in the state. The city of Lubbock went for Trump by 64%. I have no words, but I have organizing suggestions if anybody wants to turn that around.

This Trump-Appointed Judge Is About to Do Big Damage in My Texas Hometown

 

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk

AMARILLO, Tex. -- This is where you go to sue in Federal court if you're looking to hurt women's rights and LGBTQ rights, because a single Trump-appointed judge for the Northern District of Texas gets to decide all those cases -- Matthew Kacsmaryk -- a former Christian Right activist who is well on the record expressing hostility to abortion and to any gender fluidity.

A quickie anti-abortion group, fetchingly called "Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine," incorporated in late summer 2022, claimed Amarillo as its home, and very quickly, three months later, sued the Biden administration in November seeking a nationwide ban on the "abortion pill" mifepristone. Mifepristone was approved by the FDA in 2000 and is available by mail, telemedicine, and pharmacy pickup. Mifepristone is one of two medications used to terminate pregnancies, and already over 29 states, including Texas, have laws or restrictions on the use of the medication. The Federal suit in Amarillo before Judge Kacsmaryk seeks a reversal of FDA approval.

A local Amarillo doctor, who also signed on as a plaintiff, claims a woman he was treating suffered complications from using mifepristone. A press release bragging about the suit: “The FDA never had the authority to approve these dangerous drugs for sale. We urge the court to listen to the doctors we represent who are seeking to protect girls and women from the documented dangers of chemical abortion drugs.”

Judge Kacsmaryk could side with the plaintiffs and grant an emergency injunction forcing the FDA to revoke its approval of mifepristone. Abortion advocates said this would pull the drug from the market and effectively initiate a nationwide ban on the medication.

How Important Is Kacsmaryk to the Trumpists?

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued at least eight times over Biden policies in Kacsmaryk's court. It's where you go if you've got a bullshit piece of legal reasoning for turning back the clock 100 years. Judge-shopping, and Kacsmaryk's boutique is always open for business. Appeals of Kacsmaryk's rulings go the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose Republican-appointed majority routinely issues rulings favoring conservative causes.

Trump forst nominated Kacsmaryk for the Federal bench in 2017, and it was one of the most contested nominations that Mitch McConnell forced through the Senate. The first vote on Kacsmaryk in the Judiciary Committee was 11-10, but the nomination never made it to the floor of the Senate because of adjournment. Trump renominated him in February 2019. The vote in the Judiciary Committee the second time was 12-10. In the Senate floor vote, Kacsmaryk was confirmed 52-46. Even trembling reed Susan Collins voted against him.

The American Bar Association rated Kacsmaryk "qualified" (a ranking below "well qualified"). Senate Democrats and a number of LGBTQ advocacy groups opposed his nomination because of his writings and comments on LGBTQ rights and women's contraceptive rights. He had previously worked on cases opposing certain LGBTQ protections in housing, employment, and health care. He had referred to homosexuality as "disordered" and to transgender people as suffering from a "delusion" and a "mental disorder." He certainly opposed Roe v. Wade.

A Note on My Hometown

It ain't Amarillo. My hometown of Silverton, Texas, about 80 miles southeast of Amarillo, barely exists any more. Amarillo is where we went to shop. Amarillo was our big city. It's where high school seniors went to get drunk and get laid. The world-famous "Cadillac Ranch" is a few miles west of Amarillo on I-40.

Greg Abbott and Beto O'Rourke

 

Every time I read something about Texas in this Trump era, I get a stab in my heart, because I grew up there and still have connections. There's no earthly excuse for my native land to be so cussedly, dangerously backward.

I came across this yesterday

The Lincoln Project, an American political action committee formed in 2019, made up of former and current Republicans, issued a statement questioning why their TV ad [blasting Gov. Greg Abbott for his bad handling of COVID], funded for $25,000, did not run on ESPN during the nationally televised Texas vs. Rice college football game. The group said the ad was pulled 10 minutes before it was expected to run, despite ESPN's legal team clearing it beforehand.

The ad was pulled, citing a "university-made" decision. And a spokesman for Abbott told The Dallas Morning News he had nothing to do with the decision. Still, the Lincoln Project asserts that Abbott, a Texas graduate who appoints members of the school’s board of regents, played a part in the ad not running and said it plans to file a public records request to determine that. [USA Today]

So I found the ad: 

You might be forgiven for thinking that Gov. Abbott might could maybe be beaten in 2022 by a good, well funded Democrat. You would think that already perhaps, before seeing the Lincoln Project silent condemnation of his criminal ineptness. For Abbott's been a visible and willing advocate for backwardness of a shocking stripe, the curtailing of ballot access and the ending of legal abortion. The abrasive impact on independent voters of these policies perhaps accounts for the University of Texas poll that found Abbott moving underwater for the first time this summer, his approval rating sinking to 41% with 50% disapproving.

Could Beto O'Rourke be The One? 'Cause he's running, have no doubt. Hans Nichols at Axios wrote:

O'Rourke's entry would give Democrats a high-profile candidate with a national fundraising network to challenge Republican Gov. Greg Abbott — and give O’Rourke, a former three-term congressman from El Paso and 2020 presidential candidate and voting rights activist, a path to a political comeback.

"Comeback"? O'Rourke lost the Texas Senate race to Ted Cruz in 2018 (O'Rourke got a respectable 48.3% of the vote),  and then his presidential bid fizzled in 2020. So less than four years later, yes, we're talking "comeback"? Though it's not as though O'Rourke retired to a monastery. He's been active and out there on voting rights especially and he's lent his name and sweat equity to Democratic candidates for the Texas state legislature. Plus he's a proven, exceptional money magnet. Who else would have a better chance, taking it to Greg Abbott? Abbott pushes many buttons on the negative partisanship consol, and money will flow to any star Democrat willing to challenge him. Beto might have the appeal to pull it off. (Hope springs.)

July 17, 2021: 

Snitches Get Riches: The Texas Abortion Ban

 

In the old Bewitched TV series (who's calling who "old"?), Gladys Kravitz was the nosy next door neighbor to Samantha and her daily witchcraft. Gladys was always convinced -- correctly -- that something odd was going on, but she could never convince her husband Abner nor alert the greater world. Now in Texas, as of September 1, 2021, she'd have a shot at collecting $10,000 for ratting out a woman's health clinic.

The US Supreme Court actually -- actually? -- looked at, perused? studied for themselves? (I hope they read it) the new "Texas Heartbeat Act" and said it was fine with them -- the deputizing of any and all citizens to inform on -- sue -- any provider or abetter of an abortion, if the woman's fetus had a detectable heartbeat at the time of the procedure (hearts-a-beatin' happen about six weeks after impregnation). That last provision simply ignores Supreme Court precedence, wiping out the first-trimester constitutional guarantee in one sentence. The state government stays out of it, doesn't knock angrily on clinic doors -- which the law's authors claim makes the law constitutional -- but allows and empowers self-regarding vigilantes to enforce the ban through economic harassment of doctors and nurses (et al.). 

$10,000. That's the bounty, to be forfeited by defendants. In other words, Texas Senate Bill 8 sets up every avid pro-lifer with a new hobby. What about the woman who got the abortion? Oh, there's no penalty for her, except the embarrassment. Samatha gets away with it again. 

This law can turn anti-abortion extremists -- the ones who try and do kill doctors -- into a kind of secret police, a Stasi for Christ. There's already an "inform on your neighbor" website, ProLifeWhistleBlower.com, which will gladly collect your accusations anonymously: "Use the links below to report anyone who is violating the Texas Heartbeat Act by aiding or abetting a post-heartbeat abortion. And report any person or entity that aids or abets (or that intends to aid or abet) an illegal abortion in Texas .... We will not follow up with or contact you."

It takes mental wipes with super-strong fibers to accept that five conservative justices on our Supreme Court read that language and thought it was constitutional. We are truly in a dark place, America.

But ... potential blue skies here! -- the Republican hardliners in Texas may have just scrambled the 2022 elections in a tasty way by inserting an issue that benefits Democrats. Texas-style gun fight over the privacy of women's health decisions is not a good look for you, Republicans. If other states follow the Texas model, or if the Supremes actually do overturn Roe with the Mississippi case they'll hear this fall, the fact is that Republican candidates in states other than Texas are already distancing themselves from the Texas crazies. Larry Elder, the talk-show conservative who wants to replace Gavin Newsom as governor of California, didn't want to talk about it: “This is not anything that’s on my priority list.” And that Republican dude running for governor of Virginia this year -- he's on the record as officially gun-shy about raising abortion as a campaign issue. The potential of the Bounty Act to galvanize suburban white women, and young white women, to vote against every Republican in sight -- why, I think that potential for serious backlash has got to be real.

The Republicans have been brazenly rebranding themselves ever since Donald Trump rose like a tumor to take over the party, and why wouldn't they show the depths of their extremism in this very way?

The Trump Court Is Delivering the Theocracy You've Dreaded

 

"Unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend”

Bounty hunters

The Supreme Court refused just before midnight on Wednesday to block a Texas law prohibiting most abortions, less than a day after it took effect and became the most restrictive abortion measure in the nation.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining the court’s three liberal members in dissent.

The majority opinion was unsigned and consisted of a single long paragraph. It said the abortion providers who had challenged the law in an emergency application to the court had not made their case in the face of “complex and novel” procedural questions. The majority stressed that it was not ruling on the constitutionality of the Texas law and did not mean to limit “procedurally proper challenges” to it.

But the ruling was certain to fuel the hopes of abortion opponents and fears of abortion rights advocates as the court takes up a separate case in its new term this fall to decide whether Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to the procedure, should be overruled. It also left Texas abortion providers turning away patients as they scrambled to comply with the law, which prohibits abortions after roughly six weeks.

All four dissenting justices filed opinions.

“The court’s order is stunning,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”

“The court has rewarded the state’s effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the court’s precedents, through procedural entanglements of the state’s own creation,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “The court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law.”

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that he would have blocked the law while appeals moved forward.

“The statutory scheme before the court is not only unusual, but unprecedented,” he wrote. “The legislature has imposed a prohibition on abortions after roughly six weeks, and then essentially delegated enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large. The desired consequence appears to be to insulate the state from responsibility for implementing and enforcing the regulatory regime.”

The chief justice underscored the tentative nature of the majority’s ruling. “Although the court denies the applicants’ request for emergency relief today,” he wrote, “the court’s order is emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue.”

Justice Elena Kagan criticized the court’s practice of deciding important issues in rushed decisions without full briefing or oral argument — on what Supreme Court specialists call its “shadow docket.”

“Today’s ruling illustrates just how far the court’s ‘shadow-docket’ decisions may depart from the usual principles of appellate process,” she wrote. “That ruling, as everyone must agree, is of great consequence.”

“Yet the majority has acted without any guidance from the court of appeals — which is right now considering the same issues,” she wrote. “It has reviewed only the most cursory party submissions, and then only hastily. And it barely bothers to explain its conclusion — that a challenge to an obviously unconstitutional abortion regulation backed by a wholly unprecedented enforcement scheme is unlikely to prevail.”

“In all these ways,” Justice Kagan wrote, “the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this court’s shadow-docket decision making — which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend.”

[Source: The New York Times]

What's Clear Today: Washington Dems Are NOT Going to Force the Voting Rights Issue

 

...momentum on Capitol Hill has palpably shifted away from the voting rights push....

--Mike DeBonis, WashPost

Sen. Joe Manchin
"Folksy is as folksy does"

Yeah, we can tell. Voting rights, schmighter lights. That's yesterday's cause. Today what's exciting the Senate is the budget agreement, a whopping big budget negotiated by moderates and progressives, particularly senators Mark Warner (Virginia) and Bernie Sanders (Vermont). 

So while the Texas Democrats are being hailed as "brave, bold, and courageous" (Chuck Schumer), as "defenders of the Constitution" (Jeff Merkley),  and as "freedom fighters" (Amy Klobuchar), they're also being parked in Back Burner Plaza. Hope they like the view for the next long month because their mission hit its media peak days ago and nothing's changed. Meanwhile, praise of their Texas courage costs nothing, while action has become impossibly pricey for Democrats prone to panic.

The prime target of the Texans' attention, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, apparently presented a stone wall, although he visited amicably with the Texans (folksy is as folksy does). But he's not budging, at least not without presidential pressure, which ain't coming, or the calling of the question on the Senate floor. Forced to vote, what's the fallout for him? And for us?

Bottomline: President Joe Biden himself -- ex-Senator Joe Biden -- favors not the suppression of the filibuster. I had not wanted to believe it, but isn't it clear by now? He's a traditionalist, sentimental about the unique and arcane traditions of the Senate, and he clearly has no stomach for squelching one of those traditions.

Barring Biden's pressure on Manchin, Chuck Schumer could announce that there'll be no August recess at all until there's a vote on limiting the filibuster, carving out a ban on the Rule of 60 when a Constitutional right also hangs in the balance. But Schumer has seemed frozen -- not a good look. Has Manchin threatened to re-register as Republican if the Democrats get too frisky?

Meanwhile, the president came to Capitol Hill for lunch with the Senate Democratic Caucus two days ago, a meeting reported as upbeat and congratulatory because it was devoted "to the massive multi-trillion-dollar climate and safety-net plan, not to breaking a voting rights stalemate months in the making."

Voting rights? All but abandoned, on their way to being forgotten.

If the citizens whom the Senate thinks will benefit most from that big budget cannot get access to a ballot, cannot participate in the functioning of democracy, then all the spending in the world won't save us from the return of Trump.

More Democrats Like Texas Democrats!

 

Instead of more talk, including a presidential speech, we need elected Democrats to take action to protect the right to vote, like members of the Texas House did last night in chartering two planes and flying to the nation's Capitol to lobby US senators to pass the For the People Act. Without the 50-plus Democratic lawmakers, Texas Republicans are denied a quorum to pass their new voting restrictions. The special session called by Gov. Greg Abbott is set to end on August 7th. The Texas Democrats vow to stay away from the state until after August 7th.

"We are living on borrowed time in Texas,” top House Democrats said in a statement. “We need Congress to act now to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to protect Texans — and all Americans — from the Trump Republicans’ nationwide war on democracy.”

The massive Texas bill "includes a number of restrictions championed by former president Donald Trump. The measures would ban several election programs implemented last year to help people vote during the coronavirus pandemic, including drive-through voting and 24-hour and late-night voting. Voting rights advocates noted that voters of color disproportionately used these programs."

A war on democracy? Yeah, with no prisoners. Why aren't US Senate Democrats on a war-footing rather than eternally whistling through the graveyard -- "Someone-- someone might get mad if we did that. Or that. Or for that matter that." Someone might get mad. You bet, but you're looking the wrong direction.

Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, a leader of the absconded, pointed out that it's "an enormous sacrifice for many of the Texas Democrats," some of them with health problems, some single parents of young children, some of them in fear of losing their regular jobs. Not to mention the enormous expense of two chartered private jets and weeks of DeeCee guest services. Yikes.

Schumer, putative leader of the Democrats in the US Senate where all the bucks are piling up, said that he might have to cancel some of the August recess -- some of it, not all of it God knows and relax, you senators accustomed to your comforts! The canceling of the goddamn August recess ticks high on the list of demands from the Texas visitors. Why aren't the senators working through August to protect and expand the promise of democracy?

If Republicans are able to suppress the vote, nothing else in the political world, or in the real world, will count for a fart. Without our right to fight back at the ballot, all will be lost to an authoritarian regime with a cult leader.

I acknowledge the Texas reality, as described by the Texas Tribune: "Even if Democratic lawmakers stay out of state for the next few weeks, the governor could continue to call 30-day sessions or add voting restrictions to the agenda when the Legislature takes on the redrawing of the state’s political maps later this summer." 

So facing sure and ultimate defeat, why shouldn't the Texas Democratic minority shoot the moon, grab the attention of a floundering Democratic Senate majority that could still redeem itself by forcing the issue on Manchin and Sinema. There's got to be a showdown some time somehow. Maybe the Texas Democrats can be its predicate.

Thom Tillis Promotes the White People's Party

 

No one ever accused Sen. Thom Tillis of thinking original thoughts. He's more of a bandwagon sort of guy, and he'll jump on a brightly lit one if it's moving slowly enough and if there's already plenty of other Republicans riding it. So on Monday this week, Senator Thom Tillis pledged his allegiance to the conservative panic about "critical race theory" (CRT), joining such Republican luminaries as Sen. Tom Cotton, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, and Sen. Mitch McConnell in PRing a bill that would somehow prohibit the use of any federal funds to teach the 1619 Project -- "by K-12 schools or school districts" -- an astonishing mandate since the 1619 Project is already free to everyone on-line. 

The Tillis announcement (CRT-bashing being catnip to rally-goers) signals to me that the senator is still trying to cement it with the Trump wing, which has never trusted him. CRT-fear is the perfect message for low-information rural people, partly because nobody knows what critical race theory is, but hey! anything going racial has usually proved dangerous. For Tillis, this is his own Trump-holding-the-Bible-in-front-of-the-church moment. Upholding the Gospel that "history" for American students should be reaffirmations of American white virtue, pious recitations of the democratic virtues contained in the preambles of certain sacred American documents, like the Declaration of Independence. Meanwhile, glide past the whole legacy of slavery as national policy. By signing on to the anti-CRT bill, Tillis is virtue-signaling to a crowd that wants to take no prisoners and has a Caesar in exile to whom they bow. Tillis is also and incidentally confirming the Republican Party's continued contraction into something small, "The White Peoples Party."

Tillis's constituents possibly don't even understand what "critical race theory" is. That becomes clear reading through some of the complaints that our Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson solicited from a kind of parent hot-line for reporting examples of liberal classroom indoctrination. The examples that Jeffrey Billman published (the product of a contentious public records request) show that "CRT" is a convenient portmanteau suitable for packing in everything that conservatives don't like about the contemporary world, like anything related to LGBTQ, like any mention of "Black Lives Matter," like any classroom example of liberalspeak that some kid exaggerates as he reports it to his shocked parents.

Where I grew up in Texas

I grew up in the thoroughly unwoke 1950s in a section of the Texas Panhandle that had been settled after 1890 by white refugees from the Kingdom of Cotton. Lot of struggling rural people moved to that section because the state of Texas was offering essentially free farmland -- amazingly deep and fertile dirt currently covered by grass -- free to anyone willing to take it up and make it productive and build a structure to signal permanence. Why, here's you a plot of land if you're tough enough to tame it, and tough people came from Alabama (especially Alabama) and from Mississippi and from Georgia and from North Carolina (where my own forebears joined the wave). The resulting culture was about as all-white as you ever get, or could get back then, and super sure of its own virtue.

The color crisis in my little rural county came with the arrival of Hispanic farm workers, starting in the 1950s and accelerating in the 1960s and keeping pace through to this very day. Subsistence whites, my people, resented the "Mess-kins." I know. I sat in rooms and heard the talk. And I remember fights in the schoolyard between tough white boys and tough Mexican kids, bloody-nose extravaganzas. Assumptions among those white-like-me hardened: the world was made by white people, for white people, and who the ever-living hell do you think you are challenging that? 

When I first came to Appalachian State University in 1970, there was actually a senior professor in the history department quite notorious for telling her students that really, slaves were better off before the Civil War, and basically they were relieved to be taken care of. That was not necessarily a shocking opinion at the time, at least in the South, and there was never an uprising among students about such talk. Now there would be. Now our understanding of history is capable of complex thinking.

Bottomline: Tillis is one of the genetic beads on our Southern double-helix, with his playing to the white conservative preference for shows of force, if triggered by violations of an iron racial hierarchy. Tillis stands for a power structure capable of many innovations. But the only question remains: Is that bead of Southern DNA always gonna be dominant or can we evolve?

Cravings Can Get You Killed

 

The Attorney General of Texas, using the cloak of his office and in effect representing all the citizens of that state of my birth, sued four other sovereign states for their election methods and results. Ken Paxton's suit went directly to the Supreme Court, and was joined by the attorney generals of 17 other states and by 126 Republican members of Congress. They were all convinced -- or said they were convinced, in order to impress their impressionable constituents -- that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.

After The Supremes threw out Paxton's suit as a piece of ridiculous garbage, the mayor of a small Texas town near Lubbock, which is very near where I grew up in the Panhandle, announced that he was ready to go to war and so were the dozens of other members of the South Plains Patriots, an armed militia pledged to defend Trump's right to stay in the White House. That mayor said there’s “no way in hell” Biden won fairly. The only way he’ll believe it, he said, is if Trump himself says so. “Trump is the only one we’ve been able to trust for the last four years. As far as the civil war goes, I don’t think it’s off the table.”

Civil war.

That mayor -- need we say it? -- was speaking for God knows how many other Trumpists everywhere who have swallowed Trump's bullshit like it was a chicken-fried steak dinner with yeast rolls. I tend to believe their stated willingness to use ordinance against enemies of the state. But who would they march against first, especially in a state as large as Texas with Republican elected officials in every statewide office? Or would they go all the way to Michigan, one of Paxton's targets, and storm Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's home? Not sure what that would gain them. So maybe they mean to coagulate on the streets of Washington, D.C., like the Proud Boys did last weekend. The Proud Boys showed them how to do it, although with fists rather than guns -- fists and (oh yeah!) knives. They managed not to kill anyone in the Capitol, but perhaps it's only a matter of time. And they didn't nullify the election.

Maybe Trump imagines himself refusing to come out of the White House on January 20th, with hundreds of his armed supporters guarding the doors and the grounds against any attempt by Federal marshals to haul his ass out. It's a fantasy narrative worthy of Hollywood. Maybe the armed militias who are itching to pull triggers on something have that fantasy too. Some have visions of their own heroic masculinity. Remember the good old boy from Salisbury who stormed a pizzeria in Washington looking for the kidnapped children? He had a fantasy that he was a savior working for the Lord.

I both believe that mayor in Texas, and I don't. I grew up with guys like him. Our school yard sprouted bullies like our irrigated farmland sprouted cotton. Some of them loved shoving around smaller kids, more timid kids, girly kids, but punch one in the nose, he'd back off quick, cupping the blood in his hand and running for the school nurse. Granted, some of them would never back off. They had too much invested in the presentation. School yard fighting was a performance, after all, and the method actors of Texas toughness always had cheering sections of other guys who enjoyed the break from school boredom.

I doubt the prospect of armed rebellion (though if Trump actually called for his supporters to take up arms against the "deep state," Katie bar the door!). Secession is another matter. Now while a part of me wants to say so long, goodbye, don't let the door hit ya to those new secessionist-talking braggarts in Texas and elsewhere, there's no way that's happening either. Not that it matters really, but the Supreme Court in 1869 actually ruled (in Texas v. White) that secession was not only unconstitutional but also a fictional delusion. The guys like the South Plains Patriots don't know nuttin' 'bout no Supreme Court ruling and wouldn't care if they did, so they might try to stir it up. But carrying out even a fictional secession would be a mighty heavy lift, what with interstate commerce and all.

I still worry. Even without the extremes of Civil War and secession, there's every likelihood that the snipers among Trump's most devoted followers will eventually satisfy their craving to shed some blood.