Thursday

It’s mostly cloudy out this morning. Warm and humid. Just a slight chance of rain showers. But you know, a slight chance of rain showers and just the right place means you get rained on over and over for most of the day.

I was looking at the New York times yesterday and Mimi Schwartz was auditioning for the Molly Ivins School of journalism. The only thing wrong with her audition was she lacked Molly’s cutting wit. Though, I must say, she was dead on the money whit her thoughts about “my” Texas…

In particular, the natural optimism of Texans — part of what we are so proud of and what has made us exceptional (or made us think we were) — has never, in my lifetime, been more under threat.

Texas Has Broken My Heart, By Mimi Swartz – The New York Times

Texas exceptionalism… It’s been talked about here before. I grew up being well trained in the religion of Texas exceptionalism. For real trouble with Texas’s exceptionalism though, is that dogma just won’t hunt anymore.

Back when I was growing up, going to elementary school, getting my learning about Texas exceptionalism burned into my psyche… Texas had a long run of southern Democrats helping to make that exceptionalism true. Texas had a lot to think for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Texas grew up with Johnson’s Voting Right Act. The interstate highway program managed to get Texans where they needed to be, and moved Texas products from the farms in the fields to the cities.

But somewhere along the way, the persimmony old businessmen in the Republican party took over the state after Johnson’s betrayal of all things Southern. And with their usage of white dog whistles to try and maintain their hold on Texas politics, those parsimony old white men managed to lose their party, that grand old party, to the rednecks and the racist and the haters and Donald Trump.

Lieutenant Governor Patrick’s public tantrum over “Forget the Alamo,” a book that dared to challenge the mythology around the battle, was either a predictable sop to his base or a refusal to admit that times change and our interpretation of history does, too. Governor Abbott’s stated intention to complete the border wall is just another example of his penchant for closing off the future instead of opening up to it in a way that works for all. Being open to change in all its forms was a lesson I learned in my Texas public school. Maybe that’s why these guys now want to control what teachers teach.

Texas Has Broken My Heart, By Mimi Swartz – The New York Times

And so here we are America, left with right-wing politicians trying to run to the right of Donald Trump to try and capture the baser nature of their party.

So Democrats in Texas government find themselves having to leave the state to stop laws from being passed that would help a poor excuse of the governor in a run for the White House. As state business that needs to get done is ignored… Things like the power grid. Roads and bridges. Water lines.

There’s a bridge, just down the road from my house, that twin my daughter was in school they stopped running school buses across it after it was given a failing grade by engineers. That bridge has never been repaired, never replaced. But the failing grade must have been rescinded because all these years later school buses cross it every day of the school year. It have any notifications of having weight limits… Over the years, Bridges all over the county have been replaced… Even on roads let go nowhere. And over the years the traffic on my little road has gotten heavier and heavier. They move heavy equipment over that bridge, dump trucks, cement trucks. But our governor feels we need to complete Donald Trump’s wall.

Yeah… Texans are exceptional… Exceptionally dumb.

I am sorry for the rant…

Y’all stay safe, stay healthy, and pray for this state, this nation, and this world.