I Guess We Have to Channel John Lennon

It's time to stop playing nice rally and rally around Power to the People

Texas, at the urging of the Felon, is trying to do some redistricting outside of any normal timing. Talk about some crazy gerrymandering! Thankfully, Texas Democrats left not just the building, but the state to keep the legislature from having a quorum. The cowboy boot-licking, groveling POS, governor now wants to arrest all of the Democrats that left to prevent a quorum that would lead to an outrageous power play on behalf of the President whose approval ratings are tumbling. This MAGA cult Republican Party has rejected rules of fair play, and it is time for the Democrats, the Independents and all those not beholding to the whims of Project 2025 that is designed to destroy our system of government, to stand up and proudly proclaim, FUCK OFF. Do I like having to play this way, no, but when someone brings a baseball bat to a fight, well, you can’t be using a feather duster in defense.

Let’s be clear, the proposed map isn’t about governing or fairness. It’s about fear. Fear of a changing electorate. Fear of suburban voters, young people, and Black and brown Texans. Fear of competition. And above all fear of losing. If you can’t win fairly, then cheat. It is like that scene in Gangs of New York, where the mayor and head of the Tammany machine tells his team to print more ballots! And while Republicans used to preach federalism and local control, the proposed map is a first step of a national redistricting scheme orchestrated by a conservative think tank and fronted by a man who couldn’t name a Texas county if his life depended on it.

The efforts of Governor Abbott seem, because they are, highly illegal, but he is, of course, relying on his AG, Ken Paxton. And while he may not wield the power of AG Blondie, he is such a stand up, law-abiding guy, after all he was indicted on state securities fraud charges; investigated for 9 years; paid $300K in restitution; had to attend ethics training and community service; was accused by high level of assistants of “bribery and abuse of office;” as recently as May 2023, the Texas House, under the control of his own Republicans, impeached him, but the Senate, under pressure from Don Donny let him slide; filed what was described as “the dumbest case … ever … filed on an emergency basis at the Supreme Court" to overturn the 2020 election; and, where he likely curries favor with the Felon, carried on an extra-marital affair, had his office hire her, and shared an Uber account to meet. I guess that was enough for Mrs. Paxton who divorced him on “Biblical grounds.” Yep, this is a guy whose advice I would take and upon which I would act….NOT!

I guess we need to wait and see what Abbott actually does. What I really want to see is a mass of Democrats screaming “right on!”to those in Texas who left. What I want to hear from the halls of the US Congress, from every state in the union, is a chorus of “homie don’t play that tune” or some version thereof. Historically, every 10 years, states redraw their legislative and congressional district lines following the census because communities change, and redistricting is critical to our democracy by allowing maps to be redrawn to ensure that districts are equally populated, comply with laws such as the Voting Rights Act, and are otherwise representative of a state’s population. Notwithstanding that historically accepted standard, sometimes the process is used to draw maps that manufacture election outcomes that are detached from the preferences of voters. Rather than voters choosing their representatives, gerrymandering empowers politicians to choose their voters. This tends to occur especially when line drawing is left to legislatures and one political party controls the process, as has become increasingly common. When that happens, partisan concerns almost invariably take precedence over all else. That produces maps where electoral results are virtually guaranteed even in years where the party drawing maps has a bad year.

Democrats have been playing defense for far too long. That must stop that mild and meek posture if there exists a shot at stopping the Felon and his enablers. Rather than being reactive, the Party must explain not just about the lies being promulgated, or attacking the goals via Project 2025, but, and most importantly, what is the vision of their party. A good starting point would be what steps will be taken to rebuild the government and why that matters. Sure there was bloat, but surgical revisions needed to be undertaken not Civil War battlefield surgery.

One of those areas, and one which the MAGA Republicans are sitting on the wrong side of history is with respect to the environment. The newest and latest moves on climate change are destructive (the anti-science part we already know). Last week the EPA set forth a plan to revoke its endangerment finding that formally recognizes global warming as a threat to public health. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called for a rewrite of the endangerment finding back in March as part of a series of environmental rollbacks of what he referred to as “the Holy Grail of the climate change religion” and said he was thrilled to end it “as the EPA does its part to usher in the Golden Age of American success.” He added that his actions offered “the greatest day of deregulation in American history.” It surprises nobody that these climate findings were issue issued in 2009 under the Obama administration and gave the EPA authority to regulate emissions from cars, power plants, factories, and other sources of pollution. Withdrawing the finding would give the Trump administration license to eliminate those regulations. In line with the administration efforts on the endangerment rule, the EPA also said it intends to get rid of the motor vehicle emissions limits.

There remain fighters and fights, and even some victories. The administration’s agenda suffered another setback late Friday when an appeals court upheld a decision that temporarily halts federal agents from making immigration-related arrests in the Los Angeles area without probable cause. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court’s finding that the raids appeared to exclusively rely on a person’s race and other factors, like speaking Spanish. This is another case that will likely head to the Supreme Court, but it is one that the Court has to see as determinative of whether due process matters.

The questions we all must face surround education, fuel efficiency standards, defunded public media, diversity programs, and so much more (the costs of tariffs will be the telling story on the economic front). Obamacare although far from perfect was a good step in moving our country in the correct direction (the “right” direction is a giant middle finger that the Republicans have given us over 15 years of wanting to end the program, and yet we have yet to see even a…concept of a plan!). The will of the people, the charging language of We the People, means nothing to the Felon or his administration. Don’t deny the truth: this is a government brought to you by the right wing think tank at the Heritage Foundation.

In much the same way that they have adopted challenging congressional races by basing their efforts upon a simple philosophy: when you can’t win the argument, you redraw the map; consider what happened with the jobs report. William Beach, who served as the BLS commissioner during Trump’s first term, signed on to a letter with Obama-era commissioner Erica Groshen, calling Trump’s firing decision “baseless.”
The report added: “To politicize the work of the agency and its workers does a great disservice not only to BLS but to the entire federal statistical system which this country has relied on for almost 150 years.” When history paints you in a bad light, then folks like the Felon lies about the jobs report, and continues on with the diatribe re his long-debunked falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election, which he decisively lost against former President Joe Biden. Even worse, congressional Republicans and the FOX News machine are amplifying and repeating these objectively false statements. Of course, promoting and escalating nonsensical conspiracies, is the sort of behavior that lead to the eventual rise of a conspiracy theorist like Trump leading the party.

There are enough people in America that can see that prices are still high and they’re getting more expensive, not less, in large part because of Trump’s own tariffs. His polling on inflation and the cost of goods is dismal. Americans aren’t buying the spin. They’re living the struggle. Where is the tipping point? How do we tip it?

Get up. Stand up.

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