When the Texas Republican Party is not imposing more government regulation on a woman's right to choose or when it is not busy passing Voter ID laws that will make it more difficult for certain segments of the population to vote, or when it is not frantically scheming to shut down Planned Parenthood, it is shamefully redrawing district maps in order to keep this sorry red state a perpetually sorry red state. Indeed the rights robbing Republican Party has overdosed on right wing steroids for the past two years. The puppets for right wing anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist have been on a ruthless crusade to slash and burn the state's budgets. This is especially true of school budgets. As my colleague Lightseeker has shared, in addition to witch hunts against women and voter rights, there has been a Republican all out assault on Texas school children.
I guess this is what happens when a Party's politicians are so morally bankrupt that their only goal is to stay in office in order to serve themselves. To do this for the long-term takes some creative scheming because even Republicans know that one day a majority of people will no longer put up with the kind of insanity we've seen over the passed two years. Indeed, a Party with such hapless lawmakers is driven to desperate measures in order to hang on to its seats in the big bad evil government. At least it is big and bad according to Republican politicians who will routinely resort to scorched earth politics in order to keep their jobs in the place they say they hate the most.
Eventually folks are going to wake up and say enough is enough. We are not taking any more right wing lunacy policies that harm more than they help. The GOP knows this and so it redraws district maps to make it easier for them to keep their jobs that mostly consist of throwing their constituents under the bus. But if taxes are low, low, low, everyone should be happy, at least according to right wing thought.
So imagine my displeasure when I voted early the other day and I could not find the candidate for whom I had decided to vote for U.S. Democratic House Representative in CD-07. Her name was not on the ballot because my precinct which is inside 610 near the Texas Medical Center in Houston has been redistricted out to tea party land in suburban Houston. According to a friend who knows far more about redistricting than I do said the GOP moved Republican precincts out of districts like CD-07 into tea party land in order to keep Republican areas in suburban Houston securely loony as long as possible (my words, not his). Apparently the GOP thinks U.S. Rep. Culberson is so invincible that he can hold a less red district with no problem.
Voters will decide Culberson's future in November. I just won't be among them this year. For I have been gerrymandered to ol' Houston hanging Judge Ted Poe's district. Hell hath no fury, Judge. I remember getting grilled by you when summoned for jury duty years ago. I also remember how the Judge would humiliate convicted shop lifters by making them stand outside the store from which they had stolen wearing a sign acknowledging their former thievery. I think it would be equally fitting for Ted Poe to stand outside the U.S. House of Representatives while wearing a sign.
Earth to TX CD-02. I don't work for you.
Many of us know that the Republican Party has been lying to the American people on so many levels for over 30 years. During the Reagan and G.W. Bush years we heard all about
trickle down economics and its wonders. According to the tiresome right wing spin artists if the rich are given tax cuts they will create more jobs for the middle and working classes. Except that trickle down has never created jobs. Everyone knows this by now but that does not stop the GOP and Fox Faux News from its continual lying about it. Trickle down is a Trojan horse for tax cuts and a transfer of wealth from the middle class to the 1%. Media water carriers for Republican propaganda, Fox Faux News, has been faithfully beating the drums for the Party's voodoo economic policies for as long as I can remember.
Even the venture capitalist below gets the hard and fast reality that tax cuts don't create jobs.
Cross posted on
Worse, the hard right authoritarian Republican Party will pay for tax cuts for the wealthy by gutting social programs that offer the working poor, the elderly and the impoverished a safety net. It seems given the proposed Ryan budget that the Republican Party is yearning to do the same kind of austerity as practiced by Europe right now.
According to Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics Paul Krugman, this would be a really dumb thing to do. But then as we have seen over the past several years, Republicans don't do smart very often. It will always default to dumb and mean instead.
And when they are not lying about tax cuts and budgets they are lying about what Democrats say and do, especially President Obama. Karl Rove and fat cat super pacs are spending millions of dollars on lying political hit ads. Wouldn't it be nice if they created jobs instead? I know.
That's not going to happen anytime soon.
When a party merely serves as servants for the 1% and does little other than wage wars against women, minorities, gays, the middle class, children, the poor and the elderly, it is no small wonder why it finds itself drawing district maps that would make sense only in a fascist twilight zone.