Logrolling 🌻🌻🌻

Juneteenth: Yesterday was Juneteenth, the new Federal holiday that celebrates the day in 1865, when Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas and announced to the more than 250,000 enslaved Black people in the state that they had been freed. It’s being celebrated today because of that rule about not celebrating Federal holidays over the weekend.  Most of us didn’t learn about the significance of the date in primary school because it wasn’t taught back in the day but now we know and it’s more than fair to say that the day that marks the end of the scourge of slavery in the US is well worth celebrating.  Then again given the pushback against teaching anything that might make children and their parents “uncomfortable,” teachers probably aren’t or soon won’t be allowed to explain the holiday’s purpose in a growing number of places. It’s particularly ironic that enslaved Texans were the last to be told that they had been freed because the way things are going in the Lone Star state equality under the law may well be just another one of those quaint ideas whose time has passed.  Over the weekend, in addition to declaring in its platform that President Biden had not been legitimately elected, calling for students to be taught that life begins at conception, and pushing for a vote on succession from the union, the Texas Republican party labeled homosexuality an “abnormal lifestyle choice.”  That last provision, another quaint artifact of the not so distant past, probably shouldn’t have been all that surprising, least of all to the Log Cabin Republicans, the organization representing LGBT conservatives, as they were shut out of the convention. Apparently the Log Cabin set either never heard the text of “First They Came,” the poem, then song, that counts down all the targeted groups from socialists to trade unionists to Jews to just about everyone else unacceptable to the Nazis  and missed the inevitability that they too would be added to the “verboten” list by those obsessed by the Former Guy and everything he stands for.  That’s the Former Guy who spent part of his weekend at the Faith and Freedom Conference calling his former VP, you know the “pussy” “wimp” that he hoped to see dangle from a noose a ”human conveyor belt” for his role in moving the “fraudulent” election process forward. What irony, the FG speaking at a faith conference while the pious wimp had to stay away to avoid him and the religious set who would probably have booed him off the stage.      

Guns, Guns, Guns: As to booing, two other prominent Republicans were also recipients of Bronx cheers this weekend for not being adequately right wing and reactionary.  Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw and Texas Senator John Cornyn, both got raspberries for supporting some gun restrictions.  Crenshaw, the Afghanistan war veteran who lost an eye in combat was attacked by an angry mob of right wingers including some Proud Boys, or as they call them in Texas, Republicans, who called him “eye patch McCain” a moniker assigned to him by none other than that white supremacist hero Tucker Carlson and Cornyn was booed from the stage for his leadership role working on the Senate’s gun legislation. Remember when former SNL guy/KK boyfriend had to apologize in response to all that faux outrage over his lame joke about Crenshaw’s eyepatch?  As to that legislation, it remains up in the air, stuck on funding for red flag laws and whether to close the "boyfriend loophole.”  Republican’s find the idea of preventing violent partners from obtaining guns particularly problematic maybe because they fear that would exclude so many of them from purchasing the weapon of their choice?  

And: COVID shots are now available for the tiny set, in most places other than Florida, the autocracy run by  Ron DeSantis who failed to order shots on a timely basis but did finally let some in his state order on their own.  There will be more January 6 Committee hearings this week, including one tomorrow at 12:45 eastern time. As of now, assuming no one goes into labor, Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who having recently won his primary should feel free to speak his mind and one of his deputies, Gabe Sterling are expected to speak about how the FG and his team pressured them to find 11,780 more votes.  Lastly, keep your eyes on the Supreme Court, a whole bunch of rights are likely to go up in smoke soon, very soon.