Category Archives: State news

State news

Paxton targets Gohmert?

Ken Paxton must be feeling the heat from the Looney Tunes wing of the Texas Republican Party, aka Paxton’s “base” of support. Why? Because he reportedly is taking out ads attacking Rep. Louie Gohmert, one of three GOP challengers to the AG in this year’s primary.

The attorney general and the East Texas congressman figure to carve up the radical right-wing voters of the GOP while they battle for Paxton’s office. Paxton reportedly has taken out some ads that are going after Gohmert.

To be brutally candid, I don’t give a damn about either of these guys, other than I want Paxton removed from the AG’s office. He is an embarrassment to the state I call home and I want him gone from public life. He has been under indictment for felony security fraud almost since the time he took office in 2015; he has yet to go to trial. He’s also angered some of his top legal assistants, who have quit and blown the whistle on what they allege is illegal activity within the AG’s office; the FBI is investigating the allegations.

He has two other serious challengers: former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush.

Polling shows Paxton continuing to run fairly strong among the four candidates, a thought that makes my blood boil. Gohmert, though, figures to peel away enough of the goofball vote to possibly force a runoff between the top two finishers in the primary.

My idea of a political perfection includes a scenario in which the top two do not include Paxton. That ain’t likely to happen. If only …

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, State news

You tell ’em, Kel

Kel Seliger’s status as a lame-duck Texas state senator appears to have given the veteran Republican legislator some gumption as he has delivered a harsh reality to the state’s efforts at redrawing its legislative districts.

Seliger, who hails from Amarillo, said in a court deposition that the GOP-controlled Legislature broke the law in redrawing the boundaries in Senate District 10. “Having participated in the 2011 and 2013 Senate Select Redistricting Committee proceedings and having read the prior federal court decision regarding SD10, it was obvious to me that the renewed effort to dismantle SD 10 violated the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution,” Seliger said in his remarks to the court.

According to the Texas Tribune: Under the map passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, some Black and Hispanic populations previously in District 10 were split into two other districts with majority-white electorates. The Black and Hispanic voters who remain in the newly drawn District 10, in urban areas of south Fort Worth, were lumped in with several rural, mostly white counties to the south and west that drive up the district’s population of white eligible voters while diminishing the number of voters of color.

GOP Sen. Kel Seliger says Texas violated federal voting rights law | The Texas Tribune

Well … isn’t that what many critics of the Legislature have alleged against Republicans who control the body?

Now we have one of the Legislature’s top GOP senators saying that he agrees with the critics. Is that what I am reading? I believe that’s the case.

To which I say only that it would have been good to hear such candor coming when Sen. Seliger was still in the thick of the fight. As it stands now, he is on the sidelines and is heading for the exit at the end of the year.

I say this as a friend of the senator. I consider him to have been an effective representative for the Texas Panhandle, where I lived for more than two decades. Seliger and I go back a while and I have long admired him for his independent streak and his pluck while serving in the Senate.

I mean, any guy who can piss off fellow Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, as Seliger has done, is OK in my book.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, State news

Governor’s race presents conundrum

The upcoming Republican Party primary race for Texas governor presents a serious conundrum for GOP voters.

They will get to choose from among three top-tier candidates, two of whom are nut jobs.

We have the governor, Greg Abbott; challenging him are former Texas GOP chairman Allen West and former state senator Don Huffines. I won’t vote in the GOP primary this March, but I do have a thought or two I want to share.

Abbott is being challenged on the right by West and Huffines. Those two clowns don’t believe Abbott is conservative enough. West is the former one-term Florida congressman who moved to Texas because his political career in Florida was shot; Huffines is another far right-winger who says we need to ban all immigration into Texas.

Then we have Abbott, the guy who is fighting with the Biden administration over mask mandates.

I believe Abbott will survive this primary challenge, chiefly because West and Huffines are going to carve up the nut-job vote, paving the way for Abbott to skate to the party nomination.

It reminds me of the Texas Senate District 31 race in 2018 that enabled Sen. Kel Seliger of Amarillo to win his party’s nomination in a three-man race. His foes that year were former Midland mayor Mike Canon and Amarillo businessman Victor Leal. Both men sought to outflank Seliger on the far right. Seliger ran as a true-blue,  mainstream Texas conservative and won the primary fight with 50.4 percent of the vote; no runoff was needed.

Canon and Leal split the goofball vote in that year’s Senate GOP primary.

I see the same thing happening this year in the GOP primary for governor.

Texas politics is really weird, indeed.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news, State news

Cruz misfires with impeachment threat

(Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Ted Cruz has lost his marbles. His butter has slipped off his noodles. He has gone ’round the bend. He is nuttier than a Snickers bar.

The junior U.S. senator from Texas — the guy who once described Donald Trump as a “sniveling coward” but then became Trump’s primo suck-up senator — believes President Biden can be impeached if Republicans take command of the House after the midterm election.

According to the Texas Tribune: “​​Democrats weaponized impeachment,” he said, referring to House Democrats twice voting to impeach former President Donald Trump. “They used it for partisan purposes to go after Trump because they disagreed with him. And one of the real disadvantages of doing that … is the more you weaponize it and turn it into a partisan cudgel, you know, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/04/ted-cruz-joe-biden-impeachment/

Wow! I am trying to catch my breath.

The Cruz Missile has misfired — again! Democrats didn’t impeach Trump for “partisan purposes.” They impeached him for trying to persuade a foreign leader to do him a political favor; then the House impeached Trump for inciting the riot on 1/6. The weaponization of the impeachment process occurred on the Republican side of the great congressional divide when all but a dignified handful of GOP House members and senators decided to give Trump a pass when he clearly committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

For Cruz to suggest that President Joe Biden faces potential impeachment if the GOP takes command of the House is tantamount to inviting a constitutional crisis where none should exist.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Few discrepancies found

Well, what do you know about this? The first reports of the “forensic audit” that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott launched — at the behest of Donald J. Trump — of balloting in four Texas counties shows minuscule discrepancies.

That means the voting was not rife with “widespread” fraud that Trump has alleged without offering a shred of evidence.

Trump came to Texas this past summer and got Abbott to call for an audit of four of the state’s most populous counties: Harris, Dallas, Tarrant and Collin. I live in Collin County. Of the counties audited, Collin voted for Trump narrowly, while the rest of them all voted for President Biden.

The Texas Tribune reported: The first phase of the review, released New Year’s Eve, highlighted election data from four counties — Harris, Dallas, Tarrant and Collin — that showed few discrepancies between electronic and hand counts of ballots in a sample of voting precincts. Those partial manual counts made up a significant portion of the results produced by the secretary of state, which largely focused on routine voter roll maintenance and post-election processes that were already in place before the state launched what it has labeled as a “full forensic audit.”

Texas secretary of state’s partial audit of 2020 election finds few issues | The Texas Tribune

Hmm. I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that the audit of these counties won’t find anything worth mentioning. The audit that Abbott seeks was done because Trump continues to perpetuate The Big Lie about the results of the 2020 election. Trump lost! Biden won! The election was fair and legal and clean. Texas went for Trump, giving the then-POTUS its 38 electoral votes.

However, Trump wants to continue fostering doubt into the most secure election in U.S. history.

I will say once again that Donald Trump’s Big Lie only defames the hard work done at the local level by elections officials who take an oath to ensure that our elections are secure.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Hate partisan election of judges

2 Comments

I want to raise an issue that I have bitched about for years, but which needs further bitching from me.

It deals with the partisan election of judges in Texas. Yes, judicial candidates in this state run as Democrats and Republicans. They don’t run necessarily on their judicial philosophy, which should be the determining factor on whether to elect these men and women. Oh, no. They run as partisan politicians.

For the life of me I do not understand why we cannot shed the party labels for judicial candidates.

For nearly four decades watching Texas politics up close and personal I have seen fine men and women drummed out of office because they were of the “wrong party,” or the party that wasn’t in control of the political landscape. Good Republican judges and candidates would lose to inferior Democratic opponents in the old days because they ran as members of the “out” party. Then the tide turned in Texas and we have watched qualified Democratic judges and judicial candidates losing to numbskull Republicans for the same reason; Republicans dominate politics in this state and Democrats are still trying to get a foothold.

I have asked judges and those who want to be judges a question ever since I arrived in Texas in early 1984: What is the difference between Democratic justice and Republican justice?

So help me, I cannot remember a single cogent answer to that question. Not a single judge or judicial contender has been able to answer that one for me. I hope during the upcoming election season to be able to ask future candidates for judicial office that question.

Judicial candidates should run on their philosophy and how they interpret the law. I am not a lawyer, but I know enough to be able to discern the difference between a liberal judicial candidate and a conservative one. Whether those differences comport with partisan labels is utterly beside the point.

I know full well my argument won’t hold much sway with those in power. I will keep harping on it, though, until I no longer can harp on anything. Texas’s partisan election of judges does not do justice to the judicial system.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, local news, State news

Paxton should pay a big price

What do you know about this? It appears that the Texas Republican Party primary race for attorney general is shaping as a fight over the incumbent’s self-inflicted legal difficulties … not to mention the shame he has brought to the high office he occupies.

AG Ken Paxton has it coming to him.

Paxton was elected attorney general in 2014. The very next year he got indicted by a grand jury right here in Collin County on allegations of securities fraud. He continues to await trial in state court. He also has been chastised by the Securities and Exchange Commission; the FBI has launched a probe into complaints from former senior legal assistants at the AG’s office that Paxton has been behaving illegally; then he got that idiotic lawsuit tossed by the Supreme Court in which he sought to overturn the presidential election returns in several other states that voted for Joe Biden.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton facing challenges from all fronts | The Texas Tribune

Three Republicans have filed to run against Paxton: Land Commissioner George P. Bush, former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert. They’re all singing off the same song sheet, which is that Paxton’s legal troubles are enough to get him booted out of office.

I am glad to hear it. Yes, even from Rep. Gohmert, a fellow for whom I have zero respect.

Whatever does the job. Paxton is a joke, an embarrassment, a disgrace.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Beto has a shot, if …

Photo by Richard W. Rodriguez/AP/REX/Shutterstock

A gentleman with whom I had breakfast today has a theory about the upcoming race for Texas governor I feel like sharing.

It goes like this …

Beto O’Rourke is likely to get hammered by Greg Abbott if O’Rourke is nominated by Democrats and runs against the Republican governor in the fall. But he has a possible path to victory.

It depends on whether Abbott fails to deliver on his promise to keep the electricity flowing this coming winter. If the lights go out because the electrical grid cannot withstand the demand placed on it by severe cold, then O’Rourke might be able to say, according to my friend, “I can do better than that.”

Sure enough. O’Rourke then would have to explain how he would ensure that the electric grid managers keep the lights on and our furnaces functioning.

Absent that, my friend said, O’Rourke has no chance to defeat a Republican governor in this still-quite-Republican state.

Gov. Abbott had better pray that the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas keeps the lights on for the duration of the winter. His political career might depend on it.

johnkanelis_92@hotmai.com

State news

‘Lights will stay on’? They had better

Good news has arrived — maybe — for Texans who shivered earlier this year during the killer freeze that paralyzed the state in February.

The lights “will stay on” this winter, says the head of the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the guy who runs the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the outfit that manages the state’s electrical grid.

Oh, man. They had better be right.

PUC chairman Peter Lake and ERCOT interim CEO Brad Jones have given assurances that the power grid won’t overload and break down as it did in mid-February, sending millions of Texans into the deep freeze, some of them for several weeks. What’s more, the grid failure resulted in the loss of water delivery for many thousands of Texans; that crisis lasted for weeks in many communities.

The Legislature convened a special session to fix the problem and Gov. Greg Abbott assures us that it’s fixed. And we believe this politician, right? Not necessarily.

One of the pols who wants to defeat him, Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke, says the natural gas lines haven’t yet been fully winterized, that they need more attention. I’m not going to buy into O’Rourke’s criticism fully, either.

Still, with winter just a few days away from when the calendar tells us it’s here, I am going to follow the time-honored advice handed down by my parents: hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

Which is my way of saying I don’t trust the folks who are supposed to deliver the goods on the product for which I pay good money!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

‘No’ on special session!

How many ways do I have to say the same thing? Which is that the COVID-19 vaccine is saving lives, it is preventing infections from the deadly virus and that government entities are within their right to order vaccines for employees and for the public who the government is charged to protect.

Accordingly, I do not want Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to call a fourth special legislative session to enact a statewide ban on future COVID vaccine requirements.

The Texas Tribune reports that a growing number of Texas Legislature Republicans want Abbott to call a special session. They want Gov. Abbott to ask the Legislature to approve a ban on businesses and local governments issuing vaccine mandates.

The Tribune reports: “We know legislators are tired and nobody wants an extended special session,” Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi said in an interview Monday, pointing to states such as Tennessee and Florida that recently passed legislation on vaccine mandates on short timelines.

“While I am happy to be home after three special sessions in Austin,” GOP state Rep. Briscoe Cain wrote, “I would happily return to Austin if called upon to protect the rights of my fellow Texans.”

How about protecting the lives of your “fellow Texans,” Rep. Cain? A state-mandated ban on local COVID restrictions puts your “fellow Texans” in jeopardy.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com