The Texas Republican Party is on a mean-spirited, heartless and cruel mission of SLASHeconomics that is unnecessary and uncalled for. It is blindly cutting the budgets for schools and social services with absolutely no regard for the devastating long term consequences of such cuts.
Rick Perry and his far right Republicans refuse to touch the Rainy Day money for next year's budget though this is precisely the time in which we should tap into such funds. Instead the Republicans have chosen to stockpile the money and rob children of their futures.
Outside of the box thinking, complex problem solving, the ability to explore creative and unique alternatives and a modicum of compassion are called for during dire and desperate economic times like these.
Are Texas Republican lawmakers made of the right stuff to lead? Is it capable of throwing away its memorized talking point campaign rhetoric, forget about its Obamacare and federal government bashing monologues, dismiss its highly paid message masters, unglue its lips from its sugar daddy donor's backsides and engage its collective brain to do what is right and work on behalf of all Texans?
Let's take a peek at the legislation proposed in Austin so far by the super majority Party.
Readers can decide whether or not Republican lawmakers are made of the right stuff.
Please pour yourselves a little glass of your preferred beverage of relaxation, get out the popcorn, if you like, sit back and enjoy the show.
First, the ground rules: Jackass awards are not exclusive to the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh or propagandists for right wing and conservative thought. A jackass is viewed as one who is either arrogant or stupid enough to believe he/she can get away with fooling, lying to and/or willfully misleading others. In other words, any person who holds a position of influence whether one is a politician, elected official, community, or business leader, and this includes all media pundits, anchors and spokespersons for all of the above, who arrogantly or stupidly insults the intelligence of those they do, or hope to influence, is a jackass.
A jackass is also one who refuses to accept or lies about certain realities such as:
The simplest explanation for why America's reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as "socialist" ("fascist" can't be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s. "There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few," the president said in his budget message. He was calling for fundamental fairness, not class warfare. America hasn't seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.
This inequity was compounded by Bush tax policy and by lawmakers and regulators of both parties who enabled and protected the banking scam artists who fled with their bonuses and left us holding the toxic remains. The fantasy of easy money at the top of the economic pyramid trickled down to the masses, who piled up debt by leveraging their homes much as their '20s predecessors once floated stock purchases "on margin." Our culture, meanwhile, painted halos over celebrity C.E.O.'s, turning the fundamentalist gospel of the market into a national religion that further accelerated the country's wholesale flight from reality.
Finally, a jackass is also one who wants to revert to the same old failed and stupid policies that got us into this economic meltdown in the first place.
For the past few days I have been reading about Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick's fall in the Houston Chronicle and here at BOR. The Burnt Orange Report, by the way, has provided excellent moment-by-moment coverage of this fascinating drama. Huge kudos to the outstanding diarists here. The Craddick/Straus issue including BOR's coverage was front page news on Daily Kos on Monday.
Yesterday morning the Houston Chronicle's Lisa Falkenberg wrote an excellent and very revealing commentary on how Houston would benefit from a House Speaker who is from a large urban area.
After reading the article this life-long urban dweller and native of NYC who has lived in Houston for over 20 years, finally understands why I have been so frustrated by how our Austin lawmakers operate. Falkenberg's article nailed it for me. Texas has been run by a bunch of country boys who are more concerned about boll weevil eradication and transporting hogs to markets than they are a big city's crammed prisons, crumbling inner city schools, over-extended hospitals, torn up roads and gridlocked freeways.
