Texas Republicans really are a bunch of racist, fascist thugs aren’t they?

Texas Democrat says she’s locked inside state Capitol after refusing mandatory DPS escort

Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier from Fort Worth returned to the Texas Capitol on Monday but says she remains locked inside the Capitol because she wouldn’t sign a permission slip to be under escort by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The escorts for all House Democrats who left the state last month — preventing a vote on a GOP-led redistricting effort — are meant as a guarantee that they will return to the House by 10 a.m. Wednesday for the next special session.

She wouldn’t sign. So what? So fucking what? Seems like the rest of them did. Which means they have police “escorts” tagging along with them everywhere so they can’t leave the state again. Which means even if Collier, who wouldn’t sign, leaves the state, They’ll Still Have A Quorum!

At this point it’s just the sort of cheapshit petty harassment that republicans do, and their gutter crawling voter base just loves. If this really was a mature, principled party, they’d just shrug and let her make her statement and go on about their business (of helping Trump rig the midterms). But they are the party of the perpetually aggrieved and frightened of the world they live in. The Grand Old Poltroons. And that’s not just a democrat, it’s a black woman sassing them back. Of course she has to stay locked in. They’d sell her back into slavery if they could.

[NOTE: Another one in the drafts folder I didn’t publish for some reason. Probably because the whole thing back then was making me so heartsick I didn’t want to bother.]

In my free time I’m reading a New Yorker profile of the new talk radio star, Dan Bongino, and there’s a passage quoting him as saying to his radio audience that

The day after Bongino riffed on the Arizona audit, he told podcast listeners that liberals are happy when conservative vaccine skeptics get sick. “These people want you dead” he said, and offered a call to action.

But “happy” isn’t the word for it. More like the hard cold satisfaction you get when a guilty verdict is announced. Justice was served.

Maybe that’s too cold for some and I appreciate that. I would have said the same at the beginning of this plague. It’s always confusion and fright at first when catastrophe strikes. But not now. The facts are in and have been for quite a while. We have the means to save lives we didn’t have back in 1918. But now people are demanding their neighbors not avail themselves of vaccines that can save their lives as a test of tribal loyalty, and that is a level of human depravity I never thought I’d ever witness.

MAGA antivaxxers are actively spreading lies about the vaccines and the science behind them. We see the stories over and over again of people reporting pressure not to get vaccinated from republican family and friends. It’s become politics. Now even Trump can’t convince them to protect themselves. And the hospitals are filling up with unvaccinated patients and that’s making it difficult for hospitals to take care of other people.

We could be mostly out of this by now if not for them. I’m out of sympathy and I’m out of fucks to give. If that’s happiness then why doesn’t it feel like that? I hate every part of this.

It’s times like this I can see my bitter Baptist grandmother in me. The one constant thing I hear said about her on that side of the family is she was a hard woman. As if that excused that stoney cold heart of hers. I can be that sometimes and no I don’t like being that and no I’m not happy. But as the saying goes, you made your bed now lay in it. Maybe that one person you might have convinced not to get protection if this hadn’t happened to you will live now.

Via Facebook friend John Becker…