Texas

It’s early Monday morning here in Central Texas, and the rain just keeps on falling. Over the wettest weekend any of us can remember, water has saturated the ground and overflowed every culvert. Dozens are dead, an untold number of properties damaged. The drought is over, point taken. We surrender. Now we have to figure out who, if anyone, is at fault.  In the last few days, the blame has flowed faster and thicker than the raging muddy waters of the Guadalupe River. It started almost immediately on Friday morning, with a sickening torrent of anti-Texas vitriol from left-wing social media, the flip side of the horrible “God’s wrath” chatter we heard from the right during the Los Angeles fires.

The leadership of the Democratic Party is as open as it has been in generations, with Nancy Pelosi occupying emerita status, Chuck Schumer under fire from half his party – and their most prominent governors hamstrung by problems at home or the fact they’d much rather be podcasting. The field is effectively cleared for an upstart to emerge based on sheer communications talent and the ability to take advantage of a power vacuum as an avatar of leftward frustration. And if that’s the direction Democrats decide to go in 2028, there’s no one who occupies that role right now more impressively than the constantly viral phenomenon that is the congresswoman from Dallas, Texas – Jasmine Crockett.

Matt McCaw doesn’t want to live anywhere but in Oregon. But during the pandemic he felt like he was living under tyrannical rule imposed by the state’s progressive majority in metro Portland. The school that his six children attended closed for more than a year due to a state mandate — and they received just four hours of online instruction per week. His church was forced to close, and his business selling textbooks suffered because school districts were buying online curricula, not physical books. Mask and vaccine mandates were ubiquitous; McCaw couldn’t even take his wife out to dinner to break the monotony, because all the restaurants were takeout-only. “I thought there would be a huge political backlash against all that,” he says.

"He’s smoking meth,” I heard on the police radio. Lieutenant Jordan Colunga promised to take me to the action, but maintained his leisurely pace. He chuckled as the undercover officers dictated their observations from a gas station. The pipe fiend, having wisely decided he had had his fill, unwisely began wandering the pumps to sell his surplus to passersby. Undercover cops don’t blow their cover for spontaneous drug dealers, so the observers passed along the information to a nearby squad car. The suspect was back in his vehicle by the time the beat cops arrived on scene. “He’s getting out of the car, he’s getting out of the car,” an officer said apprehensively on the radio before yelling, “He’s reaching, he’s reaching!” The laughter stopped. Colunga hit the gas.

If you want casual sex in Australia, an online mistress, a “milf live chat,” or even just “local adult hookups now,” Congressman Henry Cuellar has got you covered.  It’s unclear what's going on with Cuellar’s campaign website, but it’s currently overrun with not safe for work topics. “Start a new adventure with local swinger couples now,” one post reads. “This really is a powerful way to explore new intimate fantasies and satisfy new people,” the Texas Democrat lets us know via his website. Separately, a post in Russian reads “Гоксбет 2 Ставь на свои цели!” telling readers that they should gamble their money. If you’re feeling adventurous and want to travel, Cuellar’s got you covered.

Donald Trump crushed the New Hampshire primary, as every poll in Alpha Centauri predicted he would. Nevertheless, his sole remaining opponent for the GOP nomination, Nikki Haley, “vowed to fight on.” Why? A cynical person might suggest the interaction of two volatile liquids: cash, on the one hand, and consultants, on the other. Haley is swimming in both. The cash is coming from two sources: brittle, establishment faux conservatives like the Kochs and wily Dem operatives like the billionaire Reid Hoffman who, in addition to shoveling gobs of money to Nikki Haley, is also funding such entrepreneurial activities as E. Jean Carroll’s bizarre lawsuit against Donald Trump. In a sane world, the support of a malignant figure like Hoffman would be disqualifying for Haley.

It’s no secret that Americans are moving from blue states to red ones. According to recently released Census Bureau data, the five with the largest population loss to other states between July 2022 and July 2023 were California (-338,371), then New York (-216,778), Illinois (-83,839), New Jersey (-44,666), Massachusetts (-39,149) and Maryland (-30,905). The five states with the largest overall increases during the same period were Texas (473,453), Florida (365,205), Georgia (116,077), South Carolina (90,600) and Tennessee (77,512). The most frequently cited reason for this ongoing blue-to-red migration is taxes — or, more correctly, the opportunity to pay less and fewer of them.

“Everything’s bigger in Texas” is one of those clichés that happens to be entirely true. With the diminution of the importance of impeachment as a political issue on the federal level, the Lone Star State seems obliged to take up the slack — and the impeachment of controversial Attorney General Ken Paxton is turning into a process that pits the highest-paid power lawyers in Texas against each other in a duel to the death. There's been plenty of color in the proceedings, and not just from Paxton attorney Tony Buzbee, whose heavily tanned appearance led him to take to Instagram to accuse "reputable media organizations" of editing his skin tone in photographs (watchers had started passing around memes of Buzbee as an Oompa Loompa). "So you think the news isn’t bias [sic]?

The general attitude among Texas Republicans toward the impeachment report prepared against Attorney General Ken Paxton is that they didn’t just already know some of it — they knew all of it. Paxton is the most Trumpian figure in statewide politics in Texas. He is widely known for his ethics problems and all manner of lawsuits and investigations, but he is also a reliable transactional conservative — the sort to ask the conservative base, “is this the thing you want? Then I’ll do it, with gusto.” But his current travails, where he faces the real risk of impeachment for a litany of breaches, deceptions and inappropriate donations, are actually part of a broader, long-simmering war between Texas donor bases whose priorities often clash in Austin.