​The resounding Republican victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election should be an object lesson to Democrats nationwide on how not to run a campaign in the (hopefully permanent) post-Trump era, and a wake-up call looking ahead to 2022.
 
Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe ran an off-target campaign that, from the outset, forgot what almost always decides elections: “kitchen-table” issues. Or, to quote Bill Clinton, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Exit polls revealed that the economy was issue number one in the minds of Virginia voters.
 
For months, kitchen-table issues have been hitting even closer to home than usual. Every time voters go grocery shopping and encounter both suddenly higher prices and empty shelves, or fill up their gas tanks for twice as much as it cost them a year ago, they obsess over how the economy is affecting their pocketbooks and quality of life. Politicians who do not address this ignore the kitchen table at their peril. McAuliffe never addressed these close-to-the-vest matters that were paramount voter concerns. In contrast, Republican Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin hammered them home daily.
 
Instead, McAuliffe tried to nationalize the campaign through “Trumpification.” This worked for Democrats in 2018 and 2020 when Trump dominated the daily news cycle and was a clear and present danger. But Trump is now gone and to a large extent rendered irrelevant, primarily because he has been kicked off social media and is no longer the lead story on the nightly news and 24-hour cable channels. His feeble attempts at relevance through his press releases are not even seen by the vast majority of voters.
 
Consequently, elections once again turn on kitchen-table issues that resonate with the vast majority of Americans. How Democrats could ignore this is incomprehensible.
 
The other key lesson deriving from this election is that it is the center that is almost always determinative. And suburban women represent the center more than any other demographic. Also, they more often than not do the family budgeting and can see that their hard-earned dollars do not go as far as they did even a few months ago. Despite the trend toward a more equitable sharing of household duties, they are most often the ones who do the grocery shopping. While in 2018 and 2020 they could be swayed to vote Democratic because they abhorred Trump’s boorish behavior and overt misogyny, now they have reverted to what passes for electoral normalcy.
 
In addition to misreading the minds of voters, McAuliffe suffered from his terrible gaffe—“parents should not be telling schools what to teach”—a faux pas his opponent immediately jumped on and constantly emphasized in his shrewd TV ad campaign. McAuliffe also went way beyond what was necessary and emphasized his close connection with teachers’ unions, apparently unmindful of the fact that parents view these organizations with some suspicion.
 
While, heaven forbid, Trump may be back on the ballot in 2024, he won’t be next year. Democrats need to take away from this off-off-year election that it is bread-and-butter issues that they need to emphasize. If they are actually able to enact both the Infrastructure and Build Back Better bills over which they have squabbled for months, they will have something tangible to take to voters next year. Meanwhile, in 2022 they need to forget Trump, as have the majority of suburban women, who swung from Biden to Republican Youngkin by an astounding 15 points.
 
Finally, Democratic Progressives have to abandon dumb slogans like “Defund the Police” that turn off the vast majority of voters. If they want their policy positions to prevail, they first need to elect Democrats. They won’t be able to do that if they offend the electorate. As Barack Obama once said: “Don’t do stupid stuff.”
 
Dick Hermann
November 5, 2021

​Kermit The Frog’s lament was right. Witness the lengths that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has to go to to rile up the MAGAverse and remain relevant. It clearly was not enough to hound and harangue a 17-year old high school student who was a survivor of the Parkland school massacre; or to go on a less-than-triumphant speaking tour of the nation with fellow reprehensible representative, Matt Gaetz (R-FL), the alleged seducer of underage girls and general all-around nasty person.
 
Having been kicked off of all of her House committees, MTG has little to do in return for the $174,000 of U.S. taxpayer money she “earns,” other than to make life miserable for respectable and responsible colleagues who, unlike her, are not neo-fascists colluding to destroy our delicate democracy.
 
Her latest headline-hogging attempt at relevance was to harass Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), one of only two Republican members of Congress willing to shine a light on the events leading up to the January 6, 2021 Trump-induced insurrection, for voting to refer Steve Bannon to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution for contempt of Congress. Bannon is allegedly the gray eminence behind Trump’s foiled (for now) coup d’etat.
 
Pity the people of Georgia’s 14th congressional district. They are represented in Congress by likely the most hyper-partisan and unquestionably least productive member, and that is saying something given Kevin (don’t call me Joe) McCarthy and his band of resident evils who have abandoned the GOP in favor of fascist fealty to the former aspiring despot. The folks in Greene’s district get nothing in return for their votes other than the shame and embarrassment of having sent perhaps the most disgraceful individual to ever pollute the halls of Congress.
 
A year from now, they will have an opportunity to correct their mistake. According to news reports, a good number of Greene’s 2020 supporters are harboring second thoughts. They believed that they were finally getting an advocate for their needs and grievances. Instead, they got a loose cannon conspi-racist whose social media posts are full of unhinged ravings, including: (1) that Jewish space lasers ignited California forest fires, (2) that school shootings that left families devastated for life by the deaths of their children were a hoax; (3) encouraging the execution of Democratic leaders; and (4) questioning if a plane actually crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. But NO legislation designed to improve their lives.
 
Greene is a shock-jock windbag, a publicity hound disrupter with the empathy, self-absorption and crudity of a female Donald Trump. She cares nothing for improving Americans’ lives. The tragedy and the danger, however, is that she is well on her way to becoming the face of what was once the party of constructive conservative values that could occasionally act as a check on the left’s wilder impulses. We are in very dangerous territory when people like her become Republican stars. With EVERY passing day, her GOP colleagues make it easier to be Greene.
 
Dick Hermann
October 29, 2021

​Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Japan and the USA. What do these ten countries have in common? (1) They are all among the world’s richest nations. (2) They all had colonial empires. Several clung to those empires all the way into the 1960s and 1970s. (3) They all shared an outlook that viewed their colonial subjects as less-than-human and treated them accordingly, reducing hundreds of millions of them to what amounted to slave-status and extreme poverty. (4) They exploited their colonial possessions in ways that made themselves wealthy at the expense of their colonies. (5) When their colonies finally became independent, the colonial powers abandoned them, left them to their fates, having to fend for themselves.
 
The pandemic opens up a great opportunity for the former colonial powers to help these countries that they abused and mistreated. The ten former colonial powers are well on the way to herd immunity, having vaccinated large majorities of their populations. Meanwhile, their former colonies have been left far behind in the global fight against Covid-19. For example, fewer than 3 percent of Africa’s more than 1.2 billion people have been vaccinated. At the current vaccination rate, it will be many years before Africa’s protection level reaches a point where it is comparable to that of the former colonial powers.
 
And that poses grave dangers not only to Africans, but also to Europeans and Americans. The only way to bring the coronavirus under manageable control is to vaccinate the entire world’s population. Otherwise, we will be subject to new and likely even more deadly variants than the current Delta strain that has caused so much devastation globally.
 
That can be largely stopped if the world’s rich countries go all out to quickly produce and distribute enough vaccines to their former colonies. They have the capacity to do this and to do it without charging these desperately poor nations for the jabs.
 
Among them, these colonial powers subjugated more than 100 colonies, which included virtually all of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and much of Asia and the Pacific. A concerted program of supplying these now independent nations with Covid vaccines is one way to make up for some of the terrible harms they wreaked. Belgium, for example, killed an estimated 10 million Congolese during its rule. In addition, King Leopold II’s emissaries in the Congo brutalized millions more of the people they enslaved, hacking off their hands if they did not meet their production quotas. Leopold’s cruelty was hardly unique. The other nine colonial powers were also guilty of gross mistreatment.
 
“COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access” (COVAX) the international initiative aimed at equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines has been a disappointment. It has fallen far short of its original goal In the 18 months since its inception of distributing 2 million vaccine doses to 92 poor countries. It’s time to try something else. If each former colonial power focused its efforts on directing vaccines to its former colonies, doing something so significant, salutary and morally right would be a huge step toward conquering Covid-19 and a “win-win” for the entire planet.
 
Dick Hermann
October 22, 2021

​While congressional Republicans and Democrats battle over spending a few trillion dollars over ten years designed to improve the lives of millions of Americans, both parties think nothing of authorizing more than twice as much for the Department of Defense. They vote by huge bipartisan majorities in favor of spending more than $7.5 trillion (highly likely an underestimate) over the next decade in order to prepare to fight the last conventional war.
 
The end of the Cold War has not changed the deeply ingrained assumption that the future will look like the past. Is it really necessary to spend more than $750 billion a year to maintain a military ill-suited for the battlegrounds of the twenty-first century? We are unlikely to go to war with our nation-state adversaries—China and Iran. Chinese saber-rattling over Taiwan does not mean that the U.S. would recklessly confront China militarily in its own backyard. Similarly, Iran’s inching closer to possessing nuclear weapons, a regrettable outcome of Donald Trump’s imprudent trashing of the Iran nuclear agreement, won’t lead to a war against a regional military power on its home turf 6,500 miles away. Moreover, the havoc Iran could wreak on tankers transporting Middle Eastern oil through the Persian Gulf, which would do incalculable economic damage to Western economies, would give us pause.
 
Our annual defense budgets invariably include absurdly expensive programs and weapons that are at best unnecessary and all-too-often unusable The first proposed Biden defense budget has us spending more in 2021 dollars than we did in any year of the Vietnam War or the madcap  defense spending spree of the Reagan era. This is nuts!
 
The U.S. spends more for defense than the next eleven big spending nations—China, India, Russia, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Australia—combined. We have 20 aircraft carriers (a.k.a., sitting ducks); China has two; Russia one. We spend billions on high-tech planes that don’t work, like the snake-bitten F-35 Strikefighter, and on weapons that have proven ineffective in counter-insurgencies against rag-tag bunches of non-state actors like ISIS or the Taliban.
 
A more than adequate defense could be had for only a third of our current outlay. It would still be sufficient to deter any potential adversary. We could then redirect resources to the kinds of conflicts that represent the real threats to us—pandemics, climate change, domestic terrorists and income and wealth inequality.
 
Why do we blindly persist in gross overspending on defense, on focusing our planning on fighting improbable wars against nation-states, on being able to fight two-and-a half-front wars simultaneously, and on developing monumentally expensive weapons systems that are ineffective against the real external dangers we face? The answer is complex.
 
First, the cabal that President Eisenhower warned us against in his valedictory when he left office:  “…we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” More than 50,000 U.S. companies provide goods and services to the Department of Defense (DoD). They come from every congressional district and contribute millions of dollars to congressional campaigns.
 
Second, the rivalry between the armed services over budget money. The top minds in the Army, Navy and Air Force are not directed at our external enemies. Instead, they focus on their service rivals. I witnessed this personally during a decade as a DoD employee and consultant.
 
Third, the standard career path for retiring generals, admirals and other top brass is to move from DoD to the “Beltway Bandits,” the thousands of defense contractors willing to pay for easy access to their former DoD colleagues and members of Congress who control the purse strings.
 
Fourth, the fear of members of Congress of being labeled “soft on defense,” a worry especially felt by Democrats despite their mindless enthusiasm for excessive defense spending.
 
Fifth, the unraveling of the nuclear arms control agreements that prior presidents reached with the Soviets and their Russian successors that contributed to maintaining peace between the superpowers for so many years. Bipartisan support for them has eroded as the Republican Party has gone rogue, abandoning its suspicion of and hostility toward Russia, a price of currying favor with its Putin-admiring, autocratic cult leader, Donald Trump.
 
In sum, powerful economic and political interests overwhelm any rational assessment of our defense needs. The public needs to understand that we are wasting tax dollars on defense that could be applied to the crying needs of society that, if addressed, would go a long way to make this country stronger and more secure.
 
The performative hand-wringing by Senators Manchin and Sinema and others over the size of the human infrastructure bill currently before Congress is misplaced. Their real attention should be on the trillions we are going to squander on defense over the next ten years. Defense spending has too long been protected from the scrutiny it deserves. Changing the national conversation about it depends on the media and on voters armed with far better information about what is going on here. It is a very steep slope, but one very much worth ascending.
 
Dick Hermann
October 15, 2021

​Three blockbuster books about the inner workings of government have recently been released. One is definitely worth your time.
 
I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House, by former Trump toady and shill, Stephanie Grisham, can best be described as a snarky, pathetic recollection of revelations about pathetic people by a pathetic person. Grisham, you recall, was one of Trump’s four press secretaries, all of whom contributed to dramatically lowering the bar for the job. In her year holding down that discredited position, she never took a single question from the media because she never held a single press conference. Instead, she was consumed by fear of having to voice a daily dose of Trump’s lies about everything. She also served as Melania Trump’s chief of staff and communications director and has a lot of gossipy things to say about history’s most inconsequential first lady. Grisham’s book is a lame attempt to rehabilitate her forever-tainted image while squeezing some bucks out of hard-working Americans after selling her soul for peanuts. Don’t waste your money or your time on this poorly written nothingburger.
 
Peril, by Bob Woodward and Woodward wannabe, Robert Costa, reveals a bevy of shocking details about Trump’s unrivaled corruption and contamination of the highest office in the land. These two exceptional Washington Post journalists managed to squeeze out extraordinary items of information about what loathsome wretches Trump and his team of bootlicking mediocrities were, items that should upset every American and make us all pine for the day these criminals finally get their comeuppance. But we already know that the former president and current democracy slayer is evil incarnate and abused his office like no one before. Consequently, we learn little that is really new from this book. Don’t bother reading it. You already know all the juiciest stuff from news reports. Simply take away the underlying message: the only way to avoid a total catastrophe in the near term is to put Trump and his team of troublemakers behind bars…and soon.
 
The Afghanistan Papers, by Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock in contrast, is a must-read for every American. It should be required reading in every school, university and military war and command and general staff college. The book details with painful precision the folly and duplicity that three presidents perpetrated in bogging America down in an unwinnable war and the cascade of lies they and their people barraged Congress and the American people with for 20 years. If you thought the Pentagon Papers, the secret files that hid the truth about the Vietnam War, were shocking and appalling, The Afghanistan Papers will have you wanting to make certain that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump are somehow called to account for their betrayal of the soldiers they sent to fight and die in Afghanistan and the tens of thousands of innocent Afghans who died due to their contempt for the American public. Read this book.
 
Dick Hermann
October 8, 2021

Why is it that Democratic successors so often need to rescue the nation following Republican presidential train wrecks?

• Republican Herbert Hoover slashed federal spending in a wrong-headed and disastrous attempt to temper the Great Depression, thereby contributing to a 25 percent unemployment rate. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt dramatically boosted spending in order to arrest the downturn and put people back to work so they and their families could survive.
  
  
• Republican Richard Nixon turned government into a corrupt den of iniquity. Democrat Jimmy Carter restored integrity to the White House.
  
  
• Republican Ronald Reagan ballooned the federal deficit, followed by Republican George H.W. Bush’s deficit-financed wars in the Middle East and Panama. It behooved Democrat Bill Clinton to balance the budget that his two Republican predecessors allowed to go out of control.
  
  
• Republican George W. Bush twice slashed taxes on his wealthy benefactors, launched two wars he refused to pay for, botched the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and midwifed the Great Recession, leaving it to Democrat Barack Obama to clean up his multiple messes.
  
  
• Republican Donald Trump’s reckless tax and spending policies spiraled the deficit and debt to unimaginable levels. His utter incompetence, ego-driven meanness, odiousness and psycho-sociopathic behavior allowed a pandemic to run wild and kill more than half a million Americans. He capped the worst-ever presidency with an attempted coup d’etat in order to cling to power despite losing an election by 7 million votes. It will take more than just one successor Democratic administration to clean up his manifold disasters. This is assuming our suddenly delicate democracy survives the continuing Trump onslaught. There are no guarantees.
  
  
• It is also incumbent on the current administration and its congressional allies to attempt to clean up the existential mess and dystopian chaos Republicans have wrought over the last 40 years. Their coddle-the-rich/impoverish-the-middle-class/destroy-the-poor policies require a massive correction.

 
The trickle-down effect of Republican callousness and ineptitude, to which they have added concerted attempts to subvert the republic, is now causing the same phenomenon to happen at the state level.
 
With few exceptions (Massachusetts’ Charlie Baker; Ohio’s Mike DeWine), Republican governors nationwide have made a complete hash of dealing with the pandemic. They are personally responsible for thousands of avoidable deaths. The latest example: Brad Little, Idaho’s stunningly hopeless Republican governor, has even had to call on neighboring, Democratic-run Washington State to step in and try to help stave off Armageddon. Idaho’s 40 percent vaccination rate, one of the lowest in the country, has swamped its hospitals with Covid patients. The crisis is so bad that Idaho hospitals have resorted to rationing healthcare. Sarah Palin’s fantastical, misplaced death panel hysteria about Obamacare has come home to roost in disease-ravaged Idaho.
 
Note. If hospitals are forced to ration healthcare, unvaccinated Covid patients should be at the bottom of the list, not the top.
 
These same state-level GOP unworthies spend most of their time destabilizing democracy through bills intended to suppress Democratic votes and, should Democrats prevail regardless, designing schemes to steal future elections from the winners. Despite this revival of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws playbook (where the Nazi-dominated Reichstag legislatively enacted a spate of anti-Semitic edicts that conferred a veneer of legality on blatantly unethical and unconscionable laws), congressional Democrats are not taking this existential threat seriously enough. They need to enact federal legislation to preserve democracy and stop the impending steal. Saving the nation from this scourge is the most important matter on the table. Nothing else comes close.
 
Dick Hermann
October 1, 2021

​Following a series of patently partisan political decisions, three Supreme Court justices came out within a week to protest that we are wrong to label the Court just a bunch of partisan political hacks. Like the unctuous Captain Louis Renault (in the film, Casablanca), who professed himself “shocked, shocked that gambling goes on at Rick’s” while pocketing his skim off the roulette tables, Justices Stephen Breyer, Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas went public with their claims that they are above the level of the political actors in the other two branches of government.
 
“…the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference. So if they think you are antiabortion or something personally, they think that’s the way you always will come out. They think you’re for this or for that. They think you become like a politician,” Justice Clarence Thomas said in a lecture at the University of Notre Dame. “That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.” He then had the temerity to claim that he and his Court colleagues call them like they see them, even if they conflict with their personal beliefs.
 
Right. Or, should I say, far right?
 
This after five right-wing justices, who got their jobs because they oppose Roe v. Wade, (1) essentially eviscerated that 48-year old decision, upholding Texas’ abortion ban at six weeks and its enforcement by opportunistic bounty hunters, and (2) the same less-than-Fab Five, joined by the Chief Justice, decimated what little was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in an endorsement of Republican efforts to steal forthcoming elections via a barrage of voter suppression legislation.  It is noteworthy that both decisions were courtesy of the “shadow docket” whereby the Justices don’t have to explain their shameful decisions.
 
Justice Breyer, in an ABC interview, warned Americans not to view the Texas abortion decision as political. “I am worried if people don’t understand it, they won’t have trust in our institutions.” The public is not buying this hokum. In just one year, approval of the Court has plummeted by 28 percent, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll. If you thought Breyer should remain on the Court instead of walking off into the well-deserved retirement sunset, his spewing of nonsense like this might cause you to change your opinion.
 
Justice Barrett joined this chorus of Court fantasists while standing next to Mitch McConnell at a Louisville event honoring him, among other things, for his long service in the cause of packing the Supreme Court with ultra-conservative jurists who would do the Republicans’ bidding: banning abortions; suppressing the vote; allowing racist gerrymandering; permitting guns to flourish; and cementing minority rule. “My goal today,” she said, ”is to convince you that this Court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” McConnell’s smile while Barrett spouted this absurdity would have done the Cheshire Cat proud.
 
The fact that one-third of the Supreme Court feels it necessary to deny that the Court has become a center of partisan hackery proves that it has. In a modest paraphrase of Hamlet, “Methinks they doth protest too much.”
 
Given that partisanship consistently influences Court decisions, it can no longer be said that the Supreme Court is the “least dangerous branch.” When you overlay ideological rigidity on top of the natural human inclination (and judges are, contrary to what many believe, human) to go with one’s biases, it should go without saying that the five far right justices are partisan political hacks. When Barrett and Thomas, and remarkably even Breyer, claim otherwise, rarely has the gaslight burned so brightly.
 
Dick Hermann
September 24, 2021

​Political parties traditionally form around philosophies and issues they believe will advance society’s quality of life, economic prosperity and well-being. They often champion dramatically different means of achieving those ends, but there generally is consensus regarding the goals.
 
But then there is today’s Republican Party, the first political party in a century whose core principles no longer envision a better world. Quite the contrary. They risk the lives of Americans—via their policies that promote guns, disease, and environmental devastation.
 
In its latest of a recent barrage of actions that consciously put American lives in jeopardy, Senate Republicans forced President Biden to withdraw his nominee for the position of Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Why? After a 25-year career in ATF, nominee David Chipman became an advisor to a number of gun control organizations. Heaven forbid that someone concerned about gun safety should be in charge of the federal agency tasked with gun safety.
 
The Party of Death supports and actively encourages gun-toters and inevitably, gun violence, through its advocacy of open carrying of guns, including automatic weapons suitable for little other than mass killings. In Texas now, you do not even have to have a permit or any weapons training to strut around with your guns showing.
 
They are staunch defenders of the right to life…but only up until birth. After that, you take your chances. If you believe that life begins at conception, then Republicans will vigorously defend your right to life for less than 1 percent of your tenure on Earth. The other 99+ percent of your time here, you need to keep a very low profile because the POD is doing everything it can to do you in.
 
The ink was not yet dry on President Biden’s speech in which he mandated Covid-19 vaccinations for all federal employees and contractor personnel, as well as businesses employing at least 100 people, before the Republican National Committee said it would go to court to challenge Biden’s executive orders. In essence, the POD is arguing on behalf of the Delta variant (the virus has no standing to sue on its own). This is, of course, in line with the many Republican governors who inveigh against vaccinations and masks as some kind of affront to one’s personal freedom to (a) die, and (b) kill others. POD governors are so incensed about Biden’s attempt to save lives that many are vowing to defy federal directives to get vaccinated and wear masks.
 
South Dakota Governor and super-duper Covid spreader, Kristie Noem, tweeted that her state, which has put out a red carpet for the virus, would “Stand up to defend freedom,” adding, “@Joe Biden see you in court.” Georgia Governor and voter-suppression enthusiast, Brian Kemp, tweeted that he would “pursue every legal option available” to stop "this blatantly unlawful overreach.” Ask them to distinguish between Covid vaccines and other vaccine mandates that they support and they cannot do it.
 
Despite fires, floods and storms of biblical proportions and unprecedented frequency, there are still prominent Republicans claiming that climate change is a hoax. Eventually, the warming temperatures will kill many more people than even Covid-19. The POD apparently welcomes that.
 
On top of all this, the POD does not want millions of Americans to have health insurance coverage. Despite the popularity of the 12-year old Affordable Care Act, they still rage against it.
 
What can explain the POD’s contempt for life? Does it fear losing the support and campaign contributions of the funeral industry? Being pro-death also makes no sense politically. Americans by large majorities support gun safety, abortion rights, Covid vaccinations and mask-wearing. The Trump base, fueled by the Big Liar/Sorest-Ever Loser and the poisonous bad-faith right-wing media, only comprises about one-third of the electorate. You don’t win general elections by promoting mortality.
 
What makes even less sense is that the POD’s vigorous opposition to life-saving measures aimed at overcoming the pandemic is killing its own voters. The unvaccinated are, by a huge margin, disproportionately Republicans. Go figure. It looks like the POD has a death wish. If you vote Republican, better get your affairs in order.
 
Dick Hermann
September 17, 2021

“Years ago someone pointed out that Texas is hell on women and horses. He was wrong about horses, for most horses are considered to be valuable, and are treated very well.”
--Larry McMurtry
 
I’ve been to Texas twice, both times on business. I thought San Antonio was a marvelously fascinating city, a blend of some of the best of two cultures. Discovering that the Alamo was in the middle of the city and not in the middle of a desert was a revelation to someone who grew up watching Davy Crockett. In contrast, a week in insanely hot Houston (which felt like a year in Purgatory) signaled to me that if this rapidly growing, concrete megalopolis fueled by fossils was the future, I much prefer the past.
 
In just a few short weeks, the Texas legislature, for decades a source of relatively harmless mirth chronicled brilliantly by the late, great socio-political commentator, Molly Ivins, went completely bonkers and enacted three new laws that will define it as a deadly, out-of-control coven of villains intent on bending the arc of history into the fetid swamp of neo-fascism. In breathtakingly short order, the Republican-dominated body--

• banned abortions upon detection of a fetal heartbeat (typically six weeks, before most women even know they are pregnant) with no exceptions for rape or incest, and deputized private citizens to serve as vigilantes/bounty hunters, allowing individuals to sue an abortion provider or anyone who may have helped someone get an abortion after the time limit and seek financial damages of at least $10,000 per defendant;
  
  
• authorized Texans to openly carry a gun without either a permit or training; and
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• made it much more difficult for minority and low-income citizens to vote.

 
This is a trifecta that would warm the hearts of Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy if they actually had hearts. It certainly appealed to the three Trump justices on the U.S. Supreme Court who joined with the Court’s two holdover “Doctors No”—Justices Thomas and Alito—to allow the Texas abortion ban to become law for the time being despite its language that flies in the constitutional face of the half-century old Roe v. Wade decision. As long as the Texas law remains on the books, it means that back-alley abortions awash in coat hangers will be the only option for the state’s indigent women. It also means that once reproductive health clinics close their doors, the other important services they provide—free mammograms, STD testing and treatment, pregnancy testing, etc.— will no longer be available from them.
 
The new gun law was vigorously opposed by every law enforcement organization in the state. Not only does it make it harder for police to do their jobs. It also puts their lives, and the lives of every state resident and visitor, in danger.
 
With respect to voting, the legislature’s Republican majorities, fearing that their days in power are numbered due to the demographic changes Texas is experiencing, decided to rig the system and put major obstacles in the way of traditionally Democratic constituencies seeking to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Despite the 2020 election being a model for how to conduct a free and fair vote, the legislature raised the false flag of “election integrity” in order to start the steal of the 2022 and 2024 elections.
 
It’s impossible to ignore what happens in Texas. It’s big and brash and mightily influential. After all, one-third of our presidents since 1964 hail from there. Worse, other deep red states look to Texas for their lead regarding what they can do to diminish their own citizens’A quality of life.
 
There is no easy counter to what Texas is doing. Congress and President Biden appear paralyzed in the face of the outrages wrought by the Texas legislature this summer. At this writing, the Justice Department is planning to file a lawsuit against the Texas abortion law. However, the eventual outcome is uncertain. Maybe the time has come to beg Mexico to take Texas back.
 
Dick Hermann
September 10, 2021

​What do Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Doug Ducey and Kristi Noem have in common? If you say they are all (1) Republican governors (of Florida, Texas, Arizona and South Dakota, respectively), or (2) Trump wannabes, you are correct. However, the tie that really binds them to one another is that (3) they are all complicit in deaths of constituents.
 
Knowingly and with intent, these four governors are forcing the residents of their states to engage in high-risk behaviors that have already resulted in thousands of deaths. While they have a considerable way to go before they come close to the number of Covid deaths perpetrated by their Dear Leader, Donald Trump (medical experts say that 80 percent of Covid deaths during Trump’s watch could have been avoided if he had not totally mismanaged the national response), even one avoidable death is too many.
 
This “Gang of Four” is leading the charge of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. They proclaim some perverted notion of “personal freedom” as the rationale for not getting vaccinated and not taking the modest safety precaution of wearing a mask. Worse, some of them aggressively issue edicts prohibiting mask mandates, even in schools. That makes them the most reprehensible of murderers—child killers, since children under 12 cannot get vaccinated. If you ask DeSantis, for example, to explain why every Florida student must present a Certificate of Vaccination against seven other diseases in order to enroll in school, he has no answer. I guess for him, freedom is a selective concept. It also does not matter to him that his anti-vax, anti-mask insanity is jeopardizing hundreds of thousands of Florida children who are immuno-compromised or have other underlying conditions that make both their susceptibility to Covid-19 and their survival should they contract it problematic.
 
All four of these low characters have national political ambitions. For those to bear fruit, they need to suck up to the Trump base, a demongraphic that demands that its candidates be hostile to science, logic and humanity and believe in wild, laughable conspiracies. In pursuit of them, the Four Horses A***s of the Apocalypse are perfectly willing to sacrifice the health and lives of the people they represent.
 
DeSantis, arguably the worst of this contemptible bunch—and that is saying something!—is even fundraising off his disdain for community health, selling cheap goods on the Internet that mock responsible behavior, e.g., T-shirts bearing the phrase, “Don’t Fauci My Florida.”
 
Fortunately, there are sensible school districts in these states that are mandating anti-Covid steps designed to keep their students and employees safe. An increasing number of companies are also defying their governor’s politicization of public health measures and mandating that their employees be vaccinated. Providentially for the health of Floridians, at least one court has for the moment shot down the governor’s murderous executive order. That has not prevented DeSantis from defying the court order and withholding salaries from school boards that are doing the responsible thing and mandating masks.
 
As if this imprudent behavior by these governors were not enough, DeSantis gets Covid medical advice from the California physician who is pushing the veterinary horse paste drug, Ivermectin, as a treatment for Covid. This same doctor calls people who wear masks “retarded.” He joins Dr. Scott Atlas on De Santis’s advisory team. You may remember Atlas as the Trump advisor who opposed taking any action against the virus, instead advocating that it be allowed to run its course.
 
Note: Ivermectin, an equine deworming treatment, is ineffective against Covid and can cause severe adverse reactions in humans. Calls to state and local poison control hotlines have skyrocketed in the last month. Honk if this reminds you of Trump recommending ingesting bleach and UV light suppositories. Unbelievably, some doctors are actually writing prescriptions for Ivermection for their patients. Hopefully, state medical boards will revoke these physicians’ licenses. If Fox, social media or your physician tries to push this snake oil on you, just say “neigh.”
 
How did America get to this point? Regrettably, there is no vaccine against depravity and stupidity.
 
Dick Hermann
September 3, 2021