| |
“Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.”
[Editor’s note: Hey, share around, will ya? Don’t make us beg. Our readership is going up but we’d like a faster growth curve, ya know, that hockey stick thing the startups all dream about. If we can get some more readers we might pick up some ads and that reduces the odds we will ever go away, which is, I reckon, both good and bad.]
Mexico remains at war with itself over control of the drug trade. The worst hot spot right now is Reynosa, just across from McAllen and sitting on the Rio Grande. When Mexican federal troops killed the head of the Gulf Cartel, firefights broke out between rival factions wanting to run operations. And people began dying. The Mexican government has issued its third “Red Alert” for Reynosa in the past week. Twenty people have reportedly died in the fighting. The level of horror appears to be increasing. One faction has offered $500,000 for the heads of rival cartel leaders.
Mexico’s only government sometimes can seem to come from drug cartels. One of the factions in Reynosa issued a Snapchat warning to residents telling them to stay indoors and wait for the battle to be won. The deadly engagement in street combat is benignly characterized as only a “rearrangement” in the digital warning.
The Snapchat message was as follows:
“INFORMACION SENT BY #CO #PRECAUCIÓN
“#Reynosa – By this means we inform the population of Reynosa not to leave now, even less at night, and likewise do not expose their children to the street. The cartel is doing a rearrangement, this because there were betrayers that wanted to take the town square, which was assigned to the “Commander Panilo.” Now with the death of “Commander Toro,” we want to make it clear, we are not taking revenge with families as the people of M-28 and M-42 are doing.
“We only go for enemies and the proof is that all the casualties are from the M-42, there are your hitmen, that is how they wanted to take the square? We’ll all know where you all came from, have you forgotten?
“They could not (take the town square) because they lack the knowledge to know how to get the job done. People of Reynosa, we respect families, as well as innocent people. If we are doing the cleaning of these rats, it is because we don’t want injustices. You know that we do not want more kidnappings. We have years of training from our former Chief Mr. Osiel, only to act with people of ourselves, but NEVER with their families, but they (M-42 and M-28) do not respect that, that’s why they are dying like dogs and this goes for everyone who wants to follow them, so that you know what you get yourself into.
“We urge the entire population to stay inside these days, we do not want to have innocent deaths at the hands of the people of the M-42; we are cleaning what is not good for Reynosa.
“M-42, you know where we are all ready to end your ambition. There are not many people left, and for the government to continue as they did last night, do not get involved in this fight. We are fixing it ourselves.
“Att: Commander Panilo, M-58, Range10, Range3, Mr. Cortéz.
“#Compartir #Tamaulipas #Tamaulipas Codigo Rojo”
Mexico’s sadness seems without end. Reynosa’s streets have become ghostly and there are increasing reports of dead. While the Gulf Cartel factions fight for control of the gateway city, other big operators like the Zetas are said to be moving into nearby Brownsville and Progresso, looking for opportunities to spin out of the competitive cartel’s battles. A single Reynosa faction is said to be generating $3 million dollars monthly by moving product through the town, which explains the fierceness of the fighting.
Meanwhile, nothing changes at the maquiladora plants along the river. The manufacturing facilities, which were built in Reynosa to take advantage of more affordable labor, are not bothered by the narco-trafficantes. Three thousand people commute daily from McAllen, Texas across the river to work in the maquilas, most of them in some management capacity. The locals believe the big companies are paying bribes to the cartels to make certain the factories are kept safe and out of any cross fire.
The real “war on drugs” is really a “war over drugs.”
There are a thousand pejoratives to be tossed at the governor of Texas but the most precise is to call him a coward. Governor Goddamn Greg Abbott is a rank coward of the worst sort. He ignores the police chiefs of his state who tell him, almost universally, that a sanctuary cities law will make it hard to keep their towns safe because witnesses and people with information will no longer talk to cops. Abbott heard none of their testimony, nor would we expect him to respond to the emotional pleadings of social workers and rights activists trying to explain the world from which these undocumented immigrants travel, horrid conditions often prompted by foreign policies of the U.S. government.
Abbott’s was the loudest voice with the biggest megaphone on sanctuary cities in Texas, and he heard not a discouraging word. But when it came time to sign the bill and answer questions from reporters, weinie boy went to Facebook and did a live feed. (Most people would’ve rather watched an obese biker get a tattoo). But this allowed Abbott a chance to revel in his joy over the misery of others, and do so without having to answer questions from reporters. He calls that leadership.
I call it being an asshole.
And if you have any doubts that state taxpayers will be wasting millions defending Abbott and the legislature against lawsuits, well, you need to go back to watching reruns of “I Love Lucy.” Abbott can make all the silly state laws he wants. But they will keep getting challenged, and, ultimately, tossed out. The first battle, of course, will likely be joined with Austin.
Here’s Steve Adler, mayor of the City of the Violet Crown: “For five months, we’ve been on the sidelines while the legislature has treated Austin’s safety like a political football. I’m glad the action is moving to court where it’s not about politics, it’s about the law. A judge will decide whether the United States of America or Texas determines federal immigration policy and whether local police and prosecutors have the discretion to keep their communities safe. I was elected by the people of Austin, and I will continue to speak on their behalf.”
   
They crap stuff out, in case you are unfamiliar. And several legislators, in league with their rodent-brained GOP leader Abbott, decided to pass a joint resolution calling for a constitutional convention of states. Commandante Zero was so excited he tweeted all over himself about becoming the 11th of the 34 states that need to ratify to convene such a constitution. “Boom,” he tweeted. (Goes the https://www.texasobserver.org/without-notice-texas-governor-greg-abbott-signs-sanctuary-cities-ban-facebook-live/ dynamite?)
While Abbott uses the power of the state to take away the authority of local law enforcement jurisdictions, and stop cities from passing ordinances against plastic bags or providing haven for aliens, constantly increasing state control, he, conversely, wants to limit federal government control of the state with his silly little convention. You ought to worry about this as much as Abbott worries about children without health insurance or charter schools using your tax money without accountability to educate rich kids. Because it is going to be as successful as his presidential ambitions.
There are not 23 other state legislatures that are this stooopid. If there were, the republic would have already collapsed under the weight of its own ignorance. Assume that the needed number of states do pass Abbott-assed resolutions like the one in Texas; the total of states needed to turn those goofy new ideas into constitutional amendments must reach a three quarters majority by election, which is, what, 37 and a half states? Is that Rhode Island, Puerto Rico, DC, or the American Somoa that make up that half of one percent?
Don’t Care About Health Care
Hey, you don’t think health care is a human right, do you? Because if you are one of those socialist sillies then get thee from Texas. Head to what some of our southern linguists called, “Mass-a-toos-its.” Yeah, seriously, they do, even a governor or two. You couldn’t say anything more horrible about Texas to Texans than to tell them their state was starting to look a bit like Mass-a-toos-its.
Those poor people are burdened with state health care. We don’t have that problem. Texas has 17.1 percent of its 27 and a half million population living without health care, which includes about one out of every four children. They need it less; they’re young and healthy down here, y’all.
It’s gonna get worse if Predator Paul Ryan’s version of Trumpcare makes it through the U.S. Senate, which seems, in moments of rationality and hopefulness by the sane, to not be very likely. But who knows? President Placeholder will push very hard and the problem in Texas will become acute. We already have a lot of immigrants, low-wage earners, and the state under Rick Perry and Abbott has refused to expand Medicaid to increase the number of poor and children getting federal government health care.
But we’re just getting started with the stupid. Chumpcare will kill a lot of people living under the Lone Star because you may be assured the intellectual firepower in the Texas capitol will make it possible for insurance companies to find ways to get out of covering pre-existing conditions, and rates for coverage will rise faster than health care lobbyist donations to Governor Goddamn.
“Texas is undeniable. We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it’s maddest.”
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Teeny Tiny Teddy and Senator Constantly Concerned Meet Ms. Yates
That must have been quite a show when Johnny Cornyn and Kid Cruz started quoting the law to Sally Yates and she very adroitly robbed them of their testicular units, holding them up bloody and adorned with their last vestiges of dignity. The U.S. Attorney General with the shortest tenure in history, (I think), Ms. Yates had ten days as the nation’s top law officer, but it was enough to tell the president that Mike Flynn was odious and so were Trump’s executive orders shutting down immigration by certain types of people.
Cornyn started with condescension, which is not how one deals with a wielder of rapier intellect. He suggested Yates tossed out Trump’s immigration order because it was a policy with which she disagreed, and he was quickly informed by Ms. Yates that her decision was based on constitutional law, which Cornyn had, specifically, asked her if she would uphold if she were confirmed and, possibly, later asked by a president to violate the document.
Cornyn speaks several octaves higher today.
Kid Cruz tried the same approach, reading the law to a better lawyer, and pointed out a statute that gave the president broad authority to stop immigration of classes of aliens with his executive orders. Yates told the Teeny Texan that she knew the INA statute he cited, but, said she was, “also familiar with an additional provision of the INA that says no person shall receive preference or be discriminated against an issuance of a visa because of race, nationality or place of birth, that I believe was promulgated after the statute that you just quoted.”
Both senators have queries out about microsurgeons and are hoping to get their nutz reattached prior to the summer break.
You sometimes have to go to a national news agency to hear the latest about Texas because what shocks the rest of the country about us has become passé south of the Red River. CNN ran a story Monday about a law that will allow adoption agencies in Texas to turn down potential parents if they don’t like the couple’s religion. The bill has one of those ludicrous Republican names and is called, “The Freedom to Serve Children Act.” It should have included an alternative title of, “The Freedom to Screw Over Adoptive Parents Who Aren’t Christians or Might Be Gay.”
Without anyone knowing it, apparently, the faith-based providers of adoption services are under siege and Rep. James Frank wants to protect them from being discriminated against by non-believers. He fears they might shut down due to retaliation against their beliefs, and faith-based agencies make up 25 percent of the state’s adoptions.
(It’s probably easiest to not be Muslim and childless in Texas. Either one of those or a combination thereof can be risky).
Foster care and adoption agencies will also no longer have to provide or facilitate abortion services or contraception for any teens that have managed to end up under their “care,” and those kids can be required by their fake-faith-based Christians to receive religious education that sticks them in Jesus schools.
Sometimes a man just wants to go and righteously punch a hole in the wall. Because it’s not really just about religion; it’s designed to make sure them thar same sex types don’t get their hands on our precious chilluns.
“HB 3859 would allow child welfare service providers that contract with the state to use taxpayer money to discriminate against LGBT individuals and families in foster care, adoption and other services,” ACLU of Texas said in a statement on its website.
These Christians in Texas can get ya to hatin’ real fast.
You’ve never heard of him but he is a permanent part of Texas history and his name ought to be carved into a journalism award. Bill Mason is buried in the Alice Cemetery down in Jim Wells County south of ol’ San Antone. He’d had quite a career before coming to his untimely end.
After returning home from World War I, Mason worked in big city newspapers in Minnesota, San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, and San Antonio, and was a reporter for the New York Times. He took a brief respite from journalism, (we all take one, some longer than others), and ran a presidential campaign in Mexico for Miguel Aleman, which his candidate won in 1946.
Mason decided he was ready for small town life and convinced his bride that the thing to do at the end of his career was write and edit one of the papers in Alice; except he arrived on the scene as the Duke of Duval, George Parr, was wrapping up the theft of the U.S. Senate seat for Lyndon Baines Johnson. Mason either had a pair of brass ones or he was oblivious as a newspaperman to the power of the local political broker Parr. After he ended up with a radio show called, “Bill Mason Talks,” the transplanted Yankee began to confront the corruption and outright stealing of tax dollars by Parr and his pistoleros.
One of Parr’s deputies was a 60-year-old cowboy named Sam Smithwick, and Mason said something on the air that offended him deeply, or he was possibly dispatched by Parr to silence the radio broadcaster. Smithwick pulled over Mason as he drove into town and put a bullet in the reporter’s chest. He lay dying on the street after he got out of his car, and bled to death while Smithwick called the dispatcher to come arrest him for “killing the radio man.”
Parr either couldn’t protect Smithwick or he didn’t want to and the cowboy cop ended up in prison. But he knew a bit about how Parr had padded votes and disappeared ballot boxes to give LBJ the 187 vote margin he needed to win the Democratic primary and then become senator. Smithwick, who was illiterate, had a letter written for him from Huntsville and offered to tell Gov. Coke Stevenson the details on what Parr and LBJ had accomplished with their deceit and electoral fraud. Stevenson made for Huntsville immediately after receiving the note but before he could get there Smithwick was found dead, hanging by his neck from a bed sheet. The cop’s letter to Stevenson was published in newspapers across the state and the governor at the time accused LBJ of having Smithwick killed to keep him quiet.
Bill Mason remains the only Texas broadcast journalist to have been killed for simply doing his job. His name ought to adorn a top journalism award in Texas, and he can be eternally memorialized by the words on his tombstone: “He died because he spoke the truth to a lot of little people.”
We Gotcher Tee’s Right Here
“Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.” – John Steinbeck
|
|
Carol Burnett (born in San Antonio, Texas): “But I don’t begrudge anybody, because I know how hard it is to have that dream and to make it happen, whether or not it’s just to put a roof over your head and food on the table.”
|
We love Texas. And love sharing it. The Texas to the World Newsletter is an experiment. If we get subscribers, and sustained interest, we’ll hang around. But we aren’t the types to howl alone at the sky. Please subscribe and share with your friends. We’ll come your way once a week, and will increase frequency based on interest.
|
|
|
