Taking a deep dive on Paxton, the border, gov's race nutters

Shock me both that Kenny Boy Paxton is trying to hide his cellphone texts related to Jan. 6, 2021, when he was in DC, and that the Travis County DA's office has found that this this violates the Texas Public Information Act. (That said, given Paxton's history of stalls in legal issues and the second fact that the Tex-ass AG's office is usually involved with Public Information Act and Open Meetings Act issues, how this plays out is your guess as good as mine.) Since first blogging this, Kenny Boy has rejected the Travis DA and claims that all the information Texas media outlets want is "inconsequential."

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The Borderlines blog takes a deep dive into the ongoing failures and snafus of Operation Lone Star, triggered by a state district judge saying it's unconstitutional — NOT Texas unconstitutional, but US Constitution unconstitutional, namely, the arrests being made. The blog also sets this in backdrop of Biden's continued enforcement of Trump's Article 42 (190-proof BlueAnoners won't like this and other aspects of the site) and how this ties in to what is actually NOT a new "surge" of crossings. Borderlines also puts this all into larger political context not only of Strangeabbott's current gubernatorial race but also his possible 2024 presidential interest. Borderlines ALSO notes that Biden continues to #BuildTheWall, and calls bullshit on Biden Administration claims that it's just making Trump's wall "more secure."

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Speaking of Strange and politics, the Observer takes a deep dive on the GOP guv primary. It starts by reminding us that in addition to Abbott and the other two oxygen-suckers, Allen West and Don Huffines, talk show dude Chad Prather is also running. The piece is right about extremism.

Prather claims that "god wouldn't tax his own people," ignoring that the Tanakh MANDATED tithing. And, in the New Testament, as the Observer notes, Jeebus himself said, to quote the divinely inspired King James Version: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's." Allen West, not to be outdone, claimed Marx invented the idea of property taxes. Hey, West, if Karl Marx wanted to eliminate private property rights, he'd start with eliminating private property, which would mean there WOULD BE NO private property for him to invent private property taxes. Don Huffines, among other things, explicitly rejected federal constitutional supremacy, which means that he couldn't lawfully be sworn into office without being a rank hypocrite. At the event from which the Observer reported, West had a slight edge in a straw poll. Strange, in case you can't tell by now, didn't show up.

Now, what's this all add up to? I still think odds favor Strange getting 50 percent plus 1 and avoiding a runoff. But, the odds of that aren't that much more than 50 percent plus 1.