Texas Tidbits: Republicans Can’t Spell But Can Still Oppress
A weekly roundup of fascism, foolishness, and fights worth having.
It’s election day! If you live in an area with runoff elections, today is your last day to cast a vote. Do it! Get your butt to the polls. And if you don’t? Shame.
I’ll have updates on the election winners tomorrow.
The party of “stupid” strikes again.
Campaign season is so much fun, for so many reasons. One of them is the vast number of spelling mistakes their campaign material will contain. 😊
Introducing “Alexandra Schilling,” a Republican slated to run for HD85. She misspelled her OWN name in her campaign logo:
Oh, it gets better.
After being called out for misspelling her own name, she said she needed donations to “outsource this technical stuff.”
Technical stuff. Like spelling your name, that you’ve presumably had since birth (or marriage). Because spelling your own name is fucking hard, and obviously should be outsourced.
I wish I could tell you that was this week’s biggest Republican spelling blunder, but then you’d know nothing about Tom Oliverson’s (R-HD130) shocking tweet.
This week, Oliverson boasted about cutting RED RAPE for doctors.
Actually.
Look, I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes, too. Like that one time I said “audios” instead of “adios.” But I’ve never messed up my own name, or confused “tape” with “rape.”
We shouldn’t pick apart every spelling mistake the right makes, but we should laugh at them when the mistakes are HUGE. I mean, your own name? 🤣🤣
If this is any indication of how the Republican primary season in Texas is going to go, we might have to make a weekly series and call it “GOP Hooked on Phonics.”
Kendall Scudder brings the energy we’ve all been itching for.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the drama happening in Tarrant County. If you missed it, you can see it here:
Long story, short, the Republicans are redistricting the County Commissioners Court to eliminate the Black representation we have. It’s racist, it’s ugly, and while this was going on, this video of Judge Tim O’Hare has surfaced (less than one minute- Source: Chris Tackett, filmed initially on The Wolf and The Shepherd podcast):
O’Hare said (paraphrasing) that if you aren’t being called a racist, then you aren’t an effective Republican.
In sweeps the Texas Democratic Party with the best press release I’ve ever read from the TDP. Literally.
Scudder calls O’Hare a “chickenshit, racist, MAGA bootlicker.” And that’s the truth.
The little secret I’m going to share with you is that most Texas Democrats love it when our leaders cuss, it makes them human, and Texans love cussing (most of them). That’s one of the reasons why we love Beto so much, because he doesn’t shy away from “fuck.”
Now, for you nay-sayers, who want to point out how technically that’s not doing anything. I want to point you to the other news from Tarrant County this week.
The lawsuits have been filed:
What happens now? We wait to see what the courts say, and continue to give the Republicans on the Commissioners Court hell.
Will James Talarico break our hearts?
According to the Houston Chronicle, James Talarico (D-HD52) is considering a run for US Senate. There have been two very different reactions to this news:
OMG! I love him. I would love to see him in the Senate.
Noooooo! We need him in Texas. Run for governor, Talarico, pleassssseeee.
In 2021, my favorite state legislator, whom I watched intently during that legislative session, was Jasmine Crockett. When she announced her run for Congress, I had that same reaction, “Noooooo! We need you here.”
However, as we’ve seen over the last two Congressional sessions, Crockett has become a national superstar and has been extremely effective in Washington, DC. Maybe one of the most effective. After all, she learned to fight fascism in the Texas House, which I would argue is worse than Congress.
On that same note, Crockett’s legislative seat was safe blue, and her successor, Venton Jones, doesn’t fight against the Republicans as aggressively as she did.
As long as Texas stays red, Democrats remain locked out of real power. That’s why I think pulling our star players out of the fight here and shipping them off to DC is a huge mistake.
It’s the DNC that pushes this.
You better believe national Dems are whispering in Talarico’s ear, just like they’ve talked Joaquin Castro out of running statewide more than once. The DNC only cares about DC. They see Texas as a donor state, not a battleground.
But here’s the truth they keep ignoring, if we flip Texas, we flip Washington. Forty electoral votes. Control of Congress. The Senate. The White House. All of it hinges on Texas. So until that happens, we need our best fighters here, where fascism is beating down our door, not auditioning for MSNBC hits in the Capitol rotunda.
That being said, Talarico hasn’t made any announcements, and until he does, the Houston Chronicle is just spreading rumors. And if he runs for Senate, he’ll get my vote over Colin Allred any day of the week.
Let’s not get all worked up, either way. We wait for announcements and filings of paperwork.
Will Harris County ever learn its lesson about centrist Democrats?
This week, a judge ordered former Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg to stop talking to the media about the men accused of killing 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray.
Ogg, who last week appeared on Fox 26, revealed previously unreleased details about one of the suspects in the case. DA Sean Teare has requested that the court revise its rules on extrajudicial statements. And the order is scathing:
Then, amid growing disapproval of Mayor John Whitmire’s leadership, members of the Oak Forest Area Democrats voted this week to revoke their 2023 endorsement of Whitmire and bar him from the endorsement process in 2027.
My literal reaction to this news: lol.
First of all, Kim Ogg was known to galavant in Republican circles for years before she left office. Secondly, John Whitmire’s ideological leanings in the Legislature are public and have long leaned right.
Maybe these are hard lessons that Harris County Democrats need to learn. If you elect a centrist, you get a Republican.
We still love Lina Hidalgo, though. Maybe she should run against Abbott?
Texas is a battlefield, and every week brings fresh reminders of what we’re up against. Republicans who can’t spell “rape” from “tape,” Democrats tempted by DC glitz while the house is still burning back home, and centrist clowns pretending to be progressives while selling out their own people. But here’s the thing, they’re not inevitable. They’re not invincible. And they’re not immune to pressure, not when we’re loud, organized, and relentless.
So stay plugged in. Laugh when it’s funny, rage when it’s not, and above all, show up to vote, to protest, to hold power accountable.
Because the fight for Texas is the fight for the future. And we’re not done yet.
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Michelle, I subscribe to a lot of Substacks, but none of them compare to yours. You can never leave us!
Women like Alexandra are such a blemish on the rest of us. It’s not fucking cute to misspell your own name (and it’s not “technical”) either. And what kind of chicken-fried idiot doubles-down and reposts their own stupidity? Texas GOP women, that’s who.
This is such a great article full of information that I feel, EVERY Democratic leaning person should read. Just for knowledge sake. I share your great articles like this with so many of my friends. Then when I talk about the article, I feel, then didn’t take the time to read it! 😫. I definitely feel that we would be better off with more Jasmine Crockett’s, James Talarico’s, and a few others you mentioned! Got to go…. I’m sitting at a polling site… 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼 for a win!