Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

In his typically unwavering approach to racial controversy, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas has announced a ban on teaching the history of black mermaids in Texas schools. At a press conference, a spokesperson for the Guv said, “The history of mermaids in Texas will be taught free of racial biases. Little white Texas mermaids will not be made to feel guilty about something they had nothing to do with, since all black Texas mermaids have been free since 1863. There is no separate, ‘woke’ story of black mermaids that will be forced on our schoolchildren.”
 
Why is it necessary to teach the history of mermaids of any race at all, since it is nowadays thought that historical mermaid sightings were the hallucinations of sailors drunk on rum and dying of scurvy and personal horniness?
 
“The Governor is aware that the anti-family media, particularly Disney, is pushing the idea of black mermaids along with the rest of their PC agenda, on small children. People who go to the beach in Galveston or Corpus Christi just want to relax in the sand and wash down Walmart-size bags of Fritos with a case of Lone Star. They don’t need their kids to go bugging them to find a black mermaid.”
 
Or a white mermaid?
 
“That’s innocent family fun. The important thing is, white people today are not responsible for any injustices inflicted in the past on black mermaids.”
 
Never heard of any, honestly, unless you count black Ariel to be the first black mermaid to ever land a job. So, long history of unemployment for black mermaids?
 
“NO! And as proof, for just a twenty-five-dollar campaign contribution to the Governor, you can get this t-shirt. (Holds up a t-shirt that reads “All Imaginery Lives Matter”)
 
“Imaginary” is misspelled.
 
“The people who are lining up to buy this shirt aren’t going to notice that.”
 
Why is Abbott even bothering with this?
 
“He’s pissed that the Governor of Florida is getting all that great ink for taking our illegal aliens out of here and dumping them in Martha’s Vineyard. We were planning to ship those Venezuelans to La Jolla. At first, Abbott was going to send the Texas National Guard to Venezuela to grab some Venezuelans direct from the source--there's a nearly unlimited supply of Venezuelans in Venezuela, you know--and force them on a plane to the Catskills, but for legal reasons he decided to go after black mermaids instead.”
 
What about Mexican mermaids?
 
“Bite your tongue!”

It is not often a political party requires that its members believe an unhinged conspiracy theory in order to properly belong to it, but the Republican Party of Texas has broken through that barrier and marched boldly onto the dubious plain of alternative facts.
 
Texas Republicans are now officially required to believe in the Big Lie, or, as some call it, The Vast Flooding River of Bullshit, or the Entirely Unproven Canard About Voter Fraud, or the Murky Sewage-Fest of Squirmy Allegations about the Mango Man winning the last election.
 
This, despite Trump’s Feast of Obvious Ordure currently having its nose held over it by Liz Cheney and her buds, and its various untruths, including the one about the ex-Caucasian-in-Chief actually believing that he had won, being exposed like dog turds in a hard rain.
 
The Republican Party of Texas officially cannot believe that Trump lost. They have formally taken up residence in the tight balloon of all-my-neighbors-voted-for-Trump-so-he-must-have-won. These are people that went to the rallies, nearly drowned each other in boat parades for Trump, belong to Bikers for Trump, or People in Supermarket Diabetes Carts for Trump, or just the Oath Boys.
 
They just refuse to believe he lost. Why? Because they know that if flags in pickup trucks could vote, Trump would have won the last election.
 
The question is, what is the next conspiracy theory that the Republicans of Texas are going to pick up and go with? This one’s not going to have much staying power, as other Republican contenders are going to pay lip service to Trump while they cruelly destroy his chance for the next Republican nomination by promising to get their fascist on while not destroying the Constitution. Or being in prison.
 
Not that NASA faked the moon landings, that’s for sure. Texas Republicans may be stupid, but the spirit of Texas boosterism runs proudly and mindlessly through their veins, and NASA is headquartered in Houston.
 
Nor will it be that 911 was a false-flag operation. George Bush is from Texas, and while he ought to be ashamed of himself for being Jeb’s brother, he certainly wasn’t mixed up with them Al-Qaidos.
 
The thinking here is that it’s going to be the Flat Earth. For one thing, most of Texas is mind-numbingly flat. Unbelievingly, monotonously flat. So flat, that when you’re driving across it, you’re relieved when you see another ugly sign for a Flying J truck stop sticking up out of the prairie, just because your brain has been longing to see something perpendicular. It is the biggest ironing-board of a state this side of Kansas. It’s flatter than a plastic cup of Lone Star accidentally left out on the picnic table from last week’s barbecue (Bar-B-Q, sorry).
 
Texas is one of the easiest places to believe in the Flat Earth on Earth.
 
And for sure, the Republicans of Texas aren’t worried about being pushed over the edge.
 
They already live there.

The unwanted patrol car spotlight of publicity has been shone upon the Uvalde, Texas Police Department, and it has been found wanting.
 
Bear in mind, this little cop shop had not been notorious for incompetence before being called upon to take down a mass murderer. The Uvalde cops, I presume, were capable of doing all those things that medium-town police departments do so well—setting speed traps, manhandling poor people with cars deficient in things like current registrations or working brake lights, finding drugs in vehicles that had failed to properly signal a turn, waiting outside nightclubs on weekends to make sure they got their quota of DUI’s, and coming over and shooting your dog if you reported a burglary.
 
They were probably no better and no worse than any similar sized police force in the nation, keeping in mind that all police locker rooms are basically armed high school locker rooms, with a similar ratio of bullying, jealousy, secret hatreds, open hatreds, grinding, years-long personal feuds, and loudmouths whom the rest of the room fervently wishes would shut up.
 
“So what?” I hear you saying. “Aren’t country clubs, boardrooms, and city councils basically the same thing as well?” Yes, but you probably get a little more bullying out of a PD. Bullies are naturally attracted to police work, because you can go right out of junior college into intimidating people full-time, while in other career paths, you have to work yourself up to boss-hood before you can use fear as a management mechanism, and that can take years.
 
Besides, you don’t call upon The Only Mexicans Here Mow the Grass Country Club when a teenager with an automatic rifle opens fire on a school full of babies. You call the cops, just not the Uvalde ones, because those cops are just going to mill around outside, in fear of their lives because there is a single shooter in a single room inside, who has body armor and a gun just like the ones they are carrying and wearing, and the Uvalde police only outnumber him twenty-to-one. The Uvalde cops are going to while away an hour pepper-spraying and handcuffing people who want to rush the school and save their kids. That's apparently illegal.
 
The Uvalde cops are going to wait until the Border Patrol shows up, and then make them wait for thirty minutes, until the Border Patrol says, “We’re tired of this child-murdering shit,” and goes in and shoots your mass-murderer for you.
 
Despite standing outside wetting in their tactical underwear during the killing spree, the Uvalde police were back in perfect form the next day, when Beto O’Rourke confronted his rival, the sitting Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, and pointed out that Abbott, who was having a press conference along with his Lieutenant Governor and the man known throughout the land as America’s Top Asshole, Ted Cruz,* wasn’t going to do diddley about mass murdering, because he cared far more about the gun nut vote and NRA campaign cheese than he did about dead third-graders.
 
The Governor and his fellow pols were outraged, because when you’re having a press conference about how the right thing to do about school shootings is pray and then fortify school doors like bank vaults rather than do something that the NRA is against, like raising the age for purchasing a machine gun in the Lone Star State to the same age the government wants you to be before you buy a six-pack, you don’t want to be interrupted by some Democrat.
 
They had Beto kicked out on his ass. The Uvalde police handled it.
 
So, the Uvalde boys in blue are back on the job. Count on them. Just make sure that if you decide to report a burglary, lock the dog up before they arrive.

*Sorry, Rand. Regards to your neighbor.

​Following their latest display of playoff ineptitude, the history of the Dallas Cowboys football franchise will no longer be permitted to be taught in the Texas public school system.
 
“All printed materials, video discs and paraphernalia featuring the Dallas Cowboys will be removed from public school libraries in Texas forthwith,” said the announcement by the governor’s office. “We cannot afford for the schoolchildren of Texas to be emotionally harmed by learning of the actions of some of their ancestors, particularly the coaches, general managers and players of the Cowboys since 1995.
 
“Children do not need to be humiliated, or to be made to feel inadequate or guilty by learning of misdeeds perpetrated in the past that they had nothing to do with. No child now in our school systems ever gave Tony Romo a contract extension, and there is no need for them to be shamed for living in the same state as the people that did.
 
“Parenting is a tough job, and there’s no need for the state to make it tougher by teaching Dallas Cowboy-critical theory in our public schools. Hard-working moms and dads do not need to be vexed by their children asking them, “Why can’t we move to Kansas City? Or Green Bay?”
 
“From now on, Texas public schools will only teach the proud moments of Texas sporting history. Remember the Alamo! Hook ‘em Horns! Beat ‘em Spurs! Cheat ‘em, Astros!
 
“Maybe not that last one, either.”

The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, has spoken out on the virus, right after the Governor of his state came down with it.
 
"The Covid is spreading," Patrick said, "particularly, most of the numbers are with the unvaccinated and the Democrats like to blame Republicans on that. Well, the biggest group in most states are African Americans who have not been vaccinated."
"The last time I checked over 90 percent of them vote for Democrats.”
 
Yep, that’s right. Black people are getting the ‘rona and passing it on to unvaccinated white people who are just trying to exercise their freedoms and that is practically a part of the Democratic party platform. Plus, as Governor Abbott said right before he had to quarantine, Central American immigrants are massing up at the border to spread the virus throughout the land, especially to Republican states. While these immigrants are not yet technically Democrats, since they aren’t citizens, each of them is given a fake ballot marked for Joe Biden in case they aren’t deported by 2024, and instructed to go to Walmart and sneeze as much as they can.
 
So, when a white person gets the virus, it is not because he’s vaccine-hesitant, having watched too many YouTube videos saying Fauci has a collection of kiddie porn, or that he refers to the bug as “the Chinese Communist Party Virus” and refuses to be intimidated by it. It’s because that black guy behind the buffet at the local Golden Corral coughed into the tortilla soup.
 
Some people have said that what Patrick is saying is rudely racist and wrong, but it appeals to the Republican base, who don’t want to get vaccinated or wear masks, except maybe around black people. His boss, the Governor of Texas, who has covid, has not been seen with a non-white person since 2017, so we’re not sure where he got his covid from, but it certainly wasn’t in a room full of white people yelling and snotting on each other about election fraud. Couldn’t be.
 
So instead of thinking about the virus as a plague that doesn’t care about politics, whether it escaped from a Chinese lab or just inserted itself into the lungs of a person who was innocently enjoying a nice dish of bat and rice, Republicans have figured out that it was manufactured by the Chinese and it’s being spread to good Christian rurals by hordes of sniffling refugees or dropped from the clammy hands of sickly black people who can’t take a day off their menial jobs waiting on whites.
  
“We’re all in this together” is just liberal spit-balling. Blame it on the dark people. That’s the patriot way.

Waskom, Texas, population 2,200, has declared itself a “sanctuary city for the unborn,” and banned abortions within its city limits, despite having no abortion clinics or plans to open one.
 
“We just felt it necessary to impose a gratuitous tax burden on our citizens by making it dollars-to-donuts certain we would be sued by the ACLU,” said Waskom mayor Jesse Moore. “We’re basing our case on Constitutional grounds that are shakier than those earthquakes that God uses to remind Californians that they are all going to Hell—that any churchy little town in bumfuck can overturn a decision of the United States Supreme Court.
 
“The fact that our all-male city council passed the law unanimously is also pleasing in the sight of Our Lord, because He calls us to instruct women on what they can do with their vajayjays, which is only to use them for reproduction, unless we’ve seen something on Pornhub that we really need to try. Also, if something happens that is manifestly the work of Satan, like my daughter getting pregnant after attending a rap concert, it’s only 800 miles to Austin, where there are plenty of abortion clinics from which we could send that little rap fetus to embrace Jesus in Heaven.”
 
When asked if pregnant immigrants could take advantage of Waskom’s sanctuary city status, the mayor replied, “Are you high? God is only calling us to protect American fetuses, and them unborn Hispanicals ain’t American unless they get themselves birthed here. They get plenty of Jesus where they came from, and they get it in Spanish. If God wanted them in Waskom, He would not have already translated the Bible from English into Spanish so they could read it back home.”
 
Fetal Americans are said to have mixed feelings about the law. Embryos already planning a career in the arts (read--gay embryos) are especially not happy about getting stuck in Waskom instead of a thriving urban sanctuary city like illegal Salvadorans get. “They get San Francisco, and we get Waskom?” one preborn was heard to say, rolling his little proto-eyes. “Even when you’re barely bigger than Trump’s penis, which most of us have achieved by the sixth week, you don’t want to spend the weekend in Waskom.”

The White House, under fire once again for not calling two mass shootings in one day “domestic terrorism,” clarified its position in a brief press release.
 
“Please note that President Trump and Stephen Miller both agree that only Muslims can be terrorists. And maybe people in a caravan, or if they’re in M-13. White loners who can’t get laid aren’t terrorists, even when they post hate screeds on 8chan 45 minutes before they open fire in a Walmart full of Hispanics that they’ve traveled 400 miles to get to because they weren’t enough Hispanics to shoot at home. 
 
“These people are just mentally ill cowards that nothing can be done about, because they just look like other white people responsibly owning a lot of guns and ammo and who vote Republican. Now, if this fellow had put on some ookie-looking Muslim head wrap or robes we could say terrorist for sure. Or he could have burned a Bible or a flag before he picked up his gun if he wanted us to call him a terrorist. So, it was his choice. Probably the result of playing too many video games. Right now, all we can say is, he for sure wasn’t a very fine person.
 
“Don’t think this Administration is doing nothing about mass shootings either. Right as we speak, Mike Pence is praying. And we’re encouraging as many people as we can to walk around holding candles, and leave balloons and stuffed animals at the places people fell.”
 
Texas governor Greg Abbott has also been criticized for his pro-gun policies, and his push to make Texas an open-carry state. His office said, “Open-carry had nothing to do with the fact that people observing a guy with an AK-47 going into a Walmart couldn’t identify him as a potential mass murderer because it’s perfectly legal in our state to care a military-style weapon into a big-box store just in case something goes down in the Health and Beauty aisle. Good guys with guns are our defense against crimes like this. It’s just a tragic coincidence that all those potential heroes appear to have been shopping at Target at the time.”
 
NRA head honcho Wayne LaPierre was quick to jump in to defend the mass shooters’ weapon of choice, the semi-automatic weapon.  “The fact that a guy in Ohio opened fire in an area with an active police presence and was still able to kill 9 people in less than a minute before the cops took him out does not mean that the AR-15 is an inherently dangerous weapon. The fact that random loonies prefer them is no reason to ban automatic weapons. What about America’s hunters? If they can’t take an infantry-style weapon into the woods, what happens to them if they suddenly find themselves surrounded by twenty hostile deer?
 
“Nevertheless, alert gun owners know that AR-15’s tend to go off in the heat of summer. I blame this spurt of violence on the hot weather we've been having, which has nothing to do with global warming. Just keep your machine gun in a cool dark place until after Labor Day, and we’ll all be fine.”

​Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick got his name in the news by suggesting that the Texas school shooting last week was caused by “too many doors.”
 
This new approach to the tragedy of school shootings summarized as “Guns don’t kill people—emergency exits kill people,” has caused many to ridicule Patrick, but it rings true in Texas, which has produced more than its share of  political leaders who are palpable idiots and is also a place where some people feel the need to open-carry when they decide to pop into Walgreens to buy some Chapstick.
 
This shooting was different in several ways from the last big school shooting in Florida (17 down). The shooter was a minor, too young even in Texas to buy a gun, so he had to use his dad’s weapons. Of course, some things were the same—he was also apparently a blooming Nazi, contemplating murder and race war and couldn’t wait to start it. Ahh, the impetuousness of youth.
 
But there are lessons to be learned here. The NRA, now under the leadership of arms dealer Ollie North because no one at headquarters thought Ted Nugent could be trusted to show up for work, has rushed out to school us on the gun-positive things we learned from the massacre. Here they are:
 
First, and most importantly an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle was NOT used in the Texas shooting, so they’re cool again. And so are bump stocks.

Explosives were planted by the shooter, too. This means that if he couldn't have gotten his hands on any guns, he would have blown people up instead, although the police say none of the explosive devices would have worked. But blame that on the Texas high school chemistry curriculum--don't blame guns!
 
You have to be careful leaving your guns lying around where your nutty, horny teenage boy can find them. Not that you shouldn’t teach him how to shoot, starting at the age of seven or so, or share your strong lust for firearms with him, or your keys to the gun cabinet. Just tell him firmly, when you’re handing over that box of ammo, “Hey—don’t shoot any of the girls who have laughed at your come-ons at school.”
 
Don’t have walkouts protesting school shootings. Some of the kids at this high school did, and now they’ve gotten shot. Are they completely free of blame? Who knows if the shooter would have even thought of massacring them if they hadn’t put the idea in his head? Keep your heads down and your mouths shut about guns.
 
Good guys with guns stopped this shooting. There were no cowardly deputies here—the armed guys protecting the school engaged the gunman in a “heavy” exchange of fire, although none of the bullets they fired actually hit him. The point we’re making? In Texas, good guys with guns will always be able to stop bad guys with guns after ten people are dead, in a school shooting, but after twenty-six are dead in a church shooting. Good going, good guys.
 
Those girls he was after? Are they blameless? Everybody knows today’s kids are the hook-up generation. Some of us, remembering our own achingly horny youths, are jealous of this. These girls are having sex with somebody, obviously. Why not him? You can’t blame guns for this, because guns don’t fuck people—people fuck people. Why not ban bullying and sexual rejection in high school instead of guns?
 
But most importantly, the NRA has learned that not every school shooting produces a handsome, articulate boy survivor and a charismatic, short-haired girl survivor that have to be publicly castigated as “soulless liars,” and made fun of on Fox by Tomi Lahren and Laura Ingraham.
 
If there were any kids like that in Texas, they were among the victims, not the survivors.
 
The NRA is deeply grateful for that.

Hurricanes are bigger and badder nowadays, big enough to swamp whole cities and bad enough to muss up Anderson Cooper's hair. The question is, why? Is it because of climate change or gay people?

It is time for this column to examine this enduring controversy, which looms large in the nation's collective psyche because more people watched the Weather Channel this weekend than watched the opening of the professional football season.

The liberal media favors climate change, natch. CNN, probably enjoying the little reprieve they’re getting from running stories about Trump snuggling with the Russians that people don’t believe, are running stories about the ocean being seven degrees warmer than average in the hurricane zone. Warm ocean water is like crack cocaine for hurricanes, CNN’s scientists say, making them act out belligerently. People don’t believe this, either. They prefer to blame hurricanes on gay people.

None other than prominent public witch Ann Coulter was the first to blame Harvey on homos, saying that Houston being up to its lips in floodwaters was the result of the city electing a gay mayor some years back. A number of other Christian types then chimed in, all claiming that Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and the as-yet-to-be-released Jose, were God’s punishment on us for not killing our gays, or at least making a sincerer effort to hurt their feelings.

Their theory depends upon a single passage from the Bible, which reads, roughly, “Thou shalt not lie with a man as thou dost with a woman, for that is an abomination.” Of course, God, as is his wont, chose not to be more specific, by adding that “If you don’t shame everybody who does this and at least force them to live in the closet, which hasn’t been invented yet because you all live in fucking tents, I will bring forth a mighty-ass storm on a continent that you have no idea exists, in a couple or maybe three thousand years.”

No, He left us on our own to interpret His word, so some people are naturally thinking that pestering gay people will prevent further hurricanes. Hurricanes are not even mentioned in the Bible, even though the Bible is full of shitty weather. Toads, locusts, scorpions, eyes of newts and other icky objects are constantly falling from the ancient skies, but hurricanes are not mentioned once. They don’t have hurricanes in the Middle East, which cynics agree is the reason they aren’t noted in the Bible, but believers know that the Almighty in His wisdom did not want to burden the Israelites with a lot of superfluous knowledge, and contented Himself with just raining down the odd pestilence on them instead.

In the meantime, climate scientists got busy with their instruments and gages and grids and computer simulations and all the other stuff they use to make it hard to understand what they are saying, but the gist of it came to be called global warming, since modified to “climate change,” because inventing euphemisms is a necessary feature of our modern world. They warned us that hurricanes were going to be more frequent and way huger. They did not predict that hurricanes are going to start hitting gay havens like San Francisco, Palm Springs or Berlin, which you would think hurricanes would, if the will of the Almighty was to give gays a good spanking.

Which some of them would probably enjoy. But hurricanes are not everywhere, whereas gay people are. It’s almost like God made them, or something.

So, one way or another, we’re going to have more badass hurricanes in the future, whether as a result of climate change or NBC bringing back Will and Grace. We’re going to be reading more about them, so I for one would like to request some more original reporting on them. Hurricane clichés are endless. Hurricanes always “batter” or “slam” or "smack" some place. Sometimes they “hit,” sometimes they “brush.”

​Wouldn’t you like to read “Hurricane Moe Set to Bitch-Slap the Caribbean,” at least once?
​
I know I would.

If there’s one thing we learned in the last two weeks of August, it’s that there are two things that can still bring this divided nation together.

Unfortunately, they are total eclipses of the sun and 500-year floods, neither of which are likely to happen again anytime soon.

Of course, we know exactly when the next total eclipse will be—those scientist people seem to be right on top of that, in spite of the fact that all of them believe in the hoax of global warming and the lie of evolution. The next one that crosses the US will be in 2024. It will also be right overhead in Mazatlán, Mexico, where my woman and I plan to be to watch it. We watched the last one on TV. Eclipses, like professional football, are probably better on TV, but viewing them in person means you don’t have to listen to the announcers on CNN chortle about them continuously.

Then there was the flood in Texas. CNN was right on top of that as well, so we got an up-close look at the flood, too, because a few years ago my Significant Other purchased an HDTV that is roughly the size of a ping-pong table. We felt like we could crawl into the holes people were punching in their roofs to survive, the coverage was so intimate.

We saw the thousands of boats people launched to rescue strangers from roofs, trees and overpasses. We appreciated the rescuers. We thought, like many of us did, that this represented the real America, not the cartoon America we’ve inhabited since January.

Then the cartoon America showed up, too, in the appearance of armed militia men eager to shoot looters. So, many guys who had both guns and boats had to make the morally ambiguous choice between rescuing strangers and shooting looters.

Most of them ended up in the rescue squad, because there seemed to be way more people who needed rescuing than there were looters, but I am sure there were people who wanted to do both, because most people naturally want to be heroes, and many of them want to be killers, and being a heroic killer is the best thing of all.

If you don’t believe me, you haven’t watched many movies.

Then Trump showed up and proved once again he has no idea how to do anything, unless you count self-absorbed screeching as a thing, and Melania got her fair share of criticism too, because she was filmed wearing stiletto pumps as she dashed off to Texas, shoes that probably cost more than most of the bass boats plucking people from their roofs.
​
I think that’s unfair. Look at the girl. Does she look like she owns a pair of rubber waders?