Jitterbugging for Jesus

For fools speak folly, their hearts are bent on evil: They practice ungodliness and spread error concerning the LORD; the hungry they leave empty and from the thirsty they withhold water.”

— Isaiah 32: 6

Houston streets lined with flooded furniture and wood won’t be mostly clear until after Thanksgiving. GOP state leaders, the most mean-spirited and petty leaders my beloved Texas has probably ever seen, refuse to give the City of Houston funds to clean up the mess. I have to say I don’t know what God the ever-pious GOP leaders of Texas — and those pious Christians in the Trump Administration — believe in. It is not a God with whom I’m familiar.

Talk about fools who speak folly. Consider this quote:

Damn it, this is not a good news story. This is a people are dying story. This is a life or death story. … This is a story of a devastation that continues to worsen because people are not getting food and water.

“If I could scream it a lot more louder — it’s not a good news story when people are dying when they don’t have dialysis, and when the generators aren’t working and the oxygen is not providing for them. Where is there good news here?”

That was the response of San Juan, Puerto Rico Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz to Elaine Duke, acting secretary of Trump’s Homeland Security, over Duke’s comments lauding the “amazing” federal response to the hurricane catastrophe.

“I know it’s a hard storm to recover from,” Duke told reporters outside the White House. “But I know it is really a good news story in terms of our ability to reach people and the limited number of deaths that have taken place in such a devastating hurricane.”

Yes — she actually called this “a good news story.”

Can’t imagine why the mayor is appalled.

Here are more quotes from Mayor Cruz in response to the Trump Administration’s, uh, amazingly callous claim that this is somehow a good news story, as told to CNN.

“Maybe from where she’s standing it’s a good news story. When you are drinking from a creek, it’s not a good news story.”

“I’m sorry, but that really upsets me and frustrates me. Frankly, it’s an irresponsible statement. …

“Damn it, this is not a good news story. This is a people are dying story. This is a life or death story. … This is a story of a devastation that continues to worsen because people are not getting food and water.”

For more go here.

Meanwhile, back in my beloved Texas…

The amazing governor, the lieutenant governor and the state’s senator from Houston–who all are from Houston–claim that the city doesn’t need any state money for hurricane relief.

Of course, the Houston mayor and city council members are Democrats and Houston is a sanctuary city.

It’s obvious to me and anyone else who follows Texas politics closely that Texas Gov. Greg Abbot and the boys are denying relief to the nation’s fourth largest city because for mean-spirited and petty political reasons.

These three happy, pious Christians, who never let us forget what good Christians they are, are the governor, lt. governor and state senator from Houston, who claim Houston doesn’t need any financial aid for cleaning up from Hurricane Irma. They are playing their typically deplorable mean and petty political games.

This outstanding analysis is from The Texas Observer:

On August 4, less than a month before Hurricane Harvey made landfall, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick appeared on the Fox Business Network with a diagnosis for what ails the nation.

“Where do we have all our problems in America?” he asked. “Not at the state level run by Republicans, but in our cities that are mostly controlled by Democrat mayors and Democrat city council men and women. That’s where you see liberal policies. That’s where you see high taxes. That’s where you see street crime.”

In September, another big problem appeared over Houston, a messy city run by one of those dangerous Democratic mayors, Sylvester Turner. Houston is the state’s beating heart, and Harvey could end up being the most expensive natural disaster in American history.

In the past, it would have been of some comfort to the mayor of Houston that the lieutenant governor and some of his top allies, such as state Senator Paul Bettencourt, hailed from the Houston area, because they’d help make sure the city’s needs were met in the months and years ahead. That’s not the case now, and it’s worth taking a moment to place Harvey in the context of the extraordinary animus the Legislature often seems to have for local governments and the people who run them.

Turner now has one of the most difficult and unpleasant jobs of any public official in the United States. To take just one example: An immediate crisis the city faces is waste removal — there are whole neighborhoods full of tall piles of ruined furniture and trash that will rot in the rain and attract pests. Turner recently told the city council that many of the contractors who do the kind of removal work Houston needs fled to Florida, for better rates after Hurricane Irma. The best case scenario is that “most” of the waste will be cleared by Thanksgiving, two months from now.

Got that? Many of the Texas contractors fled to Florida, a state governed by a redder than red Republican governor, for higher rates.

More from the Observer:

If things go slowly, residents will inevitably blame Turner, just as a backlash immediately materialized when he recently proposed a temporary 8.9 percent property tax hike, which would raise about $113 million for Harvey recovery. For the average homeowner in the city, that comes out to about $117 a year, which doesn’t seem like terribly much given the circumstances. More importantly, Turner’s hands were tied. The storm wiped out the city’s emergency funds and destroyed a lot of city property, and though FEMA will pay 90 percent of trash removal costs, Houston’s share is still something like $25 million. Nonetheless, Turner caught a lot of heat for the proposal.

Well that’s what Turner gets for being a Democrat and leading a sanctuary city, don’t you know.

More from freelance writer Christopher Hooks’ article:

Later, a new agreement with FEMA caused Turner to reduce the amount he was asking for to $50 to $60 million. For the state, that’s chump change — the rainy day fund alone has more than $10 billion. Though state leaders have signalled a willingness to spend some of the rainy day fund on disaster relief, no one’s rushing to appear overly generous. When Turner’s hand was forced and the tax bump was proposed, state officials had two options: Reassure Houstonians about the forthcoming availability of state money, or let Turner, the Democratic mayor of a city Republicans are increasingly struggling to contest, twist in the wind.

You know which one they chose. “I don’t understand this mindset,” Bettencourt, Patrick’s lieutenant on tax issues and a resident of the city of Houston, told the Houston Chronicle. “It’s beyond tone deaf. I don’t believe governments should be showing this type of attitude when people are down. Taxpayers are going to be furious.” Bettencourt then added that he now opposes provisions that let local governments raise taxes more easily in the event of a disaster or emergency. Bettencourt even told a Houston radio station that he’s against using any state money to help the city, offering that Houston should be “using the funds that are already there to avoid a tax increase.”

On Tuesday, after Turner made a public request for money from the rainy day fund, Governor Greg Abbott joined in, telling reporters that the fund wouldn’t be touched until the 2019 legislative session. Turner “has all the money that he needs,” Abbott said. “In times like these, it’s important to have fiscal responsibility as opposed to financial panic.” The governor went on to accuse the mayor of using Harvey recovery efforts as a “hostage to raise taxes.”

Bettencourt and Abbott are doing what state lawmakers frequently do now — putting political pressure on local governments to draw attention away from what the state is doing and gather ammo for future internecine battles in Austin. (All last session, Bettencourt was at war with local officials over property tax policy.) The difference now is that he’s doing it right after Texas’ largest city had its legs shot out from under it, at a time when you might hope Houston-area lawmakers would not only refrain from taking potshots at Turner, but find ways to affirmatively help him. But, hey, it’s just business as usual: Everything good in Texas is to the credit of the brave boys and girls of the Lege, and everything bad is the fault of county commissioners courts, city councils and school boards.

Aren’t the different layers of government supposed to work together? In Texas, they generally do not. I’ve talked to many local officials, including Republicans in deep-red counties, who can’t for the life of them get a call returned from their GOP state representative or senator. Even big-city mayors sometimes get the stiff arm, and lawmakers seem to take pleasure in nullifying or canceling popular city ordinances, sometimes because of lobby money but sometimes, it seems, simply out of spite.

Consider Houston before the storm. Its school systems are heavily penalized by the state’s school finance system, which forces locals to raise property taxes. It has huge immigrant populations whose relationships with the police were negatively affected by Senate Bill 4. The culture wars at the Legislature — and the poor quality of state services — hinder Houston’s appeal to the international business community. Houston’s health care system has suffered greatly from the Legislature’s refusal to expand Medicaid.

This is despite the obvious fact that Texas’ appeal, and strength, is the quality and dynamism of its big cities. Six of the nation’s 20 largest cities are in Texas, and each has a distinct identity and appeal. (Well, maybe not Dallas.) The state should be helping cities. To take but one too-late example, the Legislature is the only body that could have cut through the mess of overlapping political jurisdictions to control development and strengthen flood planning in greater Houston in a unified way.

Instead, we have a state government that sees its largest generators of economic activity — the six metropolitan areas in which more than half of the state lives — as some kind of threat, either because of their values or the demographic and political threat they represent to the Republican Party. You might hope Harvey would temper that, but don’t hold your breath.

Lord God in your mercy help my beloved Texas and Puerto Rico and deliver them from fools who speak folly, whose hearts are bent on evil, who practice ungodliness and spread error concerning the LORD as they withhold food from the hungry and withhold water from the thirsty.