Jim Hightower's Lowdown Jim Hightower

If you’re wondering whatever happened to Ron DeSantis, he’s now re-ensconced in Florida… goofier than ever. Last year, backed by a covey of billionaires, Governor Ron was all set to be our next president until national voters discovered he has the personality of a dirt clod and the political sensibility of a tin-pot totalitarian.

A Republican senator once tried excusing the egomaniacal right-wing nastiness of his colleague, Ted Cruz declaring, “sometimes Ted is his own worst enemy.” I said to myself: “Not while I’m alive he’s not.”

Let me be clear that I mean no disrespect to reptiles when I note that Jonathan Mitchell is a snake. An extremist right-wing Texas lawyer, Mitchell is actually creepier and all-together more diabolical that your average serpent could think of being. Jonathan slithers around the country as a self-appointed anti-abortion vigilante, terrorizing women’s advocates, health clinics, and doctors. And now (turning truly creepy), he’s singling-out

Every religion prioritizes care for the needy. Christianity’s Benedictine Rule, for example, puts care of the sick atop the moral order, “above and before every other duty.” Really – even above the holy Wall Street mandate that medical and insurance conglomerates must squeeze every last penny of profits out of America’s corporate-care system? Well, gosh, they say, let’s not go crazy with this religious stuff! There’s morality… and then there’s business.

We Texans are long-accustomed to enduring stormy outbursts of corruption among our top state legislators. The spectacle of lawmakers taking corporate bribes to provide legislative favors, tax breaks, government contracts, and such is as common as Spring tornadoes – and even more destructive to the public good.

Right-wing culture warriors have been relentlessly attacking people’s personal liberties – running hellish crusades to deny our freedom to vote, to read what we want, to form labor unions, to make our own reproductive decisions… etc.