Only in the Red State of Texas

A tip of the Stetson and a howdy from Buddy, proud Texan and proud American!

This is how we create jobs and grow the economy, by keeping jobs right here in America; better yet, planting them in low tax/low regulation states.

SpaceX has announced a massive Texas facility, 16.7 times the size of our own Lone Star Comics Timberlake headquarters/warehouse!

  • A 100-million-square-foot vertically integrated semiconductor facility called the Terafab will be built in Grimes County, northwest of Houston. When completed, the SpaceX complex will be the largest facility in the world.
       
  • As Grant Halk reports, the first phase of the Terafab project will see $16.8 billion in capital invested in the facility’s construction, along with the creation of 3,000 jobs in Grimes County. The project has qualified for a $30 million grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund.
      
  • SpaceX’s global headquarters are already based in Texas, along with launch facilities on the Gulf of America coast.
       
  • “Terafab is bringing cutting-edge manufacturing to America, creating thousands of high-paying jobs in the Lone Star State, and enabling us to produce AI chips at scale for use on Earth and in space.” – Elon Musk

Another excellent column from my friend Paul Gleiser, KTBB 97.5 FM, Tyler, Texas.

There then follows a brief postscript by yours truly, Buddy

Of Fauci and the Founders.

by Paul Gleiser  · Published August 6, 2026 · Updated August 7, 2026

From Dr. Anthony Fauci’s embarrassing performance before a Senate hearing last week we learn that he is every bit the self-dealing, narcissistic weasel that I – and many others – began thinking he was from the earliest months of the pandemic.

But we also learn something much more important and much more enduring. We learn that the COVID pandemic in the final analysis wasn’t about virology, epidemiology, or, as we were so often reminded, “the science.”

The key lesson that arises from the COVID pandemic is that the Founding Fathers were right. There is enormous danger in concentrating too much authority in too few hands.

Certainly, that’s what happened during COVID. With massive help from the media, Tony Fauci was transubstantiated from a semi-obscure career public health bureaucrat into a divinely guided oracle. His pronouncements came to be treated less as attempts at expert guidance than as sacred decrees, leaving little room for dissent.

Little room for dissent? How about zero room? Again, with help from the media, dissent from the received wisdom of Lord Fauci – however well-reasoned and however well-credentialed the dissenter – was viciously crushed.

What we have since learned is that we should have listened to some of that dissent. What we must also learn – again – is that dissent is the mechanism by which truth is ultimately revealed.

By deifying Anthony Fauci – while silencing all others with informed opinions about COVID – we made the country single-point failure vulnerable. (If you’re not familiar with the term, single-point failure is an engineering term that refers to a vulnerability in which the failure of one component causes an entire system to fail.)

In the case of COVID, that single component was the federal pandemic response led by Anthony Fauci.

RELATED: The Truth Slithers Out. (You Tell Me post from June 2021)

But this piece isn’t really about COVID. It’s about the U.S. response to COVID as allegory for the federalism that the socialists taking over the Democratic Party are dedicated to destroying.

Our founders displayed unusual brilliance in creating a nation comprised of sovereign states. Justice Louis Brandeis described the states as America’s “laboratories of democracy.”

The self-proclaimed socialists who are ascendant in the Democratic Party believe none of that. They argue that government should be centralized in the hands of an expert governing class. Rather than federalism, they want a unitary system of government.

They’re wrong.

A unitary government for a nation of 330 million souls flung across an entire continent would be the very embodiment of single-point failure vulnerability. It would result in the failures of COVID writ large.

Yes, federalism is messy. But the apparent disorder is a feature not a bug. It’s a safeguard. It reduces the risk that one flawed judgment in one place can become a flawed judgment everywhere.

It is what has made America the most successful nation in history.

Postscript from Buddy:

Indeed, we can thank God and our Nation’s Founders for our having a federal form of government, and not a pure democracy. For the reason Paul makes so very clear.


With all 50 states existing as petri dishes of ideas, all swirling together to produce better or worse outcomes, we citizens are free to live in the states that turn out to be the most productive and congenial to a person’s living free and to his attaining his fullest potential.


When it comes to choosing where to live and how to vote, the option boils down to something very simple:

Feedback always appreciated

Comments are always appreciated, both pro and con. A special thank you to those of you who do comment, and I ask that you please forgive me for not always replying. In the event that I post your comment, to protect your privacy I will list your first name and your state. And if you prefer not to read my Straight Talk, feel free to switch to the alternate email option which will not contain Straight Talk.

Leave a Reply