(It's gonna be mostly toons around here until the lateral epicondylitis subsides.)
Thanks to Lane Milburn, hat tip Vice)
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Monday, July 09, 2018
The Weekly Wrangle
The Texas Progressive Alliance won't be watching tonight's "Trump: The Supreme Court Justice" reality teevee show, but will be Tweeting and blogging about it in the days and weeks to come.
Here's the lefty blog post and news from around the Lone Star State.
Listicles were popular this week past; Stephen Young at the Dallas Observer has five reasons why Ken Paxton is the luckiestson of a bitch politician in the state.
Independence Day activities were washed out in Houston. (Don't miss the video at this link.)
You're excused from feeling a bit paranoid about the weather on holidays in Southeast Texas based on recent history (and also exempt from ridicule for considering Tax Day a holiday). With "weather panic" apparently the new normal in the Bayou City, Jeff Balke at the Houston Press points out five things Houstonians do during heavy rain events despite being warned not to.
(Please read the first one. If you're the person who blames government officials for seventy years of poor decision-making every time this happens but continues to vote to re-elect them, their friends, and their staffers when they retire ... why don't you just move to Mexico? Or somewhere else there isn't a hundred-year flood once a quarter?)
The March for Our Lives tour stopped in H-Town yesterday, featuring as speakers a few of the young men and women who survived the Parkland high school shooting. A couple of hundred supporters gathered to voice support, while about one-fourth that number of gun nuts protested loudly across the street. See more at the #RoadToChange hashtag.
The weekly roundup of criminal justice news at Grits for Breakfast includes this piece of news (bold emphasis Brains'):
John Coby at Bay Area Houston calls out Dan Patrick's bad math on metal detectors.
Bonddad suggests there are some easy-to-understand motivations underlying the Republicans' daily rabid attacks, led by Trump, as it relates to their strategy for winning in November. Speaking of the fall elections, Off the Kuff made more comparisons to 2014 on relative levels of enthusiasm and candidate fundraising.
Gus Bova at the Texas Observer reveals that the Trump administration's own figures show that 'zero tolerance' immigration enforcement did not work. In fact it only succeeded in making it much more difficult for those seeking asylum to comply with the law.
Dos Centavos takes (apparently generic, mostly unidentified) Democrats to task over their timorousness regarding the call to abolish ICE.
Equality Texas is hosting town hall meetings on the ramifications of the Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court decision in Dallas, Waco, San Antonio, and Houston next week.
Downwinders at Risk passes along the public notice from the Dallas City Council's public hearing on the proposed regional air quality monitoring network, scheduled for late August.
Bruce Melton at The Rag Blog reports on yet another environmental calamity: Alaskan permafrost has flipped from carbon sink to carbon source; it is now melting so fast that it's emitting more greenhouse gas than it formerly stored.
The Spanish language newspaper La Prensa, which closed suddenly earlier this summer, has been reborn in print (and online soon). The San Antonio Current has the story.
Vanessa Eichler at Rivard Report argues that inadequate funding remains the biggest problem in Texas public education.
David Collins has the details on the latest Texas Green Party PR disaster. Update: Which, as it turns out, happens to have been bogus.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub compares its namesake to the current White House occupant and finds similarities only in their respective failures.
SocraticGadfly suggests ways to either improve on the current shootout method or reduce them in World Cup games.
And Harry Hamid can kinda sorta relate to the Thai-boys-soccer-team-that's-trapped-in-the-cave's dilemma.
Here's the lefty blog post and news from around the Lone Star State.
Listicles were popular this week past; Stephen Young at the Dallas Observer has five reasons why Ken Paxton is the luckiest
5. Straight-ticket voting is here to clean up Paxton's mess.
According to the Texas Tribune's latest polling, Paxton faces the toughest race of any Texas Republican, leading challenger Justin Nelson by just one point, 32-31. Paxton's advantage is likely larger than that, however, because Texas still has straight-ticket voting for the 2018 election.
Incumbent Texas Gov. Greg Abbott leads Lupe Valdez by 12 points in the same poll, so about a quarter of those voting for Abbott would have to split their tickets and seek out Nelson's name on the bottom in order for him to defeat Paxton. In 2020, Texas voters will have to vote in each of the state's races individually, leveling the playing field in down-ballot races.
Independence Day activities were washed out in Houston. (Don't miss the video at this link.)
You're excused from feeling a bit paranoid about the weather on holidays in Southeast Texas based on recent history (and also exempt from ridicule for considering Tax Day a holiday). With "weather panic" apparently the new normal in the Bayou City, Jeff Balke at the Houston Press points out five things Houstonians do during heavy rain events despite being warned not to.
(Please read the first one. If you're the person who blames government officials for seventy years of poor decision-making every time this happens but continues to vote to re-elect them, their friends, and their staffers when they retire ... why don't you just move to Mexico? Or somewhere else there isn't a hundred-year flood once a quarter?)
The March for Our Lives tour stopped in H-Town yesterday, featuring as speakers a few of the young men and women who survived the Parkland high school shooting. A couple of hundred supporters gathered to voice support, while about one-fourth that number of gun nuts protested loudly across the street. See more at the #RoadToChange hashtag.
The weekly roundup of criminal justice news at Grits for Breakfast includes this piece of news (bold emphasis Brains'):
Grits has been saying for months that the opiod epidemic in Texas is overstated compared to the problem of meth addiction and overdoses, and that hysteria over fentanyl is largely unwarranted here because the drug does not mix with the relatively impure black-tar heroin common in Texas and California markets. So I was not suprised to see Snopes rule that the fentanyl-soaked flyers touted by the Harris County Sheriff's Office as causing the hospitalization of a deputy was a bogus story.
Though HCSO said "field tests" indicated fentanyl on the flyers, lab tests confirmed that was false. Laughably, HCSO said in a statement, "The Sheriff’s Office is also working to verify that deputies have access to the most reliable field testing kits available." Faulty field tests used by law enforcement in Harris County have been responsible for hundreds of false convictions, so don't hold your breath.
John Coby at Bay Area Houston calls out Dan Patrick's bad math on metal detectors.
Bonddad suggests there are some easy-to-understand motivations underlying the Republicans' daily rabid attacks, led by Trump, as it relates to their strategy for winning in November. Speaking of the fall elections, Off the Kuff made more comparisons to 2014 on relative levels of enthusiasm and candidate fundraising.
Gus Bova at the Texas Observer reveals that the Trump administration's own figures show that 'zero tolerance' immigration enforcement did not work. In fact it only succeeded in making it much more difficult for those seeking asylum to comply with the law.
Dos Centavos takes (apparently generic, mostly unidentified) Democrats to task over their timorousness regarding the call to abolish ICE.
Equality Texas is hosting town hall meetings on the ramifications of the Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court decision in Dallas, Waco, San Antonio, and Houston next week.
Downwinders at Risk passes along the public notice from the Dallas City Council's public hearing on the proposed regional air quality monitoring network, scheduled for late August.
Bruce Melton at The Rag Blog reports on yet another environmental calamity: Alaskan permafrost has flipped from carbon sink to carbon source; it is now melting so fast that it's emitting more greenhouse gas than it formerly stored.
The Spanish language newspaper La Prensa, which closed suddenly earlier this summer, has been reborn in print (and online soon). The San Antonio Current has the story.
Vanessa Eichler at Rivard Report argues that inadequate funding remains the biggest problem in Texas public education.
David Collins has the details on the latest Texas Green Party PR disaster. Update: Which, as it turns out, happens to have been bogus.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub compares its namesake to the current White House occupant and finds similarities only in their respective failures.
SocraticGadfly suggests ways to either improve on the current shootout method or reduce them in World Cup games.
And Harry Hamid can kinda sorta relate to the Thai-boys-soccer-team-that's-trapped-in-the-cave's dilemma.
Sunday, July 08, 2018
Wednesday, July 04, 2018
Pyrotechnics
14 year-old girl assures Trump she wasn't really using her reproductive freedom yet anyway
"It’s every little girl's dream to be forced into being a breeding sow, and if I can be forced to carry my future rapist's baby to term, even better!"
These 11 companies control the sale of every consumable for Independence Day ... except for the fireworks, which are almost entirely made in China
Imagine what the Founding Fathers, most of whom opposed anything that reeked of monopoly, would think if they could see how a few companies profit in the name of their nation’s founding. Certainly it would disappoint Thomas Jefferson, who once opined, "The benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression."
Monday, July 02, 2018
The Firecracker Wrangle
The Texas Progressive Alliance congratulates Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their election victories, and has high hopes that Texas can elect progressives of their kind in the very near future.
Also ... when you're firing bottle rockets and Roman candles at each other this Wednesday, be careful not to shoot your eye out.
Here's the blog post and lefty news roundup from the week just passed.
Thousands protested at the Capitol in Austin at hundreds of rallies across Texas and the nation against Trump's immigration policy that separates children from their parents.
As the immigration crisis -- not a crisis at all, according to South Texas ranchers -- morphs into a national one, even ICE investigation supervisors want to disassociate themselves from child detention and deportation. Paris Johnson at the Houston Press reminds us that the US has a long, ugly history of separating minority children from their families.
The US Supreme Court rulings in favor of Trump's Muslim travel ban, the gerrymandering by Texas Republicans, and the Janus decision against public sector unions made news, but it was Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement that abruptly focused Democrats and liberals on their failures in 2016 -- not just Hillary Clinton's in November, but Barack Obama's and the Senate Democrats' spineless inability to force a vote on Merrick Garland -- and in predictable fashion they blamed everyone but themselves (not just Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein in this go-around, but Susan Sarandon). Satire is most wicked when it is closest to the truth.
SocraticGadfly talked about the Supreme Court travel ban ruling, along with a bit about the other rulings of last week, and then analyzed Anthony Kennedy's career after he announced his retirement. He'll have a couple of additional Court posts in days and weeks ahead.
In politico news, Carlos Uresti went to prison, a freshly-scented Republican douchebag won a special election to replace the bloated, foul-smelling one previously inhabiting #TX27 for a couple of months, and Pages of Victory demonstrates how you should handle a Republican canvasser who comes knocking at your door.
Off the Kuff took a closer look at the UT/Trib June poll and thinks he found some good news for Democrats that the pollsters overlooked.
In his weekly compendium of criminal justice developments, Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast blogged about the federal judge's ruling in Harris County's bail case, the outgoing DA in McClennan County (Waco) firing one of his assistants for cooperating with the FBI, and the DPS conflating traffic stops and immigration enforcement.
The Associated Press (via the HouChron) described in detail the course provided for Texas educators that teaches them how to shoot back at school shooters. A pro-gun rally last weekend in Santa Fe, the site of the high school murders just over a month ago, was notable for its anemic turnout.
News about the media was news; Jon Tilove at the Statesman chronicled the life of one of the Annapolis Capital-Gazette's journalists who was shot and killed at the newspaper's office by excerpting some of his columns (and adding his thoughts). And Texas Standard wonders why social media bosses are meeting with GOP leaders.
Somervell County Salon wrote about an anti-SLAPP case that prevailed at the Texas Supreme Court.
Stephen Young at the Dallas Observer covered the million-gallon sewage spill at White Rock Lake.
John Nielson-Gammon at the Texas Living Waters Project would like to see more of that old-fashioned variety in our summer weather.
Keep Austin Wonky wants city-owned land to maximize residents' happiness (whatever that means).
David Collins remembers Harlan Ellison, the noted sci-fi-author who passed away last week.
Harry Hamid notices how angry everyone is, but is working to avoid being that way.
And Dan Solomon at Texas Monthly bids adieu to the UT-adjacent location of Conan's Pizza.
Also ... when you're firing bottle rockets and Roman candles at each other this Wednesday, be careful not to shoot your eye out.
Here's the blog post and lefty news roundup from the week just passed.
Thousands protested at the Capitol in Austin at hundreds of rallies across Texas and the nation against Trump's immigration policy that separates children from their parents.
As the immigration crisis -- not a crisis at all, according to South Texas ranchers -- morphs into a national one, even ICE investigation supervisors want to disassociate themselves from child detention and deportation. Paris Johnson at the Houston Press reminds us that the US has a long, ugly history of separating minority children from their families.
The US Supreme Court rulings in favor of Trump's Muslim travel ban, the gerrymandering by Texas Republicans, and the Janus decision against public sector unions made news, but it was Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement that abruptly focused Democrats and liberals on their failures in 2016 -- not just Hillary Clinton's in November, but Barack Obama's and the Senate Democrats' spineless inability to force a vote on Merrick Garland -- and in predictable fashion they blamed everyone but themselves (not just Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein in this go-around, but Susan Sarandon). Satire is most wicked when it is closest to the truth.
SocraticGadfly talked about the Supreme Court travel ban ruling, along with a bit about the other rulings of last week, and then analyzed Anthony Kennedy's career after he announced his retirement. He'll have a couple of additional Court posts in days and weeks ahead.
In politico news, Carlos Uresti went to prison, a freshly-scented Republican douchebag won a special election to replace the bloated, foul-smelling one previously inhabiting #TX27 for a couple of months, and Pages of Victory demonstrates how you should handle a Republican canvasser who comes knocking at your door.
Off the Kuff took a closer look at the UT/Trib June poll and thinks he found some good news for Democrats that the pollsters overlooked.
In his weekly compendium of criminal justice developments, Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast blogged about the federal judge's ruling in Harris County's bail case, the outgoing DA in McClennan County (Waco) firing one of his assistants for cooperating with the FBI, and the DPS conflating traffic stops and immigration enforcement.
The Associated Press (via the HouChron) described in detail the course provided for Texas educators that teaches them how to shoot back at school shooters. A pro-gun rally last weekend in Santa Fe, the site of the high school murders just over a month ago, was notable for its anemic turnout.
News about the media was news; Jon Tilove at the Statesman chronicled the life of one of the Annapolis Capital-Gazette's journalists who was shot and killed at the newspaper's office by excerpting some of his columns (and adding his thoughts). And Texas Standard wonders why social media bosses are meeting with GOP leaders.
Somervell County Salon wrote about an anti-SLAPP case that prevailed at the Texas Supreme Court.
Stephen Young at the Dallas Observer covered the million-gallon sewage spill at White Rock Lake.
John Nielson-Gammon at the Texas Living Waters Project would like to see more of that old-fashioned variety in our summer weather.
Keep Austin Wonky wants city-owned land to maximize residents' happiness (whatever that means).
David Collins remembers Harlan Ellison, the noted sci-fi-author who passed away last week.
Harry Hamid notices how angry everyone is, but is working to avoid being that way.
And Dan Solomon at Texas Monthly bids adieu to the UT-adjacent location of Conan's Pizza.
Sunday, July 01, 2018
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