Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Tongue Out Tuesday Wrangle

Panting here trying to keep up.

The new Congress maps dropped yesterday, and everybody has an opinion, analysis, and snark.


Keep in mind that these are the maiden efforts.  There will be revisions, perhaps several, and then they will be challenged in court after implementation for 2022.

At first pass my reaction was "it could have been worse".  They may eventually get that way, but these lines, while ugly and injurious to Texans of color, simply don't strike me as being the most terrible the Rethugs could have come up with. YMMV.

Reid Wilson at The Hill sees US cities -- citing Texas, Tennessee, Oregon, and Arkansas -- as being the pawns in the gerrymandering game.  Fernando Ramirez at The Texas Signal has five takeaways, with Colin Allred getting a safe seat, Vicente Gonzalez getting gutted, and the lack of a Latino/a majority district being the most significant.

Moving on to other Lege affairs.


Angela Valenzuela of the Texas Educational Equity, Politics & Policy blog posts about a new conservative website that purports to track where critical race theory is taught at US schools.

Criticalrace.org, created by (Cornell Law School professor William) Jacobson, features a state-by-state list of more than 200 colleges and universities promoting critical race theory -- which he describes as “a radical ideology that focuses on race as the key to understanding society, and objectifies people based on race.” Launched last weekend, the website was a six-month project by Legal Insurrection, the conservative blog run by Jacobson. It contains information about various schools -- including Cornell in Ithaca, where Jacobson teaches -- as well as links to critical race training activity there.

Jacobson told Fox News that people need to know that higher education “is the source of the problem.”

“It provides the ideological mothers’ milk for activists and trains the people who then go onto jobs in government and primary/secondary education and the ‘journalists’ who push this coverage,” he said.

Criminal and social injustice updates, apparently now a daily feature.


One environmental update (and it's a big one):


Tens of thousands of solar panels will line an area the size of 200 football fields and produce enough energy to power 5,000 homes. ... Houston, known for having one of the highest number of greenhouse gas emitters, will be able to offset 120 million pounds of CO2 per year through this solar farm alone.

Closing today with these.

Connor Towne O’Neill, one of the producers of the NPR podcast White Lies, discusses his book Down Along with That Devil’s Bones.

It examines the nation's reckoning with Confederate monuments through the lens of the fight over monuments to one particular figure from the Civil War: Nathan Bedford Forrest. O’Neill will speak at a virtual event with west Houston's Blue Willow Bookshop Thursday evening.

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