Friday, December 31, 2021

Wrangling 2021


I suppose the best we can say about the year ending today is that we lived through it, if only because so many who should have did not.


If the Texas Progressive Alliance had selected a Texan of the Year for 2021, my vote would have gone to Dr. Peter Hotez.


InnovationMap had Houston's top three COVID research stories.  I hope the 'rona and its latest mutation is not the most important story next year.  The climate crisis should be.  Maybe it will.


SocraticGadfly noted that Ronny Jackson and other Texas wingnut Congresscritters want to fight the effects of climate change, but only when it affects cops, and without admitting that the likes of Winter Storm Uri are connected.  The Concho Valley Homepage reported that the USGS recorded one of the largest earthquakes ever in the Permian Basin last Monday.  And Earth911 offers ten green living New Year's resolutions.


Texas will be changing enormously in the years to come.  All of us -- wherever we fall on the political spectrum -- are hoping the changes favor our points of view.


But the San Antonio Current quotes a recent report that advises liberty lovers to move somewhere else, ranking Texas 49th in personal freedoms.

Whatever the evolving demographics portend for the Lone Star State, we'll still have to deal with those who are stuck on stupid.  COVID isn't going to kill 'em all.


I'll be surprised if this remark does not cost Chairman Padron his job.


Still think they're both losers.

Here's a few criminal and social justice updates.


Mark Pitcavage presents some random facts about white supremacist tattoos.  Mandy Giles is now blogging at Parents of Trans Youth.  And as promised, some lists.

The Texas Observer submits its ten best longform reads of the year.  Politico collected the worst predictions of 2021.  The San Antonio Express News had all the spooky and strange things.  And Texas Freedom Network rounded up the ten best and worst from the Lege.

A few political items, and the soothers to close out the year.

Kuff covered a couple more redistricting lawsuits; a new one filed by Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer over CD35, and an earlier one filed by a state prison inmate objecting to the practice of counting inmates where they are incarcerated rather than where they live.   IPR opened a time capsule:

Prohibitionist Andrew Jackson Houston, son of the legendary Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto and first president of the Lone Star Republic, died in a Baltimore hospital on June 26, 1941.

Two months before his death, the 87-year-old Houston had been appointed to the U.S. Senate by Gov. “Pappy” O’Daniel to fill a vacancy created by the death of Democratic Sen. Morris Sheppard, who died of a brain hemorrhage on April 9.

Houston, who authored several books on Texas history and taught military science at St. Mary’s University on Trinity Bay, had been the Prohibition Party’s candidate for governor of Texas on two occasions. He also briefly challenged popular 1908 nominee Eugene W. Chafin for the dry party’s presidential nomination in 1912 -- the same year Roosevelt himself had snorted and thundered against the two-party establishment on his newly-formed Bull Moose ticket.

Houston was a Democrat at the time of his surprise Senate appointment on April 21, 1941.


Reform Austin introduced us to some school librarians who are fed up with and fighting back against book bans.  And Susan Hays and nonsequiteuse eulogized Sarah Weddington.

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