But Tell Us About That Terrible Leftist Cancel Culture

 

Protesters in Austin, 2013, against back-door creationism in public schools. Photo by Patrick Michels/Texas Observer.

This was some headline, in the Texas Tribune, which is a treasure of an online newspaper:

Texas A&M suspended professor accused of criticizing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in lecture

Like an "accusation" of such a crime is enough to get you in trouble with the administration.

The professor, Joy Alonzo, an expert in opioids, wasn't even at her own institution; she was giving a guest lecture at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, to a class of first-year medical students including the daughter of Dawn Buckingham, Texas Land Commissioner, a former state senator from the time when Dan Patrick was a state senator too, and a friend of Texas A&M chancellor John Sharp. Shortly after the lecture ended around noon and she was driving home, Buckingham was on the phone with Patrick, and also to the system's vice chancellor for government relations; Sharp opened an investigation, sending Patrick a text a couple of hours later:

“Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week.”

At 4:22, the course coordinator in Galveston had sent an email to the class with a "STATEMENT OF FORMAL CENSURE":

Paxton Vobiscum

Paxton is one of those AGs who really likes to be addressed as "General", so his far-right fanboys have dressed him up that way in the same way as they made Trump an Emperor.

There's a story running around about suspended criminal Texas attorney general Kenneth Paxton that isn't true, though it's his fault, because of his self-aggrandizing way of telling the story

I don’t think this can be seen enough..@KenPaxtonTX stopped 2.5 million mail-in ballots from going out in Harris County which is the Houston area in 2020 election.

Paxton admits that he interfered in 2020 election and Biden would have won Texas. pic.twitter.com/NISjufoWpF

— Skyleigh Heinen (@Sky_Lee_1) May 31, 2023

on Stephen Bannon's podcast ("the #1 political podcast in the world"):

For the Record: Del Rio

 

Screenshot from El Paso Times.

Thing that's not being mentioned now is that they were all Haitians, refugees from the 2010 earthquake, that's TWELVE years ago who had found communities in Chile and Brazil, where they were feeling unwelcome, and drawn by a rumor that Del Rio was a good place to crosss into US.

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

... deporting practically everyone without hearings on the bogus Title 42 policy that treated all migrants as likely COVID cases who would spread disease into Texas (where COVID was already raging worse than it was in Mexico, in other words it was a fraud)

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

N

And also very Trumpy in its complete arbritrariness, since some people did indeed make it into the courtry and had a chance to tell their story to a judge, and you could never tell why some did and most didn't—it felt completely random to tha Haitians And let's pause to note how extremely bad the situation in Haiti was at that point, just a few months after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, with a nonfunctioning parliament and an unelected prime minister governing by decree and the

loss of government control over strategic areas to the hands of dangerous armed gangs, widely believed to be financed by politicians and to have police officers on their payroll. Violence has worsened an already severe humanitarian crisis.

Well, of course, here we are in the US of A, where the governor of Florida seems able to commandeer the assistance of federal officials in the Department of Homeland Security and facilities at Lackland Air Force Base in his project of kidnapping 50 people in Texas—people whose asylum applications are already under consideration and who are thus not just legally in the US but officially under federal protection—maybe we've got a bit of a Haiti-style problem of our own. 

Becuase, angry as I might have been with Biden on this issue, he did try to get rid of the Title 42 idiocy and the "Remain in Mexico" imposture, and was repeatedly stopped by federal courts whose judges seem themselves to have lost interest in the rule of law. It's only now, a year after Del Rio, that he seems to have acquired some ability to have the law obeyed, and we've learned recently that there are now a million new asylum seekers in the country awaiting hearings (which, under the current situation, will be some seven years from now for most of them, during which they won't even it's a hit-or-miss proposition whether they'll even be able to get temporary working papers [see Redhand in comments], even as employers all over the country complain about a desperate shortage of workers, which is contributing the the inflation they all care so passionately about... Faugh.

On the American side too, hundreds found shelter in El Paso,https://t.co/Wgfv5raZOR but it was Mexico that really came through https://t.co/TmHgDeblkT

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

Anyway, it's clear that this small (but real) crisis of a year ago occupies an enormous place in Republican minds for one reason and one reason only: because these asylum seekers were Black. And that's why they keep bringing it up--it's a dog whistle.

/fin

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

Hispanics May Be of Any Race

Desi was willing to be non-white. For religious reasons. Good for him.

Some heartening media news on Friday was the story that TelevisaUnivision has sold 18 Spanish-language radio stations in 10 major markets including Miami, Houston, Dallas, and Las Vegas as well as New York and Los Angeles to a new organization, the Latino Media Network, which seems to be led by Democrats Stephanie Valencia (who served as Obama's Latin outreach director) and Jess Morales Rocketto,

At least Marco was pretty upset for some reason:

You mean after decades of living with monopolization by the all-white all-Republican generation of 1960, today's politically and ethnically diverse Cuban American community could be finally getting a voice. Not good news for you, I guess.

— Woke Mob Values (@Yastreblyansky) June 5, 2022

Maybe it's because one of the Miami stations (the one he chose to @) is Radio Mambí, famous for pushing the worst disinformation through the Spanish-speaking community in the Miami—that Black Lives Matter is a "Satanic cult" and that BLM and "antifa" warriors masterminded the January 6 2021 invasion of the US Capitol, and hoped to kidnap Trump from the White House, and also pushing Replacement Theory:

Deep in the Dark of Texas

 

Wendy Davis, ready to run, via KTSA TV.

Maybe the most personally infuriating thing to me about the current flurry of state anti-abortion legislation is its open contempt for the rule of law: I mean these mean-minded, pinched and intolerant people, so ready to judge others for the slightest deviations from their own idea of propriety, passing laws that are flagrantly illegal according to settled law (as the members of a Supreme Court majority from Roberts through Kavanaugh and Barrett have maintained in their confirmation hearings). 

The "trigger laws" in something like 20 states from the previous wave were designed to take effect only after such a time as Roe and Casey are overturned, should that happen (I'm not convinced it will, at least this year, though they'll undoubtedly continue working to cripple abortion rights around the edges). The current wave, in Mississippi and Florida and Oklahoma and wherever else, is as if the law doesn't even exist; it's pretty much as if they passed a law legalizing slavery, or denying women the right to vote. Saying, as they do, that it might be constitutional soon, after the Court rules on the Mississippi law, doesn't cut the mustard: it's unconstitutional now, and they know it.

And the Texas law, the infamous SB8, is the worst of all, with its sly legalism in the provisions designed to prevent the Court from considering it—since the state is not enforcing the law, simply inviting bounty hunters to enforce it privately by suing anybody who assists in providing patients with abortion services in the state, for $10,000 in punitive damages, nobody has standing to sue the state, as decided just last week. 

Facts on the Ground

 

Image credit to Getty via The Atlantic.

My new reality show is called Fogg the Abortion Bounty Hunter. Somewhere in relatively rural west Texas, there's a longhaired faithful Christian ex-con plagued by ex-wives just struggling to put it together for himself, and this is how he's doing it, pantysniffing, alongside his eccentric posse, starting with the attorney sidekick who files the lawsuits through which the law is supposed to operate, where you get that bounty of up to $10,000, paid by the defendants if you win the case, for suing somebody involved in procuring an illegal abortion (they're practically all illegal in Texas now, it's almost impossible to get a legal abortion unless you started planning it before you got pregnant).

And then the guys who know the local doctors and nurses and Uber drivers taking passengers to Mexico or New Mexico, and cross-tabs between bartenders and pharmacists maybe, since they want a fix on the girls who are fornicating without protection. That's where, as they say, the money is (though you're not allowed to sue the women themselves).

Maybe as an incredibly poignant plot point for the first season he finds himself pursuing his own daughter, after one of the ex-wives drives her to Mexico.

My alternative take on the whole repulsive situation is that the new law isn't exactly meant to work as advertised; I mean, that the Texans don't expect any bounty hunting to take place. Respectable abortion providers inside the state will be complying with the law, abominable ones know how to take care of themselves, and there won't be any lawsuits. It's not a route the traditional Christian boyfriend wants to follow, to allow her to get her abortion and then turn around to try to make $10K out of it. It's a law made for cartoon characters like my friend Fogg there, and they're fictional.

But for the Supreme Court, that's ideal, because it means they'll never have to commit themselves. I'm not sure everybody gets that, but the reason they didn't bother to give for refusing to grant a temporary injunction against the new law is a completely valid one, stupid but valid: that they can't really evaluate the law until they have a lawsuit, filed by somebody with standing to do it. So rather than making their own decisions, they can turn the case they've been handed over to the "shadow docket" and simply refuse to hear it. Meanwhile, it's established as a kind of law that hasn't been rejected by the Supreme Court, inviting 20 or 22 red states to emulate it and provide "facts on the ground", like the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank that seem to be possible because there's no place to effectively challenge them.

What interests me is the increased use of mechanisms like the shadow docket (the same way the Biden eviction moratorium was ended yesterday) where one party to a dispute gets their way, but nobody is seen to be making a decision. That's a bit scary.

Cybernetic Democracy

An enchanting interview on NPR with Mayor Betsy Price of Fort Worth on the Covid-19 response in Texas carries the headline "Coronavirus Guidance Across Texas Is Not Consistent" at their website,  but that's really not accurate. It's pretty consistent, just at odds with governor Greg Abbott and of course the suicide volunteer lieutenant governor Dan Patrick; Abbott's been resisting calls for him to issue a statewide stay-at-home order, and the mayors and executives of the state's largest cities and counties have reacted by creating the situation that Abbot's order would have created, without his assistance.

That is, they've gotten together (by Zoom, presumably, they're practicing social distancing) and coordinated the issuing of orders of their own, covering 70% of the Texas population, and the other counties are coming on board one at a time, so it's going to be as if Abbott had issued a timely order. And indeed Abbott is now suggesting he might do it after all:

Literary Corner: The Size of Texas, the Surprise of Death

From the president's press conference, San Antonio, Wednesday, 10 April, reported by Seahorse at GardenWeb, a remarkable pair of sonnets taking a long walk through his current preoccupations, the need for a wall, the fact that Texas is larger than the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which Central Americans don't realize, and the unexpected relationship between walking and death:

Two Border Sonnets

by Donald J. Trump

I. A Vast State

If we had the wall, the good people
will not be able — you’ll see them on the other
side of the wall. Number one, they won’t
come, because they’ll see there’s no way
of getting through. Right now they think there’s a
way to get through. And the people back home
never hear about that, they start to walk.
They tell them Houston’s half a mile away,

but it’s 300 miles. It’s desert. This
is a vast state, it’s a vast area. You look
at it, the state’s tremendous. I come from
New York. You have Fifth Avenue and that connects you
to Park Avenue, it's not too far away,
but this is hundreds of miles between places.

Late 17th-century print of an etching, ca. 1520, by Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg, Death and the Devil Surprise Two Women, from the collections of the Victoria and Albert, London.

Paradise Paved

Bison hunters bringing hides to market, Taylor County, TX, sometime around maybe 1870, via TexasBeyondHistory.

A huge landmark moment in media coverage of climate science occurred yesterday, but nobody seems to have noticed it, including the writer who did it, David Leonhardt ("Harvey, the Storm that Humans Helped Cause"), in The New York Times:

The daily surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico last winter never dropped below 73 degrees. You can probably guess how many previous times that had happened: Zero.

This sort of heat has a specific effect on storms: Warmer weather causes heavier rainfall. Why? When the seas warm, more moisture evaporates into the air, and when the air warms — which has also been happening in Texas — it can carry more moisture.

The severity of Harvey, in other words, is almost certainly related to climate change.

Yes, I know the sober warning that’s issued whenever an extreme weather disaster occurs: No individual storm can be definitively blamed on climate change. It’s true, too. Some version of Harvey probably would have happened without climate change, and we’ll never know the hypothetical truth.

Not sure what the "hypothetical truth" is doing in that sentence, actually. I'd say the hypothetical truth is what we do know, and what we'll never know is whether it's wrong.

But that sober warning is no longer regarded as quite true, is the thing. I can't remember where I first saw it, sometime in the last few months, but the science is now there; the new scientific consensus is that, while you can't blame a particular extreme weather event on human-caused global warming, you can blame that for the extremity, within certain probability limits.

No Comment

Photo by Dorian Santiago via NBC News.

Tomorrow's the 50th anniversary of the day Charles Whitman of Austin, Texas, 25-year-old white man, Eagle Scout and Marine, son of a violent authoritarian father, speed freak and college student, killed his wife and his mother in their homes and then went to the University of Texas campus where he gunned down 49 people, killing 16 of them, mostly from the observation deck of the Main Building Tower.

It is also, apparently by coincidence, the day the new Texas "campus-carry" law goes into effect, as I learned from NPR, allowing anybody with a Texas handgun license to carry a concealed handgun on any Texas college campus including, obviously, UT Austin.

The NPR story went to bed too early to incorporate another Austin story, where the 6th Street nightlife district was terrorized early this morning after the bars closed by reports of an "active shooter situation" in the neighborhood. But not to worry, that was just a rumor! The fact was that there were two shooters in completely unrelated incidents, and they were just working out their own private relationship issues, I guess, and only one woman got killed and four seriously injured, so it's just Texas. The one shooter who succeeded in murdering somebody is still at large, but he isn't "active". The Second Amendment escaped unharmed.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Annals of derp: The Texas Criminal Alien caper

Texas Department of Public Safety.

The chart of total Texas alien (red and green) vs. non-alien (blue) arrests for the past 30 months put out by the Texas Department of Public Safety has some interesting properties. The most interesting, in my opinion, is the way it is not to scale, so that the blue part, with numbers representing about 92% of the total, looks like it's a little less than half. [jump]

National Review Safer, Still Lying, and Less Read

Wesley J. Smith, in a self-portrait revealing how deeply he identifies with fetuses, to the point of believing he looks like one.

Texas Abortion Safer, Still Legal, and More Rare

By Wesley J. Smith

That's the headline for the reproduction in National Review Online of a couple of paragraphs ripped from the Houston Chronicle noting the busting of a Houston women's health care clinic for performing abortions without admission privileges at any nearby hospital, in [jump]

Texas Punish Women for Existing Law

When the Texas abortion bill was still under consideration by the courts, it was all about safety for women. In fact that's what they called it, the "abortion safety law". Townhall, November 1:

A panel of judges at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision Thursday that reinstates most of Texas’ new abortion safety law.

Now it's taking effect, they're telling the truth, and the glee is unrestrained:

Meanwhile in Texas: Abortion Appointments Canceled, Clinics Closing All Across State

Headline and (uncredited, i.e., stolen) image from Townhall.