Texas Progressives look at the domestic news

 SocraticGadfly from vacation experience, talked about just how bad Southworst has gotten, along with an ethical reason to stop flying them.

Off the Kuff had the July campaign finance reports for US Senate and Congress. 

The Texas Ten Commandments bill faces a new challenge — in state court, under state laws. (As I said in a comment at that Substack, its 1A-based federal challenge is not dead, contra the author of the piece; it simply has yet to be heard by the US Supreme Court after the Fifth Circuit overruled a federal district court.) 

GLO Commish Dawn Buckingham is standing up to the Border Patrol, in an issue that (unironically, I am guessing) involves a private landholder called Trans Pecos Ice. Will she eventually fold like a cheap cocktail dress?

The Observer details the problems with outsourcing state foster care. 

The battle over a proposed new high-voltage power line running to and from the Odessa area (a battle flooding my office email inbox) is heating up. And, Dannie Goeb is officially on the "no line" side.

At the Monthly, Robert Downen says Paxton is taking Talarico more seriously. That said, when you leave your own press conference, how serious are you?

The Observer looks at Houston's attempt to investigate ICE's killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, including Mayor John Whitmire's problematic opening stance. It's also complicated by Strangeabbott now getting the Texas stRangers (them, not the folks in Arlington) to do THEIR OWN investigation, with which the feds ARE cooperating. I see all sorts of reasons for this, not only PR and sweeping under the rug issues, but perhaps an attempt to deliberately generate state crime double jeopardy issues. Strangeabbott IS a lawyer, after all.

Neil at Houston Democracy Project said court decision ending Houston’s woman/minority setaside program, Whitmire still saying HPD does not contact ICE & HPD over-policing of protest shows how much work remains in so many arenas. The next action is when you organize it.  

RIP Kay Granger. Did she get forgotten in that nursing home type place? 

The Current finds CD23 candidate Brandon Herrera being an even bigger douche than before.

The Texas Signal reports on the “Data Center Week of Action” at the Capitol.

The Bloggess explains why she sometimes disappears.

Sam Husseini supposedly "may" run for Congress — I'm "mid" on this

Sam Husseini may run for Congress in Maryland. Sam, as long as you steer away from the conspiracy theory that Zionists whacked Jack, you'll get all the non-monetary support I can give from afar. Go down that road, though, and you're toast with me, and I'll bet with voters as well. 

The "may" is in scare quotes in the header because the Maryland Green Party has already chosen him. What, is Husseini going to pull an Uncle Billy Sherman and decline to run? I just learned that with teh google after already working on this piece, which adds an additional bit of spicyness. 

But, on his website, all he says is "exploratory committee" (which still asking for dinero). Sam, you've been nominated, and as a Green, not part of the duopoly. Intellectual dishonesty, like napalm, is apparently leaving a morning aroma. 

So, let's nuance that support more. I may nuance it completely away by the end.

A couple of years ago, Husseini went beyond legitimate (legitimate in terms of science, not in terms of thought-policing) questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology to claims about bioweaponization of COVID. Husseini does nuance himself on his Substack by noting a lab leak is not necessarily indicative of lab origin. But, in that same piece, he then goes down the nutter shitpile with:

The attempts to further define away dangerous lab work are even more nefarious when one considers that this entire field is arguably a euphemism for biowarfare.

Uhh, no. First, as I've noted on this issue, China would never allow US scientists access to Wuhan in such a case. Second, like the USSR with its pre-1989 bioweapons research, a Chinese bioweapons lab would be in a place far less populated than Wuhan. That's a serious level of lack of critical thinking.

He continues in that same vein in the next paragraph, using "accidental lab leak" and "biowarfare" in the same sentence.

Two paragraphs later, we go further down conspiratorial rabbit holes:

"Lab leak" implies accident. From the available information, it's possible that the pandemic origins had nothing to do with a lab (less and less likely by the day), it's possible that it accidentally leaked out a lab in Wuhan -- and it's possible that there was intentional release. There are a number of possibilities on the last possibility that I plan on fleshing out in a future piece. The most obvious is that someone was out to frame the Chinese.

Again, no. How could US government agents break into the Wuhan Institute of Virology and leak coronavirus-19? With that question mark, I now place Husseini into the realm of "just asking questions." Hold on to that thought. 

Oh, I'm not alone in wondering. Black Agenda Report, when it was still good, called him out. (This was the just about the top hit when I googled "Sam Husseini" + conspiracy theorist.) It nails the same things I did with this:

Husseini first pulls off this canard by arguing that there is no meaningful difference between biowarfare and biodefense. This is hardly true. Although there is always some overlap between basic science, medicine, preventive research, and warfare, there are also serious differences in emphasis, approach, practice, and funding that he glosses over. Husseini has to assert this tenuous proposition in order to implicate the Wuhan lab in suspected biowarfare malfeasance (or error), and to claim that there is a global biowarfare arms race between China and the US (rather than by the US against its opponents). That linguistic sleight of hand, in particular, the equivalence of biowarfare and biodefense is factually not true, and is certainly not true in one very obvious way regarding the Wuhan lab: if there were a biowarfare arms race happening around the world, the countries putatively at war with each other--the US and China--would not share or allow access to their labs to a competitor state, collaborate, or exchange their research and researchers.

And, the other shoe on that? 

As a point of contrast, no one, not a single Chinese national has ever set foot in Fort Dietrick, the key US biowarfare research lab. No Chinese university has ever collaborated with them. No Chinese funding has been directed to it. No one knows exactly what they are researching.

Yeah, handwaving, conspiracy theory version. 

Also at my second piece, tying to the top link in the third paragraph, he claims Mossad whacked Karen Silkwood. My take is that someone was indeed trying to intimate Silkwood, to the possible point of running her off the road, but not killing her, first, and that said person was working for Kerr-McGee, if anybody, and not Mossad.

He's also kind of clueless with VotePact. 

And, per the "about" page on his Substack, he also thinks the 2014 Ebola outbreak was a lab leak. Here's more that he's written on that. The main problem is that the paper argues from silence. Even if the "official" individual line that bats caused Ebola didn't find infected bats in the relevant area of West Africa doesn't mean that lab leak is the automatic alternative. (His own piece notes that Ebola symptoms are highly variable and West Africans on the ground suggested malaria as an alternative in some cases.) Wiki's long page on the outbreak indicates the "official" framing was never as precise as Husseini portrays it.

Now we get to the nutgraf, 1/3 through his piece on Ebola. That's that it could have been a lab leak from a US lab in Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo). Wiki's page addresses that; it notes a 2014 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo showed the viral strain there closely related to previous outbreaks in Central Africa, but the West African outbreak showed no links. 

And, at this point, I don't really feel like even grokking through the other 2/3. Why? Because it's the same level of fucking stupidity as his take on COVID.

Let's add that he has defended Brainworm Bobby against charges of antivaxxerism. Speaking of, here's Brainworm Bobby aping Husseini's line of thought with nutbar claims that Lyme disease and RSV were also created by gain-of-function research. Per the first link in this paragraph and my top link, it also sounds like Husseini was already a JFK conspiracy theorist before latching on to the "zionists did it" angle. This Shitter link of his offers further confirmation. Furthering the nuttery, the person he quote-Shits, Monika Wiesak, apparently believes that JFK Jr was also "whacked" rather than being an underskilled, irrationally overconfident pilot. Otherwise, Monika Wiesak is a total fruitcake herself, and contra her "JFK: Myth vs Reality" the real myth vs reality is guzzling the Camelot Kool-Aid versus knowing the reality of NSAM-263 in Kennedy foreign policy and knowing that in domestic policy the best thing Jack ever did for civil rights was to have Lee Harvey Oswald blow his head off so LBJ could make him into a martyr for the cause.

So, actually, my thought is, best of luck against Glenn Ivey. I do know that Maryland has a fairly strong Green Party to help. But, I won't go out of my way in offering support from afar. And, if you were running against a non-Zionist Democrat, I wouldn't give you the time of day. Even against Ivey, were I in MD-4, I'd have to hold my nose.

My second thought is, once again, contra Noah Berlatsky, who's not really a leftist himself, this shows that horseshoe theory is true and the likes of Husseini illustrate that. 

Texas Progressives look at the rest of Merikkka

I split my version of this week's Texas Progressives roundup into two parts. The in-Texas stuff comes later this week.

Democratic insurgents are stepping front and center, as Abdul El-Sayed looks to get the US Senate nod in Michigan (as Elissa Slotkin tries to surf between the lines) and Francesca Hong (recently profiled by Klippenstein) leads the race for Wisconsin's gubernatorial nod, despite incumbent Tony Evers' meddling. It appears lessons from Maine and elsewhere are being learned slowly, if at all. And, to the degree insurgents are staking out antizionist stances, the old guard may not be learning them at all. Ken now has an update piece about both.

Matthew Cole and Max Blumenthal are in various stages of legal battles against the government on its attempts to discover sources on their electronic devices. In Max's case, the problem was instigated by the person I called "Loony Laura Loomer, lying lizard."

Your Local Epidemiologist urges everyone (Republicans) to leave Dr. Fauci alone already. I will, YLE, if he admits his many screwups, which I rounded up in writing about his not-totally-noble original Platonic lie (also calling out his defenders, which include you), a follow-up less noble yet Platonic lie about herd immunity, followed by the set of non-public, totally ignoble, less than Platonic lies exposed by his emails. Kuff, if you're going to include a link like this in your version of the roundup, it's not going to run here without being thoroughly backgrounded. Rand Paul et al are largely full of shit, but Fauci is a piece of work himself.

Southworst officially shits the bed — personal vacation experience, non-Zionist version

For “Southworst,” we’re talking about the legacy airline (you are) officially called Southwest, and for non-Zionist version, we’re riffing on Paul Singer, creator of Elliott Investment Management, to whom the then-current Southworst board and top brass repeatedly and incrementally caved in to in 2024-25, and who is himself indeed an ardent Zionist.

(On that? Washington Report on Middle East Affairs wrote back in 2019 about Singer’s efforts to fund growth in Israel’s high-tech industry. In other words, spyware like Pegasus may be in part funded by the guy who now owns a chunk of Southworst. And, a year earlier, Mondoweiss called out New Yorker for “Zion-washing” its profile of Singer. I have added both links to his Wiki profile; we’ll see if the changes stick. Given Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales’ own well-known Zionism, I won’t hold my breath.)

The first cave (for the general public) was eliminating the old iconic “cattle car” open seating in fall 2024. (The actual first cave was a month earlier, with six board members stepping down and chairman and former CEO Gary Kelly agreeing to leave not too long later.)

As regular Southworst fliers know, the company ended its iconic “bags fly free” in the summer of 2025.

I had not, before that, taken a non-Southwest flight anywhere in more than a decade, probably since Southworst decided to not follow legacy airlines in not charging for checked bags.

That was even though, in October 2024, among the other changes, it had indicated bags would still fly free because an internal survey, per this story, said:

Southwest, which has built years of advertising campaigns around bags-fly-free, estimated that bag fees would raise about $1.5 billion a year, but eliminating the perk could drive away passengers, costing the airline $1.8 billion, or a net loss of $300 million a year.

But, nine months later, they decided to charge for bags anyway.

As a result, I flew American out of DFW rather than Southworst out of Love Field for New Year’s week time off last year.

OK.

Summer vacation time.

Closest major or semi-major airport to Yellowstone is Salt Lake City. Bozeman, Montana, actually had a nonstop on the AA, but omigod the rental car price difference humongous and not worth it.

So, Southworst it was.

And, my non-free bags, I learned, certainly didn’t pay to improve the flight experience. They probably are doing nothing but enriching Singer’s moneybags, which as a good Zionist, to get back to the second part of the header, means, they’re enriching Satanyahu’s bags, a legionary demon I am currently powerless to drive out.

And, Southworst it was.

Outbound from Love Field? More than an hour late.

Why? Our pilot was running another bird, and it was running late. Southworst has a habit of doing this. It’s happened to me personally at least once, if not twice, before.

Return from SLC? About 2.5 hours late. Our bird was coming with our pilot from Baltimore, and who knows where before that. The Midwestern heat dome and too early in the day for heavy thunderstorms shouldn’t have delayed it that much. But it did, including delays before Magic City.

But this is the new Southwest, per this airline industry website piece that notes it is LITERALLY at the bottom of the heap now on on-time percentage. Header:

65% On-Time: Southwest Falls From America’s Most Punctual To Rock Bottom
In 6 Months

Just wow.

Now, the piece notes this is in part due to Southworst’s flight model, which, while not fully point-to-point, is quasi-so, with a semi-hub backbone of sorts. (I long ago saw a term for this, never wrote it down or saved the website, and have never seen it again.) It does mean fewer cancellations, but at the expense of delays that mount up more and more, as well as spreading more and more within the system. Like a Zionist virus? Yes, I went there.

And, after giving you one chance? As I texted back on my Sunday phone alert when told my return flight would run late, after starting with “Fucktards,” said I would be looking American-first again on future flights.

Now, if only McKinney, northeast of Dallas, could expand their soon-to-be commercial airport and get Delta, United or — whoever else is left among the legacy, not the enshittified from the start JetBlue airlines of the world — anybody else reasonable there, per my story about signing up with the AA.

“Enshittification,” he said, per Cory Doctorow.

Yes, and like Southworst’s flight delays dominoing because of their operations model— and also, their long-enshittified crew scheduling software and system still not supposed to be updated until 2028, because “the chariots and horsemen and Merkavas and Uzis of Israel” need more money or something — this dominoed. (Anyway, the main point is that Southworst’s bags fees aren’t paying yet for fixes. If Paul Singer really cared, this would be addressed by now.)

 

My rental from Hertz? I didn’t thoroughly check when I left SLC’s rentals lot. I noticed when I stopped for a Coke in Ogden or wherever, that the back of the passenger side mirror was gone. Didn’t take a photo at the time, because, running late and Grand Teton is a long ways away. I didn’t notice until even later, and didn’t include it on my initial post-return report to Hertz, which enshittifiedly (I can invent that word) is limited to 500 words, that the vehicle had no driver’s floormat, either, so who knows how long it had been since they’d really checked it anyway? So now we get to see if Hertz accepts that, if that rental car insurance peddled by Travelocity is actually worth anything and more.

The 2.5 hours late on return flight? I didn’t get back home until midnight Sunday night/Monday, and didn’t get unwound enough and late-night fed enough to sleep until after 2 a.m. As I type this on Tuesday, I remain in a bit of brain fog. (SLC being hotter than the greater Metromess didn’t help, nor, probably, did me hiking in 100-plus heat up to the last half-hour before having to return the rental.)

I also couldn’t stop by a Barnes & Noble on the way home, as originally planned, to try to snag a copy of the new issue of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, de rigueur for people in my line of work here in Tex-ass.

Scratch that. B&N ain’t open at 11 p.m. It would be (I think) at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday.

As for a vauntedly low cancellation rate? Per the Transportation Department itself, cancellations are the cause of ONLY ONE PERCENT of late arrivals. Do NOT NOT NOT let Southworst gaslight you on that.

Plus, isn’t a delay of 2.5 hours essentially a cancellation anyway?

Or, to put it in Paul Singer terms?

About 2.5 hours may be how often in a day an Israeli kills a Palestinian.

There.

If there were a god, I’d think I was being punished for some moral violations. I don’t even have that opening.

 ==

Southworst are also chickenshits. Can't find a specific email address I want on the website. They've deserted Shitter, with an account inactive for 2-plus years, as well as deserting Book of Face, where I no longer am. (They have no linked logo for either account.) They're not on Threads or Instagram, either. Only LinkedIn and Pinterest of all things. Social media as turd polishing is what that one is. 

Loony Laura Loomer, lying lizard

It's for the alliteration, not David Icke, but if a non-antisemitic anti-Zionist shoe pinches? So be it.

LLL, for short, walks, talks and quacks like being a paid Ukrainian agent while in lying denial of how she got to this point. Here's that:

“I’ve come to realize I was bamboozled by Russian propaganda and I came to believe a lot of untrue things about Ukraine. I used to think that this was a country full of Nazis,” Loomer told Zelenskyy as she interviewed him for her show on Rumble, an online video platform. 

Loomer blamed her indoctrination on getting banned by American social media platforms, leading her to try Telegram, where Russian media is widely shared.

I quoted the second of those two paragraphs when I posted the link to Shitter Monday night, the Shitter where LLL is a blue-check verified (and "verified!") account that I tagged. It's an account that's active and used regularly.

Per this piece, that's the same Shitter that did NOT ban her when she raised anti-Russian conspiracy theories about the "why" of Lindsey Graham's death. I actually thought the Zionist god of Elijah, the god of "the chariots and horsemen and Merkavas and Uzis of Israel," had called him home. On Shitter at the time of Huckleberry J. Butchmeup's death and claims by her and others to this end, I joked about Vlad the Impaler shooting him in the butt with a polonium-210 pellet, but seeing that it was a cardiac problem that killed him, I said that was more likely to have come from snorting too many lines of coke with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Zionist and other neocon reptilians, Jew and Goy alike, lie out their asses in Hitlerian ways, of course. 

Back to the first piece, and this:

Loomer has said repeatedly that Ukraine did not finance her trip and insisted she had traveled in her own capacity. 

“I can guarantee you I wasn’t paid by anybody. I certainly wasn’t paid by the government of Ukraine to come here,” she said.

Really? 

Per the book of Proverbs, the guilty flee when nobody is pursuing. Sounds like you probably are paid and are trying to get ahead of the game. 

Other parts of her nuttery talk about Ukraine being Mooslimrein, but seeming to insinuate Russia has problems because it's NOT Mooslimrein. 

Maybe Jim Stiles wasn't all wrong, and not just about Utah's red rock country

These thoughts were provoked by this Substack piece about a Wilderness Study Area on the South Fork of the Crooked River. 

For the unknowing, here are two definitional points.

First, here's what a wilderness study area is:

Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs) are lands that have outstanding features such as naturalness, opportunities for solitude and recreation, and other qualities that make them suitable for inclusion in the National Wilderness System. Other factors used to determine eligibility as a WSA were historic, scientific, geological, ecological, or scenic values.

There you go.

Second, there are several activities prohibited in actual wilderness lands. (Unfortunately, per the piece above, cow shit is not one of them. "Mr. Reclamation," per Marc Reisner in "Cadillac Desert," Colorado Western Slope Congresscritter Wayne Aspinall, insisted that shitting cows be allowed to remain inside wilderness areas before he'd let the eventual 1964 Wilderness Act see the light of day. 

One of them is "mechanical transport," which, per this federal law site, has always been understood to include bicycles. Mountain bikers hate this. Too bad. 

With that said, yes, a wilderness study area is not wilderness. But, it's preserved in wilderness-like status.

So, why the hell is the Oregon Desert Land Trust promoting mountain biking in the South Fork of the Crooked WSA? I quote:

Spanning both sides of the river, the South Fork Crooked River parcel helps ensure public access to fishing, hunting, hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding in the basin.

Yeesh.

And, I have emailed both their "info" general contact email and their executive director. I've heard nothing back. 

As in, I started writing this piece two weeks ago, before I went on vacation, and have heard nothing back.

Friend Lyle Lewis suspects they want their capitalist piece of the action, so that's surely why. 

So, that gets me to where I say the late, long-term Moabite curmudgeon Stiles was maybe more than half right. 

Or maybe still less than half right.

Directly relevant to the current environmental and land preservation situation, Stiles went apeshit, not over Trump shrinking Bears Ears, but Dear Leader wanting to preserve it better (sort of) a decade ago. 

And, on that part of the story, Stiles was dead wrong. As of 18 months ago, 65 percent of Utahns wanted to keep both it and GSE as is, as part of expressing support for all monuments "as is." That said, I'm not sure if that means size unchanged, or just keeping them rather than eliminating them. Of that, 51 percent were "definitely" in favor. And, 54 percent of Utah Republicans were in favor, with 30 percent definitely in favor.

The Substack that comes from fudged a bit. Yes, more than 71 percent approve of keeping Bears Ears, but that's without the "as is," which is for all national monuments. 

Speaking of? My comments on this Substack that "branding" by naming both GSE and Bears Ears National Park Service national monuments from the start might have helped is getting a lot of support. And, several commenters agree with my take on the modern Democratic party.