Texas progressives: The other stuff

It's rare that Texas makes national headlines for anything GOOD that involves politics and/or media.

Well, it got a BIG national headline from the Pulitzer Prize folks, specifically for editorial writing about the Texas prison system.

Other chunks of this week's roundup are about prisons, crime, racial bias or related issues. Let's dig in.

Texana/media/politics

Jeff Gerritt is a hero — and a dude, Capote-style, and fully deserves his Pulitzer. He's got bigger balls than I have, for sure. He's got bigger balls than Jim Schutze, perhaps, and he's out in the boonies, vs. Schutze being in a big city. Anderson County sheriff Greg Taylor? Is an asshole and shall remain so.

Schutze? Yeah, it's not local, but there are state prisons in the Metromess. Could have given Gerritt a shout-out. And didn't.

Grits notes the Texas appellate court system suffered a ransomware attack. No telling how bad it is; apparently they're not talking much besides saying it was "contained." As he notes, state district courts in Amarillo area also refused to pay, and still have problems a year after their ransomware attack.

Paradise in Hell brings us an important butt-shaking legal update.

National

SocraticGadfly has, over the last 10 days or so, written twice about the Jesse Ventura for Green Party presidential nominee nuttery. He first talks about how this shows how much Jesse is Just.Another.Politician.™ In a follow-up, he said he wants to see exactly what was in the "letter of interest" Jesse's minions sent to the Green Party and who signed it, as the Green Party currently risks looking like Just.Another.Political.Party™.

David Bruce Collins blogs about the upcoming GP National Convention officially going virtual, and a proposed language change for nominations, while not discussing, if this is "likely" to be adopted by state executive committees, how that squares with the current square-off between the Lavender Caucus and the Georgia GP, in which issue I suspect DBC has a different stance than I do.

Will Trump lose his appeal at the Supreme Court to hide his tax returns? George Conway, using the Jones vs Clinton petard on the civil side, says yes. But ... what if he does?

Glynn County, Georgia is a cesspool of racial bias in policing; DA Barnwell was a personal cesspool long before we learned of the Ahmaud Arbery shooting. Meanwhile, SCOTUS will possibly take a new look at qualified immunity grants that let many cops off the hook on shootings. See this excellent new piece from Reuters about how often it's been granted in the past.

Beyond Bones would like to put your mind at ease about those murder hornets.

World

Read the truth about the history of passports and where we might be headed in the future.