Texas Progressives talk SD30 special election, Jim Schutze, more

As we await the results of tonight's special election for Texas Senate District 30, most likely seeing which two of the six candidates make a runoff, Texas Progressives is talking about the run-up to that and various other state and national political and social items. Coronavirus news is split off again, but running after the other news and politics roundup due to election timetables reversing the normal order.

That said, one thing this corner of the Progs is not holding his breath over is the first presidential debate tonight. I'll be swimming in my apartment pool, eating late dinner and checking Twitter feeds after that, but that's it.

With that, let's dig in!

Texas

At Texas Monthly, Peter Holley asks if Shelley Luther's callout of Strangeabbott as a tyrant will help her win the SD30 special election. It's a damn good question, and the race is clearly getting feisty, complete with Drew Springer, the man who hates public schools, buying the URL for RealShelleyLuther.com. That said, Uncle Drew does have some good takedowns, including her being a coronavirus closure Karen. (My take on the race here. Assuming there's a runoff, I'll have a take on that shortly.)

Off the Kuff stays on top of the voting litigation news, with updates about the wingnut assault on early voting, and the probably short-lived reinstatement of straight-ticket voting, which Kuff unironically and without self-reflection salutes while ignoring the state's duopoly parties and state government all working together to restrict third-party voting. My take on the crock of shit ruling here.

I guess Jim Schutze didn't have enough Amber Guyger stanning at the Dallas Observer. He's now taken it to D Mag.

Malware/phishing has hit Hamilton County's elections office. Will this ramp up in weeks ahead? 

Austin is SOOO liberal on things like plastic bags. On stuff that really matters? It has finally stepped forward, as the Observer notes in talking about the city's 30-year war on homelessness, recently reversed.

Corona Connor draws some interesting maps of CD10, one of the three Congressional districts from 2018 that Beto carried but the Republican incumbent won. 

Busi Peters-Maughan implores us to respect and care for the Black matriarchs in our community. 

Grits for Breakfast calls Greg Abbott's pro-police "reforms" a distraction from his failures on COVID-19. 

Fernando Ramirez reports on Barack Obama's latest round of endorsements, which includes MJ Hegar for Senate. 

Climate change national/global

SocraticGadfly shakes his head at bipartisan foreign policy establishment doyens still too ready to guzzle Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid, in this case on climate change, along with notes about the Kabuki theater that is the UN General Assembly opening. (An upcoming post will look at certain non-skeptical leftists too willing to guzzle Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid on Uyghur camps.

New Mexico's new (from last year) laws on oil and gas emissions control appear laden with loopholes, especially on methane. Given that ConservaDem Gov Michelle Lujan Grisham touted them, is this any surprise?

Speaking of ConservaDem govs in love with Big Oil? The former Mayor Pothole, Gavin Newsom, has said one thing but often done another on regulating the industry. The story notes that things are made worse by a lot of California's oil being "heavy" and thus having additional carbon costs.

National-other

AOC tells liberal Zionists where to get off on a Rabin memorial she claims was misrepresented to her.

A reminder that the Federalist Society isn't wingnut Protestant Religious Right, it's Opus Dei Catholic like, or more specifically, Knights of Malta based. But, as the Protestant Religious Right and Israeli politicians are bedfellows of convenience, even as the Catholic headcount on SCOTUS threatens to go to six, the same here.

Conservative Cafeteria Catholics are a real thing (note winger elected officials who ignore church statements against the death penalty as firm as its anti-abortion stance), and Trump is pandering to them by attacking Pope Francis for calling him unchristian. That said, Pope Francis needs to read history. The post-Constantinian Xn-friendly Empire had walls, as did the post-Theodosius II eastern and western empires, in which Christianity was the state religion, although Constantine and his successors started moving away from static walls to defense in depth. See here, and here. This is not an endorsement of Trump, or his wall, nor a denigration of Francis. Rather, as a secularist, it's another marker in the old battle against claims that "Christianity is 'X.'" I also don't totally agree with the second "here." I think Hadrian could and should have held on to more of the Mesopotamia that Trajan had seized from the Parthians than he actually did. Francis' predecessor, Pius X, didn't use a physical wall, but boarded himself up inside the Vatican after 1870 because of the secular Italian state's riffraff, too.