Texas Progessives winter holidays roundup

Texas Progressive Alliance wishes a Merry Christmas to all who celebrate as it brings you this week's roundup. 

Off the Kuff contemplates the Rep. Dustin Burrows situation.  

SocraticGadfly talks about climate crisis tipping points news..  

The Bloggess announces the 15th Annual James Garfield Miracle.

 Evil MoPac names and shames some Christmas songs.

 Texas 2036 reviews the year's top stories in higher education.

Nonsequiteuse is done with the casual sexism of some elected leaders.

Mean Green Cougar Red eulogizes Houston transit advocate Janis Scott.  

Rabbi Levi Greenberg writes about Hanukkah's message that evil can be defeated. Being on vacation, I didn't advance-screen this piece that Kuffner came up with, but reading now? If it's got a picture of Chabad at the top of the column, it's Zionist. (Not to mention the Lubavicher angle.) Also, since Hanukkah was adapted from an already existing Persian winter solstice festival, it's a lie. And, reading between the lines about the celebration of the fall of the House of Assad in Syria, and the silence on something else, it's anti-Palestinian. Shock me that Kuff, who passes by the plight of Palestine and pro-Palestinian protestors in silent contempt, would like something like this. But, with the lateness of Hanukkah this year, I'm leaving this note here, and not deleting the piece, so I can blog even further on Jan. 2, if I remember.

State-level Democrats are environmental hypocrites, too

Yes, I know that Dems control the governor's office and both houses of the Lege in New Mexico, the Land of Disenchantment.

But? Look at the money they rake in from the oil and gas world, per Capital & Main. Yea, the independents and wildcatters still give more to Republicans, but the oil majors? They tilt Democrat because they're paying for "access."

Now, paying a ConservaDem like George Munoz, one of the barons of the New Mexico Senate? Understandable, as is his taking the money.

Paying Nathan Small in the state House? Yeah, understandable if he'll take the money.

But, on his side? As Capital & Main notes, he's also an organizer withe New Mexico Wild. Let's read his touts there:

Nathan first joined New Mexico Wild in in 2004, after graduating with dual degrees in Philosophy and English from the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. Nathan is a third generation New Mexican who comes from a family of ranchers and educators. Nathan was a key team member working to secure and then safeguard National Monument protection for the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks and continues to work on additional landscape scale protections in Southern New Mexico.. Now there are 10 new wilderness areas in the OMDP.

Big environmentalist, right?

Back to Capital & Main.

First, his rake:

Not bad, eh?

Rep. Small received $16,100 from the industry in the 2022 election. For his 2024 election, that rose to $87,451 (of just over $385,000 in total donations), making him No. 3 in the state among Democratic recipients of such funds, after House Speaker Javier Martinez and Senate Finance Chairman George Muñoz. Between 2020 and 2024 he was promoted to chair the House Appropriations and Finance Committee, which also made him vice chair of the overarching Legislative Finance Committee, two of the most powerful positions in New Mexico’s Legislature. And he is one of the few top money recipients to have a contested race this year, which he won by 544 votes out of 14,244 cast in his race.

His babbling aside:

Does the combination of conservation work and oil and gas money make him uncomfortable? “No,” he said. “I want to have an open door and a large table for folks who see challenges and want to propose and bring solutions to those challenges.” Does he solicit campaign donations from oil and gas companies? “I engage with stakeholders, and certainly will, in appropriate ways, during campaigns, ask for support from a wide range of stakeholders for campaign efforts,” he said.

“At the state level, over the past five years, and particularly in the past three or four years, [we] have significantly increased enforcement of our common sense [oil and gas] rules,” Small said. “That’s resulted in significantly more fines for folks who are doing the wrong thing.”

He's a fricking hypocrite. He knows the oil and gas world causes climate change, has been in denial about that, and today is in the land of pretending to do something about that. That's even as Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham touts environmentally dirty blue hydrogen for hydrogen-powered cars because it's based on natural gas.

And, he's married to former ConservaDem Congresscritter Xochitl Torres Small. (Read some of the links at her Wiki page for her being a sellout to the awl bidness. Here's one to get started.) The piece didn't mention that, but it should have, that they're married.

Update, Feb. 19, 2025: Again from Capital and Main, more Small hypocrisy. And again, with another post March 12.

Wouldn't it be cool to see Betelgeuse go supernova?

Scientists know, in a general way, that that event is not incredibly far away — that is, not incredibly far away on Betelgeuse's specific timeline within the normal interstellar timeline for a red supergiant. But, no more than that. 

And, they know fairly well how powerful of a Type IIa supernova this would be.

It's all here.

Picture a Betelgeuse first becoming as bright as the crescent moon, in the last pre-supernova throes, per that picture.

Then, picturing a massive resurgence at supernova itself, to where it becomes brighter than the full moon. Wouldn't that light up the midwinter sky?

Now, one question? That 640 light years isn't that that far away on other issues. How much supernova radiation bombards our planet?

First, we read Jessica Pishko skeptically

Having now read her book, "The Highest Law in the Land," this is a riff on my old blog piece about the book, which riffed on Shakespeare in saying, "First, we get rid of all the sheriffs."

The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy by Jessica Pishko
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

For me thinking of other reviewers, on Goodreads, it was really right at 2.5, but I'm bumping down, albeit reserving the right to come back and bump back up. For me as me, it's at 2 stars flat and period

First, Pishko is preaching to the converted, overall, per the non-nutter 2-star reviewer besides me. That said, that's with an asterisk which I'll get to at the end.

Second, without claiming to know every detail of every movement within the constitutional sheriffs' world, I've long known the big picture, so nothing new here. In addition, I'd read two reviews of the book already, one at Capital and Main and the other at the Texas Observer, per my original piece. With that said?

I'm not converted on her "ergo" — the elimination of sheriffs. Not at all convinced. I have the advantage, per other lower-star reviewers, of living in a semi-rural county and knowing enough about sheriff's offices and sheriffs that run them — the good, the bad and the ugly.

Getting rid of ELECTING sheriffs? Hellz yes and I've said that for more than a decade, and in newspaper columns. We don't elect city police chiefs, we don't elect state directors of public safety, and we don't elect the head of the FBI, ATF, etc. Why should we elect sheriffs today? (That said, I know why, and with generally good reason, sheriffs were elected a century and more ago, and you won't find that in Pishko's book.) I've also said that, here in Tex-ass, we ought to get rid of the office of constable in every county and transfer constabular functions to that county's sheriff's office.

But, we need sheriff's-level policing. State directors of public safety, especially in plains and Western states with large counties, don't want to take that over, either. Patrolling county roads and knowing signs to look for is different than highway patrol. And, first-order investigative work is different from second order work that a state bureau of investigtion does.

So keep sheriffs. Just don't elect them. (And, beyond the constitutional sheriffs movement, there's plenty of other reason to remove politics from sheriff's offices, and, as a newspaper editor, I've seen and heard some of that personally.)

For other reasons, I disagree on abolishing jails. I agree on abolishing private prison contractors. I agree with making it easier for many people who have been arrested, mainly non-violent detainees, to bond out more easily. I agree with spending more money on jailer pay and total jailers, and also having somebody besides the sheriff run them. But, not every detainee should bond out easily. And, jails are also needed for more severe non-felony convictions. (I am talking specifically about jails, not prisons.)

And now, that asterisk. It comes from the conclusion, where Pishko goes off on mass incarceration, sheriffs and immigration and even Roe.

She makes clear she's a Democrat.

I'm a non-duopoly leftist, so I'm going to speak from her left.

Clinton, Obama and Biden, all in their first two years in office, had the opportunity of doing something in terms of federal protection for abortion, beyond EMTALA, which we've seen how post-Dobbs courts treat. They didn't. And, in any case, that has ZERO to do with sheriff's offices.

Mass incarceration? It is a problem. And national and state Democrats as well as Republicans, have largely supported the War on Drugs that is a primary fueler of it. Presidents of both parties have supported militarization of city police, county sheriffs and state departments of public safety all alike, as discussed in a book like Radley Balko's "The Rise of the Warrior Cop." (Balko has his own problems as an extreme libertarian, like wanting to entirely get rid of DWI laws; that's part of why I said "a book like.")

As for getting rid of policing in general, as proposed by Alex Vitale, who blurbs this book and with whom Pishko seems to half agree or more? No, policing doesn't have roots in colonialism, slavery and the rise of industrialization. I addressed that in refuting policing myths of libertarians and the New Left, noting that "the Shah's eyes and ears" of the Achaemenid Empire were cops. (Balko, unsurprisingly, is among those who gets this totally wrong.) Likewise, in writing about what I already knew about the book a month or so ago, I said Plato's archons were cops, or at least halfway so.

Immigration? Dear Leader (that would be Barack Obama) practiced family separation at the border before Trump did. Biden continued Trump's Article 42 by other means, namely tech-neoliberal ones.

Related? Presidents of both parties have continued government deals with private prison contractors on housing detained immigrants.

View all my reviews