With Texas Senate Democrats, who needs Texas Republicans?

More than half of Democrats in the Texas Senate earlier this week joined Dannie Goeb and all Republicans in supporting SB 990, which gets even more ghoulish about the death penalty in the Pointy Abandoned Object State.

For the unaware, the bill now means that killing a 10-15 year old becomes capital murder, even without another crime. It also gives prosecutors, despite their 96 percent conviction rate on crimes in Tex-ass in general, "enhanced tools." Fourth degree instead of third? It also "closes legal loopholes and gaps." Like, "Hey, he's 9 years, 364 days old, or 15 years, 1 day old?" What stupidity. 

Stupidity and concern-trolling and virtue-signaling that 6 of 11 Senate Democrats voted FOR.

Before that, apparently ALL Senate Dems joined Rethuglicans in saying that K-12 public school teachers MUST tell their students about the "unique" evils of Communism.

What? They can't teach both sides, like the Southlake Carroll administrator telling teachers there to talk about "opposing views" on the Holocaust?

In reality, because SB 24 doesn't mention fascism (let alone capitalism) it's virtue signaling on those grounds alone.

It's also virtue signaling, because of what I said yesterday about national-level Democrats, that it doesn't mention Zionism.

Maybe I should be quiet, before Dan-o brings up another bill about Islamo-terrorism.

The death penalty — the US isn't totally an outlier

First, off to those nice polite Canadians.

Canada doesn't actually have the death penalty. It got rid of it long ago. But, via David Moscrop at Substack? A majority of Canadians wish they had it.

In this year’s survey, just over half of Canadians (53 per cent, down five points since 2023) think the death penalty is “sometimes” appropriate. About one in four (26 per cent, up one point) say it is “never” appropriate, while 14 per cent (up five points) say it is “always” appropriate.

Interestingly, per the story, that's a marginal decline from 2020, but not a real decline:

Starting in 2020, Research Co. and Glacier Media have asked Canadians annually about their views on the death penalty for murder. Although our country eliminated this possibility in July 1976, we have consistently seen about half of Canadians voicing support for reinstating capital punishment.

Also interestingly, that 53 percent doesn't exactly match with:

Lest one thinks, from what Americans know of politics north of the border from south of the border, this isn't all Conservatives. 

Conservative voters in 2021 are more likely to endorse this course of action (69 per cent) than counterparts who voted for the Liberal Party (56 per cent) or the New Democratic Party (49 per cent).

I guess Greens don't count in Canadian polling any more than in US polling. (Canada has no real equivalent of the US Libertarian Party. In Europe, people who identify as libertarian there think that US L/libertarians are fucking nuts, and they're right.)

There's also one other point, that we'll get to in more detail in a minute.

The intriguing fluctuations on this question are related to ethnic origin. While 31 per cent of Canadians of European descent believe the death penalty is “never” appropriate, the proportions are lower among respondents whose origins are Indigenous (20 per cent), South Asian (15 per cent) and East Asian (10 per cent).

Really? Yes.

Japan is one of four democracies, or alleged ones, that still has the death penalty. Per Wiki, it's executed 98 people this century. Aside from the US, those other countries are Singapore (shock) and Taiwan. It's also still on the books in South Korea, but on hiatus there since 1998.

And, I don't think I need to spell out the ethnicity of those places.

Now, the 98 in Japan is far fewer than the 1,018 in the US this century. 

That then said, what prompted this is that Japan, in at least one case, has shown that it can be as egregious in prosecutorial misconduct in a murder trial as in the US.

Zionist Dems trying to "own" Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe

Yeah, for shits and giggles, its "fun" watching Senate Democrats call out the trio of the Department of Defense Drunkards, Department of National Intelligence Israeliness, and Central Intelligence Agency, respectively over Hegseth's — or somebody else's — looping Jonah Goldberg into a Signal chat. (It would have been overkill to do the "Intelligence" strikethrough a second time.) A kudo, with surprise, to Goldberg for having the Atlantic run the basics of what he had.

But? John Warner, Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, Jimmy Gomez in the House?

All Zionists.

All cutters of blank checks for #GenocideJoe and Kamala is a Zionist Cop over the genocide in Gaza — a genocide to which the Houthis reacted with their Red Sea maritime patrols.

In other words, these Zionist Democrats are the reason that Trump and his national security advisor Mike Waltz — the person who reportedly actually screwed the pooch — are making war plans against Yemen.

And, for #BlueAnon on Shitter? "Whiskileaks" may sound funny as a trending item, but, since Mike Waltz — who now has been shown to have left a Venmo account unsecured — is the problem, not Hegseth, it's another swing and a miss.

Oh, and since the Nat-sec Nutsacks™ class within Blue Anon hated the actual Wikileaks long before Julian Assange rightly earned hatred over Seth Rich conspiracy theory promotion, it's a swing and a miss that way, too. 

On the more serious side? Waltz is a Green Beret, Bronze Stars, not going through life "(fat), drunk and stupid," etc., the level of incompetence is more scary than if it were him rather than Hegseth.

Also on the more serious side, which the Zionists in national Democrats' contingent will also NOT like? The clusterfuck, called Signalgate now by many of them, or Signalghazi by Brian Beutler, had one good thing — it outed an Israeli spy. 

That said, per Beutler? The real issue is the one of administrative competence in general — and Trump cluelessness in general, like on not knowing about US troops dead in Lithuania.

Consider this to also be a post about The Resistance 2.0, to the degree it, as a subset of BlueAnon, applauds these callouts in Congressional testimony while ignoring the hypocrisy.

Texas Progressives talk foreign policy, abortion, measles

Off the Kuff says to be very skeptical of the arrests for allegedly performing illegal abortions announced by Ken Paxton, as all we have so far is Paxton's word for it. 

SocraticGadfly dives deep on a couple of foreign affairs issues, first looking at the at least eight sides in the Russia-Ukraine war, then looking at post-1949 Tibet-China history and the US role in it, even as a new book by the Dalai Lama ups the stakes there. 

Health experts say it could take a full year to fully contain the West Texas measles outbreak.

A judge has stricken down multiple components of 2023's SB1 on mail ballots.

Speaking of unconstitutionality, SB 2880, the Lege's latest attempt to suppress mifepristone usage and related things, almost certainly is that.

TDCJ allegedly falsified prison temperature logs? Shock me.

Neil at Houston Democracy Project noted the Houstonian who came to Council about HPD’s collaboration with ICE despite Whitmire saying that would not happen. Of course you can be disappeared to El Salvador for dissent.

Reform Austin highlights concerns that measles has on human immune systems.

The Barbed Wire observes that Texas is a testing ground for anti-abortion policies.

In the Pink feels like we're trapped in the Upside Down. 

City of Yes had a positive experience with a driverless Waymo, but doesn't want cities to learn the wrong lessons about them.

Religious beliefs and vaccination exemptions

 Yes, I know that Anabaptist types like Mennonites aren't Calvinist per se, but many of them hold to the same rigid determinism, as do the parents of the child who was the first measles death in West Texas a few weeks ago.

The child's parents make that clear.

The Texas parents of an unvaccinated 6-year-old girl who died from measles Feb. 26 told the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense in a video released Monday that the experience did not convince them that vaccination against measles was necessary.

“She says they would still say ‘Don’t do the shots,’” an unidentified translator for the parents said. “They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be.”

The West Texas measles outbreak, the biggest in the state in 30 years, has infected more than 270 people and hospitalizing dozens of them. Public health officials have repeatedly told Texans that studies have time and time again shown that the safest and most effective way to avoid contracting the very infectious, life-threatening disease is to vaccinate with the measles-mumps-rubella shot.

The couple, members of a Mennonite community in Gaines County with traditionally low vaccination rates, spoke on camera in both English and Low German to CHD Executive Director Polly Tommey and CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker.

“It was her time on Earth,” the translator said the parents told her. “They believe she’s better off where she is now.”

What do you say in response to that?

It's hard, but not THAT hard theologically, as I will address on my other blog site.

For here?

For the parents not keeping children home when unvaccinated, this is an infliction of their religious belief on others. Parents who don't believe their children are predestined to get measles, and have their kids vaccinated, shouldn't have to deal with a "breakthrough" case. Nor should they have to deal with more generalized school disruptions.

Nor, to be blunt, should they have to deal with, for the public eye, pretending sympathy for another family they may not feel in reality.

And, they shouldn't have to.

Especially when, reading between the lines of Covenant Hospital's statement, these parents are willing to lie for their religion.

And, with that sort of lying, they surely don't care about endangering others.

Which they are.

Health experts say it could take a full year to fully contain the West Texas measles outbreak:

“This demonstrates that this (vaccine exemption) policy puts the community, the county, and surrounding states at risk because of how contagious this disease is,” said Glenn Fennelly, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases and assistant vice president of global health at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso. “We are running the risk of threatening global stability.”

There you go.

That said, per that same piece, is this all about religion or not? One person says no:

Katherine Wells, director of public health for the City of Lubbock, during a Tuesday meeting of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a national organization for large metropolitan health departments ... said efforts to increase the vaccination rates in Gaines County, which is about 70 miles from Lubbock, and the surrounding region have been slow as trust in the government has seemingly reached an all-time low.

“We are seeing, just like the rest of Americans, this community has seen a lot of stories about vaccines causing autism, and that is leading to a lot of this vaccine hesitancy, not religion,” she said.

But, putting the cloak of religion on non-religious beliefs is an all-American pastime. 

Beyond religious issues, here in Tex-ass, as the piece notes, is state Republicans continuing to gut local control of local issues. Seminole ISD doesn't have the power to close local schools, for example.

On this and related issues, Texas gets unfavorably compared with New Mexico.

Putin is no Churchill, and no Stalin, either

A few weeks ago, I wrote in depth about Der Spiegel's piece about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a new Churchill and how he had not only gotten hoist on this petard, but was keeping himself hanging.

So, what about his counterpart, Russian President Vladimir Putin?

I've semi-regularly called him Vlad the Impaler, after Vlad Tepes, aka Count Dracul. But, that's a figure from many centuries ago,  that works primarily as a pun of sorts.

What Putin is NOT is Uncle Joe Stalin. First, contra the tankies, he's not a Communist. Second, while Stalin, at least theoretically, opposed Russian nationalism continuing from Tsarist times — a stance that, as Lenin's Commissar of Nationalities, helped get us into the situation we're in — Putin is indeed a Russian nationalist.

So, if not Stalin, and not Vlad Tepes, as he predates post-Thirty Years War modern nationalism, who is he?

Could he be, per Montefiore's book on Stalin as the Red Tsar, some sort of Black Tsar? A quasi-fascist tsar? I mean, post-Yeltsin, he shook down the oligarchs just enough .... to line his pockets, keep them in line, yet keep them loyal by protecting them.

But, not a fully fascist one. Yes, Prigozhin owned a few things, but government ownership of the means of production without a dictatorship of the proletariat? Putin's not a fascist; of course, compared to Mussolini, Hitler wasn't totally a fascist,either.

As for trusting Putin? Or, per Norm Finkelstein, saying his invasion is "justified"? Uhh, no.

Let's start with John McCain vs. George W. Bush. Without supporting McCain's idea then, or others today, of expanding NATO to included Ukraine (or Georgia), he was right when he responded to Bush by saying that, contra Shrub, when he looked in Putin's eyes he saw three letters — "KGB."

In one of the KGB's more odious moments, in the early 1980s, it was the apparent originator of the claim that the US had engineered the AIDS virus for population control of African-Americans, Black Africans, or both. And, in South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki, this led to horrendous AIDS deaths. In the US, it built on Black mistrust of the medical world because of things like the Tuskegee experiments. You know, the KGB in which Putin served 1975-90.

Ken Paxton, Coppell ISD and falling for "sting" videos

Setting aside the asshattery of Kenny Boy Paxton suing Coppell ISD for being DEI or whatever? If you're a school superintendent in Texas, how do talk to some rando coming to your district without thoroughly vetting them, which Superintendent Evan Whitfield apparently failed to do with Accuracy in Media's non-ambush videographer?

I mean, to get into a building, AIM's dude had to present a driver's license. In these days, at a school district of any size, if I don't know who "Accuracy in Media" is (assuming the dude was truthful about who he was working for), I do teh google. I also google dude's name. And, since we have his DL, I use Google Images or similar to match his face with what's available online, and to see if that matches otherwise.

I mean, it's 2025. How do you fall for a sting video, especially on a subject like this? James O'Keefe's ACORN sting happened back in 2009.