An invitation to debate

So far, this delightful ad from Texas Democrat James Talarico who is contesting the state's' corrupt Attorney General Ken Paxton for a US Senate seat wins the prize for the season.

Paxton is kind of a nasty ghoul. Talarico knows how to present an attractive contrast. Which guy might you like to represent you? Polls say Talarico has a chance. 

Greg Abbott's theater of bigotry

Things I didn't have a mental picture of, but am glad to have learned -- from basketball great and good man Kareem Abdul Jabbar: 

Wudu is the Muslim ritual of washing before prayer, which we do five times daily, at dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset, and night. We begin by saying “Bismillah,” which means “In the name of God,” then wash our hands to the wrist three times, rinse the mouth and nose, wash the face, wash our arms to the elbow, wipe the head and ears with our wet hands, and finally wash our feet to the ankles. It takes just a couple of minutes but is an essential and sacred part of our religious practice.

While wudu can be done in a restroom sink, it’s hardly ideal, and some public spaces, such as universities and hospitals that serve diverse populations, provide dedicated stations as an accommodation to Muslims. That is what two airports in Texas (Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth) have done, to little fanfare or controversy until Governor Greg Abbott decided to make it his personal crusade to end this small act of courtesy. Earlier this month, Abbott sent a letter to Dallas-Fort Worth, which was planning a second station, threatening to cut off grants to the airport if it went ahead with the project, calling such facilities “illegal” and a form of “discrimination.”

Kareem's short paragraphs explain what I used to see around the corner from my mother-in-law's apartment in Manhattan -- lines of cabs parked every which way while their drivers ran briefly into the Islamic Center on the corner ...

Texas should be as bigoted as possible if you are the Republican governor. So Abbott, running for reelection, grandstands against his Muslim citizens. He won't admit that this is just ugly hate theater.  

Abbott ... he should know better. As a paraplegic who has been confined to a wheelchair since 1984, he needs special accommodations on a daily basis. When he goes to Houston or Dallas-Fort Worth airports, he surely uses the ramps designed to make life easier for disabled people like him. Why, then, is he so eager to make life harder for other people who need accommodation, in this case Muslims?

On corruption

Corruption is a descriptor that commentators throw up endlessly in relation to the Trump shit show -- but what do they mean?

As I read around the news, I've realized I'm often confused by how the word is being used.

I know instinctively what corruption means: it's what is going on when a powerful person's favor can be bought, when the recipient of a gift is bribed, is "for sale." Certainly we see plenty of that from the regime, from immigration enforcer Tom Homan's taking a fifty thousand dollar bribe in a paper bag, to the Trump spawn hitting up oil sheiks for billions, to the Orange Toddler demanding tribute from corporations, ostensibly for his ballroom. 

But the word "corruption" carries a lot of connotations less instinctive to me that are even more applicable to the Trump regime. I see the Justice Department prosecution of James Comey for seashells called "corrupt", for example and wonder how that is meant.

So -- on to the dictionary. To my surprise, in an online dictionary, the equation of "corruption" with bribery doesn't emerge until fifth definition. The first few meanings cited are "corrupt" instances of impurity whether in metals or other objects, or of sexual morals, or of integrity and honesty. 

I guess I need to revamp my internal definition. "Corruption" means first and foremost "rot on the inside," which the Donald displays extravagantly and encourages in the people who surround him. 

Democratic politicians denouncing Donald Trump use the label "corruption" -- meaning rotten at the core -- constantly. For example, I got this today in a fund appeal from Gavin Newsom: "the Trump administration is a corruption story."

• 8 or 9 countries he's done major golf course or development deals with.
• Meme coins and stablecoins.
• The Peace Board is about getting a piece for Witkoff and Kushner.
• Donald Trump Jr. with the drone and mineral companies.
• This isn't about bibles, sneakers and watches on the Trump store ...It's the greatest grift we've seen in our lifetime.

Gavin is not my guy, but he knows where GOP rot is and calls it out.

The deepest example I've seen of using the label "corruption" to describe expansively what decent citizens are up against comes from James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Texas. 

"We are living in an era of corruption. When I say corruption, I don't just mean illegal activity. I mean corruption in the deeper sense -- the rotting of something from the inside. 

Politicians serving billionaire mega donors instead of their constituents. That's political corruption. the top one percent owning more wealth than the entire middle class -- that's economic corruption. For profit social media algorithms sowing division in our communities and turning neighbor against neighbor -- that's social corruption. Our systems are rotting from the inside out. The ties that bind us together are unraveling. 

The most powerful people in this country are profiting off our pain. Profiting off our division. Profiting off our disconnection from one another. This is, at its root, a spiritual crisis. And it will require a spiritual solution." 

Clip by way of Simon Rosenberg. Talarico sees rot and claims to want to help us do better; maybe he will, though his electoral challenge is great.

An unexpectedly articulate Christian politician

Every once in a while a politician says something so intriguing that I perk up and take notice. (Yes, the contrary is also true: most of them, most of the time, are just boring.)

 

James Talarico is a young Texas Democratic state legislator who aspires to overcome better known pols and challenge the sitting Republican Senator, John Cornyn, who is up for a fifth re-election next fall. Cornyn is endangered in his own primary by the corrupt far right Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton. The last Dem nominee for Senate from Texas, Colin Allred, would be expected to clear a large field to take on either of these Republicans. 

But along comes the young guy. Texas Dems will have to decide who suits them. But I find this seminarian turned politican genuinely interesting. He has thoughtful ideas, ideas seldom expressed candidly in politics. 

From an interview Talarico did with The Bulwark's Lauren Egan:  

EGAN: I want to talk about the attack ad from Terry Virts, the former astronaut also running in the Democratic primary, criticizing you for comments made in 2021 against GOP-backed legislation on transgender issues. You talked then about how “God is nonbinary” and that there are “many more than two biological sexes.” I understand that there’s more context to the points you were trying to make. 

But do you regret those comments? Is it something you would say today?

TALARICO: I don’t regret that comment. I realize that I was being deliberately provocative, which sometimes I do, especially when I want to grab people’s attention and communicate something important. 

I understand why those comments raised eyebrows, but theologically speaking, I don’t think that’s a controversial statement. I think most of my fellow Christians would acknowledge that God is beyond gender. In fact, the Apostle Paul says in Galatians that in Christ, there is neither male nor female. So if people have a problem with that sentiment, they should take it up with the Apostle Paul, not me.

... I think in a lot of ways my party is scarred from the last election and scared of its own shadow. We’re all freaking out about what the Republicans are going to say about any given thing. My experience in politics is if you’re genuine, if you’re telling the truth, if you’re connecting with people, that’s what will matter. Don’t worry about what the other side’s gonna throw at you.

... people are starting to get wise about this strategy of people like Ken Paxton and John Cornyn—they run for office riling people up about people’s private parts, about these culture-war issues. And when they get into office, they’re cutting taxes for rich people and raising health care premiums for everybody else.

EGAN: Right. But they got into office in part because they were able to effectively rile people up about these issues. So how do you neutralize that

TALARICO: I think it’s playing into their game and we’re not going to win at that game. We have to change the game. The first words out of my mouth in this campaign and in my launch video were that “politics is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom.” So it’s completely changing how we understand and how we view politics.

... I started running for this national seat and I went to a bunch of national reporters and every single one of them asked me about trans athletes. Literally none of them asked me about childcare, none of them asked me about health care, education.

Trans athletes are a legit issue, and I’m completely willing to talk about it. But for that to be the only policy topic that any national reporters are asking about—what does that mean? Unfortunately, a lot of our media requires clicks and that is a perverse incentive, because it means the most red-meat, divisive, culture-war stuff is going to get that attention. 

But I think people are ready for someone who’s going to call that broken system out and maybe articulate another path forward of what a different politics could look like, one that’s not built on division.

EGAN: What would you say is the Bible verse that informs your politics the most?

TALARICO: One of my favorite verses [is] Matthew 5:5, which is “the meek will inherit the earth.” I talked earlier about politics being top versus bottom, and our campaign is really not coming at you from the left or from the right. It’s coming at you from the bottom. It is trying to bring working people together across all these divisions—including party, race, gender, and religion—to try to take power back.

If we bet on each other, if we love our neighbors as ourselves, ultimately people without any power can succeed. That’s a promise that’s built on faith, not necessarily on evidence. Because you look around and you’re just like ‘there’s no way you can take on these billionaire, megadonors who own all the media outlets.’ But there’s a promise there, a seed that’s planted in my tradition of betting on the underdog.

Is this a winning message in the Texas that exists in the year 2026? Who knows? I don't believe in commenting much on primaries in states where I am not a resident; local concerns are local concerns and should predominate in a healthy democracy. Maybe Talarico can strike a chord. I certainly like him in this interview, but we'll see how it goes. He seems brave, articulate and thoughtful -- not the norm in a politician. 

The blame game attracts, but can wait

Not long after I heard about the Texas floods, social media was buzzing. A friend from the Austin area posted a devastating video which helped convey the force of the waters. 

And then, some commenters started suggesting that the Trump regime had fired the requisite storm modelers and weather forecasters in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) and therefore should be blamed for the loss of life.

And that rang true, because we know Trump hates NOAA for contradicting him. In 2018, he falsely redrew a hurricane's path with a sharpie to include Alabama -- even though the official map didn't show that trajectory.

Trump has had trouble with the weather scientists. And pretty much all scientists.

But the haste to blame someone for the awful loss of life, including all those girl campers, felt suspect to me from the get-go. I can wait for whatever investigators discover about forecasts and warnings -- and also about likely buck passing and grift in the disaster recovery process. 

Stephanie Bai in The Atlantic also urged caution:

It didn’t take long for the finger-pointing to begin. While search-and-rescue operations were getting under way (at least 161 people remain missing in Kerr County alone), false claims circulated on social media that Texans received no warnings about the impending flash flood. 

Some state officials suggested that the National Weather Service—a federal agency responsible for issuing weather-related warnings—hadn’t accurately forecast the severity of the rain. Experts questioned whether the Trump administration’s staffing cuts to the NWS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had affected emergency response. The speculation prompted the weather service to release a timeline of their flood alerts. 

Congressional Democrats are demanding an inquiry into whether NWS staffing shortages have affected the death toll, and President Donald Trump took a swipe at Joe Biden for setting up “that water situation,” before conceding that he couldn’t blame Biden, either: “This is a hundred-year catastrophe.”

Those of us who are Trump critics should be cautious about assigning blame to the MAGA governments (Texas too) without evidence. That's what they do: make stuff up about their opponents. We are daily drowning in their convenient lies and conspiracy theories. If we all start choosing our own facts, we lose touch with realities we need to know and understand.

Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit calls out our temptation to add to a cacophony of tendentious misinformation. 

The desire to have an explanation, and the desire for that explanation to be tidy and aligned with one’s politics, easily becomes a willingness to accept what fits. 

But knowing we don’t know, knowing the answers are not yet in, or there are multiple causes, being careful even with the sources that tell us what we want to hear: all this equipment to survive the information onslaughts of this moment. 

We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – both the practical information about climate catastrophes and weather disasters and the journalism that reports on it. Both the weather and the news require vigilance.

Over one hundred people have been confirmed dead in the floods. Some diligent journalist will write a more considered version of their deaths, of the floods, and of state and federal systems which might have protected some of them. While taking in the horror, we can wait for that story. We need to practice practicing information discernment. The times demand this.

A love story from Texas

Jessica Valenti chronicles Abortion Every Day on a substack. It's an exhaustive and exhausting labor of love for women and for freedom. She knows why she fights on.

Today, the Harris campaign put out what I think may be the most powerful political ad I’ve ever seen. Please know before you watch that it is extremely distressing and graphic. But for good reason—it demonstrates exactly what abortion bans do to American women. ... this is why Republicans are losing and will lose.

They think they can talk about abortion as if it’s some shallow side issue. As if calling women ‘single issue voters’ will make us forget that the ‘single issue’ is our lives.

 This election is about all our lives.

Good news from Calfornia and a surprising competitor

In this season of anxiety and political discontent, we're quietly chugging along out here on the Left Coast in the direction of a sustainable energy mix.

Here's Bill McKibben:

Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Some afternoons, solar panels alone have produced more power than the state uses. And, at night, large utility-scale batteries that have been installed during the past few years are often the single largest source of supply to the grid—sending the excess power stored up during the afternoon back out to consumers across the state. It’s taken years of construction—and solid political leadership in Sacramento—to slowly build this wave, but all of a sudden it’s cresting into view. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world and, in the course of a few months, the state has proved that it’s possible to run a thriving modern economy on clean energy. ...

It would be easy to be all doom and gloom -- but citizen activism and applied science are making this happen.

Meanwhile, sheer economic self-preservation is making renewable energy boom in Texas. Yes, Texas!

Traditionally considered to be "oil country," Texas continues to have a heavy fossil fuel presence in the state. Though it may not seem like the likeliest candidate on the surface, the state is a pioneer of clean and renewable energy production. Texas generated roughly 15% of the country's electricity from all-renewable sources in 2022, according to the Energy Information Association.

While it was wind power that helped blow Texas to the top of the clean energy production charts, increased solar capacity in recent decades has helped its standing. Through 2022, Texas was the second-largest producer of solar energy behind California, according to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association. ...

 We're smarter big apes than we sometimes realize.

Texas has increased deaths among infants

Those of us who live in modern America can avoid knowing what's happening under the regimes imposed by anti-abortion states, but if we care about human life, we look away at our peril. The toll is highest when infants suffer from extreme abnormalities.

Via Jill Filipovic: 

The state of Texas criminalized abortion in 2021, before the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs, and an infant mortality rate that had been dropping for nearly a decade spiked up. Nearly a decade’s worth of progress was reversed. Thousands of babies didn’t survive.

In 2022 alone, some 2,200 infants died in Texas, according to state health data obtained by CNN. That’s 227 more infant deaths than before the state abortion ban went into effect, an 11.5% increase. For the previous near-decade, from 2014-2021, infant deaths had declined almost 15%. In the last 9 months of 2022, Texas some roughly 10,000 more births than expected, a rise researchers also attribute to the abortion ban.

To put a finer point on it, the Texas abortion ban seems to have forced thousands upon thousands of women into unwanted pregnancies and births, reversed a nearly decade-long decline in infant mortality, and killed a lot of babies.

And, appallingly, according to CNN, “Infant deaths caused by severe genetic and birth defects rose by 21.6%.” ... Severe abnormalities often aren’t discoverable or confirmable until after the first trimester, which means that most abortions for severe abnormalities are procedures requested by women who wanted to have babies.

They say they ban abortion for the sake of "life." From afar, it sure looks like some people, mostly Republican men, want to play God with the lives of other people, mostly women and children.

Colin Allred takes it to Ted Cruz

Want to feel good about an upcoming election contest? Maybe it will take a former NFL linebacker to break through for Democrats in Texas.

"We don't have to be embarrassed by our Senator. We can get a new one. Someone like me was never supposed to get this far. I've taken down a lot tougher guys than Ted Cruz. ..."

Allred will be as viable a challenger as anyone who could run. Texas is a tease but let's hope for Texans' sake, this is the time the state makes a change of direction.

When necessary medical care is denied ...

This is a little longer than clips I usually share here -- but a necessary reminder of what it means health interventions are made a criminal offense.

Eighteen weeks into her pregnancy, Amanda Zurawski felt something was "wrong"—and learned from doctors that her fetus could not survive. Miscarriage was inevitable—"but what happened next was not," she says. Under Texas's sweeping abortion ban, doctors could not provide her with care, starting a medical nightmare that put her in the ICU fighting a life-threatening infection. In this exclusive video, she and her husband sat down with the doctors behind Obstetricians for Reproductive Justice and The Meteor to share what happened.

H/t All in Her Head.

Foreign aid: from ingenious Mexicans to needy Texans

 Via the Texas Tribune: 

In parts of Mexico where abortion has not been legalized, women rely on volunteer networks to provide medication and emotional support for at-home abortions. As access to abortion is shut down in Texas, similar networks are being built in the U.S.

H/t Jessica Valenti.

Shifting winds: Dems rising

Brian Beutler is no fan of the fossilized aspects of the Democratic party, though like so many of us, he knows Democrats are the force we've got to prop up in the fight against radical Republican authoritarianism.

He suggests, and I agree, the last week has been good for the Dems. He lists what he thinks are the elements of a Democratic surge:

    • Republican anti-abortion extremism;
    • The looming enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act ... in contrast to the listlessness of the past year;
   • Republican culpability for January 6 and subsequent efforts to cover it up.

"By dint of circumstance—the abolition of the right to abortion, the securing of votes for the IRA, the process of January 6 investigation and discovery—Democrats began acting like a party that fights for things its supporters care about, and against forces that threaten to harm them. "

Many of us want to see out candidates fight for us. If you haven't seen it, enjoy this clip of Democrat  Beto O'Rourke, running for governor of Texas, dispose of a pro-gun heckler.

 "It may be funny to you motherf---er, but it's not funny to me": Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke snapped at a man during a town hall on Wednesday who started laughing as O'Rourke discussed the gun used in the deadly Uvalde mass shooting.

Texas is about to commit a crime

The state of Texas plans to execute Melissa Lucio on April 27 for killing her 2 year old daughter Mariah in 2007. 

According to the Innocence Project, the child's death was "a crime that never occurred." Yes, there was a dead toddler. And there was a huge Latinx family living from hand to mouth in a culture of deep poverty and dysfunction that was inexplicable to the Anglo legal system. Add an ambitious DA who needs a "win" -- a conviction came easy. Oh yeah, that DA later was convicted of corruptly profiting from drug crimes. But none of that helped Melissa -- Texas aims to kill her.

The documentary The State of Texas vs Melissa is an extraordinary accomplishment, introducing and unveiling a maze of incomprehension mixed with love and malevolence. 

 The incomprehension is well-nigh universal. For her family:

"As close as we were, there were a lot of things happening. Maybe we just wanted to block it out. ... it's like opening up our wounds. ... there's nobody there to set her free. we need to continue to live."

And Melissa herself:

"If I was out there, I'd have my children with me ..."

Filmed at a moment in Melissa's long travail when there seemed more hope than today that justice might prevail, it is absolutely worth viewing.

Take a look and join the campaign to stop this mad execution.

What's up with blue Texas?

The verdict from the political pros is in: primary elections in the Lone Star State show progress for Dems, but no blue wave. My Texan friends must soldier on, working to change the mix of who votes. It's a long struggle.

But two contested Democratic Congressional primaries yielded fascinating results. I'd been paying some attention to the campaign in TX-21 (north of San Antonio and a bit of Austin) because an old acquaintance from work against the Afghanistan war had thrown down early to challenge the Republican incumbent. When that congressman retired, the race became a multi-part free-for-all. My guy, Derrick Crowe, missed the run-off, but quickly endorsed the front runner, Mary Wilson. She's a tough one: a lesbian, activist Baptist minister. She faces a May 22 run off against a moderate Dem endorsed by the scientist PAC.

Meanwhile, in the competitive west Texas 23rd district, Gina Ortiz Jones led the primary to take on a potentially vulnerable Republican incumbent.

... if she wins, she would make history as the first lesbian, Iraq War veteran and first-generation Filipina-American to hold a U.S. House seat in Texas. Her hometown district, Texas’ 23rd, has also never been represented by a woman.

Jones, too, will have to win a run off.

Them Democratic Texans seem on the way to nominating themselves some novel and exciting candidates.

What's color got to do with it?

Make no mistake, Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America by Richard Parker is a terrible book -- disorganized, repetitive, under-edited and unconvincing. That's too bad, because Parker raises and touches on what are probably many of the appropriate issues in a book about contemporary Texas: migration, racial and ethnic diversity, demographic change, urbanization, the legacies of do-nothing Republican governments, under-funded public education, and climate change in the form of drought. Too bad he doesn't have much that's cogent to say about this hodgepodge.

His method is journalistic. He introduces his reader to a cast of individuals who serve as stand-ins for his themes. "Carla Ramos" (I don't know if this is a real name or a pseudonym) serves as an instance of the emerging generation of Latinos. And in telling her story, he tosses off an anecdote that should inspire considerable speculation on a vital topic about which Parker is seemingly oblivious.

By the final months of 2013, Carla Ramos was living with her boyfriend in East Austin. Somehow the ethnicity of the young gentry was lost on the locals. She laughed: "They call us 'the white people'. They point to our house and say, 'Look, that's where the white people live.'"

Those remarks could use some unpacking that Parker doesn't offer.

Are these "locals" African Americans who are being displaced by Latinos? Or are these "locals" Latinos -- perhaps recent migrants or very low income workers -- who take Carla's ambition and relative affluence as a markers of race rather than class? Do "Hispanics" become "white" when they acquire education and more money? What is the role of African Americans -- a population whose absolute numbers are holding steady in both Austin and the state but declining precipitously in share of the population? Is "race" in Texas still defined in the ancestral fashion of this country as being determined by proximity in color and economic position to African Americans?

Parker offers next to nothing on these questions. I'm not ready to stipulate that Texas or the rest of the country is on its way to escaping them.