Texas Isn't Here for the Children

 

At seven months pregnant, prison officer Salia Issa reported contraction-like pains at work but wasn’t allowed to leave for hours. She later delivered a stillborn.

Texas is fighting her lawsuit, in part by saying her fetus didn’t clearly have rights.https://t.co/Spn5mi6HVo

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) August 13, 2023

So, I feel like I just posted about how Texas isn't really pro-life, just pro-punishing female-bodied people. It feels like I just talked about how Governor Abbott turned the Rio Grande into a death moat--which had already taken life. And here we are, talking about how a pregnant person working for the state was told she doesn't have any rights as a worker as to the safety of her pregnancy and her fetus (a wanted child) didn't have any rights, when rights of the fetus was the exact reason why a healthy woman had to carry death in her womb--a fetus that would never be viable. Here we are, talking about a dead baby on a migrant bus on the way from Texas to Chicago, driven like a longhorn from ranch to packing lot. 

I'm not here to say Ms. Issa's fetus had rights--I'm going to say she had rights as a human being who had a wanted pregnancy and whose life could have been in the balance over a problematic delivery.  I'm not here to say Greg Abbott personally caused the death of the migrant baby that he sent on that final leg of their mortal journey--I'm saying he's oblivious to the value of that child, alive, and the value of that child's parents as workers, and migrants as being not a problem, but a community of souls. 

I'm saying that a person who dreams of saw blades or razor wire greeting people who mostly walked over a thousand miles to find safety is a sadist of the worst kind--the kind with the power to practice his sadism on especially vulnerable people. 

I don't know what it takes to get people like him out of office--the people had a more caring human being in his opponent in the last election. But if Democrats cannot demonstrate the examples of El Paso, Uvalde, the death moat, the migrant buses, and all the ways Texas GOP make the state more terrible and less secure for humans to have bodies in--what hope for humanity is there? Not that Texas would listen to me. But from where I am, what a government! When does it change!

Interrupting the Solemnities

 

Democratic gubernatorial challenger Beto O'Rourke interrupted the assembled unified Republicans at their press conference whilst they were performing part of their sacred office--moving from the ritual saying of thoughts and prayers that sanctified the slaughter of the innocents, to the Ceremonial Blaming of Other Things. 

By pronouncing the feared "assigning of blame to Republicans about anything, ever", there was a narrow danger that attention might be directed at the people in the room who literally do less than nothing every single time this horrific nightmare happens. O'Rourke was expelled for the grave sin of politicizing the solemn event, because you know, people who politicize human misery are the wooooorrrrst. The danger past, the Republicans went on to assign blame to various things, like mental illness and doors, as others suggested rap music, fatherlessness, and lack of prayer in the schools. 

This is how Republicans demonstrate that they are so very serious about gun violence, in addition to mentioning Chicago. They will probably all go to a nice NRA event in a couple of days and their jowls will cease to quiver with rage about the heathen who violated their safe space with the threat of accountability and reality-facing. 

Biden Had a Heckuva Night

Former Democratic rivals Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Beto O'Rourke are all uniting behind Joe Biden's presidential bid. Meantime, Bernie Sanders appears positioned to seize a significant delegate lead on Super Tuesday. https://t.co/YugdYOdTDg

— The Associated Press (@AP) March 3, 2020

It sure looks like South Carolina had more of an effect on this race than I had thought, resulting yesterday in Senator Amy Klobuchar dropping her campaign (when she had sounded very fired up still on Sunday), and then Biden received a triple endorsement: Klobuchar, Buttigieg (whom Biden likened to his son, Beau), and Beto O'Rourke. That's not all:

All day Monday, the campaign pushed out one endorsement after another: 100 leaders in Massachusetts, 30 officials in Virginia, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, major congressional leaders in Texas and California, local leaders in North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas. Biden's sudden resurgence — his ability to at least partially clear the field and coalesce support — could prove to be a major turning point in a volatile 2020 primary.

I think SC basically was a "proof of concept" behind the idea of Biden's campaign, and lots of Democrats would like to get on to the business of beating Trump. To me, that's pretty understandable. We just have to see what today brings.

UPDATE: Right now, I'm just rooting that this cat has a very poor showing:

Bloomberg gets on the porch and says he’s spoken with both Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

“I thought both of them behaved themselves,” he says. “I felt sorry for them but I’m in it to win it.” pic.twitter.com/suZZyb6gBr

— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) March 2, 2020

"Behaved?" Like they were kids or something? Behaved! But also because he is a Republican.

So, Sometimes a Gun is Just a Cigar, Eh?

Fox News contributor Joey Jones tells Beto O'Rourke: "You couldn't take my girl and you haven't earned my respect, how are you going to take my guns?" pic.twitter.com/ImzV2LPh90

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) September 13, 2019

You know, I don't even think this is much of a secret--it's a whole advertising campaign, but Beto O'Rourke threatening to take folks' guns sure seems to have them big-mad.

The reaction doesn't so much feel like a case of people looking to defend themselves, so much as actually seeing their guns as extensions of themselves that also need to be defended, with threats of violence, if required. As if something very personal will be lost.

What witchcraft is that?


UPDATE: Apparently, this Cain dude has been a piece of work for a while.


UPDATE: Erick Erickson lends the theory ammunition:

Say what, now?

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick tells Laura Ingraham that Beto O'Rourke is "so light in the loafers he floats off the ground at times." pic.twitter.com/rAw4XUM2EF

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 30, 2019

The funny old thing about backwards-facing bigot Dan Patrick using a really old-fashioned practically mid 20th century slur to describe Beto O'Rourke as not his own definition of studly macho manhood (even if all the reports seem to come back that one Robert O'Rourke is a cis straight male in good standing--and so what if he weren't?) is that an actual gay man, Pete Buttigieg, is the apparent subject of an actually weirdly inept rodent screwing regarding Jacob Wohl, who is very young and stupid, and Jack Burkman.

NEW: Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have been trying to recruit young men to falsely claim they were sexually assaulted by Pete Buttigieg.

One recorded their convo and gave us the audio.

Another says allegations published today in his name are bullshit https://t.co/9RDYOe5aAw

— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) April 29, 2019

(Wow, the rodent intercoursing. It's a lot.)

Anyhow, implying someone is "light in the loafers" is kind of a smear to conservatives of a certain stripe, and how they feel about it is apparent in how they treat actual gay people.

What the Hell Are You Doing?

I'm not sure if this is going to be a regular feature, but I've had a lot of quick hit "WTF?" kinds of posts bouncing around in my brain, so it just made more sense for me to do them as a "round up" and with the 2020 elections coming up, I can definitely see this becoming "a thing". 

Starting with the above, Trump gave the flag some affection before launching into a two hour two minute batshit extravaganza at CPAC (which is already kind of a guano pageant). I seriously have to wonder if the length of the speech has a lot to do with his disappointment about the NK talks and the impression left by the House hearing with Michael Cohen--big-ass rally speeches seem to be one of the ways he self-soothes. So what happened when Trump went full-on Fidel Castro up there? 

Weeeelll, he re-enacted his calling on Russia to get Hillary Clinton's emails, because we all obviously need to be reminded of that. He introduced a G-rated nickname for Rep. Adam Schiff--"little
shifty Schiff"--which kind of makes me think he slipped Baron a fiver to come up with it and this is now also Schiff's new rap name: Lil' Shifty. He did an impression of Jeff Sessions that sounded a little like Yosemite Sam. He managed to shoehorn some stuff about little migrant girls eating fistfuls of birth control pills (not the way they work) before going out to visit America by crossing rape country, calling the left socialists, and making some "right-wingers on college campuses are the real victims" nonsense noises into a (probable? potential?) executive order. Maybe. And he apparently talked to a General Raisin Cane, which sounds like the kind of creative hallucinations I would like to have if I was a sweaty ham that was made a world leader and had snorted too much Adderall.

Anyway, I don't know what the hell he was doing, but he seemed to have fun, even when he verbally had to say no one was leaving the speech even though there was a line. The flag has now contacted Gloria Allred.