Showing posts with label Ken Paxton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ken Paxton. Show all posts

Thursday, May 16, 2024

Deep in the Dark Heart of Texas

 


I could just blog about how TX Gov.  Greg Abbott is a signifying sociopathic fascist who is pardoning a racist and pedophile murderer to send a chilling message to his state about his values, but I need to point out that he is not just following through on a political promise, but that the Texas Pardon and Parole Board recommended it. 

Let me repeat that: this was not without the consent of other people who sit in judgment over who gets pardons or parole, but with their express approval. Greg Abbott isn't a brand-new baby governor trying to feel out the ethos of his state--he is a monster who has figured out that many people will clap for a particular kind of monster. 

In Texas, anyway. 

Thursday, December 7, 2023

Texas and the Empty Cradle

 

My heart leapt up when I heard that Kate Cox would be allowed to terminate her genetically ill-fated pregnancy, but I knew she better have a surgical theater in her living room, because the AG of TX, Ken Paxton, impeached, indicted, self-anointed protector of the fruit of the Texan wombs, has nothing better to do than threaten doctors who engage in a court-sanctioned medical procedure. He would ruin this woman's health and future fertility, and the careers and lives of the doctors who help this woman, because?

Because he's so pro-life? Because Texas isn't pro-life. Not when it comes to the death penalty.  The strict abortion ban isn't necessarily saving lives. But it would be better to make an example of this woman, and force her to give birth to a child that might exist just to die, because?

I've long felt that while life doesn't necessarily begin at conception, mothering does. You can decide to eat right or not drink or smoke and maybe figure out how to get pre-natal care. But sometimes even basic ability to take care of your body and your baby's body isn't in your means. You can't afford to eat right. You have an addiction. You don't have access to health care. And sometimes, you just get a bad genetic draw. Nothing you do will ever make you carry a wanted child to term, because that isn't what was in the cards. 

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Texas-Sized Corruption

 


I have very little surprise reserved in the tank for Ken Paxton's acquittal: long story short, how can Texas Republicans even hold someone accountable for acting in his self-interest and doing the bidding of his big donors when it isn't in their self-interest and sends the wrong message to their big donors? But it's more than that:

Being even somewhat opposed to Paxton's corruption is simply not conservative and you are not a real Republican if you bring it up.  He may even be corrupt, but he's the right kind of Republican so long as he's right-wing enough. 

I think the party refers to this ethos as: Values!


Monday, August 14, 2023

Texas Isn't Here for the Children

 


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!

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Texas and the Cruelty of "Pro-Life" People

 


Texas women are telling their stories about their troubled and forced pregnancies under their state's strict anti-abortion laws, through tears and even vomit. They are testifying that they do not feel safe to be mothers in Texas, because it is not a safe state to be pregnant if abortion care does not exist there. It is a brutality that they have to tell these deeply personal stories under derisive and uncaring questioning under the assumption that the state's penalizing of fertile women for the heartbreak of reproductive mishap is not responsible for their misery is appalling, but worse is that they did undergo unnecessary injury, expenses, pain and suffering, because surgical options they could have had were made inoperable for them. 

Texas has a shitty record for maternal mortality. Let's get that upfront. Infant mortality as well. An actual pro-life position might well include trying to improve these stats with better health care access. But the rate of uninsured, access to hospitals for rural folks, and cost of getting medical care in Texas isn't a priority. I mean, not for the supposedly pro-life psychopaths in charge like Abbott, Patrick and Paxton. 

Figuring out ways to punish women and doctors for even having abortion as an option, apparently is. 

Sunday, May 28, 2023

Ken Paxton Got Himself Impeached (UPDATED)

 

I believe that is the Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan who was censured for being drunk on the floor but frankly, when I watched this without audio, I thought the man would have more slurring because I'm not saying I know drunk when I see it, but I have known drunk when I've been it. Drunk or sober, the count is what it is, and Ken Paxton got hugely impeached by the supermajority Texas House. This wasn't about liberals trying to get him, and this wasn't about RINOS trying to get him. This was about the creep of Ken Paxton's various problems becoming not just his problem, but the State Leg. problem, and they did not want that for themselves.

Monday, July 26, 2021

Please Clap.

 


After the ass-kissing to try and get an endorsement from Trump was over, all George P. Bush has got is the taste of Trump's ass and these fabulous and not at all cringe beer koozies:


Let's face it, you can't beat the balls to the wall lunatic loyalty of the guy who was going to sue several different states for not running their elections in a way that would have helped Trump win. All George P. Bush offered was, I dunno, another opportunity for Trump to humiliate a member of the Bush family?

It's very sad and also funny. 

UPDATE:  And I'm just going to tuck this in here because I also find it a little sad but also kind of funny, George P. Bush debased himself for the man who said horrendous things about his own mamma (just like Ted Cruz has done about the man who said awful things about his father and his wife, come to think of it) but mmmmmaaaaayyybbee a Trump endorsement doesn't necessarily get someone over the top since, you know, the thing where he lost the 2020 election and incited an insurrection. Even in Texas.

But you know. Paxton has that incumbency working for him, plus the Trump endorsement. Plus being under indictment since 2015 (I dunno, he seems to be making it work for him), so Bush is still probably losing this primary. It's a complicated goddamn party right now.

Thursday, March 25, 2021

I Have a Saying About This....


Given that the deeply corrupt TX AG actually used his office resources to contest the 2020 presidential results in multiple states and gave a stirring speech endorsing "fighting" at the January 6 rally, I am willing to bet that the reason that Paxton does not want people to look at his communications is because, well, it looks bad.

And if it looks bad...

TWGB: It's Raining Shoes!

  It certainly has been a minute, hasn't it? So, what brings me out of self-imposed blogging exile, if not something very relevant to my...