And of course, it covers such new age woke nonsense as 2400 year old Greek philosophers, i.e. A&M bans selected readings from Plato:
Wow. Wokeism runs deep. You’d think it was a good idea or something.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is sidelining the Texas Democrat who in January won a stunning upset victory in what had been considered a safe Republican state Senate district.
The Republican did not assign the newly minted lawmaker to any of the chamber’s committees this week, effectively cutting him out of the process that helps to shape future legislation.
Rehmet, a Fort Worth machinist, bashed the move as one that hurts voters and used the snub to raise money for his campaign heading toward the Nov. 3 general election.
“After months of (Senate District 9) having no voice in the Texas Senate, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has chosen to silence our district even further by refusing to assign me to any committee,” Rehmet, 33, said in a statement. “This decision reflects the kind of petty, partisan politics that too often stands in the way of delivering results for working families.”
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So even if Dems manage to elect someone, they won’t get a seat at the table.
But wait…there’s more:
Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock is asking the attorney general’s office to shut down Houston Quran Academy in his latest bid to keep Islamic schools out of the state’s new private school voucher program.
In a letter sent Tuesday, Hancock accused the school of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that Gov. Greg Abbott has designated as a terrorist organization, and said Attorney General Ken Paxton should strip the academy’s charter to operate.
“The question is not whether these schools should be able to participate … it is why they were able to operate in Texas in the first place,” Hancock wrote in the letter that was first reported by the online news outlet Texas Bullpen.
The letter is Hancock’s most aggressive move yet to keep Islamic private schools from the $1 billion program, and the first time he’s targeted or named a specific school.
Houston Quran Academy, a top-rated private school that primarily serves Muslim students, was admitted to the program this week following a temporary ruling from a federal judge, who called the state’s block on Islamic schools “troubling.” Families and groups sued the state earlier this month, saying the months-long exclusion of Islamic private schools amounted to religious discrimination.
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My bold.
Gee, ya think???
“Troubling”?? There’s that wimpy judicial language that I deplore. Speak up, Your Honor–don’t be shy! Or are you worried about an accidental shotgun blast through your front window, hmmm?
As I wait for Trump to die, I realize that although Trump is a problem, his death will leave us still with all of those who thought he should have the job. And that is a problem.
It’s the same way with those hateful, bigoted politicians in Texas.
True. Even after the bull is no longer in the china shop there are still broken plates and piles of bullshit everywhere. And you know they will have no interest in cleaning it up. At best they’ll be sulking in the corner. More likely they’ll be looking for another bull to lead in.
This country is well and truly fucked for at least a generation and Texas is one of the biggest cankers.
It’s okay; Cheney died a year ago.
This will make you cry (just like all the other news you will read today).
After missing her chair and falling on the tile floor during a child’s birthday party last October, the 54-year-old Edinburg woman begged: “Don’t take me to the hospital.”
Her head was throbbing and sharp pain stretched down her back. The woman, an undocumented immigrant, told herself she’d have to brave through it. Immigration enforcement officials have detained two of her distant family members and deported another to Mexico, and she feared that going to a hospital would make her an easy next target.
“It’s not worth the risk,” said the mother of four, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity for fear of being deported.
The woman has lived in South Texas for 27 years — half of her life so far. She moved to Texas from Reynosa, her hometown, after her brother-in-law was murdered on the street. All of her children are citizens and when she fell, all she could think about was: “I don’t want to be separated from my family,” she said.
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In November 2024, Texas hospitals reported about 30,000 visits from undocumented immigrants. In a matter of months, that dropped by 32% to 20,345 visits in August.
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Federal immigration officers have been seen staking out hospitals in other parts of the country. Although agents have not been confirmed near Texas hospitals, many immigrants are not taking the risk.
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For years, the woman in Edinburg [mentioned at beginning of article] has a work permit and has been employed as a home health aid for an elderly woman, making sure she is well fed, cleaned, and that her health is taken care of. As she now faces her own health struggles, she said she won’t stop continuing to care for someone else’s well being.
“I leave my house every day with a lot of nerves, praying and asking God to let me come back home,” she said. “To let me get to my job and let me come back home safely.”
My bold.
This is a long, disturbing article. If you can stomach it.
Truly we live in a Nazi country now.
Just waiting for the New Mexico Anschluss.
IIRC there was some stuff in the low-numbered original constitutional articles to the effect that states may not covet thy neighboring states’ counties.
I wonder how our supposedly originalist Supremes will work around that. Screeech! Stop the music!!
I don’t wonder at all. They’ll declare their radical and wrong conclusion to be self-evidently correct.
It’s an election year and so election year shenanigans will abound. The TV ads (I still watch local news as I get ready for work in the morning) ahead of the primaries revealed to me we are the ones living in the terrible alternate reality the protagonists visit to learn how good they really have it.
Texas Republicans have rarely gone wrong over the last generation correctly estimating the intelligence of the average Texas voter.
This is bad for everyone, in a very direct way. A large population deliberately avoiding medical care and treatment – that’s an invitation to epidemic disease and a health crisis, and not just among the community staying away from the doctors. That kind of thing spills over into the general population. So, beyond the cruelty and outrageousness of this state of affairs, it potentially sets everyone up for a health crisis.
Have a look at Alan E. Nourse’s science fiction novel The Bladerunner sometime, which describes a similar situation. (Nothing to do with the 1982 Ridley Scott movie of that title, except that he used that title – which he acknowledged in th credits – ‘cause he thought it was cool.)
Interestingly, the constitution only addresses forming new states from pieces of existing states, which requires the approval of the both states legislatures and congress. Nothing about an existing state taking pieces of another existing state.
Thanks for the research. So it’ll be even easier for SCOTUS to wave this land-grab through. Nice to know.
I’m pretty sure it’s always been interpreted to refer to State line changes in general. It’s not unusual for people to propose these kinds of changes, and I’ve never heard anyone suggest that would be unconstitutional, as long as Congress and all involved States agreed. What seems different here is that Texas seems to be claiming they can do it WITHOUT New Mexico’s consent. I think that would be way more blatantly unconstitutional than anything SCOTUS has let Trump get away with so far.
Eh, reading the link I don’t think he’s really clearly implying that, he’s just saying shit to get his name in the papers and own the libs. Apparently this proposal is fairly popular in the relevant counties, and a bill permitting the transfer was introduced in the New Mexican legislature last session. It didn’t make it out of committee, but I guess it’s at least vaguely reasonable that Texas would want to start considering how it would work logistically.
I know that lawyers read laws with different rules than casual English, how does this interpretation seem?
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
“No new state shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State” - uses the word “new”, so applies to new states only
”nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States” - uses the word “any”, so it applies to new or existing states , so Texas can’t form a Texas that is the junction of current Texas plus part of New Mexico.
Does that seem right? Am I ready to argue in front of the Supremes now?
”nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States” - uses the word “any”, so it applies to new or existing states , so Texas can’t form a Texas that is the junction of current Texas plus part of New Mexico.
It doesn’t say it CAN’T do that, just that it would need the consent of both Congress and New Mexico.
Under your interpretation, it wouldn’t need to say “without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned”, since there would be no scenario in which more than one existing State could have its borders changed.
This is one of the sillier bits of state boundary ideas but, historically, the legally defined boundaries between states is actually fascinating.
Mainly because of rivers. They shift with time and sometimes whether the boundary is in the middle or one bank or the other was not clearly defined for whatever reason. And these shifts have led to states swapping land on very rare occasion. So it does occur but it’s never straightforward.
One of the issues in the annexation of Texas that immediately led to the Mexican-American War was the ambiguities in the defined border of “Texas”. The Adams-Onis treaty of 1819 defined the northeastern and eastern borders of (then-) Spanish Texas, which were renewed by the government of Mexico after its revolution. But the southern and western borders were a little more tenuous, and once they became the border between two separate countries on poor terms with each other, it became the issue that sparked the war between the U.S. and Mexico. (Abraham Lincoln had a small moment of national prominence when he offered up a set of resolutions in the House of Representatives asking the government to specify “the exact spot” where a U.S. Army detachment was ambushed by a Mexican unit, with the question being whether or not this was within the historic, unambiguous boundaries of Texas.)
But all of that has been hashed out and the borders tightly defined for over a century. Texas doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Southeastern New Mexico lies atop the Permian basin, and there is plenty of oil and gas extraction that happens in the area. The folks there would prefer to be part of the petrostate of Texas rather than the rather granola-crunchy state of New Mexico, and it’s probably a popular thing for their state reps to introduce a go-nowhere bill to that effect every legislative session.