Some things I read and found interesting recently:
- ‘Take this as a warning’: AG Paxton to visit Tyler in ‘accountability’ tour : Collin County’s favorite son is out threatening people to make them vote for David Cook (R-Mansfield) for Speaker.
- The biggest cybersecurity and cyberattack stories of 2024 : While we were probably touched by more than one of them, number 8 was a direct pain in our butt when Spouse and I bought a new car. Coincidentally, Spouse and I both worked for CDK’s predecessor, the Dealer Services division of ADP, back around the turn of the century.
- Once dismissed as frivolous, ‘romancelandia’ is getting political : I expected this story to be about the troubles of the Romance Writers of America; it’s about romance writers and fans in the US opposing book bans and running for office.
- Federal courts won’t refer Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to attorney general over ethics : It’s not like a Trump Department of Justice would do anything about Thomas, but it’s disappointing anyway. See also The Reprobate Review: Announcing The Winners Of The 2024 Golden Duke Awards, where the Talking Points Memo judges awarded the Duke for best general interest scandal to John Roberts and the conservative justices.
- A Documentary About a Texas Death Row Inmate is Now an Oscar Contender : The documentary is about John Henry Ramirez, who was executed in 2022, but the story touches on a lot of other topics to do with Texas and our record in state-sanctioned killing.
- Related: Texas Has Dug a Deep Hole It Can’t Escape on a Particularly Thorny Issue : Quinn Yeargain on the Robert Roberson death penalty case and the surrounding politics in Slate.
- A Bit More on the Cybertruck Story : Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo confirms a thing we know is generally true, which is that domestic terrorists almost always have a history of abusing women before they move on to larger forms of terrorism.
- America’s Drunkest and Driest Counties : Dallas is about half a percent over the national average and Tarrant is about half a percent under.
- Elon Musk Is a National Security Risk : Glad to see this laid out by a retired senior officer in a way that the New York Times reader can understand, but also, really? Y’all needed someone to tell you this?
- TERFs, Trans Mascs, and Two Steve Feminism : Jude Doyle on both a recent social media fight I missed and larger topics around gender essentialism, trans men, and feminism. I can’t do Doyle’s arguments justice, so I suggest you read the whole thing.
- Faith on the Hill – The religious composition of the 119th Congress : 87% are Christian of one stripe or another. There are no open atheists in this particular foxhole, but there were one Humanist, three religiously-unaffiliated folks, and 21 who were classed as “don’t know/refused”. From Pew Research.