It's been nearly seven years since Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was indicted on felony securities fraud charges

The Republikkkans are the American Taliban. I think many people would feel safer in Afghanistan than the 3rd world Wild West shithole Abbott has made out of Texas. I don’t see them raking in tourism dollars anymore. But they have adjusted for the loss of blue state tourists. Red state vacationers now only seem to vacation in other red states. That is if they travel at all. Florida barely survived the pandemic by being open for business to other red states. The boom times are ending for Florida and Texas can only attract a limited number of companies that rely on unskilled/uneducated labor. Modern businesses can’t operate in unsafe environments with poor infrastructure, unreliable power grids, and lack of basic government services.

This Republikkkan regression to “simpler” times is going to create a two nations. One with modern businesses, technology, infrastructure, reliable power, social services, healthcare, food crops, and stable banking. The other will be a relic of days gone by with uneducated and unskilled labor relying on cash crops and dwindling tourism while begging for handouts.

Republikkkans/southerners will always say the Civil War was fought over states rights. Dems/liberals/progressives/northerners/West Coasters will more accurately say it was fought over slavery. Historians will tell you it was primarily the piss poor economy of the South and the North/West being sick of southern minority rule while also being appalled by the unchristian act of human bondage.

Nearly all the banks and financiers were in the north. The north and the west fed the nation. The north had infrastructure; modern roads, canals, railways, seaports, and telegraph lines. Industry was almost exclusive to the north. Free public education was widespread in the north. Nearly all trade both domestic and international passed through the north, Midwest, and west coast. The north and west were free, prosperous, and attracted large numbers of European immigrants to bolster its already large population.

The south was dirt poor and deeply in debt to the north. Everything the south needed; food, clothing, footwear, machines, tools, books, furniture, and money came from the north. The south relied on unreliable cash crops like tobacco and cotton. They had to borrow seed money from northern banks, rely on northern transport to bring their products to factories in the north and Europe, and then pay the northern banks and shippers back. Then they had to buy the goods made from their raw materials from northern factories. If they had a bad crop they went into debt or bankruptcy. The slave owning planter elite were dead broke and deeply resented the north for being the source of all capital. Even with slave labor, their economic model and way of life was not sustainable. It was an illusion that lasted a few decades in the early 1800’s and ended with the Civil War. Had Eli Whitney not developed the cotton gin the south would have suffered a catastrophic economic collapse a few decades earlier. Ironically it was the assembly lines developed and perfected by Eli Whitney that made the very guns the Union used to smash the Confederacy.

The point of this history lesson is that the south hasn’t learned from its mistakes. Money, technology, factories, infrastructure, and trade is still mostly concentrated in the north. Slavery in the south has been replaced with cheap non-union labor. In the 70’s and 80’s many modern day robber barons moved textile mills to the south but only stayed for a few years begore outsourcing to even cheaper labor in Mexico and Asia. The south has kept its head above water through tourism, limited oil production, modest agriculture, and some remnants of industry that can get by with uneducated/unskilled labor. If a second Civil War were to come to fruition the south would only be modestly better off than the first time.

Technology, international trade, heavy industry, banking, education, infrastructure, reliable power, edible agriculture, and safe communities are still predominantly in the northeast and west coast. Some of the lower Midwest has been lost to MAGAts who have migrated there in search of a better life only to bring their Republikkkan and evangelical oppressors with them to again ruin chances of prosperity.

Sadly much of the old Confederacy is still in debt, underdeveloped, poorly educated, riddled with an inferiority complex, and ruled by corporate fascist robber barons and their Republikkkan/evangelical puppets. Republikkkan corporate billionaires control 1/3 of our population and 2/3 of our landmass. The south, and rural mid-America, are experiencing late stage capitalism while struggling with catastrophic climate change. They are the third world and their refugees are spreading into our bastions of civility. The 1% have robbed the masses blind and are now plundering the government as a last ditch effort to extract every penny for themselves before it all collapses.

This is our last stand against the corporate fascists and their legions of angry racist militias. Trump is a symptom of the corporate billionaires strip mining our economy and our land. The MAGAts are the angry disillusioned foot soldiers raised on a diet of steady hatred of education, the coastal elites, the urban dwellers, immigrants, people of color, and the lgbt. While Fox News and conservative talk radio pour gasoline on the fire of lies 24/7/365 the purchased Republikkkan politicians preach hatred, intolerance, and stagnation. The purchased evangelical ministers preach spiritual hatred of all things foreign, northern, progressive, or different in appearance. The billionaires and the Republikkkans purchased the evangelical ministers because their parishes are not connected or bound by any ethical hierarchy with a tradition of rules and regulations like the mainstream Protestants and “papist” Catholics so despised by the nativists for being the religions of the immigrants. A decentralized religious movement is easy to corrupt and steer an any direction you choose when you have money and resources.

This isn’t rabble rousing or exaggeration. The MAGA movement made a bold attempt to seize control of the country by force on January 6th. The perpetrators received only a slap on the wrist and the organizers have gone unpunished. Both groups are unrepentant and plotting yet another takeover. Their Congressional leaders are waging war on America while their state legislatures and governors have already become dictators punishing all of us who oppose them. They have created a country within a country and it is a dark repressive, regressive, and oppressive place of fear, hatred, and poverty. Trump may have been personally rebuffed by Republikkkan voters in 2020, largely for not being cruel enough, but his Trumpism, aka MAGA is on the rise. If we don’t stop the Republikkkans in this year’s midterms and again in the 2024 elections we will be persecuted without recourse and killed in the streets.

Please step up your resisting now, before it is too late.

Monday, February 5, 2024

Biden finds that ‘forever wars’ are hard to quit (Washington Post) “It is time to end the forever war,” President Biden said in 2021, ahead of his administration’s fateful decision to push ahead with plans to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Biden, a major player within a Washington establishment that launched a generation of open-ended military interventions in the Middle East and South Asia, was summoning the language of critics desperate to close the book on the United States’ post-9/11 misadventures. The debacle that ensued saw the Taliban take over a feeble state that had been propped up for close to two decades with U.S. resources. Biden and his allies still defend what transpired, anchored in a conviction that the American public wanted to end the longest war in the country’s history and that the chaotic collapse in Kabul was an outcome already set in motion by the mistakes of Biden’s predecessor. Whatever the merits of that claim, this weekend Biden plunged once more into the sprawling battlefields of the post-9/11 era. The United States and a number of Western allies launched strikes on dozens of targets belonging to Iran-affiliated militant groups in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. “It looks like a very significant action by the Biden administration, but on the other hand I don’t think it’s going to be anywhere near sufficient to deter these groups,” Charles Lister, director of the Middle East Institute’s Syria program, told my colleagues. “These militias have been engaged in this campaign for more than 20 years, they are in a long-term struggle. They are ultimately engaged in an attritional campaign against the U.S.”

Rally for Border Security in Texas (NYT) A line of trucks and campers, cars and vans—from South Dakota and North Carolina, Washington and Pennsylvania—snaked over farm roads before gathering on the winter-brown grass of a ranch, steps from the Rio Grande, in the rural community of Quemado, Texas. The gathering on Saturday marked the final stop of a days-long journey: a convoy of conservative Americans who drove to the border to demonstrate their frustration, fear and anger over what they saw as a broken immigration system. The location in Quemado had been chosen for its proximity to the city of Eagle Pass, a flashpoint in the pitched confrontation over border security and immigration between the Biden administration and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas. Other convoys this week reached the border in Yuma, Ariz., and San Ysidro, Calif. The Republican governors of 25 states said that they would stand alongside Texas in its confrontation with the federal government.

Mexican police hit the beaches after killings in Acapulco (AP) Tourists have barely started trickling back into the Mexican resort of Acapulco after deadly storm damage last year, but the gangland killings on the beaches have already returned. Late Friday, the government of the Pacific coast state of Guerrero said it was deploying 60 gun-toting detectives to patrol the beaches “in light of the violent events that have occurred recently.” At least three people were shot dead on beaches in Acapulco last week, one by gunmen who arrived—and escaped—aboard a boat. The violence continues despite the presence of thousands of soldiers and National Guard officers deployed to the city after Category 5 Hurricane Otis in late October. Acapulco has been bloodied by turf battles between gangs since at least 2006. The gangs are fighting over drug sales and income from extorting protection payments from businesses, bars, bus and taxi drivers.

U.S. warns tourists to ‘reconsider travel’ to Jamaica after 65 murders in 1 month (NJ.com) The U.S. State Department has issued a security warning, urging people to “reconsider travel” to Jamaica after 65 people were murdered in one month. “Violent crimes, such as home invasions, armed robberies, sexual assaults, and homicides, are common. Sexual assaults occur frequently, including at all-inclusive resorts,” the warning from the U.S. Embassy in Jamaica stated.

For the first time, an Irish nationalist will lead Northern Ireland’s government (AP) An Irish nationalist made history Saturday by becoming Northern Ireland’s first minister as the government returned to work after a two-year boycott by unionists. Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O’Neill was named first minister in the government that under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord shares power equally between Northern Ireland’s two main communities—British unionists who want to stay in the U.K., and Irish nationalists who seek to unite with Ireland. Northern Ireland was established as a unionist, Protestant-majority part of the U.K. in 1921, following independence for the Republic of Ireland, so O’Neill’s nomination was seen as a highly symbolic moment for nationalists.

Ukraine hits Russia’s Volgograd oil refinery in latest drone attack, source says (Reuters) Two Ukrainian attack drones struck the largest oil refinery in southern Russia on Saturday, a source in Kyiv told Reuters, detailing the latest in a series of long-range attacks on Russian oil facilities. Local authorities in Russia said earlier that a fire had been extinguished at the Volgograd refinery following a drone attack. Oil producer Lukoil later said the plant was working as normal. The Volgograd refinery is the latest in a series of facilities to be targeted by drones. Kyiv sees such infrastructure as important for the Kremlin’s war effort. The distance between the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv near the Russian border and the southern Russian city of Volgograd is more than 600km.

Pakistan’s wedding season heats up in cool weather (AP) There’s a scrum of people trying to get photos with the married couple at the Radiance banquet hall, and you can barely hear someone talk above the din of 400 guests tucking into biryani and chicken tikka, music and the drone whirring around the room. The bejeweled bride and her natty groom are beaming. Outside, the street is jammed with cars heading to wedding parties in neighboring banquet halls, L’Amour, Candles and Hill Top. Hill Top, a multiplex, has three weddings going on at once. It’s winter in Pakistan, and that means weddings. Lots of weddings. During the cooler weather between November and February, millions of people attend weddings every week. Pakistani diaspora come home from around the world for the season, packing airport arrival halls and five-star hotels. Weddings are one of the few opportunities for people in the conservative Muslim country to socialize and party. So it’s no surprise that people draw them out a bit.

Xi’s Nuclear Acceleration (NYT) Nineteen days after taking power as China’s leader, Xi Jinping convened the generals overseeing the country’s nuclear missiles and issued a blunt demand. China had to be ready for possible confrontation with a formidable adversary, he said, signaling that he wanted a more potent nuclear capability to counter the threat. Now, as China’s nuclear options have grown, its military strategists are looking to nuclear weapons as not only a defensive shield, but as a potential sword—to intimidate and subjugate adversaries. Even without firing a nuclear weapon, China could mobilize or brandish its missiles, bombers and submarines to warn other countries against the risks of escalating into brinkmanship.

Shrinking international aid and enduring conflict compound earthquake misery for Syrians (AP) A year ago, Sido Naji woke to his house shaking in northwest Syria. He was used to the sounds of shelling and airstrikes after more than a decade of war, but this time the assailant was a force of nature: a massive earthquake. The 16-year-old and his father managed to flee before the house collapsed. As they ran, a stone wall crashed onto them, crushing the teen’s leg and breaking his arm. The devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake on Feb. 6, 2023, killed more than 59,000 people in Syria and Turkey. For its survivors in Syria, the massive temblor compounded already rampant poverty, destroyed hospitals and electrical and water systems, and forced many Syrians already displaced by war to move into tented settlements. In Jinderis, as in many of Syria’s earthquake-hit areas, there has been nearly no reconstruction and whole blocks still lie in rubble. Naji, whose leg was amputated, lives in a muddy tent. An initial outpouring of international assistance quickly subsided. United Nations agencies and other humanitarian organizations have been struggling to fund programs that provide a lifeline in Syria, blaming donor fatigue, the COVID-19 pandemic, and conflicts elsewhere that have erupted in recent years.

Israel Signals Its Military Will Move Into a Gaza City Turned Refuge (NYT) Israel’s defense minister has signaled that ground forces will advance toward the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, which has become a refuge for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians pushed from their homes by nearly 13 weeks of war. Rafah, which has also been a gateway for humanitarian aid, is a sprawl of tents and makeshift shelters crammed against the border with Egypt. About half of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have piled into and around the city, where about 200,000 people lived before the war, the United Nations said Friday. “We fear for what comes next,” Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said at a news conference in Geneva on Friday. He described Rafah as a “pressure cooker of despair.”

Houthis promise ‘escalation’ after U.S., British strikes in Yemen (Washington Post) The Houthis said they would retaliate after U.S. and British forces launched a new wave of strikes on targets used by the Iranian-backed militant group in Yemen. The joint attacks “will not go unanswered, and we will meet escalation with escalation,” Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthi political bureau, said early Sunday local time. The Yemen strikes targeted 13 locations associated with Houthi storage facilities and weaponry, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said. The Houthis have repeatedly targeted military and commercial vessels in the Red Sea, saying the attacks won’t cease until Israel’s assault on Gaza is over. U.S. forces struck a Houthi anti-ship cruise missile in Yemen that was “prepared to launch against ships in the Red Sea” at 4 a.m. local time Sunday, U.S. Central Command said, calling the missile an “imminent threat” to U.S. Navy ships and commercial vessels.

Senegal’s president delays elections indefinitely (Washington Post) Senegalese President Macky Sall on Saturday announced that elections scheduled for Feb. 25 would be indefinitely delayed, marking a first in Senegal’s history and fueling concerns about the electoral process in a country with one of the strongest histories of democracy in West Africa. Sall, who has served for two terms, said during an address to the nation that the delay was because of a dispute over which candidates were able to run. He reiterated that he would not seek a third term but gave no indication of when the elections would be held. The choice to delay the vote just hours before official campaigning was scheduled to start could fuel a new round of protests in Senegal, where frustration with the political process was already running high.

this is such a dumbass fucking take. the taliban is literally a male supremacist organization that forces women into marriage and bars them from public life. sexism is sexism is sexism and there is nothing uniquely american about oppressing women

The devil made him do it? Nuh... He's just a misogynistic motherfucker!

Hey friends who are also outraged and disgusted by the abortion ban in Texas, wouldn’t it be a shame if Greg Abbott, PO Box 308, Austin, TX 78767 received a ton of packages of wire coat hangers kind of like these? I wouldn’t ever encourage someone to send these super cheap wire hangers to Greg Abbott at PO Box 308, Austin, TX 78767. Definitely don’t do that. I didn’t already send some myself either. Certainly not.

Greg Abbott and the Republican Party are shitnozzles who prey on children.

Gilead.

The new Texas anti-abortion law - which allows private citizens to sue anyone assisting a woman to receive an abortion, and rewards them with a $10,000 bounty - is going to have many profound impacts on American society. - First, it will likely make it extremely difficult for any woman to receive an abortion, at any point, in Texas.

- Second, the law will likely expand throughout the Red States, making it extremely difficult for any woman in nearly half the country to receive an abortion at any point during pregnancy.

- Third, it will generate even more rancor and hatred between Americans, as the law effectively deputizes an American Stasi network of citizens reporting on other citizens for profit.

- Fourth, it may inspire similar legislation in other areas of law. Report on your neighbor's drug use - get a reward. Report on the parents down the road whose kids drink beer on the porch when they're at work - get a reward. Once a Stasi starts, a Stasi don't stop.

- Fifth, it will engender a backlash of angry folks (like me and you) deciding that if conservatives are going to dime in women who want to choose, we may as well shoot off a few thousand lawsuits at Republican officials and their families. Greg Abbott's daughter and wife are both fertile, I'd assume, and the rumor around the Handmaids' Chambers is that they are trying to escape from Under His Eye.

- Sixth, and I think potentially most destabilizing, is that someone in a venture capital office will soon figure out how to turn this into an industry. The way the law works, is that if the accused person - say, a cab driver who took a woman to an abortion clinic - doesn't defend themselves in the lawsuit, they automatically lose and owe the person who brought that suit $10,000. The intention is to force recalcitrant individuals to bend to the will of the American Taliban - but a knock-on effect is that someone soon will figure out how to turn that one $10,000 suit into 10,000 suits all filed at once, likely against marginalized communities - and that's a potential pot of $100 million. Wash, rinse, repeat. 7. Finally, this will also, undoubtedly, be used as a wedge again our migrant community. It's an entry point into the legal system that already wishes to expel them from the sacred, white body of America. My god, this is gonna be ugly. Of course, if Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema get off their asses, we could protect voting rights in places like Texas, and vote these Nazis out. But until then, a new front has opened in this uncivil war, and it's gonna be a nightmare.

Michael J. Tallon

Haitian Refugee Crisis Invokes Disturbing History of Slavery in U.S. and Abroad — President Biden Must Act

Cliff Albright and LaTosha Brown, co-founders of Black Voters Matter, issued this statement in response to the violent, mass deportation of Haitian asylum seekers by the U.S. Border Patrol:

What we’re seeing along the southern border is nothing short of a humanitarian disaster. As thousands of asylum seekers from Haiti and elsewhere wait out their asylum proceedings under unlivable conditions, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has taken the extraordinary step of dispatching the National Guard and exceeding his authority to further militarize our borders. The images of U.S. Border Patrol agents riding horseback, whipping and corralling Black asylum seekers, invoke a long and disturbing history of slavery — one whose legacy lives on through unconscionable acts of racial violence just like this. President Biden cannot “restore the soul of America” as he allows his agencies to replicate the original sin which plagues that damaged soul.

The Haitian refugee crisis is not just an issue of natural disasters; it’s an issue of years of man-made political and economic turmoil funded, supported, and perpetuated by American lawmakers. The swift response to support the Afghan people fleeing the Taliban serves as undeniable proof that the U.S. can devote the energy and resources to treating asylum seekers with dignity, respect, and humanity. In this instance, however, it has deliberately chosen not to.

We stand with organizations like Black Alliance for Just Immigration the Haitian Bridge Alliance, and Black-led grassroots groups in Texas who are providing direct support to those on the ground in Del Rio. And we join in their demands that President Biden immediately stop deportations and follow through on the established process for protecting refugees. Black voters did not risk our lives in order to put President Biden in power only to see him continue the racist immigration and asylum policies of his predecessor.

Tex-ass Taliban.

Letters From An American

Today in Fuck Abbott and the GQP Harder Than Ever Before Welcome to Fucking Gilead Edition

September 1, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Last night at midnight, a new law went into effect in Texas. House Bill 1927 permits people to carry handguns without a permit, unless they have been convicted of a felony or domestic violence. This measure was not popular in the state. Fifty-nine percent of Texans—including law enforcement officers—opposed it. But 56% of Republicans supported it. “I don’t know what it’s a solution to,” James McLaughlin, executive director of the Texas Police Chiefs Association, said to Heidi Pérez-Moreno of the Texas Tribune when Republican governor Greg Abbott signed the bill in mid-August. “I don’t know what the problem was to start with.”

Texas Gun Rights executive director Chris McNutt had a different view. He said in a statement: “Texas is finally a pro-gun state despite years of foot-dragging, roadblocks, and excuses from the spineless political class.”

The bill had failed in 2019 after McNutt showed up at the home of the Texas House Speaker, Republican Dennis Bonnen, to demand its passage. Bonnen said McNutt’s “overzealous” visit exhibited “insanity.” "Threats and intimidation will never advance your issue. Their issue is dead," he told McNutt. McNutt told the Dallas Morning News: "If politicians like Speaker Dennis Bonnen think they can show up at the doorsteps of Second Amendment supporters and make promises to earn votes in the election season, they shouldn't be surprised when we show up in their neighborhoods to insist they simply keep their promises in the legislative session.”

That was not the only bill that went into effect at midnight last night in Texas. In May, Governor Abbott signed the strongest anti-abortion law in the country, Senate Bill 8, which went into effect on September 1. It bans abortion after 6 weeks—when many women don’t even know they’re pregnant—thus automatically stopping about 85% of abortions in Texas. There are no exceptions for rape or incest. Opponents of the bill had asked the Supreme Court to stop the law from taking effect. It declined to do so.

The law avoided the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to abortion before fetal viability at about 22 to 24 weeks by leaving the enforcement of the law not up to the state, but rather up to private citizens. This was deliberate. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explained in an article in Slate: “Typically, when a state restricts abortion, providers file a lawsuit in federal court against the state officials responsible for enforcing the new law. Here, however, there are no such officials: The law is enforced by individual anti-abortion activists.” With this law, there’s no one to stop from enforcing it.

S.B. 8 puts ordinary people in charge of law enforcement. Anyone—at all—can sue any individual who “aids or abets,” or even intends to abet, an abortion in Texas after six weeks. Women seeking abortion themselves are exempt, but anyone who advises them (including a spouse), gives them a ride, provides counseling, staffs a clinic, and so on, can be sued by any random stranger. If the plaintiff wins, they pocket $10,000 plus court costs, and the clinic that provided the procedure is closed down. If the defendant doesn’t defend themselves, the court must find them guilty. And if the defendant wins, they get…nothing. Not even attorney’s fees.

So, nuisance lawsuits will ruin abortion providers, along with anyone accused of aiding and abetting—or intending to abet—an abortion. And the enforcers will be ordinary citizens.

Texas has also just passed new voting restrictions that allow partisan poll watchers to have “free movement” in polling places, enabling them to intimidate voters. Texas governor Greg Abbott is expected to sign that bill in the next few days.

Taken together with the vigilantism running wild in school board meetings and attacks on election officials, the Texas legislation is a top red flag in the red flag factory. The Republican Party is empowering vigilantes to enforce their beliefs against their neighbors.

The law, which should keep us all on a level playing field, has been abandoned by our Supreme Court. Last night, it refused to stop the new Texas abortion law from going into effect, and tonight, just before midnight, by a 5–4 vote, it issued an opinion refusing to block the law. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent read: “The court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”

Texas’s law flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents, she points out, but the Supreme Court has looked the other way. ”The State’s gambit worked,” Sotomayor wrote. She continued: “This is untenable. It cannot be the case that a state can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry."

The Supreme Court has essentially blessed the efforts of Texas legislators to prevent the enforcement of federal law by using citizen vigilantes to get their way. The court decided the case on its increasingly active “shadow docket,” a series of cases decided without full briefings or oral argument, often in the dead of night, without signed opinions. In the past, such emergency decisions were rare and used to issue uncontroversial decisions or address irreparable immediate harm (like the death penalty). Since the beginning of the Trump administration, they have come to make up the majority of the court’s business.

Since 2017, the court has used the shadow docket to advance right-wing goals. It has handed down brief, unsigned decisions after a party asks for emergency relief from a lower court order, siding first with Trump, and now with state Republicans, at a high rate. As University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck noted: “In less than three years, [Trump’s] Solicitor General has filed at least twenty-one applications for stays in the Supreme Court (including ten during the October 2018 Term alone).” In comparison, “during the sixteen years of the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, the Solicitor General filed a total of eight such applications—averaging one every other Term.”

So, operating without open arguments or opinions, the Supreme Court has shown that it will not enforce federal law, leaving state legislatures to do as they will. This, after all, was the whole point of the “originalism” that Republicans embraced under President Ronald Reagan. Originalists wanted to erase the legal justification of the post–World War II years that used the “due process” and “equal protection” clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to apply the protections of the Bill of Rights to the states. It was that concept that protected civil rights for people of color and for women, by using the federal government to prohibit states from enforcing discriminatory laws.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have sought to hamstring federal power and return power to the states, which have neither the power nor the inclination to regulate businesses effectively, and which can discriminate against minorities and get away with it, so long as the federal government doesn’t enforce equal protection.

Today’s events make that a reality.

Worse, though, the mechanisms of the Texas law officially turn a discriminatory law over to state-level vigilantes to enforce. The wedge to establish this mechanism is abortion, but the door is now open for extremist state legislatures to turn to private citizens to enforce any law that takes away an individual’s legal right…like, say, the right to vote. And in Texas, now, a vigilante doesn't even have to have a permit to carry the gun that will back up his threats.

During Reconstruction, vigilantes also carried guns. They enforced state customs that reestablished white supremacy after the federal government had tried to defend equality before the law. It took only a decade for former Confederates who had tried to destroy the government to strip voting rights, and civil rights, from the southern Black men who had defended the United States government during the Civil War. For the next eighty years, the South was a one-party state where enforcement of the laws depended on your skin color, your gender, and whom you knew.

Opponents have compared those who backed the Texas anti-abortion law to the Taliban, the Islamic extremists in Afghanistan whose harsh interpretation of Islamic Sharia law strips women of virtually all rights. But the impulse behind the Texas law, the drive to replace the federal protection of civil rights with state vigilantes enforcing their will, is homegrown. It is a reflection of the position that Republicans would like women to have in our society, for sure, but it is also written in the laughing faces of Mississippi law enforcement officers Lawrence Rainey and Cecil Ray Price in 1967, certain even as they were arraigned for the 1964 murders of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Henry Schwerner, that the system was so rigged in their favor that they would literally get away with murder.

When they were killed, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were trying to register Black people to vote.

Aug 19 Headlines

WORLD NEWS

Afghanistan: Afghans protest Taliban in emerging challenge to their rule (AP)

"Afghan protesters defied the Taliban for a second day Thursday, waving their national flag in scattered demonstrations, and the fighters again responded violently as they faced down growing challenges to their rule. A U.N. official warned of dire food shortages and experts said the country was severely in need of cash while noting that the Taliban are unlikely to enjoy the generous international aid that the civilian government they dethroned did. In light of these challenges, the Taliban have moved quickly to suppress any dissent, despite their promises that they have become more moderate since they last ruled Afghanistan with draconian laws."

Haiti: Forgotten villages cut off from help (BBC)

"The level of destruction here is hard to comprehend. Both churches were obliterated. In the voodoo community centre, people were getting ready for a dance in the chapel. They were waiting for the priestess to start proceedings when the quake struck. The building caved in on itself. A neighbour tells us that they managed pull out the body of the priestess, but there could be more than 25 people still under the rubble. What everyone asks is why there is no help - no medicine, no search and rescue teams, no food and water - nothing."

Russia: Was ready for Taliban's win due to longtime contacts (AP)

"When the Taliban swept over Afghanistan, Russia was ready for the rapid developments after working methodically for years to lay the groundwork for relations with the group that it still officially considers a terrorist organization. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov emphasized this week that Moscow was “in no rush” to recognize the Taliban as the new rulers of Afghanistan, but he added there were “encouraging signals” of their readiness to let other political forces join the government and allow girls into schools."

US NEWS

Covid: Texas grapples with worsening numbers (CNN)

"The latest surge in Covid-19 hospitalizations this summer is having a deepening effect in Texas, a state that has seen its leadership rebuke steps such as mandatory mask wearing, yet now faces hospitals stretched to capacity with sick patients. And amid both the crises at health care facilities as well as court battles raging over the legality of safety measures in schools, recent news of Gov. Greg Abbott's positive test for Covid-19 has punctuated messaging from health officials that Texans need to remain vigilant during the pandemic."

Marriage Law: North Carolina poised to raise minimum marriage age from 14 to 16 (CNN)

"Senate Bill 35 was unanimously passed by the state's Senate on Tuesday after it cleared the state's House last week, where it also received unanimous support. The bill now heads to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who is poised to sign it into law. Currently, girls as young as 14 who are pregnant or expecting can get married to the babies' fathers in North Carolina if they receive permission from judges, and boys as young as 14 can also legally marry the mothers of their born or unborn babies if they're similarly granted permission from judges. But under SB35, the minimum age at which a minor could wed would be 16, with children that age or 17 needing either permission from parents or guardians or approval from judges to tie the knot."

Afghanistan: Was Biden handcuffed by Trump's Taliban deal in Doha? (AP)

"As President Donald Trump’s administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, he optimistically proclaimed that “we think we’ll be successful in the end.” His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, asserted that the administration was “seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation.” Eighteen months later, President Joe Biden is pointing to the agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, as he tries to deflect blame for the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan in a blitz. He says it bound him to withdraw U.S. troops, setting the stage for the chaos engulfing the country. But Biden can go only so far in claiming the agreement boxed him in. It had an escape clause: The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed. They did, but Biden chose to stay in it, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September."