(Special Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Before Memorial Day Weekend)

The shebeen is going dark until Tuesday, barring any major events, like, say, indictments of former presidents*, out of respect for the spirit of Memorial Day. So a new feature is born: Out On The Weekend In The Laboratories Of Democracy.

We begin the latter semi-regular weekly survey in Texas where, as far as Attorney General Ken Paxton is concerned, there are too many chickens for a limited number of roosts. It's never been a good idea for a state to have an AG who's been under indictment for nearly a decade but, hey, Texas, boy, I dunno. Anyway, the whole thing has blown up since a legislative investigation found that Paxton allegedly carried over the same attitude into his official duties as he had exercised in the private sector. From the Texas Tribune:

After investigators for a Texas House committee concluded Wednesday that Attorney General Ken Paxton may have broken state laws and misused the powers of his office, Paxton responded by dismissing the findings as false testimony from "highly partisan Democrat lawyers." An examination of the history of the investigators for the House General Investigating Committee found no basis for Paxton’s claim. Most of the lawyers had ties to both political parties, though there were overall deeper connections to Republicans. The committee quietly launched its investigation in March after Paxton and his agency agreed to pay $3.3 million to settle a lawsuit by four of his former deputies. The plaintiffs said they were improperly fired after telling federal and state investigators they believed Paxton had accepted bribes and engaged in other misconduct.

Paxton opened another front recently when he accused the Speaker of the Texas House of presiding over that body while sockless drunk. Talking Points Memo has a good summary of the state of play, which leads one to the conclusion that Paxton's luck may finally have run out. On Thursday, a committee of the Texas House recommended that Paxton be impeached and removed from office. There are 20 articles of impeachment, which means even the Cro-Magnon Republican majority in the Texas House means business. From the Texas Tribune:

Paxton, the state’s top lawyer and one of its most powerful and controversial Republicans, has faced criminal investigations, legal battles and accusations of wrongdoing for years. But after he requested $3.3 million in taxpayer funds to end a lawsuit by former staffers who accused him of on-the-job retaliation, the Texas House General Investigating Committee began looking into accusations of wrongdoing.

A lesson for us all: don't elect attorneys general who are under indictment, and, for the love of god, don't re-elect them.

We move along to Alabama, where the culture wars are raging from the playgrounds to the lunchrooms. From the (Pulitzer Prize winning) Al.com:

Earlier this year, the State Board of Education approved English Language Arts textbooks for kindergarten through third grade after a public hearing where critics suggested the books had too much Black history and multicultural stories. These books had already been delayed after they were originally meant to be adopted in 2022. Melissa Gates, who had identified herself as a member of Eagle Forum, said the books, called the Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts, would “indoctrinate our children with DEI [Diversity Equity and Inclusion], SEL [Social Emotional Learning], woke agenda and grooming our little ones.” Cathy Odom, who had identified herself as a resident of Mobile County, said the vetting process was unclear, and she had concerns about the content. "And I thought personally there was too much Black history,” she said.

And I think, personally, that Ms. Odom is a public nuisance living in her own private 1956, but that's just me.

The piece goes on to describe the insanely complicated process by which textbooks are judged to be suitable for use in Alabama's public schools, a process that has been further complicated by the recent assault on public education that may be the only facsimile of an idea animating conservative thought these days. "Too much Black history" is not a factor in this process that I anticipated would be involved in politics in 2023.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the Great State of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Gonfalon Folder Friedman of the Plains brings us the tale of how the War On Woke is causing collateral damage to more than the nation's tenuous grip on political sanity. In 2022, the state legislature passed a law that would punish financial services companies who boycott the oil and gas industries. The law is not working at an optimum level. From frontier.org:

Part of the confusion comes from the language in the law — in order to be considered a “financial company” subject to landing on the blacklist, a company must be publicly traded. But seven of the 13 companies on Oklahoma’s list are not publicly traded. Other blacklisted companies, including BlackRock Inc., one of the largest financial services companies in the world that manages more than half the assets of the Oklahoma Public Employees Retirement System, claims it does not boycott oil and gas and has invested billions into Oklahoma energy sector companies for its clients...
In an interview with The Frontier, Oklahoma State Treasurer Todd Russ said he chose to add private firms on the list anyway because of a section in the law that requires any state or local government entity from entering into contracts with any company that doesn’t certify they aren’t boycotting the oil and gas industry. The Frontier found that the Oklahoma State Treasurer’s office applied criteria for blacklisting companies inconsistently, leaving some, including a few of the largest banks in the world, claiming they have been arbitrarily and wrongly banned from doing business with the state. The law could also have other far-reaching effects on everything from financing for public works projects to how state payroll checks are processed.

Far be it from me to carry water for lycanthropes like Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase, but this law is so loosely drawn, and so badly enforced, that I suspect Oklahoma's taxpayers will be paying for its legal defense until the return of Halley's Comet. This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.


(Further Special Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week Before Memorial Day)

This weekend, Memorial Day weekend, we celebrate the centennial of the birth of Henry Kissinger, the least excusable human-like object of the 20th century, and a man who's helped fill more graves around the world than typhoid. Be prepared for nauseating paeans to this international war criminal, blood on his hands from many lands, right up to his elbows. There will be no celebrations in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, or Timor-Leste, to name only four places that felt the gentle touch of Kissinger's realpolitik. If you find yourself tempted to Elvis your TV because of the coverage, the good people at the National Security Archive have produced some documentary Ipecac to help you purge your brain. I particularly recommend the section on Kissinger's responsibility for the bloody years of the Pinochet government. Fckabuncha this guy. He should die alone in a Chilean prison and his corpse should be left to rot in a cell in East Timor.

I'm not entirely sure why Stewart Rhodes ever should be let out of prison, let alone after 18 years. The man is a terrorist, as much as was the blind sheikh, and he died in a federal prison clinic. Imagine if Rhodes were an Islamic militant leading a group of them in an assault on the U.S. Capitol in which police officers died. Only my opposition to the death penalty keeps me from recommending even sterner punishments, but 18 years seems to me to be a slap on the wrist. Society needs to be kept safer than that from people like Stewart Rhodes, who hate America enough to try and wreck it.

Oh, you knew this was coming. The transformation of the Dobbs decision into a new Fugitive Slave Law continues apace. From the AP:

Indiana’s Republican attorney general has accused Dr. Caitlin Bernard of violating state law by not reporting the girl’s child abuse to Indiana authorities. She’s also accused of breaking federal patient privacy laws by telling a newspaper reporter about the girl’s treatment.

(Ed. Note: Why Dr. Bernard is identified by name right at the top, but AG Todd Rokita isn't similarly ID'd until well down in the piece is a very strange bit of business.)

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita’s complaint asked the licensing board to impose “appropriate disciplinary action” but doesn’t specify a requested penalty. Amid the wave of attention to the girl’s case last summer, Rokita, who is stridently anti-abortion, told Fox News he would investigate Bernard’s actions, calling her an “abortion activist acting as a doctor.” Deputy Attorney General Cory Voight argued Thursday that the board must address what he called an “egregious violation” of patient privacy and Bernard’s failure to notify Indiana’s Department of Child Services and police about the rape. “There’s been no case like this before the board,” Voight said. “No physician has been as brazen in pursuit of their own agenda.”

The girl was 10 years old. Ten freaking years old.

During Thursday’s hearing, Rokita’s office kept up a running commentary on its official Twitter account, with one post saying “When Bernard talked about the high priority she puts on legislation and speaking to the public, she did so at the expense of her own patient. This shows where her priorities are as an activist rather than a doctor.” Bernard objected to questioning from Voight that she wouldn’t be facing misconduct allegations if she hadn’t discussed the girl’s case publicly. “I think if the attorney general, Todd Rokita, had not chosen to make this his political stunt we wouldn’t be here today,” Bernard said.

Ten years old. Jesus.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Keep On Rollin" (King George): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1947, is Memorial Day on the beaches of Normandy not even three years after D-Day. Kids are playing on abandoned landing craft. When my father came back from World War II he told his sister that he planned to go into teaching because what he'd seen from his ship on the beaches of Okinawa made him want to be around young people for the rest of his life. I thought about that when I was looking at this video.

Discovery Corner: It looks like the Romans got a little more involved in Jordan than people thought they had. From Smithsonian:

Today, only the outlines of the camps remain. However, with their “playing card shape” and opposing entrances along each side, “We are almost certain they were built by the Roman army,” Fradley says in a statement. The Nabataeans, “desert-dwelling nomads turned master merchants,” prospered for centuries until the Roman Empire “annexed and subsumed their huge swath of land, which included modern-day Jordan, Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, and parts of Saudi Arabia, Israel and Syria,” Lauren Keith wrote for Smithsonian in 2020. if the dating of the camps is correct, they offer “some of the clearest evidence to date that the Roman takeover of the Nabataean kingdom after 106 C.E. may not have been as peaceful as the surviving Roman histories suggest,” Fradley explains to Artnet.

The Nabateans were an interesting bunch. Originally a nomadic Arab tribe from Africa, they settled in what is now Jordan and built an impressive civilization. Petra, the famous rose-rock city beloved of tourists and movie set designers, was one of theirs. When the Seleucids sacked Petra, they tried to carry so much loot back that it slowed them down and the Nabateans were able to slaughter them in the desert. Relations with Rome ran hot and cold, but now you tell me that imperial powers may soft-pedal how they created their empires? Unpossible!

Hey, SciTechDaily, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

When someone near you turns their head towards something in the environment, you likely can’t help to follow their gaze direction. This reaction is observed in mammals, birds, and even reptiles alike. It’s an effective way to gather information about what caught the attention of your fellow, which you might otherwise have missed. However, a far more advanced behavior is to follow someone’s gaze to a location that is initially obstructed from your view. By repositioning yourself to see what the other person is looking at, you demonstrate an understanding that the other has a different perspective. This ability, known as visual perspective taking develops in children between the ages of one-and-a-half to two years and serves as the foundation for later comprehending referential communication and that others have minds that differ from your own.

OK, yay, humans! What's your point?

A team of researchers from Lund University aimed to investigate a potential early emergence of visual perspective taking in dinosaurs. Through a comparison of alligators with the most primitive existing birds, known as palaeognaths, they discovered that visual perspective taking originated in the dinosaur lineage likely 60 million years, or more, prior to its appearance in mammals...

This is yet another finding that calls into question the prevailing view that mammals drove the evolution of complex cognition, and that they are the cognitive yardstick to which other animals should be compared. An increasing number of studies show the remarkable neuro-cognition of the avian dinosaurs, the birds, which might prompt a rethinking of the natural history of cognition.

I'm on it. I think they realized that they were living then to make us happy now.

(Special Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Before Memorial Day Weekend.)

That would be this guy — Ensign John P. Pierce, USN Armed Guard, heading for convoy duty in the north Atlantic, his duty station for the first two-and-a-half years of his service. (Think Action In The North Atlantic, with Bogie and Raymond Massey working off a script by John Howard Lawson that would get Lawson blacklisted in the 1950s.) Every year, Friedman of the Plains and I now talk about how the two Jacks are meeting for breakfast in the afterlife and chatting over what their spalpeens have been doing down here. The sons of the WWII veterans are on the back nine now, and many of the stories their parents told them will perish with them, because that's the way things go, and every year at this time, I say this as a kind of prayer for memory: Thanks, Dad, for helping save the whole damn thing.

So we're closed until Tuesday, all things considered. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line. Wear the damn mask. Take the damn shots, especially the damn boosters. And spare a thought for the people of Ukraine, the people of the earthquake zone in Turkey and Iraq, the people of Guam, where my father once fought, now facing super-typhoon Mawar, and, of course, our fellow citizens of the LGBTQ+ community, who are facing a storm of their own. The two Jacks did not fight for this nonsense.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.