Don’t forget the Lt governor has more power than the governor

That stopped being true decades ago, when Perry was granted a bunch of appointment power under the Republican legislature.

The Lt. Gov set the agenda in the State Senate, which made the position a bottleneck in the legislative process. But Senate Republicans are in total lockstep. The real legislative power rested with the House calendars committee for a few sessions, as the legislature was only in session for a few months every few years and the House could kill a bill by timing it out.

But of late, Abbott has excercised his ability to call “emergency” sessions liberally. And since he can get the agenda in these sessions, he can bully the House Reps into compliance by dragging them back over and over again until they concede.

Comedians in Cars Getting Kickbacks

Are tensions between the countries rising or is the middle class just running out of money for travel?

you just really want me to be racist

I don’t think you’re racist. I think you’re clinging to this idea of the Transatlantic slave trade as some kind of necessary evil.

It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.

Cultural traditions have cross-pollunated without mass migrations on plenty of prior occasions. The Silk Road didn’t need to move legions of displaced people in order to bring food, clothing, and music into the Mediterranean. Neither did Dutch traders need to flood into Japan in order to convey their art and technology.

The idea that you need a mass resettlement in order to mix musical traditions doesn’t bare out in practice.

Cool, I never made that claim.

How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?

They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it

Brits didn’t need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.

Scams all the way down.

there’s little chance that immigration wouldn’t have been involved somehow in your scenario(s)

Immigrants approaching the US from a position of common interest, a la French foreign investors or Chinese manufacturing interests or Saudi oil companies. You won’t just have people crossing the Atlantic to (be made to) make music, you’d have them coming over to distribute it under home-grown record labels and on contractual terms that favored their domestic interests.

They might have invented interesting musical genres, but I really doubt any of them would have invented something that closely resembles 1950s-1960s era black music.

Maybe they’d have made something just as compelling, but different. Maybe they’d have made something better. It’s very hard to say. But the claim that you have to whip people and chain them up to synthesize European folk melodies with African base rhythms seems at once absurd and sadistic.

If music history has proven anything, it is that great art flourishes when people have more leisure and more material resources. The Blues and Jazz traditions that eventually gave birth to modern Rock were the consequence of a rapidly expanding middle class. And that came out of unionization, urbanization, the modern entertainment industry, and the eight-hour work day.

Absent prior centuries of pre-industrial slavery and emiseration, we may have achieved this musical tradition sooner and developed it more fully, before the 21st century flattened and assembly-lined its production.

Texas won’t need to go blue for this to backfire

The GOP has a lot of techniques to drive down voter participation and soften up democratic opposition. Rewriting the districts just lets them define the terms of engagement.

This is as close as I get to optimism about state politics though.

Until we get a Wisconsin-style full-state flip and some replacements at the state level, or a Federal DOJ willing to drop the hammer on all the little parasites skittering around the state, there’s very little the state-level Dem Party can do to resist this kind of malfeasance.

Abbott’s been consolidating more and more power in Austin as the various municipal and county level seats have flipped to Democrat. With Trump at his back, the state is increasingly feeling like a single-party dictatorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_in_Texas#History

Rigging the districts is a long-standing Texas tradition, running straight back to the state’s founding. Under the current map, the State Senate is so meticulously drawn that Texas would need a 60/40 Dem voting majority to have a prayer of flipping it.

Abbott is trying to squeeze yet another ounce of tomato juice from a crushed can.

I don’t think that logically follows.

Music genres that came out of poor black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta could have just as easily come from middle class black manufacturing workers in Congo or Nigeria, if the continent had been integrated with the industrial west back in the 19th century rather than raided and plundered for 400 years.

Hell, maybe it would have come from middle class American Natives in the Mississippi Delta. Or Chinese rice farmers in a country not ravaged by opium. Or Iranians not ground under by the Shah’s dictatorship. Or Austro-Hungarians who weren’t cannibalized to fight the Napoleonic Wars or the 30 Years War that caused the Caucasian Exodus across the Atlantic.

The Peace Dividend reaped across the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West that gave us modern western music could have been collected anywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States#Use_of_instant-runoff_voting_at_local_levels

In NYC? This is heavy (D) turf. Blue municipality. Blue state. Overwhelmingly Blue House Delegation. Two Blue Senators. Most of the legislature from the area is DSA, ffs.

Trump might make noise, but the tip of the spear is going to have to come from the establishment Democratic Party, at least until the election is over. If anything, Trump wants Zohran to win the general, so that he can pull the institutional Dems in next to him when he announces his plan to take over the city, like he’s done with LA.

It’s so funny to see institutional democrats turning on Zohran and institutional republicans turning on Silwa.

Democracy means absolutely nothing to these people.

I have been told to Vote Blue No Matter Who and I am a loyal democrat. Zohran has my vote.

Chinese Century, baby.

They’re doing everything IRL that Elon Musk is tweeting about in between Ketamine binges.

Thank goodness for the real nationalist icon Captain America The Punisher.

The story of Moses is of God’s Chosen People being insulated from bad events while the Pagans are made to suffer.

The moral of Exodus (and Kings and Judges) is that if you’re following God’s Will, nothing bad will ever happen to you.

Action Comics #900

The Man of Steel’s declaration, “I’m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of U.S. policy,” follows accusations that he caused an international incident in Tehran. Superman flew to the country during a huge protest, where he stood silent for one day, to show his support for the demonstrators. The 24 hours pass with a mix of appreciation (flowers and flags) and fear (hurled Molotov cocktails). But the government of Iran sees Superman as an agent of the United States and feels his action is an act of war. “Truth, justice and the American way – it’s not enough anymore,” Superman tells the president’s national security adviser. “The world’s too small. Too connected.” He then makes the decision to go before the United Nations and renounce his American citizenship.

Shame they did stick with a white actor. Imagine the chuds losing their minds over a Superman played by Pedro Pascal or Michael B. Jordan.

if people stop flying they will go out of business

They won’t. That’s the rub. We have played this game over the decades. Whenever the industry is on the verge of bankruptcy, the feds bail them out. When the profits are flowing, the executives/shareholders are free to cash out without concern for the future of the company, and the people who need to travel are never given any kind of alternative even as the process of flying becomes more expensive and emisserating.

It’s not that complicated.

The central arterial system for civilian and commercial rapid mass transit is enormously complicated. Just shouting “Don’t use planes!” doesn’t address logistical alternatives.

There is no “floor” to air travel

There is. I just linked to it. We had empty planes flying because airlines were not contractually permitted to run fewer flights without having their routes monopolized by their competitors.

Some of the most powerful and influential men in America fought tooth and nail to protect the railroad industry

They didn’t. They fought to consolidate the industry decades ago. But more recently they’ve turned it over to vulture capitalists to scrap for the real estate value. One of the biggest jokes of the modern era is how Union Pacific and BNSF Railway have fumbled the bag or straight up handed it off, so a handful of senior executives could reap a few enormous windfalls.

market forces (and, yes, to a lesser extent government policy, but mainly just people buying cars) eventually led to the near-collapse of the industry

Freight rail has never been more profitable, in large part because the number of routes and the regulations on transport have hit rock bottom. Firms are charging record prices, paying minimal labor costs, deferring maintenance, flagrantly ignoring the law, and absolutely cleaning up in the free market.

They’re eating their own seed corn. And in the end, the system will fail. But when you’re an executive making tens of millions in compensation, with an eye towards retirement in years rather than decades, it’s Not Your Problem.

A knock-on consequence of this management style has been to hold up passenger rail (specifically, Amtrak, a federally owned company also plagued with underinvestment and technical debt), as points at which freight and passenger cars share lines are choked with traffic such that passengers can’t arrive in anything resembling a timely manner. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT.

Corporations can resist change but that doesn’t mean they are always successful.

Civilians boxed into a failed mass transit system who are told “Just stop using the system” are not being provided with functional alternatives or support to leverage those alternatives.