"As your senator I guarantee I will keep Ted Cruz the fuck away from Texas Longhorns football games forever"

oof on multiple levels

🚨🚨🚨 Deeply unfair and fucked up for San Antonio’s pride center to lose its HQ during pride month. Please consider donating to their emergency fund! givebutter.com/san-antonio-...

From @gusbova.bsky.social: And so Colin Allred’s three-year journey through the wilderness of ambition ends more or less where it began ...

🚨NEW MERCH DROP🚨 Ken Paxton has started calling James “Talafreako” — so we put it on a t-shirt.  Get your very own I’M A TALAFREAKO shirt today: store.jamestalarico.com

Depends on what you want to do as a lawyer. Ultimately big law is about getting money, which is fine but not a necessary feature of a successful and interesting legal career which the broad variety of public interest lawyers know all too well

To be fair (and maybe it’s true the contractors specifically weren’t talking about this) USAID was the leading voice in global aid policy for localization, spending more aid money directly in partner countries via local implementers

lol they’re gonna try way more than The Vegan don’t worry

Also the R nominee to replace Paxton is a huge doofus

Cornyn to Rick Perry: actually yeah tell me more about ibogaine

John Cornyn: man majority leader would really cap this career *monkey paw curls*

🚨 taco discourse has crossed streams with “is it a sandwich” discourse

Lmao

Ha ha

More Kamala votes than any other state besides California

Folks can crap on Texas bc of it's politics, but there are more Dem voters here than all but 3 states. Folks just bragging bc someone drew their state lines advantageously 250 years ago. But when Texas goes blue, it's gonna quickly lap a lot of the blue stalwarts in delivering wins for people.

Look I know it’s lib cringe but this guy is the real deal, like Josh Lyman gesturing at Sam Seaborn from outside the glass conference room real deal

Yes and may I say if you are inclined to contribute low effort Texas doomposting kindly have a potato egg & cheese taco and stfu

Put ice in your white wine, it’s fine

Wow "cash for data" is where global health and development is going Donald Trump reboots foreign aid with cash-for-data strategy www.ft.com/content/f5e1...

This is conditionality, which aid advocates will immediately recognize as a feature of the bad old days of doing development aid, that USAID foremost among other donors spent the last 30 or so years moving away from. Until last year.

Here's a wild thought - maybe the SJC should directly employ its own fucking counsel instead of detailing lawyers who work for the exec branch agency its supposed to fucking oversee

The State of Texas is reportedly threatening to take over and disband our elected State Board of Education if members refuse to pass TEA/Morath’s preferred mandatory ELA reading list. The reply that SBOE member, Pam Little, is sending constituents lays it out pretty clearly.

Right into my veins

Just nobody ask Jasmine Crockett’s breakfast taco order

Just never order potato & egg at Taco Deli and you’ll be fine. And @scottbraddock.bsky.social has the correct take on bean & cheese

under the court’s reading of the VRA and the 15th amendment, it is basically constitutionally suspect for a state to have a district that elects a black person to congress. you have to prove it isn’t an illegal majority-minority district.

Fell victim to one of the puro blunders

just sayin, if a D majority of SCOTX overturned the result of a statewide election to the political advantage of TX democrats and the GOP held the governorship and the legislature we wouldn't even be having this conversation because they would've done anything available to nullify it yesterday

Asked why they were doing a mid-decade gerrymander to destroy minority representation Texas republicans said “because we can,” which is all the reason Dems anywhere need to respond

I really love this series from the NYT and this is an all-timer www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/a...

Judicial supremacy was built in large part by the Warren Court, which *supported* civil rights by *upholding* acts of Congress.

Hey, #ATX, Evil Mopac has written a thoughtful essay about why the CTRMA proposed project to bollux up MoPac (the highway that’s not-a-loop named Loop 1) is all hat and no cattle. Please read and make a public comment on the review website by MAY 3rd. That’s Sunday. Please.

theres just no coming back from this without a complete tear down and rebuild of some of our most major institutions

Just remembered this

More on UT-Austin's huge fuck-up of the KUT festival, including an "angry missive" from Amanda Cochran-McCall, UT’s VP for legal affairs and general counsel (a former staffer to Attorney General Ken Paxton, named last year in a discrimination lawsuit filed by the former UTPD Chief of Police).

the other conservatives want to destroy the New Deal but Roberts in particular is a Klansman dedicated to destroying Reconstruction

In its latest ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, the Roberts Court has inverted the Reconstruction Amendments to justify the same racist devices and practices they were adopted to dismantle (🎁) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

I’m jerryfied

Bat 21 this is Bird Dog

This story gets dumber and somehow more obvious: UT’s Ken Paxton-alum general counsel wanted more cops and drone surveillance of the event www.kut.org/education/20...

I don't know how widely understood it is that the US is now conditioning lifesaving, utterly essential health aid to African countries on access to minerals and other ~sweet deals. I probably only know about it bc of the @unbreaking.org team that tracks it. healthpolicy-watch.news/ghana-rebuff...

This is precisely what Texas republicans were saying on the floor of the Texas House last summer

Incredible stuff

Speaking out against this kind of thing and supporting local and regional society trying to prevent it is a big part of what USAID would be doing if it hadn’t been illegally destroyed

Unfortunately, this means the KUT for Kids activity--including the pretty incredible family music stage I booked--is cancelled. It's a bummer. The event as a whole is still gonna be great (and it's now free). Austin folks should go and donate to the stations.

Everyone is discussing CONGRESSIONAL districts. But the VRA's effects were up and down the ballot, with huge implications for who holds local power. Here's a story on how a Tennessee community was bracing for SCOTUS. boltsmag.org/voting-right...

Trump and Elon Musk destroyed most of the global H.I.V. program that saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Zambia. Now the US is threatening to cut remaining support, unless Zambia gives access to the country’s mineral resources. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/h...

ok who's gonna be the first plaintiff arguing this violates parental rights under the newly-amended Texas Constitution

anyway #txlege, I don’t often recommend listening to the former speaker of the Texas House, but on this score I gotta say I do [email protected]