How's it going America,
Check out our latest episode of The Pod Millennial with Tim Pool, where we talk about AI art and humanity. You don't want to miss it! Subscribe so you always hear about new episodes, dropping every Tuesday, and rate (5 stars, of course)!
Let's get into it:
Primaries kick off in Texas today but the last days of the election were overshadowed by the Islamic terror attack in Austin apparently inspired by the Trump administration's war in Iran. We'll be watching to see if any of the three GOP contenders—Hunt, Cornyn, and Paxton— for a Texas Senate seat can come away with enough votes to avoid a runoff, but the prediction is that Cornyn and Paxton will end up needing to face off again in May.
On the Dem side, Jasmine Crockett faces off against local lawmaker James Talarico. Talarico was a virtual unknown before the Stephen Colbert/CBS/FCC debacle in which attorneys for CBS warned Colbert about the FCC's equal time rules and Colbert blew it all out of proportion and claimed he was being censored. Talarico took up the flag of falsehood as well, used it to fundraise, and really pissed off Crockett, who has my bet in this primary. She's fun to watch and sometimes that's enough to get you elected. We shall see.
The Supreme Court came out with two stellar rulings on Monday. In New York, they said that Kathy Hochul can't go in and redistrict away the one GOP Congressional district in the entirety of the City of New York. That seat, currently held by Nicole Malliotakis, whom I voted for when I lived in District 11, was on the chopping block as part of California's retaliation against Texas. There were all kinds of bogus excuses about underprivileged blah blah blah but as Justice Alito said, the plan to "draw a new congressional district for the express purpose of ensuring that 'minority voters' are able to elect the candidate of their choice" discriminates "on the basis of race." And yeah, you just can't do that.
The opinion from the court on a case in California is that schools cannot keep a student's gender transition secret from parents. The court said "Under long-established precedent, parents—not the State—have primary authority with respect to 'the upbringing and education of children.'" The precedent set by prior cases, they said, protects parents' "right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health."
"Gender dysphoria is a condition that has an important bearing on a child’s mental health, but when a child exhibits symptoms of gender dysphoria at school, California’s policies conceal that information from parents and facilitate a degree of gender transitioning during school hours. These policies likely violate parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children." Phew! This is very good news for parents who have been entirely shut out from their children's gender confusion, meaning they have been prevented from even helping their kids.
And finally, the Marco Rubio clip everyone is talking about. Rubio was asked by reporters if the incursion into Iran was due to an "imminent threat." He said: "There absolutely was an imminent threat. And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us. And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded, because the Department of War assessed that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first, after they were attacked by someone else, [if] Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths. We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage."
When a reporter asked, "Was the US forced to strike because of an impending Israeli action?" Rubio said: "Two things I would say: number one is no matter what, ultimately this operation needed to happen, that's the question of 'why now,' but this operation needed to happen. Because Iran, in about a year, or a year and a half, would cross the line of immunity, meaning that they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it because they could hold the whole world hostage.
"Look at the damage they're doing now, and this is a weakened Iran. Imagine a year from now, so that had to happen. Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions and understood what that would mean for us and we had to be prepared to act as a result of it, but this had to happen no matter what." Critics are saying this means the US was dragged into war by Israel. Rubio said it was going to happen anyway. It looks like the WMD oil wars are here to stay, no matter how much the American people ask for peace in a world that is intent on war.
Libby