Volunteer TV:

A judge in Corpus Christi, Texas had some harsh words for a mother charged with spanking her own child before sentencing her to probation.

“You don’t spank children today,” said Judge Jose Longoria. “In the old days, maybe we got spanked, but there was a different quarrel. You don’t spank children.”

Rosalina Gonzales had pleaded guilty to a felony charge of injury to a child for what prosecutors had described as a “pretty simple, straightforward spanking case.” They noted she didn’t use a belt or leave any bruises, just some red marks.

As part of the plea deal, Gonzales will serve five years probation, during which time she’ll have to take parenting classes, follow CPS guidelines, and make a $50 payment to the Children’s Advocacy Center.

She was arrested back in December after the child’s paternal grandmother noticed red marks on the child’s rear end. The grandmother took the girl, who was two years-old at the time, to the hospital to be checked out.

Some people certainly think that spanking children is always inappropriate and excessive. Let’s hope that even more people think that intrusions by the state into relations between parents and children in circumstances not involving grave and serious injury are inappropriate and that everyone would think that a felony conviction over an ordinary spanking is outrageously excessive.

Please pardon this brief departure from my normal folderol, but every so often a member of the chattering class issues a nugget of stupidity so egregious that no amount of mockery will suffice. Particularly when the issuer of said stupidity holds a Nobel Prize.

Case in point: Paul Krugman. The Times’ staff economics blowhard recently typed, re the state of education in Texas:

And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.

Similarly, The Economist passes on what appears to be the cut-’n’-paste lefty factoid du jour:

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:

South Carolina – 50th
North Carolina – 49th
Georgia – 48th
Texas – 47th
Virginia – 44th

If you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country.

The point being, I suppose, is that unionized teachers stand as a thin chalk-stained line keeping Wisconsin from descending into the dystopian non-union educational hellscape of Texas. Interesting, if it wasn’t complete bullshit. ...

[A] state’s “average ACT/SAT” is, for all intents and purposes, a proxy for the percent of white people who live there. In fact, the lion’s share of state-to-state variance in test scores is accounted for by differences in ethnic composition. Minority students – regardless of state residence – tend to score lower than white students on standardized test, and the higher the proportion of minority students in a state the lower its overall test scores tend to be.

Please note: this has nothing to do with innate ability or aptitude. Quite to the contrary, I believe the test gap between minority students and white students can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic status. And poverty. And yes, racism. And yes, family structure. Whatever combination of reasons, the gap exists, and it’s mathematical sophistry to compare the combined average test scores in a state like Wisconsin (4% black, 4% Hispanic) with a state like Texas (12% black, 30% Hispanic). ...

So how does brokeass, dumbass, redneck Texas stack up against progressive unionized Wisconsin?

2009 4th Grade Math

White students: Texas 254, Wisconsin 250 (national average 248)
Black students: Texas 231, Wisconsin 217 (national 222)
Hispanic students: Texas 233, Wisconsin 228 (national 227)

2009 8th Grade Math

White students: Texas 301, Wisconsin 294 (national 294)
Black students: Texas 272, Wisconsin 254 (national 260)
Hispanic students: Texas 277, Wisconsin 268 (national 260)

2009 4th Grade Reading

White students: Texas 232, Wisconsin 227 (national 229)
Black students: Texas 213, Wisconsin 192 (national 204)
Hispanic students: Texas 210, Wisconsin 202 (national 204)

2009 8th Grade Reading

White students: Texas 273, Wisconsin 271 (national 271)
Black students: Texas 249, Wisconsin 238 (national 245)
Hispanic students: Texas 251, Wisconsin 250 (national 248)

2009 4th Grade Science

White students: Texas 168, Wisconsin 164 (national 162)
Black students: Texas 139, Wisconsin 121 (national 127)
Hispanic students: Wisconsin 138, Texas 136 (national 130)

2009 8th Grade Science

White students: Texas 167, Wisconsin 165 (national 161)
Black students: Texas 133, Wisconsin 120 (national 125)
Hispanic students: Texas 141, Wisconsin 134 (national 131)

To recap: white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin.

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Get your free Rod Blagojevich ringtone.

Top favorites:

“I’ve got this thing and it’s (expletive) golden.”

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Unmarried ladies with attitude: Jane Austen’s Fight Club 3:22 video

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Horizon Auto Center in Rockwall, Texas made the Dallas Morning News with the above sign.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

According to Wikipedia, descriptions of the effect of the illegal drug MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine) better known as Ecstasy include:

A general and subjective alteration in consciousness
A strong sense of inner peace and self-acceptance
Diminished aggression, hostility, and jealousy
Diminished fear, anxiety, and insecurity
Extreme mood lift with accompanying euphoria
Feelings of empathy, compassion, and forgiveness towards others
Feelings of intimacy and even love for others

Ecstacy has been referred to as the “Love Drug” and as the “Hug Drug.” People who do too much Ecstacy and become overly mellow are pejoratively known as “E-tards.”

It should be no surprise, then, that police in Palmview, Texas recently found Ecstacy being marketed under the Obama brand.

Channel10 (Tampa)

Years later, after driving the House Majority Leader out of office, and serving as key ammunition for democrats to use to overthrow the GOP majority in Congress with corruption charges, the last undismissed count of the contrived and partisan indictment of Tom Delay by radical Austin, Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle has been demolished by an Appeals Court ruling noting that the alleged illicit financial cooperation between two political entities involved checks, and the Texas statute applied only to cash.

The Austin American Statesman story does its best to give all possible credit to the theory that the contribution of money by one Republican political organization to another really was a form of money-laundering in a deliberate attempt to evade the law. The story fundamentally incorporates also the dubious premise that opportunistic interpretations of the the arcane technicalities of state campaign finance regulations really make the victims of their unique and partisan application genuinely culpable. And it fails to note the rather important point, that though Mr. Delay was nominally and formally involved with the Texas organizations, he was actually in Washington, DC, serving in the very active role of House Majority Leader, and obviously far too busy with Congressional leadership to be personally in charge of the financial operation and details of those local organizations.

It also fails to mention that a previous grand jury declined to find in favor of Earle’s proposed indictment, and that, in an unusual and highly controversial prosecutorial move, Earle empaneled another grand jury and tried again.

We win,” said Dick DeGuerin, DeLay’s lawyer. .. it means every crime Ronnie Earle indicted Tom DeLay for was not a crime.”

Where does Tom Delay go to get his reputation back?

Where does America go to get two years of a democrat majority in Congress back?

Previous postings.

5:23 video

Hat tip to Rich Duff.

Dallas Morning News

Pegasus News

MyFox Dallas

And she owes her victories to racists, Matthew Yglesias says accusingly. So there!

Or was it really the work of Rush Limbaugh?

Liza Abater thinks so, and she’s worried about next November.

Hugh Hewitt does not agree with El Rushbo’s strategy, and remarks bitterly.

If Hillary ekes out close wins, stays alive, gains the nomination and the White House, will Rush hold the Bible at her Inauguration?

My posting on Rush Limbaugh’s “vote for Hillary” strategy.

BBC:

US scientists say an animal found in Texas is not the chupacabra – or goat-sucker – of American myth, but a coyote with a hair loss problem.
DNA tests on the carcass found at a ranch south-east of San Antonio yielded a virtually identical match to coyote DNA, biologist Mike Forstner said.

The coyote was one of three found dead by rancher Phylis Canion this summer.

Central American myth has long spoken of a vampire-like creature that slays livestock by sucking out their blood.

The chupacabra is said to attack its victims at night, leaving a trail of carcasses with their throats torn out.

Mr Forstner said that he himself had assumed the creature brought in for testing at Texas State University was a domestic dog but “the DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote”.

Ms Canion and some of her neighbours discovered the 40-pound (18-kg) carcasses of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 90 miles (145km) south-east of San Antonio.

She said she had saved the head of one of them to get it properly tested.

Additional hide samples have been taken to try to determine the cause of the animal’s hair loss, Mr Forstner said.

Original story.

AP is reporting that a Cuero, Texas woman believes she has found a specimen of the legendary chupacabra in the form of roadkill.

It is one ugly creature,” (Phylis) Canion said, holding the head of the mammal, which has big ears, large fanged teeth and grayish-blue, mostly hairless skin.

Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 80 miles southeast of San Antonio. Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she can get to get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.

She suspects, as have many rural denizens over the years, that a chupacabra may have killed as many as 26 of her chickens in the past couple of years.

“I’ve seen a lot of nasty stuff. I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

What tipped Canion to the possibility that this was no ugly coyote, but perhaps the vampire-like beast, is that the chickens weren’t eaten or carried off — all the blood was drained from them, she said.

Chupacabra means “goat sucker” in Spanish, and it is said to have originated in Latin America, specifically Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Canion thinks recent heavy rains ran them right out of their dens.

This legendary monster of the Hispanic New World must have arisen in recent stories as the result of vague memories, featuring only the name itself, of medieval legends of the Caprimulgidae, i.e. “goatsuckers”, birds of the category including Whip-Poor-Wills, Nightjars, and Nighthawks, nocturnal insectivores with wide and hairy mouths, supposedly making nightly visits to drink surreptitiously the milk of farmers’ goats. The modern Spanish goatsucker is a more alarming creature, not merely an economic menace stealing milk, but a vampiric drinker of blood.

Follow-up (11/6): DNA Testing Shows That It Was a Coyote.

They look like Western Diamondbacks (Crotalus atrox) to me.

I ran over a pretty large snakeskin when I was mowing yesterday. I expect I have my own rattlesnakes right here atop the Blue Ridge.

Like many other states, Texas bans the carrying of concealed handguns without a license. Obtaining a license requires a background check and a gun-safety course. By long-established law, however, Texans can cite “traveling” as a defense to possession of an unlicensed handgun. But while traveling was widely understood to denote a journey of some distance, it was never defined. (Travel on planes and other interstate conveyances banning weapons falls under federal jurisdiction.)

In 1997, the State Legislature tried to clarify the law by removing unlicensed carrying of a weapon as an offense while traveling. But it left unresolved whether traveling required making an overnight stop, crossing county lines or other conditions.

In 2005, lawmakers sought to remove the ambiguity by declaring that anyone in a private vehicle who was not engaged in criminal activity or otherwise barred from possessing a firearm was “presumed to be traveling,” and thus exempt from restrictions on concealed handguns.

Terry Keel, a former member of the Texas House of Representatives who sponsored the bill, explained its intent in a statement entered into the record: “In plain terms, a law-abiding person should not fear arrest if they are transporting a concealed pistol in a motor vehicle.”

But the measure hardly ended the controversy.

Almost as soon as it became law in September 2005, the Texas District and County Attorneys Association signaled its displeasure by advising members that the act did not rule out arrests of otherwise law-abiding drivers carrying weapons. The association said it was up to the courts to determine whether a person was, in fact, traveling. “Therefore,” it declared, “officers are still acting within their lawful discretion if they arrest a person who might qualify for the traveling defense or the new traveling presumption.”

Or, as Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., the district attorney of Harris County, which includes Houston, argued, “The presumption of innocence does not make the person innocent.”