Will Texas Turn Blue?

“Alarming inroads”: “We are asking you to invest in a competitive race with the largest Latino electorate in the country following an election cycle where Republicans made alarming inroads with Latinos,” reads a letter 70 Latino officials sent yesterday to Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear at the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), threatening not to support a Beshear presidential bid if the DGA fails to invest in Gina Hinojosa’s campaign to become governor of Texas.

Per The New York Times, the DGA has not spent any money on advertising in Texas, choosing instead to focus on races in Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and Wisconsin that it presumably views as more competitive.

It’s interesting that Texas is seen as a place where a Democrat might win the race for governor. The last time a Democrat occupied the governor’s mansion was in the 1990s, when Ann Richards was in charge. But back then, Texas wasn’t such a deep-red state. And Richards’ opponent made a series of stupid gaffes (such as joking to reporters that bad weather was like rape: “if it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it”) while Richards was clever, folksy, and appealing to suburban women especially.

I wonder if Hinojosa has some of the same charm. Regardless, it’s interesting that national Democratic organizations see Texas as a state with plenty of potential to go blue.

More on that Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv: The co-pilot apparently stabbed the plane’s captain, Indian national Smit Machchhar, who opened the cockpit door. A group of passengers, hearing the screams and commotion, rushed the cockpit, immobilized the rogue co-pilot, and took control of the plane, ushering it to a safe landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. “I grabbed the attacker and put him in a chokehold and took him outside,” passenger Yaniv Hayun told The Wall Street Journal.

“Two other pilots who were aboard to operate the next flight assumed control of the plane,” adds the Journal. “Flight data shows they fought for five minutes to stabilize the jet as it pitched up and down amid the unsettled situation aboard and the damage done by a rapid dive during which the plane lost 15,000 feet of altitude in less than a minute.”

Indian authorities at the embassy in Riyadh commended Machchhar’s bravery, opening the cockpit door so others could rush in and take over. The captain is expected to survive. No information about the attacker has been released, nor about their motives.

Interestingly, most post-9/11 aircraft security measures have been about securing the cockpit from outside attackers. But what if the attacker is inside the cockpit? It’s a very good thing heroic passengers were able to overpower him.

Scenes from New York: “[Nikole] Hannah-Jones notes on ‘This American Life’ that she was first alerted to Najya’s struggles in math when she scored below her grade level on a standardized test in fourth grade,” writes Jay Caspian Kang for The New Yorker. “In the Times essay, she describes having thought that Najya was simply the type of kid who struggles on standardized tests, but later it becomes clear that those tests were serving their function: to sound an alarm that something isn’t right. Parents complain about standardized testing, and perhaps there is something soulless about ‘teaching to the test,’ but it’s crucial to take these markers seriously, especially in situations where grades have become meaningless. Tests show the gaps between subjective grades and real understanding—and this, in turn, gives the public and administrators a sense of which schools are actually teaching their students. The widespread dismissal of standardized testing is one of the silliest and most harmful developments in the past twenty-five years of education discourse.”

QUICK HITS

• “Convicted murderer Christa Pike continued to breathe for nearly an hour after she was administered two rounds of lethal injection drugs Wednesday night, according to court filings by her legal team, prompting the state to halt her execution and begin emergency medical care,” reports The Washington Post. “Representatives of the media who were in the death chamber in a Nashville prison described a harrowing scene, as Pike continued to talk, breathe and snore long after the proceeding was underway.”
• “President Donald Trump said Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh should have voted against a move to hike interest rates last month, but said he did not blame him for the central bank’s decision,” reports Bloomberg.
• Everything you need to know about the Cornell (alleged) rape case, by Reason‘s Robby Soave.
• I’m intrigued by the idea of “attention infidelity.”