Saturday, May 17, 2014

Dan Patrick: suicidal tendencies

I suppose the good thing is that this is all coming out now, so that Republicans can cast their ballots (early voting beginning Monday) with a clear conscience.

Insisting he was not there for psychiatric or emotional problems but "for rest," Patrick said in the deposition that he "slept, basically, for two weeks." He also said he had been hospitalized at another facility, Memorial City, in the early 1980s for "fatigue, exhaustion."

Other records show Patrick was admitted to Spring Shadows Glen for "severe depression" after reporting "feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, hopelessness and marked decrease of self-esteem."

That admission was directly related to a suicide attempt on Jan. 14, 1986, according to the records, in which he tried to overdose on an antidepressant medication and slash his right wrist before collapsing and being taken to a local emergency clinic. According to the records, Patrick reported "business and marital problems and difficulties in personal relationships."

Patrick "feels the solution of separation would be a failure and prior to his suicide attempts saw his death as a preferable solution," Dr. Stephen Kramer wrote in the document.

Patrick was discharged five days after being admitted, and his depression "decreased considerably and there was no evidence of suicidal preoccupations upon discharge," records said.

The documents also provide details on Patrick's stay at Memorial City, which lasted several weeks and was the product of "acute exhaustion" brought on by "feeling extreme pressure from his work as a tele­vision sports broadcaster."

Then, doctors determined his anxiety had decreased "to the point that it was felt he could return to his full-time work and be followed on an outpatient basis."

Good ol' boy Mark Jones at Rice, sticking up for his man.

"If anything, David Dew­hurst is only ensuring that Dan Patrick will win by a larger margin than he might have otherwise," said Mark Jones, a Rice University political science professor who has been following the increasingly ugly race. "This information humanizes Dan Patrick. I think the blowback against David Dewhurst over this will be pretty significant."

How do you feel about his chances in the fall, Dr. Jones? Will it be another Republican sweep? Or will you be trepidatious about his prospects among the general electorate?

Let's at least note that Jones is probably going to be right about the runoff outcome: hard-charging Patrick supporters will mobilize.  I don't think there will be all that much switching of votes among Dewhurst and Patrick, so the widest the margin will likely be is in the 60-40 range, Patrick over Dew, in line with the lite gov's defeat at the hands of Ted Cruz in the 2012 US Senate primary runoff (57-43).  Anything greater than that and Patrick can get enthused about the fall.  Even if the result is in the 55-45 range or closer, Patrick will (outwardly, at least) project humility in the righteousness of God and confidence of -- and gratitude to -- the GOP base, yaddayadda.

Oh, one more thing.

On May 30, 1987, Paul Harasim was a columnist for the Houston Post and Dan Patrick, between successful stints as a TV sportscaster and radio station owner/radio talk host, was the co-owner of several Houston sports bars, which didn’t prove to be very successful.

It was a little before midnight when Harasim and his wife, Maria Teresa Espinoza Harasim, arrived at one of these bars  - the Nice-n~E.Z Club. They had been invited guests to the grand opening and they were comped at the door – a courtesy befitting what they thought was their good standing with Patrick. But, when they arrived, they were confronted by Patrick, who, it seems, hadn’t liked some things that Harasim had written about him, and told the Harasims hat they were not welcome and needed to leave.

What happened next ended up the subject of a criminal trial and civil suit, and ultimately the release – courtesy Harasim’s attorney - and the distribution last night to a number of Texas reporters - courtesy Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson – of documents from those proceedings that offer a window into Patrick’s past mental health struggles. 

Go on over to Jon Tilove's piece in the Statesman for the rest.  It's entertaining reading.

Since I'm serving again on the Early Voting Ballot Board, and am now sworn for the remainder of the cycle not to influence any voters in any way about any candidates in either party's primary runoffs, I can't say how I interpret this news.

You be the judge, in other words.

Friday, May 16, 2014

Dan Patrick: pysche ward

Let's be candid; who among us was NOT a little depressed during the Reagan years?

Reports of a state senator’s 1980s treatment for depression and exhaustion became an issue in the lieutenant governor’s race late Thursday, when the Quorum Report, a political newsletter, unearthed court papers detailing Dan Patrick's medical history.

In his deposition in a lawsuit, Patrick, whose legal name at the time was Dannie Scott Goeb, said he was diagnosed as having a chemical imbalance in the early 1980s and said he was hospitalized at Spring Shadows Glen in “late ’84 or early ’85, possibly.” He also said the treatment consisted entirely of rest. “I absolutely did nada,” he said in the deposition. “You know, there may have been something I don’t remember. But, you know, I did nothing but sleep, sleep, sleep.”

He was asked in the deposition, related to a lawsuit over an altercation with a newspaper reporter, whether he had suffered a nervous breakdown, and said, “No.” He also said he had not told any doctors he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Later in the deposition, Patrick said he was admitted into Memorial City Hospital in June 1982 for “a week, two weeks” of rest. Asked if he considered that “a significant event in his life,” he answered, “no.” And he said that the diagnosis of a chemical imbalance was made after tests taken during that stay.

This has been an inappropriate line of attack going back well before Reagan (Thomas Eagleton, anyone?).  Karl Rove just advanced a similar smear against Hillary Clinton earlier this week.  And it's not far removed from our local merchants of slime -- some holding Bibles aloft, mind you -- who would attempt to classify transgendered people as sexual predators.  Classless acts, all.

The only difference I can see is that moderate Texas Republicans (sic) like David Dewhurst and Jerry Patterson -- uncontent with the "liberalism is a mental disorder" gambit -- have turned their fire inward, waging war on the extremists in their own ranks.  Which is something of a role switch.

Lesser of two evils, anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?

Update: Mental health concerns from the past are off limits... unless you're Wendy Davis, of course.

It’s good to see Patrick supporters—and Republican state senators—speaking out about the stigma of mental illness, and the unfairness of this as an attack line in a campaign. But for those of us with memories that reach back to November, it’s a bit odd, because of what many conservatives in the state were saying about state Sen. Wendy Davis.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Fast food workers across the planet strike today

There is a workers' uprising after all, two weeks after May Day.

From New York City to Nigeria and New Zealand, fast food workers will strike and protest on Thursday to demand higher pay and better working conditions — in a global day of action with unprecedented reach for the industry.

Workers and labor organizers across the globe have united in a campaign that aims to advance workers’ specific demands in each country, while also showing solidarity with the US-based push for a $15 hourly wage and workers’ right to unionize without fearing retaliation.

[...]

Rallies and sit-ins will take place in 33 countries and 150 cities — a list that is growing by the day, organizers said. The action is reaching countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, some for the first time, in addition to Europe and the Americas. In some locations, strikes and rallies in solidarity with US workers will continue on Friday.

In the US, thousands of workers are expected to strike in St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City among others — where they will demand the right to organize and a doubling of their wages from the current $7.25, the federal minimum wage.

If I were advising any Democratic politicians who had a goal of expanding the electorate six months from now, I would say: "Get out to the streets in front of a Papa John's or a Mickey D's today".

The global day of protest comes on the same day McDonald’s employees in California, Michigan, and New York filed class-action lawsuits against the hamburger chain – which serves an estimated 68 million customers daily in 119 countries - alleging the company is making employees work off the clock, refusing to pay overtime and even charging employees to have their uniforms cleaned.

“We’ve uncovered several unlawful schemes, but they all share a common purpose – to drive labor costs down by stealing wages from McDonald’s workers,” Michael Rubin of Altshuler Berzon LLP, the lawyer who filed the California suits, said in a media statement announcing the suits. “These McDonald’s workers have courageously stepped forward to shine a light on these illegal practices, and already we’ve begun to hear from several co-workers with similar wage theft claims.”

Refusing to pay in full the already poverty-level wages of their workers.  Counseling them to apply for public assistance (a cue taken from Walmart).  Record profits, lowest wages in the nation, and the broadest gap between what their employees and their top management earn.

Yeah, I'm not lovin' it.  That's a supersized order of revolution.  Make mine a combo, with some economic and social justice, please.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

The gasps turned into shrieks

Conservative extremism is still death-rattling; it's just doing so a little louder than before. This was the scene yesterday in front of City Hall at lunchtime, just before council members convened to move forward on Houston's equal rights legislation.


Mayor Annise Parker and supporters of her proposed nondiscrimination ordinance announced a compromise Tuesday in hopes of deflecting controversy over a small provision that had dominated discussion on the measure.

A paragraph specifying that no business open to the public could deny a transgender person entry to the restroom consistent with his or her gender identity had outraged conservatives. Church and Republican political leaders have used the clause to claim the ordinance "provides an opportunity for sexual predators to have access to our families."

This 'sexual predator' bullshit is a transmogrification of the Xtianist, homophobic paranoia associated with conservatives having to potentially share a urinal or a stall with a TP (not a Tea Partier).  That and swastika cakes dominated the anti-HERO message before city council yesterday, and well into the night.

There may be some wavering, quivering CMs after yesterday's show of force by the local Talibaptists -- in which case you can shore up support by calling or e-mailing yours here, this morning -- but I expect this little fire to die out shortly after the vote is taken.

One more thing: the white face to the left of the bullhorn in the photo above -- white hair, grinning -- is that of Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart.  The man who cannot get the county's votes properly counted.  The same man who cannot tally the county's early votes and post them to the website on time, as his predecessor was consistently able to do, is out of the office at a hate rally.

Please remember the name of his worthy challenger, Ann Harris Bennett, in November.

Update: Kuff has a good roundup of developments that include protests from the various caucuses within the Immoral Minority.

Update II: Postponed for two weeks.  Like others, I believe that justice delayed is justice denied.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The last gasps of conservative extremism

They're dying hard, but they're still dying.

-- Keep in mind that Donald Sterling isn't a racist.  He told Anderson Cooper so.

"He's got AIDS!" Sterling said loudly at one point, cutting off Cooper as the interviewer attempted to cite (Magic) Johnson's accomplishments after Sterling asked, "What has he done, big Magic Johnson, what has he done?"

Sterling changed course briefly during the interview to call Johnson "a good person," but resumed his criticism.

"He acts so holy," Sterling said. "He made love to every girl in every city in America, and he had AIDS, and when he had those AIDS, I went to my synagogue and I prayed for him, I hope he could live and be well. I didn't criticize him. I could have. Is he an example for children?"

He's not a homophobe, either.

-- Lindsey Graham has decided he'll try to outlaw women's reproductive choice again. He's being primaried from the right, naturally.

The South Carolina Republican is organizing a group of his colleagues to speak in support of a bill that would federally ban abortions after more than 20 weeks of pregnancy, legislation that has the support of 41 Senate Republicans and has already passed the House. Graham is centering this legislative push on the May 13 anniversary of Kermit Gosnell’s conviction for killing infants that were born alive.

[...]

Graham introduced his abortion legislation in November and after a recent lull, the South Carolina Republican is ramping up activity alongside the Gosnell anniversary and — perhaps coincidentally — his own Senate primary in June, where he is trying to avoid a run-off by accruing 50 percent of the vote.

Because it's not whether you win or lose, it's how TeaBaggeringly thuggish can you act.

-- Ann Coulter got served, over and over again, on Twitter.  What she has also made a mockery of is the Republican urban legend of voter "fraud" (sic), the elaborate, well-established nationwide effort to intimidate minority voters from the polls.  Ann Coulter, you should be reminded, got away with actual voter fraud.

For more info and the complete documentation of Ann Coulter's well-documented voter fraud in Florida, and most likely in Connecticut as well, see BradBlog.com/CoulterFraud. (Here's a version of the full story, in one article, as it stood as of mid-2008.)

If you'd like more information on actual and apparent voter fraud by other very high-profile Republicans (none of which would have been prevented by the purposely disenfranchising polling place Photo ID schemes the GOP has been pretending are needed to stop "voter fraud"), please see the list included at the bottom of this article from just before the 2012 Presidential election.

Finally, for the record, please note that while a recent, non-partisan study of election fraud related offenses documented in all 50 states from 2000 to 2012 found just ten (10) cases of the type of voter fraud that could have possibly been deterred by polling place Photo ID restrictions, there have been zero (0) calls by high-profile Republicans for the prosecution of Ann Coulter for the crime of actual, very well documented felony voter fraud that she absolutely committed.

-- It's not just Coulter, of course, that is completely immune to hypocrisy.  An ability to grasp even the most rudimentary irony is required if you're going to be a Republican these days.

For example, you have to be terribly concerned (to the point of, you know, outrage at your income tax rate) about your grandchildren's future because of the federal debt... but not about global warming, because that's a hoax.  Which is why it costs so much to combat it.

The largest, most-consistent money fueling the climate denial movement are a number of well-funded conservative foundations built with so-called "dark money," or concealed donations, according to an analysis released (in December of 2013).

The study, by Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle, is the first academic effort to probe the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the climate denial movement.

It found that the amount of money flowing through third-party, pass-through foundations like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital, whose funding cannot be traced, has risen dramatically over the past five years. In all, 140 foundations funneled $558 million to almost 100 climate denial organizations from 2003 to 2010.
Meanwhile the traceable cash flow from more traditional sources, such as Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, has disappeared.

The study was published  in the journal Climatic Change.

Liberals like Al Gore invented global warming, you see, in order to make money off of it.  They make much more money off the climate change "fraud" (sic) than Charles and David Koch make from polluting our air and water.  After all, the Kochs have only spent $67 million fighting global warming since 1997.  That's chump change.  Literally.



I mean, if it was a bigger deal, they would have spent more on it, right?  Created more jobs.


This sort of alternate reality delusional behavior is, as you know, everywhere you look.  Benghazi, Obama's birth certificate, death panels... on and on and on.  Climate change just happens to be the place where there is the most at risk and the most money involved.  The battle fronts in the Republican War on Earth include fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline, among others.


 It would be nice if we could just laugh it off.

After claiming on Sunday that human activity does not cause climate change, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) suddenly found his ignorance credentials under attack by potential rivals for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.

“Now that Marco’s thinking of running for President, he doesn’t believe in climate change,” said Texas Governor Rick Perry. “To those of us with long track records of ignorance on this issue, he seems a little late to the rodeo.” 

Yeah, Texas Republicans.  Ignorant, arrogant, and built to stay that way.

And there's no place like my adopted hometown of Houston that better illustrates Upton Sinclair's words: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

That said, Ted Cruz's grandson and Pat Robertson's great-grandson will someday blame this on teh gayz or something. Or else they'll claim it's a sign of the Apocalypse. But, sorry, there will be no god magically rapturing you out of your flooded home, either.

It's times like these when I'm even more glad that I never had any children.  Because if I had, I would definitely be concerned for their future... having to live with so many stupid people.