Sunday, September 08, 2019

Sunday 'Category 5' Funnies









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Friday, September 06, 2019

The Weekly Twenty Twenty Update

Once more, a one-issue Update.  There's been plenty about the #ClimateTownHall for you.

The drinking game is: "Here's blood in your eye".

Former Vice President Joe Biden appeared to have a blood vessel burst in his left eye while participating in CNN's town hall on climate change.

A broken blood vessel in the eye, also known as a subconjuctival hemorrhage, can be caused by several things, including high blood pressure, bleeding disorders, blood thinners, or even excessive straining.


In rare cases, it may be a sign of a serious vascular disorder in older people. Patients who frequently experience such broken capillaries in the eye may get tests to try to find an underlying cause, such as a blood clotting disorder, the Cleveland Clinic noted.

When I was in the newspaper business, I worked with a gentleman in his early 70s who had these on a handful of occasions.  I can recall three over the course of a two-year period.  He dismissed them.

I found out later he had passed in his mid-70's of a stroke.

Biden, 76, has long been plagued by health issues. In 1988, he suffered an aneurysm that burst and required him to undergo emergency surgery. The then-senator was so close to death that a Catholic priest began preparing to administer the sacrament of last rites.

Months later, surgeons clipped a second aneurysm before it burst. Biden then took a seven-month leave from the Senate following the surgery. Describing the operation, he once said, “They literally had to take the top of my head off.”

Jill Biden said in her recently released autobiography Where the Light Enters that, at the time, she feared her husband would never be the same. "Our doctor told us there was a 50-50 chance Joe wouldn't survive surgery," she wrote. "He also said that it was even more likely that Joe would have permanent brain damage if he survived. And if any part of his brain would be adversely affected, it would be the area that governed speech."

I can't make light of Biden and his slapstick routine any longer.  Something is seriously wrong with him that isn't just early-stage dementia.

Biden hasn’t disclosed his medical history since 2008, when doctors found he had an irregular heartbeat.

Biden has also raised eyebrows for the increasing number of verbal blunders he has made so far on the 2020 campaign trail, the schedule of which has been markedly lighter than his main rivals.

For the good of the country and his own well-being, Joe Biden needs to drop out.  And Dr. Jill Biden is the one who should tell him to do so.

That's correct; I'm not a medical doctor.  And neither is she.
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Monday, September 02, 2019

Labor Day 2019 Wrangle (full edition)

The Texas Progressive Alliance did more than just grill a burger and take a nap on the day set aside to honor America's working class.

(This updated edition of the best of last week's blog posts, Tweets, and news sources -- some lefty, some poking at the Right -- from around and about our beloved Texas follows below.)

To mark the 125th anniversary of Labor's Day, here's a few blasts from this blog's past.

-- LD Wrangle 2018: A tropical storm named Gordon was bearing down on the Gulf Coast; Ted Cruz finally started to take Beto O'Rourke's challenge seriously; somebody named Michael Avenatti planned to organize an anti-Trump rally in Texas (eventually Houston) to counter it; and some history about the holiday, specifically the Pullman strike.

-- LD Wrangle 2017: Rockport, Houston, and the Golden Triangle were just beginning to assess the damage from Harvey, and that was the topic of many of the aggregated blog posts.

-- LD Wrangle 2015 and an excerpt from Robert Reich's 'Labor Day 2028'.

-- David Van Os' "My Hope for Labor Day 2011".

-- Labor Day 2010: Remember why (and who)

And from Juan Cole: US workers in 2019 are one-third poorer than they were in 2003, while the top 1% got twice as rich.

David Harrison at the Wall Street Journal reports that the lower 50% of US households by wealth have 32% less wealth than in 2003 in real numbers.

They have only now, in 2009, finally regained the wealth they lost in the Great Bush near-Depression of 2007-2009.

So they’ve gotten back to what they had in the way of assets (home value and other valuables; probably not stocks, since that half of Americans doesn’t typically own securities) in 2007, but not what they had in 2003.


The second gun massacre in the state this month occurred in Midland and Odessa.


The tragedy came the day before the several laws loosening restrictions on the carrying of firearms, passed in the last legislative session, took effect.  One member of the Lege quickly blamed it on insufficient prayer.


John Coby at Bay Area Houston was among the first to drag Schaefer for his gun worship.

Scott Braddock, for the Quorum Report, noted that the Bonnen scandal leaves the Legislature unprepared for a special session on gun safety even if Governor Abbott were inclined to call one.

Despite demands for the governor to call a special in response to mass shootings, it’s not his fault that the first order of business in the House might be to entertain a motion to vacate the chair while a chaos agent stands ready to release audio evidence of a conversation that “might make a sailor blush”

About this time in 2017, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had just made a mockery of the legislative process, using Sunset legislation as his leverage to force Gov. Greg Abbott’s hand in calling a special session to focus on a failed proposal to create restrictions on where certain Texans could legally use public facilities. The national spectacle aside, the point was that the process was used and abused, making special sessions even riskier than ever with a risk-averse governor at the helm of state government.

But now Patrick’s shenanigans are not the issue. The scandal surrounding Speaker Dennis Bonnen has created an environment in which the governor cannot be fully blamed for the lack of immediate legislative action in the wake of two mass shootings across the Great State this summer.

One more time for the people in the back: The presiding officer’s first standing order is to protect the institution. Because that post was abandoned, even momentarily by Bonnen in his meeting with Empower Texans spokesman Michael Quinn Sullivan, the House would likely not be ready to respond to a growing crisis.

As Hurricane Dorian prepares to batter the eastern seaboard, several reports look to see how much progress we've made since Harvey blasted us.





Kuff checked out the Bitecofer model, which suggests that quite a few Republican-held Congressional seats in Texas could be flipped in 2020.



The Texas Signal's lame account of Cong. Lizzie Fletcher's healthcare town hall did not convey the full story.  Read the Tweet thread below from the HouChron reporter in attendance for a better grasp of the popularity among Fletcher's constituents for Medicare for All, and the unpopularity of her position: expanding the ACA.


Stephen Young at the Dallas Observer rolled his eyes at the Republican activist group Engage Texas and their tactic of politicizing DPS parking lots.


The Texas Standard reports that even some oil and gas industry types are opposed to the Trump administration's rollback of methane regulations.

Latino Rebels has the details about the September 7 Action Against White Supremacy.


From the Complaint Department: SocraticGadfly is disgusted that Christmas creep is now apparently "officially" being preceded by Halloween creep.

From the Schadenfreude Department: Therese Odell at Foolish Watcher is loving the Trump/Fox News slap fight.

Molly Ivins, our liberal icon who was Twitter-ready long before the medium existed, is now playing on the big screen (not far from where she grew up).




The San Antonio Current brings word about The Bloggess' new business venture there.

Online goddess Jenny Lawson -- a.k.a. "The Bloggess" -- is branching out into brick and mortar. Not one to be satisfied with merely conquering the web, the best-selling author and prolific tweeter has announced that she has signed a lease for the location of her planned combination bookstore and bar Nowhere Bookshop, right here in the Alamo City.

Finally, in farewells: Rosemary Kowalski of the Rivard Report eulogized Lila Cockrell, former mayor of San Antonio, and The Guardian remembered James Leavelle, the Dallas policeman who was handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby in 1963.


“Lee,” Leavelle said in the version of the story quoted by the New York Times, “if anybody shoots at you, I hope they are as good a shot as you.” Oswald, he said, replied: “You’re being melodramatic.”
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Sunday, September 01, 2019

Sunday Funnies




He's probably not concerned about 'bad guys with guns' ...








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Friday, August 30, 2019

The Weekly Twenty Twenty Update

Lots to cover in developments over the past seven days.


All the details are here.

Those who did not make the cut -- Steyer, Gabbard, and Williamson came closest -- and those who dropped out as a result (Gillibrand) were the newsmakers.  (Last week's Update mentioned Frackenlooper, Moulton, and Inslee.)  A quick word about each of these in bold.

-- Steyer has proven the Beatles correct: Money didn't buy him love.

Running as something of a patrician populist, Steyer brushed aside the dissonance of someone with his résumé -- Exeter, Yale, Stanford, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, his own hedge fund -- flooding the airwaves with ads that castigate the influence of “the powerful and well-connected.” ...

In a fraction of the time, Steyer has already outspent his opponents online: $1 million on Google and $3.9 million on Facebook, peaking at $215,000 a day on Facebook as he sought the 130,000 donors needed to qualify for the next debate.

He appears to have spent at least $12 million on the effort.  Gillibrand also spent millions, on both TV and digital, in some early states after she got her only qualifying poll earlier this month.  All for naught.  There must be something better to do with all this money than to give it to the corporate media, new and old.  (This is where Bernie would say: "and how we'll pay for it is ...")

Gabbard returned from her two-week National Guard deployment to a Twitter party thrown in her honor by the #Khive.


Those Copmala folks sure are classy, aren't they?  Actually I don't have a mention for Marianne, just the usual fear and loathing coupled with relief from the establishment that she fell short.

-- Don't forget that before our H-Town affair, there's the 7-hour long CNN climate town hall next Wednesday ...

Details per CNN (all times are Eastern Time):
  • 5 pm: Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro
  • 5:40 pm: Businessman Andrew Yang
  • 6:20 pm: California Sen. Kamala Harris
  • 7 pm: Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar
  • 8 pm: Former Vice President Joe Biden
  • 8:40 pm: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders
  • 9:20 pm: Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren
  • 10 pm: South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg
  • 10:40 pm: Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke
  • 11:20 pm: New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker

... and, the week after the third debate, another climate forum on MSNBC.  See if you can tell the differences between the two.

Several Democratic presidential candidates and one Republican primary challenger to President Trump will appear in a climate change forum moderated by MSNBC next month.

The Democratic presidential candidates attending the two-day forum include Sen. Bernie Sanders and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, according to a statement from Georgetown University, which will host the event.

Other Democratic candidates attending are Sens. Michael Bennet, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand in addition to Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, former Rep. John Delaney, Rep. Tim Ryan, Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang.

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld will also participate.

[...]

The MSNBC forum will take place Sept. 19 and 20 and will be moderated by hosts Chris Hayes and Ali Velshi. The event is also being hosted by Our Daily Planet and New York Magazine.

Participating candidates will discuss their plan to address climate change and will take questions from students at universities including Georgetown.

-- There will also be a forum on gun violence in October, sponsored by March for Our Lives and Gabby Giffords' organization, on the day after the second anniversary of the worst mass assassination in US history: the Las Vegas music festival massacre.  It will be limited to third debate participants.

-- More climate referenda, not all of it presidential candidate-related -- although you could expect their participation if, you know, a hurricane tears up Florida this weekend or the Amazon keeps burning or some other horrible conflagration draws notice between now and then.

-- Old Uncle Joe is having the problems with his memory again.

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday rebuffed a news report that he has recently misrepresented an anecdote on the campaign trail about giving awards for valor to members of the military, possibly conflating three separate real life events.

Though Biden said he hadn’t seen the Washington Post article, he told a reporter for the The Post and Courier after a campaign event in South Carolina that he stood by his retellings of meeting with heroes of the Afghanistan war over the last decade.

According to The Post, Biden has told a shifting and increasingly dramatic account of a trip to Afghanistan while vice president to award a medal to a heroic soldier who initially resisted the honor out of guilt. The former vice president most recently told the story at a campaign event in New Hampshire last Friday.

But The Post found after conducting “interviews with more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders and Biden campaign officials, it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened.”

I'ma try to be fair here.

Biden insisted on Thursday that there was no reason for the fuss.

"I was making the point how courageous these people are, how incredible they are, this generation of warriors, these fallen angels we've lost," he told the Post in an interview.

"I don't know what the problem is. What is it that I said wrong?"

We should be reminded that he has used a better excuse than 'It's not me, it's YOU'.

"I am a gaffe machine, but my God, what a wonderful thing compared to a guy who can't tell the truth," he said ... "I'm ready to litigate all those things. The question is what kind of nation are we becoming? What are we going to do? Who are we?"

These are reasonable questions in the Trump post-fact era.  Biden, after all, was the guy who had to leave the 1988 race because he puffed his resume'.  And with respect to wartime embellishments, Hillary Clinton did catch a lot of flak -- pun intended -- for the 'sniper fire at the Bosnia airport' comment.  Al Gore, similarly, for inventing the Internet and James Lee Watt (use your own Google, kids).  Trump would climb a tree to tell a lie before he would stand on the ground and speak the truth, and the Right worships him like Jeebus.  So, truthfully and factually: what the fucking fuck?!

My answer is that we shouldn't be excusing either one of these dudes.

-- Texas is Berning, y'all.



-- Plenty of people wrote obituaries for Kirsten Gillibrand that attributed her demise, or failure to launch, on her outspokeness in regard to Al Franken's conduct, which eventually compelled his resignation from the Senate.  Strange how nobody blames Chuck Schumer at all.

I'm still conflicted about that whole deal, but it's accurate that what we all thought was going to be a big issue this cycle -- #MeToo -- isn't.

Unlike this guy, I don't really see that Gillibrand had enough support to actually benefit any of the top ten, but whatever.

-- Warren won the Kos poll again this week, which lets him crow about how much influence he thinks he still has.  Everybody in the media does seem to love Liz lately, even as they continue to shit on Bernie (same story, different week).  This may be a better way of looking at the race.

Warren's biggest weakness is still 'Pocahontas'.

-- This story, trying to tie a strange and somewhat false attack on Joe Biden to Liz Warren ... is strange.  Too weird, in fact, to get the gist of in an excerpt.


-- The DNC keeps finding more goats to blow.  On the one hand: "Cellphones! hACKERZ! election security!"  On the other: "voter suppression"!

-- Beto's 373rd "last chance".

-- A handful of Texas blogs weighed in this past week with incredibly weak takes: El Jefe Bob -- the guy who owns the oil company, loves Biden, hates Bernie, and calls himself a progressive -- mansplained Gillibrand's exit.  Worse because it's uncharacterisitically lazy, "Endgame: Presidency" reads like a two-minute brain fart, complete with the by-now-regular assertion that something is false, or a lie, when it isn't.  It's Joe Walsh, FWIW, who hasn't ruled out a third party bid.  (This dude has blogged better than this but not lately, either because I'm on his 'I hate you' list or because his St. Louis Cardinals are shit.  Doesn't really matter.)

On a brighter note, Zach Taylor -- never one to mince pixels -- chops and grinds Warren.

-- Let's listen again to all those people complaining about Berniebros.  Boot Edge Edge will never, ever be president for this reason alone.




Each video is ten minutes. Whether you love him or hate him, watch them and you'll understand why we think he's our last chance to get this right.

-- Polling sucks because the people who answer landlines are ... I've already done this.  Those of us who own cellphones exclusively don't answer calls we don't recognize because spam.

Pollsters who use phones of both kinds cast aspersions on YouGov, etc. because they are both internet and opt-in, but I see that as simply trying to keep your dinosaur alive.

-- The Greens are up to seven, and none are named Jill Stein.  Howie Hawkins is in Houston and Dallas next week.  I asked David to ask Howie for me about how convinced he is that Russia, or Julian Assange, hacked the DNC and thus the 2016 election.  This video, along with his inability to recognize Chelsea Manning as a transgender and whatever that "Klansmen" remark meant, makes him a no for me but I'll be open-minded if he's evolved to a better place.

-- Ballot Access News tells us that the founder of the Bread and Roses Party, Jerome Segal, will be their 2020 nominee.

It hopes to get on the ballot in all the states that are not “swing states.” Currently it is only on the ballot in Maryland.

-- Did I mention that Kamala Harris sucks?
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Monday, August 26, 2019

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is wishing hard -- really hard -- for Harry Hamid's health.


Update, Tuesday, 8/27: Rest in peace.  I'll post a remembrance in the coming days.

This is the full edition of the best of the left from, of, and around Deep-In-The-Hearta from the past week; we'll open with some gubernatorial promotions.


Gov. Greg Abbott announced his intent to appoint former appellate justice Jane Bland to the Texas Supreme Court to succeed Justice Jeff Brown, who has been confirmed as a federal district judge by the U.S. Senate. Bland authored more than 1,200 signed opinions while serving on the First Court of Appeals from her appointment in 2003 until her narrow 2018 general election loss to Gordon Goodman (D).

Bland is Abbott’s third appointee to the state’s highest court, joining Justices Jimmy Blacklock and Brett Busby. Both Bland and Busby will face voters in 2020. Bland will run for the remaining four years of Brown’s term while Busby seeks a full six-year term.

The Houston Chronicle reports that Bland is one of several down-ballot Republicans appointed by the governor who lost elections to their Democratic opponents last November.


Abbott's bad behavior seemed to reach some sort of critical mass last week.



The TSTA Blog wonders if our state's elected leaders will ever criticize Donald Trump.


Off the Blockquote looked at the psychological shift -- i.e., "Democrats might actually win something big!" -- taking place in the pickled brains of Texas politicos.


A few interesting candidate filings for Texas Legislature contests next year:

SD19: San Antonio attorney Xochil Pena Rodriguez, the daughter of former Congressman Ciro Rodriguez, established a campaign committee for a potential challenge of Sen. Pete Flores (R-Pleasanton) as a Democrat.

SD21: Seguin pastor Frank Pomeroy established a campaign committee for a potential challenge of Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo) as a Republican. Pomeroy is the pastor at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, the site of a 2017 mass shooting in which more than two dozen people -- including Pomeroy’s daughter Annabelle -- were killed.

HD28 special: Rosenberg real estate investor Gary Gates announced he would run in the November 5 special election to succeed Rep. John Zerwas, who is resigning effective September 30. It would be his third try for the seat. Gates has spent more than $6.3 million in several previous unsuccessful attempts at elective office:
  • $2.9M on a 2016 race for Railroad Commissioner, losing the 2016 Republican runoff to Wayne Christian, 51%-49%.
  • $2.4M on a 2014 special election for SD18, which he lost to then-Rep. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham), 56%-34%, wth three others combining for 10%.
  • $390K on a 2006 race for SD18, losing the Republican primary to then-Rep. Glenn Hegar (R-Katy), 55%-36%.
  • $277K on a 2004 race for HD28, losing the Republican primary to Hegar, 61%-39%; and
  • $327K on a 2002 race for an open HD28 seat, losing the Republican runoff to Hegar, 58%-42%.


Following up on a story mentioned in the Wrangle three weeks ago, SocraticGadfly examined the proposed Gannett-GateHouse merger and how it might affect the Texas newspaper world.

Almost two dozen Texas cities had their databases compromised in a series of coordinated ransomware hacks.

Updating the latest in the ongoing "Cops Behaving Badly" series ...



Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast commented on Harris County DA Kim Ogg's opposition to the proposed bail reform settlement.  KPRC interviewed Susan Criss, the former Galveston County judge who presided over the Robert Durst murder trial, who talked about a chance encounter with the defendant at the Galleria shopping mall in Houston one Christmas season.

And the state of Texas executed another likely innocent man this past week.

Another development in the wake of the El Paso massacre regards local control; while Governor Abbott hosts roundtable discussions, mayors in the state's largest cities want something done beyond 'thoughts and prayers' to make urban regions safer.


John Coby at Bay Area Houston called out Houston mayoral candidate Bill King's dishonest endorsement claims.  And Space City voters will be looking at an extremely crowded municipal ballot in November, writes Jasper Scherer at the Chronic.


Some ecology news ...

Natural gas flaring in the Permian Basin is distressing environmental activists; the TPA's own Sharon Wilson is pictured in this account from Earthworks.  Texas could be a leader in the nation's much-needed low-carbon future, writes Michael E. Webber of UT's Cockrell School of Engineering (for Texas Monthly), if only a few minds would open up to the possibilities.  Downwinders at Risk called attention to the TCEQ misusing a 17-year old rural air pollution model in order to permit a new asphalt plant in the city of Joppa.  And a few hundred University of Houston students and alumni signed a petition to disinvite two senior employees of Exxon Mobil from speaking at the college's fall graduation ceremonies.

“We need universities and other institutions of power to stand up to corporations and other entities that do massive harm to the world and to our environment,” (recent UH graduate Katherine Fischer) told News 88.7.

She pointed to an accusation that the oil and gas company has known for a long time about the effects of burning fossil fuels on climate change but continued to deny the science.

And now for some lighter fare ...

Therese Odell at Foolish Watcher tapdances into the Sean Spicer/Dancing with the Stars controversy.

A Houston Popeye's fried chicken restaurant trolled Chick-Fil-A after the latter trolled the former over the popularity of their new chicken sandwich.


And the Texas Standard recounts the tale of how the town of Redwater, Texas, was once named after the famed humanist Robert Green Ingersoll.

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