Sunday Funnies

Scattershooting springy events and developments

-- Democratic Senate District conventions are tomorrow.  So is the March for Our Lives.

The big one, in DC, will be televised; there are more than 800 others happening across the world.  In Houston there will be two marches, one at Tranquility Park downtown at 9 a.m. and the other setting off from Heights HS at 10.  Also in Sugar Land, The Woodlands, and Galveston.  There's an awesome after-party this evening.  Crooked Timber has some posters you can download and print.

-- The District K Houston City Council special election loses one candidate but still has two others.  Ashton P. Woods would have been my choice, but he is deferring to "a black woman" for the post, an admirable move.  Woods still plans to be on the municipal ballot in 2019 for an at-large seat.

With that said, We can't just elect the first Black woman who steps up without vetting them to make sure they won't block ordinances that protect Black people on the fringes like the Trans community and the black LGBT community at large. We need people who will have integrity to govern with respect to separation of church and state, and the strength to be open and honest. We need people willing to do what many of the men on council have failed to do, we need someone who will represent the interests of ALL Houstonians and not their donors. It is clear that city government is going in the wrong direction and not taking the time to address racial and economic disparities in Houston's Black & Brown community. Instead, the focus is to criminalize the homeless, beautify the city, and pedal the "Houston is a welcoming city" lie.

Correct me if I'm wrong but this doesn't sound like an endorsement of Pat Frazier, the only black woman in the race that I am aware of.  Update: Until yesterday, when the late CM Green's constituent liaison, Martha Castex-Tatum, filed.  The TexTrib shows she has also worked in CM Steve Le's office.  Her website is still under construction at this update, but her press release published at Guidry News lists previous electoral experience as a member of city council in San Marcos.  Here's a brief excerpt from the Chron's (paywalled) article about the race:

Candidates have until 5 p.m. Monday to file for the District K election, which is set for May 5. The city is maintaining a list of those who have filed, and a map of the district is available here.

-- Trump communicates something (even without a comms director).

I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2018

He won't veto it (the government will shut down and he'll get the blame). But even if he does, it won't be because of DACA but his precious wall.  Those shithole Democrats who, indeed, abandoned DREAMers left themselves wide open for this.  It's political kabuki, and the Democrats whose names appear in the last link just felt the samurai sword come down on the back of their necks.  It was an act of seppuku they performed last month; Trump just applied the coup de grâce (too many foreign languages?).

I'm looking at you, Bob.

Update: "I will never sign another bill like this again..."  Bullshit thick as a brick.

-- In sunnier news, the Tomball German Festival and Bayou Greenway Day and the Bayou City Art Festival are all this weekend.  And it's almost bluebonnet season.

Halfway between​ Austin and Houston, Brenham is a town that prides itself on its wildflowers. Using "Flower Watch," visitors can check in almost daily on the Visit Brenham website to see what is blooming. As of March 15, the bluebonnets are coming in a little later than usual, but there are a few clusters beginning to gather, and the town expects the season to peak at the end of March.

Among the suggested prime viewing spots is Hwy 290 East and West as you drive into Brenham; FM 1155 to 2679 in Chappell Hill; and FM 2447 and Hwy 290 at First Baptist Church of Chappell Hill (the church welcomes visitors, but requests that the parking lot remain open to members of its congregation).

That Chappell Hill route (FM 1155) is our favorite.  You can pause at the Washington-on-the-Brazos museum at the end, then slide over to SH 6 at Navasota and take a quick shot back to H-Town.  Lots of country dining options along the way.  Go on the weekend of April 14/15 and take in the Bluebonnet Festival before your drive, but be prepared for Houston-size hordes.  Go any other time, especially a weekday (check opening and closing times) to enjoy the experience without the crowds. 

Facecrooks

Is Facebook an accomplice, though, or just the getaway car?  Do we prosecute the guns used in a shooting ... or do we regulate them more strongly so that the "bad guys" can't get them?

The news keeps pouring in about the illegal data operations of the firm Cambridge Analytica, which used a Facebook personality quiz app called “thisisyourdigitallife” to mine the data of millions of users, most of whom never actually used the app. The mined data went on to be used by Republican campaigns in 2016.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that a large part of the effort to mine data on American voters was overseen by Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart executive chairman and Trump strategist who recently utterly failed to lead a radical right-wing insurgency in the Republican party.

Bannon used Cambridge to test phrases like “drain the swamp” used in the campaign of Donald Trump and the phrase “deep state,” which became the name of the all-consuming right-wing conspiracy theory over the past year. These phrases were tested by Bannon and Cambridge more than three years before they entered the popular political discussion.

Cambridge was part of Bannon’s effort to build a right-wing populist machine on the right. But a former research director and founding force of Cambridge Analytica, Chris Wylie, made the depth of this connection apparent Tuesday in an interview with the Post. Wylie said that Bannon approved the $1 million operation to acquire Facebook profiles and other data in 2014.

Wylie’s account was one of several connected to Cambridge Analytica that Facebook suspended for its failure to comply with destroying the ill-gotten user data.

There are certainly some First Amendment issues at stake: people willingly, if not entirely wittingly, hand over their personal information, which becomes Facebook's property virtually forever, even if you delete your account.  Nefarious intentions of Facebook or those who purchase its data aside (a massive 'if'), has Mark Zuckerburg simply lost control of his creation, as with Dr. Frankenstein?  Should we let the invisible hand of the free market -- that would be us, since we're the merchandise and not the customer -- slap the crap out of this kid (more harshly than a $35 billion 'market correction', that is)?

How to use Facebook while giving it the minimum amount of personal data

How to delete Facebook

Maybe we should just praise Jeebus that the conversation has finally (maybe) turned away from "the Rushins hacked thuh elekshun"...

Here's your reading.

-- From the end of the GritPost link (excerpt at top):

The gravity of the legal and ethical questions about Cambridge’s actions might overshadow the practical consideration: did it even work? It’s unclear if there was much actually gained from the firestorm-generating and dubious data mining operation, with Trump digital director Brad Parscale saying the data wasn’t actually useful.

Parscale was recently tapped to run Trump's 2020 re-election campaign.  If there is one; for a variety of reasons I have my doubts as to whether that happens.

-- Washington Monthly (link from excerpt below within):

Here’s the part that stood out to me:

The company says their work with data and research allowed Mr Trump to win with a narrow margin of “40,000 votes” in three states providing victory in the electoral college system, despite losing the popular vote by more than 3 million votes.

That is likely a reference to their efforts at voter suppression among Clinton supporters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. I suspect we’ll be hearing more about that story at some point.

-- Facebook and all of us are not alone on this Titanic disaster, as we know.  Our data, everywhere it is stored online, is being hacked, leaked, misused, etc. on a daily basis by every kind of bad actor.

"It’s not just the Cambridge Analytica debacle. Ethics don’t scale," Paul Ford writes in Bloomberg Businessweek's cover story.

The big picture: "What’s been unfolding for a while now is a rolling catastrophe so obvious we forget it’s happening. Private data are spilling out of banks, credit-rating providers, email providers, and social networks and ending up everywhere."

"So this is an era of breaches and violations and stolen identities. Big companies can react nimbly when they fear regulation is actually on the horizon — for example, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have agreed to share data with researchers who are tracking disinformation, the result of a European Union commission on fake news."

"But for the most part we’re dealing with global entities that own the means whereby politicians garner votes, have vast access to capital to fund lobbying efforts, and are constitutionally certain of their own moral cause."

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance takes alarmed note this morning of the fourth bombing in the minority communities of Austin, and wonders when President Trump might Tweet about them.

Here's the blog post and news roundup from last week.

Covering his ethnic base, Beto O'Rourke appeared on Bill Maher's HBO show the night before Saint Patrick's Day, and both men agreed that Ted Cruz is a giant asshole.  Relative to that ...



... Progress Texas reveals its "Humans Against Ted Cruz" website and swag.

Brains and Eggs completed his analysis of the state legislative and Harris County results, with some predictions for the May runoffs and the November general election.  He also noted the start of the ballot access petition-gathering effort for the Texas Green Party.

Off the Kuff examined the relationship between primary turnout and victory in November, Greg Jefferson at the San Antonio Current reviewed some of the many victories won by women in the primaries, and Bonddad poured a little cold water on Democratic midterm enthusiasm.

Stephen Young at the Dallas Observer explains how just two votes in the Texas Senate -- flipping the seats of Konni Burton (SD-10, D challenger Beverly Powell), Don Huffines (SD-16, D challenger Nathan Johnson) or Joan Huffman (SD-17, D challenger either Rita Lucido or Fran Watson, determined in May runoff) would tip the balance of power.

The fates of the three Republican incumbents in those races ... won't swing the partisan balance of the chamber. If all three keep their jobs, Republicans will have the majority of seats. Same goes if voters decide to remove all three. If any of the three GOP incumbents loses, however, that could make a dramatic difference in the ability of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to set the agenda for the Senate, which he presides over as president.

Burton, Huffman and Huffines are the most vulnerable Republicans up for re-election to the Senate ... Huffman and Huffines both represent districts that voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election. 

A Fifth Circuit panel of three judges upheld most of the sanctuary cities law, and RG Ratcliffe at Texas Monthly interprets that as unfavorable for the plaintiffs challenging its legality.

Texas Freedom Network sees that the LGBTQ community -- despite US Supreme Court rulings upholding their freedom to marry -- is still forced to fight the state of Texas for those rights.

A federal lawsuit filed by Ty Clevenger at Lawflog seeks FBJ and DOJ records relating to the murder of DNC employee Seth Rich.

Grits for Breakfast blogs about the culture of cover-up at the TDJC.

After yet another chemical plant explosion, this time in Cresson (outside Fort Worth), Texas Vox wonders again why there is no statewide chemical emergency alert system in place.  It would be as simple as duplicating existing weather or Amber Alerts for missing children/seniors.

With the reported sale of the Austin American-Statesman, SocraticGadfly offers up a game of post-primary Texas mainstream media bingo.

In other media news, San Antonio-based iHeartMedia, once known as Clear Channel Communications before a bewildering swirl of spinoffs and rebranding (but still nominally controlled by the in-laws of Cong. Michael McCaul) declared bankruptcy due to crushing debt and weak radio advertising revenue projections.  Texas Standard reported that their problems began ten years ago, in a leveraged buyout engineered by Bain Capital, of Mitt Romney repute.

The Lewisville City Council is expected to voice support for the Texas Central Railway, the Dallas-to-Houston bullet train project, and other items in its meeting tonight, reports the Texan Journal.

David Collins, an IT guy, blogs about the other IT (inverted totalitarianism).

Gus Bova at the Texas Observer introduces the socialist metalhead stumping for single-payer.

In rare bipartisan agreement, Houstonia notes that the Right and the Left are both up in arms about a puppy that died in an overhead bin on a United Airlines flight.

Leah Binkovitz at the Urban Edge points to a new study out of Houston that suggests that the benefits of homeownership are also ensnared in a discriminatory appraisal process that perpetuates racial inequality.

Houston Justice covered the protest at the Texas Education Association's Austin headquarters of the proposed plans to either privatize or close several of Houston's historic minority high schools, and Raise Your Hand Texas reported from the recent public school finance commission hearing.

As always, Neil at All People Have Value attended the weekly John Cornyn Houston office protest.

And Harry Hamid, at a funeral for a friend, points out that people live on in our stories about them.