Sunday, November 05, 2017

Sunday Fall Back Funnies


Seeing the Forest:

Voter suppression, coherent message telling voters how their lives will be better, authenticity so they know you mean it, listening to and appealing to all components and regions of the traditional Dem coalition, outreach to new voters, keeping the other side from rigging things like voting machines and voter registration lists and illegal donations and activities and interference like Russia and Comey, and then delivering for your constituencies in order to help the constituencies AND the next candidate who runs. (Thanks, Obama.)

Thursday, November 02, 2017

A Hollywood ending

So glad that I lived long enough to see it.


In one of the most evenly matched, hard-fought and thrilling World Series of all time, it's fitting that fans were treated to a winner-takes-all Game 7.

In the end, it's Houston that gets to celebrate.

The Astros -- whose first season was in 1962 -- are World Series champions for the first time in franchise history, defeating the Dodgers 5-1 in Game 7 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and completing a Fall Classic for the ages.

"You know what, Houston?" Astros manager A.J. Hinch said in an interview on the FOX broadcast. "You're a championship city."

We knew that already, but it's nice to have bragging rights.

In January of 1962 I was a kindergartener.  About a hundred miles to the west, six men fired pistols into the dirt, less than five miles from where I live today.


That summer the Houston Colt .45s lost 96 games, completing their inaugural season 8th in a ten-team National League, 36.5 behind the San Francisco Giants, who won 103 but still finished in a tie with their longtime rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers.  A three-game playoff for the pennant was won by San Fran, which became the first NL champion in the 162-game/season era.

The Giants, led by Hall of Famers Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, and Gaylord Perry, and with two Alou brothers in the outfield, lost the 1962 World Series to the New York Yankees (Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, Tony Kubek, Joe Pepitone, and Jim Bouton, among others) in seven games.

Baseball history has a discernible symmetry.

That World Series of '62 was ending just as the 13 days of the Cuban missile crisis was beginning.  Mi esposa futura and her familia had emigrated from the island nation, illegally by the new rules of Fidel Castro's government, the year before (story here).  I was a first-grader in Mrs. Rafferty's class at Averill Elementary in Beaumont, Texas.  Our school held bomb drills, where we would take cover under our desks.  As I look back on it now, this must have been a ploy to calm children about the current events.  Surely our teachers were smart enough to understand the futility of hiding under a school desk in the event of nuclear attack.

In light of recent developments in our country's relations with North Korea, it's apparent that history at large also has some parallels.

The Astros' -- err, Colt .45s' best player in '62 was probably Bob Aspromonte, who began his career with his hometown Brooklyn Dodgers.  Their best pitcher, Bobby Shantz.  A friend of mine in Ambler, PA, where Shantz lives, reports that in his varied capacities as a municipal employee in that city, used to read Shantz's meter (gas, I presume).

The team began play in a rickety old stadium constructed on the northwest corner of the vast expanse of land -- most if not all of it belonging to R. E. "Bob" Smith -- that today incorporates NRG Stadium and the now-decrepit Astrodome.  If you drive north on Kirby between the Loop and Main and pause a bit before you reach the stoplight at La Concha (south of where the Holiday Inn sits to your right) and take a glance at the parking lot, you'll see a lightpost that is rumored to be the marker for home plate at Colt Stadium.

Tickets were pretty cheap and easy to come by in those early years.


In 1964, the year my kid sister was born, the team renamed itself Astros, after the country's budding space program, and opened the Dome.  Nolan Ryan once said that he would drive up from Alvin to stare at the giant hole in the ground as it was being constructed and wonder how baseball was going to be played in it.


By the time I was eight or ten, my Dad would drive us over for a game or two each year.  I was an Astros Buddy (Lee May).  I recall a few late night drives home after games.  Dad was a real fan to make that commute on a weeknight when he had to be at work at 7 the next morning.

One great memory of a game we attended in the late '60's was against the Cincinnati Reds and Pete Rose and Johnny Bench and all those great Big Red Machinists.  We had box seats down on the third base side, and a man who was the spitting image of Sergeant Vince Carter from 'Gomer Pyle USMC' -- right down to the tight square crew cut, wide eyes, flared nostrils -- was sitting behind us.  He was mostly quiet throughout the game, but when Rose came to the plate and crouched in that signature batting stance of his, Sgt. Carter would start screaming things like, "STAND UP, PETE! YOU'RE A BIG BOY!" and such as that.


I can't remember who won the game but my family laughed about that for years after.

Anyway, and to fast forward this reminiscence, when we married and moved away from Beaumont in the mid-'80's as my newspaper career began, there was no Astros baseball televised in places like Plainview and Midland -- cable's reach was weak then -- so I lost track of my Astros fandom and became more of a fan of the game (no particular team).  But when we moved back to Houston in '93 from St. Pete, Florida, my specific request to my wife as she searched for an apartment was that we be as close to the Astrodome as possible so I could go see games often.  She picked out a cute little loft on Holly Hall, which was the east feeder into what was then still called Astrodomain parking.  I could walk to the ticket office in twenty minutes.  Those were fun times; Killer Bs, Randy Johnson, so on.  Once the 'Stros abandoned the Dome for Enron Field/Minute Maid Park in 2000 I still managed to jump the Metrorail and get downtown for a handful of games until recent years, when my health has precluded it.  So watching these postseason games on television has, as you can probably sympathize, been stressful.  That brings us to last night.

Fortunately for emotionally worn-out fans, Wednesday's game didn't have the drastic ups and downs of Game 2 and Game 5 (or the complete downer of Game 6).

And helping calm the storm he caused, the Astros' 33-year-old Cuban rookie first baseman tipped his helmet on his initial at-bat to Yu Darvish, who proved to be the Dodgers' undoing in Game 7.


And the outcome wasn't in serious doubt, as the home team -- I know, technically they were the visitors last night -- salted it away early.  As nice as it was to see the Astros win their first championship, it was a little sweeter to watch All Star shortstop Carlos Correa take a knee and propose to his girlfriend, former Miss Texas Daniella Rodriguez.  I think she said yes based on their body language; there was a lot of noise and I couldn't hear for certain.

The Angelenos represent, to some, the Democrats: California, Dodger blue, Hollywood, liberals, you know.  The Astros?  Republicans: Texas, the two presidents Bush, country music.  So perhaps there are quite a lot of folks outside the state sneering at the Astros' good fortune and tremendous skills this morning.  All I know is that the Sports Illustrated cover jinx is as dead as a doornail.


The curse dates all the way back to Sports Illustrated's first issue, Aug. 16, 1954. The cover featured Eddie Mathews of the Milwaukee Braves. Shortly after the cover came out, the Braves had a nine-game winning streak broken ... along with Mathews' hand (he missed a week's worth of games with the injury).

Since then, the jinx has struck the likes of Super Bowl losers, Olympic non-medalists and knocked out boxers for the past seven decades.

No more.

Not only did the Astros win the World Series as predicted, but the issue's cover boy – George Springer – ended up crushing five home runs and winning the Series MVP. (The day the cover was released, Springer struck out three times as the Astros were shut out at home to the Braves.)

Maybe the jinx lives on if you're a Dodgers fan, however.  The August 22, 2017 cover:


When I was a kid, my Dad used to time his vacation every year in October for when the World Series was to be played (it was all day games then).  I expect he was as happy and relieved as I am, watching the game wherever he is.

Update: Glenn Smith at The Rag Blog has many similar memories ... and observations.

Wednesday, November 01, 2017

Scattershooting low turnout


It's safe to disregard Charles' deep-in-the-weeds spreadsheet mumbling about local turnout and go to the Chronicle (!) for the bottom line.

The latest early voting numbers in Texas show just 119,000 voters our of 9.8 million in the 15 largest counties have sent in ballots either by mail or voted at early voting locations over the first seven days of voting.

Two years ago, in a similar non-presidential election cycle, 210,000 through the first seven days of early voting in those constitutional ballot measures.

In Harris County, 29,000 people have voted out of 2.2 million people according to the Texas Secretary of State's Office. Two years ago after the first seven days of voting, 82,000 had voted out of 2.1 million registered voters.

My Harris County spreadsheet from Stan "Fire" Stanart shows 37.6K EV and mailed ballots as of last night.  Even a non-math major from a non-Catholic school can see that we -- not the royal 'we', as in 'Democrats' (pointedly excluding progressive Democrats, mind you) or 'Astros', but we Texans, or maybe just us Texans who care about civics -- are seeing around a one-tenth of one percent turnout after the first week of early voting, with five more days (two in the can) and election day to go, here in H-Town and across the state.

The only word for that is pathetic.

So it's time to ponder what might happen if some or all of Houston's bond issues fail.  The consequences of the pension reform proposition ('A') have been widely fear-mongered by Mayor Turner, and the Republicans in the Lege have succumbed to it, so I see little to no chance of that result causing widespread panic across town.  My barometer of vox populi, my Nextdoor neighbors (Westbury, Willowbend, Meyerland) seem heavily inclined to vote against the rest, which happens to be the conservative position.  Not a good outcome for Turner's policy or politics, but not cataclysmic.  The bond lawyers would have a less-Merry Christmas, and the mayor and council can probably find a way to shuffle incoming Harvey funds around where they think they need them.

So we'll see.  Update: The Chron's Lisa Falkenberg seems a little nervous about Prop A, and pulls out the pom-poms to push voters to support it.  If there is a quantifiable reason -- not some gut feeling based on ghastly low turnout -- that she would be worried enough about to opine in pleading fashion, then the city is in deep (Harvey-related contaminated) silt.

I need to blog about the Russians; that's coming.

Monday, October 30, 2017

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance can't wait to see what tricks and treats Robert Mueller has in his bag as it brings you this week's roundup.  Early birds are watching Paul Manafort surrender this morning.


Off the Kuff looks at the latest UT/Texas Tribune poll and wishes the pollsters had a bit more vision.

Socratic Gadfly first offered his take on the Joe Straus retirement announcement and then excoriated the inside-the-Mopac media gaggle for its use of the phrase "moderate Republican."

The PDid slate -- recommendations in the ongoing election for Texas constitutional amendments, Houston municipal bonds, and HCC and HISD candidates -- is posted at Brains and Eggs.  Stace at Dos Centavos also has some advice for Houston and Harris County voters.

In profiling 2018 Texas progressive candidates Lillian Salerno (TX-32), Tom Wakely (Governor), Derrick Crowe (TX-21), and Dayna Steele (Tx-36), Down With Tyranny! merits inclusion in our Wrangle this week.

The Lewisville Texan Journal, returning to its digital roots, rolled its final print edition last week.

Texas frackquakes are getting mapped now, according to Texas Vox.

The Texas Moratorium Network has photos and video from the March to Abolish the Death Penalty last Saturday, at the Capitol.

jobsanger would like to remind you that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

In another crude, racially insensitive display, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller shares a suicide joke on social media.  Sid Miller IS the joke, folks.


Houstonia has some suggestions for where you can celebrate Día de los Muertos.

 Neil at All People Have Value reviewed the post-hurricane Harvey public art work in Houston called "Toxic Pile of Dirt." APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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In more state news and lefty blog posts, Houston sports teams made news for all the right reasons and a few wrong ones over the weekend.

Something yuuuuge was missing from Rev, Franklin Graham's revival in Waco, and David Brockman at the Texas Observer took notice.

An undocumented teenager held in federal custody in Brownsville was finally able to exercise her reproductive choice after a month-long court battle.  Doyin Oyeniyi at Texas Monthly provides the account.

The Rivard Report bemoans how unsafe San Antonio is for pedestrians.

Writing for the Houston Chronicle, Dr. Jennifer McQuade of MD Anderson wants to know where our government is in Puerto Rico.  And in 'Techburger', his new blog for the Chronicle, Dwight Silverman gives four reasons why Amazon Key is a bad idea.

Space City Weather examines the Harris County proposals for flood mitigation.

Wes Ferguson at the Daily Post sees fewer Texas high schoolers interested in playing football.

Aaron West at Free Press Houston has more on the history of the three skinheads arrested in Florida for firing a gun at protestors of the Richard Spencer rally.

Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, eulogizes Catherine Vance, a 40-year-old gun safety advocate from Houston who passed away a few days ago.

And Harry Hamid has a few night anthems of a ghoul.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Sunday Funnies


82% of Democrats believe "Russia-backed" content on social media affected 2016 election outcome; Clinton campaign and DNC helped pay for Steele dossier

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Joe Straus quits Texas House

The so-called sane Republicans -- as Charles Pierce said yesterday about Jeff Flake and Bob Corker -- are going to have to come up with a better response than just running away.  Harvey Kronberg crams as much into his executive summary of the past ten months as one can into two paragraphs.


Speaker Joe Straus today stunned even his closest colleagues with his announcement that he would not seek re-election to his seat in the House. This after polling in the field showed that even his weakest San Antonio precincts were solidly behind him. In addition, there was no possible math that did not have him re-elected to lead the House.

While his low opinion of the hysteria-based rhetoric of other statewide officials and the off the rails priorities of the special session (many but for his efforts) would have further made the recovery of the Gulf Coast even more protracted than it would otherwise be were barely camouflaged, one of the great stings had to be Governor Greg Abbott reassuring CEOs that Straus would kill the bathroom bill at the same time he was rallying pastors to sermonize on its behalf from the pulpit.

It sounds as if -- in a run-on sentence of massive proportions -- HK thinks the governor is going to have be the grown-up and stop pandering to the MAGA base of the TXGOP.  Harvey has lots more Austin connections than me, so I'm sure he has a basis for believing that.  But as AF One landed in Dallas this afternoon, the governor spun his wheels on the tarmac to get in the picture with Trump.


It's truly remarkable watching a crippled man play both sides of the Texas Republican Party's freak right wing against the middle, or the left, or whatever the soon-to-be former-Straus Caucus calls themselves ('moderate' just doesn't work for me).  One of these days his manipulation of the ignorant is going to blow up in his face.  That day is still a ways off.

As to the news: conservative watchers mostly screamed with glee, while Democrats either cried their eyes out or shat their drawers in unmitigated terror.  Let the parlor games begin.

-- Do I think Straus has plans to shoot his $10 million dollar wad on something besides, to quote former TDP chair Boyd Richie from 2006, "a few select Texas House races"?  All snark aside, I certainly hope so.  Surely Joe isn't slinking away into retirement just to be another million-dollar lobbyist, right?  Right?

Update: Tilove at the Statesman echoes Straus: "I don't think so."

-- Where does his top lieutenant, Byron Cook, who bailed out right behind the Speaker this morning, fit in to any of this?  The same cryptic 'look for other ways to serve Texas' line was in his resignation letter.

Chris Hooks got paid a little early this week.

John Zerwas, a moderate who once flirted with supporting Medicaid expansion, today announced his bid to (replace Straus as Speaker), and Chris Turner, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, quickly signaled a willingness to deliver the caucus’ votes to the best possible contender. That would mean, hypothetically, that Zerwas will need some 15-25 Republican votes to clinch it in the way Straus once did. That seems very doable — particularly if Democrats are able to make real gains in the next general election, in what should be a favorable climate — but no one can say.

"No one can say."   Pfffft.  He'd know better than that (he means, of course, that early speculation about what might occur is as reliable as the Texas Tribune's polling) if he didn't have me muted on Twitter, the putz.

One thing we can say is that the legacy and self-described "very conservative Democrat" who is 'exploring' a run for governor got his news completely Bigfooted by the Speaker's sudden withdrawal today.  Too bad.  Maybe there's a spot for him somewhere on Joe Straus' independent ticket.