While Harvey was wall-bangin' ...

-- Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio and fired Seb Gorka. That's how you makes every white nationalist in the United States happy and sad at the same time.  Oh, he's also using Harvey as an opportunity to deport people.

Guy's got a gift for chaos.  Probably could call it god-given (if there was a god).

-- The city of Houston failed to certify the signatures on the petitions collected by the firefighters in time to put their pay raise proposition on the November ballot.

Despite weeks of outcry, the push by Houston firefighters to put equal pay with police officers on the November ballot will not be coming to fruition, as the deadline for City Hall to validate the petition has elapsed.

[...]

(Fireman's union president Marty) Lancton said he had offered the city financial assistance verifying the signatures if it needed to pay more employees for overtime (the mayor's office accused him of an ethical violation and asked the city attorney to open an investigation; the city attorney concluded no action was necessary). Former KTRK reporter Wayne Dolcefino's consulting firm also offered help, and Lancton said at least two council members offered district resources; but "the mayor smugly ignored the offers and the City Council took no action on the issue," Lancton wrote.

City Secretary Anna Russell, who has held her post for 45 years, said earlier this month that her office could not begin verifying signatures on the firefighters union petition because it hadn't finished verifying a petition submitted in April related to pension reform, filed by an outside political group, Texans for Local Control. Alan Bernstein, spokesman for the mayor, maintained that Mayor Turner had no influence in this process, saying she has always verified petitions in the order they're received.

How convenient for the mayor.  Let's point out that he also lost in court in his effort to legally prosecute the homeless, but at least he's making some progress on that bullet train to Dallas.  And he needs to cut HillCo loose and do his own lobbying, enlisting his governmental relations staffer Bill Kelly, who worked for Mayor Pro-Tem Ellen Cohen when she served in the Texas House.  Those three could squeeze a few phone calls onto their calendar, maybe a drive over to Austin during the session a couple of times, saving the city a little money.

Kuff is wrong again.  That's been happening a lot lately.

-- At least the mayor is smarter than Greg Abbott, so there's that.  The goobner calls for an evacuation of Houston, but Turner and County Judge Emmett say, "hold on there".

Abbott urged all Texans to heed any mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders issued by local city and county officials—but even urged people to "strongly consider" evacuating even if no evacuation order has been issued.

He made comparisons to Houston's catastrophic Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, saying that Harvey is bringing rivaling amounts of rain. The National Weather Service has forecast between 18 and 24 inches of rain for the Houston region. As such, he even urged Houstonians to consider evacuating farther north, a suggestion that contradicts advice from local officials and Mayor Sylvester Turner.

"I would urge people to strongly consider the evacuation process," he said, "because there is the possibility that people may have to go a long time without access to basic necessities, without access to water, food, power. If you have the ability to evacuate and go somewhere else for a little while, it would be good."

At a 4 p.m. press conference, Mayor Turner and County Judge Ed Emmett re-emphasized that there has not been nor will be any evacuation order for Houston, nor would they recommend voluntarily evacuating. Turner had recalled the disaster that a mandatory evacuation order during Hurricane Rita created in 2005, when people died of heat exhaustion on the highway and had to be rescued during the immense gridlock. At the presser, he and Emmett said that, given Houston is not in Harvey’s hurricane path and is dealing instead with a large rain event, this is not the type of storm that would prompt evacuations.

“In the City of Houston, this is a rain maker,” Turner said of the tropical storm that Harvey is bringing to Houston. “There’s no need for people to be thinking about leaving, getting on the road and putting themselves in danger. Quite frankly, you can be putting yourself in more danger by getting on the road.”

Turner said he and Abbott have not spoken on the phone, but Emmett said when he talked to Abbott this afternoon, Abbott assured him the message to people would be "listen to your local officials" about evacuations.

Abbott is a stone cold moron.  Someone should have told him that Houston's masses attempting to evacuate from Rita -- a week after Katrina -- resulted in virtually the same number of deaths as the storm itself did over the entire region.

In the Houston area, the muddled flight from the city killed almost as many people as Rita did. An estimated 2.5 million people hit the road ahead of the storm’s arrival, creating some of the most insane gridlock in U.S. history. More than 100 evacuees died in the exodus. Drivers waited in traffic for 20-plus hours, and heat stroke impaired or killed dozens. Fights broke out on the highway. A bus carrying nursing home evacuees caught fire, and 24 died.

The story later became about whether the haste was an over-reaction to Katrina. Houston Chronicle science writer Eric Berger argued (on Sept. 22, 2015; ten years after) that the pre-storm anxiety made sense. Rita looked terrifying and was headed straight toward Houston with 175 mph winds and worst-case scenario potential.

Nevertheless, Berger wrote, “state, county and city officials were unprepared.” The haphazard evacuation plan –  no contraflow lanes; inadequate policies to keep gas flowing – created bedlam. 

I blogged extensively about my own attempt to get out of town at the time, 11 years and 11 months ago.  Berger now blogs at Space City Weather, and is the only source I consult for hurricane-related news (though I look at the maps at Accuweather and Weather Underground, nobody has demonstrated more predictive reliability than Berger).  My teevee has been on the Travel Channel or the movie channels; no local weather hypesters nor panic-inducing hysteria for me.

-- The fraud lawsuit against the DNC was dismissed yesterday.

A year-long legal battle over the Democratic National Committee’s handling of the 2016 presidential primary came to an end Friday, with a federal judge in Florida dismissing a class-action suit brought by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

“To the extent Plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC’s internal workings, or their right of free speech — not through the judiciary,” Judge William Zloch, a Reagan appointee, wrote in his dismissal. “To the extent Plaintiffs have asserted specific causes of action grounded in specific factual allegations, it is this Court’s emphatic duty to measure Plaintiffs’ pleadings against existing legal standards. Having done so . . . the Court finds that the named Plaintiffs have not presented a case that is cognizable in federal court.”

Caitlyn Johnstone at Medium speaks for me.

The oldest political party in the world has died. It doesn’t know it yet, it isn’t acting like it yet, but it is dead. By successfully getting the DNC fraud lawsuit dismissed by Judge William J. Zloch today, the Democratic party has succeeded in killing any argument for its continued existence as a legitimate political party.

The premise of the DNC fraud lawsuit was simple: the Democratic National Committee promised voters an impartial party primary, and in 2016 it did not deliver them what it promised. By taking donations from people who believed its promise of impartiality, it committed fraud, in the same way a company selling a product labeled “sugar free” would be committing fraud if its product was loaded with maple syrup.

[...]

Documents released by WikiLeaks such as the conversations in the more egregious DNC emails, the Podesta emails showing that the DNC and the Clinton camp were colluding as early as 2014 to schedule debates and primaries in a way that favored her, then-DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile acting as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passing Clinton questions in advance to prep her for debates with Sanders all demonstrate a clear and undeniable violation of the Impartiality Clause.

The DNC Charter was revised with this promise to the American people in order to prevent a DemExit after the 1968 fiasco in Chicago, and in 2016 they undeniably broke this promise.

[...]

If you are American, whether Democrat, Republican or otherwise, you should read through Judge Zloch’s Order of Dismissal in its entirety when you have time, because this is a historic moment in your nation’s history and this ruling affects you personally. Had the case been allowed to proceed, it could have seen the DNC suffer tremendous consequences for its blatant Charter violation with the promise of more penalties should they repeat the behavior again. Former DNC leaders could have been forced to testify under oath about their behavior, and people who donated to the Sanders campaign could have been refunded their money. The DNC would have been forced into a situation where it could no longer actively sabotage progressive candidates without expecting severe consequences for that behavior.

Instead, the DNC has elected a virulently pro-establishment replacement for Debbie Wasserman Schultz in its new Chairman Tom Perez, and has to this day admitted no wrongdoing nor given any indication that it will make the massive, sweeping changes that would need to be made to prevent Impartiality Clause violations from happening in the future. There is no reason to believe that 2016 was the only time the DNC weighted its scales for a preferred candidate just because 2016 was the year it got caught, and there is now no reason to believe it won’t do so again, since it has no incentive not to.

[...]

The DNC violated its Charter, and it will not be penalized for doing so. It will march right into 2018 and 2020 using its same dirty tactics and its same fake primaries to sabotage progressive candidates and make sure that America remains dominated by not one but two right-wing parties. It therefore deserves to die.

And die it will. People like myself and countless other voices in US political commentary will forevermore be able to legitimately say that the Democrats run a novelty joke party which does not feel any obligation to hold real party elections. The Dems now have as much party legitimacy as Vermin Supreme or the Rent Is Too Damn High party. Stop taking these people seriously. DemExit and do not look back, because it’s only going to get worse from here.

You are right back where you were in 1968, America. Don’t let them fool you again.

In Texas, the Green Party has been unable to capitalize (pun intended) on the ineptitude of the Texas Democratic Party because of their own incompetence and infighting.  That leaves a small band of Democratic Socialists, who seem to be gathering a bit of momentum of late.  Should be of some interest as to whether a group of progressives -- Greens, DSA, independents running on the Donkey line, like Tom Wakely -- can muster candidates to the 2018 ballot.  I'm not holding my breath.

As I peruse my early options for next year, I do find some Democrats I could vote for, though not in their primary: Beto O'Rourke, Wakely, Almost Anybody But Cargas in CD-7, Judge RK Sandill running for SCOTX.  With Deb Kerner out of the scrum to replace John Culberson, I need to vet the candidates bidding to replace my shitbag Congress critter.  Alex Treehousesyphilis seems progressive, at least as Democrats go, but he has raised a metric shit-ton of money and that does nothing to elevate him in my eyes.  Laura Moser would be a good choice if she weren't so attached to Hillary Clinton last year.  Jason Westin abruptly unfollowed me on Twitter, probably because he figured out I'm well to the left of where he is.  Joshua Butler has some promise as the African American millennial in the race.  So if any of these managed to escape to a runoff next spring, I could swallow hard and wheel in the red square beside their name if I had to.  But there's plenty of time for the field to winnow itself before next March (or April).

"I mean, have you seen the other guys?"

Shades of "We're not perfect, but they're nuts".

Dems are asking people to vote on a new sticker and I'm not sure anyone in history has been as bad at this. pic.twitter.com/isYaZV60Dp

— Mazel Tov Cocktail (@AdamSerwer) July 5, 2017

Again, gonna be as kind as I can about it.

Yes, national Democrats, I have seen the other guys. But being "not the other guys" isn't enough to wrest control of Washington away from them.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee became a bit of an internet laughingstock on Wednesday due to the circulation of some stickers with prospective 2018 midterm election slogans. One of them read "Democrats 2018: I mean, have you seen the other guys?" The "hey, we're not them!" message didn't go over super-well with plenty of pundits and tweeters, who noted that it packs a whole lot less punch and has a lot less loft than something like "Yes, we can."

Sure, it may have been only a silly sticker, not a party manifesto. But that someone over at DCCC headquarters felt secure enough to promote such a slogan publicly is also emblematic of a party that still hasn't figured out what it wants to be following a wholly unexpected loss to a reality television actor, after a campaign that was in large part premised on "hey, we're not that crazy Trump guy."

Plenty of others, mostly on Twitter, were meaner, so no need for me to pile on.  Oh, wait a minute ... yes there is.

(These pitiful slogans) are coming from the same organization that poured millions of dollars into Jon Ossoff’s failed congressional campaign and that has focused its recovery strategy on converting moderate Republicans. Since Barack Obama assumed office in 2009, the Democratic Party has lost nearly 1,100 seats in elected offices across the country to “the other guys.” Instead of stopping their losing streak with meaningful policies that would risk alienating their donors -- such as single-payer health care -- Democrats have obsessed about Donald Trump’s connection to Russia.

These slogans epitomize the current state of Democratic Party. None of the slogans address important issues or convey moral conviction. Rather, they expect their support base to “vote blue no matter who.” Democrats market themselves as better than Republicans, but they fail to address issues important to voters.

Right now, Democrats are the losing party, and leadership makes it increasingly more embarrassing to be affiliated with the party. It’s not a coincidence that Sen. Bernie Sanders -- an independent who won’t tarnish his name by affiliating with the party -- is the most popular politician in the country.  Americans (including Democratic Congressional candidates in red states like Texas) are increasingly identifying as independent, a symptom of their disenfranchisement from both political parties. Democrats fail to realize that trying to capitalize on hatred of the Republican party only creates more apathy. So far, Democrats have failed to develop a vision that resonates with voters and to sever ties with their corporate donors or widely unpopular leaders. Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Tom Perez and Hillary Clinton -- all widely disliked -- are the current party spokespersons. All these aspects combined ensure Democrats will continue losing until they drastically change course.

Ouch.  A less harsh take on the state of play, from the US News link at the top.

As befits a national party that is a bit lost in the wilderness, Democrats are being pulled in several different directions at the moment: There's the so-called Sanders-Warren wing, so named because of Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who espouse an unapologetically progressive vision. There's the tech-bro wing attempting to use Silicon Valley-style thinking to "hack" the party for the internet age. And then there's the rump of Blue Dogs and mealy-mouthed centrists who believe that triangulating and being OK with bigotry is the only way to win back those disaffected white, working-class voters so famously wooed by now-President Donald Trump.

And a sunnier point of view from McClatchy, via Raw Story.

A trio of new political action committees — the People's House Project, Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats — are looking for ways to support candidates with economically progressive platforms and to challenge the party establishment, especially in Rust Belt states where President Donald Trump saw much unexpected success last November.

The activists aren't daunted by the odds.

"Democrats should be able to win in all these places," said Krystal Ball, founder of the People's House Project, which has endorsed its first candidate, Randy Bryce, an iron worker with an attention-getting advertising shtick who is running for House Speaker Paul Ryan's seat in Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District.

And in Appalachia.

They've already begun gathering candidates, and they're not just going after Republicans.

Frustrated with increased poverty and poor working conditions in her home state of West Virginia, environmental activist Paula Jean Swearengin launched a campaign with the help of Brand New Congress to challenge centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in 2018.

"It's a disgrace as a coal miner's daughter that I have to beg for clean water and clean air for my children," she said. "He challenged us to primary him, so shame on Joe Manchin that a single mom of four is going after his seat."

Since launching her campaign in early May, Swearengin said she has raised $81,000 through small donations from more than 5,000 people.

While she said it's unlikely she could raise more donations than Manchin, who has the financial backing of the coal industry, Swearengin believes her progressive messaging could resonate with discouraged West Virginians.

Sanders won 51 percent of West Virginia's Democrats in last year's primary, easily defeating runner-up Hillary Clinton, who eight years before handily defeated then-Sen. Barack Obama in the state's Democratic primary.

In Texas, we have Libertarians who voted in the GOP primary in 2016 (read the comments) running as Democrats in places like TX-31 against incumbent John Carter.  Some people believe this is the only kind of Democrat that can get elected in Republican districts.  James Cargas, the CD-7 Democrat who supports fracking and still does not live in the district, has sold that line three consecutive times with no luck.  Annnnd he's back for a fourth go.

There remain plenty of twists and turns before November of 2018, but Democrats have a lot of work to do, and despite Charles' optimism about the locals, their compasses still aren't all pointing true north just yet.

Russians may be coming again ... but we've larger voting problems

Before we go to war with North Korea, before the unhinged Right starts killing CNN reporters, before acetamenophin destroys what's left of our empathy ...

When last we tuned in to RT while clicking on Sputnik News, we learned that our antagonists Boris and Natasha Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear (see here and here for the Wiki background) had been hard at work scaring the pants off moose and squirrel everybody from Jameses Comey and Clapper to your friendly neighborhood Dem precinct captain about what, precisely, they had been up to in the summer of 2016.  That is to say, beyond humiliating Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Donna Brazile, John Podesta, Huma Abedin, and the rest of the DNC hacks that got hacked.

We learned that they hacked into 39 states' voter databases -- or tried to, and succeeded in getting into perhaps just one, Illinois.  Alex Ward at Vox has it, with a link over to the original at Bloomberg, and previously and briefly referenced by yours truly in the second half of this aggrepost.

While this is indeed alarming, I still find voter suppression via photo ID and partisan gerrymandering to be greater threats to our republic.  Paper ballots with verifiable paper trails -- something like the Scantron-style electronic voting machines Denton County has just adopted -- would resolve the  Russian problem, but nothing short of a blue tsunami will fix the other two, and unless they can find something to run on besides "Trump is evil/Russia/Impeach",  2018 isn't going to be the cycle the Donkeys are looking for.

(*Ed note: let me pause here and acknowledge my friend Brad Friedman's lasting concerns about anything machine count-related.  Experts appear to disagree on the hackability, or at least the ease thereof, of scanned ballot counters.)

For the benefit of my conspiratorially-minded Democratic friends, let me point out -- as I have repeatedly in the past -- that the key to cracking the Russian code lies not in tracing election hacking attempts but in Trump's still-concealed tax returns.  Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Felix Sater, and the rest of that ilk are the threads special counsel Mueller should be -- and hopefully is -- pulling on.  And if Trump, or Jeff Sessions, or Devin Nunes, or any Republican in the administration or the Congress is found to be obstructing that investigation, then the walls will come tumbling down.

Focusing on the wrong Russiagate is starting to show up in polling as a loser for Democrats.  It's a winner for the corporate media and ratings, however, especially MSNBC.  Before Mika B's facelift became an atrocious but ultimately distracting Tweet -- even Tucker Carlson thinks so, by Jeebus -- Trump usually didn't give half of one solid shit about the other liberal media news channel; he's mobilized his base to destroy CNN, and now even Julian Assange is piling on.

I would like to also point out that the Democratic Party has bigger fish to fry than continuing to demonize Jill Stein, but I'm convinced that unhealthy obsession has become part of their DNA.

So with all that, plus 1) Kris Kobach, 2) a Texas Legislature poised to over-reach once more with a photo ID law that will require a couple of years for the courts to once again nullify, and 3) gerrymandered congressional and statehouse districts thanks to Tom DeLay almost fifteen years ago, as Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker reminded us in his comprehensive and compelling piece "America's Future is Texas"... why are you more worried about what Russian hackers may or may not be doing in the next election cycle?  Your vote barely counts for anything as it is.

On a more positive note, here's an easily attainable goal for those of us in Harris County: #FireStanStanart and replace him with Diane Trautman, and then push the mostly Republican county commissioners to approve and purchase paper ballots for 2020.  Because if Democrats can actually win some elections -- particularly this one -- in 2018, those GOPers will be forced to do so, due to the caterwauling from their base about Ill Eagles voting.

See how easy this is?  Just requires a little focus on the proper thing.

Hillary Clinton, 'round the bend

Let the healing begin scab be scratched open and bleed on the carpet a bit more.

"I take responsibility for every decision I made, but that's not why I lost."

She lost, she told Recode's Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, because of unfair media coverage, an "unprecedented" campaign waged against her by a foreign adversary, James Comey's decision to re-open her email probe, criticism of her candidacy that she claimed bordered on misogyny, and a prevailing sentiment that she would be victorious, which hampered voter turnout.

And also the DNC, that POS -- something we can both agree on, although for a few reasons we might agree on ... and several we would not.

Clinton said that she did not inherit a strong data foundation from the Democratic party, which was "bankrupt" and near "insolvent."  

I suppose if this was true, it then wouldn't be Debbie Wasserman Schultz's fault.  But it is not true, unless you would rather believe Breitbart, which posted fundraising numbers from the fall of 2015 and linked to a FEC page (you'll have to manipulate your request by year and org to compare the figues with Breitbart's claims).  There's this from 2013 and CNN and Fortune magazine, and that's the best evidence I can find that supports Clinton's assertion.  By contrast, this story from Politico last July completely contradicts Her.

Hillary Clinton’s joint fundraising committee with the Democratic National Committee raised $81.6 million over the last three months, and transferred $20.7 million of it to her campaign, according to a report filed Friday night with the Federal Election Commission.

The committee, Hillary Victory Fund, has been raising money aggressively since last year and it finished last month with $41.9 million in the bank. That’s more than double the balance maintained by the two joint fundraising committees started in late May by her presumptive GOP rival Donald Trump, who is facing a gaping financial disadvantage.

Hillary Victory Fund’s FEC report reveals a smoothly functioning Democratic Party fundraising apparatus behind their presumptive nominee. The committee transferred $22.8 million to 32 participating state parties as well as $11.8 million to the DNC.

It also reported receiving $1.5 million raised by lobbyists, including $31,200 bundled by Tony Podesta, the brother of Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. In contrast, Trump, who has railed against the power of lobbyists, did not report receiving any money raised by lobbyists into his joint committees.

Perhaps she's accurate; the DNC may have been flat busted in late 2015, and she certainly did 'inject money' into it.  Don't all presidential candidates do that, though?  At the very least, presidential nominees augment the fundraising of the national organization.  I recall hearing lots of complaining about the DNC not helping state parties, and the article above notes her contribution to them, but there was a later Politico story reporting that both she and they did not follow through on that, and indeed sought to conceal that fact from the media.

(*ed. note: several updates have been made to the above graf.)

Let's read Clinton's full statement for context.

"So I’m now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party. I mean, it was bankrupt. It was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong," she recalled. "I had to inject money into it."

By contrast, she said, then-GOP candidate Donald Trump inherited a well-funded and extensively tested data operation that laid the foundation for his ultimately successful campaign to effectively weaponize data and internet content against Clinton.

"So Trump becomes the nominee and he is basically handed this tried and true, effective foundation," Clinton said. 

The DNC was not bankrupt nor was it insolvent, or anything near it, at the time she became the Democratic nominee last summer.  That statement is demonstrably false.

With respect to data management infrastructure: recall that Clinton had her own (allegedly) sophisticated IT team and tool, named Ada.  So if what she said above was true ... why would Trump even need the Russians and their agents to spew out fake news on social media, conning gullible Americans into not voting for Her?

Big Data failed Clinton but not Trump?  Trump and the GOP -- specifically Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica, or maybe Robert Mercer -- were just smarter than Clinton and the DNC?  Okay, scratch that question.  But this one deserves an answer: does the evidence of the past six months of the Trump Administration in action enable you to believe this?

It did make Ted Cruz sick to his stomach once upon a time, for whatever that's worth.  Again, why do you need Russians when you have evil geniuses like Michal Kozinski?

A couple of things before we move on to the Russians hacking the election (sic).

"We did not engage in false content," Clinton said. "We weren't in the same category as the other side." (There have been false stories from both political stances, according to analysis from BuzzFeed News.)

And she was "the victim of an assumption she would win".

Now then, let's get our passports stamped for Moscow, via the looking glass.

“The [17-agency report from the intelligence community] concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an extensive information war campaign against my campaign to influence voters in the election,” Clinton said. “They did it through paid advertising, we think. They did it through false news sites. They did it through these 1,000 agents. They did it through machine learning, which kept spewing out this stuff over and over again, the algorithms they developed.”

Then she asked, not-quite-rhetorically, “Who were they coordinating with or colluding with?”

Unlike previous Russian cyberattacks inside the U.S., “This was different. They went public,” she said. “The Russians, in my opinion -- and based on the intel and counterintel people I’ve talked to -- they could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they had been guided.”

“Guided by Americans?” Mossberg asked.

“Guided by Americans,” Clinton answered. “And guided by people who had polling data and information.”

Okay then. At least we didn't get any postulates about voting machines being hacked.

After a brief tour of James Comey’s behavior during the election, Kara Swisher asked Clinton who she thought was guiding the Russians. “ I hope that we’ll get enough information to be able to answer that question,” Clinton responded at first.

Swisher prompted, “But you’re leaning Trump.”

“I am leaning Trump,” Clinton said.

“We’re going to, I hope, connect up a lot of the dots,” she said. “And it’s really important because when Comey did testify before being fired this last couple of weeks, he was asked, ‘Are the Russians still involved?’ And he goes, ‘Yes. They are.’ Why wouldn’t they be? It worked for them. It is important for Americans, particularly people in tech and business, to understand Putin wants to bring us down and he is an old KGB agent.”

I'm sorry to say it, but both the Democrats and the Republicans nominated candidates who were far too emotionally unstable to serve as President of the United States.  I still believe the worst one won, but it's a real close call.

Of course, Clinton believes she beat Trump. And Bernie Sanders, too.

Hillary in Wonderland.

I'll still stand on James Comey being a blithering idiot, voter suppression in states like Wisconsin, and Clinton being the absolute worst candidate imaginable in a 'change' election cycle, and that was before her rumored health issues were unfortunately confirmed, and a host of other Al Gore-like small mistakes that added up to her pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.  Errors in polling, the coup de grâce, gave everybody a false sense of security that she would hang on.  I went back and forth about her prospects myself at the end of September, and again in early November.  But even Trump himself was musing about 'taking a nice, long vacation' after Election Day.

That was in August, though.  Conspiracists alight!

Democrats winning and losing

-- First, a few more photos from the weekend, at the Capitol ...

... and here in H-Town:

And more pics at the Observer.

The rallies are powerful and enduring emotionally, but simply do not translate into electoral strength. Big turnouts for protests can be misleading, as Nate Silver reminds, and as Charles has noted, Wendy Davis and her filibuster produced a similarly large crowd of upset people over women's reproductive freedoms, and then Greg Abbott defeated her a year later with more white (but not black or brown) female votes than Davis was able to earn.  So it's fair to ask: where do the Dems go from here?  Bernie Sanders answered this question a few days after Hillary Clinton's upset defeat, but none of the 447 people who will be voting in this election seem to have heard it.

We can hope they don't go back to where they started two years ago, but in a glaring sign of chronic insanity, not a single DNC candidate running to replace DWS/Donna Brazile was willing to admit that the 2016 primary was rigged for Clinton.  Keith Ellison is as close to acceptable as it gets for actual progressives (not the alt-progs that comprise most of the party), and a lot of them are already stepping away from him because.... well, I suppose he just can't help himself.

In trying to woo the DNC delegates he needs to win the election, Ellison has reduced his criticism of Hillary Clinton and increased his smears of the Republican Party. He has endorsed a billionaire donor, Stephen Bittel, to become the Florida Democratic Party chair, and has announced that he will not be attending Trump’s Inauguration, which many commended. But what he failed to mention is that he will be meeting with billionaire donors instead at Clinton propagandist David Brock’s closed-door retreat. Though Ellison initially said he supported re-enacting a ban on lobbyists that former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz lifted in 2015 to help Hillary Clinton, he recently said he won’t unilaterally re-enact the ban but will put it to a vote for DNC members to decide. Many of the DNC members happen to be lobbyists.

Incidentally, only one candidate marched this past weekend.  All the rest huddled with David Brock instead.  I shouldn't have to point this out, but Republicans and Democrats are reduced to fighting over the crumbs from a couple of hundred American billionaire oligarchs, some of which hedge their losses by giving to both parties.  Another 'water is wet'-ism for the Blues: Trump did not get elected because he raised or spent the most money.

-- Kuff has kept tabs on the local D scene with updates to the Harris county chair contest, and the announcement of a bid for Congress by my neighbor, Deb Kerner.

Of the ten folks formally announced (so to speak) for the race, Art Pronin, Dominique Davis, and Lillie Schechter should be the front-runners.  This will again be a blacks vs. gays battle (an old storyline, and note that Keryl Douglas has come back for more of it) for control of the county party, so since Pronin still hasn't decided to run for certain, I would handicap it Davis and Schechter, not necessarily in that order, as early favorites.  DBC has a report on Johnathan Miller's appearance at the Houston Area Progressives meeting this week; he nails it from my perspective.

There are only a few hundred people voting in this election, too.

Kerner (her school trustee page has been updated) is popular with us southwest-siders, and unlike any of the recent challengers to John Culberson, has won an election before.  Keep in mind that Hillary Clinton narrowly carried CD7 over Trump in 2016, while Culberson pasted James Cargas by twelve points, his third consecutive defeat to the incumbent Congress critter.  Anybody that spares us from watching Cargas lose a fourth time is a good thing.

Scattershooting the state budget, the potty bill, and a few Democrats

-- The Texas House and Senate have submitted their preliminary budgets, and they're billions of dollars apart.  The Statesman says over $5 billion after the wash, the TexTrib and the Chron are going with $8 billion.  This is illustrative of the dilemma facing those of us who want to better understand these things; details are scant on some of the largest expenditures, but it's enough to conclude that state services are going to get a lot worse.  One bright spot I can find is that the House does not declare the economic stabilization account, aka rainy day funds, untouchable.

... Rep. Drew Darby, a San Angelo Republican and House budget expert, hinted that his colleagues would consider tapping the state's Rainy Day Fund, which holds more than $10 billion.

"It was designed to accommodate these times that we're in right now," Darby said of the fund at a panel discussion at a conference hosted by the Texas Association of Business. "It has been raided and reduced to near zero three times in the past."

This is more open-minded thinking than I can recall seeing, particularly from members of the Texas House, and suggests that their influence will be greater than the Senate's, which has gone too far right to be of much service to any proud Texan.

-- Related to that premise, Joe Straus is going to push on Greg Abbott to take his side -- and not Piss Lord Dan Patrick's -- on the bathroom bill.  Bold emphasis mine.

House Speaker Joe Straus, R- San Antonio, was wary of the Senate’s “bathroom bill” during a speech at the Texas Association of Business conference on Wednesday, sharing his personal opinion that Senate Bill 6 could result in economic troubles.

“There’s been a lot of work put into our state’s economic success,” Straus said. “Contrary to popular myth, it is not a miracle. We want to continue that success and we want Texas to keep attracting the best and the brightest. One way to maintain our economic edge is to send the right signals about who we are.”

The speaker also appeared to be interested in getting a real stance on the issue from Gov. Greg Abbott, saying “the governor’s opinion on this can make a big difference too.”

“If you are concerned, and I know many of you are, now is the time to speak up,” Straus said, addressing conference attendees.

I say we all try to knock the guy in the wheelchair off that fence he's straddling.

-- In under-reported Texas developments:

A state district judge in Austin has taken the next step in dissolving the American Phoenix Foundation, the group that 'terrorized' members of the Legislature last session by secretly, then not-so-secretly, filming them at the Texas Capitol and elsewhere in Austin.

Former state Sen. Dan Shelley has been appointed as receiver to take over and dissolve the foundation, which has been described by its founder Joe Basel as “defunct.”

(Many QR readers may remember that Sen. Shelley served in both chambers and was legislative liaison to the legislature for both governors George W. Bush and Rick Perry.)

"The appointment of a receiver is an extraordinary remedy applied only because Joe Basel abused a nonprofit as if it were his personal play thing," said Steve Bresnen, the veteran lobbyist who filed suit to bring the finances of the Phoenix Foundation into the light.

Scott Braddock, the author of this excerpt, is simply a terrible writer -- too many quote marks and far too much inappropriate capitalization -- so I took the liberty to edit him above in that regard.  But to his credit, he appears to be the only reporter who covered this story.  It was ten days ago that the court squashed American Phoenix to death, and my Google machine shows no other stories about it.

-- As I posted earlier last week, memes are fun, get a lot of action on social media, and are rarely fact-checked.  But the fact-checkers make their their own mistakes, too.  It's getting more difficult to discern fake news from non-fake news, and the best thing you can do is to set your BS detector to 'highest', and wait for the autopsy results.

I remain of the opinion that Cory Booker is a POS neoliberal.

In July 2013, @IvankaTrump held a $5,200 per plate fundraiser for @CoryBooker in her apartment. #TrumpHistoryLecturehttps://t.co/aGjnA2Oi8d pic.twitter.com/10iZRxTWG5

— Jeanette Sandernista (@JeanetteJing) January 17, 2017

-- Tom Perez also still sucks.

(Outgoing) Labor Secretary Tom Perez, one of the leading candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee, has stumbled in recent days when asked about his position on money in politics.

Asked at a DNC forum in Phoenix last Saturday whether he will “revive President Obama’s ban on corporate donations to the DNC” and a ban on appointing lobbyists as party leaders, Perez demurred.

“It’s actually not that simple a question,” Perez responded, adding that such a move might have “unintended consequences.” Perez argued that such a ban might impact “union members who are lobbyists,” though the question explicitly only addressed corporate lobbyists.

Speaking to the Huffington Post, Perez has refused to clarify his position on resurrecting President Obama’s ban on lobbyist donations to the DNC, which was overturned by former DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., during Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency.

The only firm restriction on special-interest money Perez has announced is that he will not accept lobbyist donations for his own campaign committee formed to support his bid for DNC chair. But even this position has come under question.

The Intercept recently obtained a fundraiser invite for Team Tom, Perez’s DNC chair campaign committee, for an event on January 26 in Washington, D.C. The event invite clearly prohibits lobbyist money, but the host committee — the individuals sponsoring the event — included several federally registered lobbyists and individuals working in the lobbying industry ...

Read on if you like, but I'm done.

2016 Brainiacs: The Democrats

I sort of telegraphed it, yes?

The cartoonists really get what the Hillbots still don't.  Beginning early in this presidential cycle -- actually in the summer of 2015, when I made my most accurate prediction -- the establishment Donkeys stubbornly refused self-examination of their move to crown Hillary Clinton, beginning in the early primaries and debates.  Democrats laughed and mocked the GOP as the Pachyderms' bizarre primary slowly produced Donald Trump as nominee.  Even as DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was finally forced out, resigning ahead of the party's convention after hacked emails revealed the committee had indeed been favoring Hillary over Bernie Sanders, they refused to think in any terms except their own inevitability.  DWS moved right over to honorary chair of the Clinton campaign, and her successor, Donna Brazile, was later revealed to have shared town hall questions with her pals inside the camp.

They also denigrated Sandernistas for saying the primary was "rigged".  This would come back to haunt them in November with their festering Russian obsession, a derangement syndrome showing no sign of playing itself out until late January at the earliest.  And maybe longer than that ...

Besides being a lousy establishment candidate running in a 'change' election cycle, the presumptive Madam President made unforced errors: failing to hold a press conference for more than nine months, attending an Adele concert two weeks before the election, but never managing to visit Wisconsin even once.  She made a severe miscalculation late, demanding SEIU activists stay in Iowa and not go to Michigan, a state she lost twice, the first time in a foreboding upset -- a polling one -- to Sanders.  This might have been the loudest alarm bell they never heard.

But if any external factor could be blamed for her defeat, it would have to be FBI director James Comey, who first cleared Clinton in the summer following a probe into her use of a private email server, then -- 11 days before the election -- wrote a letter to Congress that he had new information that led him to revisit that decision.  The "new information" was DNC emails on the personal computer of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the now ex-husband of Hillary's closest advisor, Huma Abedin.  Two days before voters went to the polls, Comey re-cleared Clinton.

Nate Silver said on the same day, November 6, that this cost Clinton 2-4 percentage points in the national polling, and since the aggregate of polls were in error by a similar margin, he evaluated in December that the Comey letter had the greatest effect on the presidential race.  Indeed, late-deciding voters in swing states broke heavily for Trump (here's your fake news on that) and in one of the more stunning reveals in post-2016 election analysis, more Republicans stayed true to their man than Democrats did their woman.  There was simply a vast overestimate of her popularity among voters -- perhaps also described as overstating the unpopularity of Trump -- and it was most clearly seen in the electoral crumbling of the Great Lakes states presumed to be her firewall: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.  Her popular vote victory of nearly three million votes over Trump exposed the superfluous waste of concentrated support in states like New York and California, and even urban cities and counties in blood-red states (like Houston and Harris County, which she carried by 12 percentage points).

Here's the lesson, repeated: nationally surveyed two-horse race polls do not pick presidents, and neither does the sum of all votes across the country.  Clinton and her supporters acted both arrogant and lackadaisical about her electoral strength due to the faulty polling, and continue to trumpet the popular vote after it as an excuse to refuse to accept reality.  As long as they remain stuck in this position, they won't be able to organize for 2018, a year with even greater electoral warning flags.

Against this backdrop, the DNC moves toward electing a new chair, which looks like a repeat of the primary battle: likely either US Rep. Keith Ellison, an African American Muslim and Sanders acolyte, or Obama's labor secretary Tomas Perez, the Clinton (or is it Obama?) faction's choice who was exposed in the hacked/leaked emails as a man willing to play the race card against Sanders in the primary.  The schism shows no sign of healing.  Update: The latest on Perez's shortcomings, essentially the same as Clinton's.

Beyond that course, the strategy for the neoliberals seems to be to TeaBag Trump right out of the gate, as the Tea Pees did to Obama in 2009.  That didn't work out so well for the Baggers in 2012, so they went harder right, morphing into the alt-right white nationalists who propelled Trump to victory in the boondocks ... and thus the nation.

The Sanders Democrats, for their part, responsibly declined to jump ship after his defeat and ongoing disrespect, as the vote tallies for the minor party candidates revealed.  There was much less leakage of votes away from Clinton than there was perceived there would be (although the polls got the numbers for the third parties mostly correct).  When the Greens' Jill Stein established a fund to pay for election recounts in the Midwestern states, it was primarily Democrats who opened their wallets and forked over millions of dollars for a last-ditch hope of changing the outcome.  The system batted away that challenge like a badminton shuttlecock.

So Sanders, via Ellison, tries again to take over a broken Democratic machine that relies on the Republican model in terms of money and corporate support, but without the ability to either fight in the trenches or appeal to the working class voters who were their base for decades.  And when they lose, they'll stay loyal, attempting to overhaul a calcified political party from within instead of moving a little to the left and doing something different.  The definition of insanity, part 937.

But an olive branch in this scathing rebuke is extended to congratulate the Harris County Democrats, who succeeded where virtually all other Democratic parties across the country failed in 2016: switch Republican voters over, turn out the vote among Latin@s, and otherwise grind out a big win in a formerly purple, 50-50 county.  They did what the national organization couldn't, and maybe they have some wisdom to share going forward.  Who they pick to replace Lane Lewis as county chair will make a lot of difference as to whether they can sustain the gains in 2018 and, in the big picture, help eject the Cheeto Tweeter from the Oval Office in 2020.

Democracy is counting on a knee-capped, divided, somewhat bitter and mostly clueless bunch of elitist Democrats who favored a strong defense and big banks at the expense of working men and women, and nobody ought to hold their breath waiting for them to figure out how to win in two years.  Four years from now ought to be easier, but that's an eon away in political terms.

I'm going to continue to help organize something outside this shell of an allegedly liberal political party, but kudos to those who still think there's a rebellion to win within it.  Those folks will eventually be allies to those of us outside the castle walls, and how long it takes for them to come to their senses is the only remaining question.

Update: Down with Tyranny has a harsher evaluation.

#GNCinHOU - Assange, Stein, Baraka, West, and YOU

Today's speeches and the roll call of states will culminate a furious week of Green Party events, media coverage, and high profile exposure (at last) of America's only political option for peace.  One highlight breaking late is the "chairman" of Wikileaks, making some remarks from long distance just before lunchtime.  Perhaps you saw him last night on Bill Maher.

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, the organization that recently posted thousands of the Democratic Party's internal emails online, will speak via live stream at the Green Party national convention, party officials announced Friday.

Assange is scheduled to speak at 11:45 a.m. Saturday over a live stream from the Embassy of Ecuador in London.

He will speak on the third day of the progressive party's national convention at the University of Houston, before the party nominates its 2016 presidential nominee, widely expected to be Jill Stein.

Assange is expected to be interviewed by 2004 Green Party presidential nominee David Cobb, party officials said in a statement Friday.

Wikileaks recently made headlines by releasing thousands of Democratic Party emails on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, suggesting that some DNC party officials quietly had backed Clinton. The revelations angered Sanders supporters, rocked the Democratic gathering and prompted the ouster of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The keynote speakers today will be Dr. Cornel West and YahNé Ndgo, late of the Bernie Sanders campaign and now -- like so many others -- advocates for Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka.

West was appointed to the Democratic Party's platform drafting committee by Sanders. The activist raised concerns over the party's stance on Palestinian rights, and later endorsed the Green Party, saying "there’s no way, based on moral grounds, those based on my own moral conscience, that I could support [the Democratic Party] platform."

He added about Sanders' ultimate support for Clinton's nomination at the Democratic National Convention: "And once my dear brother moved into his endorsement, his strong endorsement of the neoliberal disaster that Sister Hillary represents, there was no way that I could stay with Bernie Sanders any longer, had to break with the two-party system."

That should get a few pairs of Jockeys in a wad.

Not attending the Green Party's Presidential Nominating Convention in Houston. #GNCinHOU pic.twitter.com/Myfy0byIN9

— Green Party US (@GreenPartyUS) August 5, 2016

Here's a schedule of speakers and events.  Note that political conventions don't always run on time, but Assange will likely be prompt (satellite time is neither inexpensive nor flexible).  Dr. West is slated for 2 pm.  Videos from yesterday's pressers are already posted; Texas Green candidates down the ballot are represented in the third one there.

"Come for the revolution, stay for the party". Tonight, after the formalities conclude.

Music, food, a cash bar and lots more.

Throw some caysh into Jill's money boom.  She's already purchased some national teevee advertising, jumping ahead of Trump there and in this poll of voters under thirty.

If you can't be in Houston today for a little history, find a livestream.

DNC Day 1: a rocky road smooths out

Passions in Philadelphia ran hot starting at breakfast with the Florida delegation, as DWS stubbornly continued to keep a prominent role in the Democrats' confab, and was repeatedly told  -- by both Berners and other DNC officials -- that it was time to hit the road.

Monday was supposed to be simple. After months of acrimony, the Democrats were ready to present a united front. The lineup spoke volumes: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were the headliners. Lions of the left, Warren and Sanders were there to set the tone for the convention. Booming endorsements from them was a smart way to symbolically undercut the intra-party bickering, to signal unity.

But then WikiLeaks released thousands of DNC emails and, well, everything changed.

Sanders has lamented the DNC’s pro-Clinton bias for months, and now there’s indisputable evidence that he was right. The DNC seems to have violated its own charter by clandestinely backing Clinton over Sanders before any votes were cast. There was plenty of writing on the wall before this story broke, but the hacked emails are damning. So damning, in fact, that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign hours before she was set to gavel in the convention.

To anyone on the fence about Clinton and the DNC, it won’t matter that Russia was behind the data-dump or that some of the emails were likely fabricated in order to maximize the damage – there’s enough truth in them to confirm the anti-establishment narratives.

Wasserman-Schultz was indeed finally muzzled, and there was some admonishment directed at the dissenters by her temp replacement, Marcia Fudge, about respect.  That also set a tone.

Scolding.

Yes, it was great to hear (Bernie) say, “Hillary Clinton must be our next president.” It was good for party unity that you publicly declared, “I am proud to stand with her.”

But you did not personally address your most ardent supporters. You know, those “Bernie or Bust” people who have vowed to sit out the election, vote for Trump or vote Jill Stein’s Green Party.

You needed to personally address your most militant revolutionaries: the ones who now think of you as a sell-out, a fake, and a fraud.

Your diehards needed a “come-to-Jesus” moment, something like this:

Let's not go there.  Sarah Silverman's spanking of the boobirds was received well by the Hillbots, and poorly by the spankees.

Silverman — a former Sanders supporter — is known as absurdist provocateur (she once jokingly accused sweet, avuncular, octogenarian New York talk show host Joe Franklin of raping her) and she made a serious miscalculation. When she called for the audience to back Clinton (“Hillary is our Democratic nominee, and I will proudly vote for her”), they responded with deafening, unifying applause. But then she taunted the vanquished, a rookie political mistake. “To the Bernie-or-Bust people, you are being ridiculous!” she said, standing next to a puckered 'Saturday Night Live' stalwart-turned-Minnesota Sen. Al Franken.

The upper tier erupted in a cascade of “Bernie!” — out came the signs — and the kumbaya narrative was momentarily shattered.

Demi Lovato and Paul Simon alternately rocked and soothed the savages in both camps to a degree ('Bridge Over Troubled Waters', indeed) and then Sen. Cory Booker summoned the image of a happy warrior -- perhaps symbolic of the one who is preparing to depart the White House.  His rollicking ten minutes made some delegates wish he had been tapped VP.

Why, you could almost forget that he's so deep in bed with Wall Street that he could massage Hillary Clinton's toes under the covers.

Then it was Elizabeth Warren's turn, and she got her own hero's welcome.  But her speech was lackluster in delivery and included some content that simply wasn't factual, like how hard Clinton had fought the big banks and opposed unfair trade deals, and suddenly the oxygen seem to go out of the room again.

With the crying and disgust mostly at ebb tide, Michelle Obama seized the moment.

But something happened on the way to the Democratic crack-up: Michelle Obama, something of an afterthought on the opening-night program, delivered the best speech of Hillary Clinton’s career.

[...]

Over the years, much has been made of the first lady’s supposed animosity toward both Clintons (mostly fiction, with a soupçon of truth), a vestige of the bitter 2008 campaign. But on Monday night, Michelle Obama delivered a more passionate and concise case for Clinton than the candidate has ever made for herself — and perhaps the single most effective political address delivered in 2016.

While reporters scanned the arena eaves for signs of discord, Obama offered a case for unifying around the first female major party nominee in the country’s 240-year history — voice breaking as she talked about Clinton’s role in teaching her daughters that a woman could be president. It was an appeal to the better angels of the electorate, a hybrid of her husband’s classic hope-and-change message and Clinton’s “Glass Ceiling” 2008 concession speech. “We insist that the hateful language that they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country,” she said, clearly — if not explicitly — referring to Trump. “When someone is cruel and acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. … When they go low, we go high.”

That's an accurate description.  The first lady absolutely mesmerized the hall.

She handed off to Bernie, who got a thundering one-minute standing ovation.  It took a few minutes for him to get to the point, but he too let the air out of the tires of the #NeverHillary faction.

It seemed, though, as if the #DemExit bunch quieted down on Twitter, and the rancor might indeed be dissipated, so I'll keep an eye peeled today to see if it returns and the intensity if it should.  With the roll call vote and the Big Dog on tap to speak tonight, things could just as easily go south again for party kinda-sorta unity.

This piece from Chris Cillizza about Bernie's revolution having passed him by is the most cogent thing I read yesterday.  Whatever number of Berners abandon ship on July 29, the election dynamic has surely changed.  To what degree is still to be determined.  We might have more evidence of that next week in two weeks, when the Greens and Jill Stein come to Houston for their convention.

PUMA

Despite a "win" on the superdelegates thing ...

On Saturday, after a lengthy debate during the Democratic Party’s rules committee — as Occupy protesters marched outside — the Sanders and Clinton delegates agreed to create a “unity” commission. The commission will be charged with developing rules that would reduce the number of superdelegates by two-thirds. It will also give Sanders, Clinton and the Democratic National Committee each the responsibility of picking members for the commission.

“This is a tremendous victory for Senator Sanders’ fight to democratize the Democratic Party and reform the Democratic nominating process,” Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, said in a statement. “We were pleased to work with the Clinton campaign to enact this historic commission.” 

 ... and DWS's head on a pike ...

“Going forward, the best way for me to accomplish those goals is to step down as Party Chair at the end of this convention,” she said. She also stated that she would still open and close the convention, and address the delegates, though that remains to be seen.

... the Sandernistas assembling in Philly continue to demand nothing less than their man as the party's nominee.  Let's splash some cold reality in their faces:

1. the 'unity commission' is not a win for Sanders;
2. Sanders is not going to be the nominee in any imaginable scenario;
3. Wasserman Schultz's falling on her sword does not resolve the inherent corruption exposed in the leaked emails of the DNC's management of this primary's debates, rules, the Sanders voters' disenfranchisement in states like Arizona, California, New York and Nevada, and other conduct revealing the organization to be exactly like -- and in some cases worse than -- the GOP.

Hundreds of thousands and perhaps a few million Democrats are threatening to exit the party following the convention as a result, a story yet to be reported in the corporate media.  Until the exodus starts to show up in the polling, however, it ain't really hap'nin.

Trump has shown no discernible convention bounce, although there should be a raft of polls Monday morning that may suggest otherwise.  I'll update here or in a new post, either way.

Update (Monday 7/25. 7 a.m.): Trump has a six-point lead over Clinton in CNN's post-RNC national horse race poll.  The Clinton sheep will be nervous.

The story to watch next week, however, is what the Berners do next.  Jim Hightower's opinion of what that is seems to missing something of the verde shade.