Please stand by while this morning's breaking news sucks all the oxygen out of the 2022 statewide races for the next few days.
3/ O’Rourke enters 2022 a weaker candidate with a harder race.
— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) November 15, 2021
He has significantly more political baggage than he did when he came close to unseating U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, including a failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. https://t.co/4uEZ6MsqwH pic.twitter.com/nCKcxFNcFY
At the very end of the TexTrib's piece they catalog a few of the failures of O'Rourke, Texas Dems, and their inept D.C. counterparts.
For the rest of the 2020 election cycle, O’Rourke and his group focused mainly on Democrats’ fight to capture the state House majority. They came up woefully short, failing to net a single seat.
[...]
Over the summer, O’Rourke became a leading figure in Texas Democrats’ push for federal voting rights legislation. While Democrats in the Texas House broke quorum over Abbott’s priority elections bill and went to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress for help, O’Rourke crisscrossed Texas to build public pressure for federal legislation.
However, Democrats were not successful on either the state or federal levels. The state House Democrats eventually returned to Austin to allow Republicans to pass their restrictive elections legislation, while Congress still has not sent a voting rights bill to Biden’s desk.
There will be plenty of ink spilled and pixels scattered about fundraising, polling, guns, the grid, and other various and sundry issues that arise over the course of the next 11.75 months. I feel pretty sure that our ability to -- and our interest in -- casting our ballots next year will determine who wins and who loses. Not to be simplistic about it, but the negatives for both these losers are too high and will only go higher once the mud starts flying. That depresses what is certain to be the more historical pattern of low voter turnout here. And that's my marker.
Other candidate filings from over the weekend appear on Patrick Svitek's spreadsheet, and Reform Austin has compiled a grid that is difficult at best to determine party affiliation without a scorecard or knowledge from elsewhere. It looks like they lumped the third-party challengers into a category called 'potential candidates'. (Do better, y'all.)
Moving on ...
22-year-old Bharti Shahani has died following the injuries she sustained from attending Astroworld on November 5. Shahani is now the ninth victim of the concert. pic.twitter.com/pH5WeoTwPU
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 11, 2021
9-year-old Ezra Blount had been on a ventilator and was in a medically induced coma at Texas Children's Hospital since he was injured during the Travis Scott show on Nov. 5. On Sunday, the family's attorney announced he had died. https://t.co/g72UZWWsE7 #khou11
— KHOU 11 News Houston (@KHOU) November 15, 2021
The tragedy at Travis Scott's AstroworldFest claimed two more victims over the weekend, and everybody with a conscience is reassessing the rapper's prior good works for the city and even his contributions to music and the festival scene. Not Kuffner, though. Firefighter logs, lawsuits, and business insurance. One of the more appallingly tone-deaf posts I've read on that blog in recent years. He had nothing to say about Scott in the years before, and has turned into his predictable scold after, same as with the Astros' cheating, the Texans being owned by the McNairs, and other items often "seen in the background" that demonstrate how much he doesn't actually care about the people of Houston. What would you expect from a Yankees fan, after all? Wait and see how happy he is when Carlos Correa signs with the Bombers; that'll tell you.
Disgusting.
Continuing with a few more items of note that revulse me:
Arielle Jean Jackson allegedly struck a female operations agent in the head with a closed fist after being asked to leave the plane following a verbal altercation. https://t.co/bFZzmbloVx
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) November 14, 2021
Of all the reasons I have not to fly, rude-ass conservatives starting fights with airline employees is moving rapidly up the list.
Oil and gas regulators at the Railroad Commission of Texas cleared the way for $3.4 billion to be paid to natural gas companies by raising bills for ratepayers. | @KUT https://t.co/ezsw1z7xRN
— Texas Public Radio (@TPRNews) November 14, 2021
I was mad enough about the possibility of freezing in the dark this winter without being reminded that I'm paying for Kelcey Warren's million-dollar contribution to Greg Abbott out of his $2.4 billion profits from last winter. If the power goes out for days once more, maybe Beto's got a shot after all (as long as the Texans who rarely vote don't all die of hypothermia, that is).
Texans needn’t worry about freezing to death again this winter. #txpol #abbott #crt #publiceducation #textbooks pic.twitter.com/PXEsIunwTT
— John Cole (@ColeToon) November 14, 2021
I'll stop here for now -- lots more to come -- with these calm-me-downs.
NEW: Hundreds of people participating in the #atxkind “Rally for Kindness” after a series of recent racist and anti-Semitic events in Austin. pic.twitter.com/A2D6cuznIv
— Tony Plohetski (@tplohetski) November 14, 2021
Who rode the Sad Monkey Railroad in Palo Duro Canyon? Sandra Stevenson sent in this circa 1968 photo of the Sad Monkey Railroad's Depot. The Sad Monkey was a miniature railroad that took visitors on a two-mile long geological tour of the park. It operated from 1955-1996. pic.twitter.com/wW1GRyEORT
— Traces of Texas (@TracesofTexas) November 14, 2021