The Weekly Wrangle

The thoughts and prayers of the Texas Progressive Alliance are with the people of the Phillippines as we bring you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff looks at the numbers in the Astrodome referendum in Harris County to see what went wrong.

Horwitz at Texpatriate discusses and compares the (all Republican) candidates for Texas' two high courts.

Eye On Williamson is still blogging at our temporary home. There's much that is being lost in the hyperventilating over the mistake-riddled rollout of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA. Part of which is EMTALA and our cruel health care system in Texas.

The Keystone XL pipeline is dead, writes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs. Oh, it probably needs a stake through its heart to stay dead, but it isn't going to be a big deal for a very long time... and maybe forever.

Everyone is focused on the odious Ted Cruz while CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants you to know that John Cornyn is every bit as despicable. Cornyn is using the disgraced James O'Keefe to take away people's access to ACA help.

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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Grits for Breakfast informs us that "One out of Five Known Exonerations is for a Crime that Never Happened".

Texas Vox highlights construction problems with the Keystone XL southern segment.

The Makeshift Academic tracks Medicaid enrollment resulting from the Affordable Care Act.

The TSTA Blog wants to know why Greg Abbott is not making education a priority in his campaign.

Juanita Jean passes along the rumor that Tom DeLay wants to run for Congress again.

And finally, if you don't know who Justin Lookadoo is or why a bunch of Richardson High School students started calling him #Lookadouche on Twitter, then TFN Insider, Hair Balls, Forrest Wilder, TM Daily Post, Word of a Woman, BOR, and Nonsequiteuse explain what you missed.

Sunday Funnies

Socialist elected to Seattle's city council

Bravo, I say.  Bravo.

Seattle City Council candidate Kshama Sawant, a “Socialist Alternative” insurgent, has unseated four-term incumbent Richard Conlin, with the latest batch of mail-in ballots nearly tripling Sawant’s lead to 1,148 votes.

A year ago, Sawant was running against the Legislature’s most powerful Democrat, House Speaker Frank Chopp, charging that the “Democratic Party-majority government” had slashed billions from education programs while bestowing tax exemptions on “rich corporations.”

Hm. Sounds familiar.

While the Occupy Seattle organizer is about to occupy an office in the council chambers, ballots are still being counted in several close races.  One big ballot measure is still hanging, while other contests appear narrowly decided.

The $15-an-hour minimum wage proposal in SeaTac, already under legal challenge, leads by exactly 53 votes.  The margin was cushioned by 12 votes in Thursday’s count.

The proposal for taxpayer-financed elections in Seattle, Proposition 1, has climbed in the late vote count.  Unlike Sawant — who overcame a 6,193-vote election night deficit — Prop. 1 hasn’t quite climbed enough.  The “No” side still has a lead of 2,656 votes.

"Taxpayer-financed elections" is code for getting the money out of politics.  Repealing Citizens United and Moving to Amend as a city ordinance.  But pause for a moment and let that sink in: taxpayer-financed elections aren't quite as popular in Seattle as the Socialist about to be sworn in.

You may recall that Houston had both a Socialist and a Green running for mayor earlier this month, but they didn't fare quite so well as Council Member-elect Sawant (about 1% apiece).  My feeling -- well, my hope anyway -- is that continuing to offer alternatives to left-leaning Houstonians, Texans, and Americans is, at best and as this is written today, a tool to pull the Democratic Party back to the port side of the political equation, and if Democrats keep doing things like this then the trend will be inexorable.  You won't hear about it in the mainstream media, though.

Well, you'll hear some about it.



What a breath of fresh, pine-scented air.

This qualifies as bonafide progress. Honestly I thought cities like Berkeley and Portland would have been at the lead, but some will say that the Left Coast is all the same anyway.   Republicans in California, Oregon, and Washington must feel even more hopeless than Texas Democrats did in 2002.

My opinion is that this is the most effective answer to both the Tea Party and the creeping conservatism among establishment Dems; an actual progressive movement outside the center-left that threatens it just enough to make them see the error of their corporate ways... and change them.   It could be so much more with a groundswell of actual populism, here in Texas and across the country, but there are just barely audible rumblings about that.  I thought that was much closer to a real thing in 2006, but the election results that year proved me wrong.  And that was three years -- a political eon -- before the Tea Party birthed itself out of the raging spittle against "RINO" John McCain ... and the nation's first black president, Barack Obama.  (It continues today, of course, in the unrelenting assault on public health insurance known as the ACA.)

Read a little of this...

According a recent Gallup poll, Democrats and Republicans have reached an all-time low in public opinion--only 26 percent of Americans believe the two mainstream parties do "an adequate job of representing the American people." Some 60 percent said there was a need for a third major party.

In Seattle, where the Democrats predominate, this discontent translated into heavy press interest in Sawant. She won an endorsement from The Stranger before her strong showing in the August primary election--the alt-weekly wrote in an article headlined 'The Case for Kshama Sawant': "Sawant offers voters a detailed policy agenda, backed up by a coherent economic critique and a sound strategy for moving the political debate in a leftward direction."

After coming in a close second in August, Sawant continued to pick up broad support, including a small group of 'Democrats for Sawant' -- -a stark symbol of the bitterness with the incumbent Conlin, who has a long record of pandering to business interests....

As a socialist challenger in a liberal city against a Democratic opponent, Sawant was able to avoid one of the key difficulties that third party candidates typically face: the so-called spoiler effect. Without a Republican in the election, the Democrat Conlin wasn't able to browbeat his party's much more liberal base into supporting him as a 'lesser evil'.

More Greens and more Socialists on the ballot, please, in 2014.  Voters want -- and democracy needs -- more than two corporate-controlled options.

Update: Kshama Sawant talks to Salon.

President Obama told the Business Roundtable – speaking of “the capitalist class” – in his first term that he’s an “ardent believer in the free market,” and that he sees three roles for government: to create rules for a level playing field; to provide things that individuals can’t do for themselves; and to provide a social safety net. What do you make of that kind of politics?

First of all, I think Obama is being quite honest … he believes in capitalism. And so for people to have the faith that he is going to really fight against those ideas … there is no basis in reality for that …

I would say that the “free market” is basically free for the super-wealthy, and extremely un-free for the rest of us. Because they dictate the terms. And so this idea that the free market can generate conditions where social programs can thrive and a level playing field can be created — it is an oxymoron. Because what the capitalist market does – and that’s what they call the “free market” – is that if you are a big player, like one of the oil companies, then you are in the best position to consolidate your wealth even further … One of the systematic, statistical realities under capitalism is intergenerational transmission of wealth and intergenerational transmissions of poverty …

I often ask my students, “What do you think is the best way of making money under capitalism?” They often give me interesting answers, like maybe [creating] an app for an iPhone … I tell them, “Look, the best way of making money under capitalism is to have money in the first place” …

You also hear people saying, well, it’s “crony capitalism” or it’s “disaster capitalism” or some other capitalism. Well, the fact is, you know, they’re all dancing around [that] this is capitalism …

It’s not built into the system that the goal is to ensure that socially responsible life is possible. The goal is to maximize profits for those who already have wealth …

The reality is that capitalism rewards the biggest corporations and it tends toward monopoly. That is what capitalism is.

Every time you hear some pathetic conservative say "BrockObamaizaSoshulist", remember that -- as of this post -- the stock market has reached several consecutive days of record highs, and gasoline is $2.79 a gallon in Houston. So Obama is obviously a very crappy socialist.

The Keystone XL pipeline is dead.

Most likely, anyway.  This piece from Paul Ausick at 24/7 Wall St. is worth reading.

The Keystone XL pipeline will not be built. And while the environmentalist arguments against the pipeline had a significant impact in delaying construction of Keystone XL, the primary reason it will not be built is because it really isn’t needed any longer.

The market, as the Libertarians always say, decides.  And the market has moved away from KXL.  I'm going to emphasis some in the following paragraphs.

In its Drilling Productivity Report issued Friday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that crude production from the Bakken shale play in North Dakota and Montana will top 1 million barrels a day in December. The Keystone XL has been designed to transport 830,000 barrels a day from Alberta to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, with some capacity devoted to crude from the Bakken region. However, the delay in getting construction started has obviated the need for the pipeline as rail transport has filled the need for getting Bakken production to refineries on all three U.S. coasts.

You are not hearing from Gulf Coast refineries that they need more crude because they already have all they can profitably refine. If Keystone XL were to be built, that crude would very likely be re-exported. Politically, using the entire breadth of the U.S. to transport Canadian crude to foreign markets will be a very hard sell.

Close followers of the battle around KXL knew that this nasty tar sands oil was never going to contribute to national security, but to the bottom lines of a handful of major and minor oil and pipeline companies, such as TransCanada, Total (they have a refinery in Port Arthur, TX) and ConocoPhillips, Shell, and Valero.

The argument over the number of jobs created by the Keystone XL’s construction no longer carries much weight either. During the two-year construction period, a total of about 8,000 to 10,000 full-time jobs would have been created and then disappeared. The economic boost to towns along the route would have been significant, but that was a more important issue two or three years ago than it is now.

Shipments of petroleum and petroleum products by rail in the United States are up 33.6% year-over-year through last week. A total of nearly 607,000 carloads of crude and refined products have been shipped by rail in the U.S. this year, and more rail terminals are being constructed every day to accommodate booming production from the Bakken.

Environmentalists must turn their focus to safety issues with rail shipments of oil, as well as keeping the pressure on frackers to clean up their act.  The nation's pre-eminent fracking watchdog is none other than the Texas Progressive Alliance's own TXsharon at BlueDaze. As for the Big Gas Mafia, they are already advancing the premise of "national security".  Read this now; the title is "There Would Be No Iranian Nuclear Talks If Not for Fracking".

A political fight over the Keystone XL simply will not happen. The president does not need another battle, and his political opponents are running out of allies. Furthermore, Obama can score some big points with environmental voters for the next Democratic presidential nominee by rejecting the pipeline. There is no upside for any national politician or political party to go down with the Keystone XL ship.

[...]

Once the Keystone XL is officially pronounced dead, the environmentalists will proclaim victory and will use the victory to redouble their efforts to cut dependence on fossil fuels. That is a long-run issue, and as Americans become better acquainted with the effects of climate change, demand for fossil fuel will continue to fall.

[...] The refiners no longer need or want the oil, environmentalists never wanted the pipeline in the first place and President Obama can focus on getting his health care program working.

Bloomberg says "redundant", but I think 'comatose' is more accurate.  The Keystone XL pipeline is on life support and somebody will eventually pull the plug on it.  And it won't be Obama or even the Tar Sands Blockaders, but TransCanada itself.  There's some ironic justice in there somewhere.

On to the next.

LVDP is in for LG

For anyone who needs an introduction, here's Wayne Slater.

San Antonio Sen. Leticia Van de Putte will serve notice this week that she is running for lieutenant governor as a Democrat, according to a person close the decision. As such, Van de Putte is expected to join Sen. Wendy Davis atop a Democratic ticket that will showcase two women vying to be their party’s highest-ranking statewide officeholders. Van de Putte is a pharmacist who served in the Texas House and has been in the Texas Senate since 1999. In 2002 she became the chair of the Senate Hispanic Caucus and has become nationally recognized as a Hispanic leader.

Davis catapulted to national attention with an 11-hour filibuster against an abortion-restriction bill in June. As Republican lawmakers suspended Davis’ filibuster, Van de Putte challenged the decision of the GOP to bend Senate rules in order to end the marathon talkathon. When the Republican lieutenant governor failed to recognize Van de Putte to speak from the floor of the Senate, she said: “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?” The question brought abortion-rights supporters that filled the Senate gallery to their feet, effectively ending Senate business as the special legislative session came to a close.

Strategists say the addition of Van de Putte, a Latina with substantial political experience, could help mobilize Hispanic voters the Democratic Party needs if it hopes to break two decades of GOP political dominance in the state.

A Latina pharmacist with political wisdom. That's as good as it gets for the issues around which the 2014 statewide elections will turn.

Now if Democrats can convince someone like Rodney Ellis or Royce West (no offense intended to Maxey Scherr or Michael Fjetland, who announced yesterday) to run against John Corndog, they've got a real shot at toppling the Republican dominance in this state.

"When Texas is purple, there will be no more Republican presidents"

That's Roger Simon -- not a liberal -- quoting an unnamed "immigration expert".  Everybody understands this premise; even Republicans.  A dominant vocal minority in that party, however, just don't seem to care.

Government shutdowns and Obamacare fits are a walk in the park compared to the damage they are doing to themselves.

Comprehensive immigration reform is the turning point for the Republican Party as we know it today -- actually about five or six years ago, B. P. (Before Palin).  Either they will split themselves in half -- Whigs and Nativists, let's call them -- or some sense will seep into the skulls of the rebels.  Don't count on the latter.

Read all of Simon, but the best is last.

The expert also said that if comprehensive immigration reform is dead in this Congress — and it looks like it could very well be — it could pass in an election year or even by a lame-duck Congress. Obama has said he will sign any bill that includes a path to citizenship for the 11 million.

This could be his (second-term) legacy and, ironically, the only hope the Republicans have to be more than a whites-only party, rowing against a demographic tide.

“If the Republicans decided to pass it,” Obama said Friday of immigration reform, “it would be to their political advantage to do it.”

The Republicans in the House could continue to hold out and hope for a Republican White House in 2016. But every election they delay immigration reform puts the White House further from their grasp.

Oh yeah, for a while longer the rural parts of Texas will keep the state hard red longer than almost anywhere else, along with a few other stubborn Southern pockets. The battle for the soul of the GOP was lost long ago (I'm pretty sure it died sometime during Ronald Reagan's era), but the two warring factions will keep fighting over the carcass a while longer. Whoever emerges victorious hasn't actually won much; half of a once-major party.  The other half limps away madder than hell.

Rest in pieces, I say.

Texas has the worst conservatives in the country, Part II

I don't want to make it a recurring series, but if they keep showing their asses like this...

-- Wendy Davis redefines 'pro-life', enrages anti-choicers.

This one is fairly simple.  If you're pro-guns (people die), pro-war (people die), pro-death penalty (people die for revenge), anti-welfare (poor children die), and anti-health care (people of all walks of life die slowly, but too soon)... then you're pro-death.

So hurry up and die already, you assholes.

-- Speaking of gun nuts...

(Last) Saturday, nearly 40 armed men, women, and children waited outside a Dallas - area restaurant to protest a membership meeting for the state chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a gun safety advocacy group formed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

According to a spokeswoman for Moms Demand Action (MDA), the moms were inside the Blue Mesa Grill when members of Open Carry Texas (OCT) — an open carry advocacy group — “pull[ed] up in the parking lot and start[ed] getting guns out of their trunks.” The group then waited in the parking lot for the four MDA members to come out. The spokeswoman said that the restaurant manager did not want to call 911, for fear of “inciting a riot” and waited for the gun advocates to leave. The group moved to a nearby Hooters after approximately two hours. 

Four women having lunch, with 40 lunatics ourtside -- some crouched in firing position -- and a restaurant manager scared so shitless that he won't call the cops.  And this...

"The group then moved to a nearby Hooters after approximately two hours."

Yep, that's a group of Texas Republicans, all right.

Update: This photo, taken at nearly the same moment from another angle, suggests that this group was posing for a picture and not preparing to fire on the restaurant.  It doesn't absolve these thugs from anything, IMO.

-- Texas school tosses 6th grader’s breakfast in trash after he can’t pay 30 cents for it:

A Texas school is standing by its policy after cafeteria workers threw a sixth grader’s breakfast in the trash when they realized his account was short 30 cents.

Jennifer Castilleja told KTRK that she offered to come to the school Wednesday morning and pay for the breakfast but Barber Middle School in Dickinson ISD refused to feed her 12-year-old unless it got the money first. As a part of the reduced meal program, Castilleja’s son pays only 30 cents for each breakfast, but his account had run out of money.

“My son called me and asked me if I could bring him some money because they took his breakfast from him and he needed money for breakfast,” she recalled.

“I said, ‘Well, I’m on my way, I’ll pay for it,’” Castilleja told the school. “And she said no, I would have to bring some money before he could have breakfast.”

“There were kids all around him. I think he may have been a little embarrassed and upset and, of course, hungry.”

Dickinson is a pathetic little town between Houston and Galveston, in case anybody was wondering.  Other fun things happen there, too.

-- White guy wins election after pretending to be black.  And not just any old nasty Republican bigot either, but Dave Wilson.

An electrician best known for mailing homophobic fliers to thousands of Houston voters attacking the city’s lesbian mayor narrowly won an election to the Houston Community College Board of Trustees after he misled voters into believing that he is African American. Dave Wilson defeated longtime incumbent Bruce Austin, who actually is black, in an overwhelmingly African American district.

Wilson’s campaign fliers were filled with black faces that he admits to simply pulling off of websites, along with captions such as “Please vote for our friend and neighbor Dave Wilson.” Another flier announces that he was “Endorsed by Ron Wilson,” which is the name of an African American former state representative. Only by reading the fine print will voters discover that the “Ron Wilson” who actually endorsed Dave is his cousin. The cousin lives in Iowa.

I'll take the blame for this one.  I refused to blog about educational races in this cycle, and thus, Wilson got away with his scam.  I fully believe that this could have made up the 26-vote difference.

I'm probably a little too hopeful about the impact this blog is having, to say nothing about the intelligence of those Texans who manage to vote, and our democracy in general.  Taking responsibility is what Republicans want more people to do, however, and in this case a little naivete' feels better than the deep cynicism that would just be too easy to sink into.

-- Texans 'volunteer' to take women to their clinic appointments, take them to church instead.

This really alarmed us this morning. Just one reminder that getting an abortion in Texas can be very dangerous. pic.twitter.com/bdHCZ3F3lM
— Fund Texas Women (@FundTexasWomen) November 10, 2013

Repeated for emphasis.

Please share this email far and wide among Christian groups. Cicada.collective.ntx@gmail.com
It's the email address being used by a group backed by Fund Texas Women and Lilith Fund looking for volunteers to shuttle TX women around for their abortion appointments. Consider volunteering yourself. I'm not suggeting you actually take a woman to an abortion clinic but it's a wonderful opportunity to minister to an abortion minded woman for an hour while you DON'T take her to her clinic. And hey if you can't change her mind by the time she gets out of your car and realizes she is at a church and not the clinic she's missed her appointment anyway

Is kidnapping -- a felony offense,  mind you -- really what Jesus would do? Really?!

-- Finally, what would a "worst Texas conservatives" post be without Greg Abbott.

With what has been described as the worst drought in recorded history punishing parts of Texas, Attorney General Greg Abbott found a way to keep watering his yard without risking fines or incurring huge monthly bills: He drilled his own well.

Now his lawn is green, and there are no pesky city watering restrictions to worry about.

He is not alone. Abbott, the leading 2014 candidate for Texas governor, has joined an exclusive and growing list of Austin residents. That list includes Ben Crenshaw, the golfing legend, and Mack Brown, the University of Texas football coach — residents who are coping with the drought and rising water bills by procuring their own private water supply underneath their land.

But the trend is worrying city leaders and environmentalists, who fear that the rise in well drilling in rapidly growing Austin will negatively affect limited groundwater supplies, reduce the flow into rivers and discourage conservation.

“To me it’s just unconscionable. It’s a total disregard for the resource,” said Andrew Sansom, executive director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University. “What we should be doing is reducing our consumption of water.”

'Unconscionable' has been a word used to accurately describe Greg Abbott for a long time now.  But I like nosequiteuse's analogy better. 

"Hey you kids! Get off my lush, green lawn!"

The Veterans' Day Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance honors the service of America's veterans as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff analyzed the favorable poll and the unfavorable poll that came out last week.

Texpatriate, while happy that Mayor Annise Parker was re-elected, laments nonetheless that Ben Hall ran one of the worst campaigns in history against her.

Eye On Williamson is still blogging at our temporary home. What kind of message to Democrats need to run on in the Lone Star State? Good question; here are some thoughts on a Democratic message in Texas.

Two polls released last week had good and bad news for Wendy Davis, but it was when President Obama came to Dallas that things got both better and worse for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs broke it down.

People are getting poorer and poorer, just as Republicans and their backers wanted. No one knows poverty more than Brownsville and McAllen. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme says "Lets vow to elect Democrats in 2014".

With such anemic turnout, the 2013 elections were mostly a success. But some issues did still arise, and Texas Leftist was able to share a thorough account of one. If mass confusion is a goal of the Texas voter ID law, then I'd say it's working very well.

With Veterans' Day here, Neil at All People Have Value offered a brief account of views regarding war held by the late Korean War veteran Tony Aquino. All People Have Value is part of NeilAquino.com.

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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Greg Wythe gives the unvarnished view of how the new voter ID law actually works in practice.

Grits for Breakfast calls for the implementation of the "Barney Fife Rule" in the McLennan County DA's office.

John Coby has some advice for future candidates.

Better Texas tells the rest of the story on those health insurance cancellations.

Juanita Jean is seeking help getting some non-binding referenda on the Democratic primary ballot.

And finally, this isn't a blog post, but a petition calling on Ted Cruz to give up his own federally subsidized health care plan, or work to support affordable healthcare coverage for all Americans.  It definitely deserves a place here.

Sunday Funnies

Good and bad for Wendy Davis

I'm not talking about the two polls earlier this week, either.  Here's where she did good.

“I am pro-life,” she told a University of Texas at Brownsville crowd on Tuesday. “I care about the life of every child: every child that goes to bed hungry, every child that goes to bed without a proper education, every child that goes to bed without being able to be a part of the Texas dream, every woman and man who worry about their children’s future and their ability to provide for that future. I care about life and I have a record of fighting for people above all else.”

“This isn’t about protecting abortion,” Davis explained in the same appearance. “It’s about protecting women. It’s about trusting women to make good decisions for themselves and empowering them with the tools to do that.”

Conservatives spewing the Abortion Barbie crap and the murdering babies bullshit are really only chasing more moderate Texans away from the TXGOP.  This is not only what they want to do, it's a good thing for every Texan except them.  Even Susan Combs -- whom I have never agreed with about anything -- says so.  So I say: let them keep doing that.

They think theirs is the majority view, and the only thing more wrong than that is the media -- and some Democrats -- are so scared that they also believe it (as noted in the previous).  Redefining "pro-life" is the smartest thing I have seen the Davis campaign do yet.

This, however, was the dumbest.

Hardly unexpected, but state Sen. Wendy Davis is making herself scarce when President Obama comes to Texas on Wednesday. He’ll spend the afternoon and evening in Dallas. The Democrats’ leading hope in next year’s governor’s race will be hundreds of miles south in the Rio Grande Valley.

Her campaign schedule, just released, puts her in Mission in the morning, meeting with educators. And at 6 pm, she’ll be in Pharr, meeting with volunteers and supporters at Poncho’s Mexico Nuevo Restaurant.

We figured as much in today’s Texas Watch column. But choosing to get as Pharr from the president as possible was a nice touch.

Obama shouldn’t be too surprised. The 2010 Democratic nominee for governor, Bill White, headed for West Texas to avoid being seen with him.

I bet more optics like these will convert Republican voters and Republican leaning voters to her campaign in droves. /sarcasm

Now if you click on the link in the excerpted paragraph above, you could read about how Texas millionaires are once again lining up to give tens of thousands of dollars to US Senate campaigns outside Texas.  I wonder how that makes Maxey Scherr feel.  We could ask Barbara Radnofsky or Rick Noriega; I'll bet they know.

The old "Texas as ATM" swindle is already in play.  And that is the secondary outrage here. 

I just can't stand to watch any more Texas Democrats running as far away from Obama as is geographically possible (and everybody knows how I feel about Obama).  This strategy is Blue Dog consultant chickenshit personified.

"Ooooo, Obama is unpopular among Texans, and you need Republicans to vote for you, so run away from Obama as fast and as far as you can".

Davis could have, instead, met the president in Dallas, said forcefully that when she is elected governor she'll expand Medicaid, that Ted Cruz and John Cornyn were wrong in blocking ACA, and that Greg Abbott represents a continuation of Rick Perry's cruel policies that leave millions of Texans sick and dying without healthcare coverage.  And that all of these men have the gall to call themselves pro-life.  And she would have amplified her good messaging  - the recasting of herself as the pro-life candidate -- with a direct assault on the GOP power structure in this state.

And she would not have lost any votes she was never going to win anyway.

Republicans are wrong and mean and stupid, but they don't ever stop fighting, even after they have been beaten down several times (see: government shutdown).  Wendy Davis is getting blame from Republicans about the confusion surrounding the Photo ID law implemented in this week's elections.  There is no shortage of chutzpah from conservatives, and as a Democrat you can either get pummeled or you can fight back.

Here's the deal, my Democratic friends: if Wendy Davis is going to follow the Angles' advice -- worse yet, if it's her natural inclination without needing encouragement --  and run a race like Bill White's except in heels and Mizunos, then she's going to get the same result.

Who's willing to invest in that?  Who wants to work on weekends and late at night for that?

Run as a Democrat or run as a Republican, but don't run as a Democrat pretending to be a Republican.  Because as stupid as people are, they are still smart enough to vote for the real Republican every. single. time.

Update: My other brother from another mother, Socratic Gadfly, expands on this premise.

Why are conservative white men so angry?

Across the pond, from the Guardian.

(Michael Kimmel's new book) strokes a broad, acerbic brush over the white supremacists of the Mason-Dixon Line, the NRA and Tea Party stalwarts of the Bible Belt, the men's rights activists of cyberspace and the high school spree shooters of parental nightmares. The common feature, he argues, is their shared belief that certain degrees of status, privilege and social advantage, perceived to be their natural or god-given rights, have been snatched away by sudden social change. The resulting anger is targeted not at a globalised neoliberal economic system that has declared ordinary people expendable – irrespective of their race, class or gender – but immigration, civil rights and feminism. 

Yes, the South is full of these.  Texas is all but consumed by them.  They are much more likely than not to be middle-aged and living no closer to a city than in an exurban belt at least 20 miles out.  They own more than one gun, listen to Rush Limbaugh, and have a broadband Internet connection which they use primarily to post comments on Free Republic, Townhall, Breitbart, and Yahoo (scroll down and click 'view comments').

Thus their POV is represented online to a vastly greater proportion than is actually present in the public discourse.

They're the minority.  Thinking people know this.  But they scream so incessantly and so loudly that people in public office and the media and even those who disagree with everything they say think they're the majority.

Their complaints are heard mostly by those of their creed and social status whom they have elected to represent them in Washington and Austin.  This is a slightly different problem, though, because so many Americans who are not like them have ceded them control over their lives.  This is why I can agree with Russell Brand's message while rejecting his suggestion not to vote.

The answer to the question in the headline?  I don't care.  They just need to be made to understand that they don't call the shots any more.  And the only way to do that without firing any shots is to show up at the polls.

They're not taking the country back.  Well, they won't if we stop them, that is.

Dome's fate punted back to Harris commissioners

The county's voters rejected public debt to fund the proposed convention facility last Tuesday; that was not to be interpreted as "tear down the Dome".

The Houston Astrodome's obituary may have been written when voters rejected a $217 million bond proposal to renovate it, but some Harris County commissioners who will decide its ultimate fate said Wednesday it's possible that burial for the city's landmark structure is still some time away, if it comes at all.

"It's anybody's guess now," Steve Radack, one of the five members of the Harris County Commissioners Court, said.

And a quick decision or start to the demolition of the world's first air-conditioned domed stadium, dubbed the "Eighth Wonder of the World"?

"That's not going to happen," Radack said.

"We will wait to see what the consensus of Commissioners Court is before we decide what to do with the Dome," another commissioner, El Franco Lee, said.

For those of us who want to see the old girl live on, Commissioner Radack has assumed the role of Astrodome protaganist.

Studies in recent years have estimated that the cost of demolishing the Astrodome to be as much as $78 million. Radack said he understood it would cost about $20 million to fill the hole left behind.

"I think the Dome has served its purpose, but I'll say this: I'm not going to support tearing it down and then covering the hole with $20 million in dirt and a parking lot," he said. "If that's all, it can just stand there."

It doesn't have to do that, either.  It can be a revenue-generating public facility and remain an iconic symbol of Houston's past... and future.  My request of the Harris County Commissioners Court is to please consider again the Ryan Slattery (UH architecture student) option.

The Rodeo and the Texans want parking; the Dome sits over a 35-foot-deep hole in the ground with a 9-acre footprint.  There's your parking garage, and it can be two levels.  Eighteen acres' worth of underground parking.  Put a floor down over that (a roof for the garage) and then strip the Dome to its skeleton -- a Texas version of the Eiffel Tower -- and repurpose it as a semi-open air park.

(It probably can't have a crater with a lake and trees as seen here, but it can be nine acres of green space with grass, shallow-rooted indirect sunlight-flourishing shrubbery, pavilions, playgrounds, walking paths, concessions, etc.)

A park like this instantly becomes the crown jewel of the city.  An actual tourist destination for people from around the world ... just like the Eiffel Tower.  A selling point for the Olympics.  Perhaps most importantly of all, a bold symbol of a world-class city that pays tribute to its heritage and shines as brightly as its future.

Let the Rodeo and the Texans collect the fees for the subterranean parking -- your car stays cool in the summer! -- with half of the money collected paying back the taxpayers for the deconstruction and revitalization expenses until the (yes, public) debt is settled.  After that, those greedy bastards can keep it all.

It's the best way -- as far as I can see the only way -- that everybody can get what they want.

This is the plan, commissioners.  Make it happen.