Sunday Funnies

Celebrating independence through anarchy

In this instance, defined as deviations from duopoly orthodoxy.

-- Howard Zinn, from 2006:

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

It gets a little more intense from there, especially if you're a flag-waving, Fox-watching American exceptionalist.

-- "At some point, progressives need to break up with the Democratic Party", by the vaunted cartoonist I post here frequently, Ted Rall.  It's the yin to my yang of being as blue as I can be in midterm election years.

This one is going to sting, Democrats. Mostly because it describes Texas Democrats to T.

At a certain point, if you have any relationship with dignity, you're supposed to get sick of being used and abused. Speaking of which: liberal Democrats.

Democratic politicians act like right-wingers. Liberals vote for them anyway.

The Democratic Party espouses right-wing policies. Self-described progressives give them cash.

Comedian Bill Maher gave them a million cash dollars -- yet Democrats don't agree with him on anything. Why? Because he hates Republicans even more.

Why didn't Maher save his money? Or better yet, fund a group or a writer or an artist who promotes ideas he actually agrees with? Because he, like tens of millions of other liberals, are stuck in the two-party trap.

The relationship between liberals and Democrats is dysfunctional and enabling, abused pathetics sucking up to cruel abusers. Progressives like Maher are like a kid with two rotten parents. The dad drinks and hits him; the mom drinks less and hits him less. The best call is to run away from home -- instead, most children in that situation will draw closer to their mothers.

Voting-age progressives, on the other hand, are adults. When will they kick the Democratic Party to the curb, as Ricki Lake used to say?

Probably not in time for 2016. But they ought to.

You read what I wrote about Texas Democrats, specifically Wendy Davis, passing on having Hillary Clinton speak at their state convention a week ago?  And what a boost it could have been for the party's overall fortunes?  I say that as someone who does not care for Mrs. Clinton, will not be voting for her in the primary two years from now, and will not be voting for her in the general election in 2016.

But the reality is that I -- and everyone like me -- stand as much chance of keeping her from reaching the White House as the entirety of the Republican Party of the United States of America.  So there's that.

-- Finally and more gently than the previous two, from Ballot Access News, all those e-mails that you haven't been reading from Lawrence Lessig lately are summed up here.

Professor Lawrence Lessig is actively working to create a SuperPAC that would spend its money to help congressional candidates who will work to pass a public funding bill in 2015. The SuperPac has been soliciting pledges. The pledges will not be payable unless the effort reaches a goal of $5,000,000 in pledges by the end of July 4, Hawaii time. As of 1:30 p.m. Hawaii time, $4,778,325 has been pledged. *Update: they reached their $5M goal.

If the SuperPac, called MayDay, reaches its goal, the funds will be more than matched by various wealthy individuals, and the PAC will have $12,000,000, or close to it. That money could then be used for independent expenditures in favor of congressional candidates who will work for public funding. The plan is to spend the money in 5 U.S. House districts, and those districts will be chosen and announced by July 15.

See mayday.us for more information. One possible disincentive for some potential donors is that the donation part of the web page asks donors if they wish the money spent on Democratic candidates, or Republican candidates. There is no option for the donor to ask that the money be spent on a candidate not nominated by either major party.

Meanwhile, the bill in the U.S. House for public funding, H.R. 20, now has 156 co-sponsors. It gained six co-sponsors in May, but only two in June.

Yeahno.  Not quite the degree of transformation of the political system I'm looking for.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to grill some chicken.

It's not all peaches and cream for Texas Dems

I'm encouraged -- even enthusiastic -- about the past couple of weeks' worth of news, but there remain a few dark clouds on the horizon... most of them hovering over Wendy Davis.  In their latest TribTalk, pollmeisters Jim Henson and Joshua Blank -- unlike their previous attempt at post-polling analysis -- get it dead solid perfect this time.

When it comes to abortion, Texans are pro-access with a very limited acceptance of choice for women as most people understand it, according to University of Texas/Texas Tribune polling data.

This landscape forms the terrain on which the gubernatorial campaigns of Democrat Wendy Davis and Republican Greg Abbott are unfolding. While common sense says Democrats don’t want to run a campaign in Texas on the issue of abortion, Abbott's vagueness on just how restrictive his positions are — particularly on exceptions for rape, incest and threats to a woman’s health — likely benefits him much more than Davis’ silence on the matter benefits her.

That's about as strongly correct as anything I have read about the race for governor on this topic.

We wrote at the time of Davis’ 2013 filibuster that the policy that had garnered much of the media coverage up until that point, the 20-week ban, was not the likely cause of the long-unseen Democratic mobilization, because majorities of Texans expressed support for that provision. (Davis herself has subsequently suggested that she would have voted for it in isolation.) Her supporters were mobilized in opposition to other parts of the bill that promised to restrict abortion access (and have done so). In the same June 2013 survey showing that majorities supported the 20-week ban, 79 percent of respondents indicated that abortion should be allowed under varying circumstances (only 16 percent of respondents in Texas, as elsewhere, support an overall prohibition on the procedure). Thus, Davis’ reluctance to utter the A-word is not likely about her fear of a majority who abhors all access to abortion but rather a reluctance to provide further fodder for opponents who would attack her for her opposition to a bill that included a 20-week ban.

It’s little surprise that the most intense pressure on Davis is coming from those who wish her campaign ill. Republican partisans have worked overtime to reassociate Davis with opposition to the 20-week ban in an effort to define her not just as a liberal — a label that Republicans have tarred Democrats with for more than a generation — but also as an extremist on abortion.

Yes, the "Abortion Barbie" smear has been effective for the bottom-of-the-barrel conservatives in defining Davis.  So far.  But Abbott has a thin tightrope to walk on the issue himself (that's not insensitive to a man in a wheelchair, is it?).

We found broad support — greater than 70 percent — for access to abortion when a woman’s life may be in danger or when the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. While majorities of Republicans also support these exceptions, about 20 percent of Republicans regularly tell us that they oppose abortion under any circumstance. So any clarification by Abbott could potentially create a division within his base and provide ammunition for a future primary challenger — the prototype of whom is very much in the making. At the same time, any clarification that brings Abbott closer to Patrick’s position distances him further from the general electorate and gives Davis what she so sorely needs: a reason for some Republicans to vote for her.

Greg Abbott is dying to come out of the closet as an abortion absolutist, but he can't afford to do so until after he is elected.  Which is why those of us who support a woman's right to choose -- no matter the degree of that choice, no matter the party affiliation -- cannot afford to see him get elected.

But Abbott’s difficulties make for only the narrowest of political openings for Davis. Broad support for these abortion exceptions in tragic circumstances does not a pro-choice electorate make, certainly not in a literal sense of the word “choice.” In fact, under all of the circumstances in which a woman’s ability to exercise autonomous choice about a pregnancy was put to the test (for example, an unmarried woman who didn’t want to marry the man), Texans were much less supportive of abortion access.

These results highlight the difficulties that the abortion issue poses for Davis. While a clear rhetorical path that focuses on access to abortion when absolutely necessary exists and, in many respects, makes sense, to walk that tightrope would require a wholesale reconstruction of the politics that have defined the abortion debate for the last 30 years. But in the unreconstructed present, should Davis bring abortion back to the forefront, Abbott would no doubt reinforce support among his base — which is still large enough in Texas to win an election outright in the near term — by painting Davis as an old-school, pro-choice liberal.

The Dems' two-decades-long losing streak allows the Republicks to cater to the extremists in the Tea Party, more so than in any other state. Until they lose something, they won't moderate.  They don't have to.  More to the point, Abbott dodging the media's efforts to pin him down on exactly how much abortion he opposes makes more sense in this regard.  Henson and Blank saved the best for last.

Davis’ silence is nothing if not understandable — but also symptomatic of the campaign’s lack of options as it looks for ways to shake up the fundamentals of a race in which Republicans have so many advantages. But, in fact, it’s Abbott’s silence that offers the bigger advantage by allowing him to benefit from a status quo that has led Republicans to win every statewide office for the last 16 years — and enabled them to enact policies that reflect the preferences of their most activist voters. 

As long as Greg Abbott keeps shooting himself in the foot (if you're paralyzed, does that hurt?) over things like chemical explosives concealment, continuously filing lawsuits against Obama and losing, flying around on corporate jets belonging to some of the worst conservatives in the world -- Wendy Davis can keep the pressure on him, dictating and defining the terms of engagement.  Mostly away from the subject of women's reproductive freedoms.

Update: More on this from Ted at jobsanger.

She miscalculated, however, in passing on an opportunity to boost her candidacy and the party's standing by asking Hillary Clinton (or Joe Biden, or even Kirsten Gillibrand) not to be the keynote speaker at last week's Democratic state convention.  Chris Hooks at the Texas Observer noticed what I wanted to post about a week or two ahead of the convention, and dug a little deeper into the why.

The Texas Republican convention last month featured a number of GOPers from across the country, including Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, and Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska. They came to network, build ties with the state party, and raise money, and their presence helped give the convention a greater profile in national media. The slate of speakers at the Texas Democrats’ convention this past weekend in Dallas, by comparison, was devoid of such national figures.

It didn’t have to be that way, though. Democrats involved with planning the convention told the Observer that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand were in talks to speak at the gathering. Each had seemed to signal a willingness to speak—with Gillibrand even offering to help with the cost of attending the convention. But Wendy Davis’ representatives nixed the plan, fearing the national pols would be a liability for her.

The Davis campaign wanted its candidate to be the primary focus of the convention and worried that the presence of national Democrats would distract from the Fort Worth state senator’s keynote. And according to Democrats with knowledge of the debate over the speaker lineup, the campaign feared connecting Davis’ name to national Democrats who may be unpopular in Texas. Davis has suffered from quite a bit of that kind of coverage.

Frankly, this lack of confidence is a manifestation of the tired, scared, defeatist Texas Democratic Party as demonstrated so many times over the past twenty years that I'm sick and tired of writing about it.

What would the participation of Clinton, Biden or Gillibrand have meant for the convention? According to Democrats who thought the decision to exclude national figures was a mistake, there would have almost certainly been more media attention. There simply wasn’t much to write about in Dallas, and coverage, even among Texas outlets, reflected that. And there would likely have been better attendance at the convention—Clinton, Biden and Gillibrand are generally quite popular among the progressive crowd of delegates that attended the event. “Ready for Hillary” stickers adorned many delegates. Gillibrand is an icon for progressive women thanks in part to her doomed push for military sexual assault legislation.

Clinton’s attendance, especially, would have drawn the convention into the national spotlight. Major national publications have reporters dedicated solely to chronicling Clinton’s activities. In the past, Clinton’s camp has made noises about contesting Texas in the course of the 2016 presidential race; if she spoke at the convention, that would likely have featured heavily in coverage and been a boost for a party in need of some encouraging headlines. Some closer to the party said they would have loved to see that boost—and the slate of statewide candidates that the Democrats are backing, many of whom suffer from low name recognition and limited fundraising ability, could have benefited from it, sources said.

The "Ready for Hillary" booth was the busiest, consistently, that I saw in the convention hall, which everyone had to walk through on their way to their seats in the main assembly.   There has indeed been lots of whining about the lack of corporate media coverage of last weekend's convention, and Peggy Fikac and Mike Ward nailed a few of the cowards among the Dems in the week before.

Jack Freeman is a yellow-dog Democrat who has voted for his party's candidates for longer than he can remember. But he hopes his party's Washington stars will stay away until after the November general election, especially from the state convention that start(ed last) Friday in Dallas.

"Please, Mr. Obama, stay home," said Freeman, an Austin retiree, echoing the sentiments of other rank-and-file Democrats. "They're not liked down here, and we've got good candidates here in Texas who can win, as long as they stay on Texas issues and not get caught up in the mess in Washington."

Battered-person syndrome on full display.   Back to Hooks in the TO.

The decision to exclude national speakers at the convention is fascinating for a couple of reasons. For one, it highlights a split in thinking between groups backing Wendy Davis—her campaign team and Battleground Texas—and the state party, which is providing the primary backing for most of Davis’ ticketmates, including Leticia Van de Putte. The two groups are bringing markedly different approaches to the general election. While those different strategies may complement each other in some areas, they clash in others. At the convention negotiations, Davis’ team won.

A spokesman with the Davis campaign declined to comment, but an official with knowledge of the convention planning told the Observer that “there was an effort to make sure Texas was the focus of the convention.”

Davis is running a pricey, high-stakes campaign that’s banking heavily on its ability to win over moderates and independents—the kind of voters that helped her retain a center-right Texas Senate district in Fort Worth. Some of her pronouncements in the past—flirting with open carry laws, embracing some abortion restrictions, and talking tough on the border crisis—make sense if seen through that prism. And it also makes sense that she would shy away from affiliation with national Democrats, who may not be popular with the moderates she hopes to win over.

Other candidates on the Democratic slate are being backed more heavily by the state party. They, particularly Van de Putte, have a very different strategy in mind. With a fraction of the resources Davis has, Van de Putte’s team will rely more heavily on turning out the base while taking advantage of as much free media and attention as she can. And she’ll hope that her opponent, Dan Patrick, alienates moderate voters on his own.

Unfortunately I got the mild impression first-hand that Wendy is nervous about being overshadowed even by Leti, who generates her own high-wattage star power.

To illustrate that, I saw Davis speak twice the weekend before the convention, at two polar opposite events; one in Sugar Land named the Breakfast of Champions at the swanky Sweetwater Country Club raising funds for the Fort Bend Democratic Party, and then again at lunchtime in Houston, over barbecue plates at the CWA hall for the Legendary Ladies of Labor rally.  Two completely different audiences, and she gave different stump speeches at each.  The first one praised the diversity of Fort Bend County (the most so in the United States), its current purplish hue placing it right on the cusp of turning blue, and the occasion of the civil rights struggles of the era fifty years ago.  Her second speech was more boilerplate, acknowledging the power of the labor movement for Democrats and the associated call to arms for their support and organizational ability to help her.

In both venues she arrived in the room with an entourage of just one, former TDP hand Hector Nieto, who almost never looked up from his phone, thumbing furiously and constantly.  But Davis entered to a reaction as I have seen only rock stars generate.  Everyone in the room in both places -- perhaps 300 well-dressed people at the country club, and twice that many in jeans and T-shirts at the union hall --- murmur, rise to their feet, click away with their phones and cameras and begin applauding, and then cheering. The speaker at the dais in both places was drowned out by the interruption, which grew into an eruption.

Suffice it to say that neither Bill White nor Chris Bell, both Houston favorite sons who ran for governor in the last two off-presidential cycles, ever elicited anything close to that kind of response in my experience.

She spoke with conviction in both morning and afternoon appearances, clearly and forcefully... but not what I would consider passionately, and I was told by other Dems who have heard her speak many more times than me that she has improved on the stump.  I'll take that at face value.  In Dallas, I retired early before Davis' convention speech, which Hooks described as 'adequate'.  Van de Putte, by contrast, had the best speech of all by a long measure.  It included this pretty hilarious intro video.



Hooks with the last graf in his piece.

As such, Van de Putte, and the rest of the candidates the party is backing, might have relished the chance to stand on the same stage as Clinton et al, which might have brought some attention and resources to a party, and the party’s candidates, that are badly in need of both. But the Davis campaign was calling the shots. In the next couple months, we’ll see how this unusual dynamic plays out.

With so many positive developments over the last several weeks, it's worth noting that this negative one is really nothing more than a missed opportunity to build enthusiasm for all Democrats for November and beyond.  I hate to see the same old nervous, intimidated moderates continue to exert the most sway over party business, but that's how it's been for a long time.  There's still a solid puncher's chance that Dems can change their fortunes in four months, and closing whatever gap remains between defeat and victory still requires a lot of hard work and a little good luck.

Squandered chances, what-ifs, and other post mortems will be reserved for mid-November.

Happy Fourth, Houston Democrats

Jared Woodfill, Dr. Steve Hotze, Dave Wilson, et.al. just gave you a gift.

Opponents of Houston's new non-discrimination ordinance Thursday turned in well more than the minimum number of signatures needed to trigger a November vote on whether to repeal the measure.

Staff in the City Secretary's office will have 30 days to verify that the names - 50,000 of them, opponents said - cross the minimum threshold of 17,269 signatures from registered Houston voters that foes needed to gather in the month following the measure's passage in an 11-6 vote of the City Council.

Texas Leftist leads the local response, with Kuff and Lone Star Q close behind.

The referendum is going to be hard work, but it could actually end up being very good, not only for Houston Progressives, but for Progressive causes across Texas. Here are the reasons why...

Go read them.  Wayne joins me and Charles in that assessment.  They both seem a little more cautious about engaging the enemy than me, but that's okay.  Soon enough everybody within the city limits of the nation's fourth largest city -- the only one without a non-discrimination ordinance prior to Council's action in May -- will understand the electoral ramifications of what this development represents.

Make no mistake: this is a golden opportunity to pummel the very worst of the conservative opposition a second time, and lift the fortunes of every Democrat on the ballot simultaneously.  To fully capitalize requires an extensive GOTV effort... which BGTX and the HGLBT Caucus should be primed and ready to make.  It feels to me as if it's another favorable break in a gathering confluence of serendipitous events over the past few weeks -- Greg Abbott's ongoing series of mistakes, an accumulating pile of serious problems for he and others among the GOP here and elsewhere, the positive momentum generated by the filibuster anniversary and the party's state convention last weekend, the reactions to SCROTUS and Hobby Lobby, and now this -- that make me feel suddenly optimistic about the blue team's chances in 120 days.

Oh, and then there's that humanitarian crisis happening now at the southern border, which Republicans are responding to with their usual dignity and compassion.  I always appreciate their reminding us precisely what fine Christians they are come election time.

Nobody who cares about any one of these things should be sitting on the sidelines, like they did in the primary and runoff, like they usually do in off-term election years.

What Woodfill and Hotze are banking on is the tried-and-true loser's coalition of African American social conservatives joining them in their lily-white Pride of Hate Parade.  We've seen it lose with Gene Locke in 2011 and we've seen it lose worse with Ben Hall in 2013.  The one thing that causes me the most cognitive dissonance is the image of a black pastor raging against civil rights for a discriminated minority group on the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.  But I have greater faith that the majority of their congregations will be able to see through that hypocrisy.

The corporate media will parrot the truthiness that 'nobody pays attention to elections until after Labor Day', but you can dispense with that.  One of the tasks before the leaders in turning back the Hate Parade is holding the local press accountable for their failure in exposing the lies of the right adequately covering the topic when it came before Council two months ago.

Ground zero for both Republicans and Democrats in statewide elections remains Harris County, somewhere between a fifth and a fourth of their respective statewide vote totals.  The HERO ordinance referendum will only be on the ballot for Houston residents, however; excluding the red-ass suburban voters in Kingwood, Sugar Land, the Woodlands, Clear Lake, Katy, etc.  That's why you can safely predict that it is doomed to lose.

Still, even prohibitive favorites can fail to execute; just ask Eric Cantor.  Which is why -- with three and one-half months to the start of early voting, and around 90 days before voter registration concludes (make sure your ID is proper) -- this should be a very fun political season.  Hard work, yes, but with plenty of extra motivation to close the deal.

It is ON.

Update: A little more snark from Susan Du at the Houston Press.

Facebook's psychological experiments and influencing elections

Perhaps you heard?  About that Facebook mind control thingie?  If it was clever satire, it would be a great Hollywood script.  Except it's not.

Facebook’s disclosure last week that it had tinkered with about 700,000 users’ news feeds as part of a psychology experiment conducted in 2012 inadvertently laid bare what too few tech firms acknowledge: that they possess vast powers to closely monitor, test and even shape our behavior, often while we’re in the dark about their capabilities.

The publication of the study, which found that showing people slightly happier messages in their feeds caused them to post happier updates, and sadder messages prompted sadder updates, ignited a torrent of outrage from people who found it creepy that Facebook would play with unsuspecting users’ emotions. Because the study was conducted in partnership with academic researchers, it also appeared to violate long-held rules protecting people from becoming test subjects without providing informed consent. Several European privacy agencies have begun examining whether the study violated local privacy laws.

It's cool, though.  The NYT tech blogger says there's nothing to worry about and that we should welcome our new overlords.  Except for this part.

In another experiment, Facebook randomly divided 61 million American users into three camps on Election Day in 2010, and showed each group a different, nonpartisan get-out-the-vote message (or no message). The results showed that certain messages significantly increased the tendency of people to vote — not just of people who used Facebook, but even their friends who didn’t.

Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, points out that many of these studies serve to highlight Facebook’s awesome power over our lives.

“I read that and I said, ‘Wait, Facebook controls elections,’ ” she said. “If they can nudge all of us to vote, they could nudge some of us individually, and we know they can model whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat — and elections are decided by a couple of hundred thousand voters in a handful of states. So the kind of nudging power they have is real power.”

Okay then.  I feel calmer already.

How much do you think Facebook might charge... say, a well-heeled politico like Greg Abbott to "promote posts" that could swing an election his way?  A few million bucks?  More than that?

Would it be money better spent than advertising on Fox News?  I would have to think so, since that's a captive (and already well-manipulated) audience.  Not much fresh ore to be mined there.

Sort of gives pause to the traditional 'grassroots organizing' effort, doesn't it?

Oh well, I'll think about that after I level up in Candy Crush.  After all, my desire to be well-informed is currently being overwhelmed by my desire to remain sane.

Fifty years and one day ago

I am about to sign into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I want to take this occasion to talk to you about what that law means to every American.


One hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week a small band of valiant men began a long struggle for freedom. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor not only to found a nation, but to forge an ideal of freedom - not only for political independence, but for personal liberty - not only to eliminate foreign rule, but to establish the rule of justice in the affairs of men.

That struggle was a turning point in our history. Today in far corners of distant continents, the ideals of those American patriots still shape the struggles of men who hunger for freedom.


This is a proud triumph. Yet those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning. From the minutemen at Concord to the soldiers in Vietnam, each generation has been equal to that trust.


Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.


We believe that all men are created equal. Yet many are denied equal treatment.


We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights. Yet many Americans do not enjoy those rights.


We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of liberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings - not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skin.


The reasons are deeply embedded in history and tradition and the nature of man. We can understand - without rancor or hatred - how this all happened.


But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of our Republic, forbids it. The principles of our freedom forbid it. Morality forbids it. And the law I will sign tonight forbids it.

-- President Lyndon Baines Johnson (7.2.1964).  And how we have progressed in the decades since.

Every time the federal government tried to solve the problem of minority voter disenfranchisement, Southern jurisdictions found new ways to resist. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 attempted to put some new protections in place, but these too were ineffective. The following year, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, which included Section 5. It was widely regarded as the most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever.

It made jurisdictions with a history of discriminating against minority voters demonstrate to the federal government that they weren’t undermining the voting rights of blacks with any new voting changes — anything from changing polling locations, to the ways jurisdictions were drawn, changing election dates, etc. However, in 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court gutted Section 5, and some of the jurisdictions previously under Section 5 (such as Texas) immediately announced that they intended to implement voting restrictions (like voter ID laws) that had been blocked up until that point.

-- Nicholas Espiritu, staff attorney, National Immigration Law Center

Much more here.

Ken Paxton, Greg Abbott, and Joe Straus

Looks like the TXGOP has a big problem on their hands.  LSP with the developments.

Republican attorney general nominee Ken Paxton has admitted he violated Texas securities regulations and been forced to pay a fine to the Texas State Securities Board. But that is not the end of Paxton’s legal problems. Ken Paxton’s actions are more than simply violations of the state securities rules—they are felonies under the Texas criminal code (Tex. Civ. Stat. Art. 581-29).

It is only a matter of time before Ken Paxton is prosecuted, convicted of felony securities fraud and facing a sentence of up to 10 years in prison (Tex. Penal Code Sec. 12.34).

More importantly, under Texas law, a convicted felon is ineligible to serve as attorney general (Tex. Elec. Code Sec. 141.001 (a)(4)).

Will he resign his place on the November ballot?  I doubt it.

Ken Paxton should do the honorable thing—immediately withdraw from the AG race, admit his felony violations and accept his punishment. But don’t count on that happening.

Ken Paxton has dug in and appears ready to take his party down with him.

Paxton’s Republican primary opponent, Dan Branch, spent weeks trying to get GOP primary voters—and the press—to focus on Paxton’s corrupt actions. It didn’t work. Paxton beat Branch easily on the strength of overwhelming Tea Party support.

Here are just a few quotes from Branch’s campaign warning about Ken Paxton:

• “How can he be our state’s top law enforcement officer when he has a record of repeatedly violating our laws?” Dan Branch, TribTalk, 5/25/14   

• “If Ken Paxton is on the 2014 Republican ticket, his admitted lawbreaking will be a blight on the party.” Branch spokesman Enrique Marquez, Texas Tribune, 5/21/14
   
• “I’ve got an opponent who, with the securities law violations and ethics violations, is not only not qualified, but he’s disqualified himself.” Dan Branch, Dallas Morning News, 5/11/14 
   
• “Texans deserve an Attorney General who will protect them, not prey upon them.” Dan Branch Facebook page, 4/21/14

Here's where Abbott and Straus come in.

As the GOP nominee for governor, Greg Abbott is the leader of his party. Abbott could either call on Paxton to resign his candidacy and urge prosecutors to move quickly against him—or somehow explain why Texas voters should elect an admitted criminal who is ineligible to serve as Texas AG.

Instead, Abbott has done neither. He has shrunk from the moment, refusing to even comment.

Abbott’s cowardice—and his reliance on the leadership of others—was most obvious last week when information surfaced that Texas House Speaker Joe Straus may be working with the Travis County DA to prosecute Paxton in time for his removal from the ballot. Sources inside the State Capitol have told the Lone Star Project that Straus representatives—and perhaps Straus himself—have met with Travis County prosecutors and urged quick action against Paxton.

There's probably some provision that allows the RPT's Senate district executive committee members to pick another person to be their nominee for attorney general, if Straus is successful in making Paxton go away.  If Paxton fights back, then it will get ugly in a hurry.

About the last thing the Republicans need is for this kind of family feud to go public, however.  So something may come of it, or something may not.  We'll just have to watch and see.

No matter what transpires, the headwinds for a GOP sweep in Texas just got a little stronger.

A roundup of right-wing madness

-- While we wait for God's Army of Homophobes, Houston chapter to finish collecting their signatures, be reminded that this should be a fortuitous development with regard to Harris County blue turnout.  The HGLBT Caucus mobilizes like nobody else can, and certainly not the Houston Area Pastor's Council.  Things could get really exciting around the polling places in November.  And don't forget that the corporate media locally has not been liberal in their coverage of the NDO's passage, and with a second chance in the fall, need to be pressured to get the reporting correct.

-- Speaking of hard-boiled conservatives who can't give it up, those angry Mississippi TeaBaggers are still fuming and plotting revenge for losing to Thad Cochran and the black Dems there who helped him win his primary.

-- Fox News keeps doing its part to fan the flames of racial and gender strife.  This dude managed to insult African Americans and women in a single slur.

“I call them the Beyoncé voters: the single ladies,” Watters said. “Obama won single ladies by 76 percent last time, and made up about a quarter of the electorate. They depend on government because they’re not depending on their husbands. They need contraception, health care, and they love to talk about equal pay.”

Those moochers just won't stay in their place, will they?

-- Maine Gov. Paul LePage is vigorously denying that he discussed lynching Democrats with domestic terrorists.  He can't deny he held multiple meetings with them.

Talking Points Memo published on Monday an excerpt from author Mike Tipping's new book, in which he details how LePage engaged with members of the Constitutional Coalition, which is affiliated with the Sovereign Citizen movement. Members of the organization believe the government is planning an attack on Christian Americans by collecting firearms, that it runs mind-control operations and that it was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

LePage reportedly met with members of the group eight times from January through September of 2013.

Tipping, who works for the Maine People’s Alliance, a progressive advocacy group, wrote that when the coalition's members met with LePage they discussed arresting and executing state House Speaker Mark Eves (D) and Senate President Justin Alfond (D) for treason and violating the U.S. Constitution.

Sure hope those radical Mainers don't make their way down here.

-- Back in Texas, Lege Republicans are already objecting to the first bill floated for next January that will address chemical safety regulations in the wake of the West explosion. 

"It seems like we're out there with a power grab," Republican state Rep. Dan Flynn said.

[...]

Immediate pushback from GOP lawmakers on the panel signaled how tough it could be to push substantial changes through the Republican-controlled Legislature next year. They broadly called the first draft "overkill" and openly wondered how small fertilizer plant operators could afford to meet new regulations.

Was 'overkill' the proper word to use here?  State Impact Texas has a little more, including some of the back-and-forth between Flynn and Joe Pickett, who will introduce the bill early next year.

Greg Abbott helpfully offers instructions on how to circumvent his hiding the data about where in your neighborhood the explosive chemicals are stored.

Addressing reporters at a separate event Tuesday, Abbott said official confidentiality can help stop potential terrorists. But he also called the ruling a "win-win" since "every single person in the state" can learn about "chemicals stored in any plant."

"You know where they are if you drive around," Abbott said of chemical facilities. "You can ask every facility whether or not they have chemicals."

Davis spokesman Zac Petkanas said, "The only thing more outrageous than Greg Abbott keeping the location of chemical facilities secret is telling Texas parents they literally need to go door to door in order to find out if their child's school is in the blast radius of dangerous explosives."

Easy, Zac.  I'm sure these companies won't mind the public streaming in to their offices to ask that question, and I'm sure their public representatives will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth when asked.  My problem here is that Abbott just informed the state's terrorist cells how to find the information they seek to plot our destruction.

Why does Greg Abbott hate America?

There's a simple solution to Hobby Lobby

Women should simply incorporate their uteri, and then the GOP would let them do whatever they like.  Or perhaps we could have passed single-payer and avoided all of this in the first place.

The conservative justices on the SCROTUS made yesterday many things -- historical, ominous, enraging are all appropriate adjectives -- but it was also a lot livelier on social media, and all of those instant developments will hopefully reignite a women's rights movement in Texas that will burn until November.  We will just have to wait a bit to see about that.  As for reducing abortions.... no.  Of course not.  Limiting women's ability to obtain contraceptives INCREASES abortions, and if you make legal ones more difficult to obtain, women will have dangerous, life-threatening ones.  What's happening in South Texas right now is proof of that.

Facts can't frack the Republican mind, however.

So we'll just have to see who can win an election in four months.

Update: Texas Leftist wonders whether Greg Abbott would ban contraceptives -- that is to say, ask the Lege to pass a bill doing so next January, after he is elected governor.

My answer, also posted at Wayne's blog, is: Yes.  And not just contraceptives, but abortions entirely.  Perhaps after 20 weeks, perhaps sooner, but in all cases... including rape, incest, and even if the fetus endangers the mother's life.  All you have to do is read what he has already said.

Last January, on the eve of a rally by politically influential abortion opponents, a quote attributed to Abbott in The Austin American Statesman indicated he believed there should be no exceptions in anti-abortion legislation.

“If you really are pro-life, you are thinking about the life of the child,” Abbott was quoted as saying. “And once you start putting exceptions into that, you’re saying that there are certain children who really are not worthy of life.”

Greg Abbott is precisely the kind of shitty lawyer/conservative extremist with a massive ego who would think he could go all the way to the SCROTUS with that law challenged, and win.

Which would set up his bid for the US presidency in 2020 quite nicely.

#TDP14 wrap-up

Ted at jobsanger did a much better job of covering the just-concluded Texas Democratic Party convention than anybody.  He's promising some more.  Noah's post got eaten by the WordPress dog (sorry about that, dude).  I managed just a couple of posts about the race for chair.  The corporate media had a few accounts of the sparring between Ds and Rs, including the skirmish over the mean names they were calling each other.  Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins made the biggest news.  And Leticia Van de Putte's home video was indeed the highlight of the weekend.

Overall I found the convention to be the fairly stereotypical mashup of pep rally tempered by electoral reality, with a dollop of patron politics and plenty of irony.  If these folks are left-wing, much less a conspiracy of anything except how deep their throats are for the Democratic establishment, then my political dictionary has lost all meaning.  That may demonstrate more hypocrisy on their part than it does irony, but hey, I'm trying to be nice here.

And with the exception of a few Tweets about lip-syncing, Marco Rubio comparisons, fat jokes, and sage-burning, the winners -- those outside the convention floor of the SD caucuses, where Hinojosa backers twisted arms and intimidated their neighbors in order to lower RBVO's vote tally to the most miniscule level possible -- were gracious enough... if still passive-aggressive in their disrespect of the challenger.  Even this from Juanita Jean wasn't as gloatworthy as it might have been.  There's not anything particularly positive in dwelling on that small amount of negativity, though.

We had a couple of great evening meals as we always do, at Deep Sushi in Deep Ellum and at Bob's inside the Omni.  We spent some of Thursday afternoon after we hit town at the Sixth Floor Museum, well worth our time.  And I used three transportation services in Dallas; two cabs -- one Yellow, one blue (Executive), and one Uber X.  Those experiences reinforced the views I already held about the advantages and disadvantages of the competing services, and brightly illustrated the challenges both outfits have, especially in the days to come in H-Town as Council gets ready to hold that vote in one month.

We couldn't get a reservation at a decent hour three weeks in advance at Wolfgang Puck's, and we couldn't squeeze in a visit to W's library.  Alas, maybe next time.

We did Dallas, and Dallas did us, and it makes me more thankful that I live in Houston.

Update: Texpate's piece is up now, and Noah has several takes.  In order but not in total, the Thursday afternoon SDEC meeting (with which I wholeheartedly concur and upon which he elaborates further here), the race for the chair (with which I most certainly do not), and the party's platform plank on immigration and a concurrent opinion of Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia's enforcement of Secure Communities (which I am also in long and complete agreement with).   He's also dead on about David Alameel's and Mike Collier's Saturday convention speeches.

The post-TDP Convention Wrangle

As the warm glow of the Texas Democratic Party convention segues into the hot, hard summer work of turning Texas blue, the Texas Progressive Alliance has some of the best lefty blog posts from Dallas and around the state to help Democrats get motivated to make some of the necessary changes.

Off the Kuff urged everyone to look for inspiration in action, not candidates.

Libby Shaw at Texas Kaos reminisces about the Wendy Davis' filibuster last summer, and forthcoming change, in The People’s Filibuster, June 25, 2013

WCNews at Eye on Williamson points our that there is more than enough money to pay for what Texas needs. What's lacking is the political will: Surplus of Neglect.

Neil at All People Have Value added a page of clear and concise poems about everyday life to NeilAquino.com. All People Have Value is part of NeilAquino.com.

Texpatriate will not publish a convention recap before the roundup is sent out, because Wordpress has decided to corrupt 2500 words of meticulously researched and compiled Horwitz's opinions. Hopefully, he'll get to it soon. In the meantime, we would like to know which blogging software we can use that is not completely worthless.

The election to chair of the Texas Democratic Party was fairly anticlimactic. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs seemed to be the only blogger covering it (though it was Tweeted to great effect).

===========================

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

Socratic Gadfly recapped Greg Abbott's lousy week (and it was last Tuesday when he posted that).

The Texas Election Law Blog presents a long list of online resources for voters.

Todo Texas ponders the short term future of San Antonio as it navigates through some big changes.

Texas Clean Air Matters calls out PUC Chair Donna Nelson for her opposition to federal renewable energy tax credits.

Glasstire alerts us to a series of billboards that will be coming to I-10 that feature quotes from Gertrude Stein, because if there's one thing our highways could use a little more of, it's Gertrude Stein quotes.

The Texas Observer notes that like most bullies, Michael Quinn Sullivan is a lot more talk than action.

Unfair Park assures us that karma does in fact exist.

Beyond Bones does a little CSI: Cretaceous Era to discover who figured out that some dinosaurs had feathers.

Happy Fourth, everyone!

Drinking our own urine

Before I get to some thoughts about the TDP convention just passed, here's a few excerpts -- via BooTrib -- about the dystopic future we can expect here in our beloved Texas.

A long -- but not too long -- piece from Phillip Longman at Washington Monthly explores the myth of Rick Perry's "Texas Miracle".  A few grafs to whet your appetite.

Is Texas our future? The question got kicked around during the last presidential campaign when Texas Governor Rick Perry was briefly riding high. Everywhere Perry went he appealed to Republican primary voters by describing what he called the “Texas Miracle.” As Perry told conservative talk show host Glenn Beck, “Since June 2009, about 48 percent of all the jobs created in America were in Texas. Come add to it.” In his stump speech Perry would click off what he said were the four major reasons his state had come to lead the nation in job creation—without ever forgetting a one of them. They were, he said, low taxes, low regulation, tort reform, and “don’t spend all the money.”

[...]

(E)ven though Perry didn’t get to replace Barack Obama in the White House (in 2012), he has continued to boast about his Texas Miracle, including in radio ads that have caused an uproar everywhere they’ve aired across the country. “Building a business is tough, but I hear building a business in California is next to impossible,” Perry intones in one, before pitching California businesses to move to Texas. In another, he announces, “I have a word of advice for employers frustrated by Illinois’s shortsighted approach to business. You need to get out while there is still time. The escape route leads straight to Texas.”

When Perry launched a similar radio campaign attacking New York for excessive regulation and inviting its businesses to “Go Big in Texas,” he inspired the comedian Lewis Black to strike back with a “Don’t F*** with NY” video that aired on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. “You say we got too much regulation,” Black countercharged. “We’ve got Wall Street. They break the law for a living and never get punished.”

[...]

The idea that vast numbers of Americans are “voting with their feet” for liberty and prosperity by abandoning blue states and moving to Texas has become conservative gospel.

[...]

(R)est assured that Texas boosterism will loom large again in the next presidential election, and not just because Rick Perry is showing clear signs of another run at the White House. Texas has indeed outperformed the nation as a whole in job creation during the Obama years. And it has done so with a state government under the total control of ever-more-conservative Republicans, who now hold up that fact as validation of their whole economic agenda. Progressives, and everyone earnestly interested in improving the nation’s economic performance, need to confront all this Texas bragging and find out what, if anything, it proves.

"C'mon PDiddie, what about that 'drinking our own pee' part?"  You won't be glad you asked, young padawan.

Buddy Treybig, his bull neck burned the color of crawfish, steers his boat up the Lower Colorado, looking out the cabin for signs of life. There are birds on the staves of the dockside shore – herons and plovers and death-glare hawks – but Treybig isn't checking for them. Drum and sport fish promenade these waters, but Treybig isn't here for them, either. He's looking for fauna of the two-legged sort: other fishermen bound for Matagorda Bay, once the crown jewel of Texas estuaries. In the horn-of-plenty days a decade ago, so many vessels dragged its splendid reefs that fights would break out once the men got back to town – the locals trading punches with Vietnamese transplants and sometimes burning boats when things went squirrelly. Now there's no one but him in the channel; Treybig's rivals have either left for Louisiana or chained their fleets to the pier in Matagorda, too broke to buy the gas it takes to fish. "You'll see when we get up in the bay," mutters Treybig. "I'm the only one still dumb enough to do this."

[...]

Buddy hooks a left to the Intracoastal Waterway and takes the Mad Island cut to the Matagorda; there, the bay is forked by land, splitting into East and West Bay. Out on West Bay, it's eerily still, the raw morning cowled in February gloom, the prow of the Elaine Marie churning mud. Treybig and his deckhand, Erik Jacobson, lower their nets to the milky bottom to drag for oysters and shrimp.

"Used to be, you could make $100,000 a month [gross] just shrimping, never mind oysters," says Treybig, chomping the tip of a cigarillo into submission. "My hardest decision was going East or West Bay. Now the East Bay's dead and buried, and this one's dying right behind it."

For decades cool, fresh water flowed hundreds of miles south to these bays, released from the Colorado's main storage tanks, lakes Travis and Buchanan, above Austin. Once the river reached here, its fresh water mixed with salt water from the Gulf to create a glorious nursery for fin and shellfish, with just the right saline-and-oxygen mix to spawn endless supplies of hatchlings. En route to the Matagorda, the river watered the soil of south Texas' verdant rice fields, sustaining a $200-million-a-year industry; farm towns like Wharton, El Campo, and Bay City; and a dreamscape marshland for ducks, geese, and egrets – the largest winged migrations in the delta.

Then came the drought. The river's inflows shrank, and lakes Travis and Buchanan bottomed out as if someone had pulled the stopper. Three years ago, when they dipped to below 40 percent full, and rich homeowners saw their lakefronts slip 60 feet down dry cliffs, political heat was trained on the stewards of the river to cut off releases to downstream farmers. The board of directors of the Lower Colorado River Authority, who were empowered by the state to regulate releases, voted to stop flows to most of the growers, and allotted the bare minimum to the bays and estuaries – just enough to keep them alive until the rains returned. Instead, the river shrank, and for three springs running, those rice fields have stood fallow, putting all but a few farmers out of business. Meanwhile, water in the bay has turned brackish and sick, host to great swarms of parasites. Algae bloom in the shallows like stinkweed. Snails bind to oysters and suck the meat right out of them. An organism called dermo kills whatever the snails don't, and there's even a vicious bacteria that can eat the flesh off your arm.

"Don't fall in with an open cut," warns Treybig. "That shit gets on you, might have to chop off the limb."

I suppose I should at least mention the six-legged frogs.

"We've got quite a bunch of six-legged toads," says Phil Cook, a senior water expert who recently retired from Sierra Club Texas. "Bastrop's dirty secret is that it treats water for iron, but not estrogen and other drug compounds. That'd be way too expensive for their small system."

So you'll have to read all of that one, too, to see how it ties together.  The Texas Miracle is awash with rich folks -- corporate titans, bankers, oil and gas men, the lawyers for all of them, and the real estate developers in the cities (the blue cities, mind you) building massive corporate headquarters and apartments and upscale subdivisions as fast as they can -- while rural (red) Texas goes bust.  Here's Linda Curtis of Bastrop, who was instrumental in stopping the Trans-Texas Corridor a few years ago and is now fully engaged in the Water War, nailing 'em dead to rights.

In other states, progressive politicians could be called on to fight such stunts.

But in Texas, there is no opposition party. "Democrats are the same as Republicans here; they're all in bed with developers," says Linda Curtis, who runs the Texas League of Independent Voters, a coalition fighting the Keystone Pipeline and the ravages of sprawl on state resources. She says people like herself and her green-shoots cohort of hydrologists, lawyers, and Sierra Club types are the only ones fighting Perry's growth machine on behalf of small towns.

Through all the pom-pom waving and chanting this past weekend, it was almost hard to remember that yes, like Rachel Barrios-Van Os' bid to become state party chair, this battle feels depressingly quixotic.  Again.

A few more anecdotes from the po' folks in the boondocks.

(The author travels to) Bay City, where Chamber of Commerce executive director Mitch Thames gives me a guided tour of south Texas' post-water future. We drive to see Harley Savage, the 83-year-old foreman of a rice-farming clan that's been here since the 1820s.

"We're five generations, and my grandboys are willing, but this business is done by next year. Been through everything you could think of and came out of it OK, till Austin got so big it took our water."

Returning to Bay City, past shuttered stores that sold equipment and seed to farmers, we pay a call on Joe Crane, who runs a rice-drying plant and has 80 employees he calls family.

"Third year with no water – I've got no choice; we're looking at significant layoffs. Rice farming'll go east, to Mississippi and Tennessee, but we can't move east with it."

We meet Jonathan Fehmel, whose family has been spraying farms in this county since 1948. "We had 20 planes going from dawn to sundown, dusting thousands of acres a day. Now, it's only maybe 1,500 acres that still got water, and we've sold everything but our airstrip. We're trying to lease that, too, if you know someone."

That night, I sit with Treybig over a steak dinner, his mood as bloody as his ribeye.

"I'm up at four in the morning seven days a week, trying to catch enough to keep my oyster plant going, while the governor's out braggin' about the 'Texas Miracle.' We don't need more people, 'less they're bringin' some fuckin' water. What we need's a real miracle: two months of rain."

Well, our good Governor Oops can just send out another prayer request on official state stationery for precipitation.  That should make everything all right.

The good news for Texas Republicans is that even as Rick Perry gets on down the road, Greg Abbott -- always thinking ahead -- already has a deep well drilled at his Austin home to keep his lawn lush.  So, in keeping with a lifelong pattern, he's got his.  And if he can stop you from getting yours, he'll be even happier.

While you and your kids and grandkids drink your own recycled urine.

Some people think this is funny.  I'm not one.  As Booman says...

When Texans are all drinking their own pee, they better figure out how to get that estrogen out of it. Based on their record so far, their most likely solution will be to ban birth control and pray for the best.

Update: State Impact Texas lists five challenges to the looming Texas water crisis that might surprise you.

Related... Boom meets bust in Texas: Atop a sea of oil, poverty digs in

“Texas is not a good place to be poor, and there is little political appetite for change.”