The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is happy about the non-developments in the Caribbean tropics this past summer -- but is still wondering when that first cool snap is going to get here -- as it brings you the best of the left of Texas blogs from last week.

Off the Kuff suggests a way to measure the effect of the voter ID law in the November elections.

Horwitz at Texpatriate discusses the renewed efforts to bring a comprehensive non-discrimination ordinance to the City of Houston.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson points out that the ridiculous has become reality in Texas, thanks to ignorance and lies, in Absurd?

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes that the batsh*t crazies on the Texas State Board of Education textbook review board are still pushing creationism in and science out.

Texas is home to two of the top five dirtiest power generation facilities in the United States, and a new report suggests that they are "the elephant in the room" when it comes to climate change. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs thinks he has identified the main culprit, and it's not what you may have first thought.

Neil at All People Have Value said that with the proper balancing of internal life and external life,  the right calculation exists to make sense of life. All People Have Value is part of NeilAquino.com.

Even with a barrage of annoying mailers, emails and kissing babies, elections are very important. Besides being the way we choose new leaders, they are also important to ensure that our currently elected officials listen to the public, and sometimes the only way to hold them accountable for what they do. For all these reasons, Texas Leftist has decided to "take the plunge" with an official candidate questionnaire and endorsement process.

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Here's some other great posts from around the Texas lefty blogosphere.

Grits for Breakfast observes that there are now Lexus lanes at the airport security checkpoints, and that TSA groping is becoming something that only happens to poor people.

Hal at Half Empty documents the conservative argument that their Fourteenth Amendment rights trump your First Amendment ones.

Prairie Weather thinks that suburban Texas women are finally wising up.

Socratic Gadfly wonders if Wendy Davis might have a Tony Sanchez problem, and updates his extensive post about the prospects of a Blue Texas.

Dos Centavos posts the speaking engagement details of Episcopalian bishop Gene Robinson's appearance in Houston. Robinson is the first openly gay priest to be consecrated as bishop in a major Christian denomination.

TFN Insider notes that Barbara Cargill, the chair of the Texas SBOE, outed herself again as a creationist, as if the effort to write intelligent design into biology books wasn't enough of a clue for us.

State Impact Texas reminds that the shale oil boom is a bust for Texas roads.

And finally, Txsharon at BlueDaze points out all the fun they're having in Colorado that Dallas missed out on when it denied drilling permits in flood plains.

Dallas, Uber, and Yellow Cab

Top city officials in Dallas, including lawyers and the police, worked in concert with representatives of Yellow Cab before a crackdown on Uber, the smartphone car service that the cab company sees as a threat.

Interim City Manager A.C. Gonzalez coordinated the effort, and the mayor’s office now is scrutinizing his actions, according to interviews and records obtained by The Dallas Morning News.

The Yellow Cab operating in Dallas does not appear to have any corporate connection to the one operating in Houston and other Texas cities, as I detailed here.

The anti-Uber campaign included a widespread sting this summer in which police and city transportation officials wrote citations against drivers under contract with Uber. Meanwhile, an attorney for Yellow Cab — a longtime political and financial benefactor to council members — helped draft a proposed ordinance that could make it harder for Uber to operate in Dallas.

The Yellow Cab vs. Uber fight, which boiled over publicly in the past few weeks, offers a behind-the-scenes look at a conflict between old politics and new technology.

At stake: Did City Hall use its muscle to aid an entrenched business, or was it challenging a new company it suspected was skirting long-established safety regulations?

This development has reinforced Uber's primary argument.

Leandre Johns, Uber’s general manager in Dallas, said he’s not surprised that cab companies are attacking Uber.

“The only parties who stand to benefit from a lack of innovation and competition in Dallas transportation options have been the ones leading the charge” to limit consumer choices, he said.

Dallas city officials seem to have an expanding ethical dilemma on their hands, and it's one that feeds the "poor-picked-on-us" Uber meme.  That's a seriously bad development for Big D, but unless evidence of something similar surfaces here in H-Town, it has to be considered their problem.

But it does help explain the various lobbyists and lawyers throwing themselves into the mosh pit in every city Uber starts their business. Disruption as a marketing plan is working out pretty well for them.

Update: Via Charles, yet more chaos.

Update II: Still more bad news coming out of customers' experience with Uber, this time in the nation's capital.

Uber, seemingly in permanent murky water in D.C., has a funny way of playing damage control.

Last Saturday night, Bridget Todd, an activist and former lecturer at Howard University tweeted at the company that her Uber driver choked her after she kissed her husband in the back of the vehicle because he didn't approve of her interracial relationship, according to Valleywag.

In response, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick emailed the company's PR team (and apparently included a Valleywag reporter on the e-mail list) warning them to "make sure these writers don't come away thinking we are responsible when these things do go bad…for whatever reason these writers are starting to think we are somewhat liable for these incidents that aren't even real in the first place."