People are starting to get it

Thanks to Gadfly, via Twitter... this.

If Hillary Clinton ends up winning the Democratic nomination for president, some Bernie Sanders supporters will vote for her anyway. I can respect that decision. While the differences between Democrats and Republicans are often overstated -- to give just two examples (there are many), the same people advise Clinton, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz on foreign policy and Hillary Clinton is at least as cozy with Wall Street as most Republicans -- there are some real and important reasons to worry about a Republican White House. The Supreme Court and heads of agencies are, in my view, the biggest concerns in this vein. I'd have low hopes for Hillary Clinton's appointees but no doubts that they'd be better on balance than those offered by a Trump, Cruz, or Rubio.

Yet I will not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. While I understand the lesser-of-two-evils mentality, I disagree with it; most of Clinton's policy positions are unacceptable to me. If Sanders loses the primary, I will probably vote for Jill Stein.

I don't know if Ben Spielberg of 34justice reads the same things I read or came to the conclusions I did months ago by reading Brains, but it's not all that big a stretch if you value actual progressivism and do some thinking.

Wouldn't that be a strategic blunder, some friends and family ask me? Democrats who aren't quite as polite ask if I'm an idiot. Don't I realize that this type of thinking led to George W. Bush becoming president in 2000 and that I may similarly "blow this election" by deciding to vote my conscience?

The premise of these questions, however, is completely wrong, and not just because, as Jim Hightower documented at the time, voting records show that "Gore was the problem, not Nader," in the 2000 election. In fact, refusing to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election is both a principled and strategic decision that I encourage more people to embrace.

There are two possibilities when it comes to my vote: it will either impact the outcome of the election or it won't. If my vote won't impact the outcome of the election, I might as well vote for the candidate with the best policy positions, regardless of his or her supposed electability.

If my vote will impact the outcome of the election, I may have to decide which matters more: (a) the differences between a bad Democrat and worse Republican over the next four years or (b) the degree to which I'd undermine our chances to enact fundamental change to a broken political system in the long-run by pursuing a lesser-of-two-evils voting strategy.

I'm going to do the linear, bipolar Democrats a favor here by making their argument -- the one they need to make to non-voters, not to people like me and Spielberg.

"Not a dime's worth of difference."  "Don't vote; it only encourages the bastards."  (I have a Facebook friend -- a former Democratic precinct chair, then a former Green, now a voting atheist who uses that second phrase s good bit.  THE most argumentative person, in the harshest of various ways, I have ever encountered.  And that's quite definitive, but it's also a digression.)

Back on point.

... (T)he type of political "pragmatism" that would lead someone to choose (a) undermines power-balancing policy goals. Because politicians and Democratic party officials know that many voters think this way, they have little incentive to listen to our concerns. Instead, they can pay lip service to progressive values while crafting a policy agenda and decision-making process more responsive to wealthy donors than to their constituents.

That dynamic is on full display already in the 2016 Democratic primary election. Clinton is campaigning against priorities, like single-payer health care, that Democrats are supposed to embrace. While early union endorsements for Clinton initially improved her rhetoric on education issues to some degree, she is already backtracking to assure corporate donors that her positions are unchanged. The unions who endorsed Clinton early have no negotiating power relative to rich donors who make their support contingent on Clinton pursuing their interests; given that fact and her record, she seems unlikely to keep her promises if elected.

The Democratic National Committee's actions are also illustrative. The party establishment lined up behind Clinton before the race even started, and the DNC's debate schedule is, despite their protestations to the contrary, quite obviously constructed to insulate Clinton from challenge. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz's recent decision to suspend Sanders' campaign's access to its voter data (in response to a data breach by a since-fired Sanders staffer; the access was restored after the Sanders campaign sued the DNC) has caused even party loyalists to believe that the DNC "is putting [its] finger on [the] scale" and pro-Clinton journalists to acknowledge that the DNC's behavior "makes Clinton's lead look illegitimate, or at least, invites too many 'what ifs.'"

What is developing for 2016 -- and I thought it was obvious before I wrote yesterday's post -- is that the 'status quo' candidate(s) are going to be, indeed already are, at a strategic disadvantage.

Both Clinton and party leaders are making a mockery of many of the principles the party is supposed to stand for. And pledging to support Clinton in the end -- no matter what she and the DNC do -- enables this kind of behavior. It's hard for me to see how we will ever fix our political process and reclaim our democracy by refusing to draw some lines in the sand.

I could accuse those who disagree with that assessment of propping up a sham political system. I could say that, by downplaying the unfounded smears the Clinton campaign has spread against Sanders and insisting that we must support Clinton in the general if she wins the nomination, they are destroying the Democrats' credibility and thus helping to ensure ever more privilege-defending and corrupt elected officials and government policy. But it would be a lot fairer of me to acknowledge that a lot of the Republicans are really scary, that my strategy isn't guaranteed to work the way I think it will, and that people evaluate the risks differently than I do.

That last sentence is the kindest acknowledgment that can be extended to the Clinton folks.  Spielberg is about to make up for it, though.  Bold emphasis is mine.

Similarly, those who disagree can continue to accuse people like me of "helping the GOP" in the 2016 election by pointing out that the Democrats have extreme flaws and don't always deserve our support. But it would be a lot fairer of them to acknowledge that millions upon millions of people have suffered at the hands of lesser-of-two-evils candidates over the years, that an open commitment to support a lesser-of-two-evils candidate robs voters of bargaining power, and that the Democratic Party has brought voter discontent upon itself.

Bottom line: if Hillary Clinton loses to Donald Trump, it won't be anybody's fault but HERS.  I had to defriend someone on Facebook just yesterday who couldn't understand this, kept typing "Trump/GOP thanks you for your support," etc. and so on.  There's no time to waste with horses' asses, led to water, who refuse to drink.  Too many people outside the current electorate that need persuading to forfeit effort teaching swine to yodel.

Here is another olive branch.

Hopefully Sanders will win the Democratic primary and this discussion will become a moot point. In the meantime, it's good for those of us who believe in social justice to push each other on our tactics. We would just do well to remember that reasonable people with the same goals can disagree about which electoral strategy is most likely to help us achieve them.

Clinton people can do their thing, Sanders' people can do theirs, at least until he is disqualified.  It  makes more sense than to continue antagonizing each other on social media, no?  I don't think not voting sends the right message -- somewhere around 75% of Americans already do that, and I don't get that the powers that be are listening.  I also don't think writing in Sanders' name in November is a good way to go, but at least it's a protest vote and not a protest non-vote.

An alternative to vote in favor of, and not against some objectionable candidate or party -- outside the 'left-right, left-right' -- that matches up best with one's progressive populist principles.  I also think that the movement -- a political revolution, thanks Bernie -- makes the strongest statement when it advocates for a living wage.

Bernie Sanders has many of the right economic ideas, but he's also still too beholden to the military industrial complex as well as an abbreviated version of the Second Amendment (truncating the "well-regulated militia" part, like the NRA and all of its adherents do).  And I simply don't think that his social justice message is going to reach enough minorities to help him get to the lead, and even if he got a sudden groundswell of support that pushed him to the front after winning Iowa and New Hampshire, that the DNC establishment would allow him to claim the nomination.

So the question remains: cast no vote, cast a symbolic protest vote, or cast a vote that really sends the loudest message to the DNC.  The choice has always been, and will continue to be, yours.

All the best of the holiday season to all my readers.  A few Toons posts lie ahead but nothing serious -- unless circumstances warrant -- until after Christmas.

The Schlonger he leads the race...

.. the more terrified the RNC gets.  Terrorism is, after all, the only thing that motivates Republicans, whether they are giving it or receiving it.  Bold throughout Jeff Greenfield's intriguing Politico piece is mine...

Donald Trump may have eased some Republican fears Tuesday night when he declared his intention to stay inside the party. But if their angst has been temporarily eased at the prospect of what he would do if he loses, they still face a far more troubling, and increasingly plausible, question.

What happens to the party if he wins?

With Trump as its standard-bearer, the GOP would suddenly be asked to rally around a candidate who has been called by his once and former primary foes “a cancer on conservatism,” “unhinged,” “a drunk driver … helping the enemy.” A prominent conservative national security expert, Max Boot, has flatly labeled him “a fascist.” And the rhetoric is even stronger in private conversations I’ve had recently with Republicans of moderate and conservative stripes.

This is not the usual rhetoric of intraparty battles, the kind of thing that gets resolved in handshakes under the convention banners. These are stake-in-the-ground positions, strongly suggesting that a Trump nomination would create a fissure within the party as deep and indivisible as any in American political history, driven both by ideology and by questions of personal character.

Indeed, it would be a fissure so deep that, if the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run—from the Republicans themselves.

Shrillary fans, you should be able to sleep with visions of sugar plums dancing in your heads.  I know it's more fun to be angry at Sandernistas...

The history lesson continues.

The most striking examples of party fissure in American politics have come when a party broke with a long pattern of accommodating different factions and moved decisively toward one side. It has happened with the Democrats twice, both over civil rights. The party had long embraced the cause of civil rights in the North while welcoming segregationists—and white supremacists—from across the South. In 1948, the party’s embrace of a stronger civil rights plank led Southern delegations to walk out of the convention. That year, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond led a National States Rights Democratic Party—the “Dixiecrats”—that won four Southern states. Had President Harry Truman not (barely) defeated Tom Dewey in Ohio and California, the Electoral College would have been deadlocked—and the choice thrown into the House of Representatives, with Southern segregationists holding the balance of power. Twenty years later, Alabama Governor George Wallace led a similar anti-civil-rights third party movement that won five Southern states. A relatively small shift of voters in California would have deadlocked that election and thrown it to the House of Representatives.

In two other cases, a dramatic shift in intraparty power led to significant defections on the losing side. In 1964, when Republican conservatives succeeded in nominating a divisive champion of their cause in Barry Goldwater, liberal Republicans (there were such things back then) like New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Michigan Governor George Romney and others refused to endorse the nominee. More shockingly, the New York Herald-Tribune, the semi-official voice of the GOP establishment, endorsed Lyndon Johnson—the first Democrat it had supported, ever. With his party split, Goldwater went down in flames. Eight years later, when a deeply divided Democratic Party nominated anti-war hero George McGovern, George Meany led the AFL-CIO to a position of neutrality between McGovern and Richard Nixon—the first time labor had refused to back a Democrat for president. Prominent Democrats like former Texas Governor John Connally openly backed Nixon, while countless others, disempowered by the emergence of “new Democrats,” simply sat on their hands. The divided Democrats lost in a landslide.

There was also Ted Kennedy's insurgent 1980 bid for the nomination against Jimmy Carter, and at the end of yesterday's post, I mentioned Connally, Allen Shivers and the Shivercrats who abandoned Adlai Stevenson in favor of Dwight Eisenhower, and Bob Bullock, who endorsed George W. Bush for governor of Texas in 1998 and for president in 2000, as he retired from the lieutenant governorship.  What we are seeing in 2015 -- and will see in '16 -- is an updated version of the same old shit from the duopoly.

Except maybe a little different.

Would a Trump nomination be another example of such a power shift? Yes, although not a shift in an ideological sense. It would represent a more radical kind of shift, with power moving from party officials and office-holders to deeply alienated voters and to their media tribunes. (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham have not exactly endorsed Trump, but they have been vocal in defending him and in assailing those who have branded Trump unacceptable.) It would undermine the thesis of a highly influential book, "The Party Decides", which argues that the preferences of party insiders is still critical to the outcome of a nomination contest. This possibility, in turn, has provoked strong feelings about Trump from some old school Republicans. Says one self-described 'structural, sycophantic Republican' who has been involved at high levels of GOP campaigns for decades: “Hillary would be bad for the country—he’d be worse.” 

Greenfield has more on Lyndon LaRouche, and David Duke, and a few other of the two parties' least desirable elements threatening the respective establishments.  My fascination, as you might imagine, is going to be with the potential independent 2016 presidential candidates.

... Rob Stutzman, another veteran of California Republican politics—he helped spearhead the 2003 recall that put Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Governor’s Mansion—foresees a third party emerging, both as a safe harbor for disaffected GOP voters and to help other Republican candidates.

“I think a third candidate would be very likely on many state ballots,” he says. “First of all, I think most GOP voters would want an alternative to vote for out of conscience. But Trump would also be devastating to the party and other GOP candidates. A solid conservative third candidate would give options to senators like (NH's Kelly) Ayotte, (WI's Ron) Johnson and (IL's Mark) Kirk to run with someone else and still be opposed to Hillary. In fact, I think it’s plausible such a candidate could beat Trump in many states.”

Any candidate attempting a third-party bid would confront serious obstacles, such as getting on state ballots late in the election calendar. As for down-ballot campaigns, most state laws prohibit candidates from running on multiple lines; so a Senate or congressional candidate who wanted to avoid association with Trump would have to abandon the GOP line to re-run with an independent presidential contender. The (Adlai) Stevenson example shows that leaving a major party line is fraught with peril—although the write-in triumph of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2010 suggests that it can sometimes succeed.

Two items worthy of note:

-- GOP Senators have quietly abandoned not just Trump but Ted Cruz (he doesn't play well with others, as we know) in favor of Marco Rubio, and the rumors of a brokered Republican convention are being discussed on Thom Hartman's radio program, where he has already advanced the postulate that Speaker Paul Ryan will emerge from the split, possibly with Rubio as running mate.

-- Christina Tobin of Free and Equal -- they sponsored the 2012 televised debate between the Green's Jill Stein, the Libertarian's Gary Johnson, the Constitution's Virgil Goode, (who recently endorsed Trump) and the Justice's Rocky Anderson -- has taken a ballot-access qualification job with an as-yet-unnamed independent candidate for president.  That candidate is rumored to be... Jim Webb.

So...

R (a): Trump/Cruz, either/or at the top, maybe both together
R (b): Ryan-Rubio?
D: Clinton-Castro
G: Stein
L: Johnson
C: Possibly former Cong. John Hostettler
J: Poll on website asks if the JP should endorse Bernie Sanders 
I:  Webb
Other very minor party and independent candidates TBD

Won't this be fun?

The local Democrats' chairmanship squabble

Not even an anthill -- much less a molehill -- in the grand scheme, but worthy of some brief commentary.  Stace has already weighed in; let's begin here by republishing the full letter from the challenger and the leader of the Gang That Couldn't Get Signatures Straight.

Last week I wrote to all of you announcing that I had filed for a place on the ballot to run for Chair of the Harris County Democratic Party.

I was informed late Friday and again via official letter over the weekend by the chairman of the party Lane Lewis (my opponent) that my petition signatures were invalid and that I had failed to make it onto the ballot for the primary election this March. With my name not on the ballot and the deadline passed, I will not be running for party chair.

Even as I accept the decision, I was very disappointed to receive this news. The signature process is a precise one and requires 48 legible signatures from current precinct chairs. It also requires that none of these chairs sign more than one petition for a single race, yet some had forgotten they had signed Lane Lewis' petition during the summer.

Here in Harris County, our democracy has been dealt a setback. The process to challenge a sitting party chair is convoluted and flawed, and the number of signatures I received displayed a level of anxiety with our party leadership that needs to be addressed immediately. My challenge of Lane Lewis's chairmanship was never personal, but it was meant to send a strong message that change is needed in order for our party to start growing again and winning big.

That message has been sent.

I look forward to remaining a leader in our party and working with all of you to elect Democrats up and down the ballot, promote diversity, fight for equality, and move our city forward.

Thank you, Happy Holidays to you and your family!

-Philippe Nassif

In the bold emphasis above (which is mine), "legible" is not the word used in the election code but "eligible".  Perhaps this is just an unfortunate typo or autocorrect error, but it tells a story about the competence of the very abbreviated campaign Nassif was running.  Also take note in the third paragraph that the description of the process of gaining ballot access for the county chairmanship is described as "precise", and in the very next graf "convoluted and flawed".

It can be both of those things at the same time, which I believe was the author's intent to convey.  But he communicated it poorly: the rules is still the rules, and if you don't like 'em, you need to follow 'em at least long enough to get elected and change 'em.  Don't blame the rules if you can't abide by 'em.  Herein lies the more nuanced dilemma: if precinct chairs can't remember whether they signed a ballot petition for your opponent before they signed yours... whose fault is that?  But more to the problem-solving point: if you're savvy enough to anticipate a potential shortfall, what is your strategy to overcome it?  Anyone who has gathered ballot petition signatures -- which is to say, every single judicial candidate who has run for office in the last several years -- could tell you, and probably at no fee.

Was there an attorney versed in election law on Nassif's campaign?  If there was, did that person give good counsel to the candidate and his team?  Did the campaign not only understand but heed that advice in this regard?  We know the failure was in execution but only Nassif and his Gang of Three (or Four) know the answers to the rest.

I am not a lawyer, as everyone knows, but I did stay at a nationally branded hotel chain recently.  Not last night.  Anyway, best of luck to the rebel faction in 2018, and I hope everybody learned a lesson.  Insert that tired "if you strike at the king" parable here.  Comparing Lane Lewis to Debbie Wasserman Schultz is most assuredly the wrong tack, but when you lose in embarrassing fashion there's always a good excuse or two; just be sure to pick the right one.  I wonder if they would blame a member of the Green Party for their defeat if they could.

Had Nassif cleared the very low bar for ballot qualification, there's an analogy that shows up in Kuff's very cogent post about Adrian Garcia and his challenge to Gene Green: if you can't offer a sensible, demonstrable reason for changing out an incumbent, then the voters simply aren't going to make a change.  The attacks on Lewis were that his bid for Houston city council "caused (TeaBagging Republican) Mike Knox to be elected to AL 1", and he "abandoned his job as chairman" in the process.  The first part of that premise is a laughable fail; using this logic, Knox's election could just as easily be blamed on Tom McCasland, whose city council campaign was funded in large part by Amber and Steve Mostyn.  The second half of the premise simply fails on the evidence: nobody has worked harder to elect Democrats in Harris County than Lewis, with but one possible exception: Art Pronin, the president of the Meyerland Area Democratic club, who poured himself out on the streets and sidewalks of southwest Houston in the mayoral runoff.

As for Nassif, he still has a bright future in Democratic politics, but should be more cautious about who he falls in league with, generally exercising greater due diligence.  As a hint, any bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Young Turk wanting to get a job for Team Blue should look to the Mostyns, who are assimilating all aspects of Texas Democratic and Harris County Democratic politics, internal and external.  Just last week, the their 'longtime advisor', Jeff Rotkoff, was installed at the Texas AFL-CIO as campaigns director.  The power couple are currently hiring loyalists, like the fellow who recently moved from BGTX into the candidate recruitment directorship at the TDP, and the former Steve Costello campaign operative who has taken a high-ranking position at the HCDP, at three times the salary of the previous person in that slot.

Kindly note that GOP experience has no negative bearing on future Democratic leadership positions.  Especially when confronted by progressive Democrats, and especially in Texas, where there is a long history of what we call Blue Dogs today -- Allen Shivers, John Connally, Bob Bullock -- holding themselves out as the last of the Mohican moderate Republicans in the nation.

Former JCS Dempsey went around Obama, shielded Assad, aided Russians to enter Syrian civil war

Twice in two days, I'm speechless.

President Obama’s top military commander secretly orchestrated intelligence sharing with military leaders in Germany, Israel and Russia to thwart the president’s policy to remove Bashar Assad from power in Syria and lay the groundwork for Russia’s military entrance into the Syrian civil war, because he believed Obama’s anti-ISIS strategies were hopelessly misguided.

That is just one of the astounding takeaways from a 6,800-word expose by venerated investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh that was just published in the London Review of Books. Hersh, whose sources include top senior aides to the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, which commands all U.S. military forces, also described in great detail how Turkey’s president Recep Erdoğan has deceived the White House by siding and arming ISIS and other extremist Islamic militias in Syria, in a gambit for Turkey to emerge as a regional power akin to the Ottoman Empire.

The broad contours of this cloak-and-dagger tale were confirmed by Saturday’s Democratic Party presidential debate. One of the key foreign policy questions was whether the Syrian dictator had to be removed to defeat ISIS. Bernie Sanders said no, voicing the same argument Hersh reported was put forth by recently retired Joint Chiefs chairman Martin Dempsey: removing Assad would create a vacuum that Islamic extremists would fill. Ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Assad had to go, but intriguingly noted that Turkey was not helping matters. This separation of Assad’s fate from fighting ISIS is now moving into the presidential race, but if Hersh’s account is correct it mirrors the thinking of the top Pentagon commander who felt he had to act on his own because Obama wouldn’t listen to the military's advice.

This would be the highest magnitude of hubris -- short of a coup -- by the real culprits of American hegemony, the Pentagon and its weapons manufacturers.  Since the killing of JFK there have been few US presidents that were not secretly cowed by what the generals would and would not do.   Dwight Eisenhower, the most significant of many war heroes elected to the nation's highest office, warned us about what was coming.  Now that so many men -- and soon, a woman -- have been elected commander-in-chief without the 'experience' of military service, the War Machine has only gathered more strength.

The eagerness of the various Republican presidential candidates to have your children, not theirs, go into future battles is the latest tell.  Global conflict is going to be the only sustainable American economic engine for the next generation.  (Beyond the mid-century, an unstable climate -- gradually more toxic air and water, with storms, drought, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes of increasing frequency and strength -- may finish the job "America's enemies" can't.)

It may no longer be possible to end the 21st century doctrine of continuous war.

Even though I put out our Christmas decorations yesterday and took the dogs for an evening drive around the neighborhood to look at all the lights, I'm not so much in the holiday spirit.

Banksy's Christmas card

The card has recently gone viral again because of the holidays, but it is actually a few years old and seems to circulate around this time every year.

The piece first appeared at Santa’s Ghetto exhibit in London in 2005, which followed Banksy’s trip to the Middle East.

Regardless of when the image was created, it sends a powerful message about how divided (Israel and Palestine and the other surrounding Arab states are) on racial and ethnic lines, creating a massive refugee crisis, and widespread ghettos in many parts of the region. This current reality is obviously highlighted by the biblical story of Joseph and Mary, two refugees themselves who were said to travel across those lands thousands of years ago.

When the state of Israel was created, instead of integrating the Arab and Jewish cultures together the ruling class put policies in place that would force the Palestinian people onto unfertile ghettos, separated from water sources and food growing lands by giant walls. The Palestinians were also not given the right to organize, own property, or work, and without these basic freedoms, they remain refugees. These policies would result in a growing hostility between the two groups which eventually flared up in physical violence. This violence has spread all throughout the oil-rich Middle East and has allowed the western establishment to have a permanent involvement in the region’s affairs, just as they planned.

It really is this bad.  In fact it might be even worse than described above.

What Israel's Separation Wall Is Really Doing
Security? Or apartheid? We look at what Israel's separation wall is really doing.
Posted by AJ+ on Thursday, December 17, 2015

I'm at a loss for words.

T'was the week before Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance wishes Ag Commissioner Sid Miller a happy holiday as it brings you this week's roundup.

SocraticGadfly dips into the archives and offers up thoughts on that Christmas chestnut "It's a Wonderful Life," including what a remake might look like, and a follow-up post about all of what's wrong with the original.

Off the Kuff reviews who filed for what in the Democratic primaries in Texas, and Stace at Dos Centavos added some impressions of the Harris County contested D primary races.

The Green Party of Texas filed almost sixty candidates for state and local offices for the 2016 election, reports PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Greg Abbott reacts to children coming to America by sending troops. Obama looks at solving problems in Central America. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is disgusted that the only tools Republicans have are military force, fear, and hate.

Egberto Willies is concerned that America is sitting on a powder keg of hatred.

Neil at All People Have Value said that we would be better off with the values of Christmas rather than with the values of commerce.  APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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

Here's more great Texas blog post roundup...

Grits for Breakfast has the latest prosecutor screwup by the McClennan County DA in the Waco biker shootings case.

ICYMI, Democratic Blog News has both the full video and transcript of Saturday night's debate.

Illustrating the deep divisions fracturing Democrats as a result of the most recent strife in their presidential primary, Ted at jobsanger accuses the Sanders campaign of "stealing" data, and Somervell County Salon says that she won't be voting for Clinton as a result of the DNC's actions.

Mean Rachel wishes Rep. Elliott Naishtat a fond farewell.

Next City believes that urbanists will like Houston Mayor-elect Sylvester Turner, and Kyle Jack lists outgoing Houston Mayor Annise Parker's top ten snarky tweets.

Christopher Hooks analyzes the recent mock mass shooting/farting in Austin.

John Wright proposes five New Year's resolutions for the LGBT movement.

Paradise in Hell tries to distinguish between Ted Cruz's lies.

The Isiah Factor took note of Texas schools following the new fingerprint rule for educators, and Texas Watch is pressing the TEA for more information about school bus safety.

Moni at Transgriot  -- via Strength In Numbers -- seems to be fed up with Caitlyn Jenner, who was in Houston last week and had a prayer session with Pastor Ed Young of Second Baptist Church.

The Lewisville Texan Journal reported on the local press conference declaring the Lewisville Dam -- despite various seeps and a bank slide -- to be in no imminent danger of failing.

Bayou City History shows us those grand penthouse suites from the old Astroworld Hotel, a part of Judge Roy Hofheinz's Astrodomain.

And Fascist Dyke Motors is going to take a sabbatical, so don't keep an eye out for her.

What difference does it make, really.

The condescension is strong with this one.  Jonathan Tilove at the Austin Statesman with the best overnight analysis:

The dramatic highlight of last night’s third Democratic presidential debate, held at St. Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., came right after the mid-debate bathroom break.

[...]

... there was a candidate-less podium at center stage, between the podiums occupied by Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Baltimore Mayor and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

Apparently, this was just a mundane, fact-of-life, it-takes-a-woman-a-little-longer-than-a-man-to-duck-in-and-out-of -the-restroom moment and, America, get used to it.

The real puzzle was why ABC, which did not seem to be hewing to some kind of crisp schedule,  could not have simply given the former first lady, New York senator, secretary of state and presently at least even money to be the next president, another 90 seconds to get back in her place as the center square before resuming the debate.

It is not like they shouldn’t have seen this coming.

Here from Slate’s coverage of the Democratic debate in October in Las Vegas:

Hillary Clinton has noted, at Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, that electing a woman as president of the United States would be a historic first. She also, it seems fair to say, just became the first presidential candidate to make reference during a debate to how long it takes women to pee.

The transcript:

Anderson Cooper: And welcome back to this CNN democratic presidential debate. It has been quite a night so far. We are in the final block of this debate. All the candidates are back, which I’m very happy to see.

[Laughter]

It’s a long story. Let’s continue. Secretary Clinton, welcome back.

Clinton: Well, thank you. You know, it does take me a little longer. That’s all I can say.

How endearing.  A bonafide 'what difference does it make' moment.

But, with Clinton’s reappearance, any chance of any real drama emerging from last night’s debate was gone. Not that the Democrats seemed very intent on gaining an audience for last night’s event.

The debate schedule for the Democrats does seem intended to minimize any harm that could be done to  Clinton’s front-runner status.

Saturday night is better known as a date night, not a debate night. And the Saturday before Christmas leans heavily toward family not politics.

Also, (television) viewers had choices. There was the Jets-Cowboys game, which I suppose might serve as a surrogate preview of a Clinton-Cruz general election race. (Sorry Ted.)

#SorryNotSorry.  As Mrs. Clinton said when she finally reappeared.

Apart from its ratings-proof scheduling, the Democratic race simply lacks the drama of the Republican race, which is among the most interesting and uncertain of my lifetime with a bona fide reality TV star center stage.

With the Iowa caucuses barely more than a month way, the clear front-runner for the Republican nomination – Donald Trump – is a larger-than-life figure who has proved doubters wrong, again and again, and yet still seems unlikely to ultimately make it to the White House.

The Republican contest, with its rich ensemble cast, has intricate plots and subplots. It’s gripping and entertaining, if often dumbfounding.

Particularly, coming at this time of year, there is something familiarly festive about the recent Republican debate – another raucous affair, crowded with jostling personalities. And, they even continue to have, in the spirit of the holidays, a kid’s table debate.

The Democratic debate, on the other hand, has a kind of sad, empty-nester air to it. There’s Sanders, 74, and Clinton, 68, and the young upstart, O’Malley, a mere 52 – but still eight years older than the GOP kids – 44-year-olds Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

And it will be very exciting if the Democratic race doesn’t go the way we think it’s going to go. Very exciting, and really, very unlikely.

Tilove seems to sense the same danger signals about a Trump/Cruz/Rubio-Clinton general election showdown that I do.  The debate was held on Sanders' home turf, New Hampshire, where he currently holds a small lead, but focused on the same topic as the GOP debate earlier in the week, on national security and terrorism concerns.  Not exactly in his wheelhouse, but then nobody -- and I mean nobody -- measures up to Clinton's experience in that regard.  The problem is that she still hasn't learned anything from all that experience.  Being shot at on the Bosnian tarmac just isn't that big a deal, I suppose.

One could, of course, argue that, as a former secretary of state, Clinton’s fingerprints are all over the sorry situation the world is in. But, at time of great uncertainty, Clinton at least is no stranger to the world stage.

[...]

And from Clinton, the most stinging rebuke of Trump – praising George W. Bush, by contrast, and leveling a new and specific charge that I’m sure will be much talked about beginning on this morning’s Sunday shows.

CLINTON: You know, I was a senator from New York after 9/11, and we spent countless hours trying to figure out how to protect the city and the state from perhaps additional attacks. One of the best things that was done, and George W. Bush did this and I give him credit, was to reach out to Muslim Americans and say, we’re in this together. You are not our adversary, you are our partner.

And we also need to make sure that the really discriminatory messages that Trump is sending around the world don’t fall on receptive ears. He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists. So I want to explain why this is not in America’s interest to react with this kind of fear and respond to this sort of bigotry.

No evidence for Clinton claim that ISIS is already showing Trump in recruiting videos https://t.co/NVzR4YOHmE pic.twitter.com/56lk4w1g4k

— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) December 20, 2015

Perhaps she was making the point that ISIS could use videos of Trump video to recruit jihadists. But, if there is no evidence they actually are, then her statement may prove reminiscent of the elusive video that Trump said he was certain he saw of  “thousands and thousands of people” cheering in Jersey City, N.J., as the World Trade Center collapsed.

There's more of the least obnoxious "inevitability" meme I've read in this cycle at the link.  Clinton, for her part, decided she was going to be debating Trump last night, and she surely won that.  Sanders did nothing I took note of, in contrast to the previous link,  to forcefully present himself as a better alternative, save his retort to Clinton's "everybody should!" like her, not just corporate America, with "Well, they won't like me."  Point awarded to Bern for the burn.

Martin O'Maddy's Ted Cruz interpretation -- feigned outrage, talking over others, disregarding the timing rules; not the lying and demagoguery -- fell a little flat also.

If you still don't understand why Democrats aren't voting, and why 2016 will demonstrate IMHO another record low turnout for Team Blue, then neither Tilove nor I may be able to help you get it.

Apathy is Hillary Clinton's biggest election opponent.  Hers, and ours.

A more extensive analysis of the debate from Raw Story, and a very pointed reminder from Salon that Trump and the deep Republican dysfunction does not equate to a Clinton roll to the White House, SNL's quite funny skits last night notwithstanding.

T'was the Week Before Funnies

One big happy family again

You'll find very few criticisms of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schutz in these archives.  Not because I disagree with her about essentially everything, but because I arrived at a point seemingly some years ago that her tenure was helping me convince people who have left, or ceased voting for, the Democratic Party for their own various reasons -- many of them just apathy -- that they had made the right decision, and I used those examples to push others in the same direction.

Essentially DWS being the world's worst Democrat made me a bad one, too.  As those of you who know me personally or only by reading here over the past decade-plus, I haven't been able to quit the Democrats altogether because there are in fact good, honest, hard-working, respectable people -- activists and politicians -- whom I like, value as friends, and trust.  Not to mention plenty of their candidates that I have block-walked and phone-banked for, Sylvester Turner and Wendy Davis most recently among them.

Wasserman Schultz has never been one of those Democrats, however, but regular snark and occasional outrage seemed a waste of pixels.  That's in spite of her conduct just during this election cycle being both atrocious and unsurprising.  Even when threatened with losing her job two years ago, she responded by playing both the "sexist" and the "anti-Semite" card.

Given all that exceptional misbehavior, why bother complaining?  She is, after all, doing the dirtiest work that needs doing: destroying the centrist, corporatized, neoliberal Democratic Party, and from within to boot.

Why would that bother me?

So when social media exploded yesterday with the news about her suspension of access of the Sanders campaign to its own voter database, because of a classic (characterized as such by IT professionals) and repeated error by the sole vendor of Democratic computerized voter files, I frankly considered her own breach of contract action to be an early Christmas gift to Jill Stein and the Green Party.  Sure enough, I counted over a dozen different postings on my own social media feeds of Democrats threatening to bolt, using phrases like "rigged election" and -- horror of horrors -- "just as bad as the Republicans".

As we know it took a federal lawsuit for the chairwoman to come to her senses and resolve the kerfuffle.  But plenty of lasting damage to long-term relationships with devout Democrats was done, and the sole benefit to her cause -- electing Hillary Clinton president -- seems to have been in ginning up viewers for tonight's candidate debate... which is going up against Christmas parties, high school state championship football, the opening weekend of college bowl games and even the Dallas Cowboys playing in the same time slot.

The male demographic may suffer a good bit, but she can't be considered a complete failure if ABC finds itself pleased by the overnight ratings, after all.

Ana Kasparian sums up the incompetence of both DWS and the database vendor without mentioning NGP VAN's too-close-for-comfort ties to Clinton, and speaks calmly for the growing minority of Democrats who won't be casting their ballot for the former secretary of state.  A couple of days ago, that percentage could be estimated at about 16% on the low end, and 41% on the high.

Should the Greens send her a thank-you card?  Too early for that, but they can certainly be grateful for such generosity.  The more Debbie Wasserman Schultz shakes the tree, the more potential Green voters fall to the ground.  I hope there are some smiling progressives with large baskets ready to go to work harvesting the fruits of her labor.

Update: Prairie Weather and Somervell County Salon with similar sentiments, also Josh Marshall and Yellow Doggerel Democrat on the big picture: Shrillaries cannot afford to alienate the Sanders caucus.  Too late; Ted at jobsanger has already screwed that pooch.

Democrats prepare to debate amid contentiousness

It's not just the Sanders data "breach" -- the firewall fell down after a software patch by the vendor, somebody snooped, he got fired for it ...

Late Thursday night, the DNC took the drastic step of cutting off the Sanders campaign’s access to its comprehensive 50-state voter file that lists voter patterns and preferences, effectively shutting down the campaign’s voter outreach operations just over a month before the critical Iowa caucus and a little over 50 days before the New Hampshire primary.

The punishment came about as the result of a 30-minute glitch in NGP VAN — the vendor that handles the DNC’s voter data — in which internal models for each Democratic presidential campaign were briefly available to other competing campaigns while NGP VAN was applying a patch to the software. Michael Briggs, a communications aide for the Sanders campaign, said this isn’t the first time they’ve reported security bugs in the DNC’s voter file.

“On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns. Our campaign months ago alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns,” Briggs told Buzzfeed News. “At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor.”

The DNC has vowed to not grant the Sanders campaign access to the voter file until it has proved that it destroyed all of the Clinton campaign data it inadvertently accessed as a result of the glitch. However, as Reddit user bastion_of_press pointed out, the Sanders campaign cannot prove it destroyed something it doesn’t have, meaning the ban on accessing critical voter information could be indefinite.

... but also this:

The Democratic National Committee has revoked the sponsorship of WMUR, New Hampshire’s most influential television station, of the party’s presidential debate (tomorrow night) because of a labor dispute involving the station.

Pressure had been mounting on the station’s parent company, Hearst, for some time, as all three Democratic candidates for president pushed for labor negotiations to at least begin before the debate, scheduled for next Saturday, Dec. 19. Otherwise the candidates faced the prospect of having to cross a picket line.

That's enough sturm und drang added to Saturday's night's main event that we all ought to have something to look forward to, as regards whether or not Sanders might actually throw a punch at the front-runner, and how she might counterpunch (or more likely, the other way around).

Here's a few more developments that might liven up the festivities.

-- Majority of Bernie Supporters Would Back Hillary As Nominee:

A new poll has found a majority of Bernie Sanders supporters would support Hillary Clinton if he dropped out of the race. Amid increasingly demagogic rhetoric from the Republican field of candidates, as well as a dearth of Democratic nominees, it is unsurprising that left-leaning voters would opt for Clinton should Sanders halt his campaign. However, this potential support directly defies the very principles Sanders has earned passionate support for espousing.

The poll, conducted by Monmouth University, surveyed 1,006 registered voters from December 10-13, drawing data from 374 Democratic voters and voters who lean toward the Democratic party. Though the sample size was relatively small, it revealed a disturbing sentiment.

Bernie Sanders has long been viewed as an anti-establishment candidate and is most revered for his outspoken goal of breaking up big banks. Though Clinton’s policies and priorities are diametrically opposed to this proposed noble undertaking, 59% of Bernie Supporters would “be okay” with her nomination.

This acceptance of Clinton’s hegemony is ultimately unsurprising, considering Sanders has generally refused to criticize the leading Democratic candidate. Though last month the New York Times reported Sanders was prepping to hit Hillary on trade, gun control, and even the controversy over her State Department email in their upcoming debate, he has shied away from exposing the foundations of her establishment agenda.

Though Sanders has made battling the power of the banking elite a cornerstone of his presidential campaign, he has failed to significantly criticize Clinton for her deep ties to banking corporations. In fact, his campaign abruptly pulled an internet advertisement that attacked Clinton for her “big money interests.”

If he's not going to start fighting back now, it's already over for him.  Frankly I thought he'd make a good game of it until at least South Carolina.  So the Green Party and Jill Stein now have a target number, and it's around 40%.

In spite of the fact that Hillary’s policies directly defy the fundamental goals of Sanders’ campaign, however, his supporters appear content to accept her though she violates the core of their beliefs. Democrats in general are even more enthusiastic about her potential presidency.

Democrats surveyed in the Monmouth poll harbored deep support for Clinton; 22% of respondents said they would “enthusiastically” support her while 58% said they would be “satisfied” if she were to become the Democratic candidate — totaling 80% of Democrats who would positively embrace Clinton as the nominee. This support is concerning, especially considering that according to the same poll, Democrats rate the economy and jobs as their biggest concern — while they simultaneously place faith in the candidate with the strongest reputation for favoring the economic interests of corporations over constituents.

That cognitive dissonance -- or lack thereof -- is plainly what Greens must exploit.

-- On the bright side for Sanders' Democratic hopes, Nate Silver Harry Enten at Nate Silver's 538.com says it's not too late for Bernie to catch Hillary in Iowa.

Over the past month, Clinton has had a 53 percent to 37 percent advantage over Sanders in Iowa polls. A survey from polling demigod Ann Selzer found Clinton ahead of Sanders 48 percent to 39 percent. Her position is stronger than it was at this point during the 2008 cycle, when she led Barack Obama 30 percent to 24 percent. Still, past campaigns suggest that Clinton’s current lead isn’t necessarily secure.

[...]

If Clinton were to underperform expectations in Iowa, it could easily lead to a loss for her in New Hampshire, which has consistently been Sanders’s strongest state. We know from past campaigns that candidates who underperform in Iowa tend to do worse than expected in New Hampshire, while those who outperform expectations in Iowa tend to also outperform expectations in the Granite State. The ultimate example of this is Democrat Gary Hart’s stunning upset of Walter Mondale in the 1984 New Hampshire primary. Hart’s stronger-than-expected second-place finish in Iowa gave him a lot of positive media coverage and momentum going into New Hampshire.

And Clinton doesn’t have a lot of room for error in New Hampshire. Sanders and she are basically tied there. A polling average over the past month has Clinton up by 1.5 percentage points, while the HuffPost Pollster aggregate gives Sanders a 1.5 percentage point lead. A closer-than-expected finish in Iowa could easily put Sanders over the top in New Hampshire.

You might be thinking, “So what?” Clinton, at this point, has a pretty insurmountable 49 percentage point lead in South Carolina thanks to strong African-American support. A win for Clinton there after losing Iowa and New Hampshire would probably put her back on track to win the nomination.

Indeed, anyone who has been following my writing this year knows that I think Clinton is a near-lock for the Democratic nomination even if she loses the first two states. Still, Clinton probably doesn’t want a lengthy primary season against an opponent who has pulled her further to the left. She wants to pivot toward the center while the Republican race devolves into a possible (metaphorical) fistfight.

Saturday night's all right for fighting (Bernie).

Cuba, Cubans, Cuban Americans, America, and Americans

The island nation, its politics intertwining with ours, and its favorite sons battling to be the GOP nominee are all over my newsfeed this week.

-- Cruz and Rubio, two sons of Cuban parents, are vying to lead the anti-immigrant party:

There’s nothing new about seeing a group of presidential hopefuls who are the grandchildren of immigrants — Irish, Italian, Czech, German — decrying the burden of rampant immigration. Seldom, it seems, are the candidates who rail loudest against interlopers the ones whose ancestors walked off the Mayflower.

What is unusual, though, is to turn on a presidential debate and see two notably young Latino candidates, both born to Cuban émigrés, jockeying over who will close the border faster and more securely. That was the scene in Las Vegas Tuesday night, and it underscored a central paradox of this year’s Republican contest: Both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio seem like decent bets now to become the first Latino nominee in either party’s long history, at exactly the moment when anti-immigrant fervor is reaching its zenith.

[...]

It’s tempting to see Cruz and Rubio as politicians cast from the same mold and reflecting remarkably similar stories. Here are two 44-year-old conservative Cuban-Americans, both lightning fast from mind to mouth, both first-term senators who capitalized on voter rebellion — Rubio in 2010, Cruz two years later — to shock establishment-backed opponents. The parallels are kind of bizarre.

Both men, eyeing the presidency from the moment they arrived in Washington, also wrote readable, if thoroughly forgettable, political memoirs with the kind of anodyne titles that make you think there must be some publishing algorithm for coming up with this stuff: “A Time for Truth” in Cruz’s case, “ An American Son” in Rubio’s.

Cruz’s father fled political repression and existential danger as an ally of communist rebels seeking to overthrow Fulgencio Batista. Once in America, Rafael Cruz grew disillusioned with Fidel Castro and threw communism overboard, replacing it with a new guiding cause: evangelical Christianity.

Rubio’s dad, on the other hand, came to America chiefly in pursuit of economic opportunity. In Florida and then in Nevada, and then back in Florida again, Mario Rubio’s passion was to provide for his family, running small, ill-fated businesses (a vegetable stand, a dry cleaner) and tending bar.

Cruz’s Cuban story is all about zealotry and purity — a journey of faith, both political and religious. The boyhood chapters of Rubio’s memoir, on the other hand, are largely about paying bills and fitting in, as generations of immigrants have tried to do — playing football and celebrating American holidays, switching churches (Catholic and Mormon) in order to adapt to social circles.

Because of Cuba’s outsize role for a tiny island in the geopolitical drama of the Cold War and in American politics, Cuban-Americans have always seen themselves, perhaps more than any other immigrant group, as instruments of destiny. The most common narrative among Cuban-Americans revolves around all the wealth and greatness that would have been theirs save for the scourge of global communism.

“If you put together all the sugar plantations Cubans have claimed to have once owned,” jokes Joe Garcia, a Cuban-American Democrat who represented the Miami area in Congress, “you’d have a country the size of Brazil.”

I'll let you read on from there.  But don't miss this: "Ted Cruz's dishonesty on immigration".

-- Fidel’s niece, Mariela Castro, leads Cuba’s LGBT revolution:

The moment that Mariela Castro Espin met Rory Kennedy on a Monday evening in early December seemed to encapsulate all the promise of a Cuba in transition as relations with America thaw.

Here was the niece of Fidel Castro and daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro agreeably posing for pictures and gabbing with the niece of former President John F. Kennedy and daughter of Sen. Bobby Kennedy.

More than half a century after their uncles faced off during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the two scions of legendary political families sat down for an in-translation tête-à-tête at a dinner at the San Cristobal paladar, or private restaurant, in central Havana.

The moment came toward the tail end of an evening of good food, music and well-aged rum sponsored by HBO in celebration of Jon Alpert’s documentary “Mariela Castro’s March: Cuba’s LGBT Revolution,” about Castro’s emergence as the most prominent gay rights advocate in Cuba.

Of all the unexpected facts about Cuba today, perhaps none is more so than that the 53-year-old Castro daughter — straight, married, a mother of three — has become its most vocal political advocate on behalf of gay, lesbian, bi and trans rights.

-- Obama wants to travel to Cuba as president, but only if he can meet with Cuban dissidents:

President Obama promised in an exclusive interview with Yahoo News that he “very much” hopes to visit Cuba during his last year in office, but only if he can meet with pro-democracy dissidents there.

“If I go on a visit, then part of the deal is that I get to talk to everybody,” Obama said. “I’ve made very clear in my conversations directly with President [Raul] Castro that we would continue to reach out to those who want to broaden the scope for, you know, free expression inside of Cuba.”

Speaking in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Obama strongly hinted that he would make a decision “over the next several months.”

The president hopes that “sometime next year” he and his top aides will see enough progress in Cuba that they can say that “now would be a good time to shine a light on progress that’s been made, but also maybe [go] there to nudge the Cuban government in a new direction.” 

-- The Americans are coming!  Is Cuba ready?

-- US, Cuba to establish regular air service

-- Exploring the underground real estate market in Cuba

-- Hair has become an art form for Cuban men:

Under Fidel Castro, barber shops and beauty salons were state-owned and state-run. For the most part, a men’s haircut was just that — a cut. There was no shampooing and no styling.

However, in 2010, two years after Fidel’s brother, Raúl, became president, many small salons were handed over to their employees — essentially privatized. 

This quietly implemented, small economic change might be the reason behind the evolving hairstyles worn by men in Havana. When you walk down the streets today, you’ll see guys with carefully sculptured Mohawks, pompadours, fades, and highlights.

Much more from Yahoo: "US and Cuba, One Year Later" and also from the Havana Times.  And be sure and click on the blog appearing regularly in the right-hand column: "Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter".

Texas Greens file for 57 state and local offices in 2016

Kuff and Stace both have your Democratic rundown; I had some first-take POV on Tuesday, and yesterday the Green Party of Texas offered their slate for next year.

A total of 57 filed for offices across Texas, and here's the full list.  (I only counted one presidential candidate because recent polling shows Jill Stein with 63%, but she has four challengers, including Kent Mesplay of Texas).  The GPUS presidential nominating convention will be held in Houston next August, with most events occurring in and around the University of Houston.  The state convention will held in April, in San Antonio.

Regular readers here will note that I have been advancing a vote for Stein for president on the expectation that Bernie Sanders will eventually be eliminated from contention as the Democratic Party's nominee, and that his supporters should be welcomed to join the only real progressive campaign remaining after this spring.  Both Stein and the GPTX agree with me.

“The Democratic Party is not going to allow Bernie Sanders to squeak through, so where would we be if we don’t have a Plan B? When Bernie gets knocked out of contention, there would be no place for people to go if not for our campaign. The difference between our campaign and Bernie’s is that we’re not looking for the Democratic Party to save us. We are establishing an independent base for political resistance where we can continue to grow, because there is no relief on the horizon and we need to get busy right now building the lifeboat we’ll need to rescue ourselves and our children.”

Sanders is riding a populist wave in the Democratic primary that closely aligns with Green positions. For Greens who are committed to building an electoral alternative outside of the Democratic Party, we must be prepared to capture as much of this momentum as possible when the super-delegates and other Democratic Party machinery finally close the door on the Sanders campaign. To do this, we will put forward a solid and coordinated slate of candidates this cycle, and we will conduct a Green Party brand awareness campaign intended to let voters know that they still have an opportunity to vote their values and put people, peace, and planet before profit.

Since Texas Democrats and Republicans finally figured out that the way to reduce the electorate's choices back down to two was to file a candidate for every statewide office and let the mindlessness of straight ticket voting works its magic, it becomes imperative that to avoid having to petition for signatures for ballot access in 2018, a statewide Green (and Libertarian, for that matter) needs to hit the 5% threshold in next year's elections.

The statewide offices on the ballot in 2016 are Railroad Commissioner, state Supreme Court (Places 3, 5 and 9), and state Court of Criminal Appeals (Places 2, 5 and 6).  Multiple Democrats and Republicans have filed for those seats, most of them incumbents, and the primary elections in March will determine who bears the D and R standard in November.

The Railroad Commissioner's contest will be the liveliest, with over half a dozen candidates, including former Republican state representative Wayne Christian and three other goombah Republicans trying to out-"most conservative" each other in the GOP primary.  Former Land Commisioner Jerry Patterson's in-and-out dance prior to the filing deadline last Monday ended when he decided he couldn't be a ticketmate with Trump.

Former statehouse Democrat Lon Burnham, infamous perennial Grady Yarbrough -- you should remember him from his 2012 US Senate runoff against Paul Sadler -- and one other are vying to represent the Blue Team.  The Greens re-submit Martina Salinas, who got north of 2% in a 2014 bid for the RRC in a four-way race.

Gadfly had a good suggestion as the best shot for the Greens to hit their 5% number, and I won't disagree.  Quoting...

Cheryl Johnson is NOT running for Place 5 on the CCA, though. And the Democratic candidate, Betsy Johnson, is in a solo practice, which means she probably doesn't have a lot of legal depth she brings to the race. Her Texas Bar page lists, besides criminal practice, real estate and wills/probate.

Judith Sanders-Castro is the Green here; she got 10.45% against a Republican and a Libertarian in the CCA contest in 2014.  She had a long career as a voting rights activist going back to the '80's and early '90's with MALDEF.  Both Sanders-Castro and Salinas should campaign together and work the RGV and urban areas for Latin@ votes in their respective races.  Their success will be key in the bid for continued ballot access.

Besides those two excellent candidates, longtime Travis County activist Debbie Russell is running for sheriff there.  She and I spent time working on David Van Os' campaign for TXAG in 2006.  Deb Shafto, the Green Party's gubernatorial nominee in 2010, will make a run at Sylvia Garcia in Texas Senate 6, and her husband, George Reiter, the past co-chair of the state party, takes aim at Congressman Al Green in CD-9.

The godmother of the Texas Green Party, katia gruene, is a candidate for the statehouse (District 51, incumbent Eddie Rodriguez) and Joseph McElligott, fresh off his bid for Houston city council, will run against Dan Huberty in HD127.  Harris County Commissioner El Franco Lee also draws a Green challenge from Adam Socki, a transit/urban planner with engineering outfit HDR.

David Collins, the Harris County Green Co-Chair, posts more.

Fear and loathing in Las Vegas

Trump vs. Bush. (Trump, shockingly, lost.)  Cruz vs. Rubio on immigration and funding for troops (both lost on the basis of their respective lies).  Even the kid's table debate was riotous, if only for Lindsey Graham's eye rolls, Princess Bride references, and made for teevee lines like "bring on the virgins".

But the main event did not disappoint.

Republican presidential hopefuls fought to out-tough one another Tuesday night in a raucous debate animated by fears of terrorism and disagreement over how best to prevent attacks like the massacres in Paris and San Bernardino.

Agreeing on the need to destroy the Islamic State terrorist group and eager to blame President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for its ascendance, the candidates quickly squared off in a series of heated exchanges over the line between protecting Americans and trampling their rights.

Yeah, about that...

It was a festival of fraud from Cruz.

His patented formula is a mix of repellent ingredients: misrepresentation of facts, baseless smears, exaggerated sincerity and pretended solidarity with the average person. If Cruz tells you it's raining, you can leave your umbrella at home.

Even fact-checkers were aghast at the mendacity.

TED CRUZ: "You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city."

THE FACTS: The Texas senator's conviction that the Islamic State group can be routed with an air campaign of overwhelming force is hard to square with the reality on the ground. IS fighters are holed up in a variety of cities, amid civilians, raising questions about how he could direct a carpet bombing that only singles out the enemy.

He was asked in the debate if he'd be willing to cause civilian casualties in Raqqa, a major Syrian city that has become de facto capital of the Islamic State group's so-called caliphate.

He answered yes, without saying yes.  Essentially the fear and hate of Trump was unleashed by all nine of these losers.

“Like all of you, I’m angry” is how Carly Fiorina began her opening statement. That sentence encapsulates not just last night’s two-hour debate in Las Vegas but also the entire Republican nominating contest thus far. Donald Trump himself was largely a non-factor in the candidates’ fifth and final showdown of 2015, but Trumpism was the dominant, animating force inside the Venetian Theatre.

Reaganesque the rhetoric was not. Trump catapulted to the top of the polls and has stayed there for six months now because he tapped into deep-seeded anger and frustration of the conservative base that the country is slipping away from them. Chasing the frontrunner’s success, the other leading candidates each tried to varying degrees to show that they get it, that they too are mad as hell and want to take the country back. There was little effort to play to the higher angels of the American consciousness. Instead, in the wake of attacks on Paris and San Bernardino, it often felt like the candidates were preying on the electorate’s fear, anxiety and sense of vulnerability.

Guess how many times the word 'guns' was used last night?

In a two-plus hour Republican presidential debate focused on "keeping America safe," candidates mentioned guns a total of three times — twice by Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a long-shot moderate, and once by Jeb Bush, when he said, "America is under the gun to lead the free world, to protect our civilized way of life."

Before the debate began, GOP chairman Reince Priebus (rhymes with "Rinse Penis") spoke about -- seriously -- competence.

“You know a lot of people ask what does the Republican National Committee do?,” he asked the bored audience. “A competent national party. A competent national party that has its act together on the ground.”

“The one thing that we all need,” he continued, “and the one thing that every one of the candidates need on this stage is a competent national party. And it’s something that we’re all striving to do and working for every day.”

They have a long, long way to go.

Filing deadline news and reax

-- Tipped by Bill King flack Campos several days ago (scroll to the end), Adrian Garcia files at the last minute against Rep. Gene Green.  Don't much care who wins between the two; I consider them both tools of the establishment.  Green is deeply embedded with the petroleum interests, Garcia with the Republicrat politicos like Tony Buzbee and Bill White.  This is a Dumb and Dumber primary, and the voters in the 29th get to decide which one is which.  When even Annise Parker is throwing shade, you should be able to figure out you're just another unemployed stooge trying to get back on the public payroll.

Funny, I thought he wanted to be Mayor of Houston.-A https://t.co/OMyVmQgEZc

— Annise Parker (@AnniseParker) December 15, 2015

-- I do like TMF to prevail in his grudge rematch with state Sen. José Menéndez.  But does anybody else wonder why Leticia Van de Putte isn't running for something in 2016?

  -- The two "third" parties in Texas are officially in trouble.

Greens, Libertarians at risk of losing automatic access to '18 general election ballot with Rs and Ds in all seven statewide races #txlege

— TX Election Source (@TXElects) December 14, 2015

Gadfly has the gameplan.  There's every opportunity for Texas Greens to take a big step forward: the choices will come down to Hillary and some godawful Republican, be it Trump, Cruz, or Rubio; the GPUS presidential nominating convention is in Houston this summer, and Bernie Sanders supporters have no logical place to go.  Texas Democratic votes in the November presidential faceoff  -- hell's bells, the same goes for any statewide race -- simply won't matter in the end game.  There's no better chance to send the Dems a message they need to hear.

But it's on the GP to make that case.

-- I mentioned D-to-R judicial hopeful Nile Copeland at the end of this post and how it made me feel worse than Chris Bell endorsing King in the mayoral.  Copeland, a bit of a gun nut, was disillusioned by the fact that Amber and Steve Mostyn, Dave Mattheisen, and Gerry Birnberg pick the Democrats who will be judges in this county.  But his defection is part and parcel of a longstanding dysfunction within the Harris County Democratic Party; with the red unincorporated parts of the county balancing out the blue city, white establishment conservaDems like Copeland and Bell are bailing out as the two main D constituencies, blacks and gays, square off for full control.  You'll see that dynamic again in the spring primary for District Attorney (Kim Ogg versus Morris Overstreet) and County Tax Assessor/Collector (Brandon Dudley versus Ann Harris Bennett).  County chair Lane Lewis, having done a superlative job keeping the factions united in the runoff just concluded, now has to fend off a primary challenge from neophyte city council also-ran Philippe Nassif.  There's a caucus of millennial, neoliberal trust fund babies behind this effort.  I don't see a constituency that diverse winning much more than a precinct chairmanship, but stranger things have happened.

-- The best liberal Democrat likely to be on the November ballot, Lon Burnham, might have a shot at defeating Wayne Christian for the RRC if Clinton/Castro's coattails are long enough.  The sad part is that he's going to have to stick to them like glue, especially in the RGV.  That would be a sellout of progressive principles to electoral expediency for him.

-- Exhaustively more, but only about the duopoly candidates, at the TexTrib.