Joan Huffman personifies the lack of ethics in the Texas Lege

She never deserved this job in the first place, but that's a long story from the 2008 archives I don't want to dig into.  Suffice it to say that she's who replaced Kyle Janek in SD-17, and we're stuck with her now.  Maybe Greg Abbott will back up his tough talk with some action against one of his own.  Then again, probably not.

How much should state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican, be required to disclose about her husband's 34 businesses, which include an array of local bars that are regulated by the state?

It's a question currently before the Texas Legislature that surfaced last session and helped derail Gov. Greg Abbott's reform agenda on ethics, which he called "the most important commodity we have as elected officials."

When Abbott made ethics reform a top priority a year ago, spousal disclosure wasn't front and center in a package of provisions that he designated as "emergency" items.

But it is on his radar screen now after an eleventh-hour maneuver by Huffman in which she inserted a clause into an unrelated ethics measure that answered the question about disclosure and her husband's businesses in a word: Nothing.

How the matter plays out could be a harbinger of progress in Texas, which is not known for the strength of its ethics laws -- hence Abbott's focus.

Huffman used to be my state senator before they redistricted me back into SD-13, where Rodney Ellis is rumored to be one of the guys who wants El Franco Lee's seat on Commissioners Court.  She's just as lousy as the article suggests, perhaps more so.

Abbott was forced to veto part of his own ethics agenda after Huffman's ploy would have enabled lawmakers to forgo disclosure of spousal holdings as long as they had no "actual control" over them. The governor said he wanted no part of "weakening our ethics laws," which now require lawmakers and officials to disclose property and financial interests that are considered "community property" in Texas, meaning they were acquired after two people are married.

Abbott said shortly after the session ended that he would ask the Legislature in 2017 to revisit his proposed reforms. But some watchdog groups questioned whether he was truly committed to the cause or merely interested in following through with an issue he used during his 2014 campaign.

Craig McDonald, director of the liberal-leaning nonprofit group Texans for Public Justice, credited Abbott for declaring ethics reform an "emergency" item so the Legislature could take quick action. But McDonald said Abbott failed to speak out during the session when lawmakers dragged their feet.

Abbott is loyal to a fault and expects the same in return, but it's hard to see (without looking at his campaign finance reports, that is) why he's letting Huffman and her spouse walk around exposed as shills like this.  Abbott is also well-attuned to any political threat; maybe this isn't one that's big enough to him yet.

You can sure smell Huffman's BS, though.

Huffman, in a recent interview, said that despite the governor's vetoes, she believes the issue related to spousal disclosure remains unresolved and promised a thorough review this year of that topic and other state ethics laws in her role as chairwoman of the State Affairs Committee.

The businesses owned by her husband, Keith Lawyer, may be "community property" in their marriage, but she said she believes the law requires disclosure of only those that she has "actual control" over.

"I could not go up to his office and say, 'I want to sell Luke's Ice House,' " she said, referring to a popular bar her husband owns and operates. "I couldn't even walk in the door and say, 'I want y'all to mop the floor.' This should not be about me. It's really about making the law clearer for the many people in the state who have to file these statements."

But her critics said the governor's vetoes ended the debate. Huffman, they maintain, should be held accountable for the failure of ethics reform last year. They said it is, in fact, all about her misinterpreting state law so she didn't have to disclose her husband's vast business holdings.

One of those critics, Carol Wheeler, a state Democratic Party official from Katy, filed a complaint against Huffman before the state Ethics Commission, asserting that she appeared to violate state law for several years by failing to disclose "significant business interests of herself and her husband, Keith Lawyer."

Disclosure of my own: I worked with Carol Wheeler in SD-17 intra-party politics for a few years in 2009, '10, and '11.  She has no agenda other than good government.

If you want a refresher on state legislators' ethical dilemmas and the Sharpstown scandal of the '70's, which brought down dozens of politicos, including a governor and a lieutenant governor, then click over and pick up where I left off above.

Huffman and Lawyer were married in 1997. Of the dozens of businesses that Lawyer has financial interests in, according to state business records, only five were created before their marriage, Wheeler's ethics complaint states. Huffman, a former state district court judge in Harris County, was first elected to the Senate in 2008.

Lawyer owns several companies that operate 17 bars in Texas, including Luke's Ice House, with locations in Houston, Beaumont and Nederland, regulated by the state Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

In her annual ethics statement required by state law, Huffman listed seven items involving her husband's finances in 2008. After Abbott's veto and Wheeler's ethics complaint, her 2014 statement has ballooned, listing her husband's extensive business holdings for the first time. She said recently that the filing had nothing to do with the governor's vetoes or the ethics complaint; she merely was complying with the Ethics Commission rule change.

 Here's where it takes a shady turn.

Huffman's maneuver on spousal ethics came prior to this filing. She made her move during the closing weeks of the 2015 legislative session, when an unrelated ethics bill sponsored by a fellow Houston Republican, state Rep. Sarah Davis, landed in her committee. Its purpose was simple and noncontroversial, making it easier for public officials to electronically file their personal financial statements.

Huffman, the Senate's ethics gatekeeper, added the provision that she described as clarifying what public officials must disclose on their ethics statements about the finances of their spouses. The 2014 rule by the Ethics Commission, she explained, was too broad and went beyond the "actual control" standard in the 1973 law, which she wanted to go back to.

This new version of Davis' bill then passed the Senate. The House agreed with the Senate's changes, and sent the bill to the governor.

A second ethics bill introduced by Davis ended up in Huffman's committee. She again attached her language on spousal disclosure just to make sure it was adopted, in case something happened to the first. Also attached was one of Abbott's ethics provisions, requiring legislators, statewide elected officials and gubernatorial appointees to disclose contracts or any other arrangement in which they were paid by a public agency. This bill, too, passed both chambers and was sent to Abbott's desk.

The Ethics Commission wasn't pleased. The 2014 rule was not a change in law, but a clarification that was consistent with the 1973 state law and how the agency had enforced that statute, said Ian Steusloff, general counsel of the Ethics Commission.

Abbott wasted little time and vetoed both of Davis' bills, citing the provisions inserted by Huffman.

"At the beginning of this legislative session, I called for meaningful ethics reform," Abbott said in a statement. "This legislation does not accomplish that goal. Provisions in this bill would reduce Texans' trust in their elected officials, and I will not be a part of weakening our ethics laws."

Davis, in an interview, said she accepted Huffman's amendments to her two ethics bills because she was trying to get some of Abbott's reform agenda signed into law. But after the outcry, she asked Abbott to veto her own bills.

If Huffman gets appointed to work on ethics again by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in the coming session, then we'll know Abbott didn't really mean what he said about cleaning up Rick Perry's messes.

We'll also know that nothing really ever changes with Republicans in Austin.  I thought we knew these things before, but then again, these are Texas conservatives we're talking about.  None so stupid and mean as them anywhere, not even in Oregon at the moment.

Fixing open carry for your family

Leave without paying.  Jameson Parker of Addicting Info, crediting Wonkette.

If you’re enjoying a nice meal at a restaurant with your family and you see a man carrying an assault rifle walk in, it could be one of two things: either he’s a crazy person intent on killing someone, or he’s a crazy person intent on showing his gun off in public and daring someone to ask him to leave it at home. While the NRA would say just give him the benefit of the doubt, the possibility that you could be the victim of a shooting might make you lose your appetite.

You would think that businesses wouldn’t want that kind of scenario being played out in their establishments -- people afraid of dying don’t usually stay for dessert-- but instead they are more concerned with upsetting the guys with guns. And for good reason. The NRA* and other pro-gun groups have demonstrated again and again they are willing to bring down a world of pain on any business that they perceive as going soft on supporting people’s God-given right to carry machine guns wherever they go.

*The NRA initially criticized open-carry advocates for bringing guns into restaurants, saying they were being “weird.” However, I decided to include the organization because they later caved to pressure and retracted that condemnation.

This still does not solve my dilemma of being forced to pick another local grocery store, but it certainly resolves my quandary about restaurants and other establishments who are catering to the 3% and not the 97%, and the best way to send a message that capitalists can hear is an economic boycott.

On the website Philosophy Questions Every Day, University of North Dakota professor Jack Russell Weinstein tackles the question of “how people should respond to open-carry gun-rights activists?”

Again, complaints haven’t worked. Gun nuts insist they are the “good guys” and liberals are just being weak-kneed. Businesses are afraid to get too much attention from gun groups. It seems like an intractable problem. Here’s how Weinstein says we should respond.

My proposal is as follows: we should all leave. Immediately. Leave the food on the table in the restaurant. Leave the groceries in the cart, in the aisle. Stop talking or engaging in the exchange. Just leave, unceremoniously, and fast.

But here is the key part: don’t pay. Stopping to pay in the presence of a person with a gun means risking your and your loved ones’ lives; money shouldn’t trump this. It doesn’t matter if you ate the meal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just received food from the deli counter that can’t be resold. It doesn’t matter if you just got a haircut. Leave. If the business loses money, so be it. They can make the activists pay.

Before you start to go soft for the poor small business owners, keep in mind that this is an active decision on their part now to allow or not.

It may seem rude or embarrassing to simply walk out, but is the alternative any better? In a very real sense, lives could be on the line and putting yourself at risk in order to not offend is not a smart move. It also hurts businesses where it matters most: their profits. If you leave without paying, you just cost the business a sale. If they want you to pay, they should do a better job of making you feel positive that you aren’t about to get shot. If businesses don’t like that then they have to go through the awkward motions of explaining why they are more concerned about a (tab) then they are about their customers’ safety.

This is precisely what I will do going forward.

Weinstein concludes:

The gun-rights activists think that their intent is obvious and that everyone knows what they hope to do. They believe their minds are transparent. But this is because they are all extreme narcissists. It baffles them that we don’t all know exactly what they are thinking. It shocks them that we don’t know that Jim is a good guy, and that Sally would never murder anyone. But they are wrong. We don’t know them and we don’t know how they think. The only thing that makes us notice them at all is that they have guns and truthfully, that’s why they carry them in the first place. They want to be celebrities, heroes, and the centers of attention.

So give them what they want, Weinstein argues. Let them eat in the restaurant alone while the owners struggle to justify protecting them. It’s not up to the rest of us to play by their rules.

Weinstein elaborates in this YouTube:



If you want to leave a card explaining your actions, or return and pay later, that's your business. But Weinstein's rationale is to make the business pay for the assault on civil sensibility.

Recently I was in Kroger, in line for the service desk, when a person wearing a rifle across his back broke the line and went to the front, bypassing those of us waiting.  Who's going to confront that guy unless you've got your hand on your own pistol?  And do you want to be caught in the crossfire when that escalates beyond harsh language?

One legal type likened it to leaving if the establishment suddenly caught fire, as happened recently here locally.  If you believe your in danger, you have a right to escape with stopping to pay your tab.

The abundance of guns and anger, particularly in Texas, is dangerous and unhealthy.  I'm taking precautions that do not include arming myself, and that push back against a sick gun culture that needs healing.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance understands the difference between thugs and patriots -- and protesters and terrorists -- in bringing you this week's blog post roundup.

Off the Kuff published an exit interview with outgoing Houston Mayor Annise Parker.

Socratic Gadfly says he sees pandering and triangulation behind Hillary Clinton's splitting with President Obama over details of a possible finding of genocide against ISIS.

Libby Shaw, contributing to Daily Kos, believes the time is long overdue to hold our elected officials accountable for their abject failure to address climate change in the state. The Texas Blues: Living in a state run by Republican climate denying ghouls.

Texas Republicans continue their war on women and girls. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme has had enough of their misogyny.

PDiddie at Brains and Eggs did the picking for the Texans of the Year, and the come-from-behind winners were the Couches, Ethan and Tonya.

TXsharon at BlueDaze reveals the Denton power plant shell game.

McBlogger has a macro-view on the price of oil for 2016.

Dos Centavos listed his top ten posts of 2015, and the Lewisville Texan Journal had the top three stories they reported on last year.

Neil at All People Have Value suggested that we should engage in open carry of our best impulses in the new year ahead.  APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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More great blog posts from around Texas!

Grits for Breakfast sees a divided Court of Criminal Appeals in flux.

Andrea Grimes finds Donald Trump's fascism refreshing.

Prairie Weather shows us where to look for conservatism in America.

Juanita Jean wants to see the little creamery from Brenham in prison.

Isiah Carey talks about the future of two old golf courses in Houston, one of which will become a botanic garden.

Ashton Woods at Strength in Numbers had guest poster Tonya Pinkins ask the question: who wins and who loses when white creatives tell black stories?

jobsanger advances President Obama's forthcoming executive action on gun safety.

Trail Blazers recounted Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's interview on 'Meet the Press' last Sunday morning, where he indicated that concerns over Texas' new open carry law was "propaganda".

Moni at Transgriot instruct Houston black trans men to step up and lead in 2016.

Somervell County Salon sees a few things in 2016 that have not changed since 2015.

Only Democrat on Harris Co. Commissioners Court passes away

RIP El Franco Lee.  He was on the ballot for re-election this year, without a primary challenger.

Harris County Precinct One Commissioner El Franco Lee has died. The family confirmed that Commissioner Lee suffered a heart attack and died at 10:01am Sunday.

Lee (was) a native Houstonian, where he began his political career in 1979 when he was elected Texas State Representative for District 142. In 1985, he was elected and sworn in as the first African-American Harris Co. Commissioner, where he has been serving his seventh term.

Not sure about the process, but the law may allow the Democratic precinct chairs to vote a replacement candidate to their primary ballot to replace him.  Updates here as warranted.

"El Franco was a beloved public servant who never sought the limelight, preferring a low key approach that put the needs of his constituents above self-promotion," Houston mayor Sylvester Turner said, noting that Lee beat him in the 1984 race for county commissioner. "His passion was helping seniors and improving quality of life for underserved youth and young adults in the inner city. His unmatched programs for thousands of seniors include everything from health and fitness initiatives to arts and crafts and music tutorials to holiday celebrations and other special events."

Update II: Lee's name will remain on the ballot through the March primary and the general election in November.  While County Judge Ed Emmett, a Republican, will appoint a placeholder at some point (probably a Republican to avoid the screeching) to serve the remainder of Lee's term, the Democratic precinct chairs in Lee's Precinct One will elect his replacement later this year, and that person will take office no later than next January (because Lee had no Republican challenger in the general, either).  Among the rumored names for the post today are state Senator Rodney Ellis -- which would open a coveted legislative seat and initiate another scrum -- and former councilman CO Bradford, with a few others, such as Houston city councilman Jerry Davis, also mentioned.

State representative Borris Miles is also in the mix; he allegedly wants the Texas Senate seat Ellis may be vacating.

New Year's Funnies

Jim Hightower: The Corporate Media is Basically Pretending Bernie Sanders Doesn't Exist

Happy 2016 Toons

The Brainy Texans of the Year

I chose to carry on the tradition this year due to declining interest from the TPA.  Before I bestow the inglorious award, however, let's run up a few of the 'honorable mentions'.

-- Progress Texas released their Worst list earlier in the week, and Ted Cruz won the gold medal.  The Cuban Canuck Schmuck certainly made my top five, but really, how do you miss with any of Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton, and Sid Miller?  And that's just the statewide electeds.

-- The Texas House could have been its own list, with state Rep. Cecil Bell atop Texas Monthly's Worst from the last Lege, followed closely by Sen. Donna Campbell, Rep. Harold Dutton, Sen. Joan Huffman, and Sen. Jane Nelson.  Former fetus Jonathan Stickland has surged in the standings like the price of an Uber ride home on New Year's Eve, and not just because he wears an AR-15 as a lapel pin, but that he's been recently exposed as a stoner and an advocate for marital rape.

-- The Texas Congressional delegation and its chief idiot Louie Gohmert could have won this award based on lifetime achievement, but Lamar Smith, the House's leading climate denier, wouldn't be far behind, and those two made former All Star Assholes like Joe Barton, Blake Farenthold, and Pete Sessions, along with retiring Randy NoogieBoogie and Rookie of the Year Brian Babin look like amateurs.

-- Then there are the Texas Democrats, and they're no slouches when it comes to competition for the worst.  Just look again at the state House of Representatives, and the Dirty Thirty Democrats who voted to let Denton's fracking ban be overturned.  Or Senfronia Thompson, who was miffed that the Texas Automobile Dealers Association didn't get a meeting with Mr. Tesla, or my own state rep, Borris Miles, who earned a dishonorable mention from TM for drunk and disorderly conduct.

-- Or look back at Congress, with Blue Dogshits Henry Cuellar, Marc Veazey, up-and-comer Filemon Vela, and the petro-whore Gene Green, being challenged by Adrian Garcia, whose inability to clean up the Harris County jail during his time as sheriff is now a national disgrace and not just a local one.  Even Sheila Jackson-Lee kept doing what she does.  From TM's Bum Steers ...

(SJL) called Republican threats to sue the president over Obamacare a “veiled attempt at impeachment,” moralizing that the Democrats who controlled the House of Representatives during George W. Bush’s presidency had never stooped so low. Soon after, an online news source cited a 2008 resolution that Jackson had co-sponsored calling for Bush’s impeachment.

-- There was Chris Bell going rogue, lining up behind Bill King for H-Town mayor, and there was Nile Copeland turning red in hopes for a state district judgeship after running for the Court of Appeals as a Democrat four years ago and getting 46%.  This was the wrong year to change parties, fellows.

-- I could have easily selected Waller County Sheriff Glenn Smith, whose defiant attitude in the wake of the death of Sandra Bland in his jail has added to the many fatal failures of law enforcement and criminal justice in 2015.  Smith also sat in a restaurant having lunch for two hours, oblivious to the stealing of an arsenal of weapons in broad daylight from his county vehicle.  That puts him easily in the top three for Texan of the Year.

-- Abel Reyna, the McLennan County district attorney overseeing the prosecutions of whatever crimes the various biker club members who assembled in Waco may have committed that resulted in their summary execution by law enforcement, may win next year's TOY.

-- But there were also a few bright lights that I shouldn't overlook: Sylvester Turner holding on to the mayor's office for Team Blue, Cecile Richards keeping up the fight against the hordes of anti-choice extremists in Texas.  Texan of the Year in years past hasn't been about who was the biggest jerk, after all.

-- And the winner has not always been relegated to an elected official: Wallace Hall, the odious UT regent who is still dug in like an Alabama tick (thanks for that, Jesse) and who was immortalized in cartoons by the Chron's Nick Anderson two years ago, gets points for longevity.  The loons who made sure the Operation Jade Helm 15 conspiracy made a laughing stock of the state have to be in my top five.  Kory Watkins of Open Carry Tarrant County, an even more radical offshoot of Open Carry Texas, issued death threats to legislators if the law allowing Texans to pretend it is 1885 all over again did not pass.  (It did, unsurprisingly.)

-- The ongoing saga of Rick Perry's felony indictments -- which now include the judge in the case's assassination attempt -- are worthy of some special recognition.

-- In the category of Extreme Irony, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson joined a NIMBY lawsuit to stop the construction of a water tower meant to fill trucks for fracking well sites.  His company was also found to have hidden the truth they knew about the dangers of climate change for almost forty years.

-- But I've buried the lede deep enough.  The come-from-behind winner of this year's Texan(s) of the Year are Ethan Couch and his mother Tonya, who made the holidays merry and bright for the victims of his affluenza.

Just imagine how privileged you have to feel to think that disguising yourself as Mexican in order to avoid arrest is a good idea.

Carrot Top Mom's going to jail, Sonny Boy is going to avoid it for some while longer.

Authorities in Texas said an arrest warrant was being issued for Tonya Couch on charges of hindering an apprehension, a third-degree felony that carries a sentence of two to 10 years in prison.

[...]

The ruling (to delay extradition) earlier Wednesday by the Mexican court gives a judge three days to decide whether the younger Couch has grounds to challenge his deportation based on arguments that kicking him out of the country would violate his rights.

Hunter said the legal maneuver basically takes the decision out of an immigration agent's hands and asks a higher authority to make the deportation decision. He said such cases can often take anywhere from two weeks to several months, depending on the priorities of the local courts.

"It also depends on the fact the Couches have legal counsel. And it seems to me, if they wanted to, they could pay them as much money as they want to drag this thing out," Hunter said. "We're hopeful that's not the case."

Couch and his attorneys apparently believe he's better off in a Mexican jail than an American one.  I sure hope they're wrong about that, too.

"Couch continues to make a mockery of the system," said Fort Worth attorney Bill Berenson, who represented Sergio Molina, who was paralyzed and suffered severe brain damage in the crash.

A very Unhappy New Year to Ethan and Tonya Couch.

The Perils of Plutocracy

Appropriating part of Mark Kleiman's title (and fixing his many typos):

1. Billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson is involved in a lawsuit in Nevada about the corrupt practices of his casino in Macao. (Technically, it’s a wrongful-termination case brought by someone who claims to have been fired for blowing the whistle.)

2. Adelson has been fighting with the judge, Elizabeth Gonzalez.

3. Through a cut-out, Adelson bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the dominant newspaper in the state, keeping his ownership a secret until others broke the story.

4. Three staffers at the paper were then ordered to do a hit piece on the judge. No story resulted.

5. The editor of the Review-Journal then learned, by reading the front page of his own newspaper, that he had “accepted a buy-out.”

6. Michael Schroeder, who runs Adelson’s media empire and who also publishes a small paper in Connecticut, went straight to the printer of that paper, over the head of the editorial staff, to order a 2000-word piece critical of Judge Gonzalez to run there.

7. People quoted in the story say they were never contacted by the reporter whose by-line appears on the story, Edward Clarkin.

8. In fact, no one seems to have ever met Edward Clarkin in person. However, Schroeder’s middle name is “Edward,” and his mother’s maiden name was “Clarkin.” (No, seriously.)

9. A reporter for Schroeder’s paper quit in disgust.

Despite its comic-opera aspects, this story is truly scary. If plutocrats can buy newspapers to intimidate judges, what happens to the rule of law? And how much of Adelson’s media power will be exercised on behalf of his business partners in the Chinese Politburo? They made him a billionaire by giving him the casino concession in Macau, and they can take it away at a moment’s notice.

Here’s hoping this gets to be an issue in the campaign. I’d love to the Republican presidential candidates say what they think of Adelson’s behavior. Come to think of it, I’d love to hear Hillary Clinton do so.

Update: A timeline of the events from Jay Rosen's Pressthink.

Seen The Big Short yet?  Read the book if you want to know the names of the actual players.  In short (no pun), a few very prescient broker/banker/hedge fund types saw the mortgage meltdown coming a couple of years in advance, and then ran out and "shorted" -- bet it would drop -- the mortgage industry's secondary loan market, even as the Goldmans and Lehmans of the world laughed at them and gleefully took their money for those bets.  Those two or three guys also understood that the global economy would collapse as a result, ruining millions of common people's lives, and some of them felt a little nauseous about that, but still went on and made hundreds of millions of dollars on the collapse anyway.

And now the dude who first saw it coming sees it coming down the pike again, the big banks are bigger today than they were when they were Too Big To Fail almost ten years ago, and Hillary Clinton's response has been "9/11" -- just like Rudy Giuliani -- and ""I told them to cut it out".  Except she didn't.  Not really.

Maybe this will help people understand why so many people say they won't vote for her.  It's not just Shelley Adelson or the media or the GOP presidentials drooling on Adelson's shoes that's the only problem here.

The top fundraisers for Clinton include lobbyists who serve the parent companies of CNN and MSNBC.

The National Association of Broadcasters, a trade group that represents the television station industry, has lobbyists who are fundraising for both Clinton and Republican candidate Marco Rubio.

Presidential campaigns are obligated by law to send the Federal Election Commission a list of lobbyists who serve as “bundlers,” collecting hundreds of individual checks on behalf of a candidate’s campaign.

CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, is represented on Capitol Hill by Steve Elmendorf, an adviser to Clinton during her 2008 campaign, who is also known as “one of Washington’s top lobbyists.” He’s lobbied on a number of issues important for media companies like CNN, including direct-to-consumer advertising policy.

Elmendorf, according to disclosures, has raised at least $141,815 for Clinton’s 2016 bid for the presidency.

Comcast, the parent company of NBC Universal, which includes cable networks NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC, has a number of lobbyists on retainer who are working to raise cash for the Clinton campaign, including Justin Gray, Alfred Mottur, Ingrid Duran and Catherine Pino.

Much of the $5 billion expected to be spent over the course of the 2016 presidential election cycle will be on cable and network news advertisements. The election-related spending bonanza is singularly boosting the profit margins of many media companies, as we’ve reported.

“Super PACs may be bad for America, but they’re very good for CBS,” Les Moonves, president and chief executive of CBS, memorably said.

Money isn't fixing any of the problems with our politics, our political parties, or our politicians.  More money is only making things worse.

Year-End Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance gets ready to flush the bowl on 2015 take a cup of kindness in celebration of 2016, as it brings you the last blog post roundup of the year.

Off the Kuff had some thoughts on the primary in CD29 between Rep. Gene Green and Adrian Garcia.

Libby Shaw, contributing to Daily Kos, insists that Texas lawmakers must be held accountable for their bad decisions and blatant bigotry with regard to health care in the state. The Texas Blues: Living in a place run by GOP jerks, saboteurs and spiteful bigots.

People are starting to get the fact that the only practical alternative for progressives -- once Bernie Sanders is eliminated from contention for the Democratic nomination -- is a vote for the Green Party's Jill Stein, writes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

SocraticGadfly notes that if the Paris climate change deal has any hope of being real, and not just warm-fuzzies aspirational, we need negative carbon emissions — and now.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes Greg Abbott goes for a two-fer in hate. No health care for you. What a guy.

Neil at All People Have Value took a nice picture in Galveston. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

Egberto Willies says it's time to call out the pro-life faction on their opposition to Medicaid expansion.

TXsharon at Bluedaze wants the Big Gas Mafia and all of their shills to know that fracking other people's children isn't going to make their own children proud of what they do for a living.

The Lewisville Texan Journal reports on the citizen referendum that would institute a cite-and-release policy for possession of small quantities of marijuana.

Dos Centavos recounts a time in the recent past when the phrase "Happy Holidays" didn't evince so much hate from arch-conservatives.

nonsequiteuse, writing at BOR, calls for the Houston Chronicle to apologize to Mayor Annise Parker.

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More great Texas blog posts here!

Progress Texas names their Top Ten Worst Texans of 2015, though how they stopped at only ten remains a mystery.

Lone Star Ma focuses on the fourth of the United Nations' new Sustainable Development Goals, an inclusive and quality education for all.

Rick Campbell tells the story of Texas City blues singer Charles Brown, and his original recording of "Please Come Home For Christmas", later made famous by The Eagles and Don Henley.

BOR points to the real culprits in the case of cancer patients losing insurance.

John Jacob and Jen Powis advocate for Texas's endangered wetlands.

Prairie Weather believes Trump has a fatal electoral flaw: his supporters love the demagoguery and the spectacle, but do not exhibit the capacity to caucus for for him in Iowa.

Somervell County Salon thanks HEB for prohibiting open carry in its Texas grocery stores.

When a cartoonist exploits Ted Cruz's children, it's shameless and inappropriate... but when Cruz does it, it's just fundraising, explains What Would Jack Do?

Grits for Breakfast names his top Texas criminal justices stories for 2015.

Rocket Kirchner at Dandelion Salad has the exclusive Socrates interview with Hillary Clinton.

And Fascist Dyke Motors culls out her sock drawer.

I was wrong about Trump.

So admits Matt Bai of Yahoo as well, but we'll get to his take in a moment.  Here's what I wrote way back on November 13, six weeks ago.

Despite what I have said repeatedly about polls, I'm anxious to see what they reveal about a week or two from (the time Trump asked 'how stupid were the people of Iowa').  This feels like a turning point for a couple of candidates.   The conservative Borg has been completely unpredictable to this point, but a settling-out of the real lunacy of Trump and Carson to the regular loons of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio is somewhat overdue.

Ben Carson has indeed faded, but Trump's position in the polling has strengthened in the days since.  Over the Thanksgiving holiday, in time spent with family and friends, I asked the considerable number of conservatives and Republicans among our brood what they thought about the Donald.  All but one cringed and shook their head.  The one supporter -- who received his most recent book as a Christmas present and was delighted -- posed for a photograph at our Turkey Day meal at a Beaumont hotel ballroom, and just before the snapshot, I yelled, "Smile and say BERNIE SANDERS!"  A few minutes later she leaned over and told me quietly, "I get his e-mail; I like him".  I replied, "there's hope for you yet!"

So from an anecdotal perspective, I truly don't know what to make of the Trump phenomenon.  Matt Bai agrees with my status today, however ...

For many months now, like the anxious producers of some hot reality show, the American media has been waiting for Donald Trump to get up onstage and say the one thing that will lead to his swift and inevitable unraveling. (Waiting is not quite the same as hoping, but I’ll get to that in a minute.)

Sometimes it seems that Trump himself is trying frantically to find that edge of acceptable rhetoric and hurl himself over it, maybe because this business of running for president is a lot more tedious and exhausting than, say, crowning Miss Universe.

This week, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Trump told an audience in Michigan that Hillary Clinton had been “schlonged” in 2008 (a variation on the Yiddish word for penis that he seems to have invented on the spot, but that is now assured to outlive the Yiddish language itself), and he made fun of Clinton’s bizarre habit — “too disgusting to talk about” — of having to occasionally relieve herself in a bathroom.

He also clarified his difference with Vladimir Putin when it comes to these “lying, disgusting” reporters who cover him. “I hate some of these people, but I would never kill them,” Trump volunteered. “I would never kill them. But I do hate them.”

Well, that does it. If granting journalists a right to live doesn’t puncture Trump’s standing among conservative voters these days, then trust me, pretty much nothing will.

(By the way, note that Trump didn’t actually go so far as to condemn such violence, or even discourage it. He just declined to kill anyone himself. The man is busy.)

It’s time for me to admit I was wrong about Trump’s staying power. And it’s time for the rest of my industry to take a long look in the mirror and consider what we’ve wrought.

And so goes a fairly lengthy condemnation of the media coverage of Trump, which a week ago stood at approximately a 23-1 ratio to its coverage of Bernie Sanders.  I don't wish to enumerate once more all of the faults with corporate media news and politics coverage, especially since Bai does such a good job of it himself in the next excerpts.  He is most assuredly on point with the self-examination.

Because it’s clear now that Trump’s enduring popularity — his relentless assault on the weathered pillars of our public civility — is in no small part a reflection of an acid disdain for us.

Trump has always understood this. Look at the graphic terms in which he once attacked Fox’s Megyn Kelly. Or the way he viciously mocked Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who excels despite a physical disability. Or how he publicly berated Katy Tur, an NBC reporter, for sport.

Playing off the media isn’t novel, of course. When George H.W. Bush ran for reelection back in 1992, somebody — maybe it was his campaign, since in those days there weren’t any super-PACS — made a bumper sticker that read “Annoy the media. Re-elect Bush.”

For many years after Bush lost, you could still see those bumper stickers on any highway in America. It had little to do with the candidate.

They lasted on bumpers of pickup trucks in Midland, Texas (where I was) well into the mid-90's, as Bill Clinton's election began the Republican descent into fury and rage.  Nineteen-ninety four also marked the last year a Democrat was elected to a statewide office in Texas.

But that was a statement on liberalism and elitism, a kind of cultural homogeneity inside the nation’s largest media institutions. It was almost respectful. Bush would never have used the word “hate,” and neither would the people with the bumper stickers.

This is something more visceral, an emotion that’s been building in all segments of the electorate, to some extent, for decades.

This is a simmering reaction to smugness and shallowness in the media, a parade of glib punditry unmoored to any sense of history or personal experience. It’s about our love of gaffes and scandals, real or imagined, and our rigid enforcement of the politically correct.

It’s about the reflexive partisan fury we’ve been inciting in this country ever since the earliest days of cable TV, and more recently on the blogs and op-ed pages of newspapers that once set the standard for thoughtful deliberation but now need the clicks to survive.

This is dead on, and a little nauseating personally. 

And yet somehow, when the perfect and professional reality-show star comes along, utterly lost on policy but brilliant at harnessing resentment in long, incredibly watchable tirades, observers like me think his success must be short-lived. Why?

(And before you tell me Trump is more qualified to be president than a first-term senator from Illinois was, consider his final answer, after much evasion, when asked about the country’s “nuclear triad” in the last debate: “I just think nuclear — the power and the devastation are very important to me.”)

Trump is entirely different from a Barry Goldwater or a Pat Buchanan. He isn’t a conservative populist penned in by the outer boundaries of what’s politically constructive, bred ultimately to admire the same institutions he assails. I don’t think Trump has any fierce political conviction that couldn’t be abandoned overnight, just as fiercely.

Trump is an emotional extremist. He’s a pure performer, trained to manipulate the audience and mindful of no consequence beyond the ratings it produces.

Just don't believe the Facebook meme.

(I)t’s clear there’s a powerful symbiosis between Trump and the media. We need him for the narrative power, for the clicks and debate ratings and sheer fascination factor. He needs us for the free publicity and the easy, evocative foil.

Trump’s most useful opponent, the one who causes his most fervent following to stick, isn’t Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or even Hillary Clinton. It’s us.

So when I say there’s a difference between waiting and hoping, this is what I mean. This is the essential paradox that the American media has created for itself, and you can feel it becoming less and less tenable right now.

On one hand, we’re bewildered by the reality that a man can so debase our politics and continue to rise in polls, as if all the rules we’ve inherited and enforced are no longer remotely relevant. But at the same time, we need our standout contestant to hang around for sweeps week. He’s the star of the show.

We want to see Trump get “schlonged” for the same reasons we can’t bear to lose him, and he understands that dynamic better than anyone alive.

Do I think Trump is going to be the Republican nominee? No, I don’t. At the end of the day, I still tend to think he won’t win a single state. But I’ve been wrong about him so far, and I’ve very little confidence that I won’t keep being wrong for a while.

I think Bai is wrong: Trump shows no sign of losing momentum that I can discern.  The Washington Post's Jenna Johnson, via Prairie Weather, thinks the same as Bai, mostly because Trump's support includes a number of people without a clue as to how retail politics actually works.  If those two get it right, I'll refer back to this post in some future one with a plate of crow in front of me.

What I get from the WaPo article is that they're mad, but they're still not mad enough to get even.

(Randy and Bonnie Reynolds,) the West Des Moines couple who have two grown children, had never been to a political event before. Bonnie works in a mailroom; Randy is a press operator. They don’t live paycheck to paycheck, but it would take just one small catastrophe to push them there.

“In the end, everything that he’s saying might not happen if he is elected — but I’m willing to give it a shot,” said Randy Reynolds, 49, who used to vote for Democrats but switched to Republicans a decade ago. “I will give him 100 percent. . . . It would be amazing if the majority of things that he said would actually happen. That would be amazing.”

So, obviously, the couple plan to caucus for Trump on Feb. 1?

“We’re going to see,” Reynolds said. “With kids and grandkids and all this, it’s kind of hectic. . . . We’ll look into it. If our time is available, then yeah, maybe we’ll do it. Maybe. We’ll have to see.”

And ...

Linda Stuver, 61, said Trump is her top pick, although she also likes Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. During the last election cycle, she went to a rally for Mitt Romney, her first political event. The Trump rally was her second.

“This is only my second time I’ve ever been to one of these — that’s how annoyed I am with what’s happening to our country,” said Stuver, who lives in Des Moines and says she raised four children by cleaning houses and working other low-level jobs. “I can’t even have Obama be on TV anymore — I have to shut it off, that’s how irritated I am. Us old folks have seen a lot, and what’s happening in our country is not right.”

Is she annoyed and irritated enough to caucus?

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I never have.”

Caucuses have always rewarded the most committed activists, which is why Hillary Clinton and the Texas Democratic Party lackeys minimized the influence of precinct conventions in the Lone Star State after Obama won them, and a very slim majority of Texas delegates, in 2008.  Can't blame that one on Debbie Wasserman Schultz (her fingerprints aren't all over it, that is).

It could be that Trump's support is a mile wide and an inch deep, and if so, and Ted Cruz pulls the upset in Iowa because his crew outworked the Trumpers, then the establishment's last gasp might wind up being Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or even John Kasich in New Hampshire.

After that is South Carolina, and Cruz -- or Trump -- might be on too hard a roll to slow.

Refer back to here and consider how convoluted the circumstances might get if Trump or Cruz is the nominee, and the establishment withholds support and tries to broker a compromise candidate next summer.  And then Laugh Out Loud.

Update: Here's an interesting take from Eclectablog, who sees Cruz winning the nomination even as Trump maintains his lead in the polls.

Sunday Funnies

Scattershooting some after-Christmas sales

-- Why try to understand complicated things like demographics for the decline of your faith when you can blame gays and liberals for waging a “war on religion?”

Among the Christian Right, and most Republican presidential candidates, it’s now an article of faith that the United States is persecuting Christians and Christian-owned businesses—that religion itself is under attack.

“We have seen a war on faith,” Ted Cruz has said to pick one example. “His policies and this administration’s animosity to religious liberty and, in fact, antagonism to Christians, has been one of the most troubling aspects of the Obama administration,” he said.

Why has this bizarre myth that Christianity is under assault in the most religious developed country on Earth been so successful? Because, in a way, it’s true. American Christianity is in decline—not because of a “war on faith” but because of a host of demographic and social trends. The gays and liberals are just scapegoats.

-- "Things are going great, and they're only gettin' better.  We just haven't sold it like we should." -- paraphrasing Barack Obama:

“Now on our side, I think that there is a le­git­im­ate cri­ti­cism of what I’ve been do­ing and our ad­min­is­tra­tion has been do­ing in the sense that we haven’t, you know, on a reg­u­lar basis, I think, de­scribed all the work that we’ve been do­ing for more than a year now to de­feat ISIL,” Obama said. Mean­while, he blamed “the me­dia” for “pur­su­ing rat­ings.”

The pres­id­ent also said dur­ing an off-the-re­cord con­ver­sa­tion with colum­nists last week that his Oval Of­fice ad­dress hadn’t gone far enough, a short­com­ing he at­trib­uted to his own fail­ure to watch enough cable news to un­der­stand the depth of anxi­ety.

In oth­er words, the strategy is work­ing, and the White House just needs to com­mu­nic­ate that bet­ter. The fights against do­mest­ic ter­ror and IS­IS alike are go­ing great, if only people would un­der­stand it.

I can't decide whether this astounds me or is just more of the same BS coming out of the White House for the past seven years.  A fairly constant refrain from partisan Democrats produces the latter of those two feelings: the "Look at everything the president has accomplished, and imagine how MUCH MORE he could have done if it weren't for an obstructive Congress!" consistent Facebook meme-ology.  That ceased working for me in the fall of 2011.  You know, once Obama refused to spend any of his political capital influencing the recalcitrant conservative Democrats in swing districts to vote for the legislation that bears his name.  Not just in 2009, but as late as 2013, when one of the many repeal votes came up prior to an election year.

This is humbl­eb­rag polit­ics: I’m not great at ex­plain­ing it, but man, am I great at policy. But does it ac­cur­ately un­der­stand the prob­lems, or what mes­saging en­tails? Obama views bat­tle­field suc­cess against IS­IS as the goal, and mes­saging as a simple pro­cess of tele­graph­ing that. Mes­saging can be something great­er than just the wrap­ping pa­per on the policy solu­tion he has chosen. It’s about per­suad­ing people to come around to your side, not just telling them why your side is right.

This isn’t the first time Obama has in­sisted that everything’s go­ing great and it’s just the wrap­ping pa­per that needs spru­cing up. After the 2014 midterm elec­tions, which saw de­feats for Demo­crats on all fronts, Obama told Bob Schief­fer the prob­lem was that he hadn’t com­mu­nic­ated how well his ad­min­is­tra­tion was do­ing:

One thing that I do need to con­stantly re­mind my­self and my team is it’s not enough just to build the bet­ter mousetrap. People don’t auto­mat­ic­ally come beat­ing to your door. We’ve got to sell it, we’ve got to reach out to the oth­er side and where pos­sible per­suade. And I think there are times, there’s no doubt about it where, you know, I think we have not been suc­cess­ful in go­ing out there and let­ting people know what it is that we are try­ing to do and why this is the right dir­ec­tion. So there is a fail­ure of polit­ics there that we have got to im­prove on.

Policy as a product to be sold, via teevee advertising and brand research marketed by consultants (polling, etc.).   I'm so old I can remember people complaining when we sold the actual politicians like laundry detergent during a soap opera.

Nobody watches those any more -- if you're a monolingual English speaker, that is -- because the writers and actors cost too much to produce the shows.  Five hosts on a chat-and-chew, or just one, offering free media to the celebrity of the moment is a real budget-maker for those cost-cutting networks with falling ratings.

Thank goodness for SuperPACS and multiple presidential candidates coming to the mainstream media's financial rescue, amirite?  Back to Obama and messaging.

After the 2010 midterm “shel­lack­ing,” Obama had been some­what more con­cili­at­ory, say­ing, “I think that what is ab­so­lutely true is voters are not sat­is­fied with the out­comes.” But even then, he wasn’t say­ing Re­pub­lic­ans were right to op­pose his stim­u­lus; he was say­ing he hadn’t en­acted an ag­gress­ive enough ap­proach to cre­ate enough jobs. He wasn’t say­ing the price tags for the stim­u­lus were too large; he was say­ing they seemed too large to many people.

In fact, many eco­nom­ists agree that he should have pur­sued a lar­ger stim­u­lus. There is wide­spread sup­port for many com­pon­ents of the Af­ford­able Care Act taken singly, des­pite the many more people who op­pose the law in total. But it’s likely that many people would have op­posed these ef­forts any­way. Some would have done so out of par­tis­an, tri­bal loy­alty, which mo­tiv­ates many people’s polit­ic­al po­s­i­tions. Oth­ers would have done so out of es­sen­tial op­pos­i­tion to big-gov­ern­ment pro­grams. (Obama ac­tu­ally got at this, say­ing, “I think people star­ted look­ing at all this and it felt as if gov­ern­ment was get­ting much more in­trus­ive in­to people’s lives than they were ac­cus­tomed to”—though that “ac­cus­tomed to” seems to again pre­sume that with enough time and the right wrap­ping, they could be con­vinced.)

Many Demo­crats have long thought that white, blue-col­lar voters, who have gradu­ally deser­ted the party since Ron­ald Re­agan was run­ning for pres­id­ent, were just wait­ing for the right ap­proach to lure them back. Demo­crats look at them as clear al­lies who are vot­ing against their own in­terest, if only they could be made to see that. Obama touched on that idea in his In­s­keep in­ter­view, too:

But I do think that when you com­bine that demo­graph­ic change with all the eco­nom­ic stresses that people have been go­ing through be­cause of the fin­an­cial crisis, be­cause of tech­no­logy, be­cause of glob­al­iz­a­tion, the fact that wages and in­comes have been flat­lining for some time, and that par­tic­u­larly blue-col­lar men have had a lot of trouble in this new eco­nomy, where they are no longer get­ting the same bar­gain that they got when they were go­ing to a fact­ory and able to sup­port their fam­il­ies on a single paycheck, you com­bine those things and it means that there is go­ing to be po­ten­tial an­ger, frus­tra­tion, fear—some of it jus­ti­fied but just mis­dir­ec­ted. I think some­body like Mr. Trump is tak­ing ad­vant­age of that. That’s what he’s ex­ploit­ing dur­ing the course of his cam­paign.

This is really just a more del­ic­ate ar­tic­u­la­tion of Obama’s in­fam­ous com­ments in 2008 about voters who “get bit­ter, they cling to guns or re­li­gion or an­ti­pathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-im­mig­rant sen­ti­ment or anti-trade sen­ti­ment as a way to ex­plain their frus­tra­tions.” (In­s­keep, in fact, men­tioned those com­ments later in the in­ter­view.) And it’s not un­like Tom Frank’s What’s the Mat­ter With Kan­sas? thes­is, about cit­izens vot­ing against what lib­er­als see as their own self-in­terest.

Many of the dis­agree­ments here are about more than mes­saging. Per­haps those white, work­ing-class voters aren’t get­ting what they want out of the Demo­crat­ic Party. (Group iden­tity, rather than policy ig­nor­ance, prob­ably goes a long way to ex­plain­ing the dis­crep­ancy.) Maybe people wouldn’t be rad­ic­ally more sup­port­ive of Obama’s do­mest­ic-policy agenda if they just un­der­stood it bet­ter. The fact that no one else has a bet­ter idea for com­bat­ing IS­IS may in­dic­ate the mag­nitude of the chal­lenge, not vin­dic­a­tion for Obama. Ex­plain­ing to voters why you’re right of­ten re­quires first tak­ing ser­i­ously why they think you’re wrong, and ad­apt­ing un­der­ly­ing policies to ad­dress their con­cerns. Someone should fig­ure out how to mes­sage that to the pres­id­ent.

-- And that leads to this.

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries. 

You can't reason with the Idiocrats, so you might as well push their fear and greed buttons.  Seems to be working for the GOP pretty well, yes?  Happy New Year!

Happy Hanukwanzmas