Tonight's #DemDebate

Lot of chances to watch the fur fly.  Let's read Vox's executive advance summary:

The next Democratic debate is on Sunday, January 17, at (8 pm Central). The debate will take place in Charleston, South Carolina, and air on NBC. A free online live stream will be available to all on NBC's YouTube channel. 

Like the last debate, this one will feature all three of the remaining Democratic candidates: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O'Malley. It will be the fourth of just six debates that Democrats are planning. And, like the last two debates, it will take place on the weekend (a three-day weekend, in this case) — when fewer people are expected to watch.

No DWS response to her many critics about this, and it's too late for her to provide one that addresses it.  I have seen no defense of this ridiculous and somewhat dictatorial action by the DNC chair from Clinton supporters.  If someone else has, please point me to it.

For much of 2015, it appeared Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic nomination without too much trouble. 

Not any more: Bernie Sanders has been surging in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote. He's been leading in the Granite State for most of the past few months, but his Iowa momentum is more recent — and the unique dynamics of the caucuses could give him an advantage over Clinton.

Reverb Press reveals Bernie's hurdle in Iowa: university is under way, and college students, one of the most critical vertebra in his campaign's backbone, may not be able to fully participate.

So Clinton is now faced with the possibility that she could lose both of the first two states to vote — something that would be hugely embarrassing for the supposedly inevitable Democratic nominee. It's unclear whether Sanders' success in Iowa and New Hampshire will translate to other states, but it's obvious Clinton has gotten nervous: this week her campaign started lashing out at Sanders's support for a single-payer health care system — using attacks that many commentators dubbed misleading. Expect a great deal of discussion on the candidates' health care positions at the debate. 

Another topic that will surely be discussed is electability. With the Republican nomination contest lurching so far to the right, many Democrats are anxious to nominate a candidate that will ensure their party keeps the White House this November. And some believe that Sanders — a "democratic socialist" who holds far-left views on several issues — wouldn't be able to win.

Clinton's campaign has been running ads suggesting she's the only candidate who can stop the GOP, while Sanders has responded by saying early polls show him doing better than she would. So it's likely that electability will be hotly debated on Sunday.

Robert Reich has Bernie's rebuttals to these. And here's the twelve most effective TV ads so far in the campaign, as judged by Business Insider (take note of who dominates).

Finally, there's the core issue motivating Sanders's campaign and indeed his entire political career — his desire to check the power of the super-wealthy and corporations. Sanders has been laser-focused on this for decades, while Clinton has been much more of an ordinary mainstream Democrat — willing to push for policies that improve people's lives, but also eager to win the business community to her side. 

In a recent ad, Sanders said there are "two Democratic visions for regulating Wall Street," and that "one says it's okay to take millions from big banks and then tell him what to do." So expect a serious debate around whether Clinton is too close to the wealthy. 

As for the other candidate in the race — Martin O'Malley, who's way far back in last place — this may be the last time we see him in a debate. If polls of Iowa are anywhere close to accurate, he'll perform so poorly there that it's difficult to imagine him continuing his campaign. Vox's Matthew Yglesias has argued that O'Malley should be taken more seriously — so this may be the last chance for that to happen.

There will also be some sparring over gun safety and Sanders has already revised his position on gun manufacturer immunity in response to his critics on that.  Take an afternoon nap in order to stay up late and watch the whole thing, despite what Wasserman Schultz would prefer.

Here's more debate prep if you like.

-- GOP chair Reince Priebus would rather his party's nominee square off with Hillary than with Bernie.  His reasoning is faulty -- he predictably believes the Republican could win against either one -- but his conclusion is sound.

-- Clinton's questionable assault on Sanders' still-to-be-announced national health care revisions (even Ted thought it unseemly) gets called 'rotten'.  Actually it was Clinton herself labeled a 'rotten candidate'.  It's the WaPo's RWNJ Jennifer Rubin, but still ...

-- Howard Dean's blinding hypocrisy on single-payer further trashes her reputation with progressives in the Democratic Party on the topic of healthcare.  Clinton's various surrogates, from Chelsea to Dean to Joel Benenson are serving her poorly, and that includes the odious David Brock, who was Tweeted to "chill out" by none other than Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.  So one thing we should expect not to be debated this evening is the candidates' medical records.

-- Eight reasons for worry in the Clinton camp, all of them barely within or completely outside her ability to control or even influence.

-- In what could have been its own post, my personal outrage of the week against Clinton is this 2007 video of her blaming the victims for the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.  To be clear: there's plenty enough responsibility lacking in those folks who were just not credit-worthy enough to buy a home, and who simply never held the old-school value of high personal reputation (that's why they had bad credit to begin with).  Caveat emptor and all that.  But let's not dodge placing the fault for global financial apocalypse where it properly lies: with the unscrupulous mortgage lenders, the incompetent or malfeasant securitization of subprime loans rated AAA by the industry's so-called watchdogs, and the government handouts extended to the likes of Jamie Dimon (who then declined to stimulate the country's moribund economy by lending the money out) when their stinking chickens eventually came home to roost.

If you still don't get it, go watch The Big Short again, or read this.

Sunday Funnies

They really do think it's pronounced "suck-seed"...

Troubles deepen for Ted Cruz, Ken Paxton

Your Friday afternoon Texas two-fer.

-- Birther problems warming up for the Cuban Canuck.

A new lawsuit claims Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is ineligible to run for president, citing his Canadian birth. 

The case, lodged Thursday by Texas attorney Newton B. Schwartz Sr., says Cruz is ineligible to run as he isn't a "natural born citizen," Bloomberg reported. Cruz was born in Canada to an American citizen. 

“This 229-year question has never been pled, presented to or finally decided by or resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Schwartz says in his complaint. 

Schwartz has requested the U.S. Supreme Court expedite the case ahead of the Iowa caucuses and told Bloomberg he was surprised Cruz didn't file a case himself to avoid any complications.

The issue became heated during this week's GOP debate after a moderator asked Cruz about Donald Trump's accusations that the senator may be constitutionally prohibited from presidential office.

Oh dear.  Look at this from the Chronic:

A Reuters poll, reported Friday, found that a quarter of Republicans think Cruz's birthplace disqualifies him from the presidency.

Probably just a speed bump, causing a headache and maybe a little acid indigestion for our junior senator.  I suspect.  Except there's also a chance that he faces federal prosecution on that unreported Goldman Sachs loan.  From there, Martin Armstrong at The Burning Platform.

You do not forget to report a loan from Goldman Sachs when your wife is a managing director. Come on. How stupid do we have to be to entertain this excuse?

Update: The Hill is reporting that Cruz failed to disclose a second loan to his 2012 campaign, of $500,000 from Citibank.

-- Hotter water for our illustrious attorney general.  "Probe to look into more criminal misconduct allegations by Paxton":

Two additional special prosecutors have been appointed to look into other allegations of criminal misconduct involving Attorney General Ken Paxton, News 8 has learned.

The two Fort Worth attorneys – Miles Brissette and former state district Judge Bob Gill – were appointed Nov. 13 to investigate “criminal allegations” involving Paxton and others, according to filings obtained by News 8. The filings do not state who the “others” are.

News 8 has learned that the two men are looking into a 2004 land deal involving Paxton and other investors including Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis. That land would later become the site of the Collin Central Appraisal District.

And the Chronic again.

Ty Clevenger, a local blogger and former U.S. Department of Justice lawyer, wrote extensively about the land deal last year and sent a letter on the issue to the grand jury that indicted Paxton. Speaking from New York City, where he recently moved, Clevenger told the Chronicle he was glad the land deal was being investigated.

"The reason I kept pushing so hard on that issue is because I believe it went well beyond Ken Paxton," he said. "Greg Willis is involved in this and I believe a lot of other political players in Collin County probably had their hand in the cookie jar."

Crooked DAs in league with a crooked attorney general?  Let me clutch my pearls while you guide me to the fainting couch.

I'm celebrating the poor fortunes of two of our state's very worst Republicans with some champagne and caviar later this evening.  How about you?

The smell of fear

It's a stench, with this crowd.

With two weeks to go until the first contest of the 2016 presidential race, Republicans who fear their party has been hijacked by the likes of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz found little to comfort them in the latest debate. 

Both candidates, one a billionaire developer with no political experience and the other a U.S. Senator from Texas with a reputation for clashing with his Washington D.C. colleagues, stood center stage Thursday night and, for the most part, dominated the proceedings. 

More mainstream hopefuls such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio from Florida were left nipping at their heels and squabbling among themselves.

Cut to the chase; third place and the 'moderate' mantle is between Rubio and Christie.

All of it left some Republicans worried that time to stop Trump, or Cruz from seizing the inside track on the nomination was evaporating and that the establishment candidates were doing little to slow either man’s momentum. 

“They are digging themselves a bit of a hole,” said Fergus Cullen, the former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party. “It’s entirely possible the final two candidates will be Trump and Cruz, and people like me will be despondent.” 

New Hampshire holds its primary about a week after Iowa’s and perhaps offers the best chance for a more moderate option to surface as a prime challenger. Iowa Republicans historically tend to favor more conservative candidates.

Yeah, what I said yesterday.

But in New Hampshire right now, “the mainstream Republicans are as splintered and scattered as ever,” Cullen said, leaving open the possibility that Trump could win that state as well. 

Indeed, there seemed to be some acknowledgement during the debate that only one more serious contender might emerge from the rest of the field. It had Christie and Rubio, both of whom hope to win New Hampshire, repeatedly locking horns. 

“They know what lane they’re in and who their (sic) fighting,” said Chip Felkel, a Republican strategist in South Carolina, which also holds primary next month. “It’s Trump and Cruz, and the other four jockeying for some momentum.”

Cruz projects the confidence of a used car salesman reeling in a rube with a dollar bill on the end of a fishing line (yes, a Kurt Russell reference.  He's a hardcore Libertarian, doncha know).

“More and more, this is coming down to a two-man race. The polling, the support, it is more and more looking like it is Donald Trump and me,” Cruz said in an interview on the Fox Business Network after the debate. 

“We have the resources to go the distance. And one of the things we’re seeing, more and more people are coming behind us saying, listen, you guys are the only campaign that can beat Donald Trump,” he added.

I'm going to leave the play-by-play to others and just link to the fact-checking.  This Tweet speaks for me.

All the recently deceased people are reminding me that life is too short to watch the #GOPDebate.

— CatherinePrendergast (@cjprender) January 15, 2016

Wish I had listened to them.

Desperation time for the Republican debaters tonight

With Rand Paul eliminated, it's going to be "bomb them all, all the time" this evening.

Fox Business Networks’ decision to drop Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul from the main stage at Thursday night’s Republican debate, as well as Paul’s decision not to participate in the undercard event, has eliminated the sole dissenting voice from what could be called the “bomb the shit of them” consensus in the Republican field.

Yeah, too bad about that whole non-aggressionist thing.  It doesn't even play all that well in the Democratic primary.

On to the main event, where Ted Cruz may have some tight-collar moments over the high-dollar loans he forgot to report from 2012.

It's the home stretch in the presidential campaign before people actually start voting in less than three weeks — and that raises the stakes for Thursday night's Republican presidential debate in Charleston, S.C. (After this debate, there will be just one more before the Iowa caucuses.) 

[...] 

In the past, Trump and Cruz have pulled their punches in these debates. After questioning Cruz's temperament last month, Trump famously said, "He's just fine. Don't worry about it," at a debate in Las Vegas. That was enough for Cruz, who has cleverly, if not transparently, waited for Trump to implode while not offending him, aiming to inherit Trump's supporters. The detente may be over. Or, who knows, maybe the alliance continues.

Politico lights some fuses.

... Republicans are bracing themselves for a circular firing squad as the 2016 GOP candidates gather (in Charleston, SC) for Thursday's debate. 

A cluster of contenders in a fierce competition to command the mainstream GOP lane are almost certain to collide, campaign aides and strategists say. Most of the heat is expected to be directed at Marco Rubio, who, with time running out until the first votes are cast, is anxious to position himself as the establishment front-runner. 

They break it down man y mano, but let's just look at the also-rans err, "mainstream" (sic) candidate four-car pileup.

Establishment candidates have so far been stymied in their efforts to slow down the Trump-Cruz train — in no small part because they’ve been busy fighting amongst themselves. 

That dynamic is almost certain to play out again on Thursday night. With Bush, Christie, Rubio, and John Kasich all competing aggressively in New Hampshire — and all within striking distance of one another — there’s simply little incentive for them to play nice.

“That group of people that are bunched up need to separate themselves,” Wiley said.

That's what I will be watching and Tweeting, because IMO the early stage has already been set: Cruz wins Iowa, Trump wins New Hampshire, and whoever comes in third behind them in each state becomes the story.  South Carolina is the proving ground for Trump and Cruz, with two others left standing out of Rubio and someone else.

The Nevada caucuses are the wild card; the Dems go before the Rs and a week before SC, while the Rs meet three days after the Palmetto State votes.  Historically the Silver State lines up with the favorite (in 2012, Romney and Clinton) and latest polling reveals Clinton and Trump with big leads (although Cruz and Rubio are surging).  Nevada, in short, may not tell us much.

March 1 -- Super Tuesday -- hosts Alabama, Alaska (caucus, R), American Samoa (caucus, D), Arkansas, Colorado (caucus, both parties), Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota (caucus, both), North Dakota (caucus, R), Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming (caucus, R).

We should know who each party's standard-bearers for November are by that evening.

Powerball scattershooting

-- In the wake of Chelsea and Hillary Clinton's lying and fear-mongering about Bernie Sanders' as-yet-unannounced healthcare plan, Bernie's campaign raised a quick $1.4 million.  That's just slightly less than one-tenth (one-thousandth; math is hard) of the annuity-option Powerball amount, split last night by tickets sold in California, Tennessee, and Florida.  A poll released last month by Kaiser indicates that 81% of Democrats -- and 60% of independents -- support a Medicare-for-all, single-payer national health care plan.

It feels like the earth moved, and not just for the lottery winners.

-- Speaking of money problems... Ted Cruz.

-- One-third of the members of Congress just forced Speaker Paul Ryan to back down from one of his signature rule-making decisions.  From the nauseatingly conservative Fiscal Times:

On Wednesday, Ryan took one of his first high-profile steps toward instilling a little discipline in the chamber, before promptly backing down in the face of anger from members. 

A defining characteristic of the John Boehner era was that while floor votes almost always had ostensible time limits attached to them, they were almost utterly without meaning. A vote would be held open as long as House leadership felt like it, leading to 15-minute votes taking two and three times as long. 

It was a practice that, by all accounts, annoyed Ryan. And he recently warned the members of the House that he would no longer abet members being late to votes by holding them open. On Wednesday, he made good on his threat. 

The House was scheduled to vote on a bill that would toughen oversight on the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration, along with other world powers, struck over the summer. The bill was brought to the floor and a 15-minute vote was declared. And when the 15 minutes was up, the vote was closed. 

The problem was that 137 members of the House, from both parties, hadn’t made it to the floor on time. The bill had the votes to pass, 191-106, but that wasn’t the point. The Iran deal is highly charged politically, all the more so because of the detention and return of 10 U.S. sailors by the Iranian Navy overnight Tuesday. Members were anxious to be on the record voting on the bill, and weren’t at all happy when they sauntered onto the floor after the 15 minutes had expired and were informed that the voting had concluded. 

As members began complaining, Ryan quickly conferred with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Democratic leaders. Not long afterward, McCarthy requested unanimous consent to “vacate” the results of the vote, with a promise that the vote would be rescheduled for later this month, in order to give all members a chance to go on the record.

The reign of the new poker-faced Speaker isn't going to end well, unless of course he emerges as the Republican presidential nominee -- A team or B team -- in a brokered party convention this summer.

-- Still flogged on right-wing sites for the most part, the Clinton Foundation's pay-to-play business slowly being disclosed via Hillary's e-mail investigation lurks as a nomination time bomb.  It's at least worth throwing back in the face of any Shillarian who claims 'electability' now that they can't cling to 'inevitability' so much (at least until Iowa and New Hampshire returns come in).

For my part, I'll wait for the FBI to finish up.  If I keep hearing about it on any of the recently-engaged Rupert Murdoch's media outlets, I'll ignore it.

In other 'sky-is-falling' news, McBlogger has some ground-game complaining.

Chelsea and Hillary Clinton's ill-advised comments about healthcare

This is shameful.

“I never thought that I would be arguing about the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare in the Democratic primary,” (Chelsea) Clinton said at an event in Manchester (NH). “Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare and private insurance.”

She then went on to say that she believes her mother has a “more robust" record on health care than anyone else in the race.  

That's two of the biggest lies told during the campaign so far (and getting to the lead past Donald Trump and Ted Cruz is quite a despicable accomplishment).  Chelsea's just doing what her mother asked her to do, though.

"His plan would take Medicare and Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program [CHIP] and the Affordable Care Act health-care insurance and private employer health insurance and he would take that all together and send health insurance to the states, turning over your and my health insurance to governors," Hillary Clinton said Monday. "I don't believe number one we should be starting over. We had enough of a fight to get to the Affordable Care Act. So I don’t want to rip it up and start over."

She echoed the argument on Tuesday, the same day a Quinnapiac poll showed Sanders overtaking her in Iowa, 49 percent to 44 percent. Reiterating her claim that Sanders' plan would jeopardize the Affordable Care Act and effectively turn over health coverage programs to the states, many of them led by Republican governors, she said: "If that’s the kind of 'revolution' he's talking about, I'm worried, folks."

"I'm worried" at least is probably true.  The rest is BS.

In a statement on Monday, Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs hit back: "Secretary Clinton is inaccurate in suggesting that Republican governors would be able to circumvent the law and deny implementation in their states." Referring to a single-payer proposal he put forth in 2013, Briggs added: "The bill Sen. Sanders introduced was very clear. It is national legislation for all states."

National Nurses United added its voice to those defending Sanders' proposal, accusing Clinton of deliberately distorting the facts.

"Surely Hillary Clinton knows that Medicare and Medicaid are national programs, and that they would be funded as national programs," said NNU co-president Jean Ross. "To claim that expanding Medicare to all would hand it over to state governors is a crude, inflammatory distortion, and shows an indifference to all those people who continue to be harmed by a broken system."

Perhaps this foreshadows a line of attack Clinton will use in Sunday evening's debate.  The Nil Admirari's satire doesn't fall far from the truth, does it?

'Medicare for all' is not dismantling Medicare.  More truth: there is no place for for-profit health insurance companies in a single-payer world.

“So to answer your question: What I believe, is in comprehensive, universal health care for all people with a Medicare for all, single payer program. And when you do that, by the way, because you take private insurance companies out of the system, whose only function in life is to try and make as much profit as they can, when you control the costs of prescription drugs, you end up providing healthcare to all — comprehensive — and saving middle class families thousands of dollars a year. That’s why I believe in a Medicare-for-all system.”

Single-payer was too much for Obama to manage in 2009, so I feel certain Clinton isn't going to even give it a try.  She got spanked once about it back in 1993, after all.  That was millions and millions of dollars ago.

This is quite obviously the political revolution she should be worried about.

Update: Mediaite...

...(O)n CNN this afternoon, Jake Tapper confronted Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon over an angry statement Clinton made in 2008 when Barack Obama‘s campaign criticized her for her health care plan. She called it false and made these (interesting in hindsight) remarks: 

“It is destructive, particularly for a Democrat, to be discrediting universal health care by waging a false campaign against my plan… It is undermining core Democratic principles. Since when do Democrats attack one another on universal health care?” 

It appears 2016 Hillary Clinton has now answered her own question.

Bowie Toons

"Time may change me,
But I can't trace time."

"We could be heroes,
just for one day."

Big political events this week

-- Obama's final State of the Union address is tonight.  He intends to burnish his legacy, as lame ducks do.  How's he done in the past seven years with respect to promises kept?

-- Fresh polling has both the Democrats and the Republicans nervous as turkeys at Thanksgiving.  Both parties' establishment caucuses are busy strategizing Plan Bs.  Here's the 'shock me' nut graf for the Blue Team:

Because of the weakness Hillary is showing in the polls, Wall Street is thinking of backing another Democrat to stop Bernie, who obviously would be their worst nightmare.  Names mentioned this morning: Biden, Kerry and Bloomberg.

I still don't think Hillary is going to be denied the nomination even if she loses both Iowa and New Hampshire, which are neck-and-neck today.  But she's definitely a frog in a pot on the stove with the burner set to 'high'.  I believe she'll  jump out of hot water when she goes after Bernie on his gun stance in this coming Sunday's debate (as I wrote at the end of this post).  But H.A. Goodman is coming to his rescue, digging out some old quotes where she describes herself as a "pro-gun churchgoer".  So it's possible that chameleon Clinton is going to have change her colors once more.

Update: ICYMI there was an Iowa forum yesterday, sponsored by Fusion for black and brown Democrats, with all three candidates participating.  Did you catch it?  Did you even know about it?  If you didn't, thank Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

-- South Carolina will be pivotal for the Repugs as well, because Ted Cruz is going to come from behind in Iowa and Donald Trump will rebound in New Hampshire.  Trump still shows a small lead in the Hawkeye State, but they caucus there and his fans are too busy to show up for him.  Cruz, on the other hand, holds the evangelicals in his hands FTW.

I am enjoying the way they snipe at each other, however.  Trump played the birther card on Cruz; it went national again with screeching on both sides of the "is he eligible" question.  Trump is now playing Springsteen's "Born in the USA" at his rallies, while Cruz responds with a Tweet of the YouTube of Fonzie jumping the shark.

Happy days are here again.

-- The next GOP debate is Thursday night and Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina both got demoted to the JV team.  And Rand won't play at the kid's table.

"An artificial designation as being in the second tier is something we can't accept," (Paul) told CNN on Monday. "I won't participate in anything that's not the first tier."

Rand's the first man out after Iowa.  As New York Mag reminds, the year of the libertarian Republican has been eclipsed by the year of the fascist one.

Update: Moron Majority has debate questions for the remaining participants.  A few...

Donald Trump – “Not much is known about your wife, Melania. How do you think your supporters, especially evangelicals, would react knowing that  if you were elected, she would be the first First Lady to have posed nude?”

Ted Cruz – “Why does everyone hate you? Even your old college roommate, Craig Mazin, said,“I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”

Jeb Bush – “Do you regret not having listened to the words of your mother when her advice to you about running for president was: don’t?”

And Republican Talking Head John Feehery could vote for Trump because "nothing suggests he is a racist", but NOT for Cruz because he's "the new Nixon".  If that doesn't tell you how discombobulated the GOP is right now...

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance wouldn't trust Greg Abbott to write a grocery list as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff interviewed Harris County DA candidates Morris Overstreet and Kim Ogg.

Libby Shaw, contributing to Daily Kos, has had it. The governor's call for a constitutional convention deserves the lampooning and mockery it receives. The Texas Blues: Living in a place run by drunk monkeys and petulant teenagers.

Having grown up in the West and been to that area, SocraticGadfly surveyed the details of the Oregon standoff and then -- inspired by the #BundyEroticFanFic hashtag -- took time to write some purple prose.

Dan Patrick is on a crusade to kill public education. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme doesn't want the Koch brothers or any religious using our tax dollars to force the indoctrination our children.

The sudden and untimely vacancy on the Harris County Commissioners Court has been covered extensively by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Ted at jobsanger is already concern-trolling progressives to vote for Hillary.  (It seems the "cascade of anxiety" has reached Amarillo.)

McBlogger takes down a CEO for exceptionally dumb remarks against raising the minimum wage.

TXsharon at Bluedaze points out the differences between Austin's gas plant and Denton's.

Consistent with what Houston is all about, Neil at All People Have Value took a picture of contrasting things in close proximity to one another. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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

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

The Texas Observer's Strangest State has news you may have missed from Tahoka, Dogwood City, Marshall, Schulenburg, and Tyler.

Lone Star Ma documents some no-open-carry businesses, the Dallas Observer has some helpful etiquette tips for the open carry era, and the San Antonio Current provides a comprehensive list of Texas businesses that have said no to open carry.

The TSTA Blog is wary of new education commissioner Mike Morath, and The Lunch Tray reports that school kids today are making better lunch choices thanks to the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act.

The Texas Election Law Blog surveyed scholarly coverage of Evenwel v. Abbott.

The Makeshift Academic frets over labor's prospects in 2016.

Grits for Breakfast is in Missouri mode when it comes to resolving the Harris County jail's overpopulation.

Jeff Singer flies back in his time machine to 1938 to watch the Donald Trump of Texas, Pappy O'Daniel.

BOR is looking for writers.

Finally, the TPA extends its thanks and best wishes to Texas Civil Rights Project founder Jim Harrington on his retirement.

Sunday Funnies, Hezbubba edition

Wasserman Schultz draws a primary challenger

Maybe she will finally get the message: "It's over. Resign from the DNC or be booted from Congress (or both, preferably)."

Hello Twitter! Today I filed my papers to run for #FL23. Lets take back our country and restore democracy.

— Tim Canova (@Tim_Canova) January 7, 2016

Here's a snip from his bio:

Canova was an early critic of financial deregulation and the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan. In the 1980s, he wrote critically of the federal bailout of Continental Illinois, the nation’s seventh largest commercial bank, and the collapse of the savings & loan industry. In the 1990s, prior to the Asian currency contagion, he argued against the liberalization of capital accounts. Throughout the Bush administration, he warned of an impending crisis in the bubble economy. Since 2008, he has lectured and written widely on the causes and consequences of the present economic and financial crisis. In 2011, Tim Canova was appointed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to serve on an Advisory Committee on Federal Reserve Reform with leading economists, including Jeffrey Sachs, Robert Reich, James Galbraith, and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stieglitz..."

Frankly he could be Bernie's running mate and I'd be almost as happy.  But DWS needs to go and Canova is virtually a dream replacement for her.

Canova's entry is the culmination of a pretty horrible week for Wasserman Schultz; I've signed no fewer than five different petitions from various organizations, which have collected tens of thousands of signatures in a matter of days, calling for her resignation from the DNC.  Her refusal to expand the primary debate schedule, her suspending the Sanders campaign from its voter lists, and associated misconduct seems to have finally caught up to her, but she's made her situation much worse just this week.  In a gaffe she certainly never saw coming, she outed herself as a abolitionist on marijuana even as she has taken money from alcohol PACs.  The Intercept has the best executive summary of this appalling ignorance and hypocrisy.

Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told the New York Times  she continues to oppose legalizing marijuana — even as she has courted alcohol PACs as one of the largest sources of her campaign funding.

Wasserman Schultz, a House Democrat from Florida, said she doesn’t “think we should legalize more mind-altering substances if we want to make it less likely that people travel down the path toward using drugs. We have had a resurgence of drug use instead of a decline. There is a huge heroin epidemic.”

The fifth-largest pool of money the congresswoman has collected for her re-election campaign has been from the beer, wine, and liquor industry. The $18,500 came from PACs including Bacardi USA, the National Beer Wholesalers Association, Southern Wine & Spirits, and the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that during a recent period, “excessive drinking was responsible for one in 10 deaths among working-age adults aged 20-64.”

When pushed by interviewer Ana Marie Cox, Wasserman Schultz said that she was “bothered by the drug culture that surrounded my childhood — not mine personally. I grew up in suburbia.”

Cox pointed out that despite the dramatic problem with opiate abuse, the state has not made opiates illegal. Wasserman Schultz responded by saying that there “is a difference between opiates and marijuana.”

She’s right about that. An estimated 8,257 Americans perished from heroin-related drug poisoning in 2013. Nearly twice as many — 16,235 — died from opioid analgesics.

There have been roughly zero deaths from marijuana abuse.

In 2014, 64 percent of self-identified Democrats told Gallup they support marijuana legalization.

Jack Moore at GQ limited his criticism to "DWS saying some stupid things about drugs", but a Democratic mega-donor -- who noted that she took sides with Republican financier Sheldon Adelson in the 2014 campaign against Florida's medical marijuana initiative, was more blunt at the time.

(John) Morgan criticized Wasserman Schultz's position. “I know personally the most-powerful players in Washington, D.C. And I can tell you that Debbie Wasserman Schultz isn’t just disliked. She’s despised. She’s an irritant," Morgan told the Miami Herald (in June, 2014). “Why she’s trying to undermine this amendment I don’t know. But I’ll tell you, I will never give a penny or raise a penny for the national party while she’s in leadership. And I have given and helped raise millions.”

Morgan obviously caught the early train on DWS.  And when she offered to flip-flop on the issue if Morgan would take back what he said, he was similarly terse:

“No,” Morgan responded. “She is a bully. I beat bullies up for a living.”

From the wayback machine and 2008 -- before her tenure as party chair began, to be clear -- we can be reminded that the DNC chairwoman supported incumbent Republicans over Democratic challengers because 'they had to work together on regional issues".  Why, Florida is just like Texas in this regard.  Do you remember that alleged progressive state representative  Garnet Coleman once said the same thing about Robert Talton?  Esquire's Charles Pierce also mentions the "bipartisan" crapola -- and Wasserman Schultz's opposition to the Iran nuclear bargain, the Cuban detente, and her financial support from the private prison industry -- when he hung out the "Help Wanted' sign at the DNC in August.

So there's a history there. But this latest fiasco is different by an order of magnitude. If DWS wants to oppose the Iran deal in her capacity as an otherwise insignificant member of the House minority, that's fine with me. But if, as it appears, as national chairman of the president's party, she actively campaigned against a measure designed to show the support of the president's party for a monumentally important White House policy initiative, then she should have been fired from that post yesterday.

She has also recently demonstrated a remarkable disconnect with what women of a generation younger than hers think about their reproductive freedoms.

Progressives and pro-choice activists are criticizing Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for saying she's seen "complacency" among young women born after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling, a landmark decision that established the right to an abortion. 

"Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided," she told The New York Times in an interview. 

Poor choice of words at best.  Rejoinder from Twitter and from the head of a group advocating for women's choice:

Kierra Johnson, the executive director of Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity ... suggested young people view women's health issues from a different perspective. 

"There is energy among young people around these issues -- it just may not be happening in the way that Rep. Wasserman Shultz is used to seeing," she said in a statement. "The young people that are drawn into this movement today don't see reproductive justice as wholly separate from LGBTQ equality or from racial justice or economic justice or a host of other issues." 

Wasserman Schultz just shows up lately as tone-deaf on a host of current political topics, and it's approaching toxicity for Hillary Clinton's campaign.  Not in the same way that Rahm Emanuel's widespread corruption does, but both of them represent Clinton cronyism -- yep, that's what it is, and I'll expand on it in a future post -- at its very worst.

As I said before though, I'm more than happy if she stays on at the DNC, damaging Clinton's prospects further.  That's a development I'm delighted to keep track of.

Scattershooting while playing nurse

... to a recovering knee replacement patient ...

-- Joe Biden has some regrets about not running in 2016.  'Some', as in "every day".

Still, he said he made the right call for his family and for himself. And he pledged to stay "deeply involved" in the race to replace President Barack Obama.

"We've got two good candidates," Biden said, praising Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for engaging in a "robust debate" devoid of personal attacks. He glossed over the third candidate running for the Democratic nomination, Martin O'Malley, whose campaign has struggled to gain traction.

That was kind of uncharacteristically rude of Uncle Joe, wasn't it? 

-- Bernie Sanders does indeed have a credibility problem on guns.  Matt Bai:

President Obama pushed guns to the top of the national agenda this week, announcing a series of modest executive actions to be followed by a televised town hall Thursday. And that’s probably not the best news in the world for Bernie Sanders, who’s making a serious push in Iowa just four weeks before the caucuses, and who would rather be talking about almost anything else.

The problem here for Sanders isn’t just that the renewed conversation on guns takes away from his monastic focus on economic fairness, which he renewed with a combative speech in Manhattan Tuesday. Nor is it simply that gun violence is the one issue where Sanders, who needs to consolidate the populist left of his party, has been decidedly less liberal than either of his rivals.

The real issue is that, if you pay close attention, the logic Sanders deploys to defend his record on guns just happens to undermine the very core of his case for the presidency — and his case against Hillary Clinton, too.

Gun safety finally coming to the forefront of the nation's attention as an actionable item picked a bad time for Bernie Sanders' campaign, and his rural-state gun mentality. 

There have been only a handful of truly pivotal congressional votes to broadly redefine gun rights in modern America. The first was in 1968, in the aftermath of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, when Congress voted to prohibit certain kinds of citizens — convicted felons, fugitives, “mental defectives” — from walking into a store and buying a gun.

That stood as the defining law of the land until 1993, when Bill Clinton led a successful and divisive push to expand those restrictions through what came to be known as the Brady Law. That law instituted a mandatory waiting period (now three days) for all guns bought through licensed gun stores, so that federal background checks could be completed. The following year, Congress added a ban on certain assault-style weapons, which the industry quickly circumvented.

None of this, however, stopped the flow of illegal guns into American cities. So in the late ’90s, a coalition of cities, inspired by the successful litigation against the tobacco industry, started suing the gun industry and some of the less scrupulous dealers, charging that they were negligent in their business practices and asking to be recouped for the costs of gun violence.

In 2006, after years of trying, the gun lobby finally succeeded in getting Congress to grant special legal immunity to gun makers and dealers, effectively shielding them from any liability having to do with basic negligence. This was an extraordinary intervention on behalf of an entire industry, unparalleled in the modern annals of Congress.

So where was Sanders in all this? As a second-term congressman, he steadfastly opposed the Brady Law (although he did bring himself to vote for the largely symbolic assault-weapons ban). In 2006, when he was running for Senate, he voted with pro-gun, pro-corporate Republicans on the odious immunity bill.

[...]

On the two most meaningful pieces of gun legislation in American history — one that is the foundation for federal gun restrictions, and the other a clear effort by lobbyists to use their muscle to subvert the legal process — Sanders came out on the side of industry. Whatever other votes he’s taken since becoming a senator (including one to extend Brady to private sellers at gun shows) have to be considered less consequential.

Most of Bernie's supporters tend to studiously ignore this glaringly objectionable policy stance in much the same way that Shrillaries don't talk about her Wall Street largesse or her bellicose foreign policy.

One of these deficiencies in principle will be a fatal flaw in the spring, the other could very well be in the fall.  Especially if Hezbubba, the most scared and unprepared of all Americans, are convinced that their votes for Donald Trump will make the difference.  (Thinking that voting doesn't matter is an ignorance that usually only Democratic-leaners suffer from, as we know.) 

When Sanders and his supporters defend his votes, they like to make the point that Sanders has represented Vermont, where an awful lot of pickup trucks sport NRA stickers, and where an awful lot of gun dealers make a decent living and don’t want to get sued out of business.

“I come from a rural state, and the views on gun control in rural states are different than in urban states,” Sanders explained during the Democratic debate in Las Vegas in October. In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” last year, he said: “The people of my state understand, I think, pretty clearly, that guns in Vermont are not the same thing as guns in Chicago or guns in Los Angeles. In our state, guns are used for hunting.”

In other words, Sanders was representing the interests of his constituents. And you know what that makes Bernie Sanders?

A politician, that’s what.

And this is the problem the gun issue creates for Sanders. Because a politician is precisely what he purports not to be. His entire rationale as a candidate is that he alone chooses principle over polls, that he votes his convictions and can’t be corrupted by powerful interests or his own ambition.

Conversely, his main indictment of Clinton — which he laid out again this week, as Obama wept publicly over the human wreckage of gun violence — holds that she is a puppet of Wall Street, unwilling to break up the banks or re-institute 20th century regulations because she’s a creature of political calculation rather than conscience.

It turns out, though, that Sanders understands political reality, too. He voted against the Brady Law because it wasn’t popular or especially relevant in Vermont, and you can bet he was already eyeing higher office back then. He voted for immunity at the very moment when he was also running for an open Senate seat, and that’s not a coincidence.

There's more, but the point is made.  As close as Sanders might be to being the progressive populist's best option, he falls short on guns and on boondoggle military spending as long as it's in Vermont.

The sad part is that much of his support after March goes back underground, with only some declaring their bold pledge to write his name in on their ballots in November... a tremendous waste.  Keeping the best parts of of Bernie's political revolution going entails acting more intelligent than this.

In a tactical vein, if Hillary Clinton is on her game, she will strike down this hypocrisy of Sanders' at their next debate, just a few days from now in the South Carolina city where a white supremacist shot nine people in cold blood inside their church.

The next Democratic debate will be held a week from Sunday in Charleston, S.C., a city shattered by a horrific mass shooting last year. And you can be sure that Sanders will reprise the argument he made this week — that Clinton is a subsidiary of the bankers and their narrow agenda.

When he does, Clinton might point out that she’s no more a sellout to Wall Street than Sanders is to the gun lobby. Both candidates have shown themselves to be pragmatists when they need to be.

Only one of them admits it.

Meanwhile, in the other South Carolina shooting, the cop who put eight slugs into Walter Scott's back just walked.  (Some people say that's not a gun problem but a police problem, of course, and some of them might be right, if it weren't for the fact that the reason he's bonded out is because of Dylann Roof.)

-- I don't like to follow the Ken Paxton saga day to day because it is so disgusting.  Just understand that when you elect an admitted felon, you're going to wind up paying his legal bills, and the meter is spinning like a top on that shit.  It's not children and families who came across the border to seek a better life mooch free stuff off the government, it's criminals like Paxton and Rick Perry that are breaking the budget, wasting your tax dollars.

Hope that's clear now.

Harris County commissioner vacancy *update*

Update: El Franco Lee's political coffers were overflowing with cash at the time of his death.

When Harris County Commissioner El Franco Lee died unexpectedly Sunday, he left friends and allies in mourning, political hopefuls jockeying for his job and an uncommonly large campaign war chest of nearly $4 million.

What happens to that sum -- which far outstrips the campaign cash held by all of his fellow commissioners combined -- remains an open question.

All elected officials are required to disburse their political reserves after leaving office, but campaign finance experts said the present situation is unusual given the extent of Lee's holdings, which his campaign treasurer now is tasked with distributing.

"This much money I've not seen before," Austin campaign finance lawyer Buck Wood said. Andrew Wheat, research director for the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice, agreed.

"I can't remember this question coming up," Wheat said. "That's an extraordinary amount of money for a county commissioner to be sitting on."

We know four million bucks is chickenfeed for statewides and federal candidates these days, but unprecedented in a county official who rarely had competition.

He did not face a serious challenger in at least the last 20 years, but, nonetheless, accumulated a steady stream of money in his campaign account.

The commissioner took in an average of $250,000 per year from 2008 through 2014, the full years for which electronic finance reports are available, and spent an average of $200,000. That left Lee, the county's first African American commissioner, with $3.9 million in the bank as of last June.

You can understand now why everybody wants his job.

State law dictates that Lee's longtime friend and campaign treasurer, J. Kent Friedman, now must disseminate those leftover political funds to one or more of the following entities within the next six years: the Democratic Party, a candidate or political committee, a charity, a scholarship program at an institution of higher education, or the state treasury. He also may return money to Lee's donors.

Friedman said he has not considered what to do with the late commissioner's campaign account.

"I hadn't even thought about it until you asked the question," he said. "I haven't given it three seconds' worth of thought."

Wood noted that the executor of Lee's estate may have the right to replace the late commissioner's treasurer, but he could find no record of a case that clarifies the law regarding how the powers of a treasurer could be terminated or altered after a candidate's death.

"It's an unresolved issue," Wood said.

Original post: Check the comments here and then read this:

Within hours of longtime Commissioner El Franco Lee's sudden death Sunday, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett received calls from three people vying for his seat.

Emmett, who alone must appoint a temporary successor, said he will not consider these three or five others who by day's end expressed their interest.

"There's such a thing as dignity," Emmett said on Monday.

That's what David in the comments of Sunday's post suggested, and I conceded.

Replacing Lee will be a two-step process which is complicated by where it falls in the election cycle. State law dictates when a sudden vacancy occurs, the county judge must pick a commissioner to complete the term, which in Lee's case is Jan. 1, 2017.

When the term ends, the commissioner's job comes up for election. However, at this point it's too late for candidates to submit their names for the March primary, and there is no Republican running for the seat.

After the primary, sometime in June, Democratic party officials for Precinct 1 will choose a replacement candidate for Lee. The candidate the party chooses will run unopposed in November.

Jill in the comments goes a little further, and the Chron article confirms.

Emmett said he hoped to announce a short-term appointee to the job in three weeks' time, when he returns from a previously scheduled vacation. Emmett, a centrist Republican, sought input Monday morning from Lee's staff to find an African-American Democrat for the job equipped to proceed with projects already underway. He said he wanted the individual to be in place in time to participate in the fiscal year budget process.

Lane Lewis, the Democratic Party chair for Harris County, will oversee part two of this process and believes it is in Emmett's best interest to appoint a caretaker who is ineligible to run or who would choose not to run instead of picking a viable candidate for the November balloting.

"I don't think he's interested in trying to be kingmaker; he's interested in having an honorable, respectable placeholder who can do the job while the process takes place over the next six to eight months," Lewis said.

So it will be the end of January before we know the immediate replacement, and sometime in the summer when the Democrats choose the person who will ultimately replace Lee.  As a commissioner, that is.  As a person, there's no replacing him.

While the succession process begins taking shape, staff at the Precinct 1 office gathered Monday at their first briefing without their boss at the head of the table, peppering the conversation with wry comments and insights.

Interactions among staffers at the offices were quiet, mostly wordless exchanges, punctuated by hugs, tears and a stream of calls from employees and constituents expressing condolences. The 285 precinct staffers sought to focus on getting back to work and "preserving Lee's legacy," said Judy Springer, the policy and fiscal services manager for the precinct.

"It's hard because we didn't lose a boss, we lost a friend," she said.

Very large shoes to fill.