Monday, March 08, 2021

The Far Left "Texas is Messed Up" Wrangle



Kuff focused on the maskless mandate and the widespread negative reactions to it.  John Coby at Bay Area Houston is mad about the damage Republican political leaders have done to our reputation (?!).  Therese Odell at Foolish Watcher vents her spleen at Greg Abbott.

Could the worst be yet to come?


Let's take that as our segue to the coronavirus.


Isobella Harkrider for Reform Austin documents the COVID variants now in the state. Alison Medley at the HouChron spoke to Memorial Hermann Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Linda Yancey about the pros and cons of the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and the effectiveness of all the shots compared to each other, and to the variants.

"When you compare efficacy data, Pfizer ranks at the highest with 95 percent effectiveness in preventing COVID-19, compared to Moderna at 94 percent.  The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was found to be 66 percent effective at preventing moderate to severe cases of COVID-19, and  85 percent effective if disease is critical.  The concern has been whether the current vaccines will hold effectiveness against new COVID-19 variants, including the UK, New York, California, South Africa and Brazil variants.

"This vaccine is still effective against all these variants, as well as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines," Dr. Yancey reassured. "If we can get people vaccinated as quickly as we can, the virus will stop spreading."

Let's shift to the Lege, which gavels back in this week with more on their plates than ever.  Still desperate to change the subject, Abbott is diving into the culture wars.


Former RRC candidate Chrysta Castaneda opines in the DMN that the Railroad Commission and the PUC should be folded into a new energy commission (and those commissioners should be elected instead of appointed).  Socratic Gadfly looked at the Census delay and wondered if that will make redistricting even harder and more of a fistfight in a Lege special session, including the possibility of internecine Republican fights as well as R-D battles.  And Charles Miller for Texas 2036 appraises the new federal Medicaid proposal, which could mean $3 billion more for Texas.

Next, in criminal and social justice updates ...


And in political and election headlines:


Nearly two dozen candidates filed for the special election to succeed the late U.S. Rep. Ron Wright (R-Arlington) in a district that has become increasingly competitive in general elections over the past decade. President Trump carried the district by 3 points over Joe Biden in 2020, and the average Republican won the district by just over 6 points. Trump won the district by 9 points over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Mitt Romney carried it over President Obama by 17 points in 2012.

This is not a general election, and turnout is expected to fall well short of the 69% of registered voters who came to the polls in November. The 2018 special election for CD27, which was held in June, drew 15% of the number of voters as in the 2016 general election. A similar result for CD6 would result in around 55K votes cast. All candidates run on the same ballot regardless of party, and the top two candidates advance to a runoff, regardless of party, if no one secures a majority vote. Given the number of Republicans (11) and Democrats (10) in the race, a runoff is almost certain. The question is, what will be the partisan makeup of the runoff?

The last time a field this size ran in a special election was 1993, when 24 candidates filed to win the unexpired term of former U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D). There were 10 Republicans, five Democrats including the appointed incumbent, one Libertarian, six independents and two other minor party candidates. The Republicans collectively received 58.2% of the vote to the Democrats’ collective 40.5%, and the minor party and independent candidates combined for 1.3%. Eighteen of the candidates each received less than 1% of the vote, 16 of which received less than 0.5%. That left three Republicans and three Democrats with more than 1% of the vote.

Comparing a statewide race from 27+ years ago to a north Texas Congressional special election is IMHO a failure of analysis (which TXElects rarely makes).  Special elections are about ground game, and the Democrats failed there in 2020, by their own declaration.  I expect them to do so again in this contest, despite having 60 days to gear up for it.  Too bad they can't blame the Green Party.

It appears that Ag Commissioner Sid Miller is preparing to challenge Greg Abbott for the Republican nomination for governor, from his right.


And some environmental updates.


Last month Environment Texas released bold environmental agendas for Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio.  In recent years these three cities have demonstrated their environmental stewardship, but now EnTx is challenging them to improve their clean energy initiatives, bolster clean air and water protections, and put wildlife over waste by banning the worst single-use plastics.

Texas wildlife indeed suffered mightily during the freeze, and will keep bearing the brunt of the Lone Star State's refusal to move away from fossil fuels to cleaner, sustainable energy sources.

Speaking of wildlife ...


Stopping here; more later this week.
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Sunday, March 07, 2021

Sunday "Tex-Ass Backwards" Funnies

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Tuesday, March 02, 2021

Texas Tuesday Masks Coming Off Round-up


Everybody seems to think we know what's up.


Guvnuh Quixote -- pronounce that however you like; I'm rolling with "Kwiksoat" -- has been under tremendous pressure from the Trump Caucus of the TXGOP to give Texans back the freedumb to die for the economy.  What better than Texas Independence Day to declare it?


I'll be celebrating Taco Tuesday myself (wearing a double mask).


In the latest criminal justice developments:


That's our transition to the Lege, which was mostly buried in meetings that have been consumed with blaming and finger-pointing about the Texas Blackout.  In the abridged version of events, PUC chair (and Abbott appointee) DeAnn Walker testified before committees in the Texas House and Senate, and her answers to their questions about winter preparations to the state's power grid, its subsequent failure, etc., were found to be universally unacceptable.  Lite Guv Dan Patrick called for her head yesterday, and within hours, she resentfully submitted her resignation letter.


I have more links regarding who will ultimately pay for their mistakes (hint: it won't be them) that I'll save for the next Wrangle/Round-up.  The Legislature's planned short work week was lengthened by other matters.


It gets worse, but we'll move on.  COVID numbers are improving, but the gains will be lost if the mask mandate, restaurant and bar restrictions, and/or limits on social gatherings are loosened.


And that's my segue to the social injustice news of the week.

Last week, our producer Davis Land headed out from his neighborhood in Houston to talk with people trying to restore their homes after a devastating winter storm knocked out power for so many Texans. It was nearly 80 degrees -- a huge change from a couple of weeks back, when many Texans were shivering under coats and blankets, waiting out a deep freeze and a utility shutdown. But after the cold let up, what was left behind was a mess of plumbing: burst pipes and sagging walls full of leaking water. There simply aren’t enough hands to do the work.


D Magazine caught up with Jim Schutze, whose decades-old book, The Accommodation, will be re-printed after CBS This Morning aired a story about its topic -- Dallas' complicated racial and political history -- last weekend.


No, I am certain we won't.  The freeze and its aftermath was very likely the last straw for some.


Let's move toward the end of this Round-up with some overdue election news.


Here's a thread with the standard "can the Donks do it" speculation, short a couple of candidates from Svitek's list above.


With 18 hats in a jungle primary, and perhaps more, anything is possible.  The election is in May.


Another too-long post, so let's close it here and save the rest for later.

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Monday, March 01, 2021

The Weekly Wrangle from Far Left Texas

So Joe Biden's H-Town photo opp seemed to go well.



Perhaps he should have skipped making the remarks at the end of the afternoon, though, as the Aricept had clearly worn off.



"Representatives, uh, Shirley Jackson Lee, Al Green, Sylvia Garcia, Lizzie Pannili, uh, excuse me," Biden said and winced. "Pannell, and uh, what am I doing here?" he said. [...] "I’m going to lose track here," he added.

Prior to his day trip, he was not wrapping up a good week.  Few Houston journalists noticed or cared, apparently.  No inquiries were made -- or if they were, left out of the reporting.


Fuck it, I guess (right?).  Texas has bigger problems (right?).


Yes we do.


Kuff would like you to be more mad at the Public Utility Commission.  Socratic Gadfly offers his suggestions for people to fill those vacant "unaffiliated" board positions on ERCOT.  And whatever we're calling the winter storm and subsequent blackout, it's true that as bad as we all had it, the least among us had it worse.


A total of 509,206 people were still impacted by boil water notices as of Sunday night, with 458 boil water notices in effect, according to the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality (TCEQ).

San Angeloans had already been boiling water for a couple of weeks prior to the Big Freeze, as documented all over.  The Texas Living Waters Project urges the Lege to use this session to address the long-running water infrastructure challenges laid bare by Winter Storm Uri.


The death toll in Houston so far is 51.  In Austin, 86.  The full tally may not be known for weeks. Environmentally, we all got crushed again.


Should I mention all of this as just the usual failure of Texas Republicans, Texas government generally ... or is it is a failure of capitalism?


What do you think it is ... if it's not?


It's not all bad news.  Some people out of state even stepped up to help.


And those plumbers from New Jersey, who've decided to stay in Houston awhile, plumbers being the people most needed right now.

Citrus farmers in the RGV, also devastated.  We're beginning the 15th month of 2020, it seems, even as the outlook for the pandemic brightens.


Dos Centavos tells us about his successful vaccination experience. And Robert Rivard for the San Antonio Report is firm about the need to continue taking the pandemic seriously.

Too long today to include election news, social justice/injustices, and all the rest of the usual Wrangling, so I'll add that tomorrow or later in the week.  Here's our wrap.

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Sunday, February 28, 2021

Sunday "Party Unity" Funnies

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Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Welcome, Joe Biden, to Texas. Here's a Round-up just for you.


I know you've been a little busy, Mr. President, and I don't want you to get the wrong impression; your sycophants are doing just fine in that regard.  You have, once again, a grand opportunity here in the Deep-In-The-Hearta to "build back better", not to mention bluer, and if you flunk this one, we'll all have that strong Republican Party you and Nancy Pelosi keep saying you want -- in Texas, and all across the country -- two years from now, and for another ten years or so after that.

Try not to fuck it up by making more promises you won't keep or telling outright lies about the amount of aid you say you will provide.

Speaking of grand deceptions ...
“If all consumers don’t benefit from this, we will have wasted our time and failed our constituency,” then-state Sen. David Sibley, a key author of the bill to deregulate the market, said when the switch was first unveiled in 1999. “Competition in the electric industry will benefit Texans by reducing monthly rates,” then-Gov. George W. Bush said later that year.


Here's the deal, though: we complain about these assholes when they're not working, and then we complain about them when they are.


In fairness, they know they're going to be busting their guts all summer in special session on redistricting, so they might as well take long weekends -- you know, the five-day kind, from Thursday through Monday -- every week until May.  They always cram all their work into a few late-night skull sessions anyway, and besides the job pays shit.  It's always been about the bennies, and Borris Miles will be the first one to tell you that chasing skirts around the Pink Dome ain't what it used to be.

Yeah, life is tough all over, especially for those ERCOT folks -- most of whom didn't live here anyway -- who just cut and ran away from their jobs.


Then again, it's not like they went to Utah last week.  Or Cancun.


You think any of those CEOs who live in California are having second thoughts about relocating their companies to Texas?


For me, the question used to come down to, "Why can't the Democrats in Texas figure out how to beat the worst Republicans in the nation?"  Looks like they're finally figuring out that they're worthless.


(Don't miss Kuffner's predictably saccharine take on this.)

Need mo' background on the Lone Star Epic Fails? Don't see ^there^, see here.

The TexTrib and ProPublica collaborated on the story about how the state repeatedly choked in protecting the grid from extreme weather.  Greg Palast emphasized that this all began when we got collectively "Lay'd" in the '90's by W. Bush.  Scott Braddock retweeted Mike Hixenbough's point about the Texas Railroad Commission escaping scrutiny regarding the frozen oil and gas pipeline infrastructure.  And Brad Friedman spoke to TSU professor Robert Bullard about the crisis.

"Texas prides itself on being the Lone Star State," (Bullard says). "But this severe weather event and the power outages and loss of water has shown us that we are the ALONE Star State. Our energy policy of 'go it alone', keep the federal government out, doesn't make any sense. And it's never made any sense. We need to rejoin the United States [and] rejoin the grid."

Of all the cartoonists I read -- and I read a lot -- the most consistently ironic is the conservative Ben Garrison.  There is a cottage industry that's sprung up around mocking out his cluelessness.


Yes, those damned windmills.  First they caused cancer, then they froze up (not in places like Norway or the Antarctic, but in West Texas), and now launching strikes on tanker trucks and bomb trains.


I'll have more on COVID, social injustices, whatever Biden says or does (or doesn't) later in the week. Here's a few giggles at Ted Cruz's expense.

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Monday, February 22, 2021

Warming Up Round-up from Far Left Texas



As frozen Texas reel(ed) under one of the worst electricity outages in U.S. history, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott blamed grid operators and iced-over wind turbines but gone easier on another culprit: an oil and gas industry that is the state's dominant business and his biggest political contributor.

And as the toll deepened (last) Friday from a week of historic winter storms, which have killed more than 20 people in Texas, the dogpiling on a power grid that is proudly isolated from the rest of the country ignores warnings known by the state's GOP leaders for years.

Not the AP story you'd typically read in the Odessa American.

Abbott's slathering of blame for this week's electrical outages solely on the operator of Texas' power grid is both misdirected and coming a decade too late, say critics familiar with the state's utility systems.

[...]

“What happened is absolutely unacceptable and can never be replicated again,” he said.

But critics point out that this week's rolling blackouts were themselves a repeat of a 2011 incident in which freezing temperatures played havoc with the state's grid.

One thing before we return to moronic Texas Republicans.


ERCOT has indeed been referred to as the 'traffic cop', so I suppose that makes the state's Public Utility Commission 'internal affairs'.  ACA still B. Abbott appoints the three members of the PUC.  Begin the investigation there.


And so we leave the CanCruz snark behind and focus on the problem-solving.


Kuff worries that Republicans in the Lege are determined to learn all the wrong lessons from the freeze and the blackouts it caused.  Socratic Gadfly offers his take on some of the issues in The Great Texas Freezeout of 2021 with a sports metaphor: "Nature Bats Last 1, Texas Exceptionalism 0."  Andrew Exum at The Atlantic reveals the difference between performative governance and actually governing.  Speaking of:


There were lots of heroes all over the Great State.


The Great Freeze caused our refineries and chemical plants to shut down, but that didn't stop them from spewing pollution and climate-change elements into the air.

To prevent damage to their processing units due to the shutdowns, refineries flared, or burned (feedstock that would have been refined under typical operating conditions), releasing gases, Reuters reported.

The five largest refiners emitted nearly 337,000 pounds of pollutants, according preliminary data supplied to the Texas Commission on Environment Quality (TCEQ).

[...]

Exxon’s Baytown Olefins Plant emitted nearly a ton of benzene and 68,000 tons of carbon monoxide, with the company blaming the halting of “multiple process units and safe utilization of the flare system.” It said the shutdown was due to loss of utilities, including third-party natural gas supply, and the icy weather.

Meanwhile, Valero Energy Corp said in its filing to TCEQ that the Port Arthur refinery released 78,000 pounds over 24 hours beginning last Monday. It also cited the winter storm and interruptions in utility services.

Oil refineries in Texas have also suffered widespread damage due to the brutal cold and are expected to be down for weeks of repairs. Companies in the oil industry have warned customers that they won’t be able to meet deliveries under contract, Bloomberg noted.

Not going any longer today with the bad news.  Biden's coming this week; maybe someone will ask him why only 77 counties have been approved for FEMA relief.  There will be a blog post about that and everything else that unfolds in the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri.

To close today: another Black History Month memory.

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Sunday, February 21, 2021

Sunday Cancun Ted Funnies



More, just a couple of days ago, here. Ted showed too much of his ass this past week.

*      *      *

Nick Anderson, who founded Counterpoint, was interviewed by Houstonia Magazine about his cartooning career post-newspapers: "(A)rtists from all political leanings are providing takes on today’s biggest headlines as contributors. Of the 18 satirists, ten -- like Anderson -- saw their jobs cut. It’s too soon to know if Counterpoint will hit it big (at the moment it has more than 170,000 subscribers), but if it does this could be a way to ensure that his art form doesn’t just die out."

Please support their work if you possibly can.
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Saturday, February 20, 2021

Wrangling the Texas Leftists



It's going to take more than the incompetence, hubris, and by now-normalized sociopathy from Texas Republicans to make this happen beyond the meteorological.  Sorry, Michelle.

There's been so much calamity over the past week that my efforts to document it via Tweet feed collapsed.  I don't think that Katrina -- or even COVID-19 -- will match the Presidents Day Frozepocalypse in historical ramifications.  (There's always the next disaster.)  All of us suffered in large measure, if not quite equally.  When the power goes out for days, and then the water has to be boiled for several more days -- affecting everyone, including the wealthiest among us -- then I'm reminded of the hardscrabble lives of my ancestors just a couple of generations back.  Shivering under blankets by the fire, shitting into a hole in the ground, eating cold food.  Never mind the summers without a/c.

(Digression: Mine was the first generation of Dorrells not born on the farm.  Not the first that was college-educated; that distinction belongs to my mother's side of the family and my great aunt, who earned her doctorate in the 1930's.)

Rather than try to catch up, here's some of the highlights.

CancunTed (pronounce that in a couple of ways) decided his act of contrition needed to be performed on Fox News.


This is what Ali Velshi calls 'natural gaslighting'.  AOC shows us what "doing everything we can" actually looks like.


Greg Abbott's miscues, similarly, fell into both 'words' and 'deeds' categories.


John Cornyn, Ken Paxton, and Dan Patrick seemed to understand that saying or doing anything might not be the wisest course, and they hunkered down somewhere.  Not former governor and Trump energy secretary Rick Perry, though.


Bullying and mocking these jerks on social media is fun, but have you tried taking real action?


Beto and the Castros are also helping out, but so far not running for anything.  I'll be voting Green everywhere I can, and that includes Delilah for Texas.  David Collins has the interview.




And among other Texas cities, San Antonio is holding municipal elections this year and has a Green standing for mayor.


And here's the TPA wrangle, unsorted.

Socratic Gadfly, for Lincoln's Birthday and Black History Month, looked critically at two new history books that try to make Lincoln into St. Abraham of Lincoln in one particular area.  Kuff considered the possibility of appellate court redistricting in this legislative session.  Rick Casey at the San Antonio Report connected the Capitol insurrection and the Republican push for voting restrictions to the Big Lie of voter fraud.  The Great God Pan Is Dead brought us a little D.H. Lawrence.  Paradise in Hell let us in on the secret of the most affordable city in America.  And Andrea Zelinski, now writing for Texas Monthly, tried to make sense of Texas secessionists.

Closing out the week with some laughs.

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Thursday, February 18, 2021

Thursday Texas Frozen Toons

Paraphrasing the little old lady at the beauty shop: "Because they won't wait for Sunday".




Still got a regular Wrangle in the chute (though it will have to be titled "Lone Star Round-up" by now).
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Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Texas Power Outrages


As if he doesn't know who might be responsible.


They had a couple of weeks to prepare. They could have gotten some de-icing materials from one of the state's airports. Somebody fell down on the job, and millions of Texans are suffering and at least ten in Houston alone have died.


No foresight. No 'thinking ahead'. No preparation for a 'rainy day'.


All of this incompetence ought to be bad enough to provoke some resignations, but of course we know that our Grand Old Politicos are more interested in scoring points on Twitter than they are in actually governing.


Ending this with some levity, such as it is. Still more Wrangling to come.

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