Scattershooting things beside the upcoming city elections

After we note another pair of disasters at the Harris County Jail this week.

The Harris County Sheriff's Office announced that a jailer died after an altercation with an inmate early Thursday morning. And during an afternoon press conference Sheriff Ron Hickman called to take questions on how exactly this happened, he could answer virtually none of them.

Here's what Hickman did manage to say: At 4 a.m. Thursday, three Harris County jailers were transferring an inmate from recreation to his general population cell when the inmate became non-compliant and physically combative, leading one jailer to deploy his pepper spray.

But as for why detention officer Tronoski Jones collapsed moments later in the hallway and died, Hickman said he doesn't know—Hickman wouldn't speculate, at least not until they have more information from the medical examiner.

Hickman also said he doesn't know whether the inmate actually did anything to contribute to or cause Jones's death, or if the inmate even delivered any kind of blow at all—Jones did not have any outward injuries. As for why or how the struggle between the inmate and jailers escalated, Hickman said he did not know at this time. When asked if there was video of the incident, Hickman again said he didn't know.

Among other unanswered questions: Was it unusual for an inmate to be at recreation at 4 in the morning?  “I've been here for 90 days,” Hickman answered. “What do I know?”

Good on him.  At least he isn't blaming former sheriff Adrian Garcia, like I would.

At 9 p.m. Tuesday, spokesman Thomas Gilliland said two detention officers were yelling at each other when one of them, Carlton Bernard Freeney, pulled a knife. Gilliland says Freeney slashed the other jailer, whose identity has not been released, right above his left elbow.

Medical staff checked out the injured jailer, who didn't need to be hospitalized. Freeney, on the other hand, was detained and took a quick trip to, well, jail. He was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon (Gilliland said officers can carry knives up to 2 inches long). 

Other than to type "jailers get in fight with pocket knives", I got nothing.  Moving on...

-- Did you feel the summer heat was more than its usual oppressive last month?  Yeah, you weren't alone in feeling that way.  July was only the hottest month in the history of the world.  We seem to be back in our tropical mode here again in Houston, after the six-week drought that burned up a lot of the grass my lawn had grown for the first time in places.  And barely any hurricanes to speak of in the actual tropics.  Weird.

-- Hillary Clinton's email problems are weighing her down.  Congress critters are getting nervous.  It's just a Chinese water torture of some new revelation every single day.  She's now polling behind some of the Republican front-runners in three swing states.  Drip, drip, drip.  Are you ready for another fourteen-and-a-half months of watching her ship slowly list and then slip beneath the waves?  How could she blow such a sure thing?  All the Clinton supporters I know have stopped attacking Bernie Sanders and curled themselves up in a ball on the floor, moaning.

I can't take as much joy in this development as I would like, considering the fact that these people are going to be insufferable if she can't close the deal again.  Far too many of them are the type of Democrat who would vote for Bush before they would vote for Bernie Sanders.

-- Ashley Madison hacked.  Josh Duggar again.  That guy needs saltpeter (even if that is just an urban legend).  Then there's the hundreds of government workers, many with high-security clearances, who also got busted.

Hundreds of U.S. government employees — including some with sensitive jobs in the White House, Congress and law enforcement agencies — used Internet connections in their federal offices to access and pay membership fees to the cheating website Ashley Madison, The Associated Press has learned.

The AP traced many of the accounts exposed by hackers back to federal workers. They included at least two assistant U.S. attorneys; an information technology administrator in the Executive Office of the President; a division chief, an investigator and a trial attorney in the Justice Department; a government hacker at the Homeland Security Department and another DHS employee who indicated he worked on a U.S. counterterrorism response team.

Few actually paid for their services with their government email accounts. But AP traced their government Internet connections — logged by the website over five years — and reviewed their credit-card transactions to identify them. They included workers at more than two dozen Obama administration agencies, including the departments of State, Defense, Justice, Energy, Treasury, Transportation and Homeland Security. Others came from House or Senate computer networks.

Some of them used pre-paid credit cards to try to hide the transactions from their spouses, but still logged on at work.  No need to be worried about people being black-mailed, though.

"I was doing some things I shouldn't have been doing," a Justice Department investigator told the AP. Asked about the threat of blackmail, the investigator said if prompted he would reveal his actions to his family and employer to prevent it. "I've worked too hard all my life to be a victim of blackmail. That wouldn't happen," he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was deeply embarrassed and not authorized by the government to speak to reporters using his name.

Not quite hard enough, by all appearances.

-- I'm already tired of blogging about other people's inappropriate sexual proclivities (irrespective of the fact they got hacked, which is the real crime), but then there's Jared Fogle.  The news to which I am not linking, either.  Hold the gyro-sandwich-size jokes along with the mayo, please.  If they will hurry up and arrest Duggar, there's a bunk right next to Fogle available.  Maybe they can go to counseling together.

The only thing I'll say is that you have a lot to look forward to on Sunday in the Funnies, because the cartoonists are swarming like flies.

Bell: Garcia must answer for jail atrocities

Groogan at Fox, essentially the only reporter covering the city elections that's asking the tough questions.

Six fired, 29 suspended - the April bloodbath at the Harris County Jail put yet another dent in Sheriff Adrian Garcia's reputation as an effective administrator of the nation's third largest jail.

The mass terminations and punishment capped a seven year tenure riddled with jail related controversy - officers having sex with inmates, inmates raping other inmates and inmates dying after confrontations with jailers. In the minds of many, it just never seemed to get better. For mayoral candidate Garcia, management of the troubled jail looms as a potentially damaging portion of an otherwise solid resume.

In terms of political liability, Fox 26 asked University of Houston political analyst Brandon Rottinghaus to rate Garcia's jail house problems on a scale of one to ten.

"I'd rank this as a seven, rising perhaps to a nine if the issue becomes more pointed from the other candidates," said Rottinghaus.

That's because reforming the jail was arguably the biggest challenge in Garcia's career and consequently a measure of his ability to handle the city's most stubborn problems.

 "The reason is, if it happens multiple times and there is a cascade effect than it starts to look like a pattern that wasn't solved," said Rottinghaus.

It falls to Chris Bell, alone among mayoral hopefuls, to call out the former sheriff.

"He has to answer for the mistakes he made as sheriff and some of those were pretty serious mistakes that are going to cause a lot of people to question whether he really has the leadership skills to serve as the mayor of the 4th largest city," said Bel, adding, "You can't run a jail that way and you can't run a city that way."

In response to the criticism, Garcia offered Fox 26 the following statement:

"I always took responsibility and action for problems that occurred within the HCSO, disciplining or firing those responsible.  All of them were disappointing and some infuriated me.  I always faced the citizens to let them know how we were learning from each, correcting them and moving forward.  I took responsibility for any system failure that occurred during my administration.  And, we placed policies in place to keep them from happening again. This is the type of decisive and accountable leadership Houstonians want for our city."

It's nice that he took responsibility and all, but an effective sheriff would not have allowed things like this to happen in the first place, and would have moved faster to fix them, and put some measures in place to prevent other things like them from happening again.  That's the point here.

There's also these two wretched events.

A Spring woman claims sheriff's deputies violated constitutional protections by conducting a body cavity search on the concrete of a Texaco gas station parking lot during a routine traffic stop in late June.

Charnesia Corley, a 21-year-old African American, was driving in northern Harris County around 10:30 p.m. on June 21 when a male deputy pulled her over for allegedly running a stop sign. He said he smelled marijuana, handcuffed Corley, put her in his vehicle and searched her car for almost an hour. He didn't find any pot, according to her attorney, Sam Cammack.

Returning to his car where Corley was held, the deputy again said he smelled marijuana and called in a female deputy to conduct a cavity search. When the female deputy arrived, she told Corley to pull her pants down, but Corley protested because she was cuffed and had no underwear on. The deputy ordered Corley to bend over, pulled down her pants and began to search her.

Then, according to Cammack, Corley stood up and protested, so the deputy threw her to the ground and restrained her while another female was called in to assist. When backup arrived, each deputy held one of Corley's legs apart to conduct the probe.

"What these officers did out there at the Texaco station was unconscionable. I've worked many big cases and I've never seen that," said Cammack, who plans to sue the Harris County Sheriff's Office in federal court.

Garcia resigned in early May, so technically this incident didn't happen while he was sheriff.  But if you think the culture of the Harris County Sheriff's Office took a turn for the better two months after he left, then you've been smoking some of Ms. Corley's stash from the evidence room.  Sadly, for the lives of six children and two adults, sheriff's deputies topped that.

Earl Yanske heard early Saturday morning that his sister's ex-boyfriend was at her house, armed and angry.

Relatives called the Harris County's Sheriff's Office, asking them to go by the house in northwest Harris County to see if she was OK.

Hours passed.

Sick with worry and stuck in Montana, Yanske dialed David Ray Conley's cell phone number. He didn't pick up. His sister, Valerie Jackson, had two children with Conley, but feared him. She'd taken him back over the years, even after telling police he'd cut her and wrapping an electrical cord around her baby's neck. She'd changed the locks in July, after telling deputies he went after her 10-year-old with a belt.

Around 11 p.m., Yanske's cell phone rang. It was Conley.

"I need to ask you a question," Yanske said. "Did you kill my sister?"

Conley's voice was flat.

"He said, 'Yes I did.' It was like me asking if he went to the grocery store and he said, 'Yeah.' There was totally no emotion in his voice."

Conley, 48, surrendered to sheriff's deputies late Saturday night after a standoff outside the three-bedroom house on Falling Oaks. Authorities said he had broken in through a window, armed and with handcuffs, and methodically shot Valerie Jackson, her husband and six children, including his own son, one by one in the head. All eight died in the house.

Given the couple's history, Yanske said "they should have kicked down that door instantly. "

Chief Deputy Tim Cannon said deputies went to the house three times Saturday, starting in the morning.

Nothing was amiss. They came back in the afternoon. "They did not have enough information at that time to make a forced entry," he said.

On the last check around 9 p.m., they spotted a body through a window. Three officers and a sergeant tried to go inside, but Conley allegedly shot at them.

Conley was charged Sunday with multiple counts of capital murder and held without bail. Authorities identified the dead as Jonah Jackson, 6; Trinity Jackson, 7; Caleb Jackson, 9; Dwayne Jackson Jr., 10; Honesty Jackson, 11; Nathaniel Conley, 13; and Dwayne Jackson, 50.

My emphasis in bold above, to highlight Nick Anderson's cartoon with respect to what constitutes the appropriate time and circumstances for LEO to conduct a 'forcible entry'.  This tragedy also occurred after Garcia left the department, but the long-term failures of both the county's police officers and the CPS division (the latter outside the sheriff's purview, to be fair) is readily apparent.  And nobody's asking the greenhorn who moved in after Garcia moved out, Sheriff Ron Hickman, WTF happened in these two instances, either.  And if they did, he'd be sure to blame it on Garcia as well.

I have my beefs with Garcia as someone I believe is both intellectually in the slow lane and whose record as an executive demonstrates both neglect and cruelty.  Excerpting myself...

(Garcia) seems to be ambling toward the runoff as the most likable -- or least offensive -- dimwit in the race.  So far he is Teflon-coated.  Almost nobody has mentioned his lack of college degree, a la Scott Walker ... (nor his) failing the HPD sergeant's exam more than once, never having been promoted in his 23 years in the city's police department.  I have called him out numerous times: on his ugly record on deportations, his no-bid consultant scandal, his lousy responses to the county jail disaster, and even his whining about the personnel changes his Republican successor at the Sheriff's Office made after Garcia quit that job.

And if only one person in the media -- and one of his competitors -- is willing to get at how these things became commonplace in Garcia's tenure as top county cop, then we have a bigger problem than rogue, stupid sheriff's deputies.  But let's not blame the media for falling down on the job before the fact.  Let's put the accountability for these atrocities where it lies: at the feet of the former county sheriff, Adrian Garcia.

I can't vote for him even if makes the mayoral runoff against Ben Hall.  That's the definition of the lesser of two evils personified right there.  I'll have to pass on that race.

And I hope Chris Bell and Sylvester Turner are doing everything they can so that none of us have to make that choice in December.

Two adverse developments for HERO

First:

The Texas Supreme Court has ordered city officials to reword the ballot language for the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, stating in a Wednesday ruling that the current language incorrectly calls for a vote on the repeal of the law, rather than the law itself.

"The City Council is directed to word the proposition such that voters will vote directly for or against the ordinance," the court ruled.

It's an enormous victory for semantics, and Houston attorney Andy Taylor, who's led the anti-anti-discrimination charge (how's that for proper wording?) states in a press release that "Once again, the highest court in this state has delivered a message to the Mayor to stop abusing her authority. It's time to stop the games that are wasting taxpayers' money." And if there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that a lawsuit over hair-splitting sentence structure is a judicious use of taxpayers' money.

That's bad enough, but then there's this:

Within the walls of Mt. Hebron Missionary Baptist church against the backdrop of a Houston Equal Rights Ordinance many consider morally offensive, mayoral candidate Ben Hall welcomed the wholehearted support of African American ministers representing dozens of congregations.

"An end has come to open warfare between the Mayor's office and the church. I invite you gladly, to have and assume your right position in the leadership of this great city," said Hall to members of the Baptist Ministers Association, representing more than 300 congregations.

The pastors say they're backing Hall because he backed them in the battle to allow the HERO ordinance be decided by the City's voters.

"When others ridiculed us. When no one thought we would stand for what was right in the eyesight of God, it was this man, this preacher, this candidate who stood with us and did not care if it cost him his candidacy," said Rev. Max Miller, President of the BMA.

This is a seriously hard couple of shots against tolerance in Houston.

As I feared, Hall is gathering both Republican extremists and black conservatives in a bid to make the runoff against the liberal front-runner.  Mark Jones at Rice finally gets one right.

"The HERO ruling was manna from heaven for Ben Hall and took a campaign that really didn't have a strong issue and was fighting for space and constituencies and gave it a ready-made issue to appeal to both Anglo social conservatives and to African American social conservatives," said Jones.

[...]

Jones says if history is a guide, about a third of the ballots cast in the November city election will be by black voters. He says a candidate who earns 18 to 20 percent could earn a runoff spot.

I'll revisit my prediction: if the election were held today, you'd have Ben Hall and Adrian Garcia in a December duel for mayor of Houston, a result similar to San Antonio's earlier this year.  Sylvester Turner, with all of his endorsements, money, and powerful friends could still get there, of course, and would certainly be the preferred option over Garcia.  But candidly it's difficult to see such a small number of voters as Houston normally turns out for muni elections sending two black men into the final round.

There are still openings for the most liberal and the most conservative Caucasians, Chris Bell and Bill King, but ground game and future developments have to favor them more than they have up to this point.

About that HGLBT Caucus endorsement

So a week from last Saturday, as everybody who cares knows by now, the city's most powerful political constituency made its endorsements for the Houston municipal and county educational elections, coming up fast on the fall calendar.  Several other groups -- the DFA folks, the Tejanos, the Stonewalls, and others I am sure to be leaving out -- followed their lead for the most part.

Sylvester Turner, as Charles has noted, swept the so-called "progressive" endorsers, and Adrian Garcia secured his demographic identity caucus nod.

For this post, let's focus on the HGLBT Caucus, which all involved can agree carries the most weight in muni elections.  It's not disputable that they can throw their bulk around pretty effectively.  And they will need every ounce of it, and all the heavy help they can get, to once again turn back the Christian soldiers who have already gone Godwin on them, the mayor they elected thrice, and her signature accomplishment in office: the city's equal rights ordinance.

The Caucus (as it is known, sort of like The Donald) has beseeched Beyonce' Knowles via Twitter hashtag -- to no avail as yet -- to join their fight.  A few of its members have even signed my petition to kick the NFL and its league championship out of town in 2017 if the referendum on November's ballot fails.  In a crafty move, the ballot language -- being contested in court, as has everything associated with HERO -- is counter-intuitive; a 'no' vote upholds the ordinance, a 'yes' one repeals it.

The battle has begun; make sure you have your remote ready to change the channel when the teevee commercials come on, and reset your ad-blocking software to max for online exclusion (unless you just like getting paint-balled to death with advertising).

So we're up to speed on the latest.  Now, about that endorsement for mayor...

We already knew that Sylvester Turner purchased at least 76 memberships before the deadline in order for whomever they were intended to be able to vote at the Caucus endorsement meeting.  We know that Turner's consultant, Sue Davis, brushed it off as "something that's done every year".  (The Tejanos, for the record, do the same thing; the DFA has a small membership group and its executive committee makes the endorsements.  I have no idea how the process works for the Stonewalls.)  A handful of present and past officers of the Caucus even weighed in and said they had never seen an endorsement that was tilted by this "pay-to-play" mechanism in the recent past history of Caucus endorsements.

Well, they can't say that any longer, because Turner won by a count of 142-85... a margin of 57 votes.

These "endorsement membership drives" are an important part of these clubs' overall fundraising.  For its part, the Caucus also has its own PAC, and is hosting a fundraiser for it to "honor" its endorsees next week.

It might be valuable to go back to the top and click on the links for the groups mentioned in the first paragraph, where you will note that the same names of people are repetitively mentioned in the organizations doing the endorsing... of the same names over and over again of the people running for office.

So let's review.

If a mayoral candidate buys enough memberships in the Caucus to "democratically" earn its endorsement, and then gets feted by the Caucus at a PAC fundraiser, is he really a 'man of the people'?  Or just a very small, select group of people?  Let's only consider this instance of how the Caucus endorses, evaluating funds raised as an element of 'viability' scoring.  I know it's hard, but for a moment ignore the influence this might have in the outcome of the general election or the runoff.

If all that is accurate, then the election of Houston municipal officeholders is not in fact democratic at all, but oligarchic.  Or it might be plutocratic, since so much money is involved in the buying and selling -- and even in fundraising as a viability quotient -- of endorsements for public office.

Keep in mind that this bad business is not, of course, limited to Houston and its candidates for City Hall, and most certainly not limited to socially liberal Democrats and Republicans.  The same thing goes on for those who go to Austin and Washington to represent "us", when they're really only representing a very small number of people, almost all of whom can write their campaigns large checks.

We know we have big problems with too much money in our politics, but some people seem to think it's OK if "our people" win.  That's exactly what the other side thinks as well.  Now do we understand better why so many people who don't vote at all say that 'both parties do it"?  That both parties are the same?

And as Noah commented here, if Turner is "100% in" the runoff... as the candidate of the oligarchy/plutocracy, does he still meet the definition of 'progressive"?

That would be 'no', and it's not counter-intuitive.

My brother Neil communicates this with more brevity than I can muster, and for something tangential and fabulously entertaining, read Michelle Risher's screed at a certain scorned-for-endorsement council candidate.

Scenes from tonight's Meyerland mayoral forum *Updates*

A very large crowd -- perhaps one thousand -- gathered at Lovett Elementary this evening to hear the six seven candidates for Houston mayor talk about infrastructure, specifically the concerns of some of the locals about the area's severe Memorial Day flooding, and the potholes and pensions whining from the usual suspects.  Bill King also got in a rant about the city's debt obligations.  Several took shots at Steve Costello's Rebuild Houston.  Since I arrived late, there may have been other topics covered that I missed, but nothing about HERO while I was there.

Media was well-represented.

Best literature for the public I've seen.

L-R: Marty McVey, Adrian Garcia, King, Ben Hall, Chris Bell, Costello, Sylvester Turner.

Far left: Former Council Member Anne Clutterbuck, who served as moderator. Some Tweets...

At #meyerland mayoral forum.If youre concerned about #Houston flooding and drainage, you probably should watch this. pic.twitter.com/QOfAdaTiYX

— NobisNews (@NobisNews) August 18, 2015

Outline by #projectbrays showing bayou at the center of tonight's mayoral forum on #flooding #houmayor pic.twitter.com/VVk0RwijHB

— Katie McCall Fox 26 (@KatieMcCallTV) August 17, 2015

I haven't forgotten the damage the Memorial Day flood caused us. https://t.co/0uKsTyx9KY #houvote #meyerland #flood

— Chris Bell (@ChrisBell2015) August 16, 2015

I'll follow later with the media accounts in an update.

Updates: From Click 2 Houston with the best video, and Fox 26 (good video but leads with the two worst conservatives in the race, as you would expect from Fox) with the best reporting in the written word.

They certainly don't agree on who should be the next mayor of Houston, but several of the mayoral hopefuls who attended a forum in the flood-ravaged Meyerland area, and other neighborhoods along Brays Bayou, have put out some of their thoughts about what went wrong, and how to fix it.

The most popular answer: complete Project Brays.  The (infrastructure program) run by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Harris County Flood Control District isn't a city project.  So what is a mayor to do?  Lobby for the federal dollars.

State Rep. Sylvester Turner says: "If given the opportunity I would love to work with the Congressional delegation to see if we can speed up that timeline. If we're able to do that, that would make a significant difference."

The project was started in 1994, and received significant updates in the early 2000s.  But its estimated completion year is 2020, about 8 years behind schedule. Turner's sentiments were echoed by Bill King, Stephen Costello, and former Congressman Chris Bell.

Bell also said ReBuild Houston, a city-funded project which was supposed to make drainage better, failed: "It made some areas worse." Adrian Garcia added: "Whatever it is doing, we need to make sure that ReBuild Houston is doing for this neighborhood what it is doing for others."  Garcia also said high water rescue vehicles and alert systems could have saved the lives of some of the 8 flood-related victims.

Attorney Ben Hall said a storm water management and road tunnel system used in Malaysia has practical applications for Houston.  "Once the glass is full, it's going to overflow but if you have two glasses, or a saucer underneath then you have capacity and less flooding."

Hall out-dumbed Garcia for the title here.  Somebody tell "Adrain" that Houston and Harris County already have a plethora of alert systems -- for missing children, missing seniors, traffic congestion, text messaging services for the public to notify them of severe weather conditions, etc.  They don't need another, and they don't need urban assault vehicles driving through high water, pushing it into homes on flooded streets.

Hall's glass is just half empty.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance wishes former President Carter all the best for a speedy and complete recovery...

...and sends condolences to the friends and family of Julian Bond...

...as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff reports on another Voting Rights Act lawsuit, this one filed on behalf of low English proficiency voters who have been denied the ability to bring a translator of their choice to the ballot box with them.

For a time, many Houstonians considered it a point of pride that the city repealed the use of red light cameras in 2010. But as Texas Leftist has recently discovered, a Houston without camera accountability has become much more dangerous for all transit users... even deadly.

Not a trace of irony has been found to be present in the recent pronouncements of a certain Democratic so-called frontrunner for the 2016 presidential nomination. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs -- with an assist from the biting cartoons of Ted Rall -- illustrates some of the things making Clintonites so nervous of late, none of which have anything to do with e-mail servers or sagging poll numbers.

Socratic Gadfly runs Kinky Friedman's old Five Mexican Generals border control plan through a Donald Trump filter, just for a bit of fun.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is sorry to say Nueces County thinks a husband can kill his wife's lover with impunity. Stand your ground just the way a Republican likes it. Your wife is your property.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson knows there is so much Texas could do for those in need, but our GOP state leaders choose to do nothing. As a consequence, only Texas remains above the 20% uninsured rate.

Neil at All People Have Value asserted that the nine bikers shot dead in Waco this past May could have been wrongly killed. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

And in a notable reversal of the industry trend, the Lewisville Texan Journal goes from blog to weekly newspaper.  Don't worry; you can still find them online.

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

The Makeshift Academic reviews the landscape in Texas on the Affordable Care Act.

Nancy Sims considers the value of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus' mayoral endorsement.

The Houston Justice Coalition calls for an investigation into the actions of three sheriff’s deputies who forcibly conducted an illegal body cavity search publicly on a woman in Harris County.

Scott Braddock knows the real reason why Ken Paxton is still in office.

The Texas Living Waters Project reminds us that the best time to plan for a drought is when you're not in one.

TransGriot covers the first HERO grassroots activist training meeting over the weekend.

Grits for Breakfast catches us up on criminal justice reform news.

Texas Watch talks to a food safety attorney about Blue Bell's listeria problems and the long road back to the public's good graces.

Trail Blazers has the riveting story of former Dallas mayor and US trade ambassador Ron Kirk playing golf with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Vernon Jordan at Martha's Vineyard.

Finally, via Sayfie Texas Review, the Austin American Statesman reports on the district court ruling against the state's Medicaid regulators.

Sunday Funnies

Not a trace of irony

"No one wants their private e-mails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy." -- Hillary Clinton, quoted in the New York Times, March 10, 2015

Ted Rall, a couple of days later (just before the NSA was forced by court order to stop reading everybody's e-mail, or so we believed):

Update: More on Clinton's laughable hypocrisy on the sanctity of the protection of classified emails.

It turns out that at least two of the emails which traversed Hillary Clinton’s personal email account and server were “top secret,” according to the inspector general for the Intelligence Community as reported by McClatchy. To describe that as reckless is an understatement given that, as AP notes, “There is no evidence she used encryption to shield the emails or her personal server from foreign intelligence services or other potentially prying eyes.” The FBI has now taken possession of that server.

When it comes to low-level government employees with no power, the Obama administration has purposely prosecuted them as harshly as possible to the point of vindictiveness: It has notoriously prosecuted more individuals under the Espionage Act of 1917 for improperly handling classified information than all previous administrations combined. 

It's not just Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden.  Next...

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.” -- Clinton, at the 2008 AIPAC convention

Just days before Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran...

“I so hope we are able to get a deal next week that puts the lid on Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” she said. “Even if we do get such a deal, we will still have major problems from Iran. They are the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism. They use proxies like Hezbollah to sow discord and create insurgencies to destabilize governments. They are taking more and more control of a number of nations in the region, and they pose an existential threat to Israel.” -- Clinton, from Politico on July 3, 2015

Ted Rall again:

Peter Beinart:

In his book "Unthinkable", the Brookings Institution’s Kenneth Pollack notes that although Iran likely has biological weapons, it has not given them to Hezbollah. In 1982, when Lebanese Shia leaders asked Iran to send troops to repel Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, refused. In 1996, Iran pressured Hezbollah to agree to a ceasefire with Israel. And as Trita Parsi notes in his indispensable book on Iranian-Israeli relations, "Treacherous Alliance", Israel’s then-defense minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, even praised Tehran for its efforts to return Israeli soldiers that Hezbollah had captured. In 2001, according to Parsi, leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad vented frustration that Iran was not offering them greater assistance during the Second Intifada. And in 2003, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iran offered the United States a grand bargain that included an offer to cut ties to Hamas and Islamic Jihad and pressure Hezbollah to shut down its military wing if the United States ended sanctions and restored diplomatic ties.

More recent history of the vastly exaggerated claims of Iran's military threat to Israel or the US or anybody else at that link.  Last...

In a video of a private Clinton speech posted to YouTube (in June of 2013), Clinton told a Canadian audience that she hoped the U.S. would elect a woman to the White House because it would send "exactly the right historical signal" to men, women and children. She said women in politics need to "dare to compete" and the nation needs to "take that leap of faith."

"Let me say this, hypothetically speaking, I really do hope that we have a woman president in my lifetime," Clinton said at a women's conference in Toronto on Thursday night. "And whether it's next time or the next time after that, it really depends on women stepping up and subjecting themselves to the political process, which is very difficult."

The former secretary of state told the cheering audience that she would "certainly vote for the right woman to be president."

Rall:

Hillary Clinton news

She gets some bad and some good.  Good news first.

-- jobsanger is cautioning everybody not to read too much into the numerous and massive public crowds Bernie Sanders is drawing, and read more into early polling.  Here's a poll we'll have to wait to see if Ted makes a bar graph of.

Sanders has eclipsed Clinton by a 44 to 37 percent margin, according to a new Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll that was first reported by the Boston newspaper Tuesday evening.

The previous FPU/Herald poll taken in March had Sanders trailing Clinton 44 to 8.

Ted puts great emphasis on these six-months-out polling figures, blogging the latest one every single night and illustrating them with a bar graph tool.  He's smart enough to understand this is folly, but that doesn't stop him from spinning it out there every 24 hours.  Ted is your confidence man if you're a nervous Hillary supporter.

-- More on the bright side (and the most legitimate reason for not being concerned about Clinton's nomination prospects).

Black Americans view Hillary Clinton far more favorably than they do any other presidential contender, according to a Gallup survey released Monday.

Eighty percent of black adults have a favorable impression of the Democratic front-runner and former secretary of state. Even when taking into account the percentage who view Clinton unfavorably, she still has a 68 percent net favorability rating among black Americans, a group that analysts at the Cook Political Report have called the "overlooked key to 2016."

Charlie Cook is, of course, correct.

Clinton's favorability rating among black Americans eclipses those of the other Democratic hopefuls. The next highest rating belongs to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is running for president as a Democrat and has a net 23 percent favorability rating among black adults. Sanders' relationship with the black community has come under heightened scrutiny since the start of his presidential campaign. Black Lives Matters activists recently shut down a Seattle rally where the senator was scheduled to speak.

For her part, Clinton is attempting to stave off the circumstances Sanders is being forced to endure.  With her campaign appearances devoted to meeting with large donors behind closed doors and no media allowed, and with her Secret Service protection, she isn't likely to be interrupted anyway.  For his part, Sanders has moved quickly and effectively to address this most glaring shortcoming in his appeal to Democratic primary voters.  It just isn't -- won't be -- enough.

As long as BLM is stalking his rallies to disrupt, carried out by false flag operatives, improperly focused, and which they simply could not get away with at any other candidate's rallies, it's going to keep being a problem for him.  And without digressing too far into the whole BLM/Bernie issue, a lot of good analysis can be found here.  The executive summary: BLM says that Sanders and white progressives aren't progressive enough on black social justice.  White progressives taking offense to this (very accurate) criticism are telling BLM protesters and their sympathizers "you're doing it wrong", which pushes the whitesplaining button, and around we go again.

If you would prefer less abstract and more concrete, like an electoral math strategy for Bernie's uphill slog, here you go.  Everything there is too valuable to excerpt; read it all.

Now for the bad news for Clinton.

-- She capitulated to the screamers in Congress and gave up her e-mail server yesterday.  Conservatives are already yelling fire.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign casts her decision to turn over her personal email server to the Justice Department as cooperating with investigators. Her Republican critics suggest that the move and new revelations about classified information points to her malfeasance as secretary of state.

Two emails that traversed Clinton's personal system were subsequently given one of the government's highest classification ratings, a Republican lawmaker said.

Federal investigators have begun looking into the security of Clintons' email setup amid concerns from the inspector general for the intelligence community that classified information may have passed through the system. There is no evidence she used encryption to prevent prying eyes from accessing the emails or her personal server.

[...]

On Tuesday, Clinton attorney David Kendall gave to the Justice Department three thumb drives containing copies of work-related emails sent to and from her personal email addresses via her private server.

Kendall gave the thumb drives, containing copies of roughly 30,000 emails, to the FBI after the agency determined he could not remain in possession of the classified information contained in some of the emails, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. The State Department previously had said it was comfortable with Kendall keeping the emails at his Washington law office.

Also Tuesday, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said two emails that traversed Clinton's personal system were deemed "Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information" — a rating that is among the government's highest classifications. Grassley said the inspector general of the nation's intelligence community had reported the new details about the higher classification to Congress on Tuesday.

This e-mail server thing is going to be a boil on her ass for some time to come.  Hope she's using the right ointment to get rid of it.

Rick Perry's army goes from mercenary to volunteer overnight

This is my favorite fundraising story of the 2016 campaign (and maybe ever).  The lawyers, guns, and money have all moved on.

Updated at 10:32 p.m.: The Rick Perry presidential campaign has stopped paying his staff at the national headquarters in Austin as well as in the early caucus and primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, The Washington Post and The Texas Tribune reported late Monday. The report cited a Republican familiar with the Perry campaign who demanded anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Original post: In a clear sign of financial woes, the Rick Perry presidential campaign is no longer issuing pay checks to his staff in South Carolina.

The development was first reported by the National Journal.

South Carolina state director Katon Dawson told the Journal, “Pay is only one reason people do this. We’ll be able to live off the land for a while.”

The last pay checks were issued two weeks ago, Dawson said.

Once again, our glorious-haired, shaded-by-indictment former governor will be among the early exits in the presidential primary.  He had a good run for a long time, but karma is catching up its ledger with him now.

Update: This piece from the CSM suggests he's going to be abe to hold out a while longer.

In Perry’s case, two wealthy Texans – retired data company founder Darwin Deason and pipeline company executive Kelcy L. Warren – are largely responsible for backing his two super PACs, Opportunity and Freedom and Opportunity and Freedom I, Politico reports. Between them, Mr. Deason and Mr. Warren contributed $11 million of the $12.8 million the two groups raised in the first half of the year.

A third super PAC, created in July, collected another $4 million from a single donor, according to CNN.

“Here are the facts: We have plenty of money to put him in position to finish in the top three or even win Iowa,” (the senior adviser to Perry's super PACs, Mr. Austin) Barbour told the Times.  

So if we indeed have him to kick around some more, that's not all bad, either.

Paxton's federal contempt hearing will not occur

The Statesman says 'canceled', and the Express News says 'postponed'.

Wednesday’s contempt of court hearing for Attorney General Ken Paxton and a state health official was canceled Monday after state officials agreed to allow death certificates to acknowledge same-sex marriages, a lawyer involved in the case said.

The state also agreed to issue new guidelines allowing same-sex couples to be listed as parents on a child’s birth certificate, said Neel Lane, the lawyer for a Conroe man who sued Texas to be listed as the husband on his male spouse’s death certificate.

That's called a second chance, which is something Sandra Bland and a whole lot of other folks of a darker shade of pale have never gotten in their scrapes with criminal justice.

Hold off on the chains and shackles — for now.

This week’s contempt hearing for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and another top official was put on hold Monday after the state agreed to put guidelines in place to try to comply with same-sex marriage rulings.

During a telephone conference, lawyers for the state agreed to have a policy on death certificates ready by Thursday and one in place for birth certificates within two to three days, said Neel Lane, one of the San Antonio lawyers handling the litigation against the state.

U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia told Lane to confer with the state to review the policies and procedures to ensure that they do not discriminate against married same-sex couples. If Lane feels they are not adequate, he should inform Garcia, the judge ordered.

The roach gets away from la chancla again.  This time. More from Kuff.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance thinks that big GOP candidate debate needed more balloon animals and seltzer bottles as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff gives his campaign strategy for defending Houston's Equal Rights Ordinance.  And Texas Leftist reports on the latest lawsuit filed by HERO's opponents.

Harold Cook presents the GOP Presidential Debate Drinking Game, which will come in handy for the next debate, if you ever recover from the first one.  And Dos Centavos wonders if the poll reflecting 25% of Latinos as Trump supporters is really accurate.

Socratic Gadfly looks at the hoo-hah over Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments and his eventual $70,000 salary for employees, and has a mix of cautious applause and skeptical concerns.

A blogger started a petition to have the NFL relocate the 2017 Super Bowl away from Houston if the HERO is defeated by the voters in November. And then a Houston television station picked up the story. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs is in wonderment at how things can snowball -- or go viral, as the kids say these days -- so quickly.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants everyone to know that Texas Republicans are denying birth certificates for Hispanic babies born in Texas.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson sees more GOP mug shots coming this week: That Ken Paxton is Attorney General proves our political system has failed and Wilco DA Jana Duty.

Egberto Willies gathers some responses to critiques of Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matters protesters.

Neil at All People Have Value spent the past week in Chicago and the Chicago area. Neil's blog has interesting pictures of that great American city.

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

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

Texas Clean Air Matters urges state leaders to meet the Clean Power Plan with innovation and not resistance.

The TSTA Blog reminds us that long before he was indicted on felony charges, Ken Paxton was bad news for public education.

Juanita Jean watched the Republicans debate each other and then made the observation that the fellow who spoke the least was voted the winner.  Silence really is golden. And The Rag Blog makes the point that if one of those kooky conservatives manages to get elected, your best investment is body bags.

Ted at jobsanger charts the proof that Planned Parenthood supporters outnumber those who oppose their existence.

Media Matters captures video of Houston LGBT activist Noel Freeman shooting down lies about the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance.  And Moni at Transgriot reported from the scene of the HGLBT Caucus endorsement meeting.

Lone Star Ma celebrates World Breastfeeding Week 2015.

Kevin Walker says Dallas needs a 21st-century blueprint for building a better city.

The Texas Election Law Blog noted the fifty year anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and the conflict and mourning surrounding it.

Rafael McDonnell reports on a training program he attended for LGBTQ people running for political office.

The Houston Justice Coalition lays out its goals for addressing police brutality at the root.

Honorary Texan The Slactkivist advises Texas politicians on the best way to pose for their future mug shot.

And Fascist Dyke Motors made a cool .gif of the inside of her head.

Sanders interrupted by Black Lives Matter protesters again

Way back in June, I said that if Bernie didn't start to attract people of color to his campaign, he was going to be dead in the water as a Democratic primary presidential hopeful.  That was three weeks before the Netroots Nation matter, and trust me when I say that almost nobody was talking about Sanders' troubles reaching people of color prior to Independence Day.

More recent events don't seem to indicate he is making progress.  For the second time in thirty days, he was targeted by Black Lives Matter protesters at a rally in Seattle...where he left before it began.  From the Seattle P-I:

 ...Sanders was just starting to address several thousand people gathered shoulder to shoulder at Westlake Park when two women took over the microphone. Organizers couldn't persuade the two to wait and agreed to give them a few minutes. As Sanders stepped back, the women spoke about Ferguson and the killing of Michael Brown and held a four minute moment of silence.

When the crowd asked the activists to allow Sanders to speak, one activist called the crowd "white supremacist liberals," according to event participants.

After waiting about 20 minutes, Sanders himself was pushed away when he tried to take the microphone back. Instead, he waved goodbye, left the stage with a raised fist salute and waded into the crowd. He shook hands and posed for photos with supporters for about 15 minutes, and then left.

More from the Seattle Times:

“If you do not listen … your event will be shut down,” one of the protesters told organizers, who offered to let them speak after Sanders. After a back and forth with the screaming protesters, organizers relented and said the demonstrators could go first.

Some in the largely white audience booed and chanted for protesters to let the senator talk. A few yelled for police to make arrests.

Marissa Johnson, one of the protesters, shot back, “I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you did it for me,” accusing the audience of “white supremacist liberalism.” She cited Seattle’s own police problems, including an ongoing Justice Department consent decree over use of force.

Update: Video from the rally yesterday.  Before we get to the commentary, let's excerpt how the rest of Bernie's day got a little better.

Sanders later issued a statement on his website expressing his disappointment about the interruption.

In a written statement addressing the Westlake protest, Sanders said he was “disappointed that two people disrupted a rally attended by thousands … I was especially disappointed because on criminal-justice reform and the need to fight racism there is no other candidate for president who will fight harder than me.”

In a news release posted on social media, local Black Lives Matter activists said they were holding Sanders and other white progressives accountable for failing to support their movement.

Citing the anniversary of Brown’s death, they said, “We honor black lives by doing the unthinkable, the unapologetic, and the unrespectable.”

That's actually the best explanation of their actions I have read.

As an old white progressive myself, I have to admit to the same curmudgeonly discontent with the BLM protests that Sanders is feeling.  Maybe that's just my white privilege talking.  There are plenty of African American voices noting the mission fail of BLM, but it still doesn't make their protest against the only person who has walked the walk (and not just talked the talk) more comprehensible.  My well-renowned empathy of ten men is falling short here.  Dave Atkins at Political Animal says it best, at least for now.

In that vein, it’s reasonable to ask if forcing Bernie Sanders off consecutive stages is a useful strategy for bringing issues of police violence and structural racism to the foreground. On the one hand, doing so provides an opportunity for activists to make headlines and gain an audience among individuals who are supposedly allies but may not be doing as much as activists might like on their issue of choice. Certainly, climate activists and anti-war activists (among others) could leverage the same complaints. On the other, there is such a thing as bad publicity. And there’s a fine line between disrupting the activities of one’s allies to bring more attention to one’s issues, and being so aggressive with them that they actually become hostile to one’s interests.

That said, if these actions have done more damage than good, the fault lies not with the protesters so much as the event coordinators who have handed the disruptive agents the microphone at these events. No matter how righteous the disrupters’ cause may be, giving away the microphone to any non-scheduled element loses control of the event, altering the power dynamic in such a way that the candidate is forced to either adopt an apologetic and submissive position agreeing with everything being said by the upstaging individuals (certainly undesirable for many reasons), or to argue with them (even less desirable), or simply to walk away from the stage (the best of a series of bad choices.)

But giving away the microphone to protesters in this way isn’t just harmful to the candidate. It’s also harmful to the event organizers and ultimately to the protesters themselves as well.

The Black Lives Matter effort is headed down the same road as the Occupy movement.  Which is to say, marginalized and irrelevant.  And it would be a terrible shame if that happened, because what they are angry about is what Bernie Sanders, and I, and a host of other people who look like us are also angry about.

They're simply channeling their outrage in the wrong direction.

If the group engaging in civil disobedience is willingly granted the microphone at a managed event by the supposed oppressor, it’s nearly impossible for the disruptors to maintain the audience sympathy required to forgive the chaos and upset caused by the disruption itself. This is, of course, doubly true when the supposed oppressor is not an enemy but an ally within the tent. In order for an action of civil disobedience by an oppressed group to work, the oppressed group must actually remain oppressed in the context of the event. If they’re treated as equals with underdog outsider presidential candidates on stage, it simply looks like a circular firing squad of fractious activists rather than a civil rights movement speaking for the dispossessed without a voice. Once you have the stage and a microphone with a presidential candidate standing behind you (and you’re registered to vote!), it’s hard to gain sympathy for the claim that you don’t have a voice in the process.

That, of course, leads to a key question: why aren’t BLM protesters staging these disruptions at Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate events? The simplest answer is that they would be unlikely to be invited to the stage and given a microphone. But that is precisely why those are the events that BLM should be protesting.

The people who are handing over the microphone and helping them onto the stage aren’t the ones protesters should be taking advantage of for a cheap media opportunity. And event organizers should be mindful that providing such an opportunity for protesters doesn’t do them any favors, either.

Rosa Parks didn’t pick a bus in Berkeley; she picked one in Selma. If civil disobedience is the weapon of choice, it’s probably time to take that weapon to the real enemy.

Let's watch and see if Secretary Clinton -- or any GOP hopeful, for that matter; how about Ben Carson as a start? -- starts drawing some BLM folks to their events who want to take the stage.  Their success in doing so will convince me that they have a real movement focused on the agents who need to change -- and who will more likely be in the place to effect changes.

But I really don't expect Hillary Clinton or a single Republican candidate -- or any of their staff, supporters, or members of the audience on hand -- to react as calmly as Bernie Sanders.  We should find out if I'm right or wrong about that soon enough -- again, if BLM is properly organized.

Sunday Funnies

HGLBT Caucus endorses Sylvester Turner for mayor of Houston

The largest attendance remembered caused nearly an hour-long delay in getting started.

290 members here at the @HGLBTCaucus endorsement meeting, where the group just officially endorsed #HERO, as expected #houvote

— Rebecca Elliott (@rfelliott) August 8, 2015

In an early (1 p.m.) surprise, Adrian Garcia got the recommendation from the board despite Steve Costello getting higher scores overall.  Sylvester Turner, the apparent crowd favorite, came in a close third.

But the official vote is still a ways off.

The steering committee got a lot of intense questioning about the Garcia recommendation.  They were split 2-2 so the decision came down to...

Viability, LGBT knowledge, knowledge of city issues and the screening were the factors in recommendations #thecaucusendorses @HGLBTCaucus

— Shelby Hansen (@ShelbyAHansen) August 8, 2015

After a couple of hours of wrangling, the Caucus finally voted to endorse Turner for mayor in the 3 pm hour.  They followed with Chris Brown for city controller, Lane Lewis for AL1 and Doug Peterson for AL3.  I'll have more and link to their full slate later.

Scattershooting the unblogged after a very busy week

(More post-debate Trump developments below.)

-- Thanks to Kuff for plugging the petition to the NFL's powers that be to relocate the 2017 Super Bowl if HERO can't clear the bar in November.  World class cities aren't run by bigots and homophobes.  And when an offensive lineman clips a linebacker, or a defensive back commits pass interference, the whole team gets penalized, not just the infractor.  Sign it and share it.  It's already making waves.

The effort to recruit Beyonce' Knowles to the cause also continues to gain momentum.

-- The Green Party of the United States (GPUS) will hold its 2016 presidential nominating convention in Houston next August.  This is kind of a big deal.  Jill Stein, the most recent and also presumptive nominee (though she has competition) has visited Houston twice previously, in 2012 and earlier this year.  Both times she had a full itinerary and full houses at scheduled stops, and raised a lot of money (okay, a little money, but a lot by GP standards).  And both Stein and Bernie Sanders are clearly aware of the value of going into the lion's den of the South to break the stranglehold of the conservative populists.  And it also helps people lose their fear of the S-word.



-- Donald Trump spent most of yesterday feuding on Twitter and teevee with debate moderator Megyn Kelly, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, and RedState proprietor Erick Erickson, whose annual convention of the freakiest of the freak right wing is taking place this weekend.

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump said Friday he can't recall using words such as "dog," ''fat" and "disgusting" to insult women he believes have slighted him, but such language litters his Twitter feed and other public comments he's made for years.

The issue took center stage at the first Republican debate of the 2016 campaign for president, when Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly asked Trump about his use of such language and whether it reflected the "temperament of a man we should elect as president."

Trump largely dismissed Kelly's question at the debate, but on Friday he went directly after her.

Before dawn, he had retweeted a post calling Kelly a "bimbo." The post was later deleted, but on Friday evening Trump called Kelly a "lightweight."

"She's not very tough and not very sharp," Trump said during a phone interview on CNN. "I don't respect her as a journalist."

Referring to Kelly's questions during the debate, Trump said, "There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever."

Citing that remark, conservative commentator Erick Erickson said he was withdrawing his invitation for Trump to appear at his RedState Gathering in Atlanta on Saturday. "I just don't want someone on stage who gets a hostile question from a lady and his first inclination is to imply it was hormonal," Erickson wrote on the RedState website Friday night. "It just was wrong."

Erickson knows misogyny; he's the guy who coined the term "Abortion Barbie".  Update: Trump "clarifies" that he meant her nose, and calls everyone who thought he was referring to another part of her anatomy "deviants".

Trump's campaign responded: "This is just another example of weakness through being politically correct. For all of the people who were looking forward to Mr. Trump coming, we will miss you. Blame Erick Erickson, your weak and pathetic leader."

Besides what's obvious about these tirades of his, the fact remains that he can say them and Tweet them and pay no political price for doing so, unlike any other Republican running for president.  What Erickson is trying to do by shutting him out is to assert some control over Trump, a contest of wills that I wouldn't bet on just yet.  Reince Priebus is a eunuch at this point; the GOP establishment is Erickson now.  Even Rush Limbaugh is on Trump's side.  If the insiders don't do something now to slow his roll, the attacks just might make him stronger, and more difficult to defeat later.

This is what civil war looks like.

Make no mistake; The Donald is uniquely qualified to tear the Republican Party down to the bedrock under its foundation.  No matter whether he emerges as its nominee or runs as a third party independent, the GOP is already cooked for 2016 as it relates to the presidency.

And this may be the long-awaited earthquake fault line along which the Republicans crack in two.  It's the same fissure I'm trying to drive a wedge in with my HERO/Super Bowl petition.  Moderate, pro-business Republicans who are socially tolerant are continually being cleaved away from the radical Tea Party extremists.  Look at what's happening in the Texas Legislature for more clues to the future.

Except for Trump, there just wasn't all that much stupid and crazy going on last Thursday night.  Most of the ten-member varsity debaters looked weak, with Marco Rubio a notable exception (and the same for Carly Fiorina during the Happy Hour).  If the GOP nominated those two -- or to use another formidable example, John Kasich and Condoleeza Rice -- then Hillary Clinton and Julian Castro might be in real electoral trouble.

Don't worry; neither of those is happening.  And even if they did, Donald Trump as an indy would swamp their kayaks.

Update: More on the Trumpenstein Monster from No More Mister Nice and Oliver Willis.