Hillary Clinton will be president because of the Latino vote

Not just because of the Mexicano she will select as ticket-mate.  Because boosting Latino turnout is one of her core strategies.

Nearly every time I've asked a Latino political professional, "What are the early signs I should be looking for that Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign is serious about Latino outreach?", the answer has been, "Look at who the campaign is hiring, and how early it's hiring them."

By that measure, the Clinton campaign has just passed an extremely important test. Clinton has already hired her 2016 national director of Latino outreach. And the woman she's hired is a leading immigrant-rights activist — someone with more experience confronting politicians about their shortcomings than consulting them.

Some of the complaints I have consistently registered from Latino activists is that politicians of both parties wait until late in the cycle to engage them, or make a half-energized effort to do so, and/or commit unforced Spanish-language errors in communication, and so on like that.   Clinton simply isn't going to make those mistakes.  More importantly -- and unlike areas of concern for progressives -- she is very likely to do more than just talk about improving the lives of immigrant families, even if that happens only on the virtue of making the circumstances that affect American women of all creeds better.  This effort is all but guaranteed to turn out Mexicanos in droves for her.

And here it's important to note the distinction between Mexicanos and Latinos for the purpose of where the laser-beam focus of the Clinton campaign will be.  There are many, many more Americans of Mexican descent, there is tremendous room for improvement in turnout among their number, and that will make the electoral difference for her in a half-dozen different states.  Not in Florida, where the Republicans' best answer is a couple of lame Cubanos -- and where the distinction between 'Mexicano' and every other Latino subgroup is most apparent -- but in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and even Georgia and Illinois.

God forbid Texas even.  In states where the Mexicano surge does not help sweep Clinton into the White House, her coattails will be long and wide, pulling Democrats of all shades into office along with her.  There is a massive blue wave coming in 2016, and Republicans running for office up and down the ballot, coast to coast, should rightly be terrified.   

Update: It's already affecting the local GOP calculations for political office.

"I don't want to depend on Hillary Clinton being on the top of the ticket for the Democrats and trying to run county-wide when I don't know how it's going to play out," (Rep. Allen Fletcher) said (as he withdrew from running for Harris County sheriff next year).

So while Hillary Clinton may be a militarist and a corporatist, she is also a pragmatist, and she is capable of capitalizing on the "it's time for a woman to be president, and then it's time for a Latino president" sentiment among the electorate.  This is a much better angle to victory than the incessant nattering that 'Hillary is a liberal' still going on.  To repeat: she's only a liberal from a very conservative point of view.  In the eyes of actual liberals and progressives -- predominantly late middle-aged and Caucasian, if you hadn't already noticed -- she is as far from our position as a person can get on far too many issues.  (The conversation among those on the left is already coalescing on how the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, once he is eliminated from contention in the Democratic primary, can be used to help build a stronger progressive movement.  Outside the Democratic party.)

Your takeaway: Mexicanos by and large won't be giving a damn about any of that.

See Stace for more, and click on his link to the NPR story about the swelling perceived value in the eyes of both major parties of the Latino vote.  I contend that 'Latino' -- most certainly 'Hispanic', a word you can ban from your vocabulary going forward -- isn't effectively focused to win the 2016 election, especially if you're a Republican gabacho who speaks Spanish and is married to a Latina.  I've managed that much... and I couldn't get elected dogcatcher.

And neither will Jeb, as we already know.

Update: Clinton drags the money bag through Dallas and Austin next week.

American Phoenix, the group behind the Lege secret videos

American Phoenix Foundation was the organization behind the clandestine videos of Texas legislators revealed earlier this month.  Hannah Giles and Joseph Basel are the -- well, sounds like maybe former -- conservative activists that organized APF, originally designed to expose corrupt public officials on one side of the aisle... but evolved into both sides (to hear them tell it).  As background, Giles was the "hooker" in James O'Keefe's 2009 ACORN sting video; Basel was the "telephone repairman" arrested for trying to bug Sen. Mary Landrieu's offices in another 2010 O'Keefe sting operation.  They have dissolved their relationship with O'Keefe for this new venture.  The source of their funding remains undisclosed by them, however.

RG Ratcliffe at Texas Monthly has burned the "report, decide" shoe leather here for us.  Excerpts...

RGR: You’ve talked about wanting to disrupt the narrative. So what is the narrative of the Texas Legislature that you want to disrupt?

HG: One of the biggest things I’ve personally seen is little old ladies that organize and cheer-lead for certain politicians and they think, “Oh they are the greatest and they’re going to go to Texas and represent us.” And then being in Austin and having people who’ve worked in the Capitol and keeping an ear to the ground, I tell people, “No, that politician is just not a good person. They’re not who you think they are.” That person is in Austin partying, and first of all not a Christian like they think – which is fine; we don’t care – but it is just the hypocrisy of representing themselves one way to their constituents and then acting a totally different way, filing bills that aren’t consistent with things they’ve said they’d do.”

[...]

RGR: Is “progressive Republicans” just another way to say Republicans in Name Only, RINOs?

HG: What I was trying to explain or get people fired up about is they are all, “Rah, rah, Republicans are doing what’s right!” And I’m, No, not necessarily. I look at both parties as a political class. I don’t see a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats now that I see what’s going on at the Capitol.”

[...]

HG: I’ve changed a lot. I became very disillusioned with the conservative movement after all my ACORN stuff. Philosophically and politically, I’ve evolved a lot.

RGR: Why did you become disillusioned?

JB: It was the enemy of my enemy is my friend problem. All the good right-wingers were: “She took down ACORN and they’re leftist, so we like her.” They probably invited us into the back rooms way too quick. What we saw there made us so cynical of the American right that we have no country in that sense.

We're all anxious to see what they have on tape, and whether it is legitimately bad news for Texas legislators or just more sophomoric antics on the part of bored millennials.

Medicinal cannabis passes. Good?

That does not seem to be the consensus.  From my inbox, Phillip Martin at Progress Texas.

Texas just made history on marijuana policy reform.  The legislature just approved a limited medical marijuana bill - and now it goes to the Governor. 

The bipartisan-backed Senate Bill 339 is a Cannabis oil bill (CBD-oil). While we supported efforts to broaden the law, the final bill is limited to patients suffering from intractable epilepsy.

This is a small reform that represents a big step forward for marijuana policy reform.

More than 22,000 Texans took action in support of reform this year and, with help from advocates and bipartisan coalitions around Texas, we promoted a serious public dialogue.

[...]

For now, let's enjoy the victory! We've just witnessed history.

Not so fast.

Sponsored by Sen. Kevin Eltife (R-Tyler), the bill is extremely unlikely to provide patients with relief since it requires doctors to engage in conduct prohibited by federal law.

“On a certain level, the legislature should be commended for acknowledging the medical value of marijuana, and it is a historic vote in that sense,” said Heather Fazio, Texas political director for the Marijuana Policy Project. “Lawmakers missed several opportunities to amend the bill in ways that could have provided real relief to countless Texans. Not a single patient will be helped by this legislation.”

SB 339 requires doctors to “prescribe” marijuana to patients, which exposes doctors to federal criminal sanctions. By contrast, doctors “recommend” medical marijuana or “certify” patients to use medical marijuana in the 23 states with comprehensive medical marijuana laws and the District of Columbia. Unlike “prescriptions,” recommendations and certifications are federally legal and protected under the First Amendment.

“Nearly half of the states in the country have effectively implemented medical marijuana programs, and I have no doubt Texas could adopt an even better one,” Fazio said. “We need a law that ensures seriously ill patients who could benefit from medical marijuana are able to access it. There is no reason to put it off any longer.”

There's more on the "is this a good thing or not" question at PT's Facebook page.  I'm not inclined to believe that just because the word "cannabis" appears in a piece of legislation that we have made progress.  But I won't discourage the good folks at PT who spent many hours on this and other bills only to watch the Lege let out a popcorn fart on it.

Ben Carson, Lindsey Graham, Chris Christie

-- I wish I could write satire like this.  (Except it's not, of course.)

Seemingly thinking brushing and flossing is for Socialists, Dr. Ben Carson, on the campaign trail in South Carolina, has lost two teeth while in the state.

Carson was eating breakfast at Tommy’s Country Ham House in Greenville, South Carolina, and according to TMZ:

“The good doc stared into his plate, thought for a second then discreetly placed the errant chomper into his shirt pocket.”

via TMZ

At the South Carolina Freedom Summit, Carson joked about losing a couple of his teeth while in the state. He said:

“They said [South Carolina] was a pretty rough-and-tumble place. But I lost two teeth since I’ve been here… This one went out last night, this one went out — but I also had a chance to see two very fine dentists here in South Carolina, so it’s very good.”

via TMZ

Is anyone else concerned that his teeth are falling out at such a high rate? That doesn’t seem normal. 

Neither does being a brain surgeon who doesn't believe in climate change.

-- Senatah Huckleberry J. Butchmeup will drone you just for thinkin' about hooking up with ISIS.

"If I'm president of the United States and you're thinking about joining al-Qaida or ISIL—anybody thinking about that? I'm not gonna call a judge. I'm gonna call a drone and we're gonna kill you."  

He wasn't kidding around, either.  Graham doesn't think the Iraq war was a mistake, does want 10,000 troops there.  But with regard to extrajudicial assassinations, perhaps Miss Lindsey inadvertently dropped a state secret: can anyone confirm that Lockheed Martin has been working on one of those Pre-Crime time machine thingies?

-- But no matter how hard Graham tries, he's not going to get to the right of Kip's Big Boy in his hawk costume.  Fat Bastard wants a larger military, more foreign intervention, and a hotter war waged on the American people.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie offered a vigorous defense of post-Sept. 11 surveillance tactics on Monday, backing existing programs and calling for an expansion of intelligence-gathering capabilities even as Congress seeks ways to rein in the programs.

Christie, who spent seven years as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey before he was elected governor, said that he had used provisions of the Patriot Act in pursuing terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks and argued that the country must not weaken its anti-terror and surveillance laws.

"We need to toughen our anti-terror and surveillance laws to give our services the legal mechanisms to do their job," he said in a foreign policy-themed speech.

Completely detached from reality.

Last week more than 300 House members voted to end the NSA's bulk phone records collection program and replace it with a system to leave the data with telephone companies and allow the NSA to search the data on a case-by-case basis. The supporters of ending the program include Democrats and Republicans, and even the NSA doesn't object to having private companies store the data.

Independent reviews have found that the bulk collection program did not foil a single terrorist attack.

But Christie slammed those pushing reforms as "intellectual purists" and insisted law-abiding citizens had nothing to fear from the surveillance efforts.

"The vast majority of Americans are not worried about the government listening in on them, because it hasn't happened. They are worried about what happens if we don't catch the bad people who want to harm our country," he said.

He's wrong about that too, naturally.

Stay tuned for Rick Perry and Donald Trump and Rick Santorum in a couple of weeks, folks.  These three clowns were just the warm-up band.

Update:  There's always going to be at least one conservative malcontent who doesn't think anybody's got big enough balls to be the commander-in-chief.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served under all 44 presidents plus two you don’t know about, told Morning Joe Tuesday morning that the 2016 field so far can suck a foreign policy tailpipe.

“Particularly on the Republican side, most of them have not been in jobs that required them to know anything or be involved in foreign policy,” Gates said. “A couple have been in the Senate two or three years. So my hope is that as the campaigns unfold and as time goes along, they will flush out their views and we’ll see something impressive.” 

"Flush out their views".  Surely he meant 'flesh'.  Otherwise that's so classically Freudian that I wish I had read it at The Onion.

“On the Democratic side, I’m sorry that Secretary Clinton has not come out in favor of the trade agreements,” he added, referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently dividing the Democratic Party.

“And so I -- basically what I’ve said is that I’m not seeing a lot of courage out there and I’m seeing a lot of very simple solutions to very tough problems.”

Nobody show this guy Ben Carson.