The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is celebrating the summer solstice with a cold beverage and toes in the sand as it brings you his week's blog post roundup.

Off the Kuff sets a couple of hopefully attainable goals for Texas Democrats in 2016.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos has had it with political inaction after yet one more tragic mass shooting. Enough is enough. The carnage has got to stop. Fire the cowards who enable gun slaughter: When Political Cowardice is Lethal.

Socratic Gadfly reads Bernie Sanders' call for election reforms and wishes he had real reform that included third parties.

The Texas Democratic Convention was held in San Antonio this past weekend, and by all accounts was underwhelming, as PDiddie at Brains and Eggs predicted.

Oil and gas exploration is threatening the health of all Texans, and TXsharon at Bluedaze has it all mapped out.

Egberto Willies interviewed an East Texas secessionist who's closely following the Brexit scenario to see if Texas can apply any lessons.

Texas Vox takes note of the 17th and most recent state, New York, to call for a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United.

Dru Murray at the Lewisville Texan Journal toured that city's newest whiskey distillery.

Neil at All People Have Value took his efforts to the streets to promote the value of everyday life to the corner of Cesar Chavez and Harrisburg in Houston. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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

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

Diana Wray recaps Dan Patrick's very bad day on Twitter following the Orlando massacre, and TFN Insider reviews state Rep. Matt Krause's claims that it "doesn't matter" that the Orlando victims were gay.

Kris Banks asserts that gun safety is an LGBT issue, and Nancy Sims mourns the tragedy in Orlando and asks what we all will do about it.

The TSTA blog calls for educators to unite against Donald Trump.

Highlighting the divide among Texas bloggers (and the rest of the Texas Democratic electorate), Somervell County Salon didn't attend the TDP convention this year and won't be voting for Hillary Clinton in the fall.

Ben Becker has some questions for TEA Commissioner Mike Morath about the STAAR test.

Alamo Heights ISD Superintendent Kevin Brown and several of his colleagues warn that we can no longer fool ourselves into believing that just because many students seem to do well and graduate prepared for college and career, that we can sustain those results over time.

Scott Braddock peeks behind the curtain at the handful of rich radicals who were trying to buy this year's legislative elections.

Grits for Breakfast goes beyond the narrow, politicized explanations for the spike in homicides last year.  He also has a terrific aggre-post regarding the limits of Politifact, crime wave hype, police pension politics, and Harris County as a driver of mass incarceration.

And in the latest installment of 'West Texas Exceptionalism', Make West Texas Great Again retells the stories of the Texas Cowboy Reunions from the 1930s up to the present day.

Revolutionary News Vol. 8: The Wisdom of Dads

Is your mind capable of holding competing thoughts simultaneously?  Here we go ...

-- Donald Trump does NOT have a path to victory in November.

To reach 270, Trump’s team is aiming to capture America’s Rust Belt — specifically, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin — where polls generally show him performing better than Mitt Romney did at this point in 2012. If he can capture Florida and keep North Carolina — the 2012 red state of the lightest hue — a strong showing that includes capture of the Rust Belt could, Trump’s team believes, put him over the top.

But the odds are long, veteran strategists said.

“It’s a fantasy. Romney got 19 percent of nonwhites. Is Trump going to do better? I don’t think so,” said Stuart Stevens, Romney’s 2012 campaign strategist. “It’s a joke. It’s just talking. It has no grounding in reality.”

-- Neither should anyone expect the entrenched insider Republicans to overthrow the will of their voters and install someone -- anyone -- else as the GOP nominee at their national convention in Cleveland next month.  There would be an actual revolution, complete with lots of shooting from many guns and real blood running in the streets if they tried.  Bernie Sanders does, in fact, have a greater chance of being the Democratic nominee than (fill in the blank with any name you like) has of being the Republican one.  And Bernie has essentially no chance at all.  Better chances of winning the Powerball.

Only a federal indictment can stop her now, and perhaps not even that.

That won't stop the Sandernistas from their #SeeYouInPhilly mission, and whatever they accomplish beyond a few platform positions that some will characterize as "transforming" the Democratic Party will be, in reality, negligible.  Their hearts are in the right place, I suppose, but they're using their heads to beat against the castle wall.  It will feel so good to them when they stop that.

The head of Debbie Wasserman Schultz on a pike comes about three months too late.

-- More evidence that they aren't getting on the Clinton bandwagon.

Hillary Clinton may be the presumptive Democratic nominee, but the fight to unify the party and its traditional allies in the wake of an unexpectedly long and contentious primary is poised to go on much longer.

The more than 3,000 Bernie Sanders supporters and progressive activists gathered here at the "People's Summit" have engaged in little open talk about Clinton, preferring instead to plot a path forward in the wake of the Vermont senator's defeat -- and questioning the motivations of the Democratic Party and the legitimacy of its nominating contest. 

"There is massive corruption in the machinery of the Democratic Party," said RoseAnn DeMoro, the executive director of National Nurses United, the powwow's principal organizer, who had endorsed Sanders. "The only way that we can overcome that corruption and manipulation is for all of us not to work in isolation."

The People's Summit folks shut out Jill Stein and the Greens.  Everybody seems to want to start from scratch; I'm getting email now from the United Progressive Party. Their website is inoperable at this posting, but their logo should tell you everything you need to know.

The progressive left in the United States -- which has one foot inside the tent and one foot out -- has always been fractured and disorganized and ineffective as a result, and it may be even more so in 2016.  That would be unfortunate but not unexpected.

-- So Stein is going full-bore after the ruling duopoly.  Read all of this profile of her and her party; it's the best one yet.  Here's a snip about "safe states":

Sanders has drawn fire from Democrats for staying in the race despite lacking the delegates to win the nomination, but Stein may be even more politically brash than Bernie. Not only does she lack Sanders’ squeamishness about tipping the race to the Republicans, she is burying the tentative approach to presidential campaigning tried by 2004 Green candidate David Cobb. Following the 2000 election, when many blamed Nader for contributing to Democrat Al Gore’s defeat in Florida, Cobb pioneered a “safe-state” strategy—hunting only for votes in deep blue and deep red states, thus successfully protecting the Greens from the “spoiler” label. But he wasn’t successful in winning votes, garnering only 120,000 votes compared to Nader’s 2.9 million.

Stein defiantly told Politico Magazine she has a “No Safe State strategy,” because “there is no safe state under a Democratic or Republican future.” She’ll be stumping in Pennsylvania later this month.

--  Noam Chomsky has co-written a treatise about it; Counterpunch has counter-punched it. Bold emphasis below is mine.

[Chomsky and co-author John Halle] ... make an argument that by electing Clinton (i.e. by voting for her in swing states) this allows for the continuing growth of the left and reduces the amount of harm that will be caused over the next four years. I do not doubt their desire for radical change, nor do I doubt that they make these arguments because they find them morally justifiable in consideration of the consequences of our actions. Yet, it is dubious whether we can consider Clinton an LEV, just as much as it is dubious whether electing Clinton would enable the growth of the Left. I am not arguing from what they call a “politics of moral witness”, but argue in the same analytic vein that they have placed their brief. That is, is Clinton on topics such as climate change, trade, and militarism actually an LEV in comparison to Trump? Taking their criteria of consequences over rhetoric, there seems at best a “dimes worth of difference” on these topics.

Go ahead and try it on, see if it fits.

I'm an advocate of the "safe states" mission, but am swiftly moving in the direction of the "fuck 'em all" premise.  Some people say that's white privilege.  I say if someone wants to fix white privilege, then they need to go vote it out of office.  I won't be bothered one little bit by that.

-- The Texas Democratic convention this weekend past was, as I predicted, a joke.  These accounts of the steamrolling of Sanders delegates are essentially all you need to know about why there is a #SeeYouInPhilly movement.  But it was funny/not funny in pretty much every other way you can think of.  I'm glad John had a good time, though.

Sunday Keepin' Bear Funnies

Texas Dems prepare to underwhelm once again

The key to happiness is low expectations, some philosopher once said.

Statewide races on the 2016 ballot are lackluster: a no-contest Railroad Commission faceoff -- better options with the Green candidate, just as with the Ag Commissioner's race in 2014 -- and a few high civil (SCOTX) and criminal (CCA) court justices we mentioned in December last, in the spring and we'll mention again in October.

More than 75% of those gathering in San Antonio this weekend (Update: John says it's 65%, and he's on site) will celebrate the crowning of the presumptive nominee despite her accumulating baggage, and they'll exercise the same old tyranny of the majority over the 25% 35% left-wing.  The Berners should be easily abused because apparently their plan is to to lie down and take it.  Oh well, San Antone is still a great place to fiesta.  Who wants to sit in a convention hall when you could be drinking margaritas on the Riverwalk, anyway?

Drumpf is going to Bigfoot the state conclave with fundraisers and rallies in Dallas today and the Alamo City and H-Town tomorrow, sucking all the media oxygen out of the state.

Charles can still find a few small things to dream big about; good on him for his PMA.  Most of the so-called party leaders are more pragmatic, however.

And to some portion of the 25% of Texas Democrats who didn't vote for Hillary -- not to mention the half of the state's adults who are not registered to vote, and the 80+% of those who are who didn't participate in the primary -- it just doesn't look like much difference.

When it comes to thinking in binary: I have observed that the stronger the support one has for Hillary, the less this premise can be comprehended.  But at least that makes more sense than voting for Clinton in the primary because of 'the Supreme Court'.

This will be the first convention in ten years that I have actively boycotted, despite being granted both Sanders delegate and media credentials.  (I guess Sarah Slamen was right; some people don't read this blog after all.)  I'll still be following whatever action there is on social media, but I don't expect much.  Housing Secretary Julian Castro, once-presumptive vice-presidential nominee (or is it brother and Congressman Joaquin?  Or is it both?) will be keynoting, and the rest of the agenda looks primed to be knockout gas.

I kid because I care, Texas Dems.  Get your shit together for 2018.

Update: Worse than I suspected.

Another view of the Electoral College

Pretty much the same view as the previous ones.

No matter the 2016 presidential matchup after the primary campaigns, the Democratic nominee was likely to have an edge over the Republican candidate once the election turned toward the November race.

In the past six presidential elections, 32 states and the District of Columbia have voted solidly Democratic or solidly Republican. If none of that changes this year, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would start out with 242 electoral votes — just 28 shy of the 270 she needs to win.

The GOP candidate would start out with just 102, if that trend were to hold. And if presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump won Arizona, Montana and the seven Southern states that voted Democratic only when Bill Clinton was on the ballot, Trump would be up to only 180 electoral votes.

That leaves 116 votes in 10 states. As always, Florida becomes crucial.

If Trump can win nine of those 10, he still would lose, unless Florida is among his victories. Clinton can lose nine of those 10, but if she wins Florida, she would move into the White House come January.

After the San Bernardino shootings, Drumpf gained in the horse-race polling... for the GOP nomination.  And he has also done so -- slightly -- in the wake of Orlando.  FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten says not to read too much into it; the Republican primary electorate is quite obviously not the general election one.  And Clinton has otherwise bitten into Trump's lead among male and Caucasian voters.  Polling released next week will tell more, but he simply has no ground to lose.

If you're still nervous about the Queen's November prospects after reading this, be consoled with the takeaway, again: National polls are not the Electoral College.

And if you're #NeverTrump or #NeverHillary, you'll have at least two other choices in Texas -- Green and Libertarian, no indies -- and also in roughly forty other states in the Union to express your disgust with the D/R options that would be much more effective than a hashtag.  The candidate foreordained to win your state -- and/or the White House -- won't be affected in the slightest.  So vote your conscience, your principles, or your values; just don't vote for the status quo.  That's how we got to this sorry state in the first place.

And it's exactly why they take your vote for granted.