The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance ruefully observes that Giant Meteor 2016 really did win the election, and has some trepidation about the fallout for the next four years.

Off the Kuff reminds us again that climate change is not going to be kind to Houston.

Socratic Gadfly analyzes the election and offers up a Clinton post-mortem, along with one for the Democratic Party. (He'll have a Green Party post-mortem later this week.)

South Texas Chisme passes along the news that a Border Patrol agent has been caught lying about narcotics confiscation. The war on drugs leads to public corruption.

A post-election to-do-list was posted on Election Day by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs, and one item on it -- stopping the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- has already been checked off.

Neil at All People Have Value points out the distinctions between Trump's voters and Trump with respect to racism. AHPV is a part of NeilAquino.com.

The Lewisville Texan Journal editorialized against the Electoral College.

jobsanger says that the onus to fix the US economy is now squarely on the GOP.

And John Coby at Bay Area Houston is still a little sore at people who voted for Trump, and Egberto Willies is only slightly recovered from an election result nobody saw coming.

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More Texas news for columnists and bloggers from around the state!

The Dallas News notes Trump's stated intent to overturn the Supreme Court's long-established precedent on a woman's right to choose, and the Austin American Statesman sees the widening rural/urban divide exposed by the 2016 election.

The San Antonio Express-News finds a bright spot: after years of flux, the city's statehouse delegation is finally set for 2017's legislative session.

Better Texas Blog wonders what's next for Obamacare.

Texans for Public Justice has a new report (.pdf) about the Texas Railroad Commissioners and candidates who are awash in cash from the oil and gas industry.

Grits for Breakfast also shares a fresh synopsis from the Texas Public Policy Foundation abut more reforms still needed in the grand jury system.

The Texas Observer went to a rally for Austin's immigrant rights activists, and the message was "Don't Mess with Texas' families."

The Digital Heretic finds that liberals slamming evangelical support of Trump are exercising another shameful and myopic attempt to set themselves above those who elected him.

The Somervell County Salon found her county's election results and noted that she was one of 23 who voted for Jill Stein.  And DBC Green has some interesting statistics that compare TXRRC candidate Martina Salinas' votes with Stein's from various Texas counties.

Zachery Taylor thought Donna Brazile's lapses in ethics and integrity were problematic, but trivial in the grand scheme.

And in a show of post-election bipartisan magnanimity, CultureMap Houston was on the scene as Vice President Joe Biden spoke at MD Anderson's glittering 75th anniversary fete, and warmly praised former president George HW Bush.

Something we can expect from President Trump: the unexpected

"Oh shit; we won.  Now what?"  The dog chasing the car has caught it.

During an interview with the Wall Street Journal, President-elect Donald Trump offered an interesting answer about one of the most significant promises he made during his presidential campaign.

After stating that he might end up amending the Affordable Care Act instead of repealing and replacing it, Trump was asked about numerous issues and developments tied to his campaign platform. One thing that came up was that the question of whether Trump would follow through with his second debate promise and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton over her private email server.

This shifting with the winds is likely to continue.  You might recall I suggested his having Her prosecuted was something he would have to follow through on.  He could still change his mind back, but I'm out of the forecasting business w/r/t our new leader.

After Trump won on Election Night, his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway seemed noticeably ambiguous on whether Trump would do what he promised throughout the last months of his campaign. When asked about the matter himself, Trump only said this:

“It’s not something I’ve given a lot of thought, because I want to solve health care, jobs, border control, tax reform.”

Trump was also asked about his incendiary campaign rhetoric, which has now prompted protests of his victory across the country over the last few days. “I want a country that loves each other,” Trump said, but, when asked if he thinks he might have taken his campaign rhetoric too far, Trump answered with "No. I won."

Nobody's certain what he's going to say or do next.  But he sure tells it like it is.

Trump has already contradicted himself while addressing the protests. Trump first dismissed the demonstrators as professionals “incited by the media,” only to later praise them for their “passion.”

What he's thinking on any topic is based on the last person he talked to.  It appears that 25.5% of Americans has chosen a spoiled brat without much in the way of actual conviction to lead us.

(I'm not arguing against the Electoral College; I believe it should be revised to count states' votes as proportional to the winner in each Congressional district rather than winner-take-all.  And for the record, I do not support those who are petitioning and protesting for Electors to deny their oath on December 19th, when the College convenes in each state to elect the president.)

Yes, Trump is almost certainly going to be guided by the lousier angels of our country's nature in the GOP to their ends.  But if he keeps dropping campaign promises this quickly, he's bound to upset those who have installed him in the White House.  I suppose we'll have to wait for them to figure out that the joke's on them.  Unfortunately, we might be waiting a very long time for that to occur.

In the middle of composing this post, I found Echidne had said it all better, so go read her.  Also, Trump has chosen RNC head Rinse Penis as White House chief of staff and Breitbart scumbag Steve Bannon as counselor and chief strategist, calling them "equal partners".  I see Preibus as being of heavier import, which means steadying Congressional relations with the likes of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will be more important than extremist ideology and throwing red meat to the goons.

Sunday Funnies

Racists, misogynists, and homophobes voted for Trump.

The sooner people realize that it's not blue vs. red but rich vs. poor, 

elitist vs. common man, the better off we'll be.

But not all Trump supporters are, as such.

If the headline were true, then everyone who voted for Obama (which I did in 2008, but not in 2012) would own his bombing seven countries, as well as the deaths of innocent women and children standing in drone bomb radius proximity to the suspected or "pre"-terrorists, his lack of will to get behind a public healthcare option when he had a Congressional majority in 2009-10, his "most transparent administration ever", and so on.  I reject that, and ultimately over the course of the years since have been forced to reject the Democratic Party for failing to represent me and my interests adequately.  That rejection by itself invalidates the premise of calling everyone who supported Trump a racist, et.al. which, as careful people already know, is false.

Calling them all racists is almost as bad as cheering on the protests of a legitimate election outcome when, if Clinton had won and the Trumpkins were in the streets ... you would be denouncing such as fascist and undemocratic.  But nobody in this space has accused the Hillbots of using logic effectively over the past 18 months.

An associated problem is how we are lately defining 'racist'.  Here, this explains that.

As we confront our nation’s election of a man who dwells blithely in stereotype and caricature, many of us are wondering what we are to do as responsible citizens faced with what many of us regard as a political and moral catastrophe. One thing someone opposed to Donald Trump’s unenlightened, “mean boy” perspective on women, nonwhites, the disabled, Muslims, and others might consider doing is to avoid imitating him.

It may seem perhaps the least likely thing an anti-Trumpian would do, but there’s a word we might consider tempering our usage of in the coming years, given that the way we use it opens us to certain charges involving kettles and the color black. I refer to the word “racist.”

The Martian anthropologist would recognize no difference between the way those accused of being witches were treated in 17th-century Salem, Mass., and the way many innocent people are being accused of “racism” today. Those appalled by the way people were tarred with the Communist label in the 1940s and 1950s must recognize that America has blundered into the same censorious mob mentality in assailing as “racists” just recently, people such as Ellen DeGeneres — for Photoshopping herself riding on Jamaican gold medal sprinter Usain Bolt’s back in celebration of his win — and Hillary Clinton — for referring to the black men terrorizing poor black neighborhoods as “superpredators” in describing plans for protecting people in those neighborhoods from such crime.

Or, many of us have for days been furiously dismissing Trump’s victory as the action of “racists.” However, many of the people who voted for Trump did so for populist reasons, amid which to them, Trump’s take on black people and women was unseemly, but still less of a priority than to most who voted for Hillary Clinton. Regret this though one may, do all of these people deserve to be casually tarred with the same “racist” label that we appropriately apply to David Duke and Donald Sterling?

The way we use the word “racism” has become so imprecise, abusive, and even antithetical to genuine activism that change is worth addressing. More to the point, it widens the cultural divide between the elites and the people too often breezily termed the ones “out there.”

Read on here, please, for the definition and the detours from the definition's application.

However, to understand that racism is real is not to pretend that humans will ever be perfect. If there is a way to eliminate implicit bias entirely, there are no studies showing that the way to do it is to tar and feather anyone displaying the slightest sign of any kind of insensitivity on the Internet for weeks. This new practice is more about self-congratulation than change, turning what began as an unprecedentedly mature understanding of the nature of racism into a grown-up version of tattletale-ing and cops and robbers. What happened to simply noting civilly that someone has made a mistake?

I also question another usage — take a deep breath — the hallowed term “societal racism.”

Read on for the associated "problematic habits of mind".

This can only play a part in the vague but pervasive notion nowadays that part of activism on behalf of people who need concrete assistance is primly patrolling people’s personal racist sentiments. We, as it were, think we must teach “society” not to be “a racist.” Thus it is thought more interesting to teach whites to acknowledge their “privilege” than to espouse reading programs that have been proven effective in teaching (black) kids how to read. Thus the last celebrity caught on tape saying something tacky about black people, because they have a face to hate on, is more interesting than answering poor women’s calls for easy access to long-acting reversible contraception in order to be able to plan when to have children. The war on drugs has been ruining black lives for decades — but only attracts serious attention from black activists when Michelle Alexander phrases it as “The New Jim Crow,” putting a Bull Connor face on it.

Read on for 'why nobody wants to talk about racism'.  Bold emphasis is mine.

The idea that America “doesn’t talk about” racism is absurd, and is actually a euphemism from people who feel that too few Americans talk about racism in what they would consider the right way. That is, they worry that not enough Americans consider racism to be a definitive obstacle to black advancement, and that too many are weary of people’s broaching the issue and dismiss it as unnecessarily “stirring that stuff up.”

To parse this, however, as “Nobody wants to talk about race” channels a kind of smugness. It implies that the people “out there” are actually closing their ears to any discussion at all of race and racism as if it were roughly 1947. This is unfair to a great many people who don’t deserve to be labeled Cro-Magnons for not agreeing with The Nation’s take on race, and also lends a portrait of America that sacrifices empiricism for self-congratulation. We can do better.

In our moment, my comments will elicit from many the question as to whether I consider Donald Trump a racist. The answer is yes — his feigning lack of familiarity with the opinions of David Duke and his explicit statements about black people’s purported laziness decide the case rather conclusively for me, and I am revolted that he will be our president for this and countless other reasons. However, the problem is treating Ellen DeGeneres, Hillary Clinton, or even Trump voters as if they deserve being discussed in the same vein as he does.

They don’t, and only the mission creep the word racism has undergone lends any impression otherwise. Meanwhile, the melodramatic quality in designating well-meaning people who slipped up a bit as “racists” is clear to most observers, and it dulls their receptiveness to genuine, serious accusations of bigotry. Rather, “racist” starts to come off as a mere angry bludgeon used by a certain set of people committed to moral condemnation and comfortable with shutting down exchange. A common idea among Blue Americans is that the people “out there” shirk the racist label out of what could only be naïve denial. That happens — but what if a lot of them get weary of being commanded to pretend that Ellen DeGeneres is a bigot?

Social justice is about being honest and outwardly focused. Our language must encourage us in that. The way we currently use the term racism does not.

TL;DR?  Here: Trump is a racist, a misogynist, and a homophobe.  Virtually all racists, misogynists and homophobes voted for him.  And some have been and are now using his upset victory to recruit.  But not all Trump voters are racists, misogynists, and homophobes.

It would be nice to see some stand up publicly and say that; to demonstrate their sincerity with honesty, conviction, and verifiable conduct, but in the meantime Clinton supporters should cease the blanket and false condemnation.  They lost an election they should have won on the basis of failures like that.  Why repeat past mistakes?  Until they can own their loss, we're going to keep hearing and seeing things like this.

Scattershooting other people's post-election BS

-- Let's get this out of the way first: anybody not named Michael Moore who tells you they saw this coming is telling you a story (unless, of course, they can produce a public opinion that appeared before July 21st of this year).  As you read -- or listen to the same talking heads on teevee who never saw it coming try to explain it -- keep in mind that the those with the most access to the best insider information lost 4 million pounds euros (thanks to DBC in the comments) betting on a Hillary win.  You should have no shame and you have lots of company if you are able to admit to being wrong.

-- And it would go a long way toward accepting the outcome (five stages of grief and all) if you could demonstrate some sign of being awake.  Here's another poor analogy.  Why would anyone choose to rebuild in a flood zone (aka the Democratic Party) when the hundred-year floods come every year now?  You're not a tree; move.  Take off the blinders and start thinking outside the two-party box.  All you have to lose is the next election, after all.

-- The Democratic Party should purge itself of charlatans like Donna Brazile, but we all know they won't.  If you're one of those people who simply cannot bear the thought of voting for someone besides a Democrat or a Republican; if you'd rather keep trying to reform one of them from within, here's a reform you can steal from the Greens.  It just passed in Maine.  Unfortunately you'll have to change the Texas Election Code (Title I, Chapter 2, Subchapter B; IANAL) first.  Several not-so-liberal sources advocated for ranked choice/instant runoff voting in the wake of Trump's winning the GOP nomination, so perhaps the Republicans in Austin can get on board.  As our attention turns to the forthcoming legislative session, let's ask our new state representatives -- and the old ones, too -- and see what they think.