The Boxing Day Wrangle

 It's not as rough on Santa as you might think.

Off the Kuff looked at presidential voting results in two Congressional districts with an eye toward future elections.

Socratic Gadfly punctures bits of East Texas, and general Texas, historical mythology with a look at the history of Nacogdoches. (Part Two this coming Friday.)

Grits for Breakfast watched the video of Fort Worth police officer baiting, and then arresting, the woman who called 911, and wonders right alongside the police chief if it was rudeness or racism.

In a 24-hour period last Thursday, Trump managed a trifecta: antagonize US-Israeli relations, start a nuclear arms race with Russia, and knock Lockheed Martin around for a discount on F-35s by threatening to have Boeing build a 'modified F-18' in its place.  PDiddie at Brains and Eggs says that if we don't get his Twitter account suspended, he's going to kill us all.

jobsanger reprints a FWST op-ed that points out that the Texas Lege still plans on defunding Planned Parenthood.

The Lewisville Texan Journal reported on the Texas Education Agency's final school ratings for the year, and quoted some administrators as calling them a crock.

South Texas Chisme says that in the wake of the Corpus Christi public water emergency last week, that city's manager says there's "a lot" of non-compliant users of city water.

Neil at All People Have Value took a picture of Houston's excellent Christmas Tree of Tires.  APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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And still more Texas news from a variety of contributors!

From space poop to Jupiter, the Houston Press recounted their ten best 2016 stories about NASA.

The Rivard Report spotlights on San Antonio's mental health care network, a national model.

The Longview News Journal exposes the East Texas judges who pay themselves a $25,000 bonus just for showing up for work.

The Texas Observer posts the worst of 2016's social media offerings from the likes of our elected 'representatives' such as Robert Morrow, Konni Burton, and Sid Miller.  Basically all of Sid Miller's Facebook timeline.

Equality Texas sees North Carolina buckling under the economic pressure of their 'bathroom bill', and watches as Texas charts a similar ill-fated course.

Ashton Woods at Strength in Numbers excoriates 'Pantsuit Nation' in his semi-regular series on intersectionality and the problematic white gaze.

And Houstonia has the Texas state park camping trips you need to book now.

Christmas Day Funnies

Christmas Eve Funnies

Trump's 24 hours

It's going to be a long four years, people.

President-elect Donald Trump long ago earned a reputation for being unpredictable in his statements, but he outdid himself on Thursday.

In the span of just a few hours, Trump shook international relations by undercutting the Obama administration over a UN resolution on Israeli settlements, indicated he would ramp up nuclear competition with Russia and then jolted a major defense contractor -- and its shareholders -- by suggesting he would ask Boeing to replace a fighter jet being made by Lockheed Martin.

Here's the best response to that last eruption.

if Trump read his briefings
he would know the huge difference
between the F-18 and F-35
hope someone's getting model airplanes from Santa

— BROKEN PROMISELAND (@VoteAngryNow) December 23, 2016

This is going to spoil my Festivus party.  Although we'll have a few extra grievances to air.

Jake Novak at CNBC suggests Trump's disrupting of the weapons procurement process is going to involve some bilateral back-scratching.

(T)he Air Force is starting the process of replacing America's Minuteman nuclear arsenal. More than 400 of those ICBMs, most built in the 1960s, now sit in missile silos across the U.S.

And, not coincidentally, the three companies bidding to get the replacement contract are Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. Of course, the CEOs of Boeing and Lockheed just met with Trump in Florida yesterday. While Boeing came out of that meeting promising to keep the costs of replacing Air Force One below $4 billion, that's chickenfeed compared to the $60 billion to $86 billion estimated cost of replacing the Minuteman program.

Was some kind of quid pro quo discussed in Mar a Lago Wednesday? Perhaps we'll never know, but if Boeing gets the contract that will be a prevailing suspicion for years to come.

Is this what all those Trumpets meant when they said -- and voted -- for Trump to shake up Washington?  Did "shakeup" include World War III?  Of less concern: how are they going to structure a defense contract so that President Trump gets his kickback without the GSA finding out about it?  And what will the GOP Congress critters do when they find out?  Crap themselves or impeach?

Should we encounter a 'water landing', your seat cushions may be used as a flotation device.

Scattershooting Electors and Obama's pardons

-- In hopefully the last epic fail of the Hillbots (at least for 2016) it looks like they succeeded in getting Electors to be faithless.  To Hillary Clinton.

More photos from the Chron here

While there was a lot of buzz about faithless Republican electors dumping Trump, it turns out that more Democratic electors dumped Clinton.  Specifically, two Republican Texas electors voted for candidates other than Trump:  one voted for John Kasich and one voted for Ron Paul.

I relish the irony of Ron Paul having earned more EC votes -- well, vote -- than Gary Johnson.  And anything that angers Greg Abbott would delight me, no matter what it was.

But four Democratic electors voted for candidates other than Hillary Clinton:

Only eight of 12 Democratic electors in Washington cast their votes for Democrat Hillary Clinton, who won the state in November. In an act of symbolic protest, three electors voted for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and one cast a vote for Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American elder from South Dakota.

It’s the first time in four decades that any Washington electors have broken from the state’s popular vote for president.

Emphasis theirs.  Three Washington state Democratic Electors, pledged to Her, appear to have conspired to vote for a Republican who refused to run for the office and was never seriously considered for it by the Republicans.  You can't make this stuff up.  If there's hope for abolishing the Electoral College -- and there isn't very much IMHO -- it has a little seed germinating in the aftermath of this impotent act of defiance.

Democrats that choose Tom Perez over Keith Ellison will extend the losing streak in 2018.  That's my early bet, and I'm bookmarking me for future gloating.

-- I believe Barack Obama's acts of clemency -- more than the previous eleven presidents combined, 50 times the number of his most recent predecessor, George Walker Bush -- are the very best thing he has done as president of the United States.

Just weeks before leaving office, President Obama on Monday issued 78 pardons and commuted the sentences of 153 prisoners, extending his acts of clemency to a total of 1,324 individuals, by far the largest use of the presidential power to show mercy in the nation’s history.

Of the 231 people who received a pardon or a reduced sentence from Obama, virtually all had been serving sentences under tough anti-drug laws, including those convicted of low-level, nonviolent crimes like possession of cocaine.

Those who received pardons had completed their sentences and are, in the words of Neil Eggleston, the White House counsel, now leading “a productive and law-abiding post-conviction life, including by contributing to the community in a meaningful way.” The pardons wipe away any legal liabilities from a conviction.

I stepped away from this president in 2009, when he did not show any commitment to getting the legislation passed that has long borne his name.  I was incensed by his replacing the torture of the Bush administration with unadjudicated assassination of suspected terrorists by drone, a legacy of fomenting the very thing he pledged to eradicate.  This legacy will live on long after him.  Not just after he leaves office, but after he is dead and gone.

However ...

The president has said he has been motivated to exercise his clemency power by a belief that the sentencing system in the United States was used to lock up minor criminals — often minorities — for excessively long periods of time.

At the end of 2015, as he commuted the sentences of 95 federal prisoners, Obama said it was “another step forward in upholding our ideals of justice and fairness” and added that “if we can show at the federal level that we can be smart on crime, more cost effective, more just, more proportionate, then we can set a trend for other states to follow as well. And that’s our hope.”

Tens of thousands of inmates, mostly young African-American or Hispanic men, were locked up in the effort to combat drug violence during the past three decades. Many of those men were sentenced under federal guidelines that required them to serve decades or longer in prison.

During the past several years, a bipartisan coalition emerged to overhaul that system. The unlikely allies included conservatives like Charles G. and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers, and the Center for American Progress, a liberal advocacy organization with close connections to Hillary Clinton.

But hopes for a legislative deal to overhaul the nation’s sentencing system failed to materialize during the bitter 2016 presidential campaign. That left Obama with one option: to use his clemency power case by case.

Emphasis above is mine.  I applaud this action and I hope the president will pardon more individuals before he leaves office.