A 2017 Wrangle of 2016 progressive Texan news

Democrats are going to need a better plan than this toon represents.  The week's blog post roundup gathers the best from last week to start your 2017 off on the right (left) foot.

Off the Kuff pointed to Brazoria County as a potential and necessary opportunity for Greater Houston Democrats going forward.

Socratic Gadfly takes a look at Cozy Bear, Fancy Bear, et al, and while rejecting Trump's flippancy, expresses skepticism toward the mainstream narrative.

Texas Republicans expose themselves by making the lives of women, children, and prisoners as miserable as possible. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme sees Donald Trump is not the only white nationalist.

The Brainiacs of 2016, formerly the TPA's Texan of the Year and awarded solely by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs, are The Democrats.

The Apache oil company's "generosity" and speaking with forked tongue caught up with them in regard to their fracking plans in Balmorhea, as detailed by Txsharon at Bluedaze.

In a welcome relief from charting polls and stockpiling objections to Trump, jobsanger posts a survey of the most dangerous drivers in the United States, and finds Texas is tied for first -- or worst -- with Louisiana.

Neil at All People Have Value took a picture of train tracks at a Houston light rail station.  APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

Dos Centavos listed his top-trafficked posts for the year.

And in Lewisville, vandals shot through a homeowner's windows and knocked the head off of his front-yard Santa Claus, reports the Texan-Journal.

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More of the best of the left of Texas from the end of last year!

Leah Binkovitz at the Urban Edge has a rundown of the bills that have been filed to date for the coming legislative session (opening on January 10).  And Ross Ramsey at the Texas Tribune perceives that Austin and Washington out of sync in the early transitioning.

The Houston Press follows up on the Blue Bell ice cream company's continuing troubles with listeria, speaking with a food safety litigator who suggests the company is foolishly requesting of federal authorities that they be allowed to abandon the stringent -- and expensive -- poisonous bacteria testing imposed after previous tragedies.

Grits for Breakfast says the top criminal justice story in Texas -- and possibly the United States -- from last year is easy to spot, but the rest are more obscure.

The Hearne city attorney abruptly resigned last week, and Lawflog says 'good riddance'.

Members of Austin Jewish Voice for Peace held an ecumenical Chanukah vigil at the Capitol, and the The Rag Blog has the photos and story.

The Bloggess eulogized Carrie Fisher as an inspiration to people who struggle with mental illness.

Lone Star Ma urged people to email the Chemical Safety Board.

The Great God Pan Is Dead highlighted the art that moved him in the past year.

Swamplot presented its annual awards for real estate in Houston.

And 2016 was the year that Pages of Victory decided had weaned him off the Democrats.

New Year's Day Funnies

New Year's Eve Funnies

2016 Brainiacs: The Democrats

I sort of telegraphed it, yes?

The cartoonists really get what the Hillbots still don't.  Beginning early in this presidential cycle -- actually in the summer of 2015, when I made my most accurate prediction -- the establishment Donkeys stubbornly refused self-examination of their move to crown Hillary Clinton, beginning in the early primaries and debates.  Democrats laughed and mocked the GOP as the Pachyderms' bizarre primary slowly produced Donald Trump as nominee.  Even as DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was finally forced out, resigning ahead of the party's convention after hacked emails revealed the committee had indeed been favoring Hillary over Bernie Sanders, they refused to think in any terms except their own inevitability.  DWS moved right over to honorary chair of the Clinton campaign, and her successor, Donna Brazile, was later revealed to have shared town hall questions with her pals inside the camp.

They also denigrated Sandernistas for saying the primary was "rigged".  This would come back to haunt them in November with their festering Russian obsession, a derangement syndrome showing no sign of playing itself out until late January at the earliest.  And maybe longer than that ...

Besides being a lousy establishment candidate running in a 'change' election cycle, the presumptive Madam President made unforced errors: failing to hold a press conference for more than nine months, attending an Adele concert two weeks before the election, but never managing to visit Wisconsin even once.  She made a severe miscalculation late, demanding SEIU activists stay in Iowa and not go to Michigan, a state she lost twice, the first time in a foreboding upset -- a polling one -- to Sanders.  This might have been the loudest alarm bell they never heard.

But if any external factor could be blamed for her defeat, it would have to be FBI director James Comey, who first cleared Clinton in the summer following a probe into her use of a private email server, then -- 11 days before the election -- wrote a letter to Congress that he had new information that led him to revisit that decision.  The "new information" was DNC emails on the personal computer of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the now ex-husband of Hillary's closest advisor, Huma Abedin.  Two days before voters went to the polls, Comey re-cleared Clinton.

Nate Silver said on the same day, November 6, that this cost Clinton 2-4 percentage points in the national polling, and since the aggregate of polls were in error by a similar margin, he evaluated in December that the Comey letter had the greatest effect on the presidential race.  Indeed, late-deciding voters in swing states broke heavily for Trump (here's your fake news on that) and in one of the more stunning reveals in post-2016 election analysis, more Republicans stayed true to their man than Democrats did their woman.  There was simply a vast overestimate of her popularity among voters -- perhaps also described as overstating the unpopularity of Trump -- and it was most clearly seen in the electoral crumbling of the Great Lakes states presumed to be her firewall: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.  Her popular vote victory of nearly three million votes over Trump exposed the superfluous waste of concentrated support in states like New York and California, and even urban cities and counties in blood-red states (like Houston and Harris County, which she carried by 12 percentage points).

Here's the lesson, repeated: nationally surveyed two-horse race polls do not pick presidents, and neither does the sum of all votes across the country.  Clinton and her supporters acted both arrogant and lackadaisical about her electoral strength due to the faulty polling, and continue to trumpet the popular vote after it as an excuse to refuse to accept reality.  As long as they remain stuck in this position, they won't be able to organize for 2018, a year with even greater electoral warning flags.

Against this backdrop, the DNC moves toward electing a new chair, which looks like a repeat of the primary battle: likely either US Rep. Keith Ellison, an African American Muslim and Sanders acolyte, or Obama's labor secretary Tomas Perez, the Clinton (or is it Obama?) faction's choice who was exposed in the hacked/leaked emails as a man willing to play the race card against Sanders in the primary.  The schism shows no sign of healing.  Update: The latest on Perez's shortcomings, essentially the same as Clinton's.

Beyond that course, the strategy for the neoliberals seems to be to TeaBag Trump right out of the gate, as the Tea Pees did to Obama in 2009.  That didn't work out so well for the Baggers in 2012, so they went harder right, morphing into the alt-right white nationalists who propelled Trump to victory in the boondocks ... and thus the nation.

The Sanders Democrats, for their part, responsibly declined to jump ship after his defeat and ongoing disrespect, as the vote tallies for the minor party candidates revealed.  There was much less leakage of votes away from Clinton than there was perceived there would be (although the polls got the numbers for the third parties mostly correct).  When the Greens' Jill Stein established a fund to pay for election recounts in the Midwestern states, it was primarily Democrats who opened their wallets and forked over millions of dollars for a last-ditch hope of changing the outcome.  The system batted away that challenge like a badminton shuttlecock.

So Sanders, via Ellison, tries again to take over a broken Democratic machine that relies on the Republican model in terms of money and corporate support, but without the ability to either fight in the trenches or appeal to the working class voters who were their base for decades.  And when they lose, they'll stay loyal, attempting to overhaul a calcified political party from within instead of moving a little to the left and doing something different.  The definition of insanity, part 937.

But an olive branch in this scathing rebuke is extended to congratulate the Harris County Democrats, who succeeded where virtually all other Democratic parties across the country failed in 2016: switch Republican voters over, turn out the vote among Latin@s, and otherwise grind out a big win in a formerly purple, 50-50 county.  They did what the national organization couldn't, and maybe they have some wisdom to share going forward.  Who they pick to replace Lane Lewis as county chair will make a lot of difference as to whether they can sustain the gains in 2018 and, in the big picture, help eject the Cheeto Tweeter from the Oval Office in 2020.

Democracy is counting on a knee-capped, divided, somewhat bitter and mostly clueless bunch of elitist Democrats who favored a strong defense and big banks at the expense of working men and women, and nobody ought to hold their breath waiting for them to figure out how to win in two years.  Four years from now ought to be easier, but that's an eon away in political terms.

I'm going to continue to help organize something outside this shell of an allegedly liberal political party, but kudos to those who still think there's a rebellion to win within it.  Those folks will eventually be allies to those of us outside the castle walls, and how long it takes for them to come to their senses is the only remaining question.

Update: Down with Tyranny has a harsher evaluation.

Why I don't post much about Texas any more

Just a few of the latest reasons.

-- The three loons in contention for Secretary of the Department of Agriculture: Elsa Murano, Sid Miller, and Susan Combs (let me know in the comments if this Chron link and others below aren't giving you the full article).

Murano is a former president of TAMU, where she crossed swords with Rick Perry's buddy.

The Cuba-born Murano, a food safety expert who worked in the administration of President George W. Bush, is considered the least controversial of the three Texans, although she has rattled consumer advocates as well as top administrators in College Station.

[...]

Murano's more pressing political problem may be her short and stormy tenure at the helm of Texas A&M, where she clashed with then-Chancellor Mike McKinney, former chief of staff to Gov. Rick Perry, now Trump's choice for energy secretary.

Though Murano may have the heftiest food science resume among a slew of contenders in and out of Texas, her forced resignation after 18 months leading Texas A&M, Perry's alma mater, could make her an odd fit in the Trump White House.

Should I rehash the disadvantages of "romance novel/comptroller data breach" Combs and "Jesus shot/C-word/cupcake amnesty" Miller, in previous (and current) office?  No, I shouldn't.

The main reason I shouldn't is because it makes no difference as to whether these foul Texas Republicans get elected and re-elected.  The challenge may lie elsewhere, as Texas Democrats can't seem to come up with a way to defeat them.  It is no longer sensible to simply mock or deride or even point out their flaws as politicians and human beings without noting the vast ineptitude of their opposition.  See, in Texas we've been having to choose between Trump and Clinton in nearly every single statewide race for a couple of decades.  We keep waiting and hoping for the electorate to figure out which is the worst and then are shocked when they don't.  Logic and facts seems to be less and less useful in this regard.  The true fallacy of lesser evilism has been on display here in Deep-In-The-Hearta for a generation now; maybe there's a better choice beyond continuing to hold porcine singing lessons.

Here's more of the same, court room version.

A federal judge Wednesday ordered the Texas prison system to disclose the number of heat-related deaths among inmates statewide since 1990, sharply questioning why its lawyers had not provided the information sooner.

U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison gave the state 30 days to provide the details or face the consequences.

"We are not talking about how many widgets were sold out of a given factory," Ellison said during a hearing Wednesday in Houston. "We are talking about human lives, and I would be very distressed if the answer is the TDCJ does not even keep count of how many people died of heat-related illness."

What is there of value -- distress, disgust, outrage, snark, or otherwise -- to add to Judge Ellison's?  Here's more, tangentially, with respect to the Texas criminal "justice" (sic) system.

"Texas has the largest prison population of any state in the country. Nearly 145,000 are incarcerated, and a significant percentage of those are low-level offenders. People who are being held for violating parole or minor drug crimes," (Texas Association of Business President Bill) Hammond said. "Violent criminals, rapists and sexual offenders do belong in prison. However, there are some people whom we do not think belong in prison because of the cost."

Texas spends about $3 billion a year on prisons. Keeping someone behind bars costs about $50 a day, compared with $3 a day for supervised probation. With Texas lawmakers facing an $8 billion shortfall to maintain the current level of government services in 2018-2019, they need to find savings, and criminal justice is overdue for an overhaul.

Do you think posting a word like "good", or "wow", or something similar followed by an excerpt followed by an original sentence or two (generally containing the words 'see here for the background', with a link to some mention of the topic in the past), perhaps a paragraph of dishwater-flavored opinion, is making much of a difference in how Texans think about how they have been governed for the past twenty-five years?  Texas progressivism doesn't need more than one person on that beat.

Bill Hammond has been the solitary conservative in this state who has consistently tried to bridge the bipartisan divide in Austin by talking sense at Republican legislators, and you can see how successful he's been.  (Please don't assume that I'm giving Hammond credit for anything but a modicum of intelligence here.)

Hammond explained at an Austin news conference that it's not just about saving taxpayer money, though. It's about keeping nonviolent offenders employed and providing for their families while making restitution. Diversion programs and alternative sentencing can also force offenders to get treatment for drug addiction and mental health problems that underlie most crimes today.

"You are talking about individuals who are working, who are paying taxes, who are paying child support. They should be part of the community and part of the workforce instead of rotting in some prison at a high cost to taxpayers," Hammond said.

Indeed, this effort at rehabilitation is bipartisan.

Prison reform has long been a priority for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin. The group notes that politicians rely too much on incarceration, with one of every 100 American adults in prison today, compared with one in every 400 in 1970.

The group wants rehabilitation programs that reduce recidivism, such as mandatory job training, drug counseling and mental health care for the 7,000 Texans who are going to prison every year for simple drug possession.

The left-leaning Texas Criminal Justice Coalition couldn't agree more, calling for new ways to address possession of a controlled substance.

"There is no evidence that harsh penalties will discourage someone from continuing to use drugs, and therefore it is no surprise, then, that of the thousands of people who we send to state jail each year, 62 percent of them will be rearrested within three years," said Douglas Smith, a policy analyst with the group. "We can't arrest our way out of addiction."

We'd better stop there, as this gets way too deep for your average Trump voter/TeaBagger.  Appealing to the greater good in the souls of Lone Star conservatives only works if they're admonishing their lessers about the use of bootstraps.  If ill and impoverished Texans who have died because Rick Perry and Greg Abbott refused to expand Medicaid didn't graze their conscience, it's impossible to see how the lives of those incarcerated for drug "offenses" would.

At some point, again, you have to ask: is trying to make progress worth the effort in Texas?  There's always hope, but how bright does that little candle flicker?

One very minor example of the point I'm trying to make here.

Wouldn't it be grand if that vision above became reality?  Yet the elected managers of this region -- this modern, forward-looking, wealthy metropolis, with all of its spectacular diversity of arts, culture, food, and more -- cannot seem to overcome the troglodytes among their base who would rather tear down a piece of history, a legacy symbol related to the past when we dreamed big and executed big.

Nothing, in my opinion, demonstrates the abject failure of Texas conservatism more than the Astrodome in its current condition.  It's a metaphor for the crumbling, abandoned, deteriorating waste that is a long-term consequence of Texas Republican governance, as far and wide and clearly as the eye can see.

And yet the Democratic Latina county commissioner in 2012 -- now state Sen. Sylvia Garcia -- who represented a redistricted precinct that was 52.5% Latin@ VAP but only 38% CVAP, was subsequently shoved off commissioners' court by the Anglo Republicans on the east side of Houston.  Dr. Reynaldo Guerra at Dos Centavos explained this clearly at the time.  He invoked another quaint relic of a bygone era which has been steadily eroded by the GOP, the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  (Aside: boy, do I miss that kind of blogging.)

Harris County Democrats -- who stood out across the country as a shining example of how to take back their courthouse in last month's election -- need to show the rest of Texas outside the urban city limits how to replicate the feat in two years at the statehouse.  And in the US Congress, when we will have evidence of the destructive force of Trump's presidency staring us all in the face.  I'll be watching and assessing the Democrats' performance, but I won't be helping them any more. I like to have more options than just Coke or Pepsi, and I'm going to see to making that happen for everybody who can bothered to do their civic duty on a regular basis and cast a ballot.