Monday, February 14, 2022

Valentine's Day Voting Massacre Wrangle


The elephant in the room, at the polling place, in Austin, in D.C. ...


(W)hat to do about a political system where a small and extremely conservative portion of the population is basically picking the leaders for the rest of the state? In theory, it’s supposed to be a self-correcting, but that’s reliant on general election voters restoring balance when either party goes too far astray. (Texas Politics Project director Jim) Henson says the problem is Texas Democrats.

“The weakness of the Democrats as a balancing factor in general elections has gone from being a temporary condition to almost a structural feature of the political system right now,” he said.

This means if the Democrats don’t start winning statewide offices, then Texas politics will shift even further to the right. Another solution is for more Republicans, the moderates in the party, to start showing up to vote in their primary.

Or maybe more Democrats could vote in the GOP primary.  Or perhaps the Earth will burn this pestilence off its face and a new species, one more concerned with empathy and self-preservation, will take its place in a few million years.

Since I'm not voting in the primary for the first time in my life, I guess I'm betting on the latter.

It's a grim state of affairs for the Donks.  Just check the latest polling from the TexTrib and UT, out this morning.


Some will say it's just another data point, but the trend is crystal.  And if Beto is a drag at the top, then everybody else is in trouble.

It's been twenty years since John Cornyn and Rick Perry swept the "Dream Team" of Ron Kirk and Tony Sanchez, and during that time blogs rose and fell, Twitter and Facebook were born, but Texas remains the same, except further to the right.  Dan Patrick upended David Dewhurst, Sid Miller replaced Todd Staples, Greg Abbott moved up from the SCOTX to the OAG and then the Governor's Mansion, and the Lege went full-bore nuts.

Meanwhile Tex Dems focused on "a few targeted races", like SD-10 (Wendy Davis, Konni Burton, Beverly Powell, some Republican next) and HD-134 (Martha Wong, Ellen Cohen, Sarah Davis, Ann Johnson).  When they could win a seat in Congress it inevitably was an oil-soaked Blue Dog like Lizzie Fletcher replacing some putrid conservative like John Culberson, with the shitlibs cheering 'progress'.

I spent a decade of the best years of my life in that losing fight, and another decade half in and half out of it.  No More.  I'll try to find some Donkeys to vote for in November, but I'm absolutely certain they won't make their choices easy for me.

This ain't it either, for reasons that should be obvious.  I note that no member of the Texas Progressive Alliance has mentioned this event as of yet.


More about this rally from Austin Sanders at the Austin Chronicle and Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, and from Fiorella Isabel and the DSA rally that followed.  Continuing in this vein:


Giberto Hinojosa has been an unqualified disaster for the TDP, but electing Kim Olson to replace him would end the party (which is not such a bad thing to consider, IMO.  Let the Texas Greens have the urban regions and the Donks can get their asses whipped in the boondocks).  Candidly I see the next chair being Carroll Robinson.  I've been wrong before, though.

Moving on to Tex-Cons behaving badly (a topic I blogged extensively last Thursday).


If you're going to spend as much time talking about newspaper endorsements as Kuffner does, you ought to acknowledge the obvious: they're the conservatives behaving badly here.  In running for a seat he doesn't live in, Wesley Hunt is just following the example set by James Cargas.

Shifting to ecological updates and leading with the ones having to do with the lingering effects of the freeze from a year ago (last week's post on the freeze that saved Abbott is here; and the rest of my environmental posts are here).


And a few criminal and social justice posts (a larger Wrangle of these appeared last Friday).


And my soothers (more were posted last week).

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Sunday, February 13, 2022

Sunday 'Soup to Nuts' Funnies

"Do you know why I pulled you over, Ms. Greene?"
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Saturday, February 12, 2022

The Calm-Me-Downs Wrangle from Far Left Texas

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The Environmental Wrangle from Far Left Texas


Flaring at Valero’s Houston refinery in Manchester sent black smoke billowing above the city’s East Side Monday morning. [...] (That) follows another flaring event Friday night (Feb.4) at the Galveston Bay refinery owned by Marathon Petroleum Corp. It too blamed flaring on a power outage. ...

Shell Chemical Company also alerted neighbors to possible flaring at its Deer Park plant Monday night, though the cause was unclear. Shell was not immediately available for comment.

Flaring events like these rain chemicals on the city’s eastern neighborhoods, polluting the air and affecting the health of sensitive groups, said Bryan Parras, an East Side resident and an organizer with the environmental advocacy organization Sierra Club.

“One of these events can exceed the permitted levels they are allowed to emit for the entire year, depending on how long the flaring lasts,” he said.

Just another day in Big Greasy.


Bruce Melton at The Rag Blog wrote a comprehensive essay about what he called the 'Tex-Ice' disaster ahead of Valentine's week, offering some survival stories about our current emergency and some new solutions to our existential crisis.  Sharon Wilson for Earthworks reminds us that methane releases are the damaging ecological impacts of Texas winter storms nobody really mentions.  Clean Technica points out the hidden costs of keeping natural gas-fired electric plants online (paying surge prices in a Uri-like event).  And Luke Metzger at Environment Texas has new research showing the role rooftop solar could have played in preventing 2021 Texas power crisis.

The last Wrangle this week has my calm-me-downs, and it will appear later today.
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Friday, February 11, 2022

The Social Justice Wrangle from Far Left Texas


Including the legal and criminal justice news, some labor updates, and a few posts marking Black History Month.


Reform Austin wants to know what the hell we're doing to public school teachers.


The Dallas County district attorney has obtained arrest warrants for two DPD officers accused of using excessive force in the same summer uprisings.


And a second top official at the TxDMV has now resigned.


Never seems to slow down with the "bad apples".


And some BLM to close.  Environmental news and calm-me-downs in subsequent posts.

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