Sunday, February 20, 2022

Sunday "Is It War Yet?" Funnies

I don't care for Gen. Tso's chicken either.
Welcome back, after his gap year, to Two Party Opera.
And congratulations to Desi Doyen for thirteen years of the Green News Report.
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Friday, February 18, 2022

The Weekend Environmental, Social Justice, and Calm-Me-Down Wrangle from Far Left Texas


'Texas Republicans behaving badly' is again trending on my timeline, but as referenced previously, that is a) annoying and tiresome; and b) seemingly not moving the needle away from them electorally.  So without posting more of their BS, I'll hold a few of the most egregious for another day.  This Wrangle is for the other things that bother me, and a few things at the end that soothe.


The freeze from last year has been an over-reported item this week.  Beto isn't getting any traction from it, either.  Maybe time to move on.

Let me use one more as my segue.


A couple of young capitalists found a way to make money on flaring, which is good, but isn't really going to solve the crisis.


There's just no point in building the Ike Dike now.  It's too late in the game.  Seriously.  Don't bother. This kind of too-expensive, unfeasible mitigation would be a boondoggle akin to the F-35.  (Speaking of Lockheed Martin ...)


That's a good segue to the social justice tweets.  There's also some criminal justice and labor news following.


Just entirely too many instances of the cops behaving poorly as well.


Mattress Mack has had a bad week (for him).


That news could have just as easily gone into 'Repubs acting badly'.

More guns = more gun deaths.  Our children are paying the price, and hiring more cops isn't going to solve this.


Their stories in the thread.


Perhaps a lawsuit I can feel good about Ken Paxton winning.


And the other feel-goods.  First: my friend Charles is writing "Leaving Texas"; here's the first part.

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Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Still Not Voting Wrangle from Far Left Texas


Update:


Not voting, obviously.


Harris County Greens and other progressives who have given up on the partisan duopoly:

Please clear your busy social calendars to make time for these important upcoming events:
Other counties in Texas with Green Party organizations will also hold their precinct and county conventions on those dates, which are specified in the Texas Election Code.  Those counties include Collin, Dallas, Denton, Travis, and Tarrant; Bexar may also have one.  Other Houston-metro counties (Brazoria, Fort Bend, Galveston, Montgomery)  may have a consolidated county convention in the near future.  Watch txgreens.org or Green social media for details.

I am not voting in the D primary so that I can participate in the Greens' conventions.  You'll note in the right-hand column that -- for those of you who are -- there are some Democrats I recommend you choose for statewide offices.  Here are the Texas Green Party's nominees:



Molison's filing is in protest of the state law restricting political participation by financial access.  That lawsuit by the Texas Libertarian Party is currently under consideration at the Supreme Court of Texas (scroll down to Dr. Mark Jones' tweet and read from there) and in federal district court.

So we'll see if Molison can make the November ballot.

Our Tex-Pukes actin' like fools since Monday:


Please put your clothes back on anyway.  I will acknowledge that sex work is still work, but IMO we have too many whores on the RRC as it is.


Bianca Garcia vows to become a "mini Marjorie Taylor Greene" if elected to the state Senate (District 11; Galveston, Pearland).  Praise the Lawd and pass the gazpacho.  Garcia also serves as the president of the national org Latinos for Trump.  And I decided to leave Ted Cruz and his latest antics out of this one, because I'm really getting worn out by that asshole.

Honestly starting to hate this part of the collation.  I'll have environmental, criminal and legal and social justice updates, and the soothers in the next Wrangle.
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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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