More Bad News for Republicans

It's not just Greg Abbott's unfortunate developments today, though he does bat leadoff.

In May 2009, a former assistant attorney general in Greg Abbott’s office sued the Office of the Attorney General in Dallas County court, claiming she’d been fired for refusing to lie under oath about a Dallas County judge. Five years later, the Dallas-based Fifth Court of Appeals has ruled that Ginger Weatherspoon can go forward with her lawsuit.

The AG’s office has spent years trying to get the suit tossed, claiming, among other things, that Weatherspoon didn’t make a “good faith” effort to blow the whistle to the right links in the chain of command. A three-justice panel disagreed, and issued an opinion Monday written by Justice David Evans that said Dallas County Judge Martin Hoffman did the right thing last year when he refused to grant the AG’s office its request for summary judgment.

Weatherspoon’s initial filing in 2009 garnered media attention because of its explosive content: She claimed she refused to sign a “false affidavit” filled with “a number of misrepresentations and mischaracterizations” about David Hanschen, who, at the time, was a Dallas County family court judge involved in a pretty nasty tussle with the Abbott’s office over child support.

If Texas were any other state, if this much relentless corrupt behavior was coming to light about anybody else other than Abbott... that candidate would be electoral toast.

-- Rick Perry, on his way out the door to California in retirement, is doing his best to see that Lone Star Democrats have a fighting chance in November.  The headline: "Why Rick Perry's remarks on gays could sour Texas on Tesla"...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has made a career out of visiting, recruiting, and relocating businesses from California to Texas. But as the state’s GOP continues to push further and further to the right of the political spectrum, could the state’s ultra-conservative stance hurt recruitment from a progressive state?

First came the Texas Republican Party platform that said homosexuality is a choice and endorsed therapy aimed at “curing” people of being gay – a therapy banned in California.

Then, while on a company recruitment trip – one specifically aimed at enticing California based car maker Tesla to build a factory in Texas – Gov. Perry told a group of businesspeople that homosexuality was like alcoholism: whether or not you feel compelled to do something, you have the ability not to act on your urges.

“I may have the genetic coding that I’m inclined to be an alcoholic. But I have the desire not to do that. And I look at homosexual issue as the same way,” Perry said. (Watch a video of Perry’s response.)

Reporters in the room for the event say people in the crowd gasped after hearing Perry’s statement. The governor took plenty of criticism over the weekend for his comparison, leading up to a testy exchange with CNBC “Squawk Box” co-anchor Joe Kernen Monday morning.

Republicans really don't get how backward and ignorant this sort of thing looks to people elsewhere.  The rest of the article "devil-advocates' that it's not so bad, but that isn't at all the case.  People outside of Texas who aren't conservative -- that is to say, the vast majority of Americans -- are completely appalled at these social developments.  And that's before the topic changes to guns, or women's reproductive rights.

The Texas economy will bust again as soon as oil does.  Don't think it won't.  And the extended opportunities to diversify it will have been squandered by two decades of religious conservative dominance.  Casino gambling, marijuana decriminalization and then legalization... all blocked by the fundies.  Texas has managed alternate energy diversification to the extent that even the oil barons are making a play, which is how you can tell that Big Oil doesn't rule here like you think.

It's Big God that's the problem.  And that's exclusively a Republican problem (that they in turn make a problem for all of the rest of Texas).

-- Another right-wing talking point explodes in their faces: it was, in fact, a YouTube that prompted the Benghazi attack.

Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the suspect captured by U.S. special forces on Tuesday for his role in the 2012 Benghazi attack, reportedly said he was motivated in part by the anti-Islam online video made in America, according to the New York Times.

"What he did in the period just before the attack has remained unclear. But Mr. Abu Khattala told other Libyans in private conversations during the night of the attack that he was moved to attack the diplomatic mission to take revenge for an insult to Islam in an American-made online video," Times reporter David Kirkpatrick wrote in a story on Khattala on Tuesday.

Somebody owes Susan Rice an apology.

Do you think conservatives ever get weary about being wrong about everything? Or, like climate change and evolution and the polling in late 2012, they just refuse to believe the reality that they are wrong about everything?

-- Last, our local conservo-blogmeister Big Jolly seems distressed about the seeming inevitability (I warned you about that) of GOP electoral shoe-ins while he advocates a vote for Leticia Van de Putte in this post.

Folks, get ready for Lt. Gov. Patrick. This is how he operates, throwing money and government at the “crisis” of the day. No long term planning because he has no core belief in small government conservatism. No collaboration with the Feds to find out what they are doing. Just Dan being Dan. Of course, he does have an opponent in November.

I suppose he's going to have to spend a lot of time denying that's what he meant.

I'm willing to keep this "Bad News Pachyderms" series going as long as they do.

Why we need to wring the money out of our politics

Digby, at Salon.

...Whenever a powerful member of the party leadership retires or goes down to defeat, the rest of the members lose a very important resource: money. And lots of it.  The way these people ascend in partisan politics isn’t through their “beliefs” or any kind of ideological purity, it’s through their ability to raise money from big donors and industry and their strategic sense of how best to spread it around. (Eric) Cantor may have been a jerk — everyone says so.  But he was the majority leader because he had bought partisan loyalty over the years from being in bed with big money and judiciously spreading it around.

Heavy sigh.

But it isn’t just money. It’s also organization. As Robert Costa reported last Friday, McCarthy had it in spades. Not that he built it himself, mind you. He inherited the chief of staff of the most ruthlessly effective House majority leader in GOP history:

McCarthy’s office — led by chief of staff Tim Berry, who served in the same role for former House majority leader Tom Delay (R-Tex.) — methodically built their count with a numerical ranking system that DeLay had mastered. That gave McCarthy critical intelligence on who might need extra attention. And McCarthy’s top deputy whips weren’t his closest friends, but rather committee chairmen, a sign he understood how best to reach members — through their bosses.

Tom and his minions learned something from trying to kill cockroaches, obviously.  It's also now clear that we will never completely extinguish the children of The Hammer.  But back to the new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss.

Kevin McCarthy has been planning this ascension since the beginning of his political career. He’s an establishment man all the way, and in the establishment, money talks. (In fact, money’s “speech” has even got constitutional protection.) It’s how power is built and it’s not exclusive to the Republicans. Democrats do it exactly the same way.

I'd like to say 'duh' but there are still too many voters who don't understand this.  And when I say voters, I mean Democratic ones.  You know... the people who have nominated Jim Hogan this year, and in years past, Grady Yarbrough and Gene Kelly and the like.  Voting in midterm elections, especially in Texas, is a minority report, so you have to imagine that the majority -- non-voters -- just doesn't think enough about this sort of thing to care.

Weekend after next, Texas Democrats meet in plenary session in Big D to caucus and rally their partisans for a fall faceoff in which they remain decided underdogs.  I'll be among them as both reporter and delegate.  Unless, you know, somebody holding a grudge about my Green participation decides to try to strip my credential.  I don't expect that to happen, but stranger things and all that.  Still, it'll be nice to have a long weekend in another growing bastion of blue in the Lone Star State.  Dallas County elected a lesbian sheriff before Houston elected a lesbian mayor, after all.

There are Democrats who are suspicious of my midterm election year conversion, just as there are Greens who think I've sold out for access.  Here's how I rationalize it: until the liberal political party devoid of corporate influence can at least grow strong enough as an electoral threat to pull the Democrats back from the right, I -- we -- have to play in the sandbox as it is constructed.  And that does NOT mean trying to raise as much money as the GOP.  It does mean that we need to plug into Move to Amend, and support the infrastructure and local efforts to reduce and ultimately end the corrupting influence of caysh in the body politic.  In terms of minimal impact greater than nothing, some intensification of this movement in Texas sends a message to that toad Ted Cruz.

Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Tim Berry, and yes, Greg Abbott should be all the evidence you need to see that change is long overdue.

Update: Or perhaps we could just tell our Congresscritters to enforce the Tillman Act of 1907.

Greg Abbott's Bad News This Week

If Texas were any place else in the Union, there's no way a guy so profoundly corrupt would be leading in the polls.

Families who live and work near hazardous chemical facilities no longer have access to information about the type or amount of dangerous toxics in their community. According to a report by WFAA-TV, Greg Abbott recently issued a legal opinion barring the disclosure of such information despite federal law permitting disclosure and longstanding state practice to make that information available to anyone who requests it.

Abbott’s decision reflects an about-face from proclamations made by other state leaders to beef up disclosure of chemical facilities in the wake of last year’s disastrous explosion of an ammonium nitrate storage facility in West, Texas.

Why do you suppose he wants corporations to be able to keep that a secret?

The ruling by Abbott says the locations of explosive and toxic chemicals must be kept confidential because of security concerns. The ruling states that information ”is more than likely to assist in the construction or assembly of an explosive weapon or a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon of mass destruction.”

But Tommy Muska, the Mayor of the town of West, where last year’s tragedy struck, believes there is greater danger in withholding the locations of potentially dangerous chemicals from the public. He hopes the state can find some middle ground that will keep the public informed.

“They’re worried it could get into the wrong hands,” he says. “I strongly feel, though, that the public, the 99 percent of good people out there, have a right to know what’s in their backyard.”

He can always roll away and hide for a few days until the dust settles.  Speaking just for myself, I don't trust Greg Abbott to keep me safe from domestic terrorists... or the companies they own that contribute to his campaign.  Like these Wilks brothers.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) dodged the question last week of whether he agrees with his party's support for "reparative therapy," a process purported to change the sexual orientation of gay people. But campaign records show the gubernatorial candidate has been flying around on a private plane donated by two billionaires who help fund the "ex-gay" movement.

Texas fracking tycoons Dan and Farris Wilks have given Abbott a combined total of more than $30,000 worth of in-kind donations this year for the use of a private plane. The Wilks' charitable trust, The Thirteen Foundation, has contributed nearly $3 million to groups that promote gay conversion therapy, a discredited pseudo-medical practice meant to change people's sexual orientation from gay to straight. The foundation also donates millions to anti-abortion and conservative religious groups.

Abbott's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The Texas Republican Party endorsed reparative therapy in its platform this year and asserted that homosexuality is not "an acceptable alternative lifestyle." 

The Wilkses are frackers AND homophobes.  A Teabagging two-fer!

How foul does Greg Abbott have to stink before Texans decide they've had enough?

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance thinks it's the Republican Party of Texas platform writers that need some therapy as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff emphatically reminds us that Greg Abbott owns the RPT platform, no matter how much he may try to avoid the subject.

Libby Shaw at Texas Kaos asks why bother to address issues of substance that matter to most of us when it is easier to scare voters with hate talk? The Texas GOP unleashes its Hate Genie.

Almost as rare as Haley's Comet, both houses of Congress actually did some WORK this week, overwhelmingly passing legislation to help our veterans get better healthcare. But as Texas Leftist shares, helping our nation's heroes is simply a bridge too far for some over at Fox News.

The latest poll taken of the Texas electorate for the 2014 elections is what it is, just as Texas voters are what they have been for at least twenty years. All it demonstrates is that everybody's work is still cut out for them. But PDiddie at Brains and Eggs cautions everyone not to buy into the "It is inexorable" conservative spin of those numbers.

In the series "What Idiot Would...." Bay Area Houston adds another truth about Greg Abbott in "What Idiot would hide explosive chemicals from the public?"

WCNews at Eye on Williamson tells us we need candidates that can make undecided voters and non-voting Texas see the Texas GOP as extreme and frightening: In Order To Be A Hero, There Has To Be A Villian.

Neil at All People Have Value posted an updated list of ideas and thoughts for everyday resistance to our violent and money-grubbing culture. All People Have Value is part of NeilAquino.com.

===================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Fascist Dyke Motors continues her story of observing the opposition to the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance as it was being passed by City Council.

Scott Braddock reports on negative reactions to the Republican Party platform from Latino GOPers.

LGBTQ Insider laments the harsh homophobia of that same platform, while Lone Star Q identifies the "ex-gay" man behind the reparative therapy plank, and Susan Duty provides some helpful tips to straight people on how to avoid being converted to homosexuality.

Socratic Gadfly noted that Rick Perry hit new depths of cluelessness with regard to homosexuality and alcoholism.

Behind Frenemy Lines reminds Sid Miller that God actually can't make it rain.

jobsanger had a take on the Texas Tribune polls that show Democrats trailing all statewide races by significant margins.

In the Loop reads deeper into the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner exchange.

Grits for Breakfast wonders why we restrict the use of asset forfeiture funds to drug treatment only.

Tar Sands Blockade featured t.e.j.a.s. co-founder Bryan Parras' story about living in the shadow of the refineries where it is processed, and the details of The Healing Walk.

Bluedaze exposes the Mansfield, TX mayor's conflict of interest over fracking in his community.

And finally, the TPA bids a fond and hopefully temporary farewell to In The Pink Texas, whose use of Sleepless in Seattle as a political metaphor remains a classic of the genre.

Sunday Funnies

Not the numbers so much as the analysis of them

Laying aside the almost requistite harshness of the TexTrib's past record in polling, the poll's methodology (left to others to dissect), and even the fact that early snapshots hardly reveal the final picture... the most recent numbers produced by Jim Henson at UT/TT really don't leave much to quarrel about.

They represent a very accurate portrayal of the base electorate in Texas, IMHO.  Yes, Republicans have anywhere from a 8-14 point advantage in statewide races, and have had that for almost two decades now.  They wax a little in midterms (2010 being a great year for them) and wane a little in presidential election years (2008 and 2012) but that's the generic spread.

The problem this go-round is that Henson wants to be a pundit (like all the rest of us).  Start with his first premise at that link.  There probably isn't anything more obnoxiously wrong than the "resistance is futile" meme from the GOP.

That didn't turn out too well for either the Borg or the Emperor, IIRC.  To quote the underdog: you're gravely mistaken.  Zac Petkanas is correct; Greg Abbott is the weakest candidate the TXGOP could have nominated, and he has demonstrated that ineptitude every time he comes out of hiding and says or does something craven and/or stupid.  Abbott has only the home field advantage.  That's it.

Henson's second postulate ("The statewide Republican advantage survived a divisive primary season just fine") is also false and somewhat laughably so.  His poll was taken between May 30 and June 8, at the crest of the GOP primary runoff results, and concluding just as the RPT was holding their convention in Fort Worth.  You know, the one with the party platform planks that received national notoriety for their undue harshness on immigration reform and reparative therapy and reproductive freedom and a host of other issues.

There isn't enough backlash to those outrages --  from Republicans, mind you -- baked into this poll.  I could go on and eviscerate the other three points he and his polling associate, Joshua Blank, make but you get the picture.  These poll numbers are hardly probative of much of anything beyond the established baseline.

"B-B-But Wendy Davis replaced her campaign manager!", you would sputter if you were a crimson partisan.

True enough...State rep. Chris Turner has been brought on to replace DC darling Karin Johanson.  Not that big a deal.

Turner was Davis’ first choice to manage her bid, said someone close to the campaign, but was initially unavailable due to timing with the legislative session. Washington Democrats had been excited about Johanson, who they saw as an experienced hand who lent credibility to the campaign.

It was, in fact, Johanson's idea.

Johanson took credit for the decision in a farewell email.

“A few weeks ago I suggested to Sen. Davis that she reach out to Rep. Chris Turner to lead the campaign to election day. Chris has managed tough Texas races and as member of the Texas House is respected across the state for his smarts and common sense,” Johanson wrote in an email to the campaign staff, which was forwarded to msnbc by the campaign. “I am proud of what we have all built in this campaign…We have raised more money, have more donors (133,600) and have more volunteers (18,222) than any candidate ever in Texas. We have raised more money than any non-incumbent candidate for Governor in the country. We are organizing voters in every region of the state.”

Though Johanson was a D.C.-based consultant who helped get Tammy Baldwin elected in Wisconsin and spent decades working Democratic politics and with EMILY’s List, Turner is a seasoned Texas consultant and Democratic state representative.

Even if you would rather believe this is campaign spin, I will suggest what I believe is the real reason Johanson decided to leave.

Recently the Davis campaign got into a bit of a spat with the Democratic Governors Association after Johanson criticized the organization for not listing the Texas gubernatorial race as a top targets for Democrats in the 2014 cycle.

"The uninformed opinions of a Washington, DC desk jockey who's never stepped foot in Texas couldn't be less relevant to what's actually happening on the ground," Johanson said.

In response the DGA communications director Danny Kanner said that Texas is a historically difficult state for Democrats to win statewide.

"Governor Shumlin stated the obvious fact that Texas has historically been a tough state for Democrats, but that -- because we have a strong candidate -- we are hopeful about our chances this year," Kanner said.

The DGA isn't going to send millions of dollars to Texas for Wendy -- exactly the opposite in fact, as has traditionally been the case -- but they did not need to be dismissive of the Davis campaign... and Johanson shouldn't have kicked them in the shins when they were.

Anyhow, the worst way this can reasonably be interpreted is as a tempest in a teapot... and the seas are calming.

We're coming off an election just a couple of weeks ago where 1% of registered voters cast a ballot in the D primary runoff.  Three times as many voted Republican, but that's still not saying much.  Obviously this is what Battleground Texas is working hard to change.

It's way too early for any declarative statements about the 2014 election until Texans start paying more attention, and that won't happen until sometime after Labor Day.  Meanwhile, BGTX is performing the Aegean task of building the political infrastructure necessary to break up the Texas monolith.  And that remains a massive work in progress.

Abbott 44%, Davis 32%

In third place was "no opinion", with 17%.

“Abbott remains strong and this, in a lot of ways, confirms the strategy that we’ve seen from his camp: Leave well enough alone,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin and co-director of the UT/TT Poll. “The Davis campaign seems to be not able to reverse the trend.”

That's about right.  I don't think this is the reason that Chris Murphy was brought in to replace Karin Johanson, by the way.  But certainly he takes over a campaign that appears to be treading water, for any variety of reasons inside and outside its control.

Dan Patrick is still riding the wave.

In the the race for lieutenant governor, Republican Dan Patrick has the biggest margin in the pack of statewide races, leading Democrat Leticia Van de Putte 41 percent to 26 percent, with 23 percent undecided and the remainder going to third-party candidates and unnamed candidates.

Historical trends holding.

Republican candidates lead in all of the other statewide nonjudicial races, with the number of undecided voters climbing as you go down the ballot:

• U.S. Sen. John Cornyn leads Democrat David Alameel 36 percent to 25 percent in a race where 26 percent of the voters said they have not made up their minds. Rebecca Paddock, a Libertarian, got 5 percent, the Green Party’s Emily Sanchez got 3 percent and 5 percent said they would vote for “someone else.”

• In the race for attorney general, Republican Ken Paxton leads Democrat Sam Houston 40 percent to 27 percent, with 27 percent undecided. Libertarian Jamie Balagia and Green Jamar Osborne each have 3 percent.

• Republican Glenn Hegar leads Democrat Mike Collier 32 percent to 25 percent in the contest for comptroller of public accounts, followed by Libertarian Ben Sanders at 5 percent and Green Deb Shafto at 2 percent. In that race, 37 percent said they had not formed an opinion about their vote.

• In the race for land commissioner, Republican George P. Bush leads Democrat John Cook 36 percent to 25 percent, followed by Justin Knight, a Libertarian, at 6 percent, and Valerie Alessi from the Green Party at 3 percent. Thirty percent of the voters were undecided.

• Republican Sid Miller leads Democrat Jim Hogan by 8 percentage points in the agriculture commission race, with 32 percent to Hogan’s 24 percent. The Green Party’s Kenneth Kendrick got 5 percent and Libertarian Rocky Palmquist got 4 percent in that race. The remaining 34 percent were undecided.

• The numbers in the race for railroad commissioner were similar: Republican Ryan Sitton, 32 percent; Democrat Steve Brown, 24 percent; Libertarian Mark Miller, 6 percent; and Green Martina Salinas, 4 percent. The other 33 percent have not picked a favorite.

I would not expect to see any great shakeups in the numbers before Labor Day.  All the bad news for Republicans, with the possible exception of the fallout from their various party platform disasters, is baked in here.  Update: Notice in the next post that I reconsidered and abandoned this premise after some time to analyze the results... and not just because the TexTrib pollsters decided they agreed with it.

It's going to be a long hot summer for Battleground Texas volunteers, sweating it out to have something to show for their hard work in November.

Cantor gets 'bagged

Yeah yeah, "no one could have predicted that terrorists would fly airplanes into buildings", but they did.

In the most stunning upset since Republicans took over the House of Representatives four years ago, Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his GOP primary Tuesday to a poorly funded and disorganized Tea Party activist. David Brat, an economics professor, beat Cantor by 12 points when the Associated Press called the race shortly after 8 p.m. Cantor served as the congressman from Virginia's 7th district since 2001 and as the leader of House Republicans since 2011.

 Cantor was the chief opponent of President Obama in the House, organizing unanimous opposition to the stimulus act in 2009 and opposing a deal led by John Boehner to end the government shutdown in 2011 in part by raising revenue. Cantor felt the heat from Brat over immigration, airing ads in the closing days saying he opposed "amnesty." Brat will face Democrat Jack Trammell in the general election.

There's a few more interesting angles to take on the morning after than "Tea Party rises! Flexes muscle! Eats GOP! Fires all of its guns at once and explodes into space!!!1!"

The first revealed itself early yesterday evening: that Virginia Democrats heeded the call from former Georgia Congressman Ben Jones -- also known as Cooter from 'The Dukes of Hazard'.

Cooter, who ran against Cantor in 2002, has penned an open letter calling upon Democrats in his former Virginia district to vote in the open primary next Tuesday for tea party opponent Dave Brat in order to defeat U.S. House Majority Leader Cantor.

Crossing party lines to vote in an open primary has a long tradition in the solidly one-party South, Cooter argues in his letter. "[B]y voting for David Brat in the Seventh District Republican primary, we Democrats, independents, and Libertarians can make a big difference in American politics," he argues. "It is your right to cast that vote. It is an 'open' primary and it doesn’t preclude anyone from voting anyway they wish in November. It may be the only way to empower those who want to make a statement about the dysfunctional Congress and 'politics as usual.'"

This is what happens in Texas frequently, and what Rush Limbaugh branded Operation Chaos in 2008.  Be sure you read both of these links, all the way to the end, in order to gauge the value of the tactic versus its ultimate 2008 result.  Nobody can apparently measure the effectiveness of this sort of thing (unless I just can't find the evidence, that is). So I'm going to go with 'urban legend' on the power of the crossover vote, as the district went 57-42 for Romney in 2012, until I see something more convincing in terms of empirical data.

Update:

While Republican primary turnout spiked by 28 percent over 2012, according to the State Board of Elections, Cantor received nearly 8,500 fewer votes this year than he did in the 2012 Republican primary, a drop that was larger than Brat's 7,200-vote margin of victory. Regardless of how many Democrats turned out to oppose Cantor, he still would have prevailed had he maintained the same level of support as in his 2012 landslide.

If Democrats showed up in large numbers to vote against Cantor, turnout should have spiked highest from 2012 in Democratic-leaning areas, with Cantor seeing an especially large drop-off in support. In fact, turnout rose slightly more in counties that voted more heavily for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election.

The second, from Politico this morning, reveals that immigration reform -- or amnesty, as conservatives now derisively call it -- isn't the reason Cantor got upset by Bagger Brat.

Democrats are making the case that it was Cantor himself – not immigration – that dealt a powerful blow to the one-time rising Republican star’s political career. And they are releasing new data on Wednesday to back up their argument.

About 72 percent of registered voters in Cantor’s district polled on Tuesday said they either “strongly” or “somewhat” support immigration reform that would secure the borders, block employers from hiring those here illegally, and allow undocumented residents without criminal backgrounds to gain legal status – three key tenets of an overhaul, according to a poll by the left-leaning firm Public Policy Polling and commissioned by the liberal advocacy group Americans United for Change.

Looking just at Republicans in Cantor’s district, the poll found that 70 percent of GOP registered voters would support such a plan, while 27 percent would oppose.

Meanwhile, Cantor was deeply unpopular in his district, the PPP poll found. About 63 percent of those surveyed in his district said they did not approve of the job Cantor has been doing, with 30 percent of registered voters approving. Among Republicans, 43 percent approved of Cantor’s job performance, while 49 percent disapproved, the survey found.

“Cantor didn’t lose because of immigration,” pollster Tom Jensen wrote in the memo obtained in advance by POLITICO. “He lost because of the deep unpopularity of both himself personally and of the Republican House leadership. Even in his conservative district voters still want immigration reform passed, and they want it this year.”

Well, it was a "librul" poll, so cons sure aren't going to believe it.  They would rather place their faith in God's will or their own self determination, after all.

Update: There are a few Republicans also saying that it wasn't immigration that brought him down.

Candidly, the most interesting thing to me is that we might have a Texan as Speaker of the US House, sooner than later.  Because it's always about us, after all.

And because (Cantor) was next in line to be Speaker of the House, his ouster means that Dallas Rep. Jeb Hensarling could be in for a promotion. It had already been widely assumed that Speaker John Boehner may call it quits within a year, tired of tangling with tea partiers.

Whether Hensarling would have challenged Cantor, the party’s No. 2 leader, for Speaker was never clear. The Texan, elected in 2002, gave up his post as the party’s No. 4 leader last year to become chairman of the House Financial Services Committee — a perch that comes with lots of attention from deep-pocket donors. He has been widely viewed as a plausible contender for Boehner’s job, having led the Republican Study Committee, a key conservative bloc, before joining the party’s leadership team.

Cantor’s defeat will trigger a leadership scramble that will play out in coming months, and it opens a fresh path for Hensarling’s further ascent.

Plenty of tea leaves still to be read on these developments.  You can start with Booman and TPM, and I'll add more if it tells anything more significant than the stock takes.

Update: For Jewish Republicans... oy vey.

A few more words about Bergdahl and his family

-- Our local cretin Burt Levine (yes, cretin) posted this on his Facebook page.

Never underestimate the depths to which conservatives can lower themselves.  Can they dive deeper into their own sewage than suggesting Bergdahl's mother is making sexual overtures to the president?  We would hope not, but the truth is they probably can.

-- On Bergdahl's father:

Bob Bergdahl is a devout Presbyterian, not a Muslim; he self-taught himself Pashto and Urdu to better understand his son’s captors and the “world he could not escape;” he followed jihadis on Twitter to gain information; he researched Afghanistan to acquire information he didn’t have; along with his son, he questioned the war.  All of this has made Mr. Bergdahl an incomprehensible entity in this unfolding story. And as we have seen over the past many years, what the right doesn’t understand, what it can’t grasp, what eludes the very limited thinking it engages in, has to be something malodorous, something foreign, and therefore evil. Mr. Bergdahl, despite his deep religious beliefs, a strong commitment to his son, obvious intelligence and resourcefulness and patience – all positive attributes –  is not easily placed in one of the little boxes the right-wingers love to use. After all, if you’re unable to critically think, the only option left is to label.

As Sean Elder at Newsweek wrote of Mr. Bergdahl, “He wept, he suffered, but he persevered, and like any resourceful man, he tried to understand the nature and origin of the problem.”

-- Last, on the soldier/POW himself.

Republicans are so consumed by racial animus and rage that they have finally sunk to a level of attacking a white American soldier, a prisoner of war, as surrogate for Barack Obama. The conservative movement appeared to have sunk to the depths of depravity when they shutdown the government and tried to destroy the good faith and credit of the United States that was borne of racial hatred for this president. However, all their anti-American actions over the past five years pale in comparison to attacking a young man who volunteered to fight and die for his country, was held in captivity as a prisoner of war for five years, and escaped his captors twice, only to be the recipient of Republicans’ racial hatred for the president that negotiated his return home.

Racism is a vile cancer that has metastasized to such a level in the conservative movement that their animus extends to a white American soldier as surrogate for the black president who brought him home. Conservatives have indeed hit rock bottom.

No, they haven't.  There is no fathomable depth -- and not much waiting, either -- to the next craven display of political opportunism.  There is nothing too revolting for them to say, nothing too vile for them to attempt.

This is where we are in the state of our political discourse today.  Conservatives will say any hideous thing they can think of to score a point with their side, and the rest of us are left with our mouths agape in disgust.

Update: A soft call for sanity from the right.

I'd like to have that conversation, but...

-- ...what's the point? As long as the RepubliTea Party of Texas keeps calling it a narcotic, it's just a parlor game to speculate on the future date when Texas will make some progress on marijuana decriminalization/legalization.

It turns out that the Houston Chronicle’s Baker Institute blog has put up a range of views on the idea of changing Texas’ marijuana laws. The Statesman has posted two pieces on the subject, one from the ACLU and one from an opponent. The opponent, who heads the Drug Free America Foundation, looked down her nose this way at pot vacationers who head to Colorado: “Colorado experienced an infestation of ‘drug tourism.’ ”

I don’t imagine people consider Napa Valley wine tourism an “infestation”. Napa Valley tourists will spend tons more more money and sport fewer tattoos. They may head to Napa to get a buzz, but it’s a refined, expensive buzz.

Until those people who want to see that progress happen start lining themselves up at polling places across Texas and vote to remove from office those who oppose it, that is.

Yes, it could happen in less than five months... or it could take as long as ten years.  Not even Colorado's swelling tax coffers and a corresponding reduction in crime will sway the religious fundies.  They're the ones who lifted Dan Patrick up and have placed him at the gates of heaven.

If weed is your issue, then you are going to have to vote them out.

-- ... that immigration conversation needs to happen among Republicans.  And apparently it is.

Delegate Maria Espinoza, who has compared the Texas Solution to the Nazi’s Final Solution, told the thousands gathered in the convention hall that granting any kind of legal status to those here illegally would be tantamount to negotiating with terrorists. Instead of laughter, her comparison was greeted with thunderous applause.

Go back and read that graf again.

When it was over, one hardliner proclaimed: “Boom, the Texas Solution is dead.”

“What kind of message is that for Hispanic voters?” said Norman Adams, a Houston insurance agent who was part of the team that got the Texas Solution inserted into the platform in the first place. “As far as I’m concerned we’ve moved the party back 10 years,” he said.

[...]

“While I have tremendous respect for the will of the people and the direction of our Party’s grass roots activists, I am saddened today by the substantive elimination of the Texas Solution from the Party’s platform,” Rep. Jason Villalba, R-Dallas, told Quorum Report.

[...]

A young Latina who did not wish to be identified because she has worked on various Republican campaigns in North Texas said she wasn’t giving up on the GOP, but the events that unfolded on Saturday were “breathtaking,” as she put it.

“I’m going to see if my friends want to help Leticia Van de Putte,” she said, referring to the Democratic nominee for Lt. Governor.

Now we're talking.  That is progress.

GOP plots revenge against Cruz

After his sweet two weeks of high exposure and straw-poll dominance in Fort Worth, it certainly is nice to see that not every conservative in the land is swallowing Poop Cruz's BS.

Ted Cruz has not made himself a popular man in Washington. The Texas Republican would argue that’s the point. But even for a Senator — an elected office with the backing of an entire state — ticking off powerful people can have consequences.

In his first two years in Washington, Cruz has managed to help force a government shutdown, undermine the GOP’s chances of taking over the Senate and force uncomfortable votes for his fellow Republicans — not to mention the verbal bombs he lobs on a regular basis, many aimed at his own party. His colleagues, aware of the threats they face from primary challengers, have mostly held their tongues and their fire so far. But Cruz has already done some damage without much trying. A week after his election to the Senate in 2012, Cruz was named vice chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), which works to elect Republicans to the Senate. But he subsequently refused to endorse incumbent Senators, or help them in their races, a fact that many Tea Party insurgents have seized upon. He hasn’t set foot in the NRSC in more than a year, sources say.

“They tried to channel him to be somewhat productive. They tried that with NRSC,” says John Feehery, a former longtime GOP Hill aide. “Lyndon Johnson once said he’d rather have people inside the tent pissing out. But (Cruz) seems to be inside the tent pissing in. (my emphasis)”

That towel-pop from a high-ranking GOP consultant is so revealing.

Cruz hasn’t campaigned or raised money for GOP challengers, but he has forced a series of uncomfortable votes — the most prominent one being a debt-ceiling bill in February — that put imperiled incumbents on the spot. “After already forcing a strategic blunder on the conference, he stood up, looked his Republican colleagues in their eyes and said he wouldn’t work against them in the primaries.” says Kyle Downey, a former GOP Senate leadership aide. “Then he broke his word. Breaking your word, or lying, has consequences in the Senate, both seen and unseen. When it comes to the currency of relationships, he’s running up big debts.”

Not that Cruz needs much help. He remains enormously popular with a small but vocal part of the base. That has given him a powerful grassroots-fundraising platform. Even though he’s not up for re-election for another four years, Cruz has raised $1.8 million so far this cycle, $1.5 million of it coming from individual donations. He’ll need this kind of support and much more if he decides to run for President in 2016. By all accounts, Cruz’s push to shut down the government did not play well with business and corporate donors. “He’s the last person Wall Street would give money to,” says a big Republican donor. “They’re more interested in a Chris Christie or Jeb Bush. Even Rand Paul would be a preferable alternative to Cruz. How [Cruz] is going to run for President without big donors is beyond me.”

Ted will just 'trust the grassroots' to sign over their life savings, AND take out a reverse mortgage and donate it all to him.  He's a populist, you see.

At home in Texas, Cruz has little to worry about, given the Tea Party’s dominance of Texas primaries. He’s much more secure than fellow Senate Tea Party Caucus member Mike Lee, a Utah Republican Senator who’s up for re-election in 2016 and is likely to be facing a tough primary at home. That said, Texas is a state with changing demographics. “If he’s not careful the changing demographics in Texas is going to make it harder for him to get re-elected,” Feehery says.

Yeah, sooner or later the Latinos -- and women and young voters of all creeds and the 50%+ of Texans in general who would rather watch the Emmys or soccer or the NBA Finals or whatever else was on TV this weekend, and every weekend -- will show up at the polls and turn the tide from rabid red to some nice shade of purple.  Hope it happens in my lifetime.

While we wait, there'll be another TexTrib poll released any day now.  They were polling at the end of May (as a YouGov panelist, I was polled nine days ago), all statewide executive races and all four ballot-accessible parties (D, R, G, L) on the November slate.  Maybe those results will give everyone who's not drinking the tea-flavored Kool Aid a whiff of encouragement.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is glad that the Republican Party of Texas has made the choices clear for November, 2014  as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff wants to know who stands with Harris County Republican Party Chair Jared Woodfill as he whips up opposition to the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance.

Letters from Texas pens a moving obituary to Annie's List Executive Director Grace Garcia, who was tragically killed in an automobile accident last week.

Bay Area Houston highlights the Texas Tea Party platform concerning divorce.

Libby Shaw at Texas Kaos, upon returning from an overseas vacation, is not in the least surprised to learn the Texas GOP has gotten even crazier. Desperate times must call for desperate measures. Texas GOP: Welcome to the Funny Farm. The time for change is long overdue.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme sees Texas Republicans go full on hate for gays and Latinos. We see who you really are.

Appalled by the attacks on POW Bowe Bergdahl's father, PDiddie at Brains and Eggs barely noticed there was a Republican state convention going on. Has anyone asked Chris Busby about the "cure the gays" platform plank?

WCNews at Eye on Williamson demonstrates that with any tax discussion in Texas, as usual the main issue is not being discussed: Hegar And The "Cumbersome" Property Tax.

Neil at All People Have Value posted a history of the United States on his blog. All People Have Value is part of NeilAquino.com.

Horwitz at Texpatriate is frightened by the new Texas GOP platform.

===============

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

The Inanity of Sanity talks back to the Texas Tribune about their first installment of "TribTalk".

Socratic Gadfly asks: if Greg Abbott is such a big fan of public education, why is he so opposed to paying for it?

Grits for Breakfast responds to a Baker Institute op-ed on the timeline for marijuana legalization in Texas.

Fascist Dyke Motors has part one of a multi-post on her experience at City Hall as the Houston equal rights ordinance vote finally went down.

Texas Election Law Blog connects the woes of the Postal Service to the ever increasing barriers to voting in Texas.

Keep Austin Wonky wants to focus on transit productivity over political prizes.

Texas Vox analyzes the impact of the new EPA regulations on Texas.

Red Headed Wolf salutes the leaders that worked to get the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance passed.

Burkablog catches the Texas Public Policy Foundation quietly backing away from a shameless lie they made about the budget last year.

Offcite eulogizes Father Rivers Patout, founding chaplain of the Houston International Seafarer’s Center.

Beyond Bones concludes its retrospective on the Allied invasion of Normandy.

Sunday Funnies

Bergdahl's father appears to have been a lifelong Republican

As said before, there may not be a bigger disgrace to suffer by those conservatives that have called this man and his son every nasty name in the book.

In June 2010, Robert Bergdahl, the father of released American POW Bowe Bergdahl, gave a speech at an Idaho Republican Party fundraiser. In one of his first public appearances during his son's five-year captivity, he asked the conservative audience to show compassion for his son's captors—and, in a twist that foretold the plot of Homeland—he alleged that the United States had killed one of those captor's children with a drone strike.

In the past week, Bowe Bergdahl’s case has grown into a full-blown political firestorm. The 2010 speech was not televised, but it was one of the first sparks. It was Robert Bergdahl's first turn as either a tool or technician of national politics in his family's struggle.

The Idaho fundraiser was an election year event, and the day's other speakers—Idaho Senator Jim Risch, then-national-party-chairman Michael Steele, radio host Dennis Prager, and a belligerent stand-up comic named Eric Golub—took the usual shots at President Obama and rallied partisans to donate money to November's cause. (I covered the event as a reporter for AOL News.)

"There are many things that can hurt America," Senator Risch said. "Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, the Taliban—they can all hurt us. But they can't destroy us. This [Obama] Administration can destroy us."

I expect the criticisms of Bergdahl's father to quickly go mute.  You'll be able to measure the silencing of the fauxtrage by how soon (or late) they get the news.

"I grew up in a conservative family in Los Angeles," he said with a smile. "My father was for Goldwater. He wore a Nixon button in our liberal Jewish neighborhood. I was the lone U.C. Santa Barbara surfer who voted for Ronald Reagan." Many in the audience nodded in approval, and then Bergdahl talked about the work of retrieving his son.

Keep reading if you want a profound lesson in the nuances of war, supporting the troops, and all that.

The only thing I have left to wonder about is if this episode is enough humiliation for conservatives to simply STFU.  And the saddest part is that I doubt that it is.

A Triple Crown at last?

Heart says yes, head says no.  The guru, Steve Beyer, from DRF.com.

Over the past three decades, as the public has cheered for horses to win the Belmont Stakes and complete a sweep of the Triple Crown, some racing purists have been reluctant to lend their voices to the chorus.

Those of us who remember the last three colts to accomplish the feat – Secretariat (1973), Seattle Slew (1977), and Affirmed (1978) – know that they were giants in the greatest era of Thoroughbred racing in America. It would have been almost sacrilegious to put the names of runners such as Charismatic, Real Quiet, War Emblem, and Funny Cide on a short list along with the sport’s immortals.

But as California Chrome tries to become the first horse since Affirmed to sweep the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont, the old worries about blemishing the list of Triple Crown winners hardly seem relevant. After 11 horses since 1979 have lost bids for the Triple Crown in the Belmont Stakes, any horse who accomplishes the sweep will deserve praise and respect – and a place in history.

If this happens Saturday, it couldn’t happen at a better time. The sport has been beset with so many problems that it needs a positive story. What better story could there be than one with a rags-to-riches hero like the ill-bred California Chrome?

The colt has generated excitement, superlatives, and high expectations, and it is hard for many fans to assess his Triple Crown bid dispassionately. But handicappers should not be swayed by sentiment. They are supposed to look at horses and races with cold-eyed objectivity. And an objective analysis would conclude that California Chrome is not the standout that the public thinks he is.

He's not.  In fact this crop of three-year-olds may be the weakest in all of horse racing's long history in terms of speed.  Chrome has still been good enough to beat all comers, but today's finale is longer by a furlong than the Derby.  And in both Derby and Preakness, he was losing ground to a hard-charging second place finisher.  Ominous.

...California Chrome’s edge is almost certain to shrink – or disappear – at the longer distance of the Belmont. California Chrome was tiring at the end of the 1 1/4-mile Derby and was hard-pressed to maintain his margin over Ride On Curlin in the Preakness. It is hard to imagine that he will be as good at 1 1/2 miles.

The four principal challengers Saturday all appear better suited to the distance than the favorite.

Those four are Commanding Curve (who came out of nowhere and blew up everybody's exacta picks in the Derby), Ride on Curlin (third and closing in Kentucky, second and closing in Maryland), Wicked Strong, and Tonalist.

History suggests that California Chrome will face another disadvantage besides the Belmont’s distance. Not only is winning the Triple Crown difficult, but merely running in all three races is tough for modern-day horses. In the last 12 years, only a single horse has won the Belmont after competing in both the Derby and the Preakness. During that period, six horses ran in the Derby, skipped the Preakness, and won the Belmont. The extra rest is clearly an important edge.

Wicked Strong has that extra rest, plus solid credentials. He was considered California Chrome’s main rival in the Derby, but he couldn’t overcome the outside post in the field of 19. Hung wide at the first turn, he never got into striking position and found himself in heavy traffic throughout the stretch run. Even so, he lost by less than six lengths. The Belmont figures to be very different race.

My Belmont Stakes picks: 1. Wicked Strong. 2. Tonalist. 3. Commanding Curve.

I think that order of finish is as crazy as a Texas Republican convention delegate, but we'll see.

I would be happy to be wrong. But in view of the difficulty of the Belmont’s distance, the possibility that he won’t have another easy trip as he did in his prior races, and the relative freshness of his challengers, California Chrome has too many obstacles to overcome. If he does surmount them, the sport will rightly hail a worthy champion.

Truly.  I cannot discount the favorite, so he'll be in my exotic mix.  I'll throw on the three Beyer likes above, and try to work in General A-Rod, who'll be going off at a long price and will pop if he hits the board.

A day at the races is better than any day at the office, win or lose.

"Chickens for Colonel Sanders", Houston chapter

"Roaches for Raid" is really more precise.  I appreciate Chris Busby's struggles, but I have seen this movie before, and it always ends the same way.

Politics these days is often about black and white, or more accurately, red and blue. Saviors and demons. Labels, not issues. Sound bites, not sound ideas. Falling in line. Or falling out of favor.

And then you have Chris Busby.

[...]

At the University of Houston, the political junkie aligned with the Democratic Party, mostly because of gay rights. He voted for President Barack Obama in 2008, but the stimulus and his disagreement with much of the party platform led to a break from politics.

Then, after the local chapter of the gay-friendly Log Cabin Republicans collapsed, Busby says he decided to help resurrect it. He doesn't agree with every popular Republican stance. On fiscal issues and guns, he's firmly on the right. But he's against the death penalty because he believes it can't be administered fairly. He opposes abortion rights but will back candidates, such as state Rep. Sarah Davis, who do support abortion rights.

Yeah, Busby and I agree on breaking with Obama but probably disagree on the specifics; I thought the stimulus was much too small to be effective.  And we could start and end with the hypocrisy of a person fighting for his own marriage rights while opposing reproductive choice for women, but there's lots of layers to this stinky little onion.

The obvious question for Busby is why he wants to align himself with a party full of so many people who don't want him - a party that, once again this year, denied Log Cabin Republicans a booth at the ongoing state convention in Fort Worth.

He has plenty of answers. One he delivered with a chuckle: "There is a much greater chance in my opinion that the work I do in the Republican Party will eventually change the party's stance to be more equal and open than my participation in the Democrat Party would ever bring about a balanced budget."

Ha Ha Ha.

He says the Bible-thumpers don't bother him. As a young man struggling with his sexuality he found only strength in his Christian faith.

"I've never been a literalist," he said, explaining that Jesus' message of love resonates with him more powerfully than Leviticus' instructions on shellfish and the passages on homosexuality.

"There's just never been in my life any reason to think that two men or two women falling in love is anything that approaches wrong," he says.

And he says there are plenty of Republicans, especially the ones under 40, who agree with him.

Sure, "it's disheartening," Busby says, that Texas Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott has vowed to defend Texas' gay marriage ban. But, Busby will support Abbott because he believes he'd do a better job than Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis.

What a thoughtful paradox this young man is.  Meanwhile, in Fort Worth...

The Texas Republican Party would endorse psychological treatment that seeks to turn gay people straight under a new platform partly aimed at rebuking laws in California and New Jersey that ban so-called "reparative therapy" on minors.

A push to include the new anti-gay language survived a key vote late Thursday in Fort Worth at the Texas Republican Convention where, across the street, tea party star U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz fired up attendees at a rally to defend marriage as between a man and a woman.

Under the new proposed plank, the Texas GOP will "recognize the legitimacy and efficacy of counseling, which offers reparative therapy and treatment for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle."

Restorative, reparative, conversion therapy -- whatever name it goes by these days -- has been completely discredited in the scientific community.  But why would science be persuasive in any conceivable way to Texas Republican convention delegates?

Gay conservatives in Texas could still emerge with a rare victory on a separate issue: removing decades-old platform language that states, "Homosexuality tears at the fabric of society." Stripping that phrasing survived a sometimes-tense challenge from hardliners who not only wanted to preserve it, but wanted to replace "homosexuality" with "sexual sins."

"I really beg my social conservative colleagues to let this issue go," said Rudy Oeftering, a Dallas businessman and vice president of the gay Republican group Metroplex Republicans. "It's your opinion. It's your belief — but it's my life."

If that's considered a victory for the tolerant among the GOP faithful...

As for Delegate Oeftering, he appears to have committed the unpardonable sin of employing the Annise Parker rationale in his argument.  Take him outside the hall and stone him to death.

Honestly, I don't think every single LGBTQ needs to be a Democrat.  There's plenty of room in the Green and Libertarian parties for them to feel welcome.  In fact there are leadership positions available.

But any non-straight person who's voting for Republicans anywhere on the ballot needs to have their head examined (pun in-fucking-tended).  This is the most pathetic, self-loathing, glaring, obvious, against-your-own-self-interest political action that a person can take.  In context, you can almost understand why economically struggling suburbanites buy into the conservative fantasy of tax cuts stimulating job creation.

Not quite, but almost.

It would make more sense as a declarative statement if Busby ate one of his guns in the middle of Richmond Avenue, outside the Harris County Republican headquarters, than it would be to vote for their candidates.

I don't want to imply that Busby should commit suicide over his political cognitive dissonance.  He should however come to his senses about it.

Chris Busby is not ever going to influence anything in any measurable way in the TXGOP.  It's never going to happen.  Never, ever.  Thinking that he can, or will, or even might in the smallest measure is the epitome of delusional behavior.  And I hope someone shakes him awake, sooner than later.

Anniversaries

-- The 70th, of the D-Day invasion of Europe, which for this nation began on France's beaches.

Seventy years after Allied troops stormed the beaches at Normandy, President Barack Obama returned Friday to this hallowed battleground in what he called a "powerful manifestation of America's commitment to human freedom" that lives on in a new generation.

"Our commitment to liberty, our claim to equality, our claim to freedom and to the inherent dignity of every human being — that claim is written in the blood on these beaches, and it will endure for eternity," Obama said on a morning that dawned glorious and bright over the sacred site he called "democracy's beachhead."

You'd have thought that resentful conservatives who chose to throw tomatoes at Bowe Bergdahl and his family could have at least looked at a freaking calendar, and perhaps come to the conclusion that the timing of their assault on decency -- between Memorial Day and this day -- was poorly planned.

But no.

-- The 45th, of Houston's Intercontinental airport.

(It) was promoted as the "world's first supersonic jet airport" and one "so big it will have electronic trains to speed passengers between connecting flights." A local magazine, looking back on the opening a year later, said it represented "tomorrow's aviation."

[...]

David Robertson, then 5 but destined to work for the local airport system one day, remembers standing on the observation deck during his tour of the new complex, which had two terminals in the middle of a former cow pasture in an undeveloped area in north Houston.

"We were so excited to see the airport," he said. "It resembled to me, as a kid, what space stations would look like."

A month before Apollo 11 reached the moon under the guidance of Mission Control in Houston, space exploration was on the young man's mind as he toured the lobbies, with sleek black and white color schemes, and the mod furniture in the waiting rooms and baggage areas. He was impressed by the underground train that connected the terminals.

"In the late 1960s, there was still an element of fascination with flying," he said. "I thought by the time I was a teenager I'd be making space trips to the moon. I was sure that's where we were heading."

I can't get over those wide open spaces in the parking lots.

We flew out of Intercontinental a few years after its grand opening on a family vacation to Orlando and Disney World, a period in time when people wore their Sunday best on airplanes, and when -- because there was no such thing as credit cards -- everybody showed up at the airport to pay for their flight with a walletful of hundred dollar bills.

It was a different world.

Conservatives plumb new low in disgraceful attacks on Bergdahl, family

This is as miserable and sorry as they have ever been.  I'm sure they can find a way to dig deeper at some point, but for now... congratulations, assholes.  You've hit the depths of the Mariana Trench.

When an emotional Jani and Robert Bergdahl strode into the White House Rose Garden on Saturday to the share the emotional announcement by President Obama that their son, Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl would be returning home after being held captive for five years by the Taliban, it's unlikely they could have foreseen that their family would soon be under  attack by the right-wing media, or that Robert Bergdahl would be depicted on Fox News as a possible terrorist sympathizer; mocked on national television as he awaited a reunion with his ailing son.

They couldn't have foreseen it because I don't think it's ever happened before. I don't think we've ever seen a dedicated media campaign to not only undermine a returning prisoner of war, but to also cast doubt onto the soldier's family; to portray them as un-American even as they prepare for their reunion.

Instead, Fox News has helped transform the prisoner swap involving Taliban detainees into "an increasingly vicious partisan issue," as Buzzfeed described the Republican decision to go into  relentless attack mode, complete with enlisted publicists and strategists, to subvert the return of an American POW.

It's symptomatic of a conservative media mini-mob that now obsessively politicizing everything, and does it all with the knob turned up to 11. 

There was no epithet left wanting, no smear unused.

(T)his was a typical headline from one right-wing site this week: "Bergdahl: From POW to POS?", while The Drudge Report condemned the soldier as a "rat." As blogger Charles Johnson noted, by Tuesday, conservatives at Hot Air and Breitbart had posted no less than 42 Bergdahl items/rants between them. 

On Fox, the debate over whether Bergdahl deserted his post had long ago been settled, so they quickly moved onto the next phase of the campaign, which was suggesting, without any proof, that the U.S. soldier was actually a Taliban sympathizer who might have fought against American forces. "Can you imagine if it turns out that he was actually collaborating," Brian Kilmeade wondered out loud on Fox.

They went after his father's beard, for fuck's sake.

That mindset begins to explain why Kilmeade talked about Bowe Bergdahl's father this way:

I mean, he says he was growing his beard because his son was -- because his son was in captivity. Your son's out now. If you really don't, no longer want to look like a member of the Taliban, you don't have to look like a member of the Taliban. Are you out of razors?

The phrase 'dripping with contempt' barely covers the tasteless attack Kilmeade launched against a father who'd just spent every day of the previous five years trying to secure his son's release. For Fox talkers, that human element is irrelevant.

Meanwhile, Fox contributor Laura Ingraham stressed "More revelations coming out about the left-wing father of Sergeant Bergdahl I mean, left wing doesn't even begin to describe him." So being 'left wing' means you should be mocked while you await your son's return from a Taliban prison?

Taking the cue from the douchebags in conservative media, the Republick politicians sprayed Axe all over themselves to try to mask the foul odor of their reeking hypocrisy.

Recall that Republican Senators John McCain and Kelly Ayotte were in favor of bringing Bergdahl home -- until President Obama achieved it. In December, Allen West sneered that the Obama wasn't working hard enough to recover Bergdahl because there were "no camera highlights in it for him"; now that Obama has done so, West says he should be impeached.

So for the ODS sufferers, it's a win-win.  They get to attack Obama for securing a POW's release when they would have been able to attack Obama for leaving a POW behind, or die in custody, if he had not acted.

There may never be a more disgraceful moment for Republicans and conservatives than how they have treated Bowe Bergdahl and his family.  Unfortunately for all of us, however, the worst conservatives in the nation are holding their state convention in Dallas this weekend, and we should expect a rousing game of "Hey, watch this!" from them.  A showdown between the Open Carry Texas goons and the RPT security team assigned to keep them out?  More Abortion Barbie posters?

Use you imagination.  How much lower can Texas Republicans go, with the bar now set in the gutter?  Wading into the sewer isn't beneath them, as they have shown us before.  Septic tank dive, anyone?

Update: Said with a bit more incredulousness than me.

So much to blog about, so little time

-- The Benghazi-to-Bergdahl transmogrification of conservative outrage is complete.  Obama is now apologizing to senior members of Congress for doing what Bush did over 500 times, what Reagan did with 1500 missiles that went to Nicaraguan rebels in exchange for three Iranian hostages, and what Nixon did for Vietnam POWs, one of whom was an alleged Viet Cong collaborator named John McCain.

When they attacked Bergdahl's father for growing a beard -- this from the same people who worship the facial follicles of the Duck Dynasty crew -- my spin meter broke.

The stench of this latest Republican hypocrisy is just overwhelming.

Update: And people say I'm the one who's angry.

-- Speaking of extremist conservative hypocrites, the NRA crawfished on their denunciation of the Open Carry Texas freaks.  That brief moment of sanity was nice while it lasted.

-- Not content with quiet civilian life, Tom DeLay makes news again.  Oh, how we have missed him.

-- Maureen Dowd ate an entire marijuana candy bar -- it should have been sectioned into 16ths for "novices", but she said that wasn't printed on the label -- and suffered a bad trip.  No, really.

-- The NSA can hax all your I-Phones (even when you have turned them off), can haz all your data, can destroy it if they get caught.  But hey, why worry if you've got nothing to hide?

Send me a postcard from Gitmo, wouldja?  I'm sure you'll eventually be swapped out for bin Laden's driver, or somebody dangerous.  Just ask your dad not to grow a beard and you might not suffer any 'coming home' retribution from the real patriots.