Monday, May 14, 2012

The Weekly Early Voting Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance reminds everyone that early voting has begun as it brings you this week's blog roundup.

Off the Kuff finished his interview tour of Texas with a conversation with Domingo Garcia in CD33.
  
BossKitty at TruthHugger will not weigh in, whether or not the truth was actually served in court, when a black woman fired a warning shot into a wall. Firing a gun in irresponsible ways is natural in Texas. But Florida has contradictory laws that allow courts to pick and choose who gets punished for similar irresponsible behavior. You can decide for yourself how good a job of it they do.

Rick Perry came to Williamson County this week and endorsed John Bradley -- the man who whitewashed the investigation into whether the state of Texas executed an innocent man -- for District Attorney. WCNews at Eye On Williamson has the rest of the story: Birds of a feather.

It was a good week to be gay if you were Barack Obama and John Carona, and a bad week to be gay if you were Mitt Romney and Dan Patrick. And if you think that's confusing, wait until you read what PDiddie at Brains and Eggs said about Greg Abbott's rose petals and Joe Arpaio's pink panties.  

Lewisville Texan Journal looks at the Republican candidate for HD 106 Pat Fallon's residence, and addresses whether he committed voter fraud by voting from an address where he apparently did not live.

At TexasKaos, lightseeker asks: Could the education cuts be the beginning of the end for Texas Republicans? Check out the details.

Neil at Texas Liberal endorsed Sean Hubbard in the Democratic primary for the open U.S. Senate seat.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

DOJ moves on Arpaio

I'd like to see this sadist in pink panties and living in a tent, right alongside those he has done similarly. But that would be as cruel and unusual as he is, so I'll settle for arrested, charged, held without bail, and quickly tried, convicted, and incarcerated. For a long, long time. Hopefully the remainder of his miserable life.

A few days after the “Toughest Sheriff in America” oversaw his 60th Latino-harassing raid in the Phoenix area, the Obama administration’s top civil-rights lawyer flew to Phoenix and slapped Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his office with a monumental civil-rights tort alleging rampant constitutional abuses, including widespread racial profiling of Latinos. The suit also claims the sheriff violated the civil rights of his critics by “illegal retaliation” that included baseless lawsuits and meritless administrative actions.

Abuses? What abuses?

In one case, the suit says, a five-months’ pregnant American citizen was stopped as she pulled into her driveway. Officers ordered her to sit on the hood of her car. She refused. They slammed her into the car three times—fetus-side first. Next, they placed the woman in a patrol car without air conditioning for half an hour. She was released and cited with failure to provide identification. Later, the charge was changed to “failure to provide proof of insurance.”

In another case, deputies trailed a U.S. citizen to her home, then knocked her to the ground, kneed her in the back and handcuffed her when she tried to run into her house, the suit alleges. They charged her with disturbing the peace. (A judge dismissed the charge.)
In the jails, some Latinos were placed in solitary confinement because they didn’t speak English, the lawsuit says. On some streets, Latinos were nine times more likely to be stopped than non-Latinos. And sheriff’s officials detained dozens of Latinos because “probable cause” included smelling of “strong body odor” or appearing nervous and avoiding eye contact, the lawsuit says.

What do you mean only the first two above make the top ten?

1. Forcing Women To Sleep In Their Own Menstrual Blood: In Arpaio’s jails, “female Latina LEP prisoners have been denied basic sanitary items. In some instances, female Latina LEP prisoners have been forced to remain with sheets or pants soiled from menstruation because of MCSO’s failure to ensure that detention officers provide language assistance in such circumstances.” [...]

5. Criminalizing Living Next To The Wrong People: “[D]uring a raid of a house suspected of containing human smugglers and their victims . . . officers went to an adjacent house, which was occupied by a Latino family. The officers entered the adjacent house and searched it, without a warrant and without the residents’ knowing consent. Although they found no evidence of criminal activity, after the search was over, the officers zip-tied the residents, a Latino man, a legal permanent resident of the United States, and his 12-year-old Latino son, a citizen of the United States, and required them to sit on the sidewalk for more than one hour, along with approximately 10 persons who had been seized from the target house, before being released.” 

These atrocities have been going on for quite some time. In 2009, Arpaio's deputies detained (too mild a word to use to describe what happened) a 9-month-pregnant Latina, refused to remove her shackles even as she gave birth, and then refused to let her hold the baby and threatened to put the child into state custody.

Think this is still America, land of the free and home of the brave? Think again. Did you miss the words 'American citizen' in those excerpts?

Arizona is, amazingly, worse than Texas and Alabama when it comes to this shit.

See what happens when you vote for Republicans? Or when you don't bother to get out and vote against them?

Stace is kinder and gentler, but the time for that has long passed. When they're going after American citizens who look like him, it's time for people who look like me to stand up, speak out, and fight back. Else they come for people who look like me next.

Friday, May 11, 2012

Romney's Gay Pride Week (not so much)

So Mitt Romney fired accepted the forced resignation of an openly gay member of his foreign policy staff. Yes, it was almost two weeks ago, eons in the collective memory, but its recollection bleeds into "This Week in Gay Marriage", in which Obama is yanked out of the closet even as his protagonist pushes past him and forces his way in.

Oh yeah, Mitt also bullied a gay kid when he was in high school.

Reading that story almost makes strapping an Irish Setter to the roof of your car for a ride to Canada sound like a normal thing, doesn't it?

At least the Log Cabins are unswayed. So he hasn't lost the entirety of another voting bloc. But let's back away from the snark for just a moment.

This story is resonant because one can, all too easily, see Romney walking away even now, or simply failing to connect, to grasp hurt. How he talks about this incident will be impossible to divorce from how he talks about same-sex marriage in the wake of President Obama’s announcement, and about questions of basic dignity for gay and lesbian Americans. But unless he deals with it soundly, it will also be present as people wonder about his compassion for anyone not as well situated and cosseted as he has always been. Who else might he walk away from? Until now, the campaign has talked about his fondness for pranks as a way to humanize him; his wife called him wild and crazy. Is this what they think that means?

There's a whole lot of excuse-making on the Right in the wake of these developments. "Everybody gets/got bullied in high school", "I was a bully; I got bullied; it's just a part of growing up, a right of passage'. I believe most of us know better than that today. Just as many of us know better than to vote for civil rights discrimination as codified into the state constitution. But mentioning gay anything lathers up the Christian conservatives so badly that they leap out of the pews and mob their e-mail accounts, or the phones, threatening to do the same thing at the polls. So the GOP knuckles under.

As for Mitt, he's left with "Can't we just talk about the economy, please?"

Hey, they're YOUR base, buddy. You get 'em in line.

Update: Cenk Uygur had a more expansive report on this topic last night: "(W)hat looks like a lifelong pattern of Mitt Romney’s mean-spirited behavior, from allegations of bullying a prep school peer, taunting a blind English teacher, hazing classmates at Stanford and, later, pressuring a pregnant woman whom he counseled not to have an abortion, even if it risked her life."

So the record shows it's a lot more than just bullying gay kids or family pets. I doubt Mitt is going to be able to talk much about the economy for the next few days.

Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Obama's position on gay marriage needs to evolve a little faster *and so it does*

That's not just my opinion.

On Tuesday night, Jon Stewart delved in to the twilight zone that is Washington D.C. to discuss an issue dominating the news this week: gay marriage. Tracing the chronology — from Joe Biden‘s remark on Sunday, to the reaction that followed, to the subsequent reassessing of President Obama‘s “evolution” on the issue — The Daily Show looked at how far the president has come in terms of supporting marriage equality. He has evolved: from openly supporting gay marriage to becoming, well, a political candidate.

Ron Reagan was even better in describing it.

“This whole evolving thing has really jumped the shark at this point,” Reagan said. “I mean, [Obama's] taking more time evolving on this issue than humans took evolving from apes.” He acknowledged that’s a bit of “hyperbole,” but digressed. We all know it’s a “political calculation,” he added: we could argue whether it’s a correct or incorrect one, but it’s an “obvious” calculation.

Reagan continued: “He’s taking a civil rights issue and he’s trying to kind of, you know, straddle the fence on it, and it’s unseemly. He’s beginning to look ridiculous on this issue. He needs to just get off the fence and just go wherever they know he really is in the first place.”

Matthews asked, “If he loses the election because of this, and Mitt Romney walks into the White House, a man who says he will not evolve — doesn’t evolve, RINO, doesn’t believe in evolution, period — [...] is that good for the cause?” Reagan replied, “It’s not good for the cause, although the cause will continue and will prevail just because of demographics if nothing else.”

He further added: “I understand what the calculation is, but I think the calculation is now incorrect. You can only make this political calculation when people don’t generally see it as a political calculation. If people know that you’re not actually speaking your mind and your heart, if you are inauthentic about this issue – and it is an important issue to some people, a lot of people – then you’re doing yourself harm. You’re actually harming your electoral prospects.” 

What's amazing to me is that this president -- who took the biggest risk possible for his electoral prospects when he ordered the raid on bin Laden's compound -- is so equivocating on a civil rights issue. To me it's more cowardly than his lack of effort stamping the Affordable Health Care Act with a public option, which of course was way watered down from 'universal health care'.

Obama needs to get off the goddamned fence and take a stand on this, and he needs to do it yesterday. Let the conservatives wail and froth, and promptly counter-punch their teeth out. He could give a grand speech invoking Martin Luther King and LBJ and 1964 and call for legislation and out the Republicans in Congress in all their bigoted, hate-filled glory.

Ten-to-one nothing like that happens, though. This president is way too cautious -- way too conservative himself -- to stand up and fight for anything as messy as gay marriage in an election year. He'll probably promise to do something after he gets re-elected, and a whole lot of Democrats will be just fine with that.

That's not leadership; that's management by swing-state polling.

Update: Somebody should have taken my bet.

"At a certain point, I've just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married," he concluded.

Steve Clemons at The Atlantic leads the cheers.

Monday, May 07, 2012

John Carona has never said Dan Patrick was gay

This is uproarious. Two Republicans in the state Senate jockeying for the day a when Texas needs a new lieutenant governor are hurling rotten tomatoes at each other.

The Quorum Report scored a scoop highlighting the animosity between Republican Sens. John Carona, of Dallas, and Dan Patrick, of Houston — complete with Patrick accusing Carona of lying about Patrick’s marriage, and Carona not only denying it, but adding that he also didn’t call Patrick gay.

The accusation from Patrick, in part, in an e-mail to fellow senators:

I was in Dallas last week and learned that Senator Carona has told people outside the Senate that Jan and I are separated and may get divorced. He added in a few other negative comments about me in an obvious attempt by him to discredit me for some reason. … There is no excuse or justification for his actions. He could have easily checked the story out to see if it was true. He didn’t care if it was true.

The response from Carona, in part, also in an e-mail to fellow senators:

The email which you blasted to our colleagues and then provided to the media is false and you would have known that had you called or emailed before sending it. …Though I have heard rumors regarding your marital status and sexual preferences for a while now, at no time have I told anyone that you are either separated, divorced, or gay. (emphasis is mine)

Carona went on to blame Patrick’s political ambition for the e-mail.

Carona is a potential candidate for lieutenant governor if Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is elected to the U.S. Senate and senators choose an interim replacement, and also in the 2014 statewide election for the seat. Patrick is a potential lieutenant governor candidate in 2014.

Carona also called Patrick “a snake oil salesman” and “a narcissist that would say anything to draw attention to himself.”

Patrick, in response, suggested that Carona is “at a very dark place in his life for some reason” and said:

“I find Senator Carona’s response repulsive and unbecoming of a Senator. I stand by my statement. … He still owes my wife and my family an apology. Now he owes me an apology for his latest smear, another fabrication by Senator Carona.”

Paul Burka is solemn and sober in his judgment. The rest of of us are Laughing Our Asses Off.