Precisely.

"An Open Letter to My Democratic Spammer", by William Rivers Pitt.

Are you, by chance, feeling a bit ragged around the edges? On the verge of disaster? Perhaps even a bit doomed?

Me, too!

I can't imagine why...

...oh, wait. I know exactly why. I looked at my email this week.

"TRAGIC Conclusion," read one.

"Terrible News (JUST NOW)," read another.

"CANCEL NOTICE," read another.

"we. will. fail." read another.

And another, just like those. And another. And another. And another.

It wasn't the end of the world, as it turns out. It was, in fact, the master plan of some fundraiser fuzzwit for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who decided the thing to do is to scream manically into every email address available using panic-riddled headlines designed to make you click them open, because Jesus, what if?

"Terrible News (JUST NOW)." Oh, no, what happened? "CANCEL NOTICE." What didn't I pay for? "TRAGIC Conclusion." Oh God, who died?

Probably 300 emails like this in my in-box since the weekend, one after the other prophesying calamity...unless I gave $5 to the Democrats.

That's precisely my inbox as well.  I unsubscribe, they keep coming.  They've sold my e-address to so many different campaigns so many times it's ridiculous.

You want my money? Really? After decades of sucking up to Wall Street and the "defense" industry, you're telling me, over and over and over again, that you're hat-in-hand broke?

My ass. You have pornographically wealthy friends, and you bow and scrape to them every chance you get, to my detriment, and to the detriment of everyone I know, all of whom you've pestered for money.

As you send your hundreds of emails seeking cash for a party that is stacked from pillar to post with a Who's Who of Wall Street insiders, the rest of us scratch by as best we can in this catastrophe of an economy you most certainly helped to create, if only through your ongoing and ignominious cowardice. To be battered with begging emails about how oh-so broke you are is, frankly, a bridge too far. You have a job, email fiend, for now. Count your blessings.

Like me, Will Pitt -- whom I've known for almost the entire decade-plus I've blogged -- is mostly a Progressive Democrat, until the Democratic Party pushes him over the edge.  Which happens fairly regularly for me and apparently him, and particularly when they dump a daily avalanche of spam.  It's ten a day at minimum.  I suppose I should be glad that I get in a month what Pitts gets in a weekend -- 300 fundraising solicitation e-mails -- mostly going to the spam filter but then they change the sender's name and it sneaks past.  Begging, threatening, wheedling, cajoling, and yes, hints of suicidal desperation.

You know that 'motivating by fear' thing I've mentioned a few times?  This isn't how to do it.

Say what you will about the Republicans, but you cannot fault their tactics when it comes to winning. They are a minority in the United States, by the numbers, but they are running the show both politically and economically, and for one reason: they fire up their base. Sure, "firing up their base" means gay-bashing, and woman-hating, and Jesus-shouting, and war-mongering...but it works. In the fourteenth year of this brave new century, the party everyone hates and thinks is crazy, according to all the polls, is about to take over the Senate and increase its hold on the House.

It's not a magic trick, and it's not a mystery, why that is about to happen. The Republicans are acting like Republicans, and the people who support them will run through stone walls to vote for them. [...] If Democrats acted like Democrats, they might enjoy the same level of support from their own base...but instead, the people are presented with this eternally timid "Please Don't Hurt Me" coalition, afraid of the word "Liberal," and certainly addicted to the Wall Street/Defense/Petroleum money swelling their coffers. You ain't broke, despite that barrage of emails to the contrary.

Dead solid perfect.  Keep going, dude.

You support fracking while giving lip-service to climate change? You want Keystone XL approved, despite the fact that it will run the world's dirtiest fuel through our breadbasket and over our main aquifer in a pipeline that is dead-bang guaranteed to leak? You endorse the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement? You're satisfied with the barren lack of accounting meted to the Wall Street brigands who stole our future? You're down with a third war in Iraq?

Wait, you don't support all that? But you won't stand against it, because you're afraid of losing votes or campaign money?

My heroes.

There's a lot more, but Imma let him finish.

Come November, if the Democrats wind up flopping and flailing for an explanation as to why they got routed at the polls, let me offer a succinct reply: You stand for nothing. You are the Washington Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters. Everyone expects you to go down to defeat, because you always lay down, because you are paid to do so.

It doesn't have to be that way, but that's the way it is. When the midterms eat you alive, remember what I said. When you stand for nothing, you get nothing in return.

Write me an email about that.

If some "my party right or wrong" Democrats give me some rationalizations for this -- i.e. that spamming their supporters is what's necessary to be competitive with the GOP -- I'm going to laugh out loud in their face.

Update: Ramona's Voices makes the same point.

They won't get mentioned very often in other media...

Here are four Texas Greens on your ballot next month -- or on your ballot that you've received in the mailbox already: Kenneth Kendrick (Texas Agriculture Commissioner), Deb Shafto (Texas Comptroller), David Collins (Harris County Judge), and Martina Salinas (Texas Railroad Commissioner). Video is courtesy of Greenwatch TV, a local public access program airing weekly in Houston and surrounding areas.


Four Green Party of Texas Candidates (GWTV, 2014/10/01) from Art Browning on Vimeo.

Your chance to meet Kendrick and Salinas -- if you live in or near Houston -- is this weekend; they will appear together at a joint campaign fundraiser.  Details are here.

Yes. Texas will outlaw abortions if Greg Abbott is elected.

Closing clinics on the basis of "women's health" is Orwellian, to be certain.  But it's only the beginning.  The next step after that for the pro-life faction is to prosecute women who have abortions on a charge of murder, and to exercise capital punishment upon conviction.  Don't act so shocked.

A writer for National Review, (Kevin D.) Williamson likes to be the guy who will brashly express the crudest (and sometimes cruelest) version of his own team's deepest ideological commitments. Want an up-is-down revisionist take on American history that portrays the Republican Party as a far greater champion of civil rights than the Democrats? Williamson's your man. Looking for someone to mock a transgendered person pictured on the cover of Time magazine? Williamson will do it with unapologetic relish.

But none of that compares to what we got from Williamson earlier this week, when he took to Twitter to declare that he thinks women who have had abortions deserve to be executed for their actions. And not just executed in any old way, or by lethal injection, which is the standard in the 32 states that permit the death penalty. No, Williamson thinks women who have had abortions — along with the doctors, nurses, and hospital staff involved in the procedure — deserve to face death by hanging.

Now, the hanging bit is an almost perfect example of intentionally provocative rhetoric. (That's my preferred euphemism for "trolling.") Note how it adds an extra frisson of outrageousness to the proposal of capital punishment, given the way hanging has historically been deployed — as a uniquely public form of execution, used by governments as well as extrajudicial gangs of private citizens to inspire acute fear and intimidation. (Williamson might have just gone ahead and advocated beheadings, though of course, as another National Review author has recently argued, only a "purely evil" political organization could favor anything like that.)

Don't. act. so. shocked.

(T)hose who oppose abortion rights claim that the procedure amounts to the infliction of lethal violence against an innocent human being. If they truly believe that, then of course they also believe it should be prosecuted and punished like any other act of homicide. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the Williamson controversy may be that his remarks surprised anyone at all.

Did you ask your favorite Republican what they thought of Williamson's proposal?  Perhaps you should, especially if there are going be any more debates you observe among candidates, and especially if they give you the chance to offer a query.

Repealing abortion rights at the federal level would just be the first step. It would be followed by an effort to outlaw abortion on a state-by-state basis. Then those involved in the illegal procedure would have to be prosecuted and punished. At the outer fringes of the possible, anti-abortion activists hope to see a Personhood Amendment protecting fetal life added to the Constitution, or perhaps the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly expanded to include the unborn.

While Republican presidential candidates are regularly asked if they endorse their party's platform in favor of repealing Roe, they are only rarely confronted with a follow-up question about whether they also believe that women who procure abortions and the medical professionals who provide them should be prosecuted and punished for murder — perhaps even for capital murder.

Since one typically comes to favor outlawing abortion only because of a belief in its homicidal character, it's hard to see how an opponent of abortion rights could do anything other than affirm a desire to see the murderers and their accessories brought to justice. It seems the only alternative would be to look hopelessly soft on crime.

Republicans in Texas, with supermajorities in the Lege and an eager new governor in Greg Abbott, will be the first state in the nation to ban abortion, and they will dare anyone to turn them back.  They have all the votes they need: five, on the US Supreme Court.  And then they will go after the murderers, those dastardly criminal women who would break the law and kill their babies anyway.

This is not an exaggeration.

As a reminder, motivating your voting base by fear is something Republicans do exceptionally well and exponentially better than Democrats.  It's also a very pointed note to a small handful of Democrats who think voting for Greens is a bigger problem than Democrats who vote for Republicans (more than 300,000 of them who voted in Florida in 2000, for anyone who doesn't wish to click the link).  Or for that matter, Democratically-leaning semi-sorta-sometimes voters who mostly don't.

Thank goodness Battleground Texas is working so furiously on the latter.  The former is a more internal failure, and might be remedied with some soul-searching, or perhaps even a 2016 presidential candidate along the lines of Bernie Sanders.  That's a discussion for later... about one month from now.

Fear and loathing and Democrats and Greens

Bumping into this again.

This, of course, is bullshit.  The page that posted it also linked to a Mother Jones article written by Erika Eichelberger, who failed in her reporting as well.  In context, with my emphasis in italics in the excerpt.

If Keister's plan had succeeded, it could have helped Reed—the Northeast regional chairman of the NRCC—by putting on the ballot a progressive candidate who would likely draw votes away from his expected Democratic opponent, county legislator Martha Robertson. But Keister messed up: Because he filed the Robbins petition late and got the other Green Party member's address wrong, neither Green will appear on the ballot for the June primary or the November general election, according to New York election officials.

Let's establish once again that votes are earned, not "siphoned off".  To believe this logical fallacy, you would have to believe another one, that voting populations are zero sum.  So that's pretty much the end of that argument.  But in the comments at the Facebook page, you will see several folks invoking the very stubborn urban legend that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election.

It makes me sad when I see Democrats so afraid of Republicans and losing elections that they go home and kick the cat, so to speak.

So I offered some thoughts on that page, and they promptly deleted them and blocked me.  Then they came over to my blog's Facebook page -- where I had the same comments up -- and posted this.

Baby Boomers and Senior Citizens Against Republicans & The Tea Party Brains and Eggs - We removed you from our page, as it clearly states at the top of our page that we are a "DEMOCRAT ONLY" page, and that we ban trolls. You claim to be progressive? Good luck with that one. Your arguments are comparable to Republican trolls. The only one you are fooling is yourself.

As some of you may know, I was a delegate to the Texas Democratic Party convention, and I did vote in both their primary and their runoff, so by every legal definition of the word, I am a Democrat.  The problem for Democrats -- as you have probably already figured out -- is not just that I don't swallow the party line, it's that I also offer a lot of criticism to Democrats about how they conduct themselves, handle their campaigns, what they stand for, and so on.  This genuinely irritates some people.

As a reminder, I consider myself an independent progressive.  It's accurate to describe me as an activist in both parties.  I am more committed to progressive philosophy than I am partisan politics.  So their blocking me on their page has more to do with their hostility to having their thinking challenged than it does their little rules, or anything else for that matter.  I will acknowledge that the label I have applied to myself creates a lot of cognitive dissonance in partisans, and furthermore that I make no attempt to ameliorate their discomfort.

But for the sake of what happened in this particular disagreement, let's review what "the Democrats" wrote: two logical fallacies, one unprovable premise, one now two several ad hominems, including one calling me an 'ignorant teabagger'.  Hilarious.

That's just no way to get independents and progressives to vote for you, Dems.  And I'm pretty sure that you don't have any votes to lose in 2014, in Texas or almost anywhere else in the country.  And let's also be clear about the verb being used here: you're losing them.  They are not being taken away from you.

Update: Socratic Gadfly wades in with some additional inconvenient truths.

Ebola and Texas

It's too cheap a shot to take at our neighbors to the north about the way the folks at Texas Presbyterian Hospital handled the patient with Ebola who went there and was sent home with antibiotics.  After all, international flights from western Africa arrive daily in Houston.  And Atlanta, and Miami, and New York and Los Angeles and Chicago. 

Overburdened first-line healthcare specialists in the emergency room are responsible for maximizing profit in equivalent measure to the suits in the executive office, no matter which American city's hospitals we speak of.

It is not, on the other hand, unfair to point out that there are lots of people without health insurance who do not see a doctor until they are wildly ill, because their state's leaders refuse to extend them even the most nominal healthcare coverage.

Do we turn away poor folks with Ebola because they don't have insurance?  Of course we don't... because they might infect the children whose parents do have health coverage.  When a third-world problem becomes a first-world problem, then everybody gets excited.

There might be a better way to stop the spread of a contagion than knee-jerk panic reactions.  But that would require planning, and thought, and then taking the proper action.

Not to mention some measure of compassion for those less fortunate.

If there's one thing I know for absolute certain, those are not qualities possessed by the majority of the current leadership of Texas.  And the other certainty is that our once-every-two-or-four-years opportunity to change that is coming up quickly on the calendar.

Texas Lyceum: Abbott 49, Davis 40

From the press release:

A recent poll conducted by the Texas Lyceum, the premiere statewide nonprofit, nonpartisan leadership group, shows that among likely voters Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott is ahead of Democratic State Senator Wendy Davis by nine percentage points.

The killshot...

[Abbott holds] slight leads with both Independents (38 percent to 32 percent) and with women (46 percent to 44 percent).

It's worse for Leticia Van De Putte (47-33, Patrick) and David Alameel (48-30, Cornyn).

This isn't exactly the boost the top of the ticket was hoping for.  If the debates over the past couple of days move the needle favorably, it will have to be reflected in the next poll, YouGov or some other polling outfit working the field at this time.  Time is simply running short for the Democrats to stem this tide.

Here's the link to the executive summary, the full results, and the crosstabs, as well as the main page where those links are all together.

Update: Gadfly has more.