Friday, November 12, 2021

The Friyay Wrangle from Far Left Texas


It looks to be another glorious fall weekend in Texas, so put down your phone and close your laptop and get out of doors for some quality vitamin D, an adult beverage, some meat on a stick at a festival, or whatever floats your boat.


I've rounded up the usual suspects -- Texans behaving very, very badly -- for your leisure reading.

Maybe you prefer your news about our Lone Star lunatics with a little less snark and more calmly-delivered facts.  Here you go.


I'll take that as my segue to the climate headlines.


The Midland Reporter-Telegram says that illegal air pollution in the state dropped 54% in 2020 compared to '19, due in no small part to the pandemic.  (Most experts are already reporting that this decline will be short-lived.)  Charles Pierce of Esquire, only half-jokingly, says that Texas has probably outlawed the phrase 'environmental racism'.

Some legal updates, and the criminal and social justice/injustice news.


I'll save the politics and elections updates for tomorrow or Monday.  Here's a couple of media updates, and one soother.

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Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Hump Day Wrangle


Let me first update a pair of 2022 election developments since Monday.


-- Gohmert has decided it's on him to hump Ken Paxton out of the attorney general's office.  So while his announcement was logistically challenged and math-deficient, should he take the plunge it probably forces a couple of announced entrants *ahem*MattKrause* to reconsider their bids.

Two more things:

1) He'll easily raise the million bucks  he says he needs in five weeks in order to decide.  If it's $10 million he wants ... well, I would be stunned if he got that much.  So all of this exploration is perhaps just shilling for his Congressional re-election (is that how campaign finance law works?  I don't want to bother Kuffner.)

2) Should he bid for AG, win the primary (runoff likely), and then lose to the Democrat in November, I'd fully expect to see him running for his old seat in 2024 ... and right back in Congress in '25.  Bicho malo nunca muerte.

-- E-Rod Tres made his TX-35 bid official this morning, joining Greg Casar.  With TMF opting out, these two would have to be considered the front-runners for the runoff, much to Claudia Zapata's chagrin.  She should run as a Green.

And some new politics business; the lathering up for Beto is under way.


I have been posting often that O'Rourke would not go for it.  That was because I took him at his word: that because the US Senate has been unable to use its workaround (i.e. abolishing the filibuster) in order to pass an elections bill watered-down for Joe Manchin, that Texas would be far too hamstrung to elect any statewide Democrats in 2022.  With the exception of attorney general -- provided that the GOP nominee's name is Paxton or Gohmert -- I believe Beto is/was correct.  So he must be reading this news and deciding he was wrong about that.


The result is at least 1 of every 5 voters in Texas never cast a ballot in the Lone Star State prior to 2014 -- a remarkable wild card in a state that had stable politics and a slow stream of new voters for a generation before that.

“You have a largely new electorate that is unfamiliar with the trends and the personalities in the area,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor. “That rapid turnover leads to a lot of uncertainty for candidates.”

It’s all setting up for a 2022 election cycle that is more competitive, more expensive and more uncertain than statewide candidates are used to seeing in Texas.

Wallace's piece goes on to laud the voter registration efforts of Battleground Texas and O'Rourke's own PoweredxPeople, as well as Voto Latino, MOVE Texas, and Jolt.

All those new voters have made Texas politics more competitive as well as more difficult to predict. In 2018, O’Rourke lost to Cruz in the U.S. Senate race by just 2.6 percentage points. (Lt. Gov. Dan) Patrick, (Paxton), and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller all won 51 percent of the vote or less in their re-elections.

Four years earlier, each of them had won at least 58 percent of the vote.

Certainly there have been bigger jackpots won on wild cards in Vegas, much as a lottery ticket of all random picks can hit the big one once in a great while.  I sincerely wish the best of luck to Beto and his cohorts who are betting on the come.

Be reminded that in the redistricting process just completed, every single Congressional district except the two new ones were drawn to be safer for the incumbent.


Be reminded that the TXGOP has strengthened voter turnout in the boondocks.  And more significantly, in the RGV.  Twenty-twenty and 2022's results are examples of their success.  It seems that the long-awaited Hispanic voter turnout is finally showing up ... for Republicans.

Last, this.


Again, it's always possible that the Supreme Court or Merrick Garland's DOJ can somehow, some way, ride to the rescue, saving Texas Democrats from the avalanche of voter suppression laws they've been buried under, through litigation and TROs and legal what-not, just in time, a year from now.

And donkeys might fly out of my ass.  Personally, I'll be voting more pragmatically next year.


BTW, if Joy Diaz decides to run for something, I hope it's lieutenant governor, and I hope she will do so as a Green and not a Democrat.
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Monday, November 08, 2021

The Standard Time Wrangle from Far Left Texas


We're all recovering from the time change -- personally I love falling back -- so while there are Tweets aplenty I'll touch lightly today and hopefully have shorter and more frequent posts here this week.

The calamity at AstroWorldFest dominated the weekend's local, state, and national news.  And now the subsequent investigations and lawsuits are taking over.


As the filing period for the March primaries and November elections prepares to begin, a scrum has developed among Democrats for the open TX-35 seat in Central Texas.  Austin council member Greg Casar and statehouse Rep. Eddie Rodriguez III will join David L. Anderson Jr., Claudia Zapata, Danielle Fewings, and Sass, all of whom previously declared.  Zapata has been outspoken about having been overlooked since she entered the race when Lloyd Doggett was still running for re-election.  (Doggett has shifted to TX-37, hoping to avoid a Latino/a challenge.)

Following the recent TexTrib polling that showed K-Pax comfortably leading the crowded GOP AG primary, Pee Bush put on his Captain Obvious costume.


Over on the left, the Democrats picked up a new contestant, Rochelle Garza, who should split the identity vote quite nicely with Joe Jaworski and Lee Merritt.  Beyond her announcement and Stace's slobber, I've seen nothing about her campaign.  Merritt OTOH is getting a ton of publicity.


By the way, here's those Biden polling numbers Kuffner was looking for last week.  He's going to need his scuba diving gear to see them.

Let's move on to some climate updates.  I still have a rather long post planned for COP26; for now, a few state items.


Sorry, Evan Mintz.  Time has run out on the Ike Dike.


A bit of COVID:


And some criminal and social justice developments.


Once in a while, though ...


Congratulations to a couple of Texans on promotions and recognition.


McKee-Rodriguez actually scored just ahaed of Beyonce', who has mostly abdicated her public community and social responsibility over the past year (or perhaps longer ... which, to be fair, is more of a 'what have you done for us lately' complaint from me more than it is anything else).

The rest of the calm-me-downs for today:

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Sunday, November 07, 2021

Sunday Woke Funnies

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Saturday, November 06, 2021

Tragedy at Astroworldfest


After an uplifting week ... a complete disaster.


The day starting badly was a portent.

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Thursday, November 04, 2021

Wrangling the Leftover Election News


So it wasn't all bad for Team Blue on Tuesday.


The Wu Train also got a stamp of approval for her climate advocacy from Bill McKibben.  Here's a few more winners.


Of more personal importance were these Green Party members who won their local elections across the northeast US.


A four-count thread of newly-minted leftists.  Let's see some changes made, y'all.

(Speaking of, the filing deadline for Lone Star elections next year fast approaches, and the Texas Green Party wants YOU on the ballot.  Two weeks ago their legal team moved for summary judgment -- .pdf here -- in the case regarding the excessive burdens associated with minor party ballot access.)

With fresh polling, some new entrants, and lots of speculative and future election news in the pipe, I'll save all that for another day and keep the focus on what just happened last Tuesday.

Non-corporate media responses to Election Day locally were ... tired.  Hooks at Texas Monthly seemed very bored about his writing assignment.  Good ol' Campos came through, however.  Still as dumb as a bag of hammers, but was grumpily capable of expressing some outrage (undoubtedly corresponding to the Astros' losing) at someone tripping over a power cable at Harris Votes.  Should you prefer your blue blogging with a side of milquetoast slopped in mayo and cottage cheese, you can always click over to Stace Medellin and Charles Kuffner and watch them give each other handys.

Yuck.  Go back to the CFRs and the Tejano music, fellas.  Those weren't the only revoltin' developments, as we are now very familiar.


Despite all praise I gave them above, nobody should lose sight of the fact that the Democratic Party is where actual progressive policies go to die.  Matt Stoller scrapes a little on the Donks having no honest connection with working class people, but the issues go much deeper than just that.  Having made this point in these pixels before, it's still incumbent on me to remind that "progressive" is not leftist and "moderate" and "centrist" are neither.  Definitions used by corporate media and other members of the establishment are full of truthiness, an already-ancient word it seems.

Here's your illustration.


Moving back to Texas, and the non-election items.  As always, criminal and social injustices break the news.  It was interesting that the Supremes appeared so skeptical of the state's novel abortion ban law in Monday's hearing ...


... but don't be too encouraged.


Steven Hotze has a couple of lawsuits going on at the moment that you might be interested in reading about.  Even as vape shop owners sue the Texas DSHS for perfunctorily banning Delta-8, they're quickly moving on to the next thing: Delta-9.  And a Houston engineering firm filed a federal lawsuit against both the city and the state over its anti-BDS law, which prohibits governmental agencies from doing business with companies that boycott Israel.

Lots of climate updates, too, in the next Wrangle.  The soothers:

The Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo invites the public to observe the fall migration of monarch butterflies, moving through Texas from Canada and the northern United States to the oyamel fir-covered mountains of Michoacán, this Saturday.


Scott's been hosting community activities in the run-up to his Astroworld Festival this weekend.
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