Thursday, November 25, 2021

Turkey Toons

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Wednesday, November 24, 2021

A Pre-Turkey Day Wrangle from Far Left Texas


Who are these people, though?  I mean besides Elon Musk and Joe Rogan.  Are they people who want to be here for the jobs, the politics, the allegedly low taxes/cost of living?


Pleeease California -- or New York -- our Texas, y'all.  Just a little bit.  More leftist than liberal, though, and since I'm wishing, more Green than Blue.


If you're a Democrat running in 2022 and you're not advocating for weed, you might as well not waste your and everybody else's time and money.  You should be running and voting Green, but a lot of you aren't ready for that conversation yet.


If you're a Democrat or a Green or a Libertarian and you're not running on keeping the power on, wake up and smell the coffee.  Gambling is still illegal in Texas, but Governor Fish Lips has $55 million and his political future riding on no blackouts right before the primary elections next spring.  Does that sound like a good bet to you?  Maybe we won't get another Uri.  Maybe the new guys at ERCOT who are telling him the grid is just fine will be right if we do.  But if I were a betting man -- and I am -- I'm taking some of that action.


Seems like the odds for a fourth special session are getting better every day.  We know the Repukes want one to ban employer vaccine mandates, and with all the Lege vacancies at the moment, who knows what the outcome of anything Abbott might put on the call could be?

It's a little early for the governor to be focused on November 2022 by lying about Beto, but that just goes to show you that you can't put anything beyond him.


The University of Austin's mascot is not going to be an elephant.  Much too noble a creature.  I'm thinking Leeches.


And a Happy Thanksgiving to all the people that Mayor Turner screwed out of affordable housing in the years to come.


The findings push pause on at least six apartment and multi-family projects the City of Houston wants to help build until Houston sends corrections to its plan. It puts at risk $91 million in taxpayer-funded housing subsidies and the future of 933 apartments, many for low-income Houstonians.

GLO reviewers say their overall conclusion is that, "The City of Houston does not have appropriate processes and the necessary controls in place to meet (the multi-family program contract requirements)."

The program is designed to provide affordable housing to low-income families using federal funds, but the GLO found multiple instances where the city didn't follow its own housing recommendations -- the ones developers were given before planning finding the city lifted lower scoring projects above those that scored higher.

The GLO said that "result(s) in a competitive process that is not fair and open."

Say whatever you like about Ted Oberg and Greg Groogan and even George Pee Bush at the GLO.  It was Tom McCasland who first blew the whistle.

One more thing before I get off the corruption beat.


More hard news after the holiday.  I need some soothers now.

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Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Go, Go, Gohmert Wrangle from Far Left Texas


Watch him go, go, go.


We should all be entertained, at the very least.  The other obvious 'Block Paxton' Republican in the TXAG GQP primary, Matt Krause, beat a hasty retreat.


We're all hoping he can do less damage there regarding school text censorship than anywhere else he might be elected.

Yesterday in Big D, the Q-nuts reassembled in Dealey Plaza to mark ... something.


Steve Monacelli once again dove into the cesspool to bring us an on-the-scene account.


Whether to laugh or be scared, read the thread.


In a less inflammatory recollection, Bud Kennedy at the Startlegram recounts a childhood memory of his wallet being returned by Lee Oswald's mother.

Shifting gears to catch up on our less-than-favorite Texans behaving badly.


How about some business news?


I won't give either Greg Abbott or Joe Biden the credit.  I'm all but certain Louie Mueller's barbecue closed the deal.

Now that's my kinda Q.


A few legal, criminal, and social justice updates.


The Lake Highlands Advocate analyzed the racial housing wealth gap in Dallas.  And the Dallas Observer found a gap in the prosecution's case against Crystal Mason.

Here's a few extra calm-me-downs headed into Turkey Day.

Salomon Torres at the Rio Grande Guardian has a blast from the past about 2nd Lt. Ulysses Grant and the US Army's occupation of Texas following annexation in 1846.

Second Lieutenant Grant intended to march on foot with the rest of the infantry brigade. Instead he rode on a wild mustang that he had purchased at the Corpus Christi camp from a commander’s servant for $5. (The servant had paid $3). Grant, a West Point graduate, had excellent horsemanship skills and was able to break the Mexican mustang quickly.

A few days march from Corpus Christi he described a massive herd of wild horses, similar to his new horse. Lieutenant Grant and other officers then rode out from the column of American troops. They rode two to three miles to the right of the Army column to see the size of the herd.

“As far as the eye could reach to our right, the herd extended. To the left, it extended equally,” wrote Grant. “There was no estimating the number of animals in it; I have no idea that they could all have been corralled in the State of Rhode Island, or Delaware, at one time. If they had been, they would have been so thick that the pasturage would have given out the first day.”

When the Army reached the Arroyo Colorado (which Grant called the “Colorado River”), it had to improvise on how to cross it. (The location of the crossing is in today’s Cameron County east of Harlingen.) Grant pointed out that the army did not bring a pontoon train that would have enabled ease in transporting wagons and supplies across. The soldiers also had no training in bridge building.

Grant lamented, “To add to the embarrassment of the situation, the army was here, for the first time, threatened with opposition. [Mexican] Buglers, concealed from our view by the brush on the opposite side, sounded the ‘assembly,’ and other military calls. ...[T]hey gave the impression that there was a large number of them and that, if the troops were in proportion to the noise, they were sufficient to devour General (Zachary) Taylor and his army.”

More at the link.


Jonah Raskin at the Rag Blog reviews Exploring Space City! Houston's Historic Underground Newspaper.
Once upon a time it might have been necessary to keep all the facts about the 1960s in one’s own head. That’s no longer true. You can Google just about everything associated with what historian John McMillan has called “The Long Sixties,” the era that began in 1955 with the birth of the modern civil rights movement, and that lasted until 1975, when the War in Vietnam, once the longest in U.S. history, came to an end with a whimper, not a bang. ...

Everything and more that you could possibly want to know about Houston, Texas, including its politics, culture, and economics is contained in a dazzling and authoritative new book profusely illustrated and titled Exploring Space City! Edited by Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree, Cam Duncan, and Sherwood Bishop -- designed by Carlos Lowry and with dozens of staff members -- the volume is a labor of love that honors “Houston’s Historic Underground Newspaper”, to borrow the subtitle.

It’s 361 pages, it’s published by the New Journalism Project in Austin, and it offers some of the original ads that graced the paper and enabled it to survive as long as it did. Exploring Space City! is a companion work to Celebrating The Rag: Austin’s Iconic Underground Newspaper, which was published in 2016.

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Monday, November 22, 2021

Remembering JFK Wrangle


On the 58th year marking the loss of the nation's 35th president, let's tip our hats in the general direction of conspiracy theorists everywhere for altering the minds of Americans for the worse.


Follow both threads for historical -- and entertaining -- reading.  Oliver Stone wants the assassination history's archives opened (they were supposed to be last year).


Okay then; on to the present.  A new goobernatorial poll dropped yesterday.


I don't think Wooderson is going to make a go of it, but I said the same about Beto, so there you go.  Speaking of repeating myself, it's 2006 all over again if he does.  You decide if McConaghey will be playing Kinky or Grandma.  This post will be long enough without opining more about this race today, so I'll save most of the rest for later.


Same old same old.  Another point, via Hector Mendez:

“There is no real long-term investment in cultivating generations of voters because it takes time and money,” Navarro said. “It isn’t enough to just simply register voters and expect them to vote Democrat.”

This is the reason why polling separates registered voters from likely voters.  All of this makes Kuffner's parlor musing a running joke.  It's also why one of the country's A+ pollsters wants to (listen) get out (read) of the game/charade.

Of course that would make people like political consultants mostly obsolete, and if we could do that, Gawd forbid, we might even be able to ban corporate money in elections.  Perish the thought.  Maybe we could start by outlawing Congress critters from trading in the stock market.  Is that too much also?

Alas, we won't have EBJ to kick around any more.  Her announcement on Saturday, with "Re-Elect" in the graphic, was a head fake.


Read down Svitek's other thread for a few of the would-be replacements.  He fails to mention the progressive Democrat who's been in the race for several months, Jessica Mason.  Typical.

The criminal and social justice headlines, after a weekend of national news that was as tragic as one could imagine.


Invoking budget authority when the Lege is not in session, Greg Abbott et. al. took $4 million allocated to the state's prisons and gave it to the Texas secretary of state for county "election integrity" audits, as mandated by state law (SB1).  Trump has been whining about an audit of 2020, and belittled the 4-county audit which the SoS announced on September 23 as 'weak.'


Still with me?  Thank you.  Let's do some environmental news.


I've seen that look on Mayor Sylvester Turner's face before.  It's his "Gosh that's terrible, I wish there was something I could do" face.


It's a good thing that Beto and others plan on running next year on keeping the lights on.  That's an issue they can win on, especially if there's another hard freeze.


More politics in the next Wrangle, before Turkey Day.  The soothers:

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Sunday, November 21, 2021

Sunday Friendsgiving Funnies

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Friday, November 19, 2021

COPout26


I have been surly this week, as you may have noticed, and the pending demise of all Terran species by our hand is the biggest reason.

Oh, I won't live to see it.  But your children, grandchildren, great grands, and my nieces and nephews and their children surely will.  And it's going to be bad, and it's coming sooner than anyone thinks.


More on down the post on who's to blame (basically all of us) and what can be done at this point (pick your poison).  We've been building to this moment all my life and long before, essentially ever since we started burning coal and then petroleum to light and heat our homes, then our offices, and move ourselves and our commerce around.


But the people we elected to be watchdogs took payoffs to look the other way while the wealthy got ever more greedy.  Thus it has always been with capitalism, sadly.


In case you missed it:


Here's a good question: which oil company do you think is the worst?


"Exxon tells 5th Circuit that SCOTUS ruling voids $14 million award from pollution violations at Texas facility"

"Toyota Named Third Most Obstructive Company Towards Climate Change After ExxonMobil, Chevron"

I spared Royal Dutch Kuffner (wait; I can't call him that anymore.  From now on he's just plain old Shelly) as much grief as I could.  His company, after all, talks like it's trying to do the right thing.  In the words of Master Jedi Yoda; "Do or do not. There is no 'try' ".

And we are all well aware that Texas isn't going to be the leader in this effort.  Quite the opposite.



"Oil production at Permian Basin set to hit new record"

Methane leaking from old wells.  Plastics filling the oceans.  Micro-pieces of plastic in our bodies. PFAS in our drinking water.  Mountains of "fast fashion" piled high in the Chilean desert.  Big banks like Chase funding pipeline projects like Line 3 in the face of the most civil of disobedience.  The slow death of the planet, and us, is everywhere you look.

No wonder people are suffering from 'climate depression' and quitting their shitty minimum wage jobs.

With a couple of local takes ...

Hope Osborn at Texas 2036 looks ahead to the day when Texas is no longer reliant on oil and gas taxes to fund public schools.  (Might be pretty far down the list of things to worry about, since public schools, and/or the roads to get to them, will be flooded in a few years.  I'm guessing home schooling gets to be a bigger thing as more Republicans clamor for their tax cuts, too.)  David Collins seems to be feeling a little down, having been affected by the AstroworldFest tragedy and Glasgow.  Socratic Gadfly blogged about the latest in Texas-New Mexico water rights issues and other environment and climate news, and his thoughts on Glasgow COP26 were ... well, about as angry as mine.

It's time -- waaaay past time -- to rethink everything.


I'm also going to start voting like the people I love's lives depend on it.  And not like Barack Obama meant it, either.

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