The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is enjoying the pre-spring thaw and happy not to be shoveling snow as it brings you this week's roundup of the best of the left of Texas from last week.

Off the Kuff provides his four part Houston mayoral manifesto for the 2015 election.

Letters from Texas turns the blog over to Russ Tidwell for an update on redistricting litigation and the question the judges in San Antonio will be ruling on.

lightseeker at Texas Kaos takes Fox "News" to task for its fear mongering, distortion and misrepresentation in The Fear and Hate Chronicles.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson thinks it's astounding how little Texans care about corporations wasting their money. Privatization corruption is common in Texas.

The games people play with money when they are our elected representatives in Austin gets more disgusting by the legislative session. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs really thinks there's got to be a better way to run state government than with the wheels greased by the lobbyists.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes state Sen. Larry Taylor is so insulated within the Republican bubble he brags about giving the insurance industry perks at the expense of Texans.

Neil at All People Have Value wrote about the rip current warning sign on the beach in Galveston. Sometimes we do have to swim against the tide. All People Have Value is part of NeilAquino.com.

Dos Centavos underscored the strong support expressed by William McRaven, the new UT chancellor, for the Texas Dream Act.

Egberto Willies posts the demand letter to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas issued by the commoners to the lords.

Bluedaze has the reports that point to fracking wells as the source of North Texas earthquakes.

Texas Vox eulogizes Public Citizen activist Hillary Corgey.

And Texas Leftist had a story about the revival of shotgun houses in Houston.

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

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

Lone Star Ma puts out a call to action to oppose the so-called Teacher's Protection Act, H.B. 868.

The TSTA Blog calls vouchers "a tuition break at your expense".

Cody Pogue reviews "Building a Better Teacher".

Socratic Gadfly calls out Bernie Sanders for playing the military appropriations game in Vermont.

Cherise Rohr-Allegrini catalogs the latest measles outbreak and proselytizes for vaccinations.

Charlotte Vaughan Coyle stands -- as a Christian, a person of faith, and a pastor -- with her Muslim neighbors and all people who work for justice, peace and reconciliation.

Concerned Citizens reports from the first mayoral debate in San Antonio.

Sole of Houston was on the scene as the United Steelworkers Union strikers picketed Shell's downtown Houston offices.

The Texas Observer listed the winners and losers in the Texas House committee assignments.

Free Press Houston calls Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia an opportunist against the immigrant community.

State Impact Texas wants to know where the water projects are that have requested $5.5 billion in state loans.

And Fascist Dyke Motors commends a brave girl who asked for help.

Sunday Funnies

Jill Stein will run for president again

Best 2016 development of the week, as far as I'm concerned.

Most voters will likely never know her name, let alone cast a vote for her at the ballot box, but that’s not deterring Dr. Jill Stein from running for president in 2016.

Stein was the Green Party’s presidential nominee in 2012 and is expected to announce Friday the she’s exploring another White House bid in 2016.

Prior to making the announcement, Stein sat down exclusively with “Power Players” to explain why she’s stepping forward as an alternative to the current field of likely presidential contenders that she characterizes as “corrupt and sold out.”

“There are rules that make it possible for the very rich to buy politicians and that's what's going on,” Stein said. “There's a horse race around grabbing the money right now, and I think it speaks volumes about what a really sorry state our political system has come to.”

So unlike Bernie Sanders, she will run as a spoiler.  Don't worry, though, Hillary fans; I doubt you'll be able to blame another Green wrongly for "siphoning off" votes.

In her 2012 campaign, Stein received fewer than half a million votes across the country – less than 1 percent of the total popular vote – and was even arrested for trying to get into a televised debate from which she was excluded.

Stein recalled the arrest – and subsequent holding – as “the most bizarre experience you can imagine.”

“For trying to get into that debate, I was actually arrested, taken to a dark site where no one knew where I was - the site was secret - and held handcuffed to metal chairs for approximately eight hours,” Stein said. “It speaks volumes about how terrified the political system is that the voices of principled opposition may actually get heard."

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your candidate if you suddenly find yourself in October of 2016 whining about not having any good options.  A vote for Stein is much better for people who might cast a ballot for Mickey Mouse or Pat Paulsen or Hypnotoad, or some other protest vote, since they cannot abide the establishment-preferred, consultant-recommended duopoly nominees.  Console yourself, neoliberals;  in the "siphon off" illusion, even the Libertarian (I'm thinking Gary Johnson at this point, just like last time) will get about three times as many votes as Stein.  Just like last time.

Five percent of the national vote would be amazing, three percent would be real progress, but anything better than four years ago will still represent only the smallest, softest voices for changing a system buried under an avalanche of Supreme Court-approved speech money from the Kochs, et.al.   They remain voices that need to be heard, ideas that need to be discussed.  I'll consider it a monumental advance if Stein and Johnson are allowed to participate in the presidential debates.  The primary obstacle to overcome isn't getting the message out; it's changing hearts and minds about "wasting" one's vote and various other truisms, myths, and urban legends in that regard.  Greens are making great headway in Europe; along with associated issues like banning fracking (good news, natural gas exporters!) and GMOs, they're even gaining seats in Parliament, so perhaps there's still hope left for us here in the United States.

We can assert that Texas will be last as always in terms of progress.  That won't stop anybody from making the effort, from fighting the battle that needs to be fought.  Democrats in off-presidential election years -- and Republicans in presidential ones -- ought to be able to relate to that.

Update: Indy Political Report with the press release, and Irregular Times and jobsanger with more.

The week's 2016 developments

-- The Democratic establishment is coalescing rapidly behind Hillary Clinton.  That's not just bad news for Bernie Sanders and (I suppose) Elizabeth Warren, but also Joe Biden.  According to Vox, she's already assembled a "murderer's row" of political consultants, advisers and strategists.  You should already know what I think about news like that.  Matt Bai's problems with the Clinton Death Star are also mine.

Witness the procession of Democratic boomers, liberals as unimpeachable as Howard Dean and Al Franken, who have lined up in recent months to endorse a candidate who isn’t even running yet and hasn’t offered a single reform one could endorse.

I’m not saying it’s all the fault of Clinton or her longtime acolytes that there aren’t other candidates coming forward to challenge her. The party’s ranks of up-and-coming politicians took a real hit during the wave elections of 2010 and 2014, and there just aren’t a ton of strong, natural contenders this time around. It’s not Clinton’s job to invent them.

But there are some potential rivals, including the more than able vice president of the United States and the well-regarded, former two-term governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley. And at some point, if your goal is to rig this thing for Clinton, you have to look in the mirror and ask yourself if this is the kind of Democratic politics you really intended to create — the kind where the establishment decides who the nominee will be 18 months before the convention, without a single idea on the table or a single choice yet defined.

You have to ask yourself something else, too: Does trying so blatantly to steamroll the modern nominating process make it more likely that your candidate will avoid a bunch of bruising primary debates, or less so? If you got your start in Democratic politics 40-odd years ago, the answer to that one should be obvious.

-- Rand Paul is having a bad week with both his vaccine shots and with the media, Chris Christie had a lousy week overall, and a bad week got worse for Scott Walker, as his state budget took incoming fire and forced him to retreat.  Mike Huckabee successfully navigated the vaccine minefield, but face-planted into a platter of bacon-wrapped shrimp in a Jewish deli.

Compared to these guys, the reports that Jeb Bush was a hash-smoking bully in high school count as a sunny day for the GOP field.

Update (2/6): Jon Stewart via Egberto has some fun with Hillary and the gaggle of Republicans.

Is Adrian Garcia a flip-flopper or something worse?

Stace at Dos Centavos is, as he usually is, nicer than I am...

The President’s change includes a re-vamped deportation program which supposedly deports the worst of the worse; however, that was the intent as written of the original program. So, it is still a program that will be under the microscope, especially at the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, whether Garcia is at the helm or not.

Given that there is still an imminent announcement of a Mayoral candidacy, Garcia resigning and leaving the post to a right-wing Republican who more than likely will not agree with the President’s executive action will surely put Garcia in a position to defend the President’s executive action during the Mayoral campaign. Certainly, it will also frame the position of a possible Republican appointed Sheriff for 2016.

 ...but Rob Block at Free Press Houston is much meaner, calling him an 'opportunist'.  I'm excerpting the backstory he wrote on Garcia and the Secure Communities/287 (g) immigration actions, ground I've covered years ago, just so you don't have to click my links.

Adrian Garcia is the first Democrat elected as Harris County Sheriff in a long time, and he replaced someone who was pretty terrible in terms of protecting the human rights of people who end up in the county jail. Still, one reason that Garcia stands out is as a national champion of the Secure Communities Program, and as one of only two law enforcement agencies in the state of Texas to maintain a 287(g) agreement with the Department of Homeland Security. Both of Secure Communities and 287(g) are designed to identify people who are undocumented that end up in the county jail and deport them.

[...]

These programs were marketed as focusing on and deporting the worst of the worst — gang-bangers and violent criminals. But only 30% of those deported from Houston were convicted of violent crimes, the remainder being convicted of a mix of non-violent crimes, traffic offenses, or the civil (not criminal) offense of being here without papers.

This fall President Obama announced that he was going to take executive action on immigration, which included an end the Secure Communities Program, which would be replaced by a “New Priority Enforcement Program” which works in a similar way, but should only target those convicted of violent and serious crimes. Adrian Garcia appeared on the NPR Radio program Hear and Now a week after President Obama’s announcement and said that this new program means less people will be deported and that that is a good thing.

While it's great that he sees this program as a good thing, it would have been nice for him to be able to notice this earlier and push for the changes publicly while his office was facilitating the deportations of thousands of residents of Harris County for non-violent crimes.  Adrian Garcia was either being dishonest in championing a program that he knew was deporting people who should not be deported, or he is being dishonest now that he is happy this new program should deport less people. Either way, we should be able to hope for more from someone who is proud of his heritage as a child of immigrants, and has political ambitions for higher office.

See, I'm not the only guy who thinks Adrian Garcia is talking out of both sides of his mouth.  Or having trouble deciding whether he's still a Democrat or has devolved into a Republican.  Whichever happens to be the case, he's going to have real problems with Harris County Democrats -- the Latino caucuses of which he must have in his corner for a presumptive mayoral run -- if he quits the SO (handing that job to a Republican), runs for mayor... and then loses.  Essentially his political career will be over.  As a Democrat, anyway.

These mixed messages he's sending would suggest that he's smart enough to understand all this, and that he's in a real quandary about pulling the trigger on a dash for City Hall.

We'll keep waiting while he makes up his mind.

Update: The TexTrib has more on the feds' efforts to recruit Texans -- which include Garcia and HUD Secretary Julian Castro -- to sell Obama's immigration plan.

Money games Texas legislators play

Thanks much to Ross Ramsey at the Texas Tribune for these reports on the financial chicanery being vigorously exercised in Austin.  First, your primer on the machinations involved with reporting, raising, and spending the money donated to our state senators and representatives from 'concerned citizens'.  Let's move on after that to this: it's not a bribe if it's a gift.

What might look like a bribe to you could actually be a free and perfectly legal ticket to a rock concert, or dinner and drinks at a renowned Austin restaurant for a top state official.

“This is legalized bribery — it creates an actual exemption to the bribery statute,” says Paul Hobby, chairman of the Texas Ethics Commission. “Why do we legally allow any bribery? I just think we should have that conversation with ourselves.”

It's called "chickenshit makes the best fertilizer", Mr. Hobby.

You can violate the state’s bribery law by offering or accepting (or even just agreeing to offer or accept) any benefits in return for decisions, votes or recommendations by a public servant. There is an exception, though, for “a gift, award, or memento to a member of the legislature or executive branch” that lobbyists are legally required to report. Short form: If the law requires lobbyists to report buying the meal or the gift or whatever, it is a boon and not a bribe.

The exemption in the bribery statute covers the kinds of gifts you might imagine — everything from paperweights to saddles to engraved pen and pencil sets. It also covers entertainment, food, beverages and, in certain situations, travel and lodging for legislators.

It functions like any other loophole, providing an escape from a taboo: Lobbyists and others are allowed to give gifts to legislators that, without this special provision in the law, would constitute illegal bribery.

Notice we aren't making any distinction between political parties, their associated consultants, lobbyists, or political advisers.  This is a bipartisan initiative.

If you go to a concert when lawmakers are in town, chances are good that you’ll see lawmakers there, many of them sitting with the lobbyists who paid for their tickets. You’ll also see some, to be fair, who just wanted to go to a concert and opened their own wallets to get there. Maybe they like music without the added perk of sitting next to someone who wants to sell them a public policy idea.

Entertainment opportunities abound in Austin while the 84th Legislature is in its regular session this year: Fleetwood Mac will be at the Erwin Center on March 1, and Stevie Wonder, Neil Diamond, The Who, Los Lobos, and Tony Bennett with Lady Gaga are all scheduled to perform in April.

When lobbyists file their reports every month, Texans are able to see how much money is being spent on this sort of thing, often without finding out who benefited. Lobbyists have to report all of their spending. They do not have to connect the names of lawmakers (or their immediate families) to the spending unless they go over a certain amount.

And while there's much more you should read at the second link above, this lets us segue into the reporting requirement contortions that the lobby class performs to avoid naming names.

You’ve split the check before, right? Gone into a restaurant with someone and cut the bill in half to share the expense?

That’s not how splitting works for lobbyists when Texas lawmakers and other state officials are at the table.

When lobbyists split the dinner tab at an expensive restaurant or after a pricey bottle of wine, it's not so the officeholders in attendance can pay their own share. It's so the lobbyists can stay under the state’s name-that-legislator limit.

Right now, that’s $90. If a lobbyist spends less than that amount entertaining a lawmaker, the lobbyist doesn’t have to name the lawmaker in the spending report filed with the Texas Ethics Commission. If it’s over $90, the names of the beneficiaries go in the reports, where the public can see them. 

Which is how we wind up with shit like this.

Don't try to read that; go here.  There's also a bigger version of that receipt embedded in the link in the following excerpt.

One lobbyist can spend $90, two can spend $180, three can spend $270 and so on. If the new numbers are approved, that jumps to $114, $228 and $342.

Sometimes it happens on a grand scale. At the end of the 2013 legislative session, a $22,241 dinner for the House Calendars Committee at an Austin steakhouse was paid for with 65 different credit cards. The tab indicated that 121 people were fed and watered, but does not detail how many of them were legislators. The attendees got the mix right, if the object was to hide the names of the lawmakers who were there. The lobbyists reported their spending — for most, it was $340.07 — but didn’t have to name their official guests. They apparently had enough state officials in attendance to keep each lobbyist’s spending per person under the name-the-legislator trigger.

Are you getting your money's worth from your state reps?  Do you believe your political contributions are being well invested?  Are we getting better government this way?  Are we even getting good government this way?

The excuses made for this sort of behavior include a mashup of: 'well, since legislators are only paid a small amount for their service, the per-diems have to be bigger, and besides they're lower than the IRS allows, so that's good'.

No, it isn't.  Only wealthy people can afford to serve in the Lege -- doctors, lawyers, business executives -- essentially the class of person who can afford to have a second home (even if it's just an apartment) to live in Austin while they take six months every two years away from their jobs.  Once upon a time these were mostly farmers and ranchers, of course.  Things have changed a little, but not all that much.  Texas is still ruled mostly by the 1%, has been nearly all of its existence.  The extremes have just gotten more, ah, extreme.

Is it any surprise then that Democratic voter turnout -- you know, the party that is at least supposed to pretend to be for the little guy -- has fallen to depths not seen since the Great Depression?  We can call the electorate dumb for failing to participate in the game, but they might be smart enough to have figured out that they're the ones being played.  If you were a Texan struggling to make ends meet, and you saw how the men and women who make your laws live, would you think you could have any influence in changing that by voting?

That's the thing about lawmakers — they can change the laws they don't want. Their conversation might sparkle, their looks might dazzle, but it is that power to change the state’s laws that makes them such attractive dinner companions.

Their efforts fall short sometimes, but you can tell a lot about what they think and believe by what they choose to debate and what changes they try to make. Even when they fail, there is a battle to tell the rest of us that someone, somewhere, thought there was something wrong with the existing order of things. But not here.

Property tax cuts, business tax cuts, campus carry, open carry, but not Medicaid expansion and no woman has the right to decide whether or not she will have a baby.  She's not even going to be able to get a cancer screening from Planned Parenthood if they have anything to say about it.  And don't try to stop those fracking wells down the block, and don't ban plastic bags at the supermarket.  Who do you think you are?

See, they really don't give a damn about you, and that's at least partly because you don't give enough of a damn to vote.  In other words, it's a catch-22.  Who's going to start giving a damn first?  I can assure you it won't be the members of the Lege or those catering to them.

Quick updates on Houston municipal elections

As we wait for Charles' manifesto...

-- Via Stace once more, the Democrats are crowding into AL1 (Costello, term-limited, running for mayor) and AL4 (Bradford, term-limited).

Laurie Robinson, Amanda Edwards and Larry Blackmon will all run for the at-large city council seat to be vacated by C.O. “Brad” Bradford, according to campaign treasurer designations filed in recent weeks.

Bradford, a former chief of the Houston Police Department, was elected to at-large position four in 2009 and is now term limited. The seat in recent years has been held by an African American.

Robinson, who leads a management consulting firm, lost her race for an at-large seat in 2011, and considered, but declined, a repeat run in 2013. Edwards is an associate at the law firm Bracewell and Giuliani, and Blackmon is a retired school teacher active in local politics.

The other open-seat at-large race more quickly drew names: Lane Lewis, chair of the Harris County Democratic Party; Houston Community College trustee Chris Oliver; Trebor Gordon, who successfully challenged Houston’s campaign blackout period; Philippe Nassif, a local Democratic activist; and Jenifer Rene Pool, a leader in Houston’s transgender community are all running to succeed Stephen Costello, who is running for mayor after being term limited.

Not mentioned here is the candidacy of Jan Clark, an attorney/Realtor and the vice-president of the Oak Forest Democrats, who purportedly intends to run in At-Large 5 against Jack Christie.

It seems a shame to let Kubosh in AL3 just skate back in; maybe somebody will grow a pair and take him on.  Christie seems notably the weakest incumbent on council after managing just 55% two years ago against two hapless Democrats (sorry, Noah's dad).

Update: Texpate expands a little on the above.

-- A rarely-cited source of local political news is Aubrey Taylor's blog; he's got the take on the three African American men bidding for mayor (Sylvester Turner, Ben Hall, and Sean Roberts).  HBCM is difficult to read because of its style and graphics, but he has insights into the black community not found elsewhere online.  Taylor sees some obstacles to Turner's front-running status at this early juncture, but goes out of his way to warn anybody from extrapolating that into his disfavoring the state representative's bid for mayor.

Methinks too much warning.

Noteworthy there is Congressman Al Green's early and second-time endorsement of Hall.  As a sidebar conversation, there's a lot that could be blogged about Representative Green (who represented me before 2010 redistricting).  My first falling-out with him was his support of the bankruptcy re-org legislation favored by the big banks in 2005; he's more recently voted in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline.  He might be best known outside of Houston for being a rail hog at SOTU speeches.

He's a big-time holy roller and probably has been friends with Hall since divinity school, the most likely motivation for his crossing the aisle and supporting this Republican in the mayor's race.  While he's been a decent liberal on many issues, including gay rights, when he slips occasionally, they're doozies.  Somebody needs to get the congressman on record in support of or in opposition to the city's equal rights ordinance, and contrast that with his support of Hall, who will no doubt be prevaricating on the topic again.

More as it develops.

Update: Marc Campos has crowned Bill King the monarch of potholes.  That's the best thing that guy has blogged in years.