Friday, December 04, 2020

Week-ending Lone Star Left Round-up

As I complete my own blog post on this topic, here's the aggregation of what I mentioned on Monday that was discussed yesterday online.


Will Texas Latin@s eventually turn the state from Republican red to Democratic blue? The answer to that question is complicated, says Cecilia Ballí, a writer-at-large at Texas Monthly, covering the borderlands of Texas, security and immigration.

Over the past year, Ballí, along with two colleagues -- anthropologist Michael Powell and sociologist Betsabeth Monica Lugo -- had one-on-one conversations with 100 Latin@s in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley. Their research, commissioned and funded by the Texas Organizing Project Education Fund, sought to better understand Latin@ voters and nonvoters in Texas.

Ballí -- who wrote about the study for Texas Monthly -- talked to The Texas Tribune on Instagram Live about their key findings. The conversation’s highlights are here. You can watch the full conversation here.

Heartfelt eulogies poured in for Latina activist Maria Jimenez from Judge Lina Hidalgo, Stace at Dos Centavos, and Angela Valenzeula at EEP & P in TX blog.


Voting and election related-developments since Monday include the following:


COVID updates are next.


Here's a couple of COVID-related "Texas Leaders Behaving Badly" items.


It sure seems as if Austin could do a lot more progressive than the guy who rushed to be first in the line to endorse Pete Buttigeig for president.

I have criminal and social justice posts, environmental news, and a non-socialist-leaning business news update next.


El Paso Matters reports that the incoming district attorney has fired several lawyers and staff as she prepares to take office in January, including the prosecutors on the Walmart shooting case.  Leif Reichstad at Texas Monthly explains how Austin was able to reduce spending on its police department by a third.  The family of Atatiana Jefferson, the Fort Worth woman shot and killed by a police officer in her mother's home while she baby-sat her 8-year-old nephew -- has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city and the ex-cop.  And the state's First Court of Appeals has reversed a legal victory for the city of Houston, ordering it to continue litigating the case of an HPD officer who rear-ended another vehicle while looking for a cellphone charger.  A few more social justice pieces ...


And on to climate justice.


KVUE has a story about Central Texas residents threatening to sue neighboring cities as a last-ditch effort to keep treated wastewater out of their Hill Country waterways.

The San Gabriel River winds its way from Burnet into Williamson and Milam counties, 50 miles through some of the most scenic parts of Central Texas -- and now hotspots for growth. But with the development are cries for help to keep this once-pristine waterway, and others like it, from being polluted. [...] (Upstream),the Liberty Hill wastewater treatment plant has permission from the state to dump 1.2 million gallons of treated wastewater discharge into the San Gabriel River every day.

Yet according to EPA records, it has exceeded permitted discharge limits 98 times since 2015, 15 times this year.

And despite more than 50 permit violations cited by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state now allows Liberty Hill to expand operations to dump 4 million gallons per day.

Much more at the link.

What the savviest of conservative populist politicians see here is an opportunity.  The same wedge issue is forming between supporters of high speed rail (cities, big business) and opponents (country folk concerned about their property rights).  Greg Abbott is the most opportunistic of politicians in the state; he sees it, understands it, and is unlikely to let someone like Dan Patrick get to the right of him on it.  The Texas Central Railway, thus, may go the way of the Trans-Texas Corridor.

That leads me to my business wrangle.


The old Sears building in Midtown Houston is undergoing a transformation, and slated to be a tech/innovation hub called The ION upon completion.



Meanwhile, JC Penney quietly left their Plano headquarters behind after exiting bankruptcy.  Their future remains uncertain.

Wrapping a long Round-up with some lighter items.

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Monday, November 30, 2020

The Weekly Wrangle from Far Left Texas


The election is over ...


... winter has arrived ...


... and my Latinx voter post is still incomplete.  In the interim, the TexTrib has a seminar I'll be watching in order to germinate any last thoughts.


To note the last day of Native American Heritage Month, I introduce the topic of land acknowledgement, via Ali Velshi.


Former independent presidential candidate Mark Charles has also spoken about this.


The land that I have lived on previously belonged to (among several others; the following most prominently) the Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan, Karankawa, Atakapa-Ishak, and Hasinai peoples.  The most significant of these to me are the Hasinai, for which my Order of the Arrow lodge (BSA) is named.  They essentially named Texas -- or Tejas, their word for 'friend'.

As with Columbus Day, the Anglo celebration of Thanksgiving just past is a particularly difficult time for Indigenous Americans.  And as with Black Americans, the history of the United States is not well- or fully told in our schools or our texts; much of this learning comes from sources outside the mainstream.  And a lot of it -- such as the Holocaust, to use one example -- is denied by those who have the capacity to know better, or rejected on account of '(white) American exceptionalism' or related nonsense.  I consider the awareness of this knowledge, and its denial and rejection, to be a small part of there being no possibility of returning to 'normal'.  Those who don't like -- or resist -- change are going to be very unhappy for the rest of their existence.  And their resistance will make an already unpleasant set of new realities even more so for the rest of us.

Probably nothing will bother me more, however, than those who see and understand the new realities, but their investments in the status quo -- not just financial but emotional and political and intellectual -- dictate to them and to us that change can only occur incrementally and slowly.

We're already long past that point. (steps off soapbox)

On to the Wrangle, beginning with a few election post-mortems:

TXElects challenged the conventional wisdom that Tarrant County turned blue this year.  Kuff examined recent presidential results in the counties surrounding Travis and Bexar.  The Texas Lawbook reviewed appellate court races for the Houston area.  Reform Austin looked ahead to 2022 for Texas Democrats, and Patrick Svitek at the TexTrib did the same for the TXGOP.

Suffering is not something Texans can overlook.


Many are doing their part to help.


Some are not.


Here's the latest developments regarding COVID-19.


Catching up on criminal justice tweets and blog posts:


Perhaps because of Gamaldi's influence, the HPD oversight board scores as the "least robust" of all of Texas' major cities.  Grits for Breakfast wrote that Texas prison understaffing has reached dangerous levels, and calls for the Lege to close and consolidate some units.  Dylan McGinnis at the HouChron investigated the rebidding of a contract for the City of Houston to avoid using unpaid prison (aka slave) labor.  And a (legislative) gun fight is likely to break out next year in Austin.

I'll have some environmental news in the next Wrangle at the end of this week.  Here's a few items from the lighter side.


Socratic Gadfly had two snarky Thanksgiving-related posts; first, he came up with some suggestions for new names for the Washington Football Team. Second, he gave a smackdown to the cult of Whataburger.


D Magazine posted the detailed story about the helicopter crash that took the life of guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn, on the 30th anniversary of the tragic event (back in August).

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Sunday, November 29, 2020

Sunday Leftovers Funnies


Mike Peterson at The Daily Cartoonist has a list of cartoonists’ Patreon and other support sites. As newspapers and media companies continue to shed staff positions, direct support from readers becomes ever more important. Please check it out and consider giving support where you can.
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Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Chris Kindred: The Struggle Isn't Over


(courtesy The Nib)
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Tuesday, November 24, 2020

The Weekly TexLeft Wrangle


Still got that Latinx vote post on the way; maybe after Thanksgiving.  Meanwhile: time, the presidential transition, special elections, and bills for the 87th legislative session march on.

Early voting is underway in various local jurisdictions holding December 8 runoff elections including Arlington, Coppell, Denton, Duncanville, Frisco, Haltom City, Irving, Keller, Mansfield, Odessa and Palmview. Early voting begins on Wednesday in local jurisdictions holding their runoff elections on December 12 including El Paso, Baytown and The Woodlands. Early voting for jurisdictions holding December 15 runoff elections generally begins on December 3. Early voting for the December 19 special runoff election for open SD30 begins December 9. As of (Sunday, Nov. 22), just over 400 voters had returned absentee ballots.


In a nine-count Twitter thread from last week, the NYT broke down the presidential vote by county across the nation; embedded below is the 4th Tweet in that string with the widely-reported development regarding Tarrant County.


Kuff also examined recent presidential results in the Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth area.


As long promised, there will be more to come.

COVID-19 has everyone's attention.


Maybe this was a legitimate offer from our junior senator to feed some of the 25,000 suddenly-struggling Texans in Dallas, or the National Guardsman called to El Paso to handle the surplus of cadavers in that city ...

Who am I kidding?  Leadership from our Twitter trolls in the US Senate?  WTF does that look like?


I'll skip Greg Abbott this week if it's okay with you.  Ken Paxton, on the other hand, is not worthy of a hall pass, much less any other kind.


This is unfortunately a longer-than-it-should-be segment of "Texas Republicans Behaving Badly."


If you need to wash your hands or use some hand sanitizer or pour bleach in your eyes to get past all of that, take a minute and go ahead.

Okay then.

Weed may have some chance of seeing daylight in the forthcoming Lege.


Casino gambling, too.  ("Toomey", mentioned in the Tweet underneath, is Mike Toomey, the head -- or perhaps former head; his status is not clear at this time -- of Abbott's "Strike Force to Re-Open Texas".  He has re-registered as a lobbyist for the coming session.)


Then again, cannabis and slots may have the same odds as Matthew McConaughey has of being elected governor in 2022.


Texas public education faces the same old intractable problems: lack of money and the state's Puritanical culture.


Raise Your Hand Texas prepares for the next fight over school finance at the Legislature.

With a couple of environmental takes, Socratic Gadfly wonders if a new Norwegian-British study shows the James Kunstler types might be right?  And it appears we now have the measurement tools to implement a carbon tax plus a carbon tariff, which must be a part of climate change control.


Progrexas brings word of the growing concerns of Texas communities about the pollution associated with concrete plants.

Wrapping up today with these items.


Dos Centavos writes about one of his favorite performers, Max Baca, of the Grammy-winning Los Texmaniacs, who has been in a fight against COVID-19.


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Sunday, November 22, 2020

Pre-Turkey Day Funnies


Mike Peterson at The Daily Cartoonist has a list of cartoonists’ Patreon and other support sites. As newspapers and media companies continue to shed staff positions, direct support from readers becomes ever more important. Please check it out and consider giving support where you can.
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Tuesday, November 17, 2020

The Weekly TexLeftist Wrangle

Still laboring on that Latinx vote post.  (I spent much of the weekend and yesterday at the vet, where it was determined that our first-born dog has early stage renal disease, so posting may be spotty for awhile.)  It's still going to be aggregated from the so-called experts' opinions, who are at least a little more informed than I.  Congressman Henry Cuellar is not one, IMO, but here's his opinion anyway.  It is similar to Rep. Vicente Gonzalez's below.



Muchisimas Gracias, Senorita Cisneros.  I was hoping someone would remind dos Congressmanos that Bernie Sanders swept both the RGV and the borderlands in the March primary (and did not support defunding police, by the way).

DosCentavos also reminded Democrats that the election is over and that continued fighting with the "radical left" only damages the 2020 Biden coalition, held together by dollar store scotch tape.

Moving on to the coronavirus:


Don't expect any leadership from Greg Abbott or Dan Patrick (as usual).


Little Guv in particular is busy pursuing his fever dream.


All while Texans are hurting badly.


Ken Paxton has an excuse; he's been preoccupied, though leading -- except in criminal charges and mafia-styled corruption, that is -- has never been his forte', either.


Twenty twenty-two, Democrats.  And don't be so scared about what happened two weeks ago that you choose to sit out a challenge against these lousy fucks (I'm looking at you, Joaquin/Julian).

With respect to 2020 turnout, Texas had more voters than at any time in nearly 30 years, but that was still good for just 44th out of 50 states (plus DC).  So is Texas still a non-voting state?  Could it go blue if the Democrats focused on those who do not turn out, as opposed to trying to peel off disillusioned Republicans and conservatives?  And what of the mostly abandoned, always demonized leftists?  Would there be enough of those scattered around the Lone Star State to forge a viable alternative?  These are questions I'll try to answer in my "Latinx vote" post.

With a few other takes: the removal of the straight-party voting option probably cost TexDems a couple of seats in the Lege.  Can't blame that on 'soshulizm'.


Snatching state House majority defeat from the jaws of poll-predicted victory was the ugliest loss in their column.  With no control over redistricting and its decade-long impacts amplified by the SCOTUS' gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the gerrymandering will be brutal.  And among several other catastrophes, women's reproductive rights are further endangered.  They've been routed in previous sessions by Republicans.


Graciela Blandon writes for El Paso Matters about the Democratic Party there, suffering from more than than the average-sized post-election divisions.  Kuff had his first look at some election data.  Jef Rouner for Reform Austin wants to know if HPD chief Art Acevedo is running for something. (TexDonks just ran a Latina metro police chief for governor two years ago, so I can't imagine they'll make the same mistake twice -- LOL).  Schaefer Edwards for the Houston Press profiled Harris County's first elections administrator, Isabel Longoria, who's not down for any drama.  And in Laredo, a city council runoff between a detached incumbent and an aggressive progressive demonstrates the value of what many have been saying: to get Latino/as to vote for you, you have to go where they live and speak to them on the issues they are concerned about.


The work of political newcomer Alyssa Cigarroa, who waged a door-to-door write-in campaign in the City Council race for District VIII, produced a stunning return of 2,122 votes, which represents 42.62 % of the vote in the district.

She will face incumbent Roberto Balli, a six-year veteran of City Council service, in a runoff race on December 12.

I have some environmental updates, and then will close with the human interest stories, focusing on Native American Heritage Month.


The Port Arthur Community Action Network, Lone Star Legal Aid, and the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club have joined with the Environmental Integrity Project to request that the EPA deny emission permits to Oxbow Calcining LLC, Jefferson County’s largest emitter of sulfur dioxide.  The groups want the company to meet certain air quality standards that it has already been punished for violating by the TCEQ, which has declined their petition.


Jonathan Tilove takes a buyout from the Austin Statesman to return to his family in what sounds like semi-retirement.  Here's to hoping we read him again.

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