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Monday, January 31, 2022

"It's not Monday you hate, it's capitalism" Wrangle


How was your weekend?


There were two polls regarding the Texas primary elections released over the weekend.  The first, on Friday from the Hobby School of Political Affairs at the University of Houston, has most GOP statewide incumbents -- Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton, Sid Miller, Glenn Hegar -- holding comfortable leads for renomination.  Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, not so much.  The Republican primary for commissioner of the General Land Office, vacated by George P. Bush in his bid against Paxton, is a tossup (80% of those queried are unsure for whom they might vote).

In the Democratic primary, Beto O'Rourke leads handily.  In the lieutenant governor's race, Mike Collier is ahead with 24% but 58% are undecided.  Rochelle Garza (14%), Joe Jaworski (12%), Lee Merritt (7%), and two others with 7% portend a runoff in the scrum for attorney general to face off with Paxton (60% of Dems are unsure).  Same in the contest for GLO, with Sandragrace Martinez leading Michael Lange, Jay Kleburg, and Jinny Suh with 64% undecided.

While these numbers don't seem out of place, it's possible that the pollsters could be weighting Latin@ voters a bit too much and under-sampling Black Dems for my interpretation.  But there was also a general election matchup polled, and IMO these results are the closest to accurate for predicting the ultimate fall outcome.


Six percent uncertain is a rather stunning number nine months away.

The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler's poll, out yesterday, looks somewhat the same... and somewhat different.


Robert Showah has more on Texans' opinions from that survey, including this:


I did not want to open today's Wrangle with an overflowing vat of stupid and crazy, but I can't leave the topic of conservatives behaving badly without a few more items.


They simply outdid themselves this past week.

I have a few criminal, legal, and social justice headlines; the first deals with the previous Tweet regarding Tim Dunn above.


On January 22, members of the Karankawa Nation and several hundred supporters gathered in front of a Bank of America location in Austin (to speak out) against the planned expansion of an oil pier owned and operated by Canada-based oil giant Enbridge. The expansion would cross sacred land at a Karankawa village site near Corpus Christi Bay in south Texas. Pipeline construction would also endanger burial artifacts and have a disastrous effect on the sensitive and biodiverse wet marshes.

Chiara, a Karankawa organizer, gave an impassioned speech defending the environment of her people’s homeland and called out Bank of America for financing fossil fuel extraction. Bank of America invested $42 billion in fossil fuels in 2020 alone.

That will be my segue to the environmental news.




“I’ve seen a lot of Big Oil ads, but this has to be one of the creepiest,” Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, said in an email. “Valero wants us to feel like it isn’t just our cars, but the very lives of our children that depend on their product. There’s an unsaid threat in these commercials: transition to clean energy and the world as you know it will cease to exist. That’s of course false ..."

"East Texas, North Texas residents push back against solar plant construction" via KLTV

*heavy sigh*

Dozens of people living in Crawford, just half an hour west of Waco, raised concerns at a school district meeting about the company, OCI Solar Power, building facilities just outside the city. The company is based out of San Antonio, and it proposed a $115 million solar farm. A company official managing the project said the project will not cost the community any tax dollars if approved -- now it’s up to the school board to designate land as commercial property.

A farmer in Crawford said he’d been offered more money than he could make farming to sell his land to make way for construction, but said his neighbors, “would not be happy living next to a plant.”

A similar situation is happening in Southmayd, near Texas’ border with Oklahoma. The school district board there voted to agree to a deal with Galactic Energy. The solar development company is proposing the construction of a 1,750 acre solar farm. Some residents there said they don’t want to lose the landscape and property they’ve lived on for generations. People raising their concerns are asking the school board to reconsider, and say they’re considering starting a petition against construction.


Going extra long on the calm-me-downs to wrap today.

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Friday, January 28, 2022

The Weekend Wrangle

Beginning the round-up of the best of the left of Texas from the past week -- or at least since Wednesday -- with your options if you're not voting next month.


Frequent BAN contributor Jim Riley sends along a link to the court order and also speculates about where the case might go from here.  Nothing in the state's legacy media that I have found about this story yet (as usual).

So it's on to the usual bad-behaving suspects in the duopoly.


Seliger is a previously-undisclosed member of the large, bipartisan caucus which looks askance at the work of Dr. Mark Jones.


*Whew* the stench.  And the fallout from the Lege is claiming victims.


That's my segue to the criminal, legal, and social justice updates.


And there's my segue to the environmental news.


And a larger-than-regular collection of calm-me-downs.

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Thursday, January 13, 2022

Thursday Morning Wrangle from Far Left Texas, Part 1: COVID, primary skirmishes


Opening today with the latest on the pandemic.


If you want to backtrack to about a week ago ...


Very bad and getting worse.  I hope you're not one of those "putting it in Gawd's hands", but if you are, have the ambulance take you to church instead of the hospital, because there are no beds in ICUs.


As the DMN's Bob Garrett noted, Canon had been instrumental in getting state Rep. Tony Tinderholt elected, and was a background player in former Cong. Joe Barton's sexting scandal.

That might be my segue to the politics news.


The tweet's teaser is lazy and lame, but the story is lively.  Here:

"Beto O'Rourke is dangerous to the communities and to the safety of the public and the people of this state and he is not fitting to serve as governor," Abbott said.

The governor accused O'Rourke of supporting defund the police movements and attacking him for his position on bail reform.

"This is Governor Abbott lying about me," O'Rourke said. "I do not want to defund the police. I want to make sure law enforcement have the resources they need to solve and investigate violent crimes."

[...]

"As long as there's not a freeze between now until the end of March, Abbott should be in good shape," (Rice political scientist Dr. Mark) Jones said.

Dr. Jones can be really good at political analysis when he wants to be.


That's a Republican news source for those of you unfamiliar, so if you click on the link for the schadenfreude, be sure and scrape the cookies off your browser immediately after.


Drag a dollar bill past the Governor's Mansion and count on a whore in a wheelchair coming after you.


It's not politics.


That's enough Hell on Wheels for one post.


Senator Cornhole wants to be the next Majority Leader, if indeed Trump's play to blow out Moscow Mitch succeeds.  He'll have to contend with South Dakota's John Thune for the title, who looked as if he was ready to leave the Senate for a minute there.


I'll take that as my segue to post a few updates about Texas Democrats.


This is both awkward and unfortunate for Beckley.  Wu in particular is a committed shitlib -- he's still tweeting Hillary Clinton -- but Howard and Martinez are a letdown personally.

I'm also disillusioned by Jessica Cisneros.


I don't know whether Benavides is as, or less or more progressive than Cisneros.  This establishment centrist tweeted a smear against Jessica for the move, so there's that.


I'm Green, but Suh, Zapata, Reynosa, and Israel are Democrats I could vote for if I lived in their jurisdictions (and if I were voting in March).  I'm not so antagonistic as some #DemExiteers to those who seek to reform the Donkey Party from within.  I'm over that; maybe they will get there too.

More in the next.
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Monday, December 20, 2021

A Wrangle Before Christmas


I'll be adding to that list, here in this post and in the coming days.  Yes, there's lots of ground to cover; I'll open with the exploding omicron variant/COVID numbers.


Distressing news as we approach the holidays and planned gatherings.


We are three times jabbed, with the Pfizer following two Moderna shots exactly on schedule (one month ago, 7 months ago, and the first last April).  We are masked, KN95, every time we leave the house, and have recently stopped dining out again despite all these precautions.  I support mask mandates, but I oppose vaccine mandates.  People who don't want to get the shot shouldn't be forced to.  Neither should their employers keep them on payroll, or their health insurers pay for their treatment if they contract the virus.  These are the choices.  Everybody should clearly understand by now what's at stake.

The greed of Big Pharma, the waiver of liability from damage, the federal government's refusal to share the vaccines with poorer nations, the patents being protected and all of that bullshit also extends the pandemic.  For some reason we cannot compel people to do the right thing.


This does not give me hope for resolving climate change or social inequality.  Way down the list from there is worrying about whether the Democrats can figure out how to appease Joe Manchin in order to save their asses in the midterms.  As Tony Soprano might say, "Whaddaya gonna do?"

Be of good cheer anyway.  Mine comes from laughing at the foibles of the intellectually feeble, the terminally corrupt, and the uber-demagogues.





After all, I'm just here to document the atrocities.


There have been some developments regarding redistricting -- or gerrymandering, if you prefer -- since my last Wrangle.  Also the new SOS has been efforting to "clean up" (sic) the voter rolls.


Will Wilder and Elizabeth Hira for the Brennan Center show how the Freedom to Vote Act would defang Texas' voter suppression law.  Too bad that's not going to happen.  And Ken Paxton has a sad that he will not be able to go after these "criminals".  If they should break the law, that is.  His track record was poor anyway.


The War on School Libraries is the new War on Christmas.


Our school board trustees do have other things to worry about.  "Things" being legal problems of their own making.


It's not as if potential school shootings are a concern, after all.


The power grid has been in sharp focus recently.  Let's round up the latest.


I've run long here, so I'll put the criminal and social justice news in the next Wrangle.  And more calm-me-downs.  Here's one to close.

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Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Filling the Filings Wrangle (with updates)


I'm so old I remember when Warren G. Harding (not the former president) got elected state treasurer, and Gene Kelly (not the deceased dancer, as Barbara Radnofsky will attest) almost -- well, not quite -- got elected US Senator.


Anything that pisses Dave Carney off is worth a few laughs.  Update: Such as the Bum Steer of the Year award.


The downside is that serious candidates will again be forced to beg for attention from the state's political reporters while they chase the 'not that Rick Perry' story.  As long as you can accept that we live in an oligarchy on the days when it isn't a plutocracy, you won't be too disillusioned.  More blunt: Just stop with the 'democracy' shit already.


Not fond of but not surprised by Collier's overuse of the royal 'we' in his statement here.  He really ought to be called a 'perennial' -- or 'frequent' -- candidate in that dismissive tone that some use.


We'll wait and see re: "progressive".  Far too much co-opting of the word by Democrats, certainly Texas Democrats.  I question whether Latinas in South Texas not named Jessica Cisneros are breaking the mold, but I'll keep an open mind.


An update to TX-07:


On Tuesday, Javed acknowledged he was being asked to get out of the race but said he was determined to stay in it. Several hours later, Javed declared he had pulled out, too, with no further explanation.

And one additional morning-after reaction.


Really hoping the Democrats in John Whitmire's Senate district see fit to send him off to his previously-announced '23 H-Town mayoral campaign.


The Dean is going to have to put a lot of lipstick on his pig if he loses his last run for re-election to Austin.  And I will be here for it.

Truth to tell, however, there are bigger wads holding office that need to be ejected next year.  Let's consider the professional evaluations of Beto's latest tactic.


Seems like it might be effective.


Someone might fact-check Ms. Gilberg's claim, but regardless, enough evidence stands up to point out the governor's hypocrisy on defunding the police, especially in Austin.  Watch to see if this gains traction among LEOs.


I teased Michelle good-naturedly about her header and she took it in stride.  Her blog is outstanding from a civil rights perspective.  A little too heavy on the blue shilling for me, but that's because I'm Green now.  Delilah Barrios gets my support, money and vote for Texas governor.


One last filing update, intersecting with the criminal and social justice news (which follows).


... Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced grand jury indictments of three local Democrats -- Richard Bonton, Natasha Demming and Damien Jones -- connected to two election fraud schemes tied to local Texas House of Representatives races in House Districts 142 and 132.

You can read on at the link.


Nothing particularly new here; an aggregate of stories that have been ignored by the Blue crew for reasons that are patently obvious.

Updates from Texas Monthly's Mike Snyder and the Chron's Matt Schwartz.


Just plain weird.  Update:


The San Antonio Current is on top of one Alamo City school district's willingness to pull library books off the shelf.


The latest in climate.


Bloomberg Quint reported on two mysterious plumes of methane appearing on satellite above some East Texas oil and gas fields.  Update: ExxonMobil says it will use satellites to monitor the Permian Basin for methane leaks.  On the bright side, Environment Texas has a list of the top ten wins for the state's ecology this year, and the AP recounts the many coal-fired plants closing after the implementation of new federal wastewater guidelines.

Power producers that say they will shutter coal-fired units as a result of the new rule include Atlanta-based Southern Co. and Houston-based NRG. Southern, which operates electric utilities in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, said it will shutter two-thirds of its coal fleet, including units at the nation’s two largest coal-fired power plants, Scherer and Bowen, both in Georgia. NRG said it plans to stop burning coal at its domestic plants outside Texas, and install new pollution controls at its two Texas plants.


That's enough for today.  Closing with one soother.

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