Presidential not-daily briefing

-- This news broke a few weeks ago: Obama not only assassinated an American citizen with an armed drone, he also assassinated that man's 16-year-old son, a US citizen as well, in a subsequent drone attack. Sort of a Tom Cruise/Minority Report/Department of Pre-Crime kind of thing.

If you only have time for the abridged version, click here.  I didn't need another reason not to support Obama in November, but I got one anyway.

What I really don't understand is how my fellow progressives who call themselves Democrats can complain about George W Bush capturing people like this on the battlefield and then extraordinarily renditioning (read: torture) them, and now overlook Obama's acting as judge, jury and executioner simultaneously.

Too much cognitive dissonance for me.

-- Here's a sliver of slightly good news: Obama is sending aid to Syrian rebels. Unlike some peace advocates, this is the sort of thing I can support.

-- Mitt Romney is still a wealthy out-of-touch putz. He's George Herbert Walker Bush redux without the power of incumbency. No updates today but it's still early in the morning as I post this.

-- Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party is the man most likely to be held responsible for Romney's defeat in 2012. I wonder if Republicans will hold a grudge against him for decades after, like the Democrats do Ralph Nader.

-- That is, if they wouldn't rather blame Gary Johnson and the Libertarians.

-- Green Party presidential and vice- presidential candidates Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala both were arrested as part of a citizen action against two Philadelphia-area Fannie Mae foreclosures.

In explaining why she joined the protest, Stein said that almost half of Americans now live in poverty or near poverty, eight million families face eviction from their homes due to foreclosures, and over a third of mortgage holders are "underwater" - meaning that they owe more to the lenders than their properties are worth on the market.

Said Stein, "The developers and financiers made trillions of dollars through the housing bubble and the imposition of crushing debt on homeowners. And when homeowners could no longer pay them what they demanded, they went to government and got trillions of dollars of bailouts. Every effort of the Obama Administration has been to prop this system up and keep it going at taxpayer expense. It's time for this game to end. It's time for the laws be written to protect the victims and not the perpetrators. It's time for a new deal for America, and a Green New Deal is what we will deliver on taking office. "

Stanart chokes again

As of 9:15 p.m.(Election Night), Harris County still had not posted any voting data from Election Day on its website; only early voting data was available.

Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart said the delay appears to be due to technical problems in relaying the data via phone lines from Reliant Park, the drop-off location for all Election Day data, and the clerk’s election hub in downtown Houston.

“It’s a connectivity issue between here and Reliant,” Stanart said. “We’re trying different phone lines. Apparently Reliant gave us some garbage phone lines out there. That’s what it looks like right now.”

Stanart said, at this point, he’s not sure of the specific problem or who in particular is to blame. ...

Reliant never gave anyone garbage phone lines when Beverly Kaufman was the county clerk. Besides, I thought AT&T was in the phone line business, not Reliant. The morning -- or maybe afternoon -- after...

Stanart blamed delays in posting results on a Reliant Park contractor, saying his office had been given "garbage" phone lines over which to securely transfer voting data downtown.

He said the equipment had been tested, but the Reliant phone lines had not because they were not activated until Tuesday.

Reliant's phone line contractor got it wrong, then. At least that's not as cheesy as blaming the Democrats, as Stanart did in May after the primary election. 'Garbage phone lines', however, doesn't resolve the confusion in the Precinct 2 contest.

The discovery of an error in which some votes were counted twice appears to have changed the result of the Harris County Precinct 2 constable’s race.

County Clerk Stan Stanart said this afternoon he will know more detail about what happened, but said an updated report that went online at 10:12 p.m. displayed incorrect vote tallies for Democratic candidates. One batch of precinct data appears to have been counted twice, he said, while stressing that the final tallies posted at 12:43 a.m. are correct. 

So now we have computers tabulating votes that can count them twice. And the King Street Patriots are worried that Mickey Mouse or the Dallas Cowboys might try to vote.

“When we merged the databases there was an error that was not caught by my people and was not caught by the election judge. We ended up with a double count of one of the databases,” Stanart said, adding he has met with (Precinct 2 Constable candidate Zerick) Guinn and assured him they’ll have a meeting to go over the situation in more detail.

[...]

Guinn said Stanart had no answer when he asked why the number of total votes in the race appeared to drop by 478 between 10:12 p.m. and 12:43 a.m. while his person vote total dropped by 634 votes. 

More on this clusterf:

Stanart said he saw problems in a not-yet-published report of GOP results shortly before midnight, and began running both parties' results from scratch. Stanart said he initially thought the problem was isolated to the report he had just run on the computer he was using, and, thus, did not pull the faulty numbers off the county website and did not inform Democrats because their numbers were being generated by a different computer.

By late Wednesday, Stanart said, he had learned both parties' results online from 10:12 p.m. until at least 12:43 a.m., were wrong, though he stressed only the outcome of Guinn's race had changed.

Do you believe him?

"The Republican Party keeps screaming about voter fraud, but it seems the mistakes, year after year, are happening in the tax assessor's office and the county clerk's office," (HCDP chair Lane) Lewis said.

Stanart and tax assessor Don Sumners, whose office botched the boundaries for the department of education primary, are Republicans. Sumners maintains the department was required to notify him of the boundary changes; the department disagrees.

Stanart said voters should have faith in his office, adding he is going to develop software to verify that the numbers coming from the counting machine and the reporting machine match.

"Election night reporting is just a small portion of the process that goes into ensuring the integrity of the final count," Stanart said. "I understand the importance of having an accurate count for the public. This will never happen again."

Do you believe Stanart? If so, I've got some teabags to sell you. They're only a little rotten around the edges. And to the core.

My friend Keir Murray, FTW.

"You're talking about an election with essentially nobody voting," said political consultant Keir Murray. "If they can't handle this, what's going to happen when we have 1.2 million people voting in November?"

It's all conservative, most of the time

Stan Stanart's continuing snafus aside, here's a flash on some election results of note.

-- James Cargas 58%, Lissa Squiers 42%, 80% of precincts reporting.

If it goes to 60-40, then it would match the percentages in the primary of Blue Dogs to progressives. Conservative Dems split their votes between Cargas and Phillip Andrews in the first round.

Being able to torment the Corporate Democrat for the next three months really isn't a bad consolation prize.

-- Paul Sadler 63%, Grady Yarbrough 37%, 85% reporting. Sadler immediately challenges Ted Cruz to a debate.

“So far, many people have not heard my message and I am looking forward for the chance in the coming months,” Sadler said. “I challenge my opponent Ted Cruz to a debate on the issues that affect Texans. I will meet him any time, any place, anywhere.”

Not all of the contests tonight were disappointing. Pete Gallego bested Ciro Rodriguez in CD 23, Marc Veazey got past Domingo Garcia in CD 33. Those are two progressive victories and two likely new Democrats in Congress next year. The real surprise of the night locally has to be Gene Wu trouncing Jamaal Smith in HD 137. I expected something much closer.

But even as the Democrats nominated right-leaning candidates, the Republicans went further right, and not just with Cruz.

-- Pearland's Randy Weber will face Nick Lampson for the right to replace Ron Paul in Congress.

"Voters had a clear choice," he said Tuesday night... "They want someone to go into there and stop the liberal agenda." 

Yeah... no.  Lampson should win the seat and a flip from R to D.

-- Steve Stockman 55%, Stephen Takach 45%, with 61% of precinctb reporting.

The newly-created CD36 can't be seriously considering sending Stockman back to Washington. Let's hope Louie Gohmert doesn't get a butthole buddy. Max Martin is the Democrat in the fall tilt.

-- Christi Craddick over Warren Chisum and Barry Smitherman over somebody for Texas Railroad Commission. Michael "Bowtie" Williams and Elizabeth Ames Jones never looked so good.

-- John Devine narrowly over David Medina for the Texas Supreme Court. Guess those runaway grand jurors made something stick after all.

-- Speaker Joe Straus is having a bad night. Sid Miller, Chuck Hobson, Bill Keffer, and Jim Landtroop are all losing. So is state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, to Donna Campbell. None of these incumbents could have been considered "libruls" except in Tea Party Bizarro World.

In other words, the Texas Republican primary.

More tomorrow.

Update: The Tea-GOP picked the white guy over the black guy in their sheriff runoff. They might have had a chance in this race in November had they not.

Today is the day.

As the Chron notes.

Though it has scarcely been mentioned anywhere except this little shop -- the Chronicle mostly ignored the race, except for a pathetic e-board endorsement written in full by one of the candidates himself; the other blogs in Houston did also, one a recent Houston Press award-winner; heck, even the mighty Kuffner and the Great Orange Satan -- the contest for the Democratic nod for US Representative, Seventh District of Texas has great significance.

I'll let Lissa Squiers, yesterday's birthday girl, finish.

Thank you everyone for the birthday wishes.  It's been a long time since 1964 and things have changed a lot in Houston since then.  Back then my father was working at Champion Paper Mill and my grandfather worked at Armco Steel until the day it closed.  We weren't a 'consumer society' then.  There was no such thing as 'bling'.  People had a savings account and a pension fund and your average person had no money connected with Wall Street.

More recently, the 1% told us that our pensions and savings belonged on Wall Street and convinced us that corporate politicians could be trusted to do what was right for America.  As we know, that hasn't worked out!  Now we have a choice.  We can continue to try and replace John Culberson's tea party vote with a moderate guy in a suit, or we can actually replace him with a progressive voice.  The Chronicle E-board says that if you want someone who will support the Democratic Party platform and take on the powers that be, then you should vote for me.  They say if you want someone who will support the dirty fossil approach, the status quo, then you should vote for my opponent.

For the last several years I have been hosting events at places like TSU and local churches, speaking at city council and serving on local community boards.  While my opponent was sitting on the Board of the Energy Lawyers and the Gas Standards, and was busy buying and selling utilities wherever a profit could be made, I was helping to find alternatives to usurious payday lending companies and the cradle to prison pipeline that ramrods our children into private for-profit prisons, working with women's groups and supporting Democratic causes. Representing Houston in Congress is more than talking about the energy corridor and being a member of the oil patch.  As an accountant with an MBA, I have worked in some of the oil company offices on I-10 and know what they pay people, how they treat their vendors, and how they do business.  My opponent only knows the Mitt Romney end of the business -- where you buy and sell it at a profit for yourself -- he's never actually worked in these buildings he speaks so often of.

Does it matter who wins tomorrow?  I think it does matter whether a progressive Houstonian, a community Democrat, or a moderate oil and gas corporate politician from Michigan represents District 7.  What do you think?  Plus, we won once already!  In the May primary we won the mail-in vote, the early vote, and on election day.  Let's do it again on Tuesday.

Right now 2175 people have voted in Congressional District 7 -- 1600 early voters and 575 mailed-in ballots.  That's out of the 8500 that voted in May.  (Tuesday) DOES MATTER.  Literally thousands of Democrats in Congressional District 7 will go vote (on Election Day).  Has your neighbor voted?  Do you have a coworker in CD07?  Please call or go knock on your friend's or neighbor's door and ask them to come vote with you.  If  you know Democrats in CD07, please call or email them and tell them that WE CAN TAKE JOHN CULBERSON'S JOB THIS YEAR.  Polls close at 7 tonight.  There is plenty of time!  Reach out now to CD07 voters and let's make a difference today: Community Democrat or Corporate Politician.  We are deciding that now, not in November.  I know how to beat a moderate and how to beat a Republican.  I've done it once already.  Now I need your help to do it again.

Here's one link that pulls together everything I have written on the race. If you follow the links within, you will find every claim sourced, every fact verified. That as opposed to nothing but the indignant, spitting responses of the Cargas campaign... with the exception of a photo of a postcard I signed, paid the postage on, and sent out on behalf of the Squiers campaign. Cargas whined something about Citizens United in response. As if a postcard is evidence of something besides my full-throated (and previously-and-repeatedly-disclosed) support.

The Cargas campaign consistently misinterpreted what I wrote and what Ms. Squiers said so many times I went from surprised to bemused to picking myself off the floor from laughing so hard. They got the numbers wrong many times, once declaring victory after a straw poll at a pre-primary event. He even got the district's boundaries wrong, and the Chron e-board didn't bother to correct him, just repeating his claim that he "would bring federal grants to the Texas Medical Center".

They complained to the Harris County chair and his associate and even the state party chair about so many inconsequential slights that the officials cringed every time the phone rang. They bitched about missing financial disclosure reports which weren't missing; they just couldn't find them. They wrote "Formal letters of Complaint" that objected to Ms. Squiers' holding a strategy session on how to beat Culberson. As if she should have the temerity to suggest she might get the opportunity to do so. For that joke, they had their events removed from the HCDP calendar (along with the Squiers campaign's, which was likely their hope all along). I got e-mail from their communications director threatening to publish additional obscure public records about me and directions to "take down my hateful blog". They made asses of themselves over and over again, once even with the Houston Police Department's Threat Investigation Unit.

I may yet blog about that. What I will say about it now is that I am still laughing about it.

Later on this evening we'll find out whom the voters chose to carry the Democratic banner against John Culberson. I've got plans either way; I'll go right to work helping Ms. Squiers defeat the incumbent... or, paraphrasing Harry Truman, I'll keep telling the truth about James Cargas and he will keep thinking it's hell.

Honestly, I'll be fine no matter the outcome.

Find your polling place today and a sample ballot -- who you get to vote for -- here. Everybody in Harris County gets to pick the US Senate nominee and the disputed Board of Education  representative. And if you also get a vote in CD07, you get to decide...

Community Democrat, or Corporate? Oil and Gas Attorney or Single Mother? Progressive... or conservative?

The choice is ours.