Justice for Trayvon vigils in 100 cities today

In over one hundred cities across the United States, NAN is organizing “Justice for Trayvon” vigils on Saturday, July 20th to press the federal government to investigate civil rights charges against George Zimmerman. Hundreds of national preachers, led by Rev. Al Sharpton and NAN will hold prayer vigils and rallies in front of federal buildings calling on the Justice Department to investigate the civil rights violations made against Trayvon Martin.

Texas cities include Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Wichita Falls.

Houston

City Hall, 901 Bagby, 11 a.m.

Austin

Texas State Capitol Building, 1100 Congress Avenue, 12 Noon

San Antonio

Federal Courthouse, 655 E. Cesar E. Chavez Blvd., 11:00 a.m.

Wichita Falls, TX

2003 Collins Ave., 2 p.m.

What happens in Texas when Planned Parenthood clinics get defunded

Dateline March 13, by Mother Jones. Keep in mind that this is data showing up from the funding reductions passed by the state legislature two years ago.

About a year after Texas slashed its family-planning budget by two-thirds, with 50 clinics shutting down as a result, the Texas Policy Evaluation Project surveyed 300 pregnant women seeking an abortion in Texas. Nearly half said they were "unable to access the birth control that they wanted to use" in the three months before they became pregnant. Among the reasons: cost, lack of insurance, inability to find a clinic, and inability get a prescription. The state's health commission says Texas will see nearly 24,000 unplanned births between 2014 and 2015 thanks to these cuts, raising state and federal taxpayer's Medicaid costs by up to $273 million.

In a state where half of all pregnancies were unplanned in 2011, and 1 in 3 women of childbearing age lacks health insurance, this is only going to get worse.

Again, this isn't new information; it was posted last spring in order to influence the recently-concluded abortion restrictions legislation that Rick Perry signed into law yesterday. In that wake, Planned Parenthood announced three clinics would close in East Texas (only one actually provided abortion services). But seemingly unsatisfied with that result, Texas Republicans are going back for more.

Hours after Texas Republican lawmakers finalized some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country Thursday, a bill to ban abortions as early as six weeks, when a fetal heartbeat can be detected, was filed.

State Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford, filed House Bill 59, which would ban abortions “if it has been determined… that the unborn child has a detectable heartbeat.” North Dakota is the only other state to pass ‘fetal heartbeat’ legislation, and it is being challenged as unconstitutional in court.

More at Burnt Orange and Think Progress. This probably means another round of rallies at the Capitol, followed by a few arrests, some authoritarian displays of force conducted by the state police, and a party-line vote by the legislators. Maybe a lawsuit... eventually.

All we can do for the moment, in short, is simply document the atrocities. Oh yeah, and mobilize opposition for 2014.

The police/surveillance state of the nation

So is this really the best government money can buy?

In a heated confrontation over domestic spying, members of Congress said Wednesday they never intended to allow the National Security Agency to build a database of every phone call in America. And they threatened to curtail the government's surveillance authority.

Top Obama administration officials countered that the once-secret program was legal and necessary to keep America safe. And they left open the possibility that they could build similar databases of people's credit card transactions, hotel records and Internet searches.

The clash on Capitol Hill undercut President Barack Obama's assurances that Congress had fully understood the dramatic expansion of government power it authorized repeatedly over the past decade.

Sort of knocks the legs out from under that "didn't we already know about this?" crap, doesn't it?

"The statute says 'collection'," Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) told Cole. "You're trying to confuse us by talking use."

Congressman Ted Poe (R-TX), a judge, said: "I hope as we move forward as a Congress we rein in the idea that it's OK to bruise the spirit of the constitution in the name of national security."

More Ted Poe:

“Snowden, I don’t like him at all, but we would never have known what happened if he hadn’t told us.”

Poe, the least ignorant Texas Republican in Congress, reveals himself as the blind hog having found an acorn.

Is this just a failing of the Congress, though? No. The corporate media, with its toadies and sycophants fascinated by power, access, and influence is choking on reporting the story again. That's going to have to be its own post, but here's a link regarding coverage of the Snowden/NSA affair: as of yesterday afternoon, just one English language website -- Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller -- had posted former President Jimmy Carter's remark that the United States "no longer has a functioning democracy". There were many articles focusing on his comments about the Zimmerman verdict, however (he supported the jury decision). But Carter may also have been referencing Citizens United and the process by which American elections are funded. From late yesterday...

"It's accepted fact," Carter said during a speech in Atlanta. "It's legal bribery of candidates. And that repayment may be in the form of an ambassadorship to someone who has raised three or four hundred thousand dollars to help a candidate get elected."

So the answer to better government must be that Democrats just have to raise more money than Republicans. Except that Obama accomplished that, and we still have the same problems. Only worse. 

Back to who's watching you that you're paying for. And this isn't about drones.

Drive down many highways, boulevards or small side streets in America, and your movements are being noted by electronic cameras. Eyes in the sky controlled by local police departments snap photos of every passing license plate and store the data, sometimes forever. Even the smallest of agencies now deploys these high-tech voyeuristic machines, creating massive databases where more than 99 percent of the entries represent innocent people.

All, warned the American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday, for a one-in-a-million chance that the cameras might aid in the apprehension of a serious criminal.

"Plate readers are the most pervasive system of location tracking that people haven't heard of," said Catherine Crump, a privacy lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. She wrote the ACLU report released Wednesday questioning the way such cameras are being used. "Even though virtually all of us have had our cars logged into these databases, few know this technology exists." 

More and more on that. Do you feel safer yet? How about last week, when the Texas state troopers confiscated women's hygiene products? And claimed they also found jars of urine and feces, then later reneged on the word "confiscate" and sourced the tip to the "blogosphere"?

How about now?

In emphasizing the more aggressive, confrontational aspect of police work over community service—hurting people instead of helping people—they may be shifting the profile of the typical young person attracted to police work. Browse the dozens of police recruitment videos on YouTube, for example, and you’ll find that many of them feature images of cops tackling suspects, rappelling out of helicopters, shooting guns, kicking down doors, and siccing dogs on people. The images are often set to blaring guitars or heavy metal music. These are the videos that police departments send to high schools and colleges to attract new recruits. At the very first step in the process of staffing their departments, then, these agencies are deliberately appealing to people who are likely to be lured by the thrill-seeking, adrenaline-producing, butt-kicking aspects of law enforcement. Build an entire police force of people who fit that description and you have a force of cops who seek confrontation instead of avoiding it and who look to escalate volatile situations instead of resolving them peacefully. 

This is America, the greatest country inthawerld. The police have never arrested the wrong person or even busted in the wrong house; cops don't just arbitrarily shoot people's dogs. Our criminal justice system has never convicted or, God forbid, executed an innocent man. We do not torture people, and as of 2013 we don't have racial problems or gun safety issues or even concerns about our government spying on us. See, we voluntarily gave up all our privacy to Facebook. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, like Lindsey Graham and Josef Goebbels both said.

It seems to me that all of these millions and billions of dollars could be better spent. Not just the money government spends on defense or security, but also the money being given to elected officials and those aspiring to be.

Surely we are not getting our money's worth when it comes to investing in our politicians. The answer, obviously, is to help them raise and spend even more money. And discuss who has raised and spent the most money for the purpose of assigning probability to election outcomes.

Or maybe it's only a prospect list for those vendors who would like to skim off a few bucks for their own livelihood. And gain some access -- get invited to the good parties; the quiet rooms.

Whichever it is, it doesn't seem to be working right.

Mo' money in government and what we get for it

I don't know why these aggregates get so much traffic -- clicks here yesterday were ten times normal -- but if people want to read it, I suppose I'll have to write it.

Regarding campaign spending...

-- Texans outpace congressional colleagues on big donations:

Texas congressional candidates rely far more heavily on large donors than office-seekers in other states do, a Houston Chronicle analysis of federal campaign data for the 2012 election cycle found.

Three-quarters of Texas' congressional candidates collected less than 5 percent of their campaign funds from donations under $200 last year, a rate that is lower than all but nine other states.

A majority of checks from high-dollar Texas contributions went to Republicans, with just 15 percent of large donors siding with Democrats. Houston, the top city for big-dollar campaign cash, supplied 28 percent of all large donations from Texas last year. The reliance on larger contributions increases the political influence of wealthy donors, said Pete Quist, research director for the National Institute of Money in State Politics. For congressional contenders, it means a shorter path to campaign dollars.

"It's a lot easier for the candidates to just go up to these few donors and get the robust funding of their campaigns done," Quist said.

To fuel the record-setting spending of the most recent election campaign, candidates turned to a powerful minority composed of 31,385 mega-donors across the country. That wealthy stratum, including 2,700 Texans, funded nearly one-third of last year's $6 billion election in spending.

Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, who led Texas in Super PAC spending last year, recorded donations of $25 million. He gave money to 15 candidates, including high-profile out-of-state Republicans Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

It's bound to be good for democracy, yeah?

-- It's still easy for incumbents to keep their seats, but it sure costs a lot more:

Over the past 40 years, it hasn't gotten any easier—or harder—to win reelection as a House incumbent. It's just gotten way more expensive.

It's no secret that there's a serious incumbent advantage in the House. (And the Senate, too, but that data are less telling because the chamber has fewer elections and fewer incumbents.) The success rate for House incumbents running for reelection has dipped below 90 percent in only nine of the 34 elections since 1946, according to data compiled by National Journal's own Norm Ornstein and posted by the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute. The reelection success rate has fallen below 80 percent only once. If you're an incumbent looking to keep your job, you are almost guaranteed to win.

And that hasn't changed much, either. The share of incumbents seeking and winning reelection has hovered around the low 90s for the past four decades. In fact, the trendline, in black below, shows that the odds of an incumbent winning reelection have fallen just slightly by 0.7 percentage points, from 93.7 percent in 1974 to 93 percent in 2012.

Ninety-three percent retention. Brought to you by America's banks, pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors, and the business executives who run them. Ain't it grand?

No, really; what kind of government are we actually getting for all that cash?

-- Pentagon lobbies hard to be allowed to keep failing on military sexual assault:

How does the military keep fending off attempts to seriously change its sexual assault culture? Through the excessive deference of many lawmakers and an enormous lobbying operation, the details of which, as reported by Politico's Darren Samuelsohn and Anna Palmer, are staggering.

In recent months, the Pentagon's big goal has been to block Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's proposal to take decisions about sexual assault and other major crimes prosecutions out of the hands of military commanders and put them in the hands of trained legal experts. The strength of that idea has the military scrambling to accept other important-but-not-strong-enough improvements to the failed anti-sexual assault efforts that have prevailed until now—and exercising its incredible advantages in lobbying Congress:

Nearly every Democratic and GOP member of the Armed Services committees has a career military officer working as a fellow—whose salary is paid by the Pentagon—to help craft legislation, unravel the department’s labyrinth of offices and sub-offices and decipher acronyms. 

“Imagine if we had bankers serving as fellows for the Financial Services Committee. Would we do that?” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who has been pushing the military for years on sexual assault.

Plus there are Capitol Hill liaisons, members of the military who regularly meet with key Hill staff to make the Pentagon’s case on a variety of issues.

This doesn't count the actual defense contractor lobbyists, of course. It's a wonder a single military base has ever been closed. But shielding rapists from prosecution is obviously more serious than $400 hammers, $2000 toilets, incompetent weapons programs that can't be killed by Congress, weapons the military doesn't want that Congress keeps alive, and so on.

As you might imagine, this Catholic Church-like effort to protect the sexual criminals in the ranks means that military recruiters have to, ah, revise their pitch.

On and on we could go in this vein, but in the next post the focus will be on the police and surveillance state of the nation.

No Campaign Finance Reports Roundup

-- No campaign finance reports posted here. Ever. As written many times previously, that is a poor way -- probably the poorest -- of evaluating the quality of a political candidate. In fact it's sort of like picking a horse to bet on at the track based on the size of its owner's bank account. Or declaring which team might win the World Series or the Super Bowl strictly on the amount of the team's payroll.

I'm just not interested in the political insiders -- and those who crave access to them -- telling me what I should think about who is a better man or a woman of the people (sometimes erroneously referred to as "grassroots")  based on how much money they have raised. Not only don't I care, it actually has the opposite effect of convincing me that they care about the 99%. By all evidence of voter turnout in municipal elections, a vast majority of that 99% doesn't care too much either.

If it was in the best interest of our city, state, and nation to vote for people who proved themselves the most adept at pandering for campaign contributions, we'd have the kind of representation in Washington and Austin that we already have. The definition of insanity and all that.

If you don't think there's something wrong in a political system where money is scrutinized and evaluated as the most important thing to getting elected, then you might be part of the problem and not the solution.

There's an app for that. To fix it, I mean.

-- Will almost a million people quit their jobs when (perhaps I should say 'if') Obamacare is fully enacted?

A new study distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that somewhere between 530,000 and 940,000 Americans might quit their jobs after January 1, 2014, as they’re able to get affordable health insurance through one of the public exchanges to be set up under Obamacare. That could provide ammunition for both critics and supporters of the politically explosive law. Critics might see it as evidence that Obama’s reforms encourage idleness while contributing to a growing welfare state. But it might also be a sign that workers have more freedom to pursue meaningful work or other interests instead of sticking to one job just because of the benefits, a phenomenon economists have dubbed “employment lock.”

This is a bad thing how for corporations? It's like mass voluntary layoffs without the separation packages; why would they be upset about that?

-- Justice for Trayvon rallies in a hundred American cities this weekend; noon Saturday, at federal courthouses across the nation. "Juror B37 does not speak for us", according to four of the other five jurors. Here's the story of the Twitterer who single-handedly killed B37′s book deal. (Now that's what I call the invisible hand of the free market.)

Between the injustice served by a clearly biased set of panelists charged with evaluating the guilt of George Zimmerman and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, I have to wonder if the Supreme Court justices who bought the argument that racism is over in America are having second thoughts about that. Perhaps the federal judges who were planning on going in to the office this Saturday have a better understanding.

-- State representative Harold Dutton (D-Houston) has filed a pro-life bill: No abortion restrictions can be implemented until the death penalty is abolished. Sounds good to me.

What I think I like best about it is how it paints pro-birth radicals right into a corner. And they won't be able to tiptoe out of it without getting blood on their shoes.

-- Big Jolly hyperbolically -- or maybe it's hyperventilatingly -- defends Dr. Mark Jones (because he can't defend himself) and Greg calmly bats that away. What's a clown got to do to get in this fight, Dave?

-- Is the tide actually turning, or might it be a storm surge signaling a hurricane? Read all about it in Texas Monthly.

Can Texas Democrats win in 2014 just by increasing the female vote?

The short answer is 'no', but let's dig a little deeper.

The above is a bar graph that Michael Li posted on his FB page a couple of days ago (by the way, he has the best public forum around on Texas politics and if you're not following him there and on Twitter then you're missing out). I responded: "So the way I read this is: women already registered to vote in Texas can easily elect Wendy Davis governor... if they will just show up at the polls and do so."

Li's response was that it isn't quite that simple. After crunching a few numbers I am forced to agree, but since he posted it to "suggest opportunity", let's explore that.

(I'm not going to post any more charts, graphs, or spreadsheets, and we already know math isn't my strongest subject, so if somebody wants to challenge my premise, I'll welcome that discussion in the comments.)

Without having access to Li's precise figures, I have to extrapolate from the bars above to determine what the potential Democratic gain might be, given some other assumptions like: "Can 10% of the registered but not voting women in the 18-24 age bracket be motivated to cast a ballot, or should a more reasonable goal be increasing  existing turnout by that percentage?" The difference in this case is 25,000 versus almost 70,000. And not all of those will be Democratic votes, of course; the split goes more red the older the demographic.

And there's got to be a lot of rounding and estimating, which clouds our analysis. I'm thinking I can still reach a more accurate conclusion than Dr. Mark Jones of Rice University, however.

So let's open with the following parameters.

-- Increasing existing turnout by a factor of 10% is perhaps the most liberal and the most conservative goal for Dems to realize. It might be greater in the younger demographics and less in the older ones, so this will be used as the average.

-- The percentage of Democratic votes in this increase should be fairly high. I don't think the Republican women (or for that matter, men) who did not vote in 2012 have much to grow on, no matter what Phylliss Schlafly says. Not in the country, not in Texas. Still, I'm going to use a conservative estimate of the potential increase for the Ds: 75% for the 18-24 and 25-34 demographics, 67% for 35-49, 60% for 50-64, and 50% for 65+.

So on that basis, what do we have?

-- In the age range from 18-24, it looks like about three-quarters of 25,000 votes, or 18,750.

-- From 25-34, 75% of 10% of almost 600,000 (we'll call it 575K) = 43,125 Democratic votes.

-- 35-49: Ten percent of 1.1 million women who voted in 2012 is 110,000 and two-thirds of that is 73,700.

-- Texas female voters from age 50-64 total over 1.3 million according to the bar graph above, but let's round down to that 1.3 figure and take 10% of it and then 60% of that. That equals 78,000 D votes.

-- Finally, in the 65+ category, half of 10% of something around 950,000 is 47,500.

18,750 + 43,125 + 73,700 + 78,000 + 47,500 = 261,075. Again, a conservative estimate of additional Democratic votes from Texas women who are already registered to vote.

In a recent article at the Texas Tribune they helpfully disclose the vote tallies by which certain Democrats lost to Republicans in recent statewide elections. Here's that excerpt.

The grim performance of Democratic candidates in Texas over the last 10 years is hard to understate. Over the previous decade, the closest Democrats have been to any of the big ticket offices were 11 points in the 2008 presidential contest (950,695 votes), 12 points in the 2002 and 2008 Senate races (540,485 votes and 948,104 votes, respectively) and 9 points in the 2006 governor’s race (406,455 votes). 

The TexTrib goes a little farther in that piece with their back-of-the-envelope calculations of what the Latino effect might be. But they reach the same conclusion as me.

Suppose that some combination of Battleground Texas, amplified mobilization and good old-fashioned political persuasion increases Hispanic turnout in the state from 48 percent to, let’s say, 60 percent (no small feat) and, further, that the Democrats maintain a nearly 3-to-1 advantage in their vote choice (based on that 71 percent figure). That would create an additional 356,560 votes — about a third of the way toward closing the 1 million vote shortfall the Democrats suffered in the 2008 election in Texas (and remember, that was on a good day). 

I prefer to look at gender demographics as opposed to ethnic ones just for the sake of simplicity. There are people with Latino surnames who are Caucasian, to use just one example. (Exhibit A: my pal Neil Aquino. Hurry up with that new blog, by the way.) But everybody is fairly identifiable as male or female.

So what we have learned here is that -- short of a massive die-off of dessicated conservatives in the next 18 months in Texas -- Democrats still have a long, long way to go. That doesn't mean they shouldn't keep pushing, of course.

The sun is rising and the tide is turning, sooner than later. The events in the state Capitol -- and the events that occurred over the weekend in Sanford, Florida -- suggest extra motivation for people who can be convinced that voting might change things for the better. Latinos should already have all the motivation they need, and represent the greatest untapped resource. But everybody who is motivated is going to have to get registered, make sure their ID is current, and then get themselves to their polling place armed with enough knowledge to make the right choices for the future of Texas.

A tall but not insurmountable order.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance joins the family of Trayvon Martin in being "saddened" by the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff gives some advice on what to do now that the anti-abortion bill has passed.

Horwitz at Texpatriate explains why he is a Democrat.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson says the dream that once made America great has become a nightmare for too many: We must “make morality possible again”.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme can hardly wait to see the results of the republican War on Women in 2014. Some Blue Dogs like Eddie Lucio Jr. are already feeling a pinch.

Dr. Mark Jones of Rice University tried to take down Wendy Davis' political prospects, and PDiddie at Brains and Eggs had to take down Jones. Conservatives drinking "librul" whine still smell like vinegar.

At TexasKaos, lightseeker foresees the destruction of Texas Republican Party. Check it out: Texas Republicans - The Coming Crackup?

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

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

Juanita eulogizes Bev Carter, Fort Bend political journalist and rabble-rouser.

Lone Star Ma deplores the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

Jason Stanford has a personal story about why the omnibus anti-abortion bill is such a miscarriage of justice.

Equality Texas reports from the Texas GSA Network Activist Camp.

Greg Wythe shreds a recent story that claims Sen. Wendy Davis is "too liberal" to win in Texas.

Texas Vox looks at a series of new studies that focus on the destructive effects of pollution.

The Texas Green Report explains why you should care about the cost of tap water.

Concerned Citizens reminds us once again that elections have consequences.

BOR analyzes the litigation that is likely to arise from the passage of the omnibus anti-abortion bill.

Sunday Rude and Crude Funnies

Look at all those dicks in her uterus...

Greg Abbott performs a River Walk later this afternoon...

The battlefield shifts now

Just two minutes before midnight, the Texas Senate passed the controversial anti-abortion legislation, now known as House Bill 2, that has roiled crowds outside and inside the statehouse for weeks. The bill now goes to Gov. Rick Perry to be signed into law. That will likely lead to a protracted court battle over whether the measure creates an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions.

[...]

While passage of HB 2 was expected, it didn’t come easily. It took an all-night debate in which the GOP majority rejected 20 Democratic amendments and in which several protestors were ejected from gallery after outbursts. Before the final vote, a dozen senators gave impassioned speeches for and against the bill, laying bare the raw emotions of the abortion debate.

Where to now, indeed.

The day that this bill is signed by the Governor, expect there to be a lawsuit filed in the United States District Court. Given that the plaintiffs will most likely seek a temporary restraining order, it will be filed in the Western District, based in San Antonio, because that court has jurisdiction over Austin.

Noah's got much more at TexPate, but expect the decision made at this level to be appealed to the 5th Circuit. Conservatives like their chances there, but other states' bills that are similar in nature to Texas' have already been struck down. And the showdown will be with the Supremes at some point in the future, who will surely get a chance to take on (or take down) Roe v. Wade. Or maybe they will pass on that. Update: Edward Garris at Burnt Orange expands on this.

In the meantime, there must be a political cost extracted from the legislators who brought this bill into law. From Rick Perry to David Dewhurst and Dan Patrick, all the way down to the five Democrats in the House.

Symbolism we got plenty of. There's been protests, rallies, and motivation aplenty. Now we need some concrete organizing and political action. The tactics must adjust if Texas women and those who support their freedom can claim an ultimate victory, regardless of what judgment any court renders.

In a similarly revolting development from last night, Department of Public Safety officers confiscated from gallery entrants various feminine hygiene products, claiming protestors would throw them at the senators below. The irony of allowing those carrying concealed handguns to pass in unfettered was lost on them.

The Tampon Troopers also claimed they confiscated -- oops, "discovered and disposed of" --  several jars of "suspected" urine and feces, but unlike the tampons, minipads, and even diabetic medicines they purloined, there were no pictures of a single jar of anything. Hats off to the Texas Tribune for clarifying that bit of radical conservative propaganda which put the state police into totalitarian mode.

Social media blew up again as all this business went down yesterday and into the night. But once you get past the outraged Tweets and indignant Facebook posts, the real job of making the changes in Austin that will result in different legislation starts now, and there'll be a test based on the success of those efforts in November of 2014.

If you want more like last night, then I am certain you will get it from Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick and the rest of those. If you don't, there's a lot of work to be done.

More bad political science

And then again maybe it's just poor journalism. Hard to distinguish here.

More people identify themselves as pro-life than pro-choice: A Gallup poll found 50 percent of people call themselves pro-life and 41 percent pro-choice. The latter is a record low.

However, a strong majority of Americans do not want Roe v. Wade overturned: 63 percent say they would not like to see the court completely overturn Roe v. Wade; 29 percent would.

But the same Pew poll finds a plurality objects to abortion on moral grounds: 47 percent say it’s “morally wrong,” compared with 13 percent who say it’s “morally acceptable.” Twenty-seven percent say it’s not a moral issue. Nine percent say it depends on the situation.

Support for abortion rights drops dramatically after the first trimester: A Gallup poll found 61 percent of people believe abortion generally should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy while 31 percent disagree. But only 27 percent of people believe it should be legal in the second trimester and only 14 percent believe it should be legal in the third trimester. Gallup has found that pattern each time it has asked the question since 1996.

There's a lot of contradiction in there, but when you look at this bipartisan poll of Texans from last month, you see a completely different picture.

"Texans disapprove of the legislature taking up abortion bills during the special session by 80%, according to a bipartisan poll conducted from June 17-19, 2013. In addition, 63% of Texas voters think the state has enough abortion restrictions, and 71% say the legislature should be focusing on the economy and jobs. ...

74% of registered voters say that personal, private medical decisions about whether to have an abortion should be made by a woman, her family, and her doctor -- not by politicians. And the support is wide across the spectrum: 76% of independents and 61% of Republicans agreed."

Who or what to believe here?

Gallup's record in presidential polling -- a category subject to considerably less nuance than abortion -- has been slipping a lot in recent years. Pew has been more accurate. The outfit cited by Progress Texas above, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, fared best among these in 2012, according to the wizard of polling analysis, Nate Silver.

But this, written by Karen Tumulty at the LA Times 24 years ago, via HuffPolians Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy, seems definitive enough with respect to polls about abortion.

"Abortion is a topic that leaves most people feeling uncomfortable and confused. Theirs is 'a conditional, complex, middle position,' says Thomas W. Smith of the University of Chicago's National Opinion Center, which has been tracking public sentiment on abortion since the early 1960s...Surveys on abortion often yield contradictory results. Ask a question one way, and a solid majority of Americans will say that abortion should remain legal. Change the wording a bit, and the same group will favor banning it. Nonetheless, from these surveys comes what both sides realize is the winning strategy in the nation's war over abortion. 'Just as the polls come out according to the way the question is asked, so will the outcome of elections depend on who is more successful in framing what the question is all about,' [Democratic pollster Harrison] Hickman says."

Time and again I've posted my opinion of public polling. I'll repeat: polls have all of the utility of a few squares of toilet paper about to be used for their intended purpose. And once utilized, experience the most rapid of diminishing marginal value. If you wanted to be less crude than me then you might say "it's a snapshot in time". Except it would be one of those Polaroid shake-its that fades fairly quickly to nearly invisible.

For the purpose of this post let's go back to the first excerpt above and note the Houston Chron's Todd Ackerman being surprised at the pro-life versus pro-choice polling results. As we already know about polls, it's all in how the question is asked. In this case it is all about how the term "pro-life" is interpreted by the pollee as well as the reader of the poll. (Very important: not defined, but translated.)

For one thing, it isn't pro-life but actually just "pro-birth", especially as Texas Republicans and those in other states have chosen to implement legislation. From 2008 to 2011 -- the years of greatest economic turmoil in the the US -- 72 percent of women who sought an abortion already had children. Which makes it more obvious that the choice women have to make turns on economic reality more than some moral judgment. And it is no stretch to say that children born into dire financial circumstances are poorly nourished, lack basic medical care, and are further punished economically now if their parent is so much as spending time around someone else who smokes marijuana.

That is simply by no accurate definition, translation, or interpretation "pro-life".

But because Republicans have lots of corporate money with which to drive this and other false messages home -- not to mention having, you know, God on their side --  they can sway the unwashed masses into believing that their definition of pro-life is to be exalted.

Besides, those libruls are just baby-killers.

If you would like to better understand the complex socio-economic and moral dilemmas women must endure, not to mention the emotional quandaries and barriers to exercising their reproductive choice, then read this.

Finishing her testimony

The afore-blogged Sarah Slamen gets the Last Word after all.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Mark Jones tries to take down Wendy Davis

And fails. As usual.

Since her filibuster on June 25, activists, politicians and pundits within and outside of Texas have been discussing a possible 2014 gubernatorial bid by state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth. However, beyond her pivotal role in temporarily derailing a strict omnibus anti-abortion bill and her compelling life story, most Texans, let alone most Americans, know little about Davis. An analysis of her voting record on the Senate floor helps partially fill this informational lacuna, highlighting that during her tenure Davis has been one of the Texas Senate’s most liberal members.

Now you can click over and read Jones' data and interpretations for yourself, but you don't have to possess a doctorate to recognize political quackery disguised as political science. Just use Dr. Jones' own figures.

Jones asserts Wendy Davis is the 4th most liberal senator, and then charts a voting record that is all but identical to six of her colleagues. His words: "Her ideological position is statistically indistinguishable from that of the other six Democratic senators."

So if that's true, what weight is given data that makes her fourth most liberal and not one of the 6 others? By this same measurement, Jane Nelson -- yeah, that Jane Nelson -- is the 4th most conservative state senator, more so than Troy Fraser, Tommy Williams, Glenn Hegar, and Bob Estes. And every Republican in Texas is laughing out loud right now. Update II: In preparing my personal legislative scorecard at the Texas Tribune, Nelson was the Republican whose votes I agreed with the most often (a stunning 86%).

And if you have a bias hiding somewhere in the numbers that's so obvious that I can see it.... why are you even trying to hide it?

This is called cherry-picking... and then making Robitussin with the cherries instead of wine. Jones has hacked up a "too-librul" furball and needed some cough suppressant.

To be clear, I have excoriated Dr. Jones and his opinions more frequently in this space than even I had thought. Here's what I wrote two years ago when he suggested that the defeat of sanctuary cities bills in that legislative session was a "strategic victory" for Rick Perry. Jones was eventually compelled to back up and rewrite on that, and I kicked him while he was down. In searching for those I found about ten more posts eviscerating the good doctor. And when I say 'eviscerate', I mean his lower GI tract was removed and replaced with PVC pipe.

I stopped reading his dreck a while back because the sniffs I heard at the end of every sentence were just too obnoxious to endure, but I gave him another chance recently when he appeared on teevee with Khambrel Marshall and David Big Jolly Jennings. I couldn't make it to the end of the broadcast without calling my dentist to schedule a gum-scraping. I figured that would be less painful.

I am not joking; compared to Mark Jones, Marc Campos has searing political insights -- and real keen baseball knowledge, too.

Anyway, Jones buried the lede.

Paul Burka, Patricia Kilday Hart, Ross Ramsey and others have identified multiple hurdles Davis would face were she to run for governor in 2014. To those I would add one more: Davis would be competing for statewide office in what is still a very red state with the legislative voting record of a relatively liberal Texas Democrat.

Well knock me over with a feather: Texas is as red as a baboon's ass in heat and hasn't elected a statewide Democrat in a generation. And Wendy Davis is a Democrat. You don't think the past might be prologue, do you? Let's gather some data and plot a graph.

(This baloney makes almost as much sense as the TexTrib's own polls. Yeah, I've blogged about those too until I'm tired of doing so. They're so mad at me they don't link over here any more.)

Dr. Jones should have simply saved himself the trouble and just gone all Ronald Reagan "librul-librul-librul" on Sen. Davis. He could have at least updated Reagan's smear with some of Rush Limbaugh's or Ann Coulter's spew; they've both made fortunes off that 'Liberals-R-e-VILL!' schtick. But I suppose he thinks what he's doing isn't the same thing.

Actually, it is. Calling someone the "most liberal senator" was the very first argument made against both John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008, and Jones knows it's a dog whistle only right ears can hear. But he had to go and ruin his credibility again. 

I have a hard time believing that Rice University cannot do better than this in the poly-sci department, and that's even if they wanted someone who was the academic equivalent of Karl Rove or Frank Luntz. Mark Jones must be tenured harder than the mortar between the bricks under the ivy. I'm guessing that without something that meets the definition of moral turpitude, they're stuck with him out there for another twenty-five years or so.

And I doubt that remains a long enough time for him to see any librul get elected governor of Texas.

Update: Greg has a similar opinion of Dr. Jones (it's more courteous than mine, but still pretty harsh on his figures and his conclusions).