Mother's Day Toons

Wish they were funny.

Feeling the Heat Friday

-- Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster: our long national masturbation that is the NFL draft is finally over.  Hope it was good for all those involved.

I mean really. Two mock drafts a week for eight weeks by a million different Twitter nerds?  Is it possible that concussions aren't the only brain damage suffered by football fanatics?

When do you people start paying attention to things that matter?  Such as...

-- Hillary Clinton may have an actual scandal brewing.

Everyone from Rush Limbaugh to U.S. Special Operations Command blew their lids at the news, broken by The Daily Beast, that Hillary Clinton's State Department refused to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist organization. It provoked outrage on Capitol Hill and deeply partisan reactions on both sides of the aisle as the international outcry over the kidnapping of 300 female students by Nigerian based terror group grows.

Already on Thursday Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee and Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-PA), the chair of the Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Counter Terrorism and Intelligence, sent a new letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, obtained by The Daily Beast, asking why Boko Haram was not classified as a terrorist organization in 2011 as sources within elite US military units told ABC News that they tried to put the Nigerian Islamist terror group higher up on their target list -- only to be "shot down by State."

Somebody's got some 'splaining to do.

Update: That would be 'No, Monica'.  Boy, the air went out of that faux scandal faster than Gasbag Limbaugh breaking wind.

-- David Alameel is a little ahead of her, as he is already doing some 'splaining.

A chain of dental clinics owned by wealthy Dallas businessman David Alameel, the Democrats' top choice in the U.S. Senate race, entered into a federal court agreement in 2008 to settle claims brought by four women who said they lost their jobs after complaining about a sexually hostile work environment.

Alameel strenuously denied any wrongdoing this week, as he did throughout a trial in Dallas County District Court and a subsequent federal suit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

A Dallas jury found in favor of Alameel's Jefferson Dental Clinics after an emotional seven-day civil trial in November 2004. The EEOC complaint was settled four years later through a consent decree that involved no admission of wrongdoing but required Alameel's clinics to publish a non-harassment policy and conduct training for all his employees and managers.

There's one more relevant excerpt.

The case resurfaced among GOP operatives this week in advance of the May 27 Democratic primary runoff, where Alameel faces Houston political activist Kesha Rogers, a "Lyndon LaRouche Democrat" who wants to impeach President Barack Obama. Alameel, who was endorsed in January by gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, has emerged as the top choice of Democratic leaders hoping to rebuild the party in Texas by mobilizing women and minorities.

Let's leave aside that "GOP operatives" mucking around in Democratic primaries part.  Everybody knows that's what they do, after all.

I'm not voting in the Democratic runoff, and not just because I can't tolerate either of the two candidates running for US Senate or Texas Agriculture Commissioner (Jim Hogan and Kinky Friedman).  And it's not because they're going to be sacrificial lambs, either.  Hell, Friedman might actually have a puncher's chance in November because the Republican candidates are even more lame.  Tommy Merritt and Sid Miller are both opposed by the Texas farming lobby, for fuck's sake.  Why is that?  Because they're Dan Patrick clones on immigration.

“Let’s just cut to the chase on this thing: Eighty-five percent of the agricultural labor that goes on in the state of Texas … is done by either undocumented or illegally documented people,” said Steve Pringle, legislative director for the Texas Farm Bureau. “If and when that labor supply is not there, that production simply goes out of business.”

Unlike red and blue partisans, I refuse to vote for the least worst option any longer.  No more "lesser of two shitasses" for me.  And let's get clear that Democrats and Republicans are officially restricted from making fun of the Greens and the Libertarians and independents about the quality of candidates they run for office.

The larger tragic comedy is that whoever emerges from these runoffs is going to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from wealthy people across the state who want something from them if they get elected.  We'll keep getting the cheapest of political prostitutes for the highest possible price until we -- that's pretty much all of us, Texas -- wake up and do something different.

-- There's a cop in Hearne who really needs to find another job, and not one as a security guard.

More than 100 protesters gathered in downtown Hearne on Thursday afternoon for a march to call on the town to fire a police officer who fatally shot a 93-year-old woman earlier this week.

Officer Stephen Stem, responding to a 911 report of a woman with a gun, shot Perlie Golden several times Tuesday evening after encountering her brandishing a firearm at her home, according to a news release issued by police.

Golden was the second person Stem has fatally shot while on the job. He was cleared by a grand jury in the shooting death of a man in December 2012. He has been placed on paid leave pending an investigation into Tuesday's incident.

I'll bet those grand jurors didn't even have to go through an LEO shooting simulator in order to no-bill Officer Stem.  You know, since Hearne is such a small town and all.

OK, then!  Unlike the family of Perlie Golden, get out there and enjoy your Mother's Day weekend!

It might even rain!  That would be a good thing even if it rains on the Art Car Parade.

'Absurd' debate, NDO cruising, grand juries and LEO shooting sims

-- Nothing to add to this account of the pie fight between David Dewhurst and Dan Patrick yesterday:

The Texas Lieutenant Governor's Race is Now an Absurdist Experiment in Bitterness.

Chris Hooks at the Observer described it as the nastiest debate yet, in a series of notable embarrassments for the state of Texas.  And yet Democrats will publicly declare that they are crossing over in the runoff to vote for the least worst choice.  That is the purest example of battered spouse syndrome that you will ever find.

-- Houston's non-discrimination ordinance is fait accompli next week.  I had a lengthy discussion  (15-20 minutes' worth) with Council Member Kubosh this week on the issue and also Uber and Lyft.  He seems to be enjoying his job and taking it seriously.  As Charles notes, he engages, listens, doesn't seek points of contention.  That's the best you can expect from your government's representatives, and I would say easily half of them don't meet that low standard.  As for Kubosh, I like the guy even when we disagree.  That makes one hell of a good impression.

-- Socratic Gadfly has an excellent post about Harris County's effort to influence grand jurors by running them through a police officer "shooting simulator".

(T)he degree to which the DA's office (in Harris County) is going to try to get police officers no-billed when they're facing charges related to shooting civilians is reaching national scrutiny level.

It's utter horseshit for this to be happening, especially in the wake of numerous incidents like this and this and this.

Houston police fired their guns at civilians more than 100 times in the last five years, resulting in numerous injuries and deaths, but never in charges against the officers.

From 2008 to 2012, officers shot 121 people, 52 of them fatally.

This Grits post, at the bottom also.

(E)ven a conservative Republican judge questioned Harris County grand juries' lack of action on questionable Houston PD shootings. “The big void on indictments of police officers is certainly alarming, and I just hope each grand jury had decided those cases based on the facts independently of what the district attorney wants them to do,' said 209th District Judge Mike McSpadden.” Remarkably, "The newspaper’s investigation showed that more than a quarter of the 121 civilians Houston Police Department officers have shot in the last five years were unarmed." 

It's not just in Houston, as everyone knows.  And those are just the people that are dead as a result of these trigger-happy cops.  Never mind the family pets.

There's a solution to this problem.

Grand jury nullification, at least in Harris County, Texas. If you're a good liberal, and you're picked to serve on a grand jury, vote to true bill any cop brought before the grand jury. Don't get sentimental.

And, let's do this not just for these cop cases. Given that the US is the only country in the world that still uses the grand jury system, and even here, half the states (probably not "red") have abandoned it, we probably need grand jury nullification until the rest of the states, including (Texas), drop it.

And, actually, it's not "nullification." It's a "runaway grand jury," and Tea Party wet dreams aside, it gets at the roots of what grand juries did 250 years ago; in New England, they connected to the traditional town meeting and its oversight ideas. That said, the idea of a modern runaway grand jury in a state like Texas would be scary, precisely because Tea Party wet dreams can't easily be set aside.

Yeah, runaway grand juries.  My family has some experience with those.

At least Texas requires a three-quarters vote. At the federal level, and in some other states, it's still a bare majority.

In states with elected DAs, my personal thought is that, especially in smaller counties, grand jury work lets incumbent DAs show they're "tough on crime," too. As a second angle, it's used to argue tough cases in court, as in the DA saying, "A Harris County grand jury indicted Mr. Abbott (no resemblance to Greg Abbott or any other living persona named Abbott) on these three charges." So, they must be guilty is the implication.

If you want to prosecute someone, then do it. And defend it. If you want to not prosecute someone, then do that. And defend it, too.

Until we reach that day, though, grand juries, in states that still use them, need to stop being rubber stamps for DAs. No bill a few more ham sandwiches. And, in the case of cops, true bill a few more Reubens.

I've only been asked once to serve on a grand jury, and I did not make the cut.  I wonder if I'll ever get asked again now after this post gets circulated among the local law community.

Denton, Texas will go for fracking ban

They got nearly as many petition signatures as there were votes cast in the most recent municipal election in this north Texas city.

Denton’s Drilling Awareness Group (DAG) will formally file its petition with the city secretary this afternoon. The petition has 1,871 signatures, though just 596 (25 percent of the last election’s 2,385 votes) were enough.

“A lot of the work really begins now to make sure we turn out people to the polls,” DAG Vice President Adam Briggle said.

The City Secretary has 20 days to verify that the signatures on the petition are registered Denton voters, after which it will move on to the City Council. Denton’s City Council must then vote on the initiative within 60 days, and can pass the initiative directly into law.


If the council fails to pass the initiative, or passes it in a different form than what the petition lists, it will instead move to the ballot box in November.

The mayor and council are opposed.

However, despite the City Council voting late last night to extend a moratorium on new drilling permits through September, the DAG doesn’t expect the council to pass the initiative, which means it would be up for a vote in the election in November. The Mayor of Denton, Mark Burroughs, has said he thinks the fracking ban being proposed is illegal.

“If it does pass, the city has to follow it,” Burroughs told StateImpact Texas in April. “We could be bound to enforce an illegal act, which throws into a whole panoply of open issues…. We as a city would be bound to defend it, whether we believed it was illegal or not. So it’s a real open, difficult series of issues.”

“I think that City Council doesn’t particularly like this, for the most part,” Briggle said. “There’s a big difference between what they did and what we’re proposing. They’re talking about a temporary moratorium on new permits, which really isn’t the issue at all. Everything that’s going to happen in Denton is going to be on existing permits. So if we don’t attack that, we’re not attacking anything.”

If the petition passes, either through the City Council vote or as a vote on November’s ballot, it could have a ripple effect throughout Texas.

I got the embargoed press release last night.  My old pal TXSharon at BlueDaze is the leading fracking insurgent in the country, and has been all over this development, start to (almost) finish.

Expect the Big Gas Mafia to start rolling out the heavy artillery now.

Antonin Scalia and Kesha Rogers might be related

They certanly have a lot in common.

-- First: What's wrong with Fat Tony?

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made what UC Berkeley law professor Dan Farber called “a cringeworthy error” last week: he got the meaning of an opinion he cited exactly backward. Worse still — the opinion he misread was his own. As Farber explained:

Scalia’s dissent also contains a hugely embarrassing mistake. He refers to the Court’s earlier decision in American Trucking as involving an effort by EPA to smuggle cost considerations into the statute. But that’s exactly backwards: it was industry that argued for cost considerations and EPA that resisted. This gaffe is doubly embarrassing because Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, so he should surely remember which side won! Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it’s a cringeworthy blunder.

There is a broader context for Scalia’s blunder, which has at least two troubling faces. First is the overall incoherence (one might even say mendacity) of Scalia’s judicial philosophy, as another leading conservative jurist, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, argued in a scathing 2012 book review of “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts,” which Scalia co-authored with Bryan A. Garner.

Second is the bubbling over of that incoherence into intemperate behavior, such as recent remarks that could be construed as invitations to treason. (In one instance he told a student the income tax was constitutional, “but if it reaches a certain point, perhaps you should revolt.” Another instance seemed more like a sarcastic remark.)

Scalia is very likely suffering the early stages of dementia (what is more commonly called Alzheimer's disease, and used to be called senility).  I'm not  a doctor, of course, but I have witnessed the onset of the decline -- and had enough conversations with doctors enough times -- to recognize the initial symptoms when I see them.

It's not yet time for him to resign, but it is time to have a discussion about when an intervention might be necessary.  And as closer observation warrants, the time to intervene hastens.

Scalia is 78 years old (Justice Kennedy is 77; Justice Ginsberg, a rare 6-year survivor of pancreatic cancer, is 81).  SCOTUS justices do go on to productive lives if they retire from the Court.  Former Justice John Paul Stevens, 94, recently gave eloquent testimony to a Senate committee on campaign finance law.  So it's not a question of age as much as it is of cognitive ability.

Perhaps someone close to Scalia, in order to avoid further embarrassment, will talk him out of trying to outlast Obama's remaining two years -- or for that matter, cheerleading during an impeachment proceeding if/when the GOP takes the Senate in November.

-- Yes, I used the I-word.  It's not that far-fetched, my partisan Democratic friends.  Two words: Kesha Rogers.

Have you forgotten that she led the polling ahead of the primary election?  She barely made the runoff, so it's probably unlikely that she defeats the wealthy former Republican, David Alameel, later this month.  But it's worth noting that her fundraising has run more than double Dr. Alameel's.  I do not think, after having been nominated by Democratic voters in CD-22 twice, and with all of the free statewide and national media she has gotten, that there are a plurality of Democrats across the state who do not understand at least some of what she is all about.  Assuming your base voters are actually this ignorant is a stretch too far for me.

On the other hand, and as H. L. Mencken said, nobody ever went broke doing so.  Jim Hogan, the top Democrat in the race for Texas agriculture commissioner, has also noted (paraphrasing) that Democrats have a phone and a computer.  They might even use them frequently.

(Ugh. I just paired the wisdom of Jim Hogan with that of H. L. Mencken. I feel depressed now.)

Yet -- and you must for the moment overlook the fact that she would have to get elected in order to help bring an Obama impeachment trial to reality -- if she were on the November ballot, the Tea Party faction that opposed John Cornyn so strongly (well over a third of GOP primary voters just two months ago)  would have a rather humorous dilemma:

-- vote for Cornyn the RINO?

-- or vote for the black Democrat who wants to impeach Obama?

That is some serious cognitive dissonance for a conservative Republican.  But it also assumes they would be capable of such complex thought.  Let's not debate which of the two parties' core voters are more stupid, at least for the moment.

If you accept the premise that Democrats just don't know about Rogers or what she stands for, then what is the value of working so hard to motivate even lower-information non-voters to register and turn out?

This is not intended to be a criticism of Battleground Texas' monumental and worthy efforts.  I simply want to note some contradictions in logic.  Must Democrats do all the thinking for the vast majority of Texans who cannot be bothered to vote at all, much less in non-presidential years?

Some would say 'if they want to win, yes'.  I respect that.

It's certainly conceivable that so many Texans might be this ignorant.  It's also possible that they just don't care.  They don't vote because they don't care who wins, who rules, who makes the laws and the judicial appointments and rewards their supporters with ever more taxpayer money no matter how corrupt  it appears.  They might simply think there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans, or at least that there's not enough of a difference to make a difference.  The small number of voting Texans who don't vote for one of the two major parties, about 5% give or take, provide some reinforcement for this notion.  These Texans vote, but are not confident in the representation they have historically received from either the Democtatic or the Republican Party, AND believe that their vote -- no matter the outcome of the election -- still has meaning and impact.  That's a fairly high bar, intellectually speaking; many Texans who do vote think that a vote for a "third" party is a wasted one... even if they mostly disagree with the D or the R's candidate or platform.  This is "lesser of two evils" thinking, and is simply unsophisticated.  Update: Note Ross Ramsey's article today at the Texas Tribune: "Minor Parties Still Matter, Even If They Lose".

Certainly there are sheeple who vote who do no research into the candidates, who cast a straight ticket, or worst of all, outsource their thinking to a political action committee and carry a slate card with them to the poll.  My contention is that not all voters are this ignorant, and furthermore that a majority of non-voters are not this ignorant, either.

They could possibly be ignorant, or they might be too busy trying to put food on their families.  They might be too tired to think about politics, civic issues, etc., at the end of a 14 hour-day at two jobs. It might be all they can do just getting their children fed, loved a little, and then fall into bed exhausted in order to get up and do it again tomorrow.  And do that six or seven days a week, just to keep their heads above water.

It might also be possible that some of these Texans are smart enough to understand that Barack Obama -- and yes, even Wendy Davis -- aren't doing enough to help them better their lives or address the things they are concerned about.  That might be why they don't vote.

With that in mind, is David Alameel really that much different from Kesha Rogers to these Texans? 

No matter what Alameel says about himself or what others say about him, he is IMO the last of the Mohicans; an actual moderate Republican who has been pushed out of the GOP by their extremist factions.  He's also pro-life by deed: he serves on the board of a Catholic charity that contributes to a "crisis pregnancy center" in Dallas.  You know, the ones that counsel pregnant women to keep their babies.  That's not his only personal "liberal" hypocrisy, as we know.  His conversion from R to D comes just a few years after he wrote several large checks to both John Cornyn and Greg Abbott, not exactly the most moderate of Republicans (no matter what the Tea Party thinks).  And let's not ignore that Wendy Davis endorsed Alameel over a fine and qualified progressive candidate named Maxey Scherr in the primary.  Not because he was the best choice for Democrats, as Davis said, but because she needed him to write HER the big checks this year.

Texans were smart enough to figure that one out.

It might be that some Texans who didn't vote in the primary, aren't voting in the runoff, and won't be voting in November understand exactly what they are not voting for.  But like everybody else, from journalist to pundit to political scientist, I have no idea how many Texans like this that there are.

However large or small their number, these Texans -- Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, independents, and all of their potential voters, as well as all of the confirmed non-voters -- might not be all that stupid.  That's all I'm suggesting.

If you buy that, then you're left with the conclusion that something could be dysfunctional in our body politic.  Something might be wrong with our democracy.  It might not even be a democracy at all any longer, in point of fact.

Given that, it might be a little easier to understand why so many Texans -- so many Americans -- do not vote.  The real question is: with so many people passively or aggressively refusing to participate... what comes next?  If it's not democracy any more, but it's not quite oligarchy... what is it?

If one party is locked in to ruling Texas -- the same can be said of Democrats in California and the northeastern states -- and one party might be locked in to the US House of Representatives, and possibly even the White House as well, is it just going to be partisan gridlock for the foreseeable future?  Is what we have had for the past ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty years essentially the same thing we will continue to have for many years to come?  Is it any wonder, then, why the large majority of people are disillusioned by and uncoupled from the process?  And is that by design -- a form of top-down, oligarchic influence in and of itself?

How best to motivate those who are apathetic to a place where they care enough to participate.  The hardest of questions to answer.

Update: We could give "NOTA" -- none of the above -- a whirl.

As it stands, our system is great for the Democratic and Republican Parties, who happily maintain the fiction that all Americans can be served by our two enthusiastically pro-business parties. But it’s a system that’s pretty crappy for everyone else. Why can’t I say so with my vote?

Who's with me?!