The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance says Bring Back Our Girls for this post-Mother's Day roundup.

Off the Kuff takes a closer look at the competitive legislative races on the ballot this fall.

Horwitz at Texpatriate notes that, while there may be a Democrat now on the Court of Criminal Appeals, he is not doing anything of use to stop cruel and unusual punishment.

Libby Shaw at Texas Kaos found Greg Abbott hiding from Wendy Davis again. Perhaps it is because she and Texas cancer survivors have a bone to pick with him: Wendy Davis Links Greg Abbott to Cancer Institute Scandal.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson on the troubles of establishment Texas Republicans in the GOP primary runoff election: Thoughts on the GOP runoffs for Lt. Gov and AG.

Polls show that even with 8 million Americans signed up, people still don't like "Obamacare", even though they support most provisions of the law. Texas Leftist wonders if this is simply an issue of nomenclature. Perhaps it's time for Democrats to drop the name entirely when discussing the ACA.

Antonin Scalia and Kesha Rogers have more than the usual something in common, observes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Bay Area Houston has a series titled "What idiot would....." starring Greg Abbott. Today's post is "What idiot would steal from cancer research fund?"

Neil at All People Have Value says Wendy Davis needs to take up the real issues to get more folks to vote in the upcoming November election.

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

Socratic Gadfly wonders if Denton could actually ban fracking.

jobsanger posits that the root of morality is not in religion.

The Citizens Transportation Coalition reports on a presentation by Texas Central Railway about their proposed high speed rail connection between Houston and Dallas.

The Makeshift Academic explains the impact that senior status federal judges can have.

Texas Clean Air Matters summarizes the state of air quality in Texas.

The Feminist Justice League announces the North Texas Abortion Support Network.

Unfair Park reminds us that climate change denialism is alive and well in Texas.

At the Rivard Report, UIW student body president Jonathan Guajardo presents his recommendations for the reformation of campus police policies that led to the shooting death of a fellow student.

Juanita Jean notes the love Tom DeLay has for Cliven Bundy.

The Lunch Tray isn't all that optimistic about the war on obesity.

Mother's Day, for health and peace

Long before it was commercialized, Mother's Day was first a call for activism in regard to public sanitation, and then one to end armed conflict in the wake of the Civil War.

Ann Jarvis of Appalachia founded Mother’s Day in 1858 to promote sanitation in response to high infant mortality. After the Civil War, abolitionist Julia Ward Howe made a Mother’s Day call to women to protest the carnage of war. To explore the history and purpose of Mother’s Day beyond the textbooks and commercial media, the Zinn Educational Project offers below the original proclamation by Julia Ward Howe, a short film called Mother’s Day for Peace, an excerpt from an article on the Appalachian origins of Mother’s Day, and an excerpt from an article called “The Original Anti-War Mother’s Day.”

Beginning in chronological order...

If the founders of Mother’s Day saw how we celebrate this day, they would be dismayed. Ann Jarvis, founder of Mothers Work Day in 1858, created a day for mothers to work for better cleanliness and health. Because two of her children died before the age of three, Anna asked doctors in her Appalachian community to teach her how to prevent disease. On Mothers Work Day, and in Mothers Day Work Clubs throughout her county, those mothers taught others how to prepare food properly and clean their homes. This gradually improved the health of their  families.

Sadly, not all children survived. Although Ann gave birth to eleven children by 1867, only four lived to adulthood. Their lives were cut short, perhaps by childhood diseases of measles, smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, or tuberculosis. Infection spread easily among the mining towns and small communities. (Today most of these diseases are controlled by childhood vaccinations.)

Death was a constant presence in the area because of the Civil War (1861-1865). Taylor County (KY) was a major battlefield between the Union and Confederate armies. Since both sides surrounded them, Ann declared Women’s Friendship Day, convincing local mothers to be fair to both sides. They went into camps to treat the wounded and to teach sanitation and disinfection. After the war, local leaders asked these women to teach former enemies how to get along.

Julia Ward Howe, a mother, author and activist, was inspired by Ann Jarvis. Julia wrote the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic early in the war. In 1862 she and her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, joined the U.S. Sanitary Commission. More men died in the Civil War from disease in prisoner of war camps and their own army camps than died in battle. The Sanitary Commission helped to reduce those deaths later in the war.

After the war, Julia  wanted to bring an end to war and equality for all people, regardless of race, religion, gender or nationality.  She wrote the Mothers Day Proclamation, calling mothers to leave their homes for one day a year and work for peace in their communities. Julia translated her proclamation into several languages and  traveled around the world, urging all to join in a Mothers Day for Peace. On the second Sunday in June, 1872, the first Mothers Peace Day was celebrated in Boston, Massachusetts. For the next thirty years Americans celebrated this day in June.

The tradition died out after that.  Continue reading “Is Mothers Day a Lost Cause?,” by Sharon Montgomery.  More from Gary G. Kohls at Common Dreams.

The modern Mother’s Day, with its apolitical message, emerged in the early 20th century, with Howe’s original intent largely erased from the mainstream consciousness. Howe’s vision of an antiwar mother’s call to action was watered down into an annual expression of sentimentality.

And the video below, Mother’s Day for Peace, features Alfre Woodard, Gloria Steinem, Vanessa Williams, Felicity Huffman, Fatma Saleh, Ashraf Salimian, and Christine Lahti talking about why Howe started Mother’s Day as a protest against war, and the relevance of that today.  It was produced by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films and featured on Democracy Now! in a 2009 broadcast here.



And the original Mother's Day proclamation issued in 1870, by Julia Ward Howe.

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient. And at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, and the great and general interests of peace.

It's long overdue for the women of this great state and nation to take over its leadership.

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.