Je suis Charlie

I've been them from the very beginning of this blog.  And I've had my share of threats, though almost none of them have been taken seriously.  Besides mockingly humorous and sometimes offensive words, for almost the full ten years that Brains and Eggs has existed, I've posted the best of mostly American cartoonists poking their special brand of fun at the wealthy, the powerful, and the well-connected.

Mockery of which includes the invisible man who lives in the clouds, raped a virgin to give you his son as your savior -- he died for your sins, you know -- and still judges your lifetime for signs of sinful behavior that would invalidate your admission into his nirvana.

Religion is at the heart of these assassinations, of course.  But let's not limit the blame to just one set of fanatics.  Religion is also to blame when a president says God speaks to him and tells him to start a war in a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks in his own.  When you have someone that stupid and evil in charge, you just can't blame it all on the devil.  Oh, maybe you can blame Satan for a vice-president who authorizes torture of the people who live in the country that was invaded on false pretenses, and later says confidently he would do it all again.  You might even extend some blame to the president who followed that one for not prosecuting them both for torture.  Mostly because torture is certainly going to be authorized by a future president, once that still-to-be-electorally-determined one sees you can get away with it.

But I digress.  This is about people who are so insane about their religion that their Bible tells them that if somebody makes fun of their god, that's a death sentence.  No decent, respectable religion or holy book would say that, but that's what they hear.  In their heads.

So that's not a world the rest of us really want to live in, but the weapons we use to fight for and maintain our freedom aren't going to be made and purchased from Lockheed Martin.  (Thank goodness.)  Our guns and bombs are pens and keyboards.

And we're going to keep on firing them.

"Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon: laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution -- these can lift at a colossal humbug, push it a little, weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand."

-- Mark Twain

Thanks to the Lewisville Texan Journal for one of the toons above, and for being less dramatic and more succinct than me.

Best GOP wedge issue ever, and they can't do a thing with it

Chris Ladd, GOPLifer.

Republicans are being handed the kind of wedge issue that comes along once in a generation and they are utterly oblivious to the gift. The last great Democratic Party constituency, African-Americans, is pitted against the party’s last great organizational bulwark, public employee unions. The waves of protests over police brutality that ignited nationwide over the killing of Michael Brown have focused on race. Protestors so far have failed to appreciate why police, like so many other public employees, are consistently shielded from accountability to the people they serve.

No one seems to have thought to combine the protests over an unaccountable police force with the protests by some of the same people in some of the very same neighborhoods, over the failure to provide a decent public education to poor and minority communities. Both problems have the same root cause – unions that shield their members from accountability.

This nails it, but the lack of accountability is powerfully enabled by the grand jury system.  This does not happen to the degree that it actually does happen without well-connected, wealthy, white conservative grand jurors.  It also doesn't explain why police officers are predominantly Republican voters, and police unions now predominantly endorse Republican candidates in Texas and elsewhere, but let's not quibble.  Especially with this.

All of the major officials involved in the Ferguson case, from the Governor down to the local DA are Democrats. The officials investigating the Tamir Rice case in Cleveland (keep an eye on that one) are Democrats. Only in the Staten Island case are there any Republicans in decision-making roles.

Debates over urban access to effective public safety or effective public education are exclusively intraparty fights among Democrats. Despite the black community’s importance as a Democratic voting bloc, African-Americans always lose that fight with the unions. Every. Single. Time.

When the Democratic Party is faced with a conflict between a public employee union and a black urban population desperate to gain access to the public services that union is supposed to deliver, the union wins. This is the civil rights logjam that has blocked black communities from access to the prosperity that they deserve. Republicans do not own this problem and they should not help perpetuate it.

Unions provide workers with higher incomes and job security. They impose costs not only in wages, but in inertia, making it difficult for a unionized industry to adapt to changing conditions and serve its customers. A union collectivizes power, but along the way it also collectivizes accountability, creating an inherent incentive toward mediocrity and shielding the worst actors from the consequences of their actions. It is very hard to fire a worker who is protected by a union.

In four paragraphs, you've got the trouble with LEO accountability, the trouble with unions (notwithstanding the many valuable things accomplished for middle-class Americans), and the trouble with the Democratic Party (too indistinguishable from the Republicans in too many ways) gutted, filleted, and laid bare.  And it gets worse for Democrats from here.

In an old-fashioned labor union for coalminers or steel workers, the costs of a union are born by wealthy capital owners. The benefits flow to lower income workers who otherwise have little access to power and limited opportunities to support their families. That’s an outdated vision of a union’s mission which died a long time ago.

Now turn those conditions around. What happens when the beneficiaries of the union are college educated, white professionals and the people bearing the cost of unionization are politically powerless and economically exploited? Try to fire an incompetent or crooked police officer and watch what happens.

An institution that collectivizes the benefits and accountability of factory workers imposes some moderate, but generally tolerable costs. An institution that collectivizes the pay and accountability of police officers gets people killed.

African-Americans and other low-income, under-represented constituencies find themselves on the losing end of a carefully structured racket. More-affluent white citizens can flee to suburbs that have been structured to limit the power of public employee unions. Smaller municipalities and school districts combined with well-connected, well-educated voting population help level the playing field for white suburbanites with money. Meanwhile back in the city center, those most in need of public services to enable upward mobility find themselves at the mercy of institutions with far more political muscle than they can match.

And now, the reveal (well, half of it anyway).

This is an historic opening for Republicans to profit by doing the right thing. We could defend the basic civil rights of an oppressed community. Along the way we could we undermine a policy we generally loathe, mandatory unionization of public employees. In the process we would further our goal to broaden the opportunity for all to seize opportunities in a market economy. 

B-B-But...

We haven’t been able to recognize, much less exploit this opportunity due to some very serious problems we are unlikely to address.

That's right; I almost forgot.  You're Republicans.

Louisiana Republican Congressman Steve Scalise made news over the holidays when his deep, old ties to white supremacist organizations surfaced. This is important because it is the rest of the story.

We are all supposed to pretend that the Republicans won the South because Southerners coincidentally discovered some fresh interest in low taxes and “liberty” at the same time that the Federal government started enforcing Civil Rights legislation. It’s a lie and everyone knows it’s a lie, but it has taken on a Santa Claus quality as a sort of public myth necessary to maintain the basic legitimacy of our political order.

This is so perfectly demonstrated in the Twitter back-and-forth I had with Greg Aydt over the past weekend, and it is a lie he has worked hard, long hours to perpetuate.  It even came up in a conversation Bill O'Reilly had with David Duke.  But let's not quibble with that, either.

Republicans now control Congress, something that eluded us across most of the 20^th century. Almost half of that majority comes from Dixie. Sixty percent of it comes from places that failed to outlaw slavery prior to Lincoln. None of it comes from a major urban area. The party isn’t going to do anything substantive about Steve Scalise because it lacks the leverage to free itself from white supremacist ideology. And that brings us back to our problem.

There are too few Republicans who possess even the most distant understanding of the concerns of the black community to even recognize the shape of this opportunity. And if they did, it would be monumentally difficult to muster a core political bloc inside the GOP that cared. For Republicans, white supremacy will not pay the bills forever. Somehow the party will have to find a broader base on which to build a political appeal. Despite the sugar-high of the 2014 election, the clock is ticking and the outlook is miserable.

An opportunity exists and there are a few Republicans in the North with some potential to tackle it. New Gov. Bruce Rauner in Illinois could be particularly well-positioned to win on this issue if he has the insight to even recognize it. That remains to be seen. Most Republicans seem content to respond to this historic political opening by keeping their backs turned.

Like Ladd, like Grits, I see an opportunity squandered by the GOP.

Indeed, pandering by Democrats to police unions is the main reason significant criminal-justice reform didn't begin in Texas until Republicans took over the Legislature in 2003 for the first time since Reconstruction. While Dems were in charge, police unions had virtual veto power on criminal justice bills, whereas Republicans feel little need to pander to them.

Grits doubts Republican pols will seize the opportunity Ladd identifies, in part because the party contains too many elderly ex-Dixiecrats who flipped sides in the Reagan era and have little interest in civil rights or appealing to black constituents. But it's absolutely correct that the GOP has been presented with a "once in a generation" opportunity if its leaders possess the boldness and foresight to seize upon it.  

They just can't hide the hoods, white sheets, and burning crosses fast enough to capitalize on it.  There's going to have to be a massive die-off among the Republican base before they can manage to moderate themselves enough to attract more than one Mia Love.

Reaching out to African Americans -- while undercutting the stranglehold the Democratic Party has on municipal unions -- is really Scalise they could do.  But they won't, because they can't.  It's just too much cognitive dissonance for their lizard brains to process.

This week in police abuse news, Texas style

*As this post was composed, two more NYPD officers have been shot, and are expected to survive. Their two assailants escaped on foot.

It's hard out there for a cop, as we all know.  Life on the thin blue line and all that.  Some make it hard on themselves, however.  Our local version of Bad Cops on Parade has us in Victoria, near Corpus Christi, as the 23 year-old policeman who Tasered a 76 year-old man -- twice -- for having an expired inspection sticker has been terminated.  From his job, I mean.

Victoria Police Chief Jeff Craig placed Robinson on administrative leave and ordered two separate investigations: a criminal investigation conducted by the Texas Rangers and an internal administrative investigation conducted by the Victoria Police Department's Internal Affairs Division.

This follows on the heels of three other Victoria cops who punched and kicked a woman, resulting in black eyes and broken ribs, then arrested her for "vulgar language".

Mary Frances Jones told the Victoria Advocate that the three police officers woke her up early in the morning on Dec. 22, 2013 over reports that a truck that she had purchased the day before had been seen driving in a local creek.

Jones said that she had been unaware at the time that her sons borrowed the truck while she was sleeping. After officers claimed that she was lying about owning the truck, Jones said she tried to go back inside her home, and that’s when they forced her to the ground.

She's suing the VPD for assault and false arrest.

Medical records will support Jones had two black eyes for two months and was put on a ventilator after she was diagnosed with pneumonia due to her broken ribs. She's visited the hospital about six times since her arrest, Jones said.

The lawsuit claims the officers used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment and its "reasonableness" standard and falsely arrested and imprisoned Jones.

Gale, of San Antonio, said he took on the case because he thought it had merit.

"I think the police, while they're trained in the concepts of law enforcement, they are not trained in regards to the application of them," he said. "When you express your opinion in any form or fashion with any kind of words and walk away from them, that's a sign of disrespect. ... It's completely and utterly constitutional to walk away from somebody. They're just going to make you pay the price. That's concerning. This is not a police state."

What we are fast approaching in the United States today is not just a loss of respect for police but outright disrespect.  And they have brought it upon themselves.

Read this account from Remington Alessi of Houston, as he led the HPD on a wild goose chase around the Galleria parking lot in a protest last month against police abuse.  There are thousands of recent examples of law enforcement overreaction much worse than this of course, and not just in Ferguson or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or even Victoria, Texas.  There will be more incidents today, and tomorrow, and the next.

And it is the responsibility of those whose job is "to serve and protect" to discontinue rapidly escalating interactions with the public into beatings, Taserings, and shootings.  Or else these situations are just going to keep occurring with more frequency.

The police are NOT supposed to make things worse when they arrive on the scene.  Thankfully a new generation of Houston activists has made improving these instances for better outcomes their cause.  Part of the reform effort must include the grand jury system, as far too many cases of excessive use of deadly force by LEO are no-billed.

These are all good steps in the right direction, but now -- as in right now -- it's on the cops to figure out their part in lessening public tensions.  So far, they are failing at that effort also.

The insurrectionists in the House

The various campaigns to unseat John Boehner as House Speaker are -- as most all Republican threats, but notably internal ones -- blustery and meaningless.

"Boehner will be reelected overwhelmingly. There is no precedent in the history of the House of a Speaker's party exceeding expectations in the election and then dumping its Speaker," (GOP consultant John) Feehery told CBS News. "All of these guys who are complaining about Boehner have nothing to lose because the Speaker has made clear there will be no retribution. So he is giving them a free shot."

You know that old saw 'if you strike the king you must kill the king'?  Well, Louie Gohmert and his ilk can't strike a match.  This time the frothing goons of the Tea Party won't get any red meat.  Apparently they won't even get any crumbs.

You've been had again, 'Baggers.

Update:

Reps. Jim Bridenstine, R-Oklahoma, Paul Gosar, R-Arizona, Steve King, R-Iowa, Dave Brat, R-Virginia, Marlin Stuztman, R-Ohio, Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, and Walter Jones, R-North Carolina, round out the nine members who have publicly said they plan to vote against Boehner. Bridenstine is calling the group the "gang of nine." Some of these members like Yoho and Massie voted against Boehner for the speaker's job in 2013. Brat is the newest voice in this bunch -- he upset then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a special election late last year and appears eager to hang on to his his rabble-rouser reputation.

Yoho and Bridenstine both voted for Cantor for speaker in 2013. Massie was the sole vote for Justin Amash, R-Michigan; Gohmert voted for then-Florida Congressman Allen West; Jones voted for former comptroller general and fiscal responsibility advocate David Walker. Stutzman is particularly aggrieved about the misunderstanding over his switched shutdown vote, and King is upset over immigration.

"Hold on to your asparagus and keep an eye out for terror babies".

Update (1/7): After coasting to re-election, the Orange Man takes his revenge.  Feehery was wrong about something after all.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is still waiting for someone to invent the hoverboard as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff published special election candidate interviews with Diego Bernal, Trey Martinez-Fischer, and Ty McDonald.

Libby Shaw, writing for Texas Kaos and Daily Kos learned important lessons from her volunteer work with Battleground Texas: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson says there may still be hope for Battleground Texas. But the strategy will have to change. It's all about the base.

Police departments all over the country have deep roots in slavery and racism, as PDiddie at Brains and Eggs reminded.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wonders why the Port of Brownsville is so dismissive of the Sierra Club opinion on liquefied natural gas terminals. Don't they care about the health of the people and the environment?

Neil at All People Have Value said policymakers on both sides of the aisle knew years ago that automation and changing facts threatened blue collar jobs. Yet instead of helping everyday people, public policy was geared towards the rich. Neil says the work of freedom is up to each of us. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

Texpatriate asks, "What's next for Texas Democrats?" and answers: "give up".

Dos Centavos wants to know why there aren't a couple more issues Wendy Davis should take back.

McBlogger also piles on Davis for backtracking on open carry.

Bluedaze notes two more Texas earthquakes in Irving and in Snyder.

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

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

The Anti-Media reported on HPD's fruitless and prohibitively expensive efforts to stifle a single anti-police abuse activist.

Socratic Gadfly picked a Person of the Year, and guesses that you won't know his name.

The WAWG Blog explains how income inequality is much worse than we think.

Juanita Jean challenged us to come up with a title for Ted Cruz's book.

LGBTQ Insider has a caveat about the FDA's change in policy towards gay men donating blood.

Unfair Park previews the Fifth Circuit court hearing on the same sex marriage appeal.

Texans Together reviews the San Jacinto River Coalition's accomplishments for 2014.

Nancy Sims tells the story of her transitioning daughter and her own unconditional love for her.

The Bloggess pens an open letter to the Girl Scouts.

Jonathan Guajardo asks new Bexar County DA Nico LaHood for a serious inquiry into the case of Cameron Redus, a UIW student who was fatally shot by a UIW police officer outside his apartment off campus.

Scott Braddock calls 2014 the year of Tom DeLay's permanent Republican majority.

Fascist Dyke Motors is putting her best foot forward in the New Year.

Finally, Texas Politics has the story of the worst Cialis commercial ever the group hug in the Dallas Cowboys' owner's box.

Gohmert for Speaker

And so it begins. Via Alan Colmes, PJ Media breaks the (Fox) news.

The Texas congressman explained that Boehner and the GOP leadership deceived the American people when they went to Obama and Pelosi to get the votes for the Cromnibus, they told the people they would fight tooth and nail against amnesty…it follows a number of years of broken promises. Gohmert also referenced the recent poll that came out showing that 60% of Republican voters and Republican leaning voters want someone other than Boehner on the job.

This is going to be so much fun.

Gohmert said that after “years of broken promises, it’s time for a change.”

And here we have all been led to believe that change was a bad thing.  Or was that hope?

Sunday Funnies, GOP's Resolve edition

Scattershooting -- resolutions

-- Mario Cuomo's passing is being properly eulogized by many; I can still see his keynote address at the DNC in 1984 as his defining, thrust-onto-the-national-stage moment, but what I seem to recall the clearest is his declining to run for president in 1992.  And what I remember is being disappointed.  I was just coming out of my own Republican darkness after more than ten years of supporting Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, the shock and disgust of Iran-contra, the noticeable feeble-mindedness of the old actor, followed subsequently by the disastrous Mondale '84 and Dukakis '88 campaigns.  (For the record, and out of sheer revulsion for the ineptitude for the Democratic nominees, I was still a Reagan Democrat at this time.  I voted both for RWR twice and GHWB the first time.  I take full responsibility for my errors, and have since resolved never to make those mistakes again.)

I am certain now that the seed of dissatisfaction with the two political parties I hold today was germinated in that environment.  And when Cuomo bailed in December of '91 -- see, we used to wait a year after the midterms before launching ourselves into the next round of presidential mock drafts -- the Democrats panicked.  Bush the Elder was winning a war with Iraq (so we all thought), his approval ratings were 89%, and no one of seeming consequence really wanted to be the lamb at that altar.  This was before anyone outside of Arkansas knew much of anything about a fellow named Clinton beyond an ignominous DNC keynote four years earlier.  The frontrunners in '92 post-Cuomo were Tom Harkin, Paul Tsongas, and Jerry Brown, all of whom were well to the left of the eventual nominee.  Thus goes history.  National Democrats simply couldn't unite behind a progressive, and a centrist moderate won the prize.  See any parallels?

Another declination during Clinton's term led to the Notorious RBG landing on the SCOTUS.  So in my book, Mario Cuomo is much more famous for what he did not do than for what he did.

-- Via Charles, Battleground Texas and by natural extension Wendy Davis get the Texas Monthly treatment from the Texas Observer.  Spleens are still full of bile, still being vented.  This is likely to go on for some time.  I'm thankful I don't have to participate in the piranhas gnashing themselves to feel better about the 2014 debacle.

-- Syrian and Iraqi refugees are crowding on to leaking rustbuckets headed for Italy -- arrangements made by human traffickers -- to escape the Islamist civil wars being waged in those countries.  Germany's Angela Merkel recently pleaded with her citizens to disavow the growing hatred of fleeing Muslim immigrants.  See any comparisons?

-- In ten years, Cuba might end up looking much like Puerto Rico today.  Is that a good thing?  One excerpt:

The advent of Obam-apertura, the great “opening” that the U.S. neoliberal narrative holds as a form of liberation for a suffering people, is also something its internal corporate banking cabal sees as a way to recapture a lost market.  [...] the opening creates the possibility of a sudden windfall of previously unexploited consumers and a workforce accustomed to even lower wages that are foisted on places like Mexico, India, and Vietnam. For an American economy that has been largely stagnant—aside from a recent spurt sparked by falling gas prices and temporary holiday season hires—the opening up of Cuba has the look of a last-ditch opportunity to stave off looming worldwide economic disaster.

Happy 2015

TPA's Texans of the Year: Frack Free Denton activists

From our presser...

Texas Progressive Alliance taps

Denton's "fracktivists" Texans of the Year

In one of the organization's more closely contested votes, the Texas Progressive Alliance -- the state's consortium of liberal blogs and bloggers -- named Frack Free Denton and its diverse group of activists 2014's Texans of the Year.

"The biggest win for progressives in the Lone Star State on Election Night happened in Denton, Texas," said Charles Kuffner, president of the Alliance.  "The people showed the powerful who is still in charge.  No matter that the Texas Railroad Commission or the state's Legislature may try to undo the will of Denton's Republican, Democratic, and independent voters; for one day in November of 2014, those North Texans came together and said, 'No more. No more polluting our air and water and poisoning our children for profit without accountability'.  The people together spoke, and they were heard."

There were also three Honorable Mentions for the coveted award.  Finishing a close second: the medical staff of Dallas Presbyterian Hospital, who were at the front lines of the nation's Ebola crisis, notably Dr. Kent Brantley and nurses Nina Pham and Amber Vinson, who all contracted the virus and lived to tell about it.  In addition, two other large groups of Texans on either side of the political spectrum were selected: the 33% of Texans who turned out to vote in last month's midterm elections, predominantly Caucasian male Republican voters; and the Democratic volunteer army of deputy voter registrars, blockwalkers, and those who spent long hours on their phones calling prospective voters to urge them to cast their ballots.

"To the victors go the spoils, someone famous once said," noted Kuffner, in reference to the GOP base vote.  "But no one worked any harder than the folks in their precincts, neighborhoods, counties, and across the state to turn back the tide, at least a bit," he added.

The TPA's member bloggers salute all the Texans who were nominated this year, which included several candidates, some elected officials, and other activist groups.

In terms of recognizing the standout newsmakers, what you have seen from other blogs recently does reflect the discussions we had this year, and that they were a little more, shall we say, spirited than usual.  Typically this is a pretty easy choice to come to consensus on; 2014 was, as we all know, exceptional.  And not in the cheeriest of definitions.  But the city of Denton's residents were the noteworthy positive exception.

Christi Craddick in particular stands in defiance, as do the Big Gasholes, and the Lege will likely make every effort to roll back the drilling embargo early next year (thanks, Phil King and ALEC!), so the war isn't over.  But a significant battle was won, with far-reaching ramifications inside and outside Texas.

Hats off to the fractivists.