Sunday Funnies, Untrustworthy edition

Picking up what we scatter-shot

-- Big Jolly thinks I may be on to something with regard to my picks for the mayoral runoff.  It is of course difficult to analyze the conservative mind, but Jolly is reasoned and reasonable more often than any, and he's drifting toward Hall for All (the worst conservatives in the city).  His commenters point out the pastor's shortcomings, which are considerable and which few people remember from two years ago, mostly because the local media has done such a terrible job covering the city races.

For my part, I reserve the right to revise my predictions as circumstances warrant.  I'm expecting a fresh poll any day now, and there will certainly be a few after Labor Day weekend (you know, when the media tells us people begin paying attention).

-- As Hillary Clinton's polling slides further downhill and the FBI investigates her email, mumblings about Joe Biden entering the race get more serious.  This fellow thinks Bernie Sanders should now be considered the front-runner.  FWIW I believe Hillary Clinton will still be the Democratic nominee in 2016, and that she will defeat any Republican nominated, including and especially Donald Trump.  But my mother, nearly a nonagenarian and mostly a Democrat over the years, would vote for Bush.  When Hillary is losing women voters -- particularly women of her mother's generation -- she has big, big problems.

-- Why do some GOP presidential candidates now want to ban abortions without exceptions for rape, deformity, or when the mother's life is threatened?  An easier question to answer than you might think: conservatives are devolving into absolutists because they fear the wrath of their god.

“There is a significant change happening in the pro-life base, and it’s happening on a national level,” said Dan Becker, president of Georgia Right to Life. That shift is towards demanding, and being promised, an abortion ban without exceptions for rape, incest, or the life and health of the pregnant women. As many as half of the Republican candidates have fallen in line, a contrast from past election cycles.

[...]

The debate over whether to chip away at abortion rights or to openly advocate for the end of all abortion is an old one among anti-abortion activists. But despite the fact that personhood amendments have been repeatedly defeated in Colorado and Mississippi — and the fact that most Americans support such exceptions — the purist faction seems to be gaining ground.

“More and more pro-life people are starting to speak out against exceptions in legislation, and expecting more from the political process,” said Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood employee turned anti-abortion activist who frequently testifies before legislatures considering abortion restrictions.

She herself used to support exceptions for strategic reasons, until a change of heart in 2013. “I think there is this shift away from the hypocrisy that has been shown inside the pro-life movement, saying that some babies are worth our valuable time and effort to save and some or not,” she told msnbc, referring to abortions that would be allowable under an exception.

Much like the tea party’s tension with the Republican establishment, these anti-abortion activists are willing to go after their own nominal allies by accepting no less than the promise of a total ban.

“Nearly all GOP candidates since Reagan have claimed to be pro-life during elections, yet the killing continues,” Rebekah Maxwell, communications director for Personhood Iowa, told msnbc. “Grassroots activists are frustrated with the lack of action on this front.”

Some are also frustrated with the organizations that have long dominated their cause, especially the National Right to Life Committee, which has adopted a more pragmatic and incremental approach. Last year, Becker’s organization was ejected from its affiliation with the national group after it told Georgia’s congressional delegation to vote against a federal 20-week ban because it had exceptions for rape and incest. (This was the same bill over which a handful of Republican women rebelled for the opposite reason — because they believed its rape exception was too narrow.)

“Until the Supreme Court allows broad protections for unborn children, we work to protect as many children as possible by passing the strongest possible laws at the state and federal level,” the NRLC said in a statement then.

If you believe, as I do, that every awful conservative idea is cultivated in Texas, takes root here, and then the seedlings carried to other states and transplanted, then it's simple to see that with the trouncing of Wendy Davis last year, the pro-forced birth contingent has become more emboldened than ever.  The most restrictive women's reproductive laws in the nation came out of the Texas Lege earlier this year.  No compromise, no retreat, and absolutely nothing like surrender.

The split laid bare a broader dispute in the movement. “As far as I am concerned, Georgia Right to Life has now become the Westboro Baptist Church of the pro-life movement,” wrote prominent conservative activist Erick Erickson. “Instead of saving souls, they’d rather stone those who are trying to save souls.” But other anti-abortion groups have chosen to leave the fold and openly criticized the NRLC.

“What message does it send to our pro-life representatives when you whip them to support legislation that denies the right to life to innocent babies conceived in rape?” wondered one activist on Live Action News.

Kiessling, an activist who describes herself as having been “conceived in rape,” wrote that it was “clear that the emperor has no clothes, and they will need to be told so.”

Perry recounted how she persuaded him, then governor of Texas, to change his mind on exceptions. “We had a fairly lengthy and heartfelt conversation about how she was conceived in rape,” Perry said in 2011, during his last run for president. “Looking in her eyes, I couldn’t come up with an answer to defend exceptions for rape and incest.”

 It's still electoral death for Republicans, as Rick Perry again demonstrates, but these freaks just aren't going to go away.

Scattershooting things beside the upcoming city elections

After we note another pair of disasters at the Harris County Jail this week.

The Harris County Sheriff's Office announced that a jailer died after an altercation with an inmate early Thursday morning. And during an afternoon press conference Sheriff Ron Hickman called to take questions on how exactly this happened, he could answer virtually none of them.

Here's what Hickman did manage to say: At 4 a.m. Thursday, three Harris County jailers were transferring an inmate from recreation to his general population cell when the inmate became non-compliant and physically combative, leading one jailer to deploy his pepper spray.

But as for why detention officer Tronoski Jones collapsed moments later in the hallway and died, Hickman said he doesn't know—Hickman wouldn't speculate, at least not until they have more information from the medical examiner.

Hickman also said he doesn't know whether the inmate actually did anything to contribute to or cause Jones's death, or if the inmate even delivered any kind of blow at all—Jones did not have any outward injuries. As for why or how the struggle between the inmate and jailers escalated, Hickman said he did not know at this time. When asked if there was video of the incident, Hickman again said he didn't know.

Among other unanswered questions: Was it unusual for an inmate to be at recreation at 4 in the morning?  “I've been here for 90 days,” Hickman answered. “What do I know?”

Good on him.  At least he isn't blaming former sheriff Adrian Garcia, like I would.

At 9 p.m. Tuesday, spokesman Thomas Gilliland said two detention officers were yelling at each other when one of them, Carlton Bernard Freeney, pulled a knife. Gilliland says Freeney slashed the other jailer, whose identity has not been released, right above his left elbow.

Medical staff checked out the injured jailer, who didn't need to be hospitalized. Freeney, on the other hand, was detained and took a quick trip to, well, jail. He was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon (Gilliland said officers can carry knives up to 2 inches long). 

Other than to type "jailers get in fight with pocket knives", I got nothing.  Moving on...

-- Did you feel the summer heat was more than its usual oppressive last month?  Yeah, you weren't alone in feeling that way.  July was only the hottest month in the history of the world.  We seem to be back in our tropical mode here again in Houston, after the six-week drought that burned up a lot of the grass my lawn had grown for the first time in places.  And barely any hurricanes to speak of in the actual tropics.  Weird.

-- Hillary Clinton's email problems are weighing her down.  Congress critters are getting nervous.  It's just a Chinese water torture of some new revelation every single day.  She's now polling behind some of the Republican front-runners in three swing states.  Drip, drip, drip.  Are you ready for another fourteen-and-a-half months of watching her ship slowly list and then slip beneath the waves?  How could she blow such a sure thing?  All the Clinton supporters I know have stopped attacking Bernie Sanders and curled themselves up in a ball on the floor, moaning.

I can't take as much joy in this development as I would like, considering the fact that these people are going to be insufferable if she can't close the deal again.  Far too many of them are the type of Democrat who would vote for Bush before they would vote for Bernie Sanders.

-- Ashley Madison hacked.  Josh Duggar again.  That guy needs saltpeter (even if that is just an urban legend).  Then there's the hundreds of government workers, many with high-security clearances, who also got busted.

Hundreds of U.S. government employees — including some with sensitive jobs in the White House, Congress and law enforcement agencies — used Internet connections in their federal offices to access and pay membership fees to the cheating website Ashley Madison, The Associated Press has learned.

The AP traced many of the accounts exposed by hackers back to federal workers. They included at least two assistant U.S. attorneys; an information technology administrator in the Executive Office of the President; a division chief, an investigator and a trial attorney in the Justice Department; a government hacker at the Homeland Security Department and another DHS employee who indicated he worked on a U.S. counterterrorism response team.

Few actually paid for their services with their government email accounts. But AP traced their government Internet connections — logged by the website over five years — and reviewed their credit-card transactions to identify them. They included workers at more than two dozen Obama administration agencies, including the departments of State, Defense, Justice, Energy, Treasury, Transportation and Homeland Security. Others came from House or Senate computer networks.

Some of them used pre-paid credit cards to try to hide the transactions from their spouses, but still logged on at work.  No need to be worried about people being black-mailed, though.

"I was doing some things I shouldn't have been doing," a Justice Department investigator told the AP. Asked about the threat of blackmail, the investigator said if prompted he would reveal his actions to his family and employer to prevent it. "I've worked too hard all my life to be a victim of blackmail. That wouldn't happen," he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was deeply embarrassed and not authorized by the government to speak to reporters using his name.

Not quite hard enough, by all appearances.

-- I'm already tired of blogging about other people's inappropriate sexual proclivities (irrespective of the fact they got hacked, which is the real crime), but then there's Jared Fogle.  The news to which I am not linking, either.  Hold the gyro-sandwich-size jokes along with the mayo, please.  If they will hurry up and arrest Duggar, there's a bunk right next to Fogle available.  Maybe they can go to counseling together.

The only thing I'll say is that you have a lot to look forward to on Sunday in the Funnies, because the cartoonists are swarming like flies.