Sunday Funnies

Why Hillary Clinton won the debate (even though she didn't)

Sparks fly in last debate before early voting

Some real action among the debaters running for mayor last night.  The newspaper picked the former sheriff's awakening as the best rumble.

Mayoral hopeful Adrian Garcia, hoping to retain what polls have showed is his slipping grasp on a second spot in a likely December runoff, used Friday's televised debate to go on the offensive for the first time.

Just days before early voting begins, the generally amiable former sheriff of Harris County especially took aim at rival Bill King, who polls have showed is in a dead heat with for second place behind frontrunner Sylvester Turner. Garcia highlighted King's former role atop a politically connected tax collection firm and the 1980s bankruptcy of a bank he ran.

"You drove a savings and loan into bankruptcy while other CEOs across the country were able to save theirs, and then you were out there trying to take the homes of veterans," Garcia said to King, referring to tax collection efforts of Linebarger, Goggan, Blair & Sampson.

I always thought it was going to be Barzini err, Chris Bell that Garcia would lash out at.  What this suggests is that Garcia thinks his only rival for the right to square off against Turner in the runoff is King.  (He might be right about that, he might be wrong.  We'll see.)

The brief exchange represented the only new talking point or tactic from any of the top seven candidates, who have attended so many forums together that some have jokingly offered to answer questions in place of an absent rival.

I don't know about that.  Seems to my POV there were a handful of new angles.

Frontrunner and state Rep. Turner again stayed above the fray - despite being a longtime subcontractor for the Linebarger tax collection firm himself - as the candidates vying for the second runoff spot jostled, sending occasional barbs each other's way.

"All of the candidates jockeying for second were more aggressive than we would normally see, in part because of the exposure of the debate," said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones, naming Garcia, King, Bell and Costello.

See?  Even a blind partisan red hog found an acorn.

Garcia and Bell revisited their squabble over whether Garcia's tenure at the sheriff's office saw declining or rising crime rates, and whether the office came in over- or under-budget during his six years.

Bell's campaign compares spending at the sheriff's office to the county's initial adopted budget figures, while Garcia's uses the ones after budget office adjustments later in the year.

Costello defended ReBuild Houston, the city's fee-driven street and drainage repair program of which he was a key architect. Polls have shown street conditions are voters' loudest complaint.

"Only the city of Houston could have come up with a 24-step process for filling potholes," Bell said, repeating his frequent call for the city to better use technology. "If you can watch your pizza being made at Domino's in this day and age, you should be able to watch a pothole being filled in your neighborhood."

A better summary from KPRC (watch their 3-minute report from last's night's newscast):

"I've learned from Adrian Garcia that you can run up a budget up over $82 million during your six-year tenure as sheriff, but then come before a crowd such as this and still claim you saved $200 million," mayoral candidate Chris Bell said. 

"I'm a little shocked to hear Adrian's statistics, because actually, during his watch of the county, crime was up," candidate Bill King said. 

"If those who want to attack my record that I worked hard for and risked my life for, then let's look at their records," Garcia said."

Bell had a very good night.  Costello, not so much.  Hard to tell about Garcia or King, but King's rise probably isn't going to be slowed by last night's shots.

Those four and Turner, as the latest poll released just before last night's match showed, is where the action is going to be as we start voting next week.  Nobody mentioned Turner's questionable business affairs, a development that has broken late in the cycle, and it was mostly consultants on the Twitter feed last night spinning it for their respective clients.

So it's still anybody's game for second place.  Fun (as one lobbyist likes to say).

Ahead of televised debate tonight, KPRC poll shows 4-way tie for second in mayor's race

First seen at Mike McGuff (whose links are shit, by the way), the KPRC/Survey Houston mayoral poll released today, in advance of their telecast of the debate tonight reveals...

• Undecided: 22%
• Sylvester Turner: 20%
• Bill King: 14%
• Adrian Garcia: 13%
• Chris Bell: 12%
• Steve Costello: 11%
• Ben Hall: 4%
• Martin McVey: 1%
• Other: 3%

This I can buy.  With a margin of error of 4.5%, and based on the reputation of an outfit like SUSA, we have the most believable poll on the contest so far.  It's a wide-open race for the fellow who is to join Turner in a December runoff.  Except for Ben Hall, who is sinking like a stone.  The conservative whites are breaking away from him in the late game.

It also has HERO leading by nine, and almost at 50%, but I doubt that one in five likely voters is actually undecided about it.

• 45 percent of those polled said they will vote in favor of Prop 1.
• 36 percent plan to vote no.
• 20 percent are not certain.

Mark Jones, who has lost all credibility and is blissfully unaware of it.

"You really do have to consider that a majority, or perhaps three quarters of people who say they're undecided or say they have no response, will end up if they turn out, will end up voting no," Mark Jones, political science chair at Rice University, said.

No, you don't. That's a bald-assed guess on your part, favoring your own position.  Jones thinks people who oppose the ordinance would not reveal that to the pollster, another premise without any facts to back it up.  Why does anyone ask this man anything any more?  Is his conservative bias unclear to the media that has him on speed dial?  Is it the "Rice University" part?

He is an epic failure, and so are those who consider him a source of objective analysis.

Anyway, the King and Garcia and Bell and Costello campaigns can now rev their engines for the start of the race.  And a shout-out directly to the HERO haters: it's slipping away from you.  Fold your tent and slither back down into the sewer from whence you came.

Friday news and views (or: scattershooting a target-rich environment)

No canned hunts but lots of clay pigeons.

-- Sylvester Turner finally takes a body blow.  Whether it's a real damaging shot or too late in the fight for to affect the judge's scorecard, we'll find out shortly.  Early voting begins Monday; the only thing the polling has consistently shown is that there are still a lot of undecided voters.

-- Chucky no likey my petition to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to move the Super Bowl out of Houston if the city's voters reject HERO.  Meh.  I'll start another one if HERO loses, referencing the Final Four.  (That better?)  Juan at BAH says the ugly teevee commercial the haters are rolling is both right and wrong.  He's correct.  And John Royal spears the Texans owner with his helmet, but is not penalized for doing so.  Just a good solid hit, a fair football play as they say.  It's been hard work on Bob McNair's part to be a more foul POS than Bud Adams or John McMullen, but "mission accomplished", as one of his financial benefactors once flew a banner that said.

-- Hillary Clinton hearts Julian Castro.  As if this was a secret or something.

-- No court hearing today for Ken Paxton, but a portion of the turgid saga concerning his legal fate will be decided by the judge in writing later.  Update:

A district judge ruled Friday to release information related to the selection of Collin County grand juries to Attorney General Ken Paxton’s defense team.

The ruling by District Judge George Gallagher came over objections by special prosecutors in the case, who filed a motion to quash the subpoenas, saying the request was improper and not shown to be relevant.

Court filings indicate the defense seeks evidence to challenge the formation of the grand jury that indicted Paxton over the summer on two counts of first-degree securities fraud and one count of third-degree failure to register as a securities agent.

Special prosecutors say the defense won’t find any improprieties in the grand jury selections.

-- Paraphrasing Upton Sinclair: how can we help people understand something when their livelihood, especially in Houston and in Texas, depends on their refusal to understand?  Is this effort just trying to teach pigs to sing?  Grist asks an expert who has had some success with it.

-- When a Texas state representative accuses Bernie Sanders -- a Jew -- of being a Nazi, then you know that the GOP has really gone from the gutter to the sewer and have taken up residence in the septic tank.  It's not this sort of thing but also the actions of Donald Trump's supporters that increasingly denigrate the conservative POV.

-- Then again, the Democrats have their own ridiculous hypocrisy to overcome.  Did you read the Drone Papers yet?  Set aside a little time to absorb the impact (no pun intended).

-- Posted without comment, mostly because I'm without words to respond with: "The World’s Largest Detention Center Is For Black Jews Seeking Asylum In Israel".

-- Even fake football is corrupt, which must be why Phyllis Schlafly has put fantasy football on her list of threats to America, and why the two leading purveyors of the weekly games whose ads blitz every television program have been ruled out of bounds by the Nevada Gaming and Control Board.

-- See you at the East End Street Fest, where a presidential candidate will be making an appearance and my favorite charity, Barrio Dogs, will also represent.

#RaiseYourVoice - No More Wars

Obama will leave troops in Afghanistan into the last year of presidency.

Sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s — it's difficult to pinpoint an exact moment — the nation we had known as Afghanistan collapsed into civil war and chaos. And since September 2001, the United States has viewed that chaos as too dangerous to ignore.

That is, in its most fundamental terms, why the US has been at war in Afghanistan for now 14 years. And it's why President Obama, after coming into office in 2009 pledging to end the war, will announce today that he is not withdrawing after all. The next president will come into office overseeing the longest war in US history.

But what he or she will inherit isn't really a war in the traditional sense, but rather a mission — small but Sisyphean — that everyone knows is doomed: to temporarily stave off Afghanistan's inevitable collapse, a few months at a time. The war is already lost, and has been for years.

He and Vladimir Putin -- that is to say, the United States and Russia -- are already in a proxy war in Syria, technically against IS, but bombing each other's 'enemies of their friends'.  The CIA is again exposed as bloody muckraker.  From October 10, the AP account...

CIA-backed rebels in Syria, who had begun to put serious pressure on President Bashar Assad's forces, are now under Russian bombardment with little prospect of rescue by their American patrons, U.S. officials say.

Over the past week, Russia has directed parts of its air campaign against U.S.-funded groups and other moderate opposition in a concerted effort to weaken them, the officials say. The Obama administration has few options to defend those it had secretly armed and trained.

The Russians "know their targets, and they have a sophisticated capacity to understand the battlefield situation," said Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee and was careful not to confirm a classified program. "They are bombing in locations that are not connected to the Islamic State."

Then there's Iraq (the part of it comparatively stable), uncontrolled western Iraq, Yemen and the Saudi peninsula, and Africa.  Obama has sent three hundred military advisers into Cameroon on a Boko Haram excursion.

The Drone Papers remind us that the tactic is not simply utilizing a new technology -- as the US did to end WWII, as the history books tell us -- but implementing a policy of extrajudicial assassinations, and as Hillary Clinton and the rest of the neoliberals in the Democratic Party continue to reveal, the strategy is endless war.  War without end, amen.

(A)ny doubts about whether endless war – literally – is official American doctrine should be permanently erased by this week’s comments from two leading Democrats, both former top national security officials in the Obama administration, one of whom is likely to be the next American president.

Leon Panetta, the long-time Democratic Party operative who served as Obama’s defense secretary and CIA director, said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama – who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed) – for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”

Then we have Hillary Clinton, whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president. At an event in Ottawa (last week), she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta  -- and most establishment Republicans -- Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.

She has stated directly in recent weeks that when she is president, the United States will preemptively strike Iran.   Her language since the Iranian peace accord negotiated by her successor at State, John Kerry, has hardly been any less harsh.

Not even Bernie Sanders, with his "feed at the trough with the rest of the pork" mentality, bringing the bacon home to Vermont, is representative of enough hope for change in stopping any of these wars.  It's good for business, after all.

At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.

It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the “homeland security” and weapons industry -- which the US media deceptively calls the “defense sector”.

Just (last week), Bloomberg reported: “Led by Lockheed Martin Group, the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.” Particularly exciting is that “investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq”; moreover, “the U.S. also is the biggest foreign military supplier to Israel, which waged a 50-day offensive against the Hamas Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip.” ISIS is using U.S.-made ammunition and weapons, which means U.S. weapons companies get to supply all sides of The New Endless War; can you blame investors for being so giddy?

Where will it end?

Only when we the people say so.  Only when we say "STOP" to military advisers and CIA-financed destabilization efforts, which lead to special forces operations and then boots on the ground, which lead to flag-draped coffins and hearses with 'heroes' traveling down streets lined with 'Murricans holding flags, and military parades, and yellow ribbons and finally granite memorials.  Not to mention the mangled limbs and minds of the veterans of these wars who are left to suffer the after-effects, or war crimes like torture, or the loss of one's freedoms at home in the form of warrantless wiretapping and municipal police armed like the US military itself.

You'll also have to do without the war stories told by old warhorses, and the glamorous movies made about war, like 'Saving Private Ryan' and 'American Sniper' and the like.

It will not be a simple task.

War – in all its ever-changing permutations – thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes. And that’s all independent of the vicarious sense of joy, purpose and fulfillment which the sociopathic Washington class derives from waging risk-free wars, as Adam Smith so perfectly described in Wealth of Nations 235 years ago:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

We must raise our voices:  No.  More. Wars.  Enough already.  The bombing must stop, the war machine spending must stop, and the soldiers must come home.  We have to heal the warriors and ourselves so that the world can begin healing.

We must send this message loudly and clearly, with our voices and our keyboards and our actions, so loudly and clearly that they hear us and heed us.  That requires voting, and not for a member of the Demoblicans or Republicrats who support endless war.  It requires sacrificing a lot of your free time, when you'd rather be watching television or playing a game on your phone or whatever pastime you have used to inure yourself to the shooting and killing and maiming and dying.

If we cannot win this battle then we will lose all the rest.  It may be too late already.

Raise Your Voice.