A shot in the ear

Yesterday, instead of embarking on a glorious and long-planned 9-day fall foliage tour, Mrs. Diddie got a shot in her balky knee, hoping to make it to knee replacement surgery next month, and I got a shot in the ear, hoping for some relief from the worst of the Meneiere's symptoms I have experienced all year.  I might get another one next month in the other ear if this one helps.  So far not so much, but I'm supposed to be patient.  (That's why they call us that, you know.  All the waiting.)

-- Turnout might be up but it's still too early to tell.

"I always vote, and it's much easier for me to come out to early voting ... than it is for me to stand in line on election day," said Michael Epstein, 77, who wanted to support HERO, City Councilwoman Ellen Cohen and mayoral candidate Chris Bell.

"He's a very honest, transparent fellow with a lot of experience, and I'd like to see him finally succeed," Epstein said of former Congressman Bell.

Good man, that Mr. Epstein.

-- Shitty man, that lieutenant governor of ours.

With the start of early voting Monday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick began lending his voice and his pocketbook to radio and TV ads urging Houston voters to reject the city's embattled equal rights ordinance.

The radio and TV ads totaling about $70,000 were paid for by Texans for Dan Patrick. 

The unfortunate thing is that the pro-Prop 1 folks don't have a somewhat famous endorser, despite what I am certain have been their efforts to secure one.  Beyonce' left them high and dry, and Noel Freeman, while tireless, committed, and -- at the moment -- Houston's most important activist in the fight for rights for everyone, doesn't quite have the profile of Hate Caucus jerks like Patrick and Lance Berkman and Bob McNair.  We need a late breaking hero for HERO, please.

-- "Is Hillary Clinton copying Bernie Sanders?  And why does it matter?"

“Bernie Sanders has rubbed off on Hillary Clinton. Not only has she stopped combing her hair, she’s railing against billionaires and Wall Street. But how tied up with big money is the Democrats’ darling? And what does this mean for the presidential campaign and party as a whole?”

-- Finally, the best of the news of the day. week, month, and maybe year.  Scalia says the death penalty is on the way out.

Referencing rulings to restrict capital punishment and changing sentiment within the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia said Tuesday he wouldn't be surprised if the nation's highest court invalidates the death penalty.

Scalia addressed capital punishment during a University of Minnesota Law School appearance in which he also made clear retirement isn't in his near-term plans. The death penalty came up as Scalia described his judicial view that the Constitution is an "enduring" document that shouldn't be open to broad interpretation — while sharing frustration that his colleagues too readily find flexibility in it.

Scalia said death penalty decisions from the court have made it "practically impossible to impose it but we have not formally held it to be unconstitutional." Earlier in his remarks, Scalia said "it wouldn't surprise me if it did" fall, a comment that drew scattered applause in the mostly full, 2,700-seat auditorium.

He said the high court has increasingly made it difficult impose the death penalty. He said rulings have added mitigating circumstances that must be considered or made it impermissible to automatically sentence people to death for certain crimes, such as killing a police officer.

The Supreme Court this month began its latest term and has already heard one death penalty challenge out of Kansas. While that case is limited in scope it was the first high court hearing on death penalty cases since a bitter clash over lethal injection procedures exposed deep divisions among the justices last term. The court intends to consider a case from Florida that questions whether judges, rather than juries, can impose a death sentence, especially when the jury is not unanimous in recommending death.

The conservatives in Texas would lose what's left of their minds, wouldn't they?

The Early Voting Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is ready to vote as it brings you this week's roundup.

It's Election Day in Canada, and with early voting in Harris County and Texas also beginning this morning, PDiddie at Brains and Eggs presents the "P Slate".  And Dos Centavos has the "Stace Slate".  And the Lewisville Texan Journal outlines what's on the ballot there.

Off the Kuff would like to clear up some myths about sexual assault.

Libby Shaw at Texas Kaos, and contributing to Daily Kos, argues Governor Greg Abbott cannot claim to be pro-life when he denies federally expanded Medicaid coverage for 766,000 Texans, in The Holy Ones and the Senseless Cruelty of Right Wing Dogma.

Socratic Gadfly offers up a Democratic debate-related trio. First, he presents his snarky, under-the-bus debate preview. Second, he provides his take on debate winners and losers. Third, he tackles a post-debate conspiracy theory by some Sanders supporters, that anti-Semitism is behind some opposition to Sanders.

jobsanger, a diehard Clinton backer, praises Bernie Sanders (and then damns him again).

McBlogger, another Clinton supporter, bankersplains why reinstating Glass-Steagall is a bad idea.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes Republicans choose the CEO, even if headquartered out of state, over the citizens they were elected to serve. Worker safety? Not at the expense of profits. The water you drink? The air you breathe? Even the wind. Not yours.

Nonsequiteuse, writing for Burnt Orange Report, points out that voting yes on Prop 1 in Houston isn'’t just the right thing to do, it'’s your patriotic duty.

Texas Leftist aggregates his candidate questionnaires for the Houston muni elections.

Neil at All People Have Value took a picture of the sun over Houston. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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

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

Juanita Jean reports on the #CocksNotGlocks protest at UT.

Grits for Breakfast has a suggestion for Dan Patrick if he really wants to reduce police officer deaths.

First Reading followed the Texas Tribune Festival, and asked "Really, how conservative was that legislative session just passed?"

Texas Clean Air Matters would like to change the conversation about the Clean Power Plan in Texas.

Half of all the donations to presidential candidates in the 2016 election have come from only 158 families, and eight of them are neighbors in River Oaks, the toniest enclave in Houston. CultureMap Houston has the reveal.

Free Press Houston pointed out the hypocrisy in the 'local control' argument forwarded by the Republican candidates for Houston mayor.

Carol Morgan helps dispel the ignorance and fear surrounding the 'S' word.

Texas Watch has a Netflix recommendation for you.

The Texas Election Law Blog wonders if we are ever going to get a court order regarding 2016 legislative and Congressional boundaries.

Amy Valentine navigates her way through Amazon's creative standards as she attempts to promote her book about her breast cancer experience for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Melissa Hudnall bemoans anatomically incorrect spider costumes and decorations.

The P Slate

-- For Mayor of Houston: Chris Bell.

He's peaking at the right time.  He wasn't always my choice, but he gradually demonstrated that he is not just the best but also the most progressive option.  Sylvester Turner, the acknowledged front-runner, is a good man and a good candidate.  Both men understand how to work the levers of power, and that cannot be said of any of the other candidates.  Let's hope we get these two good Democrats to choose from in the runoff.

-- For City Controller: Dwight Jefferson.

It's probably going to be Chris Brown and Bill Frazer in the runoff, but in the first round Jefferson's experience as a judge and with Metro, along with an even-handed bipartisan disposition and his stated goal of managing the city's books in ministerial fashion makes him my pick.

-- For At Large 1: Lane Lewis.

Far and away the top choice in this contest.  Tom McCasland is a good Democrat, a little too much on the conservative side for my taste, and because of Republican Mike Knox, probably won't make the runoff.  The other six five in this race will hold the top vote-getter well under the 50%-plus-1 threshold, forcing a December rematch.

-- For At Large 2: David Robinson.

It should be close, as it has been in the past, but the incumbent deserves re-election.

-- For At Large 3: Doug Peterson.

The Democratic and progressive community has coalesced behind Peterson.  Even the Green Party passed over the only candidate they had running in these elections for him.  That's the mark of a quality candidate.  Peterson is bound for a runoff with incumbent Kubosh, and the community needs to return to the polls a month later and make a change in this seat.

-- For At Large 4: Amanda Edwards.

Far and way the best, but also essentially your only progressive option.  All the rest of the candidates in this race oppose HERO.

-- For At Large 5: Philippe Nassif.

Tahir Charles is a good candidate, but the objective is to force the incumbent, Jack Christie, into a runoff, and that will only happen if the Democrats and progressives unite behind one of the two.  My pick is the youthful Nassif, whose future in politics looks bright if he can prevail in both November and December.

For the District races I never got a chance to profile, here are my recommendations.

District A: No recommendation.
District B: Jerry Davis (incumbent)
District C: Ellen Cohen (i)
District D: Dwight Boykins (i, unopposed)
District E: No recommendation.
District F: Richard Nguyen (i)
District G: No recommendation.
District H: Jason Cisneroz.
District I: Robert Gallegos (i)
District J: Mike Laster (i)
District K: Larry Green (i) and my councilman.

I have no recommendations to make in the contested Houston Community College trustee's races.  For Houston ISD District II: Rhonda Skillern-Jones (i).  District III: Ramiro Fonseca, ousting the awful incumbent who deceived his way into office at the last election.  District IV: Jolanda Jones over Dr. Ann McCoy.  Both are qualified picks, but JoJo has long been the best progressive holding city office, and she's earned my vote.  And in District VIII, please vote for the incumbent Juliet Stipeche over the tainted challenger, who's had her turn and blown it.

Statewide propositions:

Prop 1:  I'm a NO.  I don't need the tax cut and this state's budget is too austere already.
Prop 2: YES
Prop 3: NO
Prop 4: YES
Prop 5: YES
Prop 6: As Progress Texas has indicated, "it doesn't matter".
Prop 7: Not just NO but hell no.  Force the Lege to do its job and fix the loopholes that are causing our highways to fall apart.

Update: Socratic Gadfly, crankier even than me, says a 'no' vote is in order on all of the state props except for 2.  Read his take and see if you agree.

I'm also voting in favor of all four of he Harris County bond provisions.

I'm a Yes on HERO (City of Houston's Prop 1) of course, and as previously indicated, a Yes on changing the terms of Houston's council members (Prop 2).

Print this out and take it with you to the poll -- you can bring printed materials into the voting booth, but cellphone use, including using your camera to take a picture of your ballot, is a violation of the law.  Or e-mail it to your friends at the link below or share it on social media if you wish.

Some photos of Jill Stein's Texas Tour (so far)

From yesterday's East End Street Fest...

From Thursday in Dallas, the conference on addressing police brutality.

Dr. Stein with Ballet Folklorico Azteca

The real last mayoral debate before early voting begins

Unless there's another one I missed that happens today.  They're saying this is the last one, and from last night, televised on KHOU and coming from Ruds, there wasn't much in the way of sharp elbows thrown except for this...

In one of the more fiery moments of the night, Garcia showed a picture of King on his yacht, trying to throw a barb and imply that he's not a man of the people.

Ha.  The format's lightning rounds were designed to cram as much into one hour as possible, which made the Tweeting difficult to keep pace with.  And the station even cut off Sylvester Turner's closing remarks, for a commercial, and then to their network's Dateline show or something.

So there's still some conversations among the seven that will keep happening -- probably a few of their own teevee commercial duels -- but if anybody paying attention is still undecided, they need a checkup from the neck up, as Zig Ziglar used to say.  Here's the video, and here's the liveblogging.  More attention was paid to moderators and analysts than is typical for these.  I ignored most of that, recommend you do likewise.  This sort of talking-head blather reminds me of the people who said Hillary Clinton won the Democratic debate last Tuesday... even though she didn't.  (You might recall that I thought she did, and I'm not voting for her under any circumstance whatsoever.  So take all of this "who won" back-and-forth with the proper grains of salt.)

Update: Free Press Houston, which was a co-sponsor of the debate and whose publisher, Omar Afra, served as one of the debate moderators, takes on the local control flip-flopping going on among the conservative candidates.

If these “small government” Republicans want to appear so brash and brazen in their resistance to federally-imposed standards when it comes to issues such as taxation, reproductive rights, education, and guns, why are they so willing to acquiesce or kowtow or punt their beloved local control and defer to the Big Bad Feds when it comes to the minimum wage and people’s freedom to engage in the victimless “crime” of marijuana consumption?

Early voting begins tomorrow, and there are some new locations from previous years.  There are state propositions, aka constitutional amendments, and that link is your best analysis of them.  Charles has the Chron's take; they suggest 'no' on a couple and I'm inclined that way as well.

Update: Progress Texas has released their voters' guide on these; they recommend an either/or vote on 1, a 'no' on 3 and 7, a 'meh' on 6, and a 'yes on the rest.

County propositions (four bond approval items), and the Houston Community College and HISD board positions follow that on your ballot (others have details on those candidates, if you care.  There's a couple of interesting races there, but most are just too low on the radar for me to get to.)

For city of Houston residents, besides the election of mayor, controller, and sixteen city council members, there is Prop 1 (HERO) and Prop 2 (city council term revisions).  I've outlined options on all of these in many prior blog posts  -- I'll gather and link them for the "P Slate" later today -- except for the changing of CM's time in office.  I like the idea of two four-year terms rather than the current 3 two-year terms, because I have grown weary of watching council members turn right around and start campaigning for re-election barely after they have been sworn in.  There might be some lessening of the temptation for corruption here.  I'd like to think and hope so.

Full "P Slate" -- how I'll be casting my ballot, and I'm voting Monday morning -- this evening.

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.

No Super Bowl for you, Bob

Go stand in the corner next to Lance Bigot Berkman.

Houston Texans owner Bob McNair donated $10,000 this week to opponents of the city's embattled equal rights ordinance, entering the political fray over the law headed to voters in November.

McNair, a frequent GOP donor, mailed the  $10,000 check to opponents  earlier this week, according to Campaign for Houston spokesman Jared Woodfill. He said the donation "was very exciting for us."

You get some free tickets or something, Jared?  Team's kinda crappy this season, there's going to be lots of 'em given away before Xhristmas.

Critics of the law, largely Christian conservatives, object to the non-discrimination protections it extends to gay and transgender residents — the law also lists 13 other protected groups.  Supporters of the ordinance, including Mayor Annise Parker, have warned that repealing the law could damage the city's economy and could jeopardize high-profile events such as Houston's 2017 Super Bowl.

Woodfill pushed back on that notion Wednesday.

"The HERO supporters have tried to scare people into believing that we would lose the Super Bowl," Woodfill said. "Obviously, if there were any truth behind that, Bob McNair wouldn't' be donating to the folks that are opposed to the ordinance."

That would be me that Brylcreem Woodfill is calling out.  Doug Miller at KHOU reported on my petition to move the Super Bowl out of Houston when it began, and Greg Groogan at Fox was first on this McNair story and his coverage of the ordinance developments -- from the slimy anti-'s teevee ad to Mayor Parker's ill-advised Twitter feud with Puma Berkman -- has been exhaustive.

Despite the furious eruptions of hate spewing like so many lava flows in Hawaii, the HERO is leading in the polls and the tourists will still be coming to H-Town for the Super Bowl.

Richard Carlbom, campaign manager for supporters of the law, released a statement saying the "vast majority of Houston business interests taking a position on Proposition 1 support it."'

"They know discrimination is bad for business and bad for the city's image. Over time, companies, including sporting franchises, will stop wanting to come here."

Bob McNair has earned a little pro-tolerance economic boycott, and I hope the folks who spent all that time on a Beyonce' hashtag get one organized in time for the next home game.

Update: "Seeing that McNair has a long history of investing in losing causes -- his football team, the GOP -- this brightens prospects for HERO's passage."  -- found elsewhere online

Update II:  More on McNair's shitty conservative politics from Texas Monthly.

Would you be willing to hand over absurd amounts of money to a person whose politics you oppose? What about if you knew that a large amount of said cash would end up in the pockets of politicians? Okay, let’s put it this way: Would you be willing to spend massive amounts of money on season tickets, $12 beers, and parking fees at the playhouse of a team who uses his clout and bank account to influence politicians?

[...]

This year, McNair has scratched out $500,000 checks to no fewer than four Republican presidential campaigns: Cruz, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, and Jeb Bush. With one of those campaigns already DOA, another consigned to the kids’ table debates, and the other two polling anemically, you could say McNair gives millions to losers off of the field and on. Last year, he gave equal amounts to no fewer than seven GOP senate candidates in seven different states. So, all told, that’s $6 million to GOP candidates across the country since the beginning of last year, and add in another $450,000 to the Greg Abbott campaign. Hey, he’s sold a lot of JJ Watt jerseys the last year or so.

Between 2009 and October 2011, McNair donated $215,200 to Republican candidates, but not a penny to a single Democrat. And in the waning months of the 2012 election cycle, evidently alarmed at the prospect of a second term for Obama, McNair went full Battle Red, shoveling millions into the Romney campaign.

Back in the 2004 election cycle, McNair gave $500,000 to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, thus helping to portray Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, as a coward. [...]

Yeah, McNair supports the free-enterprise system right up to the point where he doesn’t. Like when he needs a stadium for his football team, for example. Nearly half of NRG Stadium’s $474 million price tag—$289 million—was publicly funded. But in McNair’s mind, at least, it’s primarily the out of towners footing the bill. He told ESPN:

That’s how we sold the project in Houston, it was sort of user pay. The hotel occupancy tax, well football draws a lot of people in. The rental car tax, people from out of town come in, they rent cars. It’s not property taxes that were supporting it.

And there’s another thing that McNair and Republicans share. If there’s one thing Bob McNair hates, it’s taxes (unless they’re yours, and they’re helping him build his stadium). McNair is a co-founder of Americans for Fair Taxation, which advocates for abolishing the IRS and replacing the federal income tax with a 23 percent sales tax on retail goods and services.

Enough of this "business".  Even Republican Texans fans should be able to figure out they're getting "the business" by a con man.  This greedy capitalist pig needs a boycott like yesterday.

The reviews are in *updates*

Clinton won with force, grace, and a little charm; Sanders was good in some spots (her email)  and not so much in others (guns), O'Malley had a good closing statement, Chafee -- a Vanderbilt heir -- questioned socialism, and Webb is by far the best Republican in the race.  By far.

Prediction: if Clinton can hold her own against the rapidly crumbling Benghazi witch-hunters later this month, Joe Biden will not enter the race.

More from the NYT.

Bloggers, commentators and the Twitterati quickly weighed in on the first Democratic debate, scoring the winners and losers. Hillary Rodham Clinton was the clear victor, according to the opinion shapers in the political world (even conservative commentators).

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont won some points for his integrity, while the others — Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland; Jim Webb, the former senator from Virginia and secretary of the Navy; and Lincoln Chafee, the former Rhode Island governor and senator — were mostly viewed as having missed their chance.

Some suggested that another loser was the man still deciding on whether to run, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., as Mrs. Clinton appeared to be formidable. Others disagreed.

I really don't have anything to add.  The Republican responses, from Donald Trump to Mike Huckabee, were completely unhinged, somewhat more so than even I expected.  Their minions on Twitter likewise.   (Facebook is useless to me in this endeavor.)

AP fact-checked the debaters and found them lacking.  Just before the "festivities", as Wolf Blitzer called them, ABC/WaPo's poll found her solid among blue partisans and him (Sanders, the only guy worth mentioning from here on to 2016) growing among independents.  I think all of those constituencies strengthened after last night.

If you did not watch it -- or even if you did, uninterrupted by your party's guests yelling and cheering, or your social media timelines spinning like a penny slot machine -- this is the best review.  Update: Oh, and No More Mister Nice Blog, pretty much an echo of my thinking.

I'll have more later, tied into Clinton's Texas swing this week (she's in San Antonio tomorrow with her presumptive running mate).

Updates:  In the meantime...

-- From Vox: The revealing way the candidates spoke about Syria.  This excerpt:

(Her debate response) is consistent with Clinton's long-held interventionist approach to the world, which is generally more aggressive than what most Democratic voters are comfortable with.

You'd think that her chief rival, Bernie Sanders, would pounce on this. Yet Sanders didn't say much about her policy. His most direct hit was more tepid: "She is talking about, as I understand it, a no-fly zone in Syria, which I think is a very dangerous situation. Could lead to real problems."

On foreign policy, Sanders actually isn't that far to Clinton's left, and he is more in line with Obama. "I support air strikes in Syria and what the president is trying to do," he said during the debate. Indeed, if you look at his more extensive debate comments Syria policy answer, he basically called for what Obama is already doing...

-- Six takeaways from CNN

-- Highlights and analysis above the live-blogging from the NYT and The Atlantic.