The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance hates seeing Christmas decorations for sale in stores already as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff gives his advice for how to re-approach the Houston equal rights ordinance.

Libby Shaw at Texas Kaos and contributing to Daily Kos wishes to thank Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, former Harris Co. Republican Party Chair Jared Woodfill, eminent homophobe Dr. Steven Hotze, Republican smear artist Jeff Norwood and the Houston area's prominent minister, the Rev. Dr. Ed Young, for bringing out the absolute worst of Houston. How the good ol' boy Republicans, bigots, and preachers sold hate in Houston.

Stace at Dos Centavos has his take on last Tuesday posted.

SocraticGadfly takes a look at recently-revealed Chinese cheating on carbon emissions claims ahead of Paris climate talks.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is sick of Republicans making life miserable for everyone but their rich friends. Destroying sanctuary cities and the war on public education just to name two idiocies.

Egberto Willies caught Dr. Dean Baker's lecture at Lone Star College on economic inequality, and how it was aided by governmental policy.  Video of his speech at the link.

TXSharon at Bluedaze has the bottom line on PBS Newshour's methane segment.

The Travis County judge who was threatened by Rick Perry was shot in her driveway late Friday evening. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs believes the former governor should be considered a suspect in the attempted assassination.

Neil at All People Have Value said that everyday kindness and right behavior can be a revolutionary course of action. APHV is part of NeilAquinio.com.

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

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

TrailBlazers had the softball interview of Dubya with his father's biographer, and while Cheney and Rumsfled didn't come up, author Jon Meacham suggested that GWB understated his dad's influence on his own presidency... and Dim Son did not disagree.

Lone Star Ma supports Sustainable Development Goals.

The San Antonio Current highlights Rep. Diego Bernal's ability to deal with bullies.

jobsanger graphs a poll that shows 93% of Americans support closing background check loopholes for potential gun owners.

David Ortez recaps the Houston elections, and Moni at Transgriot takes note of the transgender community's efforts to start pushing back against the rejection of HERO.

Blues for Food, the annual drive to target hunger in H-Town, happened yesterday and Chris Gray at the HP had the advance.

Carson Lucarelli explains how he lives carless in Houston, and Pedestrian Pete (aka former city councilman Peter Brown -- joins FPH to report on a more walkable Bayou City.

Randy Harvey remembers his sportswriting colleague, transgender pioneer Christine Daniels.

Maybe it was just Halloween, but Fascist Dyke Motors feels empowered to be a Grim Reaper.

Judge that Rick Perry threatened found shot in her driveway

Not hyperbole. (Some links below via Reverb Press.)

A manhunt is underway after a Travis County judge was shot outside her home. Austin police say someone opened fire on District Judge Julie Kocurek in the driveway of her Tarrytown home around 10:30 p.m. Friday.

Kocurek had just pulled up to her home in West Austin with some other people when the shooting happened, according to police.

She was taken to University Medical Center Brackenridge where she is currently in stable condition. Sources tell KXAN she was admitted into ICU for observation. Sources also say that the judge received injuries to the upper body–left shoulder and face area–but that it was not a direct hit.

Police are searching for the shooter and interviewing witnesses.

By the way...

Kocurek, a former prosecutor, was appointed to the 390th District court in Travis County, which includes Austin, by then-Gov. George W. Bush in 1999. Later, she became the only Republican elected to a state district judgeship in the left-leaning county, but switched parties and became a Democrat in 2006.

[...]

She is perhaps best known for her statements after former Gov. Rick Perry was indicted on felony coercion and abuse-of-power charges by an Austin grand jury in August 2014.

Perry held a news conference where he vowed: "This farce of a prosecution will be revealed for what it is" adding that "those responsible will be held to account." Kocurek responded that that could be interpreted as a threat against members of the grand jury, and that they would be protected from Perry or anyone else since "no one is above the law."

Yes, that is a threat that the former governor let slip from his loose lips, and it's possible some right-wing freak with too many guns and ammo took his protest against justice literally.

Kocurek was in serious condition on admission to the hospital but has stabilized; her wounds are not considered life-threatening at this time.  Judges and prosecutors in Texas have often been targeted for reprisals from deranged people who believed they needed to settle an old score with a gun.  I'd like to think that's not the case here, but the fact is that when an assassination attempt is conducted -- and Rick Perry and Texas Republicans and threatening language are mentioned in the same breath -- you just can't rule anything out.  Because Rick Perry likes to kill people.  He especially likes to kill innocent people, sometimes letting them die slowly. 

Let's be fair: as massively stupid as he is, the former governor probably isn't so stupid that he pulled the trigger of the gun that fired the bullets that hit Judge Kocurek.  But he may have, unwittingly or otherwise, encouraged someone to do so.  And until we know differently -- once the gunman is apprehended and questioned -- he should remain a suspect.

That's. Not. Exaggeration.

Sunday Funnies

An update to "Clinton will win because of the Latino vote"

I still stand on this premise, but a couple of things require me to revise and extend my remarks.

-- Adrian Garcia ran such a laughably awful campaign that he probably set back the caucus of Tejano Democrats a cycle or two.  This from his campaign manager, who sounds like la gabacha estupida (though I have no idea as to her nationality):

"There was no way to anticipate the dramatic influx of voters in this election," Garcia campaign manager Mary Bell said.

Riiiight.  No one could have predicted that terrrorists would hijack planes and fly them into buildings despite a PDF saying exactly that two weeks previous after the Texas Supreme Court ordered the City of Houston to vote on people's civil rights, it would turn 2015 into a bathroom election.  Except for everybody.  That is as powerfully stupid as you can find in the free range.

Despite the dire straits in which Latinos and Democrats find themselves, in Houston and throughout much of Texas outside of the RGV, Clinton will still do far more to mobilize the Latino/Hispanic bloc than anyone else running for president, and by a long measure.

-- As a gabacho with a lot of learning to do myself, I finally get the difference between 'Hispanic' and 'Latino'.

The words "Hispanic," "Latino" and "Spanish" all have different meanings, and Kat Lazo is here to clear it up.

In a video from Bustle, the YouTube personality, who frequently discusses feminism and social norms in her videos, took to the streets of New York to ask people if they knew the difference before giving her explanation. Spoiler: not many people did.

Luckily, Lazo explained how the terms differ. In short, "Hispanic" focuses on Spanish-speaking origin. This means Spain is included, but Brazil is not because Brazilians speak Portuguese. "Latino" refers to people of Latin American origin. This includes Brazil and excludes Spain.

"Hispanic is ... based on whether you or your family speak the language of Spanish whereas Latino is focusing more on geographic location, that being Latin America," Lazo said in the video.

One man on the streets of New York helped Lazo with her explanation when he talked about his experience with the term "Spanish." "I hate when people call me Spanish because I’m not," he said. "If you’re Spanish it’s because you’re from Spain."

Portugal is neither Hispanic nor Latino, and Hispaniola (thanks again to the Italian Scallion, Cristoforo Columbo, although Peter Martyr might be most directly fingered for the name being Anglicized) is very precariously Latino despite being more Caribbean than Latin American, and because the languages spoken in the two countries of the island, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, are mashups (Haitian Creole and Dominican) AND despite the French influences as well.  If you think that's confusing, Google Malta.  (I've been, and it's cool.  But pretty much every European and African power through the centuries has taken a piece of Maltese ass and called it their own.)

NOW I get it.  I'm slow but I'm thorough.

RIP, KXL

Unless Hillary Clinton revives it in 2017, when oil prices rebound because of the war she starts with Iran.  New Middle East war or not, she might need to kickstart her 2020 re-election campaign with some Big Oil Super PAC lube.

Somebody get that polar bear a sandwich

Today is a day to celebrate, however, so I'll pause the snark.  From Vox:

• The Keystone XL pipeline was formally declared dead (yesterday) at 11:45am Eastern Standard Time.
  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• The cause of death is currently under review. Possible diagnoses include:

• Ritual sacrifice by the Obama administration in order to preserve "global leadership" (in President Obama's words) going into the UN climate summit in Paris next month.
  [AP]

• Chronically low oil prices. Under current prices, Keystone's investors might have struggled to break even.
  [Los Angeles Times / Christi Parsons and Paul Richter]

• A deflating jobs argument: the State Department's finding that the pipeline would create only 35 permanent jobs in the US was a pretty big blow to Keystone supporters who argued it was a job creator.
  [Washington Post / Glenn Kessler]

• An attack of activism: Climate change activists have had the Keystone XL pipeline in their sites since Obama's first term, and helped make it a serious partisan issue. They probably do deserve some credit for killing the pipeline.
  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

Let's remember that Canadian tar sands oil is still flowing through the US at a rate somewhere between 300,000 and 700,000 barrels a day since January 2014 via Keystone South, which runs from Cushing, OK to Houston and mid-Jefferson County, Texas, where it is being refined.  And that tar sands oil rides the rails from Alberta to Cushing in what has become colloquially known as "exploding bomb trains".  And that there are at least five other pipelines which never required State Department approval to pump tar sands oil directly from Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast right from the jump, several years ago.

So... a victory against Big Oil, but a somewhat hollow one.

The truth in pictures, from last Tuesday

ICYMI:

I feel certain that Republicans -- and some Democrats -- just won't ever understand.  Here's eight maps that explain where the mayor's race, HERO, and term limit changes were won and lost.

"I am a man who goes into women's bathrooms in Houston":

Your city, your state, your country...

Update: Where HERO went wrong

Democrats debate in South Carolina tonight

More to say about Hustle Town's election in just a minute, but I'd like to shift back to the presidential contenders for a bit.

Voters in South Carolina will have their first chance to see the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination together here on Friday, when Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley appear at a forum at Winthrop University.

The event, hosted by the state party and billed as the "First in the South Presidential Candidates Forum," will be broadcast live on MSNBC and focus on both regional and national issues. One issue, however, has become a flashpoint in the race this week as the candidates campaigned across the country: gun control.

The issues of gun control and criminal justice reform have revealed differences between the candidates on the Democratic side of the race and, as it has grown more competitive, the candidates have sought to take advantage.

It's not really a debate but more of an actual forum, with Rachel Maddow asking the three contenders questions separately, interview-style.  But It sure beats talking about Egyptian pyramids as granaries, or stabbing a close relative, or quarrels over teevee appearances, or whether the temperature in the hall is low enough to prevent Marco Rubio's flopsweat.

Clinton started her week in Chicago on Monday, when her campaign arranged a meeting with family members of victims of gun violence, including Sybrina Fulton and Lesley McSpadden, the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.

"They are determined to do what they can to try to prevent this from happening to any other family, and so am I," Clinton said the next day at a town hall in Coralville, Iowa. Her newest campaign ad, which started running on television in Iowa and New Hampshire that day, echoed her commitment.

It might be Martin O'Malley's last moment, so he'd better make it count.

Separately on Tuesday in Keene, New Hampshire, O'Malley laid out his plan to take seven separate executive actions as president to curb gun violence, including measures to effectively dismantle the law which shields gun sellers and manufacturers from liability if their firearms are used unlawfully.

O'Malley, who is trailing in national polls, has urged Clinton and Sanders to back certain parts of his plan to cut gun deaths in half by 2025. Clinton has also said she would work to repeal the shield law but stops short of suggesting she would use executive action to do so. Sanders, who voted for the law in 2005, said recently that he is willing to reconsider his position. And as the primary contests approach, O'Malley has started to go beyond calling for "consensus" into more personal, direct attacks.

"Secretary Clinton's been all over the place on this issue," O'Malley told NH1 News in an interview on Tuesday. "In the past when she was running against President Obama she was trying to portray herself as Annie Oakley. And in the past she has said she wasn't for universal background checks."

Sounds like sparks will fly.

He took his rhetoric up another notch on Wednesday, when his campaign released an online video comparing Clinton's past position on guns to Jeb Bush's stance. The clip, modeled after a video released by the Clinton campaign hitting Republicans for their views on gun control, showed Clinton in a debate in 2008 saying "blanket rules" imposed by the federal government on guns "doesn't make sense."

It's an argument that O'Malley will continue to use in South Carolina and elsewhere as he fights to gain traction as a progressive alternative to Clinton. 

Clinton has -- as Clintons can do effectively -- triangulated on gun safety, moving to the left of Bernie Sanders on the topic while twisting out a few sexism tropes as she did so.

On Oct. 23, Hillary Clinton opened a new front against Sen. Bernie Sanders: She framed him as a sexist. Clinton took a phrase Sanders had routinely used in talking about gun violence—that “shouting” wouldn’t solve the problem—and suggested that he had aimed it at her because “when women talk, some people think we’re shouting.”

Several journalists called out Clinton for this smear. But she refuses to withdraw it. Instead, her campaign officials and supporters have escalated the attack.  [...]

The next day, Clinton sat down for an interview in New Hampshire. Josh McElveen of WMUR asked her about Sanders: “Do you believe that he’s attacking you based solely on your gender?” Clinton replied: “When I heard him say that people should stop shouting about guns, I didn’t think I was shouting. I thought I was making a very strong case. … And I’m not going to be silenced.” McElveen followed up: “But as far as the implication that Bernie Sanders is sexist—you wouldn’t go that far?” Clinton shrugged, smiled, and sidestepped the question. “I said what I had to say about it,” she concluded.

'Poor me, the boys are pickin' on me' is a whine we're going to hear a lot of for the next year.  Especially tonight.

Clinton used her initial sound bite—“when women talk, some people think we’re shouting”—in at least six places. She posted it on Twitter, Facebook, and her campaign website. She also delivered it in three speeches: in Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, on Oct. 23, and in Des Moines, Iowa, on Oct. 24. After that, I didn’t hear it, except in her interview in New Hampshire. I thought she might be done with it. But then, on Friday, she raised a new issue.

Clinton was in Charleston, South Carolina, addressing the local NAACP. She spoke against a tragic background: the massacre of nine black people in a Charleston church by a white racist. Naturally, she talked about guns. But she added a new line: “There are some who say that this [gun violence] is an urban problem. Sometimes what they mean by that is: It’s a black problem. But it’s not. It’s not black, it’s not urban. It’s a deep, profound challenge to who we are.”

You might also look for the dogwhistling Clinton will be doing by using the word 'urban'.

The idea that urban is code for black has been around a long time. It’s often true. And it’s not necessarily derogatory: In 1920, the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes shortened its name to the National Urban League. But why would Clinton suddenly bring up, in a damning tone, people who call guns an urban problem? Who was she talking about? It can’t be the Republican presidential candidates: They haven’t disagreed enough to debate the issue at that level of granularity. The only recent forum in which guns have been discussed as an urban concern is the forum that inspired Clinton’s initial accusation of sexism: the Oct. 13 Democratic debate in Las Vegas. Pull up the transcript of that debate, search for “urban,” and you’ll see whom Clinton is talking about: Sanders.

In fact, it’s from the same moments of the debate that Clinton had already seized on. In the debate, Sanders began by saying, “As a senator from a rural state, what I can tell Secretary Clinton [is] that all the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want.” A couple of minutes later, Sanders told former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley: “We can raise our voices, but I come from a rural state, and the views on gun control in rural states are different than in urban states, whether we like it or not.” O’Malley insisted that the issue was “not about rural and urban.” Sanders replied: “It’s exactly about rural.” [...] So when Clinton, on Friday, spoke scathingly of people who call guns an “urban problem” but mean it’s a “black problem,” it’s obvious to whom she was referring.

This is pretty powerful stuff, because in the wake of our local elections where black and white Democrats split not just on their preferred candidates but also on Prop 1, we're about to see some more of that cleaving between our presidential candidates.

This line of attack is rich in irony. When Clinton ran for president in 2008, she explicitly used race against Obama. She told USA Today that she should be the Democratic nominee because “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” Clinton cited an article that, in her words, showed “how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in [Indiana and Pennsylvania] who had not completed college were supporting me.” A reporter asked Clinton whether this argument was racially divisive. “These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat,” Clinton replied dismissively. “Everybody knows that.”

Now Clinton accuses others of playing the race card. In Charleston, she told the NAACP, “Some candidates talk in coded racial language about ‘free stuff,’ about ‘takers’ and ‘losers.’ And boy, are they quick to demonize President Obama. This kind of talk has no place in our politics.”

A digression back to last Tuesday here in H-Town:  Sylvester Turner said all the right things in his victory speech about diversity and inclusiveness.  I'll be proud to vote for him in December.  It's going to a lot tougher to hold my nose and vote for Sharon Moses and Georgia Provost in their At Large runoffs because of their under-the-radar opposition to HERO.  ConservaDems have been a personal scourge of mine for a long time now, and as long as they hold sway locally, statewide, and nationally, there will be very little I will feel like doing for the Democratic Party.  But like I wrote, that's a digression.

Clinton, too, speaks in code. But in this election, her coded phrases—“some people think we’re shouting,” “some who say that this is an urban problem”—aren’t designed to veil racism. They’re designed to veil her meritless insinuations that her Democratic opponent is sexist and racist. You can argue, based on power or privilege, that playing the race card or sex card from the left isn’t as bad as playing it from the right. But even if you believe that, Clinton’s smears bring discredit on the whole idea of bigotry. If accusations of misogyny and racism are casually thrown at Sanders, voters will conclude that these terms are just rhetoric.

Seven years ago, when Clinton’s own campaign was accused of prejudice, her husband was outraged. “She did not play the race card, but they did,” Bill Clinton said of the Obama campaign. The former president went on: “This is almost like, once you accuse somebody of racism or bigotry or something, the facts become irrelevant.” Three months later, Mr. Clinton was still fuming. “They played the race card on me, and we now know from memos from the campaign and everything that they planned to do it all along,” he protested. “This was used out of context and twisted for political purposes by the Obama campaign to try to breed resentment elsewhere. … You really got to go some to try to portray me as a racist.”

They're always running the next campaign like the last one.

Now Hillary Clinton is doing to Sanders what her husband said was done to her. She’s taking Sanders’ remarks out of context and twisting them to breed resentment. You’ve got to twist the facts pretty hard to portray Sanders as a racist or sexist. But politically, it’s easy, because once you start throwing around charges of bigotry, the facts become irrelevant. You’re just another beautiful baiter. And you won’t be silenced.

Let's finish with the topic for tonight: guns.

"There's strong support among Democrats here to try to come up with new initiatives that keep the guns away from criminals and come up with some sensible policies that can make our country safer," added former Gov. Jim Hodges, who has endorsed Clinton. He continued: "In a Republican primary, talking about gun issues is a third rail. That's not so true in the Democratic primary here."

More than 3,400 people will be in the audience at the Byrnes Auditorium with hundreds more expected to turn out for other party events scheduled around the main event.

"People are engaged," said Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist and consultant based in Columbia. "Every time I go to the barber shop, there's always a discussion about national politics and talking about what's next."

Seawright, who worked on Clinton's first presidential campaign but is not involved with her second bid, added that bread and butter issues like jobs, infrastructure and education are also important to voters watching the forum, especially those from low-income, rural communities.

"When you come to South Carolina, it's important that voters feel as if you are going to talk about South Carolina issues," he said, "that you will remember the people in South Carolina."

Both Sanders and O'Malley have to make up some ground here in the Palmetto State, so in many ways it will be a turning point of sorts.  Either the Clinton steamroller picks up momentum, or one of her two challengers slows her roll.