Year-End Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance gets ready to flush the bowl on 2015 take a cup of kindness in celebration of 2016, as it brings you the last blog post roundup of the year.

Off the Kuff had some thoughts on the primary in CD29 between Rep. Gene Green and Adrian Garcia.

Libby Shaw, contributing to Daily Kos, insists that Texas lawmakers must be held accountable for their bad decisions and blatant bigotry with regard to health care in the state. The Texas Blues: Living in a place run by GOP jerks, saboteurs and spiteful bigots.

People are starting to get the fact that the only practical alternative for progressives -- once Bernie Sanders is eliminated from contention for the Democratic nomination -- is a vote for the Green Party's Jill Stein, writes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

SocraticGadfly notes that if the Paris climate change deal has any hope of being real, and not just warm-fuzzies aspirational, we need negative carbon emissions — and now.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes Greg Abbott goes for a two-fer in hate. No health care for you. What a guy.

Neil at All People Have Value took a nice picture in Galveston. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

Egberto Willies says it's time to call out the pro-life faction on their opposition to Medicaid expansion.

TXsharon at Bluedaze wants the Big Gas Mafia and all of their shills to know that fracking other people's children isn't going to make their own children proud of what they do for a living.

The Lewisville Texan Journal reports on the citizen referendum that would institute a cite-and-release policy for possession of small quantities of marijuana.

Dos Centavos recounts a time in the recent past when the phrase "Happy Holidays" didn't evince so much hate from arch-conservatives.

nonsequiteuse, writing at BOR, calls for the Houston Chronicle to apologize to Mayor Annise Parker.

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More great Texas blog posts here!

Progress Texas names their Top Ten Worst Texans of 2015, though how they stopped at only ten remains a mystery.

Lone Star Ma focuses on the fourth of the United Nations' new Sustainable Development Goals, an inclusive and quality education for all.

Rick Campbell tells the story of Texas City blues singer Charles Brown, and his original recording of "Please Come Home For Christmas", later made famous by The Eagles and Don Henley.

BOR points to the real culprits in the case of cancer patients losing insurance.

John Jacob and Jen Powis advocate for Texas's endangered wetlands.

Prairie Weather believes Trump has a fatal electoral flaw: his supporters love the demagoguery and the spectacle, but do not exhibit the capacity to caucus for for him in Iowa.

Somervell County Salon thanks HEB for prohibiting open carry in its Texas grocery stores.

When a cartoonist exploits Ted Cruz's children, it's shameless and inappropriate... but when Cruz does it, it's just fundraising, explains What Would Jack Do?

Grits for Breakfast names his top Texas criminal justices stories for 2015.

Rocket Kirchner at Dandelion Salad has the exclusive Socrates interview with Hillary Clinton.

And Fascist Dyke Motors culls out her sock drawer.

I was wrong about Trump.

So admits Matt Bai of Yahoo as well, but we'll get to his take in a moment.  Here's what I wrote way back on November 13, six weeks ago.

Despite what I have said repeatedly about polls, I'm anxious to see what they reveal about a week or two from (the time Trump asked 'how stupid were the people of Iowa').  This feels like a turning point for a couple of candidates.   The conservative Borg has been completely unpredictable to this point, but a settling-out of the real lunacy of Trump and Carson to the regular loons of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio is somewhat overdue.

Ben Carson has indeed faded, but Trump's position in the polling has strengthened in the days since.  Over the Thanksgiving holiday, in time spent with family and friends, I asked the considerable number of conservatives and Republicans among our brood what they thought about the Donald.  All but one cringed and shook their head.  The one supporter -- who received his most recent book as a Christmas present and was delighted -- posed for a photograph at our Turkey Day meal at a Beaumont hotel ballroom, and just before the snapshot, I yelled, "Smile and say BERNIE SANDERS!"  A few minutes later she leaned over and told me quietly, "I get his e-mail; I like him".  I replied, "there's hope for you yet!"

So from an anecdotal perspective, I truly don't know what to make of the Trump phenomenon.  Matt Bai agrees with my status today, however ...

For many months now, like the anxious producers of some hot reality show, the American media has been waiting for Donald Trump to get up onstage and say the one thing that will lead to his swift and inevitable unraveling. (Waiting is not quite the same as hoping, but I’ll get to that in a minute.)

Sometimes it seems that Trump himself is trying frantically to find that edge of acceptable rhetoric and hurl himself over it, maybe because this business of running for president is a lot more tedious and exhausting than, say, crowning Miss Universe.

This week, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Trump told an audience in Michigan that Hillary Clinton had been “schlonged” in 2008 (a variation on the Yiddish word for penis that he seems to have invented on the spot, but that is now assured to outlive the Yiddish language itself), and he made fun of Clinton’s bizarre habit — “too disgusting to talk about” — of having to occasionally relieve herself in a bathroom.

He also clarified his difference with Vladimir Putin when it comes to these “lying, disgusting” reporters who cover him. “I hate some of these people, but I would never kill them,” Trump volunteered. “I would never kill them. But I do hate them.”

Well, that does it. If granting journalists a right to live doesn’t puncture Trump’s standing among conservative voters these days, then trust me, pretty much nothing will.

(By the way, note that Trump didn’t actually go so far as to condemn such violence, or even discourage it. He just declined to kill anyone himself. The man is busy.)

It’s time for me to admit I was wrong about Trump’s staying power. And it’s time for the rest of my industry to take a long look in the mirror and consider what we’ve wrought.

And so goes a fairly lengthy condemnation of the media coverage of Trump, which a week ago stood at approximately a 23-1 ratio to its coverage of Bernie Sanders.  I don't wish to enumerate once more all of the faults with corporate media news and politics coverage, especially since Bai does such a good job of it himself in the next excerpts.  He is most assuredly on point with the self-examination.

Because it’s clear now that Trump’s enduring popularity — his relentless assault on the weathered pillars of our public civility — is in no small part a reflection of an acid disdain for us.

Trump has always understood this. Look at the graphic terms in which he once attacked Fox’s Megyn Kelly. Or the way he viciously mocked Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who excels despite a physical disability. Or how he publicly berated Katy Tur, an NBC reporter, for sport.

Playing off the media isn’t novel, of course. When George H.W. Bush ran for reelection back in 1992, somebody — maybe it was his campaign, since in those days there weren’t any super-PACS — made a bumper sticker that read “Annoy the media. Re-elect Bush.”

For many years after Bush lost, you could still see those bumper stickers on any highway in America. It had little to do with the candidate.

They lasted on bumpers of pickup trucks in Midland, Texas (where I was) well into the mid-90's, as Bill Clinton's election began the Republican descent into fury and rage.  Nineteen-ninety four also marked the last year a Democrat was elected to a statewide office in Texas.

But that was a statement on liberalism and elitism, a kind of cultural homogeneity inside the nation’s largest media institutions. It was almost respectful. Bush would never have used the word “hate,” and neither would the people with the bumper stickers.

This is something more visceral, an emotion that’s been building in all segments of the electorate, to some extent, for decades.

This is a simmering reaction to smugness and shallowness in the media, a parade of glib punditry unmoored to any sense of history or personal experience. It’s about our love of gaffes and scandals, real or imagined, and our rigid enforcement of the politically correct.

It’s about the reflexive partisan fury we’ve been inciting in this country ever since the earliest days of cable TV, and more recently on the blogs and op-ed pages of newspapers that once set the standard for thoughtful deliberation but now need the clicks to survive.

This is dead on, and a little nauseating personally. 

And yet somehow, when the perfect and professional reality-show star comes along, utterly lost on policy but brilliant at harnessing resentment in long, incredibly watchable tirades, observers like me think his success must be short-lived. Why?

(And before you tell me Trump is more qualified to be president than a first-term senator from Illinois was, consider his final answer, after much evasion, when asked about the country’s “nuclear triad” in the last debate: “I just think nuclear — the power and the devastation are very important to me.”)

Trump is entirely different from a Barry Goldwater or a Pat Buchanan. He isn’t a conservative populist penned in by the outer boundaries of what’s politically constructive, bred ultimately to admire the same institutions he assails. I don’t think Trump has any fierce political conviction that couldn’t be abandoned overnight, just as fiercely.

Trump is an emotional extremist. He’s a pure performer, trained to manipulate the audience and mindful of no consequence beyond the ratings it produces.

Just don't believe the Facebook meme.

(I)t’s clear there’s a powerful symbiosis between Trump and the media. We need him for the narrative power, for the clicks and debate ratings and sheer fascination factor. He needs us for the free publicity and the easy, evocative foil.

Trump’s most useful opponent, the one who causes his most fervent following to stick, isn’t Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or even Hillary Clinton. It’s us.

So when I say there’s a difference between waiting and hoping, this is what I mean. This is the essential paradox that the American media has created for itself, and you can feel it becoming less and less tenable right now.

On one hand, we’re bewildered by the reality that a man can so debase our politics and continue to rise in polls, as if all the rules we’ve inherited and enforced are no longer remotely relevant. But at the same time, we need our standout contestant to hang around for sweeps week. He’s the star of the show.

We want to see Trump get “schlonged” for the same reasons we can’t bear to lose him, and he understands that dynamic better than anyone alive.

Do I think Trump is going to be the Republican nominee? No, I don’t. At the end of the day, I still tend to think he won’t win a single state. But I’ve been wrong about him so far, and I’ve very little confidence that I won’t keep being wrong for a while.

I think Bai is wrong: Trump shows no sign of losing momentum that I can discern.  The Washington Post's Jenna Johnson, via Prairie Weather, thinks the same as Bai, mostly because Trump's support includes a number of people without a clue as to how retail politics actually works.  If those two get it right, I'll refer back to this post in some future one with a plate of crow in front of me.

What I get from the WaPo article is that they're mad, but they're still not mad enough to get even.

(Randy and Bonnie Reynolds,) the West Des Moines couple who have two grown children, had never been to a political event before. Bonnie works in a mailroom; Randy is a press operator. They don’t live paycheck to paycheck, but it would take just one small catastrophe to push them there.

“In the end, everything that he’s saying might not happen if he is elected — but I’m willing to give it a shot,” said Randy Reynolds, 49, who used to vote for Democrats but switched to Republicans a decade ago. “I will give him 100 percent. . . . It would be amazing if the majority of things that he said would actually happen. That would be amazing.”

So, obviously, the couple plan to caucus for Trump on Feb. 1?

“We’re going to see,” Reynolds said. “With kids and grandkids and all this, it’s kind of hectic. . . . We’ll look into it. If our time is available, then yeah, maybe we’ll do it. Maybe. We’ll have to see.”

And ...

Linda Stuver, 61, said Trump is her top pick, although she also likes Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. During the last election cycle, she went to a rally for Mitt Romney, her first political event. The Trump rally was her second.

“This is only my second time I’ve ever been to one of these — that’s how annoyed I am with what’s happening to our country,” said Stuver, who lives in Des Moines and says she raised four children by cleaning houses and working other low-level jobs. “I can’t even have Obama be on TV anymore — I have to shut it off, that’s how irritated I am. Us old folks have seen a lot, and what’s happening in our country is not right.”

Is she annoyed and irritated enough to caucus?

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I never have.”

Caucuses have always rewarded the most committed activists, which is why Hillary Clinton and the Texas Democratic Party lackeys minimized the influence of precinct conventions in the Lone Star State after Obama won them, and a very slim majority of Texas delegates, in 2008.  Can't blame that one on Debbie Wasserman Schultz (her fingerprints aren't all over it, that is).

It could be that Trump's support is a mile wide and an inch deep, and if so, and Ted Cruz pulls the upset in Iowa because his crew outworked the Trumpers, then the establishment's last gasp might wind up being Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or even John Kasich in New Hampshire.

After that is South Carolina, and Cruz -- or Trump -- might be on too hard a roll to slow.

Refer back to here and consider how convoluted the circumstances might get if Trump or Cruz is the nominee, and the establishment withholds support and tries to broker a compromise candidate next summer.  And then Laugh Out Loud.

Update: Here's an interesting take from Eclectablog, who sees Cruz winning the nomination even as Trump maintains his lead in the polls.

Sunday Funnies

Scattershooting some after-Christmas sales

-- Why try to understand complicated things like demographics for the decline of your faith when you can blame gays and liberals for waging a “war on religion?”

Among the Christian Right, and most Republican presidential candidates, it’s now an article of faith that the United States is persecuting Christians and Christian-owned businesses—that religion itself is under attack.

“We have seen a war on faith,” Ted Cruz has said to pick one example. “His policies and this administration’s animosity to religious liberty and, in fact, antagonism to Christians, has been one of the most troubling aspects of the Obama administration,” he said.

Why has this bizarre myth that Christianity is under assault in the most religious developed country on Earth been so successful? Because, in a way, it’s true. American Christianity is in decline—not because of a “war on faith” but because of a host of demographic and social trends. The gays and liberals are just scapegoats.

-- "Things are going great, and they're only gettin' better.  We just haven't sold it like we should." -- paraphrasing Barack Obama:

“Now on our side, I think that there is a le­git­im­ate cri­ti­cism of what I’ve been do­ing and our ad­min­is­tra­tion has been do­ing in the sense that we haven’t, you know, on a reg­u­lar basis, I think, de­scribed all the work that we’ve been do­ing for more than a year now to de­feat ISIL,” Obama said. Mean­while, he blamed “the me­dia” for “pur­su­ing rat­ings.”

The pres­id­ent also said dur­ing an off-the-re­cord con­ver­sa­tion with colum­nists last week that his Oval Of­fice ad­dress hadn’t gone far enough, a short­com­ing he at­trib­uted to his own fail­ure to watch enough cable news to un­der­stand the depth of anxi­ety.

In oth­er words, the strategy is work­ing, and the White House just needs to com­mu­nic­ate that bet­ter. The fights against do­mest­ic ter­ror and IS­IS alike are go­ing great, if only people would un­der­stand it.

I can't decide whether this astounds me or is just more of the same BS coming out of the White House for the past seven years.  A fairly constant refrain from partisan Democrats produces the latter of those two feelings: the "Look at everything the president has accomplished, and imagine how MUCH MORE he could have done if it weren't for an obstructive Congress!" consistent Facebook meme-ology.  That ceased working for me in the fall of 2011.  You know, once Obama refused to spend any of his political capital influencing the recalcitrant conservative Democrats in swing districts to vote for the legislation that bears his name.  Not just in 2009, but as late as 2013, when one of the many repeal votes came up prior to an election year.

This is humbl­eb­rag polit­ics: I’m not great at ex­plain­ing it, but man, am I great at policy. But does it ac­cur­ately un­der­stand the prob­lems, or what mes­saging en­tails? Obama views bat­tle­field suc­cess against IS­IS as the goal, and mes­saging as a simple pro­cess of tele­graph­ing that. Mes­saging can be something great­er than just the wrap­ping pa­per on the policy solu­tion he has chosen. It’s about per­suad­ing people to come around to your side, not just telling them why your side is right.

This isn’t the first time Obama has in­sisted that everything’s go­ing great and it’s just the wrap­ping pa­per that needs spru­cing up. After the 2014 midterm elec­tions, which saw de­feats for Demo­crats on all fronts, Obama told Bob Schief­fer the prob­lem was that he hadn’t com­mu­nic­ated how well his ad­min­is­tra­tion was do­ing:

One thing that I do need to con­stantly re­mind my­self and my team is it’s not enough just to build the bet­ter mousetrap. People don’t auto­mat­ic­ally come beat­ing to your door. We’ve got to sell it, we’ve got to reach out to the oth­er side and where pos­sible per­suade. And I think there are times, there’s no doubt about it where, you know, I think we have not been suc­cess­ful in go­ing out there and let­ting people know what it is that we are try­ing to do and why this is the right dir­ec­tion. So there is a fail­ure of polit­ics there that we have got to im­prove on.

Policy as a product to be sold, via teevee advertising and brand research marketed by consultants (polling, etc.).   I'm so old I can remember people complaining when we sold the actual politicians like laundry detergent during a soap opera.

Nobody watches those any more -- if you're a monolingual English speaker, that is -- because the writers and actors cost too much to produce the shows.  Five hosts on a chat-and-chew, or just one, offering free media to the celebrity of the moment is a real budget-maker for those cost-cutting networks with falling ratings.

Thank goodness for SuperPACS and multiple presidential candidates coming to the mainstream media's financial rescue, amirite?  Back to Obama and messaging.

After the 2010 midterm “shel­lack­ing,” Obama had been some­what more con­cili­at­ory, say­ing, “I think that what is ab­so­lutely true is voters are not sat­is­fied with the out­comes.” But even then, he wasn’t say­ing Re­pub­lic­ans were right to op­pose his stim­u­lus; he was say­ing he hadn’t en­acted an ag­gress­ive enough ap­proach to cre­ate enough jobs. He wasn’t say­ing the price tags for the stim­u­lus were too large; he was say­ing they seemed too large to many people.

In fact, many eco­nom­ists agree that he should have pur­sued a lar­ger stim­u­lus. There is wide­spread sup­port for many com­pon­ents of the Af­ford­able Care Act taken singly, des­pite the many more people who op­pose the law in total. But it’s likely that many people would have op­posed these ef­forts any­way. Some would have done so out of par­tis­an, tri­bal loy­alty, which mo­tiv­ates many people’s polit­ic­al po­s­i­tions. Oth­ers would have done so out of es­sen­tial op­pos­i­tion to big-gov­ern­ment pro­grams. (Obama ac­tu­ally got at this, say­ing, “I think people star­ted look­ing at all this and it felt as if gov­ern­ment was get­ting much more in­trus­ive in­to people’s lives than they were ac­cus­tomed to”—though that “ac­cus­tomed to” seems to again pre­sume that with enough time and the right wrap­ping, they could be con­vinced.)

Many Demo­crats have long thought that white, blue-col­lar voters, who have gradu­ally deser­ted the party since Ron­ald Re­agan was run­ning for pres­id­ent, were just wait­ing for the right ap­proach to lure them back. Demo­crats look at them as clear al­lies who are vot­ing against their own in­terest, if only they could be made to see that. Obama touched on that idea in his In­s­keep in­ter­view, too:

But I do think that when you com­bine that demo­graph­ic change with all the eco­nom­ic stresses that people have been go­ing through be­cause of the fin­an­cial crisis, be­cause of tech­no­logy, be­cause of glob­al­iz­a­tion, the fact that wages and in­comes have been flat­lining for some time, and that par­tic­u­larly blue-col­lar men have had a lot of trouble in this new eco­nomy, where they are no longer get­ting the same bar­gain that they got when they were go­ing to a fact­ory and able to sup­port their fam­il­ies on a single paycheck, you com­bine those things and it means that there is go­ing to be po­ten­tial an­ger, frus­tra­tion, fear—some of it jus­ti­fied but just mis­dir­ec­ted. I think some­body like Mr. Trump is tak­ing ad­vant­age of that. That’s what he’s ex­ploit­ing dur­ing the course of his cam­paign.

This is really just a more del­ic­ate ar­tic­u­la­tion of Obama’s in­fam­ous com­ments in 2008 about voters who “get bit­ter, they cling to guns or re­li­gion or an­ti­pathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-im­mig­rant sen­ti­ment or anti-trade sen­ti­ment as a way to ex­plain their frus­tra­tions.” (In­s­keep, in fact, men­tioned those com­ments later in the in­ter­view.) And it’s not un­like Tom Frank’s What’s the Mat­ter With Kan­sas? thes­is, about cit­izens vot­ing against what lib­er­als see as their own self-in­terest.

Many of the dis­agree­ments here are about more than mes­saging. Per­haps those white, work­ing-class voters aren’t get­ting what they want out of the Demo­crat­ic Party. (Group iden­tity, rather than policy ig­nor­ance, prob­ably goes a long way to ex­plain­ing the dis­crep­ancy.) Maybe people wouldn’t be rad­ic­ally more sup­port­ive of Obama’s do­mest­ic-policy agenda if they just un­der­stood it bet­ter. The fact that no one else has a bet­ter idea for com­bat­ing IS­IS may in­dic­ate the mag­nitude of the chal­lenge, not vin­dic­a­tion for Obama. Ex­plain­ing to voters why you’re right of­ten re­quires first tak­ing ser­i­ously why they think you’re wrong, and ad­apt­ing un­der­ly­ing policies to ad­dress their con­cerns. Someone should fig­ure out how to mes­sage that to the pres­id­ent.

-- And that leads to this.

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries. 

You can't reason with the Idiocrats, so you might as well push their fear and greed buttons.  Seems to be working for the GOP pretty well, yes?  Happy New Year!