Only Democrat on Harris Co. Commissioners Court passes away

RIP El Franco Lee.  He was on the ballot for re-election this year, without a primary challenger.

Harris County Precinct One Commissioner El Franco Lee has died. The family confirmed that Commissioner Lee suffered a heart attack and died at 10:01am Sunday.

Lee (was) a native Houstonian, where he began his political career in 1979 when he was elected Texas State Representative for District 142. In 1985, he was elected and sworn in as the first African-American Harris Co. Commissioner, where he has been serving his seventh term.

Not sure about the process, but the law may allow the Democratic precinct chairs to vote a replacement candidate to their primary ballot to replace him.  Updates here as warranted.

"El Franco was a beloved public servant who never sought the limelight, preferring a low key approach that put the needs of his constituents above self-promotion," Houston mayor Sylvester Turner said, noting that Lee beat him in the 1984 race for county commissioner. "His passion was helping seniors and improving quality of life for underserved youth and young adults in the inner city. His unmatched programs for thousands of seniors include everything from health and fitness initiatives to arts and crafts and music tutorials to holiday celebrations and other special events."

Update II: Lee's name will remain on the ballot through the March primary and the general election in November.  While County Judge Ed Emmett, a Republican, will appoint a placeholder at some point (probably a Republican to avoid the screeching) to serve the remainder of Lee's term, the Democratic precinct chairs in Lee's Precinct One will elect his replacement later this year, and that person will take office no later than next January (because Lee had no Republican challenger in the general, either).  Among the rumored names for the post today are state Senator Rodney Ellis -- which would open a coveted legislative seat and initiate another scrum -- and former councilman CO Bradford, with a few others, such as Houston city councilman Jerry Davis, also mentioned.

State representative Borris Miles is also in the mix; he allegedly wants the Texas Senate seat Ellis may be vacating.

New Year's Funnies

Jim Hightower: The Corporate Media is Basically Pretending Bernie Sanders Doesn't Exist

Happy 2016 Toons

The Brainy Texans of the Year

I chose to carry on the tradition this year due to declining interest from the TPA.  Before I bestow the inglorious award, however, let's run up a few of the 'honorable mentions'.

-- Progress Texas released their Worst list earlier in the week, and Ted Cruz won the gold medal.  The Cuban Canuck Schmuck certainly made my top five, but really, how do you miss with any of Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton, and Sid Miller?  And that's just the statewide electeds.

-- The Texas House could have been its own list, with state Rep. Cecil Bell atop Texas Monthly's Worst from the last Lege, followed closely by Sen. Donna Campbell, Rep. Harold Dutton, Sen. Joan Huffman, and Sen. Jane Nelson.  Former fetus Jonathan Stickland has surged in the standings like the price of an Uber ride home on New Year's Eve, and not just because he wears an AR-15 as a lapel pin, but that he's been recently exposed as a stoner and an advocate for marital rape.

-- The Texas Congressional delegation and its chief idiot Louie Gohmert could have won this award based on lifetime achievement, but Lamar Smith, the House's leading climate denier, wouldn't be far behind, and those two made former All Star Assholes like Joe Barton, Blake Farenthold, and Pete Sessions, along with retiring Randy NoogieBoogie and Rookie of the Year Brian Babin look like amateurs.

-- Then there are the Texas Democrats, and they're no slouches when it comes to competition for the worst.  Just look again at the state House of Representatives, and the Dirty Thirty Democrats who voted to let Denton's fracking ban be overturned.  Or Senfronia Thompson, who was miffed that the Texas Automobile Dealers Association didn't get a meeting with Mr. Tesla, or my own state rep, Borris Miles, who earned a dishonorable mention from TM for drunk and disorderly conduct.

-- Or look back at Congress, with Blue Dogshits Henry Cuellar, Marc Veazey, up-and-comer Filemon Vela, and the petro-whore Gene Green, being challenged by Adrian Garcia, whose inability to clean up the Harris County jail during his time as sheriff is now a national disgrace and not just a local one.  Even Sheila Jackson-Lee kept doing what she does.  From TM's Bum Steers ...

(SJL) called Republican threats to sue the president over Obamacare a “veiled attempt at impeachment,” moralizing that the Democrats who controlled the House of Representatives during George W. Bush’s presidency had never stooped so low. Soon after, an online news source cited a 2008 resolution that Jackson had co-sponsored calling for Bush’s impeachment.

-- There was Chris Bell going rogue, lining up behind Bill King for H-Town mayor, and there was Nile Copeland turning red in hopes for a state district judgeship after running for the Court of Appeals as a Democrat four years ago and getting 46%.  This was the wrong year to change parties, fellows.

-- I could have easily selected Waller County Sheriff Glenn Smith, whose defiant attitude in the wake of the death of Sandra Bland in his jail has added to the many fatal failures of law enforcement and criminal justice in 2015.  Smith also sat in a restaurant having lunch for two hours, oblivious to the stealing of an arsenal of weapons in broad daylight from his county vehicle.  That puts him easily in the top three for Texan of the Year.

-- Abel Reyna, the McLennan County district attorney overseeing the prosecutions of whatever crimes the various biker club members who assembled in Waco may have committed that resulted in their summary execution by law enforcement, may win next year's TOY.

-- But there were also a few bright lights that I shouldn't overlook: Sylvester Turner holding on to the mayor's office for Team Blue, Cecile Richards keeping up the fight against the hordes of anti-choice extremists in Texas.  Texan of the Year in years past hasn't been about who was the biggest jerk, after all.

-- And the winner has not always been relegated to an elected official: Wallace Hall, the odious UT regent who is still dug in like an Alabama tick (thanks for that, Jesse) and who was immortalized in cartoons by the Chron's Nick Anderson two years ago, gets points for longevity.  The loons who made sure the Operation Jade Helm 15 conspiracy made a laughing stock of the state have to be in my top five.  Kory Watkins of Open Carry Tarrant County, an even more radical offshoot of Open Carry Texas, issued death threats to legislators if the law allowing Texans to pretend it is 1885 all over again did not pass.  (It did, unsurprisingly.)

-- The ongoing saga of Rick Perry's felony indictments -- which now include the judge in the case's assassination attempt -- are worthy of some special recognition.

-- In the category of Extreme Irony, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson joined a NIMBY lawsuit to stop the construction of a water tower meant to fill trucks for fracking well sites.  His company was also found to have hidden the truth they knew about the dangers of climate change for almost forty years.

-- But I've buried the lede deep enough.  The come-from-behind winner of this year's Texan(s) of the Year are Ethan Couch and his mother Tonya, who made the holidays merry and bright for the victims of his affluenza.

Just imagine how privileged you have to feel to think that disguising yourself as Mexican in order to avoid arrest is a good idea.

Carrot Top Mom's going to jail, Sonny Boy is going to avoid it for some while longer.

Authorities in Texas said an arrest warrant was being issued for Tonya Couch on charges of hindering an apprehension, a third-degree felony that carries a sentence of two to 10 years in prison.

[...]

The ruling (to delay extradition) earlier Wednesday by the Mexican court gives a judge three days to decide whether the younger Couch has grounds to challenge his deportation based on arguments that kicking him out of the country would violate his rights.

Hunter said the legal maneuver basically takes the decision out of an immigration agent's hands and asks a higher authority to make the deportation decision. He said such cases can often take anywhere from two weeks to several months, depending on the priorities of the local courts.

"It also depends on the fact the Couches have legal counsel. And it seems to me, if they wanted to, they could pay them as much money as they want to drag this thing out," Hunter said. "We're hopeful that's not the case."

Couch and his attorneys apparently believe he's better off in a Mexican jail than an American one.  I sure hope they're wrong about that, too.

"Couch continues to make a mockery of the system," said Fort Worth attorney Bill Berenson, who represented Sergio Molina, who was paralyzed and suffered severe brain damage in the crash.

A very Unhappy New Year to Ethan and Tonya Couch.

The Perils of Plutocracy

Appropriating part of Mark Kleiman's title (and fixing his many typos):

1. Billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson is involved in a lawsuit in Nevada about the corrupt practices of his casino in Macao. (Technically, it’s a wrongful-termination case brought by someone who claims to have been fired for blowing the whistle.)

2. Adelson has been fighting with the judge, Elizabeth Gonzalez.

3. Through a cut-out, Adelson bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the dominant newspaper in the state, keeping his ownership a secret until others broke the story.

4. Three staffers at the paper were then ordered to do a hit piece on the judge. No story resulted.

5. The editor of the Review-Journal then learned, by reading the front page of his own newspaper, that he had “accepted a buy-out.”

6. Michael Schroeder, who runs Adelson’s media empire and who also publishes a small paper in Connecticut, went straight to the printer of that paper, over the head of the editorial staff, to order a 2000-word piece critical of Judge Gonzalez to run there.

7. People quoted in the story say they were never contacted by the reporter whose by-line appears on the story, Edward Clarkin.

8. In fact, no one seems to have ever met Edward Clarkin in person. However, Schroeder’s middle name is “Edward,” and his mother’s maiden name was “Clarkin.” (No, seriously.)

9. A reporter for Schroeder’s paper quit in disgust.

Despite its comic-opera aspects, this story is truly scary. If plutocrats can buy newspapers to intimidate judges, what happens to the rule of law? And how much of Adelson’s media power will be exercised on behalf of his business partners in the Chinese Politburo? They made him a billionaire by giving him the casino concession in Macau, and they can take it away at a moment’s notice.

Here’s hoping this gets to be an issue in the campaign. I’d love to the Republican presidential candidates say what they think of Adelson’s behavior. Come to think of it, I’d love to hear Hillary Clinton do so.

Update: A timeline of the events from Jay Rosen's Pressthink.

Seen The Big Short yet?  Read the book if you want to know the names of the actual players.  In short (no pun), a few very prescient broker/banker/hedge fund types saw the mortgage meltdown coming a couple of years in advance, and then ran out and "shorted" -- bet it would drop -- the mortgage industry's secondary loan market, even as the Goldmans and Lehmans of the world laughed at them and gleefully took their money for those bets.  Those two or three guys also understood that the global economy would collapse as a result, ruining millions of common people's lives, and some of them felt a little nauseous about that, but still went on and made hundreds of millions of dollars on the collapse anyway.

And now the dude who first saw it coming sees it coming down the pike again, the big banks are bigger today than they were when they were Too Big To Fail almost ten years ago, and Hillary Clinton's response has been "9/11" -- just like Rudy Giuliani -- and ""I told them to cut it out".  Except she didn't.  Not really.

Maybe this will help people understand why so many people say they won't vote for her.  It's not just Shelley Adelson or the media or the GOP presidentials drooling on Adelson's shoes that's the only problem here.

The top fundraisers for Clinton include lobbyists who serve the parent companies of CNN and MSNBC.

The National Association of Broadcasters, a trade group that represents the television station industry, has lobbyists who are fundraising for both Clinton and Republican candidate Marco Rubio.

Presidential campaigns are obligated by law to send the Federal Election Commission a list of lobbyists who serve as “bundlers,” collecting hundreds of individual checks on behalf of a candidate’s campaign.

CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, is represented on Capitol Hill by Steve Elmendorf, an adviser to Clinton during her 2008 campaign, who is also known as “one of Washington’s top lobbyists.” He’s lobbied on a number of issues important for media companies like CNN, including direct-to-consumer advertising policy.

Elmendorf, according to disclosures, has raised at least $141,815 for Clinton’s 2016 bid for the presidency.

Comcast, the parent company of NBC Universal, which includes cable networks NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC, has a number of lobbyists on retainer who are working to raise cash for the Clinton campaign, including Justin Gray, Alfred Mottur, Ingrid Duran and Catherine Pino.

Much of the $5 billion expected to be spent over the course of the 2016 presidential election cycle will be on cable and network news advertisements. The election-related spending bonanza is singularly boosting the profit margins of many media companies, as we’ve reported.

“Super PACs may be bad for America, but they’re very good for CBS,” Les Moonves, president and chief executive of CBS, memorably said.

Money isn't fixing any of the problems with our politics, our political parties, or our politicians.  More money is only making things worse.