Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Bowie Toons


"Time may change me,
But I can't trace time."



"We could be heroes,
just for one day."



Big political events this week

-- Obama's final State of the Union address is tonight.  He intends to burnish his legacy, as lame ducks do.  How's he done in the past seven years with respect to promises kept?

-- Fresh polling has both the Democrats and the Republicans nervous as turkeys at Thanksgiving.  Both parties' establishment caucuses are busy strategizing Plan Bs.  Here's the 'shock me' nut graf for the Blue Team:

Because of the weakness Hillary is showing in the polls, Wall Street is thinking of backing another Democrat to stop Bernie, who obviously would be their worst nightmare.  Names mentioned this morning: Biden, Kerry and Bloomberg.

I still don't think Hillary is going to be denied the nomination even if she loses both Iowa and New Hampshire, which are neck-and-neck today.  But she's definitely a frog in a pot on the stove with the burner set to 'high'.  I believe she'll  jump out of hot water when she goes after Bernie on his gun stance in this coming Sunday's debate (as I wrote at the end of this post).  But H.A. Goodman is coming to his rescue, digging out some old quotes where she describes herself as a "pro-gun churchgoer".  So it's possible that chameleon Clinton is going to have change her colors once more.

Update: ICYMI there was an Iowa forum yesterday, sponsored by Fusion for black and brown Democrats, with all three candidates participating.  Did you catch it?  Did you even know about it?  If you didn't, thank Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

-- South Carolina will be pivotal for the Repugs as well, because Ted Cruz is going to come from behind in Iowa and Donald Trump will rebound in New Hampshire.  Trump still shows a small lead in the Hawkeye State, but they caucus there and his fans are too busy to show up for him.  Cruz, on the other hand, holds the evangelicals in his hands FTW.

I am enjoying the way they snipe at each other, however.  Trump played the birther card on Cruz; it went national again with screeching on both sides of the "is he eligible" question.  Trump is now playing Springsteen's "Born in the USA" at his rallies, while Cruz responds with a Tweet of the YouTube of Fonzie jumping the shark.


Happy days are here again.

-- The next GOP debate is Thursday night and Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina both got demoted to the JV team.  And Rand won't play at the kid's table.

"An artificial designation as being in the second tier is something we can't accept," (Paul) told CNN on Monday. "I won't participate in anything that's not the first tier."

Rand's the first man out after Iowa.  As New York Mag reminds, the year of the libertarian Republican has been eclipsed by the year of the fascist one.

Update: Moron Majority has debate questions for the remaining participants.  A few...

Donald Trump – “Not much is known about your wife, Melania. How do you think your supporters, especially evangelicals, would react knowing that  if you were elected, she would be the first First Lady to have posed nude?”

Ted Cruz – “Why does everyone hate you? Even your old college roommate, Craig Mazin, said,“I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”

Jeb Bush – “Do you regret not having listened to the words of your mother when her advice to you about running for president was: don’t?”

And Republican Talking Head John Feehery could vote for Trump because "nothing suggests he is a racist", but NOT for Cruz because he's "the new Nixon".  If that doesn't tell you how discombobulated the GOP is right now...

Monday, January 11, 2016

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance wouldn't trust Greg Abbott to write a grocery list as it brings you this week's roundup.


Off the Kuff interviewed Harris County DA candidates Morris Overstreet and Kim Ogg.

Libby Shaw, contributing to Daily Kos, has had it. The governor's call for a constitutional convention deserves the lampooning and mockery it receives. The Texas Blues: Living in a place run by drunk monkeys and petulant teenagers.

Having grown up in the West and been to that area, SocraticGadfly surveyed the details of the Oregon standoff and then -- inspired by the #BundyEroticFanFic hashtag -- took time to write some purple prose.

Dan Patrick is on a crusade to kill public education. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme doesn't want the Koch brothers or any religious using our tax dollars to force the indoctrination our children.

The sudden and untimely vacancy on the Harris County Commissioners Court has been covered extensively by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Ted at jobsanger is already concern-trolling progressives to vote for Hillary.  (It seems the "cascade of anxiety" has reached Amarillo.)

McBlogger takes down a CEO for exceptionally dumb remarks against raising the minimum wage.

TXsharon at Bluedaze points out the differences between Austin's gas plant and Denton's.

Consistent with what Houston is all about, Neil at All People Have Value took a picture of contrasting things in close proximity to one another. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.


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

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

The Texas Observer's Strangest State has news you may have missed from Tahoka, Dogwood City, Marshall, Schulenburg, and Tyler.

Lone Star Ma documents some no-open-carry businesses, the Dallas Observer has some helpful etiquette tips for the open carry era, and the San Antonio Current provides a comprehensive list of Texas businesses that have said no to open carry.

The TSTA Blog is wary of new education commissioner Mike Morath, and The Lunch Tray reports that school kids today are making better lunch choices thanks to the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act.

The Texas Election Law Blog surveyed scholarly coverage of Evenwel v. Abbott.

The Makeshift Academic frets over labor's prospects in 2016.

Grits for Breakfast is in Missouri mode when it comes to resolving the Harris County jail's overpopulation.

Jeff Singer flies back in his time machine to 1938 to watch the Donald Trump of Texas, Pappy O'Daniel.

BOR is looking for writers.

Finally, the TPA extends its thanks and best wishes to Texas Civil Rights Project founder Jim Harrington on his retirement.

Friday, January 08, 2016

Wasserman Schultz draws a primary challenger

Maybe she will finally get the message: "It's over. Resign from the DNC or be booted from Congress (or both, preferably)."


Here's a snip from his bio:

Canova was an early critic of financial deregulation and the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan. In the 1980s, he wrote critically of the federal bailout of Continental Illinois, the nation’s seventh largest commercial bank, and the collapse of the savings & loan industry. In the 1990s, prior to the Asian currency contagion, he argued against the liberalization of capital accounts. Throughout the Bush administration, he warned of an impending crisis in the bubble economy. Since 2008, he has lectured and written widely on the causes and consequences of the present economic and financial crisis. In 2011, Tim Canova was appointed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to serve on an Advisory Committee on Federal Reserve Reform with leading economists, including Jeffrey Sachs, Robert Reich, James Galbraith, and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stieglitz..."

Frankly he could be Bernie's running mate and I'd be almost as happy.  But DWS needs to go and Canova is virtually a dream replacement for her.

Canova's entry is the culmination of a pretty horrible week for Wasserman Schultz; I've signed no fewer than five different petitions from various organizations, which have collected tens of thousands of signatures in a matter of days, calling for her resignation from the DNC.  Her refusal to expand the primary debate schedule, her suspending the Sanders campaign from its voter lists, and associated misconduct seems to have finally caught up to her, but she's made her situation much worse just this week.  In a gaffe she certainly never saw coming, she outed herself as a abolitionist on marijuana even as she has taken money from alcohol PACs.  The Intercept has the best executive summary of this appalling ignorance and hypocrisy.

Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told the New York Times  she continues to oppose legalizing marijuana — even as she has courted alcohol PACs as one of the largest sources of her campaign funding.

Wasserman Schultz, a House Democrat from Florida, said she doesn’t “think we should legalize more mind-altering substances if we want to make it less likely that people travel down the path toward using drugs. We have had a resurgence of drug use instead of a decline. There is a huge heroin epidemic.”

The fifth-largest pool of money the congresswoman has collected for her re-election campaign has been from the beer, wine, and liquor industry. The $18,500 came from PACs including Bacardi USA, the National Beer Wholesalers Association, Southern Wine & Spirits, and the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that during a recent period, “excessive drinking was responsible for one in 10 deaths among working-age adults aged 20-64.”

When pushed by interviewer Ana Marie Cox, Wasserman Schultz said that she was “bothered by the drug culture that surrounded my childhood — not mine personally. I grew up in suburbia.”
Cox pointed out that despite the dramatic problem with opiate abuse, the state has not made opiates illegal. Wasserman Schultz responded by saying that there “is a difference between opiates and marijuana.”

She’s right about that. An estimated 8,257 Americans perished from heroin-related drug poisoning in 2013. Nearly twice as many — 16,235 — died from opioid analgesics.

There have been roughly zero deaths from marijuana abuse.

In 2014, 64 percent of self-identified Democrats told Gallup they support marijuana legalization.

Jack Moore at GQ limited his criticism to "DWS saying some stupid things about drugs", but a Democratic mega-donor -- who noted that she took sides with Republican financier Sheldon Adelson in the 2014 campaign against Florida's medical marijuana initiative, was more blunt at the time.

(John) Morgan criticized Wasserman Schultz's position. “I know personally the most-powerful players in Washington, D.C. And I can tell you that Debbie Wasserman Schultz isn’t just disliked. She’s despised. She’s an irritant," Morgan told the Miami Herald (in June, 2014). “Why she’s trying to undermine this amendment I don’t know. But I’ll tell you, I will never give a penny or raise a penny for the national party while she’s in leadership. And I have given and helped raise millions.”

Morgan obviously caught the early train on DWS.  And when she offered to flip-flop on the issue if Morgan would take back what he said, he was similarly terse:

“No,” Morgan responded. “She is a bully. I beat bullies up for a living.”

From the wayback machine and 2008 -- before her tenure as party chair began, to be clear -- we can be reminded that the DNC chairwoman supported incumbent Republicans over Democratic challengers because 'they had to work together on regional issues".  Why, Florida is just like Texas in this regard.  Do you remember that alleged progressive state representative  Garnet Coleman once said the same thing about Robert Talton?  Esquire's Charles Pierce also mentions the "bipartisan" crapola -- and Wasserman Schultz's opposition to the Iran nuclear bargain, the Cuban detente, and her financial support from the private prison industry -- when he hung out the "Help Wanted' sign at the DNC in August.

So there's a history there. But this latest fiasco is different by an order of magnitude. If DWS wants to oppose the Iran deal in her capacity as an otherwise insignificant member of the House minority, that's fine with me. But if, as it appears, as national chairman of the president's party, she actively campaigned against a measure designed to show the support of the president's party for a monumentally important White House policy initiative, then she should have been fired from that post yesterday.

She has also recently demonstrated a remarkable disconnect with what women of a generation younger than hers think about their reproductive freedoms.

Progressives and pro-choice activists are criticizing Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for saying she's seen "complacency" among young women born after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling, a landmark decision that established the right to an abortion. 

"Here’s what I see: a complacency among the generation of young women whose entire lives have been lived after Roe v. Wade was decided," she told The New York Times in an interview. 

Poor choice of words at best.  Rejoinder from Twitter and from the head of a group advocating for women's choice:

Kierra Johnson, the executive director of Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity ... suggested young people view women's health issues from a different perspective. 

"There is energy among young people around these issues -- it just may not be happening in the way that Rep. Wasserman Shultz is used to seeing," she said in a statement. "The young people that are drawn into this movement today don't see reproductive justice as wholly separate from LGBTQ equality or from racial justice or economic justice or a host of other issues." 

Wasserman Schultz just shows up lately as tone-deaf on a host of current political topics, and it's approaching toxicity for Hillary Clinton's campaign.  Not in the same way that Rahm Emanuel's widespread corruption does, but both of them represent Clinton cronyism -- yep, that's what it is, and I'll expand on it in a future post -- at its very worst.

As I said before though, I'm more than happy if she stays on at the DNC, damaging Clinton's prospects further.  That's a development I'm delighted to keep track of.