If he can make it there...

... then anywhere, you know.  (And so can she.)

And now, after competing press releases and months of negotiations, the two Democratic presidential candidates have their chance to show which one of them is ready to make it all the way to the White House.

A political subway series, if you will, ladies and gentlemen. Two (sort of) New Yorkers battle it out on the debate stage again just days before the Empire State votes on Tuesday, April 19. 

ABC's five things to watch for this evening include the skills of one-upsmanship (without being too nasty), Round Two of the 'qualified' spat, Wall Street connections and how they might be linked to terrorism, and fracking and momentum.

Let's read the latest from the NYT's First Draft:

Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont will hold a debate at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, hosted by CNN and NY1. Their contest has become increasingly nasty, although it is genteel compared with the Republicans. But they are clearly sick of each other and tired of hiding it. Mr. Sanders has struggled in New York amid tough questions, and he has been tripped up on issues related to Israel. The borough is home to a large Orthodox Jewish population, a fact that might come up.

Brooklyn is also home to a large African-American population. Mrs. Clinton received a lukewarm response at a National Action Network conference hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton on Wednesday as she dealt with fallout from a racially hued joke during a skit on Saturday with Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York. 

Oh yeah, there might be something racial that gets discussed.  Fun.

I'll be filling up the Tweet feed on the right with the smarts and snark of others mostly, so if you don't do Twitter but want some (ten-to thirty-second delayed) play-by-play, I'll be there for you.

Clinton, Sanders, and the Empire State

We might get back around to who's qualified and who's not by Thursday, but if we don't there's still plenty of topics upon which the Democratic Party's race for the presidency is going to be decided, on the debate stage or off.  One is that the NY primary is closed, which aids Hillary Clinton and hinders Bernie Sanders since the election data has demonstrated his strength among indys, who would have had to register as a D weeks ago in order to vote next week (as Donald Trump's children glaringly reminded us).  That helps us understand why Clinton has taken to questioning Sanders' Democratic bonafides; she's speaking to a New York electorate that votes in that primary consistently, and not so much for the Zephyr Teachouts on the ballot.

And despite her (and her husband's) by-now-typical collection of verbal malaprops, Clinton maintains a solid polling lead in New York.  Also in spite of her waffling on the death penalty, as well as some historical and damning evidence that black folk have been taken for a ride downtown in the back of the squad car for the past twenty-two years courtesy of the Clintons -- long before social media's scrutiny of summary executions by paranoid, trigger-happy LEO became a thing -- that support base is still standing by their woman.

This is best explained in the context of why Bernie Sanders has been unable to erode her support by Salim Muwakkil at In These Times.  Go read the whole thing; the following has three links you should also check out.

Many are perplexed by what they consider black Americans’ perverse allegiance to Clinton. Michelle Alexander, author of the highly influential The New Jim Crow, for example, argued in a widely discussed Nation essay that Clinton is undeserving of black support. Alexander notes that the Clintons “presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.”

Others are not so perplexed. Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, argues that black people “tune Sanders out, because their main purpose for voting in national elections is to keep the White Man’s Party, the Republicans, out of the White House, and believe Clinton has a better shot.”

I think Ford is on target, and although he bemoans this tendency, it’s one that’s been honed by centuries of hard-earned experience. New York Times columnist Charles Blow calls it “functional pragmatism.”

Alexander, Ford, Blow, and other black intelligentsia (some would call 'elite') including Dr. Cornel West, radio show host Tavis Smiley, rapper Killer Mike, author Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hollywood- connected activists Spike Lee, Sidney Poitier, Danny Glover and others -- have made the case for Sanders over Clinton, but their 'bookish, boutique' support, as Muwakkil calls it, doesn't resonate with the African American working class that votes in droves for Democrats, mostly establishment ones.  There is no 'gospel accent' (again, Muwakkil's term).  It helps to apply Rev. Al Sharpton to this label, and note that while he had a sit-down with Bernie two months ago, he's also been critical.  Sharpton's blessing may be the key to victory for one or the other; so far he's not giving it up.

What I find profound (as the unenlightened middle-aged white guy) is this.

The significance of these ideological nuances made a brief appearance during a debate in Flint, Michigan, when Sanders’ response to a question about his “racial blind spots” implied that only black people live in “ghettos” and that most black people were poor.

It was a minor verbal gaffe that was likely the product of debate exhaustion. But it was a gaffe that might also be characterized as a “Marxian slip,” in that a bit of Bernie’s worldview slipped out. Specifically, his conflation of black America with the lumpenproletariat, a Marxist-Leninist conceit widely held during the days of the Black Panther Party, the time of Sanders’ ideological formation, but one that can elide the specificities of racial oppression and the subtleties of class divisions in the black community.

It was indeed a slip for Sanders. He’s been trying hard to update his rhetoric to be more attentive to issues of white supremacy. He effectively incorporated an early encounter with Black Lives Matter protesters into a more inclusive campaign platform.

But his gaffe also played into an ongoing squabble among progressives about the role of race in the class struggle (or the role of class in the racial struggle). That disagreement has been debated rancorously for the better part of a century now. And despite the historic campaign Bernie Sanders has run in this election, we still don’t seem any closer to resolving it.

I had to Google some of those words to get the full meaning.  I didn't when I read D. R. Tucker in Washington Monthly a couple of weeks ago: that blacks just aren't so keen on Bernie's message of upending the system because they have long sought a seat at the table within the system.  A piece of the pie, as The Jeffersons soundtrack sang about.

In all likelihood, most African-American voters reject Sanders because they reject the tenets of democratic socialism, preferring a more effectively regulated capitalism as a solution to the country’s woes. Sanders’s call for a “political revolution” is one most African-American voters do not hear. They don’t want to overthrow the current system; they just want more fairness in the current system.

[...]

It is this ethos—the creed of the African-American striver—that fuels black opposition to democratic socialism. Most black voters would agree with Sanders that the system is rigged; they’d specifically point out that the system has been rigged against African-Americans since 1619. Yet most African-Americans do not wish for the system to be destroyed: they wish for the system to be un-rigged, to be made fair, to be made whole.

[...]

Most African-Americans believe in capitalism, and praise those who have overcome the obstacles of racism to succeed in a capitalist system. They do not believe that capitalism and racism are inextricably linked; they believe it is possible to reduce bias without having to shift towards democratic socialism. In other words, Sanders’s core message—his linking of racism and other social “-isms” to capitalism—is one most African-American voters have zero affinity for.

Bernie's win in Michigan pointed to the class distinctions between Southern African Americans (low wages, no unions) and Midwestern ones (unions and high wages) as part of the reason why he won there and lost badly to Clinton in the South.  Reasonable enough, but not as thorough as Muwakkil and Tucker.

Last summer I wrote about the two reasons Bernie wouldn't win the nomination: minority voters and superdelegates.  So all of this helps me better understand why, exactly, that forecast is coming into tighter focus.  I'll hold off on another prediction until after Thursday night's debate, but absent something earth-quaking the nom is still Hillary's to lose.  And she could still lose it.

Update (4/14) More from Nina Turner.

SEC charges Paxton with stock fraud

Civil charges (which means a fine), not criminal, as with the state jail felonies he's been facing.  In fact there's only a few new details to add to this embarrassment.

U.S. regulators charged Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday for his alleged role in a stock scam that defrauded investors in a Texas-based technology company called Servergy Inc.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused the company and former Chief Executive Officer William Mapp of selling private stock while misleading investors about the energy efficiency of its sole product, and accused Paxton of working to raise investor funds for the company without disclosing his commissions.

The SEC's civil case followed a related criminal case against Paxton for securities fraud. Last year, a Texas state grand jury indicted Paxton for his alleged role in a scheme to mislead investors.

Let's skip over to the Chron for this:

The complaint alleges that Paxton told the SEC that he intended to pay for the shares and even offered to pay $100,000 to Mapp during a meeting at a Dairy Queen in McKinney, Texas.

According to Paxton, Mapp then said, "I can't take your money. God doesn't want me to take your money." So Paxton took the shares as a gift.

The Lord's name invoked over BeltBusters, fries, and shakes at DQ as the dirty deal went down.  That's what I like about Texas.  More from the Houston Press:

Paxton's connection to Servergy has been one of the most intriguing details about the AG's current legal woes. Before his indictment on state securities fraud charges last summer, the SEC had already accused Servergy of lying to investors by falsely claiming its data servers had already been sold to huge companies, like Amazon and Freescale. The SEC claims Servergy even lied to investors about the very servers the company was selling, falsely claiming the machines required 80 percent less cooling, energy and space than others on the market.

According to a press release announcing federal charges against Paxton and others, the SEC claims former Servergy CEO William Mapp sold millions of dollars in company stock by exaggerating his product's merits. As for Amazon's supposed interest in the company's servers, the press release states: "In reality, an Amazon employee had merely contacted Servergy because he wanted to test the product in his free time for personal use."

And last, this.

Bill Miller, a longtime Austin consultant who has represented politicians under investigation and facing criminal charges, said he expects Monday's federal charges will only make Paxton "lock down for the long haul. He will not step down."

"The feds are straight-up business in cases like this," Miller said. "They don't care whether he's attorney general or not, and they're going to press ahead with their case – and you can expect him to fight it," he said. "In a case like this, once you're there – like he is now – he's going to tough it out to the end."

Paxton is relying on the same Lone Star justice that saw Rick Perry skate on his indictments, which is that the courts in Texas are overwhelmingly Republican-elected and thus deliver their own unique interpretations of the law.  Republican voters picked Paxton in the runoff two springs ago over Dan Branch -- who was endorsed by W Bush -- despite his having already confessed to his crimes, mostly because (and here I have to make an educated guess about the rationale formed in the mind of the typical Republican primary runoff voter) of Paxton's personal relationship with Ted Cruz Jesus Christ.

After all, if you're only accountable for your sins on the day you stand before your god, who is the GOP base to judge you?

The Weekly Wrangle

No members of the Texas Progressive Alliance can be found in the Panama Papers, but there are some salacious blog posts in this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff warns about the likelihood of North Carolina-style anti-equality legislation being put forth in next year's Legislature.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos believes the GOP deserves its bigoted presidential frontrunners. 50+ years of an ugly dog whistling Southern Strategy reaps the worst among us. The Republican Party and its bigoted frontrunners. The devil made them do it.

Ken Paxton, under indictment for fraud, hired another theocrat on the public dime. CouldBeTrue at South Texas Chisme doesn't think much of his family values.

Socratic Gadfly takes a look at Bernie Sanders, presidential politician.

One of the topics later this week in the New York Democratic presidential debate will surely be qualifications to be president, writes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

jobsanger calls 'BernieBros' the TeaBaggers of the left, and Bay Area Houston goes after Sanders' "quote-unquote".

Egberto Willies wonders if the Dem primary is on the verge of implosion, like the GOP's.

Neil at All People Have Value said that while we discuss the anti-gay legislation in North Carolina and Mississippi, we should recall that Houston voters repealed our human rights ordinance just a few months ago. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

And the Lewisville Texan Journal eulogizes former mayor Gene Carey.

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

And here are more posts from the Texas blogosphere.

In a truly horrible account, Trail Blazers points how badly 4-year-old Leiliana Wright needed Dallas CPS, and how it failed at every turn.

Grits for Breakfast updates on legislation in California and Texas regarding 'junk science writs'.

Prairie Weather is struck with a realization while reading Robert Kaiser's The Disaster of Richard Nixon: maybe this is how the Republicans can appear to get away with 'it'.

Idiotprogrammer has some e-publishing updates you might be interested in.

Ashton Woods at Strength in Numbers clears up a few misconceptions.

Better Texas Blog argues that sales tax holidays are not good for consumers.

The Lunch Tray gives a meal delivery service a try.

Paradise in Hell looks forward to being able to discriminate against numerous of his fellow citizens who have raised his holy ire.

The TSTA Blog bemoans the effect of ideology on public education.

The Makeshift Academic examines cost sharing and access to health care.

The Urban Edge defends the maligned urban freeway.

And Pages of Victory tells some stories about hitchhiking and train-jumping.

Sunday 'It's Up to You, New York" Funnies

"Trump shuffles campaign staff after stumbles"

On qualifications

The temperature inside the Democratic bubble increased overnight, with Twitter hashtags and their subsequent hijacking the order of the morning.  I think I'll dodge the catfight except to point out that Hillary and her people have always been just this progressive in their acidity, and she appears to have dragged Bernie down to her level at last, with this 'who's qualified' crapola.

Following a week where Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign refused to agree to a New York debate unless Bernie Sanders “toned down” his campaign, the Clinton campaign escalated its negative tone against Sanders, with one aide telling CNN their goal was to “disqualify” and “defeat him.”

One day after losing the Wisconsin primary by a sizable margin, Clinton appeared on “Morning Joe.” POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush gave Clinton a flattering interview. The New York Daily News published a cover story headlined, “Bernie’s Sandy Hook shame.” It accused Sanders of callously defending gun manufacturers against a lawsuit brought by relatives of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

As CNN reported, “It’s the latest chapter in Clinton’s approach to Sanders. She’s tried ignoring him, brushing him aside, gently dismissing his policies.”

“The Clinton campaign has refrained from going nuclear on Sanders, aides say, in large part to keep at least some goodwill alive in hopes of unifying the party at the end of the primary fight,” according to CNN. “No more, a top adviser [said]. The fight is on. Extending an olive branch to Sanders’ supporters ‘will come later.'

This is what her supporters refer to as her being "battle-tested", this fighting dirty like a Republican business.  It's one of the descriptions they file under 'qualified' (that she's withered the assaults from the right-wing and come out smiling).  The difference with Clinton is that all of her constant battling has left her weary and reactive in the most negative sense.  It has absolutely changed her for the worse over time.  Bearing scars from past scrapes has made her a much more bitter, vindictive candidate, one completely tone-deaf to her own hypocrisy.

To be redundant about it, I just don't think this long experience of fighting with everyone qualifies as a worthwhile presidential qualification.  And to be clear, I like my Democrats to be fighters, as a long list of archived posts here would show.  But in 2016, as in 2008, as her campaign loses enthusiasm and momentum, she and her subordinates aren't actually battling anything; they're flailing like a fish on the dock, trying to stick a spiny fin into somebody as they gasp for breath.

(T)he Clinton campaign and media outlets like CNN promote a false narrative that the campaign has not been in attack mode. Since September, she has used a network of surrogates and rapid response super PACs to push anti-Sanders talking points into the media.

Shadowproof has documented a pattern of dishonest attacks and rumors, particularly since January. The attacks include: Sanders supports Minutemen vigilantes and similar anti-immigrant hate groups, Sanders opposed bailing out auto workers, Sanders supports the NRA, Sanders wants to dismantle the Affordable Health Care Act, Sanders supported the indefinite detention of immigrants, and Sanders sees President Barack Obama as “weak” and will not support Obama’s legacy.

Voters have yet to see the full scope of what the Clinton campaign will sling at Sanders, but today’s interviews indicate she will return to her effort to paint Sanders as a gun-lover. She will focus on the fact that he is an independent senator, and, therefore, he is not a Democrat who will help the Democratic Party win in down-ballot elections in November. She also will attack him on regulating “too big to fail” banks and re-up her artful smear that Sanders has no respect for President Obama.

Let's take one example: the two candidates' perches on money in politics.  She has chosen the Rovian path -- attack your competitor's strength -- with her lambasting his responses in the now-infamous NYDN interview.

Hillary Clinton fashions herself as the ultimate general in a war against big-money politics.

“You're not going to find anybody more committed to aggressive campaign finance reform than me,” Clinton said following the New Hampshire primary.

But the Democratic presidential front-runner stands poised to bludgeon her general election opponent with Republicans’ favorite political superweapon: the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which earlier this decade launched a new era of unbridled fundraising.

Clinton’s massive campaign machine is built of the very stuff — super PACs, secret cash, unlimited contributions — she says she’ll attack upon winning the White House.

Indeed, a Center for Public Integrity investigation reveals that Clinton’s own election efforts are largely immune from her reformist platform. While Clinton rails against “unaccountable money" that is “corrupting our political system,” corporations, unions and nonprofits bankrolled by unknown donors have already poured millions of dollars into a network of Clinton-boosting political organizations. That’s on top of the tens of millions an elite club of Democratic megadonors, including billionaires George Soros and Haim Saban, have contributed.

She has to keep having $700,000 fundraisers with George Clooney headlining because Bernie Sanders gets $1.5 million dollars a day from people who can only give $27 on average.  I'm sure it's been humiliating for Candidate Clinton to have to keep beating the streets for more big donors even as Sanders outraises her with his legions of small ones.  This is to say nothing about the ethical standards of the people who are raising her money.  They're not all as squeaky clean as Clooney.

Her ability to pump this much jack -- specifically the craven panhandling for it -- has become a liability, one holding sway with Republicans as well as Democrats.

A Center for Public Integrity/Ipsos poll conducted in late February indicates many potential general election voters are likewise concerned about how serious Clinton is about remaking the nation’s campaign system —a monumental challenge under any circumstance, but a goal supported by the vast majority of Americans.

Half of all poll respondents overall — and nearly four in 10 self-identified Democrats — said Clinton is relying on super PACs and big money too much. That compares to 18 percent overall who said Clinton is relying on them the “right amount” and 5 percent who said “too little.”

And when asked, “If elected president, which of the following would do the most to reform the campaign finance system and make it less reliant on big money?” Clinton trailed both Sanders and Trump among respondents.

Her deeds don't match her words.  She has no credibility on the issue.

Citizens United reformer or no, she's very unlikely to be getting things done, progressively or not-so-much, with a Congress gone putrid after eight years of obstructing Obama.  (Sanders will have this same problem as well, of course.)  Supreme Court justice nominees with a freshly-Democratic Senate in 2017 should fare better, but climate initiatives that include something as innocuous as a BDS effort are a non-starter in a Clinton II Administration, and forget about $15/hour minimum wage jobs and an economy for the working class and not the investor/donor class.

As with our government-approved, private sector profit-motivated healthcare insurance, we're all just going to have to "keep shopping" until we find something we can get by with.  If the definition of 'qualified' includes the public duty of First Lady as her longest term of experience -- neither an elected nor appointed position -- yet you wish to have that experience considered only when it suits you and not when it doesn't, then we might just have to agree to disagree.

Sanders keeps winning, still losing; Carnival Cruz sails ahead

Post-Badger State wins for both, Ted Cruz's prospects for snatching the GOP nomination -- unfortunately for us all -- appear to be a little brighter than Bernie's.

First, the losers.

As the results came in from Wisconsin last night, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the front-runners in the Republican and Democratic primaries, were nowhere to be seen. According to reports from the television networks’ campaign correspondents, they were both in New York. Trump was holed up in Trump Tower, and Clinton, after attending a fund-raiser in Riverdale, had returned to her family’s home in Chappaqua, in Westchester County. The fact that Trump and Clinton had chosen to stay at home and not to schedule any press availabilities indicated that they were both expecting to lose. However, it is doubtful that either of them expected to be defeated quite so badly.

Lucky thirteen.

In the Republican primary, Ted Cruz beat Trump by about thirteen percentage points, forty-eight per cent to thirty-five per cent, delighting the organizers of the “Never Trump” movement. And in the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders also won by about thirteen points, fifty-six per cent to forty-three per cent, earning his sixth victory in the last seven contests. Despite the fact that Sanders had been expected to win in Wisconsin, and that his campaign had expended a lot of energy and money there, his margin of victory was impressive. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, Clinton was holding a narrow lead in the polls. Buoyed by a large turnout, Sanders turned that deficit around and won handily. According to the network exit poll, he came out ahead among voters of both sexes and all income groups, and with college graduates and those who did not graduate college.

It should be stated straight away that neither of the two Wisconsin results made much immediate difference in regard to the delegate math, which will ultimately decide who the parties’ Presidential nominees are. Both Trump and Clinton still have substantial leads in the number of elected delegates, and Clinton also has a big advantage over Sanders among Democratic superdelegates—party officials and politicians who can cast votes for whomever they want at the convention. (The Republicans have far fewer superdelegates.)

On the Republican side, forty-two delegates were up for grabs in Wisconsin, which is a “winner-takes-most” state for the G.O.P. The nature of the contest insured that Cruz received the overwhelming number of those delegates: as of this writing, he was set to win either thirty-six or thirty-nine, depending on the final vote tallies. That left just three or six delegates for Trump, who went into the night with two hundred and fifty more delegates than the Texas senator.

It sets us up nicely for the New York debate between Clinton and Sanders on April 14 and the vote on the 19th.  My expectation is that Hillary and the Prags are going to come out slinging.  More bricks and bats in the Five Points from Poop Cruz and Drumpf are on tap as well.

What can’t be disputed is that both New York primaries are shaping up to be epic showdowns. Trump, who has had a terrible couple of weeks, will be trying to steady things and confirm his position as the front-runner. Sanders will be seeking an upset victory in the state that Clinton served as a senator and where she now lives—a result that would hit the Democratic Party like an earthquake.

[...]

... It’s hard not to see Cruz’s victory as a consolidation of anti-Trump forces—one that is likely to continue and perhaps expand further, especially if John Kasich, who finished a distant third in Wisconsin, were to drop out. (Despite the result, he showed no signs of doing so. “Nothing is more important than winning back the White House in November,” his campaign tweeted. “Only John Kasich can make that happen.”)

Watch to see how the state elections going forward -- New York and Pennsylvania this month -- have different elements that favor Clinton and Trump to some greater degree. 

From now on, most of the primaries, including New York’s, will be closed or semi-closed, and many will take place in states with a larger percentage of minority voters than Wisconsin has. That doesn’t mean that Sanders can’t win in such places. It does mean, however, that he will have to win over more registered Democrats and non-whites than he has previously.

Senior pol David Gergen sees Trump now as the underdog.

With 16 primaries and caucuses remaining, Donald Trump has to win 70% of the delegates to secure the 1,237 needed to win a first ballot at the Republican convention. Several states are coming up that are more favorable territory for Trump than Cruz, especially New York and Pennsylvania where Trump still has significant leads.

Even so, winning more than two thirds of the remaining delegates is a daunting challenge for him. In the 36 primaries and caucuses leading up to Wisconsin, Trump won only 46% of the delegates. And now he heads down a tough homestretch with Cruz seizing the momentum.

In a year crammed with surprises, no one can say for sure what will unfold in Cleveland, Ohio. But there are two likely outcomes: First, Cruz and Trump have each vowed to vote against a change in the GOP's Rule 40. That's an obscure provision that requires any candidate to win at least eight primaries and caucuses before he or she can be nominated.

Trump and Cruz will be the only two people in Cleveland with that distinction. They should also have enough delegate strength between them to block a rewrite of Rule 40. In other words, potential candidates like John Kasich, Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney won't be eligible even if many delegates think them likely to fare better against Hillary Clinton -- the race could narrow to Trump vs. Cruz.

If Trump then falls short on the first ballot, there will be a donnybrook. But it is now becoming apparent that Cruz is much better prepared to win that fight. Trump has run a campaign long on the outside game of televised rallies but short on the inside game of quietly piling up delegates.

[...]

In a first ballot, delegates must vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged but thereafter, of course, may vote for someone else. Signs increasingly point to the fact that Republican party regulars pledged to Trump are ready to bolt on a second or third ballot. With Cruz the only other man in the race, that almost certainly means they will drift -- rush? --toward the Texan, and he will take the crown.

Wisconsin exit polls gave further evidence, as if any were needed, that Trump's self-destructive behavior in the two weeks leading up to the vote cost him dearly. He reacted so badly to various challenges, especially in his inability to speak clearly about abortion, that one wondered whether he had tired of the game and wanted to go home. Wisconsin voters punished him severely.

Trump's trump card has always been to ditch the Republicans and go his own third way, but the time remaining for him to qualify for the ballot on enough states to compete -- not to mention the 'sore loser' laws that would prevent him from doing so in states like Texas -- make it clear he can't be anything but a pure spoiler in that regard.

Is it possible that Trump is going to prove to be a very bright flash in the GOP pan?  Can the so-called establishment wrest control from him, only to see Cruz grab the rebound?

So if we're headed to a Hillary v. Ted fall matchup, the Texas media will be thrilled, crowing about all the Lone Star influence to be had once again in DC and yaddayadda, and with Julian Castro riding side-saddle with Calamity Clinton producing the same measure of Texas pride in Democrats, maybe we won't all be bored to tears.  Nobody should whine about Texas not being a swing state, thus nobody should complain if Bernie's revolution keeps going left and maybe Green.  There will still be angry conservatives in bunches when Cruz runs aground on the shoals of sanity, the po' folks will still be scratching out a living without making time to vote, and the biggest headache the wealthy will have is crossing Panama off their tax haven lists.

Kinda sorta same as it ever was.