The Weekly Wet Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance stands with the LGBTQ communities of North Carolina and Mississippi as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff looks at the insane amounts of money being spent on the Austin rideshare referendum.

Libby Shaw, contributing at Daily Kos, sounds the alarm bells on Ted Cruz. Desperate Republican donors, afraid of Trump, are rallying around the scary man from Texas. Beware Ted Cruz. He is more dangerous than W.

Socratic Gadfly wonders if California's expected full legalization of marijuana could be the impetus in it joining North Dakota and creating a state bank.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes that the Texas Republican party, like its national parent, is heading further down the rat hole. John Cornyn was bad enough, but Ken Paxton et al maybe worse.

The water got hotter for Texas AG K-Pax as the feds piled on with some stock fraud charges. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs wishes the GOP would take out their trash and clean up their mess, but isn't going to hold his breath waiting for it.

Egberto Willies knows Lady Liberty, aka the woman who was arrested in the Democracy Spring protests last week, and interviewed her for his radio program on KPFT.

In Denton and via Bluedaze, a screening of the film Dear President Obama is being held at the University of North Texas on Wednesday, April 20.

Texas Vox had the advance on the protest by Native Peoples at the Dos Republicas coal mine, near Eagle Pass.

Lewisville's outdoor arts festival Colorpalooza was a hit despite the weekend rains, reports the Texan Journal.

And Neil at All People Have Value spotted and snapped a rainbow over a Walgreens in Houston.  APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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

More blog posts about Texas from around Texas!

The Observer describes how Amarillo became both safe haven for -- and then a battle ground over -- economic and war refugees from across the world.

The Houston Press underscores the glaring sexual misconduct hypocrisies in the Baylor University football program.

BOR has point/counter point posts about whether the Texas GOP state leadership is still funny, or not quite so much.

Robert Rivard takes issue with a proposal to build a minor league baseball stadium in San Antonio.

Former Texan Elise Hu muses about female role models.

Genevieve Cato tackles the problem of how female ambition is perceived.

Austin On Your Feet, Mike Dahmus, and Austin Teacher Dad all weigh in on the May 7 referendum to repeal Austin's ordinance that regulates vehicles for hire companies like Uber and Lyft.

Newsdesk introduces the anti-LGBT culture warriors who will be running the Attorney General's office during those times when AG Ken Paxton is too busy defending himself from multiple criminal allegations to do it.

Grits for Breakfast calls the ban on surrogate social media accounts for inmates a bad idea.

Juanita Jean welcomes Tom DeLay back to the scene.

The Rag Blog hosts actress/singer Barbara Williams and her husband Tom Hayden on Tuesday, April 26 at Austin's High Road on Dawson.  Hayden has recently switched his support from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton, notes Ted at jobsanger.

Prairie Weather excerpts some letters to the editor of the New York Times about the Democratic presidential primary, and Carol Morgan excoriates CNN for portraying the Clintons in 'Tom and Daisy from The Great Gatsby' fashion.

And Pages of Victory declares such in the War on Poison Ivy.

Sunday Funnies

Find many more toons from this past week -- none repeated here -- at Balloon Juice and the World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon.

No sleep 'til (after) Brooklyn

Apologies to the Beasties.

The bitter struggle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination erupted into fractious and at times personal attacks on Thursday night as the simmering animosities between the two candidates burst onto a Brooklyn stage.

In the ninth and possibly last televised debate between the former secretary of state and US senator from Vermont, the candidates hurled themselves at each other in barely restrained terms. From the first minute of the two-hour event to its final moment, they questioned each other’s judgment, susceptibility to lobbyists and grasp of political reality in by far the most heated discussion of the campaign to date.

From Wall Street to the minimum wage, gun control and mass incarceration, Israel and climate change, the rivals battled to set themselves apart in the hope of pulling ahead in the race. With the stakes so high – just five days before the critical ballot in New York state that carries a bonanza of 291 delegates out of the 2,383 needed to win – the rhetoric also reached a new intensity.

Right from the get-go, they were slugging each other.

“Oh my goodness, they must have been really crushed by this,” Sanders said to Clinton earlier on, referring to her claims that she was tough on the big banks. “And was that before or after you received huge sums of money by giving speaking engagements?” he went on, in a tone that went beyond sarcasm into the fringes of disdain.

The debate was feisty from the off. Sanders walked back from previous comments that he thought his competitor was unqualified for the White House. Answering a question on whether Clinton had the experience and intelligence to be president, he said: “Of course she does.” But hardly pausing for breath, he clarified: “I do question her judgment. I question a judgment which voted for the war in Iraq – the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of this country.”

There's much more at the Guardian, CBS relates more detail of the issues they quarreled about, and CNN has six takeaways, but ultimately this sparring revealed that the campaigns reached critical mass, and the most recent polling shows Sanders falling farther back.

Latest opinion surveys suggest that Clinton is extending her lead in New York with an NBC 4 New York/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll putting her 17 percentage points ahead, on 57% to Sanders’ 40%. But Sanders shows no signs of going away quietly. He came into the debate with wind in his sails, following an epic rally in Washington Square park in Manhattan on Wednesday night, attended by 27,000.

Bernie is on his way to the Vatican this morning to give a speech.  Hillary canceled a town hall on Good Morning America today, probably to rest up for her two California fundraisers this weekend, including another gig with the Clooneys.  New Yorkers vote in four days, and your taxes are due (if you haven't done them already, of course).

I'm going to try to make it out to the CounterCurrent Festival this weekend, maybe eat some crawfish.  See you later.

Update: Harry Cheadle at VICE wraps it up tight,  Socratic Gadfly's take is sharp, with a cartoon I was planning on using (Juanita Jean at the WMDBS usually pre-empts some of my selections on Fridays, making me scramble),  and Talking Points Memo has the details of the kerfuffle that has broken out overnight between the Israeli/Jewish liberal and conservative sides, who keep fighting their own war between themselves as a smaller skirmish within the larger Palestinian question.  The first paragraph at this MSNBC link tells what the debate mentions about Israel and Palestine were really all about.

Sanders was speaking mostly to American liberals (who are increasingly sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians), while Clinton was speaking to New Yorkers (whose Jewish community is still pretty pro-Israel). And by the way, yesterday’s NBC New York/WSJ/Marist poll – which came out before the debate – showed Clinton leading Sanders among Jewish Democrats in New York by a 2-to-1 margin, 65%-32%.

Crawfish.  And outdoor festivals.  Yeah, that's the ticket.

Update II: Oh, and Vox has 2 winners -- Bernie Sanders and the Fight for $15 (minimum wage), catching Hillary in another of her ridiculous waffles -- and three losers: Clinton (naturally), the lame-ass New Democrats, and 'liberal technocrats'...

The dynamic you see here is one where there's such overwhelming grassroots support for an idea that even policy elites who traditionally take it upon themselves to moderate and channel on-the-ground sentiment into more viable policy avenues aren't doing that. They're jumping on board and then talking to journalists like me off the record about their concerns, and about their concerns as to what happens if their misgivings were to become public.

Big ideas defeat pragmatism once again.  More, please.