Fidel Castro still not dead, but close

By his own acknowledgement.

“I’ll be 90 years old soon,” Castro said in his most extensive public appearance in years. “Soon I’ll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and cultural goods that human beings need, and we need to fight without a truce to obtain them.”

YaddayaddavivalarevoluciónyaddaCubaLibreyadda.

“This may be one of the last times I speak in this room,” Fidel Castro said. “We must tell our brothers in Latin America and the world that the Cuban people will be victorious.”

Es demasiado dramática.

Fifty-five years after Fidel Castro declared that Cuba’s revolution was socialist and began installing a single-party system and centrally planned economy, the Cuban government is battling a deep crisis of credibility.

With no memory of the revolution’s heady first decades, younger Cubans complain bitterly about low state salaries of about $25 a month that leave them struggling to afford food and other staple goods. Cuba’s creaky state-run media and cultural institutions compete with flashy foreign programming shared online and on memory drives passed hand-to-hand. Emigration to the United States and other countries has soared to one of its highest points since the revolution.

A nation's leaders completely out of touch with its citizens.  Imagine that.

The ideological gulf between government and people widened last month when President Barack Obama became the first U.S. leader to visit Cuba in nearly 90 years and delivered a widely praised speech live on state television urging Cubans to forget the history of hostility between the U.S. and Cuba and move toward a new era of normal diplomatic and economic relations.

The Cuban government offered little unified response until the Communist Party’s Seventh Party Congress began Saturday, and one high-ranking official after another warned that the U.S. was still an enemy that wants to take control of Cuba. They said Obama’s trip represented an ideological “attack.”

[...]

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer at The New Yorker who is writing a biography of Fidel Castro, called the day’s events “a way of restoring some kind of essential revolutionary presence or muscle in the room after the star-struck effect of Obama.”

The Cuban government appears to be engaging in “overcompensation for being bowled over a little bit by Obama’s unexpectedly elegant and charismatic performance in Havana,” said Anderson, who covered the visit. “Cubans who aren’t prepared for the full extent of what he was saying, it took them aback.”

I posted mi Cubana's story -- following the passing of my father-in-law -- with the title of the phrase he and his wife (and I presume many other Cuban expatriates) often used to describe Fidel: "bicho malo nunca muere".  There's going to be a yuuuge party at our favorite Cuban restaurant on the evening of his demise, and I won't miss it for all the tea in China.

Not sure where we will celebrate on the day Dick Cheney finally dies, but that might be just as big a deal.  Maybe both guys are drinking the same blood of Camp Fire Girls, who knows.

New York, New York. SMH

Trump and Clinton smash their challengers and reassert control of their nominations.

A preview of the face-biting to come

Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton scored sweeping victories in nominating contests in their home state of New York, and immediately cited them in arguing they are all but unstoppable as their respective parties' presidential nominees.

Trump's crushing defeat of Ted Cruz in Tuesday's primary election tilted the energy in the Republican race back to the front-runner, just as Republican National Committee members begin meeting in Florida on Wednesday to discuss their July convention, where the nominee will be chosen.

For the Democratic favorite, Clinton's more narrow victory over Bernie Sanders snapped a string of victories by the 74-year-old democratic socialist and gave her a much-needed lift with more tough fights ahead.

The eventual victors of the Democratic and the Republican nominating campaigns will face each other in November's general election.

Trump's win, celebrated to the tune of Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" at Trump Tower in Manhattan, marked a rebound from his Wisconsin defeat two weeks ago. It set him up for another big night on April 26, when Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Maryland will hold primaries.

Sanders lost NY for the same old reason: black voters (22% of the electorate there) went 75-25 for Clinton.  They made up their minds a long time ago and they ain't changin' 'em.

Those same five states mentioned in the last graf of the excerpt above were also named in Sanders' most recent e-mail overnight as where the battle would go on, so it appears neither he (nor Ted Cruz) is ready to throw in the towel.  In fact Jeff Weaver, Sanders' campaign chief, still seems more than a little defiant despite various calls for his man to quit and fall in line.

By the (CNN) numbers ...

With 93% of the vote in at 12:15 a.m ET, Trump was in the lead at 60% while Ohio Gov. John Kasich was at 25.2% and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was at 14.8%.

With 94% of the Democratic vote in, Clinton was leading Sanders 57.7% to 42.3%.

Clinton outperformed the advance polling, including the exit polls taken just before voting concluded last night, which showed a very tight race.  If Sanders' campaign funds start to dry up as reality slowly sinks in, he'll take a powder and call it a day.  At this point that's the only trend to watch for.

So what next, revolutionaries?

As promised, Bernie will end up endorsing Hillary. Doesn’t mean we have to follow in lockstep like programed cyborgs pic.twitter.com/Jz2MZOytzi

— Viva la causa! (@70torinoman) April 20, 2016

Could you be more specific?

Time to turn to Jill Stein. #NYPrimary

— mohammad barakat (@Mbarakat1990) April 20, 2016

Good.  This is the right idea.  Writing him in is wrong.  Write-in votes aren't counted in many states because of onerous pre-certification requirements (see this from the TXSOS, this from Ballotpedia, and this handy start-to-finish slideshow on the process here in Texas).

It's starting to get a little boring at this point, isn't it?

Houston now receives a hundred-year storm on a quarterly basis

Perhaps we should rename them.

Houston (was yesterday) in the midst of an unbelievable deluge, with already more rainfall in a single day than any hurricane to ever hit the hurricane-prone city. The National Weather Service has called Monday’s flooding “historic.”

More than 21,000 square miles of southeast Texas is now in a flash flood warning, but the worst flooding seems to be occurring in western parts of the Houston metro area. More than 17 inches of rainfall has fallen in just the past 24 hours in some neighborhoods, with about 1 foot of rain coming just since midnight—already making Monday the rainiest day ever in Houston before noon. At Houston’s George Bush International Airport, 11.16 inches fell by 10 a.m., breaking the all-time daily record of 10.34 inches set on June 26, 1989. And it’s still falling. More rain is in the forecast for the next 36 hours or so. Update, 6:35 pm ET: The rain has stopped for now, with 11.75 inches measured at George Bush Airport on Monday.

5 dead, 900 rescued from floodwaters in their homes or on the highways and roads. 

Officials in Harris County, where Houston is located, have declared a disaster area and estimate at least 1,000 homes have already been flooded. More than half the watersheds in Harris County are experiencing significant flooding, with at least one cresting above its estimated 500-year flood mark, a new all-time record. Bayous and creeks have overtopped levees in some parts of Houston, and the water continues to rise, with downtown Houston also in the direct path of some of the worst floodwaters.

Emergency personnel in Houston have already performed hundreds of water rescues, with firefighters taking to boats. With lightning crashing overhead, one journalist helped rescue a man after he had driven into floodwaters that threatened to overwhelm his car. Another image of a man rescuing an armadillo was widely circulated on social media, and there’s also video of people teaming up to save a stranded horse.  

Horses, plural.

They saved more than 70 of the 80 or so at the stables in the northwest portion of the county, but not all of them.  Very upsetting video here if you can take it.

Honestly though, it's just situation normal for us old hands around here.  The main thing you have to do is stock up and hunker down.  This is obviously not feasible for the working class, those who must travel to jobs via public transit, and others of the least fortunate among us.

The poor always bear the brunt of nature's temper tantrums, exacerbated in H-Town by poor planning and decisions made long ago by short-sighted elected officials and greedy real estate developers.  But that's a digression.

The National Weather Service had been warning of the potential for very heavy rainfall in southeast Texas since at least last Tuesday, as a continental-scale blocking pattern—in which an unusually stable jet stream locks weather systems in place—made conditions favorable for a stalled weather front to unload copious amounts of tropical moisture.

I went to the grocery store on Friday, had some ice chests as backup in case we lost power.  (We did not.)  The only times I so much as opened the outside door yesterday was to let the dogs out to pee, and they didn't want to go outside either.  Because both I and the wife telecommute, we don't ever worry about traffic or flooded roads nor experience the accompanying stress.  (This may be white privilege; it's certainly a benefit of our class status.)

I think it's a rite of passage living here; you have to get your car flooded out at least once in order to learn your lesson about these things.  Ours was in 1994 and this old NYT account is accurate.  This was before blogging, and there's a great tale I have to tell about getting through that storm, but not today.

Since the 1950s, Houston has seen a 167 percent increase in the heaviest downpours—defined as the number of days where total precipitation exceeded the heaviest 1 percent of all local events—one of the fastest rates of increase anywhere in the country. That’s exactly what’s expected to happen as the climate warms, since warmer air can hold more water vapor than cooler air.

An increase in the frequency of heavy rain events has long been considered one of the likeliest consequences of global warming, and a recent comprehensive National Academies report endorsed this link. Blocking weather patterns like this weekend’s may be happening more often due to climate change, boosting the likelihood of heavy rainfall events, according to a new study published last week.

This is at least the fourth major flood in the Houston area in just the past 12 months, with previous flooding events last May, June, and October pummeling Texas hard. The triangle between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio is sometimes referred to as “flash flood alley” because of its dangerous mix of hilly terrain, sprawling urbanization, and frequent heavy downpours, adding to the region’s already considerable vulnerability to climate change.

This go-around it was north Houston (from Aldine to Greenspoint) and northwest Houston (from Spring Branch to Cypress) that took it in the neck.  Less than a year ago it was my side of town, Meyerland, which still got a pretty good hit (first drone video here).

There is a great irony in the fossil fuel capital of the world being forced to endure the calamitous side-effects of the fossil fuel industry's misadventures over the past hundred years or so.  Even as oil in tank farms in Cushing, OK fills to the brim, and supertankers line up off the coast of Basra, Iraq to bring over more, Americans -- and Texans -- have reduced their consumption by switching to alternative fuels like wind and solar, and protest the mineral barons who are trying to squeeze a few more drops out of their respective lemons.

"Leave It in the Ground" doesn't seem to be resonating with the Persian Gulf oil states.

This business is as dead a man walking as your nearest Republican neighbor.  You can't tell a fucking zombie anything, though.  He just wants to eat your brain.

Green Party state convention pics, update

Thanks to the Bexar County Greens for these photos.

David Collins had this review of the business conducted.

The Green Party of Texas just concluded a packed weekend at the Grey Forest retreat in San Antonio. On Saturday (April 9), GPTX held its nominating convention for statewide offices, including the selection delegates to August's Presidential Nominating Convention in Houston. On Sunday (April 10), the Party held its annual meeting, at which the delegates assembled elected members to the State Executive Committee and passed a few resolutions regarding policy positions and internal procedures.

According to Green Party Watch, here is the Texas delegation to the Presidential Nominating Convention:
Jill Stein: 15
SKCM Curry: 3
Darryl Cherney: 2
Kent Mesplay: 2
Bill Kreml: 1

The win for Stein continues a nationwide pattern: Among states that have had their primary elections, caucuses, or conventions, Stein has won all of them. Unless something changes radically in the next three months, she will likely be nominated resoundingly on the first ballot in August.

​State Offices
David Wager, longtime treasurer for the Harris County and Texas Greens, reports that all the candidates for the various state offices had their nominations confirmed:

Railroad Commissioner: Martina Salinas
Supreme Court, place 3: Rodolfo Rivera Muñoz
Supreme Court, place 5: Charles Waterbury
Supreme Court, place 9: Jim Chisholm
Court of Criminal Appeals, place 2: Adam "Bulletproof" King Blackwell Reposa
Court of Criminal Appeals, place 5: Judith Sanders-Castro

​​ At Sunday's annual meeting, the delegates elected Laura Palmer of Harris County to another two-year term as co-chair. She will continue to serve along with Dallas County's Aaron Renaud, who was elected at last year's meeting. Also elected to the SEC:

Secretary: katija assata gruene, formerly known as kat swift (Bexar)
Treasurer: David Wager (Harris)
Members at-large: Antonio Diaz (Bexar), Wesson Gaige (Denton), Ona Marie Hendricks (Dallas)

Three resolutions passed and were referred to the national convention's committee.  Among them was a review of range voting for elections to public offices.

Salinas, who debated her Libertarian opponent on the day before the state convention, appears to be both standard-bearer and dreamcatcher for the GPTX in this cycle.  Her challenge is to keep the Greens on the ballot for 2018 by achieving 5% or more of the vote this November.

There's a chance that presidential nominee-in-waiting Stein could get this done for Texas Greens, and that's essentially the only reason why I would also like to see some early polling of the Texas electorate, with Trump and Clinton as the red and blue team leaders.  The Bernie or Bust movement -- such as it is -- needs to come to Jesus, but that's likely later than sooner.

Better late than never.

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.