The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance doesn't get paid for not working for Ken Paxton or George P. Bush as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff just shakes his head at the Supreme Court punt on birth control.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos explores the deep disconnect between the recently ratified Texas Republican Party's platform and the views of residents in Houston, the state’'s largest city. Political Divide: Texas GOP - Its braying buffoons and "penurious reactionaries" are not who we are.

Socratic Gadfly looks at the most recent imbroglio, or whatever, involving Dallas County DA Susan Hawk, and fires both barrels, saying she needs to resign AND the Dallas media needs to do a MUCH better job covering this issue.

The latest revolution update is posted by PDiddie at Brain and Eggs.

McBlogger says the Dark Ages have descended in Austin with the departure of Uber and Lyft.

Egberto Willies detailed his own bad medical experience to underscore the continuing problems with for-profit health care in the USA.

The Lewisville Texan Journal reviews the art show "Strictly Texas", on display there.

An oily substance covering the town of Mansfield, TX couldn't be blamed on pickles, by the account at TXsharon's Bluedaze.

Neil at All People Have Value walked around downtown Houston this week with a sign that called for us to respect one another. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

And Dos Centavos eulogizes Emilio Navaira.

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

Trail Blazers reveals that like Ken Paxton, Land Commissioner George P. Bush has also been paying state employees not to work; the difference is he's paid them not to sue him or the department.

The WAWG Blog observes that the Gig Economy enables you to have the right to work for slave wages as your own CEO.

Make West Texas Great Again notes that even newly re-elected RPT chair Tom Mechler sees the fallacy of having God as your campaign manager.

Jonathan Tilove at First Reading is all aTwitter about Don Willett,  the state SCOTX justice whose name appeared on Donald Trump's short list of potential SCOTUS nominees.

The Texas Observer's review of HBO's All The Way, the biodrama about LBJ, suggests a kindler, gentler, somewhat less crude portrayal of the nation's 36th president.

Robert Rivard excoriates the Supreme Court decision upholding the school finance system, and Better Texas Blog forecasts a scary future for Texas' children as a result of that ruling.

Christopher Hooks contemplates Ted Cruz's future.

Leah Binkovitz rethinks urban design in the wake of recent flooding.

Offcite reviews several new books on transportation.

The Lunch Tray documents a falling-out between the School Nutrition Association and House Republicans.

Save Buffalo Bayou reports on the sieges of herons and the skewers of egrets.

And Pages of Victory is adjusting to his chronological age.

Sunday Funnies

Revolution News Update, Vol. 4 Surrender Bernie edition

(Yesterday), Chris Cuomo had the temerity to use conditional language in speaking of Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming the Democratic nominee for President.

It didn’t go over well.

The relevant portion of the transcript is below:

CUOMO (CNN): So you get into the general election, if you’re the nominee for your party, and —

CLINTON: I will be the nominee for my party, Chris. That is already done, in effect. There is no way that I won’t be.

CUOMO: There’s a Senator from Vermont who has a different take on that —

CLINTON: Well —

CUOMO: He says he’s going to fight to the end —

CLINTON: Yeah, it’s strange.

It’s hard to take Clinton’s first comment as anything but a statement that nothing California could possibly do in its primary could change the outcome of the Democratic race — even though it’s now widely accepted that Clinton can’t win the primary with pledged delegates alone. This means that the Democratic nomination will be decided by super-delegates, who don’t vote for more than two months — at the Democratic National Convention, to be held in Philadelphia on July 25th. As the DNC has repeatedly advised the media, those super-delegates can and often do change their minds — and are free to do so up until they actually vote this summer.

CNN analyst Carl Bernstein noted several times Wednesday night that between mid-May and late July countless things could happen that would cause super-delegates to move toward Sanders en masse.

Seth Abramson is a dreamer, a bit ungrounded, but it's the Queen's reality I'm having more trouble with.  Just a bit too dictatorial for my taste.  "California, your votes won't be counted because they don't matter"?  Once upon a time -- not too long ago, in this galaxy -- Democrats called tactics like that voter suppression and disenfranchisement.

I had a brief conversation with one of David Brock's employees on Twitter this past week, mentioned something about 'tyranny of the majority", she didn't know what that meant and refused to try to figure it out.  You can't make the horse's asses drink the water.

My two observations about Hillbot behavior this cycle are 1) they just don't care that she's a war-mongering, lying, corporate shill, and 2) they see people like me saying things like that about Hillary as a personal attack upon themselves.  This is chosen ignorance.  The blind who will not see.

It's hard to hold them fully accountable for their obtuseness and misdirected anger when it is coming directly from the top.  I'm trying real hard, Ringo, to give 'em a pass, but on some level the only thing left to do is disengage.  That's what I have done and am doing with the worst and dumbest among their lot.

-- Maha:

I told someone this morning that it’s starting to feel like 1971 again; Sanders supporters are the antiwar movement, and the Democratic Party and its loyalists are the Nixon Administration. What should have been a temporary disagreement is turning into a generation-changing moment that will hurt the Democratic Party for years to come.

It feels more like 1980 to me, with Sanders as Ted Kennedy and Clinton as Jimmy Carter.  That ugly split in the Democratic Party gave us Ronald Reagan, and the Dems, in their shock, awe, and fear turned toward more autocratic, top-down authority in their candidate selection process, aka superdelegates, the unelected Democratic nobility.

What parties do tend to do is to react to the last election. 1972 was a real trauma for the Democrats—the beginning of the end of the New Deal coalition. Then Jimmy Carter loses in 1980—two Republican landslides in 10 years. In each case, the Democrats were very unhappy with their nominees and their president, for different reasons. They thought George McGovern was too far to the left, that his coalition alienated the regular party and so on. 1972 was also what created the Reagan Democrats who by 1980 were voting Republican.

[...]

How did the bitter fight between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination in 1980 figure in the Hunt Commission’s deliberations?

It was a particularly ugly fight that left very deep wounds in the party. As those floor debates were going on and Kennedy was making his statement speech, there were no party leaders on the floor. There was nobody there to put things back together.

The McGovern-Fraser reforms were aimed at opening up the party to other factions, particularly the anti-war faction in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But that didn’t mean that they wanted to cut out the entire party apparatus, which is what happened. A lot of what the Hunt Commission talked about was restoring the balance at the nominating convention.

The Hunt Commission brought the theory of superdelegates into practice; that, as Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has enunciated, "Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists."

Those dirty hippies.  Freaking peasants, what do they know?

-- The Bradblog interviews Jill Stein on their most recent podcast, which means you can listen to it at your leisure.  Here's bit from it.

"The guys running the show in the Democratic Party are basically the funders --- and that's predatory banks, fossil fuel giants, war profiteers, and insurance companies," Stein tells me. "With the Democratic Party you see basically a 'fake left-go right' situation, where they allow principled, inspired campaigns to stand up and be seen, but they sabotage them when push comes to shove. That, unfortunately, is what we see going on right now with the Sanders campaign, which is making a valiant effort here to do the right thing and change the party."

[...]

"This politics of fear that tells you you have to vote against what you're afraid of, instead of for what you believe in --- the politics of fear has a track record. It has delivered everything we were afraid of. All of the things you were told you had to bite your tongue and let the 'lesser evil' speak for you --- we've gotten all those things, by the droves. The expanding wars, the meltdown of the climate, the offshoring of our jobs, the attack on immigrants. We've gotten all of that." Stein says. "Not that there aren't some differences between the two parties, but they're not enough to save your life, to save your job, or to save your planet. This is a race to the bottom between the two sold-out corporate parties."

-- And just so we don't leave anybody out: Gary Johnson of the Libertarians has picked his running mate for 2016, and it's former Massachusetts Governor William Weld.  That's the #NeverTrump wing of the GOP's very best option.  Need to do what I can again to help those folks along, if only so that the Hillbots don't keep hatin' on the player, and not the plutocratic game.

Related to that, a report that the Koch Bros would funding the Johnson-Weld ticket to an eight-figure tune was gently denied by the campaign.

Five and a half months to go 'til November, the TDP state convention in a month -- I predict another Hillaryian shitshow like Nevada, what with the odious Gilberto Hinojosa already spreading his hate of Sandernistas in a now-deleted FB post -- and then the disrupting going on at both national conventions this summer.  Hurricanes or no, we're in for a really rough ride.