Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Daily Jackasses new and old


-- John Aravosis of AMERICAblog is today's Burro Pendejo, in what is becoming a spirited contest of "Can You Top This?".  He's got a running feud with Sputnik News going over his outlandish 'Russian sympathizer' accusations, which he's stoking in his own comments (deleting most of the ones he disagrees with, leaving his customized juvenile insults in response).

It appears that I’m the subject of a blistering article in the Russian state propaganda organ, Sputnik, over my recent criticism of Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s visit to Moscow last winter.

Let's just hope he's not the object of a Russian spy with a poison pen, a la James Bond.


Red-scaring is the most popular of the latest tactics of fever-dream Clinton Dems.  They're madly conflating Trump and Stein in a mashup of distractions from the disastrous Wikileaked DNC emails, which have detailed an unprecedented depth of corruption within the party's politburo, resulting in the firings of several top party operatives, the suspicious death of one staffer and even the Republicans' own harebrained concoctions of the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist by that country's government.

Joe McCarthy would be so proud.

Update: Mint Press News with the most thorough dismantling of this latest smear attempt.

I honestly cannot understand what drives these rants beyond a seething hostility of the left that is mostly contained within the ranks of those still involved -- or deeply self-identifying -- as Democratic apparatchiks.  In effect, we now have three conservative political parties in the United States, and that's not counting the Constitutions.  This unrequited rage goes way past a 16-year misplaced grudge against Ralph Nader, and has even swept up once-rational Texas state representatives in its contagion.

I'm going to quit trying to explain it any further because it doesn't make any sense.  I'm just going to document their atrocities and crown the king jacks and queen jennets when I discover the vilest of their tirades online.

-- Original DJ Chris Hooks got busy getting paid over the weekend with pieces in the Observerer again and in Politico.  He was calmer, but still somewhat unbalanced, with "kooks" replacing "cranks" and "dead-enders" and his animosity substituted for the most part with snarling contempt and reeking condescension.

This qualifies as progress.

Hooks even managed to rile the normally placid Kuffner with his sneering about the HD-146 special election.  Hooks is not going to be invited to anybody's house for beers and lawn darts at the rate he's expelling these noxious, prosaic gases.

Many more Jackasses on deck!  Competition is stiff!

Tuesday, August 09, 2016

Still nothing for her to worry about

Most of the Democrats I visited with over the weekend are finally starting to relax a little now that the horse-race polls are coming into alignment with the Electoral College projections.


-- This fellow (with lots of good analysis) has it Clinton 323-Trump 197, 18 EC votes tossup.  And a 99.6% probability of her winning the election.

-- These folks also see a landslide.


Note that AZ is turning blue in their scenario but NV is not.

-- Nate Silver's bunch, who'd been running a little on the conservative side this cycle after getting Berned in Michigan, shows the largest spread, with 365-172.7 and one electoral vote to Gary Johnson.   "Only" an 87.5% probability for Madam President.

-- Larry Sabato with the same conclusion, and 347-191.


Given these numbers you might think that future Daily Jackass and AmericaFUCKYEAHblogger John Aravosis would be chill, but he's not.  I booted him off the blogroll here months ago -- maybe even before Ted -- for his Clinton shilling and attacks on Bernie Sanders, which immediately transferred to Jill Stein.  With these fresh Red scares he's really going to have a lot of blood on his hands if/when Hillary bombs Iran, starts a new war -- hot, cold, or "just right" -- with Russia, or simply continues the Obama bombing campaign, now in four countries but nowhere on your teevee.

Coming up: a few fresh Daily Jackasses and some updates to old ones.

Monday, August 08, 2016

The Weekly Wrangle


The Texas Progressive Alliance is feeling the Olympic nationalist spirit as it brings you this week's roundup of the best of the left of the Lone Stars from last week.

Off the Kuff is pleased by the changes to voter ID requirements that were agreed to last week.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme, like the US Hispanic Congressional Caucus, is disgusted with the CEO of IBC bank doing business in South Texas while supporting Donald Trump.

Taking into account both real and hypothetical options, SocraticGadfly uses ranked choice voting to explain how he would vote, or like to vote, in this year's presidential election.

The Green Party's presidential nominating convention in Houston kept PDiddie at Brains and Eggs busy most of the week.  There's a CNN town hall scheduled for next week for the Jill Stein-Ajamu Baraka ticket.

Texas Leftist also blogged about the Greens' convention at U of H.

Texas Vox takes note of the US Dept. of Energy's attempts to restart the federal high-level radioactive waste program, this time in Texas.

Neil at All People Have Value walked on Houston's fabulous Airline Drive with a sign regarding the need for respect for all people.  APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston asks whether you should trust Donald Trump with your children.

Dos Centavos has another Tejano music review of Veronique and her latest, Mi Año Dorado.

And the Lewisville Texan Journal celebrates their first year as a print medium.

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

More scattershots from Texas bloggers and writers!

Zachery Taylor saw the DNC's war demagoguery as an extension of his indoctrination research.

TFN Insider has the latest from Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, a prominent Trump supporter who's spent the last two weeks "debunking" the theory of evolution.

Grits for Breakfast cited a Houston Press story where the representative for the Harris County sheriff blamed inmates for the jail's preventable, antibiotic-resistant diseases.

Ashton Woods at Strength in Numbers calls for Harris County DA Devon Anderson to step down.

Make West Texas Great Again reports on the first-ever agriculture forum in Lubbock, organized by Ted Cruz after he was criticized for inaction by Breitbart Texas.

The Texas Observer's sixteenth 'Texas Miracle' podcast speculates about the Dallas GOP's disarray and its effect on the Texas Republican Party in general.

The TSTA Blog sees through the latest school finance "reform" idea.

Pamela Coloff's 2006 story on the UT Tower shooting received a lot of attention on the 50th anniversary of that horrible day.

Better Texas Blog explains how Texas can support kinship caregivers.

Dan Wallach contemplates election security as national security.

The Texas Living Waters Project argues that desalination could harm Texas' bays.

Juanita Jean is seeking support for Glen Maxey's ballot by mail program.

Eileen Smith keeps trying to make sense of Donald Trump.

Somervell County Salon passes along the news about the multi-county feral hog program at the county expo.

And Pages of Victory reminds Democrats that Republicans are still plenty strong.

Sunday, August 07, 2016

The Daily Jackass: Voting third party is just like sending 'thoughts and prayers'



Congratulations, Jef Rouner of Free Press Houston.

Every four years we get together and play American President Idol, electing either a Republican or a Democrat. And, every four years this is when some fringe kook or two tries to tell us about all those parties outside the system, man. The ones who are really woke, as my white ass should probably not be saying, and aren’t corrupt by Big Scaryword.

See, Noah Horwitz, this is how you move to the head of the class.  Note that a clear path could involve going "anti-vaxxer" a full week after that smear has been debunked.  If you truck in lies that have been demonstrated to be lies, you're a pretty big Jackass.  But this is Rouner's moment; let's allow him to revel in it.

Between the carnival of carnage that was the Republican primary choosing the form of Gozer the Destructor and the bitter hold out of Bernie Sanders to the end of the Democratic one, emotions on both sides got a little high. I’ve never seen so much announcing that people were voting third party, and every single bit of it is as bloody useless as the Republicans offering their thoughts and prayers to the victims of the mass shooting (does it really matter which one I name?).

[...]

Which is why voting third party is mostly an empty gesture meant to telegraph a person’s own virtue without actually involving real work. If Stein really wanted to do some progressive good or even pass her bonkers woo ideas, she’d be a Democrat or at least an Independent who works with Democrats like Sanders. If Johnson actually cared about letting you smoke weed hassle-free, he should have done something about it when he was a Republican in actual power.

I was a Democrat who worked for ten years attempting to to pull the Texas Democratic Party to the left.  I wasn't alone; the Progressive Populist Caucus was, in 2006, the largest in the TDP, with several hundred members.  You have perhaps noted over the past decade how successful we were.

There's a better analogy if your intention was to crack on both progressives and religious extremists simultaneously: "the best way to make change for the better in ISIS is to join them and transform the organization from within".  Not ludicrous at all, is it?

Nothing Stein or Johnson say matters. At all. Their platforms are meaningless because neither of them will ever be called to do any of it or have to answer for the promises that they made to voters. Theirs is a consequence-free existence. Politifact is never going to check them on the Johnsonmeter or the Steinmeter like they did for Barack Obama and will certainly do to whoever wins this long-ass trudge to the future of the country.

Actually what they say and do does matter, as history has demonstrated.  Where do you think all this "spoiler" nonsense comes from?  It's that sort of progress that duopolists fear.  Even Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton's not-so-useful idiot, fell for the 'spoiler' BS right from the beginning of his campaign.  See, you can't really spoil an election that's already spoiled.

More importantly, the two major parties often co-opt the messages of the minor parties (Tea Party subsumed into GOP, sad attempts by Dems to occupy Occupy, Green becomes 'green' without those dirty hippies).  So they must be doing something right if their best ideas are being shoplifted.

Most importantly, political scientists get it and have for a long time.

"The irony is that no leading political scientist who studies political party systems believes that it is necessary to squelch minor parties in order to 'defend' the two-party system. The true definition of 'two-party system' is a system in which two particular parties are much bigger than all the others; it doesn't mean a system in which minor parties have atrophied into non-existence. The last leading political scientist who believed that it is socially useful to squelch minor parties was Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, but he changed his mind over five years ago, and now advocates that election laws treat minor parties equitably." -- Richard Winger, Ballot Access News December 12, 1996

Logic needs to stay out of Rouner's way, however.  He thinks he's on a roll.

That’s politics, and more importantly, that’s America. It’s not a place built by storming out of the room in a moralistic crusade, and it’s certainly not a place where sitting on the side-lines free from any blame deserves virtuous acclaim. There’s a reason Hillary Clinton wrote a book called Hard Choices, and even Donald Trump recognizes that if his vision for America is to matter he has to actually get in the game on a team that can win. So did Sanders. You have three choices. The last one is “do nothing,” and voting third party for president is just doing nothing with a big old bowl of sanctimonious bullshit on top. Just like praying for shooting victims who need blood donations and cities that need lead out of their water.  

Maybe I've missed it, but did Democrats get the lead out of the water while I wasn't paying attention?  Have they stopped the police from killing unarmed black men?  Have they banned fracking yet?  Repealed Citizens United?  Halted the TPP?

Ohhhhh: they just need more help in Congress, where all the guys and gals on both sides of the aisle are already owned by the banks, the pharmaceutical companies, and the NRA.  I think maybe Rouner missed the whole 'revolution' part of the equation.

As you might imagine, today's Jackass has been excoriated by the readers of FPH on the original page and on the Facebook page, very few of which happen to be orthodox Democrats or Republicans waiting to be scolded about not conforming.  This seems more like a successful clickbait trolling excursion, and if you read only a few of the responses at either place, you'll see our boy has been roasted and then seared in his own juices to a greater degree than I need to add to.

Much like the Texas Observer, Free Press Houston used to be a radical, iconoclastic, unabashedly liberal-before-progressive-was-the-word newspaper.  Then they went out and hired all these angry Hillbots, and then wonder why their subscriber base has abandoned them.

Sad!

Better Choices Funnies


There are more palatable options than chicken or fish ...