Latest on the Russians

-- Obama got his classified report on Russian interference in the 2016 election yesterday; the outgoing president said he needed "no additional evidence" to eject the Russian diplomats from the country last month.  Trump is getting his briefing this morning.

Note the first source I linked to above.  It's the most thorough and comprehensive report I have found, and it's also the same source James Clapper denigrated in his testimony before Congress yesterday.  Read RT's account of Clapper's opinion of RT here, after you read the link in the previous sentence.

-- This is compelling:

US intelligence has identified the go-betweens the Russians used to provide stolen emails to WikiLeaks, according to US officials familiar with the classified intelligence report that was presented to President Barack Obama on Thursday.

And so is this.

Via NBC's William Arkin, Ken Dilanian and Hallie Jackson: "A senior U.S. intelligence official with direct knowledge confirmed to NBC News that the report on Russian hacking delivered to President Obama Thursday says that U.S. intelligence picked up senior Russian officials celebrating Donald Trump's win. The source described the intelligence about the celebration, first reported by the Washington Post, as a minor part of the overall intelligence report, which makes the case that Russia intervened in the election."

More, from the Washington Post's original story: "The ebullient reaction among high-ranking Russian officials — including some who U.S. officials believe had knowledge of the country's cyber campaign to interfere in the U.S. election — contributed to the U.S. intelligence community's assessment that Moscow's efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House. Other key pieces of information gathered by U.S. spy agencies include the identification of "actors" involved in delivering stolen Democratic emails to the WikiLeaks website, and disparities in the levels of effort Russian intelligence entities devoted to penetrating and exploiting sensitive information stored on Democratic and Republican campaign networks."

-- Clapper testified that Julian Assange and Wikileaks put American lives at risk, reported by the AP and widely distributed from news gatherers across the nation and the world.  That assertion was disproved three and one-half years ago.

The US counter-intelligence official who led the Pentagon's review into the fallout from the WikiLeaks disclosures of state secrets told the Bradley Manning sentencing hearing on Wednesday (July 13, 2013) that no instances were ever found of any individual killed by enemy forces as a result of having been named in the releases.

Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet. "I don't have a specific example," he said.

So maybe Clapper was talking about Edward Snowden.  The report on that from two years ago has a whole lot of redactions; too many, in fact, to be inferred by the reader that Snowden's disclosures threatened anyone's life, and too many even to be implied by the writers of the report.

The DIA, which provides military intelligence to the DOD, summarized the task force's work in a 39-page report dated December 18, 2013 and titled "DoD Information Review Task Force-2: Initial Assessment, Impacts Resulting from the Compromise of Classified Material by a Former NSA Contractor." (Jason Leopold) obtained a copy of the heavily redacted report last year, which concluded that "the scope of the compromised knowledge related to US intelligence capabilities is staggering."

But explicit details about the alleged damage Snowden caused, identified in the 39-page report as "grave," were omitted from that document as well. In fact, the existence of the DIA's report had been unknown until the White House secretly authorized the declassification of select portions of it so two Republican lawmakers could undercut the media narrative painting Snowden as a heroic whistleblower.

-- The report that Obama received and Trump is getting is to be made public very shortly, maybe even this afternoon, with as much classified information Clapper says can be declassified as possible.

I'll wait for that news before I change my mind about this all being an obsession.  Note that two long-term and highly tenured former employees of the NSA and the CIA asserted yesterday that the DNC emails were leaked and not hacked, and carefully explains the difference.

Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or other cyber-protection systems and then extracts data. Our own considerable experience, plus the rich detail revealed by Edward Snowden, persuades us that, with NSA's formidable trace capability, it can identify both sender and recipient of any and all data crossing the network.

Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization — on a thumb drive, for example — and gives it to someone else, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did. Leaking is the only way such data can be copied and removed with no electronic trace.

Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any "hacked" emails from the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed through the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests. From a technical perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what happened.

Lastly, the CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in this electronic arena. Given Mr. Clapper's checkered record for accuracy in describing NSA activities, it is to be hoped that the director of NSA will join him for the briefing with Mr. Trump.

Former NSA director Mike Rogers is indeed among the four heads of national security briefing Trump this morning.  Look out for a Tweet from Trump today about it.

-- Assuming the Russian/Wikileaks dots are eventually connected, Trump has problems that go beyond being proved mistaken, and having to repair relations with the DHS, NSA, CIA, etc.  Congress is establishing a formal objection to his Twitter criticism of America's spooks and spies, forcing the prez-elect to backtrack slightly.

Within the transitioning administration to come, there are serious differences of opinion about the roles of the various agencies.  Remember: NSA-designate Michael Flynn, like Trump, admires the Russkies.  CIA chief-to-be Mike Pompeo is the farthest thing from a friend of the Kremlin, however.  Clinton's CIA director, James Woolsey, abruptly left his role as adviser to the transition team earlier this week, possibly because of this opinion of whatever game it is Trump is playing.  But the new DNI guy overseeing the whole lot is former Indiana Senator Dan Coats, whose own views of Russia have been so critical that Moscow has banned him from traveling there.

So that's all I got for now.  More as it develops.

Update: Michael Dorf posits the various what-ifs, with a great deal of food for thought.  And Juan Cole has the righteous smackdown of everyone.  The following excerpt does not do justice to a full understanding of the matter; read the whole thing and then read it again.

(Chuck) Schumer seems to have been celebrating that we are no longer a democracy, but that even an elected president has to defer to the intelligence establishment in Washington or else must fear that they will play dirty tricks on him and undermine him.

Shouldn’t the Democratic Party senate minority leader be standing for democratic values, not advising the president to shut up if he knows what’s good for him?

So to conclude, this is a sorry spectacle. Yes, Putin is a thug who should not have unilaterally annexed Crimea, and so created a European crisis that has yet to be resolved. But yes, the US has acted thuggishly -- the unprovoked and monstrous invasion of Iraq is a recent example -- and US aggressiveness toward Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union bears some of the blame for Russia’s bullying insecurity. And yes, Russia likely engaged in hacking during the US election and hoped to tilt the playing field toward Trump; but they likely failed to have any significant effect on the outcome. And yes, Clapper and other US intelligence officials have hacked everybody and his brother both abroad and inside the US, so they are hardly morally superior to Putin.

Now we have a food fight full of ignorance and hypocrisy or both, in which the Washington Establishment professes itself shocked, shocked that any hacking of one country by another could have gone on. Trump has continued his creepy bromance with the Kremlin and wants to get his information from any source that agrees with his prejudices. The Democrats have taken advantage of the story to paint Trump as a Manchurian candidate, and some of them seem to delight in the idea that Trump may provoke the CIA to do to him what Oliver Stone thinks it did to JFK.

Nobody and nothing here to admire.

The Russians come to the Capitol today

Congress opens hearings on the Russian affair today, indeed as I type.  Here's a few things to pay attention to as they go, and John Brennan says us doubters should not rush to judgement.  While we wait for the truth (a word tenuously defined these days) to be revealed, let's laugh at Hair Furor and the nation's clandestine services, who cannot even agree what day of the week they were supposed to meet for his intelligence briefing on the matter.  Remember that the president-elect said last week that he would have a big reveal for us "on Tuesday or Wednesday" of this week; that didn't happen on time, either.

This is a shit-or-go-blind choice for America.  I find myself in the position of agreeing with Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald -- but uncomfortably alongside Trump and Sarah Palin -- and opposed to Paul Ryan, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and 97 other senators by Graham's math.  A very strange place to be.

Don't let it be written that I never offered a self-deprecating cartoon.

There remains, to this moment, no conclusive evidence that the Russians gave Julian "Assuage" (Freud would be so pleased with Trump's unpresidented auto-corrections) the DNC emails that either undermined Hillary Clinton's White House bid in drip-drip-drip Chinese water torture-style, or simply revealed the rigged Democratic primary everyone (save a few Hillbots practicing denial in advance) saw happening without the benefit of purloined electronic correspondence.  And we laypeople may never be allowed to know what really happened with Russia and Wikileaks, and partly because even the definition of 'classified' information is now so nebulous, as we know from James Comey's revelations with regard to her email server.

So if I'm wrong about the nefarious Putin and his Manchurian president-elect, I'll own it just as soon as I know it.  Which may be as soon as this morning.  Watch C-Span for the hearings or check your Twitter for what trends (I'm seeing "DNI Clapper" as I hit publish on this post).

Update: DNI James Clapper's testimony revealed essentially nothing this morning (see also the Tweet feed in the top right column).  Maybe when the unclassified report he has promised to release next week is made public, I can be persuaded.

Scattershooting DC, the EC, and the inauguration

-- Some folks are still in denial.

More than 50 Electoral College members who voted for Donald Trump were ineligible to serve as presidential electors because they did not live in the congressional districts they represented or held elective office in states legally barring dual officeholders.

That stunning finding is among the conclusions of an extensive 1,000-plus page legal briefing prepared by a bipartisan nationwide legal team for members of Congress who are being urged to object to certifying the 2016 Electoral College results on Friday.

“Trump’s ascension to the presidency is completely illegitimate,” said Ryan Clayton of Americans Take Action, who is promoting the effort. “It’s not just Russians hacking our democracy. It’s not just voter suppression at unprecedented levels. It is also [that] there are Republicans illegally casting ballots in the Electoral College, and in a sufficient number that the results of the Electoral College proceedings are illegitimate as well.”

With the College's vote set to be affirmed by Congress tomorrow -- Wisconsin still hasn't finished -- I don't see this changing the result any more than I did the recount (speaking of that, read this).

Update: Still one more last-gasp attempt to stop Trump.

Protests in the nation's capital can be a high good time, but if you're planning on going this year, you'll have to face off with the very worst of the MAGAmericans, like these dudes, who are warming up by fighting among themselves.

-- Anti-Inauguration Day protests, mostly of the quieter and more passive-aggressive variety and held in or close to your city, are IMO a much more effective way in this post-truth era we've entered to demonstrate non-compliance with the Trump World Order.  Charles Blow helps out with some suggestions.  He smartly advises against mere resistance.

Exclaiming your resistance, while necessary, is insufficient. Resistance is a negative position. While negativity in the face of this menace is justified and admirable, negativity alone is a fractional response. As with most things in a fully articulated life, balance is required. You need to augment your outrage with actions that are affirming, behaviors that reinforce principles and values.

When politics seem out of your control, remember that community and culture are very much in your control. We help shape the world we inhabit every day. A life is a collection of thousands of decisions, large and small, made every day. Make those decisions with purpose and conviction, especially for Jan. 20.

The point is not necessarily to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, but rather to deprive it of oxygen and eyeballs; to plant a flag of resistance firmly at the opening gate. This doesn’t mean that people won’t attend or watch. They will. But every station that carries it, as many will, should feel the impact of your absence.

Start by taking, or arranging to take, the day off and attend something that lets you avoid the broadcast of the inaugural and get creative from there.  As referenced previously, a general strike on January 20th would be an excellent idea.

-- Black Lives Matter has worked.  (Pay attention, but give no credence to, conservative trending topics this morning.  These daily eruptions, stoked by the likes of Breitbart and Daily Caller, are only intended to keep the hate fires burning.)

The number of unarmed black men shot and killed by police in the U.S. last year was less than half the total for 2015, according to one database, suggesting that due to nationwide protests, better training or other factors, what the media has called “a national crisis” could be abating.

Police used fatal force on 16 unarmed black men in 2016, according to a Washington Post database. That is down from the 36 unarmed black men police had killed in 2015. Police used fatal force on one unarmed black woman in 2016 and two in 2015.

Separating the real news from the fake outrage is going to be tougher in 2017; resolve to to make the effort anyway.

Some affirmation of Democrats as 'Brainiacs'

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A 2017 Wrangle of 2016 progressive Texan news

Democrats are going to need a better plan than this toon represents.  The week's blog post roundup gathers the best from last week to start your 2017 off on the right (left) foot.

Off the Kuff pointed to Brazoria County as a potential and necessary opportunity for Greater Houston Democrats going forward.

Socratic Gadfly takes a look at Cozy Bear, Fancy Bear, et al, and while rejecting Trump's flippancy, expresses skepticism toward the mainstream narrative.

Texas Republicans expose themselves by making the lives of women, children, and prisoners as miserable as possible. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme sees Donald Trump is not the only white nationalist.

The Brainiacs of 2016, formerly the TPA's Texan of the Year and awarded solely by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs, are The Democrats.

The Apache oil company's "generosity" and speaking with forked tongue caught up with them in regard to their fracking plans in Balmorhea, as detailed by Txsharon at Bluedaze.

In a welcome relief from charting polls and stockpiling objections to Trump, jobsanger posts a survey of the most dangerous drivers in the United States, and finds Texas is tied for first -- or worst -- with Louisiana.

Neil at All People Have Value took a picture of train tracks at a Houston light rail station.  APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

Dos Centavos listed his top-trafficked posts for the year.

And in Lewisville, vandals shot through a homeowner's windows and knocked the head off of his front-yard Santa Claus, reports the Texan-Journal.

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

More of the best of the left of Texas from the end of last year!

Leah Binkovitz at the Urban Edge has a rundown of the bills that have been filed to date for the coming legislative session (opening on January 10).  And Ross Ramsey at the Texas Tribune perceives that Austin and Washington out of sync in the early transitioning.

The Houston Press follows up on the Blue Bell ice cream company's continuing troubles with listeria, speaking with a food safety litigator who suggests the company is foolishly requesting of federal authorities that they be allowed to abandon the stringent -- and expensive -- poisonous bacteria testing imposed after previous tragedies.

Grits for Breakfast says the top criminal justice story in Texas -- and possibly the United States -- from last year is easy to spot, but the rest are more obscure.

The Hearne city attorney abruptly resigned last week, and Lawflog says 'good riddance'.

Members of Austin Jewish Voice for Peace held an ecumenical Chanukah vigil at the Capitol, and the The Rag Blog has the photos and story.

The Bloggess eulogized Carrie Fisher as an inspiration to people who struggle with mental illness.

Lone Star Ma urged people to email the Chemical Safety Board.

The Great God Pan Is Dead highlighted the art that moved him in the past year.

Swamplot presented its annual awards for real estate in Houston.

And 2016 was the year that Pages of Victory decided had weaned him off the Democrats.

New Year's Day Funnies

New Year's Eve Funnies

2016 Brainiacs: The Democrats

I sort of telegraphed it, yes?

The cartoonists really get what the Hillbots still don't.  Beginning early in this presidential cycle -- actually in the summer of 2015, when I made my most accurate prediction -- the establishment Donkeys stubbornly refused self-examination of their move to crown Hillary Clinton, beginning in the early primaries and debates.  Democrats laughed and mocked the GOP as the Pachyderms' bizarre primary slowly produced Donald Trump as nominee.  Even as DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was finally forced out, resigning ahead of the party's convention after hacked emails revealed the committee had indeed been favoring Hillary over Bernie Sanders, they refused to think in any terms except their own inevitability.  DWS moved right over to honorary chair of the Clinton campaign, and her successor, Donna Brazile, was later revealed to have shared town hall questions with her pals inside the camp.

They also denigrated Sandernistas for saying the primary was "rigged".  This would come back to haunt them in November with their festering Russian obsession, a derangement syndrome showing no sign of playing itself out until late January at the earliest.  And maybe longer than that ...

Besides being a lousy establishment candidate running in a 'change' election cycle, the presumptive Madam President made unforced errors: failing to hold a press conference for more than nine months, attending an Adele concert two weeks before the election, but never managing to visit Wisconsin even once.  She made a severe miscalculation late, demanding SEIU activists stay in Iowa and not go to Michigan, a state she lost twice, the first time in a foreboding upset -- a polling one -- to Sanders.  This might have been the loudest alarm bell they never heard.

But if any external factor could be blamed for her defeat, it would have to be FBI director James Comey, who first cleared Clinton in the summer following a probe into her use of a private email server, then -- 11 days before the election -- wrote a letter to Congress that he had new information that led him to revisit that decision.  The "new information" was DNC emails on the personal computer of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the now ex-husband of Hillary's closest advisor, Huma Abedin.  Two days before voters went to the polls, Comey re-cleared Clinton.

Nate Silver said on the same day, November 6, that this cost Clinton 2-4 percentage points in the national polling, and since the aggregate of polls were in error by a similar margin, he evaluated in December that the Comey letter had the greatest effect on the presidential race.  Indeed, late-deciding voters in swing states broke heavily for Trump (here's your fake news on that) and in one of the more stunning reveals in post-2016 election analysis, more Republicans stayed true to their man than Democrats did their woman.  There was simply a vast overestimate of her popularity among voters -- perhaps also described as overstating the unpopularity of Trump -- and it was most clearly seen in the electoral crumbling of the Great Lakes states presumed to be her firewall: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.  Her popular vote victory of nearly three million votes over Trump exposed the superfluous waste of concentrated support in states like New York and California, and even urban cities and counties in blood-red states (like Houston and Harris County, which she carried by 12 percentage points).

Here's the lesson, repeated: nationally surveyed two-horse race polls do not pick presidents, and neither does the sum of all votes across the country.  Clinton and her supporters acted both arrogant and lackadaisical about her electoral strength due to the faulty polling, and continue to trumpet the popular vote after it as an excuse to refuse to accept reality.  As long as they remain stuck in this position, they won't be able to organize for 2018, a year with even greater electoral warning flags.

Against this backdrop, the DNC moves toward electing a new chair, which looks like a repeat of the primary battle: likely either US Rep. Keith Ellison, an African American Muslim and Sanders acolyte, or Obama's labor secretary Tomas Perez, the Clinton (or is it Obama?) faction's choice who was exposed in the hacked/leaked emails as a man willing to play the race card against Sanders in the primary.  The schism shows no sign of healing.  Update: The latest on Perez's shortcomings, essentially the same as Clinton's.

Beyond that course, the strategy for the neoliberals seems to be to TeaBag Trump right out of the gate, as the Tea Pees did to Obama in 2009.  That didn't work out so well for the Baggers in 2012, so they went harder right, morphing into the alt-right white nationalists who propelled Trump to victory in the boondocks ... and thus the nation.

The Sanders Democrats, for their part, responsibly declined to jump ship after his defeat and ongoing disrespect, as the vote tallies for the minor party candidates revealed.  There was much less leakage of votes away from Clinton than there was perceived there would be (although the polls got the numbers for the third parties mostly correct).  When the Greens' Jill Stein established a fund to pay for election recounts in the Midwestern states, it was primarily Democrats who opened their wallets and forked over millions of dollars for a last-ditch hope of changing the outcome.  The system batted away that challenge like a badminton shuttlecock.

So Sanders, via Ellison, tries again to take over a broken Democratic machine that relies on the Republican model in terms of money and corporate support, but without the ability to either fight in the trenches or appeal to the working class voters who were their base for decades.  And when they lose, they'll stay loyal, attempting to overhaul a calcified political party from within instead of moving a little to the left and doing something different.  The definition of insanity, part 937.

But an olive branch in this scathing rebuke is extended to congratulate the Harris County Democrats, who succeeded where virtually all other Democratic parties across the country failed in 2016: switch Republican voters over, turn out the vote among Latin@s, and otherwise grind out a big win in a formerly purple, 50-50 county.  They did what the national organization couldn't, and maybe they have some wisdom to share going forward.  Who they pick to replace Lane Lewis as county chair will make a lot of difference as to whether they can sustain the gains in 2018 and, in the big picture, help eject the Cheeto Tweeter from the Oval Office in 2020.

Democracy is counting on a knee-capped, divided, somewhat bitter and mostly clueless bunch of elitist Democrats who favored a strong defense and big banks at the expense of working men and women, and nobody ought to hold their breath waiting for them to figure out how to win in two years.  Four years from now ought to be easier, but that's an eon away in political terms.

I'm going to continue to help organize something outside this shell of an allegedly liberal political party, but kudos to those who still think there's a rebellion to win within it.  Those folks will eventually be allies to those of us outside the castle walls, and how long it takes for them to come to their senses is the only remaining question.

Update: Down with Tyranny has a harsher evaluation.

Why I don't post much about Texas any more

Just a few of the latest reasons.

-- The three loons in contention for Secretary of the Department of Agriculture: Elsa Murano, Sid Miller, and Susan Combs (let me know in the comments if this Chron link and others below aren't giving you the full article).

Murano is a former president of TAMU, where she crossed swords with Rick Perry's buddy.

The Cuba-born Murano, a food safety expert who worked in the administration of President George W. Bush, is considered the least controversial of the three Texans, although she has rattled consumer advocates as well as top administrators in College Station.

[...]

Murano's more pressing political problem may be her short and stormy tenure at the helm of Texas A&M, where she clashed with then-Chancellor Mike McKinney, former chief of staff to Gov. Rick Perry, now Trump's choice for energy secretary.

Though Murano may have the heftiest food science resume among a slew of contenders in and out of Texas, her forced resignation after 18 months leading Texas A&M, Perry's alma mater, could make her an odd fit in the Trump White House.

Should I rehash the disadvantages of "romance novel/comptroller data breach" Combs and "Jesus shot/C-word/cupcake amnesty" Miller, in previous (and current) office?  No, I shouldn't.

The main reason I shouldn't is because it makes no difference as to whether these foul Texas Republicans get elected and re-elected.  The challenge may lie elsewhere, as Texas Democrats can't seem to come up with a way to defeat them.  It is no longer sensible to simply mock or deride or even point out their flaws as politicians and human beings without noting the vast ineptitude of their opposition.  See, in Texas we've been having to choose between Trump and Clinton in nearly every single statewide race for a couple of decades.  We keep waiting and hoping for the electorate to figure out which is the worst and then are shocked when they don't.  Logic and facts seems to be less and less useful in this regard.  The true fallacy of lesser evilism has been on display here in Deep-In-The-Hearta for a generation now; maybe there's a better choice beyond continuing to hold porcine singing lessons.

Here's more of the same, court room version.

A federal judge Wednesday ordered the Texas prison system to disclose the number of heat-related deaths among inmates statewide since 1990, sharply questioning why its lawyers had not provided the information sooner.

U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison gave the state 30 days to provide the details or face the consequences.

"We are not talking about how many widgets were sold out of a given factory," Ellison said during a hearing Wednesday in Houston. "We are talking about human lives, and I would be very distressed if the answer is the TDCJ does not even keep count of how many people died of heat-related illness."

What is there of value -- distress, disgust, outrage, snark, or otherwise -- to add to Judge Ellison's?  Here's more, tangentially, with respect to the Texas criminal "justice" (sic) system.

"Texas has the largest prison population of any state in the country. Nearly 145,000 are incarcerated, and a significant percentage of those are low-level offenders. People who are being held for violating parole or minor drug crimes," (Texas Association of Business President Bill) Hammond said. "Violent criminals, rapists and sexual offenders do belong in prison. However, there are some people whom we do not think belong in prison because of the cost."

Texas spends about $3 billion a year on prisons. Keeping someone behind bars costs about $50 a day, compared with $3 a day for supervised probation. With Texas lawmakers facing an $8 billion shortfall to maintain the current level of government services in 2018-2019, they need to find savings, and criminal justice is overdue for an overhaul.

Do you think posting a word like "good", or "wow", or something similar followed by an excerpt followed by an original sentence or two (generally containing the words 'see here for the background', with a link to some mention of the topic in the past), perhaps a paragraph of dishwater-flavored opinion, is making much of a difference in how Texans think about how they have been governed for the past twenty-five years?  Texas progressivism doesn't need more than one person on that beat.

Bill Hammond has been the solitary conservative in this state who has consistently tried to bridge the bipartisan divide in Austin by talking sense at Republican legislators, and you can see how successful he's been.  (Please don't assume that I'm giving Hammond credit for anything but a modicum of intelligence here.)

Hammond explained at an Austin news conference that it's not just about saving taxpayer money, though. It's about keeping nonviolent offenders employed and providing for their families while making restitution. Diversion programs and alternative sentencing can also force offenders to get treatment for drug addiction and mental health problems that underlie most crimes today.

"You are talking about individuals who are working, who are paying taxes, who are paying child support. They should be part of the community and part of the workforce instead of rotting in some prison at a high cost to taxpayers," Hammond said.

Indeed, this effort at rehabilitation is bipartisan.

Prison reform has long been a priority for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin. The group notes that politicians rely too much on incarceration, with one of every 100 American adults in prison today, compared with one in every 400 in 1970.

The group wants rehabilitation programs that reduce recidivism, such as mandatory job training, drug counseling and mental health care for the 7,000 Texans who are going to prison every year for simple drug possession.

The left-leaning Texas Criminal Justice Coalition couldn't agree more, calling for new ways to address possession of a controlled substance.

"There is no evidence that harsh penalties will discourage someone from continuing to use drugs, and therefore it is no surprise, then, that of the thousands of people who we send to state jail each year, 62 percent of them will be rearrested within three years," said Douglas Smith, a policy analyst with the group. "We can't arrest our way out of addiction."

We'd better stop there, as this gets way too deep for your average Trump voter/TeaBagger.  Appealing to the greater good in the souls of Lone Star conservatives only works if they're admonishing their lessers about the use of bootstraps.  If ill and impoverished Texans who have died because Rick Perry and Greg Abbott refused to expand Medicaid didn't graze their conscience, it's impossible to see how the lives of those incarcerated for drug "offenses" would.

At some point, again, you have to ask: is trying to make progress worth the effort in Texas?  There's always hope, but how bright does that little candle flicker?

One very minor example of the point I'm trying to make here.

Wouldn't it be grand if that vision above became reality?  Yet the elected managers of this region -- this modern, forward-looking, wealthy metropolis, with all of its spectacular diversity of arts, culture, food, and more -- cannot seem to overcome the troglodytes among their base who would rather tear down a piece of history, a legacy symbol related to the past when we dreamed big and executed big.

Nothing, in my opinion, demonstrates the abject failure of Texas conservatism more than the Astrodome in its current condition.  It's a metaphor for the crumbling, abandoned, deteriorating waste that is a long-term consequence of Texas Republican governance, as far and wide and clearly as the eye can see.

And yet the Democratic Latina county commissioner in 2012 -- now state Sen. Sylvia Garcia -- who represented a redistricted precinct that was 52.5% Latin@ VAP but only 38% CVAP, was subsequently shoved off commissioners' court by the Anglo Republicans on the east side of Houston.  Dr. Reynaldo Guerra at Dos Centavos explained this clearly at the time.  He invoked another quaint relic of a bygone era which has been steadily eroded by the GOP, the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  (Aside: boy, do I miss that kind of blogging.)

Harris County Democrats -- who stood out across the country as a shining example of how to take back their courthouse in last month's election -- need to show the rest of Texas outside the urban city limits how to replicate the feat in two years at the statehouse.  And in the US Congress, when we will have evidence of the destructive force of Trump's presidency staring us all in the face.  I'll be watching and assessing the Democrats' performance, but I won't be helping them any more. I like to have more options than just Coke or Pepsi, and I'm going to see to making that happen for everybody who can bothered to do their civic duty on a regular basis and cast a ballot.

Brainiacs of 2016 on the way

This blog will award what was called 'Texan of the Year' as a TPA collaboration in years past, but since that doesn't happen any longer we'll change the name to "Brainiacs of 2016" and publish the winner(s) sometime before Sunday, the beginning of a fresh new year for Democrats to dread and the end of a true annus horribilis.

I'll go a little farther than another tired critique of Worst Texans (oddly enough, they're all Republicans), avoid a back-patting listicle of Best Stories, and kick up the acidity a notch from Daily Jackass honorees Chris Hooks, Misandry Angie, Jef Rouner, John Cobarruvias, Tessa Stuart and Brent Budowsky, Kris Banks and Allen Brain, and Barack Hussein Obama.  Oh, and everybody who said that a vote for Jill Stein was a vote for Trump.  Especially Matthew Rozsa and Dave Wasserman.

An early dishonorable mention goes to local Shrillbot Kim Frederick, still spewing venom all over her social media at Bernie Sanders and his supporters seven weeks after the Hillocaust.  If you want to understand why the Democrats are going to keep on losing, just take a look at her bilious slurs against progressive Democrats (and everybody who agrees with her).

While I finish up the roster, here's a little scattershooting a couple of trending topics.

-- Those crazy kids at Rice have cooked up a voting machine that may be hack-proof.

The drumbeat of election rigging and foreign hacking of voting machines have energized ongoing efforts to develop a new model of digital election equipment designed to produce instantly verifiable results and dual records for security.

Election experts say this emerging system, one of three publicly funded voting machine projects across the country, shows potential to help restore confidence in the country's election infrastructure, most of which hasn't been updated in more than a decade.

[...]

A prototype of the system, dubbed STAR Vote, sits in an engineering lab at Rice University, and bidding is open for manufacturers who want to produce it wholesale. Similar efforts to innovate voting systems are in the works in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

"County clerks in these jurisdictions are the rock stars of running elections," said Joe Kiniry, CEO of Free & Fair, an election systems supplier currently bidding on contracts to manufacture the designs of both Travis and Los Angeles counties. "If they have success in what they do, it will have, in my opinion, a massive impact on the whole U.S."

I saw no mention of Stan Stanart in this article.

Primarily, the team aimed for a digital system with easily verifiable results. So they devised a machine that records an electronic vote, then prints a copy of the paper ballot, which the voter examines then puts in a ballot box. If there are concerns about the accuracy of electronically tabulated results, they can be compared with a sampling of the paper ballots.

"It has a belt and suspender approach to verifiability and security," said Philip Stark, associate dean of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, who collaborated on the design.

STAR Vote runs automatic audits, comparing a statistical sample of the paper ballots with the digital records to verify results. "The savings are just enormous over doing a recount," Stark said.

While other systems allow for comparison of precinct-level data, STAR Vote can compare paper ballots with individual voters' digital ballots, which are encrypted and posted online. Officials could take a small sample of printed ballots and compare them with digital results to conclude with high confidence that election results were correct.

I suppose my friend Brad Friedman will stick to the Luddite method he's championed for so long, and I'd like to observe some field test, logic-and-accuracy run-throughs before I can be convinced, but Wallach, et.al. have a large reservoir of trust established in this corner and I'd like to see what they have designed.

-- As someone who spent some time as a grief counselor with the Houston-based death conglomerate SCI, this has lots of appeal to me (and none for them).

Dennis White knew he was going to die soon, and he had a plan. The 63-year old Massachusetts man had a disease called progressive primary aphasia — a condition that slowly robbed him of cognitive function and made it difficult for him to speak. In planning his own funeral, he had seen a TED Talk by artist Jae Rhim Lee about her idea for a mushroom burial suit, and realized it was for him.

White had his death planning process filmed and turned into a short documentary. The Infinity Suit he chose is a hand-sewn shroud made of mushroom spores and other microorganisms that are supposed to aid in decomposition and neutralize toxins, according to Coeio, the company that makes the garment (which costs $1500).

[...]

White passed away in September and got his wish to be buried in the suit. Namrata Kollo, a partnerships manager with Coeio, says that planning ahead — the way White did — can help people make better decisions around their own death. "It not only eases the burden on them, but helps people think about the legacy they want to leave for the planet," she says. "With death, as much as possible, we'd like to become food of the planet and return nutrients."

People are now rethinking relationships with death and burials, from the ground up. It's part of a movement that reimagines humans' relationship with the earth, says Suzanne Kelly, author of "Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Our Tie to the Earth."

Traditional burial and even cremation -- which has an enormously large carbon footprint -- is just not sustainable.  Certainly not as modeled for excessive profit by the United States' monopolistic death merchant, Service Corporation International (operating funeral homes and cemeteries around the world under the Dignity Memorial brand).

Kelly points out that before the 1830s, people celebrated and buried their dead without caskets, embalming or vaults, on family farms or in church graveyards. But a rise of urbanism collided with a fear of sanitation. "It was believed that if something smelled bad, it would make you sick," Kelly says. Reformers set their sights on cemeteries and banned them from town centers. Slowly, people became more distanced from dead bodies.

Today, the way we manage the dead isn't sustainable. Each year, 2.6 million people die in the United States, and most are buried in a cemetery or cremated, impacting land use and contributing to climate change. 

Go read the article and watch the video.  It's an eye-opener, but not for those who are squeamish about death or the deathcare industry (yes, that's its real name).

The Boxing Day Wrangle

 It's not as rough on Santa as you might think.

Off the Kuff looked at presidential voting results in two Congressional districts with an eye toward future elections.

Socratic Gadfly punctures bits of East Texas, and general Texas, historical mythology with a look at the history of Nacogdoches. (Part Two this coming Friday.)

Grits for Breakfast watched the video of Fort Worth police officer baiting, and then arresting, the woman who called 911, and wonders right alongside the police chief if it was rudeness or racism.

In a 24-hour period last Thursday, Trump managed a trifecta: antagonize US-Israeli relations, start a nuclear arms race with Russia, and knock Lockheed Martin around for a discount on F-35s by threatening to have Boeing build a 'modified F-18' in its place.  PDiddie at Brains and Eggs says that if we don't get his Twitter account suspended, he's going to kill us all.

jobsanger reprints a FWST op-ed that points out that the Texas Lege still plans on defunding Planned Parenthood.

The Lewisville Texan Journal reported on the Texas Education Agency's final school ratings for the year, and quoted some administrators as calling them a crock.

South Texas Chisme says that in the wake of the Corpus Christi public water emergency last week, that city's manager says there's "a lot" of non-compliant users of city water.

Neil at All People Have Value took a picture of Houston's excellent Christmas Tree of Tires.  APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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And still more Texas news from a variety of contributors!

From space poop to Jupiter, the Houston Press recounted their ten best 2016 stories about NASA.

The Rivard Report spotlights on San Antonio's mental health care network, a national model.

The Longview News Journal exposes the East Texas judges who pay themselves a $25,000 bonus just for showing up for work.

The Texas Observer posts the worst of 2016's social media offerings from the likes of our elected 'representatives' such as Robert Morrow, Konni Burton, and Sid Miller.  Basically all of Sid Miller's Facebook timeline.

Equality Texas sees North Carolina buckling under the economic pressure of their 'bathroom bill', and watches as Texas charts a similar ill-fated course.

Ashton Woods at Strength in Numbers excoriates 'Pantsuit Nation' in his semi-regular series on intersectionality and the problematic white gaze.

And Houstonia has the Texas state park camping trips you need to book now.

Christmas Day Funnies