Dan Patrick, Potentate of Piss, and other 85th Session previews

(Mad props to Cort McMurray, who gets all the credit for most of the following scatologically inspired titles for the right honorable gentleman presiding over the Texas Senate.  I was motivated to add a few.)

The 85th Texas Legislature officially gavels in at noon on Tuesday, kicking off nearly five months of nonstop banter, brawls and bills under the pink dome. When lawmakers gather for the first time since 2015, they'll have a lot on their plate: the state's ongoing foster-care crisis, property tax reform, a "bathroom bill," and public school funding, to name a few.

Our self-appointed Umpire of Urinating, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, has moved forward his bill abolishing the right of transgendered people to pee in the water closet of their choosing as our part-time working,  full time-damaging Texas Lege reconvenes.  The Kaiser of the Crapper has more serious matters of statewide business to deal with, but fear of the 'other' has consumed him, and he intends to make his mark by standing up -- not sitting down -- for the rights of scared old men across the land to avoid having to do their business in public with people they loathe.

They claim -- as they always do -- that it's being done to protect the children.  It's hard to envision how crushing the Texas economy in similar fashion to North Carolina's helps anyone, especially the kids, but logic has never been the GOP's strong suit.  Speaker Joe Straus and even Governor Greg Abbott don't share Patrick's high toilet priorities, and neither do the state's business interests, so perhaps the bill will be allowed to die quietly in the corner of some House committee room.

-- The state's revenue for the next two years is estimated by Comptroller Glenn Hegar to be $104.87 billion.  One hundred nine billion is needed just so state services can be maintained at current levels (adjusting for inflation).  That means massive cuts to critical programs, or 'belt-tightening' in Republican euphemism.  The TexTrib carefully breaks it all down, but it's bad news no matter who's spinning it.  Better Texas Blog is going to be your go-to all session long, and they've already done some heavy lifting.

(I)t’s worth remembering that the Legislature’s short-sighted tax breaks and diversions have done much more to limit future General Revenue collections than the oil/gas downturn did. CPPP will be ready with analysis after the Biennial Revenue Estimate is released to discuss the implications for critical state investments in education, health, highways, and public safety.

Their first post out of the box yesterday afternoon dealt with the ACA's pending repeal in Congress and the harsh effect it will have on mental health funding in Texas.

The just-released Texas House Select Committee on Mental Health report recommends enhancing enforcement of mental health parity protections.

A full repeal of the ACA would move in the opposite direction.  Full repeal would substantially reduce the reach of mental health parity protections, reducing access to mental health and substance use disorder (MH/SUD) care for 2.5 million Texans.[i]  One of the less-publicized benefits of the ACA is that it extended the reach of mental health parity to types of insurance plans that had been previously excluded.  An ACA repeal would mean millions of Texans would lose equal access to mental health benefits in insurance.

-- Dawnna Dukes isn't going to give up her seat after all, despite ongoing ethical investigations and a previously-disclosed inability to serve after suffering injuries in a 2013 auto accident.  While she had indicated she would resign last year, and her stalling through the holidays prompted questions from others (coveting her post, oddly enough) concerned that her waffling would delay a special election, she effectively further handicaps an already-crippled House Democratic caucus in its super-minority status.  Dukes is just one more brick in the wall Texas Democrats continue to build to keep themselves inside a prison of irrelevance.  Dukes was about to be indicted before she said she was quitting, so we'll see what happens with that now.

Update: That didn't take long.

-- As mentioned in yesterday's Wrangle, Grits points out the blinding hypocrisy of SD-17 flack Joan Huffman and her union-busting bill.

SB 13 by state Sen. Joan Huffman -- which is one of Lt. Governor Dan Patrick's stated priorities -- would eliminate payment of union dues directly from public employees' paychecks except for police, fire and EMS unions.

Include police unions in the ban and Grits might go for that idea. They're the main source of public-employee-union generated economic headaches at the local level, from excessive salaries bloating the budget in Austin to vitriolic attacks on the city manager in San Antonio to massive unfunded pension liabilities threatening to bankrupt the city of Dallas. They're also the unions most frequently throwing their weight around in local elections, to the detriment of both officer accountability and city budgets.

If the goal is to reduce organized labor's stranglehold on local budgets and politics in Texas, police unions are the place to start.

Nobody -- no legislator, no mayor, no city council -- wants to take on the guardians of the elite keepers of (alleged) law and order in any manner such as this.  They are all much too frightened of the possible repercussions.  In this strict cost-analysis of every line item in the state budget, nobody ought to be getting a free lunch.  Cops included.

-- Governor Abbott, like President-elect Trump, seems capable of exacerbating tensions with China in ways both predictable and accidental.

On Saturday, Gov. Greg Abbott met with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in Houston to discuss energy and trade relations, according to a news release from Abbott's office.

"Thanks to our favorable regulatory and legal climate, Texas remains and will continue to be a premier destination for Taiwanese businesses to expand and thrive," Abbott said in a statement. "I look forward to strengthening Texas' bond with Taiwan and continuing my dialogue with President Tsai to create even more opportunity and a better future for our citizens."

Lots more cheap crap to buy at Walmart.  Yay!

Abbott may have "committed a cultural faux pas" when he gave Tsai a clock as a gift during their meeting, according to Taiwan News. In Chinese, "giving a clock" means "attending a funeral," symbolizing an early death for someone who receives a clock as a gift.

Oops.  Didn't someone say that Abbott was more intelligent than Rick Perry?  In what way?

-- Stand by for more from the scene of the crimes in Austin; follow my Twitter feed as we cover today's Opening Day (traditionally filled with more pomp than circumstance).

Trump's cabinet picks, Senate Repubs go into hurry-up offense

This week's confirmation hearings on Trump's cabinet nominees are crowded all together, ethically non-compliant, and will be bulldozed quickly through.

The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate plans to rush forward this week with confirmation hearings for many of Donald Trump’s nominees for cabinet and other key executive positions. Though many of the picks have not yet completed the customarily required ethics clearances and background checks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has shown no willingness to delay.

“They’ve made pretty clear they intend to slow down and resist and that doesn’t provide a lot of incentive or demonstrate good faith to negotiate changes. So I think we’re going to just be plowing ahead,” his deputy, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) told Politico.

Sometimes the hubris can still amaze.

Senate Republicans have heard the Democrats’ demands for a deliberate confirmation process for Donald Trump’s nominees. But they don’t care.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s conference has scheduled six Cabinet-level confirmations hearings for next Wednesday, Jan. 11, the same day the chamber will likely slog through an all-night vote-a-rama on a budget and the president-elect will give his first press conference in six months.

One hearing -- Homeland Security-designate John Kelly's -- has been moved, and Trump has already postponed his long-awaited first presser as president-elect.  Here's the updated schedule, and more of the "everything you want to know" variety.  There's simply no precedent for this kind of cram-through -- not even Obama's own, eight years ago, compares -- and for them to shoot the finger at proper financial disclosures... well, that's a thousand miles away from 'draining the swamp'.

In fact, it reminds me of how pipelines get laid in North Dakota.  Like Mexico building the wall, another campaign promise bites the dust.  Does any Republican want to give a damn?

The Trump team’s failures could be the result of disorganization — or a lack of familiarity with the rules. Trump himself has not set an inspiring example. The ethics office is reportedly working with his lawyers to encourage him to do what the law demands of his cabinet: divest and enter office free of conflicts. He is the only incoming president in modern history who has refused to do so.

For his nominees to do the same would be a serious violation of the public trust, and would potentially violate the law.

Over/under on Trump Tweeting something akin to "I am the law" is one week from today.

Senators on multiple committees running between Capitol conference rooms to make a portion of a hearing, the hamstrung, intimidated corporate media stretched too thin to cover the developments, conservative dogs and liberal cats living in sin together ... it's our colicky-baby-government in action.  Create as much chaos as possible in order to get your way, no matter what laws or ethical standards or protocol it violates.  "Shake up Washington", even if that means a war with China or a North Korean nuclear missile attack.

Disruption is a family affair.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is firmly bracing itself for the mostly white, male, and middle-aged Texas legislators to work their will on the rest of us in the biennial 85th session, which begins tomorrow in Austin.

Off the Kuff looked ahead to the upcoming Houston elections for 2017.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos understands that if pain and suffering have to be inflicted on the American people, the cruelest party for the job is the Texas Republican Party. Yes, they are coming after Social Security. Worse: the hatchet man is a Texas Republican.

With January 20 just two weeks away, Socratic Gadfly takes an initial snapshot look at President Obama's legacy from the left. Updated Presidential rankings to follow.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme remembers the greedy corporate interests fighting the white nationalists in the 2000s. The white nationalists won that one. We're at it again with today's Texas Legislature.

Texas Leftist piles on the Lord of the Lavatory, Lite Guv Dan Patrick, and his petty, potty politics.

The top environmental stories affecting Lewisville were summarized by the Texan Journal.

Dos Centavos has a few thoughts on the HISD board vacancy.

The latest -- and hopefully the last -- on "русские сделали это" was posted by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Txsharon at Bluedaze is not as Trump as you drink she is.

After many years toiling away for the liberal cause in Amarillo, Ted at jobsanger announces his relocation to Austin.

DemBlogNews surveys the playing field in the contest to be the next DNC chair.

Neil at All People Have Value was out on the streets of Houston calling for kindness, respect, and not giving up. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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More stories from around Texas!

Peggy Fikac at the SAEN sees us all on tenterhooks waiting for the state's revenue estimate from Comptroller Jethro Bodine Glenn Hegar. Update: And the bad news breaks: almost $105 billion, or about $4 billion less than necessary to meet continuing obligations.  Yuuge cuts in state services are in store.  Follow Better Texas Blog for the deep dive.

The Houston Communist Party respectfully requests that the real hackers please stand up.

Grits for Breakfast suggests that if SD-17 Sen. Joan Huffman is serious about busting unions with her recently-filed legislation, she shouldn't leave out the police labor organizations.

John Wright makes five queer predictions for LGBT Texans in 2017, and Ashton Woods at Strength in Numbers says, simply: when people's lives are under assault, the proper response is to fight back.

Paradise in Hell wants the holes in the Texas Freedom of Information Act to be patched.

The TSTA Blog explains how the state abuses school property taxpayers, and the Rivard Report sends home the report card from the state's public school districts on the state education agency's A-F  accountability score.  Their grade?  Incomplete.

The Bloggess submits an application to become a vampire, and It's Not Hou It's Me
gives a hand with your New Year's resolutions with a guide to working out in Houston.

And Pages of Victory had some truck trouble in the cold over the weekend.

Sunday Funnies

Last on the Russians

Hopefully the last, anyway.

If the report had explained how the Russians convinced Hillary Clinton not to campaign in Wisconsin (yes, that's Speaker Ryan with the sickest of burns), that they brainwashed her staff to order those buses of SEIU ground troops headed for Michigan to turn around and go back to Iowa, or show proof that Fancy Bear or Cozy Bear put DNC emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop (which prompted James Comey's letter), then I can be convinced.

But I couldn't find that in the report.  Did I just miss it?

As I blogged on December 13, the Russians did something.  But whatever they did had an indeterminable effect on the 2016 election, because the US intelligence officers who compiled the report did not go there.  The report does say that.

“We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election,” the report stated.

If you don't want to accept that Clinton did it to herself, if you can't blame the polling that missed the mark, and if you think Comey was not at fault with his reopening and reclosing le' affaire email, then maybe you should just fall back to that old reliable, time-tested yet threadbare excuse: blaming the Green Party and Jill Stein.

House Democrats are calling for an independent investigation into the matter.  I support that.  "The Russians did it" is trying on the wardrobe of the JFK assassination conspiracy, so why not?

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.