Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Our alt-facts president

Enabled by his alt-facts press secretary.  Bold mine.

Sean Spicer has shed new light on the concept of "alternative facts," a widely-panned concept introduced by his colleague Kellyanne Conway to defend his seemingly inaccurate inauguration attendee numbers.
According to the White House press secretary, his usage of "alternative facts" is much ado about nothing: In fact, he says, its similar to a meteorologist who incorrectly predicts the weather.
"The press was trying to make it seem like we were ignoring the facts," Spicer told Fox News' Sean Hannity during an interview that aired Tuesday night. "The facts are, sometimes when you look at a situation, in the same way that you can look at a weather report. One weather report comes out and says it's going to be cloudy and another says it’s going to be light rain. No one lied to you, it just means you interpreted the data in a way that you felt got you to a conclusion."
Spicer claimed, "We weren’t by any means trying to mislead anyone. We asked for a set of facts, we thought that the group [which provided subway ridership figures] and the facts that we were given at that time were accurate. Like anything else, it's not alternative facts. There’s sometimes you can watch two different stations and get two different weather reports. That doesn’t mean that the station was lying to you. And the press made it look like we were ignoring the facts. " 

Weather reports aren't facts; they're forecasts.  Predictions.  Sort of like polls.  The weather, like the size of a crowd, is a fact afterwards and not before.  Spicer could have said "Trump's inauguration will be the biggest of all time" the day before the event, and some people would have nodded in agreement while others laughed him off as a braggart.  You can't run around telling people it rained yesterday when it didn't without looking like a moron or an asshole.

The trouble with analogies like this is that we'll have to deal with people who say "It rained at my house" next.  But alt-facts are the world we live in now, so make the necessary adjustments.

In our fresh new environment, ill Eagles cost Trump the popular vote.  And we can't have governmental agencies talking about climate change, or releasing data about unemployment or jobs when they contradict the president's strongly-held belief.  This is truthiness taken to its most petulant extreme.  But Democrats in the Senate already understand they're going to have to pick their battles, and if a nominee is just dense and unqualified, that's not as bad as dangerous and malignant.  Lesser of two evils, you see.


If making America Great Again means more jobs for robots that are themselves manufactured in China, then so be it.  It's up to us to figure out an alternatively factual way to understand it.

Here's one: Robots can't build border walls, so there's going to be some number of jobs -- millions! Yuuuge! -- for Americans that Mexicans won't do (or take away from them, or be shipped overseas).  See how easy this is?

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Democrats winning and losing

-- First, a few more photos from the weekend, at the Capitol ...


... and here in H-Town:


And more pics at the Observer.

The rallies are powerful and enduring emotionally, but simply do not translate into electoral strength. Big turnouts for protests can be misleading, as Nate Silver reminds, and as Charles has noted, Wendy Davis and her filibuster produced a similarly large crowd of upset people over women's reproductive freedoms, and then Greg Abbott defeated her a year later with more white (but not black or brown) female votes than Davis was able to earn.  So it's fair to ask: where do the Dems go from here?  Bernie Sanders answered this question a few days after Hillary Clinton's upset defeat, but none of the 447 people who will be voting in this election seem to have heard it.

We can hope they don't go back to where they started two years ago, but in a glaring sign of chronic insanity, not a single DNC candidate running to replace DWS/Donna Brazile was willing to admit that the 2016 primary was rigged for Clinton.  Keith Ellison is as close to acceptable as it gets for actual progressives (not the alt-progs that comprise most of the party), and a lot of them are already stepping away from him because.... well, I suppose he just can't help himself.

In trying to woo the DNC delegates he needs to win the election, Ellison has reduced his criticism of Hillary Clinton and increased his smears of the Republican Party. He has endorsed a billionaire donor, Stephen Bittel, to become the Florida Democratic Party chair, and has announced that he will not be attending Trump’s Inauguration, which many commended. But what he failed to mention is that he will be meeting with billionaire donors instead at Clinton propagandist David Brock’s closed-door retreat. Though Ellison initially said he supported re-enacting a ban on lobbyists that former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz lifted in 2015 to help Hillary Clinton, he recently said he won’t unilaterally re-enact the ban but will put it to a vote for DNC members to decide. Many of the DNC members happen to be lobbyists.

Incidentally, only one candidate marched this past weekend.  All the rest huddled with David Brock instead.  I shouldn't have to point this out, but Republicans and Democrats are reduced to fighting over the crumbs from a couple of hundred American billionaire oligarchs, some of which hedge their losses by giving to both parties.  Another 'water is wet'-ism for the Blues: Trump did not get elected because he raised or spent the most money.

-- Kuff has kept tabs on the local D scene with updates to the Harris county chair contest, and the announcement of a bid for Congress by my neighbor, Deb Kerner.

Of the ten folks formally announced (so to speak) for the race, Art Pronin, Dominique Davis, and Lillie Schechter should be the front-runners.  This will again be a blacks vs. gays battle (an old storyline, and note that Keryl Douglas has come back for more of it) for control of the county party, so since Pronin still hasn't decided to run for certain, I would handicap it Davis and Schechter, not necessarily in that order, as early favorites.  DBC has a report on Johnathan Miller's appearance at the Houston Area Progressives meeting this week; he nails it from my perspective.

There are only a few hundred people voting in this election, too.

Kerner (her school trustee page has been updated) is popular with us southwest-siders, and unlike any of the recent challengers to John Culberson, has won an election before.  Keep in mind that Hillary Clinton narrowly carried CD7 over Trump in 2016, while Culberson pasted James Cargas by twelve points, his third consecutive defeat to the incumbent Congress critter.  Anybody that spares us from watching Cargas lose a fourth time is a good thing.

Monday, January 23, 2017

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance won't be passing off any alternative facts in this week's roundup from the best blog posts and news stories of last week.


Off the Kuff stays on the bathroom beat.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos attended the women’'s march in Houston yesterday.  Meanwhile, in that spirit, she recalls the old Republican healthcare plan.  Remember the GOP healthcare plan? “Don’t get sick”.

Socratic Gadfly looks at the most recent Back the Blue support tool, and decries its flag desecration hypocrisy.

Neil at All People Have Value visited the segment of the Berlin Wall at Rice University that was defaced by graffiti supporting Donald Trump. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

The Irish bookmaker Paddy Power laid odds on Trump's shade of orange at the inauguration, but PDiddie at Brains and Eggs took some of their easier money.

Before leaving on a fishing trip, CouldBeTrue at South Texas Chisme sees a lot of harrassment and some tough times ahead for people who live on the border.

The Lewisville Texan Journal reports that over one hundred people are suing an emergency care facility there.

Dos Centavos notices that there are no vendidos in Trump's cabinet.

Easter Lemming Liberal News, now on Facebook and Twitter, reports Pat Van Houte is running for mayor of Pasadena, Texas.  She opposed the redistricting that was just ruled illegal.

And jobsanger dissects Trump's promise of 25 million new jobs (hint: it won't happen no matter how much 'alternative math' gets employed).

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

More Texas news!

Robin Paoli and Aimee Mobley Turney explain why they marched on Saturday.

Harris County may have more Latinos voting than previously counted, relays the Urban Edge.

David Collins at DBC Green Blog observes that the Harris County Democratic Party needs more precinct chairpersons (and more progressives, a different problem).

Allen Young traveled from rural Massachusetts to Austin to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Rag, the iconoclastic underground newspaper that carries on today as The Rag Blog.

A Texas House Republican from Fredericksburg, Kyle Biedermann, sent out a highly questionable survey about Sharia law just prior to convening a 'Homeland Security Summit' in Austin this week.  The Houston Press quotes the head of Houston's Council on American-Islamic Relations as suggesting it's a fishing expedition.

 Protestors at Texas Muslim lobby day, two years ago.

G. W. Schulz at the Texas Observer shares the lessons he has learned from hustling in the new gig economy.

Luis Hestres wonders what Trump's election will mean for digital freedom of speech.

Equality Texas is tracking the pro- and anti-LGBT bills in the Legislature.

The Texas Election Law Blog analyzes the Pasadena redistricting decision.

The Lunch Tray says goodbye to Michelle Obama.

The Bloggess did what she could to help you get through last week.

And conservative Democratic political consultant Colin Strother advises us to hold on tight.