Lordy Funnies

Scattershooting a week's worth of broken news

About six or so draft status posts need to be condensed to a sentence or two each.  Okay, a paragraph or two.

-- Sylvester Turner is simply weak, folks.  After a dozen Texas cities quickly declared they would legally enjoin the state of Texas from enforcing the sanctuary cities ban, the rest of us have been waiting for Mayor Sly to bust his move.  It's a question Stace at Dos has asked three times now -- in his best passive-aggressive voice -- and finally, after the newspaper of local record along with dozens of immigrants rights activists called him out for his recalcitrance, Turner finally said he'd put it on council's agenda in a couple of weeks.  And the mayor's lickspittles on social media all declared victory in one voice.

One CM was heard to say that Turner was still afraid of alienating Republicans in the Lege, even after securing the much-ballyhooed pension reform legislation, which has already been signed by Helen Wheels Abbott, and for which Turner held an instant self-congratulatory press conference.  So what future is he so scared of?  Yes, the fireman are going to fight back a little harder, but if the mayor were really sly he'd just kick that can down the road like all the mayors before him have done. 

If you have nine Democrats out of fifteen CMs, you shouldn't need extra time to whip votes.  But as I have said time and time again, Houston's Democrats are really moderate Republicans in disguise.  Turner's long history in the Lege taught him when to kneel to conservative complaints and when to ignore liberal ones.  And until someone pays Marc Campos to share his secret to turning out the Latinx vote, none of that is going to change.  So hey, maybe this weakness isn't all on the mayor.

And maybe he's just sitting tight, waiting for the courts to take care of it.  That's still not leadership.

-- Dan Patrick forced a special session by getting the Freedom Caucus to kill the sunset bill.

As a key deadline to pass bills out of the Texas House approached last month, a small group of ultra-conservative legislators ensured the demise of a measure that would have prevented the shuttering of several state agencies. In a text message to a lobbyist, Rep. Kyle Biedermann, a member of the self-styled House Freedom Caucus, said Patrick called the group and asked them to stall long enough to keep the bill from passing.

He made Greg Abbott his bitch, and he goat-fucked every single Texas House Republican moderate in the 2018 GOP primary.  Texas Democrats won't be able to to do anything but cry over it; it's all on the Straus Caucus to stop them.  In the special and in next year's elections.

This is among the many reasons why I'm retiring to New Mexico in a few years.

-- James Comey has again gone from being the guy who threw the election to Trump to the guy who's going to get Trump thrown out of the White House.  To hear Democrats tell it.

Some heard bombshells; sounded like eggshells to me.  The actual reveal was Comey having his buddy leak the memo that kneecapped Trump a couple of days before his testimony.  Edward Snowden said it best.

It seems the @FBI Director agrees: sometimes the only moral decision is to break the rules. https://t.co/j1V6xROs9y

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) June 8, 2017

-- It was tantalizing...

Russian intelligence agents hacked a US voting systems manufacturer in the weeks leading up to last year’s presidential election, according to the Intercept, citing what it said was a highly classified National Security Agency (NSA) report.

The revelation coincided with the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor from Augusta, Georgia, who was charged with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.

The hacking of senior Democrats’ email accounts during the campaign has been well chronicled, but vote-counting was thought to have been unaffected, despite concerted Russian efforts to penetrate it.

Russian military intelligence carried out a cyber-attack on at least one US voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than a hundred local election officials days before the poll, the Intercept reported ...

The NSA report makes clear that, despite recent denials by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the NSA is convinced that the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) was responsible for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

But ...

The intelligence assessment acknowledges that there is still a great deal of uncertainty over how successful the Russian operatives were and does not reach a conclusion about whether it affected the outcome of the election, in which Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton hinged on three closely contested states.

But ...

But the suggestion that Russian hackers may gained at least a foothold in electronic voting systems is likely to add even more pressure to special counsel and congressional investigations. The Obama administration maintained that it took preventive measures to successfully guard against breaches of the systems in all 50 states.

Someone in position to know says it's worse than is being reported.

"I don't believe they got into changing actual voting outcomes," Virginia Sen. Mark Warner said in an interview. "But the extent of the attacks is much broader than has been reported so far." He said he was pushing intelligence agencies to declassify the names of those states hit to help put electoral systems on notice before the midterm voting in 2018.

I'm again hearing eggshells.

A leaked analysis containing none of the raw data being analyzed in that analysis does not come even remotely close to being the sort of hard evidence that those of us who are skeptical of your conspiracy theory would require. For the many, many reasons listed in the debunkery compendium, nothing but hard evidence will suffice.

The fact is, we’ve already seen analysis reports from intelligence agencies on the alleged Russian election meddling, like this one by the DHS and the FBI in December, and this one by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in January, and like the Intercept’s NSA leak those didn’t contain any raw intelligence either.

[...]

Additionally, the NSA was literally just shown to have been dead wrong about Russia meddling in the French election.  [...] For weeks establishment outlets were reporting as unquestionable fact that Russia was known to have hacked French electoral infrastructure, citing NSA chief Michael Rogers’ confident proclamation that NSA surveillance had “watched” this happen. 

In an even stranger development, Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald are suddenly no longer BFF because of the burning by The Intercept of whistleblower Reality Winner.

-- UK PM Theresa May miscalculated like a Texas GOP boss (well, hopefully), and now she has to go harder right with her coalition.  There was also a remarkably hostile rift opened among Middle Eastern nations, a couple more terrorist attacks, and some other things that slid down the memory hole faster than shit through a goose.  It's not all about Trump, after all.

You all caught up now?

Just one week ago, it was back channels, broken climate accords, and covfefe.  Those were the days.

I din't even have time to opine about Kathy Griffin (Go, girl) or Bill Maher (STFU).

Too much and too fast for me to document on a timely basis.  Taking another break after the Funnies and the Wrangle; any updates after Monday morning will appear in the Twitter feed.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is still debating whether it's pronounced "cov-fee-fee" or "cov-fay-fay" as it brings you this week's roundup.

Sometime the cartoonists really nail it. The toon above appeared a couple of days 
before CNN had champion Ananya Vinay on and stumped her with Trump's gibberish.

Off the Kuff notes the final passage of Voter ID 2.0, which does not and cannot address the issue of the original bill's discriminatory intent, but will make the Texas GOP feel a little better about itself.

In some good news that came out of the legislative session recently concluded, Texas Vox proclaims the extension of TERP (Texas Emissions Reduction Plan) to 2019 as cause for celebration.

There's a case to be made for Russian involvement in the 2016 election; it's just not a convincing one, according to PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

SocraticGadfly sees Hillary Clinton's latest blame-passer about the election and wonders, among other things, if some of the latest complaints about sexism couldn't apply to her own comments.

The Lewisville Texan Journal profiles the large number of Democrats ready to challenge Republican Congress Critter Michael Burgess.

Dos Centavos had a couple of posts wondering why Houston still hasn't signed on to the lawsuit challenging the anti-sanctuary cities law, as several other Texas cities have.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme shows how Bush presided over the death of the GOP.

jobsanger cites a Media Matters poll showing the corporate media has failed the public on its reporting of climate change.

Neil at All People Have Value does not understand why citizens of Houston litter at Stuebner-Airline Park. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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As the Lege concluded its regular session -- and everyone waits with bated breath to see if Greg Abbott will call a special -- here's what made news as state legislators took a break.

A case in Wisconsin could send a powerful message about Dan Patrick's unhealthy obsession with who uses which bathroom, posts RG Ratcliffe at Burkablog.

The Dallas Observer names their best and worst legislators from this past session, and Better Texas Blog complains that the Lege is out of sync with Texas values and needs.

The TSTA Blog lets Matt Rinaldi have it.  And Rep. Cesar Blanco is not going to be silent in the face of bigotry.

Grits for Breakfast asserts that Texas gets more credit than it deserves for reducing the state's prison population rates.

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In news beyond Sine Die ...

After 17 years, the racial discrimination lawsuit between EPA and TCEQ over the pollution emitted by Beaumont's Exxon Mobil refinery that has seen a deleterious effect on the adjacent Charlton-Pollard neighborhood has finally been settled.  To a farthing, as reported by Naveena Sadavisam at the Texas Observer.  (Ed. note: I blogged about one of the public hearings regarding the circumstances involving this lawsuit in 2005.)

Space City Weather gives a primer on when to avoid breathing in Houston.

As Alamo City residents begin voting in their municipal elections, Robert Rivard notices that a majority of San Antonio city council members have taken a stand against incumbent mayor Ivy Taylor with regard to suing the state of Texas over the 'anti-sanctuary cities' law.

Sen. John Cornyn assesses Trump's Twitter 'habit' and scores him a B+ in foreign policy, according to High Plains Blogger.

Trump loyalty played a part in the election over the weekend of a new Texas Republican Party state chairman, and First Reading gave us a peek at the politicking that saw James Dickey prevail over Rick Figueroa by a single vote.

Everybody really is moving to Houston, if you measure it by the reports from U-Haul, says CultureMap Houston.  And The Urban Edge writes that millennials are flocking to the Bayou City's suburbs.

Harry Targ at The Rag Blog writes about neoliberalism, resistance, and a left that yearns to grow.

And when in doubt, Harry Hamid quotes Eugene V. Debs.