The Pre-Turkey Day Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance sends its deepest condolences to the family of Steve Mostyn, who lost his short battle with an undisclosed mental health concern last week.

Off the Kuff explains what the special election schedule might look like in the event Sen. Sylvia Garcia wins the primary to succeed Rep. Gene Green in CD29.

Socratic Gadfly takes a look at the latest on the Julian Assange-Donald Trump Jr. entanglement, along with blank-check defenders of Assange.

Both Al Franken and Don Willett (the Texas Supreme Court Justice up for a seat on the Fifth Circuit) made jokes that weren't funny that recently came to light, as PDiddie at Brains and Eggs observed.

The Lewisville Texan Journal reports that Denton County Democrats have selected the leader of Indivisible Denton to run the county's coordinated campaign in 2018, but not without some internal bickering.

jobsanger notes that fundraising for Doug Jones, the Alabama Democrat hoping to prevail over Roy Moore, has seen his fundraising surge to "Ossoff-level money" in the wake of Moore's sexual abuse scandal.  (Is that a good thing?)

Grits for Breakfast noticed another shooting by police of an unarmed black man, this time in Mesquite.

Texas jobs simply don't pay well enough, especially when they're staffed by women, says the Better Texas blog.

And The Rag Blog has a hefty podcast from last week, including Jim Hightower, some Vietnam vets reflecting on the war, a climate change scholar, a founder of the Weather Underground, and legendary Austin musicians performing live.

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In other lefty blog posts and news, today is the global Transgender Day of Remembrance, and Equality Texas invites you to join them at one of these events near you.

Houston Justice also tips his cap in deference to Steve Mostyn, recalling the outsized influence he and his grassroots arm, Texas Organizing Project, had on the 2012 SD-6 special election to replace Mario Gallegos.

In their Texas roundup from last Friday, Abby Johnston at the Daily Post has details of Harris County suing Arkema, the company owning the chemical facility near Baytown that suffered flooding and then releases of gases and explosions in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

In San Marcos, an undocumented immigrant left detention without being charged, but also without his DACA status, which was not due to expire until 2019, according to the San Antonio Current.

The Texas Observer has state Rep. Drew Springer in the crosshairs: he sits on the Ways and Means committee overseeing tax law while also serving as a director to one of the state's largest corporate tax (avoidance) law firms, a conflict of interest apparently invisible to him.

Did you vote against toll lanes in a recent election?  TXDOT is attempting a bait-and-switch, according to Somervell County Salon.

Zachery Taylor has a lengthy observation about how the Texas church shooting exposes the military's longstanding coverup of domestic abusers within -- and recently removed -- from its ranks.

And Harry Hamid walked back home after crossing the street last week, detecting some astronauts underground in the process.

Sunday "It's Not Funny" Funnies

Al Franken, Don Willett, and 'jokes'

The day before yesterday's news broke about Al Franken and Leeann Tweeden, Franken -- in his role as Senate Judiciary Committee member -- was grilling Fifth Circuit Justice nominee Don Willett about his Tweets.  Specifically one Tweet.

Go away, A-Rod. “@FoxNews: California's transgender law allows male high schooler to make girls' softball team http://t.co/hnTrWAaV8g"

— Justice Don Willett (@JusticeWillett) February 14, 2014

You can catch up on the frontstory at this Chron link, where the following is excerpted:

"Do you think it demonstrates good judgment for a man in his late 40s, a sitting Supreme Court justice, to publicly demean and humiliate a 17-year-old girl on Twitter?" asked Minnesota Democrat Al Franken.

"I believe that every child is a gift," Willett answered. "Every child is a blessing... I would never demean or disparage anyone."

Willett, a prolific social media user with more than 104,000 Twitter followers, labored to explain the Tweet. "Go away, A-Rod," he said, was a reference to New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez – nick-named A-Rod – who had just accepted a year-long suspension from Major League Baseball for using steroids.

"It was an A-Rod tweet, not a transgender tweet," Willett said.

Franken questioned why it was accompanied by a Fox News article about Cordova-Goff.

"I think it was a ham-handed attempt at levity, and at comedy," Willett said, acknowledging Franken's pre-Senate career on Saturday Night Live. "Your comedy never falls flat, but mine does, admittedly."

"I don't get the joke," Franken pressed. "Sometimes, when you don't get a joke, it's because it wasn't a joke."

"It was intended as one," Willett said, a smile frozen on his face.

Bold emphasis mine, and the quote from Franken is cringeworthy in light of yesterday' developments regarding Franken's own ... let's call it 'no longer appropriate in this national tipping point moment' sense of humor.

David Sims at The Atlantic explains this.  Again, if you need the stage set, go there.

I was just kidding is often a defense offered onstage by stand-up comedians who have, in some way, pushed past performance into something more threatening or upsetting. When Daniel Tosh heckled an audience member with a menacing monologue about how it’d be “funny” if she “got raped by, like, five guys right now,” he claimed afterwards that he was trying to weaponize the “awful things in the world” by making jokes about them. The joy of comedy, after all, is that you can make light of anything, right? But that defense falls flat when a “joke” is targeted to harass, degrade, or even assault a particular person or group—in such cases, “comedy” becomes an excuse to abuse an imbalanced power dynamic. Franken, with all his years in the comedy community, could lay claim to knowing what was funny and what wasn’t, and could plausibly pressure Tweeden into kissing him as a form of unnecessary “rehearsal.”

[...]

It was meant to be funny has been used as the defense for supposedly ironic racism that more often than not feels like button-pressing that’s meant to be emptily offensive. It’s been used to justify “telling it like it is” in ways that work to silence women. And, of course, it’s been used since time immemorial as cover for “goosing” (or whatever other euphemism you might think of) and grabbing people without their consent. Perhaps Franken’s defense could fall into this category—that he was mocking such casual sexism, that he was just pretending to be a thoughtless pig, perhaps for the benefit of giggling onlookers.

Toxic masculinity was referenced in this space just a few days ago, and I suspect there will be plenty more opportunities to rehash and revisit that in the future.  I'm no Franken supporter; he's been losing me for some time with his votes authorizing war funding and his unlimited support of the state of Israel, and more recently last year when he became a super delegate for Hillary Clinton from a state that went 61% for Bernie Sanders, though he didn't say what he was accused by Berniecrats of saying.  In terms of degree of egregiousness of sexual harassment violations, Al Franken ≠ Donald Trump ≠ Roy Moore, but that's not stopping any conservatives from trending a topic overnight.

Likewise, Democrats who attack Tweeden or employ the ' just joking' defense are nothing but blind partisan hypocritical tribalists.  (Some people there get it; most don't.)

So to summarize: Franken did something bad; Tweeden felt empowered by other women sharing their stories to come out with her complaint after more than ten years of suffering in silence about it; Franken quickly apologized, twice, and called for an ethics investigation; Tweeden accepted his apology and called the partisan diatribes "disgusting".  You can watch it all here.

That ought to be the end of it, except for ... you know.

Trump has stayed silent about Moore but has let fly on his medium of choice about Franken.  Some talking head on CNN said last night that "we have a moral leadership vacuum" in the White House.  That's spot on.  One of the things Barack Obama got right, consistently, was when he said in response to some national tragedy: "That's not who we are."

You will never hear Trump say anything remotely like that.

Franken should not resign.  If he does, then he better be holding the door for Roy Moore and Donald Trump to walk out ahead of him.  We'll take that deal, Mr. President.

Update: This take from DocPhD at First Draft is pretty solid.

What so many people are awkwardly groping for is some sort of “sex crime conversion chart” in which one boob-grab equals two ass-pats or one photo equals three teen accusers and one signed yearbook or something. We have finally started coming to the necessary conclusion that shitty behavior is shitty behavior, but people with myriad agendas want to create a hierarchy out of these behaviors, as if hierarchy itself weren’t the reason these messes exist in the first place.

It doesn’t work that way because it’s not about sex. It’s about power.

Gene Green gone. Can TX-29 do better?

Another little bit of scalding truth you'll never read at Off the Kuff.

Gene Green is one of the worst Democrats in Congress; very conservative and very corrupt, a pairing that you often find together. And he's retiring early. No realistic explanation why, since he's been raising money hand over fist all year. He raised $474,164 so far this year and has a campaign war chest with $1,272,398 as of the September 30 FEC filing deadline. TX-29 is a strongly blue district -- PVI was D+12 in 2015 and is D+19 this year -- and Obama won it in a walk both times. A 77% Hispanic district, it wraps around Houston (north, east and south) and includes much of the Ship Channel area, South Houston and Pasadena. Green has promised to help solve the endemic pollution problem at election time while taking massive bribes from the oil and gas industries the rest of the time and helping push through their agenda. He should have been replaced years ago.

The only Democrat brave enough to take him on this cycle has been progressive activist and public school teacher Hector Morales. Hector has been one of the few progressives challenging an entrenched incumbent conservaDem anywhere in the country, the toughest job in politics (please contribute to his campaign here). When the Republicans, with Green's help, passed a fracking bill last July, we asked him about Green's vote and he told us:

"This should not come as a surprise, as Gene Green is one of the founding members of the Congressional Oil & Gas Caucus along with Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, to name a few. Green was also one of the scarce Democrats that voted in favor of the Keystone Pipeline... Perhaps the Congressman should look no further than the Manchester neighborhood, deep in the heart of the 29th Congressional District, where all the refineries are located. After all, the low-income, heavily Latino community has high rates of childhood leukemia, asthma, and bronchitis, an observation that has been backed up by data from the Environmental Protection Agency and the University of Texas, which found “unacceptable” levels of cancer-causing pollutants in Manchester’s air.

"Gene Green is nothing more than a corporate shill who has gotten away with representing the oil and gas companies while claiming to look after the well-being of the community he has sworn to protect. But with $260,000 worth of campaign contributions in this quarter alone from special interests, what more could you expect?"

As an editor's note, I performed several corrections, mostly of punctuation, to the above and added the embedded links that appear.

It will be worth watching Green to see if he doles out that money to some Democrats (and whether they're mangey Blue Dogs like him or somewhat to the left of that), or charities, or whether he just walks away with it.  Maybe Charles will do a spreadsheet for us.

Here comes more hot water.

The Houston Chronicle called Green "a fixture in the Texas Legislature and Congress for nearly half a century." What a terrible, terrible waste of a seat!

Until now, Green's longevity in city politics helped preserve Houston's status as America's largest Hispanic city without a Hispanic member of the U.S. House. Aware of that status, Green worked assiduously to serve constituent needs through job fairs, immunization drives, and town halls. He also worked to court the city's top Latino activists.

A pretty wretched bunch of opportunists jumped right into the race yesterday, starting with anti-charisma state Senator Sylvia Garcia and state Rep. Armando Walle, both Green disciples who seem to have had advance notice.

I actually think a little higher of both Garcia and Walle than DWT; they're both to the left of Green, though that bar is so low it's about three feet under ground.  Morales' biography might be too wordy for Chuck to get through, but let's give him credit for at least noticing Morales, even though he probably hasn't gotten a press release in his inbox.  DWT has been writing about Morales monthly since last July, as noted in the excerpt above.

Wrapping up the slapping of the Donkeys for this morning, I'll predict that Walle drops out* and re-files for his seat in the Lege before December 11, the last day to do so, and that Sylvia Garcia, not Adrian, ultimately goes to Washington.  Carol Alvarado does not enter this race**; she waits for Senator Sylvia's seat to open and runs for that (a special election perhaps not happening until the spring of 2019; Kuff is already offering his nonspecific speculation).  Clinging like remora to the future Congresswoman Garcia are her staff of neoliberal millennial trust fund babies, seeing a political future for themselves by staying in her orbit.

If I had a vote it would be for Hector Morales.  I just can't count on the citizens of CD-29 to be so enlightened as to send some fresh progressive blood to Congress.  Prove me wrong, please.

*Too easy.  If Charles read this blog he'd have known it, too, but he's reading Campos blogging about Dwight Boykins jacking off in front of everybody (figuratively only).

**Update (11/30): Prediction #2 comes to pass.