Monday, April 09, 2018

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance will pay for Ted Cruz's DNA test ... that is, if he is willing to undergo one.  His response to the Austin woman who inquired if he would appears to be 'no comment' ...




The exchange went viral; even Ted Rall got in on the action.

More from around the left of Texas coming your way!

Eric Bradner at CNN's recent account of the Texas Seventh Congressional runoff leads with the observation that Democrats across the country are paying close attention.  Brains and Eggs posted the latest on CD-7 (anecdotally; with a wish that he might be mistaken) and the special election for the vacancy on Houston City Council, District K (and a caution for the next representative).

Disgraced Congressman Blake Farenthold abruptly resigned late last Friday afternoon, but still has not refunded taxpayers the $84,000 he used to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit from his former communications director.  Patrick Svitek at the TexTrib notes that scheduling a special election to replace him has a few considerations for Greg Abbott.


Meanwhile, Svitek took note of Speaker Paul Ryan dragging his purse through Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, and Corpus Christi, collecting four million bucks for Team Ryan's PAC, and the Trib's Abby Livingston saw the GOP runoff for Farenthold's seat tightening.  (The Democrats in CD-27's May 22 runoff are Eric Holguin and Raul 'Roy' Barrera.)

Off the Kuff noted that Texas lost another federal lawsuit about voting rights.

Socratic Gadfly, seeing the latest anti-Palestinian violence by Israelis, looks at myth vs. reality in a major piece of Jewish history.

Jef Rouner writes in the Houston Press about the urgent need white men have for gun control.

The Population Research Bureau found that white men over the age of 65 are almost three times more likely to die by their own hands as the general population. Middle aged white people, both men and women, are seeing increased mortality rates even as other groups are seeing down turns. Suicides are becoming more common, especially in men in this group, as are substance abuse problems, which a lecturer joked to me recently was “suicide on the installment plan.”

Coinciding with this rise of suicides in aging white male populations is the increase in gun buying. Men on average possess twice as many guns as women, and whites statistically outnumber all other ethnicities in America. The reasons behind both rising gun ownership and dangerous levels of despair in white men go hand in hand; economic anxiety, a feeling of lost power and agency, and fear of a country experiencing great demographical change. Guns and white men blues are making for a fatal cocktail that thousands of Americans are slamming down every year with horrific results.

White men desperately need gun control right now, and they can’t get it because the movers and shakers in the pro-gun debate have successfully overshadowed the idea of safety with oppression and disarmament. Meanwhile, gun manufacturers and pop media continue to market the gun as a virility-enhancing problem-solver, and white men in distress are eating it up.

The Lewisville Texan Journal covered the announcement that the city, together with Farmer's Branch, Carrollton, and the waste disposal company Republic Services, have agreed to combine two landfills into one giant 832-acre garbage dump spanning the Elm Fork of the Trinity River.

The Texas Standard talks to Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who doesn't think Trump's tariffs are a big deal for Texas farmers, but does think that restricting H-2A and H-2B visas (for foreign workers, ag and non-ag) are.

*Cheerleader Alert* After more than a generation of one-party dominance, it’s tough for any Texas Democrat to predict what a winning statewide campaign would actually look like.  But if Texas Leftist had to take guess, it would come pretty close to the Beto O’Rourke campaign thus far.  After a massive fundraising haul, Beto is showing that he means business in this race.  And speaking of winning, more great news for Texas’ classical music community as the Houston Chamber Choir receives a very prestigious national honor. /pom poms

Stace at Dos Centavos writes about Tex-Mex Grammy winners Los Texmaniacs' new album, Cruzando Borders, which will touch on border and Mexican American themes.  It's quite timely during this era of Trumpismo. 

Stan Spinner, Lindy McGee, and Julie Boom in the Texas Tribune's TribTalk urge Texans to not politicize vaccinations, Better Texas Blog explains why a property-tax-for-sales-tax swap is a bad idea, and Deborah Beck at the Rivard Report urges elected leaders to have in-person meetings with their constituents.

Elise Hu remembers her first mentor and his warning about Sinclair Broadcasting, and Therese Odell at Foolish Watcher grapples with the politics of Roseanne.

Neil at All People Have Value attended, as he does each week, the John Cornyn Houston office protest.  In other Captain Obvious blog posts, Ted at jobsanger has some monochromatic polling bars that reveal (!) that blacks and whites differ sharply on issues of race.

And Harry Hamid, a blind priest, and a first-year medical student have a free-wheeling discussion/argument out in the front yard.

Sunday, April 08, 2018

Sunday Funnies

I for one will not welcome our new robotic overlords.  To update the call to arms for the working class: "Seize the means of automation!"












Tuesday, April 03, 2018

The latest on CD-7 and District K

-- Yesterday, in the midst of Monday afternoon business, a knock came at the door, and the wife, working from home and stricken with an upper respiratory infection, yelled out a salutation.  It was a blockwalker for Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, who as it happens also had the first mailer in the #TX07 runoff between she and Laura Moser drop in our box later that same day.


After the visitor identified himself and Mrs. Diddie declared our support for Moser, the caller asked (if he could ask) why.  My wife said, "because Fletcher is too corporate".

That evening, as I retrieved said advertising piece and the rest of the post from the mailbox, I noticed that the neighbor two doors down had a 'Lizzie' yard sign out in front.  This neighbor had not previously committed last month to a candidate lawnwise, so this was a conversion of sorts for Team Fletch.  It also marks the strategy for the March 7 front-runner: go into your opponent's area of strength, and do so strong.

Ours is a working-class neighborhood adjacent to Meyerland.  I haven't bothered to check the precinct tallies but my guess is that Moser did well in my part of town (her grandmother was the first female director of the city's Jewish community center, and the daughter of a rabbi from Congregation Adath Emeth, now part of the United Orthodox Synagogues of Houston, a nearby branch of which was recently forced to close and be demolished after repetitive flooding; another Harvey victim).  Ms. Pannill Fletcher is really more of a West University/Bellaire/Memorial kind of Democrat, with her law pedigree and slightly more conservative POV.

This is a long way of saying that if I had to place my wager today, I would bet that LPF is likely to prevail in the runoff on May 22.  Team Moser: your work is cut out for you.

-- It turns out to be more than the normal crying shame that Houston City Council member Larry Green died prematurely ... because he died of a drug overdose.  His drug usage was perhaps something more than the usual recreational, too.  This development stains his glowing posthumous reputation and plays to a regrettable stereotype.  As with the resignation of JP Hilary Green -- the lurid drug and sex stories that came out a year ago about her, about her acrimonious divorce with ex-husband and former city comptroller Ronald Green -- and combined with the accusations and charges against Lege members Ron Reynolds and Borris Miles, Houston black Democrats are now compelled to make certain they get CM Green's replacement (and Judge Green's, whenever that occurs, by a vote of precinct chairs in Harris County) correct.

This new elected official must prove worthy of carrying a heavier burden to hold himself, or herself, far beyond any reproach.

To that end, the special election for the vacant District K seat -- a .pdf map can be seen here -- to be held on Saturday, May 5, with an abbreviated early voting period beginning April 23 through May 1, has nine contendersOf those I would surmise that Larry Blackmon, Pat Frazier, and Martha Castex-Tatum would be the three with the highest name recognition, the campaigns making the strongest effort, and the most likely of two to move on to a runoff.  I'll be following Ashton Woods' lead here, and unless I hear differently from him I will take it that he is supporting Castex-Tatum.

Monday, April 02, 2018

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is packing some extra antihistamines in addition to bringing you the best of the left of Texas from last week.

US Senate candidates Beto O'Rourke and Sema Hernandez met for the first time in the wake of the Democratic primary almost a month ago, and Geoff Campbell interviewed Hernandez afterwards for Progressive Army.  The face-to-face seemed more than a little stand-offish, but O'Rourke appears to have won Hernandez's vote -- if not her endorsement -- in the 2018 general election.  Video courtesy Holos Media on Twitter.


Socratic Gadfly has an update to a previous post on what clearly appears to be a weird triangle in Marlin between Houston real estate "flippers," a former VA hospital building, and the General Land Office and P. Bush.


Ethan Couch -- he was the Brains and Eggs' 2015 Texan of the Year for being responsible (a thinly relative term when referring to Couch) for the word 'affluenza' -- is leaving jail this morning and beginning his ten-year-probationary sentence.  Stephen Young at the Dallas Observer has the details.  Also blogged here a couple of weeks before Couch's award: a disease associated with affluenza is ... gulliblemia.

Talking Points Memo checks in from the federal courthouse in Houston with a report on Steve Stockman's fraud trial, and seems astounded that everything is bigger in Texas, doubly so when it's crimes committed by Texas Republicans.  (Meanwhile, Texans thought everyone knew this already.)

The Texas Standard speaks to the Dallas News' Lauren McGaughey (paywall) about the state's Sunset Advisory Commission describing mental health care oversight among the three agencies charged with that task as being in "severe operational dysfunction".

Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast tips Texas reporters to some news that just might have a Pulitzer hiding in it somewhere.

In the New York Times last week (March 29), former Austin Statesman editor Richard Oppell authored an article that could resonate throughout Texas indigent defense systems, as it describes a practice that's widespread, not remotely limited to the judge or attorney in Galveston at the center of the story. Here's the heart of the allegations ...

(click on the paywalled NYT link above)

Grits has heard similar stories from defense attorneys for as long as I've paid attention to the Texas justice system, including attorneys stiffed not just for time worked but also for investigators' fees or even forensic services.

Which brings me to this observation for Texas-based reporters: This is a national story which can be localized. This isn't the only Texas jurisdiction, by any stretch, in which judges reduced pay requests from lawyers as excessive when they tried to put on a zealous defense. There are also stories out there of lawyers losing out on appointments because judges considered them a tad too zealous. Attorneys who make a living representing indigent clients must routinely take on caseloads well beyond bar-association-recommended guidelines in order to pay for a mortgage, middle-class lifestyle, and law-school debts. This story explains why, and it's not just happening in Galveston.

So, for my reporter friends on the local courthouse beat: There's a courthouse paper trail on cases where judges reduce attorneys' fees, which a local attorney who takes indigent cases or the court coordinator can help you identify. Then, one simply calls up the attorneys to ask why they requested the additional pay. Follow up with calls to the judges in question to get their side of the story; the county judge so s/he can lodge a complaint about unfunded mandates from the state; then make a call to indigent defense experts like the Texas Fair Defense Project or Civil Rights Corps (the two nonprofits that sued over Harris County's unconstitutional bail practices), and you've just localized a national story.

The Lewisville Texan Journal took note of a local election where residents were asked to support or oppose giving themselves a $100 check ... but nobody bothered to vote.  Really; 0% turnout.

Voting ended Saturday for a city referendum, which would cut a $100 check for each resident of Lewisville due to a budgeting error at City Hall. Not one person voted in the election though, causing a standstill among city officials.

“If I’m being honest, we don’t really know what to do,” City Manager Donna Barron said. “We don’t have anything in the city charter to address something like this.”

A Fort Bend county commissioner wants the Lege to consider exempting the Texas Open Meetings Act for emergencies, but Christopher Collins at the Texas Observer asks if that's just another excuse to kill laws that force government to conduct itself transparently.

David Collins attended a recent Socialist Alternative meeting in Houston, where former Greenwatch host and political candidate Brian Harrison spoke about gun violence (not control).

Houston Justice wants to see more African American representation on the Bayou City's commissions and boards, and blogs about how action on that might look.

The Rag Blog's Alice Embree writes about a Chilean student who presented a paper in Paris about protests against Salvador Allende in the '60's and '70's, and used the Austin underground newspaper's digital archives for research.


Another poll bar-graphed by Ted at jobsanger leaves him puzzled as to the conservative political leanings of the Baby Boomer generation.

And both Houston Public Media and Texas Leftist covered the Bean Art War that erupted into a series of putdowns, crackbacks, and other sick burns between Chi-Town and H-Town.  (Few seemed to notice that the artist considers them 'clouds' and not beans.)

Sunday, April 01, 2018