The Weekly Wrangle

The duopoly cognitive dissonance has been in full flower lately.  As Trump becomes more unhinged, as the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party ascends, the Old Guard feels more threatened, gets more paranoid, and moves closer toward former (?) Republicans like James Comey.  (Wasn't Comey the guy who did that thing with the letter that cost Hillary Clinton the election?)

Here's the Texas Progressive Alliance's roundup of blog posts and news from the week previous.

David Collins strongly advises those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and Russophobia to avoid watering the tree of liberty with hyperbole.

Socratic Gadfly offers detailed thoughts on Robert Mueller's indictment of the GRU 12 and what it does and does not say.

Somervell County Salon collects a few interesting bits and pieces about the hypocritical servility of John Bolton.

As debate season for the 2016 elections begins to take shape, the Texas Tribune reports that Lupe Valdez has agreed to debate Greg Abbott -- just not on the date that Abbott said he would debate her.  (Abbott, like Rick Perry before him, prefers gubernatorial face-offs that compete with "Friday Night Lights" ... so that few Texans are paying attention.)  Progress Texas notes that Ted Cruz is ducking a debate with Beto O'Rourke in the most Cruz-ish way imaginable.

State Sen. Don Huffines got into a contentious Twitter back-and-forth with state Rep. Poncho Nevarez over the Texas voter/photo ID law and left us with the impression that the harshest, most punitive law of its kind in the US doesn't go far enough.  This is why some observers have concluded that Texas isn't just a non-voting state; it's actively an anti-voter state.

As the week-long trial on the Texas fetal burial law wrapped up, the federal judge who will rule in the case gave indications of three things he will decide upon.

In news of the most ironic, Texas Department of Health employees will be working in a new environment after the building in which they have been located was found to have intolerable amounts of mold.

The Texas Observer reports that the Trump administration is unlawfully mistreating immigrant children at every stage of its detention system, according to new court filings.  Which is a vast understatement of the abuse they are suffering.

Seven Texas-based chambers of commerce, two pro-business consortiums and four prominent companies, including Southwest Airlines, filed a court brief asking a federal judge in Houston to reject Attorney General Ken Paxton's argument that the DACA program be ended.  They allege that damage to the Texas economy would amount to tens of thousands of jobs -- and hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues -- that would be lost if DREAMers' work status were revoked.

In the wake of the murders committed in Houston by a parolee who had removed his ankle monitor, Grits for Breakfast (and HPD chief Art Acevedo) asked the questions that challenged the conventional wisdom: are ankle monitors making anybody safer?

The discovery of human remains in Fort Bend County -- likely slaves and prisoners who worked on the sugar plantations there in the late 1800s -- made national and international news ... but was not news to one local activist.

Neil at We Must Act Right Now posted about confrontation and civility in our politics and society.

Harry Hamid sees something missing from her writing.

And The Rag Blog -- and Threadgill's World Headquarters in Austin -- invites you to Thorne Dreyer's birthday party on August 1.

Sunday Funnies

Friday Communist Manifestoon

Eight minutes of mashed-up favorites going back to the Forties, with narration by a "monotonous, God complex, Bond villain, psychotic".

(Russophobia 2.0 ain't got nuthin' on the original.)



Hat tip to Dandelion Salad.

The Weekly Wrangle

This week's Texas Progressive Alliance roundup of lefty news and blog posts begin with two things that could happen that would improve the lives of Texans at large, and correspondingly Texas Democrats ... which is why they won't.

Stephen Young at the Dallas Observer sees one thing Texas Republicans could do that would give more than a million Texans some insurance coverage.

Despite their elected officials' position, the majority of Texans support Medicaid expansion, according to a June poll from the same group that published Friday's report, the Kaiser Family Foundation. Sixty-four percent of Texans, according to the poll, believe that the state should accept federal cash to expand the low-income insurance program, with the same percentage agreeing that the state is "not doing enough to help low-income Texas adults get health care."

As with automatic voter registration, Medicaid expansion is simply not going to happen without a substantial increase in public pressure on our lawmakers.

Some Republicans have used the specter of foreign hacking of digital voter registration databases as evidence that (automatic, online registration) would be too risky, even though the Texas secretary of state’s office has testified to the contrary. In May, a federal judge in San Antonio ordered Texas to allow drivers who are renewing their driver’s license online to also register to vote. The Texas Attorney’s General Office has appealed the decision, hoping the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will give a more favorable ruling.

State Senator José Menéndez, a San Antonio Democrat who filed an automatic voter registration bill in 2016, says resistance to voter expansion policies comes down to fear. “I think it’s about politicians who are afraid of more people getting involved in the process. They want to deal with the same people they always have.”

And there you have the reason why Democrats running for office in Texas feel they must chase Republican votes: because the size of the Lone Star electorate is so severely constricted by the monopoly political party in power that Texas Democrats' efforts to recruit new voters are a scattershot of short pisses into a stiff headwind.

Stimulating increased activity from registered but mostly inert, i.e. presidential election-year Democrats with policies and candidates that would support working-class men and women (and those living below that class) remains an elusive strategy for the paid political consultants advising campaigns that mostly rely on unpaid volunteers.  It's a Catch 22 spiral downward; as the population of the state grows, as Texas becomes more diverse -- in fact becomes a majority-minority state -- its electorate  isn't keeping up ... and its electeds are not representative of the people at large.

Relying on pollsters for some glimmer of hope for Texas Democratic candidates is probably a fool's errand, but that doesn't stop Kuff from reviewing the prognosticator projections for Texas' Congressional races.  Nor does it slow down Ted at jobsanger, who would simply have nothing to blog about if the political polling industry were to suddenly collapse under the weight of its illusions.  Like tea leaves and goat entrails, the guessing games that some people are paid to play for the masses are a charade that even the not-so-gullible enjoy watching.

In a few Capitol-related developments:

The Texas Moratorium Network reprints El Paso state representative Joe Moody's eloquent call for abolishing the death penalty in Texas.

The TSTA Blog suggests using the state's increased revenue on public education.

And Ross Ramsey at the TexTrib explains how Greg Abbott is cementing Rick Perry's legacy of consolidating power in the governor's office.

At the national NAACP convention in San Antonio last week, Brooklyn branch president Joy Williams explained why she would not date anyone who didn't vote.  CNN contributor Roland Martin went further.

" ... Because Trayvon Martin can’t, because Tamir Rice can’t, because Philando Castile can’t, because Laquan McDonald can’t,” Martin said, referencing black boys and men who were killed by police officers. “They can’t vote, but you can vote for the city manager who hires the police chief, you can vote for the [district attorney] who prosecutes the cop that killed them.”

Sanford Nowlin at the San Antonio Current frets about the sorry state of the Alamo City's media.

And several pieces of environmental news were blogged ...

Greensource DFW believes in the recent research that suggests there's a microscopic solution to the macroscopic plastic pollution problem.

Downwinders at Risk found the Clean Air Fund that time forgot.

In 2006, then-Dallas Mayor Laura Miller teamed up with Houston Mayor Bill White and organized a coalition of Texas local governments to oppose the “fast-track” permitting of a dozen new coal plants Governor Rick Perry was pushing.

15 North Texas cities, Houston, and McLennan County (Waco) established the “Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition” to fund a legal team and the technical expertise needed to take on not only the big utility companies, but Perry and the State of Texas as well.

But before the battles could begin, a settlement was reached that cancelled all but one of the coal plants. The approximately $500,000 raised by the Coalition to wage clean air war was not needed now. Instead of reimbursing the separate contributors, it was kept in total by the Coalition, possibly because it had already been budgeted to “protect Texas air.”

And there it has sat ever since. With each new election cycle, the number of local elected officials who knew about the fund got smaller and smaller, until there was hardly any institutional memory of the Coalition or its half-million dollar fund left at all.

Offcite becomes the latest blog to take the "Toxic Tour" of east Houston neighborhoods (Manchester) and small communities (Galena Park), still living under the oppressive yoke of some of the worst refinery pollution in the United States.  In Corpus Christi, Naveena Sadasivam at the Texas Observer reports that the minority neighborhood of Hillcrest is finally getting some relief, though not from the cessation of the fouling of their air and water by the petrochem giants there, and with some mixed feelings about leaving.

Grits for Breakfast chides liberals in and out of Congress for allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good with respect to the FIRST-STEP criminal justice reform bill.

Renaming his blog, Neil at You Need To Act Right Now detailed some steps he is taking to defeat Trump and his associated wickedness. 

SocraticGadfly talked about how the latest animal research seems to partially refute some ideas of Elizabeth Loftus' claims about how memory can operate.

Last, Elise Hu bids adieu to her house in Austin. 

Sunday Funnies

SuperCallousFragileRacistSexistNaziPotus

Everything he says and does is really quite atrocious

Dairy Industry Trumps Infant Health with U.S. Rejection of Breastfeeding Resolution

During the hearing, immigration judge John Richardson said he was “embarrassed” to ask the child if he understood the proceedings.

"Raucous, partisan, cage match hearing"

Operation Shock and Kavanaugh

Go on to Parts Three (Gideon v. Wainwright), Four (Griswold v. Connecticut), and Five (Boerne v. Flores) at the links.

For those with short attention spans, the TLDR can be summarized as follows: in Griswold, Wikipedia notes famed liberal jurist William O. Douglas doing what conservatives have come to loathe: interpret the Constitution for the current times rather than "following" it as the Founders (and those who amended it in later years) wrote and -- they believe -- intended it to mean.  The term they favor is 'strict constructionism'.

Although the Bill of Rights does not explicitly mention "privacy", Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the majority that the right was to be found in the "penumbras" and "emanations" of other constitutional protections, such as the self-incrimination clause of the Fifth Amendment. Douglas wrote, "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship." Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote a concurring opinion in which he used the Ninth Amendment in support of the Supreme Court's ruling. Justice Byron White and Justice John Marshall Harlan II wrote concurring opinions in which they argued that privacy is protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  

For those non-attorneys and law students reading here, Griswold was the precedent for many other cases ... including Roe v. Wade.

So as disclaimer, I'm not a lawyer or a law student so I'm certainly not teaching or interpreting law here; just trying to understand the motivations and rationales of those that are.  Former Senator and member of the Judiciary Committee Al Franken has some questions he would ask the nominee if he were still serving; perhaps some of his once-peers might take them up in September, when Chair Grassley indicates confirmation hearings might begin.  Mitch McConnell has indicated the full Senate will vote before October ... just as we all begin to focus on the midterm elections, which might influence turnout to some degree.  On both sides.  (Understatement?)