The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Not-As-Progressive-As-It-Could-Be Alliance welcomes the Texas Legislature back to work this week, as the 86th Legislative Session opens under the pink dome tomorrow.

The Corpus Christi Caller lists a few things we can expect; Juan Carlos Huerta tells Texas Standard that he's seeing less far-right legislation being filed early.  The Dallas News wonders if lawmakers can deliver on a property tax cut.  The funding of public education and addressing a new goal, accepted by Governor Abbott, of providing Texans health care coverage that would eventually replace Obamacare, present enormous fiscal challenges for the biennium.

To that end, Better Texas Blog will cover state Comptroller Jethro Bodine Glenn Hegar's revenue estimate, scheduled for 10 a.m. this morning, as numbers and promises begin to come into focus.  Ross Ramsey at the TexTrib, via Progrexas, says that fortunately for the Lege, voters just aren't that into the state budget.  On more positive news, Grits for Breakfast sees prospects for marijuana decriminalization as quite bright.  (Forget about a potential tax revenue stream from cannabis legalization, however.)

After the governor attacked and threatened HISD in the wake of their turning down a partnership with a private entity to manage some of the district's legacy African American schools, Texas Vox came out in strong support of their decision not to charter public schools.

In the state's longest-running snarkathon -- predating the Internet by decades! -- Texas Monthly has 2018's Bum Steer Awards, their annual list of "humanity's most ridiculous and idiotic endeavors".  Alex Jones came in first (as if no one could have predicted that).

Texas Leftist kept us current on the #JazmineBarnes murder case with a couple of updates prior to the arrest of two suspects.

Daniel Williams shares his research on the effect of ballot length on voter turnout.

Off the Kuff took a closer look at how the candidates for Harris County offices *zzzzzzz* ...

Somervell County Salon provides an update on a local anti-SLAPP lawsuit that has won a second time at the Texas Supreme Court.

Continuing its focus on rural Texas, the Observer sees Panhandle towns that are thriving because of their immigrant populations.

Jim Schutze at the Dallas Observer thinks city council in Big D is getting it both right and wrong about poverty and crime.

San Antonio native Carol Burnett received a new Golden Globe, named after her, at last night's annual celebrity awards presentation for film and television, reports the Current.  The list of winners is here, courtesy Buzzfeed.

BeyondBones shares a piece of Houston TV history.

The Travel Channel's Andrew Zimmern returned to Houston to eat again at some of his favorite restaurants, including Chinatown's Crawfish and Noodles.  There he demonstrated an odd affinity for crunching on the mudbugs' heads.  There's video at CultureMap.

SocraticGadfly made a New Year's resolution for other people: stop reading self-help books and the late-stage capitalism they're predicated on.

Elise Hu presents her New Year's resolutions.

The Texas Living Waters Project has New Year's resolutions for all of us on water conservation.

Harry Hamid celebrates a few early milestones in the New Year.

David Collins' winter travel itinerary included Leakey, Castroville, Marfa, Terlingua, Kerrville, Fredericksburg, and Luckenbach.

The Texas Tribune's 2016 bio of Elizabeth Warren's decade in Texas made a reappearance as she announced her exploration for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

Maria Eugenia Guerra at LareDOS profiles Yến Bạch Nguyễn, among the first of the Vietnamese immigrants who came to South Texas in 1975, and the lives they built there.

And Texas Monthly saluted RG Ratcliffe, a Texas political legend for our time, on his retirement.  Sorry about what Trump is doing to your 401k, RG.

Sunday Funnies

2018's last Wrangle

The rest of the Texas Fauxgressive Alliance decided to take the week off from rounding up the best of the lefty blog posts and news (except for those who may be using some or all of this one).  To augment the missing, you'll find some great year-end listicles, including this video from Turner Classic Movies with the compendium of actors, directors, screenwriters, and others we lost from the year just about to pass into the history books.



In another obituary, almost overlooked from early November, Will Pitt of Truthout wrote the eulogy for Buzzflash, one of this blogger's very first finds on the InnerToobs that both enabled sanity in a GWB-world gone mad, and inspired the creation of Brains and Eggs.

The big Texas story closing out 2018 was the series of incidents where hundreds of migrants detained by ICE were summarily -- and initially without promised warning to relief agencies -- dumped at bus stations and parks in El Paso.

Just in from Ruben Garcia at @AHouseElPaso: ICE is releasing 518 more migrants in El Paso today, bringing the 4-day total to more than 1,300. CBP also expected to begin more quickly releasing children in the wake of 2nd death. This will strain El Paso resources. 1/

— Bob Moore (@BobMooreNews) December 26, 2018

The callous and inhumane actions by the Trump administration to provoke yet another immigration crisis were met head-on by volunteers and agencies, who quickly mobilized after social and corporate media hit red alert.

NNU union nurses join with doctors, professors, faith leaders, and concerned community members to provide volunteer medical support and aid to #migrants arriving in El Paso, Texas.@EPTMaria via @ElPasoTimes #AsylumSeekershttps://t.co/P6AZEBRQ1z

— NationalNursesUnited (@NationalNurses) December 31, 2018

Naveena Sadasivam at the Texas Observer wrote about the weird Texas weather extremes -- heat, cold, drought, floods -- we experienced this past year.  And the climate denier sitting in his wheelchair in the Governor's Mansion.

At a press conference announcing the release of the report, Abbott responded to a reporter’s question about climate change by saying he’s not a scientist and that it is “impossible for [him] to answer that question.”

The majority of Americans aren’t scientists, but surveys show they still believe climate change is occurring. All it’d take Abbott is to look at the extreme weather events happening in his state and listen to those in his own administration.

Texas Vox also comments on Abbott's Hurricane Harvey report, entitled 'Eye of the Storm', pointing out areas of disagreement and/or recommending stronger action (like acknowledging climate change, for starters).

Continuing another tradition abandoned by the TPA, PDiddie at Brains and Eggs picked Co-Texans of the Year: Beto O'Rourke and Travis Scott.

Stephen Young at the Dallas Observer collects the most ridiculous social media posts from Texas pols (spoiler: Sid Miller could have been this entire list all by himself).

Harris County prosecutors are predicting a surge of drunk driving incidents due to the extended New Year's holiday weekend, writes Jay R. Jordan at the Chronicle.

"This is an unbelievable crisis that we're facing," Vehicular Crimes Division Chief Sean Teare said on Wednesday. "We lead the nation, year-in, year-out in fatalities on our roadways, specifically attributable to DWI. We're not anywhere near the size of Los Angeles or New York, and we're not as big as Chicago – and we blow them away every year. It's inexplicable."

Zachery Taylor blogged that truth is a fungible commodity at corporations like Shell, ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson, Wells Fargo, and by extension Wall Street and the media.

Current Affairs had the 25 worst headlines of 2018 (their #12, Politico's "Biden Should Run With Romney on a Unity Ticket", was my personal #1).  Not linking it, but the summary is aces.

There is no more appealing ticket than Joe Biden and Mitt Romney, argues a former Republican policy adviser currently working for the Biden Institute Policy Advisory Board. What America wants is the down-home bonhomie of a 76 year old who gets handsy with little girls and has total contempt for struggling millennials, plus the awkward stiffness of a milquetoast also-ran who once tied a dog to the roof of his car and gives off a vibe “like the guy who fired your dad.” Their bipartisan slogan will be: “Centrism! It Just Makes Sense, You Whiny Poors.”

Tanvi Misra at CityLab exposed the business model behimd the explosion of dollar stores in rural communities.

It has become an increasingly common story: A dollar store opens up in an economically depressed area with scarce healthy and affordable food options, sometimes with the help of local tax incentives. It advertises hard-to-beat low prices but it offers little in terms of fresh produce and nutritious items—further trapping residents in a cycle of poverty and ill-health.

A recent research brief by the Institute of Local Self Reliance (ILSR), a nonprofit supporting local economies, sheds light on the massive growth of this budget enterprise. Since 2001, outlets of Dollar General and Dollar Tree (which bought Family Dollar in 2015) have grown from 20,000 to 30,000 in number. Though these “small-box” retailers carry only a limited stock of prepared foods, they’re now feeding more people than grocery chains like Whole Foods, which has around 400-plus outlets in the country. In fact, the number of dollar-store outlets nationwide exceeds that of Walmart and McDonalds put together—and they’re still growing at a breakneck pace. That, ILSR says, is bad news.

“While dollar stores sometimes fill a need in cash-strapped communities, growing evidence suggests these stores are not merely a byproduct of economic distress,” the authors of the brief write. “They’re a cause of it.”

Dollar stores have succeeded in part by capitalizing on a series of powerful economic and social forces—white flight, the recent recession, the so-called “retail apocalypse”—all of which have opened up gaping holes in food access. But while dollar stores might not be causing these inequalities per se, they appear to be perpetuating them. The savings they claim to offer shoppers in the communities they move to makes them, in some ways, a little poorer.

Grits for Breakfast has the top ten Texas criminal justice stories, and Popular Resistance has the top 25 censored news items (going back into 2017 a bit) including the report about county sheriffs along the border using iris technology to fill a new database, lending to existing concerns about racial profiling and loss of privacy in public places.

Right Wing Watch summarized the year in false prophecies and failed predictions: red election waves, weather wipeouts, mass arrests of pedophiles, coups by leftists, and on and on.  VICE had the seven wildest scams and scandals of the year that didn't involve Trump.  And DeSmogBlog revealed Big Oil's attempts to show that fracking is actually making money (it isn't).

In January, The Wall Street Journal touted the prospect of frackers finally making “real money … for the first time” this year. “Shale drillers are heeding growing calls from investors who have chastened the companies for pumping ever more oil and gas even as they incur losses doing so,” oil and energy reporter Bradley Olson wrote.

Olson's story quoted an energy asset manager making the (always) ill-fated prediction about the oil and gas industry that this time will be different.

"Is this time going to be different? I think yes, a little bit," said energy asset manager Will Riley. “Companies will look to increase growth a little, but at a more moderate pace.”

Despite this early optimism, Bloomberg noted in February that even the Permian Basin — “America's hottest oilfield” — faced “hidden pitfalls” that could “hamstring” the industry.

They were right. Those pitfalls turned out to be the ugly reality of the fracking industry's finances.

And this time was not different.

The Week offered the 5 biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2018, and the Pew Research Center had 18 striking findings from the year just past, including this one.

About six-in-ten women in the U.S. (59%) say they have been sexually harassed. Women with at least some college education are far more likely than those with less education to say they have experienced harassment. Non-Hispanic white women are also more likely than women in other racial and ethnic groups to cite such experiences. Around a quarter of men (27%) say they have been sexually harassed.

The stark reality of race and incarceration was once more detailed by KERA via Texas Standard.

If you’re a black man in America, you’re five times as likely to go to state prison as a white man. Latinos and African Americans make up one-third of the U.S. population; they make up two-thirds of the prison population.

Millard Fillmore's Bathtub highlights -- pun intended -- the anniversary of Bright Idea Day, December 31st, 1879; the day Thomas Edison demonstrated for the public a working light bulb in Times Square, New York.

And Pages of Victory has a poem about some other kinds of Christmas.