Sunday 'Hitting the Wall' Funnies

More 2020 updates

As this post was being written, Tulsi Gabbard announced her exploratory committee for the Democratic nomination.  Her candidacy will be hotly debated among progressives Democrats left and center.  More later in a separate post.

Since the topic is trending ...  See my first post from a few days ago here.

Let's mention the Republicans' Trump primary -- under way now -- along with the speculation as to whether it could even happen.  (With South Carolina publicly considering canceling their primary to shield Trump from challengers, I believe it won't.)  John Kasich is barking the loudest; Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, and apparently Ben Sasse are definite maybes.  Don't count on anybody getting any traction.  The deck is stacked against them.

That would seem to open the door for a high-profile independent bid, possibly regurgitating the Unity08/AmericansElect2012 -styled thing.  Evan McMullin's 2016 effort, financed by the anti-Trump PAC Better for America, managed to get on the ballot in 11 states as well as qualified write-in status in several others.  He and running mate Mindy Finn of Kingwood pulled over 731K votes, or 0.4% of the nation's total, which ran behind the Greens' Stein-Baraka (1.1%) and the Libertarians' Johnson-Weld (3.3%) tickets but certainly wasn't a bad showing for having declared in August of that year.

No noise on this waterfront I can detect yet, but the more you hear about "how far left" the Democrats have moved, and with Trump the assumed GOP standard-bearer ... there will be lots of corporate media-induced wailing for "sensible-center" shitholes.  Expect it.

Speaking of the Greens and the Libertarians, recent posts at Independent Political Report update both, candidates and speculation.  Outside of William Weld for the Libs, nothing very interesting.  No point in dwelling on this from a progressive perspective, since Texas Greens lost ballot access in 2016 and ongoing state party dysfunction precludes their regaining it in time for 2020.

On to the Democrats, the only story for the rest of the year -- and maybe the cycle -- to be reported here, unless something really unexpected happens with Trump or the others.

===============

Axios has your comprehensive duopoly candidate tracker, listing as 'declared' Richard Ojeda, and twenty more 'possibles' including Sherrod Brown, Eric Swalwell, Andrew Gillum, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bennet, Howard Schultz, Eric Garcetti, Terry McAuliffe, Michael Bloomberg, John Hickenlooper, Jeff Merkley, Steve Bullock, and Eric Holder among the names I didn't mention earlier.  Click over.  Those I bolded are the ones I think are the most serious, for various reasons but mostly on the combination of name recognition, electoral experience, and deep pockets.

Ojeda is the retired Army major, Afghanistan and Iraq war veteran, West Virginia state senator and 2018 Congressional candidate -- he lost to Republican Carol Miller, but improved Democratic numbers in WV-3 by 32 points and outperformed Hillary Clinton -- who was notorious for saying he had supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 D primary ... but Trump in the general election.

He now says he believes Trump is a fraud, but could not bring himself to back Clinton.

“I have been a Democrat ever since I registered to vote, and I’ll stay a Democrat, but that’s because of what the Democratic Party was supposed to be,” he told The Intercept. “The reason why the Democratic Party fell from grace is because they become nothing more than elitist. That was it. Goldman Sachs, that’s who they were. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party that fights for the working class, and that’s exactly what I do. I will stand with unions wholeheartedly, and that’s the problem: the Democratic Party wants to say that, but their actions do not mirror that.”

I have no idea how this guy will do but he should be interesting as hell in the debates, especially if he's on stage with the likes of Bloomberg, Schultz, and/or John Delaney (see previous) -- any of whom could just as easily wind up on a centrist independent ticket with their respective abilities to self-fund.  Let's call it the American Plutocracy Party.

I agree with Lawyers, Guns and Money that Brown needs to stay in the Senate.

Here's FiveThirtyEight's first volume of what the TwentyTwentys said and did last week.

It's comprehensive -- from Beto's beard to Ojeda's resignation from his state Senate seat.

A few more related links:

-- 'Business' is a dirty word in the D primary:

Schultz, Bloomberg, Steyer

On Wednesday, billionaire California investor Tom Steyer announced that he’s decided against running for the Democratic presidential nomination. (He’ll instead continue his current project of funding aggressive, impeachment-oriented activism.) CNN’s Harry Enten subsequently noted that in a primary environment in which Democrats view a number of potential nominees very favorably, Steyer -- and other businessmen who were/are considering running -- are among the few who poll poorly. (Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur/venture capital guy; Howard Schultz was the CEO of Starbucks.)

Indeed, I couldn't figure out why Andrew Yang had a 5% fav & 12% unfav in the poll. Then I realized he was introduced as "businessman". People were likely just going off that. Oh and just 17% said Howard Schultz would "add" to the campaign. Lowest of all tested on that question.

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) January 9, 2019

Last week, CNBC ran a piece reporting that New York senator and maybe-2020 candidate Kirsten Gillibrand had reached out to potential presidential campaign donors on Wall Street. The piece was immediately circulated by prominent leftists on Twitter -- and was perceived as so potentially dangerous by Gillibrand that she responded directly to one of those critics with a list of her tough-on-finance bonafides. As New York’s Eric Levitz notes, Gillibrand and other potential 2020 Dem candidates who’ve gotten big finance industry donations in the past have spent the past two years endorsing as many ambitious, leftist policy ideas as possible in what seem like attempts to distance themselves from the more big business–friendly parts of their voting records. Gillibrand, who was once described in Politico as a “go-to advocate for the financial services industry,” has gotten behind Bernie Sanders’ proposal to tax all securities transactions. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker famously took the pharmaceutical lobby’s side on a bill involving prescription-drug importation; he now supports a single-payer health care bill.

You get the picture.

-- Here's a Twitter feed for "Elizabeth Warren" with all of the most recent news, 'attacks' (sic), and opinion/snark-related Tweets.  What's kind of cool is that yours is going to look different than mine because you follow different people than me.  If you're not on Twitter, you'll get more of the straight news, like WaPo and Politico.

-- Kamala Harris was on Colbert, said "she might" run for prez, is gutted vetted as her side of the story regarding the 2012 settlement for bad mortgages in California -- the cause of the Great Depression in 2008 -- gets spun back over her.  It's long, a bit in the financial weeds, and a very bad look for the junior Cali senator.  On top of her bumpy (well-hidden; look for the graf with David Sirota mentioned) record (scroll to the end, past the puffery) as a prosecutor, I have trouble seeing how she gets to the nomination.  Tough-on-crime and easy-on-banks Democrats pretending to be progressives doesn't sound like the winning ticket to me.

But identity politics Democrats are swooning anyway, seeing Obama in a dress.

-- Yes, if you you watched Liz Warren cracking open and swigging from a Michelob Ultra in her kitchen while Beto got his teeth cleaned this past week, you fell prey to this cycle's Instagram Live My Life/Campaign trend.  It sucks.

Back to the future: 2020's latest news

It's been over six months since Blue Dog Ted turned down easy money in my proposed wager between his lap dog, Joe Biden, and my man Bernie Sanders.  The national conversation is still mostly centered around those two old white guys, although our Texas boy Beto moved in and up in the polling, and Liz Warren is occupying portside Democrats' attention with her first-out-of-the-gate exploratory announcement.  We should have Julian Castro to kick around by Saturday.  There's also Kamala Harris waiting in the wings; this account says she'll kick off on MLK Day, January 21.  She'll benefit greatly from a California primary that comes very early on the calendar.

Quietly organizing under the radar are Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand.  A mash of stale reruns like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton are trying to draw attention to themselves, and there are a few very long shots in early: WA Gov. Jay Inslee, (signature issue: climate change); Andrew Wang (the UBI candidate), and Maryland Congressman John Delaney, the extremely wealthy centrist.  He's been running since last July; has staffed up for -- and scheduled meet-and-greets next week in -- New Hampshire, and is capable of pouring millions of his own dollars into his bid.

Here's a few headlines, Tweets, and assorted other thought-provokers I've collected over the past several days, along with some of my usual salty opinions.

Warren's been most talked-about, so she gets to lead off.

-- Start with the TexTrib's profile from 2016, about how her decade teaching at UT Law influenced her (if you haven't read it already).  I found it seminal.  It suggests to me that she will have some network of support in Keep-It-Weird that competes with the Berners.

Warren is the progressive Democrat that establishment Democrats prefer over Sanders, who is still being smeared by orthodox Donkeys because he gets elected as an independent.  This is its own purity test, as thinking people clearly get.  Those who squeal "Vote Blue No Matter Who" will have to put up or shut up in 2020 if Bernie wins the nom.  History reminds us that the PUMAs failed in 2008 where the Sandernistas did not in 2016.

Daily Kos kicked off their every-two-weeks straw poll and the inaugural gave Liz a big win.

Nearly 35,000 votes in the first @dailykos 2020 straw poll, which will be conducted every 2 weeks:
- Warren (22%)
- Beto (15%)
- Harris (14%)
- Biden (14%)
- Bernie (11%)
- Unsure (9%)
- Other (9%)
- Booker (3%)
- Castro (1%)
- Gillibrand (1%)https://t.co/pTeQZlWfYp

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) January 8, 2019

Let's note a few things for the record: Kos has been a vituperative gasbag against Sanders for a long time now.  The author of this Tweet is also the co-author of this piece.  And the DK straw poll is an Internet poll, which didn't stop Nate Silver from performing an act of seppuku.

So much credibility lost in such a short period of time.

A lot of people think Warren and Sanders are competing for the same voters, but that's lazy and uncareful.  She ain't him in her own words.  This Tweet thread was instructive as an academic exercise if you're into that.

Liz Warren is from the tradition of Brandeis: she's a progressive (in the original meaning of the word) who wants to limit corporate power. To her, the problem isn't capitalism per se: the threat is the concentration of power and capital.

Bernie is from the tradition of Debs.

— Gritty 2020🔥 (@maxberger) December 31, 2018

More on those differences from Jacobin.

As for my M4A litmus test ... well, Warren is a capitalist, a believer in markets, like she said above.  She also said in autumn 2017 that she supported Sanders' Medicare for All bill, "but until we get there"... six months later (as in last March) introduced her own bill strengthening the ACA instead.  That was of course prior to the recent decision by a federal judge here in Texas that struck down Obamacare.  Her position ten months ago -- there is no clarity on her presidential website -- is best explained by Daniel Callahan at STAT.

(Warren) has proposed an alternative plan. She judges that a single-payer plan would be difficult to get through Congress and concedes that private insurance will have to continue. But that insurance would “have to be at least as good and priced as reasonably as the coverage provided by our public health care programs.” The obvious advantage of her plan is that it aims to build upon and improve the embattled Affordable Care Act, likely making it easier to get through Congress than a single-payer plan. Warren’s plan would benefit from the strong gain in public support for the ACA over the past couple of years despite assaults on it by President Trump and other Republicans.

Too mealy-mouthed for me.  She's gonna hafta take a mulligan.

-- Lots has already been posted about the "war" on Beto by the "Berniebros", its own double smear.  I summarized it in the Xmas Eve Wrangle.

In the span of seven days, Beto O'Rourke went from expanding his statewide cult of personality from sea to shining sea to exploding on the 2020 launching pad, writes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs, in a post originally motivated by two hilarious takes about Bernie Sanders from Bay Area Blue Dog John Coby.  But it was a takedown by David Sirota at Capital and Main of Beto's voting record that did the most damage to the erstwhile Congressman's reputation as a "progressive", and that in turn spawned an article about a "war" on O'Rourke being waged by "Berniebros".  The geek fighting didn't just carry on all weekend on Twitter, it again ruptured the 2016 fault lines between the center of the Democratic Party and the left. 

Give the shitlibs credit for rapidly counter-attacking, especially when you consider that examining the Congressman's voting record does not constitute a "war" by any stretch of the definition of the word.  As was said repeatedly in 2015 and '16 regarding Hillary Clinton's long public service history, facts are not attacks.  For fuck's sake, vacation in Yemen soon, you fucking neoliberal fuckwads.

Undeterred, Tina Nguyen at Vanity Fair throws more gas on that fire.  She opens with the premise that the GOP will use the data that Sirota, et. al. have published about Beto for themselves, as advanced by The Hill.  Somehow I find it difficult to believe that Trump, or any of his potential primary challengers, could make a credible case for criticizing O'Rourke for taking money from oil & gas industry executives.  Just ridiculous.

Maybe I need to turn off my hypocrisy sensor.  Is it a common practice at this point in the presidential election cycle for Republican political consultants to share mud with their Democratic professional advisor "friends", where that might benefit the Dem's clients and help the GOP overall (by, say, hurting Beto with the Sanders/Inslee/anyDemocratwhosupportsclimateaction caucus)?

Or do they sell it to them?  Capitalism, you know.  And how does the invisible hand of the free market set a price for that commodity?  Berning questions.

We're closing in on 400 locations for Saturday's livestream house parties! Sign up to attend one, or host your own. Learn how you can help build a campaign-in-waiting for #Bernie2020. https://t.co/YFVlwj3ROP #RunBernieRun

— Organizing for Bernie (@OFB2020) January 9, 2019

-- Bern Notice: six of these are in the Houston area, two in DFW and San Antone, five in Austin, and one each in Abilene, Waco, Bastrop, Luling, and Temple.  I'm attending the one at Axelrad.  Sema Hernandez, challenging John Cornyn in 2020, is the organizer.  For people who would rather work on revolution than mere resistance, this is the place for you.  As I see it, that's the role of the Democratic Socialists as well (but YMMV and I could just be wrong since I don't attend the local chapter's meetings due to my various handicaps.)  With the implosion of the Texas Green Party, I remain a Bernie or Buster.  He's got his faults; he's a rural state gun supporter and also a Defense Department grifter for Vermont, but he's better on BDS than anybody else, especially Warren.  They both have a bit of a complicated relationship with the Pentagon, but they're both also saying and doing things that are breaking new ground in Democratic foreign policy.

Brian Hanley has listed 20 reasons why Bernie is the only one who can beat Trump in 2020.  I agree.  If the Democrats nominate anybody else, Trump will be re-elected and everybody can blame us all over again.  I just don't GAF any more.

-- Read everything in this hot 2020 take but especially the excerpt below.  It's certainly true that there are far too many trolls online -- no matter your social medium of choice -- who will make the next almost-two years somewhat intolerable for all of us.  Clean up your own feeds and timelines; use 'mute', 'ignore', 'block', and 'report' to your advantage.

Will there be assholes online getting in circular arguments and making inappropriate personal attacks on the integrity and intelligence of anyone who supports the wrong candidate(s)? Of course! There always will be assholes. Always, always, always. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that there are always going to be some big assholes in the mix. But we don’t have to let online wankers define the discourse around what is shaping up as the most ideologically significant Democratic primary in at least a generation. All we need to do is pay attention to what the candidates themselves are talking about and remember that social media apps come with a mute button. 

-- And let's not let the vile corporate media and their 'he said, she said', 'soandso' slams 'what'shisface' on Rachel/Hannity, "Entertainment Tonight"/"A Current Affair"/TMZ panel of political experts masquerading as news reporting BS fuck this up again, either.  When they show Trump saying 'Pocahontas', you turn them off.  When they show a video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing, don't you click on it.  If Beto's head appears Photoshopped onto the nude body of a male stripper ... well, try not to click on that, okay?

Matt Taibbi, from his book Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus.

“Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money,” Taibbi writes. “The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching banks, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, anti-trust waivers and dozens of other things.”

And Chris Hedges, in this Truthdig piece entitled "The Election Circus Begins".

“The corporate media ignores issues and policies, since there is little genuine disagreement among the candidates, and presents the race as a beauty contest. The fundamental question the press asks is not what do the candidates stand for but whom do the voters like.”

The only way we'll avoid Idiocracy again is if we don't pay for idiocy.  Don't give them the clicks, ratings, subscriptions, or eyeballs.  Set your adblocker to 'vaporize'.  Block the social media trackers (the latest version of Firefox is doing this now).  And for the love of Dishrag, get off Facebook and use DuckDuckGo and not Google.

-- Debates begin in June, with six this year and six next.  We'll have a clearer picture about who's in, out, up, down, sideways, and every other direction between now and then.  I'm still of the opinion that Beto and Castro are in it not to win it but to be picked veep, and before Christmas comes around again one of those is better-than-even-odds to drop out and file to run against John Cornyn.

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.

Sunday Auld Lang Syne Funnies

B&E Co-Texans of the Year: Beto and Travis Scott

(Ed. note. Still doing the work that the rest of the Texas semi-Progressive Alliance gave up on a couple of years ago.)

And there you sat thinking they had nothing in common.

Travis Scott speaking at Beto O’Rourke’s rally in Houston @trvisXX making sure the kids vote! 🗳🗳🗳 pic.twitter.com/FGVMQYhHbP

— FTPFLAME (@FTPflame) October 28, 2018

What more needs to be said about the recently retired Congressman from El Paso that hasn't already been said ... or for that matter is currently being said?

In the span of seven days, Beto O'Rourke went from expanding his statewide cult of personality from sea to shining sea to exploding on the 2020 launching pad, writes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs, in a post originally motivated by two hilarious takes about Bernie Sanders from Bay Area Blue Dog John Coby.  But it was a takedown by David Sirota at Capital and Main of Beto's voting record that did the most damage to the erstwhile Congressman's reputation as a "progressive", and that in turn spawned an article about a "war" on O'Rourke being waged by "Berniebros".  The geek fighting didn't just carry on all weekend on Twitter, it again ruptured the 2016 fault lines between the center of the Democratic Party and the left.

And as the Christmas lights come off the tree and the wrapping paper fills the recycling bin, the snark keeps leveling up.

I mean, I get it that Beto 2020 is desperately trying to be a thing, but as a Sanders supporter, I can’t support any candidate until Putin calls Susan Sarandon to tell her who* to tell me to vote for.

*Jill Stein

— The Opinionated Lab (@OpinionatedLab) December 26, 2018

Whatever happens with the two old white dudes running to be top Donkey in two years, you can rest assured that Beto/Bob will keep breaking news of one kind or another throughout 2019. 

So about the man who re-opened "Astroworld" this year and took it across the country ...

Travis Scott's Tour is the Greatest Show on Earth (Rolling Stone)

The apex of Travis Scott’s second night at Madison Square Garden for his Astroworld — Wish You Were Here tour wasn’t when Kendrick Lamar — leading candidate for best rapper alive — made a guest appearance to perform his verse on “Goosebumps.” It wasn’t “Stargazing,” the rattling, pyrotechnic-inflected opener that set the tone for the night. It wasn’t even “Sicko Mode,” the second most popular song in the country that Scott extended to close the night out. Instead, it was one of his earliest hits: “Antidote.” As the opening synths swelled, a young woman with platinum blonde hair walked onstage and the audience screamed. Kylie Jenner was then buckled into a makeshift rollercoaster car. As her baby father performed one of his biggest songs next to her, she documented the entire moment on her phone and kicked her feet to the beat. They kept riding, back and forth over the roiling crowd, for three more songs.

Inside the stadium, the crowd milling around seems more likely to watch KUWTK than listen to “Mo Bamba.” A man in a suit walks by with his elementary school-aged daughter, smiling gleefully. A suburban mom ushers her daughter and friends to premium seats. A child stops, picks up his phone and debates his parental figures about the fiscal responsibility of buying food at Madison Square Garden concession stand prices. He swipes his debit card. Travis Scott has officially gone mainstream.

Welcome to AstroWorld.

'Baby father'.  That's pretty white.  More from recently.

Travis Scott wants to see Kylie Jenner before her private jet takes off, but he’s running late to meet her, so he punches the gas on his Lamborghini SUV and sends the speedometer into hysterics: 80 miles an hour becomes 95 becomes a screaming 110, or exactly double the speed limit on this particular stretch of Houston highway. It is pouring rain. Farther up in Scott’s lane, where traffic is thicker, a Land Rover brakes, but Scott — left hand on the wheel, right hand on his phone, eyes on a maps app — does not. The Land Rover’s rear bumper is maybe 200 feet away, then 75 and then, sickeningly, 25. Scott has stopped accelerating but, for unclear reasons, he hasn’t touched the brake.

You can take the wheel from there.  L'il mo' from TexMo.

Travis Scott is the future. Ask Lil Wayne, who gushed about the 26-year-old artist from the stage during his sub-headlining set at Scott’s Astroworld Festival in Houston on November 17. Ask Houston rap legend Bun B, who likes to talk about how “there’s something special” about Scott. You could even ask Mayor Sylvester Turner, who declared November 18, the day after the festival, “Astroworld Day” in Houston.

See him at halftime of the Super Bowl in February as well (though Reverend Sharpton's recent opinion about that may resonate).

This has been a PSA for all of us elderly Caucasians out here.  Twenty nineteen is likely gon' be kind to both men, though it might be difficult to improve upon this past year.

T'was The Day Before Wrangle

The Texas kinda-sorta Progressive Alliance celebrated Festivus yesterday and the airing of grievances, but still has a few problems with you people.  And now you're going to hear about it.

(The very condensed 'Seinfeld' episode, from 1997.)

Here's the blog post and lefty news roundup from the next to-last week of 2018.

In the span of seven days, Beto O'Rourke went from expanding his statewide cult of personality from sea to shining sea to exploding on the 2020 launching pad, writes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs, in a post originally motivated by two hilarious takes about Bernie Sanders from Bay Area Blue Dog John Coby.  But it was a takedown by David Sirota at Capital and Main of Beto's voting record that did the most damage to the erstwhile Congressman's reputation as a "progressive", and that in turn spawned an article about a "war" on O'Rourke being waged by "Berniebros".  The geek fighting didn't just carry on all weekend on Twitter, it again ruptured the 2016 fault lines between the center of the Democratic Party and the left.

"I think (last) week can be understood as a kind of turning point, where — for the first time really — millions of Americans are seeing pieces that look underneath the superficial gloss of projections onto Beto," said Norman Solomon, who was a delegate for Sanders at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

"What we’re seeing is someone who’s a big step up for red-state Texas statewide and actually a big step down for where the majority of Democrats are nationwide. ... If we buy the Beto package, we’re gonna have buyer’s remorse later on."

David Collins was ahead of everybody else on this, blogging last Tuesday that these New Democrats are nothing but kinder, gentler Republicans.

As the Year of the Blue Wave closes out, there are still two empty seats in the Texas House that need to be filled with special elections.  They'll be held after the 86th Legislative Session begins.

Special elections to fill vacancies in #HD145 (Alvarado) and #HD79 (Pickett) set for Jan. 29, 2019 https://t.co/SqKeMbC38k Filing deadline 1/3, EV begins 1/14, per @TXElects. @MelissaNoriega has filed for HD145, per @PatrickSvitek #TXLege

— More Powerful Than Putin (@PDiddie) December 22, 2018

Off the Kuff noticed the latest bit of (some small handful of Texas political number nerds' fascination with) small counties' vote totals.

T'is the season for listicles, and the Texas Observer kicks it off with the six stories about rural Texas you should read, and the six Texas political players who lost power this past year.  Texas Monthly serves up their twenty most-read stories, their 22 favorite long reads, and their 15 best Tex-Mex bites across the Great State.  Grits for Breakfast has the six takeaways for national criminal justice reform supporters -- and the three for conservative state lawmakers -- from the First Step Act passed by Congress last week.

Almost swamped in the latest tsunami of hysterical "The Russians Hacked Meddled in the Election" accounts: Jim Schutze at the Dallas Observer calmly points out that Fake News, aka Advertising, has always been with us, and it's always been our responsibility not to be duped by it.

Tell me this. Recently I looked at the website of a prominent Dallas consulting firm and noticed they have a social media specialist on their staff who “guides paid social strategy … working with clients to generate content that educates, motivates and empowers target audiences to act in ways that benefit … clients.”

So how is that different from the Russians?

[...]

Fake news, I gather, is stuff that is somewhat not totally true maybe, purveyed deliberately by people who know it is not totally true maybe but who purvey it anyway in order to get a certain reaction out of the people who read it.

Or, as it used to be called in the days of dinosaur media, advertising. We charged big money for that. We wish we could again.

Before Russian trolls, before Google, before the internet, even before computers, I was told every morning by a breakfast food box that I could become a professional baseball player by eating Kellogg's Corn Flakes. I looked up the box yesterday on Google. It had a picture of a boy wearing a necktie and a newsboy cap about to swing a bat.

The box said, “This boy knows. He keeps his ‘eye on the ball.’ He’s the kind of boy that eats Kellogg’s. He likes the taste, the realness of these flakes.” I can now tell you without fear of contradiction that, in my own case anyway, that was fake news.

Texas Standard explains what the end of the Medicaid waiver means for the state's healthcare: the impacts of the loss of an average of $3 billion per year over the last decade, assisting the 11 million Texans who are of highest risk and greatest need, must be communicated to Texas legislators.

The Texans challenging the Affordable Care Act have no legal standing, posits Nicholas Bagley at The Atlantic, who is a law professor at the University of Michigan.  (Emphasis is mine.)

And so, the red states (who sued, led by TX AG Ken Paxton, in Judge Reed O'Connor's federal court) added new plaintiffs: two self-employed Texans, John Nantz and Neill Hurley, who say they have to pay higher prices for insurance because of Obamacare. They may be right about that. If the law were wiped from the books, insurers could refuse to sell insurance to sick people. That would allow insurers to charge healthy people less for their coverage.

But freewheeling complaints about the Affordable Care Act aren’t enough to give Nantz and Hurley standing, any more than they’d be enough for the red states. “Standing is not dispensed in gross,” as the Supreme Court has said. To have standing to sue, Nantz and Hurley have to show that the individual mandate caused them some kind of injury.

And they can’t do that. Remember, the entire basis for this lawsuit is that Congress, in 2017, repealed the tax penalty for going without coverage. That means Nantz and Hurley are free to buy insurance, or free not to. The individual mandate doesn’t force them to do a damn thing.

In a changing of the guard at Equality Texas, Chuck Smith steps aside after 15 years at the helm of the state's largest LGBTQ rights organization, passing the torch to Samantha Smoot.

Smoot brings 20 years of experience leading citizen advocacy campaigns to the Equality Texas organization. She has served as Political Director of both the Planned Parenthood Federation for America and the Human Rights Campaign, as well as the Executive Director for Texas Freedom Network. More recently, she has fought to support citizen groups and political leaders as they build more inclusive democracies through her work in the Middle East and North Africa, West Africa, and Eurasia with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

Ty Clevenger at Lawflog took note of the aggressive, and perhaps defamatory, tone of an email that the executive director of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission sent to one of the agency's critics, defending its top enforcement officer from corruption charges.

Any conversation about stopping violence in our society before it begins -- such as with the ending of corporal punishment in schools -- is absent from the corporate media, blogs Zachery Taylor.

Texas Vox summarizes coverage of the changing face of energy in the state: cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable as the transition away from fossil fuels proceeds (slowly, but inexorably).

Downwinders at Risk thanks activists for mobilizing opposition to the Estrada Concrete plants in south Dallas (near Paul Quinn College), forcing the permit approval hearing at City Hall to be rescheduled for January.

The Rag Blog mourns the passing of yet another 1960s-era Austin "radical" and one of its founders, Dennis Fitzgerald.

SocraticGadfly, influenced by his reading of a new bio of Ronald Reagan, posted the first of what will be several counterfactual history blog posts — what if Reagan, not Goldwater had somehow run in 1964? (Click the "counterfactual history" tag for similar writing by him.)

In Houston barbecue news, Katie Watkins at Houston Public Media reports that Burns BBQ in Acres Homes now has a mural on the outside wall that features the establishment's late founder, along with twice-a-guest Anthony Bourdain.  And the story of Blood Brothers BBQ getting their brick-and mortar-location opened in Bellaire, and the backstory of how the business got started, was posted by Mai Pham at the Houston Press.

Millard Fillmore's Bathtub has a couple of questions about the origins of Christmas.

And in one of the most fascinating Tweet threads of 2018, Kari Blakinger of the Houston Chronicle writes about how she got off heroin while spending Christmas in jail.

Sunday 'Christmas Eve Eve' Funnies

GoFundMe campaign for Trump's border wall averaging over $2.5 million/day since creation

A cup of kindness, yet: Facebook, Flynn, Schwertner, and Melania

This post tried to get blogged all week, and it reads a little dated in the wake of the Trump shutdown and RBG's latest cancer scare, but I'll throw it up anyway: in the spirit of giving, I should direct a few good wishes at some of those beyond our crappy local Democrats.  Just a bit to starboard.

-- Facebook has been sued by the attorney general of the District of Columbia on behalf of the city-state's residents harmed by the company's data breaches, authorized and un-.  Other states will surely follow, ah, suit.

DC Attorney General Karl Racine on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Facebook, accusing the social-media giant of “unfair and deceptive” practices that violated consumer privacy and led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The first lawsuit of its kind in the United States, the move could result in billions of dollars’ worth of fines for the company and pave the way for states around the country to file similar complaints.

[...]

The lawsuit also comes on the heels of a New York Times report published Tuesday night that revealed that those same data practices allowed at least 150 other companies to access consumer data, including Facebook users’ private messages. The sharing of data with third parties continued well past a 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission that required Facebook to disclose its data practices more transparently and improve its privacy practices. Racine says his office will be updating its suit to include the new allegations.

The lawsuit could take years to wind its way through the courts, but if it’s successful, Facebook could be on the hook for serious civil penalties under DC’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act, a blanket law that allows for damages for a number of trade violations, including data security breaches. Under the law, a company can be fined up to $5,000 per violation. According to the DC attorney general’s estimates, as many as 340,000 District residents were affected by the Cambridge Analytica incident.
If the lawsuit is expanded to include more recently revealed violations, which gave parties ranging from Netflix to Russian search engine Yandex access to consumer data, fines could possibly reach into the billions of dollars and could top the nearly $1.7 billion fine Facebook is currently facing in the European Union, where consumer data protections are much more stringent. On Tuesday, Facebook settled for $450,000 a lawsuit brought by Washington state alleging the company had violated political advertising laws.

IANAL but this sounds remarkably similar to Texas' DTPA, which contains a provision for punishment of three times damages for guilty verdicts.  Let's ask Ken Paxton to do something for us instead of to us for once.

This will be the end of Facebook, ladies and gentlemen.  They'll be forced into bankruptcy under a blizzard of litigation of this kind if the state attorneys general get their acts together on some mass class action.  But the fact is that we the people can move faster than any court of law to end Mark Zuckerburg's foul corporation.  If you haven't deleted your Facebook account ... what exactly is it going to take?  Pretend you hear Zuck speaking in Arnold Schwartzeneggar's voice (as Dutch Schaefer from Predator): "Kill me! Do it NOW!"

-- Michael Flynn is stewing in his own traitorous juices over the holidays after Judge Emmet Sullivan trashed him at his sentencing hearing last Tuesday.  It's going to be a terrible Christmas and a horrible New Year around that dude's house.  Sullivan was apparently having none of Robert Mueller's recommendation of no prison time for Flynn's cooperation in his investigation, a gambit I figured was aimed at short-circuiting a Trump pardon.  If Flynn gets time in the Big House, Trump is bound to throw more gas on his dumpster fire by giving him a 'get out of jail free' card.

-- State Sen. Charles Schwertner is going to keep insisting he didn't text that UT co-ed right to the end of his political career.  Which we all hope is sooner than four years from now.  Borris Miles, the other sexual predator still in the Texas Senate, is up for recall in 2020, but since African Americans in southwest Harris County last month re-elected Ron Reynolds, currently sitting in jail on a barratry conviction, I have my doubts as to whether any good Christian can unseat Miles for being too aggressive about his nearly-constant side chick hustle.

-- FLOTUS reports (to an unnamed 'close' source, who is whispering to Hollywood Life's Bonnie Fuller) that POTUS is "under immense stress" because of all the concurrent witch hunts (sic) going on and that she is concerned for his health.

I Really Don't Care.  Do You?