The pre-SOTU Wrangle

The Texas Fauxgressive Alliance, having endured the most boring Super Bowl game and the worst commercials ever, is now prepared to sit through Trump's rescheduled State of the Union speech tomorrow night -- expected to be bombastic and inflammatory -- with drinking games and STFU memes at the ready.

Two Texas Congresspersons are making statements with their invitees to the SOTU.

Rhonda Hart, the mother of a Santa Fe High School shooting victim, will be the guest of Houston U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher at President Donald Trump's State of the Union address (on) Tuesday.

Another congressional freshman, San Antonio Republican Chip Roy, is inviting Brandon Judd, the president of the National Border Patrol Council and an outspoken supporter of Trump's hard line on illegal immigration.

[...]

Judd ... is a frequent guest on Fox News, where he is a vocal defender of the Trump administration's border policies. He has also taken aim at Democrats on Twitter.

TXElects has the executive summary of last week's special elections in the Texas House.

Art Fierro, the chair of the El Paso Community Collefe board, won a three-way race outright to succeed former Rep. Joe Pickett (D-El Paso). Fierro received 53% of the vote, defeating El Paso council member Michiel Noe (27%) and Republican candidate Hans Sassenfeld (20%). Pickett resigned in December, citing health reasons.

In HD145, funeral home director Christina Morales (36%) and former Houston council member Melissa Noriega (31%) advanced to a runoff. Republican candidate Martha Fierro, no relation to Art, finished third with 25%. None of the other five candidate received more than 3% of the vote or more than 100 votes.

Turnout was light for both races.

Greg Abbott has not scheduled the runoff election date for HD145 yet.

Off the Kuff has been all over that bogus SOS advisory about alleged non-citizen voters.  Likewise, Paradise in Hell was not impressed by Abbott's voter purge.  Meanwhile, a legal advocacy group will sue the state's top officials over the issue.

The federal lawsuit, filed in Corpus Christi by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, names Secretary of State David Whitley, Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton as defendants. It contends that Whitley, in questioning the status of more than 95,000 registered Texas voters, singled out naturalized citizens because they were born outside the country.

Texas Standard wonders if it's really possible that our state lawmakers can cap property taxes and increase public education funding.  Better Texas Blog checks up on health care bills in the Lege.  And CultureMap Austin notes that the capital city is one of the biggest anti-vaccination hotspots in the country.

Grits for Breakfast has some questions about that police raid in Houston that left two police officers dead and five injured.  So does Leif Reichstad at Texas Monthly, specifically the nature of 'no-knock' warrants being served with SWAT backup, a seeming invitation to disaster.

“It’s a use of force, it’s them taking people by surprise,” said Ashton Woods, the founder of Black Lives Matter Houston. “They want to over-police the community. They think they are preventing crime when they are really creating larger problems with community relations. It seems like a police state. They need to be reined in, and we need to know more about the way that they are policing.” Woods also noted that had Tuttle and Nicholas been minorities, their deaths likely would not have been so heavily covered by the media, nor would the incident have drawn such widespread criticism of the police.

Making the situation worse was HPD union president Joe Gamaldi, whose words in the wake of the shooting inflamed tensions between civil rights activists and law enforcement.

Johnny Mata, the presiding officer for the (Greater Houston Coalition for Justice), said that (Gamaldi) went too far and created an untenable situation by threatening civil right activists and organizations who speak out against police brutality and misconduct.

“All the work that has been done by a lot of people cannot go down the drain,” Mata said. “He (Gamaldi) is inciting tensions between police and communities with his egregious comments.”

[...]

Houston police Chief Art Acevedo said (Gamaldi) went "over the top" with his remarks about the shooting.

Gamaldi's remarks are at the link.  John Coby at Bay Area Houston weighed in.

PDiddie at Brains and Eggs updated the 2020 Democratic nomination developments, with Cory Booker jumping in and Howard Schultz mulling an independent run.  Maria Recio at Texas Monthly reveals that the woman behind Kamala Harris' campaign is the granddaughter of  Ann Richards.

Jim Schutze at the Dallas Observer has the latest on the Dallas mayor's race, with the campaign turning a little dirty as it becomes 'stop the perceived front-runner' (Scott Griggs).

Somervell County Salon has a deep dive into the local government's violations of the Texas Open Meetings Act.

Socratic Gadfly speculates on what White Castle selling veggie burgers has to say about the future of meat-eating and cattle-raising in Texas and elsewhere.

David Collins took issue with the HouChron business writer Chris Tomlinson's misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, and misinterpretations of the Green New Deal.

Jeff Balke at the Houston Press points to the real issues with technology and privacy.

Beyond Bones posts the February guide to the night sky.

Brendan Gibbons at the Rivard Report writes about Pearsall Park's nature trails, on San Antonio's southwest side.

Steve Rossignol at The Rag Blog tells a tale from a hundred years ago in East Texas about baseball, socialism, and oil.

And Harry Hamid has a mapp that shews the order and causes of salvation and damnation.

Super Sunday Funnies

2020 this week: Cory Booker, etc.

Senator Spartacus of New Jersey big-footed Liz Warren's tease this morning (her hotly-rumored declaration a week from tomorrow).  These developments are pushing Howard Starbucks out of the headlines, thankfully.  More at length on Booker, Warren's wealth tax, Schultz's potential indy run, and other items below.  There's been a few comings and goings since I last updated.

-- Richard Ojeda realized he had no path to winning, so he dropped out.  Less than two weeks after he resigned his seat in the West Virginia state senate, which enabled the Republican governor to tap one of his cronies to fill it.

-- Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti decided against a bid for the White House.

-- Former AZ Sen. Jeff Flake will become a teevee talking head rather than challenge Trump in the GOP presidential primary.  Nobody has more fully lived up to their name since Anthony Weiner.

Okay then.

Everybody that's in today, except for Booker. Can you name them all?

-- Cory Booker has some razzle-dazzle, as even not-so-close observers know.  His rejoinder to John Cornyn during the Kavanaugh hearings was a standout moment, if not quite Kirk Douglas-worthy.

During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh last fall, Booker dramatically threatened to release confidential documents from Kavanaugh's time in the Bush White House, even though, as he claimed, "the penalty comes with potential ousting from the Senate." Booker called it his "Spartacus moment," but the drama was significantly deflated when it became clear that the documents in question had already been approved for public release.

He's also got some heavy baggage.

He’ll have to contend, though, with his work promoting charter schools (not a favorite of the teachers unions) and the perception that he’s close with Wall Street. 

There's also the big money he's been taking from Big Pharma until recently, the appearance of quid pro quo to them, and this.

If Cory Booker is the future of the Democratic Party, they have no future! I know more about Cory than he knows about himself.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2016

*heavy sigh* There's always a Tweet.

Like Kamala Harris, there's a great deal in Booker's record that both does -- and does not -- reflect progressivism.  Like Harris, he's going to depend on charm to overcome it.  Senator Copmala might have a slight edge with their shared ethnicity voting bloc.

... about 60 percent of black Democratic voters are women, and black women may want to make history and elect a black woman.

How the black caucus breaks probably rests on how the vetting of her record as a prosecutor goes.

-- Elizabeth Warren's 'wealth tax' proposal, which came on the heels of Alex Ocasio-Cortez's 70% marginal tax rate suggestion, was followed up with legislation presented by Bernie Sanders to ask the most well-off Americans to share their wealth with the poorest among us.  It's a lesson most of us learned in kindergarten.

No surprise, though, that Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg are strongly opposed.  It was enough to make Schultz reconsider his Democratic Party membership.

The proposals have plutocrats shook. Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor who is flirting with a run in the Democratic presidential primaries, invoked the spectre of Venezuela and suggested Warren’s wealth tax could lead to Americans “starving to death.” Billionaire Starbucks emeritus chairman Howard Schultz this week blasted Warren’s plan as “punitive” and “ridiculous,” and insists he cannot run for president as a Democrat because he doesn’t believe in steeply progressive taxation. “I no longer feel affiliated” to the party, he said, “because I don’t know their views represent the majority of Americans. I don’t think we want a 70 percent income tax in America.” 

He's wrong, naturally.

But Schultz — who stubbornly and wrongly insists he’s standing up for a “silent majority” — does not have the people with him. According to recent polls, wide majorities of Americans support both Warren’s wealth tax and Ocasio-Cortez’s top-bracket tax hike.

The proposal to tax income earned above $10 million-a-year at 70 percent is favored by nearly six in ten Americans — and even 45 percent of Republicans according to a recent HarrisX poll. And a new poll by YouGov, commissioned by the liberal group Data For Progress and reviewed by Rolling Stone, finds a wealth tax is even more popular: 61 percent of Americans support Warren’s proposal to tax the rich, including 44 percent of Republicans. (A near majority, 46 percent, “strongly support” the measure, while only 15 percent “strongly oppose” it.)

“The idea of taxing billionaires is extreme to the Beltway elite that takes their money, but not to voters,” says Sean McElwee, a co-founder of Data for Progress. “Meanwhile, ideas like Social Security cuts that billionaire elites love are despised by ordinary voters.” Politicians looking for “bipartisan solutions” McElwee believes, should start with “expropriating the wealth of billionaires.”

To be clear, it does not happen without a Democratic Senate in 2020, and like Medicare for All, almost certainly requires the suspension of the filibuster.  <<Follow the links here.

Get more, including the 'Draft Beto' movement, from the sources I've linked in past posts: FiveThirtyEight's 'What They're Saying and Doing' this past week, and Vox's 'Biggest Questions So Far, Answered'.