Friday, April 12, 2019

The Weekly Twenty Twenty Update

First up: Houston and TSU will host eight presidential candidates at the "She The People" forum.


CNN's Cillizza and Enten have their top ten ranking out, and the top five are Bernie and Biden tied at the top, then Kamala, Beto, and Mayor Pete.  The cable news network hosted Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, and JuliΓ‘n Castro for townhalls this week, and later this month has five more candidates back-to-back.


On April 22, Chris Cuomo will moderate the Klobuchar (7 p.m. ET) and Sanders (9 p.m. ET) town halls, Anderson Cooper will moderate the Warren (8 p.m. ET) and Buttigieg (11 p.m. ET) town halls, and Don Lemon will moderate the Harris (10 p.m. ET) town hall.

While Senator Kirsten's was the lowest-viewed of all to date, Castro's townhall is receiving plaudits from various quarters.  Castro also held a counter-rally to Trump's fundraiser in San Antonio on Wednesday.  The former HUD secretary is having a good week.

By contrast, Inslee's townhall held Wednesday night did not break through for him; perhaps because of moments like this one.

In one of the more curious moments of the night, Inslee -- a candidate whose campaign is almost entirely focused on climate change -- said he didn't know enough about the recycling system to say how he would change it.

"I thought I had the answers to every question and I don't have (an) answer to that. But next time we meet, I'm going to have a better approach. I know that I have a team of people who are looking for options on this. We know how important this is," he said.

Here, Governor; show your team this.  Money shot:

There’s an interesting debate warming up about if we should focus on improving our recycling or if that is going to enable our continued consumption of plastics. In other words, let’s not focus on recycling, let’s just focus on not using plastics. I personally think that we need to do both, and I’m concerned about this argument that we shouldn’t even be improving recycling, that we just need to focus on not using plastic, because that seems like a lot harder of a goal to reach.

We must change the way we live.  That's a post for another day.

This post at Democratic Underground counts nineteen candidates so far declared, which means it isn't counting Biden or Michael Bennet.

Speaking of polls ...

-- It's true that the Democratic primary isn't going to vote as progressive as one might think, especially if you spend a lot of time on Twitter.  Biden isn't too centrist to win the nomination, unfortunately.  (To defeat Trump in the general, he is, but that's JMO.)  By and large, Democrats are unfazed by his handsiness.

-- Elizabeth Warren is in trouble.  She's third in her home state behind Biden and Bernie, and her main finance man quit because she won't solicit big donors.

(It does seem awfully strange that there are four white guys in CNN's top five listed at the top, and that even Harris seems to be losing some momentum.)

-- Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg are the top three in the most recent Iowa poll.

-- FiveThirtyEight congloms more polling wisdom, including who benefits if Biden does not run (or gaffes his way to the sidelines early, which I believe is more likely).

-- Carl Beijer says Nate Silver has screwed the pooch again, and shows his math.

I don't think that much further elaboration is necessary. There is no math or method to Nate Silver's madness; he's simply making it up as he goes along, and changing his approach in ways that appear to consistently favor some candidates and penalize others.

I agree.  Silver faceplanted on Election Day 2016 and has not been able to get up since.

Enough polling for this week.  Bernie Sanders had the best week of all candidates, reaching one million volunteers and introducing Medicare For All in the Senate.



Back in February, I blogged that the haters wouldn't have Jill Stein to kick around any longer, and it appears that US Greens are coalescing around Howie Hawkins.


Howie Hawkins exploratory committee announcement April 3, 2019, Washington, DC. 
Center, Howie Hawkins. 
To his right, Ajamu Baraka, 2016, Green Party vice presidential candidate, 
to his left, Cheri Honkala, Green Party 2012 vice presidential candidate.

Washington Babylon is little more blunt about the Greens' 2020 prospects.   Also from IPR is this interview from presidential candidate Sedinam Moyowasifza-Curry.

And if you're missing the 538 roundup I usually sample heavily from for this weekly update, here it is.  I'll mention one more development: Tulsi Gabbard is sympatico with my view on Julian Assange.


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Tuesday, April 09, 2019

Compare and contrast



Questions?
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Monday, April 08, 2019

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance congratulates the Baylor Lady Bears ...


... and gets its guns up for the Texas Tech Red Raiders in tonight's NCAA men's basketball final.


Here comes the round-up of the best blog posts and lefty news from across the Lone Star State from last week!

With seven weeks remaining in the regular legislative session, Texas lawmakers got down to business, with the House passing major public school finance reform including a raise for teachers.  The Senate decided that a few bigotry bills were more important.

In election-related news ...

The state Senate this week is expected take up Senate Bill 9, an omnibus election integrity bill by Sen. Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola), who chaired an interim committee on election security. Broadly, the bill is the results of that committee’s work and would:

  • Require counties to use “auditable voting systems” that produce a paper record enabling a voter to verify their vote was cast as intended
  • Establish a “risk-limiting audit” pilot program to ensure electronic voting machines are counting votes accurately
  • Strengthen criminal and civil penalties for Election Code violations; and
  • Increase the certification requirements for people providing transportation and curb-side assistance to voters.

The bill passed the State Affairs committee on a 7-2 party-line vote on April 1. Individuals representing Tea Party and conservative interest groups such as Concerned Women for America, Direct Action Texas, True Texas Elections spoke in favor of the bill at a public hearing last month. Opponents included individuals representing the Texas Civil Rights Project, Disability Rights Texas, MALDEF, and the League of Women Voters.

CD17: Pflugerville IT manager Rick Kennedy reauthorized his campaign committee for a potential rematch against U.S. Rep. Bill Flores (R-Bryan), who defeated Kennedy, 56%-42%, last year.

CD21: Former Sen. Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth), the 2014 Democratic nominee for governor, said she will not challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R) and may instead challenge U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Austin). Davis said on a recent podcast that she would support U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-San Antonio) if he chose to run for U.S. Senate.

CCA: Houston attorney William Demond established a campaign committee for an unspecified seat on the Court of Criminal Appeals, likely as a Democrat. Judges Bert Richardson (CCA3), Kevin Yeary (CCA4) and David Newell (CCA9) -- all Republicans-- are on the ballot in 2020.

Down With Tyranny reports on a rumored primary challenge in TX-33, where state Rep. RamΓ³n Romero may run against Cong. Marc Veasey.  Off the Kuff cheered the impending settlement of the lawsuit over that bogus SOS advisory about non-citizen voters.  Texas Standard found over a quarter-million Texans who experienced difficulties voting in the 2018 midterms.

Based on data (the Texas Civil Rights Project) collected, it identified five main barriers to casting a ballot in the state. They include voting machine malfunctions, non-compliance with voter registration law and inconvenient polling locations.

Law and Crime blogged about a federal judge in Austin who seems inclined to strike down the state's anti-BDS law.  Grits for Breakfast has a load of data about arrests for Class C misdemeanors.  The Texas Observer's Michael Barajas writes about improvements to the Sandra Bland Act.  And since hemp is no longer classified as a dangerous drug by the state of Texas, and as the Lege debates decriminalization, what exactly is legal and what isn't?  This piece in the Dallas News offers some answers and some clues to the future.

Even as another chemical plant in the Houston area exploded ...


... several climate activists went to Austin to testify about the #ITCDisaster.


KUT reports that a battle over renewable energy is brewing under the pink dome.

Before speaking at Rice University last Friday, Vice President Pence stopped by ICE offices in north Houston and tried to find a silver lining in Trump's about-face on shutting the border down.

“The president’s made it clear that if over the course of the next year, if Mexico fails to act we’ll begin by considering tariffs that we impose on cars that come into our country and our president will consider closing portions of southern border,” said Pence. 

Pence also praised ICE officers who arrested 284 employees at a technology repair company in the Dallas suburb of Allen on charges of working in the United States illegally.  No charges were announced for the employer.


PDiddie at Brains and Eggs posted his regular weekly 2020 update, and SocraticGadfly showed why, as he sees it, that Pete Buttigieg is so bad a presidential candidate he could be called Beto Lite.  Progrexas blogs that Beto O'Rourke's charter schools problem isn't going away any time soon.

Dan Solomon at TM has the Croatian who finds art in James Harden's beard.


And Beyond Bones tells the tale of when beer saved the world.
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