Monday, November 15, 2021

The Filing Wrangle from Far Left Texas


Please stand by while this morning's breaking news sucks all the oxygen out of the 2022 statewide races for the next few days.


At the very end of the TexTrib's piece they catalog a few of the failures of O'Rourke, Texas Dems, and their inept D.C. counterparts.

For the rest of the 2020 election cycle, O’Rourke and his group focused mainly on Democrats’ fight to capture the state House majority. They came up woefully short, failing to net a single seat.

[...]

Over the summer, O’Rourke became a leading figure in Texas Democrats’ push for federal voting rights legislation. While Democrats in the Texas House broke quorum over Abbott’s priority elections bill and went to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress for help, O’Rourke crisscrossed Texas to build public pressure for federal legislation.

However, Democrats were not successful on either the state or federal levels. The state House Democrats eventually returned to Austin to allow Republicans to pass their restrictive elections legislation, while Congress still has not sent a voting rights bill to Biden’s desk.

There will be plenty of ink spilled and pixels scattered about fundraising, polling, guns, the grid, and other various and sundry issues that arise over the course of the next 11.75 months.  I feel pretty sure that our ability to -- and our interest in -- casting our ballots next year will determine who wins and who loses.  Not to be simplistic about it, but the negatives for both these losers are too high and will only go higher once the mud starts flying.  That depresses what is certain to be the more historical pattern of low voter turnout here.  And that's my marker.

Other candidate filings from over the weekend appear on Patrick Svitek's spreadsheet, and Reform Austin has compiled a grid that is difficult at best to determine party affiliation without a scorecard or knowledge from elsewhere.  It looks like they lumped the third-party challengers into a category called 'potential candidates'.  (Do better, y'all.)

Moving on ...


The tragedy at Travis Scott's AstroworldFest claimed two more victims over the weekend, and everybody with a conscience is reassessing the rapper's prior good works for the city and even his contributions to music and the festival scene.  Not Kuffner, though.  Firefighter logs, lawsuits, and business insurance.  One of the more appallingly tone-deaf posts I've read on that blog in recent years.  He had nothing to say about Scott in the years before, and has turned into his predictable scold after, same as with the Astros' cheating, the Texans being owned by the McNairs, and other items often "seen in the background" that demonstrate how much he doesn't actually care about the people of Houston.  What would you expect from a Yankees fan, after all?  Wait and see how happy he is when Carlos Correa signs with the Bombers; that'll tell you.

Disgusting.

Continuing with a few more items of note that revulse me:


Of all the reasons I have not to fly, rude-ass conservatives starting fights with airline employees is moving rapidly up the list.


I was mad enough about the possibility of freezing in the dark this winter without being reminded that I'm paying for Kelcey Warren's million-dollar contribution to Greg Abbott out of his $2.4 billion profits from last winter.  If the power goes out for days once more, maybe Beto's got a shot after all (as long as the Texans who rarely vote don't all die of hypothermia, that is).


I'll stop here for now -- lots more to come -- with these calm-me-downs.

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Sunday, November 14, 2021

Sunday "Big Bird, Little Bird" Funnies

That time a cartoon preempted the Cuban Missile Crisis

In his column looking back at past interviews, veteran journalist A. Craig Copetas remembers a time when The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends offered an alternative version of US-Soviet history.

Support a disappearing craft and give a Christmas gift subscription to your loved ones from your favorite cartoonist(s).
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Friday, November 12, 2021

The Friyay Wrangle from Far Left Texas


It looks to be another glorious fall weekend in Texas, so put down your phone and close your laptop and get out of doors for some quality vitamin D, an adult beverage, some meat on a stick at a festival, or whatever floats your boat.


I've rounded up the usual suspects -- Texans behaving very, very badly -- for your leisure reading.

Maybe you prefer your news about our Lone Star lunatics with a little less snark and more calmly-delivered facts.  Here you go.


I'll take that as my segue to the climate headlines.


The Midland Reporter-Telegram says that illegal air pollution in the state dropped 54% in 2020 compared to '19, due in no small part to the pandemic.  (Most experts are already reporting that this decline will be short-lived.)  Charles Pierce of Esquire, only half-jokingly, says that Texas has probably outlawed the phrase 'environmental racism'.

Some legal updates, and the criminal and social justice/injustice news.


I'll save the politics and elections updates for tomorrow or Monday.  Here's a couple of media updates, and one soother.

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Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Hump Day Wrangle


Let me first update a pair of 2022 election developments since Monday.


-- Gohmert has decided it's on him to hump Ken Paxton out of the attorney general's office.  So while his announcement was logistically challenged and math-deficient, should he take the plunge it probably forces a couple of announced entrants *ahem*MattKrause* to reconsider their bids.

Two more things:

1) He'll easily raise the million bucks  he says he needs in five weeks in order to decide.  If it's $10 million he wants ... well, I would be stunned if he got that much.  So all of this exploration is perhaps just shilling for his Congressional re-election (is that how campaign finance law works?  I don't want to bother Kuffner.)

2) Should he bid for AG, win the primary (runoff likely), and then lose to the Democrat in November, I'd fully expect to see him running for his old seat in 2024 ... and right back in Congress in '25.  Bicho malo nunca muerte.

-- E-Rod Tres made his TX-35 bid official this morning, joining Greg Casar.  With TMF opting out, these two would have to be considered the front-runners for the runoff, much to Claudia Zapata's chagrin.  She should run as a Green.

And some new politics business; the lathering up for Beto is under way.


I have been posting often that O'Rourke would not go for it.  That was because I took him at his word: that because the US Senate has been unable to use its workaround (i.e. abolishing the filibuster) in order to pass an elections bill watered-down for Joe Manchin, that Texas would be far too hamstrung to elect any statewide Democrats in 2022.  With the exception of attorney general -- provided that the GOP nominee's name is Paxton or Gohmert -- I believe Beto is/was correct.  So he must be reading this news and deciding he was wrong about that.


The result is at least 1 of every 5 voters in Texas never cast a ballot in the Lone Star State prior to 2014 -- a remarkable wild card in a state that had stable politics and a slow stream of new voters for a generation before that.

“You have a largely new electorate that is unfamiliar with the trends and the personalities in the area,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor. “That rapid turnover leads to a lot of uncertainty for candidates.”

It’s all setting up for a 2022 election cycle that is more competitive, more expensive and more uncertain than statewide candidates are used to seeing in Texas.

Wallace's piece goes on to laud the voter registration efforts of Battleground Texas and O'Rourke's own PoweredxPeople, as well as Voto Latino, MOVE Texas, and Jolt.

All those new voters have made Texas politics more competitive as well as more difficult to predict. In 2018, O’Rourke lost to Cruz in the U.S. Senate race by just 2.6 percentage points. (Lt. Gov. Dan) Patrick, (Paxton), and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller all won 51 percent of the vote or less in their re-elections.

Four years earlier, each of them had won at least 58 percent of the vote.

Certainly there have been bigger jackpots won on wild cards in Vegas, much as a lottery ticket of all random picks can hit the big one once in a great while.  I sincerely wish the best of luck to Beto and his cohorts who are betting on the come.

Be reminded that in the redistricting process just completed, every single Congressional district except the two new ones were drawn to be safer for the incumbent.


Be reminded that the TXGOP has strengthened voter turnout in the boondocks.  And more significantly, in the RGV.  Twenty-twenty and 2022's results are examples of their success.  It seems that the long-awaited Hispanic voter turnout is finally showing up ... for Republicans.

Last, this.


Again, it's always possible that the Supreme Court or Merrick Garland's DOJ can somehow, some way, ride to the rescue, saving Texas Democrats from the avalanche of voter suppression laws they've been buried under, through litigation and TROs and legal what-not, just in time, a year from now.

And donkeys might fly out of my ass.  Personally, I'll be voting more pragmatically next year.


BTW, if Joy Diaz decides to run for something, I hope it's lieutenant governor, and I hope she will do so as a Green and not a Democrat.
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