A skeptical leftist's, or post-capitalist's, or eco-socialist's blog, including skepticism about leftism (and related things under other labels), but even more about other issues of politics. Free of duopoly and minor party ties. Also, a skeptical look at Gnu Atheism, religion, social sciences, more.
Note: Labels can help describe people but should never be used to pin them to an anthill.
As seen at Washington Babylon and other fine establishments
For the third or fourth week in a row, the annual Texas Progressives
roundup got too big and too diffuse in focus to run in one piece. So,
here's the second half.
A group affiliated with the Lipan Apache and a Terlingua-based river rafting company are suing the feds
to block a border wall in Big Bend. That said, the rafting company's
real problem is lack of water on the river; it should be suing BOTH
duopoly parties over the climate crisis. The Observer has more
The Monthly reports in detail
about bulldozers on the ground and other things at Big Bend. It's right
in noting the noise pollution this involves, as well as other things.
Much of the story is pull quotes, like this:
When I
saw the photos of the bulldozers in front of Santa Elena Canyon, I
thought of another sickening image: the two colossal, 1,500-year-old
Buddha statues in central Afghanistan being blown up by the Taliban in
2001. What is happening in Big Bend is an act of mindless zealotry being
sold as border security. And it forces us to realize that the things of
this earth that are beautiful and sacred and mysterious to most of us
will always be regarded by a cynical, powerful few as just being in the
way.
—Stephen Harrigan, longtime Texas Monthly contributor and former staff writer
Olivia Julianna has a lot of questions about the Big Bend border wall.
Supposedly, work on the wall has now been paused, whether what was being installed was a physical wall or not.
Related: A federal judge has extended a pause on border wall work
in the Valley along the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. (It's still
on my bucket list to get down there to that and the National Butterfly
Center.)
For the third or fourth week in a row, the annual Texas Progressives
roundup got too big and too diffuse in focus to run in one piece. The second half, on environmental and national parks issues, runs this afternoon.
Off the Kuff finds that even Greg Abbott's pollster thinks the Governor's race is close. (Your correspondent thinks Kuffner's reading too much into this. Shock me.)
On the other hand, late last month, Faux News' polling said Strangeabbott was just 1 percentage point ahead. The one normal big asterisk for Tex-ass polling is that it's registered voters, not likely ones; other than that, it looks totally solid.
Side note: It also puts Talafreako 3 points up on Kenny Boy. Will that push Paxton into agreeing to participate in already scheduled debates?
Second side note: Inflation is listed as the No. 1 concern. The border is next, then health, jobs, and political divisions tie for third. "Environment," which would include the water side of data centers, is not listed. "Inflation" right now is driven above all by gas prices, which means Strangeabbott's November future is tied to Trump's stupidity on Iran, which is ultimately in the service of Zionism and Islamophobia, stuff Kuff really doesn't cover much, especially not the former.
Related to the subject matter of the first paragraph, the Trib reports that Strangeabbott plans an electric usage audit of about 300 projects, primarily data centers. That said, another story there notes how specifics-free (shock me) Abbott's "audit" is. It's also unclear how much or how little any of this addresses water as well as electricity.
Regina Vanburg argues that Greg Abbott isn't going to save anyone from data centers.
Also also related? The Observer says its still unclear who will pick up what on the electricity tab cost.
As for Talafreako? A new round of his hypocrisy has popped up.
The justices have considered a similar law before. In 1980, in Stone v. Graham, the court ruled that a Kentucky law requiring public schools to display a framed copy of the Ten Commandments in classrooms violated the Constitution. In an unsigned opinion, the court wrote that “[i]f the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause,” which prohibits the government from favoring one religion over another.
In the 46 years since the Stone decision was handed down, both the court’s make-up and its religious-freedom jurisprudence have changed significantly. In particular, the court’s ruling in Stone rested on its conclusion that the Kentucky law failed the “Lemon test” – a three-part test, outlined in the 1971 case Lemon v. Kurtzman, to determine whether a law violates the Constitution’s establishment clause. Under that test, a statute had to be found to have a secular purpose, the statute could not promote or restrict religious beliefs or practices, and the statute could not foster excessive church-state entanglement. In 2022’s Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, in which the court ruled in favor of a high school football coach who lost his job after leading post-game prayers on the field, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion for the six-justice majority indicated that Lemon had been “long ago abandoned.” Instead, Gorsuch wrote, courts should look at history and the understanding of the drafters of the Constitution to determine whether a law or practice violates the establishment clause.
Well put.
Part of the problem is that Gorsuch and others of the "six" badly framed Bremerton, and I suspect deliberately. That said, beyond that, the Court was presented a case that was itself deliberately misframed by Kennedy and his backers, and it became a tool for wingnuts. See Wiki's summary.
The plaintiffs are saying that Stone has not been rejected, whatever the standing of Lemon is.
That said, per SCOTUSBlog, the plantiffs have another angle:
The majority also rejected the families’ effort to rely on Mahmoud v. Taylor, a 2025 decision in which the Supreme Court agreed that a Maryland school board violated the rights of parents to freely exercise their religion when it refused to allow them to opt their children out of instruction that included LGBTQ+ themes. S.B. 10, the majority stressed, “authorizes no religious instruction and gives teachers no license to contradict children’s religious beliefs (or their parents’).”
It's been speculated by many court-watchers that the Supremes would vote to overturn the Texas law, and a similar Louisiana one, on this basis or similar. I can see a 5-4 or 6-3 coalition possibly breaking that way, in what will be a three- or four-way fractured opinion.
Per the 9-8 Fifth Circuit ruling, it's clear that majority there rejects entirely the Jeffersonian "wall of separation" not just broadly construed but narrowly.
If five or six justices agree, we're really in trouble.
James Talarico, by late July Fox polling, and other sites, continues to post a small polling edge over Ken Paxton.
Kenny Boy remains much more ethically challenged than Talafreako, but the latter is not simon-pure.
Shock me again, but he's apparently violating his pledge
not to accept endorsements from church pulpits. And, though he's not a
lawyer, he's doing so in Strangeabbott-type legal-Jesuitical fashion:
The
Sunday before he’d announced his Senate candidacy, he’d gone to his
home church of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian, he said, where his pastor, Jim
Rigby, had addressed it explicitly.
“He
said, ‘You know, the new IRS rules mean that I can now endorse
candidates from this position,’ ” recalled Talarico. “And he said, ‘But I
won’t be doing that, because I still believe in the separation of
church and state.’ That’s exactly how I feel. I will not seek, nor will I
accept, any endorsement from the pulpit anywhere, because that boundary
is sacred in my mind.”
It’s a strong
statement—one on which he seems to have compromised. On Sunday morning,
at the Luke Church, in Humble, Pastor Timothy Sloan brought Talarico up
to the pulpit and made a strong statement of his own. “In the spirit of
my pastor, Reverend William Alexander Lawson—he would always say this
whenever he had an official that came to the church. He’d say, ‘Now, we
don’t endorse candidates. That’s not the church’s role. However, you
should know who your pastor endorses and believes in.’ And I want you to
know my full, total, and complete weight is behind James Talarico.”
Talarico’s team shared the clip across its social media accounts,
touting the endorsement of “one of the most respected pastors in
Houston.”
Sloan’s caveat that he is
endorsing the candidate in his personal capacity, and not as a
representative of the Luke Church, is delivered as a knowing wink—the
congregation bubbles up with laughter at his “however.” It’s a technical
loophole—not that such things matter anymore, as far as the IRS is
concerned—that is pretty well annulled by the fact that it is being
delivered from the pulpit on Sunday morning.
Yet more
reason to either undervote the race or hope some write-in candidate is
entered. And, yet one more thing that Kuff either will ignore or else
put in his spin cycle. (The Monthly story was Aug. 11 and as of Aug. 18, Kuff had nothing, so it's on his ignore cycle. I know he reads the Monthly online often enough.)
And, per the next paragraph, Team Talarico immediately put it in their spin cycle:
When
I reached out to the team, citing Talarico’s previous denouncement of
pulpit endorsements and asking whether his position on the matter had
changed, spokesperson JT Ennis pointed to the distinction. “James is
honored to have the support of Pastor Sloan, a dedicated and trusted
spiritual leader in Houston. As Pastor Sloan made clear, it is not the
church’s role to endorse candidates—but that does not preclude faith
leaders from speaking out in their personal capacities,” Ennis said in a
statement. “As James travels across Texas to engage with places of
worship, he will continue speaking beyond political talking points to
address the deeper spiritual crisis facing our country.”
It's clear that the the DSA Roseys are self-inflating expectations (while running away from past social media statements). Barring some new piece by Ken Klippenstein, per his most recent one, it seems many fellow travelers, per an old Deep Purple song, think it's not about the kill, but the thrill of the chase.
That seemed true enough after Abdul El-Sayed's much narrower than self-projected win of the Democrat nomination for U.S. Senate in Michigan. It seems more true than ever after Francesca Hong's loss for the Democrat gubernatorial nod in Wisconsin.
And, yes, BlueAnon, leaving off the "-ic" is deliberate, from the left, not the Rethuglican world.
So, why?
Part of it, per CNN, is crappy polling. Mainstream media — and not just print media, but national cable teevee people like, er, CNN — are spending less and less on polls. That means partisan polling rises to the front. Add in the corruption of prediction markets like Kalshi, and partisan polling then feeding back off that to try to create a narrative that may often be almost as fallacious as The Donald claiming he's winning in Iran, and there you go.
As for Ken claiming "The Rebels Already Won," er, no they didn't, and this comes off in hindsight as flat-out performative spin. Especially with your ongoing refusal by silence to admit even a partial political mea culpa on Graham Platner, you come off looking less and less like a political analyst on Democratic party elections and more and more like the Substack version of a talking head.
If that's what you want to be, fine. Be honest about it, because if you aren't, I'll keep hanging that label on you. As I read you more and more, I see less and less in the way of actual political analysis in actual electoral races. (For example, Ken in that piece, and notes after the election so far, has said nothing about Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both refusing to endorse Hong, and why he thinks they didn't.)
Beyond that, as I noted off this Time piece, per the parentheses in the first paragraph, Hong was looking like a Pander Bear even before Wisconsin primary day. That said, my concerns about that Time piece includes Hong not being quoted, whether the author chose not to reach out, or she chose not to respond, while Crowley was. (I'm assuming lack of reach-out; the author never mentions the old journalistic "We contacted Francesca Hong but she chose not to respond.")
So, Wisconsin didn't even have a rebel running, not in all aspects.
Speaking of all of the above? Here's a Substack restacking note I had to Ken's Aug. 14 piece about The Third Way ready to label certain Democrats, whether restricted to the DSA or not, as "extremist":
If only Ken recognized that third parties exist, and as part of his talking-head-ism, encouraged more readers to think about that.
Also, wouldn’t this have been a good chance to ask AOC and Bernie, since he’s using their picture, why they didn’t endorse Hong, and what they think about this new Third Way policy statement, if they know about it?
As is, I think Ken wants the sweet spot of putting talking-headism on top of investigative reporting leaks, but without always getting into actual analysis behind those leaks.
The Bradley effect? The degree of its effect, and even its existence, have been debated since it was first posulated. And, to the degree it exists, if at all, is it primarily or only about race? This:
While there is widespread belief in a racial component as at least a partial explanation for the polling inaccuracies in the elections in question, it is not universally accepted that this is the primary factor. Peter Brodnitz, a pollster and contributor to the newsletter The Polling Report, worked on the 2006 campaign of black U.S. Senate candidate Harold Ford, Jr., and contrary to Edelman's findings in 1988, Brodnitz indicated that he did not find the race of the interviewer to be a factor in voter responses in pre-election polls. Brodnitz suggested that late-deciding voters tend to have moderate-to-conservative political opinions and that this may account in part for last-minute decision-makers breaking largely away from black candidates, who have generally been more liberal than their white opponents in the elections in question
Offers definite food for thought, as it can apply within primary races as well as general elections. Plus, with much wider use of early voting today, election-day voting, especially outside of senior citizens, still continues to break Republican.
So, if Abdul El-Sayed does lose in Michigan, you heard it here first. (The state has a minimum of nine days of early voting.)
On Hong? Per Ken's interview of her, she won a seven-way primary (presumably for a safe Democrat seat — Wiki confirms with noting it's the east side of the People's Republic of Madison) for the Wisconsin Assembly in 2020, with 28 percent. As for her "consistently leading polls"? Well, per the above, WHOSE polls, first? Ken doesn't say. Second, even if by quality independent pollsters, sure, when other candidates keep dropping out, you might float to the top.
Also per that Wiki page on Hong? Ken doesn't tell you she was a carpetbagger into that district in 2020, first. Second, it discusses those polls, saying her rise only really took off in July — after the Dem straw poll endorsed Sara Rodriguez, then other candidates dropped out, then she dropped out. There was nothing inevitable about her before that.
Third, the bottom portion of her Wiki page confirms what I say above and already said on Shitter: She was turning into a Pander Bear. (Ken didn't tell you that, either, in his interview story. It's true that this only started happening after the date of his interview, but Ken didn't append a note to that piece, do a follow-up or anything else.)
Update, Aug. 19: Angie Nixon's win in the Florida Democratic Senate primary may spin things further.
Glenn Hegar, the last regular elected comptroller, was bad enough. Strangeabbott-shenaniganed interim comptroller Kelly Hancock was worse.
And now, here's Huffines with the normally halfway anodyne news release about monthly sales tax allocations:
Texas Comptroller Don Huffines said many cities and counties can reduce property taxes due to increased sales tax revenue as local governments will receive $1.4 billion in sales tax allocations for August, 13.6% more than in August 2025.
These allocations are based on sales made in June by businesses that report tax monthly and on sales made in April, May and June by quarterly filers.
“The increased sales tax revenue distributed to local governments is a strong sign the Texas economy continues to grow,” Huffines said.
“It is also a clear signal that many local governments with increased sales tax revenue can dedicate much of that to property tax reduction. Lowering property taxes is one of the best ways to make housing more affordable and help Texans with the cost of gas, groceries and other living expenses.”
First, as I noted, school districts don't have sales taxes.
Second, property taxes are high because .... capitalism, which Tex-ass Rethuglicans don't like when it gores their ox.
Third, they're high because no income tax.
Fourth, Dannie Goeb, with repeated jackings of the homestead exemption, rather than putting a reasonable increase on that, then a COLA, has played politics with property taxes for years.
Fifth, the cost of living is up right now because of Warmonger Don's Zionism-driven illegal war against Iran.
