I'll eat my hat if Texas Dems flip 12 state House seats

They claim they can, per the Trib.

Platner wins; DC dishes as Klipp misses

As political junkies all know, political novice and oysterman around town Graham Platner won Maine's Democratic Senate primary Tuesday night.

I offered my thoughts on his Totenkopf tattoo and other matters of his campaign about a month ago. That was before the sexting after marriage came out, and before the newest allegations of some form of abuse came out as well. Early voting in Maine also started about that time, meaning, especially since Democrats generally are more likely to vote early than Rethugs, that Platner didn't have to fully face the music on these issues in the primary.

That leads me to Klippenstein.

Ken used his space on Substack Tuesday to dunk on national Democraps and media punditry types for trying to boost Gov. Janet Mills and her walking dead campaign, while calling out the media punditry for publishing allegations against him as fact.

Ken says:

The New York Times was so desperate to align itself with the Party in Washington that it published allegations that it said it “could not independently corroborate” — something I’ve literally never seen them do before.

Versus something it claimed was corroborated, but wasn’t, like the story claiming Palestinian rapes?

Versus something I don’t think the NYT even tried to corroborate, but just took a “trust us” stance, like Judith Miller on Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction”?

Maybe not in exactly the way it did with Platner, but yeah, the NYT. has done this before, or similar.

As for his chances in the general, Ken is pretty right that Maine is hard to poll in primary races, in part because of ranked choice voting. But, unless there's a "name" third candidate, whether independent, Green or Libertarian, in the general, the RCV issue itself isn't in that much play. And, on the ticket-splitting and him looking at Collins overcoming polling takes to beat Sara Gideon in 2020? That one cuts both ways. Wiki's piece on the Maine 2026 Senate race notes Collins has outperformed other Republicans on the Maine ballot in all previous races.

The miss? Ken has uses this race to bash DC, rather than to talk about Democratic alternatives to both Platner and Mills.

Like Amanda LaFlamme. I only learned about her on Tuesday when I did teh Google to find out what other candidates were in the race. I don't know why she was only a write-in. The Bangor Daily News reported in February that she actually filed in 2025, plenty of time to get the 2,000 signatures necessary. But the first piece says "failed to get." So, did more progressive Dems in Maine deem Platner a lock? Well, he only filed in August 2025, two months after her.

She sounds like she could have been good on multiple issues, but, for whatever reason, got no traction. I'm sure there's something I'm missing, but I don't know what it is, and teh Goggle hasn't really helped me.

Since Platner was and is a flawed candidate, and yet he's the best Maine Dems could present, I'd like to hear more about why LaFlamme failed to gain that traction and less, for now at least, of dunking on Chuck Schumer and national media. 

The Maine Green Independent Party had its state convention May 30, and per Wiki's page on the election, per Ballotpedia, and per the party's book of face and website, sadly appears not to have a candidate. Ballotpedia lists three minor candidates, but they all appear to be Democrats who dropped out of the Doink primary. A sad election in many ways it shall be. 

Texas Progressives

Off the Kuff highlights the Texas Railroad Commissioner race as the latest example of Republicans getting even worse.

SocraticGadfly notes that Trump's education voucher tax credit could explode on top of Texas vouchers in January; looking to this November, he thinks data centers are not a big political needle-mover.

Some Texas Lege wingnuts and the "public policy" orgs want to further expand the 2023 "Death Star" bill. Given that this was the model for the abortion law by providing "enforcement" by private lawsuit, some of the push is to let the AG sue.

Related? More than 130 primarily smaller-sized Texas towns have their tax rates frozen over lack of annual audits, and now must play catch-up, with the lessened funding hindering catch-up. 

Israhell even shoots Palestinian babies. 

Trump AG Todd Blanche faces a June 14 ticking time bomb. (I doubt he'd actually be disbarred in New York, but you never know.) 

Daniel Vaughn calls on barbecue gourmands and smokers alike to remember that Texas barbecue was not based on brisket and doesn't need to be limited to it today.

Chris Hooks says, in hindsight, that impeachment was the best thing to happen to Kenny Boy. 

Dan Crenshaw lets it rip with the Monthly. 

Space City Weather spells out what you need to know for the 2026 hurricane season.

The Texas Signal presents an updated brief history of Pride in Texas.

Law Dork analyzes the appellate court ruling that protects current enlisted transgender service members from discharge.

Texas Public Opinion Research asks some broader questions about current issues.

Franklin Strong explains what's going on with the SBOE's bizarre required reading list, and what you can do to help.

Scott Pelley keeps speaking out while Lesley Stahl, other vets, staying for now

Here's Pelley talking to the NYT. Let's start with the Nick Bilton hiring and his take.

Nick Bilton wrote an email to the staff, introducing himself. And it was so insulting. He told us that it wasn’t 1968 anymore, and he helpfully noted that gasoline doesn’t cost 32 cents anymore, suggested that we had all been frozen in amber in 1968 when the program first went on the air, and that nothing had improved. He said in his email that it was “strange” that “60 Minutes” is only on the air at 7 o’clock Eastern time on Sunday once a week, when we’ve been on the air 24-7 globally, online, for well over a decade. It betrayed the fact that Nick Bilton didn’t know anything about us, didn’t know anything about our culture, and yet was being imposed on us as our new leader.

Well, there you go. 

Next, like a Trump-fired federal government employee, on the video, he talks about peers who are still "trapped." 

As for the speaking out, and why him? This:

First of all, our entire senior staff had been wiped out. They’re not there. I looked around the room. I’m the only correspondent there, which surprised me very much. I learned that my colleagues were out shooting stories, as they should be in the month of June, but I’m the only correspondent. And I looked at my friends and colleagues in the room and realized I was the senior person.

Summarized it. 

He notes also the insensitivity of many staffers there being fired right after the Emmys and right before Bilton was hired. He notes the lack of experience of Bilton. 

He notes it was like losing "family." As he starts tearing up:

It was the wholesale nature of it. Senior staff wiped out after a triumphal year. One of the things Nick Bilton said in that ill-fated email to the staff was that he was excited — I’m paraphrasing here — to tell the staff about the new crop of correspondents. And when I saw that, I thought, “They’re going to fire all of us, eventually.” So that’s why I use these admittedly, for a journalist, hyperbolic terms. They capture the scale of what happened.

Again, nails it. 

More, from the video: 

When someone wipes out — murders — a large number of your family members, people are hurt and shocked and in disbelief and just desperate for some explaination.

Ouch.

I think that's what pissed him off above all. The lack of explanation. Pelley went on to refute Bari Weiss on this. 

There still has been none.

None as in no explanation. 

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The second half of the header? This, from Deadline.

The three remaining fill-time correspondents on 60 Minutes — Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim — said Friday that they will remain with the show. 

“We feared that our returning might be construed as an endorsement of the existing power structure,” they wrote in a joint memo on Friday. “That is simply categorically not the case. Here’s why we are staying: We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.”

OK.

Isn't "60 Minutes" as you previously knew it already dead?  And, if you're actually believing what Nick Bilton is promising, I have beachfront property in North Dakota for sale.

==

As for calls by Pelley for CBS or its Paramount parent to fire Weiss? Not happening and Scott knows.

That said, beyond the ideological agenda she's foisting on the network's news? She has nowhere to go.

She's not going to peel off significant numbers of MAGAts from Fox, and the post-MAGAts to the right — Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc —are already lost over the strident Zionism. I don't know about the never-full-MAGA types like Dan Crenshaw, where he's at on Israel and Gaza, but surely not totally in Weiss' ballpark at a minimum. 

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Pelley's background? He, per Wiki, got yanked from running CBS Evening News because he complained to (and about) brass then as well. This time, it was over the network's slow response to "Me Too" and related. 

Talarico fellation and religious inaccuracies from the Texas Observer

Fresh off him throwing secularists halfway under the bus (despite him having previously written about the secular movement) and not looking very deeply at the roots of Hanukkah in a piece at the Observer last December, which I eviscerated, TCU professor David Brockman now writes that Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is firmly within Presbyterian tradition.

The first big fail is pretending that the Presbyterian Church USA is the only Presbyterian denomination in Merikkka. Wrong. The PCUSA is the biggest, but even with setting aside splinter groups, it's far from the only one. Wiki has the details. It list the PCUSA at 1,045,000 members. The conservative Presbyterian Church in America, which split off from the southern half of the predecessor to the PCUSA, is at 400,000, or 40 percent of its size. Let another split of the PCUSA, the ECO, has 125,000 members. The Evangelical Presbyterian Church split off the Northern Presbyterian predecessor to the PCUSA back in the 1980s and also is at 125K.

OK, adding up the three main conservative groups and you're at 650,000, or 65 percent of the PCUSA. So, we've got a fail by Brockman right there. Or a lie by hand-waving. 

Now, the big differences, per this site which does not list the ECO, but does have a 1930s splitoff from the northern Presbyterians, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

PCA is men-only pastors; ECO and EPC, that's an adiaphoron. All three non-PCUSA believe in an inerrant bible. Homosexual acts are a sin.

Brockman claims Talarico is also within the mainline Protestant tradition. Wrong. While conservative Lutherans may not add up to 65 percent of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, they break 50 percent. Actually, they break 75 percent; I didn't realize, per Wiki, that ELCA membership has cratered in the last decade or so. (It's 55 percent, per Pew, if you talk about people who "affiliate with" the different wings.) The UMC, now entering the schism world, lost 25 percent of its US churches after its 2024 general conference.

Brockman also is a weasel-shit in another way.

He nowhere discusses Talarico's claim that the Annunciation in Luke is about being pro-choice, which I noted last month is bullshit. 

The three non-PCUSA churches in my link, and I will venture the ECO as well, all consider abortion wrong. 

Interestingly, per the "mush god" stereotype of librul Protestantism, he's a very easy grader and prof in general, per Rate MyProfessors. 

Look, Prof. Brockman, if you want to just say you're "chill" with Talarico from your personal religious perspective (he was at SMU before TCU, and says in one piece that he's "high church Episcopalian"), say so.

But, don't think you can bamboozle all readers out in the wild like freshman college students in a 100-level class. 

In 2022, for the Observer, he wrote about Southern Baptists facing up to a denominational history of sexual abuse. Actually, the denouement on that was sweeping it under rug and forcing dissenters out of the denomination, as much as possible. 

Observer has surprisingly non-sanguine take on Talarico odds

The Observer notes not all Republican pundits are afraid of Talarico swamping Paxton. This:

Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP strategist in Texas, isn’t so confident that Talarico’s theology will land with swing voters. While O’Rourke was, and Talarico is, a young, dynamic candidate able to make the Senate race highly competitive, Steinhauser believes Talarico will have a harder time maneuvering around his past. “O’Rourke was a much fresher face, like he had more room to define himself.” 

Since Talarico secured the Democratic nomination, Paxton has seized on past Talarico statements about trans kids and God being “nonbinary” to deride the Democrat as a fake Texan, fake Christian, and radical leftist. Steinhauser said that while Paxton should focus more on his accomplishments as attorney general, culture-war issues remain a strong motivator among the moderate to conservative base. “Those words are going to get played in a loop all the way to November,” said Steinhauser. That’s a standard Republican playbook: In 2024, Ted Cruz’s campaign plastered the state with ads attacking Democratic challenger Colin Allred—who ultimately lost by about eight points—on the issue of transgender kids in sports.

Is an interesting observation. 

For many "moderates," not just conservatives, transgenderism and transsexualism are a "third rail." State and national Democratic apparatchiks may not like that, but that doesn't change the fact on the ground. 

I'm already on record as thinking he doesn't do much better than Beto-Bob did against Havana Ted in 2018. 

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Meanwhile, the Pander Bear watch on Talarico continues. He promises to help farmers by reducing the federal tax on diesel. Gee, isn't Trump talking about that? He did also mention the war in Iran, but "somehow" avoided mentioning the country behind that.