Texas Progressives talk politics, fall, book bans

Off the Kuff showed that in Harris County, Republicans did slightly better than 2020 in terms of votes collected. It was a downswing among Dems that made them competitive.  

SocraticGadfly takes a look at some recent climate science news of concern, especially in light of the upcoming COP29.

John Cornyn lost his Senate Majority Leader bid.

And ... the Observer has now removed the interim tag from Gus Bova as editor in chief. Way to make him sweat a few months.

Joe Biden is not emptying federal death row, sorry, Slate. Dear Leader didn't do it and he didn't free Leonard Peltier. 

Usually, I'm not that big on Steve Vladeck, but his interaction with Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones at a Federalist Society panel is definitely worth a read. That said, had I been him, I wouldn't have participated, because I would have expected the possibility of being sandbagged. That then said, yes, judges are partisan — but basically, within duopoly party bounds.

Frank Strong recapped the school board elections of note.  

Texas 2036 points to higher education opportunities in prison as a way to break the recidivism cycle.

The Fort Worth Report repeats plenty of previous information that turning out office building lights at night reduces the number of fatal collisions suffered by migratory birds. 

The Current reports that Texas enacted the nation's third-highest number of book bans in the last academic year. 

 The Bloggess assures us that she and her progressive bookshop aren't going anywhere.

John Nichols puts himself on #BlueAnon stupidity watch

The header is a pun on being on a "death watch," and post-Nov. 5, I wish I had thought of it sooner.

Nichols, the columnist at The Nation with the most visceral dislike for third parties, using his DSA Rosey fellating as a cudgel at times, yesterday seemed to think it was a big deal that Trump's share of the popular vote had officially fallen below 50 percent. (It had, per Wiki, as of Nov. 18, not 19, but as of yesterday evening when I wrote this, Wiki had Trump back at 50.0 percent.)

So, Wikipedia itself backstops my first callout of Nichols — he's shooting at a still-moving target.

So, this?

Unfortunately, for the president-elect, the United States takes time to count 155 million votes—give or take a million—and the actual result will rob Trump of his bragging points.

Might be a self-own.

And this?

Trump can no longer claim that powerful mandate. By most reasonable measures, the beginning point for such a claim in a system with two major parties is an overwhelming majority vote in favor of your candidacy. Trump no longer has that.

Certainly won't stop Trump from claiming a mandate. Shrub Bush was only a plurality president, if that, in 2000. Didn't stop him.

Nichols even, much later in the piece, admits this.

That won’t matter to Trump, who claimed a mandate even when he lost the 2016 popular vote by almost 3 million ballots. Four years later, Trump refused to accept his defeat by more than 7 million votes, and denied that majority support for Biden in the 2020 election amounted to anything akin to a mandate.

So, why is this being written?

Nichols goes on to note how Harris was better than this, that, and the other candidates of years past, even as Wiki's page notes her EV results were the worst since Dukakis.

He says she did well and thus Democrats shouldn't despair.

He ignores the massive decline in Democratic turnout, the Hispanic shift and other things that can't all be blamed on Harris running a craptacular campaign, worsened by Dementia Joe's failure to drop out sooner. I mean, per Anton Chekhov, the gun from Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign stupidity in Great Lakes states was in the room in Act I. Then 2020 was Act II and here we are in Act III.

That then said, to riff on Corey Robin? Winning by 2 percentage points or more in an America, er Merikkka still frozen in the Sixth Party System, and unlikely to unfreeze in the near future, is something.

I saw this piece because it was trending on Google News. Probably a sign that a lot of BlueAnon other than Nichols need to be put, or put themselves, on that stupidity watch.

Reminder that, speaking of fellation, Nichols also did that long ago with fauxgressive Randy Bryce, aka Iron Stache.

Warmonger Joe ups the game again in Ukraine

Warmonger Joe is doing it again, OKing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to use ATACMS in long-range use. 

Semafor doesn't even cite anonymous Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ in poo-poohing Russian President Vladimir Putin's concerns — it just does so, in clear editorializing. (The NYT, at the first link, at least has that fig leaf, and it also notes specific possible responses by Putin.) Nor does it call bullshit on Zelenskyy's offer to replace US troops in Europe with Ukrainian ones. (I'll bet other MSM have also been letting that one fly.) Anybody who's seen Ukrainian draft-dodging and the violence when Ukrainian draft officers land a fish know how that would turn out.

Texas Supreme Court basically sends Robert Roberson back to hell

The reprieve Roberson got a few weeks ago, when the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence subpoenaed him to appear before it, to testify about the state's junk science law and the Court of Criminal Appeals' refusal to follow it?

Out the door. Sort of.

The Texas Supreme Court said the committee overstepped its constitutional authority, and that prosecutors can ask for a new execution date to be set. As a sop, they said the committee can subpoena Roberson again, as long as that doesn't interfere with a new execution date. Joe Moody of the committee thinks it's more than a sop. We shall see. As of the time of that story, the Anderson County District Attorney had not asked for a new execution warrant.

Science news: Climate change cheating at Paris, atmospheric red flags — important as COP29 approaches

Not that this will actually affect anything undertaken at COP29, starting with the hypocrisy of it once again being held in a petrostate, this time, Baku Azerbaijan. (Yale Climate Connections notes that countries of the world need a "quantum leap" just on meeting current, and currently unfulfilled, commitments from past climate "accords.")

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The cheating at Paris? I'm talking about the Paris round of climate change "accord" talks, which I have long ago called "Jell-O" that was made such by two people: Dear Leader Obama and Xi Jinping.

Now, more evidence in that general direction? Two Swedish academics talk about what was essentially game-rigging on trying to stay below 1.5°C, which we of course have broken already.

(S)oon, the ambitious Paris agreement limit turned out to be not much of a limit at all. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC, the world’s foremost body of climate experts) lent its authority to the 1.5°C temperature target with its 2018 special report, something odd transpired.

Nearly all modelled pathways for limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels involved temporarily transgressing this target. Each still arrived back at 1.5°C eventually (the deadline being the random end point of 2100), but not before first shooting past it.

OK ....

They then spell this out:

De facto, what they said was this: staying below a temperature limit is the same as first crossing it and then, a few decades hence, using methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere to dial temperatures back down again.

From some corners of the scientific literature came the assertion that this was nothing more than fantasy. A new study published in Nature has now confirmed this critique. It found that humanity’s ability to restore Earth’s temperature below 1.5°C of warming, after overshooting it, cannot be guaranteed

Fantasy! Many of us have already faulted the IPCC for being overly conservative. Now, per further items in the piece, it appears that this overt conservativism (contra climate change Obamiacs like Michael Mann and Katharine Hayhoe, with Mann even attacking James Hansen) was deliberate for political reasons.

Read on, MacDuff: 

If reversal cannot be guaranteed, then clearly it is irresponsible to sanction a supposedly temporary overshoot of the Paris targets. And yet this is exactly what scientists have done. What compelled them to go down this dangerous route?

Our own book on this topic (Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, published last week by Verso) offers a history and critique of the idea.

When overshoot scenarios were summoned into being in the early 2000s, the single most important reason was economics. Rapid, near-term emissions cuts were deemed prohibitively costly and so unpalatable. Cost optimisation mandated that they be pushed into the future to the extent possible.

Politics! Also note the phrase "Climate Breakdown," in the book.

Politics!

(B)ecause modellers could not imagine transgressing the deeply conservative constraints that they worked within, something else had to be transgressed.

One team stumbled upon the idea that large-scale removal of carbon might be possible in the future, and so help reverse climate change. The EU and then the IPCC picked up on it, and before long, overshoot scenarios had colonised the expert literature. Deference to mainstream economics yielded a defence of the political status quo. This in turn translated into reckless experimentation with the climate system. Conservatism or fatalism about society’s capacity for change flipped into extreme adventurism about nature.

There we are.

And read that Nature study. (I'll be trying to find that book!) It notes the real cost is that of carbon removal. IF possible. It also goes into more detail about how climate change feedbacks that are likely already being cooked into the system can't necessarily be undone by negative human GHG emissions.

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The atmospheric red flags connect. A new study shows that global methane emissions continue to rise. And, guess who's one of the worst offenders of a 2021 global methane emissions agreement? China is also in the top five, as are the rest of the BRICS countries not named South Africa.

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And, a friendly reminder — it's not fundagelicals vs the liberally religious that's the big divide on taking climate change seriously, as a climate crisis. It's secularists/non-metaphysicians/atheists vs everybody else AND that "everybody else" includes the so-called Nones or religiously unaffiliated.

Texas Progressives post-election Roundup: Some bemoan, others are more realistic, detached and more

There IS a Texas Progressives Roundup in this corner this week, even if Charles Kuffner, still in a state of shellshock at Off the Kuff over missed predictions at the state level, isn't initiating it. I know I got the national results wrong in my prediction, and have no problem admitting it, even without Brains dropping in — though he got his response back. (Speaking of, him quitting the Roundup rather than editing what Kuff sent and adding his own material, which I had been doing months, if not a full year or more, before Brains left? OK.)

That said, I'll lead. I offer an early post-mortem (with other things being posted this week) while also focusing on non-duopoly issues, including a big win for the Green Party in Texas, and what also appears to be an implosion, not just here in Texas, but elsewhere, for the Libertarian Party. (I will have a follow-up when we have nationwide popular vote totals for third and minor parties as well as the two duopoly parties.)

The Trib looks at why Texas Dems underperformed again.

At the Observer, Gus Bova talks about "a lost decade"when it's actually been two now, and never mentions Hinojosa's name. True, it was a day before his resignation, but he's still the guy at fault.

That underperformance went beyond statewide races and the GOP gaining a couple of state House seats. Republicans won 25 of 26 contested appeals court races. The Observer looks at the PAC money behind this almost-sweep.

And, Trump took a majority of Latino votes. He even took 14 of 18 border counties. Bova looks at that, too, and manages to mention Hinojosa once, but without attaching any blame to him. In other words, the Observer largely continues to suck, and Bova as its still interim (why does he still have that tag?) editor-in-chief offers little hope for its future, IMO.

The Guardian suggests that nationally, the inflation, or inflation perception, issue was in large part due to Delaware Joe cutting off the tap too much and too quickly on COVID relief.

What happened to Colin Allred indeed?

The election, re the Texas House, did NOT eliminate Dade "Dade" Phelan from another shot at Speaker. Stay tuned.

Beside the nationwide post-election text messages to Blacks, especially men, some students at Texas State showed their own lack of enlightenment.