Texas Progressives: More primary post-mortems

This corner of the Texas Progressives Alliance has no idea where the people of Ukraine honestly stood on things like NATO expansion before the Russian war, so won't claim it knows where to stand with them, and leaves that at that while introducing this week's roundup.

Texas Monthly has the post-mortem on Harris County primary vote-counting and Isabel Longoria. Why County Judge Lina Hidalgo hired such a hack, and what this may say for her longer-term political future, who knows? 

Democrats won't win more races until they recruit better candidates. (As the piece notes, many potential such candidates refuse to do the dirty work on statewide races.)

And, related to that? Dem primary turnout was down, GOP numbers were up, the Observer notes. Personally, I doubt it's primarily due to SB1; rather, it's anti-Trump animus driving Dems in 2018 vs. anti-Biden animus and the GOP today. Add in a more sharply contested GOP gubernatorial primary and there you go.

As for that bill? The Trib reports 18,000 mail ballots rejected in the 16 largest counties. But, we don't know the GOP/Dem split on this, nor statewide numbers, nor the GOP/Dem split on them. Off the Kuff rounds up news reports about mail ballot rejections from the 2022 primaries.

The Observer dives in to the GOP AG runoff between Kenny Boy Paxton and Pee Bush.

The Texas Signal takes a deeper look at that Abbott-supporting oligarch's lawsuit against Beto O'Rourke.

Department of Family and Protective Services, already short-staffed and already under a federal court order about its family services, is the agency Strangeabbott picked to meddle into family privacy on issues of transgender and transsexual children and medical and related issues. (They're two different classes of people, folks.) Rightfully, a judge put this on hold.

Collin College is facing its third First Amendment lawsuit from an ex-professor.

Internationally, Anatol Lieven has a good take on the real elites connected to Putin: Not the oligarchs, but those who rose to power with him in the post-Yeltsin world. Interestingly, his long-time Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, gets only a listing, and no discussion. Stand-in President Dmitri Medvedev doesn't even get a listing.