Texas Progressives talk butterflies, Methodists, New Year's resolutions

SocraticGadfly talks about protecting monarch butterflies. 

Off the Kuff analyzed precinct data in Harris County for the Presidential and Senate elections.

In a case that will surely jump into federal court, the Texas Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether or not Southern Methodist University can leave the United Methodist Church. As an interesting side note, I did not realize the UMC moderated some of its anti-LGBQ etc language last year. Presumably the fallout from the denominational split had hit pretty bad.

Kudos to Costco for standing behind its seemingly real and thorough DEI efforts.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project said Texas Senate District 15 has many people who may be impacted by mass deportations. Senator Molly Cook must take the lead in informing SD 15 residents of the rights/resources they have if confronted by immigration authorities. 

 Evil MoPac makes some New Year's resolutions for Austin.  

Elise Hu looked back on her 2024.  

Reform Austin notes the rise in fatal newborn abandonments since the state's harsh abortion ban was passed.  

Mean Green Cougar Red suggests a corporate resolution for 2025.  

Jeff Balke offers some resolutions for Houston.  

Eric Berger tries to make sense of Elon Musk's comments about NASA's Artemis mission.

Finally, the TPA bids an early farewell to Juanita Jean, who alongside with the other denizens of the World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon will be signing off on January 23. Thanks to them all for the laughs, the memes, and the sass. (I guess; that's Kuff's words. She's not on my blogroll, and while I don't dislike her, she's never totally floated my boat.)

1976 — the wrong turning

Per my takedown obit of Jimmy Carter as president yesterday, we had options in 1976 — certainly on domestic policy vs Carter's neoliberalism, and possibly on his foreign policy of propping up authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, followed by saying we'd go to war to keep relatively keep Persian Gulf oil available.

No, no Green Party existed then, but the Democrats had better (and worse) options available in the 1976 primaries, starting with Wiki's page.

 The two clearly worse options, first, to get them out of the way?

George Wallace is obvious; he was still unrepentant of his past and unchanged of his present at the time. The other? Scoop Jackson, aka the Senator from Boeing, whose staff housed many neocon thinkers who started rising to prominence with him. Scoop, as an antienvironmentalist, was lesser known, but also known, as the Senator from Weyerhauser, having never met a tree he didn't like — chopped down.

Just as bad candidates would include the vanity candidate Lloyd Bentson.

Modestly better would include the likes of Birch Bayh.

Somewhere between modestly and moderately better would be Frank Church and Jerry Brown. Church was NOT all that James Risen has cracked him up as being, but would have been better than Carter. Gov. Moonbeam might have gone less far down his California neoliberalism road and actually been a moonbeam had he been elected.

Definitely better? The person who became Carter's main challenger, and an early dropout who was better than Bernie Sanders before Bernie Sanders.

The latter first. That would have been Oklahoma Sen. Fred Harris, mounting a truly populist campaign. He wasn't a total unknown — the Hump considered him as 1968 running mate material. He was an early fighter for American Indian land rights, and was the only senator to vote against Lewis Powell's Supreme Court nomination, among other things. Coming from a border state, he might have had some of Carter's Southern appeal, while yet being pure-on Great Society. Also, going better than Church, he wanted to disband the CIA.

Harris just couldn't get enough traction, sadly.

The other? The man who, after it became clear Humphrey wouldn't seek the office, was the main rival of both Harris and Jackson (defense contractors are unionized!) — Mo Udall.

Udall, after Harris dropped out, narrowly lost the Wisconsin primary to Carter. Like older brother Stu, he was a strong environmentalist — except when it came to Arizona dams. He was also a relatively early opponent of Vietnam, openly calling for withdrawal in 1967, years after he had been elected to the House and long before LBJ officially withdrew from re-election. On labor issues, while personally strong, by voting record, he was less strong than Jackson or Harris, though better than Carter.

His main "hamstrings" were probably being a House Congresscritter rather than Senator or Governor, and coming from Aridzona before the Sunbelt explosion and thus not having high national exposure that way.

==

Of side note: 1976 is the last time a Democratic nominee captured less than 50 percent of the vote in primaries and caucuses; before Trump did it in 2016, I'm not sure when it last happened on the GOP side.

For Democrats, it had happened just four years earlier. Indeed, George McGovern not only was not a majority nominee by Democratic popular votes, he wasn't even a plurality nominee, as the Hump narrowly edged him out there.

==

Side note 2: Was there an "October Surprise" in 1980? Most likely. Per the Trib, per story by Ben Barnes, John Connally told an Arab leader that Iran would get a better deal from Reagan than Carter on the hostages release. Per my "conspiracy or conspiracy theory" piece, though Gary Sick hasn't nailed down the evidence, it's almost certain a Carter debate briefing book was stolen, and highly likely that Team Reagan representatives met somewhere in Europe with Iran intermediaries.

RIP Jimmy Carter, and RIP to the legends of him as president

This is a semi-takedown obit, but since I didn't have a chance to do much when he passed away, I'm timing it for his state funeral.

Pieces by Chris Hedges and Counterpunch are good starting points. Counterpunch puts his Nobel Peace Prize in snarky context next to other U.S. presidents who have been so honored. Hedges talks about Carter's human rights failings, beyond Central America, but also his neoliberal domestic failings, including but not limited to deregulation of trucking and airlines. My review of "Everyone Who is Gone is Here" adds more to Hedges' foreign policy angle on Carter, specific to the Northern Triangle.

And, below, are selections of my review of Stu Eizenstat's bio of Carter's presidential years, Stu having served as White House domestic policy advisor.

President Carter: The White House Years by Stuart E. Eizenstat
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After I recently read Kai Bird’s somewhat disappointing bio of Jimmy Carter, I saw other reviewers of it mention Jonathan Alter’s bio as better. Well, I’ve not read that, but my library had this book, and so I checked it out. (Alter's turned out to be a 3-star meh.)

And, it is better indeed.

This book is at its best on two issues: The “malaise” speech and the Iranian hostages. I’ll give the basics of both without full-on detailed spoilers.

On the speech, he first notes Pat Caddell’s Rasputin-like hold over both the Carters. And, yes, he uses the word “Rasputin.” Then he describes where the “malaise” came from, since Carter never used the word. It was in Caddell’s notes and talking points, that eventually got to Elizabeth Drew at the NYT.

As for its effect? Eizenstat says Carter initially boomed UPward in public polling. 17 percentage points. What happened? Carter’s Cabinet firings and how they were done undercut this.

(All probably needed to go, but only Schlesinger out in the cold. Michael Blumenthal? Find another economics position for him … assistant head of the Fed? Califano? Move him inside the Oval as a White House counsel; in some way, clutch the scorpion closer.

On the hostages? He notes that the biggest failure, after they were taken, was Carter making an ironclad “no harm” commitment to their families, closely followed by too personalizing their situations. Both became lead anchors on his political future.

On how this happened? Ignoring both Ambassador Sullivan and George Ball, who I did not know before had been involved with analyzing the situation before Khomenei solidified control. Before the Shah vamoosed, even, Ball, like Sullivan, recommended reaching out, and QUICKLY, to non-theocratic opposition and cutting a deal. (Ball, per Counterpunch, had been Carter's original choice for Secretary of State, but the Israel lobby, already on the rise, nixed this. Perhaps Cold Warriors butt-hurt over Vietnam did too.)

After the hostages had been taken? Eizenstat says their continued holding wasn't so much an FU to the US as it was pro-Khomenei Islamic Republic types wanting to get the upper hand over the quasi-secular, theoretically official government. He notes US efforts to negotiate with government officials went nowhere, even when seeming to go somewhere, because none of them had Khomenei's sign-off, an issue that continues with Iran's dual government today. (Counterpunch discusses this briefly.)

This relates to the taking of the hostages, Eizenstat says. He says that from what we can tell, Khomenei did not order this, but knew it in advance. Although Eizenstat doesn't use the US presidential phrase of "plausible deniability," it seems this is exactly what was at stake.

On domestic stuff? Eizenstat is right on Carter’s legacy on energy, and the difficulty in getting his energy policy bill passed. He’s right on not wanting national health care without cost controls, still an issue today. He’s right on Ted Kennedy refusing to compromise with Carter any more than he had with Nixon, and being wrong there.

He also praises to the point of overpraising on airline and truck/railroad dereg. On the former, dereg is not the only reason airline costs dropped. On the latter, some things should have been retained; don’t just blame Reagan and others later than Carter.

The chapter on how Andy Young, and his promoted deputy, influenced the 1980 Dem primary is interesting. Had Kennedy not won New York, he would have dropped out, but the US supporting an Arab resolution at the UN, falling through several cracks, backfired.

The book is also good overall on Carter’s personality and his political personality and the problems it caused.

Although five-star overall, it misses addressing two of those problems from the previous paragraph. One is that Carter’s engineering micromanagement personality, not just wanting to be the anti-Nixon, is why he refused to have a chief of staff for two years. Related? Despite being warned about it, he hired both Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski because, IMO, he thought he could engineering-manage both of them. (Hamilton Jordan, per Counterpunch, said he would resign if that happened. Hah! We know he didn't.) If we could half-star, I'd cut to 4.5 because of not going deeper into just how self-injurious Carter really was.

View all my reviews

Per Hedges, and per my own knowledge, yes, Begin rolled Carter at Camp David. But? At that time, maybe Carter was halfway willing to be rolled and let Begin be the fall guy. (Begin, of course, simply saw himself as doing what he thought needed being done for Israel.) Hedges notes that Camp David had no enforcement mechanism on Israeli settlements. In big hindsight, no Camp David deal at all might have been better than what actually happened.

As for Carter the peace candidate? As president, long before the Soviet Union moved into Afghanistan at its then-government's (free? unfree?) request, he did an about-face and started asking for more defense spending, per this second Counterpunch piece. As for that request? We started arming the mujahedeen BEFORE the USSR moved in.

As for Carter in the White House as a person? I've read Secret Service claims those self-carried suitcases were sometimes empty. That famous smile looked like a Duchenne's smile quite often.  

Beyond Pat Caddell as inventor of "malaise," per Wiki, don't forget that he was an informal advisor to Trump in 2016, and a regular collaborator with Steve Bannon, so a semi-insider even if he didn't have a formally defined role. After Trump was elected, Caddell was among those pushing his calling of the media "the enemy of the American people."

Top blogging of 2024

Just as in my monthly "best of" pieces, not all of these were written in 2024, but all were in the top 10 of 2024 readership.

Not blogged about, but seen by me at 98 percent totality? The April solar eclipse. And, since it's about sun, moon, calendar and related issues, we use it instead of a "2024" graphic.

With that, let's jump in.

As with the monthly, we start from the bottom and head upward.

At No. 10? No, Juan Soto is not a generational talent, I said last April at the start of the baseball season, and said he wasn't worth $500 million, let alone $600, and certainly not what the Mets wound up paying him, a bloated $765 million.

No. 9 is tied to No. 5 and No. 7. All came from December, and we'll start with No. 5.

That was Dustin Burrows' claim to have enough votes to become the new Tex-ass Speaker of the House, and how poorly that claim seemed to face reality.

No. 7 was my laughing thoughts on current (then) Speaker McDade Phelan bailing out on an effort for re-election.

No. 9 was whether or not the Texas Republican Party would officially censure anybody for voting for Burrows instead of David Cook, and whether or not the recently added bar of a two-year GOP primary ban would hold up in court.

At No. 8 was my callout of Genocide Joe Biden's lies about seeing pictures of dying babies in Gaza. My extension, it was a callout of Kamala is a Zionist Cop, too.

No. 6? Even though I'm not a duopoly voter, maybe there was a bit of wishful thinking that ran behind my 2024 election prediction blown claim.

No. 4? A blast from the past, from 2017 in particular, in part because I posted it a few times here and there on Elmo Musk's Shitter aka Twitter. Actual Flatticus aka Alan Smithee in real life Chris Chopin and my savage takedown of the legend of Flatty got hot again.

No. 3 was an Eastertime Texas Progressives Roundup whose header riffed on my post in the roundup about Gaza and my callout of Charles Kuffner, aka Off the Kuff, for not writing about this, not even the DPS' kettling of pro-Palestinian protestors here in Tex-ass in general and even in Houston in particular. See above, Kuff the duopolist, at No. 8.

No. 2? Because I pushed it all election season long, my detailed reporting on how Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was an investments hypocrite, above all related to Israel and Gaza.

No. 1? Perhaps foreshadowing Luigi Mangione — dental care as heath care and the insurance thereof.

Build the unbuilt gappy state wall?

The Trib has a longform piece on how Tex-ass' state border wall is riddled with gaps due to landowners who refuse to let the state build.

The wall is not a singular structure, but dozens of fragmented sections scattered across six counties, some no wider than a city block and others more than 70 miles apart. Each mile of construction costs between $17 million and $41 million per mile, depending on terrain, according to state engineers.

Will Trump try to go federal on these gappy sections?

Or, will this year's Lege reverse its 2021 take that allows private citizens to say no?

Officials cannot seize private land for the wall like they can for other public infrastructure projects because the Legislature prohibited the use of eminent domain for the wall program.

I'll give you 2-1 odds against on that, in part because neither Strangabbott nor Dannie Goeb has pushed for that. As many rural people know, eminent domain is a serious issue here in Tex-ass. It's been tightened up a bit in the past few years, but bills for major tightening have never crossed the finish line. In essence, even as Texas urbanizes more and more, eminent domain is a third-rail issue.

That said?

Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, filed a bill for consideration in January that would allow the use of eminent domain for the border wall. He said it’s the only way to eliminate the possibility of holdouts.

“The Texas border wall will take years to complete, therefore we are rolling the dice in an extreme manner, potentially putting ourselves back where we are today if we do not take the necessary steps to protect our citizens, our sovereignty and our southern border,” Creighton said in a statement. “Texans should not wait on anyone to save us, including the federal government.”

Keep an eye on that.

As for the feds taking over? Even there, eminent domain on private land for this issue in federal court would surely be rough legal sailing.

Washington’s experience building border wall, however, shows how eminent domain is far from a panacea. The Department of Homeland Security has regularly filed condemnation cases to seize land, but the first Trump administration estimated it would need 21 to 30 months to secure parcels in South Texas, a 2020 Government Accountability Office report found.

Plus, as the story notes, so far, this time around, Der Grüppenfuehrer is talking mass deportations, but very little about a wall, since it's clear, contra 2017-21, that Mexico ain't paying for one.

And, per the Trib, most the state wall, gaps aside, isn't in some of the high-traffic areas, between Del Rio and El Paso, anyway, which will be the focus, one presumes, of further federal wall-building.

As of right now, "bribes," as in the form of a 5x increase in per-mile payments, have been Strangeabbott's resort.

As for these gaps allegedly being so secretive? Between some coyotes having cheap drones, or others able to study land ownership, no, they're not as secretive as Strangeabbott might be wanting the Trib to think.

And, yes, we all know — or all of us who aren't the state version of MAGAts — that this is political kabuki theater:

Raul L. Ortiz, retired chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, said the rural wall construction appeared to be more about sending a strong message than deterring border crossings.

“Part of the building of that infrastructure, even in the rural areas, was as much a political statement as it was a means to have an effective wall,” Ortiz said. “You’re making a statement that, hey, we’re going to do everything we can to deter and impede folks from crossing, to include building wall in areas where it may not be the most effective tool.”

That said, expect nothing to change.

Waiting for some minion of Strangeabbott or Goeb to call the Trib traitors.

Bye, Pretty Boy Trudeau

Well, Justin did it on his own terms. His resignation is official, along with a request to the governor-general to prorogue Parliament until just before a service-and-supply vote in late March.

So, he chased Freeland off, has no other clear successor, and wants the Crown's representative to give him 2 1/2 months of grace for that? Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives cannot submit a no-confidence vote during the prorogation period, per CBC. More weasellyness from Trudeau.

They can be submitted after that time. Trudeau seems to expect them, which means he's hoping that he can defeat them and stall out the next election until its scheduled October date.

Will that happen?

Depends on if Jagmeet Singh as NDP head thinks it's beneficial to his party or not, which in turn depends on how much or how little he has his shit together. I'm not hugely holding my breath.

That said, NDP leadership will probably see their party's performance as a referendum on Singh. The party did gain one seat in 2021, but is still far from its glory days.

Trudeau's resignation is effective as of his replacement as party leader, and not immediate. The first link notes the search normally takes four-five months, but of course will be expedited even without a formal no-confidence vote, whether a successful one or not.

Other than that? CNN's live streaming updates have lies by Pretty Boy, including that his one big regret was not getting ranked choice voting in Canada, though he doesn't use that word. Dood. When the NDP was in formal coalition, you never tried to get proportional representation, and never even discussed RCV.

Check Wiki's page or elsewhere on updates for when the 2025 election date is set.

Brief Jan. 6 thoughts

Is it arguable Trump is a quasi-insurrectionist? Yes.

Note the exact phrasing on that.

One of Trump's largest assets is being weaselly. Hence my caveats and qualifiers.

My best guess is that Trump did not want violent action on Jan. 6, 2021. That said, he was stupid enough not to consider the possibility that the event would go beyond intimidation. And, he may have lost control of things to a degree.

Is Trump legally an insurrectionist? Given the above, no, even before John Roberts' presidential criminality ruling, there's no way you could hang a charge on him.

Since then, is the national security state paranoid? Yes, and here's Ken Klippenstein:

Today is not a day to celebrate democracy. January 6, 2025 represents a leviathan, a juggernaut of government extremism casting a shadow over American civic life. An event meant to ratify the will of the American public will be flooded by an army of federal agents, police, and military personnel from all over the country.

Well put.

And why?

This:

If Washington does anything well, it is overcompensating for past embarrassing failures. Like 9/11, January 6 represented an intelligence failure for which none of the responsible agencies were punished. In fact, the opposite happened, with more resources lavished on the same agencies that had dropped the ball. For the national security state, every failure turns into an opportunity to “learn,” which really means punishing the public through demands for greater surveillance, policing and of course bigger budgets. 

Again, well put.

We continue to take our shoes off at airports even though another shoe bomber Richard Reid hasn't happened since then and almost certainly never will. This is political kabuki theater.

As a third-party voter, I consider the real threats to democracy to be both duopoly parties, but especially Democrats, fighting against third-party ballot access, both duopoly parties fighting against ranked choice voting, and more.