Texas progressives look at Paxton's fraudit and more

So, Kenny Boy Paxton is just "happening" to do election audits on some of Texas' biggest and bluest counties? But, why not Tarrant? Maybe the GOP thinks that would be too obvious of a #fraudit or else that it can't be redeemed? 

In other news about him, Kenny Boy is claiming he's not a public employee and therefore immune from state whistleblower law. It's a novel defense, even coming from him; state appellate judges do not appear to be laughing. 

Meanwhile, the Observer interviews former Ranger Chris Callaway, who describes how the state's public integrity law hamstrings investigations in various ways, not to mention how few the number of Rangers are who do this on a full-time basis.

R.F. O'Rourke, still not a declared gubernatorial candidate despite new monging of rumors earlier this month, nonetheless is acting like one in one way, namely, shivving the potential opposition. He says of the also undeclared Matty McConaughey that "I don't know how he feels about any of these issues." Translation: Beto-Bob thinks Matty is uninformed on some, and even more a ConservaDem than him on others, and he's going to start smoking him out.

At the Monthly, after starting with a head fake describing the run-up to the 2014 campaign of Wendy Davis vs. Abbott, without naming the year or the person, C.D. Hooks says R.F. is the least bad candidate  Dems and perpetual loser Gilberto Hinojosa could field. He then notes Abbott will be a tougher foe than Havana Ted Cruz was in 2018, should R.F. indeed enter the race.  

SocraticGadfly, with some help from an Arkansas hospital chain CEO punks the fetal stem cell crowd, going beyond religious exemptions for COVID vaccines and to elements of the "pro-life" movement in general.

Rep. Lyle Larson is trying to prove, or pretend, he's not quite a total wingnut on abortion. He'll fail. He already is. He already has.

Off the Kuff crunches some more 2020 Congressional data to see how much things have changed since 2012.

Stace reminds us of what is really happening on the border: A human rights crisis.

Sanford Nowlin observed how quiet many businesses have been since the "heartbeat" law was passed.

Space City Weather suggests that hurricane season is likely over for Texas.

Michelle Davis outlines her claims on how she thinks Beto can beat Greg Abbott.

The Great God Pan Is Dead has more fall art to look forward to.

Houstonia welcomes Top Chef to Houston.

Bitcoin mining in Big Spring is just another example of what's wrong with Texas today.

West Coast port congestion and its supply chain problems will probably last a while as, unlike in Europe, different parties can't get on the same page re 24 hour operations and similar issues. Ahh, late stage American capitalism, hoist by its own petard.

Amazon is officially lobbying for federal legalization of marijuana.

For various reasons, car crash fatalities have INCREASED during COVID.

AOC a fraud again: Alexandra Ocasio Cortez officially Just.Another.Politician.™

Unless you're entrenched in BlueMAGA / Blue Anon, you already know this from the left-liberal left side of the street.

She's been a fraud on the stolen Green New Deal, on climate change and burgers, on a grifting chief of staff and more.

She ran for Congress on a fraudulent family narrative.

This time?

A fraud on Israel and Palestine.

Last week, the House voted on whether or not to give Israel $1 million in supplemental funding for its Iron Dome defense system.

AOC "managed" to not vote to oppose this. She ALSO managed to not vote for it.

Nope. She voted "present."

She can't be so dumb as to think that the types of people mentioned in the first paragraph don't see through this.

So, I guess she figures the cult of personality behind her doesn't care, or doesn't look that closely.

 

And, on "cult of personality," she's right. I present Socialist Boomer on Twitter last Friday:

I will lose followers for saying this but I still completely support AOC and Bernie Sanders. pic.twitter.com/SCGsFnLjRL

— Socialist Boomer (@socialistboomer) September 24, 2021

And, he's right! I unfollowed as soon as I saw that.

 

And, as AOC gets her butt kicked more and more on Twitter, here's a good AOC dress for Boomer.

pic.twitter.com/zAS5D6bXwb

— Jamieson Dahl (@DahlJamieson) September 23, 2021

And another.

pic.twitter.com/oA2y1T40Sf

— Burp for Peace (@BurpFor) September 23, 2021

That said, this one isn't new. After her initial election, but before even being sworn in, she retreated from earlier support for BDS. And, after that, halfway threw Ilhan Omar under the bus on this issue. She hinted at one time at supposably having Jewish ancestry; I colored myself skeptical.

Also, asking for a pay raise after you've been on the job just six months is more of Just.Another.Politician.™ territory.

 

Update: At Mondoweiss, Steven Salaita has more on her AND Bernie. 

Update two: After she originally had seemed ready to vote "no," was her "present" vote, especially if the tears were crocodile tears, part of bigger political plans? At least one Zionist group says yes, speculating about a 2022 Senate run. I doubt it; I really can't see her primarying Chuck Schumer. Now, a gov run, if Gov. Kathy Hochul stumbles? I doubt that, too; NY AG Letitia James is a possibility and others are likelies as far as primarying her. Primarying Kirsten Gillibrand in 2024? Nother story.

Update three: Per the voting? Jayapal and Bowman are more sellouts than frauds or hypocrites.

CIA wanted to kidnap or assassinate Assange

Michael Isikoff and two co-authors have some breaking news at Yahoo News.

Under Mike Pompeo's reign, the Trump-era CIA was so infuriated at the Vault 7 leaks by Wikileaks (remember, they didn't directly steal this one, nor was it Russkies) that they talked about either kidnapping Julian Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy in London or else assassinating him.

Meanwhile, they gave high credibility to claims that Ecuador's then-president was looking at giving Assange official diplomatic status and sending him to its ambassadorial mission in Moscow. (That presumes that Assange was willing, or at a minimum would accept this if given a TINA by Ecuador, though a former Ecuadorean first minister in London says that when he learned about it, he refused to accept it.)

So, the CIA discussed either getting in a gun battle with Russian operatives on London streets trying to get to the airport, or else shooting the tires out of any Russian plane believed to be carrying him. At least with the latter, the British agreed to assist. But, they also said "No" on any kidnapping attempt.

Post-Edward Snowden leaks, the CIA pushed Dear Leader Obama to not only officially designate that Assange was not a journalist but rather an "information broker," but to do the same for the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. The Obama Admin said no, thank doorknob.

I totally agree re actual journalists. However, Snowden has himself said he's not a journalist, and I certainly don't think Assange is. My most recent in-depth thoughts on that here.

And, Assange probably had some degree of sympathy within the Obama Admin until he started publishing the Russia-filched emails of the DNC in 2016. I know he started losing sympathy from me when he became the first real pusher of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. My thoughts on that here. My thoughts on some alleged leftist media outlets gaslighting readers over that is here with Consortium News (one of several), and here with "Cozy Bear" gaslighting by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, and here, my big picture piece refuting the Forensicator bullshit first peddled by Patrick Lawence at The Nation. (The Nation eventually had Nathanial Freitas write a new piece to clean up for Lawrence's BS, but has never, AFAIK, ever officially apologized for running it in the first place. Anyway, today's story shows that Consortium, especially, and others who also attacked Isikoff's reporting over Seth Rich and over the fact that Russia's Internet Research Agency stole those DNC emails, owe us all an apology. But, based on past history, they won't. It's part of bigger lying not just by CN, but bigger stooges like Ty Clevenger.)

DOJ rightly thought Pompeo was an unhinged nutter on this and wanted something better.

This led to the sealed charges against Assange, which became unsealed after the change in Ecuadorean governments led to the removal of his asylum, followed by his British arrest. My thoughts on that here.

Anyway, there's lots more. Isikoff talks more about the CIA's self-perceived, self-defined powers under "CIA common law" and other things. Go read it.

National Public Lands Day, High Country News woke version

National Public Lands Day is a good day for celebrating our public lands, even though Ken Burns was wrong and they're NOT "America's greatest idea" or that close, and even though, as Olympic National Park shows, as I blogged earlier today, the Park Service looks good only when compared with the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service. I forgot that six years, ago, in the run-up to the NPS centennial, I had tackled various other shortcomings of the Park Service.

So, it's nice of High Country News to have staffers reminisce about access to public lands.

Or, when I clicked the link, I found out it was "nice."

Two problems with noting the American Indians who once had possession of the land.

First, as Al Runte noted years ago, and I blogged about, being American Indian is no guarantor of being a good environmentalist.

Second, the American Indians in possessions of the land at the time the U.S. government made treaties with them, then broke them, weren't always the possessors. In fact, in the case of Comb Ridge, it was NEVER part of any Navajo Reservation, not the main part and best known part in Utah, vs the southern tip in Aridzona. It's arguably got a better claim from Utes. And Sarah Tory should know that, and she specifically mentions the Utah portion.

Runte also tackled that, quoting T.H. Watkins:

In short, if compensation in 1974 was the proper policy, why limit it to people of European descent? For example, Watkins asked: “If the descendants of nineteenth-century white Americans have a moral obligation to the descendants of nineteenth-century Navajos, do not the Navajos have a similar obligation to the descendents of the Pueblo Indians, whom they forced from their lands in the thirteenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Chippewas (or Ojibways), do not the Chippewas have a moral obligation to the Lakota Sioux, whose lands they appropriated by warfare in the seventeenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Blackfeet, do not the Blackfeet have a moral obligation to the Shoshoni, who were driven out of their hunting territory by the Blackfeet in the seventeenth century? If white Americans have a moral obligation to the Cherokees, do not the Cherokees have a moral obligation to the Shawnees, whom they vanquished in the early nineteenth century in a war over which tribe would have a monopoly selling Indian slaves to the South?”

There you go.

I think this is about Reason No. 116 why I haven't, and won't, renew an HCN subscription that's been lapsed for years. (This also is not the first time it's gotten American Indian land issues wrong.)

Sidebar: I do NOT agree with everything Runte writes at National Parks Traveler and elsewhere about preservation in the modern U.S. in general and the modern NPS in particular. I do NOT want light rail, let alone light rail run by traditional rail companies, in the parks, contra his plea. Instead, I want more buses at sites that already have them, with smaller buses running more frequent routes, and buses at places that don't already have them, and I want these buses to be all-electric. No more propane buses. His critics are right that his idea almost certainly means "more development." They're also right about the worrisomeness of him first writing that piece for a "more development in the parks" site. Things like that undercut some of his other insights and make them look politically motivated.

Olympic National Park — still a tenuous hold on the future?

This is an expanded version of an already long Goodreads review of a book I saw while on vacation and got via interlibrary loan after I got home.

Olympic Battleground: The Power Politics of Timber Preservation by Carsten Lien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A MUST READ for environmental types who are not familiar with the tenuous past of Olympic National Park, and continuing threats to it from the US Forest Service and possibly from within the National Park Service.

A MUST READ for environmental types who aren't familiar with the largely dirty history of the NPS, and not just in association with Olympic.

This is a fascinating, hugely informative and often HIGHLY infuriating look at the effort to create Olympic National Park, to make sure it was run by the Park Service and NOT the USFS, and then the battle to force the Park Service to act like the people then thought the Park Service would act.

As for the realities of the National Park Service? Having read one book about its history long ago, I had already known that Ken Burns presented a sanitized, even highly sanitized, history in his PBS miniseries. (What’s new? That’s de rigueur for him.)

But, I didn’t realize it was THIS bad. Stephen Mather and Horace Albright not only were development-first people, including hotels, roads, etc. inside parks, and shoot the omnivore and carnivore wildlife if they’re not made to do entertainment, but that they both internalized the Forest Service’s philosophy of “cut the damn trees,” including not wanting old-growth forests in national parks as not being worthy enough. This mentality infused the service for decades.

In addition, many of their underlings didn’t think USFS-run Olympic National Monument was worth of national park status. Others thought it would “compete” with Rainier.

(Many early NPS rangers and even superintendents may have hated "birders" almost as much as the USFS definitely did. Fortunately, the preservation of Olympic preserved plenty of trees for species like the chesnut-backed chickadee.)

Indeed, NPS FOUGHT AGAINST a “large park” when FDR was committed to making Olympic a national park, making it a large one, and taking it out of the hands of the Forest Service. It finally lost due to a public pressure campaign that was arguably even better than the one Dave Brower organized against BuRec to stop the Echo Park dam in the 1950s.

Meanwhile, hacks continued to run the NPS. Cammerer and Drury were both hacks. So was Connie Wirth. (And, contra one other reviewer on Yellow Satan, I knew Drury was a hack even before I read this book.)

AND, using a misinterpretation of the 1916 Organic Act, they let Olympic’s superintendent during the 1940s-1950s, Fred Overly, allow logging, and extensive logging, inside the park. At the same time, NPS leaders as well as the majority of folks at Olympic continued to entertain ideas of getting rid of one southeastern corner of the park, then building a road connecting Quinalt and Dosewallips rivers. (Drury was Overly's boss, and contra the mealy-mouthing of one reviewer, knew — eventually — what Overly was doing and decided "plausible deniability" was good.

(Imagine how the tree at left would look like as a dwarf, surrounded by some of 8-9 feet diameter.)

Yes, you read that right.

Other hacks, or worse?

The “Senator from Boeing,” Scoop Jackson, while still on the House side, never met a tree he didn’t think needed cutting, or a lying lumber company he didn’t think needed more trees to cut. He comes off as a serial liar on anything related to Olympic National Park when not being a hack. (Disgustingly, Wikipedia touts him as an environmentalist.)

It didn’t stop there. In the 1960s, Scoop Jackson, via his flunky Fred Overly, made another run at the west side trees. (Overly had been “exiled” to Great Smokies after the 1950s incident, but eventually got on top-level staff of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, an agency within Interior created in 1962 for rec planning for all Interior agencies. Why Jackson later was a co-author of NEPA, I have no idea. Guilt?

Sadly, the assaults continued even after the coastal strip was added. Overly, and others, tried to get a road built through it. Later, the offshore lands and tidewater were turned over to Fish and Wildlife, with its less restrictive regulations, and with a past and present history of hackery almost as bad as USFS and BLM.

(Imagine a beach like this not being part of Olympic National Park. Imagine that it did have its originally-dedicated level of protection, rather than now using that of U.S. Fish and Wildlife.)

After that? The Park Service opposed original wilderness preservation for most the park. It wanted 20-acre carveouts for hostels and food on a regular basis.

Also a hack, and for something besides Japanese internment? When Newton Drury was fired as NPS director, word leaked that Earl Warren was looking at hiring him to run California parks. All the people that did the initial PR push to protect Olympic in the 1930s and get FDR to make it a park, and that revived themselves in the 1940s against NPS’ attempt to give part of the park back to USFS, wrote Warren. He ignored them.

Near the end, Carsten Lien shows that the “F” management of Olympic by the NPS carried into the 1980s and beyond. In 1988, the idea of breaching and removing the Elwha dams was first raised. The Park Service refused to back it, until the public pushed enough that NPS flipped, as part of what Lien calls its conflict avoidance management strategy. Overall, he says between the lines it looks good only because it stands in comparison to USFS, BLM and FWS.

Lien concludes the book with both fears and recommendations for the future. The recommendations have generally not been followed. There’s still no ranger station marked on maps in the Bogachiel Valley. (I recently hiked the trail from Forest Service trailhead to approximately the park boundary.) An ideal location, per NPS map, would be a ranger station at the junction of the Bogachiel and Sitkum/Calawah trails.

As far as I know, dual-use NPS/USFS visitor centers still exist.

Carsten Lien, with whom I was unfamiliar before, was a long-time activist in The Mountaineers and its president in 1988. He was one of the seasonal rangers in the 1950s who blew the whistle on Fred Overly.

Also at the end of the book, Lien presents three scenarios for the future of the park, and somewhat for the future of the Park Service. The third is more prescriptive than descriptive. He suggests something like a U.S. Wilderness Service to take the highest-level parks away from the Park Service. He's probably right on the prescription, as well as probably right in noting that's only got about a 10 percent chance of reality. If I thought it could be pulled off, I would totally support this. The current Park Service looks good only compared to the land-raping of BLM, the tree-raping of USFS (which has occasionally gotten better), and the wildlife-strangling of FWS.

(Sidebar: Lien also tackled the legend of American Indians as "noble stewards," a modern environmental spin on "noble savages." The Makah Tribe, as documented by him here, tried to get its mitts on all lands of the extinct Ozette Tribe ... for lumbering. Alfred Runte has taken this head-on.)

That said, we should also admit progress. I saw this at the Port Angeles Visitor Center bookstore. According to this piece in National Parks Travelers, a decade ago, Lien's book was kept behind the counter like pornography, if available at all to visitors.

(Update, Sept. 24: I forgot that six years, ago, in the run-up to the NPS centennial, I had tackled various other shortcomings.) 

View all my reviews

Texas Progressives talk Beto, SB8, Afghanistan, more

Axios claimed Sunday that Beto was running (for gov, of course). Beto's inner circle denied it.

 

Meanwhile, for whatever weird reason (well, not weird if wingnut but not wingnut squared Texas GOP members are panicky), Joe Straus for gov rumors have heated up. (Ain't happening, folks.)

Texas Monthly has a detailed dive into why Texas Hispanics are shifting Republican. Remember, the Census and other questions always refer to "Hispanics of any race"; it's a cultural box. And, in Tex-ass, many don't see themselves as La Raza but as White. It also confirms my own refudiation, with later detailed follow-up,  of a decade-plus in the making of Texas Democrats from Gilberto Hinojosa on down blindly believing demographics is destiny. The identification is interesting; New Mexico has plenty of Hispanics who have been in the US at least as long as the Texans in the Valley. They may or may not identify as White; they're definitely more Democratic, but by no means totally so. That said, back to Texas. How do they deal with racism in the Texas GOP? And, yes, Valley Hispanics, it's real. In a somewhat related issue, I blogged last month about how demographics is not destiny among young voters.

Colleyville Heritage High School's principal was placed on paid administrative leave earlier for alleged teaching critical race theory, even though, as a principal, he doesn't teach. The Grapevine-Colleyville ISD School Board deliberated his fate Monday night. Per the first link, there's much additional backstory, not only over race issues, but the principal's take in the ISD's handling of COVID and other things.

Dr. Alan Braid, an OB/GYN announced via newspaper op-ed Sunday he'd deliberately performed an abortion that violated SB 8. Pro-life (except for the death penalty) groups split in their reaction. Texas Right to Life said we're "exploring all our options." At the same time, its John Seago said this was a "stunt." Another anti-choice group, Human Coalition, explicitly said it had no plans to sue; in typical wingnut paranoia, it feared a "trap."

Can Mark Cuban undercut the pharmaceutical industry?

Chicago is recruiting Texas businesses over permitless carry, anti-abortionism and other shite.

Barrett Brown is in trouble again.

As the withdrawal wound down over the last month, SocraticGadfly had a series of pieces related to history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. First was initial thoughts on the withdrawal. After that, he looked at how the initial 1978 US meddling unnecessarily led to all that followed. Third, he said former Counterpunch publisher Alexander Cockburn was probably lying with his claimthe Taliban had a pre-invasion offer of a no-strings-attached surrender of bin Laden. Finally, he rejected claims, and the domestic political thought behind some of them, that the Taliban would now run wild, instead saying Afghanistan's future looks complex.

In other international news, Pretty Boy Trudeau's snap election in Canada basically backfired. As compared to the current Parliament, he gained two or three seats, no more. Conservatives and Greens treaded water while the Bloc and NDP both had small gains. The People's Party Canada, largely a vanity project, increased its vote share but took no seats in Canada's Westminster-style election.

In case you're wondering about the Haitian flood at Del Rio? The Trib says that many of them left Haiti years ago for various countries in Latin America and have now decided to try to cross. It's not coyotes rounding up some new flood. My question, and unanswered by the Trib story, is why are they not staying in Chile or whatever?

People claiming to be part of Anonymous have hacked Epik, the internet host for Parler, Gab and other alt-right and alt-white sites.

Texas 2036 released its poll showing widespread dissatisfaction with the direction the state is going.

The Texas Living Waters Project sees the American Rescue Plan Act as a historic opportunity to invest in our water infrastructure.

Reform Austin catches Ken Paxton in a rare moment of self-awareness.

The Bloggess recommends some horror movies for you.

The Great God Pan Is Dead is looking forward to fall art season.