Counterfactual history: New Mexico is bigger, Texas smaller

The so-called "Trans-Pecos" region of Texas, west of the Pecos River and hence "trans" from the point of view of populated East Texas, really doesn't fully like the capital city folks in East Texas' Austin. Well, the one metropolis in the area, El Paso, at least, doesn't. Most state agencies underserve El Paso compares to East Texas cities, in per capita staffing at state agencies.

Texas own official state history book acknowledges some of this, even:

Most of the region's physical and cultural landscape has little in common with the rest of the state. Although it constitutes about 11 percent of the area of Texas, the Trans-Pecos has received less attention than the more populous east. 

There you go, Texans.

Of course, until Anglo Texians tried to make it so, El Paso never really was part of Texas in the first place. It wasn't part of Spanish Texas, nor was it part of Mexican Texas. We know both of those had the Nueces, not the Rio Grande, as a southern/southwestern boundary. The Llano Estacado, to the west of the headwaters of the Nueces and running north, really was like "unorganized territory," like the land north of Nebraska Territory in the early 1860s before it was officially organized into Dakota Territory.

But El Paso was further west. And on the royal highway between Chihuahua City and Santa Fe. Nobody went east from El Paso 200 years ago, but plenty of people went north and south. In short, El Paso was really either part of today's Mexican province of Chihuahua, part of New Mexico, or part of its own province. El Paso, tis true, didn't have much population, but it was an established city, since 1680, and, as of the Compromise of 1850, more populous than Albuquerque and Santa Fe. (It still is today, but metro Albuquerque is larger than metro El Paso, and the larger Albuquerque-Santa Fe area is larger than El Paso-Las Cruces.)

Today, El Paso is north of the Rio Grande, so it can't be part of Chihuahua. It's about as close to Albuquerque as to Chihuahua City, though, and far closer to it than to Dallas-Fort Worth or Austin. And, given the fact that Texas invaded Mexican New Mexico in 1841, trying to conquer it, shows that early Anglo Texans, despite their claims of the Rio Grande as their border all the way up to its source, really didn't believe that.

So, let's say that as part of the Compromise of 1850, with the feds paying off Texas' massive independence-era debt in exchange for reducing its state boundaries, among other things, those state boundaries, in the Far West, were shoved even further to the east than they actually are.

What would have been some real-world results?

Well, after the Texas oil boom got out to the Permian Basin in the 1920s, New Mexico would be known as even more of an oil state than it is today, because more of the Permian Basin would be in New Mexico. That would have affected the state's broader economy.

Related to that, a New Mexico Territory wouldn't have sold off so many state lands.  So, Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains national parks would be bigger than they are today, and Davis Mountains would be a national park, too. An enlarged southeastern New Mexico, with all of that plus Carlsbad and White Sands, would rank higher as a nature tourism destination.

Politics? If anything, New Mexico would be more liberal yet than it is today. El Paso is as reliability liberal as Austin, and its liberalism is more New Deal worker liberalism than Austin techie neoliberalism. Oh, sure, the rest of the Trans-Pecos would have far-right ranchers and oilmen, but they'd be far outnumbered by greater El Paso.

And, New Mexico probably would have not just one, but two new Congressmen. El Paso's population alone would provide for one. New Mexico's been on the border between three and four representatives long enough that the rural and small-town parts of the Trans-Pecos might be enough to bump it to a fourth representative, not counting El Paso's addition.

Let's say it has five representatives, or seven electoral votes.

Now, let's look at the 2000 presidential election. Bush beat Gore by 271-267. Give New Mexico two more electoral votes and we're tied and headed to the House to decide, not the Supreme Court. (That said, due to the one-state, one-vote principle, Bush likely would have won the House.)  Beyond that, a New Mexico with two extra electoral votes makes all of the Four Corners states more important politically in general.

So, thanks, Stephen Douglas and other 1850 Compromise folks, for caving in to Texas pouting or whatever.

Younger Dems double down on #neoliberalism, even over #OWS

For real liberals believing Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton before him, might just be aberrations, and that Elizabeth Warren will decide to run for president in 2016, this Charles Edsall column is cold water in the face.

Edsall notes that younger Democratic voters are more likely to be neoliberal on economic issues, focusing their liberalism on social issues only, like gender and sexuality rights, etc. And, he links to a Pew survey with massive data to seemingly back this up. Edsall centers his column on this:

The Pew survey points up the emergence of a cohort of younger voters who are loyal to the Democratic Party, but much less focused on economic redistribution than on issues of personal and sexual autonomy. 

Back in April, Pew researchers wrote that “huge generation gaps have opened up in our political and social values, our economic well-being, our family structure, our racial and ethnic identity, our gender norms, our religious affiliation, and our technology use.” These trends, Pew noted, point “toward a future marked by the most striking social, racial, and economic shifts the country has seen in a century.” 

I asked Andrew Kohut, the founding director of the Pew Center, what he made of these results. He emailed me his thoughts: “There is a libertarian streak that is apparent among these left-of-center young people. Socially liberal but very wary of government. Why? They came of age in an anti-government era when government doesn’t work. They are very liberal on interpersonal racial dimension, but reject classic liberal notions about ways of achieving social progress for minorities.”

Edsall backs this up by reference to other larger-scale polling.

At the same time, this doesn't surprise me. Even Occupy Wall Street, at least its original Wall Street incarnation, seemed to have a lot of people who only became mad at economic justice when, despite their MBAs and JDs, they didn't get Wall Street jobs because of the Great Recession. More on my in-depth analysis of the reality vs myths of the original Occupy Wall Street is here.

In fact, Edsall notes that a majority of younger Democrats thinks Wall Street helps the economy more than it hurts it.

At the same time, the younger Democrats are more dismissive of the element of luck, more naive about the likelihood of their own hard work playing off economically, and everything in between. Perhaps this connects to the level of online narcissism among younger people, the idea of self-branding online, and other things. It's not just personal vanity, it's economic vanity wearing a massive pair of Dunning-Kruger Effect blindfolds

Well, people who "bash" me for touting the Green Party? (I'd tout Socialists if there were a party in Texas.) Well, guess what? If this is even halfway true, I'll be promoting Green voting even more in years to come.

Anyway, read the whole column.

#GregAbbott — ethically right for once, legally wrong again, on #Confederate plates

At least that's my call on the ongoing battle over whether or not Sons of Confederate Veterans can be among groups that has personalized license plates.

There's several reasons he's wrong.

They start with the Sons of Confederate Veterans being a recognized nonprofit agency. Related to that, lest we have the irony of Greg Abbott talking about hate speech is that, officially, they are about promoting historic heritage, namely that of Texas soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War. I think it's a bunch of bloviating Texas exceptionalism, but that's another issue. 

Second, there's clear semi-precedent that says Abbott is wrong. It's only semi-precedent because it's not the exact same legal issue, but it's close enough.

Namely, it's the tussle that a number of states had, several years ago, over Adopt-a-Highway sponsorship, and more specifically signs announcing something like, "The next 2 miles are sponsored for clean-up by the Grand Klaven of the Knights of the Klan."

Groups like that were wanting to sponsor highway spots. So were gay rights groups, and with civil unions having less support a decade ago than gay marriage does now, that too became problematic.

But, in various states, state and federal courts alike said that it was a First Amendment issue. States had to list all Adopt-a-Highway sponsors. Or else none. Being selective is censorship. In its proper, First Amendment definition.

What about the flag, the flag as a symbol? Could the state print SCV vanity plates without the tag? Don't think so. First, ever since Texas v Johnson, flags certainly have a place in protected speech. Abbott's only angle here would be for the state to drop logos and symbols from all personalized plates, and nobody's going to buy those.

Abbott could try applying the Dr Pepper plate rule, but I'm sure the SCV could get 200 pre-orders, and the logo, as it now stands, doesn't unduly clutter the plate.

I have no doubt that people beyond SCV supporters will order the plates. However, outside of criminal law, legal statues in general aren't allowed to take intent into account.

NO, NO, NO to #geoengineering as main effort to "fight" climate change

I am getting more and more tired of techie types, especially ones with Internet 2.0 outlooks who are right-neolibs or even outright libertarian, promoting seeding the oceans with iron, or the sky with particulates, to either have plankton digest the rise in oceanic carbon dioxide, or have particulates block enough of the sun to keep temperatures from further rising, rather than putting more effort into more conventional adaptation or mitigation efforts first, or even better,

More effort into cutting carbon emissions first!

There's several problems here.

First, both of these approaches assume they're dealing with closed systems, when they're not.

Second, hasn't deliberately engineering our planet through deliberate introduction of invasive species taught us how clueless we are at things like this? Obviously not.

The story somewhat notes these concerns, or at least, the fact that people besides me have them:

Environmental activists stoked fears about unknown side effects. Some worried the iron could lead to a toxic algal bloom, like those that have poisoned sea lions and other sea life off the coast of California. Others floated the possibility that the experiment could lead to a dead zone, like the one created each summer by the algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico, where the fertilisers that support Midwestern cornfields gush out of the Mississippi river’s mouth and into the ocean. When that algae dies, other microbes consume the corpses, using up all the available oxygen in the surrounding waters. When the oxygen shortages hit, fish flee, but slower-moving sea life such as crabs and worms suffocate and die in droves.

The story claims iron fertilization has been tested. Yeah? Well, one test in a small patch of the ocean does nothing to modify "closed loop" thinking, which the article doesn't even address, let alone test how likely such, or other, open loop side effects are to happen.

Third, I don't see a cost estimate on either of these examples of "salvific technologism," as I call it here. Expenses could be whopping, and, unless more is done to cut carbon emissions, this isn't a one-shot effort. Plus, per the idea that these efforts would NOT involve closed loops means that there's likely hidden costs that aren't even on the technologism folks' radar screens.

And, the story doesn't even address large scale costs.

Fourth, there's no carbon estimate on just how much in carbon emissions either of these would cause. That too is unaddressed in the story.

As one commenter put it:

No matter how seductive geo-engineering may appear, we have never exhibited the capacity to fully predict complex externalities, even in systems we do understand. Nor have we been able think outside whatever paradigm rules political and economic bureaucracies.

In fact these two problems perfectly explain why we have reached such a dangerous place where we need to dream up fantasies like geo-engineering in the first place.

Yep, this is an inside-the-box, or inside-the-paradigm, solution. It's tech-based, engineering-based, capitalism-based.

And, from one of the high priesthoods of science, the Royal Society, there's a much more in-depth smackdown of ideas like this.

The report is five years old, but, I still see nothing to contradict this statement in its introduction:

Far more detailed studywould be needed before any method could even be seriously considered for deployment on the requisite international scale. Moreover, it is already clear than none offers a ‘silver bullet’, and that some options are far more problematic than others.

Indeed.

Fifth, although iron is much more available than, say, gold, still, there's also no accounting for the general effort, besides price and carbon emissions, of a forced increase in iron mining.

Sixth, due to Jevons' paradox, to the degree this might actually work, many people might use it as an excuse to stop worrying about global warming.

This, at the end of the story, is halfway in line with that:

Back in Bremen, Smetacek told me that commerce might be the only way to motivate further research into iron fertilisation. Replenishing missing krill, and the whales it supports, could be the best route to broader acceptance of the practice.

Sure, and then Japan says we don't need to protect whales anymore.

As for where I saw this, on Facebook? I thought that a Bora Zivkovic was smarter than this. Well, no, that's not totally true. Four years ago, I might have thought that.

#GregAbbott gives me one less reason to go to the movies

"Thank" Greg Abbott for interrupting your movie.

I'm not a big moviegoer by any means. On average, a once-a-year guy at most, though I saw Lincoln twice.

That said, I can bitch along with anybody else about the growing blizzard of pre-movie commercials in the movie houses. And now, Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott, aka AG Strangeabbott, has just given me more reason yet not to go.

Combine three barf factors:
1. Ads before movies;
2. Political advertising in general today;
3. People using cellphones at movies;

And, here you go:

In a new twist, Abbott is taking his campaign to the movies. He is running an ad in two dozen movie theaters across the state, playing on every screen a film is being shown. The ad asks moviegoers to text the word “FREEDOM” to the campaign. The effort is aimed at collecting information the campaign can use to identify and boost turnout in November.

This is also another post-Citizens United sign of a political system so damned swamped with money that candidates don't even know what the hell to do with all of it, other than inundate us even more.

That said, somebody, somebody, please text "FUCK OFF" to Abbott instead if you're at a movie.

Redistricting in Texas: Time for #GregAbbott to lose in court again?

A federal judges' court troika in San Antonio has started its hearing on the state of Texas' proposed redistricting for U.S. House and state Lege seats, and the US Department of Justice is getting more involved, not just minority rights groups. Here's why:

“The state of Texas, as it has in redistricting cycles since 1970, adopted maps that discriminated against its citizens,” Bryan Sells, an attorney for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said during opening statements.

The big issue is one of intent, as the story notes:

 What’s at issue is whether Republicans drew the original maps with the intent to discriminate. If so, Texas could be required to continue seeking federal preclearance under Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act. That section has rarely been employed because the same effect was formerly achieved through the better-known part of the law that is now eliminated.

One of Texas attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott's flunkies denies such intent:

“No one in the Texas Legislature discriminated on the basis of race,” Patrick Sweeten, an assistant Texas attorney general, said during his opening statement.

However, that's hard to square with this:

Sells argued that an email written by an attorney for House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, explains seeking blocs of voters with few Spanish surnames to pack districts that would otherwise favor minority candidates.

But Sweeten said that message was taken out of context and that the process was “not about just drawing the map but drafting legislation and getting enough support for it to pass.”

That is BS on the part of Sweeten, and we have a lot more evidence to that end.

Salon has a great story with the details:

On Nov. 17, 2010, Eric Opiela sent an email to Gerard Interiano. A Texas Republican Party associate general counsel, Opiela served at that time as a campaign adviser to the state’s speaker of the House Joe Straus, R-San Antonio; he was about to become the man who state lawmakers understood spoke “on behalf of the Republican Congressmen from Texas,” according to minority voting-rights plaintiffs, who have sued Texas for discriminating against them.

A few weeks before receiving Opiela’s email, Interiano had started as counsel to Straus’ office. He was preparing to assume top responsibility for redrawing the state’s political maps; he would become the “one person” on whom the state’s redistricting “credibility rests,” according to Texas’ brief in voting-rights litigation.

In the Nov. 17, 2010, email, Opelia asked Interiano to look for specific data about Hispanic populations and voting patterns.

“These metrics would be useful to identify the ‘nudge factor’ by which one can analyze which census blocks, when added to a particular district [they] help pull the district’s Total Hispanic pop … to majority status, but leave the Spanish surname RV [registered voters] and TO [turnout] the lowest,” Opiela writes to the mapmaker.

Interiano responded two days later: “I will gladly help with this Eric but you’re going to have to explain to me in layman’s terms.”

Let us explain in layman's terms, Mr. Interiano.

This was microtargeting Census tracts to make Hispanic districts a bare majority on paper, but doing so in a way that was intended to actually dilute Hispanic voting power.

As friend Perry notes in his blog on this issue, Opiela is a wingnut who ran for the GOP nomination for Ag Secretary this year, but couldn't make it to a runoff.

As for intent? About three years ago, in its Shelby County ruling, by a 5-4 (shock me) majority, the Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That's the section that required "pre-clearance" of electoral boundaries in states like Texas that had shown a past history of discrimination. But ...

If the Obama administration and the minority plaintiffs show in Perez that the Texas defendants intentionally discriminated against minority voters by diluting their votes, they could dramatically undo the Texas consequences of Shelby.

But, the Salon piece notes that not all of the VRA was gutted.

(T)he high court stripped only a pivotal lever used to trigger Section 5, specifically Section 4b of the same act. That stricken provision laid out formulas for determining which states, based on their histories of discrimination, the Department of Justice could impose preclearance requirements upon.

The Shelby ruling left intact: Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act — or its “Secret Weapon,” as Travis Crum, a former clerk for U.S. District Judge David S. Tatel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, refers to the provision in his 2010 Yale Law Journal article. In the article, Crum explains that the Voting Rights Act’s Section 3 allows: a federal court to find evidence of a state intentionally racially discriminating against voters and therefore order the state to submit to DOJ preclearance.

Nina Perales, vice president of litigation for MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in San Antonio, who represents Perez plaintiffs, believes Opiela’s emails show evidence of intentional discrimination and thereby provide the federal government with a spare key to restart Section 5, replacing the one the Shelby decision removed from the ignition.

And that's why Abbott's flunky protested so vociferously.

That said, this will be way too late to affect 2014 elections, and AG Strangeabbott will do his best, especially if elected governor, to try to make sure it doesn't affect 2016 either.