Showing posts sorted by relevance for query houston gop. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query houston gop. Sort by date Show all posts

Friday, July 17, 2020

Stop Making Sense



This is what's going on:

Odd that Abbott is a party to the suit.  Can't figure out why he would be, except that the Texas GOP is.

Anyway, the argument is we tried to go virtual, but we're technical dweebs, so we have to expose hundreds of people in Houston so we can have our convention.  Except, how do they get everybody there now?  And does GRB have to allow them to stay beyond the contracted period?  'Cause I think that ends tomorrow, or maybe Sunday.  (My guess is the judge has no authority to require GRB to extend the contract period; only to comply with it.  I don't see how the judge can compel GRG to do whatever the GOP wants.) Allowing a day for travel, can the GRB say: sorry, we're closed now?  Your contract has expired? Especially considering many delegates probably can't get be ready to convene before Sunday. And what about hotel accommodations?  Or restaurants at 50% capacity?  Or Turner going back to enforcing public health orders, as he originally said he would do?

"Remain available" may not be the victory they were looking for.

Besides, I wonder if the judge can force the employees of the Convention Center to work the convention?

I know I'd be spitting in the food....

I'm gonna let this post stand, even though now we have a bit more information.  I'm assuming the judge decided the City of Houston "interfered" with the GOP's contract, though I find that reasoning dubious, at best.  I also find the judge's conclusions rather difficult to follow, but then I don't have the judge's reasoning to review and analyze:

Jared Woodfill, an attorney for Houston activist Steve Hotze, who helped file the lawsuit, said Judge Lynn Hughes ruled that the party can hold an in-person convention both this weekend and next weekend — and “that the City of Houston may not interfere with it.”

According to Woodfill, Hughes concluded that the state party, which joined the lawsuit Friday, “made a good-faith effort to have a virtual convention" and that Houston put the party "in an untenable position to do it [virtually] in a very short period of time.”

That sounds rather like the version Woodfill would like to have be true, so I'm still dubious. I see a gap between the reporter's version of what the judge ruled, and the attorney's version.  I don't see how the City put the GOP in a "dubious position" when it's the pandemic that did that.  I'd be interested to see if the City tries for an interlocutory appeal.  Especially that "the City of Houston treated us unfairly" stuff:

I'd like to know if this is a TRO or a TI.  World of difference in those two.  Still might be worth the interlocutory appeal, too.

And if I worked there, I'd still spit in the food.  Forcing the city to give the GOP another weekend seems especially unsound to me.  Then again, I'm not involved in the litigation, so maybe I've said enough already.
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Monday, July 20, 2020

Both Sides Now


Back in 2018 I actually got this flyer (both sides pictured here) in the mail.  The issue was drag queens running story time in Houston public libraries.  This was also, at the time, when the whole "transgenders in our bathrooms want to rape our young white daughters" was all the rage.  Stephen Hotze, a Houston GOP lawyer and "activist," as the press calls him, was behind the group that published this garbage.  The Democratic ballot at the time included black women for all the district court seats in Travis County.

Those women swept every District Court judge in Travis County out of office.  It was the unofficial declaration that Harris County is now blue.  I don't think the rest of the world has caught on to that yet.

Anyway, I mention Stephen Hotze because he was behind the Texas GOP lawsuit in federal court to get the Texas GOP convention in Houston put back in the Convention Center.  That lasted, by the way, from late Friday afternoon until early Saturday morning, when the 5th Circuit suspended the TRO the trial judge issued (which in itself is extraordinary, and tells you how far out of bounds the trial court was. I mean, the 5th Circuit is a court populated with the kinds of Judges McConnell dreams of for every federal judgeship in the nation.).  The Texas GOP had to hold their convention "virtually," and the upshot of some of that was speeches by Dan Patrick and John Cornyn were cut off as the feed ping-ponged between speeches and the meeting of the Rules Committee (as any fule kno, the Rules Committee actions are far more important).  Then late Sunday night the Texas GOP dumped their Chairman in favor of Allen West.

Allen West is a cracked pot of long standing, a man so extreme he lost his House seat in Florida, if memory serves.  Anyway, he moved to Texas some time back, where Republicans like his kind of crazy, and now have put him in charge of their state party.  It's a representative system, after all.   And his first act is going to be:  taking on Republican office holders in the name of the Republican Party.

I shit you not.

"It's time that our Republican Party once again steps up and leads the way, not just in Texas, but all across the United States of America," West said. "It's time to make sure that the Republican Party of Texas is relevant again, that our message is out, that our message is being heard."

West also appealed to some in the party who have grown frustrated with their own leaders — namely Gov. Greg Abbott — for how they have responded to the coronavirus pandemic. West rallied delegates against what he said was the "tyranny that we see in the great state of Texas, where we have executive orders and mandates, people telling us what we can and cannot do, who is essential, who is not essential."
If you don't remember him, West is a really charming guy:

Responding to West's win Monday morning, the Texas Democratic Party pointed to his long trail of incendiary rhetoric. Among the comments: He has argued Islam is not a religion but a "totalitarian, theocratic political ideology." West, who is Black, has also suggested Black communities were "stronger" during segregation.

“We’re disgusted but not surprised that Texas Republicans chose a certified racist conservative hardliner like Allen West as their new chairman," state Democratic Party spokesman Abhi Rahman said in a statement. "West is everything that is wrong with the Republican Party and brings to light their failures on building an inclusive, welcoming party that is deliberate and thoughtful in handling crisis situations."

I'm disgusted with Greg Abbott, too; and the enemy of my enemy is my friend, except in this case I don't want to interrupt my enemy when he is beating himself in the face.  If I was concerned about a resurgence of the GOP in Texas, I'm not concerned anymore.  The GOP answer to the coronavirus is to let it in as if it were a migrant worker come to harvest our crops.  Which is doubly bizarre because the majority of people I see in all the photos of GOP conventions past are old white people; not unlike me, actually.  But I'm staying home as much as possible and wearing a mask when I do go out, because I'm neither crazy nor stupid nor ready to die (or infect the Lovely Wife).

As I say, Democrats saw 1 million voters turnout statewide for primary runoffs, in July.  There's a reason we have primaries in Texas in March:  by July nobody goes outside except to go to work, or to find a large body of water on the weekends.  That kind of turnout, for a primary runoff in which most of the candidates were unknowns (and none were Beto O'Rourke who, say what you want, has star power and charisma to spare), is a harbinger of things to come.

And the GOP is still trying to scare us about drag queens and commies under the bed and losing our right to go maskless in public and infect people because "FREEDUMB!"
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Wednesday, July 08, 2020

It's A Little Premature


...to enjoy the thought of this, but I do.

Obviously I back Mayor Turner's stance.  I didn't expect him to come around to this, though it would have been my first thought if I were in his position. The state GOP is so far offering nothing but bluster:

Party Chair James Dickey responded later Wednesday, criticizing Turner for "seeking to deny a political Party's critical electoral function" after the mayor recently allowed protesters to demonstrate there "without any of the safety precautions and measures we have taken."

Dickey also said the party's legal team was assessing the city's ability to cancel the convention and weighing its legal options.

"We are prepared to take all necessary steps to proceed in the peaceable exercise of our constitutionally protected rights," Dickey said in a statement.

There are no constitutional issues at all, here.  The city has an absolute right to prohibit the peaceful assembly of people when there are public health grounds to do so.  The GOP is not being denied the right to hold its convention; they're just being told they can't hold it in the George R. Brown convention center in Houston, Texas.  The City of Houston has good and defensible reasons for banning such a gathering (public health of all persons involved, especially hotel and convention center staff and employees), and I'm sure they can find some reasons to void the contract without putting the convention center into a breach of contract posture.

Or rather, in a defensible breach of contract posture.

For some reason the state GOP has determined this is the hill they want to die on, even as none of the GOP elected officials in the state want to be there.  It's a puzzlement to me, but I hope Mayor Turner finds his grounds and makes his move.  We have a goddamned crisis in this city, and all the GOP wants to do is to pour kerosene on the fire.

OOPS!

If you read the tweet carefully, you saw the photo caption didn't match my commentary.  Seems the story's been updated:

The Republican Party of Texas' in-person convention next week has been canceled, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said Wednesday.

The news came after Turner directed the city's legal department to work with the Houston First Corp., which operates the George R. Brown Convention Center, to review the contract with the state party.

Turner said officials with Houston First sent a letter this afternoon to the State Republican Executive Committee, the state party's governing board, canceling the gathering, which was set to happen July 16-18 and was expected to draw roughly 6,000 attendees.
I'd dance in the streets if I wasn't 65 and wearing cowboy boots.  And if I could dance.  Combine the three, and the men in the white coats would scoop me off the street before the Lovely Wife could yell at me to get back inside and quit acting such a damned fool.

Now whether there's enough room in there for the GOP to get an injunction is another question.  Certainly time, yet; but still, I admire the backbone of the Mayor.
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Thursday, July 09, 2020

Snowballs in Hell are Laughing


First reactions:

a) unless they seek a TRO, this is a useless suit.  Then again, if this is the basis of their complaint:

b) "Mayor Turner may not treat the [Republican Party of Texas] convention differently from that of the recent public protests that the Mayor supported," the petition reads. "Political viewpoint cannot be the basis for unequal treatment."

They have no hope of getting even a TRO.  That's not a legal complaint, IOW (and granted, it's not the entirety of the language of the complaint.  I don't have access to it, so I can only go by that quote just now.).  That's the "legal argument" of an ignorant layman.  (Please tell me they didn't pursue this pro se.  No, that would be legally impossible.  Still....)

I'm a bit rusty on civil procedure after all these years away, but I used to know to the minute when a Defendant's Original Answer was due in response to service of an original petition, and if memory serves it involves a Monday after 20 days from date of service.  20 days I'm still pretty sure about, which puts the time of response well past the date of the convention.  In other words, the City can sit on this until the end of July, when the whole thing is moot.  Unless the GOP seeks a TRO; and to do that, they have to be able to show a likelihood they will prevail on the merits at trial (however many months or years later that is).

Based on that quote, they don't have a case, much less a snowball's chance in hell.  I'm sure their lawyers did better than that, but the idea that public health concerns cannot override any public gathering is not even worth laughing at.  It's practically hornbook law.  The argument that "political viewpoint" is the basis for this decision is a joke.  They can't possibly prove that in court, especially when the City can bring in evidence of the difference in contagion risk from being outdoors (as the GOP wants to be in Jacksonville, FL) and being confined indoors.  There's also the greater risk now, v. almost 2 months ago when those protest marches were going on.  As well as the fact those marches lasted 2-3 hours at most, rather than being all day affairs for three days running.

There's a bit more from the petition revealed in an update to that article:

In its letter to the party Wednesday, Houston First cited a force majeure clause in its contract, which lets either party cancel the agreement if an occurrence "is beyond the reasonable control of the party whose performance is affected." That clause included "epidemics in the City of Houston."

In its lawsuit, the party agued that the mayor and Houston could in fact "perform if they wished, but they simply did not want to" and that Turner's instruction to his legal department to examine the contract counted as an admission thereof. "The admission means that he cannot use force majeure as a magical spell to escape what he has decided is an unwanted contract," the petition reads.
Well, that's an argument; but it's weak as tea grounds for a TRO.  Might work for a breach of contract claim, but what are the damages? Then again, considering the severity of the pandemic at this time, I don't see how that clause doesn't let Houston First out of the contract.

As I say, without a TRO, this suit is moot, because the City doesn't have to answer until the end of the month, and until then, absent a TRO hearing, there's nothing the state GOP can do, either.  I really don't know what their legal strategy is here.   There is a plea for damages (deposits, money that would have been raised, etc.), but that depends on the validity of the breach of contract claim.  Again, apparently no plea for a TRO/injunction, which means this is not a serious case.  Entirely possible I'm not seeing the most important parts of the petition, but what I've seen so far seems like a waste of effort.

There's also this:

This is the second lawsuit related to the cancelation filed on Thursday. Earlier, a handful of other Republicans including Houston activist Steve Hotze and Texas GOP secretary Josh Flynn, sued Turner, the city and Houston First.

Can't even imagine what grounds they have.  (Pretty sure Hotze was the guy behind this flyer two years ago.  It had to do with this (somehow the picture and the story got separated.  Go figure.)  He's a clown, IOW; and not the good kind.)

I don't think I have to read the Plaintiff's Original Petition after all.  I think a snowball in hell has more of a chance of victory than they do.

I'll let Mayor Turner have the last word:*
*Not really a word, but I can't get the image out of my head.  On a completely unrelated topic, a news reporter last night on the TeeVee went to a courthouse to interview a judge.  He was on the bench, but behind a large plexiglass box which walled him in on three sides.  He had a lap top open before him, on which he was clearly conducting hearings in an otherwise empty courtroom.  After Turner's quote,  can't get that image out of my head.  Honestly, unless the GOP has some slam-bang legal theories that aren't being reported, they need to get on the stick and find somewher else, or some way else, to do this convention of theirs.
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Wednesday, July 08, 2020

Governor Butterball


NPR reports this morning that the mayors of the largest cities in Texas expect their hospitals to be "overwhelmed" within 2 weeks.  Texas reported an increase of over 10,000 cases yesterday.  And Greg Abbott whinges that the mayors of those cities are not serving him well.

Abbott: So I have received what seemed to be kind of like a form letter, from a couple of mayors — one was the Austin mayor — and it seemed very similar to a letter I received from the Houston mayor and some other officials, primarily from the large cities across the state of Texas, that ask for additional shutdown measures and asking in the alternative to give them the authority to completely shut down and lock down their jurisdiction for a period of time.

And I find that frustrating in this sense, and that is, for most of these officials, no action whatsoever to enforce the executive orders that are in place. The reason why I emphasize that is these executive orders were established by doctors with the understanding that if they were complied with, it would reduce the spread of COVID0-19.

A quick example is, for many mayors, maybe all of them, I’m unfamiliar with any effort they ever undertook to shut down any bar where it was clear from just an eyeball view that there was a violation of the orders that are in place. But also, they are saying we need to reduce the capacity of restaurants, of retail centers and things like that. No mayor has sent me any information saying that there’s any type of spread of COVID-19 in any of those types of establishments or that they’ve taken any effort to close down those types of establishments.

Bottom line is, we need better, stronger enforcement. If the current rules are followed and applied, we will not have to shut Texas back down.

This is the same guy who said Houston (and other cities) couldn't enforce mask mandates, until he decided they could (see below; it's the difference between June and July).  Of course, they did enforce these rules; but they don't have the manpower to go to every bar in their town and shut them down, either.  That's technically the jurisdiction of Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission (TABC).  Police could only shut down a bar if a health inspector investigated and found violations of public health rules, and even then it's a civil action which would require investigation and civil, not criminal, action.  Civil action is not the police showing up, clearing the place, and arresting the owner.  Besides, Abbott set the standard when he imposed a closure order which was violated by a salon owner in the Dallas area, who was charged criminally and put in jail.  Dan Patrick went and paid her bail (from his campaign funds; Patrick's not generous with his money, just with other people's money) and Ted Cruz went there to get a haircut.  Abbott rapidly backed down from wanting to see people in jail, even as her case was dismissed because Abbott lifted the closure order and made it retroactive to get her released.

In fact, let's just put some of the historical record into this discussion:

Yes, that was less than a month ago. So he's not only been a tower of Jell-O on this issue, he's taken power away from localities when it pleased him politically to do so.  Blaming local officials for inaction now is just too rich.  Because nine days later:

Two days after that:

Pay attention to that rise in patient numbers.  It becomes important quickly.

By July 2, he had reversed course entirely:

Yesterday Texas reported 10,000 new cases.  And Abbott keeps blaming anybody but himself.

He also provides another example of Abbott imitating a profile in butter, not courage:

Question: We are hearing of mounting pressure on the Texas GOP to cancel next week’s in-person convention in downtown Houston. Do you support the party’s plan to move forward?

Abbott: I know that they continue to look at it and, you know, the facts that we see today contribute to that. As we may see in the coming days, as we get even closer to the convention, the reality is that there will be more people testing positive both in Texas as well as in Houston. There will be more hospitalizations in Houston and there will be more deaths.

So, I think that the party leaders that make the determination based on issues like this, they will continue to weigh all these facts and we’ll see how things progress. But, I know that they want to put public safety first. I know that they don’t want to compromise the health or safety of anybody. But, I also know at the same time, that they need to find ways in which to conduct the official business that must be conducted by the party.
Again, don't look to him for leadership or any responsibility in the matter.  He's just the Republican Governor of Texas, after all.  He's not responsible for anything.

Question: But if they ask you, Governor, will you tell them to move it to a virtual convention?

Abbott: I would ask that they take into consideration the health and safety of everybody who would be attending and make sure they conduct it — whether it be in-person or online — in a way that secures and protects the safety and health of everybody.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner has said he'll have the Health Department shut down the convention in a heartbeat if they aren't following the requirements for public gatherings (masks, 6 feet distance, etc.)  The Greater Houston Partnership, a very powerful and influential Houston business group, is now asking the GOP to cancel the convention.  And the GOP has announced that none of the top GOP officials, party or state, will be at the convention.

The cherry on the sundae is this answer, in response to this question:

Question: The TEA says that based on your recent executive order, masks will be mandatory in school buildings. Would you like to end that order before school starts and if so, what will it take?

We will not have to shut it down if everyone will follow this very simple rule and that is, just get a mask like this, wear it, make sure that you don’t get COVID-19 and you don’t give it to anybody else.

One of those things, obviously, we can all do.  But the latter two?  Completely impossible.  Might as well count on Santa Claus bringing you a pony.  At least Gov. Abbott has denied any responsibility if you do get Covid-19 and give it to someone else.  He told you not to!

That man is utterly useless.
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Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Well, I guess


Perhaps more insane is the party that follows him.  This is the situation the Texas GOP fought tooth and nail to drop 6000 people into the midst of:

In Houston, major hospitals have had to treat hundreds of COVID-19 patients in their emergency rooms as they await space in intensive care units. Data shows the dozen busiest hospitals in the area are increasingly telling emergency responders that they cannot safely accept new patients.

Ripple effects can be felt throughout the region, including at El Campo Memorial Hospital, about 75 miles southwest of Houston.

Under normal circumstances, hospitals in Houston’s world-renowned Texas Medical Center would accept transfers of medically complex patients from smaller regional hospitals that are less equipped to handle them. But with many Houston hospitals diverting patients away, smaller facilities like the 49-bed El Campo Memorial Hospital have taken them on.

On Monday, the hospital was caring for 18 coronavirus patients, including at least two who were admitted from Houston and the Anahuac patient who was transported by helicopter, said Nathan Tudor, chief executive of the Mid Coast Health System, which includes the hospital.

“Traditionally, if the complex cases need to go out, they do go to Houston,” Tudor said. “We’re just praying that this virus gets behind us sooner rather than later.”
Because the GOP said they had a "constitutional right" to meet where they'd decided to meet in order to elect delegates to go to a national convention no elected GOP official wants to attend in order to do nothing more than seal the coronation of Donald Trump as the nominee who kills the GOP.  When three courts and the Texas AG (!) said they didn't have a case, they finally relented and decided to hold a virtual convention.  Finally.

I grew up with the metaphor (never tried it, but the brief time I spent around cows didn't disabuse me of the idea) that to get a cow's attention you had to smack it between the eyes with a 2 x 4.  It was usually applied to a particularly obtuse person stubbornly clinging to an obviously bad idea.  Gonna have to revive that metaphor, it seems.  I've stopped caring why people get devoted to spectacularly bad and even dangerous ideas.  I've just learned to care that they do.

When the party, any party, is acting so mindlessly like lemmings, being without one is a survival strategy.  I never thought that would be literally true.
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Monday, March 06, 2006

Goin' back to Houston

I-45 starts in Galveston and heads north through Houston. I-10 cuts across from Florida, and continues through town toward California.

Several state highways cut through here as well, on their way north or west, away from the Gulf Coast. If you want to leave Louisiana's coast, your first choice of road is toward Houston. If you want to leave the upper Texas Gulf coast, your first choice of road is toward Houston.

I-45 and I-10 are known locally as the roads you don't want to be on, because of the heavy local traffic. Slowdowns and crawling parking lots start early in the day, and linger for hours. Both highways are under construction now, which means traffic chokes down to fewer lanes, and some of the access roads are simply lost causes where you might as well plan to spend the night.

And hurricane season is coming back around soon.

The traffic jam that snarled Houston last year as Hurricane Rita seemed to be barreling down on us was not caused solely by Houston residents. It was caused by residents from Lousiana to Galveston to Corpus Christi, trying to flee the coast. Houston residents joined in, and the traffic jam became the stuff of legend: a line of cars literally unable to move, from Houston almost to Dallas, some 250 miles away. Could it happen again? Why ever not? The Texas Legislature has not met since Hurricanes Rita or Katrina; the Governor has not so much as announced a commission to review what happened in Houston last September, much less to plan how to avoid it again. Controlling traffic on two fo the main arteries through the city would require more law enforcement personnel than Houston and Harris County could muster, working 24 hours a day for weeks, not days, before the next hurricane. It's fair to say, especially with the recent reminder of how devastated New Orleans is (and never doubt many people on the Texas coast are well aware of how bad off Mississippi and Gulf Coast Louisiana are) that personal evacuation plans now anticipate weeks, not days or hours, before the next storm, for an area due west of New Orleans to almost just north of Corpus Christi. How would Harris County handle that kind of traffic flow?

As poorly as they did the last time.

Houston residents died last September because of the flight from the coast, not because of Hurricane Rita. Lake Charles, Louisiana, to the east of Houston on I-10, is recovering almost as slowly as New Orleans. Few residents there are going to sit out the next threatened storm. Residents of Beaumont-Port Arthur are no better off, and are likely to head this way. And Galveston is more aware than ever that it is a barrier island. Memories of 1900 have not totally vanished down there.

But the bad memories of Rita seem to be gone already, at least for those in government down here. If asked, they would assure us that we can remain calm, that all is well.

This is government a la Grover Norquist. Texas has been the great laboratory for this experiment in short-sighted and pug ignorant politics. Now this picture of New Orleans is the image that is burned into everyone's brains. It should be connected with these words, and both should be connected with the GOP (and to some extent, the spineless Democrats) from dog-catcher to President:

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Sunday, November 06, 2022

Methodologies For Predicting The Future Are A Different Thing

Claire McCaskille and Pat McCrory agreed on one thing today on MTP: They had been in races where the polls said they were going to win, and races where the polls said they were going to lose.

The binding thread? The polls were wrong, each time.
There's always an "if" and an excuse. Sort of like the weatherman who predicts a torrential downpour, and there’s not even a drop. Eh, weather forecasts are not a hard science; more a matter of probabilities. But the argument in that tweet is that the polls are right; it’s our expectations that are wrong. Silly us! We should know better than to argue with the polls!

We treat polls as if they were windows opening on the future. The effect of this can be real. The year Katrina struck New Orleans and those left homeless were brought to Houston (among other places), Rita was predicted to slam straight into Houston. That prediction was actually based on probabilities, which are frankly more grounded in meteorology than in polling. It doesn’t take any interpretation to know whether or not the hurricane hit. 

In the case of Rita, it didn’t hit Houston. But the prediction it would created bumper to bumper traffic jam from Houston to Dallas, a distance of about 240 miles. Rita went to Beaumont, and Houston didn’t get so much as wet.

We can’t look into the future. Meteorologists in Houston learned not to pretend they could. Pollsters and pundits, on the other hand…
  How many people didn’t vote because, “Fuck, it’s Hillary, but look! Trump can’t win!”?  And still today:
But it’s science! And numbers! How could it be wrong? Chuck Todd sagely intoned this morning that something something had never happened in this century (IOW, the polls he relied on are right and a window into the post-Tuesday future). No one pointed out that 22 years is a vanishingly small data point in the 233 years we have been a Constitutional republic.

Innumeracy is real. As is the struggle.

Polling is based less on numbers than on models. That’s how 1000 people (or less; the point of that thread) can speak for 330 million. But when the models fail? What then? Note in that thread the sentence: “ 2022 is a midterm.” So, “We have a model for that.” But is it reliable?

The upshot of the thread is: “Well…maybe!” Non-response, after all, is a thing. Telephone polling is based on the old practice of answering a ringing phone. My parents did that ’til the day they died. Until I pulled it, my landline announced my calls and if I didn’t know the caller, I didn’t answer. I grew up reflexively answering a ringing phone. I learned not to. Maybe I missed calls from pollsters. I didn’t miss them at all. Do the models account for this? How does anyone know? We know when the forecast rain fails to fall. How do we know the models are sound?

Weather forecasting can be presented as a matter of probabilities based on knowledge of meteorology and observable data. But polling starts with presumptions and then finds data to support. Well, that’s not quite fair. The data is used to justify the model. And then the prime users of that data (political journalists and pundits) conveniently fail to focus on the inaccuracies of the polls as predictors of election outcomes (because, like Chuck Todd, they have their own models). They also want to use numbers to sound like their opinions (it’s all they are) are not mere conjecture but are science! 

Although really it’s more sciencey than scientific. Science, after all, works with probabilities, at best. It doesn’t predict the future, but can establish likely outcomes. Flip a coin 100 times, and probability can calculate the likelihood of the number of times it comes up heads or comes up tails. But it can’t predict what the next flip will be. The basis of chaos theory is that there are too many unknowable variables (the butterfly’s wing) in a causal chain to ever accurately calculate an outcome of the chain. But pollsters regularly confidently predict the outcome of elections with unverified data which is used to justify models which may not reflect current reality; or reality at all.

What is the matter with Kansas ?

Like the proverbial generals, pollsters are always modeling the last situation. Or rather, what they think the last situation was. 

They justify this with the closeness of their predictions and the outcome, although even that is an interpretation. They take that success as justification of their methodology, and carry forward to the next election. Where they justify their methods again, whatever the result. And they count on the public not really paying attention; or forgetting that they did (and how do you prove either explanation is true?), and relying on the pundits and journalists not to give up the game. And why should they? They have too much invested in it. 

Numbers =science =“hard facts,” and who doesn’t want that authority?

But where does that leave the consumers of this information? Misinformed, mostly.
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Wednesday, October 24, 2018

By the way




The latest word from Houston:

Harris County voters broke another record for turnout in the midterm elections on Tuesday.

Polling locations received 64,781 people Tuesday, while 1,534 people mailed in their ballots. With Monday’s turnout, 181,916 people have now voted in Harris County.

In the 2014 midterms, 83,347 voters had cast their ballots by the second day.

Turnout in the 2018 midterms is on par with early voting in the 2016 presidential election. By the second day of early voting in 2016, just over 200,000 people had cast their ballots.

Turnout at each individual polling location remained roughly the same, with areas west and northwest of Houston seeing the most votes. However, turnout is up across the map.
Josh Marshall is right:

 Everything Shows a GOP Resurgence Except for the Evidence

Which is why I'm ignoring AP articles like this:

Kavanaugh And Caravan Firing Up GOP Voters: Race ‘Closer Than People Think’

Which contain contradictions to their own thesis like this:

It took voters in the Houston area less than six hours Monday to set a new opening day record for early voting during a midterm election. And in some Florida counties, two and three times as many voters cast ballots on the first day of early voting Monday compared to four years ago.

Public and private polling, however, suggests the GOP is getting more excited as Nov. 6 approaches.

“Republican enthusiasm doesn’t quite equal the white-hot enthusiasm of Democratic voters, but the Kavanaugh hearings got it pretty close,” said GOP consultant Whit Ayres.
I have to say, this is the first article I've read mentioning a "Kavanaugh bump."  Even the President is trying to use immigrants and tax cuts to get people to vote.  Kavanaugh?  Who?  I think I'll rely on articles like this instead:

Angry Americans will be more likely to vote, and Democrats are generally more angry about their hot-button issues than Republicans, according to the Reuters/Ipsos data.

That is a change from two years ago, when Republicans and Democrats were equally furious, said Nicholas Valentino, a voter behavior expert at the University of Michigan who collaborated on the poll and analyzed the results for Reuters.

The data suggests Democratic candidates could get a turnout boost that exceeds expectations, he said, possibly tipping the scale for them in tight races.

“That’s what happened in 2016,” Valentino said. “A lot of people who were predicted to stay home were very angry at (presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, and they showed up to the surprise of everyone.”
Sure it's my bias; but Harris County went for Clinton in 2016, and everybody seems to forget Trump lost the popular vote, and is stuck at 52% disapproval.  His base is small and even if it is motivated, angry Democrats outnumber angry Republicans across the country.

And recent polling shows Beto within 4 points of Cruz; and GOTV is the name of the game now. The truth is, even polls I like (or sort of like) are as valuable a predictor of the future as chicken entrails.  Voter turnout is up, enthusiasm is high, and I prefer to be optimistic at this point.

 So I think I'll buy some more popcorn.

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Friday, November 02, 2018

What If They Had a Crisis and Nobody Knew?

Actually got this flier in the mail.  It's hilarious, especially the crying baby in the box.
  Proof positive the GOP is confident of their triumph on Tuesday.

"Epistemic--of or relating to knowledge or knowing."  Webster's

Philosophers differentiate the meanings of “epistemic” and “epistemological” where, broadly, epistemic means "relating to knowledge (itself)" and epistemological means "relating to the study or theory of various aspects of knowledge".

--Wiktionary 

You can chase it into the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy if you want; I wan't that curious.

Vox says that the "caravan" in Mexico and Trump's response with calling up troops presents an "epistemic crisis" in America.  Really?

First, let's be clear:  Trump hasn't called up 15,000 troops.  Last I heard he'd called up 800, and later threatened to send up to 20,000.  The DOD says 5200 troops are due to the border; Texas already has 1000 of them.  That's a lot of people ready to impede the progress of a few thousand (at best, by then; attrition on a walk from Mexico City to the Rio Grande, or worse to Tijuana, is going to be brutal.  2000, reportedly, have already decided to stay in Mexico) men, women, and children walking across the Sonoran Desert, who probably won't get here before Christmas. Imagine the images of people being shoved into the Rio Grande or blockaded on bridges at Christmas.  I would almost pay Trump to set that news footage up.

Trump also said he was going to have a military parade to rival the one he saw on Bastille Day.  Heard any more about that?

I mean, he said this:


Which is a little hard to do, since the Congress won't be back in session until November, and then it'll be a lame duck session no matter what the electoral outcome.  And besides, new laws won't put a magic shield down 2000 miles of border making sure no brown person invades Trump's white America.  So it's a bit hard to take this seriously, even when Trump says:

A) it already has been mobilized, in the form of the National Guard.  B)  what does this mean in terms of actual numbers, deployment, etc.?  5000? 10,000? More? Nobody seems to know; but everybody seems to be upset.

Well, everybody in Washington, anyway.  Google shows a couple of on-line polls asking what I think about troops on the border, but no reports of polls with information about how this is affecting the electorate.  Republicans, of course, insist the country is behind them on this and the GOP will rule because of it.; but then they would, wouldn't they? I suspect the people already freaked out about brown people below the Rio Grande are still freaked out; and the rest of us find this rather ludicrous, or aren't paying attention at all.

So where's the epistemia of the crisis?

I mean I'm sure this is driving advertising and e-mails and text messaging on the GOP side, but I'm not picking up anything about it on the Democratic side here in Texas, not even at the level of the Senate race.  The GOP down here is still talking about "socialist Democrats" who want to "abolish ICE" (that's so two months ago!  Come to think of it, so is Kavanaugh.  I don't think anybody even remembers he's on the bench now.)  Vox argues effectiveness doesn't matter because there's a performative aspect here:  believing the invasion is coming because it is absurd is a bonding experience for the right.  And yet, beyond references to FoxNews (who repeats everything Trump says and immediately makes it gospel and eternal truth all right thinking people have known since God was born), there's no evidence for this.  Just the certainty that it must be so because, how else did Trump win in the first place?

And there's the displacement.  The whole country went into the shock SNL mocked the Saturday after the election 2 years ago.  Many people who despised Trump, sure he couldn't possibly win, couldn't bring themselves to vote for Hillary.  We still haven't figured out that government by default is not better than government by involvement, and we got what we didn't wish for, but didn't vote against, either.  For two years voters have been waiting to correct their mistake; but in those 2 years Trump has been President and the GOP Congress has been supportive, and everyone kept expecting the hero to ride in and save us from ourselves like always happens in horror movies and shows where the bad guy is winning....and it didn't happen.  So now Trump must have some numerical base of power which will rise as a tide and swamp all democratic (yes, small "d") boats and we will remain in the place of wailing and gnashing of teeth for another 2 years, at least.  Trump won; he's the President; the Presidency is powerful; ergo, Trump is powerful and must be winning:  QED.

Except, as I say, Trump never got his military parade; because the military didn't want to waste money like that, or time, or personnel, or materiel; and so they didn't.  Trump hasn't gotten a lot of things he insists he wants, and when this Administration is finally over, the lasting image of it is going to be the number of times (I can think of 3 off the top of my head) Trump walked into a room, talked to the cameras, and walked out again, having failed to sign the piece of paper he was in the room to sign in the first place.  Yeah, they get signed eventually, but he couldn't care less.  He doesn't want to govern, he wants to be praised.  He doesn't want to work, he wants attention.  He doesn't care if the caravan ever gets to the state of Tamaulipas.  He only cares about the attention.  His epistemic crisis is knowing he's about to lose the House, and maybe even the Senate, and the shit is going to hit the fan.  But he doesn't even care about the shit or the fan; he cares about being labeled a loser, so he's preparing to blame the loss on the GOP.  The epistemic crisis is not national; it's coming from inside the White House.

Is Trump's strategy working?  All the pundits seems to think so.  GOP politicians don't.  Late night comedians point out the GOP is so unpopular they had to resort to a racist scam to drum up votes.  In North Dakota, the state legislature's attempt to defeat Heidi Heitkamp by keeping Native Americans from voting has prompted them to respond in record numbers with determination to be able to vote on Tuesday.  Early voting in the first 10 days in Texas has exceeded the entire turnout for 2014 in Texas.  Texas is usually 50th in voter turnout, yet 4 million Texans have voted in the 30 counties with the most voter registrations in the state.  Trump got 7000 people to come to Houston to hear him.  Even if all 7000 were registered voters in Texas, who would notice in a sea of 4 million?  Beto got 55,000 to come to Austin.  If even half of them voted, that 7000 is already underwater.  The heavy vote turnout is not because Trump has become so popular in Texas (according to 538 he hasn't been popular anywhere since the election).  The rise is in what have always been non-voters, the very people Trump is not reaching out to. The young person vote is up 500% in Texas.  Yet that doesn't matter, because:  reasons.  I heard it again this morning, from two local political science professors who regularly opine on the local NPR station.  Texas is not a blue state or a red state, it's a non-voting state, regularly 50th in voter turnout.  The GOP is a minority part in the country, even in Texas, and yet no one votes against them, so they dominate.  The last time voter turnout was high in Texas, Democrats won.  Voter turnout in Harris County is already almost 100,000 votes higher than the vote total in 2014.  Even Fox News admits that's "presidential-type" turnout for Harris County; but none of that is enough, these professors say.  Why?  Polls, of course, which may not be measuring the number of young people who are turning out; or Latinos; or blacks.    It is well known Republicans are the minority party nationally, but "enthusiasm" is up for the GOP, too, we are told nationally.  That must be true for Texas, right?  And enthusiasm among GOP voters means enthusiasm among Democratic voters means nothing, because:  reasons.  Certainly not numbers, just:  reasons.  That 500% increase in young voters, voters who have no idea why they should fear Communism or Drag Queen Story Hour, will be swamped by the enthusiasm of over 65 GOP voters, I'm sure.  And yet the early vote turnout keeps increasing, and the number of young voters and new voters keeps increasing; but nothing can ever change because blood red Alabama has to elect Roy Moore no matter what.

Epistemic crisis?  I think that's going to be the term for the GOP next Wednesday morning.  

If it isn't, well, all the troops in the entire military won't make a difference to the fate of the nation then.
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Friday, July 03, 2020

Well, Of Course They Do


Yes, the Texas GOP still wants to have a "super spreader" event in Houston, the epicenter in Texas of the coronavirus pandemic.

And the vote in favor was 40-20.

Unsurprisingly the Texas Medical Association has decided that's a bad idea:

"With or without masks, an indoor gathering of thousands of people from all around the state in a city with tens of thousands of active COVID-19 cases poses a significant health risk to conventiongoers, convention workers, health care workers, and the residents of Houston," Diana Fite, the group's president, said in a statement. "We are concerned not only for the City of Houston but also for the communities to which the delegates will return, giving the virus easy transportation to parts of Texas that have far fewer cases."
I am concerned for all the people who work in the convention center who will be exposed to the idiots who think the virus is a hoax, or the flu, or they are just invisible and bulletproof against it.  And Gov. Abbott, who is responsible for public health in Texas, or at least acts like he is when it suits him, was once again a tower of Jell-O.

The SREC did not get much guidance from Abbott, at least publicly, ahead of its Thursday evening meeting. In a TV interview less than two hours before the meeting, Abbott declined to take a position on whether an in-person convention should move forward, deferring to the SREC while speaking generally about putting health and safety first.

"One thing that’s so important is we obviously have so many people who would be attending who would be coming from a variety of locations across the state of Texas," Abbott told KRIV in Houston. "These people are very valuable, very important, to the Republican Party. My top concern for them is their health and safety. The last thing that I would want to have happen is for any of them to contract COVID-19 or worse, lose their lives over it." 
Some in the party argued this was not a good look when the City will be closed thanks to the Governor's orders.  Some said they simply won't come, because of the risk. I guess there's a few people under 65 in that picture, but not many.  Then again, considering the majority of cases in Houston now are in people aged 20-40, even the young delegates are at risk.  My favorite group, though, is this one:

Meanwhile, a faction of activists has argued that canceling an event focused on selecting delegates for the national convention and voting on the party’s platform, among other things, would not reflect well on a party that dubs itself the party of personal responsibility. Some have also suggested that a virtual convention could disenfranchise certain delegates.

Apparently taking "personal responsibility" means "Fuck you, buddy!"  It doesn't mean I bear any personal responsibility for public health.  Which is where a decent government would say "Well, we do.  No convention in this city, WE ARE CLOSED!"  I think the Mayor is without authority to do that, though I'd love to see him make the GOP Governor override him.  Ah, well, if wishes were horses....

There is still the possibility that a Sunday vote could scrap all plans for a personal convention, and they go for a "virtual" one instead.  No one is holding their breath on that.
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Saturday, June 27, 2020

Something About Republicans and Public Health

Harris County, where Houston is located, has the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the state, but the Texas GOP plans to press forward with plans to hold an in-person convention from July 16-18 in the city’s George R. Brown Convention Center.
....

“The Republican Party isn't considered a commercial entity so they themselves are not required to comply with the mask order,” said Melissa Arredondo, a spokesperson for the office of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who issued the mask order.

But I'm pretty sure the Convention center is covered by the mask order, so we're preachin' it round and square.

Hidalgo and Sylvester Turner (Hizzoner of Our Fair City) are Democrats, even though the offices they hold are technically non-partisan.  Abbott is a Republican, and as Governor has authority over the county and the city in these matters.  So Harris County and Houston aren't looking for a fight; still, we're at the limits of our hospital capacity now, and that situation is not going to improve in two weeks.  Besides, the GOP obviously chose Houston for their convention because they've lost it to the Democrats for at least a generation to come.  Now, they wanna drive a stake into the heart of that, to be sure their chances in Harris County/Houston are well and truly dead?

'Cause that's where this is going.

What is it about Republicans and death wishes?
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Friday, May 13, 2022

Money Talks

“Republicans dominated school board races across Texas because parents are fed up with left-wing garbage,” said Texas GOP chair Matt Rinaldi, who declined to be interviewed for this story but provided a statement. “The Republican Party of Texas will continue to support education over indoctrination and plans to expand our efforts in local and nonpartisan races.”

Or it was this:

Conservative school board candidates saw victories across the state, but most notably, they won big in Tarrant County, which has been moving away from its perch as one of America’s reddest urban counties. The county had 10 candidates win their races with the backing of the conservative Patriot Mobile Action PAC, which poured half a million dollars into the races.

There was a lot of PAC money spent on three board candidates in the small ISD I live in.  All three candidates won, probably because of the unprecedented amount of campaign flyers, e-mails, text messages, and even signs, that sprang up and were targeted very carefully to particular areas of the district.  Even then, the votes for the three came mainly from the rich white side of the district, arguably a reaction to an ongoing civil action to require the at large Board to be divided into regional districts, the better to reflect the ethnic diversity of the district.  The "rich" part of the district is mostly white; the "poor" part of the district is as ethnically diverse as the rest of Houston (one of the most ethnically diverse cities in America.  Suck it, NYC.  You are not alone.)  My guess is the "rich white" people voted to keep their district representation just the way it is:  white people from their side.  Ironically, unless the Board settles the case (which they've made no move to do so far, and clearly won't now), there's nothing the Board can do about it.  The decision is in the hands of a judge.  How he will rule is anybody's guess.

So did all those "conservative" candidates win on CRT and fear of a brown planet?  Maybe.  But that's the GOP in Texas anyway.  Nothing has really changed.  Houston has a black mayor, and before that we had a lesbian mayor.  Then again, Ted Cruz lives here, and so does Dan Patrick, and the area is so gerrymandered Dan Crenshaw represented a portion of it until redistricting put him in a new district, which he will probably represent as well.  Houston and the county are still dominated by Democrats, as are all the major urban areas of Texas.  Are these few school board victories, in Tarrant County and in Katy ISD (just outside Houston, but you'd have to look for the signs to know you've left Houston and entered Katy) may be no more than a patch of ice; whether it makes a winter or not remains to be seen.

What is depressingly clear is that money talks, and pouring money into races traditionally non-partisan and funded by the candidates (another reason the trustees in SBISD are all wealthy white people), is a sad sight.  Then again, I think using the school board as a springboard to higher office is pretty damned laughable.

Let me explain:  in Texas, we elect everybody from dog-catcher (well, almost) to Governor.  I doubt most people in a county know who their elected DA is, or their elected County Attorney, or their elected county court-at-law judges, or their elected district judges.  Some of those judges move up the ladder to the Courts of Appeals or the Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals (Texas has two "supreme" courts).  That movement is facilitated almost entirely by lawyers, who pay attention to who the competent judges are.  Most voters no more know a former Justice of the Peace is running for District Court than they know they elect those offices.

Just as most voters don't vote for School board trustees.  Usual turnout in my ISD is 1000 for a Trustee election.  This last one was 15000. Money talks.  But those supporters of the 3 new candidates are going to be very disappointed when the Board can't do anything they promised.  Indeed, my expectation is the Board will step on a rake in short order.  Shorter order if the judge moves the case to trial anytime soon, and doesn't rule as the new majority of the school board promised.

This is a small and very parochial school district.  Recently the first high school ever built here was remodeled for further use by the district.  My high school, indeed my elementary school, have been torn down (not in this district) and replaced; the high school was even renamed.  So far as I know, that was only mildly controversial (I sure don't give a shit. Both campuses were buildings that never should have been built; the buildings I attended, I mean. But that's another story.).  This old high school building had a portion of it named for a highly regarded superintendent who, ironically, worked very hard to preserve and maintain the building by finding district uses for it.  He retired from the district many years ago.  A small but vocal group of students of the first class to go to that building (very old people, in other words) sent angry e-mails to the Board complaining about the name change, because they didn't know who it was being named for, or why; and because it was "their school."  This kind of thing requires sensitive handling by the Board if you don't want to poke a hornet's nest.  But the new Board wants one of their own to be President.  It's the Board President who has to be the chief public face and diplomat for the school district.  Their choice for the President is not up to the task.  His election is going to be a PR disaster, sooner or later.

At that point, all the campaign funding in the world won't make any difference.

I don't like this situation; but I don't think it portends a brave new world of dystopian horrors. I do think what goes around, comes around; and it's going to come around a lot faster and harder than these clowns think it will.  If these incautious and intemperate boobs are the future of the Texas GOP, God help 'em.  Because no one else will.  They think they've taken on great power.  They're going to find out all they've taken on is great responsibility; and the accountability for that is going to come down hard upon them, especially at so local and parochial a level as a public school system. 
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Tuesday, July 14, 2020

"Where Never is Heard/A Discouraging Word...."

Picture Your Acceptance Speech Here

Gee, why didn't the Texas GOP pick a stadium in Houston?

A discouraging sign for the GOP is the experience of its Texas affiliate, whose plans to hold an in-person convention in another COVID-19 hot spot, Houston, have come to grief. First Houston officials, led by Mayor Sylvester Turner, withdrew permission for the Republicans to utilize the city-owned venue for their 6,000-person event. Then a trial judge and later the Texas Supreme Court rebuffed Republican claims that the cancellation violated their First Amendment rights.

While it is less likely that Jacksonville officials will similarly shut down the RNC, there could be a mutual agreement between the city and the party that holding a “celebration” that just draws attention to president’s poor handling of the pandemic is in no one’s best interest. Perhaps Trump can just deliver his acceptance speech from Mar-a-Lago with his hirelings whooping it up.

Maybe because it's mid-July and Houston is already under a heat advisory because it's 100F outside, and the humidity is so high you have to swim through it.

I'm sure it'll be much cooler and drier in Jacksonville in August, though.
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Thursday, September 22, 2022

Local Putz Gets National Notice. Again.

That would be this guy: Also the guy responsible for this flyer:


Sent out not last week, but several years ago (he was ahead of his time).  He was aiming at Harris County District court judges.  That year was marked by the entire slate of Democratic Harris County District judges (all black women) being elected, sweeping all GOP judges out of office.  Oh, you want to know about those charges in the tweet?

The charges stem from Hotze’s hiring of more than a dozen private investigators to look for voter fraud in Harris County ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

One of the investigators, former Houston police captain Mark Aguirre, was arrested in December 2020 and charged with aggravated assault. Prosecutors said Aguirre used his vehicle to run an air conditioning repairman off the road before dawn on Oct. 19, 2020.

Aguirre then detained the repairman at gunpoint and ordered an associate to search his truck, according to court filings. When a Houston police officer happened upon the scene and stopped to investigate, Aguirre said the truck contained 750,000 fraudulent mail ballots prepared by Democrats.

The truck contained only air conditioning parts and equipment. Hotze’s investigators have not produced any credible evidence to support allegations that Democrats orchestrated a wide-ranging mail ballot scheme in Harris County during that election.
He also sued the Texas GOP to force them to hold a physical, v. virtual, convention during the covid pandemic when almost everything was in lockdown.  A federal judge said it could be physical, not just virtual, but the Texas GOP said:  "No, thanks," and stuck with its virtual convention.

That was in 2020. He beclowned himself again earlier this year (for the primaries) as part of the same mail ballot scheme.  Basically he's been permanently pissed since Harris County went blue.
 
He's a putz with too much money on his hands and not enough sense to spend it wisely.  Why am I not surprised he's ranting about mind control through vaccines using 5G?  Does he understand any of those words?

I'd be willing to bet not.
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Monday, September 01, 2008

Wasn't that a Mighty Storm?


Grandmere Mimi has been in exile from Hurricane Gustav, and my hope is whatever damage the storm does will not trouble her or her family. My prayers are for her and her family, too, but more on that in a moment. It is the sanctimony of the GOP over this natural disaster that may yet come a cropper.

The Slate article I linked to earlier was all about how Gustav was good news for the GOP because McCain turned it so much to his advantage. However, the analysis depended on a ghoulish expectation: a repeat of New Orleans v. Katrina, from 3 years ago. Not many people remember Hurricane Rita, which followed on the heels of Katrina, or if they do, they remember it for the traffic jam that extended from Houston to Dallas (about 250 miles), and not for the damage it wrought on Port Arthur in Texas, and Lake Charles in Louisiana, or in the rural areas of Louisiana between and around those two cities. No major city was drowned, so the news about Rita was quickly forgotten; even the sight of a major US city in full blown and pointless panic (Houston is not prone to the same kind of flooding which beset New Orleans) soon receded from memory.

This time, of course, instead of sharing a birthday cake with John McCain, Bush is on top of things: in Austin, Texas, nowhere near any projected path of the storm. (Apparently going even to Tyler, Texas, where many Louisiana residents have been relocated, was too close to the storm for the Fearless Leader). McCain got as close as Toledo, Ohio, after issuing these stirring words:

"I wanna thank all of my fellow Republicans as we take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats and we say, 'America, we're with you. America, we're going to care for these people in their time of need,' and we're gonna display it in every possible way as Americans always have and Americans always will."
The not-so-subtle implication that only Republicans are real Americans is not lost on anybody; nor is his visit to a battleground state, far from the threatened Gulf Coast.

Gimme a break.

But now there will be no stirring pictures from the damaged cities of the Gulf, because New Orleans was spared. This is excellent news, of course, but what of the smaller cities? Even that MSNBC article only names a few of them in the path. Will Anderson Cooper and Brian Williams be reporting for days on end from New Iberia or Lafayette or Cocodrie? Don't hold your breath. Weather predictions have indicated for weeks the storm will pass across Louisiana into East Texas, bringing great potential for damage and flooding. But there are no big cities there, so don't expect cable and network news to descend with worried faces and impertinent questions. Which only means those townspeople will be spared the full treatment as political symbols by GOP compassionate conservatism. Hooray that local and state governments learned their lesson about what government is supposed to do, and did it so well. Boo to the national politicians who still want to exploit any crisis, any situation, for political gain. No wonder so many Americans are so cynical about politics.

What now? Well, prayers for the afflicted are always appropriate, especially for anyone you know, more especially if those prayers spur you to do something besides look for pictures of disaster on your TeeVee. A little thankfulness that at least one convention will spend one less day inflicting politics as usual on the electorate is also in order. But this prediction?

Tuesday is also probably shot. His campaign has chartered a plane to send worried delegates back home. The vast roster of fundraisers in town has been put to work raising money for the relief effort. The party atmosphere has been redirected. The Distilled Spirits Council, aka the booze lobby, has turned its Monday party into a fundraiser for the Red Cross.
And this?

By taking bold public steps, he also burnishes his credentials as a crisis manager and distances himself from Bush.
I think it's clear McCain had as much to do with managing the crisis of Gustav as he did with the release of hostages in Colombia. If Tuesday is "shot" for the GOP Convention, I imagine most of us will mourn it just as we did the news that President Bush and Vice President Cheney wouldn't be speaking after all.

It really is an ill wind that blows nobody some good.

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Thursday, August 04, 2011

Why No One Really Listens to Paul Burka



The Texas political press is moribund. The best voice we ever had as Molly Ivins', and nobody listened to her, despite the fact she wrote two best-selling books about W. But trying to find out what is happening in the Texas Legislature is like trying to read the tea leaves in your cup after the power has gone out. Try as I might during the last session (the Lege meets for 6 months every two years, no more, no less, except for special sessions, which are as rare as hen's teeth, and last only 30 days), I couldn't find out what was going on with school funding or the budget process in general. One day the story was this, the next day it was that, another day there was no story at all, then everything changed again! And political coverage of candidates? Fuggedaboutit!

Into this breach supposedly steps Paul Burka and Texas Monthly. Except Texas Monthly is for the well-heeled in Texas, the people who live in River Oaks in Houston, or Highland Park in Dallas. Seriously rich people, in other words. Paul Burka is their mouthpiece. His most challenging political piece in my memory was a cover of W during the 2004 campaign with a single word splashed across it: "Maybe."

For Burka, that was flirting with liberalism.

So now we get this, about Perry's "The Response" prayer meeting in Houston this weekend:

"Three days before The Response, the Reliant Stadium prayer event Gov. Rick Perry initiated two months ago, the response has been spirited among those objecting to the governor’s participation.

"On Tuesday, more than 50 Houston-area religious and community leaders disseminated a signed statement drafted by the Anti-Defamation League expressing “deep concern” about a prayer rally “not open to all faiths,” while the Houston GLBT Political Caucus and related organizations announced a Friday rally at Tranquility Park to protest the event. The groups that represent gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered individuals accused the American Family Association and other sponsors of the prayer event of hatred toward the GLBT community.

"The ADL statement followed a June letter from the Houston Clergy Council that criticized the governor for excluding non-Christians, partnering with an anti-gay group and blurring boundaries between church and state."

My feelings about public-prayer events haven’t changed, but I’m intrigued by the Anti-Defamation League’s statement, quoted above, that the prayer rally isn’t open to people of all faiths. How are the organizers going to restrict the participants to Christians? Are they going to ask everyone who comes through the turnstiles to prove their Christian bona fides? Of course not.
Those first three paragraphs are from a Houston Chronicle story on the response to "The Response." I do wonder how clueless Burka is to imagine a fundamentalist Christian prayer service is "open to all faiths." I've participated in ecumenical services, and I made a special point during the prayer I offered to exclude even the word "God" so as not to offend the Jews present, and I also omitted any reference to Jesus as the Christ. It only seemed polite, and it had come up as an issue during the planning meeting with the one rabbi who attended. He thanked me later for my consideration.

Did we check credentials at the door? Of course not. Should we have been sensitive to those we invited who were not Christians, and speak of the one God we do worship (as do the Muslims; sadly, at least at that time, no one thought to approach the Imam in the synagogue not far from where I sit now)? Yes, I think so. Will the religious groups Perry has invited, or Perry himself, show any such sensitivity?

Do you really have to ask?

But wait, there's more!

Nor do I think that the rally “blurs the line between church and state.” The line between church and state is very clear. It’s the First Amendment: Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The governor of Texas holding a Christian prayer meeting is not an establishment of religion.
Actually, let's just say Burka is completely clueless as to the state of the law on that issue, and leave it at that. It's embarrassing to see him display his ignorance so profoundly within two paragraphs. But it illustrates why no one takes him seriously.

As Molly once said about a Texas legislator, if he gets any dumber we'll have to water him twice a day.

Why do I say that? Well, because the church/state issue is precisely about exclusion. The Court has upheld references to God ("In God We Trust") on the grounds such things are a cultural statement with no real religious significance (which kind of diminishes the importance of the phrase, but no matter), hence no one religion is favored above another. Since at least the passage of the 14th Amendment, the 1st Amendment has been held to apply to the states as well as the federal government, so Burka's "clear" reading of the Constitution is about as muddled as the waters in a flash flood. The Response, a rally initiated by Perry and promoted from his Governor's lectern, is clearly meant to be an exclusively Christian affair. How do I know? Ask Paul Burka:

Attendance is going to fall far short of expectations and the noise generated by Perry’s critics is going to get as much media attention as the prayer rally itself. This is what happens when you think the rest of the country has the same civic and religious values as Texas.

This could have had a much different ending. Perry could have made the event nondenominational. He could have invited people and clergy of all faiths. But he elected to make it exclusionary–and not just exclusionary, but reflective of preachers who have expressed some of the most extreme religious views in Christiandom.

Another misjudgment was the public invitation to all of his fellow governors. The right way to do this was to feel out the other governors first and announce the acceptances later, when you know who is coming. Now, with only one acceptance–Sam Brownback, of Kansas, and he has said he is going on vacation this weekend–the event looks like an utter failure.
Utter failure? Really? Gee, sorta like Perry's entire tenure as Governor, then, huh?

Nobody could have predicted.....

Addendum: If you're interested, here is what Burka didn't say about Perry's prayer rally:

In interviews, the event's planners have conceded that the non-Christians will not be allowed on stage, and that the event—which Perry says is open to everyone—is intended in part to convert people to Christianity.
No, Paul, your religious bona fides won't be checked at the door. But non-Christian, non-evangelical beliefs, won't be welcome, either. And there again, Burka is clueless. Perry contacted the groups detailed in Mother Jones to organize and run this rally. NPR ran quotes from them this morning (hearing a man tell you in his own words that the Statue of Liberty is demonic is quite different from reading about it) in its story on this event. Perry is not just appealing to the Michelle Bachman wing of the GOP, he is being wrapped in this lunatic fringe, even as he tells reporters now that he may only be an usher at the event (aw, shucks).

Whatever effect this has in the GOP primaries, this is the way Perry's career ends.
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