Scattershooting fear, Gary Johnson, and more blog updates

-- My Nextdoor (neighborhood social forum) is filled lately with posts about crime: burgled homes, gunshots, suspicious people driving or walking the 'hood.  It seems as if my neighbors are crapping their pants about everything, even packs of stray dogs roaming the streets.  Put this together with the weekend bombing in New York and the discovery of another pressure cooker bomb in New Jersey, Trump's ratcheted-up fascist rhetoric, the continuing escalation of war in Syria despite "cease-fire" agreements, repetitive micro-aggressions between the US and North Korea and China and Russia, the queasiness reflected by a lot of my old Democratic friends about Hillary's gaffes, prevarications, and stumbles that have squandered her polling lead, and I believe we're about one actual terrorist attack away from President Donald Trump in an eruption of panic by the electorate.

Buck up, Americans.  This is supposed to be the home of the brave.  Start acting like it.

And please stop with the updates on Rick Perry and the Dancing With The Stars and the indignant outrage directed at football players who aren't standing for the national anthem, or holding up their fists instead of putting their hands over the hearts.  Let's focus more on the things that matter and less on the ones that don't.

-- You may have noticed that the blogroll in the right-hand column is back to "latest posts".  And Blogger is canceling the "Slideshow", top right, so I'll see if there's something I can come up with that will appear shortly in that space.

-- The news lately has exposed, in embarrassing detail, the Libertarian presidential candidate as an intellectual lightweight.  It began with "What is Aleppo" last week, and continued Sunday night on 60 Minutes.  The man just looks to me as if he has smoked too much pot over the course of his life.

Position-wise, the Libs get it right on a few things: decriminalizing weed and normalizing work visas, for example.  But Johnson's stand on other issues is an exercise in Trump-Lite.

• He supports TPP.
• He supports fracking.
• He opposes any federal policies that would make college more affordable or reduce student debt. In fact, he wants to abolish student loans entirely.
• He thinks Citizens United is great.
• He doesn't want to raise the minimum wage. At all.
• He favors a balanced-budget amendment and has previously suggested that he would slash federal spending 43 percent in order to balance the budget. This would require massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and social welfare programs of all kinds.
• He opposes net neutrality.
• He wants to increase the Social Security retirement age to 75 and he's open to privatization.
• He opposes any kind of national health care and wants to repeal Obamacare.
• He opposes practically all forms of gun control.
• He opposes any kind of paid maternity or medical leave.
• He supported the Keystone XL pipeline.
• He opposes any government action to address climate change.
• He wants to cut the corporate tax rate to zero.
• He appears to believe that we should reduce financial regulation. All we need to do is allow big banks to fail and everything will be OK.
• He wants to remove the Fed's mandate to maximize employment and has spoken favorably of returning to the gold standard.
• He wants to block-grant Medicare and turn it over to the states.
• He wants to repeal the 16th Amendment and eliminate the income tax, the payroll tax, and the estate tax. He would replace it with a 28 percent FairTax that exempts the poor. This is equivalent to a 39 percent sales tax, and it would almost certainly represent a large tax cut for the rich.

Johnson got the full Mediaite snark for his appearance yesterday morning on CNN.  He's previously -- as in 2000, before the election that year -- had a good laugh with W. Bush about how ignorant both men are.

Since protest votes seem lately to be the preferred cudgel Democrats are using to beat those who aren't on the Hillary bandwagon, let's be certain your progressive friends aren't making this mistake.  Here's the whole 60 Minutes enchilada, video and transcript.  Greens are on when, CBS?

-- It is a surprise, as Kuff has noted, that the Chronic endorsed Ann Harris Bennett for tax assessor/collector on the basis of incumbent Mike Sullivan's epic fail on voter registration.  I had previously commented that it wasn't likely to happen, but if newspaper endorsements still mean anything, this one should.  This is the local race to watch on Election Night (Kim Ogg and Ed Gonzalez should win, Jenifer Pool ought to in a just world), as it will likely be construed by talking heads as a harbinger of the length of Hillary Clinton's coattails, the GOTV effort of the Harris County Dems and Repubs, and other morning-after armchair-quarterbacking like that.

The Democratic statewide judicial slate is a farce

Last week in this post I gave my old buddy Kuff a bad time about his unforced error linking to the wrong Betsy Johnson, the one who isn't running as the Democratic nominee for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 5.  This week the Dallas Morning News editorial board -- perhaps in payback to the GOP for endorsing Hillary Clinton -- exposed nearly the entire D statewide judicial slate as a joke.  First, their kudos for the Republican in Place 5, Scott Walker (no, not that one).

To our readers who have a natural inclination to generally favor Democratic candidates, please give these next few sentences great heed. A vote for Betsy Johnson, of San Antonio, who may or may not be earning a livelihood as a lawyer these days, strikes us as reckless.

She doesn't return our phone calls nor respond to requests to fill out a candidate questionnaire or attend an interview. She was removed from the Bexar County appointed attorney list by the criminal district court judges in June 2011 after multiple cases of refusing to represent defendants who declined to plead guilty.

Not only can we find no shred of evidence that she's qualified for this job, reports from the Bexar courthouse indicate her conduct was boorish and unrestrained.

This person is on the ballot for a single reason: to try to deny the Green Party a 5% capture and knock the party and all of its candidates off the ballot beginning in 2018.  Vote for Judith Sanders Castro if for no other reason than the worst of the duopoly in Texas badly needs the competition.  (With very little in the way of online presence herself, you might be reminded that she long ago paid a political price for fighting for Latin@ voting rights and the environment.)

The DMN similarly trashed the CCA Place 2 incumbent, Lawrence Meyers, who as it turns out is more of a death penalty advocate than Chief Justice Sharon "Killer" Keller.

Meyers, 68, was elected as a Republican but switched parties in 2013 for a failed run at the Texas Supreme Court, the state's highest for non-criminal cases. He remains the only Democrat in statewide office.

He since has formed something of a faction with conservative Presiding Judge Sharon Keller. Interestingly, while the appeals court granted an unusual eight stays of execution in 2015, Meyers, the court's lone Democrat, dissented on half.

This year, he was the only dissent to a stay for Robert Roberson III, whose attorneys argued that his conviction was based on "junk science" and false testimony. Meyers also unsuccessfully opposed the recent stay for Jeff Wood, sentenced to death despite not being the gunman in a 1996 convenience store killing in Kerrville.

In 2012, Meyers refused to pay a speeding ticket until an Austin municipal judge issued an arrest warrant. Last month, Meyers and some neighbors in Fort Worth tried to bar TCU students from parking near their homes with fake "no parking" signs until the city took them down.

Another race where sensible Democrats -- even those who have been scared into voting for Hillary Clinton just recently -- should be splitting their tickets.  (If you like your judges flamboyant in the Texas style, then the Green, Adam "Bulletproof" King Blackwell Reposa, is your man.)

Finally, the Democratic challenger for TXCCA Place 6 earns plaudits for being a good judge but demerits for being a truthfully lame political candidate.

Count Democrat Robert Burns among the critics who contend that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is too reflexively tough on crime. The question then is whether Burns should replace Place 6 incumbent Republican Michael Keasler.

This newspaper says no. This is not an easy call, since Burns, 52, is a strong Dallas County trial judge, by reputation and by Dallas Bar Association ratings. He runs an efficient court, and his rulings are well-reasoned.

Our problem is that his run seems half-hearted. He isn't raising campaign money, he expects to spend less than $1,000 for a statewide office, and he tells us he expects to lose.

That hardly makes a case to oust a judge with a background and resume' like Keasler's. If he won re-election, Keasler, 73, would reach the mandatory retirement age of 75 during the next six-year term; by law, he could serve only four years. Gov. Greg Abbott would appoint his replacement for the final two years on Texas' top appeals court for criminal cases.

He clearly has moved toward a more reasonable position, indicative of a judge who weighs the law more than ideology in reaching decisions.

In May 2012, for instance, Keasler shot down arguments from Abbott's AG office and wrote that death row inmate Hank Skinner should be allowed to have DNA evidence from the crime scene tested. "You really ought to be absolutely sure before you strap a person down and kill him," Keasler said.

I don't believe that Greg Abbott is capable of picking a qualified, dispassionate, unbiased jurist as Keasler has been -- by the DMN's account -- four years from now, and there's no Green in this race, so I'll be voting for the "indifferent Democrat" on the off chance that he can get lucky, overcome his own negativity, and that Hillary Clinton can find and reattach her downballot coattails.  (But if you're inclined to go Libertarian, Mark Bennett is IMHO a good enough choice.  He writes a great blog.)

Better luck securing candidates in two years, Democrats.

The Weekly Wrangle

At least one member of the Texas Progressive Alliance thinks that, in desiring to represent all Americans, calling some 'deplorable' was simply a bad gaffe.

Off the Kuff encourages you to read the Houston Chronicle's story about how special education services have been systematically denied to Texas families.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos is not in the least bit surprised to know that Greg Abbott threw his hat into the ring with the The Grand Wizard of Birtherism.

On Sept. 11, Socratic Gadfly looked back at 9/11 and reminded readers of many repeated, recurring causes of death that kill almost as quickly as 9/11, some with political connections, that still don't get truly addressed.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme blames Republicans for playing mean political games instead of addressing real problems like the spread of the Zika virus. Cruel like Texas Republicans denying services to disabled children

Political polling wizard Nate Silver tells Democrats they can start to panic this week, as passed along by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Neil at All People Have Value took the Harris County volunteer deputy voter registrar class this past week.  It takes a long time to really be able to register anybody after you take the class because the Republicans who run the county don't want you to register anybody. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

Egberto Willies has Tim Kaine's five reasons for millennials to vote for Hillary.

The gap between the lives experiences of white Americans and Americans of color is significant. With this in mind, Texas Leftist offers a viewpoint on and justification for Black Lives Matter.  Most that have lived the experience of being unlawfully detained (or worse) by police see the movement as not only valid, but necessary.

The Agonist says that fastest-growing region of the country for labor organizing is the South, but there's no media around to cover it.

And Lewisville's Western Days festival is this weekend, report the Texan-Journal.

===============

More posts from around the state!

Meagan Flynn at the Houston Press writes that Harris County's defense of its bail system is going to cost county taxpayers a lot of money, and Grits for Breakfast interviews Rebecca Bernhardt, executive director of Texas Fair Defense Project, one of the plaintiffs suing Harris County over its bail practices.

City Lab, via Houston Strategies, praises The Cisterns, Houston's once-forgotten underground city water storage that has become its own art exhibit.

The Digital Heretic thinks that bashing a large swath of the electorate is a counter-productive get-out-the-vote strategy.

Better Texas Blog has a bit of good news in the fight against food insecurity.

The Lunch Tray packs up six years of lunch packing advice.

Streetsblog wonders why TxDOT doesn't believe its own data that show Texans are driving less per day on average than they were a decade ago.

Bonddad encourages Clinton Democrats to buck up.

Eileen Smith has a few questions about those charitable Trump portraits.

The TSTA Blog sounds the warning about school vouchers again.

And Somervell County Salon has the H&M spot that turns the word 'lady' on its ear.

Sunday Funnies

(Remember when it was "Hell No, I ain't forgettin'!"?)

Nate Silver says it's almost time for Democrats to panic

Might be time to refill those anti-anxiety prescriptions, Hillbots.

Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls has been declining for several weeks, and now we’re at the point where it’s not much of a lead at all. National polls show Clinton only 1 or 2 percentage points ahead of Donald Trump, on average. And the state polling situation isn’t really any better for her. On Thursday alone, polls were released showing Clinton behind in Ohio, Iowa and Colorado — and with narrow, 3-point leads in Michigan and Virginia, two states once thought to be relatively safe for her.

It’s also become clearer that Clinton’s “bad weekend” — which included describing half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” on Friday, and a health scare (followed by news that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia) on Sunday — has affected the polls. Prior to the weekend, Clinton’s decline had appeared to be leveling off, with the race settling into a Clinton lead of 3 or 4 percentage points. But over the past seven days, Clinton’s win probability has declined from 70 percent to 60 percent in our polls-only forecast and by a similar amount, from 68 percent to 59 percent, in our polls-plus forecast.

That’s not to imply the events of the weekend were necessarily catastrophic for Clinton: In the grand scheme of things, they might not matter all that much (although polling from YouGov suggests that Clinton’s health is in fact a concern to voters). But when you’re only ahead by 3 or 4 points, and when some sequence of events causes you to lose another 1 or 2 points, the Electoral College probabilities can shift pretty rapidly. A lot of light blue states on our map have turned pink, meaning that Trump is now a narrow favorite there instead of Clinton:

Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida have all gone pink of late.  Give the polling time to catch up with popular opinion, and this time next week we'll see if this momentum of Trump surging and Clinton falling is sustained as the first debate -- Clinton and Trump only, as you may have heard -- looms on the calendar.

When a candidate has a rough stretch like this in the polls, you’ll sometimes see his or her supporters pass through the various stages of grief before accepting the results, beginning with a heavy dose of “unskewing” or cherry-picking of various polls. In this case, however, the shift in the race is apparent in a large number of high-quality surveys, and doesn’t depend much on the methodology one chooses. FiveThirtyEight, Real Clear Politics and Huffington Post Pollster all show similar results in their national polling averages, for example, with Clinton leading by only 1 to 3 percentage points over Trump.

This potentially ignores a more important question, however. Sure, Clinton might lead by only a percentage point or two right now — with a similarly perilous advantage in the Electoral College. But is that necessarily the best prediction for how things will turn out in November?

Silver goes on with the deep dive; I'm an executive summary kind of guy.

This is a complicated question, and one that we might want to revisit over the next couple of weeks. But the short answer is… I don’t know. We know that many news events — most notably, the political conventions — produce short-term “bounces” in the polls that partly or wholly reverse themselves after a few weeks. There were also some examples of this in 2012. Mitt Romney’s position improved by several percentage points following his first debate in Denver against President Obama, but his gains soon proved fleeting. Media coverage of the campaign — which tends to rally behind whichever candidate is gaining in the polls until it tires of the story and switches to scrutinizing the frontrunner — could also contribute to such swings back and forth.

So it’s plausible that Clinton’s “bad weekend” could be one of those events that has a relatively short-lived impact on the campaign. As if to put to the question to the test, Trump upended the news cycle on Friday by relitigating the conspiracy theory that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. (Trump finally acknowledged that Obama was born here, but only after falsely accusing Clinton of having started the “birther” rumors.) If voters were reacting to the halo of negative coverage surrounding Clinton rather than to the substance of reporting about Clinton’s health or her “deplorables” comments, she could regain ground as Trump endures a few tough news cycles of his own. Over the course of the general election so far, whichever candidate has been the dominant subject in the news has tended to lose ground in the polls, according to an analysis by Larry Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley.

All of this is tricky, though, because we still don’t have a great sense for where the long-term equilibrium of the race is, or even whether there’s an equilibrium at all — and we probably never will because of the unusual nature of Trump’s candidacy. Perhaps Trump isn’t that different from a “generic Republican” after all. Or perhaps (more plausibly in my view) he is very poor candidate who costs the Republicans substantially, but that Clinton is nearly as bad a candidate and mostly offsets this effect. Still, I’d advise waiting a week or so to see whether Clinton’s current dip in the polls sticks as the news moves on from her “bad weekend” to other subjects.

So is there anything that Clinton can do to take the initiative and regain the lead instead of just reacting to how awful Trump is, hoping that will somehow rally undecideds to her cause?  Two sources may have that answer.  First, Glenn Thrush at Politico, in "Five reasons Trump might fall in autumn" (I'm excerpting just the last two):

4. Terrified Democrats are Clinton’s secret weapon. This is the big one, the factor upon which the election truly hinges. Raw, small-mammal fear. Trump’s success might be the only thing that gets many Democrats (or anti-Trump moderates outside the party) to hold their noses and vote Hillary.

The wow in recent national polls is not Trump’s rise, but the fact that more Trump voters are psyched about their candidate than Democrats are jazzed about their less-than-exciting nominee. In the Times survey, 51 percent of Trump supporters were enthusiastic about him vs. 43 percent of Clinton supporters who were thrilled about her. But fear is as powerful an emotion as love in politics (it’s why negative ads work and the decision by Jeb Bush’s super PAC to dump tens of millions into positive ads was so bad) — and Democrats are panicking, in a way that could be good news for their underperforming nominee.

Ultimately, Trump Terror has been at the core of Clinton’s strategy since the end of the primary, and it’s why her comment about half of Trump supporters being in a “basket of deplorables” probably won’t do any long-term damage: It’s basically still a base election, and she needs to get them out to win. A more vexing problem is her continued meh performance with younger voters who are flirting in the 25 to 30 percent range with third-party candidates.

The endgame strategy, here, in a quote: I ran into a top adviser to Clinton at a social event earlier this week, and asked him how things were going. “How the hell do you think it’s going? We’re probably going to win, but there’s a 30- to 40 percent chance we are going to elect a f---ing madman for the White House.” Then the guy headed for the bar.

5. Gary Johnson? Really? Very, very few Clinton voters are leeching directly over to Donald Trump — but a substantial number are visiting the pot-loving, socially liberal, bean-bag decorated Libertarian halfway house run by 2016’s chilliest third-party candidate, Gary Johnson. Johnson is a smart ((Ed. note: LOL), iconoclastic critic of both candidates who has been making a broad pitch for Bernie Sanders’ supporters, and it now appears he’s drawing skeptical former Clinton supporters in substantial enough numbers to affect the race.

Clinton’s Brooklyn brain trust is in a quandary on dealing with this: Attack him, and Clinton allies have compiled oppo files on the former New Mexico governor, and raise his low profile; let him roam the firmament snatching up progressives in his VW van and lose votes.

Fortunately for Clinton’s team, support for Johnson seems relatively soft (as opposed to the smaller, but more militant following attracted by Green Party candidate Jill Stein), and Clinton’s team expects many to drift back to her cause, as third-party defectors often do in October and November.

Barring an unexpected Johnson boomlet, this will be their anti-Johnson strategy — claiming that a vote for the mild-mannered Libertarian is, in fact, a vote for President Trump.

That might work.

Just ask Al Gore, who made the same case against Ralph Nader in 2000.

Priceless.  Now Angry Bear, who's already freaking out.  Too long to excerpt in context, so here's the bottom line.

 I just desperately wish she would run a campaign that is grounded in the economic and anti-campaign-funding-corruption populism in tune with 2016.  A.k.a., a strong desire for change.  Instead she’s running a deplorable one and turning a lot of us former Sanders supporters into basket cases.

Turns out that a substantial percentage of millennials think there’s no difference between Clinton’s policy preferences and Trump’s.  Not all that surprising, I guess, given that Clinton spent the summer campaigning for Republican votes.  Brilliant idea!

Clinton has abandoned the hard-negotiated Sanders platform as if on cue.  The Democratic fear factor is one of the few options left for her to try to hang on and run out the clock.  A 'prevent defense', as the best football coaches say, only prevents victory.  And an inevitable coronation suddenly finds itself flailing.

I don't have any insights that Nate Silver doesn't already have, and he admits he doesn't know where this will wind up.  But to me it feels like the Titanic's unsinkable hull has been breached, and she is slipping under the waves.

Why is Clinton losing to Trump?

Is this just a natural, cyclical closing of the huge gap that existed a month ago?  Is it something more significant?  I think the answer is mostly fundamental and as simple as 'people don't like her and don't trust her'.  Matt Yglesias explains.  Bold emphasis is mine.

Hillary Clinton’s ongoing campaign to paint Donald Trump as unacceptable in the eyes of most Americans is working. It’s just not good enough. That’s the message of the spate of recent polls showing a dramatically tightened race that Trump may even be narrowly winning.

The truth is that Trump is not doing well. Even Trump’s very best recent polls (which, by definition, are outliers that likely overstate his true level of support) show him receiving fewer votes than Republican candidates usually get. A recent CNN poll of Ohio, for example, that gave him a 5-point lead in the crucial swing state also shows him only getting 46 percent of the vote. Mitt Romney and John McCain both did better than that. Clinton’s attacks and Trump’s well-known weaknesses seem to have him losing the support of some GOP loyalists, even in his best polls.

The problem is that Clinton herself is doing worse. Because despite her campaign’s emphasis on Trump’s weirdness and unpopularity, that isn’t the only force shaping this race. It’s profoundly unusual across two other dimensions — the strength of third party candidates and the weakness of the frontrunner — that will probably prevent Clinton from ever opening up a sustained comfortable lead unless she can do something to make herself better-liked.

"A freakishly unpopular frontrunner".

Despite a couple of days’ worth of bad polls, Clinton still leads in national polling averages. It remains the case that if the election were held tomorrow, she would win.

In that context, her 42-56 favorable/unfavorable split in national polling is truly, freakishly bad. Political junkies have probably heard the factoid that Clinton is the least-popular major party nominee of all time — except for Donald Trump. But conventional dialogue still underrates exactly how weird this situation is. John McCain, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Bob Dole were all viewed favorably by a majority of Americans on the eve of presidential elections that they lost, and Mitt Romney was extremely close.

It is totally unheard of to win a presidential election while having deeply underwater favorable ratings, and it is actually quite common to lose one despite above water favorable ratings.

Since there are only two major party nominees in the race and they are both far underwater right now, it’s pretty likely that precedent will be shattered. But we are in a bit of an undiscovered country in terms of the underlying opinion dynamics.

Here I am given hope that the two "major minor" candidates (since there are almost a dozen others that will appear on someone's ballot somewhere), more commonly referred to as third-party candidates, are still to rise.

RealClearPolitics’ four-way polling average shows Gary Johnson at 9.2 percent and Jill Stein at 2.7 percent.

If those numbers hold up (which of course they might not), they would make Johnson the strongest third-party candidate since Ross Perot in 1992. That’s a big deal. Stein’s strength is, however, even more unusual. She is polling ahead of where Ralph Nader did in 2000 and is the strongest fourth-party candidate we’ve seen in a 100 years, besting both the Thurmond and Wallace tickets from the infamously four-sided election of 1948.

To find a fourth-place candidate polling higher than Stein’s current results, you need to dial all the way back to the 6 percent of the vote Eugene Debs earned in the bizarre 1912 election that saw the GOP nominee (the incumbent, no less!) finish in third place behind a third-party bid spearheaded by ex-president Teddy Roosevelt.

Did you know that Perot was only polling in the eight-percentage-point range when he was allowed to be in the debates with GHWB and Bill Clinton in 1992?  In context, he had polled as high as the thirties and forties as a tease candidate, before announcing that July he would not run, and then declaring as an independent on October 1, ten days before the first debate.  If not for Perot's help, we might have never seen the first Clinton in the White House.  (To be certain, Bush lost in '92 because of his own mistakes.  Just like Al Gore, eight years later.)

But back to Hillary.

Lambasting Trump while being unpopular herself would be a clear winning strategy in a zero-sum, head-to-head race. But in a four-sided race, where the two lesser candidates aren’t receiving much scrutiny from the press or the campaigns, it tends to have the side consequence of pressing a lot of people to Johnson or Stein. The fact that there are two different third-party candidates in the race — one for people who think Clinton’s too left and one for people who think she’s not left enough — makes it really difficult to avoid bleeding voters.

If polls stay very tight or Trump pulls into a lead, then anti-Trump messaging to Johnson and Stein voters could take the form of classic warnings about spoilers and wasted votes.

But the fact that Clinton has been consistently leading in the polls — and in August was doing so by a large margin — has itself undercut purely tactical arguments for voting Clinton. If she is overwhelmingly likely to win, which is what people have been hearing, then you may as well not vote for her if you don’t like her.

It’s simply going to be very hard for Clinton to open up the kind of stable lead that her supporters think Trump’s awfulness deserves while she herself is so little-liked. September of a general election year is probably not a great time to turn that around.

But the fact remains that her basic problem in this race is almost painfully simple. Over the course of her winning primary campaign she became a deeply unpopular figure. And it’s hard — indeed, unprecedented — for such an unpopular person to win the presidency.

The polling this weekend and next week will reveal the trends in more detail.  Clinton's campaign is already preparing "a vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for Trump" messaging, a demonstrative failure.  Here's your Daily Jackass, by the way.  These mules are not even going to get a featured post from here on out.

The first presidential debate is Monday, September 26, ten days away.  I don't know where Gary Johnson is going to be, but I expect Jill Stein will be outside the Hofstra University hall in Hempstead, NY, getting herself arrested, just like four years ago.

Here's Jeff Feldman, of Framing the Debate fame, with the "more".

Clinton is not just disliked for some abstract reason. She went out and actively made a key group hate her and her people. She alienated a key block that she now needs. She has not secured the Left that's tipped to Stein. Clinton's strategy with that part of the Left has been to shame them. It was a segment of the Sanders base. For months and months her campaign did it. They even hired people to do it under the guise of online commenting, etc. They're still doing it. The result is that a now significant percentage has left the party. She could have done something different. She could have gone after the Left -- brought them into the fold, worked more in public with Sanders, etc. She made no moves in this direction. And now it's probably too late. It will likely go down as a historic misjudgment on her part: believing it was still the 1980s and she could win by distancing herself from the McGovern wing. But it's not the 1980s. She alienated one of the most active, nimble and contemporary segments of the big tent. Take them back and she is on top. The crucial part of the vote that doesn't like her -- she invested time and money into making them hate her more, instead of doing the opposite.

Clinton will hold more of the Berners than she loses to Stein, but more than those two combined will choose the worst possible course of action and not vote (or write in Sanders).  Stein has increased her numbers from four years ago by a multiple of at least nine -- but that only gets her to three percent.  If her November tally winds up at four or six percent nationally ... well, that's still not saying much in the grand scheme.  But it is certainly something to build a foundation upon.  If the sheer number of people that Sanders pulled back to the Democrats, plus former Dems like me, have faded away -- this time forever -- we can now better calculate Clinton's opportunity cost, whether she wins the presidency or loses it.

Can she overcome all of this adversity and these setbacks of the past two weeks and still capture the White House on the strength of Republican crossover votes?  That's essentially what she has gambled on, almost from the very beginning.  If she can, then she will owe that caucus a very large debt.  And won't it be swell to watch her pay that back over the next four years.

Colin Powell agrees with me

This election sucks all around.

 "A national disgrace" and an "international pariah."  (Indeed he is.)

"Greedy", "unbridled ambition", and "everything (she) touches she kind of screws up with hubris".

It does make you wonder if Powell might vote for the stoner who blanked on Aleppo, though.

It's disappointing to me, as you may have previously suspected, that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein haven't gotten more traction in the past month or so.  Duopolists would rather just call them unqualified, but I cannot find any redeemable qualities in either Trump or Clinton to merit my vote.  Is 85% of the electorate so deplorable or terrified that the only option they see outside the blue/red box is to tap out?

Seems to be the case.  While we wait for polling that will reveal whether Clinton's lead has been further dented by her own hand, some of the goat entrails available to us push the needle back to the right and forth to the left (not the actual left, but as represented by the Democratic Party.  I consider that an important distinction to make, since I don't consider the Democrats to be all that left any more except on a few social issues).

Hillary blew a lead to Obama in 2008, beginning in January that year in Iowa.  She almost choked up the "inevitable" nomination to Bernie Sanders this year.  There is certainly enough doubt that she could not have won without all of the DNC's cheating on her behalf.  In historical context, why should we be surprised that she's giving way to Trump?

She really is that bad.  She's lucky she's running against Trump.  I'm still not going to be choosing either evil, however.  And whether you would vote for a third-party candidate or not, they should be allowed to participate in the debates (and a majority in a recent survey of likely voters agrees).

So sign the petition.  Unless you just like the system the way it is.  Rigged.

Cartoonists go off on Hillary

You won't see any of these at Ted's Shill shop or Juanita's beauty salon, after all, and the week is still young.  There'll be many more.

And here's some "equal time" ...

Scattershooting a few of my fellow bloggers

-- I was kind of saddened to read this.  It's chock full of all the fear and loathing of Trump that you have come to expect from various quarters of late, but the saddest part of it buys into the false logic, repeated ad infinitum, that voting for a third-party candidate -- particularly in a swing state -- is a waste.  A spoil, as even poor Bernie Sanders revealed when he declared himself to be a Democrat running for president a year ago.

Brother Neil formerly advanced that if he lived back in his home state of Ohio, he would vote for Clinton.  That's logic I share (although many Greens don't).  But that's not the same as considering a vote for Jill Stein in Ohio a waste, and if you believe that Texas is suddenly in Electoral College play -- and were also a Democrat, or Democrat-leaning -- then your vote for a third-party would suddenly be in danger of being accused a "spoiler".   Which tells you why some Democrats are so busy spinning that Texas is about to flip blue.  (Hillary's 'powering through' her pneumonia has surely ended whatever surge of that kind existed before last week).

There's both a public debate and a mathematical analysis that disproves the premise of wasted or spoiled votes, but I wouldn't expect any quivering Hillary fans to get it.  It's those folks still straddling the fence that I hope will be braver and smarter than this.

No, wait; the saddest part is that Neil's reason for switching to Clinton is that he thinks Julian Assange is a Russian agent, or in cahoots with Putin, or some of the other conspiracy theories advanced by the DNC after their email servers were hacked.  To be fair, there is a veritable mountain of circumstantial evidence that this could be the case, but no actual proof.  Smoke but no fire, as Clinton herself might say.  My opinion has always been that the content of what was in the leaked DNC emails was more critical than who hacked them, but that's another story Hillbots don't speak of.

Candidly, I think he's spent too many hours standing out in the sun holding a sign of late.  Anyway, if this is the kind of progressive you claim to be, then the word has lost all meaning.

-- Let's hold the lady at the beauty shop to account for the rumor she's spreading about Hillary leading Trump by double digits in Harris County.  She ain't writin' no blog down there in Fort Bend, after all.  It's going to be extremely difficult to hold a ten-point lead after Sunday's developments had it existed, either by rumor or something else, and I wouldn't have believed it a week ago.

Once again, for the sake of fairness: Clinton should win Harris County, and handily, and she should have some nice coattails for the judicials and others down the ballot.  But before 'a basket of deplorables' and 'overheated' became walking pneumonia, it could have been a much bigger win.

Not ever 55-45 Clinton, though.  I'll pull a Kuffner and remind you that Obama only carried Harris County by 50.5% over McCain in 2008, and by a scant eight-hundredths of one percent -- 49.39 - 49.31, or less than 1000 votes out of more than one million, one hundred thousand cast -- in 2012.  Somebody's pulling ten percent out of  their deepest, darkest nether region.  Maybe it's her big blue butt, probably someone else's, I don't know.

And speaking of Kuff ...

-- In this post a few weeks ago, the Betsy Johnson he linked to as running for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 5, is not actually the Betsy Johnson running for that office.  I know this because I called the San Antonio office of her firm, which directed me to Austin, and the person answering her phone said specifically that she "is not a candidate for public office".

The funny part is that Betsy Johnson worked in Greg Abbott's OAG for ten years.  Which wouldn't necessarily make her a Republican... or a Democrat, for that matter.  But if she were a Democrat running for statewide office, what she would have to say about working for Greg Abbott might be newsworthy.  The Texas Democratic Party might even be trumpeting (no pun intended) it.

This is just an uncarefully researched mistake on Kuff's part, I feel certain.  But if you're going to pick fun at political candidates in other parties who don't have websites, or Facebook pages, or essentially any online presence whatsoever save a state bar listing, then you should be prepared to acknowledge your own party's.  (I contacted Cliff Walker, the man in charge of candidate recruitment for the TDP, who provided me the contact data for the Betsy Johnson in the most previous link, and the addresses match.  She did not return my phone call.)

Which is what I should do at this time with respect to Judith Sanders-Castro, the Green running for Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Place 5.  She has not returned my calls, either.

My chastened blog brothers and sister:

I kid because I care.  I feel embarrassed by the fact that our Little Alliance has withered and become such a joke over the past few years, and claim my share of responsibility for running some folks off with my abrasive manner.  But y'all need to get it right, especially since there's no Republican blogosphere locally or statewide remaining (Breitbart doesn't qualify as anything but propaganda) to keep you accountable, and our mainstream media remains a big fat corporate fail.

Now if I have made some mistakes or errors in judgment, I'm prepared to either admit them or defend them.  I expect no less from each of you.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance has a secret plan to ask someone else for a plan to bring you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff is not surprised that the Justice Department is accusing the state of Texas of misleading county election officials about the updated voter ID requirements.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos believes the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News should hold the Texas Republican Party to the same standard as it does Donald Trump. According to the DMN, Donald Trump is no Republican. But neither is the Texas GOP for that matter.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes a bad week for Ted Cruz: afraid of 'Value Voters' and dissed by John Cornyn.

Asian American Action Fund praised President Obama for pledging to double the funding for unexploded ordnance removal in Laos.

Socratic Gadfly looks at the Texas Trib and Bizjournals touting "the world of apps" as an allegedly surefire get-out-the-vote idea, is sure that it's NOT a surefire idea with folks like Valley Hispanics, but expects the Texas Democratic Party to be suckers for it anyway with pretty much the same results as before.

Equality Texas is hopeful for some improvements in civility -- at the very least -- after AG Ken Paxton had supper with the Briggle family.

Egberto Willies believes the story of the pharmaceutical company CEO who raised the price of EpiPens to stratospheric levels ought to be enough to motivate us -- and Congress -- into taking some action.

"A basket of deplorables" was a bad gaffe but still might not cost her the election, writes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.  Think more along the lines of "clinging to their guns and Bibles" as opposed to "47%".

Txsharon at Bluedaze finds herself once again in the fracking crosshairs.

Neil at All People Have Value added a page of his public art and revised his photography page as well at NeilAquino.com.

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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

CulturemapHouston has news of Houston's finest Italian restaurants joining the global relief effort for victims of the earthquake in that country by offering the signature dish of the town of Amatrice.

Jonathan Tilove at First Reading Dem-splains why Texas Republicans would be better off with a President Hillary Clinton.

Grits for Breakfast wants to see racial profiling data added to the discretionary traffic stop-and-searches performed by Texas DPS troopers.

Lawflog details the bar grievances he has filed against Hillary Clinton and several other attorneys associated with her and her presidential campaign.

Juanita Jean reminds us of the Trump U - Greg Abbott connection.

Eileen Smith looks at the Catholic angle on Donald Trump.

Anna Dragsbaek chastises Bexar County DA Nico LaHood for his misinformation about vaccinations.

The TSTA Blog is hesitant to be optimistic about pre-K in Texas.

Houston's Metro is looking for an urban designer.

Nan Little Kirkpatrick makes the connection between abortion access and transgender health care.

Jenny Dial Creech is not having Art Briles' apology.

And Pages of Victory describes his altercation with those aggressive red wasps that are so prevalent this time of year.