PBS: Video: NewHour: Texas Monthly's Wayne Slater: Previewing The Governor's Race in Texas

Kire Schneider on Google+ The New Democrat on Facebook The New Democrat on Twitter This is Texas Democrats’ best opportunity to win the Texas governorship since 1990, when Anne Richards won this seat.  I’m not saying State Senator Wendy Davis is going to win this race, because she is definitely the underdog.  I am saying that she can win this race, and it could become competitive, somewhere…

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My 15 minutes of fame…my daughter Kristen interviews me for Texas Monthly magazine about Jensen, my Instagram account and fandom 🙃🙂 (x) (x)

On Billionaires and "Tyrannical Freedom"

Another excellent commentary by Jamelle Bouie. As such, this is a gift🎁link that anyone can use to read the entire article, even if they do not subscribe to The New York Times. Below are some excerpts:

This week in Texas Monthly, I read a troubling profile of Tim Dunn, a 68-year-old billionaire Texas oilman and lavish financier for right-wing extremists in the state. “In the past two years,” Russell Gold writes, “Dunn has become the largest individual source of campaign money in the state by far.” He has spent, through his political action committee, millions of dollars targeting Republicans who don’t meet his ideological litmus tests of opposition to public schools, opposition to renewable energy and support for tax cuts and draconian anti-abortion laws. A pastor who once said that only Christians should hold leadership positions in government, Dunn sees himself as someone who is on a religious mission of sorts and has devoted his time and wealth to imposing his ultraconservative politics and fundamentalist beliefs on as many Texans as possible. [...] I was disturbed. There is his wealth and influence, yes. But there is also his worldview, captured in the opening scene of the piece. Dunn makes an unfavorable comparison between human societies and bee hives:

By itself, this passage reads as fairly innocuous. But when read with Dunn in mind — a straightforward Christian nationalist whose allies in Texas politics are leading the charge to ban books, suppress the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. Texans and restrict reproductive health care — it takes on a more ominous cast. The passage, in that context, seems to capture the perspective of a man who does not believe in democratic freedom — a freedom rooted in political and social equality — as much as he believes in the freedom of the master, which is to say the freedom to rule and subordinate others. It’s a tyrannical freedom, one that rests on the idea that the world is nothing but a set of overlapping hierarchies, and that if you do not sit at the top of one, then you must be made to serve those who do. You’ll find freedom within your role, and nowhere else. This is not a new or foreign conception of freedom — it is...one of the more dissonant notes in our collective heritage. The issue, today, is twofold. First, we have a powerful political movement, led by Donald Trump, that defines itself in terms of this freedom. And second, we’ve allowed such a grotesque accumulation of wealth that figures like Dunn can wield tremendous influence over the political system. I’ve written before that the fight to save American democracy will involve more than beating Trump at the ballot box. Finding ways to radically limit the political reach of the super wealthy is part of what I mean. [emphasis added]

This week, our editors recommend stories about:

The decimation of a national park.

The survival of Texas Monthly.

An enslaved couple’s daring escape.

Scheduling a death.

The future of jelly.

All in this week’s Top 5!

I saw this on the Supernatural Wiki and thought it was nice.

it’s so crazy to me that houston didn’t have tornado sirens btw. that was a place i lived

The Texas Supreme Court and the AG can fuck all the way off with their shitty abortion denying ruling.

There is something so incredibly funny about getting W from this relic.

Did the Doctor dump her into this squad because Ines was the leader? Were they like: "Yeah, I'm not dealing with her. Ines, she is your responsibility!"

Never trust descriptions of instruments from people who know nothing about them. His brother plays bass. And the pedal steel is not an “electronic” instrument as opposed to “analog” guitars. Yeah, it’s a forty pound “delicate instrument”… And then he calls the pedal steel an “analog” instrument.

You are not a reporter if you can’t understand what you are saying. That’s not writing. That’s just typing. Spell check is not enough.

It's here! September Streakin', Day 1! 🏃‍♀️🏃🏃‍♀️🏃

Decided to kick it off with an easy run around my friends' neighborhood. It was nice! I hope everyone has a great day one, and I look forward to Streakin' with you all! 😁

My first memories of Juneteenth began in church. I grew up in a predominantly Black section of Jamaica, in the New York City borough of Queens. Our small congregation at New Bethel Baptist Church consisted of Caribbean immigrants such as my Haitian-born mother, native-born New Yorkers such as me, and migrants from across the South, including Texas. As new parishioners arrived, they transplanted their food, culture, and folkways into our church rituals and traditions.

My mother prided herself on the excellence of her Haitian cooking, especially dishes such as soup joumou, stewed chicken accompanied by rice and beans (black or red), and the sweet coconut dessert she occasionally prepared for other congregants. But we also relished those special occasions at church when the cozy upstairs room that doubled as a kind of banquet hall was filled with the rich aroma of Southern soul food: cornbread, fried fish, red velvet cake.

This was the early eighties, my elementary school years. One Sunday morning, as I sat on a light brown pew in New Bethel’s sanctuary, I was rapt as parishioners from Texas took to the pulpit and told a fascinating story of enslaved African Americans who didn’t hear news of their liberation until Union general Gordon Granger issued an order in Galveston on June 19, 1865, more than two months after Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, in Virginia. I was reminded of my mother’s stories about the Haitian Revolution, in which slaves overthrew French rule and, to much of the world’s surprise, achieved independence in 1804. That uprising inspired emancipation movements around the globe, though it would be another six decades before freedom for the enslaved reached America’s shores. After the service I overheard fervent conversations about slavery and the need to teach young children like me to never forget.

Baume & Mercier ad, 1978

love to unwind before bed with some relaxing content (youtube videos about baby psychology experiments)

theres a more eloquent and smart way to say this and many have. but man. it sucks so much to LOVE a place, be from that place like thousands of years ago know that your family roamed these hills but the state itself resents that you live here, that you exist at all so it strangles the life out of everything from schools to culture to the environment it is hard to love a place that hates you so so much (does it anyway) i dont want to leave (i really really need to move out of state)

As a result of … gerrymandering, few legislators have to worry about the general election. Their only vulnerability comes during the spring primary, in which a small number of voters choose their parties’ nominees. Primary elections are all about ideological purity, about appealing to hard-core activists. Moderation is not a quality in high demand.

Texas is home to around 30 million people, including 22 million eligible voters—17 million of whom are actually registered to vote. Yet only about 2 million typically turn out for Republican primary elections. (One to two million typically vote in Democratic primaries.) … Since the Republican nominee has gone on to win every statewide general election for the past 24 years, it is this tiny slice of the electorate—disproportionately old, disproportionately white, disproportionately affluent, and disproportionately rural—that, in effect, selects our leaders.

…

But the problem with gerrymandering goes beyond the disenfranchisement of non-white Texans. By creating safely red and blue districts, the process reduces incentives for politicians of both parties to appeal to moderate voters. Instead, candidates are beholden mainly to the small cadre of voters who reliably turn out for primary elections. And according to multiple nonpartisan public opinion polls, the policy preferences of these voters are very different from those of most Texans.

…

In the United States, [voting] usually means a binary choice between a Republican and a Democrat in general elections. And in spite of their disagreement with many GOP positions, most Texans who vote have pulled the lever for the Republican in every statewide race since 1996. Unhappy as they may be with the current crop of Republican officeholders, many Texas voters simply can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat.

That’s partly because the positions favored by the Democratic base no more align with the views of most Texans than do those of their Republican counterparts. … No wonder the Democratic party keeps nominating candidates who can’t win a general election. “Texas Republicans have moved to the right, but national Democrats have moved to the left,” said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones. “The Democratic party has not presented itself as a credible alternative.”

unrelated to anything but i’m reflecting on how my mom’s cousin is one of the coolest and dykiest women i’ve ever met but her wife is an unbelievably bland midwestern housewife named susan and i have so many questions