Wednesday I did promise a piece on the Fletcher-Moser primary runoff in TX-7, but I don't really have a lot to say about the race itself. The result was unexpected more because of Lizzie Pannill Fletcher's 2-1 margin of victory than because she actually won it: 67.08% for Fletcher, 32.92% for Laura Moser. Considering that they received about 29% and 24% respectively in the seven-way first round, this looks like a case of the other candidates' supporters voting for Anyone But Moser.

While the Democrats' runoff for the gubernatorial nomination split 3% of the registered voters statewide, about 4.26% of registered voters in District 7 turned out to choose between Fletcher and Moser. In March the figure was about twice that. So congratulations to Ms. Fletcher for amassing 11,000-plus votes Tuesday. She'll need a lot more than that to knock off nine-term incumbent John Culberson.

I had no dog in the TX-7 primary fight, having neither lived nor worked in TX-7 since the early '00s, Culberson's first term. However, I have many friends and acquaintances who do live and vote there, and, Congressional districts being drawn as they are in Harris County, I travel through portions of it frequently. This race illustrated and exemplified for me what I call the Phenomenon of False Extrapolation: the notion that you can construct the bigger picture on an issue from experiences in your own little slice of the world.

In the Greater West University area, where I might occasionally travel on two wheels or four, yard signs for Moser seemed to far outnumber those for Fletcher during the past two months. Various media outlets, including some truly progressive websites, churned out profiles of the race that made it seem much closer. The progressive articles cast Moser as the aggrieved party in the conflict, playing up the angle of how the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee published opposition research to thwart Moser just before the March primary.

The nationwide attention Moser received after the DCCC story broke did not translate into sufficient vote support in May any more than all the yard signs in West U, Southside Place, Southampton, and Upper Kirby. There is so much more to TX-7 than the parts that Rice University professors and aging bohemians call home. There's also a whole lot of Far West Houston and Spring Branch and Cypress-Fairbanks, where I don't travel much.

But while we're talking about false extrapolations, some habitual Democrats got all enthused about how the primary turnout in Texas was about as even for the two corporate parties as it's been since Republicans ran the table in 1994. In TX-7, about 34,000 turned out to vote in the March Democratic Primary, compared to about 40,000 on the Republican side. Compare that to the equivalent figures in 2014: about 7,000 (to choose between three-time nominee James Cargas and relative unknown Lissa Squiers—and oh yeah, for Governor etc.) and 38,000, respectively.

​So obvs, there's a Democratic renaissance brewing in TX-7, right? You know, the district that has sent Republicans to Washington since the 1960s? And Fletcher may ride the Blue Wave right to the US Capitol?

Cool your jets, Democratic friends. Remember that Texas has open primaries. We don't know how many Republicans crossed party lines to vote in the Democratic Primary, regardless of which candidate they most wanted to see Culberson beat. By the same token, we don't know how many nominal Democrats voted in the Republican primary in an attempt to thwart Culberson.

Even in these extraordinary times, you cannot look at 34,000 versus 40,000 and conclude that Fletcher will draw 46% of the vote in November, let alone defeat the Republican incumbent. Unlike yesterday's prediction about the gubernatorial contest, I'm not ready to declare the TX-7 race over, because I'm actually hoping that Fletcher will make a lot of noise in the next five months and show the world what a weenie Culberson is. But Culberson has not hitched his wagon to the Trump Train, so he does not engender the kind of revulsion that Trump does. The Republican establishment will circle the wagons around the weenie and carry him comfortably to a tenth term.

The only statewide primary runoff race decided yesterday in Texas was the Democratic primary race for Governor. After more than a million voters spread their votes among nine candidates in March, fewer than half a million came back for Round Two, or less than 3% of the nearly 16 million registered voters in this state. Ultimately, about 1.5% of registered voters in Texas came out to nominate Lupe Valdez to run against Greg Abbott.

Oh joy. Participatory democracy FTW.

I looked into the numbers for the Congressional races on both sides—especially the Democrats vying to knock off John Culberson in CD-7 in a primary race that drew national attention—but I'll leave that for a later post.

It's a little harder to gauge the total Republican turnout, due to the lack of a statewide race on that side. However, according to the current figures, 158,708 cast votes in runoffs for six Congressional seats; 73,088 in seven State House races. You can't just add those totals together, since there may have been some overlapping jurisdictions. Turnout in those Congressional elections ranged from almost 44,000 is CD-5 (East Dallas and points southeast) to just over 2,000 in CD-29 (some heavily LatinX portions of Harris County where Republicans are rare as hen's teeth).

Rest assured that this is not another blog entry about sucky turnout figures and the virtues of Instant Runoff Voting. We've done plenty of those. Nor is it about former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez apparent lack of political acumen since she announced her candidacy.  LatinX and LGBT groups gave her a long look, found that there was no there there, and endorsed conserva-Dem Andrew White instead (the one PDiddie refers to as "Average White Guy").

Dear Politicians:

Please, for the love of all that's good in this world:

• Shut up about the good ol' days when we still had prayer in public schools.
• Shut up about violent video games and that infernal so-called rock and roll music.
• Shut up about mental illness.
• Shut up about too many entrances and exits on school buildings.
• Shut up about distributing guns to teachers and school staff.
• Recognize and admit that, while a nation owning more than 300 million firearms is not, on its own, the recipe for mass shootings at schools and elsewhere, it is the primary ingredient. Easy access to firearms—even your dad's legally purchased guns—makes shooting and killing multiple persons a helluva lot easier.
• Recognize and admit that the United States has created a uniquely violent society, thanks mostly to a foreign policy that responds to every nation's attempt at resisting our global capitalist empire with massive violence and environmental devastation.

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In the matter of the Santa Fe High School shooting, current reports indicate yet another alienated suburban white kid on a mission to kill himself and take some teachers and classmates along. But not only did he fail to kill himself, the Galveston County Sheriff's Deputies didn't finish the job for him, even after he shot and wounded one of them. (Yes, little Santa Fe, Texas, has grown into a suburban municipality.)

I suppose we can be grateful that this incident did not involve an AR-15, so there will be no inane online debates between "Ban all assault weapons now!" and "The AR is not an assault weapon, duh!" I suppose we can be grateful that the deputies didn't add to the carnage by killing Dimitrios Pagourtzis, and hopeful that law enforcement can show similar restraint when, say, they catch a young black man jaywalking.

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The Texas Progressive Alliance weeps for the families of the Santa Fe victims, the latest in America's ongoing carnage of gun violence and the predictable aftermath of excuse-making and inaction by our bought-and-paid-for lawmakers.

The tweet above appeared late yesterday afternoon, as I stopped for a tofu banh mi en route to BikeHouston's annual Ride of Silence. As of this morning, Fight for the Future hasn't even had time to redo its website in celebration of the Senate vote.

Amazingly, Senate Democrats held the line, even the Blue Dogs. A few Republicans joined them: Susan Collins of Maine, John Kennedy of Louisiana, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska apparently had constituents who spoke up loudly and clearly enough to drown out their corporate sugar daddies. Here's the report from The Hill.

Despite the victory, FFTF is still running its Red Alert campaign, in which dbcgreentx.net is still participating. The Senate vote does not end the FCC's rollback of Net Neutrality provisions. Both houses of Congress have to pass the same resolution to overturn that rollback. Republicans hold 235 seats to the Democrats' 193 (with 7 seats currently vacant). As The Hill's article notes:

So concerned Netizens will need to lean on a lot more House members to close the gap, plus prevent Democratic Reps from wandering off the proverbial ranch. Net Neutrality is a consistent hit, with astronomical majorities favoring it in poll after poll. Let's see whether FFTF and related organizations can nettle enough of them into making some phone calls.

OMG AT&T WTF ROFLMAO??!!

Today I received a message from World Beyond War asking me to boycott the United States government. Not Israel, (I signed onto the BDS Movement years ago), but the US. I'd love to, but I'm not really in a position to do that.

As a blogger concerned with Net Neutrality, I am in a position to urge my friends, comrades in the struggle, and casual readers to boycott the living shit out of AT&T. I quit them forever eleven years ago, and they haven't shown any sign of growing a conscience since then.

In fact, if anything, they become worse. Just savor the latest news about AT&T's more-than-nodding acquaintance with Michael Cohen. Do yourself a favor and click through some of the links to the sources that Fight for the Future cites. Then grab some of their Red Alert graphics for your websites or social media profiles.

In this week's batch o' bloggage from last week, apart from Martha Castex-Tatum's big win in Houston's Council District K, I found particularly poignant the entry from Grits for Breakfast about Texas Democrats' attempts to out-"Law 'n' Order" Republicans in the 1990s. The phenomenon was not limited to Governor Ann Richards, the state of Texas, or Hillary "Bring Them to Heel" Clinton. It didn't stop at the prison-building binge that was oh-so-fashionable at the time: Richards also took pains to communicate that she favored capital punishment like her friend Bill Clinton, and that she liked guns just fine because, y'know, she liked to shoot birds.

Grits's brief stroll down Memory Lane had a Proust-meets-madeleine effect on me, bringing back the early to mid-'90s in multisensory detail. Unlike M. Proust, I promise to keep this reminiscence (relatively) brief. Mostly, it brings back memories of shock and outrage: It was shocking to see the Republican takeover of Texas, even after our popular governor had so narrowly defeated Clayton "Rape Is Like the Weather" Williams four years earlier; it was outrageous to see President Bill Clinton's rightward tack after the Republicans won a majority in both houses of Congress, after which I switched my allegiance to the Greens once and for all.

During Richards's lone gubernatorial term, the state and the nation had genuine problems with gangs and hard drugs. Whatever the actual causes may have been, I saw the effects of the problem and the "solutions" up close when I was teaching at Pasadena High School. I had dozens of students who showed up at school primarily to sell or score drugs, as well as because their families would stop receiving federal or state benefits if they didn't show up.

A generation later (crikey, has it been that long?), we are reaping the results of the git-tough policies implemented then, when very few voters saw just how profitable the prison-industrial complex was becoming—and how the "solution" to gangs and drugs would bring about more devastation in communities of color than the gangs and drugs themselves had. The school-to-prison pipeline did not have the stamp of academic recognition yet, but law enforcement agencies were busy criminalizing an entire generation of black and Latinx youth.

Even in the 1990s, the worst gang in the working-class suburbs east of Houston was the Ku Klux Klan, which was clandestinely circulating recruiting materials in the schools. The main distinction was that the street and neighborhood gangs would generally commit violence only against each other, typically as reprisals, while the KKK advocated violence against people who had merely had the gall to be dark-skinned in public. Cracking down on Klan activity was a new practice in Pasadena, which had recently succeeding in pushing the Klan's headquarters out of the city to Channelview, just across the Ship Channel.

In my first month at Pasadena High, I caught one of my students with what looked a lot like a Klan pamphlet; that same student later had a noisily public break-up with a girlfriend who had decided that black folks and Mexicans were OK by her. In an inservice workshop, Pasadena ISD brought in the leader of the police department's anti-gang task force, who identified the Klan as a gang and alerted teachers to signs and symbols we might see on students' clothing or drawn on book covers, just as the Blood- and Crip-affiliated gang members and wanna-be's might sport on theirs.

Pasadena PD also identified anti-racist skinhead groups as gangs, which I thought was bizarre. The skinheads (including some of my students) had no organization or leaders; they hung out together, went to hardcore punk shows, and would come to defense of individuals or groups whom the Klan kids threatened or harassed.

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With this week's lefty blog post and news roundup, the Texas Progressive Alliance welcomes Governor Greg Abbott to the New McCarthyism, a domain of paranoia and fake news previously occupied exclusively by sullen Hillary Clinton bitter-enders.

Here comes the stampede!