David Bruce Collins—the Official Site

"You Say 'Alt-Right,' I Say 'Neo-Nazi'" Bloggage

16/8/2017

The Texas Progressive Alliance has no room for hate in its heart, no matter what it calls itself.

Here's the roundup of blog posts and news from last week.

Off the Kuff looks at July finance reports in key state Senate districts.

Socratic Gadfly examines Consortium News' latest in-depth piece on how Putin did NOT "do it" on the DNC hacks and and ties this together with Sy Hersh's comments about Seth Rich.

With only a few days remaining in the special legislative session, it appears that Greg Abbott won't come close to getting everything he wanted out of it, says PDiddie at Brain and Eggs.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme calls out the Texas Republican hate on display this week, from LGBTQ bashing, immigrant bashing to the kicking of the poor.

The Lewisville Texan Journal profiles John Wannamaker, a former Marine and prison inmate, one of four Democrats competing to challenge US Rep. Michael Burgess (CD-26).

Texas Watch asks the TDI to investigate the automobile insurance collision repair industry's practices that appear to be short-changing Texas drivers.

Ted at jobsanger posts some statistical facts about Muslims in the United States.

Texas Vox needs some help for its challenge to one of Trump's deregulatory executive orders.

Neil at All People Have Value went to the monthly meeting of the Houston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The meeting was well-attended and many tangible actions were discussed. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

=================
More Texas blog posts and news!

Houston, Austin, and cities across North Texas all held vigils for Charlottesville last evening in the wake of white supremacist provocations, animosity, and violence in that city.

Meanwhile in College Station, so-called alt-right leader Richard Spence has been scheduled to appear on the campus of Texas A&M in September. (UPDATE: A&M canceled the event!)

In San Antonio, Gus Bova of the Texas Observer reported that hundreds pf people clashed over the removal of a Confederate monument in Travis Park.

Leif Reigstad at the Daily Post reports that the guy who quit after 37 days as Corpus Christi's mayor, Dan McQueen, is running for the US Senate against Ted Cruz in the GOP primary.

Marc Campos eulogizes former Governor Mark White, while the TSTA blog remembers his legacy.

The Rivard Report notes San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg telling Greg Abbott to back off the attack on cities.

Durrel Douglas at Houston Justice has been covering the Houston ISD goings-on of late, beginning with a post about the candidates challenging board president Wanda Adams, and the possibility of several black legacy high schools in HISD threatened with closure due to failing grades by students.

In a tale reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984 the Texas Senate's Education Committee claims that a $1.8 billion cut to Texas public school funding is part of a long-term remedy, reports the Texas Standard.

Ty Clevenger at Lawflog wonders why the FBI is still protecting Hillary Clinton.

Bonddad takes another look at The Changing of the Guard, a 1980 book that foretold the rise—and destructiveness—of neoliberalism.

Pages of Victory posts part 2 about why he left the Democratic Party.

The Texas Living Waters Project frets about the zebra mussel invasion.

Lone Star Ma makes the case for breast pumps.

And Harry Hamid fears the incoming hordes of killer babies.

0 Comments

I Survived "Dragonfly"

16/8/2017

0 Comments

Cover of the hardback edition of Diana Gabaldon's

Drag-On-Fly in Amber

The next feat of literary endurance will be to tackle the third book in the Outlander series, entitled Voyager, preferably before the Season 3 premiere of the Starz Original Series®.

Add me to the pile of readers who think Drag-On Fly would have been better minus 200-300 pages. Normally I don't hold it against an author when the book is full of padding that doesn't advance the narrative, extraneous "character moments," even Moby Dick–style long-winded explanations. The Harry Potter series has some of the best padding I've ever encountered, stuff that would sink the page-to-screen translation like a lead weight—e.g., the subplot involving Hermione's Society for the Preservation of Elvish Welfare.

Gabaldon's extra padding in D in A does us readers the great service of making 18th-century Scotland that much more real, through all the senses, right down to the smells of the malnourished and malprovisioned Jacobite Army. But there's too damn much of it. Nonetheless, that multi-sensory approach is one of the aspects in which the quality of the writing took a quantum jump over the first Outlander volume.

0 Comments

Unit 2 Is Up!

9/8/2017

0 Comments

For any among you who have already mastered Unit 1 of Bite-Size Hungarian, Unit 2 is now ready for your consumption.

Revisiting and revising my horribly presumptuous attempt at language instruction has been quite enjoyable. My hope is to get my Magyar back up to snuff in time to visit Transylvania with the First UU choir either next summer or in 2019.

I will readily admit that I have been checking my own accuracy via at least two sources, one of which has "Google" in its name.

0 Comments

Atomic Blogosphere

7/8/2017

1 Comment

PDiddie introduced this week's Weekly Wrangle thusly:

The Texas Progressive Alliance mourns the passing of former Texas Governor Mark White over the weekend. A champion for public education, White ushered in reforms that still impact Texas schools to this day, including limits on elementary class size, a "no pass, no play" policy for high school athletes, and the first-ever statewide testing standards.

White will be eulogized by former president George W. Bush and Luci Baines Johnson, daughter of former president Lyndon Johnson, on Wednesday at a memorial service held at Second Baptist Church in Houston. White will then lie in state in Austin's Capitol rotunda, with a second memorial service held there on Thursday. He will be interred at the Texas State Cemetery.

Permit me a reminiscence. I got my first teaching job in 1984, at the dawn of "No Pass, No Play." Teachers howled incessantly about having their jobs made more difficult, suddenly having to live six weeks or more at a time with resentful students barred from their chosen sport or other activity, as well as hearing from those students' resentful parents and coaches. Teachers and administrators alike cursed the names of Mark White and H. Ross Perot. I favored the measure at the time, in principle and practice, despite the hardship. Of course, I was mostly teaching Latin, and I had very students failing, and even fewer failing students who were in extracurriculars. What few of us anticipated was the ways our state and school districts would make the job even more difficult in the years to follow.

===============
Here's the blog post and news roundup from last week.

Off the Kuff casts a critical eye at Chris Hooks' latest (and weakest) piece about Democratic recruitment for state offices.

Blake Farenthold doesn't just insult and demean female Republican senators, he disses his own constituents by favoring oligarchs over Army employees. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme can't wait until he's former representative Farenthold.

In an environmental news roundup, SocraticGadfly wonders if the internal combustion engine's complexities will hasten its demise.

This fall, when someone asks if PDiddie at Brains and Eggs is ready for some football ... the answer will be no.

Stace at Dos Centavos applauds Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez' discontinuance of the use of private jails, and makes the cogent point about elections having consequences for the rotten money bail system in the county.

jobsanger underscores that our nation's greatest shame is an inadequate healthcare system.

Texas Freedom Network's quotes of the week include a few from some highly embarrassed state Republicans.

The city of Lewisville and its school district join the growing chorus of Texas municipal organizations pushing back against the state legislature's attempts to override local laws with dictums from Austin, reports the Texan Journal.

Neil at All People Have Value offered his guide to activism in the Age of Trump. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

===============
And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs and news sources.

With ten days left in the special legislative session, the Texas Tribune provides a comprehensive update on where things stand regarding Governor Greg Abbott's priorities.

"The Freest Little City in Texas," in the Texas Observer, tells the tale of a libertarian experiment in city government that went awry over taxes, debt, and some very angry people.

Some prison inmates will get moved into air conditioned cells...after a federal judge set a deadline ordering the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to do so, reports the San Antonio Current.

Michael Li explains how the Texas redistricting case might play out.

Grits for Breakfast sorts out the DPS crime lab fees situation.

Paradise in Hell wonders what the floor is for Donald Trump's approval rating.

The TSTA Blog calls for adult leadership in Austin.

Therese Odell wades into the latest revelations in the Seth Rich story.

Molly Glentzer pushes back against an article that had criticized Houston's mini-murals program.

John Nova Lomax goes looking for the "real" Montrose.

DBC Green Blog wants you—yes, YOU—to run for office.

Pages of Victory links to a piece that best explains why he left the Democratic Party.

And Harry Hamid collects a few parts from a passenger train.

1 Comment

Run for Office. Seriously.

4/8/2017

2 Comments

Just because I'm not running for public office in 2018 doesn't mean that you shouldn't run if you have the time and energy. I am willing to help a sincere candidate or two with logistics, communications, and other important aspects of campaigning. As I told the co-chairs of the Green Party of Texas in a teleconference last Sunday evening, I am hoping that anyone who runs as a Green in this state will run an actual campaign.

Current plans, still in the making, call for GPTX to hold a candidate recruiting drive and workshop in the DFW area during the weekend of 30 September 2017. If that workshop is successful, we will take it on the road to other metropolitan areas in Texas.

2 Comments

Bite-Size Hungarian: Unit 1 Is Up

31/7/2017

0 Comments

Most of the relevant information about the Bite-Size Hungarian project is on this page. In the next few months, I intend to do the same thing for Latin, a language that I have studied at the collegiate level. Although I have no business publishing a Hungarian language text and charging money for it, I'll happily place one on my own website as a free download.

There are plenty of free resources on the WWW for learning all kinds of languages. The difference is all in the formatting. My observation is that the actual hard-copy texts that I have seen present long, complicated lessons that throw tons of vocabulary at the learner. I found the Teach Yourself series a good fit for my learning style, but these books require the learner to absorb a great deal of vocabulary and other information from each chapter. (Teach Yourself Gaelic proved a disappointment, especially without the accompanying CDs, because the book never explores the correct pronunciations for the many diphthongs and triphthongs for which Gaelic is infamous.)

My approach is to scale it back and provide concise two-page lessons, each with about a dozen new words and at most one or two new grammatical concepts. Only the very first lesson, devoted mostly to pronunciation, is a double-length episode. Each unit is divided into a dozen lessons, including a vocabulary review, plus some bonus material. Busy learners can master small amounts in small chunks of time, more easily, at their own pace, before moving on to the next lessons.

0 Comments

Harry Potter's Birthday TexProg Blog-o-Rama

31/7/2017

0 Comments

Wow, I took the whole week off from this-here blog. It's not that I've had nothing to say, but that nothing has happened that inspired any coherent entries, especially on the Green front. Last Monday I missed the opportunity to collect blog-fodder by abstaining entirely from the monthly general meeting of the Harris County Green Party for the second consecutive month. In the week since then, my initial anguish over letting my comrades down by announcing my withdrawal from participation has evolved into the Serenity of Letting Go.

Last night, however, I participated in a GPTX conference call regarding candidate development, and that call has inspired a post that will appear here in the next day or two. Beyond that, I expect to post at least a couple of times this week.

=============
Off the Kuff looks at July campaign finance reports for Democratic Congressional challengers.

SocraticGadfly, looking over the battle to (apparently) kill Trumpcare, notes that insurers were only temporary allies, not friends of America, and remain bloodsucking leeches who are part of why true national health care in America needs a British-style NHS.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme calls out the so-called pro-life Texas Republicans for drastically increasing the maternal death rate. Now they are going for more deaths.

Democrats appear to be suffering another severe outbreak of Jill Stein Derangement Syndrome, reports PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

The Texas Tribune reveals Cong. Lamar Smith and Randy Weber complaining to the Department of Treasury that Russia is funding a massive, back channel, disinformation campaign—aka fake news—against America. Just not the one you may have thought.

Ted at jobsanger observes today as Black Women's Equal Pay Day.

Neil at All People Have Value called upon all people to show up and fight back. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

The Mom of No, writing at the Lewisville Texan Journal, takes a vacation but not before becoming the Mom of Everything Must Be Sparkling Clean in This House.

And the Rivard Report was on hand as more than 350 San Antonians gathered at the historic San Fernando Cathedral and lit ten candles for ten migrants who perished in the back of tractor trailer truck, found in a Walmart parking lot.

=============
More Texas lefty blog posts and news!

Dan Solomon at Texas Monthly has the latest update from the FBI on the state's most dangerous cities, and there are a few surprises.

Grits for Breakfast finds AG Ken Paxton as perhaps the most unlikely Fourth Amendment advocate imaginable, but apparently only when a Second Amendment right was at stake.

The Texas Living Waters Project highlights the activism of Janice Bezanson, who advocates for wise water use over the construction of reservoirs.

The Texas Observer documents Greg Abbott's Texas Tree Chainsaw Massacre.

The TSTA Blog is not impressed with the Senate's "fake" pay raise for teachers.

Transgriot wants to hear more black voices in the coverage of the bathroom bill, and Equality Texas urges pushback on Greg Abbott's arm-twisting to make Republicans sign on to them.

Paradise in Hell has some sage words about highway driving.

And Katie Walsh sets the record straight about the authenticity of Tex-Mex.

0 Comments

Moon Day Prog Bloggage

24/7/2017

0 Comments

The chicanery that Kevin Zeese reported at the Green Party's Annual National Meeting weekend before last: Can we really call that "racial strife," as noted below (fifth paragraph from the end)? Some ANM attendees obviously see it that way, according not just to Zeese but to other observers.

Is this a strife that will damage the Party, or will the Party emerge stronger for having endured it? Some longtime white members may decide that they've had their fill of being reminded that they are racist, or even running the risk of being reminded, and leave. Will a greater number of black, LatinX, indigenous, and LGBT members replace them? Perhaps other Party veterans will turn that strife inward, in the classic definition of jihad, waging an internal struggle to acknowledge that they have a problem that requires constant vigilance, and making amends to those affected when they speak or act from implicit bias.

================
Off the Kuff notes the two Democratic candidates who have emerged so far to run for Governor.

SocraticGadfly looks at Mitch the Turtle's ongoing Senate manueverings on Trumpcare.

Texas Democrats who can't support Tom Wakely for governor may be stuck with having to draft Joe Straus, according to PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes that Texas Republicans are all about encouraging polluters and not about the health and well-being of people.

Texas Leftist sees Ashley Smith making THE point about the bathroom bill debate in her selfie with Greg Abbott.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston posts the fundraising totals for the seven candidates in the running for CD-7, and the best news is that four-time perennial James Cargas is badly losing that race also.

Stace at Dos Centavos follows up on Harris County's stance on SB4, seeing county attorney Vince Ryan filing a brief against enforcement despite the commissioners' reticence to do the same.

Texas Vox is stumped by Abbott's anti-tree agenda.

With a vacancy in the Denton County district clerk's office, the Lewisville Texan Journal collects some of the candidate filings for the position.

jobsanger joins the question of what Puerto Rico should be going forward: state, nation, or territory?

Neil at All People Have Value promoted the half-year mark of the weekly protest at the Houston office of terrible Senator John Cornyn. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

================
More progressive news & views from the Lone Star State:

The San Antonio Current reports that in the aftermath of the tragedy discovered in an Alamo City Walmart parking lot—where several people were found dead and others stricken by heat in the back of a semi-trailer—it's worth underscoring what SAPD Chief William McManus said:
“This is not an isolated incident; this happens quite frequently," he told reporters. "Fortunately, we came across this one. Fortunately, you know, there are people who survived.”

The Texas Observer explains what a ban on abortion means for women with high-risk pregnancies.

The Rag Blog co-hosts authors Steve Early and Nick Licata on July 27 at Scholz Biergarten in Austin, who will speak about the progressive alliances in their respective cities (Richmond CA and Seattle) ahead of the Local Progress conference in Austin's AT&T Center this weekend.

RG Ratcliffe at Burkablog reveals Greg Abbott's million dollar donor, which helps explain why's he's veering his wheelchair ever more to the right.

Houston Justice Coalition is back and ready to get to work building up and not tearing down.

Robert Rivard calls the bathroom bill a choice between social justice and discrimination, and PoliTex quotes some anonymous Texas Republicans in the Lege as saying they don't want to have to vote on the bill...but are afraid they might have to.

Grits for Breakfast updates on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's latest court loss, requiring the state jail system to address the stifling heat inmates are forced to live in, and posits the next legal avenues.

DBC Green Blog took note of the "racial strife" that rose to the fore at the GPUS annual meeting earlier this month.

Better Texas Blog reminds us that the state relies an awful lot on local property taxes to fund our schools.

The Texas Election Law Blog flags a Rick Hasen editorial about the perils to our democracy.

Fort Bend ISD school board president Kristin Tassin explains how Greg Abbott's voucher plan hurts kids with disabilities.

And Keith Babberney at Trib Talk speaks for the trees.

0 Comments

GPUS ANM 2017: Maybe Not Such a Rousing Success?

22/7/2017

0 Comments

Perhaps in this recent entry I spoke too soon regarding the success of the Green Party's Annual National Meeting last weekend in Newark NJ. You may need to scroll down to the section head The Partisan Picture: Greens and the Fractured Left to see my comments on the slow, painful disintegration of my political tribe.

The too-soonness is twofold: The first fold is that, along with the general good feelings of accomplishment and the largest attendance ever for an ANM outside of Presidential Nominating Conventions, there was conflict aplenty in Newark, some of it downright bitter. Second, as Kevin Zeese might attest, the dissension can be viewed as growing pains; what appears as disintegration may in the end prove to be evolution.

0 Comments

More Blogrolling with PDiddie, Pacifica Edition

17/7/2017

3 Comments

This piece was intended to be brief, but...uhm...sorry, it ain't.

Hanging out on the left wing has never been easy. You see the world differently from your neighbors because your media intake is not limited to the major corporate networks; you actually read and understand books with big words; you spout Chomsky-esque inconvenient truths that make middle-class lifestyles seem inherently immoral. As a result, the mainstream world tends to ignore you, belittle you, cast doubt on your sanity, or find less savory ways to neutralize you.

Sure, liberal-to-progressive ideology enjoys periods of vogue, when pop culture co-opts lefty issues and talking points, and when lefty males are society's rock stars, getting laid without much effort. Then comes the inevitable backlash from the hung-up wealthy men who are missing out on all the fun.

This is my big-picture way of introducing this reflection on Perry "PDiddie" Dorrell's fairly comprehensive Brains and Eggs post on the ongoing crisis du jour at Pacifica radio. As I write, I'm nodding along with his headline about "a microcosm of Left's dysfunction in Texas." Such dysfunction is certainly not limited to Texas, but considering the size of this state, one doesn't need a magnifying glass to see its effects.

3 Comments

<<Previous

"You Say 'Alt-Right,' I Say 'Neo-Nazi'" Bloggage

I Survived "Dragonfly"

Unit 2 Is Up!

Atomic Blogosphere

Run for Office. Seriously.

Bite-Size Hungarian: Unit 1 Is Up

Harry Potter's Birthday TexProg Blog-o-Rama

Moon Day Prog Bloggage

GPUS ANM 2017: Maybe Not Such a Rousing Success?

More Blogrolling with PDiddie, Pacifica Edition

DBC Sez...

Archives

Categories