Accretionist posted:

Think local politics are amenable to an attack from the left? Socialist Alternative indicates they have a new branch in Austin. Juicing them up with money and volunteers could help light a fire under the Democrats. It would also mean juicing up Texan Socialists. Win-win!

Zwabu posted:

So what would it take to awaken the sleeping El Paso giant? A well run and well supported Julian Castro Senate or Governor run?

Swan Oat posted:

Our Department of Transportation is so underbudget that it has converted some portions of our roads to gravel to save on maintenance fees, and I have heard that roads in areas with a lot of fracking are in absolutely terrible condition due to vehicle damage from heavy trucks. Anecdotally, living in Houston, I can say that while our highways are generally well maintained, with one notable exception, the surface streets are in pretty bad condition.

TXDoT's prime/only solution to increasing traffic problems throughout the state seem to be "build more roads" even though this doesn't work. For comparison's sake, noted progressive utopia Moscow -- the Russian one -- is attempting to solve it's horrendous traffic issue by massively expanding the metro, the bus system, and commuter rail, while plans for congestion pricing and other means of discouraging car travel are on the table. Good job Texas!

quote:

Abbott has a 64-27 percent lead among white voters. Davis leads among Hispanics, 43-33 percent, and among African Americans 72-11 percent.

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/greg-abbott-holds-double-digit-lead-over-wendy-dav/nfZ4w/

quote:

In a year when immigration issues have figured prominently in primary elections, the survey describes the sharp lines in public opinion. Republican voters were much more likely to take a hard line on deportation, for example, with 74 percent in support of that idea, compared with 56 percent of independents and 32 percent of Democrats. At 85 percent, support is even stronger among Texans who identify themselves as Tea Party voters.

“The harder-line conservatives have shifted this issue by the way they have talked about this issue,” said Daron Shaw, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin and co-director of the poll. “The majority of Republican sentiment is moving in a more conservative direction in Texas.”

https://www.texastribune.org/2014/06/18/uttt-poll-hard-line-immigration/

BatteredFeltFedora posted:

Haha, Price is a huge rear end in a top hat and a massively corrupt one at that, but as a professional troll there's few on his level.

VitalSigns posted:

All right, I can't do this anymore. What the gently caress is with the pro-child-beating planks? I mean okay, you want to whip your kids, does that really need to be in the state political platform?

quote:

For connoisseurs of WTF—I’m looking at you trolls—there is but one ur-text, the guiding document from which all others emanate, and are compared to. And though it is based on immutable laws of nature and God, it is nevertheless a living document too, revised every couple years by a gathering of wise men and women, who puzzle and debate over the text with the passion and intensity of a gathering of Talmudic scholars. I am of course referring to the Texas Republican Party platform.

The Texas GOP convention is meeting this week in Fort Worth and one of the most important items of business is revising the Platform—a task that is taken very, very seriously by many of the delegates. The Platform isn’t binding on Republican elected officials (though some in the grassroots would like it to be) but it matters for symbolic reasons. It’s also a fascinating glimpse into the id of conservatism. The folks who write it are the true believers and this is their wish list, their vision of a world that conforms to their ideals and beliefs. The Platform (I’m capitalizing “platform” in honor of The Platform’s RANDOM use of Capital Letters) is also contested ground: the turf on which the GOP’s various factions fight, usually over brown people and immigration.

http://www.texasobserver.org/wtf-friday-texas-republican-party-platform/

quote:

Texas GOP Chairman Steve Munisteri said the two-week delay in releasing the platform had to do with some clerical errors and nothing to do with controversy surrounding the document. But he did address the inclusion of reparative therapy in the platform, saying he doesn’t believe you can convert a LGBT individual to a heterosexual by simply talking to them.

“And I just make the point for anybody that thinks that may be the possibility: Do they think they can take a straight person to a psychiatrist and turn them gay?” Munisteri said.

Munisteri said he’s not the only one who opposes this plank in the party’s platform.

“My emails and phone calls to the office are running overwhelmingly opposed to that plank in the platform,” Munisteri said.

Munisteri said a group of Republicans at the convention led by his predecessor, Cathie Adams, were able to pass the reparative therapy resolution using a parliamentary trick.

“Because the way the platform works, once somebody calls the question on the platform it’s a parliamentary maneuver," Munisteri said. "The delegates are really forced to pass the platform as is, because if you don’t there is no platform.”

Munisteri said there is no way anyone can tell if a majority of Republicans statewide support the reparative therapy plank.

http://tpr.org/post/texas-gop-chairman-munisteri-speaks-out-against-reparative-therapy

VitalSigns posted:

And then it ends on a bizarrely bittersweet note

Xarthor posted:

A 60 million dollar stadium that is currently unusable because of giant cracks in the concrete that are rendering the stadium unsafe. The district say it'll be fixed by graduation but I'm skeptical.

Dante Logos posted:

Makes me wonder when they went full-derp like this. Say what you will, but Texas Republicans, despite some of their actions, were politically aware enough to not poo poo the bed. This platform though, shits the bed and smears it on the walls and furniture.

VitalSigns posted:

Does anyone even read the thing anyway? That's probably why they don't bother fixing the process. Get all the Jesus and racism in there so the candidates have a list of talking points to rile up the base, and then just figure no one will bother getting all the way down to the freedom to drink milk right from the cow tit while thrashing my son and punching the missus.

Ronwayne posted:

For some reason I find that vaguely comforting. Austin seemed highly inauthentic, with dallas/houston-style mammonist immigrants mixing freely with the urban hillbillies in the poets shirts and flat caps. Jesus.

Yes, dallas is pretty terrible, but I found midnight gunfire to be a great aid in getting to sleep, since it is comforting to know someone is having a far worse night than you are.

Ronwayne posted:

Its not near as bad in dallas. I got a 700sq footer for 650/mo, elec included, in an ok part of town. I had to leave austin in large part because the land lord kicked us all out of the rentals/refused to renew leases since he was selling the place for something like over twice what he paid for it.

Ronwayne posted:

Unlike him, I don't think any of the above is a bad thing. Well, I mean, they are, but the spectacle of those things producing bad things is a beautiful cultural trainwreck. This place is a self important, trumped up parking lot and by god I love it.

ReidRansom posted:

It's not necessarily wealthier, it's new money vs. old.

Shifty Pony posted:

That is completely the opposite of Austin, which is obsessed with the appearance of authenticity. When there is too little authenticity to go around it is created by slapping the appropriate veneer onto it. Every new place now has logo design straight out of the 50s and many food trailers have permanent dedicated seating and haven't been moved in years. You hear people who talk poo poo about a restaurant not because it is bad but because "it is a chain" (even if it is just a local place with North and South locations).

Anyway on to housing: I heard someone who works for the city lamenting that Austin has no way to force the inclusion of "affordable" units in the large projects they approve. Is this some Texas legal quirk or is a matter of the city not being willing to attach conditions to the zoning and city variances that the large projects inevitably require?

Trabisnikof posted:

The other problem is, Austin is actually rather cheap to live in, you just don't get to live in downtown.

e_angst posted:

Seriously, when I was in middle school in the early 90's there was a bond bill to get bus stops out in our mid-cities DFW suburb. My grandmother was very upset at the idea and I asked her why. Her exact words (to her 10-year-old grandson) were "Because busses bring the n*ggers into town."

The bond was defeated, and to this day there's no public transit in that suburb.

e_angst posted:

They're starting to get there. I mean, I'm in tech support and will gross around $60k this year. Granted, I have a lot of years with the company but it's decent money for a guy without a degree. Most of the people I know who are even halfway-decent programmers are signing $50k 6-month contracts. And it seems like everyone who isn't coding or working for a startup is a project manager and pulling a pretty good salary.

I feel sorry for the poor bastards stuck in state jobs, though, as the Republicans in capitol are happy to starve them. They used to be the stable backbone of the city, and now it's hard to imagine someone with an entry-level state job being able to afford to live anywhere near the capitol.

Shifty Pony posted:

Ronwayne posted:

From what I remember the "Cheese" epidemic (Black Tar Heroin+Tylenol PM, alleged/apparenly a "kiddy drug") was especially bad in Arlington in the ~2007-09 era. I might be confusing this with the pre-sudafed-restriction meth epidemic, however, when trailers around Red Oak and north east texas in general were going up nonstop like Micheal Bey pyrotechnics.

Communist Zombie posted:

Actually wasnt it some rural county or town that started it? Plastic bags were causing issues with livestock and wildlife I believe.

Frackie Robinson posted:

Thanks to this thread for reminding me to vote today


For Abbot Even I couldn't bring myself to vote for Dan Patrick though; I just left it blank. gently caress that guy.

amanasleep posted:

Paul Rudd spotted straight-up regulating homophobia in Texas. Texans also helped out.

Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:

The craziest part of this story is if you read the comments on The Blaze it is full of surprisingly not anti gay comments and more hoorah that cowboy rules

quote:

I'm a social conservative through and through. I think that social issues are legitimate political issues, and that it is important to debate them. But social issues are rating near the bottom of voter concerns heading into the 2014 election. Abortion and other social issues rarely rate more than a few percentage points above zero when Gallup polls voters on their concerns. It turns out that the Republican implosion on social issues in 2012 was not a prelude to Democratic triumphs on the same.

There may be a left-of-center coalition that can win Texas. But a politician like Wendy Davis, raised to premature celebrity by a social issues showdown, was never going to be the one to find and lead it.

zoux posted:

If you ever find yourself posting unironically "the truth is in the middle " please stop posting forever. It's using the fact that people on this board hate South Park to promote loving extremeism and absolve the left of any kind of accountablity or blame. I get really loving mad when I see Republicans accusing Dems of doing things they do or have done themselves and if you think it's fine for D's to do the same to their opponents but not for the R's to do you are officially part of the problem.

Trabisnikof posted:

What exactly makes it a "boondoggle" in your mind?

quote:

I'll just sum up my own criticism of the Prop. 1plan by saying that I've consistently seen it as a sort of "urban jewelry" approach to rail transit — in this case, primarily an expensive amenity for a faction of local real estate developers, plus expansion ambitions by the University of Texas administration — rather than a bona fide effort to address real mobility needs and traffic congestion. For that, our alternative plan, routed in a central corridor defined by major arterials called North Lamar and Guadalupe St., seems a far better option. As a recent article in Austin Rail Now explains, a route serving that corridor would likely cost half as much as the official $1.4 billion, 9.5-mile plan, while offering the prospect of three times as much ridership.

Sometimes, an official rail plan might be a really bad idea. I see Prop. 1 as a proposal that would offer relatively little actual benefit while consuming a lot of available resources, and "soaking up the oxygen" of funding for future rail in our city.

http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/blogs/lyndon-henry/should-rail-transit-advocates-never-oppose-a-rail-project.html

quote:

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2014-10-30/texas-isnt-turning-purple-what-happened

This was not supposed to happen in Texas—not this year, not to Wendy Davis. Twenty-one months after Obama campaign veterans launched Battleground Texas, on the theory that a majority-minority state could become competitive for Democrats, Davis is running far behind Abbott. A University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll released this week found Davis trailing Abbott by 16 points. Among Hispanic voters, the race was almost tied: 48 for Davis, 46 for the Republican.

Battleground never pretended that Democrats could surge to victory in 2014. The point of their effort this year was to reveal that Texas was not actually red; their campaign would wake up the natural progressive voters who never turned out. Battleground Texas would serve as Davis’s de facto mobilization campaign, but the effort would outlast her. Executive Director Jeremy Bird always talked about a generational effort, of raising minority turnout to the level of white turnout and “mobilizing Texans who are already registered but haven’t been making their voices heard.” Even Bill Clinton, whose first thankless assignment in politics was to win Texas for George McGovern, repeated the wisdom that Texas Hispanics were “under-registered,” and just needed to raise their voices.

But what if their voices sing in chorus with Republicans? Democrats hardly considered that. None of the “purple Texas” plans contemplated a Republican candidate pulling 46 percent of the Hispanic vote. They assumed a backlash among Hispanics to the GOP’s right turn, as well as a boost from Davis’s Latina running mate, fellow Sen. Letitia Van De Putte. March’s primaries and May’s runoffs produced a rigidly right-wing ticket, starting with De Putte’s opponent, State Sen. Dan Patrick, a former radio DJ famous for storming out of Muslim prayers in the legislature.

[...]

The majority party’s candidates responded to the Battleground threat with a very strategic panic. They knew that Texas Latinos tended to have deep roots in the state, and weren’t going to embrace the Democrats on immigration the way that more recent immigrants did.

This freed them to act like the dams were breaking along the border. “The state of Texas is coming under a new assault,” Abbott told a crowd of Republicans, “an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons.” He, and the rest of the ticket, would respond to aggressively to non-whites, particularly along the border.

And there was another plank to their Hispanic platform. Davis had risen to national prominence with an epic, and briefly successful, filibuster of an abortion restriction bill. Republicans had numbers, including a 2013 Wilson Perkins Allen survey that found Latinos in the states identifying strongly as “pro-life,” by a 2-1 margin. When he traveled to the valley, Abbott started reminding voters that he, too, was “pro-life and Catholic.” According to strategist Dave Carney, a veteran of Perry’s campaigns, the brain trust looked at the lost Davis counties and identified more than 1 million Hispanic voters who might be receptive to a social, economic conservative message.

Battleground sees this as a ruse. Its organizers point to data that shows registration up by 2 percent over 2012 in the state’s five most populous counties—and up 3.6 percent in El Paso’s Bexar County. Battleground’s 8,600 volunteers had, on average, visited 100 voters’ homes each. That reversed the post-2008, Obama-swoon decline of the Tea Party era. In Davis’s own Fort Worth district and in some other local races, Republicans admit that Battleground may make the Democrats competitive.

But it is inarguable that they are not closing the top-of-the-ticket races with Hispanic votes. The day after Cascos’s barbeque, I meet investor and Democratic mega-donor Alonzo Cantu at his usual table at McAllen’s Peppers restaurant. Cantu, a bundler for Hillary Clinton, had plowed even more money into his own long-term registration effort—the Advocacy Alliance Center of Texas. Cantu’s organizers, drawn from the local business class, used the same Catalist software that Democrats had used to shock Republicans in red and purple suburbs. This election’s goal was to bring turnout up to 25 percent, at least. Next cycle, the target was 40 percent.

“We’ve brought 30, 35 U.S. senators down to see the border,” says Cantu. He slams a fist next to his enchiladas to illustrate his points. “We’ve been changing their impressions of the valley, that it’s some dangerous place, the third world, where you need some kind of bulletproof vest. We have money, then we get the votes—we’re in!”

“In” did not necessarily mean that Valley Hispanics would build the new Democratic majority. Many of the people registered by the new push were going to go for Republicans. Cantu himself had already given $7,500 to Sen. John Cornyn, who’s been just as aggressive as Abbott in wooing Hispanic voters. The donor joked that a Cornyn rally in the county felt “like a Rush Limbaugh event,” but he’d shown up anyway.

Cornyn had reached out to Cantu. Abbott was reaching out to the whole valley.

The GOP approach seems to be working; while Cantu held court, two friends who’d traveled to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute with him stopped by and talked politics. They were left cold by the president’s approach to the border. They knew about Davis’s abortion filibuster, but couldn’t name anything else she’d achieved.

“There’s a perception that Wendy Davis is pro-abortion, and that’s hard to overcome with us Latinos,” says Cantu. “It’s been hard for her to get away from that.”

Badger of Basra posted:

Flannigan still has a grindr profile and I don't really understand why.

e_angst posted:

I don't get how Travis county is down. There's been a lot of push (both for and against) the rail proposal and we've got this massive city council election happening. Is the voter ID law keeping UT students from voting?

quote:

Four days before federal authorities arrested him on federal weapons charges and found ammonium nitrate in his South Texas hotel room, border militia leader Kevin Lyndel "K.C." Massey chatted and posed for a photo with Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott at a campaign event in Brownsville.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/politics/article/Photo-shows-Abbott-posing-with-militia-member-who-5860768.php#photo-7078514

quote:

In a memo early Friday by Battleground senior adviser Jeremy Bird, a former top field organizer for Barack Obama, the Democratic group claimed early voting had increased by more than a third so far and that Democratically leaning voters — non-whites in particular — were turning out in much larger numbers than four years ago.

But that analysis fell apart when it became clear, based on an inspection of figures from the secretary of state's office, that Battleground was using flawed data from 2010.

"The county data from 2010 was incomplete," said Battleground spokeswoman Erica Sackin. She said the group was "clarifying and updating" the memo from Bird, which was taken down from the group's website. Since the flawed data was used in calculating the demographic breakdowns, the big percentage of non-white voters said to be turning out can't be trusted, either.

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/10/31/battleground-misfires-turnout-memo/