Last night in Texas was disappointing, but not surprising.  All statewide races were lost by Dems.  100%.  And the spreads were predictable, all double digit losses but for the race for Ag Commissioner.  Susan Hays lost to the worst Ag Commissioner in Texas history by a mere 7 points.

Who to blame?  Leaving out for now the radical gerrymandering in state and US districts, the statewide blame for this kind of loss lay with the Texas Democratic Party and the candidates it produced, period.  Sure, Republican voter suppression, intimidation, and misinformation shaved 2 or 3 points from turnout, but it didn’t shave over 10.  The TDP did in 2022 what the TDP always does, just expected a different result.  In the governor’s race, the polls here were pretty clear and surprisingly close to actual results.  Real Clear Politics averaged Abbott + 10.4, and he won by 11.  A lot of the blame, too, needs to be laid at Beto’s feet.  He had a promising future when he came within 2 points of Cruz for Senate in 2018, but starting to believe his own bullshit, throwing it all away with his disastrous run for president in 2020.  That was stupid.

The lessons here are clear and need to be learned.  First, the TDP needs a serious housecleaning and fumigation.  Old assumptions need to be thrown out the window, especially the longstanding myth that Texas is getting more blue just because demographics are changing.  GOP messaging and ideology plays well with some groups like the Latino community, especially since the Dems have taken them, and African Americans, for granted for decades.  The party always plays to these demographic groups in voting years and then underserves them until the next election.  That’s got to stop.

I know this is hard to hear, but the GOP in Texas has outplayed, outworked, and out strategized Dems for years, and the asymmetric performance at the polls is the result.  Starting in the 1960s, Repubs went after school boards, precincts, city councils, and county offices.  Over this time they’ve built a huge base with a bench a mile deep.  The Dems have done the opposite; the Dems are every person for themselves until election season, and then try to build a strategy around a standard bearer who elbows their way in, be that for president or governor. (See Barack Obama, 2004 to 2008.)  They then vehemently resist change, leaving petrified party leadership in place for decades, stiff arming all new comers and those with opposing opinions.  Doing this discourages younger leaders because there’s no opportunity for leadership roles and stultifies policy.  What you get then are losers like Beto and Mike Collier.  In Beto’s case, you can’t build a statewide strategy on a standard bearer who acts like a teenager and says stupid shit in public.  Lastly, and this is not just a Texas problem, is that the Democratic party needs to stop counting noses.  I’ve been to meetings where the majority of the time is spent doing math to make sure every possible demographic is in the room before the meeting can start.  I’m not saying the party needs to be less inclusive; I’m saying the time for inclusivity is at the beginning, not at the end. There needs to be an obsessive focus on inclusion of demographic groups at the micro local level, not only at state conventions and statewide campaigns.  Being inclusive at the start would negate the necessity of nose counting at the end.

The textbook example of party failure in 2022 is not Beto, it’s Rochelle Garza.  Dems overwhelmingly chose Garza and rejected a very experienced and well known attorney, Joe Jaworski.  Let’s be frank – Ken Paxton is a deeply flawed, dishonest, embarrassing, and weak AG.  He was ripe to be picked off.  The Dems snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by overwhelmingly nominating a less experienced, less well known candidate who didn’t have a prayer of beating Paxton; her nomination was a vote for diversity, not for a win.  Another example was Lupe Valdez in 2018.  Dems overwhelmingly chose her as the standard bearer over Andrew White, son of former governor Mark White.  Valdez ran a terrible campaign, had low name recognition, and then lost to Abbott by over 13 points.

Before you say it, I am actually all about diversity and inclusion.  But diversity and inclusion doesn’t get you a goddam thing unless you WIN.  Not winning has a lot worse negative consequences than winning every time.  The TDP (and all Dems) can actually do more than one thing at a time.  They need to be strategic, not just inclusive, because what the Dems are doing, and have been doing for decades, is a loser.  I know this opinion, just like the one I hold about Hillary, will piss a lot of you off, and I accept that.  But until the Texas Democratic Party and Dems in general start operating strategically they’ll keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result.  And we all know what that’s called.  Until they start working strategically, there will be no joy in Mudville.

Oh, and Beto?  I love ‘ya, bro, but please go back to El Paso. Run for mayor or even the House again. Do some maturing.  You’ll have another chance at some point, but you need some years of growing up.

Since November 3rd, Trump has been childishly ranting about the election, obstinately refusing to accept the inevitable. For the most part, his enablers have played along with his claims of massive fraud and even amplified his claims.  There are now plans being circulated by Trump loyalists in Congress to actually steal the election from the voters on January 6th when both houses meet to tally the electoral votes and finally certify the election.  That effort will fail, of course, but the damage Trumpists will do to our democracy is incalculable.

Let’s consider how we got here.  One of these conclusions are true:

1. 1. Thousands of voting machines, run by Dominion Voting Systems, were manipulated by a server in Berlin to delete millions of votes for Trump and flip the votes to Biden.  Dominion has links to Venezuela and its dead former president Hugo Chavez.  Also, thousands of dead people voted for Biden, and thousands of volunteer vote tabulators added suitcases full of fake ballots, all in favor of Biden.  Republican vote observers were denied access to the counting rooms in counties where Trump lost.  Also, state legislatures violated the Constitution by making it easier and safer for legal registered voters to vote during an exploding pandemic.  Mysteriously, all of this massive voter fraud and unconstitutional action exclusively benefitted Biden.  While the election was being stolen from Trump, Republicans gained seats in the US House and kept control in most State houses.  To accomplish this fraud on Trump, the conspiracy was massive, requiring thousands  of politicians, career staffers, and volunteers all over the country to conspire to steal the election.  Then all of those involved in the conspiracy committed perjury or just remained silent to cover their crime.
   2. More people voted for Biden.

From Merriam Webster:

Trump tweeted this morning that we should delay to November elections until people “can properly, securely and safely vote??”  Here’s the offending tweet:

Let’s make sure we’ve got this right – it’s safe to open schools, safe to go back to work, but now it’s not safe enough to vote?  Yeah, that will make you dizzy.  The one thing that doesn’t make you dizzy, though?  Trump and his goons have intentionally made the pandemic more severe and longer so he could have an excuse to shut down the election.  If he had responded as a competent president or even a normal human being, we would have been on the other side of the pandemic like most other developed countries rather than being consumed by exploding cases and deaths.

Yes, I just said it…Trump has caused tens of thousands of deaths, cost Americans trillions of dollars in losses, and prolonged the suffering of millions of people just so he can try staying president.  He doesn’t care if you live or die.  Well, Fuck Him.  If he thinks he’s seeing unrest in the streets now, he hasn’t seen anything yet.

Yesterday the New York Times published an explosive story detailing the boldness of two Russian hacking groups infiltration of government and political party computer systems and the stupidity of those, especially at the DNC, that allowed both groups access to EVERYTHING for over a year.  The “IT Guy” was a part timer, who ignored multiple attempts by the FBI to warn the DNC that they were compromised, and especially makes the FBI look inept because no one from the agency went to actually visit higher ups to report that they knew the DNC was hacked and who was doing it.

Most disturbing was the complicity of the media when it was clear what was going on when the daily email dumps began, and how the Republicans, trying to win the election by hook or crook (emphasis on crook) refused to cooperate with the Dems and the Obama administration to go public with what they knew.  Infuriating is the fact that the hackers got in like they do to unsuspecting people every day, with a fake Google or other provider email saying “click here to change your password”.  You would think that government and party staff would know better, but apparently not.

The result is that the Russians actually helped Cheeto Jesus get elected.  The continuous noise of the email and document dumps, the uncritical and breathless reporting by the media added to the stupidity of DWS and other DNC leadership all came together in the conflagration we are seeing today.

All of this could have been prevented, but we are now in a post democracy era where party trumps country (no pun intended).

Russia has a new friend, and no, it’s not Cheeto Jesus.  He’s been a friend for a really long time.  The new friend?  Mitch McConnell.  The Washington Post is reporting today that the Obama administration, after being briefed by the CIA that Russia was clearly trying to intervene in the presidential election, attempted to form a bipartisan coalition to go after their hackers.  Obama wanted a bipartisan effort to avoid looking like he was playing politics during the campaign.

In mid-September, intelligence officials briefed congressional leaders in a secure room in the Capitol.  The Democrats present unanimously supported a bipartisan effort to go public with an accusation against Russia for (more…)

Computer security experts at the University of Michigan have found compelling evidence that election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have been altered or hacked, and have urged the campaign to challenge the election results in those states.  In Wisconsin counties alone, where electronic voting machines were used versus paper ballots, Hillary underperformed by 7%.  That 7% would swing Wisconsin to Hillary’s column. That unusual pattern caught computer experts’ attention, which indicates hacking of results.  The experts have had a conference call with John Pedestal, but nothing has come out of the campaign yet.  Apparently the White House doesn’t want Hillary to challenge, feating upheaval that they don’t want.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop.