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March 4th, 2018:

Weekend link dump for March 4

Mar 4th, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
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Donald Trump is making more lawyers. You’re welcome, I guess.

“In fact, if you’re a Gmail user, the periods in your email address don’t matter at all. Gmail completely ignores them. You can add or remove as many periods as you’d like.”

“Every time there’s a mass shooting or terror event, due to the subsequent backlash, this YouTube conspiracy genre grows in size and economic value. The search and recommendation algorithms will naturally ensure these videos are connected and thus have more reach. In other words, due to the increasing depth of the content offerings and ongoing optimization of Youtube’s algorithms, it’s getting harder to counter these types of campaigns with real, factual information.”

RIP, Nanette Fabray, star of stage and screen best known to me for her role on One Day At A Time.

Citizens United at work: “Donations from 10 super-rich individuals account for more than 20% of the money filling the bank accounts of federal super PACs, a USA TODAY analysis shows, highlighting how a small group of wealthy patrons is racing to influence which party will control Congress for the remainder of President Trump’s first term.”

Bending over: You’re doing it wrong.

An ode to Lisa, the beating heart of The Simpsons, a role model to a generation of women—and to Yeardley Smith, who’s been bringing Lisa to life for 30 years.

The kids are all right.

“The Republican Party has backed itself into a politically untenable position, defending a stance on gun rights that is so extreme it has rendered the government incapable of fulfilling its most minimal function, which is to protect citizens against the kind of deadly violence from which they would suffer in the absence of any government at all.”

“Nearly two-thirds of adults now believe that mass shootings can be prevented, the first time since Columbine that a majority of Americans have felt that way.”

Is umpire extortion a thing, and if so did Lenny Dykstra do it?

“More than 100 cities around the world now get at least 70 percent of their electricity from renewable sources such solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower”.

“If the tax cuts matter for investment, then companies like GE, Microsoft, and Amazon were making plans as soon as it became clear that the Republican majority in Congress was serious about passing a tax bill. The fact that we are seeing zero evidence of an uptick in investment suggests that tax cuts don’t have much impact on investment.”

Remembering M*A*S*H, 35 years after its finale.

“Certainty of death, in other words, is no deterrent to mass shooters. Most of them may, in fact, be driven by it.”

What Would the GOP Do If 30 Clinton Staffers Lost Their Security Clearance?

RIP, Judge Paul Clarence Murphy III, one of two Republican judges on a Houston appeals court who ruled in 2000 that the 100- year-old Texas sodomy law was unconstitutional.

“The strongest available evidence supports the conclusion that statutes aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of children curtail unintended injuries to kids, self-injuries and suicides.”

RIP, David Ogden Stiers, versatile and prolific actor best known as Major Winchester on M*A*S*H.

RIP, Sir Roger Bannister, first person to run a mile in under four minutes.

The Republican poll of the Democratic CD07 primary

Mar 4th, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

I would not pay too much attention to this.

Lizzie Fletcher

A poll in a pivotal Democratic congressional primary in Houston shows that activist Laura Moser could be in a position to make the run-off despite recent attacks by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee DCCC).

The poll, by the Republican-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund, shows Moser with 17 percent support in the seven-way primary race in the Seventh Congressional District. She trails only Houston lawyer Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, with 28 percent.

In third place on the last day of early voting in the primary is cancer researcher Jason Westin, at 14 percent.

Laura Moser

Alex Triantaphyllis, the top fundraiser in the Democratic field with more than $1.1 million in receipts, trails with 13 percent, virtually tied with Westin, who has raised half that amount.

Fletcher’s double-digit lead over three rivals in a virtual statistical tie still leaves open the likelihood of a runoff election on May 22. If nobody reaches 50 percent of the vote, the top two vote-gettters go on to a runoff.

The others in the field, James Cargas, Joshua Butler and Ivan Sanchez each polled at about 1 percent in the survey, which was conducted Thursday. Cargas, an assistant city attorney, was the Democrats’ 2016 standard-bearer. About 25 percent said they were undecided, with less than a week before next Tuesday’s primary.

[…]

The automated Interactive Voice Response and phone survey of 726 likely Democratic primary voters found that 61 percent disapproved of the DCCC attacks on Moser, while 13 percent approved and 26 percent said they weren’t sure.

The reason I am dubious is not because this is a Republican firm doing the polling but because nobody knows what a “likely voter” is in this race. Primary polling suffers from the same problem that polling in municipal races suffers, which is that the composition of the electorate can vary widely based on turnout. We already know that a significant number of people voting in the Dem primaries have little to no primary voting history. By definition, these people are not “likely Democratic primary voters”, but here they are anyway. It’s possible that this firm has guessed well as to who is likely to show up and thus arrived at an accurate result, and it’s possible they’ve produced a 2014 UT/Trib debacle. They have no track record in Dem polls to examine, so we’re left to judge this poll for ourselves. My judgment is to note it as a data point and move on. I’d advise you to do the same.

Rural Dems

Mar 4th, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
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They still exist, and they’re making some noise.

Trish Robinson was dropping off supplies for Hurricane Harvey relief efforts in Liberty County, about 40 minutes from Houston, when a handful of people scowled at her left-leaning political T-shirt.

David DeLuca, head of the Fayette County Democrats, said he recently introduced himself to a Republican volunteer poll worker, but the woman declined to shake hands.

And during a Tyler County town hall hosted by Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke on a recent Friday in February, multiple people thanked the Democrat for coming to the Republican stronghold.

[…]

As a result, many of the remaining rural Democrats say they’re leery of making their political views public.

Now, as national and state party leaders talk a big game about a blue wave this November, some Democrats in rural East and Central Texas say they’re working to overcome a drag on local momentum ahead of the primary: stigma.

[…]

Something changed after Trump’s election. Through social media, Democrats in rural areas began finding each other and organizing in small but meaningful ways. County chapters have dusted off their welcome signs and other Democratic-leaning groups have emerged, both publicly and privately.

Robinson said she began the Liberty County Indivisible chapter after reading the handbook published by its national founders, which gives guidance on anti-Trump grassroots political organization.

“That sort of fed into what I believe and how I felt, and what I wanted to do,” she said. “Liberty County [Democrats] need to know there’s options for them, too. We shouldn’t always have to leave the county to feel like we belong or have a purpose or can speak up.”

She began with a Facebook post, and then held meet-ups at local restaurants. Sometimes, only one person showed up. But “if one person comes every time, I feel like that’s progress,” she said. The group has since grown to about 40.

This isn’t exactly profound, but the main thing these folks can do is believe that their votes matter, so that they actually do show up and vote in November. Dems have made big gains over the past several cycles in the big urban and suburban counties, but there are a lot more small and rural counties, and the steady degradation of the vote in those places has largely canceled those gains out. Compare the 2012 and 2012 Presidential results on a county-by-county basis sometime – it’s a thousand votes here and a thousand votes there, but in a state with 254 counties that can really add up. This is basically what the Beto strategy is all about: Narrow the margins in the unfriendly places enough so you can bridge the remaining gap in the big counties.

So having local candidates to vote for, even in uncompetitive districts, helps. Having the statewide candidates remember that these places exist helps, too. I don’t pretend to know when Dems might be able to truly contest these places, nor do I know what issues might hasten that day, but I believe the Republican Party is doing its best to marginalize itself, and the effect that has will not remain limited to the cities and the suburbs. In the meantime, let’s run candidates in races we can win – city councils and school boards and the like – and put some resources into figuring out how to make common cause and gain ground with voters in the small and medium-sized cities in these counties. I believe the opportunities are there, and we’ve taken the important first step of showing up. Let’s keep it going.

The sad fate of some giant Presidential heads

Mar 4th, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

It is to weep.

It is a peculiar sight – Ronald Reagan has a large mark on his damaged face, George Washington is missing a piece of his nose, William Taft has a stain trailing from his eye to cheek, Millard Fillmore has a bee’s nest inside of his nose and Abraham Lincoln has a gigantic hole in the back of his head, eerily evoking his unfortunate fate.

This is just some of the damage on a few of the 43, 20ft-tall busts of former U.S. presidents that sit shoulder-to-shoulder in the most unlikely of places – a field on a farm in rural Croaker, Virginia.

It may only be two hours away from Washington DC, but it’s a world away from the nation’s capital.

Titled the Presidents’ Heads by creator David Adickes, the larger-than-life sculptures have become an eerie sight on businessman Howard Hankins property in Croaker.

The derelict statues that weigh up to 20,000 lbs each were once part of the now-failed Presidents’ Park in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The park was a collaboration between Adickes and landowner Everette ‘Haley’ Newman. They pair opened it in 2004 with hopes that it would attract thousands of visitors yearly after they invested $10million of their own money for it.

[…]

But it did not attract the hordes of visitors they wished for partly due to its poor location behind a motel off I-64 and being located far from Colonial Williamsburg.

The Presidents’ Park shut down in 2010 with the land being sold off. Newman enlisted the help of Hankins to have the statues, worth an estimated $6.5 million in total according to Adickes, demolished.

‘When they asked me to get rid of them, I immediately starting thinking of how I could move them without destroying them,’ Hankins, who had helped to construct the Presidents Park, told Richmond.com.

Instead of demolishing them, Hankins paid $50,000 to move the busts to his 400-acre pastoral farm in Croaker for safe-keeping once he figured out what to do with them.

In 2016, Hankins came up with the idea to create his own Presidential Historic Park featuring the busts along with other attractions.

We’ve heard about this before, and it’s still sad. Long story with lots of pictures somewhat shorter, the Hankins plan didn’t work out, and the fabled Giant Presidential Heads have fallen into disrepair. The pictures are actually kind of disturbing, and more than a little sad for a dedicated fanboy like me. Demolishing them would have been a kinder fate. I suppose they could still have use as props in a dystopian future TV show or movie – I bet the Walking Dead folks could work them in – but really, they deserved better. At least there are some others that are still out there, doing their thing in a more dignified fashion.