Month: September 2020

For some, the most significant moment of the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden came when the president refused to condemn white supremacist groups and told the far-right Proud Boys organization to “stand down and stand by,” presumably for future instructions on how they should use violence against minorities and left-wing protestors.

This was certainly a disturbing moment, but hardly the only one in the hour and half debate. Yet, it warranted follow-up questions on Wednesday, and Trump tried to clean things up by denying any familiarity with the Proud Boys.

Trump spoke to reporters while leaving the White House en route to Minnesota and was asked about his muted response to Chris Wallace’s question on denouncing racist groups, plus his instruction that the Proud Boys “stand back and stand by.”

“I can only say they have to stand down and let law enforcement do their work,” Trump said. “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are, but whoever they are, they have to stand down and let law enforcement do their work.”

At this point I like to enter this week-old article into evidence.

Roger Stone, a confidant of President Donald Trump who was convicted by a federal jury of lying, obstruction of justice and witness tampering, recently endorsed a Hawaii candidate for the state House of Representatives.

Nick Ochs is running as a Republican for House District 22, which represents Waikiki, Ala Moana and Kakaako, against Adrian Tam, who unseated incumbent state Rep. Tom Brower in the Democratic primary.

Ochs is the founder of the Proud Boys of Hawaii, a far-right organization he described in a 2018 interview with Hawaii Public Radio as the political counterpunch to the Aloha State’s liberal establishment.

He said the group is a pro-gun, anti-feminist, America-first movement that supports Trump, closed borders and an end to political correctness. Ochs told HPR that while the Proud Boys are not racist they are “anti-racial guilt” and “Western chauvinist.”

Hawaii is not the ideal place to run on “anti-racial guilt” and Western chauvinism, but I’m not concerned with Mr. Ochs prospects for electoral success. The point is that Roger Stone runs with the Proud Boys and this has been no secret. Donald Trump knows exactly who these guys are and he knows their views perfectly align with his.

I know. I know. It’s not a news flash that Trump is lying again, nor that he’s a virulent and toxic racist. But I still have to point these things out from time to time.

It’s another midweek. If you are still in shellshock after the debate Tuesday night, you’re not alone.

We’ll start out with a song that seems fitting for our current times (and it’s nearly 40 years old):

Roger Waters brought the band back together (well the band from his last LP a few years ago) and did some Pink Floyd covers. I’ve always found this particular song timely. We always seem perilously close to midnight. Given the pandemic, the whole Zoom session gig format is fitting:

To the extent that we can get any comic relief at all, I am relieved that Sarah Cooper took a break from some of the cool opportunities that have come her way, and graced us with yet another one of the videos that made her famous this year:

Okay. The bar is open. Drinks are on the house. Do what you can to stay sane. I get the feeling these next few weeks will be a bumpy ride. I will be there with you. Take care, and cheers!

In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s polling lead in Pennsylvania slipped away almost imperceptibly . t never fully disappeared, making her loss by 44,292 votes a shock to prognosticators. Collectively, more than 20 distinct polling operations surveyed a Clinton/Trump matchup in the state dozens of times. From the first poll in August 2015 to the last, released on Election Day, Trump led in only three, all of which were outliers at the time they were released.

Yet, the double-digit lead Clinton typically enjoyed in late-July and early August became a high single digit lead by late-August and early-September. After that,  a the polls bounced in a narrow band until then-FBI director James Comey sent his infamous letter to Congress on October 28 announcing a reopening of the Clinton email case. Of the ten surveys i conducted entirely after the Comey letter, Clinton’s lead was three points or less in eight of them.

A May 2017 autopsy of the election by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight concluded that the Comey letter cost Clinton the election. Undecidedvoters broke heavily against her, Silver concluded. Still, on the morning of Election Day, FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a mere 11 percent chance of winning the popular vote nationwide and an 18 percent chance of winning the election. The final HuffPost forecast for Pennsylvania had Clinton leading narrowly, 45.5 to 41.4 percent.

As of the morning of September 29, 2020, the average of polls at FiveThirtyEighthas Joe Biden leading Trump in Pennsylvania by a similar 49.9 to 45.5 percent margin. Is Biden’s lead safe?

The short is answer is no. As Comey’s letter demonstrated, unexpected events late in the campaign can swing a lot of votes, and Tuesday night brings the first of four presidential and vice-presidential debates. Moreover, Clinton had a polling lead and still lost.

Yet, there are some reasons to believe that Biden’s lead is more sturdier than Clinton’s. Most obviously, Trump is no longer a hypothetical president but an incumbent with a four-year record voters can evaluate. Current surveys, including the bullish-for-Biden Washington Post-ABC News poll, show Pennsylvanians are unimpressed.

Biden’s support stands at 54 percent to Trump’s 45 percent among the Keystone State’s likely voters and 54 percent to 44 percent among its registered voters…

…Trump’s overall approval rating in the state among registered voters is 43 percent positive and 55 percent negative, with 49 percent saying they disapprove “strongly.”

An incumbent facing 49 percent strong disapproval is in real trouble.

Another troubling sign for the president is that his base isn’t quite as loyal as its #MAGA reputation. In the Washington Post-ABC poll, Pennsylvanians who voted for Trump in 2016 prefer him by 92 percent to 8 percent. But that pales in comparison to the transference of support from Clinton to Biden, which registers at 98 percent to one. The discrepancy between those two results accounts for almost the entirety of Biden’s nine-point lead with likely voters.

A closer look shows that Trump has lost support among key groups and in key regions. White Pennsylvanians without four-year college degrees went for Trump by more than 30 points in 2016 but his lead with them is now down to seventeen. Relatedly, Trump is severely underperforming in Western Pennsylvania, the region I pegged as most responsible for his surprise victory in my Washington Monthly  piece How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values. Excluding Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County, Trump carried this region four years ago by 29 points. The Washington Post-ABC poll has him leading there by three.

Trump surely hopes he can bring some of these Western Pennsylvania non-college white voters many of who are hunters back into the fold as well as more affluent suburbanites.  But they know what kind of president he is. He’s no longer just a guy they know from watching The Apprentice.

There was nothing in the 2016 election comparable to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Pennsylvanians prefer Biden 54 percent to 40 percent to tackle the issue going forward. Yet, there has been one benefit from the health crisis for the president: the Republicans have continued to knock on doors and register voters while the Democrats have not. This helps explain why the Republican Party has added 198,000 registered voters in the state since 2016 compared to only 29,000 for the Democrats.

The Washington Post-ABC News survey also gives Trump an enthusiasm advantage over Biden, which should have some impact on turnout. On the other hand, Clinton understandably had difficulty exciting the black community to the same degree as Barack Obama, but Biden relied on black support to win the nomination and chose  Kamala Harris as his running mate. If higher black turnout results, it will help offset any enthusiasm gap.

Biden’s biggest advantage over Clinton, however, is that he’s much less unpopular. In 2016, voters who disliked both candidates went heavily for Trump, but the opposite outcome has been predicted in 2020 surveys going back to the Spring.  There are many fewer undecided voters today than four years ago, but the chances are they will break heavily for Biden as they often do for challengers. This is especially true because the Democrats succeeded in having the Green Party candidate removed from the ballot in the Keystone State and other battlegrounds. In 2016, Jill Stein’s 49,941 votes exceeded the 44,292 vote separating Clinton and Trump.

In the aftermath of the 2016 debacle, Pennsylvania Democrats were split on the best approach for regaining the state in 2020. One camp believed the party needed to focus on turning out the urban/suburban base, and the other thought the losses in rural areas had to be held in check. So far, it appears that Biden is doing both at once. His strength in the affluent Philadelphia suburbs is remarkable but it also reflects nationwide Democratic strength among college educated whites:

Biden is strongest in southeastern Pennsylvania. The Post-ABC poll finds the former vice president leading Trump by more than 2 to 1 in the Philadelphia area, including its populous suburbs of Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties. Clinton won these counties together by a 14-point margin in 2016, but they have grown more Democratic since then.

 Biden’s average lead in polls (4.4 percent) in the Keystone State is not significantly larger than the lead (4.1 percent) Clinton enjoyed at the end of the 2016 race, but he looks to be in better shape.

Of course,  if Biden wins Pennsylvanis we may not know that on Election Night. According to the Washington Post-ABC News poll, nearly a third of voters intend to vote either by mail or at an early voting site. They skew heavily Democratic. The mail ballots will not be tallied in advance, and there is litigation about how late these ballots can be received and still count. This means that when results first come in, Biden may be trailing but have a huge lead in the yet-to-be-counted vote, some of which may not even have arrived yet in the mail. Expect Trump to cry foul and try to stop the counting. Unlike 2016 that might be his best chance of winning.

This, from the gang at the New York Times, is simply beautiful:

From the back seat of a stretch limousine heading to meet the first contestants for his new TV show “The Apprentice,” Donald J. Trump bragged that he was a billionaire who had overcome financial hardship.

“I used my brain, I used my negotiating skills and I worked it all out,” he told viewers. “Now, my company is bigger than it ever was and stronger than it ever was.”

It was all a hoax.

I love how they throw the president’s favorite word right back in his face by calling his entire persona a frickin’ “hoax,”

Trump wasn’t a billionaire. In fact, he was broke as fuck, having just filed an individual tax return showing “$89.9 million in net losses from his core businesses for the prior year.” The Apprentice actually saved his ass. It got great ratings and had a nice run on television, earning him hundreds of millions of dollars in income and allowing him to build up his brand and prevent the total collapse of his business empire.

This isn’t some kind of revelation to me. I figured out in 2015 that something along these lines had occurred. Over the last five years, more and more pieces were revealed that helped fill in the puzzle.

What’s almost funny is that I vaguely remember my reaction when I first saw The Apprentice. I was a bit confused because I hadn’t thought about Trump much since his Atlantic City casinos went belly-up in the early 1990’s. The last thing I remembered reading about him was about how he owed the banks so much money that they couldn’t let him go completely broke or they’d never get repaid. Growing up in the New York media market, I’d learned to really dislike the man, and I resented that he’d been bailed out and allowed to continue living the high lifestyle when ordinary people would be living in a truck under a bridge down by the river.

And, yet, a little more than ten years later, here he was presenting himself as some business genius. I wondered what I had missed.

But, truth be told, I didn’t care enough to look into it until after he declared himself a candidate for president and started doing well in the polls. Even before that, I’d learned a bit more about the basics from people who were angry about his whole Obama birth certificate schtick. For example, I knew Trump University had been a giant scam well before it ran into legal trouble.

When I started to look into his businesses myself, it quickly became obvious that he’d reimagined his business model so that instead of building things, he simply got paid for the use of his name. This worked out a lot better for him than trying to run a profitable operation because he didn’t have to do any work beyond the licensing agreements. But it was a weird deal, because people were associating his name with wealth and luxury, and paying for it. But he never actually made money doing anything except pretending to make a lot of money.

I almost admired the way he pulled this scam off, except that he’d revealed himself to be a racist crank and he didn’t just use his name to sell condos. He also used it to bilk people out of their money by, for example, paying tuition to his fake university to learn real estate tips from a guy who lost several fortunes in real estate.

I know they are some people who love Trump and will always love him, but it’s nice to see the truth about him revealed, and revealed in actual tax documents. I consider it a small victory every time someone sees this information and for the first time understands that Trump is a scam artist.

His whole life and image has been a giant hoax, and those who have eyes to see can now see.

Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is a towering six foot eight inches tall, and he beats his spouse. That’s clear from the police report on a Sunday incident at “the $2.4 million home he shares in Fort Lauderdale’s Seven Isles with his wife, Candice.”

Officers also wrote in their reports that Parscale’s wife told them he had post-traumatic stress disorder and had become violent in recent weeks. Candice Parscale, 41, showed them bruises on her arms from an argument two days prior, they said. Police say they took photos of injuries.

“While speaking with Candace Parscale I noticed several large sized contusions on both of her arms, her cheek and forehead,” wrote Detective Steven Smith, slightly misspelling her first name. “When I asked how she received the bruising, Candace Parscale stated Brad Parscale hits her.”

Parscale’s wife told them her husband had not hit her Sunday, but had smacked her phone out of her hand when she tried to call his father.

Parscale was having a bad day, but it got worse after he locked and loaded a gun during an argument with Candice and she responded by fleeing the home.

Officers say they were first called to the Parscale home around 3:36 p.m. Sunday by a neighbor who’d encountered Candice Parscale. When they arrived, police said the two women were in a parked car outside the couple’s home. Officers said Parscale’s wife told them the couple had been arguing and her husband had pulled out a handgun and loaded it.

She also told him that he was suicidal and may have fired the gun as she was leaving, but he was still alive because she had heard him “ranting and pacing around the residence.”

Reached by phone inside the home, he sounded drunk and defiant, but he eventually emerged into the driveway smelling of alcohol with a beer in his hand. Then things got ugly.

In reports released Monday, police documented a tense scene in which Parscale — after possibly firing a shot inside his house — refused to leave and was ultimately tackled by SWAT officers on his driveway when he emerged shirtless with a beer in his hand.

“I initiated a double leg take down,” wrote Sgt. Matthew Moceri, one of the responding officers.

I have sympathy for the mentally ill and would never joke about suicide, but I have no pity for wife-beaters. Brad Parscale is a garbage human being, and he’s been involuntarily committed at Broward Health Medical Center for his own safety.

Of course, the Trump campaign blames this all on liberals and Never Trumpers.

Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, wished Parscale well Sunday and blamed Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans for the incident.

“Brad Parscale is a member of our family and we all love him,” Murtaugh said. “We are ready to support him and his family in any way possible. The disgusting, personal attacks from Democrats and disgruntled RINOs have gone too far, and they should be ashamed of themselves for what they’ve done to this man and his family.”

To repeat, the only disgusting thing here is that a 6’8″ man would lay his hands on a woman. But that’s not why Parscale was fired by the campaign. He was enriching himself to a ludicrous degree with money from Trump’s campaign, and that didn’t sit well with the president or, no doubt his numerous creditors, which no doubt includes Russian mafia members.

For Parscale, who just a few years ago was designing websites in San Antonio for Trump’s properties, among other clients, the sudden wealth has afforded him a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a pair of million-dollar condos, a brand new $400,000 boat, and another half-million dollars in luxury cars, including a Range Rover and a Ferrari.

It’s a mystery why Trump allowed Parscale to steal from him so flagrantly for so long, but now he can strong-arm the money back if he wants to. All he has to do is tell Boris and Ivan to collect his debts from his dismissed campaign manager, and perhaps they paid him a visit to do exactly that. That could make any man suicidal, although it’s no reason to pull a gun on your wife.

Politico helpfully enlists a Facebook executive to explain that conservative content is more widely shared on the social media platform because Nazis are popular.

But Facebook says there’s a reason why right-wing figures are driving more engagement. It’s not that its algorithm favors conservatives — the company has long maintained that its platform is neutral. Instead, the right is better at connecting with people on a visceral level, it says.

Now, you might be saying to yourself that this has nothing to do with Nazis, but they clear that up for us.

“Right-wing populism is always more engaging,” a Facebook executive said in a recent interview with POLITICO reporters, when pressed why the pages of conservatives drive such high interactions. The person said the content speaks to “an incredibly strong, primitive emotion” by touching on such topics as “nation, protection, the other, anger, fear.”

“That was there in the [19]30’s. That’s not invented by social media — you just see those reflexes mirrored in social media, they’re not created by social media,” the executive added.

In case you’re still confused, “Right-wing populism” from the 1930’s is commonly known as fascism, specifically Hitler and Mussolini’s variety of murderous assholes. So, this executive is saying that Facebook didn’t invest Nazis and Nazis are dominating Facebook because humans beings are just absolute garbage by nature.

“It’s why tabloids do better than the [Financial Times], and it’s also a human thing. People respond to engaging emotion much more than they do to, you know, dry coverage. …This wasn’t invented 15 years ago when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook.”

As for Zuckerberg, the customer always comes first:

Facebook employees have challenged Zuckerberg in company-wide Q&A’s on these topics and the CEO has pushed back against his progressive workforce.

“The community we serve tends to be, on average, ideologically a little bit more conservative than our employee base,” Zuckerberg said during one such forum on June 18, according to a report this week from The Verge. “Maybe ‘a little’ is an understatement…If we want to actually do a good job of serving people, [we have to take] into account that there are different views on different things, and that if someone disagrees with a view, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re hateful or have bad intent.”

I wasn’t raised to do a “good job of serving” Nazis. The veterans I met growing up didn’t talk much about the war, but they were clear on what their job was. I never questioned the worth of that job, and I still don’t.

Maybe it’s true that right-wing populism is “engaging.” I don’t find that a compelling excuse for letting them take over the world. For me, it just means the battle to contain them is never easy.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Jerome, Arizona. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now painted over most of my pencil sketch. You can get an idea of how I will handle this. It feels to me like this will have a nice sense of distance. More to come next week.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has earned a reputation for efficiently pushing through the Trump administration’s nominations, despite often vociferous opposition from the Democrats. This week, however, he moved through two Trump nominees who had more support from the minority party than from his own. The two votes are illustrative of the sorry state of bipartisanship in our nation’s capital.

In the summer of 1991, John Charles Hinderaker was a junior lifeguard instructor for the Parks & Recreation Department in Santa Barbara, California. He’d later work as an errand runner, a busboy, a warehouse laborer, a substitute teacher and a car salesman at a Nissan dealership. As of September 23, he’s a confirmed judge, awaiting his commission on the U.S. District of Arizona. It’s a reminder that hard work can pay off, but Hinderaker’s case is interesting for another reason: he’s a Democrat.

Born in 1968, Hinderaker graduated from the University of California-Santa Barbara in 1991 and the University of Arizona College of Law in 1996. He clerked for two Arizona District Court judges before going into private practice. In 2018, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey appointed him to the Pima County Superior Court.

In May 2019, shortly after a Judge Rader Collins took senior status on the District of Arizona Court, Hinderaker was approached by staffers for U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). They were looking for someone to recommend to President Trump to fill the vacancy.

Sen. Sinema had some credibility with the Trump administration, particularly after she took heated criticism for signing off on the nomination of Michael Liburdi, a former general counsel to Gov. Ducey known for his legal challenge to Arizona’s independent redistricting commission and his controversial work with Protect the Vote AZ.

As Matthew Brown of Deseret News reports, the Protect the Vote campaign in Arizona is aimed at reducing turnout among Native Americans and Latinos.

The Republican National Committee launched its Protect the Vote campaign…to counter efforts by the Democratic Party to expand vote by mail, ballot collecting and other measures that would make voting more accessible…

… [Ballot collecting] has a cultural component among the Native American voters who approach voting as a community effort. “There’s a lot of distrust among the indigenous people toward government,” said Democratic state Sen. Sally Ann Gonzales, of Tucson and a member of Pasqua Yaqui Tribe. But “people trust their neighbors, their family members, to help them mail or turn in their ballot” if they can’t do it themselves.

Over the years, thousands of ballots have been collected by volunteers in Latino and Native American communities and delivered to voting locations as it became an effective get-out-the-vote strategy for Democrats. which eventually caught the attention of GOP lawmakers, like state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who sponsored HB2023, restricting and criminalizing the practice.

Despite his voter suppression actions, Liburdi was confirmed in July 2019, in a 53-37 vote, with only Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Doug Jones of Alabama joining Sinema in support.

Armed with this good will, Sinema successfully lobbied President Trump to nominate Hinderaker. It probably helped that Hinderaker had made political contributions to candidates for both parties and was appointed to the Pima County court by Gov. Ducey, which gave him some bipartisan credibility.

Nonetheless, when the roll call on his confirmation was held in the U.S. Senate, 25 Republicans voted against him.

Jocelyn Frances Samuels received degrees from Middlebury College (1977) and Columbia University Law School (1982) before serving as labor counsel to former Sen. Edward Kennedy. During the Obama administration, she served as director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health & Human Services and as acting assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice. She’s now executive director of The Williams Institute at UCLA, a think tank that “conducts independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy.”

On September 23, Samuels was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to a Democrat-reserved seat on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC is a five-member body responsible for enforcing laws on hiring discrimination and sexual harassment. With the confirmation of Samuels, it is fully staffed for the first time in the Trump administration.

According to Bloomberg Law, the Senate Democrats sent Samuels’ name to the White House in December 2019, but they dragged their feet on nominating her to the Commission.

Minority-party seats on the EEOC have traditionally been run through Democratic Senate leadership before being announced by the White House. The sources familiar with that process said all that remains is for the White House to make an announcement, but the timeline was not immediately clear…

The delay wasn’t solely intended to keep the EEOC understaffed and ineffective.

Samuels’ background as an LGBT rights advocate could create hurdles to confirmation in the Republican-majority Senate. Former EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum was nominated for a third term with the agency when a small group of Republican lawmakers led by Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Mike Lee (Utah) blocked her nomination, citing concerns about Feldblum’s ability to balance religious freedom and LGBT rights. Feldblum in January decided to not pursue another term.

The Senate HELP committee didn’t receive her nomination until March 16, 2020, and ultimately only eight Republican senators supported her confirmation. As expected, Sens. Rubio and Lee voted against her.

It shouldn’t be so hard to get consensus in the Senate.  Hinderaker was chosen as a judge by both a Republican governor and, in a rare gesture at bipartisanism, a Republican president. Yet, Senate Republicans were still split 27-25 on his nomination, with opponents objecting simply because Hinderaker is known as a Democrat and was suggested by a Democratic colleague.

Meanwhile, the EEOC seat was reserved for the minority, so opposing Samuel’s nomination served little purpose other than signaling opposition to gay rights. Forty-two of fifty voting Republican senators opposed her nomination, despite her clear qualifications for the position.

Even on the rare occasions when Trump and McConnell do something semi-normal that the Democrats can support, rank-and-file Republicans can’t abide it. As long as this kind of reflexive partisanship remains the norm, consensus in Washington will remain elusive.

Hi photo lovers.

It’s that time again. I really haven’t been out the way I normally would be, so fresh images are a bit harder to come by. A while back, before everything got too tropical, I made some efforts to get outside. Never quite enough. I am hoping we really are hitting fall weather. Until then, here is a shot I took of some railroad tracks near the riverfront where I live.

I am still using my same equipment, and am no professional. If you are an avid photographer, regardless of your skills and professional experience, you are in good company here. Booman Tribune was blessed with very talented photographers in the past. At Progress Pond, we seem to have a few talented photographers now, a few of whom seem to be lurking I suppose.

I have been using an LG v40 ThinQ for almost two years. It seems to serve me well, for now, but I know that the lives of these devices are limited. Most of my family seems to be gravitating toward iPhones, so I suspect I may eventually have to succumb and go to the Dark Side of The Force. In a recessionary environment, my default is to avoid major purchases for as long as possible. So, unless something really goes wrong with my current phone, I’ll stick to the status quo for as long as possible. Keep in mind that my last Samsung kept going for over four years (the last year was a bit touch and go). Once I do have to make a new smart phone purchase, the camera feature is the one I consider most important. So any advice on such matters is always appreciated. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters seems to have commandeered it. So it goes.

This series of posts is in honor of a number of our ancestors. At one point, there were some seriously great photographers who graced Booman Tribune with their work. They are all now long gone. I am the one who carries the torch. I keep this going because I know that one day I too will be gone, and I really want the work that was started long ago to continue, rather than fade away with me. If I see that I am able to incite a few others to fill posts like these with photos, then I will be truly grateful. In the meantime, enjoy the photos, and I am sure between Booman and myself we can pass along quite a bit of knowledge about the photo flog series from its inception back during the Booman Tribune days.

Since this post usually runs only a day, I will likely keep it up for a while. Please share your work. I am convinced that us amateurs are extremely talented. You will get nothing but love and support here. I mean that. Also, when I say that you don’t have to be a photography pro, I mean that as well. I am an amateur. This is my hobby. This is my passion. I keep these posts going only because they are a passion. If they were not, I would have given up a long time ago. My preference is to never give up.

Peace.

As of September 24, FiveThirtyEight has Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in Texas by 1.7 points. A perusal of recent surveys shows a tied race in the Lone Star state. When either candidate leads, it is within the margin of error. As I wrote in June 2019, the contours of American politics will be permanently changed if Texas turns blue, and conservatives see the danger.

That’s the backdrop for understanding why the Texas Republican Party is suing its own governor in an effort to curtail early and mail-in voting.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is facing a lawsuit over his extension of early voting for the November election from prominent members of his own party — including state party Chair Allen West, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and members of the Texas Legislature.

In July, Abbott added six days to the early voting period, moving the start date up to Oct. 13 from Oct. 19, citing the coronavirus pandemic. In the lawsuit, filed Wednesday with the state Supreme Court, Abbott’s intraparty critics say the move defied election law that requires early voting to start on the 17th day before the election.

It is the latest legal challenge to Abbott’s emergency powers, which he has wielded aggressively in dealing with the pandemic.

As Texas Monthly explains, Gov. Abbott also changed an odd provision that prevents voters from submitting their early ballots to a voting clerk before Election Day. Abbott made this drop-off option available throughout the early voting period and the lawsuit challenges him on this front as well.

These accommodations to the COVID-19 pandemic should modestly increase turnout, but Democrats wanted to make voting even easier. In another uniquely Texas twist, only those 65 and older can vote-by-mail by default When the Dems tried to extend this privilege to all Texans, the state Supreme Court rejected their arguments.

With Trump running even with Biden, the Texas GOP opposes Abbott’s effort to boost voter participation. Looser voting restrictions would likely mean more young and minority voters, endangering not only the president but opening the door for big Democratic gains in the state. Sen. John Cornyn, the Republican, is up for reelection and several House seats are ripe to flip blue.

The Senate race between Cornyn and Air Force veteran MJ Hegar looks only modestly competitive in the polls, but the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) has invested heavily, indicating they think the seat is winnable. Perhaps, their optimism is bolstered by what Ally Mutnick of Politico described as “staggeringly high Democratic turnout in the Texas suburbs” in the March primary.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is targeting 10 Republican-held House seats, five of which are rated Lean Democratic or toss-up by the Cook Political Report. Two more are in their Lean Republican category. In the unlikely event the Democrats win all seven competitive contests, the Texas congressional delegation will go from 23 Republicans and 13 Democrats to 20 Democrats and 16 Republicans.

Democrats might even win control of the Texas House of Representatives – a seismic achievement because they would have a big say in the 2020 Census redistricting process. The state party is targeting nine Republican-held districts carried by Beto O’Rourke in his 2018 Senate race against Ted Cruz and Democrats, which is the same number of seats they need to have a majority.

Texas Republican Party chairman Allen West, a former Florida congressman and favorite of the Tea Party, is therefore facing political Armageddon. A Trump defeat in Texas would be bad, but unlikely to affect the outcome of the national election. Cornyn’s Senate seat in more important, however, as is the party’s majority in the state’s congressional delegation. Worst of all, would be having to negotiate with Democrats over the drawing of new state and federal district lines. The GOP’s current losses are happening despite very favorable maps. Fairer districts would compound the Republicans’ problems, especially with the blue drift in the suburbs and the ever-increasing diversity of the electorate.

Abbott understands this, and he opposed the Democrats’ efforts to increase absentee voting. But even his modest efforts to help Texans vote in a time of COVID are too much for the state party. So, it’s understandable that West is suing his own governor in an effort to suppress turnout. Trump’s unexpected weakness in the Lone Star State is putting the party at risk a wipeout, and it might not be something they can recover from down the line.