A Teachable Moment re: Who's Allowed to say Mean Things about Abbott

"Do not be deceived: 'Evil company corrupts good habits.' "
1 Corinthians 15:33

For those who aren't aware, last week Empower Texans accidentally released an outtake from their podcast that included some R-rated (although factually accurate) comments about Governor Abbott's recent job performance.  The comments were certainly in poor taste.  Regrettable, tacky, etc.  That being said, the comments in question aren't anything anyone wearing big boy pants hasn't heard before.

Of course, this hasn't stopped the caterwauling banshees of insincere outrage from taking advantage of the situation.

That's fine, you can't really blame them for exploiting an opportunity that fell into their lap.

This morning, however, a certain columnist from the Houston Chronicle got in on the act:

Grieder: Texas GOP needs to separate itself from heavy-handed activists at Empower Texans

Erica GriederJune 24, 2020 Updated: June 24, 2020 6:44 a.m.

Grieder's column is a fairly boring act of concern trolling. You're welcome to read it for yourself. But, Greider's claims to have engaged in original reporting over a meeting that's been public knowledge for almost a year notwithstanding, her column contains nothing new.

Here's what's so gobsmacking about the situation: Erica Greider, in the not very distant past, has done the exact same thing.

Erica Greider used to be one of the higher-ups at Texas Monthly. In 2016, she left that position under bizarre circumstances. Whether she was fired or she quit has never truly been resolved. Either way, the details of who initiated her departure aren't relevant except to the degree to which they highlight the oddness of the whole situation.

Once she departed from Texas Monthly, you'll never believe who Erica Greider went after while using some grown up language:

[Note: This tweet log is in reverse chronological order.]

There you have it.  Two situations.  Both involving irritation with Abbott.  Both, probably regrettably, producing some strong language.

The difference, of course, is that only one of these incidents begot howls of phony outrage.

It's almost like the issue has nothing to with saying mean things about Greg Abbott and everything to do with who opposes bidness as usual.

Or is that too cynical?!?

Bottom Line:  Last week's comments were obviously not good, but for someone who's done the exact same thing to condescendingly lecture the rest of us speaks volumes about how government in this state operates.

A tale of two legislative assessment tools....

"Wisdom rests in the heart of him who has understanding,
But what is in the heart of fools is made known."
Proverbs 14:33

Over the past few days, we've seen the release of the 84th #TXLEGE edition of Texas Monthly's Best and Worst lists and Empower Texans' scorecard; the reactions were revealing.

Texas Monthly's heirloom rankings were essentially ignored.  While a few people (including this author) congratulated Jonathan Stickland on making the worst list, nobody else said much.  The reaction was subdued, even within Austin.

By contrast, when Empower Texans released their scorecard this morning, they were immediately attacked by a sitting government official:

Relevancy of any scorecard is what u make it.For the good of Texas keep doing ur job and majority will send u back.Truth wins out #txlege

— Jim Keffer (@RepJimKeffer) June 22, 2015

Unlike Texas Monthly's subjective intellectual solipsism, Empower Texans data-driven analysis is calculated upon dozens of record votes.  Their scorecard is a coherent picture of where the legislature stands on their issues.  It's the difference between a scout's opinion and Moneyball.

One final note on Texas Monthly's list: it was boring.  They could have picked out legislators that at least took interesting stands during the session.  Not that'd we'd agree, but where were Gio or Sarah Davis on the best list?!?  What about Don Huffines on the worst?!?  If you're looking to cure insomnia, the editors explain their picks here.

Legacy media's decline is apparent.  Lawmakers' votes are a sounder basis for analysis than a gatekeeper's whim.  One reflects truth, the other kabuki theater.  The 84th #TXLEGE saw alternative media reach a critical mass.  One measure will be forgotten by Wednesday; the other will influence voters.

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Fun Fact:

- Average Empower Texans Score TM 10 Best: 54.5
- Average Empower Texans Score TM 10 Worst: 77.1

Astonishing Movement on Tuition Deregulation

"Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord,
But a just weight is His delight."
Proverbs 11:1

Suddenly, there's real momentum to repeal one of the more noxious pieces of legislation in recent memory:

In 2003, the Texas Legislature voted to deregulate tuition and allow universities to set their own tuition rates free from legislative oversight. At the time, supporters of the move argued that deregulation would drive students to consider which university offered the best educational value for their dollar and force schools to compete on the basis of quality and affordability. While the underlying concept of deregulation makes sense in more traditional free markets, proponents of the law in Texas failed to take a key factor into account: the explosion of readily accessible student loan debt.

Student loans now represent the nation's second largest source of debt, surpassing credit card debt and second only to mortgages. Federal student loan disbursements in Texas have nearly doubled over the past decade, and the average student borrower in Texas now graduates with over $24,000 of student loan debt. Since these loans are so difficult to discharge in bankruptcy, they’ve become one of the safest investments a lender can make.

Student loan companies are well aware of the insatiable demand for their product and, absent the hazard of losing money on a bad investment, are motivated to issue as much debt as a student is capable of assuming.

These easily accessible student loans can disassociate students from the true cost of their education and prevent them from appropriately scrutinizing the realistic value of that education. When you couple a limitless demand for higher education with a limitless supply of money to finance that education, you're no longer dealing with a free-market system.

....

The unintended consequences of tuition deregulation continue to shortchange Texas students. By providing public universities the flexibility to set their own rates, the Texas Legislature has essentially given them a perverse incentive to increase tuition and fees as the simplest means of expanding their own operating budgets. In the fall of 2003, a resident undergraduate attending class full time paid $1,934 per semester in tuition and fees. A decade later, the same student owed an average of $3,951 per semester. Since 2003, tuition and fees at Texas public universities have more than doubled, and designated tuition (the portion of tuition set directly by the universities) has increased an astounding 222 percent. Are we really expected to believe that the value of an undergraduate degree is worth twice what it was only a decade ago?

Texas Monthly has more:

In Schwertner’s analysis, rising tuition costs aren’t the only ill effect of tuition deregulation; also salient are rising debt burdens among student borrowers. The latter trend is salient, and deserves attention, because student debt is so often a burden for the borrower. And, as Schwertner argues, easy access to student loans helps explain why deregulation is a dangerous approach to higher education. In a traditional free market system, consumer decisions are driven by a number of factors, including prices. Heavily promoted (and sometimes subsidized) education loans distort those signals, especially when the borrowers are 18 year olds raised to believe that a college education is crucial to their success.

We'll take it!!!

Quorum Report, Erica Greider flush their credibility

"Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord,
But a just weight is His delight."
Proverbs 11:1

Last week, TPPF released a report "The Real Texas Budget," that detailed current fiscal realities in Texas.  The report used two distinct metrics to measure the profligacy of the 83rd Texas Legislature.  On cue, Quorum Report deliberately confused the two metrics:

The conservative think tank in Austin where Midland oilman Tim Dunn is Vice Chairman of the board on Tuesday released a report saying that Texas state government spending saw a 9 percent increase over the previous biennium.

In their new report, which you can see here, the Texas Public Policy Foundation said their analysts looked at the finished budget and did comparisons going back to 2004.

The 9 percent figure is, of course, far less than their previous estimate of as much as a 26 percent increase in state spending that was splashed on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal under the headline “Texas Goes Sacramento” and was repeated ad nauseam by Tea Party candidates running against establishment Republicans in the recent primaries and runoffs.

Erica Grieder (*) of Texas Monthly went further:

Lurking on the fringes, however, were a group of conservatives clamoring that the budget actually represented a 26 percent increase in spending for 2014-15 compared to 2012-13. That figure was a blatant misrepresentation, but one that gained a fair amount of traction, especially after the Wall Street Journal published an editorial, in June, harrumphing that the 26 percent surge in state spending amounted to a California-style spending spree that would put Texas on the road to serfdom. Opposition to the budget became a litmus test among conservatives, a factor that would be heavily weighed in the report cards some of them are elected to represent.

Where did the 26 percent figure come from? Well, it came from the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The same Texas Public Policy Foundation that just released a report estimating that state spending will increase 9 percent in the next biennium.

In other words, TPPF is now disavowing its own earlier analysis.

 Of course, TPPF did no such thing, as they explain:

Due to variations in the way money is spent and data availability, multiple metrics might be used. We might, for instance, compare appropriations to appropriations or spending to spending.

There’s an important point here, in that appropriations and spending are not the same thing.The former is what a Legislature approves to be spent, and the latter is how much taxpayer money is actually spent. A credible comparison of an adopted budget alone — that is, appropriations — against actual spending from the previous cycle is not made, because the state almost always spends more during a two-year budget cycle than the appropriated amount.

Advocates of more spending like to compare different numbers over differing time spans to make their growth rates look artificially smaller.

....

The first is session vs. session: measuring the appropriations from one legislative session to the next. TPPF employed this method in May and June 2013 to expose the 83rd Legislature’s heavy bias toward spending. That Legislature’s problems actually started with its predecessor, 2011’s 82nd Legislature, which by delaying education payments and underfunding Medicaid, gave the impression that legislators spent conservatively. In fact, they merely pushed spending into the 2013 session. We sounded the alarm on this back in 2011, writing in the Austin American-Statesman that the 82nd Legislature’s “budget writers had to rely heavily on gimmicks and one-time fixes.” We also noted then that legislators passed up key opportunities to make state budgeting more transparent and understandable to the ordinary Texan.

In 2013’s 83rd Legislature, legislators passed supplemental bills to backfill spending into the previous budget period, and undo the accounting gimmicks of 2011.

As we published last June and republished this week, the appropriations approved by the 83rd Legislature in 2013, including the backfill money, were significantly higher than the appropriations approved back in 2011; 24 percent higher in state general revenue and almost 26 percent higher in all funds, using the Legislative Budget Board’s (LBB) latest numbers.

That's a tremendous increase by any standard.

The second metric taxpayers may find useful is comparing spending on a biennium vs. biennium basis. This is the method legislators generally use to evaluate the growth of state budgets — not least because it often yields smaller numbers that may be less shocking to taxpayers. TPPF’s “Real Texas Budget” report includes this metric.

[Emphasis added]

In other words, the reason the session over session (rather than biennium over biennium) number is more accurate is because a big chunk of the 26% spending increase was buried in those supplementals.  That budget gimmick allowed lawmakers to claim they "only" increased spending 9%.  But, of course, if the people have accurate information about the budget, it could upset the crony party in Austin....

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* -- In the original post, we misspelled Erica Grieder's last name, we apologize and have fixed the post:

@cahnman @quorumreport @TPPF @morgslw @Michellebbz That's not how my name is spelled.
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) June 10, 2014

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Update: If you have ten minutes, TPPF's Bill Peacock does a great overview:

#Stand4Life During #SXSW

SXSW Interactive has proposed a panel about social media during Texas' recent abortion debate.  This could be an awesome event that draws from both sides.  For this to go down, however, you need to click through the link and vote for the thumb's up button on the top left corner.

The Unruly Mob Would Like to Comment

When the Texas Legislature took up abortion legislation, planned and spontaneous social media filled the Capitol with thousands of activists and delivered a global participatory audience. Celebrities tweeted as an 11-hour filibuster approached a midnight deadline, joined by fake Twitter accounts, YouTube, viral memes, livestreaming, guerrilla wifi hotspots, Taiwan animation, secret Facebook groups, Google+ Hangouts, new songs, merchandise, competing Wikipedia edits, dueling commentators, inappropriate touching, women in chains, alleged terrorist sightings, tampon confiscation, Hail Satan chanting, attempted use of a smartphone as an official timepiece, humorous Amazon product reviews for the filibuster shoes, conflicting timestamps, suffragettes, pizza, and vomit. The Internet had it all. Did it make a difference? Hear battle-tested techniques you can use from those in opposing trenches and in between.

Highlights:

• Dewhurst's tweet "ignited the opposition."

• #STAND4LIFE got bigger than Dewhurst's staff anticipated.

• "Use Twitter to push people to other platforms."

To see this panel, you first need to click through this link, then follow the instructions.

Again, click here.

Erica Greider's Tweets

“Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. ¹⁴ Because^[a] narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it."
Matthew 7:13-14

“But why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do the things which I say? ⁴⁷ Whoever comes to Me, and hears My sayings and does them, I will show you whom he is like: ⁴⁸ He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently against that house, and could not shake it, for it was founded on the rock.^{[a] 49} But he who heard and did nothing is like a man who built a house on the earth without a foundation, against which the stream beat vehemently; and immediately it fell.^[b] And the ruin of that house was great.”
Luke 6:46-49

"And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."
John 3:19

As the blogger who witnessed the Hail Satan chants, multiple people have sent us copies of tweets from Texas Monthly Senior Editrix Erica Greider:

@jpodhoretz @bdomenech I really can't make out the chant. *Maybe* that 1 girl at the end. But isn't sharia law the new satan worship?
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) July 3, 2013

@powellnyt that's what I thought, but this will probably be a full-blown right-wing meme by tomorrow morning
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) July 3, 2013

@JonAshDaniels @BDayspring @powellnyt @sunnyright In general, I don't think people should judge any group by one member thereof (#radical)
— EricaGrieder (@EricaGrieder) July 3, 2013

Cahnman's Musings has nothing to say about the politics of Mrs. Grieder's tweets; Erica Greider's politics speaks for itself.  We met her last January and found her to be diligent and fair.  Mrs. Greider's tweets, however, illustrate the spiritual reality behind this legislative fight.

The day after Wendy Davis' filibuster, we wrote about the spiritual deception driving most of the pro-abortion crowd.  Mrs. Grieder's tweets are an example of that deception.  If Mrs. Grieder understood Satan, she wouldn't joke about him.

A Hollywood film, the Ususal Suspects, explains it well:



Mrs. Grieder might not believe Satan exists, but what if she's wrong?!?

During the 7th century B.C., the Prophet Jeremiah wrote:

God’s Warning Rejected

¹² And they said, “That is hopeless! So we will walk according to our own plans, and we will every one obey the dictates of his evil heart.”
¹³ Therefore thus says the Lord:

“Ask now among the Gentiles,
Who has heard such things?
The virgin of Israel has done a very horrible thing.
¹⁴ Will a man leave the snow water of Lebanon,
Which comes from the rock of the field?
Will the cold flowing waters be forsaken for strange waters?
¹⁵ “Because My people have forgotten Me,
They have burned incense to worthless idols.
And they have caused themselves to stumble in their ways,
From the ancient paths,
To walk in pathways and not on a highway,
¹⁶ To make their land desolate and a perpetual hissing;
Everyone who passes by it will be astonished
And shake his head.
¹⁷ I will scatter them as with an east wind before the enemy;
I will show them^[a] the back and not the face
In the day of their calamity.”

 Cahnman's Musings finds it tragic that Mrs. Grieder buys into the same spiritual deception as all the other orange shirt people.  That deception manifests itself in a misplaced pride that suggests there is a constitutional right to consequence free sex.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  You're free to engage in sexual activity, but if that sexual activity results in the creation of new life, then that new life deserves legal protection.  Cahnman's Musings urges Mrs. Grieder to repent of such absurdities while she can.

The bottom line for Mrs. Grieder, just like everyone, is that God loves her.  God loves her so much that He sent His only Son to die a sacrificial death for her on a Roman Cross.  It's a free gift, but she has to say yes.  If she says yes, she will receive God's Holy Spirit who will bring spiritual understanding.  The Holy Spirit can certainly clarify any misconceptions about why Satan is bad, why there is no constitutional right to sex without consequences, and why new life resulting from sexual activity deserves legal protection Mrs. Greider might have.

Or Mrs. Greider could consciously reject a Loving God in favor of the empty philosophies of this world; it's her eternity, not ours.... 

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More information here.