Michelle Davis writes a blog called Lone Star Left, where she opines on the struggle to reverse the hold of fascists on the state of Texas. She previously reported on the state convention of the Texas GOP, which cherishes the “right to life” for fetuses but wants to impose the death penalty on women who seek or obtain an abortion. Women who want an abortion apparently have NO right to life.
In this post, Davis reports on the Texas Democratic Party platform, which is the polar opposite of the GOP. She loves it!
She writes:
Okay, we’re finally to it. The Texas Democratic Party Platform and the proposed changes went through the Platform Committee. The Texas Democratic Party (TDP) platform is a critical document that outlines the party’s values, principles, and policy goals. It serves as a roadmap for Democratic candidates and elected officials, providing a clear vision for the future of Texas. The platform reflects the collective voice of party members and sets the agenda for the party’s legislative priorities.
The platform also plays a significant role in mobilizing voters. It provides a comprehensive guide to what the Democratic Party stands for, making it easier for voters to understand its positions on critical issues. (Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.)
If you missed the previous articles about the TDP’s updated rules and resolutions:
- Key Rule Changes at the Texas Democratic Party’s 2024 Convention
- Equality, Inclusivity, And Justice: Inside the Texas Democratic Party’s Resolutions
Personally, I love the Texas Democratic Party Platform and have kept up with its evolution over the years. The previous platform is online, which you can see here:
Loving a party platform? That’s weird.
Earlier this week, I was mindlessly scrolling on TikTok, and I came across some dipshit from Los Angeles who has several hundred thousand followers; her video was all about how “both parties are the same,” and she was discouraging people from voting. The privileged position of living in a blue state, right?
People like this piss me off because NO Democrats and Republicans are not the same.
While the Republican Party of Texas debated giving women who have abortions the death penalty, this week, the Texas Democratic Party added a platform plank that says, “Restore the right of all Texans to make personal and responsible decisions about reproductive health.”
Republicans want unfettered end-stage capitalism with no healthcare, no public education, no Social Security, no Medicaid, and vast wealth inequality. Democrats want universal healthcare, well-funded public education, robust social safety nets, and economic equality.
The Texas Democratic Party platform is a testament to our commitment to creating a fairer, more just society for all Texans. Seeing such misinformation spread online is frustrating, especially when it can lead to voter apathy. However, our platform represents a clear and progressive vision for the future.
It’s a comprehensive document outlining our priorities for a better Texas. We must continue to show these differences between the blue and the red to counteract the cynicism and misinformation that is prevalent today.
What are some of the positive highlights?
Education:
The platform changes maintained the emphasis on protecting and improving Texas public education. They also retained strong language prohibiting school choice scams, such as using vouchers, including special education vouchers, and opposed these programs. The platform kept the requirement that every class have a teacher certified to teach that subject. It clarified that teachers should not be expected to provide financial support through classroom supplies and other essentials at their own expense.
Some of the planks I thought were good:
- Oppose discriminatory policies affecting special education funding. (It’s an ongoing problem in the Republican-led legislature.)
- Offer dual credit and early college programs that draw at-risk students into vocational, technical, and collegiate careers.
- Ensure all public school children are provided free school meals.
Higher education:
The TDP platform includes several favorable planks in higher education to make college more accessible and affordable. These include advocating for student loan debt relief, providing free college tuition for low-income qualified students, and offering paid internships and debt-free apprenticeship programs. Additionally, the platform supports eliminating standardized testing requirements like the SAT and ACT for college admissions.
Voting and elections:
The platform supports electronic voting systems that utilize paper backups and an auditable paper trail, ensuring election integrity. This particular plank led to some debate. While some supported it for ensuring election integrity, others were wary of potential vulnerabilities and preferred more traditional voting methods. Ultimately, it passed.
Another fundamental plank supported the establishment of a limit on campaign donations in Texas elections to ensure fairness and transparency. We badly need campaign finance reform in Texas. Democrats see this need and are taking it seriously.
They also supported establishing a code of judicial ethics for the Supreme Court of the United States and efforts to recalibrate the court by tying the number of justices to the number of federal circuit courts (13).
The Case For Expanding The Supreme Court
·FEB 14 Read full story
Healthcare:
If you missed my previous article, the Texas Democratic Party Resolution supports universal healthcare. This has also been part of their platform for several years. Unfortunately, we’re still fighting for basic healthcare access in Texas, so it’s a part of the Texas Democratic Party platform that doesn’t get enough attention.
Here are some (not all) other interesting planks added this year:
- Protect doctors and hospitals from politically motivated attacks that hinder them from providing the best care possible.
- Legalize and expand access to harm reduction supports such as fentanyl testing strips, Narcan, and safe syringe programs.
- Support policies that reduce pollution and protect clean air and water.
- Ensure that veterans have access to high-quality mental health services and support for substance use disorders.
Reproductive healthcare:
We all know what the GOP is doing. Besides restoring the right of Texans to make personal and responsible decisions about reproductive health, other new TDP platform planks include:
- Protect the right to access in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment.
- Uphold the right to travel to another state for legal medical services.
- Offer comprehensive, age-appropriate sex education.
- Hold medical providers accountable for withholding information about a pregnancy based on their presumption that the pregnancy would be terminated.
- Safeguard reproductive health and gender-based care patient privacy, including protection from law enforcement.
The environment and climate.
Sometimes, I wonder if we spend enough time talking about this issue. It’s terrible right now, and the next several months could bring devastating weather.
Issues regarding the environment and climate change are life-threatening, and with Texas being the number one producer of greenhouse emissions in America, it’s an issue that Texans should take very seriously.
The new planks, which add to the TDP’s previous commitments to clean energy, address many of these concerns. Including supporting policies that develop clean energy resources, promoting alternative fuel vehicles, promoting more energy-efficient buildings and appliances, streamlining the permitting process for building new electric transmission lines, and adding charging stations for electric cars at all state highway rest stops.
Dawn Buckingham, the Texas Land Commissioner, and oil and gas shill has promised to fight the federal administration from connecting offshore windmills to Texas. However, the TDP platform supports federal legislation to share offshore wind lease and production revenues with Texas and other states, incentivizing state and local governments to facilitate successful siting processes and funding coastal infrastructure and flood resiliency projects.
They also emphasized creating and enforcing stringent state and federal regulations on oil and gas operations, including methane release monitoring and enforcement without exceptions.
All of these planks are fantastic, and maybe by the time the 2026 Convention rolls around, we’ll be ready to add support for legislation that holds fossil fuel companies responsible for climate change.
Criminal justice reform.
The TDP platform includes significant changes in the criminal justice reform plank, stressing a more humane approach to law enforcement. The platform proposes raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 13 years, ending the prosecution of juveniles in adult courts, and closing the remaining youth prison facilities while investing in community infrastructure to support children. Additionally, it aims to enforce the constitutional mandate against imprisoning individuals for debt, promote alternatives to incarceration for non-threatening offenses, and eliminate mandatory minimum sentences to allow for judicial discretion—notably, the platform advocates for abolishing the death penalty and instituting a moratorium on executions.
There is more. Open the link to finish her post.
What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas. It spreads to other GOP extremists. Stay informed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When I read the headline for this post, a thought appeared that Putin is somehow responsible for what’s happening.
Yes, I think the divisions were always there reaching back to the Revolution and made worse by Lincoln’s assassination. If Lincoln had lived until a natural death, history may have taken another path.
“Lincoln’s death elevated a bigoted Democrat from east Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, to the presidency — and thereby changed the course of Reconstruction. Booth’s bullet pitched a nation still reeling from four years of fratricidal war — a conflict that had snuffed out the … Apr 14, 2024″ — National Review
Back to Putin. With that thought, I Googled, “What is Putin’s Long Game” and came up with this from Politico Magazine.
Putin’s Real Long Game – POLITICO Magazine
One pull quote stands out:
“From Moscow, Vladimir Putin has seized the momentum of this unraveling, exacting critical damage to the underpinnings of the liberal world order in a shockingly short time. As he builds a new system to replace the one we know, attempts by America and its allies to repair the damage have been limited and slow.” — January 1, 2017
And Traitor Trump helped Putin increase that damage, widening the gap into a canyon.
Putin has held continuous positions as president or prime minster since 1999.
25 years!
The question in the subtitle of that Politico piece reveals the author of that piece didn’t know anything about Traitor Trump’s history.
“Can Trump figure out the new war in time to win it?”
But I think Biden gets it. VOTE BLUE in 2024
Biden is on the right track and the economy reflects it. I think a second term will allow him to do even more for working families without the burden of pleasing the wealthy donors.
We need video of Trump with Putin and a diffident Trump saying something like Putin says Russia didn’t interfere with our election, and I believe him. I don’t remember the exact quote. The Russians will likely be at it again with deep fakes, if they can get away with it. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-iran-moscow-elections-c640ed02202c9d44f0ad186ebd0b3396
Trump says he takes Putin’s word on Russian interference in U.S. election (youtube.com)
That video, in which Trump says that he believes Putin over his own U.S. intelligence agencies, contains numerous references by Trump to an imaginary server. Here’s what that’s about:
Trump is fond of repeating a conspiracy theory that emerged around the time of the U.S. presidential impeachment inquiry in 2019. The theory suggests that Ukraine, rather than Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and that a Ukrainian company is in possession of the material from the DNC server that was hacked.
President Trump mentioned this theory in the context of a phone call with the Ukrainian president, which became a central part of the impeachment inquiry. He suggested that the cybersecurity firm in California, CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC to investigate the breach, was somehow connected to Ukraine and that the server was given to them. However, these claims have been widely debunked. There is zero evidence that Ukraine interfered in the election or have the material from the DNC server, but repeating this theory takes the heat for interfering in the election off Russia. The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by and with a majority of Republicans, issued a report saying that indeed Russia interfered with the election to help Trump. Russia committed enormous resources of money and people to this task. There’s a reason for that.
MAGA: Moscow’s Asset Governing America
Trump: Putin’s dog
cx: contains numerous references to the imaginary possession by a Ukranian company of hacked material from the DNC server.
This is a major problem BECAUSE one party is convinced that Putin is no danger and actually kinda likes him, and the other party is so afraid of the pro-Putin party in the U.S. that it does almost nothing. The one ray of light recently is that Europe agreed to provide 50 billion USD in assistance to Ukraine in the form of impounded Russian assets. But enormous damage was done to the Ukrainian war effort by the delay in funding due to Trump and Johnson and other Repugnicans in the House. The blood of a lot of Ukrainians is on their dirty hands.
The astounding thing about the Republican complicity in Ukraine’s troubles is that this was the party that made its living bashing Russia and communism. Any form of the news cycle that brought to light the Russian connection to Trump in 2016 would have caused a voter stampede to his opponent in 1980. But the Tea Party had taken the party over by 2016, a takeover that will, if Trump and other MAGA types win this year stand with the Free Soil takeover of American politics that actually spawned the GOP in 1854.
Let is hope MAGA fades rather than reigns
The GOP of Ronald Reagan understood the USSR/Russia.
Today’s GOP does not. People like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin are admirers of Putin.
If you review Johnson’s Wikipedia entry, there’s not a conspiracy theory he’s missed out on. https://search.app/?link=https%3A%2F%2Fen%2Em%2Ewikipedia%2Eorg%2Fwiki%2FRon%5FJohnson&utm_source=igadl%2Cigatpdl%2Csh%2Fx%2Fgs%2Fm2%2F5
The Repugnicans always loved a dictator (and so, sadly, did the Dimocrats for a long time). Now, this is particularly explicit. Putin is their kinda guy. He checks all the boxes. Imperialist? Check. Homophobe? Check. Sexist pig? Check. Autocrat? Check. Religious fanatic? Check. Thief of the national wealth? Check.
Their guy.
And, he’s the handler for The Repugnicans’ Glorious Leader, Moscow’s Asset Governing America (MAGA), aka Putin’s dog.
The Orange Idiot just announced that he will cut off aid to our important ally, Ukraine, after he wins the election but even before he takes office. Servicing his master, Putin. But ofc he cannot do that, but Trump doesn’t understand how anything works, so this is typical for him.
It is a shame that Texans are so tribal and brainwashed that they vote against their own self-interests. They deserve better representation than scoundrels like Abbott, Patrick and Cruz. Of course, the same can be said about other states as well.
Are we too proud to admit a grievous historical error and quietly hand it back to Mexico?
The former Repugnican Party Chair in Texas said that it might be time to secede. What a gift that would be to the rest of our nation!
Yes, the Texas Republican party is extreme, as are many Republicans elsewhere. If only the Democrats would nominate someone for President who isn’t obviously cognitively incapable of completing a second term and who is barely hanging on mentally now.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/joe-bidens-decoy-presidential-candidacy/
Kent,
The choice in 2024 is between a wise elderly man with decades of experience and a narcissistic man three years younger who is a fascist and wants to destroy democracy.
I know my choice.
Biden is elderly, but almost everyone in the political world who has known him well – including Barack Obama – has never regarded him as wise. We agree on the dangers of Trump. We differ in that I’m not willing to ruin my intellectual integrity by shilling for Biden or anyone else.
I’ll take a competent corporate Biden presidency over the absolute disaster that was Donald Trump ANY day. He abandoned our allies, leading to the resignation of his superb SECDEF. He ordered his Secretary of Homeland Security to have the Border Patrol SHOOT innocent, unarmed asylum seekers and conducted a campaign of mass kidnapping whereby kids as young as little babies were taken from their parents and shipped off god knows where. He completely gutted the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. He never delivered the healthcare bill that he kept promising “any day now” or “within a week.” He similarly never delivered his infrastructure bill. He increased the federal deficit by 7.8 TRILLION dollars.
And he thought that stealth airplanes were actually invisible and that we should send astronauts to the sun and nuke hurricanes and sweep forests and buy Greenland and inject disinfectant.
A traitorous, seditious career con man and sexual predator versus a statesman.
No, this is not a difficult decision to make. If his presidency is being run by the people he hired, who cares? At least Biden is not AN INSANE PERSON who thinks that a dementia screening is an IQ test and keeps talking about how he lusts after HIS DAUGHTER, a pathological liar and a malignant narcissist. Ronald Reagan was completely senile during his second term, but he delivered Perestroika and Detente.
That the National Review is supporting Don the Con’s candidacy given what he is–a traitor to his country and a seditionist and so much else that is egregious–shows the depths to which it is willing to sink, this magazine started by Buckley, who hired a leader of the American Nazis movement to be one of his major writers.
any time you vote, you are. Opting for a collection of interests that coalesce around groups of political figures. For most of my life, I have voted for political figures (Clinton, Obama, Mondale, etc) not because I agreed with a totality of their political positions but because the alternative was generally do starkly against my own position that I preferred them.
Bob Shepherd, you obviously haven’t read National Review since at least 2016. They published an entire issue that year of anti-Trump essays under the cover title NEVER TRUMP. They publish many pieces every week that strongly criticize Trump. Make an effort to actually be informed before you make such ignorant comments.
BTW, Diane, one of the trolls you keep kicking off your page is totally sloshed, I think, this afternoon, and posting screeds to my homepage essay and suggesting that I perform certain sexual acts on Mr. Biden. I’m letting him go on and on, for he is simply embarrassing himself.
So glad he didn’t waste my time. I’m often tempted to post his comments because they are hilarious in a sick way.
I know, right? The guy is a real hoot. But I think that his alcoholism problem is severe. He really needs to get treatment.
out in the cedar glade on a warm summer night. Chuck wills widow, whippoorwill, and common nighthawk are all abundant here, making themselves heard.
Which party is more likely to care? Which party wants to protect our natural places?
exactly
“If only the Democrats would nominate someone for President who isn’t obviously cognitively incapable of completing a second term and who is barely hanging on mentally now.”
I mean no disrespect, but this statement is just asinine.
As Oliver Darcy reported at CNN on the Wall Street Journal hit piece on Biden,
“Republicans accusing their political foe of lacking the mental fitness to hold office is nothing surprising. Such accusations are made every night on Fox News. And Donald Trump, who at 77 years old has also shown plenty of signs of waning mental faculties, including repeatedly falling asleep at his own high-stakes hush money trial, has made the accusation a centerpiece of his campaign. In other words, these accusations from the right aren’t exactly news.”
“Even more inexplicable is why The Journal would quote former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the piece as a serious person speaking in good faith. McCarthy is, in fact, a MAGA Republican who has for years lied on behalf of Trump. I’m sure reporters at The Journal would acknowledge McCarthy’s extreme record of dishonesty in private. So why present him to readers as an honest arbiter of reality?”
“The New York Times’ Katie Rogers and Annie Karni even reported last year that McCarthy had praised Biden’s mental faculties when speaking amongst confidantes — a starkly different tune than the one he is now singing in public. “Privately, Mr. McCarthy has told allies that he has found Mr. Biden to be mentally sharp in meetings,” Rogers and Karni reported in March 2023. Rogers re-upped that reporting on Wednesday in the wake of The Journal’s story.”
“Bizarrely, while quoting McCarthy, The Journal apparently ignored on-the-record statements provided by high-ranking Democrats. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disclosed that she spoke to the newspaper, but she was notably not quoted in the piece. Other Democrats went public on Wednesday with similar experiences. Instead, one of the only on-the-record quotes in the entire story was delivered by the former Republican leader who would lie about the color of the sky if it pleased Trump.”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/06/media/wall-street-journal-biden-mental-acuity/index.html
nice summary. Who could be surprised that Republicans attack their opponents as senile since they really don’t have communism any more. When you have no policy to advocate except more to the wealthy and control the masses, you are forced to using personal attacks and the shibboleth of a time in history that never was. It quacks like a fascist duck.