Archives for 2024

I promised another post on Rep Greg Casar (D-TX-35), the chair of the House Progressive Caucus for the next term.  (Pramila Jayapul, the current chair, is term-limited.). Casar comes from a D+21 district along I-35 between Austin and San Antonio that contains parts of both cities.  He was first elected in 2022.

Here’s a piece in the Texas Tribune about Casar.  It highlights his support for the homeless in Austin, and how he lost a fight an initiated measure to make camping in the city illegal.  In the piece, Casar re-iterates his opposition to that initiative, and reflects on how he could have done better in the fight.  Casar started as a member of the Austin city council at age 25, which is pretty impressive.

Since the big dust-up in the comments was about Casar’s stand on trans rights, based on a paraphrase in a NBC News article, I went looking for his statements on trans rights.  Here’s the page from his House website on that.  He’s a member of the Equality Caucus.  I also found an interview shortly before the election with Casar and Hasan Piker.  Here’s the whole interview [YouTube], and the portion I’m quoting starts around the 21 minute mark.  The context for it is Casar’s trip to Nevada to talk with Latino construction workers there:

Casar: They have had this message where the Democratic Party isn’t focused on them, even if their Congressperson has been there for them, even if we voted for the infrastructure bills that have created the construction jobs they’re working on.  So how does that propaganda break through?  I think we’re going to have this challenge…where people like Gregg Abbott, my governor, pick on LGBTQ youth.  Do you decide you’re not going to stand up for LGBTQ youth because you don’t want a news story that distracts from the economic issues?  No, I mean you’ve gotta do the right thing — trans young people have rights, we should be able to stand up for civil rights.  But then at the same time we don’t want this distraction from the core economic issues these disaffected voters care about.  I think that takes the pairing of the issues and saying why is it that this guy with all this power is picking on trans middle-schoolers?  Isn’t that sick?  Maybe he’s doing it because he’s trying to take money out of your pockets and not have you notice.  I think it’s that connection, that piece, we have to do.  Because we can’t just tell people, hey, don’t worry about what you see on TV.  We need to make that connection for folks.

I can see how this would get paraphrased in stories in a way that sounds like Casar might be wobbling on trans rights, especially since the media narrative of Dems running away from trans rights is something the DC press wants to promote, and some Dems have definitely helped them.  It’s the kind of “dog bites man” story that they crave (because the Progressive Caucus chair who went squishy on trans rights would be big news, since that caucus has always led on LGBTQ issues).  But as far as I can tell, and I looked hard, Casar is a strong advocate of LGBTQ rights.

Biden just signed the Defense Authorization Act  for 2025 (NDAA), which included the first ant-LGBTQ legislation since DADT and DOMA.  It bans TriCare coverage for gender-affirming care to minors.  The House Progressive Caucus came out against it — the trans healthcare ban was part of the reason.  Here’s the roll call.  I don’t see any Progressive Caucus members voting YEA, including Casar.  I don’t know why the hell Dems like Colin Allred and Yadira Caraveo, who both lost elections, felt that one of their last votes had to be for the first bill to take away LGBTQ rights since the ’90s.  These kinds of votes are the issue with trans rights in the Democratic Party, not the new Progressive Caucus chair.

Greg CasarPost + Comments (92)

We’ve gotten in the habit of bringing a lot of “big city” food when we come to visit our parents in a small red Dakota town.  The grocery stores here are a combination of expensive and mediocre.  We used to pack it in the 12 volt compressor fridge of our van, but since we’re transitioning to another rig (not yet built), I needed to get a cooler.   We were near a Wal-Mart, so I stopped in and found an Igloo brand 48 quart cooler (iow the big one) for $14.

I just can’t get over that price.  It’s a decent plastic cooler, for $14.  It would take 2-3 styrofoam disposable coolers to carry the same amount of stuff, and that would be more than $14 at the grocery store.  It almost seemed immoral that a cooler of that quality could be purchased for that price.  I wonder what kind of slavery and exploitation was involved in the production, shipping and shelving of this item.

I’m a pretty big devotee of “buy once, cry once,” especially as we’ve radically downsized.  So I buy very little at Wal-Mart, though when we’re traveling in the rural red south or southwest, I’ll stop a Wal-Mart for groceries simply due to lack of a choice.  I’ll also stop at them in Baja because little Mexican tiendas have a terrible supply chain and/or about the same selection as you’d see in a 7-11 in the states.  (There are actually stores in Baja with signs of Costco brands that are full of merchandise purchased and carried down the peninsula from the couple of Costcos near the border or near Cabo.)

This is all to say that I’m no purist, and I also don’t think I’m doing the world a favor by picking (for example) Target instead of Wal-Mart — all big box retail is exploitative, as far as I’m concerned.  So I’ll hold back my shocked face when I read that economists have finally figured out just how deeply Wal-Marts fucked up rural communities:

[…] [T]hey find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being.

This is apparently a surprise to economists, since even the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors believed that the cheap prices at Wal-Mart outweighed the economic harm to the community.

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to Jon Lovett interview Hasan Piker, who’s one of the young guys trying to build a following  as an alternative to Joe Rogan et. al.   Piker made the point that the rise of Wal-Mart, etc., is part of an implicit social contract:  big box retail and chains would take away local retail, decimate Main Street, deliver a bunch of cookie-cutter restaurants with mediocre food, and in return, everything would be cheap.  When prices went up, people were pissed, because they had kept their part of the bargain and gotten screwed.  That anger was part of the “throw the bums out” election.

This gets abbreviated in the comments here as “cheap eggs”, and, yeah, I get that people shouldn’t vote for racists, sexists and anti-LGBTQ bigots just because prices went up.   But I bought that fucking $14 cooler.  It was something small and frail and plastic, baby, and cheap is how I feel.

‘Cause Cheap is How I FeelPost + Comments (186)