My Dad is 97 years old today. Yep, 97. He’s in as good as shape as you can expect at 97. He will read his hard copy of the Chron this morning with a cup of coffee. He will also have a couple or so so beers later on. He will be ready to vote by mail when he gets his ballot in a little over a month. This will be his 19th presidential election. A lifelong Democrat, he is 8-10 in presidential elections. BTW: He was also a delegate to the 1992 National Democratic Convention. Too bad we can’t have a party for him today. I am sure his grandkids and great grandkids will be calling him today. Happy Birthday, Dad! Happy Birthday, Tony Campos!
It’s a wrap. Commentary is talking about the 2020 Democratic National Convention. Former Vice President Joe Biden nailed it in his acceptance speech. That’s all you need to know.
Someone needs to do a side-by-side of Biden’s and Donald Trump’s speech after next Thursday
Sarah Cooper dropped in yesterday and that was cool.
Here part of today’s column by Ken Herman of the Statesman:
I’ve got a question: After TV was invented, why did we ever do national political conventions the way we always used to do national political conventions?
I think the Democrats’ virtual or whatever-we’re-calling-it national convention was pretty darned good.
Of course, it’s possible I’m overreacting as someone weary of too many evenings of looking for something to watch and asking this soul-searching question for our times: Do we really need that many zombie movies?
This week’s made-for-TV Democratic National Convention worked well, a notion for which I drew some pushback Tuesday night when I tweeted, “Impressive Dem convention setting high bar for GOP convention, which very well could be four days of praising Dear Leader.”
Someone who tweets as Ollie Lama (love it) didn’t appreciate me “comparing the President of the United States to a Communist dictator.” OK, so he’s not a commie and he only aspires to dictatorhood.
And GOP operative Brendan Steinhauser responded with this salient point: “In fairness, didn’t the Dems just spend all their time praising Biden? Isn’t that the point of the conventions?”
Yes, but …
And this:
Back to the Dems. When at national conventions (and I like being at national conventions, even in Cleveland), I’ve always had the feeling I was in the studio audience at a made-for-TV event. I’ve always had that feeling because national conventions long have been made-for-TV events.
As made-for-TV events, live conventions could be clunky.
What’s missed the new way? Plenty. I miss the daily breakfasts at which delegations hear from featured speakers, often national figures. I miss the energy of a live convention. I miss funny hats.
My family misses the cheesy “Limited Convention Edition” Kraft mac and cheese (donkey-shaped for Dems, elephant-shaped for Repubs) that was a convention souvenir staple for years and is destined to become a coveted and possibly litigated portion of my estate.
I don’t miss the conventions as another opportunity for high-dollar corporate donors to throw high-dollar corporate dollars into our political machine.
Though the speeches seem more intimate without the crowd interruptions, I do feel sad for delegates for whom the national conventions are a highlight as well as a reward for their activism.
Is this another thing that 2020 will forever change? Will we never see another in-person national political convention? Check back with me in 2024.
But here’s hoping we never have another year like this year. This is not a year for balloon drops.
Gov. Greg Abbott is a bumbling fool for sure. The headline in the hard copy of today’s Chron says it all:
Abbott’s key metric in virus fight unreliable
Unf__kingreliable! We are into our sixth month fighting COVID-19 and this fella still hasn’t gotten it right. Yet, he has the gall to act like a bully with our Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo. What a four-star dumbarse. Here is from today’s Chron:
AUSTIN – As schools begin to reopen and Gov. Greg Abbott faces pressure to relax shutdown measures, it is impossible to determine where Texas stands on a COVID-19 metric that has guided the governor’s decisions on when to tighten or loosen restrictions on businesses and public activity.
Over the past week and a half, the state began reporting coronavirus data from a backlog of 500,000 viral tests that officials say accumulated because of coding errors from Quest Diagnostics, Walgreens and CHRISTUS Health — all private entities that process the tests.
The result has been an ongoing miscalculation of the “positivity rate,” the rate at which people test positive for the virus.
Last week, it reached as high as 24.5 percent, and suddenly dipped back down again to about 11 percent this week as more backlogged tests were included in the data. Abbott has said a sustained positivity rate below 10 percent would allow for further reopenings in the state.
The influx of backlogged tests, dating as far back as March, has also exposed a convoluted reporting system that requires state officials to receive lab results, send them back to counties and wait for them to return to the State Department of Health Services before counting them.
The result is a mess of information reported recently to the public in “data dumps” that include test results from months prior, skewing statewide coronavirus statistics and positivity rates.
“The timing of it is horrible because it’s right at the beginning of opening the schools, when you want your data to be as accurate as possible, and it’s not,” said Darrell Hale, a Republican commissioner in Collin County.
Here is the entire read: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/texas-gov-greg-abbott-covid-fight-positivity-rate-15498320.php.
Sheesh. When a GOP County Commissioner from Collin County is unhappy, well, that says a lot.
My pal Jose de Jesus Ortiz tweeted out yesterday that right wing arsehole Curt Schilling is on the Advisory Board of Steve Bannon’s We Build The Wall outfit. That’s the group that ripped off another bunch of arseholes. Schilling, in case you didn’t know, is a former MLBer. Jose, who is a past President of the Baseball Writers of America, said he voted for Schilling last year for the Baseball Hall of Fame. He said he won’t this year. Good.
Schilling got 70% of the baseball writers vote when it was announced back in January. You need 75% to get into the Hall of Fame.
The Rockets won yesterday and play tomorrow.
We have won eight in a row. We are 15-10 and in San Diego this weekend.
Camposcommunications' Blog 