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Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston).

Listen live on the radio, or on the internet from anywhere in the world! When the show is live, we take calls at 713-526-5738. (Long distance charges may apply.)

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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]:

“What we’re discovering is that the Constitution is not a mechanism that runs by itself. Ultimately, we are a government of men and not law. The law has no force without people who are willing to enforce it. The ball is now squarely in the court of the Republican Party, and particularly Senate Republicans. Will they ever be prepared to say enough is enough?” ~ William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution who graduated from college just before Watergate.

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Make sure you are registered to vote! (Show information begins after Item 4, after voting and election information.)

1. “Obamacare” (gov) & Medicare Enrollment (Medicare.gov)
   1. ACA 2020 Open Enrollment is here – and ends Dec 15. Questions? Call 1-800-318-2596 (Healthcare.gov)
2. Medicare 2020 Open Enrollment is here – and ends Dec 7. Click here for contact info.  (Medicare.gov)
3. ACA – HEALTHCARE.GOV
4. HarrisVotes.com (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965) Dr. Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk
   1. Last Day to Register to Vote was Monday, October 7, 2019
   2. Make sure you are registered to vote!
      1. November 27^th 7:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
      2. December 2nd – December 7^th 7:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
      3. December 8^th 1:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
      4. December 9th – December 10^th 7:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
      5. If you are denied your right to vote any place at any time at any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
      6. Next Election: December 14, 2019 – Joint Runoff Election
      7. If you are denied your right to vote any place at any time at any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote..
5. ‘Almost Akin to a Political Coup’: Houston Teachers Fight Back Against State Takeover of HISD – In a last-ditch effort to stop a state takeover of Texas’ largest school district, the Houston teachers union is suing the state for disenfranchising voters of color. Justin Miller | ORG | Nov 22, 2019, 5:55 pm CST
   1. The fight over the future of Houston’s public school system escalated this week when the local teachers union joined a federal voting rights lawsuit against the state. The legal challenge is part of a last-ditch effort to stop the state government from taking indefinite control of Texas’ biggest and most diverse public school district.
   2. “This seems more like a power grab and almost akin to a political coup than a political governance system,” Zeph Capo, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, which represents more than 6,500 HISD employees, told the Observer. …
   3. Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath alerted the Houston Independent School District in early November that he was taking control of HISD. He cited a TEA investigation into the scandal-plagued school board and its “failure of governance,” as well as the district’s inability to improve chronically low academic performance at Wheatley High School, a predominantly black and Hispanic school in the city’s historic Fifth Ward.
   4. “Given the inability of the board of trustees to govern the district, these sanctions are necessary to protect the best interests of the district’s current and future students,” Morath wrote.
   5. The scale of the state government’s intervention in a local school district is unprecedented. The TEA has taken over a handful of smaller struggling districts in recent years, but HISD comprises more than 275 schools and is home to more than 200,000 students—many of them black, brown, and low-income. It’s by far the largest school district in the state, and one of the biggest in the country.
   6. Governor Greg Abbott, who appointed Morath to head the TEA, has been a leading critic of HISD, saying it needed to be taken over. In a January tweet, he called its leadership a “disaster” and condemned the school board for its “self-centered ineptitude.”
   7. Morath made the decision official just one day after Houstonians voted to oust two of the school board’s embattled incumbents, Board President Diana Dávila and Trustee Sergio Lira. Two other sitting incumbents opted not to run for reelection, meaning that the nine-member board would feature four new trustees next year. They likely won’t have much time to actually serve. Morath has already started the application process for state-appointed managers and intends to install his new board within the next few months. There’s no precedent for a takeover of this size and no definite timeline, though the TEA will remain in control for at least two years. …
   8. Representative Harold Dutton, whose district includes Wheatley and Kashmere High School, another chronically “failing” campus, pushed for the takeover, thinking it was the only way to get the entire school board to care about equity for all HISD schools, not just the ones in their districts. As he said at the time, “I am convinced that, without a gun to their head, it won’t happen.”
   9. In 2017, the Legislature created an escape hatch for districts at risk of takeover, giving them the option to hand control of their struggling schools over to charter school operators or nonprofits rather than face sanctions.
   10. Dutton insists that he never thought the law would lead to a HISD takeover. Still, he has little sympathy for those who bemoan the takeover provision as overly harsh. “It’s kind of like saying, if you don’t want to go to prison for murder, then don’t kill anybody,” Dutton told me back in January. “Well, if you don’t want to suffer the penalties under House Bill 1842, don’t have low-performing schools for five consecutive years.” …
6. Minnesota school throws away 40 students’ lunches due to debt, by: CNN | Posted: Nov 14, 2019 / 11:46 AM EST / Updated: Nov 14, 2019 / 11:46 AM EST
   1. RICHFIELD, Minn. (CNN) – A public school in Minnesota is apologizing to students after throwing their hot meals away.
   2. About 40 students at Richfield High had their hot school lunches taken away Monday. School officials say the reason was because the students owed $15 or more on their lunch balance.
   3. The hot meals were taken away and replaced by cold lunches.
   4. In a Facebook post, the district said “We deeply regret our actions today and the embarrassment it caused.”
   5. One of the seniors captured the incident in the cafeteria on social media and it went viral. School superintendent Steven Unowsky said that if a student has a lunch on their tray, they should be allowed to eat it.
   6. The school district says it is owed nearly $20,000 in outstanding lunch balances. Administrators say they are trying to solve the shortfall by raising money in the community and they won’t try embarrassing students who can’t pay again.
7. Supreme Court lets lawsuit by climate scientist continue against conservative outlets, By Robert Barnes| washingtonpost.com | November 25, 2019 at 10:38 a.m. CST
   1. A climate scientist may pursue his defamation lawsuit against a magazine and a Washington think tank after the Supreme Court on Monday declined to intervene at this stage of the litigation.
   2. The National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute had asked the court to review a decision by local District of Columbia courts that said the lawsuit by Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann could continue. …
   3. Mann is an internationally recognized expert on climate change and has published work that blamed human activity for global warning. The work was criticized by some scientists, but an investigation by Penn State cleared him of any wrongdoing.
   4. That did not stop the criticism. In a CEI blog, Rand Simberg wrote that Penn State had “covered up wrongdoing” by Mann, and he characterized Mann as the “Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” because he had “molested and tortured data in service of politicized science.”
   5. Sandusky is a former Penn State football coach who was convicted of molesting children.
   6. Mark Steyn picked up the theme in a post on the Corner, a blog hosted by National Review Online, the website of National Review.
   7. In his post, Steyn said that while he would not have “extended the metaphor all the way into the lockerroom showers,” Mann was “behind the fraudulent climate-change” study and the investigation clearing him was a coverup.
   8. Mann demanded retractions and apologies from CEI and National Review.
   9. Instead, National Review published a response from its editor, Rich Lowry, titled “Get Lost.” He refused to retract and clarified that “ ‘fraudulent’ doesn’t mean honest-to-goodness criminal fraud. It means intellectually bogus and wrong.”
8. Want Trump to Go? Take to the Streets – Another moment for public protest has arrived. By David Leonhardt, Opinion Columnist | COM | Oct. 20, 2019
   1. On Nov. 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s election, Obamacare looked to be doomed. Millions of Americans, it seemed, were going to lose their health insurance. …
   2. … Fortunately, some progressives understood that politics isn’t only an inside game. The outside game — of public protest and grass-roots lobbying — matters, too.
   3. Even before Trump took office, activists began planning a strategy to make repeal as politically painful as possible. On the day after Trump’s inauguration, some four million Americans took to the streets for Women’s Marches (which obviously were about much more than repeal). In the months that followed, groups like Indivisible organized people to attend town halls, visit Capitol Hill and inundate members of Congress with phone calls.
   4. The efforts transformed the debate. Obamacare repeal was no longer a bloodless legislative matter, in which public opinion was measured merely with poll results and pundit analysis. The story became rawer, more human and much harder for politicians and ordinary citizens to ignore. …
   5. … Consider what happened last week alone. Trump created a foreign-policy disaster in Turkey and Syria, for no apparent reason, while multiple administration officials testified that he views diplomacy largely as a way to advance his personal interests. His attitude, evidently, is: America, c’est moi. Even more so than a month ago, Trump is a national emergency, flagrantly violating his oath of office and daring the country to stop him.
   6. Yet the chances of removing him appear as dim as Obamacare’s chances of survival did on Nov. 9, 2016. Trump even has plausible paths to re-election, some of which involve again losing the popular vote.
   7. A. Kauffman, a historian of protest movements, has said that effective ones often throw “a monkey wrench into a process that was otherwise going to just unfold smoothly.” That’s the role that an outside game can now play in the impeachment saga.
   8. It can wake up more Americans to the gravity of the situation. It can mobilize progressives to work as hard as they did during the 2018 midterms. It can confront congressional Republicans with their cowardice.
   9. “Protests work,” as Kauffman has said — not always, of course, but often “when groups are willing to be bold in their tactics and persistent in their approach within the broad discipline of non-violent action.” As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote last week, public protest “serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.” If anything, protest may be more important than in the past, because the elite institutions that helped bring down Richard Nixon, like political parties and the national media, are weaker today.
   10. So it’s time for a sequel to that first Women’s March — an Americans’ March, in which millions of people peacefully take to the streets to say that President Trump must go. And it’s time for a more intense grass-roots campaign directed at his congressional enablers, one that conjures the respectful intensity of the save-Obamacare campaign. Even if the Senate still acquits Trump, a new protest movement can help galvanize people to defeat him, and his enablers, next year.
   11. The country is in crisis. Right now, that crisis feels all too normal.
9. GM, Toyota and Chrysler side with White House in fight over California fuel standards, exposing auto industry split – The move potentially pits Nissan, Subaru and others against automakers such as Ford, Honda and Volkswagen, who have forged a separate pact with California regulators. By Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin| COM | October 28, 2019 at 9:57 PM EDT
   1. A coalition of international automakers, including General Motors, Toyota and Fiat Chrysler, on Monday announced an effort to intervene on behalf of the Trump administration in its ongoing fight with California over how fuel-efficient the nation’s auto fleet must be in coming years.
   2. The move could pit the powerful auto manufacturers against other industry giants such as Ford, Honda and Volkswagen, which this summer struck a deal with California regulators to produce more fuel-efficient cars and trucks through 2025. It underscores car makers’ desire to achieve some sort of regulatory certainty, at a time when the Trump administration and the nation’s most populous state remain at a standoff. …
   3. John Bozzella, president of the Association of Global Automakers and a spokesperson for the coalition, said Monday that the companies intervening are not necessarily endorsing a White House proposal that would essentially freeze fuel standards enacted during the Obama administration. But he said the firms do support the long-standing principle that the federal government has the “sole purview” for setting national standards.
   4. Ultimately, he said, what the group wants is for California and the federal government to forge a compromise on one national set of fuel-economy standards — a compromise that so far has been nowhere in sight. …
   5. “Honda is not a participant in this litigation, and is not contributing any funds supporting our trade association’s activity in this area,” the company said, noting it has already “locked in” mileage standards through Model Year 2026. “We have been very clear on wanting to avoid lengthy and costly litigation on this issue, which will result in a great deal of regulatory uncertainty.” …
10. Air Force spaceplane returns to Earth after 780-day mission, By William Harwood | CBS News | October 27, 2019 / 8:33 AM /
    1. An unpiloted Air Force X-37B spaceplane, one of two winged orbiters used to carry out classified research, made a surprise landing at the Kennedy Space Center early Sunday to close out a record 780-day mission. It was the fifth flight in the secretive Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) program, pushing total time aloft to 2,865 days.
    2. “This program continues to push the envelope as the (Air Force’s) only reusable space vehicle,” Randy Walden, director of the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office, said in a statement. “With a successful landing today, the X-37B completed its longest flight to date and successfully completed all mission objectives.”
11. Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows, By Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle | COM |Oct. 29, 2019
    1. Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities.
    2. The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury. …
    3. Southern Vietnam could all but disappear. … More than 20 million people in Vietnam, almost one-quarter of the population, live on land that will be inundated. …
    4. In Shanghai, one of Asia’s most important economic engines, water threatens to consume the heart of the city and many other cities around it. The findings don’t have to spell the end of those areas. The new data shows that 110 million people already live in places that are below the high tide line …
    5. The new projections suggest that much of Mumbai, India’s financial capital and one of the largest cities in the world, is at risk of being wiped out. Built on what was once a series of islands, the city’s historic downtown core is particularly vulnerable.
    6. Over all, the research shows that countries should start preparing now for more citizens to relocate internally, according to Dina Ionesco of the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental group that coordinates action on migrants and development.
12. The Federalist Society Says It’s Not an Advocacy Organization. These Documents Show Otherwise. By AMANDA HOLLIS-BRUSKY and CALVIN TERBEEK | com | August 31, 2019 (Amanda Hollis-Brusky is an associate professor of politics at Pomona College and author of Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Calvin TerBeek is a Ph.D. candidate in political science)
    1. MIKE NOTE: The Federalist Society  – The Federalist Society is a tax–exempt 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Our federal tax identification number is 36-3235550.
    2. This past March, when the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies held its 37th annual national gathering for conservative law students, the lineup of speakers and panelists included an impressive number of Republican Party and conservative movement stars. …
    3. Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party “or engage in other forms of political advocacy,” as its website says. The society does not deny an ideology—it calls itself a “group of conservatives and libertarians”—but it maintains that it is simply “about ideas,” not legislation, politicians or policy positions.
    4. Federalist Society documents that one of us recently unearthed, however, make this position untenable going forward. The documents, made public here for the first time, show that the society not only has held explicit ideological goals since its infancy in the early 1980s, but sought to apply those ideological goals to legal policy and political issues through the group’s roundtables, symposia and conferences.
    5. The question of whether the Federalist Society is properly characterized as a “society of ideas” or a political organization has significant ramifications. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges, a set of guidelines administered by the federal judiciary’s Judicial Conference, was revised earlier this year to bar sitting federal judges from participating in conferences and seminars sponsored by groups “generally viewed by the public as having adopted a consistent political or ideological point of view equivalent to the type of partisanship often found in political organizations.” (The Code does not “explicitly” apply to Supreme Court justices, though they have looked to it in the past.) One former federal judge argued that under the new ethics opinion, the Federalist Society is now a “no-go zone for federal judges.” The Society’s president, Eugene Meyer, responded, calling the former jurist’s argument an “absurd and ludicrous” interpretation of the rule, adding that the Federalist Society has said “time and again” that it is nonpartisan and does not take official policy positions.
    6. But the newly unearthed documents—a 1984 grant proposal and cover letter, written by Meyer on the Federalist Society’s behalf and now housed in the late Judge Robert Bork’s papers at the Library of Congress—provide evidence that the Federalist Society, in contravention of what the new Code states, in fact “advocates for specific outcomes on legal or political issues.” This suggests that federal judges, by attending Federalist Society events, are transgressing the Code’s new guidelines. Given the importance of active federal judges to the Federalist Society’s long-term goal of reshaping the law, barring them from the society’s events could hamper its continued ability to exert the political influence it has impressively built over decades. …
    7. …The Federalist Society’s founders and conservative patrons understood early on that the battle for control of the law would not be won on campuses alone. In the January 1984 grant proposal, Meyer, then the Federalist Society’s executive director, asked the conservative-leaning Smith Richardson Foundation for “seed money” to fund a new entity, a “Lawyers Division.” The central goal, Meyer wrote, was “to build an effective national conservative lawyers organization.” Meyer began the proposal by asserting that an alternative to “an increasingly radicalized bar,” exemplified by the American Bar Association, was now necessary because “lawyers continue to fill key positions in the modern instrumentalities of the welfare state.”
    8. SHORTER VERSION OF ARTICLE ABOVE- REVEALED: New documents show the Federalist Society has lied about its mission — and could blow up on sitting judges, By Matthew Chapman | COM | Published on August 31, 2019
       1. On Saturday, political science academics Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Calvin TerBeek wrote an exposé in Politico revealing that the Federalist Society, an association of conservative and libertarian lawyers infamous for forming a semi-official pipeline of right-wing academics into the federal court system, have deliberately misled the public about the purpose of their organization’s existence for years.
       2. “Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party ‘or engage in other forms of political advocacy,’ as its website says,” they wrote. “The society does not deny an ideology — it calls itself a ‘group of conservatives and libertarians’ — but it maintains that it is simply ‘about ideas,’ not legislation, politicians or policy positions.”
13. The hidden hunger affecting billions, By Michael Marshall | BBC.COM | 7-JULY-2019
    1. Two billion people do not get enough micronutrients in their diets, which can lead to severe health conditions.
    2. New kinds of crops could help to create better, more nutritious foods to beat these deficiencies.
    3. When children do not get enough iron in their food, the results are heartbreaking. They are slower to acquire language, struggle with short-term memory, have poor attention spans and ultimately do less well at school.
    4. “They can never live up to their full physical and mental potential,” says Wolfgang Pfeiffer, director of research and development at HarvestPlus, an organisation that develops nutritionally improved crops in Washington DC. “If they are deficient in their childhood, they learn 20% less as adults.”
    5. In the poorest parts of India and China, millions of children have their lives stunted through lack of iron. In South Asia, an estimated50% of pregnant women have iron deficiency, and it is also prevalent in South America and sub-Saharan Africa.
    6. But iron is only one small part of the story. There are several dozen other “micronutrients” – substances that we need to consume, in small quantities but regularly, to remain healthy. They include zinc, copper, vitamins and folates such as folic acid and vitamin B9.
    7. The traditional solution to micronutrient deficiencies has been to add more micronutrients to common foods, or to supply pills … But these strategies have limits. If people can’t afford pills or don’t have access to a pharmacy, they may still not get enough micronutrients. What’s more, adding micronutrients to food is a constant process: every batch of breakfast cereal has to be artificially dosed with iron and vitamins.
    8. A much simpler approach would be to go back to the crop plant from which the cereal is made, and ensure that it packs itself full of the micronutrient in the first place.
    9. This is the thinking behind “biofortification”, the process of creating crops that have unusually high levels of micronutrients like iron. HarvestPlus was founded in 2003 by economist Howarth Bouis, after a decade of lobbying and raising moneyto create biofortified crops and make them available where they are needed. Today HarvestPlus has members in more than 20 countries and has biofortified over a dozen crops, from rice to sweet potatoes.
14. India’s blowout election is a lesson for US Democrats, By Annalisa Merelli | COM/ | May 24, 2019
    1. Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, defied expectations when he won his second election in an even bigger landslide than the first one. He did so at the expense of India’s Congress party, which campaigned on a secular and pluralist platform.
    2. Turns out the nationalist message of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hugely popular with voters. It was a massive defeat—the second in a row—for India’s more liberal Congress party. It’s a bitter loss that came with many lessons, ones that Democrats in the United States would be wise to heed. …
    3. … Politics in India have traditionally been about the economy. This time, however, Modi and the BJP’s support of Hindu nationalism took a more prominent position than it had in past campaigns, exploiting tension with Pakistan to redirect the debate toward national security and anti-Muslim sectarianism. As Modi’s message grew stronger, [the once-dominant Congress Party] failed to really fight for India’s long-established secular ideals. …
    4. … The Congress isn’t known for its ability to learn lessons, but there are some more to note. And given that a left-leaning party promoting pluralism just lost to a right-leaning party promoting nationalism, the Democratic Party in the United States should probably read a long as it prepares for its own election season.
    5. Don’t make it about the candidate: Modi’s leadership of the BJP is strong, and there is no separating his party or government’s success and work from his own. His party capitalized on this, turning the election into a referendum on him—rather than his government’s record. Polarizing figures like Modi tend to benefit from these kinds of politics. His party understood this. His adversaries did not.
    6. Turning the campaign into a vote for or against Modi prevented the opposition from asserting its own ideas. Even when the Congress proposed policies that could have appealed to a broad electorate — for instance, guaranteed minimum income … — they received little attention. As George Lakoff explained in his 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, obsessing over a candidate’s flaws only makes him or her more popular.
    7. Democrats in the United States made this mistake in the 2016 election, running a campaign against Donald Trump instead of for their own policies.
    8. Dare to be different: … For many voters, the Congress party is associated with old-school elitist politics, corruption, and a perceived inability to bring change to India. Gandhi’s candidacy didn’t do much to change anyone’s minds.
    9. Make friends: Congress also failed to make strong alliances with other, smaller political parties…. Progressives seem to make this mistake a lot. While conservatives often stick together (the Republican Party’s support of Trump during the campaign is a textbook example), liberals often fail to find common ground. In the last presidential campaign, the Democratic primaries went on long after Trump was the presumed nominee. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent more time tearing each other apart than focusing on the bigger fight. The extremely crowded field of potential democratic candidates suggests the same thing could happen again.
    10. Focus the narrative: Modi’s narrative of a new, strong, corruption-free India—one with international power, credibility and gravitas—appealed to many voters. It delivered a clear vision of what he was promising, and one that Indians were fast to embrace. Congress never presented a clear vision of its own.
    11. [The Congress Party] decried the threat to secular values [Modi’s Party] posed, and held itself up as its defender. But rather than communicating how those values could help India succeed, the party focused more on what would happen if protections further deteriorated.
    12. This is not unlike what happened during the 2016 election in the United States. Just look at the campaign slogans: Trump’s “Make America Great Again” had a clear if suspect mission. Clinton’s “Stronger Together” described a status, not an intention. Democrats could face the same problem they did in 2016—and the same problem India’s Congress party faced this week—unless they forget about the opposition, stop playing defense, and promote their own, clear vision.