Saturday, May 10, 2008

Houston's Art Car Parade

is today. Mrs. Diddie insists on going this year (and taking the dog).


(The Car of a Thousand Chairs, from last year's parade.)

Friday, May 09, 2008

Corndog is bubbling in the grease

A second poll confirms what the first one earlier this week revealed: Republican voters do not support a second term for John Cornyn as US Senator from Texas.

Even though Texas isn't yet in play for the Democratic nominee for president, a far greater number of Lone Star conservatives would vote for amnesty for illegal aliens, 100 more years in Iraq, more reactionary judges on the Supreme Court and no chance of health care for millions of Americans (aka John W McSame) than would vote again for a Box Turtle for the Senate.

That is a pretty significant and striking disconnect, even for Texas Republicans (never known for their discernment of hypocrisy in voting patterns).

Texas Blue, BOR and Burka have more.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Rural Texas finally collapses from GOP "leadership"


(This sinkhole in Daisetta, which suddenly opened up today, may -- or may not -- be the end result of eight years of Bush administration pillaging of the environment, and the day-to-day mismanagement by their junior partners in Austin.)

Signed, I Have Changed My Middle Name to Hussein

No less an authority than Newt Gingrich says that the GOP is headed for electoral disaster in 2008, from the top of the ballot to the bottom:

The Republican loss in the special election for Louisiana's Sixth Congressional District last Saturday should be a sharp wake up call for Republicans: Either Congressional Republicans are going to chart a bold course of real change or they are going to suffer decisive losses this November.

The facts are clear and compelling.

Saturday's loss was in a district that President Bush carried by 19 percentage points in 2004 and that the Republicans have held since 1975.

This defeat follows on the loss of Speaker Hastert's seat in Illinois. That seat had been held by a Republican for 76 years with the single exception of the 1974 Watergate election when the Democrats held it for one term. That same seat had been carried by President Bush 55-44% in 2004.

But... what about John McLame? There's all those Chaos Agents who have voted for the Hill-debeast in the Democratic primaries, and all of her supporters who claim they can't vote for a black man in November. We'll win by division just like always, right?

Senator McCain is currently running ahead of the Republican congressional ballot by about 16 percentage points. But there are two reasons that this extraordinary personal achievement should not comfort congressional Republicans.

First, McCain's lead is a sign of the gap between the McCain brand of independence and the GOP brand. No regular Republican would be tying or slightly beating the Democratic candidates in this atmosphere. It is a sign of how much McCain is a non-traditional Republican that he is sustaining his personal popularity despite his party's collapse.

Second, there is a grave danger for the McCain campaign that if the generic ballot stays at only 32 % for the GOP it will ultimately outweigh McCain's personal appeal and drag his candidacy into defeat.

Bu-bu-bu ... can't we win by tearing down Barack Obama for being a socialist liberal Muslim who sat listening to his radical lunatic preacher for twenty years without wearing his flag pin?

The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti-Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins), anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail.

This model has already been tested with disastrous results.

In 2006, there were six incumbent Republican Senators who had plenty of money, the advantage of incumbency, and traditionally successful consultants.

But the voters in all six states had adopted a simple position: "Not you." No matter what the GOP Senators attacked their opponents with, the voters shrugged off the attacks and returned to, "Not you."

The danger for House and Senate Republicans in 2008 is that the voters will say, "Not the Republicans."

The majority of Chron.com posters -- angry white men (with computers, in the suburbs) -- no longer represent the majority of opinion in America, in Texas ... or even in Houston.

Harris County, and Texas, is going to elect dozens and dozens of Democrats in 2008. And the United States of America will have a black president.

Thank God.

Signed,

I Have Changed My Middle Name to Hussein

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Craddick again demonstrates his defiant corruption

It's DeLay-ish in its sinister sociopathy about using government for one's personal gain in every imaginable way. It's almost like the serial killer who dares the police to "stop me before I kill again". Except that -- if you don't count the thousands of poor Texas children who have died due to his arrogant, willful, callous neglect -- Tom Craddick is only raping you, the taxpayer:

Embattled Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick is cynically encouraging critical news reports and investigations about members of the Legislature who compensate some employees by making health care coverage available to them. Last week, Craddick said "If some legislators are paying employees with taxpayer dollars who are performing little or no work, that is an egregious misuse of state money." (Austin American-Statesman, May 02, 2008)

Craddick did not acknowledge, however, that he personally supported and helped pass special legislation providing health care coverage to his adult daughter Christi Craddick, even though Christi makes hundreds of thousands of dollars working for her father’s political operations and provides no service to the State of Texas.

As Speaker, Tom Craddick is ultimately responsible for administering and enforcing the rules of the House. It is his job to appoint competent colleagues to the Committee on House Administration and provide members accurate information on employee health care eligibility. Clearly, the same Speaker who worked to deny health care coverage to hundreds of thousands of children, failed in his responsibility to manage the House properly. (Fort Worth Star Telegram, January 25, 2005) Rather than take responsibility for his failure, he is lashing out at his political enemies.

The only way to get rid of this miserable bastard is to elect a Democratic majority in the Texas House.

The (GOP's) War on Voting Rights

Once again, for emphasis (courtesy clammyc at Booman):

According to The League of Women Voters, close to 11% of Americans (21 million) have no photo identification. They break this down a bit further:
he following statistics reflect those individuals who do not have photo identification:

  • 11% or as many as 21 million Americans
  • 36% of voters in Georgia over the age of 75;
  • 18% of Americans over 65 (6 million);
  • 25% of African Americans;
  • 10% or 40 million people with disabilities;
  • 15% of low income voters
Here are a few more numbers:

  • 650,000 registered voters in Georgia have no photo-ID (law recently passed);
  • 200,000 Missourians of voting age, including 16% of seniors, have no photo-id;
  • 5.5 million African American voting age citizens have no photo-ID;
  • 6 million senior citizens have no photo-id
And just for good measure, here are a few other breakdowns:
People with disabilities:

According to disability advocates, nearly ten percent of the 40 million Americans with disabilities do not have any form of state-issued photo identification. Source: Center for Policy Alternatives

Low income people: Citizens earning less than $35,000 per year are more than twice as likely to lack current government-issued photo identification as those earning more than $35,000. Indeed, the survey indicates that at least 15 percent of voting-age American citizens earning less than $35,000 per year do not have a valid government-issued photo ID. Source: NYU and Brennen Center Survey



Forget the e-machine vote hacking (can't be proved beyond a reasonable doubt). In fact, forget about calling them "stolen elections" any more, because of the same "It's always happened/you can't prove it" rebuttal. Dismiss the thousands and thousands of anecdotal instances of vote-flipping, along with exit poll discrepancies for the same reason. In fact ...

It seems like the whole “War On [insert boogyman here]” theme works well, and the fact is, all of the above - not to mention the few other matters that have come to light over the past few years with respect to election-related issues and questionable vote suppression laws and actions.


So let's just forget all that. The real challenge to democracy this go-round is voter suppression and intimidation, like what happened in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, except this time rolled out nationally, as the Republican brand managers might say. clammyc summarizes:

You do it by rigging the system from the inside - by massive voter roll purges that are designed to purge the very demographics that are most likely to hurt the other party, by challenging districting in order to “make it more fair for people’s votes to be reflective of the district”, by implementing laws that are meant to keep millions of people who are likely to vote for the other party from voting and by stacking the deck in the positions where the voting machines are selected and monitored, where the federal and state election laws are “interpreted”, where the decisions are made with respect to voter registration and how the elections are run and even having cousins in the very media outlets who are calling the races for their candidate-cousins.

Make no mistake - this is a more than just a major partisan initiative. This is an all-out assault on the voting rights of millions of potential Democratic voters and therefore, votes. This is a premeditated, long term, wide ranging attack against millions of Americans’ voting rights. But it isn’t just an assault on Democratic voters. It is an assault on the most basic right that a democracy affords.

And it should be referred to accordingly.