Sin City for the weekend

To help the nephew celebrate his 21st. Staying at Tilman's.

This old photo is from '46, when it opened. My maternal grandfather -- a train conductor -- said it was his favorite place, and he passed down to us grandkids a few of the silver dollars he won there (when they paid those out back in the day).

Skynet is about to become self-aware

It has begun. RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!

Don't be alarmed. High above your heads, a zombie satellite is on the loose. OK, actually, it won't really be a bother to us earthlings. Or at least to most of us. (More on that later.) But the rogue communications satellite is wreaking havoc in Earth's orbit and does threaten to interfere with signals coming from other satellites. Here's the backstory...

The communications satellite named Galaxy 15 lost contact with ground control after a solar flare probably fried its brain. As a story from the Christian Science Monitor reports, attempts from Earth to contact the satellite have been unsuccessful. But instead of just dying and drifting off, the satellite has continued to orbit the Earth, even though it refuses to receive instructions from its owner, Intelsat.

For the science nerds out there: The satellite is still on, with its "C-band telecommunications payload still functioning even as it has left its assigned orbital slot of 133 degrees west longitude 36,000 kilometers over the equator." Translation: Not good.

What's confounding scientists is that even though the satellite is toast, it continues to operate at full power, but with nobody telling it what to do. Why on earth we should care: The "zombiesat" (as its known in space talk) could steal a working sat signal, and interrupt programming for its customers. Yes, that means our television programs. The horror. As the blog Boing Boing points out, Galaxy 15 was one of the satellites that carried the Syfy channel's signal. And now it's met an end good enough to be its own Syfy show.

The Galaxy 15 is on course to mess with an SES satellite that transmits to Luxembourg. If it's any consolation to the good people of Luxembourg, officials are calling the situation "unprecedented."

The undead satellite has caused (Yahoo) searches for "galaxy 15 satellite" to rise an astronomical 10,300% in the last week. Searches were also out of this world for "nasa satellite imagery," "satellite photo," and "nasa satellites." It's also caused people to wonder "how many satellites are in space." Not enough to bump into each other. Yet.

Update:

Galaxy 15 continues to receive and transmit satellite signals, and they will probably interfere with the second satellite, known as AMC 11, if Galaxy 15 drifts into its orbit as expected around May 23 ...

AMC 11 is part of a satellite constellation that transmits HD television signals for more than 100 channels, ranging from Showtime and MTV Networks to HSN and the Food Network. Among the channels carried by Galaxy 15 and its sibling satellites are Cinemax, Encore, ESPN, Fox News Channel, HBO, Starz and SyFy.

If it knocks out Fox then I suppose it's worth the sacrifice. Of course if that should happen then it will surely be Obama's (or ACORN's) fault.

Seven days to Sestak-Specter and Halter-Lincoln

If you're as worn out as I am about the over-hyped and over-inflated importance of the TeaBag effect on the nations' Senate primaries, you're in for a welcome respite. From my Senate Guru e-mail:

In Pennsylvania, Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak is taking on recent Republican Arlen Specter.  As you may have read, recent polling has trended very much in Congressman Sestak's direction, but all polling continues to show a very tight race.  Democrats deserve better than nominating Specter, who not long ago championed McCain-Palin and stood as a roadblock to progress on issues like health care reform.

In Arkansas, Democratic Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter is taking on corporate lackey Blanche Lincoln. Lt. Gov. Halter has taken impressive strides toward tightening this race, and the numbers are moving in his direction, but Lincoln still enjoyed a high-single-digit edge as of the end of April.  (This more recent poll shows Lincoln with a 12-point lead.) Every poll -- including ones showing Lincoln edging Halter in the primary -- show Halter performing MUCH stronger against Republicans than Lincoln does.  In fact, Lincoln is arguably unelectable in the general election because of rampant anti-incumbent sentiment in Washington.  However, with Bill Halter as the Democratic nominee in the general against likely Republican nominee GOP Rep. John Boozman, Arkansas Democrats will turn that anti-incumbent sentiment from a weakness into a strength.

We might see a couple of actual progressives -- that would be the Democratic base, in case you were wondering -- knock off some conservative incumbents in their respective elections next week. And no TeaBags anywhere in sight.

How refreshing would that be?

Left over from Sunday Funnies

Lena Horne 1917 - 2010

A life in full.

Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress who reviled the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not socialize with them, slowing her rise to Broadway superstardom, has died. She was 92. ...

Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her sultry voice, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success.

"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," she once said. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."

In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.

In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical "Stormy Weather." Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece.

More from the NYT:

Ms. Horne might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the color of her skin, although she was so light-skinned that, when she was a child, other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.” ...

When she was 16, her mother abruptly pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks, Duke Ellington was the star of the show and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934.

And concluding from the AP link above.

By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination. ...

She had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.

In the 2009 biography "Stormy Weather," author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she'd married a white man, she replied: "To get even with him."

Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970 and 1971, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her.

"I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters," she said. "It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live."

And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness.

"I wouldn't trade my life for anything," she said, "because being black made me understand."

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes everyone had a lovely Mother's Day as it reviews the highlights from the blogs.

WhosPlayin has election results and commentary for Lewisville, Lewisville ISD, and Flower Mound.

Neil at Texas Liberal posted a picture of the Mayflower landing in West Texas. Under Texas State Board of Education guidelines, you can teach kids just about anything as long as it is false.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme applauds South Texas for supporting their schools. Tea Party tax brats take note.

Indemnification language exposes industry known threats to safety, public health and environment from hydraulic fracture. On Bluedaze: DRILLING REFORM FOR TEXAS.

Bay Area Houston posted Governor Perry's personal offering on National Prayer Day: Let Us Prey.

Off the Kuff reminds us of the cost of Rick Perry's rejection of stimulus funds for unemployment insurance.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson states that the 2003 Texas GOP/DeLay redistricting scheme continues to cost Texas dearly, in The perils at the national level of being a majority minority-party state.

Rick Perry's ad attacked Bill White's ad this past week, and Rick Perry's ad lost. Not because it was filled with lies and mischaracterizations, and not because it used Yao Ming in a weirdly inappropriate way. No, Rick Perry's ad got kicked because Rick Perry is man so terrified of everything in his life that even laser sights and hollow points aren't enough to comfort him. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has "Perry v. White over the air", a fight which resembled Mayweather-Mosely in its one-sided outcome.

At TexasKaos, JRBehrman poses three questions about the BP oil spill and gives useful perspective on their answers... Check it out : Three Questions. Hint: no quick fixes here!

Ugh. Kagan.

Saw it coming. Still don't like it.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan will be nominated Monday to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama, a person familiar with the president's thinking says, positioning the high court to have three women justices for the first time.

Obama plans to announce his choice at 10 a.m. in the East Room of the White House. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision, which came after a monthlong search, had not been made public.

Just look at all the fawning.

Kagan is known as sharp and politically savvy and has enjoyed a blazing legal career. ...

What the president gets from Kagan, 50, is a terribly bright, progressive judicial voice without a great deal of liberal baggage for critics to sort though. The White House also will get someone who has a long-held inside-the-beltway reputation for being some sort of "consensus-builder."

This comes a little closer to my POV:

SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein, who has been supportive of Kagan, describes her as “extraordinarily – almost artistically – careful” about her views of constitutional law, managing to avoid taking any definitive positions even in conversation. The simple, empirical fact is that there’s very little evidence available for the public to understand her outlook on the Constitution. Should Obama choose Kagan to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, she can remain a blank slate because the mechanism for public investigation of a nominee – the confirmation hearing – has been reduced to a venue for absurdist performance art.

But Glenn Greenwald as usual nails it, with seven salient points about why this is a bad pick ...

1) University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos, who previously expressed shock at the paucity of Kagan's record and compared her to Harriet Miers, has a new piece in The New Republic entitled (appropriately): "Blank Slate."

(2) Digby examines what a Kagan selection would reveal about Obama, and she particularly focuses on Kagan's relationship to Goldman Sachs.  That relationship is relatively minor, but it is illustrative in several ways and will certainly be used by Republicans to advance their attacks on this administration as being inextricably linked with Wall Street.  The Huffington Post's Sam Stein has more on the Kagan/Goldman Sachs connection.

(3) Following up on the article published yesterday in Salon by four minority law professors -- which condemned Kagan's record on diversity issues as "shocking" and "indefensible for the 21st Century" -- Law Professor Darren Hutchinson of American University School of Law today writes that Kagan's record is "abysmal." 

There's more so go read it. But this is the clincher.

(7) Perhaps most revealing of all:  a new article in The Daily Caller reports on growing criticisms of Kagan among "liberal legal scholars and experts" (with a focus on the work I've been doing), and it quotes the progressive legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as follows:  "The reality is that Democrats, including liberals, will accept and push whomever Obama picks."  Yesterday on Twitter, Matt Yglesias supplied the rationale for this mentality:  "Argument will be simple: Clinton & Obama like and trust [Kagan], and most liberals (myself included) like and trust Clinton & Obama."

Just think about what that means.  If the choice is Kagan, you'll have huge numbers of Democrats and progressives running around saying, in essence:  "I have no idea what Kagan thinks or believes about virtually anything, and it's quite possible she'll move the Court to the Right, but I support her nomination and think Obama made a great choice."  In other words, according to Chemerinksy and Yglesias, progressives will view Obama's choice as a good one by virtue of the fact that it's Obama choice.  Isn't that a pure embodiment of mindless tribalism and authoritarianism?  Democrats love to mock the Right for their propensity to engage in party-line, close-minded adherence to their Leaders, but compare what conservatives did with Bush's selection of Harriet Miers to what progressives are almost certain to do with Obama's selection of someone who is, at best, an absolute blank slate.

One of the very first non-FISA posts I ever wrote that received substantial attention (uniformly favorable attention from progressives) was this post, from February, 2006, about the cult of personality that subsumed the Right during the Bush era.  The central point was that conservatives supported anything and everything George Bush did, regardless of how much it comported with their alleged beliefs and convictions, because loyalty to him and their Party, along with a desire to keep Republicans in power, subordinated any actual beliefs.  Even Bill Kristol -- in a 2006 New York Times article describing how Bruce Bartlett had been ex-communicated from the conservative movement for excessively criticizing George Bush -- admitted that personal allegiance to Bush outweighed conservative principles in the first term and that "Bush was the movement and the cause."

To say that "Democrats, including liberals, will accept and push whomever Obama picks," based on the rationale that "Clinton & Obama like and trust her, and most liberals (myself included) like and trust Clinton & Obama" -- even if they know nothing about her, even if she might move the Court to the Right -- seems to me to be an exact replica of what I described four years ago.

This woman has the potential of being what Harry Blackmun was to Richard Nixon, what David Souter was to George H. W. Bush, what John Paul Stevens was to Gerald Ford. And that not coming to pass over the years is the best we progressives can hope for.

TeaBagger loses in SD-22

As has been the case across the nation, election predictions of TeaBagger takeovers missed a few times. Initially covered here but better blogged since by a variety of other shops, a pair of alleged CarpetBaggers finished first and second in the free-for-all to replace state Sen. Kip Averitt of Waco yesterday.

Former state Sen. David Sibley and Gulf War veteran Brian Birdwell are heading to a runoff after neither garnered enough votes during a special election Saturday for a Texas Senate seat.

Sibley, a Republican, is trying to retake the seat he held for 11 years and finished with the most votes. But with all precincts reporting, no candidate in the four-way race earned the required 50 percent of the vote to secure the seat.

The central Texas seat includes 10 counties stretching from Waco to the outskirts of Fort Worth.

Sibley, a lobbyist and former dental surgeon, captured 45 percent of the vote while Birdwell, also a Republican, came in second with about 37 percent. Birdwell, who survived the Sept. 11 terrorist attack at the Pentagon, trailed Sibley by more than 2,500 votes.

Both men questioned the other's residence eligibility (a state senator must reside in the district for one year at minimum). But the real news is that the TeaBagger, Darren Yancy, came in fourth with just over 5% of the vote in a four-man race. He finshed woefully behind Baylor political science professor and Democratic candidate Gayle Avant, heretofore famous only for his moustache.

So the good conservatives of the Central Texas counties comprising SD-22 picked two establishment Republicans to face off against each other in a runoff. And the Democrat got nearly three times as many votes as the TeaBagger.

Yet we will continue to be treated to more stories about the Tea Party revolt sweeping Texas and the nation. Just remind yourself that it is horseshit when you see it.

The Teabs are an internal Republican Party uprising, and they are experiencing limited success in their maiden electoral endeavor. The Teed Off phenomenon is, at its core, anti-Obama: a virulent strain of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Nothing more.

Because what this country needs is a more conservative senator from Utah

RIP Bob Bennett. No great loss, and his replacement will probably be worse.

He voted in favor of the bailout, which was his death warrant among this extremist subset. The real message, though, is being sent to Texas' own TeaBagger, NRSC head Box Turtle Cornyn.

The result is yet another rebuke of the GOP establishment -- barely a week after Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, official Washington's pick for the state's Senate nomination, quit the party in a last-ditch effort to survive. Another blow to Republican powers here may come in another week or so, as Tea Party favorite Rand Paul may take out the establishment choice in the Kentucky Senate primary.

Note the Teabonics in this link's ending sentence that Republicans had "best head voters warnings".  Sadly Tim Kaine, the Democrats' mostly invisible chair, didn't proof-read his response, either:

" ... If there was any question before, there should now be no doubt that the Republican leadership has handed the reigns to the Tea Party."

Yeah, and the rein in Speign falls mainely on the plane. Go back to sleep, Governor Kain.

The other Senator Bennet, he of one 't' and hailing from Colorado, said it best when he called the TeaBaggers nihilists.

"Who do you think built the road that you traveled here on? Who do you think built the bridges and the sewers and the waste-water systems and invested in the higher education system that we now have. They built that stuff from scratch!... Our parents and our grandparents. And we can't even maintain it?!"

But hey, never forget that " 'Murrica is th' greates' cuntry inna werld".

Update: Steve Singiser ...

Bob Bennett is not burdened by scandal, nor has he been the kind of perennially unpopular politico that barely scrapes by intraparty challenges for the duration of his career (the way his fellow Utahn, Chris Cannon, was).

He is a standard-issue incumbent, who committed the capital offense (for 2010, anyway) of being a Republican occasionally capable of a non-ideological vote. This led him to a raft of opponents, and an unceremonious second-round exit in the state convention, one that was fueled at unbridled anger at ideological apostasy, as local columnist Peg McEntee pointed out:

When Bennett lost, the yips and howls from thousands of delegates sounded like coyotes going after one of their own.

Left standing were Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater, both Utah County Republicans who like the tea partiers and 9/12ers just fine. Both claim to be strict constitutionalists who will free Utah from an oppressive federal government, take back federal lands in Utah and repeal health care reform.

This process is being repeated from coast-to-coast, where so-called mainstream or "establishment" Republicans are getting battered for their lack of commitment to the "principles" of conservatism.

Read more, and take note particularly of the muddled past as prologue.

Greasy Sunday Funnies