Jane Russell 1921 - 2011

Jane Russell, whose voluptuous good looks won the attention of millionaire Howard Hughes and launched her on a movie career, died Monday of respiratory failure at her home in Santa Maria, California. She was 89.

Generally cast in fluff films like 1943’s The Outlaw that showed off her well-endowed beauty, Russell reached the pinnacle of her career with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), starring in the comedy with Marilyn Monroe.

Although best known for her figure, Russell showed a comic sensibility in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and again with Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955) and The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956). Nevertheless, most of her movie roles were designed around her towering physicality and frontal amplitude.

"Frontal amplitude". Have to remember to use that one in conversation soon.

During the 1970s, Russell was widely recognized as the spokesperson for Playtex bras, appearing in national TV commercials for the “Cross Your Heart” bra campaign.

That's how I remember her; with that tape measure worn as a bandolier on those old teevee commercials.

She lived the would-be-starlet's dream: discovered by a famous director at the dentist's office, used what she had (which, depending on your POV, was either not very much or a whole helluva lot) to get ahead in show business, and always let the men know she was in on the joke -- which was on them.

Rest in peace, Ms. Russell.

Rick Perry annexes Juarez

He may have thought this was the same thing as seceding. I'm just surprised he didn't claim that he meant "North" America.

It seems Texas isn’t big enough for Rick Perry.

During a sit down with reporters on Monday, the Texas governor incorrectly identified Juarez — located across the Rio Grande, and border, from El Paso — as “the most dangerous city in America.”

The misstatement came in the middle of an impassioned assault on the administration’s record of enforcing the border.

“How many more American citizens are going to have to die?” Perry asked.

The border state governor then turned to the chaos created by Mexico’s drug wars.

“There have been 34,000 Mexicans killed directly attributable to the drug wars. It is a very dangerous place,” he said.

Perry then pointed out that “Juarez is reported to be the most dangerous city in America.”

After an aide informed the governor of his mistake, Perry clarified that Juarez indeed belongs to Mexico, not Texas.

This is why he blocks reporters from following him on Twitter -- because his Tweets are even more ignorant than this, and he knows it. Is there a word that goes beyond 'embarrassed' -- the way that Texans feel about their governor, and what their governor is incapable of feeling for himself?

The Weekly Wrangle

As the Texas Progressive Alliance gets ready to rodeo, we would also like to thank the Academy for this week's blog roundup.

Off the Kuff published an interview with Chris Barbic, founder and CEO of the YES Prep charter schools, which included a discussion of what the looming budget cuts will do to charter schools.

Doing My Part For The Left is having a greeting card event. Refinish69 thinks it is time to Send Republican Senators and Representatives a Greeting Card to thank them for the work they are doing.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson points out that the GOP's wish is coming true -- the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, in Plutocracy: the 30-year class war on working and middle class Americans.

Nat-Wu from Three Wise Men analyzes the Tucson shootings and the concealed-carry-on-campus bill before the Texas legislature.

From Bay Area Houston: "Teabaggers are the most dangerous, ignorant, disrespectful bunch of people on the planet."

No one fails quite like Mucous, according to McBlogger.

The Texas Cloverleaf speaks out against concealed firearms on Texas campuses.

Public Citizen's TexasVox asks who the real sacred cows are in the Texas and federal budget, replying that the obvious answer are the corporate welfare queens making profits off fossil fuel subsidies.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme calls out the Dallas Morning News for siding with the Koch brothers against hard working people.

Lightseeker over at TexasKaos thinks he knows what game the Republicans are playing and what the Democrats are trying in reply. Check out Shock and Awe and The Democratic Strategy Going Forward.

Redistricting endangers several Texas House representatives, Democratic as well as Republican. The mapmakers may need long knives instead of sharpened pencils (since we can all do maps online now). PDiddie at Brains and Eggs summarizes the opening of "negotiations".

Neil at Texas Liberal discussed the fact that he will soon be taking an airplane trip.

People-Powered Protest Pictures

Click on these for a larger and much clearer look. From yesterday's "Rally to Save the American Dream" in Austin, at the Capitol:

More pictures here and also here. From the "Houston Walk for Choice" in Houston, also yesterday:

More photos here.

Sunday Funnies

Redistricting endangers state representatives

One of them is Houston's Scott Hochberg.

Last week's census figures showed that Harris County grew dramatically during the past decade but not fast enough to warrant adding a new state legislative district. The county, in fact, likely will lose one.

As Texas lawmakers turn their attention to the complex and contentious task of redrawing their own districts, that loss will set in motion a game of musical chairs to determine who has a place among the 150 House seats. That number does not change despite a 20 percent increase in population statewide, which means the kaleidoscope of voters each lawmaker represents will shift. Harris County is expected to go from 25 to 24 state House seats.

Legislative districts, redrawn every 10 years in the wake of federal census results, must be roughly the same size, somewhere near 167,637 people per district.

[...]

In the House, Democrat Rep. Carol Alvarado's 145th District, with 132,730 people, is down 20.8 percent, as are districts represented by her inner-city cohorts, including state Rep. Scott Hochberg, a Democrat, whose District 137 fell to a population of 137,876, which is 17.8 percent below the mean. District 143, an inner-city district represented by Ana Hernandez, a Democrat, has a population of only 127,381, about 24 percent below the mean. ...

Legislative districts west of downtown gained population dramatically. State Rep. William Callegari, a Republican, represents 264,426 people in District 132, nearly 58 percent above the mean. With a population of 212,484, District 150, represented by Debbie Riddle, a Republican, is 26.8 percent above the mean. Incumbents will have "to start pushing and pulling in different directions" — to use Republican consultant Allen Blakemore's phrase - to equal out the districts.

"Scott Hochberg's gone," Blakemore said. "He's under, and he's a white Democrat."

That sentiment could be premature, said political scientist Mark Jones of Rice University.

"Hochberg is gone if you change the district by too much," he said. "He's well-known in the area he represents, but if he has to pick up population in an area where he's not all that well-known, he could be in trouble. He'll be fine if he keeps, maybe, 65 percent of his current district. He's more endangered if you create a district that's more Hispanic." ...

Jones suggested that Sarah Davis, a rookie Republican representing a central Houston district, could be in trouble. Davis' district is 12.2 percent below the mean.

"She's squeezed," Jones said, "because she's close to Democratic districts. Plus, her district is likely to swing back in 2012."

Hochberg, one of the best and brightest serving in the Texas House, has always managed to walk enough blocks and knock on enough doors in his district to get it done. But the GOP will target him and him alone in Harris County, because they don't want to make things any more difficult for their own people than they already are, and because the VRA makes targeting a Latina -- Alvarado or Hernandez Luna -- virtually off-limits.

Spread Sarah "Ding Dong" Davis with butter and jam no matter what the lines are in HD-134, because she is toast. We're taking that district back in '12.

In west Texas, Paul Burka identifies Jim Landtroop of Plainview as "most vulnerable player".

1. He’s a freshman.

2. He supported Paxton for speaker.

3. He cast one of the fifteen votes against Straus for speaker

4. He represents a part of the state that is hemorrhaging population.

5. He has nowhere to go to pick up extra people.

6. He’s a hard-right conservative

7. He has already been marginalized by his committee assignments (Agriculture & Livestock, Defense & Veterans’ Affairs), although Ag is important in his district.

Landtroop has one of the most oddly shaped districts. It is essentially a cross (.pdf), seven counties from north to south, five from east to west, with appendages on the east side. He is landlocked by savvy veteran members who play important roles in the House: Chisum on the north; Hardcastle, Darby, and Keffer on the east; Hilderbran on the south; and Craddick and Charles Perry on the west. Perry is a Landtroop clone: tea-party type, hard-right conservative, poor committee assignments, supported Paxton for speaker, voted against Straus. You could flip a coin and let the winner have the seat without affecting the House at all.

The factors that squeezed out Speaker Pete Laney six years ago hits Hale and surrounding Panhandle counties again. And read the comments there for some nostalgic give-and-take from the 2006 Democratic primary. The entreaties for Laney to run for lieutenant governor are almost poignant.

Note however that Warren Chisum, having announced his intention to run for the Texas Railroad Commission, may make Burka's speculation moot if the mapmakers absorb his district into a new one that meets the population threshold. Burka thinks that the district moves south toward Lubbock, but I'm inclined to believe that the new lines go north toward Amarillo.

The commenters at Burkablog's link point out that Donna Howard and Craig Eiland are also endangered Democrats, that a variety of GOP incumbents in Travis and Dallas Counties could get unseated in the musical chairs shuffle, and that east Texas will be down a seat, likely a Republican one. More on that from the Franklin County GOP, namely turncoat Chuck Hopson, who seems to have trouble constructing his sentences:

“Wayne Christian is over in House District 9, which is Nacogdoches, Shelby, St. Augustine, Sabine, Jasper — immediately to the right of Cherokee County — that district is 22,000 short. The district, Bryan Hughes, immediately above me, District 5, is 9,000 short. Lavender, which is up in Texarkana, is 21,000 short. Cain immediately next to him is 21,000 short. Phillips next to him is 13,000 short,” Hopson said. “Leo Berman in Tyler is the only person (whose district is above the qualifier), he has an excess of 2,500 people in Tyler because Tyler’s had a really good growth. But from Texarkana all the way down to Galveston, all those districts are short.”

Then again maybe it was the transcriber. Somebody really needs to learn English or just get of the country, don't you think?

First Tunisia, then Egypt, now Libya. Is Wisconsin next?

Eliza Griswold of The Daily Beast:

The last nine days in Libya are bringing the bloodiest of all recent revolutions to pass. Over the past 48 hours in downtown Tripoli and to the east, in the city of Benghazi, which has long opposed Muammar Gaddafi’s 41-year rule, Gaddafi has declared war on his own people, using fighter jets, helicopters, and possibly anti-aircraft fire, as well as African mercenaries to gun down Libyans who dare to oppose him. Due to a media blackout, very few images have emerged from the country.

Libyans have turned, instead, to Twitter, logging in voicemails of eyewitness accounts of the mounting brutality on Enough Gaddafi. Numbers of dead and wounded are impossible to verify. Human Rights Watch has confirmed at least 233 dead, most in the east. As in Egypt, Libyans have begun to record the fallen on 1000memories.com.

But Libya is not Egypt. “This isn’t a Facebook revolution. It’s more like Holler—people calling to each other from the other side of the street,” Khaled Mattawa, a Libyan poet and professor at the University of Michigan, says. Mattawa, like many other members of the exiled intelligencia, has set up a makeshift situation room in his Michigan basement, from which he supplies information to reporters and fellow Libyans.

When it comes to a functioning civil society, Libya is a near total vacuum. It is home to six million people, not Egypt’s 80 million, who have lived in almost total isolation for 41 years. Internet access is limited. So are opportunities for study abroad for anyone whose last name isn’t Gaddafi. Unlike Egypt, the county is filthy rich, but that money is meaningless for those outside of the regime.

In Libya, global forces have held a limited sway. Unlike Egypt, there are not millions of tourists arriving every year. There are only a small handful of international visitors, many of whom (including me) have received direct invitations from the Gaddafi regime to come watch their petro-dollar Potemkin village function as an “opening” state.



On Monday night, in The Leader’s signature bizarre fashion, he appeared on national television to quell rumors that he had fled to the safety of his good friend, Hugo Chavez. “I am still in Tripoli, and not in Venezuela,” he said in a brief, less than minute-long speech. He wearing a fur hat and carrying an open umbrella speaking through the open door of a white truck.

One of Muammar Gaddafi’s greatest fears is that of ending up “in a hole” like his former friend and colleague, Saddam Hussein, M. Jibriel, a senior Libyan economic advisor told me.

To safeguard his teetering grip on power, Gaddafi is willing to openly slaughter protestors in droves—a practice he has long carried out in secret.

Last night I read that some of the fighter pilots had flown to the island of Malta and asked for asylum rather than bomb the protestors. A dozen or so of Libya's foreign diplomatic corps have resigned; the US ambassador said that he could no longer represent "the current dictatorship".

Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Libya ... Wisconsin?

Update: Or maybe Indiana?

President's Day Quiz

No fair Googling. Answers at the end.

1. Which president negotiated a treaty with Peru that kept U.S. businessmen up to their elbows in a cheap (cheep?) fertilizer known as bird shit?
A) Lincoln  B) Fillmore  C) McKinley  D) Kennedy

2. Which president's autobiography fails to mention his wife even once?
A) Van Buren  B) Grant  C) Wilson  D) Taft

3. Who liked to blame his farts on his Secret Service detail?
A) Hayes  B) Ford  C) L. Johnson  D) Eisenhower

4. "I can't remember what I did" is what this president said about his time in the Alabama National Guard…and no one else can remember anything about his service there, either:
A) Clinton  B) Hoover  C) Nixon  D) George W. Bush

5. Which president shared the same nickname with his five brothers?
A) Eisenhower---"Ike"  B) Tyler---"Tye"  C) Monroe---"Mugs"  D) Taft---"Big [Name]"

6. Which president-to-be lost his first election, claiming that his rival only won because he was the tallest man in the room?
A) Pierce  B) John Quincy Adams  C) John Adams  D) Cleveland

7. Who uttered the misstatement, "Now we're trying to get unemployment to go up. I think we are going to succeed."
A) Obama  B) Truman  C) Harding  D) Reagan

8. Who felt that horses "ate too much, worked too little, and died too young," and became influential in the breeding of mules for farm work?
A) Jefferson  B) Washington  C) Jackson  D) Taylor

9.  Who advocated for the removal of "In God We Trust" from U.S. currency?
A) Carter  B) Teddy Roosevelt  C) Polk  D) Garfield

10. Who got swindled by a brokerage firm, declared bankruptcy, and rejected an offer of $100,000 from P.T. Barnum for his war memorabilia?
A) Benjamin Harrison  B) W.H. Harrison  C) Grant  D) Madison

Answers: B, A, B, D, A, C, D, B, B, C

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance stands in solidarity with the workers of Wisconsin as they bring you this week's blog roundup.

Off the Kuff examines the Perry/Combs slap fight over Amazon's decision to leave Texas rather than pay taxes.

Letters From Texas reports on a note that a pregnant woman sent to Texas state Senator Leticia Van de Putte, as the Senate prepared to pass the sonogram bill, and as the woman prepared to leave for the hospital to deliver her baby. Surprise #1: the woman is against the bill. Surprise #2: so is her father. Surprise #3: her father is another Texas state Senator.

This week the Legislative Study Group released an updated version of the "Texas on the Brink", Eye On Williamson had this to say: for Texas to get off the brink, we must fight for the impossible.

A gaggle of Houston bloggateers met with Metro's CEO and board members and discussed the many changes the transit authority has completed in the past year. PDiddie from Brains and Eggs was there and filed a report.

Libby Shaw explains what the Texas GOP means by shrinking government over at TexasKaos. Give a read to Texas GOP "To Shrink Government to fit inside a Woman's Uterus".

Neil at Texas Liberal looked at some early campaign advertising by incumbent Houston Mayor Annise Parker and considered if Mayor Parker's record matched her claims.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wonders why republicans dislike women so much.

This week at McBlogger, your punishment is your reward!

Sunday Funnies

Redistricting follies

Lots has been written and and a lot still to be on the coming rework of Congressional and state legislative boundaries for 2012. Mark Jones at Rice's Baker Institute, with whom I seem to disagree most of the time, gets some of it right in this post entitled "Why Houston won't send a Hispanic to Congress":

(O)ne might expect that a second Hispanic-majority district (in addition to Gene Green's CD-29) would be created in the Houston area during the current redistricting process. This is unlikely to happen for four principal reasons.

First, any Hispanic-majority district created in the Houston area would be expected to elect a Democrat. However, the redistricting process is already expected to produce two additional Hispanic majority districts, which will elect Democrats. One district will be in the lower Río Grande Valley, where any district is by definition a Hispanic-majority district, and one will be in the DFW Metroplex which presently lacks a Hispanic-majority district and where suburban Republicans are eager to make their districts safer by packing Democrats into a urban minority-majority district. As a result, the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature (along with Governor Rick Perry) is unlikely to support the creation of a third Democratic district in Houston.

The italicized assumption above by Jones is probably false. Aaron Pena was again assigned to the House Redistricting committee and is going to get lots of help drawing a district in the Valley he can quite possibly win.

Second, Houston-area Republicans strongly back the creation of a new Republican majority district in the Northwest portion of the region. Furthermore, this district could be created rather painlessly (from the perspective of Republican incumbents) from some combination of portions of the current districts represented by Representatives Brady, Culberson, McCaul, Olson, Paul and Poe.

Absolutely correct. Just take a look at the spreadsheet at the top of this post. CD-10 alone has almost half of a new district's population to shed. McCaul, an Austin resident, would probably love to have more of Travis and southeast Austin in a new-to-him district, while Harris County's northwest corridor, and further out 290, elect another Republican.

Third, to create a second Hispanic majority district would require significant changes to the districts presently occupied by Representatives Al Green, Gene Green and Sheila Jackson Lee, while the creation of the Republican district in the Northwest suburbs would leave these representatives' districts relatively untouched. As a result -- at least privately -- none of these three Democratic representatives is likely to be overly enthusiastic about the creation of a second Hispanic-majority district (especially Al Green and Jackson Lee).

Fourth, given the relative lack of residential housing segregation among Hispanics in the region, it would be difficult to draw a second compact and contiguous district in which Hispanics comprised a strong majority (55 to 60 percent) of the district's population. Recall, that the creation of minority-majority districts depends on residential housing segregation. If a certain demographic group is well-integrated residentially, then it is much more difficult to draw a district where it comprises a majority of the population.

Accurate -- if slightly obnoxious -- on both counts. The Austin Chronicle suggests that all the new Congresspersons will be up and down Interstate 35...

There does seem to be consensus that the four new seats should be somewhere along I-35. According to a report produced by the Texas Legislative Council, an advisory body to the Lege, 57% of the decade's growth based on the 2009 estimates occurred along the I-35 corridor. Another 39% occurred east of that line, and only 4% in West Texas.

"I think the big controversy will be the battle between Hispanics and Republicans over several areas, in particular the area between Tarrant County and Dallas," (UT law professor Steve) Bickerstaff says. "The issue is whether there is a sufficient Hispanic population there now to create a Hispanic opportunity district under the Voting Rights Act. [The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund] has wanted that for two decades now; this is the third decade. Each time the Hispanic percentage has grown but not reached the legal requirements. I think there will be considerable attention given that this time." Bickerstaff thinks a similar battle could occur in redrawing the state Senate.

"Clearly, the distribution is going to be along the I-35 corridor and the Rio Grande Valley," says Sen. Kal Seliger (R-Amarillo). For the Valley, recent Capitol buzz has strongly suggested that Republicans will try to draw a district that could elect to Congress newly turncoat state House Republican Aaron Peña.

Like I said. If the Lege can't get this done, in regular session or special -- and I believe that they will -- then the Legislative Redistricting Board will do it for them, without benefit of Democratic input ...

"I'm not very optimistic that we'll do anything different in 2011 than we did in 2001," (Sen. Jeff Wentworth) says, noting that the LRB gets legal control over the process if the Lege fails, and the LRB would now be all-Republican. "For partisan Republicans in the majority ... there's not a lot of incentive to sit down and work out a fair map with the Democratic minority, when they know if they just do nothing and adjourn [at the beginning of June], five Republicans will draw the map, and they can be more partisan than the Legislature."

Be reminded that the LRB is comprised of David Dewhurst, Joe Straus, Greg Abbott, Susan Combs, and Todd Staples. Wentworth raises another interesting angle; that the maps might not be submitted to the Justice Department for Voting Rights Act pre-clearance:

Other knowledgeable observers disagree and believe the Republicans won't even bother with the Justice Department and will go directly to the courts. "I think what will happen is Republicans will say [the review process] is unfair," Bickerstaff told the same gathering. "If [the GOP redistricting] is aggressive, you go to the court."

Wentworth, whose district includes part of South Austin, told the Chronicle the same thing. "I don't believe it would be in Texas' interest to even go the route of trying to get precleared by the Department of Justice," Wentworth said. "We've always had the option of going to a three-judge federal court in the District of Columbia. We've never taken that route; we've always gone the preclearance route through the Voting Rights division of the DOJ. But I think that would be a waste of time in 2011, and I don't believe we're planning on doing that."

These are just the preliminary skirmishes. Greg goes as deep in the weeds on census data and redistricting maps as you could hope to go. Update: Here's his response to Jones of Rice's Baker. Kuffner has posted lots on the topic already.

Watch for much more ink, airtime, and pixels.

Lunch with Metro

Yesterday this bloggateer was invited to a gathering of similars with Gilbert Garcia and George Greanias of Metro, the metroplitan transit authority of Harris County. Present also was their media outreach chief Jerome Gray and board members Allen Watson and Christof Spieler and others. In the ongoing dynamic of evolving media, the purpose of the luncheon was to open the dialogue between Metro and us in order to make more transparent the functions of Houston's mobility coordinators.

And there was a free lunch involved, so I'm always wherever that is.

Joining me were Charles and Neil and Greg and Tory and Erik and John and a few more.

Following our lunch and conversation with Q&A we toured the maintenance facility at 1601 West Bellfort, just south of the Fannin South railway station (the southernmost terminus for the Texas-Medical-Center-to-downtown light rail line, also known as the Main Street Line and the Red Line).

Just in the past ten months (April '10 to January '11), and besides the personnel overhaul, Metro has ...

-- had a compliance review completed by Fulbright and Jaworski with no significant findings;

-- bought out former CEO Frank Wilson's contract at a discount;

-- settled the lawsuit with Lloyd Kelley;

-- reworked their real estate contract with McDade Smith to save some commission expense;

-- cancelled the contract for more rail cars with the Spanish company that builds them and received $14 million back as part of that settlement;

-- adopted a reduced capital budget (.pdf), one which slows the expansion of light rail projects in tune with their funding (as part of their transparency initiative you can even see their check register online now)

-- and has begun to demonstrate a much improved relationship with the Federal Transit Administration (of the USDOT), resulting in an extra $50 million (from $150MM to $200MM) in President Obama's budget proposal for construction of Metro's North and Southeast rail lines.

*Whew*. That's a lot of long hours and late nights for some people.

Myth-buster: Metro just celebrated its 75 millionth boarding, four years ahead of projections. Next time you hear someone say that nobody rides the train (or the buses), know that they're full of it.

Garcia wrote an op-ed last month with more detail on these organizational improvements.

While much of our Q&A centered around things like transparency and budgets and so on, I asked -- thinking that my question might be better directed to the appropriate county commissioner -- about the fate of the Danny Jackson Bark Park (see more at Yelp), which runs along the south side of Westpark between the West Loop and Newcastle ... precisely where the west end of the University Line will go. I -- and about a hundred different Houstonians at any thirty-minute interval of the day -- love this place, especially for our big dogs, who really don't get much exercise or socialization without it. And Steve Radack has cracked (scroll to the bottom) that the very reason "he" put a dog park there was so that 'Metro would lose votes if they took it back' for the railway. Well, even though Metro originally wanted to run University down Richmond -- spurring plenty of community outrage at the time -- they had purchased much of that right-of-way on Westpark from Southern Pacific in 1992. In other words, it was Metro's land for a long time before somebody thought about asking them if they could put a dog run there. And with the Uptown line coming into play, the attractiveness of increased Galleria-area ridership made everything work out well in the end.

Except for the future of a truly beloved dog park. That's still Radack's bailiwick, and maybe Metro can help him out again with something, real-estate wise.

So at this point you might be thinking "PDiddie is just a cheerleader for Metro". Well, I'm certainly a big fan of infrastructure. And a Houston that solves its ongoing and future mobility challenges is a Houston that thrives. For bidness, and for its residents. I think Metro has a real handle on how to make that happen. Tune into their board meetings online and feel free to voice your opinion, whether you agree with me or not.

Update: Big Jolly plays the victim.