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.