Little Rock, Memphis, Shreveport

We'll shift gears into travel and leisure mode for this post.

Over the Easter weekend mi Cubana loca and I took a little road trip to the cities listed in the headline. I'd wanted to go back to LR and the Clinton presidential library ever since I made a similar trip with my mother in the fall of '07, when we ambled our way up to Fayetteville to watch my niece and her granddaughter play a weekend volleyball series with Georgia and Auburn in her senior season. (Sidebar: I don't like to write about my out-of-town traveling before it happens any more, or take photos while on vacation and post them to Facebook or Twitter. Some people will leverage information like that to your disadvantage, you know.)

We departed H-Town around 7 Thursday morning, dropped off the dogs at the kennel, and took off up US 59 north. We had lunch at Bryce's Cafeteria in Texarkana around 1 p.m. and made the Arkansas capital by 4. It's an easy 7-hour drive at slightly above posted speed limits, eight or nine depending on how many stops you make. That evening we bumped around the River Market district, ate at the Flying Fish, had a cocktail at the Underground. It was cool and rained on us a little but we had slickers on so we weren't bothered. That was the only inclement weather we experienced. Somehow we managed to dodge all the tornados in Arkansas and elsewhere that roared through about the same time we were there.

We stayed overnight at the Courtyard by Marriott, which is within both sight and walking distance of the library at the eastern edge of downtown. But one-half block away there's an executive golf cart that will pick you up in front of the Clinton Museum Store and whisk you the five blocks or so to the front door. The old train trestle in front is undergoing renovation to a walk/bike pedestrian bridge, so there's some construction to navigate.

As presidential libraries go, it's the best I have ever been in (LBJ's and GHWB's are fine archives but the architecture is stale and conservative at both). The Clinton is modern and gleaming and soars figuratively and literally. Some cattily compared it to a mobile home when it opened ... but those are mostly the same people who still think Obama was born in Kenya. The exhibits tell not just the president's and the nation's political and social history but also the world's from 1993 - 2000, and the displays seem more accessible and personal. The restaurant is amazing, both the food and the atmosphere. We toured the library on Good Friday morning and had lunch there before shopping a bit at the Museum Store and then driving the 2 1/2 hours on to Memphis.

We made a reservation at the Westin one block off Beale Street before we knew we were going on Easter weekend, and before the NBA scheduled the Grizzlies to play their first-ever home playoff game against the San Antonio Spurs right next door at Fed-Ex Center. So while at first we thought it might be a good contrarian stay (you know, when everybody else isn't) we came to realize we would be in the thick of the action (Beale plus basketball). It turned out grand, even with the Spurs checking in about the same time as us (through the back door, of course).

What is there to say about Beale that hasn't already been said? Just go. It's much the same yet totally different from Sixth in Austin. Think ribs and blues instead of Tex-Mex and rockabilly; it's all good either way. We had the babybacks -- dry rub for her, wet for me -- at Blues City Cafe before taking our ghost tour Friday night. We walked up to the Peabody and heard a scary story, then headed south on Main to the Orpheum, took note of Gus' Fried Chicken (we came back for lunch Saturday), paused at the Lorraine Motel (where MLK Jr. was assassinated) and on into the Arts District and past the Voodoo Fields, ending at Ernestine and Hazel's -- read this also from Rathbone and Tully -- before catching the trolley back uptown. Walkin' in Memphis on a cool night was just marvelous.

Saturday morning we drove out to Graceland. Again, how much could I add to the narrative? I'm not even what anyone would consider an Elvis fan. Liked him, liked his music, but that's about it ... until I arrived. His home just outside of town has been converted into both museum and shrine, and it does the job of preserving and extending the man's legacy. It's over the top in some ways just like Elvis himself, but also has a special and happy karma; at times glorious and at others vain and excessive. It holds literally everything Elvis: the charisma, the clothes, the cars, the gold records ... even him. He's of course buried there, between his mother and father and near his infant twin brother and grandmother. All together in life and death, as that generation was so fond of doing. This two-minute amateur video made me dizzy but will give you a sense of his enduring popularity. The flowers and memorials still pour in from around the world, and are all placed at his gravesite (until they start to wilt, then removed).

Besides the mansion, the Graceland park across the street sprawls across several acres and has half a dozen exhibits -- the autos, motorcycles, snowmobiles, golf carts and other toys make up one, another consists of his fleet of two airplanes which you can climb into, one is dedicated just to his impact on fashion (a video playing there has a rap artist noting that "Elvis musta had some gangsta in him because he was the first dude to do 'bling' big"), another to his comeback in 1968 ... on it goes. There's his music playing unobtrusively in the background seemingly everywhere, scenes from his movies and clips from TV shows like Ed Sullivan showing on monitors frequently. There are eleven gift shops, all full of mostly the same kitsch and junk and junk food (just as Elvis would have wanted).

The best time to go is early in the morning before the crowds and the heat arrive.  We were there with a couple of the wife's high school friends, and they were quick to agree that 9:30 a.m. Easter Saturday was much better than 4 p.m. July Fourth weekend, when they had been the last time. We saw everything and finally left -- a little bit Elvis'ed out -- around 1 p.m. and had lunch at Gus', waiting about 45 minutes to be seated. The chicken is as good as everybody says, but I wouldn't go again because of the wait ... and because I'm diabetic and shouldn't be eating fried chicken and all the starchy sides anyway.

Saturday night was spent inside the Beale zoo. We watched the Griz top the Spurs at Club 152 but hustled down to Silky's in the fourth quarter to get a good table in front of the Zydeco band before the crowds poured out to celebrate the win. It felt like Mardi Gras.

Easter Sunday we had steak and eggs for brunch with a small gathering of like-minded agnostics at Miss Polly's Soul City Cafe' before hitting the road for Shreveport -- about six hours, backtracking most of the way through Little Rock -- and the Louisiana Boardwalk in nearby Bossier City, with casinos and shops and restaurants and all that. We gambled a little and had the buffet at the El Dorado, neither of which was remarkable (we've had much better luck and grub in Kinder and Lake Charles). But our stay at the Courtyard there was terrific: brand-new, all the latest modern amenities, including a big interactive high-def TV in the lobby which let you touchscreen locations and print out directions. Very classy. We checked out and left LA around 11 Monday and drove about four hours back to Houston, hitting town just before rush hour. We passed through Crockett around 2 or so; tornadoes struck there that evening.

I would take this same trip again in a heartbeat, and stay longer in each town if I could. No, nobody paid me for all of this advertising. They should be, though ... don't you think?

Update: I-40 between Little Rock and Memphis is closed due to flooding from the Big Muddy. Mud Island and South Memphis are threatened as the water rises. Timing is everything, people.

Planned Parenthood of South Texas luncheon with Celinda Lake

Assembled today at the Hotel Zaza near Houston's Hermann Park with Mayor Annise Parker, former county commissioner Sylvia Garcia, city council members Melissa Noriega, Sue Lovell, Ed Gonzales, Stephen Costello and a host of other dignitaries were the defenders of Texas women in the form of the powerful activists united with Planned Parenthood's local chapter. The blog table included yours truly, Charles Kuffner, Julie Pippert, Neil Aquino, Stace Medellin, John Cobarruvias and others.

Nobody who reads a political blog in the United States needs to be reminded about the vicious attacks on the rights of all women to determine their reproductive future. Today in fact was not a day for Texas women in particular to note the maliciousness of those (old, fat, mostly white conservative men) who insist on thrusting their ignorance in women's faces -- and elsewhere -- rather, today was a celebration of a fund-raising record and to prepare for the battles ahead.

Pre-eminent pollster Celinda Lake gave the keynote, and served notice in her thorough research into the thoughts and opinions of voters with some data we were suspecting: that a majority of both Americans and Texans, mostly Democrats and liberals but also a large number of independents -- are appalled at the overreach by Republicans who were elected in 2010 to create jobs and help mend the economy.

So far, as has been noted, they're going hard and fast in reverse on that mission also.

The highlights of Lake's presentation included:

-- Americans not only remain supportive of Roe and against an abortion ban, but they are also tired of the debate around the question.

-- That's probably because Lake's polling verifies that the issue is severely polarized; Democratic voters and independents are pro-choice, Republicans of course are anti-choice.

-- Just three percent of voters said abortion was their single most important issue when deciding whom to send to Congress. Those voters, naturally, were most likely to be anti-choice.

-- Two-thirds of Americans still want to continue federal funding for Planned Parenthood ... but slightly oppose federal funding for abortions.

(In point of fact, federal funding for abortion has been outlawed since 1976 ... when the Hyde Amendment was passed. We were made painfully aware of more of this kind of ignorance recently when Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona absurdly claimed that abortions were 90% of PP's business, and was corrected -- to his profound embarrassment -- by the facts. That didn't stop John Cornyn from repeating the stupidity. In Texas, we know that morons who think like Cornyn come a dime a dozen ... and many of them serve in the Texas Legislature.)

-- While economic concerns were the dominant issue among voters in the 2010 election cycle, Lake's polling revealed a surprise: reproductive freedom played a "strong role" in the closing days of the campaign in a number of close races across the nation ... and "helped swing the results in the progressive candidates' favor".  Specifically cited in Lake's PowerPoint were Maine's 1st (Chellie Pingree) and Virginia's 11th (Gerry Connolly) Congressional tilts.

-- More things we thought we knew already: the 2010 electorate compared to its 2008 counterpart was older, more conservative, and less ethnically or racially diverse (does this describe any Republican you know? Or all of them?). Texas voters were all those things and more male, too. Democrats suffered due to lower turnout among younger voters, unmarried women and African Americans. The gender gap in Texas is smaller than elsewhere, but 53% of women in the last election still voted GOP compared to 57% of Texas men.

-- A majority of Latinos (61%) and an overwhelming majority of African Americans (88%) in Texas voted Democratic ... but 2/3 of Texans who voted in 2010 were Anglo, and they went Republican 69-29.

-- Younger Texans (18-29) were just 9% of the total and they went against the GOP wave by 5 points (51-46); those from 30 to 44 were split evenly (48% D, 49% R) and made up 23% of all Texas voters; 45-64 year-olds comprised 48% of the electorate and broke Republican 57-41, and Texans 65 and older, 20% of all voters, went 62-36 for the GOP.

-- Independents made up 39% of all voters, compared to 28% who self-identified Democratic and 33% Republican, and the indies favored Rick Perry by 16 points in 2010 (56-40%), This was a shocking statistic to me. Another one: Twelve percent of Texans who voted for Obama in 2008 voted Republican in 2010.

There's more like this, but you get the picture. On the question of women and the right to choose ...

-- A solid majority of Americans (59%) want the next Supreme Court justice to uphold Roe if a case like that came before the court again.

-- There is a great deal of consensus among all voters for moving away from the push-and-pull of abortion and broadening the discussion to reproductive health, including birth control, comprehensive sex education, and improving maternal and childbirth outcomes. And by a slight majority (52-40), Americans disapprove of Republicans adding new federal restrictions to choice for women.

Eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood's family services -- the actual 90% of their work -- means that Republicans will be taking away affordable birth control for poor and unemployed women (think about all the teachers in Texas who are losing their jobs and their insurance), and affordable health services like cancer screenings. Cutting PP's funding will, to put it bluntly, result in more unintended pregnancies -- nearly a million annually now in the US -- and thus more abortions (almost half of that one million). It also means women will contract more STDs and cancers that could have been prevented.

If you now understand the moral crisis being created by the Republican cabal of men who are determined to take women's rights back to the 19th century, contact your Republican representative and tell them to cut it out. And then send an e-mail to your friends and family asking them to do the same. You can easily e-mail this post to them if you have trouble writing a message yourself.

And then make sure you vote in 2012, and that everybody on your e-mail list does, too.

Update: From Neil, regarding yesterday's passage of the Texas mandatory sonogram bill ...

If the state can force one medical procedure on free citizens, why can’t it force any medical procedure on free citizens?

Yet the same people turn around and say it is wrong to compel people to buy health insurance as part of health care reform.

In Texas, “Choose life” appears to mean choose a crappy life with no health insurance, no social security, no steady work, and no quality education.

Will women who refuse the sonograms be arrested? Will they be in some way forced to get the sonogram? Will doctors be forced to detail patient conversations in order to prosecute women who refuse to comply?

This is how the State of Texas defines small government and personal freedom.

And Evan, at Burn Down Blog ...

Ah Republicans, the party of small government except for vaginas. At the rate they want to regulate those things, you would think that vaginas work by trading synthetic derivatives made out of radioactive mercury. After all, what do you think that red dot in the Kotex commercials stands for?

And nonsequiteuse, with this poem by Marge Piercy (just the closing excerpt follows; go read the whole thing).

We are all born of woman, in the rose
of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood
and every baby born has a right to love
like a seedling to the sun. Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.
I will choose what enters me, what becomes,
flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,
no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,
not your uranium mine, not your calf
for fattening, not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators do not hold
shares in my womb or my mind.
This is my body. If I give it to you
I want it back. My life
is a non-negotiable demand.

12,372 (and counting) fewer TX public school jobs. Thanks, GOP!

The Republicans in the Texas Senate passed their budget today, bypassing the body's customary 2/3rds rule in order to jam it through over Democratic objections to its massive cuts. The 19-12 vote was straight down the party line, meaning that the impact and the consequences belong solely to the Texas GOP. In response, the Texas Progressive Alliance -- of which this blog is a charter member -- has calculated some of the damage to public education. From our press release this morning:

More than 12,000 Texas public school teachers, librarians, administrators, and support staff have left their school job in the roughly three months since the Texas Legislature released proposed budget figures for the 2012-2013 biennium, according to data released Tuesday by the Texas Progressive Alliance.

"There is no bunk in these numbers," said Vince Leibowitz, chair of the Alliance, a group of progressive online activists including more than 50 netroots activists, bloggers, and online writers from across Texas. "These numbers are the cold hard truth (about the Republican budget passed today) and show precisely how significant an impact (it) is already having on school districts across the state," Leibowitz said.

More alarming, he noted, is that the more than 12,000 layoffs, firings, and voluntary or forced retirements represent only a fraction of the devastating toll the proposed budget is taking on public education. "These reductions come from a grand total of 60 of the state's 1,234 school districts, less than five percent of all school districts statewide," he noted. "Imagine how high this number will be when data is collected for all of these school districts," he continued.

The Alliance collected the data from publicly available sources including newspapers, television stations, and other media outlets that cover Texas school boards. The data was compiled by members of the Alliance and includes districts from all parts of the state.

The data was released on the heels of an announcement by the Texas Legislative Budget Board that the proposed budget being considered by the Legislature will be the first since at least 1984 that does not adequately fund public school formula funding and makes no allowance for enrollment growth.

"Yesterday, Senator Ogden was quoted as saying that Texas school districts could 'live with' five percent cuts," said Charles Kuffner, Vice Chair of the Alliance. "Evidently Senator Ogden and Republicans in the Legislature, Governor Perry, and our state leadership think losing 12,000 public school employees, increasing class sizes, and reducing the quality of instruction are worth living with. We do not," Kuffner stated.

The Alliance will continue to track school district layoffs through the start of the 2011-2012 school year and today will ask readers of their blogs to help them track this critically important number in ISDs across the state.

In the table below is the summary of the sixty school districts tabulated. As best as possible, the Texas Progressive Alliance attempted to avoid counting projected job loss figures. The numbers below should reflect jobs that have already been cut and positions that have promised not to be fulfilled. In some cases, news reports reported several totals of jobs reduced or positions not filled; in those cases, the Texas Progressive Alliance used the lowest and most certain of the figures.

School District	Job Reductions	Source
Abilene	14	Abilene Reporter-News, 4/4/11
Arlington	538	Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 4/7/11
Atlanta	14	KTAL 6
Austin	1,153	Austin American-Statesman, 4/6/11
Bay City	43	The Tribune, 4/25/11
Brownsville	275	The Monitor, 4/7/11
Canutillo	13	KVIA, 4/12/11
Cedar Hill	97	Dallas Morning News, 4/5/11
Clear Creek	17	The Bay Area Citizen, 3/11/11
Comal	92	New Braunfels Herald Zeitung, 4/5/11
Dallas	1,450	Dallas Morning News, 4/9/11 & Dallas Morning News, 4/9/11
Denton	274	Denton Chronicle, 3/23/11 & Denton Chronicle, 4/27/11
Eanes	98	Community Impact, 4/8/11
East Central	7	San Antonio Express-News, 3/25/11
Eastland	2	KTXS, 4/5/11
Ector	104	Odessa American, 4/11/11
El Paso	116	KVIA, 3/30/11
Floydada	5	KCBD, 4/6/11
Fort Bend	483	Click2Houston, 4/5/11
Fort Worth	553	KDFW, 4/12/11
Georgetown	142	KEYE, 3/3/11
Gorman	9	KTXS, 4/5/11
Hays	156	Hays Free Press, 3/23/11
Hitchcock	15	Galveston Daily News, 3/30/11
Houston	1,007	Houston Chronicle, 4/12/11
Hutto	74	Hutto ISD, 5/4/11
Irving	278	Dallas Morning News, 4/5/11
Katy	550	KTRK, 4/5/11
Keller	440	Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 5/3/11
Killeen	200	KXXV, 4/8/11
LaJoya	22	The Monitor, 4/8/11
Lake Travis	28	Community Impact, 4/8/11
LaMarque	50	Galveston Daily News, 4/7/11
Lamesa	11	KCBD, 4/6/11
Leander	213	Austiin American-Statesman, 3/22/11
Lewisville	422	Dallas Business Journal, 4/25/11 & Who is Playin, 4/14/11
Lubbock	70	Lubbock Avalanche Journal, 3/27/11
Magnolia	179	KHOU, 3/23/11
Marshall	18	KTBS, 4/19/11
New Braunfels	127	KSAT, 4/7/11
North East	69	WOAI, 4/12/11
Northside	973	San Antonio Express-News, 4/27/11
Pasadena	340	Houston Chronicle, 4/6/11
Pharr-San Juan-Alamo	5	The Monitor, 4/8/11
Plainview	10	KCBD, 4/6/11
Plano	344	Dallas Morning News, 3/29/11
Post	8	KCBD, 4/6/11
Round Rock	280	Fox 7 Austin, 3/25/11
San Angelo	35	San Angelo Standard-Times, 3/26/11
Santa Maria	26	KRGV, 4/13/11
Shallowater	8	KCBD, 4/6/11
Slaton	5	KCBD, 4/6/11
Socorro	100	El Paso Times, 4/10/11
Somerset	73	San Antonio Express-News, 4/12/11
Spring Branch	350	Springbranch ISD, 4/6/11
Tornillo	13	El Paso Times, 4/10/11
Waco	200	KXXV, 4/8/11
West Oso	20	KIII, 3/10/11
Wichita Falls	134	Wichita Falls Record-News, 4/2/11
Wyline (Abilene)	1	KTXS, 4/5/11
TOTAL	12,353

UPDATE #1: Diboll ISD, 5 more. New total - 12,358. Source - KTRE, 4/27/11

UPDATE #2: Refugio ISD, 14 more. New total - 12,372. Source - Refugio Country Press, 4/25/11

Former Pres. Bush video reaction to death of OBL

President Bush Reacts to Osama Bin Laden's Death (with Will Ferrell)

Toons: OBL and the deathers, OBL in Hell, OBL at the bottom of the sea

Let's give credit where it's due: President Kerry would've wrapped this up in 2007.

Those clamoring to give recognition to the previous administration for the killing of Osama bin Laden are like the flies on the ass of the ox who claim credit for plowing the field. Shoo, fly. Look! Fresh droppings!

Tommy Lee Jones, MIB III, and (still hopefully) the US Senate

Via Eye on Williamson, this public service announcement is from Raise Your Hand Texas:



TLJ is currently preparing for the opening of Men in Black III in four weeks. He'll almost certainly make the rounds of the teevee talk shows to promote the movie -- Jay, Dave, Jimmys Kimmel and Fallon, Conan, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert perhaps. It would be a marvelous time for him to spring an announcement that he's at least "considering" a run for the United States Senate from the Great State.

Truly, he's the Texas Democratic Party's only hope. If you're inclined to encourage him to do so, then go to this website and to this Facebook page.

Update: Sorry; MIB3 doesn't open until Memorial Day weekend 2012.

The post-bin Laden Wrangle

So Obama had a pretty good week ...

1. Here's my long-form COLB, now STFU.
2. Here's some in your face, Trump (and booyah, Seth).
3. Let's go with Panetta at Defense and Petraeus at CIA. Huge news all by itself if it happened any other week.
4. Oh, and BTW, that OBL dude? Not taking in oxygen any more, as of a few hours ago. Nope, you don't get to see his body, either. Just the fish at the bottom of the sea do.

Visiting tornado-ravaged Alabama, in the crowd to watch a space shuttle launch that had to be postponed, and the attack on Gadhafi's compound that missed him but got several of his offspring don't even make this list.

Two cautionary notes for the president, however:

1. It's STILL the economystupid (yes, one word), and he better get cracking on creating some jobs, or else it will be Herbert Walker he gets compared to instead of Jimmy Carter; and...

2. All this wild celebrating of someone's demise -- the cheering, chanting USAUSA, climbing lightpoles to wave American flags, etc. -- strikes me as unseemly, no matter how evil the dude was. It always seems to be the most radical, Muslim and Christian, who tend to overgloat about retribution. Which sets up the next round.

Here's the blog round-up from the Texas Progressive Alliance.

Marxists, CFL light bulbs, and Paul Tsongas? These topics and more were discussed during Congressman Michael Burgess' recent town hall meeting in Frisco, covered by the Texas Cloverleaf.

We have a new map for the State House. Off the Kuff has a first look at it.

At TexasKaos, liberaltexan explains the Republican Path to Plutocracy. Are you listening, Paul Ryan?

Former Texas Lt. Governor Bill Hobby served in the office longer than anybody else. So when he sounded the alarm on the Great State's lack of leadership, in a poem he wrote entitled "The Perverted Village," Letters From Texas figured people better listen up.

Texas state comptroller Susan Combs is under intense fire for allowing the personal data of 3.5 million Texans to be left unsecured online for more than a year. Calls for her resignation and various lawsuits aren't being quelled by her belated apologies and offers to pay for credit monitoring services for those affected. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs sees a political career crashing in flames, and a scrum among the GOP sharks in the tank to eventually replace her.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts that it's finally here ... Texas Democrats have the opportunity they've been waiting for.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes that republicans are going gangbusters killing public education and other institutions.

This week, McBlogger asks David Stockman to STOP THE DEFICIT MADNESS!

Neil at Texas Liberal noted that former Texas Lt. Governor Bill Hobby -- very much an establishment figure -- is wondering if the Republican intent in the ongoing legislative session is to ruin Texas.

When the end came

... for Bin Laden, he was found not in the remote tribal areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border where he has long been presumed to be sheltered, but in a massive compound about an hour’s drive north from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. He was hiding in the medium-sized city of Abbottabad, home to a large Pakistani military base and a military academy of the Pakistani Army.

The house at the end of a narrow dirt road was roughly eight times larger than other homes in the area, but had no telephone or Internet connections. When American operatives converged on the house on Sunday, Bin Laden “resisted the assault force” and was killed in the middle of an intense gun battle, a senior administration official said, but details were still sketchy early Monday morning.

The official said that military and intelligence officials first learned last summer that a “high-value target” was being protected in the compound and began working on a plan for going in to get him. Beginning in March, Mr. Obama presided over five national security meetings at the White House to go over plans for the operation and on Friday morning, just before leaving Washington to tour tornado damage in Alabama, gave the final order for special forces and C.I.A. operatives to strike.

Mr. Obama called it a “targeted operation,” although officials said one helicopter was lost because of a mechanical failure and had to be destroyed to keep it from falling into hostile hands.

In addition to Bin Laden, three men were killed during the 40-minute raid, one believed to be his son and the other two his couriers, according to an American official who briefed reporters under White House ground rules forbidding further identification. A woman was killed when she was used as a shield by a male combatant, the official said, and two others wounded.

“No Americans were harmed,” Mr. Obama said. “They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” Muslim tradition requires burial within 24 hours, but by doing it at sea, American authorities presumably were trying to avoid creating a shrine for his followers.

The fate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Al Qaeda second-in-command, was unclear Sunday night.

The terse announcement came just after 9:45 p.m. Sunday from Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10:30 PM Eastern Time,” he wrote on Twitter, sharing the same message that had just been transmitted to the White House press corps.

According to Brian Williams, the “NBC Nightly News” anchor, some journalists received a three-word e-mail that simply read, “Get to work.”

The nation’s television anchors and newspaper editors did not know, at first, that President Obama would be announcing the death of Osama bin Laden, an extraordinary development in the nearly 10-year-long war against terrorism waged by the United States and its allies. But reporters in Washington suspected almost immediately that the announcement could be about bin Laden.

That speculation was not aired out on television immediately, but it did erupt on Twitter and other social networking sites. Wishful thinking about bin Laden’s death ricocheted across the Web — and then, at 10:25 p.m., while Mr. Obama was writing his speech, one particular tweet seemed to confirm it. Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff for the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, wrote at that time, “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.”

May Day March today

HOUSTON, April 21 (2008) —“I’m going to bring my wife and kids to march May Day this year, that’s going to be my protest of these raids,” a Latino worker who lives across the street from a Shipley Do-Nuts warehouse and company housing compound told the Militant. Twenty Shipley’s workers were arrested in an April 16 raid by federal immigration police.

“I looked down the street and I see all these cop cars in front of the trailers,” the worker, who asked that his name not be printed, said. “I know these people, they’ve never caused any problems, they just worked hard like everybody in this neighborhood—and working for Shipley they don’t make much either. This is completely unjust.”

“That’s just people trying to work, they come into the country to try and feed their family,” Derek Shumake, who also lives across the street, told the Houston Chronicle. “They work hard, and they do jobs most people won’t.”

May Day Funnies

And just in case you missed it ...

Susan Combs is sorry.

Very, VERY sorry.

Taking "full responsibility" for the inadvertent online exposure of the personal information of 3.5 million Texans, Comptroller Susan Combs on Thursday said her agency would pay for free credit monitoring and Internet surveillance to those affected, and her campaign fund would provide identity restoration services for anyone whose personal information is misused.

"I am deeply sorry this incident occurred and I take full responsibility for it," Combs said. "This incident has affected the lives of Texans that I have dedicated my life to serving and I am determined to restore their faith in the Comptroller's Office."

While her office's initial explanation for the incident blamed three other state agencies for failing to send encrypted filed, on Thursday, Combs called the finger-pointing "irrelevant."

"We had the last clear chance to make it right and we didn't," she said.

The comments at the link are running pretty much against her apology.

She also defended her office's hiring of two campaign contributors as consultants to review her office's Internet security, saying state procurement policies limited her choice of technology firms who could immediately begin work on the project.

Because "speed was important," she said she hired Deloitte Consulting and Gartner, Inc., rather than going through the competitive bidding process, because those firms already had contracts with the state.

She declined to comment on a court filing this week in Austin by attorneys who are seeking to take her deposition to get to the bottom of what they called the "most massive and far-reaching invasion of privacy in the history of Texas."

Those lawyers called on Combs to resign, saying she should take responsibility for her office's role in the incident.

Apparently she's going to try to ride the storm out. Good luck with that, Susan. In the meantime the millions of Texans affected by your criminal negligence can take advantage of that discount credit monitoring service, graciously paid for by your political campaign.

Combs had her sights set on moving up from comptroller to something bigger and better someday, just like Todd Staples and Greg Abbott and David Dewhurst and all the other ladies-in-waiting behind Governor Suckseed. There will now be a little less competition in the shark tank.

And I'm certain the pup sharks in the RPT are already sharpening their teeth in anticipation.

Texas House passes redistricting bill

It will soon go to the Senate.

The GOP-led Texas House approved a redistricting plan early Thursday that would all but guarantee a continued Republican majority — albeit a smaller one than the party has now.

The map was approved on a 92-52 vote after a marathon debate that dragged into the wee morning hours Thursday. It would pit several Republicans against each other, the natural result of an unsustainably large super-majority.

Some Republican members and activists wanted to make the map a much bolder grab for conservative seats and limit the number of losses. But House leaders easily beat back those attempts. Either way, there is only so much they can do given the constraints of federal anti-discrimination laws and shifts in population away from conservative rural areas and toward the suburbs that have seen explosive and diverse population growth.

The emotional and heated debate ended up dragging on for some 16 hours, the longest single session in the House so far this year and testament to the importance lawmakers place on their own futures. The map faces a final procedural hurdle before it can move to the Senate.

Once again, if you follow "Inside Baseball" on this sort of thing, then Greg (who live-blogged it yesterday) and Charles have been keeping you up to the minute. If you have only been keeping track via my executive summary, then you will note the following revision affecting one pair ...

Republican Reps. Jim Landtroop and Charles Perry, both from West Texas, would get separate districts under the proposal that would take a single seat out of the region for redistribution elsewhere. Perry and Landtroop called the new proposal a victory for the rural region.

There was some speculation that Charles Perry might try for the Senate against Robert Duncan, but this development likely negates that. Houston's Scott Hochberg, on the other hand, is getting as royally screwed as Kate Middleton.

Two Democrats would also be paired in the Houston area. One of them is Rep. Scott Hochberg, who said map drawers creatively split the 5401 Chimney Rock apartment complex, hoping for his demise. If the map became law, inhabitants of the complex could be in different state House districts depending on which unit they live in, Hochberg said.

I would prefer that Hochberg and Hubert Vo not run against each other; indeed, that one of them moves into Jim Murphy's district and knocks him out. We'll see. There's also the possibility that former state rep. Kristi Thibaut mounts another challenge to Murphy as well.

Paul Burka speculates that this map endangers Speaker Straus -- now, and in the future.

Once again, Straus’s speakership is at risk. This is what happens when you come to the critical moment of the session with no team in place, no plan, and brush fires of discontent among the members. I have to say, though I like Straus personally, he is sowing what he reaped. He has spent the entire session kowtowing to the far right, so that the inmates are running the asylum, and it has gotten him nowhere. He was never going to win them over, and now he has the worst appropriations bill in modern history to show for his efforts, and a potential redistricting revolt on his hands. His speakership is at risk–if not now, then in the Legislative Redistricting Board. Rick Perry will likely send redistricting to the board, probably with whispered instructions to draw a map that pairs Straus loyalists and insulates the conservatives from potential challengers. This could get really bloody.

And Scott at Grits notes that if incarcerated people were assigned accurately in the redraw, then Houston would not have lost a seat. Prisoners don't get representation? That's the Republican way.

Update: Via Eye on Williamson, both the Observer and the Tribune have more on last night's marathon debate.

What's next?

Now that the birthers have been slapped down ...

Update: Never mind. I overestimated the intellect we are dealing with.

Combs under pressure to resign over exposed data

Suggesting that Comptroller Susan Combs should resign for her role in exposing the personal information of 3.5 million Texans, two Austin lawyers have petitioned a state district court for permission to question Combs as part of their investigation into the incident.

Calling the data exposure “an egregious example of incompetence and hypocrisy,” attorney Chuck Herring, representing teacher Sarah Canright, and Jim Harrington of the Texas Civil Rights Project, filed court documents seeking Combs’ deposition.

“Petitioners desire to investigate potential claims concerning the most massive and far-reaching invasion of privacy in the history of Texas,” the court filing stated. “The incomplete, misleading statements issued by Comptroller Combs and the Comptroller’s Office to date raise more questions than they answer. Texans deserve to know the truth concerning how this illegal and unconstitutional invasion occurred.”

Herring noted that Combs has fired four employees but has not personally accepted responsibility for the exposure of the information, which was transferred to the Comptroller’s office by the Teacher Retirement System, the Employee Retirement System and the Texas Workforce Commission.

“If this was the private sector, would she still be CEO?” asked Harrington.

Combs' political career is over, whether or not she is eventually forced to step down. The problem, of course, is that she was just re-elected last November, so there's plenty of time for the people who voted for her to forget all about this. But if she decides to hang on, she'll get a TeaBag primary challenge ... and maybe this time the Democrats will run someone against her (or the TeaBagger) in 2014.

Personally, I wish she would go back to writing those steamy paperback novels.

Update:

Looking for ways to cope with inadvertently exposing the personal data of 3.5 million Texans, the state’s comptroller has retained the services of two firms whose leaders or political committees contributed over $50,000 to her campaign.

Using your political contributors to help hide your crimes. It's just the Texas Republican way.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance thinks it's never too early to plan your Sine Die Day activities as it brings you this week's roundup.

The long range plan to kill public education is reaching the end game. Over at TexasKaos, lightseeker talks about seeing one of the (unintentional) moving parts at a public lecture given by one of the premier charter schools in the nation. Check out Educational Reform and Our Common Peril!

Bay Area Houston has the latest on state representative Larry Taylor's emergency surgery.

What conservatives believe to be true ranks far above what is actually true, and even what is demonstrably true according to science and mathematics. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs points out that this why Rick Perry declares Easter weekend as 'Days of Prayer for Rain in Texas', and why John Cornyn "isn't so sure" that Jon Kyl was wrong when he claimed that abortions were 90% of Planned Parenthood's budget. It should consequently be no surprise that they place no value in teachers and education.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme thinks the Texas Supreme Court, aka the republican crony justice system, sucks.

Always looking out for your mental health and well-being, Letters From Texas Worldwide Headquarters, Psychological Testing Department, offers a redistricting Rorschach test.

The Senate Finance Committee, led by GOP Senator Steve Ogden, approved their version of the Texas budget last week. WCNews at Eye On Williamson shows that it truly is the lesser of two evils.

How about a bit of good news for a change? Off the Kuff notes that a bill that gives microbreweries greater latitude in getting their beers to customers passed the House last week.

Neil at Texas Liberal praised Governor Perry for his call for prayer to end the severe drought in Texas. At the same time, Neil asked that if prayer can end the drought, might it be that Texas is being punished by God for hard-hearted policies towards the poor?

McBlogger take a looks back at one idea to bring more water to Texas that will work, and another one that is from Rick Perry.

Easter Lemming discovers Oh, the places you'll go! as an iPhone, even if it is no longer your iPhone.

Sunday Funnies

Belief ... not math, not science

"Conservative" icon Steven Colbert long ago identified the neurological disorder and labeled it 'truthiness'. Like much of conservatism's ideological IQ, it has little to no basis in facts or reality (those have a well-known liberal bias, again first observed by Colbert). Here's Gail Collins' latest as it relates to the Texas strain of this insanity. I'm reposting the piece and adding some links and emphasis ...

One of my favorite stories about the Texas State Legislature involves the time Senator Wendy Davis was trying to ask a colleague, Troy Fraser, some questions about a pending bill. Fraser deflected by saying, “I have trouble hearing women’s voices.”

Really, she was standing right there on the floor. Holding a microphone.

These days in the budget-strapped, Tea-Party-besieged State Capitol, you can be grateful for any funny anecdote, no matter how badly it reflects on Texas politics in general. Like the time Gov. Rick Perry defended the state’s abstinence-only birth control program by saying that he knew abstinence worked “from my own personal life.”

Right now, the state is wrestling with a fiscal megacrisis that goes back to 2006, when the Legislature cut local property taxes and made up for the lost revenue with a new business tax. The new tax produced billions less than expected to the shock and horror of everyone except all the experts who had been predicting that all along.

Governor Perry blames the whole thing on President Obama.

Texas’ problems are of interest to us all because Texas is producing a huge chunk of the nation’s future work force with a system that goes like this:

• Terrible sex education programs and a lack of access to contraceptives leads to a huge number of births to poor women. (About 60 percent of the deliveries in Texas are financed by Medicaid.) Texas also leads the nation in the number of teenage mothers with two or more offspring.

• The Texas baby boom — an 800,000 increase in schoolchildren over the last decade — marches off to underfunded schools. Which are getting more underfunded by the minute, thanks to that little tax error.

And naturally, when times got tough at the State Capitol, one of the first things the cash-strapped Legislature tried to cut was family planning.

“It’s in total danger,” said Fran Hagerty, who leads the Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas.

One of the best family-planning efforts in Texas is the Women’s Health Program, which provides an annual health exam and a year’s worth of contraceptives to poor women. For every dollar the state puts into the plan, the federal government provides $9.

The state estimates the pregnancies averted would reduce its Medicaid bill by more than $36 million next year. But when a budget expert told the Texas House Committee on Human Services that the program saved money, he was laced into by Representative Jodie Laubenberg for using “government math.”

“You speculate that,” she snorted.

Meanwhile, on the House floor, anti-abortion lawmakers were stripping financing for other family-planning programs. Representative Randy Weber successfully moved part of the money into anti-abortion crisis centers for pregnant women.

“There’s been research done. ... It actually shows the highest abortion rate is among women actively using contraceptives,” Weber insisted.

“These folks are anti-abortion, anti-contraception and anti-science,” said Representative Mike Villarreal, who tangled with Weber during the debate.

Villarreal has had a rather dark view of the rationality of some of his colleagues ever since he tried to improve the state’s abstinence-only sex education programs by requiring that the information imparted be medically accurate. It died in committee. “The pediatrician on the committee wouldn’t vote for it; he was the swing vote,” Villarreal recalled.

Welcome to the fact-free zone. This week, U.S. Senator John Cornyn gave an interview to Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune in which he claimed that the battle in Congress to defund Planned Parenthood “was really part of a larger fight about spending money we don’t have on things that aren’t essential.”

There are a lot of fiscal conservatives in the anti-abortion movement, and it’s apparently hard for them to admit that destroying Planned Parenthood is a money-loser.

There’s also a resistance to government support for contraceptive services. “There are some people in the pro-life movement who think birth control pills of all kind are abortifacients,” said Senator Bob Deuell, a Republican. “But I don’t see any medical evidence.”

Deuell is one of those rare abortion opponents who is dedicated to the cause of helping women avoid unwanted pregnancy in the first place. He says his allies in the anti-abortion movement haven’t objected to his approach, but he admitted that they haven’t been handing him any medals either.

We’re currently stuck with a politics of reproduction in which emotion is so strong that actual information becomes irrelevant. Senator Cornyn, in his interview, was reminded of the great dust-up his colleague Jon Kyl of Arizona created when he claimed that 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood did involved abortions. When challenged, Kyl’s staff said the figure “was not intended to be a factual statement.”

So did Cornyn agree that Kyl screwed up?

“I’m not so sure,” Cornyn said.  

Rick Perry has proclaimed today, Good Friday, through Easter Sunday to be Days of Prayer for Rain in order to help in putting out the wildfires engulfing our once-Great State. Because that would be better than, you know, socialism. And also because the invisible hand of the free market is busy right now giving women the finger.

I intend to ask God -- and the Easter Bunny -- for some other things too while I'm at it, like deliverance from evil, a new governor, some new state legislators, a different Democratic party or the necessary tools to fix the one we have ...

Because Santa Claus only comes at the end of December, and I don't think we can wait until then.

Or maybe I'll just get busy on doing that work myself, since Santa and the EB and God all appear to be occupied with some more pressing matters.

Update: Both Hal and John suggest some prayer wording.