Memorial Day Wrangle

Here's the Memorial Day round-up from the Texas Progressive Alliance's member blogs ...

refinish69 at Doing My Part For The Left is trying to understand why John Cornyn is such a.....

McBlogger takes a look at an email from Republican Chair TinaFish begging for money.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wonders how the Webb County elections administrator can claim one recount where the votes didn't change vindicates their work on the Sheriff's recount where 160 votes flipped.

BossKitty at BlueBloggin tell us how truck owners and operators are delving into long-ignored gas saving subjects like aerodynamics, slower cruising speeds and all the snake oil scams to increase mileage. This could lower your food prices and consumables: Ten mpg is now feasible … may save you money!

Lightseeker of Texas Kaos applies his powers of analysis and persuasion to the question of What Can Be Done to Keep the Momentum for Change Going? What's going on in your precinct to organize for November?

WhosPlayin's grbtexan posted some "rules" guaranteed to invite feminine wrath.

State Rep. Myra Crownover wants West Texas to have their very own radioactive waste dump. North Texas Liberal has the story.

Vince at Capitol Annex notes that the word around Austin is that Rick Perry is planning on calling a special session of the Texas Legislature prior to the November elections. You won't believe why.

Chris Bell is widely rumored to be considering a run for the Texas Senate seat being vacated by Kyle Janek, and PDiddie at Brains and Eggs joins the call to encourage him to do so.

Social wing nuts are up to their old tricks, as the TX State Board of Education give the finger to teachers and parents alike this past week. On a 9-6 vote, your kids get a decade's worth of grammar lessons etched on a napkin.

lightseeker over at TexasKaos takes on the question of what to do with all these new Democratic/Progressive activists and voters? Are they doomed to grow quickly disillusioned , retreating into political cynicsm again ? What can be done to keep the momentum for change going?

Gary D at Easter Lemming Liberal News last week blasted Texas Railroad Commission Chairman Michael Williams, Texas Monthly Blogger Paul Burka and Senator John 'Forget the Alamo' Cornyn because he is not bitter but sometimes he gets angry.

Off the Kuff continues his look at the Harris County races with an early overview of the District Clerk campaign.

Texas soldier dies after 100 surgeries

The young Marine came back from the war, with his toughest fight ahead of him.

Sgt. Merlin German waged that battle in the quiet of a Texas hospital, far from the dusty road in Iraq where a bomb exploded, leaving him with burns over 97 percent of his body.

No one expected him to survive.

But for more than three years, he would not surrender. He endured more than 100 surgeries and procedures. He learned to live with pain, to stare at a stranger's face in the mirror. He learned to smile again, to joke, to make others laugh.

He became known as the "Miracle Man."

But just when it seemed he would defy impossible odds, German lost his last battle this spring — an unexpected final chapter in a story many imagined would have a happy ending. ...

Merlin German died after routine surgery to add skin to his lower lip.

He was already planning his next operations — on his wrists and elbows. But Renz also says with all the stress German's body had been subjected to in recent years, "it was probably an unfair expectation that you can keep doing this over and over again and not have any problems."

The cause of his death has not yet been determined.

"I may no more understand why he left us when he did than why he survived when he did," Renz says. "I don't think I was meant to know."

As people learned of his death last month, they flocked to his hospital room to pay their last respects: Doctors, nurses, therapists and others, many arriving from home, kept coming as Friday night faded into Saturday morning.

German was just 22.

Remember

Arlington National Cemetery workers setting a headstone.

John and Stace, along with many others, made the local Memorial Day display at Hermann Park (you can see it today). No conservatives in sight, sadly.

They must have forgotten to never forget.

Extra Funnies (at the GOP's expense)

Courtesy First Door on the Left (who does it on Fridays):

Make your own Bill O'Reilly tantrum remix

Straight from the FOX Attacks! folks:

No doubt you've already seen this recently unearthed clip of Bill O'Reilly experiencing, um, temperamental technical difficulties on the set of Inside Edition during his pre-FOX days. The O'Reilly Factor really hasn't changed him that much - he's still the same unhinged, unstable, belligerent blowhard.

O'Reilly has tried to laugh this off, but there's plenty more fun to be had. Stephen Colbert released a clip of one of his own past freakouts, and Keith Olbermann invited an O'Reilly-type body language expert to talk about O'Reilly's dictatorial body language. Some terrific remixes of O'Reilly's meltdown have started surfacing, like this hilarious one from Barely Political; there's even been a dance remix.

So we at FOX ATTACKS! thought we'd invite all of you to submit your own O'Reilly Tantrum remixes! As you can see from the clips above, there are a lot of directions you could take this, so go for whatever you think is the funniest, most entertaining and adheres with the Fair Use doctrine. You can find a downloadable Quicktime version of the original clip here - the rest is up to you!

When you have finished your video, post it on YouTube and paste the URL into the comments section of our blog. Once we have enough videos, we'll put them on a page where everyone can view them and vote on them. There will be prizes for winners in multiple categories.

Can't wait to see what you guys come up with!

Billo is going to bust a blood vessel yet.

Sunday Funnies (on time this week)

The ugliest election

Open Source Dem, who hopefully will be more regular here with some Texas Democratic Party convention-related postings as we draw closer to the first weekend in June, submits the following ...

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“Recount” in your review and Salon sounds fascinating. I imagine it is possible to maintain decorous appearances on the street while actually fighting ferociously in the courthouse. My guess is that Warren Christopher and David Boies were just inept from either perspective.

What I remember from Jake Tapper’s coverage at the time was (a) the Florida Democratic Party attorney’s success with an expeditious and fair recount in Volusia County before the Washington/Tennessee team flew in and took over and (b) Tapper’s observation that those local “demonstrations” were staged by GOP operatives flown in from Washington and coordinated using DynCorp commo vans rolled out from Homestead AFB –- the ones we ordinarily use to stage coups in Latin America on behalf of particular concession-holders.

This coup-meme is a left-wing cliché today, but it was documented to a fare-thee-well by Alabama Senator BLOUNT and by General Smedley BUTLER during the nineteenth century.

(Senator BLOUNT was previously a Confederate General but appointed High Commissioner to sort out the coup in Hawaii. The coup stood but he freed the Queen and kept the natives from being entirely exterminated. General BUTLER was the retired Marine hired to overthrow FDR. He declined and, indeed, exposed his employers. The conspirators, too-big-to-fail bankers even then, decorously were not shot. But as a precautionary measure, Douglas McArthur was sent off to the Philippines with a commission in that not-the-US Army.)

The left/right narrative in our constitutional history seems less durable to me than the Federalist/Anti-Federalist one that only sort of tracks what little we have actually had of “responsible two-party government”. We have always had at least two parties, but they are usually in various coalitions.

Someday I think history will show that while he was not convicted in the Senate, Bill Clinton was under something like House arrest by the end. I recall that General Clark was forced out and the constitution was reversed from what it had been in 1876. Clinton did not use his military authority to keep order in Florida and force the matter at issue into the Congress, as had happened in the close election 124 years earlier. Who rolled the vans?

In any case, I think “overly decorous” is also a good description of our approach to election integrity here in Harris County, anything to avoid embarrassing Sylvia Garcia, Bill White, and now, Sue Lovell. I see these risk-averse individuals hanging back, while all those other poor suckers run for countywide election this year, unsupported by office-holders we supposedly already have. Yeah, the polls are all good. But, are we really going to storm the courthouse with no artillery or sappers at all? Is “decorous” the new “dumb”?

There are some major differences within the GOP coalition: Darbyites, Trotskyites, and Thatcherites. But the GOP is not decorous about clinging to power and can put aside their esoteric differences as well as our Constitution to do so. They however are very plain about the latter, never having consented to the principles of popular sovereignty or of universal suffrage, not in 1789, not in 1874, certainly not now.

The Darbyites, however, are suspicious of DRE machines and would be in an uproar over the VUID, if there was any public controversy over it. I do not understand why we whine over marginalia and provide cover for the GOP on election integrity matters rather than trying to drive a wedge among them.

The “winning elections” meme of Democrats habitually collaborating with the GOP and not willing to fight for those, or any, principles at all seems like a suicide pact to me. How can a Republican or Democratic party expect to win elections without upholding popular sovereignty or universal suffrage? As Alexander Keyssar points out, they have always been contested, never established in this country or state.