Independence Day Funnies

Bell leans toward Senate run

Italy's Tower of Pisa stands straight up by comparison. Alan Bernstein, honing the snark:

Officially, Democrat and former Houston congressman Chris Bell is considering running for the seat in the state Senate vacated by Republican Kyle Janek. Bell, the Democratic candidate for governor in 2006, even acknowledges that he is leaning toward running in the District 17 race.

But, with Bell's permission, a current lawmaker and a former lawmaker already have scheduled a July 24 fund-raising event for Bell's candidacy and that of Joe Jaworski, who is running for state Senate in an adjacent district.

State Rep. Craig Eiland of Galveston and former state Sen. Lloyd Criss are helping together the Galveston Yacht Club event (.pdf).

As leanings go, this one's pretty sharp.

Bell said today that he approved the preparations in case he runs. And, he will make his decision public by four days before the fund-raising event. Guess what he'll say!

The district runs from southwest Houston to the Beaumont area to Key West and Cuba. Well, not that far, but the strangely shaped boundaries do go from Braes Bayou to the eastern edge of the state (.pdf).

News we've been eagerly anticipating for some time now. With Joe Jaworski and Wendy Davis and Chris Bell in the Texas Senate, we go a long way toward reversing the red tide in Texas.

Extremism in the defense of liberty

" ... is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

-- Barry Goldwater, the nation's last respectable conservative (apparently)

(Thanks to Dallas Sidebar)

Patriot primer

Read Christopher Hitchen's account of getting waterboarded. Watch the video of the "exercise". Spoiler alert: he didn't like it. Thinks it's torture.

Then there's the New York Times' account of how Gitmo interrogators inadvertently adopted Chinese-Korean War-era interrogation methods (once upon a time referred to as "torture" and "brainwashing") that are proven -- like waterboarding -- to produce false confessions. Oops.

Almost as informative: how large GOP donors can influence policy in Texas in a New York minute, or give to both John McCain and to Latin-American death squads. Now that's as All-American as Ollie North and Ronald Reagan.

The tug-of-war going on between my friends and associates in the progressive community revolves around a couple of whip counts worth pondering over the long holiday: how many of us think that things are so bad that the best course of action is to let them get much, much worse so that "things come to a head" and we don't delude ourselves into thinking that our country can get by with incremental changes ...

... and how many of us think things are so bad that the best thing to do is to work as hard as we can to get Barack Obama elected, and likewise elect Democrats in sweeping victories in both houses in Washington, in Austin, and in Harris County so that we can emphatically reject Republican rule and get started ASAP in a better direction.

Or some half-measure of the above (the centrists, in other words).

Personally, I'm still deciding.