Saturday, January 03, 2009

A moderate Republick for Speaker of the Texas House?

I don't think so -- and not just because "moderate Republican" is an oxymoron:

A crusade by Republican lawmakers to depose House Speaker Tom Craddick accelerated in earnest Friday when they selected Rep. Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, as the candidate strong enough to oust the longtime incumbent.

The maverick group of 11 Republican state representatives met secretly Friday in an effort to unite behind a single candidate — one they believe also will appeal to Democratic lawmakers in what's expected to be a weekend showdown over the coveted House leadership position. ...

He and the other 10 Republicans represent a growing number of GOP representatives who have grown weary of the leadership style of Craddick, who also has lost the support of most of the chamber's 74 Democrats.


Straus has "impeccable credentials", according to someone at Harvey Kronberg's Quorum Report (until HK brings his website into the 20th century, click on "Daily Buzz" and scroll down to the entry dated January 2nd and time-stamped 7:20 p.m.). It's postings like these that call into question Harvey's reputation as a non-partisan. Likely he pissed off Craddick and all of the radical right-wing that runs the Republican Party of Texas more than he did me, however.

So why wouldn't the most conservative powers-that-be not like Straus? Muse has the news:

Oh, my, my, my. Straus got a 100 rating from NARAL in 2007. That's the highest pro-choice rating they give. Only 5 Republican legislators got above zero in 2007. Bust out the popcorn, because this is going to get crazy!

He's already getting the scarlet letter from the crazies.

I just don't see how a guy this sensible (for a Republican) defeats Craddick. Color me the same shade of "shocked" as Burpa:

(I)f this goes south, and Craddick somehow survives, this will be one of the ghastliest mistakes I have ever seen in Texas politics.

I also agree with McB that Speaker Tom is going to slide back in. STXC has more and a good round-up.

Friday, January 02, 2009

Cornyn will filibuster Franken seating

Six more years of obstructionism from this sorry ass:

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) threatened Friday to filibuster any attempt to seat Democratic Minnesota Senate candidate Al Franken next week.

The newly minted National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) chairman said he had not whipped votes in the GOP caucus, but added that he could not imagine any members defecting and seating Franken without a certificate of election.

Franken will not have that certificate as long as the election is challenged in the courts — a likely scenario, with Sen. Norm Coleman’s (R-Minn.) legal team already attacking the credibility of the recount process.

“This is a very, very serious matter,” Cornyn said. “I can assure you that there will be no way that people on our side of the aisle will agree to seat any senator without a valid certificate.”

To think that we could have had one decent Senator from this great state. Just one.

Yeah, we need more of it

I'd like to jack up a few conservatives to open the New Year.

The corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism -- one that will insist on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars -- or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our surveillance state.

The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote, “that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.

There is a political shift in Europe toward an open confrontation with the corporate state. Germany has seen a surge of support for Die Linke (The Left), a political grouping formed 18 months ago. It is co-led by the veteran socialist “Red” Oskar Lafontaine, who has built his career on attacking big business. Two-thirds of Germans in public opinion polls say they agree with all or some of Die Linke’s platform. The Socialist Party of the Netherlands is on the verge of overtaking the Labor Party as the main opposition party on the left. Greece, beset with street protests and violence by disaffected youths, has seen the rapid rise of the Coalition of the Radical Left. In Spain and Norway socialists are in power. Resurgence is not universal, especially in France and Britain, but the shifts toward socialism are significant.

Corporations have intruded into every facet of life. We eat corporate food. We buy corporate clothes. We drive corporate cars. We buy our vehicular fuel and our heating oil from corporations. We borrow from corporate banks. We invest our retirement savings with corporations. We are entertained, informed and branded by corporations. We work for corporations. The creation of a mercenary army, the privatization of public utilities and our disgusting for-profit health care system are all legacies of the corporate state. These corporations have no loyalty to America or the American worker. They are not tied to nation states. They are vampires.


That's from Chris Hedges, it's entitled "Why I am a Socialist", and you really ought to go read the whole thing.

Thursday, January 01, 2009