Lots of Sunday Funnies

There'll be more later today, too ...

Borris Miles versus Al Edwards

My old Texas House district hasn't gone without its share of news, either. Isiah Carey of Houston's Fox 26 and his blog Insight, followed by Elise Hu at the Texas Trib ...

Would you take a drug test live on the radio? Former State Representative Borris Miles did. If you tuned into KCOH radio (Thursday) morning you would've been entertained. Miles took on the challenge put forward by current State Representative Al Edwards. He mad the challenge Wednesday on KCOH. This comes after Miles challenged Edwards for weeks to a debate on the issues in district 146. Around 9 am (Thursday) morning Miles brought in a private drug testing firm, gave a urine sample, and took his screening live on the radio. Miles says he didn't want to ever put the people of the district through what he calls this type of b.s. again. ...

Note: Miles eventually challenged Edwards to take an IQ test!

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This whole drug test deal actually got started at a campaign event photographer Justin Dehn and I attended two weeks ago, at a soul food restaurant called Just Oxtails, in the district. Edwards was taking questions from his supporters, and one supporter wanted to know whether Miles is actually drug-free, given past press coverage of his partying. Edwards started challenging Miles to take a drug test within 72 hours. It's a lot more than 72 hours later, but it appears Miles submitted to the test in a most-public way. He's drug free.

These two fellows have entertained us for years. Earlier in this cycle I received e-mail on the day before his campaign kick-off that by all appearances was from Miles' campaign and cited numerous endorsements from elected officials and community leaders from both sides of the aisle.  That turned out to be a dirty trick.

Theatrics aside, there's only one choice in HD-146. Edwards remains a tool for the Republicans in the Texas House; Miles is the one of the strongest progressives I have ever met. I expect that -- with his recent marriage and the legal issues that troubled his brief term behind him -- Miles has conquered his personal demons.



Borris Miles should be returned to Austin and Edwards should be involuntarily retired, again.

Shami and white people, Medina and more truther gaffes

Let's just go to the videotape. Shami first.



WFAA's Brad Watson also posted this at the station's website.

And Medina, in an interview with Victoria's KAVU-TV.



Let's take Shami first.

Of all the bizarre -- I mean truly bizarre -- things he's been saying lately, a little overt racism isn't such a big surprise, now is it? He's telling a brutal truth but a vastly, politically incorrect one nevertheless. The fact that he also won't deny the MIHOP/LIHOP conspiracy theory is just icing on the cake.

Truth to tell, he was done before this interview. Slam the lid shut on this campaign. Maybe his people can find a way to keep him from talking to any other reporters between now and March 2.

The interview Medina did with Beck and the walking-back from those comments -- as well as her claims of a conspiracy among the two against her -- have gotten more attention than the conversation above. She actually said that asking questions about the 9/11 Commission report is as legitimate as asking questions about Obama's birth certificate.

Like Shami, if she keeps on talking she's going to make Sarah Palin start to sound reasonable.

Update: Is it true that Medina worked for the Mexican Mafia and sold so much ecstasy back in the day that she was the inspiration for Funky Cold Medina?

Hey, I'm just a patriot asking questions here.

Update II: Medina has taken to salting campaign staffers into her press conferences, posing as reporters. That's not exactly "non-politician" ...

Friday "Talk to the Hand" Funnies

TexTrib poll blows up in their face again

Remember what I said yesterday about polls? It's particularly true of the Texas Tribune's Republican half of their most recent gubernatorial poll -- released today but conducted before the Medina truther kerfuffle, which will surely alter the numbers severely.

So disregard that right away. Let's take a quick look at what they have on the Democratic side, however.

White 50
Shami 11
Everybody else 9

Among Democratic voters, 30 percent were undecided, and of those, 48 percent, when pressed, said they lean toward White. With White already at 50 percent, that means Shami would have to strip votes away from him in order to force a runoff or to claim a win.

That's now two three polls showing pretty much the same result, and both all were conducted in the week prior to their debate on February 7. So with the previous advice about polling value in mind, White may improve on his position. And if these are numbers are accurate I have to eat crow served by Dr. Murray.

Democratic primary voters have a couple of other statewide races to decide. In the contest for lieutenant governor — the winner will face Republican incumbent David Dewhurst in November — labor leader Linda Chavez-Thompson took 18 percent of those polled, former Travis County District Attorney Earle got 16 percent, and restaurateur Marc Katz had 3 percent. Five percent of voters said they wanted "somebody else," and a whopping 58 percent remain undecided on the eve of early voting, which begins on Tuesday.

Recall that the TCUL's numbers from February 3,4, and 6 were Earle 25, Chavez-Thompson 18, and Katz 5. Ms. Chavez-Thompson's is the only campaign with any visibility to me in this contest.

Friedman and Gilbert — two refugees from the governor's race now running for agriculture commissioner — are locked in a tight race, 32 percent to 27 percent. While Friedman's ahead, the difference is within the poll's margin of error. And, as with the Lite Guv race, “undecided” is actually leading, at 41 percent.

These two are going at each other hammer and tong. After the DMN disguised a slap at Gilbert with a lukewarm endorsement of Friedman, Gilbert shoved back with this:

Kinky told the El Paso Times Tuesday, among other nonsensical things, that Governor Perry could win re-election and "will probably be President".  This despite running four years ago in the governor's race as a spoiler and taking votes from the actual Democrat.

"We knew that Kinky's baggage would be used to damage the Democratic ticket by suppressing minority turnout," said Gilbert campaign consultant Mike Lavigne referring to questionable comments in the candidate's recent past.  "But we didn't expect him to dismiss the Democratic gubernatorial nominee before there even was one."

Kinky then countered with an endorsement of Bill White. Stay tuned for more headlines today from these two, and probably every day until Election Day.

Last interesting bit from the TexTrib's poll ...

How strong is the Tea Party movement, and who does it steal votes from? Asked the generic congressional question with that movement included as a third organized party, 21 percent said they would choose the Republican, 36 percent would choose the Democrat, and 16 percent would vote for the Tea Party candidate. More than a fourth — 27 percent — said they were undecided. So the Democratic numbers held, while Republicans lost 16 points to the Tea Party and the rest to undecided.

"The electorate is responding to whatever it is they're associating with the Tea Party — at the expense of the Republicans," Henson said. While that's not necessarily to the advantage of the Democrats, he said it will have an effect on the majority party: "The tea party is going on in the Republicans' house."

Take that with a grain of salt, and now toss it out.

Update: Katherine at Burnt Orange adds the results of the Research 2000 poll conducted by the Daily Kos, and rounds up all of the February polls in pretty side-by-side graphs. That view makes it seem likely that Governor MoFo doesn't clear a run-off -- but again, the Medina gaffe's effect is reflected in none of them.

So hit the reset button ... or the flush handle.

Of the kooks, by the kooks, and for the kooks

And she was doing so well, with everybody on that side thinking she was only a closet secessionist...

Anti-Washington activist Debra Medina was on the brink of knocking U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison out of a likely Republican gubernatorial runoff, but she may have spoiled her chances Thursday with her remarks on the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

A series of public opinion polls of likely Republican primary voters this past week had indicated that Hutchison was dangerously close to losing second place to Medina in the contest to oust incumbent Gov. Rick Perry.

Medina has benefited from a pair of solid debate appearances, and millions of dollars in attack television advertising by Hutchison and Perry has made her the none-of-the-above candidate for conservative voters.

But Medina may have stumbled Thursday when talk show host Glenn Beck asked whether she believed the government was involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Medina said people raising that question were slinging “mud” at her but went on to say:

“I don't have all of the evidence there, Glenn, so I don't, I'm not in a place, I have not been out publicly questioning that. I think some very good questions have been raised in that regard. There are some very good arguments, and I think the American people have not seen all of the evidence there so I have not taken a position on that.”

Where exactly is the line drawn on the Right between crazy and sane? Beck is a birther, and he's calling Medina crazy for being a truther?!?

These are people who think climate change isn't happening, that evolution isn't happening, that Barack Obama isn't a US citizen, that the Earth is only 6000 years old ...

Some on our side want to suggest that this a plot executed by the Perry campaign. I think that has the potential of being as big a conspiracy theory as MIHOP itself. The only real story here is that Medina pulled a Clayton Williams -- which is a big enough (and funny enough) story all by itself.

Really, all you need to do is just sit back and watch the lunatics set fire to each others' hair for the next few days.

Texas Right aflame with Medina "truther" insanity

Get your corn popped and watch the lunatics fall down and spin around. I'm serious; these people are ALL batshit crazy.

There are fifty blog posts and dozens of comments on the mainstream websites arguing about how much damage Debra Medina did to her campaign today.

In an interview with the certifiable Glenn Beck -- that would be the same Glenn Beck who calls Rick Perry a "progressive" -- she couldn't say with certainty whether the federal government was in some way responsible for the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

You could not dream up stuff this wacky if you were smoking rocks.

The normally breathless Eric Dondero at Libertarian Republican -- a near-daily source of laugh-out-loud amusement for yours truly -- is hyperventilating over the news. Go ahead, click on over. You won't get any slime on ya. Read also the HouChron's Texas Politics blog for the direct quotes and especially the comments.

Perry lovers are giddy with excitement. Medina's minions are outraged.

Todd Gillman at TrailBlazers sums up the moral of the story in "At last, something Perry and Hutchison can agree on".  And this comment there is pure comedy gold:

Hutchinson's campaign headqurters (sic) is probably delirious with joy. What an earthquake! This comment is even dumber than Clayton Williams' "rape" blunder. It cost him the election and this is even bigger than that. I was seriously considering voting for Medina. I'm not sure which one of us that exposes as the bigger idiot. Well, I'm not a big enough idiot to stay with her, now. Kay, I'm back in the fold.

Can I get you more popcorn while I'm in the kitchen?

Update: Rhymes with Hate rounds up more links (if you can stand any more) and slams the door on Medina's foot.

Bi-poll-er disorder

One says there were almost certainly be a run-off in the GOP primary and one does not ...

A new Texas Credit Union League poll in Texas finds Gov. Rick Perry (R) leading the Republican race for governor with 49%, followed by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) at 27% and Debra Medina at 19%.

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 A new Public Policy Polling survey finds the Republican primary for Texas governor on a path to a runoff. Surprisingly, however, the runoff could be between Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Debra Medina (R), leaving Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) as the odd-woman out.

Perry currently leads with 39%, followed by Hutchison at 28% and Medina at 24%.

This is why pollng will drive you nuts. When you see blog entries -- or for that matter, Traditional Media reports -- along with the pundit class quoting the poll's results, just dismiss it (and them). Any poll you can come up with always has nearly immediate diminishing marginal return. In layman's terms, the instant-and-then-instantly-useless value of toilet paper freshly used.

Yes, it's very important to have for a brief moment, and then it's worth shit.

Having said that -- and noting particularly that both polls show Bill White being thisclose to avoiding a run-off --  I will skooch a little farther out on the limb I crawled a few weeks ago and say that if Rick Perry is as wily a political raccoon as I believe he is, he will start laying off the attacks on Kay Bailey. Because if he should find himself in a run-off with Debra Medina on March 3, he will lose.

The most interesting information in these polls IMHO are the TCUL's numbers associated with the Democratic lieutenant governor candidates -- Ronnie Earle, Linda Chavez-Thompson, and Marc Katz -- who show 25, 18, and 8 respectively. That leaves 49% undecided.

I'd say that's exactly right. Now throw that nasty thing down the toilet, would you?

Charles Wilson 1933 -2010, and John Murtha 1932 - 2010

One week, two Congressional titans.

Former U.S. representative Charlie Wilson, a flamboyant 12-term East Texas Democrat who used his control of CIA purse strings to finance and arm an Afghan insurgency that drove out the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, died Feb. 10 at a hospital in Lufkin, Tex. He was 76 and had a history of heart ailments.

Wilson's epic overseas engagements outlive him. The power vacuum left in Afghanistan when the Soviets exited in 1989 contributed to the rise of the Taliban, and the weapons that Wilson helped bring to that country were probably in use when the United States went to war there in 2001.

Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania powerhouse in Congress for 36 years and an early ally for Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her rise to the top of the House, died Monday afternoon as a result of complications from recent surgery. ...

A Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, the 77-year-old Democrat won national fame for standing up against U.S. military involvement in Iraq. But in Congress itself, he also symbolized an old-school generation going back to Tip O’Neill and the Democratic heyday of the ’70s, when the House was less divided by partisan ideology than by often regional interests.

Wilson came and spoke in my high school gymnasium on a campaign trip in 1972, the first year he ran for Congress. He was of course tall and charismatic but especially so to this 15-year-old freshman. He was running to represent the Texas 2nd, replacing John V. Dowdy -- whom my older brother had served as a Congressional page a few years before, and who was forced into retirement from Congress earlier that year. Dowdy was under federal indictment for bribery, conspiracy, and perjury (he was later convicted and sent to prison on the perjury charge, but the other counts were overturned on appeal).

It's safe to say that Charlie Wilson was my first exposure to politics.

Much has already been written about Wilson's colorful legacy, personal as well as professional. Here's the best excerpt I found of stories I hadn't already heard:

Pretty much everyone else who ever met him developed a fondness for Charlie Wilson. They just couldn't help it. The columnist Molly Ivins once pondered how it was that a liberal feminist such as herself could love such an unreconstructed chauvinist so very, very much. "I've been worrying about my fitness to write for Ms. Magazine on account of I like Charlie Wilson," she wrote in that magazine in 1988. "Good Lord, that is embarrassing. Congressman Wilson is the Hunter Thompson of the House of Representatives; a gonzo politician. He's a sexist and has made war a spectator sport. By way of redeeming social value, he's funny, a good congressman for his district, and hasn't an ounce of hypocrisy. ... I called Wilson to ask him why we like him, thinking he might know. He said: `Feminists like me because I am an unapologetic sexist, chauvinist redneck ... who ... votes with 'em every time. I have proven that I can vote with 'em without kissing their ass. I try not to let 'em know I vote with 'em; it's more fun to have 'em mad at me.' "

Wilson and Murtha (and Dowdy, before and with them) served in Congress when business was conducted in a certain way, as you likely already know. Murtha replaced Clarence "Doc" Long (portrayed by Ned Beatty in "Charlie Wilson's War"), the chair of the subcommittee on Foreign Operations of the House Appropriations Committee when Long was defeated in his re-election bid in 1984. Murtha and Wilson thus were more tightly conjoined in the covert war-by-proxy on the USSR, of which Wilson famously said: "we f--ked up the endgame".

Earlier in their careers, Wilson had narrowly turned back an ethics charge against Murtha. Carl Hulse at the NYT relays:

As recounted in the book, “Charlie Wilson’s War”, then Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill asked the colorful Mr. Wilson to take a spot on the House ethics committee to help shut down an inquiry into Murtha, who had gotten caught up in the Abscam bribery investigation. Murtha wasn’t prosecuted for his role, but the internal watchdog committee was looking into whether he broke House rules by not reporting a bribery attempt.

In the book written with Wilson’s cooperation by investigative journalist George Crile, Wilson agreed to take the seat on the ethics panel in return for appointment to the board of the Kennedy Center, which would provide him with plenty of access to exclusive entertainment events. The inquiry was quickly derailed, leading the chief investigator to resign.

“It was the best deal I ever made,” Wilson told Crile. “I only had to be on Ethics for a year, and I get to stay on the Kennedy Center for life.”

Wilson and Murtha will be laid to rest in the heart of their mostly rural Congressional districts. Additional recommended reading:

The Hill's Pundits blog: John Murtha

Politico: Charlie Wilson's Way

Texas on the Potomac: Where are they now? -- Joanne Herring

Update: JR Behrman had this take, and sent it to me with these comments ...

Making “progressive” and “populist” coexist within anything as complex as a federal union with two written, overlapping constitutions which actually failed the challenges of (a) slavery and (b) segregation is hard, maybe impossible.

Nonetheless, Charlie Wilson and John Murtha are pretty much what I expect of representative democracy.

To be specific, I think they and a few other Democrats of their generation actually defeated the Soviet Union, where the GOP would have eventually taken us to something nuclear that they read about in the Book of Revelations.

... and Melissa Roddy at HuffPo added hers on Wilson, Herring, and another Houstonian who always seemed to have a hand in everything, James Baker III.

The Snooze can't work out the Kinks in their endorsement

It is truly a remarkable day for the New Media when my friend Neil at Texas Liberal trumps the Dallas Morning News in the logic associated with their respective endorsements for Texas commissioner of agriculture.

But don't take my word for it...

In the contested Democratic primary for Agriculture Commissioner, the Dallas Morning News has endorsed Kinky Friedman over Hank Gilbert. Well, maybe we should say: The News has opposed Gilbert over Friedman, since the editorial is more of a knock on the former than an attaboy to the latter.

I don't know who over at the Kingdom of Belo wrote that endorsement, but they have lost their f'ing minds. Essentially the DMN doesn't care about details. They just like cigars.

The Dallas Morning News Editorial Board must be smoking crack for endorsing Kinky Friedman in the Democratic Primary for Agriculture Commissioner. One thing the DMN didn't remember is that Friedman is not a Democrat. Never has been. Never will be. You would think if you were going to endorse a Democrat, endorse one that is actually a Democrat and one that knows something about what he is running for.

Forget, for a moment, the mischaracterization of Hank's position on global trade (he's for FAIR not FREE trade... I think we can all agree that the effect of free trade has been detrimental on balance to this country as we've seen GDP go up and wage growth stagnate). The issue is Hank's opposition to impounding, under water, 72,000 acres of productive land in East Texas. And what the DMN failed to mention is that the water district that covers Dallas is the most wasteful in the state.

Hank's position, which he made clear, was to enhance conservation and begin building desalinization plants capable of producing the water that Texas needs. For one thing, desertification is becoming a problem in Texas and rainfall more and more erratic. In point of fact, reservoirs are just not going to cut it. We need a better solution and pressure exchange desalinization is very cheap and very easy. Who knows, maybe our good buddy on the Ed Board William McKenzie just hasn't been keeping up with changes in technology.

There's only one person who deserves to be the Democratic nominee for ag commissioner, and it's not Kinky Friedman.