Monday, May 10, 2010

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes everyone had a lovely Mother's Day as it reviews the highlights from the blogs.

WhosPlayin has election results and commentary for Lewisville, Lewisville ISD, and Flower Mound.

Neil at Texas Liberal posted a picture of the Mayflower landing in West Texas. Under Texas State Board of Education guidelines, you can teach kids just about anything as long as it is false.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme applauds South Texas for supporting their schools. Tea Party tax brats take note.

Indemnification language exposes industry known threats to safety, public health and environment from hydraulic fracture. On Bluedaze: DRILLING REFORM FOR TEXAS.

Bay Area Houston posted Governor Perry's personal offering on National Prayer Day: Let Us Prey.

Off the Kuff reminds us of the cost of Rick Perry's rejection of stimulus funds for unemployment insurance.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson states that the 2003 Texas GOP/DeLay redistricting scheme continues to cost Texas dearly, in The perils at the national level of being a majority minority-party state.

Rick Perry's ad attacked Bill White's ad this past week, and Rick Perry's ad lost. Not because it was filled with lies and mischaracterizations, and not because it used Yao Ming in a weirdly inappropriate way. No, Rick Perry's ad got kicked because Rick Perry is man so terrified of everything in his life that even laser sights and hollow points aren't enough to comfort him. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has "Perry v. White over the air", a fight which resembled Mayweather-Mosely in its one-sided outcome.

At TexasKaos, JRBehrman poses three questions about the BP oil spill and gives useful perspective on their answers... Check it out : Three Questions. Hint: no quick fixes here!

Ugh. Kagan.

Saw it coming. Still don't like it.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan will be nominated Monday to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama, a person familiar with the president's thinking says, positioning the high court to have three women justices for the first time.

Obama plans to announce his choice at 10 a.m. in the East Room of the White House. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision, which came after a monthlong search, had not been made public.

Just look at all the fawning.

Kagan is known as sharp and politically savvy and has enjoyed a blazing legal career. ...

What the president gets from Kagan, 50, is a terribly bright, progressive judicial voice without a great deal of liberal baggage for critics to sort though. The White House also will get someone who has a long-held inside-the-beltway reputation for being some sort of "consensus-builder."

This comes a little closer to my POV:

SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein, who has been supportive of Kagan, describes her as “extraordinarily – almost artistically – careful” about her views of constitutional law, managing to avoid taking any definitive positions even in conversation. The simple, empirical fact is that there’s very little evidence available for the public to understand her outlook on the Constitution. Should Obama choose Kagan to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, she can remain a blank slate because the mechanism for public investigation of a nominee – the confirmation hearing – has been reduced to a venue for absurdist performance art.

But Glenn Greenwald as usual nails it, with seven salient points about why this is a bad pick ...

1) University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos, who previously expressed shock at the paucity of Kagan's record and compared her to Harriet Miers, has a new piece in The New Republic entitled (appropriately): "Blank Slate."

(2) Digby examines what a Kagan selection would reveal about Obama, and she particularly focuses on Kagan's relationship to Goldman Sachs.  That relationship is relatively minor, but it is illustrative in several ways and will certainly be used by Republicans to advance their attacks on this administration as being inextricably linked with Wall Street.  The Huffington Post's Sam Stein has more on the Kagan/Goldman Sachs connection.

(3) Following up on the article published yesterday in Salon by four minority law professors -- which condemned Kagan's record on diversity issues as "shocking" and "indefensible for the 21st Century" -- Law Professor Darren Hutchinson of American University School of Law today writes that Kagan's record is "abysmal." 

There's more so go read it. But this is the clincher.

(7) Perhaps most revealing of all:  a new article in The Daily Caller reports on growing criticisms of Kagan among "liberal legal scholars and experts" (with a focus on the work I've been doing), and it quotes the progressive legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as follows:  "The reality is that Democrats, including liberals, will accept and push whomever Obama picks."  Yesterday on Twitter, Matt Yglesias supplied the rationale for this mentality:  "Argument will be simple: Clinton & Obama like and trust [Kagan], and most liberals (myself included) like and trust Clinton & Obama."

Just think about what that means.  If the choice is Kagan, you'll have huge numbers of Democrats and progressives running around saying, in essence:  "I have no idea what Kagan thinks or believes about virtually anything, and it's quite possible she'll move the Court to the Right, but I support her nomination and think Obama made a great choice."  In other words, according to Chemerinksy and Yglesias, progressives will view Obama's choice as a good one by virtue of the fact that it's Obama choice.  Isn't that a pure embodiment of mindless tribalism and authoritarianism?  Democrats love to mock the Right for their propensity to engage in party-line, close-minded adherence to their Leaders, but compare what conservatives did with Bush's selection of Harriet Miers to what progressives are almost certain to do with Obama's selection of someone who is, at best, an absolute blank slate.

One of the very first non-FISA posts I ever wrote that received substantial attention (uniformly favorable attention from progressives) was this post, from February, 2006, about the cult of personality that subsumed the Right during the Bush era.  The central point was that conservatives supported anything and everything George Bush did, regardless of how much it comported with their alleged beliefs and convictions, because loyalty to him and their Party, along with a desire to keep Republicans in power, subordinated any actual beliefs.  Even Bill Kristol -- in a 2006 New York Times article describing how Bruce Bartlett had been ex-communicated from the conservative movement for excessively criticizing George Bush -- admitted that personal allegiance to Bush outweighed conservative principles in the first term and that "Bush was the movement and the cause."

To say that "Democrats, including liberals, will accept and push whomever Obama picks," based on the rationale that "Clinton & Obama like and trust her, and most liberals (myself included) like and trust Clinton & Obama" -- even if they know nothing about her, even if she might move the Court to the Right -- seems to me to be an exact replica of what I described four years ago.

This woman has the potential of being what Harry Blackmun was to Richard Nixon, what David Souter was to George H. W. Bush, what John Paul Stevens was to Gerald Ford. And that not coming to pass over the years is the best we progressives can hope for.

Sunday, May 09, 2010

TeaBagger loses in SD-22

As has been the case across the nation, election predictions of TeaBagger takeovers missed a few times. Initially covered here but better blogged since by a variety of other shops, a pair of alleged CarpetBaggers finished first and second in the free-for-all to replace state Sen. Kip Averitt of Waco yesterday.

Former state Sen. David Sibley and Gulf War veteran Brian Birdwell are heading to a runoff after neither garnered enough votes during a special election Saturday for a Texas Senate seat.

Sibley, a Republican, is trying to retake the seat he held for 11 years and finished with the most votes. But with all precincts reporting, no candidate in the four-way race earned the required 50 percent of the vote to secure the seat.

The central Texas seat includes 10 counties stretching from Waco to the outskirts of Fort Worth.

Sibley, a lobbyist and former dental surgeon, captured 45 percent of the vote while Birdwell, also a Republican, came in second with about 37 percent. Birdwell, who survived the Sept. 11 terrorist attack at the Pentagon, trailed Sibley by more than 2,500 votes.

Both men questioned the other's residence eligibility (a state senator must reside in the district for one year at minimum). But the real news is that the TeaBagger, Darren Yancy, came in fourth with just over 5% of the vote in a four-man race. He finshed woefully behind Baylor political science professor and Democratic candidate Gayle Avant, heretofore famous only for his moustache.

So the good conservatives of the Central Texas counties comprising SD-22 picked two establishment Republicans to face off against each other in a runoff. And the Democrat got nearly three times as many votes as the TeaBagger.

Yet we will continue to be treated to more stories about the Tea Party revolt sweeping Texas and the nation. Just remind yourself that it is horseshit when you see it.

The Teabs are an internal Republican Party uprising, and they are experiencing limited success in their maiden electoral endeavor. The Teed Off phenomenon is, at its core, anti-Obama: a virulent strain of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Nothing more.

Because what this country needs is a more conservative senator from Utah

RIP Bob Bennett. No great loss, and his replacement will probably be worse.

He voted in favor of the bailout, which was his death warrant among this extremist subset. The real message, though, is being sent to Texas' own TeaBagger, NRSC head Box Turtle Cornyn.

The result is yet another rebuke of the GOP establishment -- barely a week after Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, official Washington's pick for the state's Senate nomination, quit the party in a last-ditch effort to survive. Another blow to Republican powers here may come in another week or so, as Tea Party favorite Rand Paul may take out the establishment choice in the Kentucky Senate primary.

Note the Teabonics in this link's ending sentence that Republicans had "best head voters warnings".  Sadly Tim Kaine, the Democrats' mostly invisible chair, didn't proof-read his response, either:

" ... If there was any question before, there should now be no doubt that the Republican leadership has handed the reigns to the Tea Party."

Yeah, and the rein in Speign falls mainely on the plane. Go back to sleep, Governor Kain.

The other Senator Bennet, he of one 't' and hailing from Colorado, said it best when he called the TeaBaggers nihilists.

"Who do you think built the road that you traveled here on? Who do you think built the bridges and the sewers and the waste-water systems and invested in the higher education system that we now have. They built that stuff from scratch!... Our parents and our grandparents. And we can't even maintain it?!"

But hey, never forget that " 'Murrica is th' greates' cuntry inna werld".

Update: Steve Singiser ...

Bob Bennett is not burdened by scandal, nor has he been the kind of perennially unpopular politico that barely scrapes by intraparty challenges for the duration of his career (the way his fellow Utahn, Chris Cannon, was).

He is a standard-issue incumbent, who committed the capital offense (for 2010, anyway) of being a Republican occasionally capable of a non-ideological vote. This led him to a raft of opponents, and an unceremonious second-round exit in the state convention, one that was fueled at unbridled anger at ideological apostasy, as local columnist Peg McEntee pointed out:
When Bennett lost, the yips and howls from thousands of delegates sounded like coyotes going after one of their own.

Left standing were Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater, both Utah County Republicans who like the tea partiers and 9/12ers just fine. Both claim to be strict constitutionalists who will free Utah from an oppressive federal government, take back federal lands in Utah and repeal health care reform.
This process is being repeated from coast-to-coast, where so-called mainstream or "establishment" Republicans are getting battered for their lack of commitment to the "principles" of conservatism.

Read more, and take note particularly of the muddled past as prologue.

Greasy Sunday Funnies

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Hearst shuffles Beaumont publishers again

After just three years the soon-to-be-former Beaumont Enterprise publisher is moving on to an undisclosed 'other business opportunity'. The new man in charge is from the Houston Chronicle.

As part of a larger restructuring of Hearst newspapers in Texas, Bill Offill, executive vice president of sales and marketing at the Houston Chronicle, will succeed John E. Newhouse II as publisher of The Beaumont Enterprise. ...

As executive vice president, Offill has overseen the Chronicle's advertising sales, circulation and marketing divisions since 2004. He joined the Houston Chronicle in 1987 as an advertising sales account executive and later held key leadership positions, including advertising director and vice president of circulation.

Offill is one of the big winners in the mass shakeout the Chronicle itself experienced just over a year ago. His roots in circulation and advertising should provide some sorely needed expertise to the Enterprise, which continues to hemorrhage readership and, correspondingly, advertisers.

I've spent time in Beaumont recently working with some new clients and attended the Better Business Bureau's Torch Awards banquet just this past Tuesday evening. While all of the television stations and their on-air personalities were represented, along with a few radio stations, the newspaper was conspicuously absent -- no attendees, no sponsorships.

Heavy community involvement and activism was one of the hallmarks of the tenure of previous Enterprise publishers Aubrey Webb and George Irish (both of whom I once worked with; I have blogged here and here about that). I was more than surprised that there was nobody at an event of this profile. Even if the top man had plans to leave the paper, it seems odd that a business editor or reporter would not have attended or covered it. This link looks like a reprint of the press release.

Here's hoping the reorganization of the six Texas Hearst papers -- besides Houston and Beaumont, they include the Express-News in San Antonio, the Reporter-Telegram in Midland, the Daily Herald in Plainview, and the Morning Times in Laredo -- is a success.

Now if she will explain how Dirty Sanchez relates to immigration reform

Right-wing nutbag Melissa Clouthier tried to be outraged about the TeaBaggers being outraged about being called TeaBaggers.

She failed. Massively. This link is completely unsafe for work.

This one from the Houston Press is mostly OK, though. No excerpting; just go read it and LYAO. Or weep, as the case may be. Hat tip to Kuff for the link, and more and ever more hilarious comments at Wonkette.

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Perry v. White over the air

Bill White is running ads in Houston (possibly elsewhere):



And this is the Perry campaign's response:



About the only thing they did right was getting that response out roughly 24 hours after the White ad.

This kind of attack this early in the campaign season says one just thing: Rick Perry is a man running scared.

He's seeing the polls tightening up; he's reading the articles about how White is going after his base (not the TeaBaggers, the country-clubbers), seeing Republican elected officials endorsing White and so on.

So despite the Newsweek cover story two weeks ago and the lingering speculation fueling a potential presidential bid in 2012; despite showing up and feeding his ego with Glenn Beck in Tyler and the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington; despite the millions of dollars of free media he's earned in the last week for shooting a coyote, pandering to Texas Hispanics and jabbing the 'Baggers by not supporting AZ-style immigration law, not to mention declaring the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to be an act of God -- that's all just in the past seven days -- Rick Perry remains a terrified little man. Terrified of losing his twenty-plus year government paycheck; frightened of snakes and coyotes when he jogs, afraid that he might be revealed as a drugstore cowboy.

Which at least helps us understand why, despite having several armed Texas Rangers as bodyguards, he carries a handgun with a laser sight and loaded with hollow points when he goes out for a run in suburban Austin.

Because he runs scared. Not just of snakes and coyotes. Of everything.

Hat tip to Todd Hill at Burnt Orange for the DMN links, and to Quorum Report for the campaign videos.

Update: Elise Hu at the Texas Tribune notes the use of Yao Ming in Perry's ad in a weirdly inappropriate way. As it turns out the Perry campaign thought it would be hilarious to make fun of how short White is ... when he's standing next to Yao.

Monday, May 03, 2010

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is enjoying the May flowers as we bring you this week's blog roundup.

The Texas Oil and Gas Accountability Project is A BIG BUNCH OF MEANIES according to a major industry publication. OGAP is so mean for "setting up shop in Texas" and requiring that industry Drill-Right Texas. And, TXsharon is really, really mean on her blog Bluedaze: DRILLING REFORM FOR TEXAS.

Off the Kuff had a discussion of the city of Houston's term limits, which are currently under review.

In a first for WhosPlayin, a local school board trustee is compelled to admit he lied about his criminal record before the "liberal blogger" can write about it, based on act of investigating it.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants to point out that border violence precipitated by poor drug policy has nothing to do with immigration reform. Think about it. Don't let the fear mongers fool you.

Adam at Three Wise Men gives us the skinny on the upcoming midterms.

Governor MoFo had a decent media week: his two-month-old shooting of a coyote went national, and he pandered effectively to Texas Hispanics. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs summarizes the manipulations in "Rick Perry's not bad, pretty good week".

The Texas Cloverleaf looks at the possibility of the Arizona immigration law coming to Texas in 2011.

Neil at Texas Liberal wrote about one small way he maintains his faith in democracy despite all the dumb things taking place in daily life.

In a week full of immigration policy debates and talk of killing coyotes, Barfly at McBlogger chose to look at something far more troubling.

Bay Area Houston found Rick Perry's official campaign song; Macho Man by the Village People.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson wrote about Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst's double standard on spending taxpayer money in Please don't Dew us like this.

Libby Shaw discovers the true prototype for Governor Perry's governing style: Beavis and Butthead. As she tells it: "Rick Perry has as much compassion and empathy for his constituents as would Beavis and Butt-Head." She wonders: "...why does Rick Perry have serious problems with outreach programs, whether local, state or federal, all of which attempt to throw lifelines to those who are in a desperate struggle, be it a financial burden, crippling health care costs, or top quality educational benefits for public schools? Check it all out at TexasKaos.

Sunday, May 02, 2010

Houstons Sports Museum re-opens (yes, inside the Finger's)

This collection of sports memories is really special.

The Houston Sports Museum, a favorite of local fans since the 1960s, is once more open for reminiscing on the site of Buff Stadium, Houston's pre-Astros minor league baseball stadium, inside the reopened Finger Furniture store on the Gulf Freeway.

After disappearing from view as the Finger family reorganized its business in the wake of third-generation CEO Bobby Finger's death in 2007, the museum returned with a soft opening in March and in more formal fashion with the furniture store's relaunch last month.

Fans can again assume a batting stance alongside a plaque in the floor marking the site of home plate at Buff Stadium, the home of Houston minor league teams from 1928 until 1961. And, once renovations are completed, they can again view a statue of ex-Rice baseball coach Dickie Kerr, the stand-up southpaw of the 1919 Black Sox.



The heart of the collection was assembled by Sammy Finger, Rodney Finger's grandfather, during the heyday of the Buffs as a St. Louis Cardinals farm team. It was augmented through the years by items representing the Colt .45s and Astros plus other Houston sports franchises, but baseball still accounts for the majority of the items inside its glass display cases. ...

New additions include a 1980s-vintage video history of the Buffs and the museum, narrated by former Colts/Astros announcer Gene Elston, and a display tracing the Finger family's sponsorship of the Buffs, Colts and Astros.

Sunday "How's that Drill Baby Drill workin' out for ya?" Funnies

Saturday, May 01, 2010

Mayweather - Mosley, the Derby and Houston weekend festivals

-- Sugar Shane and Floyd Jr. hook it up in the ring tonight. Mayweather has a big chip on his shoulder for being called out by Manny Pacquiao's trainer Freddie Roach (and everybody else, for that matter). I think Mayweather will silence the critics and again stoke the dream match.

-- The Kentucky Derby will go off this afternoon in the mud, scrambling the odds and creating another opportunity for a huge underdog to pop at a nice price. Currently I'm considering Super Saver (with Calvin BoRail aboard), Devil May Care (Todd Pletcher's filly), Mission Impazible (I'm heavy on the Pletcher horses), along with the favorite Lookin' at Lucky in something exotic and boxy. Strong consideration will be given to Ice Box and Awesome Act and Noble's Promise, the best mudder in the field and at long odds for -- among other reasons -- he's recently recovered from a lung infection. More from Joe Drape's Rail blog if you are so inclined. Update: My 4-2 exacta, a $2 investment, paid $152.40.

-- The Polish Festival in near west Houston and the Dragon Boat Festival at Allen's Landing downtown promise fun with a little cultural exchange.

-- The Frenetic Theater has Projected.2010 happening tonight. Described as a "series of performance-based art and art-based performance", it looks like fun, too. More on this weekend's local art gallery scene from Houstonist (and a hat tip for this portion of the entry).