Poll: Paul surges ahead of Palin among self-identified morons

MINNEAPOLIS -- In a sign of his increasing prominence in the so-called Tea Party movement, a new poll shows Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul topping former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin among voters who describe themselves as morons.

In the poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota's Opinion Research Institute, 42% preferred Paul, 36% preferred Palin, and the remaining 22% were unsure what the word "prefer" meant.

According to Davis Logsdon, who supervised the poll for the University of Minnesota, Paul's surging popularity among morons is bad news for Palin, who previously had a lock on that important constituency.

"I never thought I'd say that, but if Palin is going to stay competitive with Paul, she's going to have to start dumbing down her message."

 Thanks, Andy.

Sunday Funnies (gRand Oil Party edition)

The governor's race in 3 minutes, and more postpourri

-- So if you haven't been paying attention you can catch up on the Texas governor's contest in less than three minutes, courtesy Eileen Smith at Texas Monthly.

-- What Eileen left out that developed this week: The Texas AFL-CIO offered Rick Perry a double-wide furnished with his favorite magazine for $1 a year. That's obviously a big savings over the ten grand a month for the mansion he's been squatting in. You'd think in these hard times, when every state agency had to cut its budget by 5% or more, that would be a grand gesture for the governor. He turned it down.

Let's Evict Rick instead.

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates follows up on Rachel Maddow's evisceration of Rand Paul:

That interview would have went a lot better for Rand Paul if Maddow had have just thrown her notes in the air and accused him of being a bigot, and a covert member of the Klan. That's what they want. And I don't simply mean conservatives--I mean people you disagree with. I know I've won a debate when my adversary says, "What the fuck type of name is Ta-Nuh-hah-see, anyway?" It translates to "I've got nothing." Much scarier is the opponent who takes your argument, with whatever nuances it may or may not possess, and politely disagrees with the argument as it is.

-- The SBOE finalizes its social studies standards today. Muse has been on the scene. BOR, Kuffner, the TFN and the Texas Tribune have much more.

Last week on my Vegas vacation I took time off from my intense sports booking and heavy slot action to call in and conference with Judy Jennings and Rebecca Bell-Metereau, two of the Democratic candidates for the state school board. Needless to say, electing these two women in November -- as well as Michael Soto -- goes a long way toward effectively mitigating the current board's whacked-out decisions.

-- Pappas Seafood Restaurants is suing BP for damages related to the Gulf oil spill. BP has tried desperately to keep a lid on photos and video of the underwater gusher, but they lost that battle too. Here's a wrap-up of the latest.  This site has also been terrific for aggregating information, and Eric Berger is good as well.

Update: Hideous.

Ayn Rand Paul, arrogant ignorance, and the Texas SBOE

Chris Good at The Atlantic:

Here's one thing that can, plainly, be said about the controversy over Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act: this is exactly what Democrats hoped would happen.

The Democratic campaign and message apparatus has been banking, for months, on the rightward tilt of the Tea Party to damage the Republican Party in November's midterm elections. They put out a strategy memo to this effect in January.

The idea is, basically: Tea Partiers are crazy, right-wing extremists. If the Republican Party elects them to run in November, the Republican Party will lose. Democrats have been saying this for months.

Paul's statements about the Civil Rights Act, brought up last night by Rachel Maddow and discussed at length, in an interview, have dominated the news cycle today. It has not looked good for Paul, or for the Tea Party.

Joe Klein:

...Rand Paul is now saying that  he regrets the appearance with Rachel Maddow, not the ridiculous statements he made in favor of a private business's ability to discriminate according to race. I suspect that this will be the first of many such disasters for the Tea Party libertarians. They are about to find themselves faced with actual political rivals who will be more than happy to expose the utopian foolishness of their ideology. This will be a rare moment of public education for an electorate that doesn't pay sufficient attention to even the most important aspects of democracy.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, also from The Atlantic:

But what about red-lining? Does Paul know anything about blockbusting? Does he think banks should be able to have a policy of not lending to black businesses? Does he think real-estate agents should be able to discriminate? Does he think private homeowner groups should be able to band together and keep out blacks? Jews? Gays? Latinos?

I think there's this sense that it's OK to be ignorant about the Civil Rights Act because it's a "black issue." I'm not a lawyer, but my sense is that for a senator to be ignorant of the Civil Rights Act, is not simply to be ignorant of a "black issue," but to be ignorant of one of the most important pieces of legislation ever passed. This isn't like not knowing the days of Kwanzaa, this is like not knowing what caused the Civil War. It's just embarrassing--except Paul is too ignorant to be embarrassed.

This is George W. Bush-style prideful ignorance, and it's probably the worst thing about the TeaBaggers specifically and the Republican Party generally.

They don't know, they don't care and they don't like you because you do.

Muse notes among the many atrocities in the Texas SBOE hearings going on in Austin is that -- as Coates points out in the last sentence excerpted above -- the Civil War was fought not over slavery or even states' rights but because an angel fell from Heaven (and became Satan, I suppose is the lesson).

The stupidity is literally breath-taking.

Sestak retires Specter; Lincoln likely in run-off with Halter

The real news here is that Barack Obama and Joe Biden and others in the Democratic establishment supported both of these two losers. Voters are rejecting incumbents, as has been accurately reported in lots of places.

The Democrat, an asinine Blue Dog named Mark Critz, easily held on to the late Jack Murtha's seat -- the only Kerry-McCain district in the country -- despite a million Republican dollars and all manner of doom-filled predictions that the election to fill the unexpired term was a referendum on Obama.  If it is, we will certainly be happy in November.

The progressive, state Attorney General Jack Conway, defeated the Blue Dog -- Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo -- in the Kentucky Democratic Senate primary election to replace the Alzheimer's-riddled GOP retiree Jim Bunning. But all the media wants to talk about is RuPaul Ron Paul's son and the TeaBaggers again, despite the fact that Mongiardo's 2nd-place finish is more votes than Paul's first-place one.

So where's the "Mitch McConnell's boy and GOP mainstream gets thumped" headline?

Update: Blanche Lincoln may not even be the top vote-getter in AR.

The Weekly Wrangle (from the streets of Las Vegas)

Really. I'm on the patio of the Starbucks outside the Golden Nugget, on Fremont and 2nd. I observe that the Associated Press has picked up the story of Rick Perry's ten-grand-a-month rental house, while Rassmublican pushes back with their poll. (Update: Phillip Martin at BOR has more on these ridiculous numbers.)

Distracted though I may have been by our gambling winnings (over $300 on the Preakness which produced a nice dinner at Vic and Anthony's) I'm staying on task long enough on get-back-to-H-Town-day to bring you the blog roundup.

This week at Left of College Station, the spring semester ends and Teddy has made it through another twelve hours of classes. He wasn't too busy to take a look at the developments in the campaign for TX-17, and how the Republicans are attempting to nationalize the midterm elections.

TXsharon of BLUEDAZE: Drilling Reform for Texas took some EPA officials from D.C. on a Barnett Shale tour last week.

Bay Area Houston says Arizona's Governor Brewer is the new Face of the GOP.

Off the Kuff interviewed Democratic candidate for Lt. Gov. Linda Chavez-Thompson about Arizona's immigration law and what comprehensive immigration reform would look like.

WhosPlayin has the final results from the Texas DSHS investigation of blood and urine for residents of Dish, TX; the conclusions are not by any means an exoneration for the industry because of significant limitations to the investigation.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes the futility of Cornyn and Perry saying they want the Hispanic vote while Republicans simultaneously rev up the Tea Party racists.

Sarah Palin decides to release another book and McBlogger had just a few comments.

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw has a question: Is Rick Perry's 2006 Business Tax an Income Tax? According to a pretty sharp legal student, the answer is yes. Who would have thought it, Rick Perry pulling a fast one so he could continue his lower property tax bait and switch scam.....

Announcing the planned City of Houston budget for the year ahead Houston Mayor Annise Parker said Houston has an economy "better than that in any other part of the country." She said this despite Houston's high poverty rate, high dropout rate and large number of people without health insurance. These issues, however, don't seem to be part of Parker's agenda for the future of Houston. Neal at Texas Liberal elaborates.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson observes that as taxes receipts ebb and budget troubles hit Williamson County, the poor and middle class are most likely to pay for it: Changes to indigent health care in Williamson County.

A slow post week at Brains and Eggs as PDiddie slid out to Sin City to help his nephew celebrate his 21st birthday. There's a great old pic of the Golden Nugget -- now under the ownership of Tilman Fertitta -- from 1946, when PDiddie's grandfather used to frequent the gambling hall.

Sunday Funnies

Sin City for the weekend

To help the nephew celebrate his 21st. Staying at Tilman's.

This old photo is from '46, when it opened. My maternal grandfather -- a train conductor -- said it was his favorite place, and he passed down to us grandkids a few of the silver dollars he won there (when they paid those out back in the day).

Skynet is about to become self-aware

It has begun. RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!

Don't be alarmed. High above your heads, a zombie satellite is on the loose. OK, actually, it won't really be a bother to us earthlings. Or at least to most of us. (More on that later.) But the rogue communications satellite is wreaking havoc in Earth's orbit and does threaten to interfere with signals coming from other satellites. Here's the backstory...

The communications satellite named Galaxy 15 lost contact with ground control after a solar flare probably fried its brain. As a story from the Christian Science Monitor reports, attempts from Earth to contact the satellite have been unsuccessful. But instead of just dying and drifting off, the satellite has continued to orbit the Earth, even though it refuses to receive instructions from its owner, Intelsat.

For the science nerds out there: The satellite is still on, with its "C-band telecommunications payload still functioning even as it has left its assigned orbital slot of 133 degrees west longitude 36,000 kilometers over the equator." Translation: Not good.

What's confounding scientists is that even though the satellite is toast, it continues to operate at full power, but with nobody telling it what to do. Why on earth we should care: The "zombiesat" (as its known in space talk) could steal a working sat signal, and interrupt programming for its customers. Yes, that means our television programs. The horror. As the blog Boing Boing points out, Galaxy 15 was one of the satellites that carried the Syfy channel's signal. And now it's met an end good enough to be its own Syfy show.

The Galaxy 15 is on course to mess with an SES satellite that transmits to Luxembourg. If it's any consolation to the good people of Luxembourg, officials are calling the situation "unprecedented."

The undead satellite has caused (Yahoo) searches for "galaxy 15 satellite" to rise an astronomical 10,300% in the last week. Searches were also out of this world for "nasa satellite imagery," "satellite photo," and "nasa satellites." It's also caused people to wonder "how many satellites are in space." Not enough to bump into each other. Yet.

Update:

Galaxy 15 continues to receive and transmit satellite signals, and they will probably interfere with the second satellite, known as AMC 11, if Galaxy 15 drifts into its orbit as expected around May 23 ...

AMC 11 is part of a satellite constellation that transmits HD television signals for more than 100 channels, ranging from Showtime and MTV Networks to HSN and the Food Network. Among the channels carried by Galaxy 15 and its sibling satellites are Cinemax, Encore, ESPN, Fox News Channel, HBO, Starz and SyFy.

If it knocks out Fox then I suppose it's worth the sacrifice. Of course if that should happen then it will surely be Obama's (or ACORN's) fault.

Seven days to Sestak-Specter and Halter-Lincoln

If you're as worn out as I am about the over-hyped and over-inflated importance of the TeaBag effect on the nations' Senate primaries, you're in for a welcome respite. From my Senate Guru e-mail:

In Pennsylvania, Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak is taking on recent Republican Arlen Specter.  As you may have read, recent polling has trended very much in Congressman Sestak's direction, but all polling continues to show a very tight race.  Democrats deserve better than nominating Specter, who not long ago championed McCain-Palin and stood as a roadblock to progress on issues like health care reform.

In Arkansas, Democratic Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter is taking on corporate lackey Blanche Lincoln. Lt. Gov. Halter has taken impressive strides toward tightening this race, and the numbers are moving in his direction, but Lincoln still enjoyed a high-single-digit edge as of the end of April.  (This more recent poll shows Lincoln with a 12-point lead.) Every poll -- including ones showing Lincoln edging Halter in the primary -- show Halter performing MUCH stronger against Republicans than Lincoln does.  In fact, Lincoln is arguably unelectable in the general election because of rampant anti-incumbent sentiment in Washington.  However, with Bill Halter as the Democratic nominee in the general against likely Republican nominee GOP Rep. John Boozman, Arkansas Democrats will turn that anti-incumbent sentiment from a weakness into a strength.

We might see a couple of actual progressives -- that would be the Democratic base, in case you were wondering -- knock off some conservative incumbents in their respective elections next week. And no TeaBags anywhere in sight.

How refreshing would that be?

Left over from Sunday Funnies

Lena Horne 1917 - 2010

A life in full.

Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress who reviled the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not socialize with them, slowing her rise to Broadway superstardom, has died. She was 92. ...

Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her sultry voice, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success.

"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," she once said. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."

In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.

In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical "Stormy Weather." Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece.

More from the NYT:

Ms. Horne might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the color of her skin, although she was so light-skinned that, when she was a child, other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.” ...

When she was 16, her mother abruptly pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks, Duke Ellington was the star of the show and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934.

And concluding from the AP link above.

By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination. ...

She had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.

In the 2009 biography "Stormy Weather," author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she'd married a white man, she replied: "To get even with him."

Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970 and 1971, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her.

"I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters," she said. "It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live."

And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness.

"I wouldn't trade my life for anything," she said, "because being black made me understand."