Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Rick Perry annexes Juarez

He may have thought this was the same thing as seceding. I'm just surprised he didn't claim that he meant "North" America.

It seems Texas isn’t big enough for Rick Perry.

During a sit down with reporters on Monday, the Texas governor incorrectly identified Juarez — located across the Rio Grande, and border, from El Paso — as “the most dangerous city in America.”

The misstatement came in the middle of an impassioned assault on the administration’s record of enforcing the border.

“How many more American citizens are going to have to die?” Perry asked.

The border state governor then turned to the chaos created by Mexico’s drug wars.

“There have been 34,000 Mexicans killed directly attributable to the drug wars. It is a very dangerous place,” he said.

Perry then pointed out that “Juarez is reported to be the most dangerous city in America.”

After an aide informed the governor of his mistake, Perry clarified that Juarez indeed belongs to Mexico, not Texas.

This is why he blocks reporters from following him on Twitter -- because his Tweets are even more ignorant than this, and he knows it. Is there a word that goes beyond 'embarrassed' -- the way that Texans feel about their governor, and what their governor is incapable of feeling for himself?

Monday, February 28, 2011

The Weekly Wrangle

As the Texas Progressive Alliance gets ready to rodeo, we would also like to thank the Academy for this week's blog roundup.

Off the Kuff published an interview with Chris Barbic, founder and CEO of the YES Prep charter schools, which included a discussion of what the looming budget cuts will do to charter schools.

Doing My Part For The Left is having a greeting card event. Refinish69 thinks it is time to Send Republican Senators and Representatives a Greeting Card to thank them for the work they are doing.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson points out that the GOP's wish is coming true -- the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, in Plutocracy: the 30-year class war on working and middle class Americans.

Nat-Wu from Three Wise Men analyzes the Tucson shootings and the concealed-carry-on-campus bill before the Texas legislature.

From Bay Area Houston: "Teabaggers are the most dangerous, ignorant, disrespectful bunch of people on the planet."

No one fails quite like Mucous, according to McBlogger.

The Texas Cloverleaf speaks out against concealed firearms on Texas campuses.

Public Citizen's TexasVox asks who the real sacred cows are in the Texas and federal budget, replying that the obvious answer are the corporate welfare queens making profits off fossil fuel subsidies.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme calls out the Dallas Morning News for siding with the Koch brothers against hard working people.

Lightseeker over at TexasKaos thinks he knows what game the Republicans are playing and what the Democrats are trying in reply. Check out Shock and Awe and The Democratic Strategy Going Forward.

Redistricting endangers several Texas House representatives, Democratic as well as Republican. The mapmakers may need long knives instead of sharpened pencils (since we can all do maps online now). PDiddie at Brains and Eggs summarizes the opening of "negotiations".

Neil at Texas Liberal discussed the fact that he will soon be taking an airplane trip.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

People-Powered Protest Pictures

Click on these for a larger and much clearer look. From yesterday's "Rally to Save the American Dream" in Austin, at the Capitol:



More pictures here and also here. From the "Houston Walk for Choice" in Houston, also yesterday:


More photos here.

Sunday Funnies

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Redistricting endangers state representatives

One of them is Houston's Scott Hochberg.

Last week's census figures showed that Harris County grew dramatically during the past decade but not fast enough to warrant adding a new state legislative district. The county, in fact, likely will lose one.

As Texas lawmakers turn their attention to the complex and contentious task of redrawing their own districts, that loss will set in motion a game of musical chairs to determine who has a place among the 150 House seats. That number does not change despite a 20 percent increase in population statewide, which means the kaleidoscope of voters each lawmaker represents will shift. Harris County is expected to go from 25 to 24 state House seats.

Legislative districts, redrawn every 10 years in the wake of federal census results, must be roughly the same size, somewhere near 167,637 people per district.

[...]

In the House, Democrat Rep. Carol Alvarado's 145th District, with 132,730 people, is down 20.8 percent, as are districts represented by her inner-city cohorts, including state Rep. Scott Hochberg, a Democrat, whose District 137 fell to a population of 137,876, which is 17.8 percent below the mean. District 143, an inner-city district represented by Ana Hernandez, a Democrat, has a population of only 127,381, about 24 percent below the mean. ...

Legislative districts west of downtown gained population dramatically. State Rep. William Callegari, a Republican, represents 264,426 people in District 132, nearly 58 percent above the mean. With a population of 212,484, District 150, represented by Debbie Riddle, a Republican, is 26.8 percent above the mean. Incumbents will have "to start pushing and pulling in different directions" — to use Republican consultant Allen Blakemore's phrase - to equal out the districts.

"Scott Hochberg's gone," Blakemore said. "He's under, and he's a white Democrat."

That sentiment could be premature, said political scientist Mark Jones of Rice University.

"Hochberg is gone if you change the district by too much," he said. "He's well-known in the area he represents, but if he has to pick up population in an area where he's not all that well-known, he could be in trouble. He'll be fine if he keeps, maybe, 65 percent of his current district. He's more endangered if you create a district that's more Hispanic." ...

Jones suggested that Sarah Davis, a rookie Republican representing a central Houston district, could be in trouble. Davis' district is 12.2 percent below the mean.

"She's squeezed," Jones said, "because she's close to Democratic districts. Plus, her district is likely to swing back in 2012."

Hochberg, one of the best and brightest serving in the Texas House, has always managed to walk enough blocks and knock on enough doors in his district to get it done. But the GOP will target him and him alone in Harris County, because they don't want to make things any more difficult for their own people than they already are, and because the VRA makes targeting a Latina -- Alvarado or Hernandez Luna -- virtually off-limits.

Spread Sarah "Ding Dong" Davis with butter and jam no matter what the lines are in HD-134, because she is toast. We're taking that district back in '12.

In west Texas, Paul Burka identifies Jim Landtroop of Plainview as "most vulnerable player".

1. He’s a freshman.

2. He supported Paxton for speaker.

3. He cast one of the fifteen votes against Straus for speaker

4. He represents a part of the state that is hemorrhaging population.

5. He has nowhere to go to pick up extra people.

6. He’s a hard-right conservative

7. He has already been marginalized by his committee assignments (Agriculture & Livestock, Defense & Veterans’ Affairs), although Ag is important in his district.

Landtroop has one of the most oddly shaped districts. It is essentially a cross (.pdf), seven counties from north to south, five from east to west, with appendages on the east side. He is landlocked by savvy veteran members who play important roles in the House: Chisum on the north; Hardcastle, Darby, and Keffer on the east; Hilderbran on the south; and Craddick and Charles Perry on the west. Perry is a Landtroop clone: tea-party type, hard-right conservative, poor committee assignments, supported Paxton for speaker, voted against Straus. You could flip a coin and let the winner have the seat without affecting the House at all.

The factors that squeezed out Speaker Pete Laney six years ago hits Hale and surrounding Panhandle counties again. And read the comments there for some nostalgic give-and-take from the 2006 Democratic primary. The entreaties for Laney to run for lieutenant governor are almost poignant.

Note however that Warren Chisum, having announced his intention to run for the Texas Railroad Commission, may make Burka's speculation moot if the mapmakers absorb his district into a new one that meets the population threshold. Burka thinks that the district moves south toward Lubbock, but I'm inclined to believe that the new lines go north toward Amarillo.

The commenters at Burkablog's link point out that Donna Howard and Craig Eiland are also endangered Democrats, that a variety of GOP incumbents in Travis and Dallas Counties could get unseated in the musical chairs shuffle, and that east Texas will be down a seat, likely a Republican one. More on that from the Franklin County GOP, namely turncoat Chuck Hopson, who seems to have trouble constructing his sentences:

“Wayne Christian is over in House District 9, which is Nacogdoches, Shelby, St. Augustine, Sabine, Jasper — immediately to the right of Cherokee County — that district is 22,000 short. The district, Bryan Hughes, immediately above me, District 5, is 9,000 short. Lavender, which is up in Texarkana, is 21,000 short. Cain immediately next to him is 21,000 short. Phillips next to him is 13,000 short,” Hopson said. “Leo Berman in Tyler is the only person (whose district is above the qualifier), he has an excess of 2,500 people in Tyler because Tyler’s had a really good growth. But from Texarkana all the way down to Galveston, all those districts are short.”

Then again maybe it was the transcriber. Somebody really needs to learn English or just get of the country, don't you think?

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

First Tunisia, then Egypt, now Libya. Is Wisconsin next?

Eliza Griswold of The Daily Beast:

The last nine days in Libya are bringing the bloodiest of all recent revolutions to pass. Over the past 48 hours in downtown Tripoli and to the east, in the city of Benghazi, which has long opposed Muammar Gaddafi’s 41-year rule, Gaddafi has declared war on his own people, using fighter jets, helicopters, and possibly anti-aircraft fire, as well as African mercenaries to gun down Libyans who dare to oppose him. Due to a media blackout, very few images have emerged from the country.

Libyans have turned, instead, to Twitter, logging in voicemails of eyewitness accounts of the mounting brutality on Enough Gaddafi. Numbers of dead and wounded are impossible to verify. Human Rights Watch has confirmed at least 233 dead, most in the east. As in Egypt, Libyans have begun to record the fallen on 1000memories.com.

But Libya is not Egypt. “This isn’t a Facebook revolution. It’s more like Holler—people calling to each other from the other side of the street,” Khaled Mattawa, a Libyan poet and professor at the University of Michigan, says. Mattawa, like many other members of the exiled intelligencia, has set up a makeshift situation room in his Michigan basement, from which he supplies information to reporters and fellow Libyans.

When it comes to a functioning civil society, Libya is a near total vacuum. It is home to six million people, not Egypt’s 80 million, who have lived in almost total isolation for 41 years. Internet access is limited. So are opportunities for study abroad for anyone whose last name isn’t Gaddafi. Unlike Egypt, the county is filthy rich, but that money is meaningless for those outside of the regime.

In Libya, global forces have held a limited sway. Unlike Egypt, there are not millions of tourists arriving every year. There are only a small handful of international visitors, many of whom (including me) have received direct invitations from the Gaddafi regime to come watch their petro-dollar Potemkin village function as an “opening” state.



On Monday night, in The Leader’s signature bizarre fashion, he appeared on national television to quell rumors that he had fled to the safety of his good friend, Hugo Chavez. “I am still in Tripoli, and not in Venezuela,” he said in a brief, less than minute-long speech. He wearing a fur hat and carrying an open umbrella speaking through the open door of a white truck.

One of Muammar Gaddafi’s greatest fears is that of ending up “in a hole” like his former friend and colleague, Saddam Hussein, M. Jibriel, a senior Libyan economic advisor told me.

To safeguard his teetering grip on power, Gaddafi is willing to openly slaughter protestors in droves—a practice he has long carried out in secret.

Last night I read that some of the fighter pilots had flown to the island of Malta and asked for asylum rather than bomb the protestors. A dozen or so of Libya's foreign diplomatic corps have resigned; the US ambassador said that he could no longer represent "the current dictatorship".

Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Libya ... Wisconsin?

Update: Or maybe Indiana?