The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance salutes the final voyage of the shuttle Endeavour, its commander Mark Kelly, and his wife, Cong. Gabrielle Giffords as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff took a look at the proposed new map for the state Senate and the effect it could have on incumbent senators.

The guy in charge of the Letters From Texas blog, which isn't the Capitol Annex blog, published a guest post entitled "Caught in the Zipper," written by the guy in charge of the Capitol Annex blog, which isn't the Letters From Texas blog. Confused yet? Our work here is done.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson has the latest installment of My Congressman is an idiot - John Carter praises Socialism.

refinish69 at Doing My Part for The Left is getting fed up with The Texas Lege...The Gift That Keeps On Giving. The only cure for the herpes that is the Texas Legislature is to vote the jerks out of office.

Why Osama's porn stash matters, at least according to PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Libby Shaw over at TexasKaos helps us understand how and why the GOP stands by its men over at Big Oil.

Stace at DosCentavos reports on a press conference put on by a coalition of 16 pro-migrant organization who slammed the Texas Legislature's HB12 -- the bill to ban nonexistent sanctuary cities. It's worse than Arizona, believe it or not.

Neil at Texas Liberal posted about a furniture designer in the Netherlands who asked if he could use a picture posted at Texas Liberal to showcase a table he was designing. You never know when the efforts you make in life will be of benefit to someone else.

This week, Nat-Wu at Three Wise Men takes a look at the surprising results of the elections in Irving.

"In order to save the refineries, we must flood the coonasses."

It's not like it hasn't happened before. It's not like they don't warn them every year that it could happen.

In a historic action designed to minimize the risk of catastrophic flooding in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers has begun opening the Morganza Floodway to divert water from the rain-swollen Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya basin.

The second-ever opening of the nearly 60-year-old structure 186 miles upriver of New Orleans began (yesterday) at 3 p.m. sharp, when a crane lifted a gate covering one of the spillway structure’s 125 bays, releasing a gusher of about 10,000 cubic feet of water per second into the floodway. A live video feed of the procedure is being streamed online by the corps.

More of the 28-foot-wide bays will be opened in the coming days to gradually increase the flow rate to about 125,000 cubic feet per second, corps officials said.

About 25,000 people and 11,000 structures are in harm’s way, as up to 25 feet of flooding is expected in a 3,000 square-mile area of Cajun country stretching from Melville to Morgan City.

The water is expected to pass below Interstate 10 in a day and reach Morgan City in three days, said Col. Ed Fleming, commander of the corps' New Orleans district.

The Morganza control structure was completed in 1954 as part of the corps’ sweeping flood-protection upgrades to prevent a repeat of the Great Flood of 1927.

The only other time the spillway opened was in 1973 to relieve pressure on the Old River Control Structure, a critical barrier 35 miles upriver that prevents the Mississippi from its natural tendency to shift course to the Atchafalaya Basin, a steeper shortcut to the Gulf of Mexico.

Such a shift would have a catastrophic economic impact on the ports in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

The needs of the many -- in this case, everybody who's already bitching about $4 gasoline -- outweigh the needs of the few -- in this case, the people who have mostly lived off the land in that swamp since they relocated there 250 years ago from Nova Scotia.

It's not like we were all buying American-farmed catfish in favor of the much-less expensive, more bacteria- and chemical-laden Vietnamese swai anyway.

Huck won't jump in

He likes his paycheck from Fox, the new big house he's building, and the opportunity to be kingmaker instead of king.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Saturday he won't seek the Republican presidential nomination, choosing to stick with a lucrative career as a television and radio personality over a race that would be both costly and caustic. ...

Had he chosen to run, Huckabee would have been forced to give up the lucrative media career he's enjoyed since his unsuccessful presidential bid four years ago. In addition to his TV show, Huckabee hosts a nationally syndicated radio program, gives paid speeches around the country and has even launched a series of animated videos for children on American history.

The talk show is the centerpiece of Huckabee's enterprises, which have made the one-time Baptist preacher from Hope, Ark., and 10-year governor a wealthy man with a $2.2 million beachfront home under construction in Florida. Huckabee, 55, and his wife moved their residency and voter registration to the state last year.

And don't forget the chicken fried steaks, mashed potatoes and gravy, and mmmmm, those triple-scoop banana splits.

“It’s been hard the last several months (keeping the weight from piling back on) because of the crazy schedule and I have had some issues with (my feet),” Huckabee said. “It’s a constant struggle to find decent things to eat on the road and not get terribly messed up with the same old habits.”

His feet. Or maybe his knee. It's important to note that none of these issues about portliness seem to be affecting Chris Christie's dithering. But let's focus on the thin people -- that doesn't necessarily exclude Newt -- going forward.

Huckabee’s decision not to run almost certainly guarantees a more wide-open contest as his vote share, which, in most polling was between 25 and 30 percent, is now up for grabs.

A Huckabee-less field also makes the Iowa caucuses far more competitive as the Arkansas Republican would have been a clear favorite in the state following his surprise victory there in 2008. That’s good news for people like Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn), former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — all of whom are expected to make a major push in the Hawkeye State.

The GOP race is now also without a well known social conservative candidate — a void that will be even more pronounced if former Alaska governor Sarah Palin decides against the race. (Palin has set no timetable to make a decision.)

With social conservative voters playing prominent roles in the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary — two of the first four nominating contests — the candidates who do run will position themselves to court this influential vote.

Since Huckabee was my pick for the nomination, I admit I'm crestfallen. Like so many others, picking from the remainder bin leaves me feeling a little empty.

But I do think Rick "Frothy Mixture" Santorum stands to surge.

Sunday Funnies

Osama bin strokin

Seriously though, you know why the pornos matter?

You're an evil SOB, murdering in the name of your religion? That's acceptable even if most people don't like it. That's the old "he's firm in his commitment" respect. "He's got strong principles and he sticks to 'em."

Just be certain you're actually sticking to your principles. You can't be a dishonest evil SOB.

If you're such a hypocrite that you cannot hold yourself to your own lofty moral standards, then that outrages people in a way nothing else does. And that's before we even get to the topic of pornography and Islam.

For that, simply contrast:

-- Can't see a woman's hair, or face, or ankles.
-- Can, however, see her get banged in a porno.

Like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker (and more recently John Ensign and Newt Gingrich and especially John Edwards), there's some things your followers just will NOT tolerate.

This news is much more destructive to the (relative) moral certitude of al-Qaeda's jihad against the West than the "martyring" of their leader, and is the strongest psy-ops blow yet struck by the United States against them.

Blogger hiccups

As Grits has noted ...

Google's Blogger service has been offline or unreliable for much of the day, with Blogger-hosted blogs changed to read-only mode, and posts and comments made after 7:37 a.m. PDT on May 11, 2011, removed.

In a post on the Blogger help forum, the product team said that it had rolled back a scheduled maintenance release from last night and that its "engineers are working hard to return Blogger to normal and restore your posts and comments."

Google's reply for a request for comment was, "The team is working on this." The company has posted some short updates to the Blogger Twitter account and Status blog, but hasn't yet explained what's happening, how widespread it is, or what will happen to users' content.

After Marc Zuckerberg's bullshit spats with Google of late, could the Facebook boy wonder be blamed? I hope so. More from ZDNet here, if you care, with implications to the cloud computing strategy Google is hawking. Since I only lost one post -- it was about this poll -- this outage didn't affect me much at all. Still, many of my blog bretheren and sisteren have long ago migrated to Wordpress for a reason.

Update: The missing post has returned.

Take a poll

Like others, I have been asked to bring your attention to this poll being conducted by UT research scholar Tom Johnson, who needs to get his data a little more 'fair and balanced' (I'm guessing some of those right-wing nuts posted it at Free Republic or Townhall or some such). So go and share your opinion, and then forward it to your sphere of influence. It's not quick; it may take you 15 minutes or longer to read the questions carefully and respond with your POV in the most accurate way, but your input is highly valued. They will assure confidentiality by removing your IP address after completing the survey. Below, Johnson's excerpted appeal:

(T)he vast majority of our survey respondents have been conservatives. We are embarrassed we can't convince more liberals to fill out our survey. Could you provide us a link to Brains and Eggs to help provide a liberal balance? We also include questions about how people found out about Osama Bin Laden’s death, what sources they used to get further information and how they shared information about his death.

The survey is online at http://survey.utk.edu/mrIWeb/mrIWeb.dll?I.Project=SOURCES2011 for your perusal.

Our survey has been approved by the Internal Review Board at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. As part of the permission process it is guaranteed that all submissions are anonymous and confidential. Any identifying information (i.e. IP address) will be deleted by the researchers upon receipt.

We all know that my regular right-tilted readers Matt Bramanti and Greg Aydt are going to see this and rush over to take the poll; why don't you do the same?