The Weekly Wrangle (live from Bracketville)

The Texas Progressive Alliance has its NCAA tournament brackets all filled out as it brings you this week's roundup.

The Republicans, perhaps unwittingly, offer the Democrats a deal on redistricting, which Off the Kuff thinks they ought to give serious consideration to taking.

Dan Patrick wants to pull a Jan Brewer and Dos Centavos tells you what is going on with SB1128 in what might fast become another Republican-created debate on just what kind of history is taught at Texas colleges and universities.

The stock market surge is breaking records, but strangely neither the Republicans nor the Democrats want to talk about it, much less take credit for it. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has noticed the anamoly.

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw has a bone to pick with the City of Houston. Check out Houston: It is illegal to feed homeless people, but country clubs get tax cuts.  

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants you to know that we're #1 in minimum wage jobs. Just what the crony capitalists pulling Republican strings ordered.  

WCNews at Eye on Williamson says all we ever hear from is the center and the right. It's long past time for pushback from the left.

Neil at Texas Liberal was in Los Angeles this past week. When he's on the road, Neil tries to make the time to visit a veterans' cemetery. This picture is from the main veterans' cemetery in Los Angeles.

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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Greg's Opinion revealed the secret, untapped Democratic voting bloc: apartment dwellers. And then the Daily Kos helpfully followed up on it later the same day. (Note the two GOP Congresscritters most endangered by this strategy: TX-24 (Kenny Marchant) and TX-07 (John Culberson).

Letters from Texas suggests we need to move beyond the usual debates on public education.

News Taco rounds up reaction to the death of former ambassador and mayor of El Paso Raymond Telles.

Keep Austin Wonky describes the choice Austin must make on urban rail routes.

Burnt Orange Report was there for the Battleground Texas launch in Austin.

Grits for Breakfast reports on a bill from Rep. Harold Dutton that would reduce the penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana.

The Texas State Teachers Association points out that public schools don't have waiting lists.

Nonsequiteuse documents AG Greg Abbott's hypocrisy about misleading medicine.

Texpatriate notes that there is in fact a candidate for governor that would be worse than Rick Perry.

Jason Stanford tells Dan Patrick that keeping public and private school athletics separate is actually not like the civil rights struggle at all.

Texas Leftist reminds us that the Family Research Council really hates the ladies.

Beyond Bones reminds us that now is an excellent time to be looking up at the sky.

And finally, The Bloggess reveals the untold truth about McDonald Land.

Stock market soars, but nobody's talking about it

It's been kind of an unintentional theme here for awhile, even in the Funnies: the old "rich get richer, poor get poorer" story. What's different this time is that neither political party wants to talk about it, much less take credit for it. Joe Concha at Mediaite nails it.

... Obama portrays himself as a savior of the middle class. His primary function, as successfully articulated in the campaign that earned him a second term, is to shelter working folks from Republicans, who, of course, only exist to protect their rich buddies currently waterskiing behind a yacht near you.

Mantra: Tax the top 1% even more, make them pay their fair share, level the playing field, and give everyone else a break.

Most Republicans portray themselves as saviors of the economy and capitalism. Their primary function is to prevent the President/Democrats from spending us into oblivion (some call it Greece) as evidenced by our $17 trillion debt…about $7 trillion of which was spent under the current administration.

Mantra: Stop the bleeding, balance the budget, allow more folks to keep their hard-earned money, and party like its 1986 again.

In a related story, Friday’s Dow closed down slightly at a still-eye-popping 14,514, ending its longest winning streak in nearly 17 years. This kind of rally, these record-highs, are usually great news for the party in power. But for a guy who enjoys spiking the football on any issue resembling success, Mr. Obama rarely broaches the subject.

Republicans are mum as well. After all, any good economic news (in their view) can’t be good for the party going into the midterm election season (which starts in seven minutes). That’s not saying [...] that the GOP is rooting for Americans to suffer…it just means you won’t really hear any conservatives in government or its brand of media bring it up. 

This past Friday, every single Republican (and six Democrats) in the House voted against raising the minimum wage. That vote doesn't seem to reflect the will of the 71% of Americans -- which includes half of all Republicans, mind you -- who support raising the federal minimum.

I know this is going to come as a shock, but your Congresscritter -- unless you live in a deep blue district -- is out of touch with you, his constituent. If lifting the minimum wage can't be done in an economy where the rich people are this rich, it probably can't be done with this Congress. But it also may not be -- even here, in Houston's latest boom -- the minimum wage that is all of the sputtering economic problem.

Let's not digress, though.

So why isn’t the President taking credit for the market’s awesome performance?

Here’s one theory: As mentioned earlier, the President says he’s a champion for Main Street, not Wall Street. If he touts the Dow busting through another ceiling, he’ll only be contradicting the Occupy Wall Street crowd he subtlety aligned with during the campaign (when he was drawing a contrast with a very rich Republican nominee). The way Mr. Obama’s surrogates in the media laid out the argument when courting votes, Wall Street is a place where corporate raiders like Gordon Gekko and Mitt Romney get rich on the backs of the middle class. To suddenly say a big bull market is a good thing for the country as a whole would somehow be seen as hypocritical, the improving 401k argument notwithstanding. 

Concha has some other ideas, and includes an explanation of quantitative easing that everyone ought to read.

Corporations doing better doesn’t necessarily mean its employees are also (consumer incomes are at a 20-year low, for example). Hence why President Obama didn’t mention the market’s performance even once during his most recent interview with George Stephanopoulos last week, a conversation dominated by the economy. Creating more millionaires is soooo Republican in the President’s eyes, but that’s exactly what’s going on, and that’s exactly why he ain’t talking.

And when the President wants to avoid a subject, so do (for the most part) his allies in the media. A booming stock market, particularly one breaking records that had existed for nearly two decades, should be a lead story on, say, MSNBC. But all we hear about is how horrible Paul Ryan’s budget is, or all about the legion of doom at CPAC, then we ever do about what’s unfolding on Wall Street.

I know it's a barrel of laughs to make fun of Sarah Palin -- and whatever revolting thing has most recently fallen out of the mouth of Ted Cruz, or Louie Gohmert or even some shithole who doesn't represent Texas -- but I am just worn out on that. Somebody needs to talk about what's really happening, after all.

As for conservative media, it’s the same deal. For Sean Hannity or The Five to lead their programs talking about a historic rally would appear too favorable to the President’s economic record amidst the gloom and doom normally hammered home on a daily basis. 

At least we haven't heard as much bleating about Obama being a socialist of late, have we?

In other news, Rick Perry is digging his little heels in on Medicaid expansion. If he had even 10% as much empathy as Rob Portman, we would still be left hoping that Griffin Perry would come out of the closet as poverty-stricken.

But that seems as possible as the governor himself finally declaring he is gay.

Sunday Funnies

Scott Prouty's "47%" video blackballed by Kossacks

So if you watched "The Ed Show" last night, you saw the bartender who recorded Mitt Romney's loose lips that sank his own ship. It was a Hall-of-Fame moment in populist political activism.

Prouty, a Midwest native, took his Canon camera to the fundraiser, thinking Romney might pose for photos with the event staff. Instead, he captured Romney speaking about "the 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent on government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe that government has the responsibility to care for them. Who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing."

The bartender said in a series of embargoed phone and in-person interviews with The Huffington Post that he decided to make the video public and posted clips online, hoping they would go viral.

There's more at this HuffPo link about Prouty, who is about as unlikely a progressive patriot as we are likely to get in the Social Media Golden Age. He could have made an enormous amount of money long ago (still might, hope he does), but he was motivated by things other than that after he left the Boca Raton fundraiser that mid-May, 2012 evening. The timeline of how the momentum was slow to build is here. But the most interesting thing to me is that the denizens of the alleged progressive community Daily Kos got Prouty blocked after just a few snips of his video were uploaded to the site.

"There was some pushback from people you wouldn't expect to push back," he told The Huffington Post. "To be banned from Daily Kos -- I had been a longtime reader. ... That was maybe the biggest surprise."

His profile is still accessible on Daily Kos, but individual items have been taken down.

The man said that other Daily Kos community members accused him of posting fake videos and didn't believe his protestations to the contrary. "They later apologized. Kos chastised the community," the man said.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas explained in an email to HuffPost that the filmmaker had "posted 6-second clips of audio, without offering any proof or further authentication. The Daily Kos community is hyper-sensitive to people trying to play them for fools, and his claims weren't borne out by the audio clips he was posting." (The clips can be found here.)

That is one big black eye for the Great Orange Satan. Some Kos diarists still seem to be insistent on killing the messenger in order to feel righteous about having stifled the message and thus protected the website's, ah, reputation.

I have a lot of appreciation for what DK does generally, but this episode highlights one of the worst things about online fora ('communities', they prefer): this incestuous tendency to refuse, even blackball, those who don't buy into the groupthink. It's why I have moved to reading them to see what's being disseminated and not what's being discussed -- same as with places like Democratic Underground, and even the Chron.com comments underneath the stories there. I sill like to play in those sandboxes, but spend a lot less time there than I used to. It had the end result of simply being a massive waste of time and effort.

It's not just that those opportunities for self-expression can result in a reader losing faith in the human race (they can); it's that they are no longer populated by people with whom you want to have a conversation, civil or otherwise. There's some wheat there, but you have to wade through too much chaff to get to it. If you have more than 1000 people in your Twitter or Facebook feed, you know what I'm talking about: too many rants, too many comedians, too much bragging about what's being seen, done, and eaten; too many prayers and prayer solicitations... you get the idea. And culling the narcissists and publicity hounds is not enough. You have to defuse the urge in yourself to follow the herd in "building your brand".

So now I just concentrate on my little shop here and if people want to read what I write, fine. I'm well off the beaten path anyway and certainly not everybody's cup of tea. The problem, as Prouty has learned, is that even when you know you've got something newsworthy, it's difficult to get noticed.

"It was harder than you imagine to get the story out there," (Prouty) said.

Maybe this is a good thing for the left: some self-vetting. We have always been less likely to advance things like "Friends of Hamas", for example.

Anyway, the moral of the story remains 'be careful about what you read on the Internet'. Even here. ;^)