Everything you need to know

-- The reason CNN can't talk about anything else but the missing Malaysian plane is because it's paying off for them.

The news that wreckage from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet may have been spotted in the southern Indian Ocean was enough to create a surge in news viewing late Wednesday night and, for the moment anyway, stave off potential flagging interest in the two-week-old story.

CNN continued to show enormous audience increases, though as of Wednesday it was no longer topping the perennial leader, Fox News, anywhere in prime time. Fox News had always won in terms of total viewers, but CNN had been doubling its usual audience among the group favored by news advertisers, viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, and topping Fox News in some isolated hours.

CNN still posted greatly increased numbers with that group Wednesday night, but Fox maintained a lead in every hour from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. (It won the ratings for the total day, as well.) CNN’s 10 p.m. hour, which had been doing especially well with the format of asking aviation experts questions texted in by viewers, faded somewhat, dropping behind Sean Hannity’s show on Fox by the biggest margin of the night in the 25-to-54 group, 291,000 viewers to 410,000 viewers.

Perhaps the audience lost some interest when the CNN anchor Don Lemon asked one expert if it was really preposterous, after all, to ask if Flight 370, which vanished on March 8, may have been swallowed by a black hole. The plane, which carried a total of 239 passengers and crew members, took off from Kuala Lumpur in the early hours of March 8, bound for Beijing, and disappeared from ground controllers’ screens 40 minutes later.

I'm weeping for the future.  How about you?

-- Ted Cruz runs a new scam on the conservo-rubes.

“It is time to Draft Ted Cruz for president,” says RedState diarist “razshafer,” and to that end, Raz has established RunTedRun.com, and an affiliated Draft Ted Cruz for President PAC. Raz is, Dave Weigel explains, Ted Cruz’s (now former) regional director Raz Shafer, and not just some person using Cruz’s name to convince conservatives to send along their lucrative email addresses.

Here is part of Shafer’s pitch:

I know there are other candidates who may run as conservatives, but I believe Ted Cruz has demonstrated that he’s the only consistent conservative who will do what it takes to roll back Barack Obama’s agenda. He’s the only one who has the passion, principles, and courage needed to deliver real results for Americans.

I’ve never spoken to Ted about him running for president and I honestly don’t know if he will do it, but I do know he won’t succeed unless freedom-loving Americans like you and me begin organizing this effort now.

Ted Cruz is the people’s candidate and we need to be the ones driving the effort to elect him.
So if you’re ready to be proud of your vote again and you agree that Ted Cruz should run for president, please do three things:

1. Go to RunTedRun.com and sign the official Draft Ted Cruz for President petition.
2. Urge your friends and family to join you.
3. Donate whatever you can to help us spread the word and build support.

My advice, even if you do support Ted Cruz and think he should run for president, is don’t do any of this. It is a waste of your time and you will be exploited. Your name and contact information will be sold. You will have no effect whatsoever on Cruz’s decision to run for president or not. Your monetary donation will have no effect whatsoever on Ted Cruz’s potential 2016 electoral chances.

They'll do it anyway.  Conservatives are sheep for the fleecing.  It would be so cool if the GOP nominated Ted in 2016, wouldn't it?

-- America needs welders.  Houston especially needs technical labor.

-- Obama warns Democrats again that midterm elections are historically bad.

"But in midterms we get clobbered -- either because we don’t think it’s important or we’ve become so discouraged about what’s happening in Washington that we think it’s not worth our while," he said, according to the transcript.

Low Democratic turnout during non-presidential elections is one reason the deck is stacked against the party going into Nov. 4. Obama has repeatedly urged Democrats to focus on state-level races this year even though they're less "sexy" than national contests, and has reportedly offered to stay out of races where his appearance with a vulnerable candidate could do damage.

I talked to some people exactly like this in calling my precinct earlier this month.  In particular, a middle-aged white woman with a Democratic voting history who said she was "taking a pass" this year.  Quote unquote.

No, I didn't ask her why.  You can't fix stupid, and there are plenty more people to help.  "Next," as God might say (if there was a God).

Why did the 500-lb. chicken cross the road?

A. It could do whatever it wanted, because it was also eleven feet long and had five inch claws on its hands.  And please don't disturb it with your silly questions.

-- John Coby found Greg Abbott exposing himself on television.  Ew.

-- Boehner rejects 'bipartisan breakthrough' on jobless aid:

After months of effort, a group of senators from both parties announced last week they’d reached a deal on extending unemployment benefits. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), one of the lead negotiators, called it a “bipartisan breakthrough.”

And by most measures, it was. The agreement would extend jobless aid to nearly 2 million Americans, without increasing the deficit. It’s a popular, election-year measure, backed by a Senate supermajority, and the compromise is poised to pass the chamber next week.

That House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced yesterday, however, that the Senate shouldn’t bother – House Republicans won’t even consider the “bipartisan breakthrough.”

“We have always said that we’re willing to look at extending emergency unemployment benefits again, if Washington Democrats can come up with a plan that is fiscally-responsible, and gets to the root of the problem by helping to create more private-sector jobs. There is no evidence that the bill being rammed through the Senate by Leader Reid meets that test,” Boehner said in a statement Wednesday.

That the Republican leader doesn’t want to extend unemployment benefits is predictable. But what mattered yesterday was the weakness of his excuse.

I got nothing.

-- This is going to be a little rough on you Christians out there.



Sometimes the truth is brutal.  And harsh.

-- Twenty-five years ago, the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound off the coast of Alaska. Even though I worked in their Beaumont refinery in the summer of 1980 before my final senior semester, I never bought any of their gas after that environmental apocalypse.  The permanent loss of my business hasn't slowed 'em down too much, though.

-- And speaking of protests...

A federal judge has ordered the FBI to explain why it withheld some information requested by a graduate student for his research on a plot to assassinate Occupy Houston protest leaders.

Ryan Noah Shapiro, a doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., filed a lawsuit April 29, 2013, against the U.S. Department of Justice in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer issued her order, with an accompanying memo, on March 12.

The FBI, as part of the Department of Justice, controls the records Shapiro wanted for his study of "conflicts at the nexus of American national security, law enforcement and political dissent," the plaintiff's complaint stated.

Houston was among hundreds of U.S. cities where protesters occupied outdoor spaces as part of the Occupy Movement that started in New York's Zucotti Park on Sept. 17, 2011.

"The movement has sought to expose how the wealthiest 1 percent of society promulgates an unfair global economy that harms people and destroys communities worldwide," the complaint stated.

Kind of a big deal, if we can ever learn the truth about that.  Oh, and don't miss reading some of the comments to discover what our local conservatives really think about Occupy.  It's far too late for them to keep it classy; that oil tanker has sailed.

"All bets are off"

Harvey Kronberg, in his weekly Austin teevee appearance.

“We are seeing something none of us has anticipated, and that is the Abbott campaign is on the defensive. First, they had the Ted Nugent experiment... which was supposed to be about the Second Amendment and ended up being about child predators. The second event was the Lily Ledbetter Act, which is about equal pay. They want to talk about process. But the message that is breaking through now anyway is about equal pay for women. If you have a series of additional issues like that that seem to put the Republicans on the wrong side of women, then all bets are off as to how this election will actually turn out.”

Republican women pinch-hitting for Abbott that are saying women are too busy to be concerned about their pay inequality -- or need to be better negotiators -- is just digging his hole deeper.

Abbott has always been a lousy lawyer and an even worse human being, but now it appears his vaunted political instincts are failing him.  The ladies doing the talking for him this week must have been trained by Todd Akin, or maybe Ralph Reed.  I am amazed that Abbott is making these kinds of mistakes because he's never, ever made them in his political career before.  Like Noah and Charles, I didn't believe that Emerson College poll had enough of a track record to be legitimate, but if another one that does reports a similar tightening of the race, there will be a massive surge in momentum to Davis.  Her press shop is now firing on all twelve cylinders, and that -- as much as Abbott's stumbling (is that insensitive to a man in a wheelchair?) -- has moved her campaign forward in the past week.

Abbott's failings in policy and tactics have been clear to those of us who follow these things closely for some time, and now they're getting more attention, such that the low-interest, low-data, low-participation voters might begin to take notice.  None of this addresses the Democrats' historical turnout problem, but Battleground Texas keeps grinding away on that also.

Now if Senate and Congressional Democrats will just stop running away from Obamacare, November prospects might really brighten up.  Here's their clue on how to turn a negative into a positive, courtesy Dave Weigel.  Nancy Pelosi, in Houston yesterday, reiterated the message: run on Obamacare, and run hard on expanding it (and Medicaid).

Texas Democrats report to their Senate district conventions this weekend, and with stinky options like David Alameel and Kinky Friedman as least worst choices looming in the May runoff, Wendy Davis and Leticia Van de Putte are going to have to do the heavy lifting for the fall slate.  It's a good thing they both have years of experience in doing dirty jobs left to them by the men.