Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Random Texas news

Kelso does a typical Kelso-take on the hooker the Dems in Dallas nominated:

Former male prostitute has a leg up on the other candidates

Malin can joke about this. He points out that his campaign color is burnt orange. He says he's had phone calls from people asking, " 'Are you changing your campaign slogan to Hook 'em, Tom?' and no, we're not."

Instead of pooh-poohing his past as a male hooker, he should mention it prominently in a TV ad campaign.

How's this for a slogan: Tom Malin: He's Done It Before, and He Can Do It Again.

At the Capitol, Malin would be doing the same work he used to do. It's just that he'd be doing it to a larger audience, and in a suit.

Really. How many other candidates can say they've prostituted themselves, so therefore they understand how the Legislature really operates?


Embezzler's thefts from Doggett, others escalated over years
Victims, friends can't understand why Kristi Willis stole from them.
By Chuck LindellAMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFFTuesday, February 21, 2006

Like most embezzlers, Kristi Willis started small and grew increasingly bold.

She first dipped into U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett's campaign treasury in January 1999, the same month she volunteered to start keeping the books.

[...]

For many, Willis' choice of victims was as puzzling as the thefts themselves.

A committed Democrat, Willis drained money from Brown while he was seeking to claim a Republican-held seat in the Texas House. Taking the $8,500 also kept the Capital Area Democratic Women from making campaign contributions in next month's primary or last week's House District 48 runoff, won by Democrat Donna Howard.

[...]

"I think Austin is a pretty forgiving and caring place, and she really has been a great contributor to this community," Edward said. "There is a sense that there was something that was really wrong, a real psychological problem."


The sympathy for Kristi Willis is really amazing, I mean, she stole a lot of fucking money. Actually it's not amazing. She's white and upper-middle class. The same people quoted in this story who feel bad for her selling her house and hoping she gets treatment for her problem rather than jail time probably flip through COPS on Saturday night and feel no such sympathy for the crack whore who has a real "problem" getting busted by the cops and facing hard time.

If she'd broken into a bunch of West Austin homes and stolen $167K worth of loot, there'd be no one not calling for her to be locked up.

Maybe she does have a problem. Maybe restitution and counseling and community justice is a better way for society to deal with theft than jail time. But until white liberals in Austin start hollering for a full-scale revolution in criminal justice and the way Texas treats drug criminals, prostitutes, and non-violent thieves, I don't want to hear shit about Kristi.

Finally, Bob Gammage smacks Chris Bell for not being a good Dem. Seems some pretty serious charges.

Did Bell really vote wrong on ANWR, bankruptcy and taxes? Anyone want to defend those votes?

From the Gammage campaign:

Chris Bell is running in the Democratic Primary for Governor, but he cannot seem to figure out what he really is. Chris Bell flips-flops back and forth:

[...]

BELL VOTED TO ALLOW DRILLING IN THE ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE. League of Conservation Voters, National Environmental Scoreboard, 2003, p.28 and following. Congressional Record, 4/11/2003, Roll Call 145

BELL ENDORSED THE BUSH TAX CUTS THAT GAVE HUGE TAX BREAKS TO THE WEALTHIEST 1% OF AMERICANS—AND CAUSED THE BIGGEST BUDGET DEFICIT IN OUR HISTORY. Houston Chronicle 9/13/2002

BELL VOTED FOR THE BUSH-CHENEY ENERGY PLAN…The Sierra Club called it “one of the worst disasters for the environment and public health in recent years.”
League of Conservation Voters Scorecard, 2003, p 28 and following


BELL VOTED AGAINST FELLOW DEMOCRATS AND JOINED REPUBLICANS
TO PASS AN INFAMOUS “BANKRUPTCY BILL” WRITTEN BY BANKS AND CREDIT CARD COMPANIES.
Congressional Record, March 19, 2003; Roll Call Votes 72 and 74


BELL VOTED TO WEAKEN CLEAN WATER LAWS…by granting special exemptions to oil and gas companies.

League of Conservation Voters Scorecard, 2003, p 28 and following


Bell campaigned against a city initiative to raise the minimum wage in Houston.
Houston Chronicle 2/14/97; 2/16/97

MD pols almost as wacky as TX

Schaefer's Antics: Maybe He Should Charge Admission

By Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts
Sunday, February 19, 2006; Page D03

William Donald Schaefer -- bully or ham?

That was the question last week after the Maryland comptroller leered at a young state aide in front of a crowded room, asking her to "walk again" so he could gaze at her backside. It was typical of the former governor and Baltimore mayor's three-decade track record of egomaniacal spectacle -- dressing like Elvis at state banquets, throwing kicking-and-fist-pounding tantrums on the floor of City Hall, dropping trousers in front of lawmakers.

· July 1981: To make up for his failure to open the new Baltimore aquarium on time, the mayor jumps into the seal pool in an old-fashioned bathing suit, and splashes about with a "mermaid" model.

[...]

· March 1991: Angered by critical letters to the editor, Schaefer has state troopers drive him unannounced to the writer's home and harangues him for an hour.

[...]

· March 1993: At a news conference calling for a ban on some firearms, Schaefer points a 9mm pistol (unloaded, it turned out) at an AP reporter. "Some of you have never had it in your face. . . . I don't know what would happen to your pants, but I can imagine."

· August 2001: Midway through his first term as state comptroller, Schaefer calls his gubernatorial successor, Parris Glendening, a "chicken" at a public hearing, makes "cluck-cluck-cluck" noises, flaps his arms.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

We love you Donna Howard!

Howard wins House race
Democrats pick up a seat in GOP-controlled House.
By Jason Embry

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Democrat Donna Howard defeated Republican Ben Bentzin handily Tuesday to win the District 48 seat in the Texas House for the rest of the year.

Howard picked up 58 percent of the vote to Bentzin's 42 percent, according to unofficial returns.


Today is a glorious day!

Monday, February 13, 2006

Cheney, Republican "accountability," and a new blog

Kudos to local news for playing it hilariously straight in reporting, simply, "Cheney Shoots Man."

Best headlines I've seen:

Dick Cheney’s “Bird Flew” Problem
From Dan Quayle to Damn Quail!

Cheney steps up war on lawyers
Dick Cheney's Hunting Horror

The BBC was great, reporting, US Vice-President shoots friend
And they published a side by side photo of Whittington and a quail:















Harry Whittington (left). A quail (right)

Hehe, those Brits!


Nice quip, Brady:

"Now I understand why Dick Cheney keeps asking me to go hunting with him," Jim Brady said in a statement. "I had a friend once who accidentally shot pellets into his dog -- and I thought he was an idiot."

"I've thought Cheney was scary for a long time," Sarah Brady said. "Now I know I was right to be nervous."


So, let's bring on the obvious metaphors.

Is this scenario more reminiscent of Bush fragging McCain in S.C.? Or does Whittington represent the Iraqi civilians accidentally shot when the Bush Admin goes off on an unnecessary shooting war? Maybe Whittington was a stand in for Scooter?

Whatever, I just want to see Cheney go down for manslaughter. I want the sentence stacked with the one for violating national security law about disclosure of classified information.

Next topic: Even the Rs know Bush fucked up in NO:

Republicans' Report on Katrina Assails Response

WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 — House Republicans plan to issue a blistering report on Wednesday that says the Bush administration delayed the evacuation of thousands of New Orleans residents by failing to act quickly on early reports that the levees had broken during Hurricane Katrina.

A draft of the report, to be issued by an 11-member, all-Republican committee, says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached, even though the president and other top administration officials earlier said that they had learned of the breach the next day.

[...]

A White House spokesman said that President Bush was now focused on the future, not the past. A Department of Homeland Security spokesman said that Michael D. Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was partly to blame for failing to make timely reports to his superiors.


What a telling statement: A White House spokesman said that President Bush was now focused on the future, not the past.

The whole idea of being held responsible for your actions is just non-existent with these people. Imagine if a criminal tried this at the end of trial. "Yes, I know the evidence shows I broke into that house and pawned their TV, but we need to focus 'on the future, not the past.' Let's just forget about it and talk about what we all can do to make sure I don't do that again. Bygones, eh?"

Finally, a friend in Minnesota has a new blog for the DFL party: Check it out.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Savage Q and A

Nice interview with Dan Savage in Onion AV Club.

Choice excerpt:

AVC: You use your column to advocate freedom, but that often seems to scare people. Historically, it seems like there's a real terror that other people might somehow get the freedom to do the things we ourselves don't want to do. Why do you think that is?

DS: Because Canada got the French and Australia got the convicts and we got the fuckin' batshit crazy Christians. And that matters. We're all lied to in high school—"The Pilgrims came here seeking religious freedom." No they didn't. They were the Puritans kicked out of England. They went to Holland, Holland was like "Fuck you people," and they kicked them out too, so they came here. They came here seeking the ability to persecute everybody else—and each other—for their religious beliefs. And we are living with the descendants of those nutjobs, and we have to fight them.

We also have to concede some things to them. There's a big mistake the left has made with talking to religious people, which is attempting to talk them out of their interpretations of the Bible, attempting to have theological debate with them. When I'm on right-wing whackjob radio, when people call up to inform me that I'm going to hell, I concede the point. [Laughs.] "I'm going to hell. Yes. Can you leave me alone now? Isn't that enough? Isn't punishment for all eternity enough? Do you have to screw with me here on Earth, too? Can't you just sit back content that I will roast on a spit in hell right next to Ronald Reagan, adulterer?" And often if you concede their theology and let them have their crackpot religious beliefs, you can make a little progress. The left has made a mistake trying to argue with religious people about their religious beliefs. They have a legitimate beef when it comes to thought police from the left getting up in their business and telling them how they should interpret Leviticus. Well, who gives a fuck how you interpret your fuckin' Grimm fairy tale?

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Go f*ck yourself, boss!

News roundup:

Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information

(this should lead the evening news)

Ciro raises $70K online from bloggers after Cuellar-Bush photo makes the rounds

(Go Ciro, though Amy Walters has it right when she writes: "I just don’t think Ciro is doing everything to make this as competitive as it could be.")

Hastert, Frist said to rig bill for drug firms

(Somebody's press release worked... nice.)

Monday, February 06, 2006

But if you're innocent...



(click to enlarge)

Friday, February 03, 2006

Go Ciro

The bloggers have picked up the Ciro Rodriguez cause.

See Daily Kos:

TX-28: Ciro Rodriguez
by kos
Fri Feb 03, 2006 at 10:26:21 AM PDT

We've been talking a lot about that Republican in sheep's clothing Henry Cuellar, and we'll do so again moving forward.

But for now, let's talk about Ciro Rodriguez.

[...]

Ciro is a good guy, a good Democrat. In the 107th Congress, Ciro
was ranked 122 outof 213 in the party's left-right scale, right in the middle. He scored more liberal than such party stalwarths as Patrick Kennedy and Joe Hoeffel, and just behind Zoe Lofgren, John Dingell, and Corrine Brown.

This is a guy who showed Henry Cuellar the ropes, introduced him to donors, to other Democratic congresspersons including the entire Hispanic caucus, mentored him, until DeLay redistricted them into the same district and Cuellar decided his personal ambitions were more important than the help and friendship Rodriguez provided.

It's been about 23 hours since I started posting on this race, and in that time the netroots, Atrios, and Firedoglage ActBlue pages have collectively raised nearly $30K. The Cuellar people
dismissed our efforts yesterday as a "one-day story". Too bad for them it won't be.

According to SAEN:

A well-traveled photograph of U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar being embraced by President Bush prior to Tuesday's State of the Union address triggered a rush of Internet donations to one of Cuellar's Democratic primary rivals Thursday.

Within hours of a call to arms being posted on two liberal-leaning political blogs, the Daily Kos and Eschaton, former congressman Ciro Rodriguez's campaign received 263 cyber contributions totaling nearly $12,000, according to ActBlue, a Web-based clearinghouse for Democratic candidates nationwide.


“This may be billed as a Democratic primary, but in this solidly Democratic Latino-majority district, Republicans needed a Republican in sheep's clothing like Cuellar to have a chance of winning,” the Daily Kos blog post read.


Cuellar sucks. Give to Ciro if you can.

http://www.actblue.com/list/CiroforCongress

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Perhaps the most offensive thing in Bush's SOTU...

... was his appropriation of MLK's legacy to advance his own war-mongering. I'm willing to overlook the paean to Coretta Scott King at the beginning. Any president would have had to begin that way.

But take a look at the end of the speech here:

Fellow citizens, we have been called to leadership in a period of consequence. We have entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite. We see great changes in science and commerce that will influence all our lives. And sometimes it can seem that history is turning in a wide arc, toward an unknown shore.

Yet the destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing. Lincoln could have accepted peace at the cost of disunity and continued slavery. Martin Luther King could have stopped at Birmingham or at Selma and achieved only half a victory over segregation. The United States could have accepted the permanent division of Europe and been complicit in the oppression of others. Today, having come far in our own historical journey, we must decide: Will we turn back, or finish well?

Before history is written down in books, it is written in courage. Like Americans before us, we will show that courage, and we will finish well. We will lead freedom's advance. We will compete and excel in the global economy. We will renew the defining moral commitments of this land. And so we move forward, optimistic about our country, faithful to its cause, and confident of the victories to come.


So he essentially is saying that the legacy of MLK -- a man committed to nonviolence who spent the last years of his life speaking out against the Vietnam war -- is somehow "honored" by rejecting calls for withdrawal from our present-day Vietnam, Iraq.

The line about "And sometimes it can seem that history is turning in a wide arc, toward an unknown shore" even echoes King's line about "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.''

So Bush wants to continue fighting this war in Iraq. Though you can never say for certain where he would have stood on this issue, consider what King said:

"Testimony of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr." Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1966.


It is a question of the allocation of money, which means the establishing of priorities.

Instead of joyfully committing ourselves to the war on poverty, a grudging parsimonious allocation of resources is measured out as if we feared to overkill. In contrast, the exploration of space engages not only our enthusiasm but our patriotism. Developing it as a global race, we have intensified its inherent drama and brought its adventure into every living room, nursery, shop and office. No such fervor nor exhilaration attends the war on poverty. There is impatience with its problems, indifference toward its progress, and pronounced hostility toward its errors. Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, and from which non presently can benefit, while the densely populated slums are allocated miniscule appropriations. With the continuation of these strange values in a few years we can be assured that we will set a man on the moon and with an adequate telescope he will be able to see the slum on earth with their intensified congestion, decay, and turbulence. On what scale of values is this a program of progress?

THE WASTE OF WAR


In still another area the expenditure of resources knows no restraints -- here, our abundance is fully recognized and enthusiastically squandered. This is the waste of war. While the antipoverty program is cautiously initiated, zealously supervised, and evaluated for immediate results, billions are liberally expended for ill-considered warfare. The recently revealed misestimate of the war budget amounts to $10 billion for a single year. The error alone is more than five times the amount committed to antipoverty programs.

The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures, we will lose in our decaying cities. The bombs in Vietnam explode at home -- they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.



Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther King 4 April 1967
Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City


Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It wassending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

[...]

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

[...]

I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries. They must see Americans as strange liberators.

[...]

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

[...]

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Does anyone really think he would support Bush's illegal war of choice against Iraq? Does anyone think that the decision of King to struggle on for civil rights after Selma is equatable to Bush's refusal to admit we've already lost in Iraq and waste another few 100 (1,000?) American lives there?

Add to the outrage the fact that this president is slowly but certainly eroding the very civil rights King struggled for. Specifically, Bush's political appointees at DOJ consistently overruled staff attorneys on whether states like GA and TX have been violating the voting rights of minorities.

Politics Alleged In Voting Cases
Justice Officials Are Accused of Influence

By Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 23, 2006; Page A01

The Justice Department's voting section, a small and usually obscure unit that enforces the Voting Rights Act and other federal election laws, has been thrust into the center of a growing debate over recent departures and controversial decisions in the Civil Rights Division as a whole.

Many current and former lawyers in the section charge that senior officials have exerted undue political influence in many of the sensitive voting-rights cases the unit handles. Most of the department's major voting-related actions over the past five years have been beneficial to the GOP, they say, including two in Georgia, one in Mississippi and a Texas redistricting plan orchestrated by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) in 2003.


And, finally consider, this new (though unsurprising) report:

Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases
By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 30, 2006; Page A05

Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes -- subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.

That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.

[...]

The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.

"Obviously, such research does not speak at all to the question of the prejudice level of the president," said Banaji, "but it does show that George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor greater anti-black prejudice."

[...]

"If anyone in Washington is skeptical about these findings, they are in denial," he said. "We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting. Republicans are supported by whites with prejudice against blacks. If people say, 'This takes me aback,' they are ignoring a huge volume of research."