Ciro!

It’s good to see Ciro out with a strong ad:

Fact-checking Palin

For those who suffered through the mocking, pit-bull-with-lipstick speech from Sarah Palin last night, you can find excellent fact checks here and here.
I didn’t watch the speech myself. But I was surprised to learn that they skipped the video introduction for Palin which is pretty much a standard thing at conventions nowadays. They blamed it on Rudy Giuliani’s speech running too long, but I think they just didn’t have time to throw together any kind of decent video.

Palin wields the veto pen

Sarah Palin, having served as governor less than two years, probably didn’t have many opportunities to use her veto pen. But when she did, ironically, she went after funding for a group that provides shelter and support for unwed teenage mothers. How ironic. And how typical of a radical rightwing culture warrior.
Keep in mind, too, that this came at a time when Alaska was rolling in dough because of the huge increase in oil prices and was running a large surplus.

Michelle Cottle from TNR spells it out here:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live.

After the legislature passed a spending bill in April, Palin went through the measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation -- "SP" -- Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million. Covenant House is a mix of programs and shelters for troubled youths, including Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.

According to Passage House's web site, its purpose is to provide "young mothers a place to live with their babies for up to eighteen months while they gain the necessary skills and resources to change their lives" and help teen moms "become productive, successful, independent adults who create and provide a stable environment for themselves and their families."

I'm sorry, but a politician who opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest and who opposes comprehensive sex education should be at the forefront of championing support systems that make it easier for young mothers to keep their babies. 

I would have assumed Palin herself felt this way. After all, she is a proud member of Feminists for Life, an anti-abortion nonprofit whose stated aim is to give women a real choice--that is, to make certain that women faced with unplanned pregnancies have access to the information and support systems that will enable/encourage them not to have an abortion. Surely a program aimed at assisting the most desperate of young mothers--those whose boyfriends aren't amenable to a shotgun wedding or who don't have a strong family support system--would be something a pro-life feminist such as Palin would work to expand not destroy. 

Pro-life conservatives have for years faced accusations by abortion-rights activists that they only give a damn about a woman and her baby until the moment that baby is born. After that: Best of luck! Don't come looking to us for any help! Palin's rough handling of Passage House does nothing to combat that unfortunate image.

Remember that this is one of the few examples we have of Palin exercising her “executive” powers that, according to Republicans, are supposed to make her MORE qualified to be president than Barack Obama.
Perhaps in the next few weeks she will explain her reasoning for this veto. But right now she is not making herself available to the media for interviews.

Couldn’t have said it better myself...

From the NYTimes:

Candidate McCain’s Big Decision

More often than not, the role of a vice president is a minor one, unless some tragedy occurs. But a presidential nominee’s choice of a running mate is vitally important. It is his first executive decision and offers an important insight into how that nominee would lead the nation.

If John McCain wants voters to conclude, as he argues, that he has more independence and experience and better judgment than Barack Obama, he made a bad start by choosing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

Mr. McCain’s supporters are valiantly trying to argue that the selection was a bold stroke that shows their candidate is a risk-taking maverick who — we can believe — will change Washington. (Mr. Obama’s call for change — now “the change we need” — has become all the rage in St. Paul.)

To us, it says the opposite. Mr. McCain’s snap choice of Ms. Palin reflects his impulsive streak: a wild play that he made after conservative activists warned him that he would face an all-out revolt in the party if he chose who he really wanted — Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.

Why Mr. McCain would want to pander to right-wing activists — who helped George W. Bush kill off his candidacy in the 2000 primaries in a particularly ugly way — is baffling. Frankly, they have no place to go. Mr. McCain would have a lot more success demonstrating his independence, and his courage, if he stood up to them the way he did in 2000.

As far as we can tell, Mr. McCain and his aides did almost no due diligence before choosing Ms. Palin, raising serious questions about his management skills. The fact that Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant is irrelevant to her candidacy. There are, however, very serious questions about her political past and her ideology.

If Mr. McCain wanted to break with his party’s past and choose the Republicans’ first female vice presidential candidate, there are a number of politicians out there with far greater experience and stature than Ms. Palin, who has been in Alaska’s Statehouse for less than two years.

Before she was elected governor, she was mayor of a tiny Anchorage suburb, where her greatest accomplishment was raising the sales tax to build a hockey rink. According to Time magazine, she also sought to have books banned from the local library and threatened to fire the librarian.

For Mr. McCain to go on claiming that Mr. Obama has too little experience to be president after almost four years in the United States Senate is laughable now that he has announced that someone with no national or foreign policy experience is qualified to replace him, if necessary.

Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who has been one of Mr. McCain’s most loyal friends, said Tuesday that he was certain that Ms. Palin would take the right positions on issues like Iraq, Russia’s invasion of Georgia and Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions. That seemed based largely on his repeated assertion that Ms. Palin would be tended by Mr. McCain’s foreign policy advisers. That was not much of an endorsement.

Some of the things Ms. Palin has had to say in the recent past about foreign policy are especially worrisome. In a speech last June to her former church in Wasilla, Ms. Palin said the war in Iraq was “a task that is from God.” Mr. Bush made similar claims as he rejected all sound mortal advice on how to conduct the war.

Mr. McCain, Mr. Graham and others also claim that Ms. Palin is a fearless reformer who is committed to fighting waste, fraud and earmarks. Ms. Palin did show courage taking on some of the Alaska Republican Party’s most sleazy politicians. But she also was an eager recipient of earmarked money as a mayor and governor.

Mayor Palin gathered up $27 million in subsidies from Washington, $15 million of it for a railroad from her town to the ski resort hometown of Senator Ted Stevens, now under indictment for failing to report gifts.

The Republicans are presenting Ms. Palin as a crusader against Mr. Stevens’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” The record says otherwise; she initially supported Mr. Stevens’s boondoggle, diverting the money to other projects when the bridge became a political disaster. In her speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God in June, Ms. Palin said it was “God’s will” that the federal government contribute to a $30 billion gas pipeline she wants built in Alaska.

Mr. McCain will make his acceptance speech on Thursday, and Ms. Palin will speak on Wednesday. Those two appearances will go a long way to forming voters’ views of this Republican ticket.

As Senator Graham noted, Mr. McCain has to reach out beyond the party’s loyal base. “We’re going to have to win this thing,” he said. “This is not our race to lose.”

Mr. McCain’s hurdles are substantial. To start, he has to overcome Mr. Bush’s record of failures. (The president addressed the convention Tuesday night and now, McCain strategists fervently hope, will retire quietly to the Rose Garden.) That record includes the disastrous war in Iraq, a ballooning deficit, the mortgage crisis — and the list goes on.

To address those many problems, this country needs a leader with sound judgment and strong leadership skills. Choosing Ms. Palin raises serious questions about Mr. McCain’s qualifications.

Zombie comics

Last week Lynn Johnston brought her long-running “For Better or For Worse” comic strip saga to a satisfying conclusion with the marriage of the eldest daughter to her old high school sweetheart.
But Johnston did not end the comic strip, choosing instead to run repeats going back to the beginnings of the strip with some occasional new materials and commentary added in.
Unfortunatley, the Express-News editors decided to ditch the strip anyway and have replaced it with a creepy, gag-a-day strip by Mark Tatulli called Lio.
Lio is not a bad strip. It’s just not the best one that they could have replaced “For Better or For Worse” with. It’s not even the best strip written by Tatulli. That would be his delightful “Heart of the City” which the Express-News has inexplicably ignored and passed over.
My biggest problem with canning Johnston’s strip is that it is unfair in light of their past decisions to continue running other comic strips long after the original artist/author is dead.
Here are the 11 comic strips currently running daily in the E-N that live on under the direction of different artists (except in the case of Peanuts which is in reruns).

Peanuts
Hagar the Horrible
Hi and Lois
Born Loser
Frank and Ernest
B.C.
Wizard of Id
Blondie
Dennis the Menace
The Lockhorns
Fred Basset

So the question remains, why is Lynn Johnston, who is not even dead yet, being singled out for special mistreatment?

Sarah Palin = Richard McLaren

One of the things that John McCain’s Google search vetting process failed to turn up about Sarah Palin was her past membership and close affiliation with a radical seccessionist group in Alaska.
The Alaskan Independence Party which is apparently affiliated with the radical Constitution Party wants to secede from the union and form their own country.
It brings to mind the nutjobs in the Republic of Texas movement here in Texas who claim that Texas was never properly made a state and deny the authority of the U.S. government.
This isn’t just something out of Palin’s distant past either. Here is a video message she made for the group for their most recent convention:



Good luck, indeed. Why are their only 49 stars on your flag lapel pin, Gov. Palin?

Update
Here is a quote from Joe Vogler, founder of the Alaska Independence Party that Sarah Palin has courted throughout her political career:

The fires of Hell are glaciers compared to my hate for the American Government, and I won't be buried under their damn flag.

It is really shocking that the Republican vice presidential candidate would have ever associated with such a radical, America-hating group.

Sarah Palin = Robert Byrd

Sarah Palin reportedly secured $27 million in federal earmarks for her tiny little town of Wasilla during the four years that she was mayor.
I guess this is the kind of “executive” experience that Republicans are harping about that should qualify her for the highest office in the land. That’s a per capita rate that put’s Sen. Robert Byrd to shame!
I went to high school in Premont, a small town in South Texas, and I am not aware of any federal earmarks they have ever received for anything. Boy, what the folks in Premont could have done with just a smidgen of that pork that Palin was pigging out on!!

As Kevin Drum notes, she’s the Earmark Queen.

Sarah Palin = Harriet Miers?

The only thing the media is going to talk about for the next week or two is the revelation that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old unwed daughter is five months pregnant with a shotgun wedding in her immediate future.
But that is only the tip of the iceberg. You would need a flowchart to keep up with the avalanche of bad news coming out about John McCain’s VP pick.
I tend to agree with Barack Obama that Palin’s family should be off limits. But I think it is fair to point out that this is yet another example of failed Republican policies at work.
It would be different if Palin wasn’t an outspoken advocate for religious right social conservatives, but she is and now her outspoken opposition to birth control and sex education stands out very loudly.

But I think there are many other problems with Palin that surfaced over the weekend that will take prominence as they sink in, such as her affiliation with a radical right seccessionist group in Alaska during the 1990s. Or her blatant hypocrisy on earmarks and 527 groups. Or her vast lack of knowledge on any number of issues that will come up during the campaign.

Hilzoy sums it up thusly:

Sarah Palin's record speaks for itself. She is a far rightwing nut who has abused government power for personal reasons. Repeatedly. She was a member of a group calling for secession from the very country she now wants to lead. She is a bald-faced liar. She is as ignorant of science as she is of American history. She may be well-liked in Alaska, but even there they think it's ridiculous to imagine her a heartbeat from the presidency.

There is already speculation that Palin will be forced off of the ticket before the GOP convention is over, like Harriet Miers was pitched over the side for a Supreme Court nomination. I’m not sure that will happen, but I won’t be surprised if it does.

The "No He Can't" Speech

You know it's coming.
Someone at the Republican Convention will have to give a speech somewhere along the lines of the "No He Can't" speech. That is, a speech that will take Obama's catch phrase "Yes We Can" and try to turn it against him while giving the delegates something to chant.
It will go something like this:
They will provide a litany of things that Obama is purported to want to do with the appropriate Republican spin and each time they will end with "No He Can't" which will be chanted in unison by the audience.
So, they will say "Obama wants to raise your taxes! No He Can't!!!
Obama wants to cut-n-run from Iraq! No He Can't!!!
Obama wants to redefine marriage to allow gays to marry! No He Can't!!!
Obama wants to prevent us from drilling for oil in wildlife preserves! No He Can't!!!
And so forth.
The question is who will give that speech?

Sarah Palin = Clarence Thomas

Is McCain out of his mind?

That’s a good question. McCain picked someone whose sum total of experience is having served as governor of a teeny tiny state for less than two years.
Alaska? A tiny state?
Yes. Alaska is one of the smallest states by population. San Antonio, Texas has nearly twice the population as the entire state of Alaska.

Some people are calling her Sarah Quayle Palin, but I think the more apt analogy is with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Sarah Palin was picked for two reasons, and experience wasn’t one of them. First, she’s a woman. And second, she is a fundamentalist rightwinger.
There are many other women in the Republican Party far more experienced to take on the job of Vice President starting with Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and former N.J. Gov. Christie Todd Whitman. Then there is Sens. Olypia Snow, Susan Collins and Elizabeth Dole and Govs. Jodi Rell and Linda Lingle, all with more experience than Palin.
But none were apparently rightwing enough to satisfy the James Dobson-wing of the Republican Party.
That is where Sarah Palin fits the bill. Vigorously anti-choice, even in cases of rape and incest, and a favorite of the anti-public education homeschool crowd who pushes for “creation science” to be taught in the classroom, Palin promises to be a reliable rubber stamp on all evangelical religious right issues.

That is the way it was with Clarence Thomas back when George Bush the Elder passed over dozens of far more qualified black jurists to elevate Thomas to the Supreme Court simply because of his hard-right political views.

BeldarBlog has been pushing for Palin as VP since early June and he is clearly elated. Below is a comment I left on his blog back then:

I think Sarah Palin is a very interesting choice. But I am a bit surprised that Beldar is so enamored with her. As others have already noted, she has little experience on the national stage and if she happened to have a D after her name rather than an R would Beldar still agree that she was a good choice for the other party?
Let's face it, she is a one-term governor of a teeny, tiny state. Yes, I mean tiny in the population sense. Alaska has fewer people than Rhode Island afterall. Why, twice as many people live in Hawaii. It is the 47th smallest state population wise and only merits one representative in the U.S. House. Texas has 32 by contrast.
In fact, more people live in Austin than live in the entire state of Alaska. Twice as many people live in San Antonio. So that means that Mayor Phil Hardberger is respeonsible for twice as many people as Gov. Palin.
I'm still betting that McCain will go with a Hispanic VP - someone like Sen. Mel Martinez - to try and make inroads with that ethnic group. You say that identity politics is stronger with Democrats, yet I think it is almost guaranteed that McCain will pick a woman or a minority for his VP. I would be shocked if he did otherwise.

Gallup Daily: Obama Moves Ahead, 48% to 42%

Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it out! Wh-wh-wh-wh-what’s it all about?

Sorry, that was a line from a Beastie Boys song that is stuck in my head. But, seriously, check out the latest from Gallup polls.
Mark was in a frenzy the other day when the poll had McCain up 46-44, but now McCain is back down at his normal low-40s level (42) and Obama has jumped up to 48.

So is that the “bounce” that Mark swore that Obama wasn’t getting? Or (more likely) are the polls simply correcting back to the trend where they have pretty much been all along? And what happens when and if Obama gets a real bounce out of the convention?

More of the McSame and Pawlenty of it

Veep speculation on the Republican side has reached it’s high point, which (Yawn!) ain’t all that high.
Who will McSame pick to go down in flames with him this November?
Mitt Romney, the wealthy Mormon from Massachusetts who has flip-flopped almost as many times as McCain has?
Or Holy Joe Lieberman, the turncoat Democrat and No. 1 apologist for Bush’s quagmire in Iraq?
Or will it be that guy who no one has ever heard of - Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota? What’s his story? I haven’t cared enough to try and find out.
Or is there some other dark horse pick out there waiting to surprise us?
The suspense is so high it is ummm, it’s uhhh... Wait. What were we talking about again?

It’s the policies, Stupid!

Presidential campaigns tend to be driven by personalities and political conventions brings it all out in spades. Everyone has a story to tell and they can be heartwrenching.
We’ve heard about how Michelle Obama lost her father to MS; how Joe Biden lost his first wife and a daughter to a drunken driver when he was first elected to the Senate. We’ve heard about Hillary’s struggle to break the glass ceiling on the highest office in the land and we are going to hear lots more about Obama’s personal story tonight.
Next week, John McCain will have his own compelling story to tell about the five years he spent in a Vietnamese POW camp.
And when it comes time to vote, these are the stories that will resonate the most with voters as they go into the voting booths. But that is a shame, because the personalities and the human interest stories are really just window dressing and matter very little in the day to day functioning of our country.
It is the policies that the winning party will implement that matters the most. And what needs to be made clear to people is that after eight years of near total control of the federal government - Republican ideas DON’T WORK!!!
But Democratic ideas, as evidenced by the boom times of the Clinton years, clearly DO WORK.
Regardless of what you think about the personalities involved in this election, the only thing that really matters is which policies will be put into place and the choice comes down to the ones that have consistently failed for the last eight years, or the ones that worked great during the previous eight years. It is as simple as that.

Big Dog Time

Here is President Bill Clinton doing “everything possible to ensure Obama's defeat” this fall.



It is clearly in the Clintons’ interests to have Democrats in the White House this fall, especially if it can be shown that they had a hand in getting them elected.
I think they played this one brilliantly. They allowed the bar to be set real low with this phony media-fed melodrama about them being upset and bitter. They played the rightwingers for suckers and dupes. And then they blew everyone away with their actions at the convention. Well done.

And here’s another great speech....

Olympic flashbacks at the Democratic Convention

I feel like I'm still watching the Olympics.
Every person who gives a speech at the Democratic convention gets judged by the pundits the same way the athletes in Beijing would get judged after every event.
Last night, Hillary Clinton nailed her dismount after a flawless performance on the uneven bars. But Keynote Speaker Mark Warner fumbled badly like a gymnast who landed on his knees after a vault. Or at least that's the way the pundits judged it.
Tonight, Bill Clinton dominated his event like Usain Bolt running the 100-meter dash and made it look easy. John Kerry also impressed with his performance on the rings. But Joe Biden stutter-stepped after his less than fantastic pomel horse routine. Or so the pundits judged.

Update

And now after having watched Biden's speech, I realize that the pundits are just as boneheaded and full of it as many of the Olympic judges in Beijing. That was a terrific speech and just because it was partially overshadowed by Bill Clinton's tour de force doesn't mean it wasn't also great in its own right.

Whose a Bush Dog??

I nearly flipped when I ran across this the other day via Glenn Greenwald.

Matt Stoller over at Open Left has listed MY congressman, Ciro Rodriguez, among the so-called “Bush Dog Democrats” who they want to target for defeat in future elections.

First off, this kind of ideological purging is not healthy for the Democratic Party in the slightest. Second, how in the HELL do they end up placing someone like Rodriguez - who voted 96 percent of the time with the Democratic Party last year - in a list like this??

As it turns out, they only concerned themselves with two votes, one on continued funding for the Iraq War in 2007 (nevermind that Ciro voted against the war authorization back in 2002) and one on their stupid Holy Grail FISA issue.

That is so incredibly stupid that it just makes me want to bash my head against a wall in frustration. And here I had thought that Matt Stoller was one of the leading lights of the liberal blogosphere. Moron!!!

People around here worked their tails off to finally get a Democrat elected in this district and this is the thanks they get. Ciro has a tough re-election battle ahead of him and he needs all the help he can get to keep this seat in the Democratic column. Republican Lyle Larson isn’t going to be a pushover in the general election, and having this “Bush Dog” smear attached to Ciro will only depress his supporters and dampen their turnout on election day.

This is exactly the kind of thing I feared would happen with the stupid “Moneybomb” campaign promoted by Greenwald, Hamsher and a lot of other prominent liberal bloggers who seem to be aping Ralph Nader these days if not Joe Lieberman. The “Shoot Ourselves in the Foot” campaign would be a more accurate moniker.

Good news on Senate races

I don’t think the presidential polls will be worth much until after both conventions are over, but these Senate polls are highly encouraging.

Last week we had good news in Minnesota where Al Franken has evened things up and even inched ahead of Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.
Franken has been down in polls for some time and I was concerned that his might be the one race we lose this cycle. Now maybe not.

And today we get this great news out of North Carolina: Democratic Senate candidate Kay Hagan has taken a lead over incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole.

And the best news of all comes out of Alaska where Sen. Ted Stevens campaign is falling like a rock. I think this graphic from Pollster.com illustrates it best:



Now if Rick Noriega could just get some traction against John Cornyn here in Texas...

What we’re up against

There has been no better example of the “Any news is good news for McCain” theme in the media that Mark Halperin’s latest bit of “political analysis” for ABC News this past weekend.



So, McCain doesn’t know how many houses he owns - a huge political gaffe for someone who has been trying to make the case in the campaign that the other guy is an “elitist” — and this is somehow bad news for Obama.
Halperin holds the title of “political analyst” for Time Magazine and ABC News, but it is very clear that he is little more than a Republican shill for John McCain. It would be one thing if the media would identify him accurately as a McCain partisan when he starts spouting his nonsense, but to play him up as some kind of non-partisan expert is outrageous and unfair. ABC News should have fired him on the spot after this latest idiocy. Instead, this is just a small sampling of what Democrats are up against for the rest of this campaign.

Pleased with Biden

I would have been happy with just about anyone Obama was considering for the VP slot, but I am particularly pleased with Joe Biden. I think my biggest problem with Evan Bayh and Tim Kaine was the prospect of having to listen to the big hissy fit that SOME Democrats were prepared to throw had they been selected. I swear, I have heard far too much carping and whining from people on the Democratic side since the end of the primary season. It’s a wonder that Democrats ever get elected these days.
Nevertheless, I think the hype about all the disunity at the convention is just that — HYPE — and it is best to just follow the advice of Public Enemy and Don’t Believe It.
I think most all of these disagreeable and disgruntled folks will eventually fall in line, just like all those wingnut bloggers who swore a few months back that they would never vote for McCain are now all firmly on board. But first they have to get their time in the limelight, like the handful of South Texas Hillary delegates who keep getting written up over and over and over again by the San Antonio Express-News.
But back to Biden, I think he is an excellent choice. Unquestionably experienced and qualified to step in and take over as president, he will also be a great asset to the campaign as someone who can aggressively strike out at the Republican noise machine.
I remember feeling sorry for Biden when he had to drop his 1988 presidential campaign after one of his speechwriters borrowed too profusely from British Labor Leader Neil Kinock. At the time, borrowing phrases was not uncommon, but a new standard was being set as the global information machine was starting to evolve. My friend Mark is already giddy over the prospects of the “GOP ridicule machine” going after Biden over these past charges of plaigirism. But I think that will be a little difficult to do when their standard bearer likes to crib recipes from Good Housekeeping, does his foreign policy research with Wikipedia and borrows inspirational stories from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
I was glad to see Biden re-emerge as a political force after his failed ‘88 campaign and it was pretty clear that he was in line for a major cabinet post in an Obama administration had he not been tapped as VP. But the VP slot is an excellent place for him right now. Once they finish fumigating the vice president’s office and sweep up all the shredded pieces of the Constitution, hopefully he will be able to get in their and start piecing things back together so that our country can finally get its reputation back.

TPA Roundup 8-25

It's Monday. Do you know what the Texas Progressive Alliance blogs and bloggers have been up to this week? Well, our weekly round-up will tell you. This week's round-up was compiled by Vince from Capitol Annex.

refinish69 explains why Travis County and Texas doesn't need another Keel at Doing My Part For The Left.

Two White guys in Houston want each others' jobs. Former Gov. Mark might run for for mayor, and current Mayor Bill may run for governor. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has the Frick-and-Frack report.

Prepare yourself for a shock when you visit Bluedaze and see the BILLIONS in handouts given to Big Oil. TXsharon shows how these handouts, paid with our taxes, enable Big Oil to buy influence, work against our best interest, blatantly ignore laws and keep the US dependent on hydrocarbons rather than moving forward.

Mayor McSleaze at McBlogger wonders why, if Washington is broken as McThuselah's campaign says, McThuselah himself hasn't done something to fix it since he's been there more than, you know, 25 years.

The major media outlets may be arguing about whether experience, the war or the economy is the most important issue in this year's presidential election, but jobsanger says there is only one issue that matters , and it's not any of those three.

The Texas Cloverleaf exposes the plan by Congressman Michael Burgess and the Bush DOT to make I-35 from Dallas to Denton a toll road!

BossKitty at TruthHugger is concerned about WATER and what our fearless leaders plan to do about it: "Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink."

Justin at AAA-Fund Blog wonders when Houston will find good leadership ñ in government, in corporations looking for good PR, anywhere ñ for recycling.

Off the Kuff criticizes State Sen. Dan Patrick and State Rep. Frank Corte for their request for a ruling from AG Greg Abbott that the Lege can require cities to enforce federal immigration laws.

Off the Kuff criticizes State Sen. Dan Patrick and State Rep. Frank Corte for their request for a ruling from AG Greg Abbott that the Lege can require cities to enforce federal immigration laws.

Texas Liberal says that he is not a bridge builder.

Before she took off for the DNC convention in Denver, and the Big Tent, Texas Kaos frontpager SCCS took a look at the state of the Central Texas Congressional races.

The rich get Visas while the poor were asked to self-deport notes CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chimse.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts about Perry, Dewhursts, and Craddick's new toll road plan, Texas GOP Leaders Want To Use Public Pension Funds To Build Corporate Toll Roads.

Vince from Capitol Annex takes a look at Republican State Representative candidate Van Brookshire's stupid press release about immigration and the incorrect facts he based it on.

North Texas Liberal shares a stunning tribute to Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, penned by a great friend of the late congresswoman.