A Texas-Sized Surrender

Now this is very good news if it plays out the way The Hill seems to think it will:  Texas Republicans are basically looking to settle their redistricting case with the DoJ, which would have to include approval by the minority representation groups that are the plaintiffs, that would give the state a number of new districts that would be won by Dems.

“They’re backed up against the wall and have to come to some agreement and it’ll be awfully favorable on our end,” said one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Another plaintiff agreed.  “It’s clear they know they’re in a vulnerable position and that’s why they want to settle,” he said.

Any settlement would need to get the multiple minority group plaintiffs on board, and would create more majority-Hispanic and majority-African American congressional districts. Two of the plaintiffs predicted that an agreement will be reached early next week.

That’s pretty much a massive capitulation by Republicans in the state, who purposely drew the four new districts in the state legislature to favor Republicans precisely by splitting Latino and African-American neighborhoods across district lines and using pencil thin lines to connect them to overwhelmingly red districts, assuring that at least three of the four new districts would be safe GOP seats for the next decade.

But the DoJ gets ultimate veto power over this sort of thing for states like Texas, and that decision by a three-judge panel is expected soon.  Texas Republicans are apparently so terrified of this that (especially after the Supreme Court punted the map back to Texas to work it out as a state issue) they are begging for a settlement before the DoJ takes them out back with a two by four and a grim expression.

If the state of Texas and the plaintiffs in the case reach an agreement it would solve a drawn out process with two separate lower court battles and a Supreme Court opinion already on the books.

Texas is gaining four seats in Congress and will have 36 total House seats next election.  Most of the state’s population growth has come from African Americans and Hispanics, but the Republican state legislators who drew the maps gave the groups few new opportunities in the state.

Any agreement would lead to a minimum of 13 Democratic-leaning seats, and possibly a fourteenth seat depending on how the districts in Fort Worth are drawn.

With conservative former Rep. Nick Lampson (D-Texas) running for a Galveston-area seat, Democrats could win as many as 14 or 15 seats in the state, up from the nine seats they currently hold. Republicans would hold 21 or 22 seats, down from the 23 they currently have.

Dems picking up 5 to 6 House seats in Texas would go a long, long way towards regaining the House in 2012.  Republicans know this and they’re looking to settle anyway, which shows you just how bad they think their position is in respect to the three-judge pre-clearance panel.

On the other hand, the districts that Texas is gaining is coming at the expense of states like Ohio and New York, and ultimately one of the reasons that I think the GOP is looking to take the settlement here is that they know redistricting Dem districts out of existence in other states they control like Missouri and Louisiana (and in Ohio especially) will make Texas into a wash at best for the Donks, especially given that GOP-controlled SC and Georgia are getting a new district and Florida two.  They were going for all the marbles in the redistricting pile, and they’ll have to settle for merely half as a losing proposition, which was the point of the entire exercise given the level of state control handed to the GOP in 2010.

And once again we come back to the fact that voters picked a really awful time to give the Republicans more power by deciding President Obama and the Dems hadn’t moved fast enough in Operation Ponycorn With Sprinkles.  The repercussions of that nonsense will be felt for, well, a decade.

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Cruisin’

Most of the recent media coverage of the Costa Concordia disaster has focused on the the captain, who, after disabling the autopilot and tearing the ship’s hull open, abandoned ship early and refused to return. When there are so many opportunities to contrast his apparent cowardice with the bravery of hundreds of other captains, I’m sure the media will drill into this and keep drilling until that well is bone dry. (Here’s a prime example from the Guardian, with bonus Falklands heroism.)

But there’s another factor in this story that’s a lot more important than a wimpy captain, and that’s the preparedness of the passengers and the tendency of the crews to minimize and deny when something goes wrong. It’s apparently still common practice for cruise lines to board passengers in the evening and delay lifeboat drills until the next day. The Costa Concordia sailed in the evening and the passengers were scheduled to get a lifeboat drill the next morning, the day after the ship sank. And the crew told passengers that the collision was an “electrical problem” and waited over an hour before ordering an evacuation even though the captain was informed by his engineers that his ship was going to sink a few minutes after the collision.

I was on a cruise about 15 years ago, and on that cruise, there was a fire in the galley. We sailed in the evening, and the fire occurred a few hours later, in the middle of the night. I had no idea where my lifeboat station was, where the lifejackets were, or what was going on—all I heard was the ship’s whistle blowing, paging of fire teams and crew running through halls. Luckily, the crew was able to put out the fire, but we were told nothing about the whole event until we had a very abbreviated and incomplete announcement the next morning.

My guess is that the few hours after a boat is launched are very busy for the crew, so it’s more convenient to delay the lifeboat drills to the next day. And there’s such a huge investment in pretending that ships can’t sink that cruise line personnel have an deep, inbred reluctance to attend to disasters quickly. I’ll bet that a lifeboat drill shortly after boarding would have saved a few people on that boat, because I know that I’d have been in deep shit if I had been ordered to abandon ship on that one and only cruise that I’ll ever take.

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We’ll Just Call It A Tie

In an example of just how terribly corrupt Republican party officials are, the official, certified results of the Iowa caucus are finally in and Rick Santorum actually won by 23 votes.  The Iowa GOP has decided to call it a tie instead.  Josh Marshall:

The rationale for calling this a tie, according to the Des Moines Register, which has the story as an exclusive, is that 8 precincts’ numbers are lost permanently and will never be certified. So in practice it’s a tie, too close to call, etc. That of course probably applies to pretty much all recount type elections — Bush v Gore, maybe Franken v. Coleman, etc. The vagueries of the process itself is too imprecise in some sense to tell you who ‘won’ in some Platonic (the other sense of the word) sense. But in normal elections where the people holding it aren’t deeply invested in not letting one guy win we have a name for that kind of situation — Rick Santorum won.

Of course, it’s unlikely to do Santorum much good at this point. And he probably just was never a good enough, or viable enough, candidate to have truly shifted his fortunes even if it had come out on caucus night. But it’s worth speculating how the news would have affected Romney’s momentum. A win is a win, as the state GOP of Iowa seems to have a hard time now accepting. And even though it was razor close, Romney came out of Iowa with a win. And after a rout in New Hampshire he had two ‘wins’. And together those shifted where the race was pretty decisively by mid-January, finally forcing a lot of Republicans with Mitt-commitment issues to get on board.

In other words, the call in Iowa then made Mitt all but inevitable now.  It’ll be interesting to see how the Republicans react to this on the road.  If Mitt wins Saturday, it’s over.  But would he have done worse if Santorum had been rightfully declared the winner in Iowa?  The Iowa GOP is saying that several precincts lost their votes so there’s no way to know if Santorum’s 23 vote lead is really true:

Results from eight precincts are missing — any of which could hold an advantage for Mitt Romney — and will never be recovered and certified, Republican Party of Iowa officials told The Des Moines Register on Wednesday.

We’ll never know.  Republicans aren’t terribly interested in facts, just results.  Remember that the next time they play the ACORN/UNION THUGS/BLACK PANTHERS card and say Democrats are cheaters.

[UPDATE]  To clarify, 1) I’m all for a GOP primary process that is as long and painful for the GOP as possible (for them, but admittedly that sucks for all the rest of us too) and 2) Can you imagine the howling if this happened at a Democratic party caucus?

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I Get By With a Little Help

Because of the gross incompetence of basically the entire GOP field, the Virginia AG is stepping in to save them from themselves (careful, link to Faux News):

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is intervening in the Virginia presidential primary dispute and plans to file emergency legislation to address the inability of most Republican presidential candidates to get their name on the ballot, Fox News has learned.

Only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul qualified for the Virginia primary, a contest with 49 delegates up for grabs.

The failure of other candidates to qualify—notably Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry—led to complaints that the 10,000-signature requirement is too stringent.

Cuccinelli, who is a Republican, shared the concerns.

“Recent events have underscored that our system is deficient,” he said in a statement. “Virginia owes her citizens a better process. We can do it in time for the March primary if we resolve to do so quickly.”

A half a million people voted in the 2008 GOP primary there, but getting 10k signatures is too stringent? That’s pretty laughable, but, whatever. I’m in favor of more ballot access. Unfortunately, while Cuccinelli thinks millionaire Republicans need a hand, he and McDonnell still preside over one of the most onerous felon disenfranchisement regimes (.pdf), and in 2010 turned an objective process for reinstatement into a subjective mess.

I guess this really is the modern GOP at its core- one set of rules for the rich and the powerful, another set for everyone else.

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Cough

Should have bet money on it.

Gingrich is not materially different from Trump, Bachmann, Perry or Herman Cain. He is another clown with a slightly different brand. The only meaningful question is whether the thing that trips Newt up will be his past, his faulty brain-mouth filter or the crickets and spiders that live in empty storefronts where his campaign organization ought to be.

And no, there will be no Huntsmanmania when Newt! throws an axle some time in late Hannukah (Or Fred Kargermentum, in case you were wondering). Huntsman already played enough contrarian cards to enjoy the Amish treatment for the rest of his short political career. If I were Rick Santorum, though, I might start to wonder whether my turn on the hotseat might not line up in a convenient way with Iowa or South Carolina.

The Ron Paul-mentum admittedly took me by surprise. In my defense though, the guy has so much crazy going on that he stands out even in a crowd of demented haters, liars and losers. His will not be the Perry or Cain chardonnay hangover that builds over time and leaves you sore and queasy while trying to stay lucid at church group. The Paul hangover will be a grain alcohol skullbreaker that hits like a train and passes in a blacked-out blur, the kind that leaves people wondering whether it was real and, much later, lets them deny that it happened at all.

If I had to guess about Iowa, I would stick to my bet that Santorum will win the lottery and peak just in time to beat Romney in Iowa and then sink quietly beneath the santorum radar before any other significant primary comes along. Romney will sheepishly claim the mantle like everyone knew he would, and the party will piss and moan and line up behind their guy just like Democrats did behind Walter Mondale in ‘84.

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PUMAs return as “a project of the 99%”

Today, Democrats from across America have been getting robocalls from Zombie-PUMAs. I got one of them this afternoon in Baltimore. Sam Stein and others have posted the audio, which has your typical free-from-the-constraints-of-reality PUMA rant:

America would be better off today if Hillary Clinton was our president. The Wall Street robber barons would be jailed, young people could afford college and find jobs and six million homeowners wouldn’t face foreclosure. We need to change our course. Please sign our petition to draft Hillary Clinton for president.

The message pimps a PUMA fronting web site with no information about who is behind the effort. Well, almost no information. Each page of the site proclaims the effort is: “a project of the 99%”, which is kind of funny because in 2008 the goal of the PUMA movement was to help John McCain and this year’s effort seems designed to help the next Republican nominee. I’m betting the “99%” line has the 1-percenters funding this effort pissing their pants from laughter.

Some blogs and news organizations are reporting on the robocalls and some are leading with the notion that the 99%/OWS movement is organizing the effort to draft Hillary. (Proof that just placing a tag line on your web page can generate results!) I expect that by the morning the “serious” people of our media and blog-o-sphere will be discussing this grift as a real movement and another “proof positive” sign that the “Left” hates President Obama just as much as the “Right”.

It will be interesting to learn which wingnut asshole is funding this effort to reanimate the PUMA corpse. So far, I think it’s safe to assume that the comedy team of Caddell/Schoen is on that wanker’s payroll.

Cheers

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You And Me Baby Ain’t Nothin’ But Mammals

Turns out yesterday’s bizarre escaped animal incident in Zanesville, Ohio (east of Columbus) where dozens of exotic animals were put down after they were released into the Ohio countryside before their owner apparently committed suicide?  Yeah, you can hang that one on Gov. John Kasich’s neck too.

The tragedy exposes the dangers of wildlife trafficking, in which private collectors actively trade in exotic animals all over the states “in a vibrant and poorly regulated market.” According to the Humane Society, Ohio has long been “the center of the exotic-auction industry.” Ohio’s former Gov. Ted Strickland (D) attempted to “crack down” on the market by issuing an executive order that banned new private ownership of exotic animals. Issued on Jan. 6, 2011, it was one of his last acts as governor and lasted 90 days. His replacement, GOP Gov. John Kasich let it expire. Only now, after the bloodbath, does Kasich see it as “a problem.”

Kasich’s team called the measure “unenforceable.”  Only one problem:  parts of that executive order were very much enforceable, including the provision that could have prevented this awful event.

If Kasich had extended the emergency ban, “the state would have had the authority to remove [the owner’s] animals” as the owner, 62-year old Tommy Thompson, had been convicted of animal cruelty. Thompson shot himself after releasing the animals yesterday.

So yeah, way to go, Republicans.  You could have done the right thing, you could have stopped this mess, instead Kasich said “NO BIGGIE LOL” and let the order and the power the state had that could have prevented this from happening expire.  If he wasn’t the most hated Governor in the land, this one pretty much seals it.

Asshole.

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McCain’s Billions And Billions And Zero Plan

As Greg Sargent points out there’s literally no amount of compromise that President Obama can make that will be acceptable to Republicans short of his resignation from office, and Sen. John McCain is at the head of that particular train of sore loser goalpost-shifters.  McCain on FOX yesterday introducing his new “jobs bill”:

We have a plan and we’ll have almost all of the Republican Senators behind it. And if [Obama] wants to bring up a piece of his proposed plan, we’ll bring up a piece of ours.

We’d love to see, for example, a vote in the United States Senate on a moratorium on Federal regulations, which are coming out by the thousands, costing businesses billions and billions of jobs. We’d love to see a vote on that. But it will be interesting to see if the Majority Leader will allow it.

And yes, he actually said Obama was costing America “billions and billions of jobs” and wants a complete moratorium on federal regulations (he can’t even get his talking points straight.) In other words, McCain wants Obama to stop being President until further notice.  It doesn’t matter what the President does for the economy, it doesn’t matter what he proposes, it doesn’t matter how many business roundtables or Silicon Valley town hall meetings he holds, Republicans are going to say he hates business and the proof is he won’t give them 100% free reign to pillage the serfs like Republicans demand.

And yes, this means “centrist” McCain is now using the Rand Paul playbook.

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You can always count on Republicans to be dicks

Turns out that a lot of people watched the President’s speech on jobs Thursday night:

According to the LA Times more folks watched President Obama than tuned into opening game of the NFL season, which drew 27.5 million viewers. The President has given other speeches that pulled more viewers—like his first speech to a joint session of Congress in February 2009 and the night he announced the death of Bin Laden—but some recent major speeches did not have the pull to push through the clutter and get the Nation’s attention. This one did. A big reason why is because President Obama was able to count on Republicans being predictable assholes.

When he announce the speech to be at the same time as the first Rick Perry GOP debate one of two things would happen: either he would talk on Wednesday or the speech would be moved to Thursday. If it was Wednesday the debate would be pushed back an hour and that is what it looked like the outcome would be until Rushbo demanded that Boehner do something about it. In a rapid response to Limbaugh, the Orange Speaker became the first Speaker of the House to refuse the request of a President to speak to Congress. He suggested Thursday and President Obama accepted the change.

This, of course, generated a wave of howls and outrage from the predictable precincts of the left. The wingnuts celebrated and the media played up the controversy. The effect was to let even low information citizens know that the President was giving a major speech right before the start of football—and many of them decided to watch. This resulted in the GOP debate being a less than one day story and the President’s speech dominating the political news cycle—and framing the political agenda for the Fall—even as we head into the 10th anniversary of 9-11 and concerns of another possible attack.

In a post this morning, Steve Benen highlighted a comment from a reader, that pointed out how the outcome would have been different if the Boehner and company had just let the President speak at the requested time:

“I wonder, does the GOP regret forcing the WH to move the date of Obama’s speech? Just imagine if he’d given it the night of the GOP debate. The next day, he’d be splitting the news cycle with Perry and Romney. Now, of course, he’s monopolizing it to the point where even a possible attack on NY isn’t crowding him out.”

Instead, they were predictable assholes about it and allowed the President to use them a foils. Now we are in for a fall where the President and the vast majority of Americans are demanding action on jobs. The President has a plan that will put money in everybody’s pocket, create jobs and help the economy. You can watch the White House’s enhanced version of the speech (with charts and other details) here. This is a well thought out plan and he is daring the Republicans to block it. He is counting on them being assholes. I think when the dust settles he will win this fight, but he will need our help. As Tim F. points out here is how you can get in touch with your Member of Congress and your Senator:

Find your Congresscritter here.

Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Guide for first-timers here.

Calling your local Mayor and your Governor’s office might help with the pressure as well.

The message is simple: Pass The President’s Jobs Bill NOW!

Cheers

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Ginning Up Their Base (-est)

Brad Friedman and Mother Jones have a meaty series of linked articles taking us “Inside the Koch Brothers’ Secret Seminar“:

“We have Saddam Hussein,” declared billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, apparently referring to President Barack Obama as he welcomed hundreds of wealthy guests to the latest of the secret fundraising and strategy seminars he and his brother host twice a year. The 2012 elections, he warned, will be “the mother of all wars.”

Charles Koch would probably not publicly compare the president of the United States to a murderous dictator. (As a general rule, he and his brother don’t do much politicking or speechifying in public at all.) But Mother Jones has obtained exclusive audio recordings from the Koch seminar, a private event that took place in June at a resort near Vail, Colorado…

Charles and David Koch are co-owners of Koch Industries, an energy and chemical conglomerate inherited from their father that is currently America’s second-largest privately held company. To date, the brothers have spent more than $100 million supporting hard-right political campaigns and institutions. They are key funders of the movement to discredit climate science and sow doubt on the scientific consensus that human activities contribute to global warming.

The Kochs also bankrolled the fledgling tea party by making massive investments in right-wing political advocacy groups such as Americans for Prosperity as detailed by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker last year. More generally, the brothers have dedicated a portion of their vast wealth—and that of their benefactors—to influencing elections across the nation and swaying public opinion on everything from health care and fracking to labor policy and government spending…

During his welcoming remarks, Charles Koch warned his guests that the 2012 elections are nothing short of a battle “for the life or death of this country.” He then acknowledged the individuals and families who had given more than $1 million to the brothers’ efforts—though he misspoke, saying “more than a billion,” earning a huge laugh from the crowd. “Well, I was thinking of Obama and his billion-dollar campaign,” Koch said, to more laughter and cheers. “So I thought, ‘We gotta do better than that.’” (Forbes pegs the brothers’ personal net worth at around $22 billion apiece.)...

“We’ve had a lot of tough battles,” he continued. “We’ve lost a lot over the years, and we’ve won some recently.…And I pledge to all of you who’ve stepped forward and are partnering with us that we are absolutely going to do our utmost to invest this money wisely and get the best possible payoff for you in the future of our country.”

Because progressives are punctilious about fairness (not that there’s anything wrong with that), Kevin Drum points out that “[I]t’s quite possible that Koch intended something like, ‘Saddam Hussein called the Gulf War the mother of all wars, and for us, this is the mother of all wars we’ve got in the next 18 months.’”

Besides, when you read the whole thing, there’s plenty hard-data details to get righteously outraged over, apart from Koch’s habit of speaking from the murky depths of his Robber Baron id.

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This Mess We’re In

This asinine, silly, childish snit and clusterfuck over scheduling of Obama’s speech on jobs shows that John Boehner is a utter dick, or that the Obama administration is hopelessly naive and John Boehner is an utter dick. I guess I’m pretty sure about the dick part, the rest is kind of grey.

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The Balls On These People…

Ben Smith, who spent last week lecturing us that calling Mitt Romney weird is tantamount to attacking his Mormonism, actually posted the following:

So calling him “awkward” is acceptable, but weird- STOP ATTACKING HIS RELIGION! Let’s use the waybackmachine to look at the kind of things that the Obama campaign were going to use to define Romney as “weird:”

“There’s a weirdness factor with Romney, and it remains to be seen how he wears with the public,” the adviser said, noting that the contrasts they’d drive between the president and the former Massachusetts governor would be “based on character to a great extent.”

***

Democrats also plan to amplify what Obama strategists described as the “weirdness” quotient, the sum of awkward public encounters and famous off-kilter anecdotes, first among them the tale of Romney having strapped his dog to the roof of his car.

None of the Obama advisers interviewed made any suggestion that Romney’s personal qualities would be connected to his minority Mormon faith, but the step from casting Romney as a bit off to raising questions about religion may not be a large step for some of the incumbent’s supporters.

Again, the Obama team never mentioned Mormonism, just things he does that are, you know, weird. In other words, exactly the kind of shit that Smith now finds “awkward.” Yet when the Obama campaign said they might focus on it, Smith and Martin surmised it was just a way of opening a stealth attack on his Mormonism.

You can’t make this shit up.

(via)

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Oops

Markets crash after banksters discover to their horror that Washington embraced austerity budgeting during a recession.

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