Citizen’s Arrest of Karl Rove!
Saturday, August 19th @ 5:30PM
Meet up with Cindy Sheehan, CODEPINK Austin, and National
CODEPINK to make a citizen’s arrest of Rove for his numerous
crimes.
Bring signs, banners, and any thing else to let Rove and his
supporters know that there is a new branch of law enforcement in
town and we plan to hold them accountable.
We will gather outside the parking garage of the Renaissance
Hotel. If you are facing the main entrance of the hotel, the garage
is on your right.
If the Supreme Court has opened the gates to partisan redistricting - and it seems to have done - it will behoove progressives to pay serious attention to state legislative elections, from which Congressional majorities and protected incumbencies flow:
This from today's WaPo story is right on point:
Michael Davies, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said the ruling could make it "impossible for either party to have any chance of winning a majority in Congress without winning state legislatures first." Those legislatures, he said, hold a "huge potential" for a national power shift. Of the 36 states whose legislatures control redistricting, 20 of them, accounting for 195 congressional districts, have at least one chamber within four seats of changing hands, Davies said.
With congressional Democrats already "fighting an uphill battle," he said, "This year's Democratic wave will need to overcome a wall of Republican gerrymandering that has cut the Democratic voter base and left some congressional Republican incumbents in safe seats that should not be. . . . This ruling means that the only way Democrats can stop a Tom DeLay style power-grab is to win at the state legislative level."
...our troops will stand down? Is that it? Is it possible W once again has no exit strategy for this latest deployment?
I'm interested in the sense of other BORians on this new troop movement which, according to the pre-announcement leaks, will be under the control of Rick Perry and other border governors.
Good for BushCo? Good for Perry? Good for the country? Or just a good way to fill those detention centers that Halliburton/KBR is under contract to build?
Ya know, I'm looking forward someday to a governor willing to represent all Texans, not just the members of his own political party.
From Dubya Gardner Selby's tidbits column in the Statesman:
Gov. Rick Perry commiserated this week with Lake Travis Republicans on the occasional downs of being red (or Republican) in historically blue (or Democratic) Austin.
"Good guys are usually outnumbered in Travis County," Perry told more than 200 guests at the Hills Country Club in the Lake Travis area Tuesday. "It's like being a member of the resistance movement in enemy territory."
...we’ve worked hard to support legislators' goals of lowering your property taxes while adequately funding public schools.
They're also happy to point out BAD ways of financing schools - like a real estate transfer tax and a tax on services like, oh, I don't know... real estate services.
Meanwhile the Texans for Taxpayer relief website went dark pending revision, shortly after Chris Bell charged they had stepped over the line into illegal lobbying. http://www.taxpayerrelief.com/
...the Shaky Heartland, the Wavering West all stand out clearly in a new chart by Survey USA here: http://tinyurl.com/hje79 The chart graphically illustrates Bush-loving states where the Deceiver-in-Chief now has a net disapproval rating on the straight-up approve/disapprove question. Texas is net negative toward Bush, but Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina are moreso. He's got a 60 percent disapproval rating in Arkansas, 61 percent in Florida. Out West, in Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada more than 60 percent disapprove, as do similar majorities in Heartland states like Iowa and Ohio. All these states gave W their electoral votes in 2004. At this point, he is president only of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska.
Even though my favorite convenience store in our little burg of Elgin, TX might as well be the bank of a small Mexican town - with wire transfers and money orders flowing out continually to the background of a murmur of Spanish - I hadn't really thought through all the implications.
An LA Times reporting team did, however, and has a fascinating story on how dollars earned in the USA are transforming small towns in Mexico: http://tinyurl.com/k2zrp
The government of Vicente Fox even provides matching funds for immigrant dollars spent on public works projects in Mexico.
And the immigrants are not just physically transforming small town Mexico either - they're also bringing new ideas of government transparency that are largely foreign concepts south of the border.
All this is going on without the guiding hand of the Heritage Foundation, Halliburton, the Coalition Provisional Authority, or Shock and Awe - it's really kind of amazing.
...to a new organization formed to support his school finance tax plan, according to a story that Harvey Kronberg is reporting on Quorum Report.
Using a vehicle called "Texans for Taxpayer Relief" (a 501(c)(6) entity) they plan to raise and spend a million a week over the next five to six weeks to fund advertising to build support for the governor's plan - apparently while the lege is discussing it.
One burning question - will those contributions be subject to any disclosure at all? The website at http://taxpayerrelief.com doesn't have much to say about who is behind it.
DALLAS-AP — Tens of thousands of people banged drums, waved U.S. flags and marched in a protest Sunday urging federal lawmakers to pass immigration reform that would legalize an estimated 11 million undocumented workers.
Shouting "Si Se Puede!" — Spanish for "Yes, we can!" — the marchers crammed into the downtown streets. They included families pushing strollers with their children and ice cream vendors who placed American flags on their carts. Many wore white clothing to symbolize peace.
Police estimated the crowd at 350,000 to 500,000. There were no reports of violence.
