Texas For Romney - I Doubt It

The Texas Primary was originally scheduled for Super Tuesday (March 6th), and if it had been held on that day it might have had a significant effect on the current Republican campaign (because Texas has an enormous 155 delegates at stake). But the Texas primary had to be delayed, because the Republican legislature over-reached in it's effort to create safe new GOP districts (denying minorities the new districts they were entitled to have).

That caused the redistricting effort to be tied up in a lengthy court battle, which still has not been settled. Finally, a federal court in San Antonio drew its own districts (good only for this year's elections) so the primary could be scheduled and held. That primary is now scheduled for May 29th. This was a disappointment for Republicans, because they thought the May 29th date would be too late for them to have a voice in the Republican presidential nomination race.

After Tuesday's results (where Romney finished third in both Alabama and Mississippi, and had to split Hawaii's delegates with his opponents), that may not be true. It's looking like the GOP race will be a long one, and Texas might be optimally-placed on May 29th to make a big difference in who gets the nomination. Of course, this brings up the question of just who the Texas Republicans will support.

Two days ago, the Rasmussen Poll published their latest survey of Texas Republicans -- and that survey showed Willard Mitt Romney (aka Wall Street Willie) as the leader in Texas. Here are their numbers:

RASMUSSEN POLL (Texas)
Mitt Romney...............32%
Rick Santorum...............30%
Newt Gingrich...............19%
Ron Paul...............9%
Other/Undecided...............10%

Having been born and raised in Texas (and still live there), I find that hard to believe -- for a couple of reasons. First, the Texas Republican Party is composed of mainly teabaggers and evangelicals (groups that Romney has yet to win over). It much more closely resembles the party in states like Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, and South Carolina than it does the party in states Romney has done well in (like New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Nevada).

Second, there are two other polls that show Santorum with a good lead. And both those polls show the Santorum lead exceeds the margin of error (while the Romney lead in Rasmussen is within the margin of error). Here are those polls -- one released on February 20th and the second on March 14th.

TEXAS TRIBUNE/UNIV. OF TEXAS POLL (February)
Rick Santorum...............45%
Newt Gingrich...............18%
Mitt Romney...............16%
Ron Paul...............14%
Others...............6%

WPA RESEARCH POLL (March)
Rick Santorum...............35%
Mitt Romney...............27%
Newt Gingrich...............20%
Ron Paul...............8%

Wall Street Willie will get some Texas delegates (because they are awarded proportionally and he will top the 15% threshold), but he will not finish in first place in Texas -- unless he somehow clinches the nomination before Texas votes (and that is not likely).

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Illusion

Political Cartoon is by Joe Heller in the Green Bay Press-Gazette.

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Recent Attacks On Women's Rights

The wonderful organization called Emily's List is dedicated to electing more progressive women to all levels of government. It is a very worthy goal and I support their efforts (and if you have a few extra dollars, they would put it to good use). That's why it comes as no surprise that they are upset (like all decent people are) about the recent Republican ramping-up of the war on women. Over at their blog, one of their writers (Allison McQuade) has written a piece about the 10 most egregious attacks on women's rights in the last few months. I thought it was excellent, and repost their list here:


Here are our Top 10 Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Attacks on Women?s Rights (just in the last 6 months!)

1. The Blunt Amendment. Reasonable religious exemptions weren?t enough for Roy Blunt. This amendmentwould have allowed your employer ? not your doctor - to decide what kind of health care you could get based on his or her own personal moral or religious convictions.
2. The All-Male Birth Control Panel, or the Man Panel. Congressman Darrell Issa convened a panel to discuss the coverage of birth control ? but refused to include any women.
3. Susan G. Komen Foundation defunds Planned Parenthood. Komen opted to cut off funding to the largest provider of reproductive health services in the US because of their new VP?s objection to a mere 3% of their activities.
4. Rush Limbaugh Calls Sandra Fluke a Prostitute and a Slut. After Sandra Fluke stood up for women everywhere, Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves and called her a prostitute and a slut for speaking out in favor of birth control coverage. He also said she should have to put videos of her having sex online to compensate the taxpayers who ?are going to pay for your contraceptives." Classy.
5. Forced Trans-Vaginal Ultrasounds. Republican legislators in Virginia invited the commonwealth into the exam room when they proposed a bill that would require women seeking abortions to undergo an invasive, medically-unnecessary vaginal probe before their procedure.
6. Texas defunds Planned Parenthood. Under Governor Rick Perry, the state of Texas banned funding to Planned Parenthood because it provides abortion services. In the end, though, this fight has only served tohurt low-income women looking for breast cancer screenings, birth control and pap smears.
7. Women in the Military Should ?Expect? to be Raped. Responding to a 64% increase in the reports of rape and violent sexual assaults in the military, Fox News pundit Liz Trotta responds, ?What did they expect?? She goes on to say that there is a bureaucracy of people to support these women who are being ?raped too much.?
8. Foster Friess Suggests Women Put Aspirin Between Their Knees. Rick Santorum supporter, Foster Friess, reminisced about back in his day when ladies put aspirin between their knees for birth control. Back in his day, people also died of polio.
9. Santorum wants to deny birth control coverage because he thinks it?s available and affordable. Despite the fact that most forms of birth control still require a prescription and 1 in 3 women have reported struggling to afford birth control. Santorum feels there is no barrier to access, so it shouldn?t be covered by insurance.
10. Mitt Romney doesn?t understand a woman?s reproductive system. Romney has publicly supported ?personhood amendments,? which would ban abortion by declaring life begins at conception. When asked about how this affects birth control, Romney seemed to be completely unaware that hormonal forms of birth control stop implantation, not conception and would be banned under any personhood amendment.

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The 19th Century Candidate

Political Cartoon is by Chan Lowe in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

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The Op-Ed Read ‘Round the World

Considering that Goldman Sachs alums live inside the Obama administration and help run our entire financial system, the bombshell yesterday will be talked about for weeks.

Here’s an excerpt from the op-ed appearing in yesterday’s New York Times:

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm?s ?axes,? which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) ?Hunt Elephants.? In English: get your clients ? some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren?t ? to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don?t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym. – Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs, by Greg Smith

The video above is from Think Progress, who captured the financial cable yakkers having a conniption that someone could actually blow the whistle on the immoral capitalistic, self-serving greed that he personally witnessed at Goldman.

Nobody is surprised, except maybe Tim Geithner, who never thought anyone in The Death Star would become a whistleblower.

There’s no money in it.

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http://taylormarsh.com/blog/2012/03/the-op-ed-read-round-the-world/

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Assad's emails leaked

The Guardian reports that they have obtained copies of Assad's private email:

Bashar al-Assad took advice from Iran on how to handle the uprising against his rule, according to a cache of what appear to be several thousand emails received and sent by the Syrian leader and his wife.

The Syrian leader was also briefed in detail about the presence of western journalists in the Baba Amr district of Homs and urged to "tighten the security grip" on the opposition-held city in November.

The revelations are contained in more than 3,000 documents that activists say are emails downloaded from private accounts belonging to Assad and his wife Asma.

As is usually the case in these situations the initial disclosures mostly confirm what we already knew but besides the thuggery and the bragging there is the banality of the wife's demands for crystal chandeliers and fondue sets in the midst of a civil war.

We have no way to know whether the emails are genuine or fake but many of the major intelligence services monitoring Syria will have a pretty good idea. It takes a lot of information to produce a forgery that would withstand cross checking with the volumes of information they have on file [1].

The opinion of the emails that is likely to matter is that formed by Russia's GRU. According to the US establishment media Russia is the principal force blocking UN action against Syria. Which is the truth but not necessarily the whole truth. A cynic might suggest that with the Libyan civil war just finished and the war in Afghanistan continuing, the Obama administration would prefer to have its hands being tied by the Russians than charge into what could be a messy situation in an election year. Should Russia decide to change that position, the emails would provide a convenient pretext.

[1] Dissatisfied by the opinion of the CIA analysts who dismissed evidence of Iraqi WMD as clearly spurious, the Bush administration had to create a new intelligence unit (Feith's Office of Special Plans) to pronounce the evidence compelling. Unlike Feith, the CIA analysts could spot that it was rather unlikely that Iraqi plans for nuclear technology would use Farsi, the language of Iran.

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Late Late Night FDL: Hellhound

Son of Dave -- Hellhound live at Union Chapel, Islington, London.[...]

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The Nightowl Newswrap

By @BG & @YD

• Shut up about firing Rush Limbaugh! For the love of all that is holy, shut up about firing him. He needs to stay on the air and keep talking, doubling down every few days, all the way to November, criminy, even republicans are bailing on him, now is no time for him to clam up.

• Somebody's gonna get their hair pulled! Ann Coulter unloaded on Sarah Palin, calling her a charlatan and blasting her for cheering the idea of a brokered convention. For the record, the only thing we would like to see more than those two in a hair-pullin' catfight is a brokered GOP convention, but we remain convinced that we have simply not lived good enough lives to see either happen in our lifetimes.

• We give them five years, tops. By then the pink tent will be folded up and packed away. The largest chapter of the Komen Foundation, the one in New York City, is cancelling it's big spring gala and having a quiet, unassuming breakfast to announce the grantees for the next year. They admit freely in the letter announcing the cancellation that the breakfast is by invitation only, the invitation is non-transferable and the big soirree was cancelled because the group is unsure of their ability to raise money in the short and intermediate term.

• Breathtakingly sociopathic. While Assad's military was slaughtering civilians in Homs and murdering children in his torture chambers, he was buying games for his iPad from iTunes.

• We can't believe that in 20-fucking-12 this sort of nonsense is still sanctioned rather than scorned A Baptist minister from Oklahoma (where else?!?) delivered a prayer on the floor of the state House of Representatives a few days ago in which he blamed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 at the hands of Islamist radicals for Americans 'turning away from (the Christian) god.' Oddly enough, he didn't take it the next logical step and blame the people of Oklahoma for the attack on the Murrah federal building in 1995 at the hands of a CHRISTIAN terrorist.

• We hope this suit is successful Sexual Minorities Uganda, an organization that works for LGBT rights in Uganda, has, with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights, brought a suit in US federal court against an American evangelical leader Scott Lively. The suit seeks damages, but more importantly, seeks to have his actions, and by extension those of his associate in the Ugandan parliament, the truly evil David Bahati, as persecution.

• Here's something else we haven't lived good enough lives to see come to pass -- but CREW wants the IRS to investigate Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform group for violations of the tax code. The complaint filed alleges that "It appears ATR and Mr. Norquist declared less than half of the political activity it conducted in 2010 on its tax return. Therefore, the IRS should investigate ATR and Mr. Norquist and, should it find they violated federal law, take appropriate action, including but not limited to referring this matter to the Department of Justice for prosecution."

• While we're crusing hate radio can we get rid of that awful skank Dana Loesh? And if anyone perfects time travel, send her ass back ten years when she was just an obscure, apolitical scribe writing a parenting column quite poorly. She is totally not equipped to be a serious pundit. And she's married to a goon.

• Once, twice, three times a victim. "A 16-year-old Moroccan girl has reportedly killed herself after a judge ordered her to marry the man that raped her. ... The teen, known only as Amina, ate rat poison after the Tangier judge ruled that her 26-year-old rapist could marry her instead of going to jail, according to the Moroccan publication al-Massae. ... The ruling came after Amina's family asked the court to punish the man. The paper said that Amina committed suicide at the home of her husband's family. ... Under Moroccan law, a rapist may be exempted from punishment if he agrees to marry his victim. Local tradition holds that forcible marriage protects the honor of the woman who is raped."

• Yes, unless you're willing to unleash nukes, stopping a homicidal maniac with an army is impossible. "President Barack Obama has said the prospect of international military intervention in Syria is premature and could lead to a civil war. Speaking at a White House news conference on Wednesday, Obama said military intervention could lead to more deaths in Syria. Obama says he and David Cameron, the British prime minister, discussed possible "immediate steps'' their countries could take in order to make sure humanitarian aid is being provided to the Syrian people."

• This is kabuki: Ahmadinejad doesn't make any decisions in Iran and everybody knows it. "Iran's parliament grilled President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over a long list of accusations, including that he mismanaged the nation's economy and defied the authority of the country's supreme leader. Ahmadinejad is the first president in the country's history to be hauled before the Iranian parliament, a serious blow to his standing in a conflict pitting him against elected officials and the country's powerful clerical establishment."

• Swiss bus tragedy "At least 28 people, including 22 children, have died in a bus accident in an alpine tunnel in Switzerland, police said. The children were returning to Belgium from a skiing holiday in Val d'Anniviers on Wednesday. The bus hit a wall on Tuesday night in the motorway tunnel running from east to west and exiting at Sierre in the Swiss canton of Valais."

And finally...

• The Adam and Eve myth gets more stupid every day. "The remains of what may be a previously unknown human species have been identified in southern China. The bones, which represent at least five individuals, have been dated to between 11,500 and 14,500 years ago. But scientists are calling them simply the Red Deer Cave people, after one of the sites where they were unearthed. The team has told the PLoS One journal that far more detailed analysis of the fossils is required before they can be ascribed to a new human lineage. "We're trying to be very careful at this stage about definitely classifying them," said study co-leader Darren Curnoe from the University of New South Wales, Australia. "One of the reasons for that is that in the science of human evolution or palaeoanthropology, we presently don't have a generally agreed, biological definition for our own species (Homo sapiens), believe it or not. And so this is a highly contentious area," he told BBC News."

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ightowl-newswrap

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Super-PACs Should Be Illegal

As you can see by the above graphic from The Washington Post, about 7 out of 10 Americans would like for super-PACs to be outlawed. They are unhappy with the way they are perverting our electoral system (by giving the rich a much bigger voice in who gets elected). It's time for our politicians to step up and get this done. Do we want to live in a democracy (where everyone has a voice) or in a plutocracy (where only the rich get a say in government)?

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Fracking Madness In Pennsylvania

Blue America is concerned about every congressional seat in the country but PA-17 is especially important for a few reasons. For one, it's the only realistic shot to replace an incumbent Blue Dog, with a progressive champion. This cycle. The race pits our friend Matt Cartwright against corrupt reactionary Tim Holden. Holden has voted more frequently with Boehner and Cantor against core Democratic issues and principles than almost any other Democrat in Congress. But there are two more reasons. I used to live in Stroudsburg in Monroe County, now part of this district and I love the beautiful part of the state and the wonderful people who live there. And then there's Matt Cartwright himself... an extraordinary candidate committed to the values that have always animated DWT and Blue America.

Yesterday the state legislature in Harrisburg passed Act 13-- an ironically numbered bill... unlucky for everyone in the Commonwealth. As you may know, Holden has been one of the few Democrats in Congress to help the GOP with their fracking agenda and to work to allow drilling in the national parks. We asked Matt to give us his read of what happened yesterday in the legislature and how this kind of bill could have passed in a state like Pennsylvania.

I was dismayed when I read about Act 13, and I agree with the Sierra Club?s nickname for this bill. The Republicans running state government in Pennsylvania are so completely given over to the notion that out-of-state fracking companies represent economic salvation that they seem to have taken leave of their senses. It?s not only that they?ve stripped communities and municipalities of all control over local zoning. It?s also painfully obvious that Pennsylvania is getting next to nothing in return.

Think about it. Taking away local control of zoning, in the name of preventing any community objections to fracking operations, means that the people in charge of deciding whether fracking can occur locally will never be the people who have to live nearby, the people whose water wells are most at risk for contamination. The people who have most to lose have the least say. It makes no sense at all, and it flies in the face of hundreds of years of zoning practice and tradition. That local citizens can no longer show up at local zoning variance hearings to give voice to their concerns about their families? safety and the water purity on their land-- but must now hire attorneys to file suit in Commonwealth Court, in Harrisburg-- this is nothing less than an un- American assault on property rights.

In return for relinquishing these rights, what do Pennsylvanians receive?

Jobs? Everyone living in northeastern Pennsylvania knows that the great bulk of the jobs created by the fracking boom consists of jobs given to oil and gas workers from out of state. Thousands and thousands of license plates on pickup trucks from southern and western states are silent testimony to that. The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Airport parking lot is always filled, not with the vehicles of the people whose aquifers are endangered, but with those of the faraway workers who got these jobs. Where is the evidence that tens of thousands of local jobs are being created, so as to justify this Harrisburg kowtow to the fracking companies?

Tax revenues? Why is it necessary that Pennsylvania apply one of the lowest environmental impact fees in the nation to fracking companies? Enormous fortunes are being made on the gas. Charging an impact fee that is one of the lowest in the country makes no sense when there is no evidence that there truly is a ?race to the bottom? going on.

Few people are saying that fracking should be permanently banned, as it is in France. Instead, people are saying, ?this gas has been there for ages. Given the clear risks of groundwater contamination, why the rush now?? Clearly, the right approach is to make deliberate, sensible assessments of the risks and benefits involved. I am not convinced that that has been done. Considering the risks to the aquifers, streams and rivers of Pennsylvania, I believe that moving forward with Act 13, while drowning out the cries of local townspeople, truly is a form of madness.

Please help Blue America replace Tim Holden with Matt Cartwright. There really is a big difference. Matt's new ad:



Read The Full Article:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/03/fracking-madness-in-pennsylvania.html

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