Wouldn’t it be beautifully ironic?

There’s one ironic twist that came to mind over the last couple of days as, I’ve read about and mulled over Wendy Davis’ chances of winning the race for Governor of Texas.

It was Greg Abbott’s redistricting shenanigans that forced the 2010 primaries in Texas to be held much later then usual.  That allowed Ted Cruz the time needed to force Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst into a runoff election for US Senate.  A race which Dewhurst ultimately lost.

The irony is that it could be David Dewhurst’s lack of control of the Texas Senate during Wendy Davis’ filibuster that propelled her into the national spotlight and into the Governor’s race.  A race where she ultimately beats Greg Abbott.

It would be beautiful irony if these two bumbling GOP politicians wind up screwing each other out of their aspirations for higher office.

Random Thoughts on Monday

The GOP has redistricted themselves into a box. By drawing such partisan districts, which guarantee that only a member of the GOP can win, they have left themselves no room to moderate their stance. They cannot be beaten by a Democrat in these districts only by a more right wing nut job then themselves.

This is a very interesting and heartening analysis of the difference between Wendy Davis’ filibuster and Ted Cruz’s rambling speech, Who Cares?

This is from Google Trends and looks at the scale of searches for “Ted Cruz” and “Wendy Davis” over the last six month. The spikes show the period of their respective filibuster events. When we first looked at it the ‘search week’ wasn’t complete yet. So we didn’t have full data. But now we do.

What’s notable here is that this measures not press attention but popular interest in the two events. And as you can see there appears to have been much, much more for Davis.

Adding the term ‘filibuster’ to the names makes the disparity even greater.

Now one argument might be that Davis, for most Americans, came absolutely out of nowhere and thus more people might be searching her name than Cruz who’s been something of a known commodity for more than a year. Of course, press attention can also drive searches. So the dynamic can work in that direction too.

But even with all these caveats, it’s hard not to conclude that there was a lot more interest in Davis’s gambit than Cruz’s – a fact I find quite surprising. If anything it’s the national news media that’s out of sync with popular interest and perception.

Click the link above to see the graphs, they help tell the story.

I didn’t get to spend any time at the Tribune Festival this year. Nothing too important seemed to transpire. The big fireworks will come on Thursday, when Wendy Davis makes her big announcement.

And to piggy-back on Atrios, The Precious.

Except for the fact that he beat them twice, conservative really don’t have any reason to hate Obama. “Obamacare” is just the Heritage Foundation health care plan, aka Romneycare, and otherwise, uh, what?

I’m not making the argument that Obama is just like a Republican, just making the point that he really hasn’t given them much to work with. They’ve seized on Obamacare because it’s the big legislative accomplishment, but they’re mostly incoherent (or lying) about why it makes them so mad. It’s just the thing they’ve chosen to rally behind because they really don’t have anything else.

I suppose there’s Benghazi!

My take is that our country has moved so far to the right, that it’s hard to see what is really going on. The GOP and the wing-nuts agenda is to discredit government in any way they can. Federal employees, soldiers, etc.. not getting their paychecks further discredits the government. That is what the GOP along withTed Cruz and his minions are all about. They don’t care who gets hurt as long as it’s the government, even if they’re a part of that government, that gets damaged.

[UPDATE]:  Or go read Perlstein, Thinking Like A Conservative (Part Three):  On Shutting Down Government.