Monday Roundup: Republican Plans Gang Aft Agley

We are very close to the end of the session. In one week, it will all be over but the crying. After a session in which Democrats acquitted themselves very well, it is worth examining who the losers were. In this case, it was the legislative leadership, whose plans were quickly scattered and dismantled.

I'm not the only person who thinks so. Notice this story from the Houston Chronicle in which the derailing of GOP hopes and dreams is described blow by blow. Recall, for instance, that this was to the be session of property tax appraisal reform. That didn't happen. The Chron's Ratcliffe makes the very salient point that House Speaker Tom Craddick, after starting out facing a contested election for Speaker, stopped minding the store so hard. That resulted in what every once in a while seemed like chaos.

The Governor's office is also in damage-control mode, talking vaguely about agendas. Former state party chairs have a bad habit of not playing ball very nicely after they bail out, but former state GOP chair Tom Pauken is particularly visceral when he says that Republicans "squandered a majority." That hurts.

Also, if you care to read far enough, they talk to Dan Patrick for some reason, and he continues his crusade against Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst for reasons that are thinly veiled at best. It is so obvious that Patrick fancies himself a gubernatorial candidate in 2010, I wonder why he isn't already putting out yard signs.

The immigration bill that everyone got all hot and bothered about may be a non-starter. It turns out that the remarks about "the extremes of each party being upset" about some details of the bill adds up to about 40 senators, according to the Washington Times. That's bad news, and what comes out on the other side of the contentious, endless debate we'll see on this bill may not resemble anything currently being discussed. The biggest issue is going to be the amnesty portion of the bill. Some senators seem pleased that something is getting done, but will dig in on the details, like Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Other senators are less than excited about the whole deal because they weren't included in the negotiations, and are not happy about it. The fine details of the proposal, openly lauded as a compromise between the two sides, are largely unknown to a big chunk of the membership. KBH and Cornyn have gotten together in an op-ed to let you, the people of Texas, know that they are not crazy about amnesty.

In national news, Jimmy Carter is letting George Bush and Tony Blair have it. Carter went as far as saying that the Bush administration is "one of the worst in history" as far as what Bush has done for (or to) the US in a geopolitical sense. He also called Tony Blair "apparently subservient." While it may not be crazy good for message control, I must admit that Carter's strident, open criticism of so many things in governance in the last 6 years or so has been enjoyable for me.

Do you know who George Lakoff is? He is a cognitive linguist who has been doing work on progressive framing and language for a long time. His books have turned grassroots activists everywhere into amateur linguists, which sometimes ends up being more harmful than helpful. However, if you wonder why Frank Luntz is so dangerous, it's because we don't have one, and Lakoff is at least offering some overt, basic tools for us to build a couple of our own. The Dallas Morning News has a report on Lakoff's time in Texas last week.

Finally, the Washington Post has another story about how Democrats beat Republicans to the Internet. They know it, and they are working on it. I wonder if the traditional Republican sources of money will be excited about developing a national GOP online strategy or supporting bloggers. If they do, they will catch up fast, but I don't know that the Internet is exactly a GOP demographic.