Tom DeLay prepares for ''Dancing with the Inmates"

Former Dancing with the Stars "star" (obviously not as wingnut-beloved as grizzly cub Bristol Palin) and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is now, officially, a convicted felon for money-laundering donations from corporations to state candidates in violation of Texas law.

First, DeLay will NOT go quietly. Nor repentantly. Not even pseudo-repentantly. Expect no Bob Ney or Jack Abramoff here. No, the Hammer will stay the Hammer.

The man who, in pot-calling-kettle mode, accused then-Travis County DA Ronnie Earle of a political vendetta won't change.

Poetic justice would be to send him to a privately operated prison of the type his GOP buddies favor, like GEO Group (the former Whackyournuts) or CCA. Doorknob knows there's enough of them.

Even more poetic justice would be for the one-time pest exterminator to literally get a dose of his own medicine.

New York Times doesn't understand Texas politics

In this "Texas tribune" preview of fallout from midterm elections, we get this totally wrong statement, contrasting state legislative redistricting with Congressional reapportionment:

Legislative redistricting works differently. The number of seats is set, and the people who occupy them in January are the people voting on the changes. A partisan breakdown over the last redistricting maps resulted in a very deliberate work stoppage, with House Democrats leaving the state for Ardmore, Okla., at one point and the Senate Democrats bailing out to Albuquerque at another.

Plain wrong over why state senate Democrats left the state.

As well as being full of omissions.

First, it was Tom DeLay's attempted mid-decade redistricting of Congressional boundaries that caused Democratic walkouts.

Second, note that the story never tells how DeLay's state-level henchmen abused power, in conjunction with him, and sicced regional FAA on the Dems' plane.

Third, the story totally overlooks the role of sellout, turncoat Democrats such as Helen Giddings in undermining the Democrats' flights in the first place.

That said, the story does note that a Democratic Department of Justice, namely the Civil Rights Division, will clamp down on the worst gerrymandering.

GOP pork threatens Galveston and could be nonfunctional

But, nonetheless, Bush, Tom DeLay and Kay Bailey Cheerleader all favored building a hazardous biomaterials lab — a major one, with majorly hazardous critters like Ebola — on Galveston Island.

Hurricane Ike has already shown just how stupid that decision was:

“It’s crazy, in my mind,” said Jim Blackburn, an environmental lawyer in Houston. “I just find an amazing willingness among the people on the Texas coast to accept risks that a lot of people in the country would not accept.”

Now, among the safety features, they include shutting down all experiments 24 hours before a hurricane landfall.

But, if it were built somewhere else…

You wouldn’ have to do that!

The claim that politics had nothing to do with the location is laughable.

Abramoff web starting to catch up to DeLay

Here’s how the tentacles of Smilin’ Jack’s corruption are starting to be connected to The Bugman, as the Houston Chronicle reports.

The federal probe into corruption related to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff could be inching closer to former U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay of Sugar Land as investigators focus on a former DeLay chief of staff who later employed the Republican leader's wife.

DeLay has not been charged with any crime in the Abramoff case. And his lawyer, Richard Cullen, said federal investigators have given DeLay no indication that he is a target of the ongoing grand jury probe, such as subpoenaing documents.

But prosecutors could decide within weeks whether to bring charges against former DeLay staff chief Edwin Buckham, according to sources close to the investigation who spoke on the condition that they not be identified. The decision should give a clear signal on whether DeLay remains in legal jeopardy, the sources said.

In recent days federal prosecutors have served notice that their sprawling Abramoff case has remained very much alive.

Josh Marshall has more on why Buckham is joining other present and former Congressional staffers, and even one Congressman, Arizona’s Rick Rienzi, in the gunsights of federal prosecutors tracking down Abramoff threads.

Why the sudden explosion of movement on the Abramoff and other GOP corruption investigations? Is it tied in some way to the Purge story? It's always hard to infer just what the delays and speed-ups in these investigations mean. Most of the big developments we don't know about until long after the investigation is completed. Sometimes we never know. And that leaves us like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, each speculating based on our little patch of facts with little understanding of the big picture.
That said, there’s been such an avalanche of developments in recent days and weeks, that I think it's now quite reasonable to conclude that the turnaround is related to the fact that Gonzales and his crew are flat on their backs and aren't able to block them any more. This is the sort of question or charge people only make sheepishly and with some embarrassment. I've been reluctant to come to this conclusion as well. But now I think there are solid reasons to believe this is true.

Behind all this, let’s not forget that Ronnie Earle’s state-level investigation, which includes DeLay himself, is still out there, too.