ustxtxb_obs_2010_08_20_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

Diane Wilson PHOTO BY MONI HOFLER @MsVFAB on President Barack Obama’s arrival in Austin on Aug. 9, and his brief meeting with Perry. “RT” means msVFAB was relaying news from News8Austin. `Ah, John Philip Sousa, I can’t quit you.” @Virgotex on the music played by the UT Trombone Choir as Obama left FOR THE LATEST political analysis, read Bob Moser’s Purple Texas at www.texasobserver.org/purpletexas all, “safe R.” Sabato’s reasoning has more to do with Gov. Rick Perry’s seemingly endless tenure than with an ideological shift. Sabato says the Texas climate is actually worse for Democrats now than a few years ago. “If Bill -White were running this race in 2006,” Sabato says, “and Perry at that time had already served 10 or 11 years, the results might be different than I think they’re going to be.” For now, experts are telling Democrats it’s not time to pull out the party hats. Polling numbers are “the first word,” says Sabato. “Not the last word.” ABBY RAPOPORT TYRANT’S FOE Diane Wilson ON JUNE 9, ACTIVIST DIANE WILSON THREW, IN HER words, a “wall-eyed fit” when Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, ranking minority member of the Senate Energy Committee, blocked the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Actlegislation that would have lifted oil companies’ paltry liability caps. Wilson poured something that looked like oil over her head, and disrupted Murkowski’s hearing by yelling, “We’re tired of the bailouts, and we are tired of being dumped on in the Gulf!” On June 17, during former BP CEO Tony Hayward’s testimony before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Wilson smeared another oil-like substance all over herself, and shouted, “Tony, you ought to be charged with a crime!” Wilson was charged with two counts apiece of unlawful conduct and resisting arrest. On Aug. 20, she’ll go before a jury and face a sentence of up to two years in federal prison. To those familiar with WilsonSouth Texas’ answer to anarchist Emma Goldmannone of this should come as a surprise. Nor should her insistence that raising a ruckus over the BP catastrophe, which she calls “a soul-killing, nail-in-the-coffin apocalypse,” is important enough to risk spending time behind bars. A fourth-generation shrimper from the tiny town of Seadrift, Wilson was radicalized in the late ’80s after witnessing environmental atrocities committed by local petrochemical companiesespecially Formosa Plastics Corp. Remember in the Bible, when trumpeters made the walls of Jericho crumble? Wilson’s a trumpeter and Formosa’s Jericho. Since the early ’90s, she’s been circling their walls and blowing her horn. In 2002, she chained herself to one of Formosa’s towers to draw attention to the company’s record of environmental and public health violations. That protest earned her 180 days in jail. Wilson recounts her adventures in a memoir called An Unreasonable Woman, a title borrowed from George Bernard Shaw’s observation that “all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Wilson gave the sentiment a feminist twist and started using it during speeches for Code Pink, the plucky antiwar group she helped start. “Most people have no idea that you can stand up and shout,” Wilson has said. “We’re all much too well-behaved.” ROBERT LELEUX BROWSE the Code Pink website at codepink4peace.org “I know you’re on a tight schedule, President Obama, but we have a lot of tasty taco trucks in town. I am just sayin’.” @omarg on Austin’s reputation for mobile Mexican eateries “President Obama just Hooked ‘Em” @katienaranjo on Obama taking the stage at the University of Texas at Austin 4 THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG