I am referring, of course to Wendy Davis, whose epic filibuster against the radical anti-abortion legislation proposed by the Texas Taliban Republicans was crucial to running out the clock on the special legislative session:

She was a state senator Tuesday morning. By Wednesday, she was a political celebrity known across the nation. But also hoarse, hungry and thirsty.

The leg-numbing filibuster by Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat — in which she stood and talked for more than 11 hours at the Capitol here, never sitting, eating, drinking or even using the bathroom to help block passage of an anti-abortion bill supported by the state’s top Republicans — was not the longest such marathon, by Texas standards.

But it didn’t matter.

Her feat of stamina and conviction gained thousands of Twitter followers in a matter of hours. Pictures of the sneakers she wore beneath her dress zoomed across computer and television screens. The press corps demanded to know her shoe brand. (Mizuno, it turned out.) Hundreds of men, women and children waited for hours at the Capitol to sit in an upstairs gallery and watch her in action, standing in lines that snaked around the rotunda. Even President Obama noticed, posting a Twitter message on Tuesday that read, “Something special is happening in Austin tonight.”

Ms. Davis, 50, has known long odds and, for Democrats, was the perfect symbol in a fight over what a woman can do. She was a teenager when her first child was born, but managed as a single mother to pull herself from a trailer park to Harvard Law School to a hard-fought seat in the Texas Senate, a rare liberal representing conservative Tarrant County. According to Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston, she had the second-most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2011.

They used some bogus rules of order to shut her down down two hours early, but parliamentary points of order made by Democrats, along with a remarkably raucous gallery, pushed the vote past the midnight deadline for the special section.

Of course, playing by the rules is not how the Republicans play, so they tried to reset the clock, in order to make it appear as if they had made the deadline:

That is evidence that someone changed the official record to backdate the vote, which took place beginning at 12:02 AM on June 26th to before 11:59 PM on June 25th.

That’s stealing the vote. Or cheating. Or being a Republican.

Social media is cruel to cheaters, though. There was a YouTube live stream, there was a paper record with a timestamp of 12:02 AM for the vote, there was this image of the date discrepancy, and there were plenty of reporters who put it together and deduced that hijinks were afoot.

Hundreds of thousands of people watched this online, and knew the time as well, so in the wee hours of the morning, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst fessed up.

Rick Perry, who appears to still think that he can become President, is calling another special session in order to get another bite at the apple.

I think that the Democratic State Senators should leave the state to prevent quorum.

I also think that Wendy Davis should be the Democratic nominee for either Governor or US Senate in the next election, but I rather expect that the Democratic Party insiders will find a way to dismiss her, because, after all, she has the, “the second-most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2011,” and heaven forbid that you nominate someone from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.