An ACA showdown, a Cornyn fail, a D for Comptroller, and the Texas Libertarian slate

-- It's high noon here between the Poop Cruzers and the Affordable Healthcare Act supporters.

The ground war over Obamacare — the one that will determine whether people sign up — will be won and lost in places like Texas.

If Obamacare fails in the Lone Star State — that is, if a significant portion of the 6.1 million uninsured Texans don’t or can’t enroll — then the White House could miss its national enrollment targets, the new health insurance exchanges could falter and insurance rates could spike.

[...]

Advocates are banking on the idea that a grass-roots push in more liberal, urban areas of Texas, plus the demand among the uninsured to get health coverage, will overcome the state’s institutional opposition and deliver on the promise of Obamacare.

“Some of my friends on the other side of the aisle are doing as much as they can to make it difficult for this program to work,” state Sen. Rodney Ellis, a Democrat from Houston and prominent supporter of the law, said as enrollment began a few days ago. He thinks the Republican strategy will backfire. “One more election cycle and all of this is going to go away,” he predicted.

I'm going to keep shouting out to my state senator to run against John "RINO" Cornyn next year.  Go read the whole article as always.  Here's more to tease you.

The best hope of Obamacare backers is to support the efforts of local allies in regions such as Houston, Dallas and Austin, the bluest areas of a deeply red state. That’s because these areas lean liberal and also have an existing network of progressive activists. The Obama administration sent Texas nearly $11 million — more federal grant money than any other state — to fund “navigators” who are trained and tasked with helping people through the sign-up process.

In Houston, with 1.4 million uninsured residents, city officials are modeling their efforts on hurricane-force emergency response to counter the adamant state opposition, said Stephen Williams, director of the Houston Department of Health and Human Services.

“We believe this effort is so critical that we have created an incident command structure,” Williams said. “This is the same structure that we use to respond to hurricanes and to respond to public health disasters.”

The city of Houston has provided free office space to Enroll America, a nonprofit group closely associated with the former Obama campaign that is now spreading the word about the health law. The city has provided at least 55 people to help residents enroll and created space for a phone bank. It has ordered public library computers to have links to enroll access and it’s even printing Obamacare information on local water bills “so the broader population can all be informed,” said Mayor Pro-Tem Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat.

-- Speaking of Corndog, he was humiliated by Bob Schieffer on Facepalm the Nation yesterday, and appeared to be completely oblivious to it.  There's video of the exchange at the link.  It's just laughably absurd to watch Cornyn parrot his talking points as Schieffer compared Republicans to colicky babies, and then gangsters.

Update: Cornyn's TV spot joined the flurry of campaign ads breaking today -- trumpeting his "Conservative" bonafides -- but the senior senator from Texas has already lost the race; Glenn Beck has informed Louie Gohmert that God wants him to run for the US Senate.

-- Mike Collier makes official his bid to be the state's Comptroller of Public Accounts.



Please, somebody tell the man how to pronounce the name of the office he's running for.

-- Texas Libertarians are once again fielding a full slate of candidates next year.

Saying that the current federal government shutdown and tensions between Republicans and Democrats have made Texans ready for a change in leadership, Libertarian Kathie Glass on Wednesday officially announced her candidacy in the 2014 governor’s race.

"We’re going to be active in every aspect of this race,” said Glass, a Houston lawyer who also ran for governor in 2010. “We are getting out there a lot sooner.”

Glass said she plans to visit every county in Texas during her campaign and will talk to Texans about their frustrations with the current state of affairs.

That's a page out of the David Van Os playbook.

“This shutdown is just a glimpse of what might happen,” Glass said at her Austin news conference, at which several other Texas Libertarian hopefuls also announced their candidacies. “Voters know that what they want they are not going to get from the two other parties, so we are looking forward to offering them this alternative from the Libertarian Party.”

Glass said her campaign would focus on the idea of nullification, a legal theory that a state can invalidate federal laws it finds unconstitutional. [...]

She said she would nullify the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, and federal regulations on companies that lead them to ship jobs overseas to nations with laxer regulations.

More on the Libs down the ballot.

Her husband, Tom Glass, the vice chairman of the Texas Libertarian Party, announced at Wednesday’s news conference that he will be running for attorney general in 2014. He said he is running to battle unnecessary restrictions from the federal government.

“I will use the force of the office to stop unconstitutional federal acts in Texas,” Glass said, citing Obamacare, privacy laws, prison regulations and spending.

[...]

Other Libertarians who announced their candidacies Wednesday include journalist Brandon de Hoyos and Allen businessman Ed Kless, who are running for lieutenant governor; Lago Vista City Council member Ed Tidwell, who’s running for land commissioner; rancher Rocky Palmquist, who’s seeking to become agriculture commissioner; and Austin businessman Mark Miller, who’s running for railroad commissioner.

The Libertarians are always entertaining, and if Texans who vote in the GOP primary actually paid attention to them, they'd see that the Libs come closest to representing their isolationist, xenophobic views.

I simply don't think those voters are intelligent enough to figure that out, though.