Greg Abbott's Bad News of the Week

He makes headlines twice; this one is for dirty money.

A report released by Texans for Public Justice today revealed that Attorney General Greg Abbott took in $85,000 in campaign cash from two brothers who were convicted this month of massive civil securities fraud.  The Wyly brothers could be on the hook for $550 million for what SEC called "an elaborate sham system."

From the report:

Fruits of this investment fraud appear to have trickled down to Texas politicians. The two Wyly brothers contributed $1,247,543 to state PACs and politicians from 2000 through 2009, money that overwhelmingly benefited the GOP.

Unfortunately—considering Greg Abbott’s own record of corruption and insider dealing—it comes as no surprise that Abbott would count the Wyly brothers among his cronies.

(If you haven't been following the trial of Charles and the late Sam Wyly, then catch up here.  It's just run-of-the-mill Lone Star 1%-er corruption, but every time some of these white collar crooks get busted, more strings get pulled and their politicians fall out.)

And this one is for vote suppression.

As the Waco Tribune reports, 92-year old Ruby Barber has tried, but has so far failed, to obtain one of those so-called “free” photo IDs from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), now that one is required for her to cast her legal vote this year, as she has for decades, until now, without a problem.

Barber’s story is heartbreaking and maddening but, unfortunately, probably not entirely rare. The DOJ estimated, based on the state’s supplied data when the federal agency blocked the law in 2012, “the total number of registered voters [in Texas] who lack a driver’s license or personal identification card issued by DPS could range from 603,892 to 795,955.”

Barber’s driver’s license expired in 2010 and she’s now having difficulty locating “her nearly century-old birth certificate that she’d need to obtain a voter ID under a new state law.” As the New York Daily News reports, the details of Barber’s story and her fight to try and cast her vote are simply absurd.

It's shaping up to be a long hot summer for the man on wheels.  Is it really a surprise that Greg Abbott only wants to debate Wendy Davis twice?  There's no way he could get elected if Texans understood how truly terrible a human being he is.

Even just the small number of Texans who have ID and only an occasional voting habit.  Even the Texans that vote at all -- those who are smart enough to comprehend the depth of Greg Abbott's corruption -- are still enough Texans to keep him out of the governor's office.  Republicans are blind to it, but no one else.  And they're the minority... but only if enough of the casual-political-interest Texans see the light and take hold of the reins.

To be continued, from now until early November.

Update: And it just got worse for him.

Wrong foreign policy scandal opportunity, GOP

Benghazi is not ever going to amount to anything except a molehill on Fox News for Republicans, and even they seem to finally understand this.  And it's not because they are beginning to comprehend the hypocrisy associated with their MIA outrage at the thirteen attacks and over sixty deaths at American embassies on George W. Bush's watch.

The real blunder they have made is that if they had wanted to tar Obama with a actual scandal, they could have gone after this.

Amid a deadly backlash again vaccinations and a resurgence of polio in Pakistan, the White House has promised that the CIA will never again use an immunization campaign as a tool of spycraft.

[...]

The Central Intelligence Agency had enlisted a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, to collect intelligence under the guise of an immunization effort in the city of Abbottabad as part of planning for the high-risk May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound there.

The agency aimed to confirm intelligence that bin Laden was at the compound by comparing DNA obtained from children living there to a sample from the fugitive al-Qaida chief’s late sister, the Guardian newspaper reported in July 2011.

Even before those revelations, the Taliban in Pakistan had already opposed Western-backed vaccination campaigns, claiming that they were secret efforts to sterilize Muslim children. But the CIA’s actions helped fuel an armed backlash against immunization workers, reportedly killing 56 people between December 2012 and May 2014. The victims include not just medical workers but police officers assigned to guard them.

Another result of the CIA’s actions was to lead many Pakistani parents to forgo vaccinations for ailments like polio. The crippling and sometimes fatal illness has no known cure – but there are several safe and effective vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Of the 77 documented new cases of polio worldwide in calendar year 2014, 61 were in Pakistan, mostly from the remote and restive Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) region, which serves as a Taliban stronghold.

Maybe it's that presidents just aren't interested in reigning in the CIA.  Maybe they simply are unable to, or are fearful of repercussions if they attempt (a la JFK conspiracy theory).  But that's a separate quandary from "how do we make Obama look bad on this".

Irrespective of the glamorous drama of the CIA analyst's life in shows like '24' and 'Homeland', it's not all guns and bombs, as the disclosure of Valerie Wilson Plame's secret agent double life revealed.  Being deployed by State in a foreign country is both boring and exciting at the same time, dangerous and monotonous simultaneously.  It comes with mostly intrinsic rewards in exchange for the elevated risk of being violently killed.  Update (5/22): Please note the distinction I should have more clearly made between a diplomat and a spy.  And an ambassador's risk of violent death varies by nation, with Caroline Kennedy's risk being exponentially less than Christopher Stevens'.

If Republicans had chosen this vaccination scandal instead of Benghazi, then it certainly follows that they would have had to condemn the CIA.  More problematically IMO, they would have been forced to express sympathy for little brown children dying of an easily eradicable disease... because American security interests in Pakistan were more important.

And it's difficult to care about poor children in Pakistan when you don't care about poor children in America, or even in your own state.  At least Republicans are consistent, in other words.  Mean, sorry, and stupid, but consistent.  Oh well, suppressing the vote and sustaining the Obamacare outrage seems to be working for them, so why should they worry too much about 2014?