Sunday Funnies

Save our CEOs

Coming in October:

Closing ranks behind a scandal

Leo Vasquez, Harris County tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, issued a statement that dismissed complaints that Johnson’s job, which can include approving or rejecting voter applications, conflicts with his side business.

“Ed Johnson is an honorable man,” Vasquez said. “It is slanderous and absolutely reprehensible to suggest without evidence that he is involved in inappropriate activity with regard to voter registration in Harris County.”

Bullshit, Leo. You squeal like a stuck pig every single time somebody shows you the dirt under your fingernails. You're a hack. A token Latin hack, at that.

Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos’ campaign paid more than $7,000 last year to CDS. She said late Wednesday her campaign hired CDS for targeted campaign mailers but she did not know about Johnson’s job with the county.

She insisted she saw no compromise of the elections office’s mission.

“I saw no conflict,” Lykos said.

Now that's the kind of hypocrisy Harris County Republicans are more accustomed to: blind injustice.

Gee, ya think there's any chance Attorney General Greg Abbott will investigate?

Huckabee's "mushy middle"

Great news; the Republicans are still not getting it:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee warned Republicans Wednesday against moving to the "mushy middle," arguing that only clearly stated conservative policies can bring the party back to power. ...

"I hear people who give advice that the Republicans need to moderate. They need to be a little more to the left," Huckabee said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It sounds like advice that Democrats would give to us so that we'd never win another election ever."

Some argue that Republicans have lost Congress and the White House because they've turned the party over to social and religious conservatives, driving away moderates and independents. Huckabee made precisely the opposite argument.

"It's when they move to the mushy middle and get squishy that they get beat," he said.

Pastor Mike, patron saint of adult onset diabetes, he of the big mushy middle himself -- having lost all that weight -- is readying himself for a run in 2012. He's got to sound as tough as Newt and Dick, though, so he's throwing his own (stir-fried lightly) red meat to the mad-dog base.

You remember the right-wing base; they shoot doctors and museum guards, don't they.

"Historically, the way we've found our way back to winning, having clear convictions that are conservative and then when elected, act like it," he said. "In every election, when Republicans have had clarity of convictions and those convictions were conservative, they win."

He warned that many Republicans have gone astray by buying into President Barack Obama's big-spending effort to stimulate the economy, a move he called "a big, colossal, utterly disastrous mistake.

"Our Republicans have culpability in that," Huckabee said. "There were some people who questioned whether I was really conservative. I don't want to hear, ever, people ever again talk about how conservative they are if they supported that."

Now that last line there sounds like a shot at Kay Bailey.

Which reminds why Governor MoFo is going to whip her next spring, even with one arm in a sling.

Midland's water contaminated

Erin Brockovich is on it:

"I never thought I'd see another Hinkley, California," Brockovich told CBS News from Midland, Texas, “but I’m afraid I might be wrong."

Hexavalent chromium, Brockovich said, is now being found in significant amounts in the water of over 40 homes in Midland.

"The only difference between here and Hinkley," Brockovich said, "is that I saw higher levels here than I saw in Hinkley."

Midland resident Kay Saythre knew something was wrong, and asked Brockovich to investigate.

"We didn’t really understand why the water was yellow when we filled the pool," Saythre said.

She also conducted a town hall meeting there last night:

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing — green water,” Brockovich, now president of Brockovich Research and Consulting, told a crowd of concerned homeowners and neighbors at the Midland County Horseshoe Arena.

The water looked like Gatorade coming out of the tap at one home near the most hard-hit area of County Road 112. The levels of hexavalent chromium in the wells is the highest she’s ever seen.

Drilling company Schlumberger is the suspected culprit.

Bob Bowcock, Brockovich’s chief environmental investigator, said in his research he has learned the state tested some wells in the area in February 2006 and found the levels to be at 2,600 parts per billion (ppb), well above the 100 ppb safety threshold. However, an error was made and not one of the homeowners was notified of the problem.

Now three years later, some of those levels measure at 5,000 ppb and higher.

“What people are pulling out of their water today, I wouldn’t give to my dogs. Or rats I wanted to kill in my attic,” he said.

There's a website set up for the area's residents.