"New players pour resources"

"to help Harris County Democrats win."

Gotta love that:

Little-known Texas organizations that support Democratic candidates are pouring money and personnel into Harris County at seldom-seen levels for the Nov. 4 election, with the help of a few wealthy statewide donors and national labor unions.

Although some of the money is sluiced to the Texas Democratic Party or other counties, the work is part of an unprecedented push to aim resources at Houston-area elections through two groups run by a Washington-based director: The Texas Democratic Trust and the Lone Star Fund.

Together they have raised about $3.3 million in the last 18 months, apart from money each candidate has collected, according to state Ethics Commission records.

Free your wallet and the rest will follow (apologies to En Vogue).

In 2006, the same groups and donors helped Democratic candidates sweep out of office the Republican district attorney and Republican judges in Dallas County.

Now, the stakes are even higher in Harris County, the state's most populous, which provides a fat slice of the vote in statewide races.

That slice has historically been around 18 percent of the total of Texas votes, but in the Democratic primary in March -- with swollen turnout all over the state -- it was 27 percent.

Twenty-seven percent of the the Texas Democratic vote was cast in Harris County.

Democrats were tossed from Harris County administrative and judicial offices in the 1994 and 1996 elections and have not recaptured any posts. But surveys, the voter roll and other indicators suggest that the Republican voting advantage in the county has melted to near nothing.

Republican Party donors show no sign of matching the Democrat (sic) effort of operating apart from their party. Instead the GOP is using the same strategy it followed with success in 2006 and previous elections — funneling money from influential donors through the state and local parties.

Lots more good news in that article for the chances of having a two-party system in the nation's third-largest county again.

Bell for Senate's grand opening, yesterday

The Weekly Wrangle

This week's Texas Progressive Alliance Blog Round-Up includes no submissions from blog publishers who attended last weekend's Netroots Nation convention in Austin (we're saving those for a different Round-Up). There is one from someone who did not attend, however ...

The Texas Cloverleaf asks if John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison want more HIV in the global pandemic? Our Senators were 2 of the 16 votes against the latest HIV/AIDS bill in the Senate that passed overwhelmingly.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts on Diana Maldonado's great fundraising numbers in Maldonado Has Almost 4 to 1 COH Advantage In HD-52.

WhosPlayin stepped outside of his comfort zone a bit and commented on the Fannie and Freddie situation.

jobsanger blasts Republican attempts to allow offshore and ANWR drilling in Drilling Won't Make Us Energy Independent and in Bush Playing Politics With Oil.

The bar may be open, says TXSharon at Texas Kaos in Fire Water: With Compliments from EnCana, but if Encana's serving up the cocktails, it might be better to abstain.

McBlogger's own Harry Balczak has a new recurring feature, Harry Balczak's Reminder To You People. In this edition, he'd like to remind Those Of You Who Just Couldn't Vote For Kerry that your decision was, well, pretty stupid. He is nice about it, though.

Vince at Capitol Annex notes that poultry kingpin Bo Pilgrim paid to jet around Texas Governor Rick Perry's staff to promote the ethanol waver he bought and paid for with a $100,000 contribution to the Republican Governor's Association.

Mean Rachel contemplates whether Fannie and Freddie have anything to do with being raised in 78704, but living through young-adulthood in 78749 in Crashes.

The final word, for now, on the Webb County sheriff's race says Martin Cuellar wins by 41 votes. Since the various 'official' totals for Cuellar have been +37, -133, +39 and finally +41, CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wonders what the h*ll happened!

Off the Kuff looks at the Harris County campaign finance reports and finds good news and not-so-good news for Democratic campaigns.

The Texas Observer's Melissa Del Bosque had an observation about one of the panels at Netroots Nation this past weekend, and PDiddie at Brains and Eggs had some observations about what she observed.

BossKitty at BlueBloggin shows us smuggling humans into the US is no problem at all; From Africa to Mexico to US, Any Way They Can Immigrate.

BossKitty at TruthHugger points out the continued struggle by our soldiers suffering from PTSD and the inadequate response by the incapable VA, in But, When They Come Home ….

Even more Funnies (Last jeers from the Grammstand, etc.)

Rich: "It's the Economic Stupidity, Stupid"

A classic evisceration of John McCain's incompetence on the economy by the NYT's Frank Rich. Some of the hilarity ensuing:

In 2000, he told an interviewer that he would make up for his lack of attention to “those issues.” As he entered the 2008 campaign, Mr. McCain was still saying the same, vowing to read “Greenspan’s book” as a tutorial. Last weekend, the resolutely analog candidate told The New York Times he is at last starting to learn how “to get online myself.” Perhaps he’ll retire his abacus by Election Day.

Picking myself off the floor from laughing after that one.

McCain’s fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated on video by whining about “a nation of whiners.” The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. McCain has been so dependent on Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.

Just two weeks before publicly sharing his thoughts about America’s “mental recession,” Mr. Gramm laid out equally incendiary views in a Wall Street Journal profile that portrayed him as “almost certainly” the McCain choice for Treasury secretary. Mr. Gramm said that the former chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was “probably the most exploited worker in American history” since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the “billions” he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell.

Coming on this news about the compensation packages of Houston's titans of the oil industry -- along with the free-market apologists in the comments -- this data about Gramm's employer, UBS, has even greater impact ...

But no one in the news media seemed to notice Gramm’s naked expression of the mindset he’d bring to a McCain White House. And few journalists have vetted the presumptive Treasury secretary’s post-Senate history as an executive at UBS. The stock of that banking giant has lost 70 percent of its value in a year after its reckless adventures in the subprime lending market. It’s now fending off federal investigation for helping the mega-rich avoid taxes.

McCain made a big show of banishing Gramm after his whining “gaffe,” but it’s surely at most a temporary suspension. When the candidate said back in January that there’s nobody he knows who is stronger on economic issues than his old Senate pal, he was telling the truth. Left to his own devices — or those of his new No. 1 economic surrogate, Carly Fiorina — McCain is clueless.

And then Rich zeroes in on McCain's, ah, changes of mind:

The term flip-flopping doesn’t do justice to Mr. McCain’s self-contradictory economic pronouncements because that implies there’s some rational, if hypocritical, logic at work. What he serves up instead is plain old incoherence, as if he were compulsively consulting one of those old Magic 8 Balls. In a single 24-hour period in April, Mr. McCain went from saying there’s been “great economic progress” during the Bush presidency to saying “Americans are not better off than they were eight years ago.” He reversed his initial condemnation of mortgage bailouts in just two weeks.

In February Mr. McCain said he would balance the federal budget by the end of his first term even while extending the gargantuan Bush tax cuts. In April he said he’d accomplish this by the end of his second term. In July he’s again saying he’ll do it in his first term. Why not just say he’ll do it on Inauguration Day? It really doesn’t matter since he’s never supplied real numbers that would give this promise even a patina of credibility.

Mr. McCain’s plan for Social Security reform is “along the lines that President Bush proposed.” Or so he said in March. He came out against such “privatization” in June (though his policy descriptions still support it). Last week he indicated he isn’t completely clear on what Social Security does. He called the program’s premise — young taxpayers foot the bill for their elders (including him) — an “absolute disgrace.”

Rich goes on to savage Carly Fiorina, the backup financial adviser as well as Mitt Romney, presumptive vice-presidential selection, as similarly economic-justice-challenged. But then he quite oddly advances former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg as the ultimate in Maverick picks for running mate.

Yeah, that ought to go over swimmingly with both Bloomberg -- himself heavily rumored earlier this year for the job McCain wants -- and the GOP base of obstructionists of reproductive choice and gay rights.

More Funnies

Not quite 300.

I know I promised reality last week, but states that are, in the aggregate, only one percentage point apart really belong in the undecided (grey) category. Thus the only changes from last Sunday are NV (blue) and AK (red). It's still out of reach for McCain and because the upper Midwest Ohio River Valley is where the contest will turn for him, expect him to pick someone like Mitt Romney (MI, kinda) or Rob Portman (OH) as his V-P. They both answer most of the doubts (McCain's age, conservative enough to satisfy the mad-dog GOP base) without raising any concerns (Crist being gay).

The only thing ultimately that his running mate will be is the Republican favorite for 2012.

<p><strong>><a href='http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/electoral-college/'>Electoral College Prediction Map</a></strong> - Predict the winner of the general election. Use the map to experiment with winning combinations of states. Save your prediction and send it to friends.</p>