The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is glad that so many people will be getting health insurance -- even if that number should have been much higher  -- as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff pushes back on some happy talk about the voter ID law.

Dos Centavos reviews the biopic of Cesar Chavez and emphasizes that the radical fringe in Texas would like to keep his name and others like his out of our kids' classrooms.

Horwitz at Texpatriate made the case for anyone but Jim Hogan, including Kinky Friedman, in the Democratic primary for Agriculture Commissioner.

Thanks to James Moore at Texas to the World, Libby Shaw at Texas Kaos learned Ted Cruz is a cheapskate who spends more time in Iowa than in the Rio Grande Valley. Libby also discovered Ted Cruz lied about The Biggest Lie in all Politics.

The Texas Central Railway, the latest effort to launch high speed rail from Houston to Dallas, made their initial plans public this week and PDiddie at Brains and Eggs had the advance (before) and the post-press conference report (after).

Texas has a woefully inadequate and unfair tax system, and that puts us in a bind when we need stuff. Because as WCNews at Eye on Williamson reminds us that stuff costs money.

Texas Leftist is glad Democrats have finally stumbled upon a winning strategy for 2014. The questions now... Can we keep the fire burning through November, and will Greg Abbott and the rest of the GOP weasel out of having general election debates?

Reading a book about the settlement routes of black people in the United States, Neil at All People Have Value wrote about ideas of movement beyond physical migration. All People Have Value is part of NeilAquino.com.

Join Egberto of EgbertoWillies.com on his new radio show Politics Done Right on KPFT 90.1 FM, Monday at 8:00 PM to discuss Obamacare and the 2014 election.

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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

The Great God Pan Is Dead wants to know what Rice University has against art.

Cody Pogue asks and answers the question "What is Texas?"

Mark Bennett defines the ethics of decolletage.

Offcite photographs the Alps of Pasadena. No really, it makes sense once you read it.

Nonsequiteuse has a suggestion for those who think the equal pay issue is no big thing.

The Texas Living Waters Project implores you to give your feedback on our state’s water future.

Jen Sorenson, a freelance artist now living in Texas, illustrates her experience with Obamacare.

Texas Vox asks "How many oil spills will it take?" as it marks the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

And finally, in much happier anniversary news, Amy Valentine celebrates her fifth anniversary of being cancer-free.

Sunday Funnies

Friday Lone Star roundup

-- Greg Abbott once again has a corporation's back, this time against the people who were seriously injured, and occasionally killed -- probably intentionally -- by a neurosurgeon.

This is a pattern.  Abbott doesn't care about you unless you're a company.  Or maybe a fetus.

-- Glenn Hegar, the Republican running for state comptroller (a word he cannot articulate) has proposed replacing state property taxes with a sales tax.  It would need to be a sales tax of about 20-25%, in order to be revenue neutral.  Once he was saying "just do it", but now that the math has been presented to him, he thinks maybe we should go a little slower.

If you can't correctly pronounce the office you seek, and math comes slow for you, then perhaps you don't deserve to be elected the state's accountant.  That's all we're saying.

But the damage was done. Politically, you can’t easily replace the more than $40 billion a year that local property taxes yield by tinkering with state and local sales taxes, which currently produce about $28 billion.

If Hegar wants to be the chief tax collector and revenue estimator, he should know that.

EOW and BOR with more.

-- Leticia Van de Putte kicks off her spring Texas tour.

Van de Putte’s campaign made the announcement in an email to supporters Tuesday that provides a rough framework for the bus tour, which will kick off Sunday in San Antonio and is set to wrap up April 7 in Austin. ...

After San Antonio, the campaign bus tour will dip into the heart of South Texas, making stops in Pharr and Laredo before shifting west and trekking to El Paso. From there, the bus tour heads for events in Midland, Lubbock and Wichita Falls. ...

Van de Putte’s bus tour is also scheduled to make stops in Fort Worth, Dallas, Tyler, Lufkin, Nacogdoches, Houston and Corpus Christi before concluding in Austin.

LVDP was extensively profiled in the San Antonio Current recently.  She rolls into H-Town on April 5, when she will meet privately with us bloggers ahead of the rally.  We're getting to be kind of a big deal, in case you hadn't noticed.

Fifth Circuit upholds Texas abortion restrictions

Just as expected.

A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld Texas' tough new abortion restrictions that shuttered many of the abortions clinics in the state.

A panel of judges at the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court judge who said the rules violate the U.S. Constitution and served no medical purpose. In its opinion, the appeals court said the law "on its face does not impose an undue burden on the life and health of a woman."

Texas lawmakers last year passed some of the toughest restrictions in the U.S. on when, where and how women may obtain an abortion. The Republican-controlled Legislature required abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and placed strict limits on doctors prescribing abortion-inducing pills.

Most Republican leaders in Texas oppose abortion, except in cases where the life of the mother is at risk. In passing the new rules, they argued they were protecting the health of the woman.

Greg Abbott Tweeted his delight at the news.  Burnt Orange has a map of the areas in the state where the restrictions are already making it difficult to impossible for women to get an abortion.  While the Fifth Circuit deliberated, women's clinics were closing all around the state.

On to the SCOTUS, and probably to be ultimately settled in a year and a half or so (in other words, just in time for it to become a 2016 presidential election year issue).

More on the Texas Central Railway

Earlier this week a handful of us local blog-types sat down with TCR prez Bob Eckels, outreach director David Hagy, and press spox David Benzion to get an update on the bullet train they're planning for the Houston-Dallas corridor.

I won't bury the lede; color me cautiously optimistic.  If you wish, watch some of Eckels giving essentially the same pitch elsewhere that we got here.



A summary, courtesy to me from Charles Kuffner -- who has led in the early reporting -- because my audio capabilities were somewhat impaired during our gathering:

-- TCR is privately funded and they expect to be profitable if only the proposed Houston to Dallas route gets built. They will build with future expansion in mind and to accommodate connections with future rail systems, including one that is probably highest in priority, linking Dallas to Fort Worth.  (See below for the link to today's press conference with the mayors of H-Town, Big D, and Cowtown.)

-- There will be rail stations in downtown Houston and Dallas, and perhaps a handful of others elsewhere in both cities. Depending on the ultimate route chosen -- there are three possible alignments -- there may be a stop in-between, in Bryan/College Station or Huntsville or some other city.

-- Going private means, among many other considerations, that they could plan the route and station locations without having to take political considerations and consequences into account.  The TCR will be still regulated by the Federal Railroad Administration, and once they submit their intent to build to the FRA (next month), they will go through the environmental impact study and public hearing process just as TxDOT or Metro or any other public agency would. 

-- My question to Judge Eckels in our meeting was about eminent domain.  His response was that they will have that capability, but their preference is to make the kind of offer people will want to accept, as that is cheaper than involving attorneys (and certainly better from a PR perspective).  They will mostly be using existing railroad rights of way and don't expect to have to usurp the property of too many landowners.

Frankly, this response suggests a prescription for some pretty thick rose-colored glasses.  The obstacles will sprout like weeds as soon as their route gets published.  Will the train be elevated in rural areas, minimizing the danger of crossings?  Surely it's not going to be constructed mostly at-grade -- dangerous for country travelers -- or below, which would seemingly be the most expensive and present challenges of unexpected kinds. (These are questions I wished I had asked, and will pose to communications director Benzion.)

-- So far the project has not encountered opposition they have been unable to overcome. When they held a similar get-together with Houston-area conservo-bloggers, the primary reaction there was suspicion that their plan would evolve to securing taxpayer funding.  Noteworthy here was Eckels' emphasis on efforts to keep politics out of the project, and particularly the politics of the far right minimized.  He wants the Railway to neither be tarred with an "Obama" brush nor be touted as some strain of  'Texas exceptionalism'.  This is an admirable goal and a challenging mission, IMHO.

Eckels also says that environmental groups 'like' them, and that they have good relationships with the FRA and with other rail builders such as the one in California.

Again, my initial take here with respect to the ecological concerns is a dash of skepticism.  After our meeting, my brother Neil expressed some regret that he had not asked about the Houston toad, an endangered species that lives in some of the area likely to be transited by the bullet train and already experiencing stress from roadways, pipelines, transmission lines and the construction of all those.

Overall, this "socialist" can get on board with the Texas Central Railway, especially if it expands service to those Texans who are not part of the "luxury" class.  Even if it remains an elite mode of transportation affordable by only the 1%, though, it wins environmentally by getting cars off the road and squeezing yet more efficiency from the airlines.

How the Railway handles their security, TSA-style and along the physical line itself, is a question that still needs an answer.

Mayors Annise Parker of Houston, Mike Rawlings of Dallas, and Betsy Price of Fort Worth are hosting media at Houston's city hall this morning to make an announcement about high speed rail.  Isiah Carey at Fox 26 has posted the press release, and I'll add anything they have that I don't afterwards.

Update: Here's the Chron's take.

The caption of the photo oops, 'photo illustration' above of a Japanese bullet train reads: "The planned high-speed rail line between Houston and Dallas would use overhead electrical lines and its own separated tracks to shuttle riders between the two metro areas, through mostly flat, rural land."  I interpret that as mostly at-grade.  I wonder if we will hear the same conservative whining that we have endured for the last decade about Houston Metro's light rail service.

Update II: Posted in the comments to this news in another forum, this Wiki link relates the long, tortured history of high speed rail in Texas.  It should be interesting to see if some of the same old coalitions line up to stifle it again.

Update III: CultureMap covered this morning's presser, and Texas Leftist -- who was with me at the meeting earlier in the week -- filed his story.

"Act like a Texan"

I still have some thoughts to collect from yesterday's meeting on the Texas Central Railway, so let's catch up on Wendy Davis slamming Greg Abbott around (I'm sure someone somewhere might construe that to be insensitive to a man in a wheelchair)...

Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis delivered a strong message to Republican opponent Greg Abbott on equal pay for women Monday morning, telling him to "act like a Texan" and stop letting his surrogates speak for him on the issue.

"I have a message for Greg Abbott today," Davis said at a speech in Austin. "Stop hiding behind your staff members. Stop hiding behind your surrogates. This Texas gal is calling you out. Act like a Texan and answer this question for yourself: What on earth is going on at your attorney general's office?" 

That's vintage Ann Richards right there.  Or maybe Don Vito Corleone.



Everyone knows she's saying "act like a man" (a phrase usually preceded by "Stand up and") and everyone also knows that Abbott has been acting like a man in his business dealings with the women that have been hired in the OAG over the years.

Two of his surrogates stumbled in television interviews on the subject, saying women are too "busy" to think about equal pay for equal work and insisting that the reason women are paid less is that "men are better negotiators." The San Antonio Express-News reported that Abbott's office pays female assistant attorneys general $6,000 less, on average, than men in the same position, and Abbott's campaign said he would veto equal pay legislation that because current wage discrimination laws are sufficient, he would make it easier for women to sue over pay discrimination.

As attorney general, Abbott also successfully defended the state against a female college professor who was being paid less than her employees for the same work, arguing that federal equal pay protections don't apply in state court.

Davis pointed out on Monday that as state senator, she introduced an equal pay bill in a Republican-controlled Texas legislature that would have changed the circumstances under which women can sue their employers for pay discrimination, and it passed. Gov. Rick Perry (R) vetoed the bill last June.

The only thing Greg Abbott has done in the nearly twelve years he's held office -- besides sue Barack Obama, of course -- is act like a man.  Just as every other man has been acting towards the women they hire, in Texas and across the country, for decades.

Keep in mind that it's just an act.  In order to get men like Greg Abbott to act differently -- and also the millions of other men who have kept women down with this pay gap since, I don't know, forever -- enough shame and blame needs to be heaped on their heads and draped around their shoulders until they get it.  Until they start acting better.

Paying women less than men like me for the same job is wrong.  It's wrong even if their experience differs: if they are good enough to be hired, they are good enough to be paid the same.  Underpaying people on the basis of their genitalia is plain old discrimination.  Since so many women are primary breadwinners in their households now, pay inequality affects the children they are struggling to raise as well.

But here's where we are reminded that Republicans don't really care as much about children as they do fetuses.  Once that umbilical cord is cut you're on your own, kid.  Get out there and make something of yourself, like I did.

Especially if you're a man, like Greg Abbott.  Why, you can have a tree fall on you and collect ten million bucks for it, then make certain nobody else -- man, woman, child, or fetus -- ever does the same.

That might be what a real Texan looks like to Republicans.  But it's not how one acts.

A bullet train between Houston and Dallas comes into view

Today our little progblog contingent is taking a meeting with the principal players, including former Harris County Judge Bob Eckels and his comm director, David Benzion, about this.

In Asia and Europe, tens of millions of people have been happily riding high-speed bullet trains for decades. On our own shores, however, the implementation of intercity high-speed rail has suffered from a host of delays. The one system that has managed to get moving, somewhat—California’s—has lately found itself beset by legal problems and public cynicism over rising costs and the use of eminent domain to obtain private land for the rail line’s right-of-way.

The situation has fans of high-speed rail worried. If America’s first bullet-train system can’t get built in high-tech, environmentally progressive California, they wonder, where can it possibly get built?

Hold on to your ten-gallon hats. Texas, of all places, has emerged as the state that may stand the best chance of winning the U.S. race for high-speed rail. That California might lose bullet-train bragging rights to a state governed by a pro-fracking climate-change skeptic may come as a surprise. But a Texas triumph could also provide us with a teachable moment about how to tailor bullet-train projects to the different cultures and demographics of all 50 states.

 Way back in 2012, CultureMap had it first.

Talks of the quick trans-Texas trip have been underway since 2010, when Central Japan Railway Company (JR Central) rallied for part of an $8 billion federal grant that President Barack Obama set aside for high-speed rail corridors.

That effort failed, but JR Central has teamed up with the Texas-based company to raise roughly $10 billion in private dollars for the Houston-to-DFW route. Eckels believes federal involvement slows the process and piles on expenses, and claimed that private money would be repaid by riders' fares — "competitive and in many cases less than airfares."

The "no-taxpayer-dollars" thing should be popular with a certain caucus.

Though his company has been working closely with federal and state agencies on safety and right-of-way issues, TCR president Robert Eckels is confident that “our private development approach will be successful for this corridor.” TCR’s market-led approach, he adds, “will be differentiated by the high level of customer experience offered.”

That level is hinted at on TCR’s website, which emphasizes the speed and luxuriousness of the Japanese-built trains that would make up the company’s rolling stock. Clearly TCR hopes to lure the same Texas business travelers who helped make Southwest Airlines a homegrown corporate success story—but who now complain that the time spent getting into and out of airports has made flying between Dallas and Houston not much faster, and definitely not any easier, than driving.

Yes, eminent domain for a private operation such as this might not be a concern here, thanks to a recent development in the Keystone XL pipeline's legal tussle that was resolved in TransCanada's favor and against a Texas landowner.  And when I say 'resolved', I mean the SCOTX declined to hear her case.

The On Earth article has more on the environmental benefits of taking so many cars off the road and airline passengers out of the sky, and here's the bottom line on that.

Mass transit yields an environmental dividend regardless of why people use it. Were the nation’s first bullet train to come about thanks to Texas business travelers—shuttling, ironically, between two capitals of the oil and chemical industries—it could be the best advertisement imaginable. If high-speed rail is good enough for the good ol’ boys and gals of Texas, maybe the rest of America will realize that it’s good enough for them too.

So I'll be anxious to hear what more they can tell us about this development.  I'll have a followup post tomorrow morning.