John Crony-n gets choreographed

by Ralph Reed. I knew he was gay ...

Former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed claimed in a 2001 e-mail to a lobbyist that he choreographed John Cornyn's efforts as Texas attorney general to shut down an East Texas Indian tribe's casino.

The lobbyist was Jack Abramoff, who is under federal investigation along with his partner Michael Scanlon, on allegations of defrauding six Indian tribes of about $80 million between 2001 and 2004. The e-mail, along with about a dozen others, were released last week as part of the investigation. In 2001, Abramoff was working as a lobbyist for the Louisiana Coushatta tribe to prevent rival gaming casinos from siphoning off its Texas customers. He paid Reed as a consultant, and Reed lobbied to get the Alabama-Coushatta and Tigua casinos closed in Texas.

In the Nov. 30, 2001, e-mail, Reed told Abramoff that 50 pastors led by Ed Young, of Second Baptist Church in Houston, would meet with Cornyn to urge him to shut down the Alabama-Coushatta tribe's casino near Livingston, Texas. He said Young would back up the request in writing.

"We have also choreographed Cornyn's response. The AG will state that the law is clear, talk about how much he wants to avoid repetition of El Paso and pledge to take swift action to enforce the law," Reed wrote. "He will also personally hand Ed Young a letter that commits him to take action in Livingston."

Cornyn, now a Republican U.S. senator, had filed a lawsuit in 1999 to shut down a casino operated by the Tigua tribe in El Paso, saying it violated the state's limited gambling laws. In 2002, federal courts shuttered the Tiguas' casino and Cornyn used that ruling to shut down the Alabama-Coushattas' casino.

The entire article, including the transcripts of the e-mail exchanged between Reed and Abramoff about Cornyn, can be found here.

Here's a question for my local paper, the Houston Chronicle: do you plan on investigating this and/or covering it yourselves or are you just going to rely on the wire reports?

(So far, the Austin American Statesman has an identical wire story. Houston Chronicle, nada. Dallas Morning News, zip. Thanks to Sean Paul at The Agonist for the tip.)

Update (11/14): Charles Kuffner has been all over this from the beginning, which was over a year ago.

In honor of her father, on Veterans' Day

My friend Lisa wrote this, and I post it here in its entirety:

I have been thinking about my father a lot lately. It seems like every time we pass another milestone in the Iraq War death count, I think about my dad. No, he didn’t die in a war, but I still believe that war killed him … slowly.

It really saddens me to hear about every new life lost, but for each one of them, how many others’ lives have been irrevocably changed? I was too young to know who my father really was before Viet Nam, but I still realize how it changed him. I was 17 when that realization sunk in.

I was in an advanced history class in high school, which encouraged unusual class projects and different perspectives as opposed to memorization of names and dates. When we reached the Viet Nam era, I had the idea to do an interview with my father about his experiences and how they affected him. He agreed. I had two weeks to write the report. Somehow the weeks passed with him managing to put me off several times.

Finally, the day before it was due, he sat down with me. I asked him to tell me about what it was like. He stared across the room and did not speak. His eyes welled up a bit. He shook his head gently and said, “I’m sorry. I can’t.” He stood and left the room.

Initially, as a rather normal selfish teenager, I wondered, “How the heck am I gonna do this report?!” But then I realized the importance of those two short sentences. It had been almost 17 years, and all he could say was “I’m sorry. I can’t.” That spoke volumes about the horror he had been through. I ended up doing a report on PTSD in Viet Nam veterans and made an A.

In addition to the weight of the terrifying memories, my father also suffered from numerous health problems. Some he believed were related to chemical exposure, most were from alcohol abuse and smoking, both habits he picked up during the war. He would eventually die from cancer, with few treatment options due to damage to his heart and liver.

I often feel like I was cheated. We had a tumultuous family life. Beer was the wall between him and us. At times I thought he hated me because it made him so moody. I was cheated out of having a closer relationship with him, and I was cheated in years as he died in only his 50s. I believe it was war that cheated me and him. I believe that the horrors he experienced changed him forever, and he was unable to cope with it in any other way than by staying numb.

The scene from Fahrenheit 911 that moved me the most was of a young, fresh-faced kid with a hollowness in his eyes talking about his experience. He said, “Every time you kill someone, you can't do it without killing a piece of yourself.” I wondered how many pieces of himself had died already.

I was raised to be patriotic. I even won a scholarship for an essay on patriotism. I love my country, warts and all. I respect people like my father who devote their life’s work to serving their country. I respect them regardless of what mission they are sent on. More than respect, I stand in awe of their commitment. But I respect and love them so much that I can’t bear the thought of them risking death, injury, and emotional trauma for a cause that is not just. They are precious, a resource not to be wasted. It is an INSULT to their honor to use them in an immoral war based on lies and manipulation.

MY troops deserve more respect than that!

My father deserves more respect than that!

Every soldier who has ever served his/her country deserves the knowledge that they and all who come after them will be serving NOBLE causes. It is our duty to ensure that for them.

That is why I march. Justice, to me, is to hold this administration accountable for disrespecting our armed services by committing them to a cause that is beneath them.

I want justice in honor of my father, who gave his life for his country. It just took a long time to happen. I want justice for the men and women we have lost in this war. I want justice for the ones who will come back and never fully recover. I think this justice is also a way of paying respect to the veterans who have served us over the ages. It says “The country you protected strives to live up to your honor.”

Thank you, Dad. I know I didn’t say it enough while you were alive. And thank you to all of you who have committed to protecting me.

"Everything was all right so long as the children didn't look over the roof at the bodies floating past."

From behind the paywall at Texas Monthly, the account of two New Orleanians, as told to John Spong in the Astrodome:

TEN ROWS OF COTS and two thousand or so people away, a couple in their fifties, Benjamin and Ermica Wilson, sat next to each other on a cot with a Bible. He was a big man, wearing a black T-shirt and a black New York Mets cap. She was much smaller, in bright purple sweatpants and a white T-shirt covered in little purple flowers.

Benjamin said they’d gone to their Ninth Ward church, St. Mary of the Angels, to weather Katrina. When the water rose too high in St. Mary’s, they’d climbed to the roof with their own family of 18, from Benjamin’s mother on down to his young nieces and nephews, plus about 75 other people. They were up there for two nights.

“We had a grill up there,” said Benjamin, “and I put a life jacket on and swam to my mother’s house to get meat from the freezer. We had pork chops, ribs, smoked sausage. My mother made a pot of gumbo for everybody, and my wife made a pot of chili. It seemed like we were stretching those five loaves and two fishes. Everything was all right so long as the children didn’t look over the roof at the bodies floating past.

“The worst part was at night. It was pitch-black. No street lights or lights in the buildings because there was no electricity. It was dead silent except the sound of people trapped in their attics screaming as the water rose..."

Update (11/12): People Get Ready has some photos of St Bernard's Parish.

"We do not torture."

Then I suppose it depends on what your definition of the word 'torture' is.

Or 'we'.

Or 'not'.

Prop 2 post-analysis

I've been ruminating on the declaration of bigotry overwhelmingly displayed on Tuesday by my fellow Texans, and while thinking of something to say that had the right amount of bitterness, as well as a root cause for the landslide of ignorance demonstrated at the polls, found two articles which contained both.

sui generis expresses the frustrations of us 26 percenters quite clearly, and from the first-person POV (my edits appear in red, blue, and bold):

I couldn't help but notice that your newspapers actually called it a "Texas Upholds Gay Marriage Ban", instead of "Upholds Straight Marriage Defense", but we knew that's what you meant all along.

To the 535,000 people who voted in Texas to recognize same sex marriages, many of which already exist but not yet legally: thank you, from the bottom of our hearts for being remarkable, principled, fair minded and decent humans. You did the right thing, and it means more than is possible to put into words. You recognized that my love for my family is as fierce and as powerful and as consuming as your love is for your family, and you did the right and decent and moral thing, as you would have done for your own family. Thank you, thank you.

The rest of you three out of four Texans, you can go f*** yourselves, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart, for being the (lots of expletives deleted) shitbag throwback worthless waste of piss poor protoplasm that you are. I wouldn't give you my piss to drink if you were dying in the desert today...

The next time you ask for money for breast cancer at the supermarket, I want to know which way you voted. The next time a fireman stops me in traffic with a boot collecting for charity, I want to know which way you voted. The next time your kids come to my home by the busload for Halloween or Scouts or school trips, I want to know which way you voted; the next time you call me to get a cat out of your tree, pick your ancient husband up off the bathroom floor, or to rake your leaves or help find your kid's dog, because I know that three out of four of you voted to make and keep my family illegal. You will be held accountable.

Three out of four of you voted to make my family's life as difficult and as fragile as possible. Three out of four of you voted that my evil little nephews have a greater claim on my estate than my life partner of 9 years, or my adopted children as long as I live in the state of Texas. Three out of four of you voted to keep my life illegal and invalid. Three out of four of you assaulted my family, stepped out of your busy little evil lives and into mine to tell me, with the weight of the law, what is right for me, by taking away my rights. Three out of four of you had better watch your back now, you will be held accountable.

I want vengeance. I want to hurt your families the way you've hurt mine; legally, financially, socially. I want to figuratively slam you up against the wall and ask you why you think that the green-eyed marriage ban is moral, or why you think that the asian-american marriage ban or the red-headed marriage ban is moral or why you petty little judgemental sons of bitches think that the gay marriage ban is moral. I want to know why you think that discriminating against my family is a family value.

I want to know why you think my family means less to me than your family means to you, why you think I should feel any less angry or devastated than you would if your family was assaulted by three out of four people that you know. I am hurting today and deeply, profoundly, even dangerously angry today, and there isn't a lot that I can do for the pain and the rage I feel except to vent it here.

We knew it was coming, like knowing that getting pushed down the stairs means you probably will break an arm doesn't make it hurt any less when you break it. How can we support what is right and decent in society when society won't be right and decent to us?

We're not waiting for your permission to live our lives. We are already married for all intents and purposes. We already have families, we just have to work A LOT harder to keep bigots from hurting us, from interfering with our families in the name of "morality" and "family values". But a clear warning here: if you get in the way of me and mine at the hospital, you will require the services of a hospital, and I mean that literally, not figuratively. If you decide that my children no longer belong to me or that I can't live with the person I love for the rest of my life, I can't say in public the lengths I would go to to disabuse you of that notion, but I will invoke Darwin ...

Just for the record here, I'm comfortably hetero, in addition to being happily married. But there are gay members of my immediate family who have fought for years for the rights Prop 2 now denies them by constitutional fiat, and I profoundly feel the impact of what this means for them.

That it was a prominent number of minority voters in Democratic precincts -- who attend church regularly -- who voted to deny those rights is particularly galling:

Blacks and Hispanics who traditionally vote Democratic strongly backed the state's gay marriage ban at the ballot box this week, sometimes outpolling Republicans, analysts said Wednesday.

That broad interest across political lines contributed to the highest participation in a constitutional amendment election since 1991, with roughly 18 percent of registered voters turning out for Tuesday's election.

Republican Gov. Rick Perry rallied his evangelical, socially conservative base on the issue, but political analysts said Proposition 2's success doesn't necessarily predict future success for individual politicians.

"I don't see how it can be useful for a party or a candidate because this so transcends all the political parties and the typical categorizations," said Kelly Shackelford, president of the conservative Free Market Foundation, which backed the amendment.

"We didn't even call Republican homes. *cough*bullshit*cough* We called Hispanics, African-Americans and rural Texas voters. That's where the numbers were," he said.

Others agreed, noting that religion and family values resonate in traditionally Democratic precincts with large minority populations.

On the single issue of defining marriage as between a man and a woman, minorities often voted as favorably and sometimes more favorably than higher-income Republican precincts, said political scientist Tim O'Neill at Southwestern University in Georgetown.

There's about a dozen more nuggets of wisdom in that Chron article, so go read it all. Last paragraphs:

(Rice University political scientist Bob) Stein said the Proposition 2 election probably did little to change the dynamic of the GOP primary for Perry because he already had the support of solid social conservatives.

"What Perry did with the evangelicals was an organizational effort," Stein said. "Liberals tend to view those people as rabid dogs. They're not. They're sophisticated. They're organized. Church is just another organization."

Remember this for the near future: Prop 2 was just a dress rehearsal for the GOP GOTV effort in advance of the primaries in March and the general election in November. Bear in mind the words of former DeLay press secretary and Abramoff cohort Michael Scanlon:

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."

Boy, we still have a lot of work to do.

A good start toward taking our country back

** Kaine wins in Virginia, Corzine in New Jersey. Handily. In fact, we should've paid Dubya's traveling expenses to stand beside other Republicans. (Oh wait, we did.)

** A gay marriage amendment actually failed (in Maine).

** Californians don't like their governor (again).

** Locally, the man who may be the strongest Democrat in the South won re-election with over 90% of the vote. There's rumors -- and not just on the internets -- that he'll run for something statewide next. I personally hope it's against Senator Torture in 2008.

** ... and ...
Texas Bloggers have banded together to ask our readers to nominate a Texan for our very own blogger version of the mainstream media's favorite attention grabber, the "Person of the Year"! Join us by nominating a Texan that has made the most impact this year, be it good or bad, evil or embarassing. We're accepting nominations from you through November 23 and we'll post your Texan of the Year by December 1st. Email your nominations to: Texanoftheyear@gmail.com

All of your favorite Texas political blogs -- left, right, and center -- are participating. Each of us will write our own post about the winner, so on December 1st you'll have lots of different opinions but they'll all come from the same source, you ... the smartest people in Texas.

Vote today

Prop 2 garners Supreme endorsement

God has announced His support of Proposition 2.

At least according to Charlie Howard, the Texas House representative from Sugar Land:

"What we're doing, we are saying, here is a law we are going to follow. It happens to be God's law".

You may see it for thine own eyes by clicking here (link will carry you to TexansFORMarriage.org and their embedded Windows Media Player will begin).

Let me simply say that the separation of church and state is a good thing for both religion and government. And you can support the separation of church and state by voting AGAINST Prop. 2.

Cheney polls two points below adultery

Bob Harris via This Modern World:

As you’ve no doubt heard, Bush’s approval rating has fallen to 35. Maybe America is starting to realize that secret prisons and endless war aren’t really the best government we can possibly hope for.

Dick Cheney, in the same poll, has a 19 percent approval rating.

How low is 19 percent?

According to previous surveys (scroll down in the link), that’s two points less popular than cheating on your spouse and seven points behind corporal punishment in schools.

Dick Cheney is now comfortably nestled deep in what can be politely called lunatic territory. As I’ve been pointing out for years, twenty or thirty percent of Americans believe any insane thing you can imagine.

Dick Cheney is now 18 points behind the number of people who believe alien beings have secretly contacted the U.S. government.

"Do you suppose we could get Bush a BJ..."

Overheard at today's Houston progressive blog luncheon:

"Do you suppose we could get Bush a blowjob so that he can be impeached?"

Considering that a majority of Americans polled now believe he should be, maybe soliciting an oral favor won't be necessary.

Pictured: Rick Perry and Greg Abbott (can't tell which is which)

...and their GOTV volunteers, who will be appearing in Austin tomorrow.

From the man who will defeat Greg Abbott next November:

On November 5, the hooded bigots of the Ku Klux Klan will descend on Austin to march in support of the passage of Proposition 2. These masked shock troops of hate do Texans a favor in exposing the real meaning and significance of the proposed amendment in all its shining glory. There could be no greater barometer of what is really at stake in the vote on Proposition 2. The Klan does not show up anywhere unless it is to support bigotry and hate. Never before has the Klan shown up to support passage of a proposed amendment to the Bill of Rights of the Texas Constitution, because never before has there been such an organized attempt to enshrine the Klan’s brand of hate in the noble charter of liberty and democracy of the people of Texas.

The Bill of Rights of our Texas Constitution of 1876 is one of the greatest charters of individual human rights on the face of the earth. Every Texan who loves our state should be personally offended at this disgusting effort to use it as a forum for the propagation of hate. I know that I am.

Every Texan should also be appalled that the lawyer who has the greatest responsibility to defend the Constitutional rights of the people of Texas, the state Attorney General, instead allies himself with the prophets of hate, as Attorney General Greg Abbott does in his public letter of October 27, 2005, in support of Proposition 2. I know that I am, and I know that Texans are entitled to a lawyer for the people who understands that every Texas citizen should have equal legal respect as a 100% equal part owner of our Constitutional democracy.

The world will be watching Texas in the vote on Proposition 2. Fellow Texans, let’s show the world what we’re made of. Take a stand against hate. Take a stand against the Ku Klux Klan. Take a stand against politicians who ally themselves with the Klan. Take a stand for liberty and democracy. Show the power of Texans’ support of our Constitution. Show the power of your vote. Vote down Proposition 2.

A squabble over Prop 2 among Republicans

An amazing exchange between the Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas and one of their precinct chairs in Harris County (my edits to protect privacy appear in red). There was a message ahead of Ms. Sykes' response, which follows:

Mr. (name redacted),

We have no association with, nor control over, the KKK. I think the fact that we have been working partners with such as Pastor Blackwell, Pastor McKissic and the Cornerstone Baptist Church shows that in itself. To equate the KKK’s idea of white supremacy with the RPT standing for traditional marriage is ludicrous. Thank you for your comment and for representing to me the Harris County GOP Precinct (redacted).

Jennifer Sykes
Assistant to the Chairman & Executive Director
Republican Party of Texas

And to that, this:

Dear Ms. Sykes:

Thank you for your response to my message of October 31, 2005, although I am a bit surprised to receive such a stern rebuke. I neither stated nor implied that the Republican Party of Texas has any "association with, or control over," the Ku Klux Klan. I did not "equate the KKK's idea of white supremacy" to the RPT's position on Proposition No. 2. You falsely accuse me of both of these things merely to characterize me as "ludicrous"—not a very respectful attitude toward a fellow member of the GOP.

Over 1100 rights flow automatically from the legal state of marriage. Not long ago, we watched Britney Spears walk down an aisle in Las Vegas with an Elvis impersonator officiating and obtain all 1100 of these legal rights for a marriage she later termed "a joke"--a marriage that lasted only 55 hours. If "traditional marriage" is in jeopardy in this country, it seems to me that the good Republicans of Texas should perhaps look in their own back yards before setting out to blame the decline of traditional marriage on homosexuals.

Many Republicans feel that gay Texans pay their taxes and should be entitled to the same legal rights as everyone else. Many Republicans feel that passing laws to deprive one group of citizens of constitutional rights to which they would otherwise be entitled harks back to the days of segregated waiting rooms, all-male juries, laws against interracial marriages, and "whites-only" drinking fountains—all ideas which were vigorously supported by the KKK, but now lie "in the ash heap of history," to borrow Ronald Reagan's colorful phrase. Many Republicans feel that this is not the direction Texas should be heading in the 21st century. Most of all, many Republicans are offended by the presumptuousness of GOP leaders in taking for granted that all Republicans are in agreement on this issue.

While your desire to distance the GOP from the KKK is understandable, the KKK's alignment with the GOP on this issue is not coincidental. Flies are drawn to garbage wherever it may be found. Proposition No. 2 was motivated by an animus toward gay people and the bald arrogance of declaring that heterosexuals shall be forever superior to homosexuals through policies of law.

Declaring groups of people to be unworthy of the same rights as others is something the KKK knows a lot about. The GOP's pretensions of self-righteousness and its harrumphing about how different the GOP is from the KKK have a very hollow ring in the context of Proposition No. 2.

(name withheld)
GOP Chairman, Harris County Precinct (redacted)
(address withheld)