HCDP has a new Director

Meet my buddy Melissa Taylor, who was just named the new Director of Party Administration for the Harris County Democratic Party.

I've known Melissa since we both rode the bus to Crawford on the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in March of 2004. She was *ahem* slightly active in Howard Dean's presidential campaign, was the volunteer coordinator for Richard Morrison's congressional run last year, and has recently served on the steering committee of Democracy for Houston.

Melissa's task -- and she is more than qualified to accomplish it -- is to improve upon some of the following numbers:

Harris County, with a population of 3.6 million people, is larger than 24 states and the District of Columbia. It covers 1,777 square miles and has 913 precincts. In 2004 58% of its 1.8 million registered voters cast ballots in the general election, and 45% of those votes were for John Kerry.

This county -- the second most populous in the United States -- is already purple, and with a little extra work is going to turn blue in 2006.

Congratulations Melissa. Let's kick some Republican ass in 2006 -- and beyond.

Abramoff, Scanlon, Suncruz, and Elmore Leonard

Josh Marshall just keeps pulling on the loose threads (and so does the Justice Department):

You know that when the casino boat line SunCruz was owned by Jack Abramoff and Adam Kidan, the company paid the men who blew away SunCruz founder Gus Boulis.

Now it turns out they also had the company pay the National Republican Congressional Committee (the House GOP election committee) $10,000 on behalf of Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH). That was in exchange for Ney's putting anti-Boulis remarks in the congressional record that helped Abramoff and Kidan pressure Boulis to sell them SunCruz.

The guy who helped arrange Ney's anti-Boulis-trash-talking and the later pay-off was none other than Mike Scanlon, who later did public relations work for SunCruz, in addition to going into the Indian gaming bilking biz with SunCruz owner Abramoff.

Scanlon is the guy who just agreed to testify against, well ... everybody in the Abramoff cases.

Complicated? Hey, don't blame us! We didn't tell them to go out and live an Elmore Leonard novel.

As Glenn Reynolds would say: "Heh."