The Weekly Wrangle

One week before early voting in Texas begins, and the Texas Progressive Alliance blog round-up is full of posts you should read before you cast your ballot. This week's round-up was compiled by Vince from Capitol Annex.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme agrees with Webb County elections commissioner Patricia Barrera and Webb County voters: electronic voting machines need a voter verifiable paper trail.

jobsanger thinks the Texas Legislature should rescind the Texas Driver Responsibility Program, which has one million Texas drivers owing $815 in fines, and wonders if a Denver mural is artwork or a political sign.

Justin at AAA-Fund Blog makes note of nearly violent anti-Iraqi racism at Texas A&M.

Captain Kroc at McBlogger has some advice for evangelicals narrowly focused on abortion.

Voter suppression by Republicans in Harris County is carefully distinguished from the "voter fraud" the conservatives continually whine about, but PDiddie's favorite (indeed his only) conservative commenter studiously doesn't get it. At Brains and Eggs.

nytexan of BlueBloggin points out that once again Bush lied and Congress went along with NSA Eavesdropping On Americans And Bush’s BS War On Terror. Americans now have the pleasure of knowing that NSA has listened to US citizens. Happy now!

Off the Kuff takes a look at the 30-day finance reports for Harris County candidates.

Mail in ballots returned for postage? It has already happened in Denton County. The Texas Cloverleaf has more.

Gary at Easter Lemming Liberal News posted videos that explain why Obama is leading in North Carolina to the new GOP base and other stuff in one of his rambles around the web.

BossKitty at TruthHugger is saddened how some Americans cannot progress beyond old thinking. I’d Rather Not Say It's About RACE is an expose showing how Republican politics exploits "old thinking" to control voters.

If you live in Bellaire, Sugarland, Galveston, or another part of the oddly gerrymandered SD 17, you may have gotten a "push poll" from folks trying to whittle down Democratic candidate Chris Bell's lead in the state Senate race. George at The Texas Blue points out some dirty tricks in Texas' 17th Senate district.

Vince at Capitol Annex -- freshly back from a six-day hiatus after moving servers -- has ranked "Hot" Texas House races in anticipation of the 2008 elections.

Harris County election details (updated)

Reposting with a few updates and corrections to the original September 25 post, due to questions posed about the SD-17 race ...

-- There will be 874 voting precincts in the nation's third-largest county. Some precincts will be combined in polling places, being determined by your respective county commissioner even now.

-- There are 263 ballot versions in the general election, and more than a hundred others for "limited" voting (for example, someone from out-of-state voting just a presidential and/or federal candidate ballot).

-- There are thirteen different election entities, which split precincts in some cases (such as school districts and MUDs).

-- The special election for SD-17 (79 precincts in Harris, but also on ballots in Jefferson, Brazoria, Fort Bend, and Galveston counties) will be at the very top of the ballot, above the presidential candidates and even the straight-party button. Alan Bernstein explains:

The contest will appear before the "straight ticket" option that allows voters, with a single physical motion, to vote for all candidates of a particular party, from president to justice of the peace. But, since there are multiple Democrats and Republicans in the SD 17 race, the straight ticket vote would not apply to it anyway. Voters in the district can mark their choice in that race and then get on with the businesses of voting "straight ticket" or cherrypicking their way down the ballot.

Chris Bell will appear first on the ballot in Fort Bend, Galveston and Jefferson counties, in the third position in Brazoria County, and in Harris County Bell's name appears as the last one listed in the SD-17 contest. As I have previously noted -- and despite what you may have read elsewhere, like in Al's post above -- he is the one true Democrat in the race.

-- Here's a sample ballot, listing all of the races. You will obviously get to vote for a single Congressional and statehouse candidate to represent your area, but all of the judicial candidates and all of the Harris County executive races will appear on your ballot (if you're voting in Harris, of course).

-- The deadline for voter registration was October 6. Learn which candidates represent you and will be on your ballot through the various links listed here. Early voting begins October 20. Here are the EV locations, hours, and more useful information.

-- Harris County election officials project that 1.2 million votes will be cast here. If that holds historically accurate it would represent about 20% 15% of the statewide tally, which works out to six somewhere between 8 and 9 million Texas votes.

-- Finally, Harris County will be parallel-testing its voting machines for the first time ...

Parallel testing, also known as election-day testing, involves selecting voting machines at random and testing them as realistically as possible during the period that votes are being cast. The fundamental question addressed by such tests arise from the fact that pre-election testing is almost always done using a special test mode in the voting system, and corrupt software could potentially arrange to perform honestly while in test mode while performing dishonestly during a real election.

And I will be present as they do.

Charles Kuffner points out in the original posting's comments that I significantly underestimated the statewide turnout, leading to the strikeouts and revisions above.

EV 10/12: 338 - 174

As tipped earlier in the week: Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and Nevada all tip over to the blue. Indiana falls back into the red. Only Missouri and North Carolina are still too close to call. (There's also an outlying WV poll that shows it solidly in Obama's camp, but I'm not going to switch it yet.)

<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>

Sunday Funnies (a last bit of sanity in an unhinged world)

You'll have to scroll all the way to "The End" to understand ...

The Death of Capitalism in America

Added to the legacy of George W Bush -- which is to say, thrown onto the ash heap of history:

Sounds pretty dramatic but that is the headline of a story on the front page of the Washington Post today. Maybe a bit exaggerated, but that the subject even comes up is amazing. None of the candidates are passing out the collected works of Marx and Lenin yet, but the next President is in for what candidates love to call (but hate to make) "tough decisions." It is far more likely that the scary phone call will come at 3 P.M. rather than 3 A.M. and will have to do with which other industries have to be nationalized to save them from going belly up.

For example, General Motors stock was off 31% to $4.76 a share yesterday. The Bush administration has turned the budget surpluses inherited from Bill Clinton into massive deficits financed by borrowing money from foreigners, especially in Asia. This means that Asian countries, especially China, own hundreds of billions of dollars worth of treasury bills. Now suppose the Chinese government decides it wants to get into the car manufacturing business so it makes a deal with Toyota, now the world's largest car manufacturer, to buy GM outright for a song and move its factories to China to be operated by Toyota but employing Chinese workers. All they keep is the U.S. dealer network and millions of American jobs are lost. If the next President nixes the purchase of GM, the Chinese sell their treasury bills and the dollar collapses. This is not science fiction any more. Which candidate is better prepared to deal with stuff like this could determine the election.

Auto sales slide as much as 50% and auto dealers go out of business as prospective buyers with impeccable credit could not get a car loan in the single digits last month. In response, even Toyota's credit arm begin offering 0% loans up to 72 months. That has long been the domain of the poor struggling Big Three (perhaps to become the Big Two in short order), but to see Toyota resort to giving away automobile credit is a stunner.

Newspaper companies -- they of the twenty- and thirty-percent profit margins not long ago -- cannot pay even the interest on their debt, and continue to shed employees (as do companies in all industries). And retail businesses are failing right and left:

Sharper Image filed for bankruptcy protection in February, and has since been liquidating itself, getting even lower prices for its assets than it had hoped. Several other well-known retailers have since gone bust. Steve & Barry’s, a casualwear retailer that is a core tenant of numerous shopping malls, terrified commercial-property investors when it entered bankruptcy protection in July. It emerged in August with new private-equity owners and a plan to close 103 of its 276 stores. Linens ’n Things filed in May, and at first hoped to reorganise itself and leave bankruptcy. After the collapse of a planned sale to Cerberus, a private-equity firm, it now plans to liquidate itself, with closing-down sales due to start at its remaining stores on October 16th.

These failures have contributed to a rise in bankruptcy filings in 2008 that is showing every sign of accelerating. Even before September’s record-breaking financial-sector bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, with assets of well over $600 billion, and the technical bankruptcy of Washington Mutual en route to its acquisition by JPMorgan Chase, there had already been more bankruptcies this year than in 2007.

For every store closing, for every company liquidating its assets, for every business bankruptcy filed, there are suppliers who don't get paid and who thus become the next business faced with insolvency. And there are employees who lose their jobs and their health care benefits, and who can't meet their mortgage payments.

It becomes a vicious cycle, as more and more people fear for their jobs and drastically curb their purchases, which leads to more stores closing and more layoffs for manufacturers and suppliers. The shippers who transport all these goods start to lose business as consumer spending dries up. And the businesses that provide services find that their clients can't or won't pay their bills. Bankruptcy lawyers and collection firms are busy, sure, but they can't sustain an entire economy. They are getting rich off those who still have the cash to buy stock and properties and inventories and other business assets at rock-bottom prices. We are entering the vulture stage of the Crash of 2008. And it could last for a very long time.

And I don't think more tax cuts for the rich can fix this, do you?

Is Barack Obama prepared to be this century's FDR? We have to hope so. Because we're just not going to be able to drill our way out of this one.

Conservatives keep on shrieking 'fraud'

Following the revelations that ACORN registered Tony Romo and a few other Dallas Cowboys to vote in Nevada, the knee-jerk Republick outcry shifted suddenly from "ILL EAGLES" to "FRAUD". Closer to home, the Local Twos found a few dead folks who voted in the Texas primary in March.

That led, predictably, to a little LBJ bashing. (Really though, what do the conservatives have left to complain about? Since John McCain has been forced to talk down the bigots showing up at his rallies, they can no longer claim even with a half-straight face that Barack Hussein Obama is a terrorist. Team Maverick sidekick Sarah Barracuda got gaffed by the Republican investigation in the Alaska legislature that found her guilty of abusing her authority, so her stock is going to keep plummeting. Republicans across the country from the White House to the statehouse to the courthouse are about to be washed out to sea under a blue tsunami, and the panic and desperation is palpable.)

Regarding ACORN:

ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. (It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.

And as for anybody voting with a deceased person's registration, they ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But the task of updating voter registrations falls to the county tax assessor-collector (Matt), and because Harris County maintains a vital records database that includes death certificates, there's really no excuse beyond bureaucratic incompetence that allows for 4,000 dead people to remain on the voter rolls.

Fortunately we have a great alternative to Paul Bettencourt on the ballot next month, and her name is Dr. Diane Trautman.