"Vote for Chris Bell" Weekly Wrangle

Tomorrow is Election Day in SD-17. Be sure and vote for the only candidate demonstrating real reform. Here's this week's edition of the Texas Progressive Alliance's weekly Round-Up.

BossKitty at TruthHugger is amazed that today's America is repeating the 1930s era of economic depression and prohibition. America's Second Biggest Waste, War on Drugs describes how prohibition of medical marijuana keeps profiteering Big Pharma and the greedy military/industrial complex in the money, while hurting legitimate patients. Keeping medical cannabis illegal hurts everyone.

Joan Huffman's campaign for Texas Senate reached new lows during early voting last week, notes PDiddie at Brains and Eggs. First she violated election law by holding a campaign rally down the hall from an EV polling location, and then her campaign made smear robocalls to Democrats in the middle of the night. Let's put an end to this kind of politics and elect Chris Bell.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston has the top 10 reasons Paul Bettencourt quit.

jobsanger discusses America's broken and bloated healthcare system, and decides the best solution offered to date is Rep. John Conyers' National Health Insurance Act (HR 676).

Some unsolicited advice for Republicans from CouldBeTrue of South Texas
Chisme.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson discusses the likely federal stimulus and its implications on infrastructure in Texas in their posting entitled "Possible stimulus money for infrastructure creates debate on spending priorities".

This week, Mayor McSleaze at McBlogger takes on Kay Bailey and speculates on who is best positioned to take her on in 2010.

Off the Kuff finishes up his series of precinct analysis posts with a look at CD-10.

The Texas Cloverleaf looks at what could have been contained in Rick Perry's suspicious envelope.

Neil at Texas Liberal posted about Houston mayor Bill White and Harris County Judge Ed Emmett writing in the Houston Chronicle about cuts in emergency care and job reductions at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. These cuts, impacting the uninsured and a city reeling after a hurricane, are a classic Texas story of kicking the little guy while he is down.

Vince at Capitol Annex notes that sources are denying that state Sen. Leticia Van De Putte (D-San Antonio) will be leaving the Texas Senate for a position in the Obama administration.

"This is the farewell kiss, you dog"

The full statement:

"This is a gift from the Iraqis, this is the farewell kiss, you dog. This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."

It's the height of insult to do anything with your shoes in the Iraqi culture. You may recall that when the statue of Saddam was toppled in Baghdad in 2003, Iraqis took off their shoes and slapped the face with them. Apparently the Iraqi shoe-throwing journalist had a colleague who had been kidnapped and tortured.

That man has more spine than all of the United States Congress.

Huffman smear-dialing SD-17

In the middle of the night, no less. How much lower can she go?

Some Democrats -- I am one -- are getting late-night robo-calls (11:00pm-2:00am) about ethics complaints against an unnamed candidate in the SD-17 runoff. Since this slime is NOT coming from the Chris Bell campaign, it's obviously the latest effort by the usual shadowy group of Republicans who used the same tactic of smear calls and websites on Huffman herself in the general election. The purpose is not to encourage support for Huffman but to simply discourage Democratic voters from going to the polls. The website mentioned in the call, www.texasethicsreport.com, is a poor ripoff of Drudge and is quite visibly shoddy and hastily thrown together. It contains a sham ethics complaint against Bell.

Yet another robo-call is going out to certain voters trying to scare them by saying Chris Bell will take away their guns if elected, another tired conservative bromide and which is also untrue. Bell has never indicated he wants to place additional limits on second amendment rights.

Tuesday, December 16 is Election Day in SD-17. There's only one choice for reform. And decency.

Sunday Funnies

Turmoil at Hearst reflects uneasy state of newspaper biz

Last week George Irish, senior vice president of the Hearst Corporation and the head of Hearst's newspapers group (which oversees Texas dailies in Houston, San Antonio, Beaumont, Midland, Laredo, and Plainview) abruptly resigned from that position to become a director of the Hearst Foundation. I wrote about my personal saga with the man and the company here.

For a 64-year-old who climbed rapidly almost to the top of the company's ladder, that is NOT a promotion.

Irish follows CEO Victor Ganzi out the door, who got crossways with Hearst's board because he apparently wasn't making bold enough acquisitions. This is a truly remarkable amount of turnover for a conglomerate that has had a reputation for being tight-lipped when it comes to, well, all facets of its business, even (especially) how much money it makes. Because the company is one of the largest privately-owned operations on the planet, it has always placed a premium on loyalty and omerta. So to see this kind of drama play out publicly is itself revealing.

My guess is that he pulled the chain because Hearst vice chairman Frank Bennack, 75 -- Irish's new/old boss -- wasn't going to let him sit in the big chair, and running the dying newspaper division for another few years didn't look to be too hot an option either. That rumor is noted in this NY Post "Media Ink" column, reporting Ganzi's departure in June.

So the FNG is 46-year-old Steven Swartz, whiz-bang Harvard guy with the e-newspapers cred. He's got a tough task ahead; revitalize a company's flagship business at a time when the industry appears to be at the brink of extinction. But with his background in Hearst-related ventures such as magazines and yellow page directories, as well an eye for savvy acquisitions, he's probably the CEO-in-waiting.

All the old guys I used to work with in the business are out of it now themselves -- Rollie Hyde in Plainview, Aubrey Webb in Beaumont, Charlie Spence in Midland, and now Irish. My first Hearst boss after Irish, James Thomas, the long-retired publisher of the Plainview Daily Herald, passed away in July of this year at 84.

End of an era, in every way.

Friday Funny: Please Hurry

Sharp and the Senate (and Bill White)

Another development I have resisted posting my opinion about is the fact that Texas Democrats are -- as of this writing -- reduced to a pair of fat, bald, white male conservatives as standard-bearers in 2010. Harvey Kronberg -- who spoke last night at a town hall hosted by my state rep, Ellen Cohen -- says that Bill White is probably going to run for Washington and not Austin:

For almost two weeks now, the political rumor mill has been breathlessly anticipating Houston Mayor Bill White's announcement of future election plans.

While still rumors, the quality have improved and they have moved up the food chain. Reasonably reliable sources tell QR that the current announcement date is next Monday and that Mayor White will announce he intends to run for what may become an open seat in the United States Senate.

We frame this rumor with caveats galore. Truth is, we will find out whether or not it is true next Monday.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a fat, balding, white male myself. I just keep finding myself farther and farther away from 'conservative' with each passing day.

And unlike some in my circle, I'm not in favor of Bill White for anything. He's far, far too conservative for me. He's demonstrated a particular disdain for the Democratic wing of the Texas Democratic Party, from toadying with Tom DeLay to haughtily dismissing concerns about e-voting.

But John Sharp is even farther to the right than White; "pro-life Catholic", an on-again, off-again pal with Governor MoFo all the way back to their Aggie days, and apparently a consort of Texas religious fundamentalists:

He and Mr. Perry were students together at Texas A&M but became politically estranged until 2006, when San Antonio megachurch pastor John Hagee brokered a reconciliation that led to the governor appointing Mr. Sharp to lead a commission to craft a property tax overhaul.

Like Kuffner, I'm at a loss as to where Vince gets the idea Sharp is a progressive.

Neither of these two comes close to my idea of a Democrat ... even in Texas. While White was a disaster as the Texas Democratic Party chair from 1995 -98, Sharp is a two-time loser for lt. governor, in '98 and '02.

The only thing we need now to hit the trifecta is Kinky Friedman.

Surely we're going to be able to do better than this ... ?

Update: Socratic Gadfly has more on the Republican company Sharp keeps. How is White going to top that?

Update II: Mayor McSleaze nails it ...

Who's Afraid Of KBH?

The answer seems to be pretty much everyone these days. Working off the premise that Kay Bailey Hutchison will resign her Senate seat to challenge Governor For Life Rick Perry in the 2010 Republican Primary, would-be senators have been lining up like WalMart shoppers to replace her.

Auto industry slain last night by Senate Republicans

Been holding my water on this for as long as I could. Can't stand it one more minute:

A bailout-weary Congress killed a $14 billion package to aid struggling U.S. automakers Thursday night after a partisan dispute over union wage cuts derailed a last-ditch effort to revive the emergency aid before year's end.

Republicans, breaking sharply with President George W. Bush as his term draws to a close, refused to back federal aid for Detroit's beleaguered Big Three without a guarantee that the United Auto Workers would agree by the end of next year to wage cuts to bring their pay into line with U.S. plants of Japanese carmakers. The UAW refused to do so before its current contract with the automakers expires in 2011.

The UAW acceded to the politicians' demands to reduce its members' compensation -- they are NOT $70 an hour, by the way; that's another radical conservative urban legend -- just not next year, as Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Richard Selby of Alabama, and a few other tobacco-juice-drooling, slave-owning symbols of the Old South insisted.

That bill — the product of a hard-fought negotiation between congressional Democrats and the Bush White House — was virtually dead on arrival in the Senate, where Republicans said it was too weak in its demands on the car companies and contained unacceptable environmental mandates for the Big Three.

Thursday's implosion followed yet another set of marathon negotiations at the Capitol — this time involving labor, the auto industry and lawmakers. The group came close to agreement, but it stalled over the UAW's refusal to agree to the wage concessions.

"We were about three words away from a deal," said Corker, the GOP's point man in the negotiations, referring to any date in 2009 on which the UAW would accept wage cuts.

...

Congressional Republicans have been in open revolt against Bush over the auto bailout. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky joined other GOP lawmakers Thursday in announcing his opposition to the White House-backed bill, which passed the House on Wednesday. He and other Republicans insisted that the carmakers restructure their debt and bring wages and benefits in line with those paid by Toyota, Honda and Nissan in the United States.

Hourly wages for UAW workers at GM factories are about equal to those paid by Toyota Motor Corp. at its older U.S. factories, according to the companies. GM says the average UAW laborer makes $29.78 per hour, while Toyota says it pays about $30 per hour. But the unionized factories have far higher benefit costs.

GM says its total hourly labor costs are now $69, including wages, pensions and health care for active workers, plus the pension and health care costs of more than 432,000 retirees and spouses. Toyota says its total costs are around $48. The Japanese automaker has far fewer retirees and its pension and health care benefits are not as rich as those paid to UAW workers.

So let's make sure everybody understands: because the US auto industry is almost a hundred years old, because its workers bled and died on assembly lines (and continue to do so today) before they organized for livable wages, affordable health care, and a comfortable retirement -- things the GOP has dismantled in virtually every other American industry over the last 25 years -- they are to be punished.

McConnell, the happy co-killer of labor unions and by extension the willing assassin of what's left of America's middle class, is married to Elaine Chao, the (so-called) Secretary of Labor. You can NOT make this shit up.

Even the massive financial contributions to the GOP by the auto manufacturers over the years couldn't buy them a break, because the Republicans saw an opportunity to bust a union and couldn't resist ...

An action alert circulated among Senate Republicans on Wednesday called for Republicans to "stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor."

In doing so, analysts said, Republicans were planting the seeds for a fundraising appeal to big business -- other than the Big Three, of course -- as they gear up for a major political fight next year over expected legislation that would make it easier for unions to organize.

Even Dick Cheney told the GOP Senate caucus that it was going to be "Herbert Hoover time" if they killed this bill.

I believe the Republicans just sealed their fate as a minority party for a generation, isolated in the Southern region of the nation, policed by radicals and extremists. The homophobes and racial bigots throughout Dixie ought to be be real happy this morning. The poor people in Kentucky and Alabama and Tennessee -- and yes, Texas -- who elected these scumbags may yet live to regret voting against their economic self-interest, but they're probably still too stupid to realize it this morning.

Give them another three months, let the REAL depression settle in. I bet they start to smell the coffee.

Update: BooMan ...

When you've let your anti-union ideology move you far to the right of Dick Cheney, you know you're out on a limb. It appears the Senate Republicans decided to play their own game of chicken with the Bush administration. They said, essentially, 'if you don't want to go down in history as the modern-day Hoover administration, bail Detroit out on your own'. And now it is up to the Bush administration to do just that.

The 18 Senators who voted FOR the $700 billion bank bailout, and against the $14 billion loan to the auto manufacturers. Our very own Kay Bailey is one.

And this:

"I don't know what Sen. Vitter has against GM or the United Auto Workers or the entire domestic auto industry; whatever it is, whatever he thinks we've done, it's time for him to forgive us, just like Sen. Vitter has asked the citizens of Louisiana to forgive him, " said Johnson, president of Local 2166. Otherwise, Johnson said of Vitter, it would appear, "He'd rather pay a prostitute than pay auto workers."

-- Morgan Johnson, president of the United Auto Workers local representing General Motors workers in Shreveport

Harris judicial candidate Pierre sues to overturn November result

Because of the voting registration failures of Paul Bettencourt, of course:

The Democratic candidate who lost a Harris County judicial race by 230 votes last month is asking a court to make him the winner, saying a variety of alleged vote count and voter registration failures by the county cost him a victory.

Democrat J. Goodwille Pierre, a lawyer who manages small business programs for the Houston airport system, is no stranger to voting rights lawsuits; he said he worked on such issues in Texas for the liberal group People For The American Way, particularly on behalf of Prairie View A&M University students registering in Waller County.

Now the first-time candidate is filing suit on behalf of his own campaign against Republican civil court Judge Joseph "Tad" Halbach of the 333rd District Court.

This lawsuit is only slightly related to the TDP's own, filed yesterday, which points to the same shenanigans.

Both suits now allege that outgoing Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt, a Republican who also serves as voter registrar, rejected legitimate voter registration applications.

Pierre's lawsuit also cites a non-partisan ballots board's rejection of about 5,800 ballots cast by voters who, according to records from Bettencourt's office and other agencies, had not been properly registered. The ballot board chairman said some of the ballots, after being processed by Bettencourt's staff, had information obscured by correction fluid.

"Had all persons who cast a vote in this race been allowed to have their vote counted; it would have changed the outcome of the election by providing Pierre with more votes than Joseph "Tad" Halbach," the suit said. "Moreover, various irregularities make it impossible to ascertain the true outcome of the election."

Ah, the Wite-Out caper again. Recall that it was the GOP ballot board chairman who caught it?

But Republican Jim Harding, a retired Houston business executive who chairs the ballot board of about 35 people, said the counting process was delayed by faulty work by Bettencourt's staff.

The problems included hundreds of voter forms whose information the registrar's staff masked with white correction fluid and then altered with new information, Harding said.

As ballot board members determined whether ballots should be counted, he said, they wanted to have confidence in the accuracy of the registrar's research.

But "that kind of confidence is not replicated here, and then when they see this 'white-out' all over the place they get nervous," he said.

I don't know what to expect out of Pierre's complaint, other than to draw more heat to Bettencourt's misadventure. Pierre is a respected local attorney and Democratic activist; he also challenged Kaufman for the county clerk's position in 2006.

With the breaking news earlier this afternoon that Joan Huffman has likely violated campaign election law by holding a political rally in the same building as an early voting poll, one thing we know for certain is that Vince Ryan is going to be one busy guy.

Huffman violates campaign law with rally at poll

Posted about half an hour ago. Paul Bettencourt probably told her it was OK:

Joan Huffman's campaign for state Senate appears to have broken the law against campaigning on property where voting is taking place, Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman said today.

Republican Huffman, opposing Democrat Chris Bell in next Tuesday's state Senate District 17 runoff, hosted a barbecue luncheon for voters today inside the Tracey Gee Community Center in far west Houston. Early voting in the state Senate election is taking place through Friday in another room in the same building.

Commissioner Steve Radack, a Republican, said he attended the luncheon along with Huffman and urged people to vote for her. She is a former felony court judge.

Under state law, it is a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $500, to campaign for or against a candidate "within 100 feet of an outside door through which a voter may enter the building in which a polling place is located."

Radack said a member of Kaufman's staff working at the early voting station took no action after checking into a complaint by a voter. But Kaufman said the event was "ill-advised" and should not have taken place there, regardless of the distance between the two rooms inside the community building.

Kaufman said it was up to a voter to pursue any charges against the campaign. The voter who complained to the election worker said she, indeed, would do so.

Just another reason to go vote for Chris Bell (as if you need one).

Crunch time for Chris Bell

And no, that isn't the snow and ice under your feet (which in my neighborhood was all gone before the sun even came up this morning). No, Politicker suggests that the early vote is going Joan Huffman's way:

Numbers are out from the first day of early voting for the state Senate District 17 runoff, and they appear to point to a more competitive race between Republican Joan Huffman and Democrat Chris Bell.

There are now three days of EV in the can, and while Tuesday's numbers jumped up a bit, Wednesday's were severely depressed by the weather.

Early voting, which began Monday and runs through Friday, brought 3,822 voters to the polls on Monday in the five district counties — obviously a far cry from the 223,295 total votes in the initial election. But on a percentage basis, Bell strongholds aren't voting as much, while Huffman's strongholds are becoming an increasingly larger proportion of the electorate.

For example, in Harris County, which includes Houston, Bell won the Nov. 4 race, 38 percent to 21 percent. However, Harris County voters made up 53.6 percent of the vote in the initial election. On Monday, they accounted for only 41.1 percent. After Harris, the second-largest county in the district is Fort Bend, which represented 27.8 percent of the Nov. 4 vote and went to Bell, 39-36. On Monday, Fort Bend accounted for only 19.7 percent of the vote.

Huffman's biggest strength was in Brazoria County, which she carried, 37-27, on Nov. 4. However, Brazoria County voters were only 9.5 percent of the electorate in the special election. On the first day of early voting for the run-off, they made up 19 percent of all voters.

The numbers aren't all bad for Bell. He dominated the counties of Galveston and Jefferson on Nov. 4 by margins of 49-18 and 58-7, respectively, and both of those counties have more than doubled their percentage of the electorate, based on the early sample. Galveston rose from a 4.1 percent share to 9.9, while Jefferson increased from 4.9 percent to 10.1.

However, even with the increased weight proportionally of those counties, they still only make up 20 percent combined of the vote, meaning potential slides in Harris and Fort Bend would be more important.

Today and tomorrow are the final two days of EV, and the hours are longer, stretching from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. both days. Let's push this race over the finish line for Chris Bell, and put another much-needed Democratic Senator in Austin.

Yesterday's Bettenquit Follies

Houston's "blizzard" kept me from attending the TDP presser and from posting this update yesterday. Alan Bernstein was there and files this report (as they say on teevee). At the end of the excerpt are a couple of emphasized portions:

"Mr. Bettencourt's late-night resignation announcement is his attempt to avoid bringing to light the inner workings of his office over the past several years and still does not ensure that the problems surrounding Harris County voter registration will be resolved," the state (Democratic) party said Wednesday in a statement distributed by Houston lawyer Chad Dunn.

Republican Bettencourt, the tax assessor-collector, said it was ridiculous to suggest he and his staff purposely foiled voter registrations or that his resignation was triggered by the lawsuit.

...

Dunn, the Democrats' lawyer, said the lawsuit was expanded to, among other things, include as plaintiffs four people whose voter registration applications were stymied by what the party calls the county's "unlawful and hyper-technical voters registration activities." The lawsuit alleges Bettencourt's staff has disenfranchised voters by using unwarranted technical reasons for rejecting their registration applications.

Bettencourt said the four were rejected for routine, justifiable reasons involving their paperwork, and that the registration system in the county works well.

"You are going to have mistakes made," he said. "What you do is fix them."

The bipartisan ballot board that decided whether to accept provisional ballots cast by voters whose names were missing from the Nov. 4 rolls accepted some that Bettencourt's staff had classified as incomplete. His staff was unable to get thousands of registrations onto the rolls before early voting.

Bettencourt apparently still will have to give pre-trial testimony in the lawsuit after this month and will be represented by the new county attorney, Democrat Vince Ryan.

That first part above is why I believe that a new tax assessor/collector/voter registrar deserves to be relieved of the VR portion of their job title. As explosive as the legal complaint of malfeasance is, the fact that thousands of people didn't get to vote because their paperwork (a postcard, mind you) couldn't get processed in time reveals a incompetence of the rankest order on the part of Bettencourt and his staff. Put aside the partisan rancor and even the alleged criminal mischief for a moment: can a new department head get this job done more effectively than an incumbent with several years of experience at it? I'd have to be pessimistic, no matter how talented that person may be.

Bettencourt kept the inner workings of the voter registration process as secretive as he could. The FNG is going to have to do many things better, and one is to open up the process to observers -- media, political party, and otherwise -- in a significant way. Not for nothing, but Beverly Kaufman has a few cycles of experience dealing with HCDP observers like myself and John Behrman (and others before us) analyzing the county's vote counting -- with us suggesting changes, arguing for more security, and so forth. She has -- grudgingly at times -- moved closer and closer to our requests for improved e-Slate integrity, including L&A and parallel testing, tightened chain-of-custody security, and more. She hasn't done every we have asked; she fights us some and slow-walks us too much, but she has certainly demonstrated far more openness and allowed more "sunshine" into the vote tabulation process conducted by her staff than Bettencourt ever had a nightmare about.

If commissioners court intends to seriously address the mess that is voter registration in Harris County, it will remove the task from the purview of the tax assessor/collector's office and give it to the county clerk.

As for Vince Ryan defending Paul Bettencourt against a TDP lawsuit, that is going to be comedy gold down the road.