Memorial Day Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes you all had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend as it brings you this week's blog roundup.

This week on Left of College Station, Teddy asks if Don't Ask, Don't Tell could be coming to an end, and also covers the week in headlines. Teddy at will be looking back this week at highlights from Left of College Station's first two years of blogging, and will be taking the month of June off from blogging. Look for more in-depth coverage of politics and social commentary in July, including extensive research and investigations. Thanks to the Texas Progressive Alliance for supporting political and social thought to the Left of College Station.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson points out that even though there's been another audit of TxDOT, nothing will change until Texas gets a new governor: TxDOT's management audit, we've heard it all before.

Harris County is considering creating an elections administration department with a non-partisan, unelected appointee at the helm. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs is in favor of it, but irregular contributor OpenSourceDem is not.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is tired of racist, Republican fearmongerers driving poor policy decisions on the border.

Off the Kuff took a close look at the UT/Texas Trib poll of the governor's race.

WhosPlayin hopes everyone has a nice Memorial Day, and has a message of gratitude and remembrance of those who have fallen in the service of our country.

A Houston right-wing talk show host and former Houston city council member calls for bombing of a mosque. Bay Area Houston has an opinion. Imagine that.

Asian American Action Fund Blog's Justin invites everyone to Houston to attend the OCA National Convention June 17-20. Festivities include panel discussions, awards gala, and free Starry Night Market and Film Festival. Eric Byler and Coffee Party founder Annabel Park's immigration documentary "9500 Liberty" will be shown.

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw helps us understand Rick Perry's complaints about the EPA taking over the permitting process from the toothless Minerals Management Service, I mean the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Surprisingly enough, Mr. "Act of God" is upset he can't continue his business first, second and always approach to environmental regulations. Take at look, at Governor Perry to the EPA: Back Off.

Neil at Texas Liberal offered up a 58-second video where he listed eight points about democracy while standing in front of a car demolition lot near the Houston Ship Channel. Every place is the right place to talk about freedom.

Sunday Funnies

Dennis Hopper 1936 - 2010

Dennis Hopper — actor (Rebel Without a Cause, Blue Velvet), director (Easy Rider, Colors), screenwriter, photographer, painter, hellraiser, raconteur, and no-bull Hollywood legend — died of prostate cancer at his house in Venice Beach, in Los Angeles (yesterday). He was 74.

Hopper may have had the surest hand on the zeitgeist of anyone in Hollywood, putting his fingerprints on a series of iconic, era-defining pictures. He played a supporting role in the ultimate '50s teen drama, Rebel Without a Cause (1955); legitimized hippies on film (and in Hollywood's power structure) with Easy Rider (1969); contributed a memorable cameo as a crazed journalist to Francis Ford Coppola's New Hollywood apotheosis Apocalypse Now (1979); concocted one of the scariest of all screen villains as Frank Booth in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986); directed the gang drama Colors (1988) with its hit title track by Ice-T just as L.A.'s Bloods and Crips were making news; and completely stole the blockbuster Speed (1994) as the bad guy. Later in life he became a widely exhibited photographer and published collections of his images.

He was a member of a small cadre of baby boomers who changed the cinema industry in the '60's.

With its portrait of counterculture heroes raising their middle fingers to the uptight middle-class hypocrisies, "Easy Rider" became the cinematic symbol of the 1960s, a celluloid anthem to freedom, macho bravado and anti-establishment rebellion. As a low-budget independent film that earned huge amounts of money, it also triggered a seismic shift in Hollywood, which began eagerly to court the youth market and look for similarly disreputable properties to co-opt.

My favorite recent role was that of Huey Walker in Flashback, a film which managed to satire the '60's at every plot turn. Keifer Sutherland's role as son-of-flower-children-turned-FBI-agent in hot pursuit of Hopper's Abby Hoffman-ish Walker is hilarious. More from the Rolling Stone link:

Hopper spent the '90s and '00s in a reliable niche as a hipster emeritus, frequently appearing on talk shows and playing a wide range of roles, though in Blue Velvet's wake he was most frequently identified with villain roles.

The alcoholic coach in Hoosiers, the intergalactic contraband hauler in Space Truckers, the band manager in White Star ... even his minorly freaky roles were legend. Concluding from the WaPo link:

As the sexually compulsive, pathologically troubled villain Frank Booth, Hopper -- three years clean and sober -- found a way to combine the knife-edge madness he had always possessed with newfound powers of control and discipline.

Hopper left the planet too soon, but it was still gratifying to see him turn what could have been a career of flameouts and sad self-destruction into a triumph of endurance. Now that he's gone, he has left behind a generation of actors who grasp at his wildness with mannerisms and empty emoting, but who can never reach that precise alchemy of derangement and focus that Hopper embodied at his best. ... It's an irony Hopper himself surely appreciated that the man who embodied antiauthoritarianism at its most anarchic finally realized his best artistic self when he embraced self-control.

Update: It's kind of difficult to picture Hopper, Art Linkletter, and Gary Coleman all going anywhere together ... and of course, maybe they didn't.

College World Series update

The Lamar University baseball team continued its hit parade Saturday in a Southland Conference tournament championship-clinching game.

The Cardinals tallied a season-high 22 hits and rolled to a 17-7 victory against Texas State in the conference championship game at Whataburger Field in Corpus Christi. ...

The conference tournament championship is Lamar's third in the Southland, fifth overall and its first since 2004. By winning, the Cardinals are automatically qualified for the 64-team NCAA tournament. The tournament field will be announced at 11:30 a.m. Monday on ESPN.

Lamar entered the tournament as the No. 7 seed but won four straight tournament games. Lamar's last three victories came against teams against which Lamar failed to win in seven regular season games.

****

After scoring 53 runs in the first three days of the tournament — all wins — top-seeded Rice was stymied by the Southern Mississippi duo of Todd McInnis, the two-time C-USA Pitcher of the Year, and Scott Copeland, who hasn’t lost yet this season and was working on two days of rest.

After playing nearly flawlessly for three days, the Owls were merely mortal in a 7-4 loss. ...

Two errors, four unearned runs and 10 runners left on base mean that, for the only the second time in the last five years, the conference trophy doesn’t reside with Rice (38-21). The Golden Eagles (35-22), jubilant after Diego Seastrunk’s groundout to first base for the final out, earned the league’s automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament.

Back in February when I watched my undefeated Cardinals whip the winless Owls, I figured the team was destined for big things. But they had a terrible regular season, while Rice returned to their normal, dominant selves. This upset victory in their conference tournament, and Rice's fade in theirs, was another reversal of fortune for both teams. Rice may still make the CWS as an at-large representative on the strength of a 38-21 record and their storied reputation.

And hopefully there will be some regional and super-regional games nearby to attend.

Maddow's "That was Then, This is Then"

Via David Ortez and others, Rachel Maddow's segment here exposes the oil industry as woefully unprepared for underwater well blowouts. As they have been for more than thirty-one years, the last time something much like this happened.



Maddow is doing some of the best reporting on television, and her show has become a must-DVR for me.

Happy Mem Day everyone

Don't forget the reason for the season. We all get to grill and shop and sun because of men like Lieutenant Finn:

Retired Navy Lt. John Finn - the first American to receive the nation's highest military award for defending sailors under a torrent of gunfire during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - died Thursday. He was 100.

Finn was the oldest of 97 Medal of Honor recipients from World War II still living. He died at a nursing home for veterans in Chula Vista, outside San Diego, according to a Navy statement.

Despite head wounds and other injuries, Finn, the chief of ordnance for an air squadron, continuously fired a .50-caliber machine gun from an exposed position as bullets and bombs pounded the Naval Air Station at Kaneohe Bay in Oahu. He then supervised the rearming of returning American planes.

"Here they're paying you for doing your duty, and that's what I did," Finn told The Associated Press before his 100th birthday. "I never intended to be a hero. But on Dec. 7, by God, we're in a war."

I'd like to quote from his citation.

For extraordinary heroism, distinguished service, and devotion above and beyond the call of duty. During the first attack by Japanese airplanes on the Naval Air Station, Kanoehe Bay, on 7 December 1941, Lieutenant Finn promptly secured and manned a 50-caliber machine gun mounted on an instruction stand in a completely exposed section of the parking ramp, which was under heavy enemy machine-gun strafing fire. Although painfully wounded many times, he continued to man this gun and to return the enemy's fire vigorously and with telling effect throughout the enemy strafing and bombing attacks and with complete disregard for his own personal safety. It was only by specific orders that he was persuaded to leave his post to seek medical attention. Following first-aid treatment, although obviously suffering much pain and moving with great difficulty, he returned to the squadron area and actively supervised the rearming of returning planes. His extraordinary heroism and conduct in this action were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

They don't make 'em like that any more. RIP.

Rand Justice for All (another bad week for freedom)

OpenSourceDem on a Harris County elections administrator

Occasional contributor OpenSourceDem is responding to this post of mine.

When you realize that Sir Thomas More was pretty much a creep (before becoming a Saint on a legal technicality), you may not be in favor of a “utopian ... non-partisan, unelected official” running elections.

Um, that would be like the county jails, toll roads, sports stadiums, and drainage ditches.  Think about it!

Here is a practical alternative to an Elections Administrator who would be accountable to ... nobody:

Diane Trautman is Tax Assessor-Collector and focuses on tax matters, countering the endless, high-pitched whine from Dan Patrick and Paul Bettencourt, who are both still on the air. Here’s a clue: “Uniform taxation of real property ad valorem” is progressive, popular, and very, very constitutional. And here’s another clue: To do that the Tax Office needs to manage the property records efficiently and impose a “stamp tax”, not to raise revenue so much as to force disclosure of transaction prices.

Ann Harris Bennett is County Clerk and manages elections, including voter registration and history records, responsibly.

Loren Jackson manages the Jury Wheel and provides for the security of personal identity and integrity of property data across all county and state database systems that now, by design, expose Harris County citizens to criminal identity theft, discriminatory pricing, disenfranchisement, and official oppression.

All of the government data and meta-data -- save for keys and valuable or derogatory personal information that is not necessarily or legitimately in the public domain -- should be open and well documented publicly and professionally. To assure this, database and tabulation technology should fall under the routine auspices of a non-partisan and technically proficient county Testing and Audit Board, as well as subject to periodic involvement of non-partisan election officials and workers.

This is not utopian. It is very practical and basically how things worked when Houston was a “bi-racial city in which the rule of white, male (lawyers) was taken for granted”.  That is a quotation from Steven Klineberg from Tuesday night's Brown Bag ... well, except for the lawyer part.  What has happened since then is that as Houston and Harris County have become more “diverse” racially, the white, male (lawyers) have retreated behind legalism, bureaucracy, and police-powers to maintain their control and privileges by replacing pervasively crude, racial discrimination throughout local government and commerce with even more pervasively sophisticated, computer-mediated, economic discrimination throughout local government and commerce.

The result is right-wing and left-wing intellectuals arguing over the literary heritage of Ayn Rand while white, male (lawyers) extract more monopoly rent from government concessions and share it among themselves. What we have here today is one political establishment (bi-partisan!) and a criminal financial superstructure together with a criminal underground economy made palatable by bread, circuses, cute puppies, and mumbo jumbo for a majority-minority middle-class of working families.

Net, net: this gets us a lot of elections and not many voters -- the highest incarceration and lowest political participation rates of cities in our league. It does not get us to republican democracy by any stretch of definitions or imagination.

You can stay in Utopia, but I’m going to Texas!

An elections administrator for Harris County (?)

Harris County should consider appointing a bureaucrat to take over election duties from two elected officials who currently split the job, County Judge Ed Emmett said.

Emmett said he plans to ask Commissioners Court next month or in July to authorize a study of the costs and consequences of such a change.

Harris County's tax assessor-collector registers voters, a job that accompanied its duty to collect poll taxes. The county clerk runs elections. Both are elected.

Thus, taking voter registration out of the tax assessor/collector's office and elections management out of the county clerk's office and combining them into an elections administration department, under the supervision of an appointed county official, is the idea. And I like it.

Proponents of an elections czar say an appointee would be insulated from accusations and lawsuits alleging partisanship in carrying out the duties of the office.

In late 2008, the state Democratic Party said in a lawsuit that then-Tax Assessor Paul Bettencourt, a Republican, had illegally blocked thousands of people from registering to vote. The lawsuit was settled last fall. Bettencourt resigned in December 2008 to work in the private sector, just weeks after being elected to a third four-year term.

“The Democrats' lawsuit against the tax office and Paul Bettencourt's abrupt departure were game changers,” Emmett said. “It brought to everybody's attention that any time you have partisan offices running elections, you're just sort of leaving yourself open to lawsuits.”

The legacy of Quittencourt. He now runs a company that negotiates with the Harris County Appraisal District to get property taxes lowered for homeowners, marking time for his next electoral opportunity.  Continuing with Chris Moran at the Chron ...

There was talk of tinkering with the county's elections machinery at the time. County Clerk Beverly Kaufman and newly appointed Tax Assessor-Collector Leo Vasquez opposed it. No formal proposal emerged.

“I was glad because I didn't want to lose a lot of my people,” Kaufman said.

But Kaufman is retiring, and her endorsed successor lost the March primary election for the nomination to succeed her. Vasquez lost his Republican primary.

That opens a window for proponents in which they can largely avoid the turf war over taking money, people and power from the tax assessor and clerk. Kaufman herself restarted talk of an administrator when she sent Emmett information about it a month ago. Now that she is leaving office she supports an elections administrator, she said.

“This is the ideal time, when you're not pulling the rug out from somebody that's already doing it,” she said.

No incumbent owns any turf to lose, but the challengers bidding to replace them are howling:

Democrat Ann Harris Bennett and Republican Stan Stanart, the November candidates to succeed Kaufman, both said they oppose an elections administrator.

“The voters don't have any way of removing (an appointee) when they're not happy with the performance,” Stanart said.

Democratic tax-assessor candidate Diane Trautman agreed with Stanart, though her released statement had a more partisan bent.

“Now that his hand-picked appointee for tax assessor and Beverly Kaufman's chosen successor for county clerk have been rejected by voters, Ed Emmett wants to change the rules,” Trautman said. “He wants to make sure that the next time he appoints someone to oversee elections processes in Harris County, that person cannot be removed by the voters.”

Republican tax-assessor candidate Don Sumners said, “It's not broken. We don't need to fix it.” He said he suspects the plan is retaliation for his past public criticism of Commissioners Court.

The partisan PDiddie would love for this crucial bit of democracy to fall under the control of Diane Trautman and Ann Harris Bennett. But the (perhaps utopian) idea of a non-partisan, unelected official has great appeal -- assuming it could actually happen.

Statewide, an administrator is used in 77 of the 254 counties, including Bexar, Dallas, El Paso and Tarrant. By state law, an election commission consisting of the county judge, the tax assessor, the county clerk and the heads of the local political parties hires and fires an elections administrator.

The leaders of the county's Republican and Democratic parties condemned the idea.

GOP Chairman Jared Woodfill said the party took a stand against an administrator two years ago. “It's another level of bureaucracy that we didn't need,” Woodfill said.

Democratic Chairman Gerry Birnberg said there is no party position on the matter but that he may take it up if the idea gets traction at Commissioners Court.

Charles Kuffner has more, including these questions:

Does this person have to be periodically re-appointed, or re-confirmed? Under what conditions can he or she be fired? How can you isolate this person from political pressure, yet ensure they are accountable?

All important considerations. I think my condition would be someone with prior metro county experience outside of Texas -- thus somewhat removed from the Republican Party of Texas' unique view on what constitutes free and fair elections. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Greg Abbott. Update: ... and so is Kuffner.

Green Party submits petitions to qualify for Texas ballot

*As a Democratic precinct chair I cannot -- and do not -- endorse or support any of the Green Party candidates.

There were no TV cameras Monday in front of the Texas Secretary of State's office building south of the Capitol. No crowd of cheering supporters. But statewide coordinator Kat Swift with the Green Party of Texas says the dozen or so boxes filled with signed petitions spoke louder than a roaring crowd.

Swift: "And we have with us 93,000 petitions roughly of Texas voters, who did not vote in the primary, who want to see the Green Party on the ballot."

That's more than double the 44,000 signatures needed to get a political party on the Texas ballot.

[...]

Beyond that, it costs real money -- from $100,000 to $500,000 to pay a company to collect the signatures. That's where the Free and Equal Elections Foundation stepped in. Christina Tobin is founder and chair of the non-partisan foundation.

Tobin: "What we do is we gather signatures for candidates nationwide across the political spectrum. From Greens to Libertarians to Constitution to disenfranchised Democrats and Republicans."

And in Texas, the group also helped the Green Party raise the money needed to pay for the signature collection. Richard Winger edits the website Ballot Access News, a clearing house for information from across the country. He says Texas is considered one of the five hardest states to get on the ballot, basing his claim on the 2008 presidential election.

[...]

Meanwhile, the Secretary of State's office says it will validate the signatures and have an official ruling of whether the Green party made the statewide ballot sometime in the middle of June.

More from the Independent Political Report:

Assuming they get on the ballot, the list of candidates who will qualify for the ballot is as follows:

Bart Boyce Governor
Deb Shafto Governor
Herb Gonzales, Jr Lieutenant Governor
Edward Lindsay Comptroller of Public Accounts
Art Browning Railroad Commissioner
Jim Howe US Congress, District 11
Ed Scharf US Congress, District 23
Paul Cardwell State Board of Education, District 9
Ryan Seward State Representative, District 94
Joel West State Representative, District 144
Don Cook County Clerk, Harris County
Roger Baker County Clerk, Travis County
Earl Lyons County Clerk, Bexar County
kat swift County Commissioner, Pct 2, Bexar County
Chuck Robinson Justice of the Peace, Precinct 1, Place 1, Bexar County
Joy Vidheecharoen-Glatz Justice of the Peace, Pct 3, Dallas County
Jeffrey Dale Glatz County Surveyor, Dallas County
Esther Choi County Clerk, Dallas County

Don't miss the comments at that link. Shafto and Cook, you may recall, ran as Houston city council candidates under the Progressive Coalition banner in last November's municipal elections.

Here's a bit from the afore-mentioned Ballot Access News:

This is only the second time that the Texas Green Party has submitted enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. The first time was in 2000, and the party polled enough votes in 2000 so that it was automatically on the ballot as well in 2002. Parties in Texas must poll either 5% for any statewide race, or 2% for Governor. Parties that get 2% for Governor enjoy qualified status for the next four years, but parties that get 5% for any statewide race only gets qualified status for the next two years.

Lastly, our freaky TeaBagger buddy at the Ellis County Observer:

I don’t think the Dallas County surveyor position will hold up, unless the Greens have a hidden secret that the surveyor position was never abolished. And, state law requires that in order for a minor party to be automatically given ballot access after this year, they must score 5 percent in a statewide race. So, the Green Party candidate for Comptroller should easily get that, since Republican Susan Combs only faces Libertarian Mary Ruwart in November. A three-way race for Comptroller should get that coveted 5 percent.

And the worst is yet to come

Laurence Lewis:

Fifty miles of Louisiana's coastline already have been hit, including a major pelican rookery. The Louisiana marshes served as nurseries for shrimp, crab and oysters. Will the local fishing industry survive? Even if it does, how long will it take for even moderate recovery, and how many jobs will be lost, both temporarily and permanently? Those marshes also served as a buffer for New Orleans, when hurricanes hit. This just keeps getting worse. And it will take many years for nature to break this mess down.

Among other ominous developments, BP is responding to the EPA's order that it seek an alternative to the dangerous chemical dispersant it had been using by saying it intends to continue with the one it has. Who is in charge, here? Gulf Islands National Seashore is imminently threatened not only by the oil, but by those chemicals. And the government official leading the response to the disaster says only BP has the expertise to plug the leak, and he trusts they are doing their best. Which raises the question of why we entrust entire ecosystems to the expertise of a corporation whose best is a continuing catastrophe.

The magnitude of this disaster is so overwhelmingly large that it's easy to overlook the ways in which it is very small. As in the human scale. The people on Grand Isle who will lose their businesses and their jobs. Those employed in the Louisiana fishing industry. Those employed in the industries that depend on the catch. Those living and working on the coast of Florida, and beyond. The people for whom this disaster could not be much larger. And all the fragile ecosystems that will be destroyed.

This is a teaching moment, for us all. It should be a learning moment. If someone would take this moment to teach. So that enough people would learn. So that we could, collectively, do what needs be done. On the large scale. On the small.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is enjoying the last week of school before summer vacation as it brings you this week's blog roundup.

WhosPlayin notes that the Dallas-Fort Worth area has once again failed to meet its 8 hour ozone attainment, forcing TCEQ to implement contingency measures. Have you had your two teaspoons of ozone today?

Rand Paul explains why Texas Republicans don't mind pollution, notes CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme.

Off the Kuff kicks off the official countdown to KBH's 2012 re-election announcement.

Gas and greed divide neighbors in Argyle, TX. A tale of avarice, lies and corruption and civil disobedience in the Barnett Shale brought to you by TXsharon at Bluedaze: DRILLING REFORM FOR TEXAS.

Bay Area Houston will be attending the Sunset Commission review of the Texas Department of Insurance on Tuesday.

There's a common thread of arrogant ignorance that runs between Rand Paul and the Texas SBOE, and PDiddie at Brains and Eggs pulls the string.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson shows that the "big 3" get skittish on certain budget cuts. That won't be the case after the election: Perry, Dewhurst, Straus playing politics with budget cuts.

Libby Shaw says Thank You Rand Paul. The brash-talking ideologue has broken the right wing's first rule: don't tell me what you really think. See more at TexasKaos.

Neil at Texas Liberal reflected on how glad he is that we have a well-armed federal government from freedom-snatching folks like Rand Paul of Kentucky.