Now that the birthers have been slapped down ...
Update: Never mind. I overestimated the intellect we are dealing with.
Update: Never mind. I overestimated the intellect we are dealing with.
Suggesting that Comptroller Susan Combs should resign for her role in exposing the personal information of 3.5 million Texans, two Austin lawyers have petitioned a state district court for permission to question Combs as part of their investigation into the incident.
Calling the data exposure “an egregious example of incompetence and hypocrisy,” attorney Chuck Herring, representing teacher Sarah Canright, and Jim Harrington of the Texas Civil Rights Project, filed court documents seeking Combs’ deposition.
“Petitioners desire to investigate potential claims concerning the most massive and far-reaching invasion of privacy in the history of Texas,” the court filing stated. “The incomplete, misleading statements issued by Comptroller Combs and the Comptroller’s Office to date raise more questions than they answer. Texans deserve to know the truth concerning how this illegal and unconstitutional invasion occurred.”
Herring noted that Combs has fired four employees but has not personally accepted responsibility for the exposure of the information, which was transferred to the Comptroller’s office by the Teacher Retirement System, the Employee Retirement System and the Texas Workforce Commission.
“If this was the private sector, would she still be CEO?” asked Harrington.
Looking for ways to cope with inadvertently exposing the personal data of 3.5 million Texans, the state’s comptroller has retained the services of two firms whose leaders or political committees contributed over $50,000 to her campaign.
One of my favorite stories about the Texas State Legislature involves the time Senator Wendy Davis was trying to ask a colleague, Troy Fraser, some questions about a pending bill. Fraser deflected by saying, “I have trouble hearing women’s voices.”
Really, she was standing right there on the floor. Holding a microphone.
These days in the budget-strapped, Tea-Party-besieged State Capitol, you can be grateful for any funny anecdote, no matter how badly it reflects on Texas politics in general. Like the time Gov. Rick Perry defended the state’s abstinence-only birth control program by saying that he knew abstinence worked “from my own personal life.”
Right now, the state is wrestling with a fiscal megacrisis that goes back to 2006, when the Legislature cut local property taxes and made up for the lost revenue with a new business tax. The new tax produced billions less than expected to the shock and horror of everyone except all the experts who had been predicting that all along.
Governor Perry blames the whole thing on President Obama.
Texas’ problems are of interest to us all because Texas is producing a huge chunk of the nation’s future work force with a system that goes like this:
• Terrible sex education programs and a lack of access to contraceptives leads to a huge number of births to poor women. (About 60 percent of the deliveries in Texas are financed by Medicaid.) Texas also leads the nation in the number of teenage mothers with two or more offspring.
• The Texas baby boom — an 800,000 increase in schoolchildren over the last decade — marches off to underfunded schools. Which are getting more underfunded by the minute, thanks to that little tax error.
And naturally, when times got tough at the State Capitol, one of the first things the cash-strapped Legislature tried to cut was family planning.
“It’s in total danger,” said Fran Hagerty, who leads the Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas.
One of the best family-planning efforts in Texas is the Women’s Health Program, which provides an annual health exam and a year’s worth of contraceptives to poor women. For every dollar the state puts into the plan, the federal government provides $9.
The state estimates the pregnancies averted would reduce its Medicaid bill by more than $36 million next year. But when a budget expert told the Texas House Committee on Human Services that the program saved money, he was laced into by Representative Jodie Laubenberg for using “government math.”
“You speculate that,” she snorted.
Meanwhile, on the House floor, anti-abortion lawmakers were stripping financing for other family-planning programs. Representative Randy Weber successfully moved part of the money into anti-abortion crisis centers for pregnant women.
“There’s been research done. ... It actually shows the highest abortion rate is among women actively using contraceptives,” Weber insisted.
“These folks are anti-abortion, anti-contraception and anti-science,” said Representative Mike Villarreal, who tangled with Weber during the debate.
Villarreal has had a rather dark view of the rationality of some of his colleagues ever since he tried to improve the state’s abstinence-only sex education programs by requiring that the information imparted be medically accurate. It died in committee. “The pediatrician on the committee wouldn’t vote for it; he was the swing vote,” Villarreal recalled.
Welcome to the fact-free zone. This week, U.S. Senator John Cornyn gave an interview to Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune in which he claimed that the battle in Congress to defund Planned Parenthood “was really part of a larger fight about spending money we don’t have on things that aren’t essential.”
There are a lot of fiscal conservatives in the anti-abortion movement, and it’s apparently hard for them to admit that destroying Planned Parenthood is a money-loser.
There’s also a resistance to government support for contraceptive services. “There are some people in the pro-life movement who think birth control pills of all kind are abortifacients,” said Senator Bob Deuell, a Republican. “But I don’t see any medical evidence.”
Deuell is one of those rare abortion opponents who is dedicated to the cause of helping women avoid unwanted pregnancy in the first place. He says his allies in the anti-abortion movement haven’t objected to his approach, but he admitted that they haven’t been handing him any medals either.
We’re currently stuck with a politics of reproduction in which emotion is so strong that actual information becomes irrelevant. Senator Cornyn, in his interview, was reminded of the great dust-up his colleague Jon Kyl of Arizona created when he claimed that 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood did involved abortions. When challenged, Kyl’s staff said the figure “was not intended to be a factual statement.”
So did Cornyn agree that Kyl screwed up?
“I’m not so sure,” Cornyn said.
Congratulations, Texas Democratic Party: you are on the verge of a new level in cynicism. Sanchez’s tenure running the Iraq war saw a humiliated and cashiered Iraqi military metastasize into an insurgency that killed and maimed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Under pressure from the Pentagon, he approved abusive detention and interrogation practices for Abu Ghraib that resulted in the U.S.’ most damaging wartime scandal since Vietnam. What could possibly interrupt Sanchez’s deserved fade into obscurity?
[...]
But it wasn’t just George Bush that Sanchez derided. It was practically everyone out of uniform. In an October 2007 speech, Sanchez bashed Bush, Congress, the media and American society in general for lacking “moral courage in this war effort.” About the only responsibility Sanchez could let himself shoulder was to allow that “mistakes have been made by the American military,” as if it was the entire armed services who authorized dogs to menace Iraqi detainees.
Sanchez’s blend of self pity and martial triumphalism could turn out to be a political winner. But think what a message that would send. Texas Democrats would ask voters to excuse wartime disaster and torture. It’s easy to see what Sanchez and the Dems get out of this. Actually, it’s easier to smell it.
(I) was sent some stuff yesterday and also ran across a few things on how folks are reacting to the possible General Ricardo Sanchez candidacy for the U.S. Senate here in the Lone Star State. He’s being chewed up on how he handled or bungled the war in Iraq. He’s being accused of saying okay to water boarding and other torture tactics. He’s being described as a pawn of certain Lone Star State Dem power brokers.
It will be interesting to see how he responds to the criticism in the coming days and weeks. Of course, if there is too much piling on, the Latino leadership and community might just get offended and come to his defense.
A pal of mine sent me a note asking why wasn’t a Latina recruited. Hey, I’m not in charge of picking our candidates – sorry.
Democrats appear to have recruited retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez to run for the U.S. Senate in Texas, setting the stage for the party to field a well-known candidate in the 2012 race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.
Former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, a Democrat, confirmed that Democratic Senate campaign chief Patty Murray, D-Wash., was referring to Sanchez on Thursday when she said Democrats were close to announcing a candidate in Texas.
Sanchez, reached by phone at his San Antonio home, asked where the reports of a Senate run came from and then said, "I can neither confirm nor deny."
Sanchez, the former top military commander in Iraq who was left under a cloud from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, would not discuss the Senate race. But he did respond to questions about his career and political philosophy.
"I would describe myself as during my military career as supporting the president and the Constitution," Sanchez said. "After the military, I decided that socially, I'm a progressive, a fiscal conservative and a strong supporter, obviously, of national defense."
Sanchez was commander of coalition forces during a period when abuse of prisoners occurred at Abu Ghraib and at other locations. In a memo signed by General Sanchez and later acquired by the ACLU through a Freedom of Information Act request, techniques were authorized to interrogate prisoners, included "environmental manipulation" such as making a room hot or cold or using an "unpleasant smell", isolating a prisoner, disrupting normal sleep patterns and "convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United States are interrogating him." [2] On May 5, 2006 Sanchez denied ever authorizing interrogators to "go to the outer limits". Sanchez said he had told interrogators: "...we should be conducting our interrogations to the limits of our authority." Sanchez called the ACLU: "...a bunch of sensationalist liars, I mean lawyers, that will distort any and all information that they get to draw attention to their positions." [3]
Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.
The U.S. policy, details of which have not been previously disclosed, was approved in early September, shortly after an Army general sent from Washington completed his inspection of the Abu Ghraib jail and then returned to brief Pentagon officials on his ideas for using military police there to help implement the new high-pressure methods.
The documents obtained by The Washington Post spell out in greater detail than previously known the interrogation tactics Sanchez authorized, and make clear for the first time that, before last October, they could be imposed without first seeking the approval of anyone outside the prison. That gave officers at Abu Ghraib wide latitude in handling detainees.
Unnamed officials at the Florida headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, which has overall military responsibility for Iraq, objected to some of the 32 interrogation tactics approved by Sanchez in September, including the more severe methods that he had said could be used at any time in Abu Ghraib with the consent of the interrogation officer in charge.
As a result, Sanchez decided on Oct. 12 to remove several items on the list and to require that prison officials obtain his direct approval for the remaining high-pressure methods. Among the tactics apparently dropped were those that would take away prisoners' religious items; control their exposure to light; inflict "pride and ego down," which means attacking detainees' sense of pride or worth; and allow interrogators to pretend falsely to be from a country that deals severely with detainees, according to the documents.
The high-pressure options that remained included taking someone to a less hospitable location for interrogation; manipulating his or her diet; imposing isolation for more than 30 days; using military dogs to provoke fear; and requiring someone to maintain a "stress position" for as long as 45 minutes. These were not dropped by Sanchez until a scandal erupted in May over photographs depicting abuse at the prison.
"He's got a very compelling story," Barnes said. "He's the one guy who could unite the Hispanic vote. He'll get the conservative Hispanic businessman."
A wildfire sweeping across 20,000 acres in North Texas have destroyed at least 30 homes, forced hundreds of evacuations — including an entire town — and closed a popular state park, state officials said Friday.
The blaze was burning in a mostly rural area about 120 miles west of Dallas, but the region also has expensive lake homes and is a popular recreation spot for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Officials closed Possum Kingdom State Park and clear out its campsites, fearing the fire could block access roads.
The campaign came in the wake of Yarborough's politically hazardous votes in favor of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and his opposition to the Vietnam War. Bentsen made Yarborough's opposition to the war a major issue. His television advertising featured video images of rioting in the streets at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, implying that Yarborough was associated with the rioters. While this strategy was successful in defeating Yarborough, it caused long-term damage to Bentsen's relationship with liberals in his party.
Bentsen's campaign and his reputation as a conservative Democrat served to alienate him not only from supporters of Ralph Yarborough, but from prominent national liberals, as well. Indeed, during the 1970 Senate race, the Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith endorsed George Bush, arguing that if Bentsen were elected to the Senate, he would invariably become the face of a new, more conservative Texas Democratic Party and that the long-term interests of Texas liberalism demanded Bentsen's defeat.