2012 Candidates Cafe' Dialogue Tuesday, Sept. 11

ACR Houston, the American Leadership Forum, and The Institute for Sustainable Peace will host the second Candidates Cafe' Dialogue at the United Way of Greater Houston, 50 Waugh Drive, on Tuesday September 11 from 6-8 p.m.

The first Candidates Café Dialogue was held October 19, 2008, with 17 candidates for public office and 100 citizens participating. This second Dialogue aspires to host as many as 50 candidates and 250 citizens. This is an opportunity for candidates to converse with fellow citizens -- speaking and listening to each other -- about big issues that our region faces, such as water supply and quality; air quality; parks, trails & trees; mass transit; education for a dependable work force and green building.

Several of the Green and Democratic candidates on the Harris County ballot will be in attendance. This is a facilitated forum of candidates and citizens; there will be four rounds and each facilitator will manage a table of 4 or 5 people in a structured non-partisan format to discuss pre-determined questions. The facilitator will guide everyone at the table to speak, to listen and to share positive ideas on the issues. A more detailed description of the evening's events can be found here. A summary...

Our country is becoming increasingly polarized and unable to bridge our divisions to find real world, non-partisan solutions for the very complex problems we face.  Houston’s leaders have a history of coming together across political and ethnic divisions to build a thriving community.  That ability to work together is very much a part of the “can do” spirit that has built Houston.

The intense polarization and absence of civil discourse becomes even more evident during the campaign season preceding an election.   What if it were possible for political campaigns to elevate civil discourse? That question led to the idea of convening the first Candidate Café Dialogue, and continues to inspire us.

You are invited to join the discussion. RSVP at this link.

Republican Just Us in Harris County

Whether the charge is robbery, shoplifting or drug use, most people arrested in Harris County stay in jail because they can't afford to post bail.

That's largely because this conservative county and its judges have been reluctant to grant no-cost personal bonds that are increasingly popular in other large metropolitan areas in Texas, say attorneys, judges and those in the bail bond industry.

 "There's no good reason for it,'' said Mark Hochglaube, the trial division chief of the Harris County Public Defenders Office. "I can't speak for what they do in other counties, but I can tell you the general sense of the culture here is one that is opposed to pretrial release. I wish it weren't, but it's as basic as that."

Last year, just 5.2 percent of slightly more than 94,000 people arrested by Harris County police agencies got out of jail on no-cost personal recognizance bonds, according to a report by the Harris County Pretrial Services office. In July, 65 percent of the county's 9,133 inmates were pretrial detainees rather than convicted criminals serving sentences, according to the Office of Criminal Justice Coordination.

"That's disgustingly high," said Chris Tritico, president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association. "A lot of those people could be out working, supporting their families and awaiting their day in court. Just because you can't afford a lawyer and a bond, that doesn't make you guilty."

The best comment from that article follows.

We must have people committing crimes and being in jail. If we cut back on any of it, we would have thousands of lawyers, prosecutors, judges, bail bondsmen, police, jailers, prison guards, prison and jail management people, probation workers, parole supervisors and jail and prison suppliers out of work...the economy would be devastated. The Criminal Justice System is big business and fast growing.

More from the article.

(B)ond practices in Harris County force some innocent defendants to plead guilty because they'd rather accept a plea deal and a short sentence than spend months in jail waiting for a trial. In a few cases, he said, defendants have been held awaiting trial longer than the maximum sentence they could have received.

"It's not just a failure of the judges, the district attorney - it's everybody. It's a failure of the defense bar. Even good attorneys don't ask for a personal bond. Everyone is indoctrinated with the idea that if you are charged with a felony you're not going to get a PR bond," said Hochglaube.

That would even be true in the case of people charged with felonies who were framed by undercover police officers. Yes, some of those port protestors are still in county lockup, and have been since December.

Keep in mind that all of this results in overcrowded jails, which sends the Harris County Sheriff to Commissioners Court to request construction of additional detention facilities. Usually the voters are disinclined to approve bond issues for jail construction, as former city councilwoman Melissa Noriega noted here, so the problem persists. But when the bonds do get approved and the construction bids awarded, the pals of the commissioners with construction companies get real happy.

So it's a win for everybody involved in the criminal justice "industry"... except for, you know, justice.

Let's not overlook the fact that this is only the beginning. After the bonding (or not) and the trial come the convictions and the sentencing. The private prison system we have in Texas depends on corporations that have quarterly profit projections -- and stockholder demands -- to meet. This requires a steadily increasing flow of new "customers".

And the corporations running our prisons -- just like the bail bondsmen named Kubosh in the article -- must, in turn, keep contributing to the Republicans running for judgeships and sheriff and district attorney on a "tuff on crime" agenda to keep sending them those customers... by conning a gullible, poorly-informed, slow-witted base into voting for them. Over and over again.

There's a way to break this cycle. It starts by not voting for any Republicans.

I have already identified a few judges and a sheriff candidate whom you should vote for. I will present more qualified names in the coming days and weeks. And there will be plenty of Libertarians on your ballot if you simply can't bring yourself to vote for a Democrat.

Kuff and Grits have been on this case a lot longer than I have.

Democrats still waiting on a saviour

FiveThirtyEight's Micah Cohn has the seasonal "waiting for the Latinos to turn Texas blue" post, written by someone every few months now for at least the past decade. Finally though, there was some revealing news...

Non-Hispanic whites are still a slim majority in Tarrant County, which helps make it a much better statewide bellwether than Dallas County. Tarrant County exactly matched the statewide vote in 2008, and was just 1 percentage point more Republican in both 2004 and 2000. 

"As goes Tarrant County, so goes Texas". I hope some local pollsters pick up on this with some Tarrant County data as we draw closer to November. Those numbers have been approximately 55% R and 41% D, by the way. So there's a long way still to go.

Some think the Lone Star will get redder before it gets bluer. I think that is less likely to be true in 2012 than in 2014 (as it is in every off-presidential year).

And while there are still many Dems pushing back on the twin obstacle of Texas' role as ATM to the rest of the country's Democratic campaigns, it was Michael Li's Facebook page -- an interesting place for discussion among Texas Democrats -- that recently revealed there are many Democrats who think a key to victory still lies in turning out Blue Dogs in East Texas.

What a sick sad delusion these people operate under. Those Democrats are all dead now, and the ones that are still alive have been lobotomized, their brains replaced by Fox News. They are part of the Zombie TeaBagger Apocalypse. Here's just one anecdotal piece of evidence of that folly, from Isiah Carey's Insite today. All the Democrats in East Texas who used to hold office switched parties before they eventually lost to a Tea Party primary challenge. Even the former Democratic strongholds in Southeast Texas -- Jefferson, Orange, Hardin -- are turning red.

Texas Democrats are indeed constrained by several things -- poor organization, no money, an ingrained defeatist attitude, backbiting and infighting -- but the main thing that plagues them is that they increasingly are indistinguishable from Republicans (or rather, what Republicans used to be). This has been obvious to everybody but them going back to the 2000 presidential campaign of George W Bush, when he used his 'record of bipartisanship' as governor to tout himself as an agent of change in Washington. The running joke they didn't get was "Democrats in Texas are Republicans everywhere else".

Another sick sad joke, but thankfully water long since passed under the bridge.

The problem in Texas -- and in the nation -- is that we have one radically conservative corporate party, and one moderately conservative corporate party. When Democrats continue to operate under the paradigm that more money is the answer to their problems, they just perpetuate their losing mentality. The only people who win that game are the consultants. Update: This is more of it, particularly the horse-race-like aspect of reporting it. Just like the daily polling numbers, you can almost hear Tick-Tock McLaughlin's voice at Santa Anita.

One day, in-between waiting for the Latinos and waiting for someone(s) with a massive bank account to show up and save them, they might come to the realization that the right message coupled with sizable sweat equity might be all they ever have, and they could get better results if they would focus on those two.

In the meantime, the Green Party will concentrate on doing those two very things, primarily in the state's five major metro areas, making things still more complicated for Democrats.

Someone will fill the void. Something always does.

Sunday Funnies