Wendy Davis introduces herself

In this campaign video, also released today.

Annise Parker isn't counter-punching any longer

She went on offense yesterday with the spot embedded below, airing it several times during the Sunday morning blabfest.



It's not a new ad; it was posted to Youtube a week ago. But her press conference at lunchtime today -- happening as this post goes live -- is the second of two punches she's landing against her leading challenger.

Mayor Annise Parker will be available to the media to discuss today’s Houston Chronicle story revealing that Ben Hall again has had to pay back taxes and penalties to the IRS. Hall agreed to pay $680,000 in January 2013.

Here's the Chron with the details on that.

Top mayoral challenger Ben Hall agreed to pay the IRS more than $680,000 in back taxes and penalties earlier this year, court documents show.

On Jan. 16, less than a week before Hall made his first campaign expenditures as a mayoral candidate, the challenger and his wife signed a document in U.S. Tax Court agreeing to pay $520,782 in back taxes and about $160,350 in penalties to cover four years of deficiencies, from 2005 through 2008. The amount was a little more than half of the $1.28 million the IRS claimed the Halls owed when it issued a formal "notice of deficiency" in June 2011.

Hall is going to pick up a few extra Republican votes with this response.

"It's clear there's no intent to hide or misrepresent revenue," Hall said. "The way I look at this is, I won because I sued them and I reduced their amounts and justified my conduct. I'm willing to live on that record. I'm going to pay exactly what I'm supposed to pay in taxes and I'm not going to let anybody bully me, especially not an IRS that's out of control."

The IRS did not respond to requests for comment due to the federal government shutdown.

Every one of the usual insider suspects the newspaper calls for reaction to these stories managed to curb-stomp Hall while he was down.

Democratic political consultant Mustafa Tameez said the case raises questions about Hall's ability to manage details, undercutting the challenger's criticism of Parker as a manager who lacks a grander vision.

"One way to look at it would be that many of the issues that Ben Hall has had regarding his taxes can individually be explained, and some of it is unfair to him," Tameez said. "The challenge he faces is that he has so many of these issues that now it looks like a pattern. There's a sense of carelessness on his personal finances that will make voters question his ability to manage the details of a city the size of Houston."

Republican communications consultant Jim McGrath said, "People understand accountants getting things wrong. You trust accountants to handle these matters because the tax code is such a monster. I'm sympathetic there, but when you put it in the broader fact pattern, it just raises that many more questions. One thing you don't need as a challenger coming up against an incumbent with a strong economy are doubts as to whether your own financial house is in order."

Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said the case either is a business lapse or an ethical one, neither of which helps Hall.

"In the best case, he did not do a particularly good job managing his business affairs, which is not a good attribute for a mayor, particularly in a strong mayor system, because the mayor is a chief executive and one of the mayor's jobs is to hire the right people and to manage those people," Jones said. "From the worst light, he was trying to avoid his fair share of taxes."

The odds for Parker clearing the field and avoiding a runoff just got a lot shorter.

An ACA showdown, a Cornyn fail, a D for Comptroller, and the Texas Libertarian slate

-- It's high noon here between the Poop Cruzers and the Affordable Healthcare Act supporters.

The ground war over Obamacare — the one that will determine whether people sign up — will be won and lost in places like Texas.

If Obamacare fails in the Lone Star State — that is, if a significant portion of the 6.1 million uninsured Texans don’t or can’t enroll — then the White House could miss its national enrollment targets, the new health insurance exchanges could falter and insurance rates could spike.

[...]

Advocates are banking on the idea that a grass-roots push in more liberal, urban areas of Texas, plus the demand among the uninsured to get health coverage, will overcome the state’s institutional opposition and deliver on the promise of Obamacare.

“Some of my friends on the other side of the aisle are doing as much as they can to make it difficult for this program to work,” state Sen. Rodney Ellis, a Democrat from Houston and prominent supporter of the law, said as enrollment began a few days ago. He thinks the Republican strategy will backfire. “One more election cycle and all of this is going to go away,” he predicted.

I'm going to keep shouting out to my state senator to run against John "RINO" Cornyn next year.  Go read the whole article as always.  Here's more to tease you.

The best hope of Obamacare backers is to support the efforts of local allies in regions such as Houston, Dallas and Austin, the bluest areas of a deeply red state. That’s because these areas lean liberal and also have an existing network of progressive activists. The Obama administration sent Texas nearly $11 million — more federal grant money than any other state — to fund “navigators” who are trained and tasked with helping people through the sign-up process.

In Houston, with 1.4 million uninsured residents, city officials are modeling their efforts on hurricane-force emergency response to counter the adamant state opposition, said Stephen Williams, director of the Houston Department of Health and Human Services.

“We believe this effort is so critical that we have created an incident command structure,” Williams said. “This is the same structure that we use to respond to hurricanes and to respond to public health disasters.”

The city of Houston has provided free office space to Enroll America, a nonprofit group closely associated with the former Obama campaign that is now spreading the word about the health law. The city has provided at least 55 people to help residents enroll and created space for a phone bank. It has ordered public library computers to have links to enroll access and it’s even printing Obamacare information on local water bills “so the broader population can all be informed,” said Mayor Pro-Tem Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat.

-- Speaking of Corndog, he was humiliated by Bob Schieffer on Facepalm the Nation yesterday, and appeared to be completely oblivious to it.  There's video of the exchange at the link.  It's just laughably absurd to watch Cornyn parrot his talking points as Schieffer compared Republicans to colicky babies, and then gangsters.

Update: Cornyn's TV spot joined the flurry of campaign ads breaking today -- trumpeting his "Conservative" bonafides -- but the senior senator from Texas has already lost the race; Glenn Beck has informed Louie Gohmert that God wants him to run for the US Senate.

-- Mike Collier makes official his bid to be the state's Comptroller of Public Accounts.



Please, somebody tell the man how to pronounce the name of the office he's running for.

-- Texas Libertarians are once again fielding a full slate of candidates next year.

Saying that the current federal government shutdown and tensions between Republicans and Democrats have made Texans ready for a change in leadership, Libertarian Kathie Glass on Wednesday officially announced her candidacy in the 2014 governor’s race.

"We’re going to be active in every aspect of this race,” said Glass, a Houston lawyer who also ran for governor in 2010. “We are getting out there a lot sooner.”

Glass said she plans to visit every county in Texas during her campaign and will talk to Texans about their frustrations with the current state of affairs.

That's a page out of the David Van Os playbook.

“This shutdown is just a glimpse of what might happen,” Glass said at her Austin news conference, at which several other Texas Libertarian hopefuls also announced their candidacies. “Voters know that what they want they are not going to get from the two other parties, so we are looking forward to offering them this alternative from the Libertarian Party.”

Glass said her campaign would focus on the idea of nullification, a legal theory that a state can invalidate federal laws it finds unconstitutional. [...]

She said she would nullify the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, and federal regulations on companies that lead them to ship jobs overseas to nations with laxer regulations.

More on the Libs down the ballot.

Her husband, Tom Glass, the vice chairman of the Texas Libertarian Party, announced at Wednesday’s news conference that he will be running for attorney general in 2014. He said he is running to battle unnecessary restrictions from the federal government.

“I will use the force of the office to stop unconstitutional federal acts in Texas,” Glass said, citing Obamacare, privacy laws, prison regulations and spending.

[...]

Other Libertarians who announced their candidacies Wednesday include journalist Brandon de Hoyos and Allen businessman Ed Kless, who are running for lieutenant governor; Lago Vista City Council member Ed Tidwell, who’s running for land commissioner; rancher Rocky Palmquist, who’s seeking to become agriculture commissioner; and Austin businessman Mark Miller, who’s running for railroad commissioner.

The Libertarians are always entertaining, and if Texans who vote in the GOP primary actually paid attention to them, they'd see that the Libs come closest to representing their isolationist, xenophobic views.

I simply don't think those voters are intelligent enough to figure that out, though.

Will Mostyn fund Medina?

Robert Miller.

An ancient Arabian proverb says the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The concept is that two parties, opposed in most respects, unite against a common opponent. In Texas, it has aligned Steve Mostyn, a passionate liberal and prolific contributor to Democrats, with Debra Medina, a libertarian Republican now contemplating a run for governor as an independent in 2014.

Mostyn began supporting Medina because she opposed Gov. Rick Perry in the 2010 Republican primary. Mostyn also created the Back to Basics PAC and contributed almost $4 million in 2010 to attack Gov. Perry.

I trust Miller's hunches and sources and instincts and whatever else he uses to blog with when it comes to Republicans. I have to question virtually everything he writes when it comes to Democrats; his track record is poor in that regard. He's actually trying to follow money that hasn't been donated (yet).

(A)ccording to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Medina “has received millions of dollars in pledges on the condition that she instead run for governor as an independent.” It doesn’t take a Rice graduate to figure out the source of those pledges. Steve Mostyn and his wife, Amber, are fervent backers of Sen. Wendy Davis and her gubernatorial campaign. It is a time-honored political tactic to entice other candidates into a race to siphon votes from the frontrunner, in this case Attorney General Greg Abbott.

I beat Miller to the punch on this last week, and the news first appeared over two weeks ago in the TexTrib, which credited Harvey Kronberg's Quorum Report for breaking it.  Miller, then, is spitballing here by throwing the Mostyns' name in; they have a ton of money set aside for political causes, but they also have a lot of folks in line with funding requests in 2014 besides Davis.  There's BGTX and there will soon be LVDP and other Democrats on the statewide ballot in due time.  I don't think even Steve and Amber are made of that much green.

Speaking of Green, Miller's scolding of Medina rings extremely hollow considering that Republicans have ALWAYS played this "muck with the other primary" business, and his morality appears to have been misplaced during those times.  If you read those links you'll pick up on my own disgust with the tactic; I wasn't much of a Green at all until well after then.

I'm still convinced, as I wrote previously, that Medina wants Greg Abbott to tell his benefactors to cut her a fat check to keep her in the comptroller's race.

It would make a great deal of sense for the Mostyns to pledge money to Medina, if for nothing else than it seems to piss off Republicans.  So I actually hope I'm wrong and Miller is right (I mean correct).

Update: Miller has appended his post with an unequivocal denial from the Mostyns' representative.

I want to state unambiguously to you that your post claiming the Mostyns have committed financial or political support to Debra Medina -- should she choose to run for Governor in 2014 -- is incorrect.

To be clear, the Mostyns have not spoken with Ms. Medina about any campaign for any office in 2014. Neither they, nor I on their behalf, have suggested that they would provide any kind of financial or political support to Ms. Medina in a 2014 gubernatorial run.