Ramshaw may not have known she was talking to a candidate in a district only seven miles from the Tribune’s office, or she simply did not care. Either of those possibilities, however, is not acceptable to anyone who might believe the Tribune can do meaningful reporting on Texas politics and government. One suggests incompetence; the other points toward collusion. The Trib simply cannot be unbiased because it has become a part of the institutions it told the public it intended to scrutinize and hold responsible for good government. Regardless of the organization’s intentions, there is no conclusion to reach other than the Texas Tribune has to be considered corrupted by its sources of funding.
In journalism, appearances are destiny.
The “non-profit” Tribune is the recipient of significant amounts of money from the same corporations and lobbyists that donate to legislators and other office holders to help them in their campaigns, and to influence the outcome of legislation related to those donor’s special interests. In any context, this is a classic conflict of interest, and regardless of how much the Trib’s editors might insist they are able to do their work without being affected by these funds, they have been in operation long enough to see there is no reason to take them seriously as a news organization, and the evidence to reach this conclusion is abundant.
It’s also a kind of rank hypocrisy that is so grandiose as to be entertaining.
During the glory days of journalism at the Texas capitol in Austin, newspapers with large bureau staffs covered hearings and debates on legislation, almost every statewide campaign for office, and also held the governor and lawmakers accountable on a daily basis. TV stations from the four major cities maintained full time broadcast bureaus even when the legislature was not in session. We were expected to be on the air every evening with a new and important story. The hourly machinations of state government in the 80s and 90s were scrutinized by many sets of eyes. Big city newspapers circulated in Austin and reporters read and watched the competitions’ stories to learn what had been missed, and so did the lobbyists and legislators.
After 22 years of being a part of that capitol press corps as a TV news correspondent, I joined a startup company that tried to launch a statewide network newscast and website. The Internet was just beginning its maturation process and we were hopeful. My final year in the business, however, ended with me traveling on the George W. Bush presidential campaign for that nascent news operation and, subsequently, I left journalism to begin work in public relations. In retrospect, my timing was excellent. The slow shutdown of every TV news bureau and reduction of newspaper staff sizes indicated editors and budget writers had made a decision about what interested their readers and viewers, and government did not make the cut.
There is no sustainable business model for doing the kind or journalism and reporting that the public needs in a democracy. Corporations and the wealthy will not buy advertising on media outlets that doggedly expose their malfeasance and corruption. The publicly funded model we once had did a pretty good job of supporting the kind of journalism and reporting we need. But when the same money that’s buying public and non-profit media, is also buying our politicians, it’s unlikely they’d be willing to ramp up funding for funding public media. One that would be independent enough to expose their political corruption.
The reaction to the Texas Tribune piece has been mostly condescension from Trib reporters. None of them addressed me directly in their tweets but one of their digirati tweeted a “counter-counter” response, “No country for old men.” I’m sure that is patently true. Best I can tell the only people over 50 at the Tribune are Ross Ramsey, though I think Jay Root is 50 or close, and Evan Smith is 47. Everyone else is quite young, and much more affordable, and easily taught the way things are done.
But youth doesn’t slow down the Trib. CEO Evan Smith tweeted that they were looking for a reporter to do a deep, investigative dive into the Texas criminal justice system. A complex as hell topic that has befuddled many a grizzled journalistic veteran but the Trib is advertising the slot as “entry level.” Good luck, kid, from an old man who apparently doesn’t belong in that country.
Attorney General Greg Abbott, who has said he supports the Americans with Disabilities Act, has tenaciously battled to block the courthouse door to disabled Texans who sue the state.
In a series of legal cases in his three terms, Abbott’s office has fought a blind pharmacy professor in Amarillo who wanted reflective tape on the stairs to her office; two deaf defendants in Laredo who asked for a qualified sign language interpreter in their courtroom; and a woman with an amputated leg. In that case, the state argued she was not disabled because she had a prosthetic limb.
Abbott, who has used a wheelchair since a tree fell on him while he was jogging and crushed his spine almost 30 years ago, applauds the 1990 federal law. It has helped provide the ramps, wide doors and access that allow him to give speeches and meet with constituents.
While Abbott, the leading Republican contender for governor, benefits from the ADA mandates that guide businesses, builders and cities, he believes it is unconstitutional to force the state to comply. He has argued that his duty is to protect the state’s autonomy and its taxpayers by using all legal tools available to him — including the argument that the state is immune from disability lawsuits brought under the ADA.
“It’s the attorney general’s duty to zealously represent the interests of the state of Texas, and in these cases that meant raising all applicable legal arguments in litigation where Texas was sued in court,” said Abbott spokesman Jerry Strickland.
Advocates for the disabled say Abbott’s office has worked to deny ADA protections by repeatedly and falsely claiming that impaired Texans don’t have the right to sue the state for discrimination. Abbott declined several requests from The Dallas Morning News to discuss the matter.
It touches on two key elements of Abbott’s campaign to succeed Gov. Rick Perry. He is touting his record of defending conservative legal principles. But Abbott also is highlighting his disability as evidence of his toughness. In campaign speeches and videos, he notes that he has “literally, a spine of steel” as a result of the accident.
For former Texas Tech University Health Sciences professor Elaine King Miller, who was suffering a degenerative eye disease, the question was whether the university would provide her, among other things, reflective tape on the stairway and voice-recognition software for typing on her computer.
It took a five-year legal fight with the state. In 2005, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for her to pursue a discrimination suit.
...In 2004, it argued before the Texas Supreme Court that a woman with one leg could not claim disability discrimination because she wore a prosthesis that remedied her mobility.
The all-Republican court rejected the argument, issuing a unanimous, written opinion just three weeks later. The court usually considers cases for months, even years.
Dennis Borel, executive director of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities, said that advocates’ frustration stems from Abbott’s office consistently seeking immunity for Texas agencies, regardless of the claim.
“When you invoke the sovereign immunity defense, you’re not responding to the merits of the case,” he said. “You’re simply saying the state is immune for its violations of the ADA and therefore there’s not even a point of having a day in court.”
Brian East, senior attorney for Texas Disability Rights, said the repeated efforts to raise sovereign immunity against the disabled cuts off the chance to fix problems.
“I wouldn’t say they were hostile,” East said of the attorney general’s legal team. “They are hostile to the notion that individual citizens might have redress against the state, in general. They are not targeting people with disabilities specifically, but doing what they can to limit the rights of individuals to use the courts in civil rights cases against the state.”
The biggest chunk of the state’s growth can be attributed to an increase in the minority populations, and the biggest part of that growth has been Hispanic. And that is where the hype about politics revs up: To the extent that they vote, minorities in Texas tend to vote for Democrats more than Republicans. If the number of minorities rise along with the population, and if those new voters behave like their voting counterparts, then the electorate should grow to favor the Democrats.
That was the idea behind the Democrats’ “dream team” ticket in 2002, which included a couple of big-city mayors, Ron Kirk and Kirk Watson; a wealthy Hispanic oilman, Tony Sanchez Jr.; and a mix of proven veterans and promising prospects. It didn’t work, but there were some hopeful years, when Democrats in the Legislature made gains.
Then the 2008 presidential race arrived. The Democratic primary that year had 2,874,986 Texas voters. Most of the time, presidential contests are all but settled by the time the campaigns reach Texas. But in 2008, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton had clinched the nomination, and their battle over Texas lifted turnout considerably. The excitement over a contested national race even helped increase Republican turnout that year.
The Republicans held their numbers, turning out about the same number of voters in each of the two primaries that followed, but many of the Democratic primary voters who came out in 2008 never returned. In 2010, only 680,548 Texans voted in the Democratic primary. Two years after that, only 590,164 voted. In general elections, their top-line numbers also fell. Obama received 43.7 percent of the overall vote in the 2008 general election. Former Mayor Bill White of Houston got 42.3 percent in 2010 in a race for governor, and Paul Sadler lost the U.S. Senate election to Ted Cruz with 40.6 percent.
The population may be booming, but the electorate is not, and the Democratic electorate got smaller.
46.3 percent of Texans earning more than $75,000 voted in 2010, compared to 26.7 percent of those earning less than $35,000
52.4 percent of Texans with college degrees voted, compared to 22.8 percent with less than a high school diploma
16 percent of Texans under 30 voted, while 42.7 percent of the over-30 crowd participated
43.8 percent of white Texans voted in 2010, compared with 38.7% of African Americans and 23.1% of Hispanics
The Republicans have more money, and their steady, habitual turnout has given them a list of stalwarts who vote no matter what. The Democrats have a list of stalwarts, too, but it is considerably smaller.
So they are looking for first-timers, people who haven’t voted before because they just moved here or just recently came of age or haven’t been involved in elections before and are just waiting for someone to ask them.
And there is the other group, the 2.2 million Texans who turned out in March 2008 and haven’t been seen in a primary location since then. The Democrats already have their names, if not their votes.
Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis said she supports medical marijuana use as well easing the state's legal consequences for possessing small amounts of the drug.
Davis' comments echo those of current Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who said he supports less stringent penalties in Texas for marijuana use.
This takes the decriminalization discussion beyond where Perry took it, and Davis showed little hesitation. In his recent remarks in Davos, Perry talked about moving “toward a decriminalization,” whereas Davis said she’d consider signing a bill removing criminal provisions for possessing small amounts. That would be de facto decriminalization if Texas made small-time possession a civil matter.
Pre-Davos, I doubt Davis would have been as willing to address this head on. But Perry provided safe harbor to Davis or anyone else who wanted to go there. Plus, a statewide poll last year showed voting Texans are open to change on the pot question.
Davis probably picks up more votes that she loses on this. Those general election voter who are motivated by law-and-order issues aren’t getting near her anyway. Those persuadable middle-spectrum voters who could tilt either way have an important issue to consider here.
Davis, to them, might seem more in touch with a national sense that the war on drugs is so Richard Nixon. Our editorial page has said we appear to have reached a national tipping point.
Sticking by the status quo on drugs would make Abbott seem decidedly retrograde. Then again, his handlers seem to be looking for a very safe course so far. Abbott certainly isn’t coming off as a man of new or great vision, lest it’s Rick Perry’s vision. If he thinks that’s a formula for victory in 2014, we’ll see.
In her first public statements in support of same-sex marriage since announcing her campaign for governor, Democrat Wendy Davis called on likely Republican opponent Greg Abbott to stop defending the state’s marriage bans in court.
Davis’ statements came a day after a federal district judge in San Antonio heard arguments in a lawsuit challenging Texas’ marriage bans, including its 2005 constitutional amendment.
Davis, D-Fort Worth, is a strong LGBT ally who has co-authored bills to ban anti-LGBT employment discrimination and bullying during her time in the Legislature. Davis is backed in her run for governor by LGBT groups including Equality Texas and the Human Rights Campaign.
But Davis’ statements to the San Antonio Express-News editorial board on Thursday marked her most public and emphatic endorsements of marriage equality in her 15-year political career.
“It’s my strong belief that when people love each other and are desirous of creating a committed relationship with each other that they should be allowed to marry, regardless of their sexual orientation,” Davis said.
The tea party is teeing off on Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
Matt Bevin, who is challenging McConnell in the GOP primary in Kentucky, seized on the senator's vote Wednesday to move ahead on legislation to increase the nation's debt limit, describing it as a blank check for President Barack Obama. The tea party-backed businessman and conservative groups signaled they won't let Senate Republican incumbents forget the vote this election year."Kentucky and America can literally no longer afford such financially reckless behavior from the likes of Mitch McConnell," Bevin said in a statement.
Setting the vote in motion was one of McConnell's Republican colleagues — Texan Ted Cruz, the tea party darling who has caused heartburn for his GOP colleagues in his year in the Senate.Cruz insisted on a 60-vote threshold for the Senate to proceed to must-pass legislation to allow the government to borrow money to pay its bills. House and Senate Republicans had decided against another round of brinkmanship and let it be known that they were ready to let Democrats deliver the votes on the debt bill after the House had passed it Tuesday.Not Cruz, who along with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, precipitated the 16-day government shutdown last October over their demands that Obama gut his health care law.
Instead of going along with a simple majority vote, Cruz showed no mercy in forcing Republican leaders to cast a tough vote to clear a filibuster hurdle, exposing them to widespread criticism from primary challengers and outside groups.After what seemed like an eternity, a grim-faced McConnell finally voted yes. An equally grim-faced Sen. John Cornyn, the party's No. 2 leader and Cruz's Texas colleague, changed his vote from no to yes. Sen. John McCain rallied other Republicans to vote yes, providing a show of political support for the leaders. The 67-31 tally advanced the bill to a final vote.In that vote, no Republican supported lifting the Treasury's borrowing authority. The bill passed on a party-line 55-43 vote, moving on to Obama.
Pressed after the votes about what he made his leaders do, Cruz was unapologetic."It should have been a very easy vote," he told reporters. "In my view, every Senate Republican should have stood together." Whether McConnell remains the leader, Cruz said it "is ultimately a decision ... for the voters in Kentucky."
This week, Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis delighted her detractors and confounded her pro-choice supporters when she appeared to support the very same 20-week ban she spent 11 hours filibustering.
Davis’ remarks to the Dallas Morning News that she would have voted for a ban with a broader health exception than the one in force – i.e., not an actual reversal, though it wasn’t terribly clear – were promptly represented as “flip flopping.” More accurately, they represent Davis falling into a trap set for her by abortion opponents, a place of awkward hairsplitting on unpopular later abortions.
Davis' statement comes as a shock, but perhaps that's because we weren't paying close enough attention. Though Davis' opponents prefer to characterize her filibuster as nothing more than a defense of later-term abortions, in truth the bill she stood against was mostly written to shut down access to safe first-trimester abortions. And her remarks this week are largely consistent with what she said during the filibuster, when she argued that the medical exceptions in the bill for later-term abortions were too narrow, replacing a doctor's judgment with that of nonexperts like judges.
Abortion is a complicated issue, and one about which most Texans have complicated feelings. There has never been any real reason to think that Davis is enthusiastic about abortions, despite the fact that she was against a law that would restrict access to the procedure. The fact that she is so often accused of being a "cheerleader" for the procedure, in fact, proves nothing so much as the sanctimony, dishonesty, and occasional misogyny of her critics. [...] Think of Davis as a regular pro-choice person, rather than the abortion advocate her critics have tried to paint her as. From that perspective, the comments offered yesterday are an elaboration of her previously expressed opinions, rather than an attempt to distance herself from them.
What Davis is saying about the nature of later abortions — the fact that they’re very rare, are typically necessary when serious health issues arise, and require consultation between women and their doctors — is all true. Those realities just aren’t compatible with a ban on the procedure.
From a policy position, Davis’ stance simply doesn’t make sense. If the goal is to “give enough deference” to women who are making complicated decisions about their reproductive health, and allow medical professionals to exercise their own judgment about their patients’ care without being hampered by the legislature, that’s directly undermined by the enactment of a ban. For proof, look no further than any abortion provider who practices in a state with abortion restrictions on the books. Every attempt to separate abortion from the rest of medical care, and use political language to describe the circumstances under which it may be performed, changes the way that doctors would have otherwise chosen to conduct their work. Even attempting to include exceptions for some women doesn’t actually work in practice.
On a conference call with reporters today, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) hinted that he may filibuster the House passed debt ceiling suspension in the Senate....
Cruz broke out the same rhetoric that he used before the government shutdown, and hinted at blocking the debt limit bill, “If you get outside Washington, D.C., this issue is practically a no-brainer. President Obama is asking Congress for a blank check. …Under no circumstances will I consent to the debt ceiling being raised with only a 50-vote threshold. I think Senate Republicans should stand united and insist upon a 60-vote threshold. And that is my intention.”
The 'stand united' language was the same point that he made before the government shutdown.
People are so desperate for jobs they don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want rules and regulations enforced that might cost them their livelihoods. For them, a job is precious — sometimes even more precious than a safe workplace or safe drinking water.
This is especially true in poorer regions of the country like West Virginia and through much of the South and rural America — so-called “red” states where the old working class has been voting Republican. Guns, abortion, and race are part of the explanation. But don’t overlook economic anxieties that translate into a willingness to vote for whatever it is that industry wants.
A 30-second ad is the perfect vehicle for a visceral lie. It's a lot easier to scream "job killer" than it is to explain the CBO's carefully hedged nuances. Typically in politics, when you're explaining, you're losing.
And most importantly, the Republican lie is red meat for the ravenous conservative base that delights in hate-feasting on the health law. Those voters are conditioned to believe the worst; passion drives turnout, which means they're likely to dominate midterm balloting in November. They've already swallowed a slew of lies - from "death panels" to "rationed care" - so why would factual reality enlighten them now?
The best defensive player in college football's best conference only a third to fifth round NFL pick? Really? That is shocking, and I guess that other thing is, too.
Michael Sam would be the first openly gay player in the NFL; says he knows there will be problems... and they've already started.
Several NFL officials are telling Sports Illustrated it will hurt him on draft day because a gay player wouldn't be welcome in an NFL locker room. It would be uncomfortable, because that's a man's world.
You beat a woman and drag her down a flight of stairs, pulling her hair out by the roots? You're the fourth guy taken in the NFL draft.
You kill people while driving drunk? That guy's welcome.
Players caught in hotel rooms with illegal drugs and prostitutes? We know they're welcome.
Players accused of rape and pay the woman to go away? You lie to police trying to cover up a murder? We're comfortable with that.
You love another man? Well, now you've gone too far!
It wasn't that long ago when we were being told that black players couldn't play in "our" games because it would be "uncomfortable." And even when they finally could, it took several more years before a black man played quarterback. Because we weren't "comfortable" with that, either.
So many of the same people who used to make that argument (and the many who still do) are the same people who say government should stay out of our lives. But then want government in our bedrooms.
I've never understood how they feel "comfortable" laying claim to both sides of that argument.
In the final minutes of the Cotton Bowl, with Missouri clinging to a three point lead, their opponent, the Oklahoma State Cowboys, were driving deep into Tigers territory. A field goal would have tied it for the Cowboys, a touchdown would probably have won it. On third down, inside the thirty, the Cowboys quarterback dropped back to pass. Sam, in a wondrous combination of power and speed, shot past his blocker on the outside. As the quarterback was flushed from the pocket, Sam sacked him, knocking the ball loose. His teammate scooped it up and returned it for a touchdown. Sam’s play helped seal the victory, and it was obvious to anyone watching just what kind of player he was: a real man’s man.
No matter what happens next, Sam has proven what we already knew: that football, or any sport, isn’t somehow in itself hostile to the breadth of human sexuality. At Outsports, in a great behind-the-scenes explanation of how Sam’s announcement was planned and timed, Cyd Zeigler writes that Sam has no plans to become an activist anytime soon: “His role in the movement toward LGBT equality in sports will be simply playing the sport as an out gay man.” He’s done it before.
