Bell busts Garcia on another questionable jail contract *updated*

It's time for this race to start heating up.

Mayoral candidate Chris Bell criticized former Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia on Wednesday for reportedly authorizing a $1.1 million jail ministry contract with a friend's organization – the latest in a series of attacks on Garcia's management record.

According to KHOU-11, Garcia signed a three-year contract with a group run by former Houston Oilers tight end Mike Barber, even though Barber's ministry provided similar programming elsewhere for free. Billing records also allegedly show Barber's employees charged for chaplain duties at the Harris County Jail while simultaneously clocking in at other correctional facilities.

"Houston City Hall is not for sale," Bell said at a press conference in front of the building. "If this was an isolated incident, it would be one thing. But it seems like every week something else is coming forward about the way the Harris County Jail was administered when Adrian Garcia was sheriff."

Bill King, as last time, piled on.

"This is more evidence that Adrian Garcia is not even remotely prepared to be mayor," King said in a statement. "He touts his record as sheriff, but the fact is he failed by almost every metric on which you can judge a sheriff's performance."

Garcia is feeling the pressure... and running away from it.

After taking heat for his management of the Harris County Sheriff's Office, Adrian Garcia ducked out of a Houston mayoral debate a half-hour early Tuesday, before moderators opened the floor for candidates to ask each other questions.

Garcia said he had to leave for a prior commitment, even after one of the moderators noted that appointment – an interview with the Chronicle's editorial board – was scheduled to begin nearly an hour and a half later.

In departing early, Garcia avoided a debate format that has proved tricky for him in recent weeks, as his competitors have taken aim at his record in the sheriff's office.

Even so, four of the five candidates on stage with Garcia used their rebuttals during a preceding round to criticize the former sheriff's management skills.

"The sheriff's office wasn't working when Adrian was there," businessman Bill King said, citing the decrease in the department's rape clearance rate under under Garcia's tenure.

With the former sheriff on the lam, it turned into a free-for-all.

City Councilman Stephen Costello, former Congressman Chris Bell and former City Attorney Ben Hall subsequently chimed in, calling attention to Garcia's use of an outside consultant during his tenure, as well as a mentally ill inmate left for weeks in a filthy cell in 2013.

"Adrian has to explain how it is that he had a sheriff's department that could have a mentally challenged person living in a cell for weeks without getting remedial care," Hall said. "I think that speaks to his management skill and he does have to answer for that."

There was more slugging each other on pensions.

Offered the chance to question Bell, with whom he spars infrequently, Costello asked about financing the city's unfunded pension liability.

"I do want to honor the defined benefit plan for the existing firefighters. I think everything should be on the table for the incoming firefighters, but I would like for them to be able to have a defined benefit plan as well," Bell said.

He then took swipes at his closest competitors.

"Whoever's sitting at that table should not have a dog in the hunt," Bell said. "I am not a city pensioner, like Adrian Garcia, and I'm not the hand-picked candidate of the Houston firefighters, like Sylvester Turner."

Garcia's issues have been well-documented in this space, as has my very public opinion that they render him unfit to serve.  I just hope the small number of Houstonians who will begin casting ballots in a few weeks can make the right choice for mayor, because there's too many wrong ones (besides Garcia, that is, the worst of all).

Update:

The Harris County Sheriff's Office has asked the Texas Rangers to look into alleged billing irregularities of a jail ministry hired by former Sheriff Adrian Garcia, providing fresh fodder for his opponents in the Houston mayor's race.

According to the sheriff's office, employees of a ministry run by former Houston Oilers player Mike Barber charged for chaplain services at the Harris County jail while simultaneously clocking in at other state correctional facilities.

Sheriff Ron Hickman terminated the three-year, $1.1 million contract in June, opting instead to hire three people for $40,000 each to coordinate volunteer services.

"We cut his cost more than in half," Hickman said, referring to Barber. "And most of the volunteers ... are still right where they were."

Hickman asked the Rangers to investigate the billing discrepancies in early September, the sheriff's office said. A Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman said Wednesday night that "the Texas Rangers are conducting an inquiry to determine whether an investigation is warranted."

Attempts to reach Mike Barber Ministries on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

I'm thinking that Adrian Garcia is really starting to regret quitting that job he had before lining up another one.  Aren't you?

Planned Parenthood's Richards embarrasses GOP's Chaffetz with his own chart

Over the past month or two, the only thing that's been more appallingly ignorant to observe than l'affaire Kim Davis -- complete with its own fake pictures -- is the rolling smear campaign against Planned Parenthood.  During yesterday's Inquisition Congressional hearing on defunding the women's health organization, Cecile Richards made Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Thank Dog Not Texas) pay for his stupidity (or his lies, whichever it was).

As the accompanying video shows, the Utah Republican put a chart on display, purporting to show that over the last decade, the number of prevention services provided by the health care group has steadily declined, while the number of abortions has steadily increased.

Part of the problem, as MSNBC’s Zack Roth reported, is that the information in the chart is misleading [Update: this is what the chart would have looked like if it were honest]. But nearly as important is the fact the congressman presenting the image as devastating evidence simply didn’t know what he was talking about.

When Richards said she’d never seen it before, Chaffetz replied: “It comes straight from your annual reports.”

Moments later, Richards shot back: “My lawyers just informed me that the source of this information is Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group. I would check your source.”

Oops.

The Utah Republican lectured the Planned Parenthood chief, certain that the misleading image had come from Planned Parenthood materials. It apparently didn’t occur to Chaffetz to actually look at the darned thing – it literally says, “Source: Americans United for Life,” in all capital letters, on the chart he was so excited about.

This isn't a bug in the conservative hive mind, it's a feature.  Look, there's Carly Fiorina's angry defense of her nightmare make-believe video, which expands upon clandestine, hoax, provocatively-edited-for-maximum-shock value videos.  But this conservative brain-eating virus isn't contained to women's health  issues.  There's climate science and evolution and basic math and pretty much everything that Republicans cannot or will not understand that must be argued out.

Watching much of the proceedings, I was reminded of the congressional committee hearings in early August over the international nuclear agreement with Iran. Republicans had months to prepare their best arguments and sharpest questions, but they fired nothing but blanks. Slate’s William Saletan attended all three hearings and came away flabbergasted: “Over the past several days, congressional hearings on the deal have become a spectacle of dishonesty, incomprehension, and inability to cope with the challenges of a multilateral world... I came away from the hearings dismayed by what the GOP has become in the Obama era. It seems utterly unprepared to govern.”

 It was hard not to draw a similar conclusion (yesterday). Republicans on this committee prepared for months to grill the Planned Parenthood president, having ample time to organize their thoughts, coordinate their lines of attack, read their own charts, etc.

But the GOP lawmakers, once again, seemed confused, lost in details they didn’t understand.

We can't make even the smallest amount of progress if we're going to have to stop and straighten out the idiots who insist that south is actually north despite what the compass says, and we're doing it wrong because their Bibles tell them so.

If we're going to have Congressional hearings to debate whether or not the sky is blue, which way is up and which is down, or shut down the federal government over defunding Planned Parenthood because some morons think that will reduce the number of pregnancy terminations, then our representatives have long ago stopped doing so.  Representing us.

They have, in fact, failed the very conservative morons that elected them.  When even John Boehner gives up fighting with the TeaBaggers, maybe that's a sign something's gone wrong for them.  When Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn can outwit Ted Cruz, perhaps that should be telling the people who voted for "Poop" as their senator, and support his campaign for president, that they might be off the rails.

I just don't think these pigs can be taught to sing, though.  What's Plan B?

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes that everyone made it through the blood moon apocalypse as it brings you this week's roundup. (Assuming we're all still here to read it.)

Off the Kuff comments on the first poll of Texas we've seen in awhile.

Libby Shaw at Texas Kaos, and contributing to Daily Kos, notes that George P. Bush is a predictable clone of his father and uncle. It's all about him and his cronies. Texans should be wary. George P. Bush: A Chip Off of the Old Block.

Socratic Gadfly has a two-fer on Texas-related big business smackdowns. First, he compares VW to Blue Bell, without being sure who loses more in that. Second, after yet ANOTHER recent flight delay, he bitches about Southwest becoming more and more just another legacy airline.

With seven million bucks to spend and a Houston mayoral race that's putting people's feet to sleep, the Houston Chronic excitedly reports that the campaign air wars are about to begin. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs points out that this is just one of the signs of a dysfunctional political system.

Texas Leftist asks: is affordable housing the next great challenge for Houston?

Dos Centavos advances the Festival Chicano in Houston this weekend.

TXsharon at Bluedaze blogged live from the EPA hearing in Dallas.

Bay Area Houston defended Carly Fiorina and her twisted, squirming, heart-beating, legs-kicking nightmares about Planned Parenthood.

Neil at All People Have Value took a picture in downtown Houston that suggested the important place of just plain luck in our lives. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Trail Blazers was in the Austin courtroom when a Texas judge blocked the state's cuts to Medicaid therapy.

Eric Berger shows us what Sunday's lunar eclipse would have looked like if we saw it from the moon.

Mike Barajas discovered in a recent court filing that the state of Texas is officially dealing drugs.

Prairie Weather -- via Political Wire via Politico -- learned that Pope Francis, Elton John, and Janet Yellen have all snubbed the Clinton Foundation recently because of.. well, you can probably guess.

Joe Deshotel collects some of the free-range thoughts of Louie Gohmert on the next speaker of the US House.

The Rag Blog has the details on De Novo, a documentary play about immigration, coming next month to UT-Austin.

Offcite reports from Parking Day in Houston.

Carol Morgan flashed back on a week of moral epiphany, immoral extortion, and dangerous rhetoric.

GOPLifer thinks the Texas Model -- where the Speaker of the House is elected with bipartisan support -- might work well in Congress, too.

Greg Wythe wonders when the campaign for Houston mayor will begin.

Glenn Smith notes that the late Yogi Berra was a beneficiary of birthright citizenship, which many Republicans like Ted Cruz would like to rescind.

Mean Green Cougar Red recalls Hurricane Rita.

And Fascist Dyke Motors believes in everything, but nothing is sacred.

Sunday Funnies

The vindication of Kenneth Kendrick

I join with Ted in commending the man who blew the whistle on Stewart Parnell and Peanut Corporation of America.

Kenneth Kendrick, missing Monday from the federal courthouse in Albany, GA, did not hear the praise that came from a witness during a pivotal day in the world of food safety.

Kendrick is a former assistant plant manager of the Plainview, Texas, peanut processing facility once owned by the now-defunct Peanut Corporation of America (PCA). On Sept. 21, 2015, his past bosses and supervisors — Stewart Parnell, former owner of PCA, Michael Parnell, former peanut broker, and Mary Wilkerson, former quality assurance manager — sat for sentencing in the same courthouse in which their federal trial was conducted a year earlier.

At the heart of this trial and sentencing sits the 2008-09 Salmonella outbreak, considered one of the most significant in U.S. history. The CDC report on this multistate outbreak identifies 714 clinically confirmed illnesses across 46 states and nine deaths. Later estimates from the CDC place the number of potential victims not reporting an illness at more than 22,000.

Their attempts to hide evidence and obstruct justice delayed investigators from finding the true source of the contamination and bringing an end to the outbreak sooner.

Kendrick, you may remember, ran for state agriculture commissioner in 2014 on the Green Party line.  Texas voters ultimately chose Sid Miller, known for cupcakes and sonograms, over his DINO challenger, Junior Samples.  There's a great deal more to Kendrick's story that most people wouldn't know from reading the article -- he's found steady employment difficult, his wife left him, he has suffered transportation problems and health consequences -- but throughout his ordeal he's been stoic, determined that his actions were the right thing in the face of unrelenting personal hardships.

In 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Parnell, his brother, and three other executives involved in the attempts to conceal problems at PCA on charges of fraud, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and more than 70 other charges.

At the end of their 2014 trial, a 12-member jury found Stewart Parnell guilty on 67 federal felony counts, Michael Parnell guilty on 30 counts, and Wilkerson guilty on one of two counts of obstruction of justice.

The 2015 sentencing of the five convicted food industry executives included the testimonies of victims and families affected by PCA and the outbreak of Salmonella tied to the company. Jeff Almer, who lost his mother during the outbreak, named each guilty executive and had a word or two for them. He asked Wilkerson about her definition of quality assurance. He even stared at Stewart Parnell and said, “You killed my mom.”

Before ending his testimony, Almer stated before the court his appreciation for the efforts of Kenneth Kendrick in helping to make sure that the investigation, as well as the subsequent trial and sentencing, became possible.

On Monday, Sept. 21, 2015, the judge handed Stewart Parnell a sentence of 28 years in prison, Michael Parnell 20 years, and Mary Wilkerson 5 years. Former PCA managers Daniel Kilgore and Samuel Lightsey, who pleaded guilty under agreements with federal prosecutors, are scheduled to receive their sentences on Oct. 1, 2015.

Compared to the morals and ethics of Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton, Jethro Bodine, and George Pee Bush, try to imagine how much better our state government, in one small department like the agriculture commission, might be with a man of Kendrick's integrity at the helm.

The next time you get a choice between a conservative embarrassment like Sid Miller or a progressive role model like Kenneth Kendrick, choose wisely.

Boehner gives up

Both the Speakership and his seat in the House, at the end of next month.

In a stunning move, House Speaker John Boehner informed fellow Republicans on Friday that he would resign from Congress at the end of October, giving up his top leadership post and his seat in the House in the face of hardline conservative opposition.

The 13-term Ohio Republican shocked his GOP caucus early Friday morning when he announced his decision in a closed-door session.

He's tired of fighting wth the TeaBaggers.  Frankly, I don't blame him for feeling that way.

A focus of conservatives' complaints, Boehner "just does not want to become the issue," said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. "Some people have tried to make him the issue both in Congress and outside," Mica said.

Conservatives have demanded that any legislation to keep the government operating past next Wednesday's deadline strip Planned Parenthood of government funds, an argument rejected by the more pragmatic lawmakers. The dispute has threatened Boehner's speakership and roiled the GOP caucus.

Some conservatives welcomed his announcement.

Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas said "it's time for new leadership," and Rep. Tom Massie of Kentucky said the speaker "subverted our Republic."

That's about as douchey as it gets.  The FNG might be an improvement -- in terms of compromise and such -- but I'll bet the Gohmerts and the Massies and the rest of the Wacko Bird Caucus have somebody else in mind who isn't.

Update: Never mind the positive spin on Kevin McCarthy in that NYT piece linked above.  McCarthy and the other three potentials mentioned here are all worse.

Update II: "Right-wing base already hates McCarthy as much as they hated Boehner":

Following former Congressman Eric Cantor’s equally surprising exit from Congress — after being primaried out by a Tea Party favorite — McCarthy moved up the Republican food chain, much to the chagrin of hardliners who saw him as a Boehner/Cantor clone more interested in legislation than throwing red meat to the masses.

In a post on Red State, conservative gadfly Erick Erickson attempted to shoot down McCarthy’s ascension, saying it would continue the “bad blood” between the hardcore conservative wing and the moderates.

“McCarthy is not very conservative and, for all of Cantor’s faults, lacks Cantor’s intelligence on a number of issues. Lest we forget, McCarthy had several high profile screw ups as Whip and has not really seemed to ever improve over time,” Erickson wrote.” If House Republicans wish to not find common ground with the conservatives who make up their base, McCarthy is a fine pick. But if they want to get everyone together as we head into November and then into 2016, they should consider someone else. McCarthy is a non-starter for conservatives and the bad blood will continue.”

Radio host Mark Levin left no doubt had he felt about McCarthy, calling him “dimwitted.”

Update III: And a longer short list.

Money Changes Nothing (Part II of a continuing series)

(Part One, "Money Changes Everything", brought a smarting rebuke, you may recall.)

With midyear fundraising north of $7 million and a throng of top-tier candidates, Houston voters were expected to see a barrage of mayoral advertising across the airwaves come fall. Yet, the race is only now crawling onto television.

To date, five candidates have paid a combined $1.6 million to advertise on network television, half of what was spent on TV in the last open-seat race in 2009.

Instead, they are embracing other advertising methods and retail politics: door-knocking, community appearances and a seemingly endless slog of forums.

"The campaign's not about who's going to win the air war," University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus said. "It's about who's going to win the ground war."

I'm going to stop there with the excerpt because Rottinghaus got it right.  The rest is just politico/consultant crap.

Teevee advertising does not persuade undecideds to vote.  Everybody who intends to do so -- something on the order of about 15% of registered Houstonians -- will, and the other 85% are too busy or too bored to do so.  There's no compelling motivator for the casual, occasional voter outside of HERO, and everybody already has their minds made up about that.  Ben Hall's record may be under assault from pro-King forces, but that's a side skirmish.
 
Because the universe of active and engaged voters is so minuscule (no, I did not spell it wrong), teevee advertising isn't going to persuade those who are voting to do so for someone besides the person have already chosen.  There is likely some meaningful number in context with the afore-mentioned 15% who have only narrowed their choice down to a couple or three men (sorry, but the runoff qualifiers are going to be cis-males) and if those people make an ultimate decision based on a teevee commercial, then the electorate is even more ignorant than I would have believed.  And to use just one specific example, Steve Costello's ad buys -- he should already have plenty of name recognition after three winning citywide races -- are the greatest waste.  But 625 large is peanuts to him.  Like Donald Trump, he can spend whatever he chooses; the best thing you can say about that fact is that he can't be bought (theoretically, at least).

The newspaper only reports the teevee and radio advertising expenditures as a measure of their resentment.  They aren't getting any of that money, you see.  And therein lies the real problem: the system has been corrupted by all of this cash flowing in, but the medium most likely to report that story doesn't.  This story being reported is one that only some campaign staffers, a few whored-out professional consultants, and a small cadre of contemptuous bystanders (like me) care about.  If that is 1000 people in the entire city of Houston, I would be surprised.

Accounts of fundraising totals, campaign finance reports, media buys, and the evaluation of "viability" attached to such, are the sniffles and coughs of a body politic with a bad case of affluenza.  But the pols aren't going to do anything about it, and the media that benefits from the advertising isn't going to so much as mention it.  The fat cats who write the big checks, and call in their chits after the election, like the system just the way it is.  Sick.  After all, they know people who know how to profit obscenely by raising the price of medicine.

Oh, there are a couple of presidential candidates talking about healing the system, and there's a populist movement laying the foundation for eventually changing it, but they are low voices and short on helping hands.

If you're one of those people who doesn't care what's going on with the mayor and city council races, you're not reading this blog or this story in the paper.  If you're one of those people who's still undecided about who to vote for, or which way you might go on HERO, you might ought to report to the nearest Texas MH/MR facility for a psychological competence exam.

And if you do -- care, that is; you have a pretty good idea about who you're voting for, when you will vote (first day of early voting, somewhere in-between, or on Election Day) -- then very little of what I have written here is influencing you.  Your mind is made up.

But there's seven million bucks in potential ad revenue, and ad buy commissions, and political staff and their resume' garnishments at stake.  For those couple of hundred folks, the stakes are high.

For the two men who move on to the one-on-one in December, it's a big deal, of course.  Their futures are heavily invested.  It's a BFD to them, their families and supporters, and certainly the people they will owe some payback to if they wind up getting to sit in the big chair in the middle of the horseshoe down on Bagby.

Ads you see on teevee for the next five or six weeks -- or most probably, all the ones you won't see -- will have nothing to do with the outcome in November.  The real contest comes after that.  The playoff, in December.

So if I were one of those profoundly indifferent 85%-ers in H-Town, I'd go back to watching millionaires bash their brains out for the entertainment of a few billionaires and a couple hundred million Idiocrats.  You know: the people who put on jerseys, paint their faces, scream and cry at their teevees over a duel of gladiators.

That's the real game, with the real money being spent, on your teevee.  And if, Flying Spaghetti Monster forbid, a political advertisement comes on in the middle of it, hit fast forward or change the channel.