You'd think, after all the high-profile squabbling over stimulus funds for the unemployment insurance trust fund, that the news of SB1569's advancement in the Senate might get a bit more notice than this, but apparently not. The only other story I could find was this from the Tyler Telegraph:
A Senate bill authored by a local legislator that would place provisions for Texas to accept $555 million in federal stimulus funding passed unanimously out of committee Monday.Sen. Kevin Eltife, R-Tyler, authored Senate Bill 1569 in the hopes that the state would accept hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government and avoid "strings" attached to the funding. The bill passed from the Senate Committee on Economic Development and is the first Unemployment Insurance Modernization legislation to pass out of a House or Senate committee.
The bill would place provisions to allow the state to accept the stimulus dollars for Texas' Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund.
"I am pleased to keep the bill moving forward," Eltife said. "I will continue to refine the legislation so that Texas can be eligible for the $555 million in federal stimulus money for the Unemployment Trust Fund. This will help many of our fellow Texans who are out of work while at the same time keeping the burden on business to a minimum."
[...]
Eltife said with the provisions the state can accept the money and avoid future burdens.
[Eltife's] plan no longer includes a sunset provision, which is barred by the federal legislation, but calls for a review of the changes after they are put into law. Gov. Rick Perry remains opposed. It will be interesting to see whether Eltife can round up enough Republicans to bring this measure up, which would be a direct challenge to Perry. Chairman Joe Deshotel will have similar legislation in his Business and Industry Committee on Wednesday, according to the Statesman's Kate Alexander.
As far as the attempts to come up with a sunset provision that isn't really a sunset provision, if that's what it takes to pass this, then that's fine by me. I think it's a bit ridiculous to have to go over such hurdles, given that the marginal cost to the state some number of years down the line for expanding its unemployment insurance program and collecting that $555 million in stimulus money today is tiny compared to the overall budget - something like 0.2% of state revenues - and the marginal benefits are substantial, as Ray Perryman has estimated that every $1 from these unemployment benefits would add $2.66 to the economy. That doesn't even take into account the hit that businesses will take when the unemployment tax gets hiked in the coming months to keep the unemployment trust fund from going dry. All this, and we help a lot more people make it through some hard times intact. Point being, this is a good deal regardless of whether or not we think we might need to repeal it later. I mean, I understand the politics of this. I just don't understand the logic.
UPDATE: Typically, Bill Hammond of the Texas Association of Business opposed this bill, defying all logic and (given the provisions in the bill making it easier for victims of domestic abuse to claim the benefits) compassion. Burka summarizes a debate among three lawmakers over the stimulus funding for UI.
We've seen all of the stories about inmates being freed from jail in Texas after however many years inside, the result of DNA evidence proving they could not have committed the crime for which they were convicted. But what happens to these men once they are freed? Often, it's not so good.
Wiley Fountain spent 15 years in a jail cell for a rape he did not commit.Now the wrongly convicted man is serving another kind of time. He's free, but he's homeless.
After squandering nearly $390,000 he received from the state as compensation for his time behind bars, Fountain, 52, spends his days collecting aluminum cans for 35 cents a pound. He spends his nights in a tattered sleeping bag on the asphalt behind a liquor store in a run-down South Dallas neighborhood.
To other exonerees and their lawyers, Fountain is the worst-case example of the need for reforms in how the wrongly convicted are compensated. They are asking the Texas Legislature to increase compensation and to expand its offering of social services to give newly freed men a better shot at a second chance.
[...]
[U]nlike parolees, exonerees get almost no help from the state when they first re-enter society.
That could change this year.
State Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, filed a bill to increase lump sum compensation from $50,000 to $80,000 for each year of incarceration. The bill also would require the state to pay some of the compensation in annuities, assuring exonerees a lifetime income. The payments would be retroactive to exonerees who already received lump sum payments, including Fountain, and would cease if there was a subsequent felony conviction.
"I don't imagine any of us locked up more than 20 years have a lot of experience managing personal finances," said Charles Chatman, who was exonerated in January 2008 after nearly 27 years.
The bill also would provide exonerees the same health insurance given to state employees, a crucial benefit for those who often emerge from prison with severe health problems but no way to get medical coverage.
[...]
Exoneration hearings have become common events in Dallas courtrooms in recent years. They've also highlighted the lack of social services available to the wrongly convicted.
Such services are commonplace for convicts paroled out of prison. Parolees receive $50 and a bus ticket to anywhere in Texas upon release, and another $50 when they meet up with their parole officers, said Jason Clark, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
There are re-entry centers in major cities that offer employment help, counseling and substance abuse treatment, and there are halfway houses for parolees who need additional supervision.
"We're not releasing people so they can be homeless," Clark said. "That doesn't happen."
But that's what routinely happens to exonerees, who are released suddenly and with no place to go.
"It's really terrible," [Billy Smith, a Dallas exoneree who served about 20 years of a life sentence on a wrongful conviction of aggravated sexual assault,] said. "People who get out on parole have a better chance of getting started on the right foot than a person who has been exonerated."
On a related note, as we also know, a lot of these men were convicted on the basis of faulty eyewitness testimony. State Sen. Rodney Ellis is the point man in the battle to improve witness identification procedures, but his efforts have been watered down somewhat.
The exonerations have not convinced all police and prosecutors that sweeping changes are needed. They don't want lawmakers to mandate policies they believe are unworkable, and they fear losing court evidence because of honest police mistakes or technical violations. But leading law enforcement figures have agreed that eyewitness identifications could be improved.Those pushing for reform, including defense lawyers and public interest groups, want language stiff enough to compel mandatory identification procedures.
Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, dropped his original version of the bill that would have ordered police agencies to follow specific lineup methods or face exclusion from trial of identification evidence. Gov. Rick Perry vowed to veto any bill that applied laws on evidence exclusion to eyewitness identifications, said Keith Hampton, legislative director of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers.
The compromise legislation requires police agencies to have written policies on identifications that reflect the latest scientific research. But it specifies that the judicial rule governing what is admissible evidence does not apply to eyewitness identifications.
"I'm more optimistic [about reform legislation becoming law] than I've been in my 19 years in the Senate working on these issues," Ellis said in an interview last week.
Hampton said prosecutors had gutted the aim of the original bill.
"This is a pathetic response," he said. "It's a bill that does nothing."
Prosecutors do not want real reform, Hampton said, and are conducting a "whisper campaign" to prevent Ellis' bill from being debated on the Senate floor even if, as expected, it clears committee.
[Edwin Colfax, state director of The Justice Project, a national reform group,] agreed that the original bill was softened by opposition. But he said it would establish a framework for future meaningful change.
"It's not as if the defense lawyers are not coming off better than they were before," he said.
Finally, I recently stumbled across this old Baseball Prospectus article, which illustrates how one cannot always rely on one's memory to know what actually happened. Check it out.
In my previous post on gambling, in which I presented the economic case for "racinos" as made by the racetracks, I alluded to the moral case against gambling. Bringing moral arguments into political discussions is fraught with pitfalls, but sometimes they just can't be avoided, and this is one of those times. What's interesting about the fight over gambling in Texas is how it hasn't broken down strictly across party lines, which leads to some interesting bedfellows as well as the occasional double reverse. (For instance, despite his avowed opposition to expanded gambling now, Governor Perry once explicitly supported video lottery terminals at racetracks and on Indian reservations, which is to say pretty much exactly what the racetracks are pushing for now.) That in turn means that I sometimes find myself nodding in agreement with members of Texas' Christian conservative movement, something which doesn't happen very often. This Fred Clarkson article gets at the heart of this.
"It is a myth" says Leslie Bernal, executive director of DC-based Stop Predatory Gambling, "that liberal and conservative religious groups can't get along." The same, he says, goes for the many religious and secular groups that work comfortably together all the time. "This is something I take for granted."The transformation of the religious community's understanding of and response to the situation turns on two key points. One is distinguishing between what they call "predatory" forms of gambling and "social gambling," such as church bingo nights, buddies playing poker, or the office football pool.
"Predatory gambling," Bernal says, "is the practice of using gambling to prey on human weaknesses for profit." He points to the highly addictive nature of contemporary electronic slot machines and video poker as the primary source of the profound "social costs" related to gambling addition. "Slots are," he says, "designed to make you play as fast as possible for as long as possible," and in gambling industry parlance, "to play to extinction."
The other key transformational understanding is a growing recognition that state-sponsored casino gambling is incompatible with constitutional democracy itself. This argument is being championed by eminent historian of the civil rights movement Taylor Branch, who says that raising revenue via state-supported gambling addiction is a betrayal of the citizens and an avoidance of critical questions about our democracy: what do we want our government to do and how we are going to pay for it? "State-sponsored predatory gambling is essentially a corruption of democracy," he said recently.
"[T]his violates our social compact, and the trust we must have in the belief that we are all in this together," he continued. "And the first step away from it is to play each other for suckers. We're going to trick them into thinking they are going to get rich, but they are really going to be paying my taxes."
(You may note there's a parallel to another kind of legalization debate. As Mark Kleiman puts it, "The money in any drug, including alcohol, is in the addicts, not the casual users.")
So that's a big part of my qualms on this issue. There's no way to capture the revenue from social gamblers without getting the problem gamblers as well, and we just don't acknowledge those costs, much less account for them. How big a problem this represents is to some extent a matter of personal conscience. I must admit, I don't know how many of these people we're already dealing with, and how many more there would be if and when we make it easier to gamble right here. It's possible the difference isn't as big as I think it might be. But just as I believe the economic claims being made by the casino interests have gotten a woefully insufficient vetting by the press, so do I believe the costs associated with expanded gambling have been overlooked. If HJR 31 or something like it passes and we do wind up voting on an amendment this fall, I suspect some of these issues will get vetted as the various advocacy groups make their case. I just wish there'd be more discussion of them now, before the Lege takes action.
As you know, the Lege has one task they absolutely must do every biennium, and that's pass a budget. The Senate Finance Committee has taken its first step towards doing that.
A two-year state budget that accepts federal stimulus money and increases spending by 7.3 percent, but hoards cash reserves, was approved by Senate budget writers today.Counting federal funds, the Senate Finance Committee's budget would spend $182.2 billion, up $12.5 billion over the current two year cycle.
"It's a fairly significant increase in the overall budget," said Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, R-Bryan. "The committee worked hard to try and address many, many legitimate needs in state government, and we wouldn't have been able to do it without the federal stimulus money."
The panel approved the budget, 14-0. The full Senate is expected to act on it later this week.
A key goal of Senate budget writers was to protect the state's "rainy day fund," so that 2 1/2 -year old school property tax cuts won't vanish after 2011. The committee left untouched some $9.1 billion expected in the rainy day fund by September 2011.
The reserve is expected to be used next session, when lawmakers will confront a yawning gap between the 2006 property tax cuts and offsetting new revenues from a revamped business tax and higher taxes on cigarettes and private transfers of used cars.
A 24-percent increase in federal funds helped the Senate panel balance the budget for 2010-2011.
In a brief discussion by the Finance Committee, Sens. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, and Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville, said they were voting for the budget with reservations.Zaffirini said the panel should have heard testimony from experts before adopting a last-minute provision that would bar using any funds in the budget for embryonic stem cell research.
Proponents of using embryos, who say they are obtained from fertility clinics and would be discarded anyway, said Texas stands to lose billions from a burgeoning biotech industry if it continues to create a hostile legal and regulatory climate.A recent study by University of North Texas economists Bernard Weinstein and Terry Clower said the state could lose out on as many as 100,000 new jobs in the next five years if the state restricts embryonic research.
House budget writers, spurred by a chairman angered by how Gov. Rick Perry helped steer a $50 million grant to the Texas A&M University System, voted Friday to strip Perry of one of the powers he used to make the grant happen.The House Appropriations Committee put language in its proposed budget saying any transfers between the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technology Fund must be approved by the 10-member Legislative Budget Board. The panel also said the budget board, made up of the lieutenant governor, House speaker and members of the House and Senate, must approve any grants from the two funds.
Perry uses the Enterprise Fund to attract businesses to the state and the Emerging Technology Fund to launch tech projects at universities working with the private sector. Current law says grants from those accounts must be approved by the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker.
Friday's move was a response to Perry's announcement this week that he had transferred $50 million from the Enterprise Fund to the Emerging Technology Fund to pay for a grant to the Texas A&M University System for a new pharmaceutical manufacturing center.
But House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie , says that's not how the state usually pays for buildings at universities.
Several members of the Appropriations Committee, including Pitts, praised the Texas A&M center, saying they were more concerned with the process than the result.
"We have a legitimate concern that funds (that) were dedicated for one purpose were moved to a fund with a completely different purpose with little or no input from the Legislature," Pitts said.
One more thing:
The Appropriations panel also proposed putting $136 million into the Enterprise Fund and $77 million into the Emerging Technology Fund over the next two years -- combined, more than $200 million less than Perry requested."Now is not the time to cut back on job creation programs," Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle said.
As we know, Sharon Keller, the Presiding Judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals, has asked that the state pick up her legal fees in defense of the charges against her on grounds that paying for her own attorney would be financially ruinous for her. And if you were to ignore the vast financial resources that she's been failing to disclose as required by law, that might even be true.
The sworn statement Keller was required to file with the Texas Ethics Commission last April reflected income of more than $275,000, including her annual state salary of $152,500. It also showed that she owned at least 100 shares of airline stock, a home in Austin and one commercial property in Dallas. County tax records valued the properties at about $1 million.Keller's statement did not list her ownership interest in seven other residential and commercial properties in Dallas and Tarrant counties. Those properties are valued collectively by county appraisal districts at about $1.9 million.
Among Keller's unlisted properties are two homes valued together at just over $1 million in the family's compound across from the Dallas Arboretum. Keller is listed as sole owner under Sharon Batjer, her married name. She was divorced in 1982.
The other omissions include two Keller-owned properties valued at about $823,000: a vacant commercial site in Euless and an occupied commercial property next to Keller's Drive-In on East Northwest Highway, a landmark hamburger restaurant operated since 1965 by the judge's father, Jack. Also not disclosed are three properties valued at $114,000 and owned by Keller's 27-year-old son, a law student whom she claims as a dependent.
[...]
Keller's assets, including those she is not required to disclose to the state, could reveal that she is even wealthier.
Her 2008 statement to the ethics commission did not list about $3 million in real estate held by three family corporations or trusts, in which she has an interest. State law requires that officeholders list any corporations in which they are an officer or director. Keller did not do so for the three family-run entities, although she did acknowledge earning income of at least $25,000 from a trust in her father's name.
State law does not require asset disclosure if the officeholder does not have at least a 50 percent interest. Records do not show Keller's percentage holdings, and neither she nor her lawyer would comment on any details of The News' findings. Keller also did not list two properties worth about $796,000, owned by a family corporation in which her dependent son is an officer, as she is required by law to do.
Officeholders are also required to list outstanding debt over $1,000; Keller listed none on her latest report to the ethics commission.
Last year, Keller bought a residential property in Hunt County, valued on tax rolls at $251,000. She will not have to report that property until this year's filing.
It's April Fool's week, but there's no fooling around with the Texas Progressive Alliance and the weekly blog roundup. Click on for the highlights.
Phillip Martin of Burnt Orange Report is feeling proud to have a Democrat in the Oval Office in his post, President Barack Obama: How He Won & Early Successes.
McBlogger's Harry Balczak has some great news about a new movie coming out.
Off the Kuff examines the economic claims made by the gambling industry, and also prints a response from the racetracks.
BossKitty at TruthHugger recognizes the pattern of disaster cycles, why is everyone surprised when their world is turned upside down? America must pull its pants up and be ready for the unexpected, because it should be expected ... So Many Red Rivers - What Have We Learned Speaking about learning, What Else Can We Cut Besides Cost ...
The GOP declares doomsday if Obama's budget is enacted. Let's hope they don't pre-emptively invade the White House to try to stop it, as if a Democratic federal budget were equivalent to Saddam's WMD. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs reminds us that the Republicans tend to hyperventilate when they exaggerate.
Neil at Texas Liberal writes about Houston City Council candidate Noel Freeman and is hopeful that Mr. Freeman will address some questions of how the Democratic Party regards some if its' most loyal voters.
At Texas Kaos, Libby Shaw keeps an eye on the best gov't that political contributions can buy-TRCC edition in Fat Cat The Business Owner Sticks It to Joe the Consumer.
nytexan at BlueBloggin is not surprised by the GOP's latest stunt; The Party of NO: GOP Budget Has No Numbers And No Plan. The GOP leadership offered "The Republican Road To Recovery," a 19 page joke which took them 27 days to write. It actually sounds like a book title for Alcoholic Anonymous. The best part of the GOP budget is there are "no" numbers in it. Page numbers don't count.
Justin at AAA-Fund Blog urges readers to call State Rep. Angie Chen Button to condemn State Rep. Leo Berman's conductLeo Berman.
The Texas Cloverleaf explains why it is going into hibernation.
Also on Burnt Orange Report, Todd Hill had an interview with Tom Schieffer, potential Democratic candidate for Governor, about his vision for Texas, his friendship with George W. Bush, and why he thinks he can win in the general election.
WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts on President Obama's first budget - A primer.
CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is glad that the cowboy Bush administration is no longer in charge of diplomacy.
Bills to abolish Bob Perry's Builder Commssion will be heard on Tuesday in a Business and Industry Subcommittee at 10:00am.
Vince at Capitol Annex reminds readers that a controversial campus carry bill that would allow Texas students to carry guns on college campuses gets a hearing before a House Committee on Monday.
Look on his works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Texas Sen. John Cornyn is threatening "World War III" if Democrats try to seat Al Franken in the Senate before Norm Coleman can pursue his case through the federal courts.Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, acknowledges that a federal challenge to November's elections could take "years" to resolve. But he's adamant that Coleman deserves that chance -- even if it means Minnesota is short a senator for the duration.
Boy, we only thought voter ID would not be brought up in the House till next week. Apparently, Rep. Betty Brown tried to attach a voter ID bill she has pending in its entirity to HB71, an otherwise fairly innocuous bill "relating to the establishment of a program to provide a ballot by electronic mail to military personnel serving overseas and their spouses and dependents residing overseas". The amendment was not germane to the bill caption and would likely have been knocked out on a point of order, but in the end the amendment was withdrawn and the fight was saved for another day. As Burka notes, don't expect this to be the only time such a maneuver is attempted. One way or another, the Republicans will do everything in their power to push this through, even as Elections Chair Todd Smith tries to strike a conciliatory tone. All of which is makes the Heflin plan seem that much less crazy.
We're past the halfway point in my interview series for the District H special election. Today's subject is Maverick Welsh, who resigned as chief of staff to Council Member and Mayoral candidate Peter Brown to run in this race. Welsh is a former teacher and relative of the late historian Maury Maverick, and he resides in Proctor Plaza. My interview with Maverick Welsh is here, as always in MP3 format.
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Rick Rodriguez
Yolanda Navarro Flores
Lupe Garcia
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This has been talked about for some time, and not unexpectedly it's starting to move forward.
After years of scandal at crime labs across the state, local officials have proposed opening a regional lab based at the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office.Previous debacles include three Houston exonerations, which occurred because of flawed forensics, questions about conditions at state labs and concerns about mounting backlogs of cases never tested.
To restore public confidence in the Houston Police Department, Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos and Police Chief Harold Hurtt plan to halt DNA testing at HPD and use the regional lab, which could grow to serve the entire Houston-Galveston Area Council region.
Some small counties see no need for a new facility. They already use outside labs such as those operated by the Department of Public Safety.
"It is more wishful thinking than a reality to think that the 13-county region would want to be involved," said Judge A.G. Jamison, of Colorado County, who chairs the Houston-Galveston Area Council. "There is zero interest in our county."
However, larger players, such as HPD and DPS, support the proposal. DPS analyzes DNA at its Houston lab but cannot keep up with requests for testing. Last year, DPS' local lab received more than 1,700 cases with DNA evidence. It completed work on just 1,040, and the total backlog of cases exceeds 1,200 cases.
"There is plenty of forensic DNA demand," said Tela Mange, a DPS spokeswoman.
The idea of creating an independent regional crime lab has been discussed since the first signs of problems at the HPD crime lab, where the DNA division was shuttered in 2002 after auditors uncovered widespread problems with the quality of work.
Plans gained new momentum in recent months with the election of Lykos.
1. Not to sound cranky, but this idea was a plank in C.O. Bradford's platform for District Attorney as well. As with many other changes Lykos has been implementing since her election, Bradford was speaking about them before she was even a candidate. I'm glad to see this happening, but these plans would be going forward regardless.
2. While I agree with this concept, there are many questions that need to be settled. What jurisdiction would this lab have? Would it operate independently, or would it be aligned with the prosecution, as it the default now? What governance would it have? Maybe we're too early in the process to have the answers to these questions, but those answers will determine whether this is indeed better than what we have now or not.
3. And of course, there's the matter of funding. Will the creation and/or funding of this lab require legislative intervention? If so, it may already be too late for this session, though perhaps a budget appropriation is still doable. I realize nothing could really have been done until a new DA was in place, but that does make it hard to get something going in a timely fashion.
I'm not asking these questions because I'm skeptical of this idea. I like this idea, and I want to see it done right. I just want to know more about what they have on the drawing board.
While I still have hope that voter ID can be stopped one more time, I can certainly understand the viewpoint that a sufficiently determined Republican majority can push through what it wants to if it really tries, especially if we do wind up having one or more special sessions, and that as such the best tactic is to try to mitigate the inevitable damage. So I don't have a problem with State Rep. Joe Heflin coming up with a "compromise plan" for this essentially uncompromisable issue. It's just that in doing so, he (probably unintentionally) points out how absurd it all is.
Rep. Joe Heflin of Crosbyton is drafting an approach that he believes could bring members of both parties together. Early this week, he outlined some of his ideas to Smith, who didn't reject any ideas out of hand, though he said today he wants to hear testimony on their feasibility and potential costs before making commitments.Heflin hopes to have a draft proposal ready by Tuesday including these elements:
-- Phasing in the ID mandate over four to six years to soothe Democratic qualms that the Republican ID push is driven by partisan desires to tamp down turnout among minority, Democratic-leaning voters next year in legislative elections. Their fret: The 2011 Legislature (elected in 2010) will be tasked with redrawing congressional land legislative districts based on the 2010 U.S. Census; more Republican legislators means a more Republican map.
-- Exempting voters 65 and older from the ID mandate, with the exemption age increasing by one year every year after the law takes effect;
-- Placing each voter's photo on their registration cards, which also would newly have bar codes linked to PIN codes that voters wishing to submit ballots by mail would have to mark down in order to do so;
--Ensuring there's funding for ID cards in some cases and to support expanded voter education and registration efforts.
Exempting voters over the age of 65 sounds nice, and would solve some of the problems of disenfranchisement. It's just that by enacting such an exemption, you're stipulating to the disenfranchisement problem, which the Republicans have adamantly denied. And given that one reason why some people have a hard time getting state-issued ID is that they don't have their original birth certificates (some folks, who were born at home, never had them), how are we going to ensure that those who are eligible for the exemption, and only those who are eligible, receive it?
Putting photos on voter registration cards is a nice idea, and might have avoided this whole stupid issue had we been doing that all along. But how exactly are we going to do that? Will everyone have to go to their county's voter registrar office to get a photo taken? If we just use existing driver's license or state ID photos for voter reg cards, what about the folks who don't have them? That's what Democrats have been complaining about all along. And how much would this cost?
Speaking of which, does anyone really believe that the party that doesn't want to fully fund the unemployment insurance trust (among many other things) is going to want to put up an appropriate amount of coinage to pay for ID cards and expanded voter education and registration efforts? Remember, officially SB362 has no fiscal note, meaning that "no significant fiscal implication to the State is anticipated". Even if we managed to create some pool of money for this, we have a pretty lousy track record of late in ensuring that the funds collected go to the purpose for which they were intended. I see this as a huge trap.
Other than all that, of course, I think this is a reasonable idea. Again, I don't blame Rep. Heflin for trying. I just don't see how he can succeed, at least on the terms of the debate as they have been advanced so far.
What EoW says. I've said it before and I'll say it again, it's ludicrous to think that a rational profit-maximizing actor such as Bob Perry would spend as much as he does on political access without expecting to get some kind of return on his investment. Seeing him collect the returns on his investment, in a manner that clearly contravenes the public interest, should therefore come as no surprise. John has more.
And so we approach the end of another college basketball season. Which can only mean one thing: Time for baseball to begin! Woo hoo!
Amazing beer bottle dominoes. May be the best thing I'll see on YouTube this year. Now if I can just find someone to translate the intro/credits. Thanks to Jim Thompson for the link.
Because I follow Dwight on Twitter, I knew about the free download of the Nine Inch Nails/Jane's Addiction EP. And now you know about it, too.
That Bill O'Reilly sure is one classy guy.
Congrats to State Sen. Wendy Davis on passing her first bill, with style.
Hey, remember when Bobby Jindal said "something called volcano monitoring" was wasteful spending? Mount Redoubt begs to differ.
For the record, I'm not the least bit miserable. And I was 38 when Olivia was born.
A customizable representation of the solar system, in which you can learn about retrograde motion. Very cool. Via John.
Yeah, this is just wrong.
I suppose it was inevitable that someone would make a Three Stooges movie one of these days. Pete, however, refuses to believe it.
It's really hard to overstate the degree to which Rep. Michelle Bachmann is an idiot. And pretty much everyone knows it. Of course, she does have plenty of company in that regard.
"To wrestling fans, George W. Bush is worse than a sledgehammer molester." Via Jack.
Embarrassing moments in TV cooking history. You'll never look at an ear of corn the same way again.
Apparently, when I was in college and giving campus tours, I supplied some misinformation. I suppose I should come up with some kind of penance for that.
Republican attorney Jacob Monty calls on his party to tackle the problem of immigration reform in a serious and rational way. I think he makes some good points about the toxic relations the GOP currently has with Hispanics nationally, and about the fact that the Democrats haven't exactly trampled over anyone to get a handle on this. None of that stopped me from having a belly laugh over this:
Republicans have a long-standing record of courageous support for realistic immigration reform that goes back more than 20 years. It was Republican icon President Reagan who successfully battled organized labor and the GOP's own right wing to normalize 3 million undocumented immigrants. By building on that record, Republicans will begin the process of taking back the harsh words of some of the extremists on the right -- and begin putting a critical wedge into the Democratic coalition in the process. By forcing the issue, Republicans will force Democrats to take sides, exposing serious fractures in the Democratic coalition. Equally important, for the first time since the November elections, they'll show America they are still a party with positive, practical ideas to solve real and long-standing problems -- and the courage to move them forward.
Oh, and since we're invoking St. Ronald Reagan, the Republican they don't make 'em like any more, I'll note that he also embraced serious, realistic solutions to budget problems (which were of his own making, mind you, but still), including tax increases. Today's Republicans? Not so much.
And even if you could find such a Republican to push for serious comprehensive immigration reform, how are you going to keep the screaming banshees of ideological purity from ripping him apart? To his credit, Monty recognizes this problem. But if he has a solution for it, he keeps it to himself.
Bottom line, this is indeed an issue that needs leadership and serious, comprehensive thinking. All I can say is good luck finding those things in today's Republican Party.
Well, this might help keep Shiners Galveston Hospital open.
The University of Texas Medical Branch on Friday asked a judge to stop Shriners Hospital for Children Galveston from locking its doors and imperiling millions of dollars in shared burn research.UTMB asked Galveston County District Judge Wayne Mallia for a temporary restraining order and an injunction preventing Shriners from padlocking its hospital and its world-renowned burn center by a Tuesday deadline.
Ralph Semb, chairman and CEO of Shriners Hospitals for Children, said he was puzzled by the lawsuit because Shriners was prepared to give UTMB two more weeks to vacate the hospital.
[...]
UTMB was given only two weeks notice to move all laboratories and researchers out of the Shriners hospital, which is across the street from UTMB's John Sealy Hospital and is connected by a walkway to UTMB's Blocker Burn Center, Dr. Garland Anderson, UTMB executive vice president and provost, said at a news conference.
Anderson said it would take at least six months to a year to move all the equipment and researchers to a condemned building that had been slated for destruction. He said UTMB had tried to negotiate with Shriners headquarters but was unable to make any headway.
Nearly $14 million in ongoing research is at stake, officials said.
"If the laboratories and burn units were forced out in only a few days time, the damage would be catastrophic and irreparable," according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit says that an affiliation agreement between UTMB and Shriners requires a five-year notice of termination.
As you know, I've been a big advocate for wind energy on this site. Texas has done a lot to make itself a leader in that industry, and I believe it will pay many long-term dividends. But just as we have a lot of wind in this state (insert your own joke here), we also have a lot of sunshine, and as we do with wind, we ought to take advantage of that. Fortunately, there's a lot of action on that front in the Lege, with much of it taking place this past week in the Senate.
Altogether, according to David Power, the deputy director of Public Citizen Texas, a consumer and environmental advocacy group, there are 69 renewable energy bills before the legislature, and over 50 of them promote solar power -- far more than ever before."There are senators and representatives that are talking about solar that have never mentioned the word probably in their lives," he said. "We've actually heard the term 'global warming,' and two years ago that was called 'the G word' -- you didn't talk about it."
Mark Strama, a state representative who is a leading promoter of renewable energy, has introduced at least five green bills this year (including a measure that would allow local governments to create a property tax financing program for solar, along the lines of several California cities).
"It just seems like everybody recognizes our leadership in wind, and that government policy got us where we are today in wind," he told me last month.
In solar, he added, "We need to catch up."
With over 60 bills in the House and over 30 in the Senate all pertaining to green energy initiatives, the Solar Alliance has targeted 6 major criterion needed in in any solar package in order to trigger the kind of job growth a widespread solar industry can create.1. 3,000 total megawatts of installed solar over a 5- to 10-year program;
2. At least 1,000 of these megawatts dedicated to distributed generation;
3. Statewide application, with every region, every electric provider, and every customer class included, because if everyone benefits, everyone should participate;
4. Rate impact for residential consumers of less than $1.00 per month;
5. Provide an average of $250 million annually in incentives for the life of the program;
6. Program expires when the goal is reached.This is an interesting tactic. Instead of advocating for a package of bills, the Solar Alliance has focused on specific policy positions.
Finally, along similar lines, there's a push for a coal moratorium. Maybe these things can happen this session, and maybe not. But the chances for any of them are better than they've been in recent memory, perhaps in forever.
They're not making as many coins as they used to.
As falls the economy, so falls the jingle of coinmaking at the U.S. Mint.Production at the federal government's coin factory in Denver fell a sharp 26 percent in 2008 from the previous year, contributing to a national output decline of 30 percent.
Mint officials said the drop is a direct reflection of the plunging economy and the resulting fall in cash-register transactions that require merchants to provide change.
"Coin demand is definitely affected by economic activity," said Greg Hernandez, acting director of public affairs in Washington for the U.S. Mint.
"Banks are not ordering as many coins as they were," he said. "If local banks are not getting orders from local merchants, it's going to affect Mint production."
The U.S. Mint in 2008 produced 10.1 billion general-circulation coins, the fewest in at least 10 years.
[...]
Part of the coin-production decline stems from diminishing consumer interest in collecting quarters issued for each of the 50 states -- a phenomenon that had ramped up the minting of quarters to a record level in 2000.
And some analysts say increasing use of credit and debit cards, and other electronic transactions, has played a role in reduced demand for coins and currency.
But economic conditions are believed to be the biggest factor.
"If people are just buying fewer things and there are fewer transactions, that will have an effect" on the demand for cash, said Dennis Stansbury, assistant vice president for cash operations at the Denver branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Mint officials said they expect production of at least one coin type -- the relatively new U.S. presidential $1 coin -- to increase as the government conducts a marketing push for merchant and consumer acceptance of the coin.
Bummer. Remember the plan Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack floated to allow bowhunting of feral hogs in George Bush Park, both as pest control and boon for the local food banks? The Army Corps of Engineers, which had say-so on this matter since the park was federally created as a flood control measure, put the kibosh on it.
In a March 19 letter, Richard Long, the supervisory natural resource manager for the Corps' Houston office, agreed that the park's feral hog population is a major problem for the Corps, the county, park users and nearby homeowners. But he said a limited archery program probably is not the appropriate solution.For one thing, he said, a hog that is wounded but not killed could become a serious threat to the hunters, other park users or the people who live near the park. And allowing certain people to hunt would give the appearance of preferential treatment while potentially leading some people to mistakenly believe the entire park is open for public hunting.
"This would create a major enforcement problem for all agencies concerned as well as have a detrimental impact on the wildlife resources of the project," Long wrote.
Long suggested expanding the trapping program Radack has been operating for more than a decade, which currently removes about 300 to 400 hogs every year.
That's the basic conclusion to draw after the three-day circus that was the now-concluded SBOE hearings in Austin. TFN Insider sums it up:
TFN President Kathy Miller: Texas State Board of Education Adopts Flawed Science StandardsThe word "weaknesses" no longer appears in the science standards. But the document still has plenty of potential footholds for creationist attacks on evolution to make their way into Texas classrooms.
Through a series of contradictory and convoluted amendments, the board crafted a road map that creationists will use to pressure publishers into putting phony arguments attacking established science into textbooks.
We appreciate that the politicians on the board seek compromise, but don't agree that compromises can be made on established mainstream science or on honest education policy.
What's truly unfortunate is that we now have to revisit this entire debate in two years when new science textbooks are adopted. Perhaps the Texas legislature can do something to prevent that.
The Statesman visits an issue with which we are familiar.
Ever wondered why you can't go to the store and buy a six-pack of the North by Northwest Restaurant and Brewery's beer? How about one more: Ever wondered why, in a state of 24 million that ranks second-thirstiest in terms of beer consumption, Texas has about, like what, eight craft breweries? Partly thanks to, say many in the business, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission code, which keeps these small brewers from selling you a six-pack to go at the brewery.Blame the code or blame beer distributors and their lobbyists, who wield a considerable amount of political power when it comes to TABC code changes, some small brewers say.
One item from the story:
A compromise measure that would allow breweries to sell admission to tours, and for admission to include a beer sale, had a hearing before the House Committee on Licensing and Administrative Procedures last week, and Rick Donley, president of the Beer Alliance of Texas, testified in its favor."We had worked real hard with Rep. Farrar to craft some kind of legislation that would allow (brewers) to do some of the things they want to do without disrupting the three-tier system," Donely said. "You're not going to walk up and buy beer without taking the tour."
As for some brewers' gripe that distributors have disproportionate pull at the statehouse, Donley said: "I wish we had a tenth of the influence they think we have. The fact is the three-tier system has served the state well for many decades."
Two weeks ago, I printed a Special Guest Star edition of the Friday Random Ten with an offering from Chron reporter Alan Bernstein. At the time, I asked if anyone else would like to submit a list for publication. I got a response from Linkmeister, my blog buddy from Hawaii, which I present to you here:
1. Up Around The Bend -- Creedence Clearwater Revival
2. Colorado -- Linda Ronstadt
3. So Much to Say -- Dave Matthews Band
4. Memory -- Elaine Paige
5. Old Man -- Neil Young
6. Divided Highway -- The Doobie Brothers
7. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking for -- U2
8. (Goin') Wild For You Baby -- Bonnie Raitt
9. Lines On My Face -- Peter Frampton
10. See The Sky About To Rain -- Neil Young
11. Travelin' Band -- Creedence Clearwater Revival
Complete with a bonus track, because that's the way they roll on the Island. My thanks to Linkmeister for the contribution. Anyone else want to join in, drop me a note. Happy Friday!
In her response to the charges pending against her before the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, Sharon Keller made the claim that the state should foot her legal bills. Rick Casey notes the problem with that claim.
[We do] provide attorneys for accused criminals.True, we don't hire lawyers for accused criminals who make $152,500 a year, as Judge Keller does.
And we provide lawyers only for indigents in danger of losing their freedom or their lives, not simply their jobs like Judge Keller.
And we don't allow indigent defendants to choose their own free lawyers, particularly the highly regarded likes of Mr. [Chip] Babcock.
Keller wants the taxpayers to pick up the "usual and customary fees" of Babcock's firm, despite the fact that, according to the filing prepared by Babcock, hiring him is to "risk a financially ruinous legal bill to defend against these charges which are without merit."
The judge should know better, especially in these tough times, than to ask us taxpayers to agree to a lawyer whose usual and customary fees can lead to a ruinous legal bill. However, I personally would be willing to chip in for the kind of lawyers whom Keller has found acceptable for people whose lives were at stake.
Mark Bennett, who compliments Casey for his efforts, has his own critique of Keller's defense.
She spends several paragraphs reiterating the facts of Michael Richard's case (the "he had it coming" defense), explains that Richard was not seeking not to be executed, but rather not to be executed using the current protocol (the "only hastening the inevitable" defense) and points the finger at Court of Criminal Appeals counsel Edward Marty and Richard's lawyers (the "some other dude did it" defense).My second favorite part of the answer is where Judge Keller claims that "If applied to these charges [Article 5] Section I-a(6)A [of the Texas Constitution] is unconstitutional under the United States and Texas Constitutions." So part of the Texas Constitution is itself unconstitutional under the Texas Constitution.
Alas.
Local Shriners vowed Wednesday to take their case for reopening the storm-damaged Shriners Hospital for Children in Galveston to convention delegates after the national leadership again decided to keep it closed.Officials of the 1,000-member Galveston-based El Mina Shrine were notified Tuesday that their plea to reopen the hospital and its world famous burn center had been denied for the second time.
[...]
"Myself and the local Shriners from the El Mina Shrine, we are definitely going to take it forward to the national membership," said Tommy Lambright, Shriners Hospital for Children Galveston board member.
Packets of information arguing for reopening the facility have already been sent to the 1,163 Shriners delegates who will meet in San Antonio on July 23.
The delegates can vote to overturn the leadership's decision and have done so at least twice before.
Delegates prevented the leadership from closing the Minneapolis Shriners Hospital for Children in 2003 and last year stripped the leadership's authority to close any hospital, a rule that does not affect its power to forbid the Galveston hospital from reopening.
Lambright said El Mina Shriners would be lobbying delegates.
"We fully expect to get a positive vote to overturn the board's action," Lambright said.
This is a positive step.
In Harris County, the voter registration office is starting to anticipate your next move.County Tax Assessor-Collector Leo Vasquez has put together a coalition of private organizations and large employers to make sure that residents who move within or to the county get an on-the-spot chance to fill out fresh voter registration applications.
Moving into an apartment or buying a dwelling involves signing lots of papers. Now the Houston Apartment Association and the Texas Land Title Association will make sure the papers include voter registration forms, Vasquez said Wednesday.
Continental Airlines and the Houston Independent School District are the first employers to join the coalition by ensuring that registration forms go to workers who update their personnel records with new addresses.
"Let's hit people when they are trying to make one of those moves," said Vasquez, who was appointed in December to succeed fellow Republican Paul Bettencourt, who resigned from his elected post.
We know about Sen. Jeff Wentworth's biennial efforts to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission for Texas. On Monday, those efforts advanced forward a step.
By a vote of 21-10, senators approved Senate Bill 315 that would create the nine-member commission -- eight of its members named by the Legislature, four Republicans and four Democrats, with the ninth member to serve as a non-voting presiding officer.The measure by Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, would also designate the Texas Supreme Court as having original jurisdiction in all cases regarding redistricting.
Passage came after a bit of drama. Debate was stopped after it appeared that Wentworth might not have the 21 votes necessary to suspend the Senate's rules to debate and pass the bill.
But after several minutes of huddling on the Senate floor, Wentworth went ahead and got enough votes.
State Sen. Mike Jackson, R-Lake Jackson, was among the 10 senators who voted against passage. During the brief debate, he said he had doubts that the commission could accomplish its intended purpose.
Wentworth insisted it would, noting that 12 other states use such commissions successfully.
Yeas: Averitt, Carona, Davis, Deuell, Duncan, Ellis, Eltife, Gallegos, Hegar, Hinojosa, Lucio, Patrick, Seliger, Shapleigh, Uresti, VanideiPutte, Watson, Wentworth, West, Whitmire, Zaffirini.Nays: Estes, Fraser, Harris, Huffman, Jackson, Nelson, Nichols, Ogden, Shapiro, Williams.
San Antonio's Ken Mercer, part of the board's seven-member social conservative bloc, tried to put the much-debated "strengths and weaknesses" language back into the state's science standards that guide the content of textbooks and curriculum. Mercer's amendment to a final draft of the science standards would have required science teachers to discuss the so-called weaknesses of evolutionary theory in their science classes.A few minutes ago, Mercer's amendment failed by one vote (the tally was 7-7).
Corpus Christi's Mary Helen Berlanga missed this morning's vote, though she isn't one of the board's social conservatives and would be expected to vote against the strengths weaknesses language.
The board will take a final vote on the science standards tomorrow.
Unless one of the other members has a last-minute change of heart, it appears the strengths and weaknesses language won't be included in the new science standards. That would be a huge victory for the pro-evolution side.
The bad news is that some other petty little odious amendments did make it through. I haven't followed this closely enough to tell you about it, but there are plenty of others who have, so for more information than you could possibly need, here's where to go:
TFN's exhaustive liveblogs - one, two, three, four.
Vince's liveblog from today.
Thoughts from Kansas, another busy liveblogger. Too many posts to recount - try their creationism archives for an overview.
Martha on Twitter - you might also search for the #txsboe hashtag. Martha also testified before the committee.
On balance, I'd call it a good week for science, though between this and the stem cell skulduggery, I wouldn't say it was good by that much.
UPDATE: The TFN summarizes:
OK, we've had a little time to digest all that went on today at the Texas State Board of Education. Without going through each of the many amendments that passed, here's essentially what happened. This morning the board slammed the door on bringing creationism into classrooms through phony "weaknesses" arguments. But then board members turned around and threw open all the windows to pseudoscientific nonsense attacking core concepts like common descent and natural selection.The amendments approved today are very problematic, regardless of the important victory over "strengths and weaknesses." We anticipate that all 15 board members will be participating tomorrow, however, including a pro-science member who was absent today. So there is still time to reverse course.
Tomorrow, with the final vote, the board has a serious decision to make: is the science education of the next generation of Texas schoolchildren going to be based on fact-based, 21st-century science or on the personal beliefs of board members promoting phony arguments and pseudoscience?
You can still weigh in by sending e-mails to board members at sboeteks@tea.state.tx.us. Texas Education Agency staff will distribute e-mails to board members.
UPDATE: Dave Mann thinks the picture is bleaker.
The seven social conservatives on the 15-member board mostly got their way this afternoon. They passed a series of minor amendments that, with a slight word change here and there, diluted the state's science standards and the teaching of evolutionary theory. Critics say these proposals open loopholes in the standards for the teaching of unscientific theories espoused by religious conservatives. (The same approach was tried, quite successfully, at the board's meeting in January.)[...]
The change in fortunes occurred largely because of Rick Agosto of San Antonio, who voted against the social conservatives in the morning and mostly with them in the afternoon. Agosto is viewed as the key swing vote on the board. He voted against the "strengths and weaknesses" language in January and again this morning, despite fierce lobbying from religious groups in his district.
Agosto wasn't alone. Several other pro-evolution board members voted with the social conservatives' this afternoon.
The board will take its final vote on the science standards, which will set content of classes and textbooks for years to come, tomorrow. The board can add in or take out language up until final passage.
So one last fight is likely tomorrow.
The Chron covers a report by the Justice Project about faulty eyewitness testimony and the many wrongful convictions to which it has led.
Most wrongful convictions in Texas stem from mistaken eyewitness identifications, errors that experts say could have been avoided -- or even eliminated -- with more sophisticated lineup techniques, according to a report released Wednesday.Since 1994, DNA evidence has exonerated 39 men convicted in Texas of crimes ranging from kidnapping to murder, according to a report Wednesday by the Justice Project, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform.
Six of the cases occurred in Harris County. Each was investigated by the Houston Police Department. Each was built on flawed eyewitness evidence.
"Eyewitness identification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in Texas and across the country," said Edwin Colfax, Texas director of the Justice Project, which analyzed the factors that contributed to the wrongful convictions.
"But of law enforcement agencies across Texas, only a tiny fraction have any written policies for these critical investigative procedures and only a tiny fraction have implemented best practices," he said.
[...]
The Justice Project report calls on law enforcement agencies to adopt several procedures, such as documenting the entire lineup process and having an uninvolved or "blind" officer conduct a lineup. It also recommends that witnesses see suspects' photos one after another rather than at the same time in an array.
Grits has a link to the full report. He also notes that the wrongful conviction figures are understated:
Ironically, by focusing solely on DNA exonerations, such analyses understate the real number of innocent Texans who've been exonerated - 35 were pardoned from the Tulia drug stings, 24 innocents were set up in the Dallas "fake drug" scandal, and another dozen or so were set up by a lying informant in Hearne, an event about which a major motion picture will be released next month.Add those to the 39 DNA cases the Justice Project examines and the number of recent exonerations easily tops 100. (And it would not be difficult for some law student to spend some quality time on Westlaw to add to the list.)
I don't think there's any mystery about who is and isn't running for Mayor, but as other candidates have had their formal campaign announcements, so today will Gene Locke. From the press release:
WHAT: Gene Locke To Announce CandidacyGene Locke will make a public declaration of candidacy for the Houston Mayoral race. Locke will also reveal plans for a campaign kickoff event on April 18th to rally volunteers and supporters for his candidacy and make public a video introducing him through his campaign web site at www.genelocke.com.
WHERE: Tranquility Park, 400 Rusk Street, Houston, 77002
WHEN: 11 to 11:20 a.m. Thursday, March 26, 2009
Gene Locke is a Texas Super Lawyer who graduated valedictorian from his high school in Marshall, Texas. The son of a teacher, he enrolled at the University of Houston shortly after it became integrated. There he became a leader - attuned to social issues and civil rights. He later graduated from South Texas College School of Law attending night school and worked at a refinery to support his family. After graduation he moved to Washington D.C. to serve as Chief of Staff to Representative Mickey Leland. From 1995 to 1998 he served as Houston City Attorney under Mayor Bob Lanier. Locke is a partner at the Andrews Kurth LLP law firm, and remains General Counsel to the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority. He has been instrumental in negotiating contracts that allowed the development of Minute Maid Park, Reliant Stadium and the Toyota Center.
Gene Locke is a devoted husband and father. His wife, Aubrey Sampson Locke; daughters, Tembi and Attica; sons, Nicholas, Douglas and Thomas - are among his biggest supporters.
When I wrote my earlier post about how much revenue expanded gambling would generate for Texas, I said I'd be more than happy to do a similar exercise for someone on the pro-gambling side of things. Sure enough, I got an email from Mike Lavigne on behalf of Texans for Economic Development, who sent me a copy of a study done by TXP that examined the question for the horse racing interests. I've uploaded it here (PDF) for your perusal. The main thrust of the argument is as follows:
Texans are already gaming at a high level. Based on data from a variety of sources, including state gaming commissions, convention and visitors bureaus (CVBs), and other academic studies, TXP has estimated the current gaming revenue in a seven-state region that is attributable to Texans at approximately $2.3 billion during 2007, the equivalent of about 3.8 percent of the national total. This is the assumed universe of current Texan gaming; while there undoubtedly are individual instances of Texans gaming elsewhere in the country, it does not appear to be significant.The Innovation Group was engaged by Texans for Economic Development to estimate the size of Texas' gaming market. A summary of their results follows. As the table indicates, the total Texas market approaches $4.2 billion in gaming revenue at full implementation. However, there is still leakage out of state, as some Texans will continue to game elsewhere.
A significant share of the revenue that would occur in Texas with the implementation of racinos would be recaptured from other states where Texans currently game. Measurement of the volume of this spending is done through subtracting the leakage out-of-state ($840.2 million) from the $2.4 billion figure, yielding recaptured spending of approximately $1.8 billion.
I remain basically skeptical of the claims made here - I think some of these projections are optimistic, especially the ones made separately about the economic benefits for other businesses that flow from expanded gambling. I also think it's foolish to rely on gambling revenue for anything other than "found money" - the Texas Lottery should be an object lesson there. Finally, there is a moral case to be made against expanded gambling, and I think we greatly underestimate the social costs associated with it, which the state does precious little to mitigate. I've got a future post planned for that, since it's outside the scope of this one. Having said all that, I can at least see where the racetracks' numbers are coming from, and while I think they're sunny, they're comprehensible and reasonable. We can argue over these numbers because they're here to be argued over, which remains more than I can say for the casino interests, whose claim that they would generate $3 billion for the state looks even more ludicrous to me based on this.
I also asked Lavigne in an email exchange after he sent this to me about the bleak picture the racetracks have painted for their industry today, and why they would be a better vehicle for capturing the "leakage" than regular casinos. Here's what he said, reproduced with permission:
The Racing Commission did indeed paint a glum picture. There is no denying the shape the industry is in right now. The primary reason is that purses in Texas are so low, there is no incentive for breeders to breed in Texas. If they take the same horse and breed it in Louisiana, NM or OK they will be eligible for much larger prizes. A large chunk of the money made in this bill will go toward growing purses here that will be competitive with not only with our neighbors, but with the eastern seaboard, where racing has had a lot more success. This model is the reason our industry in Texas has fared so poorly. When parimutuel wagering was legalized in Texas, there were very few (if any) racinos in our bordering states.We don't oppose the proposal for regular casinos on its face, but we do object to the disparate tax rates. That would surely kill any chance racinos would have to be successful.
As to why we think racinos would better capture the money than casinos? I think that is the wrong question. Both would be able to get at that money. We do have to look at political reality though. What is more palatable to the legislature? Full on casino gambling overnight? Or a smaller expansion at existing sites with legal wagering already taking place.
The Governor and many Republicans have repeatedly said that they do not want to expand the footprint of gambling. We believe our proposal is a more modest one.
The most important thing to remember about these figures is that the Comptroller will ultimately make the decision as to how much money these proposals would raise. She will do her own math.
Finally, on a related note, whatever reservations I have about casino and/or racetrack gambling, I do support an expansion of legalized poker in Texas. HB222, introduced by Rep. Jose Menendez as the Poker Gaming Act of 2009, would establish poker as a "game of skill and not a lottery or gift enterprise prohibited by the Texas Constitution" and would thus allow for the creation and regulation of legalized games. In particular, it would allow establishments that hold a license to serve alcoholic beverages issued by TABC or a license issued by the Racing Commission to have the ability to host the game of poker. There was a hearing for this bill yesterday in the House before the Licensing and Administrative Procedures committee. I have no issues with this bill and support its passage.
Federal transit officials on Tuesday reversed course and agreed to allow Metro to use nearly $30 million in economic stimulus funds for utility relocation work on the proposed North and Southeast rail lines, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee announced.Just last week, Metro was told such stimulus funds could not be used on the latest extensions of the rail lines because the projects were not deemed "shovel-ready." Instead, the Federal Transit Administration recommended Metro use its stimulus funds for converting 83 miles of high occupancy vehicle lanes to high occupancy toll lanes.
[...]
Jackson Lee said the about-face -- announced in "letters of no prejudice" from the FTA -- followed U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's visit to Houston earlier this month.
LaHood, who was invited here by Jackson Lee to see the light rail line, spent all day March 13 meeting with Metro supporters, officials from various universities and other public institutions.
"He was able to ride on the (rail) system and meet with the head of Texas Children's Hospital, who was able to explain how vital the system was," Jackson Lee said.
Of the total $28.9 million in federal stimulus funds freed up for Metro's rail plans, $19.2 million is earmarked for utility relocation work on the North Corridor Light Rail, while $9.7 million will be devoted to relocating utilities for the Southeast Corridor Light Rail.
The key to getting the economic stimulus funds was proving that Metro could start the work within 90 days -- a requirement to secure the federal monies, Jackson Lee said. The utility relocation work can be contracted and people hired to do the work immediately, she said.
The state has not yet appropriated the money in the trauma center fund that it has collected from cities with red light cameras.
That is because the Legislature, which passed a 2007 law requiring cities to share profits with the state, has not formally approved transferring the money to the hospitals.To spend the camera money, which totals about $9 million so far, lawmakers this session must include specific language in the biennial budget plan being drafted.
"We need to get the money out to these centers," said state Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, whose 2007 law required cities to share their profits. "We promised the public that the money would be for regional trauma care, and, to me, there is no excuse for that money going any place else."
The Senate version of the biennial state spending bill, which is being printed, does not include language for the red-light camera funds. The provision could be added in later negotiations before being enacted into law.
The $9 million collected so far -- much of it from Houston -- is a fraction of the state's biennial budget. But trauma centers across the state need all funding available, said John Hawkins, vice president for governmental relations for the Texas Hospital Association.
He said that especially is true at facilities like Ben Taub General Hospital, which has seen increased traffic since Hurricane Ike damaged operations at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
"All of the money collected ought to be appropriated," he said. "There's real need out there."
It remains unclear how the money, if allocated, would be spent. City officials said they would prefer the money be distributed using a formula proportionate to what regions collect. Houston, for example, sent the state $3.7 million -- about 40 percent of the total.No other city in Texas came close to collecting more than Houston. Arlington, Duncanville and Humble all collected about $1 million in profits, respectively, which they split with the state. Dallas collected only $336,000.
[...]
The money, so far, has been sent in by more than 40 cities, from Allen to University Park, that have collected fines since Carona's law took effect in September of 2007.
At least 10 cities reported to the state that they lost money on the cameras. A few others reported just breaking even, records show.
Leading the way was Garland, which was the first city in Texas to install cameras. Officials there say that city lost more than $300,000 from September 2007 to this month.
"We experienced a fairly substantial decline in the number of violations after a period of time," said George Kauffman, managing director of financial services in Garland. "They learn where the intersections are and probably take extra precautions at those intersections."
That city since has renegotiated a contract with the vendor that maintains the cameras in an effort to break even. There also are plans to add three cameras, bringing the total to 12.
Sigh.
Steve Ogden may have lost support of Senate Democrats for SB 1 with his surprise rider prohibiting state funds to be used in stem cell research, or as the rider states: "in conjunction with or to support research that involves the destruction of a human embryo."The rider was added Monday with little debate, on a 6-5 vote, with several members absent from the committee.
I seem to recall Rep. Myra Crownover complaining about a vote being taken on the unemployment insurance stimulus funds while a couple members of that committee were not present because they didn't know a vote was going to take place. If that was wrong, then so is this. Actually, given the subject matter, it's wrong regardless. Surely this deserved a real debate, and an up-or-down vote, instead of being snuck into the budget. It's not a matter of principle - I've no doubt Sen. Ogden is sincerely acting on his - but one of procedure and policy. Matters of policy should be debated. As Sen. Kirk Watson said in his statement opposing this action, it's not clear whether the committee intended to implement such a sweeping ban. The only way to know for sure is to talk about it and let anyone who has questions ask them.
UPDATE: BOR has more.
Brutal day at 801 Texas yesterday, with more today. I confess, I don't understand how getting rid of the people who create the content helps make the product more viable going forward, but what do I know? I'm sure they have some Cunning Master Plan to make it all make sense.
Banjo and Hair Balls have the gory details. I'd like to express my sympathies and best wishes to everyone who got the axe. There's a lot of talent on that list, and it won't be easily replaced. May you all find something better.
I have to say also, as a fan of the Rice Owls, that I'm truly pissed off that the Chron has let MK Bower go. He did an outstanding job on the Rice beat, and Owl fans are showing him the love for it. With the departure of Mike Murphy and Terrance Harris, who covered UH and TSU, as well, the Chron has made it clear that if it ain't the Big XII, they won't be paying attention. Thanks a hell of a lot.
Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller, who has been formally accused of violating her duty as a judge in the matter of the Michael Richard case, has filed her response to the State Commission on Judicial Ethics. (For which she was given an extension, because she couldn't get it done in time. God really does have a sense of humor.)
Keller said the Texas Defender Service has filed previous death penalty appeals with the court after the clerk's office closed. She also noted that the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure allow for after-hours appeals to be filed either with the clerk or a judge of the court willing to accept the case.Keller said all the judges of the court are listed in the blue pages of the telephone book and the phone number of court General Counsel Ed Marty phone number was listed on his letterhead and known to (the defender service.)
She said when Marty called her on the day of the execution about a defender service request that the clerk's office stay open late, she understood that only to be about the clerk's office, not Richard's ability to file an appeal.
"Judge Keller did not, and could not have, if she had wanted to, close access to the court in light (of the appellate procedure rules)," said the brief by her lawyer, Chip Babcock.
The Texas Defender Service said Keller is trying to deflect attention because she "knowingly broke the rules" and caused Richard's execution when he likely could have gotten a stay.Neal Manne, counsel for the service, said the judicial conduct commission found that Keller knew she was not the assigned judge handling the Richard execution and that she should have referred the calls to that judge, Cheryl Johnson.
"The commission has properly focused on Judge Keller's conduct, and has not in any way suggested that Texas Defender Service acted improperly or was at fault," Manne said.
No idea when the Commission may make its ruling. Any lawyers out there want to comment on her defense?
Continuing on with the District H candidate interview series, we come now to Gonzalo Camacho, who is a transportation/traffic engineer and planner, probably best known for his concept of the I-45 Parkway, a combination tunnel/limited access thoroughfare as a replacement for the existing North Freeway. Camacho is a resident of the Woodland Heights, and previously ran in the 2003 race for District H, finishing sixth. My interview with him is here. As always, please let me know what you think.
PREVIOUSLY:
Rick Rodriguez
Yolanda Navarro Flores
Lupe Garcia
Back in January, the State Board of Education somewhat surprisingly voted to remove anti-science "strengths and weaknesses" language from the curriculum. That was only a preliminary vote, however, and today is the day that the hearings begin for the final vote. The Texas Freedom Network gives a preview.
After more than a year of work and often bitter debate, the State Board of Education is set this week to decide what the next generation of Texas students will learn in their public school science classrooms. Media outlets across the country (including the New York Times here and here, the Wall Street Journal today and even FOX News) have focused attention on the important battle over what the state's new science curriculum standards should require schools to teach about evolution.Beginning with the public hearing at noon on Wednesday, we will be live-blogging the debate for three days. So you will be able to keep up with the action here. A preliminary vote is scheduled for Thursday, with a final vote coming Friday.
[...]
What students should learn about evolution isn't really debated in much of the rest of the developed world. In Texas -- and, in fact, much of the United States -- it still is. And because the huge Texas market is so important to publishers, what this state requires students to learn is likely to be taught in textbooks used by students across the country.
Scientists are "atheists." Parents who want to teach their children about evolution are "monsters." Pastors who support sound science are "morons."Is that the sort of message Chairman Don McLeroy and his cohorts on the State Board of Education have in mind for Texas science classrooms if they succeed in their campaign to shoehorn "weaknesses" of evolution back into the science curriculum standards? That's certainly the message of a new book McLeroy is now endorsing.
Oh, and it turns out that in addition to everything else, Don McLeroy is a plagiarist. Isn't that, like, a sin or something? I mean, what will we tell the children? Thanks to Lisa Falkenberg for the catch.
Go click the TFN links to get the details on that - you can even get to a full copy of the book, if you really want to. In any event, this should give you some idea of what to expect. As Evan Smith noted awhile back, get ready for Texas' image around the world to take another body blow.
Well, that didn't take long.
Rep. Todd Smith, R-Euless, chair of the House Elections Committee, announced today his committee will devote two days of hearings to voter ID on April 6 and 7. The first day will be devoted to expert testimony, with an equal number of people for and against the bill invited. The second day will be for public testimony.Smith said he thought splitting the hearing over two days would help the House avoid the tense, all-night, marathon session the Senate endured on the issue.
"We're going to meet two days that week just because I didn't like that the public testimony (did) not start 'til midnight," Smith said. "I thought that was not the best way to approach it."
Nice to hear that a couple of local museums are thriving in these hard times. Sadly, they're very much the exception.
On the heels of the March 14 opening of a seven-gallery addition to its Hermann Park-area building, the [Children's Museum of Houston] this week announced plans to add 25 positions to its 177-member workforce.The $35 million expansion almost doubles the museum's size to 90,000 square feet. Plans call for boosting programs targeting low-income or bilingual families.
Meanwhile, the [Houston Museum of Natural Science], which this year marks its centennial, is moving forward with a campaign to raise $85 million for construction of a 194,000-square-foot addition that will help it cope with millions of visitors who pour through its doors annually.
Museum President Joel Bartsch said $61 million has been raised and a summer groundbreaking is scheduled.
"We're fairly fortunate in that we have a lot of rocks and seashells -- and a town full of geologists and universities," said Bartsch, who noted attendance, membership and revenues all have increased over the past year.
Unfortunately, as noted, for most museums it's been the opposite experience.
"Overall, the state of non-profits right now is very, very difficult," said Ford Bell, president of the American Association of Museums. "They are laying off staff. We hear a lot of stories about capital campaigns postponed. Nationally, museum attendance is up ... unfortunately, admissions don't pay the bills."As foundations and private donors see the value of their portfolios dwindle, he said, donations drop. Profitable museum memberships, Bell said, also are declining.
Earlier this month, New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would lay off one-fourth of its merchandising staff and cut its total workforce by 10 percent by summer.
The New York Times reported the museum, whose endowment lost $800 million, or 28 percent of its value, since last summer, has halted hiring and curtailed merit raises and staff travel.
Museums in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, Indianapolis and Los Angeles also have cut staff, the newspaper reported.
The Museum of Fine Arts-Houston has cut workers' salaries up to 4 percent, and the Contemporary Art Museum imposed a hiring freeze and reduced its budget by 10 percent. By the end of last year, said MFA spokeswoman Mary Haus, the value of the art museum's endowment had dropped 28 percent. CAM spokeswoman Connie McAllister said the museum fell short of its fall fundraising goal.
Another step forward for Dynamo Stadium.
Dynamo ownership has all but secured all of the financing needed for the construction of an $80-million soccer stadium just east of downtown and plans to break ground on the project as early as this fall."We have some I's to dot and t's to cross, but things are looking very favorable," Dynamo president Oliver Luck said Tuesday. "It's not a done deal, but the principal points have been agreed upon."
Dynamo co-owners Anschutz Entertainment Group, Brener International and boxer/promoter Oscar De La Hoya have secured financing totalling about $20 million on behalf of the City of Houston and Harris County through Spanish bank BBVA/Compass.
The development clears the way for city council and commissioner's court to put the stadium item on their respective agendas.
Both government entities have committed tax increment reinvestment zone revenue streams to the project provided the Dynamo could find a bank to provide financing up front, Luck said.
"We spent about three months talking to banks," Luck said. "Given the economic climate, finding a bank was a challenge, so we are appreciative of BBVA/Compass."
Dynamo ownership has pledged $55-60 million in private funding for the proposed 20,000 capacity facility stadium to be located near the intersection of Texas and Dowling, just east of downtown and U.S. 59.
[The Stadium] will seat 21,000 fans and will have around 35 suites.The Dynamo say they hope to keep the average ticket price under $20.
Construction will begin in the fall and is expected to take about 18 months.
There are still hurdles to overcome - the money isn't in hand yet, and the whole thing still needs Council approval and the TIRZ funding from Commissioners Court - but those pieces will likely fall into place. Of course, I thought things would be settled a year ago, so don't go counting any chickens just yet.
UPDATE: Today's version of this story indicates that Commissioners Court is still an obstacle.
Commissioner El Franco Lee, whose Precinct 1 would house most of the stadium, said no agreement is in place."There is nothing that I'm about to put on the agenda at all," Lee said. "There's nothing happening on that."
[...]
Most of the stadium -- to be located near the corner of Texas and Dowling, just east of downtown and U.S. 59 -- falls in Lee's precinct, while a smaller portion is in [Commissioner Sylvia] Garcia's precinct.
Mark Seegers, a spokesman for Garcia, said a number of issues remain to be resolved, particularly involving the availability of affordable tickets for low-income families.
"Nothing is imminent in terms of this item appearing before Commissioners Court," Seegers said.
Throughout this session, every time the subject of expanded gambling in Texas comes up, along with it comes some kind of projection of how much revenue it might generate. Those estimates always come from the proponent of that form of expanded gambling, and as expected are wildly optimistic. For example:
Texas Insider, February 13:
"Our breadth of support cuts across all lines of gender, race and party," said Tommy Azapardi, Executive Director of Texans for Economic Development. "In these economic times, voters are very motivated by the 53,000 new jobs and the billion dollars a year for state coffers racinos could generate for the state."
Proponents say casinos in Texas could generate anywhere from $3 to $4.5 billion per year.
Backers of Joint Resolution 31 and Senate Bill 1084, the broad gambling legislation, said their proposal would bring in at least $3 billion a year in new state and local revenue.
During 2008-09, the [Economic Forum] expects gaming taxes to drop from $804 million to $715 million, an 11 percent decline. Gaming revenues will increase by 3.3 percent to $739 million in 2009-10, and by 3.9 percent to $767 million in 2010-11, according to the forum.
So the question is, do we think Texas casinos will generate more than Nevada's? HJR 31 sets the revenue tax at 15%, so we could generate as much tax revenue on less than half the amount - about $4.8 billion, or $68 billion in bets at the same payout rate. To get all the way to $3 billion, though, you'd have to have the casinos take in $20 billion, which in turn is about $270 billion in bets. I don't think that's going to happen.
By the way, a little further Googling led me to this article, which suggests that gross casino revenue in Louisiana is about $2.5 billion. That strikes me as a better comparison to Texas - note that Louisiana has 13 riverboat casinos and one land-based casino, while HJR 31 would call for 12 casinos in Texas - and would generate $375 million in gambling taxes at 15 percent.
Now of course, the casinos have other ways to make money for themselves (food, drink, hotel occupancy, entertainment, etc) and for the state (sales taxes, hotel taxes, alcohol and cigarette taxes (assuming smoking would be legal in the casinos, which I'm guessing would not be the case), property taxes, business margins taxes, etc). I don't know what the components are to that $3 billion figure for the casinos, or the $1 billion figure for the "racinos" (I still hate that word). It's entirely possible - likely, really - that I'm not comparing apples to apples. But at least you can see where my numbers are coming from. It would be nice if the gambling industry could do some of the same kind of calculation, and show their work, so that a proper comparison, as well as a judgment of their projections, can be made.
Full disclosure: The two Nevada links came to me from Teresa Kelly of Texans Against Gambling, after she commented via email about an earlier post of mine. That was the inspiration for this post, though the rest of the research is mine. I'll be more than happy to do a similar exercise for someone on the pro-gambling side of things if they want to as well.
The recent news that the UTMB Hospital will remain in Galveston and is now rehiring laid off workers was great to hear not just for Galveston but for the larger region, which really needed the facilities. Now that this one is back, perhaps we can get similar news for the another Island hospital.
The national Shriners leadership may vote this week on a proposal to keep open the storm-damaged Galveston Shriners Hospital for Children and its world-renowned burn center.The vote will come at the insistence of local Shriners, who ask for a financial review of the organization's entire 22-hospital system to find places to cut or consolidate services "and preserve the most acclaimed burn care facility in the world."
If the leadership fails to open the hospital, closed since Hurricane Ike damaged the first floor, local Shriners have vowed to take the issue to the national convention this summer.
"We are just trying to get our hospital reopened," said Shriner Tommy Lambright, a member of the Galveston hospital's governing board.
Shriners Galveston is the only burn hospital in the Houston region verified by the American Burn Association and the American College of Surgeons.
The failure to open the burn center puts the lives of children at risk, said Shriner Duncan McDowell of Beaumont. "How many children will die in the future if we fail to get it back in service?" McDowell asked.
An important reason for closing the Shriners Galveston hospital was the initial decision by the University of Texas Regents to downsize the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Lambright said.Shriners was staffed by UTMB doctors who devoted a percentage of their time to Shriners' patients and were reimbursed by the Children's Hospital. Herndon, chief of staff at Shriners Childrens Hospital, also heads UTMB's Blocker Burn Unit.
Shriners and UTMB researchers often share multimillion dollar research grants.
Under pressure from the Texas Legislature, the regents reversed policy two weeks ago and committed to rebuilding UTMB. A letter from UTMB Provost Dr. Garland Anderson reassured the national Shriners leadership of UTMB's continued support and pointed to research offices supplied to Shriners researchers at no cost.
[...]
Local Shriners sent their proposal last week to the national leadership and to all 1,163 Shriners delegates to the July 5 convention. A vote by the delegates would overturn a decision by the board.
Raoul Frevel Sr., a member of the national hospital board and a supporter of opening the Galveston hospital, will put the proposal forward for a vote during a three-day joint meeting of the two Shriner boards that begins today, Lambright said.
Here are some words I never thought I'd hear in Texas, at least while the current regime is in charge.
Texas regulatory agencies could get as much as $41.2 million more over the next two years to better do their jobs keeping an eye on everything from banks to investment advisers to doctors.The spending is recommended by Senate budget writers, partly in response to the national economic crisis.
"A lot of the problems that are going on in our country now appear to have been related to lax regulation and lax enforcement," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, R-Bryan. "And so one of the issues in here is to make sure that our regulatory agencies have the adequate resources so that they can go do their job, and hopefully, at least in Texas, we won't have as many problems because we had sufficient oversight and regulation going forward."
The money would be used for such things as more frequent inspection of investment advisers by the State Securities Board; salary increases for financial examiners to prevent federal agencies from luring them away; more people to handle complaint investigations involving doctors; and more people addressing fraud, complaints and solvency monitoring at the Texas Department of Insurance.
The cost would be covered mostly by fees paid by those who are regulated.
We are officially into spring, and we're halfway through the 81st Legislative session. With those two happy thoughts, here's this week's Texas Progressive Alliance blog roundup. Click on for the highlights.
With the arrival of Spring, a legislative session in Austin, municipal campaigns revving up around the state and Texas' primaries less than a year away, the blogs of the Texas Progressive Alliance continue to bring you insights from our members around the state. Here's a roundup of what we've been reporting.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is now saying that the recession has landed full-force in Texas. Spared from the worst job losses during the first 6 months of the current recession, Texas is shedding jobs at an alarming pace. Wcnews at Eye On Williamson looks at the trends, and offers a sobering assessment of the hard line, let 'em crash, mentality of Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas GOP.
Off the Kuff points to a bill by State Rep. Dwayne Bohac to demonstrate that the push for voter ID really is about vote suppression.
If Republicans really cared about election integrity, then why do we still have non-auditable electronic voting machines? CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme wants to know.
BossKitty at TruthHugger sees an opportunity to get a degree in the dark arts If Texas HB2800 Passes, I Want A Masters Degree In VooDoo
In a post that took some work and came out well, Neil at Texas Liberal wrote about what Google searches miss. Also, Neil read the bird sermon of St. Francis to a dancing duck chicken.
John Coby at Bay Area Houston says Why Ethics Reform is Needed in Texas.
The Texas Cloverleaf looks at a few local Twits in the GOP. Twittering Republicans, that is.
Over at TexasKaos, Libby Shaw tells us that in Hutchinson's world "It's All About Me". So she is going to run for governor, keep her Senate seat and give the people of Texas absentee represenation. Whatever makes her happy, heaven forbid she should put her constituents first.
WhosPlayin examined HB 4441, an attempt by Rep. Yvonne Gonzalez Toureilles to solve some problems related to pipelines.
Nytexan at BlueBloggin is stunned that Obama Taps CitiGroup Economist For Treasury Spot. So, how does Washington's logic work? They offer a job, at the Treasury Department, to Lewis Alexander of CitiGroup. The Global Marketing Division, that Alexander heads up, was just fined $2 million by The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) for trade-reporting violations, including publishing flawed quotations. Let me know how that works out for you!
Xanthippas at Three Wise Men has some thoughts on the goals of American foreign policy, and is wondering if the war in Afghanistan is winnable, at least as we appear to be defining victory.
Molly Ivins warned us years ago about AIG, "too big to fail", and Phil Gramm. So says PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.
McBlogger take a look at the valuations being placed on the evil CDO's. Lots of laughs, of course, follow.
Seems to me there's an easy and straightforward way to resolve the debate that Burka and the Texas Politics Project are having over the efficacy of the latter's Internet-based polling: Why don't we compare the results they get to what actually happens next year and see how close they come to the mark? I mean, the reason we know that Zogby Interactive polls are crap is because they were such a crappy predictor of the actual results back in 2006, when they were being prominently partnered with NBC/WSJ for those elections. Maybe we've learned how to do these polls better since then, maybe the UT folks are just better pollsters than John Zogby, and maybe the method is still crap regardless of who's doing it. Seems to me that if the UT folks can provide regular updates, right up to the election next March, we'll find out soon enough.
I mean, many people, including as I recall one Paul Burka, once thought robopollers like Rasmussen and SurveyUSA were questionable, until they established a track record that demonstrated their accuracy. The idea behind Internet polling is plausible enough, it's just a matter of seeing if the experience can match the theory. Maybe this will be a good test. In the meantime, to keep things interesting during the intervening year, maybe Burka and Professors Henson and Shaw can come up with a friendly wager on the outcome. I'll leave that to them to determine. What say you, fellows?
Real good interview by BOR's Todd Hill with prospective Democratic candidate for Governor Tom Schieffer. I've said before that while I'm glad to see a Democrat with some stature take steps towards the Governor's race, Schieffer is a big unknown to most of us, and he carries some baggage that needs to be dealt with. He did a pretty good job of addressing the latter, and I feel like I have a better idea of who he is and how he might conduct a statewide campaign. These are very good things, and they definitely help. I'm still hoping for some real competition for him - and no, I don't mean this - if for no better reason than to apply one of the big lessons from 2008, which is that a spirited primary benefits us all, but this is a step towards making me comfortable with the idea that he may be the standard-bearer next year. Go read and see what you think.
Meanwhile, Clay Robison mentions those two dirty words, as spoken by Governor Perry:
So far, it's just talk, fighting words to keep the conservatives in his corner. But Gov. Rick Perry is threatening to keep legislators in special session this summer if they don't tighten spending enough to suit him."If it (the budget) grows unacceptably ... I'll keep them here are all summer," one attendee quoted him as saying during a private meeting hosted by the conservative Texans for Fiscal Responsibility last week.
And on the one hand, if he is concerned at this point about the general election matchup as well, keeping the Lege in Austin all summer would hamstring one potential opponent, State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, who can't raise money while in session. On the other hand, that same restriction applies to Perry as well, and if KBH is out there raking in the dough, he may get anxious to begin catching up. So who knows? Other than the fact that this sort of consideration is all that will matter in the special/no special decision, there's no way to tell.
Next up in the District H interview series is Lupe Garcia, who is a small business owner and a resident of the Heights, where he grew up and where his mom still lives. My conversation with him is here. As always, please let me know what you think.
PREVIOUSLY:
Rick Rodriguez
Yolanda Navarro Flores
So we got a weird little piece of mail Saturday. Addressed to both of us, in a plain envelope with no return address was a one-page letter that attacked Carl Whitmarsh, best know for his prodigious Democratic email list, and consultant Marc Campos. Using questionable grammar and a lot of underlining, it basically accused Carl and Marc of being in cahoots, specifically that Marc bankrolls Carl's email operations, while Carl plugs Marc's clients to his list. I don't have a scanner, so I can't show you the letter just yet, but I can tell you it contained the following closing, reprinted exactly as it appears:
Paid political news brought to you by Don Carpenter & M. Rodriguez - Owners Investigations Inc. Houston, Texas -- Marc & Carl your gig is up, the truth is out now.
I don't know who these guys are - Google searches on "Investigations Inc Houston" and on "Don Carpenter investigations Houston" yielded nothing useful - and I don't know what their beef is or what interest they may have in the District H race. I assume this has something to do with that since the one clue as to their motivation comes from the following paragraph, again reprinted exactly as it appears:
Marc bashes good Democrats (via Carl's list) like Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee & Senator Mario Gallegos just to name a couple of recent ones via Carl's list. Why? Marc did this cause the Senator kicked Marc's & Carl's client Yolanda's arse before. They want a client candidate to run at Sheila & Mario in order for them to make some $.
The proponents of bi-annual Lone Star State legislative sessions usually don't have to go far for ammo. Check out what an astute legislative observer sent Commentary yesterday:"Wanted you to know, because someone may ask, Mario (Gallegos) filed legislation (SB 1895) today that would require any member of HISD or HCC board to resign if they were to become a candidate for a municipal, state or federal office.
He did it last session, and it's clearly a personal attack bill, but of course it's not going anywhere. Just a heads up should someone get a hold of it."
This bill is clearly aimed at HCC Trustee Yolanda Navarro Flores who is running in the H-Town City Council District H Special Election that is scheduled for May 9. I don't know why anyone up in the legislature would want to weigh in on a local council race. This isn't exactly a major public policy crisis that needs addressing. If Gallegos was to ever have a hearing on the bill, I sure would love to see the witness list and their talking points. There are quite a few of Gallegos' constituents that are supporting Yolanda. I wonder what they think. All this bill does is energize Yolanda's family, friends, and supporters. It sounds like Gallegos has a case of the insecurities if you ask me. Commentary would have a little respect for this if Gallegos had included H-Town city officials. Of course, that would have meant calling out the Mayor. This is clearly one of the silliest bills of this session.
Anyway. I can only presume this has something to do with that. Assuming there is a coherent motive behind all that, that is - as I said, this looks like the work of a crank who is just trying to stir up trouble. Whether there will be more than this, or whether the identity and motivations of the senders comes out, I don't know either. Heck, I don't even know how widespread this was - the last time there was this kind of mail related to a District H race, back in the 2003 election, other people who'd gotten the mail emailed me to inquire about it. So far, I've heard from one other recipient, so at least I know they didn't just send it to me. I'll try to find a scanner this week so I can post the whole thing for your perusal. In the meantime, if anyone else got this, please leave a comment and let me know. Thanks.
One last thing: The reason I'm blogging about this is that I dislike anonymous attack pieces, and I think it's best to shine light on them. This one had names attached to it, but so far those names don't tell me anything, so it may as well have been anonymous. I also don't care for the way this piece went about making its charges but merely teasing about proof. If you're going to accuse someone of something, show me the evidence. Don't just claim you've got it then say you'll get back to me. Put up or shut up, and give the people you're accusing a chance to respond. In the meantime, I say it's the senders who look bad. If and when I get more on this, I'll let you know and we'll go from there.
Reading about death row inmates who lost federal appeals because their attorneys missed a filing deadline makes me angry.
The Houston Chronicle reviewed records in nine appeals that were filed too late. In some cases, lawyers or judges appear to have miscalculated or misunderstood the dates of the deadlines, which generally fall one year after state appeals are concluded. In others, computer failures or human foibles are blamed, records show."Any decent judges would be deeply ashamed of the quality of legal representation in most capital cases in Texas," said Stephen Bright, a leading specialist in capital case law and who directs the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. "The very least they could do about it would be to prohibit lawyers who miss the statute of limitations from taking another case and referring them to the Bar for disciplinary proceedings."
[...]
James Marcus, an expert in capital case law who teaches in the Capital Punishment Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, said missing the deadline for a federal writ of habeas corpus -- thereby waiving all federal review -- is the equivalent of "sleeping through the trial."
Federal courts, he noted, have overturned several recent Texas death cases for errors overlooked by state judges, including one involving allegations of discriminatory jury selection by Harris County prosecutors. Federal judges also awarded a new trial to another Montgomery County death row inmate this year based on new evidence presented about forensic errors in his case.
Quintin Phillippe Jones, another Texas death row inmate who also recently lost his federal appeal because of an attorney's tardiness, said he did everything he could to alert the federal courts to report problems months before his Fort Worth attorney blew his federal deadline. Jones wrote letters to the judge, filed two motions with the help of other prisoners in an attempt to get another attorney, and even sent two separate complaints to the state bar. Nothing worked.
"I heard he didn't file (on time) through another lawyer," Jones said. "I'm the one who pays for his mistake. It cost a lot, and I'm paying for it."
It's still another month till the anniversary, but the people of Wichita Falls are remembering the massive tornado that nearly destroyed their town thirty years ago.
It was April 10, 1979, that Mother Nature grew furious.It was when three supercells spawned a series of tornadoes that dispatched that fury -- more than 50 tornadoes that barreled through not only Texas and Oklahoma, but through Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Nebraska, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Alabama.
It was the perfect storm, and Wichita Falls was in the middle of it all.
An F4 tornado hit Wichita Falls late in the afternoon that day, Terrible Tuesday, killing 42 people in Wichita County and another 12 in Wilbarger County as it dug its heels over almost 47 miles, leaving unimaginable damage in its path.
It's been 30 years since that day, and the Wichita Falls Museum of North Texas History is remembering the Terrible Tuesday that left its indelible mark in the area with its latest exhibit, "Gone With the Big Wind: 30th Anniversary of the 1979 Tornado."
The exhibit is mainly a photography exhibit, with countless 8x10 black-and-white images displayed at the museum showing the destruction: cars pummeled as if they were made of tin, and frames of houses surrounded by a swirl of debris.
A family friend once played the word "equinox" in a Scrabble game against me. On a triple-word score square, too. Needless to say, he kicked my butt in that game.
Of course Dick Cheney loves Rush Limbaugh. Are there two people more suited for each other than those guys?
Hammer and Ice? In Utah? How did I not know about this?
Are you smarter than a cougar? No, not these Cougars.
What's that you say? Kay Bailey Hutchison won't resign from the Senate as she pursues the Governor's mansion? Why, no one could have predicted that.
Accused billionaire swindler R. Allen Stanford and his wife owe the IRS $226.6 million in back taxes, according to a new court filing by the IRS. You know, I'm not going to excuse any of the people whose tax problems we've been reading about lately for their failures to comply with the law. But geez, if the IRS can't do a better job of enforcement than this, it's a wonder anyone bothers to comply.
If you market to bloggers, you really should read their blogs first.
Yeah, I still have this dream, too. And it's been 20 years since I graduated college. Via John.
Hmm. Apparently, I've been in decline for almost as long as I was on the rise. Needless to say, it's all downhill from here. Via Matt, who's farther up the slope than I am.
God may love the Irish, but apparently Lou Dobbs doesn't. What a bizarre little man he is.
When Brazilian waxing is outlawed, only outlaws will wax Brazilians. Thankfully, cooler heads ultimately prevailed.
Question: If the mainstream media had put 10% of the effort into investigating Bush Administration claims of WMD as they are into the claims that Tim Geithner and/or Chris Dodd facilitated the AIG bailout bonuses, what are the chances we would have gone to war in Iraq?
This week's sign of the apocalypse.
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged." I won't spoil what comes next, so click over and see for yourself.
I have three things to say about this.
The housing slump that has battered much of the country for two years finally has trickled down to Harris County, where residential property values have declined or stagnated for the first time since the oil bust of the 1980s, the county's top appraiser said Friday.Nearly half of homeowners saw their property values decline this year, while a third saw no movement, Harris County Appraisal District chief appraiser Jim Robinson said. Just under 20 percent of properties increased in value, mostly in neighborhoods featuring homes worth more than $500,000.
HCAD has finished appraising 860,000 of the county's approximately 1 million homes, and homeowners' value notices should begin arriving in mailboxes in the next few days, Robinson said. The district will spend the next two weeks appraising the remaining homes, mostly new construction and properties damaged by Hurricane Ike.
The total value of the 860,000 homes that have been assessed has declined by about 2.5 percent from last year, Robinson said.
It will be difficult to determine how the sputtering real estate market will affect local governments, which rely heavily on property taxes to fund operations, until all residential and commercial appraisals are completed. Robinson said his office is reporting declining values for many commercial properties after years of soaring appraisals.
"I think there will be some jurisdictions, perhaps a significant number, that will see their tax base less than it was in 2008," Robinson said.
A decline could force budget cuts or tax rate hikes by some local government entities that have watched their tax revenue grow steadily in recent years.
But local leaders said they have assumed a slowdown was imminent and budgeted accordingly.
2. By the same token, this will probably make it even more difficult to pass sales price disclosure legislation, which is intended to ensure that commercial and high-end residential properties are appraised fairly and accurately. Not that such legislation was likely to pass anyway,
3. This is another reason why federal stimulus money is so important. It can and will help local governments bridge their budget deficits in ways that will let them avoid making the kinds of cuts that would greatly exacerbate the effects of the downturn; specifically, it will help them not have to lay people off. The fewer people that lose their jobs, and the more that feel confident they won't lose their jobs, the better for the economy.
This isn't too much to ask, is it?
Give State Rep. Gary Elkins some credit for being honest.At a hearing [Thursday] of the House Committee on Human Services, Elkins and other members of the panel considered more than two dozen bills related to Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Three hours into the hearing, Elkins asked: "What's Medicaid?"
The Houston Republican continued: "I know I hear it -- I really don't know what it is. I know that's a big shock to everybody here in the audience, OK."
He could have kept quiet. He could have asked an aide. He could have Googled it. Instead, he asked the question into the microphone in the middle of a public hearing.
This is cool.
When San Antonio researcher Kyle Murray peers into the future, he sees the land of black gold turning bright green. Algae green.Murray, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, thinks the city is perfectly poised to become a research and production hotbed for literally one of the greenest fuels around, mined from the slippery marine life that thrives in the shallow ponds and warm, sunny weather that are hallmarks of this region.
Rather than punching holes into the ground to find petroleum, Murray envisions a shift to commercial production of native algae species and processing that harvest into biodiesel, which then would power the massive trucks that roar through San Antonio along the NAFTA corridor from Mexico.
Most species of algae are very efficient at producing oil. Unlike corn or other feedstocks for biofuel, algae can be grown year-round in warm climates, and an abundant crop can be produced on a relatively small amount of land, Murray noted.
"I think the potential is huge for San Antonio to get into this, and everybody would benefit," Murray said. "Biofuel is something we should be studying in San Antonio."
The downturn in the economy has created an opportunity for the Houston Police Department to bolster its ranks.
A year ago, the Houston Police Department could barely muster enough recruits to fill a 70-seat academy class. Now with 1,000 applicants in the pipeline, HPD is benefiting from the nation's [worsening] economy, and so are several other police agencies in the Houston region.Since September, HPD has seen a steady uptick in applications, jumping from 280 to nearly 800 last month, according to police records. The Harris County Sheriff's Office also has seen a noticeable increase in the number of recruits taking the initial hiring test. The department usually draws about 50 people, but the number has doubled in the past few months, sheriff's officials said.
"I think a lot of people know that government jobs are a place where they can get pretty steady employment and the benefits are good," said Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt.
The ample applicant pool is a major turnaround from a couple of years ago when many agencies struggled to find qualified recruits and had to compete with each other to attract potential officers. Last year, HPD began offering $12,000 bonuses to lure candidates to its academy.
Hurtt's goal to boost the city's police ranks by more than 1,000 officers by 2010 will likely be much easier to reach.
Don't know how much longer we can or will keep this up, but the Houston metropolitan area just keeps growing like gangbusters.
The Houston metropolitan area added more than 130,000 residents between July 1, 2007 and July 1, 2008, the second-highest number in the country after Dallas-Fort Worth, the bureau said. Among counties, Harris County added more than 72,000 people, trailing only Maricopa County, Ariz., in growth in sheer numbers.In percentage terms, the Austin-Round Rock metropolitan area posted 3.8 percent growth, the nation's second-highest behind Raleigh-Cary, N.C., with 4.3 percent.
Four Texas counties, all in the Austin or Dallas-Fort Worth areas, were among the top 10 in growth rates. Fort Bend County ranked 14th with 4.8 percent growth.
Jobs were the key to the Texas population gains, said Karl Eschbach, the state demographer."The particular edge that metro Texas had is that places like Houston were adding jobs at the beginning of the year when most of the rest of the country had slowed or stopped job creation, so Texas employers had a window where they were hiring while others elsewhere were laying off," Eschbach said.
In 2008, Eschbach said, Texas was one of only six U.S. states, along with the District of Columbia, that experienced job growth. The other states that added jobs were far less populous.
But Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that jobs in Texas have begun to contract this year, making expected population trends for Texas metropolitan areas less clear, he said. While natural increase -- births minus deaths -- likely will remain stable, it's possible that migration into Texas from other countries and states will decline as the state's attraction as a job center diminishes, Eschbach said.
"Population movement occurs because of job creation; that's not the only thing, but it's the big thing," he said. "When there are no jobs available anywhere, why move?"
Presidential candidates will do almost anything for publicity. But Ron Paul's appearance in Sacha Baron Cohen's upcoming Bruno movie suggests he draws the line at making sex tapes with gay Austrian TV hosts.In a five-minute scene, comedian Cohen tries--and fails--to seduce the Texas congressman and former Republican presidential candidate in a Washington hotel room. A spokeswoman for Paul confirmed the appearance but declined to discuss details, which were provided by two people who attended a test screening last week.
[...]
The scene with Paul, filmed in early 2008, occurs about halfway through the movie, after Bruno gets the idea that you have to make a sex tape to become famous.
You know what's one reason why I love the onset of Daylight Savings Time? It means that spring is right around the corner. And what do you know, here we are on the first day of the spring season. So to celebrate, here are ten songs that are reminiscent of spring:
1. April Come She Will - Simon and Garfunkel
2. Bluebonnets - Clandestine
3. A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing - Joe Henderson
4. Fly Me To The Moon - Frank Sinatra with Count Basie and his orchestra
5. God Loves The Irish - Rob Carlson
6. I Can See Clearly Now - Johnny Nash
7. Poisoning Pigeons In The Park - Tom Lehrer
8. Springtime For Hitler - from "The Producers"
9. Morning Has Broken - Cat Stevens
10. The Rainbow Connection - Kermit the Frog
One thing I learned in putting this list together: There's far more songs about summertime. But that's a list for another week. What are you listening to today?
Way back in those crazy, innocent days right after Joe Straus was elected Speaker, some of us had the silly idea that this might portend better legislation making it through the House. You know, serious policy stuff that actually benefits people, that sort of thing. Well, we're still waiting for that to happen, but if it does, one place where a real difference can be made is with CHIP. Rep. Garnet Coleman is at the forefront of that, as he's been for the past few sessions. From his office:
I will lay out legislation in the Health and Human Services Committee which will restore CHIP to its intended levels, and restore health coverage for hundreds of thousands of children in Texas. Representative Patrick Rose, Chair of the Health and Human Services Committee, has also invited me to sit in the committee to hear testimony regarding the 25 CHIP and Medicaid bills which will be heard.My legislation, HB 2962, will restore CHIP to pre-2003 levels by removing unnecessary barriers which stand in the way of Texas children. It will remove the assets test, allow deductions beyond those for child care, and make it easier to renew. HB 2962 will also eliminate in person interview requirements at renewal, and use joint applications and supplemental forms for Medicaid and CHIP. Additionally, it will keep the once-a-year applications, making it easier for both working families and an already overwhelmed system.
The fight to fully restore CHIP will continue until our state laws match federal guidelines to ensure every eligible child is enrolled in CHIP. HB 2962 takes full advantage of an opportunity from the federal government to expand state CHIP coverage to include children from families earning up to 300 percent above the federal poverty level. It also includes a buy in option, at no cost to the state, for children from families with a net income up to 400 percent above the federal poverty level.
Governor Perry has stated that he does not favor the increase in eligibility, and that we must focus on enrolling children currently eligible but not enrolled in the program. We can and must do both. My goal is to remove the bureaucratic hurdles that keep eligible children from receiving health care.
Anyway, I feel pretty confident this will pass the House, or at least that something like this will pass the House. I'm less confident about the Senate, but it could happen. And if it does, I am totally confident that Governor Perry will veto it, because doing so will play well with the five percent or so of Texas' population that he cares about, that being the GOP primary electorate. Maybe in 2011, with a different Governor, we can make this happen. Until then, we have to keep pushing for it.
Isiah Carey reports.
The Insite had a brief conversation with Houstonian Rozzy 'Roz' Shorter. She's not quite given up on her political career. You may remember Shorter as the local woman chosen by the Barack Obama camp to get the Houston audience hyped when then Seantor Obama made a campaign stop in the Bayou City. Shorter now says she's already to take on sitting Houston City Council Member Sue Lovell. Shorter says At-Large Position 2 is perfect for what she wants to do and she's willing to do serious battle with Lovell to take the spot. Shorter says she will make an official announcement in the weeks to come.
By the way, if things break just right, Houston could end up with a Mayor, a Controller, and three out of five At Large City Council members who are all African-American, and that's without there being such a candidate running for Peter Brown's At Large #1 seat as yet. With CMs Jarvis Johnson in District B and Wanda Adams in District D, that could mean seven or even eight of the 16 members of city government are African-American. That would really be something.
On a side note, Mike Laster has his campaign website up and running for District F. He's still the only candidate I've heard anything about in that race.
I've spent a lot of time lately talking about the state budget - more than the Lege has spent, I daresay - but while this is happening there's also the federal budget, the first one President Obama has proposed, to be debated and amended and eventually passed. I'm not going to get into the details of it, because there's about a zillion other blogs that follow the national stuff more closely than I do and you'd be better served going to them for the nitty gritty, but I do want to say a couple of things about the process.
The first step in the process is the House Budget Committee, on which Texas Rep. and Vice Presidential contender Chet Edwards sits. My main hope here is that every Democrat on that committee, especially those who wear the "moderate" or "centrist" labels (whether they are self-defined or media-bestowed), has learned something about the Republicans from the stimulus debate. In particular, what I hope they've learned is that the Republicans don't have any actual interest in passing a good budget. They're in full-on opposition mode, bound and determined to say "No!" more often than Audrey does these days, and at the end of the day unless the budget eliminates spending and taxes altogether, they're going to vote against it, most likely in unanimous fashion as they did with the stimulus package despite President Obama's much-touted efforts to reach out to them. That's perfectly logical as a political strategy, and everybody should be able to see this coming a mile away, but I fear that it won't stop the "moderates" from trying to placate them to some degree, in the inevitably vain hope that they can buy some crossover support. I'm sorry, but that just ain't gonna happen. We've seen their dance moves before: Scream about anything that can be turned into a sound bite in order to press for its removal, vote against the final bill regardless of how successful they are in altering it to their liking, then claim credit for any benefit it brings to their district while simultaneously slamming it for being wasteful. It's as predictable as a slasher movie, yet the temptation to open that door anyway persists.
This doesn't mean you can't engage with the Republicans. If against all odds they offer up a good amendment on something, go ahead and consider it on its merits, and vote for or against it as you see fit. As long as you recognize that the outcome of that vote is independent of the outcome of the final vote, it's all good. Similarly, by all means voice whatever objections you have to the bill, and work to make it better in whatever way you see fit. (Assuming it really is about making it better, and not about making headlines.) Again, just remember that there is no Republican support to be had in the end.
I know, I know - fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Democrats gotta bend and cajole and give. It's the natural order of things. But hey, I can hope. And as long as I'm wishing for ponies, let me throw in a plea to avoid the pointless kabuki-ing about earmarks and "pork". Let's put aside the fact that earmarks constitute a tiny percentage of the budget, and that if these bellyachers were serious about "waste, fraud, and abuse" they'd turn their sights on the defense budget. The fact is that it's very easy to play dumb about any number of line items in a budget and ignorantly pretend that because it sounds a little funny it must be wasteful. Republicans are a master of that, and they often get gullible mainstream journalists and pundits to play along - see, for example, Lisa Falkenberg and her silly remark about "the porkiest of pork projects, a study on why pigs smell". (Hey, Lisa, let me Google that for you. I know how busy you must be churning out two columns a week. You're welcome.) To paraphrase Colonel Flagg, don't play dumb on this. They're better at it than you are.
So anyway. There's a lot to be hopeful about in the budget process, as we have the opportunity to change directions in a significant way after nearly thirty years. As Matt Yglesias observes, Democrats and progressives don't get this kind of opportunity very often, but when they do they can have a profound and long-lasting effect. It's up to them to take advantage, and up to those of us who want that to happen to remind them of that.
During the 2007 legislative session, $110 million was appropriated at Governor Perry's urging for border law enforcement agencies to combat drug smuggling and gang activity. How's that working out?
The state's $110 million Border Star program, designed to help local authorities combat violent crime and drug smuggling, has been ineffective and a waste of resources, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas said Wednesday.In a study of 11 of the 40 border law enforcement agencies participating in the program, the group said authorities were stopping and searching thousands of vehicles but making few drug seizures and arrests. Also, it said, the 13 surveillance cameras set up on the border - a $2 million investment - netted just three arrests in their first six months of operation.
The ACLU said Operation Border Star's performance measures encourage law officers to engage in work that doesn't truly protect Texans from drug crime and emphasize geographic areas other than major drug corridors.
What resulted "was a disruption of the lives of ordinary citizens," said ACLU policy analyst Laura Martin, who noted that the 29 other police and sheriff's departments in Border Star didn't respond to the request for information.
Program supporters say that although it may not have recorded great numbers of drug arrests, it's a deterrent. And they said the departments studied by the ACLU account for just $5 million of the $110 million allocated and aren't a representative sample.
"It's proven that more boots on the ground disrupt and deter criminal activity along the border," said Katherine Cesinger, spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry. "The governor believes that Operation Border Star and the state-led border security efforts are working."
I read this story and I think about the people who apply for food stamps and CHIP and stuff like that who have to fill out numerous forms and submit to interviews and investigations to prove that they really need those funds. For just about every social program that we spend money on in this state, lawmakers demand to see results to justify that spending. Teachers are held accountable nine ways to Sunday for what goes on in their classrooms. But we drop a hundred million bucks on border security funds, and we're supposed to accept Governor Perry's faith that it's making a difference? Where are the metrics and the reviews and the progress reports? I don't get it. Stace has more.
I'm basically agnostic about the plan to convert HOV lanes to HOV-plus-toll lanes that Metro is floating. Like Christof, who was quoted in the story, I don't think it will make that much difference in terms of actual traffic flow, though I think that Texas Transportation Institute fellow is correct to note that it will help outside of the normal rush hour, when the roads are still pretty full. Mostly, I wanted to blog about this story because of this:
Metro President and CEO Frank J. Wilson estimated the cost at between $40 million and $50 million.In its request for federal stimulus funds earlier this year, Metro estimated the project would cost $70 million.
Metro is slated to receive $92 million in stimulus funds.
Wilson said that he learned last week in discussions with Federal Transit Administration officials that the monies cannot be spent on the North and Southeast light rail lines, as Metro had planned, because those projects have not received the FTA's final funding approval.
As we know, in the aftermath of the Senate pajama party on voter ID last week, State Rep. Mark Homer touted HJR 53, which he had filed earlier in the session, which would replace the Attorney General on the Legislative Redistricting Board with the Ag Commissioner. The reason behind it was simple enough - since the Attorney General might be called upon to defend a redistricting scheme in court, he shouldn't be party to its creation. Since then, Homer has gained some support for his measure in the upper chamber.
Sen. Bob Duncan, who had the unenviable job of keeping order during the Committee of the Whole, said he agreed with Abbott's position (though he denied published reports -- based on statements from the AG's office -- that he instructed Abbott to stay away). On Friday, he took that position a step further, and filed SJR 41, which would replace the attorney general with the agriculture commissioner on the Legislative Redistricting Board.Duncan said he has always though the AG's role on the LRB is "unusual" as it puts the state's attorney in the position of defending a plan in which he or she is also a decision-maker. "What if the Attorney General voted against a particular redistricting plan and then had to defend it in court?" he asked. "It is an inherent conflict."
Shortly after the Committee of the Whole debate, Duncan learned that Rep. Mark Homer had filed HJR 53 giving the AG's spot on the LRB to the ag commissioner. "When I heard about that bill over there, I said I'll carry it on the Senate side," Duncan said.
This is good news, though it does make you wonder what the point of all the initial layoffs was.
The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, which laid off more than 2,400 employees last fall because of damage caused by Hurricane Ike, has begun rehiring in earnest.School officials said Monday they've rehired about 500 people since January and will continue hiring in large numbers in coming months, action that has caused some to question whether last November's cuts were rash.
"It's easy to Monday morning quarterback, but in October and November there was no crystal ball available to tell us what our fate was going to be," said Karen Sexton, executive vice president and CEO of the medical branch's health systems. "We didn't know how quickly we could get clinical facilities up and running and whether we'd be getting legislative support."
Sexton added that the expenses reduced by fall's workforce reduction enabled UTMB to get through the period during which it had no clinical revenue and be in a position to start hiring again this year.
[...]
Joe Jaworski, a lawyer in an ongoing lawsuit challenging the layoffs, cited the rehirings as evidence that many of last fall's "pink slips were premature."
"I think it's reasonable to ask whether UTMB had to let employees go in such huge numbers if it was able to turn around and rehire them months later," said Jaworski. "But I'm happy to see many coming back and hope the rehiring continues."
Jaworski added that the rehires and the regents' decision to remain in Galveston seem to be "an effort to recapture what was lost."
Ever wanted to buy some booze on a Sunday? Maybe soon you'll be able to.
Most Texans are familiar with the Blue Laws.Put into effect decades ago, they prevent the sale of hard liquor on Sundays, among other things.
"There is certainly an inconvenience there, no doubt about it," Spec's Liquor Warehouse customer Bud Hall said.
And it's inconvenient even for customers wanting to buy beer or wine. The same laws make it illegal to sell those items before noon on Sundays.
"If we are having a barbecue on a Sunday or something like that, and it is before noon, we have to sit there and wait," Spec's customer Scott Moody said.
Now, a bill filed in the Texas Legislature is looking to repeal those restrictions for good.
But that's not good news for Spec's owner John Rydman."In the 2,500 or 2,600 package stores that there are all over the state of Texas are family people. We don't want to necessarily work another day. It's not good for my employees. They need a day off," Rydman said.
It would also add more overhead to the store's bottom line, Rydman said.
With the economic downturn, state lawmakers are looking for different ways to generate revenue. Selling booze on Sundays is just one of their ideas.
"I think this is a good source of revenue without having to increase taxes or cut valuable state programs," District 143 State Rep. Ana Hernandez said.
Hernandez said Sunday liquor purchases could generate upwards of $5-8 million for the state.
Rydman disagrees.
He said his sales wouldn't go up. Instead, he believes they'd just be spread out over seven days instead of six.
"Those who filed the bills are still convinced there is extra money somewhere. They just think we are crazy--that we people in business don't know what we're talking about," Rydman said.
UPDATE: Roland Gutierrez, not Robert. My apologies.
Well, the Senate did manage to do one good thing today.
By a 23-7 vote -- not enough for immediate final passage to the Texas House -- senators approved Senate Bill 188 that will allow local health departments to begin one-for-one exchanges of syringes along with drug-abuse education and prevention programs."I know this has been somewhat controversial," said Sen. Bob Deuell, R-Greenville, the author. "Texas is the only state in the nation that does not allow this. People think it will increase drug use. It won't.
"It decreases HIV. It decreases Hepatitis B and C. It saves the state money. It reduces the number of dirty needles in the community."
The no votes were all among Deuell's fellow Republicans: Sens. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls; Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bend; Joan Huffman, R-Houston; Steve Ogden, R-Bryan; Dan Patrick, R-Houston; Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, and Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands.
The bill would allow health departments to begin exchanging clean syringes for dirty ones, one-for-one, in conjunction with increased drug education programs in an effort to fight the spread of diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis C, and Hepatitis B.According to Deuell, half of HIV infections in Texas are injection-related. Texas is currently the only state that does not allow these exchange programs to occur.
Deuell's opposition believes that an exchange program would encourage increased drug use. But Deuell says, "There have been countless studies that shows that it does not increase drug use."
Deuell also argued that an exchange program would save the state money by lessening the tremendous medical cost associated with these diseases.
"I know this is a hard vote for some of you," said Deuell in an appeal to his colleagues to favor pragmatism over ideology on this issue. "It shows up on scorecards and we hear from people that oppose this despite the facts."
The good news is that this is likely to pass the House as well. It probably would have passed in 2007, but was never allowed out of committee by now-retired Rep. Dianne Delisi. The bad news is that it will need a similar margin in the House, because it's going to get vetoed.
"The governor is opposed to the needle-exchange proposal," said Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle. "We need to focus on substance abuse prevention, not providing an incentive to continue illegal drug use."
I'm glad to see that the KUHT political program The Connection: Red, White, and Blue is on its way back to the airwaves after an unplanned hiatus followed by a bit of a kerfuffle. It fills a very useful niche in the local media landscape - as the story notes, it was the only place to see Adrian Garcia and Tommy Thomas go head-to-head last year - and is the sort of thing that public television should be doing. (And just so we're clear, I think KUHT has been doing some excellent work, most notably with its "Houston Have Your Say" series.) It's also the show where I made my local teevee debut, so there's some sentimental value there as well. I look forward to its return, hopefully in time for some shows focusing on the big municipal elections we'll be having this fall.
Next up in the District H special election interview series is Yolanda Navarro Flores. As far as I know, she is the only candidate to have been elected to public office before - she served one term in the Lege in HD148 from 1993-95 (she then ran for the open SD06 seat in the Democratic primary in 1994 and lost in a runoff to Sen. Mario Gallegos); she is also the HCC Trustee from District I and Vice Chair of the Board, a position to which she was first elected in 2001. Flores is a resident of Lindale. My interview with her is here. As always, please let me know what you think.
On a side note, please be aware that the location for tomorrow night's candidate forum has been changed to the HCDP headquarters, 1445 North Loop West, Suite 110, which is just east of Ella. Hope you can make it to this event.
PREVIOUSLY:
So now that we've finally disposed of the single most important issue facing Texas today in the Senate, perhaps we can move on to other matters thay may be of interest, like the budget and CHIP and windstorm insurance and unemployment and...Ha ha ha, just kidding. Who needs to debate those issues when we can talk about forcing women who want to get an abortion to get an ultrasound first? That's the idea behind Sen. Dan Patrick's SB 182, which will be heard by the State Affairs committee this Thursday at 1 PM. Floor Pass has the background on this little charmer, in which the modern day Republican Party finds another reason to ignore its self-professed philosophy of getting government out of people's lives. I mean, who doesn't want Dan Patrick and Frank Corte making medical decisions for other people? Who cares what the American Medical Association, American Medical Women's Association, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and American Public Health Association - all of whom oppose procedure-specific requirements that get in the way of the doctor-patient relationship - think? Frankly, I'm surprised that Patrick and Corte didn't include a provision that would require all these women to get a diagnosis over the phone from Bill Frist before proceeding. Anyway, if you think that maybe it isn't such a good idea for Dan Patrick and Frank Corte to get involved a patient's private business, now would be a good time to give your Senator a ring and let him or her know that. Thanks very much.
I can't say authoritatively if it's the first of its kind anywhere, but this is the first announcement for public office via Twitter that I've seen.
Announcing the launch of my Houston City Controller campaign web site, pamholm.com! Visit often, bookmark, send to your friends. Thank you!
That makes Holm the first candidate for Controller among the local Twitterati. Ronald Green, MJ Khan - what say you?
UPDATE: Got the traditional press release today. It's beneath the fold. Miya has more.
HOUSTON (March 17, 2009) - Today, Pam Holm, candidate for Houston City Controller, launches her campaign web site, pamholm.com."In Houston, we elect - not appoint - our Controller to be independent of the Mayor and City Council and accountable to the people of the city," Holm says in the first of what her campaign staff says will be several "webisodes" to be posted at her web site.
"More than ever, Houston's taxpayers need to know exactly how their money is being spent; Council needs to know the impact of their decisions on the budget; and we must utilize technology to cross-reference, compare and fully justify expenses in today's environment to ensure that not only core services but also the city's critical infrastructure needs are met well into the future," said Holm. "My campaign is grounded in these concepts and I will work hard to earn the vote of Houstonians on Election Day, November 3, to serve as Houston City Controller."
Holm is serving her third and final term (according to city mandated limits) as District G City Council Member. She began discussing the idea of running for Controller with key supporters late last year and officially announced her campaign in February.
"I have consistently been a watchdog of your tax dollars as a City Council Member, asking tough questions about how your money is being spent, refusing to rubberstamp expenditures until I have a clear understanding of where the money's coming from and why it's justified. I believe you have a right to know, and as your Controller, I'll make sure you do," Holm adds.
Says supporter Lee Hogan, "At a time when financial challenges are our city's highest priority, we need a City Controller with a proven record like Pam Holm."A native Houstonian and a citizen leader for more than 35 years, Pam Holm was first elected to City Council in 2003 to represent the people and interests of west Houston in District G. She is currently serving in her third term, which began in January 2008.
NETROOTS
Bookmark pamholm.com
Read Pam's Campaign Blog at pamholm.com
(http://www.pamforcontroller.com/welcome)
On Facebook:
Pam's Group Page 'Pam Holm for Houston City Controller'
(http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53820528951&ref=ts)
On Twitter:
twitter.com/pamholm
(http://twitter.com/pamholm)
On YouTube:
youtube.com/pamholmforcontroller
(http://www.youtube.com/pamholmforcontroller)
In the end, after more debate and a bunch of Democratic amendments that were rejected by the same 19-12 vote, SB362 itself was passed on second reading in the Senate on a 19-12 party line vote. There were two amendments that were tacked on.
The amendment, introduced by Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, and adopted unanimously, seems to remove the requirement that a voter must show their voter registration cards. Under SB 362 as amended, if photo identification is not presented, a voter will still be able to vote by providing a combination of two other documents, such as a utility bill and a library card. There is confusion around whether voter registration cards would retain any relevance if this passes. This point will likely be clarified prior to the Senate's final vote tomorrow.A second amendment authorizes the secretary of state to use any funds available, including federal funds, to educate voters on the new requirements. The amendment drew criticism from Democrats for seeming to betray the falsehood of the bill's fiscal note, which says there will be no fiscal impact to the state. The Senate Finance Committee has already put a rider into the appropriations bill dedicating $2 million for this purpose should SB 362 pass.
Lord only knows when the House will get to this, given that the House has gotten to very little so far. Some Dems such as Rep. Rafael Anchia have been saying that SB362 will not make it through the House. I don't feel quite that confident, but it wouldn't surprise me if some watered-down version of this, perhaps the Chuck Hopson compromise bill, gets sent back to the upper chamber. Given that there's already talk of a special session because of concerns that the budget won't get passed on time and/or will get vetoed by Governor Perry as part of his continued grandstanding tour over stimulus money, I don't think we can count on running out the clock. I expect something to pass, and then it'll be up to the feds to decide whether or not it sticks.
Just a couple of announcements that may be of interest to readers. The first is a press release from Women Professionals in Government:
Women Professionals in Government Offers Scholarship OpportunityWomen Professionals in Government proudly announces a $1,500 scholarship award to be given to an outstanding woman who is currently pursuing studies toward a career in public service. The award is open to those pursuing future careers or furthering their education to enhance her existing public administration position. The primary objective of the WPG Scholarship is to assist exceptional women who are dedicated to becoming public servants.
Full-time or part-time graduate and undergraduate students are eligible. In addition, the winner of the scholarship will receive a complimentary one-year membership to WPG, affording excellent networking opportunities with established professionals in government and professionals from government affiliated companies and organizations.
Candidates must be female residents of the Greater Houston area and students in good standing at an accredited university. Graduate applicants must have completed at least 12 graduate hours, and undergraduate applicants must have completed at least 30 undergraduate hours. Determination of the award will depend on the applicant's professional and scholastic achievements, demonstrated community service, reasons for pursuing a public service career, challenges to future professional and scholastic achievement, and scholarship need.
If you're a parent in Houston and are trying to figure out what to do with your kids this summer, you might want to check out The Summer Book, which is put out every year by Sarah Gish.
[The Summer Book] includes information on over 200 organizations offering camps and classes for children in the summertime. The camps are divided by "arts", "educational", "religious", "special needs" and "sports". It also includes information on which camps are free or offer scholarships, which are full day or for teens, as well as a week-by-week chart by date and a chart detailing amenities of each camp. To help parents "map out" each child's summer, there is a camp calendar for organizing weekly schedules.
While one may feel reasonably optimistic about the chances of a legislative override to Governor Perry's decision to reject stimulus funds for unemployment insurance, it never hurts to try to grease the skids a little.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said she would ask Vice President Joe Biden, who chairs a task force on the use of stimulus funds, to allow Texas to receive the money even if the state enacts provisions to automatically end these additional benefits after two years. Current federal rules forbid such a "hard-sunset" provision.Making the changes temporary would be politically beneficial in getting them passed, said Democratic state Sen. Rodney Ellis, but he believes the Legislature should eventually make them permanent.
Perry said accepting the stimulus money would increase costs on small businesses and would come with too many federal strings. The state would have to provide unemployment payments to certain part-time workers and to a spouse who stayed home to care for children while the other spouse worked, for example.
Ellis said he would work with colleagues to pass a resolution accepting the federal funds, make necessary additions to the state's unemployment insurance system and override a presumed Perry veto.
Jackson Lee and Ellis spoke harshly of Perry's decision.
"We find ourselves in a difficult situation, because the governor of the state of Texas has decided that roads are more important than people," Jackson Lee said, noting that Perry had accepted stimulus funds for infrastructure projects.
It is true, as Clay Robison points out, that KBH voted against the stimulus package, as did nearly every other Republican in DC. But so what? Perry campaigned against it in his leadership role with the Republican Governors Association. That hasn't stopped him from grabbing over 95% of the funds with both hands. It would be child's play for KBH to say that she took her stand against the stimulus, but now that it's law she wants to make sure Texas gets everything it has owed to it. Hell, Ron Paul does this, and if you listen to him explain his actions it almost makes sense. This is not rocket science.
Finally, how precious is it that the Chron editorial board says "We don't know" if Perry's actions here "[have] something to do with the politics of the 2010 governor's election"? Yeah, and I don't know if John Calipari's complaints about Memphis not getting a #1 seed have anything to do with the politics of player motivation. Must be hard to type those editorials while clutching one's pearls, that's all I can say.
The rumor of a list of legislators looking to oust House Speaker Joe Straus turns out to be, well, a rumor.
The Statesman's Gardner Selby started hearing chatter late last week that Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, was circulating a list of signatures to remove Straus. Martinez Fischer told Selby on Monday that he first heard the rumor from a Straus aide last week."I just kind of laughed," Martinez Fischer said. "I said, 'What are you talking about?' I didn't think it was a big deal.'"
The rumor apparently persisted, and Martinez Fischer took it up with Straus on Monday.
"I said, 'I hear I have a list,'" Martinez Fischer said. "He says, 'yes, that's what I'm hearing.' We started laughing, the speaker and I, and I said, 'Joe, you know I think that's crazy.'"
For the record, Martinez Fischer told Selby, "There's no list that either I'm circulating or that I've signed."
He said Straus referenced in their conversation a Monday post on the Republican-friendly Web site texasinsider.org. "Word around the Texas House of Representatives is that a phantom list of nearly 76 signatures is circulating that will take out Speaker Joe Straus when the time is right. A few representatives wishing to remain anonymous have told Texas Insider they have signed the sheet calling for a motion to remove the speaker," the post says.
[...]
Since it cites a large number of Democrats, I brought it up with Rep. Jim Dunnam, leader of the House Democratic Caucus. "Nobody's asked me for a signature on anything," Dunnam said. He later added, "I haven't heard anybody talking about that."
But not all is fine. "I do know that there are people who are unhappy with how business is not being conducted in the House," Dunnam said. "I think there is a general frustration that the clock is ticking. Nobody's doing anything about insurance rates. Nobody's doing anything about electric rates. Nobody's doing anything about college tuition."
Dunnam says he counts himself among those who are unhappy. But is removing the speaker the way to remedy that? "That's not the way I'd want to solve it."
The author of the post is said to be someone named Mark Feldt. A Google search for that name and Texas Insider produced only this article on the site. And Mark Felt (not Feldt) was the name of the former FBI operative who was Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's critical source during the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate. In other words, this post is based entirely on unnamed sources and is written by someone who could well be using a fake name. Texas Insider is the product of conservative activist Jim Cardle.
The Greater Heights Democratic Club is holding a candidate forum for District H this Thursday.
Please join the Greater Heights Democratic Club for aCandidate Forum for the upcoming City of Houston, District H, Special Election.
Place:
Reagan High SchoolHCDP headquarters, 1445 North Loop West, Suite 110 (just East of Ella).
Date: March 19
Doors open: 6:30pm
Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pmMr. Jerry W. Simoneaux, Jr - Moderator
Special election is Saturday, May 9
Early Voting begins April 27
UPDATE: Please note the location change for this event.
The "Open Carry" movement, which was advocating for a change to Texas' concealed carry law to allow guns to be worn in plain view, appears to have failed as no bill was filed to achieve this end.
[A]fter months lobbying the Legislature, members of the grassroots gun group [OpenCarry.org] have conceded that they could not persuade any Texas lawmaker to file open carry legislation this session, said Ian McCarthy, a student who chairs the Texas Open Carry Work Group."I've been calling, meeting, doing everything but nobody wants to introduce it," he said.
It's not as if there wasn't ample interest among lawmakers, McCarthy said, but "most of them are just loaded down with so many bills they've already introduced."
State Rep. Debbie Riddle, whom the open carry folks tagged months ago as the bills presumptive sponsor, had the legislation drafted but never introduced it. Her chief of staff explained to open carry members in an email that such legislation was unlikely to pass and that talks of an open carry proposal have already caused difficulties for other Second Amendments bills.
In the roughly six months since the group started fundraising through online donations to pay for radio spots, billboards and advertising on taxi's across Texas, they apparently did little to gain favor with the gun lobby.The Texas State Rifle Association, a state affiliate of the National Rifle Association, never publicly supported the proposal, saying instead they were focusing this session on their current agenda, which did not include open carry. Ultimately, the lack of support from the influential gun lobby could have doomed the group's efforts to get a bill introduced, open carry members opined on their forums.
We didn't have any voter ID action yesterday, but we did have this.
Some Democratic lawmakers joined by Texas residents who have had trouble getting drivers' licenses under new Department of Public Safety rules pushed Monday for legislation that would undo a policy they say harms U.S. citizens and legal immigrants.Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon, of San Antonio, said the DPS overstepped its authority by creating new identification rules last fall for drivers' license applicants without getting approval from the Legislature.
"It's far-reaching, it's completely uncalled for and it's completely unnecessary," she said.
McClendon filed a bill that went before a House committee on Monday to stop the policy. Democratic Sen. Judith Zaffirini, of Laredo, filed an identical proposal in the Senate.
Under the new DPS rules, people seeking drivers' licenses who aren't U.S. citizens must show they are in the country legally and that their immigration documents don't expire within six months. DPS also changed the look of the licenses given to legal residents and added the designation "temporary visitor" on the card.Republican Gov. Rick Perry supports the DPS rules, which took effect Oct. 1. His spokeswoman, Katherine Cesinger, said the rule change "ensures public safety and national security." She said the identification requirement is not unreasonable and shows that applicants are who they say they are.
The Public Safety Commission, which oversees DPS, said it wanted the change to enhance security and deter fraud. DPS officials say the change brings Texas closer to compliance with the impending federal REAL ID Act launched after the September 2001 terrorist attacks and governing drivers' license security.
The REAL ID act is unpopular with many states, and McClendon said it amounts to an unfunded mandate.
Rep. Rafael Anchia, a Dallas Democrat, said some elderly Texans do not have birth certificates. He specifically mentioned a 98-year-old woman in Fort Worth, whose original certificate burned in a courthouse fire years ago. Other U.S. citizens who were delivered by midwives don't have birth certificates, he said.
To get a Texas photo ID for the first time, you have to provide a birth certificate. A certified copy will cost you 22 smackeroos (Fraser's bill does not waive that fee), if you can manage to get one at all.I asked DPS spokeswoman Tela Mange if there was any way to get a Texas photo ID without a birth certificate. She answered, "We gotta know who you are."
Getting a birth certificate so you can get a photo ID is a Catch 22 at the Texas Department of State Health Services. To get a copy of your birth certificate, you need to submit a copy of your photo ID. Technically, if you don't have an ID card, the DSHS Web site says you can submit an immediate family member's photo ID, or copies of two documents bearing your name, one with a signature. But the application http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/vs/reqproc/forms/vs142.3.pdf for a birth certificate reads, in bold caps, "APPLICATIONS WITHOUT PHOTO ID WILL NOT BE PROCESSED."
Summary: Getting a photo ID in Texas requires a birth certificate ... which requires a photo ID ... which requires a birth certificate ... which requires a photo ID ... and if you manage to stumble across the information about the technicality allowing alternative documentation, it'll still take DSHS 6 - 8 weeks to process your request if you pay with a check or money order ... by which time it may be too late to vote.
Spring is in the air, and the Texas Progressive Alliance has a spring in its step. Click on to see what we're animated about.
Vince of Capitol Annex took a new look at the latest creationist attack on science in Texas classrooms in Bill Would Make "Strengths and Weaknesses" Teaching Of Evolution State Law.
Bay Area Houston says State Representative Wayne Christian has filed a bill that would scare Texas citizens from filing ethics complaints against elected officials.
Off the Kuff takes a look at who would be affected by the voter ID legislation that is being pushed in the Lege by Republicans.
WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts on the turmoil facing some inside Texas GOP regarding Gov. Perry's decision to turn down$555 million dollars of unemployment insurance from the stimulus money, UI debate must be maddening for the GOP supporters of Hutchison.
Neil at Texas Liberal reads Malcolm X in a cemetery and says that Rick Perry has found his schoolhouse door to stand in and block.
The Texas Cloverleaf expands upon Capitol Annex's look at Garnet Coleman's proposed repeal of the anti-gay marriage amendment in Texas.
BossKitty at TruthHugger truly believes there is profit for everyone when wasteful and costly opposition to Medical Marijuana is brought in to the economy instead of keeping it out. The War on "Illegal Activities" should focus on smuggling Heroin and Human Trafficking. Can Marijuana Rescue The Economy In 2010 Like Booze Did In 1933
At Texas Kaos, Lightseeker highlights the Texas Shakedown for those who make the mistake of driving in Tenaha, Texas while not white.
CouldBeTrue at South Texas Chisme notes thuggery isn't the first choice for governing Democrats addressing drug cartel violence. Analysis and coordinated effort is.
Governor "Good Hair, Bad Policy" Perry starts his primary campaign against Hutchinson by piling on the unemployed. Libby Shaw over at TexasKaos has the details and the outrage.Pendejos Perry Says YES to Roads, NO to the Jobless
Mayor McSleaze of McBlogger returns from his holiday to post his thoughts on developments in the Wall Street infotainment industry.
nytexan at BlueBloggin is disgusted, but not surprised, by the new Republican strategy; GOP: Divide and Conquer The Democrats, Then Do Nothing For The Country. As tent cities pop up in Sacramento, unemployment is at 10% in may states and the Wall Street continues a downward slide; the GOP response, to the past 8 year Bush disaster, is to lower approval numbers for Pelosi and House Democrats.
WhosPlayin is focused on local races for Mayor and City Council in Lewisville. This week he interviewed Shelley Kaehr and David Thornhill, who are running for Place 2.
There was harmonic convergence in the left and right Texblogosphere last week. See PDiddie's Brains and Eggs for what happened.
Xanthippas at Three Wise Men takes down the right-wing handwringing and disingenuous criticism over Obama's stem cell decision.
Via press release from the HGLBT Political Caucus, it looks like we have a resolution to the incident at the Union Bar:
Representatives from Union Bar and Lounge met with leaders from the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community at the office of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus Monday and reached a resolution that actions that led to the perception of discrimination were unintended."Due to a miscommunication between management of Union Bar and Lounge and the door staff, we acknowledge that actions by the door staff caused an unintended perception of discriminatory actions towards the gay and lesbian community," said Union Bar owners. "We wholeheartedly did not want or intend for this to happen. We also acknowledge that this unintended action caused hurt and bad feeling within the gay and lesbian community towards Union Bar and it staff. We also extend this apology to all of our regular gay and lesbian customers who may have been hurt by this misunderstanding."
"We deeply appreciate Union Bar and Lounge coming to us to clear up this incident," said Kris Banks, president of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus. "We accept Union Bar's explanation that miscommunication was at the heart of the problem. We understand that there was no discriminatory intent, but circumstances led to a strong perception that we were excluded because of our sexual orientation.'
"Our community is sensitive to discrimination, an understandable sentiment given the unfinished nature of our civil rights movement. Discrimination still exists, and should be addressed with legislation like House Bill 2215. We were happy to hear that the owners of Union Bar and Lounge are 100 percent supporters of this legislation.'
"We are happy for resolution and call for the GLBT community to move on and continue working for equality. We urge the community to cease negative bombardment, especially highly inappropriate harassment and threats."
The Union Bar and Lounge will continue to work with the GLBT community and intends to hold a fundraiser in the near future for a GLBT-specific community organization.
The Senate was supposed to finish doing its dirty work on voter ID today, but a clerical error has put things off for another day. Including all previously scheduled committee meetings, because nothing else can get done till the single most important issue facing Texas today is disposed of. Well, if nothing else that helped keep my Twitter traffic to a manageable level today, no small thing with all the SxSW tweeting going on. Tune in tomorrow, yadda yadda yadda. BOR and EoW have some related reading to tide you over till then.
Texas Insider passes along what is probably a rumor.
Word around the Texas House of Representatives is that a phantom list of nearly 76 signatures is circulating that will take out Speaker Joe Straus when the time is right. A few representatives wishing to remain anonymous have told Texas Insider they have signed the sheet calling for a motion to remove the speaker.[...]
We are now two-and-a-half months into the 81st Legislature. Committees and chairmanships have been assigned, and all of a sudden members are second guessing the choice for speaker.
Many Democrats had high hopes for plumb chair posts and committee assignments, but when appointments came out they were surprised to see their support for Straus didn't pay off they way they anticipated.
Consequently, a large number of Democrats and a few Republicans have signed a list that may unseat Speaker Straus when the time is right. It has been rumored that the proper timing would be shortly after the budget passes the House, which it is expected to go for a vote the week after Easter (April 12).
Anyway, make of this what you will. I think it's more talk than action, but who knows? Anybody out there hearing about this? Vince has more.
As you know, there is a special election coming up in City Council District H to fill the seat that was vacated by now-Sheriff Adrian Garcia. There are nine candidates running for this seat, and as has been my custom I intend to interview as many of them as I can. This is the first such interview, and I will run two of them a week until they're all done. Today's subject is Rick Rodriguez, a 23-year veteran of the Houston Police Department and a resident of Lindale. You can listen to the interview here, as always in MP3 format. Let me know what you think.
Once the voter ID debate shifts over to the House, there will be several bills there for them to consider as companions to SB362. One such bill is HB1414 by Rep. Dwayne Bohac, which is as far as I can tell essentially identical to the Fraser/Estes bill. Bohac has been filing such legislation for several sessions, so this is old hat to him. Of perhaps more interest is another Elections bill Bohac has in the hopper, HB488, which is about eligibility to act as a deputy vote registrar. The key bit from the text:
To be eligible for appointment as a volunteer deputy registrar, a person must be eligible to register to vote in the county served by the registrar [18 years of age or older].
Now, while the case for voter ID legislation falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, the rationale for it is at least understandable. The only rationale I can see for this is to make it harder to register voters. How does that serve the public interest? If you say that ensuring all registrars are citizens is worthwhile, then this bill should simply change "18 years of age or older" to be "eligible to register to vote". It's the restriction on registering voters outside of the county in which you are registered that is unnecessary and frankly offensive. Again, the only reason I can see for this is to make it harder to register voters, which in turn will make it harder for people to get registered to vote. That's the mentality that people like Dwayne Bohac have, and that's one of the reasons why the push for voter ID is about voter suppression. They want to make it harder, and in doing so make it so that fewer people vote. And last year, in what was possibly the most exciting Presidential race ever, millions of people were prevented from voting thanks to tactics like this. That's what it's all about.
If we must build the Grand Parkway Segment E, then this would be a far more preferable way to do it. Probably less expensive, too.
Here's an updated story on the end of the sixty-five percent rule.
Gov. Rick Perry's 4-year-old mandate that schools spend at least 65 percent of their money on classroom instruction is under fire from key lawmakers in Perry's own party.[...]
House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, filed legislation last week to erase the requirement. And though Perry defended the standard as the right thing to do at the time, he said he's working with Eissler to come up with "new ideas to make our schools even more efficient."
Eissler said he filed House Bill 2262 because the standard has not been feasible for districts that vary in enrollment and geographic size.
"There are better ways to measure instructional priorities," Eissler said. "Why don't we look at the school districts that are doing the best and see how they're spending the money?"
Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, said she also wants to repeal Perry's order. "Many of the school districts cannot meet that mandate," Shapiro said. "There are so many other activities and so many other things that are not included in that 65 percent that it skews the numbers."
Perry and his staff did not criticize the rule as strongly as Eissler and Shapiro. Allison Castle, a Perry spokeswoman, said he wants to scrap it only if it can be replaced with something that "maintains or strengthens the goals of the 65 percent rule."
Perry used a 2005 executive order to put the rule in place after lawmakers failed in their regular session and two special sessions that year to change the state's school finance system. "Even though the Legislature did not act, I will," he said then.
Beware The Ides Of March...
Why we immunize. The post is from last month, but there's no bad time to be reading that. Don't click on some of the photo links if you have a weak constitution.
When robot love is outlawed, only outlaws will love robots. Or something like that.
More office conversations should be like this.
So investing Social Security funds in the stock market would have been a great idea, wouldn't it?
ZOMG! The Establishment! Aaaieee! (Wait, I'm a middle-aged middle-class married white guy. Aren't I supposed to be The Establishment? Just as well I'm not.)
"Diaper Dave" Vitter is now also known as "Airport Rage" Vitter. Quite the Renaissance man.
Now this is fame.
If Frank Miller drew "Peanuts". Via Oliver Willis.
Given the present chaos, shouldn't we be asking if business education is not just a waste of time, but actually damaging to our economic health? Via Brian Linse.
Quick, call Buffy and the Scooby gang!
Bad paintings of Barack Obama. Have I mentioned lately that I love the Internet? Because I do.
Apparently, raising funds for the Bush Library at SMU has been a tough job. Well, we always knew presidenting was hard work.
KHOU has a story on the incident at Union Bar on Friday.
[T]he bar's owner said it was all a big misunderstanding, and apologized for the incident.He said since the bar opened late last fall, it has been booked solid with private parties.
The bar is small, with a total occupancy of 117 people.
The owner said private parties often fill the bar before the doors open to the public.
[...]
Owners at the Union Bar were approached about it Thursday and reserved 50 seats inside.
Word spread, and in the end, they simply couldn't accommodate the crowds.
The bar's owner said no one was turned away because of their sexual orientation.
"What Union Bar did was, technically, in line with the law. They had the right to do that," [Jerry] Simoneaux said.
The bar's owner said his establishment has always been gay friendly, and he's willing to prove it.
He said he plans to reach out to Houston's gay community to clear up what he insists is just a misunderstanding.
Along those lines, the United Against Union Bar Facebook group has printed a response from the bar:
Regarding the night of Friday 3-10-2009. "The staff and management at Union Bar are very apologetic for the misunderstanding that happened at their place of business. Union Bar in no way refuses entry to any persons due to sexual orientation, race, gender or religion. We do have a capacity of 117 persons as set forth by the City Of Houston and The Fire Marshal. We follow this guild line to the letter for guest and employee safety. This was the main factor or refusing entry Friday night. Persons have booked parties 6 to 7 weeks in advance and have limited of RSVP so their guests have the right to entry first. The Guest in question was allowed to bring his 50 RSVP guest. His party showed up at 10 with approximately 200 guests and could in no way accommodate that. We offered to take all 50 guests and he demanded that we let in all. Accordance to city code we could not allow this. At no time was the staff of Union Bar rude or uninventive to their needs while inside. At 10pm we were almost at capacity and the enclosed pictures will show that (1) We were almost full (2) We had a very high numbers of male guests that were not turned away."We would be open to speak with the GL community on this and help prove to the G&L committee that we are a gay friendly bar!
This would be very cool.
As they prepare to host CONCACAF Gold Cup matches at Reliant Stadium for a third consecutive tournament edition July 9, the folks at Lone Star Sports and Entertainment are busy thinking big -- really big."We want to bring the World Cup to Houston," Chris Keeney, LSSE's general manager, said Friday.
You read right. The World Cup. The biggest, most watched sporting event on the planet.
The United States Soccer Federation has expressed its desire to host the 2018 or 2022 World Cup.
An official declaration of interest has been submitted to FIFA, the sport's governing body, and U.S. Soccer has until May 2010 to submit all paperwork related to its bid.FIFA plans to award the tournaments by December of that year.
[...]
U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati is optimistic about the United States' chances.
"We are confident we can put together a successful bid to host another impressive event," he said last month, making reference to the 1994 World Cup, which the United States hosted to unprecedented success.
Keeney believes Houston and Reliant Stadium have a strong case to be one of 10-12 host cities, should the U.S. bid prove successful.
I know we thought that the current round of anti-evolutionism was in remission once the effort to change the science textbooks by the State Board of Education fell short. Sadly, these things never truly go away, and where the SBOE failed State Rep. Wayne Christian will try again with HB4224, which would put the bogus "strengths and weaknesses" language into state law. This probably won't go anywhere, but it's never a bad idea to be vigilant. Vince has more.
It's a kitchen degreaser. It's a window cleaner. It kills athlete's foot. Oh, and you can drink it.Sounds like the old "Saturday Night Live" gag for Shimmer, the faux floor polish plugged by Gilda Radner. But the elixir is real. It has been approved by U.S. regulators. And it's starting to replace the toxic chemicals Americans use at home and on the job.
The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water -- hardly as catchy as Mr. Clean. But at the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica, some hotel workers are calling it el liquido milagroso -- the miracle liquid.
That's as good a name as any for a substance that scientists say is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores without harming people or the environment.
Via Mark Evanier, the opening number from The Music Man as performed on a subway by students from Boston University.
I'd heard bits about this last night on Twitter, but via an email from Carl Whitmarsh I've learned the details of a nasty little incident. The following is a press release from the Houston GLBT Political Caucus:
Nearly 100 gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people were refused entry to Union Bar and Lounge in Midtown Friday while others were welcomed.Patrons started lining up at about 9:40 p.m. and were told to wait in line and not allowed inside, even as straight-appearing people were waved through. As the line grew and patrons waited in the rain, employees at the door told those who were that they were maintaining a "ratio." Later, the bar employees simply indicated they had the right to refuse anyone.
"I was shocked to be a victim of that kind of discrimination in a city like Houston in 2009," said Neal Falgoust, a Houston law student. "I have never experienced anything like that before in my life."
A patron who arrived at the bar early reported that the bar was nearly empty at about 9:40 p.m., when gay people started arriving and were stopped at the door.
Gay people continued to line up to the street and around the corner as people who appeared to be straight went to the front and were ushered in. Kris Banks, who stood at the front of the line, said the bar employees were asking the women who were entering with men if the men were accompanying them. If the men were with the women, they were allowed in.
"I arrived and heard that they were not allowing gay men in, so when I got to the door with three women I asked if we would be allowed in, and the door employee said 'I was told to keep you out,' " said Lindsey Dionne. "This was supposed to be a social event, but now it's political."
That this kind of discrimination is still legal in Houston makes it more outrageous. A coalition of GLBT rights groups, including the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, the Houston Stonewall Young Democrats, the Harris County Impact Houston and Amicus at South Texas College of Law said Saturday that the incident is proof of the necessity of legal protections for sexual orientation and gender identity for public accommodations.
"Houston is the only major city in Texas without a law that prevents this kind of discrimination," said Jerry Simoneaux, GLBT civil rights lawyer. "This incident is exactly the reason Houston should implement such an ordinance."
The event was organized as Houston's first "Guerilla Gay Bar," a tongue-in-cheek event that has been popular in other cities in which GLBT individuals come to traditionally straight bars to interact with other communities. Though Guerilla Gay Bars are usually a surprise event in other cities, Houston organizers informed the bar owner in advance out of courtesy and were told they would be welcomed.
UPDATE: Hair Balls noted the "Guerilla Gay Bar" concept a couple of days ago. There are now two groups on Facebook for those who want to register their disapproval with the Union Bar.
UPDATE: On Yelp, at least one person who was there last night is disputing this account.
Houston City Controller Annise Parker sharply criticized Texas Governor Rick Perry today for rejecting $555 million in federal stimulus money that would have funded unemployment benefits for out-of-work Texans."In January alone, more than 65,000 Houstonians were unemployed - the most since 2004 - and our economy is slowing," said Parker. "While the Governor makes his political point, our local economy is losing out on millions of dollars in stimulus funds - and Houstonians are hurting."
[...]
Parker recently called on Perry to allow more transparency and local input into decisions about allocating stimulus dollars, to ensure that Houston receives its fair share of funds. She also met with local legislators in Austin to discuss the use of stimulus funds.
"I support the efforts of our local representatives to bypass the Governor's rejection of these funds and bring more stimulus dollars to Texas and to Houston," said Parker.
"As the impact of the national economic crisis hits home in Houston, our leaders should be doing everything they can to keep our economy growing," she said. "The Governor's rejection of these badly needed funds is a failure of leadership."
Of course, if there's one person you'd think would be taking the lead on this, it would be Perry's main opponent in the 2010 primary, Kay Bailey Hutchison, since this stunt (like everything else he's doing these days) is about the primary. But so far, nothing but some meaningless platitudes from KBH, which one presumes isn't making her supporters happy. What pushback there has been has mainly been from Dems in the Lege and responsible economic types.
"The tax implications for 2010 are much, much worse if you do not take the stimulus money," said Don Baylor, a senior policy analyst for the Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for low-income Texans. "The fund is basically going to be out of money by the OU game." In other words, by October.Economist Ray Perryman testified to a panel of lawmakers earlier this week that "it is unrealistic to assume the system can continue in its current form."
The federal money would be enough to pay for the increase in benefits, including changes in state law, for a decade, Perryman told the House committee charged with making recommendations to spend the federal stimulus money.
House Democratic Leader Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, who chairs the committee, said the move is so counterproductive it "has to be 100 percent political."
"What is taking the money going to do to your taxes? Nothing," Dunnam said. "Put this $555 million up and it will pay for the whole program for a decade. Maybe in a decade there may be some impact ... there is no rational basis for it."
Bills to expand benefits -- and thus allow Texas to get the money -- have been filed by lawmakers including Reps. Joe Deshotel, D-Beaumont, and Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound; and Sen. Kevin Eltife, R-Tyler, whose bill was signed onto by Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie, has backed taking the money. Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, filed a resolution to take all the stimulus money."It's a bipartisan effort in the House to get these funds," Dunnam said. He noted rising unemployment and said a state jobless benefit fund could need a federal loan and state bonds to stay in good shape. Business taxes pay for the fund.
[...]
A veto override would require a two-thirds vote -- particularly difficult in a Legislature dominated by Republicans. The last veto override occurred in 1979.
Dunnam said an override isn't the only option: "There are more than a handful of ways to skin a cat."
Rep. Garnet Coleman agreed, noting that legislative bargaining is common as the session's end nears. "There may be ways to move forward that don't require a veto-proof majority," said Coleman, D-Houston. "At the end of the day, there are things that Rick Perry wants."
The group name "Rope With Hope" signifies - R.O.P.E. (Recruiters Offering Professional Expertise) With H.O.P.E. (HR Offering Professional Expertise) - and it is an online network of Corporate Recruiters and HR personnel that have come together to assist area Job Seekers in their attempts to gain meaningful employment.Unemployed Houstonians are encouraged to email their resumes if they would like a professional assessment to HoustonRWH@hotmail.com, and every HR or Recruiting professional that would be interested in volunteering for "Rope With Hope" is asked to do one of the following:
* Allot 1-2 hours per week (can be after-hours/weekends) to offer your HR, Interviewing, Recruiting, or Resume review expertise to unemployed candidates.
* Attend an event or meeting that would either allow you to announce this new resource for displaced or unemployed workers; or conduct a presentation on interviewing or resume writing techniques. This is as simple as appearing at your own existing HR Society, Civic Association, Church Group, or Chamber of Commerce meeting and introducing the concept of "Rope for Hope - Houston".
Anyway, I wanted to introduce the concept and group to you and encourage you to spread the word if you could. Even if you could just pass this info on to your Corporate HR/Recruiting folks at your "normal job".
Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack has an idea.
Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack has a problem with hungry hogs. Houston has a problem with hungry people.If Radack gets his way, hundreds of pounds of pork soon could be hitting the needy's tables.
Radack plans to allow a few select bowhunters to begin targeting the thousands of feral pigs that live in George Bush Park and hopes to donate the meat to food banks, churches, homeless shelters or even needy individuals.
"If you could harness this, it could feed so many people it's unbelievable," Radack said.
[...]
Off-duty county employees have been allowed to trap hogs at the park for more than a decade, and they typically remove about 300 to 400 every year, [Precinct 3 special activities coordinator Mike] McMahan said. The trappers are responsible for removing the hogs and have been allowed to keep the meat.
But those efforts barely have made a dent in a population that swells so quickly that 50 sows could replace all the hogs that were harvested with just one litter each.
[...]
Most of the park's hogs weigh between 50 and 150 pounds, McMahan said. That translates to about 40 to 120 pounds of steaks, roasts, ribs and ham per animal, said Midway Food Market owner Herman Meyer, who processes 700 to 800 wild hogs a year at an average cost of about $60.
Houston Food Bank spokeswoman Betsy Ballard said the organization would be delighted to receive that much meat. But food safety laws could make such a donation difficult. Texas Department of State Health Services spokesman Doug McBride said food banks could not accept the meat unless the hogs were taken live to a processor with an on-site state or federal food safety inspector.
Hunters for the Hungry, a statewide wild game donation program, does not accept feral hogs because it is too difficult to find a processor who adheres to all the state rules, program coordinator Anitra Hendricks said.
"There's just not any easy way or profitable way to get a group together to do this," said Barbara Anderson, state director of the Texas Food Bank Network.
Radack said he will find a way to make the donations work if he has to line individuals up to pick up hogs they will butcher themselves.
"If people catch fish out of sewage-infested waters like Buffalo Bayou and eat them, and people eat out of garbage cans because they are hungry, it seems reasonable to me that there is a way to take lean meat of a feral hog out of the woods and put it on people's tables so they can have a meal," he said. "There should be a way to do that and I'm determined to find it."
The Statesman has a profile of Don McLeroy, the young-earth creationist who is also the chair of the State Board of Education and who is currently leading the fight to cripple science education in Texas. I'm not going to get into the details of this story - Hal and TFN Insider do all the heavy lifting, if you're interested - but I will pass along Greg's observation that McLeroy didn't score a particularly impressive electoral victory in 2006, and will be on the ballot again in 2010. That's the good news; the bad news is that McLeroy's district is made up of 28 mostly small, mostly rural counties - suburban Collin County was about 30% of the vote there in 06 - and therefore isn't likely to be all that friendly to a Dem in 2010, no matter how much more attention McLeroy's harmful antics attract. Still, this is a fight that will need to be fought, so I hope he will draw an opponent at least as strong as his fellow traveller Cynthia Dunbar has done.
Today's Friday random ten comes courtesy of Alan Bernstein. Take it away, Alan!
1. 1985 -- Bowling For Soup
2. Chain Reaction -- Joe Sample
3. Autumn In New York -- Harry Connick
4. Thrill Of It -- Robert Randolph and the Family Band
5. Perfect Girl -- Sarah McLachlan
6. Don't Think Twice -- Joan Baez
7. Lay It Down -- Al Green
8. The Great Intoxication -- David Byrne
9. Madame George -- Van Morrison
10. Pardon Me -- Allison Moorer
Good stuff. Alan and I had been corresponding about my weekly Random Ten lists, which led me to suggest that he provide one to be published, and here we are. If you'd like to do so as well, send me an email with your Random Ten list, and I'll run it in a future edition. My thanks to Alan for participating. What are you listening to this week?
Let's take a moment as we wait for the next round in the voter ID battle to consider who might actually have their right to vote affected by this unneeded piece of partisan legislation.
Meet Bessie Jenkins Foster.
The 98-year-old African-American woman, who is recovering from gallbladder surgery and is hard of hearing, went to three different local Texas Department of Public Safety offices last week. And three times she was turned away without getting her card."I feel bad," said Foster, who at times has difficulty speaking. "To cash a check, or something, I need an ID card."
Foster is one of countless people nationwide having trouble getting a state-issued photo identification card -- the very kind that would be required to vote if a bill raging in the Texas Legislature becomes law.
[...]
Last week, Foster and [her daughter Robbie] Hamilton went to three DPS offices while they were running other errands. There, they presented Foster's driver's license that expired last July, along with her photo military identification, Social Security card and other documents.
They were told they needed Foster's birth certificate, but when they brought a copy, they were told they had to bring the original.
They don't have an original, though, and can't get one because the birth certificate was lost when a 1968 fire destroyed the Walker County Courthouse in Huntsville. So they brought a copy provided by the Texas Department of Heath's Bureau of Vital Statistics. But still had no luck.
Meet Vanessa Edwards Foster, and the issues that transitioning transsexuals have with ID cards.
Identity Matters!" -- TX State Sen, Florence Shapiro (R-Plano)Both the transgender community and I couldn't agree with the good senator more! For well over a decade, the transgender community has been pushing for passage of a name and gender change bill that would make the process much easier (alleviating the need for attorneys, courts, the idiosyncratic judges and their individual "discretion," and especially the cost!) And for well over a decade, the legislature has ignored us. People transitioning, who have an ID in one gender but live as the other, will effectively be disallowed the vote per the Voter ID bill.
As Sen. Shapiro said in debate on the Senate floor, "we're just trying to make sure everyone's identification matches." Sen. Fraser as well reiterated, declaring "I just want to make sure this person is who they say they are!" The trans community has been attempting to facilitate that with our own for years, and yet it's these same partisans who've done nothing to attain that - zero. Therefore we have problems getting identification that matches our gender thanks to Texas' Republicans and other Democrats running in fear of them - and yet also have to listen to the likes of Sen. Fraser complain about identities that don't match!
Meet Matt Glazer. He was a victim of identity theft last year.
Credit cards were racked up in my name and they went as far as to attempt to take out student loans under my name.The case is mostly resolved and soon my credit score and life should be back on track. However, my social security number is frozen and I am unable to get a new ID.
In the end, these three folks and everyone like them may wind up being able to vote. They'll just have a harder time of it, and some of them will be unable to get past the newly-erected barriers between them and the ballot box. That's what this is about - making it harder for a lot of legitimate voters to cast their ballots, so we can make it a little harder for a crime no one's been arrested for to be committed. How exactly does that make sense?
I'm glad to hear that District Attorney Pat Lykos is going to examine cases of wrongful conviction in Harris County. I'm sure there are plenty more than the five she plans to highlight, but the fact that she wants to focus attention on the issue and to require DNA testing in cases where it may matter is a welcome change from the past.
"We are going to establish clear policies regarding forensics," Lykos told the Houston Chronicle recently. "In the (Ricardo) Rachell case, there clearly was forensic evidence and it was not tested and the question is, 'Well, why not?' "She is expected to release today the first-ever postmortem of a wrongful conviction in Harris County, where DNA evidence has exonerated five men in recent years but -- until now -- has prompted little dissection of what went wrong.
Lykos' report will detail the factors that contributed to the conviction of Ricardo Rachell, who last year was cleared of the 2002 sexual assault of an 8-year-old boy for which he was serving a 40-year sentence.
The report will provide guidelines that spell out when prosecutors should order DNA tests and also will call for the creation of a regional crime lab, which Lykos has pushed for since her campaign last year.
[...]
In the Rachell case, Houston Police Department officers collected a rape kit from the victim and reference samples from Rachell in 2002. But that evidence never was tested until last year, when it pointed to another man who committed other assaults while Rachell was in prison. So far, no one from the District Attorney's Office has been able to say why the evidence was not tested sooner. Lykos will use the Rachell case to push forward a plan to create a regional crime lab.
"You cannot expect a police department, no matter how large, to oversee a crime lab," Lykos said.
In the Rachell case, Houston Police Department officers collected a rape kit from the victim and reference samples from Rachell in 2002. But that evidence never was tested until last year, when it pointed to another man who committed other assaults while Rachell was in prison. So far, no one from the District Attorney's Office has been able to say why the evidence was not tested sooner. Lykos will use the Rachell case to push forward a plan to create a regional crime lab."You cannot expect a police department, no matter how large, to oversee a crime lab," Lykos said.
The article doesn't quote from any of the innocence activists, so we don't know yet how this will be received. On its face, it looks good, and should help avoid bad situations. There are other reforms that can and should be implemented, regardless of whether or not the Lege gets around to compelling them, on subjects such as eyewitness identification, and taping interrogations. But this is a good start.
On the matter of taping interrogations, I strongly recommend you read thie Law.com article about an especially egregious case of wrongful conviction in Ohio, in which justice was only (eventually) done because the initial interrogation was recorded, and made it plain to any objective observer that the confession given - by a 12-year-old suspect - was bogus and coerced. I hope it makes you as angry as it made me; be sure to read it all the way to the end for the full impact. Thanks to Grits for the link.
News flash: Travel times on the newly-expanded Katy Freeway have improved.
The expansion of 23 miles of roadway along the Katy was completed in October. The $2.8 billion project took five years to complete and added 18 lanes between the Loop and Texas 6. Each direction has four main lanes, three frontage road lanes and two toll lanes.TTI researchers compared commutes before construction began in June 2003 to average speed and travel times in November 2008.
Darrell Borchardt, a TTI senior research engineer, concluded that morning commutes for eastbound travelers between Barker Cypress and the West Loop had improved by 13 minutes and 12 minutes in the evening.
For westbound drivers, the morning time savings was just four minutes, but jumped to 18 minutes during the evening. Midday travel times also showed improvements of six minutes headed eastbound and five minutes westbound.
One more thing:
"Opening up the Katy Freeway has been a tremendously effective way to strengthen our economy and improve our quality of life," U.S. Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, credited with advancing the expansion project, said in a statement. "It's given us more time on the job and more time with our families."
The House committee charged with recommending how to use the federal stimulus money does not see eye to eye with Gov. Rick Perry on the $555 million for unemployment insurance.In a 5 to 1 vote, the committee on Thursday endorsed enacting the necessary changes to state law so that Texas would be eligible for the money. Earlier today, Perry said Texas should not take the money.
House Appropriations Chairman Jim Pitts was the only Republican among the "ayes." Rep. Myra Crownover, R-Denton, voted against the measure and argued that action should be delayed.
[...]
Also, Pitts plans to join Rep. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, as a co-author of a bill that would enact the required legislative changes but allow the extended benefits to expire when the federal money is gone. Estimates indicate the federal money would cover seven years of the additional benefits.
Economist Ray Perryman, testifying before the committee, said taking the money is on balance a good deal for Texas. The federal infusion would lessen a tax increase on employers now and would cover the extended benefit for at least seven years.He added that the unemployment tax does not affect Texas' ability to compete for jobs. Property taxes and the business tax are much bigger considerations when businesses choose where to set down roots, Perryman said.
Here's a copy of official motion (PDF), which lays out the case for accepting the funds, and a copy of a statement from Rep. Garnet Coleman (PDF), which notes that Texas is already mostly in compliance with the federal law for the funds. EoW, Vince and Vince again, Eileen, McBlogger, and the CPPP have more; I also have a couple of press releases, from Rep. Coleman and State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte. By the way, did you know that 32 million people are on food stamps, and one in 11 of them is in Texas? Or that Texas' unemployment rate is now 6.4% and climbing? Just FYI. Maybe someone should inform the Governor.
UPDATE: More from Texas Impact.
State Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston) criticized Governor Rick Perry for playing politics with the future of Texans by rejecting the unemployment insurance component of the stimulus package. In January alone, Texas lost 75,800 payroll jobs, bringing the total number of Texans seeking jobs to 797,000. Unemployment claims in 2009 are double what they were in 2008, and the current unemployment fund reserves are not adequate for this downturn."Governor Perry ran Texas into the ground by suspending the tax on business that goes to the unemployment fund," said Representative Coleman. "That short-sided act has helped to deplete the fund by October."
If Texas accepts the stimulus funds, Texas tax payers will have to pay an additional $294 million in 2010. However, not accepting the funds will make it likely that employers will have to pay $935 million in 2010 to make up for the deficit.
"Governor Perry will run us further into the ground if he does not accept the unemployment insurance component of the federal stimulus," said Representative Coleman. "The Governor is costing Texas business owners close to $1 billion."
If Texas enacts necessary changes to its unemployment laws it could receive $555.7 million to pay for unemployment benefits from the stimulus package. Texas should make the changes, expand benefits, and help our fellow Texans by accepting this money.
"Texans who have lose their jobs in this economy deserve to receive the unemployment benefits that they have paid taxes towards," said Representative Coleman. "We should not let this money go somewhere else."
Additionally, today after learning of the Governor's actions, Representative Coleman authored and passed a motion in writing in the Select Committee on Federal Economic Stabilization Funding describing the committee's findings and recommendations to Speaker Strauss.
Senator Van de Putte Statement on Governor Perry's Refusal of Funds for Unemployed"Governor Perry's decision will harm many Texas families. With 26,000 Texans filing new unemployment claims each week, Texans need help now. The unemployment fund is already running low and will reach zero by October 1st," said Van de Putte. "Why would Governor Perry place the burden on already stressed employers to make up the shortfall? I am amazed that Governor Perry would put partisan interests above the interest of already unemployed Texans and those who will unfortunately lose their jobs due to this economy."
By the way, the money that the state has in reserve for unemployment insurance is rapidly being depleted. Just so you know.
[Tuesday], the Texas Workforce Commission announced that the unemployment trust fund is now expected to be almost depleted by October. The commission issues monthly projections and each has been gloomier than the last. By law, the trust fund must stay above $858 million at the beginning of the fiscal year in October. At the current rate, the fund will be $812 million below the floor, commission executive director Larry Temple told the House special stimulus committee yesterday.And a $812 million deficit means somebody's gotta pay - and that somebody, according to Temple, will be Texas employers.
Temple said the fund can raise money to pay unemployment benefits in three ways: 1) By borrowing from the feds (and paying interest on the loans) 2) By issuing bonds (also involves paying interest) and 3) By raising taxes on employers. He said the commission's strategy would probably involve a combination of the three.
However, combo or no combo, even if TWC borrows from the feds or floats bonds, the employers will be the ones funding the debt.
Dunnam made this clear when he asked Temple, "Do any of [the scenarios] involve anyone other than employers paying for the deficit?"
Temple responded, "No."
Here's where the stimulus comes in: Don Baylor, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Public Policy Priorities, said if Texas changes its eligibility statute and accepts the stimulus funds, employers will still have to pay an additional $294 million in 2010 to make up for the deficit. But without the federal funds, employers will pay an additional $935 million to make up for the deficit in 2010.
[Hammond] presented a bold proposal to "save" $630 million a year in unemployment benefits payouts, which included measures such as greatly restricting or eliminating benefits for people who receive severance pay. He also said the commission didn't do enough to ensure people are looking for work while they're receiving benefits: "The commission is allowing [unemployed] people to sit on their laurels."
Well, I suppose it's all academic, since Governor Perry has now officially rejected the unemployment insurance funds. Hope all you business owners that will see your taxes go up more than they needed to will appreciate that. Perry made the announcement right here in Houston, which is somewhat ironic.
Houston's growth advantage over the rest of the nation during the past five years--oil and natural gas--has not only evaporated in the face of a global commodity bust but has turned into a definite liability. The coming year will see significant job losses in Houston, led by the energy sector.
Texas AFL-CIO President Becky Moeller today issued this statement in reaction to Gov. Rick Perry's announcement that he opposes acceptance of $555 million in federal economic stimulus funds for jobless workers in Texas:"Today Gov. Rick Perry said to the workers and employers of Texas: 'What crisis?' The governor's decision to reject $555 million in federal unemployment insurance funds available in the economic stimulus package amounts to a callous statement to tens of thousands of Texans who are losing their livelihoods that Texas does not have their backs."
"Playing 2010 or 2012 politics when Texans are suffering in 2009 has nothing to do with good public policy. The Texas AFL-CIO has worked with lawmakers who are carefully exploring the ramifications of accepting the UI funds. The stimulus package essentially covers for seven years any cost associated with making UI benefits more accessible to workers who have lost jobs through no fault of their own. If today's decision stands, employers will start paying an additional $555 million in taxes in January, courtesy of the governor, and Texas workers who desperately need help will be left to fend for themselves."
"In short-circuiting the legislative process, Gov. Perry is telling employers that it is better to pay $555 million extra to keep the current lousy UI system than to pay an incremental increase seven years from now for a better system."
"Here's hoping the Legislature sees this issue differently. This is no time to demonize workers who are victims of the worst economy America has seen since the Great Depression."
The city of Houston is taking a crack at boosting participation in its curbside recycling program by making it easier to dispose of recyclables.
The pilot program, to be announced by Mayor Bill White today, will be offered to about 10,000 households in eight neighborhoods. Residents will be given wheeled 96-gallon recycling bins, similar to the city-provided plastic trash bins, in which to dump every recyclable.Currently, households with curbside pickup must sort recyclables into two "streams": paper goods and containers (plastic and cans).
In addition to increasing the number of households participating in Houston's recycling program, officials hope the "single-stream" method will solve common complaints about the city's twice-a-month recycling program: that it's too complicated to sort the materials and haul them to the curb, that the bins are too small, that glass is not included.
The long-term goal is to increase recycling participation. A 2008 survey from Waste News pegged Houston with a dismal 2.6 percent recycling rate.White has said the city's rate will approach 20 percent after the implementation of new programs. In January, the city began a wood waste recycling program for tree limbs and brush. In the spring, officials are planning to expand yard waste recycling through the use of biodegradable bags.
But single-stream recycling appears to be an increasingly popular strategy for improving participation. Fort Worth and Plano already have single-stream programs.
A single-stream system can more than double participation rates, said Pat DeRueda, president of Waste Management Recycling Services.
Via Stace, I see that one of the leaders in the fight against xenophobia in Farmers Branch is a on the ballot for City Council there.
Business owner and activist Elizabeth Villafranca [announced] her candidacy Monday afternoon.Villafranca, an outspoken opponent of city officials' failed attempts to prohibit immigrants from renting homes, is seeking the spot being vacated by Jim Smith.
She and her husband own Cuquita's, a Mexican food restaurant in Farmers Branch.
Sen. John Cornyn, apparently with some free time on his hands, takes his turn tackling the pernicious issue of Democrats winning judicial races - er, the problem of partisan judicial elections. I'll give him credit for this much - he puts his finger on the main issue.
As the cost of political campaigns in Texas increases, particularly for those seeking statewide office, judicial candidates must spend more time raising funds from the narrow set of donors most interested in seeing them on the bench.The demands of fundraising are especially corrosive for the judiciary. Campaigns for legislative or executive office typically are supported by a broad donor base with a wide variety of interests, making it less likely that the interests of one group will dominate to the disadvantage of the general public. Judicial elections, by contrast, are funded largely by the lawyers and other interest groups most likely to appear in court or be directly affected by judicial decisions.
Clay Robison reminds me of something in a discussion of Governor Perry's resistance to spending stimulus money on expanding unemployment insurance.
Right after giving the back of his hand to thousands of jobless workers, he was promoting a $60-million handout for the film industry.Yes, the industry that pays some of its top stars almost that much for a single picture and seems to always thrive, even in a struggling economy, because fans are willing to spend small fortunes on movie tickets and popcorn.
Perry, who once had a bit part in a movie, has asked the Legislature to increase the state's financial incentives for movie and TV productions from the $20 million budgeted for the current biennium to $60 million for 2010-11.
He wants to encourage more film production in Texas and compete with other states that have lured production away with sweeter deals. The incentives, he says, would help create jobs in Texas for technicians and other specialists who are paid far less than the screen idols.
It is, however, a niche industry, and relatively few Texans have the skills necessary for the higher-quality jobs.
Perry is leery of the $555 million in federal unemployment aid, part of the financial stimulus package, because it would require Texas to expand its jobless program to allow more people to qualify for assistance. He said the aid would leave Texas on the hook for a half-billion dollars in additional costs when the federal aid ends.
One of the questions that was raised during the Voter ID All-Nighter in the Senate was why Attorney General Greg Abbott took a pass, even though the Democrats wanted him to be there, since he was a leading crusader of "voter fraud" accusations. Abbott's office claimed his presence would lead to a conflict of interest:
Abbott spokesman Jerry Strickland said Abbott would not testify. He attributed the decision to Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, who as the Senate's president pro tempore is set to preside over today's hearing before the 31-member Senate sitting as a committee of the whole.Strickland said: "Because the Office of the Attorney General would represent the state of Texas in legal matters that could arise from this legislation, the chair (Duncan) decided it would be inappropriate for the attorney general to be present as a witness in a legislative debate."
Earlier this session, Representative Homer filed House Joint Resolution 53 which proposes a constitutional amendment to replace the Attorney General on the Legislative Redistricting Board (LRB) with the Commissioner of Agriculture. "Senator Duncan and General Abbott have made a clear and compelling argument for HJR 53," Homer said. "If General Abbott can not offer the Senate testimony regarding the results of a multi-million dollar investigation conducted by his office without a conflict of interest, he can not possibly vote on the LRB. His participation in the redistricting process would create an even more apparent conflict with even more imminent litigation coming out of it." As currently structured, the Legislative Redistricting Board is composed of five members: The Lieutenant Governor, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Attorney General, the Comptroller of Public Accounts and the Commissioner of the General Land Office."If the LRB is called upon to act, there is a 100% certainty that litigation will follow. Through his actions today, General Abbott has certainly clouded the AG's participation in LRB proceedings." Homer continued by saying, "If the Attorney General is not replaced on the LRB and follows the precedent that he and Senator Duncan set today, he would be required to recuse himself. Because of this, I hope I can count on Senator Duncan and General Abbott to support this apparently much needed correction."
In case you hadn't already heard, the measure was passed out of committee - which was the full Senate in this case - by the predicted party-line vote, which was actually 20-12 since Lt. Gov. Dewhurst, sitting in the cheap seats while Sen. Robert Duncan acted as master of ceremonies, cast a vote as well. That happened at about 9:30 this morning, after nearly 24 hours of hearings and testimony. The measure was made eligible for floor action on Monday, so it may wind up in the House sometime next week. Don't be surprised if that turns into another all-nighter. Roundups and commentaries: Floor Pass, EoW, Vince, Stace, Burka, Eileen, TMF, Martha, STxC, and BOR, which also highlights the dumbest argument made during the proceedings. So take a minute and catch your breath, but don't get too comfortable. It'll be back on before you know it.
Looks like things wrapped up in the Senate at about 2:30 AM. It's not clear to me if they got through all of the expert testimony, or if they plan to get to the public testimony, assuming anyone who signed up to speak yesterday bothers to come back today. Elise says the Senate will take their first vote on SB362 today, and I'll join her out on that limb in predicting passage by a 19-12 margin.
The last witness of the evening, from the Harris County Tax Assessor's office, was the first to make any concrete claim of voter impersonation actually occurring, based on a report earlier this year from Texas Watchdog that said dead people had voted in 2008 and in some cases before. I don't know why the Rs wouldn't have led off with this guy, since if nothing else that might have gotten his testimony into today's papers, but whatever. (Maybe they didn't want to rehash the allegations that the Tax Assessor's office spent a lot of time this year rejecting legitimate voter registration applications.) No cases have been prosecuted, so it's a little hard to judge the evidence. It seems to me this is more an illustration of identity theft than anything else, and if so then the perpetrators, who did have to show some form of identification to cast those votes, would likely have been able to produce a photo ID as well. It's not like nobody's ever done that before. Even if you accept all this as incontrovertible, the point would still remain that far more legitimate voters would be denied than illegitimate ones would be deterred. Which is still what all this has always been about.
Anyway, we may see the end of this spectacle for today, though I presume there would still be subsequent votes in the Senate - I don't think they can do all three readings in one day. Then we get to do it all over again in the House. Yippee.
As we know, City Council hopeful Karen Derr missed the official filing deadline for the District H special election, and thus will not be on the ballot on May 9. Anyone who has driven through the Heights lately has observed that she had quite a few visible supporters, and from what I know many of them had been urging her to try a write-in candidacy. According to a press release dated March 9 on her website (which I didn't get but others clearly did), she has decided to run for At Large #1 in November instead. From the release:
After much encouragement from supporters of the Karen Derr Campaign for City Council District H., Karen Derr has decided to continue her dream as a public servant to the City of Houston by running for a vacant At-Large position. Many of her supporters have asked that she continue to run and be a voice at the City Council table for all of Houston neighborhoods.Karen Derr stated, "I have been working hard for years visiting civic clubs, organizations, and most importantly-talking with everyday people about the issues that concern them. I believe that a Council Member should truly represent all people and serve with responsive government. As your next At-Large Councilmember, I am ready and committed to improve our quality of life, provide efficient quality constituent services and fight crime in our streets."
City Controller and Mayoral candidate Annise Parker has proposed a new policy for giving Houston firms an advantage when bidding for city-financed work.
Under Parker's plan, when companies bid on a city project -- say, to build roads or provide office supplies -- local firms automatically would get picked when they tie with an outside company's offer to do the job for the lowest amount.She also said the city should give local companies a second chance to match the lowest bid for smaller jobs (under $100,000) if they initially come within 10 percent of it. She added the city should not have to pay more for services and goods in such a program.
To the extent allowed by law, city government jobs should go first to applicants who live in Houston, according to Parker's proposal, and mayoral appointees to boards and commissions also should come from within city limits.
This is a pleasant surprise.
The University of Texas Medical Branch hospital, still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Ike, will remain on Galveston Island under a plan approved today.The decision by the University of Texas Board of Regents not to move patient beds, teaching and research facilities inland should be positive news to area elected officials and local citizens who wanted to the damaged operation to remain. The plan, however, depends on new funding from the Legislature over time.
"This board, by this vote, is deeply committed to the future of keeping UTMB on Galveston Island, but this decision is not our decision alone," said board chairman Scott Caven Jr., referring to the need for recovery money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, philanthropic sources and the state.
[...]
The regents had been considering a consultant's recommendation that some beds be moved off the island to compensate for the as much as $710 million in damage and losses caused by the hurricane, which came ashore in Galveston in September, destroying lower floors at UTMB's John Sealy Hospital.
The $285,000 consultant's report recommended that the hospital be rebuilt in League City, saying it had a better chance there of making a profit by competing for paying patients.
State Rep. Craig Eiland, D-Galveston, applauded the regents' decision to rebuild the island campus. He said the effort, including the renovation of a damaged hospital and the construction of a new medical tower, could cost as much as $1 billion over time."We've come a long way, and we're on the right path, and we're all moving in the same direction," he said. "We've still got to get to May. We've got to make sure that the Legislature funds the plan."
Harris County Commissioners Court on Tuesday approved an agreement to build and maintain a segment of the Grand Parkway connecting the Katy Freeway and U.S. 290, but questions over what would happen if the county ultimately decided the project was not financially viable could delay work indefinitely.The agreement with the Texas Department of Transportation clearly states that Harris County would be reimbursed for its investment in Segment E of the proposed "outer outer" loop around Houston if another entity agreed to develop the entire 185-mile project.
But the agreement does not describe what would happen if the county decided not to build the segment after spending money on the segment and no one ever agreed to build the whole project.
After a lengthy discussion during Tuesday's meeting, the court voted to accept the agreement anyway. But Commissioner Steve Radack said later he does not want the county to spend any money until he knows for sure who would reimburse those expenses and how quickly that would happen.
"I am not going to put $20 million-plus dollars worth of county money on a toll road roulette wheel," he said after the meeting.
TxDOT spokeswoman Raquelle Lewis declined to speculate on whether the agency would agree to those terms.
On a more serious note, this vote went through despite there being numerous unanswered questions about the project's financial viability, and the use of stimulus funds on a toll road.
Citizens' Transportation Coalition chairwoman Robin Holzer said the county should not invest any more money in the segment until that study is completed."Harris County has a responsibility to every toll road user in our region to slow down and do this right," said Holzer, whose mobility advocacy group argues that Segment E will do little to address pressing traffic concerns while helping developers get rich building sprawling subdivisions on the Katy Prairie.
Art Storey, the executive director of Harris County's Public Infrastructure Department, acknowledged that deadlines associated with accepting $181 million in stimulus funding for the project are prompting county leaders to move expeditiously. Construction must be completed within three years, according to the Texas Department of Transportation.
Storey said the county has been negotiating with TxDOT for permission to build the road since last June, hoping it would ease traffic on U.S. 290 by diverting some drivers to the expanded Katy Freeway.
"Stimulus money was not in anybody's vocabulary when we asked for permission from Commissioners Court to negotiate with TxDOT," Storey said. If anyone truly started moving more quickly after the stimulus money became available, it was TxDOT, he added. The $181 million allocation was among $1.2 billion in stimulus projects the Texas Transportation Commission approved last week.
[...]
The new "investment-grade" study would build upon similar but less detailed analyses conducted in 2004 and 2008 that showed the segment is toll-viable, meaning it would pay for itself over time. An investment-grade study involves an extensive analysis of local traffic and economic data to let potential investors know what kind of risk they would be taking.
Previous studies showed most of the other Grand Parkway segments would not be used enough individually to recoup the cost of building them. However, the entire project could be revenue neutral over the years if the highest-grossing segments subsidized the lowest-grossing ones, Storey said earlier this year.
According to Elise Hu's liveblog of the voter ID hearing in the Senate, they're on witness number 3 of 15, and they haven't gotten to any public testimony yet. Suffice it to say, this is gonna go on for awhile, almost certainly into tomorrow and possibly beyond. Which as I've said is only appropriate for the single most important issue facing Texas today.
Lots of people have been following this all day and giving blow-by-blow accounts. Twitter has been a great resource, if you follow folks like Elise, Gardner Selby, and Texas Monthly, among others. If you prefer the bloggy route, Phil, Vince, Patricia Kilday Hart, the tag team of Jenny Hoff and Karen Brooks, and the Observer have been on the case.
Speaking of the latter, the Observer reports on a possible compromise bill.
Last week, Democratic Rep. Chuck Hopson filed an attempt at a compromise on Voter ID in the form of House Bill 2513. The bill requires the secretary of state to coordinate with the Department of Public Safety and other state agencies to obtain photographs that would be placed on individuals' voter registration certificates, which voters have to present at the polls."HB 2513 would not place the burden of obtaining photos for registration cards on voters and includes an affidavit provision that minimizes concerns over voter suppression," says Dustin Rynders, a policy specialist and attorney for Advocacy, Inc., a federally funded statewide advocacy group for the disabled.
Still, many advocates feel that even Hopson's diluted version of Voter ID is not as good as no Voter ID at all.
"Moves toward photo identification in any form are, at best, unnecessary," says Rynders, who is at the Capitol today to testify in opposition to the Senate's Voter ID bill. "The main consideration is whether the bill is the best use of limited state resources. Once investigated, most election irregularities are found to be related to poll worker error, so the state could instead consider using resources to provide more robust poll worker training."
Still, as things stand now the Senate bill won't pass the House but could stir things up considerably. Whenever we do get to the end of today's hijinx, we're nowhere near the finish line for this fight.
Ready or not, here comes the voter ID battle in the Senate. There's a chance today will merely be Day One of this fight, as Patricia Kilday Hart notes in her preview.
Sen. Robert Duncan, who will chair tomorrow's Committee of the Whole on Voter ID, will need to "steer small" during what promises to be a lengthy, acrimonious debate. He told reporters today he hoped the hearing would not last longer than one day, and while he said he believes Senate rules would allow members to cut off debate, but he does not believe such a vote would be necessary."The goal is to fully develop the issue to allow the opportunity to make a record," he said. " The key is getting that done in the least disruptive way."
Democrats have promised a protracted hearing to allow opponents of the measure to testify against it, and there's speculation they will draw out the hearing for a week as a delay tactic.
Here's the Chron story about today's coming attractions. While it has some interesting details about other states' experiences, it omits a couple of important points. One:
"This is about Republicans scaring off just enough eligible elderly, disabled, blacks and Hispanics to stay in power four more years, plain and simple," said Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, of the Republican proposal.Republican Caucus Chairman Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, said the bill is simply about ending voter fraud.
"We know voter impersonation is taking place. It's been well documented. It's going to come out in the hearings," he said.
Point two is that we are already required to show identification when we vote. It's just that today, your voter registration card is good enough. But because Republicans have been seeing ghosts - more accurately, because they've been seeing too many Democrats show up to vote - they don't want that to be good enough any more. And what happens if the two forms of ID you'll be required to bring to vote don't match exactly - one has a middle initial, or maybe one doesn't reflect a recent name change due to marriage or divorce? There are many possible reasons why a perfectly legal voter might win up being told they won't be able to vote, as Texas Voter Twister shows. All I can say is I hope they build some kind of appeals process into this sucker, because we're gonna need it. BOR, Vince, and Stace have more.
Missed this last week.
A lawsuit challenging the layoffs of nearly 3,000 employees at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston will be fought on home turf, a state district judge ruled Wednesday.The courtroom audience applauded as Galveston County District Judge Wayne Mallia rejected an attempt by attorneys for the University of Texas Board of Regents to move the lawsuit to El Paso.
Alistair Dawson, an attorney for the regents, had argued that El Paso was neutral ground.
Galveston attorney Joe Jaworski, interviewed after the ruling, said a move to El Paso would have stripped the plaintiffs of the advantage of trying the case in the area most affected by the layoffs."The fact that UT would as a matter of first action try to get the case out of the city shows how important it is," Jaworski said.
[...]
Both sides were given 30 minutes to convince Mallia where the proper venue should be. Dawson argued that the law required the case be tried where the meetings were held, in Austin or El Paso. He acknowledged that Austin would be favorable to the regents, but said El Paso was neutral.
But Mallia sided with Jaworski, ruling that the lawsuit sought to reverse the layoff of UTMB employees and therefore Galveston was the proper venue.
Tiffany and I have been enjoying the new show Dollhouse lately. Its premise is a bit complicated, and I'm not sure if it can be sustained long-term, but so far it's been worth our time to watch. Recently, I came across this analysis of the show and its premise, which postulates that its own existence dooms it to failure, and I thought it was worth sharing. I don't know that I agree with the author's perspective here, but it's got me thinking. Anyway, read and see what you think. Link via Chad.
It's blog roundup time. I'll refrain from making any lame Rodeo-related jokes. You can thank me by clicking on to read this week's highlights from the Texas Progressive Alliance.
jobsanger knows that more money needs to be raised to pay for needed improvements and repairs to America's infrastructure, but he remains convinced that the Mileage Tax Is A Terrible Idea.
WCNews at Eye On Williamson gets readers ready for hte upcoming Voter ID debate, or as the the Texas GOP calls it The single most important issue facing Texas today.
The new video at Texas Liberal is called Reading About The Panic Of 1873 In Front Of The Enron Building.
Over at McBlogger, Captain Kroc posts an interesting piece about seemingly unrelated issues, Rush Limbaugh and Child Molestation.
The Texas Cloverleaf gives a brief on Equality TX Lobby Day this past Monday.
Off the Kuff looks at the case against voter ID, also known as the single most important issue facing Texas today, as advanced by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst.
DosCentavos posts about the latest on the Voter ID. Can national Latino political and economic muscle be flexed effectively, as it was for Obama?
Obama sent the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to see what our military can do to stop drug cartel activities. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme thinks John Cornyn is shopping border violence as a theme for his 2012 presidential run.
BossKitty at TruthHugger is frustrated at the regression, into childhood, of those who claim to be Republicans. They are NOT Republicans. They are the Neo-Republicans who have hi-jacked the party name to deceive ordinary conservative Americans. They have stolen the GOP cloak to hide their real agenda. Op Ed: Neo-Republicans Are Not The Grand Old Party, scattalogical analogies.
Xanthippas at Three Wise Men rounds up opinion on the newly released OLC memos. We knew they'd be bad...but still.
John at Bay Area Houston says the Harris County GOP's "Give a Mexican a Bike" program is probably against federal law and smothered with hypocrisy.
As the head of FreeRepublic.com gets visited by the Secret Service, PDiddie at Brains and Eggs finds several GOP pre-post-mortems on the GOP.
TXsharon joined other blogs in areas effected by unconventional natural gas drilling in asking readers to TAKE ACTION and let The View know they were irresponsible to give T.Boone Pickens free advertising for his plan without investigating the full implications. The same drilling practices Pickens promotes recently contaminated water wells in the Marcellus Shale causing one to explode. Manhattan borough president called for drilling moratorium.
Via email from State Sen. Mario Gallegos:
This Tuesday, March 10, 2009, the Senate Committee of the Whole will conduct a hearing on proposed photo Voter Identification (SB 362 by Fraser) legislation in the Texas Senate Chamber. On behalf of all Texans, your testimony is vital to blocking unnecessary Voter ID legislation. Please come to Austin to voice your opinion.Here is what we are hearing regarding the specific schedule that day:
9 a.m. - Hearing will begin with invited testimony
Midday - Hearing resumes with public testimony (anyone can sign up to testify) after the daily Senate session
There is no justification for Voter ID, this legislation only address in person voter fraud - a problem which is virtually non-existent. Despite spending millions on a 2005-2006 Voter Fraud crusade, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott did not find or prosecute one case of Voter Impersonation.
Currently, voters can participate in an election by presenting their voter registration card. The Voter ID proposal would require voters to produce an official ID along with their voter registration card in order to cast their vote. This legislation will create a bureaucratic nightmare for voting that will affect the elderly and minority communities across this state.
In fact, after Indiana passed their Voter ID legislation, twelve elderly nuns were denied access to the poles, because they did not have a valid photo ID. Make no mistake this legislation is aimed at all of us.
As you may recall two years ago I risked my life and went against doctor's orders to block unnecessary partisan legislation, this is how important this issue is to me and to all Texans. This time I am asking you to come to Austin and fight along side me. In order to protect our fundamental right to vote we need everyone to attend this important hearing.
How to testify:
How can YOU be a part of preserving your civic duty to vote? According to the Senate Rules all you have to do in order to testify, is show up and fill out a witness affirmation card. If you want to register your opposition to the bill, but not testify, then just check on the card where it says "does not wish to testify," and your name will be added to the record as having opposed the legislation, without offering testimony. Unfortunately, there is no way to sign up in advance.
Thank you and see you on March 10th!
If you cannot attend the hearing you can still help the fight against Senate Bill 362 by Fraser:
Write a letter to local newspaper
Spread the word to your friends and family
Thank you for your support,Mario Gallegos, Jr.
Texas Senator
District 6
Sen. Rodney Ellis is also on this:
When the Texas legislature should be serving the public by addressing the serious issues facing our state today--access to health care, improving education, addressing the serious issues facing our state's economy-- Republicans have chosen to focus on a partisan attempt to deny many the right to vote. Voter identification is a bitterly partisan issue, one that some in the Texas Senate knew would never be heard unless they changed the rules. On the second day of the 81st legislative session, they did just that.I recently wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, urging the U.S. Department of Justice to review this bill to ensure that Texas is complying with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act requires Texas, and several other states, to pre-clear any election procedure that may affect minority voters. The Voter Suppression bill will do nothing to ensure the integrity of our election process. It will only serve to suppress thousands of minority and elderly voters from exercising their rights as American citizens.
We need your help. The Voter Suppression bill is coming to the Senate floor to be voted on by the Committee of the Whole Senate on Tuesday, March 10 at 9am. I encourage you to participate in the democratic process that some are trying to suppress by signing up to testify at the Texas Capitol in Austin Tuesday morning.
If you are willing to testify please come to the Texas Capitol on Tuesday, March 10 or email Dallas Jones at dallas.jones@senate.state.tx.us. Please include your:
* Full Name
* Mailing Address
* Email Address
* Contact Phone NumberThank you for your attention regarding this pressing issue facing our state.
Sincerely,
Senator Rodney Ellisemail: rodney.ellis@rodneyellis.com
web: http://www.rodneyellis.com
I've blogged before about SB488, the "Safe Passing Bill". Via email from Jon Boyd of the CTC, I'm told that the bill will be heard by the Senate Committee on Transportation & Homeland Security this week. Bike Texas has the details.
What's happening now.The 2009 Safe Passing Act, Senate Bill SB 488 will be heard by the Texas State Senate Committee on Transportation & Homeland Security on Wednesday morning, March 11, 2009 in Hearing Room E1.016 in the Capitol Extension.
The bill includes the "3-feet clearance" provision for cars passing cyclists. It has also been expanded to address right and left hooks and harassment for a range of "vulnerable road users" including pedestrians, persons in wheelchairs, utility workers, motorcyclists and others on the road or roadside not in a protective steel vehicle shell.
What you can do to help.
Below are the Senators on the Transportation Committee, with their party affiliation and general district areas.
Supporting SB 488
John Carona, (chair and bill co-author) R-Dallas, Dist. 16
Kirk Watson, (vice-chair) D-Austin, Dist. 14
Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, Dist. 10
Rodney Ellis, (bill co-author) D-Houston, Dist. 13
Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, Dist. 29
Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, Dist. 25Uncertain on Support for SB 488
Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, Dist. 3
Joan Huffman, R-Houston, Dist. 17
Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, Dist. 8Click here to identify the Texas State Senator who represents you.
* If you are represented by a State Senator who serves on the Transportation Committee, please call or email your Senator by Tuesday to ask for their "Yes" vote. If they already support SB 488, thank them. If they are uncertain on SB 488, urge them to vote "Yes". Communication should be direct and frank but should always be respectful. If you are not a constituent of any of these Senators, please do not contact their offices because it creates additional unnecessary staff work. They naturally place much higher value on contact from constituents.
* If you live in the Austin area or can easily travel to Austin, come to the hearing at 8:00 a.m. (More details are below.) Please wear business attire including coat and tie for men. Even if you do not have a Senator on the committee who represents you, your presence is very important.
The Chron's David Barron talks to some experts about putting slot machines at horse tracks, which is one of several major proposals to expand gambling in Texas this legislative session.
William Eadington, an economics professor at the University of Nevada and director of the university's Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming, questions the accepted wisdom in racing circles that video slots are a magic bullet for racing."The official argument is that this is a way to save racing and increase purses, which will attract better horses," Eadington said. "The only thing wrong with that is that it hasn't really held up.
"Racing continues to be in decline. If you look at handle and on-track attendance and net revenue after payment of purses -- any of the standard measures -- it has been stagnant for 20 years."
While track operators stand to benefit financially from state licenses for video slots, granting such licenses during an economic downturn and limiting the field to racetrack owners cuts into potential state tax benefits by eliminating the large casino operators as competing bidders, Eadington said.
"Most of the major companies, with a couple of exceptions, are in no position to be bidding on casino licenses. They have no money for capital commitments," Eadington said. "In that sense, this is not a great time to be putting things out for bid. You foreclose the option of doing something better if and when the economy gets going again."
Difficult times for the resort casino industry, of course, make this a perfect time for racetracks to seek state legislation that would grandfather them in as video slot operators.
"It's all political," the economist said. "What (the tracks) would like is an environment that preserves the possibility of long-term excess profits. If they can have exclusivity in slots in urban areas, they are potentially very profitable."
Meanwhile, John Nova Lomax has a cover story in the Press about the history of casino gambling in Galveston and the debate today about bringing it back as a means to revitalize the place post-Ike. I think this is the key bit:
You can see arguments for and against casinos before your eyes. Both major Lake Charles casinos sport huge parking lots -- which begs the question of where they could fit in Galveston.Those lots are also jam-packed with cars with Texas license plates. When you couple that with all the signs touting the many shuttles offering dirt cheap transport from nine pickup points in Houston to the casinos, you realize the magnitude of the cash drain over the Sabine.
Both the Isle of Capri and L'Auberge du Lac are vast complexes that rise mirage-like out of acres of concrete in the middle of nowhere. Each offers in-house restaurants, shops, clubs and lodging, and that underscores one of [gambling opponent Harris] Kempner's main anti-casino contentions -- that [Allen] Flores and the Strand merchants are fooling themselves if they think casinos will bring them customers. Even in the old days, he says, the Balinese Room knew well how to lock down the junket trade. "When the casinos wanted to attract banquets, they undercut," he says. "They could afford to do that because they can make food, drink, shelter and entertainment a loss leader, and they will do it again."
Kinky Friedman has been saying for a long time that he wants to run for Governor again, this time as a Democrat. He's now finally getting ready to make that official. At least, that's what he tells Gardner Selby:
Friedman told me today he'll decide by the end of this month whether to start an exploratory committee--a step enabling him to raise money for a bid."It's time to win," Friedman said. "If I were to win the Democratic nomination, I have the best chance of winning" against Gov. Rick Perry or Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who are expected to face off in the 2010 GOP primary.
"I'm the only (prospective candidate) since Ann Richards who can excite the grass roots," Friedman said. "If we run a generic Democrat, we're going to get beat again." Richards was governor from 1991 to 1995.
I asked him if he'd place Tom Schieffer of Fort Worth, the former ambassador, in the generic category; Schieffer started his Democratic gubernatorial committee on Monday. Friedman said he doesn't know Schieffer.
So what's he depending on before starting his committee?
"Mostly my conscience," Friedman said, and "mostly if I can bring about the betterment of Texas." Also, "can I win where I don't think the others can?"
Unprompted, Friedman outlined a prospective campaign platform.
He envisions a "no-kill" Texas with executions banned. He vows to give every schoolteacher a $3,000 raise the day he takes office. He said he'd seek to repeal the revamped business franchise tax, perhaps replacing it with a state personal income tax or the legalization of casino gaming.
Hailing President Obama's success at the polls, Friedman said he'd similarly count on small donations to give him liftoff while he tests his support across rural Texas where residents, he said, have been ignored by Democrats for years.
"We're very close" to getting started, he said. "We just have to pull the trigger."
Did you remember to spring forward?
The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country's love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. I swear, if it's not one thing, it's another.
Would you pay money to hear former President Bush speak? I'd have paid money to not hear him speak if I could have.
It's only wasteful spending when it's spent someplace else.
The party of ideas. Old, stale, recycled ideas.
Saying Obama is more analytical than Bush is like saying I have more facial hair than Olivia.
The case for monitoring volcanos.
RNC Chair Michael Steele learns the hard way who the real leader of the GOP is.
Product reviews that need to happen.
Grown-up Calvin and Hobbes. That second one really gets to me. Via Chad.
The ultimate David Brooks column. Via Niq.
I'm sorry, Rush! Big John and I love you! Now can we all leave Rush Limbaugh alone!
Um, Wolverine?
It seems that health care reform is lucky in its enemies.
Go ahead! Go Galt! Please!
There are some places that technology just shouldn't take you. This and this are two of them.
I just want to say that I love daylight saving time. I love having more sunlight hours after work, when we can all use them. Double daylight saving time might be a bit much for me, but if we kept this schedule year-round it would be fine by me. I don't mind dark mornings - as someone who was out of the house a little after 6 AM every day to go to high school and whose work day started at 6:30 for many years, I'm used to dark mornings. It's dark afternoons and dinnertimes that get to me.
Show of hands: Who's with me on this, and who's on the other side? Leave a comment and let me know.
This story doesn't really advance our knowledge of Justice Sharon Keller, but it does provide some insight as to her supporters. At least, it confirms that she has them. How they can reconcile their opinion of her with some of her more outrageous rulings and statements about the justice system and the appellants that appear before her, we don't know because they didn't ask. But we do get one interesting new tidbit:
Judge Keller's lawyer, Charles L. Babcock, said that many people shared in a failure of communication that day and that her role was minor."Hindsight being 20/20, I think Judge Keller is certainly sorry that the system broke down," Mr. Babcock said. "As far as her overt actions, I don't think she feels she did anything wrong. Nor do I."
UPDATE: Scott and Vince have more.
Texans for Public Justice have put together a really good report on government subsidies for WalMart here in Texas that I highly recommend. Stories like this constitute another reason why I tend not to get too bent out of shape over things like the driving deputies. That story is about a couple thousand dollars, and it generates a front page story in the newspaper and a ton of outrage and snark. This one is about millions of dollars being funneled from counties and cities to one of the largest and most profitable businesses in the world, and it will largely be ignored. I confess, I don't quite understand why that is. Be that as it may, read it and if you live in an area where your tax dollars are going to benefit WalMart's bottom line, you might consider giving some feedback about that to the elected officials who made it happen.
Nice little shoutout to Houston's Catastrophic Theater.
Recently returned from a month-long residency at New Hampshire's prestigious MacDowell Colony for artists, Jason Nodler is bursting with exciting plans and projects for his Houston-based Catastrophic Theatre Company.His agenda for the next year includes:
- Bluefinger, a world-premiere rock-opera to be created in collaboration with Charles Thompson -- aka Black Francis, best known as front man for the influential alternative-rock group Pixies -- to begin workshops in December for a premiere here in early 2010;
- Catastrophic's first international collaboration, a new Albanian-language treatment of Friedrich Durrenmatt's classic The Visit, to be performed in Kosovo in partnership with the Mitrovica Cultural Center this summer;
- A partnership with Stages Repertory Theater that will have Catastrophic staging three productions there, including a new showcase for Houston favorite Tamarie Cooper, and another premiere based on the life and work of writer-musician Daniel Johnston (following Speeding Motorcycle, the hit Johnston-inspired rock opera Nodler created in 2006);
- And the Houston premiere of Lisa D'Amour's acclaimed off-Broadway play Anna Bella Eema at DiverseWorks, in September.
Nodler has been a leader in Houston's alternative arts scene for more than a decade, first as founding artistic director of Infernal Bridegroom Productions, and now with Catastrophic. Launched in April 2008, regrouping many of Nodler's former IBP colleagues, Catastrophic presented several intriguing shows last year and really hit its stride with its back-to-back productions of two works by Chicago playwright Mickle Maher (The Strangerer and Spirits to Enforce) in November and December.
The story about the deputies that were assigned driving duties for Sheriff Adrian Garcia and County Judge Ed Emmett got an extended play in the Chron thanks to a letter to the editor from Garcia and an email he sent to his distribution list, which led to this blog post by story author Liz Peterson. I mostly want to say that I was pleasantly surprised to see this bit:
I'm surprised the story warranted such a strong response from Garcia. A good percentage of readers thought we were making a mountain out of a mole hill anyway.
Dear Friend:As the Sheriff of Harris County I made a commitment to make our communities safer and take the fight to criminal street gangs: both domestic and international. I vowed to fight drug and human trafficking organizations, to fight the threat of terrorism in our area, and to elevate the profile of the Harris County Sheriff's Department so that we may become the lead law enforcement entity in our region, if not in the country. This is an agenda that the citizens want, and my staff and I are working hard everyday to fulfill it. This is an agenda that will make criminals angry.
As I work everyday to realize these goals, I am talking to key stakeholders, engaging the community, reviewing documents, talking to employees and employee groups, and I am making decisions on operational, legal, strategic and budgetary matters, all of this on a nearly daily basis.
In order to maximize my time and focus on these matters, I have a deputy who is assigned to accompany me as I travel throughout the county, so that I can read documents, take and make calls, and use as much of my time on the business of the county.
This deputy has the challenge to act as my eyes and ears as I focus on my duties as the chief law enforcement officer of Harris County. That is why he has received specialized training from HPD and will soon be trained by the U.S. Secret Service. He has to watch for those who do not want me to keep our community safe, and in a community of over 4 million, this is not an easy assignment. He stays in contact with my office and relays critical information to me and will even interrupt my meetings if the information warrants it. When I am not traveling about, he also has additional duties. Furthermore, if other officials like our Judges in our criminal and civil courts are threatened, this deputy will be among one of the first to respond and be assigned to protect them.
Yet the Houston Chronicle published a misleading story yesterday suggesting that this deputy was nothing more than a "chauffeur". I wanted to communicate directly with you to set the record straight. The Harris County Sheriff's Department does not hire chauffeurs. The Chronicle was given examples of his duties but chose not to print any of them. This is inexcusable. This deputy is willing to risk his life to protect the citizens of Harris County as well as to protect me. I hope that the Chronicle will realize how wrong they were to refer to him as just a chauffeur and apologizes to him.
As for the deputy assigned to County Judge Ed Emmett, this deputy has served the Sheriff's Department for over 20 years, and his assignment was the result of a request from Judge Emmett. I took his request seriously.
It is important that we do not let inaccurate reporting go unchallenged. I want to thank you again for your continued support and encourage you to forward this email to your friends and family.
Sincerely,
Adrian Garcia
Harris County Sheriff
I've mentioned before that the microbrewers are going to try again as they did in 2007 to get a law passed that would allow them to sell their wares at their bottling plants. Here's an update in the Chron on where that stands.
State Rep. Jessica Farrar, D-Houston, introduced a bill this week allowing small brewers -- those producing no more than 250,000 barrels a year -- to sell up to 5,000 barrels' worth of beer annually at their breweries.On Monday, she said she felt the bill was limited enough to balance the brewers' interest with those of distributors, the middlemen between breweries and the public.
By Thursday, Farrar had already run into stiff resistance from the distributors' lobby.
"The industry feels that if you crack the door, you'll open a Pandora's box," she said.
Farrar, who two years ago introduced similar legislation that never came out of committee, said she would be willing to further confine the current bill -- restricting the direct sales to the conclusion of a brewery tour, say, or limiting how much beer could be sold to an individual.But regardless, she said, the law needs to recognize the way alcoholic beverages are produced and marketed today. She cited the change a few years ago allowing online sales of wine.
Brock Wagner, the Saint Arnold founder, said allowing small breweries to sell on site would build brand awareness and could actually increase sales at groceries, liquor stores and bars.
"We are not trying to compete with the retailers or our distributors," he said.
For example, Saint Arnold hosts a popular brewery tour each Saturday. Visitors see how the beer is made and can sample some of the varieties. If they could take a six-pack home, Wagner said, they would be more likely to remember the style they liked the next time they go to the store. Or they could share with a friend, who might also then buy the beer.
As it is now, when the tour is over, the brewery can't legally sell anything stronger than root beer.
Imagine touring a Hill Country winery and being told you couldn't take home one of the bottles you liked.
Farrar agreed that a law change would boost tourism.
"Having this allows a visitor to the brewery to have a more complete experience," she said.
"This would be a huge win for the 'little guys,' " added Scott Birdwell, owner of DeFalco's Home Wine & Beer Supplies in Houston, in an e-mail.
Approving the construction contract with Parsons is a big step forward for the long-awaited light rail expansion in Houston. But there's still a lot more to be done.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority will look to the Federal Transit Administration for help funding the University line. The FTA has yet to approve Metro's environmental impact study for the line, a key element in moving the project forward."I'm feeling the frustration of a lot of people in this organization who are trying to get through this process," Metro spokesman George Smalley said Thursday.
He also conceded the University line may not be completed along with the other lines by 2012, as Metro had projected. That, in turn, could affect the completion of the Uptown line.
That is because the east-west University line would connect the 4.7-mile Uptown line with the rest of the MetroRail system.
In other words, no University line, no Uptown train.
"It wouldn't be prudent to build the Uptown line if we had no hope for the University line," President and CEO Frank J. Wilson said Wednesday. "But if the University line is proceeding as we expect, then there's not a reason to hold Uptown back either. It's a carefully choreographed set of moves here."
Say what you want about Amy Winehouse and her trainwreck life. Here's what Genius has to say about her and her musique verite hit "Rehab".
1. Rehab - Amy Winehouse
2. Papa Was A Rolling Stone - The Temptations
3. Tell Me Something Good - Rufus
4. Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowza, Yowza, Yowza) - Chic
5. Cross My Broken Heart - The Jets
6. I Heard It Through The Grapevine - Marvin Gaye
7. I Got You (I Feel Good) - James Brown
8. Hot Stuff - Donna Summer
9. Hit The Road, Jack - Ray Charles
10. Got To Be Real - Cheryl Lynn
And as played:
1. Rehab - Amy Winehouse
2. I'm You're Boogie Man - KC and the Sunshine Band
3. Want Ads - The Honey Cone
4. Silent Night - Aretha Franklin
5. Band of Gold - Freda Payne
6. Love/Hate - Pebbles
7. I've Found Someone Of My Own - The Free Movement
8. Busted - Ray Charles
9. Three Times A Lady - The Commodores
10. River Deep, Mountain High - Ike and Tina Turner
That is to say, Genius says "You sure she's not the love child of Motown and disco?" Not that there would be anything wrong with that. What's on your playlist this week?
The following is a press release from a coalition of activists, including the Sierra Club, Environment Texas, Independent Texans, Houston Tomorrow, and the CTC:
Representatives of a broad coalition of quality of life, political reform, and environmental groups and citizens from across the state are requesting that the five Commissioners of the Texas Transportation Commission (the Commission) slow down and revisit the transportation projects that they will vote on Thursday morning at 10:00 AM to include in Texas' request to the Federal government for use of American Economic Recovery Act transportation funds. The Commission has the authority to delay the vote and tell the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) to reconsider the project list.
With $1.2 billion of stimulus funding at stake, many Texans, including Texas legislators, have raised red flags, citing a lack of transparency and fairness in the process led by the TxDOT and culminating in the vote by the Commission today. The concerned groups charge that TxDOT failed to address environmental and quality of life issues, including development of alternative forms of transportation.
The rest of the release is beneath the fold. I will note that if you're one of those people who thinks Metro should have been more transparent in their negotiations with Parsons, you ought to be holding TxDOT to a similar level of scrutiny. It's still the public's money, after all.
Quality of Life and Environment at Stake with Bad ProjectsThe coalition is asking TxDOT to delay its vote tomorrow and expressing concerns about quality of life and environmental impacts from new roads that drive sprawl development in sensitive, uninhabited areas of Texas. The groups point out that such projects pose serious risks to the climate, to Texans' quality of life, risks to groundwater quality and quantity, air quality, habitat and species diversity. The coalition asserts that the current list of projects will encourage a new wave of inefficient housing development at a time when foreclosures are widespread and the market is moving away from such development. The groups are asking TxDOT to provide transportation infrastructure closer and more connected to schools, jobs, and services in places where people already live.
"What we build now will determine where we work and where we live for decades to come, as well as determining our quality of life," said Jon Boyd, Advocacy Chair for the Citizens' Transportation Coalition. "Bad transportation projects squander taxpayers' money, and sever neighborhoods and habitats. TxDOT needs to slow down and think carefully about the project list. Stimulus funding should address the needs of all Texans - not just developers, contractors, and special interests."Instead of considering true environmental impacts, TxDOT's short list is biased toward new highways in uninhabited places and it includes projects that are actively opposed by citizen groups. Among other projects, many Texans oppose the Grand Parkway and feel that it will destroy the heart of one of Texas' ecological treasures, the Katy Prairie.
"TxDOT proposes highway robbery by destroying Houston's beautiful Katy Prairie, encouraging energy wasteful sprawl, and paving empty spaces. TxDOT should fix the roads where people already live and not build new 'Roads to Nowhere,'" said Sierra Club's Brandt Mannchen.Comparing an earlier TxDOT list submitted to the Texas Select Committee on Federal Economic Stimulation, and its later short list, new construction now takes precedence over rebuilding bridges and other proposals to fix existing transportation systems. TxDOT never considered transit, sidewalks, complete streets, or other multimodal solutions, even though this pool of stimulus money was designed for shovel-ready, green projects, such as Houston's innovative light rail expansion.
"There are better and more responsible ways to spend this money that create more jobs and reduce our burden on the environment," said Alejandro Savransky, Environment Texas Field Organizer. "If we continue with business as usual - more highways and toll roads to nowhere - we will be laying the groundwork for decades of increased global warming pollution and dependence on oil. We should instead choose a different path. Public transportation and transportation alternatives mean more and better jobs now, as well as less global warming pollution, fewer asthma attacks from air pollution, and lower dependence on oil."Lack of Accountability and Transparency Put Stimulus Funds at Risk
Many of the groups involved have been closely following the TxDOT Sunset Review Commission's numerous recommendations for reform of TxDOT principal among those being to include more public input. These recommendations are under consideration in current legislation.
"The people of Texas and the legislature spoke clearly and comprehensively to the Texas Sunset Commission about their concerns with TxDOT behavior." says Jay Blazek Crossley of Houston Tomorrow, a nonprofit that works on transportation and urban planning issues in Houston. "Texans are asking the agency to address the multimodal transportation needs of all ages, lifestyles, and abilities, to overhaul its public participation process, to develop long range planning processes that Texas communities feel have a positive impact on their future, and to stop advocating to the public in favor of any particular policy alternative,"TxDOT Executive Director Amadeo Saenz claims to have achieved an "open, in-depth, and transparent" process in developing the stimulus funds list, however the 'delay the vote' coalition group representatives have experienced differently. TxDOT representatives have not addressed citizen concerns, have not explained how TxDOT prioritized projects for stimulus funding, have not explained a process for working with citizens and the legislature to use these funds to build a stronger Texas. Instead they have belittled those who have complained. In line with the Sunset Review Commission's mandates currently in process in the Legislature, the new stimulus funds tracker from the Texas Comptroller's office asserts, 'At both the state and federal levels, transparency and accountability are critical parts of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act.' http://www.window.state.tx.us/finances/stimulus
The Texas legislature and federal congressional delegation should work with the federal and state administration to ensure that Texas stimulus funds create good jobs, preserve Texas land, and provide efficient transportation in a way that the public feels is open and transparent."I hope all Texans - regardless of their politics - go to recovery.gov to contact Vice President Joe Biden, who was appointed by the President to be in charge of the stimulus funds," said Linda Curtis with Independent Texans. "Let the Vice President know that federal intervention is warranted if TxDOT doesn't slow down and take the 120 days they have to hear citizens' real and justifiable concerns."
The Commission is scheduled to vote at 10:00 AM on Thursday in Austin (125 11th Street). Representatives of the coalition will show up to request a delay.
Reporters and interested persons can compare TxDOT's original list,
ftp://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/stimulus/house_select.pdf
with TxDOT's current, short list, (which is the one they will vote on Thursday), to see what was dropped: ftp://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/stimulus/project_list.pdf
Are you looking for a bicycle race, but without all those tedious mountains and drug tests? Well then, the Tour de Houston is what you're looking for.
The 2009 ride date will be Sunday March 22, beginning and ending downtown at McKinney @ Crawford, in Discovery Green, across from the George R. Brown Convention Center.Route distances will be approximately 20, 40, and 70 miles.
Pre-Registration: $25 for adults and $15 for youth 12 years and under. Pre-Registration ends at 11:59 p.m. Thursday, March 19, 2009. Registrants will pay $35 on the day of the event.
Funds raised will benefit the Houston Parks and Recreation Department through the Houston Parks Board.
The subject of the partisan polarization of Congress came up in conversation recently, and along with it was the topic of redistricting and gerrymandered districts. That made me hunt up this paper (PDF) from Princeton's Nolan McCarty, UCSD's Keith Poole, and NYU's Howard Rosenthal, which debunks the notion that weirdly-drawn Congressional districts are a significant factor.
Both pundits and scholars have blamed increasing levels of partisan conflict and polarization in Congress on the effects of partisan gerrymandering. We assess whether there is a strong causal relationship between congressional districting and polarization. We find very little evidence for such a link. First, we show that congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences. Second, we conduct simulations to gauge the level of polarization under various "neutral" districting procedures. We find that the actual levels of polarization are not much higher than those produced by the simulations. We do find that gerrymandering has increased the Republican seat share in the House; however, this increase is not an important source of polarization.
For what it's worth, when the Lege - or some appointed commission - gets around to drawing new lines, the main criterion I hope they use isn't competitiveness per se, but community of interest, and to a lesser extent compactness. The problem with valuing competitiveness is that you can simply glue together deep blue areas with deep red ones; not only is that unsatisfactory, as half the district will feel unrepresented at all times, it doesn't guarantee a moderate result - you may well get two candidates whose strategy is base turnout. Ironically, the much-maligned Austin-to-Houston CD10, which was drawn to be a solid red district, is basically what you'd get from prioritizing competitiveness. That's not my idea of good design. Whatever we'd wind up with in terms of competitiveness, I think we'd be much better served emphasizing communities of interest, and we'd get representation that's no more or less partisan than what we've already got.
Fort Bend County Commissioner Richard Morrison writes about the recently-greenlighted Grand Parkway Segment E and the possibility that stimulus funds could be used to fund what will become a toll road.
If Segment E is funded from the stimulus money and finally constructed, exorbitant tolls from this segment will be used to finance and construct the remaining segments in Liberty, Montgomery, Brazoria, Chambers, and Galveston Counties. That means the citizens of Fort Bend County and North-west Harris County will be paying for those segments even though they never drive on them. From a mobility standpoint many of these remaining segments are useless. Miles and miles of the remaining pieces will cross open prairie where no one lives, will have little or no effect on traffic and are not needed. When our transportation dollars from Washington D.C. are desperately needed to get people to and from our population centers, it only seems reasonable that the federal stimulus money should be spent on actual mobility projects.
If so, there's a lot of people who won't be sorry to see it go.
"We have counted on testing and testing only. And it's caused a lot of angst in the schools," Senate Public Education Chair Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, said Wednesday about the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills."We'll still test, but we're using other variables to give us the results that we need."
Shapiro and House Public Education Chair Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, plan to file the school accountability legislation on Thursday. The changes -- which would start in the 2011-12 school year -- aim to gradually elevate Texas into the top 10 states when it comes to preparing students for college or equipping them with workforce skills.
Texas ranked 46th in the country last year in the Scholastic Assessment Test scores and last among all states in the percentage of adult population with a high school diploma.
The legislative proposal contemplates a "Texas diploma" for college-bound students and a "standard diploma" for those seeking skilled workforce training and a related career. The standard diploma would require three years of English and one year of algebra."This diploma will be in a field that says you are certified and are skilled workforce ready," Shapiro said.
Students would be measured by individual improvement instead of a single test score. Existing "exemplary" "recognized" and "acceptable" ratings for schools and school districts will be eliminated and replaced by an "accreditation tier" focused on individual student achievement based on readiness for college or career.
High school, middle school and elementary school campuses also can earn distinctions for excellence in a variety of areas, such as growth in student achievement, workforce readiness, second language learning, fine arts and physical fitness.
Student testing "will cover more than minimum skills," Eissler said. Tests will be given in each grade level in an effort to get "an instant growth indicator," Eissler said, measuring a student's academic improvement from one year to the next.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority board of directors on Wednesday unanimously approved a $1.46 billion contract for four new light rail lines, which would add 20 miles to its lone seven-mile line along Main Street.Under the contract, which came after almost a year of negotiations, Parsons Transportation Group is responsible for designing, building, operating and maintaining the new East End, Southeast, North and Uptown lines at an average cost of $73 million a mile. Metro has said the lines will be complete by 2012.
A fifth rail line, the University line, and an intermodal terminal near downtown still are planned, but are not included in the contract.
Metro officials said the agency intends to spend $632 million on the initial phase of the project, primarily on the East End line along Harrisburg as it is further along in the planning than the others.
"Today is obviously a very significant milestone in our building of the Metro Solutions program," board Chairman David Wolff said moments before the vote. "Our objective is to improve transit in Houston."
The contract includes $50 million in incentives for Parsons and the other contractors to complete the project early. Parsons and Veolia Transportation, which operates systems in 150 cities in the United States and Canada, will team up as the operations and maintenance contractor. Parsons also will be responsible for any design defects for five years after completion of the rail lines.[...]
Jeff Moseley, president of the Greater Houston Partnership, told the Metro board that Houston's business community was pleased with the inclusion of community input to help determine whether incentives should be awarded.
Under the contract, the community and Metro leaders will "score" contractors on their ability to maintain physical access to neighborhoods and businesses during construction of the light rail expansion.
Construction on the initial phase of the project likely will begin no earlier than June, a Metro spokesman said.
I feel like I've read this story about part-time drivers for Sheriff Adrian Garcia and County Judge Ed Emmett before. It reminded me of this one about state Senate staffer salaries, and this one about City Council expenditures. In each case, it involved a sizable fuss over a relatively small amount of money that was being spent on something that was (to my mind, at least) justifiable. I understand the reason for the fuss, and I don't have a problem with anyone who wants to kick it up, I just think it's not that big a deal, but rather is one of those things that looks - or at least, can be made to look - worse than it is. I figure in return for 20% or so of two deputies' time, we can all rest assured that a couple of busy guys won't be working their BlackBerrys while driving. I don't know about you, but I've gotten worse trades than that. So put me in Judge Emmett's corner on this:
Emmett said he believes the commissioners spend too much time worrying about minutiae like his driver and not enough time deliberating over multimillion-dollar projects."If the commissioners really want to pitch a fit and say this is the wrong thing to do and they're not going to approve it, fine. I don't care," Emmett said. "But that, to me, would be nonsensical."
The venerable Brennan's of Houston restaurant, which burned down during Hurricane Ike, will reopen later this year.
Alex Brennan-Martin said he wanted to put to rest the rumor that Brennan's of Houston would never reopen.It will, in October, 13 months after a fire resulting from Hurricane Ike gutted the historical Midtown structure, home for 42 years of one of Houston's most popular dining venues.
Standing under a sign above Brennan's Smith Street entrance that read "Thank You Houston! See Ya'll Soon!" Brennan-Martin, accompanied by Houston Mayor Bill White, announced that the restaurant will be restored and is expected to start serving turtle soup and Bananas Foster to loyal customers in October.
"It's a happy day," said Brennan-Martin, who served a three-course meal of Brennan's restaurant news on Tuesday morning. Not only will the eatery reopen, providing 125 new jobs for the city, the Brennan's brand will expand in Houston with two new ventures.
Good for Dallas. If they can do this, unanimously, even, then there must be hope for Houston and its proponents here. We might get lucky and avoid an Ashby lawsuit, but it sure would be nice to be better prepared for this sort of thing the next time it comes around. Right?
Yesterday was the filing deadline for the District H special election. Usually, that brings a last-minute surprise in the form of an unexpected candidate. This time, it brought a different kind of surprise.
As one of the first people to declare her candidacy to replace Adrian Garcia in the District H City Council seat, Karen Derr seemed to have lined up all her ducks in a row.
Until today.
The Realtor and potential candidate apparently forgot to file her papers with the City Secretary by yesterday's deadline.
Oops.
Officially filing the paperwork in candidacy 101. Derr had done everything else by the book. She started a website (which was just taken down), appointed her husband treasurer, and had a high name ID thanks to her real estate business. The City Secretary's list does not show Derr, and that is a major break for Maverick Welsh, the former Chief of Staff for Council Member Peter Brown.
KHOU has more.
Derr tells 11 News that she thought the city's deadline matched a state deadline for special elections, which is not until later this month."To tell you the truth, we've been out with a very grassroots campaign on the trail and going to three and four meetings a day," she said. "We dropped the ball, evidently."
"You dust yourself off, and you try again," she said.
She added that supporters are urging her to either mount a write-in campaign or run for an At-Large seat in November. Derr says she has not yet made a decision, nor is she ready to endorse another candidate.
So with Derr out, who's left? It's still a long list.
The order on the ballot, which was determined by a drawing according to a longstanding tradition set up by the city secretary, is as follows: Edward "Ed" Gonzalez, Lupe Garcia, Gonzalo Camacho, Hugo Mojica, Larry Williams, Maverick Welsh, James Partsch-Galvan, Yolanda Navarro Flores and Rick Rodriguez.
Karen Derr Campaign Filing DeadlineThe Karen Derr campaign inadvertently missed the March 3rd campaign deadline for filing for the City Council District H May 9th special election. "We've had our treasurer's designation in order for weeks but we misunderstood the special election filing deadline," explains Derr who takes full responsibility for the missed filing. "I have a dynamic team of both seasoned and first time campaign staff and we have been very excited to be running a truly grass roots campaign, out in the field going door to door." Derr, who has never run for public office before was seen as one of the frontrunners in the race. Candidates can now only file as write-in candidates for the special election or can file to be on the ballot for the general election in November.
That wasn't his intent, of course, but it's clear to see in his plea for a "compromise" on the measure that the more people like Lt. Gov. Dewhurst argue for voter ID legislation, the more obvious it is that they're pursuing a partisan fix to a non-existent problem.
"I still can't believe we're not really close on this," Dewhurst told reporters after the Senate adjourned for the day, just a few minutes ago. "Democrats are concerned about elderly voters with no ID ... and I've wanted a grace period of 2-4 years. We've also considered having the state paying for the ID."
Asked why the Voter ID law is needed, Dewhurst cited allegations that surfaced last year during the presidential campaign in Ohio, of advocacy groups that registered to vote a number of fakers: "Mickey Mouse, the Dallas Cowboys starting team" among others."In Harris County, we had 4-5,000 people registered to vote who, when they were called for jury duty, they sent their (voter) cards back. That could have been a felony," he said.
As for the "Mickey Mouse" voter registration case Dewhurst cites, the thing to remember is that none of those obviously phony registrations turned into actual voter registration cards that were then used by actual people. No fraudulent votes were cast. There's been a relentless focus on this issue over the past few years by the state and national GOP, and the number of prosecutable cases that they've turned up, even by the most partisan Attorneys General and the Bush Justice Department, have been vanishingly few. They don't have the goods, so they point to something vaguely similar and hope it confuses people.
On the matter of voter registration, I'll refer you to these two posts by Matt Yglesias last fall. We deliberately make it hard to register to vote, and easy for people who want to vote and are perfectly eligible to vote to be denied that opportunity, as happened to many Harris County residents last year. If Dewhurst and the Republicans are really serious about finding a compromise, I say that Greg's idea about same-day voter registration, right up to and including Election Day, would be the starting point for such negotiations.
But I don't expect them to try. This is just a little good-cop stuff, done in the hope that we'll forget everything that came before now, including in this session. Dewhurst didn't force the two-thirds rule change to build consensus, he did it to clear a path. I expect him and his partymates to take it. The only question is what the Dems have in store to try to trip them up.
Patricia Kilday Hart reports that Sen. Jeff Wentworth's redistricting commission bill has a chance this session, thanks to the change in Speaker.
Wentworth, who presented his bill to the Senate State Affairs Committee, tells me he has confirmed pledges from six of nine Senate committee members to vote for his plan to turn congressional redistricting over to an independent commission. He gave a compelling -- if lengthy -- argument at State Affairs today for a new congressional redistricting mechanism, noting that lawmakers of both parties have been guilty of overreaching, vengeful actions that lead inexorably to expensive court appeals every decade.He's optimistic about his chances in the House, since it died there last session since "Craddick personally killed it." Here's the story: Wentworth had pledges from more than a majority of the House committee, but chairman Joe Crabb told him Craddick had instructed him to sit on the bill. Wentworth then collected signatures form 20 House chairman in support of his bill, but Craddick wouldn't relent. Why? Wentworth says Craddick instructed him to go read "Craddick vs. Smith" -- a 30-year-old lawsuit over Craddick's mistreatment during redistricting at the hands of Democrats. (Wentworth's bill doesn't touch legislative redistricting, but oh well, ....)
Could Texas really go a less bloody form of congressional redistricting? There were two opponents at Monday's hearing -- the executive director of the Republican Party of Texas, and a witness purporting to represent the Republican County Chairman's Association (turns out his group hadn't actually taken an official position on the bill.) Still, things are looking up for Wentworth: Joe Straus was one of the signatures on his letter supporting the bill last session.
Wentworth also claims that Gov. Rick Perry "wants to sign this bill."
This is a good thing.
Working to make good on a campaign promise, recently elected Harris County District Attorney Patricia Lykos agreed on Monday to provide copies of police offense reports to criminal defense lawyers, changing the longstanding practice of allowing attorneys to only take notes from reports.One of the most divisive issues in the criminal courthouse, defense lawyers often complain about the hours spent taking notes from a document that prosecutors have instant access to, which can include witness statements, photographs and other evidence prosecutors intend to introduce at trial.
Mark Bennett, president of the Houston's criminal defense lawyers association, gave Lykos high marks for the change in policy.
"It's an excellent move forward," Bennett said.
Assistant District Attorney Scott Durfee said the release of the actual document requires additional safeguards. Prosecutors are now marking out information that is private under Texas open records law, including Social Security numbers and Texas driver's license information.Defense attorneys also have to sign a confidentiality agreement that mandates that the information can be used only for the case at hand. If they don't sign the agreement, Durfee said, they can work to get the information though a formal discovery process.
Anyway. For a more detailed discussion of the ins and outs of this practice, see Murray Newman and Mark Bennett. May there be more reforms like this coming from the DA's office soon.
Elise Hu has compiled a list of elected officials in Austin who use Twitter, for those of you who are into such things. It's a shorter list than I would have expected, but I'll bet it grows before the legislative session is over. A few locals I can add to the list:
http://twitter.com/BillWhite2010
http://twitter.com/billwhitefortx
Houston Mayor Bill White
http://twitter.com/anniseparker
City Controller and Mayoral candidate Annise Parker
http://twitter.com/roymorales
Roy Morales, HCDE Trustee and candidate for Mayor
http://twitter.com/maverickwelsh
Maverick Welsh, running for District H
http://twitter.com/edforh
Ed Gonzalez, running for District H
http://twitter.com/susancriss
Galveston District Judge Susan Criss
http://twitter.com/JulianCastro
Julian Castro, candidate for Mayor in San Antonio
I'm sure there are others - feel free to chime in with names in the comments - but those are ones I'm following. And if you obsess about celebrities instead of politicians, Twitter has you covered there as well.
The good news: Metro is set to vote on the contract to build the next light rail lines. The bad news is that they're doing is amid headlines like Metro refuses to discuss rail contract details before vote.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority's board is expected to vote on a multi-billion-dollar light rail contract tomorrow, but agency officials have refused to disclose details about the scope and price of the contract prior to the board action.The board is reviewing the proposed contract in a closed-door executive session this afternoon.
Board President David Wolff on Tuesday defended the agency's silence, saying negotiations with its builder, Parsons Transportation Group, likely will continue up until Wednesday's meeting and that the terms of the contract also are likely to change.
Metro spokesman George Smalley today declined to disclose any details of the pending agreement, saying it still was being negotiated.
The board is scheduled to vote at 2 p.m. Wednesday at Metro's downtown office.
"If the public can't find out what's going on until two seconds before the board makes a decision, that's just too late," said Jennifer Peebles, of the non-partisan Web advocacy group, Texas Watchdog. "If they are not giving details before the vote and not allowing us a chance to weigh in, they're making decisions in a bubble."
The first batch of funds is arriving.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development allocated more than $500 million to Texas cities and counties on Monday, part of a wave of stimulus money expected to flow into the state.Federal officials released $14.4 million more to support 12 Texas health centers, many of which provide care to people with no health insurance. The federal money is expected to create more than 400 jobs in the state, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
[...]
The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs received the biggest chunk of money -- about $148.4 million for affordable rental housing projects that rely on low-income housing tax credits.
More than 350 public housing authorities in Texas received $119.8 million for public housing projects, including energy-efficient modernization, capital improvements and critical safety repairs. San Antonio and El Paso received the most public housing assistance with about $14.6 million and $12.7 million, respectively.
Of course, there's still a fight looming over how much Governor Perry wants the state to accept. Towards that end, a group of Democratic legislators will be calling on Perry to take everything that has been allocated for Texas. From their release:
Senator Rodney Ellis (D-Houston,) Representative Jim Dunnam (D-Waco), Senator Leticia Van de Putte (D-San Antonio), Senator Kirk Watson (D-Austin), Senator Eliot Shapleigh (D-El Paso), Senator Eddie Lucio (D-Brownsville) and Senator Mario Gallegos (D-Houston) will hold a press conference to urge Governor Perry to accept all available stimulus funds on Tuesday, March 3, 2009, beginning at 9:00 AM, in the Lieutenant Governor's Press Room.The press conference will call on state leaders to invest the stimulus funding in programs and priorities which will give a hand-up to as many Texans as possible. The legislators will particularly focus on plans to shore up Texas' rapidly dwindling Unemployment Insurance System.
While Texas does not yet face double digit unemployment, as Michigan does, the economic forecast is not rosy. According to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, the Texas economy will lose 111,000 jobs in 2009, and the unemployment rate is expected to rise from 6 to 8.2 percent. The recently passed Economic Recovery Act offers $555.7 million to Texas to shore up its shaky unemployment fund, but the state must first pass a series of reforms to be eligible. Unfortunately, even as Texas accepts stimulus funds, some continue to say the state should reject unemployment funding, simply because it requires small changes to the program.
Finally, on a related note, a group of transportation activists will be making a call of their own to TxDOT tomorrow regarding that agency's plans for its federal stimulus funds.
In February, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) allocated $2.25 billion in federal transportation funds to Texas. The US Department of Transportation (DOT) will allow states up to one year to decide which projects to build.But the Texas Transportation Commission is poised to ram through $1.7 billion of new stimulus-funded projects at their meeting Thursday. The project list is chock full of controversial projects, including the Grand Parkway in Houston, the US-281 toll road across the Edwards aquifer in San Antonio, roads to nowhere, and sprawl highways through environmentally-sensitive areas. Further, many Texans object to spending stimulus on toll roads.
On Tuesday morning, Texans from across the state will converge at the capitol to demand that Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) slow down and do this right. We must ensure our federal stimulus isn't wasted on boondoggles!
What: Joint citizen press conference
Who:
* Texans United for Reform and Freedom (TURF), Terri Hall, http://texasturf.org
* Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, Brandt Mannchen, http://texas.sierraclub.org
* Environment Texas, Alejandro Savransky, http://environmenttexas.org
* IndependentTexans, Linda Curtis, http://indytexans.org
* Houston Tomorrow, Jay Crossley, http://houstontomorrow.org
* Citizens' Transportation Coalition (CTC), Robin Holzer, http://ctchouston.org
When: Tuesday, Mar 3, 2009 at 9:15 amWhere: East steps of the Texas Capitol, Austin, TX
UPDATE: The Observer has more about TxDOT and the fast one they're trying to pull.
Got the following from State Rep. Ellen Cohen's office:
State Representative Ellen Cohen filed House Bill 2070 today to reform the Adult Entertainment Fee she passed during the 80th Legislative Session in 2007."We have been successful in raising the money," Cohen said. "The 1.9 million Texans who are victims of sexual assault could be greatly helped by the $11 million currently collected under this fee. This bill will move us closer to fully addressing sexual assault in Texas."
Primarily, HB 2070 addresses constitutional concerns with two modifications from the original legislation. First, the new bill eliminates a spending provision that previously directed funds to indigent healthcare and will now dedicate all revenue collected to the Sexual Assault Program Fund 5010. Secondly, the fee assessed on certain sexually-oriented businesses would be lowered from $5 to $3 per patron.
Using all funds generated by the Adult Entertainment Fee directly for sexual assault programs will provide an estimated $18 million per year for the fund. This amount will allow for a comprehensive approach to address sexual assault issues in Texas, including research, prevention, response and sex offender management and treatment.
"In the end, the focus must remain on the victim survivors and providing them with the resources they need," Cohen said. "As a Legislator, I will continue to work with members of both parties to bring support to those who need it most. I am confident that my fellow Legislators will, as always, vote with their districts in mind and support the thousands of women, children and men who are survivors of sexual assault."
It's not quite boldly going, but it's still pretty darned cool.
The universe may be filled with Earth-like planets -- worlds where extraterrestrials might flourish.But these planets were once considered too small to spot, even with the latest in space technology.
Now, many astronomers believe NASA's $600 million Kepler telescope, which is scheduled to shoot into space this week, will help to clear up the mystery.
Named for Johannes Kepler, a 17th-century German astronomer who studied planetary motion, the telescope is designed to search 100,000 stars in the Milky Way for Earth-sized rocky planets where water could flow and form streams, lakes and oceans.
Some astronomers believe the spacecraft could eventually find about 50 Earth-like planets.
"If we find that many, it will certainly mean life may well be common throughout our galaxy," said William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center, the astronomer who leads the Kepler science team.
"On the other hand, if we don't find any, that is still a profound discovery," he said. "It will mean that Earth must be very rare. We may be the only life in our universe.
"It will mean there will be no Star Trek."
It's the last week of winter, which I define as "the time before Daylight Savings Time", and it's time again for the weekly roundup of the Texas Progressive Alliance. Click on for the highlights.
McBlogger takes a look at possibilities for 2010.
Bay Area Houston is following a bill to abolish the Texas Residential Construction Commission.
BossKitty at TruthHugger is sad to see that some things have not changed in the minds of the loosers - CPAC Fans Fuse of Hatred - Seeks Civil War
jobsanger discussed a couple of Supreme Court cases. The first case discussed in A Good Supreme Court Decision denied anyone convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse the right to own a gun, and the second case discussed in The Right To Know The Penalties, which will be heard this Fall, will settle the matter of whether an immigrant defendant has a right to be informed of all penalties that could be imposed in his case -- including deportation.
Off the Kuff takes a look at the push for expanded gambling in the Lege this session.
Can you read this resolution, posted on Bluedaze: DRILLING REFORM FOR TEXAS and find any good reason why Big Oil should get to keep the hydraulic fracturing exemption from our Safe Drinking Water Act? Yeah, TXsharon didn't find one either.
nytexan at
The Texas Cloverleaf reviews the TX Stonewall biennial conference in Austin, and notes who was or wasn't there, among elected officials and hopefuls.
WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts on the economic changes that are starting to show up locally in The state of the economy in Williamson County.
Neil at Texas Liberal states his intent to make videos for the blog in Big Texas Liberal Blogging Announcement and Innovation. Also, Neil discusses if Ice Age beasts in Massive Fossil Find-Should Ice Age Creatures Be Brought Back From The Dead?
CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is hopeful that the adults will address the drug cartel violence and figure out how to end the war - the drug war that is.
Rhetoric & Rhythm laments the fact that George W. Bush has become a scapegoat for the conservative movement. Bush did everything they wanted. It's not HIS fault that their ideas don't work.
Xanthippas at Three Wise Men, on the mixed bag that is the Obama administration's decision to try captured terrorist suspect al-Marri in the criminal justice system and what this might mean for the future of the "war on terror."
Do you know the real reason John Sharp and Bill White aren't running for governor? Because they're afraid they will get whipped by a girl, just like Rick Perry. So says PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.
Over at Texas Kaos the 2.7 trillion that Duyba forgot to mention as part of his deficit. As Libby tells it the bubble dwellers who should have been on top of this little detail weren't. "...The bubble dwellers don't know what is going on outside of their self-fixated bubble. Now I understand why President Obama leaves that nutty and toxic place when he wants to speak to real people..."
WhosPlayin has video and commentary on Lewisville's first Barnett Shale gas well.
We have a candidate, one not named Kinky.
Former U.S. Ambassador Tom Schieffer of Fort Worth has just announced he is taking his first formal step toward seeking the Democratic nomination for governor during a Texas Independence Day press conference in the State Capitol."At the very time when Texas desperately needs leadership, people worry that we are experiencing a crisis of leadership," said Schieffer, the younger brother of CBS newsman Bob Schieffer.
Schieffer, who was still overcoming a bout with laryngitis, said he and his wife, Susanne Silber Schieffer, made a final decision about the race on Sunday.
Schieffer, 61, has been moving toward becoming a candidate since returning to Texas at the end of the Bush Administration in January after serving as Bush's ambassador to Australia and Japan. The Schieffers traveled more than 4,000 miles around the perimeter of Texas in a homecoming road trip that reacquainted them with potential voters.
[...]
Before becoming a diplomat in the Bush administration, Schieffer was an investor in the partnership that bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989, with Bush and Edward W. "Rusty" Rose. Schieffer served as team president for eight years, running the club's day-to-day operations and overseeing the building of the Rangers' ballpark in Arlington.
Politically, Schieffer, a Fort Worth attorney, was identified with the conservative-moderate wing of the Texas Democratic Party during the 1970s and 1980s and was active in the campaigns of such high-profile Democrats as U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, Gov. Mark White and Fort Worth Congressman Pete Geren. He was elected to the State Legtislature in 1972, at the age of 25, and served three terms.
I think LizeB summarizes the issue with Schieffer as succinctly as possible:
I'm having a tough time getting my mind around not regretting voting for Bush 4 times and wanting to be Dem candidate for guv.
UPDATE: BOR has video.
As I mentioned on Friday, I had the opportunity to speak with State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte. She's the chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus (I mistakenly said "House Democratic Caucus" in my intro, but got it right after that) and lately has been mentioned as a possible candidate for Governor. We talked about voter ID, the budget, what the Dems hope to accomplish this session, and her future ambitions, among other things. You can listen to it here, as always in MP3 format. And if that's not enough, Phillip Martin of BOR has an interview of his own in the works and will publish it shortly, so be on the lookout for that as well. Let me know what you think.
MADD wants to make it harder for people with a drunk driving conviction to get behind the wheel.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving is again pushing Texas legislators to require ignition interlocks for people convicted of their first driving while intoxicated offense.The ignition interlock device tests a driver's breath to confirm he or she hasn't been drinking before the car will start.
"We really want to see this on first-time offenders in order to prohibit the third or fourth time down the road," said Hope Rangel of Humble, executive director for MADD's Southeast Texas region.
Proposed legislation, including bills filed by state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, and state Rep. Bill Callegari, R-Katy, calls for the interlock to be installed for offenders convicted of their first DWI who are placed on probation.
Two similar measures filed in the last legislative session in 2007 died in committee.
Current Texas law requires interlocks as a condition of probation only for repeat offenders or those with a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.15 in any alcohol-related driving offense.The device also is required for those released on bail while awaiting trial if they are charged with repeat DWI offenses or if they hurt or kill someone while driving drunk.
Although the proposed legislation is encouraging, Rangel said, many convicted drunken drivers in Harris County are opting for jail time instead of probation. If an offender chooses to go to jail, no interlock is installed.
Drunken drivers put on probation have to pay for the device -- which can average about $150 a month -- so they might find jail more appealing, she said.
Facing the stiff costs and strict rules that come with probation, thousands of convicted drivers in recent years have decided spending time behind bars is the better option.And in a county already struggling with crowded jails, that's a disturbing trend. Sentences can be short enough to mean losing only one weekend and a vacation day, but some end up behind bars as long as half a year.
"Because of the number of sanctions and what the defendants feel is the 'hassle factor,' many opt not to go on probation," said County Criminal Court at Law Judge Sherman Ross. "Financially, it's more expensive."
The choice of jail time also may mean fewer options for treating the alcohol problems that land many drivers there.
"Probation has become so onerous that there's no incentive to take it," said Bob Wessels, manager of the county criminal courts at law. "If we really want people in treatment, we aren't providing incentives."
Of the 6,685 DWI defendants in the county who accepted plea agreements last year, 2,894 (43 percent) took jail time rather than probation, Wessels said. In 2000, fewer than 10 percent (479 of 5,034) chose jail.
Last year's figure, though significant, did represent a drop from 2004, when it reached 52 percent. Robert Pelton, past president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association, attributes the decline at least partly to lawyers not doing all they should for their clients.
"I think any attorney is doing a disservice to their client by putting them on probation," he said.
Pelton, a defense attorney for 31 years, said he generally advises clients to take the jail time because probation can be so arduous, financially and otherwise. Probation for DWI carries another risk: If it's revoked, a judge can pile on even more jail time than originally would have been ordered.
This, added to the fact that Harris County has the highest per capita rate of probation revocations in Texas, means it may make more sense to burn some vacation time behind bars, Pelton said.
By the way, the story notes that installing the interlock can already be a condition of bail or probation. It might be nice to know why it's only done sometimes and not as a matter of course before we require it.
Back to the original story:
Research suggests lawbreakers with prior DWI convictions are a serious problem. MADD claims such offenders comprise nearly one-third of the alcohol-related dangers on the road.Last year, Texas had 124,662 residents with three or more DWI convictions, according to the state Department of Transportation. The agency reported 18,271 other Texans had five DWI convictions or more.
One person had 22 convictions, the most of any driver in the state, TxDOT said.
Drunken drivers involved in fatal crashes were eight times more likely to have a prior DWI conviction than sober drivers involved in a fatality, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported in 2007.
[...]
Not everyone supports MADD's proposal.
The American Beverage Institute, a restaurant trade association, is urging the Texas Legislature to reject the bills.
Institute spokeswoman Sarah Longwell said ignition interlocks for first-time DWI convicts "ignore the root cause of today's drunk-driving problem: hard-core alcohol abusers."
The bottom line is that while I agree with the goal of this effort, I have problems with the means being proposed to attain it. Let's fix what's wrong with probation first.
State Rep. Jim Dunnam, who is the chair of the ad hoc committee that is charged with disbursing federal stimulus funds, gave an update on their proceedings. Among other things, the federal money may free up some state revenues.
Normally, the federal government pays about 60 percent of Texas' Medicaid expenses, a contribution known as the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP). Under the stimulus law, the federal government would pay around 66 percent of the expenses, which would, according to Health and Human Services commissioner Albert Hawkins, free up about $4.6 billion in general revenue. Some of it would go to make up for the Medicaid shortfall, but the rest would be free to be appropriated.The stimulus law says a state is not eligible for in increase in its FMAP funding if any of the increase ends up, directly or indirectly, in a state's reserves or rainy day fund.
"There's a question as to what that means," Dunnam said. He said the committee did not yet know whether maintaining the rainy day fund at its current level would result in the feds revoking the FMAP funds. At the beginning of the session, comptroller Susan Combs reported the state had a $9.1 billion budget shortfall, and it seemed to make ends meet, legislators would have to dip into the state's reserves.
"It was very, very clear that if not for the stimulus money that we were going into the rainy day fund," Dunnam said.
The committee hasn't discussed what to do with the freed general revenue, but it seems like Dunnam would be in favor of spending it. He said the stimulus funds were intended to stimulate the economy. If Texas were to use federal funds where state funds are usually spent, and keep state funds, then, he said, "you haven't complied with the intent of the act."
True aficionados know, if you really want the kind of Coca Cola they used to make before the "New Coke" fiasco, you have to get one that was bottled in Mexico.
Coca-Cola Classic, as it has been known since then, wasn't exactly the old formula, because it no longer contained cane sugar. Instead it was sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Regardless, sales skyrocketed and order was restored to the universe.
Now, decades later, iconic glass bottles of Coca-Cola sweetened with cane sugar have been appearing on store shelves around the U.S. Ironically, this arguably more real version of the real thing happens to be made in Mexico, where soft-drink bottlers still use cane sugar.The surge of popularity of Mexican Coca-Cola in the U.S. doesn't make the corporation happy, partly because of territorial rights, but more important, because cane sugar is a more expensive ingredient in this country than HFCS, thanks to tariffs and farm subsidies.
HFCS is cheaper because it comes from corn. The sweetener is made in a complex process that uses enzymes to partially convert nearly pure glucose corn syrup into fructose; the fructose is then recombined with glucose to create a high-fructose mixture of varying percentages, depending on the intended use. The soft drink ingredient, for example, contains 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose.
Cane sugar, on the other hand, is sucrose, a disaccharide of glucose and fructose obtained from sugar cane, which is not widely grown in the U.S.
Mart Martin, a spokesman for Coca-Cola's North American division in Atlanta, says there is "not a perceivable taste difference" between U.S. and Mexican Coca-Cola, according to the San Diego Union Tribune.To find out, we conducted a blind tasting of Mexican and U.S. Coca-Cola with the help of the Culinary Institute of America in San Antonio. Unmarked samples, both taken from glass bottles, were served to the students and faculty, who rated their relative sweetness and overall flavor.
Interestingly, people who had been raised in or near Mexico often instantly identified the Mexican Coca-Cola and universally preferred it, while those raised in the States preferred the U.S.-made Coca-Cola. In other words, we tend to like what we're used to.
One thing that wasn't tested is how much influence the shape of the Mexican Coca-Cola bottle and the label might have on taste perception. After all, nostalgia is a thirst for something sweet from the past.
In like a lion, out like a lamb...
America's top ten healthiest fast food restaurants. Which I guess is something like "America's top ten most liberal Republicans", but there you have it.
Jay Lee with a pancake on his head. Nuff said.
Breaking bad news with baby animals.
You know, I'm thinking that Diaper Dave Vitter doesn't exactly have the moral authority to suggest that someone else needs to resign from the Senate.
Oh, and what could be better than Diaper Dave versus a pr0n star? Why, a three-way with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, that's what.
The guy who drew that chimp cartoon for the New York Post, for which Rupert Murdoch eventually felt compelled to apologize, has a long and loathsome history. Via TAPPED, which supplies one more example.
Are politicians overly obsessed with Twitter? Um, yes. So are their staffers. And I say that as someone who loves Twitter. Oh, and has anyone told Rep. Culberson that Sully is a proud union man?
Conservative health care reform. Why didn't we think of that before?
Sen. Jim Bunning (R, KY) says "I don't believe anything John Cornyn says." We know the feeling, Jimbo.
Is Norm Coleman ever going to accept the fact that he lost the election and get on with his life?
When chimps are outlawed, then only outlaws will have chimps. Jokes aside, the legislation in question was worthwhile and overdue.
State Rep. Jessica Farrar supports Texas microbrewers.
The 20 greatest campaign ads of all time. Well, since Eisenhower's time, anyway.
Today's right wing, just like those damn dirty hippies of 40 years ago. Bring on the puppets and the "Free Mumia" signs!
Some worthwhile children's music, for those who need to know these things.
Houston Politics makes an observation.
As noted previously, the flap over the proposed Ashby high-rise and all the land-use questions stirred up by that controversy have subsided recently as the recession and credit crunch slowed or stopped many high-profile development projects. But that may be about to change.The project's developers, Matthew Morgan and Kevin Kirton, made a presentation Wednesday to a group of "young leaders" from the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit development organization. Neither my colleague Nancy Sarnoff nor I, who have followed this project, could attend, but today I saw this timeline that was part of their presentation.
The juiciest bit is the last two sentences: "The developer is exhausting its administrative options, and hopes the city will issue the necessary development permits. If denied, the developer will exercise all legal rights to force the issuance of its development permits for the project."
Since March of last year, Morgan and Kirton have submitted various versions of their permit application eight times, and the city has rejected it eight times.
Since one definition of insanity is taking the same action repeatedly and expecting a different result, some observers have speculated that the developers were building a record for a lawsuit. The language in their timeline shows they're prepared to take this step, whether or not it's been part of their strategy all along.
The developers are portraying this case as an example of heavy-handed and inequitable city regulation that all developers should worry about. How much support they'll get from their industry colleagues if they choose to go to court remains to be seen.
UPDATE: Swamplot has more.
The regulatory agency that oversees horse and dog tracks in Texas is begging for a handout to make it through the end of the fiscal year.
Faced with a 14 percent, nearly $678,000 shortfall, the commission that oversees horse and dog racing in Texas has asked Gov. Rick Perry for a $250,000 emergency grant to finish the fiscal year ending Aug. 31 in the black.In case that strategy fails, members of the Texas Racing Commission Wednesday signed off on a letter to Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Joe Straus requesting a $250,000 supplemental budget appropriation.
Members acted shortly before representatives of horse and greyhound interests painted a desperate picture of the racing industry's health at Wednesday's commission meeting.
"Time is clearly running out," said Bryan Brown, CEO of the Retama Park, a horse track north of San Antonio. "We can't continue on as an industry and face all these issues."
The agency attributes $70,000 of the shortfall to the impact of last year's hurricanes on track revenues. It blames the rest on a factor likely reflecting decreased betting.
[...]
Brown told the commission that from 2007 to 2008, the number of Texans involved in horse racing dropped by more than 1,200 to 3,325. He also noted drop-offs in horses bred and raced in the state, live racing days at tracks and in total revenue. He said tracks also continue losing customers to online alternatives and illegal gambling parlors.
Earlier this week, Rolando Pablos, the commission chairman, told the budget-drafting Senate Finance Committee the racing industry is on the decline.
Your house may have once been a meth lab.
Experts say meth contamination of apartments, hotel rooms, houses, storage sheds and even cars is more common than people may imagine. Meth-making or heavy use can leave chemicals in carpets, air ducts and attics. And without proper cleanup, experts say, the chemicals linger and expose people to health risks."We get calls once a week from people who are the innocent victims - who have nothing to do with drugs or dope," said Kirk Flippin, owner of Texas Decon, a New Braunfels company that tests for meth labs and does cleanups.
Although Texas home sellers are required by law to disclose knowledge of a house being used as a meth lab, experts said the law is not strong enough to protect buyers.
Flippin said Texas needs laws requiring complete disclosure of places contaminated by the manufacture of meth or heavy use. Experts said Texas also needs clearer guidelines on cleanup.
House Bill 23, introduced this session by state Rep. David Leibowitz, D-San Antonio, would require landlords to disclose previous use of leased premises for manufacture of methamphetamine.
And before those of you who've been in the same house for awhile get too complacent, consider this.
Illegal methamphetamine "cooks" are traipsing undetected through an unknown number of motels and hotels with covert drug-making labs - leaving a toxic mess behind for unsuspecting customers and housekeeping crews.They are places where drug-makers can go unnoticed, mixing the chemicals needed for the highly addictive stimulant in a matter of hours before slipping out the next morning. The dangerous contaminants can lurk on countertops, carpets and bathtubs, and the sickening smells produced can be masked by tobacco smoke and other scents.
Motels can be an attractive alternative for drug makers seeking to avoid a police bust in their own homes.
"They can seize the trailer or seize your house but they can't seize a motel room," said Dr. Sullivan Smith, director of emergency services at Cookeville Regional Medical Center in north-central Tennessee.
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration records obtained by The Associated Press show that states reported finding drug-making in 1,789 motel and hotel rooms in the past five years - and that's just what authorities found.
