In Week 2 of my contested Congressional tour of Texas, I have one interview from the most heavily populated primary, and two from the second most heavily populated. First up is State Rep. Marc Veasey, who is running in the hotly contested race for the new CD33 in the Metroplex. Veasey was elected to HD95 [...]
Posts Tagged ‘interviews’
Interview with Ciro Rodriguez
Also running to reclaim CD23 for the Democrats is the man who last held it for the Dems, Ciro Rodriguez. Rodriguez served five terms in the State House before being elected to CD28 in 1996, where he served until being defeated by Rep. Henry Cuellar in the 2004 primary after the DeLay re-redistricting. He then [...]
Interview with Pete Gallego
There are two Congressional districts in Texas that are on the national radar as November battlefields. One is CD14 thanks mostly to the candidacy of Nick Lampson, and the other is CD23, which flipped to the Democrats in 2006 after the last redistricting litigation concluded in the Supreme Court, then flipped back to the Republicans [...]
Interview with Rep. Silvestre Reyes
As discussed last week, we now enter a period in which I will be publishing some number of interviews with Congressional candidates in contested Democratic primaries around Texas. There’s a lot of interesting and high-profile races and I’d love to talk to everybody, but that’s not going to happen. I hope to have as many [...]
The home stretch for interviews
Barring anything unusual, I’ve done all of the Harris County interviews I’m going to do at this point. You can see who I’ve spoken to and listen to them all on the Harris County primary page. You may have noticed that there’s still a couple of weeks till early voting, and you might be wondering [...]
Interview with Mary Ann Perez
We come now to my final interview for Harris County and for the State House. Next week I will start running interviews with Congressional candidates from elsewhere in Texas. Today’s candidate for HD144 is Mary Ann Perez. Perez was elected to the HCC Board of Trustees in 2009 and currently serves as the Board President. [...]
Nasty yet nice
The Chron’s characterization of the GOP primary race for District Attorney as a nasty fight between polite people strikes me as apt. Complaints about Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos buzz through Houston’s criminal courthouse. Assistant district attorneys, police officers and criminal justice bloggers talk about her being targeted by two grand jury investigations and [...]
Interview with Kevin Risner
My second interview in HD144 is with Kevin Risner. Risner is a Pasadena native who is employed with CBS Radio as a Senior Account Manager for all marketing and public relations campaigns for State agencies. He previously worked for then-Congressman Chris Bell and with the Department of Defense, and he is the son of Harris [...]
Interview with Phillip Andrews
Wrapping up this week’s worth of Congressional interviews we have Phillip Andrews, who is also running for CD07. Andrews is the President and CEO of Daugherty International, which supplies private security forces, and is also the manager of his wife’s law firm. He has a background in finance and is an adjunct professor of accounting [...]
Interview with Lissa Squiers
My next interview for CD07 is with Lissa Squiers. Squiers was a write-in candidate for this office in 2010 after deciding that incumbent Rep. John Culberson should not go unchallenged by a progressive. Squiers has been active with Occupy Houston, helped organize the “Response to The Response” rally that protested Rick Perry’s prayer-a-palooza at Reliant [...]
Interview with James Cargas
We come now to the three-way race for the nomination in CD07. The first candidate in this diverse primary is James Cargas. Cargas is an attorney with a background in environmental and energy law who has done two stints in the Clinton Administration in the White House and the Department of Energy. He has also [...]
Interview with KP George
There are many contested Democratic Congressional primaries around the state this year, but in a sense the most important one is for a race that’s not on any national list of races to watch. I’m talking about the CD22 primary, and the reason this race matters is because in 2010 the Democrats unknowingly nominated Kesha [...]
Interview with Nick Lampson
I still have one more State House primary to cover, that being the one in HD144, but the way things worked out I wound up doing interviews with local Congressional candidates first, so I’m going to run those this week. First up is the familiar name of former Rep. Nick Lampson, back in the saddle [...]
Interview with Sarah Winkler
Wrapping up a week of conversations with candidates who hope to succeed Rep. Scott Hochberg in HD137, today we have Sarah Winkler. Winkler has served on the Alief ISD Board of Trustees since 1997 and on the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) Board of Directors since 2001; she was TASB President in 2009-10. She [...]
Interview with Jamaal Smith
Continuing with the candidates who hope to succeed Rep. Scott Hochberg in HD137 we have Jamaal Smith, whom you may remember from his time as Executive Director of the HCDP and as the Deputy Campaign Manager and Campaign Manager from the 2008 and 2010 Coordinated Campaigns. Before his stint with the HCDP Smith was the [...]
Interview with Gene Wu
The second candidate running to succeed Rep. Scott Hochberg in HD137 that I interviewed is Gene Wu. Gene is currently a felony prosecutor in the Harris County District Attorney’s office, and he also has legislative experience, having previously been the Chief Clerk for the House Higher Education Committee for the Texas Legislature. He is currently [...]
Interview with Joseph Carlos Madden
There’s one open Democratic seat in Harris County for the State House: HD137, in which State Rep. Scott Hochberg decided not to run for re-election. There are four Democrats vying to succeed Rep. Hochberg, and I will be presenting their interviews this week. First up is Joseph Carlos Madden, who currently serves as the Chief [...]
Interview with Rep. Borris Miles
State Rep. Borris Miles is in his second term representing HD146, though his terms were not consecutive. He knocked off longtime Rep. Al Edwards in 2006, lost a rematch in 2008, then won again in 2010. He will face Edwards for a fourth time this May. Miles is a former police officer who owns an [...]
Interview with Rep. Garnet Coleman
State Rep. Garnet Coleman is one of my favorite people in the Legislature. He’s one of the most knowledgeable members in the House on matters relating to health care policy, and he’s a leader on a wide range of issues where leadership is always needed – civil rights, women’s health, reproductive freedom, marriage equality, voting [...]
Interview with Wanda Adams
Also running in HD131 is Wanda Adams, who has served two full terms in Houston City Council District D and was re-elected easily for her third term last November. Adams is a native Houstonian who graduated from Kashmere High School and Texas Southern University. She worked for the city prior to her election to Council [...]
Interview with Rep. Alma Allen
I now finally turn my focus to legislative and Congressional primaries. As you might imagine, it’s been a bit of a challenge figuring this part out, since we just now know what the districts look like and who the candidates are. The order in which I do these going forward may be a bit jumbled, [...]
Interview with Sean Hammerle
Sean Hammerle is running to be the Democratic nominee for Harris County Commissioner in Precinct 4, the seat formerly held by the now-convicted Jerry Eversole and now by Jack Cagle. Hammerle is a Certified Fund Raising Executive (CFRE), and has worked as a development director and board member of various local charities. He now owns [...]
Interview with HCDP Chair Lane Lewis
Next week I will begin running interviews for legislative races. As you might imagine, the long-running saga of when the primary would be, coupled with the uncertainty of what the districts would be as well as the re-filing period now going on has made that a challenge, but I’ll muddle through. This week is a [...]
Interview with Patty Quintana-Nilsson
My final interview with the Democratic hopefuls for State Board of Education District 6 is with Patty Quintana-Nilsson. She is a UH graduate with a degree in Radio & Television Communications, and she is a 15-year employee of the Spring Branch ISD. Currently she teaches Digital Film and Commercial Photography at the Guthrie Center, which [...]
Interview with David Scott
Next up for State Board of Education District 6 is David Scott. Scott ia an A&M graduate who has a Masters of Library Science from the University of North Texas. He worked a variety of jobs in several industries, including as a reference librarian for the San Francisco Public Library, before becoming a full-time dad. [...]
Interview with Traci Jensen
We now move on to the State Board of Education, the one entity affected by legislative redistricting that is not at issue in the current litigation, as the new SBOE map was precleared. I don’t think I need to explain to this audience why the SBOE is and has been a hot mess and why [...]
Interview with Paul Sadler
I have just a couple of Harris County Democratic races left to deal with, and I will return to them in two weeks. In the meantime, we now have a sorta-kinda primary date of May 29, but we still don’t have US or State House maps. I’m hoping that we’ll have a bit more certainty [...]
Interview with Mike Anderson
Challenging Pat Lykos in the GOP primary for District Attorney is another person who has spent years as a judge, Mike Anderson. Anderson started out in the DA’s office after completing law school and spent 17 years as a prosecutor, including as a Special Crimes prosecutor in the Major Offenders Division. He was elected to [...]
Interview with DA Pat Lykos
For my interviews this week, I’m going to take a brief detour from the Democratic primaries to converse with the two candidates in the highest profile Republican primary in Harris County. That would be the District Attorney race, and we begin today with incumbent DA Pat Lykos, who bucked the Democratic tide in 2008 to [...]
Interview with Alan Rosen
Concluding my series of Precinct 1 Constable candidate interviews is Alan Rosen. Rosen has worked in law enforcement for 21 years and is currently a Major and Commander of the Special Operation Bureau for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. Here’s what we talked about: Download the MP3 file You can find a list of all [...]
Interview with Quincy Whitaker
Continuing on with the Constable interviews in Precinct 1, today I present Quincy Whitaker. Whitaker is a native of Nacogdoches who has lived in Houston for 21 years, after being discharged from the army where he was a military policeman. Whitaker is currently a Lieutenant in the Sheriff’s office, where he has worked for 20 [...]
Interview with Cindy Vara-Leija
Next up for Precinct 1 Constable is Cindy Vara-Leija. She is the only one of the four candidates to have worked as a Constable deputy, spending 35 years in the Precinct 1 office before retiring last year. She started out as a clerk, then got her law enforcement certification and became a deputy, then moved [...]