Today was a travel day - we returned home from a week in Portland to visit my parents and siblings. It was a great trip, and Olivia is already a better flyer than I am; for sure, she whines and complains less than I do. I'll be back to my usual posting schedule tomorrow, and for sure there will be much to talk about.
The editorial reviews on Talmadge Heflin's House challenge to overturn his electoral loss to Hubert Vo are coming in, and it's as you'd expect.
The Statesman says "Heflin is asking his House colleagues to give him the seat he didn't win anyway".
The Chron says Heflin will "clearly do anything to retain possession of the District 149 seat he's held for two decades, even if it includes thwarting the will of the district's voters". Note how they also pick up on the implicit questioning of Republican County Clerk Bev Kaufman's competence.
Even Dan Patrick's boyos are telling Heflin to pack it in.
Andrew D has some related stuff. The official recount, which does not affect the challenge, begins today. There are two other challenges giong on in the House as well - I'll have more on this later. I'll post more editorials as I find them.
With the college football season drawing to a close, we can turn our attention to our real favorite sport, the game of What's Wrong With The BCS This Season? We've got a twofer this year, as one of three undefeated teams (Auburn) will get shut out of the championship game, while the mandated inclusion of a crappy Big East titlist - Pittsburgh, perhaps - forces the likes of once-beaten Texas and unbeaten Boise State to the lower bowls. Even the sop to the second-class conferences is causing heartburn, as Utah's guaranteed spot thanks to their top-six BCS ranking helped do in the Longhorns.
The system is what it is, and it will do what it's designed to do, even after all the ad hoc jerryrigging, which is to have the #1 team play the #2 team. It's a stupid and arbitrary system, in my opinion, but that's what it's supposed to do. Personally, I think it should be clear that a better system would recognize that more than two teams could be legitimately considered championship contenders. You could simply pick a top eight, or you could let in the champs of all eleven major conferences - would anyone argue this year that Utah, Boise, and Louisville are less deserving that whoever the Big East sends? - plus five at-large choices to get sixteen; either way would be preferable. Every other division of college football, from 1-AA down to III, does this sort of thing. If that means enforcing an eleven-game schedule to ensure that the teams who ultimately play for the title don't have a longer season than the pros, so be it.
But hey, what do I care? College hoops have started, and it'll be pitchers and catchers before you know it. Enjoy the mess, fellas. I'll enjoy laughing about it.
I obviously missed the story that spawned this editorial, but I agree 100% with its arguments and conclusions. Building a toll road through the Heights so that commuters from the far reaches of the 290 Corridor can get downtown a little faster is head-slappingly stupid.
Does it really make sense to damage the quality of life in inner-city areas where residents have chosen to raise their families so someone who lives in the suburbs can shave a few minutes off their drive-time? What is the purpose of the city's new mass transit strategy if not to reduce the volume of cars coming into the city?This is the toll road version of folk singer Joni Mitchell's famous lyric: "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."
District H Councilman Adrian Garcia says such a toll road would "wreak havoc" in the area. He also believes citizen groups should have been consulted before the county approved negotiations to take over the rail line.
Harris County Toll Road Authority spokeswoman Patricia Friese claims the hubbub over the possible use of the former rail line as a toll road is "premature." Yet she also admits that if her agency gets the property, it would likely build the road. "The worst-case scenario," comments Friese, "is that you'll have a toll road instead of a rail line."
That ignores the reality that the rail line is long gone. The city shouldn't sit back and allow a worst-case scenario to unfold in the Heights.
I should mention there's already a freight train that runs through the Heights, too. It's on a track near Washington and Center Streets, and though it's a bit more than a mile from my house at its closest point, I can still hear the train whistles from my bedroom. They're usually blowing in the predawn hours. Just so you know.
Nice atricle about the diversity of the cast of "Lost" and how it happened more or less naturally. And here's a word about Staten Island's newest breakout star-to-be:
"What's cool about that, actually, is that on an international flight, you have people from all different countries, so it doesn't feel forced at all," agreed Daniel Dae Kim, a Korean-born, American-reared actor whose Lost character, Jin, speaks no English whatsoever.Kim owes his job in part to Yunjin Kim, the Korean-born actress who plays his wife, whose audition for another role in the show "blew us away," said executive producer Damon Lindelof. "We realized that she spoke fluent Korean and decided that we should have a Korean character on the island. And maybe it was a husband and wife."
Lindelof's fellow executive producer, J.J. Abrams, added that "one of the things we were talking about before then was we knew we wanted to have a couple that didn't speak English."
For Daniel Dae Kim, it's "an opportunity because I haven't had a chance to speak any Korean in any of the projects I've done."
The kids who sang the chorus in Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall" are suing for royalties.
Twenty-three teenage pupils from Islington Green School secretly recorded vocals for the track, which became an anthem for children with the chorus "We don't need no education."On hearing the song, the headmistress banned the pupils from appearing on television or video -- leaving them no evidence and making it harder for them to claim royalties -- and the local school authority described the lyrics as "scandalous."
[...]
Royalties expert Peter Rowan told Reuters he was appealing to a music royalties' society on behalf of a former pupil and was working with other members of the class. He said he was still trying to contact the majority of the group.
"They are owed their money and we lodged the first claim last week," Rowan told Reuters. "I've been working on it for almost two years."
UPDATE: Spelling corrected. My apologies to David and his kin.
I just heard a Neil Diamond version of John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)". If the Republican Party wants to use its complete legislative hegemony for good and not for evil, they would take immediate steps to ban such things forever.
And that was followed by Jessica and Ashlee Simpson doing "The Little Drummer Boy". Just shoot me now...
With the passage of the Fair Defense Act in 2001, this should be no surprise.
The cost of providing lawyers for poor defendants in Harris County has risen about 80 percent since the Legislature set new criminal defense standards in 2001.[...]
For the 12 months ending Sept. 30, indigent defense costs in local felony, misdemeanor and juvenile courts neared $20 million, compared with $11 million three years ago.
[...]
The number of indigent cases in Dallas is falling, but in Harris County it has shot up 75 percent in the past two years, from 42,667 to 74,879. The number of defendants who are indigent rose from 38 percent to 61 percent.
Troy McKinney, who was president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association when the act was implemented, said one reason for the latter increase is that judges are setting higher bonds, causing people to remain in jail longer.
"Five years ago a first-degree felony might have a $20,000 bond," McKinney said. "Today, it may have a bond of $50,000. So the odds of remaining in custody are greater." Defendants in jail "get an appointed lawyer almost automatically."
The question of court-appointed defense attorneys versus a public defender ysstem is something I'd like to see studied in more detail. My opinion is that for a county as big as Harris, a public defender system would make more fiscal sense, but that's just my opinion. I'd like to see someone delve into the data and come up with some decent facts before I commit on that. I'd also like to hear Scott's opinion when his holiday hiatus is over.
Sarah Berel-Harrop, a frequent commenter around here of late and a member of the Hubert Vo campagin team, has her own blog now. I promised her I'd give her some publicity when she got started, and I'm pleased to do so for an intelligent, progressive Houston voice like hers. Check it out.
Elsewhere, Avedon Carol has a new home. She still needs to get a working RSS feed, but update your blogrolls, and hopefully that will follow.
OK, so UT muffs an extra point attempt against Texas A&M. The ball, which was never held properly, is kicked into the end zone, where an Aggie falls on it. The refs then award UT a one-point "safety", which apparently must be kosher since A&M Coach Fraudchione isn't blowing a gasket over it. I know that if the Aggie had picked it pu and run it back it would've been two points their way, but I'm boggled as to why this isn't simply a touchback/dead ball.
Like the announcers, I've never seen or heard of this before. What would the call have been if a UT player had fallen on the ball? If the only good outcome for A&M after this kind of blown PAT attempt is for the ball to roll out of the end zone on its own, then maybe this is a dumb rule. Anyone out there have a better perspective on this one?
UPDATE: Lynn Swann finally gave an explanation that made sense. Apparently, the muffed kick was picked up in the field of play by an Aggie, and in the course of bringing it back, he fumbled it into the endzone. When another Aggie fell on it there, it became a one-point safety by rule 8-3-1. That's still the weirdest play I've seen in a long, long time.
UPDATE: The Chron explains the play.
No, this is not a feeble attempt to one-up all those catbloggers. I'm just noting a story about Yet Another Trend In Blogging.
Baby blogs are fast becoming the new mommy (or daddy) must-have. Like other kinds of blogs, they vary in quality and style, but at their core are oodles of adorable baby pictures, practical parenting advice and such nuggets as "Bobby did the cutest thing today."They may have started as a way to keep distant relatives in touch with a new baby in the family, but they often are read by complete strangers, thanks to myriad Web links connecting baby blogs worldwide.
The sites, with names such as Daddyzine and Bloggingmommies, are this generation's baby books, though many bloggers also scrupulously record every burp, giggle and bottle in book form as well.
Of course, it's impossible to know how many baby blogs there are, but "they've taken off faster than other blogs," said Clancy Ratliff, who is writing about gender-specific Web logs for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Minnesota.
Great. Another thing to worry about.
Over the past two years, federal safety officials have received 83 reports of cell phones exploding or catching fire, usually because of incompatible, faulty or counterfeit batteries or chargers. Burns to the face, neck, leg and hip are among the dozens of injury reports the agency has received.The Consumer Product Safety Commission is providing tips for cell phone users to avoid such accidents and has stepped up oversight of the wireless industry. There have been three voluntary battery recalls, and the CPSC is working with companies to create better battery standards.
"CPSC is receiving more and more reports of incidents involving cell phones, and we're very concerned of the potential for more serious injuries or more fires," said agency spokesman Scott Wolfson.
U.S. phone makers and carriers say most fires and explosions are caused by counterfeit batteries and note that in a country with some 170 million cell phone users, the number of accidents is extremely low.
"Is it a problem? It has turned up, you bet. But statistically it is extraordinarily rare," said John Walls, spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. "But the fact that it has happened certainly has the industry's attention."
Some consumer advocates say the cause goes beyond bad batteries making their way to the market. They point to the increasing pressure on battery and phone makers to fit more capabilities into small instruments.
"If you're cramming more and more power in a small space, what you're making is a small bomb," said Carl Hilliard, president of the California-based Wireless Consumers Alliance, which has been tracking incidents of cell phone fires and explosions.
Meet Al Hartman, the man behind City Proposition 2.
"I'm doing this because it's right versus wrong," says Hartman, 52, an attentive, mild-mannered real estate developer who proclaims he has been "on fire for the Lord" since becoming a born-again, evangelical Baptist 10 years ago.[...]
[Mayor Bill] White, a Methodist, said he deeply appreciates religious faith but doesn't understand what it has to do with competing revenue caps.
"In my faith, there's not too much about airport revenues in the Scriptures," he said.
No news is good news today. Enjoy the food, family, and football, and I'll see you tomorrow.
I'm thinking we might have ourselves a theme in this.
Politicians in Congress are responsible for the leaders they choose. Their choices reflect their moral values.Every law enforcement officer depends on the moral values and integrity of society for backup; they are like body armor. The cynical destruction of moral values at the top makes it hard for law enforcement to do its job.
In terms of moral values, this is where the rubber meets the road. The rules you apply to yourself are the true test of your moral values.
[...]
There is no limit to what you can do if you have the power to change the rules. Congress may make its own rules, but the public makes the rule of law, and depends for its peace on the enforcement of the law. Hypocrisy at the highest levels of government is toxic to the moral fiber that holds our communities together.
The open contempt for moral values by our elected officials has a corrosive effect. It is a sad day for law enforcement when Congress offers such poor leadership on moral values and ethical behavior. We are a moral people, and the first lesson of democracy is not to hold the public in contempt.
Carlos Guerra writes about the continuing effort to develop a bigger and badder convention center hotel in San Antonio, and follows it up with a look at the numbers game. This is a topic I've touched on before. You'd think experience would eventually be a good teacher, but you'd apparently be wrong. Via Lasso.
You know, I try not to curse or swear on this site, but I'm having a hard time controlling myself.
State Rep. Talmadge Heflin will ask the state House of Representatives today to overturn the results of his failed re-election bid and either order him returned to the Legislature or call for a new election.Heflin's attorney, Andy Taylor, said the election results in state House District 149 in southwest Harris County were fraught with voting irregularities and potential fraud, most of which occurred in predominantly Democratic precincts.
"The true outcome of this election was stolen from the voters in House District 149," Taylor said Tuesday. "We will prove that Representative Talmadge Heflin was re-elected."
Greg has the information you need to take action. And for the record, Kevin owes all the readers of this blog a beer.
UPDATE: More from Sarah.
In the comments here, Kevin asks:
If the e-slate totals change significantly, maybe even enough to justify a new election under House procedures, would it be worth it to you because it would drive home the need for a transparent (paper) audit trail?I think Vo wins a new election anyway. But I do think it would be a GREAT opportunity to shore up some of our concerns as citizens (not partisans) about e-voting machines. If it happens, that is. Thoughts?
I guess I want to force the question but I'm more than a little scared of what lies behind the door. I do know that even if the manual recount here gives us the same result again, the concerns about non-verifiable voting haven't gone away. Maybe Andy Taylor's blustering will help break down some of the partisan divide on this. If that happens, I'll take back the nasty things I've said about him. Well, the nasty things I've said about him in this case, anyway.
Chron TV writer Mike McDaniel recaps the missing episode of "Desperate Housewives" and notes that it still got a pretty good local rating, despite not starting until midnight. I'm still mad at KTRK, though, and I still think it's lousy that they won't show a decent-hour rerun. Retrogrough has kindly offered to mail me a videotape, so at least I'll get to see it one way or another before it does run again.
Family obligations through the weekend and into next week mean a light blogging schedule for me during that time. I plan on enjoying my holidays and hope you will do the same. I'll check in occasionally, and I'll be back to normal in a week. Happy Thanksgiving!
I think Byron is right about the potential trap in the "Amend for Arnold" movement, and I approve of his solution:
If Republicans are smart, they'll turn this into a campaign about supporting immigrants, and enlist prominent Hispanic elected officials and donors to bankroll the campaign. They'll turn this into a wedge issue to paint Democrats not supporting the amendment as anti-immigrant. And frankly, there's no reason Democrats should be running from this issue. After all, we've historically been the party of immigrants.So how do we balance the concerns of supporting immigrants and of not wanting an amendment to our constitution designed to benefit one particular person? I see an easy solution that would take the politics out. As long as this amendment is seen as benefiting one politician or one party or another, there's no way that it will pass. There's no way it gets two-thirds majorities in both houses and three-quarters of the state legislatures if this is seen as a partisan issue. So take the politics out of it.
Pass an amendment that allows naturalized American citizens to run for president that are born after 34 years prior to the amendment's enactment. For example, should the amendment pass in 2005, any naturalized citizen born after 1971 would be eligible to run for president (assuming they meet the other requirements). Thus, no current politician would benefit, but within a few decades most leading non-U.S. born politicians would be eligible to run for president.
I heartily approve of this. Rosenberg has just about everything I'd want in a DNC Chair - non-recycled insider, creative outside-the-box thinker who makes things happen, and non-controversial (sorry, Howard). If only it weren't almost too hard to believe the powers-that-be won't screw it up...
Reports that anyone may be off the hook in the Travis County grand jury investigations are premature.
Assistant District Attorney Gregg Cox, who is leading the investigation, said all individuals associated with Texans for a Republican Majority are still potential suspects in the case. But Cox said no further grand jury investigation or potential indictments will occur before January."No one has ever named Tom DeLay or any other individual as a target in this investigation. Nor have we ever said that anyone is off the hook," Cox said.
Cox said District Attorney Ronnie Earle "has repeatedly said that anybody who committed a crime is a target in this investigation. And this investigation is ongoing."
Cox reacted to a CBS News report that said DeLay is unlikely to be indicted in the case by saying, "It would be premature to talk about who may or may not be indicted at this point."
Three of DeLay's political associates have been indicted on charges of illegally flowing corporate money into 2002 Republican campaigns for the Texas House.
The GOP takeover of the House in that election set the stage for DeLay to push a major congressional redistricting bill through the Legislature.
Cox said prosecutors in those cases have been too busy to present any additional information to the current grand juries.
"Given the limited amount of time left in the term of these grand juries, combined with the time off for the holidays and other interruptions that we expect, it's not feasible to start with anything with these grand juries," Cox said. "So we will probably wait until January to begin any major action in the grand jury."
In maybe-related, maybe-not news, the President and CEO of Bacardi, one of the TRMPAC Indicted Eight, has resigned to "spend more time with his family". Make of that what you will.
You know, it's bad enough that local ABC affiliate KTRK bumped "Desperate Housewives" to 11:35 PM last night so it could simulcast the Texans-Packers game, but what really cheeses me off is that they couldn't bother to wrap up their endless highlight show in time for that rescheduled slot. As such, unless you set your VCR or TiVo to record for an arbitrary length of time, or you stayed up well past midnight, you turned on the tube today to learn that you did not record as planned. And there's no rebroadcast set for this week, so pretty much everyone in the Houston area who didn't take extraordinary measures got screwed out of seeing this week's episode. Thanks for nothing, guys.
Talmadge Heflin has asked for a manual recount of the votes in his electoral loss to Hubert Vo.
State Rep. Talmadge Heflin has asked the state to order a manual recount of all ballots cast earlier this month in Heflin's unsuccessful bid for a 12th term in the Legislature.Heflin's attorney, Andy Taylor, said that the Heflin campaign had uncovered "deeply disturbing evidence of voter fraud and election irregularities" and that the problems may have contributed to Heflin's 32-vote loss to businessman Hubert Vo earlier this month.
"Illegal votes were counted, and legal votes were rejected," Taylor said this afternoon.
Officials with Heflin's campaign filed a petition with the Texas Secretary of State's office today asking that the Harris County Clerk's Office hand-count the approximately 42,000 ballots cast in the race for state representative in House District 149 in southwest Harris County.
That recount could be complete by the first week of December, Taylor said.
Although Heflin and his supporters decided to seek the recount, Taylor said no decision has yet been made on whether to contest the election results in the state House of Representatives. Campaign officials have until the end of the day Thursday to decide that issue, he said.
One more thing: I've said this before, but I do hope someone in HCDP is writing down all these nasty things Andy Taylor is saying about Bev Kaufman so we can use them against her in the 2006 election. Feel free to search my archives, fellas, it's all there for you.
UPDATE: Vince points out something I (like Greg) did not know:
Electronic balloting seems at issue for Heflin's camp. His attorney, Andy Taylor--who figured prominently in the state's congressional redistricting saga last year--said Harris County's e-Slate voting machines allow election officials to print out an image of each vote that was cast.
Via Political Wire, an anonymous source has told CBS News that Tom DeLay will not be indicted in Travis County.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, appears to have dodged a bullet.The powerful GOP chieftain is unlikely to be indicted by a state grand jury probing alleged campaign finance violations in Texas, according to an official involved in the investigation.
"No, no, I really don’t think DeLay will be indicted," the official told CBSNews.com. "And to be quite honest, [DeLay’s] lawyers know that."
[...]
A review of documents made public through civil litigation indicate DeLay was kept aware of the fundraising activities that were taking place. (DeLay’s daughter was a paid consultant to two fund-raising committees that pumped money into the races.)
Nevertheless, the official familiar with investigation said investigators would have to establish that DeLay "acted to promote" the illegal activity, and that such evidence had not been forthcoming.
"To indict and prosecute someone, we have to be able to show not just that they were aware of something," the official explained. "We have to show that they engaged in enough conduct to make them party to the offense."
There were also jurisdictional hurdles, the official said.
"For a penal code offense [such as money laundering] we would have to find something done in Travis County, Texas, to be able to indict," the officials said. "And [DeLay] wasn’t here very often."
Anyway, back when the indictments of Jim Ellis, John Colyandro, and Warren Robold were handed down, it was noted but not widely reported that Travis County DA Ronnie Earle might not have jurisdiction over DeLay because he doesn't live in Austin but does live in Texas. I've never seen anything to contradict that, so I can't say this surprises me even if it is for a different reason. But this raises the question that Josh is asking - if it's such a poorly kept secret that Earle can't touch DeLay, then why bother implementing the Tom DeLay Scoundrel Protection Act? (Possible answers: They know there's evidence out there and it's just a matter of time; they figure the three indicted conspirators will roll on DeLay rather than go to jail; they did it because they could and what are you wimpy treasonous liberals gonna do about it?)
OK, I got a response to my support ticket, which seems to have resolved the problem of all comments needing to be approved before they appeared. I needed to delete the following old MT Blacklist files:
extlib/jayallen/*.* (three .pm files)
plugins/Blacklist.pl
Note that the second file is in the plugins directory, not the Blacklist subdirectory from there, which you create when you install the MTB plugin. Hope this helps anyone else who may be experiencing this problem.
File this under "Things Enron affected that you didn't know they affected".
After [Enron]'s collapse, SNAP's budget fell from $3 million to $2.5 million.[...]
SNAP (www.snapus.org) has slowly recovered, and now has its largest annual budget ever, $5.5 million, after gaining a foothold in communities outside of Houston. It has contracts to provide free or low-cost spaying and neutering in poor areas of Los Angeles, Albuquerque, N.M., and Monterrey, Mexico.
Ron Artest has been suspended for the rest of the NBA season for his role in the arena melee from the weekend.
Indiana Pacers forward Ron Artest, who led the charge into the stands and sparked a near riot at the end of the game against the Detroit Pistons on Friday at The Palace of Auburn Hills, Mich., was suspended for the remainder of the season without pay. He is the first player ever suspended for almost an entire season for fighting during a game.Nine players in all were suspended for a combined total of 143 games.
That said, if equally harsh sanctions are not levied on the morons in the stands who helped precipitate this travesty, then Ron Artest got screwed and ought to consider a lawsuit himself. I totally agree with Eric McErlain here:
Here's hoping the Pistons work with the police to identify any fan who was involved last night, and ban them from the Palace for life.In addition, the NBA needs to take a cue from the NFL, and revoke the season tickets of any fan who provided tickets to anybody who was involved in the brawl last night. That's the course the New York Giants took after the infamous "Snowball Game" at Giants Stadium back in 1995 where one San Diego Chargers assistant wound up being sent to the hospital.
Finally, I heard some commentator on NPR this morning who put some blame on "antagonistic" attitudes in stadia towards opposing teams. He said that the way player intros are done nowadays demonizes opponents, and that there used to be more "respect" in the older days. I have to say, that's a load of crap. Ugly confrontations between players and fans are a part of our history, from the ancient days of Ty Cobb to the days of my youth to now. Sports is an aggressive, confrontational business, and this sort of thing is bound to happen now and then. The best we can do is be prepared for it, by having the resources on hand to deal with it, and by making the price for causing the problem to be steep enough to deter most people from succumbing to the temptation. The NBA has done its part; now it's up to the Pistons and the local DA's office to do theirs.
UPDATE: Tom Kirkendall remembers an incident from the 1970s at the venue formerly known as The Summit.
This is the chapter that Lou Dubose and Jan Reid would have added to their book "The Hammer" if publication had been delayed until now. It's a good overview of where things stand in the Senate investigation of DeLay cronies Mike Scanlon and Jack Abramoff regarding their Indian tribe lobbying ripoff. Will John McCain be the man to take down DeLay? He may have a better shot at it than you think. Check it out.
The Istook Amendment. Is this what those of you who supported Republican candidates in the election were voting for? How about the Presidential yacht? Somehow, I don't recall that being a theme in the campaigns. It sure as hell isn't something I stand for.
John McCain is right: The system is broken.
I'm liking the new version of Movable Type so far, and other than the sheer drudgery of FTPing all the new files to my webhost it was pretty darned easy to do. One problem I have noticed, and I've got both a support forum question and a support ticket open for it, is that all comments have required my approval, even though I do not have "Enable Unregistered Comment Moderation" selected. Bottom line is that until I get this cleared up, you won't see your comments here until I see and approve them. Needless to say, I want to get this fixed soon. I'll post something when it is. Thanks for your patience.
Here's your chance to learn more about Jack Ruby, the man who shot the man who shot the President in 1963.
Even if you're still not sure who killed Kennedy, you're probably pretty certain who killed his alleged assassin.After all, strip club owner Jack Ruby was caught on live TV and in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph firing the shot that killed Lee Harvey Oswald on Nov. 24, 1963, two days after President Kennedy was gunned down in a Dallas parade.
But — in the eyes of the law, at least — Ruby died an innocent man.
That's just one of the facts explored in a new exhibit at Dallas' Sixth Floor Museum, which seeks to set the record straight on Ruby's life, crime and trial. "Jack Ruby: Voices from History" debuted earlier this month as the nation prepares to mark the 41st anniversary of Kennedy's assassination on Monday.
Though a jury convicted Ruby in 1964 of murder with malice and sentenced him to death, an appeals court later reversed the verdict on the grounds that a police sergeant gave false and inadmissible testimony and that the trial should have been moved outside Dallas County.
Ruby became ill and died in January 1967, a month before his new trial was set to begin in Wichita Falls.
The temporary exhibit, separate from the permanent exhibit on Kennedy's assassination, is expected to run at least six months, organizers said. It's a patchwork of photos, newspaper pages, artifacts and quotes from witnesses, key players, Ruby's acquaintances and Ruby himself.
"Every time we talk to people about Jack Ruby, we find that not many people know much about him," said museum curator Gary Mack.
The local ABC affiliate did a story on the KLOL format change, with an emphasis on the online reaction to it all.
Christopher Jones was one of the impassioned Rock 101 listeners. After the change, the Kingwood College student jumped on the internet looking for answers but found little out there. So he decided to create a website to help himself and others cope with the situation. The following Monday, bringbackklol.com was born, a site that tried to provide answers to puzzled KLOL listeners and with an online petition, maybe bring the station back."I had only told one person the first day and I had signatures from people that I work with that I hadn't even told about it yet," Jones told abc13.com. "Word has spread like wildfire."
Jones was a big fan of the former station. He listened to the long time rocker every day as he ran errands. While he knew that radio stations go through changes for business reasons, he was surprised that Rock 101 disappeared with no explanation.
"Rock 101 KLOL had been on the air for 34 years with the same format," Jones said. "Some families had two or three generations of KLOL listeners. It is hard to believe a company would end that overnight."
Brandon Goetz had the same feelings. Wasting no time, Goetz created rock101.info hours after the station flipped formats. The site lets fans talk, sign a different online petition and mobilize. A post on the site claims it organized a group that passed out 10,000 flyers demanding rock radio's return to Houston during the recent Metallica concert at the Toyota Center.
"I have my doubts about Clear Channel Communications bringing back Rock 101 based on their past dealings in Houston and around the state," Goetz said. "But if you can make enough noise, somebody will have to listen."
And this group of displaced Rock 101 listeners is making plenty of noise. So far these two petitions are nearing 20,000 signatures. Message boards from radio-info.com to our own abc13.com message boards have been full of chatter too.
Blogs like OfftheKuff.com and blogHOUSTON.net started to speculate the demise of the station immediately. Some posts even pondered if the switch was a big publicity stunt.
Not that any of this will matter, of course.
Ken Charles, Vice President of Programming for Clear Channel's Houston stations, says he's noticed the web uproar and is not surprised by it."KLOL has been around for 34 years. It has great heritage and is a piece of history," Charles told abc13.com. "When a piece of history changes, it's going to get a reaction. We respect that, but its time had come."
Sen. Jeff Wentworth will serve as the master of discovery for the challenge to Sen. Mario Gallegos' election.
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst appointed the San Antonio Republican to supervise discovery proceedings and to take depositions and gather evidence on whether Houston Sen. Mario Gallegos should be allowed to begin another term in January.Write-in candidate Susan Delgado charges that Gallegos, victorious at the polls, doesn't live in the 6th Senate District and shouldn't be allowed to serve.
Wentworth, who can recommend to a Senate panel whether the challenge should be dismissed as frivolous, said he will act in "an even-handed fair way."
Doug Ray, Gallegos' Austin lawyer, noted that state law does not list residency among reasons that a candidate can contest an election with the Senate.
He also said Gallegos has lived with his mother in the district since 1989 or so, though he owns a house outside the district that is home to his daughter and grandson.
What Greg heard yesterday is now being reported: Talmadge Heflin is no longer the chair of the House Appropriations Committee.
House Speaker Tom Craddick on Friday appointed state Rep. Jim Pitts to replace Talmadge Heflin as chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee.Pitts, R-Waxahachie, has served in the Texas House since 1992.
Heflin, R-Houston, was defeated for re-election by Democrat Hubert Vo. Heflin is considering whether to seek a recount or to file for an election contest in the House.
Craddick said Pitts would begin immediately.
"There is a lot of work to do on the budget," Craddick said. "We have to be ready to hit the ground running when the session starts."
"I am honored to have the confidence of Speaker Craddick, and to be given this enormous responsibility," Pitts said. "We have several challenges facing us next session, but I look forward to working with my colleagues to address them."
Remember "Desiderata"? If you grew up in the 70s, you surely knew someone who had that poem hanging on their wall. Those of you who know what I'm talking about will especially enjoy this Flash animation of the National Lampoon parody "Deteriorata", narrated by the late, great Norman Rose, whose obituary is brought to us by Mark Evanier. Even if you have no idea what I'm talking about, click the link for a good laugh.
The Dallas Observer has an interesting article on the recent woes of the Morning News. Much of the problem is blamed on recommendations by consultants from McKinsey, who have pushed to process DMN stories for all Belo news outlets, causing much of the content to be dumbed down as they pursue "light" readers. It's easy to see how this would be bad for the Morning News, and indeed for any respectable newspaper, but I found the overall tone of the article, which basically assumed that producing consistently high quality journalism would solve everything, to be frustrating. It's not clear to me that doing what they've always done would be a formula for continued success, and no evidence is offered to support that thesis by the author. Still, it's an interesting look inside a newspaper that's had a rough year. Check it out.
Had a little time to myself this afternoon, and upgraded to MT 3.121, apparently without any problems. I was a bit macho about it, in that I didn't make a backup of my existing installation first, but I figured if something screwed up I could always blow it all away and install the full version. There may not be time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over, after all. In this case, the karmic arrogance did not bite me on the ass, and everything installed correctly.
Now I need to read the documentation to see what if any fancy-schmancy new features I want to install, and I need to figure out the new MT Blacklist. The link to MTB documentation is broken - anyone know (before I post a question in the support forum) if it exists somewhere else? Oh, and are any other of the plugins that came with the Plugin Pack worth my time? Thanks.
Good damn question, from Mark Kleiman.
Is anyone rallying the law enforcement folks behind Ronnie Earle?I've only met him at a few conferences, but I know his reputation, and he rates about as high on professionalism as any D.A. in the country. But that doesn't mean that Earle won't get spattered by the current slime-and-defend if people don't speak out for him.
Loren Steffy is in the same boat I am, radio-wise.
I'm not a good demographic. That's not an easy thing to admit. No one likes to be unloved, even if it's only by marketers.
Clear Channel Communications' decision to pull the plug on KLOL-FM, though, drives home the point that I am an outcast, both musically and commercially.My biggest hint came several years ago when a station in Dallas changed its format to music that I swore was pulled from my own CD collection. It was an eclectic mix with unique programming such as a weekly show featuring Texas artists. It lasted exactly a year. "Not commercially viable" was the official cause of death.
I'd like to think that KLOL died because it replaced music in the mornings with moronic prattle, but the truth is more harsh: all of us who grew up listening to KLOL and stations like it simply aren't the marketing draw we once were. We've lost the sweet spot.
What's a middle-aged white guy who doesn't want to hear Fleetwood Mac 13 times a day to do?
Fewer media owners mean fewer media choices. If you own eight stations, as Clear Channel does, in a broadcast area the size of Houston, you can create vertical markets, nice little demographic compartments tailor made for advertisers.
No matter what your business, Clear Channel has a cookie-cutter market segment for your target customer base: Latino hip-hop, "new mix" pop, Fleetwood Mac-inundated "classic rock," news/talk and gooey "easy listening" to name a few.
There's lots of real estate on the dial, with little format overlap. What's the point in dominating a market if you have to compete with yourself?
The betrayal of the public trust didn't happen in San Antonio; it happened in Washington.Clear Channel has an obligation to grow. That is, after all, what businesses do, and Clear Channel has simply done that better than any of its rivals, gobbling up stations like Pac Man since the broadcast industry was deregulated in 1996. It now owns 1,200 nationwide.
Deregulation has meant an end to incremental revenue. Broadcasting now is about growth, and big money is in the buying of stations, not the owning of them.
Clear Channel reported a 10 percent rise in third-quarter profit, but that increase was driven by its billboard advertising business. Radio sales actually fell in the quarter, and the company has struggled to reverse the trend. Next year, it will cut advertising spots, hoping that fewer ads will allow it to raise rates.
Clear Channel's financial performance, lackluster as it is, remains the industry's gold standard. Its next-largest competitor, Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting, which has a mere 180 stations, reported a 4 percent decline in third-quarter sales.
Meanwhile, John Nova Lomax offers his eulogy to KLOL, in which he returns to the lousy-programming theme he's been hitting on lately.
Could the likes of KIKK and KLOL have done anything to ensure their survival in light of all these factors? "Yes," and "probably not," respectively. As for KIKK, their stab at a Texas country format was half-assed and ill conceived. Alongside their Waylon & Willie and Pat & Cory, they played way too much Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Tim McGraw and Shania. They should have spun more Steve Earle, Hank, Guy Clark and Johnny Bush instead. There are quite a few stations in the Hill Country that have thrived after doing just that.Which leaves us with KLOL. These days, ailing hard rock stations are an admittedly much tougher species to save than even struggling country stations. Once young women of easy virtue abandoned hard rock -- which was along about 1991 or so, for those of you keeping track -- KLOL's days were numbered. Hell, by the time of its demise, even strippers had stopped listening to KLOL. These days, what young chickenhead wants to pole-dance to Velvet Revolver when she can get nasty to "Get Low"?
The first thing they could have done is not fire Stevens and Pruett. The second thing they could have done is widen their playlist a little. I know it's a desperate measure, but they could have thrown in some vintage hair metal to woo some of the nostalgic women, like the one featured in Bowling for Soup's "1985." They could have jumped all over Los Lonely Boys when their record came out instead of championing the stale likes of Tesla. They could have been more of a local presence -- not just played more Houston bands, but also hosted more events and been a heavy presence on the scene, the way they were back in the '70s and '80s.
Addressing the "youth" market that Clear Channel is pursuing with its format switch on KLOL:
One of the radio conglomerates could get these kids back, but only if it were bold enough to spin rock and hip-hop side-by-side. Okay, this is the third time I've said this in the last nine months, but recent events have made me nothing if not more certain that this format will work. Why is their no station here -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- that spins the likes of the Killers, the Faint, Franz Ferdinand, the Strokes, Radiohead, U2 and Bright Eyes alongside Eminem, 50 Cent, OutKast, the Roots and Kanye West? One that also played classics like Public Enemy, the Violent Femmes, Eric B. and Rakim, and the Cars? What's so difficult about that? Almost nobody born since the mid-'70s would mind a little straight-up hip-hop (other than the three tracks off Licensed to Ill the Buzz spins) mixed in with their rock, because that's the way they've been jamming their whole lives. It's a demographic now. It's reality. It's who the youth of America is today.But no, when it comes to Anglos at least, Clear Channel can see only in black and white. When the company shut down a KLOL-like station in San Jose, California, and flipped it to a Latin format earlier this year, Clear Channel Communications regional vice president Ed Krampf had this to say in the San Jose Mercury News: "The fastest part of the market is Latin. And rock is having trouble. Young white kids are listening to hip-hop, and the other young segment is Hispanic…Sometimes you just have to move on.''
Yes, young whites are listening to hip-hop, but that's not all they listen to. Some of those same whites also listen to lots of indie rock, or country, or hard rock. At least in terms of what they listen to, they are neither white nor black but brown.
Which brings us back to the target audience of Mega 101. I've listened to the station for a few hours, and even though my Spanish is barely conversational and by no means up to the task of deciphering the slangy and rapid-fire lyrics of the music, I've enjoyed the station. You'll hear a Ricky Martin remix alongside one with Latin rappers rhyming in Spanish over a Lil Jon track alongside another edgier group rapping over the tracks to "This Is Radio Clash" and "Bust a Move." Molotov mingles with the Kumbia Kings; Paulina Rubio segues into Juanes.
Hell, it's as if you were hearing a Spanish version of the unborn Anglo station I've been harping on about all year. It's a sad comment on either us or them that they don't think the Anglos can take a station like that. To them I say, try us.
I'd noticed Tom DeLay's use of the phrase "politics of personal destruction" in his defense of the newly adopted Tom DeLay Scoundrel Protection Act (which has been simply designated the Tom DeLay Rule in the blogs), but I hadn't twigged to its significance. EJ Dionne explains.
Recall how Republicans dismissed any and all who charged that the investigations of President Bill Clinton by special prosecutor Ken Starr were politically motivated. Ah, but those were investigations of a shady Democrat by a distinguished Republican. When a Democrat is investigating a Republican, it can only be about politics. Is that clear?Rep. Henry Bonilla, the Texas Republican who sponsored the resolution to protect DeLay, said it was designed to protect against "crackpot" prosecutors whose indictments might get in the way of the ability of House Republicans to choose their own leaders. Can't let a little thing like an indictment get in the way of the sovereignty of House Republicans, can we?
"Attorneys tell me you can be indicted for just about anything in this country," said Bonilla. Remember the old days during the Clinton impeachment when Republicans went on and on about the importance of "the rule of law?" Oh, well.
DeLay's response to the whole thing came, almost word for word, from Clinton's old talking points. "We must stop the politics of personal destruction," Clinton said in December 1998 after the House impeachment vote that DeLay had rammed through. On Wednesday, DeLay said that Democrats "announced years ago that they were going to engage in the politics of personal destruction and had me as a target." Maybe it's time for Bill and Tom to sit down at that big new library in Little Rock for a friendly drink.
Josh Marshall has been all over this. The Daily DeLay is keeping track of the public statements and responses to constituent inquiries by individual Republican representatives on how they voted on this rule. Marshall has some red state paper editorials which give the thumbs-down to the DeLay rule (here and here), while Daily DeLay urges writing letters to the editor. Three anti-DeLay letters appear in the Chron today.
Kos diarist Kagro X suggests stealing a few pages from Newt Gingrich's 1993 playbook to keep this story in the news. I like the way he thinks.
One more Texas editorial: The Star Telegram says "That anyone would consider it appropriate for an indicted House member to remain in a leadership post is a slap at the people, who are entitled to have their elected representatives act legally, ethically and in the best interests of the country, not their own ambitions."
Tangentially, The Stakeholder has a few questions about some unexplained matters in the Abramoff/Scanlon affair.
Finally, the House Ethics Committee, in a display of timing which I'm sure had nothing whatsoever to do with the current news cycle, sent a letter to Chris Bell regarding what they called "innuendo, speculative assertions or conclusory statements" in his complaint against DeLay.
The committee's Republican chairman and senior Democrat used the letter to Bell to warn lawmakers that making exaggerated allegations of wrongdoing could result in disciplinary action against the accuser.Bell was not disciplined. He lost in a primary earlier this year because of a DeLay-engineered redistricting plan.
In the future, exaggerations and misstatements also could lead to dismissal of a complaint, said the letter from Chairman Joel Hefley, R-Colo., and senior Democrat Alan Mollohan of West Virginia. The panel they lead is formally called the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.
Bell's complaint was not dismissed, the letter said, because it contained allegations against DeLay, R-Sugar Land, that warranted consideration.
The committee concluded in October that DeLay appeared to link political donations to a legislative favor and improperly persuaded U.S. aviation authorities to intervene in a Texas political dispute.
The ethics panel is expected to outline new guidelines on fund raising and proper uses of political power in the wake of the DeLay admonishment.
The Texas Secretary of State has officially certified Hubert Vo as the winner in the HD149 race over Talmadge Heflin.
Democrat Hubert Vo officially defeated veteran Republican state Rep. Talmadge Heflin by 32 votes in the closely watched House District 149 race, the secretary of state's office announced Thursday.The official certification of the Nov. 2 election gave Vo one more vote than the 31-vote margin he had after the final ballot tally last week in Harris County.
The secretary of state's office said the canvassed vote was 20,694 for Vo and 20,662 for Heflin.
"The voters have spoken and we're excited," said Mustafa Tameez, a consultant to Vo's campaign. "We're grateful that this process has come to a conclusion."
But Heflin's lawyer, Andy Taylor, said the extra vote "came out of thin air with no explanation why it wasn't counted earlier."
"Why does the number keeping changing?" Taylor asked. "It raises serious doubts about the accuracy of the count and underscores the importance of knowing what really happened."
Taylor said that Monday is the deadline for Heflin to request a recount from the secretary of state, and Nov. 29 is the deadline to file for an election contest.
"We're still considering our options right now," he said.
Republican consultant Bill Miller, who seems to be speaking on behalf of House Speaker Tom Craddick, is advising Heflin to take the retire gracefully option.
State Rep. Talmadge Heflin, a senior member of the House Republican leadership team, should not ask his fellow lawmakers to overturn this month's election results, which showed him losing by 31 votes to a political novice, a key adviser to Speaker Tom Craddick said Thursday."A lot of people may feel sorry for Talmadge and say he got the short end of the stick. But when the votes are counted and you lose, it's time to move on," Austin political consultant Bill Miller said. "This is only my opinion, but there's no way that I see this [a challenge to the election results] coming to the floor of the House."
[...]
Craddick, who in January will begin his second term as the House's first Republican speaker since Reconstruction, has not said whether Heflin should challenge the election results.
But insiders from both parties said Miller's comment appeared to be a direct message to the veteran lawmaker that a potentially bloody post-election fight would be an unwelcome way to begin the 140-day legislative session.
"It's just not credible to suggest that this is anything but a very strong signal to Mr. Heflin to give up this fight," Democratic strategist Kelly Fero said.
State Rep. Toby Goodman, R-Arlington, said that challenging the vote count in the House would be unwise.
"I would hope he doesn't go that route," said Goodman, a 14-year House veteran who twice in the 1990s served on special panels convened when election results were challenged. "We don't need the divisiveness."
[...]
Miller said all sides should respect the outcome of the vote counting, which in the Vo-Heflin race took several days to complete.
"There's an old saying in politics that says if you're going to lose, lose big," Miller said. "It saves a lot of heartache and second-guessing and just lets you move on. And that's what should happen here."
Meanwhile, here's an addition to the message versus mobilization files:
Mike Lavigne, chief of staff for the Texas Democratic Party, said Vo's campaign used a very advanced block-walking method that became available because of a new "voter file" the Democrats rolled out before this election season."This was more detailed and more organized than anything we have ever produced," Lavigne said. "It gave our candidates the ability to know where voters stood, and ended up being the key to a successful ground attack."
Lavigne said the system works by providing the candidates with demographic information on constituents in their districts. It rates people on a scale of 1 to 5 and tells the candidate where potential swing voters live.
While Vo went door-to-door meeting voters and encouraging them to get to the polls, Heflin took a less aggressive approach and was seen as lackadaisical by his friends, said Harvey Kronberg, editor of the Quorum Report, an online site that covers Texas politics.
"Ten days before the election, Heflin was out of his district campaigning for another candidate," Kronberg said.
Karen Loper, Vo's campaign manager, said that Speaker of the House Tom Craddick became increasingly concerned about the race toward the end of the campaign and held a fund-raiser on Heflin's behalf, which generated $200,000 that was used to air radio spots in the Harris County area. The effort was too little too late, as Vo took the election with a razor-thin margin of 31 votes.
Matt Wilson, political analyst for NBC, said the aggressive Democratic ground game also worked in Dallas, pointing to a wide array of judgeships and the newly elected Democratic Sheriff Lupe Valdez.
"The Democrats had very good ground mobilization, especially with the Hispanics. This proved to be a big key to all of the Democratic victories in Texas," Wilson said.
[...]
"This year Democrats defiantly got the better of the ground game," Wilson said.
Locally Mark Strama upset Republican incumbent Jack Stick in a slightly Republican leaning district. Again, a strong grass-roots attack came into play that succeeded in capturing enough swing voters to give the election to Strama by a margin of 556 votes.
"Strama broke new ground on voter identification," Kronberg said. "His campaign touched thousands of hands."
Kronberg said that Stick's ground game was "modest," and Strama's campaign will be "textbook" for future Democrats trying to win Republican districts.
Kelly White, Texas House Democratic challenger, filed for a recount Thursday after provisional and overseas ballots left her with a 147 vote margin of defeat."Statistically this is a dead heat," said Melissa Abel, White campaign spokeswoman.
[...]
Mike Lavigne, chief of staff for the Texas Democratic Party, said there is no reason to think any inconsistency occurred during the election, but with the margin being so close, they want to be sure.
The White campaign will be responsible for meeting the cost of the electronic recount, which they anticipate will bear a price tag of a few thousand dollars.
"[White] owes it to her supporters to do this," Abel said. "We will use the electronic method because a manual count would be prohibitively expensive."
Alan Sager, Travis County Republican chairman, said the recount will not affect the results of the race, and White needs to understand the election is over.
"Of course she's entitled to ask for a recount, but we watched the process very carefully; we had poll watchers in place, and this is a waste of the taxpayers' time," Sager said. "Unless she sneaks some ballots in at the last minute, nothing is going to change."
Eric Opiela, a Karnes City lawyer and rancher, said the recount could prompt him to concede the District 35 House race or take the unusual step of asking the Texas House to mandate a new election after the 2005 Legislature convenes in January.Opiela trailed Democratic candidate Yvonne Gonzalez-Toureilles, an Alice lawyer, by 854 votes on Nov. 2, according to results posted by the state. They each sought the seat representing seven counties held by Gabi Canales, who fell to Gonzalez-Toureilles last spring.
Gonzalez-Toureilles said today: "The fact that he's making these allegations is highly insulting to the voters. I won fair and square."
Opiela, a former aide to Gov. George W. Bush whose candidacy welcomed Gov. Rick Perry as a fund-raiser, said he will ask the Texas Secretary of State's Office to order recounts in Jim Wells, Bee and Karnes counties. His request will be accompanied by $1,852.25 to cover the costs.
[...]
Opiela said his campaign has identified hundreds of possible irregularities in Jim Wells and Bee counties. He said records suggest some people voted more than once and others voted despite not being registered.
He provided copies of voter sign-in sheets for a precinct in Jim Wells County showing more than 100 signatures but not the voters' names, addresses or other information.
"I'm not throwing any punches right now," Opiela said. "We just want to know the facts."
It wasn't so long ago that rock music of the '80s was punchline nostalgia along with the Rubik's Cube and Miami Vice. In 1998, Adam Sandler spent a whole movie, The Wedding Singer, poking fun at bands like Culture Club and A Flock of Seagulls, along with the kids with frosted, spiked hair who loved them.But apparently everything that was once cool will become cool again some day, as 2004 has seen Top 20 debuts for both the Cure and Duran Duran and acclaimed new albums by their 21st century progeny like Interpol, the Rapture and Franz Ferdinand.
The triple bill of TV on the Radio, the Faint and Beep Beep this Sunday at Numbers is another signal that the bleeping keyboards and dark guitar jangle that fueled radio just before grunge and rap took over might be on the rise again.
"I grew up with commercial alternative radio WXXP 107 in Pittsburgh listening to bands like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and the Stone Roses," said TV on the Radio guitarist Kyp Malone. "I can't really listen to commercial radio anymore. What they call modern rock radio now is just recycling Pearl Jam and Green Day. It's homogenous."
Malone and the rest of his band apparently did have cable when MTV burst onto the scene in the mid-'80s. Not surprisingly, it was artists like Eno, Peter Gabriel and younger groups with eccentric thinking like the Pixies and Jane's Addiction that appealed most to the band's own sense of song.The Wrong Way, the opening track on Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, is Adebimpe's thoughts on being a black man in American society that plays somewhere between the hard-edge of "Me Decade" rock stars Living Colour and the original conscious rap of A Tribe Called Quest. Others like Staring at the Sun and Dreams are quirky looks at love and relationships that speak the same ethereal language as Echo and the Bunnymen and Houston's King X.
Anyway. There are audio samples on the Chron page if you want to check these folks out.
Oddly buried in the This Week community section of today's Chron is this article on Hispanic voting patterns from the 2004 election. This bit in particular piqued my interest:
Nationally, Latinos cast 8 percent — a little more than 9 million votes — of the total vote in the Nov. 2 election, and there's still some controversy as to whether 44 percent of the Hispanic vote went for Bush, as exit polling indicated, said Tatcho Mindiola Jr., director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and associate professor of sociology at the University of Houston."It's a considerable improvement over what he received last time," Mindiola said. "The question is why."
In Texas, Hispanics accounted for 23 percent — or 1.6 million votes — of the number cast statewide, he said.
In other states, "there is no question," he said, that Hispanics came out to the polls in large numbers, accounting for 21 percent of the vote in California, 32 percent in New Mexico, 10 percent of voters in Nevada and in Hawaii, 9 percent in New York and 3 percent in Ohio.
"South Texas still went for the Democratic Party, whereas the border went for President Bush," Mindiola said.
In the most heavily Hispanic counties in Texas (see spreadsheet), Bush got 44.5% of the vote. 471,000 votes were cast there; 85% of the population is Hispanic, so if they voted proportionally that's 400,000 voters, of which about 178,000 voted for Bush.
That leaves 1.3 million Hispanic voters in the rest of the state. If Bush got 59% of the Hispanic vote in Texas, that means a smidgeon over 1 million Hispanics total voted for him, or 822,000 of the Hispanics in these other counties. That comes to 63.2% of the Hispanic vote in all the other counties in Texas, including Bexar, Dallas, and Harris, in which Bush got 53.5% of over 2.2 million voters overall. These three counties would account for a huge proportion of those 1.3 million remaining Hispanic voters, and if they were going for Bush to the tune of 63.2% there's no way in hell he gets only 53.5% of the vote overall there. White voters are still the bulk of the electorate in the big urban counties, even as they drop to non-plurality of the total population (as an example, George Strong assumed 68% of the voters in the 2003 Houston mayoral runoff vote would be Anglos), so the only way to make these numbers add up is to assume that white voter support for Bush dropped like a rock in the big cities. Once again I say, no way in hell.
I continue to believe that the 23% figure for the Hispanic portion of the Texas electorate is too high, but there is another factor to consider when evaluating both that claim and the claim that Bush got 59% of their vote, and that factor is the percentage of the Anglo vote that Bush got. Yglesias thought that 72% white support for Bush was pretty darned high. Maybe so, but in Texas, maybe not. Consider the following:
County Pct Anglo Bush vote Pct Bush vote Total vote
==========================================================
Collin 76.1 173,014 71.23 242,889
Denton 76.0 140,541 69.99 200,791
Ellis 71.3 34,577 74.59 46,352
Johnson 83.2 34,739 73.54 47,232
Lubbock 62.5 69,675 75.28 92,548
Montgomery 81.4 104,361 78.10 133,624
Wichita 73.3 32,472 71.29 45,545
Williamson 73.5 83,079 64.97 127,857Total 672,458 71.77 936,838
UPDATE: Ruy Teixeira performs similar calculations and comes to the same conclusions.
Sarah brings us some bad news about SafePlace:
Seven months after being named one of the nation's best programs for victims of violence, SafePlace is slashing jobs, cutting services and closing one of its emergency shelters because of money problems.The Austin nonprofit organization expects to lose $1.3 million by the end of 2005 because of shrinking public and private revenue, said Rebecca Lightsey, SafePlace's executive director. That reduction, combined with the group's annual need to raise $1.5 million for operating expenses, means the nonprofit would have to generate $2.8 million to maintain current services through 2005. So SafePlace is cutting back.
In February, the group plans to fold its single women's shelter into its family shelter, reducing capacity from 122 to 100. Officials are laying off 19 people and reducing services, including counseling. The waiting list for sexual assault victims seeking counseling already is three months long. Children wait four to six months.
Given the vast everflowing river of comments that my recent KLOL-related posts have become, I should perhaps be hesitant to mention this, but I will anyway. Christine says this is Blurker Amnesty Week. Says she:
Yo! You! There in the corner? Long time listener, it’s time to be a first time caller. I want to know that you are out there, so give it up and leave a comment. It’s ok. We love you.[...]
Blurker (BLUR-kur): n. 1. One who reads many blogs but leaves no evidence of themselves such as comments behind; a silent observer of blogs. 2. One who reads many blogs but has no blog of their own; a blog-watcher or blog voyeur.
It’s ok to be a blurker, but it’s a good idea to come out into the light every once in awhile. Here is your chance - with amnesty even!
Two years after the ferocious budget-cutting of the 78th Lege, we still have a budget deficit.
"It looks to me like we're going to be short about $2 billion," said [Lt. Gov. David] Dewhurst, who presides over the Senate."That's a lot of money, and during all of the 1990s the Legislature was never faced with a shortfall like that," he said. But after the deficit of two years ago, he added, "Two billion dollars doesn't sound quite as bad."
Even with a shortfall, he said, "We're going to balance this budget. We're going to put more money into public education. We're putting more money into the Medicaid and CHIP programs. We're putting more money into adult protective services and child protective services.
"These are all critical needs."
One thing to note: State Rep. Rob Eissler (R, The Woodlands), who has introduced a bill to increase the sales tax, gave as a justification for the increase the new federal law which allows sales taxes to be deducted from one's federal income taxes. Apparently, the Bush Administration is considering doing away with deductions for state and local taxes as a deficit-reduction measure. I rather doubt that will ever pass, for a variety of reasons, but its very specter might spook some legislators. Watch the rhetoric on this one.
There are, of course, other obstacles to school finance reform.
Gov. Rick Perry is serving notice that he wants to make more than funding changes in the public schools.And he is armed with a new report from business advisers who want, among other things, to spend tax dollars on school vouchers, boost funding for charter schools and restructure the way teachers are paid.
Those proposals, strongly opposed by many educator groups and many Democrats, already are producing fireworks, two months before lawmakers convene Jan. 11.
Perry told a business audience in Dallas earlier this week that Texas has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to provide "meaningful reform" to public education.
He is expected to deliver a similar message today in an address to the Greater Houston Partnership.
The Tom DeLay Scoundrel Protection Act is now official Republican policy.
House Republicans moved to protect House Majority Leader Tom DeLay from a Texas political corruption case, deciding Wednesday that he will not be automatically forced to give up his leadership post should he be indicted.[...]
Asked if he could be an effective leader if he is indicted, DeLay responded swiftly.
"I am not going to answer that question because I am not (going to be indicted)," said DeLay, the second-highest ranking House Republican. "This has nothing to do with whether I was going to be or was not going to be."
Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-San Antonio, who initiated the rules change before consulting with DeLay or his staff, said GOP leaders needed protection from "any crackpot district attorney" with a political agenda.
You know, if I ran an advertising agency, and the Democratic Party hired me to devise a campaign around this latest move by the GOP, the first slogan I'd release would be something like "Democrats Believe Crooks Should Not Be Leaders...Unlike Some Other Political Parties We Could Name". I know that an indictment is not a conviction, but so what? I'm just a hypothetical advertising agency here. And hey, we don't even know for sure that the GOP has a rule in place which says that a member who has been convicted of a crime would have to relinquish a leadership role. Besides, I'm sure the Republicans can explain the difference to voters. They're good at that sort of fine nuance.
Let's check some editorial reviews:
The Houston Chronicle says "In a show that combined bravura with insecurity, House Republicans changed their rules so that Majority Leader Tom DeLay would not automatically have to step aside from his No. 2 spot if he is indicted as part of a state investigation into campaign finance operations."
The Express News says "[Rep. Henry] Bonilla's eagerness to disregard reasonable ethical standards to curry favor with DeLay is an embarrassment."
The Statesman says "In changing their rules to protect U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Republicans in Congress have made it clear they prefer raw power over ethical leadership."
The Morning News says "Having power doesn't mean you can abuse it. Regrettably, that's what congressional Republicans did yesterday when they changed an important party rule – apparently for the benefit of one man."
(Todd Gillman notes, by the way, that this is just one more GOP reform from the 90s which has since been tossed aside.)
The Lufkin Daily News says "It seems our Republican leaders really don’t care what actions they have to take, or how those actions appear, as long as they get what they want."
The Waco Tribune says "[I]n an outrageous power play typical of DeLay's reign as Congress' most powerful man, House Republicans changed rules under which he'd have had to relinquish his majority leader post under a state felony indictment."
More to come, I'm sure.
UPDATE: The Stakeholder has a nice roundup of the case against Tom DeLay so far, and a petition you can sign to let the GOP House leadership know how you feel about their actions. And do read William and TP's comments below. Senator Bedfellow indeed.
Morat is contemplating a run for his local school board here in the Houston area, and he's seeking advice from anyone who's been there and done that. Drop by and help him out if you can.
And good on you for contemplating this, Morat. Every good person who runs for office makes the world a better place.
DeLay cronies Jack Abramoff and Mike Scanlon have been sued by the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana over the $32 million the two men bilked from them.
The lawsuit, filed in state court in Louisiana by the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, alleges that between 2001 and 2004 the tribe was overcharged and billed for work that was never performed, and that Abramoff and Scanlon converted tribal funds to personal use. The tribe said it is seeking to recover the $32 million it paid the pair and plans to seek punitive damages.The Coushattas were one of six newly wealthy gambling tribes that paid the two men $82 million in public relations and lobbying fees for work that some tribe members contend was worth a small fraction of that sum. Abramoff also directed the tribes to give millions of dollars in campaign contributions to members of Congress.
The fees are the subject of a grand jury investigation in Washington. The FBI and a task force of five federal agencies are investigating the campaign contributions and whether tribal funds were misused, among other issues, according to government sources.
In also naming Abramoff's former law firm, Greenberg Traurig, which is headquartered in Florida, the Coushatta tribe alleged that it failed "to adequately supervise, control and monitor" Abramoff.
The tribe said the firm "was unjustly enriched by the fraudulent overbilling and overcharging practices."
"It's one thing to pay a premium for people who can make your case in Washington," said Joe Kendall, an attorney for the tribe. "It's something quite different to play on the fears of a group of people who may not know the system all that well and bilk them out of millions."
Greenberg Traurig ousted Abramoff when questions were raised in the spring about the lobbying and public relations fees he and Scanlon obtained from the tribes. The firm has said it is cooperating with the criminal investigations and a separate one by Congress, but Coushatta attorney Joe Kendall said yesterday the firm has not made any effort to reimburse the tribe for the more than $5 million Greenberg Traurig was paid.
Circuit Judge Eric Johnson issued an order this week barring the Abramoffs from transferring or depleting their assets other than for normal living expenses or to pay attorneys' fees. He did so at the request of 13 former employees of the now-defunct Eshkol Academy, who have sued the school and the Abramoffs. They contend that they were wrongly deprived of one-quarter of their annual salaries when the school closed in May.The Eshkol Academy, an Orthodox Jewish school in Columbia that received most of its funds through Abramoff's efforts, was a casualty of the controversy resulting from Abramoff's lobbying practices. Abramoff was ousted by the Greenberg Traurig law firm this spring after disclosures that he and an associate charged tens of millions of dollars in fees to Indian tribes seeking to protect their gambling wealth. A federal grand jury is investigating their contracts with the tribes.
The Eshkol employees, who include nine teachers and the principal, contend they are owed $149,000. Johnson granted a temporary restraining order securing the Abramoffs' assets late Wednesday, pending a full hearing.
On a tangential matter, The Stakeholder has a petition going around to put pressure on the values-free House GOP caucus for its disregard of the legal process vis a vis the Travis County grand jury investigations into DeLay Incorporated. You've got to love the Republicans' reasoning.
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told The Hill that the rule change, first reported by The Hill yesterday, “reflects a reality that [Earle’s investigation is] nothing but a political witch hunt bent on taking him to court. It’s the final phase that Democrats are coming to grips that Republicans are a permanent majority. There’s not any question it’ll pass.”[...]
Republicans have used Democrats’ ethical lapses, including a check-kiting scandal at the House bank, to their political advantage. In 1987, then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) told The Washington Post: “[You] now have a House where it is more dangerous to be aggressive about honesty than it is to be mildly corrupt. … We have in Wright, [Majority Leader Tom Foley (D-Wash.)] and Coelho a third generation of Democratic leaders, the first that has never served in a minority. … You now have a situation where I think people feel almost invulnerable.”
Cantor said, however, that by inoculating DeLay in the present case the Republicans will not lose the moral high ground gained by instituting the rule in the first place.
“That line of reasoning [accepts] that exercise of the prosecutor in Texas is legitimate,” he said.
By the way, for anyone in the state or national Democratic inner circles: Running a strong challenger against Henry Bonilla, who made the formal proposal of this rule change, might be a good idea. I'm just saying.
UPDATE: Scanlon gets spanked, and Abramoff is exposed as a liar in testimony before the Senate subcommittee. Click the More link for the story. Thanks to AJ Garcia for the tip.
In new testimony Wednesday in the Senate’s ongoing investigation into the exorbitant lobbying fees charged by Republican lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, tribal representatives charged that House Administration Chairman Bob Ney (R-Ohio) was a key — if unknowing — accomplice in a scheme to bilk millions of dollars from American Indian tribes.
At a Senate hearing Wednesday, representatives of the Tigua tribe painted Ney as the central player in an effort by Abramoff and Scanlon to persuade the tribe to hire the pair for a $4.2 million fee in 2002.
According to Marc Schwartz, a government affairs official with the Tigua tribe, Abramoff told the tribe in March 2002 that Ney had agreed to add a provision to an election-reform bill he authored that would permit the tribe to reopen its profitable Speaking Rock Casino in Texas, which had been closed by a federal judge in February 2002.
Abramoff later assured Tigua officials that the Senate sponsor of the election reform bill — Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) — had also promised Ney that he would sign off on the Tigua’s plans, Schwartz told a joint investigative committee in the Senate on Wednesday.
But it turns out that Dodd had not agreed to the provision and knew little about it. In a statement released after the hearing, Ney said that he had been “duped” by Abramoff.
Ney said that he only asked Dodd to include the Tigua’s provision because he had been told by Abramoff that the Connecticut Democrat supported the language.
“In short, I had been misled by Jack Abramoff,” Ney said in a statement.
One thing was clear during a joint hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation, and Indian Affairs panels: the Tigua tribe thought that paying $4.2 million for its Washington lobbying team — and closely following their advice to give money to Ney financially — would allow them to reopen their casino in short order.
According to testimony from the Tigua’s Schwartz, Abramoff began asking the tribe to make political contributions to Ney and other key GOP lawmakers soon after he agreed to represent the tribe in early 2002.
Just weeks after the Tigua tribe inked a deal with Abramoff and Scanlon, Abramoff told the Tigua tribe to “make additional [political] contributions to Congressman Ney through some PACs he had,” Schwartz testified.
A few months later, Schwartz said he “received an e-mail from Abramoff stating that Congressman Ney had asked if the tribe could cover the expense for a trip to Scotland.”
Though the Tigua tribe agreed to send the political contributions to political action committees controlled by Ney and other Republican lawmakers, the tribe refused to pay the $50,000 requested to cover the costs of the trip.
Still, Abramoff assured the tribe that Ney planned to include the tribe’s casino language in the final version of the election reform legislation that year, according to Schwartz.
In August, Abramoff arranged for Schwartz and other tribe members to meet with Ney in Washington to discuss the prospects for the language, Schwartz said.
Before the meeting, Abramoff warned Schwartz in an e-mail “that Congressman Ney didn’t want his trip to Scotland brought up, as he would show his appreciation to the tribe later.”
Ney’s disclosure form on file with the House Clerk said the trip was paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a large contributor to a nonprofit foundation run by Abramoff. A Tigua official testified Wednesday that two other tribes underwrote the trip.
In a lengthy, 90-minute meeting with tribal leaders in his Capitol Hill office, Schwartz said Ney praised Abramoff and his lobbying successes and personally pledged his support to help the Tigua include language in a bill to reopen the casino.
“During that meeting, Congressman Ney was very animated about Mr. Abramoff’s skill and repute as a leader in the lobbying circles,” Schwartz told the Senate hearing.
“We were told about the impending success of Mr. Abramoff’s legislative plan and how much Congressman Ney wanted to help,” he recalled.
Scanlon, for his part was telling tribal leaders that Dodd — the Senate sponsor of the election-reform legislation — that he would include the provision in the final version on his bill, Schwartz said.
But when the election reform bill passed in October 2002, the language that the Tigua tribe had sought — and which they paid $4.2 million to include — was not to be found.
The day after the bill was approved, Schwartz testified, “Abramoff phoned to say that he had just spoken with Congressman Ney who had reported that Senator Dodd had gone back on his word and stripped the measure from the committee report.”
Schwartz and other tribal members then prodded other lawmakers to call Dodd to find out what happened.
But the tribe was then told that Dodd “knew nothing about the issue,” Schwartz said.
On Oct. 8, 2002, Abramoff arranged for Ney to contact members of the tribe to express his outrage at the turn of events.
According to the testimony from Schwartz, “Ney held a conference call with the tribal council and told them about his disbelief that Senator Dodd had gone back on his word.”
However, Dodd said he never agreed to help the Tigua tribe in 2002 — and that he knew little about the issue.
In a statement read at Wednesday’s hearing, Dodd said neither Abramoff nor Scanlon “contracted me on recognition of the Tigua tribe and I never represented — either to them of Congressman Ney — that I would in any manner work to legislatively recognize the Tigua tribe.”
Dodd added that Ney and one of his aides “did approach my office during the waning hours of negotiations over the [election reform] legislation to inquire whether recognition provisions for the Tigua tribe could be included in the bill. The suggestion was summarily rejected.”
Ney, in his own statement, said that Abramoff “explicitly told me that this provision was supported by Senator Dodd.”
He added: “Believing that Senator Dodd supported this provision and knowing that Senator Dodd’s support was critical to [the election reform legislation’s] passage, I then personally asked Senator Dodd about this provision and he expressed no knowledge of it.”
Senate Commerce Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) blasted Abramoff and Scanlon, saying they “went to El Paso selling salvation and instead delivered snake oil.”
Meanwhile, a red-faced Scanlon sat in the second-to-last row of the hearing room, listening to the testimony.
When he was summoned to the witness table a few minutes later, he refused to answer questions from Senators about his activities, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination.
Looking down on Scanlon from the dais, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said: “I don’t know how you go to sleep at night. Really. I would hope that your conscience bothers you.”
But the day’s most dramatic moment came in the final minute of the hearing when retiring Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.), the chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee and the only American Indian in the Senate, used his final words as chairman of the committee to express his scorn for Scanlon.
“For 400 years, people have been cheating Indians, so you are not the first one Mr. Scanlon,” he said. “You’re the problem, buddy, with what has happened to Native Americans in this country.”
Still no new news in the Heflin-Vo saga. While we're waiting, the Star-Telegram weighs in with another don't-challenge editorial.
Heflin could justifiably request a recount and hope that Vo's scant margin of victory will disappear. If it doesn't, he then could walk away and be justly proud of his long service to the state.But Heflin is not just a powerful Republican player in Austin. With long experience on the Appropriations Committee, he carries facts and figures in his head to an extent that is unmatched in the House. Going into a session that could include a thorough overhaul of state taxes and of the way that Texas pays for public schools, that knowledge is extremely valuable to the House leadership.
Heflin will feel some pressure to consider a tougher fight to overturn the tenuous election results. That's where things could get ugly.
Heflin could contest the election. Most likely, his argument would be that illegal votes were counted and that, thus, the election should be thrown out.
But Texas political insiders say that Heflin's district is increasingly one populated by ethnic-minority Democrats. To protest the election probably would mean pointing to some of these minority voters, saying that they were not properly registered or that for some other reason their votes should not have been counted.
Tossing out minority votes is troubling business. And where would the arguments on this election contest be heard? State law gives exclusive jurisdiction to the House itself.
Heflin and other House leaders have to decide whether they want to crawl through that mud. Surely not.
Kevin notes that the powers that be at Clear Channel in Houston have pulled a few stunts in the past, and wonders if maybe the furor over KLOL's format change could be another trick on their part. Who knows? I will say this - format changes, especially when they involve a new and big player into an established market, often provoke chain reactions. Remember how old-school classic rock station KZFX changed its tune after The Arrow entered the scene? As I said before, it would not shock me if one of the lower-rated existing Latino/Tejano stations moves to fill the niche KLOL has abandoned. Maybe they'll even be better than what KLOL was just before the change. It could happen.
By the way, go to Clear Channel's radio homepage, click on Station Search, and enter Houston as the criteria. Someone's still a little conflicted over there regarding the KLOL change.
Federal authorities are investigating whether former Enron Chairman Ken Lay's wife acted improperly when she had their family foundation sell large quantities of Enron stock just days before the company's bankruptcy.
Mike Ramsey, lawyer for Ken Lay, confirmed Tuesday night that the Enron Task Force is investigating Linda Lay's requests that the charitable foundation sell shares in order to use the money to pay charitable obligations."It is a low and dirty blow," Ramsey said of the investigation. "The government has a vivid imagination. They believe they were anointed by the Lord to do what they please."
Ramsey said the Lays have learned of the investigation "in circumstantial ways" and have not been confronted by federal authorities.
Ramsey said Ken Lay has repeatedly asked for a speedy trial and complained that prosecutors have not complied."It appears the reason they were not willing to go to trial early is they have no proof. Now they will try extortion," Ramsey said.
He said the government has not directly threatened the family with charges against Linda Lay.
In its case against Enron's former chief financial officer, Andrew Fastow, the government threatened to file charges against his wife, Lea, sometime before she was actually indicted.
The husband and wife wound up pleading guilty in a joint deal. Lea Fastow is serving a year in prison on a tax charge, and her husband faces a possible 10-year sentence on two charges but is cooperating with the government.
David Berg, a longtime Houston lawyer, said if Linda Lay did act on information she got from her husband and did so before the public knew it, prosecutors are right to look at it, no matter who benefited.
"But they should have been looking at this years ago. The timing of this makes me suspicious. Doing this now conveys a weakness in the government's case," Berg said. "You have to think about what happened to Lea Fastow."
He said he suspects prosecutors knew about this possibility some time ago and are using it now "when they are facing one of the strongest trial lawyers in the country," he said, referring to Ramsey.
He noted the prosecutors got what they wanted in the Fastow case, and that was Andrew Fastow's guilty plea and cooperation.
"Now they are looking to hammer Ken Lay. And the hammer is his wife," Berg said.
Elsewhere in Enronarama, Tom and Dwight take a look at the rather large bills being prepared in the Enron bankruptcy case. All I can say is "Yowza!"
Greg makes a pretty good case (here and here) that turnout was as good as you could reasonably expect in the uncontested Democratic districts, thus rebutting HCDP Chair Gerry Birnbirg's assertion that this was our primary failure in 2004. That's what I get for doing a cursory analysis. The best GOTV effort we can make starts with strong candidates delivering a strong message - the rest will follow.
One number that should have jumped out at everyone regardless of their position on the turnout/message axis is that of Moldy Joe Nixon. Running against an unfunded, unknown independent candidate, Nixon was named on only 53.76% of the ballots, meaning he barely outperformed Martha Wong in the contested HD134 race. Going through the precinct data, District 133 voted for George Bush at a 54.6% rate, which is to say dead on even with Harris County as a whole. You think maybe a serious Democratic challenger could have moved the numbers in HD133 a bit? Hopefully, we'll get a chance to find out in 2006. Put this one on your radar now as a top-tier pickup opportunity, and ask yourself again why we didn't have anyone running this time around. Precinct comparison data is beneath the More link.
And just because I can't help myself, some of those precincts where Nixon and Bush got less than 40% of the vote had crappy turnout. If wishes were horses, let me tell you...
Precinct Votes Nixon Nixon Pct Bush Bush Pct ====================================================== 130 1851 1383 74.7 1393 75.3 338 2177 859 39.5 850 39.0 356 2135 1356 63.5 1377 64.5 395 1363 939 68.9 963 70.7 429 600 273 45.5 282 47.0 437 1555 1085 69.8 1124 72.3 438 1425 1030 72.3 1051 73.8 457 1331 309 23.2 301 22.6 483 1587 918 57.8 918 57.8 487 843 251 29.8 262 31.1 492 1795 1057 58.9 1099 61.2 493 1350 890 65.9 904 70.0 499 1840 1340 72.8 1353 73.5 503 688 261 37.9 275 40.0 504 1754 1187 67.7 1198 68.3 508 1625 706 43.4 733 45.1 511 1301 823 63.3 803 61.7 546 72 37 51.4 42 58.3 559 1806 699 38.7 726 40.2 565 1446 315 21.8 330 22.8 620 2828 1501 53.1 1522 53.8 624 556 261 46.9 281 50.5 625 1342 863 64.3 839 62.5 626 1853 1072 57.5 1057 57.0 706 379 219 57.8 223 58.8 727 1343 514 38.3 523 38.9 765 1992 901 45.2 934 46.9 882 569 135 23.7 134 23.6Totals 39406 21184 53.8 21497 54.6
Continuing the 2004 postmortem, looking at the turnout-versus-message argument (see here, here, and here)...
I had a chance to hear Gerry Birnbirg's analysis of the 2004 election, and how Democrats did in Harris County. He downplayed the importance of message while stressing turnout, which Greg and I have discussed in the posts linked above. There was one thing he said which stood out to me, though, and I wanted to check it out. He spoke about how in the various uncontested State Rep races, the Republicans did a much better job getting people to the polls than the Democrats did.
Well, there were sixteen uncontested races (I'm counting any race without a Democrat and a Republican as uncontested - sorry, Libertarians and Independents). Those races split as eight uncontested Dems and eight uncontested Republicans. In those eight races, the Republican incumbents drew a total of 298,571 votes, for an average of 37,321 each. On the Democratic side, the numbers were 201,337 and 25,167.
The difference between the two parties is over 97,000 ballots. If the uncontested Democrats had drawn an equal number of voters, and if those voters had pushed the button for other Democratic candidates, that 97,000 boost to the totals would have been enough to win every contested judicial race. Every single one, from Kathy Stone (47.92%, lost by 42,000) down to Zone Nguyen (45.79%, lost by 85,000). Think about that.
Democrats would have still lost the top-of-ticket countywide races, but Reggie McKamie would have been within 8000 votes of Chuck Rosenthal, and Guy Robert Cark would have lost to Tommy Thomas by less than 15,000. And we'd be talking about how Harris County was just like Dallas County, on the verge of being blue again.
I'm making some assumptions here, of course, but in looking at these numbers, which I have under the More link, I can see where Birnbirg is coming from. I'll pick this up again in a later post.
(All data from the Cumulative Results page on the Harris County Clerk site.)
UPDATE: Greg responds.
Dist Incumbent Votes Ballots Reg'ed RegPct VotePct Turnout ========================================================================= 129 John Davis-R 40,002 58,414 91,506 43.72 68.48 63.84 130 C Van Arsdale-R 54,026 71,088 102,778 52.57 76.08 69.17 131 Alma Allen-D 28,474 35,807 65,278 43.62 79.52 54.85 132 Bill Callegari-R 40,328 55,543 86,167 46.80 72.61 64.46 133 Joe Nixon-R 21,184 39,406 67,844 31.22 53.76 58.08 135 Gary Elkins-R 31,014 46,107 75,279 41.20 67.27 61.25 136 B Woolley-R 41,719 58,165 85,890 48.57 71.73 67.72 139 S Turner-D 30,151 36,714 73,284 41.14 82.12 50.10 141 S Thompson-D 27,490 36,429 74,294 37.00 75.46 49.03 143 Joe Moreno-D 13,282 19,586 49,074 27.07 67.81 39.87 144 Robert Talton-R 25,873 40,398 73,312 35.29 64.05 55.10 145 Rick Noriega-D 15,160 21,638 48,909 31.00 70.06 44.24 146 Al Edwards-D 36,773 49,157 86,964 42.29 74.81 56.53 147 Garnet Coleman-D 32,566 40,676 76,962 42.31 80.06 52.85 148 Jessica Farrar-D 21,041 31,684 60,783 34.62 66.41 52.13 150 Debbie Riddle-R 44,425 60,102 94,473 47.02 73.92 63.62Votes = Votes received by that candidate
Ballots = Total votes cast in that district
Reg'ed = Total registered voters in that district
RegPct = Percentage of registered voters who voted for that candidate
VotePct = Percentage of total votes which went to that candidate
Turnout = Percentage of registered voters who votedDem Avg Votes = 25,167 (201,337 total)
Rep Avg Votes = 37,321 (298,571 total)
I admit, I was almost fooled by this. I mean, it's not like The Onion hasn't been a bit too realistic some days, right? Read and laugh. Via Pandagon.
No one should be the least bit surprised if this comes to pass:
House Republicans have until noon today to propose any rules changes to inoculate Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) from losing his leadership position should he be indicted in a campaign-finance criminal probe back in Texas.Republicans dismiss the investigation by Travis Country District Attorney Ronnie Earle as a politically motivated witch hunt, but GOP internal conference rules are clear that any elected member of the leadership must temporarily relinquish his position if indicted on a felony count that could lead to more than two years in prison.
[...]
“We’re in the process of receiving proposed rules changes. The deadline is noon tomorrow, and we have yet to receive any proposals dealing with leadership or their tenure,” said Greg Crist, spokesman for the House Republican Conference.
In a reorganization meeting tomorrow, the conference will consider any potential changes to its internal rules.
One senior GOP aide said that a handful of lawmakers are discussing whether or not to make the proposed modification. But he added that they were under no pressure from DeLay’s office, or other House leaders, to do so.
“Any effort to modify that rule would be outside DeLay’s office,” another GOP leadership aide said.
The Republican rule requiring any elected leader to take leave of his leadership position pending the outcome of an indictment dates back to 1993, when Republicans sought to draw attention to the ethical problems of then-Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.).
If Republicans did attempt to change the rule, Democrats would accuse them of rank hypocrisy. Republicans must weigh that likely media maelstrom against the potentially more damaging prospect of having their majority leader forced to step down as a result of a campaign-finance indictment.
In the early ’90s, when House Republicans were in the political wilderness, they latched onto a series of ethical scandals in making their claim that the majority power had been corrupted by its years in power.
“We need new leadership which will act because it is right, not because they have been caught in cover-ups and scandals,” DeLay said on the House floor in 1992.
“Once again, what we are pointing out here is that we are outraged at the mismanagement of this House, and it is not just this last year. It has been going on for years. It is the arrogance of power, the lack of follow-through, the ‘Oh, yes, we can push that over in the corner and not address it.’”
DeLay has already been admonished on two separate occasions this year by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, actions stemming in part from an ethics complaint filed by outgoing Rep. Chris Bell (D-Texas).Bell compiled his ethics complaint with the help of outside groups. Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) would like to change that practice.
In an Oct. 8 letter to colleagues, Dreier asked for their input on changing the rules on filing complaints. In response to Dreier’s letter and to bolster their charge of hypocrisy, Democrats unearthed a 1997 quote from Dreier where he said, “In our view, there is an inherent conflict of interest when only members are involved in evaluating ethics complaints against their peers.”
For those of you who need a refresher on the various DeLay scandals, Thomas Nephew points to this Mother Jones article by Lou DuBose, coauthor with Jan Reid of "The Hammer", which sums up the current state of affairs. I share Thomas' fondness for this quote:
Ronnie Earle doesn't buy it. The 62-year-old district attorney is approaching the end of 27 years in office and has said he would have retired were it not for this case. Earle has the somber countenance of a hanging judge and a sense of humor as arid as his West Texas origins. Investigating the TRMPAC case has been slow, he says, because it's like "watching clowns climb out of a Volkswagen. There are a lot more in there than I imagined."
Talmadge Heflin may yet challenge his electoral loss to Hubert Vo, but in the meantime, he's been evicted from his office in the Capitol.
Some people in Austin already are waiting to move in, with a senior legislator claiming Heflin's Capitol office in a ritual that follows legislative elections. Based on seniority, returning House members get the chance to pick new offices being vacated by retiring or defeated members.State Rep. Edmund Kuempel, R-Seguin, the only remaining member of the legislative group first seated in 1983 along with Heflin, claimed Heflin's third-floor office, one of the bigger ones in the Capitol.
Rep. Peggy Hamric, R-Houston, who chairs the House Administration Committee that on Monday began reassigning office space, said she doesn't know if Heflin will contest the election.
"I'm sure he will make whatever decision is best for him," she said.
But she said it is necessary to proceed with the office assignments so moves can be complete before the 2005 regular session convenes Jan. 11.
Hamric, who has been in the Legislature since 1991 and is the senior Republican member of the Harris County delegation after Heflin, said letters about office assignments were mailed to all House members the day after the election.
The most senior members started the office assignment process Monday. It will be completed the first week of December. Legislators who aren't returning have until Dec. 1 to empty their offices, she said.
I should note that just because some folks in Austin are looking at reality doesn't mean that will be the predominant view. If Talmadge Heflin does go forward with a formal House challenge, it will be an expensive proposition for Hubert Vo. For that reason, Richard Morrison is urging people to consider helping out Hubert Vo. Byron has the details.
Found this blast from the past while searching for old KLOL stories.
There will soon be something new on the radio: Houston's first all-talk station on the FM dial -- and the first talk station to bill itself as ideologically middle-of-the-road -- debuts next week.KRTK 97.1 Talk, which was Tejano station KOND in its previous incarnation, is backed by local investors drawn heavily from the ranks of plaintiffs' lawyers. Self-described "raging heterosexual moderate" Roger Gray leads off a roll of familiar names who'll be manning the mikes, including former KLOL jock Dayna Steele and Don Imus, the onetime Friend of Bill syndicated out of New York.
But who's going to be listening? Gray, who was ousted from KPRC's lineup of conservative talkers last fall, claims there's a wider audience in Houston waiting for a station that doesn't pitch exclusively to the right.
"One of the mistakes is letting your callers drive what your programming is," observes Gray, who is busy setting up the station is the CRSS building on the West Loop. "Callers will take you in directions you don't want to go. You want to be responsive, but by the same token, less than 10 percent of your listeners will ever call."
Gray discounts traditional radio wisdom that talk shows won't work on the FM band, long the home for music formats. He points out that KUHF, which features NPR in its morning and afternoon slots, actually has better Arbitron ratings than KPRC in the same time periods. KUHF also has a better mix of men and women listeners, a statistic that should appeal to advertisers.
David Jones, a Democratic activist and lawyer who has had several talk shows on cable and radio, came up with the idea for a new talk station and began pulling together the components, including Gray and the station's key financial backer, lawyer Gerald Birnberg.
Mike Stude, the previous owner, was also brought in as an investor, along with county Republican chairman and criminal defense lawyer Gary Polland, Vinson & Elkins attorney Gary Robin and plaintiffs' attorney Jim Moriarty. Jones says the investors put up $10 million to buy the station, not counting construction costs at the new site.
Just how well the city accepts a diet of Imus's edgy East Coast humor or how well a former rock DJ Steele adapts to the talk format remains to be seen. After all, observes a former co-worker of Steele's, "handling a talk show is a little different from introducing the latest Metallica hit."
Are you a smoker who opposes a state income tax or an increased sales tax? One way or another, you're gonna get screwed.
More than three out of four Texans say the state should put more money into public schools and social services, according to a new poll.Seventy-six percent said the state should provide more money for education, and 69 percent said they are very or somewhat confident that putting more money into schools will lead to improved student performance.
More money for social services such as children's health insurance and Child Protective Services was favored by 78 percent of respondents to The Scripps Howard Texas Poll.
Only 16 percent disagreed that schools need more state funding, and 15 percent didn't support additional money for social services. The rest said they didn't know.
[...]
Seventy-four percent of poll respondents favored raising the cigarette tax $1 per pack, compared with 25 percent who opposed. Seventy-two percent supported a $1 surcharge on tickets for concerts, professional sporting events and amusement parks.
On gambling issues, 72 percent favored legalizing state-taxed video lottery terminals at horse and dog tracks, an idea proposed by Gov. Rick Perry to raise money for schools. Perry also proposed the cigarette tax increase and ticket surcharge, but his plan was voted down.
Fifty-eight percent said they favor casino gambling.
There is less support for increasing and expanding the state sales tax. Only 44 percent said they favor increasing sales taxes to fund the state's schools, while 46 percent opposed, 7 percent said it depends and 3 percent didn't know.
Similar results were found for an income tax, even if it reduced property taxes and was used for schools. Forty-four percent wanted an income tax, 49 percent didn't and 7 percent didn't know.
Want more evidence? Look at what the people say are the top issues for this session:
The poll also found a split on whether people found their local property taxes to be fair or unfair. Fifty-four percent said the taxes are fair and 43 percent said they are unfair, with 3 percent saying they don't know.Texans were asked to name the main issue they want the Legislature to address in the upcoming session. Twenty-four percent said education, 13 percent said school finance and 13 percent cited health care. Eight percent said the focus should be on the economy and jobs, 6 percent said lowering property taxes, 4 percent said immigration, 2 percent said homeowners insurance, 1 percent said the state budget, 1 percent said teacher pay and 1 percent didn't know.
How's Perry doing, by the way?
Respondents gave mixed ratings to the governor's job performance. Forty-six percent rated Perry as excellent or good, up from 37 percent who gave him those ratings in the spring. But 49 percent said his performance is fair or poor, and 5 percent didn't know.
As long as we're talking about a judicial system that's bending way over to be nice and accomodating to prosecutors, check out this article from Sunday's Chron regarding the grand jury system in Harris County. Here's the crux of the issue, all tied up in a bow:
A 1940 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court requires that grand juries— the panels of citizens that decide whether criminal suspects will be indicted — represent "a broad cross-section" of the community.But 64 years later, law enforcement officers and others with courthouse jobs that make them less likely to sympathize with a defendant are a strong presence on Harris County grand juries. And even though Hispanics make up a third of the county's population, only 9 percent of grand jurors are Hispanic, and most of those jurors are nonvoting alternates.
[...]
The narrow variety of grand jurors came to light in a University of Houston-Downtown study conducted by criminal justice instructor Larry Karson, who reviewed 32 Harris County grand juries impaneled in 2002 and 2003, with further reporting by the Houston Chronicle.
Part of the problem is due to the selection process. Of Texas' five largest counties, only Harris, Travis and Tarrant still choose grand jurors exclusively through commissioners selected by the presiding judge, who often end up being his colleagues or employees, who then turn to their colleagues.
Of the 129 Harris County grand jury commissioners selected in 2002 and 2003, 65 — just more than 50 percent — were in some way linked to the area's legal establishment. The study identified those individuals as judges, attorneys, court employees, bail-bond agents, probation officers and law enforcement officers. One judge even selected three of his court employees as grand jury commissioners.
[...]
"My grand juries, as a rule, have been very diverse, and I work very hard to find people who will serve from different neighborhoods and different socioeconomic backgrounds," said state District Judge Kent Ellis. "I think focusing on the commissioners is the wrong place to look."
A look at Ellis' grand jury commissioner selections, however, reveals that he didn't search very far to find them. In August 2002, Ellis chose two court reporters and an employee of the Harris County District Clerk's Office. One year later, Ellis used two of the same three people as commissioners.
State District Judge Bill Harmon didn't look that far. In November 2002, Harmon chose three employees of his court to serve as grand jury commissioners. He declined to discuss those selections with the Chronicle.
Hotshot Casey gives his perspective on being a grand juror as well. Casey notes that some people do escape without being indicted:
Unlike the grand juries reporter Steve McVicker describes in Harris County, ours included nobody from law enforcement. Two, including the foreman selected by the judge, were lawyers whose practices included criminal defense.Several owned small businesses. A couple were retired civil service workers. Several were spouses of attorneys. The panel was well-balanced ethnically and geographically.
But for nearly all the cases we considered, it wouldn't have mattered if we were all hooded hangmen. We became human rubber stamps.
[...]
On the typical three-hour morning, we dealt with 30 to 40 cases. A suspect was stopped for driving erratically. The officer asked if he had any drugs. He said yes, they're under the seat.
The ex-boyfriend broke down the door and knifed the victim.
The woman was seen stuffing clothing under her jacket and was arrested after she walked to the parking lot.
That's all we would hear: a prosecutor's summary of police reports. Any unopposed lawyer who couldn't tell the story in such a way that you would indict wasn't trying.
On some cases, we would ask questions. Then, toward the end of the morning, the prosecutors and bailiffs would leave the room. One by one the foreman would recap a case, and we would vote to indict.
Toward the end of the first day's list, there was one that seemed questionable. I jokingly suggested that as a matter of human pride we should try to "no bill" (vote not to indict) one case a week.
After that, a fellow panel member would occasionally describe a case as a candidate for the "Rick Casey Award."
We no-billed 12 cases in 11 weeks, 4 percent of those presented. But prosecutors wanted us to no-bill more than half of these. They were cases with some political sensitivity where the district attorney felt the need to be able to blame the decision on the grand jury.
So we were, I confess, one almost mindless step in the conveyer belt of criminal law.
Scott points to this Texas Monthly article about the state's Court of Criminal Appeals and its head hack, Sharon Keller. They lead off with a discussion of the infamous Roy Criner case, which thrust Judge Keller into the national spotlight.
IT WAS, BY ALL ACCOUNTS, the high court’s low point. A teenage girl named Deanna Ogg had been raped, bludgeoned, and stabbed to death on a late September afternoon in 1986 near the tiny town of New Caney, north of Houston. Roy Criner, a 21-year-old logger, was arrested after three friends said that, within hours of the time of Ogg’s death, Criner had bragged about picking up a hitchhiker, threatening her with a screwdriver, and forcing her to have sex. No other evidence tied him to the crime, but Criner was convicted and given 99 years for aggravated sexual assault. In 1997 newly available DNA tests showed that the sperm found in Ogg was not Criner’s. To be certain, the Montgomery County district attorney did a second test in the state’s lab and got the same results. Criner’s attorneys moved for a new trial, and in January 1998 the trial court agreed he deserved it.Four months later, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in the state, went against law, science, and, it seemed, all common sense when it wrote, “The new evidence does not establish innocence,” and overruled the trial court. Sharon Keller, who had been on the CCA only a little more than three years but was rapidly becoming the court’s philosophical leader, cited the incriminating statements to the three friends as “overwhelming, direct evidence” of Criner’s guilt. New evidence ofinnocence, she argued, had to be so clear and convincing that no reasonable jury would have convicted Criner had it known about it. DNA, she said, was not enough. Keller noted that perhaps Criner had worn a condom or failed to ejaculate. There was also testimony, she wrote, that the victim had said that she “loved sex,” so perhaps she had had sex with someone and then met her demise at the hands of the logger. These theories had not been alleged at trial, nor was there evidence that Ogg had had sex with anyone else within 48 hours of her death, and court watchers wondered why an appellate judge was posing alternate theories that the prosecutor could have offered years before at trial. It seemed that Keller and the court really wanted to keep Criner in prison.
In 2000 the PBS show Frontline aired an episode called “The Case for Innocence,” featuring Criner’s story. Keller was interviewed, and she defended the CCA’s opinion and characterized the victim as “a promiscuous girl.” When asked about the possibility that Criner was innocent, Keller said, “I suppose that that is a possibility. But he certainly hasn’t established it.” When asked how a person could establish it, Keller replied, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” She appeared to be lost in her own circular reasoning. All Criner was asking for was a new trial, but that, said Keller, was out of the question. It was the last in-depth interview she would give to the media.
Later that year more DNA tests were done, this time on saliva from a cigarette butt found at the crime scene. The DNA matched that of the sperm, and a month later the DA and the county sheriff joined the trial judge in calling for a pardon for Criner. The state Board of Pardons and Paroles, which almost always denies such requests, voted 18–0 to grant one, and in August Governor George W. Bush, in the heat of a presidential campaign, relented. Roy Criner was freed.
[...]
AN OLD FRIEND OF SHARON KELLER’S remembers hearing about Keller’s comments on Frontline and being dumbfounded: “I didn’t know where that absolute moral conviction came from. She didn’t question herself at all.” The friend reminisced about their youth in the early seventies and said, “She didn’t do anything wilder than anyone else. But I don’t know how she sleeps at night.”
Scott suggests that the three CCA judges who are up for reelection in 2006, including Keller, are "the weakest statewide Republican targets available to Democats". I don't know if that's necessarily true, and unfortunately the CCA races are about as low profile as any statewide election can be, but there's no question in my mind that the Democrats owe it to us to find some strong candidates for them. Read the article, and you'll see there's no shortage of material with which to attack the integrity and, well, the values of the incumbent judges. I can't say that any of these offices will be easier targets than, say, the Governor's mansion, but they sure as heck are worthy ones.
Russell Jones, also known as Ol' Dirty Bastard, died yesterday at the age of 36.
A founding member of the groundbreaking Staten Island rap group the Wu-Tang Clan, ODB - whose real name was Russell Jones - collapsed on the floor of 36 Records LLC just two days short of his 36th birthday.He was pronounced dead at 5:04 p.m., officials said.
"This ain't no joke. This is real life, just like you lose your mother, or your brother," said fellow Wu-Tang rapper GhostFace Killah, when ODB's body was brought out of the W. 34th St. studio three hours later.
"This is a big loss," said Killah, who said ODB had complained to others of chest pain. "But I guess he's with the Father now. He's in good hands."
[...]
After Wu-Tang exploded on the music scene in 1993 with the album "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)," ODB became as notorious for his erratic behavior as his hit singles "Brooklyn Zoo" and "Shimmy Shimmy Ya."
He was shot at least twice, and fathered at least 13 children with several women. He drew national attention when he rushed onstage during the 1998 Grammy Awards to complain when he didn't win.
He was charged with attempted murder, shoplifting and drugs, and spent time as a fugitive before getting collared in a McDonald's parking lot in 1999.
He attempted suicide before entering prison, but upon his release in 2003, he vowed to clean up his act.
This souped up, individual stuck, the new stuff
Same kid cryin on the stand with Judge Cuffner (sic)
UPDATE: And here's the Advance story (thanks to William in the comments for the heads-up).
After going in front of the West Brighton judge on drug charges, O.D.B. made Supreme Court Justice Charles Kuffner famous with the lyrics: "Sad kid crying on the stand with Kuffner."When contacted, Kuffner said his first reaction to news of O.D.B.'s death was, "There goes my 15 minutes of fame ... I'm history just like him."
When was the last time a radio station format change generated this many articles in the newspaper?
Clear Channel Radio's format switch Friday at KLOL-FM (101.1) from rock 'n' roll to Spanish hip-hop and other pop styles aimed at a young Latino audience leaves Houston with just two rock stations, both also owned by Clear Channel.KKRW at 93.7 FM, known as the Arrow, carries classic rock. KTBZ at 94.5 FM, the Buzz, plays moderate rock and bills itself as "Houston's new music alternative."
Longtime KLOL listener Steve Evans said he was online this weekend seeking the comfort of other classic rock fans when he learned of an Internet petition at www.rock101.info, which implores Clear Channel to "Bring Back Houston's Rock 101.""KLOL is a radio legend — this is crazy," he said of the new Spanish music format.
Fewer than 100 KLOL fans had signed the petition Sunday evening.
Former disc jockey Dayna Steele Justiz, who was on the air for about 13 years, beginning in the 1980s, said many former listeners had called her to find out what happened."The station has incredible loyalty," she said. "I haven't been on the air in 8 1/2 years, yet my phone's been ringing for 24 hours."
Although Justiz said she didn't know exactly why the change occurred, she noted that change is common in the radio business.
"There are not many stations anywhere that can say they were the same format for 34 years," she said. "Radio years are similar to dog years, but even shorter."
Unlike with many stations, Justiz said, KLOL personalities were well-known around town and stayed a long time. Among them were the morning duo Stevens and Pruett (Mark Stevens and Jim Pruett, 1991-2000) and "Outlaw" Dave Andrews, from 1993 to the close.
"With radio today, you can pick up any station and plop it down in any city and no one would notice," said Justiz, a 45-year-old mother of three and president of an online business she started. "They're all playing the same thing, giving away the same thing."
Dayna's right about the personalities on KLOL. There were good people on the air there, and that's why we remember them. Of course, even in the pre-CC days, there were upheavals and sudden changes, like when one-time drive time DJ Donna McKenzie got unceremoniously dumped. The breakup of Stevens and Pruett was the beginning of the end, as far as I'm concerned (Rich Connelly be damned).
What happened at KLOL was probably an inevitable result of music trends, said Joseph A. Kotarba, professor of sociology at the University of Houston.Kotarba, who has taught about rock music for 20 years, said the traditional audience for hard rock and heavy metal has decreased since the 1980s. That audience is not as lucrative for radio stations and their advertisers as the quickly growing, young Latino audience, he said.
"Traditional hard rock is falling into the category of oldies," he said.
That means the music will be heard from time to time but with less and less talk about who the performer is, where the band is touring and so forth, Kotarba said.
"Hip-hop dance music, techno and various other styles of pop music are taking over in popularity," he said. "So that is what radio stations like the ones owned by Clear Channel go for. Everyone wants a more lucrative segment of the population."
Being part of the change can be painful, Kotarba said.
"There's a real sadness when one sees the style of music one grew up with fall into that neverland of the oldies bin," he said. "It's no longer fashionable. That hurts and contributes to a sense of aging."
I was listening to Dean and Rog on KKRW this morning as they talked about KLOL's demise and took some calls from people who wanted to vent about it. (Since KKRW is also a Clear Channel station, they had to tread a bit lightly.) They suggested that the playlists at both KKRW and KTBZ will expand to appeal to former KLOL listeners. If that happens, I'd count it as a good thing. I still don't understand why there aren't more stations like 100.3 The Q in Vancouver, which plays a real variety of music, though.
October was my busiest month ever, with about 58,000 visits. Obviously, the election drove a lot of that. Things have slacked off a bit in November, but not all that much so far. We'll see what happens. I expect to be a little less political in the coming months, but not too much. Not with the 79th Lege about to convene, and with local elections next November (though they rate to be a lot less exciting than last year's), and with what should be rampant speculation and jockeying for the 2006 statewides. But I'm in as much need of a little change of pace as the next person, so expect to see some more variety around here for awhile.
As always, thanks very much for visiting. Top referrers and search terms are beneath the More link.
Aggregators, collections, indices, etc ====================================== 325: http://www.bloglines.com 290: http://blo.gs/ 190: http://www.technorati.com/ 141: http://radio.userland.com/newsAggregatorWeblog referrers
================
3994: Daily Kos
2562: Atrios
1648: TAPPED
460: Kicking Ass
286: The Burnt Orange Report
257: The Stakeholder
234: Liberal Oasis
231: Pandagon
200: MyDD
152: The Sideshow
146: Safety for Dummies
124: Taking on Tom DeLayTop search terms
================
#reqs: search term
-----: -----------
904: real men of genius
638: extreme home makeovers
308: electoral vote calculator
248: kristine nissel
187: andy pettite
147: diane zamora
145: ted poe
137: political bloggers
118: off the kuff
101: how many career stolen bases did babe ruth have
100: linda pritzker
94: richard morrison
92: roy blunt
87: kristen breitweiser
87: schlitterbahn galveston
84: budweiser real men of genius
84: prime number algorithm
79: sales tax deductible
77: how many career stolen bases did babe ruth have?
76: jeannie zelasko
This week is the deadline for Talmadge Heflin to take some kind of action in his electoral loss to Hubert Vo. I've seen different dates cited - the 17th and the 20th, to name two - but one way or another, we should know by Friday if Heflin will ask for a recount, mount a House challenge, or simply concede.
Clay Robison cites two other election challenges from recent history.
Republican Bill Clements was governor, but the Texas House still had a greater than 2-1 Democratic majority in 1980, when veteran state Rep. Al Brown, a Democrat from San Antonio, was upset by a young Republican challenger, Alan Schoolcraft.Brown lost by 1,038 votes out of more than 37,400 cast. In filing an election contest with the House, Brown challenged hundreds of mail-in ballots, many from absentee military personnel who had once been stationed at a nearby Air Force base. He argued that many of those ballots, enough to affect the outcome of the election, had been cast illegally by people who didn't meet Texas' residency requirements.
After hearing four days of testimony in January 1981, a House committee recommended 5-4 that Schoolcraft be seated. But the full House overruled the panel and voted 78-52 for the governor to call a new election.
The vote was largely along party lines. All 78 legislators voting for a new election were Democrats, while 20 Democrats joined 32 Republicans -- every Republican voting that day -- in support of Schoolcraft.
Brown got his second chance, but he also got a lesson in democracy when a special election was held in San Antonio a few weeks later. Schoolcraft trounced him in the rerun by a 3-1 margin, a much wider gap than in the previous election, and went on to serve several years in the House.
A similar result occurred in Houston in 1992, when then-state Sen. Gene Green and then-City Councilman Ben Reyes were fighting over a new, Hispanic-majority congressional district.
Green won a runoff for the Democratic nomination by 180 votes, which Reyes challenged in court. A judge ordered a new election after finding that some voters had illegally cast "crossover" ballots in the Democratic runoff after voting in the earlier Republican primary.
Green won the rerun by more than 1,000 votes, defeated a Republican nominee in the general election and is still in Congress.
Several election contests have been filed in the Texas House in recent years, but Brown's was the only one to produce a new election. Some others were withdrawn by the unseated legislators who had filed them, after they either lost their zeal for further combat or realized they were fighting a lost cause.
Gary Scharrer suggests that Heflin's odds won't be much better this time around.
El Paso legislator Paul Moreno visited with colleagues in Austin and San Antonio this week to warn them that he will take extreme measures if Republicans try to muscle Heflin back to power. Moreno says he will revert to disruptive, radical 1960s tactics: "I am not going to hold back anything on anybody."Some legislators doubt that Heflin will make his colleagues decide the outcome, but Moreno believes otherwise: "Knowing what happened last session, these guys are going to go through it. They cannot lose their big gun to a poor, Vietnamese immigrant."
Rep. Chente Quintanilla, D-El Paso, doesn't think Republicans want to start a new session with an ugly and nasty fight that the public might see as an attempt to derail democracy: "I believe that they're smarter than that," he says.
But Quintanilla says some of his colleagues insist: "If they can do it, they will do it."
Republicans control the House, 87-62, not counting Heflin's seat.
El Paso's lone Republican, Rep. Pat Haggerty, says Heflin would have to bring "some compelling evidence" for his colleagues to change the outcome.
Citing their own "irregularities," Vo supporters wonder how a 110-vote margin, with all precincts counted, suddenly slipped to 38 without explanation before the absentee and provisional ballots dropped the final figure to 31.
Heflin's defeat would create opportunities for other Republicans to move up a notch on the leadership ladder. That may be another reason why some Republicans will not encourage Heflin to contest the outcome.
"Too many of the inside players are already picking after the bones," Haggerty says.
Contrary to rumors, House Speaker Tom Craddick "is staying out of it," Craddick spokesman Bob Richter says.
Rep. Joe Pickett, a Democrat, is probably Heflin's closest El Paso ally. Heflin elevated Pickett to chair an Appropriations subcommittee.
Pickett says he would objectively assess any election dispute that comes to the House floor: "He is a friend, but I would not treat it any differently. People would have to understand that -- the same with Talmadge."
The Express News tells Heflin to not make a fool of himself.
Nothing could begin a legislative session with more partisan acrimony and nothing could end a long political career with less dignity than Heflin's seeking an electoral do-over from his colleagues.Seek your recount, Rep. Heflin, but spare yourself, your district, your party and your state the dishonor of a contested result.
Minutes after all votes were counted, giving Democratic businessman Hubert Vo a 31-vote edge over longtime state Rep. Talmadge Heflin, the Republican incumbent's operatives said they had no confidence in the results.Andy Taylor, a Republican legal troubleshooter, said the outcome couldn't be trusted because the process was flawed. Poll watchers, he said, noted a discrepancy in the way votes were being counted and excluded.
It's the right thing to say if Heflin plans to challenge the outcome. But Taylor did not raise the concern during the two-day canvass of votes earlier this week.
And it could put his team at odds with Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman, a fellow Republican whose office has escaped any hint of scandal during her decadelong tenure.
"I don't know what he is referring to," said Kaufman, the county's top election official. "He did not express any of that to me throughout the day."
Here's a great article on how the hit show "Lost" came to be in almost no time. There are times when I feel like the writers are going by the seat of their pants, and the heavy meet-the-characters plots of late have distracted a bit from the mystery of the island (though we appear to be heading back to that next week), but overall it's been pretty damn enjoyable seeing them grope their way through it all. I'm still torn on the idea of whether this should be a one-season story arc that resolves itself one way or another in the end or not. I have no clue if you could continue this concept indefinitely, but I've been happy with things so far, so we'll see.
And it's majorly cool that Yunjin Kim is from Staten Island. My hometown hasn't had a decent celebrity since Rick "Don't call me Ricky!" Schroder. About time we got another one.
A few weeks back, Penn State registered two safeties for its only points in a 6-4 loss to Iowa. Yesterday, after trailing UTEP 21-17 in the fourth quarter, Rice scored two safeties to tie the game before losing in double overtime. You could go an awful long time without seeing two safeties in a game - only twice in Rice's history had they scorred as many as two safeties in a season - and now you've seen it twice in 2004.
Safeties are rare. In the NFL, the Rams once scored three safeties in a game against the Giants, while two safeties have been scored by the same team in one game 13 times since 1927, most recently in 1999. According to the NCAA record book, Alabama State scored three safeties against Albany State in 1988. This Ask College Football News column claims Arizona State did it against Nebraska in 1996, and also lists two other games in which a team finished with four points. I'll leave it up to you to figure out which is accurate. The NCAA record book, which is from 2002, says the last two-safety game was in 1998 when Duquesne did it to St. Francis; it also happened in the 2003 BYU-Boise State game, which is what prompted the question to Ask CFN.
I wanted to blog about the history of the safety in football, but if the definitive article has been written, I couldn't find it. Alas. This article on how the rules of football first evolved in the 1880s is pretty interesting, though.
UPDATE: It's National Safety Weekend, as for only the second time in NFL history, an overtime game was ended by a defensive two-pointer, with the Bears topping the Titans thanks to a sack in the end zone. The previous time this happened was 1989.
KLOL's format change was front page news today.
In a clear signal of the growing media clout of Houston-area Hispanics, radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications has yanked legendary rock station KLOL-FM (101.1) off the air and replaced it with a format that radio insiders call "Spanglish Top 40."The switch took place Friday morning when the new station — now called Mega 101 FM (with the tag line "Latino and Proud") — began playing 10,101 songs in a row.
The new format is a mixture of Spanish hip-hop, reggaeton and pop/dance music aimed at listeners between 18 and 34 years old. Music in Spanish by artists ranging from the rapper Pitbull to pop star Shakira will be accompanied by DJs using a combination of English and Spanish.
Clear Channel officials said Houston is the first city in the nation to get the new format.
With the format change, the station is targeting young second- and third-generation Latinos, said Adam Jacobson, editor of industry trade publication Radio and Records.
"There are many Hispanics in the United States who grew up speaking English but are very proud to be called Latino," Jacobson said. "That's what Clear Channel wants to go after."
But he cautioned it would take time for the new format to take hold.
With the format change, Houston now has 16 stations that appeal to a Spanish-speaking audience.
Clear Channel's pitch for Spanish-speaking listeners is the latest sign that large corporations are recognizing the importance of the growing Hispanic market.Such heavyweights as NBC and Viacom are among the media giants that have bought communications companies that appeal to a predominantly Hispanic audience. Univision Communications, the largest U.S. Spanish-language television and radio broadcaster, already owns 68 radio stations, including eight in Houston.
"Corporate America and the boardroom are staring to realize, 'Wow, we're really behind the curve. We've got to catch up,' " said Alex Lopez Negrete, president of Lopez Negrete, a Houston-based advertising agency.
Even so, Negrete is saddened by the loss of KLOL.
"On a personal basis, I am every bit a rocker as I am a salsero. Will I miss KLOL that I've listened to for 34 years? Absolutely.
"Will I switch to Mega? They'll have to convince me like they have to convince the rest of the market, because we have our favorites."
If it's November, it's time to talk turkey, and the best turkey of all is a fried turkey. Seriously, if you've never had a Cajun fried turkey, you just haven't lived. Just make sure someone else fries it for you. If you insist on doing it yourself, it's best to have 911 on speed-dial and your fire insurance up-to-date. Bon appetit!
Via Mark Evanier (of course), some more TiVo news of interest.
Sometime in the next few months, your machine will quietly download a patch that makes it respond to a new copy protection scheme from software maker Macrovision. The app puts restrictions on how long your DVR can save certain kinds of shows - so far, just pay-per-view and video-on-demand programs. It's the first time your TiVo won't let you watch whatever you want, whenever you want.
Damn. Did anyone see this coming?
KLOL, 101.1 FM announced Friday that station has changed formats. The station switched from a rock format to a Latino music format branded as Mega 101.The station's web site was listed as under construction, but KLOL's former morning show hosts Walton and Johnson announced on their web site that they were informed Thursday night of the change.
The radio hosts stated on WaltonandJohnson.com that, "Thursday night Walton and Johnson were informed by lower-level management sources via a last-minute phone call that there would be no Walton and Johnson Show tomorrow. In its place would be Hispanic music programs."
What this means is that there's no rock station in Houston which isn't limited to a time period. You've got your Oldies Rock on 107.5, your Classic Rock on 93.7,and your Alternative Rock on 94.5, but no one station that might play anything from the Beatles and Cream to Collective Soul and Green Day, which KLOL used to do. If there's a better definition of "vast radio wasteland" than that, I don't know what it is.
Found via Metroblogging Houston.
UPDATE: Various KLOL fans have found this old post and are expressing their angst over the format change. Google's cache still has the old KLOL web page in it. This discussion thread was complaining about KLOL's format - one can perhaps see how a change might have been in the works, though clearly what they got was not what they were asking for. I hope Ken Hoffman and.or John Nova Lomax has something to say about why this happened soon.
UPDATE: Pete piles on. Jim D wails. Michael finds a scapegoat. Callie has some words from Walton and Johnson. Kevin examines his non-FM options.
Colorado Luis takes a look at the numbers which show an improvement by President Bush in Hispanic voting preference, and asks why it is that Hispanics in Colorado went so much more heavily for John Kerry. He also links to this article, which says that Bush may have gotten up to 59% of the Latino vote in Texas.
But among the dozens of numbers produced by the national exit poll, perhaps none were more surprising than the Latino totals for Texas. Bush, the poll concluded, earned 59 percent of their votes, a 16 percent jump from the same poll's 2000 number.Latino-voting experts agree Bush did better in their communities than he did in 2000. In the lower Rio Grande Valley, for instance, Kerry won Hidalgo County 55 percent to 45 percent and lost narrowly in Cameron County. Both have Hispanic populations exceeding 80 percent.
But if Bush actually did claim almost 60 percent of the Latino vote statewide, his overall margin over Kerry in Texas should have been closer to 70 percent, not the final 61 percent to 38 percent, [Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Willie C. Velazquez Institute, which researches Latino voting patterns] said.
As I said, Bush's performance in these counties was decidedly better than in 2000. He increased his share of the two-party vote from 39.99% to 44.54% while improving his percentage in every single county, added over 46,000 votes to his total to 15,000 for Kerry/Gore (almost all of which came from El Paso and Webb Counties), and carried three counties that he didn't in 2000 (Val Verde went his way both times). If Texas is at all representative, then he had to have improved on these numbers nationwide. The NDN blog looks at some of the nationwide numbers, and they ought to provide a wake-up call for Democrats. Especially read point #4, since people were sounding the alarm about this well before the election.
I should note that there is one bit of good news for Texas Democrats in the 2004 numbers: Bush's improvement among Hispanics did not appear to have any coattails. I spot-checked the three statewide races in each of these counties, and Bush outperformed the other Republicans everywhere. That includes in the Railroad Commissioner race, where the Republican incumbent is Victor Carillo (the Libertarian candidate, Anthony Garcia, did pretty well in these counties, and in some cases his vote plus Carillo's slightly exceeded Bush's, but even in those cases, Democrat Bob Scarborough did better than Kerry did). You can check for yourself here, and recall that I've already shown that Bush generally outperformed the statewide Republicans in the big urban counties as well.
Luis gives his thoughts as to what happened in his state, and there's a lesson that we in Texas need to pay heed to:
I think the lesson for Democrats is that there has to be a visible presence of respected Latinos in the upper leadership in the party in order to achieve the overwhelming majorities Dems used to get back when, frankly, only the most politically active Latinos went to the polls. There has to be real visible integration, not just "reaching out" by non-Latinos or simplistic finger-pointing at Tancredo-style race baiting, which is on the decline on the GOP side anyway. With Ken Salazar as the party leader, we've achieved that in Colorado, but I'm not seeing it elsewhere in the southwest.
UPDATE: Big Media Matt thinks the 59% number may be plausible. I think the problem with his math is that he is overstating Hispanic turnout. Twenty-three percent would be an all-time record in Texas - I believe Hispanics comprised something like 12% of the electorate in the 2002 statewide elections. If you assume 13% are Hispanic, and 73% are Anglo, then Bush getting 45% of the Hispanic vote, which is entirely consistent with what I found in the heavily Hispanic counties, brings him to about 60.33% of the vote total, which is pretty close to the actual result. Getting 50% of the Hispanic vote, which would mean Bush did better in the big urban counties than elsewhere (not a very big stretch) would put him right at 60.98%, which is even closer. I stand by my assertion that 59% is too high a figure.
Like Greg, I'll be spending some time this weekend checking out the Harris County canvass report to see what I can learn. One quick point of interest for me is in Precincts 003 and 004, which cover my neighborhood.
2004 Presidential electionPrecinct Bush Pct Kerry Pct Total votes Reg voters Turnout
003 634 41.4 852 55.7 1530 2129 71.9
004 442 36.1 747 61.0 1224 1749 70.0
2000 Presidential electionPrecinct Bush Pct Gore Pct Total votes Reg voters Turnout
003 490 41.8 541 46.1 1173 2006 58.5
004 393 35.4 574 51.7 1111 1836 60.5
(By the way, would it kill anyone in Bev Kaufman's office to make this stuff available for download in Excel or some kind of database-friendly format? I'm just asking.)
Another article on the College Republicans' fundraising controversy, and frankly it raises more questions than it answers. First, we see that CRNC President Eric Hoplin has decided that avoiding the press won't make them go away.
Hoplin, 26, whose job was once held by top White House strategist Karl Rove, says he is looking into whether the committee's chief consultant misled and preyed on elderly people with a barrage of letter solicitations."We've come to discover that there are a few donors who have been confused, a few donors who have some form of dementia, who aren't entirely sure of the amount of money that they're giving -- and how often they're giving," Hoplin said this week.
Hoplin also acknowledged one source of that confusion: The College Republicans raise funds "using a lot of project names" -- letters that in the past neglected to mention his group at all.
Hoplin said that, after becoming the committee's executive director in 2001, his "first reform" was to require that every solicitation identify the College Republicans.
He pledged in a phone interview to refund donations to any unhappy contributor and said about a half dozen have been reimbursed.
But Monda Jo Millsap, 68, of Van Buren, Ark., said she agreed, when solicited by phone and mail, to "lend" nearly $60,000 to the group, but hasn't gotten her money back.
"They were supposed to give it back, and I haven't heard nothing," she said.
Hoplin said he is looking into possible irregularities by the group's longtime consultant for direct-mail fundraising, Virginia-based Response Dynamics Inc. The firm and its subcontractors appear to have been paid at least $6 million for sending hundreds of thousands of direct mail solicitations, according to the College Republicans' disclosure reports to the Internal Revenue Service.
"If Response Dynamics is preying on old people, I'll put a stop to it," Hoplin said.
Ron Kanfer, president of Response Dynamics, said the firm has no way of knowing the ages of the recipients of its fundraising letters. He said the problem more than likely resulted from some people appearing on dozens of purchased lists of potential donors, possibly resulting in their being bombarded with solicitations within days. Kanfer said his firm has tried to eliminate duplications."Why would any client want to have the same person receiving these letters?" he asked. "It's not in anybody's best interest."
Alison Eikele, a spokeswoman for the College Republicans, said 79 percent of the group's revenue has been eaten up by the costs of fundraising consultants. The rest went for a campus recruiting drive that more than tripled membership to 150,000, for grooming new members to be foot soldiers in the Bush-Cheney campaign's get-out-the-vote effort and for dispatching 75 paid staff members to presidential battleground states this fall, Hoplin said.
Thanks again to Mark McCaig for the tip.
Greg has a long open letter to Harris County Democratic Party Chair Gerry Birnbirg regarding the importance of having a good message to bring to voters in every election. I strongly encourage everyone to read what he says and think about what it means. Democrats are engaging in a much healthier overall dialogue about what went wrong this year than we did in 2000, and we need to get everything on the table.
It's important to realize that a strong and clear statement of principles and philosophies can and should bridge disagreements about specifics. Greg favored the invasion of Iraq; I didn't. Greg is pro-life; I'm emphatically pro-choice. We're on the same team because we trust that the underlying precepts of the Democratic Party and the people who belong to it will guide us to sensible answers for tough issues on which many principled opinions can coexist. That kind of trust is what we need from more people, and the only way we're going to get it is to help them understand who we are, what we believe in, and how they can expect us to act when something we haven't already discussed comes up. Ezra talks about how the Republicans have done this and how it benefits all of their candidates, and I talked about the Republican Party's "brand identity" after the 2002 debacle.
A couple of specific points to address:
In the 2000 election, the precincts composing West U & Bellaire garnered 30% of their vote for Al Gore and 32% for Jim Dougherty as District Attorney. In that same election, however, Eric Andell essentially tied his opponent (winning West U outright). Now, there's some apples and oranges involved, I realize. But did Andell have a better GOTV effort in that campaign? Of course not. He had a better message. Why ignore what works?
People cannot vote for a Democrat if they can't see one. If we cede Kingwood because it's 20% Dem base simply isn't enough to effect any electoral outcome, then what good does it do if we chase 2-3% more votes in Fourth Ward when the other side has just been offered a free grab at 100% of those voters left behind? As a case in point, I fault Charlotte Coffelt for the campaign strategy she went into the campaign with moreso than I do for actually jumping into the race at all. In fact, I find absolutely no fault with her running at all. If I take your views to heart, however, then we have no business fielding a strong candidate (or even A candidate) in those types of races. My own preference is to field a candidate in every race. Believe me when I say that it is increasingly becoming a point of concern and questioning outside of this corner that the party fields fewer candidates than the Libertarian Party.
And the time to start recruiting candidates for every single stinking one of those ballots is right now. Everyone is in a what-can-we-do-now mood, so why not strike while that iron is heated up? Hubert Vo has set the example for all of us. We need to start following it.
Andy Taylor, lawyer for Talmadge Heflin, is still being cagey regarding strategy to cope with Heflin's electoral loss to Hubert Vo.
Because of the narrow margin, Heflin and his attorney were still considering late Tuesday whether to ask for a recount, and perhaps for the 150-member, Republican-dominated House to review the balloting to make sure that the election was carried out legally. The deadline for requesting a recount is Nov. 20."We are vigorously pursuing all of our options," said Andy Taylor, a former Texas assistant attorney general who specializes in election law. "We have not yet made a decision as to whether we will, in fact, seek a recount. But we are gathering information to make a fully informed decision."
Taylor said that observers hired by the Heflin campaign to watch the final vote counting Sunday and Monday questioned whether some legally cast ballots were discarded and whether illegally cast ballots had been counted.
Taylor said Heflin has not ruled out asking the full House to nullify the election results, which would force Gov. Rick Perry to order a second election early next year.
"Let me make clear that at this moment, we are only focusing on whether to seek a recount," Taylor said.
"I can't speculate on anything beyond that."
"Republicans in the House are stuck between losing their best and most qualified budget guy and looking like they're trying to steal an election," said Ross Ramsey, the editor of the political newsletter Texas Weekly, which tracks Texas politics. "And if Heflin wasn't such an important part of the budget machinery over there, I don't think they would risk this fight."But, without a strong contender to replace Heflin as chair of the powerful House budget-writing committee and facing another tough budget year and a likely tax bill, it could be worth a "full court press" for the Republican leadership, Ramsey said.
[...]
If Heflin chooses to challenge the results, the issue would go to the House, where Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick would decide if the chamber will take up the issue, now ruled by Republicans by a 88-62 margin. The full chamber would then decide if it would order Gov. Rick Perry to declare the election void and set a new election.
The House can only accept Vo as the winner or order the governor to call a new election and has no authority to declare Heflin the winner.
Austin political consultant Bill Miller, who gives political advice to Craddick, said lawmakers in the House would put aside partisan preference and respect the election process.
"All of those individuals have run for office and they know that the ballot box is where it begins and ends," Miller said. "They're there because voter preference has been shown at the ballot box."
I think it would be incredibly dumb for the House to order a new election in the event of a Heflin challenge. For one thing, 87-63 is still a pretty substantial majority - it's not like some Democratic bills are suddenly going to sail through because of one more Yes vote. For another, no one is ever irreplaceable. Surely there are plenty of other Republicans in the House who would jump at the chance to take over Heflin's spot as the Appropriations Committee chair. And finally, what are the odds that Heflin would win a second election? The district's demographics are already stacked against him, there won't be a Presidential election to bring out the Republican base, and you can bet your sweet bippy that Vo's supporters would be highly motivated. Strong notes that this would be an "interesting message to the Asian community at a time when the GOP is trying hard to make inroads to that group", and he's right about that. I just don't see the upside for this strategy. But hey, they've got the power, and if they want to use it then by God they're going to use it. We'll know soon enough.
UPDATE: Missed this Statesman story.
Does House Speaker Tom Craddick really want to begin next year's legislative session with a heated election contest laced with race and partisan rancor?Craddick, at least publicly, declined Wednesday to deflate rampant speculation that the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives might try to save the re-election of its second most-powerful member, Houston Rep. Talmadge Heflin, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee who lost to Democrat Hubert Vo by 31 votes.
"It's Talmadge's decision on what his strategy is," said Bob Richter, Craddick's press secretary, after the speaker conferred with Heflin on Wednesday morning. "Craddick is staying out of it."
As Heflin, a 22-year veteran, weighed a recount and a legal challenge of the results to the full House, Democrats spun into action, salivating at the thought of portraying Texas Republicans as trying to steal an election victory -- a la Florida in 2000 -- from a Vietnamese immigrant who fled communism almost 30 years ago, then worked his way up from dishwasher to successful businessman.
Both sides, at least privately, are skeptical that a recount of electronic ballots would change the outcome. That would leave it to Heflin's lawyer, Andy Taylor, to make a legal case that would allow the House to set aside Vo's victory and require Gov. Rick Perry to call a special election, probably in February, that would set up a rematch.
"I know there's a lot of buzz," Taylor said. "We want to complete our investigation before we decide what to do."
He said a decision on whether to request a recount probably would come Nov. 19, after the vote has been canvassed by county and state officials.
[...]
The legal challenge could focus on software or hardware glitches that might not have recorded straight-ticket votes for Heflin. (Houston uses the same e-Slate system used in Travis County.)
Taylor also could second-guess election judges who decided which provisional ballots to count. Those ballots were given to voters on Election Day if there were questions about their qualifications to vote. Teams of Democratic and Republican judges decided which ballots to count.
Any disputes were settled by the presiding election judge, a Republican.
Let me throw my hat in here with Ginger regarding all this "Fsck the South" stuff. It's insulting, and I refuse to loathe myself because of where I live. I'm doing what I can to help turn my little corner of the world blue (actually, my immediate vicinity is already a deep and robust shade of blue, thankyouverymuch), and I'd appreciate it if y'all would not make it any harder than it has to be. OK? Thanks.
Similar expressions of what I'm talking about also come from one of Josh's readers and from Texas Law Chick. Nota bene:
And there are thousands like me here in the "red America." There are only four states in the US (California, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania) that had more votes for John Kerry than Texas. 2,825,000 people here voted for Kerry. That is not an insignificant number of votes, and there are millions more in the other red states.
The Washington Post takes note of the bluing of Dallas County and the election of Lupe Valdez as its Sheriff. Check it out. Via Vince, who's back in the blogging saddle again now that his duties with the Bob Glaze campaign have ended.
UPDATE: Salon checks in on Lupe Valdez as well.
Michael thinks I'd enjoy this comic because it pokes fun at Staten Island, my hometown. He's right. Thanks, Michael!
Want to know what fellow TiVoholics are watching? Via Mark Evanier, here are the Top 100 season passes. I'll stipulate to having the following in my pass list:
Rank Title
---- ---------------
3 Desperate Housewives
4 Lost
10 The Sopranos
19 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
20 24
55 The Amazing Race 5
87 The 4400
Mac Thomason dropped me a note to say that with the apparently premature death of Bloghosts.com, his regular blog site is unavailable. He's set up a temporary home for War Liberal here, and will eventually migrate everything (including, I hope, the domain name) there. Update your links accordingly.
Last night I finally got around to downloading the latest version of Movable Type. I'm hoping to do the upgrade in the next few days, Copious Spare Time permitting. I've got a couple of questions for those of you who have already taken the plunge:
1. Any gotchas I need to worry about?
2. Is the new dynamic page rebuilding thing worth it?
3. Besides the new MT Blacklist, which (if any) of the plugins are you using?
4. Anything else I should be aware of?
Thanks.
One of the things that I never got around to blogging about in the runup to the election was a little fundraising scandal that's percolating in the ranks of the national College Republicans. Here's an update to that story.
Officials with the national group, based in Washington, D.C., did not return phone calls seeking a response. But in a memo last month to state officers across the country, [College Republican National Committee chairman Eric] Hoplin urged them to stay quiet about newspaper articles detailing the group's fund-raising tactics.Hoplin wrote that media accounts of the fund raising are "full of lies and distortions" orchestrated by the "liberal media" and aimed at hurting President Bush's campaign just before Election Day.
"We need the story to go away, which it will ... but only if we all withhold our comments," Hoplin wrote in the memo, which was confirmed by several state officers.
In Texas, a former vice chairman of that state's College Republicans called the fund raising "morally repugnant" and called for Hoplin and the group's treasurer, Paul Gourley, to resign."Preying on the elderly to make money is unconscionable and should not be tolerated by any member of the College Republicans or the Republican Party," said Mark McCaig, a Texas A&M University student who stepped down about six weeks ago as vice chairman of the Texas Federation of College Republicans but remains a Republican. "Like many others, I am embarrassed to have been associated with these individuals."
Reached Monday, McCaig said he believes the CRNC could raise money successfully without misleading people.
"I think the programs of the College Republicans should stand on their own. I think there's a product there that people would be willing to invest in," he said. "I don't think it's necessary to have to funnel it through a bunch of front organizations and make a bunch of unfounded claims."
McCaig said the group's spending also should be reviewed.
"When you see tens of millions of dollars spent on fund raising ... that's insane," he said.
But Sarah Floerke, the current Texas College Republicans chairwoman, said McCaig was in a dispute with the organization's leadership when he stepped down and might be biased. She had not heard about the questions surrounding the group's fund raising, other than in Hoplin's memo, she added.
"I'm sure I'm going to find out a lot more at the meeting," she said. "I think the College Republican National Committee did an excellent job fund raising, and they were able to send out College Republicans across the nation."
The original story is here (thanks to Linkmeister for the reminder). There's something about this whole thing that puzzles me.
About $9 million of the College Republicans' reported spending this year appeared to go into fund-raising expenses, according to a Times analysis of reports filed with the IRS.About $313,000, roughly 3 percent, went for travel, convention expenses and "hospitality." About $210,000 went to payroll expenses, helping pay for campus organizers who have been drumming up support for the GOP ticket among young people.
The large amount of money devoted to fund raising, and the small amount for political activities, is unusual among the top ranks of the burgeoning field of so-called 527 independent political groups.
Of the $20 million the anti-Bush group MoveOn.org spent, according to its filings, 93 percent went to media, advertising, marketing and polling.
Of the $13.7 million spent by the anti-John Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, 90 percent went to media, advertising and media consulting.
Coyotes in River Oaks. What's next?
Fears are running high that coyotes living in Memorial Park's isolated areas are wandering farther afield, bringing them into contact with joggers and residents of the city's toniest neighborhood, River Oaks.
There have been periodic coyote sightings in Memorial Park for many years, parks department officials said.[...]
"We have them all over Harris County. ... We've kind of embarked upon their habitat," Capt. Albert Lynch of the Texas Parks and Wildlife said. "Development has pushed them into a smaller area."
Apparently, Austin is having similar problems.
Unusually brazen coyotes have been spotted in streets, yards and playgrounds and even on porches in neighborhoods throughout Travis County, and a program approved Tuesday aims to instill a bit of fear back into the packs.Travis County and the City of Austin will finance a $40,000 contract with the Texas Wildlife Services Program to cull the coyotes. The problem has been most pronounced in the Northwest Hills area.
The culling, to be handled by a wildlife biologist, will be focused on the most aggressive animals that have lost their innate fear of humans, said Jeff Ripley of Texas Cooperative Extension. In turn, the remaining coyotes should relearn to avoid humans. The animals will be humanely trapped, then euthanized. The traps will be set on public lands with limited access for people.
Texas regulations do not permit the relocation of coyotes.
Residents bear some responsibility for quelling the problems, Ripley said, and an education program will go hand in hand with the culling.
"This is not something that Wildlife Services can do on their own," Ripley said.
In particular, residents should refrain from feeding the coyotes or leaving pet food outside where the coyotes can get it. They should also seal their garbage cans. Pets should remain inside or on a leash.
The votes have been counted, but we still don't know for sure what will happen in the race for HD149 between Hubert Vo and Talmadge Heflin.
"It's not over yet," Vo said. "I am proud of the results. I feel at ease. But this is going to be a short feeling, because I know there are some process and procedures that my opponent will take advantage of."Whatever happens, Vo said, he believes he will prevail.
Lawyers for Heflin, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, have not yet decided to seek a recount.
"We are vigorously pursuing all of our options," said Andy Taylor, who is representing Heflin. "We are examining instances where illegal votes were wrongfully counted and instances where legal votes were incorrectly discarded."
The deadline for requesting a recount will be sometime during the week of Thanksgiving.
Heflin did not return a phone call seeking an interview. But his campaign spokesman, Craig Murphy, said Heflin remained even-tempered.
"He's exactly the same, he's very mild-mannered and as matter and fact, and business-oriented as he always has been," said Murphy, who called Heflin with the final results about midnight Monday when they were reported.
Taylor said Heflin's camp wants to learn all of the facts and circumstances surrounding both the tallying of the absentee and provisional votes before they make a decision to request a recount of electronic votes.
Vo was ahead by 38 votes before mail-in and provisional ballots, cast by voters who could not prove their eligibility when they went to the polls, were counted.
A recount, however, is not a necessary prerequisite to contest the election. Heflin has until Dec. 8 to do that. The election would then be thrown to the House of Representatives, which could either seat Vo or overturn the election and require a new vote.
There have been several contested elections in the Texas House in recent years, but none has reversed the outcome. Most were withdrawn.
Buck Wood, one of several lawyers observing the Harris County vote canvass on Vo's behalf, said Heflin's case posed a potential public relations "nightmare" for Republicans.
With an 87-62 Republican majority (excluding the contested seat) in the House, partisanship could become a factor.
"This House has shown itself to be as partisan as any I've ever seen," Wood said.
If Heflin were to contest the election, Vo would still be seated when the Legislature convenes on Jan. 11. He could vote in the speaker's election and on other House business but couldn't participate in any decisions involving the contested election.
Byron has the official resolution from the contested Wohlgemuth-Erickson race of 1994. I continue to hope that it doesn't come to that. Looks like we will have at least one contested election this year, though:
Susan Delgado filed an election contest against state Sen. Mario Gallegos, D-Hous-ton, who easily won re-election last week with more than 90 percent of the vote against a Libertarian opponent and Delgado, a write-in candidate.Delgado, Gallegos' former mistress, alleged that the senator doesn't live in District 6, which he represents. Gallegos has said he and his wife spend most of their time at his mother's house in District 6, although he takes a homestead exemption on a residence outside the district.
Meanwhile, in other close races, both Kelly White and Ken Mercer appear to be preparing to ask for recounts. There are different types of recounts which cost different amounts of money, so the final details have not been determined. Stay tuned.
Now that we've established that Kristen Mack was correct regarding an election challenge being decided in the House rather than in the courts, I'm starting to find out more about how that process might work if Talmadge Heflin goes that route. A commenter in this Burnt Orange post gives some background on a challenge in the 1994 election which sent Arlene Wohlgemuth to the Lege. Here are some details on that case.
Wohlgemuth became chairwoman of the Johnson County Republican Party in 1992 and helped Bernard Erickson become the first state Republican representative elected from Johnson County since Reconstruction.But after only one term in the Texas House, and mere days before the filing deadline for a second term, Erickson switched to the Democratic Party and announced his bid for re-election.
Wohlgemuth scrambled to find a strong enough candidate to run against Erickson. [Rep. Joe] Barton recalls discussing various possibilities with her, only for Wohlgemuth to dismiss each of his suggested candidates.
"What about me?" she finally asked.
"You're crazy," Barton replied.
Barton recalls telling Wohlgemuth he'd support her bid for the Texas House, but that she needed to fully consider what she was getting into.
"You can't just run to look good, you've got to run to win," the congressman told Wohlgemuth. "It's 18-20 hours a day, six days a week . . . and you're going to have to do it for six months, and if you're real lucky, you might win.' "
Wohlgemuth did run, and won, but Erickson went down only after a ferocious fight. Following a ballot count that found just 118 votes separating the two, Erickson called for a recount. After Wohlgemuth came out ahead again, he called for an election contest, which put the case before a 9-member special state House committee in what was then a Democrat-dominated chamber.
"I think Bernard thought that if he could get it back down there in the hands of his Democratic cronies that they'd hand him the election back," Wohlgemuth said. "And it didn't work that way."
The process cost Wohlgemuth $142,000 in legal bills after she'd spent $82,000 on the election, and Erickson took depositions from more than 250 people in his attempt at re-election.
Of course, Heflin may not go that route. And he is absolutely entitled to a recount, just as Vo would have been had the result been reversed. Asking his buddies in the Lege to consider overruling 20,000+ voters, though, is not something he should feel entitled to.
If you have any further information about the Wohlgemuth-Erickson challenge or any others, please drop me a note or leave me a comment. Thanks.
Roger Clemens has won his seventh Cy Young Award.
Clemens, 42, is only the fourth player in history to win a Cy Young in both leagues and is the oldest winner of the award given annually to the league's best pitcher. He won the American League Cy Young with the Boston Red Sox in 1986, 1987 and 1991, with the Toronto Blue Jays in 1997 and 1998 and with the New York Yankees in 2001.Clemens received 23 out of a possible 32 first-place votes, with eight second-place votes and one third-place vote. Astros righthander Roy Oswalt finished third in the balloting behind Clemens and Arizona’s Randy Johnson and received one vote for first place, three for second and five for third.
Oswalt led the NL with 20 wins, finishing 20-10 with a 3.49 ERA. Teammate Brad Lidge received one third-place vote. The award is voted upon by members of the Baseball Writers Association of America.
Clemens and Oswalt are the first Astros pitchers to finish in the top three of the NL Cy Young voting since Mike Hampton finished second in 1999. Teammates have finished in the top three of the Cy Young voting on numerous occasions, most recently in both 2001 and 2002, when Johnson and Curt Schilling earned the top two slots, respectively, in both years.
Clemens joins Mike Scott (1986) as the only Astros to win the award. Clemens, who's in Japan on a tour with major league All-Stars, went 18-4 this season to lead the NL in winning percentage and ranked sixth in the NL with a 2.98 ERA. He won his first nine decisions of the season and his final six to help the Astros reach the playoffs.
The initial filing period for bills to be introduced in the 79th session of the Texas State Legislature has begun, and as always, it brings silliness.
Gay marriage was a heated issue during last week's national elections, with 11 states approving constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. At least five other states had previously passed similar constitutional amendments.Texas already has a law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, as well as a law passed in 2003 that prohibits the recognition of same-sex unions.
House Joint Resolution 6 would add a new section to the Texas Constitution that reads: "Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman." It would have to be passed by two-thirds of the House and Senate before going to a vote of the people.
"I think it's very important that we get this issue out of statutes and into the constitution so that there's no question about how the people stand on this issue of marriage," said Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, who introduced the joint resolution.
On to more serious things:
The school finance bill was filed by Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands. The measure would increase the state sales tax by 1 cent and add a 1 percent tax on business profits as a replacement for the current corporate franchise tax.Eissler said his "one-plus-one" plan would raise $4 billion that could be used to reduce local school property taxes and provide funding for schools.
Eissler said a new federal law allowing Texans to deduct their sales tax on their federal income tax returns makes a sales tax increase viable. He said with only one out of six businesses paying the franchise tax, a small tax that reaches all businesses would be good for the state's economic climate.
Sen. Kip Averitt, R-McGregor, filed a bill to fully restore the Children's Health Insurance Program. The proposed measure reverses legislative changes that have cut 159,000 children from the health insurance program."Texas families need health insurance, and CHIP helps working families afford the high cost of insuring their children," Averitt said.
Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling wants his trial moved out of Houston because one-third of area residents polled associated his name with negatives like "pig," "snake," "economic terrorist" and the "financial equivalent of an ax murderer."Skilling's lawyers filed documents in federal court Monday asking that his case be transferred to a more neutral venue such as Denver or Atlanta.
"As much as he would like to be tried in Houston, the sad reality is that Jeff Skilling cannot get a fair trial there," said Daniel Petrocelli, his lead trial lawyer. "The community has an emotional, sociological, and financial stake in the outcome of the case and has presumed Mr. Skilling to be guilty unless proven innocent."
[...]
In the papers, Skilling's experts argue many Houstonians have not only an emotional stake but a real or perceived economic stake in Enron convictions because fines go back to the victims in this case.
Skilling, who has previously said he wanted the case moved, hired five experts to examine the publicity about Enron, the community's economic interest in the outcome of the trial and other factors. Petrocelli filed a 75-page motion with a box full of reports and exhibits with U.S. District Judge Sim Lake on Monday.
The filings showed that 31.8 percent of Houston area survey respondents used negative descriptions when asked about Skilling. That was about three times the percentage of people in Atlanta, Denver and Phoenix who came up with negative responses when asked about Skilling.
"He is the devil," said one Houston-area respondent.
"Jeff Skilling is an arrogant, conniving, pompous, brilliant crook," said another Texan surveyed by Philip K. Anthony's DecisionQuest firm.
Skilling's lawyers cite "fervent, inflammatory, and demonstrably prejudicial" media coverage of the Enron cases, especially in the Houston Chronicle, as one of the main reasons the case should be moved.
They claim even in-depth questioning of potential jurors about their biases can't eliminate the latent prejudice built up over the years since the company's dramatic fall in 2001.
They compare the far more voluminous coverage here to coverage in Atlanta, Phoenix and Denver, the cities Skilling suggests for his trial.
"Citizens of this venue and the media that serve them have erected metaphoric and psychological divides between the 'evil' executives at Enron and the 'good' people they betrayed," the filing said.
[...]
Lay, who had initially hoped to get a speedy trial in Houston and by himself, said he is forced to join Skilling's motion. His attorney Mike Ramsey argued that the local press has taken leads from prosecutors and "substantially distorted and magnified" such information to an intolerable level.
Enron Task Force Director Andrew Weissmann would not comment on the filings. The government has several weeks to respond, and Judge Lake will likely hear again from the defendants and could even hold a hearing before he rules.
Skilling's request was adopted by Causey, saying he "must reluctantly ... seek trial elsewhere," and citing Houston Chronicle stories that "make it impossible to impanel a fair and impartial jury." Causey's lawyers Reid Weingarten and Mark Hulkower added New Orleans to the list of cities appropriate for the trial.
We have a winner, pending any recounts or other challenges.
With the last votes finally counted late Monday, Democratic newcomer Hubert Vo nudged Republican incumbent Talmadge Heflin out of the Texas House of Representatives seat he has held for 22 years by a 31-vote margin.According to the official canvass, Vo garnered 20,693 votes, compared with 20,662 for Heflin.
Heflin supporters, however, immediately indicated the powerful Republican would challenge the results of the two-day canvass by the Harris County Clerk's office.
"There's no confidence in these results at this point," said Andy Taylor, a Republican legal troubleshooter with expertise in election law, who was on hand to represent Heflin. "The outcome can't be trusted because the process was flawed."
Taylor said poll watchers cited a discrepancy in the way votes were being counted and excluded. The difference of 31 votes is so small that any slight irregularity could change the race, he said.
Heflin's camp is expected to meet this morning to make a decision about what to do next.
With more than 41,000 votes cast in last week's general election, Vo entered the canvass Sunday clinging to a 38-vote lead over Heflin and then sweated out hundreds of absentee and provisional ballots Monday night to claim the District 149 seat.But the count is far from over.
Heflin still can request a recount of electronic votes. He also could contest the election, which would throw the jurisdiction to the state House to make a ruling. If it comes to that, Heflin would appear to have an advantage, with the House consisting of 88 Republicans and 62 Democrats.
The count of the absentee and provisional ballots began Sunday and ended just before midnight Monday.There were 27 valid provisional votes counted in the district race. Fourteen went to Vo and 9 to Heflin. The other four did not cast a vote in the district contest.
Neither of the candidates appeared at a county election office in north Houston where the count took place.
Vo's campaign admittedly was sweating the outcome of the mail-in ballots, which historically have favored Republicans. Seventy-five percent of the early vote went to Heflin.
I don't know what will happen next. Heflin has until next Wednesday, November 17, to ask for a recount. I'll be surprised if he doesn't take some further action, but I hope he doesn't. Hubert Vo worked his butt off, and he deserved to win. Thank you for your service, Talmadge Heflin. I have every confidence Hubert Vo will build on it to achieve greater successes in the future.
UPDATE: Two items of clarification. First, I agree completely with Sarah's second comment. If Andy Taylor has "no confidence" in the count as performed by the Harris County Clerk in front of 24 witnesses, then he owes us some actual evidence that his lack of confidence is justified. Simply stating that the process was flawed is irresponsible and designed to cast doubt on what happened.
Second, regarding Heflin's option to contest the election, I believe the statutes on election law, in particular Chapter 221 and Chapter 241, apply here. One should not disbelieve everything one reads in the Chron, especially when one can check it out. It would have been nice of Kristin Mack to check with an election law specialist to explain that bit in some nice, understandable detail (and as I Am Not A Lawyer, I could be totally misrepresenting what I'm reading here), but it looks to me like she has conveyed accurate information.
It's an even more razor-thin margin, but Hubert Vo is still in the lead in HD149.
Houston political newcomer Hubert Vo clung to a narrow lead Monday night in his bid to unseat the state House's most powerful GOP committee chairman.With about 200 provisional ballots yet to be counted but all other votes accounted for, Mr. Vo, a Vietnamese immigrant and Houston businessman, was 26 votes ahead of Rep. Talmadge Heflin, a 22-year veteran and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, elections officials said. More than 44,000 votes were cast in the contest.
If Mr. Heflin is defeated, the Democrats would hold 63 of the 150 seats in the state House. And for the first time in the 30 years since Republicans began their rise to power in Texas, the Democrats would gain a seat in the lower chamber.
Officials say there's likely to be a recount in the race, which political observers have said was a risky one for Mr. Heflin, whose district is increasingly Democratic.
"We're very happy, and we thought we would prevail," said Karen Loper, Mr. Vo's campaign manager. "We're grateful to the people of the district, and what can I say? The candidate is very happy and very pleased. It was a long and hard campaign."
Republicans reiterated that even if Mr. Heflin loses, they will still have a 87-seat majority in the House and control of the Senate and all statewide offices.
"If it turns out to be true, we're disappointed to see such a great chairman not come back to the House, but we'll have to wait and see from him on what he decides to do," said GOP party spokeswoman Alexis DeLee. "He could still call for a recount, especially since the votes are so close. And if it ends up being the case that Vo takes the seat, then we still have a great majority Republican leadership that is ready to tackle the issues ahead in the coming session."
Mr. Heflin became committee chairman when House Speaker Tom Craddick, R-Midland, was elected to the speaker's office in 2003. If he loses, he would be the latest in a series of leaders chosen by Mr. Craddick to be defeated at the polls, including committee chairmen Ron Wilson and Glenn Lewis, both Democrats.
Longtime Republican Rep. Talmadge Heflin, chairman of the House budget-writing committee, trailed his Democratic challenger, businessman Hubert Vo, by 26 votes tonight after officials with the Harris County Clerk's office had gone through absentee ballots. The count continued with provisional ballots, which are used when someone's eligibility to vote is questioned.Among the ballots were about 189 provisional and 200 absentee ballots from people who voted in the race between Heflin and Vo.
After the count of absentee ballots was complete, Vo led Heflin by a vote of 20,679 to 20,653. Vo's margin over Heflin shrank by 12 votes.
The counting process is usually without much fanfare because races have been decided. The tight race, however, has meant its outcome will be determined by the absentee and provisional ballots.
At least 24 poll watchers, half Democratic and half Republican, were on hand as the ballot review that began Sunday went into a second day.
While they waited, officials with Heflin's campaign and the Republican Party of Texas accused state Democratic Party representatives of harassing and criticizing Harris County election officials for how they conducted the ballot review.
"Our primary concern is to make sure every eligible vote is counted," said Republican Party of Texas Chairwoman Tina Benkiser. "The election officials are doing their job. It's completely uncalled for and casts a pall on the process when the process is working as state law dictates."
Craig Murphy, spokesman for the Heflin campaign, said such tactics have been employed by the Democratic Party throughout the campaign.
But Karen Loper, Vo's campaign manager, denied the accusations.
"If that is happening, and I don't know if that is happening, that has nothing to do with the campaign," she said. "We don't attack people. We believe in the process so we don't do that."
At a rally this afternoon at his campaign headquarters, Vo thanked his supporters and remained hopeful.
"We know what the end result will be. We are confident," he said.
Well, now that election is over we can get back to focusing on all those Tom DeLay-related scandals that are still floating about. The WaPo kicks in with a little bio of Jack Abramoff, whose cookies are soon to be toasted by the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. Here's a little peek at what kind of person Abramoff is:
While at the College Republicans, Abramoff, [Grover] Norquist and [Ralph] Reed quickly earned reputations as zealots. Abramoff wrote in the 1983 annual report: "It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently." The group's recruits were required to memorize a speech that included the lines: "Democrats are the enemy. Wade into them! Spill their blood!"
Abramoff's success lay in his ability to portray clients as exemplars of successful free market competition under attack by overzealous Democrats. On behalf of Indian tribes and other clients, Abramoff convinced the GOP majority that Democrats were bent on regulating and taxing the entrepreneurial vitality out of the U.S. economy. In effect, he turned conservative orthodoxy into a cash spigot.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is intent on secret negotiations for more tribal casino compacts, seeking up to 25% of their revenues for the state. In fact, that seems to be part of his strategy for bailing the state out of its financial hole. After the election, he noted he had said during his run for governor that "one of the things where we can get a lot of revenue is from the Indian gaming tribes."
Take a look at these two stories and see if you see what I see:
October numbers released last week show 32,941 average weekday boardings, up 2 percent from the 32,292 recorded in September. That was the first month the daily ridership count topped 30,000.Average weekend ridership also went up 2 percent compared with September's count, not counting three Sundays in October when the Houston Texans played home games at Reliant Stadium. MetroRail ridership typically doubles on a Sunday home game.
The record weekend count remains from January, when an average 41,648 people per weekend rode the train during its inaugural month of service.
Total ridership, including special events, for October was 853,542, up 4.5 percent from September's record high.
Metro collects ridership data through "automatic passenger counter" devices embedded above train doors.
The Westpark Tollway is attracting new customers as it continues being built farther west, according to the Harris County Toll Road Authority.HCTRA opened the Westpark's first segment, from the Galleria area to Old Westheimer Road, in May. It's the first toll road in the country where drivers must pay with an electronic transponder.
Though a dispute with a contractor has stalled completion of the critical interchange at Beltway 8, the tollway lanes are now open west to Texas 6.
Eastbound lanes opened from Howell Sugarland Road, just east of Texas 6, last month. The westbound side, which includes an exit ramp to Texas 6, was completed in September.
Mike Strech, HCTRA director, said traffic counts show the new westbound lanes were popular immediately.
"Our traffic jumped by almost 7,000 transactions in the first week alone," Strech said of the westbound opening.
Greg gives his look back and look ahead from this year's election. I'm still mostly agnostic about who should run for what statewide office on the Democratic side, but the more I think about it, the more important I think it will be to mount an all-out assault on Congressional, State House, and State Senate races in two years. I've harped on this before, and I fully believe that having strong candidates all across the ticket will help everyone out by ensuring that voters in all parts of the state have a clear and compelling choice to make.
You've already seen my wish list for the 2006 Congressional races, and I've touched on my hope that all of the unelected Congressional Democrats look to the State Senate. Greg wants Nick Lampson or Chris Bell to run for SD17; I'd prefer to have Lampson take on Tommy Williams in SD04 (added benefit: Lampson wouldn't have to move) and leave SD17 for Bell or Richard Morrison if one of them wants it and if Bell declines to take on John Culberson in CD07. Let's add John Mabry to the list as a challenger to whichever of Kip Averitt or Troy Fraser makes geographic sense for him. I'm sure there's more - feel free to leave a suggestion.
As for the State House, the main thing that I can say is that there are eight GOP-held seats in Dallas County, and either 13 or 14 in Harris County, and if every single one of them doesn't have a halfway decent Democratic challenger, then the Democrats in this state officially suck. HD133, home of Moldy Joe Nixon, ought to be a prime target. I just hope that the failure to run a Democrat against him this time won't bite us in the butt two years down the line. It's not too early to think about this, and if you don't like your current representative, it's not crazy to think about making the run for office yourself. Hubert Vo positioned himself to win with $60,000 and a lot of shoe leather. Those are attainable tasks.
UPDATE: Greg has some linkage with further speculation, and I forgot to link to these five Austin Chronicle stories, which are mostly recapitulations but which have some good info in them.
Kos had an interesting post a couple of days ago regarding gains made by Democrats in state legislatures around the country. As silver linings go, that one's pretty good. For one thing, state legislators should be a big part of a party's statewide bench. Off the top of my head, Governor Perry, his now-former chief of staff Mike Toomey, Tom DeLay, John Culberson, and the newly-elected Kenny Marchant are all alums of the Texas Lege. For another thing, when a state like Colorado turns both legislative chambers plus a Senate and Congressional seat Democratic, it suggests to me that perhaps it was Bush's victory there that was the anomaly.
To build on their (as yet unofficial) gain in the Lege this year, I see lots of potential in the urban counties for Democrats. Byron sees opportunities in the suburbs. I've talked about how Democrats are generally doing better in the big urban counties. Well, chew on this:
2000 election returns - Fort Bend CountyGeorge W. Bush /Dick Cheney REP 73,567 59.56%
Al Gore /Joe Lieberman DEM 47,569 38.51%Tom DeLay REP 69,557 57.45%
Jo Ann Matranga DEM 47,692 39.39%
2004 election returns - Fort Bend CountyGeorge W. Bush/ Dick Cheney - Incumbent REP 93,554 57.38%
John F. Kerry/ John Edwards DEM 68,655 42.11%Tom DeLay - Incumbent REP 58,399 53.21%
Richard R. Morrison DEM 46,114 42.01%
UPDATE: Chris in the comments and Albert Hollan via email remind me that I overlooked Ron Paul's CD14, which does include a piece of Fort Bend County. Since Paul had no challenger, his totals don't currently show up anywhere on the Sec of State page; the only numbers I found were here. That muddies the waters quite a bit, though as Chris notes in the post linked above, the FBGOP still ought to feel that it underperformed. Hollan noted these numbers:
The 400th District Court is a single-county district. It covers all of Ft. Bend County. Here are the results:2000 General Election---
Bradley Smith (Rep) 65,283 (57.18%)
John Cangelosi, Jr. (Dem) 48,888 (42.82%)2004 General Election---
Cliff Vacek (Rep) 87,387 (56.57%)
Albert Hollan (Dem) 67,095 (43.43%)This was the only local, countywide election this year in Ft. Bend County. As much as I would like to believe that we are making progress, I am sad to say that we are only keeping even.
Is it silly of me to hope that by the time Olivia is 16 someone will have invented Star Trek-like transporters so I won't have to buy her a car?
Nearly every culture has a recognized turning point between childhood and adulthood, when rules must be learned, tests passed, talismans awarded. In the United States, for the past half-century, the iconic rite of passage for a teenager has been this: You take your driver's test. You get your license. You slide behind the wheel and drive into the grown-up world.In the past, the car in question usually belonged to Mom or Dad, who handed over the keys with a combination of pride and trepidation. Increasingly, however, the cars teenagers drive are their own. Even parents who hadn't planned to buy their children cars feel pressure to do so -- not only from the new drivers in their household, but also from other parents and from their own busy schedules.
[...]
According to CNW Marketing Research, which tracks national purchasing trends, 41 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds in the United States own cars, up from 23 percent in 1985. The percentage of parents who pay for those cars has also risen. In 1985, 19 percent of teenagers' used cars were paid for by their parents. Today the figure is 40 percent.
One reason parents are willing to spend the money is safety, according to Art Spinella of CNW. If their child is going to have a car, they want it to have air bags and anti-lock brakes. Another reason, he believes, is indulgence.
"Baby boomers are trying as hard as they can to not so much be parents as be friends with their kids," he said. "That translates into buying them a car instead of letting them buy their own car. It translates into buying them a new vehicle instead of getting them a used one and letting them do the work on it."
But some parents are resisting the trend. Long before 15 lives were claimed this fall in teenage driving accidents, [Julie] Sussman decided that her son Chad, a freshman at Westfield High School, will not get a license -- let alone a car -- when he turns 16 next year. He won't even drive until he turns 17 and becomes an Eagle Scout, his parents told him."Everyone I know who has a child who is driving has bought their child a car," Sussman said. "I don't judge them, but they all say to me, 'So, you're going to be getting Chad a car?' and I say, 'No, we're not getting Chad a car.' "
Their reaction: Yeah, right. Sure.
"Why am I defending myself?" she asked. "This is crazy. It should be the other way. I should be saying to them, 'Why are you letting them drive?' "
As teenagers' car ownership rate rises, so does their pickiness. "Just having a car isn't enough in many circumstances," Spinella said. He said that one of the most popular cars among high school students is the Cadillac Escalade, a large sport utility vehicle that averages $50,000. "It's on MTV a lot -- they see a lot of music folks driving them," he said. "It's become kind of a teen cult idol car."
Via Julia, who is no doubt thankful for the New York subway system.
We should find out today if Hubert Vo's lead in the HD149 race will stand up.
Officials began but didn't finish counting the county's 3,000 absentee ballots on Sunday. They planned to finish on Monday as well as count 4,000 provisional ballots.Intermingled with all these ballots are about 189 provisional and 200 absentee ones from people who voted in the race between Heflin and Vo.
This process is usually without much fanfare but this time it had at least 24 poll watchers, half Democrat and half Republican, looking on and taking notes.
"Usually we have no poll watchers. It's no doubt because of the closeness of the race," said David Beirne, a spokesman for the Harris County Clerk's office. "We welcome them. It's just that normally the margin is wide enough so that no one sees this process unfold after the election itself."
While the poll watchers stood over the about two dozen early voting ballot board members as they reviewed absentee ballots, members of both candidates' campaigns sat a few hundred feet away and waited.
Craig Murphy, spokesman for the Heflin campaign, said if the Harris County Clerk's office had given an updated total Sunday, that would have been a fairly good indication of where the race stood.
"Both sides, if it's close, are going to ask for a recount just to make sure it's right," he said. "If the margin is tiny, tiny mistakes could make a difference."
Karen Loper, Vo's campaign manager, said the status of the race won't be known until the provisional ballots are counted on Monday.
"It would just be premature to make a statement on incomplete returns," she said. "We'll wait to see what happens."
The only other race that could possibly tip during the count of absentee and provisional ballots is the White/Baxter race in HD48. According to Karl-T and confirmed by an email sent out to supporters by Mark Strama, the number of outstanding ballots in Strama's campaign against Jack Stick is smaller than the difference in their cumulative totals. There could still be a recount, but if so it will be made with Strama as the original winner. The Leibowitz/Mercer race appears to be over as well, again pending the loser's decision whether or not to ask for a recount.
Interesting article about how Asian-Americans have made political inroads in Houston.
Hubert Vo's strong showing against entrenched state Rep. Talmadge Heflin in Tuesday's election is the latest evidence of the rise of Asian-Americans in Harris County politics since 1994, the year state Rep. Martha Wong was elected to Houston City Council.Vo won by a handful of votes Tuesday, but it will be at least today, when absentee and provisional votes are counted, before the final outcome of that race is known.
Vo, a Vietnamese immigrant, would be the second Asian-American in the state House, joining Wong, R-Houston, a Chinese-American elected in 2002 and re-elected Tuesday.
Two Asian-Americans — Gordon Quan and M.J. Khan — sit on the Houston City Council. Quan is from China, and Khan is from Pakistan.
Besides holding office, Asian-Americans have become more active in the area's political parties, with five Asian-Americans from Harris County attending the Democratic National Convention earlier this year — about 10 percent of the county's delegates. Asian-Americans also worked in Republican campaigns, though none from here attended the national convention.
"These immigrants are ... becoming players in our political system," said Nestor Rodriguez, a professor at the University of Houston. "They come from the smallest of the four major racial and ethnic groups in the Houston area. ... It speaks to their ability to enter the political system, become sophisticated, draw support and become part of the political mainstream."
About 5.1 percent of Harris County residents identified themselves in the 2000 Census as "Asian-American," a sweeping category that encompasses people tracing their roots to eastern Asia (including Japan, China and Korea), Southeast Asia (including Vietnam and Thailand) or South Asia (including India and Pakistan). The percentage has doubled since the 1990 Census.
And, according to the census, nearly 48 percent of those who identified themselves as foreign-born Asians said they had arrived in the United States as recently as the 1990s. Many of those are concentrated in southwest Houston and Harris County, near the Fort Bend County line. That's also where Vo took on Heflin, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
Whether Vo ultimately prevails, that he even came close to unseating a powerful incumbent indicates a transformation in Houston supported by immigration, Rodriguez said.
"That's very telling," he said. "These are consequences of the racial and ethnic transformation in some districts. It's fascinating because things are changing so rapidly. There's a demographic transition in that district, and it's changing the face of the city."
In the heart of the district, where street signs are posted in English, Chinese and Vietnamese, entrepreneur Dan Nip says Vo was until recently relatively unknown among the local community leadership.But like other ethnic groups, Asians tend to vote for themselves, says Nip, an accountant and president of the Chinatown Development Corp.
Nip, a businessman who emigrated from China decades ago, says he did that when he noticed a Vietnamese name on Tuesday's ballot in a judicial race he knew nothing about.
"I didn't even know who he was, but he got my vote," said Nip, who developed the sleek Hong Kong City Mall on Bellaire.
Nip and other Asian-Americans said though they may differ on some political issues, Asians are united by a strong work ethic, an entrepreneurial spirit and the common struggles that immigrants often face.Khan says he believes that the rise of Asian-Americans in local politics is an untapped treasure for the established political parties.
"I think it's a real opportunity for both political parties," he said. "I see very little outreach by the parties themselves toward the Asian community. They're forgetting this community is banded together, they tend to work together as a group, and they are a very well-informed community. And I think that whichever party will reach out to them will benefit a great deal."
Khan said Asian-American voters here have not yet cemented any strong party affiliations and prefer to evaluate individual candidates.
"We don't hate each other based on our party affiliation. ... We will find Asian voters in the same constituency — in the same precinct sometimes — voting for a Democrat and another person who's a Republican just because of other factors.
"I think Asian-Americans are trying to figure out which party suits them. ... By and large, people still are not finding, 'This (party) is my home.' "
Khan's opinion is supported by a Houston Chronicle poll of 800 registered voters conducted by Zogby International last month. Asian-American voters preferred President Bush over Sen. John Kerry, 52 percent to 41 percent, but leaned toward Democrats in their congressional races.
Last word, that is.
Haunting friends and family from beyond the grave just got easier.LastWishes.com, a Dallas-based Web site, has found there's a lively market for people who want messages distributed upon their death.
Since it was launched last October, the site has drawn more than 10,000 customers who've paid initial fees of at least $39.99 and agreed to annual fees till doomsday, all to get in the last word by text, photos and videos for their loved (and maybe not-so-loved) ones.
"It's an amazingly simple idea," said Simon Schurmer, the company's co-founder.
Customers can leave details on life insurance policies, passwords for computer applications and personal messages, Schurmer said.
Schurmer and his business partner, Jonathan Yeo, came up with the idea when a friend died two years ago. With the friend in Texas and the family in England, tying up loose ends became difficult.
"We didn't have his insurance," Schurmer said. "We didn't know his banks or anything, and we thought this would be a great idea."
LastWishes.com isn't the first site to promise the living the ability to commune with their loved ones. At least three similar sites, including MyLastEmail.com and FinalThoughts.com, have folded.
Schurmer said that won't happen to LastWishes because the site is so cheap to maintain.
While the business is proving successful, Schurmer and Yeo aren't ready to give up their jobs as computer consultants.
The site basically runs itself, Schurmer said, and work only needs to be done when a customer logs out of this world — which hasn't happened yet.
Not the most auspicious sign for the Astros' offseason: Lance Berkman tears his ACL playing flag football.
Known for his positive outlook, Berkman, a three-time All-Star, used humor to caution against panic. He also joked he is more frustrated because he wasn't playing "worth a dang" during the flag football game when he got hurt at Second Baptist Church on Oct. 28. Nonetheless, he might be out until mid-May."I haven't missed a game yet," said Berkman, who hit .316 with 30 home runs in 160 games this year, leading the club in average, games, home runs, walks, slugging percentage (.566), on-base percentage (.450) and total bases (308). "When I miss a game, then tell people to start mourning my loss."
Berkman expects to have the surgery Wednesday or Friday with Astros medical director Dr. David Lintner.
Recovery time is expected to take about five to six months, barring complications or setbacks.
"It's a significant injury, but it's not like, 'Hey, this guy will never come back,' " Berkman said. "Shoot, I may never miss a game. It happened at Second Baptist, and that's not even where I go to church. I had no business being out there (playing football). There's no doubt about that. At the same time, we play football all the time in the offseason. I use that as part of just staying in shape."
[...]
Berkman, 28, just finished a three-year contract that paid him $11 million with all the incentives. Activities such as flag football are barred in standard contracts, but because his contract expired after the Astros were eliminated in Game 7 of the National League Championship Series last month, he broke no contractual obligations.
"Players have lives outside of the game," Astros general manager Tim Purpura said. "What they do with those lives (is) their decision. They bear some risks. The way Lance has handled this is absolutely first class and what you'd expect from Lance Berkman."
In other Astros news, David Pinto discusses Carlos Beltran's initial contract rumblings, and why he'd probably do better looking for a shorter deal.
On Thursday, while driving home from work, I spotted a little black Dachshund wandering on the street a couple blocks from my house. My dog Harry came to me eight years ago after being found on the street by a friend of my then-boss. I always wondered if the people he once lived with - and it was clear he'd been someone's pet, as he was well cared for and housebroken when I got him - looked for him and mourned his loss. Since then, I've always been vigilant about apparently lost dogs. So I pulled over.
The dog, a female, came to me when I called her. She had no collar. I looked at the house I found her in front of, but no one appeared to be home. Two women walking nearby didn't know her. So I loaded her in my car and brought her home. Which involved some logistical jujitsu, since Harry doesn't like other dogs, and me nearly losing her inside my house (who knew a dachshund could climb stairs?), but it worked out in the end. We posted a "found dog" note on our neighborhood chat line, and settled her in our garage apartment.
I took her for a walk later that night to see if she'd lead me to a house that was familiar to her. We wandered around but never really went in a definitive direction. Along the way, I learned about a dachshund owner a block from where I found her. I knocked on the door and discovered his dog was safely at home with him. Nice try, but no luck.
On Friday, armed with a couple of new leads from the chat line, I loaded the dog in my car and started out with a trip to the vet. My hope was that she had one of those doggy ID chips implanted. No such luck. The other dachshund owner I was alerted to, three blocks from where I found her, was also not missing any dogs. It looked like I was going to have to take some pictures, print "found dog" flyers, and post them in the area.
Thankfully, I got lucky. I finished some other errands I had to run, then as I was driving back, I saw a car pulling into the driveway of the house where I first found her. I rolled my window down and asked "Have you lost a little black female dachshund?" Turned out the woman and her little boy were just getting back after posting a bunch of "lost dog" flyers. I led them to my house, and a happy reunion ensued. Reba, who I was told got her name from a B-52s song, was back in her mommy's arms.
On balance, this week has sucked. That went a long way towards making me feel better. Here's to you, Reba, and the less-easily-removed collar that's in your future.
Backers of City Prop 2 are in the corner and looking for a way out.
Prop 2 was a charter amendment put on the ballot by citizen petition. It called for a cap on all city revenues, such as taxes, fees and airport revenues.White put forth Proposition 1 as an alternative. It caps property-tax revenues and water/sewer rates but specifically leaves the rest alone. He said that was a better approach to addressing residents' concerns about rising property taxes, with less damage to the city's financial condition.
That measure carried Tuesday by 64 percent.
The city contends that although both measures passed, they are contradictory, so the one that got the most votes — Proposition 1 — will go into effect.
Since Houston first allowed citizen initiatives in 1913, its charter has said that if amendments that pass on the same ballot are "inconsistent" with one another, "the amendment receiving the highest number of votes shall prevail."
Prop 1 got 36,463 more affirmative votes than Prop 2.
[...]
At a casual glance, it would seem both could be enacted. Proposition 1 caps just property-tax revenues and water/sewer rates to inflation plus population growth. Proposition 2 caps all revenues to those restrictions.
But city attorneys wrote Proposition 1 specifically so it would conflict with Proposition 2. In one place, the full Proposition 1 ordinance says: "The City Council shall have full authority to assess and collect any and all revenues of the city without limitation, except as to ad valorem (property) taxes and water and sewer rates."
Proposition 2 would limit that council authority.
Proposition 1 also says: "If another proposition for a charter amendment relating to limitations on increases in city revenues is approved at the same election at which this proposition is also approved, and if this proposition receives the higher number of favorable votes, then this proposition shall prevail and the other shall not become effective."
This sort of language — stating that one proposition trumps the other — probably has never been tested in court, [attorney Bill] Helfand said. A court might react, for example, by nullifying parts of Proposition 1 and then declaring that the rest doesn't conflict with Proposition 2, he said.
We needed another high profile trial in Houston now that the first Enron case has ended, and so just in time the trial of Calvin Murphy has begun.
Calvin Murphy's extensive family tree -- including 14 children he fathered with nine women -- came under close scrutiny today as the beloved local basketball hero went on trial, accused of molesting five daughters more than a decade ago.Murphy, a 56-year-old retired Houston Rockets player and former TV commentator, sat silently as prosecutors told jurors that he sexually abused the girls between 1988 and 1991, when they ranged in age from 6 to 13.
"These were children who were on the receiving end of their father's divide-and-conquer ploy," Assistant District Attorney Lance Long told jurors in his opening statement.
Murphy is charged with three counts each of indecency with a child and aggravated sexual assault. If convicted, he could face a sentence ranging from probation to life in prison.
His attorneys said the allegations stem from a dispute about money and long-standing tension between the children Murphy had with his ex-wife, Vernetta Murphy, and those born to other women, who were pressured to keep their father's identity a secret.
"This case is not just about money .... This case is about resentment," said defense attorney Andy Drumheller. "This case is about jealousy. This case is about hatred. This case is about revenge on a father who did a disservice to his children by having such an unusual family tree."
[...]
Defense attorney Brian Wice, who is not involved in the case but was one of several lawyers observing the trial, said five separate complaints will make it hard for jurors to reject them all as fabrications.
"What bothers me, from a defense standpoint, is the sheer number of complaints," Wice said. "And there is no nexus between the children. It's not like they all grew up together and were sitting around talking about what Calvin may have done to them."
I meant to note this before, but got caught up in the elections frenzy and never got around to it. Last month, an anti-drug task force arrested 72 people in Palestine, Texas on various drug-related counts. Note what the now-offline news report says at the end:
If convicted, many of the defendants could face a maximum sentence of life in prison. Other federal defendants face between 40 and 300 years.
Why am I bringing up a comparison to Tulia here? Well, for one thing, all 72 of the people arrested are black. According to Census figures from 2000, 23.5% of the residents of Anderson County are black. What are the odds that 100% of Anderson County's crack-using and -distributing community are black?
Dave Mann of the Texas Observer asks the same question, and notes how this sort of task-force drug bust works:
All over Texas, federally funded drug task forces, with little oversight from state officials, have employed the same strategy. The task force targets a minority community and sends in an undercover officer or confidential informant armed with public funds to buy drugs. Over the course of a long investigation, the undercover officer befriends a group of addicts. Eventually, the undercover cop asks his addict friends to get drugs for him. When an addict goes to his or her dealer and scores a small amount of drugs for the cop, he or she has stepped into a felony charge of delivery of a controlled substance and, because of harsh sentencing guidelines, could face decades in jail.[...]
Nearly all of the 56 defendants in state court are charged with delivering less than four grams of crack, according to the county indictments. At least 14 of them have no prior felony convictions, and eight more have had a clean record for at least 10 years. For instance, 43-year-old Ira Mae Gross, who has a clean record in Anderson County, is charged with just one count of delivering between one and four grams of crack to Kimbrew last June, according to her indictment. She now faces a second-degree felony drug dealing charge that could earn her a prison sentence of two to 20 years.
Many other suspects are seemingly longtime addicts. Henry Rhodes, Sr., 56, was convicted of possession of less than four grams of crack in 1995. He has no history of selling drugs, though. He was indicted on three counts of delivering crack to [task force confidential informant Othella] Kimbrew. Then there’s Charles E. Barrett, 45, who has a lone drug possession conviction from 1977. He too is facing one count of felony drug dealing for allegedly delivering less than a gram of crack to Kimbrew on June 22, 2004.
Scott Henson, from whom I got most of this info, has been following this case closely. Check his blog for future updates.
UPDATE: For some reason, that Texas Observer link is broken. It worked earlier today, when I read the article and copied the bits that I quoted. Not sure what happened, but I'll try to find out.
Here's the report on the scheduled public meeting to discuss plans for widening I-45 north of downtown.
TxDOT statistics show that some 224,000 vehicles per day use I-45 inside Loop 610. The average speed of those vehicles is 36 mph.By 2025, TxDOT estimates that, with no change to I-45, that average speed will decrease to 32 mph along I-45 within the Loop as the number of vehicles that travel that section of the corridor increases to 269,000.
The I-45 high-occupancy vehicle lane, which is used by 7,000 vehicles per day that travel an average of 55 mph, will bog down to 38 mph by 2025 as the number of cars that travel on those lanes increases to 17,000.
As a result of those projections, analysts have concluded that the addition of managed lanes heading each direction along I-45 will most effectively ease traffic along the corridor.
The managed lanes will take up four center lanes in the middle of the freeway between downtown and Beltway 8, then will reduce to two lanes between the Beltway and Texas 242.
Along with serving as two-way HOV lanes, the managed lanes will also be used for two-way bus service, and will be eligible for use by single-occupancy vehicles that wish to pay a toll.
Those changes would expand I-45 from nine to 12 lanes between downtown and the Beltway, from 11 to 12 lanes between the Beltway and FM 1960, and from eight to 10 lanes between 1960 and Texas 242.
Second, isn't the fact that we're even discussing the need to add lanes to I-45 an admission that the Hardy Toll Road is an utter and abject failure? We've got eight lanes of mostly empty highway, running from The Woodlands to Loop 610 two miles east of I-45, yet it apparently has no impact at all on I-45's congestion. Wouldn't it make more sense to take advantage of this grossly underutilized existing capacity instead of spending millions to pour more concrete? Why isn't this a part of the plan? Why doesn't TxDOT just offer to buy out the Hardy from the HCTRA, for whom it must be an albatross, and spend whatever is left over from the I-45 expansion budget to extend the Hardy into downtown? What am I missing here?
The expected recount final count (see update at bottom) in the extremely tight Vo-Heflin race will take place this weekend.
Democratic businessman Hubert Vo apparently defeated Heflin in Tuesday's election by just 52 votes — a margin that narrowed to 38 with a preliminary count of mail-in votes.Rather than count the remaining 193 absentee ballots and 189 provisional ballots, cast by voters who could not prove their eligibility when they went to the polls, Vo's operatives asked election officials to delay the count until the countywide ballot canvassing already scheduled for Sunday.
Larry Veselka, a former Harris County Democratic chair and one of Vo's representatives, said counting earlier would not comply with the state Election Code.
"We are convinced Mr. Vo's lead will stand up with the final count. We are not overly concerned," Veselka said.
Neither of the candidates appeared at a county election office in north Houston where the count had been scheduled Thursday.
[...]
A few thousand provisional and absentee ballots remain to be counted countywide. The count will take place Sunday afternoon and will go into Monday if it is not completed then.
The Harris County clerk's office is expected to announce the official results Monday.
Democratic incumbent David Farabee returns to the 69th District Texas House of Representative seat for a fourth term by a margin of 3,024 votes."I am honored and humbled by the opportunity to represent the fine people of Wichita and Archer counties," Farabee said.
It was three days of long, painful waiting for Farabee and his Republican challenger, Shirley Craft. Complications with ballot counting equipment stalled Wichita County's tally of the race from Tuesday evening to late Thursday afternoon.
Archer County residents also vote in the 69th District.
After the wait, Farabee said he has "confidence in our county officials and was proud of the job they did."
Election night problems with the county's software that tabulates votes kept spitting out an unusually high number of "undervotes" - ballots without votes in some races.County officials performed several tests on the machine using dummy ballots that came out perfect. But when the real ballots were processed the "undervotes" would appear again.
"It wasn't properly programmed to pick up straight party votes," County Clerk JW Martin said.
County Judge Woody Gossom said the dummy cards did not cover all the possible voting possibilities and that is why the tests were successful while the real vote count was not.
The county remedied the problem Wednesday night with the help of a computer programmer from Elections Systems and Software, the county's software provider.
Gossom said the programmer alleviated the counting problem by re-entering all the program information and increasing the test parameters to allow for the testing of more areas.
"ESS did a wonderful job. There are no problems with the results," Martin said about the fix.
Martin said he was told by two representatives from the office of Texas' Secretary of State who were present for the final result tallying that the problems were not a reflection on the actions of the county clerk's office.
"Throughout the whole event Martin and I worked to keep our local county chairs, poll watchers and Secretary of State's office as informed as we could," Gossom said.
Gossom said the county's problems with the punch card voting system are ironic in light of the federal mandate requiring Wichita County to switch to electronic voting machines by 2006. In defense, Gossom said, "there were problems with those machines, too."
Talk of a manual count of the Wichita County ballots by local Republican campaign leaders filled the air Wednesday afternoon. They felt the continuously failing voting equipment could not be trusted.
A manual recount was conducted Thursday night on the 69th District legislative race between Democratic incumbent David Farabee and Republican challenger Shirley Craft. Farabee took the race by 3,024 votes.
Gossom said he offered to allow a hand count of all the local elections after the final results. The results have no legal bearing and would not be reported to the Texas Secretary of State.
"It sounded acceptable to everybody," he said.
The 69th District count is being done in conjunction with a manual recount of three precincts as dictated by the Secretary of State. Martin said a recount of this type is done after every election to spot check the electronically counted ballots.
Finally, Kristin Mack takes a look at Mustafa Tameez, the man behind Hubert Vo's so-far successful campaign as well as Mayor Bill White's city proposition elections.
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Tameez, 35, moved to Queens, N.Y., when he was 8.Tameez moved to Houston in 1994 and married a year later.
He's worked as a compensation analyst, started a small software company and worked at a sales/marketing company, selling coupons on backs of books and billboard space. He's good at sales jobs, and that skill is useful in politics, too.
His wife's uncle encouraged him to get politically involved in the community, and he started by recruiting South Asians to become delegates to the 2000 Democratic National Convention.
In 2001 he worked on get-out-the-vote efforts in the South Asian community for then-Mayor Lee Brown's re-election campaign. Eighty percent of Asians voted for Brown.
Then Tameez had to take almost a year off recovering from hip and shin surgery related to his avascular necrosis, which results in a loss of blood to the bones and leads them to deteriorate. He walks with a cane.
Last year, White tapped Tameez to get out Asian-American votes for White's mayoral campaign.
[...]
Like most political consultants, Tameez prefers to work behind the scenes. And most candidates like it that way.
His presence has been felt by Republicans, though, and they're not happy with his role in the campaigns against Heflin and against Proposition 2, which the local GOP formally supported.
That animosity already is leading to talk that Republican legislators will make it tough on White when he tries to push the city's agenda in Austin during next year's legislative session.
Tameez says he doesn't take these rough edges of politics personally — even when an elected official suggested that Tameez might do better if he changed his name.
He's doing fine with it as it is.
UPDATE: As Rob notes, this is not yet a recount, but a count of the votes which have not been counted yet, including absentees and provisionals. After that, the losing candidate is pretty darned sure to ask for a recount, which is completely logical and understandable in a race this close. As I recall from the recount in City Council District G last year, the electronic votes will be recounted by feeding the relevant eSlate memory cards into the readers. As with that instance, one would hope that the same answer will be reached, lest even bigger questions be raised. Once the not-yet-counted votes have been officially tallied, that result is likely to be what stands. As noted here, "No recount has ever changed the outcome on an election in Harris County".
Backers of City Proposition 2 are mad that they won't get their way.
Houston officials say they wrote Tuesday's Proposition 1 tax cap in a way that specifically meant that the competing Proposition 2 revenue cap couldn't be enforced if it passed with fewer votes.
After it did, Mayor Bill White announced Wednesday that he intends to follow through with the original intent. Prop 2 backers cried foul."The citizens have clearly spoken" by endorsing Prop 2 with 56 percent of the vote, said Jeff Daily, a key backer of the city charter amendment.
Prop 2 backer Bruce Hotze said White should expect a barrage of phone calls and faxes if he doesn't honor the will of those voters: "They can ignore it at their peril."
Proposition 1 got 64 percent "yes" votes and, more importantly, 36,463 more affirmative votes than Prop 2. The city's charter says that if two amendments on the same ballot are "inconsistent," the one that gets the most votes is the one that shall be enforced.
City attorneys knew of that existing charter provision when they drafted Prop 1 with language intended to make it inconsistent with Prop 2.
[...]
When Prop 1 was drafted, it included this sentence: "The City Council shall have full authority to assess and collect any and all revenues of the city without limitation, except as to ad valorem (property) taxes and water and sewer rates."
The sentence is not in the summary language on the ballot but is contained in the full amendment ordinance passed by the City Council. Prop 2 is similarly abbreviated for the ballot. The sentence directly conflicts with Prop 2, which limits the council's ability to assess and collect revenue.
This should be no secret, White said, as the major purpose of Prop 1 was to offer an alternative to Prop 2, and the explicit pre-emption was discussed openly.
"There are a lot more of us who voted for Prop 1 (than Prop 2). How can I decide to disregard the plain language of what they voted for?" he said.
He's still outmaneuvering them, too.
Tellingly, no Prop 2 backers would follow through Wednesday on earlier threats to sue the city if it didn't implement both amendments. Hotze repeatedly sidestepped the question.Instead, Hotze went to City Hall as chairman of a new group, "Implement Prop 2," and delivered a letter to the mayor and council members.
"We are certain that our City Council members are eager and excited to implement the 234,598 voters' will and add Proposition 2 to the Houston City Charter," the letter said.
State Democrats celebrate the still-unofficial pickup in the House.
Seeking victory wherever they could find it, Democrats Wednesday were claiming their first net increase — a gain of one — in the Texas House in more than 30 years and the toppling of a key Republican statehouse figure.
But they were keeping their fingers crossed as state Rep. Talmadge Heflin, R-Houston, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, refused to concede an unofficial, 52-vote loss to Democratic challenger Hubert Vo in District 149, pending the counting of mail-in and provisional votes.Elsewhere, Republicans, seeking to preserve the 88-62 House majority they won two years ago, apparently broke even with Democrats.
Republican challengers unseated Democratic state Reps. Dan Ellis of Livingston and John Mabry of Waco, while Democratic challengers defeated first-term Republicans Jack Stick of Austin and Ken Mercer of San Antonio. Stick and Mercer each lost by fewer than 600 votes, and recounts were possible after mail-in and provisional votes were counted, a process that could take several more days.
In another close race, state Rep. Todd Baxter, R-Austin, edged Democratic challenger Kelly White by 171 votes. It was uncertain what impact mail-in or provisional ballots could have on that outcome.
[...]
Most of the statehouse attention Wednesday, however, was focused on Heflin, a 22-year legislative veteran who was instrumental in the controversial spending cuts that enabled Republican leaders to balance a state budget last year without raising state taxes.
That role made him a Democratic target, and it probably cost him votes, said Craddick spokesman Bob Richter.
Heflin declined interviews Wednesday. Spokesman Craig Murphy said the campaign is awaiting the counting of 189 provisional ballots cast by voters who could not prove their eligibility and 193 absentee ballots. Absentee ballots historically lean toward Republican candidates and a large percentage of provisional ballots are disqualified, election officials said, which could give Heflin the advantage. The ballots will be counted this afternoon.
Vo remained upbeat, saying voters chose him to represent them and their interests in the House.
"My faith in the fundamental fairness of our democratic process is profound," Vo said. "And I look forward to working within that process to make a positive difference in the lives of everyone who has, in turn, put their faith in me."
“In a race like this, this close, there will be a recount,” Heflin said. A Heflin aide said officials were still looking at returns Wednesday morning.Vo, a refugee from Saigon, could become the first Vietnamese member of the Texas House.
But election officials say it could be weeks before the winner is known.
"Not in our imagination, did we expect it to be this close," said David Beirne, with the Harris County Clerk's Office.
The clerk's office said there are still 193 absentee ballots to count and 189 provisional ballots to review. The military votes are also expected to come in by mail in the next few days.
They plan to count the votes currently sitting inside a vault on Friday.
"What we'll probably do is issue the official results for the canvass on Monday, November 15 unless it's determined to go ahead and give notice to the candidates of the results themselves so they could plan accordingly," said Beirne.
"We haven't made a decision yet. We're still reviewing our options," Mercer said. "It would be wrong to concede without knowing everything was done 100 percent right."Leibowitz received 19,653 votes in Tuesday's election, while Mercer got 19,126 — a margin of 527 votes.
"There is a question about a box that came in late and why they came in so late and why they were separated," Mercer said. "That's one of many, many things we're looking at."
Cliff Borofsky, Bexar County elections' administrator, said there's nothing unusual about having "boxes," a term still used for computer voting units, to come in individually and separate from the rest.
In some cases, "the judges have a hard time closing it, or there's some other problem with it," he said.
A few more votes could go to Mercer or Leibowitz after some 2,000 provisional ballots are looked at, Borofsky said. He declined to speculate on how many of those ballots would actually count.
"For instance, there were a number of people who voted in this election who hadn't voted in 10 years," Borofsky said. "They had long since been dropped from the rolls and perhaps neglected to re-register."
Leibowitz said whatever Mercer decides to do is his own business, but he doesn't consider the margin to be too close.
"I think that if you ask 100 people in town, with that size of a margin, 99.9 of them are going to tell you that (a recount) is somewhat pointless," said Leibowitz, who spent the day trying to recover from a long campaign.
"I would like to think that if I were in his shoes that I would be able to deal with defeat more graciously."
Final results won't be known until overseas and provisional ballots are counted next week, but there was a feeling among political professionals Wednesday that Baxter's 171-vote margin over Democrat Kelly White would probably hold up. Democrat Mark Strama's 556 vote lead over Stick is probably insurmountable.Baxter and Stick, both Austin Republicans running for re-election for the first time, sustained intense, expensive TV assaults of guilt-by-association with U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, whose aides were indicted in September on money-laundering charges from the 2002 election and who urged the Republican-led Legislature to split Travis County into three congressional districts to diminish Democratic chances this year.
Baxter and Stick both got cash from DeLay's political committee in 2002 and voted for his redistricting plan last year. Prosecutors never implicated either Austin Republican in the grand jury investigation, although White and Strama spent a lot of money doing just that.
[...]
That Baxter appeared to weather the Democratic storm while Stick didn't might say more about the mechanics of campaigning, the differences in their districts and sheer luck more than anything else.
"Baxter is a better candidate," said Austin consultant Bill Miller. "And Jack (Stick) was the unluckiest."
Miller said Baxter was more aggressive in responding to White's attacks and paid more attention to detail.
Strama's 1,200-vote lead in early voting is an example of the Democrats' out-organizing the Stick campaign, Miller said. By comparison, Baxter secured his victory margin over White in the early vote.
Meanwhile, Stick, who had to deal with a primary challenger in the spring, also drew a Libertarian opponent in his showdown with Strama. Baxter had the luxury of facing only White. The 2,389 votes cast for Libertarian Greg Knowles could have provided a margin of victory for Stick.
David Butts, a longtime Democratic consultant who helped White, said Strama's District 50 in northeast Travis County is a fast-changing district compared with the Baxter-White battleground in District 48 that includes western Travis County.
Butts said Republicans in 2001 divided Travis County into six legislative districts, making sure three of them would be Republican. But he said Democratic areas in Stick's district continue to grow in population, particularly as more minorities leave Austin for northeast Travis County.
"For Republicans, it's a demographic time bomb," Butts said of District 50. He predicted District 50 would be a swing district that both parties would fight over in the future.
The first Enron trial was an 83% success for the prosecution.
A former Enron finance executive and four ex-Merrill Lynch bankers were found guilty of conspiracy and fraud Wednesday while a co-defendant, an ex-Enron accountant, walked onto the sunlit sidewalk in front of the federal courthouse a free woman.The jury in the first Enron criminal trial acquitted a grateful Sheila Kahanek while convicting the five others in a 1999 deal in which Enron padded its earnings by pretending to sell an interest in Nigerian barges to Merrill Lynch.
Though 14 former Enron employees have pleaded guilty to various crimes, this verdict marks the first jury finding against an ex-Enron executive and four ex-Wall Street bankers for aiding and abetting the Enron scheme.The case was a test of Enron Task Force prosecutors' accusations of earnings manipulations, alleged repeatedly in the bigger upcoming case against ex-Enron Chairman Ken Lay and ex-CEO Jeff Skilling. Prosecutors were also very pleased that jurors found two defendants guilty for lying to or obstructing authorities.
But the government was not invincible, and legal experts think the case has many lessons for the 11 people awaiting trial on Enron-related criminal charges.
"This may be a shot across the bow for the government in its upcoming multiple-defendant cases. Juries like to let somebody go; they understand how important these charges are, and they feel better when they find someone to let go," said Houston lawyer David Berg.
I had thought that John Kerry would do better in all three of the big urban counties - Bexar, Dallas, and Harris - than Al Gore did. (That he was going to kick butt in Travis County was never a stretch to imagine.) That was only the case for Dallas County, which Bush carried by the tiny margin of 50.4 - 49.0, but a closer look at those counties shows that Democratic progress is indeed being made.
To see what I mean, I'm going to compare how Bush and Kerry did in these counties to how the three statewide races stacked up. Let's start with Harris County, which is sadly still the least Democratic-leaning of the three.
George W. Bush/ Dick Cheney - Incumbent REP 580,553 54.85%
John F. Kerry/ John Edwards DEM 472,320 44.63%Victor G. Carrillo - Incumbent REP 540,937 52.85%
Bob Scarborough DEM 456,230 44.57%Scott Brister - Incumbent REP 551,990 54.42%
David Van Os DEM 462,212 45.57%Michael E. Keasler - Incumbent REP 537,234 53.25%
J.R. Molina DEM 471,630 46.74%
George W. Bush/ Dick Cheney - Incumbent REP 259,762 54.88%
John F. Kerry/ John Edwards DEM 210,354 44.44%Victor G. Carrillo - Incumbent REP 226,019 50.00%
Bob Scarborough DEM 205,103 45.37%Scott Brister - Incumbent REP 234,085 52.47%
David Van Os DEM 212,041 47.52%Michael E. Keasler - Incumbent REP 224,549 50.47%
J.R. Molina DEM 220,337 49.52%
George W. Bush/ Dick Cheney - Incumbent REP 345,482 50.43%
John F. Kerry/ John Edwards DEM 335,871 49.03%Victor G. Carrillo - Incumbent REP 317,609 48.41%
Bob Scarborough DEM 313,707 47.81%Scott Brister - Incumbent REP 328,007 50.35%
David Van Os DEM 323,404 49.64%Michael E. Keasler - Incumbent REP 319,209 49.26%
J.R. Molina DEM 328,726 50.73%
Winning the big urban counties will certainly help in statewide races in the long run, though there's a large counterbalancing force in the big suburbs, a subject I'll get to later. Where it can pay immediate dividends is in the State House and in countywide races, where a party's bench gets built. Dallas Democrats are already winning countywide races, with Lupe Valdez's victory being a true watershed. We already knew that Ray Allen was facing a stiff challenge, but who had the Tony Goolsby/Harriet Miller race on their radar? HD102, and perhaps Linda Harper-Brown's HD105, will bear watching alongside HD106 in two years.
With David Leibowitz's apparent win in HD 117, there's less fruit to pick in Bexar County, as the Dems took every competitive State House race there. I do note that Lamar Smith barely carried his portion of Travis County, so perhaps a strong San Antonio-based Democrat like current Mayor Ed Garza could make the Bexar portion of CD21 competitive in 2006. And though he's a relative moderate, I wouldn't object to someone taking on State Sen. Jeff Wentworth.
As for Harris, if Vo's win stands up the GOP will have 13 of the 25 State Reps from this county, meaning that among other things, there will be plenty of opportunities for pickups. Martha Wong did a percentage point better this year than 2002, but as long as she draws in the 52-53% range, she'll be a prime target. A stronger Democrat running in CD07, which encompasses much of HD134, might well swamp her boat in 2006. Joe Nixon, who really should have been challenged this year, ought to be in someone's sights in 2006, while Dwayne Bohac, Wayne Smith, and Peggy Hamric might sweat some tougher opposition.
One more thing to consider:
George W. Bush/ Dick Cheney - Incumbent REP 93,554 57.38%
John F. Kerry/ John Edwards DEM 68,655 42.11%Tom DeLay - Incumbent REP 58,399 53.21%
Richard R. Morrison DEM 46,114 42.01%
All right, enough time in the funk for me. Let's look back at a few of the things that went well, a few places where we need to do (much) better, and a few opportunities for 2006.
First things first, I'm really thrilled about Chet Edwards. I wish he had more company, but if I had to pick the most egregious of the Endangered Five's opponents, it would've been tough, but Arlene Wohlgemuth would have come out on top. She was the perfect opponent for Chet - a true wingnut, disliked in Waco for her stance regarding pollution in the lake there, and presenting a big target on her back for sponsoring the legislation that kicked 150,000 children off of CHIP. Edwards hung that around her neck like the millstone it deserved to be, and I think it really hurt her. He earned his victory. Of course, he'll continue to be vulnerable in 2006. That's still a GOP-friendly district, and maybe next time the Republicans will run someone who isn't so scary against him. At least by then he'll have the usual incumbent's advantage and will be tougher to beat. He'll be under the gun, though, make no mistake about it.
I'd like to see all of his outgoing colleagues run for office again in 2006. Not for their old seats - if they didn't win them this time, they won't win them as challengers, so they may as well let someone else give it a try. I'd like to see at least three of them take a shot at the State Senate, say Lampson versus Tommy Williams, Sandlin versus either Kevin Eltife or Todd Staples, and Frost versus John Carona. Stenholm would make a great Ag Commish candidate, but if he prefers a more local race he could take on Robert Duncan. I wouldn't say any of them would be favored, but if the Democrats are going to make a serious push statewide in 2006, they need as many serious candidates on the ballot as they can get.
The State House offers some interesting possibilities. Assuming all results remain as they currently are, there were more Democrats elected with less than 60% of the vote than there were Republicans by a 17-11 margin, but all of those closely-elected Democrats did it while up against a homeboy President who racked up 61% of the vote statewide; for their Republican counterparts, their close victories came with that gale force as a wind to their backs. Who do you think will be in the stronger position in 2006 when the conditions aren't quite so extreme?
And take note of Sarah's comment here Hubert Vo's victory, even if it eventually gets overturned on instant replay, should send a pretty loud message to both Democrats and Republicans in Harris County. Allen Blakemore's words may prove more prophetic than he thinks. Moldy Joe Nixon in particular ought to be concerned. I'll take a look at some of the other possibilities in my next entry, when I examine some county data.
Sadly, I was wrong to predict that this would be the year that the Harris County Democratic Party won a countywide race. Kathy Stone came closest, losing 52-48; the other judicial candidates all scored in the 46-47% range. Reggie McKamie lost his bid to oust DA Chuck Rosenthal by a 55-45 margin, essentially the same tally Rosenthal won by in 2000. Guy Robert Clark lost to Sheriff Tommy Thomas by a tiny bit more, while Paul Bettencourt was reelected Tax Assessor over John Webb by a 58-42 margin.
The main thing I notice as I look at the countywide results is how much better Republicans did overall in early voting than they did on Tuesday. I don't know if there are any conclusions to be drawn from this; it just struck me as interesting.
Ohio isn't the only place than can expect a legal challenge to poll results. Backers of City Proposition 2 have threatened to sue if its provisions are not enacted.
"If the mayor says, 'We'll see you in court,' we'll see you in court," said Bruce Hotze, spokesman for the group Let the People Vote, which collected more than 20,000 signatures to get the initiative on the ballot.[Mayor Bill] White said city law clearly says only Prop 1 should become law and that a lawsuit "would be a waste of taxpayers' money."
With all precincts reporting, Prop 1 had 63 percent of the votes. Prop 2 passed with 56 percent of the votes.
White said it was significant that Prop 1 drew 271,061 votes in favor, compared with 234,598 for Prop 2.
White says the city's charter states the one with the most votes will be implemented because they are in conflict. In fact, city officials crafted the language of Prop 1 to ensure it conflicted with Prop 2.
Prop 1 limits annual increases in the city's property tax revenue and water and sewer rates to the combined total of Houston's population growth and inflation, with property tax revenue increases limited to no more than 4.5 percent.
Prop 1 would also increase homestead exemptions for senior citizens and disabled people to a projected total of more than $70,000 by 2008. A city ordinance, already approved, is scheduled to increase those exemptions to about $64,000 by 2007.
Prop 2 would cap annual increases in almost all city revenue — not just property taxes and water rates — to the combined rates of population growth and inflation.
The language of Prop 1 says: "The City Council shall have full authority to assess and collect any and all revenues of the city without limitation, except as to ad valorem taxes and water and sewer rates. ... If another proposition for a Charter amendment relating to limitations on increases in City revenues is approved at the same election at which this proposition is also approved, and if this proposition receives the higher number of favorable votes, then this proposition shall prevail and the other shall not become effective."
Chet Edwards was the only one of the five endangered Democratic incumbents to survive, as he topped Arlene Wohlgemuth by a 51.17-47.45% margin. Nick Lampson and Martin Frost came closest, but neither came particularly close; both lost by about 10 points. Lloyd Doggett cruised to reelection in the new 25th CD, so only one of the three must-defeat incumbents cited by Jim Ellis actually fell. For what that's worth.
Richard Morrison did put up the best fight Tom DeLay has ever seen, losing 41-55. Morrison carried Galveston County and did relatively well in Fort Bend. Only in Harris County did DeLay outperform the Bush/Cheney ticket. No other race was anywhere close. I did predict that John Martinez would do better than the 30% Democratic index in CD07, and I was right about that - he lost to John Culberson by a 64-33 margin.
There's good news in the State House, where the Democrats appear to have picked up a seat. Two Democratic incumbents lost - Dan Ellis in HD18 and John Mabry in HD56 - but three Democratic challengers won, all in exceedingly close races. Two of those races haven't been conceded yet, so anything can still happen, but if things stand as is the Dems have a gain. Leading the way is Mark Strama, who defeated Jack Stick in HD50 by about 550 votes. In San Antonio's HD117, David Leibowitz knocked off Ken Mercer by 500 votes. In the closest race of all, Hubert Vo knocked off Talmadge Heflin in Houston's HD149 by 52 ballots. Those last two will likely see a recount, as will HD 48, where Rep. Todd Baxter held off Democratic challenger Kelly White by 181 votes. If everything stands, the GOP delegation in Austin shrinks from 88 to 87 out of 150.
I don't really have much to say about what happened in the Presidential election. I think John Kerry is correct to pursue claims of irregularities in Ohio, but in the end I don't think it will matter. That's all I've got.
For the record, I overestimated the support Kerry/Edwards would get in Texas - I thought they'd pull about 42%, but they finished at 38%, falling short of Gore's total from 2000. Harris and Bexar Counties were not as close as I thought they'd be, with Bush pulling around 55% in each. Dallas County was the squeaker I thought all three of the biggest counties would be, with Bush taking it by about 10,000 votes for a 50.4-49.1% margin. Travis County was about as heavy for Kerry as I thought it would be, finishing up at 56-42.
UPDATE: It's over. I have nothing more to say today, other than to recommend you read this.
We're off to watch returns at the Get Donkey! household. I'll try to check in before heading over to KPFT to make my media debut. The Burnt Orange guys will be posting results, so keep an eye on them. Oh, and if you're in Austin, tune to KUT at 11 tonight to hear Byron's take on things.
Turnout is indeed high in Houston. How heavy, we'll see.
Andrew has some projections from around the state.
One hour till we start seeing some results here...
Astros GM Gerry Hunsicker has stepped down from his position.
Adamant that he had sought an exit strategy for about a year, Hunsicker stepped down and ceded his position to longtime assistant Tim Purpura. Even though Hunsicker led the Astros through their most successful era, it was clear franchise owner Drayton McLane did not try to persuade him to stay.The announcement was made less than two weeks after the Astros fell one victory short of earning the first World Series appearance in the franchise's 43 seasons.
"I think after the extra emotion and demands of this year and all the major issues hanging over this organization, knowing that next year would be my last, the more we talked about it, it made some sense that this might be in the best interests for everybody," Hunsicker said.
Hunsicker -- who helped the Astros win division titles in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2001 and a wild card this year -- will serve the final year of his contract as an adviser to Purpura in a role that hasn't been determined.
I don't have much to offer here. Hunsicker did a fine job under difficult conditions. His biggest failures were due to fan constraints (re-signing Biggio and Bagwell), that's-the-way-it-goes luck (the Randy Johnson trade; wouldn't Carlos Guillen look good in an Astro uniform?), and the usual low-level overpaying for fungible but clubhouse-friendly commodities (Jose Vizcaino, anyone?), while his biggest successes are right there on the field - Oswalt, Lidge, Berkman, and so forth. Whichever team gets his services next will be doing itself a favor.
I know what Ezra means when he talks about feeling a strange calm today. Actually, for me, it's more like the feeling I used to get as a big test that I'd really studied for was being handed out. Confident, but still nervous, you know?
There are lots of tales of busier-than-ever polling places out there. There are stories like this and reports like this to boost one's confidence. Even the weather in Houston is currently cooperating.
One of the side effects of blogging is having friends call you to ask who they should vote for in a given race. Lorenzo Sadun and the powers behind City Prop 1 were the beneficiaries.
One sentiment that seems to be prevalent is the hope that one way or another we'll have a clear winner today. I wonder if there will be some kind of backlash if the final electoral vote tally isn't that close but the losing side unleashes the lawyers anyway. Maybe this will be the year that suing after the fact becomes a less profitable tactic. We can only hope.
Tom Hanks has bought the rights to the book Charlie Wilson's War.
More than a year after publication of the book Charlie Wilson's War, the Washington lobbyist and former Texas congressman continues to ride the wave of interest in his story.Last week, Wilson entertained Houstonians by the scores with the tale — from a distant diplomatic era — of his surreptitious arming of the Afghans in battle against the Russians.
In addition to speeches before several nonprofit groups, the popular Texan was the toast of a few private gatherings. A bonus for those audiences — Wilson's insights into the current conflagrations in the region.
Mary and Evans Atwell invited 60 friends to the Bayou Club Wednesday night for dinner with Wilson and his wife of five years, Barbara. News to many at the dinner — Tom Hanks has bought movie rights to the book written by George Crile.
I think my favorite Charlie Wilson story is told in one of Molly Ivins' books. Wilson liked gadabouting in South America, and he stirred up his share of trouble along the way, to the point where his life was threatened by some politician or other. Wilson gave it no heed, but the threat made its way to his mother's ears, and she panicked. After trying to reach him on the phone for a few days but failing - because he was off in South America again, of course - she finally called House Speaker Tip O'Neill. According to Wilson, the call he then got from O'Neill went like this: "I just spent an hour on the phone with your mother. I don't HAVE an hour to spend on the phone with your mother. Get your ass back to Washington and stay there."
After beautiful weather throughout the early voting period, the Houston area has had severe thunderstorms since yesterday. It didn't rain all day everywhere, but it did rain a lot, and it was pretty heavy at times. If we get anything like that today, you can kiss those rosy 60% turnout projections goodbye. Let's hope the storms pass quickly so people can get to the polls without difficulty.
Just a few Congressional race stories to tide you over until it's all over...
MyDD suggests that President Bush's campaign stop tonight in Dallas is recognition that Pete Sessions is in trouble against Martin Frost. I sure hope that's right. For what it's worth, Stephe n Yellin thinks all of the Endangered Five will survive except for Charlie Stenholm. I don't think you can have that result plus a 60-38 Bush win in Texas, though - one or the other has to give.
The Stakeholder has Max Sandlin setting the record straight on the 9/11 Commission and Congress' failure to act on any of its recommendations.
Here's a nice article on Morris Meyer and his race against Smoky Joe Barton. Given the conditions he had to work with, I think Meyer ran a damn good campaign. Via The Stakeholder.
New anti-DeLay ad by the Campaign Money Watch folks. I have to say, it was weird to see their original TV ad running back-to-back with a pro-DeLay Club for Growth ad tonight. I've just about worn out the TiVo's "mute" button, so this election is coming just in time.
Remember Westar? Sure you do. See what Tom DeLay hath wrought in Kansas. Via The Daily DeLay.
The folks at KPFT have invited me to join them on the air tomorrow night at 10 PM for post-election punditry, along with some people with actual qualifications. No, I don't know what they were thinking either, but hey, it ought to be fun and I'm flattered to have been asked. Tune in to 90.1 on your FM dial in Houston or catch their web feed and see for yourself if I've got a voice made for blogging to go along with my made-for-radio face.
One of the things we've heard way too much of this election season is that there erally isn't a pro-Kerry vote, there's just an anti-Bush vote. My response to that is "So what?" One of the other things we've heard way too much of this election is that it's a referendum on the incumbent. Well, if that's the case, then it's perfectly honorable to cast one's vote for not-George Bush. As it happens, of all the possible not-George Bushes who could have run this year, we're lucky enough to have just about the best not-George Bush we could have had. Embrace that, if that's what is propelling you to the voting booth tomorrow.
I'm happy to have cast my vote for John Kerry, and I have faith that my vote will in the end have been for our next President. I just hope we'll know that for sure by approximately this time tomorrow night.
I do hope that those of you who didn't partake in early voting have spent a little time looking at all of the non-Presidential races that will be on your ballot. Those of you in Texas can see a short list of races to know about here, but there's much more than that. Local candidates, judicial candidates, your state rep and various other state officials will all have a big and direct impact on your day to day life, but most people can't tell you who represents them in those offices. Please pay attention to those downballot races and make good choices. There's no electoral votes at stake, and tiny margins of victory are quite common. You want to make a difference, there's a place to start.
Happy Election Day. Let's make it a good one. And if you want some fine endorsements for Houston-area races, start here and work your way down.
Scott explains why he's representing a Republican client for the first time in his professional life.
Yesterday, I drove to the Metroplex for a well-attended town hall meeting held by the League of United Latin American Citizens, in Grand Prairie, halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth. There I listened to Ray Allen, the Republican chairman of the Texas House Corrections committee -- which oversees the Texas prison system -- refer to the Drug War with comments like, "Let's put people that we are afraid of in jail, not the ones that we are only mad at."A life-long pro-life and gun-rights activist, Chairman Allen endorsed with few qualifications the findings of fine, recent study by LULAC, which lays out the case against overincarceation based on pragmatic realism, compassion and human rights. Allen called for increasing the parole-release rate, even after his opponent had called for lowering it, hoping to run to his right as tougher on crime.
My friends Ana Correa of LULAC and ACLU's Ann del Llano opened the event tag-teaming to describe eight "myths" about the criminal justice system -- a critique that basically calls for substantially reducing sentences for non-violent crimes and overhauling the probation and parole systems. The crowd issued audible gasps and cries of "no way" when Ann revealed that Texas has identified 1,941 separate acts we've labeled as felonies, including 'electrocuting fish,' and in some cases, prostitution, graffiti, and stealing cable. One in 11 Texans is a felon, and one in 20 is currently in prison, on probation, or on parole. The Fort Worth Startlegram coverage said the audience appeared "stunned" by the statistics. They were almost equally stunned when their Republican state representative stood up and told the crowd, to closely paraphrase, since I didn't take notes, 'everything these extraordinary women just told you was true.'
Allen said the agenda ACLU and LULAC were proposing had historically been considered "liberal," but that the groups brought him only the best of facts and analysis. He'd come to be convinced of the positions in the report because of his conservative principles, he said, not in spite of them. The cost to the state, the harm to inmates' future prospects and their families, and evidence that incarceration doesn't stop recidivism, but other methods do, were the main reasons he cited.
This isn't just a man bites dog story, Chairman Allen in 2003 actually proposed a bill lowering the lowest level drug possession crimes to a misdemeanor. In the waning days of the session, a nationally touted compromise bill passed that kept the charge at a felony, but required judges to sentence defendants to probation and treatment instead of incarceration on the first offense, a provision that affected 4,000 people this year. Allen told Governing magazine he was able to do it for the same reasons Nixon could go to China -- his hard right positions on other issues make him immune to attacks as soft.
As a matter of full disclosure, I worked on Chairman Allen's re-election campaign professionally this cycle -- my first Republican client ever in more than 60 campaigns -- and I'm also listed as a reader on LULAC's report; in other words, I'm conflicted out the wazoo so take it as you will -- I make no pretense at objectivity.
Still, the admission requires some small explanation for my Democrat friends. In this partisan era, crossing party lines inevitably makes some people mad, plus he and I disagree on a lot of important stuff, starting with choice, not just abortions but schools. I chose to work for Allen precisely because of his leadership on the criminal justice issues described above. His district was targeted by pro-choice groups and Democrats as one of the few competitive seats in North Texas, and he's presently in quite a nasty race. To my way of thinking, though, if Allen loses, the Texas Legislature will still be pro-life, but criminal justice reformers would lose an important Republican friend, and a committee chair to boot. That made it a no-brainer. Yesterday I was proud of Chairman Allen, and it made me feel completely comfortable, perhaps for the first time, about the decision to help his campaign.
There are two ways to run against Republicans on the crime issue without staking out the farther-right position. One is to note that if our criminal justice system is screwed up through the felonization of increasingly minor crimes, wildly out-of-whack sentencing guidelines, unscalable barriers to exonerating the innocent, and so forth, it got that way after thirty years of Republican demagogery and the legislation that resulted from it, which leads to a question: Why should we trust the people who broke the system to fix it?
Second is the notion that our longterm tuff-on-crime mentality has been (among other things) a huge drain on state and county budgets, which is something I've harped on before. Given the budget crunches at all levels of government, it makes sense to me to tie criminal justice reform to fiscal responsibility. Locking up the right people has certainly made a dent in crime, but locking up people indiscriminately is unaffordably expensive in addition to being just plain dumb.
I recognize, as you can see in that last link above, that there are Republicans, even in this state, who are coming around to the idea that there's a point at which being tuff-on-crime is counterproductive. I'm glad to see it, but I'm not convinced that the Ray Allens will ever be the majority in their party. I think wholesale change is going to be necessary to deal with these problems. (Assuming, of course, that the Democrats abandon their me-tooism and figure out a coherent message that makes sense, both of the common and political varieties.) In the meantime, I can't blame Scott for making a pragmatic decision. I just hope that in the near future, he won't be faced with that kind of choice again.
There's a new blog in town, run by a variety of computer scientists and security experts, on the topic of electronic voting and the issues that have been reported so far in this election cycle. It's called Evoting-Experts.com, and so far it's got a pretty good explanation of a reported problem voting straight ticket in Houston. My buddy Dan Wallach is one of the contributors. Check it out. (Thanks to Matt for the tip.)
OK, I think I've found the point at which the social stigma against smoking has gone too far.
"We know that demographically approximately 25 percent of the adult population smokes, and that 25 percent tends to have less desirable characteristics in terms of employment," said Dieter Benz, a principal with Investors Property Management in Seattle. "Some of our people are out in the field every day, and they present an image to the public."Smoking "is not the image that we want."
Although Benz's company relies on the honor system to ferret out job candidates who smoke, others take stricter measures.
In states that allow it, some companies ask for proof. In Washington, Alaska Airlines requires potential hires to take nicotine tests before granting them jobs, and the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department makes applicants sign an "affidavit of nontobacco use" and to promise to "educate" citizens caught smoking within 50 feet of the building.
Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories in Pullman, Wash., warns on its Web site that it may fire anyone who starts smoking after being hired.
Benz, a former smoker himself, is unapologetic about his smoker-free workplace policy, as well as the rule against allowing tenants to smoke in the buildings his company manages.
Businesses have reason to worry about their employees' health. Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have increased by doubledigits for the last four years,rising nearly 14 percent in 2003.Family coverage now costs about $9,000 a year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and individual plans an average of $3,400.
Smokers cost employers an average of $753 per year more in medical costs than nonsmokers and miss an average of two more workdays a year than nonsmoking colleagues, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department's literature states.
Activists contend, however, that employers are selectively targeting smokers while ignoring other health risks that cost them even more.
In a 1999 study of more than 46,000 employees, the Health Enhancement Research Organization, a national coalition of hospitals and public health organizations, found that medical costs for workers suffering from stress, obesity or depression were higher than for employees who smoked.
"Everything we do affects our health," said Lewis Maltby, director the National Workrights Institute, a spinoff of the American Civil Liberties Union. "What you eat, whether you drink, what your hobbies are, whether you practice safe sex. If employers are allowed to control off-duty behavior when it's health-related, we will have no private lives left."
