Eye on Williamson County has a great roundup of local news coverage of the anti-Trans-Texas Corridor rally yesterday. Be sure to also check out this post on his state rep’s role in the care and feeding of the TTC.
I should have updated my earlier post to include a link to the Chron‘s non-wire coverage of the protest. Comptroller Strayhorn must have really been whipping them up.
“Perry and his hand-picked highway henchmen say we have a choice: no roads, slow roads or toll roads,” Strayhorn said. “I say to Governor Perry and his highway henchmen: Hogwash. Vote our way today for freeways.”
Strayhorn, a potential challenger to Perry in next year’s GOP primary, never personally called for the governor’s impeachment or election defeat. But she fanned the flames of a crowd that mostly came from Wharton, El Campo and Fayetteville and obviously was already against Perry.
The yellow-shirted people at the rally were Republicans and Democrats, members of the Texas Farm Bureau and the Texas Farmers Union and average people afraid they will lose their land.
“No more Perry!” the crowd shouted, “Impeach Perry!”
Strayhorn “never personally called for the governor’s impeachment”? Tell us what you really think, Carole. I don’t know how broad these sentiments about the TTC are in the GOP, but they seem to run pretty deep.
The toll-road issue has the potential to take support away from Perry in rural areas. The rural vote was the cornerstone of Perry’s base when he began his statewide political career as agriculture commissioner and campaigned for landowner property rights against government environmental regulations.
“It’s not a critters, birds, bees, foxes, jaguars issue,” Perry told a landowners rally near Austin in 1994. “It’s about land control. You’ve got it, and the (federal government) wants to control it.”
There’s a quote I think we’ll be seeing again between now and next November.