Imagine my pleasant suprise on New Year’s Eve when I opened the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and read an article by Bud Kennedy entitled “New poll detects a change in the political climate in the Capitol”:

 Texas Democrats have pulled even with Republicans, and the state is now about half red, half blue. At least, that’s according to 1,053 Texans surveyed by an independent Democratic pollster. The poll’s news announcement focused on one specific response: By 46 percent to 35 percent, respondents said Democrats “care” more about “people like me.” That’s a reversal from two years ago.

But most eyes went immediately to the bottom line of the poll, conducted in early December by Austin-based Montgomery & Associates:

Asked which political party they lean toward, 45 percent chose Democrat.

Only 43 percent chose Republican. If you figure in the poll’s margin of error, that’s a tie.

Two years ago, in the same Democratic poll, Republicans led by 55 percent to 34 percent.

As author Bud Kennedy is quick to point out, the poll was a simple poll and not directed at “voters”. Needless to say, the momentum is still there and we can begin to see the turning of the red tide in Texas.

Our biggest challenge in the coming two-year cycle is to raise awareness and to motivate those who find their interests better represented by Democrats to register to vote and to actually vote.

Rick Perry (Governor Good Hair) is back to his old tactics now by promising to do what he said he would do four years ago. The problem now is finding a way to pay for his empty and shallow promises.

Perry now says that he will be fiscally conservative in his next term and that his priorities are (and have been, according to his account) education, health care and transportation.

Let’s take a look at these priorities and Perry’s stance on them:

1. Education was only a priority to Perry after Tom DeLay stuck his big head into state redistricting to keep Republicans in power for years to come. By having an unbelievable margin of control in both state houses, Perry was able to ram-rod his form of education finance reform through. The problem is, his education reform brought property tax cuts that the state cannot afford.

From the Houston Chronicle today we have:

And the GOP chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee noted lawmakers next year will need to come up with billions of dollars to pay for a cut in local school property tax rates approved this year.

His own stinking party is sweating his plan. How crazy is this? The school finance system needed to be fixed, that is for sure. But the plan put forth by Perry is fiscally irresponsible.

2. Health Care is not a priority for Rick Perry. It never has been and never will be. He is too closely aligned with the lobbyists representing HMO’s and pharmaceutical companies. According to the Dallas Morning News, Texas has the highest uninsured rate of any state at 25%. He has tinkered with Medicaid enhancements over the years, but has really done nothing to correct the uninsured problem.

There have been attempts by Perry and Washington Republicans to tie the debate for health care woes in Texas to illegal immigration, but the DMN article indicates otherwise:

Uninsured Americans don’t get the preventive medical care they need. Once they’re really sick, they enter the health care system through the most expensive pathway – hospital emergency rooms – where their treatment tends to be passed on to insured patients and taxpayers.

Undocumented workers, particularly from Mexico, are often seen as the major reason that uninsured patients cost everyone else so much money. Last month, Parkland Memorial Hospital estimated uninsured illegal immigrants are costing $22.4 million a year.

But in fact, working Texans, not immigrants, are the vast majority of the state’s uninsured.

“Seventy percent are U.S.-born, 6 percent are nationalized, and the rest are immigrants – a large percentage of whom are documented,” Dr. Malinow said. “So to say the problem of the uninsured in Texas is a problem of the undocumented or even of all immigrants is really not true.”

The article concludes by pointing out that uninsured medical treatment cost [Dallas County Hospital] Parkland $410 million in 2005, with illegal immigrants representing only $22.4 million of that number (5.5%). That is a clear demonstration that Perry has done very little about health care, and gives us little hope that he is serious about it now.

But Perry’s real priority, transportation, is likely his worst political strategy.

3. Transportation in the mind of Rick Perry means creating lucrative deals with big construction companies to build a network of massive toll roads that criss-cross Texas. Toll roads are a poor decision on the part of the governor because it creates an additional tax on taxpayers, and is more harmful to those citizens who can’t afford another form of taxation. As we just witnessed, 25% of our citizens work in such low-paying jobs that they cannot get health insurance. How does Perry expect people to afford the expansion of toll roads? It would be one thing if new roads were constructed to ease congestion and made into toll roads, but the Perry plan takes existing highways and converts them back into toll roads as a way to pay for additional construction on a different road entirely. So, if you are in South Dallas Perry wants to convert certain roads into toll roads and use those funds for highway projects in North Dallas. That is just not fair and it’s not ethical.

At the peak of this toll road plan is Perry’s beloved TransTexas Corridor system. The Houston Chronicle recently detailed the plans of the road after a court ruled that the state must release all records of negotiations with private contractors to build the system:

Perry announced the corridor plan in 2002, calling for a $175 billion, 4,000-mile limited-access transportation network built mostly with private dollars for profit but owned by the state.

 

TTC-35 generally would run east of Interstate 35 from Oklahoma to Mexico and would include an $8.8 billion toll road from Oklahoma to San Antonio.

The proposal has received continual criticism, despite efforts by TxDOT to reassure the public.

Farmers and ranchers have expressed concern that their property would be divided or taken by eminent domain.

Local officials feared that the corridor would draw business away from existing routes.

Others were concerned that negotiating a 50-year contract for a project of such size was being done behind the scenes.

Despite its bulk — 1,600 pages — and the numerous maps included, the master plan does not include the actual route of TTC-35.

 

TxDOT says that will depend on the same federally required environmental process, including public hearings, as any other road project.

If all the hurdles are jumped, TxDOT says, construction could begin in 2011.

Because the master plan supersedes earlier “conceptual” development and financial plans that TxDOT declined to reveal in March 2005, these were released Thursday as well.

The Houston Chronicle and others had filed open-records requests to see the documents, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott agreed they should be released.

TxDOT and Cintra-Zachry then sued Abbott, asking an Austin court to exempt the plans from disclosure on grounds that they would reveal proprietary information, give competitors unfair advantage and have a “chilling effect” on future proposers’ willingness to reveal their ideas.

The lawsuit was dismissed Thursday by agreement.

The campaign manager for gubernatorial candidate and state Comptroller Carol Keeton Strayhorn had urged that the plans be made public.

Strayhorn said Gov. Rick Perry had “fought to keep Texans in the dark and his contract with a foreign-owned company to build toll roads across Texas a secret.”

Perry’s plan for transportation has all of the same characteristics of Dick Cheney’s energy plan of 2001 that to this day remains top secret.

For all this governor claims that he wants to accomplish, there is little reason believe that he will do any of it in an ethcical way, and even less evidence that he will do anything that is in the best interest of the vast majority of Texans.

According to a piece in the Houston Chronicle today, less than 125 donors account for 40% of all money raised in the Texas governor’s race so far, with those contributions ranging between $50,000 and $850,000. This astonishing figure highlights how influential just a few people are how only the rich get a chance to control elections and what legislative agendas are set.  Who stands to gain the most from these contributions? 

The governor [Rick Perry] has raised nearly $13 million over the past two years. About one-third of that came from 75 donors who gave $50,000 or more. This year’s legislative and gubernatorial elections in Texas are pivotal for the average Texan, simply because so much is at stake when it comes to healthcare, product and company liability, and property rights as they relate to land-grabs for the TransTexas Corridor highway. For the GLBT community, this election is critical since same-sex couples wishing to adopt children will most likely see their rights stripped further in the next legislative session. Who stands to profit the most from this agenda? Fewer than 125 people apparently. 

Chris Bell, the Democratic candidate for governor has raised a paltry $2 million with seven individuals or committees accounting for roughly one-third of that amount. (Naturally democrats represent the forgotten who can barely afford to buy gas and groceries, so contributing to the expensive political process is out of the question.) 

Rick Perry will win his bid for re-election this year. It is almost a certainty, much to my disappointment. If re-elected Perry will become the longest serving Governor in Texas history. Rick. Perry. Unfortunately Perry won’t win because he has the best ideas, not because he is the most charismatic, and certainly because he his the brightest hope for the state. Rick Perry has none of that and is none of that.

At his best Rick Perry is a puppet of corporations and big-money contributors, and a very lucky puppet he is. In recent polls Rick Perry is running at less than 40% of the vote in the upcoming election, a formula for defeat in other election year. But this year is not your average election year. This year is about political parties regrouping, drawing new battle lines, and the self-destruction of others. For that reason alone, Rick Perry will be re-elected.

Facing three opponents in a race that only requires one candidate get more votes than the other(s), means that Perry will walk away with the right to govern the state for another four years with less than 40% of the people supporting him.

This is not a sad commentary on the Democratic party in Texas. It is a sad commentary on the whole political atmosphere. Chris Bell is a fine individual who could easily run circles around Rick Perry in terms of leadership and intellectual thought. Unfortunately, Democrats did not have a strong enough candidate leading the race going into the primary season to build the careful name recognition that is required to unseat someone like Rick Perry.

Kinky Friedman on the other hand had months, if not years, to spout his political ideologies on local, regional and national outlets. Two years ago Kinky was in the national spotlight for his non-traditional views and plain-spoken manner about what he would do as governor. Yeah, it was all a little crazy. He has stated on several instances that he would refuse to call the legislature into session because everytime the legislature meets the state suffers. That is clearly crazy talk. But it is talk that people identify with and are entertained by.

And then there is the craziest of them all — State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn. Strayhorn, a former Democrat turned Republican turned Independent is on course to completely destroy herself politically. She has amassed an incredible amount of money to battle Rick Perry. According to the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Strayhorn is second to Rick Perry in terms of cash ($8 million to Perry’s $10 million), and only because of the very public campaign she ran leading up to the Republican primary and her subsequent Independent bid. The basis for most of the money Strayhorn has raised comes from a growing sense of dissatisfaction among Republicans for Perry.

If I were to write a fiction novel about this year’s election it would be that Rick Perry is defeated by Chris Bell when Kinky Friedman realizes he can never win, withdraws from the race and throws his support behind the other outsider, Bell. I am affriad that Strayhorn’s withdrawl (the most logical event) would only net a gain for Perry inside a red state. But alas, the truth is much stranger than fiction in Texas politics, and neither of those things will happen and Rick Perry will have a legacy as the longest serving governor in Texas history. Rick. Perry.

But there is great reason for hope for Democrats. The battle between Strayhorn and Perry does nothing if it does not show the clear displeasure with Perry and his puppet administration. In the next four years we can look forward to more school finance reform — this time with more lobbying from the business special interest as they seek to reverse the new coporate taxes used to finance the latest round of school finance reform. In the next four years we get to hear more about Perry’s TransTexas land grab highway, and there will be plenty of pissed off constituents. There are heavy issues ahead for Perry, and Democrats stand to gain.

Rick Perry has ordered a special election to replace Tom DeLay in the U.S. House. After months of saying that he would not hold a special election the Governor has had a change of heart and has ordered that the election take place on November 7.

Perry says that his change in heart came after all legal avenues to remove DeLay’s name from the Nov. 7 general election ballot ended in defeat for Republicans resulting in a massive write-in campaign to elect his replacement.

DeLay, who resigned in June, was elected in the March primary as the Repblican candidate. But since he resigned after the primary the courts have ruled that his name must remain on the ballot. DeLay argued that since he no longer lived in Texas, much less the district he represented, he should not be permitted to stay on the ballot. The courts, rightfully, acknowledged that DeLay’s case was no different than if the candidate died between the primary and the general election.

As a result of this wrangling, the GOP was forced to mount a write-in campaign to elect a Republican to the seat. The problem here is that the method of voting within DeLay’s district is electronic. Entering a write-in candidate on the ballot is very confusing since the space is limited to 25 characters (including spaces and hyphens), and the voter must enter the candidates name in completely. The local GOP managed to filter their choice down to a Houston city council member. Her name? Shelley Sekula-Gibbs.  Actually having voters remember the correct spelling and hyphenation will be a long shot at best.

In a show of how desperate the GOP is to keep this seat in the red,  Rick Perry has now decided to hold a special election in which Shelley Sekula-Gibbs’ name will actually appear printed on a ballot. So, when voters go to the poll on November 7 in DeLay’s district they will need to vote twice.

The special election move is a stroke of genius, politically speaking, since it helps voters remember the write-in candidate’s name. But from a citizen view, Rick Perry is an absolute mess. He has denied the people of the Sugar Land district representation in the U.S. House long enough, and until the legal options ran out he was fully prepared to leave that seat open until next January. Proving again that Perry does not care about the people, he only cares about his own political aspirations. In fact, given Perry’s record on everything (which is nothing really), I would say that he has done a remarkable job of failing Texas just as W failed Texas and now the United States.

Wake up America!

I’ve heard some dumb things in this election cycle, but this guy takes the cake. Van Taylor, a Republican challenger for the 17th District in Texas, appeared on Hardball on 8/22 to debate the Iraq war. Taylor is the lone Republican Iraq war veteran in this Congressional election. He tends to speak in soundbites and is tripped up leaving he gate when he asserts that al Qaeda is fighting the U.S. in the war. Matthews proceeds to take him to the proverbial “woodshed” where he is beaten senseless-er.
 
 

More is available over at the Burnt Orange Report. Excuse me while I go get some popcorn and play this video again!