There's nothing wrong with doing a story about the availability of public toilets downtown. Doing such a story without mentioning that there are in fact public toilets downtown - indeed, doing such a story in such a way as to give the impression that there are no public toilets downtown - that's not so good. But it's what KHOU did this evening.

I'm talking about the downtown tunnel system, folks. You can't tell from a street-level map, but once you're in the tunnels, the maps they have down there very clearly mark where the various public facilities are. Oddly enough, all the Googling I did on "houston downtown tunnel" did not give me a single link that mentioned the presence of bathrooms in the tunnels, so KHOU missed an opportunity to educate here. Trust me on this - if you go in the tunnels, just look at a map there and you'll find what you need.

You know, I was just saying to myself this morning that what the Texas political blogging scene really needs is a snarky Wonkette-style gossip blog centered around the Texas Lege. And lo, the fates have heard my plea. Thanks to Byron for the tip.

Via Greg, I see there are two editorials discussing State Sen. Jeff Wentworth's biennial quest to pass a bill that would take the chore of redistricting away from the Legislature and hand it to a balanced bipartisan commission. (His bill hasn't been filed yet, or at least you can't find it yet by doing a search for it. Out of curiosity, I called his office and was told it's still being worked on.) I'm perfectly happy to see this happen, and if it does I hope his proposed commission is charged with ensuring that districts are compact and composed of communities of interest, but come on. There's a reason things like this are called "quixotic". The Republican leadership didn't spend six months in 2003 carrying Tom DeLay's water so that Jeff Wentworth could undo it all.

(Idle Machiavellian thought: Wentworth is up for reelection next year. Do you think DeLay and his cronies will threaten to have him primaried if he gets any traction? Wouldn't surprise me, that's for sure.)

I don't want to let my pessimism detract from the rightness of this idea. The voters should be picking the representatives, not the other way around. One thing that really stuck out at me in Byron's post about Martin Frost's effect on increasing Democratic performance in Dallas County was realizing that only one of five Congressional districts which contain a part of Dallas County is represented by a Democrat. Dallas was a fifty-fifty county last November, but the Congressional split is 4-1. I've never said that DeLay isn't good at what he does, just that what he does isn't good.

(For comparison purposes: Harris County's delegation is 4-3 GOP, Bexar's is 2-2, El Paso is 1-1, Tarrant is 4-0, and poor butchered Travis is 2-1.)

UPDATE: Byron notes in the comments that Wentworth was nearly knocked off in the primary in 2002:

JOHN H. SHIELDS   REP 25,265 48.82% 

JEFF WENTWORTH(I) REP 26,481 51.17% 

The Chron, which you may recall endorsed Talmadge Heflin for the November election, calls him the poorest loser and urges him to drop his electoral challenge against Rep. Hubert Vo.

I don't know much about the International Labor Communications Association, but they have two interesting posts up regarding the details of the challenge hearing from last week. This one shows Andy Taylor's retreat from the wild and ill-founded allegations of fraud that he was spreading around like grass seed as recently as a week ago, while this one concludes that when all is said and done, the revised count done by Discovery Master Will Hartnett will still result with Vo in the lead (latter link via Byron). Stay tuned.

I was shocked to look at my Sitemeter stats yesterday and see that I was getting thousands of hits from searches for Ashley McElhiney. Shoulda realized that could only mean she's been in the news: She was fired after a bizarre on-court dispute with her team owner.

"I'm not going to comment on anything right now," said McElhiney, the first female coach of a men's pro basketball team. "We're still trying to work things out. I'm on the phone with my agent right now."

[Sally Anthony, a partner in the ownership group of the Nashville Rhythm] made national news when she fired McElhiney after an on-court dispute during a 110-109 win over the Kansas City Knights. The argument concerned the playing time of the team's newest member, Matt Freije.

Playing under a two-game contract that has expired, Freije started and played most of the game despite Anthony's orders to bench him.

Anthony approached McElhiney during the game and instructed her to bench Vanderbilt's all-time leading scorer, who was recently released by the NBA's Charlotte Bobcats. McElhiney ignored the demand and Anthony was eventually restrained by security guards and taken off the floor.

After the game, Anthony addressed the team and gave them 24 hours to decide whether they would side with her or McElhiney.

None of the 10 players had contacted Anthony about the ultimatum, but in a statement released Sunday afternoon, the Rhythm's Adam Sonn said the players were completely in the dark.

"She comes in and gives us this ultimatum, and we're like - no disrespect intended - but this is all new to us. We hardly knew (Anthony)."

"I didn't make it a hard deadline like it's either you call in 24 hours or you're out," Anthony later said.

More here and here. What a weird little story this is. I'm not going to claim there's wisdom or virtue in defying one's boss, but it's not Ashley McElhiney who comes out of this looking bad. I thought she had a bright future when I first blogged about her, and I definitely still think that now.

Even if it is just a ploy by the gorilla suit manufacturers to sell more product. Mark Evanier will be your master of ceremonies for the day. Read more about this important national holiday here and here. Enjoy!

Mardi Gras Galveston has gotten off to a lukewarm start.

Tommie LeCroy, who owns a Louisiana-style grill called Bistro LeCroy, said his sales are down 40 percent compared to last year.

"It's not been good at all," said Lecroy, 56. "It's too cold. I'm hoping tomorrow it'll be warmer. If it warms up, everything goes great.

"The people just don't drink that much beer and hurricanes when it's cold."

Lee Carter, a first-time beer vendor at the event, said he only sold 96 beers on Friday. He said he had hoped to sell more than 400 daily.

"Maybe it's just the first weekend," Carter said. "We need it to pick up."

At least someone is giving away a lot of product, whatever the crowd sizes may be.

Lynne Sassi said she believes attendance this year is down significantly. No figures were available late Saturday for Friday's attendance.

The size of the crowd, however, hasn't curbed the party mood on the Strand, she said.

"People are just begging for beads," she said. "It's been absolutely crazy."

By early Saturday night, the Sassis already had run out of the 1,000 beaded necklaces they bought for $60 for the event's opening weekend.

"Next weekend I'm spending $200 a night on beads," Lynne Sassi said.

The next step in the Heflin challenge will be taken by Discovery Master Will Hartnett, who will issue his recommendations on Wednesday. Along the way, he rejected some bogus evidence presented by Team Heflin.

Hartnett, R-Dallas, ruled as irrelevant testimony by a Republican pollster who used calculations to project Heflin's margin of victory.

Michael Baselice, an Austin-based pollster, testified Friday as an expert witness for Heflin.

Heflin's lawyers said he would win by five votes, based on their analysis of 91 ballots cast by allegedly ineligible voters who have been willing to reveal their votes.

Baselice used a mathematical analysis, known as extrapolation, to determine that Heflin's margin of votes would increase when applied to the remaining 250 potentially illegal ballots that were cast and counted.

"It's a projection of a known quantity," Baselice said. "It gives us an idea about how these may end up."

Under cross-examination, Baselice acknowledged that what he did was "nothing more than middle school math." He also said that he knew nothing about the votes, other than the percentage breakdown Heflin's lawyers gave him.

For some odd reason, this story gives a different total in Baselice's sample:

Taylor got sworn statements from 129 of the 250 people who cast what he says were illegal votes. Of those, 86 said they voted for Vo and 43 for Heflin.

Taylor argued that meant Heflin won the election by 10 votes.

Larry Veselka, one of Vo's attorneys, said Taylor's numbers show Vo winning by 37 votes.

As each vote was scrutinized over the past two days, attorneys argued over its legality. Hartnett made occasional comments, sometimes agreeing with one side and sometimes the other. He often said he would have to return to a specific vote.

At one point he told attorneys that "you're asking me to assume an awful lot here."

"No one knows for sure what he's thinking," said Rick Gray, one of Vo's attorneys. "He's giving everyone a fair shake."

Finally, a quick hit from the Morning News.

Defeated GOP Rep. Talmadge Heflin continued his vanity bid Thursday, telling the Texas House why representatives should invalidate his loss to Democrat Hubert Vo. We remind you that this election has been through a few recounts already. And even some Republicans think Mr. Heflin has no business asking the House to throw out his loss. Most of all, we think the last thing the House needs is a partisan sideshow. The redistricting battles of 2003 split the place up enough. It's time to heal and move on.

One of the two Republicans in the special election for HD 121 has dropped out and will endorse the other, though his name will remain on the ballot.

"I believe that the Democrats are waging a very strong campaign, and I do not want even one vote displaced for a Republican in that district," said [Glen] Starnes, a financial adviser.

The election is Feb. 5; early voting runs through Tuesday.

Starnes, 39, was one of two Republicans seeking the seat. The other, Joe Straus III, already has garnered key endorsements from elected area leaders, including U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, state Sen. Jeff Wentworth and County Commissioner Lyle Larson.

Starnes said he plans to add his name to the list of endorsements and actively campaign for Straus, 45.

Because the ballots already have been printed, Starnes' name will remain on the ballot, and his vote totals will be reported election night, said officials with the Bexar County Elections Department.

Also on the ballot are Democrat Rose Spector, 71, and independent Paul Silber, 80.

From the Creative Revenue Streams Department:

Lawmakers trying to plump up the bottom line are considering a "vanity tax" on cosmetic surgery and Botox injections in Washington, Illinois and other states.

[...]

The tax would not apply to reconstructive surgery for, say, burn victims or women who have undergone mastectomies.

In September, New Jersey became the first and so far the only state to tax plastic surgery, at 6 percent. The tax is projected to bring in $25 million a year.

In Illinois, the state comptroller has proposed a 6 percent tax on cosmetic surgery to create a stem cell research institute. If the Legislature approves, the question could be put to the voters in 2006.

In California, the very capital of cosmetic surgery, such procedures are tax-free.

Melissa Wilson, executive director of the Texas Society of Plastic Surgeons, said that, so far, Texas lawmakers have not suggested such a tax here. However, with other states considering it, Texas may not be far behind, she said. "We know because of the school finance issue that legislators will be looking for any and all sources of income," Wilson said, adding that the society opposes the tax.

Jokes aside, the point here is that the service side of our economy grows, proposals to tax portions of it will increase. Sooner or later, some legislator will realize that services as a whole should be treated as goods have always been and propose an overall change to his or her state's sales tax structure. And really, why should lipstick be taxed but not liposuction? Why tires but not tuneups? We've had some preliminary discussion on this in Texas, and I daresay it will get a longer look this time around.

Here's an interesting article from the This Week section of the Chron regarding an acrimonious and public battle between a disgruntled homebuyer named Jordan Fogal and the builder who constructed her house, Tremont Homes. The basics of the feud involve claims of defects with the house, a demand to have it bought back by Tremont, and a refusal to use binding arbitration, which is a standard part of most new-home contracts. I'm in no position to judge who's right and who's wrong, but I think the following illustrates pretty clearly why many people don't trust the arbitration process, and why I have a fair bit of sympathy for them.

[William S. Chesney, III, a lawyer for Tremont] said groups like [Homeowners for Better Building, or HOBB] have a skewed view of the arbitration process and in doing so, convince people like [Jordan] Fogal that what they need to do is force builders into buying back a home instead of getting to the bottom of the problem and fixing it.

"It's customary, if not exclusive, to have arbitration provisions both for homeowners and builders to get quicker and more expedient resolutions to what would otherwise be a 2-3 year court process," Chesney said. "HOBB thinks 12 people on a jury is better than an independent arbitrator. (Fogal) found HOBB, and HOBB said, 'This is the position you need to take,' so she did.

"When she started having some problems, she quickly went to 'buy back my $360,000 house.' "

Said [Charles Turet, another lawyer for Stature and Tremont], "HOBB likes the emotion of 12 people who don't have any real knowledge of the situation over an impartial arbitrator who isn't going to be swayed by the emotional argument and is just going to look at facts and determine the best and easiest way to solve the situation."

Turet, along with being a lawyer for Tremont and Stature, is also an arbitrator for [American Arbitrators Association, or AAA].

But what really gets me is the last quoted sentence. The lawyer for the builders is also an arbitrator for the AAA, which is the group used to rule on these builder/buyer disputes. If you were brought up on criminal charges, how much faith would you have in getting a fair trial if the judge were an assistant district attorney? Yet here we have an attorney for the homebuilders who also rules on disputes involving homebuilders. Why should anyone outside the industry have any reason to trust this? Remember, restricting access to the courts is something that builders have actively lobbied for, and one of the extra rewards they got for their efforts (and campaign contributions) was a seat on the Texas Residential Construction Commission, the governing body that sets the rules for how these disputes get resolved (see here and here). So again I ask, why should anyone trust this?

As I said, for all I know in this particular instance, the buyer has been irrational and the builder has acted in good faith every step of the way. Without knowing for sure that that's the case, though, it's hard for me to sympathize with the builder.

In the matter of Stuart Rothenberg versus MyDD (see here, here, and here), I come down firmly on Jerome and Chris' side. Greg went and saved me the time of writing most of what I think needed to be said about this. The strategy he discusses of recruiting Party Builder types to fill out the slates in low-return districts is one he and I have talked about at some lenghth, and it's something I fully endorse.

There are a few things I'd like to add to this conversation. One has to do with something Jesse Lee says in response to Greg's post:

Nobody at the DCCC is stopping [the Party Builders] from running. If there is such a person in every district, who is willing to do all that and much more (forget weekends, running for Congress is full time, so give up your income; having their name dragged through the mud, etc.), then please do come forth, as we would certainly prefer a candidate in every district as well. We don't appoint candidates, we help recruit when we can, but we can not just "trot out 70 year old former State Supreme Court Justices" as Greg suggests for state races. We cannot "trot out" anybody in fact, as they need to consent to giving up their lives. We also do not maintain any monopoly on recruitment, encouraging candidates to run is open to all, from bloggers to state party chairs.

There are a few things the DCCC could do to help grease the skids for this sort of thing. Both Chris and Jerome have suggested creating a pool of seed money to get these candidates started. Ten grand a pop to cover filing fees and startup costs for a hundred or so races (incumbents and those who can raise their own money don't need this help) would probably be enough, and would I think give you a pretty decent return on the relatively small investment. Providing domain names and web hosting, plus some professional-looking templates for campaign sites that could be easily and quickly set up would be very helpful. If you really want to make a long-term investment, how about a national candidates' school to train potential nominees in the basics of campaign reality? Such a thing may already exist, but how many people who aren't already a candidate know about it and could get in on it if they thought they might want to give it a try? Some of these things could also be done at the state level, too.

An objection I've heard to this run-every-race idea is that by funding the Don and Donna Quixotes of the world, we'd be taking money away from the races we could win. I disagree with the premise that the amount of money available to a political party and its candidates is static and zero-sum. If we learned anything from the Year Of The Online Campaign, it's that by reaching out to folks who haven't been reached out to previously, we can grow the pie higher. Remember all those articles from 2003 which talked about President Bush's insurmountable fundraising advantage? I'm not saying that there's an unlimited amount of moolah out there waiting to be plucked, but I sure don't believe we've reached the bottom of the well.

Rothenberg himself subscribes to that fixed-amount thesis when he writes:

Last cycle, Markos Moulitsas (whose Web bio does not mention any campaign experience) of Daily Kos promoted a number of Democratic House candidates, including Missouri's Jim Newberry and Ohio's Jeff Seeman and Ben Konop as good targets for fundraising assistance. Newberry drew 28 percent of the vote against Rep. Roy Blunt (R), while Seeman hauled in 33 percent against Rep. Ralph Regula (R). Konop topped the trio, taking 41 percent against Rep. Mike Oxley (R).

All three races were unwinnable from day one for the Democrats, so raising cash for those challengers was about as useful as flushing money down the toilet.

(By the way, something Rothenberg doesn't tell you: In 2002, Blunt's opponent got 23 percent of the vote, while Regula's got 31 percent and Oxley's got 32. Sometimes it takes more than one cycle to beat an entrenched incumbent. Just ask Congresswoman Melissa Bean.)

The difference between a visionary and a crank isn't always in the vision itself. Sometimes it's in the execution of that vision. We may all be pie-in-the-sky idealists over here, but please wait until after the 2006 elections to see if we're visionaries or cranks.

Rock music is back in Houston, and it's even a little ahead of schedule.

In a not-so-subtle jab at KLOL, which for 35 years billed itself as "The Texas Rock 'n' Roll Authority" before switching to a Spanish hip-hop/reggaeton music format aimed at a young Latino audience two months ago, the new station's call letters are KIOL.

At noon Thursday, Cumulus Media flipped the former KRWP-FM Power 97.5 urban contemporary station to Rock 97.5. The first song played was AC/DC's For Those About to Rock (We Salute You).

The station is led by radio veteran Pat Fant, who managed KLOL in its heyday from 1983 until 1995, when he introduced the Buzz alternative music format at KTBZ-FM (94.5).

"This town is too big, too fast, too fantastic not to have a real rock station," Fant told an excited crowd at a launch party at the Fox Sports Grill.

Former KLOL personalities Jim Pruett and Dayna Steele Justiz were among those in the audience. Pruett said he is negotiating with the new station to helm a midday show.

Rumors were flying that the station hopes to sign former KLOL disc jockeys Outlaw Dave and the morning duo of Walton & Johnson when their non-compete clauses expire in the next few months.

Fant said no contact has taken place with the former KLOL DJs, but "when this talent is free to negotiate, my phone is always open, and I'm eager to talk."

Lawyers for Talmadge Heflin and Hubert Vo had their day in the House yesterday.

Heflin's lawyer, Andy Taylor, maintains that Vo's "razor close" victory margin was decided by illegal ballots, and that the election otherwise would have gone to Heflin.

Taylor said he contacted 129 voters who cast ineligible ballots and agreed to reveal their votes, and that Heflin would have won by 10 votes if the ineligible ballots hadn't been counted.

But Vo's lawyer, Larry Veselka, said his examination of the ballots increased Vo's margin of victory to 37 votes.

Taylor, who previously has alleged fraud in the election, toned down that language Thursday, saying only that there were "serious and deep flaws."

Most errors resulted from actions of unspecified election officials, Veselka said.

"It should be clear what we have at stake here," he said. "We don't have voter fraud, but honest mistakes by people living busy lives."

He said Taylor failed to seek enough evidence to prove that the election results should be overturned.

[...]

[Rep. Will] Hartnett, the presiding lawmaker, appeared skeptical of arguments by both sides.

"You are asking me to assume an awful lot," he said during discussion of the eligibility of one voter. "There's no clear evidence in all of this. It's muddied up."

In considering a dispute over whether signatures on an Election Day list indicated a double vote, he said: "It's suspicious, but it seems to me we are speculating. At best we have sloppy activity."

As the lawyers began arguing over individual cases, Hartnett made it clear he was holding Taylor and Heflin to a tough standard.

Under the law, evidence must be "clear and compelling" in order to throw out a vote as illegal. As Vo lawyer Larry Veselka put it, that is higher than the "preponderance of evidence" needed to decide ordinary lawsuits but lower than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" of criminal trials.

Here's an example of Hartnett's use of the standard.

Both sides agreed that scores of voters had voted illegally, mostly because they had moved. Often they were mistakenly told by election officials that they could vote at their old precincts.

In those cases, their votes would be subtracted if it could be determined for whom they voted. They were sent written questionnaires with questions from both attorneys, and signed them in front of a notary.

In one case a voter testified that he voted the straight Democratic ticket. But in a later question he was asked if he possibly voted for Heflin. He answered "Don't know."

It is possible, on the electronic ballots used, to push a button for the straight ticket but to then vote for individuals of the other party down-ballot.

Veselka argued that the voter may have done that. Taylor argued that it was pretty clear that "straight ticket" meant "straight ticket."

Master Hartnett responded: "My inclination is that under 'preponderance of the evidence,' yes. But 'clear and convincing? No."

Finally, this wouldn't be our Lege if there weren't an element of unintentional comedy.

Heflin has fellow Houstonian, former legislator and lawyer Ron Wilson on his side. Wilson, a Democrat who lost the primary race in March, said he offered his services — for free — to Heflin because "it just so happened that he's the one that came out on the bottom."

A hundred and sixty thousand new jobs in Texas! That's so great! Well, until you read the fine print. Lasso explains, here and here.

StarBock beer has survived a motion for summary judgment in the trademark lawsuit filed against it by Starbucks.

U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Kent issued his decision over the weekend and filed his response with the court Monday, denying all of the requests by the global coffee corporation.

Starbucks delivered a massive, 7-pound volume of legal paperwork to the judge on Dec. 23, citing myriad examples from other well-known trademark cases, and asking him to declare a partial summary judgment or summary adjudication.

The case pits the Seattle-based company against Rex Bell, owner of the Old Quarter Acoustic Café. Bell sells Star Bock Beer from a draught keg at his Galveston bar, a product that Starbucks claims infringes on its well-known worldwide brand.

Bell received approval from the federal trademark office for his beer, but Starbucks opposed the ruling, saying it had subsequently filed its own trademark request regarding its plan to sell coffee-flavored liqueur. Bell’s lawyer countered that move in November 2004 by formally opposing Starbucks’ own distilled spirits trademark.

Kent’s ruling puts the onus on Starbucks to clearly prove in court that Bell’s beer infringes on their trademark.

“Defendants (Starbucks) have not produced evidence of actual economic harm,” Kent wrote in his decision. “The issues of trademark dilution and trademark infringement present nuances of fact best left for trial. Because genuine issues of material fact remain as to each claim, summary judgment is not appropriate.”

Go, go to see Godzilla, this weekend at the Museum of Fine Arts.

The original Godzilla returns to the big screen in this restored print featuring 40 minutes of previously unseen footage. When the sea erupts, a Japanese steamer sinks in flames, a rescue ship disappears, and a few incoherent survivors babble about a monster! This first Godzilla is truly terrifying—a 30-story Jurassic behemoth intent on destroying the city: an exquisitely detailed miniature Tokyo created by special-effects genius Eiji Tsubaraya. Godzilla is one of the great films by sci-fi master Ishirô Honda (Akira Kurosawa´s close friend and occasional second unit director).

The expansion of the Grand Parkway from a little state highway in Katy to a zillion-mile mega-loop took another step forward this week.

Despite pleas from Spring residents who oppose the road, Commissioners Court gave the Harris County Toll Road Authority permission Tuesday to spend $5.6 million to plot the route of a possible toll road in the north part of the county.

The county has not committed to building the road, which would be part of the Grand Parkway, a 182-mile super loop around Houston that has been planned for decades.

The county is looking at a possible 52-mile tollway from Interstate 10 on the west side to U.S. 59 near Porter. The expenditure approved Tuesday was to plot 40 miles from U.S. 290 to U.S. 59.

Most opposition involves a 14-mile section between Texas 249 and Interstate 45, said Commissioner Jerry Eversole, whose Precinct 4 includes much of the area where the road would be built.

One plan calls for this section to be built through the Forest North and Mossy Oaks subdivisions in Spring. The highway would pass within about 1,000 feet of Klein High School and cut across Northwood Catholic's ball field.

Opponents say the toll road would do little or nothing to alleviate congestion on local roads.

Anne, who lives in Spring, is unhappy about this proposal, and points to some useful discussion of alternatives that might actually benefit Spring. She also notes that the folks in my neighborhood got better treatment from the County Commissioners after the ridiculous Heights toll road idea was floated. True enough, but remember, we've got other road-expansion threats to deal with as well.

(UPDATE: To be clear, Anne's criticism was aimed County Judge Robert Eckels. I don't think I had conveyed that notion properly.)

I'm actually amazed at how many grassroots opposition groups there are to this project. It's got to be a bit tough to do, since this monster road passes through so many areas, with so many politicians to lobby about it. More info can be found in this Houston Architecture Forum thread.

One last thing:

County officials rejected state Sen. Jon Lindsay's offer to work for the county as a consultant who would try to persuade north Harris County developers to donate land for the project.

Lindsay, a Republican who represents much of the area where the segment would be built, has long supported the Grand Parkway.

He said he met last year with 14 developers who own land between Texas 249 and I-45. About 10 of the developers agreed to donate land to the county for the toll road, Lindsay said.

With that land, the toll road could have been built without traversing as many Spring residential areas as called for under TxDOT plans, he said.

Lindsay said he met with [Commissioner Jerry] Eversole and other officials in the fall and tried to sell them on hiring him as a consultant.

He would have asked the county to pay him about $5,000 or $6,000 a month for his services, Lindsay said.

"I told them I was not going to do it gratis. It was too much work," he said.

County officials balked at the proposal, saying it could appear to be improper for the county to hire a state senator to lobby developers who were his business acquaintances or friends and who would benefit from the highway's construction, Lindsay said. "I did not understand where the conflict of interest was, just because I was a senator," he said.

It's showtime today in the Heflin-Vo election contest, and you can add Select Committee on Election Contests Chair Terry Keel to the list of Republicans making reasonable public statements about the whole thing.

"You are going to have to have a high level of commitment to integrity and fairness and honesty, and your pursuit of those duties is likely not to ever, in any instance, make people happy," said Keel, a legislator since 1997. "It's more likely to always make somebody unhappy."

[...]

Activists from both parties tried to influence lawmakers, but Keel said there's too much at stake for those efforts to work.

Some questions have been raised about Keel's role as chairman because he was the treasurer of the Stars Over Texas political action committee, which raised money last year for Republicans in tight election contests. The committee did not give money to Heflin's campaign, though Heflin once gave money to the group.

Keel said his connection to the group should not cause concern because members regularly help their parties win seats.

Rep. Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, said he's confident Keel will be fair because he knows him well. But he said Craddick should have appointed a committee chairman who did not have such visible ties to a group such as Stars Over Texas. "Why set up a situation where these are questions that can be asked?" said Dunnam, who is chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

[...]

Keel said the House rarely calls for a new election and usually decides to seat the person who was declared the winner on Election Day. But he said history will not determine what happens this time.

"The integrity of the House is the bottom line here," he said. "Consideration of party label or friendship or any other feelings on this matter have to give way to the law and evidence and the standards that we operate under."

Discovery Master Will Hartnett is also joining the chorus.

"I'm concerned about the use of the word fraud based on what I have seen so far," Hartnett said, adding that he views fraud as intentional misdeeds by individuals seeking to thwart an election. "I'm going to be emphatic on determining what evidence there is of fraud."

Well, there's this:

Amy Wong Mok, an Austin businesswoman and community activist, says Asians here and abroad are closely following this case. The outcome, she believes, could have long-lasting effects on the overall political landscape of Texas – home to the fourth-largest Asian population in the country. "If they take away Hubert Vo," said Mok, "Asian-Americans are going to be very angry for the next two generations. It would be a slap in the face." Mok, a former candidate for Austin City Council who leans Democratic, says the state GOP will have a hard time justifying itself to those Asians who traditionally vote Republican. "Many different Asian organizations are united behind Hubert Vo," she said. "As we see it, this is about arrogance ... it's about not accepting defeat gracefully."

Three further items. First, from the Chron story:

Michael Baselice, an Austin-based Republican pollster, will testify as an expert witness for Heflin. University of Houston political scientist Richard Murray and Waco economist Ray Perryman will testify for Vo.

Speaking of the AusChron story:

"I have no numbers to back this up, but the 'Rs' have already been hurt in Texas by this effort to seat Heflin," said Kelly Fero, chief strategist for Take Back Texas, a sister organization of the state Democratic Party. Fero points out that Rep. Martha Wong, R-Houston, the first Asian-American woman elected to the Texas Legislature, is herself vulnerable and could lose her next re-election bid – "with help from the Asian community." Rep. Joe Nixon, another Houston Republican, could also draw a challenger, already identified as attorney Robert Pham, a Vietnamese-American with a compelling success story like Vo's, Fero said.

Finally, The Red State notes that today is also when committee and committee chair assignments will be announced. This is where Democrats will pay the price for last session's Ardmore walkout. Regrettable, but not unexpected.

UPDATE: Greg tunes into the webcast of the hearings and commences banging his head against the wall.

Whether you've got a favored candidate in mind for DNC Chair or not, I highly recommend this interview with Martin Frost. Frost gave what I think are the right answers to these questions, and though he certainly could be telling us what he knows we want to hear, his stock has risen in my eyes. If nothing else, his promise that Texas won't be forgotten by the national party means a lot. Southpaw gives it a thumbs-up; Annatopia will offer her thoughts later. Check it out.

Oh, Jacksonville. We here in Houston feel your pain.

Via Banjo Jones. It still puzzles me how a city with as many topless clubs as Houston could fail to appeal to a bunch of sportswriters travelling on expense accounts, but there you go. Who knew they were all such aesthetes?

Geez, this special election for the open HD121 is less than ten days away, and early voting is already going on. Here's a little news roundup for you:

Ken Rodriguez says that in a race this short you've gotta have some juice to win.

In a race that begins and ends so quickly, you have almost no chance to win unless you're anointed to win. Which means you need the blessing of the prominent and the powerful.

The anointed one appears to be [Joe] Straus. In a heavily Republican district, Straus has the support of influential GOP leaders, including U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith.

Though Jones has not publicly endorsed a successor, her family is putting up yard signs for Straus.

While appearing before the Express-News Editorial Board on Monday, Straus noted his friendship with Jones and cited relationships with legislators in Austin.

Also helping Straus is Frank Guerra, a Republican consultant who worked on President Bush's campaign.

Even with strong GOP support, Straus says he isn't counting on an easy victory. "Rose Spector is a formidable opponent," he says. "She's working hard. So am I."

[...]

Spector knows that Straus is the heavy favorite. "People say I don't have a prayer," she notes.

But Spector also believes she can overcome the GOP anointing that makes Straus the front-runner.

"When I ran for judge, every time I did well in this district," she says. "I have beaten two Republican incumbents."

[The] Bexar County Democratic Party [has] lodged an ethics complaint against Republican candidate Joe Straus III.

The complaint, filed Monday, claims Straus, a first-time candidate, sent out campaign materials without the "paid for by" disclaimer required by law.

Straus' campaign said the omission was an inadvertent error on a small batch of campaign fliers and that all his other materials carry the message.

"When you're dealing with an extremely compressed campaign and you have so little time to get out so many materials, you're bound to have little things happen," said Frank Guerra, a well-known Republican consultant advising Straus.

What kind of legislator would Joe Straus be? Here's a hint.

U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, endorsed Texas House hopeful and longtime supporter Joe Straus III at the opening of the candidate's campaign headquarters Sunday.

[...]

Straus has been involved in many Republican campaigns, but this is his first run for elected office. He served as campaign manager for Smith's first congressional campaign in 1986.

"If there was ever a role model for a young legislator, it's Lamar Smith," Straus said. "He does the hard work of legislation without seeking the spotlight."

If you think the Lege doesn't need any more of Tom DeLay's waterboys in it, consider giving Rose Spector a hand. Click the More link for a message from Richard Morrison regarding this race (courtesy of Byron.

Dear Friends,

I'm writing to tell you about a special election for the Texas House of Representatives that is being held now. We Democrats are fielding a great candidate in Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Rose Spector.

This special election, which pits Justice Spector against two Republicans and an Independent gives us an excellent chance to build on our net gain of one seat in the 2004 elections. Please click here to support Justice Spector.

Early voting has already begun and the campaign is seeking volunteers. If you are in the San Antonio area or could help with remote data entry and would like to help please email the campaign at: spector_campaign AT hotmail DOT com

fight on,
Richard Morrison

Very interesting read about how the implosion of the Republican Party in Illinois was a long time in coming, even before Alan Keyes showed up to lecture everyone. I daresay there may be a lesson or two in there for folks of both major parties here in Texas. Check it out. Via your one-stop shop for all things Illinois, Archpundit.

The end of Talmadge Heflin's crusade to regain his seat can't come soon enough for the voters who have been singled out by Heflin and Andy Taylor.

Ignatius Okeze has been voting since he became a citizen in 1998 -- same neighborhood, same precinct.

"Of course I'm proud that I can make a contribution through the voting process," Okeze said.

But in the contest between Hubert Vo and Talmadge Heflin, Okeze's vote was one of those called into question and he is none too happy.

"I am knowledgeable about the voting process. I know who I am voting for. I know the values I stand for. And I voted correctly," Okeze insisted. "I've been voting for years now."

He wouldn't tell questioners who he voted for. That is not the way it's done he says.

[...]

The last thing Manu Patel says he wants is another election. Way too much taxpayer money he says.

"Fixing the roads, there are a lot of other things they can do, you know, for the people," said Patel.

"I'm trying to go into it with an open mind," said Rep. Rick Hardcastle, R-Vernon, who won his first election by 350 votes, "but I'm pretty well convinced that the voters are never wrong, unless something went seriously wrong."

If the case were to go strictly along party lines, Mr. Heflin would win his contest because the committee and the House have a Republican majority.

But just about everybody agrees that the politics are on Mr. Vo's side. Democrats can't lose: If Mr. Vo's election is upheld, they've gained a rising star and secured their first House gain in 30 years. If he loses, they can cry that power-hungry Republicans are defying the voters.

Republicans, however, are caught between a rock and a hard place.

Houston GOP Rep. Gary Elkins said he's gotten some e-mails from constituents asking him to consider the evidence seriously.

But unlike his party leaders, Mr. Elkins hasn't decided what the evidence proves. Several House Republicans said the burden is heavy on Mr. Heflin, and he would have to prove outright election-rigging among the 44,000 ballots cast.

"I just don't see us overturning the will of the people," Mr. Elkins said. "I'd have to see the evidence, of course, but unless there's blatant and undeniable fraud, I don't see it. We've never overturned an election and handed the seat to someone [other than the winner]. I don't see what's going to be different this time around."

On the editorial side of things, the Star Telegram bends over backwards to be fair to Heflin, but still draws a line.

Finally, while House members must give Heflin every chance to prove his case and must not let an improper election stand, they cannot ignore the hazards of public perception. They are judging a contest brought by a once very powerful Republican to a Republican-controlled legislative body. Nothing but a clear and convincing case will avoid a perception of political cronyism if this election is set aside.

This is Heflin's case to prove. If he is able to do so, clearly and convincingly, he asks that the House seat him instead of Vo. Alternatively, he asks for a new election.

If House members are convinced that action is necessary -- and that is far from clear at this point -- sending the contest back to a new vote in District 149 is as far as they should go.

Apparently, the new Enron documentary is knocking 'em dead at Sundance.

With moonlight drenching the ski slopes outside the theater Saturday night, a collection of about 150 viewers, many with connections to the film, watched the premiere of the nearly two-hour distillation of the people-driven saga of the Houston company.

While paparazzi scoured Main Street for a look at Elijah Wood, Lisa Kudrow, Michael Keaton and Sidney Poitier, the stars of the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, are ex-Chairman Ken Lay and ex-CEO Jeff Skilling. That's the way director/producer/writer Alex Gibney wanted it. "Jeff Skilling plays Jeff Skilling," Gibney said.

[...]

The picture, with multiple screenings that sold out quickly here, is by no means all fun. It soberly deals with mark-to-market accounting, rank-and-yank management style and the heartbreak of an Oregon electrical lineman whose company Enron swallowed and whose $348,000 retirement stockpile collapsed into a $1,200 shadow of itself.

[...]

It'll be at least late April before the movie opens in theaters.

Then a national audience will get to see this overview of the scandal made more amusing with a clip of Homer Simpson on a roller coaster called Enron's Ride of Broken Dreams, Marilyn Manson music backing footage of wild motorcycle rides like those Enron's executives used to take, and the by-now-obligatory topless-club footage thanks to the ex-exec who married a stripper.

Keith Gaddie, who commented on the reconsideration of the 2003 re-redistricting case here, has a guest post at BOR in which he expands on his initial remarks. He thinks the key to the review may not be the Pennsylvania Vieth case, but the Georgia Larios case. Check it out.

One quibble I have with Professor Gaddie:

In Texas, the old maps made a minority of votes into a majority of seats, whereas the new districts do not. In Georgia, the illegal map that was thrown out made a minority of votes into a majority of seats.

Now, one of the original arguments made for re-redistricting (and this may have been Prof. Gaddie's point) was that a majority of Congressional votes overall in Texas went to Republican candidates, yet they had a minority of the delegation. True enough, even if the numbers cited at that time were a tad misleading, but by that logic we should have had an 18-14 GOP split, not the intended 22-10 division (again, this is probably Gaddie's point). We could have even achieved that 18-14 ratio had uber-DINO Hall switched parties a decade ago when he should have and had a couple thousand votes changed sides in the close CD11 and CD17 races of 2002. And of course that line of reasoning was dropped soon afterwards in favor of the argument that only the Lege can draw the lines, and from there it was an easy reach to a map with maximum partisan advantage.

Anyway. The argument is that the Texas and Georgia cases are otherwise identical. We'll see if the court agrees.

Another loss in the courts for TRMPAC.

Lawyers for Texans for a Republican Majority lost another attempt this morning to show that their clients, accused of breaking Texas election laws, were just doing what the Democrats had always done.

After a morning hearing, State District Judge Joe Hart dismissed the Republican organization’s request that the Texas Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee and the Texas Partnership, a political action committee once headed by Democratic Speaker Pete Laney, provide documents about inter-party transfers of money.

Texans for a Republican Majority and its treasurer, former State Rep. Bill Ceverha of Dallas, are accused in a civil lawsuit of collecting and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate dollars in the 2002 legislative elections. State law forbids corporate money from being spent on politics, but lawyers for Texans for a Republican Majority, a group created by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, are arguing that the law is vague and Democrats were doing the same thing.

Mike Lavigne, the party’s chief of staff, denies it: “We didn’t do the same thing as the TRMPAC.”

As for the Republicans’ “everybody-else-was-doing-it” defense, Lavigne quipped after the hearing, “My mother never bought that excuse.”

Rose Spector's campaign website is up and running. Early voting has already started for the Feb 5 special election, so visit now and help her out if you can.

I know it won't make a whit of difference to my Senators, but count me in with the many others who say No to Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. I do not condone torture, and I do not agree with those who do. Alberto Gonzalez may have the brains, education, and experience to be the Attorney General, but he has no conscience and no morals, and as such he has no business being the nation's top law enforcer. I say No, and I hope you will join me.

Before we sign over the keys to the PerryPike to Cintra, it would be nice to know what kind of power Cintra will wield over its customers. We can look to Ontario, Canada, for examples.

Some toll-road companies can raise tolls without a government hearing, or send collection agencies after drivers with past-due accounts.

Some even negotiate noncompete clauses into contracts so that governments cannot expand other freeways that might take business away from toll roads.

Just how much power Cintra will have is being negotiated behind closed doors in Austin. State officials say that within weeks they expect to sign a contract, known as a comprehensive development agreement, identifying Madrid, Spain-based Cintra as the lead agency, along with San Antonio's Zachry Construction Corp. and other minority partners.

[...]

Ontario has filed several lawsuits attempting to gain some decision-making powers, including the right to veto toll increases, but courts generally have sided with Cintra, citing a 1999 contract signed by both parties.

In fact, Cintra is pushing for additional authority. The company has asked Ontario not to renew vehicle registrations for motorists who are behind on their toll payments, a request the government has declined.

As for toll hikes, that's the nature of free enterprise, right? Cintra's a profit-maximizing firm, and they'll set their price point where they see fit. But what happens if somewhere down the line they're the only provider for a certain area? Again, what if any checks and balances will exist here? The gas tax doesn't get raised without public input (sometimes after the fact, but still), so are we comfortable letting Cintra make unilateral decisions about tolls?

A noncompete clause and the power to deny vehicle registrations to delinquent payers are complete nonstarters for me. That's just way too much power in the hands of people no one voted for. And I don't know about you, but I have little faith that future Leges will be able to resist the urge to accede to whatever new demands Cintra will have. The potential to give away the store is just too high.

We'll know what the contract looks like in a few weeks. I just hope there's enough skepticism in the Lege to keep it from being too outrageous. Via Lasso.

Here's an interesting suggestion to clean up the air in Dallas: Enlist America's Team in the fight against polluting cememnt plants.

Public money will buy cement for the [Dallas Cowboys'] new football stadium. Public financing is intended to be for the public good. Midlothian's cement production practices do not qualify as public good. They do not deserve Arlington's taxpayer money.

State-of-the-art, publicly financed stadiums should be built with the best available, state-of-the art, pollution-controlled cement. Anything less will make the Cowboys accomplices to these cement makers' relentless assault on local public health.

[...]

Money, and the prospect of losing it, is the only language that Midlothian's polluters understand. If we are serious about improving regional air quality, county commissioners, city council members, developers, shoppers at Home Depot -- and even Jerry Jones -- should ask how their cement is made and at whose expense.

Consumers can draw a line in concrete and declare with their purchasing power that Midlothian's smokestacks must clean up -- now.

[...]

As a partner with Arlington, the Cowboys are stewards of public money. They have an opportunity to champion local health by setting high standards for their cement supplier.

In doing so, they would score a huge win for families in Dallas-Fort Worth's red zone.

Mayor White made his State of the City address yesterday, which you can find here. The Chron has a bunch of stories relating directly and indirectly to the items mentioned in this address. I'll start with the two big proposals for 2005:

Foreclosing for affordable housing

The city of Houston will foreclose on 1,500 tax-delinquent properties beginning next month in an effort to add affordable housing and stem the gentrification of poor neighborhoods near downtown, Mayor Bill White said Monday.

[...]

White said at a news conference after his speech that with the help of the Texas Legislature, he hopes to complete the foreclosures in six to 18 months. After that, he said, the city envisions working closely with developers and funneling tens of millions of dollars in local, state and federal funds to build mostly subsidized, single-family homes on the 1,500 lots.

The city also plans to improve infrastructure in these areas, he said.

White said that too many subsidized housing units now are being built in outlying areas of the city, "far away from work centers." White also has expressed concern that the increasing popularity of inner-city neighborhoods could drive out low-income homeowners as rising property values increase tax bills.

[...]

Steve Tinnermon, White's special assistant for neighborhoods, said White's plan is more ambitious than anything the city has tried in an effort to clean up tax-delinquent properties and build affordable housing.

Tinnermon said the city will ask the Legislature to pass two laws to help the plan. The first would eliminate, in some cases, a requirement that courts appoint a lawyer to represent the interests of property owners who cannot be located.

Tinnermon said the city wants to remove that requirement on properties that have delinquent tax bills and fees greater than their appraised values. About half of the 1,500 properties are in that category, called "upside-down" in real estate parlance.

Tinnermon said such a law could expedite foreclosures by reducing the entire process to as little as four months from as much as 18 months. He said the city has been unable to locate owners for about 80 percent of the city's tax-delinquent properties and that taxes have been unpaid on some properties for almost 20 years.

The city will also ask the Legislature to create a Houston "Land Bank," such as one already authorized in Dallas, that would give it the first right to buy foreclosed properties by paying the lesser of either the delinquent tax bill or the appraised value.

The city then could pass along the savings in selling the property to developers who would build affordable housing.

Tracking toxic air

Taking his strongest stance yet on the city's air pollution problems, Mayor Bill White on Monday said the city would set up an air pollution monitoring network along the fences of some of the region's industrial plants to track down companies contributing to risky levels of carcinogenic chemicals in city air.

"We will begin to place air quality monitors outside the plant gates of those firms most likely identified as the source of these excess levels of air toxics," White said in his second annual State of the City address.

"I don't want to wait two or three years," the mayor later said in a briefing. "I don't care who does it, but if somebody doesn't do it quick, we are going to do it."

The new air quality initiative — one of two unveiled by the mayor for his second year in office — is aimed at addressing "needs we've swept under the rug for too long," he said.

While White applauded business community efforts to cut smog, he said "we cannot ignore air toxics," a group of 188 chemicals linked to cancer and other serious health effects.

Other goals of his clean air plan include: asking state and federal agencies' to post their air toxics data on the Internet; assembling a task force of medical experts to analyze the risk from the pollution levels measured; and joining other local governments to bring legal action against companies whose plants are "cutting corners."

Other headlines relating to the address or items mentioned by Mayor White:

ChevronTexaco deeds golf course to the city

Texas Rangers to oversee crime lab review

LULAC denounces SafeClear

Council to weigh funding for Emeergency Center audit

Happy reading.

Strayhorn hints against running for governor

Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn indicated Monday she may be about to back away from challenging Gov. Rick Perry in next year's Republican primary.

Strayhorn's spokesman, Mark Sanders, issued a statement denying she ever told Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs that she would not seek re-election as comptroller. Combs has been preparing to run for Strayhorn's office if she vacates it to run for governor.

Sanders said in issuing the statement that Strayhorn was not trying to send signals about whether she would seek re-election rather than run for governor. Sanders said Strayhorn just wanted to "set the record straight" about statements attributed to Combs.

Combs was quoted indirectly in Sunday's Corpus Christi Caller-Times as saying Strayhorn had told her she was not running for comptroller again.

"The people of Texas are certainly asking her (Strayhorn) to run for governor, and she is listening," Sanders said. "But the comptroller never told Commissioner Combs she is not running for comptroller again, and Commissioner Combs knows it."

Combs spokesman Reggie Bashur said Combs "agreed" with Strayhorn that Strayhorn "did not tell her directly that she was not seeking re-election."

Bashur said the Caller-Times article misquoted Combs. The reporter who wrote the story could not be reached for comment. Editors at the paper said they had no information that would cause them to run a correction.

Lawyers for both Talmadge Heflin and Hubert Vo have filed their briefs in the election contest, and Andy Taylor is still beating the "irrefutable evidence of massive fraud!" drum. I've seen a copy of Vo's brief, and I have to say they do a pretty decent job of refuting much of that "irrefutable" evidence. I have not seen the Heflin brief, so I have a one-sided view of this. It still looked darned convincing to me. Some highlights from the Vo brief:

1. Team Heflin interviewed a subset of those whose votes were questioned, and extrapolated from there.

2. Among those Team Heflin did interview, Team Vo disagreed with many of their assertions about whose vote should or should not count.

3. Some votes were questioned because voters went to the wrong precinct, but were still in HD149.

4. Some of the voters who had moved to Fort Bend were told by Paul Bettencourt's office that it was OK for them to vote at their old location.

5. As noted in the story, some votes were challenged on the basis of uncorroborated phone interviews.

You get the idea. The hearing is Thursday, and Discovery Master Will Hartnett will issue his recommendations next week. In the meantime, ponder this:

[Andy] Taylor said Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman agrees with Heflin's team that Heflin should be declared the winner because so many ballots cast for Vo should be thrown out.

But in a prepared statement, David Beirne, Kaufman's spokesman, said Kaufman is waiting for the House to conduct an investigation and has not endorsed the findings of Heflin's team.

"No such endorsement exists or should be construed from the office of Harris County clerk," Beirne said.

Last but not least, the Daily Texan calls on Heflin to drop his challenge.

Via Atrios, this rather stunning bit of testimony from the Gonzales confirmation hearings.

Asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy to describe "in detail" the only court appearance he ever made on behalf of Bush, Gonzales—who was then chief counsel to the Texas governor—wrote that he had accompanied Bush the day he went to court "prepared to serve on a jury." While there, Gonzales wrote, he "observed" the defense lawyer make a motion to strike Bush from the jury panel "to which the prosecutor did not object." Asked by the judge whether he had "any views on this," Gonzales recalled, he said he did not.

While Gonzales's account tracks with the official court transcript, it leaves out a key part of what happened that day, according to Travis County Judge David Crain. In separate interviews, Crain—along with Wahlberg and prosecutor John Lastovica—told NEWSWEEK that, before the case began, Gonzales asked to have an off-the-record conference in the judge's chambers. Gonzales then asked Crain to "consider" striking Bush from the jury, making the novel "conflict of interest" argument that the Texas governor might one day be asked to pardon the defendant (who worked at an Austin nightclub called Sugar's), the judge said.

UPDATE: I should have been clearer about this. The idea that then-Governor Bush could have been concerned enough about the prospect of some day pardoning a strip club employee (and anyone who's spent more than a day in Austin knows that Sugar's is a strip club) for a drunk-driving offense to see it as a possible "conflict of interest" is so ridiculous on its face that I just can't believe a judge would buy it. Liberty in the comments is correct - if this is the case, then he couldn't have been "prepared to serve" because the same argument would work for any defendant ever.

Anyway. I posted this because I was amused by the reference to Sugar's as a "nightclub", and because seeing that took what I thought was an already-silly argument to new heights of ludicrousness.

Andy Taylor, chief mouthpiece for Talmadge Heflin, was supposed to have a press conference this afternoon at 2:30 in which he would present irrefutable evidence that those nasty Democrats stole the HD149 election from poor ol' Talmadge. He's been saying that all along now (modulo the occasional backtrack), but as there's no news stories about this momentous event just yet, I can't say if he's finally come forth with something resembling evidence or not or if this is just more of the same. Consider this post a placeholder for now.

In the meantime, both Gary Scharrer and Harvey Kronberg note that the state GOP is putting a lot of pressure on its foot soldiers to fall in line and support overthrowing Hubert Vo for Heflin. Kronberg:

While Heflin was popular among his peers, virtually every Republican I have interviewed - including the most senior leadership - has stressed that only overwhelming evidence of serious and systemic voter fraud would persuade them throw to out an election.

Proving substantial voter fraud is a high standard and the burden rests exclusively with Heflin. Last week's filings by Heflin point to some election irregularities, but I am not sure there is much evidence of fraud.

Meanwhile, Republican Party chairman Tina Benkiser has been ratcheting up the rhetoric, calling for a GOP grassroots uprising. Alleging a history of Democrats stealing elections, she has called upon the Republican faithful to lean on their legislators. She claims outside pressure is being exerted to keep the challenge from reaching the floor of the House. But with a Republican super majority and a fearless Republican speaker who is firmly in charge, Benkiser's claims of outside pressure ring hollow.

Of course, the so-called "stolen" elections to which Benkiser refers were in South Texas where Democrats administered the elections.

This election was held in Houston where Republicans administered the election and counted the votes.

Democrats warn of dire consequences if Republicans call a new election for Heflin.

"I'm going to let loose unless they do what's right," says Rep. Paul Moreno, D-El Paso.

Individual Republicans have told Moreno they are under pressure to push a conservative agenda "no matter what" and might have to support Heflin, Moreno says.

UPDATE: Rob reminds me that many contest-related documents can be found here. I do know that each side's full briefs are not there, however. Initial and rather unexcited coverage is here.

Last week, Chris Bowers of MyDD looked at a number of Congressional races that ought to be priority targets for the Democrats in 2006. He has a goal of targeting 80 races, with every seat being challenged.

As a proponent of a 254-county strategy in Texas, I'd like nothing more than to see strong Democrats running in all 32 races here. It's hard to say right now what the Congressional race landscape will look like next year. There will be two high profile races for sure - whoever goes against Chet Edwards for the last of the redistricting-targeted seats, and a DeLay/Morrison rematch in CD22. Beyond that, other than a likely rematch between Henry Cuellar and Ciro Rodriguez in the Democratic primary for CD28, it's hard to say what races of interest, if any, will develop.

As I noted in the comments, races I'd like to see on the map next year include CD23 which, depending on what KBH does, may involve an open seat, CD21, and CD14. I still have fond hopes that someone with a recognizable name and an ability to raise cash will take a shot at CD07, but I expect to be sadly disappointed there.

Something that I keep coming back to as I look at different districts is that Democrats need to be more aggressive in challenging for State House seats, almost as a prerequisite for mounting more serious challenges in Congressional races. As an example, Andrew D recently intruduced us to a potential rising star on the Democratic side:

Another pleasant experience was meeting the man who I have bestowed the sobriquet "Gov" on- Lt. Cmdr. Juan M. Garica (USN-Ret.) of Corpus Christi. Sounds great, right? A Military guy. But his resume only begins there. LCDR Garcia is also a graduate of UCLA, Harvard Law and the Kennedy School of Government. In terms of charisma he is second only to John Edwards in people I have met. He had ladies (and some of the guys) turning their heads and the rest of the guys (and all the ladies) ready to open their wallets. His family is great too- his beautiful wife Danielle came with him, though they left their 4 kids (straight out of a commercial cute) in Corpus. He is also bilingual. Garcia was approached by the Republican Party to run for office, but made it clear that he was not on their side and is now planning to take on Republican State Rep. Gene Seaman in 2006. Keep your eye on this guy- he is going places. The Latino John Kennedy I called him.

And what does that have to do with Congressional races? Well, HD32 contains Calhoun and Aransas counties, both of which are represented by the unchallenged-in-2004 Ron Paul. I don't know about you, but I think it'd be an easier task to knock off Paul with a Democratic state rep in those districts, especially if Paul's 2006 challenger comes from the opposite end of that nearly-bifurcated district (i.e., someone like Galveston's Craig Eiland). But no challenger to Seaman in 2004 means no chance to have that help there for Paul's putative challenger in 2006. So sorry.

Another example: Williamson County, home base of CD31's John Carter, appears to be on a modest Democratic trend - George Bush did three points worse there this past year than he did in 2000 despite running two points better overall in Texas. CD31 is as few cycles away from being competitive, but wouldn't it be nice to have already unseated one or both of Williamson's Republican State Reps for when that does happen? Hey, Jon Porter, what do you think about that?

Basically, having a stronger and broader slate of State House candidates (and, one hopes) a larger share of the State House membership means having a deeper bench from which to recruit candidates for the next level. Democrats didn't do a good job of building its bench in 2004 despite its (so far) one-seat gain. If there's one concrete thing the Democratic Party can do better in 2006, that's it.

There are ancillary benefits to running aggressively in the State House races - Greg and I are (very slowly) working on a thesis that having candidates in these races, even sacrificial lambs running in abandon-all-hope districts, help to boost other candidates on your ticket. That's something Democrats should really want to have wherever they can find it if they want to have any hope of winning statewide (or, more modestly, Harris County-wide) elections. (The same is true at other levels - one reason I keep harping on CD07 is the belief that a strong Democratic challenger to John Culberson would help to swamp Martha Wong and maybe Joe Nixon's boats.) And even though State Rep races are more expensive than they used to be, they're still dirt cheap compared to Congressional races; in addition, as Hubert Vo demonstrated, good strategy and lots of shoe leather can make up for a big funding gap. It's just good value for the investment, and the eventual payoff can be big indeed.

One last thing: We'll be redistricting again in 2011, and assuming that Jeff Wentworth's perennial proposal to have that chore done by a nonpartisan commission remains a beautiful theory, it would be awfully nice to have a Democratic House by then. Wishing for a favorable ruling from the courts only gets you so far, you know?

For the foreseeable future, there still won't be a comprehensive directory of cell phone numbers.

Nearly half of the 175 million cell phone users in the United States will not have a chance to sign up for the directory when it is unveiled later this year because they use one of three major carriers that have chosen not to participate.

Among them are Sprint and Alltel, which backed away from the project for at least this year because of bad publicity over the directory and possible regulations that could make the service less profitable. Verizon from the onset said it would not participate because it felt consumer privacy needs could not be guaranteed.

"With Sprint, Alltel and Verizon out, the power of the tool is greatly diminished," said Julie Ask, an industry analyst with Jupiter Research.

[...]

Analysts believe the wireless industry itself should be faulted for coming up short. They say it should have anticipated consumer concerns and been aggressive about countering them through advertising or public relations.

The Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, which spearheaded the directory, is taking the brunt of such criticism.

"The CTIA did a bad job of PR, quite frankly," said Michele Pierz of the Pierz Group, a consulting firm that analyzes directory assistance and has done consumer studies on the wireless directory.

As an example, Pierz points to a mad rush by cell phone users to register their numbers on a federal no-call list aimed at preventing calls from telemarketers.

Bogus e-mails circulating around the country last month incorrectly told wireless consumers that inclusion in the directory would mean telemarketers would have access to their numbers.

Millions of wireless consumers responded by registering their cell phones on the national do-not-call registry.

Telemarketers, by law, are not allowed to call cell phones.

[...]

A Pierz Group study published in August illustrates the confusion, Pierz said.

Only 10 percent of the wireless consumers polled in Pierz's survey said they would want their phone listed in the directory when no privacy measures were clearly explained to them.

But once consumers understood the service, they overwhelmingly favored it.

She said consumers were especially attracted to any directory service offering technologies that carriers have successfully tested but are not yet including.

"If you gave people a choice of different privacy protections, 74 percent said they would list their cell phone numbers," Pierz said.

The latest crazy-ass proposal for I-45 north of downtown: Move it west, where Houston Avenue is. Just say no.

First Ward leaders reacted with alarm when a Downtown Management District board member proposed rerouting a section of Interstate 45 to run along Houston Avenue, which would require eliminating some homes and businesses. It was the latest in a series of recent proposals for development or transportation projects that would affect neighborhoods north of downtown.

"We're very concerned, and it's part of that whole sweep across the north side that we're trying to track that's threatening these older neighborhoods," said David Bush, the director of programs and information for the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance.

[...]

The latest flare-up is response to a proposal by Mark Cover, an executive of the Hines real estate firm who serves on the board of the Houston Downtown Management District. His idea calls for shifting a segment of Interstate 45 westward to align with Houston Avenue, opening up space for a new urban park and related development projects.

In October, the district proposed a more modest realignment of the freeway to public land near the site of the old Houston Police Station on Riesner Street. This proposal, part of a broad 20-year vision for downtown, would not affect the First Ward or other nearby neighborhoods, said Guy Hagstette, the district's planning and capital projects director.

Cover could not be reached for comment. Hagstette said Cover thought the district's proposal "wasn't bold enough," but he emphasized the district had not endorsed Cover's idea.

"This is still just in the discovery stage. This is extremely preliminary," Hagstette said.

[...]

The alarm caused by the I-45 ideas might seem premature, since the Texas Department of Transportation says its study of the freeway's northern segment does not envision any change from its current alignment. Agency spokeswoman Janelle Gbur said she could not recall a section of any Houston freeway having been moved.

Gbur said, however, said the I-45 planning process is in an early enough stage that new ideas can be considered.

"Now is the time to be engaging TxDOT in this dialogue," Gbur said. "We can entertain some different options for Interstate 45's future, but we can only build what the public will endure."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Until someone can explain to me why the already-existing and heavily-underutilized Hardy Toll Road isn't the better solution to I-45's congestion than tearing up neighborhoods to widen that accursed freeway, I will oppose any alteration to what we've got now.

Good night, Johnny.

As always with all things showbiz, Mark Evanier's blog is the place to go for the best information. Start here and work your way forward.

The Stakeholder points to the UPI coverage of the re-arguments of re-redistricting in the federal appeals court. I agree it covers the main points well, but there's a glaring factual error that needs to be corrected:

The old Texas map was drawn shortly after the 2000 census, which is the custom every 10 years in states. Ironically, the same three-judge panel approved that map after the Democratic-controlled Legislature failed to reach agreement.

A thought occurred to me as I read this:

Attorneys for Latino voters complained to the three-judge panel that the plan violated "one-man, one-vote" because the lawmakers failed to use the most up-to-date census figures.

Jose Garza, an attorney for the League of United Latin American Citizens, said the Legislature used census figures from 2000 when there were more accurate figures available in 2003 that reflected the state's growth.

"The time has come to place restraint on the state's mischief," he said.

The state's population increased from just less than 21 million to 22 million from 2000 to 2003, according to U.S. Census figures. The percentage of Latino citizens in the Lone Star State climbed from 32 percent to 34 percent in that period.

Lucas Powe, a University of Texas law professor, also complained about the failure to use up-to-date figures, and he argued that a Legislature should not attempt mid-decade redistricting unless there is a necessity.

"Any redistricting plan that replaces a valid plan must be to meet one-man, one-vote and a compelling state interest," he said.

A couple of emails have hit my inbox this week with the news that former Houston City Council member Eleanor Tinsley has been diagnosed with breast cancer. I just want to take this opportunity to offer her my best wishes for a full and speedy recovery.

One of the advantages of occasionally dawdling before posting on something is that sometimes someone else will do the heavy lifting for you, which Greg has done on this story regarding the state of the Heflin challenge. Basically, he covered the important bits, and I agree with what he said.

One little thing:

Vo raised $114,000 during the period between Oct. 24 and Dec. 31, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Texas Ethics Commission this week.

Among the post-election donors were political action committees representing farmers, architects, doctors, hospitals, automobile dealers, the restaurant association and beer distributors.

Heflin raised $184,000 in that same period.

Contributing to Heflin after the election were Houston home builder Bob Perry, who wrote a $50,000 check, and Gov. Rick Perry, who chipped in $10,000 from his campaign fund.

Some Republicans have suggested privately that Heflin should accept his loss to avoid disruption of a busy session and to prevent the appearance of a partisan grab.

The Texas Republican Party, however, is putting pressure on GOP lawmakers not to sweep the case under the rug.

An e-mail from state Republican Chairman Tina Benkiser to thousands of members encourages them to contact their representatives to ensure that the election contest goes to the House floor.

"There are people who would just like this to go away," said party spokeswoman Sherry Sylvester. "People have been very discreet, but it's clear representatives are receiving pressure to not take it seriously and not consider the evidence."

Letter to the Editor:

Do all the Bush-bashers really believe that if John Kerry had won that he would not have had an even grander inaugural ceremony? Please!

LINDA SNYDER
Sugar Land

The Harris County DA office has appealed the order for a new trial for Andrea Yates.

In a motion filed Thursday, prosecutors say the 1st Texas Court of Appeals erred Jan. 6 when it ordered a new trial, citing an expert prosecution witness who gave erroneous testimony about a TV program.

In Yates' March 2002 murder trial, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz told jurors that she might have patterned the killings after an episode of Law & Order, in which a mother drowned her children and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. It later was found that no such episode existed.

Prosecutors say the remark about the TV show had no bearing on Dietz's assertion that Yates was sane when she killed her five children in June 2001.

Dietz's remark "does not impact in any degree upon the jurors' determination as to whether (she) knew what she was doing was wrong at the time that she committed the offenses," prosecutors said in court papers.

[...]

Citing 23 other cases, prosecutors contend the law cited by the appeals court about false testimony requiring a new trial applies only if the testimony had a direct bearing on the defendant's guilt or innocence.

They said the testimony arguably could have helped Yates' insanity claim. "If (Yates) had watched a Law & Order episode, (her) expert witnesses clearly would have viewed that as just another ingredient to (her) increasingly psychotic thoughts," prosecutors said.

In September of 2003, Plano housewife Lisa Diaz obeyed the voices in her head that ordered her to kill her children. She drowned her two daughters in a bathtub, then stabbed herself repeatedly in an ultimately unsuccessful suicide attempt. In August last year, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Read her story in the Houston Press, including how her attorneys learned from those who had defended Deanna Laney, but beware - some of the details are quite gruesome.

There's also a good sidebar story about the recent developments in the Andrea Yates case. Meanwhile, Ginger points to this Newsweek article in which Park Dietz whines and stamps his feet about how it's soooo unfair that his "honest mistake" has caused him soooo much grief. Poor baby.

One of the things that attracted me to Trinity University while I was going through the college applications process was getting personal letters from the chairs of the math and music departments telling me about their programs. Now that I see what colleges are doing these days, it all seems kind of quaint.

Forget course catalogs and colorful pamphlets. Think sex, skiing and rock 'n' roll.

When it comes to recruiting students for college, admissions officials are turning to increasingly outlandish stunts to get the attention of high schoolers. Colleges and universities are using birthday cards, ski weekends and even reality TV shows to get an edge.

Personal contact with students is in. Indiscriminate mass mailings are out.

"Everybody's trying to do something that isn't the mundane," said Dan Kunzman, vice president of admissions at Doane College in Crete in southeast Nebraska.

[...]

But not all of the gimmicks are received with open arms.

After the University of Nebraska-Lincoln agreed to let Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee film his reality show, Tommy Lee Goes to College, on campus, some faculty members protested. Local domestic violence and family groups also expressed concern that having the rock star representing the university may not be the best image to project. Lee spent about four months in jail after pleading no contest to kicking his then-wife, Pamela Anderson, in February 1998.

The show is tentatively scheduled to air this summer.

At Doane College, school officials apologized after receiving complaints about recruiting postcards sent to 13,500 prospective students that showed a male student surrounded by women, encouraging students to "play the field."

Meanwhile, Saint Vincent College, in Latrobe, Pa., is planning a ski trip for potential students. Between snowboarding and skiing, students will be given information about financial aid, academic programs and life at the college.

I'm glad to see stories skeptical of the Trans Texas Corridor being run, especially on the TV news. There's quite a bit that's good in this KHOU piece from earlier this week, but before I get to that, I need to getan annoyance off my chest first.

It's no secret that Texas is in a jam -- a traffic jam.

Freeways are overcrowded and the state can't afford to build new ones. It can barely maintain the ones we have.

Having gotten that off my chest, I'll say that the rest of the story did a good job hitting on the main points of contention with the TTC. More like that would be nice.

Elsewhere, the NBC affiliate in Waco has a piece on the skeptical response that the TTC got from McLennan County commissioners.

The Trans-Texas Corridor is one of the boldest highways ever proposed, but what will be the economic impact be on McLennan County? That's what commissioners tried to figure out from state transportation officials at their weekly meeting.

Many of the concerns surrounded the county's tax base because as much as 4,000 acres of rural land would be taken to build the highway. That's tax money the county would lose.

Commissioners are also concerned the county and the state may not have the final say because a private company is building the highway and development of I-35 could be slowed if the focus shifts to the Trans-Texas Corridor.

County Commissioner Wendall Crunk says, “Just about everything I've looked at has been negative for McLennan County.”

[...]

TxDOT officials and county commissioners talked for about two hours, but in the end, some commissioners were still not convinced the Trans-Texas Corridor is the best thing.

Commissioner Lester Gibson says, “I did not get any specific answers. The gentleman tried to answer, but it was still vague.”

This was bound to happen sooner or later: HISD ponders selling naming rights to high school football stadia.

If HISD goes forward with the proposal, Houston would join a small but growing list of Texas school districts to plaster corporate names on their stadium facades.

"These things are worth discussing," said HISD trustee Greg Meyers. "It's probably a fine idea."

Businesses have paid more than $1 million each to put their names on at least three Texas high school football stadiums, in Midland, Forney and Tyler.

HISD's three sports complexes — Barnett, Butler and Delmar-Dyer — would be enticing advertising venues to many companies, said Dave Stephenson, president of Titus Sports Marketing in Dallas.

"With so many campuses and students tied into their facilities, if they look at an umbrella proposal, there's tremendous prospects for that," Stephenson said of HISD. Last year, his company negotiated a 12-year, $1.9 million deal with a hospital system that changed the Tyler stadium name to Trinity Mother Frances Rose Stadium.

Although most naming deals have involved advertisers seeking suburban and rural audiences, Stephenson said he believes urban school districts will attract interest as well.

"There's a lot of companies that want to get involved with inner-city students," he said. "They may like HISD because they want to give back to the community and see their name put into helping disadvantaged kids."

There are those, however, who believe public school facilities should be commercial-free zones.

"What schools have to understand is that naming a stadium after a corporation is basically saying to the kids, 'Buy this. These are the good guys.' And should a school be doing that?" said Susan Linn, a Harvard psychologist and founding member of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. "We used to name buildings after heroes, and now what we're doing is naming buildings after the highest bidder."

UPDATE: KPRC did a story on this during the 5 PM news tonight. In one shot, they showed the scoreboard at some named-for-a-person stadium. In each of the corners of the scoreboard was a big red Coca Cola logo. Yeah, changing the name from Obscure Rich Guy Who Once Gave The School A Pile Of Money Stadium to Three Initial Corporation Stadium is really gonna send a message to the kids.

In the comments, Dru Stevenson mentions an interesting possibility, which is that one of the Houston megachurches, who already do a lot of advertising, might be in the market for a stadium name. It could happen. Lakewood Church already owns the Compaq CenterSummit, so adding an Oasis Of Love Stadium to their portfolio might make sense. I'd love to hear the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on that one if they try.

I thought that James Dobson's bizarre obsession with SpongeBob's sexuality would easily be the dumbest thing I'd read this week, but damn if Jim Henley didn't find something even dumber. Do we need to start putting warning labels that read "This is fiction. That means it's not real." on all pop-culture products for the benefit of clueless conservative commentators?

Once again without directly attacking Governor Perry, Senator Hutchison is talking about how much money Texas has lost in CHIP funds.

Texas forfeited $104 million in federal funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program when it failed to spend all that was allocated to the state in 2002, according to recent figures from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

[...]

"I regret that another significant allotment of Texas taxpayer dollars that could have helped local governments pay for their health care bills has again been voluntarily forfeited," Hutchison said. "As a simple matter of fiscal conservatism, this does not make much sense."

[...]

Jennifer Harris, a spokeswoman for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, said the unspent federal money is mostly a result of Texas starting its CHIP program late.

Congress allowed states to begin drawing down CHIP money in 1998, but Texas did not start its program until later, Harris said. Texas has received federal money every year since 1998 even though the program didn't start in the state until 2000.

Gov. Rick Perry's office criticized Hutchison and Congress for not passing legislation that would allow the state to keep all the money allocated to the program.

"This is a problem of the senator's own making," said Perry spokesman Robert Black. "Texas didn't lose this money, the federal government took it away because we have no effective voice on the federal health subcommittee looking out for the interests of Texas uninsured."

States have three years to spend each year's CHIP allotment before the money is redistributed to other states.

The Supreme Court-ordered review of the federal lawsuits filed against the Texas re-redistricting of 2003 is scheduled for tomorrow. SCOTUS has ordered the lower court to reconsider its ruling in light of the Vieth v Jubelirir case that it decided subsequently. Rick Hasen gives some background.

The case puts the lower court in a really tough position, because four Justices in Vieth ruled that partisan gerrymandering cases are non-justiciable, four dissenters proposed (at least) three different standards for judging the constitutionality of partisan gerrymander, and Justice Kennedy simply could not decide: he left the door open for future challenges, but rejected all the proposed standards that have been set forth so far.

One other thing to note is that the federal court is supposed to take the result of the 2004 elections into account. It seems to me that if at some point the new boundaries are eventually tossed on the grounds that they're too partisan to be legal, that could be a fatal blow to Tom DeLay (assuming he hasn't been indicted or voted out of office by then). His role in pushing for the new boundaries, and the fact that the GOP would have lost seats in the House otherwise, was frequently cited as a reason to support him during the DeLay Rule dustup. So what happens when that stone is removed from his foundation? Maybe we'll get to find out.

Hasen link via Kimberly, who is also the author of this AusChron story which notes another new development in the case.

Attorney General Greg Abbott released a series of briefs late Friday afternoon, including a response to an amicus brief filed by University of Texas law professors, Travis County, and the League of United Latin American Citizens, who wrote that mid-decade redistricting should take into account the "phenomenal growth" and population shifts in Texas between 2000 and 2003.

[...]

The UT professors, along with Travis County and LULAC, argued that the state's redistricting plans violated "one person, one vote." As the minority population shifts and changes, those groups are no longer accurately represented by 2000 census data. The amicus brief argues that the state did not make a "good faith effort" to take those population shifts into account when the map was redrawn in 2003.

In its response, the state argues that a "one person, one vote" argument is "an undisguised attempt at a backdoor judicial prohibition on 'mid-decade' redistricting" that the court has already concluded was both legal and permissible. Decennial census data is considered "presumptively valid for redistricting," absent a substantial showing to the contrary. The state goes on to say the claim failed because the plaintiffs failed to meet the burden of pointing out any equal-population violation the new map created.

The brief cites a number of Supreme Court cases that support the use of decennial data as the 'best population data available,' lacking any replacement data of equal validity. The fact that the census data is the "best available" is undisputed, according to the state's brief, and the plaintiffs didn't offer an alternative or provide a map that demonstrates how the lines could have been redrawn for a fairer balance.

"That the University Professors and Travis County have not offered legal authority is no slight on their research skills," wrote the state in its brief. "Rather, it reflects that the rules they propose are both novel and contrary to law. Their arguments – by demanding a presumption of unconstitutionality – ask this Court to overrule binding Supreme Court precedent establishing that the burden of proof in equal-population claims falls on the plaintiff and the requirement that the plaintiff offer a means of achieving a lower population inequality."

Norbizness dares us to list all the movies in the IMDB Bottom 100 that we've seen. This one is easy for me:

Jaws 3-D

That's it. Sometimes not being a big moviegoer has its advantages.

In case you missed it last time around, my personal Bottom 10 is here. Read the comments at your peril - you will be forcibly reminded of many, many really bad movies.

UPDATE: Both Michael in the comments, and The Chunk note that the IMDB list is skewed towards recent bad movies. This is true, which is why the staying power of a flick like Jaws 3-D is so impressive to me. Too recent to be an MST3K-style classic, too old to be on anyone's mind, too irrelevant to warrant a DVD release, and yet still crappy enough to be a Bottom 100 movie. You just have to respect that.

Parole, probation violators add to prison overcrowding

Scarce Texas prison beds are increasingly being used by offenders who have violated a condition of their parole or probation, often for something as minor as missing a meeting or failing to pay a fee.

As Texas lawmakers ponder ways to revamp the law on student discipline both to ensure fairness and keep schools safe, parents are frustrated and worried about the pervasiveness of so-called "zero tolerance" discipline.

Critics say this policy gives school districts the green light to impose strict, uniform penalties for misbehavior without considering extenuating circumstances such as the students' intent to do harm or prior disciplinary records.

Just for the record, in my junior year of college, I took an upper level math class (Real Analysis, in case you're curious) in which I was the only male. That includes the professor, who happened to be my major advisor. While I knew the composition of this class was not a common one, it never occurred to me that there was anything unusual about it.

That's pretty much all I have to say about Lawrence Summers' silly statement. Oh, and that my daughter is going to grow up to think there's nothing unusual about my Real Analysis class, either. For more on the subject, see Bitch PhD and PZ Myers. Via many bloggers, including Kriston.

The trials of Rick Causey, Jeff Skilling, and Kenny Boy Lay will not be moved to another venue.

Despite their plea to be tried outside of Houston, a federal judge ruled today that the fate and future freedom of ex-Enron chieftains Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling will be put in the hands of a Houston-area jury.

U.S. District Judge Sim Lake found that the two former top executives and their chief accounting officer, Richard Causey, all accused of multiple counts of fraud and other felonies, could indeed find a fair jury among the citizens of Harris County and 13 adjacent counties.

"Although news coverage about Enron's collapse, this case, and these defendants has been extensive, the court is not persuaded that it has been so inflammatory or pervasive as to create a presumption that there exists a reasonable likelihood that pretrial publicity will prevent a fair trial," Judge Lake wrote in a 24-page opinion.

Though the judge cited several instances of the Houston Chronicle and other media columns and feature items poking fun at the defendants, the judge said "isolated incidents of intemperate commentary about the alleged crimes and their perpetrators do not rise to the level of 'inflammatory' where, as here, for the most part, the reporting appears to have been objective and unemotional."

Lake said "the facts of this case are neither heinous nor sensational" as he said were most of the cases cited by the defendants requesting the case be moved.

Since Bloglines is my tool of choice for blogreading, I don't update my blogroll as frequently as I should. I finally did so today, adding some sites that were long overdue for the sidebar. When I get in a frenzy like that, I tend to overlook things, so if you think you belong there but you're not, please let me know. Thanks.

Once again I got those overcrowdwd penitentiary blues.

Texas prisons are running out of beds more quickly than expected and may need to lease space in county jails by March. But there is no money in the prison system's budget to pay the jails.

Prison officials confirmed Tuesday that they may need to ask lawmakers for an emergency appropriation to get through fiscal 2005, which ends Aug. 30.

Robert Black, a spokesman for Gov. Rick Perry, said the governor asked TDCJ last year to begin identifying potential leased space and to assess whether the Legislature needs to build facilities.

"The governor was aware of this certainly last year," Black said.

Black would not say whether Perry will call for new prison capacity when he gives his State of the State speech Jan. 26.

In 2001, Perry proposed spending $95 million to construct facilities to house 1,000 inmates who need to be segregated from the general prison population and 800 "geriatric" inmates. At the time, his staff said the prison capacity would be needed by 2004-05.

Lawmakers questioned whether the beds were needed and said it was more important to raise pay for prison guards.

Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, objected to Perry's proposal at the time and is again questioning whether new prisons are the answer. Whitmire, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, discussed prison crowding Tuesday with TDCJ Executive Director Brad Livingston.

Whitmire is concerned that 46 percent of the 77,000 inmates who were sent to prison during fiscal 2004 were there because their parole or probation had been revoked.

"It's just unbelievable. We almost sent as many people to prison for violating probation and parole as we did by sending them directly from court," he said.

"It sounds tough, but it's not smart because we're out of space. And we're going to spend millions of dollars that we don't have for additional capacity that we could be using for drug and alcohol treatment," Whitmire added.

Here's a site that has a few ideas for how to handle this problem without building more prisons. Check it out.

Omigod! Carole says that, like, Rickie totally dissed her and all. As if!

Her name missing from an invitation letter to an upcoming Texas Republican Party fund-raiser, state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn cried foul Tuesday and blamed the perceived snub on Gov. Rick Perry.

Spokespersons for Perry and the party dodged responsibility for the omission, the latest flap to erupt between the governor and the comptroller, who is eyeing a challenge to Perry in next year's Republican primary.

The event, which will benefit the state party, is scheduled for Feb. 22 in Austin. With ticket prices ranging from $5,000 to $25,000, it is being billed as a tribute to Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick.

An invitation letter mailed this week was signed by all other elected statewide officials except Strayhorn, members of the judiciary and the two U.S. senators from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn. Hutchison also is considering a race against Perry.

Mark Sanders, a spokesman for the comptroller, said Strayhorn wasn't invited to sign the letter or attend the event.

"The governor is doing the party a disservice by excluding the top vote-getter in the state last time (the 2002 election) and one tough grandma who has proved herself to be one phenomenal fund-raiser," Sanders said. "His fear of her presence is a truly self-absorbed disservice to the electorate."

Luis Saenz, director of Perry's political committee, said the event was the Republican Party's business.

"The Republican Party of Texas knows best how to raise money from true Republicans," he said.

No, not a sequel to The Crooked E, but a documentary called Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, based on the book by the same name.

The movie, which will have its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah later this month, will likely show in Landmark Theaters such as the River Oaks and Greenway and maybe others too, [filmmaker Alex] Gibney said Tuesday.

[...]

"Using insider accounts and incendiary corporate audio and videotapes, Gibney shows the almost unimaginable personal excesses of the Enron hierarchy and the utter moral vacuum that posed as corporate philosophy," reads the press release about the distribution deal.

It promises "a harrowing denouement" as audiences hear traders pull profits from the California energy crisis and offers understanding on how Enron executives' avarice "had a shocking and profound domino effect that may shape the face of our economy for years to come."

[...]

"I have high expectations," said Philip Hilder, the Houston lawyer for ex-Enron executive Sherron Watkins, who penned the now-famous memo predicting corporate scandal. Hilder and Watkins were interviewed for the film.

"These filmmakers seemed to understand the significance of the Enron story, and I expect they will treat it in an important manner," Hilder said.

Former State Supreme Court Justice Rose Spector has officially entered the race for the now-vacant HD121 seat in San Antonio. There's two Republicans and an independent as well. Like Greg says, the demographics aren't favorable, but anything can happen in a race like this. I'll echo the kudos for whoever recruited Spector for this race, and hope this is the beginning of a more aggressive challenge-every-seat trend. Meanwhile, stay tuned for a Texas Tuesdays profile of Spector.

Yoo hoo! James Howard Gibbons! If you want to learn the right way for a newspaper to embrace the blogging concept, look here. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to send a box of chocolates to the Statesman's news room.

Let me start by saying that I agree with what Sam Rosenfeld says regarding Martin Frost and his candidacy for DNC Chair. There are plenty of reasons to oppose Frost's candidacy for this position, but on balance I'd say how he ran his campaign against Pete Sessions is a point in his favor. You want a no-holds-barred fighter, Martin Frost is your guy.

Something to keep in mind that though the outcomes were different, Frost's campaign was tactically very similar to Chet Edwards' in that they both touted areas of agreement with President Bush. It's hard not to do that when some 60-65% of the voters in your district will be pushing the button for Bush. Edwards won, so people are willing to overlook that sort of thing because we all know he's infinitely better to have in Congress than Arlene Wohlgemuth would have been. Edwards has been widely lauded for his odds-against victory, and justly so, but if he were in Frost's position, he'd be vulnerable to the same criticism. See Andrew D's comments in this post for more.

One thing I want to make clear: Martin Frost is not my first choice for DNC Chair. He's not in the top three - I favor Rosenberg, Fowler, Dean, and Wellington Webb in more or less that order. I'm just saying that if you're going to oppose Martin Frost, do it for the right reasons.

UPDATE: Southpaw weighs in.

Nice article in the Press about Erik Slotboom and his work disputing the need for the Trans Texas Corridor. One thing I learned in reading this piece is that we already have a shining example of a private toll road in Texas, the Camino Columbia down in Laredo. How'd that work out? Not so well.

The state's only private toll road, a $90 million link to Mexico that opened just three years ago, was auctioned back to the bank Tuesday for $12 million and may close.

The 22-mile Camino Columbia route between Mexico and Interstate 35 had investors expecting to get rich because of increased Mexico-U.S. truck traffic linked to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The landowners along the route invested a total of $15 million, in addition to providing strips of property 400 feet wide.

Tony Sanchez's International Bank of Commerce provided an initial $6 million funding for the road. John Hancock and New York Life Insurance Co. loaned an additional $75 million.

But motorists weren't buying the $16-per-truck, $3-per-car trip from a bridge 23 miles northwest of the city, and traffic was only 13 percent of expectations.

Less than a year after it opened landowners were filing lawsuits claiming they'd been duped.

Still, the state sees privately run toll roads in its future, as population growth puts a strain on existing roads. Gov. Rick Perry's proposed $175 billion Trans Texas Corridor, is a 4,000-mile network of superhighways, high-speed rail lines and private toll roads.

"Basically, across the state we've got a transportation crisis," TxDOT spokeswoman Gaby Garcia said. "The demand is growing exponentially. ... Tolls are an option that we're going to consider. We have no choice."

In any event, TxDOT bought Camino Columbia in May, and their diagnosis of why it crashed and burned is what should really be worrying us.

The state has agreed to purchase the 22-mile Camino Columbia private toll road that disappointed investors and ended up on the auction block.

The Texas Department of Transportation will pay $20 million for Camino Columbia, which cost $90 million to build.

[...]

TXDOT spokeswoman Gaby Garcia said the road was a good deal for the state.

"It's just a matter of waiting for the traffic to come in," she said in Friday's San Antonio Express-News. "Unfortunately, the previous owners weren't able to hang in for the long haul because they had debt to pay and the revenue they had coming in to pay it wasn't there yet."

Something to keep in mind here, going back to the original story:

He points out that the toll fee from Dallas to San Antonio would be about $40. "The nightmare scenario is that these highways are underutilized because the people won't pay tolls, and then they'll toll existing interstates to make up the cost," says Slotboom.

Finally, this snarky column by Ed Wallace, who if the picture is to be believed has a bit of a young-Johnny-Cash thing going for him, gives some more background on Camino Columbia and how Washington State solved its "transportation crisis". Check it out.

As a lifelong Giants fan, I'm saddened to see this.

Harry Carson, an all-time great Giant, plans to stage an unprecedented protest if this is the year he makes it from finalist to enshrinement into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He insists he will be a no-show in Canton for the Aug. 7 induction.

It will be humiliating for the Hall of Fame and subject Carson to ridicule. But he's not backing down. He's faced enough rejection from the Hall and is prepared to dish it right back. His bronze bust might be in Canton, but not him. He received the overnight letter last week from Canton informing him he's made it to the final 15. It's the sixth year in a row.

Carson sent a letter to Hall of Fame officials in mid-March demanding his name be removed from consideration after 11 years of failing to pick up enough votes. They didn't listen.

"I made the decision to take myself out of the process," Carson said the other day after being notified he's a finalist again. "It wasn't sour grapes. I'm not bitter or angry. By taking this stance, I understand I'm cutting my own throat. I'm crashing my ship. If I make it and go back on my word, then I come off as being hypocritical. I've thought long and hard about the position I'm taking. I didn't wake up one day and say take my name off. It's something I can live with."

He believes the constant scrutiny of the board members judging whether he's worthy of induction has tarnished what he accomplished in his 13-year career - nine Pro Bowls, one Super Bowl title, dominant player even before Lawrence Taylor arrived - and he no longer wants to subject his family and close friends to the pain and disappointment if doesn't make it.

I confess, it hadn't actually occurred to me that Harry Carson wasn't already in the NFL Hall of Fame. He was the Giants before the likes of Simms, Parcells, and LT showed up. I wish I knew what the voters thought he lacked in his resume. In his open letter, Carson says he doesn't want to be like Susan Lucci, remembered for his failure to win an honor voted on by others instead of his own stellar accomplishments. I can totally understand that. I'm just sad it came to that, and I hope that if and when the Hall voters come to their senses, Carson will reconsider his stance.

Supporters and detractors of traffic light cameras duke it out with competing studies which may or may not show that such cameras reduce collisions at intersections. I'll simply note again that Fritz Schranck has discussed this issue in the past, and leave it to you to figure out which side's scientists can beat up the other's.

One item of interest from the article:

In discussing alternatives to red-light cameras, [Eric Skrum, spokesman for the National Motorists Association of Waunakee, Wis., a nonprofit group that opposes camera enforcement] said that lengthening the time of yellow lights can reduce violations and that the [Transportation Research Board] underplayed that possibility. He contends that most drivers run red lights because yellow lights are too short and don't allow time to stop safely.

For example, Skrum said a 2002 San Diego study that reported a reduction in red-light running buried the fact that the greatest reduction in red-light violations, 88 percent, was at an intersection where the yellow light duration was increased from 3.1 to 4.7 seconds. At five other San Diego intersections, the number of violations also significantly dropped due to longer yellow lights.

Additionally, Skrum said, increasing the yellow-light duration from 4 seconds to 5.5 seconds in an intersection in Fairfax County, Va. — already equipped with red-light cameras — reduced red-light violations by 96 percent.

He said communities that install red-light cameras rather than lengthening yellow lights or making other engineering changes are more interested in increasing their cash flow than reducing accidents.

Getting back to the cameras themselves, you may recall the story about Dallas' Deep Ellum installing surveillance cameras. According to the CrimProf Blog, such cameras are a lot more widespread than you might think. Does that make you a little uncomfortable? I know I am.

Banjo Jones tells his story of getting fired by the Chron for blogging to NPR. Also see the Houston Press story from the time.

The Rev. Alan Bean files his last dispatch from the Lubbock County courtroom in which Tom Coleman was convicted of perjury. I'll say it again - if this man started a blog, I'd not only read it every day, I'd badger other people to read it until I drove them crazy. Read and enjoy. Grits also provides a one-stop archive of all things Coleman trial-related. May this sordid chapter in our history be buried, but never forgotten.

Via Byron, former State Supreme Court Justice Rose Spector is mulling a run at the newly open HD121 seat.

Spector, one of the last Democrats to hold statewide office in Texas, is the second potential Democratic contestant for the special race in a district that is stacked with Republican voters. Melissa Kazen, the wife of a county court-at-law judge, is also weighing a possible bid in the special election for HD 121.

[...]

Democratic strategists do not want more than one candidate in the special state House campaign. The Democrats' hopes will hinge on getting a candidate into a runoff and then trying to beat the top Republican vote-getter in a one-on-one match. That won't be easy - considering that almost 70 percent of the voters in HD 121 backed the GOP's statewide ticket in 2002. The district contains the old-money enclaves of Alamo Heights, Terrell Hills and Olmos Park - all Republican bastions - along with suburbs that have more GOP voters than Democrats in the northeast part of Bexar County.

But Democrats see Spector as a potential dream candidate for that particular district. She was a highly-respected Texas Supreme Court member for six years until falling victim to the Republican statewide avalanche in 1998. She was a state district judge for a dozen years before winning a seat on the state's highest court and a Bexar County court-at-law judge for five years before that. Spector, whose children attended Alamo Heights schools, fared better than all other Democratic statewide candidates except John Sharp and Paul Hobby when she lost to Republican Supreme Court Justice Harriet O'Neill in the general election six years ago.

I'm a fan of Desperate Housewives. I enjoy the show, I'm glad they won some awards last night, and I like seeing feature articles on various cast members.

But man, is it just me, or could we see a nationwide drop in crime if the feds simply swooped into Wisteria Lane and busted everyone in sight? Let's go to the video tape here. I'll put the rest of this entry beneath the More link for those who may still be catching up on the show.

Let's start with the Young household. Paul is the worst offender so far, having bumped off Martha Huber - had he not hired a conscientious hit man (you get quality service when you hire Shaft! to do your dirty work), he'd also have Edie Britt's blood on his hands. And of course, there's the dismembered adult female he dug up from his pool (I still don't know why he did that; surely it was going to stay hidden where it was) and the mysterious daughter, who may or may not be the mysterious "Dana".

The late Mary Alice almost surely knew about the body under the pool, and may have been involved in the daughter/Dana situation, which I believe is what Martha was blackmailing her about. Paul did say Martha had it wrong before he killed her, though, so maybe she's not guilty of any of this, or maybe she's really guilty of something else altogether. We don't know yet.

We also don't know if Zach Young is really responsible for the death of his sister, or if that sister even existed. He was probably too young to have been arrested as a felon for "Dana's" death, but again, we just don't know.

Both Bree and Rex Van de Kamp are guilty of obstructing justice in their son Andrew's hit-and-run accident. I don't know if Andrew would have been charged with a felony had he come forward right away, but by now the coverup is at least as big as the original crime.

Gabrielle Solis appears to be guilty of statutory rape, since her relationship with John the lawnboy started when he was 16. She certainly thought the cops who busted Carlos for fraud were coming for her. The charges against Carlos appear to be federal in nature, but we don't have a whole lot of detail about what he really did. Gabrielle seems to be pretty upset with him, since she tried to burn his passport, but we don't know exactly what that was about.

UPDATE: Almost forgot - Juanita Solis hinted to Gabrielle that she bumped off Carlos' father after she caught him cheating on her. If true, she moves up into Paul Young territory.

Susan Mayer was responsible for burning down Edie's house. It was an accident, but if there ever was suspicion of arson, she's obstructing justice by not coming forward, not to mention the fact that she wasn't supposed to be in Eide's house in the first place. She also had her daughter Julie break into Martha's house to steal back the telltale measuring cup. Given the value of the object stolen and that fact that it was hers to begin with, that was probably not a felony, but involving a minor in the break-in may alter things. Both of them trespassed at the hospital where Zach was held, and Julie covered up Zach's escape - again, not felonies but still illegal.

Lynette Scavo abused her sons' prescription ADHD medicine. How serious a crime that might be depends on the medicine itself, so I can't say if it was a felony. She seems to have stopped before she did anything felonious related to taking the drugs, however.

Martha Huber was blackmailing Susan Mayer and at the least sent a threatening note to Mary Alice Young. She paid a very heavy price for her sins.

Maisy Gibbons was probably only committing misdemeanors in her little house of pleasure, but if she ever had any, ah, business associates, she might rise to the felonious level of promoting prostitution. Unless she's declaring all that extra income on her taxes, however, she is committing the felony of filing a fradulent return.

About the only regular adult on the show who has no crime to her name is Edie Britt. (Well, no fashion crimes, anyway.) And I don't know what Mike Delfino's story is (I haven't seen last night's episode, so please don't tell me if we learned something about him last night!), but he appears to be in law enforcement of some kind, so he's (tentatively) not on the felony list. Yet.

I think that covers it. Did I miss anything?

UPDATE: Sue points out that Lynette also stole prescription drugs from a friend's medicine cabinet, which likely bumps her into the felony category. Rex's solicitation of Maisy is only a misdemeanor, though it should be noted. Thanks!

So we've had one year of light rail, and there's some development along the line but not as much as maybe there could have been. And rail ridership is great on a per-mile basis though it's still a small number in absolute terms, and rail critics aren't satisfied because, well, they were never going to be in the first place. I think that about sums up those two articles.

Personally, I've been happy with the light rail line when I've taken it. I just wish there were more opportunities for me to take it. I do a lot of my driving inside the Loop. I know that the Powers That Be spend a lot of time thinking about how to build more roads so as to move more people into and out of the inner city each day, but I have to tell you, as someone who's here all the time, moving around once you're off the freeways and on the main drags is a growing pain. Have you driven Kirby or Shepherd anywhere north of Holcombe lately? How about Bissonet, Richmond, or Westheimer? I can't quantify it (though I'm sure someone can), but it wasn't nearly this bad ten or even five years ago, before the inner-Loop renassaince took off. What are we doing about this?

What we need to do is give us city dwellers some options for navigating our daily tasks that don't require driving everywhere. I've already harped on a Rice Village shuttle, which would expand the area served by the existing light rail line. The point to remember here is that unlike the outlying freeways, you can't just pour more concrete to widen main roads like Kirby and Richmond, at least not without buying up and condemning a whole lot of pricey residential and commercial property. The only realistic option is to reduce the number of cars back to a level the route can bear. Unfortunately, the same space constraint means you can't easily lay down rail tracks along those roads, either (though adding a line along the Southwest Freeway from downtown into the Galleria, which has been part of the Metro design and should be feasible, would go a long way towards alleviating the east-west thoroughfares). So what's the plan? It ain't the RTP 2025, that's for sure. What will there be for people like me?

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, the story of Jack Johnson, the first black man to win the heavyweight boxing title, and the man who has made it his crusade to get Johnson's hometown of Galveston to honor him. A Ken Burns documentary runs tonight on PBS at 8 PM CST.

By the way, you can hear an MP3 of MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech here. The words on paper are plenty powerful, but hearing the man himself say them is something you just have to experience. Via Julia.

If your head is still spinning from having to pick just one winner from all the fabulous entrants in each of the nominating categories for the Koufax Awards at Wampum (current contest I'm pulling my hair out over: Most Hmorous Post), take a break and pick some winners in the voting for the Perranoski Prizes. I'm very curious to see how some of their categories are realized by the nominated blogs. Polls close on January 31, so check it out.

Catching up on some older stuff: The State House is down to 149 members as Elizabeth Ames Jones (R, San Antonio) declined her seat after being named to the state Railroad Commission.

On the morning she was to be sworn in to her third state House term, San Antonio Republican Elizabeth Ames Jones confirmed that she was declining her seat to fill a vacancy on the powerful Railroad Commission, a springboard to higher office.

"It's a very bittersweet day for me," Jones said as her House colleagues prepared to take their oath of office on the opening day of the 79th Texas Legislature. "I felt like this was an opportunity I could not pass up."

In accepting Gov. Rick Perry's appointment to the three-member commission, Jones, 48, a two-term House member and the daughter of a wealthy San Antonio oilman who "grew up in an oil patch," becomes one of the state's brightest Republican stars.

[...]

Jones has long been involved in Republican politics. In 1980, she worked with Karl Rove, believed to be the mastermind behind President Bush's rise to political prominence, on behalf of then-Gov. Bill Clements.

"We cut our teeth in politics," Jones said of herself and Rove.

A special election to replace Jones has been set for February 5. This is a strongly Republican district - Jones ran unopposed in 2004 and had only a Green Party opponent (who got 10%) in 2002. Nonetheless, Andrew hints that someone from the Democratic side will make a race of it. This article suggests a couple of names.

Until an election is scheduled, no one can officially declare their candidacy. But four politically connected people have expressed interest in the seat: Democrats Melissa Kazen and Chip Haass and Republicans Joe Straus III and George Pierce.

The district, which stretches from Olmos Park northeast to Windcrest and north past Loop 1604, is considered a Republican stronghold.

In the six general elections up to 2002, District 121 voters have consistently voted for Republican candidates in higher percentages than the rest of the state for all major statewide offices.

"That is a very Republican district," said U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, whose district largely overlaps the House seat. "I can't see a Democrat winning the seat."

Nevertheless, some Democrats consider the district winnable and are contemplating a run, hoping that strong name identification and a quickly mounted grass-roots operation will be key given the short time frame of a special election.

Sure does look like Andy Taylor's wild claims of massive fraud in the Heflin-Vo race are melting away, doesn't it? This article says that maybe a hundred noncitizens applied to vote in Harris County, a third of whom were rejected by the Tax Assessor's office. The one confirmed noncitizen who voted in the HD149 race - he got a voter's reg card despite checking the "not a citizen" box on the application, an error which one can attribute to the Tax Assessor - voted straight Republican. And Tax Assessor Bettencourt chalks this sort of thing up to mostly honest mistakes and bad paper processing.

Meanwhile, Hotshot Casey brings us the sad news from Taylor himself.

Heflin attorney Taylor says he hasn't seen anything that "rises to the level of fraud," but he has not yet questioned some people who are listed as having voted twice.

"There may be innocent explanations," he said. "I will accept those as true, then I will present to the House that some persons appear to have double-voted."

But Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt, a Republican, says most or all of those "double votes" will "melt away" after accounting for typographical errors, clerical errors and people who didn't use early-voting forms that had been sent to them.

He said the level of improper votes in this election was not unusual.

"A lot of people don't have a firm lock on the county line down there," he said.

Well, you could interview everyone involved, I guess. Or drag them up to Austin to testify before the House. Or you could maybe just accept that there was no fraud, just some confusion and human error among people acting in good faith, and get on with your life. Will you follow in Jack Stick and Eric Opiela's footsteps now, Talmadge? The choice, as ever, is yours.

One more thing, on a side note, from the first article:

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based group that pushes to reduce immigration, advocates a "national citizenship verification procedure" to ensure that voters in U.S. elections are citizens.

Federation President Dan Stein says it is virtually impossible to determine how many foreign citizens are voting here.

"Making false claims of U.S. citizenship is all but impossible to detect. It's a huge, gaping, massive hole in the whole integrity of our enforcement structure," he said.

Without citizenship verification, he said, Americans should have serious questions about the integrity of their electoral process.

"If we continue to have things like Florida in 2000 and these close elections being swung by ineligible voters, the very legitimacy of the electoral process itself is being thrown into question by ineligible voters voting," he said. "While we sit around concerned about hanging chads and whether votes are counted, no one seems interested in ensuring that people who register are citizens."

This is a story I'd not known before. In 1965, the All-Star Game for the American Football League was to be played in New Orleans. Upon arrival in New Orleans, the 21 black players in the game quickly realized that the city was especially hostile to them, so they took a stand and refused to play. The game was moved to Houston, and the fallout had an impact on the efforts to start an NFL franchise in New Orleans as well as the eventual AFL-NFL merger. Read about it here.

Tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it beyond any doubt for the whole fricking world to see. James Howard Gibbons will not be getting chocolate from me anytime soon. Greg and Byron are on this, while Kevin and Anne are (for now, anyway) oddly silent. Perhaps Anne is still recovering from listening to the radio this morning.

I don't think this is sufficient.

Tom Coleman was acquitted of testifying falsely in a 2003 hearing that as a sheriff's deputy he never stole gas from county pumps, but he was found guilty of saying that he didn't learn about the theft charge against him until August 1998.

Jurors deliberated his punishment for less than an hour before recommending a seven-year probated prison sentence. The judge can either follow their recommendation or come up with his own sentence. He is expected to rule Tuesday.

Aggravated perjury is a third-degree felony and carries a maximum 10-year sentence and $10,000 fine.

Coleman clamped his eyes shut and dropped his head when the judge said the sentence would be seven years. He started to fight back tears when the judge added that jurors said the prison sentence should be probated.

The Tulia defendants in the courtroom looked up when they heard seven years and shook their heads in disbelief when they heard the sentence would be probated.

John H. Read II, Coleman's defense attorney, said his client should be given probation. He said sending a former police officer to prison could be dangerous.

"He's got a problem if he's sent to prison," Read said, adding probation "is punishment enough."

But prosecutors said he deserved a harsher punishment.

You may wonder why I'm being so hardassed about this. I'll let Lauri, who addresses the conviction of naked-pyramid fan Charles Graner along with that of Coleman, speak for me here:

I think that many people who normally defend the rights of the accused found themselves siding with the prosecutors. It's because the defendants in both cases were accused of abusing their authority to deny the rights of possibly innocent people, I assume, and the evidence against both was pretty solid.

More, as always, from Grits. The big news is that while Tom Coleman may get off lightly, the counties that help enable what others like him have done may not be so lucky.

Bev Carter, publisher of the Fort Bend Star, was censured by the Fort Bend County GOP for endorsing Richard Morrison in the CD22 election last year.

Carter, the founder and publisher of the weekly Fort Bend Star, said she will not quit the post she has held since 2002.

"They can't make me resign. The only people who can make me resign are my voters in my precinct," Carter said Friday.

Fort Bend County Republican Party Chairman Eric Thode said he thinks Carter, who regularly skewers the county's leaders in her column, was wrong for endorsing Richard Morrison before the Nov. 2 election.

"It is inappropriate for an elected party official to endorse a candidate of another party. Absolutely unacceptable," Thode said Friday.

Don Braley, who submitted the resolution against Carter, said Carter has been attacking elected leaders for years. But he said once Carter became a precinct chair she took on certain responsibilities.

"She came out in her paper and encouraged people to vote Democratic. That is definitely against the bylaws of which she is supposed to uphold as a precinct chair."

Braley, who is also a precinct chair in an area near Carter's precinct, said Carter is a Republican only because Republicans dominate county politics.

"If you are going to get involved in politics you are a Republican," he said.

[...]

Carter, whose precinct covers part of the Quail Valley subdivision, said her duties as a newspaper publisher and columnist require her to be critical of elected leaders regardless of their political persuasion.

"If I am going to criticize officeholders, they are going to be Republican because we only have two (there are three) Democratic officeholders in the whole county," she said.

Carter believes the local Republican Party is being dominated by people she calls the "religious right."

"I decided to become a precinct chair because I saw the Republican Party in Fort Bend being captured by the radical right wing," she said.

I heartily endorse this idea.

Newspapers clearly are embracing the idea of staff blogs, and one area of news coverage that's ripe for blogging is the politics and government beat. At the Times Argus and Rutland Herald in Vermont, a new statehouse blog by Vermont press bureau chief Darren Allen has debuted.

New media director Ernesto Burden says the blog, called Hall Monitor, features "an inside perspective on statehouse happenings, including scuttlebutt that may never see the pages of the newspaper but will be a great resource and a heck of a lot of fun for political junkies, news lovers, and probably the legislators themselves."

Says Allen: "There are countless things that members of the press talk about informally with lawmakers, lobbyists, and state officials, and it never gets communicated to our readers. With the blog, I am excited by the opportunity to let them in on the conversation." (There's not yet a reader forum attached to Hall Monitor, but that's planned soon, says Burden.)

While we're on the subject here, how about some blogging from state reps themselves? Aaron Pena (D, Edinburg) is the pioneer here, though I do wish one of his "younger staff members" had also explained the advantages of Movable Type or WordPress to him. Still, the fact that he's actually putting out content of interest on a reasonably regular basis is something to be happy about. Way to go, Rep. Pena! Via Byron and Greg, who notes a more traditional blog from New Hampshire State Rep. Peter Sullivan.

Nothing like a naked calendar to raise money for the arts.

"The flesh may sag," said calendar cover girl Judith Greer, "but skin still sells."

Greer's wisdom draws laughter loud enough to drown out the sea gulls floating over the marina of this coastal resort town. Her audience, mainly senior Port Aransas women, know exactly what she's talking about.

Skin does sell, and sometimes a little sagging here and there even helps, not that Greer, statuesque and sleek at 65, shows much sign of it. To prove it, 14 Port Aransas women — including the newly elected mayor, Georgia Neblett — posed for a pinup calendar that has rocked the local boat and made these Port A beauties delightedly notorious.

"I'm not used to people saying 'I didn't recognize you with your clothes on,' " said Fran Hail, 53, a retired nanny and teacher who moved to Port Aransas from the Houston area. "I'll be standing in line at the grocery story in town and get people looking at me. I just want to say, 'Yeah, I'm Miss April.' "

All but three of the calendar girls are past 50. All 14 can be seen, not quite bare but barely covered, in the Treasures of South Texas 2005 calendar.

Meet Jolanda Jones: attorney, civic activist, City Council candidate, contestant on Survivor. I think Keir is right when he says "No amount of money could buy her potential campaign the kind of notoriety she would gain from an extended run on the hit show." Once again, this November is starting to look more interesting that I would have thought it would be.

Good.

The lone undercover agent in a sting that sent dozens of black people to prison on bogus drug charges in Tulia was convicted today of one of two perjury counts.

Tom Coleman was acquitted of testifying falsely in a 2003 hearing that as a sheriff's deputy he never stole gas from county pumps, but he was found guilty of saying that he didn't learn about the theft charge against him until August 1998.

Jurors were to begin hearing evidence in the penalty phase of the trial later today. Aggravated perjury is a third-degree felony and carries a maximum 10-year sentence and $10,000 fine.

Coleman had no noticeable reaction as the verdict was read, but some Tulia defendants in the courtroom bowed their heads as the verdict was read.

Dallas attorney John Nation turned out to be the biggest surprise of the day. Defense attorneys for Coleman called Nation as a witness. Attorneys questioned him about a potential conflict of interest since Nation formerly represented the state and Coleman in the 2003 writ of habeas corpus hearing for several Tulia drug defendants. That`s the hearing that Coleman is accused of perjuring himself.

In cross-examination, Nation said he removed himself from the case, "because I was convinced he was committing aggravated perjury and I had an ethical duty to stop there."

The state is expected to pick up with more testimony Friday morning and then the case will go into closing arguments.

The judge granted Nation`s motion to be removed from the case Thursday evening.

The defense called Tom Coleman`s mother to the stand early Thursday morning. She supported defense claims that her son did not steal gas because witnesses say they saw a man in a white hat. Ms. Coleman says her son only wears black cowboy hats.

Finally, as Grits notes, the last chapter of the Tulia case might be the abolishment of Tulia-style narcotics task forces in Texas. If so, then something good will have come out of all this.

UPDATE: Initial coverage from Grits here and here.

So Major League Baseball has implemented a new steroid policy which includes random testing and suspensions for violations. What reaction I've seen so far has been mixed - King Kaufman approves, while AP's Steve Wilstein disapproves (latter link via Eric McErlain). David Pinto has some more info.

Personally, I'm ambivalent. This is being done primarily for public relations purposes, and as far as that goes I think the policy will achieve its desired result. Until someone shows me a study which shows a link between steroid usage and improved performance on the diamond, though, I'll think it's nothing more than that.

Questions to ponder: Does a player who says the positive result he generated is false get an appeal? How will they differentiate between "cream" and "clear" and legitimate palliatives which contain steroids (as an example, I used to use an inhaler for asthma which was steroid-based)? If BALCO's products had been shown to have use as pain relievers, would we still demonize them? I'm just asking.

Looks like Comptroller Strayhorn will be in decent financial shape for any GOP primary she chooses to participate in.

Republican Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn said Thursday that she has $5.7 million in cash on hand for her next campaign.

[...]

"In 30 years of public service, I have never enjoyed this level of support this far out from an election," Strayhorn said. "I am honored and humbled by the support of hard-working Texans across this state."

Between July 1 and Dec. 11, Strayhorn raised $2.25 million.

Perry, who also filed his report on Thursday, said he has $8 million in cash on hand for his re-election bid.

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, also thought to be a contender for governor, has $6.7 million to spend on a state or U.S. Senate campaign.

UPDATE: This post about Ryan Pitylak is no longer accurate, and as it is apparently causing Ryan some harm, I have removed it.

Developing, as they say, at The Red State. Suspicion all along has been that like Jack Stick, Eric Opiela's challenge was a stalking horse for Talmadge Heflin and his quest to overturn the election of Hubert Vo, but if both Stick and Opiela drop theirs before the hearings begin, his cover is gone. Nothing on this that I can see in Google News as yet, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: Andrew D is hearing the same whispers.

UPDATE: And now it's official.

Former Republican House candidate Eric Opiela has withdrawn his election challenge for the South Texas seat, his attorney confirmed Friday.

David Donnelly of The Daily DeLay was in town yesterday to meet up with various locals and talk about the lay of the land for 2006. You can read his writeup here. He's here today and in Austin tomorrow, so look for more later on.

The DC area loses a longstanding rock station.

WHFS-FM, the Washington area radio station that was a pioneering purveyor of alternative rock to generations of young music fans, did a programming U-turn yesterday by ditching the genre for a Spanish-language, pop-music format that transforms it into the largest Spanish-language station on the local dial.

[...]

The switch reflects both changing demographics and a corporate war of attrition involving Washington's two major radio station owners, Infinity Broadcasting, which owns WHFS, and Clear Channel Communications, which owns WHFS's chief competitor, DC-101.

[...]

WHFS was among a handful of stations that developed the album-oriented format: The music was alternative and free-form, featuring such groups as Led Zeppelin, the Who and Yes, but with the occasional bluegrass or other unexpected ditty. Disc jockeys weren't confined to the strictures of a corporate-mandated playlist. They played what they wanted.

[...]

WHFS began as a classical music station, then switched to pop music in the early-to-mid-1960s before turning to rock about 1968. The moves were orchestrated by Jake Einstein, who began as an advertising salesman and became one of the station's owners in the mid-1960s.

Einstein's son, Damian, a longtime on-air personality on WHFS, said yesterday that the station's reputation as a maverick programmer began to decline more than a decade ago, at the beginning of a rapid consolidation of ownership in the industry.

"They really weren't interested in the music anymore," said Einstein, who was one of WHFS's best-known personalities and who is now the program director at WRNR-FM, a small alternative rock station in Annapolis. "There really wasn't that much creativity there. Having been there for so long and having done so many things there, of course it's sad. But I guess you gotta do what you gotta do."

The prosecution has now rested in the perjury trial of disgraced former undercover cop Tom Coleman, and the first witness for his defense, Swisher County Sheriff Larry Stewart, may be in legal trouble of his own.

"We believe there are significant variations in his testimony, and it's problematic," special prosecutor Rod Hobson said.

District Judge David Gleason met privately with Stewart and announced that Lubbock attorney Chuck Lanehart had been retained to represent the sheriff. Stewart, who was on the witness stand when jurors recessed for lunch, did not return to the stand. But he is expected to return once his attorney has had time to compare Wednesday's testimony with what he has said in some of the Tulia drug trials and at a 2003 hearing about the cases.

Because of a gag order in the Coleman trial, prosecutors could not discuss their reasons for advising Gleason to appoint Stewart an attorney.

[...]

Some of the Tulia defendants and their relatives, who were sitting in the rear of the courtroom, were elated when they heard Hobson tell the judge that Stewart might need an attorney. One woman silently pumped an arm as she realized the significance of Hobson's statements. After court recessed, some former defendants talked with reporters and watched as Coleman's defense team left for the evening.

"We always felt the sheriff had something to do with it, too," said Kareem White, 28, who spent more than three years behind bars before being released.

"I still feel Tom Coleman and [former Swisher County District Attorney] Terry McEachern had more to do with this than Stewart, but they all deserve the blame."

McEachern, who was voted out of office, faces a disciplinary trial that accuses him of lying in court and concealing evidence from defense attorneys that Coleman had an arrest record.

Alan Bean, executive director of Friends of Justice, a group formed to challenge the drug convictions of the 46 defendants in Tulia, said the news about Stewart will likely divide Tulia once again.

"We have always felt that Sheriff Stewart should be held accountable for what he did in these drug investigations, and we hope there will be a full inquiry into his actions," Bean said. "... At the same time, the Tulia establishment is not going to like this one bit. They have always stood behind Sheriff Stewart, and I'm sure they will continue to stand behind him even if this goes forward."

Elsewhere on Grits, there's an action alert for Harris County residents.

As Tom Coleman's perjury trial continues this morning, a few Texans have an opportunity to directly help get rid of our corrupt drug task force system. ACLU is asking Harris County residents to contact their elected officials, urging them to spend federal Byrne grant funding on drug treatment and crime lab improvements instead of the county drug task force.

The US Supreme Court has apparently made it easier to get a conviction in cases involving money laundering.

Justices [unanimously] upheld the convictions of two people accused of pocketing more than $1.2 million as part of a nationwide religious investment scheme.

David Whitfield and Haywood "Don" Hall were convicted in Florida of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

They were leaders of the Greater Ministries International Church, which told people during roadshow meetings that God would double their money.

The church, which targeted Mennonite, Amish and Christian fundamentalist communities nationwide, took in hundreds of millions of dollars from 1996-99 and donors got little if any money back. Other church leaders were convicted of various charges.

The Supreme Court used appeals by Whitfield and Hall to clarify a matter that has divided lower courts, the proof required in money laundering conspiracy cases.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the court, said that because the federal law does not "expressly make the commission of an overt act an element of the conspiracy offense, the government need not prove an overt act to obtain a conviction."

The cases are Whitfield v. United States, 03-1293, and Hall v. United States, 03-1294.

In the 78th Lege, the Senate and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst took the problem of school finance seriously (unlike Governor Perry and Speaker Craddick), and proposed a real overhaul to both the state tax structure which would allow for a more solid foundation of the school finance structure. They're first out of the gate on this issue again, but I fear they've got some fuzzy math going.

The plan outlined by Dewhurst would eliminate the school tax for maintenance and operations — now capped at $1.50 per $100 assessed valuation — and replace it with a $1 statewide property tax. Such a statewide tax would require a change in the Texas Constitution that would have to be approved by voters.

Local districts would be allowed to raise an extra enrichment tax of up to 15 cents. Some property-wealthy districts would still have to share some of the local enrichment with less wealthy districts so that school funding would remain equal.

[...]

The new business tax would apply to corporations and partnerships, but not sole proprietorships. Dewhurst said by expanding the base, the 4.5 percent franchise tax rate could be cut in half.

The plan also relies on increases in sales, tobacco and alcohol taxes, and closing a loophole on sales taxes for used cars. The Senate did not specify how much the sales tax would be increased.

Dewhurst said most Texans would not end up paying more taxes because of the offset of lower property taxes.

"This plan, thank God, doesn't raise the net overall tax burden on Texas," Dewhurst said.

Senate Finance Chairman Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, said extra money could come from existing state revenues, which have been growing as the economy improves.

The existing corporate franchise tax, which raises about $1.7 billion a year, would be replaced with an expanded tax that partnerships also would pay. It would raise about $3.5 billion in fiscal 2006 and $3.7 billion the second year of the biennium.

[...]

Dewhurst said it would cost $1.1 billion to give the state's 276,000 teachers a $4,000 pay raise.

That leaves a $4 billion gap. A better economy will probably generate more revenue from existing sources, though I hope by now we've learned that we can't rely on good economic times forever That leaves a bunch of as-yet unspecified increases in sales, tobacco and alcohol taxes.

First things first: How can we cover a billion dollars in new spending without an increase in the "net overall tax burden on Texas"? Well, you can't. I'm sure Dewhurst meant that statement to reinforce what he said about most individuals not paying more in taxes, but that's still a misleading statement. Apartment dwellers won't do much better, and until we know how the sales tax will be changed, we can't say how big a variation there will be from one person's burden to another. Last time, the Express News tried to quantify all this for different state rep districts. We'll need that same sort of analysis this time around, too.

One thing we apparently won't get this session is more gambling. Governor Perry has thrown in the towel.

"I don't think video lottery terminals or any form of gambling is as attractive to this Legislature as it was six months ago. I'm not sure it was very attractive then," Perry said in an interview with the Houston Chronicle.

His plan to legalize slot machines at racetracks and on Indian reservations, which contradicted the official anti-gambling position of his own Republican Party, died during a special session last spring.

But track owners — who are seeking an economic boost for their industry — and other gambling interests are expected to try again this year. The issue poses a tough fight because additional gambling would require a constitutional amendment, which must be approved by two-thirds votes in the House and Senate.

[...]

Perry said Wednesday that he backed video slot machines last year because the state had limited revenue options. Now, lawmakers are beginning work with a $400 million surplus projected by Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn.

"Gambling was always a function of not having enough resources," Perry said.

Lastly, on a tangential but related matter, the Attorney General has given up seeking reimbursement for fees paid to a lobbying firm for drafting gambling legislation.

The move, made formal in a letter dated Monday from Assistant Attorney General Barry McBee, came after the regional head of a national watchdog organization filed a lawsuit claiming that the state overstepped its authority when it agreed to pay the firm as much as $250,000 for legal advice.

"They blinked," said Russ Verney, who heads the Dallas office of Judicial Watch. "It looks like there won't be any lottery money going to those lawyers in Las Vegas."

The firm of Lionel, Sawyer and Collins, which represents some of Nevada's best-known casinos, drafted legislation that would have legalized video slot machines at Texas racetracks and Indian reservations. The proceeds were to have been used to help reduce local property taxes and fund public schools in Texas under a new education-finance plan.

The measure was defeated during a special legislative session last year, but many observers say they expect the matter to resurface during the 140-day regular session that started Tuesday. Gov. Rick Perry says overhauling the school-finance system, declared unconstitutional last year by a state district judge, a legislative emergency.

[...]

The firm's hiring in December 2003 has evolved into a political football, with some lawmakers questioning its propriety and state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn refusing to reimburse the attorney general's office the $176,373 it paid to the firm in the spring. The attorney general's office had wanted the lottery commission to repay the legal fees.

Strayhorn has also said she will not pay the additional $185,293 that the firm has billed the state -- nearly $113,000 more than the state agreed to pay. Spokeswoman Angela Hale said the attorney general's office has no plans to ask Strayhorn to pay the firm any more money.

One of the jurors for the Andrea Yates case says his decision to convict was affected by Dr. Park Dietz' testimony.

Ron Jones, juror No. 7 on the panel that decided Yates' fate, told state District Judge Belinda Hill in a letter that the controversial testimony from Dietz about a Law & Order television episode convinced him to change his mind from finding Yates to be insane to voting to convict her. The episode never aired.

[...]

Jones' comment came in a letter to Hill after the trial. Jones could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

In a letter to Hill dated April 5, 2002, Jones said he was the only juror not convinced about finding Yates guilty during jury deliberations. At one point, he said, he went to the bathroom for a few minutes to pray "and the understanding came to me."

Jones said he summarized that Yates watched the Law & Order program two weeks before her children's death. At the same time, Yates also had been taken off the antipsychotic drug Haldol.

"I figured if she watched the program, only been off of Haldol that day. Her mind should have been sane," Jones wrote in his letter. "(An) easy way out of her horrible situation, I thought. This I told everyone of why I changed my mind from insane to guilty. That was the preponderance of the evidence that sealed her guilt to me."

Another juror wrote to the Houston Chronicle this week, saying Dietz's testimony played no role in determining Yates' fate.

In a letter to the editor, juror No. 5, Kenneth L. Blanchard, said he was disappointed in the appellate court's decision.

"I cannot speak for the other jury members, but I can say definitely that the inaccurate portion of Dr. Park Dietz testimony had no impact on my decision," Blanchard said. "I also recall an informal poll in the jury room prior to our release in which we were asked if the controversial portion of Dr. Dietz's testimony factored into our decision. The opinion of the other jurors appeared consistent with mine that it had no bearing."

Blanchard said despite the rhetoric about the nobleness of jury duty, the appellate court decided to set aside the jury's verdict based on a few statements made during three weeks of testimony.

"I appreciate the opinions and perspectives on both sides of this tragedy and the earnest support of those around Ms. Yates," Blanchard wrote. "Another thing we agreed on was that Andrea Yates was a sick woman. However, the question was simply did she know right from wrong at the time she drowned her children. In our opinion, the evidence independent of Dr. Dietz's misstatements overwhelmingly supported that she did know right from wrong."

Juror Robert Buxton agrees with Blanchard, saying Dietz's testimony did not influence the jury's decision. Buxton said the crime was so horrendous that Yates will "never be sane again."

"It's just another way for her to get another trial the way other people do to use the system," Buxton said. "I'd sure hate to see it."

Naturally, as soon as I hit Publish on that last post, I realize I should have noted that I've also started reading The Brazosport News, which returned from a multi-month hiatus in December. You want to know about the City of Freeport red-light district or who Andrea Yates' mom and brother blame for what happened, Banjo Jones is your man.

Couple of new and new-to-me Houston blogs to check out. First is The Red State, run by Eddie Rodriguez, who used to work for State Rep. Carlos Uresti (D, San Antonio) and served as the Chief Clerk for House Committee on Human Services during the 78th Texas Legislature. He also worked on Hubert Vo's campaign, and he's the founder of the Houston chapter of Drinking Liberally. Among his recent entries are a listing of some Bills of Ill Repute to watch out for in the 79th Lege.

Closer to home (for me, anyway) is By the Bayou, whose author John lives in the Heights. He's got a review of Hotel Rwanda, a tale of walking in Houston, and two posts on Strange Household Objects that...well, just go look and see for yourself.

Anyway. Good stuff at both places, so check them out.

Some long overdue reforms are looming for NCAA Division I member institutions.

On the last day of the NCAA convention, the Division I Board of Directors approved the Academic Progress Rate (APR), the standard teams in every sport must reach beginning in the 2005-06 school year to avoid scholarship reductions.

Schools will receive warning reports in the next few weeks that let them know which of their teams fall below the APR set by the Division I Committee on Academic Performance. The rate is based roughly on a 50-percent graduation rate over a five-year period.

The Academic Performance Program applies to every men's and women's sport -- more than 5,000 teams at the 325 Division I schools.

[...]

The so-called "contemporaneous penalties" are considered rehabilitative in nature and expected to serve as warnings for teams with poor academic performance. Such penalties could begin after December 2005.

Another phase of the program will be historical penalties, which will be more severe and directed at schools with continued problems. [The] committee is still working on the penalties, and they will have to be approved by NCAA directors later.

[...]

The APR will be based on the number of student-athletes on each team who achieve eligibility and return to campus full-time each term. There will also be a longer-term graduation success rate.

Beginning next fall, teams that fall under a minimum APR will lose scholarships when players who are academically ineligible leave the school. Such scholarships can't be re-awarded for a year.

[...]

Teams that continue to have problems will be subject to the more severe penalties once the "historical penalties" are put into place.

Consecutive years of falling below certain academic standards would lead to recruiting and further scholarship restrictions. A third straight year could lead to being banned from preseason or postseason games, and a fourth would affect Division I membership status.

More details in this DMN story. Also on the table for later on is a change to the requirement that a Division I-A school must maintain and average attendance of 15,000 for football to stay in Div I-A.

When the board meets in April to vote on legislation that came through the convention, it also will reconsider amending or eliminating a 2-year-old bylaw that went into effect last fall requiring Division I-A football programs to average at least 15,000 in attendance.

The first failure to do so would put a school on a 10-year probationary period. A second failure during the period would result in a bowl ban. A third failure would result in reclassification to I-AA.

Five schools – four in the Mid-American Conference plus Middle Tennessee State of the Sun Belt Conference – unofficially fell below that figure last season.

The closest of the 10 Division I-A programs in Texas to falling below the requirement was North Texas (15,184). Rice was next (17,652), followed by SMU (17,706) and Houston (21,167).

The board also will look at adding rules to help football programs currently in I-AA. That could include allowing I-A schools to count victories over I-AA schools against the six needed to be bowl eligible.

We know that Sears and Diversified Collections Services have cut deals with the Travis County DA's office to get the charges related to TRMPAC dropped in return for cooperation on the case. Now we see that progress is being made with the other six indicted corporations.

According to documents filed in Travis County District Court, two companies accused of making illegal political contributions have "flipped" for prosecutors in the past month, signing deals requiring them to cooperate in exchange for dismissal of their cases.

The agreements were signed with Illinois-based Sears, Roebuck and Co. and DCS Inc., a debt-payment company based in California, and say the contributions were given "on the basis of false and misleading information provided by the fund-raiser that solicited the contribution."

Sources close to the investigation said this week that similar deals were being negotiated with some of the remaining six companies indicted late last year: the Williams Companies Inc., Bacardi USA, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, the Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care, Questerra Corp. and Westar Energy Inc.

The companies that could be reached declined to comment, as did Gregg Cox, director of the Travis County district attorney's public integrity unit and a leader of the investigation.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said information gleaned from the companies could be used as leverage to pressure remaining defendants and, potentially, to target more powerful members of the Republican Party in Texas and in Washington.

UPDATE: The Stakeholder points to the full LATimes story that the Chron excerpted. I'll echo Kevin's comment below.

And so the 79th Texas Legislature is officially in session, with the usual pronouncements of bipartisanship, Serious Talk about Serious Solutions to Serious Problems, and miscellaneous pomp and circumstance. Let the wild rumpus begin!

Three new Houston legislators were among those sworn in yesterday, including Melissa Noriega, who is pinch-hitting for her husband Rick, currently serving in Afghanistan. We're still two weeks away from the hearing for the Heflin contest. Hubert Vo will be a full voting member (except, of course, for the contest itself) until then.

Here's an item for the new Lege that I hope we can all get behind.

The Texas House and Senate may adopt rules later this week that will require more votes to be recorded and make it easier for the public to track those votes online.

Texas is one of nine states that does not require lawmakers to record all of their votes. Legislators often take voice votes, which are not recorded for public view.

The only votes required to be recorded are committee votes and proposed constitutional amendments, which require approval of two-thirds of the members.

Though legislation has been filed to require all votes to be recorded, the issue also could be addressed immediately through rules changes. Lawmakers are scheduled to vote on rules for each chamber Thursday.

Finally, the United Ways of Texas is blogging the 79th Lege. The first entry is here. Looks promising, but if anyone can tell where their blog index link (and RSS feed link) is, I'd be obliged if you could point it out to me. Via Sarah.

Comptroller Strayhorn has given her revenue report to the Lege, and it's much better than the last time.

Strayhorn estimated legislators will have $64.7 billion in state revenue to spend in the upcoming two-year budget — $6.4 billion more than they had in January 2003.

But whether that means lawmakers are in the black for the 2006-2007 budget is in the eye of the beholder.

Gov. Rick Perry and legislative leaders told state agencies to cut 5 percent out of their current budget to use as a starting point for budget writers. This would put it in the black by billions of dollars, but the surplus would rapidly disappear as the Legislature added spending.

Strayhorn made estimates based on current state spending levels plus money to cover population increases in public schools and social services. She said that would leave a $400 million surplus.

But advocates for the poor said Strayhorn's revenue estimate is at least $7 billion in the red if the state wants to maintain current services and restore cuts made during the 2003 session. And that does not include increased funding for Child Protective Services, teacher health insurance or to lower public school property taxes.

As always, this is a campaign opportunity for Strayhorn:

"No matter how strong our economy is, fixing our broken school finance system cannot be done within our existing revenue estimate," Strayhorn said. "There is no shortfall when it comes to the budget. There is a shortfall when it comes to the governor's leadership."

Strayhorn said Perry needs to immediately restore funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program, fully fund teacher health insurance and give teachers a $3,000-a-year pay raise.

Those proposals would cost almost $3 billion more than her revenue estimate, but she said they could be funded by adopting a $1 a pack increase in the cigarette tax, legalizing video lottery at horse racing tracks and closing franchise tax loopholes.

"The governor (in 2003) championed a budget with $2.7 billion in new fees and charges and out-of-pocket expenses, and balanced the budget right on the backs of our school teachers and our most vulnerable Texans," Strayhorn said.

UPDATE: Lasso has some editorial reaction to the announcement of the "surplus".

Like Greg, I note that three of the four people quoted in this Chron story about subpoenas being sent to testify before the State House in the Heflin contest voted for the Republican. I think that ought to put a dent in the crazy idea that there was some kind of nefarious Democratic plot to steal that election. What say you, Andy Taylor?

One other thing:

"If a person interferes with an election unjustly, they have no right of privacy as to who they voted for," [Rep. Will] Hartnett said. "Historically, I don't believe they have been forced, but that doesn't bind me. I have the ability to compel illegal voters to divulge who they voted for."

One subpoenaed voter, Henry Akuchie, described a day of confusion when he tried to vote Nov. 2.

Akuchie, a native of Nigeria who has been a U.S. citizen since 1993, had lived in Vo's and Heflin's district until a recent move to Sugar Land. He said he was sent to three different polling sites on Election Day.

"I ran around. It took me almost two hours," he said. "I just hope my vote counts. How could I have done anything wrong? All I wanted to do was vote somewhere."

He said he voted for Vo.

Meanwhile, the Senate has set a good example for their brethren and sistren in the lower chamber. Let's hope the House is paying attention.

The perjury trial of disgraced gypsy cop Tom Coleman is underway. He has pleaded "not guilty" to the charges before him.

Tom Coleman is accused of lying under oath during a March 2003 evidentiary hearing about his investigation, which led to the arrests of 46 Tulia residents, 39 of them black.

A jury of seven men and five women was seated Monday, along with one female alternate.

The trial was moved to the 72nd District Court in Lubbock County after Swisher County prosecutors asked for a change of venue.

Coleman's indictments do not directly relate to the drug cases. Rather, he is accused of lying about stealing gasoline from a Cochran County-owned pump for his personal car and about when he learned that he faced a Cochran County theft charge.

On Monday, prosecutors waived a third perjury count in the indictment.

The prosecution's witness list includes some high-profile names, including [Governor Rick] Perry and Sen. John Cornyn, who was Texas attorney general at the time of the drug busts. Also on the list is retired state District Judge Ron Chapman, who presided over the March 2003 hearings and called Coleman "the most devious, nonresponsive law-enforcement witness this court has witnessed in 25 years on the bench."

After jury selection, the subpoena for Perry was quashed because a Travis County constable submitted the summons to a general counsel instead of the governor.

Special prosecutor Rod Hobson vowed to reissue the subpoena and threatened to hold the constable in contempt for not serving the governor.

It was believed that Cornyn, whose subpoena was issued Jan. 4, had not been served by late Monday.

This way (via Greg and Keir)?

1.) More blog-style journalism done by the News & Record staff. This is not exactly a surprise, since it was the blogging boss who asked the blogger Lex to compile the report.

2.) More participatory or open source journalism where readers or "affiliated" bloggers from the community are the knowledge engine or the agenda setter.

3.) A new and strikingly different Web philosophy for www.news-record.com, stressing open standards, transparency, interaction, dialogue, linking widely-- in a word, a different kind of site. Including a permanent, free archive, in itself a mini-revolution if enacted.

Newspaper industry consultant John Morton, who heads Morton Research Inc., said he thinks many newspapers want to wean readers off free online content and transform their Web sites into paid-only publications.

Free editions of newspapers on the Web are "quickly falling out of favor," he said. "I think you will see newspapers selling electronic subscriptions or print subscriptions, or a combination of both, which is what the Wall Street Journal does, and has been very successful at."

As for the former option, I think it has more promise than Greg does. Recruiting blogger types to cover low-volume but high-interest-for-those-who-care things like high school sporting events and neighborhood issues is a great idea, as are open archives and the "must link out" policy. Having comments on news stories, however, is something that I think would fail - I'd bet they very quickly become the kind of unreadable wankfest that would make Usenet's signal-to-noise ratio look good. I'd have more faith in comments on things like restaurant reviews and feature columns, but even those would be no sure thing. Still, there are lots of good ideas there, and almost all of them would be worth considering.

Which way are we more likely to go? Beats me. What do you think?

Vince brings us the news that Barbara Radnofsky is indeed now an official candidate for the Senate in 2006. This is reflected on her campaign website, which by the way has a rather cleverly named (though permalink-free) blog on it. No word on Radnofsky's candidacy in the media yet, so nicely scooped, Vince.

So now that Carlos Beltran has left the Astros, the question is are they better off without having to spend the kind of money it took to sign him? Tom Kirkendall says Yes, while David Pinto thinks the Mets got a bargain.

Personally, I don't think the annual salary is as important a consideration as the length of the contract. Beltran is a very good player, but he'll be 34 in the last year of this contract, and for sure he won't be as good then as he is now. He's got no history of injury, and he's got the type of skill set (in particular, speed) that ages well, but those last couple of years are a huge risk. Throw in the no-trade clause, which will cost more to waive in the event he no longer fits in with the long-term strategy down the line, and one can certainly argue that losing out on him is not the end of the world. No guarantees, of course, but it's reasonable to see it that way.

By the way, did the Mets have a great offseason or what? Omar Minaya did some pretty good things with a spare-change budget in Montreal, and now he's showing he can spend money, too. Joe Sheehan gives them their props.

One possible source of school finance revenue is a change to the way farmland is evaluated for property tax purposes.

[A] growing number of legislators would like to add a revamp of the agricultural valuations to the list.

Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, said the state could add $400 million to its school finance coffers by tightening the law.

"A lot of weekend farmers get an ag exemption and agriculture is not their primary income," said Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston. "If we're going to really, really examine school finance and our tax system, everything should be on the table. No sacred cows."

Whitmire is one of several Houston-area lawmakers who receive ag valuations on property they own. He said his farm near Chappell Hill is not a weekend operation; he pays a family to manage 100 cows on 300 acres.

Across the state, $91 billion in property value is taken off the tax rolls. The loss in revenue to school districts tops $1.5 billion.

In comparison, the state-mandated $15,000 homestead exemption costs school districts statewide $1.1 billion.

The state's reliance on local property taxes to fund nearly 60 percent of the $30 billion public school system has many homeowners straining under ever-increasing property tax bills. A homeowner with a large lot in an urban area pays full market value on the unimproved land.

And those getting the breaks are increasingly less likely to be family farmers and ranchers. According to the state comptroller, $409 million in agriculture productivity tax savings goes to out-of-state interests and $500 million goes to Texans whose family income is more than $90,000.

Back when KLOL first switched formats, I thought that another station would eventually switch to a similar style to fill the void it left. According to this thread on the Houston Architecture Forum (which is a useful place to find all sorts of things about Our Fair City, btw), Power 97.5 is about two change to an "Adult Oriented Rock" format on February 15. How they will differ from the late, lamented KLOL is anyone's guess at this point, but I'll be prepared to give them a button on my car stereo.

There is some bad news, though: The new, as-yet-named station will feature Walton and Johnson in the morning. Which means I'll not be tuning in until the afternoon.

(Look at the URL for that "News" link on the W&J page. Truly, anyone can be a blogger.)

Link via blogHOUSTON.

Reading this article about how Andrea Yates is (according to her best friend) doing a little better now reminds me why after all this time I still get irrationally pissed off reading articles like this.

[O]ver time, Yates, who home-schooled her children and once agreed with Rusty to move the family into a converted bus, has expressed doubt about whether her husband always supported her.

Her friends and family have maintained he did not.

In a letter written to Bob Holmes in September 2003, Yates wrote: "Maybe sometimes I do wear rose-colored glasses regarding my husband but I have to 'wake up and smell the coffee.'

"I'll ask him what was I like when I was sick? 'Oh, like you usually are, just quieter,' " Yates wrote.

"Little Mary couldn't bear to look at me — she'd cry," the note continued. "I'd hold her outward so she didn't see my face. So heartbreaking and tragic."

After signing the letter, she asked Bob Holmes in a postscript to show Rusty compassion. "He has lost so much," she wrote.

"All the 'factors' that contributed to the tragedy are complex and it wastes energy to assign 'blame' (ultimately I was the one who did it) but Rusty and I have lost our beautiful children," she wrote.

[...]

[She] is interested in the efforts of the Yates Children Memorial Fund for Women's Mental Health Education. The fund was established by the Mental Health Association of Greater Houston. In a letter to Debbie Holmes written shortly after their Christmas weekend visit, Yates expressed a hunger for more information about a statewide symposium the association had in November.

Holmes said that over the past three years, she and her husband have tried to convince Yates that she was severely ill in the months leading up to the children's deaths. She said Yates only vaguely recalls that period and has been wrought with guilt.

"I told her, 'Your speech, your breathing, your hygiene, your walk, your talk, your approach to your kids, everything wasn't normal. There was nothing normal about you,' " Holmes said.

John would raise his hand over his eyes when he would talk to his mother, and Mary often cried in her arms, Holmes recalled.

Those memories make Yates sad to think what her children's lives were like during those months, Holmes said.

But they also have empowered Yates to think about ways she can help prevent similar tragedies for other families.

She and Yates have talked about collaborating on articles about her mental illness, and Yates would like to eventually speak out in favor of better treatment for the mentally ill, Holmes said.

Parnham said Yates has expressed the same desire to him.

"She's beginning to appreciate the fact that her situation could be possibly used as a learning tool for women across the world who suffer from the same kind of mental illnesses," he said.

"All of this is looking at the lives of those five children and realizing that they will forever be wasted unless something good can come out of what happened at 942 Beachcomber on June 20, 2001."

I'm glad that Andrea wants to make something good come out of this horror story. Whatever peace she can find she deserves. May she live to make a difference.

Elsewhere, on the legal status of things, Tom points to this overview by South Texas College of Law (that's here in Houston, btw) professor Dru Stevenson. One nit I have to pick with Prof. Stevenson is that Andrea Yates did not have postpartum depression, she had the rarer and much more malevolent condition of postpartum psychosis.

Women experiencing a psychosis are at risk of committing suicide and, in very rare cases, of harming their unborn child or infants. These women need to be hospitalized for their safety and to safeguard their infants.

This is a psychiatric emergency and the woman needs to be hospitalized immediately. Because of her confusion the woman may not have the insight to recognize how ill she is, therefore, the decision for hospitalization will be made by her physician.

UPDATE: The DMN's Steve Blow boils the appeals court's ruling down to a simple question: "How much false testimony is OK?" Via Alan D. Williams.

Ed Bass is letting go of some property you might have heard of.

The company that owns Biosphere 2 Center, 3.1 glass-enclosed acres designed to simulate the Earth's environment, has put the site up for sale.

The company is also selling 70 other buildings on the center's 140-acre campus 16 miles north of Tucson, said Christopher Bannon, general manager of Decisions Investment Corp. of Fort Worth, Texas.

"We'd love to see the Biosphere 2 used as a research activity, but we know that may not be the end result," he said last week.

Texas billionaire Ed Bass, president of Decisions Investment, spent more than $200 million to build Biosphere 2 in the 1980s as a prototype for a space colony.

The closed ecological site 16 miles north of Tucson contained miniatures of Earth's rainforest, ocean, desert and other environmental features.

In 1991, eight "biospherians" were sealed inside for a two-year stay. But the project was plagued by rising costs and other setbacks and Columbia University assumed responsibility for the site under a management agreement, turning it into a research and education facility.

The relationship with Columbia ended in September 2003 and Biosphere 2 has been open as a tourist destination.

The perjury trial of Tom Coleman, the renegade undercover cop whose false testimony led to the wrongful conviction of dozens of citizens from Tulia, Texas, begins today. Guest blogging for the trial at Grits for Breakfast is the Rev. Alan Bean of the Tulia Friends of Justice. He's got two entries up, here and here. He's a natural at this, so I'm hoping he'll come back again. Check it out.

Not too surprisingly, I saw a big dropoff in traffic from November to December. About 41,000 visitors came by last month, making it the second slowest month of the year, and that was after a late referral from Atrios. Everything is relative, of course - last year at this time I had 35,000 hits and it was my best month ever up till then.

Counting it all up for the year, I got about 535,000 hits, which is pretty amazing to me. As always, I thank you all very much for coming by. I feel very rewarded knowing that you do.

Top referrers are beneath the More link. Sadly, this month I seem to be deluged with spam domains in the referral stats that I get from my webhost. They don't show up as Sitemeter referrals, which makes me wonder if they're comment or trackback spams that got blocked by MT Blacklist but still counted as referrals by my host. I don't know, but I do know that at the rate some of these are showing up, they may crowd out real referrers from the monthly total (I only see the top numbers). We'll see what happens.

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I was reading this column by real estate writer Nancy Sarnoff about a group of folks from a neighborhood near where I work trying to fight against the construction of a big Med Center parking garage when I came across this tidbit:

Just like the city of Houston, the Medical Center has the ability to acquire property through eminent domain, which allows it to sidestep deed restrictions.

Seems like just last week we were looking back on how successful a year Mayor Bill White had in 2004. (See also his interview in the Texas Observer.) Since then, White has been pummelled for problems with the Safe Clear mandatory towing program and for lack of action cleaning up the HPD crime lab. Oops.

I haven't followed the Safe Clear story very closely - for all of their rhetorical excesses, the folks at blogHOUSTON have been all over that one. If Bill White is as smart as we've all thought he is, he'll recover from this since there's certainly merit to the concept of clearing stalls and fender benders from the highways, and a better plan, or a better implementation of this plan, could achieve that objective without pissing lots of people off. State Sen. John Whitmire, a recent critic of the program, has apprently suggested that an expanded MAP program would be a better idea, and so it would. Fixing this program is doable, and the sooner it happens, the more of a salvaged win this would still be for White.

(By the way, note how that Chron story on Whitmire's criticism has no indication that he supports even the idea of Safe Clear, but this KHOU story does? So much for the Chron being a cheerleader for White.)

A potentially bigger problem, floating under the surface, is White's relationship with those who should be his allies. At the Greater Heights Democratic Club meeting yesterday, Councilman Adrian Garcia discussed the Safe Clear issue, and he said that he had been assured prior to passage of the city ordinance which created Safe Clear, that items like fee coverage for the poor and transporting families would be taken care of. He stated that having seen what has happened with the program, he felt that he had been lied to by David Saperstein, Mayor White's "Mobility Czar". That's pretty damning, and it needs to be addressed at least as quickly as the other Safe Clear prblems are.

I still think White is in a strong position, but he's been bloodied, and it's his own fault. He can get back on the right track, but the clock is ticking. Don't screw it up, Mister Mayor.

(For more on the HPD Crime Lab, see Grits.)

Tuesday is the day that state legislators are sworn in, marking the start of the 79th biennial 180-day session. Many of the problems of 2003 will be back in 2005 - budget shortfall, a tax structure in dire need of overhaul and the broken school finance system that depends on it, social services in desperate need - though this time there's a little more consensus that spending cuts alone are not a viable solution (see "CHIP funding, restoration of").

The 78th Lege, the first one with Republicans in charge of everything, finished as one of the most divisive and partisan sessions ever, but it didn't start that way, as the DeLay-driven reredistricting push didn't gain steam until April. With the Opiela and Heflin challenges looming large on the January agenda, and the specter of DeLay-necessitated alterations to campaign finance laws and the means of investigating their violations waiting for later, this session starts out with a divisive air, but it doesn't have to end that way. It's entirely up to the Republicans, since they control everything, whether partisan interests like these take precedence over actual governing or not. The Democrats can carp and wail from the back microphones, but it's Craddick, Dewhurst, and Perry that will steer the course. There's plenty of grist for the ideological mills in the issues that actually require everyone's attention. Any distractions from those issues along the way will be the result of choices made by those three.

In the Chron, Clay Robison outlines the agenda, while R.G. Ratcliffe looks at the personalities. The starting gun gets fired on Tuesday.

UPDATE: Here's a good column outlining the issues and the problems with school finance. Via Kimberly. And Kevin makes a good point about managing teachers and merit pay.

Having previously announced the support of conservative groups, Governor Perry has released a list of fellow Republican officeholders who really really like him.

The endorsements for Perry were from Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, Attorney General Greg Abbott, Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs, Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Railroad Commissioners Victor Carrillo, Michael Williams and Charles Matthews.

Matthews was named on Friday as the sole finalist for chancellor of the Texas State University System.

[...]

The endorsement from Combs was a surprise because she is longtime friends with Hutchison and has said she will run for comptroller if Strayhorn vacates the office. Combs could not be reached for comment, but she released a statement that she has $1.74 million available for a comptroller's race.

Perry's greatest strength among Republicans is from the party's right wing — social conservatives who oppose abortion and support issues such as private school vouchers.

Meanwhile, Kinky Friedman, the only candidate so far who would be assured of running in the November general election, has picked up a crucial endorsement from New Jersey, something which I'm sure he'd appreciate.

This morning, Tiffany and Olivia and I walked to the new Berryhill near our house for breakfast tacos. It's about 70 degrees outside, with clear and sunny skies. In a month or so, I expect many of you who are "blessed" with four seasons to be bitching and moaning about how much you hate February, while I'm making plans to attend a Rice baseball game on my birthday. Yes, this is another reason why It's Worth It.

The plot thickens.

The psychiatrist whose erroneous testimony led an appeals court to overturn Andrea Yates' conviction for drowning her children said Friday that he got the flawed information from Harris County prosecutors.

Park Dietz, of California, said it was "an honest mistake" when he wrongly told jurors that Yates might have been inspired by an episode of the TV series Law & Order. He described an episode about a woman who drowned her children and was found innocent by reason of insanity.

After jurors convicted Yates of capital murder, it was learned that no such episode existed. The 1st Texas Court of Appeals concluded Thursday that Dietz's testimony rendered the trial unfair.

Dietz said Friday that he had been confused because prosecutors told him there was a Law & Order episode with that plot.

"I put that in my notes and must have remembered those notes," he said in an interview on ABC's Good Morning America program.

[...]

Prosecutors have repeatedly said they did not know Dietz's testimony was incorrect until later, after Yates was convicted but before jurors decided her sentence.

Assistant District Attorney Joe Owmby, who tried Yates' capital murder case, said the discussion of the TV show was brief. Owmby told the Associated Press on Friday that, before the trial began, he asked Dietz whether such a Law & Order episode had ever aired and Dietz said he would look into it.

Dietz did not follow up on the conversation and the subject never surfaced again, Owmby said.

"So, in a way, I'm not disputing the question came up because of something we asked him," he said. "But we got no response, and it wasn't important to the development of our case.

"But I think it's a little leap to say we caused this to happen," Owmby said.

The remark about the TV show apparently can be traced back to an e-mail sent to the District Attorney's Office from a Houston-area schoolteacher shortly after Yates' arrest.

The teacher said that, just days before the slayings, she had seen a rerun of an episode from the 1980s legal drama L.A. Law, in which a woman drowned her children and was found innocent by reason of insanity.

After news reports of Yates' arrest, the teacher, who asked not to be identified, e-mailed the District Attorney's Office.

She later received a call from Owmby, said her attorney, Philip Hilder.

Owmby has previously declined to comment on the e-mail. He could not be reached for comment Friday.

Kenny Boy Lay is sponsoring links in order to spread the word of his innocence.

The former chairman's computer-literate litigation team is making use of "sponsored links," which appear prominently in searches for a word or name in an Internet search engine. It's one of the ways the search engines make money and one of the ways Web sites can be sure they'll be noticed.

The cost for Lay and others depends on two things: how many people actually look at his Web site and how many other sites want to be seen in connection with the same keywords.

Put the search words "Enron scandal" or "Ken Lay," or even this Enron reporter's name, "Mary Flood," into any of the above search engines and one of the first things you will see is www.kenlayinfo.com. If you hit on Lay's Web site from there, then Lay pays between roughly 5 cents and 12 cents.

Mac notes that despite his screwup in Houston, Park Dietz can still be a force for good.

Keir Murray, a familiar name but a new blogger around here, reports a conversation he had with a state senator, who thinks the House may override the result of the Hubert Vo-Talmadge Heflin election.

I spoke last night with a state senator, who shall remain nameless, who now believes the State House GOP may decide to seat Heflin and bump Vo out, overturning Vo's legitimate win in District 149. Like most folks familiar with the Legislature, until recently he didn't think there was any chance of that happening. He's changed his mind. The reasoning is as follows:

The legislative session begins next week, and Democratic House members begin baiting Craddick from the back microphone -- "Mr. Speaker, if you are indicted, will you step down from your leadership post?" -- and so on. The session quickly dissolves into a partisan lockdown, and Vo loses on a party-line vote.

Sound far-fetched? Think for a moment about what the GOP, at both the state and federal level, has had the audacity to do in the last couple of years -- redistricting, ethics changes, now trying to eliminate the filibuster from the U.S. Senate, etc -- and you may reach the same conclusion the state senator has. "These guys just don't give a sh*t." Bad press? Who cares. Public outrage? They'll get over it. Politically dangerous? Not a chance -- all we have to do is win a GOP primary anyway. Democratic retribution? (After several moments of laughter) Who?"

The senator (and I) believe the GOP will make every attempt to do this for one reason, they can. They have the votes and they value power above all else. If they can take a little bit more, they will, integrity and the public be damned.

I fear, however, that such provocation isn't necessary. As Greg notes, Harris County Tax Assessor Paul Bettencourt has announced that an open records request says that there were 167 illegal votes cast in the HD149 race. Of course, who those people voted for, or even if they did vote in the HD149 race, is something we can't know unless we drag them onto a witness stand and ask them under oath. But if the House GOP leadership wants to seat Heflin, the mere existence of those votes would be a sufficient fulcrum for them. Jack Stick laid some groundwork with his own charges of vote fraud (though to his credit, Discovery Master Will Hartnett hasn't bought it, and apparently Stick's ideas of what constitutes fraud include voter registration). But who's to say that can't or won't happen?

I will say this: Whatever happens later this month, Talmadge Heflin has won his last race. Whether he retires from public service and slips into a lucrative lobbying job now or in 2007 is still an open question, but he's done as a candidate. His actions now may be enough to poison the well for a long time in HD149 for all other Republican hopefuls. Not that this bothers me, of course.

Lastly, Keir and Greg both also talk about the likely impact of seating Heflin on two other Republican State Reps, Joe Nixon and Martha Wong. Nixon's district is even more Vietnamese than 149 is, and like Vo, Wong has benefitted from crossover support from Asian constituents. Further, Moldy Joe is already a prime target for 2006, and Wong's district is about as swingy. For sure neither one will want to risk opposing Vo; the real question is whether they'll publicly support him.

The Perry VsWorld blog points to this story about the early movings of the Perry campaign in Southeast Texas. He notes that there are no quotes in support of a primary challenge by Kay Bailey Hutchison, but I think the evidence is a bit more mixed than that.

There is little enthusiasm for Hutchison among Republican voters, said David Teuscher, a Beaumont physician who serves on the state party's executive committee.

"Perry is the most conservative governor we've had, and I can't imagine why the Republican base wouldn't support him," Teuscher said.

In pushing through a redistricting plan that ousted several Democratic congressmen, balancing the budget with deep cuts rather than tax hikes and by enacting tort reform, Perry has earned the backing of the staunch conservatives who vote in Republican primaries, Teuscher said.

[...]

Some local Republican activists, however, still are undecided. Shane Howard, who started the Southeast Texas Young Republicans earlier this year, said although he's satisfied with Perry, he would take a close look at Hutchison if she enters the race.

[...]

State Rep. Mike Hamilton, R-Mauriceville, who clashed with Perry over redistricting, voting against the Republican-sponsored map on grounds it hurt rural areas, said he will wait until the legislative session ends before deciding which candidate to support.

Meanwhile, over at Polstate, Vince Leibowitz offers a variety of scenarios on the Democratic side, and breaks the news that Barbara Radnofsky is officially in as a candidate for Senate. The news isn't on her campaign website yet, but she's been exploring this race for some time now, and given the challenge it would be, an early start would be a good idea.

The updated Chron story on the overturning of Andrea Yates' convictions has some info on what might come next.

The decision means that if prosecutors cannot get Yates' capital murder conviction restored through appeals, they will have to decide whether to put Yates on trial again.

"We are going to ask for a rehearing," Assistant District Attorney Alan Curry said.

[...]

Prosecutors said Thursday that they will ask the 1st Court of Appeals to reconsider its ruling. If that is unsuccessful, they expect to take the case to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest court.

Prosecutors argued that Dietz's remarks about the TV program were peripheral, compared with other evidence suggesting Yates was guilty and sane at the time of the killings.

If the appeals court's ruling is upheld, the District Attorney's Office will have to decide whether to seek a new trial.

Texas law allows for a new trial if a witness gives false testimony that may have influenced the verdict, legal experts said.

The decision surprised juror Leona Baker, who said Thursday she and the other jurors discounted Dietz's testimony, saying it did not have any weight in their decision to convict Yates.

"We heard (Dietz) talk about the episode of Law & Order, but it was never made clear that she actually watched that particular episode," Baker said.

Dru Stevenson, a criminal law professor at the South Texas College of Law, said the ruling didn't surprise him, adding that the testimony was "prejudicial."

Yates' attorneys said they would represent her again if a new trial is ordered, but Stevenson said that is unlikely.

"If I was a betting man, I would bet they will reach some sort of plea bargain," he said.

Yates' husband, Rusty, who filed for divorce in July, said on CNN's Larry King Live Thursday that he believes prosecutors should not pursue the case.

"I would like to see them drop the charges against her, and I would like to see her go to a state mental hospital until she is stable," he said. "I say safe, stable medically. I'd say it would be a few years.

Yates' mother, Jutta Karin Kennedy reacts to the decision:

"I have mixed emotions," said Kennedy, exhausted after spending the day talking to reporters and answering calls from friends and well-wishers. "If this does any good, I'll be happy. I just don't know."

Kennedy alternated between feelings of vindication — she has said all along that Andrea was not murderous, but mentally ill — and fear of a new trial with the same outcome.

She sighed heavily, not sure if she or her 40-year-old daughter could face that ordeal.

Since Yates has been at Skyview, near Rusk in northeast Texas, her mom has visited several times a month.

"It's a good day when I can go visit," Kennedy said. The other days are harder.

Kennedy said she got the news of the conviction reversal when the anchors for NBC's Today show, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, called about 7 a.m.

"I was speechless, shaking," she said. "The decision came out of the blue. I wasn't expecting to hear anything for four to six months."

She believes her daughter got the news an hour or two later from a Skyview warden. For now, she can only guess Yates' reaction. "I think she's been hoping for a reduction in her sentence. I just don't know."

"In a case like this, you ought to be very, very sure that the testimony you are giving is accurate," said Lucy Puryear, a forensic psychiatrist at Baylor College of Medicine who testified in Yates' defense. "I was incredulous that in a case where someone's life depended on it, that he could give testimony that was wrong, and so egregiously wrong it could have had an influence on the decision of the jury."

[...]

Dietz did not return phone calls for comment. In a prepared statement issued Thursday, he said he made an honest mistake in part because he had not anticipated answering questions about Law & Order.

"My spontaneous recall about particular shows is admittedly imperfect," Dietz said.

One of Puryear's Baylor colleagues, psychiatry professor Victor Scarano, said Dietz's gaffe is hard to understand given his reputation for thoroughness.

"He is usually very careful about what he does," Scarano said. "When we do our work, we usually are very scrupulous that what we have are the facts. We understand that we are going to be vulnerable to cross-examination, so we have to have our ducks in a row. How this happened, I don't know. Unfortunately, it will hurt him."

After the Yates case, Dietz was retained by Tyler prosecutors pursuing a capital murder conviction for Deanna Laney, charged with bludgeoning two of her children to death in 2003. Dietz surprised prosecutors by concluding that Laney, who said she was acting under orders from God, was "a textbook case" of insanity. Laney was found not guilty.

That shows he's not just a gun for hire, supporters say.

"Dietz is to my knowledge just as honest and ethical as he can be," said William Reid, a Texas forensic psychiatrist who, like Dietz, has served as president of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. "He has felt extremely badly about his error. I've talked to him personally about it and heard him speak to others."

Reid said he did not think the mistake ultimately will affect Dietz's credibility or his popularity as a witness.

"It was an accident on his part," Reid said. "He did give an off-the-cuff answer that there had been this episode. The person who took it to the next level and said (Yates) had seen it was the prosecutor."

UPDATE: Missed the Chron editorial calling for a plea bargain. Via Ginger.

In this article about the productive bench of the Rice Owls men's basketball team, writer Moisekapenda Bower makes a strange assertion about Owl swingman Jamal Moore.

His energy and stifling defense, intangibles statistics can't quantify, are as valuable as [teammate Brock] Gillespie's penchant for hitting timely treys.

Voting for the 2004 Koufax Awards is going on at Wampum. There are several posts up with the nominees in different categories for your approval. I'm as motivated by enlightened self-interest as the next blogger, so I'll point out that I'm among the many fine choices in the Best Single Issue Blog race. And if you have a little spare change left over this week, consider making a donation to the Wampum crew for their hard work and elevated bandwidth costs.

A Top Ten List of Top Ten Lists. Why didn't I think of that? Via Kimberly.

If you really want to follow the Senate confirmation hearings of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General as closely as possible, this blog will help.

Andrea Yates' conviction has been thrown out by the Texas First Court of Appeals.

The three-member appeals court granted Yates’ motion to have her conviction reversed because the state’s expert psychiatric witness testified that Yates had patterned her actions after a Law & Order television episode that never existed. In ordering a new trial, the appellate court said the trial judge erred in not granting a mistrial once it was learned that testimony of Dr. Park Dietz was false.

Prosecutors plan to appeal the ruling, but Yates' family and attorney were jubilant this morning.

“It’s unbelievable,” defense attorney George Parnham said. “I’m stunned, unbelievably happy.”

[...]

During her 2002 trial in the Houston courtroom of State District Judge Belinda Hill, Yates’ attorneys argued she was unable to discern that difference when she filled up the family’s bathtub and drowned her children one by one, but the Harris County jury deliberated just 3-1/2 hours before convicting her of drowning three of her children. She was not tried in the deaths of her other two children.

Yates' attorneys vowed at the trial's end that they would appeal the case because of the testimony of Dietz, who told the jury he had served as a consultant on an episode of the television drama Law & Order in which a woman drowned her children in the bathtub and was judged insane. He testified the show aired shortly before Yates drowned her own children.

Prosecutors referred to Dietz's testimony in his closing arguments of the trial's guilt or innocence phase, noting that Yates regularly watched the show and that she had alluded to finding "a way out" when Dietz interviewed her in the Harris County Jail after the drownings.

But right after Yates' conviction, defense attorneys discovered no such episode was produced. As a result, both sides agreed to tell jurors who'd moved on to consider Yates' punishment that Dietz had erred in his testimony and to disregard that portion of his account.

Dietz later said he had confused the show with others and wrote a letter to prosecutors, saying, "I do not believe that watching Law & Order played any causal role in Mrs. Yates' drowning of her children."

[...]

Writing for the appeals court, Justice Sam Nuchia agreed the state hadn't knowingly used perjured testimony but expressed concern that the jury could have been prejudiced when weighing Yates' guilt.

"We conclude that there is a reasonable likelihood that Dr. Dietz's false testimony could have affected the judgment of the jury," the court ruled. "We further conclude that Dr. Dietz's false testimony affected the substantial rights of appellant."

Via Ginger, who sums it all up: "For once, a criminal appeal in Texas has shocked me the right way."

In 2003, the Lege created the Texas Residential Construction Commission to resolve disputes between homeowners and builders without having to use the civil courts. Today's Chron takes a look at the effectiveness of the TRCC, and learns that the answer is not so good if you're a homeowner, since the TRCC has no actual power to enforce its findings.

Since its inception, the agency has received 104 requests for help through the formal dispute resolution process; 42 of those requests are open, and 24 were closed after the agency found for the homeowner. The rest are ineligible or are being processed, the agency said.

The agency does have some powers. Although it can't force a company to make the repairs it recommends, it can apply other pressures, such as revoking the builder's registration, assessing a fee capped at $5,000 per violation and asking the state attorney general to file an injunction against builders that violate commission rules.

But the disciplinary actions would be used only to enforce final orders or rulings, such as those that come from a court or arbitration proceeding, not the agency's recommendations, said Stephen Thomas, executive director of the agency.

Thus far, the commission has not taken disciplinary actions against any builder for construction complaints. It has, however, pursued three actions on administrative issues.

Homeowners, however, can submit the findings as evidence in court to pressure the builder. And some builders are quick to resolve matters. Others can't agree on fixes after the appeals process.

"It would be nice to be able to have a little more authority to help carry through some resolution on some of these things," he said."I think there certainly is concern that if there is a particularly egregious case and we go through the process, a builder could just continue to drag out the process and not resolve it."

[...]

Consumer advocates worry that the commission's limited power is self-defeating, forcing some homeowners with uncooperative builders to turn to the court system — something the resolution process was supposed to help stop.

Further complicating matters, even if they want to go to court, many can't because clauses in their construction contracts force them into arbitration if a dispute arises.

The overwhelming majority of home builders have arbitration clauses built into their contracts, said John Cobarruvias, president of the Houston chapter of Homeowners Against Deficient Dwellings.

Although builders promote arbitration as a faster and cheaper alternative to the court system, the homeowner has no right to decline the mandatory process and hence no alternative, he said.

There's another angle here, which didn't get mentioned in this story. Part of the problem I have with the concept of the TRCC is that its membership is appointed by the Governor, who has already taken the opportunity to pay back one of his patrons with a seat on the Commission. How confident does that make you the homeowner feel about your odds of getting a fair shake?

A comment in this post on Gregg Phillips led me to this blog post that I recommend you read by Father John Whiteford, a caseworker with TxHHSC. Father John and I are not on the same side of the fence politically or philosophically, but I agree with much of what he says here, and I appreciate the insight. He promises more on this topic in the coming weeks, so check back later as well.

I'm a bit behind Greg and Byron in noting that Richard Morrison is more or less gearing up already for a rematch with Tom DeLay in 2006. That may sound a bit extreme, getting started so soon, but it's entirely in line with the thinking of Mustafa Tameez, one of the architects of Hubert Vo's upset victory this year:

If you are running for a state representative office or a local district city council or a small public office, people have to feel like—whether I am a Republican or a Democrat—I know that guy, and by my knowing that guy, I have access to government. That is how you get people to cross party lines. That takes longer. I think campaigns can’t start after Labor Day anymore. From a candidate’s standpoint, if you are going to be running for office for a state-representative type of race—you need to start a year ahead of time.

The other key feature, of course, is money. Morrison raised a fair bit of cash from small donors, but had nowhere near the dough to keep up with DeLay. This time around, as a known quantity, he ought to be able to get some bigger players to kick in. It's hard to say how much action there will be at the Congressional level in Texas next year - surely the GOP will gun for Chet Edwards again, but beyond that it's pretty much up to the Democrats to make something happen. With no redistricted incumbents to draw all the attention and capital, Morrison should have a shot at evening things up a bit.

Which is a big deal, as Ruy Teixeira notes, pointing to new research which claims money and not redistricting is the prime factor in creating competition in Congressional races. TX-22 is not a high-risk Republican district in the sense that it was carried comfortably by President Bush, but it is an opportunity because of Morrison's strong overperformance relative to that.

How strongly did he overperform? I've compared precinct data for the DeLay/Morrison race to the Bush/Kerry race (and some other races where applicable) for three of the four counties in CD-22: Galveston, Fort Bend, and Harris (Brazoria County doesn't have precinct level data online as far as I could tell). The numbers are pretty striking. For the Galveston County precincts contained within CD22:

Candidate  Vote Total  Vote Pct

===============================

DeLay            9193     42.62

Morrison        12377     57.38

Bush            11188     49.73

Kerry           11311     50.27

Candidate  Vote Total  Vote Pct

===============================

DeLay           58444     55.88

Morrison        46151     44.12

Bush            70489     63.38

Kerry           40730     36.62

Candidate  Vote Total  Vote Pct

===============================

DeLay           64590     60.72

Morrison        41778     39.28

Bush            74427     67.47

Kerry           35884     32.53

Basically, Morrison outperformed John Kerry - or, if you prefer, DeLay underperformed Bush - by seven points in each county in the two-party totals. He certainly has growth potential, as DeLay's little capitulation on the DeLay Rule is far from the end of his ethical problems, and one would hope he won't have the distraction of multiple third-party challengers. It's certainly possible that he's hit a plateau, and even if not he'll still need a lot of things to break his way, but I think he's got as good a chance as anyone of being 2006's version of Melissa Bean. With that in mind, if you want to help him hit the ground running, here's where to go.

How happy am I that there's a new Lost tonight? Very very happy. That said, having watched a lot of football on ABC and ESPN these past couple of weeks, I'm glad I won't have to see any more promos for it.

Am I the only person who finds it odd that a show about plane crash survivors on an uncharted tropical island with mysterious beasties and powers has required less suspension of disbelief than a show about life in suburbia? Not that it has (so far) reduced my enjoyment of either show, mind you.

Next week: the shocking truth about Boone and Shannon. I'm ready.

Former Rep. Jack Stick has dropped the challenge of his electoral loss to Mark Strama.

The former legislator calls the voting system in Travis County problematic and chaotic and he'll continue to review the system.

Stick plans to submit his findings to the House elections committee.

Stick says he believes there were serious irregularities in voting that may indicate he won the race.

But Stick says it would be a waste of lawmakers time and taxpayers money to continue the contest.

The other challengers will have their hearings on January 26 (Eric Opiela) and 27 (Talmadge Heflin). I suppose it's too much to ask that they come to their senses like Stick did by then.

Hat tip to Andrew D for the catch.

Here's an interesting suggestion for a more comprehensive way to fight comment spam: Create standard HTML tags that tell search engines to ignore the content within when indexing. With such a tag around your comments, there'd be no good reason for spammers to invade. The SearchEngineWatch blog has the scoop. Thanks to Scott for the tip.

News flash: A big part of the medical malpractice litigation problem is caused by a few bad doctors. So says a study commissioned by the Bush Administration, ironically to support their contention that damage award caps need to be implemented.

"There's a need to protect the public from substandard performance by physicians," said Josephine Gittler, a law professor at the University of Iowa supervising part of the study. "If you had more aggressive policing of incompetent physicians and more effective disciplining of doctors who engage in substandard practice, that could decrease the type of negligence that leads to malpractice suits."

Randall Bovbjerg, a researcher at the Urban Institute, said, "If you take the worst performers out of practice, that will have an impact" on malpractice litigation. "Most doctors have few or no claims filed against them. But within any specialty, a few doctors have a high proportion of the claims."

And who's the leader in taking action against these insurance premium inflating malfeasors? Why, that decadent socialist haven of Taxachusetts.

Massachusetts has adopted an approach that experts say may provide a model for other states. Without waiting for a complaint to be filed, the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine conducts a clinical review of any doctor who has made three or more malpractice payments to patients, as a result of jury verdicts or settlements. Nancy Achin Audesse, executive director of the board, said: "Three is a magic number. Doctors who have to make three or more payments are also more likely to be named in consumer complaints and to be subject to discipline by hospitals and the medical board."

In Massachusetts during the last 10 years, Audesse said, "one-fourth of 1 percent of all the doctors — 98 of the 37,369 doctors — accounted for more than 13 percent of all the malpractice payments, $134 million of the $1 billion in total payments."

David Donnelly has an op-ed in today's Chron about why Tom DeLay and the Republicans reversed course on the DeLay Rule.

There are three reasons why DeLay caved on the provision, which was enacted by the House Republican conference back in mid-November and was designed to protect him if he gets indicted for his role in the on-going investigation into corporate fund-raising in Texas politics: constituent anger; a measurable rebellion among House members that emboldened House Democrats; and the growing sense that DeLay is becoming politically radioactive.

[...]

The second reason DeLay & Co. backtracked was that they simply didn't have the votes to win on the floor of the House. While the DeLay Rule only applied to Republicans, Democrats smelled an opportunity and were preparing a straight up-or-down vote on whether House rules would allow any member of Congress to maintain a position in leadership after being indicted. That vote was to have happened Tuesday, the day after DeLay proposed revoking his rule.

I'm convinced that the Democrats wouldn't have pushed for this vote if it weren't for the prospects of winning. A blog I run, the Daily DeLay, tracked responses from members of Congress from constituents' inquiries and news reports and built the only comprehensive and public record of where members stood on the matter. In the end, 23 Republican members of Congress went on record as having voted against the DeLay Rule and 10 to 12 more said they missed the vote but would have opposed it if they were there, or were given another chance. Outgoing House Ethics Chairman Joel Hefley, R-Colo., issued a timely statement saying he was siding with the Democrats. The potential of cleaving off 20-30 Republicans emboldened the Democratic minority, which pressed to take the issue to the floor. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, DeLay retreated in defeat.

I must say, I'm rather amused by efforts to paint DeLay's capitulation on the DeLay Rule as a loss for Democrats. By his own words, DeLay's about-face on this issue had everything to do with political strategy and nothing whatsoever to do with recognizing the difference between right and wrong, so it's just a matter of time before he does something else as vile and venal. But if I'm wrong, and Tom DeLay really has learned his lesson and reformed himself into an honest and ethical person who respects the law, then I'm sure that Democrats everywhere would consider that to be a triumph for all Americans. Wouldn't you?

Guess that NY Metro fellow will have to redo his odds: Ron Kirk has dropped out of the race for DNC Chair.

Kirk, who made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 2002, wrote a letter to DNC members Tuesday saying he would not run but was endorsing fellow Texan Martin Frost, a former congressman.

"Martin is ... a winning strategist, innovative grass-roots organizer and tough, disciplined spokesperson," Kirk said in his letter.

Who is my last choice? After reading this, that would be Tim Roemer.

Near the end of this article on the Trans Texas Corridor comes an observation about the 2006 elections.

I've whined a lot that the biggest cost of sprawl is the opportunity cost – the value of the things we didn't, or now can't, do with the land and the money trampled under the path of least resistance. The Trans Texas Corridor is just not a very good investment of resources we can better use doing something else.

This highlights a need for a real progressive strategy for dealing with roads – beyond saying they all suck. This does little to help the multitudes who are not fiscally or physically fortunate enough to afford central-city housing or get to work by human-powered transport. It also prompts the Other Side into taking the binary position, wrapping itself around the most ridiculous ideas like the Trans Texas Corridor, because after all, the only people who don't like roads are those crazy hippies.

Obviously that's not true in this case, but progressives are ill-served having to rely on, say, the Texas Farm Bureau to bail them out. A better, more sustainable alliance would be – duh! – with the other urbanites along I-35, such as Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, who have little use for either the corridor or Perry and Ric Williamson, and (in Miller's case) have little political impetus not to say so. Miller's been tapped as a potential statewide candidate in 2006, which hints at a salient point: Whoever carries the Dem banner against the winner of the Rick-and-Kay-and-Carole cage match needs to be running against the Trans Texas Corridor and the highway ho-ho-hos. Who's got the last laugh now?

The rural aspect of this shouldn't be overlooked, however. The Corridor Watch page is loaded with quotes from rural citizens and officials that run the gamut from concern over the impact of the TTC on rural communities to outright panic. Convincing these folks that the TTC is a clear indication of Governor Perry's lack of concern for their way of life would be a pretty good way to possibly peel some votes out of a Republican stronghold. We're not going to win in 2006 on cities and South Texas alone. We need some people to switch sides, and I think this is an issue that could be persuasive.

The TTC encapsulates just about everything that's wrong with the Perry administration: Whacked-out fiscal priorities, so-called solutions that don't actually solve real problems, Tammany Hall tendencies, and power as an end unto itself. The more noise we make about it now, the better.

Wade Boggs and Ryne Sandberg have been inducted into the Hall of Fame, thus resolving one puzzling omission but not others.

Boggs, a five-time American League batting champion for the Boston Red Sox, was selected by 474 of the record 516 voters who are 10-year members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

The 91.86 percent of ballots he received was the 19th-highest percentage in Hall history, and he became the 41st player elected on his first chance.

In total votes, Boggs trailed only Nolan Ryan (491) and George Brett (488).

"It's mind-boggling to be put in the same category," said Boggs, who credited his success to his 79-year-old father, Winfield.

"He coached me in Little League and sort of nurtured me along -- was there every phone call in the minor leagues," Boggs said.

Sandberg, the 1984 National League MVP for the Chicago Cubs, was picked by 393 voters. He appeared on 76.2 percent of ballots, just above the 75 percent cutoff (387). Sandberg received 49.2 percent of votes in 2003 and got 61.1 percent last year, falling 71 votes short.

"Watching Ryno play in the other league was a treat," Boggs said. "He could work Wrigley magic more than anybody knew."

Reliever Bruce Sutter, appearing on the ballot for the 12th time, received 344 votes (66.7 percent), up from 301 last year but 43 shy of what was needed this time. He was followed by Jim Rice (307), Rich "Goose" Gossage (285) and Andre Dawson (270).

Based on the odds he's assigned to a somewhat abridged list of contenders for the DNC Chair, this dude seems to think Ron Kirk is the favorite. Not sure what to make of that, but take a look for yourself. Kirk has been rumored to be looking at another statewide run in 2006, so who knows. Via Lauri, who has an amusing story from the Kirk/Cornyn Senate race of 2002.

Kristen Mack takes a look at Year One of Bill White's term as Mayor.

White can count several successes after a year in office, even as he faces a continuing tight budget, complaints from some City Council members that they're left out of decision making and the possibility of obstacles in Austin.

"Houston has had a great year," White said. "I'm proud of the role my administration played in that. We've started to change the culture at City Hall. There's a sense of confidence that it works."

City Controller Annise Parker also is completing her first year on the job, but she served three terms on the council and says she likes the new atmosphere.

"I think people inside and outside of City Hall feel like things are happening," she said. "There is a sense of optimism in the city, and there is an air of activity. It certainly has a different feel."

[...]

White succeeded Lee Brown, who could not seek re-election because of city term limits. Brown had successes — three new sports facilities and a light rail system were completed on his watch — but he struggled with partisan splits on City Council, failed to pass a drainage funding plan and was criticized for inattention to detail during his lame-duck third term.

This is not in any way to sell short what White accomplished last year. As Bob Stein put it, he pushed the envelope and did very well at it. He tackled some very big problems and made headway on them, all without much dissension in the City Council. Agree with what he's done or not, you've got to respect the achievement.

I think this year will be more difficult for all the reasons Mack states, but I think White will remain popular overall and will continue to get most of what he wants to do done.

This is a good start.

The head of a state House investigating committee said Monday he will look into allegations of cronyism involving contracting at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the Texas Workforce Commission.

"This is something we need to look into," said Rep. Kevin Bailey, D-Houston, chairman of the House General Investigating Committee.

[...]

Bailey said he has asked his staff to review the Chronicle stories to see if a full investigation is warranted. Bailey said he also will ask for cooperation from the state auditor's office as well as Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle in looking into contracting at HHSC and TWC.

Bailey said the Chronicle's stories looked similar to a state auditor's finding last year that HHSC overpaid a vendor for a rural Children's Health Insurance Program by $20 million.

More than a fourth of that money went to a subcontractor with no employees and two consultants.

"It appears to be business as usual over there (at HHSC)," Bailey said.

State Rep. Craig Eiland, D-Galveston, a member of the budget-writing appropriations committee, said he asked Bailey to initiate the review.

"The general investigating committee should look at this and report to the Legislature to open our eyes, especially if there is going to be more privatization of state business," Eiland said.

Eiland said he was surprised at how many people involved in state contracts with Phillips and Temple had Mississippi ties.

"All their friends seem to be from Mississippi. At least they could get some friends here in Texas," Eiland said.

Well, well, well. Sometimes outrage gets results.

House Republicans suddenly reversed course Monday, deciding to retain a tough standard for lawmaker discipline and reinstate a rule that would force Majority Leader Tom DeLay to step aside if indicted by a Texas grand jury.

The surprise dual decisions were made by Speaker Dennis Hastert and by DeLay who asked GOP colleagues to undo the extreme act of loyalty they handed him in November. Then, Republicans changed a party rule so DeLay could retain his leadership post if indicted by the grand jury in Austin that charged three of the Texas Republican's associates.

When Republicans began their closed-door meeting Monday night, leaders were considering a rules change that would have made it tougher to rebuke a House member for misconduct. The proposal would have required a more specific finding of ethical violations.

Republicans gave no indication before the meeting that the indictment rule would be changed. Even more surprising was DeLay's decision to make the proposal himself.

Jonathan Grella, a DeLay spokesman, said DeLay still believed it was legitimate to allow a leader to retain his post while under indictment. But Grella said that by reinstating the rule that he step aside, DeLay was "denying the Democrats their lone issue. Anything that could undermine our agenda needs to be nipped in the bud."

Grella said Republicans did not know that DeLay would make the proposal. "He was doing some thinking and this was the conclusion he came to," the spokesman said.

Hastert made the proposal to retain the current standards of conduct.

Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., said, "It's a mark of a leader to take a bullet for the team and not for the team to take a bullet for the leader. I'm very glad we decided to stick with the rules."

Hastert spokesman John Feehery said that a change in standards of conduct "would have been the right thing to do but it was becoming a distraction."

Brendan Daly, spokesman for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, said Republicans pulled back on the discipline rule because "the issue simply became too hot for them to handle."

Democrats on Monday toughened their own indictment rule. Previously, only committee chairmen were required to step aside if indicted. Now, the same rule applies to House Democratic leaders.

[...]

Congressional watchdog groups joined House Democrats in opposition to a change, saying any such move would be for one purpose: to protect DeLay.

"All of this is designed to make one man truly above the law," said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said, "Tom DeLay is a poster boy for ethics problems in the House."

I like Josh Marshall's wrapup.

So the DeLay Rule is no more? After all the trouble of getting Republican bankbenchers to walk the plank in support of the thing? We've put some good bit of time into putting together our gallery of DeLay Rule Letter-Writer letters to constituents with all their mannered and far-fetched explanations for why they voted for the thing. And now this? The rug is pulled out of under them?

Oh the humanity ...

(Several editorial links courtesy of The Daily DeLay.)

UPDATE: Here's the Chron story, plus coverage from the NYT and WaPo.

Dave Barry is signing off for a year or more as the Miami Herald's weekly humor columnist. Whether you think he "used to be funnier" or not - personally, I think his material is a bit familiar, but he himself is about as funny as ever - he has certainly earned the break. I hope he'll pop up from time to time during his sabbatical when the muse strikes him - it appears that his blog is still active - because he really is one of the best writers around. But if this is his swan song, then all I can say is "We who laugh at exploding toilets and falling cows salute you". Thanks to Matt for the reminder.

Due to be sworn in to the 79th Legislature in two days but with an electoral challenge still hanging over his head, Hubert Vo talks about how he got here.

Vo worked as a busboy and a cook. He assembled digital watches and video games. He was robbed more times than he cares to remember as a convenience store clerk. He went door to door updating listings for telephone books. He's been a steelworker and a goldsmith, built computers and formed a computer company. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Houston, where he met his wife. And they're raising three children.

He got into real estate, built shopping centers, manages apartment complexes and even earned a license as an air-conditioning technician.

"I worked at different places, getting understanding of a worker, of a manager, of a supervisor," Vo said. "From the ground up, I have that hands-on knowledge, different classes of society. Hopefully I can understand the people of my district better than anybody else, because I've been through all those things myself."

In war-ravaged Vietnam, where his father worked for the Vietnamese navy and coast guard and had ties to the CIA, Vo was a freshman in college studying economics and politics when their world imploded.

His father brought home word they'd have to leave.

They boarded a boat to the Philippines, then went to a resettlement camp in Little Rock, Ark., which they chose over California (too expensive) and Pennsylvania (too cold). He and his family were adopted by a church congregation in Palestine in East Texas, moved to Lubbock in 1976 and to Houston a year later. His father had learned through a friend that Houston would be a good place to settle, crowded like Saigon and full of opportunity.

Wow. How big a persecution complex do you have to have to do this?

Kimberly adds quite a bit to my post yesterday on Gregg Phillips and his self-enriching tendencies. She's got a lot of good insight there, so check it out.

Something I want to clarify: I thought the story that RG Ratcliffe wrote was a very good one, and for sure it's not one that could have been written in June of 2003. My point was that while couldn't know at that time for sure what Phillips was going to do as the HHS boss, we did know what he had done in basically the same job in Mississippi. That quote Ratcliffe used about "the appearance of impropriety" was known in 2003. I spoke to Chron reporter Polly Ross Hughes, who had written the original piece on Phillips, on the phone about it, and sent her the relevant links via email. My complaint is that this aspect of Phillips' record was known at the time, but not reported on. As such, however good a job Ratcliffe did in this Sunday's story, it feels like locking the barn after the horse was stolen to me.

Am I being churlish? Maybe. But I really feel annoyed when it seems clear to me that a few minutes with Google could have produced a better story.

You know, I'm not actually sure whether the new TV show about the psychic who fights crime will have a higher gobbledygook quotient than the new TV show about the mathematician who fights crime, but doesn't it just give you a warm fuzzy to know that there's finally a show that portrays the psychic community in a positive light?

Laurie McQuary of Lake Oswego, Ore., appreciates Court TV's approach to featuring the psychic as another investigation tool. "It's being presented as not only credible, but also accepted by law enforcement," she said. McQuary is often featured on Court TV's Psychic Detectives, and tonight's episode, "Hollywood Mystery," details her work on a Los Angeles case of a missing model. She has made 61 TV appearances, and after her last chat with Larry King, her workload tripled.

"I am absolutely ecstatic every time I find a missing person, or if I even make a confirmation in a case and where I know I made a difference."

DuBois, the woman upon whom Medium is based, seems pleased with the NBC series because it helps break the stereotype that psychics are nutty.

"The story rings true to my life and how I experience it," she said. "The best part is that other people will be able to have a glimpse at my life from my perspective. Hopefully it will help people to relate to what I do and that there really is another side after we leave this world."

• An increased coupling of western medicine and holistic treatments will begin eradicating many forms of cancer.
• Osama Bin Laden will be found dead and much of the terrorist movement will disintegrate.
• U.S. fighting in Iraq will continue all through 2005.
• Discovering that Iran does have nuclear weapons and is developing biological and chemical weapons, the U.S. is likely to begin military operations there.
• Boxer Muhammad Ali and Monaco's Prince Rainier III will die.
• Several hurricanes will hit Florida, but with less damage than in 2004. Texas will not see any hurricanes, but will see heavy summer rains.
• Moderate earthquakes will shake California in January or February, and a level 3 quake will shake up Los Angeles in the spring.
• The stock market will get stronger, especially in energy fields. Interest rates will rise.

UPDATE: For what it's worth, leading psychicbusiness columnist Shannon Buggs thinks the picture is a bit murkier for energy stocks in 2005.

Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, has died at the age of 80.

"She was our Moses that opened the Red Sea for us," Robert E. Williams, president of the NAACP in Flagler County, told the Associated Press late Sunday. He did not have the details of her death.

Chisholm, who was raised in a black New York City neighborhood and was elected to the U.S. House in 1968, was a riveting speaker who criticized Congress as being too clubby and unresponsive.

"My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn't always discuss for reasons of political expediency," she told voters.

She went to Congress the same year Richard Nixon was elected to the White House and served until two years into Ronald Reagan's tenure as president.

Newly elected, she was assigned to the House Agriculture Committee, which she felt was irrelevant to her urban constituency. In an unheard-of move, she demanded reassignment and got switched to the Veterans Affairs Committee.

Not long afterward she voted for Hale Boggs, who was white, over John Conyers, who was black, for majority leader. Boggs rewarded her with a place on the prized Education and Labor Committee, and she was its third-ranking member when she left.

She ran for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1972. When rival candidate and ideological opposite George Wallace was shot, she visited him in the hospital — an act that appalled her followers.

And when she needed support to extend the minimum wage to domestic workers two years later, it was Wallace who got her the votes from Southern members of Congress.

Pragmatism and power were watchwords. "Women have learned to flex their political muscles. You got to flex that muscle to get what you want," she said during her presidential campaign.

In her book, Unbought and Unbossed, she recounted the campaign that brought her to Congress and wrote of her concerns about that body: "Our representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men."

Her leadership traits were recognized by her parents early on, she said. Born Shirley St. Hill in New York City on Nov. 30, 1924, she was the eldest of four daughters of a Guyanese father and a Barbadian mother.

She was married twice. Her 1949 marriage to Conrad Chisholm ended in divorce in February 1977. Later that year she married Arthur Hardwick, Jr. She had no children.

Once discussing what her legacy might be, she said, "I'd like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That's how I'd like to be remembered."

More sad news from California as Rep. Bob Matsui passed away over the weekend.

Matsui, 63, died Saturday night at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., outside Washington.

Matsui was the third-ranking Democrat on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, where he was his party's point man on Social Security legislation. He also recently chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

His office said the congressman had been diagnosed several months ago with myelodysplastic disorder, an often-fatal form of bone marrow cancer. The congressman's family said he entered the hospital on Dec. 24 with pneumonia.

[...]

Matsui was born in 1941. The following year, his family was among the Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. Decades later, he helped pass legislation apologizing for the internment policy and providing compensation for the survivors.

"True believers in the freedom and justice of the American system, many internees simply could not believe that their country could do this to them," Matsui said in a 1988 speech to the House. "My own father could not even talk about his experience in the Tule Lake Internment Camp until 40 years after his freedom was returned to him."

An attorney, Matsui became a Sacramento City Council member in 1971 and was elected to represent the capital area's solidly Democratic 5th Congressional District in 1978.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will call a special election to fill Matsui's seat. Analysts said Matsui's successor will almost certainly be a Democrat, most likely a member of the Sacramento City Council or state lawmaker.

So we do get a first baby of the year story after all.

Nearly 30 years ago Maria Ramon missed being a New Year's Day baby by two days.

On Saturday, with her third child, she did not miss. Omar Salgado, born at 1:38 a.m. Saturday, was the first baby born at a major hospital in Houston in 2005.

A big boy, Omar measured 20 inches and weighed 8 pounds and 6 ounces when he was announced into the world at Ben Taub Hospital.

"I'm just happy that he was born healthy," Ramon, 28, said Saturday morning through a translator. "That he was born on the first day of the year, that is just as well."

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison doesn't attack Governor Perry in her op-ed piece on restoring CHIP funds. She doesn't even mention him. She didn't have to. Look at this quote:

CHIP requires cooperation between the state and federal government. In 2005, for example, for every dollar the state puts into CHIP, the federal government will provide $2.65 in matching funds. (This program is particularly beneficial to state health systems, because the match is greater than Medicaid. For every state Medicaid dollar, the federal government supplies $1.56.)

I'm concerned that, despite the best efforts of our congressional delegation, Texas has not maximized its use of CHIP to support our state health care system. Since 2000, Texas has turned back about $700 million in unused federal funds to the U.S. Treasury, and those funds are now being used by other states, to help their working families pay for health insurance. In the recently ended fiscal year, the Congressional Research Service estimates Texas turned back more than $50 million in unused federal funds.

This money should be used to assist our county hospitals and the property taxpayers who fund them. Dr. Ray Perryman, an economist, has concluded that whenever Texas fails to take full advantage of Medicaid and CHIP, the state's economy is weakened. For every state dollar removed from these plans, he notes, local taxes must rise by 51 cents, insurance premiums on those with coverage must rise by about $1.33, and retail sales decline by almost two dollars. Perryman suggests the state treasury is also an ultimate loser, because the decreased economic activity causes a drop in state tax revenue.

As a matter of simple fiscal conservatism, I hope Texas will, in the future, take full advantage of available federal matching funds to bolster our state health care system, and relieve increasing pressure on taxpayers who fund county hospitals. CHIP, given the available federal match, makes sense for our children's health and economic sense for our taxpayers.

UPDATE: Greg suggests what the Democratic response to KBH should be.

The Chron has a long and detailed story about the tenure of former Health and Human Services Director Gregg Phillips, who was responsible for overseeing the transition of much HHS work to private firms. Phillips, who helped write the infamous HB 2292 which legislated the HHS changes, had connections to some of the firms that stood to gain multimillion dollar contracts from the state.

When Deputy Health and Human Services Commissioner Gregg Phillips and private consultant Chris Britton helped write the $1 billion legislation to privatize Texas' human services system, they apparently did so partly with an eye on profit — their own.

A Houston Chronicle investigation into the activities of Britton, Phillips and Texas Workforce Commission Executive Director Larry Temple found weaknesses in Texas ethics laws concerning conflicts of interests and cronyism. Their relationships and how they benefited from state business illustrate how Texas law has overlooked the power of lower-level bureaucrats who are often charged with crafting laws.

Current laws force state agency chiefs to disclose their financial interests but do not apply to their subordinates.

And a private consultant such as Britton can help write a state law, then try to profit from it without being subject to either the state's lobby-registration laws or revolving-door prohibitions.

The investigation found that:

•Britton's company joined with one founded by Phillips to get a $670,000 state contract in January 2004 from the Workforce Commission, a state agency run by Temple, one of Phillips' longtime friends.
•Phillips once headed the human services system in Mississippi, where legislators criticized him for giving a major state contract to a company, then going to work for the firm. In Texas, Phillips played a role in a major state contract going to another former employer in 2003.
•Phillips also apparently helped a business partner, Paige Harkins, get work advising companies on how to win Texas human services privatization contracts that he could influence. On at least one occasion, records indicate Harkins set up a meeting between Phillips and potential state vendors.
•Britton's consulting company explored bidding on state contracts that were mandated by legislation primarily drafted by himself and Phillips during the 2003 Legislature.

But Phillips left as the head of the Mississippi Department of Human Services in 1995 under fire from the Legislature for his management of the state welfare programs. Lawmakers later that year accused him of ethics violations.

As human services director, Phillips had given an $875,000 state contract to a company that he went to work for when he left state government.

"Mr. Phillips' actions create the appearance of impropriety, facilitating an erosion of the public trust," said the Mississippi Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review.

How much business will Enterject, Inc. receive as a result of [the proposed changes to HHS]?

Does Gregg Phillips still have any role with Enterject, Inc.?

Will he immediately start working for Enterject when he eventually leaves his current position?

Is there anyone out there who thinks this is a conflict of interest?

Why does't anyone know about this?

More on Gregg Phillips can be found here, here, here, and here.

Texas Democratic Party Chair Charles Soechting left the following comment in my post on his statement about Talmadge Heflin. I still disagree with him on this, but as that post is a couple of days old, I wanted to make sure folks got to see what he had to say:

Charles, I have been out of town for a few days but saw your post when I got back. First, as I read history and how it affected America in the 50's, guys like McCarthy got a free pass because people didn't call their hand when they made false, baseless accusations. In the meantime in addition to the hundreds of lives that were destroyed by this kind of Tom DeLay sponsored hate, our country suffered until courageous men and women stood up and fought back. I had the honor of meeting and coming to know John Henry Faulk extremely well in the late 60's and into the 70's. He was one who stood strong and fought back. I know that were he alive today he would be telling me " You get 'em Charlie and you keep telling the world what a bunch of crooks they are." Charles, Andy Taylor's actions do remind me of Joe McCarthy and all of the evil that went with him. Rather than tone my views down, I will do a better job making sure that everyone knows where the Texas Democratic Party and it's Chair stand on the important issues affecting this state and country.

I think this is the first article I've read about babies born at this time of year that talks about the tax advantages of December babies.

In the final days of 2004, Houston delivery rooms were filled with parents fawning over their new bundles of joy and counting the small bundles of cash they won't have to send to Uncle Sam in April.

By delivering before today, these parents qualify for a $1,000 federal income tax credit, and $3,100 of their earnings are exempt from taxes.

Most of the pre-Jan. 1 births resulted from good timing, doctors say. But some parents weren't bashful about asking for a little extra help in beating the deadline.

"There is some pressure exerted to try to have the baby before the end of the year ... to get the tax break," said Dr. Geoffrey Schnider.

Schnider said he's usually willing to accommodate, as long as it's safe.

"So-called 'social' inductions are done if the cervix is, quote, 'ripe,' but we never do it if there is any potential danger to the baby or mom," he said.

As a result, hospital maternity wards tend to get busier in the final days of the year, Schnider said.

"There is a flurry in the elective Caesarean sections," he said. "I think I have two patients left for this month, one who's on her way in right now."

New Year, same old stories.

Months before a construction company won a multibillion-dollar road deal in Texas, a man who had worked for the company before becoming a top aide to Gov. Rick Perry met at least five times with state transportation officials on behalf of the Spanish company, state records show.

Dan Shelley, who is now the governor's legislative director, declined to comment on the meetings.

The meetings were documented in visitor sign-in sheets at the Transportation Department's Austin headquarters.

State Transportation Commission Chairman Ric Williamson, a Perry appointee, previously said that he recalled only one meeting with Shelley on behalf of Cintra. He said the other meetings were with department staffers.

He distinguished between meetings that Shelley had with department staff who recommended Cintra and the final decision-makers on the Texas Transportation Commission..

A spokesman for Perry said Shelley's activities did not constitute lobbying, and he reiterated that Shelley and the rest of the governor's staff had no role in the awarding of the $7.2 billion contract.

Happy New Year everyone! Among other things, today marks my third anniversary as a blogger. I've seen better political years than 2004, but it was pretty darned good to me personally, and I wish that same kind of success and happiness to everyone out there.