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October, 2014:

Friday random ten: It must be Halloween

I know I’m in the late stages of a recurring theme for Friday Random Tens, but how can I not break out of it when Halloween falls on a Friday?

1. Creepy Doll – Jonathan Coulton
2. Scarecrow – Steeleye Span
3. Frightened – Easter Island
4. Monster – Lady GaGa
5. Skeleton Man – Evangelicals
6. Voodoo Chile – Stevie Ray Vaughan
7. Ghosts – ON AN ON
8. Spiders And Snakes – Jim Stafford
9. Vampires – Fastball
10. The Candyman – Nevada Newman

I’ve done this twice before, and I’m happy to say that I’ve managed to avoid repeating any songs as I’ve repeated the theme. I’ll need to wait a couple of years before I do this again to ensure I can still say that the next time. Happy trick or treating, y’all.

2014 Day 11 Early Vote totals

But first, a little Republican angst.

EarlyVoting

The Republican Party of Bexar County has issued a series of desperate pleas to conservative voters, saying “the Democrats are beating us on base turnout,” but two of the Texas party’s biggest names converged on San Antonio to get any complacent GOP voters off their couches.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott rallied supporters on Wednesday at Alamo Café, echoing concerns of local GOP leaders that loyalists who usually vote early aren’t all doing so.

“It’s a risk when people feel you’re going to win. They feel ‘why bother?’ That’s why events like this are so important, to encourage people to vote,” Cornyn said.

“We noticed that our base is sagging a bit,” said Bexar County GOP Chairman Robert Stovall.

“For the first time, I hope Republicans are right,” quipped his Democratic counterpart, Manuel Medina.

Both parties are armed with overnight data from early voting that ends Friday. While Republicans are anxious about their turnout numbers, Democrats are buoyed by theirs.

I have no insight into Bexar County, and it’s often difficult to distinguish between truth and bluff in this kind of story, but I like the sound of this anyway. It is credible to me that Bexar could be overperforming thanks to the presence of Leticia Van de Putte, as Tarrant appears to be doing for Wendy Davis and Harris did in 2010 for Bill White. Be that as it may, I think we can take this at face value.

And then there’s this from the Quorum Report, via email from the Davis campaign:

As we’ve said from time to time at Buzz Central, if Texas is a battleground, Harris County is ground zero. Perhaps never before has that seemed so true. Conservative activists, including the local GOP’s new and old leadership, are said to be waging all-out war to try to keep Sen. Wendy Davis’ performance in Harris County from affecting their down ballot candidates. There has been much grumbling in recent weeks from local Republican judicial candidates who feel that not enough has been done to turn out the GOP vote.

Longtime conservative activist and donor Dr. Steve Hotze – a major financial contributor to Sen.Dan Patrick – recently sent out mailers and emails pleading for Christian conservatives to get out the vote.

In offering what he called a “Contract with Texas,” Hotze said “Republicans are in trouble in Harris County. For the first time in over two decades the Democrats have matched the Republicans in Early Ballots by Mail which Republicans historically have led by a 2 to 1 margin.”

Hotze went on to explain that he’s seen polling that shows Attorney General Greg Abbott running behind Sen. Davis by just 1 percent in Harris County. Some reliable sources tell QR they have seen similar polling.

“This adversely affects the down ballot races,” Hotze wrote. “Republican District Attorney Devon Anderson is in a dead heat with Democrat challenger Kim Ogg,” he said.

“The Republican judges are running neck in neck with the liberal Democrat judicial candidates. Obama’s Battleground Texashas registered over 1,000,000 new voters in Texas.”

And with that, here are your Day 11 EV totals, and here are the full 2010 EV totals. In this case, skepticism is warranted. The evidence we have is that Republicans have an eight or nine point lead, which is smaller than what they’re used to for off year elections, but still nothing to sneeze at. Whatever the polls say – the KHOU poll is the only Harris County-specific public data of which I am aware – the actual vote rosters tell us more. The good news, from the Dem perspective, is that we have more base voters left to motivate. The bad news is that there ain’t much time left to do that, and I’m not sure anyone knows why the numbers haven’t been higher. But hey, at least you know that we’re not the only ones that have been sweating.

McClelland wants more money for more cops

And I want some answers before we go along with this request.

Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland asked city leaders Tuesday for an additional $105 million over five years to hire hundreds of new officers as part of a plan to shore up divisions where thousands of crimes are never investigated and bolster traffic enforcement as automobile collisions citywide are rising.

McClelland’s request comes as Mayor Annise Parker is searching for cuts to address an estimated $120 million budget deficit for the fiscal year that begins next July 1. Rising pension and debt costs, along with a voter-approved cap on city revenues, are fueling the city’s looming budget problems.

Executive assistant chief Timothy Oettmeier said HPD is proposing hiring 540 additional officers over the next five years, part of a 10-year plan to add 1,200 officers to investigative and patrol divisions. The staff increase would include new officers and hiring civilians to free up officers for field work.

Oettmeier said HPD was “enormously sensitive” to the budget situation and is using the hiring plan as a way to start a discussion. “What we’re simply saying is we need additional personnel, but given the current economic climate, can we sit down and figure out how to proceed at a time that’s appropriate for everybody,” Oettmeier said.

[…]

This summer, two independent police research groups hired to analyze HPD’s staffing noted that the department’s division commanders reported they had more than 20,000 crimes with workable leads that were not investigated due to a lack of manpower. That figure included burglaries and thefts, hit-and-run crashes and assaults.

Crime statistics provided to the committee showed HPD’s clearance rate for theft, burglary and auto theft was 11 percent last year.

[Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union] blamed a 44 percent clearance rate for rapes on low staffing, adding that HPD has seven detectives working adult sex crimes, compared to 15 deployed by the Austin Police Department.

“There’s no question that we’re struggling in some of the investigative divisions,” Oettmeier said, responding to the union.

I’ve expressed my opinion on that no-investigations report before, and the questions I raised then have not been addressed, as far as I know. I am not willing to spend more money on hiring officers until we get some answers to how well HPD uses the budget and resources it has now. We may well need to hire more officers, and to increase the pay we offer to them. I’m perfectly willing to accept that possibility, and the possibility that we will need to spend more money on police, but I am not willing to accept anyone’s word for it. Show me how HPD has performed in comparison to its own recent past and to other large city police forces, and then we can talk staffing levels. I don’t think I’m asking for too much here.

The Fifth Circuit is in no hurry to rule on same sex marriage

Such a show of courage on their part.

RedEquality

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals tentatively has scheduled oral arguments in the Texas and Louisiana gay marriage cases for early January, disappointing local advocates and possibly delaying until 2016 a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Texas gay marriage advocates were disappointed with the Monday announcement. The New Orleans-based appeals court had earlier agreed to expedite the hearing, and the appellees hoped oral arguments would be scheduled before the New Year.

“This doesn’t look like a very expedited schedule to me. But justice can’t come soon enough,” said Daniel McNeel “Neel” Lane, an attorney for the two same-sex couples challenging Texas’ ban on gay marriage. U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia of San Antonio struck down the 2005 ban in February, saying it violated couples’ 14th Amendment rights to due process and equal protection.

Nicole Dimetman and her wife Cleopatra DeLeon, one couple on the appeal, are expecting the birth of their second child in March. They had requested an expedited hearing in the hopes the legal process would be completed, or at least further along, at that time.

“I may have to miss the argument in January because I will be in my third trimester and may not be able to travel,” Dimetman said. “That is sad for Cleo and me and for everyone else who is waiting for the Fifth Circuit to recognize our right to marry.”

[…]

Many agree a circuit court split of this kind is most likely to occur in the Fifth or Sixth Circuits, seen as the two most conservative appeals courts in the country. Oral arguments in the Sixth Circuit have already taken place, and a federal judge in Louisiana became the first to uphold a state’s same-sex marriage ban in September.

“I think the safest thing to say is the Supreme Court is waiting for a clear circuit split…and these cases raise that very significant possibility, said Kyle Duncan, special counsel the state of Louisiana has hired to handle the challenge to its gay marriage ban. “They were already extremely important cases and now even more so,” Duncan said, adding he also thought the hearing would have been scheduled a little sooner.

But unless the Ohio-based Sixth Circuit upholds a state ban soon, the Fifth Circuit may not rule on the Texas and Louisiana cases until after the current Supreme Court term ends in June, said University of Richmond School of Law Professor Carl Tobias. This would push back any hearing by the high court justices until the 2015 term, which starts in October, thus delaying an ultimate decision until 2016.

See here and here for the background. I’m going to play the contrarian card here and suggest that the logical explanation here is that the Fifth Circuit knows full well there’s no rational argument for upholding Texas’ ban on same-sex marriage. It’s just that they don’t want to uphold the lower court either. So, they delay, figuring it maintains the status quo as long as possible without making them look like complete idiots. Anyone got a better crazy theory than that? Lone Star Q has more.

Endorsement watch: Juvenile courts

I had thought we were at the end of the line for endorsements, but not quite yet.

Natalia Cokinos Oakes

314th Juvenile District Court: Natalia Oakes

Democratic candidate Natalia Oakes has dedicated her career to helping children, and voters should put that passion to use on the bench. Oakes, a graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, has practiced in Harris County family courts for 14 years. Before becoming a lawyer, Oakes worked as a teacher, giving her a solid background for communicating with children and their parents in distress. She told the Chronicle editorial board that she is running for judge to “have the power to introduce new and innovative programs” to the juvenile courts. She would like to see more emphasis on tracking offenders to determine the effectiveness of different rehabilitation programs. Her goals are laudable and her background promising, but her opponent is the tipping point.

Republican incumbent Judge John F. Phillips has served in the 314th since 2002. Despite recognized capabilities, Phillips has earned a reputation for cronyism and heavy handedness. He has been noted for assigning former law partners and campaign contributors as court-appointed attorneys. Phillips also has been criticized for abusing his discretion in separating an abandoned 12-year-old rape victim from her child. We wanted to hear Phillips’ side, but he refused to meet with the editorial board.

Despite her lack of judicial experience, we think the 314th needs a change and that Natalia Oakes will be a capable new judge.

I should note that the Chron endorsed Cokinos Oakes in 2010 for the then-open 313th Juvenile Court. I don’t think she got any less experienced since then. Be that as it may, the Chronicle didn’t mention that the criticism they cite of the incumbent judge in this race comes courtesy of their own Lisa Falkenberg. Falkenberg gives us a reminder of Judge Phillips’ rap sheet.

In recent days, readers have contacted me, some of them apparently on their way to vote early, asking variations of the same question: “What was the name of that judge who took away Angela’s baby?”

By now, all you readers should know his name by heart. But as a frequent sufferer of name-recall syndrome myself, I don’t mind answering.

He is state district Judge John Phillips, a Republican elected to the 314th district court in 2002. After his Republican primary opponent was excluded from the ballot, apparently on a technicality, Phillips was left to face Democrat Natalia Oakes, a juvenile law attorney and former teacher.

In a recent Houston Bar Association poll, Oakes bested Phillips 400-348 – not a huge lead for Oakes but a significant shortcoming for Phillips, a Republican on the bench for more than a decade who holds an administrative position in juvenile courts.

Recently, I asked a reader who votes overwhelmingly Republican and often disagrees with my stances on social issues what kept her from voting straight ticket.

“Well, because there’s always a few,” she said with a laugh. “There’s just always a few.”

She listed Phillips among the few.

[…]

In 2008, I wrote about how the judge ordered two children, aged 1 and 2, from the home of their LaPorte grandparents, who had raised them since infancy, and placed with strangers in a foster home. In a hearing terminating the rights of the parents over drug abuse, Phillips refused to let the grandparents intervene, apparently because he deemed the couple, both in their 50s, too old.

Phillips said the boys would need guidance into their 20s and “the stark reality is there’s a very good chance” their grandparents “will be dead at that time.'”

More recently, a series of columns on 12-year-old rape victim “Angela” gained wide attention from readers. Angela, abandoned by both parents after she became pregnant, was placed in CPS custody. The girl, who had every reason to resent the life inside her, embraced pregnancy, decided on breastfeeding, and even bonded with a Rosharon relative of her foster mother who agreed to provide a loving, stable home for her and her baby.

But when Phillips got wind the Rosharon family was caring for the newborn, he demanded that child protective officials transfer the baby to a foster home in Montgomery County where Angela wouldn’t have access to her.

Phillips told Angela bluntly in court: “You and your baby are not going to be together.”

His reasons had nothing to do with the law. State law only allows children to be taken from parents if there’s evidence of abuse or neglect – neither of which was ever alleged against the young mother.

Phillips was ready to throw Angela away as damaged goods, and he might well have succeeded, if not for attorney Thuy Le, who fought to represent the girl and eventually prevailed in getting a new judge to reunite Angela and her baby.

He also likes to post juvenile crap on Facebook, and he didn’t like the Public Defenders Office, but there’s enough to question his fitness to be a judge without that. Cokinos Oakes did not send me Q&A responses this year but she did so in 2010, and you can see that here. I did get responses from Tracy Good, the Democrat running for the 313th Juvenile Court, and those are here. We’ll see if there is any Falkenberg Effect in this race.

2014 Day 10 Early Vote totals

EarlyVoting

Here they are, and here are the full 2010 EV totals. The debate about what the turnout numbers mean continues apace. You already know what I think about that, so let me introduce a different perspective. We’ve been talking about these numbers mostly in the context of 2010. I’ve been saying that’s at least somewhat misleading since so much of the early voting explosion that year came from Republicans. I thought it might be useful to look back at previous to see how Democrats in Harris County performed in them, since as I’ve been saying it’s as much about who turns out as it is how many of them there are. To that end, here are the actual absentee plus in-person early voting numbers for the Land Commissioner race for 2002, 2006, and 2010, taken from harrisvotes.com:

Year Candidate Mail Early Total Pct RvD ======================================================== 2002 Patterson 22,114 79,879 101,993 56.1 58.0 2002 Bernsen 12,607 61,003 73,710 40.6 42.0 2002 Others 634 5,374 6,008 3.3 2006 Patterson 13,640 88,517 102,157 55.2 56.8 2006 Hathcox 7,945 69,703 77,648 42.0 43.2 2006 Others 477 4,629 5,106 2.8 2010 Patterson 36,216 221,145 257,361 59.2 60.3 2010 Uribe 16,450 152,832 169,288 39.0 39.7 2010 Others 733 7,098 7,831 1.8

“RvD” is the straight R versus D percentage. I have used the Railroad Commissioner race for similar purposes in the past; I had no specific reason for using the Land Commish race here, I figure they both recapitulate partisan participation reasonably well. Greg had the R/D number at 54.5/45.5 through Monday. However you feel about the numbers so far, they are better than what we have done in elections past. Does that mean they are as good as they could be? Is this where I thought we’d be as of today? No and no. But it is better than what we have done in past non-Presidential elections, assuming we don’t do any worse till the end of the week. We’ll see how it goes from here.

Parker orders withdrawal of pastor subpoenas

They got what they wanted.

Mayor Annise Parker

Mayor Annise Parker

With local pastors standing with her, Mayor Annise Parker has told the City Legal Department to withdraw the subpoenas filed against five local pastors who have identified themselves as the leaders of the petition drive to repeal the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO).

“This is an issue that has weighed heavily on my mind for the last two weeks,” said Mayor Parker. “Protecting the HERO from being repealed is important to Houston, but I also understand the concerns of the religious community regarding the subpoenas. After two meetings yesterday, I decided that withdrawing the subpoenas is the right thing to do. It addresses the concerns of ministers across the country who viewed the move as overreaching. It is also the right move for our city.

In a breakfast meeting yesterday, Mayor Parker met with local Pastors Rudy Rasmus, Jim Herrington and Chris Seay. She had a second meeting later in the day with National Clergy Council President Rob Schenck, Reverend Pat Mahoney of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Pastor Myle Crowder from Utah, Pastor David Anderson from Florida, Pastor Sean Sloan from Arkansas and two others.

“These pastors came to me for civil discussions about the issues,” said Parker. They came without political agendas, without hate in their hearts and without any desire to debate the merits of the HERO. They simply wanted to express their passionate and very sincere concerns about the subpoenas. The second meeting group wasn’t from Houston, but they took the Houston approach of civil discourse in presenting their case. We gained an understanding of each other’s positions.”

Thousands of the signatures submitted with the HERO petition failed to meet one or more of the requirements mandated by the City Charter and had to be disregarded. As a result, the petition was not placed on the ballot for voter consideration. HERO opponents have filed suit against the city in an effort to reverse this decision and force the issue to a vote.

Mayor Parker reiterated that this has always been about proving that the petition process used by the five pastors who identified themselves as the organizers of the effort did not meet the requirements of the City Charter. “That got lost in the national debate over the subpoenas,” said Parker. “Today’s move refocuses the discussion and allows us to move forward.”

The lawsuit is scheduled for trial in January.

There was a story in the paper on Tuesday about the meeting Mayor Parker had with these visiting preachers. I didn’t see any evidence of good faith on their part, but I suppose the Mayor did. When I saw this press release my first reaction was that it would not buy any goodwill from the HERO haters. I was right.

The move is in the best interest of Houston, she said, and is not an admission that the requests were in any way illegal or intruded on religious liberties. “I didn’t do this to satisfy them,” Parker said of critics. “I did it because it was not serving Houston.”

Regardless, the mayor’s critics were not quieted. Grace Community Church pastor Steve Riggle, who was among the subpoenaed pastors, said, “If the mayor thought the subpoenas were wrong, she would have pulled them immediately, not waited until she was forced to by national outrage.”

[…]

The plaintiffs’ attorney, Andy Taylor, called Parker’s announcement a “head fake,” and challenged her to not only pull down the subpoenas, but to drop the city’s defense of the lawsuit and put the ordinance to a vote.

“The truth is, she’s using this litigation to try to squelch the voting rights of over a million well-intentioned voters here in the city of Houston,” Taylor said. “It’s very simple why we filed a lawsuit: Because they won’t do what the city constitutional charter requires them to do.”

Plaintiff and conservative activist Jared Woodfill said he was glad the subpoenas were dropped, but he and others said a planned protest rally Sunday at Riggle’s church will proceed.

Quelle surprise. I personally would have said that if you want the subpoenas dropped, there’s an easy way to make that happen: Drop the lawsuit to force a referendum to repeal the Equal Rights Ordinance. No lawsuit, no need for subpoenas of any kind. Instead, I’ll make a prediction that not only will this unilateral action fail to satisfy the bigots, it won’t stop them from claiming that Mayor Parker is continuing to oppress them even though they got exactly what they were demanding. What will you bet that at least one speaker at that rally says something like that? Or that nobody bothers to tell those people sending all those bibles that they can stop now? Why let an inconvenient fact ruin a good victimization tale, especially one with such good fundraising potential? Yeah, I’m not thrilled with this decision – I’d at least have told the preachers to read David Gushee’s new book first – but it is what it is. For everyone else, let me recommend LGBT Positive Impact Day as an appropriate way to respond. Lone Star Q and Hair Balls have more.

Endorsement watch: County civil courts

I believe we are finally at the end of the endorsements line. Last to the table are thecounty civil courts, where in a slight change of pace the Democratic challengers were recommended in two out of three contested races:

Civil Court of Law No. 3: Gloria Cantu Minnick

A graduate of South Texas College of Law, Democratic candidate Gloria Cantu Minnick, 69, would bring not only trial experience but sorely needed management skills to this bench with a docket that has grown too long.

Minnick has served as assistant city attorney and senior assistant director for the Public Works and Engineering Department. Republican incumbent Judge Linda Storey has served on the bench since 2006. Also a graduate of South Texas College of Law, Storey, 46, told the Chronicle editorial board that she believed in the election process for judges.

In this case, voters need to vote for a change and support Minnick for this bench.

Civil Court of Law No. 4: Damon Crenshaw

Democratic candidate Damon Crenshaw, 55, is campaigning on the promise to make this court run more efficiently. A graduate of South Texas School of Law, Crenshaw has over 25 years of legal experience.

We agree that it’s time for a change. His opponent, Republican incumbent Judge Roberta Lloyd, received her law degree from Stetson University College of Law and an L.L.M. in taxation from the University of Miami. Her work in animal cruelty resulted in weekly appearances on the television show “Animal Cops-Houston” for several years. Lloyd, 59, has a reputation for being hard to work with on the bench. When you’re a judge, it’s not just about being right, but about how you manage your courtroom. Lloyd has served on this bench since 2004; it’s time for fresh ideas and a new energy.

As has been the norm, the Chron had some nice things to say about the Dem challenger they didn’t endorse, Scot Dollinger, whose Q&A you can see here. I don’t know how much these endorsements matter in the end, and I certainly didn’t agree with all of their choices, but kudos to the Chron for making the effort on all these races. There are a lot of them, and not a lot of sources for voters to learn about the candidates – the endorsements, the League of Women Voters Guide, the HBA Judicial Preference poll, and the various Q&As done by myself, Texpatriate, and Texas Leftist. I hope you feel you had enough information to make sound decisions.

Texas blog roundup for the week of October 27

The Texas Progressive Alliance says VOTE VOTE VOTE as it brings you this week’s roundup.

(more…)

2014 Day Nine EV totals

Here they are, and here are the full 2010 EV totals. I don’t have it in me to do any analysis, so let me refer you to Greg for the lay of the land. Monday wasn’t as good as I had thought it was, though it was a bit better than the average day last week. Tuesday looks similar to Monday, but I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll wait till Greg does his number-crunching before I make any pronouncements.

The larger issue on voter ID

The Trib reminds us that there are bigger questions that remain to be answered in the voter ID litigation.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

The litigation on the state’s voting district maps for legislative and congressional elections is still underway, and the treatment of minority voters and their ability to elect the candidates they choose is at the center of it. A federal court in Washington found that the state had intentionally discriminated in drawing its maps for Texas House districts. That finding has been set aside, but the lawyers suing the state have raised the same issues before another set of judges. The finding could come back.

The voter ID case is infused with some of the same arguments and conclusions that have marked past redistricting and election cases, each adding another brick to the wall of evidence that led the judge in this case to her conclusion.

“This history describes not only a penchant for discrimination in Texas with respect to voting,” she wrote, “but it exhibits a recalcitrance that has persisted over generations despite the repeated intervention of the federal government and its courts on behalf of minority citizens.”

“History” is worth your attention in that sentence. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the part of the federal Voting Rights Act that put Texas and other jurisdictions with histories of discrimination under federal supervision. It required those places to get permission, or preclearance, from the Department of Justice for any changes in voting or election laws before putting those laws into effect.

With the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling, those laws take effect after they are passed, and the Justice Department can come in with other defendants, as it has done in the voter ID case, to try to overturn those laws.

The Supreme Court decision left in place a provision of the Voting Rights Act that could put a state like Texas back under the preclearance provisions — not for historical discrimination, but for current discrimination.

If the voter ID ruling by Gonzales Ramos, an Obama appointee and a Hispanic, stands, it leads in that direction, saying the law’s proponents were motivated at least in part “because of and not merely in spite of the voter ID law’s detrimental effects on the African-American and Hispanic electorate.”

See here, here, and here for more on the Section 3 option for preclearance. Just bear in mind that the whole reason why Texas got to go ahead and implement this discriminatory law is because preclearance under Section 5 was gutted by the Supreme Court. Bringing it back would be huge, and the plaintiffs in both lawsuits can make an argument for it. I very much look forward to the next meeting with the attorneys that Judge Ramos will hold after the election.

Elsewhere, Rick Hasen explains why the SCOTUS ruling on voter ID came down so late.

But every so often court watchers are reminded that these justices are working very hard behind the scenes by reading briefs, exchanging memos, and debating outcomes. Case in point: The justices issued an order and a dissent in a Texas voting rights case at 5 a.m. Saturday morning. Supreme Court reporters stood by all night for the ruling. The holdup apparently was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s six-page dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

[…]

Sometimes justices disagree with emergency court orders such as these and do not even bother to write a formal dissent. And recently, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has noted, the majority has not been explaining its various orders in cases from voting rights, to abortion, to same sex marriage, at all.

So why did Justice Ginsburg keep the court and court-watchers up all night for a relatively lengthy dissent from an order issued with no majority opinion? There is no way to know from the outside, but my guess is that she wanted to make an important statement about how the Supreme Court should handle these voting cases going forward and to publicly flag where she believes the court is going wrong. Like a rare oral dissent from the bench after a written opinion, this middle-of-the-night dissent calls attention to what Justice Ginsburg likely sees as a grave injustice.

Hasen pessimistically thinks that SCOTUS will eventually uphold Texas’ voter ID law. Interestingly, via the Texas Election Law Blog, one of the big cheerleaders for voter ID says there are no valid legal grounds for an appeal by the defendants, and no likelihood of the decision being overturned by an appellate court. In the Fifth Court of Appeals we trust nothing, but I sure hope he’s right.

Fort Bend’s electoral future

Fort Bend County isn’t what it used to be politically, but it’s also not what it ought to be headed for yet.

It has been more than two decades since a Democrat won countywide office in Fort Bend, but swift growth and shifting demographics are prompting the party to take a second look at the traditionally red county west of Houston and forcing Republicans to adapt.

The number of registered voters in Fort Bend has increased by a third since 2008, and non-Hispanic whites no longer comprise a majority.

The Fort Bend County Democratic Party is using digital analysis to target a narrow segment of likely liberal voters. The effort is being bolstered by paid staff from Battleground Texas, a political action committee formed to make Texas competitive for Democrats.

By fielding a candidate to oppose Fort Bend’s longtime Republican district attorney – another first – Democrats hope to test their new strategies.

Also seeking to capitalize on the area’s growth, the Fort Bend County Republican Party has opened its first field office in Katy.

“My goal is to prove that (Battleground Texas) was wasted money,” county GOP Chairman Mike Gibson said. “But am I taking it lightly? No. We’re going to run like we’re 20 points behind with an outside organization trying to influence it.”

Political analysts still place Fort Bend solidly in the GOP column, but say the margin of victory in Fort Bend elections could signal the health of the dominant Republican party and the odds of Democrats keeping their promise to turn Texas blue.

To Donald Bankston, the Fort Bend Democratic chairman, it’s inevitable that his party will regain dominance.

“There’s been a seismic shift in the demographics,” he said. “If this was a highly voting county, this county would be reliably Democratic.”

The share of the population that is non-Hispanic white shrunk from 54 percent in 1990 to 36 percent in 2013, according to Census figures. Because Latino, African-American and Asian voters tend to lean liberal, Bankston hopes to convince them to turn out at the polls as reliably as their white counterparts, giving Democrats a fighting chance.

Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said the equation for taking over Fort Bend is not so simple.

“Minority doesn’t equal Democrat,” Jones said. “Minorities on average tend to vote Democrat significantly more than Republican, but that varies notably among some groups.”

True, but not that big a factor in this case. It’s about turnout and engagement. Democrats can’t take for granted that turnout among populations friendly to them will continue to rise as their share of the overall population increases, they can’t assume that people who have been turned off by Republicans’ harsh and often racist rhetoric will necessarily flock to them, and they can’t assume that Republican rhetoric will remain that toxic forever. Republicans can’t assume that Asians and Latinos “just don’t know yet” that they’re really Republicans, and sooner or later they really are going to have to figure out how to tame the dominant but shrinking enraged nihilist faction of their party. I have considered Fort Bend to be like Harris politically, just maybe a step or two behind. FB came close to being blue in 2008, and like Harris took a bit of a step backward in 2012 when the excitement wasn’t quit as high as it had been then. In between was 2010, and the less said about that, the better. There are some good candidates running under the Fort Bend Democratic Party banner this year, but sometimes outside forces are too big for that. No matter what happens, there should be plenty of lessons to learn from this election.

Mayor Parker for pot reform

The list of people who think it’s time to talk about reforming our drug laws keeps growing.

Mayor Annise Parker

Mayor Annise Parker

Add Houston Mayor Annise Parker to the growing list of officials calling for a new approach to the nation’s drug laws, especially when it comes to marijuana.

She said as much during an interview this week with community public radio’s Dean Becker, for his Cultural Baggage Radio Show.

“I agree with you that we need a complete rethinking of the nation’s drug laws,” she told Becker, according to a transcript of the show. “We have seen over and over again that outright prohibition doesn’t work. We saw that in the 20’s when the prohibition in this country fueled the rise of organized crime.”

Becker, who broadcasts from KPFT in Houston, has made drug legalization his mission.

An audio clip of the interview is posted on this page.

The story links to this earlier Chron article about Becker’s pro-pot activities. We’ve discussed this before, and it’s worth reiterating that “reform” comes in a variety of flavors here, ranging from issuing citations for drug offenses rather than making arrests (something which has already been authorized by the Legislature but which is not in widespread practice in most Texas jurisdictions) to reducing the classification of offenses for possession of small amounts of pot to a Class C misdemeanor, to various rehab or community service alternatives to legalizing medical marijuana and finally to full-bore Colorado-and-Washington legalization. (As Hair Balls notes, the Marijuana Policy Project has a legislative agenda that includes three options like these.) Because of this, pot reform is not like same sex marriage, where you’re either all in or you’re in the way. There are plenty of places to honorably say “this is as far as I’m willing to go”, at least right now. It’s also hard to know what if anything might be doable in the 2015 Legislature, in part because it’s hard to say right now what the priorities of the leadership will be. That said, one does get a sense of inevitability for change, though the time frame is unknown, and given that one should not want to be the last person hopping aboard the bandwagon. The money people are now sniffing around the possibilities, and you know if anyone has influence with the Legislators, it’s the money people. Be that as it may, I’m glad to see Mayor Parker has arrived on this issue and is looking to be a part of the conversation about where we should be going.

2014 Day Eight EV totals

But first, a few words about the overall picture.

EarlyVoting

The number of Texans voting early at the polls is down significantly in Harris County compared with the last midterm election, a potential warning sign that pundits say may mean Democrats will suffer worse defeats than those seen in the 2010 countywide Republican sweep.

In-person turnout during the first seven days of early voting is 33 percent less than in 2010, a drop masked by a huge surge in vote-by-mail ballots that inflated the first day’s returns. Texas Democrats launched a coordinated vote-by-mail program this year to target the state’s elderly voters, and the Harris County Democratic Party supplemented that effort with its own absentee operation.

Together, the numbers of votes by mail increased by 17,000 on the first day over the last midterm election’s haul, but that increase was quickly been nullified by a daily drop of 5,000 to 8,000 in-person ballots. Vote-by-mail ballots are received and counted mostly on the first day, so it is not expected that the massive uptick seen on day 1 will repeat, while the in-person decline may persist throughout this week.

At the end of the first week, about 195,000 total votes have been cast – 13 percent less than the number at this point in 2010, when former Houston mayor Bill White ran as the Democratic candidate for governor but local Democrats still suffered heavy losses.

Democrats would need a large turnout statewide – especially in Harris County, the epicenter of Texas’ efforts to turn the state blue – to earn surprise victories on Election Day. The lower turnout could spell trouble for Democratic candidates, including Kim Ogg, the district attorney who stands as the Democrats’ best chance to win a countywide offiice this fall.

“Clearly, they’re down in the count,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “You’ve got this hidden pocket of Democratic voters that voted in 2008 that clearly aren’t deciding to show up in 2014.”

Rottinghaus noted that turnout was weak at the Acres Home and Metropolitan Multi-Service Centers, which typically are heavily Democratic.

Early voting typically increases daily during the second week, which has longer hours, and spikes on Friday, the final day. That gives Democrats a chance to reverse the trend, said Lane Lewis, the county’s Democratic Party chairman.

“The challenge that’s going on right now is our base vote,” said Lewis, “but the second week of early voting is always our strongest week, so I’m very optimistic.”

Here are the Day Eight totals and the full 2010 EV totals. No question, early voting totals are down overall, though as it happens Acres Homes had its best day yesterday while the Metro Multi-Service Center had its second best day. Actually, nearly every EV location in a Democratic State Rep district had its best day yesterday, which was not the case for the GOP SRDs. Dem turnout was similarly up on the second Monday in 2010, but so was GOP turnout.

What I’m saying, and what I have said before, is that “turnout” includes Republicans, too. What matters is who shows up. Republicans have had the best of it so far, no doubt. Dems have done better than they did in 2010, but that’s a low bar to clear, and the general consensus is about a 55-45 lead for the GOP. That said, Dems had their best day on Sunday, and yesterday looks to me like it was pretty good as well. The opportunity is there to make up some ground.

Early voting in the top 15 counties remains up overall compared to 2010, though this continues to be due to strong mail ballot numbers. The Davis campaign has argued that the vote so far has been less white than it was in 2010. The guts of their argument, from the Quorum Report via email:

In what has been a historically strong period for Republicans in early voting because of the truncated hours (8-5), the Davis team counters that 4% more African American voters have participated than in 2010 and 12% more Hispanic voters.

It is Republicans that have faded so far in this mid-term election the Davis people say. Historically, it is women, minorities and young people that vote in presidential years but then disappear two years later. Not so this time.

To bolster their argument, campaign spokesman Zac Petkanas told QR that by their analysis, 602,343 anglos had voted at this point in the anti-Obama tidal wave of 2010. In stark contrast, only 587,098 anglos had voted five days in to this election. In other words, white participation (from which Republicans derive most of their votes) had dropped by around 15,000 votes and minority participation increased by 16,000 votes.

I don’t have access to that data, but even if true that would represent a narrowing of the gap, not a closure of it. And as encouraging as that would be, it’s important to remember that the gap in 2010 was pretty fricking huge, like 25 to 30 points in the non-gubernatorial race. Cut that in half and you’re still looking at a double-digit deficit. The Trib acknowledges the issue in a way that I haven’t seen them do before.

Part of politics is persuasion — getting people who are likely to vote for a particular candidate to turn out. Another strategy is to get people who are not as likely to vote — and who, if they voted, would choose a particular candidate — to go to the polls.

That second group is the target for Democrats this year, and part of their rationale when they complain about political polls that show Republicans winning all of the statewide races. Those surveys concentrate on likely voters. If new people are voting and the pollsters do not have them in sight, the reasoning goes, the outcome on Election Day will be something other than what the pollsters and pundits are forecasting.

Whether that is the case will be clear in less than two weeks.

Ross Ramsey could easily have been giving me the side-eye as he wrote that. I would point out that pollsters have wrestled with that question as well, at least to some extent. That may be why, as I noted before, some have this as about a ten point race while others have it at sixteen or more. I’ll be keeping an eye on the Harris totals as we go to get a better feeling for that.

Lies are worse than missteps

But you know what we’re going to hear more about.

PetitionsInvalid

Conservative outrage over the Parker administration’s admittedly bungled subpoena of five pastors’ sermons last week marked just the latest episode in a messy political saga surrounding the city’s equal rights ordinance, with both critics and supporters making significant blunders.

For example, a recently leaked deposition of City Secretary Anna Russell shows she entered a meeting with Mayor Annise Parker and City Attorney David Feldman having drafted a memo saying there were enough signatures, then left agreeing to tack on a paragraph from Feldman saying the effort had failed.

Similarly, opponents of the non-discrimination ordinance have struggled to explain a video showing one of their leaders explaining the very rules the city says they violated to those who would be gathering petition signatures as the effort got underway.

“If you’re going to undertake these efforts, you want to drill people pretty carefully,” said Richard Murray, a University of Houston political science professor. “You don’t want to waste people’s time.”

For her part, Parker has handled the back-and-forth around the case “clumsily,” Murray said, pointing to the subpoena of the pastors’ sermons that drew national attention and criticism. “Usually, she shows pretty good political judgment. She let her political guard down a bit with this.”

See here, here, and here for the background. I’ll stipulate that the subpoenas should have been better, and I’ll leave the petition questions to the court. But the outrage over those subpoenas is vastly out of proportion with the magnitude of the sin committed by the city’s lawyers, and that outrage is fueled by a relentless barrage of bald-faced lies, the same kind of lies that have underpinned the opposition to the HERO from the beginning. Lies, it should be noted, that are being peddled by members of the clergy, the kind of people whose behavior might reasonably be held to a high standard. I’m not talking about exaggerations or spin or the like but provably false statements that are intended to be factual. You wouldn’t know it from most of the stories you’ll read about the HERO and the attempts to repeal it, though. I have no idea why that is.

Chron overview of DA race

There’s a simple question at the core of the race for Harris County District Attorney.

Kim Ogg

Kim Ogg

For two years, in the early 1990s, Kim Ogg and Devon Anderson worked in the same office under legendary Harris County District Attorney Johnny Holmes.

Houston at the time was in the throes of a crime spike that sent the city’s homicide numbers soaring as crack cocaine and drug-related violence were roiling cities across the nation. Harris County led the country in death penalty verdicts, cementing the reputations of Holmes and the district attorney’s office as among America’s toughest and most aggressive prosecutors.

Ogg already was a senior prosecutor when Anderson joined the office in 1992 as a “baby DA.” Though they rarely crossed paths at the time – the office employs more than 200 lawyers – the two carved out reputations as hard-charging assistant district attorneys with more than 100 prosecutions to their names.

Whatever experience they may have shared as prosecutors, the two have taken widely divergent paths since getting their starts in the office they now want to lead. And it is those differing paths that inform their ideas on how the office should be run.

[…]

Her long experience at the office is one of the reasons former district attorney Chuck Rosenthal is supporting Anderson.

“I just think she’s a better candidate and would do a better job,” he said. By working as a prosecutor, then as a judge, he said, Anderson has stayed in the courthouse and knows more about how the office should be run.

Robert Scardino, a criminal defense lawyer for more than 40 years, said he is supporting Ogg because he hopes she will modernize the office.

“I think that office needs to have a change in its entire perspective and approach,” he said. “It’s been going in the same direction for many, many years. I think she’ll bring it into the modern age with some ideas on how to make it run more efficiently.”

That last bit encapsulates what I’ve said before about this race. Putting all partisan considerations aside, if you like the way the DA’s office has been run for however long it’s been since Johnny Holmes was first elected, minus the four years that Pat Lykos was in office, then Devon Anderson is the DA for you. If you think it’s time for a change, and/or if you liked Lykos, then you should vote for Kim Ogg. That’s about all there is to it. Partisan considerations may overshadow that dynamic, in which case it may get re-litigated in 2016. If not – if Harris is close to 50-50 overall – then we’ll at least have an answer to that question.

The battle over booze sales comes to Tomball

I always enjoy a good story about when a county or town votes on whether or not to repeal Prohibition-era restrictions on local alcohol sales.

Eight decades ago, the oil started flowing in Tomball and the whiskey soon followed. The boomtown began attracting a rough and rowdy crowd, prompting the town’s leaders a few years later to pass a law prohibiting the sale of hard liquor.

Two world wars, several social revolutions and a digital age later, the statute remains on the books. Only now, residents call this part of town historic “Old Town Tomball” and count the trendy shops and restaurants where one might imagine enjoying a Margarita or a Bloody Mary, in addition to the beer and wine sales that are now permitted.

That’s why many around town are looking with anticipation to Nov. 4, when voters will have a chance to repeal the Depression-era restriction.

“We would really be only going from moist to wet. We were never completely dry,” explains Bruce Hillegeist, president of the Greater Tomball Chamber of Commerce.

[…]

Tomball garnered the nickname “Oiltown USA” as the oil started gushing in 1933, the same year that Prohibition was repealed. Saloons and brothels soon sprouted up along the railroad tracks near the train depot, residents said.

“Boys were being bad. The area was getting too wild. So the town leaders decided to take control and ban the sale of all distilled spirits except beer or wine,” Wilson said.

Both the oil boom and brothels have long since gone bust.

“I don’t think the statute ever really toned things down back then,” she said. “They probably just drank more beer.”

The town’s mayor and chamber of commerce fully support this change as another step to draw people to Old Town Tomball, which is being revitalized by the opening of quaint shops and restaurants and the restoration of historic buildings.

As it happens, Tomball is named after a prohibitionist and fervent opponent of the demon rum, Thomas Ball. That’s because Ball – a lawyer and congressman credited with being the “father” of the Port of Houston – was responsible for routing the railroad tracks through this tiny community 32 miles northwest of Houston. The citizens of the town, which was then called Peck, were so grateful for their own train depot in 1907 that they changed the town’s name to honor him.

His connection to Tomball would later thwart an attempt to be elected governor, though. His opponent, James Ferguson, obtained photos of the town that bore his name. The images showed four saloons boasting nickel beer and 10-cent shots as well as houses of ill repute doing a brisk business.

Awesome. If there’s any organized opposition to this proposal, it went unreported in the story. Some of these referenda have been pretty hotly contested, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. As I’ve said before, I don’t really understand the point of these laws and I support the efforts to repeal them. Good luck, Tomball.

2014 first week EV totals

EarlyVoting

Here they are, and here are the full 2010 EV totals. Democrats still have a lot of work to do, at least in Harris County. I sure hope it happens, that’s all I can say.

We’re already seeing postmortems for this election – I guess some people like to be ahead of the game – and so we have this effort from yesterday’s op-ed pages. Author William Thorburn makes some valid points, but I think he’s reaching a bit here:

Battleground Texas, with its commitment to expanding the Democratic base by registering more voters and turning them out, had its first test with the 2014 Democratic primary. This year, 555,000 Texans cast a ballot in the Democratic primary, a total that for the third straight election year has been decreasing rather than increasing. In fact, this year’s total of Democratic primary voters is lower than in any year since 1920 when 450,000 voted. In 1920, however, the state’s total population was only 4,723,000, as contrasted with a current population of 26 million plus.

Having failed to recruit candidates for many county and state legislative offices, with no one willing to conduct a primary in 22 counties, and the lowest primary turnout in more than 90 years, the remaining test for Battleground Texas and the state Democratic Party is the performance of its statewide candidates next week. Should this year’s slate of candidates fail to do much better than those in recent elections, one must wonder whether Democratic big-dollar donors will continue to pour money into Battleground Texas or move their contributions and resources to more favorable territory.

I don’t recall candidate recruitment being part of BGTX’s mission statement. In fact, I’m pretty sure the county parties would have resented it like hell if they had tried. Be that as it may, his point about primary turnout is a bit weak. In 2002, with hot races for Governor and US Senate, Dem primary turnout topped one million; in 2006, with snoozers across the board, it was half that; and in 2010, with Bill White duking it out with Farouk Shami, it about 700K. Yet as we know, base Democratic turnout in each year was about the same. In 2008, during the most exciting Democratic primary in at least a generation, turnout was 2.8 million. In 2012, it was less than one fifth of that. In each case, November turnout was about the same. I don’t dispute his larger points, but there’s no correlation here.

Anyway. It’s the last five days of early voting. No time to lose. Let’s hope the numbers improve.

What they didn’t tell us about voter ID

Republicans knew fully well that their voter ID bill would disenfranchise a lot of people. They just didn’t care.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Republican state officials working to pass a voter photo ID law in 2011 knew that more than 500,000 of the state’s registered voters did not have the credentials needed to cast ballots under the new requirement. But they did not share that information with lawmakers rushing to pass the legislation.

Now that the bill is law, in-person voters must present one of seven specified forms of photo identification in order to have their votes counted.

A federal judge in Corpus Christi has found the law unconstitutional, but the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the state can leave it in place for the November election while appeals proceed.

The details about the number of voters affected emerged during the challenge to the law, and were included in the findings of U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos.

During the 2011 legislative struggle to pass the voter ID law, she wrote, Republican lawmakers asked the Texas secretary of state, who runs elections, and the Texas Department of Public Safety, which maintains driver’s license information, for the number of registered voters who did not have state-issued photo identification.

The answer: at least a half-million.

There was evidence, the judge wrote, that Sen. Tommy Williams asked the Texas Department of Public Safety to compare its ID databases with the list of registered voters to find out how many people would not have the most common of the photo IDs required by the law. No match was done to see how many people did not have other acceptable IDs. “That database match was performed by the SOS, but the results showing 504,000 to 844,000 voters being without Texas photo ID were not released to the Legislature.”

Gonzales Ramos sourced that finding in a footnote, noting that in a deposition, Williams, a Republican from The Woodlands who has since left the state Senate, said he requested that information and then did not share it with fellow lawmakers.

Clearly, that was too inconvenient to share. Look, the Republicans could have passed a voter ID bill with broad bipartisan support if they had addressed two issues. One was the other facets of ballot integrity that they left out, like better procedures for mail ballots and improvements to electronic voting machines, like what Travis County is pursuing on its own. The other was taking real steps to ensure that everyone could still vote, by allowing more forms of ID, funding a real outreach program to those half-million-plus people, maybe making it easier to register to vote. One could argue that if you have to show a valid photo ID to vote, there’s no point in also requiring a voter registration card, for example. But of course they didn’t do any of that since the whole point of this law was to make it harder to vote, especially for certain classes of people. Repblicans across the country are perfectly willing to disenfranchise people in pursuit of their vision of “ballot integrity”. It’s a feature, not a bug, and they were called out for it by Judge Ramos. Only a deeply flawed ruling by SCOTUS has saved them for now. But we know the truth. It’s right there in the ruling.

It shouldn’t be this hard to get a driver’s license

And for most people it isn’t that hard. But for some people, it is.

Mayor Annise Parker

Mayor Annise Parker

Daniela Parker has two mothers, a circumstance that turned a typically routine matter – scheduling a road test for a Texas driver’s license – into a lengthy hassle.

Parker, Mayor Annise Parker’s daughter, was turned away from taking the road test on Thursday because, according to the mayor, there are inconsistencies on her personal identification documents.

In a tweet, the mayor said that in some documents she is listed as the girl’s mother, while in others Annise Parker’s wife, Kathy Hubbard, is listed as the mother. They adopted Daniela and younger sister Marquitta in 2003. Parker and Hubbard married earlier this year in California.

Two previous trips by Daniela to the Department of Public Safety were unsuccessful. A third trip Friday to the Rosenberg office did the trick.

“I’m just glad that on the third try someone cared enough to sort it out,” Parker said.

According to the Texas DPS website, information on documents used to verify identity must match. If, say, a name is different, the person must provide documents proving a legal name change.

As Hair Balls notes, getting a driver’s license has also proven a challenge for Connie Wilson, the California transplant who took her wife’s name when they got married out there. DPS did not recognize her California marriage license as being valid and thus turned her away because her legal name doesn’t match what is on her birth certificate. I don’t want to be too harsh on DPS here, as they are implementing the rules they have been given. The issue is that the rules are wrong and need to be changed, because Daniela Parker and Connie Wilson and everyone else in a similar situation deserves better. They deserve to be treated the same way I would be. I will never understand the reasons why anyone would disagree with that. I very much look forward to the day when stuff like this never happens again. Lone Star Q has more.

Location, location, location

At the first public meeting about the proposed Dallas-Houston high speed railroad line, the main focus was the endpoints.

More than 100 people were in attendance on Tuesday for the first of six public meetings being held jointly by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and the Texas Department of Transportation on Texas Central Railway’s plan. The FRA is leading a federally required environmental impact study of the proposed project, which aims to connect Dallas and Houston in 90 minutes or less with Japanese-manufactured trains traveling at more than 200 miles per hour.

At the meeting, federal officials revealed some details on the leading routes and station locations under consideration, though they said everything was still subject to change.

[…]

Attendees who spoke at the meeting were almost universally focused on where the rail stations will end up. FRA officials did not reveal the exact addresses of station locations but did offer up areas being considered. For both Dallas and Houston, the locations included spots in each city’s downtown as well as some several miles outside of them.

Most speakers stressed an interest in seeing the Dallas station at or near downtown’s Union Station, where it could seamlessly connect with other public transit, including the city’s light rail.

“Union Station is the opportunity for high-speed rail to engage with our area,” Dallas City Councilman Lee Kleinman said.

Ken Dublé of Dallas said putting the station downtown will make more sense if the rail line ends up becoming one piece of a larger system.

“We need to be able to think past Houston and Dallas and think to the day when we’re going to want to extend it to Oklahoma City,” he said.

No Texas Central Railway officials spoke at the meeting, though company officials did speak with attendees and reporters before and after the hearing.

Travis Kelly, the company’s vice president of government relations, said Union Station was likely “too built out” for the train to have its station there, but he added that five other downtown Dallas locations were under review. He said the company considered potential ridership demand a central factor in selecting station locations, but that other issues — such as the company’s ability to develop land around a station — were also playing into its decisions.

Dallas resident Paul Carden stressed the need for the train to go “from downtown to downtown.” If the company ends up choosing a spot too far outside of downtown Houston, he said, he would probably drive or fly instead.

“I’m more concerned about the Houston side than the Dallas side,” Carden said after the meeting. “I hope they don’t underestimate what I think would be induced demand just by having a route that goes to downtown Houston.”

See here for the background. I can’t speak to the Dallas station options, but downtown is the only place that makes sense for the Houston end. It’s centrally located, it’s where a lot of business travelers would want to wind up anyway, and it offers connections via light rail to Midtown, the Medical Center, Rice University, UH, and maybe someday if the Unversities Line ever gets built, to Greenway Plaza and the Galleria/Uptown area. There are also potential commuter rail connections that would extend the network of the Texas Central Railway line even further. Sure, people want to go places other than downtown, but no other place offers all of these benefits for a rail station. It just makes sense. Hair Balls has more.

Weekend link dump for October 26

Placebo power should not be underestimated.

You’re no Brooklyn, you know.

In her spare time, Laurie Holden, aka Andrea from The Walking Dead, rescues sex slaves. And what have you done this weekend?

Are you looking for a good way to ascertain that you are in fact old and out of touch with pop culture? See how many of these songs you’ve even heard of, much less know by heart. You’re welcome.

Did you ever wish you had scented crayons? Alas, you’re about 20 years too late.

“When something is late, don’t always assume you know who is at fault.”

Raising the minimum wage would save the taxpayers money, in addition to being the right thing to do.

From the “Nice work if you can find enough people to sucker” department.

Saying that you’re not a scientist is not an answer.

I’m old enough to remember when the PG-13 rating was created, in response to parental complaints that the distinction between PG and R had lost all meaning.

“Campaigns spend an incredible amount of time, money and effort trying to get their people to the polls. What if that just wasn’t an issue?”

“After all, while it’s true that the right to access contraception has been the law of the land for more than 40 years so has the right to have an abortion. And I don’t think even George Will is so out of touch that he doesn’t know that Republicans are as serious as a heart attack about reversing that right.”

This is as good an example as you’ll find of the maxim that oral agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

Three words: Puppy-sized spider. Those of you that are now recoiling in terror should not click this link to see the pictures and description of the encounter. Though if you do, this fellow’s blog has some amazing pics of other animals that you’ve probably never seen or heard of before.

“Also, when the serfs were bound to the land, there was nobody on welfare, I’ll tell you that.”

The war on voting is going as planned.

“Republicans would probably hold the House — and still have a real chance to retake the Senate — if they lost every single Hispanic voter in the country, according to an analysis by The Upshot.”

“This rejected New Yorker cartoon might just be the best New Yorker cartoon of all time.”

RIP, Ben Bradlee, former Washington Post editor.

The Gamergate debacle is as outrageous as it is soul-crushing.

“Lost episodes from a television sketch show that featured John Cleese and fellow member of Monty Python Graham Chapman have been found after 47 years.”

“Turns out it’s my neighbor’s water buffalo.” This sort of thing never happens to me.

I join the Washington Monthly in wishing Kevin Drum a full and fast recovery from cancer. I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin way back in 2002 when he was doing his thing on Blogspot. (Those of you who are well versed in the prehistoric era of blogging will nod your heads when I say it was Brian Linse who introduced us.) He’s a good guy and an excellent writer. Get well soon, Kevin!

Especially given that news, this picture made my week. Now let’s please get Nina Pham and her dog back together again as soon as possible.

Suing for same-sex death benefits

Married people receive death benefits when their spouses die. Unless your marriage isn’t recognized as legal by the state you live in. That’s the basis of this lawsuit.

RedEquality

An Austin woman filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday seeking to halt the Social Security Administration’s practice of withholding spousal benefits from gay couples who reside in states, like Texas, that ban same-sex marriage.

Kathy Murphy’s lawsuit argued that the practice perpetuates discrimination and unconstitutionally deprives same-sex couples of equal treatment under the law.

“With increasing frequency, state and federal executives and courts — including the United States Supreme Court — have recognized the patent discrimination and affront to dignity faced by same-sex couples whose families are denied the protections of marriage,” the lawsuit said.

Murphy and Sara Barker, Austin residents since 1984, were married in Massachusetts, where same-sex unions are legal, in 2010 after 30 years as a couple.

But after Barker died of cancer in 2012 at age 62, Murphy was denied spousal and death benefits because the Social Security agency determines whether couples are married based on the laws of the state where they live, not where they were married, according to the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“SSA’s incorporation of discriminatory state laws tells same-sex couples living in those states that their valid marriages are unworthy of federal recognition and equal treatment,” said the lawsuit, filed by lawyers with Lambda Legal, a national gay-rights legal advocacy organization.

Texas Politics has a copy of the suit. There are three other federal lawsuits against Texas’ same sex marriage ban that have been filed and are still active in the courts. One is DeLeon v. Perry, in which the ban was ruled unconstitutional and is awaiting an appellate hearing from the Fifth Circuit. The other two were filed in Austin and are separate from DeLeon despite Greg Abbott’s efforts to combine them. I’m assuming the two Austin suits have been combined, but I couldn’t verify that. Yet another lawsuit, this one filed in state court and having to do with parental and custodial rights, also resulted in a ruling that declared Texas’ ban on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional. That one is awaiting appeal in the state’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. One would think this one would be straightforward given all that has gone on before it, but you never know. The one thing we do know is that Greg Abbott can’t wait to “just do his job”, which in this case involves defending the federal government. So ironic. Anyway, here’s Lambda Legal’s blog post and press release about the lawsuit, and Lone Star Q has more.

Council approves meaningless tax cut

Such awful policy.

The Houston City Council unanimously passed a nominal property tax cut Tuesday afternoon, the first rate reduction in five years, as the city for the first time runs into a revenue cap imposed by voters a decade ago.

The modest rollback equates to $12.27 a year for the owner of a $200,000 house with a standard homestead exemption. Many Houston property owners will not pay less in overall property taxes, however, as appraisals continue to rise.

The city’s new property tax rate is 63.108 cents per $100 of assessed value, a reduction of about three-quarters of a cent. State law requires the city to adopt its tax rate within 60 days of receiving the certified tax roll, so the approval came Tuesday rather than Wednesday, when the council typically votes.

Officials in Mayor Annise Parker’s administration have said the rate reduction will not force immediate budget cuts because the spending plan the council passed for the fiscal year that began July 1 assumed property tax revenues would not exceed the cap.

However, the cut does mean the city will collect an estimated $12.7 million less than it otherwise would have, and will have that much less on hand to deal with a looming $120 million deficit for the fiscal year starting next summer.

Basically, thanks to the stupid revenue cap, the city is forced to spend $12.7 million and get nothing in return for it. May as well withdraw it all in cash and set it on fire. I’ll say again, I will not support any candidate for Mayor next year that does not support repealing the revenue cap.

Wilvin Carter

As we know, there are interesting races for District Attorney in Harris, Dallas, and Bexar Counties. Turns out there’s one in Fort Bend County, too.

Wilvin Carter

As Fort Bend County District Attorney, John Healey has faced competitive elections before.

Since a Democrat hasn’t won a countywide election in decades, those races were generally against fellow Republicans in primaries. For the first time since 1994, Healey will square off against a Democratic challenger – his former employee, Wilvin Carter – in a general election race that may be his tightest yet.

The campaign has included allegations that Healey violated responsibilities of his office when he waited months longer than other colleagues to inform defense attorneys and defendants that their cases may have been affected by a state chemist found to have fabricated results.

[…]

Carter grew up in Birmingham, Ala., in a neighborhood where police and prosecutors were treated with suspicion. Through a circuitous route that included doing legal research at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta and eventually graduating law school at Texas Southern University, Carter was drawn to the work, interning in the Harris County District Attorney’s office, the state Attorney General’s office and his school’s Earl Carl Institute.

Carter, who lives in Missouri City but has practiced law in Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties, decided to run because of one particular case where a child was charged with assault for pushing his teacher at school.

“It was just one of those cases that had fallen into my lap one too many times,” explained Carter. The district attorney has a great deal of discretion when it comes to accepting and pursuing charges in a case, and Carter felt that Healey’s decision to accept charges in this case was wrong. “The school didn’t want to deal with him, his teachers didn’t want to deal with it and when they put him in the system, their solution was to punish him for his behavior,” said Carter.

Instead, he wants to expand the number and scope of pretrial diversion programs in the county, particularly for first-time, non-violent offenders. “As the district attorney, I would be able to build relationships with these schools and school board members, the superintendent and say, ‘What can we do?’ ” said Carter. More options will help clear case loads and allow the office to focus on more serious crimes, according to Carter.

I like the sound of that. DA seems like an office where even strong partisans might be willing to cross over given the right circumstances. I don’t know anything about the allegations against Healey, but that is the sort of thing that could sway people. There’s also been a strong effort to turn out Democrats in Fort Bend this year, which of course wouldn’t hurt Carter’s prospects. I haven’t followed this race so I won’t venture a guess as to what the odds are of a Wilvin Carter victory, but I’ll be keeping an eye on this one on Election Day.

Endorsement watch: State Senate

The Chron makes another curious choice.

District 17: Joan Huffman

In District 17, which includes parts of Harris County and counties to the east, Republican incumbent Joan Hoffman has a credible Democratic opponent in Rita Lucido, 58, a family law attorney and activist with such organizations as the Houston Area Women’s Center and Planned Parenthood.

Huffman, also 58, who initially won her seat in a 2008 special election, is vice chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee and has built strong working relationships with members of both parties. She is a strong advocate for mental health issues, particularly as they intersect with criminal justice, and she’s gaining in seniority.

Although Lucido is a strong candidate with an impressive command of the issues, we endorse Huffman.

Perhaps they missed what Texas Monthly had to say about Sen. Huffman’s tenure on the Criminal Justice Committee.

Sen. Joan Huffman

Intransigence, thy name is Joan Huffman. Consider, if you will, the evidence. She initially opposed one of the session’s most celebrated bills, the Michael Morton Act, named for a Williamson County man who served nearly 25 years after being wrongly convicted of murdering his wife. Huffman’s concerns about the bill, which requires prosecutors to share evidence with a defendant’s legal team, endangered the bill’s prospects for passage. Then there was a measure to create an innocence commission to review the convictions of the 117 people who have been exonerated in Texas, which was supported by Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson and passed the House handily 115–28. What was Huffman’s opinion of the proposed legislation? “There’s nothing you can do to fix this bill for me,” she fumed as she closed out her ten-minute speech in a Criminal Justice Committee hearing. Huffman, the committee’s vice chair, had rattled off twenty pieces of legislation that, in her estimation, adequately reformed Texas’s criminal justice system, making the creation of the commission unnecessary. Cory Session, the brother of Tim Cole, the state’s first posthumous DNA exoneree, was especially incensed by Huffman’s remarks: “That’s your job—to figure out what went wrong in this state,” he said. “You don’t like it? Go find another.” (Session ultimately stormed out of the hearing room, calling Huffman a name for which he later apologized.)

Huffman’s monologue, which she began by saying, “ ’Cause I’m chair, I can take as much time as I want,” helped kill the bill in committee, making her guilty of Behavior Unbecoming a Senator. But the former prosecutor and district judge, who exerts a huge influence on her colleagues when it comes to criminal justice issues, received her own punishment for practicing such bad politics. The House sponsor of the innocence commission bill, Democrat Ruth Jones McClendon, talked to death several of Huffman’s bills on the local and consent calendar. Here’s a case where an eye for an eye made perfect sense.

Now Texas Monthly isn’t the final arbiter of things, and one could make a case that Huffman’s other contributions have outweighed this bit of petty bullying. But if you’re going to laud her for her ability to work with people, you might at least acknowledge that it isn’t always the case. My interview with Rita Lucido is here if you’d like to consider the alternative, and my interview with Sen. John Whitmire is here if you missed it back in January.

2014 Day Five EV totals

Here they are. I’ll save commentary for after the weekend, but suffice it to say that today needs to be a good day for the Democrats in Harris County.

KHOU poll shows little support for Astrodome Park plan

Another result of interest from that KHOU/KUHF poll.

Still cheaper to renovate than the real thing

The plan to turn the Astrodome into the world’s largest indoor park is politically unpopular with Harris County voters if the transformation requires any taxpayer dollars, according to a new poll released this week.

Fifty-one percent of those surveyed by KHOU/Houston Public Media said they opposed spending any public money to convert the stadium. The plan hatched by County Judge Ed Emmett could include both public and private dollars if approved, but the poll suggests that voters would only support something that is entirely privately funded.

Thirty-one percent of Harris County voters said they would support spending taxpayer dollars to create the park, and 17 percent said they didn’t know. The poll of 325 likely voters has a margin of error of 5.4 percentage points.

To be clear, this is about the Ed Emmett Astrodome Park plan, in which the Dome would be transformed into a giant indoor park. It differs from the original Astrodome Park plan in that it would not involve demolishing the Astrodome. It also doesn’t have much in the way of specifics, which may be why people are skeptical of it. KHOU takes a closer look.

“Voters in this county are simply not comfortable spending any money on the renovation or restoration of The Astrodome,” said Bob Stein, the Rice University political scientist and KHOU analyst who supervised the survey.

Polls conducted by KHOU and Houston Public Media in years past have shown an interesting divide, indicating people old enough to have seen events at the Astrodome were more likely to support saving the stadium. Now that generation gap has disappeared.

“It’s pretty much across the board,” Stein said. “We couldn’t find a group of voters who are significantly more likely to support spending county money on the renovation of the Astrodome as an indoor park.”

Another curious statistic popped out in the poll. Almost all of the undecided voters were people who didn’t vote in the 2013 Astrodome referendum. As Stein crunched the numbers, he came to an interesting conclusion: If the dome park plan were put on the ballot next month, it would probably fail by roughly the same margin as last year’s proposal.

Of course, Emmett’s idea hasn’t yet been fleshed out and, most important, nobody knows its proposed cost. But the survey indicates voters are wary of any plan to spend more money on The Astrodome.

My concerns about this poll aside, this makes sense to me. As I suggested before, it’s going to take a detailed and specific plan, which clearly shows the benefits of the proposed park or whatever they decide to call it, and a sustained persuasion effort to get voter approval. It should be noted that the Rodeo and the Texans put out their own poll in August that claimed widespread support for their plan. It was basically a push poll, and their description of what was being proposed was not entirely accurate, but the point is that an effective sales job combined with a worthwhile product could be a winner. There’s a lot of work to be done, both in putting together a plan that can be sold to the public and in getting all of the players on board with a commitment to make it work, before any campaign can get off the ground with a hope to succeed. If the goal is to do something in time for the Super Bowl in 2017, time is of the essence. Swamplot has more.

HPOU wades into the DA race

They’re all in for incumbent Devon Anderson.

Kim Ogg

Kim Ogg

The already intense race for Harris County district attorney became more heated Wednesday with the Houston Police Officer’s Union attacking Democratic candidate Kim Ogg, saying that during her time at Crime Stoppers she violated the privacy of victims she was supposed to help support.

The 5,300-member group is endorsing GOP incumbent Devon Anderson, who declined to comment about the attack, which included a radio ad that was released earlier in the day.

At her news conference later Wednesday, Ogg called the attack a “desperate act,” then accused Anderson of making backroom deals involving a former judge and at least one former police officer, allowing them to avoid prosecution.

“The union’s support of Ms. Anderson, launching an ad 13 days before the election is a desperate act by this incumbent,” Ogg told reporters. She denied any wrongdoing and said the ad was not true.

At the union news conference, Anderson touted her record and thanked area law enforcement agencies for their endorsements.

“Since I’ve been in office, we’ve tried almost 700 jury trials,” Anderson said. “And of those, over 70 percent are violent criminals, the rest are property crimes and a very small percentage are drug cases.”

[…]

During the union’s news conference, Hunt said Ogg’s style was similar to former district attorney Pat Lykos, who was ousted in the 2012 GOP primary by Mike Anderson.

“It’s going to be very much like it was under Pat Lykos,” Hunt said of an Ogg administration. “It would make our job a lot more difficult.”

The union has long protested the so-called “trace case policy” instituted by Lykos, then repealed by Anderson. The police unions want crack cocaine users caught with powder-covered crack pipes to be arrested on felony charges. Citing clogged courts, overcrowded jails and the inability for the defense to re-test the scant amount of evidence, Lykos directed police to ticket those offenders for misdemeanor possession of drug paraphernalia. The policy was applauded by criminal justice system reformers and derided by law enforcement agencies.

“There’s a direct correlation between the trace case people and the amount of burglaries we have,” Hunt said.

Ogg denied the claims made by Hunt and the HPOU and pressed her own charges against Anderson, but that last bit above is what all this really comes down to. Anderson, even with her willingness to make incremental changes in how pot prosecutions are handled, represents the way things have always been done in the Harris County DA’s office. Ogg, like Lykos, represents change. As is always the case with change, not everyone likes the idea. As you know, I agreed with Lykos’ trace case policy, and I do think the DA’s office could stand to do things a little differently. I look forward to seeing what Kim Ogg can do in that position. Ray Hunt would disagree, and that’s fine. That’s why we have elections. Hair Balls has more.

There’s an app for birth control

I’m sure this won’t controversial at all.

“Isn’t there an app for that?”

Turns out there is, if what you’re after is birth control or a test for a sexually transmitted infection.

In the latest example of fast-growing “telemedicine,” video conferencing that virtually extends medical expertise, Planned Parenthood is rolling out a pilot project for real-time “office visits” that bring patient and medical provider face to face on a smartphone, tablet or personal computer.

Fueling the Planned Parenthood Care project, under way in Washington and Minnesota, is a “horrible statistic,” says Chris Charbonneau, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest: “People are sexually active for six to nine months before they get a really reliable birth-control method.”

One result: an estimated 52,500 unintended pregnancies in Washington in 2010, according to the state Department of Health.

Combine that with the prevalence of chlamydia, the most commonly reported sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the U.S., and gonorrhea — both primarily affecting people ages 15 to 24 — and Planned Parenthood hatched a plan to meet young people where they live: on their phones and mobile devices.

For now, the virtual visits create a streamlined process for getting mail-order birth control — and soon, test kits for two common sexually transmitted infections.

Along with convenience, the virtual visits provide a technological answer to this question, Charbonneau says: “How do we see people who either can’t or have difficulty walking into bricks-and-mortar sites, to at least get them started on birth control” or begin investigating a potential sexually transmitted infection?

The national Planned Parenthood organization chose Washington as one of the first states for the project because of its long history of support for women’s reproductive rights and its strong local chapter, according to the local organization.

Planned Parenthood hopes the project will expand next to Alaska and eventually go nationwide. Obstacles include state laws — and possibly some controversy in the wake of a telemedicine controversy in Iowa.

[…]

Some [anti-abortion] activists also worry that webcam visits, though solely for birth control, may ultimately lead to more abortions.

“We know how these things start,” says Dan Kennedy, CEO of Human Life of Washington. “Who is honestly going to believe that’s as far as it goes?”

I’m sure you can imagine how the “argument” will go from there. I’m posting this partly because it’s a great idea, and partly so we’re all familiar with the background when someone in the Lege inevitably files a bill to ban this. In the name of women’s health, of course. Tech Times has more.

Friday random ten: W for the win

Almost done with the alphabet, at which point I’ll have to come up with a new gimmick to get me through a few weeks. But until then, the W names.

1. Dance Hall Days – Wang Chung
2. Casey Jones – Warren Zevon
3. I Can’t Turn You Loose – Was (Not Was)
4. Rainy Day Woman – Waylon Jennings
5. Ships With Holes Will Sink – We Were Promised Jetpacks
6. Waterfall – Wendy & Lisa
7. You May Be Right – What Made Milwaukee Famous
8. Late Night Television – Wild Moccasins
9. Hesitation Blues – Willie Nelson & Asleep At The Wheel
10. This Land Is Your Land – Woody Guthrie

Whatever else may be true about them, We Were Promised Jetpacks and What Made Milwaukee Famous are up there on the All-Band Name team. I know, it’s easy enough to come up with clever band names, but having a clever band name and actually making music that someone might want to listen to, that’s something. What’s your favorite name of a band that has produced at least one worthwhile song?

UT/Trib: Abbott 54, Davis 38

More of the same from the Trib’s pollsters.

Republican Greg Abbott has a 16-point lead over Democrat Wendy Davis in the closing days of this year’s general election for governor, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

Abbott has the support of 54 percent of likely voters to Davis’ 38 percent. Libertarian Kathie Glass has the support of 6 percent, and the Green Party’s Brandon Parmer got 2 percent.

“The drama of the outcome is not who wins, but what the margin will be,” said Jim Henson, co-director of the poll and head of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “Wendy Davis has not led in a single poll in this race.”

Among men, Abbott holds a 61-32 lead in this survey. And he leads by 2 percentage points — 48 to 46 — among women.

Abbott leads among likely voters who dropped out of high school all the way up to those with post-graduate degrees. Davis leads with voters who said they never attend church services, but Abbott leads with every group that did, no matter how frequently or infrequently. With Anglo voters, he holds a 62 percent to 31 percent advantage. Davis leads 75 to 19 among black voters and narrowly — 48 to 46 — among Hispanic voters.

“It should be a really interesting, contentious race,” said Daron Shaw, a government professor at UT-Austin and co-director of the poll. “And yet, it doesn’t seem to have penetrated the public consciousness. Certainly, nothing down-ballot has.”

Most of the statewide races are not as close as this one, the poll found — and Republican candidates hold the lead in each one.

It’s more of the same for the other races as well. You know my issues with their methodology, so I’ll just note two points. One is that since August, Internet-based pollsters UT/TT and YouGov have shown Greg Abbott with a wider lead than the phone-based pollsters have, with the exception of that KHOU poll. It’s either about a 16-point race or about a ten-point race, depending on who you think is more believable. Also, if you take the UT/TT poll’s word for it, Davis’ problem isn’t so much turning out her base as it is holding on to them in the first place. When was the last time a Republican candidate in Texas won nearly 20% of the African-American vote? We’ll see what the exit pollsters have to say about that. In the meantime, early voting continues. Let’s just concern ourselves with taking care of our own business there.

Abbott’s actions in the Hecht ethics case belie his “just doing my job” evasion

More accurately, it’s his lack of action that speaks clearly about his priorities and discretion.

Still not Greg Abbott

Attorney General Greg Abbott, accused of favoritism in his handling of an ethics case involving a Texas Supreme Court justice, says it’s not his duty to press the case that has sat idle for two years.

That reasoning, however, doesn’t stand up, according to an American-Statesman review of state law.

The issue began in 2008, when the Texas Ethics Commission fined Chief Justice Nathan Hecht $29,000 for violating campaign finance rules by getting a $167,200 discount on legal fees. Hecht appealed to Travis County district court, arguing that the agency misinterpreted state law.

With Abbott’s office defending the Ethics Commission, several years of sporadic action followed — until all activity ceased two years ago.

Defending the inactivity, an Abbott spokesman last week said his office wasn’t motivated to press the case because the ruling against Hecht remained in force — placing the onus to act on the chief justice.

But state law says otherwise.

The moment Hecht filed his appeal, the Ethics Commission judgment against him was vacated — or rendered void — to allow a Travis County district judge to conduct an independent review of the charges against him.

Legally, there is no judgment in place against Hecht, placing the onus to act on lawyers with the attorney general’s office.

[…]

Buck Wood, an Austin lawyer specializing in election law — mainly representing Democrats — said appeals of Ethics Commission rulings are rare, but the result is the same in every case.

“Once they appeal it, no enforcement action can be taken because it does vacate the decision,” Wood said. “The ethics fine is basically put on hold, and if (Abbott) doesn’t prosecute it, it’ll never get prosecuted.”

The inactivity is even harder to explain because Abbott’s lawyers believe Hecht’s appeal was improperly filed and should be tossed out.

A motion to dismiss the appeal, filed by the attorney general’s office in June 2012, argued that Hecht lawyer Steve McConnico failed to ask the Ethics Commission to reconsider its judgment against Hecht — a necessary first step before an appeal can be pursued in district court.

McConnico filed a brief rebutting the claim, and the last activity in Hecht’s appeal came in October 2012, when both sides filed responses trying to poke legal holes in each other’s arguments.

See here for the background. The 2012 filings weren’t included in the timeline of events put together by Texans for Public Justice, who has filed suit to toss Abbott off the case and appoint a special prosecutor that will actually do something, but the overall point stands. Nothing can or will happen in this case until one side or the other takes action, and since Team Hecht has no incentive to do anything – he’s in the clear for the time being, after all – that means Abbott needs to quit jerking around and do his job. Keep that in mind the next time you hear Abbott piously muse about how pursuing endless appeals of same sex marriage rulings and the like are “just doing his job”.

Alameel 2018?

Sure, why not?

David Alameel

David Alameel

Even against long odds, David Alameel hasn’t thrown in the towel in his bid to unseat Sen. John Cornyn.

“I’m in it for the long run,” the Dallas investor and dentist told The Dallas Morning News editorial board on Monday.

Cornyn leads by about 20 percentage points in most polls. Alameel says it hasn’t dampened his optimism.

“My aim is not just to win. I want to change the way people think,” he said.

He also sees this year’s effort as a way to position himself to try again in 2018, when freshman Sen. Ted Cruz’s term expires.

“The next one is in four years, and you have to build a base. I’m building a base right now,” Alameel said.

I appreciate the willingness to think beyond this election. Some races need to be viewed as multi-cycle. Most candidates, for good and obvious reasons, don’t have that in them, so kudos to Alameel for taking the long view and seeing Ted Cruz’s re-election bid as an opportunity. That said, I hope Alameel has some fierce competition for the chance to take on our lunatic junior Senator. I hope this election is successful enough that several of our vaunted “rising stars” begin licking their chops and gearing up their fundraising with an eye for being first in line at filing time in December of 2017. A nice, high-profile Senate primary will be an excellent way to start the year in 2018.

By the way, the Alameel-Cornyn debate will be tonight, and it can be viewed on Univision on Saturday dubbed in Spanish. There’s a drinking game in there somewhere, I’m sure of it.