Rick Perry vs World

18 March 2007

Cornyn and White

DMN compiles wire reports:

"We can't have one-size-fits-all," Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said Thursday. He led a group of House and Senate lawmakers in introducing legislation that would let states opt out of No Child Left Behind requirements without losing federal education money.

Any state that does not adhere to the requirements of the $23 billion program cannot get the federal dollars that come with it. The requirements include annual testing in math and reading in grades three through eight, and once in high school. The tests must show steady yearly progress toward a goal of getting students working on grade level by 2014.

John Cornyn, R-Texas, Mr. Bush's most reliable defender in the Senate, is supporting the conservatives' bill. So is House Republican Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri, even though he voted for the law in 2001.

It's quite fascinating to see Cornyn come out for a bill that guts NCLB. I have no inside information, but it is widely assumed that Karl Rove made calls encouraging folks not to challenge Cornyn once he had announced.

I assume -- though I haven't looked it up -- that the "Mr. Bush's most reliable defender in the Senate" is the DMN editors language.

Cornyn has two political weaknesses: 1) he is still unknown to many of the state's voters after 4 full years in the Senate. 2) the Establishment views Cornyn as too close to the President.

I continue to doubt that Democrats will field a serious candidate, however. Bill White might be the best choice, but he really, really needs some time to try to clean up the mess that he's created on crime in Houston. Check Taylor and Carnahan at Professors R Squared:

What peeves both of us is that Jon asked a direct question about HPD staffing (thank you to both Chris Baker and Councilman Michael Berry for inspiration!) when he was one of four academic panelists in a 2003 Mayoral debate… at a time when the issue of HPD retirements and manpower was just starting to heat up and could have been addressed quickly once Mayor Lee Brown blessedly left office to haunt Rice. Our then-future Mayor gave the usual hyperbole about being tough on crime, but essentially ignored the question. Surprised?

Crime has certainly lost some of its potency as an issue. But it will be salient in White's record, and the sort of suburban female swing voters who might swing towards White will be very turned off by his record as mayor. Everyone knew that the Houston Police Department was facing an impending shortage of officers, and yet Bill White did nothing. Houston's sharp rise in crime is directly attributable to Bill White's decisions. Whether he is soft-on-crime or not, the buck stops there.

Posted by Evan @ 03/18/07 09:17 AM | Comments (0)

Ambassador Bonilla

Defeated CD23 Congressman Henry Bonilla has been appointed ambassador to the Organization of American States.

Sigh. Is Ciro Rodriguez really going to get a free pass? Bonilla would have a reasonably good shot at defeating Rodriguez. He barely* lost during a horrible, horrible environment in a runoff.

I'm disappointed. Bonilla should've picked himself back up, and challenged Rodriguez. He ran a bad race in 06, but there's no reason he couldn't have knocked off Rodriguez with a smart campaign.

*Well, it wasn't that bare: Rodriguez did pick up 54% of the vote.

Posted by Evan @ 03/18/07 08:51 AM | Comments (0)

Curt Schilling blogs

Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling has started a blog. So far, his posts are mostly Q&A, but it's pretty interesting Q&A.

I'm not one of Houston's baseball sabermetricians (one should look to Kuff or Tom for that), but I'd have to disagree with Schilling's assertion that he is not a Hall of Famer:

That being said I am not a HOF player. I know this because I’ve played with actual HOF caliber players. Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, Scott Rolen, Dale Murphy, Cal Ripken. When I think of Hall of Fame I think of guys like that.

Intuitively, that doesn't sound right to me. Schilling has been excellent for a long, long time. A quick google search appears to confirm my belief. Here's a list of the top 10 RSAA guys in the post-expansion era, as of April 2005:

1. Roger Clemens 645
2. Greg Maddux 553
3. Randy Johnson 511
4. Pedro Martinez 477
5. Tom Seaver 361
6. Bert Blyleven 344
7. Curt Schilling 327
8. Kevin Brown 321
9. Jim Palmer 316
10. Tom Glavine 294

Apparently, the sabermetricians are talking about this.

Once upon a time, I dated a girl who lived in Curt Schilling's neighborhood. He had a nice house, but nothing ostentatious. One thing always amused me, though: he frequently flew a baseball flag out front.

Posted by Evan @ 03/18/07 08:40 AM | Comments (2)

Bob Perry backs Romney

WaPo's Cilizza reports that Houston homebuilder Bob Perry has decided to back Mitt Romney.

Bob Perry, a Houston home builder, is named as a member of Romney's Texas Leadership Team in an invite for a fundraising event in Dallas on March 26.

Perry really should've kept his powder dry in anticipation of a Fred Thompson candidacy.

Posted by Evan @ 03/18/07 07:52 AM | Comments (0)

Greg Abbott's future

Selby checks in on AG Greg Abbott's political future:

Abbott, 49, was a candidate for lieutenant governor for several months in 2001 before the attorney general's job opened. There's talk of him trying afresh if Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst seeks another post.

Friends say Abbott, a former state district judge, even enjoys the scut work of politics many officeholders abhor.

Dallas lawyer Deborah Hankinson served on the Texas Supreme Court with Abbott, who was appointed to the court by Gov. George W. Bush in 1995.

"I didn't like raising money," she said. "He likes doing that. He enjoys the strategizing, the campaigning, the fundraising. . . . every aspect. Greg enjoyed every day, whether he was going to be out doing politics or he was going to be working at the court."

Royal Masset, a Republican consultant mindful of Abbott's zest, rates him the GOP favorite to succeed Dewhurst if Perry sets off the political dominoes. Abbott is better known than State Comptroller Susan Combs, Masset said, and hails from Houston, a strong Republican base.

That jockeying in the 2002 cycle was interesting. For a few weeks there, it looked like we were going to get a few Republican primaries for the first real time in Texas politics. But then Phil Gramm retired. Dewhurst had the Senate seat locked up until his indecision prompted Cornyn to declare and scare everyone out of the field. Then the dominoes cascaded the way they did.

Although I didn't quote it, Selby also brings up several (three?) times the freak accident that left Abbott paralyzed. Abbott must've been in a reflective mood when Selby interviewed him.

Kudos to Selby for not using the hackneyed AG/Aspiring Governor. I like to read the occasional story without that in there.

Posted by Evan @ 03/18/07 04:03 AM | Comments (0)

14 March 2007

Growl.

I put a post up earlier tonight, which was apparently eaten.

Here's the synopsis: blogging not a priority recently, not paying as much attention to politics (so as to remind me how the median voter thinks), and I've been busy on the job search.

Posted by Evan @ 03/14/07 01:43 AM | Comments (0)

02 March 2007

Draft Fred: Successful?

Fox News is reporting that former Tenn. Sen. Fred Thompson is "seriously considering" entering the race. Yay. Draft Fred Thompson.

I've always thought it's a longshot to happen, mostly because he is supposedly such good friends with McCain. But Thompson would really be the perfect presidential candidate.

UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, and Mort Kondracke all unanimously panned Thompson's entry. Krauthammer didn't like the idea that he'd come straight from a TV show, and Kondracke claims his record as Govt. Affairs Chairman was negligible.

I think they're entirely missing the appeal of Thompson and why he's electable.

Posted by Evan @ 03/02/07 06:41 PM | Comments (5)

The media does CPAC

I always love it when the media covers CPAC. That's the Conservative Political Action Conference, for those of you who aren't junkies. The coverage is generally amusing. No less so this year.

Start with the headline on this Julie Mason Chron article: Far right feeling left out. Assuredly Ms. Mason didn't write that, but even so, it's a standard old media paradigm that Republican primary voters are "the far right." Unless it's Hillary speaking, in which case it's "the vast right-wing conspiracy." Yeah, there's some nuts at CPAC, but there are way more normal Americans.

The lede:

Leading American conservatives are fed up with President Bush and the Republican establishment, and they don't give a toss for the party's 2008 presidential front-runners, either.

At this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual, three-day gathering of the far right and its leaders, the mood is feisty and disgusted — but not just at Hillary Clinton, this time.

"We as conservatives need new leaders," Richard Viguerie, the conservative father of political direct mail told hundreds of cheering conservatives in a Washington ballroom. "Just because the Republican Party has a death wish doesn't mean we have to go down with them."

A little context on Viguerie would be nice. Viguerie is a gadfly who breathlessly exclaims time and time again how all Republican officeholders are sell outs. The quote Mason uses could have been given in any of the last 25 years. Seriously. I think it took him all of a year during the Reagan Administration for him to start screaming about Reagan selling out.

Anyway, old media is mostly just recycling the ledes from last year's CPAC. 10 seconds of research found me this headline/lede on a Nina Easton story in the Boston Globe a year ago:

A WRATHFUL RIGHT TURNS ON BUSH/The Republican family feud was laid bare in public last week at the Conservative Political Action Committee's annual confab. CPAC activists are a notoriously cranky bunch, quick to pounce on politician friends who stray toward the center. But this year the spears aimed at George W. Bush were especially sharp.

One last bit from Mason's article:

"We cannot afford to let Mexico turn us into a two-language nation," [Phyllis Schafly] said, as her audience roared approval and banged on tables in support.

Funny, I seem to recall people saying that about Italians, Irish, etc, etc.

The greatness of America is its ability to assimilate immigrant groups and social mobility. Culture is not static, but dynamic. That's a good thing.

Still, I'd say Schafly is much more representative of CPACers than Viguerie. And hey, was Paul Weyrich unavailable to give Ms. Mason a quote?

Posted by Evan @ 03/02/07 04:04 PM | Comments (1)

28 February 2007

Random facts

I live in one of the 10 highest income-tax paying congressional districts in the country, according to the Tax Foundation. The average taxpayer in CD7 pays over $15k in federal income taxes ever year. That's quite a bit of money being sent from Houston to Washington DC.

Of the 10 highest paying tax districts, 7 voted for Kerry (the top 7). No surprise there. In Texas, the rich still vote for Republicans, unlike the rest of the country.

I am (un)happy to report that I pay a fraction of that in income tax.

Click for the extended entry to see every Texas congressional district. I'd love to have formatted this, but time constraints do not permit.

[Read More]

Posted by Evan @ 02/28/07 03:33 PM | Comments (2)

20 February 2007

Really bad law that needs to be changed

Lindell, Statesman:

Texans who unintentionally cover even a small portion of their car's license plate can be stopped by police, ticketed and perhaps arrested for the offense, the state's highest criminal court ruled Wednesday.

The 8-1 decision left three Court of Criminal Appeals judges holding their noses — proclaiming the statute "uncommonly bad," but acknowledging that the letter of the law prohibits drivers from encasing their license plate in a frame that obscures the state name, state nickname or even portions of the artwork.

Unfortunately, the law as written unintentionally endangers civil liberties, Judge Cathy Cochran wrote in an opinion that, while siding with the majority, raises concerns about the ruling's impact.

"It is a 'gotcha' law because it allows the police to arbitrarily stop, ticket, arrest and search any person who is driving a car whose license plate frame covers up any portion of that plate's design," Cochran wrote in an opinion joined by Judges Tom Price and Cheryl Johnson. "Look around you — the vast majority of drivers on Texas roads and highways can be stopped and arrested at any given moment."

Still, Cochran wrote, under a law revised in 2003, "it is a crime . . . if that frame obscures even the tiniest bit of the doo-dad design details of the standard-issue Texas license plate."

Hat tip to Kevin, who had commented on it previously.

This is potentially a much bigger threat to civil liberties (in that it allows any rogue police officer to capriciously pull over probably something like 50% of the population) than something like...oh, I don't know, the death penalty, yet I see nothing on the Texas ACLU's website. [To be fair, I didn't see anything on their website about the death penalty either, but I still think it's a fair comparison.]

Posted by Evan @ 02/20/07 02:38 PM | Comments (0)

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