Hank Gilbert and the Kinkster in a Footrace

I noted with some relief here that Hank Gilbert withdrew from the race for the Democratic nomination for Texas governor, and left the story for awhile when it looked like Kinky Friedman, erstwhile professional comedian and campaigner, was going to follow suit but not before weighing his options on to whom he would throw his support, Bill White or Farouk Shami.

Then I sat back and watched for awhile as the progressive blogosphere went completely berserk in their condemnation of Kinky Friedman’s move to oppose the darling of the left, Hank Gilbert.

On Gilbert’s own website, he is quoted as saying “Kinky is no Democrat. If he was, he never would have stayed in the 2006 race running as an independent and denied our party’s nominee a real chance at the governor’s office.” This was echoed again and again from one blog to another.

Making me look askance at my fellow progressives.

Not because I don’t agree with them, I do. Kinky Friedman has no intention of becoming Ag Commissioner. It doesn’t serve his purpose unless an Ag Commissioner, in some way can get medical marijuana legal in Texas – something I am highly doubtful of.

Kinky Friedman simply wants to market himself, his cigars, his books, his doll (yes he sells a doll that looks like Kinky Friedman on a bad hair day).

And bottom line, and there always is a bottom line, they say that Kinky Friedman is going to cost Hank Gilbert’s campaign some money to run in a contested primary.

To which I say, yes, yes, yes and yes. All true. But I really think these people are missing the point. An uncontested primary is the most boring kind of election imaginable. Sure it’s nice not to have to bend your brain a little and choose between 2 or more people who may or may not be Democrats.

But it’s also boring.

And when it’s boring people stay away from the polls. When it is unexciting people would rather stay home and watch the grass grow.

And you don’t have to like Kinky Friedman, or agree with him, to admit that where Kinky Friedman goes, excitement follows. Newspaper articles get published. TV. That’s right, the race for Agricultural Commissioner becomes newsworthy.

Kinky Friedman will run, and he’ll get his requisite 12% of the vote from die-hard Kinkster fans that may or may not be Democrats, and Hank Gilbert will win and have a leg up in name recognition from this contested primary that was so much in the news.

If anything, contrary to how it turned out last time when Friedman cost Chris Bell the election (29% + 12% would have beaten Governor 39% if Kinky’s voters all voted the same – which is a reach), this has the opposite effect today, I think. In essence, if Hank Gilbert beats Todd Staples in November 2010, he may just have Kinky Friedman to thank for that.

On Secrets and Public Education

Yesterday’s article in FortBendNow shows an interesting development in a local school district’s project to build a district science center, staff it, and use it to teach its K through 8 students aspects of science that cannot be taught in a typical middle or elementary school classroom.

And teach their teachers about science.

It seems that a local group of activists have asked the Fort Bend County district attorney’s office to look into the possibility that recent actions, or shall I say inactions, by the Fort Bend ISD administration are violations of the Texas Open Meetings Act.

The group has petitioned the school district to present records on specific details in regard to its feasibility study and other actions taken to promote the construction of the center, thought to be costing somewhere in the $23 to $25 million range.

Things like (from FortBendNow):

1. All documents under review by a committee the district set up to study the proposal’s feasibility
2. All comments made about the project publicly on an FBISD website
3. A list of “current committed companies and the amounts they have already donated to this project
4. All communication between members of the feasibility committee, PBK architects, FBISD Superintendent Timothy Jenney, and former Sugar Land mayor and developer David Wallace, who headed the feasibility committee
5. Any available financial disclosure statements since 2007 for Jenney.

The group claims that they have yet to receive any of these documents despite the fact that the records-release deadline has long since expired. So DA John Healey, truly a man of action, asked the Fort Bend Sheriff’s Department to look into the matter.

So that should do it. Now we’ll see some action, right?

Can anyone say “dead man in a truck in Needville?”

Now all of this took place earlier this year, but since these events, filings, and inactions the Houston Museum of Natural Science has opened its Sugar Land branch in a restored prison barracks building 3 miles from where Fort Bend ISD wants to build its science center.

It even has its own web page.

But my main point is here. They are going to be offering a wide variety of educational opportunities for the local student and teacher community.

Daytime classes ($10 per student)

Field Trips ($2.50 per student to “varies”)

Professional Development (Free - that is, sponsored - to $1250/person)

Because this makes me ask three questions:

1. If the district wants to build its own science center, what are the chances that it will want to send a single student to the museum to take advantage of their offerings?
2. In the absence of building the center, and in light of the same arguments that the district cannot afford a center, how much does anyone think that the district will have funds budgeted to take care of financing these field trips?
3. And finally, if those who oppose building the science center get their way, are these self-same people willing to kick in, say, $100 per student per year to take care of the museum fees?

Because “public education,” despite its appellation, isn’t free.

GAO Reverses Army Contract

I really don’t know how unprecedented it is, not following these things too closely, but today in its decision over the US Army’s award of a military truck contract to Wisconsin-based Oshkosh, Corp., the Government Accounting Office essentially told the Army that their decision-making process was “flawed”, and that they should not have awarded the contract to the lowest bidder.

Get that? Don’t award contracts to the lowest bidder.

My question is then, what does that leave us with? Awarding contracts to the squeakiest wheel?

The second-lowest bidder, a British-owned company called BAE, with a plant in nearby Sealy, Texas, lost in its bid to renew its 17-years long lucrative contract to build military trucks, lucrative in that these need to be replaced when they get ruined by IEDs, and cried foul when the lowest bidder, Oshkosh, won.

Losing the contract would have been bad news for the British company and a blow for workers in the Texas plant. After they lost the bid, after mind you, federal legislators from the Texas delegation scrambled to get a mulligan from the feds.

They wanted a do-over.

Because, they said, Oshkosh hadn’t been building these trucks for 17 years, and the Texas plant had.

That’s all. End of story. Nevermind that the Wisconsin company underbid the British company by 10%. Never mind all of that. What matters is not how much taxpayer money gets spent, but who gets to receive the money.

I guess I am mainly amused by these two-faced Texas congressmen and senators who decry spending one dime for a child’s health insurance because that would be fiscally irresponsible, have no trouble spending billions of taxpayer dollars for military equipment as long as it goes to a Texas company (and at that, a wholly owned subsidiary of a British conglomerate).

Because when it’s money that’s doing the talking, hypocrisy can’t be far behind.

Houston Elects Openly Gay Mayor

Well you could have knocked me over with a feather. In a low turnout runoff election taking place in the midst of Hanukkah and the Christmas shopping season, Houston elected Annise Parker to be its next mayor. Or should I say the first openly gay woman to be its next mayor.

This, in a state that passed an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment by a whopping 76.25% (in Harris County, the vote was 72.47% For and 27.52% Against). This in a city whose voters voted down a city referendum to grant spousal benefits to city workers in 2001.

And yes, I remain ever the cynic that the results that Houston got were partly due to a low turnout election with 16.55% of registered voters even bothering to come out on a cold dreary day in mid-December to vote in a run-off election in an old-numbered year. Parker won by just over 11,000 votes in a city with nearly a million registered voters.

And while I am not a resident of Houston, I am nevertheless quite pleased with the outcome, as Houston has elected the best person for the job, and that’s good for people in my area. Living in the suburbs of Houston is much like what the Canadians say about being next to the United States – it’s like sleeping with an elephant. But I am also content with this outcome because of how supporters of Parker’s opponent, Gene Locke, went viral with their enlistment of anti-gay activists and evangelical crazies to help get out the anti-gay vote. How they went absolutely bat guano crazy in an effort to denounce Ms. Parker for her gayness. And about how Locke seemingly shrugged his shoulders helplessly at the anti-gay antics of his supporters, rejecting “any association with the style of campaigning”of these whackjobs, but refusing to denounce them.

Here is what he did say a month ago, from the Chron:

“‘If it's based solely on that one issue I've rejected them,’ Locke said when asked during a TV debate why he accepted Hotze's endorsement. ‘If it's based on looking at my record and seeing that I am the better candidate, I would accept them.’”

A statement that insults the intelligence. A statement as transparent as a pane of glass. We are judged not only by what we do, but by what we fail to do.

We really don’t need people like that in office. Not after the kind of homophobic behavior we saw in San Francisco city offices back in 1978 that resulted in the double murder of Mayor Moscone and City Commissioner Harvey Milk.

And in saying that I hope that Ms. Parker realizes that her victory yesterday is not, as the media talking heads are all saying, and indication of how things are changing in Texas. I think things are as bad as they ever were here and to prove my point I want to point to the number totals between the 2005 Harris County votes for Proposition 2, the anti-gay marriage amendment, and the 2009 Harris County votes for Annise Parker.

Parker netted a total of 81,743 votes in the election yesterday.

Total Harris County voters who voted against Proposition 2? 89,652.

And no, I don’t believe in coincidences.

On Opening Up Medicare: A Solution for Unemployment?

Two separate issues are taking up a lot of time lately in DC. In the Senate the Public Option, a federally funded medical insurance plan that the insurance industry just hates appears to have been switched out for an intriguing plan to expand Medicare coverage for those Americans age 55 and over. Not full blown Medicare, mind you, but a plan to let sub-seniors buy into the plan.

Apparently this idea has legs, maybe because the insurance industry has been dealing with Medicare for 34 years now and this is the devil that they know.

The other thing that seems to be gaining momentum is a renewed undertaking to ease the unemployment situation, a problem that has not responded to federal stimulus like the financial sector has.

So we had an Obama “job summit” that, as reported in the Huffington Post, resulted in “a proposal for a battery of necessary and unsurprising, but probably not sufficient, recommendations.” On top of that we had a house bill proposed that would redirect unspent TARP funds to fund such things as small businesses, teacher salaries and highway construction. A direct infusion of funds to stimulate job creation.

But I wonder if anyone has yet realized that the Medicare for 55 years old people and jobs creation, seemingly two separate efforts, are really something akin to synergy when viewed in combination.

If they haven’t yet, anyone in the over 55 age group will now stop and ask themselves why they continue to work, especially if the only reason for working is to have a decent health insurance benefits package at an affordable cost. And in doing so, how many will conclude that early retirement, once a pipe dream, is now a reality.

Making their job, whatever it is, available to those under 55 who still need to work to live.

I wonder how many will jump at this chance to enjoy the fruits of their labor earlier than planned, simply because their health benefits can be switched to the government (aka Single Payer) plan?

Democratic Primary Filing: Three Days In

After only three days, the Texas Democratic Party has three pages of filers for the March 2, 2010 Democratic Primary. Look in for yourself from time to time. There are now three links to get a PDF file, one for the list by filing date, one for a list by filer’s name, and one for a list by office the candidate is running to be nominated for.

I notice that for Governor, we now have three filers: Bill White, Bill Dear and Felix Alvarado. Farouk Shami the hair care billionaire has yet to file. Nor has Kinky Friedman but we are now reading today that Friedman, who got just 9% of the popular vote in the 4-way gubernatorial race in 2006 when he ran as an Independent, is changing his mind again and might just drop out. In fact, a news conference was scheduled yesterday but the thing was cancelled, ostensibly while Kinky tries to figure out who he should support in the primary.

Felix Alvarado lists his profession as a teacher (a teacher without a phone number). He has a website and all the proper social networking in place. Bill Dear is a Private Eye, was the first to file on day one, and has no campaign website. I suspect that Dear would have a lot to say about the case against, and the execution of Todd Willingham.

I expect Shami to continue his campaigning and will eventually file as it is reported that he has opened a campaign office today in San Antonio.

So this should be fun.

A term-limited mayor of the 4th largest city in the United States, a tec, a teacher, and a self-funding businessman with a bottomless pit have filed so far (or will file in the near future).

I hope that’s not all, but that appears right now to be the case. Primaries on the ballot with a high stakes office like governor up for grabs, and no incumbencies to worry about, draw more people to the polls as it creates a little more excitement. Not as much as the record level primary attendance that we had last March when the Democratic nomination for the presidency was still up in the air, not by a long shot. But excitement is what we are going to need to carry us through to victory in November.

So anything to keep that excitement up (with the exception of Kinky Friedman who darn near single-handedly gave us 4 more years of Rick Perry) is welcome.

The more the merrier.

Pearl Harbor Day 2009

68 years ago today an American naval base in Hawaii was massively attacked by over 400 Japanese carrier-based airplanes. The result was the damage or destruction of 21 American naval vessels including several of our main line battleships and the outright sinking of two. Indeed the life lost on just the USS Arizona amounted to nearly half of the total of 2403 lives lost that day.

It was labeled a “sneak attack” in that Japan had not declared war before the first bomb fell, and American intelligence was left completely flatfooted.

Americans rose with righteous indignation and entered World War Two later that week.

Now unfortunately, all of the signs of Japanese desperation were evident before their attack was ever mounted. The Hilo Tribune-Herald, as it was called at the time, ran a front page article on November 30th that the Japanese “May Strike Over the Weekend.” The article, however, focused on Singapore – closer to Japan and a British colony at the time. Singapore was attacked as a part of their initial aggression in December 1941.

But that notwithstanding, an attack on American naval facilities by air was predicted by General Billy Mitchell in 1925. That same year a British reporter, Hector Bywater by name, published a fanciful novel called The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 in which he predicted a Japanese attack by carrier-based airplanes, but not in Hawaii. Bywater predicted an attack on Subic Bay, in Manila.

Something they ended up doing as well.

Trouble is, with information like this, you need almost 20-20 hindsight to be able to divine where and when the Japanese would eventually attack.

Why dwell on this, 68 years later? Most people alive now weren’t alive 68 years ago.

Well obviously, it’s because after all this time we haven’t learned much. I still cannot believe that the warnings in the NIE that was issued to Bush a month prior to the 9/11 attacks, attacks that resulted in the loss of human life in numbers greater than on December 7th 1941 were not acted upon.

You know, the intelligence report that said this:

“Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

See? It was all there for anyone to see. All except for one thing. Yes, airplanes had been hijacked, but in the past, this was a vehicle of extortion. Yes, the World Trade Center was previously bombed and it was known that Osama bin Laden wanted to “follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and ‘bring the fighting to America.’” Trouble is, who could have predicted from that information that the planes would be hijacked and used as gigantic bombs to level important buildings?

Who could come up with a fantastic scenario like that?

Tom Clancy did.

And by an odd happenstance, the fictional perpetrator was Japanese.