Burnt Orange Report

Some Things you Didn't Know

By Karl-Thomas Musselman

I've been meaning to post this for some time but have been busy with school starting.

Back when we had the Grassroots training here in Austin and Dean came, there were a number of people of interest that came to our evening gatherings to talk politics and such. One of which was Tom Hughes, political director for DFA. There were others, the trainers, and at this point I'm not entirely sure who said what about each of these following discoveries. So I'll put it under the category of "Things Learned That Neither You Nor I Knew Before".

First off, the Infamous Iowa Dean Scream. I was there, many of you have heard me and just about everyone else bitch about it and how the media didn't bother to include the crowd sounds and just filtered out everything. I went on and on about how in the room you might now have even heard the scream (which is still true) and the callous media didn't bother to do a 'reality' check.

Come to find out, the entire fiasco, and especially the Cable TV clips that were run over and over 100s of times might have been the fault of the Dean Iowa campaign. That night, all of those stations were plugged into the general media Pool Feed (similar to the Democratic National Convention where there was a Pool Camera just to the right of the Texas Delegation that didn't pan on us, hence why you never saw us on TV floor flyovers). Well, the Iowa Dean staff had plugged into the Pool Feed box only the mic for Dean and no feeds that were there for background crowd noise as can be done for rally like events. (Nothing is worse than having a big applause line and then hearing quiet muffled nothingness.) So in short, we screwed up, and though the Media in the grander scheme certainly isn't absolved of being at times hostile to the Dean campaign, it's not all their fault.

Second big thing, and this one is more local to Texas. These rumors concern the DA's office and the Ronny Earle investigation into Tom Delay and illegal corporate money flowing here, there, and everywhere in and out of the state of Texas in relation to influencing the 2002 Texas House elections. Apparently, they are finding out more connections that they thought they would find and the analogy given was, "each stone turned over is revealing 5 new bugs that lead to other stones with more bugs under them".

So the problem? This is taking more time than expected. As in, possibly extending the time frame of the investigation beyond that of the election cycle this fall. Which means that some candidates might not get their indictment/guilty verdicts or otherwise before Nov. 2. Because if they stop too soon, the leads dry up, and the greater goal of bringing down influential Corporate Money in Texas once and for all will not be achieved.

And now, going even more local into a race where the Republican was aided by Delay Money Funneling, Jack Stick, being challenged by Mark Strama here in northern Travis County, apparently has only recently in the last 3 weeks gone in to get his first Voter File from the County offices. There has been no active field program as of yet according to the Stick staffer who picked up the file, who unwittingly talked to a Democratic operative that he apparently didn't recognize. So all summer, as Mark Strama and his Interns have been blockwalking, phoning, and raising money up in Pflugerville, Stick has been raising some money and doing nothing.

Doesn't that make you want to donate to Strama with .01 added for BOR? Let's swing this one our way.

And there is one other tidbit I have learned but am not ready to share quite yet if at all. Let's just say that it could fall into the category of ScHrOCKING.