We've all gotten one. You know the kind of email I am talking about. It breathlessly lists a long litany of half truths and slanders against Obama and insists that you have to pass it on since the fate of the world, or at least the Republic depends on it. Its a modern form of gossip, I guess.
A new acquaintance collects them for study. I won't repeat the slanders here since that just pushes them up the ladder when people search for them. My personal favorite is the one that lifts sentences from Obama's books without page references or any context.
(With all this talk about spending caps and property taxes, we sometimes overlook how that affects specific policy like insuring children and seniors, paying our teachers, educating students, making college affordable, etc.
Great read! - promoted by Matt Glazer)
The Houston Chronicile ran this frontpage subhead today: "Over the past 6 years, at least 101 inmates have died at the Harris County Jail". Seventy inmates lost their lives in Dallas County's jail in the same period. That earned them a stinging rebuke from, of all places, the Bush Justice Department. Why is this happening? The linked video has the whole story. I make a few key points beneath the fold...
Lowering real compensation, predetory credit cards, bankruptcy reform which throws working class America an anchor, record levels of consumer debt. What does it all mean? It means welcome to the "company town."
LINK Texas not meeting kids' Medicaid needs, court agrees.
Ruling in mothers' federal lawsuit means they can seek relief from state for failing to comply with 1996 agreement
The promises made when deregulation was pushed through were ringing and clear - lower rates! But, as in the telecommunications deregulation the results have not been so clear,at least so far. Did I also mention the heat wave's death toll.?
Over on the Texas-Democratic Yahoo group, a suscriber wrote this:
I have a question for Councilmember Alvarado and commentator Marc Campos... Was Democrat Barbara Jordan mean spirited when it came to Immigration... as per her testimony before congress March 29, 1995??? It was also Democrat President Bill Clinton who began the border fence in 1996-1997 after illegal immigrants would crash the border city gates 500 at a time... He was also the first President since the 1920's to sign a tough immigration act. If I, a DEMOCRAT, share the same feelings as Barbara Jordan did in 1995, am I considered MEAN SPIRITED???
[snip]
"Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave." "...for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process." [Barbara Jordan]
I have omitted his/her name, since my point is not to bash them, but to address the very real points they make. I offer a response below....
Taking a page from the Roivan playbook: attack their strengths!
SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Politics -- Dean raps Bush on defense
"“You know, people say the Republicans are tough on defense. How can you be tough on defense if five years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden is still at large, the Iranians are about to get nuclear weapons, North Korea's quadrupled their nuclear weapons stash. . . ." Source
It is a well known Rovian strategy, dating back to his College Republican dirty tricks days I would guess. Well the smear always comes first, but attacking your opponent's strengths is also standard fare as well. So , if you are John Kerry, war hero, tell the voters you are a dirty grandstander who didn't deserve the medals. What Dean is doing is literally the Rovian thing. Make the Repugs defend their "tough on defense" mantra
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If I hold my nose and surf over to Perry's online sight, I discover that he highlights 4 issues : education reform, jobs and prosperity, fiscal responsiblity and family values. Let's think about each of these in turn.
Education Reform
There is a brewing insurrection on this one. Turn up the heat on his "reforms". Did you know that these reforms take more and more local control from your school boards and centralize them in the hands of the State Director of Education. Call it a power grab. Did you know that these so called reforms, while our TAAS or TEKS or whatever bullshit name you give these tests have been going UP, our SAT's and ACT's have been doing a Titanic?
"You've seen newspaper accounts that explain how Enron used a single indicator to show how well the company was performing," McNeil said. She went on to explain that the average scores on Texas' standardized tests are like Enron's stock price -- inflated and manipulated. Profits and successes were reflected in stock price. Debts and losses were carried on a different set of books. McNeil believes that placing so much emphasis on kids' scores, and linking the scores to the jobs and cash bonuses of school administrators, corrupted the system. Just as Enron's focus on stock price corrupted the company by encouraging every employee to do everything possible to keep the stock price climbing, school administrators were pressured to use "any means necessary" to pump up test scores. Everything from replacing good curriculum with test practice drills to dumping weak students likely to be a liability to the school's ratings.
LINK In fact, according to the 2006 Kids Count Data Book, a just-released national report on the well-being of children, child poverty is up 5 percent in Texas. Nearly one in four kids lives in poverty, less than $16,600 a year for a family of three.
More Texans are at risk of going hungry than anywhere else in the country. Every day, one in six Texans is food insecure, meaning they aren’t sure where they’ll get their next meal. Nearly 5 percent of families actually goes hungry, ranking us fourth worst in the nation.
Texas also has the highest rate of adults and children without health insurance. One in four Texans is uninsured.
These problems have real consequences for all of us. If a family is living in poverty or if a child is hungry or sick, we all pay the price.
Fiscal Responsiblity
The time bomb has been planted on this one, but it won't go off for a year or so. It was planned this way during the educational special session. As I blogged about 2 month ago:
Perry family values uh? If we cannot depend on outsourcers to do telephone applications right, why should we place the well-being of our most vunerable children in their hands? .
Absent remarkable improvement, the state should cancel the massive contract with a private company hired to screen applicants for state assistance
"Since the Texas Health and Human Services Commission approved an $899 million contract with a consortium led by Bermuda-based Accenture, very little has gone right. The people who've paid for the blunders are the state's poor, particularly children and the elderly.
Since the state instituted the privatization effort, enrollment and reinstatement rates in the Children's Health Insurance Program have slumped; hundreds of persons have erroneously been denied Medicaid and food stamp eligibility; and applications were mistakenly directed to a Seattle warehouse. Planned layoffs of state caseworkers, which were supposed to result in big savings, were canceled as overwhelmed call centers were forced to return thousands of cases to state employees."
Why can't we agree to divide up the work and have these counter-themes pushed by various ones of our candidates, not just Bell? Surely, there is in these themes plenty of ammo for use in local legislative races. While shooting at the your local Republican critter, throw a shot Perry's way as well. Surely, we can create imaginative events to highlight these themes and simultaneously put forth our positive counter agenda? Why not make these a set of common theme for candidates throughout the state? They would not have to abandon their own concerns, just weave these into the mix as well.
As I see it, Bell needs to dramatically turn up the heat on Perry. He is holding steady at 39% or so and I don't Bell making up much ground. See poll here
I may be out of my depth, but I see too much reaction, not enough proactive traction on Bell's part. If I am totally off with all this, somebody tell me so...
