Lincoln and Douglas are Still Dead

I didn't watch the Republican gubernatorial debate the other night- didn't really feel a need to. I haven't decided for certain yet which primary I'm going to vote in- vote for the best Democrat or the worst Republican- but I already knew how I felt about all three of the people seeking to be the chief executive of Texas.

That said, the Houston Chronicle's account of the debate is a bit interesting.

Gov. Rick Perry spent most of the evening defending his promotion of the Trans-Texas Corridor, toll roads and the spending of $380 million to attract businesses to move to Texas. Perry said he would not have done anything differently during his nine years in office.

I hope the Democrats have THAT little clip in hand for their fall ads. "If you hated the last nine years of Republican rule, how about four more?" Or better yet, "If this man has his way, someday all Texas roads will be toll roads- including the street on which you live."

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison again tried to square her “94 percent pro-life” voting record with her support for the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. She also took the brunt of anti-Washington rhetoric.

Dead campaign walking. In this environment, nothing other than "the right to life begins at conception and ends at birth" is going to satisfy the radical right organization that the Texas Republican Party has become.

Hutchison restated her promise to quit the Senate no matter whether she wins or loses the governor's race.

So what's keeping you?

Please don't say manana if you don't mean it...

Activist Debra Medina had to distance herself from statements she made last year that if efforts to promote states' rights fail, the nation may need a “bloody war” of secession. Medina said she is against secession. She said she wants the state to be able to nullify federal laws...

So, you don't support secession, you just support the thing that led to secession a hundred fifty years ago.

Debra, dear, don't be ashamed of your pro-secession views. Rick Perry shares them, remember?

But very few concrete ideas were offered by the candidates on how to resolve a possible $17 billion shortfall in the state's budget over the next two years or how to pay for an expected $300 billion in highway construction needed over the next 20 years.

And this is the fundamental point of the debate. The Republican Party has forgotten how to even HAVE ideas. They've lost their brains and have nothing left but their campaign reflexes- fight, and fight dirty.

It's ironic that almost the only idea of any solidity came from the teabagger outsider, Medina:

She offered one of the more direct proposals of the evening: replace the property tax with increased sales taxes — even if that means the sales tax rate would have to go to 14 percent.

I actually ran with this as my main platform plank when I sought a seat in the legislature as a Libertarian, back in 2006. I still think it's not a bad idea, provided you make most necessities of life tax-free and provide some mechanism to ease the pain on the poor.

But it's not really a Republican idea, and never has been, because it requires that one tax be raised to offset the abolition of another. No mainstream Republican has the honesty to admit the need to do this; instead, it's "cut taxes" forever, and to hell with balancing the budget or maintaining minimum services for the worst off among us.

It's sad that a pro-secession, lunatic-fringe teabagger candidate appears to be the most honest and most sensible of the Republican options. It's also not a little bit frightening. Right now the empty suits like Perry and Hutchinson are the only things standing in the way of an open (and possibly armed) revolt by the people who Debra Medina represents. If they don't come up with better policies- or, more to the point, better candidates- then the old Republicans will sink...

... and something new, and much more savage and ruthless, will rise in its place.

Trans Texas Corridor- Minor Victory

Good news: the Texas Department of Transportation has nixed their plan to build the I-69 Trans Texas Corridor as an entirely new highway, grabbing millions of acres of new land to bypass virtually everyplace.

Bad news: the plan to make I-69 part of the Trans Texas Corridor still stands- which means that US 59 will be expanded to the Goliath proportions of the 400-yard-wide Trans Texas Corridor standards for most of its rural length. Local businesses near the existing US 59 lanes will be destroyed or bypassed for the toll incarnation of I-69, which will have businesses owned and operated by the same private corporations that operate the toll road itself.

In short, the Trans Texas Corridor Project is still alive; the beast has not yet been slain.

TxDOT promises that existing lanes will not be made into toll lanes on US 59. This, of course, presumes that existing lanes won't be torn up or shut down for various reasons.

Granted, Rick Perry is having trouble holding even his loyal Republicans in line on this issue. My Republican State Senator, Robert Nichols, was elected without any opposition whatever- but he supported the moratorium on toll road construction currently in place, and he seems favorable to killing TTC off completely.

Still, it's all the more important to elect Democrats to the Texas state legislature- especially since the Republicans hold only a five seat majority in the House at present. A flip of three seats would be enough to turn the House Democratic, which in turn would spell doom for the TTC and for most long-distance toll projects in the state.

Good Lord, let it happen...

Say No to Trans-Texas Corridor

The following is a statement I will try to deliver Wednesday night, when the Texas Department of Transportation comes to Livingston to give an open house on its attempt to include the proposed I-69 project as part of the Trans Texas Corridor toll road project.

In 2005 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Kelo v. New London that governments may use the power of eminent domain to take homes and property from one person and give it to another for the purposes of private profit. Here in Texas the Republican Party voiced their outrage at this ruling and promised to pass laws to forbid any such abuses within the state of Texas.

The eminent domain bill that actually came out of the legislature was a toothless, worthless document. It did not require that property owners be paid market value for their property or recompense for loss of access to property not taken. It allowed state and local officials to declare property "blighted", take it, and give it free to private developers. It had a list of exemptions a mile long- exemptions for new private wharves and yacht harbors in Freeport, exemptions for the new stadium for the Dallas Cowboys in Arlington, and most notably Governor Rick Perry's Trans Texas Corridor project. Perry signed this measure, this sham of a law, and called it reform.

In 2007 the Legislature came back and tried to close some of these loopholes. It tried to remove the power to declare property blighted. It tried to force the government to pay fair market value for property seized. This bill passed with veto-proof margins in both houses.

Rick Perry waited until the Legislature adjourned, then vetoed it.

Why did Rick Perry veto this second, substantial reform? Because Rick Perry wants to take our homes. Rick Perry wants to give our property to a handful of toll road corporations and land developers. And Rick Perry does not want us to be able to stop him.

In 2002 Rick Perry announced his Trans Texas corridor as a solution to the problem of "rural interstate congestion." There is no such thing as rural interstate congestion. There is, however, such a thing as over $800,000 in campaign donations from toll road interests into Rick Perry's campaign funds in 2001 alone- with hundreds of thousands of dollars since.

Ric Williamson, Perry's hand-chosen head for the Transportation Commission, has told us that, quote, "It's either toll roads, slow roads or no roads." This is by design. In the biannual budget for 2007 Rick Perry assigned 40% of the state's highway budget to the Trans Texas Corridor. By an amazing coincidence, maintenance of existing roads amounts to 60% of the budget. Perry and his supporters, including our very own representative John Otto, have deliberately rigged the state budget to create a shortfall in the highway budget to both fund and justify building toll roads. To quote Commissioner Williamson again: "In your lifetime most existing roads will have tolls." This is their ambition: to force you to pay a toll every time you leave your driveway.

Governor Perry claims the only way Interstate 69 will be built is through the Trans Texas Corridor project. This is wrong. What will be built under Trans Texas is not an interstate. Nearly a third of the projected I-69 project is either already built or can be built with no additional taking of private property. Trans Texas Corridor would bypass virtually all this existing freeway.

In its place Trans Texas Corridor would build a highway with exits spaced as far apart as twenty miles, cutting off access to towns like Livingston, Corrigan, and smaller villages. The Trans Texas Corridor would be over five times as wide as a standard interstate... with no access roads. If the bypass around Livingston became the center of the Trans Texas Corridor route, everything from the Brookshire Brothers store to Long King Creek would be taken, flattened, and handed over to a Spanish corporation... and it still wouldn't be wide enough.

Furthermore, the developers of Trans Texas would build their own restaurants, gas stations, and hotels within the Corridor... property wholly exempt from county or city property taxes, causing all other residents' taxes to go up. The result would be not an expansion of the local economy, but a sharp decline.

Trans Texas Corridor does not help our area. Trans Texas Corridor will take half a million acres statewide to build over four thousand miles of toll road, almost entirely in areas where they are not needed. In urban areas such as Austin it will convert highways already built, paid for at taxpayer expense, into toll roads. It will take homes and pay homeowners pennies on the dollar. It will split counties in half and shut farmers and property owners out of their land. Worst of all, it will triple-tax Texas citizens- once to pay for the construction, then again for auto registration, then a third time for the toll.

Finally: in the past, toll roads were built to cover only the initial cost of construction, after which they were made freeways. This is not true of Trans Texas. The leases, contracts, and agreements involved with this project have terms of as long as seventy years. That means, if this project were completed tomorrow, not a single person in this room tonight would live to see the toll booths taken down. And those tolls would not go to maintain the roads or build new ones: they would go into the pockets of a handful of corporate interests. Instead our tax dollars- which would go ever higher- would be used to maintain these roads built not for our sake, but for the sake of rich men getting richer.

I am oppposed to the Trans Texas Corridor project. I am opposed to Rick Perry, Ric Williamson, John Otto, County Judge John Thompson, and all other supporters of the Trans Texas Corridor project. In November my votes will all be NO for this proposal and YES for those who will go to Austin, repeal the Trans Texas Corridor Act, and shut this project down.

We do not need this boondoggle.

We do not WANT this boondoggle.

Do not BUILD this boondoggle.

Anyone want to give odds on whether or not I'll actually be able to say a word of this?

Didn't think so.