For BP has messed with Texas. Again. God must be very angry at Governor Rick Perry. Maybe when the Governor blamed God for BP's disaster and then later, after Perry had stolen from Texas school children, he brought the wrath of heaven to Texas.
This past weekend tarballs washed up in Galveston on the Bolivar Peninsula at Crystal Beach.
About a dozen tar balls that washed ashore on Crystal Beach were identified Monday as oil from the BP well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the first evidence that oil from the spill has reached the Texas coastline.
But it was unclear whether the oil from the blowout dropped off a passing ship or drifted nearly 400 miles.
Laboratory tests showed that the tar balls came from the BP Macondo well that blew out April 20, killing 11 crew members on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, said Coast Guard Cpt. Marcus Woodring, commander of the Houston-Galveston sector.
The handful of tar balls came ashore Saturday and a second wave amounting to about 5 gallons of oil was found Sunday scattered along 1½ miles of beach on eastern Galveston Island and Crystal Beach on the Bolivar Peninsula, Woodring said. Laboratory results on the oil discovered Sunday are expected today, Woodring said.
Will Governor Perry pray for a miracle or will he parrot RNC talking points and blame the spill on the Obama Administration? Will he rail against the feds while gladly stuffing U.S. clean up funds into the state coffer? Will the Governor use federal money to actually clean up the spill or will he try to use fed bucks to cover his $18 billion budget shortfall? As we well know by now, Rick Perry excels at playing games with the evil doing federal government taxpayer dollars that he hates but loves to spend.
I wonder what Rick Perry and his Party of Partisan Misery will do to prevent future oil disasters in the U.S.?
Last week at the BP Congressional hearing TX U.S. House Representative Joe Barton bluntly revealed the Republican Party's ideological view on the role their elected lawmakers believe they are supposed to play while serving in office. Despite his apology for the use of "shakedown" when referring to President's Obama demand for a $20 billion escrow account to pay for damages and despite his retraction of his apology to BP, behind closed doors most, if not all, Republicans are on the same page as Joe Barton. John Cornyn certainly is. When the BP Congressional hearing concluded it would not surprise me if all of the Republicans present sent text messages to their most generous BP contributors and wrote the following.
I am so very sorry that Obama forced you to pay $20 billion to the U.S. Please understand that I have to pretend that I am very angry at you right now, but you should always know how much I love and respect you. Please understand, from the bottom of my heart, that I will always work to loyally serve and obey you. And I promise, as soon as we can take back the House, Senate and White House, I will see to it that you get deep tax cuts. We will transfer your burden to taxpayers just as we did to bail out Wall St. Hugs and kisses, from your closest and dearest tool in the U.S. Congress.
It should be clear to any informed voter that Texas Republicans do not work for the people of Texas. They never have and they never will. Anyone who believes otherwise should pull one's head out Rush Limbaugh's, FOX cable TV news and Glenn Beck's trash cans.
The Office of Congressional Ethics has sent letters to several residents of the C Street Christian fellowship house informing them that there is no "probable cause" to believe legislators are getting improper gifts in the form of below-market rent, Roll Call reports.
The house has been the target of more than one allegation that the reported rent of $950 for a furnished room amounts to an unreported gift or income.
Roll Call reports:
Aides to Reps. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), Heath Shuler (D-N.C.), Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) said Friday that each lawmaker received a letter from the OCE informing him that it closed the investigation.
As with all such declartions, I am sure there is a reasonable explanation. Except when there isn't. You have read all I can find on the justification for this decision. If you fail to see said justification, join the rest of us in the real world.
Moran [one of the involved residents]has said he believes the complaint is groundless, and he said at the Wichita event: "I do believe that there are those people that want to make certain that one's religious faith is not something that is mingled with their public service. ... My public service is clearly related to my beliefs as a Christian."
Ethics lawyer C. Simon Davidson, who is a contributing writer for Roll Call, said "the fundamental issue is, 'Did they receive a gift?' In order to determine whether they received a gift, you would need to determine whether they received disproportionately more than what they paid for." In short, did the Members pay a fair price for their lodging?
But Davidson pointed out, "The difficulty is that it is not clear that there is really a fair market value for this type of thing. It is such an unusual living arrangement," more akin to a rooming house than a normal hotel or apartment building.
Got it? It is SOOOOOO hard to figure out a fair market value for prime residential living in the DC area with all the amenities, and I do mean all the amenities.
If this is not proof that big oil owns the Texas Republican Party I do not what else is. Joe Barton (R-TX) apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward for President Obama's successful demand for $20 billion commitment from BP in order to help make reparations for those that have been financially devastated by the disaster. This includes fisherman who can no long fish for a living, the tourism industry and oil workers who are out of work b/c of the temporary ban on deep water drilling in the region.
Ol' Joe is obviously more worried about his own campaign coffer than he is the people in the Gulf region. Joe has received $33 million from big oil during his career in office.
God forbid should the government work on behalf of the American people.
What a shocker. Not. According to an article in the Houston Chronicle today 37 of the 64 judges in the Gulf region from Texas to Florida, have financial ties to big oil and gas.
Thirty-seven of the 64 active or senior judges in key Gulf Coast districts in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have links to oil, gas and related energy industries, including some who own stocks or bonds in BP PLC, Halliburton or Transocean - and others who regularly list receiving royalties from oil and gas production wells, according to the reports judges must file each year.
As many of us already know, big oil and the energy industry has been buying politicians and judges for decades.
Those three companies are named as defendants in virtually all of the 150-plus lawsuits seeking damages, mainly for economic losses in the fishing, seafood, tourism and related industries, that have been filed over the growing oil spill since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. Attorneys for the companies and those suing them are pushing for consolidation of the cases in one court, with BP recommending Texas and others advocating for Louisiana and other states.
BP's devastating oil gusher has certainly opened a pandora's box of a systemic and pervasive lax regulation and oversight, little, if any accountability, crony capitalism, mind boggling corruption and criminal negligence that has pervaded our culture for decades. To learn that judges are part of this toxic anti-American brew should serve as a wake up call to all.
Harris County Republican Tax Assessor Collector Leo Vasquez signed an agreement to settle the TDP lawsuit growing out of the corrupt suppression tactics practiced by his predecessor, Paul Bettencourt last week.
But poor Leo, he cannot overcome his deep seated Republican nature. Having made nice in order to end the embarrassing law suit, he now wants to insist that it was all a partisan nuisance, without merit.
Really Leo? So when the Houston Chroncile opined that :
Lone Star Project"But the specified changes in the tax-office procedures for handling registration applications make it clear that the original complaints were anything but frivolous."
- Houston Chronicle Editorial, October 29, 2009
It was making things up, right?
And when you said:
"These attacks are nothing more than partisan witch hunts"
The fact that ....
Lone Star ProjectAs part of a court settlement, Vasquez acknowledged widespread voter registration problems detailed by the Lone Star Project. Vasquez was forced to accept more than a dozen changes insisted upon by Democrats to protect the rights of Harris County voters. (Source: Houston Chronicle, 10/23/2009)
So we are now finding out the answers to some of our questions about which members of Congress actually represent We, the People...and which ones represent, Them, the Corporate Masters.
We have seen a Democratic Senator propose a policy that would put people in jail for not buying health insurance and a Democratic President who has taken numerous public beatings from those on the left side of the fence for his inability to ram something through a group of people...and yes, folks, the entendre was intentional.
But most of all, we've been asking ourselves: "why would Democratic Members of Congress who will eventually want us to vote for them vote against something that nearly all voting Democrats are inclined to vote for?"
Today's conversation attempts to answer that question by looking at exactly how money and influence flow through a key politician, Montana's Senator Max Baucus-and in doing so, we examine some ugly political realities that have to be resolved before we can hope to convince certain Members of Congress to vote for what their constituents actually want when it really counts.
AUSTIN, Texas - Before the House voted Speaker Tom Craddick out of his powerful job, state officials wiped his computers clean and deleted scores of electronic files, raising concerns that important public records may have been destroyed.
[snip]
The computers were removed from the speaker's office to be wiped clean at 5 p.m. on Jan. 12, said Anne Billingsley, spokeswoman for the Texas Legislative Council. Rep. Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, was sworn in as speaker at noon the following day.
[snip]
"Everything that Speaker Craddick had on his computers as far as data and records, he was allowed to take with him into his (state representative's) office," Billingsley said. "As far as the computers go, they took all the computers for the speaker's office and they got wiped."
Forget the fact that Craddick is a card carrying arrogant crook in my book. He was part of the state government. He does not get to decide , unilaterally what belongs to him, and what belongs to the people of Texas as a record of how their government was conducted.
Court disagrees, pointing out opinions are often divided
By ERIC TORBENSON / The Dallas Morning News
Texas' Supreme Court justices aren't in the habit of defending their judicial records, much less from lawyers grilling them as they would an uncooperative witness.
But that's just what happened in September at a continuing education event at Horseshoe Bay Resort hosted by the Dallas Bar Association, where lawyers peppered two justices with questions about their impartiality.
Sample query: Do the justices hunt for plaintiff victories in appeal courts just so they can overturn them?
"To be honest, I've never seen anything quite like that in a bar group," Justice Paul Green told Texas Lawyer magazine after the event.
His name is Sandy Kress . His claim to fame? He helped push write and pass "No Child Left Behind". If you like mindless high stakes testing that empoverishes our children and enriches the Not So Fab Five (Thomson Learning, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin and Harcourt General (a division of Reed Elsevier). ) eudcational stuff producers/publishers, then you too will want to support his candidency. Having written the law, our "expert" came back to Texas as lobbyist for the very corporations he helped enrich. The dismally bad system put in place by NCLB costs tax payers between 1.9 and 5.3 Billion dollars last year according to GAO. Is anyone happy with what we are getting for our money?
How bad is this clueless expert? Check out some outtakes from the Texas Observer piece on him from May , 2005. ( via the blog schoolsmatter )
Many lawmakers and local/regional governmental officals erupted in glee at the prospect of transferring financing of public infrastructure projects to private equity partners. The traditional group of public works hogs at the public money bins jumped cartwheels anticipating funding to flow more rapidly out of other pockets into theirs. Governor Rick Perry spent Texan's hard earned tax money to fly to Europe to court potential European and Australian partners. TxDOT repeated the same old lies: "There is no way to finance roads without tolls."
To the public CDAs or Private Public Partnerships for toll roads is presented as being financed by private partners. When we look up close and get real personal and examine specific projects however, the facade doesn't hold up to scrunity. For example, Cintra, if awarded SH 121, would have invested about the same amount of money which Texas taxpayers have already invested in the project (state, federal dollars and local governments investment in right of way). The Federal Government would also loan the private partner additional fund and faciliate borrowing of billions of dollars of tax exempt money from other private lenders.
When Democratic Rep William Jefferson was recently indicted for accepting a 6-figure bribe from FBI undercover agents, Republicans in Washington were quick to pounce on the story and use it to question the ethics of the Democratic Party.
You can't blame them. After the numerous scandals they've had with Republican Congressmen over the past 3 or 4 years, they were downright giddy and grateful for Jefferson. And, yes, the major scandals ALL involved Republicans.
The list of scandals goes on and on and on and...well, you get the idea. It's a real shame the GOP has been so corrupt or they could've acted all holier than thou and could've used Jefferson like a hammer against the Dems. They did try for good measure to act offended, but like Paris Hilton's apology, people didn't buy it.
So they did the next best thing. They basically hoped to convince the public that Democrats were no better than Republicans when it came to corruption.
That strategy will work to some degree, but not everyone watches Faux News and not every American is lazy. You have got to be pretty brain-washed or lazy to think that one corrupt Democrat offsets all the sex, embezzlement, corruption, and bribery scandals have erupted in the GOP the last seven years.
The Democratic Party is not perfect, but the imbalance of scandals tilts so far against the GOP that it's kind of tough to sell that "politicians are all the same" crap.
Perry of Perry homes. You know him well as one of Gov. Goodhairs bestest sugar daddies. A piece from the Texas Observer reminds us what his money has bought and what it has cost consumers.
link The industry hijacked the agency from the beginning. The Legislature created the TRCC in 2003, ostensibly to regulate the state's many homebuilders and to protect consumers. It quickly became clear that the commission was principally designed to keep large home construction companies out of court.
Much of the bill that created the commission was written by John Krugh, a corporate lawyer for Perry Homes. The Houston company is owned by Bob Perry-one of the state's most prolific home builders and also Texas' top contributor to political campaigns. Since 2001 Perry has donated more than $15 million to campaigns in Texas, almost exclusively to Republicans, according to the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice. Perry has contributed $436,800 to the Gov. Rick Perry's campaign account since January 2004, according to filings at the Texas Ethics Commission. Gov. Perry (no relation) later appointed Krugh to serve as one of the nine commissioners who run the agency he helped create. As the Observer reported two years ago, the commission overseeing the TRCC features not a single consumer advocate [see "The Agency that Bob Perry Built," February 4, 2005].
The FBI raided the home of yet another GOPer in connection to the Jack Abramoff scandal. This time it was California Representatvie John Doolittle home that was searched by the FBI, the same day that the home of Kevin Ring, a Doolittle aide, was raided as well. Ring was to go to work for Abramoff but abruptly and without explanation resigned. Doolittle of course has denied all charges, but what's the saying? Where there's smoke there's fire, right?
In this case, there's a big fire and Doolittle (love that name) has done a lot (sorry) to add gasoline to the flame, including getting personally involved on the behalf of Abramoff to get the case against Abramoff dismissed.
Now why do you think a United States Congressman would want to get involved in one criminal investigation? Hmmm? Don't suppose the fact that Abramoff funneled, err, I mean, "employed" Doolittle's wife for almost $67,000 had anything to do with it, do y'all?
Mark Foley and Ted Haggard with their sex scandals rocked the Republican party last election cycle and it seems the Republicans still aren't done with the corruption.
I know the Abramoff scandal doesn't involve prostitution or child molestation, but in my opinion it is an even more serious scandal because what Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Republican Bob Ney of Ohio (who is in jail), and politicians like John Doolittle tried to do was undermine the very principles of our democracy.
The men - ALL REPUBLICANS - funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to themselves and treated the goverment and your tax dollars as their personal vehicle for fortune and power. Follow me on the flip because it's not just Ney that should be jail.
WASHINGTON - Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.
Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party elections, only about 120 people have been charged and 85 convicted as of last year.
Most everyone charged has been a Democrat, voting records show. Many of those the Justice Department concentrated on appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.
This is dot one documenting Rove's efforts to use voter fraud laws as weapons of political warfare. It is no longer conjecture, it is fact .....
Big Nate got in trouble for pimping his girlfriend for the US Supreme Court and asked for donations to pay his legal bills to wriggle out of the charges. Bob Perry knows how The Man can hassle a fine upstanding citizen, so he slipped Nate-baby a cool $16 grand through his PAC. Now those libruls up at the DMN are trying to cause trouble by pointing out that the bribe donation was made just days before Nate was going to hear a case involving a couple of malcontents complaining about the crapholes houses that Bob's company hires illegal aliens affordable labor to build.
As if Big Nate could be influenced by a measly $16 thousand.
Editor's note: It may not just be $16,000 either. Look:
Hillco PAC, an Austin-based committee whose primary funder is Mr. Perry, donated $16,000 to the justice. And the contribution came days before the Texas Supreme Court heard an appeal by Perry Homes seeking to overturn a string of unfavorable rulings.
The case involves a retirement-age couple, Bob and Jane Cull of Mansfield, locked in a 10-year legal battle with the Houston-based homebuilder over structural problems with their house.
An arbiter awarded the couple $800,000, but Perry Homes has refused to pay. Attorneys for Perry Homes say the couple waived their right to arbitration. The arbiter and lower courts disagreed.
The donation violates no laws or ethics rules. And Justice Hecht is not required to report campaign contributions until July, so it's unclear whether he received more from Mr. Perry or other donors with business before the court.
link
NC, Texas firm reach settlement on Medicaid billing contracts
RALEIGH, N.C. - The state will pay $10.5 million to a Texas company to settle litigation that began when the Department of Health and Human Services canceled its contract with the firm hired to complete a massive Medicaid system overhaul.
The agreement, announced Tuesday, ends a dispute with Affiliated Computer Services, which in 2004 won a five-year, $171 million deal to modernize the state's Medicaid billing system that pays about 1.7 million claims annually.
And it will only cost us taxpayers 10.5 million dollars!
So there was a very interesting comment dropped in my post from yesterday:
The plan .... (4.00 / 4)
was to offer Richard Morrison two million dollars to run for the 22nd congressional seat. Morrison, in turn, would drop Noriega.
You see how far that secret plan went.
by: Galveston Gale @ Thu Mar 29, 2007 at 14:18:50 PM CST [ Reply | ]
