RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Progress Texas' Glenn Smith Talks Wendy Davis, Rick Perry, and More

Democratic political consultant Glenn Smith in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, June 28, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Talking politics with Glenn Smith,
director of Progress Texas PAC

Glenn Smith, who organized Ann Richards' successful campaign for governor of Texas, talks about Rick Perry, Wendy Davis, and the Texas Legislature, and the prospects for Texas turning blue.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / July 2, 2013

Progressive writer and political consultant Glenn Smith, director of the Progress Texas PAC, was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 28, 2013.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Glenn Smith here:


Glenn W. Smith managed Ann Richards' successful campaign for governor of Texas in 1990. A former reporter for the Houston Chronicle and Houston Post, Smith is the author of the highly regarded book, The Politics of Deceit: Saving Freedom and Democracy from Extinction. Smith, who served as a senior fellow at George Lakoff's Rockridge Institute in Berkeley, currently is director of Progress Texas PAC, “helping the Texas progressive movement develop and deliver disciplined, effective messages.”

On the show we talk politics -- with special focus on the phenomenal developments in the special session of the Texas Legislature, June 23-25, where Sen. Wendy Davis filibustered Rick Perry's draconian anti-abortion legislation. We also discuss the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions on voting rights and gay marriage, the status of immigration reform, and the prospects for Texas turning blue (or at least purple) in the reasonably near future.

We also discuss the efforts of Progress Texas, the progressive multi-issue organization with which Smith works -- and the under-the-radar work of Battleground Texas, the group that's busy applying the Obama campaign's grassroots organizing techniques to the state of Texas.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas called Glenn Smith a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” Listen to Smith's earlier appearances on Rag Radio, at the Internet Archive.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement.

The show has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Political Analysts Glenn W. Smith & Peck Young on the 2012 Elections

Glenn W. Smith, left, and Peck Young in the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, September 7, 2012. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio.
Rag Radio interview:
Glenn W. Smith and Peck Young
discuss the 2012 presidential elections

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / September 12, 2012

Prominent political analysts Glenn W. Smith and Peck Young were Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio, Friday, September 7, 2012, on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. They discussed the recent Republican and Democratic national conventions and larger issues related to the 2012 presidential elections and electoral politics in American society today.

Listen to Thorne Dreyer's Rag Radio interview with Glenn W. Smith and Peck Young, here:


Rag Radio features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. The syndicated show is produced in the studios of KOOP-FM, Austin's cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station. It is broadcast live on KOOP and streamed live on the Internet, and is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA.

Glenn W. Smith has spent the past 30 years as a writer, campaign manager, activist, and think tank analyst. A former political reporter for the Houston Chronicle and Houston Post, Smith led Ann Richards’ successful 1990 campaign for Governor of Texas and worked for Texas Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby and U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen. He’s coordinated national campaigns for MoveOn.org. and was a senior fellow at George Lakoff’s prestigious Rockridge Institute in Berkeley.

Smith is the author of The Politics of Deceit: Saving Freedom and Democracy from Extinction, writes regularly for The Huffington Post and FireDogLake, and created the popular DogCanyon website. Smith has appeared as a political analyst with Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Brit Hume, and many others.

Peck Young, who worked for 30 years as one of Texas leading political campaign strategists, is Director of the Center for Public Policy and Political Studies at Austin Community College. He has worked as a consultant with Texas Governor Ann Richards and numerous other leading Texas political figures, and for the presidential campaigns of Michael Dukakis, Bill Bradley, and Bill Clinton/Al Gore.

Young has received many professional honors and has been a force in Austin politics, working for renewable energy and single-member City Council districts, and drafted the city’s first Ethics, Financial Disclosure, and Lobby Registration ordinances.

This podcast includes original politically-themed topical songs by Austin singer-songwriter and "eco-troubadour" Bill Oliver that were first performed on the August 31 program. KOOP underwriting announcements and fall membership drive fundraising pitches have been removed from the podcast.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, 91.7-fM in Austin, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, September 14, 2012: Famed Texas civil rights and labor attorney David Richards.
September 21, 2012: Singer-songwriters Bob Cheevers and Noelle Hampton & Andre Moran.

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Glenn W. Smith : Is Rick Perry a Person?

That goes for all of us! Image of Wile E. Coyote from Three Fingers of Politics.
Is Rick Perry a person?

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / August 25, 2011

Glenn W. Smith will discuss "Rick Perry and the 'Texas Miracle'" with Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio, Friday, Aug. 26, from 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live here. Find podcasts of all Rag Radio shows at the Internet Archive.

Rick Perry and I go back a ways. As a reporter in the 1980s, I covered his undistinguished years in the Texas House. As a staffer to a Democratic lieutenant governor, I sat in meetings with him and watched him getting teased by his colleagues for his vanity. He clearly loves him some Rick Perry. He’s reported to shave his legs. Something about jogging speed. It’s earned him the name, “Nair Do Well,” but maybe shaved legs are de rigueur among the coyote-whacking-while-jogging set.

Here’s an odd fact: Rick Perry loves to criticize the federal stimulus package. But without the billions in federal money Texas received in 2009, Perry would have had to raise taxes to cover Texas’ budget deficit. Had he raised taxes, he would now be dead in the water in the GOP primary. President Obama, in a sense, paid for the campaign viability of his most likely 2012 opponent.

Still, if Rick Perry can be president, I can play center field for the New York Yankees. But I try to reassure myself. The universe simply can’t be this upside down. Nonetheless, Perry is likely to win the Republican nomination for president.

The Perry candidacy would pit a secessionist Southern governor against the nation’s first African-American president. Just pause and think about that a moment.

Perry tries to distance himself from his public flirtations with secession. A recently uncovered video, however, shows he was thinking about secession even before he mentioned it at a Tea Party rally in April 2009. Perry is using racist code when he speaks of secession. Anybody who thinks it is about the size of government or economic populism is kidding themselves. With his secession remarks, Perry is calling the Klan.

When Perry announced in South Carolina, he criticized governments “that elevated rulers at the expense of the people.” Odd, because after knowing Perry since the 1980s, I’m pretty sure that elevating rulers above the people is his first principle.

Perry’s religious cult fest in Houston a week ago was neatly summed up by writer Sarah Posner:

"command" and "obedience" were the day’s chief buzzwords for many speakers...

One preacher, Mike Bickle, was explicit, recommending not liberty but “ a life of obedience.”

It remains a mystery that so many libertarian-leaning Americans overlook the authoritarian ambitions of America’s Right. Perry talks about obedience to Jesus, but he really means obedience to Rupert Moloch, I mean Murdoch, and other transcendent, unreachable corporate gods.

Perry’s allegiance is not to other people, but to global Corporate Olympians. Just like Zeus, the new Corporate Olympians disguise themselves as persons so they can screw us. The disguise is called “corporate personhood,” though it should be called “corporate superpersonhood.” (The organization, Move to Amend, campaigning to end corporate personhood and “legalize democracy,” is worth your support).

The headline above is meant in jest, of course. Rick Perry is an all-too-human person, a human who has turned Texas into a third-world region that is the nation’s most polluted environment populated by the least healthy, most poorly educated, and most poorly paid humans in the nation. Maybe Perry’s running for president to improve Texas’ standing, not by pulling it up but by pulling the rest of the nation down.

Molly Ivins called him “Governor Goodhair” in reference to his Marvel comic book hairdo. He’s learned to speak in short, clipped sentence fragments like George W. Bush did, a practice that guards against “wordrobe malfunction” that would graphically display a rather flat-brained intellect.

Nonetheless, Perry has never lost an election. He’s been lucky. But he’s ruthless, disciplined, and quite willing to step outside the law. Just look at the suspicious network of Super PACs created to spend millions on Perry’s campaign while claiming, outrageously, that they will not spend millions on Perry’s campaign.

Twice now Perry has won elections by running ads that call his opponents cop-killers. I’m not making that up. In 2002, Perry accused Democrat Tony Sanchez of complicity in the murder of a DEA agent. In 2010, Perry accused Democrat Bill White of complicity in the murder of a Houston policeman. We don’t know yet what cops were killed by Mitt Romney or Michelle Bachmann, but Perry’s team will find them. It’s only a matter of time.

Perry’s campaign themes -- no regulation or oversight over corporations, low taxes on corporations, no legal accountability for corporations -- are the themes of a dangerous corporate authoritarianism. They are meant to complete the transformation of democracy into Democracy, Inc., to use Sheldon Wolin’s fine term. Perry’s is a frontal assault on individual liberty.

Perry is all about obedience to authority, his authority and the authority of corporations to run our lives without interference or oversight. Libertarians -- and the rest of America -- had better wake up to the place Perry’s ruthlessness and discipline will take us.

Here’s a video some Texans put together to give the nation a look at Perry. I hope they look hard.



[Austin's Glenn W. Smith, according to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” A former newspaper reporter, Smith managed Ann Richards' successful campaign for governor of Texas and worked for Texas Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby and Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. His excellent blog on politics and culture is DogCanyon. This article was first published at Firedoglake. Read more articles by Glenn W. Smith on The Rag Blog.]

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Glenn W. Smith : Conservative Lies About Human Nature

The "gloomy Hobbesian picture." Graphic from Apollo.Gold.
A dog-eat-dog world?
Conservative lies about human nature

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / June 29, 2011

Since World War II, America’s elite policy makers have arranged and rearranged our political and economic relationships around an empirically false -- radically false -- understanding of human being and behavior.

Paradoxically, the false portrait of humankind feeds both an unwholesome worship of dog-eat-dog individualism and a sense of powerlessness in the face of godlike market forces that must be obeyed no matter the cost in lives, global environmental catastrophe, or gross economic injustice.

Its roots lie in the gloomy Hobbesian picture of unredeemable, brutish humanity and in the Enlightenment’s faith in universal reason. Twentieth Century conservative thinkers, looking to rationalize authoritarianism and excuse the inevitable social destruction caused by unrestrained greed, simply invented new concepts of human nature that made their policy goals seem essential.

It’s just one of many ironies that this authoritarian view was swallowed whole hog by so-called libertarians. (It should be noted that Robert Nozick, author of the seminal libertarian book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, later spit out the worm he’d swallowed and repudiated his earlier work.)

The ugly, empirically false portrait is this: a human is a cold and isolated individual who uses unemotional reason to reach predetermined ends. This is the widely discredited but still popular “rational actor” model. And there’s another color in the picture, which some are now calling the “rat choice” model. This tells us those predetermined ends are always selfish or self-interested.

We are, these conservatives say, rats.

As virtually every field within the human sciences has found, we are nothing like that. Because we are hard-wired for empathy, we can and do act altruistically. We seek fairness. Our selves are not isolated, but interconnected in many ways. We are competitive, but we are also cooperative. Reason and emotion are intertwined. There’s no such thing as unemotional reason. We don’t coldly follow the rules of logic in making moral decisions.

In his new book, The Fair Society, biologist Peter Corning writes:

Contrary to the stereotype about our innate selfishness and greed, most of us share a desire to live in a society where fairness is the operative norm, where everybody’s basic needs are met... where there is a robust sense of "reciprocity" -- a rough balancing of benefits and obligations.

Cognitive scientists like George Lakoff have been urging us to grasp the new 21st Century understanding of human being and thinking. Dozens of others have made similar points. We can’t advance a progressive social vision using false assumptions disguised as unbiased scholarship, assumptions intended to forever preclude a fair, progressive, democratic society.

In her new book, Cultivating Conscience, UCLA law professor Lynn Stout demolishes the concept of “homo economicus,” the descriptive name for the lonely, selfish, hyper-rational, and exclusively materialist creature invented by conservative propagandists.

That view, Stout says, “implies we are psychopaths.”

It should come as no surprise that corporations and wealthy conservative ideologues funded the multi-decade effort to convince Americans our nature is other than it is. First came the Rand Corporation. It was there that economist Kenneth Arrow articulated the so-called “rational choice” theory. Here’s how historian Alex Abella summed it up in Soldiers of Reason:

Arrow’s rational choice theory would become a mainstay of economics and political science; by the 1960s... it would redefine the foundations of public policy by assuming that self-interest defines all aspects of human activity... When applied to corporations, the theory exempted them from any social responsibility other than that owed to their shareholders...

Next came the so-called “law and economics” movement, centered mostly at the University of Chicago and spearheaded by Richard Posner, Gary Becker, and others. In a nutshell, its propagandists insisted that the “rational actor” model be employed to decide legal disputes.

Such right-wing benefactors as Richard Scaiffe funded the law and economics movement with millions of dollars to the University of Chicago, the Manhattan Institute, and other institutions. The funding was not intended to help a search for truth. It was intended to paint a picture of human nature that justified unbridled greed and the injustice that follows from its institutional legitimacy.

There are echoes here of other authoritarian traditions that condemned the rabble to justify elite power. The religious myth about the Fall of Man, for instance, is accompanied by the assertion that only priests and pastors can save us from ourselves.

Conservative columnist David Brooks is clearly alarmed that the dark vision of humanity that fueled the conservative movement for decades is being unmasked. He is trying to fit the new, more humanistic and hopeful portrait into a scheme for more, not less, authoritarian control.

In his book, The Social Animal, Brooks recommends the new human sciences be employed to shape (read: control) people’s behavior. He leaves untouched all questions about whether such control is moral.

Edwin L. Rubin, who elaborated on the “rat choice theory” mentioned above, summed up the motivations of those who invented the cruel, selfish homo economicus:

...rational choice theory and rat choice theory, when combined, provide a comprehensive argument for an unregulated market, an argument grounded in a theory of human behavior and human choices.

Just last week, philosopher John McCumber took on the rational actor model and homo economicus in The New York Times:

Whatever my preferences are, I have a better chance of realizing them if I possess wealth and power. Rational choice philosophy thus promulgates a clear and compelling moral imperative: increase your wealth and power!

A moral imperative for the pursuit of wealth and power, whatever the consequences for the many and for society at large. That was the goal of the confidence men who sold us a false and destructive view of our own natures. So successful were they that many progressives (and most Democrats) remain content to operate within the frames and narratives generated by the scam.

Our most important task involves replacing the deceitful view of humankind with the new -- and true -- picture of cooperative, empathic, and complex human being (we can, obviously, be selfish, cruel and violent -- but that’s not all we are).

A society organized around the values generated by such a picture will look radically different from political and economic structures forced upon us by the greedy authoritarians who sold us a bill of goods about ourselves.

[Austin's Glenn W. Smith, according to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” His excellent blog on politics and culture is DogCanyon, where this article was also posted. Read more articles by Glenn W. Smith on The Rag Blog.]

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Glenn W. Smith : Gabrielle Giffords and The Blood of Eden

Jackson Pollock's The Deep. Oil and enamel on Canvas (1953).
The Blood of Eden:
Our escalating political violence

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2011

I caught sight of my reflection
I caught it in the window
I saw the darkness in my heart
I saw the signs of my undoing
They had been there from the start

So many American bodies are sprayed with blood, their own, their lover’s, their mother’s and father’s, their brother’s and sister’s. Oh we are so certain of our innocence, but we are a nation tattooed in crimson, eyes to belly, with Jackson Pollock’s "The Deep."

We called it a New World then carved a Trail of Tears for those who knew it to be ancient: the Choctaw, the Cherokee, the Seminole. And now we walk that Trail ourselves, lost and tormented, crying for Gabrielle Giffords, U.S. Judge John Roll, and the other victims of the Tucson shootings.

The “Rawhide Orator,” Choctaw Chief George Washington Harkins, in 1831 wrote to the American people before leaving for the Trail of Tears:

I could cheerfully hope, that those of another age and generation may not feel the effects of those oppressive measures that have been so illiberally dealt out to us; and that peace and happiness may be their reward.

A cheerful hope, and one unfulfilled, as the ghosts of dead immigrants whisper to us from the Arizona desert.

Within a few short hours of Saturday’s shootings, pundits and politicians were decrying the violent political rhetoric and symbolism that feeds the fires of hell. The conversations could have -- and should have -- taken place long before Saturday. They all knew what was coming.

And the darkness still has work to do
The knotted chord’s untying
The heated and the holy
Oh they’re sitting there on high
So secure with everything they’re buying

Just Friday I did an interview with Thorne Dreyer of Texas’ The Rag Blog and Austin’s KOOP-FM in which I warned again of our escalating political violence and compared our era to the years preceding the Civil War. Gods, I should have prayed hard to be wrong.

Gabrielle, you are named for the angel who foretold the coming of eternal peace. In your remarkable March 2010 MSNBC interview following the vandalism of your office, you saw a different future:

They really do need to realize that their rhetoric and firing people up and even things for example where on Sarah Palin’s targeted list... the way she has it depicted, it has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that they have to realize there are consequences to that action.

What haunts us is not a momentary collapse of good manners. We have spoken often here about the loss of sociality in the public sphere. It is a fact that many in power have very consciously promoted hatred and violence. I suppose they meant it poetically. They will all plead innocence now and wear modest garlands of grace about them. It’s a thin disguise.

My grip is surely slipping
I think I’ve lost my hold
Yes I think I’ve lost my hold
I cannot get insurance any more
They don’t take credit, only gold
Is that a dagger or a crucifix I see
You hold so tightly in your hand
And all the while the distance grows between you and me
I do not understand

We are a polarized people, and violence races like a water snake through the river of our history. We are attracted to those who kill for their prejudices or beliefs. But as John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards discovered in The Searchers, such is the path to the death of the soul.

And it does not need to be this way. Our greatness lies less in violent victories than in moments of democratic transcendence, from the Bill of Rights to women’s suffrage. We are linked to one another, like it or not. When one falls to the bloody ground, so will the other.

This is not a game. It is a great struggle for human freedom and peace, and we can no longer tolerate the cowardly murderers who stir the beasts in us for a few gold coins. Pilate’s hands, they may be reminded, have not yet been washed.

At my request you take me in
In that tenderness I am floating away
No certainty, nothing to rely on
Holding still for a moment
What a moment this is
Oh for a moment of forgetting
A moment of bliss
Oh...

As it happens, as the shots were fired in Tuscon we were safe and unaware in our home, holding still in a moment of forgetting and bliss, as the song says. And I’m reminded that we must make of love not a refuge from the world but the world itself, and that will be the end of forgetting.

I can hear the distant thunder
Of a million unheard souls
Of a million unheard souls
Watch each one reach for creature comfort
For the filling of their holes

One another to hold -- that is all we are given in this life, and I mean that with a fierceness that ought to set the violent to wondering. And we’ll hold them tenderly, too, because if we’re to love we must acknowledge and extinguish the fear that can twist the hearts of those who very briefly share this place with us.

In the blood of Eden we have done everything we can
In the blood of Eden, so we end as we began
With the man in the woman and the woman in the man
It was all for the union, oh the union of the woman, the woman and the man

[Austin's Glenn W. Smith, according to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” His excellent blog on politics and culture is DogCanyon, This article was also posted at Firedoglake and DogCanyon.

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's Jan. 7 interview with Glenn W. Smith on Rag Radio.
• Listen to earlier shows on the Rag Radio archives.

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Glenn W. Smith : Aristotle and the Cyberpoke

Photo of cyberpoke by Willie Pipkin / DogCanyon.
Making real connections:
Aristotle and the cyberpoke

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / January 6, 2011

Democratic political consultant and progressive Texas blogger Glenn W. Smith will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Jan. 7, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. To stream Rag Radio live on the internet, go here. To listen to this interview after it is broadcast -- and to other shows on the Rag Radio archives -- go here.

WEST TEXAS -- I’m partial to the desert mountains of West Texas, but on my frequent visits out here I’m always surprised -- and touched -- by the strong spirit of friendship and community that marks the place.

“Friendship holds political communities together,” said Aristotle, and he was on to something. American political culture has deteriorated as the various perils of modernity weakened the role of friendship in our political life. It’s a weighty, complicated topic. I just don’t want to be friendly with Glenn Beck.

It seems appropriate to kick off the New Year with a reminder that “concord” -- the word Aristotle used -- is instrumental to a community’s pursuit of justice. The loss of some sense of reciprocity and mutual concern for others is a dangerous consequence of a political culture lost in myths of hyper-individuality and zero-sum thinking in which one’s gains seem to depend upon the losses of others.

Out here for a West Texas New Years with large groups of friends from all over America, I find a common understanding of our absolute dependence upon one another. And this is a place our myths tell is a veritable source of the independent rugged individualist.

There are some rugged folks, and they understand that concord doesn’t mean conformity. But by God if your truck breaks down, they’re there to help you, and they expect the same in return.

Every year some of my friends and I give a small New Years Eve country concert on the front porch of the old Stillwell Store not far from the Rio Grande and Big Bend National Park. Ranch folk come from all over. The Stillwell family puts out a nice spread of food. We hail from very different worlds, but those differences disappear on this day because we’re all here for one reason: a shared moment of concord.

Look at the picture above. This old cyberpoke is taking advantage of the wireless on the patio the Marathon Motel (you might have seen it Wim Wenders 1984 film, Paris, Texas). He was sittin’ there at his computer when we checked in early last week.

It’s a cool picture (taken by Austin guitarist Willie Pipkin), and it tells us something. The possibilities for connection among us are nearly infinite, even though it sometimes seems like the web adds a bit of fragmentation, isolation, and loss of real-world community.

We tend to gather on the web with those we’re pretty sure will agree with us, and we lose (if it’s all we do) the wordless, emotional lessons of connections with strangers, with different others who, say, work a mountain ranch while we race around our cities.

Aristotle said true friendship transcends simple utilitarian relations, making justice possible and the political community stronger. And that’s another danger of distant internet connections: it often seems to come with a utilitarian end in mind. We need to take this action, make this point, cause this political consequence.

But these downsides and dangers are outweighed, I think, by the magnified possibilities of authentic connection -- and even concord. But it will take an effort, maybe a special effort, to bring such a spirit to the digital world.

By the way, the thin gruel of what’s called “bipartisanship” shouldn’t be mistaken for authentic friendship. Real friendship requires moral steadfastness and honesty. I may not win the given political argument, but if I’m to be a friend to others, the least they should expect is sincerity and moral courage.

[Austin's Glenn W. Smith, according to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” His excellent blog on politics and culture is DogCanyon, where this article also appears.]

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Glenn W. Smith : Attacks on Voting Rights in Houston

The top photo is the captured still from a video (see it here) put out by True the Vote that alleges "Democrats" manipulate elections. Digital Dupes then reported that it appeared that some of True the Vote's evidence might be manipulated, pointing out, as an example, that the type on the poster in the top photo was "perfectly flat," and that "the font is clearly Comic Sans with a slight compression along the x-axis, not hand lettered which would make this an unlikely meticulous stencil or expensive printed sign." Then the un-doctored original (lower photo) was found.

Contempt for democracy in Houston:
Attacks on voting rights

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2010

In Harris County (Houston), Texas, a tea party group called King Street Patriots is engaged in a systematic attack on voting rights. They are working dirty hand in dirty hand with a Republican County voter registrar to suppress the votes of those they believe unworthy, that is, those who might disagree with their own political choices.

Of course, they say they just want fair and open elections. “It’s really about truth,” says King Street founder Catherine Engelbrecht in an eight-minute video that includes doctored images and phony charges of “fraud” against... well, you only see pictures of African-Americans when fraud is discussed, so the implication is clear.

Maybe it was just coincidence that the warehouse containing all -- all -- of Houston’s voting machines burned down mysteriously just as King Street Patriots and their ally, Tax Assessor-Collector Leo Vasquez, went public with their fraud allegations. Whatever the case, the voter intimidation and suppression campaign is clearly part of a well-funded national effort to put barriers in the way of voters suspected of disagreeing with the perpetrators’ right-wing agenda.

The contempt for democracy demonstrated by partisans who think nothing of violating the fellow citizens’ right to vote is staggering. Not only are election outcomes potentially altered, the health of civil society itself is altered.

I wrote that back in 2004 after surveying decades of GOP voter suppression campaigns for my book, The Politics of Deceit. Voter suppression is the most under-reported political scandal of my lifetime, and it pains me to admit that I under-reported it myself when I was a political writer for daily newspapers.

Journalists tend to shrug it off as a kind of prankish misdemeanor. But mail pieces like that one pictured above (read about it at Lone Star Project) are clearly intended to scare would-be voters into thinking any misstep will land them in jail. Mailers like the one below are now a common part of every election.


Groups like King Street Patriots hide behind rhetoric that they are the guardians of fair, open, and honest elections. If that is true, why do they lie? Why do they invent stories of fraud where none exist? Why do they doctor images in their video? If truth is what they want, why do they poison it?

Their lies betray their real goal: to limit the voting rights of their political opponents. Let me detail one of their lies. They claim repeatedly that in Houston, six people are registered to a vacant lot. The claim is the symbolic center of their phony accusations of voter fraud.

It didn’t take very many minutes of research to discover how ridiculous this charge was. Incidentally, the Liberty Institute has taken the image down from its website. LI is run by King Street Patriots lawyer, Kelly Shackleford, the guy who tried to suppress the Alaska Legislature’s Sarah Palin report. Anyway, it turns out that there was a rent house on that vacant lot until 2010. A demolition permit was issued in September 2009. Tax records indicate the house stood until 2010. The six registered voters mentioned in the attack were renters going back 10 years.

If any doubt remains, here’s a Google Earth photo of the house that once stood on King Streets’ allegedly vacant lot.


King Street Patriots doesn’t care, of course, because the truth of an allegation is irrelevant. Like all voter suppression and intimidation campaigns (Greg Mitchell’s account of the the 1934 California gubernatorial race tells a great story about how unfounded accusations of fraud can be used to suppress votes) racist allegations of widespread fraud are used to stir anger among (usually white) conservative voters and intimidate minority voters.

Here’s another example. In their video, King Street Patriots uses a doctored image of an African-American rally-goer holding a sign that reads, “I Only Got to Vote Once.” [See above.] The sign is lettered in the Comic Sans font and was clearly photoshopped. Once again we have to ask, if truth and fairness are what they want, why phony-up images? This one actually makes me chuckle for its sheer absurdity. Under what possible circumstances would anyone publicly complain that they only got to vote once?

By the way, there is a national effort to find the young female victim of this particular little fraud. Go to DigitalDupes.org to participate.

The Right wants its suckers to believe that scary people are out there undoing what would otherwise be the natural result of “fair” elections: the absolute hold on power by, well, them.

King Street Patriots appears to be connected to the national right-wing network funded by the notorious Koch brothers. Jane Mayer’s recent piece on them in the New Yorker should be mandatory reading. I think the voter intimidation and suppression campaigns in 2010 will be better funded and more organized than ever before. And I think the best way to discredit them is to expose their lies.

An argument over a lot at 2307 Jackson Street in Houston, Texas, may seem trivial. But it’s not. Caught in a lie, King Street Patriots betrays its true intentions, intentions shared by a national network of anti-democracy forces that will disrupt the 2010 elections any and every way they can.

[Austin's Glenn W. Smith, according to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” His excellent blog on politics and culture is DogCanyon, where this article also appears.]

• Also see Glenn W. Smith: It's Getting Hot in Houston / The Rag Blog / August 31, 2010

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Glenn W. Smith : It's Getting Hot in Houston

Image from Dog Canyon.
Likely Arson in Houston, and
Voter suppression from the Right

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / August 31, 2010

A mysterious fire last Friday destroys all of the voting machines in Harris County (Houston), Texas. Arson investigators have not yet issued an opinion.

Meanwhile, a well-funded right-wing group emerges in Houston and begins raising unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud. A video on their website pictures only people of color when it talks of voter fraud. White people are shown talking patriotically about the need for a million vigilantes to suppress illegal votes.

In the video, an unidentified spokesman for “TrueTheVote” says, “If we lose Houston, we lose Texas. And guess what? If we lose Texas we lose the country.”

The former Mayor of Houston, Democrat Bill White, is running against secessionist Republican Gov. Rick Perry this year. White’s counting on a big turnout in his home town. The fire and the voter suppression campaign guarantee a greatly diminished turnout.

TrueTheVote’s video [see below] is well produced. Participants speak in calm and knowing tones, disguising the racist agenda behind their project. We don’t yet know where the group’s money comes from. But they have money.

As I’ve said before, right-wing voter suppression campaigns are the most under-reported political scandal of the last 50-100 years. But there’s never been anything like the criminal destruction of all the voting machines in the nation’s fourth largest city.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect the machines in Houston were destroyed by an arsonist. Warehouses don’t regularly and spontaneously combust at four in the morning, especially warehouses containing all the voting tools in a pivotal city in a pivotal election.

In other details, the suppression campaigns follow a familiar pattern: raise suspicions of widespread voter fraud. Accuse “others” of stealing elections from us (read: white people). Threaten would-be voters with criminal charges. Limit polling locations in poor and minority precincts. Distribute spurious “felon lists” that disenfranchise legal voters who happen to share a name with a felon. Staff phone banks that make election calls to minority and poor voters giving incorrect polling locations and dates. Dress up vigilantes in cop clothes to intimidate would-be voters.

Huffington Post contributor Greg Mitchell wrote one of the best accounts of such a suppression and intimidation campaign in his book about the 1934 California governor’s race, The Campaign of the Century. At least since then, voter suppression has been a part of nearly every election cycle.

Voting machines go up in smoke in Houston. Photo from KRIV-TV.
There are simply no machines available to replace the loss of Houston’s machines. That means either a return to paper ballots (there may be very few scanners to count them) or a greatly reduced number of polling locations. The latter would require the emergency suspension of state law and run afoul of the Voting Rights Act. In any case, confusion will reign, and confusion reduces turnout.

What about that TrueTheVote statement, “If we lose Houston, we lose Texas. And guess what? If we lose Texas we lose the country.”? That may be the only true thing TrueTheVote has said.

For much of the country, Texas is a vast right-wing breeding ground. Actually, Democrats have nearly reached parity in the state House of Representatives. All the elected officials in Dallas are Democrats. Austin, too. Most of the judges and many of the officials in Houston are Democrats.

With a strong turnout in Houston, White could very well beat Perry. Without a national effort to counter the largest voter suppression effort in my memory, that turnout won’t happen. Even if the fire is ruled accidental, its consequences remain the same. If a great number of Houston voters are disenfranchised as a consequence of the fire and the right’s election vigilante effort, democracy loses, and so does the country.

Keep in mind that population shifts will hand Texas several new congressional seats lost in the Democratic rustbelt. This election will decide the players who will draw new lines in redistricting. The stakes are high. The question is, do Democrats have the will to do battle with right-wing forces who believe they can choose who votes and who doesn’t?

[Austin's Glenn W. Smith, according toDaily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” His excellent blog on politics and culture is DogCanyon, where this article also appears.]


UPDATE: Tuesday, August 31, 2010, 7:30 p.m.

The Houston Chronicle reported today:

Despite a fire that destroyed Harris County's voting machines last week, County Clerk Beverly Kaufman said Monday that she intends to keep all polling places open with replacement machines on Nov. 2.

Commissioners Court approved Kaufman's emergency plan Monday to spend $13.6 million to buy 2,325 electronic voting machines and supporting equipment.
[....]
Kaufman's plan includes 1.4 million paper ballots, which will be distributed to polling stations as a backup in case a shortage of machines leads to long lines.
[....]
Despite Kaufman's confident predictions of a timely and fair election, 16 Democratic state senators and representatives have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to oversee the development of an emergency plan for voting that begins in 48 days. Their letter asks for the department's involvement to "protect the voting rights of racial and language minorities" against any plans to close some of the 739 scheduled polling places due to a lack of equipment.

"Removing neighborhood voting locations and fostering conditions for longer lines must be avoided to prevent suppression of minority voters," the legislators wrote...

Despite her apparent confidence, Kaufman urged residents to vote early to avoid long lines and said she would seek "loaner machines" from other counties.

The Chronicle reported no new information about the cause of the fire, but said that an arson investigation is under way.

'TrueTheVote' Video



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Supremes Make it Official : Corporations Rule!

High court ruling on campaign finance:
The corporation as supreme being

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / January 21, 2010

If you had any doubt about the corruption that has infected the very bloodstream of American politics, look at today’s ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court said corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence the outcome of elections.

I’m gonna repeat my sad joke: we are approaching the time when there will be “corporate creationists” so convinced of the divine status of the corporate life-form that they will deny vehemently that corporations evolved from human beings. Americans, we are the new monkeys.

At the root of the Court’s attack on popular democracy -- and it is an attack, and it will promote if not guarantee rule by unaccountable corporate oligarchy -- is the Court’s infamous 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision that said money equals speech. Left unaddressed in today’s decision -- and others -- is the absurdity of this formula. When money equals speech, outfits with more money have more speech. And that destroys the very principle of free speech.

Ask yourself this question. If you had to persuade your community about political opinion X, but corporations opposed your view, would you stand a chance knowing that their “political speech” was worth much more than your political speech? The answer is obvious. Mere people have been thrown on the scrap heap. The U.S. Supreme Court is lifting corporations to the top of the evolutionary ladder.

Teabaggers, do you get it now? You are outraged by your powerlessness. Can you now see the real source of that powerlessness? It is not government. Government has been turned into the handmaiden of the corporate oligarchs.

I’m compelled to repeat something else: I’m a fan of entrepreneurship and responsible capitalism. But it’s not the so-called heavy hand of government that is the enemy. It’s the corporate monopolists.

I also share the view of the sanctity of the individual in a democracy. While many anachronistically worry about creeping socialism, it is the unrestrained power of unaccountable global corporatists that threatens individual rights with extinction.

The Supreme Court’s decision should be a wake-up call to America. The corruption has gone far enough. Democracy hangs in the balance. This is not hyperbole. This is a day that will live in infamy.

[Austin's Glenn W. Smith, according to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” His excellent blog on politics and culture is DogCanyon, where this article also appears.]

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