RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Jim Hightower Brings the Lowdown on 'Poopgate' and 'Tinkle-Down' Economics

Texas populist gadfly Jim Hightower at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, September 13, 2013. Photos by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Famed Texas populist commentator
and political gadfly, Jim Hightower

In 30 years, we’ve gone from Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down’ to the Koch Brothers’ ‘tinkle down’ economics. We are resurrecting the robber barons and imposing a plutocracy over our democracy.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / September 26, 2013

Texas populist writer, commentator, and political gadfly Jim Hightower was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 13, 2013.

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

Listen to or download the podcast of our September 13 interview with Jim Hightower here:


Texas progressive populist writer, public speaker, humorist, radio commentator, and political gadfly Jim Hightower was twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner and is a former editor of the Texas Observer.

He is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books including Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow; Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There's Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.

Jim Hightower broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried on more than 150 commercial and public stations, on the web, and on Radio for Peace International. He publishes a populist political newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown, which now has more than 135,000 subscribers, is the fastest growing political publication in America, and has received both the Alternative Press Award and the Independent Press Association Award for best national newsletter. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

'Tinkle-down' economics

Jim Hightower told the Rag Radio audience that “we have a greater share of our wealth going to the tiniest portion of our people than any time in the last century.”

“In 30 years,” he said, “we’ve gone from Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down’ to the Koch Brothers’ ‘tinkle down’ economics.” According to Jim, “We are resurrecting the robber barons and imposing a plutocracy over our democracy.”

“This is a structural change,” he says. “this isn’t a recession, this isn’t a technical glitch in the system. Thie is deliberate. We’ve enthroned the corporate powers to rewrite the rules.”

And we have a Congress “that is so ideological that they don’t care. And so many of them really don’t know regular workaday people. They’re millionaires, most of them,” he said. “You’ve got both parties that are tied to the corporate money.”

Thanks to gerrymandering and the dominance of big money in electoral politics, the politicians “rig the system so that they keep getting elected.” The Republicans, who “have voted 40 times to repeal Obamacare," play to a “Republican tea party fringe that doesn’t represent 10 percent of the American people.”

They “ignore the real problems” like “joblessness and rampant underemployment,” and “play games with these phony political issues.”

Hightower faulted the corporate-run media. (“A reporter used to be a working stiff. They worked in rumpled clothes, went home to a working class neighborhood, drank at a bar named Joe.”)

We do have some strong progressive media, he said, citing the country’s numerous independent community radio stations, many of which air Hightower's commentary -- with special praise for Austin’s KOOP and Rag Radio -- and the Texas Observer. “And we’ve got voices like Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman,” he said.

Texas pols -- and 'Poopgate'

On the show, Jim talked about the recent “flapdoodle” in the Texas legislature over abortion and women’s health that drew thousands of activists to the Texas Capitol and was highlighted by State Sen. Wendy Davis’ remarkable filibuster.

“It’s about abortion,” Jim said, “but it really is about power. Mostly men, wanting to go back to ‘Father Knows Best’ years, the 1950s, before women got uppity...” In this case, the dramatic citizen activism “defeated the Republican leadership and embarrassed them. And, quite honestly, frightened them.”

“It was a hoot,” Jim says, “to hear Rick Perry say, ‘It was a mob. Mob rule! Mob rule!' And (Lt. Gov. David) Dewhurst saying, ‘Socialists, socialists!’ One representatives even said we had terrorists in the Capitol.”

Jim wrote about the events at the Capitol in the Hightower Lowdown: “If you’ve never seen a pack of pompous state legislators fall into a panic, you’ve missed a scene of truly uproarious low comedy.”

And then there was ”Poopgate!”

According to Hightower, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst (“he’s such a prissy guy anyway, a multi-millionaire public servant who doesn’t like the public...) got spooked by all the women in the State Capitol building.

Dewhurst “had heard that they were going to bring tampons and other ‘feminine projectiles’ into the Senate chamber, to toss down on the floor,” Jim says. So he had the state troopers search ladies’ purses at the Capitol entrances and confiscate anything resembling a tampon.

And then, as if that wasn't enough, “Dewhurst claimed that they had also confiscated some 19 jars of feces and urine.” But, when pressed by the media, he couldn’t come up with any evidence. So the reporters asked the troopers at the Capitol gates, and they didn’t have a clue what Dewhurst was talking about. “They said, No, that they hadn’t seen any excrement -- except what was in the Lt. Governor’s memo!”

“It’s just astonishing,” Jim said. “The extremism that is loose. And they seem to think that this is leadership.” But, “not only the women who were there, but just people of good will recognize that and think, maybe we can do something. Because there was such a force there that can’t be denied.”

“Throughout our history, we’ve had to do a little screaming, and confrontation, and rebelling -- when the skids are greased and the system is rigged against people. Because that’s what happened that night.”

Whether or not Wendy Davis runs for governor, Hightower believes that real change is in the works for Texas politics. The long-dormant state Democratic Party is alive and kicking, he says, under the “vigorous and vibrant” leadership of new party chair Gilberto Hinojosa, who is committed to returning the party to grassroots organizing.

The Texas Democrats “got way too cozy with the lobbyists and with the money,” Jim says. “We had people sitting in the office down by the Capitol, just talking to each other.” Now the party has 20 organizers working in the field.

Concerning efforts at voter suppression, Hightower asked, “Why don’t Republicans want people to vote?” “We should make it an issue,” he said, “that these bozos are trying to keep people from voting in the United States of America!”

From left, Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, populist commentator Jim Hightower, and Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz.

Corporate trade scams and NSA eavesdropping

One issue that raises Hightower’s hackles is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (a secretive and very controversial “nuclearized and supersized NAFTA” that would involve 11 nations, including China and Japan). “It’s not about free trade,” Jim Says. “It’s a corporate coup d’etat. Against us… It’s about enthroning corporate power.”

Jim says there’s strong opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership that's being organized by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a "wonderful project that's been battling these issues for years." “We’ve defeated 10 of these kind of trade scams just in the last decade,” Jim says. “So people really will make a difference.”

“You know, Lyndon Johnson said, ‘You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure.' So, the more people know about this thing, the more that they’re smelling that manure.”

Jim is also enraged about the NSA’s massive eavesdropping program. “This is not just another entity that’s poking into our personal privacy and lives... this is a comprehensive violation of at least the first and fourth amendments, and possibly the fifth and sixth as well. And a violation of the privacy laws of the United States.”

“It’s one thing to use spooks to go chase down terrorists, which we certainly want them to do, but to then decide that the entire 330 million people of the United States of America are suspects, that’s another thing altogether.”

“There are 3 billion phone calls made in the United States every day. They get them all... These are not metadata, as they call them, these are profiles. They’re little pieces of us. And they draw a picture.”

They are “using these super-supercomputers, and using this fog of fear that was generated by the powers that be, using 9-ll, to take away our core rights.”

“Snowden, to me, has done a tremendous public service by revealing all this,” Jim said.

Also read "Jim Hightower and the 'Populist Moment'" on The Rag Blog from April 11, 2012, and listen to our earlier Rag Radio interview with Jim Hightower here.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer; Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio 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. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web 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.

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

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist, edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. Dreyer was an editor of The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, was on the editorial collective of Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York, was general manager of Pacifica's KPFT-FM in Houston, and was a correspondent for the early Texas Monthly magazine. Dreyer can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, September 27, 2013: In their first father/daughter interview, newsman Dan Rather and Austin-based environmentalist Robin Rather.
Friday, October 4, 2013: Novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross, set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

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Anne Lewis : Texas Women Who Misbehave

Texas Sen. Wendy Davis speaks to a crowd of thousands at the Texas State Capitol, Austin, Texas, July 1, 2013. Photo by Phillip Martin / The Frisky.

Deep in the heart of Texas:
Women who misbehave

While pro-life sentiment is used to cut funding for women’s health, sanctity of life has not affected the State’s number one status in executions.

By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / July 8, 2013

“They never preached or sat in a deacon’s bench. Nor did they vote or attend Harvard. Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all.” -- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 1976

AUSTIN, Texas -- Around midnight on Tuesday, June 26, 2013, thousands of Texans took their Capitol. The crowd, predominantly young women, defied a group of sour and narrow legislators by yelling at them so loudly that they couldn’t vote for the bill that they planned to pass.

The “pro-life” bill is designed to shut down all but five of the abortion clinics in the state, forcing them to meet state requirements for “surgical ambulatory care.” It’s interesting that Milla Perry Jones, Texas Governor Rick Perry’s sister, serves as Vice President for Government Affairs for United Surgical Partners International, a major provider of surgical ambulatory care. Doctors, even those dispensing pills, would be required to have privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic.

The law would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks -- the time when, according to a disputed study, the fetus can feel pain. Or pleasure, as U.S. Congressman Michael Burgess (R-Texas), an OB/GYN, appears to believe. Burgess, when arguing before a House committee in June that abortion should be banned at 15 weeks, suggested that that's when male fetuses start masturbating.

Rape and incest and the mental health of the mother were not exceptions -- only the mother’s physical health and “serious” abnormalities of the fetus.

Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the Texas Democratic Party, along with many local progressive and radical organizations -- the Workers Defense Project, the International Socialist Organization, the United Students Against Sweatshops, TSEU women, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Rise Up Texas, Occupy Austin, and others -- had come to the Capital that night.

The Capital vibrated with the yelling of the crowd. It was the largest, most energetic, and by far noisiest indoor protest I’ve ever seen.

The Texas legislature is dominated by right-wing fundamentalist Republicans who rose to power through gerrymandering, redistricting, and voter suppression in the midst of significant demographic change. Texas is majority non-white and Latino according to the 2010 census: 45.3% white, 11.8% African-American, 3.8% Asian, 37.6% Hispanic, and 3.5% other (including Native American).

The Republican attacks have a white supremacist edge. Right after the June 25th Supreme Court repeal of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said that the Legislature's 2011 redistricting plan should be immediately implemented along with Voter ID. Federal judges in Washington had blocked the redistricting plan, saying that it intentionally discriminated against minorities.

An on-going legislative attack on the public sector has placed Texas 49th among states in spending per pupil, 46th in students graduating from high school. Texas has the most people without health insurance in the U.S. and ranks 47th in expenditures for mental health. Texas ranks 49th in reproductive health, including 46th in teen birth rates and 4th from the bottom in sex education.

"Pro-life" demonstrator at Capitol. Photo by Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog.

While pro-life sentiment is used to cut funding for women’s health, sanctity of life has not affected the State’s number one status in executions. Since 1982 Texas has executed 500 prisoners, more than half of them coming during Rick Perry's time as governor. 

The anti-abortion bill was filed by Rep. Jodie Laubenberg (R-Parker) who made national news herself. When Rep. Senfronia Thompson (D-Houston), a wire coat hanger attached to the podium, called for the exemption of victims of rape and incest from the anti-abortion bill that Laubenberg had filed, Laubenberg objected: "In the emergency room they have what's called rape kits where a woman can get cleaned out.”

She instantly became the subject of national ridicule.

Laudenberg speaks for more than Christian fundamentalists in the Texas House. She is the Texas State Chair of the American Legislative Council (ALEC) -- a behind-the-scenes organization that is anti-union, anti-choice, anti-environment, and anti-immigrant. ALEC is responsible for the “shoot first” legislation that in part caused the killing of Trayvon Martin.


The sad life of the Anti-Abortion Bill: SB5

I went to the Capitol on Sunday, June 23, to join the people trying to stall the vote in the Texas House. We stood in the hallway leading to the House Gallery waiting to greet the Representatives. A few “pro-life” people had also gathered with tape over their mouths, I suppose pretending to be fetuses.

One miserable looking man in a shiny blue shirt and black tie shouldered me aside. Then they began to hum “Amazing Grace,” written by a reformed slave trader, sung by the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears, brought to life by Mahalia Jackson for use in both the mass Civil Rights movement and in opposition to the Vietnam War, and a source of inspiration on union picket lines. It was as if all that is good and holy had been twisted and perverted.

Demonstrators fill the Capitol stairs. Photo by Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog.

Finally inside the House Gallery I heard the articulate amendment by Rep. Donna Howard (D-Austin). Supported by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Texas Medical Association, and the Texas Hospital Association, Howard wanted to strike language that might keep doctors and nurses from acting in the best interests of both mother and fetus.

Rep. Laubenberg got up to state her opposition, was asked simple questions about her bill by Lon Burnham (D-Ft Worth), and mumbled something about it gutting the bill. Burnham persisted with specifics. As a result, Laubenberg moved to table all subsequent proposed amendments to the bill without returning to the microphone. This included an amendment by Mary González (D-El Paso) who spoke of the disproportionate impact on women in her community who would have to travel 600 miles each way to the nearest abortion clinic in San Antonio.

We sat in the gallery, occasionally giving voice but quickly silenced by Planned Parenthood and Democratic Party organizers. A succession of amendments by House Democrats and procedural issues delayed voting on the bill into early Monday morning, giving the Senate filibuster a chance to succeed.

Wendy Davis during filibuster..

Like many, I returned to the Capitol Tuesday evening and became part of a long line trying to get into the Senate Gallery to observe Wendy Davis’ filibuster. We snaked in circles. I was thrilled to see my students and former students, young women whom I had not considered activists, in the crowd. Once more we were told to be quiet and follow the rules of decorum. And we did, for the most part, remain quiet and contained.

The "third strike" against the Wendy Davis filibuster took place at 10 p.m., filed by Sen. Donna Campbell (R-New Braunfels) who claimed that the sonogram bill -- which Davis was addressing -- had nothing to do with abortion. I was by then in the Senate Gallery. Campbell stood down below us, the sharpness of her features complemented by a thoroughly unpleasant expression.

The Gallery erupted when Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst ruled in Campbell’s favor. We yelled “Shame” and “Let her speak.” I remember a man with a shoe in his hand and an older woman pointing down at the legislators and yelling at them. Both were removed along with nearly all the people who happened to be nearest the door. Every time the door opened we could hear the crowd outside. They yelled, “Let us in.” The troopers locked the door and the only way out was through the Senate Chambers.


"Let her Speak" June 25 2013 10 07 to 10 10 Texas Capitol from Anne Lewis on Vimeo.

On Wednesday, June 26, Gov. Perry called for a new special session to pass the anti-abortion bill. Just hours later, Perry spoke at the National Right to Life Convention in Dallas, saying, "Texans value life and want to protect women and the unborn."

He attacked Wendy Davis: “It’s just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example: that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters.” I wonder at his inconsistencies -- the political opportunism of priorities that shift so quickly from pro-life to pro-death.

There’s an element in Perry’s and the other Republican legislators’ reactions to Wendy Davis that reminds me of the way white supremacists branded white Southerners who took up the banner of racial equality as “race traitors.” How could she, a white woman, betray him? But it wasn’t mainly white women who stood up to the majority in the Legislature.

During the session, Senfronia Thompson, Leticia Van de Putte, Dawnna Dukes, Mary Gonzales, Alma Allen, Judith Zaffirini, Yvonne Davis, and others proved themselves smarter than all of those right-wing men put together and far more competent to govern. I remember the image of this man with a wooden stick poking around on the Senate floor while Wendy Davis filibustered hour after hour -- not allowed to eat, drink, sit down, or use the bathroom.

And it’s not just the Republican men, but also those infantilized right-wing women. Baby dolls that men protect and control, they are sanctimonious, hidden, and vicious when someone calls them out -- very much Ulrich’s well-behaved pious matrons. It’s all about the white man’s party and its ability to rule. Those of us at the Capitol were there to stop them.

At 11:45 p.m. on Tuesday, June 25th, 15 minutes before the end of the session, Sen. Leticia Van de Putte (D-San Antonio) -- who had returned from her father’s funeral in order to be heard -- stood to demand that her colleagues recognize her. It was not the first time she had defied those in power.

In response to the sonogram bill, she had said, in parody of Grover Norquist’s promise to shrink government to a size that could fit in a bathtub, “Texas is going to shrink government until it fits into a woman's uterus." On Tuesday night she asked, “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?”

That line -- so solidly expressive of misuse of power and male supremacy -- was the cue for the gallery. They yelled and chanted and took over the Chamber.

We could hear the Gallery through the locked door. The whole Capitol filled with a giant roar. We cheered, yelled, and chanted.


"Vote Stopped by Protesters" Texas Capitol June 25, 2013 11:50pm to June 26, 2013 12:01am from Anne Lewis on Vimeo.

I was reminded of those special times during the mass civil rights movement -- and the movement that ended the war in Vietnam -- moments when our relatively minor differences go away, when we act in one loud clear voice against a system of oppression, when we are willing to be obnoxious or even go to jail for our deep-felt beliefs. As Joe Begley from the eastern Kentucky coalfields put it: “Everyone should go to jail for a night or two.”

What a wonderful night of misbehavior it was!

[Anne Lewis, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas and a member of TSEU-CWA Local 6186 and NABET-CWA, is an independent filmmaker associated with Appalshop. She is co-director of Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A, and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. Her website is annelewis.org. Read more articles by and about Anne Lewis at The Rag Blog.]

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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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Ted McLaughlin : Wendy Davis, Energized Dems Deal Blow to Texas GOP and War on Women

Pro-choice demonstrators at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Sunday, June 23, 2013. More than 1,000 packed the place on Sunday and the numbers kept growing during the week. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

A new day for Democrats in Texas:
New political stars and a raucous crowd
deal blow to GOP's insidious attack on choice

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2013

[The Week that Was! As the Supreme Court made landmark decisions about voting rights (two thumbs down) and gay marriage (it's about time!), thousands of cheering pro-choice Texans -- wearing orange shirts that read "Stand With Texas Women" and rooted on by Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, daughter of the late and great Texas Gov. Ann Richards -- filled the rotunda and packed the galleries of the State Capitol of Texas in Austin for their own marathon filibuster. The enthusiasm was intoxicating.

It was a massive three-day show of opposition to Texas Republicans' attack on women's health in the form of a draconian new abortion law -- and of support for Texas Sen. Wendy Davis and her dramatic filibuster in the Senate chambers. Davis has emerged as a superstar and a legitimate candidate for higher office in Texas. The events captured the imagination of the nation. As MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said Tuesday night: "Texas: Who knew!" Oh, and coming next week: "Kill the Bill, Volume 2." See you there. -- Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog]


AUSTIN, Texas -- The teabagger governor of Texas announced Wednesday, June 26, 2013, that he is calling a second special session of the Texas legislature. Three issues are on the agenda -- transportation funding and juvenile justice (both of which died in the last session because Republicans wasted the whole 30-day session trying to shut down the state's abortion clinics), and, of course, the same old anti-choice legislation that was filibustered to death in that first special session.

Perry seems determined to keep the issue alive, and give Democrats something to make sure their supporters remain energized and engaged.

Texas Democrats have been a dispirited bunch for a long time now. It has been more than 20 years since a Democrat held statewide office, and prospects for the future seemed dim because there were really no politicians in the party with true statewide appeal.

That changed dramatically on Tuesday night, when a couple of female State Senators put themselves in the limelight to stop (at least temporarily) an odious anti-choice bill that would almost certainly close 37 out of 42 clinics in the state that do abortion procedures -- and in the process they inspired and renewed thousands of Democrats across the state.

Texas Senators Wendy Davis, left, and Leticia Van de Putte in the Texas Senate Chamber, Tuesday, June 26, 2013. Photo from Jobsanger.

The new Texas political stars are Sen. Wendy Davis and Sen. Leticia Van de Putte. Davis got the ball rolling by declaring she would filibuster the bill (which had to be approved by midnight, when the session ended, or it would die).

She got the floor about 11:15 a.m. and began her filibuster -- and then she held the floor for over 10 hours. She was helped by the other 11 Democratic senators who lobbed her "softball" questions to keep her filibuster growing, but the real work of the filibuster was on her capable shoulders -- and she performed admirably.

With only a couple of hours to go before midnight, the Republican majority was able to stop her by claiming for the third time that she was not being germane to the bill with her discourse. It was arguably not true, but truth or rules have never been very important to Texas Republicans. The other 11 Democratic senators stepped forward with a barrage of parliamentary maneuvers (points of order, parliamentary questions, etc.).

One of the most prominent of these senators who sprang to the defense of Sen. Davis was Sen. Van de Putte. And with only about 15 minutes until midnight, she challenged the Senate president by demanding to know, "At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?" The crowd in the gallery began to applaud her, and that applause turned into more than 20 minutes of shouting and applauding that delayed a vote on the GOP bill.

With time running out, the GOP tried to hold their vote -- but as Democratic senators pointed out, the vote was not finished before midnight, and by Texas law, the session was over at midnight. This caused a big mess -- as Republicans claimed the bill was passed, since the vote started before midnight, and the Democrats claimed the bill was dead since the vote was not finished before midnight.

The official senate record backed Democrats, showing the bill was passed on 6/26 and not on 6/25 as required. The Republicans then tried to fix that by illegally altering the senate record (see below).

The top picture shows the original Senate log, and the bottom one shows the log after being altered by Republicans. The senators then argued among themselves for a while -- and at about 3 a.m. the Republicans backed down and admitted the bill had been passed after midnight, which means the bill was DEAD.

The governor will call another special session and most likely get the bill passed (even if they have to lock the public out and do it in secret). But for right now, the bill is dead. And the Republicans did nothing good for their image, since their shenanigans were observed by hundreds of thousands of Texans and other Americans.

I watched the proceedings on the Texas Tribune's live YouTube feed. More than 182,000 people watched on that stream, but that was just a portion of those watching the proceedings, since there were approximately 199 other live feeds -- not to mention all the traffic on social media like Twitter and Facebook.

And while the Republicans were humiliated, thousands of Texas Democrats (and others) were energized -- and Sen. Wendy Davis and Sen. Leticia Van de Putte were able to increase their political capital immensely. They are now both credible candidates for statewide office. And combined with the new statewide Democratic effort to register new voters, and the added impact of changing demographics, this means Democratic prospects in Texas are brighter than they have been in many years.

To put it bluntly, it was a great night for Texas Democrats and a terrible night for Texas Republicans.

[Amarillo resident Ted McLaughlin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, also posts at jobsanger. Read more articles by Ted McLaughlin on The Rag Blog.] 

Photos by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog:

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Bob Feldman : Texas Governors Bush and Perry, and Their Network of the Ultra-Rich, 1996-2011

Texas Gov. Rick Perry with then President (and former Texas Governor) George W. Bush at a 2002 campaign event in Dallas. On the left is Texas Sen. John Cornyn. Photo by Larry Downing / Reuters.

The hidden history of Texas

Conclusion: 1996-2011/1 -- Bush, Perry, and their network of Texas ultra-rich

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / May 20, 2013

[This is the first section of the conclusion to Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

When George W. Bush became the Republican Governor of Texas, “he arrived indebted to dozens of industries and wealthy patrons” and “repaid some of his supporters with choice political appointments,” according to the Center for Public Integrity’s The Buying of the President 2000.

The same book indicated what the political situation was like in Texas state politics in 2000 -- before Texas’s governor moved into the White House in 2001 after receiving fewer popular votes than the Democratic Party candidate in the 2000 U.S. presidential election:

One of the most prestigious political appointments is a seat on the University of Texas board of Regents. The board is filled with Bush’s top-dollar donors. The chair of the UT Regents is Donald Evans, Bush’s old friend and longtime fund-raiser who, as the finance chairman for Bush’s presidential bid, has overseen the campaign’s record-shattering fund-raising drive. Evans is the chief executive officer of Tom Brown, Inc., an oil and gas company based in Midland, Texas .

In 1989, Bush joined the board as an outside director. He received $12,000 a year plus stock options for attending several meetings and participating in conference calls... Shortly after he was elected governor of Texas, Bush sold his Tom Brown holdings for a profit of $297,550.

Another regent and top Bush patron is A.R. `Tony’ Sanchez, the chairman and chief executive of Sanchez-O’Brien Oil and Gas Corporation... Sanchez and his mother also own a controlling stake in International Bancshares Corporation, the holding company of International Bank of Commerce, a Texas banking chain founded by his father in 1966. Over [George W.] Bush’s career, Sanchez, members of his family, and employees of his companies have given him at least $230,150, making them his No. 2 career patron…

Bush owed few people more than Richard Rainwater, the Fort Worth financier... Rainwater launched an investment company in 1994, Crescent Real Estate Equities Company... In 1997, Bush backed a plan to cut state property taxes that would have saved Crescent some $2.5 million in state taxes... Later that year,...Bush signed a bill into law that produced a $10 million windfall for Crescent... Dallas taxpayers were to foot most of the bill for the new sports arena…Rainwater, through Crescent, bought a 12 percent stake in the Mavericks. Under the purchase agreement, Crescent will get $10 million when the arena is completed…

The Texas Teachers’ Retirement System...sold two office buildings and a mortgage on a third to Crescent in 1996 and 1997 at a $70.4 million loss... At the time of at least one of the sales, Bush owned about $100,000 worth of Crescent stock... The University of Texas Investment Management Company [UTIMCO]...has steered close to $1.7 billion of its assets into private investments; a third of that money has gone into funds run either by...[UTIMCO Chairman Hicks]’s business partner or by Bush patrons...

Industries that have provided the bulk of Bush’s campaign contributions have gotten his help in a variety of endeavors, from staving off pesky environmental regulations and shielding themselves from consumer lawsuits to driving off meddlesome investigators... According to a study by Public Research Works, Bush raised $566,000 from...polluters for his two gubernatorial campaigns. And from March 4, 1999 to March 31, 1999 Bush raised $316,300... They included: Enron ( Bush’s No. 1 career patron); Vinson & Elkins (Bush’s No. 3 career patron), a law firm that represents Enron and Alcoa, a...polluter; and companies owned by the Bass family (Bush’s No. 5 career patron).

And, coincidentally, some of the same ultra-rich folks who bankrolled former Texas governor Bush’s campaigns in the 1990s have apparently been donating a lot of money in the 21st-century to fund the campaigns of the current governor of Texas, former 2012 GOP presidential primaries candidate Rick Perry.

Between 2001 and Oct. 23, 2010, for example, Perry (a former U.S. Air Force officer who is the son of former Haskell County Commissioner Ray Perry) received $337,027 in campaign contributions from Lee Bass, $100,000 in campaign contributions from Sid Bas, and 265,000 in campaign contributions from Ray Hunt, according to the Texans for Public Justice website.

The same website also recalled that “as Texas' longest-serving governor, Rick Perry raised $98.9 million from 2001 through Oct. 23, 2010,” and that “Perry raised almost $49 million (or 50 percent of this money) from 193 mega donors who gave him $100,000 or more.”

Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people who lived in Austin increased from 465,622 to 656,562; and the number of people who lived in the Austin-Round Rock metropolitan area increased from 846,227 to 1,249,763 during the same period.

According to the “Forty Acres and a Shul: `It’s Easy as Dell’” essay by Cathy Schechter that appeared in Lone Stars of David: the Jews of Texas, between 1990 and 2000,  Austin ’s Jewish-affiliated population also increased from 5,000 “to more than 10,000," and “by 2002, the American Jewish Yearbook estimated the city’s Jewish population at 13,500.”

But “the appearance of young `Dellionaire’ Jews who made millions in the brave new world of high-technology took the mellow Austin Jewish community by surprise.” Yet by 2007, Texas billionaire Michael Dell -- with an estimated personal wealth that year of $17.2 billion -- was the wealthiest ultra-rich person in Texas .

But in 2007 Robert Bass was still worth $5.5 billion, Ray Hunt was worth $4 billion, Sid and Lee Bass were worth $3 billion, and Ed Bass was worth $2.5 billion, according to Bryan Burrough's The Big Rich. The same book also noted that in 2007, coincidentally, “Hunt Oil received a lucrative concession to drill in northern Iraq,” and “Sid Bass, whose family, along with the Hunts, ranked among Bush’s largest financial backers, was photographed alongside the president, Laura Bush, and the queen of England...”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Roger Baker : Can TxDOT Avoid Financial Disaster?

Maybe TxDOT should heed its own sign.
Warning sign:
Can TxDOT avoid financial disaster?

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / January 24, 2013

"Things can become complicated when you actually try to understand them." -- Richard Vodra

This is the first of a two-part series.

AUSTIN -- The funding shortfall at the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is about 50% of its entire budget. How did it ever come to this? TxDOT's roads are now at war with our schools, nursing homes, and health clinics in the Texas legislature, all fighting for survival level funding.

There is great pressure to use an official increase in state revenue to restore the big cuts made to education, health, and human services in the last Texas budget. Every sort of social and governmentally funded need is competing for a piece of the budget increase since Texas Comptroller Susan Combs recently declared a substantial increase in available state revenues compared to the last budget two years ago.

This coming budget battle leads us to an important policy question concerning TxDOT and its roads. How could anyone even hope to manage a state agency that, according to it own management, falls 50% short of its needs? Yet this is the situation described by TxDOT Director Phil Wilson as the Texas Legislature prepares to meet, wheel and deal, and eventually to hammer out TxDOT's two year budget allotment.

One way to lobby for road money, although they can't call it that, is by inflating future hypothetical travel and road construction needs. TxDOT director Phil Wilson describes the situation this way:

TxDOT needs an additional $1 billion-a-year alone to shore up its maintenance budget, he said. And going forward, the agency will likely need another $3 billion-a-year infusion to its current $10 billion annual budget to “address congestion long-term with a sustainable method.”

The reality is that TxDOT's proclaimed road construction needs of $3 billion a year are utterly unfundable pipe dreams appealing to road builders and land developers. By contrast, the estimate of $1 billion a year in maintenance shortfalls is probably way short, but maintenance lacks political sex appeal. In fact, Texas road maintenance has been underfunded to such a degree that "Texas received a 'D' in roads, ranking Texas from 17th in 2008 to now 43rd for highway spending per capita."

Lets take TxDOT Director Phil Wilson's claim at face value. If TxDOT's current budget is $10 billion and needs an added $1 billion in maintenance, and another $3 billion to deal with congestion, that means that TxDOT is already about 40% short. This picture of a dire need for money for new roads does not even consider the fact that TxDOT already spent a billion dollars more than it took in last year.

Once you add the $1 billion net deficit for this year, the claimed gap between the available cash and current spending plus claimed needs rises to about 50%! Further complicating this situation is the fact that TxDOT is now about $14.6 billion in debt, and the debt service alone required nearly a billion dollars in 2012. (See pages 13 and 28 of TxDOT's Annual Financial Report.)

Meanwhile, for accounting purposes, TxDOT is claiming its state roads as assets, all together worth about $64 billion. The reality is that TxDOT's roads should be seen as constantly growing maintenance liabilities. In the context of high oil prices, a stagnant economy, and reduced driving, TxDOT's roads are like an oil-addicted, tax money-starved monkey solidly chained to the back of Texas taxpayers for the foreseeable future.


Texas Road Politics 101

TxDOT offers an important window on Texas politics, both because of the large size of the budget and because of the opportunity for political interests to affect the budget, which can change a lot from year to year, depending largely on legislative whim.

How could things be otherwise? Texas has been ruled since its early days primarily by its landed gentry, first those tied to agriculture, then to the oil interests. A strong focus on "property rights" has been basic to Texas politics ever since the Texas constitution was written, soon after the Civil War, after the Yankee "carpetbaggers" were expelled.

Celebrated Texas journalist Molly Ivins used to call TxDOT "the Pentagon of Texas" for good reason. TxDOT roads have been a political pork barrel for many decades, with all that this implies. In the 1920s, soon after the formation of the  Texas Highway Department, as it was then called, Texas Gov. James E. (Pa) Ferguson got caught up in a Texas road contracting scandal, which forced him to resign and have his wife Miriam A. (Ma) Ferguson become a replacement governor. After this, the Highway Department kept its nose clean for a few decades, particularly under director Dewiltt Greer.

In recent decades, Texas road contractors have regained their old clout as key political players, nowadays in alliance with suburban sprawl land developers. The latter have benefited greatly from publicly funded roads that serve new development ringing the urban areas where most Texans now live. During Gov. Rick Perry's first term, the big road contractors gave him more than $1 million in campaign contributions. Texas is the kind of state where it is always possible to bribe a politician, as long as you call it a campaign contribution.

Gov. Rick Perry appointed a fellow Texas Legislature warhorse and friend, Ric Williamson, to chair the Texas Transportation Commission, TxDOT's governing body, when Perry first got elected. TxDOT Chair Williamson pulled out all the stops to promote Perry's hugely unpopular $185 billion Trans-Texas Corridor -- a deluxe road building solution in search of a future problem to solve.

Williamson died in 2007, and Perry appointed another close associate, Deirdre Delisi to chair the Commission. A little over a year ago, in September 2011, Perry appointed Phil Wilson, one of his top advisors, to be director of TxDOT and its budget. He was appointed to solve TxDOT's problems at a time when that agency had become distinctly unpopular with the legislature. With Wilson installed to manage TxDOT policy from the inside, there was no longer the need to control the Commission from the outside. Delisi resigned soon thereafter.

Before Wilson's appointment, TxDOT directors had all been engineers promoted from within TxDOT's own ranks. This had the effect of limiting TxDOT's top management to those good at building roads, but not necessarily those good at politics or balancing budgets. By most accounts, what Wilson brings to the table is smarts and skillful politics. Wilson's approach seems geared to working harder to raise money to build roads or toll roads as usual. This rather than facing the political reality that the traditionally entrenched transportation solutions and trends are so unsustainable that they demand a basic shift in transportation policy away from roads.


TxDOT has embraced a mountain of new road debt, despite deteriorating finances

It was clear that TxDOT was an agency in deep denial even several years ago when Paul Burka quoted a newly released legislative report on TxDOT in this 2010 blog post:

At present, State Highway Fund revenues are not as stable as in previous years, nor are they continuing to increase at the same pace as in the past. In addition, from 2005 through 2007, TxDOT used a combination of State Highway Fund revenues and bond funding for operations and capital investments. During this period their expenditures for these areas outpaced revenues, resulting in TxDOT using approximately $700 million of reserves to pay for operating and project expenses during this period...

First, when TxDOT bumped up spending through the use of bond funding, baseline expectations for TxDOT spending levels in any given year were raised both inside and outside the organization, even though that approach was not sustainable and represented a marked deviation from historical spending levels. Second, TxDOT incurred a significant debt service burden associated with the bonds it issued -- and that servicing reduces the availability of General Revenue and Fund 6 dollars for TxDOT to use for operations and new projects. [In other words, the bondholders had to be paid from the funds -- general revenue and Fund 6 -- that were being used to pay for the projects.]

The end effect is that TxDOT’s available budget (for maintenance, new projects, etc.) is effectively lower than it would have been before the bond funding was issued. At the same time, maintenance requirements are increasing as a result of having increased the size of the highway system (every new road brought into the system must be maintained).

To which Burka responded:

In other words, the Legislature acted in a fiscally irresponsible manner when it issued several billion dollars in bonds to pay for road projects. By going into debt to build roads, TxDOT ended up with less money for new roads than if it had just used gasoline tax money. This is what happens when lawmakers spurn the pay-as-you-go principle. This is not fiscal conservatism. This is spending beyond your means. You can’t blame TxDOT. The blame belongs with the Legislature and in particular the leadership at the time, Dewhurst and Craddick. And with the voters, who approved the bonds...

Since this was written, not a lot has changed. TxDOT still likes the idea of toll roads, just so long as someone else is responsible for managing them. There has been no discernible shift in policy away from trying to build as many roads as fast as possible. Roads are considered urgently necessary to meet TxDOT's hypothetical, but always increasing, future travel demand estimates.

A growing number of TxDOT roads are now being built with the help of a sort of road bidding competition. This demands that local government contribute matching funds to help TxDOT pay for construction. With the "pass-through tolling" being encouraged by TxDOT, TxDOT helps by building a road while a county (like Williamson and Hays near Austin) helps front the money. The county gets reimbursed by TxDOT, but ONLY if the projected traffic shows up in TxDOT's subsequent traffic counts.

As an agency currently in obvious financial trouble, TxDOT is doing whatever it can to shift its debt burden toward private lenders, toward local level government, and toward making roads a general obligation of Texas government.

In Part 2 of this series we will take a closer look at why TxDOT's denial of current trends is leading to financial disaster.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Roger Baker on The Rag Blog.]

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CARTOON / Charlie Loving : Rick Perry on Foreign Oil!

Political cartoon by Charlie Loving / The Rag Blog.
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Suzanne Goldenberg : Perry Officials Alter Environmental Report; Scientists Rebel

Texas Governor Rick Perry. Censorship of scientists' report sparks revolt. Photo by Evan Vucci / AP / The Guardian.
Rick Perry officials doctor
scientists' environmental report

Scientists ask for names to be removed after mentions of climate change and sea-level rise are deleted by Texas officials.

By Suzanne Goldenberg / The Guardian / October 17, 2011

Officials in Rick Perry's home state of Texas have set off a scientists' revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state's environmental agency.

By academic standards, the protest amounts to the beginnings of a rebellion: every single scientist associated with the 200-page report has demanded their names be struck from the document. "None of us can be party to scientific censorship so we would all have our names removed," said Jim Lester, a co-author of the report and vice-president of the Houston Advanced Research Center.

"To me it is simply a question of maintaining scientific credibility. This is simply antithetical to what a scientist does," Lester said. "We can't be censored." Scientists see Texas as at high risk because of climate change, from the increased exposure to hurricanes and extreme weather on its long coastline to this summer's season of wildfires and drought.

However, Perry, in his run for the Republican nomination, has elevated denial of science, from climate change to evolution, to an art form. He opposes any regulation of industry, and has repeatedly challenged the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Texas is the only state to refuse to sign on to the federal government's new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. "I like to tell people we live in a state of denial in the state of Texas," said John Anderson, an oceanographer at Rice University, and author of the chapter targeted by the government censors.

That state of denial percolated down to the leadership of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The agency chief, who was appointed by Perry, is known to doubt the science of climate change. "The current chair of the commission, Bryan Shaw, commonly talks about how human-induced climate change is a hoax," said Anderson.

But scientists said they still hoped to avoid a clash by simply avoiding direct reference to human causes of climate change and by sticking to materials from peer-reviewed journals. However, that plan began to unravel when officials from the agency made numerous unauthorized changes to Anderson's chapter, deleting references to climate change, sea-level rise, and wetlands destruction.

"It is basically saying that the state of Texas doesn't accept science results published in Science magazine," Anderson said. "That's going pretty far."

Officials even deleted a reference to the sea level at Galveston Bay rising five times faster than the long-term average -- 3mm a year compared to .5mm a year which Anderson noted was a scientific fact. "They just simply went through and summarily struck out any reference to climate change, any reference to sea level rise, any reference to human influence -- it was edited or eliminated," said Anderson. "That's not scientific review. That's just straight forward censorship."

Mother Jones has tracked the changes. The agency has defended its actions. "It would be irresponsible to take whatever is sent to us and publish it," Andrea Morrow, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. "Information was included in a report that we disagree with."

She said Anderson's report had been "inconsistent with current agency policy," and that he had refused to change it. She refused to answer any questions. Campaigners said the censorship by the Texas state authorities was a throwback to the George Bush era when White House officials also interfered with scientific reports on climate change.

In the last few years, however, such politicization of science has spread to the states. In the most notorious case, Virginia's attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who is a professed doubter of climate science, has spent a year investigating grants made to a prominent climate scientist Michael Mann, when he was at a state university in Virginia.

Several courts have rejected Cuccinelli's demands for a subpoena for the emails. In Utah, meanwhile, Mike Noel, a Republican member of the Utah state legislature, called on the state university to sack a physicist who had criticized climate science doubters.

The university rejected Noel's demand, but the physicist, Robert Davies, said such actions had had a chilling effect on the state of climate science. "We do have very accomplished scientists in this state who are quite fearful of retribution from lawmakers, and who consequently refuse to speak up on this very important topic. And the loser is the public," Davies said in an email.

"By employing these intimidation tactics, these policymakers are, in fact, successful in censoring the message coming from the very institutions whose expertise we need."

[Suzanne Goldenberg is the U.S. environmental correspondent for the London-based Guardian newspaper, where this article was first published. She has won several awards for her work in the Middle East, and in 2003 covered the U.S. invasion of Iraq from Baghdad. She is author of Madam President, about Hillary Clinton's historic run for the White House.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Documenting Flawed Forensics and the Willingham Execution

Scene from Joe Bailey Jr. and Steve Mims's Incendiary: The Willingham Case. Image from Truly Indie.
Rick Perry and the Texas
death penalty smokescreen

Incendiary: The Willingham Case, a documentary film. It is both riveting and sickening to watch how, in Texas, we execute people on false evidence.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / October 12, 2011

The new documentary Incendiary: The Willingham Case works at two levels. It focuses on what happens when supposedly expert witnesses in a criminal case get the forensic science wrong, and what happens when politicians pretend that the criminal justice system works well. If you are interested in either topic, it is a worthwhile film to see. It is both riveting and sickening at the same time to watch how, in Texas, we execute people on false evidence.

Those who follow the news will recognize the name of Cameron Todd Willingham. He was accused in 1991 of killing his three young children in a fire he deliberately set at their home in Corsicana, Texas. Willingham was convicted and executed for the deaths in 2004. While no one knows how the fire that killed the three young Willingham children started, what seems certain is that Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted and executed based on evidence that does not meet the standard of reliable science. To state this another way: There was and is no reliable scientific evidence to show that Willingham started the fire that killed his three children.

Once the fire investigators began focusing on Willingham as an arsonist, they ceased looking for other explanations for the fire's origin. While we don't know how it started, some evidence suggests that it could have started from poor electrical wiring or from a gas heater. These causes were not properly investigated and we will never know the fire’s origin because the investigators allowed the evidence to be compromised or destroyed. No court ever considered the sufficiency of the arson evidence. They focused on whether the trial judge made a mistake in his trial rulings, not the quality of the evidence offered against Willingham.

Missing from the film are interviews with the original fire investigators, the DA, and the defense expert, and an interview with Governor Rick Perry made just for the film. But there are comments from Perry that reveal the closest thing to callous indifference that can be imagined as he was questioned about the case at occasional press conferences and during interviews on a range of topics.

Not once has Rick Perry ever shown any interest in looking at the forensic evidence that was used to convict Willingham, comparing it with the conclusions of fire investigators with unquestioned scientific credentials, and drawing from that comparison a reasoned conclusion about whether the testimony used to convict Willingham was worthy of belief. Had he done so, Perry would have realized that the death penalty system in Texas has serious, fatal flaws.

While my disdain for Rick Perry knows few bounds, I reserve my harshest criticism for the criminal defense attorney who represented Cameron Todd Willingham at his trial -- Robert Dunn. Criminal defense lawyers owe their clients, at a minimum, what one of my law school professors called “warm zeal.” Renowned defense attorney Clarence Darrow, as described by writer Joelle Farrell, “defended both the righteous and the despised with the same vigor.” Willingham’s defense attorney lacked both warm zeal and vigor. To this day, he harbors nothing but contempt and loathing, if not hatred, for his now dead client.

I reserve special contempt for Dunn because I have been in his position representing a despised defendant charged with capital murder in a small East Texas town. I doubt that my skills as a trial lawyer were any better than Dunn’s, but what I lacked in experience I tried to make up for with hard work, research, and investigation. There is little evidence that Dunn tried to represent Willingham diligently.

Dunn failed to get the best expert witness available to help him analyze the fire investigation conclusions that were key to Willingham’s conviction. My impression is that Dunn was a hack attorney, cozy with the judges in Corsicana, and unwilling to make waves to provide the best representation possible.

At the time of Dunn’s representation of Willingham there were valuable resources available to him from a Texas death penalty project. I had those resources 12 years earlier. They were enormously helpful in the legal work I did on behalf of my client. They would have saved Willingham's life had his attorney used them.

The key to Willingham's case is the inadequate and fictitious fire investigation done by two investigators who had learned on the job. What they learned was not science but folk lore. Their testimony bore all the hallmarks of witchcraft, a point suggested by the comments of renowned fire expert Gerald Hurst, a former chief scientist for explosives companies with a doctorate in chemistry from Cambridge University, who has studied fire science for 40 years.

Hurst filed a report of his findings just before Willingham was executed. Rick Perry received a copy of the report, but there is no evidence that anyone on Rick Perry's staff bothered to read it. The governor could not be bothered to even glance at it.

More than a half dozen nationally acknowledged experts in fire investigation have confirmed Hurst's findings in the Willingham case, but Rick Perry was unwilling to delay the execution by 30 days so that the matter could be thoroughly vetted. Perry preferred to dismiss such findings as interference in the Texas capital punishment system by "latter-day supposed experts." Science doesn't matter to Perry. He cares about the political implications of what he does.

The two fire investigators in Willingham's case cited 20 indications that the fire was arson, yet not one of those indications stood up to the fire science known at the time they did their investigation. The investigators were not scientists, but amateur sleuths who saw their work as more art than science. They reached conclusions based on hunches, guesswork, and speculation, which they characterized as faultless conclusions drawn from years of experience.

While the investigation of the Willingham fire was irredeemably flawed, Perry himself, as governor, is one of the greatest flaws in the Texas death penalty scheme. He exercises no independent thought about death penalty matters that come before him, nor does he seem to want to do so. In reviewing the extensive files of the Innocence Project about the Willingham case -- perhaps the most complete publicly accessible record of any capital murder case -- there is no evidence that either Perry or his staff even looked at the report of Hurst.

Perry referred to Willingham as a monster more than once -- a statement intended to close off rational consideration of the facts in the case. After Willingham’s execution, Perry continued to thwart attempts by the Texas Forensic Science Commission to determine the validity of the fire evidence. This is not a man that reasonable people would want to have caring for their dog while they are on vacation. He has not demonstrated the capacity to make rational, intelligent, and wise decisions about mundane matters, let alone matters of life and death.

Incendiary: The Willingham Case documents the deadly folly of the Texas death penalty scheme. It is a system in which no one likes to admit mistakes. This is especially true of politicians -- governors, district attorneys, judges, investigators. For those who accept science, the Willingham case is conclusive proof that Texas has executed a legally innocent man. But for Perry, for the district attorney, and even for Willingham’s defense attorney, the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham was the politically expedient thing to do

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Don Swift : Rick Perry and the New Apostolic Reformation

Rev. Tom Schlueter, a New Apostolic Reformation pastor, shown laying his hands on Rick Perry in front of a painting of the Battle at the Alamo. Image from Right Speak.
A threat to American liberties:
Rick Perry and the New Apostolic Reformation

Two years ago, two NAR ministers explained to Perry that Texas had been anointed by God to bring America to Godly rule.

By Don Swift / The Rag Blog / September 28, 2011

[This is the third in a series on Dominionism by Don Swift.]

The most vigorous branch of Dominionism is the New Apostolic Reformation. Rev. Dr. C. Peter Wagner of Global Harvest Ministries in Colorado Springs, is the “convening Apostle” or leading light in New Apostolic Reformation, and he says the reformation or New Apostolic Age began in 2001.

A former professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, Wagner is famous for helping develop the “growth model” that was to produce the huge megachurches that now dot the land. He and his followers aim for a post-denominational Christianity shaped by them. Their leaders are God’s new apostles and prophets who have greater power than the original apostles and prophets.

Spiritual warriors must convert adherents of other churches and seek political power. They think the end times will see the perfection of Christianity and they will have a perfected religion to turn over to Christ, when he returns. They will be given great power and crush evil with a “rod of iron.”

These NAR Dominionists look to the day when they and, above all, their clergy take over society. Dr. Wagner advocates a pragmatic theology which justifies acting in a way whereby the ends justify the means. His followers tend to be Charismatics and Pentecostals, and they are post-millennialists rather than pre-millennialists. That is, they believe that Christ must return to earth before they can complete the work of establishing his Kingdom. Of course, not all Charismatics or Pentecostals are Dominionists.

The New Apostolics are busy in worldly affairs because they believe they are destined to rule. In addition they want to expel demons, witches, and sorcerers, and they claim the power to physically heal others and raise people from the dead.

They believe they have the world’s only valid religious belief system. They want a post-denominational church, but it will not be warm and fuzzy as some think. People can be forced to join the new non-denominational Christianity for their own good, and other churches can be forced to stop teaching false doctrines. One official of Morningstar Ministries admits that life under their theocratic rule “may seem totalitarian at first.”

They target youth to be members of Joel’s Army (a distortion of an illusion in Book Joel 2) to seize political power and force non-believers to accept their version of Christianity. In addition to Joel's Army, they have used other names like Shepherding, Latter Rain, and Manifest Sons of God.

These churches engage in “spiritual warfare” as was depicted in the movie Jesus Camp. In the film, young people were trained to “take dominion” over the world. They will also purge the Christian church of elements that strongly disagree with them.

These sincere Christians believe that the world is inhabited by all sorts of demons and that the powers of demons even get passed down in families, just as curses are passed down. Some demons run territories; others inhabit some of their enemies, and still other very powerful demons run churches they dislike. The reverse side of believing in evil demons is the teaching that the New Apostolics have the power to heal, raise the dead, and successfully combat the forces of darkness.

NAR Dominionists seriously think some people are sorcerers or demons and must be fought. They think sorcery runs in families. They see themselves as being involved in continual spiritual warfare. NAR people see themselves as spiritual warriors and “prayer warriors” who constitute the “Army of God.” It seems we heard that name in some other context of late.

They are out to destroy the demons and evil spirits that cause problems in a territory so that the truly saved can take over and rule. Congress has helped the movement by giving it millions in grants for abstinence sex education and anti-AIDS projects.

They see secularists as members of satanic armies and demonic enemies of religion and freedom. Bill Bright, founder of the Campus Crusade for Christ, believed that demons were active agents that could take over institutions and political entities. Many Dominionists share this belief. Lou Engle, of the Family Research Council, who has also prayed with Michele Bachmann, frequently said that the people supporting health care reform were guided by demons.

Rick Perry, a Pentecostal, also has strong ties to Dominionism, but he does not seem to go as far as Rep. Bachmann. He is particularly attractive to a group of Pentecostal Dominionists who are members of the New Apostolic Reformation movement. Rev. Tom Schlueter, a New Apostolic Reformation pastor, is close to Perry. Schlueter has said that God called the NAR to infiltrate government: “We’re going to infiltrate [the government], not run from it. I know why God’s doing what he’s doing ... He’s just simply saying, ‘Tom I’ve given you authority in a governmental authority, and I need you to infiltrate the governmental mountain.”

NAR pastors call the Lone Star State the "Prophet State,” meaning it was foretold that it was to be a template for the rest of America. Two years ago, two NAR ministers explained to Perry that Texas had been anointed by God to bring America to Godly rule. They had been instructed to visit Perry by one of their prophets, Chuck Pierce of Denton, Texas.

Eight NAR leaders were deeply involved in Perry's recent prayer rally, called “The Response.” Not everyone who attended that event was a Dominionist or even knew what that term meant.

Few note that Governor Perry sent invitations on official stationery and promoted it on a state government web site. Dominionist Mike Bickle of the International House of Prayer also played an important role at the event. He claims that demons have repeatedly attacked him and is known for his address “Authority of the Believer, Exercising Our Dominion in Christ.”

[Don Swift, a retired history professor, also writes under the name Sherman DeBrosse. Read more articles by Don Swift on The Rag Blog.]

Also see:

• "Perry, Bachmann, and the Threat of Dominionism" by Don Swift / The Rag Blog / Sept. 14, 2011
• "Dominionists and the 'Kingdom of God" by Don Swift / The Rag Blog / Sept. 21, 2011

And:

• "Leap of Faith: The making of a Republican front-runner," by Ryan Lizza / The New Yorker / Aug. 15, 2011

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