The Texas Observer

Rule #2,351 for Politicians: When ordering a city employee to toss copies of an opposition newspaper in the trash, make sure there aren’t any surveillance cameras around to capture your indiscretion. Laredo Mayor Raul Salinas apparently hasn’t learned this rule. In June he ordered copies of LareDOS, a monthly rag critical of the city government, removed from the Laredo airport and City Hall. Naturally that didn’t go over so well with the free speech fanatics and Salinas had to apologize.

But things get worse for Mr. Mayor. Recently LareDOS got their paws on the surveillance tapes from the airport showing the mayor in action. Obtained through an open records request, the two-minute video is now available on YouTube and the LareDOS site.

In it you can see Salinas - the mustachioed, bald guy who kinda looks like Colonel Blimp - at first doing politician type things like looking enviously on while someone else is interviewed by a television reporter. But at about the 1:36 mark he can be seen talking to an airport worker and pointing to the metal rack holding copies of LareDOS. The woman then picks up the stack of issues and dispenses with them somewhere off-camera. You can’t see it in the grainy surveillance tape, but on the cover of that issue was something naturally offensive to the mayor.

As it turns out, the rabblerousing newspaper had visually impugned and humiliated a valued member of the Salinas family. Understandably, the mayor - a former FBI agent - was incensed that Princess, the First Dog of Laredo and an absolutely precious longhaired Chihuahua, made a cameo appearance on the cover of the newspaper. She appeared as a skeletal dog watching the unappetizing tableau of the city elders partying down - Laredo pachanga style - with a private prison CEO.

“I’m sensitive sometimes. I have feelings too,” Salinas told the Laredo Morning Times weeks after the incident. “You learn through your mistakes, but it does hurt when someone depicts you in a fashion that’s not true.”

The Times reported: “Putting a positive spin on Princess debut in LareDOS, Salinas said his dog is more popular now, which has brought more attention and donations to the animal shelter, he said.”

Bonus: Check out the Mayor’s MySpace page!

Proving once again that “loyalty uber alles” is the Perry motto, the Guv yesterday appointed H.S. “Buddy” Garcia chairman of the state’s environmental agency. Buddy has long been a Perry buddy, serving variously as deputy secretary of state, special assistant to the governor, and border commerce coordinator. He brings little environmental know-how to the chair.

In making Garcia chairman of TCEQ Perry passed over commissioner Larry Soward, whom the Guv appointed to the TCEQ in 2003. Soward may have proved a little too independent for Perry’s tastes, repeatedly criticizing the agency for rubber stamping permits and being feckless about cleaning Texas’ lousy air. On the other hand Garcia has, since his nomination to the TCEQ in January, proved charmingly in line with the Guv. On a number of important votes Garcia joined former chairman Kathleen Hartnett White in favoring the interests of corporate polluters.

Environmentalists and urban leaders pressing for sane air pollution policy had hoped that Garcia’s appointment would give them a 2-1 edge. No dice. Especially upsetting was Garcia’s vote in June to approve TXU’s massive new Oak Grove coal-fired plant near Franklin in Robertson County. Two administrative judges had recommended that the permit be denied because they found TXU’s pollution control technology lacking.

Some lawmakers too were hopeful that Garcia would be a breath of fresh air, so to speak, on the commission. In March, a Senate appointment committee tried to suss out where Garcia stood on pressing environmental issues. Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin) asked Garcia to assure skeptics that he would not rubber stamp the coal plants. “I believe the obligation I have as commissioner is to make sure a permit applicant has met its burden of proof,” said Garcia. “I’m here to tell you I will not be a rubber stamp. I take this job very seriously.”

(Yet, the administrative judges in the Oak Grove case explicitly noted in their ruling that TXU had failed to meet the burden of proof required under state law.)

At the senate hearing, Sen. Eliot Shapleigh (D-El Paso) warned Garcia that his constituents had “lost faith in TCEQ.” “They believe TCEQ is a servant of polluters,” said Shapleigh. “How are you going to clean up that perception?”

Garcia’s reply: “Applying the law and using common sense might be a good start.”

Whenever you’re ready, Buddy.

The White House today released the president’s proclamation in honor of Constitution Day. As all you Constitution Day lovers out there know well, the holiday isn’t until September 17. You may be wondering why the White House celebrated Constitution Day three weeks early. We can’t say for sure. The answer is probably stamped “highly sensitive” and locked in Cheney’s walk-in safe. Maybe it’s hereditary, the first president Bush once celebrated Pearl Harbor Day a month early.

Officially known as Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, the holiday marks the date that the Constitution was signed, on September 17, 1787. You can read the history of the holiday here and the actual document here.

Ironically, what’s clearer than ever today is that the Bushies would do well to spend some time with that document. A Washington Post story tells the story of a White House manual that instructs event staff on how to muzzle dissent at presidential events. You can read the manual for yourself here. The document was obtained as part of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of people ejected from Bush’s speeches, including one couple who were arrested and detained in West Virginia in 2004 simply for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts. (You can read about this First Amendment case here.)

The goal of the White House manual is to ensure that the president never has to witness dissent. The document advises event planners and advance teams to “work with the Secret Service and have them ask the local police department to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably not in view of the event site or motorcade route.”

The manual instructs organizers to form roving “rally squads” to drown out or remove nonviolent protesters at presidential events. “If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors [sic] (USA!,USA!,USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site. The rally squads can include, but are not limited to, college/young republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities….If the group is carrying signs, trying to shout down the President or has the potential to cause some greater disruption to the event, action needs to be taken immediately to minimize the demonstrator’s effect.”

Happy Constitution Day everybody!

We hear Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was sighted at the Texas Capitol this morning. Folks under the pink dome saw the AG and his family pull up in a motorcade of black Suburbans and a white Hummer (because, of course, justice rides a white Hummer). A Department of Justice spokesperson told us that Gonzales isn’t here on DOJ matters: “There’s no official event going on. If he’s there, he’s there on personal business.”

Personal business, eh? Perhaps he’s reminiscing about the good old days or as so many do, just returning to the scene of the crime. Since Texas is scheduled to execute its 400th prisoner tonight, maybe Gonzales is here to commemorate his contributions to inflating that number. Maybe he’s looking for a job. (He’s loyal, unscrupulous, willing to lie at the drop of a fired attorney, and bend rules for his employer. Sounds like a perfect House parliamentarian.) Or maybe he’s on an errand for his boss, feeling out possible replacements. Seems like Justice Nathan Hecht has the necessary virtues to lead Bush’s Justice Dept.

On the eve of Texas’ landmark 400th execution, the European Union is calling on Gov. Rick Perry to scrap the death penalty. The EU, which has an all-out ban on capital punishment in member nations, directly asks Guv Goodhair in a statement “to exercise all powers vested in his office to halt all upcoming executions and to consider the introduction of a moratorium in the State of Texas.” The Europeans apparently regard executions as “cruel and inhumane” and the elimination of the practice as “fundamental to the protection of human dignity, and to the progressive development of human rights.”

Um, EU, I don’t know how to tell you this but asking a Texas governor to pull the plug on executions is like asking a Frenchman to lay off the vin and brie - you’re li’ble to get hurt. Perry, in particular, is unlikely to be responsive. He holds the record for most executions on his watch, besting even former governor George W. Bush. As such, Perry’s spokesman - and professional sassmouth Robert Black - fired back at the EU with a statement, the first line of which blends Thomas Paine with Yosemite Sam.

“230 years ago, our forefathers fought a war to throw off the yoke of a European monarch and gain the freedom of self-determination.”

The statement goes on: “Texans long ago decided that the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for the most horrible crimes committed against our citizens.” (To which a bumper sticker in Austin replied: Why do we kill people who kill people in order to show that killing people is wrong?)

Perry’s brief statement concludes on a softer note: “While we respect our friends in Europe, welcome their investment in our state and appreciate their interest in our laws, Texans are doing just fine governing Texas.”

“Welcome their investment”?! At first blush that seems like a bit of a non sequitur. But remember, Europe is the largest source of foreign investment in Texas. And companies across the pond are under pressure from shareholders and activists to restrict investments in states that use the death penalty. Perry’s no fool and he just may recognize that the death penalty could prove to be bad for bidness. One can sense, perhaps, a promising new front in the international movement to ban capital punishment.

Everybody on the outside loves a good mystery. This one comes to us from Del Rio, home of the Val Verde Correctional Facility, a private detention center run by the Florida-based Geo Group. It seems detainees at the 875-bed lockup have been getting sick and dying from what the San Antonio Express-News dubbed a “mysterious illness.” [Cue creepy Twilight Zone theme.] So far two inmates have died and two more have been hospitalized. More people, including guards, are rumored to have fallen ill. Three of the men were undocumented immigrants from Honduras and Mexico.

The men showed symptoms of erratic behavioral changes followed by incontinence and dehydration, reported the Express-News. Geo Group officials and the Texas Department of State Health Services haven’t figured out what befell the men, so they’ve called in the big guns from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate. The CDC team has not provided any answers publicly, but have promised a statement soon.

The criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast wonders if the Unsolved Mystery could be tuberculosis, a jailhouse scourge. State health officials haven’t ruled that possibility out. “I can’t tell you it isn’t tuberculosis,” Dr. Sandra Guerra-Cantu, an official with state health services told the Del Rio News Herald. “The presence of tuberculosis is almost expected in any correctional facility.”

That equivocation doesn’t sit well with Grits.

Because of its method of transmission, prisons and jails are a prime breeding ground for TB. But for exactly those reasons health officials should be scurrying to prevent it. If TB was the cause of not one but two inmate deaths in Del Rio, that’s a much bigger deal than Guerra-Cantu makes it out to be.

Incidentally, at another Geo-run detention camp in Tacoma, Washington 300 immigrant detainees recently became sick, possibly from food poisoning. But officials aren’t sure and are calling that incident a “mystery” as well.

But what’s not a mystery is that like many for-profit prison operators, Geo Group’s track record in Texas does not inspire confidence in its ability to prevent or manage problems. (The company owns and/or operates 18 “corrections” facilities in the state.) Geo’s corporate rap sheet is longer than that of its inmates. Two high-profile lawsuits have highlighted conditions at the Val Verde prison, which holds detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service, and also county inmates. A 2006 suit brought by the Texas Civil Rights Project blamed Geo for the death of 23-year-old LeTisha Tapia, who hung herself in 2003 after allegedly being raped and beaten. The suit was settled for $200,000 earlier this year. As part of the settlement, an independent monitor was appointed to oversee the facility.

A discrimination lawsuit, filed in 2005 by a former guard who is African American, alleged that a jail supervisor had a fondness for KKK paraphernalia, which he kept in his office. Last year, in Willacy County, a jury returned a $47.5 million verdict to the family of a man who was beaten to death by other inmates, finding that Geo Group (then called Wackenhut) were negligent in the man’s death. In July, MSNBC reported on an inmate suicide, linked to squalid conditions, in a Geo-run lockup in Spur. A top Idaho prison authority investigating the Spur jail, where Idaho had sent a surplus of its offenders, declared it the worst facility he had ever seen and “beyond repair.”

But the steady drumbeat of scandal has done little to harm the company’s bottom line. Geo’s second-quarter profits are up 96 percent and the stock has made analysts’ “buy” lists. The CEO of Geo, George Zoley, told analysts recently that they typically squeeze a 25-30 percent profit margin out of each prisoner in the facilities they own, such as Val Verde. That brings to mind a troubling, if entirely unoriginal, thought: what if the unbelievable profit margins are the product of running an inhumanely bare-bones operation?

Well, I’m off.

In an effort to keep this good-bye from falling into sentimentality or preachiness, I’ll just leave with a recommendation. “Fifty Years of The Texas Observer” pretty much tells the tale of why everyone who works for this magazine does what they do. The anthology was compiled by Char Miller and published in 2004. I came across it by accident while packing up after a different part-time job cut my position. But from the book’s earliest pages, I found a testament to this magazine’s commitment across decades to simple, yet difficult, principles: freedom, equality, and justice. The titles of the very first editorials — “To Enlighten, and Not to Suppress” (Ronnie Dugger) and “Keep Facts Straight, Stand By Convictions” (Paul Holcomb) — tells a reader everything she needed to know about this rag-tag operation. And they do it without a single pun. The current crop of contributors is decidedly puzzled by that.

As frustrating as it can be covering politics, the book is an unexpected record of progress. The problems of fifty years ago seem horrific by today’s standards. Little quirks, like the public obsession with “bra-burning feminists,” covered so well by Kaye Northcott and Molly Ivins, seem pitiable now. And even our 2003 account of House Democrats’ escape to Ardmore, Okla., seems like a story about crises averted. (”If we can stop [the Republicans] now, then my six-year-old will have an opportunity to have a Democratic Congress in her lifetime,” said Rep. Jim Dunnam, who was shooting for optimism at the time.)

And, of course, here is the place for the caveat that these problems are never resolved, just alleviated. The struggle continues. So do the happy hours, hopefully.

I’m off to San Francisco, just because it’s time for this Texas boy to try something new. Please send margaritas.

Thanks for reading. I can’t wait to see how the next blogger only makes this space better.