The Texas Observer

Gov. Rick Perry’s office has been deleting its emails with the fervor of Oliver North at a paper shredder expo.

But thanks to Austin reporter Elise Hu over at Political Junkie and Milwaukee software tester John Washburn, Perry’s office has stopped erasing its emails.

A spokesperson for Perry’s office told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Sunday that it has now halted a policy that required employees of the governor’s office to destroy emails after just seven days.

Hu has been blogging about Texas agencies’ public records policies in a series she calls “The Purge.” Hu has obtained the governor’s records retention policy, which she believes requires him to keep many of his records until the end of his term of office.

Washburn read Hu’s postings and decided to set up a mail server to automatically request email from Perry’s office on a regular basis. Texas Open Records law requires that agencies preserve records that a member of the public has requested.

Washburn told me that, “clearly the solution is to ask for the records.”

Now, as someone who has watched with shock and awe the Texas Department of Public Safety’s mind-numbingly anti-open-records efforts to thwart a simple open records request by the Observer, I found Washburn’s ‘just ask for the records’ approach to be refreshing.

Washburn is an open records enthusiast who got his start analyzing (of all things) voter fraud among the many hanging chads in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties back in 1994. Now that’s prescient. Washburn said he participates in what is called the Carnival of Open Records, a wikiFOIA-sponsored site.

He said in Milwaukee, when he goes about business at the courthouse, “a roomful of county clerks audibly hiss at me.”

As for political leanings, Washburn said he’s not a member of a political party, though he did run for Congress twice as a Libertarian in a district on Milwaukee’s south side in 1988 and 1992. He received slightly more than 1 percent of the vote each time.

Washburn has yet to receive any emails from Perry, and in fact, the governor’s office has sent him correspondence noting the large expenses that Washburn likely will accrue due to all the printing and redacting they have planned. And they asked if Washburn was interested in “narrowing” his request.

He said no thanks.

He suspects there may be something of a legal fight brewing, and I asked if he had proper counsel, funding, etc… In fact he has only the average resources of any individual American, and if you want to help him in this fight, he does accept donations toward fees associated with his open records requests, here.

The next email request goes out early tomorrow morning, and rest assured, we will be talking with Washburn about what he receives.

The majestic old Denison High School building — one of North Texas’ most historic structures — has finally been demolished. We’ve chronicled the rush by city leaders in Denison to tear down the beautiful structure that dates to 1913 to make way for redevelopment. A group of Denison residents valiantly fought the demolition. (You can read our previous coverage here and here. You can see a video of the old building, via YouTube, here.)

Activists’ last-ditch efforts to save the structure — including an offer to buy the building from the city — were refused. A demolition crew flattened the last remnants of the high school in mid-October. All that remains on the site is the detritus of the Mission Revival structure and, oddly, the white clock tower.

Before the wrecking ball took its final swings, the Denison city council decided it wanted to preserve the wonderfully detailed clock tower as a memorial to the old building. It’s not clear why the council got sentimental about the clock tower when they easily could have saved the whole structure.

The city purchased the clock from the demolition crew for $38,000 (typically in demolitions, the crew gets to sell off the remnants). Before the final demolition, a large crane removed the clock tower and carefully placed it in a fenced-off corner of the lot, where it sits.

The word in Denison is that the city plans to build a new library on the site in the Mission Revival style. The old clock tower may be part of the new building. Why would the city tear down one historic Mission Revival building only to replace it with, um, another Mission Revival? We’ll put that question to Denison city leaders early next week.

Michael Chertoff has a heckuva job: With a stroke of his pen last month the Homeland Security chief suspended nineteen laws in Arizona that stood in the way of a two-mile section of border fence slated for the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.

He’s threatening to do South Texas the same way, unless environmentalists win a recently filed lawsuit.

Chertoff is using a tool granted to him by Congress in 2005 as part of the Real ID Act. In Section 102 of that act, Congress offered Homeland Security the power to waive laws conflicting with border militarization security. Congress also stripped the courts of judicial review except for Constitutional claims.

Chertoff decided to use the law in Arizona after a federal judge blocked further construction on the fence. In October, the judge agreed with environmentalists that the government had failed to address environmental concerns involved in building a massive fence through a wildlife refuge. The judge issued an order halting construction. Two weeks later, Chertoff invoked Section 102. Construction immediately resumed. (Question: if Chertoff gets pulled over for, say, speeding, can he skip out of the ticket by waiving traffic laws?)

On November 1, the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife amended their lawsuit against the government to argue that Section 102 “violates the U.S. Constitution’s fundamental Separation of Powers principles by impermissibly delegating legislative authority to a politically-appointed Executive Branch official.” Read the amended complaint here.

It should make for an interesting fight, and it’s relevant for us Texans because Homeland Security is turning its attention from other parts of the border to the 70 miles of wall it has slated for the Rio Grande Valley. As an Observer story in September detailed residents on both sides of the border as well as environmentalists and birders are enraged over the fence.

The latest map released by the government shows segments of the wall slicing through critical habitat in Texas. The Sabal Palm Audubon Center in Brownsville will be completely walled off, leaving this rare, species-rich palm grove in a sort-of no-man’s-land. Many Texans probably do not know that the Lower Valley is the most biologically diverse region in the nation. Yet it has a global reputation. I’ve met people from as far away as South Africa who have never set foot in Texas but know about the Valley because of its fame as a birding and wildlife paradise.

Chertoff’s response to all this? “I have to say to myself, ‘Yes, I don’t want to disturb the habitat of a lizard, but am I prepared to pay human lives to do that?’,” he told the AP.

I’ve been ruminating over these fiendish propositions for nearly a month, now — always, you know, with this notion in the back of my head of the futility of the project — since these things almost always pass. As you may know, the propositions up for a vote today will amend the Texas Constitution for things large and small, obscure and not so obscure, often incurring debt via bond issues.

Today’s voter turnout figures will be low, as usual, and even the best-informed voter out there does not know the full merits and demerits of each of the sixteen props — although we and others have done plenty of examination.

When I encounter political futility, I always think, what would the Libertarians do? After all, nobody can beat them at steadily managing a third-party presence on the ballot and just as steadily failing to place any candidates in office — every time. Still, they consistently carve out a couple percent of the vote.

The answer, in this case, is “When in doubt, vote no,” which I think is a fairly reasonable approach to such an expensive list.

That’s what Travis County Libertarian Party Chair Wes Benedict says was the general feeling among his comrades, although the TCLP did approve four of the props and had no position on four more (and deciding against the other eight, particularly the big bond props (4, 12, 15)).

I also asked Benedict what he says others have been asking, namely, what did he think Ron Paul’s run for president would mean to his party?

“It does both help and hurt in the short term,” he said.

He himself has donated $600 to Paul’s campaign. Yesterday, Paul, according to his website, broke all online fundraising records, raising more than $4 million*. This puts mainstream pundits in quite a bind since they have long equated electability with how much money a candidate can raise.

Benedict pointed out something I hadn’t considered. “The one rule is… you can’t vote in the Republican Party primary and be a Libertarian candidate,” Benedict noted.

Benedict wrote about this in a post that suggests Paul’s run will eventually help the national party. But, at one point he considers what would happen if all of the Libertarian conventioneers went and voted in the GOP primary for Ron Paul:

Unfortunately, by voting in the Republican primary, those Libertarian activists would cause the Libertarian Party of Texas to lose its ballot access. We would have no candidates anywhere else on the ballot. The Libertarian Party of Texas would effectively disappear.

Now, I know a lot of Republicans and Democrats that wouldn’t mind seeing that happen one bit, but, as Benedict notes, by the time Texas’ primary rolls around, the GOP nomination will probably be decided — so Libertarians can relax a little.

But, after losing a nasty GOP primary fight, would Paul consider running again as a Libertarian for president (as he did in 1988)?

Benedict did say he is “holding out a little bit of hope for that.”

* We apologize for a previous inaccuracy in the post. 

Howard Dean failed to go much of anywhere in 2004 — but he managed shortly thereafter to secure the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, and he transformed his presidential campaign into Democracy For America — which still has subsidiaries across the U.S., including Democracy For Texas.

U.S. Senate candidate Rick Noriega is tapping into this political structure, and according to folks associated with his campaign will likely gain the endorsement of DFA — which would be on top of the recent endorsement by DFT.

Karl-Thomas Musselman is publisher of the Burnt Orange Report (a slice of the world wide web that most Texas Democrats know well). He is also affiliated with DFT.

Musselman let readers know last month that he has signed on as Online Coordinator for Noriega. He notes that, if Noriega gains DFA’s endorsement, it will be the first endorsement by the national organization in any U.S. Senate race in 2008 — which certainly says something about how Lone Star politics has changed in the last four years.

Musselman points to “that unique story that Rick has.” Noriega has served on the border, with hands-on experience on the front lines of the right wing’s pet issue. He also served, as Off the Kuff’s Charles Kuffner noted, in Afghanistan, and will be able to speak truth to power about the war.

“That energy is going to be helpful,” Musselman says. “That endorsement is a measure of the excitement…”

Musselman pointed to the record of John Cornyn (R-Texas) to explain why he thinks Noriega deserves such a high-profile endorsement.

He cited “votes that infuriate” like Cornyn’s insistence on opposing the S-CHIP bill in even its most diluted form. Musselman said Cornyn is in “lock-step with the president, who is no longer popular, even in Texas.”

But above all, Musselman says, Noriega “can speak with authority on the war…”

Dean made his mark criticizing Bush and Cheney’s war of choice — back before it was fashionable. Dean also introduced the political world to the phenomenon of online fundraising. Now that San Antonio lawyer Mikal Watts has dropped out, Rick Noriega will need those online constituencies to help him not only with fundraising but also in getting the word out about his candidacy since there won’t be the free media attention from a contested primary. But even with the online community a fairy tale ending for this Cinderella story is going to take tremendous work and a lot of luck. It has been a long time since a Democrat won statewide in Texas.

Friday began with a blast from the White House’s spin department detailing how the latest job numbers showed an unprecedented “50th Consecutive Month of Job Growth” — a sign, the administration says, of a strong economy — noting that “personal income” and “real wages” have risen.

By the end of the evening, news programs were noting the decisive drop in stock prices despite the fact the Federal Reserve has slashed key interest rates twice. And on political summary shows like the McLaughlin Group on PBS, the pundits all round were outdoing one another predicting just when the recession (or ‘puny growth’) will strike.

Anybody that has had to work for a living in America during this administration knows damn well that today’s jobs and benefits are not the same as they used to be — that personal income and savings have suffered because of ever-increasing health care costs, endless food and energy price hikes, and huge college tuition increases. We know, that, in fact, ‘real wages’ have never kept up with inflation and have only risen despite efforts by the Bush White House — because long-sought increases in federal minimum wage laws brought about by a Democratic Congress finally raised the wage floor.

The reality is that a frightening number of Americans (we’ve heard as many as 86 percent) are just a paycheck or two away from being homeless. But not everybody is in such a precarious position. For those at the top, the economy is doing very well. The top 300,000 earners together receive almost as much income as the bottom 150 million.

Meanwhile, the dollar is tanking underneath the weight of debt the fiscally imprudent Bush administration is wracking up. My friends in Europe visit and marvel about their beer-purchasing-power — and likewise my old English professor warns that if I should really visit as I have been threatening, I “will find London expensive.”

That’s because the U.S. dollar has never been worth so few Euros, Yen, or Pounds. Curiously, the rise in any “real wage” income I might have experienced in the last decade seems to be escaping — since my money as a whole simply buys less than it did a few weeks ago.

What kind of bubble are they in over at the White House to be able to paint this economic picture as a rosy one — when in “real” terms, the U.S. is dancing with recession and the “fundamentals” — from the dollar to oil prices to inflation — are obviously not healthy?

We were reading in the paper today that current assistant House parliamentarian and former Houston state rep. Ron Wilson wants to be a Department of Public Safety Commissioner. Two Democratic legislators who knew Wilson well back when they all formed part of the Houston delegation together, Sen. Rodney Ellis and Rep. Garnet Coleman, think putting the entertainment lawyer and closet Republican on the commission would be a big mistake. “People don’t think he best fits the qualifications for running DPS not so much for past ethical problems as that he might use the position for political purposes,” says Coleman.

We were mulling over this when we looked out the window of our office and what did we see but Wilson’s unmistakable bright orange Lamborghini Diablo GT. The retail price is a mere $300,000. Of course it can zip from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds and its top speed is 211 mph, which means Wilson, if he chooses to break the law, can drive from Houston to Austin in 45 minutes. (The Lamborghini Web site oozes pretentious minimalism; company motto: “Every weapon needs a master.”)

Then, we noticed the car still had temporary tags, which was odd since we’ve seen the car around for what seems like years.

We approached the ex-lawmaker-turned-lawyer/lobbyist. He told us the tags were temporary because the car was new. As to the DPS, all he would say was, “My name is out there, but you never know.”