The Texas Observer

You may remember last month that Crystal Beach resident, Michael Ray Kujawa, spent a grueling night during the worst part of Hurricane Ike in a Baptist church with his 11-year old pet lioness “Shackles.” Well, he also left behind a 7-year old female tiger that nearly drowned in her enclosure.

The tiger managed to tread water for four days until it could be rescued by former Jefferson County Judge Carl Griffith, a local veterinarian Dr. Sarah Matak and some Texas game wardens. According to Matak, who tranquilized the tiger, the animal was not running loose on the Bolivar Peninsula as reported in an Associated Press story. The rescuers transported the female tiger to a temporary refuge in Somerville, Texas.

The good news is that the tiger will now have a permanent home at the International Exotic Animal Sanctuary in north Texas. The sanctuary, profiled in last month’s Observer story “A Tiger’s Tale” is one of the only accredited facilities in Texas that cares for abandoned and neglected big cats.

“It is truly amazing that she survived,” says Richard Gilbreth, director of the sanctuary. He says the tiger will arrive at the sanctuary tonight and be quarantined until she receives a clean bill of health.

Gilbreth said he received a call from the USDA asking if he could take the tiger. “The former owner has nothing left to take care of the tiger,” he says. The lion that spent the night in the Baptist church still resides at the temporary shelter in Somerville.

After Gilbreth received the call from the USDA, he reached out to Tony Stewart, a two-time NASCAR champion for help. The Tony Stewart Foundation generously supports animal and child welfare organizations, Gilbreth says.

Stewart has pledged $5,000 so far to build a new enclosure for the tiger. Stewart also named the tiger “Zippy” in honor of his crew chief Greg Zipadelli. To find out more about Zippy or the International Exotic Animal Sanctuary, go to www.bigcats.org.

by Melissa del Bosque

Free speech has won out at the University of Texas. UT-Austin just decided to suspend its stupendously dumb rule that students can’t have signs in their dorm windows.

“The students and community raised their collective voice and the president of the university listened,” Jeffery Graves, vice president of legal affairs at UT, told me a few minutes ago.

Graves said an interim rule has gone into effect, allowing signage in dorm windows. Disciplinary actions pending against students who refused to remove their political posters have been dropped.

Really, UT didn’t have much of a choice. The media was hammering the university administration. The blogs were lighting up. The University Democrats and College Republicans had even joined forces. More important, some alumni were threatening to stop making financial donations. Here’s what one alumna wrote in an email to UT:

I will find it very difficult in the future to make financial contributions to an educational institution that suppresses political speech in such a broad brush manner. You certainly are teaching the students (and the rest of us) one thing - that we need a new legal department at the University if students want to enjoy their Constitutional rights. Congratulations on embarrassing UT in front of the entire country.

If there’s one thing the Tower fears, it’s a good old fashioned alumni boycott.

by Forrest Wilder

The campaign finance reports for Texas candidates are rolling in today. There’s some bad news for Republicans, at least in the races we’ve looked at so far. Here’s our snap analysis (for background on the races, go here):

House District 52, Diana Maldonado-Bryan Daniel

Democrat Diana Maldonado, who’s running for an open seat in Republican-leaning Williamson County, is absolutely killing her opponent Bryan Daniel. The “kid bloggers” at the Burnt Orange Report are psyched. Between July and October, she pulled in a little over $227,000. Daniel raised only about $85,000. But here’s the really interesting part: Maldonado has about $278,000 left in the bank; Daniel has a paltry $19,000.

Where’s Tom Craddick? Where are the fat-cat donors and Big Business PACs?

Daniel’s only sizable donations come from Bob Perry, the check-writing homebuilder and swift boater, and Texans for Lawsuit Reform, the corporate-backed organization that pushes tort reform. Perry and his wife gave Daniel $30,000 while TLR chipped in about $17,000. Daniel is also getting some money from ag interests (he is an agricultural insurance executive) but overall his fundraising is weak. Not a good sign for him.

Maldonado has twice as many donors, and some big checks. Annie’s List, a PAC that supports women candidates, has spent more than $31,000 on Maldonado. Blue Texas PAC, $50,000. Oh, and here’s a sign that Maldonado has reach beyond her district: Don Henley - yes, that Don Henley - gave her $15,000. Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life) offered up $500.

House District 32, Juan Garcia-Todd Hunter

This is probably the most-watched, most expensive House race in the state. Freshman Democrat Garcia faces a tough re-election challenge from Democrat-turned-lobbyist-turned-Republican Todd Hunter. At least on the money front, Garcia is starting to pull away from Hunter. Between July and October, Garcia hauled in almost $354,000 while Hunter took in about $187,00. If you take Bob Perry out of the equation — he gave $80,000 — Hunter had a pretty bad run of it. The key figure, though, is this: Garcia spent more than $554,000 to Hunter’s $173,000.

For a lobbyist, Hunter hasn’t done a great job of calling on his friends it seems. There’s a smattering of uranium mining, banking, and oil donations in the report, but not a whole lot of four- and five-figure sums. After all, Hunter has been sticking his neck out defending their profession.

Garcia, on the other hand, is benefiting from the largess of some very generous PACs: Parent PAC ($75,000); Texas 2020 PAC ($60,000); Vote Texas PAC ($10,434); Blue Texas PAC ($50,000); and Border Health PAC ($5,000). Garcia campaign manager Christian Archer said another big fundraiser is planned at the home of grocery magnate Charles Butt (of the HEB stores) on October 15th.

Presumably, this is a race that Craddick and the boys would like to win. Unseating Garcia would give them a net two seat gain in the House. Archer says the other side has been strangely low-key. “We’ve been prepared for a gunfight,” he said. “We showed up with a howitzer ready to go but we haven’t seen much coming back yet.”

Maybe the calvalry is on its way.

House District 85, Isaac Castro-Joe Heflin

The Republican candidate in 2006 raised $800,000 (three times more than Joe Heflin) but still got beat in what should be a GOP district. So far it looks like the big money is shying away from Castro. He raised just $34,000 between July and October, and 60 percent of that amount came from Texans for Lawsuit Reform. (You can understand why TLR would have a crush on Castro — he’s calling for an end to “frivolous lawsuits,” including the two pending against him.) Heflin raised about $66,000 and three times as much money on hand as Castro. Again, not a good scenario for the Republican 30 days from the election.

House District 144, Joel Redmond-Ken Legler

File this one in the possible sleeper department. The district, vacated by Republican Robert Talton who ran unsuccessfully for Congress, is 58 percent Republican, according to Dana Chiodo’s Texas Candidates. That makes for a steep climb, but Democrat Joel Redmond, who comes from a prominent family of Baptist preachers, is besting Legler on the finance front. Redmond reports raising $137,000 with $90,000 still in the bank. Legler took in only $45,000 and has $14,000 on hand.This is the second reporting cycle in which Redmond has done far better than his opponent. In May, Redmond said he expected to be outspent 2-1.

One final thought: where’s the good doctor,  James Leininger, the right-wing multimillionaire who would finance a ferret if it supported private school vouchers? He was active in the primaries but seems to be AWOL so far in the general. Could Leininger be sitting this “change” election out? A Leininger spokesman told the Lubbock paper that he would “be more modest this cycle.”

Of course, there’s still time for large last-minute contributions to make a difference. And in recent elections, major donors have funneled money into PACs with generic sounding names — like the Texas Opportunity PAC — that dropped last-minute attack ads in key districts. Stay tuned.

by Forrest Wilder

An international commission on human rights is in Texas today taking a closer look at the border wall and at immigrant detainee rights. Lawyers from the commission are speaking with former detainees from the Hutto immigration facility and other immigration detention facilities. They will also visit Brownsville and other parts of the Rio Grande Valley tomorrow to speak with landowners, lawyers, and UT Brownsville faculty about the border wall.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the commission is appointed by the general assembly of the Organization of the American States. The OAS is an international body, similar to the United Nations, that is comprised of 35 members states from North, Central, South America and the Caribbean. Created in 1959, their headquarters are based in Washington D.C., and in Cost Rica. Every four years, seven international experts on human rights issues from the member states are appointed to serve on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The commission examines and monitors allegations of human rights abuses by its member states, including the United States. The commission has investigated some of the worst human rights abuses in the Americas, including the Plan de Sanchez massacre of 250 villagers in Guatemala, and the murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez.

Denise Gilman, a clinical professor at the University of Texas Immigration Law Clinic requested in August that the commission conduct a hearing on human rights abuses and the border wall. The hearing will be held in Washington D.C. on October 22nd. Gilman and others will attend the hearing along with landowners affected by the border wall. The commission will also ask that a high ranking official from Department of Homeland Security attend the hearing.

The UT law clinic and other legal groups also asked the commission to hold a hearing on immigrant detainee rights. The hearing will be held in Washington D.C., on October 28th.

Interestingly, Gilman says commissioners had planned to visit Texas to tour some of the detainee facilities in Raymondville. The State Department, however, told the commissioners that it wanted the name of every detainee they spoke with. “There was concern about reprisals against the detainees,” Gilman says. So commissioners decided they would not visit the facilities and jeopardize detainees. Instead the UT law clinic is setting up interviews between two staff attorneys from the commission and former detainees from the Hutto facility and other detention facilities in Central Texas.

While the commission may not force a change in Homeland Security’s policies toward the border wall and immigration detainee rights, Gilman hopes it can enrich the immigration debate in the United States. “They bring a unique perspective and look at immigration and the border wall issues from a rule of law and compliance with international norms on human rights,” she says.

Ultimately, Gilman hopes that during an increasingly negative election season in which immigration reform has so far not been a major issue, the commission can help inform candidates about immigration and human rights concerns. “I’m hopeful that this might help frame the issue for the next presidential administration,” she says.

by Melissa del Bosque

Texas scientists have finally stopped agonizing over creationism and gotten busy organizing.

Today, a group of university professors announced in a press conference the 21st Century Science Coalition, a vehicle to promote science education in Texas and push back against the retrograde agenda at the State Board of Education. It’s about time. The obscure but powerful board is a known hotbed of pseudo-scientific activity. At least six of its 15 members, including Chairman Don McLeroy, are creationists who have done little to hide their contempt for evolutionary biology. With an overhaul of the state’s science curriculum underway, this religious right faction has an opportunity to leave its fingerprints all over biology textbooks.

That’s where the scientists, mostly biologists, come in. Dr. David Hillis, a professor of integrative biology at UT-Austin, came out firing at the press conference:

[McLeroy] is on record stating that there are two kinds of science: one that uses natural explanations, and one that relies on supernatural explanations. He is dead wrong about this: supernatural explanations have no place in science classrooms. Science is about testable explanations, and supernatural explanations are by their very nature untestable. It is clear that Chairman McLeroy wants to promote a particular religious, rather than a scientific, agenda in our science classrooms, and that has stimulated our group of over 800 Texas scientists to object.

The speakers made the usual — but necessary — statements that evolution is undisputed among the vast majority of scientists. To illustrate the point to a media that sometimes sacrifices accuracy for balance (”on one hand… but on the other”), the organizers piled up 10 years’ worth of the journal Evolution. Altogether, there are some 100,000 peer-reviewed articles supporting evolution published in this journal and others, said Dr. Dan Bolnick, an assistant professor at UT-Austin. “Not a single one shows that evolution has not occurred,” Bolnick said.

Dr. Richard Duhrkopf, who teaches — God bless him — biology at Baylor, had the best zinger of the day: “It’s time to keep religion and faith in the Sunday schools and not in the public schools.”

The coalition’s first goal is to strip language from the state’s standards that calls for the teaching of “strengths and weaknesses” in scientific theories. A committee of teachers has already recommended removing the language, but the board will make the final decision. McLeroytold the Austin American-Statesman that he wanted to maintain the status quo.

“Evolution shouldn’t have anything to worry about — if there’s no weaknesses, there’s no weaknesses. But if there’s scientifically testable explanations out there to refute it, shouldn’t those be included too?”

That argument is the new hobbyhorse of the creationist crowd. Having failed to get Intelligent Design into the classroom, the intellects of the creationist movement are pushing the “strengths and weaknesses” line. It’s a wedge to introduce creationist thinking into the classroom, says Dr. Sahotra Sarkar, a UT professor and founding member of the coalition. “What they’re trying to do is put in some completely phony doubts about what constitutes evolution,” said Sarkar.

This semester Sarkar is teaching a class to freshmen that touches on creationism. Of his 18 students, three of them claim to never have been taught a thing in high school about evolution, Sarkar says, even though it’s required by the state.

by Forrest Wilder

As the Senate’s proposed $700 billion bailout bill goes thudding down to ignominious defeat—an hour after John McCain rushed to claim credit for its success—it’s worth remembering another vote, in another time, that just may have helped get us where we are today.

On September 23, Jay Bookman from the Atlanta Journal Constitution reprinted a Molly Ivins column on the 10th anniversary of its original publication. In it, Ivins argues that proposed deregulation of the banking industry is going to lead to “financial disaster.”

Watching Washington Mutual and Wachovia’s catastrophic collapses, it’s easy to forget that way back, oh, about 10 years ago, things seemed pretty good. The economy was going through one of the biggest booms in our history. People had savings accounts. Students could get loans. Major banks weren’t failing. And the Senate met to vote on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a proposal to, in Ivins’ synopsis, “eliminate barriers between banks, brokerage firms, and insurance companies.”

Her critique is worth quoting at some length. “This sets up financial holding companies that offer all three types of services simultaneously. The most obvious risk is that a blunder in the insurance or brokerage end of the business could bring down a bank, putting insured deposits at risk. The taxpayers, of course, then wind up with the tab, as we did with the savings-and-loan mess.

“So what we have here is (1) increasing likelihood of a recession dead ahead, (2) banks already looking at serious trouble because of stupid lending policies, and (3) a bill that effectively further deregulates the banks and hurts consumers, making it even more likely that banks will get themselves into serious trouble . . . Veto, veto, veto.”

Almost a year after that column, as the bill went to a vote in the House, U.S. Representative John Dingell (D-Michigan, and now chairman of the Commerce Committee) stood before the House to warn that the act would create “a group of institutions which are too big to fail.

“Not only are they going to be big banks, they are going to be big everything, because the are going to be in securities and insurance, in issuance of stocks and bonds and underwriting, and they are also going to be in banks . . . Taxpayers are going to be called upon to cure the failures we are creating tonight, and it is going to cost a lot of money, and it is coming. Just be prepared for those events.”

Nine days later, on November 12, 1999, President Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act into law. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), co-sponsor of the act, was there to claim credit.

“The world changes,” he said, “and Congress and the laws have to change with it. We have learned that government in not the answer. We have learned that we promote economic growth and we promote stability by having competition and freedom.”

He added, “I believe that this is the wave of the future, and I am awfully proud to have been part of making it a reality.”

by Saul Elbein

Even with Congress embroiled in the country’s financial meltdown this week, the Department of Homeland Security managed to get its $400 million to keep building the border wall.

This week, the department also awarded three contractors $37 million in contracts to build border fence in Cameron County. The three companies chosen were the Texas-based Jaco Construction, Colorado-based MCC Construction and the Omaha-based Kiewit Corp.

Now the question is: when might construction begin? And can DHS build a fence on property whose owners have filed lawsuits against the department? As is its custom, the department didn’t respond to emails from the Observer seeking comment.

A phone call to Peter Schey, the lawyer representing Dr. Eloisa Tamez and the Benavidez Family in El Calaboz, helped answer some of the questions. Schey said that DHS could not build on his clients properties because they had filed a formal discovery document in federal court in Brownsville in early September.

In layman’s terms, this means that Schey has asked Homeland Security to specifically explain to Dr. Tamez and the Benavidez Family what the department plans to do with their property. He’s also asked the court not to act until DHS responds. The agency has until October 5th to respond to the court on what it plans to do regarding Schey’s filing.

To date, Homeland Security has never specifically explained to landowners what it has in store for their land. Or whether the department could alter their properties in the future. The agency has also never explained how it came up with the monetary amounts it’s offering for landowners’ properties.

“Property owners are blindfolded. DHS won’t tell them the rules of negotiation and won’t tell them the extent of the use of the land. Are they going to build one road or two roads? Are they going to put in guard towers with machine guns? Landowners have no idea,” Schey said.

Schey said he had no doubt that the department had properties where it could start building.

He said that DHS’ negotiations were built on a foundation of lawlessness. “All these agreements they got, DHS never told landowners they had the right to negotiate a reasonable price under the law,” he said. “Most people are unaware of their rights.”

He also said that in most pending cases, judges haven’t issued orders that would prevent DHS from building. Schey said he plans to share his motion for discovery with other lawyers representing landowners in court. “To my knowledge I am the first one to do this,” he said.

Schey’s client, Dr. Eloisa Tamez will be honored in Austin on October 3rd by the Texas Civil Rights Project for her courage in fighting the building of a border wall through her community. In 2007, Tamez was the first landowner to stand up to the plan to build an 18-foot wall through her backyard.

It also appears that Congress may have put in some hurdles to building the border wall. In the spending package passed by the House, U.S. Customs and Border Protection received $775 million to spend on fencing. The text of the spending package, however, requires Chertoff to consult with communities , federal agencies and other stakeholders before building. It also requires the agency to seek approval by congressional committees and a review by the Government Accountabilty Office before it can spend its $400 million on the border wall.

It would seem that DHS has its own wall to overcome before it can start building one in Brownsville. Of course, these days anything can happen. But given these new hurdles, it seems the border wall issue will be left for the next president to resolve.

by Melissa del Bosque