La Linea

The Senate passed the Department of Homeland Security bill today without any additional funding for the border wall. Good move, but it still stinks for the hundreds of landowners in Texas who have the ugly 18-foot tall monstrosity in their backyards. They got caught in the crossfires of bad public policy, i.e. the Secure Fence Act, and now they’re stuck with it.

The nonprofit environmental organization Sierra Club lauded Congress’ decision today not to fund the border boondoggle.

In a previous post I pointed out that the federal Government Accountability Office said Homeland Security can’t determine whether the fence is working. It’s also going to cost us billions to maintain. How about some money from Congress  to take the boondoggle down?

I got a sinking feeling in my stomach when I read today that El Paso’s online Newspaper Tree is taking a hiatus. I’ve always enjoyed checking out NPT’s coverage of the news in El Paso  – their original analysis, their coverage of public corruption and their willingess to allow different perspectives on the page. If you want to know what’s really going on in El Paso you go to NPT and read the articles, then you read the comments. Sure, there are a few loony, crank commenters like always, but overall readers are much more thoughtful and engaged and often they contribute to understanding the story better.

The NPT became even better last year when it hired veteran investigative reporter David Crowder who had worked for three decades at the El Paso Times. Both Negron and Crowder were calling public officials to account on a weekly basis and illustrating to readers why public policy matters.

The economy took a beating on the news journal’s owner El Paso Media Group. As a result the media group’s publisher is not funding the NPT anymore. I called up Sito Negron, the editor of NPT, to find out what’s in store for the online newspaper. Negron has a very positive attitude. “What we’ve been doing has been very well received in the community and since we made the announcement we were going on hiatus, we’ve been contacted with some interesting options to keep NPT going.”

Negron said that NPT has never made money, despite their attempts to do so. El Paso doesn’t have a large Internet advertising market. To make money off of advertising NPT would have to get millions of hits everyday on its Web site. NPT has a healthy circulation but it’s by no means in the millions.

The most viable option will be to become a nonprofit, he said. This seems to be the tactic being taken by many newspapers and magazines these days. There’s plenty of stories and plenty of reporters to write them — now if we could just find a way to make a living doing it.  That’s what every media organization is struggling to figure out at the moment.

Negron, 42, has been in the journalism business for at least two decades “and just about done it all,” he said.  Instead of taking the gloomy path — he has two kids to feed and no salary coming in afterall — he sees great things ahead for journaiism, which I think is admirable.

“Journalism is super healthy,” he said. “We used to bitch about the corporate media and then there was an explosion of alternative weeklies and there’s magazines like the Texas Observer and Mother Jones,” he said. “There are multiple threads of journalism now.”

Multiple threads — unfortunately none of them are made out of gold. I, for one, am hoping that NPT survives and thrives in the coming years.

 

Is it my imagination or is Rick Perry saying even nuttier things than usual on the campaign trail?

First it’s his comments yesterday about the Cameron Todd Willingham case which my fellow Observite Dave Mann has been doing a great job blogging about on The Contrarian. Perry’s repugnant sticking-to-his-guns banter makes him sound like an amoral Neanderthal.

He was in El Paso yesterday for a fundraiser and stopped to tour a Lucchese boot factory, according to the El Paso Times. Since it’s election time, Perry has been making much noise about sending the Texas Rangers to the border. He’s got a sexy name for it called “Ranger Recon” which sounds like a Chuck Norris movie that went straight to video (I guess they probably all do these days).

He’s just got to send the Rangers because the feds (i.e.) Kay Bailey Hutchinson don’t have the political cojones to secure the border.

He’s been very evasive, though, about how many Rangers he’s sending and what exactly they will be doing on the border. That’s probably because there are only 134 Rangers in the entire state. Rangers are already stationed in Presidio and El Paso and other sites along the border.  So that means he’ll be pulling Rangers off of important investigations in the rest of the state to go down to the border to make Perry look mas macho than Kay.

So, yesterday Perry was stroking boots at Lucchese and coincidentally talking about “The fact that the federal government needs to be addressing our requests for additional boots on the ground” (nice photo op). Perry told reporters that “criminals were using spots along the border as their personal playgrounds.” Oh really? Are they building swing sets?

He then went on to say about his campaign nemesis Kay “I hope she stays in Washington D.C., and continues to stop that Obama health care and the (anti-pollution legislation) and the other assaults on our freedoms.”

Uh, what?

 

The troubled federal agency in charge of the Rio Grande might have a new commissioner soon, according to  El Paso’s Newspaper Tree.

The current commissioner of the International Boundary and Water Commission C.W. “Bill” Ruth has been on “personal leave” since the Inspector General showed up last week to investigate some serious allegations made by the agency’s former general counsel Robert McCarthy.

Reportedly there are a few names in the ring for a possible replacement. El Pasoan Ed Drusina is  working the phone lines hard and collecting letters of recommendation to win the presidential appointment, according to Newspaper Tree.

Here is a little on Drusina’s background from David Crowder’s article in the NPT:

Drusina, 57, is a graduate of Burges High School and holds an engineering degree from the University of Texas at El Paso.

Until recently, he was president of OMNI Construction Services LLC, a subsidiary of the El Paso engineering and construction firm, Moreno Cardenas Inc. While with Moreno Cardenas, the company reported, Drusina was construction manager for over $28 million of infrastructure construction associated with El Paso Water Utilities’ desalination plant.

He is now the El Paso area director for Paragon Project Resources Inc., a national engineering firm with offices in El Paso.”

Anyone who wants this position should be commended,  (or possibly have his or her sanity checked )because it’s going to be a pain in the Elephant Butte to clean up the mess. If McCarthy’s allegations are true about the IBWC the new commisioner will need a large mop and some intestinal fortitude to get the job done.

It never fails to amaze me how congressional leaders who are not from border states believe they know more about border security than the residents and law enforcement who live there.

Take Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina for example. DeMint, a relative newcomer to Congress who has become the conservative leading light in the Republican Party, introduced an amendment in July to build an additional 369 miles of border wall.

Apparently, DeMint didn’t get the GAO report released three weeks ago that says the wall is costing us bilions and Homeland Security can’t even tell whether it’s working or not. One thing it is good for is providing scrap metal to thieves, apparently. Oh, and it’s ugly, infringes on people’s private property rights, destroys the environment and guarantees private defense contractors like Boeing limitless  taxpayer dollars.

Luckily, according to this Rio Grande Guardian story today, Congressman Ciro Rodriguez, a Democract who represents the Texas border, was able to strip the amendment yesterday from the $42.8 billion Homeland Security bill.

The biggest disappointment in all of this is that our two Texas Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchinson — who should really know better — voted for DeMint’s border wall amendment. How many times have Cornyn and Hutchinson looked border residents in the eye and said they’d do everything in their power to stop the wall?

What a waste of time.