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If TCEQ disappeared tomorrow, would anyone know the difference?

Sometimes I wonder.

Here’s the latest: After years of citizen complaints about air pollution linked to the natural gas boom in Ft Worth, the agency finally did some air quality testing. TCEQ officials then told the Ft Worth City Council that the tests showed no harmful levels of pollutants. The council, which has been friendly to the gas companies, was evidently pleased; the mayor hailed the good news.

But, lo and behold, the test results came with a hilarious-if-it-weren’t-so-insulting caveat:

This data is for screening purposes only and may include samples that did not meet the established quality control acceptance criteria. This data was not collected, analyzed, or reviewed using the documented quality assurance/quality control protocols defined in the Laboratory and Mobile Monitoring Quality Manual or those defined by the National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Conference 2003.

In other words, the state’s “study” was as good as junk.

“That disclaimer is the most absurd statement I’ve seen in a very long time,” Alisa Rich, environmental scientist at Wolf Eagle Environmental, told the FW Weekly.

TCEQ’s excuse is that using certified labs would have taken too long.

Maybe the next time I do a story on TCEQ, I’ll include a fine-print disclaimer that says: “This story is for screening purposes only and may include facts that did not meet established journalistic standards. The information was not collected, reported or fact-checked by myself or an editor according to long-standing protocol as prescribed by the Society of Professional Journalists.”

Marc Katz revels in doing things a little differently. He’s best known for owning a New York-style deli in downtown Austin. Though he’s never held an elected position, he decided this fall to run for lieutenant governor of Texas, perhaps the state’s most powerful office. He began his campaign by mockingly naming deli sandwiches after his opponents. He will face two Democrats in the March primary, and if he pulls off the upset, will take on two-term Republican incumbent David Dewhurst, whom Katz deemed “baloney on white bread.”

Katz held his first big campaign event on Saturday night, Jan. 9, at Oilcan Harry’s, a gay bar in the middle of Austin’s thumping Warehouse District. There were some of the usual political trappings: balloons, bumper stickers, and a buffet well stocked with—what else?—deli meats. But the greeting table, where you could sign up for Katz’s e-mail list, was staffed by two shirtless, buff young men who had adorned their chests with Marc Katz stickers.

In a few hours, the club would be packed from mirrored wall to mirrored wall. But at 9 p.m., the place was still mostly empty. Katz and three or four dozen people milled about the marble-topped bar while techno and Top 40 blared. After Sean Kingston’s hit “Fire Burning” (“Somebody call 9-1-1/Shawty fire burning on the dance floor”), the music was cut, and Katz was introduced—first by his press aide and then by his friend Jennifer Justin. At that moment, Katz likely became the first major-party candidate for lieutenant governor to be introduced by a transgendered person.

Katz tossed aside his notes and spoke off the cuff for about 20 minutes. He talked about the need to improve education and expand access to health care. But he returned again and again to same-sex rights and gay marriage. “It says nowhere in [the Texas Constitution] … that we can’t have the rights of anybody else,” Katz said. “[The right to get married] is not something we should have to fight for … . Our sexual preference or what we do in bed or what we lust for has nothing to do with our health insurance. It has nothing to do with our benefits. It has nothing to do with nobody else’s business but our own!”

It seemed for a moment that Katz—a wealthy businessman who has promised to pour millions into the race—was about to launch a single-issue campaign based around gay rights, which few politicians in Texas have had the courage to defend in recent years. In an interview after his talk, Katz wouldn’t quite go that far. He said the central theme of this campaign would be “human” rights, which includes gay rights, but also those of all minorities in Texas.

Asked which minorities he belongs to, Katz paused for a long moment and said, “I’m a religious minority.” (He’s Jewish.) Asked more specifically if he’s gay, Katz responded, “My sexual preference is nobody’s business. Let’s talk about the issues, not about whether Dewhurst wears makeup.” Then he laughed and added, “If you print that, I’ll love you forever.”

Gov. Rick Perry has made a habit of mocking California. In speeches, he loves to boast that workers and companies are bolting the Golden State for the Lone Star State. His press office rarely lets a month pass without hyping a media report that praises Texas and kicks dirt on California. Perry’s Web site currently touts a story from the October issue of Trends Magazine that reads, “California is $26 billion in the hole and has recently been paying its bills with IOUs. Its once-proud schools are suffering and the prison system is releasing criminals early because the state can’t afford to keep them.”

California’s budget is a mess, no doubt. So why is Perry pitching the same budget policies that have gotten California in so much trouble?

In early January, the governor proposed that Texas float a constitutional amendment that would require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to raise any taxes. He termed it a “taxpayers’ bill of rights.”

In 1978, when Reagan-style Republicans held sway, California instituted the same two-thirds rule—along with a cap on property taxes, which Perry has also called for in Texas. The result has been disastrous. California’s budget is consistently starved of funds, and its lawmakers can almost never muster the two-thirds vote necessary to raise taxes.

Perry might want to study the recent history of California a little more closely.

I gotta give credit to D Magazine: They had the guts to headline an article “Harold Simmons Is Dallas’ Most Evil Genius.” Of course Simmons – Republican financier, Swift Boater, corporate raider, radioactive and hazardous waste empresario – may very well take that as a compliment.

Simmons hasn’t made his billions playing nice. He’s done it ruthlessly, spending money and political capital lavishly to get his way.

As the article nicely illustrates, Simmons has cunningly found a way to get the taxpayer to pay him twice in his waste management business. As regular readers of the Observer will know, we’ve written frequently about Waste Control Specialists, a Simmons company that has been developing a vast hazardous and radioactive waste dump near Andrews, West Texas.

(In the current issue, I look at how Waste Control probably flipped the state the bird and imported waste they weren’t supposed to.)

The D Magazine piece lays bare how Waste Control is getting paid to deal with the contamination caused by another Simmons’ company, NL Industries. For decades, NL Industries ran a reckless uranium processing operation in Fernald, Ohio that contaminated the soil, water wells and workers at the site. Radioactive contamination of groundwater there could persist for 100 years.

Cleaning this mess up has cost the federal taxpayer some $4.4 billion. NL Industries? Nothing.

More incredible is that Waste Control is getting paid to bury some of the Fernald waste at its Andrews site… over what some TCEQ geologists contend is an aquifer.

Also last year, WCS buried 3,776 canisters of uranium byproduct waste generated by the NL Industries facility across the street from Lisa Crawford’s house in Fernald, Ohio. One Simmons company made the waste. The other buries it. And it all comes to West Texas.

The D Magazine article also captures the ever-changing “science” behind the Andrews site’s hydrogeology. You’d think after at least five years of study, we’d have a clear answer to the question, Is the dump located over an aquifer? Nope.

To recap: first the boundary dispute involved one aquifer under the site. Then the revised maps showed it was another aquifer. Then WCS said no, it was actually a third, and it was briney. But both the state board in charge of aquifers and the USGS say there is interchange among the aquifers.

If there is hydraulic communication between aquifers in Andrews County, then disputes over the boundaries of the Ogallala Aquifer at the WCS site are beside the point.

 

It hit me about halfway through the Texas Nullification Rally.

Several hundred tea-party types had gathered at the State Capitol on a sunshiny Saturday to wave U.S. and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, brandish handmade signs with slogans like “Guns and Ammo/Be Ready,” and holler about the evils of health care, President Obama, illegal immigrants and government in general. I was listening to the keynote speech by John Stacy, a bespectacled, suit-wearing, squeaky-voiced youngster from Dallas who’s organized an anti-health-reform group called Not in Texas. He had just called for cutting off Social Security and Medicare for all Americans born after Jan. 1, 1980—why that date? why not?—and was working himself up to a full-throated finish, screeching, “I don’t care if all 49 other states and every country in the world socializes their medicine, Texas ain’t gonna!”

As I squinted into the bright winter sun, watching the working- and middle-class white folks who’d come from Waco and Waring and Texas City to cheer such sentiments with all their hearts, I suddenly realized: Moser, you are surely the only openly gay, government-loving, socialist health-care-supporting, gun-hating member of the media in America who gets his jollies from hanging out with people who loathe everything you stand for.

It’s a sickness. What can I say? But I simply adore a good tea party, and can’t help wishing its denizens well. Maybe it’s the anti-establishment streak that makes my spirits soar whenever people of any stripe gather together to spit in the face of power. Maybe it’s the fact that when I go to these functions, it’s like attending a family reunion back in North Carolina, where I grew up among folks who were partial to George Wallace because, as my daddy said, “He might be a nut, but he’s a working man’s nut.” (Which was true enough, I guess, if your idea of a working man was limited to the white, segregationist kind.)

But as with family reunions, I always leave these rallies feeling simultaneously envious and bummed out. Envious because my kind of anti-establishment folk—those on the populist left—have turned into a tame, passive, MSNBC-watching bunch by comparison. Bummed because I always come away thinking, Why can’t these people make a lick of sense?

To my mind, there’d be nothing better for America—or for Texas—than an ongoing, free-for-all debate between those who hold a consistent set of small-government ideals and those of us who believe in the social contract and good government and a more perfect union. I’d much prefer to slug it out with thoughtful states’ rights libertarians than with the followers of mealy-mouthed corporate flacks like Rick Perry or George W. Bush, who make their political hay by giving lip service to true believers while serving no one but the wealthy. (Partly, I’ll admit, this is because I’m convinced that the left would have a much better chance of winning an open and honest debate.)

But to my constant dismay, there is no set of consistent ideas on the tea-party right—only a jumble of half-baked notions, conspiratorial hobgoblins and inchoate anxieties stoked to a fever pitch by the specter of an African-American president who is not Clarence Thomas. Take the Nullification Rally. It was supposed to have a clear, though quixotic, purpose: calling for a special session of the Texas Legislature to vote on nullifying all future laws passed by Congress—health-care reform, most pressingly—until they’ve also been approved by Texans. But the messages were all over the map, and they tended to be both dimwitted and self-contradictory.

Exhibit A: Republican state Rep. Leo Berman, who started his oration by saluting military veterans (including himself), went on to declare Obama a “fraud” and a “socialist” whose health-care bill will force Texans to “spend $2 billion a year for the next 10 years to give Medicaid to illegal aliens”—and then piously quoted, with absolutely no sense of irony, from the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”). The crowd ate it up.

Unlike many a liberal, I’m not deeply offended by the people who show up at these rallies wearing T-shirts depicting Obama as Stalin or Hitler. I don’t really give a hoot if somebody yells out, as somebody did at the Nullification shindig, “Kill Obama!” What truly depresses me is that there’s nothing at the bottom of all this fist-waving fury but a mess of nonsense. That, and the fact that the only fist-waving, spit-at-power, publicly protesting folks in contemporary Texas are on the far right.