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Calvin Tillman, the indefatigable mayor of DISH, Texas, is lobbing another grenade at the natural gas industry and their partners in state government. In a press release last evening, Tillman announced that on December 13, he commissioned emergency air testing by a private engineering firm after the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Railroad Commission ignored his calls. That day, Tillman says, the town was inundated with acrid fumes from nearby gas compression stations.

Air sampling by Wolf Eagle Environmental found that DISH “continutes to show high levels of atmospheric VOCs known to have both carcinogenic and neurotoxin capabilities in concentrations that exceed [the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality's]” standards. The findings, Wolf Eagle said, were consistent with the August 2009 study, which found levels of toxins near residential areas potentially harmful to humans.

It will be instructive to see how TCEQ reacts to this report. On one hand, the agency has tried to make nice with DISH by promising to respond quickly to odor complaints and undertaking additional air sampling. On the other hand, TCEQ just got done telling folks in Fort Worth they had nothing to worry about from natural gas-related emissions – an assertion vehemently challenged by various parties.

In a perfect world, we would have an objective state environmental agency that we could trust to police polluters. Alas, we live in a state where tiny towns with puny budgets have to commission outside experts to tell them whether they’re being poisoned.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission—now under new management—will meet on Jan. 29 in Harlingen. It will be the commission’s first meeting since that unpleasantness last fall when Gov. Rick Perry axed three commissioners just before a key hearing on the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, a likely innocent man executed in 2004 (read about the case here).

The Willingham case isn’t on the commission’s agenda for this meeting. Commissioners will discuss mostly organizational and administrative issues, according to the agenda. (Hat tip to the Texas Moratorium Network blog, which first posted the meeting agenda.)

That means the commission won’t take up the Willingham case before the March gubernatorial primary. That’s not a huge shock. In fact, that seemed the whole point of Perry’s moves—slow-walk the commission’s investigation of Willingham until after the election(s).

Still, I’m a little surprised the Willingham case has been such a non-issue in the governor’s race. No one bothered to ask Perry about it at last week’s Republican gubernatorial debate.

There’s still one more debate to come before the primary. Will one of the questioners raise the Willingham scandal?

They say you don’t appreciate what you had—or almost had—until you lose it.

So let’s look at what we might lose if the health care reform bill stalls after last night’s election results: 30 million Americans—a population bigger than Texas—who would have had health insurance will remain uninsured. And many Americans will continue to be denied coverage based on pre-existing conditions.

I wonder if—in the months and years to come—Democrats will look back at this moment and deeply regret the missed opportunity to reform the nation’s health care system.

I won’t pretend to know what last night’s Senate election upset in Massachusetts means for the future of the health care bill, but there’s no doubt the political landscape has shifted dramatically. That’s just simple math: With 41 Republicans in the Senate, it seems unlikely that the current reform bill can pass. (Some suggested reading: Politico has a good story on the political implications; and Burka publishes an interesting missive from a dejected health care lobbyist.)

No one is truly happy with the current health care reform plan: Conservatives hate the cost and the expanded role for government; liberals hate the lack of a public option and the prominent role for insurance companies; and libertarians hate the mandate that every American buy health care. It’s not the plan I would have designed if I were lord of the Universe.

But for all its imperfections, the bill, in the big-picture view, has many benefits. Not only would 30 million people be insured, but after decades of a widening disparity in this country between rich and poor, the health care reform would transfer a lot of wealth back down the income ladder. The bill essentially would take money from the rich to pay for health care for middle- and lower-income Americans.

You would think most Democrats would be downright giddy about that kind of wealth redistribution. Yet many liberals have been lukewarm about the bill and some are downright hostile to it, feeling that Obama has betrayed them.

I suspect a lot of Democratic-leaning voters in Massachusetts fell into that category.

The Bay State isn’t as hostile to Republicans as its national reputation—let’s not forget that Mitt Romney was governor up there not long ago. But in senate and presidential elections, it’s about as solidly Democratic as any state gets. In 2008, Obama won 62 percent of the vote in Massachusetts. That barn-burner John Kerry was reelected to the Senate with 66 percent of the vote.

In fact, Republicans comprise only about 12 percent of registered voters.

And yet the Republican won handily yesterday—by a comfortable 52-47 spread—after a campaign in which he plainly said he planned to go to D.C. to kill the health care reform bill.

What that tells me is that a large number of Democrats and independents who supported Obama just 14 months ago either voted for a Republican with an anti-health reform platform or simply weren’t energized enough to vote.

If health care reform dies, many Democrats—especially the ones in Massachusetts—will have no one but themselves to blame.

If you tuned into cable news or talk radio last night to find out who’d won the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat—it was Scott Brown, Republican state senator, former Cosmo centerfold, and Massachusetts’ most famous truck-owner— you probably heard enough false analogies and sweeping assumptions and bold predictions to choke a horse. Maybe a rhinoceros. A greatest-hits list:

Americans now hate health-care reform! Obama is finished!Coakley lost because she thought Curt Schilling was a Yankee! Congress will never pass a health-care bill now! Tea-partiers rule American politics! Correction: Independents rule American politics! Democrats will lose every Congressional and Senate seat in America in the mid-terms!

Good gravy, where to start? Observer readers are surely too smart to believe that a special election in Massachusetts is a sure predictor of what will happen in every other state in the Union 10 months hence, when the entire national political landscape might look different. And certainly, comparing Massachusetts to Texas would be quintessentially pea-brained. So I won’t bother to pick those all those logic-leaps apart.

But one of them does have some relevance to Texas politics, so let’s take a look: Chris Matthews and Co. kept hollering all night about how the Massachusetts vote makes it impossible for Democrats running in “red states” next November to make a case for health-care reform. Martha Coakley, the disastrous Democrat who lost Kennedy’s seat, was for health-care reform. Brown was agin’ it. So there!

By that logic, Texas Dems’ likely nominee for governor, Bill White, would be stripped of one of his strongest cases against his likely Republican foe, Gov. Rick Perry. White would need to keep quiet about health-care reform because if nobody in Liberal Massachusetts wants it, surely nobody in Red Texas does.

Balderdash. Why? People in Massachusetts already have nearly universal health insurance. The main issue there was that people didn’t want to foot the bill for everybody else’s.

In Texas, more than one-quarter of the population is uninsured. That number has ballooned during King Perry’s reign. In a state where so many people desperately need health coverage (and health care), the calculus is completely different. White will have to be smart about it, of course: Perry will play the anti-federal-government card, and he knows how to do that. But health care can be part of a Democrat’s winning formula in Texas. Too many people here need it too desperately, and the incumbent hasn’t lifted a finger to help.

So: No lessons from Massachusetts on the health-care issue. But Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Bill White could both learn a thing or two from what went down up there.

With six weeks to go before the primary, Hutchison looks a whole lot like Texas’ answer to Martha Coakley. Coakley clearly believed she (as a Democrat) was entitled to the job and didn’t have to show the people that she’d work her butt off to get it. Hutchison has made it clear that she believes she is entitled to be governor of Texas, simply because she is—drum roll and fanfare, please!—Kay Bailey Hutchison.

If anything, Hutchison has gone Coakley one worse by declining to resign from the Senate and showing she truly wants to be governor. Staying in Washington has meant that her campaign mostly has had to be waged through TV ads. (And they haven’t been nearly good enough to compensate.)Texas is a vast state compared to little old Massachusetts, and hand-shaking is arguably less important here—but the principle’s the same: A candidate who isn’t hitting the pavement, asking for as many votes face-to-face as humanly possible, comes across as a candidate who thinks she’s above the people, above working her tail off to win folks’ support.

The one universal message from the Massachusetts results is really nothing earth-shaking or surprising: Good campaigns win, and bad campaigns lose. And good campaigns, whether Republican or Democratic, are campaigns characterized by a generous dose of populist energy. If you don’t come across as a “candidate of the people,” you almost always lose. Gov. Perry, for all his massive flaws, understands this. Hutchison does not. Bill White had better.

It’s less than two months before the Republican primary. Suddenly our gubernatorial candidates are chomping tacos at a fundraiser in Laredo or looking tough with a posse of Border Patrol agents behind them in Brownsville.Yes folks it’s election season, when politicians in a rare instance reverse their migratory pattern by heading south to shake hands, kiss babies and collect fundraising contributions.This month the candidates released their manifestos on the border region many of them under the banner “border security,” which itself is a disconnect for many border residents. It’s well documented that border cities such as El Paso and Brownsville have lower crime rates than many other parts of Texas.  So why then do half of the candidates running for governor want to turn it into a DMZ?Instead of more border walls and more Ranger Recon, how about turning “Border Security”  into “Border Empowerment?”  Why not focus on building top-notch medical schools, better infrastructure and pulling people out of poverty? Why not solve the colonia problem once and for all and move families out of their third-world living conditions? ( Conditions that exist in many parts of Texas btw, not just the border region.)After having perused and digested the various candidate’s stances on the border region on their Web sites. Their views of the region range from sounding like a Chuck Norris flick to (gasp) actual common sense ideas. Here’s a brief rundown candidate by candidate. Rick Perry, our esteemed Governor. I believe Rick Perry has a heart. And deep deep down in that heart of his, all Rick really wants is to be his friend, action-hero wingnut Chuck Norris. How do I know this?  All you have to do is read his Border Security page where you will find stuff like “Ranger Recon,” “Boots on the Ground,” and “Surge Operations.”From Perry’s Web site you would think the border region has gone to hell in a Gucci handbag (isn’t that what all the narco wives are carrying these days?) Clearly, Rick’s a man of accion. You can almost picture him in a camo Hummer mowing down narcos right and left on Expressway 281. Oh no, wait, those are innocent border residents on their way to HEB, whoops!  And Ranger Recon, please…Texas already has Rangers stationed along the border. We don’t need to pull them off important cases in the rest of the state and send them south just because it’s election season.  Kay Bailey Hutchinson, our esteemed Texas Senator. Kay, oh Kay…who are you exactly? Because when you visit the border and talk to the folks about the border wall or immigration reform you nod your head and seem to understand the issues. Once you drive north of the Bexar County line you become someone else. You are our political Sybil. On your Web site it says you are pro-border fence, pro-287(g), which means turning cops into federal immigration officers and you want National Guard troops on the border. Pro border-fence, really? What I find especially ironic, or perhaps sad, is that the very next important issue listed on your Web site is preserving private property rights. You say they “should be constitutionally protected.” And that they are “the foundation of this great state.” Have you not noticed that for the past two years your constituents along the border have had their land seized by the federal government? Valuable land which the government is paying pennies for, which doesn’t come close to the “fair compensation” they talk about in the U.S. Constitution. Oh, and the wall cost $2.4 billion and rising, and it’s being built by a series of subcontractors overseen by the behemoth Boeing Corp, which has a limitless government contract to build the boondoggle.  I guess you also didn’t hear the border mayors say they don’t need National Guard troops on the border right now. Maybe it was the other Kay they spoke to?Farouk Shami, our esteemed hair care gadzillionaire. I know that just about every sorority girl in Texas owns one of your CHI- hair flattening gizmos. Across the nation, the sisterhood of the frizzy hair has flocked to your products, which have made you rich enough to run for, uh well, Governor.I have to say I like Shami’s border page. Let’s start with the headline for one “The Texas Border: War zone or Asset?” That about sums it up. Too many times state leadership, i.e. Perry, Hutchinson, etc.  has characterized the border as a war zone to win political points when in fact it is a huge economic and cultural asset for the rest of Texas. Billions of dollars in trade are generated by and come through the border. Farouk is spending some of his considerable millions on targeting border voters. He’s even got a plan for the region (drum roll please) It’s called: The Shami Plan. Here are the high points of the Shami Plan: Work with local officials along the border and their counterparts in Mexico to create industry clusters along the border Stop checking immigration status during all but Level One offenses (murder, rape, drug trafficking, etc) so that the undocumented community will work with police Build new interstates to facilitate greater trade opportunitiesIncrease educational opportunities Modernize infrastructure of border communitiesEnsure adequate healthcare in border communitiesWow, it sounds like Shami is actually listening to border residents instead of trying to build a wall around them.

Bill White, Our Esteemed Ex-Mayor of Houston. Guillermo Blanco didn’t have anything on his Web site so I gave one of his press people a call. I know that White has been visiting with border leaders, kissing babies etc. lately. Here is a highlight on White’s thoughts on the border region: “Border communities should be involved at the outset in changes and policies and procedures. Local authorities have practical insights into what works and what does not. We should listen to them rather than having border issues decided in political press conferences outside communities so directly affected.”

Again, we like a man who listens.

Debra Medina, Our Esteemed Gun Totin’ Conservative. Deborah skips around and hits all of the far right buzzwords: invasion, sovereignty, illegal. She likes to put things in bold. These are passages I guess she thinks are really important. On her border page titled “Better Border Needs Better Economics” she writes this in bold:

“As governor, I will work for measures to reduce social and welfare enticements for illegal immigration and to increase border sheriffs and border patrol when necessary, while making sure legitimate commerce and travel are uninterrupted.”

Okay, but how? Also, what social and welfare enticements? People without documents cannot qualify for social or welfare enticements already. This being Texas, with a miserly social service system, I wouldn’t exactly call them enticements either. I will give her points for writing “the immigration process is no longer a process at all, but another example of runaway government red tape and bureaucracy.”

At least she acknowledges that our immigration system is broken.