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Newspaper obituaries for Teel Bivins, who passed away on Oct. 26 at age 61 after a long bout with a rare brain disease, focused on the highlights of his political career: the 15 years he represented Amarillo as a Republican in the Texas Senate and his short stint as President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Sweden. Absent from the remembrances was any mention of the policies Bivins successfully championed, which have left a lasting—and unfortunate—mark on the state. Also missing was any hint of the most memorable aspect of Bivins’ public persona: his humor.

Bivins was damn funny. He possessed a wonderful eye for irony and delivered cutting one-liners with devastating timing. In 2003, Bivins served his first, and only, term as chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. His wit was refreshing during monotonous hours of testimony about arcane state budget numbers.

Like many of the policies he advocated, Bivins’ humor had an edge. During one Finance Committee hearing, state Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, interrupted a presentation by state health officials to shamelessly grandstand. She talked at length about why meat-safety inspections were important (as if anyone disagreed). Chairman Bivins let her go on, but after a few minutes, he was clearly getting restless. Nelson finally finished by saying, “So those are important issues I’m going to be paying attention to this session.” Bivins was silent for a beat and then said in perfect deadpan, “Well, good for you.”

Later in the same hearing, Eduardo Sanchez, then head of the Department of Health, pleaded with the budget-writers not to cut funding for a state program supplying AIDS patients with anti-retroviral drugs. Why not? Bivins asked. The AIDS patients still had a terminal disease even with the drugs, right? The room was quiet for a moment while the comment sunk in. Bivins seemed to be saying that the AIDS patients were going to die anyway; why should the state spend money on them? Sanchez explained that the anti-retrovirals were saving lives and making AIDS a chronic disease, not a terminal one.

In the end, the program survived, but Bivins’ comment had underscored the kind of thinking that produced the austere 2003 budget. The state faced a $10 billion shortfall that year, and Bivins and other Republicans used the budget gap to cut to the bone. It was the 2003 budget, partially crafted by Bivins, that famously cut hundreds of thousands of Texans off Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, not to mention trimming nearly every state agency. Texas is still recovering.

But Bivins’ longest-lasting legacy will be the nuclear waste dump outside the West Texas town of Andrews. The Dallas-based company Waste Control Specialists had tried to pass a bill allowing the dump for three straight sessions before Bivins ascended to the Finance Committee chairmanship. In 2003, Bivins, whose district bordered the proposed site, muscled it through. In the years since, Waste Control has built one of the nation’s largest and most controversial nuclear dumps. (See “Waste Texas,” March 6).

Teel Bivins is gone, but the nuclear waste he helped bring to West Texas will be around for hundreds of years. And that, in the end, isn’t very funny.

 

Marfa has been courting artistic types for a few years now. They may be thinking twice about courting Hollywood again after actor Randy Quaid and his wife model/actress Evi Quaid get through with Marfa.

A few weeks ago there was a brief article about the Quaids getting busted in Marfa for an outstanding $10,000 hotel bill at the San Ysidro ranch in swanky Santa Barbara. Too bad for them, I thought. But now I see in the Big Bend Sentinel today that the City of Marfa has obtained  a no-trespassing citation against Evi Quaid after a meeting at city hall turned combative. According to the story “Mrs. Quaid is alleged to have damaged some city documents and hurt a city employee.”

Apparently, the Quaids have taken up residence in Marfa and the entire county knows it. Both of their neighbors have filed civil lawsuits against them. Evi Quaid is also being sued for libel by a Presidio County deputy sheriff, the subject of a sign (I’m guessing not too flattering) hand-painted by Quaid that appeared on the couple’s GMC truck parked along North Highland Avenue.

This is only a small sample of the numerous charges that are piling up against the Quaids in Marfa. Do they not get enough cable channels at home?

 

 

 

Back in 2005, right-wing media seized on a sketchy account of “terrorist garb” found near the small town of Hebbronville in South Texas. Border Patrol agents had found a ski jacket with three unusual patches attached: One featured a lion’s head, a parachute and Arabic script, another an airplane flying toward a tower and the words “Midnight Mission.” The third patch read “Daiwa.”

One of the most ardent spreaders of the story, Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez, told the Cybercast News Service that these “military badges in Arabic” were proof that “Arabic-speaking individuals are learning Spanish and integrating into Mexican culture before paying smugglers to sneak them into the United States.”

The “terror patch” story bolstered the case for building a border wall and ratcheting up “border security” funding as essential to homeland security. But was there anything to it?

Agent Mark Qualia, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told the Observer in a recent email message that it was highly probable that an “illegal alien” wore the coat and left it behind. “We see a lot of clothing that is procured at the ‘pulgas’ [flea markets] just before crossing before the border,” Qualia wrote. “Though we can’t speculate on the individual’s nationality or intent, we have not seen any threat or other concern arise from this incident.”

But wait: What did the Arabic script say? What country did that patch come from?

In a second email, Qualia was more expansive: “Agents called a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) translator,” he wrote of the patches’ discovery. “During contact with the translator via phone and facsimile transmission, the investigation concluded that the Arabic script patch read, ‘Defense Center,’ ‘Ministry of Defense,’ or ‘Defense Headquarters.’ The bottom of the patch read ‘Martyr,’ ‘Way to Eternal Life,’ or “Way to Immortality.’ “

As for Daiwa, that’s a well-known international sport fishing company.

The “Midnight Mission” patch was inside the jacket. While the logo appears to show an airplane flying over a building and headed toward a tower—9-11 all over again—a closer look reveals the airplane is flying over an airport with terminal ramps and airplanes on taxiways.

Qualia said that the jacket was determined to have been manufactured in Mexico.

“No link was established to Al Qaida,” he wrote.

Still not satisfied, the Observer reached out to Leah Caldwell, a graduate student in Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The patch came from a branch of the Syrian Armed Forces, she wrote after consulting friends in Syria. The Syrian Armed Forces was established by former President Hafez al-Assad’s brother Rifa’t al-Assad. The literal translation, she said, is “Defense Brigades/Martyrdom is the Path to Immortality.”

Rifa’t's defense brigades took a leading role in a 1982 massacre of Hamas partisans in Syria—making the “terrorist” claims attached to the patches ironic as well as overblown.

And so, finally, a mystery is apparently solved. All that fuss was over a military patch from a defunct air brigade in Syria that was anti-Islamist, and another advertising a popular fishing company. But what a fine story it was.

For all the black ink Boone Pickens has garnered for his green energy plan, I wish he would get an equal amount of press for his blue devilry. What I’m referring to is Pickens’ long-brewing scheme to amass an ocean of groundwater in the Panhandle and then sell it to cities when they get desperate enough.

Pickens’ water company, Mesa Water, already has an estimated 210,000 acre-feet of Ogallala Aquifer water rights, potentially worth hundreds of millions. That’s a lot of water. An acre-foot is enough to cover one acre with one foot of water. Austin uses about 170,000 acre-feet each year.

Pickens has made no secret of his views on water: It’s a commodity to be owned, bought and sold. “There are people who will buy the water when they need it,” he told BusinessWeek last year. “And the people who have the water want to sell it. That’s the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing.”

That’s a nice purist, free market approach but a lot of folks in the Panhandle aren’t buying it. One of the problems Mesa is running into is that some groundwater conservation districts, locally-controlled entities that manage pumping, want to leave a lot of the Ogallala in the ground.

Right now, the state’s 16 groundwater management areas – consortiums of groundwater districts that roughly follow the boundaries of major aquifers – are working on 50-year groundwater plans that will ultimately result in pumping limits. (To simplify a ridiculously arcane process.)

Groundwater Management Area 1, which oversees much of the Panhandle and the Ogallala, is faced with an especially difficult task. The Ogallala Aquifer is being depleted, slowly but surely. The question before water planners is simply how quickly they want to draw the aquifer down.

Most of GMA 1 has settled on allowing 50-60% of the groundwater to be pumped over the next half-century.

In contrast, the Hemphill County Underwater Water Conservation District, which oversees an ecologically-interesting area of the Panhandle with many seeps, springs, creeks and river, has decided to take an aggressive conservation approach. That district has proposed to leave 80 percent of its portion of the aquifer intact in 2060.

Pickens is pissed.

The Amarillo Globe-News reports on a meeting this week in Amarillo in which Mesa Water and another water rancher complained about any efforts to limit withdrawals:

Staff members of the Texas Water Development Board listened to representatives of Mesa Water and G&J Ranch explain why they think recent water plans for the region are unreasonable.

“It is my desire to do what I want to with my property,” said George Arrington, co-owner of G&J Ranch and an independent oil and gas producer. “I really wanted to be treated like everybody else in (Groundwater Management Area 1).”

[...]

Mesa Water representative Steve Stevens said the company, owned by T. Boone Pickens, owns water in restrictive Hemphill County and wants to make money on it by selling it to thirsty cities. With about 210,000 acres of water rights at $400 an acre, there’s a lot of money riding on producing at least as much as most of the Panhandle.

“With groundwater rights and other costs, it’s right at $100 million,” Stevens said.

The goal of maintaining 80 percent of water “makes the water in Hemphill County worthless,” he said.

The Hemphill Underground Water Conservation District has more than 100 affidavits from people supporting the 80 percent goal, said Janet Guthrie, general manager.

“Their rights and interests should not be pushed aside or trampled on,” she said.

This is a battle about competing notions of rights. Pickens thinks he has an absolute right to do what he pleases with “his” water. Hemphill County believes they have the right to manage their water based on the community’s desires, in this case to keep the springs and streams flowing.

Based on the best science to date, if the aquifer was drawn down by 50%, much of the surface water in and around Canadian (“The Oasis of the Panhandle” and the Hemphill seat) would simply disappear, a fact that doesn’t seem to have ruffled Mesa.

As this issue of the Observer went to press, Jehovah had not yet seen fit to rain fire and devastation on the wicked citizenry of Houston. Not since Hurricane Ike, anyway. But if you ask Eric Story, Republican candidate for Congress from Houston’s 29th District, the Good Lord was barely getting warmed up with that measly storm.

“When a city or state or a nation accepts the homosexual lifestyle, history tells us that destruction follows,” Story recently told the Houston ABC affiliate KTRK-TV. And nothing says “acceptance” quite like electing a gay mayor. Which Houston appears likely to do in December, when City Controller Annise Parker will face attorney and former civil-rights activist Gene Locke in a runoff election. In a crowded preliminary on Nov. 3, Parker led the field—and then, as the gays are so notoriously wont to do, flung her sexuality in the face of one and all by bringing her partner, Kathy Hubbard, and their two adopted daughters on stage with her to celebrate.

Around the same time, Story—who won 24 percent of the vote as the GOP challenger to Congressman Gene Green in 2008—was leading a fervent prayer at a sad election-night gathering for supporters of mayoral candidate Ray Morales, a Republican who finished fourth (and says he did not authorize the prayer). “God, I pray right now that you would hold off that judgment,” Story intoned. “Lord, we cannot stand idly by and see the lifestyle—that is, assuming she is going to take office—but you’re not finished yet.”

Story’s storm-warning was nothing new—right in line with the Revs. Falwell and Robertson’s famous assertion that their best friend God had initiated the 9/11 terror attacks as partial payback for Americans’ increasing acceptance of the “homosexual lifestyle.” The only thing that made Story’s prayer noteworthy was its jarring contrast with the tenor of Houston’s mayoral campaign, in which Parker’s sexuality had been a resounding non-issue. The only time it became an issue was when an anti-gay attack letter popped up in some folks’ email in September. Supposedly sent by a group called Christians for Better Government, the message endorsed Locke as the best non-gay choice. Locke immediately shot back: “I vehemently reject this so-called ‘endorsement.’ … Furthermore, as a church-going Christian, I reject any association with this bogus and divisive style of campaigning.”

The letter turned out to be fake. So far gone into “acceptance” is Texas’ largest city, apparently, that if you want to stir up mass homophobia, you have to invent it.

Parker can claim some credit for that. From her first successful run for city council in 1997, she’s been matter-of-factly upfront about her sexuality. “From my first election for city council, I printed it on my campaign materials and it is part of my résumé,” she tells the Observer. “I think they’re comfortable with me.”

Memo to Eric Story’s God: That comfort level with “the lifestyle” appears to be spreading beyond the borders of Harris County and infecting the rest of the state in surprising ways. Just this fall, the state’s Republican senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, officially recommended the appointment of openly gay Judge Robert Pitman as U.S. Attorney for the state’s Western District—and stuck by it even after the religious right started squealing like stuck swine. Hank Gilbert, the cattle-ranching Democratic candidate for governor, announced an ambitious 10-point proposal for combatting discrimination against the state’s LGBT community. In Dallas, a district judge ruled that a gay couple married in Massachusetts could legally divorce in Texas and that the state prohibition of same-sex marriage violates the federal constitutional right to equal protection. (In a shocking development, Attorney Gen. Greg Abbott quickly announced an appeal. Gov. Rick Perry issued a loud oink.)

Meanwhile, a survey by the Texas Lyceum found that most Texans now support either same-sex civil unions (32 percent) or marriage (25 percent), while only 36 percent—and just 43 percent of Republicans—oppose them both. While a grain of salt is highly recommended when digesting that result, it’s another strong suggestion that Texans’ views have evolved since the state’s anti-gay marriage amendment passed four years ago with 76 percent of the vote.

Let’s not get carried away, though. Texas has hardly transformed overnight into the Amsterdam of the Southwest. Anti-gay bias remains pervasive and ugly, both in everyday life and politics. Queer Texans still face workplace discrimination, police harassment and hate-fueled acts of violence. The Texas GOP recently elected a chairwoman who’s a longtime leader of the far-right Eagle Forum, one of America’s most virulent anti-gay groups. And no sane person actually believes that Lone Star voters would swing the other way (so to speak) if another anti-gay initiative were to slither onto the ballot next November. But it’s safe enough to predict that the margin would, at least, be narrower. And it’s becoming possible to envision a long-term future in which gay Texans’ sexuality will be no more remarkable, or controversial, than the idea of a lesbian mayor in America’s fourth-largest city. Lord willing.