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Landowners in Brownsville have already had to endure the destruction of their property to build an 18-foot border wall. Now all they are asking for are gates so that they can access the south side of their properties.

The Brownsville Herald has a story about the Loop Family today. This family has been farming in Brownsville for several generations. They have a beautiful piece of property along the Rio Grande where they grow citrus, sorghum, cotton, corn, soybeans, okra, and sunflowers.

Homeland Security is bulldozing their grapefruit orchards to build the wall. The wall cuts their farm in half. Not only are they cut off from half of their crops, but also half of their family lives on the south side of the wall.

The Herald reports that the Loop Family has been dealing with Homeland Security for 18 months now. Leonard Loop, the patriarch of the family, still hasn’t been told whether they will get a gate to access the south side of their property.

“They (government officials) have said something and then changed their minds,” he said. “At one point they said they would close the gates after 6 p.m.; then they said they wouldn’t. Its almost 2010 and I still don’t know what kind of gate they are going to put there…

The difficult access to the property worries Loop’s wife, Deborah, because not only will her family and workers farm land to the south side of the wall, but some of her family members live there, too.

“I’m worried about the safety of my son, (Frank). His house is on the south side of the fence (which is near completion),” said Deborah Loop. “What happens if we need emergency assistance? How long will it take for help to get there and what happens if they can’t get through the gate? Now I don’t feel so free in my own country.”

Eloisa Tamez, another Brownsville landowner, is also getting the run around from Homeland Security about whether she will receive a gate. A good portion of her land is on the south side of the wall. Without a gate, she will have to drive a few miles down the road until she can find an access point then drive back down the levee to her land.

At least Tamez can access the levee. In the Loop Family’s case, it sounds like DHS may prevent them from driving down the levee to get to their property if they don’t get a gate.

So let’s get this straight: We have a wall with huge gaps that doesn’t go through golf resorts or rich people’s properties. If you don’t have the political connections or the cash you get an 18-foot wall with no gate to access your property on the other side. It’s just jaw gaping stupid and outrageous what DHS is doing to landowners in Brownsville.

I’ve been pulled away from the blog this week to finish a feature story about the recent controversy over arson convictions. (The story will be out in two weeks.)

But I wanted to highlight Rick Casey’s excellent column in today’s Houston Chronicle about the spat between John Bradley and Sam Bassett over the Forensic Science Commission.

Bassett was, until recently, head of the commission. Gov. Rick Perry replaced him with Bradley, the hard-line Williamson County prosecutor who appears to be slow-walking the commission’s investigation into the controversial execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. (Willingham, of course, may well have been innocent.)

The two have been sniping at each other since Bradley appeared before a legislative committee earlier this week and criticized the commission’s approach under Bassett.

Casey nails exactly what’s at issue here:

Bradley is speaking like a prosecutor. He assumes that the commission’s job is to decide whether the fire marshals, laboratory technicians, fingerprint experts and others engaged in solving crimes were negligent or incompetent…..

Here’s the most important thing. The prosecutorial culture wants to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether the people involved did something wrong.

The scientific culture wants to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether everything was done right. That’s why findings are published, peer-reviewed, and subject to never-ending scrutiny.

The Commission actually voted not to attempt to define the terms “professional negligence” and “misconduct” at its February 2008 meeting in Dallas. The minutes show agreement that it was “unnecessary since we have no rule making and/or enforcement authority under the present statutory structure.”

In other words, their job as scientists wasn’t to sanction the investigators, but to judge the quality of the science. That is the way scientists learn how to do things better.

The sole purpose of the findings, however embarrassing for the investigators, would be to improve future practices.

That’s right on. As I’ve written before, Willingham is gone. His case is irrevocably closed. But we can use the lessons from Willingham’s case to help innocent people still in prison on bogus arson convictions and to help prevent future wrongful convictions.

Bradley seems in no rush, though.

Even under the commission’s original timeline for the Willingham investigation, a final report wouldn’t have been ready until winter or spring of 2010 — six years after the execution and four years after the commission first received a request to examine the case. 

With Bradley in charge, it could be a year (or several years) before we see conclusions on the Willingham case.

And only the Legislature seems positioned to speed up that timeline.

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.

Conservative Texans of every flavor have plenty of candidates to get fired up about in next year’s statewide races. There’s Kay Bailey for the Chamber of Commerce crowd, Perry and Abbott and Dewhurst for the right-wing regulars, and Debra Medina for the Ron Paulers and Tea Partiers, to name just a few ballot-toppers. The state’s long-suffering progressives, on the other hand, have been staring at next year’s elections — if they’re not averting their eyes, unable to look — and seeing a big old pile of nothing. What leftie in her right mind is going to do cartwheels over the so-called leading Democratic contenders for governor, Tom “George W.” Schieffer and Kinky “Book Tour” Friedman? Or the Democratic contenders for the imaginary U.S. Senate seat, John “Who the Hell?” Sharp and Mayor Bill “What’s the Opposite of Charismatic” White? But one Democrat running for governor is showing flashes of actual (gasp!) progressive life. Last week Hank Gilbert, the anti-toll road activist and rancher who ran for Agriculture Commissioner in 2006, burst out with a clarion call to combat anti-gay discrimination in Texas. Among other things, Gilbert called for the state to recognize same-sex unions, for universities to recognize domestic partnerships, and for the state to make it easier for transgender folks to change their gender on birth certificates and drivers’ licenses. “Just because some people see this as controversial or say that Texas isn’t ready for this,” Gilbert said, “is not a reason I can use to justify remaining silent on the issue.” Dear God, can this be true? A Democrat with guts? This is highly irregular, people. Texans are used to Republicans swinging for the ideological fences and paying no political price for even the wildest swings. But Texas Democrats? Pure-T wusses. (It’s only fair to point out that Bill White has long spoken up for gay rights, to his considerable credit.) The overwhelming turnout for last year’s presidential primary demonstrated that there are progressive Democrats in Texas, and a pretty fair number of them. They’re the base. They’re the door-knockers and voter-getter-outers. But there’s nobody in the marquee races doing diddly-squat to get them off the couch. On Wednesday, Gilbert signaled that he doesn’t just have guts: He also has ideas. Specifically, in this case, bold and (at first glance) eminently sensible ideas for cleaning up Texas’ environment — and reforming its euphemistically named environmental “regulators.” Standing in front of Lady Bird Lake, Gilbert rolled out a nine-page “go green” plan. Among other key elements, he called for allocating $150 million to buy and develop state parks; requiring coal plants to use cleaner technologies by 2017; making North Texas’ filthy cement kilns cut their mercury emissions by 80 percent; and incentivizing alternative-energy production. Even more significant, given the pro-polluter boot-licking of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), Gilbert proposed a whole new agency called the Texas Environmental Commission. This entity would absorb various state agencies charged with environmental oversight, bringing them all under one (quite possibly) more effective umbrella. The initial response from leading environmentalists was over the moon, as Dave Montgomery reported in the Star-Telegram: “Fantastic,” said Luke Metzger of Environment Texas. “Absolutely great,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith of Public Citizen. More than anything, Gilbert’s moves show that there’s at least one Texas Democrat with the basic good sense to understand that you don’t win elections without giving people something to vote for. The days when mealy-mouthed, money-soaked DINOS (Democrats In Name Only) like Lloyd Bentsen could win statewide elections have long since passed. Gilbert, so far, has next to no money. Schieffer and Friedman will likely fund-raise circles around him. But if he continues to be the sole Democrat with a scintilla of progressive energy and genuine ideas, there’s an outside shot that the man in the cowboy hat could catch fire on the netroots, mobilize the TexObamans, and teach the wusses a lesson next March.