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Filibuster Launches Davis Onto National Stage

State Sen. Wendy Davis has held the Texas spotlight before. But Tuesday night’s marathon abortion filibuster propelled her into the national spotlight.

By the time the Senate unsuccessfully forced the vote on some of the nation’s strictest abortion regulations, the 13 hours Davis had spent on her feet challenging the measure had gone viral, drawing praise on social media from President Obama, U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and celebrities like author Judy Blume and actors Lena Dunham and Henry Winkler.

“I have never seen a Texas senator suddenly make world news over the course of 13 hours,” said longtime Democratic consultant Harold Cook. “I’m not sure it was possible before Twitter, honestly. At the start of the day, this was a local story. By the end, it was an international story.”

The attention has prompted even more speculation that the Fort Worth Democrat, who was first elected to the Senate in 2008, could be a future statewide contender — even a gubernatorial candidate. At a minimum, she is poised to have a wider fundraising base if she seeks re-election in 2014.  

Republican consultant Matt Mackowiak predicted that her fundraising potential was now “unlimited.”

“If they were doing really smart things — some of the things Ted Cruz‘s campaign did in the last U.S. Senate race — she can raise millions of dollars over the next couple of months online alone,” he said. “I think she may be able to do that anyway.”

Hundreds of opponents of the legislation packed the Capitol, while hundreds of thousands followed the proceedings online and on Twitter. The hashtag #StandWithWendy was trending worldwide; “The Filibuster Heard Round the World” was leading The Huffington Post. After it was all over, Davis told reporters she was “pleased to know the spotlight is shining on Texas.” Of the filibuster’s success, she added, “the proof is in the pudding and the pudding tastes pretty good right now.”

This wasn’t Davis’ first filibuster rodeo. She effectively torpedoed the 82nd legislative session in 2011 by refusing to accept a school finance plan that cut funding for public schools by $5.4 billion. Her move that year prompted Gov. Rick Perry to label her a “show horse” — and to send lawmakers back into an immediate special session, drawing the ire of many of her colleagues. (It’s still unclear whether Perry will call lawmakers back a second time to revisit abortion legislation.)

But as University of Texas political scientist and pollster James Henson put it, that was mostly “inside baseball.” In the most recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll, which Henson helps conduct, Davis was still unknown to 58 percent of respondents. Adding those who said they had no opinion or a “neither favorable nor unfavorable opinion” of her, the total rose to 77 percent.

“I really don’t think she had become a statewide figure yet,” Henson said, adding that recent events were “very likely going to push her much closer to that threshold.”

Tuesday’s filibuster was on a grander scale. The topic — abortion and reproductive rights — had already drawn attention from women’s groups across the country, and protesters had spent the last few days manning the Capitol. And the Senate’s debate — devolving into legislative technicalities and what was widely seen as a breakdown of decorum as Republicans sought to derail Davis’ filibuster — captured the attention of national news organizations as it exploded across social media.

As of late Tuesday night, roughly 200,000 people were watching the proceedings on The Texas Tribune’s YouTube feed. Obama tweeted, “Something special is happening in Austin tonight,” followed by the hashtag “#StandWithWendy.” Even filmmaker Michael Moore and comedian Sarah Silverman got in on the social media action.  

Davis started the day with just 1,200 twitter followers; by early Wednesday morning she had more than 46,000.  

“Because of the way this worked out, from a procedural and strategic standpoint,” Mackowiak said, “I think the Republican leadership in both chambers of the Legislature unwittingly helped create a national Texas Democratic star.”

He expressed doubts, however, about whether this newfound stardom would, in the near future, translate to electoral success statewide, which has eluded Democrats for nearly two decades. He questioned the party’s infrastructure and whether Davis was the person to break the losing streak.

“Wendy Davis does not have the profile of a Democrat that’s going to win statewide in this interim period where Democrats are trying to become competitive again,” he said. “It’s going to be a pro-business, moderate, big-city Democrat.”

Others aren’t ready to call it. “I don’t know and neither does anybody else,” Cook said. “It’s too early to tell, but I will say that it is episodes like tonight that are potentially game-changers and that change the electorate fundamentally.”

And that could have a ripple effect for other Democrats. Henson said: “We keep saying there aren’t enough people on the bench, there are no statewide candidates, the Democrats have no energy and no mojo. But this kind of thing can be a shot in the arm.”

via The Texas Tribune: Main Feed http://www.texastribune.org/2013/06/26/filibuster-propels-davis-national-spotlight/?utm_source=texastribune.org&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Tribune%20Feed:%20Main%20Feed

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Bill Banning “Double Dipping” Dies in Committee

A bill to ban “double dipping” by state elected officials, a practice brought to light during Gov. Rick Perry’s failed run for president, has died in committee for lack of support, a top Republican lawmaker said Monday evening.

State Rep. Bill Callegari, R-Houston, chairman of the House Pensions Committee, said lawmakers on the panel did not consider the legislation a priority and wanted to focus on more important bills.

“We didn’t have enough support for it,” Callegari said. “There just wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for it.”

In late 2011 Perry revealed on federal disclosure forms that he had taken advantage of an unusually generous perk reserved exclusively for longtime state elected officials. It has allowed him to draw both his $150,000 a year state salary and a $92,000 annual pension. The Democratic Lone Star Project, citing a national study of governors’ salaries, said the combined income makes Perry the highest-paid governor in the country. 

State Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, filed a bill at the beginning of the session to end the practice. House Bill 416 would not apply retroactively to Perry but would prevent future lawmakers or statewide elected officials from collecting a state salary and pension without ever leaving office.

State officials in the “elected class” who meet the age and service requirements of a state employee can begin collecting a pension, based on their highest salary over a 36-month period. Then they can retire again when they leave office in the “elected class,” which for legislators is based on the salary of a state district judge, or $125,000. They don’t have to disclose the pension income on state ethics disclosures, and the Employees Retirement System considers the information strictly confidential. (Perry was required to release his pension income by the Federal Election Commission).

Turner got a public hearing on the bill, but it effectively died Monday at midnight, the deadline for committees to pass House bills on to the full body for consideration.

Besides Callegari, the members of the committee include Reps. Roberto Alonzo, D-Dallas; Dan Branch, R-Dallas; John Frullo, R-Lubbock; Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio; Phil King, R-Weatherford; and Phil Stephenson, R-Wharton.

Turner said he is disappointed but won’t give up. He’s looking for opportunities to attach the double-dipping ban as an amendment to other bills.

“Clearly a lot of people on both sides of the aisle agree this is a reform that needs to be made,” Turner said. “Politicians shouldn’t be allowed to double dip a pension and a salary at the same time, while they’re still on the job.”

via The Texas Tribune: Main Feed http://www.texastribune.org/2013/05/07/bill-banning-double-dipping-dies-committee/?utm_source=texastribune.org&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Tribune%20Feed:%20Main%20Feed

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Father Cleared of Murder Charges Asks Why His Daughter is Still in Prison

By Brandi Grissom

Richard Winfrey Sr. is beside himself. He cannot understand why the state’s highest criminal court has taken more than six months and still not decided whether his 24-year-old daughter should be acquitted of murder when the primary evidence used against her — a dog-scent lineup — has been discredited.

“How in the heck can these people keep her in prison?” he asked during a phone interview from the frigid oil fields of North Dakota, where he works 14- hour days, seven days a week, to pay for his daughter’s legal fight. “I can’t stand what they’re doing.” 

There is no legal deadline for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to issue an opinion, and the chief deputy clerk for the court said the reason a case remains pending is not a matter of public record.

Richard Winfrey Sr., and his daughter, Megan, and his son, Richard Jr., were charged with murdering Murray Burr, a janitor at Coldspring High School in Coldspring, during a robbery in 2004. Richard Winfrey Sr. and Megan Winfrey were convicted.

The charges against the Winfreys were based primarily on evidence gathered during a dog-scent lineup conducted by a self-trained police deputy whose work in the Winfrey case — and others — was found unreliable by experts. They said the deputy had cued the dogs to “alert” for the suspects during the scent lineups. 

A jury acquitted Richard Winfrey Jr. in 13 minutes after his lawyers had presented evidence that the dog-scent lineup was a sham.

In April, Megan Winfrey’s lawyers told the criminal appeals court that the dog-scent evidence used to secure her conviction and a life sentence was “bad science masquerading as science.” In her father’s case, the same court found that the dog-scent evidence alone was not sufficient for his conviction. They issued an acquittal in 2010, and he was released.

But Megan Winfrey remains in the Murray prison unit for women in Gatesville.

“No matter what, by George, we need to not let this go like this,” Richard Winfrey Sr. said. “How long can they actually wait?”

District Attorney Richard Countiss of San Jacinto County has said that the jurors in Megan Winfrey’s 2009 trial had also considered her seemingly suspicious behavior when they convicted her, a decision he said should stand. And despite the acquittals of her father and brother, Countiss told the appeals court in April that he believed the Winfreys had committed the murder.

“I think the state should win the appeal,” Countiss said in an interview this week.

In 2009, Jeff Blackburn, the chief counsel at the Innocence Project of Texas, wrote a report that denounced the use of dog-scent lineups like the one used in Winfrey’s case. In an interview this week, he called the technique the “junkiest junk science that ever was.”

He said the appeals court, which typically favors prosecutors, was simply stalling, unwilling to admit that the Texas criminal justice system had made another error.

“Every single day they don’t make a decision means another day of life that is taken away from this girl,” Blackburn said.

As Megan Winfrey awaits the court’s decision, life outside prison marches on. Megan Winfrey’s daughter, who was 1 when her mother was arrested, is now 6. On June 1, Megan Winfrey’s grandmother and primary caregiver, Joyce Winfrey Berry, died.

“It’s hard enough to lose a treasured grandmother, but she was really losing her mom,” said Shirley Baccus-Lobel, Megan Winfrey’s lawyer. 

Baccus-Lobel said she had given up predicting when the appeals court might make a decision. “I don’t really know what they’re up to,” she said.

Richard Winfrey Sr. said that despite his frustration that his daughter remained behind bars, there were some reasons for hope. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit recently agreed to allow Richard Winfrey Jr. to proceed in a lawsuit against the dog handler and two other officers involved in the murder investigation.

Richard Winfrey Jr., who was a teenager when he was arrested, is seeking compensation for the more than two years he spent in jail awaiting trial. The money, his father said, could help the family hire investigators to determine who killed Burr.

“It may take that to get her out,” he said of his daughter.

via The Texas Tribune: Main Feed http://www.texastribune.org/texas-dept-criminal-justice/texas-court-of-criminal-appeals/father-acquitted-murder-daughter-still-prison/?utm_source=texastribune.org&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Tribune%20Feed:%20Main%20Feed

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The Oops Diaries: Hugs and Tears in Iowa

By Jay Root

“I walked with [CBS reporter] Rebecca Kaplan back to our floor, and we both decided this was the most disastrous and yet most entertaining campaign we would probably ever cover. It would never be this good again. From treasonous Ben Bernanke to all those heartless immigrant haters, through the oops moment, the voting-age gaffe, Sonia Monteyamor and Joe Arapahoe, we had been there to chronicle it. We killed it, man!”

— Exceprted from Oops! A Diary from the 2012 Campaign Trail.

From Chapter 11: “Caucus Time.”

Wednesday, January 4, 2012 — Part 1

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — It’s 3:46 a.m., and I’m in my room at the Sheraton West Des Moines. I would probably be hammered if we hadn’t run out of booze, because that’s the kind of night it’s been.

The governor announced a few hours ago that he is canceling his upcoming South Carolina trip and going home to Texas for some “prayer and reflection” to see if there’s a “path forward” after his ass-kicking tonight in the Iowa caucuses. Everybody knows what that means. No more debates! Oh please, God.

Iowans don’t start voting until evening at these caucuses, which are like hundreds of little popularity contests held at gyms and churches across the state. So we first had to endure an exhausting five public events, beginning with Perry’s address to the Texas Strike Force, otherwise known as the special interest lobby of Austin.

I got started at the Sheraton restaurant, where I caught a rare glimpse of Joe Allbaugh—table hopping, talking to various Texans and Friends of Rick. I always thought the former FEMA director, despite his gruff exterior and large build, was a big ol’ teddy bear inside. But most of the Texans who work for him at Perry HQ seem to hate his guts. I passed by one of the tables where he was seated and said hello in passing. I went through the buffet line, sat down, and swilled a bunch of coffee with my lumpy and mostly dry scrambled eggs. Allbaugh, still making his rounds, came and sat down for a while with me. “I didn’t know you’d be sitting alone,” he said.

He grabbed the USA Today sitting at the table and glanced at a story by national political writer Susan Page. It largely concluded that Perry was on his last leg. Joe told me to tell her he was mad at her for that. I’m pretty sure she hasn’t been out on the road, and certainly not anywhere near the moribund Perry campaign, but I promised him I would tell her if I saw her. National attention has dropped off, which is both good and bad. It’s good because I don’t have to wade through a bunch of competitors to get access. It’s bad because nobody cares about the story anymore.

By late afternoon all the reporters had set up shop in a relatively small ballroom, with press risers in the back and a podium and microphone in front. Ben Philpott [of Austin public radio station KUT] had a dedicated high-speed Internet line, which was key because wireless sucks in Iowa and there was obviously a big draw on it here. I let [ABC reporter] Arlette Saenz glom onto my Verizon wireless signal but I was hanging on to the password Philpott gave me as if it were the nuclear launch code. Behind the podium was a large TV screen on the wall where we would watch the returns come in. Perry hit two caucuses himself, and supposedly 1,500 surrogates—the Texas Strike Force plus a bunch of other volunteers—fanned out across the state to advocate for him at the 1,700-plus voting sites.

They had a 15-passenger bus ferrying reporters to the two events but I only went to one of Perry’s appearances. Ann Romney was there, too, speaking for Mitt. Perry spoke first and then hugged her before she went onstage. I skipped Perry’s second caucus appearance and went to the filing room. The results from CNN entrance polls were already coming in. It looked like a very bad night for Rick Perry. There weren’t many people in the dingy ballroom. With hundreds of Texans around I figured there would be more crammed in. I guess the strike force was all out at those far-flung caucuses.

Perry surfaced at around nine o’clock, stood in the middle of the ballroom, and did a live shot with Fox, with all the reporters jammed in around him to record what he said. Arlette typed up a transcript of it and e-mailed it to me. It seemed a little delusional to me. He said it was still early in the evening and there was “a lot of hope and excitement.” He said he would “wait to see in the morning what it looks like.” Wait till the friggin’ morning? Would it take that long to count? “He looks sad/tired,” Arlette texted me. Then Wolf Blitzer started spilling the awful truth. Perry would come in fifth, at barely 10 percent—behind Romney, Santorum, Paul, and Gingrich.

What a collapse. The guy who had raised $17 million in forty-nine days—a bigger third-quarter haul than even Mitt Romney—and who had spent way more on TV here than all the other candidates. The former front-runner who once seemed like the inevitable conservative alternative. Fifth place? Given the damn-the-torpedoes attitude of late, I fully expected Perry to step onstage and give a defiant speech, to proclaim that this was a minor setback. Onward to South Carolina. He’s been saying that repeatedly. But that’s not what happened. Instead he got pretty emotional, started talking about how it was all worth it, how there is “no greater joy” than his experience out there on the trail.

And then: “I’ve decided to return to Texas to assess the results of tonight’s caucuses, and determine whether there is a path forward for myself in this race.” He spent a few minutes working the rope line, and I saw his Iowa director, Bob Haus, wiping away tears and hugging him. Everybody seemed to be feeling the catharsis of nearly five months going up in smoke—the last three of them really god-awful. I saw one of Perry’s top aides milling around and I practically leaped at him. “So this is over, right? I mean, he’s saying reassess, but …” I didn’t get to finish my sentence.

“It’s done,” the adviser said. A couple of seconds passed as we just stared at each other, and he felt like he had to throw in a little caveat: “But you know Rick Perry,” he said. “He’s crazy. You never know what he’s going to do. He might wake up tomorrow and decide he’s back in.” I sent off a Tweet: “Hugs and Tears at Perry HQ in Iowa.” I was dying to get to the bar, where people were starting to gather. Arlette and Ben Philpott had been busily typing away, too, but when I looked up after filing my story I was the only one left in the Sheraton ballroom. I heard a loud cheer rise up from the bar. Damn. Had Perry gone out there to the bar? I stuffed my charger and audio cable into my backpack. Then I heard another loud cheer. My God, what was I missing? I ran into the bar area, which was overflowing, and asked around: What the fuck is happening?

“They were doing shots,” someone said. “For Rob.” They were toasting Rob Johnson, the campaign manager who had been busted down to a lowly surrogate and replaced by Bush-era honcho Joe Allbaugh. It was proof that Rob was the one who still had the loyalty of all the campaign staffers. That set the mood for the night. Everybody was toasting everybody else, and hugging and crying. I invited several people to future lunches in Austin. I promised I’d stay in touch. I gave some unsolicited career counseling. I ran into one senior aide who was very happy to be moving on.

“Dude, no matter how bad you’ve heard it was, it was ten times worse,” he said. He told me that at the end there had been two distinct campaigns at the end: the “zombie campaign,” composed of Texas loyalists walking around in a funk, waiting for it all to end; and the “shadow campaign,” the one with all the power, composed of D.C. consultants running the show from the Stephen F. Austin Hotel across the street from Perry campaign HQ in Austin. Grim. By then, it was practically impossible to get a drink at the bar because the bartenders were so busy. When they closed it down, the party spilled over into Perry policy analyst Sean Davis’s room.

I brought what was left of Arlette’s Grey Goose, which made me a very popular guy. I have this vision of a mildly incoherent Perry spokeswoman, Katherine Cesinger, laughing uncontrollably on the bed, and wondering what new fate might await her back home. Luckily, we ran out of booze about an hour ago. I walked with [CBS reporter] Rebecca Kaplan back to our floor, and we both decided this was the most disastrous and yet most entertaining campaign we would probably ever cover. It would never be this good again. From treasonous Ben Bernanke to all those heartless immigrant haters, through the oops moment, the voting-age gaffe, Sonia Monteyamor and Joe Arapahoe, we had been there to chronicle it. We killed it, man!

via The Texas Tribune: Main Feed http://www.texastribune.org/texas-people/rick-perry/oops-diaries-blowout-iowa/?utm_source=texastribune.org&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Tribune%20Feed:%20Main%20Feed

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The Oops Diaries: Gay Pollster’s Role in Anti-Gay TV Ad Was Concealed

By Jay Root

“Obviously, the Strong Ad didn’t rescue Perry in Iowa. It’s not clear anything could have at that point. But the attempt to hide [Tony] Fabrizio’s role in the making of a notorious anti-gay commercial — to leak a fraudulent version of internal division to a national publication — is another reminder of how messed up Perry’s campaign became.”

Adapted from Oops! A Diary from the 2012 Campaign Trail.

From Chapter 17: “I Bow To You.”

Once the “oops” moment happened, a widespread feeling took hold within Gov. Rick Perry‘s campaign that a comeback was uphill at best. New Hampshire, with its New England sensibilities, was hopeless. The money spigot, which produced about $2.5 million a week when Perry first came out of the chute, had slowed to a trickle. The intense scrutiny he once faced as a front-runner had shifted to Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and, soon, to Rick Santorum. It was all coming down to Iowa, where Perry was in the single digits.

Nelson Warfield, a former top aide to 1996 GOP nominee Bob Dole, was experienced at ginning up social conservatives in past campaigns, and he decided something big and dramatic needed to happen. Something that would cut through the clutter. He proposed a TV ad script charitably described as edgy and viscerally anti-gay.

According to internal campaign e-mails, the idea for the commercial was conceived about a week after the “oops” moment. It would come to be known as the Strong Ad. Here is how Perry read it into the camera: “I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a Christian. But you don’t need to be in the pews every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”

When the ad was unveiled on December 7, it set off a viral uproar on YouTube, spawning hundreds of sometimes hilarious parodies and outrage from viewers. By the summer of 2012, the Strong Ad had generated more than 8.3 million hits on YouTube, with more than 770,000 clicking on the “dislike” button and only 26,000 having hit “like.” It was the third most-clicked-on political video of 2011.

The ad struck an intensely raw nerve with gay activists. They were particularly angry that it had happened on the watch of Perry pollster/strategist Tony Fabrizio, who had worked alongside Warfield on the Dole campaign. Although he had not publicly come out of the closet, Fabrizio was known in personal and political circles to be gay. He had done lucrative polling work for pro-gay groups, including the Log Cabin Republicans and an organization fighting a gay marriage ban in Florida.

On the day the spot ran, Jimmy LaSalvia, director of the pro-gay Republican group GOPround, wrote a furious denunciation on Twitter. “I’ve just about had it with faggots who line their pockets with checks from anti-gay homophobes while throwing the rest of us under the bus,” he said.

In case there was any confusion, LaSalvia later Tweeted that he was referring to Fabrizio. When the ad hit the airwaves, the Huffington Post contacted the Perry campaign and asked what role Fabrizio had played in the crafting of the anti-gay message. Ray Sullivan, Perry’s communications director, didn’t know the details.

Hardly anybody did beyond Perry’s Washington, D.C.-based consultants — the “consulterati,” as they were known among the governor’s Texas loyalists. Sullivan said HuffPo had told him the news organization was more likely to post a story about the ad if Fabrizio favored it and played a role in its creation, since the spot would clash with his pro-gay political background and was provoking furor from gay rights activists.

Sullivan discussed the issue with Warfield. “I think Nelson took it upon himself to try to inform or convince them that Fabrizio was not behind the ad and in fact didn’t like it,” said Sullivan. In other words, Warfield tried to make the story go away. On that count, he failed.

He was quoted on HuffPo on Dec. 8, the day after the ad was unveiled, under the type of headline no campaign wants to see: “Rick Perry’s Anti-Gay Ad Divides His Top Staff.” Warfield told HuffPo in an e-mail that Fabrizio was “against it from the get-go.” Fabrizio had even sent out an e-mail calling the proposed ad script “nuts,” the website reported.

The Miami Herald also reported on Warfield’s and Fabrizio’s supposed disagreement over the ad. The newspaper ran what was said to be the Nov. 18 email exchanges about the ad between the two, presumably provided by one of them.

The paper published an email from Warfield about his desire to test the Strong Ad script as an “aggressive values question” in a poll of Iowa voters, to see how they’d react to a candidate who thinks it’s terrible that gays can openly serve in the military, while public schools can’t stage Christmas celebrations.

Fabrizio responded to Warfield’s email five minutes later: “We already tested the taxpayer funding of abortion and planned parenthood. Nelson — your question is nuts, just nuts.”

Once those emails were leaked and Warfield publicly described the campaign’s deliberations over the ad, news outlets widely reported and re-reported that Fabrizio had condemned the ad internally. But the single email exchange concealed the real story.

Numerous internal emails and interviews with key players indicate that Fabrizio not only favored testing the ad script, he expressed awe at the number of voters who responded positively to it. Then, once it was turned into a TV commercial, emails show that he agreed it was a “good idea” to use the anti-gay ad as a Perry fundraising tool.

The only Fabrizio email exchange that got leaked to the media was the one in which he referred to the proposed question from Warfield as “nuts.” It was sent at 11:33 a.m. on Nov. 18, 2011. There was more, though. Here’s what came next:

Warfield (11:39 a.m.): “So nuts we could lose our 6%? Heaven forefend. Let’s not test it. Better not to know. Let’s just argue our econ plan is about 7 millimeters better than all the rest. Yep, that’ll make ’em forget about all those Mexicans in study hall at Texas A&M.”

Fabrizio (11:41 a.m.): “Didn’t say I wouldn’t test it, just said it was nuts. LOL! Touchy today, huh?”

At the exact same moment, Perry’s longtime Texas pollster, Mike Baselice, sent an email urging the two to tone down the question. But Fabrizio sided with Warfield and argued against taking out the reference to gays in the military.

Baselice (11:41 a.m.): “How about this: Rick Perry will end the Obama Administration’s war on religion because he knows his faith and this nation’s Christian heritage can make us stronger (strong again).”

Warfield (11:46 a.m.): “I would test it the way it was written. If you take the gay stuff and the Christmas stuff out of it, it loses its punch.”

Fabrizio (11:47 a.m.): “Mike — Nelson is right. (As much as I hate to admit it.)”

After results of the poll of GOP voters about the Strong Ad language were tallied and reported inside the campaign on Nov. 21, Fabrizio’s response can only be described as gushing: “WOW!” he wrote in an email to the top Perry hierarchy. He said he had never seen so many people in a survey agree with a polling question, adding: “Nelson — I bow to you. You were right on your question!”

By the time the ad got cut, the Texas loyalists had been marginalized and were no longer in the loop. Even speechwriter Eric Bearse and Perry political director Wayne Hamilton, who had deep experience with evangelical voters not only in Texas but also in Iowa, didn’t know about the ad until it was put into rotation to be aired.

Senior Perry advisers say the data showed the “top lines” were high, meaning people said when prompted that they look more favorably upon a candidate who took the position being articulated in the survey questions. But a deeper “regression analysis” showed it didn’t move people.

“Out of the six or eight things we tested, the weakest was the gays-in-the-military thing,” said a top Perry aide who reviewed the data. “The best thing was still just the generic Perry position on faith and the constant onslaught against people of faith.” Obviously, the Strong Ad didn’t rescue Perry in Iowa. It’s not clear anything could have at that point. But the attempt to hide Fabrizio’s role in the making of a notorious anti-gay commercial — to leak a fraudulent version of internal division to a national publication — is another reminder of how messed up Perry’s campaign became.

There was internal division over the Strong Ad, alright, but it wasn’t between Fabrizio and Warfield. It was between the Washington consultants who would probably never work for Perry again and the Texas loyalists who thought the governor was harming his legacy by embracing a harsh view of gay soldiers, who, after all, were risking their lives right alongside their straight counterparts.

Mind-boggling dysfunction had reached the highest levels of the Perry campaign. Ray Sullivan offered an apt description of Warfield’s attempt to stop HuffPo from writing a negative story about the campaign’s partially closeted pollster. The same thing might be said of Perry’s entire campaign: “It was a risky strategy that didn’t work.”

via The Texas Tribune: Main Feed http://www.texastribune.org/texas-politics/2012-presidential-election/gay-pollsters-role-anti-gay-ad-was-concealed/?utm_source=texastribune.org&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Tribune%20Feed:%20Main%20Feed

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Cruz Defeats Dewhurst, Will Face Sadler in Fall

By Aman Batheja

Defying all early expectations and upending long-standing conventional wisdom in Texas Republican politics, former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz handily won the Republican runoff for an open U.S. Senate seat Tuesday night.

He moves on to the general election against former state Rep. Paul Sadler, who defeated retired educator Grady Yarbrough in the Democratic runoff.

Cruz defeated Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst after a lengthy, contentious political battle in which Cruz painted a longtime statewide elected official backed by Gov. Rick Perry as a moderate.

“Tonight is a victory for the grass roots,” Cruz said Tuesday night. “It is a testament to Republican women, to Tea Party leaders and to grass-roots conservatives.”

In a short concession speech, Dewhurst said he was proud of the race he had run.

“We got beat up a little bit, but we never gave up,” Dewhurst said. “And we stand tall in knowing that we never compromised any of our values.”

In a statement, Sadler made clear that he will fight for Dewhurst’s supporters ahead of the Nov. 6 general election.

“Tonight, I stand alone as the only nominee of a major political party in Texas because the Texas Republican Party has been hijacked by the Tea Party,” Sadler said in a statement.

The fight for the GOP nomination to replace U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison drew strong national interest and more than $45 million in spending, making it the nation’s most expensive nonpresidential race of the election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

From the start, the race appeared to be Dewhurst’s to lose, as he had held statewide office for more than a decade and had millions of dollars in personal wealth at his disposal to outspend any opponents. But many influential activists aligned with the Tea Party were unimpressed with Dewhurst’s record and could not shake the feeling that he would crumble to pressure from moderates once in Congress.

Cruz also benefited from protracted legal fighting over last year’s congressional and legislative redistricting maps that pushed the Texas primary from March to May and the subsequent runoff to July. The longer primary gave Cruz more time to introduce himself to the state’s Republican voters. 

Though Dewhurst and Cruz agreed on practically every major issue, the race still managed to draw passions on both sides as the race turned largely on the candidates’ temperaments and records. 

Cruz, a Cuban-American, Harvard-educated lawyer who worked on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign and later for the Bush administration, centered his Senate campaign on his five-plus years as Texas Solicitor General under Attorney General Greg Abbott. In fiery speeches, he cited his work on cases dealing with states’ rights, gun control and religious freedom as a “proven record” of “fighting for the U.S. Constitution.” Conservative stars including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., endorsed Cruz’s campaign.

Dewhurst, who has served as lieutenant governor since 2003, pointed to a long list of conservative legislation passed under his watch, as well as his experience as a businessman and service in the Air Force and CIA.

Cruz relentlessly criticized Dewhurst as “timid” and a “moderate,” accusing him of raising state spending and blaming him for conservative measures not becoming law.

Texas Republican leaders including Perry and more than half of the Texas Senate endorsed Dewhurst and accused Cruz of distorting Dewhurst’s legislative record and, simultaneously, their own records as well. 

Dewhurst attacked Cruz for some of the clients he has taken on as a private lawyer and painting him as a “Wasington insider.” He described millions spent by the Club for Growth and other anti-tax groups to boost Cruz’s campaign as out-of-state meddling from people who didn’t care about Texas. None of the attacks seemed to blunt momentum for Cruz.

On the Democratic side, Sadler adopted some of Dewhurst’s criticism of Cruz on Tuesday night, describing the Republican nominee as  “untested, untried and unknown to the vast majority of Texans.”

Yarbrough, who has never held elected office, said he would support Sadler in November. The perennial candidate surprised many by making it into the Democratic runoff. Though he invested much of his personal savings into his campaign, he said he didn’t regret entering the race. 

“I enjoyed it quite a bit, tremendously,” Yarbrough said. “You never know how elections are going to go. Sometimes they go the way you think they’re going to go and sometimes they don’t.”

via The Texas Tribune: Main Feed http://www.texastribune.org/texas-politics/2012-elections/cruz-defeats-dewhurst-will-face-sadler-in-fall/?utm_source=texastribune.org&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Tribune%20Feed:%20Main%20Feed

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Horse Slaughtering to Be Focus of Senate Hearing

By John Wayne Ferguson

More than five years after horse slaughtering was effectively banned in the United States, the controversial issue is returning to Texas, which was home to two of the nation’s last three such slaughterhouses.

The state Senate’s Committee on Agricultural and Rural Affairs will meet Tuesday to hear testimony on the economic impact of the closure of Texas’ horse slaughterhouses. The testimony comes in the wake of federal officials opening the doors for horse slaughtering to return to the U.S.

Since the federal ban was lifted, new horse slaughterhouses have been proposed in New Mexico, Missouri and Oregon, and laws that would permit them to be built more easily have been proposed in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. And although no new slaughterhouses have been proposed in Texas, the state’s history with the industry has some believing that a lifting of the state ban could be on the table.

Sen. Craig Estes, chairman of the Agricultural and Rural Affairs Committee, said Tuesday’s hearing is only a response to an interim charge by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and not necessarily an indication of future action.

“Not every charge results in a bill in the next session,” Estes said. “There may be a recommendation, and there may not be.”

Either way, Estes said, he expects the hearing to be a “lively time.”

“It’s a good airing for both sides of the issue,” he said.

The opposing sides, meanwhile, believe that the stakes are a bit higher.

“We suspect that the hearing is intended to look at reopening slaughterhouses in Texas,” said Keith Dane, the director of equine protection for the Humane Society of the United States. He has been invited to testify about the Humane Society’s opposition to horse slaughtering.

Both Dallas Crown Inc. in Kaufman and Beltex Corporation in Fort Worth closed in March 2007, after a federal court upheld a 1949 Texas law that criminalized horse slaughter for human consumption. The law had been essentially ignored until it was brought to the attention of Attorney General Greg Abbott, who determined it was still in effect in 2002. The slaughterhouses lost their challenge to the law.

At the same time in 2007, Congress withdrew funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s horse meat inspection program, forcing the slaughterhouses to pay for the services themselves. When a federal court determined that horse slaughterers could not pay for their own inspections, the USDA pulled the last of its inspectors from an Illinois slaughterhouse — essentially shutting down the industry, because meat cannot be sold for human consumption without being inspected.

The defunding of horse meat inspections persisted until last fall, when President Obama signed an appropriations bill that included money for the inspections. The change of course opened the possibility for horse slaughterhouses to return to the U.S.

But there are obstacles to again opening one in Texas. The Legislature would need to repeal the 1949 law, specifically Chapter 149 of the Agriculture Code, which bans the sale of horse meat for human consumption.

One of the issues that could be raised Tuesday is the increase of abandoned and neglected horses since the last U.S. slaughterhouse closed. Pro-slaughterhouse advocates say the closures, along with the downturn of the economy, have led to the increase. Those advocates also say that as a result of the closures, horses that would have been slaughtered here are shipped long distances for slaughter in cruel, cramped conditions.

“I think we’re in a perfect storm,” said Dave Duquette the president of the pro-slaughterhouse group United Horsemen. Duquette, a horse trainer from Oregon, said that horse values were at an all-time high before the slaughterhouses closed. He said the closures had a greater effect on the horse industry, which had survived previous bad economic situations.

“The horse industry never took a hit like this in the ’80s,” Duquette said. 

Duquette and other slaughterhouse supporters said the closures also took away a method to dispose of horses that need to be put down, either because they are sick or lame, or because they are too dangerous to work with. They say rescue operations can’t keep up with the number of horses that are in need of homes.

That’s not the position the Humane Society takes.

“Horse slaughter is used by people who don’t want to find a better way,” Dane said. “There’s no more relationship [to the increase of neglected horses] to the closing of the plants than to any other event in history. How can a lack of slaughter cause an increase in problems?”

The federal reversal on horse slaughter came after the release of a Government Accountability Office report that recommended refunding the inspection program. The GAO determined that, since 2007, the export of horses to Canada and Mexico for slaughter had increased by 148 percent and 660 percent, respectively. The report also noted an increase in the number of U.S. horse neglect and abandonment cases since 2007.

Specifically, the report noted that Colorado had a 60 percent increase in horse neglect cases between 2005 and 2010. No specific data was available for Texas.

According to the GAO report, almost 105,000 horses were slaughtered in the U.S. in 2006, the last full year of horse-slaughtering operations, and 17,000 metric tons of horsemeat were exported overseas. The amount was valued at about $65 million. 

In 2010, 138,000 horses were exported to Canada and Mexico from the U.S. for slaughter.

“There is not an ideal solution for dealing with unwanted horses,” said Elizabeth Chote, the general counsel for the Texas Veterinary Medical Association, who will testify at Tuesday’s hearing. 

While TVMA does not support horse slaughter, the group, which represents veterinarians from around the state, says the Texas ban needs to be rethought.

“What has happened in Texas is that politicians simply banned horse slaughter, but they failed to deal with the situation,” Chote said.

Some advocates for slaughterhouses say the closure of such facilities led to a decrease in the auction price of horses, while the cost of raising a horse remained the same. The decreased price allows buyers from slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada to purchase healthier horses (which provide more meat) in greater numbers. Meanwhile, less healthy and older horses are left behind with owners who can no longer bear the cost and are more likely to abandon or neglect the animal.

“Any livestock that has value is going to be taken,” said Duquette, the pro-slaughterhouse advocate. “That’s when horses stand to suffer even more.”

Reopening U.S. slaughterhouses would bring balance to the market and result in fewer healthy horses being sent to slaughter, Duquette said.

United Horsemen will not be represented at Tuesday’s hearing, but Duquette, who is one of the investors in a proposed 20,000-square-foot horse slaughterhouse in Oregon, said Texas will turn out its own supporters for the return of slaughterhouses.

“There will be no lack of support from Texans for that,” Duquette said.

Chote said that although many of her group’s members may be sympathetic to horse lovers, they also realize the scope of the problem may require some tough choices. 

“What is the more humane solution?” Chote said. “What is the lesser evil?”

Both Chote and Dane said the issue of unwanted horses needs to be addressed not only at the end of animals’ lives, but at the beginning. Both said that more attention must be paid to breeding practices in the racing and show industries that lead to an increase of young, unwanted horses.

There has been one attempt in recent years to change the horse meat ban in Texas. In 2007, state Sen. Chris Harris, R-Arlington, and state Rep. Sid Miller, R-Stephenville, proposed identical bills that would make it legal to produce and sell horse meat, as long as it was sold outside of the U.S. Neither bill made it to a vote.

Among those invited to testify at Tuesday’s hearing are former U.S. Rep. Charles Stenholm, who now lobbies for the horse meat industry; Jerry Finch, the President of Habitat for Horses, an equine rescue organization; and former Kaufman Mayor Paula Bacon, who was one of the driving forces behind closing the Dallas Crown slaughterhouse.

via The Texas Tribune: Main Feed http://www.texastribune.org/texas-state-agencies/department-of-agriculture/horse-slaughter-debate-returns-statehouse/?utm_source=texastribune.org&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Tribune%20Feed:%20Main%20Feed

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Perry: Texas Won’t Implement Key Elements of Federal Health Reform

By Emily Ramshaw

Texas will not expand Medicaid or establish a health insurance exchange, two major tenets of the federal health reform that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld last month, Gov. Rick Perry said in an early morning announcement.

“I stand proudly with the growing chorus of governors who reject the Obamacare power grab,” he said in a statement. “Neither a ‘state’ exchange nor the expansion of Medicaid under this program would result in better ‘patient protection’ or in more ‘affordable care.’ They would only make Texas a mere appendage of the federal government when it comes to health care.”

Perry’s office said he’s sending a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius this morning asserting his opposition, both to accepting more than a hundred million federal dollars to put more poor Texas adults onto Medicaid, and to creating an Orbitz-style online insurance marketplace for consumers.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states — even Texas, which has the country’s highest rate of the uninsured — may not be punished for opting out of the Medicaid. The insurance exchange is not optional; if Texas doesn’t devise its own, the feds will establish a one-size-fits-all program for the state.   

“If anyone was in doubt, we in Texas have no intention to implement so-called state exchanges or to expand Medicaid under Obamacare,” Perry said in a statement. “I will not be party to socializing healthcare and bankrupting my state in direct contradiction to our Constitution and our founding principles of limited government.”

The governor will appear on Fox News at 10:30 a.m. to talk more about his decision. 

via The Texas Tribune: Main Feed http://www.texastribune.org/texas-health-resources/medicaid/perry-tx-wont-implement-key-elements-health-reform/?utm_source=texastribune.org&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Tribune%20Feed:%20Main%20Feed