"I'll be as hardy of mind as I am of body. I'll be a straight-shooter and a square-dealer. My family name will be sacred My word will be as good as any contract. I'll remember the Alamo. I'll stick by my friends. And I'll eat more chicken-fried steak."
Junior John has got to figure in this mix and Fil is the inroads (for Cornyn) into South Texas. We need to put a Big Stop Sign up in Robstown and inform them about Connie Scott as I understand Fil Vela is her campaign manager or treasurer and Mike Scott is a TLR guy with a title
Cornyn poised in re-election fight to stick by Bush on taxes, Iraq
Republican seeking second U.S. Senate term next year is banking that voters will back him on stands he's taken.
Listen to this article or download audio file.Click-2-Listen
By W. Gardner Selby
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
For someone who proclaims his independence from the White House, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas can still sound like a cheerleader for President Bush.
Speaking to fellow Republicans in Fort Worth at a presidential straw poll recently, Cornyn staked a claim to re-election next year as a pro-war, anti-tax candidate who expects to match up with voter sentiments in his home state.
Ralph Barrera
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
(enlarge photo)
John Cornyn says he has differed with Bush some.
MORE W. GARDNER SELBY
W. GARDNER SELBY
He stressed his support for the course Bush has set in Iraq and suggested that voters can rely only on Republicans to extend the tax cuts Bush made in his first term.
Two Democratic Senate hopefuls, San Antonio lawyer Mikal Watts and state Rep. Rick Noriega of Houston, are counting on voters to hold Cornyn accountable for Republican stewardship of Congress in the first four years of his six-year term.
"People will not rehire someone who has had bad plans replaced by more bad plans," Noriega said.
Watts called Cornyn a senator "who parrots exactly what he's told to say by this administration and Karl Rove," the former White House counselor.
Cornyn, who ran in 2002 as part of "Team Bush," said in an August interview that he has been a Bush ally on judicial appointments and the war on terrorism but that he has also parted with his friend on a few issues.
A Cornyn proposal to allow greater access to federal records has cleared the Senate without White House backing. Cornyn also is among senators at odds with the president by proposing to give states alternative ways of complying with the federal education accountability system that Bush started.
Also, he and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., are seeking to grant the Food and Drug Administration regulatory authority over tobacco and ingredients including nicotine, a step yet to be endorsed by Bush.
This summer, Cornyn opposed the Bush-favored compromise on changes to immigration policy. The senator unsuccessfully offered an amendment barring felons and other offenders from legal residency.
He later called Bush tone-deaf on the issue. "I don't think he had any real concept of the public engagement on that issue," he said.
In Fort Worth, though, Cornyn said Bush was absolutely right to raise the specter of Vietnam when discussing Democrats' calls for a timed withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
If American forces leave prematurely, Cornyn said, the region will plunge into a humanitarian crisis, and unwatched terrorists will plot attacks. "Unless we get the job done, they will follow us here," he said. "And we've got to make sure that never ever happens again. Not another 9/11, not ever."
His Democratic opponents each noted that as young men, Cornyn and Bush didn't serve in Vietnam.
Noriega, a lieutenant colonel in the Texas National Guard, said, "Comparing Vietnam to the Middle East is like comparing apples to wheat; they are not in the same food group. Differences include geography, terrain, cultures, religion, technology, history of region, just to name a few. This is just another example of the unfortunate circumstance we face when we have leaders who have not walked the walk."
Watts said, "I don't think there is a plan for victory in Iraq. ... We have to stay in the region, but I don't think we should be standing around on street corners getting shot at while we observe someone else's civil war."
On the domestic front, Cornyn charged Democrats with planning not to extend tax cuts enacted at Bush's request starting in 2001. Barring congressional action, cuts of income, capital gains, dividends and other taxes will expire in 2011.
On Capitol Hill, the cuts are rated either Bush's keystone domestic achievement or a gift to the nation's wealthiest residents.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending the tax cuts would cost the government more than $1.8 trillion through 2017.
Tax-cut advocates say such money rightly belongs to taxpayers.
Cornyn's take: Democrats will let into law the biggest tax increase in history.
"They're going to do it without a single vote unless we get the majority back," he said. "They're going to do it because the tax relief that we passed under President Bush back in 2003 will expire unless we make it permanent. And we have to get the majority back and keep taxes low and keep America growing."
Watts said he would review each tax cut one by one but opposes extending cuts for the wealthy as long as government runs a deficit.
Noriega called it "blatantly false" to forecast all the cuts vanishing.
Nationally, 52 percent of voters favored making the tax cuts permanent in a poll conducted this year by Moore Information, an Oregon-based research firm. Thirty-eight percent preferred to let the cuts expire, and 10 percent had no opinion.
Republicans and a plurality of independents supported making the cuts permanent. A majority of Democrats wished to see them expire.
About half of respondents agreed that the cuts should be extended only for households with annual incomes of less than $150,000. About a third of voters favored making the cuts permanent for everyone.
Jason Furman, an economist and senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, an independent research outfit, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee last week that extending the cuts would widen after-tax income gaps between Americans.
Furman said a best-case U.S. Treasury projection suggests an extremely slight impact on the economy, with extended cuts more likely increasing the national debt and reducing government savings.
An eventual need to repay the cuts, he said, would drive down disposable income as taxpayers see cuts in government programs or bumps in taxes to bankroll the cuts, leaving at least three in four households with lower after-tax incomes.
"There is no free lunch because, ultimately, the government faces a budget constraint," Furman said.
wgselby@statesman.com, 445-3644
Why must we flex our muscles?
Nueces County, CCISD, 105th Judicial District Attorney; how many kids were locked up without an attorney?
Nanotechnology at work right before our eyes finally an acknowledgment of what has been going on for quite a while now. The information in those "Court Appointed Rolodex's", there is gold in them hills. And this is going to start becoming available when? and for who? We have came to a narrowing of the road here in this alligning of energy fields. I can see it now we got Mikal who who is the adversary of my adversary John Cornyn. We also have the Honorable Judge Manuel Banales who needs to align with Mr Watts and vice versa. Does he want to run for mayor unopposed? I would rather see him correct the errors and run for Governor or Ascend to the Texas Supreme Court. Now, John Cornyn has "Confessed Error" and I assure you it wasn't out of fairness but in the essence of knocking the checkers off of the Table because he was going to lose. And Carlos Valdez & John Hubert "Confess Error" on appeal from the 105th. Hubert & Valdez "confess error" so they can conceal Mary Cano. And that is as painless as it gets.
Anton
CCCT Political PulseMikal Watts seeks to round up list of Democrats for self, others
By Jaime PowellA Monday noontime fundraiser at Vietnam restaurant for U.S. Senate hopeful Mikal Watts was a who's who of the local bar association and judiciary, including five district judges. Watts, who is living in San Antonio, told the crowd that "nobody knows Mikal Watts better than Corpus Christi."
Watts, a Democrat, who is seeking the seat held by Republican Sen. John Cornyn, asked the gathering to dig through their Rolodexes and e-mail address lists because he hopes to compile a statewide database to reach Democratic voters that can be used by all Texas Democrats.
"That way, when Judge (J. Manuel) Bañales runs for mayor he can use it," Watts joked, to uproarious laughter from the crowd and a big grin from Bañales, who was sitting on the front row.
Former Raza Unida gubernatorial candidate Ramsey Muñiz has been transferred from a federal corrections institute in Three Rivers six months after arriving at the facility. Muñiz, who ran for governor of Texas in 1974 and 1975 under the Raza Unida Party, was transferred from Three Rivers on Tuesday.
Mike Truman, spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said Muñiz is being housed in the Federal Transfer Facility in Oklahoma City until he can be transferred to another facility.
Truman said he could not release where Muñiz would be transferred or when, citing security concerns. He also said he did not know why Muñiz was transferred.
Muñiz, 64, is serving a life sentence for three felony drug convictions.
The Three Rivers Federal Correctional Institute, 77 miles northwest of Corpus Christi, has been the closest the former Miller High School football star and local defense attorney has been to home since his 1994 conviction.
Under the banner of Raza Unida, a political party shaped and led by Hispanic activists seeking a political voice, Muñiz earned support from 6 percent the state's registered voters.
Muñiz's wife, Irma Muñiz, said she was surprised to learn of the transfer especially because senators, congressmen and civic groups have written letters to the Federal Bureau of Prisons on her husband's behalf.
Irma Muñiz said her husband had hoped to be housed at the Three Rivers facility because of its proximity to his family in South Texas.
Since he was transferred there in December from an institute in Colorado, Irma Muñiz has made frequent trips to visit her husband.
She likened Muñiz's transfer out of Three Rivers to the treatment of Hispanic Civil Rights figure Felix Longoria.
Longoria, a U.S. Army private killed on-duty in the Philippines in 1945, was refused a proper funeral in his hometown of Three Rivers because the only funeral home in town didn't allow Hispanics to use its funeral chapel.
Civil Rights hero Dr. Hector P. Garcia interceded and U.S. Sen. Lyndon Johnson arranged for Longoria to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Joe Ortiz, League of United Latin American Citizens district director and national and state civil rights director of the American GI Forum, helped organize letter-writing campaigns when Muñiz was in Colorado asking for his transfer to Texas.
Ortiz didn't know about the transfer out of Three Rivers but said both LULAC and the American GI Forum will work toward getting Muñiz returned to Texas.
"We are going to petition our legislators to see if they can do anything to bring him back," Ortiz said.
Contact Adriana Garza at 886-3618 or garzaa@caller.com
Posted by geomatica on June 21, 2007 at 9:47 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I am certain that Ramsey Muniz was falsely imprisoned, but no matter what you believe, he was and is a model prisoner, and it is a complete waste of taxpayer money to be moving him all over, when it makes the most sense for him to be here near his family. He didn't kill anybody, and his treatment has been nothing but inhumane. Something has to be done about the inequities in our prison system. His punishment certainly does not fit his supposed crime. When is his mistreatment and that of his family going to end?
Posted by colorderosa on June 22, 2007 at 9:13 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Only in America does a convicted murderer, chlld rapist, or other harden criminal walk free, while a supposed drug dealer gets life in prison.
colorderosa
Posted by sosiouxme13 on June 22, 2007 at 8:47 p.m. (Suggest removal)
In my opinion, someone convicted of dealing drugs, can be likened to a murderer...
Posted by dannoynted1 on June 23, 2007 at 5:25 a.m. (Suggest removal)
This is retaliation for the "scared status quo". They are afraid if he is in Texas he just might get out.
Only in Texas can this happen.
Eureka~ perhaps Jurisdiction resides in Oklahoma?
or is it Louisiana, where i hear Hayden Head is sending our Federally convicted non white americans as of late?.
Is that legal?
Why would you send a texan to another state unless you want to keep them from their family.
Posted by gmikedear1954 on June 23, 2007 at 3:44 p.m. (Suggest removal)
As a career Federal Agent living in Detroit, Michigan, I find it silly to deny this man the opportunity of being close to his family. As one person stated earlier that far worse criminals are given the option to be close to their family. Also, The whole war on drugs is nothing more than a farce to make contractors rich.
Posted by chuco11 on June 23, 2007 at 8:54 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Ram, you were the impetus for the movement that slowly is gaining speed. Maybe not in our lifetimes but down the road there will be Spanish spoken along with English in the schools, businesses and professional sports, to name a few, all across America not just Texas. "The Man" sees this and doesn't like it! But he can't stop the ineviteable. What was that old adage...."GOD grant me the serenity....... Irma, you are a model of a loving wife. All men should be this fortunate!
First, in seeking the death penalty, prosecutors sometimes overlook glaring illegalities.
"courts, especially state courts, are too often willing to overlook even obvious constitutional flaws when reviewing death penalty cases."
----Earlier this month, Vincent Saldano, one of the 468 inmates on Texas' death row, had his death sentence vacated. This development was duly reported in the press. But accounts of Saldano's good fortune uniformly failed to appreciate what makes his reprieve truly newsworthy and potentially a landmark.
Saving Saldano: Texas Confesses Error
![[Illustration]](http://writ.news.findlaw.com/images/illustrations/e-chair_cropped.jpg) | |
Saldano was not freed from the prospect of execution by the actions of a court or even, as occasionally happens, by the clemency of a governor. His death sentence was erased because Texas, through its newly created office of the solicitor general, "confessed error" in his case -- that is, it admitted, despite defeating Saldano's initial appeals in court, that his death sentence was illegally obtained. Quite simply, this never happens, either in Texas or in the dozens of other states with active death penalty laws. It is thus worth pausing to consider the value and potential implications of Saldano's case as well as the notion of confessing error.
Saldano had received a death sentence in part due to profoundly troubling testimony by a state expert witness at the sentencing phase of his trial. The expert, a clinical psychologist named Walter Quijano, suggested that Saldano should be executed because, as an Hispanic, he posed a special risk of future dangerousness to society. To support this astonishing conclusion, the expert pointed out that Hispanics make up a disproportionately large amount of Texas' prison population.It does not take a tenured professor of constitutional law to realize that linking racial identity with a propensity for violence was not only bizarre but also a violation of the equal protection clause. Indeed, that it should take a confession of error by the state to correct this problem highlights at least two problems in the current administration of the death penalty. First, in seeking the death penalty, prosecutors sometimes overlook glaring illegalities. The same flaw identified in Saldano's case infects at least seven other Texas capital cases. Second (and perhaps even more distressing), courts, especially state courts, are too often willing to overlook even obvious constitutional flaws when reviewing death penalty cases. After all, before the state's confession of error, Saldano had lost all of his appeals.
Under these circumstances, one might think that confessions of error would be, if not commonplace, at least occasional. On average, the Solicitor General of the United States confesses error in two or three criminal cases every year -- even though it is a safe bet that federal prosecutions, conducted by better trained lawyers with greater supervision, are less likely to contain obvious legal errors than their state counterparts. As the Supreme Court recognized when endorsing the practice in 1942, "the public trust reposed in the law enforcement officers of the Government requires that they be quick to confess error, when, in their opinion, a miscarriage of justice may result from their remaining silent." But as a practical matter, states never confess error in death penalty cases (even though courts overturn roughly two-thirds of all death sentences as legally infirm) -- and some states candidly admit that their policy is never to confess error.
Mutual Distrust
Why? One crucial and usually overlooked factor is the deep antagonism that has grown up over time between state death penalty prosecutors and the death penalty abolitionist lawyers who seek to foil them in every case. The abolitionists, prosecutors know all too well, never concede that their clients deserve the death penalty or that the death penalty was legally imposed -- no matter how flimsy their arguments in a given case. Rather, they use every procedural and substantive trick in the book to delay executions.
There can be no denying that such abolitionist tactics have angered and frustrated state prosecutors. And one response to these understandable emotions has been for prosecutors to mirror the fight-to-the-bitter-end approach of their opponents.
The problem with this reciprocation, however, is simply that the ethical duties of prosecutors and defense attorneys are vastly different. Defense attorneys are duty-bound to scratch and claw to win for their clients. Prosecutors, by contrast, despite striking hard blows, must never lose sight of their ultimate obligation to do justice in every case.
That may sound trite and perhaps overly idealistic, but it has a practical side as well. Prosecutorial confessions of error -- knowing when to fold them, as it is known -- establish credibility. They create trust in the system, a sense that someone is being careful and exercising sound judgment, that extends far beyond any single case. And that can make a world of difference for someone like me, who is not morally opposed to the death penalty but skeptical of how it is imposed.
Death Penalty Politics
In addition, the reluctance of state prosecutors to confess error is a clear reflection of how politics affects the death penalty. Up until now, anyway, undoing a death sentence was akin to political suicide for an elected district attorney or state attorney general, or for any state official with ambitions for re-election or higher office. And yet the willingness of Texas' new solicitor general to confess error in the Saldano case suggests a possible turning point. With the current groundswell of death penalty opposition based on the possibility of executing an innocent person, elected officials may now find some advantage in approaching capital cases (even those where innocence is not an issue) with a greater degree of care and honesty.
case will start a broad trend. But there is reason to believe that the tide is indeed turning. On June 9, Texas Attorney General John Cornyn announced the results of an investigation into other death penalty cases involving testimony by state expert Walter Quijano. Cornyn acknowledged that Dr. Quijano had provided testimony in six other death penalty cases similar to his improper testimony in the Saldano case. Cornyn's staff has advised defense lawyers for the six inmates now on death row that his office will not oppose efforts to overturn their sentences based on Quijano's testimony. In response, a pessimist might note that Texas is appealing a ruling in another capital case that the defendant received inadequate counsel -- when, indisputably, his lawyer slept through much of the trial. But doing the right thing has a contagious quality to it. Or at least so we can hope. Edward Lazarus, a former federal prosecutor, is the legal correspondent for Talk Magazine and the author of Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court.
I must say the tactics being carried out right now are transferring from a division between majority & minority groups to a division of within the minority groups. This concept is how CCISD manipulates. Think about it? Investigations, Colloquial Intelligence, Manipulation of one’s JOB opportunities, personal & political missions and nanotechnology to forecast, design and carry out plans ranging from 0 to at least a good 20 years. WIA slush fund is all about the final data in each category. There are many exemptive solutions & creative methods that are encouraged. The WIA allows the creation of multiple programs and agencies to create JOBS or JOB training. WIA is the DARE program, COPS program, Communities in Schools, and anything they can draw up a quick blueprint of. Innovation and Malleability produce stellar new programs from dedicated grant writers given the concepts and goals of a brainstorm. This is a brilliant concept for our youth. The problem is the adults take candy from the babies. CCISD is way to big for their britches. A board much too elevated to consider input from the community. Such audacity to condescend to engagement of the community they fleece in the justification “they know WATT is best for us”. Furthermore, contrary to their schmoozing persona-ism they do not know it all “we wouldn’t understand the process so why do we need to know how they conduct the business of running our school district?”. We would never understand anyway? The concern is to make the numbers JIVE with each other and the terminology is dynamic so are the variables applicable for each method of calculation.
“I guess it just depends on WATT your definition of is………..
| Chair Vice-Chair | Members: |
| Too often students are given answers to remember, rather than problems to solve” | |
Charles Handy
Ray told me this before he spoke at his Official Announcement to run against the Corporate Democratic Military Industrial Complex Candidate for Texas US Senator.
A very passionate candidate who is anything other than a fake or what some like to call a politician.
Ray is not a Politician and this is a very very positive attribute.
Dont get me wrong he is very well suited for the Senate and the diplomacy is there but there is a sternness that demands his respect kind of like the respect and command he possesses in the classroom. I think we can all agree, if he can handle our youth in the classroom he will do well for us in Washington.
Two more things
Remember the Alamo
and
Stay tuned for Jan 2 next year.
Ray Mc Murrey is from Corpus Christi.
He tells us upfront of his progressive leanings and his disappointment in both of the Hegemonic Parties.
Hegemony,.... Watch the Movie "Hot Fuzz".