Doug wrote:
> I was just reading the pages on Texas in John Mickelthwait and
> Adrian
> Wooldridge's The Right Nation: Consservative Power in America. They
>
> make it sound just awful - a corrupt plutocracy, violent, brutal to
>
> the poor, miserable public services, "America exponentiated." And
> these guys are sympathetic to American conservatism. Is it really
> that awful?
I'd have to say yes. The state's size does at least render pockets of progressive (however that is defined) opinion or policy, e.g, Austin, some of Houston, bits and pieces here and there, but the state government is owned by the Republicans. Two terms of Shrub and a term with the current yahoo, Perry, has devastated this state's public services, exploited tax bases for industry, taken apart judicial remedy under the guise of "tort reform" and nurtured the most narrow-minded types of state legislators who are pro-business, pro-"family" and pro-Jesus. What most people outside of Texas don't understand is that what Molly Ivins writes about the Texas state government is not hyperbole or comic fiction: the facts dictate the story, sad to say.
Many of the domestic policies Shrub tries to inflict on the national scale he first attempted at the state level, and the results, thus far, have been poor. His "leave no child behind" program was one of his pillars here, and the result is a state-wide test that only a little over half of the students pass. Teachers now "teach the test" and scores and passage rates are higher, but overall SAT and ACT scores are plunging. State budget cuts this last term resulted in thousands of children being bumped from state Medicaid and ChIPs healthcare programs.
Environmentally, this state suffered and continues to suffer under the Bush legacy. Suffice it to say that if a law burdoned business, it was rolled back. Think of the little smiley-faced guy in the Wal-mart ads on TV that "rolls back" prices. That's the state of government here since Bush and currently with Perry.
Lest we not forget, this state is also the playground of Tom DeLay, and his ability to spearhead the infamous redistricting ploy this past year, which effectively wrote out several Democratic representatives at both the state and national level, will haunt us at both the state and national level for some time to come.
Lastly, and there is so much to rant about, I have to mention our arcane death penalty issues here. We lead the nation in actual executions, and the stories of Bush laughing as he signed death warrants was the stuff of legend here, either told in horror by opponents or told as a tale of machismo by supporters. But the problem is worse than who sits in the governor's chair, for the governor has little power over such in this state. In Texas, capital crimes are punished by one of two terms: death or life w/chance for parole in 40. If a jury wants to keep someone off the street permanently, their only choice is death. Movements in the legistlature to add "life without parole" have been muted for the last 4 terms, with one sorry excuse being that the legislature is afraid that it would give current inmates on death row a basis for appeal. And in Harris County (Houston), where the district attorney is known for the "death count" he keeps on his office wall and for setting off firecrackers in the stairwells (I am not making this up), state psychologists who dare diagnose a capital offender as "retarded" are systematically removed from the state's vendor list and replaced with someone who will not find the inmate retarded so that a death conviction will stick.
Is that the violent and brutal element you speak of? Undoubtedly.
- Deborah