From a flyer or something published for the 1848 presidential campaign, images of the Whig Party ticket, Zachary Taylor for president and Millard Fillmore for vice president:
"Zachary Taylor, People's candidate for president; Millard Fillmore, Whig candidate for vice president"
We probably shouldn’t read anything into Taylor’s being identified as the “People’s Candidate” and Fillmore’s being identified as the “Whig Candidate.” Probably just the copy writer’s way of not sounding redundant.
The fiercely independent Democratic Blog of Collin County compiled a series of Burnt Orange Report posts that make the case that Rick Perry should be retired from the governorship, at a bare minimum.
Will voters wake up before Tuesday, and do the right thing?
Even the conservative, often stuck-in-the-mud Dallas Morning News endorsed Bill White to take the governor’s chair. Texas needs people to be smart about this race.
DemocratBill White is better-suited to steer this ship of state through the challenges ahead.
The former mayor of Houston is a fiscal conservative with a progressive bent. He’s more pragmatic than partisan. He’s proven himself competent in business and in public office. Indeed, he’s a bit of a throwback – in the best Texas tradition of the businessman governor.
We don’t make this recommendation lightly. This newspaper has a long history of recommending Rick Perry for office against Democrats from agriculture commissioner to the governor’s office. But Texas requires a different kind of leadership at this important juncture.
Bill White is an entrepreneur and an energy expert who succeeded in the private sector before branching out into public service. White, 56, has no use for Perry’s swashbuckling, coyote-shooting style. The Democratic candidate is meticulous and analytical, hesitant to overpromise but determined to solve Texas’ most pressing problems.
As Houston’s mayor, White proved himself to be adept at balancing budgets, managing to cut property tax rates repeatedly. He drew national acclaim for his leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
And White laid waste to the idea that environmentally friendly policies inevitably were bad for business – a myth that Perry perpetuates as he fights to maintain Texas’ right to pollute with impunity. In Houston, White struck a careful balance, proving that a city could go green and still be open for business.
As governor, White would be well-positioned to deliver in areas where Perry has fallen short.
For example, Texas’ transportation infrastructure needs are daunting and urgent. Yet Perry seems to be stumped when it comes to offering workable funding options for building roads. The governor’s go-to move is to blame Washington – and he does, for not sending more money. That’s a fine lament, but it won’t pay for any new lane miles.
White recognizes the need for new revenue sources and supports allowing counties to call elections to raise funds for transportation projects. This local-option approach has the support of North Texas transportation leaders but would stand a better chance in the Legislature with the backing of the governor.
Every major newspaper in Texas endorsed Bill White for governor, over incumbent Republican Rick Perry. For the rest of us, Robert Earl Keen’s endorsement should be reason enough, no?
Robert Earl Keen, in this publicity photo standing on a Texas highway, endorsed Bill White for Governor of Texas -- no doubt to keep the Texas road going on forever.
GO VOTE!
Release from Bill White’s campaign:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Bill White bands together with Robert Earl Keen
White, Keen ask students to vote for Bill White
DENTON — On Friday, Bill White and Robert Earl Keen, legendary Texan singer and songwriter, will roll into Denton, Nacogdoches, College Station and San Marcos for special early vote concerts. The concerts are free and open to the public on a first come basis.
“College students have a huge stake in the governor’s race,” Garry Jones, Students for Bill White Director, said. “For many of us, Rick Perry is the only governor that we’ve ever known, and we don’t like what we’ve seen. College tuition rates have jumped by 93 percent under Perry’s reign, and we understand that our teachers are being forced to teach us how to take multiple choice tests and not prepare us for college or careers.”
“Texas students are lucky that we have a candidate who will put our needs first,” continued Jones. “Someone who will be more concerned with fighting for our future here in Texas than battling the federal government to raise a national profile. That candidate is Bill White!”
Robert Earl Keen is one of Texas A&M’s most famous graduates. Last weekend, the Bryan-College Station Eagle, endorsed Bill White. The editorial board wrote:
“[W]hy any loyal Aggie would vote for Rick Perry is beyond us . . . Ten years of Rick Perry as governor are more than enough. It is time for a change and Bill White is that change. He is a strong fiscal conservative who proved as mayor of Houston that it is possible to do more with less. We’ve had the less. Now it is time for the more.”
Early voting started Oct. 18 and continues through Friday, Oct. 29. To find a polling location near you, visit http://www.billwhitefortexas.com/ev/
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Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
In fact the GOP’s deficit-detonating tax-cut proposals make the Democrats with their spending look like pikers. The stimulus bill, remember, cost $787 billion. The tax-cut bill that Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell unveiled last week—a combination of making permanent the Bush tax cuts and throwing in a host of other tax credits—has a price tag of around $3.9 trillion. For those keeping score at home, the self-styled party of fiscal responsibility wants to blow a hole in the budget nearly five times larger than the alleged profligacy they have spent the last year or more condemning.
Who is listening to the facts anymore?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Bill White is rising in the polls, and, according to some watchers, has a good chance to unseat Texas Gov. Rick Perry, seeking an unprecedented fourth term in office (he succeeded George W. Bush when Bush won the presidency).
Perry is scared, as illustrated by his chickening out of debates (he said that he wouldn’t debate White unless white released tax returns dating back nearly two decades, more than Perry has by a long stretch; plus, the period covered includes White’s service in the federal government, which required an annual report of financial information more detailed than tax returns).
White’s been combing Perry’s record to document where he and Perry differ — and in the doing, White’s team discovered that the official records from the governor’s office show he puts in fewer than ten hours of work a week.
If just half the Texans who put in more work hours than Rick Perry were to vote for White, White would win in a landlside.
At a minimum, it makes for an interesting political ad.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Four years ago, while few were watching, Democrats took every county post in Dallas County, Texas, previously a bastion of Republican votes. Not even normally-Democratic-leaning Harris County (Houston, nor Bexar County (San Antonio), went so blue.
In Corpus Christi in July, Democrats were wowed by a slate of powerful state-wide off candidates — Bill White, very successful, pro-business Mayor of Houston nominated for governor, a firebrand of a woman named Linda Chavez-Thompson to make Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst sweat and run from debates, and Hector Uribe for Texas Land Commissioner, and others. White is leading Gov. Rick Perry in fundraising.
Lots to get to today as [Joe] Driver takes a hit, we learn more about the state’s budget problems and thousands of prison workers could be out of work.
While the split between 77 Republicans and 73 Democrats in the Texas House is close enough that there has always been a legitimate battle for partisan control in 2010, most objective observers have long said Republicans are likely to keep a House majority heading into next year. For one thing, it’s a Republican year, and for another, GOP groups seem better-organized and better-funded than usual, and for another, we already know of one seat (Wichita Falls) that is likely to switch from Democrat to Republican because of an incumbent’s retirement.
Well, this thing just got more interesting.
Jay Root of the Associated Press reports in this morning’s papers that Rep. Joe Driver, an 18-year-legislator, has been getting reimbursements from the state for legislative-related travel and other expenses paid by his campaign, to the tune of $17,431.
From Root’s story: “A north Texas state representative who rails against the evils of runaway government spending admitted Monday that he has pocketed thousands of dollars in taxpayer money for travel expenses that his campaign had already funded. Rep. Joe Driver, R-Garland, faced with findings from an investigation by The Associated Press, acknowledged in an interview that for years he has been submitting the same receipts — for luxury hotels, airline tickets, meals, fees and incidentals — to both his campaign and to the Texas House of Representatives. He has also been collecting thousands of dollars in state mileage reimbursements for travel in vehicles for which his campaign has shelled out more than $100,000 since 2000. The AP’s review of hundreds of pages of state and campaign travel records found that Driver double-billed for at least $17,431.55 in travel expenses, much of it at fancy out-of-state hotels, since 2005. The number could go higher, but House travel records before mid-2005 have already been destroyed. Driver has been in office for 18 years. The double-billing figure does not include the vehicle expenses.”
What’s almost as amazing as the story itself is Driver’s reaction to the findings. His initial effort at damage control made Linda Harper-Brown look like Karen Hughes.
“Now you’re scaring the heck out of me,” Driver told the AP, adding: “It pretty well screws my week.”
Ya think?
Later in the story, Driver says, “If I knew it was wrong, I wouldn’t have done it that way. I wouldn’t have done it just to make money.”
Dan Quayle’s son, Ben, has raised obnoxiousness and rudeness to new heights (that’s “rudity” or “rudiferousness” to Palinistas).
Quayle the Lesser is running for Congress in Arizona, the state where his family owned a huge interest in the state’s main newspaper, and the state where his father, Dan, said he learned all about California while spending time with family in Arizona growing up. (Logic? You wanted logic?)
And he’s put out this ad.
I’ll wager the ad gets more play on the internet than on television.
Sounds like Quayle is really, really desperate. Do the polls show him down that much? It’s a 10-way race for the Republican nomination, with the primary election on August 24.
Quayle has other embarrassments already in the campaign, including a campaign flyer that showed him playing with two little girls, when he was married just this past April (the girls turned out to be his nieces), and a connection to an off-color website regarding Scottsdale.
Years ago Esquire magazine named Sen. Bill Scott, R-Virginia, the “stupidest” senator on Capitol Hill. Scott called a press conference to deny it. The first question he was asked: “If you’re not the stupidest senator, who is?”
A more clear demonstration of bad weather vane politics could not be imagined, could it?
Republicans’ relying on focus-groups to determine their positions, instead of doing what is right, is a major problem for us all — but especially in an election year.
For Inglis, this is the crux of the dilemma: Republican members of Congress know “deep down” that they need to deliver conservative solutions like his tax swap. Yet, he adds, “We’re being driven as herd by these hot microphones—which are like flame throwers—that are causing people to run with fear and panic, and Republican members of Congress are afraid of being run over by that stampeding crowd.” Inglis says that it’s hard for Republicans in Congress to “summon the courage” to say no to Beck, Limbaugh, and the tea party wing. [emphasis added] “When we start just delivering rhetoric and more misinformation . . . we’re failing the conservative movement,” he says. “We’re failing the country.” Yet, he notes, Boehner and House minority whip Eric Cantor have one primary strategic calculation: Play to the tea party crowd. “It’s a dangerous strategy,” he contends, “to build conservatism on information and policies that are not credible.”
Tip of the old scrub brush to Sara Ann Maxwell.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
It’s maybe an apocryphal story. Republicans in Texas hope so.
It was at a very large, mostly African-American church in Dallas. The social action committee, or whatever it’s name is, was meeting. The only white guy in the room was there to try to get them interested in the elections for the members of the Texas State Board of Education. Normally these races are sleepers, down ballot, and off the radars of almost all interest groups. The social action committee was just as tough an audience as any other group with limited resources and limited time to try to get good political action.
Besides, a good chunk of Dallas is represented by Mavis Knight, an African American who is a pillar of common sense on the Texas education board, and Ms. Knight’s seat isn’t being contested in 2010. Why should Dallas voters be interested in any of these races?
“Before we start talking,” the lone white guy said, “I’d like to show you some of what has been going on in the Texas State Board of Education over the last year, in their work to change social studies standards.”
And he showed the video below. The entire committee grew quiet, silent; and then they started to shout at the television image. “What’s that?” “Is he crazy?” “He said white men gave us civil rights?” “HE SAID WHAT?”
A 58-second video clip that could greatly animate electoral politics in Texas. The comments came fast and loud.
“That was part of the debate? What, are they crazy down there? Don’t they know history? Don’t they know the truth? They aren’t going to tell our children that Martin Luther King didn’t work to get civil rights, are they? They aren’t going to say Martin Luther King died, but some white man gave rights to African Americans — are they?”
It’s a video clip that every Republican candidate in Texas hopes will be hidden away. The Democratic tide that has swept Dallas County in two consecutive elections threatens to stop the Republican stranglehold on statewide offices in November, if those who voted in such great numbers in 2008 turn out again.
There are other stakes, too — the Republican stranglehold allowed the state education board to gut science standards, to eliminate Hispanic literature from language arts standards, and to try to change history, to blot out Thurgood Marshall and as much of the civil rights movement as they could hide. So Texas children get a second-rate, incorrect set of standards in social studies, in English, and in science.
Republicans have declared war on good education, war on the children who benefit most from good education.
So, according to Don McLeroy, who lost the primary election to keep his seat, this little piece of history, below, is inaccurate. Tough for McLeroy — the Schoolhouse Rock video sits in too many Texas school libraries. Sometimes, the facts sneak through, defying the best efforts of the Texas State Soviet of Education to snuff out the truth.
But don’t you wonder what every woman, African American, and Hispanic in Texas will think about the importance of the 2010 elections, when they see what Gov. Rick Perry’s appointee to chair the SBOE, thinks about how civil rights were achieved in the U.S.?
Over at Republican headquarters, they hope that story is apocryphal.
Bill White, Linda Chavez-Thompson, Barbara Ann Radnofsky and others are clearly superior candidates running on a real, pro-Texas, pro-business, pro-family platform. Help Texas, help America, help yourself: Support them and give them your votes in November.
Texas Democratic Party platform word cloud
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 