LoneStarTimes.com

It’s Time to Worry About Houston

The above headline is from PajamasMedia over a column posted yesterday by Bryan Preston, former Communications Director of the Texas Republican Party. He wrote:

I could’ve gone with the “Houston, we have a problem” headline but that’s so … cliché. Nevertheless, the fact is that Houston has a major election problem, one which threatens the integrity of elections in Houston and across the Lone Star State. And when you work in the fact that Texas stands as the nation’s largest solidly Republican state, well, what happens in Houston will not stay in Houston — with next year’s redistricting, it won’t even stay in Texas.

The problem centers on a massive voter registration problem in Houston, and the suspect fire that followed closely once the registration problem became public. On Tuesday, August 24, Harris County’s tax assessor-collector, Leo Vasquez, held a press conference in which he detailed what he called systematic and organized voter registration fraud across the county. Texas Watchdog reported on Vasquez’s presser that day. Vasquez accused two nominally nonpartisan groups, the Texans Together Education Fund and its elections arm, Houston Votes, of engaging in massive voter registration fraud that put as many as 25,000 fraudulent registrations on the county’s roll. Vasquez offered substantial evidence to back up his claim, and likened the groups to ACORN.

Texas Watchdog has covered the story here and posted the 71 page briefing packet given to members of the press by Harris County Voter Registrar Leo Vasquez.

King Street Patriots are calling for volunteers for their True the Vote efforts in Harris County and have been researching the voter fraud themselves.

The King Street Patriots also recently hosted former Department of Justice attorney, J. Christian Adams, for a speech in Houston.  The event on August 9th was covered in depth by Dave Jennings at Big Jolly Politics here.

Adams has become a regular contributor at PajamasMedia and publishes the blog, electionlawcenter.com.  He also covers voter fraud in this piece at PJM posted yesterday.

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By 2010, the general public received a series of shocks. The first shock was the jobless recovery of the Great Recession that cost 8 million jobs. Most of the job losses occurred in the private sector yet the majority of the $800 billion Stimulus Bill went to “save and create” public sector employment. The second shock was learning that civil servants earned twice that of private workers. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal workers received average pay and benefits of $123,049 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation. The third shock was revelation of incredible retirement plans doled out by politicians since 1999. In 2002, California passed SB 183 that allowed police and safety workers to retire after 30 years on the job with 3% of salary for each year of service, or 90% of their last year’s pay. During the Great Recession, fireman began retiring with $150,000 pensions at age 52 despite a life expectancy approaching 80. In Orange County CA, lifeguards, deemed safety workers, retired with $147,000 annual pensions. The Orange County sheriff, recently convicted of witness tampering, will receive $215,000 annually while in jail. Bob Citron, the Treasurer of Orange County who pushed the county into bankruptcy in the 1990s, receives a pension of $150,000 per year. A tsunami of anger and resentment is building.

California once again leads the nation with a $26 billion budget deficit plus an unfunded pension obligation of $500 billion. Its current financial structure is clearly unsustainable. It has an operational structure that in ungovernable with often duplicative agencies, some collecting less in tax revenue than the agencies spend on collection. Wikipedia lists 500 existing public agencies for the State of California. California can no longer afford such a luxury. It must deconstruct these bloated inefficient government agencies, and rid itself of their chairman, staff, offices, cars, pensions and the overhead that such excess represents. A $26 billion dollar deficit is not something that can be corrected with a wage freeze or job furloughs. Bold leadership can lead California to deconstruct its 500 agencies down to 100 functional organizations. California is a classic example of what must change in the coming Great Deconstruction.

Read the whole thing.

What happens in other states, particularly one as large and influential as California, has dramatic effects on the remaining 49 through bond and equity markets.  Keep a close eye and don’t forget the disastrous economic climate in California is driving even their creepiest residents to take up residency in Texas.

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The strain of failure is beginning to take its toll on our president. A strange quote from today’s speech in Milwaukee:

“Some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true,” he told a crowd largely consisting of union members.
Watch the video. His handlers should never let him go off-prompter. In front of a friendly crowd he becomes even more full of himself and starts improvising what he seems to think are witty remarks. This one was just plain weird.

And who exactly are these mean “powerful interests”? Not the unions, I suppose, since he’s speaking to a union crowd. Maybe he’s talking about Nancy Pelosi? Or George Soros? Maybe Michelle is mad at him? We need to get to the bottom of this.

Image from NoSheeplesHere.com

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Download the song: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/tea…
Join us on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TeachenorClark

Nashville based songwriters Jamie Teachenor and “Banjo” Ben Clark team up for this exclusive release, aimed to raise-the-hair and boil-the-blood of every liberty-loving American ready to make a difference this fall…one vote at a time.

Please help the powerful voice of “We The People” ring through the halls of Congress by forwarding this to any and all who are fed up with the Elites in Washington who consistently ignore our cries.

If you’re not registered to vote, PLEASE do so now, and may God bless America now and forever.

Hat Tip for the song video: Gerard Vanderleun of American Digest

Has anyone actually looked at those races featuring “tea-party candidates?” In Kentucky, Rand Paul has been the poster boy for tea-party Republicans. The media has wrung its hands and worried mightily about how his primary victory could cost Republicans a competitive Senate seat. However, the most recent Rasmussen poll shows Paul with a 9-point lead. With only two exceptions, he has led in every poll taken in the three months since his nomination. His opponent has not gotten above 42 percent in the polls all summer.

In Colorado, Ken Buck, another tea-party favorite, won the GOP Senate nomination, prompting more crocodile tears from the media. Despite the implosion of the Colorado Republican party, Buck is leading his opponent, incumbent Democratic senator Michael Bennett, by four to nine points and is pushing 50 percent in recent polls. The defeat of incumbent Utah senator Bob Bennett was met with wailing and the gnashing of teeth among D.C. pundits. The GOP nominee, Mike Lee, holds a 25-point lead. And, most recently, with challenger Joe Miller apparently upsetting Republican senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, the media is wondering whether there is now another Democratic “opportunity.” Apparently, not much of one: Miller leads his Democratic opponent 47–39 in the only post-primary poll.

Meanwhile in Florida, Rick Scott’s insurgent victory in the gubernatorial primary was trumpeted as great news for Democratic candidate Alex Sink. No doubt Scott carries some baggage, but he leads by three points in Rasmussen’s latest poll. At the same time, tea-party favorite Marco Rubio has retaken the lead in his three-way race for Florida’s Senate seat.

Read it all from the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner at National Review.

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There seems to be a distinct disconnect between the elite in the Democrat Party and reality. Despite overwhelming evidence for more than a century of history that socialism’s wealth redistribution schemes never work, they keep on hawking it. Bob Herbert attempts to tug at our heart strings with a touching story of an unemployed maid:

Martha Escobar is staring into the cold, dark, unforgiving eyes of destitution.

Ms. Escobar is one of 16 janitors who were laid off from their jobs at a luxury complex in Los Angeles that houses some of the wealthiest tenants imaginable. JPMorgan Asset Management, a unit of the vast JPMorgan Chase empire, manages an intricate investment web that owns the buildings. The layoffs were ordered by a maintenance contractor, ABM Industries.
…
They also did the mopping and scrubbing at 2000 Avenue of the Stars, which also is part of the complex and is home to an array of glittering businesses, including the Creative Artists Agency, an entertainment and sports powerhouse. The janitors were let go a few weeks ago, and, given the current job market, they have not been able to do much since then but suffer with anxiety.

You know the rant. Rich fat cats getting richer on the backs of the poor getting poorer. In the real world businesses look at a slowing economy and make adjustments. And yes, sometimes that means laying off workers. In Washington, our congressional leaders, the President, and tired Keynsian economists look at the same slowing economy and somehow decide that tax and spending increases will fix everything. But back to Ms. Escobar:

Ms. Escobar is 41 years old and has two daughters, 14 and 10. She told me, through an interpreter, that she had enough money to pay September’s rent but not October’s. She has no savings. School is about to start, but she has no idea how she will pay for her girls’ uniforms.

“I have not been able to find another job,” she said.

No mention of a Mr. Escobar being able to help with the rent and uniforms so I assume he’s not an active participant in the financial dealings of the Escobar family. Another possibility is that he is in the picture but is not mentioned as that would spoil the SEIU thugs’ publicity stunt.

It would also help Ms. Escobar immensely to learn English. That would undoubtedly give her many more employment choices and possibly give her a chance at a better paying job. But this is the Democrats’ America, where she’s a victim. No more melting pot. We’re all about balkanizing America nowadays.

What’s different about these layoffs is that the janitors are not going quietly. They have been vigorously protesting the callousness of their treatment — the way the rich people who employed them for the munificent sum of $13.50 an hour found it so easy to dump them on the scrap heap with the rest of America’s unemployed millions.

The janitors have marched and fasted outside the buildings they once cleaned. And Ms. Escobar and another laid-off janitor, Elba Polanco, were brought to New York City last week by the Service Employees International Union, which represents them, to bring their plight to the attention of Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase. Mr. Dimon has made a fabulous living by, among other things, borrowing enormous sums of money to buy companies and then hurling people out of work.

In the real world of America’s increasingly two-tiered society, you have to laugh at the idea of these janitors trying to get the ear of Jamie Dimon, who counts his wealth by the hundreds of millions. He is royalty, and they are from the peasant class. Mr. Dimon’s universe is orders of magnitude different from the one that Martha Escobar is scrambling around in. He talks to the Geithners and Bernankes and Larry Summerses of the world. The paycheck Ms. Escobar used to get wouldn’t cover Jamie Dimon’s dinner tab.

It would be interesting to see how much the SEIU paid Escobar, et al, for their camera op in NYC. Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, the former SEIU boss representing Escobar had his own media day:

A federal judge Thursday sentenced the former head of one of L.A.’s most powerful labor unions to prison for fraud.

As head of the Service Employees International Union Local 660, Alejandro Stephens once represented 50,000 L.A. County employees. He enjoyed a lot of political clout — until federal prosecutors charged him with fraud.

They say he bilked $52,000 from a union-backed nonprofit called the Voter Improvement Project by entering into bogus consulting agreements that included friends and family. He pleaded guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion.

If we are an “increasingly two-tiered society” it is because for decades the federal government has turned a blind eye to illegal immigration. They have refused to secure our borders. For the most part they have refused to prosecute employers for hiring illegal immigrants. Most of these illegal immigrants are coming from countries that were designed as two-tiered societies centuries ago. These countries export their poverty and we gladly accept it.

Accepting those with no hope in their homelands is nothing new for America. Our great country was built on such immigrants. The problem now is that we no longer require immigrants to become Americans – to embrace our American exceptionalism. As soon as they step foot on our soil we immediately dub them victims. This is a relatively new phenomenon, maybe 30 years old. I first came to Houston shortly after the area became home to a large number of Vietnamese “boat people”.  These folks were subjected to as much prejudice and hate as any immigrants. Around 1980 it was a common sight along Houston area freeways to see Vietnamese crews picking up trash. Within a couple of years you didn’t see them out there anymore. They purchased convenience stores in inner city neighborhoods. Next they purchased small restaurants. Those became larger and larger. These immigrants didn’t whine about picking up litter. They used the opportunity given them, even menial jobs, to improve their lot in life and, more importantly, educate their children. Have you ever seen a homeless Vietnamese person in Houston?

When did it become a crime to offer lower wages for certain jobs? I worked as a janitor as one of my three jobs for several years while attending a Community College in the late ’70s. Yeah it was a lot of work for little money but it got me through college. And it beat the heck out of my previous employment from age 12 to 18 – cropping tobacco, tossing hay bales, and lugging watermelons. These hard, low-paying jobs taught me a valuable lesson: the advantages of an education. When did America lose this?

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