The foul fowl's stench gets worse

The following is a Letter to the Editor that I sent to the San Antonio Express-News this morning...

The foul stench emitting from the Express-News comics page was even more odorous and offensive this past week as the “Mallard Fillmore” strip launched a vicious and nasty week-long attack on public school teachers to mark the beginning of the new school year.
Why the Express-News editors tolerate this nastiness is a mystery to me. Whenever the Doonesbury strip has anything even remotely controversial they are quick to yank it and run replacement strips. But I suppose a mean-spirited “comic” strip that mocks public school teachers as being stupid and lazy is perfectly fine with them.
The public school system is a favorite target of Bruce Tinsley, the far-rightwing author of the humor-free Mallard strip. Whenever he tires of drawing grotesque caricatures of politicians he does not like — with their eyes crossed and their noses and chins stretching off the page — Tinsley typically turns his wrath on postal workers, school teachers, labor unions, immigrants or any other group of people to serve as the scapegoats of his twisted ideology.
Real conservatives should be just as offended by Tinsley’s hateful diatribes as the people who get slapped in the face everytime they open their newspaper. They should demand that the Express-News follow the lead of its sister paper in Houston and dump the foul fowl and replace it with a conservative strip that does not bring shame and dishonor on their side of the political spectrum. Prickly City, which already runs in the E-N, is one example and there are many others.
I am not a teacher, nor am I employed by the school system or any part of the public sector. But I send my kids to public school and I respect the good work that their teachers do to give them an excellent education. It is too bad that our teachers have to be denigrated everyday in their daily newspaper’s so-called funny pages.

How awfully convenient for Rick Perry!

Former Houston Mayor Bill White will need a lot of votes out of Harris County if he is going to win a statewide race for governor. How incredibly convenient for Rick Perry that all the voting machines for Harris County would be destroyed in a mysterious fire just a few weeks before election day.
It boggles the mind.

How I despise judicial elections!!

It's election time again and the street corners are filling up with campaign signs mostly for the dozens of judicial races up for grabs.
And despite the fact that I am a voracious reader of the "news" and follow politics at all levels as a hobby, I have no clue as to who any of these people are.
Oh, sure, I could probably tell you which person is the incumbent and maybe even which party they come from. But that's about it. And that is pretty sad to base an election on. Then you consider that most people know even less about the candidates than I do and you realize it is nothing more than a name recognition contest which comes down to who can raise the most money and get the most campaign signs up, and who can saturate the airwaves with the most advertising.
Enough!
We have no business electing judges in the first place! Judges should be appointed and approved by the people we elect to represent us. Once appointed, judges should be completely independent and not beholden to any political party or interest group with the power to lavish or withhold reams of campaign cash.

We have too many elections as it is. The only people we should be electing in a democracy are the ones who actually "represent" us at some level of government: Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, state Reps. and senators, County judges and commissioners, Mayors and councilmembers, school board members and so forth.
But county clerks, treasurers, sheriffs, comptrollers, dog catchers and so forth should be appointed and/or hired by the local governing bodies, not elected by the citizenry.

Hounding celebrities, ignoring crimes

Why federal prosecutors are pushing a perjury case against former baseball star Roger Clemens is beyond me. I have little sympathy for prosecutors who pursue these high-profile, celebrity cases which have little, if any, value to the larger community. I feel the same way about the big, overblown Blagojevich trial in Chicago.
What possible difference would it make if they could actually prove to a jury, beyond any doubt, that Clemens lied in his testimony to Congress? Who cares either way? He’s retired from baseball already. Are they worried that he might get into the Hall of Fame? At this point, I really don’t care. Clemens’ reputation has already been so smeared and drug through the mud already that there is little chance he could win over enough votes to get into the HOF anyway.
Clemens is getting the same smarmy treatment that Pete Rose did. Rose had a gambling addiction that he refused to fess up to for years and years. But it never impacted his playing or any of his historic achievements in baseball and should therefore not be a consideration for his eligibility for the HOF.
I don’t know if steroids affected Clemens’ playing career or not. A lot of people suspect it did and they won’t take his denials as a definitive answer.
Meanwhile, Karl Rove is scot free after lying his rear off to Congress. Same with Dick Cheney and dozens of other Bush-era officials and Scooter Libby got himself a nice pardon.

At least he's not Ben Quayle

2010 Senate elections

The 2010 elections will undoubtedly see some victories for Republicans. There are at least four Democratic-held seats that are almost guaranteed to flip to Republicans for the next cycle: Arkansas, Indiana, Delaware and North Dakota.
North Dakota is a clear give-away to the Republicans. Byron Dorgan’s decision to step down now set up a cakewalk for popular Republican Gov. John Hoeven to waltz right into the seat with little opposition.
In Arkansas, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s primary loss to incumbent Blanche Lincoln pretty much sealed the fate of Democrats there. It is very likely that Halter would have lost as well, but Lincoln is almost a lock to go down to defeat.
In Indiana, Republican former Sen. Dan Coats is nearly a lock to take the seat being vacated by Democrat Evan Bayh. I had hope that U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth could put up a good fight, but the polls aren’t reflecting that. Unless something changes, he looks like toast.
And it is highly frustrating that a reliably Blue state such as Delaware is all set to replace Vice President Joe Biden in the Senate with a Republican. What a slap in the face! Thanks a lot, you Delaware losers! That’s almost as bad as Blue Massachussetts replacing Ted Kennedy with Republican Bozo Scott Brown.
The only semi-bright spot is that Republican Mike Castle will join Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins in the Almost-Non-Existent, Blink-And-You’ll-Miss-Them Moderate Wing of the Republican Tea Party.
In the other races, I am fairly confident that Democrats will be able to hold on in most cases and may even have an opportunity here or there for a pickup of their own.
I think Richard Blumenthal will have little trouble hanging on to the seat in Connecticut being vacated by Chris Dodd. I also think Michael Bennet’s chances of re-election in Colorado are now greatly improved thanks to the Tea Party nominating a wacky candidate in the Republican primary. The same goes for Harry Reid’s chances in Nevada.
What this will all mean, unfortunately, is that Republicans will have an even easier time filibustering everything under the sun and forcing the entire United States government to near gridlock. If something doesn’t give soon, I fear that our whole democratic system of government will bust apart at the seams.