Lessons for Obama from Bush
Wayne Slater on Trail Blazers has a curious take on an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Paul Burka of Texas Monthly. Burka and Slater claim that "can't deliver on his politics of hope any more than Bush could deliver on his promise of being a uniter, not a divider." The argument is that the American political system is inherently adversarial. Burka and Slater support their argument by identifying divisive tendencies in Bush even in Texas, before he ran for President on a reputation for being a uniter.
Well, Obama is no Bush. It's one thing to say being a uniter in Washington is a hard promise for Obama to keep. It's another to imply that Bush ever had any intention of keeping that same promise. Big difference.
A week ago, pundits were inaugurating Obama as president before he won even his first primary. After New Hampshire, where Obama lost by about the polls' margins of error, a hypothetical Obama presidency itself is being dismissed as "doomed". The press is fickle but never in doubt.
The Politics of Construction (of Light Rail)
Rufus Shaw on Dallas Blog puts up a spirited defense of his wife, Lynn Flint-Shaw, chair of the DART board. Or maybe he doesn't, on the advice of her attorney who advised him not to comment. Defense is needed because of the embarrassing fact that DART's estimates for building lines to Irving and Rowlett were off by 100%, or a billion dollars.
In the end, it comes across as him saying he could defend her, if he was free to, but you'll just have to take his word for it. She's a victim of "race mongers" or something like that. She didn't know of a billion dollar shortfall until just a month or so ago. And it wasn't misappropriated. They just did a lousy job of forecasting. Besides, Denver miscalculated by three billion dollars. There, don't you feel better about the DART board and its chair, now? If this is the best defense Rufus Shaw can offer, he should have listened to his wife's lawyer and just kept his mouth shut.
2008 Tom Pauken, Same As 2007
The new year finds no changes in Tom Pauken's tired old whines. He goes to a real estate CEO to report the shocking discovery that Dallas property taxes are too high. He again fails to find a link between the state's constitutional allergy to income taxes and the reliance on property taxes instead. Tom Pauken is more interested in shifting the tax burden from the rich to the working classes than in achieving a fair, broad-based, progressive tax system in Texas. So far in 2008, it doesn't look like he's found any more convincing arguments than he offered in his failed run at this issue in 2007.
Pauken then goes all the way to Vietnam to find his latest example of religious persecution against Catholics in the world. Or rather, a decades-old example, since the case in question involves confiscation of church property in the 1950s and 1960s. A lone priest has been overseeing a Hanoi church alone ever since. A weekend public protest against the treatment of the church gives Tom Pauken reason to believe that the Communist government may be headed towards collapse. See if Tom Pauken ever gets to buy his plane tickets for his triumphal return to Vietnam before he dies. See if Pauken ever shows any empathy towards victims of religious persecution other than Catholics. Just don't bet the farm.
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