by Elise Hu, The Texas Tribune
September 7, 2010

Already the state’s single largest Democratic donor this campaign cycle, the Houston attorney has pledged to contribute at least $3 million to the party and its causes this year and has no intention of turning off the faucet. The man behind the Back to Basics PAC’s “coward” ad sat down with the Tribune last week to talk about why he feels the need to give, the influence of money in Texas politics, how “trial lawyer” became a perjorative and what he really thinks of the Democrats’ chances this fall.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/aQ0XtY.

Pat Hernandez, KUHF MP3

Tropical Storm Hermine’s rapid formation in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the fastest on record.

Hermine went from tropical depression to tropical storm in just 21-hours over the weekend, an extremely fast intensification rate. Hurricane Humberto in 2007 holds the record at 18-hours. Impact Weather Meteorologist Chris Hebert is a hurricane expert. He says Hermine’s quick development was no surprise, since the southwestern Gulf of Mexico is prone to these types of rapid formations.

“We had been looking at that disturbance in the eastern Pacific on Thursday and Friday and some of the model guidance had been predicting for the past week, that part of that disturbance would move into the Bay of Campeche, and develop into some kind of low pressure system in the gulf that would track up toward northeastern Mexico. So a couple of days before, we had already alerted our clients to that possibility that something would be developing there and tracking up in the general direction that it did.”

Latest on Hermine (Google)
National Hurricane Center (NPR)

Historically September is the month when tropical activity peaks in the Atlantic, but Hebert says its not unusual for developments to occur early or late in the hurricane season.

“We saw it with Alicia in 1983. A weak frontal boundary pushes off the coast, just some thunderstorms out there and it forms into a hurricane within about 36-hours. They can form very quickly in the early parts of the year when there are fronts moving off shore, and in the latter parts of the year. When we start to get fronts out in September and October in the gulf, they can form with the thunderstorms of these cold fronts, and they can form on the cold front, and form into a tropical cyclone very quickly out in the gulf.”

The topography of the land surrounding the Bay of Campeche induces a counter-clockwise spin to the air over the region, which helps in the quick formation of tropical storms.

“We’d love to prepare for all emergencies and disasters, if we knew they were going to happen three days from now. Unfortunately, that’s not the world in which we live.”

Mark Sloan coordinates operations for the Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, He says planning for weather related emergencies is a year round endeavor.

“We have to be prepared today, and that’something that we want our public to understand is that, when we talk about it in May of hurricane season, its making sure you have non-perishable food and water all throughout hurricane season, cause they can pop up out of nowhere, and impact us in a very short time frame.”

Sloan adds its important for newcomers to the area to be aware of this time of year.

“We know from June 1st to November 30th and our proximity to the coastline, that Mother Nature can stir up a storm in a hurry, and we just want our communities to take the time and review their plans and their kits that they did back in June. This is the heart of hurricane season and survive whatever it is we may face in our near future.”

by Mose Buchele
September 7, 2010

Ask anybody — from the president of the United States to your high school guidance counselor — and you’ll probably hear the same, seemingly obvious thing: Higher education is the key to financial advancement. But is everybody going to college a realistic goal? And would the world really be better if we achieved it? Mose Buchele of KUT News reports.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/beci9s.

WHYY: Waylon Jennings once said, “If we could all sound like we wanted to, we’d all sound like George Jones.”

TPR: EPA Toxic Coal AshBy David Martin Davies, Texas Public Radio

Everyday tons of coal in Texas are burned to generate our electricity. There are plenty of federal regulations about what comes out of the smoke stack – but none for the ash waste – which contain heavy metals and other toxic contaminants.

The coal ash is dumped in landfills with little to no required safeguards, leading to contaminated soil and groundwater.

Now the Environmental Protection Agency is looking at regulating coal ash for the first time.

A recent study by Earthjustice found that a coal ash site at the Fayette Power Project in LaGrange – 75 miles- southeast of Austin is contaminating two creeks with arsenic.

The electric power industry is lobbying to keep regulation up to individual states.
The EPA public hearing is in Dallas on Wednesday.

Related
Current: Texas leads nation in coal ash waste production

by Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune
August 30, 2010

The governor depicted by Democrats as a coward in statewide newspaper ads last week doesn’t seem nervous.

In fact, Rick Perry looks pretty comfortable, though he says he’s taking his Democratic challenger, Bill White, seriously and expects the last two months of the general election campaign to be at least as much work as his primary battle earlier this year against U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Republican renegade Debra Medina.

He’s traveling six days a week, combining campaign and official business — a pace that will continue through Election Day. On the last Thursday in August, the pins in the map were on Killeen, for a college groundbreaking ceremony; Temple, for some unfiltered politics at a barbecue haven; and Texarkana, for the first day of classes at a new college building, some meetings and a private fundraiser. A reporter from The Texas Tribune accompanied him as he made his way from stop to stop.

Undefeated in five statewide elections over the last 20 years, Perry has a well-oiled operation and a network of staffers, former staffers, friends and supporters built up over the years into a statewide political machine. But machines without messages don’t win elections. This cycle, the theme of his campaign is pro-Texas, anti-Washington, we’re-mad-as-hell-and-we’re-not-gonna-take-it-anymore conservatism, which syncs up conveniently with the populist political tide that’s gripped the country.

The opposition argues that it’s time for change, that Perry’s tenure at the statehouse has left Texas with a deficient public education system, high insurance rates, a “pay-to-play” government run by donors and a revolving door that allows too many high officials to flit profitably between the public and private sectors. They hope the negative perception of people in power that has imperiled so many Democrats can be turned against Perry.

Perry, however, believes the prevailing mood isn’t necessarily anti-incumbent (of course, he would say that, since he’s been in state office for more than 20 years and in his current job for 10). Rather, it’s anti-the-current-state-of-things: The economy is tight and the federal government is growing and people are ticked off. He went to a number of Tea Party rallies on April 15, 2009 — including the one in Austin where he uttered his infamous non-rejection of secession — and came away confident about the coming GOP primary and about the political season in general.

“I knew it at the end of the day,” he says. “Austin, Arlington, Fort Worth. I saw regular, everyday people — just working stiffs, moms, sisters, Hispanic, African-American. … When I got home, I was like, ‘This isn’t going away. This is the real deal.’”

Fiscal matters shaped the primary and now the general campaign, pushing the social issues that have been Perry staples to the side. “That’s not what is on the forefront of people’s thought process right now,” he says. “Yeah, it’s still important to them. I’m not confused that there’s been any degradation of that belief system. But when your pocketbook is being attacked, when you’re really concerned about what the future of this country is going to be for your children or yourself, then that is immediate. That is now.”

Perry is still pro-life and pro-family values and all that, but that’s not what voters are talking about. A recurring line in the governor’s stump speech has four points: “We have created an atmosphere in Texas where you’re not going to get overtaxed, over-regulated, over-litigated and where your kids can get a good education,” he says. Another: “Principle No. 1 in government: Don’t spend all the money.” And: “Get out of the way, government, and let the private sector do what it does best.”

Perry successfully made the primary election a referendum on Washington governance instead of state governance, defeating Hutchison — painted as the embodiment of the federal government — with surprising ease. Now he’s trying to paint White with the same brush: as a confederate of the Democrats in Washington, hoping to color the former Houston mayor as the enemy in the war between the state and the feds.

White likes to tell audiences that he’s traveling the state, applying for a job. Perry’s answer, in so many words, is that there’s not a job opening. “We’re all a little bit in a test-pilot mode,” he says. “People know me. People know my record. I’m not an unknown. I don’t have to go out there and say, ‘If you elect me, here’s what I’ll do.’ And it’s really never been that way before.

“The opponent out there, he’s got to go out there and say, ‘Here’s what I would do different.’ And people aren’t thinking state government. They’re thinking we need to really stop spending money in Washington, D.C., and get this country back on stable financial footing.”

Perry points, in particular, to four areas of contention: the conditions that went along $550 million in unemployment insurance that he rejected from the feds, the current fight between the state and the federal government over who should regulate air quality in Texas, a new law that would prevent Texas from using more than $800 million in federal education money unless it promises not to lower state spending, and the federal health care package signed into law earlier this year. “The federal government and their strings attached make it harder for the states to actually govern themselves,” he says. “And it goes to the soul of the Obama administration’s statist beliefs. They want to run Texas and the other 49 states.”

On the trail

Perry’s first stop on his trip last Thursday was for state business, set under a big tent on a patch of land in Killeen that will be the site of a new Texas A&M University campus there. It was an hour of speeches from public officials ranging from the mayor all the way up to governor, who took the opportunity to tout the strength of the state’s economy, to link education to jobs and to say the new campus is “a tangible reminder of our state’s commitment to education.” The event had an atypically bipartisan tone, with Perry thanking former Democratic state Rep. Stan Schlueter for years of work getting the school located and built, and U.S. Rep. John Carter, R-Georgetown, going out of his way to praise Democratic U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards of Waco, who used to represent the area, for his help. (Schlueter was there; Edwards wasn’t.)

Later that afternoon, Perry spoke to a crowd on the first day of school in a freshly finished building at Texas A&M-Texarkana, with much the same message about the economy, education and opportunity. Then he was off to a private fundraiser. Sandwiched between the two state events was a political stump speech for a lunch crowd that had been waiting 45 minutes for the guy whose name was on the sign out front.

The friendly crowd at Clem Mikeska’s Bar-B-Q in Temple (across the street from Rylander’s Best Hamburgers, if you’re looking for political omens) ate it up. Standing on a chair under a mounted set of Texas Longhorns, Perry steered his listeners through subject matter that wasn’t a regular feature in his earlier campaigns: gubernatorial and legislative races in other parts of the U.S. “We’ve got good candidates all over the country,” he said. Perry talked his way through New Mexico, Oregon, South Carolina and Nevada with a little detail from each. Regarding Nevada, for instance, he told the crowd he’s for Brian Sandoval, who’s running for governor against Rory Reid, the son of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “If you’ve got a little extra money, send it to Nevada,” Perry said. “It’s a two-fer.”

That prompted a question, later on, from someone in the audience who wanted to know if the governor of Texas wants to be the next president of the United States. “No,” Perry said. “I have no intention to go to Washington, D.C., except maybe to go to a museum, like the Smithsonian.”

Social issues might be in the back seat, but they’re still in the car: “There is still a land of opportunity, friends — it’s called Texas,” Perry said. “We’re creating more jobs than any other state in the nation. … Would you rather live in a state like this, or in a state where a man can marry a man?”

He talked about the full-page ads that appeared a day earlier in newspapers around the state, featuring a shadowy picture of Perry under the word “Coward.” He told the crowd Texans don’t like that sort of name-calling — they nodded their heads at this — and then said he hopes the Democrats keep it up, since he thinks the ads probably do more harm to White than they do to him. The Coward campaign is a product of the Back to Basics PAC, a political action committee funded almost entirely by Houston attorney Steve Mostyn, and it’s based on Perry’s refusal to debate White until the Democrat has released tax returns for years when he was in public service, elected or not. Perry didn’t talk about debates at Mikeska’s, and none of the people in the audience brought it up.

“Look, Bill White won’t remove taxes from his repertoire,” Perry said later, on the plane ride from Temple to Texarkana. “He won’t do it. And if you think for a moment that a former personal injury trial lawyer is not going to let this guy who’s putting in $5 to $6 million turn back the clock on tort reform in this state, you’re dreaming. We know what will happen with him. And that is worth fighting for. … We fought hard for 10 years to get us in this position, and I’ll be darned if I’m gonna let some guy ride into here and turn back the clock on all the progress we made. And he would.” (That epithet for White isn’t entirely correct; the Democrat was a trial lawyer, but only has one personal injury case — handled for a friend — on his record.)

The campaigns will start ads of their own in the next few days. Both candidates are prowling the state for votes and media coverage. The gears of a modern election are engaged. Perry is in his element.

“For me it feels great out there,” he says of his time on the trail. “I have big crowds. We’re in the last 60-plus days of a campaign. This is about energy. This is about focus. This is about getting people fired up about doing the hard work of a campaign. If I’m not touching the buttons that fire them up, then I’m not being a good leader.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/axoEBR.

NYT: The Texas attorney general has opened an antitrust investigation into how Google ranks search results, the first United States case to strike at the heart of the company’s main search business.

NPR: A fire on an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico has been extinguished, the owner of the rig said Thursday.

The platform, about 100 miles south of the Louisiana coast, exploded Thursday morning. All 13 people aboard were rescued from the water in the second such disaster in the Gulf in less than five months.

Production Platform On Fire South Of Louisiana, U.S. Coast Guard Reports
The owner of the rig, Houston-based Mariner Energy, said the cause of the fire remains unknown and that an investigation is under way.

NPR: According to U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Colclough, an offshore oil rig, Vermilion Oil Rig 380, owned by Mariner Energy, Inc., is on fire, some 90 miles south of Vermilion Bay, below Marsh Island, Louisiana.

In an interview with CNN, he said there were 13 people aboard the rig. All of them have been accounted for. Twelve of the employees have been placed in immersion suits. They will receive medical treatment at Terrebonne General Medical Center in Houma, Louisiana.

Eight Coast Guard rescue helicopters have been dispatched to the rig location. In addition, three Coast Guard cutters — Decisive, Manta and Skip Jack — are en route, with four civilian vessels.

As of last year, Mariner Energy, which is headquartered in Houston, “had interests approximately 240 blocks on the continental shelf and 100 blocks in deepwater,” and “net interests in more than 185,000 acres, primarily in the Permian Basin and Gulf Coast.”

NPR‘s Corey Flintoff: President Obama has drawn an official end to U.S. combat operations in Iraq, but challenges lie ahead in a country that faces persistent insurgent violence and political turmoil.

In a prime-time address Tuesday night, the president called on the American people to put the energies that were devoted to Iraq into the widening fight in Afghanistan and the need to rebuild the U.S. economy.

But Obama also foreshadowed what analysts say will be a difficult and dangerous job of training Iraqi forces to maintain their own country’s security. And he reminded Iraqi leaders that the U.S. commitment to Iraq will continue, but that they must stop factional bickering and form a government.

Speech Transcript, Live Blog, Press Gaggle en route to Fort Bliss in El Paso earlier in the day