At least one Houston Chronicle reporter and at least one editor forgot that Ed Emmett still had an opponent when Ahmad Hassan dropped out of the race. They forgot to check with the County Clerk's office. But then, the County Clerk's website didn't even have the candidates for the November election up yet. They were still concerned with a special election that just happened.

The weekly San Antonio Current seems to have forgotten that incumbent Democrat Mike Villarreal has Green opposition in the race for his seat in the Texas House. Somebody must have alerted them, because the Current made up for its lack of due diligence by running this short interview with Dr. Paul Ingmundson.

This is one Dr. Paul I think I could vote for, if I lived in that part of San Antonio—unlike, say Dr. Ron Paul or Dr. Rand Paul. At the very least, I might patronize him for help with my sleep disorders.

If you're curious where District 123 is, it's mostly the north side of San Antonio, as well as the downtown area. Here's DistrictViewer, a cool little map-app that shows the boundaries of all Texas Congressional, State House, State Senate, and State Board of Education districts.

A friend from the Glory Days of KTRU-FM, Rice University Radio, replied on Facebook to a recent website update announcement with these words about the incumbent Harris County Judge:

"Emmett brought us roads and driveways paved to commissioners' houses using toll revenues, the elitist strategies we have for HOT/HOV lanes, elimination of free HOV use for motorcycles and for all vehicles on off-rush hours, the ridiculous and overused term 'hunkered down' and mandatory evacuations during overrated storms, and extreme election sign scofflawism. Grrr..."


Over the past 30+ years, Mike has seen me at my best and worst. I've never known him to be overtly partisan, so he won't be voting for me based on the (G) next to my name. Even if he's voting for me because I'm the only alternative to Ed Emmett, I'll accept that.


If any of you want to slip me $13, I'll accept that too. Or more if you're feeling wealthy.

As I write, I am missing the demonstration at the HPD Southeast Command Center. Yes, I know that I should be there. I even rode my bike from work to the site, but I arrived nearly 30 minutes early and didn't see anyone who wouldn't normally be there. At least I made it to the rally at HPD's downtown headquarters last Saturday, along with about 50 others.

As a sign said at the rally last Saturday, "Ferguson is the symptom. Racism is the disease." Racism may not be overt problem at all times. You could be a carrier. You could be ill from it and not even know. Our nation is practically soaking in it.

Darren Wilson, the Texas-born officer who allegedly shot Michael Brown to death, is a young man, just 28. His friend from high school denies that the killing was racially motivated. Somehow Wilson got at least an acute case of the disease.

There have been peaceful rallies all over the US and beyond since the Death By Cop of Michael "Mike Mike" Brown, 18, in Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson, a northern suburb of Saint Louis, is the epicenter of public wrath now. However, never lose site of the fact that this problem is not confined to the mostly black town of Ferguson—not today, not yesterday, not ever.

It is our national problem that police officers, sheriff's deputies, state troopers, and federal agents kill people. They torture people and beat them bloody. And they're not just killing, torturing, or beating "bad guys."

They're killing people who resemble a bad guy, who have the same name as a bad guy, who happen to be where the cops thought the bad guy would be. They're killing and injuring friends and family members of people they suspect to be bad guys. They're killing and injuring bystanders. Sometimes it's premeditated, sometimes it's driven by impulse.

Policework on US streets, especially in our desperate cities and first-tier suburbs, is difficult. It induces a kind of official paranoia. Officers can't put on enough body armor to feel safe. They frequently cannot tell whether the person they're dealing with is armed, has mental health problems, or both. The "safe" approach is to draw your gun before being drawn upon. For some reason, whether owing to experience or a lot of bad TV cop shows, it's easy to fall prey to thinking that a black or brown guy is armed and dangerous.

To invoke an old liberal shibboleth, "Society is to blame." These are the results of the society we have created in the US: competition over cooperation, self-reliance over community, scarcity over abundance (because scarcity is more profitable). This nation "freed" millions of slaves in 1865, only to let the South find new ways to re-enslave them—and then to grow beyond its boundaries. (Did anyone actually get the promised Forty Acres and a Mule? What would those acres be worth now, with 150 years' interest tacked on?)

Race relations in the US are improving year by year, especially among the young, even more so in multicultural spots like Houston. But we still have people of color whose families have been poor for generations; who own their homes free and clear but cannot afford property taxes; who could sell those homes at a decent profit but would have no affordable housing nearby to move into.

These people live with the side-effects of racism every day.

In case anyone forgot, it isn't just black and brown folks who get killed by cops too eager to use their weapons, especially here in Houston.

Let me conclude by planting a song in your head.

(NOTE: I composed this entry some time in June, before I was able to put this website together. I never finished it, but it's long enough as it is, don't you think?--dbc)

I'll be quite candid with you, Dear Reader. I didn't especially want to run for Harris County Judge. Much of county government in Texas revolves around tax policy, and my understanding of tax policy is best described as "intuitive." County taxation and expenditure is as nuts & bolts as it gets.

When I ran for the open US Senate seat in 2012, the office of Senator fit my big-picture orientation on the world; I have a much deeper understanding of and appreciation for the philosophical questions that guide the deliberative house of Congress. I made several trips to various spots in Texas, some of which I had visited previously, some not. It was easy to connect with voters in Austin, San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth, Laredo, Midland-Odessa, Lufkin-Nacogdoches, and West, as well as Houston; most of the voters knew a thing or two about he US Senate.

I saw myself running for Senate again in 2014, this time against the incumbent John Cornyn. However, I made my move a little too late, and Emily "SpicyBrown" Sánchez of Del Rio filed for that position first. I could have run against her—sometimes we do have contested nominations in the Green Party of Texas—but I saw that my schedule in my new job would be less flexible about traveling during the work week and thus demurred.

My next choice would have been to run for US House District 18, occupied since 1995 by Sheila Jackson Lee. Yes, as much as I have touted Rep. Jackson Lee as a Progressive ally, it was time to give her some competition. However, Remington Alessi proved himself much more enthusiastic about taking on this challenge. Whereas I have trepidations about alienating potential allies in the Democratic Party (going back to 2000), Remington has none.

OK then, how about County Judge? I have lived in Houston itself, as well as in the unincorporated wilds of Cy-Fair and Clear Lake. My total time living in Harris County adds up to more than 40 years. I wasn't born here, but destiny brought me here at age 3. My first home here was in Bunker Hill Village, where my grandparents had bought a house during the great oil & gas migrations of the 1960s and '70s. As much as I love Houston itself, I love this sprawling county that is larger than Rhode Island and four times as populous. I have seen examples of good and bad county government: I lived in Precinct 3 when Bob Eckels had his legal difficulties. I have seen 40 years of unguided growth, flood maps redrawn in secret, real estate developers getting too wealthy and powerful, people and small businesses getting the shaft.

It's well past time to bring smart, sensible growth to Harris County.

Side note: Why run against Sheila? For one thing, she's not as Progressive as she would like her constituents to believe. It's hard to be consistently Progressive in the House of Representatives, so I completely understand that: Sometimes you have to engage in horse-trading, and sometimes you have to follow the path that will best serve your district regardless of your ideology. What galls me even more, though, was an incident having to do with Sheila's campaign troops in 2012.

I went to Palm Center on the Sunday of early voting in October 2012. Palm Center, at the corner of Griggs Road and Martin Luther King Boulevard, combines commercial and community facilities between the Third Ward and Sunnyside districts of southeast Houston. It's a great place for early voting, and on that one Sunday locals turn out after church, dressed in their finery, and they socialize before and after they vote. I was encouraging voters to vote for Green candidates in races where the Democrats had no nominees, and to look farther down the ballot for the bond issues (such as $2 billion for fixing HISD school buildings). A few of Sheila's crew showed up and started encouraging voters to vote straight-ticket Democrat, which would have deprived them of voting in two statewide races and on the bonds.

If it were just me, the middle-aged white dude, affected by this, it would have been bad enough, as they made me feel like an outsider bringing in complex foreign ideas like multi-party democracy. But it wasn't just me: Dozens of high schoolers were already there as well, trying to convince voters to approve the HISD bonds, which they couldn't do if they just voted Straight D and walked out. I truly believe that Sheila's campaigners did the people of the MLK Corridor a grave disservice by telling them that voting anything other than Straight D was too complicated for them.

Let's begin the first blog entry on this site by expressing gratitude toward Houston's most astute political blogger, liberal/progressive division, Charles Kuffner of Off the Kuff. A few years ago, Chuck's analysis of local events caught the eye of someone at the Houston Chronicle, who asked him to contribute to the online edition. In this posting, Chuck actually remembered that two candidates remain in the 2014 race for Harris County Judge after Ahmad Hassan dropped his candidacy, whereas the Chron's reporter had not remembered.

Let's continue our spate of gratitude with thanks to another Chuck, namely Jones, for inspiring the title of this entry. Yes, it's rather politically incorrect humor, but the cartoon Hassan isn't stupid because he's a stereotypical Middle-Easterner. He's a stereotypical Middle-Easterner who just happens to be stupid (or at least unable to outsmart a rabbit).

According to the Harris County Clerk's campaign finance figures, Ahmad Hassan had neither raised nor spent a single dollar on the campaign. What a coincidence! Neither had I! But then, I am the candidate for a "minor" party, with very little disposable income of my own, a full-time office job, and no time to go out shaking money trees. Hassan was the nominee of one of the two name-brand parties. It leaves one to wonder why

1. he bothered to pursue the nomination in the first place, and
2. the Harris County Democrats couldn't find a better sacrificial lamb to run against the incumbent, alleged Republican Ed Emmett.

"Alleged," you ask? Judge Emmett is officially a Republican. Until recently it was difficult for a Democrat to win county-wide office here, and, well, he does have some conservative leanings. But as the Republican Party nationally grows more outrageous and Medieval in its ideology, Emmett stands out as a Republican in the mold of New York Mayor John Lindsay back in the 1960s, or even Harris County Judge Jon Lindsay in the 1970s without the crooked dealings.

Hassan better fits the label "alleged Democrat" because of his electoral history: He was the Republican nominee for US House District 18 in 2006. (That's Sheila Jackson Lee's seat.) Perhaps it's more appropriate to refer to him as a part-time Democrat.

Emmett clearly understands the importance of government and doesn't crack jokes about drowning it in a bathtub. In 2008, at the time of Hurricane Ike, he embodied the importance of government. This is part of why Hassan dropped out of the race. And when Hassan dropped out, even though I share his respect for Emmett, I concluded that I could serve Harris County better by staying in.

Am I going to win this race? Not likely. Can I be the non-Republican alternative for yellow-dog Democrats and true progressives who will bother to vote this November? You bet.

My next report to the County, due in a few weeks, will have fewer naughts on it, because now that I've actually begun this campaign, I have raised a few bucks. I also believe that I understand the issues of importance to this county better than Hassan, according to Kuffner's diagnosis after their 2010 interview.

I also understand that Harris County will not be best served by a "business as usual" approach to county government. The Green Vision arose because "business as usual" has always served the top 1% well and left the rest of us to fight over scraps. Here is a small portion of that vision as it applies to our county:

• As a worldwide energy capital, Houston and Harris County can and must take the lead in the switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
• As a region with an astoundingly diverse population, we can and must work to find ways to leverage that diversity to show the world how such a population lives harmoniously.
• As the county that sentences more people to death each year than most states and many nations, we have acquired an international reputation as a pariah; we can and must stop behaving as if  "justice" means "a dark-skinned fellow gets executed."
  

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