Month: January 2008

One place in which the Internets, as Prez Gee Dubya calls ’em, have made a huge splash is in the speed and ability of obtaining political campaign finance data. Slightly more than a decade ago, when working as a reporter at a small East Texas newspaper, I can remember going on an assignment in Austin for something or other. My editor told me that since I was going out there, I should stop by the Texas Ethics Commission and get the disclosure reports for the local politicians. That’s right little chil’ren we didn’t have an Internet then and used to have to walk five miles in the snow to get coffee and it wasn’t even Starbucks. How primitive, right?

A short while ago this evening I was looking at the Federal Election Commission Web site. They have now a user-friendly “map” on which contributions to both presidential candidates and those of congressional candidates can be searched. It is really easy. It’s kind of like eating lettuce.

I did a search of money given to presidential candidates from folks in my very own city, Beaumont, Texas. It is home to a bevy of high-profile trial lawyers — names like Walter Umphrey and Wayne Reaud of the tobacco litigation wars, and upandcommer Brent Coon who has been making his name by besting British Petroleum over their killer Texas City refinery explosion in which 15 workers died. Beaumont courts over the years have also turned out large verdicts in asbestos and various other civil litigation. The city doesn’t quite display: “Beaumont: Judicial Hellhole and Damn Proud of It,” but close. The area is also filled with refineries and traditionally has had a Democratic labor union base. So given these fields of employment it isn’t very unusual that trial lawyers and some others would mostly be giving to Democratic presidential candidates.

Coon himself, for instance, is shown with more than $7,000 spread over five contributions to both John Edwards and Joe Biden. That’s not a lot, but despite the national media’s clamor over the first primaries and the Iowa caucus, the election is in (shhhh!) November. FEC stats shows Reaud giving $4,600 split evenly between Biden and Bill Richardson. And while the Mrs. Umphrey has a few donations of her own, $4,600 was doled out by Walter Umphrey, between the $2,300 for Bill Richardson and $2,100 for John Edwards.

As I said, these contributions are hardly surprising to anyone around these parts or others who might know what a “Yellow Dog Democrat” might be.

Contributions for one of our area congressmen are a little more puzzling. Republican U.S. Rep. Ted Poe went to the House largely on his fame for headline-grabbing “creative” sentencing when he was a state district judge in Houston. He has never met a news camera, especially one playing to right-wing causes, that he didn’t like. Poe has been the darling of immigration hawks like Lou Dobbs and the Fox News crowd. The congressman has been seen in news clips on the Texas border, which if you know anything about Texas is a hell of a long drive from his own district.

Yet FEC records show that Walter and Sheila Umphrey contributed a total of $8,400 to Poe’s campaign. Dick DeGuerin, arguably one of the nation’s premiere criminal defense lawyer, gave Poe $1,000. That is kind of a surprise but not. DeGuerin was David Koresh’s attorney but he also represented former GOP House Marjority weasel Tom DeLay. No big surprise is the $2,000 given Poe by Drayton McLane, Houston Astros baseball team owner and a former board of regents member at uber Baptist Baylor University in Waco. To be fair, Umphrey is a graduate of Baylor Law School and a donor of the millions given to build the Sheila and Walter Umphrey Law Center at Baylor. Speaking of schools, the $250 donation doesn’t stand out and probably neither does the name Dr. James Simmons of Beaumont except for the fact that he was long-time band director and now president of the area’s state school Lamar University.

Poe has been in the forefront of the anti-immigration effort to release from prison two former border patrol agents — Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean — who were imprisoned for shooting a suspected drug dealer who was fleeing across the Mexican border. The agents say they didn’t think he was injured so they didn’t bother reporting the shooting. The suspect received immunity from prosecution for testifying against the agents. In light of this case and Poe’s clamoring for the two disgraced agents’ release, I don’t know if it is irony or just sad that one of his congressional campaign donors is Russell Ybarra, a contributor of $250, who is listed by FEC records as president of Gringo’s Mexican Kitchen.

Nothing “reported” here is particularly earth-shattering, even to me. I don’t know if it is even being reported. I just started looking at some numbers and next thing that I know I think it’s time to shut off the computer for the night. What else I am I going to do, finish that biography of Millard Fillmore (Oh, sorry you dumb son of a b***h, he was the 13th president of the United States of America!) that I have had for a month? Man, that is absolutely the worst of all the presidential histories I have read. I’m sorry if someone reading this was the a cousin or wife or kid of the author, Robert J. Rayback, but I will be happy when it is read and like Fillmore is history.

My goodness gracious how far we have come with civilization so that we can blog from the laundromat? It used to be that people communally doing their laundry could do something like … read or watch soap operas or even … in extreme circumstances, talk.

With a good portion of my young Navy days spent in pursuit of women and beer to drink, it was almost heaven minus West Virginia when I realized a bar down the street from the Seabee base in Gulfport two-fered as a laundromat and bar. I believe the establishment was named “John’s Laundromat and Bar.” Some of the even more hardcore among my young friends but more so among the old-timers was delighted by the fact that John’s opened at 7 a.m. I used to like beer but only winding down a day at 7 a.m. and not starting the day with the so-called “Breakfast of Champions.”

It is funny, however, that once I got into a bachelor enlisted quarters (a.k.a. barracks) with a washer-dryer, going to John’s went out the window because those were the 1970s, the heady days of 35-cent beer in the barracks vending machines.

No matter how easy the Navy use to make it for both doing laundry and heading straight down a pathway toward substance abuse, I never found a particular fancy for washing my clothes. I did continue drinking beer and will drink one every now and then these days.

A lot of talking heads have pontificated upon how this plugged-in, wired-up, dialed-out society of ours is losing interpersonal communication as an important part of what makes a civilization functional. That might well be. Although one may also argue that the explosion of technology gives each other the ability to communicate with each other like never before. I, for instance, keep up with family and friends much better than in the past especially because of the Internet. And those same people can keep up with me either through e-mail, to a lesser extent cellular or occasionally even through my blog although that is not the primary purpose of this site. I no longer bother warning any of them of looking into my world at their own peril. My relatives especially will likely read and have read my points of view, some of which they vehemently disagree. But just like I tell any other cyber voyeur who happens to pass by, the same road that leads into this place leads out. This is my spot, my space if you will, that has been staked out on the great Internet Prairie.

With that said, I think I better see if my clothes are ready to dry. If technology could only make laundry no longer a necessity then I suppose we will have reached Ne’er do well Nirvana. I am willing to give it a try, however.