Chupacabra Report

News that gets my goat..

You’ve heard about Alvin Green of South Carolina winning the Democratic Primary to run against Sen. Jim DeMint, (R-Flypaper) raising questions about how this unpolished, unemployed stealth candidate came up with the $10,000 filing fee, and why he thought he ought to run for the Senate, or more accurately, who put him up to it.

Now we have a suspicious development in the race for Texas Governor involving a candidate from the Green Party. It seems that Garret Mize, of the Texas Green Party, was paid $12,000 by Rick Perry’s former Chief of Staff Mike Toomey to convince his party leadership to accept $350,000 from out-of-state Republicans to hire a petition drive to place a Green candidate in this year’s race for Texas Governor.

So far there’s been no comment from Governor Perry about his crony’s actions to place a third party candidate in the race to draw votes from former Houston Mayor Bill White.

But to observers of the Texas GOP, this is nothing new. It seems that vote suppression, illegal campaign finance, and dirty tricks make up the Tory strategy for winning elections.

I just hope this story has legs. How many people realize how Tom DeLay’s TRMPAC packed the statehouse using illegal corporate campaign spending, so that they could usurp the Texas congressional delegation with an off year redistricting? In recent years Republican elected officials denied or disqualified thousands of the voters over tens of questionable votes. The Harris County Registrar had a staffer who used his access to voter info to run a consulting operation, GOP Senator Dwayne Bohac’s Campaign Data Systems, selling data to GOP campaigns. And lets not forget how the Republicans in the Legislature bollixed-up the last session trying to pass a Voter ID law, and promise to do the same in the upcoming session; like Texas doesn’t have enough pressing business.