El Paso Politics

El Paso, TX - Today, El Paso County Tax Assessor Collector announced that he will seek a fifth term representing the County of El Paso.    “15 years ago, I decided to run for Tax Assessor-Collector, because I believed the Tax Office needed new leadership. It has been a tremendous honor to serve as your Tax Assessor-Collector and once again I am asking for your support,” Flores said.     Victor A. Flores was elected in November 1996 and will be seeking another term in office.  The deadline to file for all offices in the March primary election is in December.

As I mentioned the press conference yesterday regarding the recall movement and the signature gathering operation was pretty interesting. I noticed that when asked directly in two successive press conferences whether the recall supporters gathered signatures at church's Pastor Brown would not answer the question. As you can see in this video sent to me a couple of weeks ago, during mass on Sunday, August 28th, 2011 one of the recall supporters appears to allegedly be soliciting signatures for the recall drive. This was sent to me by a parishioner who was at the mass and shot the video from their cell phone. The parishioner says that he didn't believe that the church was aware of what the announcement was going to be when the announcement was being made. The witness says that the solicitation came at the end of the service, during the announcement portion of the mass.

Another thing I noticed about the Caballero-Leeds-Brown press conference I referenced this morning was that when asked about signatures to recall Susie Byrd, they all said they didn't know. I found it odd that they knew the numbers of Ortega and the Mayor off the top of their head, but they couldn't recall what the numbers were for Byrd. My personal opinion is that they don't have enough. Word on the street is that they were scrambling to try to get enough signatures and that phone calls were going out to the constituents stating that Susie Byrd was working on some kind of eminent domain issue in the district in order to try to drum up support for the recall. More details as they become available.

There is a name that has been floating around lately for as a possible candidate for the state house seat currently held by State Rep Chente Quintanilla. A guy by the name of Hector Enriquez. If they name sounds familiar, its because his father was formerly the County Clerk. Hector Enriquez also served on the SISD School Board a while back if memory serves. That's all I have for now...

Okay, I have been getting a lot of flack about the Bobby Kennedy remark. I don't mind getting criticism, hell I get it all the time. But all the people that are pissed about the Bobby Kennedy remark are people that weren't there. There is nothing wrong with giving an honest assessment. O'Rourke was impressive last night. Deal with it. Just about anyone who was there probably made a similar assessment. And another thing, why aren't you people pissed off at the Gandara's being called the Kennedy's? There is honestly no real comparison between the Gandara's and the Kennedy's other than they are wealthy political families that maintained political control over a given area. For the Kennedy's it was New England and they had the White House. For the Gandara's it was Socorro, for a short time. O'Rourke was dynamic, bright, eloquent, and was able to inspire a level of excitement in a group of people I have never seen before in El Paso. The Gandara...

So if you haven't seen the video of a press conference held by Stuart Leeds, Theresa Caballero, and Tom Brown yesterday on the El Paso Times, you should go and watch it. Its fascinating stuff. I noticed that during the press conference Theresa Caballero was asked a question from a reporter (from El Diario if I'm not mistaken) about whether the recall people had a PAC. Her response made me curious. At another point in the press conference in response to another question, Caballero emphatically stated, "We follow the law." Over the weekend there was a sticker attached to the El Paso Times that reminded people that they were running out of time to sign the recall petition. That costs money. Certainly more than $500. I mention $500 because that is the spending threshold before you have to file as a PAC. So I went digging around to see if the recall people had filed a PAC. I didn't find any listing of a PAC for the organization, although I did find a listing for El Pa...

That's what several people had to say about their impression of the campaign announcement of Beto O'Rourke earlier this evening. O'Rourke made his bid for Congress official before a standing-room only crowd at Tablas Restaurant & Bar, which was about a couple of hundred people. Here is the audio of his campaign announcement speech (I'll post video tomorrow): The crowd was loud, energetic, and decidedly younger than most political crowds in El Paso. I didn't recognize most of the crowd, in fact I only recognized about 20 or so people there, which means the vast majority of the supporters in attendance aren't your normal Democratic Party crowd. In fact, the only person in attendance that I noticed as a normal Democratic Party regular was Tony Escobedo. The announcement, as an event, went off without a hitch. After seeing the original "soft-launch" of the campaign, I thought there was a better than even chance that the campaign was going to go off in...