El Paso Politics

Well here is the consequence of city council's ridiculous vote. Let's see how long this lasts. This is the box that all members of council have to put their phones in. Poor Richarda has to walk around with this thing all day!  Hilarious. Only this city council will do something this ridiculous. 

I'll post some more serious stuff later but right now I thought I'd post this fun little piece and about the D'oh bug having run its course through the all the candidates for Tax Assessor Collector.  Let's call it Fun with Stock Photos. Check out this mailer that landed this weekend from Siria Rocha. As you can see from these two other photos, it's a stock image. And this one: Same image, just the angle is flipped and it's cropped differently. That's not really the D'oh! Take another look at the first image.  See it?  Rocha's campaign sent the mail to the campaign manager of her opponent. I mean it's not exactly a secret that Michael Apodaca is running Ruben Gonzalez's campaign.  Has her data person never heard of an opposition list? 

Its strange that such an important - and overtly political - development such as the DA investigating the dealings at city came out on a Friday. But its a big story. More importantly its a big deal and its going to impact City Hall. Lets start with that the practical impact of a DA investigation means. The Texas Rangers will start a brand new investigation, its not going to be something that will just pick up where the Fischer report left off. You're talking about the actual Texas Rangers, not the crappy baseball team. They aren't going to come in and go through the motions of an investigation. They aren't going to just flip through someone else's investigation (especially considering it wasn't done by law enforcement to begin with) to come to their conclusion. They are going to have their own independent process that will make people more nervous than going through a teenaged boys bedroom with a black-light or your internet search history. You're bound to find...

District Attorney Jaime Esparza has been getting a lot of criticism on the campaign trail about not having a leading role in the public corruption cases that plagued El Paso for many years. In fairness to Esparza he did try former founding member of Socorro's G-Unit, Jesse Gandara. He got a conviction but didn't put anyone on the stand during the punishment phase and the communities in the Lower Valley were upset that Gandara only got probation. But in this article in the El Paso Times,  Check out this article from El Paso Times: Texas Rangers asked by DA to review City Hall report http://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/local/el-paso/2016/02/26/rangers-asked-review-el-paso-city-hall-report/80994172/  it appears Esparza is going to take a look at the ethics investigation report.  Now when you hear Esparza's answers to attacks by his opponents about why he didn't take a more active role previously, his desire to look into this case appear to fly in the face of his previous...

I briefly mentioned the fact that at least two members of council basically share the same staffer, Dora Oaxaca. If you recall I wrote about how she had explained that she was working for Rep Acosta but that she was also getting paid by Rep Noe to help him out with stuff dealing with the MPO. The MPO stands for the Metropolitan Planning Organization and they are one of the most powerful entities around because they are the body that divides up the local funds for transportation and mobility in the region. Its the entity that the city has having all kids of issues with meeting their requirements and have been losing out on a lot of money. All you people complaining about how the city lost $20 million dollars...you should be more upset about the city losing TRIPLE that amount in lost or postponed projects because of their inability to get shit done on time and correctly. So Noe getting some help from Dora Oaxaca on those issues isn't really a surprise. She has been working on MPO stu...

Here's some quick notes from the political scene that I haven't gotten around to talking about because of campaign stuff but are really important for El Paso. The Black El Paso Democrats made a little history recently and elected the first woman president of organization. Sissy Byrd took over the reigns as president recently. Congratulations to her and the Black El Paso Democrats. *********************** Twymeni Purchase RIP The El Paso Democratic Party lost one of our own recently. Twymeni Purchase passed suddenly this week. She was an active member of the Party. I first met her and her husband during the Obama-Hillary War of 2008. Very nice and religiously faithful people. Her passing is not only a big loss to the black community in El Paso but also to the religious community and the El Paso Democratic Party. My thoughts and prayers are with her husband Steven and the rest of their family.

Awhile back in the local Democratic Party scene there was all the buzz when the various establishment groups were all getting behind Hillary Clinton and getting on that bandwagon there was talk about bringing Hillary to El Paso. As a veteran of the Obama-Hillary War of 8 years ago, I remember fondly the energy behind that race. The Hillary people were coming out of the wood work. There were Hillary signs and stickers everywhere. On the Obama side we tried to do what we could but it was clear that El Paso was Hillary country. And on Election Day, we saw huge voter turnout numbers in El Paso. Seriously big numbers. Numbers so big that when we campaign types put together ground ops, we typically through those numbers out the window because they were such an anomaly. But there were people that maintained hope, (see what I did there) that Hillary would still be able to draw big numbers. Well time to play the sad trumpet. We haven't seen a big uptick in voting. In fact, turnout has been ...