Vouchers Dead, Dead, Dead

If a Right-Wing Republican dominated Legislature, cowering under the stiletto bootheel of Tom Craddick, can't pass vouchers (or stop a pay raise, however modest, for the liberal, secular humanist, Islamo-fascist teachers), then I think it's safe to say the issue is deader'n a doornail for the forseeable future.
Somewhere, Dr. James Leininger is crying in his bottled organic milk.

Okay, THAT Hurts...

"Gonzales" and "Trust"...

...two words that just don't go together.

H/T Wampum

If I Were An Advisor to President Bush...

...I'd tell him to sign the Iraq Budget Supplement WITH the pullout deadline. And I'd tell him to add a one line signing statement, "The President will enforce this act consistent with his powers as commander-in-chief." And then I'd wait for the Democrats to start howling, because there will be NOTHING they can do about this until at least the actual deadline runs and even then, the courts won't get involved in an intra-branch dispute when they could dodge it by invoking the "political question" doctrine. Then what's left? Impeachment or nothing. If the Bush White House really wants a constitutional Battle of Armageddon with Congress, this would be a blockbuster.

UPDATE: Slate has picked up on my fiendish solution. So, President Bush, if you are reading this, please note that this blog entry does NOT constitute a contract, nor initiate any attorney-client relationship. In other words, you're on your own.

The Definition of Insanity...

...is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
So, turns out that the Department of Family and Protective Services (better known as CPS) remains stubbornly still-broken, despite the fact that the Legislature boldly re-arranged the deckchairs on the bureaucratic Titanic two years ago and pronounced everything hunky-dory. So what's Senator Jane Nelson's latest proposal? Why, privitize everything, of course! Because, you know, it worked so well with the Health and Human Services Commission and Accenture...no, wait, I meant charter schools! No, wait! Crap!

Court Reform

A proposal to overhaul the Texas court system isn't being very well-received in the Legislature. One of its more controversial proposals is the create "expert courts" to handle cases deemed "too complex" for local judges to handle. Naturally, many "local judges" find this insulting and the Texas Trial Lawyers Association is concerned that this is just another type of backdoor "tort reform." Normally, I am not a big fan of panels of "experts" doing anything, but this bill (and its opponents both) gloss over a hard fact: as long as we elect judges in partisan elections, "unqualified" judges are going to get elected. And by "unqualified," I mean judges who lack the experience, temperament and judicial knowledge to handle cases but just happened to win because they have the right letter ("D" or "R") beside their name on the ballot. Ask ANY lawyer in Texas and they can tell you horror stories of being caught before such a judge. Republicans complaining about the judges swept into office last November in the Dallas County Tsunami forget that the Reagan Wave in the 1980's swept in all manner of bizarre and downright silly GOP judges all over the state. Ultimately, the only real solution to this problem is to have local judges (district judges and county court at law judges) run in non-partisan elections and run in districts in the big counties to better reflect their communities. Frankly, I think everybody involved in the law enforcement or court system (District Attorneys, County Attorneys, Sheriffs, Constables) should be elected on a non-partisan ballot since they have no real policy-making authority; they merely enforce laws passed by the (properly) partisan Legislature, but that's another issue. Appellate Judges and the Judges of the Court of Criminal Appeals and the Justices of the Texas Supreme Court should be appointed and then have to periodically run in retention elections where campaign contributions are strictly limited. Even then, it might well be necessary to create a sort of "expert pool" of retired judges with specialized knowledge who are retained by the State and dispatched to handle complex cases, such as death penalty trials, that might otherwise overwhelm judges in courts of general jurisdiction who are either new to the bench or never really practiced much in that field (complex commercial litigation, say, or criminal law) before being elected.

Slow Surrender

Tim Giago (Oglala Lakota) on the corrosive effect gaming compacts have had on tribal sovereignty.

Column for 25 March, 2007

“Your rulers are rebels, companions of thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts. They do not defend the cause of the fatherless; the widow’s case does not come before them.”
--Isaiah 1:23

Let’s be clear about one thing right from the get-go: President Bush was entirely within his authority to fire eight US Attorneys. They are political appointees and serve “at the pleasure of the President.” He hired them; he can fire them. You could make a decent argument that US Attorneys should be appointed for fixed terms, to remove the temptation of Presidents to meddle in politically-sensitive cases (which is exactly what happened here), but that’s not what the law currently provides. He can even fire them for not being “loyal Bushies,” to quote one of the many inane, embarassingly juvenile e-mails that document this farce. It wouldn’t be the first time politics overrode justice in this Administration; you may recall when veteran voting rights lawyers in the Justice Department determined that Tom DeLay’s redistricting scam, implemented by his sock puppet Tom Craddick, violated the civil rights of black and Hispanic Texans, only to be overridden by political appointees. But here’s why all of this is a scandal: first, hypocrisy. When Bill Clinton asked for the resignation of all but one of the US Attorneys upon taking office, Republicans in Congress had a wall-eyed conniption fit, even though Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter had both done precisely the same thing when they took office (as would George W. Bush). Senator Bob Dole compared the scandal to Watergate, inaugurating a trend throughout the Clinton years of Republicans frantically damning anything and everything Bill Clinton did as “worse than Watergate.” Second, Democrats are in charge of Congress now, not the pack of snivelling, lily-livered trained poodles that the modern Republic Party has degenerated into. As Senator Barbara Boxer pointed out to Senator James Inhofe recently as he tried to hijack her hearing on global warming, “Elections have consequences.” Or, to put it more succinctly, payback’s a female dog. Third, it smells bad. These US Attorneys were singled out for firing because they were either successfully prosecuting corrupt Republican Congressmen (as in the case of Carol Lam) or for refusing to engage in political witchhunts against Democrats to preserve the GOP majority in Congress (as in the case of David Iglesias). Moreover, as with most political scandals, the cover-up is worse than the actual “crime,” with a variety of assinine, ludicrous and false excuses being tossed out by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales like so much ballast from a rapidly sinking zepellin. In fact, by the time you read this, Gonzales (who will arguably rank with John Mitchell and Edwin Meese as one of the worst attorneys general in US history) may have already been thrown to the wolves by the Bush White House. Now, the Administration is trying to block the power of Congress to make White House officials testify without lying through their teeth, or at the very least, make it so they get in trouble if they do. Bush argues this with a straight face, even though his own press flunky denounced it when Bill Clinton tried it. This is, of course, Bush’s long-sought after Battle of Armageddon with Congress, wherein he rides into the fray defended only by the tin-foil armor of his bizarre belief that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the Founding Fathers intended the president to have powers like unto a Pharoah. I predict this “President as God-Emperor” notion will come back to haunt the GOP when they have to deal with a President Clinton or a President Obama. Unlike that delusional notion, however, the US Attorney scandal is not yet another example of the Bush Administration’s visceral contempt for the rule of law, like running secret prisons, secret courts, unconstitutional signing statements, the fetishization of torture and so forth. No, this is precisely how Bush Republicans think the law is supposed to work; a tool for the wealthy and powerful.
Similarly, back here in Texas, the TYC Disgrace (it’s beyond scandal now) has nothing to do with the fact that a Texas government agency was run incompetently. That’s not news; that’s Tuesday. Texas is, after all, in the words of the late, great Molly Ivins, the national laboratory for bad government. No, what makes this one particularly egregious is that our alleged governor, self-proclaimed warrior for family values, knew as early as June of 2005 that children were being raped and abused in detention centers and did nothing! Our alleged Attorney General, Greg Abbott, knew about children being beaten and abused in detention centers in 2004 and did nothing! That’s not incompetence; that’s criminal negligence. Both of these empty suits are trying to shift blame to a local District Attorney for not prosecuting some of these abuses and I’ll stipulate that Randall W. Reynolds is, at best, a lazy nitwit, and at worst a defender of child abusers, but these are State of Texas facilities. And they were being investigated by the Texas Rangers, part of the State Department of Public Safety. These children were abandoned to their fate because of Rick Perry and Greg Abbott (and Tom Craddick, who recently killed a provision to create a standing special prosecutor to investigate TYC abuses) and a political philosophy that only cares about children from conception to birth (and even then, not enough to provide decent pre-natal care); once they’re out, they’re on their own. In a perfect world, both Perry and Abbott would resign in disgrace over this, or be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. But that’s not going to happen; there were likely never be any justice for the children who are scarred for life because these jacklegs were asleep at the switch. The best we can hope for is that some reform comes from it all and, more importantly, that the voters learn at long last about the dangers of letting the inmates run the asylum of state government.

GUTS

Chet Edwards votes to end the war. In the most Republican district in America represented by a Democrat.
That sound of crickets chirping you hear in the background? That's me waiting for an apology to Chet from all the liberal fascists in this county who regularly bash him as the unholy spawn of Satan.

The Company You Keep

Oklahoma elected officials, including Governor Brad Henry and Lieutenant Governor Jari Askins are scrambling to distance themselves from Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith after the NAACP expressed outrage that they were planning to attend a Smith fundraiser. Smith, meanwhile, is scrambling to distance himself from the anti-Freedmen vote. In the immortal words of Senator Barbara Boxer, "Elections have consequences."

GORE PWNS BARTON

Film at Eleven! Cong. Joe Barton continues to solidify his position as the single biggest wanker in the entire Texas Delegation. A rare combination of nerdy, ignorant, petty and self-important, Smokey Joe has gotten so silly and shrill that he is rapidly descending into self-parody. He is, in fact, the William Shatner of Congress, only less funny. I wish I had a link to Gore's testimony in the Senate, when Senator Barbara Boxer shot down Senator James Inhofe when he tried to take control of the hearing with the devastating line, "Elections have consequences."



UPDATE: Blognonymous has the video of Barbara Boxer smacking down James Inhofe.

Quod Licet Iovi Non Licet Bovi

From the Great and Powerful Kos, an intriguing speculation on just why Dubya is apparently planning to go to war with Congress over an issue that has been pretty well-settled--subpoena power. The short answer: the White House wants a Constitutional Armageddon to try to prove their asinine assertion that the Founding Fathers, despite all evidence to the contrary, intended for the president to be like unto Pharaoh.

Tom Craddick: Backstabbing Poltroon

He also hates children. Probably puppies and kittens, too.
Okay, Mr. Rose? Mr. Turner? Your assignment is for each of you to write "I will not kiss Tom Craddick's ass" 100 times on the blackboard.

More Reactions to the Freedmen Vote

Here, here, here, here and here. This last link is particularly troubling, as it indicates the powerful and influential Congressional Black Caucus is taking an interest in the Freedmen's case. No word yet on the federal litigation; almost an ominous silence.

Conservative Hypocrisy Watch (Update)

Why 2007 is not, in fact, like 1993. From Glenn Greenwald via Atrios. Great minds think alike.

By Blood

A thoughtful essay on blood quanta, the Freedmen, and what it means to be an Indian by Dalton Walker, a Native student journalist.

Great Moments in Race Relations

From our friends in the Potawatomi Nation, this heart-warming story of a local small businessman reaching out in friendship to his tribal customers...

UPDATE: They took it down. Wimps. I can hear the muttering over "political correctness" already...

Today In History...

...Julius Caesar is assassinated in Rome (44 BC).

...another brutal tyrant, Andrew Jackson, is born in Lancaster County, South Carolina (1767)

Not A Good Month to be Me

March has not been a good month for Cherokee Southern Baptists from Texas. First, there was the Cherokee Nation's fraudulent racist constitutional pogrom against the Freedmen; then there's Rick Perry and the Texas Legislature being, well, Rick Perry and the Texas Legislature...and now a prominent Southern Baptist seminarian claims that we should determine once and for all if homosexuality is genetic and if so, we should wipe them all out in the womb.

If anyone asks, I'm really a Unitarian of Lithuanian origin from Connecticut.

Conservative Hypocrisy Watch

Bill Clinton calls for the resignation of all US Attorneys soon after taking office (a not unusual practice):

IT'S. A. MORAL. OUTRAGE!!!
(And it still is, as the debunked frantic conspiracy theories are recycled)

George Dubya FIRES a select handful of US Attorneys (that he himself had appointed in the first place; an act unprecedented in the last 25 years) for failing to be sufficiently partisan, then has his consigliere lie about the reasons:

Eh.

UPDATE: Everything you ever wanted to know about the hiring and firing of US Attorneys but were afraid to ask, by hilzoy.

A Victory for the Sacred

The Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Bush Administration violated the religious freedom of the Dine (Navajo) and Hopi People by allowing reclaimed wastewater to be used to make snow on the sacred San Francisco Peaks of the Arizona Snowbowl

Suffer the Little Children

The TYC Scandal just keeps getting uglier, with a riot by juvenile inmates at the San Saba facility; revelations that official documents were altered, apparently as part of a cover-up; evidence that Perry's new TYC chief, Ed Owens, is already experienced in covering up sex scandals from his time at TDCJ; an internal email that shows "Special Master" Jay Kimbrough has adopted the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against the Media; and some excellent research from the Blogosphere that shows that evidence of abuse was known as early as 2004. The Senate Criminal Justice Committee has unanimously (and self-righteously) passed a bill to fire the entire TYC Board, a measure only necessary because our alleged Governor lacks the huevos to do it himself. But on the other side of the Capitol Building, Rep. Jessica Farrar places the blame where it truly belongs: a Legislature that has abandoned its constitutional, moral and ethical duties.
Why do scandals like the TYC fiasco happen? Because the government of Texas doesn't give a fat rat's ass about children. Children don't vote; more importantly, they don't donate money to politicians. And evidently, the people of Texas approve of this, because we keep electing this same impotent gang of craven morons, year after year after year.

Column for 11 March, 2007

“Jesus said to His disciples: ‘Things that cause people to sin are bound to come, but woe to that person through whom they come. It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. So watch yourselves.”
--Luke 17:1-3

Two parallel current scandals, in Austin and Washington, DC, illustrate how the blasphemous Republican philosophy of Social Darwinism inevitably leads to criminal neglect of at least two segments of society whose protection should be our top priority: children and veterans. In Washington, the despicable treatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed is merely the tip of the iceberg, a mere symptom of the Bush Administration's delusion that Iraq would be a “splendid little war.” True, the Secretary of the Army has been thrown under the Congressional bus, but it's not just Walter Reed--the VA is riddled with bureaucratic idiocy and indifference. And Cong. Steve Buyer of Indiana, the Republican who was responsible for overseeing VA hospitals until 2007, is downplaying the uproar as “just politics.” At the same time the Right Wing Noise Machine loudly denounces anyone who dares question the catastrophe in Iraq as a traitor or appeaser, the sheer unvarnished hypocrisy of that very same Right Wing abandoning veterans of that war to their fate is absolutely overwhelming. FOX News, for example, devoted twelve times more coverage to the death and paternity issues of a dissolute, drug-addled D-List celebrity than this horrific scandal. Undeterred by reality, the Noise Machine is frantically trying to spin this heartbreaking betrayal of faith as, if you can believe it, proof that “government health care” doesn’t work! These are the people who have the temerity—the unmittigated gall, the brass monkeys—to call dissent treasonous?Meanwhile, back in Austin, the Texas Youth Commission stands revealed as a chamber of horrors, where pedophile guards are protected and the State is shielded against any meaningful civil liability for the callousness that allowed it all to happen. A special investigation team has already uncovered 150 more instances of abuse of child inmates, on top of the ones that caused the scandal to erupt in the first place, broken by the venerable progressive monthly, The Texas Observer. Of course, this investigation team is itself headed by Jay Kimbrough, a tainted crony of the feckless, venal and supercilious Rick Perry, whose primary mission appears to be providing political cover for the governor. Had these juvenile inmates broken the law? Yes, or they were accused of having done so. Is that then a justification for abandoning them to be manipulated and sexually assaulted? Of course, this is the same State of Texas that has repeatedly and routinely locked up innocent children (some of them American citizens) in a private prison in Williamson County solely because their parents are accused of immigration violations. I suppose under the circumstances these children should be grateful they weren’t surrendered to the tender mercies of the Texas Youth Commission.But these scandals cannot be so easily dismissed as mere “incompetence,” of the sort we have become painfully accustomed to under Republic Party rule. No, rather both of these scandals are symptomatic of the foul ideology that is the fundamental basis for GOP governance (or the lack thereof). Under what passes for conservative “thinking” these days, the weak are to be despised. Any suffering they bear is their own fault, God’s judgment against them for moral failure. This must be true, because the reverse (the wealthy are wealthy solely because God has shown them favor) is the cornerstone of the unholy blasphemous union between Right-Wing Christianity and Right-Wing Crony Capitalism. Wounded veterans of the Iraq Debacle must be hidden from view, for they are living reminders that the Dear Leader is, in fact, a mere mortal. Besides, Walter Reed might shine an uncomfortable light on the GOP mania for privatization, a mania that is also implicated in the TYC scandal. And children, whether they are the uninsured children of working families or juvenile offenders in custody, can be ignored because the sins of the parents are the sins of the children. Besides, children don’t vote and they don’t donate money to candidates. This is the same philosophy that in the past treated African-Americans as beasts of burden, Native Americans as wild animals to be hunted, and workers as disposable cogs in the machine. This philosophy is utterly alien to the teachings of Christ. It is, in fact, almost the polar opposite of Christianity, which makes the use of Christianity as a fig-leaf for these views, aided and abetted by apostates like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Pat Roberston, all the more damning. There is, to put it simply and bluntly, no way to reconcile Social Darwinism’s message of “survival of the richest” with Christianity. You cannot love both God and Mammon. You can only love one and must hate the other. These scandals should come as a surprise to no one; they are the inevitable result of the anti-Christian, un-American, anti-capitalist economic philosophy that undergirds the modern Republic Party: money talks.

Greg Abbott's Priorities

Apparently, the Attorney General is more interested in harassing the elderly for partisan purposes than he is in protecting Texas children from sex predators in the TYC.

Alert Mel Gibson!

Mayan priests in Guatamala have announced plans to purify the ancient site of Iximche following a visit by George W. Bush.

Hat Tip to Wonkette!

A Hero Passes

Billy Walkabout (Cherokee), the most decorated Native American from the Vietnam War era, died of complications from Agent Orange poisoning on March 7.

From Our Readers...

...this classic:

How many members of the Bush administration does it take to change a light bulb?
The answer is 10:

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed;
2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed;
3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb;
4. One to tell the nations of the world that they either favor changing the light bulb or support darkness;
5. One to give a billion-dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb;
6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a step-ladder under the banner "Light bulb Change Accomplished";
7. One administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in detail how Bush was literally "in the dark";
8. One to viciously smear #7;
9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light bulb-changing policy all along;
10. And, finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing in a light bulb and screwing the country!

Today in History...

...the Gnadenhütten Massacre (1782). Ninety-six Munsee (a Christian band of Lenape/Delaware) are clubbed to death with mallets by Pennsylvania militiamen who falsely accused them of participating in raids against white settlers. Among the victims are 29 women and 39 children. The bodies are scalped and mutilated. No criminal charges are ever brought against the murderers by white courts, though one, Captain Charles Builderback, is killed in Ohio by Indians in June of 1789.

Cuddlier, Dammit!

A Reader kindly submitted this proposal for Anime Dick Cheney. I think he should be made the new blog mascot. Special thanks to Mister Quibble!

Preserve & Protect

Two parallel scandals, in Austin and Washington, DC, illustrate how the Republican philosophy of Social Darwinism inevitably leads to criminal neglect of at least two segments of society whose protection should be our top priority: children and veterans. In Washington, the despicable treatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed is merely the tip of the iceberg, a mere symptom of the Bush Administration's delusion that Iraq would be a "splendid little war." True, the Secretary of the Army has been thrown under the Congressional bus, but it's not just Walter Reed--the VA is riddled with bureaucratic idiocy and indifference.
Meanwhile, in Austin, the Texas Youth Commission stands revealed as a chamber of horrors, where pedophile guards are protected and the State is shielded against any meaningful civil liability for the callousness that allowed it all to happen.
Under what passes for conservative "thinking" these days, the weak are to be despised. Any suffering they bear is their own fault, God's judgment against them for moral failure. This must be true, because the reverse (the wealthy are clearly wealthy solely because God has shown them favor) is the cornerstone of the unholy blasphemous union between Right-Wing Christianity and Right-Wing Crony Capitalism. Wounded veterans of the Iraq Debacle must be hidden from view, for they are living reminders that the Dear Leader is, in fact, a mere mortal. Besides, Walter Reed might shine an uncomfortable light on the GOP mania for privatization, a mania that is also implicated in the TYC scandal. And children, whether they are the uninsured children of working families or juvenile offenders in custody, can be ignored because the sins of the parents are the sins of the children. Besides, children don't vote and they don't donate money to candidates. These scandals should come as a surprise to no one; they are the inevitable result of the anti-Christian, un-American economic philosophy that undergirds the modern Republic Party: money talks.

Freedmen Kicked Out

The constitutional amendment to disenroll the Freedmen has apparently passed overwhelmingly, despite strong editorials against it. With the federal courts now involved, the Cherokee Nation faces the very real threat that the June Tribal elections will either be thrown out or not recognized by the BIA, leading to a cut off of vital funding. Principal Chief Chad Smith, one of the strongest backers of the amendment, began trying even before the vote to put a positive spin on what is clearly a race-based disenfranchisement of thousands of people with strong historical, cultural and in some cases blood ties to the Nation. I have a great fear that the end result of all this will be yet another blow to tribal sovereignty.

UPDATE: More reactions to the vote from around the Blogosphere. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

Happy Texas Independence Day!!

The Unanimous Declaration of Independence made by the Delegates of the People of Texas in General Convention at the town of Washington on the 2nd day of March 1836.

When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted, and so far from being a guarantee for the enjoyment of those inestimable and inalienable rights, becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their oppression.
When the Federal Republican Constitution of their country, which they have sworn to support, no longer has a substantial existence, and the whole nature of their government has been forcibly changed, without their consent, from a restricted federative republic, composed of sovereign states, to a consolidated central military despotism, in which every interest is disregarded but that of the army and the priesthood, both the eternal enemies of civil liberty, the everready minions of power, and the usual instruments of tyrants.
When, long after the spirit of the constitution has departed, moderation is at length so far lost by those in power, that even the semblance of freedom is removed, and the forms themselves of the constitution discontinued, and so far from their petitions and remonstrances being regarded, the agents who bear them are thrown into dungeons, and mercenary armies sent forth to force a new government upon them at the point of the bayonet.
When, in consequence of such acts of malfeasance and abdication on the part of the government, anarchy prevails, and civil society is dissolved into its original elements. In such a crisis, the first law of nature, the right of self-preservation, the inherent and inalienable rights of the people to appeal to first principles, and take their political affairs into their own hands in extreme cases, enjoins it as a right towards themselves, and a sacred obligation to their posterity, to abolish such government, and create another in its stead, calculated to rescue them from impending dangers, and to secure their future welfare and happiness.
Nations, as well as individuals, are amenable for their acts to the public opinion of mankind. A statement of a part of our grievances is therefore submitted to an impartial world, in justification of the hazardous but unavoidable step now taken, of severing our political connection with the Mexican people, and assuming an independent attitude among the nations of the earth.
The Mexican government, by its colonization laws, invited and induced the Anglo-American population of Texas to colonize its wilderness under the pledged faith of a written constitution, that they should continue to enjoy that constitutional liberty and republican government to which they had been habituated in the land of their birth, the United States of America.
In this expectation they have been cruelly disappointed, inasmuch as the Mexican nation has acquiesced in the late changes made in the government by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who having overturned the constitution of his country, now offers us the cruel alternative, either to abandon our homes, acquired by so many privations, or submit to the most intolerable of all tyranny, the combined despotism of the sword and the priesthood.
It has sacrificed our welfare to the state of Coahuila, by which our interests have been continually depressed through a jealous and partial course of legislation, carried on at a far distant seat of government, by a hostile majority, in an unknown tongue, and this too, notwithstanding we have petitioned in the humblest terms for the establishment of a separate state government, and have, in accordance with the provisions of the national constitution, presented to the general Congress a republican constitution, which was, without just cause, contemptuously rejected.
It incarcerated in a dungeon, for a long time, one of our citizens, for no other cause but a zealous endeavor to procure the acceptance of our constitution, and the establishment of a state government.
It has failed and refused to secure, on a firm basis, the right of trial by jury, that palladium of civil liberty, and only safe guarantee for the life, liberty, and property of the citizen.
It has failed to establish any public system of education, although possessed of almost boundless resources, (the public domain,) and although it is an axiom in political science, that unless a people are educated and enlightened, it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty, or the capacity for self government.
It has suffered the military commandants, stationed among us, to exercise arbitrary acts of oppression and tyrrany, thus trampling upon the most sacred rights of the citizens, and rendering the military superior to the civil power.
It has dissolved, by force of arms, the state Congress of Coahuila and Texas, and obliged our representatives to fly for their lives from the seat of government, thus depriving us of the fundamental political right of representation.
It has demanded the surrender of a number of our citizens, and ordered military detachments to seize and carry them into the Interior for trial, in contempt of the civil authorities, and in defiance of the laws and the constitution.
It has made piratical attacks upon our commerce, by commissioning foreign desperadoes, and authorizing them to seize our vessels, and convey the property of our citizens to far distant ports for confiscation.
It denies us the right of worshipping the Almighty according to the dictates of our own conscience, by the support of a national religion, calculated to promote the temporal interest of its human functionaries, rather than the glory of the true and living God.
It has demanded us to deliver up our arms, which are essential to our defence, the rightful property of freemen, and formidable only to tyrannical governments.
It has invaded our country both by sea and by land, with intent to lay waste our territory, and drive us from our homes; and has now a large mercenary army advancing, to carry on against us a war of extermination.
It has, through its emissaries, incited the merciless savage, with the tomahawk and scalping knife, to massacre the inhabitants of our defenseless frontiers.
It hath been, during the whole time of our connection with it, the contemptible sport and victim of successive military revolutions, and hath continually exhibited every characteristic of a weak, corrupt, and tyrranical government.
These, and other grievances, were patiently borne by the people of Texas, untill they reached that point at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. We then took up arms in defence of the national constitution. We appealed to our Mexican brethren for assistance. Our appeal has been made in vain. Though months have elapsed, no sympathetic response has yet been heard from the Interior. We are, therefore, forced to the melancholy conclusion, that the Mexican people have acquiesced in the destruction of their liberty, and the substitution therfor of a military government; that they are unfit to be free, and incapable of self government.
The necessity of self-preservation, therefore, now decrees our eternal political separation.
We, therefore, the delegates with plenary powers of the people of Texas, in solemn convention assembled, appealing to a candid world for the necessities of our condition, do hereby resolve and declare, that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a free, Sovereign, and independent republic, and are fully invested with all the rights and attributes which properly belong to independent nations; and, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions, we fearlessly and confidently commit the issue to the decision of the Supreme arbiter of the destinies of nations.

Richard Ellis, President of the Convention and Delegate from Red River.Charles B. StewartTho. BarnettJohn S. D. ByromFrancis RuisJ. Antonio NavarroJesse B. BadgettWm D. LacyWilliam MenifeeJn. FisherMatthew CaldwellWilliam MotleyLorenzo de ZavalaStephen H. EverettGeorge W. SmythElijah StappClaiborne WestWm. B. ScatesM. B. MenardA. B. HardinJ. W. BurtonThos. J. GazleyR. M. ColemanSterling C. RobertsonJames CollinsworthEdwin WallerAsa BrighamGeo. C. ChildressBailey HardemanRob. PotterThomas Jefferson RuskChas. S. TaylorJohn S. RobertsRobert HamiltonCollin McKinneyAlbert H. LatimerJames PowerSam HoustonDavid ThomasEdwd. Conrad Martin PalmerEdwin O. LegrandStephen W. BlountJms. GainesWm. Clark, Jr.Sydney O. PenningtonWm. Carrol CrawfordJno. TurnerBenj. Briggs GoodrichG. W. BarnettJames G. SwisherJesse GrimesS. Rhoads FisherJohn W. MooreJohn W. BowerSaml. A. Maverick (from Bejar)Sam P. CarsonA. BriscoeJ. B. WoodsH. S. Kimble, Secretary

Meet The New Boss...

...Same As The Old Boss? The Democrats are having a hard time living up to their promises on ethics reform.
And, shockingly enough, Republicans are making hay over the Speaker's assinine decision to put William Jefferson on the HOMELAND SECURITY COMMITTEE! See what happens when you don't listen to me?