Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Now Just What Constitutes Fraud, Waste, and Abuse? And Wasn't That A Republican Mantra?

Just read this dandy post on BOR, a report on Chris Bell's appearance in Galveston. I'm just gonna give you a taste of Chris Bell on the Texas Enterprise Fund, which may be a fancy name for Republican Business Slush Fund:
Here is where the façade falls down and we find out the dirty little secret behind all those big promises. Rick Perry says that he spent more than $200 million to bring more than 22,800 jobs. But earlier this year, the Legislative Budget Board reported how many jobs had actually been created. Anyone want to guess how many jobs we got for $215 million dollars?

It wasn’t 22,000, not by a long shot. Anyone have any guesses?

The truth is so awful it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. For $215 million, the Texas Enterprise Fund only created 275 jobs as of January 31. Two-seventy-five. That’s about a million bucks a job. Some of those jobs will become real in the future, maybe ten years down the road, maybe someday, if we squeeze our eyes shut and wish really hard, but right now we’re paying way too much to do way too little.


Can you spell C-O-R-R-U-P-T-I-O-N?

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Blockwalking, Chili, and Mutt and Jeff

Well, John Courage came over, gave us some blockwalking training yesterday, and sent us out to practice. We realized getting signatures in 3088 was going to be like digging diamonds - hard, long, dirty work. I say dirty because some of us had to do some really quick and dirty thinking getting past gate guards into a few developments, like pretending to be house-hunting.

Molly, 8 years old, fell immediately in love with John, and he was a little surprised, until COMM-D explained that she has been seeing his bumper stickers all around, and now that she is meeting the man, she was " a little in awe". Of course, it doesn't hurt that John is a doll-baby, tall, good looking, and approachable. Plus, he looked like a candidate in his blue blazer thing. Her grandpa, Candidate Larry is as approachable, but quite a bit shorter than John. And she seldom sees him in anything other than sweat pants and a tee shirt, covered in dirt, or paint. So, if you see him being referred, not-quite-disrespectfully in these pages as "Little Larry", it is a sort of Mutt and Jeff reference when we think of the two local Dems running for office to save America, and save Texas.

So, here's the chili. I call it Blockwalker's Chili. Now those good folks who came here to walk for John and Larry could have been being either real polite or real hungry, but the chili did seem to go over pretty well. It was almost gone by the time everybody left, so I am giving y'all the recipe here:

5 lbs ground round of beef
1 of those really big cans of pinto beans, weighs about as much as a newborn (I know, I know, beans don't belong in chili, but think of them as a nutritional supplement, like the tomatoes you will also see in this recipe)
2 one-pound cans fire-roasted, chopped tomatoes
1.5 cups chili powder (yes, cups is correct)
2 T cumin
2 T onion powder
1 T garlic powder

Fry the ground round, draining it of fat (or not). Add 1 quart of water, the tomatoes, and the spices. Cook about 30 minutes on low, then put it into a big pot, and stir in the whole can of beans, liquid included, and 1 quart more water. I had to use an 8-quart pot for it all. Stir in the beans carefully so as not to mash them up, unless you like mashed-bean chili. Simmer on medium about an hour, then turn the heat down lower and continue simmering about an hour or more.

This is not your gourmet, authentic chili - I like that, too; this is for the hard-core blockwakers who just need something good to eat before facing a mostly-Republican precinct.

And to those stalwarts who braved hustling petition signatures in this Republican precinct - Muchisimas Gracias! (Put in your own upside down exclamation point and accent marks, please - I can barely embed links, and that took me almost a year to be able to do without a cheat sheet. This should tell you we are running a shoestring operation here.)

Today, we are going to take a few hours off to do some Christmas stuff for the baby in the family. I keep thinking because he towers over both his parents and is not home much at all, we can dispense with trees, lights, Christmas mugs and decorations, but, no. He shows up just in time to force me into it. Then his face lights up, he gives me that 5000 watt smile, and I think it was worth it.