GREETINGS FELLOW DEMOCRATS!





TDW Meeting

January 26
Fritella Italian Cafe
Texas Avenue
10 a.m.
Health Care Crisis in America by Dr. Rich DeVaul
Call Carol Biggs at 690-6039 to make reservations





State TDW Annual Meeting

February 29-March 1
Austin, Texas
Dr. Beth Berigan and Bridget Bassett will be receiving Star Awards
To register go to www.tdw.org





Super duper Primary Tuesday

February 5
Margarita Rocks
Come watch with liked minded people





This is a sensitive issue for a lot of people. But it is an issue we all need to be informed on.

Roe v. Wade -- 35th Anniversary Event

Come join us for an informal event featuring Reverend Tom Davis, author of Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances. It will be a fun time of discussion and Q&A.

Sunday, January 20th
6:00pm—8:00pm
Dr. Nancy Bertsch’s home
1111 Park Place
College Station, TX 77840
Please RSVP to Abby Johnson, 979-268-6717

Tom Davis is the chair of the Clergy Advisory Board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and a member of the board of directors for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. In Sacred Work, Davis explains why working for family planning and contraception, abortion services and reproductive health is the sacred work of securing hope and dignity for those who need it most.





Too Funny!!!

This is fall down laughing funny until you think about the seriousness of it.
http://blip.tv/file/520347





Race and Politics

Editorial
January 17, 2008

After watching the subject of race intrude on the primaries last week, and become even more prominent this week, we were relieved that Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama called a truce Tuesday night.

The last thing Americans need is a loony debate over whether it is more important to choose the first woman or the first African-American nominee for president. That threatens to alienate voters more than they are already and obscures the fact that an American party actually managed to create that choice.

The presence of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton should have made talk of race or gender academic. But Mr. Obama seized the mantle of change and upset Mrs. Clinton in Iowa in part by drawing away her support among women. By the time the campaigns got to New Hampshire, the Clinton team was panicking. Mrs. Clinton had to win or risk being out of the primaries entirely.

It was clearly her side that first stoked the race and gender issue. Mrs. Clinton mentioned in a debate in New Hampshire that a woman president would be a change for America. It was an offhand comment, and obviously true. But the next day, at events we attended, Mrs. Clinton’s surrogates were pushing hard the line that a woman president would be “the real” change.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/opinion/17thu3.html?ei=5088&en=c263152d502ed85d&ex=1358312400&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print





El Gobernador

The question isn’t whether we’ll elect a Hispanic to lead Texas. It’s whom, and from which party, and how quickly jai alai’s loss will be our gain.

by Paul Burka
11.2018

The Texas governor’s race of 2018 was one for the history books—on a par with Lyndon Johnson’s disputed victory over Coke Stevenson in the 1948 U.S. Senate race and Bill Clements’s upset of John Hill in the 1978 governor’s race. These elections came at crucial moments in the state’s history that separated the old from the new. Johnson’s 87-vote margin certified the transformation of Texas from a rural state to an urban one and the accompanying transformation of its economy from agrarian to industrial. Clements’s victory, which made him our first Republican governor since Reconstruction, was seen as an aberration at the time, but it proved to be the leading edge of a surge that reshaped Texas from a one-party Democratic state to a one-party Republican state and produced two presidents of the United States.

Now, with the triumph of Dallas mayor Rafael Anchía as the first Hispanic governor, another watershed election has occurred, this one confirming that political control in Texas has shifted from Anglos to Hispanics. What made the 2018 race different from those in 1948 and 1978 was that the change it brought about was one the Texas political community had known was coming. The question was not whether Texas would elect a Hispanic as governor; it was when and whom and from which party.

Anchía and the Democrats benefited greatly from a GOP that had been convulsed over the issue of illegal immigration for a decade, rendering it blind to demographics and even its own self-interest. Two Republican governors, George W. Bush and Rick Perry, understood that the future of the party in Texas depended on attracting Hispanics. Bush’s former political guru Karl Rove believed that Hispanics, because of their patriotism, their religious and family ties, their conservative views on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, and their work ethic, could be won over to the R’s. But the base of the party had an entirely different view. Even as Bush won 40 percent of the Hispanic vote nationally in his 2004 race for reelection, Texas Republicans were adopting a platform plank on illegal immigration that read “No amnesty! No how. No way.” Republican opposition to immigration—and immigrants—grew so virulent that many Hispanics, even those who had voted Republican, came to believe that the opposition was motivated by racism. The election of Anchía may have relegated the R’s to semipermanent minority status in the state they once dominated.

http://texasmonthly.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=El+Gobernador%3A+Texas+Monthly+February+2008&expire=&urlID=25899816&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.texasmonthly.com%2F2008-02-01%2Ffeature.php%3Fclick_code%3D073449ac0004659082a428db7563340d&partnerID=989





BLOOMBERG IN TEXAS SATURDAY TO MEET WITH LANCE ARMSTRONG AND FORMER SURGEON GENERAL

Can a guy willing to spend a billion dollars find a way to get on the Texas ballot as a third party candidate?

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will be in Austin Saturday meeting with Lance Armstrong and former Surgeon General Richard Caroma. No word about the reason for the meeting. Afterward, he will fly to California to meet with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Obviously, both states are rich with electoral votes.

Bloomberg has previously said he is considering running for President as a third party independent candidate. Texas law requires signatures collected between the March 4 primary and May 12, a daunting task for most.





An article well worth reading: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/marketsmag/mm_0907_story1.html

The Insurance Hoax

Property insurers use secret tactics to cheat customers out of payments--as profits break records.

By David Dietz and Darrell Preston
Bloomberg Markets September 2007

Julie Tunnell remembers standing in her debris-strewn driveway when the tall man in blue jeans approached. Her northern San Diego tudor-style home had been incinerated a week earlier in the largest wildfire in California history. The blaze in October and November

2003 swept across an area 19 times the size of Manhattan, destroying

2,232 homes and killing 15 people. Now came another blow.

A representative of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., the largest home insurer in the U.S., came to the charred remnants of Tunnell's home to tell her the company would pay just $220,000 of the estimated $306,000 cost of rebuilding the house.

"It was devastating; I stood there and cried," says Tunnell, 42, who teaches accounting at San Diego City College. "I felt absolutely abandoned."

Tunnell joined thousands of people in the U.S. who already knew a secret about the insurance industry: When there's a disaster, the companies homeowners count on to protect them from financial ruin routinely pay less than what policies promise. Insurers often pay 30-60 percent of the cost of rebuilding a damaged home--even when carriers assure homeowners they're fully covered, thousands of complaints with state insurance departments and civil court cases show.





Two Views in the White House on an Economic Fix

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
January 17, 2008

WASHINGTON — As President Bush weighs a stimulus package to jump-start the sagging economy, a debate has broken out inside the White House over how hard to push Congress to make Mr. Bush’s tax cuts permanent — a priority for the president, but one that Democrats say would kill the plan before it is even considered.

On one side, according to people familiar with the deliberations, is a powerful group of pragmatists, including Henry M. Paulson Jr., the treasury secretary; Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff; and Ed Gillespie, counselor to Mr. Bush. They argue that the need for a stimulus is urgent, but have expressed concern that the administration may have to scale back its ambitions for permanent tax cuts to get a package through Congress.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/us/17bush.html?_r=1&ei=5088&en=3c44c00f80b73609&ex=1358312400&oref=slogin&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print





Brazos County Democratic Party
P.O. Box 4568
Bryan Texas 77805
979-779-5600 Fax 979-779-5601

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
Harry S. Truman, Democrat, President of the United States of America