Maybe it's not Texas, but Arizona that's like a whole other country.

Some highlights of the state budget that was passed by the state house of representatives by a unanimous vote:

*-- A 5.1% increase in spending (thanks to the use of federal stimulus funds without draconian cuts elsewhere)

*-- Increased scholarships for students whose families make less than $50,000 by 25%

*-- Expanded electric bill discounts for the poor

*-- Promotes the creation of a high speed rail line between two of the state's biggest cities

*-- Took money from the Governor's office budget to fund programs for veterans and the mentally ill.

*-- Gave most state workers, retired state workers and retired teachers a $1,000 one-time bonus

Wow, our house did that?? No, it was another state's house. A liberal, northeastern, high tax state then? No, it was TEXAS.

Granted this budget will have to be reconciled with the budget passed by the more conservative Texas Senate, but it shows that even in a conservative state it is possible this year to pass a progressive budget.

Except that here in Arizona our legislators give us a choice between draconian, more draconian and most draconian.

Why can't we adopt the Cuban hurricane plan?

It appears that hurricane Ike is set to nail the Texas coast, the city of Houston and a quarter of American oil refining capacity. I've already heard that when we wake up tomorrow morning gasoline prices may be up by as much as a half dollar (we filled both our vehicles this evening and lent my daughter twenty bucks so she could buy gas in case those rumors turn out to be right.)

I hope and pray that there is little loss of life (I'd say none, but one man in Corpus Christi, two hundred miles away, has already drowned in heavy surf).

There are some troubling questions I have right now though. The first is why when a mandatory evacuation was ordered for Galveston, so many coastal residents-- as many as a quarter million according to one site I read-- didn't leave. I know that about two weeks ago a lot of them left for Gustav, which weakened and then hit over two hundred miles away in Louisiana. But this was cleary much more dangerous than Gustav, it just seems to me that it is incredibly stupid to hang out on a low lying coastal island with a major hurricane coming. Well, I guess I should feel lucky that I live in a place without many natural disasters.

Now, I know why they haven't evacuated Houston. There was a botched evacuation three years ago for hurricane Rita and the highways ground to a standstill so that more people actually died out on the highway (of both storm-caused and non-storm caused accidents and other problems) than would have died if they'd all stayed home. But the question that has to be asked then is this: why haven't planners over the past three years developed a better evacuation plan for Houston? They knew this day would be here sooner or later. Not only could they have developed a secure network of local shelters (more on that later) but if necessary the state police have the authority to close highways, and if they have to even reverse highways (so that all lanes would lead in the same direction.) That would double the number of lanes available for evacuees. But for some reason they twiddled their thumbs for three years so that now that Houston is again a target all they can do is tell people to remain at home. Let's hope that Ike doesn't flood Houston too badly and that the inevitable damage to homes won't lead to loss of life.

There is another question that will have to be asked if Ike kills a lot of people (or even if it does not): Ike, as a much stronger category four storm, raked every bit of Cuba, crossing the island near its eastern end, with the eye running parallel to and just offshore for a couple of days as it worked its way up the island and then coming back onshore and nailing Havana. It then exited the island at very nearly the same point as Gustav had (and remember that Gustav was also a category four when it encountered Cuba). Yet in spite of what could have been a horrific loss of life (as there has been in Haiti, where Gustav, Hanna and Ike have likely killed at least a thousand people together-- maybe more, maybe many more) the total loss of life from all three hurricanes (Hanna also brushed by Cuba on the northeast) has been five (all from Ike.) Why do these things kill so few people in Cuba even when they are directily in the path? The answer is simple. In Cuba they have a network of local shelters, similar to bomb shelters where local residents can report and ride out the storm. In urban areas they are close enough for most people to walk to, but even in rural ares they are ubiquitous enough that people won't have to take very long to get to one.

I know, Cuba is a repressive communist dictatorship. True, it is. But that doesn't mean they can't do some things right, and the network of safe local shelthers makes a lot of sense. It is a smart alternative to being forced to choose between two risky alternatives-- evacuating millions of people down a few highways within a few hours, or hoping and praying that nothing happens to people who 'ride it out' in their homes.

But building safe local shelters would make entirely too much sense here, so expect no one to suggest that we do.

Texas may lose their fight over FLDS children, and it will be an expensive loss.

I've in the past been quite critical of some of the aspects of the FLDS church, in particular their practices of forcing teenage girls into marriage (such as I blogged on here) and kicking out teenage boys (as I blogged on here.)

I've also made it clear that my problems with them have to do with child abuse in particular, not polygamy in general (what sexual relations consenting adults have with each other, and in what numbers, is not a matter which interests me, nor is it a matter which should warrant the interest of the state.)

However, following the recent raid in Texas, I wrote a post in which I expressed concern about civil rights violations by the state of Texas in their decision to remove hundreds of children from the FLDS compound, with no specific evidence that any of them in particular had been abused. The determining factor, in fact, was their religious identity and nothing other than that. It is true that several of the teenage girls were pregnant, but without being too blunt about it I suspect that if you go to any community in America you will find that a significant number of teenage girls are pregnant. My eldest daughter was pregnant when she was fifteen. I'm not suggesting that this is a good thing, but it's not grounds to remove a child from their home in the absence of any specific evidence of rape, incest or another crime causing the pregnancy (and as noted, they had none about specific children who they removed.)

Since then, Texas' case has been unraveling and they have been embarrassed by a steady stream of bad news about their case. The first came when it turned out that the phone calls that Texas authorities had received, claiming to be from an abused teenager named, 'Sarah' inside the compound, actually turned out to be a hoax after they were traced to a woman named Rozita Swinton in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her motivation was apparently a progressive, but misplaced mindset. These phone calls had provided the original justification for the raid and the warrant to go in, in the first place. What is especially troubling is that it is not all that hard to reverse trace a phone call and verify the caller's location (in fact this was obviously done but the information was apparently not examined until after the raid.) This leads to two scenarios, both troubling: either that Texas authorities were looking for a pretext for a raid and jumped so fast that they didn't bother to check a basic fact like this, or even more troubling that they knew the calls were phony and went ahead anyway.

Texas authorities then claimed that they had reason to believe that a man named Dale Evans Barlow had abused some of the children at the ranch. Only problem is that there is no evidence that Dale Evans Barlow was ever at the ranch. In fact during the time period in question, Dale Evans Barlow was checking in weekly with his Utah probation officer. It is conceivable but a bit far fetched to suppose that every week he met his probation officer, drove for about 36 hours to the Texas compound, stayed there a couple of days to abuse some girls, then drove 36 hours back to Utah and met with his probation officer, and then repeated this pattern every week. Texas Rangers did travel to interview Dale Barlow on April 12, but left without making an arrest, and they have no evidence at all that he ever did travel to Texas during the time when he is alleged to have committed the crime (though no one can even name who made the allegation in the first place, unless perhaps it was made by Rozita Swinton while she was pretending to be 'Sarah.')

Then we have the case of Pamela Jessop. Pamela Jessop was a pregnant teenager who was removed from the compound. She maintains that at the time told them that she is eighteen (legally an adult) and showed them her birth certificate to prove it. Records seized at the scene by the Texas authorities confirmed that her age was eighteen, so they knew how old she was. They forcibly kept her in custody anyway so that when she gave birth they were in a position to give her a choice of either returning to the compound without her newborn child (she also has a one year old) or to stay there with the newborn. Jessop has hired some attorneys and they are considering filing a Federal lawsuit against the state of Texas.

Which leads us to what happened earlier this week. State authorities returned to the compound, claiming that they believed there were more children inside. They were denied admittance despite having a search warrant.

Understandably after what happened last month, the FLDS at the ranch are not very welcoming of another search warrant. More to the point though this feels a lot like a 'CYA' situation. When a case starts to fall apart, and especially if it is a case that could result in expensive lawsuits, sometimes authorities will dig in and desperately start trying to find any evidence they can, no matter how flimsy, in order to manufacture a case when the original charges don't pan out.

So then today the Texas Court of Appeals ruled that the mass removal of the children of 38 mothers was wrong because the state failed to prove that the children were in 'imminent danger.' Though the court stopped short of ordering all of the children returned immediately (allowing Texas to maintain them in foster care until they decide whether to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court,) the Court of Appeals made it very clear that the raid and continuing detention of the children is, in the opinion of the court, not justified by facts or evidence and may be a gross violation of civil rights occurring on a massive scale.

What Texas did earlier this week, apparently realizing that the Appeals Court cas was likely to go against them in trying to launch a second raid was an act of desperation. They realize now that they overreached in seizing hundreds of children with no specific evidence that any one of them is in danger, and now they are starting to realize that Pamela Jessop's likely lawsuit is only the first of hundreds that could be filed-- likely costing the state of Texas hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars. So this is likely to be a very expensive and painful lesson for Texas to learn about respecting civil rights.

I'd also like to point out how the 'hang 'em high, cowboy' attitude of Texas contrasts to the strategy that is being employed cooperatively by Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard (a Democrat) and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff (a Republican.) Goddard and Shurtleff have cooperated to seize and place the assets of the FLDS Church under the direction of an outside board of directors where they will be used for the benefit of the community and all its members, have put FLDS leader Warren Jeffs behind bars and recently held a joint meeting in St. George in which polygamists from Colorado City and Hildale were able to openly discuss their concerns and the concerns in their community. By focusing on enforcing the law against the leaders who pushed their flock into violating it but not punishing the members of the church, Goddard and Shurtleff have created an atmosphere of at least limited communication and understanding that it is safe to say after this episode law enforcement officials in Texas will never have. And with today's court decision, it doesn't look like they will have anything else to work with either.

Texas considering the death penalty for child molesters

It seems that Texas, not happy with being the number one state in the country in executions is the latest state to propose the death penalty for some child molesters.

Now, I blogged last year on why the death penalty for child molesters was both a bad idea and a sterling example of political cowardice (which is linked here). In part, I wrote:

What could be more pleasing and more just, than to execute child molesters, right? Well, no actually. I know, it's tough to make any argument against doing something to a child molester, but I will make it here.

Begin with the gut reaction. Yes, what child molesters have done is horrible. And we have to protect our children ahead of any other consideration (one reason I recently added the Code Amber Alert ticker at the top of my screen). But is executing them the answer? It is true, after all, that child molesters are that way by nature, and that they can't be truly 'cured,' even if they want to be (there is ample scientific as well as criminal evidence to back that up.) However, let me make some points why executing them is not the answer.

Start with a bald fact that I have to state anyway and which overshadows the rest of the discussion: It won't hold up in court. That is pretty much conceded by nearly all legal scholars. No one has been executed for a crime other than murder in the U.S. since the Rosenbergs were executed for a 1950 conviction for treason, for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. No one has been executed for a sex crime in the U.S. since the early part of the last century (and then child molestation wasn't even an issue, and the people executed were invariably black men convicted rightly or wrongly or raping white women.) So the courts will virtually certainly strike this down as 'cruel and unusual punishment' not proportional to the crime, and what is really infuriating is that the politicians know it better than anyone, but they are doing this to be popular...

But more to the point here is that it is exactly the kind of 'red meat politics' that has gotten us into the mess we are in today.

I used to live in Texas (only for a year, but it was an educational year, with 'Shrub' running for re-election as governor in a state that seemed to have lost its collective mind. A prime example was the race for railroad commissioner that year. One of the candidates (who ultimately won the race), instead of commenting on anything that had to do with being railroad commissioner ran ads touting his support for the death penalty. Now, it's hard to see what the railroad commissioner would have to do with the death penalty anyway, unless maybe they were considering using 'tying to the tracks ahead of the train' as a method of execution (think Snidely Whiplash) but no matter, apparently it doesn't matter if you get an unqualified lunk in the office, as long as he is pro-death penalty.

And that's the way the death penalty is in Texas. It's a little like when the Dallas Cowboys win on Sunday. People may be falling behind in their bills, have a leak in the roof and Little Johnny may be getting F's on his report card, but if the Cowboys win on Sunday then it seems like everyone in Texas feels much better on Monday. True that the bills still have to be paid, the leak still has to be fixed and Johnny still has to get caught up in school, but people think that because the Cowboys have won, their life is better somehow. The same thing with the death penalty. Never mind that everyone on death row is safely behind bars and away from the general population, or that the murder rate in Texas (6.2 per 100,000 population in 2005) is higher than the national average or for that matter than any of the twelve states that have no death penalty, nor does it matter that the man executed may not even have been guilty, nor the fact that if everyone on death row were executed tomorrow the prison population would catch up to what it is now within two weeks, the fact that some miscreant has been sent to the next life makes people feel better the next day. They still can't pay their bills, the roof still leaks, Johnny is still failing, but doggone it, we sure showed that loser a thing or two.

What is worse though is the cynical politicians who demagogue this issue (and the death penalty for child molesters, though it will be thrown out in court, is a demagogue's dream-- and when the courts throw it out then they can demagogue some more about 'liberal judges' or some such tripe and still avoid having to tackle anything that matters) because they'd rather pass this kind of bill and then bash the courts than deal with the really hard issues (and in Texas, there are a lot of them that need dealt with).

It does make the rise of Shrub a little easier to understand though.