I Endorse Sam Houston in the Democratic Primary

Having read the Dallas Morning News endorsement of Sam Houston, I also endorse Sam Houston:

We...'re comfortable recommending Houston attorney Sam Houston, whose law partnership and background in business-related legal affairs equips him for the types of cases that dominate the Supreme Court's docket.

Meanwhile, his opponent, Dallas attorney Baltasar D. Cruz, displays a shocking penchant for verbosity. If he were to win a judicial seat, we worry that his difficulty keeping statements brief and focused would threaten to overwhelm a court already facing a significant backlog.

Where Mr. Cruz expounds at convoluted length to seemingly simple questions, Mr. Houston responds with clarity, thoughtfulness and brevity.

Mr. Houston also has an impressive list of high-profile endorsements, and his campaign war chest – $111,650 vs. Mr. Cruz's $2,500 – shows he is prepared for a statewide race.

Our opinion of Mr. Cruz hasn't changed from when he ran in a 2006 county election. His opponent, we felt, was unacceptable. After getting acquainted with Mr. Cruz, we decided neither deserved a recommendation.

This race boils down to judgment and judicial temperament. Mr. Houston has it, and Mr. Cruz clearly lacks it.

Here is more hilarity from Cruz:

Virtually every aspect of modern American life has been improved by the Democratic Party over the opposition of the Republican Party. The civil rights laws of the 1960s (including specifically the prohibitions on discrimination in providing public accommodations and services, the Fair Housing Act, and the Voting Rights Act), child labor laws, the creation of labor unions, collective bargaining, the minimum wage, the forty hour work week, extending the right to vote to women, Social Security, Medicare, the Department of Agriculture (including the Federal food inspection program), the Pure Food and Drug Act, OSHA, rural electrification, federal aid to education, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Open Records Act are all examples of Democratic initiatives passed over Republican opposition. The Republican Party's shameful opposition to civil rights for African Americans alone is inexcusable. In addition, every Republican President since Ronald Reagan has shown contempt for the laws of the United States, international treaties, and the Constitution of the United States and created and/or exacerbated serious domestic and international crises. Reagan's illegal sales of arms to Iran (in violation of the Arms Export Control Act), illegal arming of Iraq (as reported in Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq by Alan Friedman) illegal funding of the contras in Nicaragua (in violation of the Boland II Amendment), illegal mining of Managua harbor (a terrorist act which caused millions of dollars of damage to international shipping), support of governments employing death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, deregulation of the Savings and Loan industry, massive irresponsible tax cuts which resulted in record deficits (exceeded only by Bush I and then Bush II) while hypocritically making unemployment benefits taxable, sharing of military intelligence with Saddam Hussein (including satellite photographs of the region and actual building of a satellite downloading station for Saddam Hussein in Baghdad so that he could directly download our satellite pictures of the region and camouflage his scud missile launchers so that we could not find them when we subsequently went to war with Iraq), reckless teacher in space publicity stunt, tragic military excursion to Lebanon, and subversion of this country's environmental laws by appointing coal mining and oil company lobbyists and executives to enforce our environmental laws and revise our environmental regulations, failure to timely address the AIDS epidemic, sales of national forests to lumber companies, approval of ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches, commemoration of dead Nazi soldiers and SS officers by laying a wreath at Bitburg Cemetery in Germany, attempt to give tax breaks to private religious institutions with racist policies such as Bob Jones University (which at the time prohibited interracial dating), and policy of refusing to timely investigate complaints to the EEOC before limitations periods on discrimination claims elapsed, are but a few examples of Republican policies and initiatives which I still find personally offensive and have reinforced my identification with the Democratic Party. The Bush administration's ill-conceived Iraq policy, which I condemned in a letter published by the Dallas Morning News on February 16, 2003, which violates the legal principles established in the Nuremberg War Crimes Indictment (by conspiring to wage a war of aggression in violation of international treaties and international law and actually planning and waging a war of aggression in violation of international treaties and international law), bombing of civilian neighborhoods in Iraq in violation of international law, subversion of the Open Records Act, violation of international treaties prohibiting torture, employment of secret prisons in violation of international law and international treaties, widespread program of illegal searches without warrants, illegal international kidnaping and rendition operations, policy of undermining U.S. environmental laws (as described in Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), failure to fund Superfund, passage of a bankruptcy bill which benefits credit card companies and harms consumers, treasonous revelation of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, destruction of government records, and misuse of the Department of Justice to pursue a political agenda rather than enforce laws against discrimination and other legitimate activities, which have been defended and supported by the Republican Party, as well as the Republican Party's repeated widespread efforts to suppress the African American vote and intimidate African Americans from voting, have further reinforced my dim opinion of, and prevent me from associating myself with, the Republican Party while reinforcing my identification with the Democratic Party.

Comments Posted by Baltasar D. Cruz @ 8:13 PM Sat, Feb 02, 2008

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was sponsored by Democrats Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Mike Mansfield (D-NY) after John F. Kennedy gave a speech (on June 11, 1963) in which he called for legislation "giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public — hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments," as well as "greater protection for the right to vote." After Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson renewed the effort to get this legislation passed, over the opposition of 1964 Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and future Republican Presidents George. H. W. Bush, who consistently voted against civil rights legislation, and Ronald Reagan (who repeatedly campaigned against civil rights legislation). As a result of this and other landmark civil rights legislation introduced and sponsored by Northern Democrats and signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, the South turned Republican. Although many Northern Republicans voted for the civil rights laws passed in the 1960s, these would not have been introduced without the support of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, over the opposition of the likes of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Republican hero Reagan also was outspoken in his opposition to the Fair Housing Act during his campaign for governor of California in 1966 and declared that: "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house he has a right to do so." Years later, Reagan campaigned in the South for the Republican presidential nomination on an anti-integration platform in 1976 and 1980 and chose Philadelphia, Mississippi (where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were famously murdered in 1964 and only Federal convictions ensued after all-white juries acquitted the murderers under state law) to give one of his first general campaign speeches in 1980, condemning the Federal Government's encroachment on "state's rights!" As President, Ronald Reagan actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which he had previously characterized as "humiliating to the South") and even vetoed bills to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation and to impose sanctions on South Africa's apartheid regime (both vetoes were overridden thanks to the leadership of Congressional Democrats)! In addition, Republican efforts to suppress the black vote by spreading flyers with false information in black neighborhoods and making intimidating telephone calls to African American voters seem to recur every election cycle in many parts of the United States. In short, the Republican record on civil rights is disgraceful.