If you haven’t voted yet, tomorrow’s the big day.  Polls are open from 7 am to 7 pm.  If you don’t know where your poll is, call your County Clerk’s office or just google it at “polling place” (with your county).

If you haven’t yet decided who your candidate for Governor is, here’s why Independent Texans members endorsed Debra Medina in the Republican primary.*

Here’s one of the best reasons to Boot Perry, not that you need convincing.  Rick Perry is paying ordinary folks to get on the internet and use social networking tools (like Facebook and Twitter) to reach people in their networks to pull a fast one — again — on unsuspecting Texas voters.  Maybe these are the jobs Rick keeps touting that he’s “created.”

Fight fire with fire, y’all!

Get on Facebook, get on Twitter, or just get on the phone and spread the word about Perry by sending folks here BootPerry.org for the real dish.  I’m calling people today and tonight.  (Call me or hit reply if you want to help today or this evening.)

Also, if you live in Texas House Rep. Todd Smith’s district (Euless, Hurst and Bedford), please consider keeping this incumbent & read our post here as to why.

Independents are united on just a few things.  None of us are real fond of dirty tricks nor lies.  That’s why Rick and his fat-cat backer, homebuilder Bob Perry, need to feel the boot tomorrow.

We will never forget Rick Perry’s Trans-Texas Corridor!

Independently yours,

Linda Curtis, Independent Texans, 512-535-0989 office

*Remember, Texas has open primaries, which means you do not have to pre-register with a party to vote in their primary.  If you lean Democratic, it appears that the gubernatorial nomination is not competitive (Bill White is a strong favorite), therefore, why not vote in the Republican primary this year?  But do keep in mind that if you are with a “third-party” (Libertarian, Green, Constitution, etc.), you cannot sign their petition nor participate in a third-party convention and vote in either party primary.

*  There are contested Democratic judicial races in the Austin/Travis County area.  If you want to know who I am personally supporting just reply and ask.

We independents used to think we had to have a leader to guide us.  There was Perot, Nader and Jesse Ventura, or more recently in Texas there was Carole and Kinky.  They made a contribution, but their political careers got the best of them and they too began talking about us in the third person or not at all.

President Barack Obama?  He spoke to us powerfully with his post-partisan message before election day, but since then hasn’t made an effort to reach out to us.  Instead, his political crew made a decision to build Organizing for America within the confines of the Democratic National Committee, even when his campaign ground game guru, Marshall Ganz (a brilliant political organizer) advised him not to.

It’s the same old story.  There is the rush to get elected.  They tell us, “Trust us, we will include you.”  Some of them even sincerely mean it.

Howard Fineman wrote in the latest edition of Newsweek about how the President can win back independents.  Fineman says for independents “it’s all about process.”  But then he goes on to quote budget hawk and moderate Democrat, Evan Bayh who says the President is, “to the left of the mainstream.”  Does Evan Bayh or Fineman have any clue that most Americans either do not know the difference between politically left and right or simply don’t give a rip? This out-dated paradigm makes no sense to most independent voters who hold a variety of views on issues.  For example, many Texas independents, though we are largely understood as conservatives, believe that the banks rule the world and they should be overthrown.  That is a left-wing idea supported by the right-wing John Birch Society!

So here is my advice as someone who has been out there for 30 years walking the walk of independent politics.  First, why don’t you just ask us?  We want to be part of the political conversation in our country.  We cannot be part of the conversation when our participation is choked off by unfair restrictions and regulations designed to limit competition to the two-parties like impossible petitioning requirements, government apparatus’ like the Federal Election Commission (3 Democrats and 3 Republicans) and Redistricting committees that have representatives from the two parties only.  We need open primaries in all 50 states (one of the few progressive features of Texas elections) and the right to petition to place issues on the ballot (initiative, referendum and recall) at all levels of Texas government – not just municipalities Texans are limited to currently.   Government should protect our rights to petition rather than participating in criminalizing such a fundamental right to organize in our country.*  And how ’bout those term limits?**

Texas politicians naturally do things bigger and badder than most.  That is why Texans desperately need the right to recall politicians at the state level.  If Texans had the right to recall state officials, Rick Perry would have had to “get on down the road” years ago for his outrageous manipulations of state laws and state agencies to carry out the largest land seizure in US history related to Trans-Texas Corridor.  Not long after the Governor pronounced the Corridor DOA (in large part because Republicans fled to the independent movement based on this issue), it became apparent the Governor was involved in covering up the fact that he allowed the execution of an innocent man (Todd Willingham).  Our legislature would never impeach Rick Perry based on these “high crimes and misdemeanors”, but you can bet that ordinary Texans would have pulled the political recall trigger if we could get our fingers on it.

We wish we could say these ideas are new.  Perot in 1996 said that the problems in government are vertical not horizontal.  In other words, the conflicts in America are increasingly between the few people at the top with the people at the bottom, who are the vast majority of Americans.  In other words, the left-center-right paradigm that keeps ordinary Americans fighting amongst each other rendering us vulnerable to the manipulations of the parties and their corporate backers, was DOA 14 years ago!

The Massachusetts upset will pale in comparison to what Texas independents can do in the Texas gubernatorial where we have the opportunity to ‘recall’ Governor Rick Perry.  Independent Texans, the state’s only voter association seeking recognition for approximately 4 million independent Texas voters, is urging Texas independents to vote in the open Republican primary, to send Rick Perry down his toll roads once and for all.  Watch for our endorsement shortly before early voting starts on February 16th.  We can shop the ballot in November between the Democratic, Republican and Libertarian nominees.  (Don’t forget to go to http://BootPerry.org/give-him-the-boot and give ol’ Rick a kick right now and donate to our just cause!)

The American people that politicians and pundits like to banter about so much are in one particular way woefully culpable in the political predicament in which we find ourselves.  We are like parents who don’t want to admit our role in raising irresponsible children.  We vote for our “children” (or ignore them by not voting) – politicians in both parties – and we complain about them endlessly.   Maybe American voters are ready for a new role in political life.  That would be a change for sure.  And that is one change that we, the people, can do for sure.

*  The right to petition is so fundamental, volumes could be written about the attempts to stymie petitioner’s rights.  Independents will never forget the Attorney General of Oklahoma’s recent attempts to criminalize petitioning by arresting Paul Jacob, a leader of the term limits and initiative movement and Susan Johnson, President of National Voter Outreach – one of the premier petitioning companies in the country.  The case was thrown out, but not without heavy burdens placed on Jacob and Johnson.  The right to petition is still not protected in public places like outside the Post Office!

**  So far, in the Governor’s race, Kay Bailey Hutchison is promising to help enact term limits on the Governor’s Office.  Let’s hope that includes all state officials, but we’ll take it if it’s only the Governor’s office.

Larry wisely decided not to use the bb gun he brought along to shoot the balloons when he was ready to come down.  He wound up being rescued when he came up on air controllers’ sites near the LA Airport.

Rick Perry is our very own Texas Lawn Chair Larry.  Though he is a big joke on Texas, his stunts, like bringing pigs to crash opponent Kay Bailey Hutchison’s press conference, just aren’t funny.  Hey Governor, bringing pigs to press conferences are what grassroots organizers like me do to entice media attention.  For god’s sake, you’re the flipping Governor!

Austin voters fought a $65 million tax subsidy of a luxury shopping mall in '08

I am advocating that independents carry out an “Anyone But Perry” strategy in the 2010 Governor’s race.  We should use the Texas open primary and vote in the Republican primary and then again, in the general election as a massive voting block of at least 1.3 million voters.  That is the number of voters who voted either for Carole Strayhorn or Kinky Friedman in 2006.

We’ve got two chances to cut Perry’s rope.  The first is to vote for one of Perry’s opponents in the March Republican primary: Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison or Debra Medina, a Republican Party activist aligned with Ron Paul. Perhaps Medina can get enough steam going to split the conservative wing of the Republican Party.  Kay Bailey could unite some Republican conservatives with Republican moderates and win over enough independents to beat Perry in the primary. The second chance will be in the general election in November.  The Democrats may consider running a more viable candidate than the current menu (no offense Kinky and Hank) to take on one of the two titans, Kay Bailey Hutchison or Rick Perry.  I predict that if Perry is the Republican nominee, most independents (including many third party and Libertarian voters) will vote Democratic to help send Rick Perry 16,000 feet above the Dallas airport.

So many reasons to cut Perry’s rope, yet so little time.  My favorite is Perry’s dogged efforts to rob Texans of their land for a $700 billion project that nobody wants.  The Trans-Texas Corridor (or whatever name the Governor cooks up to confuse us) is a massive road, utility and rail trade corridor designed to import even more cheap mostly Chinese goods moving through non-unionized Mexican ports.

The Corridor and the Governor’s privatized toll road schemes are his Achilles heel because they spurred a grassroots cross-partisan citizens movement that is independent of the parties and the mess they’ve created.  How about those toll roads to nowhere, like the near infamous Grand Parkway (aka “Porkway”) and the expansion of 290E in Austin?  Thanks to the our slick Governor and the corrupt agency otherwise known as TxDOT, these two roads are slated to use stimulus funds to satisfy the Growth Lobby.

The Growth Lobby – the perpetual hogs at the government trough-consists of companies like CINTRA (the Spanish toll road consortium, whose lobbyists have worked inside the Governor’s office); homebuilders like Bob Perry (no relation) who have given Perry millions; Democrats like Austin area State Senator Kirk Watson (who is so smart he could have really been somebody), Chambers of Commerce, the Real Estate lobby, some road contractors, and a litany of related companies and lawyers.

The Growth Lobby helps ensure that Texas has highest property taxes in the nation, and is one of only five states without real estate sales disclosure.  Under this scenario large-scale commercial developments and raw land across Texas are undervalued by, on average, 40%.  The Growth Lobby is driving population growth to areas, like Austin, where they want to double the population in just 16 years.  Their plans for infrastructure, including roads and water are at best speculative.  (For details go to CostofGrowth.com).

Lawn Chair Larry gave us all a helluva lot more than Rick Perry — a great big laugh at our own silliness.  Let’s not be so silly as to re-elect Lawn Chair Perry. The only award Rick Perry deserves is the one actually bestowed on Lawn Chair Larry.  That was the Bonehead Club Award of Dallas.