The Texas Innocence Project has been instrumental in doing much of the legal footwork to identify and verify innocents in the prison system. Last week, a man who died in prison in Lubbock was revealed to have been completely innocent the entire time, and today, another man in Dallas, Patrick Waller, was released after 15 years in prison, thanks to DNA evidence.

Scott Henson has been slamming eyewitness identification as being the primary cause of innocents being pulled into the system. He also suggests some evidence that the average person’s poor observation skills are being ‘helped along’ by police detectives eager to solve a case. In all, it appears painfully easy to put nearly anyone in jail on a murder charge merely on the say of some bad ‘eyewitnesses’ and an eager cop.

One of my standing arguments against the use of prisons is that innocent people sent to prison would more likely become thieves and murderers when they got out than otherwise. Unless they are appropriately funded and staffed, prisons are simply felony universities: any notion that anything like “rehabilitation” occurs without the appropriate funding is ludicrous. I know that if I were in such a situation, it would not do good things for my pysche. I’m pretty sure I’d have a hard time “playing the game” after having the rules played on me like that.

So who are these guys? (From J. Carlton’s AP article)

Four former inmates who collectively served nearly 100 years in prison before being exonerated lined the back wall of the crowded courtroom. The men freed by DNA testing in Dallas County have made a habit of showing up in court for exoneration hearings, and on Thursday they presented Waller with a prepaid cell phone as a gift.

These fellows went through all of this, and they became activists. The thing is, as poorly as Texas courts have apparently run in the last, oh, century, finding potential innocents in prisons has been like shooting fish in a barrel. Now there’s five men from Dallas County who were vindicated and will show up in court every time the State has to face another exoneration case. Soon, there will be six, then seven, then more.

Perhaps at some point, they will begin to appear — similarly attired, like a team of lawyers — at criminal trials in the State. Their presence alone might be a good message to the judge: You are being watched. Prosecution alone is not justice.

• But, Etzel said, “I don’t think anybody is all that enthusiastic” about McCain’s candidacy. “McCain is not a very enthusiastic type of guy.”
• “The contrast between John McCain and Barack Obama is so stark,” [Bryant] said, a hint of worry in her voice. “Obama is a charismatic speaker, and John McCain isn’t.”
• Banville called McCain weak, saying, “I don’t see how he has a chance at all unless people vote only because they don’t like black people.”
• “I resent the fact that we were forced into him to represent us,” Martinez said, a reference to the GOP nomination contest all but ending before Texas voted. “I had nothing to do with his picking.”

The fact that there were 4-5 times more people at the state Democratic convention leads me to presume a similar ratio of participation in November. I’ve read many emails and blogs from delegates from all around the state who were shocked and surprised to find other Dems in their crimson Red counties — these folks are organizing and reaching an unprecedented number of folks in rural parts of the state.

It also appears that the conservative religious and evangelical voters bloc the GOP had been able to count upon since the glory days of Reagan has melted away in the ocean of Obamacans. It appears that economy and war issues will trump abortion politics this year, bringing over Catholics, evangelicals, black conservatives, and other issue conservatives who feel that the current administration can do no right.

Finally, looking at this electoral college map, it’s obvious that, although Texas didn’t go for Clinton in ‘92, that race was very much closer than the GOP would like. Clinton did not have anything like the machine that Obama has created, and didn’t spend any attention on Texas, and still nearly won Texas. Obama may not be focusing on Texas, but his 50-state strategy means that he’ll have an active center here in this state to coordinate the organization of long dormant county clubs. Add to this the monumental work the Clinton team did this year in Texas and I think the Democratic party has never had better grassroots organizations, nor has it activated so many communities before.

In sincerely believe that the Democrats, Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and all of their activist faithful across the nation have effectively redrawn the political map of the country, and that we’ll see the surprising results in November.

What’s disturbing is that I’m familiar with the maps of racial distribution in the US and the correlation between this and the relative power levels of the parties is astonishing. For those of you unfamiliar with demographics collection methods (which I would presume is most of you), there are four basic ways to group people: by gender, by age, by language, and by “race”. I think we should be honest and admit that “race” means “color code”, or more specifically, the “Whitey Hierarchy”. You know, it’s the old slaveholder’s designation of free Europeans as “white”, while the slaves were “black”. (”Hispanics” are considered “white” by race, but “Spanish” by language.) The fact that the states with the have the highest proportion of white people are solidly red makes a very specific statement about the long-term viability of the Republican party.

My very non-scientific estimates based on my own spotty memory is that the Democratic party in Texas is largely composed of whites and Hispanics, with a small proportion of blacks. At this last convention, the black caucus brought in a significant proportion of delegates. It showed me to what degree the blacks had been ignoring the entire process. Up to this point, the Republicans had been actively recruiting financially successful Hispanics into their party, with some success. I think that this year’s concentration by the Clinton team on the Hispanic vote has probably already sucked a lot of air out of GOP efforts in this area. Obviously, the Dems now have the leader that can really motivate the black vote.

I think the 2008 Democratic primary season has purchased for the party a number of southern states in the November general election. Republicans may end up with only the English-speaking white people in their camp, losing the southwestern states for their Hispanic bias. We may even see a large portion of Dixie turn blue in November. The NYT map shows that Colorado and New Mexico as ‘battleground states’. I think Arizona and Texas fall into that same category for much the same reason — Hispanic voters flocking to the Clinton campaign. Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, and even Virginia are appearing to be very strong Obama states, and with voter turnout in the primaries as incredible as it was, I have no doubt that in November, there will be an unprecedented number of voters, and that this can only be an advantage to Democrats.

Now that I’ve had a nap and a sandwich, I am beginning to remember how to string words together. Time to blog!

The morning shift was a rather relaxed stint signing up the occasional VIP and otherwise directing delegates to breakfasts and caucuses from a comfortable chair under the four-story escalators. I got to meet Luci Johnson, daughter of that famed Texan, LBJ, and former US Rep, State Senator, State Attorney General, and State Supreme Court Justice Jack Hightower. My VIP booth partner was a former State Senate staffer who knew everyone. Her former boss, former Speaker Pete Laney, sat with us for an hour, regaling us with stories and gladhanding folks that stopped by.

After a glorious chopped beef sandwich from Iron Works (yum!), I returned to nap in the volunteer pit for an hour before taking over on door duty like the night before. Today, the rules were relaxed for kids, who were allowed in with their appropriately credentialed parents. That made me feel a lot better. Since everyone had been up until 3 in the morning electing national delegates, cranky moods were the norm. This made me feel a lot worse. When we were finally released from “door duty”, I numbly collected my things and shuffled the three blocks to my bus in the steam room afternoon.

The concession speech was what everyone there wanted to see. It was so important that they actually delayed the start of the second general session so that the delegates could watch it on the jumbo-trons. Early speculation that she wouldn’t release her delegates turned out to be correct.

The Texas Muslim Democratic Caucus was well represented: some 80% of Muslims voted Democratic in the last election, and the occasional hajib, khimar, or shayla mixed easily with the baseball caps, kufis and stetsons on the convention floor. One lady had a blue khimar and dress, both trimmed with a foot of white material with the word ‘Democrat’ printed on in in various fonts and sizes — naturally separated by a strip of wavy red trim!

Overall, the most amazing thing to note about this convention was the population of sincere, committed democrats who came out. Many, many first-timers, naturally: many folks who wondered three hours into the general session when the politicians would stop talking so the voting could begin. Many complete families turned out to see history in the making. There were some bare spots and miscommunications, but given the enormity of the event, I’m really impressed that the party was able to pull it off as well as it did.

One lady asked me while I was guarding a door if I would consider volunteering for the national convention. My quick “Hell no!” took her aback at first, and I was quick to explain that the state convention was all of the crazy that I could handle. She laughed and agreed that “Hell no” was probably a really good answer to that question.

Caucusing is a long and painful process in the best of worlds. What we’re seeing in the Democratic State Convention this weekend is the party for the first time actually having to function on the scale at which it was intended. For several decades, the party had drawn up rules intended to allot proportional representation to the entire state but has never been held responsible to that number: relatively few people usually ever attend the state convention. This weekend, the state’s full compliment of delegates and alternates are present for the biggest political event in this party’s history.

The main hall is even more stunningly huge when it is full of people. The hall is acoustically dead, which is a great thing when there’s ten thousand people in it, but also means that they had to pump in the audio with many, many speakers distributed over the space. The room is so huge that from the back, the speakers on the stage looked about an inch tall. They had to put four jumbo-trons in the room in order for everyone to see the action. There were very, very few empty chairs. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Traditionally, there has always been a strong black presence at the state convention, and blacks are present as friends, neighbors, voters, and elected officials. Democrats try hard to be an inclusive party, and I believe that the substantive participation of blacks and Hispanics is proof that the inclusion is sincere. That being said, I have not ever seen black people so well represented at the Texas State Democratic Convention. Nor have I witnessed so many with such joy and excitement in their eyes. Fact is that nearly all Democrats are giddy with anticipation these days, with the impending grasp of the executive and legislative houses seemingly nearly inevitable. The party of CEO businessmen couldn’t have done a better job of running the country into the ground, so a major Democratic victory in November appears to be fait accompli.

One disappointment has been a direct result of the enormous draw this event has occasioned. The convention floor had to be limited to delegates and alternates only, with guest tickets strictly rationed and raffled and good only for an overflow room with a jumbotron and audio feed. The stated reason for this policy was to keep the fire marshal from getting wiggy, but the result was that friends and families who came along to witness history had to be split up or turned away. What was worse was seeing the vast pools of empty chairs in the overflow room that could have easily been opened to the general public without any loss of capacity. It’s not my obligation to run it, though, so I can’t really second guess the decisions the party staff made.

To that end, the general flow of the convention has been pretty good. Most folks got credentialed within an hour of arriving, with late arrivals getting through in ten minutes or less. Issues causes appeared to be well attended, but the senate district caucuses in the afternoon ended up running over handling delegate assignments, so not every caucus was able to complete before the rooms needed to be cleared for the general assembly. As was expressed more than once by folks other than myself: the party could still have done a better job of communicating the anticipated flow of the process to everyone.

It turned out that I was picked, or perhaps I was self-selected, as I went to a training meeting this evening and got my shift times. The main hall is Exhibit halls 2 through 5. It’s the most amazing continuous open space I’ve ever seen. Even more bizarre is the sight of 20,000 folding chairs all neatly set up in parade formations throughout the entire space of the hall.

If you’re going as a delegate from Senate Districts 25 or 14, you’d better bring binoculars if you want to even see the projection screens. Of course, if you’re not a delegate, alternate, or guest, you may as well stay home, because every door to the main floor will be guarded and open only to credentialed conventioneers.

Despite attending the training and ’signing up’ for my shifts, I’m still uncertain about what it is I’ll actually be doing this weekend, but I’ll get to help and be part of the biggest state convention ever hosted by the Democratic party. I’m really excited. I hope I get to do something fun and not a lot of sitting.

This brightly shining light upon the woes and shortcomings of CPS may hopefully force the legislature to take steps to adequately fund and support CPS, even if they have to redirect the agency in some manner to avoid future constitutional breakdowns. Here’s to hoping that the entire fiasco with the YFZ ranch is at least remembered long enough to restrict CPS to a higher standard of proof.

When the Supreme Court shut down the Keystone Kops routine, it exposed some loyalties that may have exacerbated the civil rights violations. Judge Walther, for one, has made it clear that there was never any intention to give the YFZ families a fair deal or even an assumption of innocence. The county sheriff who marched into the ranch with his SWAT team after speaking to Dale Barlow on the phone in his Arizona prison, probably also knew at that point that the call from Rozita Swenson was a hoax. The same sheriff failed for two months to confirm this dismissive evidence to CPS, always claiming some ongoing investigation.

And of course, the whole stupid brigade might have been avoided if there had not been some pressure from certain state legislators to evict the Mormons from West Texas. These are the same congresscritters that passed laws specifically to torment the FLDS. Word is that these folks were concerned that the YFZ folks might laid down serious roots here. They might decide to enter into local politics and the school board or maybe a judge might soon come up Mormon. Thanks to the thick fists of state authorities, including CPS, what had been a largely insular, self-directed community has ordered a batch of 500 voter registration cards for what will surely be an FLDS-dominated slate of candidates come next November. Some speculate that they may be able to dominate all of the political offices in a three-county area within a decade.

An even larger blunder is that any hope the state conspirators may have had that the YFZ ranch might simply dissolve away from lack of interest is now gone. Every child who has gone through this experience, every mother, every father, is now bonded in a way their leaders could never have dreamed. There may be some small percentage who walk away, deciding that they’ve had their fill of Texas hospitality. But remember that the folks who settled YFZ were hand-picked as the most loyal members, so it’s more likely that this entire episode has simply reinforced their beliefs.The vast majority are going to stay on that land and it’s going to be their Holy Land for generations. Now that they’ve been persecuted by the authorities, they can be sure that they are the chosen ones.

Sometimes, in isolation, I’ll allow myself to warm up to the idea of having Z go to public school, and then I’ll hear directly from a friend whose child in public school talk about what their kids are doing and I’m horrified again. Or I’ll see an article like the one I discuss below, and I’m horrified again.

I’m fully aware what an impossible task it is to measure the “success” of an educational system. But whatever it is this blueprint isn’t going to achieve any measure of success as I see it.

The emphasis on graduation rates is unfortunate. Who cares if 99% of students graduate if none of them can count change or get a job? It’s obvious from the chart adjacent that public school is successful at significantly reducing the ability for Hispanics and blacks to get into college. Wouldn’t it be better if the two thirds of ninth graders who actually go on to graduate high school were able to succeed in college? I think it would be a far better thing for school administration and staff to be able to say that all those who finish are “college ready” rather than only being able to apply this standard to “half of the white kids who finish and ten percent of the black kids who finish” as we have now.

Those in the education industry likely disagree, but I think we ought to reconsider the value of a college degree. Is it really something that everyone needs? Does it make sense to expect that everyone should go? The big picture is that there are a lot of things kids ought to know before leaving high school, and these things are simply not being taught. It’s not hard to find reasons why. Not enough money. Not enough qualified teachers. Too much emphasis on standardized testing.

These are all good answers, but the problem is systemic. Teachers complain that parents don’t spend enough time with their kids, when families have to work two jobs just to cover property taxes to pay for schools. Now they load up kindergarteners with homework and wonder why the kids don’t interact with their families more in the ten minutes between finishing homework and going to bed. I say these problems are systemic, but it goes far deeper than this.

The reason we will never be able to improve public school is because we don’t want to violate our precious national superstitions about personal equality and class blindness. If we were to say, “Oh, look! Black kids aren’t succeeding in a impressive way in public schools. Let’s set up special schools just for them — oh, don’t worry, we’ll make them separate, but equal.” Bam! We’ve got a constitutional violation. If we say, “Hey, let’s group the kids by their own achievement and not by age and create classes that teach kids at their own abilities,” and discover that the more affluent kids occupy the top tiers and poor kids inhabit the lower ones — especially if racial differences are so highlighted — and (bam!) we’ve got a constitutional violation. (Not to mention the fact that schools just can’t pay for enough teachers to properly attend to the students now.)

The standardized test is the apex of public education. One size fits all. The standardized test allows politicians and school administrators to talk about class and race without it being about class or race. It’s a great short-term goal to keep everyone distracted while the last of the liberal arts are swept away from curriculums. It’s a goal that politicians and administrators can agree on and stand behind, even to the point of dismantling schools down to test prep day cares. Those nominally in charge can then arbitrarily draw the line between “college ready” and “prison ready” kids. If it just so happens that more black kids fall below that line, they can just shrug and babble about parental involvement.

Public education was bitterly opposed in the early days of our country, and for good reason. Education then was largely a function of the religious institutions, and people just didn’t understand how you could put the Catholic and various types of Protestant kids together and not have a riot. Calmer minds reasoned that once enough controversial material was removed, that what was left would be a threadbare, homogenized excuse for an education, entirely lacking in moral and cultural values — and this was the reason, then, to avoid creating public education.

After over a hundred years of public education, the entire goal of the system has become this threadbare, homogenized excuse for an education — the standardized test.

Super-Kudos to Scott Henson for really staying on top of this whole fiasco. Even the stuff he merely suspected at the beginning has turned out to be ominously correct. At this point, if the State said that the YFZ women preferred Colgate over Crest, I’d be suspicious that the choice was rigged or the real answer was changed. But if Scott Henson were to report that the YFZ women sprouted wings and flew themselves to Utah, I would immediately post it in my blog like God’s own truth.