GilGarzaOnline.com

Ciro Rodriguez Falls Off the Healthcare Fence

2010-03-20T07:57:00.000-05:00

I spoke with Mr. Rodriguez' office two days ago and was told that he was not making his stance on healthcare reform public! I was told that he was going to wait until it was time to cast his vote to make his view public. Apparently, he has decided to fall in line with Obama on this issue.

Here's the latest political wizardry from our local paper with my comments in BLUE.

With a handful of congressional Democrats taking deep breaths and coming out for health-care reform this week, the New York Times offered up this formula: “With every addition to the yes column, another Democrat potentially gets a pass.” This is the official line from Washington: Save your seat by voting for healthcare reform! Never mind what the people say! Pay no attention to the polls! Ignore the historic deluge of marchers, letters and calls telling you to vote no!

Rep. Ciro Rodriguez won't be one of the takers.
The San Antonio Democrat plans to vote for !!!! the lightning rod of a bill, possibly Sunday, saying the package of changes ultimately would cut the cost of medical care and extend coverage to many of the uninsured. Spending trillions of dollars we don't have will SAVE us money. Did you get that?
“This is probably one of the most important votes I will ever take,” Rodriguez says. “This is the first time that we're close to making a difference, to taking on these sacred cows, like the insurance industry, and doing what's right.” By "making a difference" he means creating a fascist style government run bureaucracy in charge of the healthcare industry. Sweet.
Of course, many the vast majority of his constituents will see his vote as part of a power grab, a government takeover of health care.
And Republican strategists will be ecstatic. They've targeted his andCongressman Chet Edwards' seats as possible pickups in Texas in November, and Rodriguez's vote could be will be a gift.
Banker-attorney Francisco “Quico” Canseco and retired CIA agent William Hurd are fighting in a GOP primary runoff for the chance to face Rodriguez in the general election.
The 23rd Congressional District is one of the largest in the country, and it's complex. It runs from San Antonio to El Paso, lumps urban dwellers with ranchers, encompasses some wealthy and many poor constituents, is majority Hispanic and includes a close mix of Democrats and Republicans, with the D's having a smallish edge.
Not surprisingly, Rodriguez's voting record is more moderate than it was when he represented the 28th District, the seat he lost in 2004 a year after Republicans forced through their redistricting plan Democrats are always bitter when the people use democracy to express their wishes. At the time, the district had footholds in San Antonio's South Side and in Webb County.
Now representing less solidly Democratic turf, Rodriguez and his supporters usually call up his vote against emissions cap-and-trade legislation as proof of his moderation.
But former County Commissioner Lyle Larson, the Republican who lost to Rodriguez in 2008, says a yes vote on the health-care bill would set off a grass fire, consuming the image of Rodriguez as a moderate.
“This is a visceral issue that's probably going to be a litmus test,” he says. “If he votes for this, he's done — this will galvanize conservatives and business people.”
But in a poor district, health-care reform — if it's signed into law — could excite Democratic voters in a way cap-and-trade never could. At least that's the hope among Democrats. Is there any evidence of this sentiment at all? Even the slightest? No there isn't. Democrats know this. Watch the pitch that comes next.
An analysis by the House Energy and Commerce Committee claims the bill would result in tax credits for 176,000 families and 13,200 small businesses in the district to offset the cost of insurance, and would extend coverage to 134,000 uninsured residents. Here's the koolaid: You'll pay less and get more!
Matt Angle, a Democratic consultant and founder of a Washington PAC dedicated to helping Texas Democrats to get elected, says: “I believe that, given the need in his district and given that it's consistent with Ciro Rodriguez's career, he'll be just fine.”

Contact Rep. Ciro Rodriguez and let him know what you think.

D Mac Discusses St. Peter's in Rome

2010-03-19T19:19:00.002-05:00

Truth & Myths of the Health Care Bill

2010-03-19T16:40:00.000-05:00

See the whole thing at FDL

Dems Sell Their Vote

2010-03-19T16:34:00.000-05:00

By the way, selling your vote is highly illegal.

More Troop 814 2009 High Adventure

2010-03-19T07:56:00.001-05:00

Troop 814 High Adventure Mt. Lindsey 2009 from Gil Garza on Vimeo.
Troop 814 High Adventure trip to Colorado Mt. Lindsey climbing crew 2009

Troop 814 Summer High Adventure Trip to Colorado

2010-03-07T19:57:00.001-06:00

I just realized that I never posted the video from the Troop 814 High Adventure trip to Colorado this past summer. So here you go! Enjoy!

EZ Cracker!

2010-03-07T18:47:00.000-06:00

YOU will want one too!

Downtown Vision Falls Short

2010-03-07T17:50:00.000-06:00

I'm shocked and disturbed. I found myself in complete agreement with the editor of the SA Express-News! This is unprecedented!

Here what Robert Rivard wrote in todays paper, Downtown Vision Falls Short:

Rebecca Ryan owns the stage. Smart, fit and attractive, funny and confident, she has a packed audience of Downtown Alliance members laughing, Twittering and nodding in agreement as she works her way through a captivating session imagining a truly great future city.

Ryan is a dynamo: the author of the praised book “Live First, Work Second,” an urban planning consultant and an expert observer of the next generation. Introduced by Mayor Julián Castro, she mesmerizes listeners with a clever mix of data, trends and one-liners.

As Castro noted, San Antonio is a growing place, and with San Diego, Calif., now in the rearview mirror, in terms of the nation's largest cities, Philadelphia will be the next city we pass.

Fine, Ryan notes, but young people don't necessarily want to live here. The challenge, she said, is to build a city that makes young people feel homesick, a place they ache for when gone rather than a city they can't wait to leave.

Ryan lives in Madison, Wis., which some compare culturally to Austin. The big screen above the stage fills with a city map showing Madison's comprehensive network of bike lanes, despite the city's long winters.

Then she turns to San Antonio's patchwork of bike lanes and says the map communicates one message to local cyclists: Don't even think about riding in this city.

I was as inspired as everyone else in the audience at the Westin Riverwalk Hotel on Thursday, but inspiration is one thing, reality another.

A Saturday cycling outing for some 20 members of the Third Street Grackles, the team I captain, ended in near-disaster for one rider. Lisa Marie Gomez was riding home north on Broadway around noon just south of Hildebrand when she collided with an oncoming taxi that turned into her lane, the driver apologizing that he didn't see her.

Fortunately, Gomez was uninjured, not the usual outcome in motor vehicle-bicycle mishaps.

While the mayor has been speaking passionately about the “Decade of Downtown” and others in the Downtown Alliance have joined him in supporting imaginative and ambitious plans for the future inner city, the sad truth is that the rhetoric is not being matched by action.

In the coming year, both Hildebrand and Mulberry avenues, both of which cross and connect the city's key north-south avenues — Broadway, McCullough and San Pedro — will be closed for long periods to undertake major drainage improvement projects.

The newly constructed streets will include some additional right of way, yet city engineers have no plans to add bike lanes to either Hildebrand or Mulberry, which bracket Brackenridge Park.

The resistance by city planners to embrace sensible planning and best practices is both arrogant and astonishing. And the city's top leadership is doing little or nothing about it.

As we report on Page 1A today, University of the Incarnate Word President Lou Agnese has been quietly working to expand the campus across Hildebrand into Brackenridge Park.

The street crossing from UIW to the park already is one of the most dangerous pedestrian crossings in the city core. Allowing new campus structures, parking lots and vehicle traffic to spill into the park will only make matters worse.

The city, like the taxi that collided with Gomez on Saturday, is actually making some very bad decisions that run counter to the mayor's progressive vision. The next generation will have to live with the consequences, or find somewhere else more appealing to call home.

What You Didn't Know About the Ft. Hood Shooter

2010-03-06T22:55:00.000-06:00

From Atlas Shrugs:

There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear. Just for knowing:

{Muslim} Major Hassan used an FNH 5.7x28 pistol. This is not a very well known weapon. That is it is unlikely that a psychiatrist would know about it. It fires a 5.7 mm, 40 gr bullet at a very high velocity, 2034 fps, giving a muzzle kinetic energy of 367 ft-lbs. ( about the same as a 9mm ). This bullet has a polymer expanding tip and due to the expansion of the tip and the high velocity leads to a tumbling expansile bullet which has a very destructive course. It can penetrate almost 10 inches into ballistic gelatin after penetrating a Level II bullet proof vest.

This is not a weapon that an unknowlegeble person would even know. Someone who was a weapons expert told him what to buy. This involves more than Hassan. This is not the Islamic terrorism of just one man. The same weapon had to be used in the Seattle shooting of four police officers at the cafe. These officers had their Kevlar vests. It is inconceivable that these were all head shots. The armor piercing version of this bullet is restricted to military or law enforcement. This is more than just one man.

Love Has Wings

2010-03-06T09:51:00.000-06:00

How Liberals Think

2010-02-28T21:22:00.000-06:00

Purple Belt Slideshow

2010-02-27T13:24:00.001-06:00

Purple Belt!

2010-02-27T13:23:00.000-06:00

Dr. Hivnor & Healing Laser

2010-02-23T19:40:00.000-06:00

A close friend of mine, Dr. Chad Hivnor is using a leading edge healing laser that is helping our wounded warriors. Good on ya, Chad!

What is Real on TV?

2010-02-23T12:29:00.000-06:00

Obama's Health Care Proposal Costs How Much?

2010-02-22T15:15:00.000-06:00

President Obama has finally posted his version of Healthcare Reform on the White House website. Today the Director of the Congressional Budget Office posted this bit on the Director's Blog about the President's proposal:

The Obama Administration’s Health Care Proposal

This morning the Obama Administration released a description of its health care proposal, and CBO has already received several requests to provide a cost estimate for that proposal. We had not previously received the proposal, and we have just begun the process of reviewing it—a process that will take some time, given the complexity of the issues involved. Although the proposal reflects many elements that were included in the health care bills passed by the House and the Senate last year, it modifies many of those elements and also includes new ones. Moreover, preparing a cost estimate requires very detailed specifications of numerous provisions, and the materials that were released this morning do not provide sufficient detail on all of the provisions. Therefore, CBO cannot provide a cost estimate for the proposal without additional detail, and, even if such detail were provided, analyzing the proposal would be a time-consuming process that could not be completed this week.

So, we have no idea how much the President's Health Care Proposal is going to cost because the President didn't provide enough detail. Nice.

The Leftist Hate of Joseph Andrew Stack

2010-02-21T17:01:00.000-06:00

The editor of the San Antonio Express-News has chimed in on what caused Joseph Andrew Stack III to fly his plane into a building that housed the CIA and IRS in Austin. He writes, "A rising tide of populist anger in this country is driven by bitter sentiment that our system is broken, our leaders unworthy, and the average citizen left to rage helplessly. Stack seems to have been part of that movement."

Typically, the liberal leader of the San Antonio media establishment casts Stack as a rageful populist, an angry tea-bagger who listens to talk radio who hates the Democrats and Obama because he blames them for his personal woes. Rivard warns us that angry tea-baggers are fomenting hatred and murder in our country. He writes, "The truth is we have it good. Not as good as it has been, not as good as it should be in this nation. But the federal government, the Obama administration and its employees are not the enemy. It's too bad Andrew Stack III allowed himself to believe otherwise and succumbed to the politics of despair, and too bad that so many others out there think just like him."

Watch out for those angry tea-baggers, says Rivard. They'll kill you just as soon as look at you! Forget that the Tea Party movement is perhaps largest spontaneous movement of ordinary people from across the political, social and ethnic spectrum in our history. Yeah. Forget that part. Instead, focus on how evil and angry Tea-baggers are.

Rivard takes his cues from Dan Turner at the LA Times who wrote a strangely similar opinion piece entitled, "Manifesto of a... terrorist?" three days ago. Turner writes, "Yet it's also striking how much his rhetoric resembles that of a very powerful political movement in the United States: the "tea party" crew." Turner argues that Stack was angry that our government had failed to follow the principles of our Founding Fathers and that his manifesto was a "symphony of Palinism," despite the lack of any reference to the Founding Fathers or Sarah Palin by Stack.

What Rivard and Turner want you to miss, however, is that Stack was a liberal and not a conservative. He was also highly educated and highly placed. Stack was angry that the Democrats and Obama hadn't done enough to move the agenda to the left. He called for a violent revolution against a system corrupt with profits in his pathetic manifesto. He hated capitalism and conservatism. He railed against the Catholic Church, George W. Bush, GM executives and corporate profits in his manifesto. He closes his rant with, "The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed."

It was Stack's leftist hate that drove him to murder much like Lee Harvey Oswald and or Amy Bishop in Alabama. My thoughts and prayers are with his widow and his daughter that he so selfishly left behind and all those hurt or killed by his hatred.

Obama and ACORN

2010-02-20T18:07:00.002-06:00

Breckenridge 2010

2010-02-19T13:15:00.000-06:00

Overpopulation

2010-02-18T08:17:00.002-06:00

T-Shirt War: Stop Motion Music Video

2010-02-12T22:55:00.000-06:00

Can You Guess?

2010-02-11T12:53:00.000-06:00

Can you guess what I have in common with Burt Reynolds, Thomas Edison, Paul Bocuse, Sarah Palin and Jeb Bush? That's right! We all share the same birthday. Today! God has given me another year. I'm so grateful for my wonderful family, my friends and my J.O.B.. Thanks Mom for giving me life!

Juan Pedro's Musical

2010-02-09T21:53:00.002-06:00

More From Tio Chano

2010-02-08T20:55:00.002-06:00

Court of Honor

2010-02-07T17:50:00.000-06:00

Josemaria received his Life Scout rank at today's Boy Scout Court of Honor. He was presented with several merit badges (including the super cool Snow Sports, Shotgun Shooting & Rifle Shooting), his Duty to God badge and BSA 100th anniversary badge. We are so proud of him! Congratulation!