Wood, Johnson, Harper, and TullosLewis Wood, a Justice of the Peace in Queen City (northeast Texas) agreed to quit "in lieu of disciplinary action" after the State Commission on Judicial Conduct investigated reports he sexually assaulted a woman in his office. He did not admit guilt in the agreement, but did agree not to sit or serve as a judge in Texas ever again. State District Judge Faith Johnson of Dallas was Publicly Admonished by the commission after telling her staff she was going to pick up cake and ice cream to celebrate the return of an escaped convict she had sentenced to life in prison. Her staff then decorated her courtroom with balloons and streamers when Billy Wayne Williams returned, and the judge made national headlines when she told him, "You just made my day when I heard you had finally come home. We're so excited to see you, we're throwing a party for you." Johnson, in a statement, said she had cooperated with the commission, that she'd been surprised by the attention the event attracted, and ended with this: "If my celebration of the return of fugitive Billy Wayne Williams offended any member of the community, I deeply apologize." Former Judge H. Lon Harper of Houston got a Public Reprimand from the commission for not doing enough of the legally required judicial education work while he was on the bench. At one point, he offered to resign in response to the complaints, but didn't follow up. And finally, the commission issued a Public Reprimand against Oscar Tullos, a JP in Brownsville. He told a lady suing a body shop to include the court fees in the amount she was claiming (in small claims court). She did, but the other side eventually got the case killed, by Tullos, because of an error in her original filing. The error? She included court costs in her claim and didn't specify what they were for. The commission had previously sanctioned Tullos for similar behavior, saying this time that he "failed to comply with the law and demonstrated a lack of professional competence..."

In a speech delivered to the Camp County Republicans in East Texas on Saturday, April 23, 2005, former Republican Chairman and ex-Reagan official Tom Pauken called for major policy changes in Austin and Washington, D.C. He wrote this piece afterwards and passed along to us. The state property tax was killed by the Texas Senate this morning."At a state level, we have Republicans in the Senate pushing a statewide property tax which will further erode local control over our public schools and flies in the face of our Republican-led efforts twelve years ago to successfully defeat the "Robin Hood" School Finance amendment to the Texas Constitution. Voters rejected a statewide property tax by a two-to-one margin. The Texas House has passed a school reform plan which is effectively a tax on wages combined with significant increases in sales taxes. It leaves "Robin Hood" intact. What happened to the Republican policy pledge over the past decade to eliminate Robin Hood, an unfair school financing scheme which imposes too heavy a tax burden on property owners to fund Texas public education." Pauken called for the replacement of Robin Hood with the Hartman Plan -- a broad-based, low percentage business activities tax which would replace the franchise tax, severance tax, and insurance tax. Proposed by Austin businessman David Hartman, Pauken called the Hartman Plan the fairest and most equitable way to tax business in Texas while reducing our excessive reliance on property taxes to fund public education. The Hartman proposal can be found at www.lonestarfoundation.org on the Studies page under Economic Policy-State: "Texas State Tax Reform Via the Flat BAT by David Hartman". Pauken added, "I am concerned that Austin lobbyists representing a variety of special interests are exercising far too much influence over the legislative process as our legislators try to come to grips with an appropriate solution to the failed Robin Hood scheme. We need a tax plan that is equitable and fair to our entire business community, rather than one that favors some businesses to the detriment of others. Otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for a personal income tax, which Texas doesn't need." At the national level, Pauken claimed that neither Republicans nor Democratic leaders were addressing the loss of our manufacturing base and the move to outsource jobs to workers in other countries which Pauken believes threatens the long-term viability of our American middle class. We are losing too many jobs overseas. According to Pauken, "every trading nation in the world -- except the United States of America -- has a value added tax to protect its domestic industries. Moreover, we are running trade deficits that are approaching the $700 billion level this year. This is not sustainable. As Warren Buffet has noted, what we are building in America is not "an ownership society" but "a sharecropper society". We need to replace the corporate income tax which penalizes companies for creating jobs in the U.S. with a border-adjusted VAT tax, as proposed by David Hartman, which will help level the playing field for American businesses. Pauken went on, "Any Republican leader who claims 'deficits don't matter' doesn't' know what he is talking about. You cannot continue to run current account (or trade) deficits in excess of $600 billion annually and budget deficits of more than $500 billion a year without facing a day of reckoning. What happened to our traditional economic principles which encouraged thrift and capital investment while warning of the dangers of excessive debt?" Pauken also called for a re-thinking of our War on Terrorism and criticized the neo-conservative influence over foreign policy in the Bush Administration. We have gone from a policy that views war as a last resort to one that talks about the necessity of preemptive war. Pauken added, "I am not sure the American people realize that neo-conservative leaders are committed to the principle of "perpetual war" to force democracy all throughout the Middle East. According to Pauken, "Unlike neo-conservatives, true conservatives are wary of utopian schemes to remake human nature." Pauken called for a foreign policy that is principally driven by what is in America's national interest. Pauken noted that the Soviet Empire fell without a shot being fired. Yet the neo-conservative architects of the War in Iraq now are calling for the overthrow of the regimes in Iran and Syria at a time when our U.S. military is already stretched too thin. According to Pauken, hardly any of the neo-conservative advocates of "perpetual war" have ever served in the military, much less in our last major war in Vietnam (Pauken is a former Military Intelligence Officer who served a tour of duty in Vietnam). Pauken questioned whether the neo-conservative strategy of perpetual war in the Middle East does not run of the risk of destabilizing the Middle East, turning more Muslims into Al Queda supporters, and furthering bin Laden's objective of radicalizing the Middle East. Pauken concluded, "What happened to our conservative principles of local control, limited government and government spending restraints? And, why have we abandoned a foreign policy guided by what is our national interest and replaced it with one which seeks to impose so-called American-styled "democracy" everywhere in the world? Conservatives need to speak out on these issues rather than allow blind party loyalty to cause us to go along with whatever our Republican officials in Austin and Washington tell us we have to support, no matter how much those policies are at odds with our conservative principles." Tom Pauken is a Dallas lawyer and the former chairman of the Republican Party of Texas. He can be contacted at 469-235-3995.

SurveyUSA, a polling company that does work for several media outlets in Texas and elsewhere (we're not a client), says Gov. Rick Perry ranks 38th among U.S. governors in popularity in his own state. More Texans disapprove than approve of the job he's doing, according to the poll.The pollsters say 38 percent of Texans approve of Perry while 48 percent do not. They based that on a sample of 600 people polled by phone over the past weekend, and put the margin of error at 4.1 percent. Their question was "Do you approve or disapprove of the job Rick Perry is doing as governor?" You can see the full results and cross tabs and such at this address: www.surveyusa.com/50governorsrated051005.htm While Perry's numbers were upside down, he hasn't crossed into that dangerous land where more than half the population wants him out. Fourteen of the nation's governors got disapproval ratings over 50 percent, including California's Arnold Schwarzenegger. The most popular governors on the list are from smaller states. In fact, the governor's from the biggest states don't make the top 25 in approval ratings. The leader of the pack: John Hoeven of North Dakota, with 71-20 approval-disapproval numbers. The stinker? Ohio's Bob Taft, who gets 19-74 ratings, is the least popular chief executive in the U.S. according to SurveyUSA. Big state governors, with their ranking: Jeb Bush of Florida, 28; Edward Rendell of Pennsylvania, 29; Sonny Perdue of Georgia, 30; Richard Codey of New Jersey, 34; Schwarzenegger, 36; Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, 42; Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, 44; and George Pataki of New York, 45.

Appointments, a Libertarian gets 68 percent, and the House remembers Joe Moreno.Appointments: Gov. Rick Perry named T. Dan Friedkin of Houston and Peter Holt of Blanco to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission. Friedkin is president and CEO of Friedkin Companies, which includes Gulf States Toyota among its investments. Holt's the jefe at Holt CAT, which bills itself as the biggest Caterpillar distributor in the U.S. He's also the principal owner of the San Antonio Spurs. He's on the commission now, and Perry's reappointing him. Perry put six people on the Brazos River Authority's board and named Steve Peña of Round Rock, who's already on the board, to chair it. The newbies include U.S. Air Force Gen. (ret.) Christopher Adams Jr. of Granbury, former chief of staff of Strategic Air Command and former associate director of Los Alamos National Laboratory; former Clifton Mayor Truman Blum; U.S. Army Col. (ret.) Robert Christian of Jewitt; Christopher DeCluitt of Waco, an exec with The Sovereign Corporation; Carolyn Johnson of Freeport, an environmental consultant with Dow Chemical; and Roberta Killgore, a Somerville rancher. The local elections last week included the City of Lago Vista, which elected Pat Dixon, chairman of the Texas Libertarian Party, to its city council. He got 68 percent of the vote. Deaths: Rep. Joe Moreno, a well-liked Houston Democrat who worked as an aide in the Capitol before running successfully for office in 1998, in a much-reported traffic accident. He was 40. Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, was treated and released after the accident, and Monica Piñon, an aide to Rep. Joe Pickett, D-El Paso, remains hospitalized with injuries from that accident. The three were returning to Austin after a basketball game in Houston. The House adjourned for a day out of respect and moved one day's legislative work to 6 p.m. so friends and colleagues could attend the funeral in Houston and the burial in the state cemetery.

Revving the engines for 2006...Ag Commissioner Susan Combs sets a "statewide leadership team meeting" for May 21 in Austin to talk about her race for comptroller. That's a purse/wallet-safe event; state officeholders can't raise money while the Legislature is still in session. The current comptroller, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, hasn't said for sure that she's leaving office, but she's not making any noise about Comb's recent moves on that spot. Kinky Friedman, running for Texas governor as an independent, is in the midst of the first trip he's openly calling a campaign foray. It's in Houston, and the capper is his gig as grand marshal of "Everyone's Art Car Parade," an event that proves Austin is not the only weird place in Texas, or even the biggest one. And Democratic gubernatorial explorer Chris Bell, a former Houston congressman and city council who's considering a run next year, is holding "house parties" here and elsewhere to raise money and support for his candidacy. He's got two coming up in Texas, one in Chicago, and another in Washington, D.C.