[AGL] a white knight - please vote for him

[michele mason]

Connie, note the new address. And, yes I will.  mm

On Oct 31, 2006, at 8:03 AM, Connie Clark wrote:

>> Last week Van Os was in Houston at the County Courthouse - rallying 
>> support and filing his 'Affidavit of Public Record' (see quoted 
>> below), but was stopped by Harris County Clerk (Republican).  She 
>> looked at it and said, 'we do not have to file this, and we won't'.  
>> Every other County in Texas received it and filed it.  The Houston 
>> Chronicle did not cover any of this event.
>>> Excerpt from Dugger:
>>> In a deliberate affront to routinely lying politicians, Van Os is 
>>> making some of his promises under oath.  In every courthouse he has 
>>> visited recently he files an "Affidavit for Public Record" pledging 
>>> his personal honor to certain commitments.  "I am placing written 
>>> oaths in the public records," he says, because "I mean what I say. 
>>>  Under oath I promise that I will use every legal means {made} 
>>> available to me by that office to protect Texans and their property 
>>> from the unconstitutional attack on the integrity of our land and 
>>> property known as the Trans-Texas Corridor.  I will enforce and 
>>> uphold the Texas Constitutional promise that runaway corporate 
>>> monopolies will not be allowed to devour democracy and free 
>>> enterprise.   I will defend the people of Texas from big oil and the 
>>> insurance jackals....The office of Attorney General will belong to 
>>> the people and I will be the people's lawyer."
>>> Full article from the Observer:
>>  
>> The Wizard of Os
>> By Ronnie Dugger
>> Texas Observer            October 20, 2006
>> Two hundred forty-seven down, seven to go.  That was the achievement 
>> of David Van Os, the Democratic nominee this year for Attorney 
>> General of Texas, the first Friday afternoon in October in Dickens, 
>> Texas, as he spoke to voters assembled to meet and hear him at the 
>> 247th county courthouse where he has campaigned this year out of the 
>> 254 counties of this huge state.  He was on course to stump at the 
>> courthouses of the five biggest counties during the week of Oct. 
>> 16th, shaking hands and declaiming in Travis County, his 254th 
>> courthouse, in Austin on Oct. 20th.
>>
>> Not only is the stocky, bearded Van Os the first leading Texas 
>> politician since Ralph Yarborough who has taken his campaign 
>> passionately to the small towns and lost little counties all over the 
>> state.  He is also the first leading political figure in the state 
>> since Jim Hightower to run an all-out Populist campaign.  As his 
>> campaign literature says, "David has proven day-in, day-out, that he 
>> stands for the people of this great state, not its corporations."
>>
>> Consider the phenomenal commitment and personal energy Van Os is 
>> laying down every week of his campaign.  In just four days, for 
>> instance-Sept. 26th-29-he spoke at the county courthouses in 
>> Brownfield, Plains, Morton, Levelland, Littlefield, Muleshoe, 
>> Farwell, Dimmitt, Tulia, Plainview, Silverton, Memphis, Childress, 
>> Quanah, Crowell, Paducah, Matador, Floydada, Crosbyton, and Lubbock. 
>>  People are startled in many of these little places to actually see 
>> and hear, again or for the first time, a walking, talking statewide 
>> Democratic candidate.
>> Van Os charges that the five big-city Texas dailies all but ignore 
>> him, and he predicts they will continue to do so for the rest of the 
>> election.  (He concedes that the Houston Chronicle has run one so-so 
>> story on his candidacy.  In October the Austin American-Statesman ran 
>> another one.)  Weeklies and small-city dailies, though, have welcomed 
>> his uncompromising anti-big-corporate message, as scores of news 
>> reports attest.  Win or lose, he is what the late Senator Yarborough 
>> most missed in Texas politics in his later years, candidates who run 
>> hard for what they believe in, holding forth in hell's despite, 
>> especially to the young, the image and reality of someone saying out 
>> boldly what he actually believes needs to be said and done.
>> This is a journal of the historical record, among other things, so 
>> before the election occurs let it be recorded here that in 2004 Van 
>> Os, a labor lawyer from San Antonio, won 41% of the Texas vote for 
>> the state supreme court, finishing two and a half points better than 
>> the 38% margin of John Kerry in Texas.  Van Os is running this year 
>> on a platform that, if carried out, would not only profoundly change 
>> the state, but could also change, and more profoundly, the nation.
>> Van Os said one self-identified Republican rancher said to him at 
>> lunch in Brady, "You know why we stopped votin' for the Democrats, 
>> don't you?  They lost their kick-ass.  We like you because you've got 
>> some kick-ass."  And that he does.
>> "The people of Texas are under attack today," he said in August, 
>> "from a reign of greed, corruption, and arrogance at the hands of the 
>> corporate monopoly robber barons and the crooked politicians who are 
>> their water boys.  The rich lawyers and the ivory tower consultants 
>> who are telling Democrats not to try to carry Texas this year are 
>> giving the robber barons and their incumbent Republican stooges 
>> exactly what they want.  In effect, those lawyers and their 
>> consultants are doing nothing less than protecting the silk-stocking 
>> Republican social clique that runs Texas government as if it were a 
>> private club."
>> In a deliberate affront to routinely lying politicians, Van Os is 
>> making some of his promises under oath.  In every courthouse he has 
>> visited recently he files an "Affidavit for Public Record" pledging 
>> his personal honor to certain commitments.  "I am placing written 
>> oaths in the public records," he says, because "I mean what I say. 
>>  Under oath I promise that I will use every legal means {made} 
>> available to me by that office to protect Texans and their property 
>> from the unconstitutional attack on the integrity of our land and 
>> property known as the Trans-Texas Corridor.  I will enforce and 
>> uphold the Texas Constitutional promise that runaway corporate 
>> monopolies will not be allowed to devour democracy and free 
>> enterprise.   I will defend the people of Texas from big oil and the 
>> insurance jackals....The office of Attorney General will belong to 
>> the people and I will be the people's lawyer."
>> You may wish to keep in mind, my fellow Texans, that this is the 
>> official nominee of the Texas Democratic Party for the highest 
>> law-enforcement position in the state.  He has been endorsed by both 
>> Jim Hightower and the Texas AFL-CIO.
>> Calling attention to Exxon-Mobil's inconceivable net profit of $10.7 
>> billion in the first quarter of this year, Van Os says:  "In Texas we 
>> have always stood against monopoly power.  Our Texas Constitution 
>> declares...that monopolies are contrary to the genius of free 
>> government and shall never be allowed.  We were the second political 
>> jurisdiction in the world to enact an anti-trust statute-in the 
>> 1880s, a decade before the U.S. Congress passed federal anti-trust 
>> legislation.  That first Texas anti-trust law was drafted by 
>> then-Attorney General James Stephen Hogg, one of the great people's 
>> lawyers to occupy the office."
>>
>> "I've got a message to big oil companies," Van Os said in Lufkin last 
>> June.  "You'd better spend every penny of your billions to help 
>> defeat me because when I get sworn in in January, I'm coming after 
>> you."  Monopolies don't create jobs, he said, they downsize-"For 
>> example, over 9,000 jobs were lost when Exxon and Mobil 
>> merged....Already at least two state attorneys general, in 
>> Connecticut and California, are initiating challenges to the big oil 
>> companies under their states' anti-trust and consumer protection 
>> laws....One of my first actions after being sworn in...will be to 
>> initiate anti-trust investigations of the big oil barons."
>> Van Os has a strategy for victory.   Whether he'll win or not, he 
>> thinks he has it figured:  the Democratic parties in the five major 
>> cities regularly win about 47 to 48% of the vote for statewide 
>> candidates, so to carry the state, he calculates, he needs to swing 
>> over to voting for him one in 12 who voted Republican last election. 
>>  That is why he has spent almost all his time in the boondocks.
>> The San Antonian, who is of Dutch extraction, regards the Democrats' 
>> down-ticket candidates this year as the most Populist in decades-he 
>> specifies Marie Luisa Alvarado, running for lieutenant governor, Hank 
>> Gilbert, for agriculture commissioner, and Fred Head, for 
>> comptroller.  The official state Democratic Party embodied in the 
>> State Democratic Executive Committee has attracted Van Os' special 
>> wrath.  "On Saturday, August 26, at the Radisson Hotel in Austin," he 
>> charged, "members of the SDEC attended a private luncheon to which 
>> Democratic candidates were not invited.  At this luncheon, (they} 
>> learned that a small group of moneyed lawyers and their consultants 
>> are now providing the funding for the Texas Democratic Party's 
>> operations and will do so for the next four years."  Van Os is 
>> convinced that the state party is ignoring him and the other Populist 
>> candidates because their winning would upset the aspirations of all 
>> the tippie-toe Democrats such as ex-Rep. Martin  Frost of Dallas who 
>> are scheming to win office in the state After Bush (A.B.).
>>
>> And what of the United States?  We Texans are, after all, a part of 
>> it.  Democrats hope to win a majority of the U.S. House and have a 
>> fair chance to take back the Senate, too.  There are only two ways 
>> the Bush Administration can be properly investigated, while still in 
>> office, for its many crimes, especially for its war of aggression in 
>> Iraq that has killed 2,700 Americans and wounded more than 20,000 of 
>> our people, at a cost to the taxpayers of almost $2 billion a month, 
>> while also killing and wounding some hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. 
>>  If the House goes Democratic, impeachment charges can be initiated 
>> against President Bush by Cong. John Conyers, Jr., from Michigan, who 
>> will then be chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which has charge of 
>> impeachments.  But if the Republicans keep control of the entire 
>> Congress, the only chances left to hold this Administration 
>> accountable while still in office abide right here in Texas.
>>
>> In February Van Os exclaimed, "The argument that George Bush's puppet 
>> Alberto Gonzales uses to defend illegal wiretapping...boils down to 
>> the outrageous assertion that neither the Congress nor the courts has 
>> any authority to place limits on whatever the President decides the 
>> Constitution means or an act of Congress means....As far as they are 
>> concerned, there are no checks and balances, and they are the law. 
>>  This is a trait of dictatorship, not democracy.
>>  "The Constitution and the Bill of Rights belong to Texans just as 
>> much as to other Americans," Van Os continued.  "Texas Atty. Gen. 
>> Greg Abbot took an oath to uphold the Constitution when he accepted 
>> the office. Where is his voice in this crisis?  Why has he not spoken 
>> up on behalf of the Constitutional rights of his clients, the people 
>> of Texas?"
>>
>> Van Os, the Democratic nominee for the highest law-enforcement office 
>> in the state, promised this on last Feb. 8th:
>> "As your new Attorney General, I will file the lawsuits against the 
>> federal government and federal officials, including the President and 
>> Attorney General, which individual Texans do not have the means to 
>> file on their own to stop this headlong rush to trash our 
>> Constitution."
>> Knowing Van Os personally as I do, in my opinion, if the Democrats do 
>> not win the U.S. House but Van Os is elected, George W. Bush will be 
>> called to account, to a serious extent, in his home state, for the 
>> high crimes and misdemeanors, including his war of aggression in 
>> violation of the United Nations charter, which he has committed as 
>> President.
>> How much of any of this, I wonder, have our readers in the big cities 
>> learned from their newspapers and television and radio stations? 
>>  Damn little, if any.  Well, you have learned it here.Want to start 
>> your own business? Learn how on  Yahoo! Small Business. 
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