Abbott’s Shining Example Of A Voter Fraud Prosecution Goes Down The Toilet

Remember back in 2006 and 2007 when Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott was crowing about a bunch of “voter fraud” indictments in Hidalgo and Starr Counties?

It appears, now that the majority of those cases have been dismissed, that the AG has little or nothing to crow about:

Criminal charges against two politiqueras accused of tampering with ballots in the 2005 McAllen mayoral election were dropped Tuesday, the same day their case was scheduled to go to trial.

Hidalgo County Court-at-law Judge Jaime Palacios dismissed the case against Maria Helena Belasquez and Alicia Liscano Molina at the request of prosecutors who did not feel they had enough evidence to convince a jury of wrongdoing.

The decision comes five days after a similar case was dismissed against another politiquera, Gloria Barajas.

Most amusing about this situation is that the local District Attorney, left to prosecute the case in the wake of Abbott’s swoop-in-and-indict-them episode, has no problem throwing Abbott under the bus and telling the world what he thinks of the prosecutions:

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Alice Mayor Resigns Over Dog Incident

We’ve been casually paying attention to this story for a while, so we wanted to keep you updated. The DMN has more.

Alice Mayor Urged To Quit Over Doggone Flap

We’ve been following (somewhat) the saga of Alice mayor Grace Saenz-Lopez, who is in hot water for, essentially, allegedly stealing her neighbors’ dog. She’s been indicted in connection with the saga, and last night the Alice City Council called upon her to resign. The Statesman has more on this ongoing saga.

Strange Texas Politics: Alice Mayor Indicted Over Dog

If you haven’t been following the bizarre, entertaining saga of Grace Saenz-Lopez, the mayor of Alice, and her Shih Tzu, you are missing a lot. Via the SAEXN:

As with most tragic love affairs, the one that has unfolded here in recent months in a harsh media glare has all the classical elements: a blind infatuation, public condemnation and the harsh threat of ruin.

The only thing unique to this doomed romance is that it involves Grace Saenz-Lopez, the mayor of Alice, and a 5-pound Shih Tzu dog that happens to belong to someone else.

The Alice Echo-News has more on the indictment. More here and here, here, here, here and here.

All I can say is that it always seems like stuff like this always seems to crop up from the Valley. Interesting.

Border Mayors Refuse To Allow Homeland Security On Land For Border Fence

Given that most of the major metro dailies typically ignore the Rio Grande Valley–even as the border fence becomes an hotter and hotter topic–I was surprised to see some version of this story in four of the state’s major dailies this morning:

Mayors along the Texas-Mexico border have begun a quiet protest of the federal government’s plans to build a fence along the border: Some are refusing access to their land.

Mayors in Brownsville, Del Rio and El Paso have denied or limited access to some parts of city property to Department of Homeland Security workers assigned to begin surveys or other preliminary work on the fence Congress has authorized to keep out illegal immigrants. Eagle Pass has denied a request from federal officials to build a portion of the wall within its city limits.

This is totally priceless. It’s especially priceless because these Texas cities are, from all accounts, pushing around the federal government as they tell the Feds, “not in my backyard” with regard to that stupid border fence.

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Valley Officials Could Use Litigation To Stop Border “Wall”

This interesting tidbit comes via Legislative Media, which tracks legislation and politics in South Texas:

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Texas Border Economy Prospered Under Fox

Like most bloggers trying to give readers a statewide political picture, I too often fail to bring my readers important Valley news. Luckily, there are a ton of excellent RGV blogs (check out the sidebar) already doing that.

Anyway, I ran across this story in the Brownsville Herald and thought it was very interesting and worthy of a mention:

It seems as though the border economy in recent years has been significantly aided by the administration of now-former Mexican President Vicente Fox:

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Good Fences May Make Good Neighbors, But They Sure Can Screw Up Your Yard

No doubt that, by now, you’ve heard about Congress’s monumentally stupid idea to place 700 miles of ‘fence’ along the U.S. Mexico border, with much of that fence being built in Texas.

You’ve probably also heard the phrase “good fences make good neighbors.” And, if your neighbors have 14 pit bulls and like to subathe naked around their swimming pool in spite of weighing 500 pounds, good fences probably do make good neighbors.

But, they can also really tear up your yard. Or, in the case of the border fence, they can endanger the environment, according to the Associated Press in a recent El Paso Times article:

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The Rio Grande Valley…Waiting for it’s two cents worth…Only the beginning?

The Rio Grande Valley, South Texas. The southernmost border between the United States and Mexico. A collection of small towns and booming urban areas connected by a main roadway that is Expressway 83 which runs east to west along miles and miles of palm trees. An area that is estimated to have close to one million people calling this corner of the world their home. Of that population, 86% are of Hispanic ethnicity.

But despite these statistics, the recent immigration debate on Capitol Hill has done nothing more than cause a ripple in the every day lives of it’s citizens. This is in sharp contrast to the more than five hundred thousand protestors that marched last weekend across the country in cities like Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, and Milwaukee. Los Angeles bearing the brunt of the protests at an estimated five hundred thousand people, according to various news sources, and bloggers across the web.

One could argue that places like Los Angeles, and Houston are so highly populated and ethnically diverse that an ethnic group’s call to action takes little more than a comment by a television anchor, or radio disc jockey. After all, if there ever was a hotbed for marches and protests, Los Angeles would be at the very core of such public displays, i.e. Cesar Chavez, 1968 walkouts, etc. But what drives these citizens to take action? What at the very center of their beings compels them to not sit back and take whatever the government has in mind to feed them at any given moment? To hold true to the time honored quote by this country’s forefathers, “Don’t tread on me!”?

This same attitude, this same ideal is being questioned by more than a few people in the Rio Grande Valley. After all, for most of us that got into the business of political blogging, the lack of active citizens in the area is both disheartening and worrisome. Word on the street from John Q. citizen seems to always be, “It doesn’t affect us personally, why bother?” or the ever popular, “the government is going to do what it wants, what can we do about it?”.

It’s this same type of attitude that I have stated before on RGV Politics, that gets the wrong people elected in the first place, and secondly, allows the government to pass questionable laws and policies that will affect us for generations to come. But words like these seem to fall on deaf ears for the most part. Or at the very least there is the general conception that Valley political bloggers, and those that share our views and need for a more pro-active community is nothing more than a case of preaching to the choir.

Things may be changing. According to a report out of the local South Texas newspaper, The Monitor, students from McAllen High School staged a walk-out to protest the illegal immigration debate. Students marched from the high school down Bicentennial Blvd. to the Mexican Consulate in downtown McAllen, about a two mile stretch. Outcry’s by students, according to the report, included, “We are not criminals, we are dreamers”. Should we leave it then to the younger generation of children that will bear the burden of whatever laws Congress decides to pass regarding illegal immigration and border security? Some may say that student walk-outs are wrong, children need to be in class, which is true, I’ll concur that there are better days to stage a protest. Instead of normal weekend activities, they should stage there protests on Saturday afternoons, or Sunday mornings. After all, becoming a more pro-active community should not involve unruly conduct or lawlessness. But I will say, that if these young adults are willing to become more organized in their protests, it would be irresponsible of us as a community not to encourage such activity. Wouldn’t it?

This may be the first step in changing the attitudes that are prevolent in the Rio Grande Valley political and social atmosphere. After all, for too long, the Rio Grande Valley has been built as somewhat of a political and social pergatory. On one end of the spectrum, an unflinching idealism that the government will do what it wants and it’s citizens should have no say. On the other end, there are the beginnings revolving around an undercurrent of political rumbling and frustration that believes that we can no longer sit idly by, and do nothing about it.