![](http://borderpundit.com/"wp-content/uploads//2011/05/runannerun.jpg "Run, Anne, Run!")
El Paso Politics
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Morgan Lilly Re-Election Poster
Friday, May 27th, 2011El Paso’s Crookedly-Singing Mayor
Saturday, September 18th, 2010Mayor John Cook, sometimes slurred as Mayor Crook (but only because nearly everyone around him is convicted, under investigation, or suspected of corruption), wants to "annex" Fort Bliss. He wants this so as to take advantage of the allegedly massive tax base that exists on the Army post. So we made a song that we hope sums up the nature of Crook, El Paso and… why, yes — why the local guvmint has a problem paying first-responders their due. It's because Crook & Co have squandered the city treasury on misc. silliness. Enjoy!
THIS POST IS MY POST
CHORUS
This post is our post, this post is my post
From Cassidy, to Biggs Airfield
From the Dyer redline, to McGregor Range
This post was made for taxing you
As I was walking Spur 601
I saw above me an Army sign
I saw below me a tax man sign
This post was made for taxing you
CHORUS
I've sang and stumbled and I've slept with hoodlums
Ethics Commission and drug-soaked buddies
And all around me, corruption cases
This post was made for you and me
CHORUS
The dollars shining as I was thinking
My failures growing and charges pending
How could I pay them, the local cops
This post was made for you and me
CHORUS
As I was ploddin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said – 'corruption free'
But on the other side… it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for El Paso!
CHORUS
In Magoffin Alley – where we began
Near to my office – I see my people
Who wonder how, we spent it all
And if this post's still made for you and me.
CHORUS (2x)
Where’s Silver Reyes?
Monday, March 22nd, 2010![](http://borderpundit.com/"wp-content/uploads//2010/03/reyes_hiding1.jpg "reyes_hiding")
Reyes hasn't updated his taxpayer-funded blog since 2008. Why, we remember the time when he was a fixture on intelligent matters like Intelligence (since, like, whenever), and "reducing college costs" (2007). You could hardly choke down a dry flauta without seeing Silver around, picking up loose change off the restaurant floor and selling snippets of his hair to admiring locals. Now, it's like he got off Pelosi's chain and is running loose around the political neighborhood. Everyone knows him, but no one wants to bring him in. He's like the ugly one-eyed, three-legged chihuahua, not the beautiful Siberian Husky. So he's just a stray, and everyone seems be repulsed by him. Politically.
Where in the World is Congressman Silver?
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010Wow, Congressman Silvestre Reyes hasn’t posted anything on his blog since April 16, 2008. He doesn’t appear to have done anything in Congress since then, either. We nearly get a tear in our eye when we remember the big news about him joining some Intelligence Committee or other. Of course, we thought it was a school for increasing intelligence.
Two theories:
1) He was overconfident enough after the Obama election that he felt he didn’t need to communicate any more with his constituency.
2) He’s a lily-livered coward in hiding after the heat Democrats and Obama have been taking since Hopey-Changey didn’t go like their Left-wing supporters demanded it go.
3) His only web-savvy staffer quit.
Three theories. OK.
And, Yes, He Did it on Company Time
Sunday, December 21st, 2008The El Paso Times rightly responds to Judge Anthony Cobos’ doorknocking antics.
Theater of the Absurd: Lion Star Covers Anthony Cobos
Sunday, December 14th, 2008I’ve been wanting to cover the antics of the El Paso County Commissioner’s Court beyond my dull link chart of the FBI corruption scandal, but what’s the point when another blogger is wrapping things up nicely? Just go to The Lion Star Blogand keep scrolling. No one in town is doing a better job of both covering Cobos and opining on his actions. Newspaper Tree is running an admirable second, but is constrained by its journalistic standards (read: hinting at reportorial objectivity).
UPDATE: Theresa Caballero weighs in. Over to You, Lion Star and Refuse the Juice.
Loony Tunes cartoon: indeed.
UPDATE: El Paso Fake News continues the theatre with this.
Your Tuesday El Paso Corruption Update
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008Former National Center for the Employment of the Disabled President Bob Jones was arrested today, along with former NCED employees Ernesto “Ernie” Lopez and Patrick Woods. Woods was an NCED board member. Newspaper Tree is also covering the story.
With that, it’s time to update the corruption link chart. It’s below. I suppose that, based on this incomplete chart, one could say this gets closer to El Paso Mayor John “John” Cook, but that’s a faulty assumption. Links don’t necessarily mean links, if you know what I mean. So far as anyone knows, Cook’s only secret indictment is about his singing and his appearance of being kind of a willing tool. But looks usually deceive when considering politicians of greater or lesser means, talent and motivation (see Joe Wardy).
It’s almost like there are two prosecutorial lines of attack right now. There is NCED, and there are the outliers around the County apparatchiks.
Finally, in these nervous election times, with scandalous election fliers arriving in the mailbox like letters to Harry Potter down the fireplace, one notes that Dee Margo finds a place on the chart (not linked to anything) while Joe “traceofdoubt” Moody is confined to apparently slagging off military members. Can’t remember who can’t remember where he lives, but in the end, whether tainted by corruption or not, both Moody and Margo are tained by being nincompoops of the general sort.
Both of them make shady El Paso roofing contractors look like candidates for sainthood.
So here’s the latest update to the corruption chart. Clicky once to see a larger chart. Clicky twice to super-size your order:
Your 01 September El Paso Corruption Update
Monday, September 1st, 2008Former El Paso Independent School District Trustee Sal Mena Jr. was arrested by the FBI on Friday. He has long been associated with the ongoing El Paso corruption investigation undertaken by the FBI. An eight-count indictment was released; gory details at the link.
Mena Junior is the first person indicted for corruption in the case; others have pled guilty.
Naturally, according to the El Paso Times, Mena Junior could not be reached for comment: his cell and home phones were reportedly disconnected (and no Times reporters know where he lives to get out and do some door-knocking, I guess).
Mena’s indictment reads like a laundry list of all you ever suspected about El Paso honchos and what they’re involved in: conspiracy, deprivation of honest services, bribery, and false statements to obtain credit. I’ve had contractors come to my house conspiring to obtain credit by way of outrageous down payments, and lying through their teeth about their competence, licenses, insurance and the time of day they’d show up for work.
The “alleged co-conspirators” in this case, and others whose names will no doubt come to light (by flashing police car lights, that is), make po-dunk contractors, who try to screw their own companies by offering jobs “on the side, for cheaper,” look like amateurs.
And so here we go with an updated version of the El Paso corruption link chart. It’s getting so complicated even I’m not sure if it’s accurate anymore. If anyone knows of any El Paso politician/judge/trustee/board member who is not under suspicion, let me know. It might be easier to make a link chart of El Paso honchos who are clean.
Clicky once to see a larger image. Clicky twice to super-size your order:
The Old Prospector Gets a Benz
Friday, August 22nd, 2008OP, the Old Prospector, pulled up to my house in a brand spanking new E320 BlueTEC Sedan.
“Say, partner,” I said, “is that a Mercedes-Benz?”
“Yup,” he said. And then proceeded to tell me all about the 24-valve V-6 engine that delivers 210 horsepower, or something.
“Well, that sure beats your old mule,” I said.
OP only took offense for a second.
“Hell, man, I’m rich!” he declared, staring at me to see if I believed him.
I believed him because I saw the golf clubs sticking out of the trunk with the Coronado Country Club sticker on the bag.
“So have you gone West Side?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was dumb.
“I got a pay raise,” he said, eyeing my xeriscaped (i.e., cheap) front yard and my wood-and-plastic bench on the porch, and my ages-old Justin workboots. “Everyone’s doing it.”
It clicked.
Half of El Paso’s elected, appointed or self-annointed guv’mint officials are getting pay raises these days.
What with the ongoing FBI corruption investigation, I guess everyone who’s anyone on a potential court docket list is trying to grab what they can, just in case.
Just in case they need to relocate assets and asses to Mexico or Texaco or Aruba. Or any outlying outlet where the crazy local ruling body has no extradition treaty with the US, like North Korea or Austin.
I guess 30,105 extra clams will buy any under-suspicion County Commissioners Court member about six months of defense lawyer work, or a year’s protection in Juarez by a drug trafficking organization or, come to think of it, about 2/3 of a Mercedes-Benz E320 BlueTEC Sedan.
“Now, don’t you look at me like that,” said OP, as he ran an Armor-All cloth over the dashboard. “I’m not on the Commissioner’s Court. You know as well as I do that I wouldn’t qualify for that elite club.
“Hell, I’m too damn honest!”
El Paso Corruption Update 22 Jun 2008
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008The FBI El Paso corruption case keeps humming along. The latest conviction, that of Antonio “Tony” Dill, a lobbyist, made headlines last week. He plea-bargained out, admitting to bribing a member of the El Paso County Commissioners Court. Link chart (below) is appropriately updated.
I’d link to a good El Paso Times article from May 29th on U.S. District Judge Frank Montalvo’s disclosure that ‘more than 80 “persons of interest” have been linked to the investigation, including 35 past or current public officials, 13 lawyers and three current or former judges,’ but the Times’ extraordinarily-excellent archive system hides articles faster than the Air Force hid the Roswell alien bodies, and you can’t read the article out of the archives, or Google it, to save your alien body-hiding life.
Nonetheless, the center-of-gravity in this Venn Diagram-like arcade of corruption appears to be the odd construct known as the El Paso County Commissioners Court.
Newspaper Tree, which has a functioning archive system, reports on the Dill plea here.
The Old Prospector asked me by cellar phone the other day what the heck a lobbyist does anyway. “How does he make money off of urging people to do stuff?” OP asked.
“I don’t rightly know,” I said. “But if I urged you to lay off the cheladas at Acetunas would you give me five dollars?”
I couldn’t tell if the gurgling, snorting sounds coming out of the phone were laughter or anger.
Meanwhile, back on May 12th, Newspaper Tree’s David Crowder was trying to, in more cerebral terms than the Times staff had done previously, argue for more openness in the case. Well, that’s 3213 words a reader will never get back in his or her lifetime. OP told me on the phone that anytime media argues for more access, it just means they’re lazy.
“I know a thing or two about digging for gold,” he said, in a conspiratorial tone of voice that suggested he was talking to me out of a stall in the men’s room of a nearby bar on Doniphan. “And I ain’t never asked the guvmint to pint me towards the goal. I found what I found through my own hard work.”
I’d link to another Times article on Dill being out on bail quicker than you can say “Commissioners Court,” but hell, it’ll be “archived” soon enough.
“Archiving” by the Times is just another way citizens get El Paso’d around here.
OP later texted me from Acetunas. He was between sets in a karaoke showdown, having just won the narcocorrido competition before heading into the single-elimination Bee Gees Are Back retro-round. ‘Don Kirkatrick is blowing thng out of prportion.’ OP still hasn’t mastered texting on his Blackberry.
I texted him back: ‘Gt on ur mule and go hme.’ I’m no Blackberry hero either.
So here we go with another updated El Paso Corruption Link Chart: