The dog days of summer are upon us.
Maybe not as hot in Laredo as in previous years (so much for global warming) but there sure is a lot of whining coming from the North. Come on, Yanquis! We know how to handle a little snow in Laredo. Why can you handle a little heat in New York?
Lizardistas, the real temperature is beginning to rise here in Laredo in anticipation of the much awaited (and apparently for some too distant) March 2014 primary. That’s right folks, people are either so charged up or so BORED that they’ve got nothing better to do than to make their own bumper stickers and start rallying for candidates who haven’t even come out of the woodwork yet.
One who has crawled to the fore is County Judge Danny Valdez, who last month broke out his new campaign bumper sticker and shoved it down the throats of all his employees. This at about the same time Commissioner John Galo was promoting a policy to make county supervisors resign if they’re running for office. Sorry, John, that won’t apply to the captain of your ship, Mr. Valdez, who is already pulling out all the stops in order to save his phony baloney job from Laredo’s favorite son, Tano Tijerina, who hasn’t announced he’s running — but also hasn’t announced he’s not.
Meanwhile, the news hasn’t been good for longtime State Senator Judith Zaffirini, who has been accused of mishandling funds from a $150 million trust and is now fighting two lawsuits. The suits are filed in San Antonio, so we’ll see how much pull she has over the judges there. The safe bet is that she’ll be totally exonerated of any wrongdoing and won’t even have to answer questions whether she’ll consider retiring from the Senate. You can say a lot of about the good Senadora, but one thing you can never say is that she has ever shown any propensity toward corruption of any kind.
Fact is, Senator Z is a powerhouse in Austin and has been for a long, long time. Love her a lot, or love her not … she’s done very well by us all. Of course, that’s not what this is all about.
Still, how interesting would an open State Senate seat be? (Imagine the names that might surface…)
Stay tuned, Lizardistas. More to come!