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Josh Berthume's blog

Speaker's Race: Liveblog

6:03 pm
Here comes the record vote with Craddick as the only nominee for Speaker.
Results: 121 - 27. Craddick is back for two more years.

Wrapping this up now - comments welcome.

Speaker's Race: Who is Jim Pitts, Anyways?

Yesterday, I posted the YouTube video from the Craddick Austin Club party on Sunday night. I thought it was interesting for journalistic / intelligence purposes - here is footage with immediacy that chronicles attendees to a party thrown by one side against the other in a legislative leadership race. Other progressives took offense to the attendance of Democrats, even those already known and acknowledged to be in Craddick's camp - so much so that the term "primary opponents" began floating around.

Speaker's Race: Confident Speculation Begins in Earnest

Pena called it last week but I thought that was too early. Burka did it late this afternoon, and now we're within 24 hours, so it feels less uncertain. Both have called it for Craddick.

New Feature, Quick Roundup

Today we have a new feature from Hale County Democratic Party chairman James Belk, who examines how Joe Heflin managed to keep former Speaker Pete Laney's seat in the Democratic column in 2006.

Weekend Roundup: Sunday Night

Craddick had a bad weekend - after introducing his new, creepy pledge card and engaging in one last knock-kneed run for the sun on commitments, he started to lose some support in a very public way.

Reyes bringing it home

Paul Burka has a post up about how Silvestre Reyes got some Homeland Security dollars for El Paso. The title is hilarious.

Speaker's Race: Criminals and Secrets

There was a dearth of news yesterday until late in the afternoon, when all sorts of things started happening, not the least of which being this story about Representative Lon Burnam filing a criminal complaint against Tom Craddick with Travis County DA Ronnie Earle. Vince from Capitol Annex has the letter.

Speaker's Race: Other Possibilities

After having some hours to turn yesterday's press conference over in my mind, I wanted to return to it for a sort of pre-weekend summation of the whole deal. It has been suggested to me by a few sources that while what I'm saying is possible, there are other things that could be going on that I'm not fully considering, so I will do so here:

Speaker's Race Coverage: Confusion Abounds

If you're going to have a press conference in which you say you definitely have the votes to do a thing, the guy who just endorsed you probably shouldn't say that some of those votes "are not ready to be on [y]our list."

A Very Merry Un-Press Conference

Oh man, Craddick is getting ready to crack skulls. According to several sources, Pitts and McCall showed up at their press conference to announce that they are totally going to win now that they are consolidating their pledges into one easy payment, but they wouldn't want to trouble anyone by releasing a list of names.

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