Wednesday Roundup: Fence War of Attrition

Some notable West Texas mayors in El Paso, Del Rio, and Brownsville are showing their displeasure with Homeland Security plans for building the border fence. They are doing so with what the Dallas Morning News calls "a quiet protest."

The mayors have restricted access to parts of their town so DHS workers tasked with surveying or initial construction setup can't finish their jobs. In Eagle Pass, the wall has been banned from within city limits.

"This is exercising our rights," Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada said Tuesday. "We are not going to make it easy for them."

I imagine this could end up with Homeland Security getting tough, but it would probably be in their best interest to handle things diplomatically. Public relations and all. I guess time will tell.

There's been a couple of national stories about the rise of chronic, preventable diseases and what that could mean for health care costs. Again from the Dallas Morning News comes a state-centered analysis, with the news that 12 million people in Texas have those diseases. Many of them are tied to obesity. Eat an apple today and walk around or something, and try to keep down the associated $75 billion price tag in health care and lost productivity.

The Texas Youth Commission is back in the news again, this time for the deplorable conditions at a West Texas detention facility run by private contractors. TYC shut down the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center because of those conditions but questions about why things were allowed to get so terrible and why no one noticed before now remain. Statesman has more.

Denton County is getting a Democratic judicial candidate — Karen Guerra is running for the 16th District Court seat. The Denton Record-Chronicle has the story about the first announced Democratic candidate for a county office.

Only in this year's hyperfund environment can raising $20 million in the 3rd quarter end up as a loss. The press has roundly qualified Hillary's $27 million as a win, but they have also pointed to Obama's $20 million as a major concession. Here the New York Times says that Clinton has succeeded in "stripping [Obama] at least temporarily of a crucial political advantage." The bar for fundraising is getting awfully high.

Today's last story discusses an important counterpoint to all of the stories about how Republicans are in a black temper over the condition they are in for 2008: how do the Democrats feel? Despite all signs pointing to go, some Democrats have a little bit of The Fear, waking in a cold sweat from a dream in which the wheels come off and everything goes south at the last minute. The Politico story is an interesting read with some commentary by James Carville.