Votor Guides and Other Awards:
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts
In Virgil's Aeneid, Book 2, written in 19 BC someone warned “Do not trust the horse, Trojans. Whatever
it is, I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts."
This is what came to mind as I reviewed a couple of recent political “gifts”. Something looked fishy
about them.
Voter Guides in General:
One of the tools “we the people” can use to help us understand if our elected officials are doing the
work of properly representing us is voter guides. These are a “gift” in that they SHOULD represent a lot
of work, thoroughly analyzing the votes and actions of our elected officials and thus save us that work.
One that I’ve learned to know and trust is the Freedom Index by the New American Magazine
http://www.thenewamerican.com/freedomindex/ . They thoroughly explain the vote and how it
relates to the Constitutionality of the law and then render a rating based on that. Unfortunately, they
only do their survey at the national level. On the local level, there are several I use, some of them
“single issue” organizations (like Texas State Rifle Association http://www.tsrapac.com/ - their index is
not on-line, only printed in their magazine - that looks solely at firearms related legislation). Others I’ve
found that are generally accurate on general topics at the state level are Empower Texans
http://index.empowertexans.com/ and YCT Young Conservatives of Texas http://www.yct.org/.
There are two good ways to evaluate the validity of a support organization typically associated with
voter guides or awards:
1) Understand the people and the organization behind it. Unfortunately, sometimes that is difficult to
ascertain. Some organizations exist to confuse and misdirect. The background people involved and the
real goals are intentionally obscured.
2) Correlate the rating against what you already know. This is what caused the fishy smell on the guides
mentioned above.
As with charities, the NAME of the organization that publishes a voter guide isn’t always representative
of the result. They may have a compelling name but that may be a “Trojan horse”, intended to mislead.
Conservative Roundtable of Texas:
I saw the rating of some Texas legislators in the “Conservative Roundtable of Texas”
http://txcrindex.com/ . Gosh, that sounded like a good organization. Conservative?, that’s me.
Roundtable?, sounds like King Arthur, very noble. Texas?… well that makes it great! So when I took a
look I found some very strange things. Foremost of which was that some legislators that I have
followed for a while and know to be very conservative on almost all issues were rated very poorly and
names I didn’t know or knew to be less than conservative were rated highly. My first thought was that
these people have changed. Some of them slip, some of them improve. But Au contraire, mon ami!
When I saw in the House section that Scott Turner, John Stickland and David Simpson on the bottom of
the list I knew something was up. These men are true conservatives. I looked in the Senate side and to
see Donna Campbell and Brian Birdwell with only “C” ratings, that confirmed that something was
askew. Some investigation was in order. I verified the ratings of those I knew ono both Empower
Texans and YCT sites. Yep, those I knew are still strong conservatives.
While Conservative Roundtable don’t publish who their officers or analysts are, it is clear that they are
NOT about my type of “conservatism”. Some digging at Empower Texans website
http://www.empowertexans.com/features/oops-straus-political-cover-operation-brands-democratseffective-conservatives/ leads me to believe Conservative Roundtable of Texas is a Strauss oriented
organization. I, of course refer to Speaker of the House Joe Strauss who was elected by 67 Democrats
and 14 republicans, NOT a majority of Republicans and who’s proven many times that he’s no friend of
true Texas Conservatives. Enough said on the validity of THIS group’s index.
Texas Citizens Coalition:
While researching the above group another group regularly came up - Texas Citizens Coalition
http://texascitizenscoalition.org/ . The same names appeared here as did in the search of the
“Roundtable” group above. Along with this: http://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=22578 . Turns out
Mr Gates is now running for yet another office, this time Rail Road commissioner, and is building his
coalition of Strauss supporters… Probably with the same “Strauss money” that buys others in Austin,
but I haven’t been able to make that connection yet.
Do not trust the horse, Trojans.