The video below was released today by Rep. Quico Canseco (R-TX-23). Canseco is one of the 2010 freshmen in Congress, having defeated Democrat Ciro Rodriguez in the west Texas district that stretches all the way from the edges of San Antonio to the edges of El Paso. El Paso is where the president will hold his “official” function today, a speech on immigration policy.
But that speech is not why the president is really in Texas. The speech was only scheduled a week ago. The president’s trip to Austin today for a swank fundraiser was scheduled 79 days ago, according to Matt Mackowiak at the Daily Caller.
The $1,000/person fundraiser, which will be held in the studio where the famed Austin City Limits show is filmed and feature a performance by songwriter Robert Earl Keen, was first reported by the Austin American-Statesman’s Jason Embry on April 8, more than a month before the event.
Then, a funny thing happened.
Last Thursday, six days before Air Force One was scheduled to land in Texas, the White House added an “unspecified” official event in El Paso.
The El Paso event lets the president count the trip as an official function, even though it’s a campaign swing. And in this case, it’s a particularly brazen campaign swing. Thirteen people, 12 of them drug gang thugs, were killed in a firefight on Falcon Lake Sunday. That is the same lake where Mexican drug cartel pirates have harassed Americans for about a year now, and on which those same pirates murdered American David Hartley last year. The president will speak in El Paso, not about border security per se, but about his usual shibboleth, comprehensive immigration reform, paths to citizenship for illegal aliens, and so forth.
The president will not tour the fire stricken part of the state, where the worst wildfires in state history have burned up over 2 million acres. Yet the president is withholding an emergency declaration that would put additional federal funds into the fight to quench the fires. As a net payer into the federal coffers, Texas deserves to get its own money back to deal with the wildfires.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET6rOBSGCms
This story carries a couple of shocking aspects. One, that the president is so brazenly calling a fundraising trip an official duty while he shirks his true official duties of helping states deal with disasters and with securing the border. Barack Obama is a constant campaigner, but he is seldom a real president of all the United States. Two, that the local Democrats are evidently so complacent about his behavior toward the state that they will host him for a campaign fundraiser here even while his administration denies the state disaster relief and only treats the border as a political opportunity, not the security threat that it is. To the Texas Democrats and the president, Texas is just an ATM to fund liberals in other states. Do the Texas Democrats feel nothing for their own state, or for the Texans who are dealing with the fires and the border insecurity? Apparently they don’t, and they’re having the president here to spike the football in the faces of everyday Texans.
Update: Also read about the Texas House passing a crackdown on sanctuary cities, and Obama’s pathetic El Paso speech.
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