But on Capitol Hill, the Jones High School fight has been used to justify an effort by the Department of Education and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, to waive those federal rules. The sheer number of evacuated students needing new schools, say advocates of the change, has turned the federal homeless statute into little more than burdensome red tape. On Monday, Hutchison introduced a bill with Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, to allow school districts across the country to open separate schools for hurricane victims. The bill would take away the ability of evacuating parents to protest their children’s placement in particular schools. It would also allow schools to issue “identification cards or other identifying insignia” for students affected by Hurricane Katrina. “Our top priority is keeping the kids from Louisiana in an environment that is safe, secure and familiar,” said Chris Paulitz, a spokesman for Hutchison, who argues that in some cases evacuees might be better served by going to schools with other evacuees. “This is only a temporary waiver for the remainder of the school year.”

But advocates for the homeless fear the waiver would relegate evacuated students to second-class status. “It basically allows schools to discriminate pretty broadly against kids who are homeless as a result of the storm,” says Barbara Duffield, an advocate for the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. The waiver would suspend parents’ right to protest their children’s placement, while making it easier for students to be moved during the school year or denied transportation, Duffield said. She calls the prospects of Katrina-specific school identifications “absolutely horrifying.” “It’s like a scarlet letter K or something,” she says.

Others in the Senate have already announced their intention to fight the proposal. “We shouldn’t be segregating children who have just gone through such a traumatic experience,” said Alex Glass, a spokeswoman for Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who sits on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Calls to waive the federal rules protecting homeless students began shortly after the evacuation of New Orleans. On Sept. 8, the top educator in Texas, Shirley J. Neeley, wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Education asking for some legal “flexibility” in applying the McKinney-Vento Act, a law that requires equal treatment for homeless students. Among the concerns, wrote Neeley, was the broad powers the law gave parents of homeless students to choose their children’s school. “It is not practical to permit parents or guardians to select the campus a child will attend,” Neeley wrote.

At around the same time, Utah officials sought permission to begin educating about 90 evacuated students at Camp Williams, a National Guard base south of Salt Lake City. “We needed to keep those children as close to their parents as possible,” said Pamela Atkinson, a community advocate who was asked by Utah’s governor to help coordinate the program. The program is now winding down, she added, since there are only 20 students left on the base. “We said right from the beginning that Camp Williams was only temporary.”

After researching the law, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings decided that she did not have the power to waive the requirements herself. She has asked Congress to grant her new authority to help place the 372,000 students from Mississippi and Louisiana that the department estimates have been displaced by the storm. “The point is to get these kids into some kind of normalcy across the board,” said Chad Colby, a spokesman for Spellings, who added that Mississippi has also requested waivers. “In a unique situation like this, which McKinney-Vento was not written to address, the secretary thinks she needs the authority.”

The Hutchison bill goes further by specifically allowing exemptions to the portions of McKinney-Vento that prohibit school officials from doing anything that would “stigmatize” homeless students, like issuing identification badges. The provision is targeted at younger students, said Paulitz, Sen. Hutchison’s spokesman. “It would be an easy way for teachers and bus drivers to be able to bring them back to a specific shelter,” he said, adding that he knows of no schools in Texas that have begun issuing badges or wristbands to homeless schoolchildren.

There are definitely no badges in Houston, where officials say they have been working to make evacuated students feel as comfortable as possible. But the district will face a problem if Congress does not approve a waiver. The district has opened up two elementary schools, Douglass and Ryan Elementary, simply to handle the evacuee overflow. Under the current law, a temporary school just for homeless students is allowed in response to an emergency. But unless Congress acts, they will eventually have to be integrated with local students.

Houston school board member Arthur Gaines says he does not expect the integration to be a problem. “They are our students,” Gaines said of the 4,000 young evacuees who have arrived in the district in recent weeks. The recent fight at Jones High School was just an aberration. “It was an incident,” he said. “I am quick to want to isolate it.”

A few notches farther to the right you’ll find, Ted Cruz, the state’s former solicitor general, who is Dewhurst’s main challenger in today’s primary. “Cruz is an ideologue,” Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson told Salon. “He would be decidedly more conservative than either [Texas Senator John] Cornyn or Dewhurst. They’re staunch conservatives, but at the end of the day, they’ll try to get something done.”

Dewhurst has the edge going into the election, but there’s a catch: Under Texas law, if he doesn’t capture at least 50 percent of the vote today, he’ll face a runoff election in July, when his prospects will be decidedly worse. Two factors are working against Dewhurst today: a third candidate in the race, former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, who will siphon off votes, and the fact that a runoff would likely come down to turnout. “It’s going to be the really intense, really fired up voters” who show up in a runoff poll, University of North Texas professor Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha told Salon. “And that tends to be the Tea Party guys.”

Jillson said the race is emblematic of the Tea Party’s role in this year’s election cycle. In 2010, the conservative insurgents took on actual moderates. But now that they’ve already picked all the “low-hanging fruit,” they’ve moved on to conservatives like Dewhurst and Sen. Dick Lugar, who recently lost his GOP primary in Indiana. This has pushed everyone to the right, Jillson said: “The next tier of senators saw what happened in 2010 and said, ‘Oh shit.’ They had been conservative, but legislators … so they not only stopped doing that, but moved about 10 points to the right.”

Cruz, who went to Princeton and Harvard Law School, is the latest in a strain of Tea Party candidates with impressive pedigrees that make their whacky or radical views seem palatable. Ian Millhiser, Senior Constitutional Policy Analyst at the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund, told Salon that Cruz represents a “second generation of Tenter Senate candidates” — more careful than failed 10th Amendment lovers two years ago who said outright that Social Security or the minimum wage ought to be abolished. “I think he’s learned the lesson from people like Joe Miller and Sharron Angle,” failed Senate candidates from Alaska and Nevada, “that he needs to be more circumspect in his rhetoric,” Millhiser said.

Nonetheless, Cruz has adopted some fairly out-there positions. In March, he posted a message on his campaign website railing against a “grand scheme” by left-wing billionaire George Soros to use the United Nations to outlaw golf courses and paved roads. The U.N.’s “Agenda 21” project has long been a bugaboo of the black helicopter set — despite the fact that George H.W. Bush signed on to the 20-year-old environmental project — but it’s unusual to see a top-tier Senate candidate discuss it. “Obviously, whenever people start talking about George Soros-based conspiracy theories, they’re already putting themselves in an elite category of paranoid extremists,” Millhiser said.

As a conservative legal activist, Cruz advocated a method to use the 10th Amendment to exempt states from federal law that has its roots in the pre-Civil War nullification movement. He also co-authored a policy paper advocating an unusual reading of the Constitution that would declare unconstitutional Medicaid and many federal education programs.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Cruz has attracted tremendous support from national right wingers like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Sarah Palin, as well as outside groups and super PACs. Independent groups have spent $1.7 million backing Cruz in one of this year’s most expensive Senate race so far. “He’s once-in-a-generation type candidate for FreedomWorks, for the Tea Party movement,” said Brendan Steinhauser of the national Tea Party group, which has spent almost $100,000 backing Cruz.

Dewhurst, who has raised $6 million and chipped in another $8 million of his own money, has been trying to spend Cruz into submission. “Dewhurst is everywhere,” Eshbaugh-Soha said, saying ads have even popped up on ESPN.com. The campaign is clearly worried about not capturing 50 percent today, as experts agree Dewhurst will have a much tougher time winning the runoff. And because the Democrats have essentially zero hope of winning the general, that means there’s a very real possibility that the Senate’s far-right wing will gain another crucial voter in January.

A new investigative report by the Columbia Human Rights Law Review reveals that Carlos DeLuna, who was executed by the state of Texas in 1989, was likely innocent as well. The full report, titled “Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution,” can be viewed at CHRLR’s newly launched interactive website where readers can view all of the evidence cited in the article.

DeLuna, a poor Latino man described as having the intelligence of a child, was convicted of murdering Wanda Lopez, a 24-year-old single mother who was stabbed to death with a folding knife in 1983 while working behind the cash register at a gas station in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Lopez called 911 when her killer entered the store, leaving behind a recording of the encounter. She is heard answering a series of yes or no questions asked by the dispatcher about the creepy customer with the knife in his pocket and then whispering that he’s “standing right here at the counter” and “can’t talk,” followed by “Okay. This? Eighty-five,” in response to the customer. After more questions from the dispatcher, Lopez is heard pleading for her life and the line cuts off.

On Monday, a U.S. District Court judge didn’t buy the state’s legislation defunding Planned Parenthood, putting a temporary stay on the enforcement of the law. But within a day, there was another judge who found the argument persuasive: Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, last seen obnoxiously demanding that a female Justice Department lawyer ”submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power.” (Kevin Drum memorably compared it to “a middle school teacher handing out punishment to a student because of something her father said at a city council meeting the night before,” and you wouldn’t have to look hard to find the sexist condescension.)

The District Court judge had written 24 pages on the constitutional merits, focusing on Planned Parenthood’s First Amendment rights of association. Smith issued two sentences two hours after the state’s petition, undoing that, and apparently buying the state of Texas’ argument that Planned Parenthood’s alleged “abortion promoting” mission justified discriminating against a qualified provider of healthcare.  (The clinics receiving WHP funding don’t even provide abortions, but other Planned Parenthood clinics do.)

In an election year, these posturings take on new meaning; by today, Planned Parenthood was proclaiming in a news release, “What would Mitt Romney’s America look like for women’s health care?  We need look no further than Texas,” and highlighting the policy similarities of Romney and Perry on women’s health. Romney, of course, has pledged to defund Planned Parenthood, which during the primaries became a consensus Republican issue. The last federal attempt to do so, last year’s Pence Amendment, nearly shut down the entire government, though Obama held the line — as he pointed out in a recent campaign video supporting the organization.

The presidential policies matter, but as we can see from Texas, the judiciary, prompted by state legislatures that are coming off a wave of abortion restrictions, is currently wielding the most power when it comes to women’s everyday lives, and the 5th Circuit in particular has been unrepentantly hostile to reproductive rights. When they failed with Pence, right-to-lifers turned to the states, primed by the 2010 election of even more anti-choice legislators and governors. In Texas, the conservative 5th Circuit has become a brick wall, previously allowing enforcement of the most extreme ultrasound law in the country, one that requires a woman to listen to the results.

Smith is a Reagan appointee, as is his fellow 5th Circuit conservative gadfly Edith Jones, who wrote the opinion in the ultrasound case, though if they’re feeling particularly emboldened lately, you can’t really blame them. After all, the Obama administration has shown little interest in prioritizing the judiciary, even after Bush’s ambitious effort to fill federal appellate courts with movement conservatives. A January Brookings Institution report showed that Obama has nominated fewer federal trial judges than his predecessors, even as a wave of judges retires. (Unprecedented Senate intransigence is a major factor in confirmations, but doesn’t explain the nominations.)  And Dahlia Lithwick has argued that “Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, has selected lower court judges more notable for their racial and gender diversity than their hard-left judicial orientation.”

All of this is to say that as long as states like Texas keep passing laws that punish women and stretch the boundaries of constitutional interpretation, to put it mildly, the buck is likelier than ever to stop at a judge like Jerry Smith.

The business card he handed me during the sheriffs meeting identified Sikes as the director of the Border Security Operations Center (BSOC) – which is a type of fusion center for border-security operations in Texas. It’s a project of the Texas Rangers Division, which in turn is a branch of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).

However, Mac Sikes is neither a Texas Ranger nor a DPS employee. Like most of the other key figures behind the Lone Star State’s border security campaign, Sikes is a contract employee.

A “senior operational analyst” at Abrams Learning & Information Systems (ALIS), Sikes became director of BSOC as part of the firm’s $3-5 million annual contracts with DPS since 2006. The recent DPS decision — in response to a public records request — to release the ALIS contract revealed the true identity of Sikes.

The Border Security Operations Center is the nexus of the Texas’ own border security initiatives, collectively known as Operation Border Star. ALIS, a homeland-security consulting firm with offices in Arlington, Virginia, was founded in 2004 by Ret. Army Gen. John Abrams to cash in on the billions of dollars in new government contracting funds that started to flow after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.

Since 2006 ALIS functioned as the hidden force behind virtually all non-federal border-security operations in Texas. Whether it’s strategy formulation, border crime-mapping, operations management or public relations, ALIS and its team of consultants have been closely involved in creating what Governor Rick Perry calls the “Texas model of border security.”

ALIS, which has received $22.7 million from DPS and the Governor’s Office for border-security operations in FY 2007-FY 2011, describes its mission in Texas as follows:

ALIS was commissioned to improve border security strategy and operations along the U.S. – Mexico border through the development of an epicenter for security operations. The objective of the operational center is to plan, coordinate, implement, and evaluate interagency border security operations to counter the threat of organized crime, terrorism, and the flow of contraband and human trafficking to foster a secure border region.

Gov. Rick Perry has boasted to both President Obama and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano that Texas has created a new model for border security. In a letter to the president, Perry hailed his state’s “proven and successful multi-agency border security strategy,” while the governor invited Napolitano to visit the Texas border to see the “Texas model of border security.” DPS Director Steven McCraw, who was appointed by Perry and also served as the governor’s homeland security director from 2003 to early 2012, says that Texas is creating its own “paradigm” of border security.

Perry and McCraw support an aggressive, militarized border security strategy. They claim that Operation Border Star – their name for the Texas model or paradigm – is succeeding in securing the Texas border whereas the Obama administration’s border-security operations are, they charge, a manifest failure.

That’s a claim that was highlighted in a September 2011 report on border security commissioned by the Texas Department of Agriculture. The report, “Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment,” was written by Gen. Robert Scales (ret.) and Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who have their own Washington Beltway consulting firms, Colgen and BR McCaffrey Associates.

In their highly alarmist and unabashedly militaristic report, the retired generals describe the border as a “war zone” and contend that purported success of Operation Border Star and the Texas Rangers “should serve as a template for the future” of border security operations nationwide. Such a model, they argued, should be “based on proven joint military operations” and the type of “layered ‘defense-in-depth’” strategies employed by the Rangers and Operation Border Star.

But the generals failed to offer any evidence, other than anecdotal testimonies collected by Texas Commission of Agriculture Todd Staples to document the achievements of the Texas model. That’s not surprising, given that after nearly seven years Perry and McCraw have also failed to offer any substantial documentation to back their claims about the success of the Texas model of border security.

The “made-in-Texas” boasts about the state’s model of border security and the “can-do” braggadocio about “Texans protecting Texans” don’t stand up to close scrutiny.

Border Star operations and programs are funded by a combination of DHS grants, Justice Department criminal-justice assistance and economic-stimulus funding, and Texas general revenues.

The first funding for Operation Border Star came from the Obama administration’s border-security programs to aid local and state law enforcement. Although the state legislature, starting in 2007, started appropriating about $100 million annually for BSOC and other Border Star operations, federal funding has been the main stay of the Texas model. It’s also an operation that has been almost wholly outsourced to Washington Beltway consultants.

Outsourcing Texas Border Security

The Public Safety Commission has repeatedly approved DPS contracts with ALIS without any public discussion and without any evaluation. The commission, whose director is a major donor to Perry’s election campaigns, have allowed Perry and McCraw to run Operation Border Star without any oversight or review. ALIS contracts – including emergency contracts – have been routinely approved without any evaluation of its cost and impact.

With no discussion, the Texas Public Safety Commission at its Aug. 12, 2010 meeting in Austin approved an “emergency contract for providing strategies and plans to support the management of the Texas Border Security Operations Center (Abrams Learning & Information Systems).”

The commission also extended another DPS outsourcing contract held by APPRISS for another information and technology-driven project called the Texas Data Exchange (TDEx). DPS has paid APPRISS $30.9 million in FYs 2008-2012 for information systems of dubious worth.

Meanwhile, DPS in 2010-2011 repeatedly rejected requests by the Center for International Policy for the various strategy statements, operations plans, and performance reports that ALIS was contracted to produce, arguing that the information was “law enforcement sensitive.” DPS has contended that the release of the classified documents to a nonprofit education organization would place law enforcement officials at risk.

However, these same documents that were denied CIP were apparently accessed by the for-profit security consultants contracted by Texas Ag Commissioner Staples.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has upheld the DPS rejection of the public records requests for documents that would shed light on the structure, operations, and achievements of Operation Border Star and the role of ALIS. The only documents that DPS did release to the Center for International Policy were the ALIS contracts themselves.

The DPS contract with ALIS, which was signed Aug. 31, 2010, delegated not only the inner-workings of Operation Border Star to the Beltway contractor but also gave the contractor the responsibility for formulating border-security and homeland-security strategy statements, running public-relations operations, and directing law-enforcement operations.

Questions about the value of Operation Border Star and about its political character have been repeatedly raised over the past few years by several Texas media outlets and by the Texas American Civil Liberties Union. Texas border communities that have been adversely affected by the redirection of state and local law-enforcement agencies into border-security campaigns and away from public-safety missions have also criticized the cost and focus of the Perry administration’s border-security programs.

Gross Mismanagement in Texas of Federal Homeland and Border Security Funds

The Texas State Auditor recently raised new questions and concerns about the unprofessional DPS management of federal funds and about the agency’s dubious contracting practices under the stewardship of Steven McCraw.

The independent report, which was commissioned by the state auditor and released in February 2012, found, among other violations, cases of stunning material weaknesses in DPS accounting, a pattern of noncompliance in following federal procedures, and an array of alarming deficiencies in reporting and monitoring federal funds.

The report highlights a pervasive and systemic mismanagement of federal funds by DPS, including eight duplicate payments to contractors, sloppy accounting, failure to open contracts to competitive bidding (while in at least one other case bypassing low bidder for a preferred one), routine reliance on emergency contracts to avoid contract renewal and bidding processes, and a persistent failure to communicate accounting and reporting guidelines to subrecipients of more than federal funds managed by DPS. (In 2010 DPS administered $397 million in federal revenues for subgrants and contracts.)

The audit reviewed a representative selection of cases among the $265.9 million in federal grants and subgrants to DPS — in the areas of homeland security, border security, emergency management and law enforcement interoperability.

Among the findings of negligence and incompetence were these startling instances:

•  A draw-down of $755,509 in federal funds to issue a duplicate payment to one subgrantee.
•  Five of the six procurements (83 percent) examined by the auditor in the cluster of federal grants for homeland and border security were not bid competitively as required.
• DPS categorized four of the five procurements examined by the auditor as “emergency procurements,” and in three of those four DPS was unable to document why they were processed as “emergency” contracts.
• DPS has no system to track, administer, monitor federal subgrants – as federal guidelines require, leading to routine occurrences of duplicate payments, dipping into one federal fund to pay for unrelated programs, and failure to submit required reports and audits.
• Complete failure to track interest rates on unused federal funds and to remit those funds, as required by federal grant guidelines.
• Access to law-enforcement databases by contract programmers who lacked proper authorization or clearance.

Texas officials, including the governor, DPS chief, attorney general and agriculture commissioner, frequently charge that the federal government has failed in its responsibility to control the Texas-Mexico border.

It is rarely acknowledged, however, by these same critics how dependent Texas law enforcement and criminal justice agencies – including state’s homeland security department, DPS, governor’s criminal justice division, border sheriffs, agriculture department and state prosecutors and courts – are on the continuing flow of federal funds into Texas.

In fiscal year 2011 Texas received $57.5 billion in federal funding. That same year DPS relied on federal funding for approximately half its annual budget — down from the 60% funding in 2010 when federal stimulus funds were still flowing. The audit did not include the names of the private and local government recipients of DPS contracting and subgranting funds that were reviewed in the audit.

However, DHS and DOJ funding for homeland security, border security, and law enforcement interoperability have all been used to prop up the Texas model of border security – and to pay for the outsourcing of the building of the model and its implementation. It’s likely that the DPS contracts with ALIS, being one of the top-ranking DPS contractors, came under the scrutiny of the auditor.

The audit, which occurred during 2010, underscored problems with the type of DPS emergency contracting that benefited ALIS. The audit and its alarming findings have contributed to mounting cynicism and criticism about the Texas border security model and its outsourcing.

The audit raises fresh questions about McCraw’s ability to manage the large state agency. The shocking findings of DPS management of DHS and DOJ funding to support Texas homeland and border security programs also underscores rising skepticism about the “go-it-alone” and “can-do” boasting of the Texas border hawks critical of the Obama administration.

Outsourcing Strategy and Propaganda

It would be hard to exaggerate the degree to which Governor Perry and DPS Chief McCraw have outsourced state border-security, homeland-security and public-safety programs to Washington Beltway contractors.

ALIS, according to the August 2010 “emergency contract,” was, among other things, hired to do everything from formulating strategy to running operations to managing public relations – not only for Operation Border Start but also for the Texas Rangers and DPS itself.

The “emergency” contract for $1.5 million ALIS services, which was signed by McCraw and ALIS Chief Operating Officer on August 31, 2010, underscored the central role of ALIS in shaping and directing border security operations in Texas.

Echoing the expansive scope of the language used in earlier contracts, DPS once again hired ALIS to:

Develop and refine border-wide security strategies and plans for seamless integration of interagency law enforcement border security operations in the State of Texas.

With a staff of at least 17 analysts and information specialists — many with military backgrounds –ALIS was contracted to provide the vision and the structural foundation for Operation Border Star. Initially, Border Star had been little more a commitment by the Perry administration to support the newly formed Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition and its Operation Linebacker, using federal criminal-justice funds controlled by the governor’s office, along with an occasional show of force by DPS police in Texas border counties.

Over the years, with each successive contract, the extent of responsibility outsourced to ALIS expanded dramatically. One of the first contracts gave ALIS the task of developing a computerized crime-mapping system for the greater Texas border region, which is known as TexMap. By late 2010, however, DPS was paying ALIS to, among other things:

• “Define and write a Border Security Strategic Vision.”
• “Manage and operate the Border Security Operations Center (BSOC).”
• “Develop border-wide strategies and plans to support interagency effectiveness.”
• “Refine and update Operation Border Star 2012-2013.”
• “Develop plans for border-related Mass Migration contingencies.”
• Develop plans for “Texas Ranger operations,” and develop standard operating procedures for “Ranger Renaissance Teams” (including the new gunboat operations).
• “Facilitate creation of the Border Operations Planning Group.”
• “Develop a Border Security media/public information outreach strategy.”
• “Provide sufficient manpower to provide leadership, subject-matter expertise, and quality assurance/control in areas of border security planning and operations.”
•  “Support and sustain the six Joint Operations Intelligence Centers (JOICs),” which are situated along the Texas border and Gulf Coast.
•  “Conceptualize a Sensor Master Plan for the border region,” as part of the “web-based” electronic surveillance systems created by the governor’s officer and   DPS.
•  “Develop and refine DPS Agency Strategic Plans,” including the DPS Strategic Plan 2011-2015.
•  “Facilitate development of a DPS policy document outlining roles, responsibilities, and authorities of Regional Commanders, Ranger Captains, DPS Divisions, and JOICs with regard to countering crime and terrorism in the border region.”

The Aug. 31, 2010 emergency contract with ALIS built on earlier contracts, which steadily reinforced the centrality of the homeland security contractor not only to execute assigned tasks but also to formulate strategy and direct operations. An earlier contract had empowered ALIS to formulate the drafts of the Texas Border Security Campaign Plan, the governor’s 2010-2015 Homeland Security Strategy Plan, and the DPS Agency Strategy Plan 2010. That’s worth repeating. This little-known, upstart consulting agency from the Washington Beltway had been hired by the state’s public safety and homeland security director to: write the campaign plan for the governor’s border security campaign, conceptualize and write the state’s strategy statement for homeland security, and produce the strategy plan for DPS itself.

One of the most striking and disturbing components of the August 2010 contract was the new public relations and outreach role given ALIS contractors. According to the contract, ALIS would assume a new role that would combine public relations, communications and policy-advocacy functions.

Instead of merely being a hired gun contracted for predetermined border-security operations in Texas, ALIS contractors were expected to develop strategies, gather information to support these strategies, and then work to shape public opinion and public policy about border security threats and responses. The only border experience that ALIS brought to the table when it was hired was that its founder General Abrams had in the late 1980s commanded a regiment that was responsible for protecting the German “inner-border” prior to German reunification.

Specific tasks outsourced to ALIS included producing “reports, briefings, studies and recommendations” for “Texas leadership.” ALIS was also tasked to “orient senior government leaders on border security issues,” with possible options including “public affairs strategy and plans, fact sheets, talking points, speeches, presentations and testimony.”

The stipulated goal of the “Border Security media/public information outreach strategy” was, according to the DPS contract, to “build support for border security” among the public, media and policy community in Texas. As noted in the contract, ALIS would at times also be expected to leverage its BSOC fusion center staff “to surge for 24/7 information operations.”

Rather than gathering intelligence and analyzing information, DPS tasked ALIS to provide DPS and the Texas Rangers with “the necessary information to assist the ongoing operations.” Its BSOC staff were expected to “discipline the information operations process by serving the state information operations ‘net control’ station for border security.”

The BSOC and the JOICs would be tasked, according to the contract, to “provide needed information products as required by Texas Rangers” and to produce “effective information products.”

In review, in the interests of border security and homeland security, ALIS was contracted by DPS – with the approval of the Public Safety Commission and the governor – to manufacture “information products.” What is more, DPS wanted ALIS to ensure that the information was “effective” as well as “necessary” for ongoing operations. There has been absolutely no review by policy makers or by the public of DPS outsourcing of border-security strategy and operations.

It’s likely, though, that if there were ever such transparency and accountability, at least a few policymakers and concerned citizens would caution that structuring information as an instrument may replicate the information- and psychological-ops of the military and intelligence agencies but may not be an appropriate way to consider information gathering and dissemination on the home front. The term propaganda might arise in any public review this type of outsourcing.

Similarly, the concept that a private contractor should participate in information surges that would parallel operational surges by law enforcement officers and state troops might also have sparked discussion about the proper use of state and federal funds.

As is, it seems that the directors of Operation Border Star – Governor Perry and DPS Director McCraw – view information and intelligence as fungible commodities that can be created, manipulated and shaped to serve the greater good of the nation and Texas border security.

The Republican presidential hopeful was in Florida for a fundraiser and told Bay News 9’s “Political Connections” and the St. Petersburg Times that, “we don’t need to be opening old wounds.”

The actual decision on the plates will be made by a Texas Department of Motor Vehicles board, but the board — like most boards in the Texas government — is made up entirely of Perry appointees.

This is something of a “flip-flop” for Perry, who in the past opposed efforts to remove Confederate symbols and monuments from public property. Perry likely wants to avoid another round of headlines connecting him to the South’s ignominious history of white supremacy and racial tension, following the “rock with the word ‘Niggerhead’ painted on it” story. This is why white Southern Republican politicians use vague language like “reopening old wounds” — it’s best to just let that shit stay buried, where it can’t embarrass anyone.

But the fact that it’d be embarrassing for Perry to endorse the Confederacy is something of a positive sign. For years, Republicans seeking the presidency have been expected to embrace Confederate symbolism to prove their conservative bona fides, and the political press largely excused these endorsements as simply part of the path to the nomination. John McCain got some grief for endorsing the South Carolina flag, but that’s because he waffled on the issue, not because embracing the battle flag of anti-American racist separatists is morally horrific.

The fact that Perry would rather quietly make the issue go away than quietly signal his approval of the neo-Confederate movement means progress is being made in the campaign to educate everyone as to the actual meaning of certain symbols of “our heritage.”