Friday, February 13, 2004
 Alexandria Gazette Packet 2004 02 11:Alexandria voters went the way of the rest of the Commonwealth and overwhelmingly selected Massachusetts Senator John Kerry as their Democratic candidate for president.
Slightly more than 16 percent of the city’s registered voters cast ballots in the first Democratic presidential primary since 1988. Kerry received 7,303 votes, or 53.2 percent of those cast . . .
The real news for the primary in Alexandria was the new electronic voting machines. . . .
VOTERS complained that there was no paper trail for voter verification. "I really understand this concern and if the General Assembly wishes to do so, this system can be retrofitted to produce paper verification at some later time," [Alexandria’s registrar of voters. Tom] Parkins said.
eSlate was purchased at a cost of about $750,000 and was implemented two years before the national deadline for localities to procure Americans with Disabilities Act compliant voting systems. . . . The paperless eSlate is 'certified' by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and is also in use in Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia. It is manufactured by HartInterCivic.
Austin Chronicle:Why does the state of Texas run its own venture-capital business, anyway? Who benefits politically from high-risk investments in companies that -- like Veridian -- are in potentially unsavory lines of work? If such concerns are all subordinate to the power of the dollar, then the natural temptation is to credit the Republicans with responsibility for the Texas Growth Fund and any successes -- or scandals -- that may emerge from the investment of over half a billion dollars of state money. A 1988 constitutional amendment creating the fund was presided over by then-Gov. Bill Clements, a Dallas oilman and former high-ranking Defense Department official. (The fund actually began operations in 1992.)
But a very important Democratic hand may have been at work behind the scenes as well.
"That was [Bob] Bullock's deal," says a former investment official of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, who asked not to be named but was present at the TGF's creation. According to this former official, the then-lieutenant governor (Gov. George W. Bush's mentor) considered the teachers' pension fund a big bank -- which in a sense it is, with a present value of $77 billion -- a very small percentage of which could be tapped to great effect for political purposes.
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Profits (or lack thereof) aside, it is TGF's investment in Hart InterCivic which may be the most problematic.. . .
a companion article in that same day's ChronicleIf you live in Texas, no matter where you live or what sort of work you do, you're profiting from the various wars, armed interventions, covert actions, and miscellaneous military conflicts now being pursued worldwide by American armed forces and the U.S. intelligence community.
Here's how:
On an upper floor of an office tower in downtown Austin, about a mile from the Capitol, is the suite belonging to an investment company called the Texas Growth Fund.
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In 1995, the state of Texas, through the TGF and during the administration of then-Gov. George W. Bush, helped create a very formidable defense contractor by investing millions of dollars of state money in Veridian. The company has gone from $100 million in revenues (prior to the state's investment) to $1.2 billion now, benefiting directly from a slew of federal defense-related contracts, as President George W. Bush's "War on Terror" has taken shape. . . .
This investment is unlike most state investments, in which pension funds or university endowment managers have simply bought stock in various companies. In the case of the TGF and its infusion of cash to Veridian, the state assumed an equity interest in the company. Texas has held a place directly on Veridian's corporate board, in the person of Jim Kozlowski, the president of TGF . . .
Precisely what Veridian does to earn all that money is secret. . . . The company has by its own admission recruited among Air Force and CIA senior staff. . .
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