I am the Democrat running in Texas Congressional District Ten against Mike McCaul. I apologize for being so late to this forum. We all know I must be stupid, since I have chosen to run against a multi-millionaire Republican in Texas, whose father-in-law owns 1200 radio stations. If you want to know why I'm doing this, look under the Iraq tab on my homepage http://www.tedankrum.com.
I used to have a fairly lengthy website with positions on everything one could think of; but I was advised to keep it simple, and to put my ruminations on the Daily Kos. So, here goes.
I have personal experience of Tom Delay's abuse of power. I was in charge of Environmental Compliance at NASA in Washington, DC in 1989, when I directed Johnson Space Center to use a type of equipment that would not damage the Earth's ozone layer in their project to replace the giant air conditioning equipment, there. I promptly got a call from Tom Delay, who asked me to rescind that direction so that a business crony could bid on the contract with equipment that used a chemical banned by the Montreal Treaty to save the Earth's ozone layer. I refused. He called my then-boss, Dr. Howard Robbins, the Associate Administrator for Management, to overrule me. Howard said it was my call. For the next two weeks, I received nearly daily calls from a Delay staffer insisting that I change my mind, and my boss got calls from Tom Delay asking for my removal. It didn't stop until I asked the staffer if he wanted to read about it in the Washington Post. I succeeded in standing up to Tom Delay, then, because he wasn't the House Majority Leader. I wouldn't have stood a chance, last month. I'm running for many reasons, not the least of them being the culture of abuse of power and corruption among the current Congressional leadership.