Reply #4: Oh, whoa, I don't like the people who are supporting it.

[crispini]

This is baaaaaaad. This is some bad shit....

What everyone seems to be ignoring during all the shouting is just who it is who wants Dallas to have a strong mayor--aside, that is, from the mayor herself, who said last week she supports Blackwood's proposal that Dallas do away with the city manager and make the mayor the city's chief executive.

Supporting Blackwood are five wealthy and powerful men who've given her and her husband, Tom Thomas, almost $150,000 to put this issue before the voters. Together, they've also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to, among others, President George W. Bush, Governor Rick Perry, Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives Tom Craddick, Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, Senators Arlen Specter and Dick Armey and various local, state and national Republican Party committees--not to mention Miller and her husband, former state Representative Steve Wolens. In fact, former Dallas Times Herald managing editor Will Jarrett and Vance Miller (no relation to Laura) were part of the mayor's original campaign finance committee.

At least two of their ranks were part of a campaign out to sink John Kerry by suggesting maybe he wasn't really in Vietnam after all.

And two of them have given thousands to an ultra-conservative Dallas-based political action committee whose Web site tells you which GOP officials to pray for each day and, in 2002, sent out direct-mail campaign brochures charging so-called liberal Republican incumbents with "promoting the radical homosexual agenda," according to stories that appeared in the Austin Chronicle and The Dallas Morning News.

The rest of the article's pretty hairraising too:

Source:
http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/2005-01-13/news/news.html?src=newsletter

Ok, I'm probably gonna be against it, I'm thinking, just because of who these people are. Jeez....