Free Republic

THE HAGUE, 08/11/08 - The Christian democrats (CDA) conclude in a study that Islam can be a source for fostering democracy. The sharia, or Koran-inspired law, can play a role in this process, the study compiled by Arie Oostlander finds. Oostlander strongly opposes what is known as the secularisation premise, which claims that democratic development benefits from reduced religious involvement. "I take a strong stand against the idea that Islam is incompatible with democracy. This premise plays into the hands of extremist groups. Islam can provide a basis for promoting the democratic constitutional state," Christian newspaper Nederlands Dagblad quoted him...

Todd Kruse has an interesting “observation and question to the CDA’s representative stating, “since there is already an oversupply of housing on the market today your development plans, using our tax dollars, would simply add more housing stock to an already saturated market. This will further reduce our homes’ values don’t you think?”

AUSTIN — The Texas Transportation Commission on Thursday selected San Antonio's Zachry Construction Corp. and a Spanish toll road developer to plan a superhighway from Texarkana to Brownsville. The $5 million contract calls for Zachry American Infrastructure and ACS Infrastructure to create a financial plan for the Interstate 69 segment of the Trans-Texas Corridor. "This team represents the best in the balance of local and global expertise necessary to complete a project of this scope," said David Zachry, chief operating officer of Zachry Construction Corp. The private developers' plan calls for seven new loops around Corpus Christi and other cities...

The Texas Transportation Commission never fails to amaze us. Bottom line - this leopard has not changed its spots. Nothing has changed. The Commission and TxDOT are hell bent to sign deals and give away the farm before the legislature can rein them in. Rain, sleet and snow won't stop the mail; and, moratoriums, legislative intent and a sunset review won't stop TxDOT. Just a week ago TxDOT tried to impress everyone with how responsive they could be as they announced their recommendation that TTC-69 focus on using existing facilities rather than building a new highway. The only thing that...

Earth Tech Inc. has been awarded a multi-million dollar contract to provide environmental services to Central Texas Highway Constructors, LLC (CTxHC). Earth Tech, the lead planning and engineering firm for Cintra Zachry, LP on the Trans-Texas Corridor 35 (TTC-35) project, was approved by CTxHC for environmental work on Segments 5 and 6 of the SH 130 highway project. The SH 130 project is the first facility to be developed under the TTC-35 Comprehensive Development Agreement. An integral part of the preparation for highway construction, the project includes site assessments, hazardous materials clean-ups, remediation, and other environmental services. A private-public partnership,...

SH 130 Concession Company LLC finalized the legal details of a financial close with Texas DOT on a $1,360m toll concession to build SH130 segments 5&6 Thursday and Friday last week in bankers' offices in New York City - at Orrick, 666 Fifth Avenue. The actual money flows should occur on Thursday or Friday (Mar 13 or 14) this week, Jose Maria Lopez de Fuentes, president of Cintra North America, told us this morning. Hundreds of documents and over 20 lawyers were involved last week representing TxDOT, private equity people, banks, mostly European, the TIFIA loan group from FHWA, and...

Officials with the Spanish toll road operator Cintra have announced that the company has secured $430 million in loans from the U.S. government to build and operate two segments of a toll road in central Texas. Cintra officials announced the company’s financial plan for the $1.36 billion Highway 130 segments on Monday, March 10. OOIDA Senior Government Affairs Representative Mike Joyce told Land Line that the Association does raise red flags when federal dollars are used to subsidize private investors. Officials with the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association are not, however, categorically opposed to a state using future toll revenue to...

Senior executives of the Texas Department of Transportation can expect some heavy grilling from state legislators when the state Legislature convenes next January, state Rep. Jim McReynolds said Friday. Speaking to the monthly First Friday luncheon of The Chamber, Lufkin-Angelina County, McReynolds said many legislators, especially those from rural East Texas, are unhappy with TxDOT leaders over the Trans- Texas Corridor project and how it has incorporated plans for an Interstate 69 through the region. McReynolds said he attended all four of the TxDOT hearings on the TTC held in his district, which included one in Diboll, and "never heard...

THE HAGUE, 04/03/08 - The Christian democrats (CDA) would only win 29 seats if general elections were held now. The disfavour of the voters is the result of the party's attempts to prevent Geert Wilders's film on the Koran from being shown, pollster Maurice de Hond reported. Last week, CDA still scored 32 seats. The new result of 29 is the party's lowest score since the spring of 2006. CDA currently has 41 seats in the Lower House, which has 150 members. The three seats lost by the CDA would be divided between Wilders' anti-'Islamisation' Party for Freedom (PVV), the...

HEMPSTEAD -- The Trans Texas Corridor may be the most controversial highway ever built in Texas. That is, if it ever gets built. All month, there have been public hearings throughout the area where people have been showing up in droves to oppose it. People don’t drive very fast on Odis Styers’ family ranch near Hempstead, but TxDOT wants that to change. “It’s quiet, it’s peaceful,” Styers said. “It’s a shame a road is gonna mess it up.” The road is the Trans Texas Corridor. The plans call for it to come through here, and with it: separate lanes for...

When the Texas Department of Transportation begins work on the I-69/Trans Texas Corridor, the U.S. 77 leg from Victoria to Brownsville will be developed first. Cameron County Commissioners revealed the information during Tuesday’s Cameron County Commissioners Court meeting. County officials received the news from the state’s Turnpike Authority Division on Monday. In a letter to Cameron County, Turnpike Authority Division Director Phillip E. Russell said, TXDOT has identified U.S. 77 as “high priority� and the “first near term facility to be developed under the I-69/TTC Comprehensive Development Agreement.� The U.S. 77 Highway runs from Victoria to Brownsville. Precinct 3 Commissioner...

STAPLES — Dennis Elam knew he wasn’t cut out to be a city dweller during the one month he lived in San Marcos with his new wife, Brenda, after they were married in 1963. “I’ve got to have my horse. They won’t let me keep him in an apartment,” Elam said. The problem for Elam and his family is that the State Highway 130 construction contractor and the property acquisition firm has tapped the 57 acres they live and work cattle on and it is smack in the middle of the path of the highway where it will connect with...

Toll road contract in Texas allows state to lower speed limits on nearby interstate freeway to avoid paying penalties to a private company. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) has agreed to consider lowering the maximum speed limit on a stretch of interstate highway that competes with a planned toll road. Cintra-Zachary, a joint Spanish-US venture, paid TxDOT $1.3 billion for the right to collect tolls on 40-miles of State Highway 130 set for construction beginning in 2009. Although TxDOT suggested that free market competition was part of the goal of using a public-private partnerships to construct and operate roads,...

Road plans in Texas have conspiracy theorists in an uproar I am driving along a mostly empty road in rural Fayette County, Texas, about an hour east of Austin, looking for the NAFTA superhighway -- the one that Stephen Harper, George W. Bush and Felipe Calderón mocked as a conspiracy theory when they were asked about it at their trilateral meeting in Montebello, Que., in August. Critics, who say that behind the leaders' denials lurks a larger, nefarious plan to unite North America, fear that such a roadway will eventually be a four-football-stadium-wide artery connecting Mexico, the U.S. and Canada,...

Monitoring the court fight between activist Terri Hall and the Texas Department of Transportation is a lot like staring at a buffet line full of warmed over hospital cafeteria food. On the one hand, you're hungry and interested in eating. But on the other, you really can't get excited about the choices before you. It's tempting but unpalatable to root for Hall, who has adopted the noble cause of trying to stop TxDOT from spending millions of dollars on a PR blitz to build support for toll roads. Despite Hall's impressive gifts of organizing, public speaking and rabble-rousing, she is...

...[The building of the Trans-Texas Corridor] is all too sinister for Jerome Corsi, the Vietnam War veteran who helped lead the Swift Boat charge against John Kerry. Corsi has knitted disparate strands of each of these separate road projects to help convince fellow xenophobes such as Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Lou Dobbs and the John Birch Society that the corridor is the first leg of a secret federal project called the NAFTA Superhighway, a four-football-field wide monstrosity that would run from Mexico's Yucatan to Canada's Yukon... Yet even Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican candidate for president, has fallen...

AUSTIN – Lawmakers broke camp Monday, taking it on faith that Gov. Rick Perry won't slam the brakes on a compromise toll road bill. Monday's session finale came and went without Mr. Perry signing the bill, which imposes a partial two-year freeze on private toll road deals. Lawmakers did not try to override his veto on their initial bill to overhaul the state's toll policies. Many involved in the contentious toll road debate were expecting Mr. Perry to approve the bill by now because his office was closely involved in hammering out the compromise. Perry spokeswoman Krista Moody said the...

AUSTIN — The House gave final approval Wednesday to placing a two-year moratorium on private toll road contracts, sending the bill to Gov. Rick Perry and setting up a showdown over the future of the state's transportation policy. Perry had urged the Legislature to reject the freeze but has stopped short of promising a veto. The House approved the measure 139-1, showing it has broad enough support that lawmakers could vote to override the governor if he tries to kill it. The Senate approved the bill 27-4 last week. The Legislature can override a veto with a two-thirds vote of...

AUSTIN - A two-year moratorium on private toll roads that won preliminary approval in the House last week would put the brakes on the Trans-Texas Corridor, a superhighway that a private firm received a contract for earlier this year. The moratorium also would halt seven near-term projects in the state, said Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, the Brenham Republican who added the proposal to a House bill. "This is us tapping the brakes, looking before we leap ... into contracts that last 50-plus years," Kolkhorst said. Her proposal would require the state to create a commission to study the effects of private...

Warning: Unless you put up a roadblock this minute, soon Florida Republicans will "Dubai" all the state's assets. Once again, Elephants in the Florida Legislature have sold their souls, assuming they ever had any. Routinely, they barter the public interest for a buck. This time, in a scheme that only Halliburton could hail, House Republicans just passed H.B. 7033, giving private companies virtual monopoly ownership of most of Florida's toll roads. (Democratic state Reps. Susan Bucher and Keith Fitzgerald told me they were outraged.) That's right! If the scheme becomes law, corporate interests will be able to make a profit...

Texas’ largest farm organization is once again describing the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) as a disaster for farming and ranching operations that lie in the potential path of the TTC and a major mistake for Texas itself. The Texas Farm Bureau is also discovering that there are many allies in opposing the massive highway project, some of them members of the Texas Legislature. “Our members are overwhelmingly opposed to the Trans Texas Corridor,” says TFB President Kenneth Dierschke, a grain and cotton farmer from San Angelo. “There’s never been any doubt that the impact on agriculture would be negative, but...

? 2007 WorldNetDaily.com Texas farmers are stepping up their opposition to the Trans-Texas Corridor, a massive highway project that ultimately could take about half a million acres of the state out of agricultural production ? and according to opponents possibly hasten the advent of a North American Union. "Our members are overwhelmingly opposed to the Trans-Texas Corridor," said Farm Bureau President Kenneth Dierschke, a grain and cotton farmer from San Angelo. "There's never been any doubt that the impact on agriculture would be negative, but now we see a growing number of people who believe the TTC would be bad...

The massive Trans-Texas Corridor project is a disaster for farms and ranches that lie in its proposed path, the Waco-based Texas Farm Bureau says. The Farm Bureau has been steadfast in its opposition to the project and says its encouraged by efforts in Austin to derail or at least delay the $184 billion plan, which ultimately calls for a 4,000-mile network of transportation corridors that would crisscross the state with separate highway lanes for passenger vehicles and trucks, passenger rail, freight rain, commuter rail and dedicated utility zones. ?Our members are overwhelmingly opposed to the Trans Texas Corridor,? says TFB...

In the political world, rapid change only occurs when the public focuses attention on a specific issue. We have that situation right now in Austin. Public and legislative attention is focused on the Texas Department of Transportation and a proposed moratorium on the Comprehensive Development Agreement process, including the recently announced CDA to construct State Highway 121 in Collin County. This public and legislative attention may offer an opportunity for Texas to reaffirm our commitment to focus government spending on core functions – in this case, transportation. There are many subplots swirling in this complex CDA moratorium issue – reining...

Mike Krusee looked tired. The Republican state representative from Williamson County, interviewed at his Capitol office last week, for 10 days or so had been fighting what some people call the creeping crud, a debilitating mixture of cold, flu and allergy symptoms hitting many Central Texans this spring. But Krusee, for much longer than 10 days, has also been fighting the creeping realization among legislators that over the past two sessions, they might have granted Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Department of Transportation too much power to create toll roads. For the first time in his three sessions as...

Over the decades of watching the Legislature, no issue has so inflamed passions — and unified such disparate groups — as the current toll-road proposals winding through state government. Texas Department of Transportation officials have argued that the state's highway needs greatly exceed what fuel taxes will generate, and the only way to catch up with the traffic congestion is to sell some planned and existing roads to private operators and use the cash to build other roads. Clearly, the proposal that has most inflamed opponents has been the Trans-Texas Corridor, a massive 50-year project for which the state would...

(January 26, 2007)--A legislator from San Antonio has filed a bill to kill GOP Gov. Rick Perry's Trans-Texas Corridor toll road proposal. Democratic Representative David Liebowitz says his measure would take away the Texas Department of Transportation's authority to buy land and do contracts for the project. Click Here For More Information Liebowitz told WOAI radio that the Trans-Texas Corridor would "destroy rural Texas as we know it." Perry's office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Joe Krier with Texans for Safe Reliable Transportation believes the Liebowitz bill, which was filed Thursday, is a mistake. Krier says the...

A recent poll posted at KeepTexasMoving.org, shows that visitors to the site consider land acquisition as the most pressing issue needing to be addressed regarding the planned Trans-Texas Corridor. Visitors to the site chose acquisition of property by an overwhelming 64 percent of the vote, with 14,280 votes. The next highest vote was for connectivity to cities with only 12 percent, or 2,659 votes. The Web site is published by the Texas Department of Transportation to release information regarding the planned Trans-Texas Corridor. The Trans-Texas Corridor is a large transportation plan envisioned by Gov. Rick Perry and TxDOT to provide...

Across the country, state highway officials are almost giddy about the prospects of selling the right to build toll roads to private investors. Financial wizards have learned how to amass gigantic pools of capital to pay the states for the privilege. Prestigious financial institutions are promoting the new method of financing infrastructure as the greatest development since sliced bread. Left out of the equation is the consumer – the poor working stiff who has paid exorbitant local, state and federal taxes on every gallon of gasoline he ever purchased so that highway officials would have the funds necessary to construct...

Four thousand miles of smooth blacktop. Six open lanes of road with never a traffic jam. Four lanes for trucks to keep the 18-wheelers from bothering Joe Motorist. High-speed rail to get you from San Antonio to Dallas in just a couple of comfy hours. Oil, gas, and water lines running from Oklahoma to the Mexican border. Handy motels, shops, and gas stations to keep you from having to get off the road until you hit the state line. That’s the dream of the backers of the Trans-Texas Corridor, the biggest public works project in the history of the state...

More than 54,000 cars a day pass through Interstate 35 near Hillsboro where the highway splits, leading motorists either through Dallas or Fort Worth. Added volume on New year's Day slowed traffic to 5 mph through the town, with cars stuck in medians and map-savvy drivers turning the Hill County Courthouse square into a traffic jam. Hillsboro is more than 150 miles from Tyler, Longview and Marshall, but one official says the growing pressure on the Central Texas highway is beginning to affect East Texas arteries. "I-35 is one of the busiest in the state, and people are already coming...

Every day I can look out the window of my office in downtown Austin and watch traffic creep along Interstate 35, half a mile away. The time of day doesn’t seem to matter, nor does the weather: morning or evening, wet or dry, the snarl persists. Part of this is due to the unwieldy design of the downtown exit and entrance ramps, but the main reason is the volume of traffic, much of it commercial. I dread the drive to Dallas, which I last made on the Friday afternoon before the Texas-Oklahoma football game – surely the worst day of...

We Americans are a suspicious lot. Gas prices go down and a good many of us assume there's a conspiracy that starts and ends in the White House. Take the results of a recent Gallup poll. Forty-two percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement that the Bush administration "deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall's elections." It's a good yarn, but I can't ignore the fact that nearly two-thirds of those who said they suspected President Bush of pulling a fast one heading into the Nov. 7 elections are registered Democrats. Plus,...

AUSTIN - Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, running for governor as an independent, was teed off Wednesday over Republican Gov. Rick Perry's state transportation commission chairman's remarks that a foreign-owned company could supersede local officials in deciding where new toll roads are built. Commission Chairman Ric Williamson, a Perry appointee and longtime friend, rejected pleas by North Texas leaders last week that a road-building consortium partly owned by a Spanish firm be forced to locate a new tollway system closer to the population centers in Fort Worth and Dallas. When courting private companies to construct highway projects, Williamson told about 100...

Nine decades of unity and charity exemplified in a Sioux City Catholic organization of women were celebrated Tuesday. The Catholic Daughters of the Americas (CDA) Court Ave Maria 269 marked its 90th anniversary with a 5:30 p.m. anniversary Mass at the Cathedral of the Epiphany. The Most Rev. R. Walker Nickless, bishop of Sioux City, was the celebrant of the Mass and the Rev. Paul-Louis Arts, chaplain of the CDA court and rector of Cathedral, concelebrated and delivered the homily. "This is truly a celebration of the past, present and future," noted Arts in his homily. "In unity and charity,...

Gays in the Military (1993) "Don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding homosexuals reaffirmed and codified in military regulation. This revolutionary decision ushers in an era of reduced tensions in America regarding acceptance of homosexuals into society. Further, this renewed focus on the privacy of homosexuals' own affairs satisfies the needs of this group, and brings calm to a heated debate. World Trade Center Bombing (1993) Violence and terror strikes New York City as a horrific explosion detonates in the garage beneath the World Trade Center. A swift apprehension and just prosecution of the direct perpetrators of the act ensures that...