BISD RACE BECOMES WOMAN BASHING: LOPEZ, ZAYAS AND WIGHTMAN VYING FOR APROVECHADOS OF THE YEAR

By Juan Montoya
Judging by the political ads and blog posts, the Brownsville Independent School District races have deteriorated to woman bashing, especially in the race between Cesar Lopez and Shirley "La" Bowman.
In this Sunday newspaper, Lopez again lists Catalina Presas-Garcia and Luci Longoria for suing the district over what they say are First Amendment violations which prevent them from performing their duties to represent their constituents.
In their lawsuit, both claim that the majority on the board prevent them from entering items on the district meeting agendas where they want to question the legality of some baord actions. Specifically, the women have not been allowed to enter items to review the district general counsel Baltazar Salazar and whether he was up front about his three arrests for felony theft by check that resulted in him getting probation.

The district's policies prohibit the employment of any applicant who has been convicted of a crime of moral turpitude, including theft. A 13th Court of Appeals decision indicates that Baltazar had tried to get his record of the charges expunged but was challenged by the Texas Department of Public Safety. The DPS said that because Baltazar had not been fully honest in his expunction request and had served probation for at least one arrest, the courts could not grant him the expunction of his record.
Nonetheless, a board majority that included the late Ernique Escobedo, Minerva Peña, Jose Chirinos and Otis Powers voted to hire Salazar from among eight other law firms and voted to give him a $240,000 retainer.
The board – now with Lopez on the board – voted to extend  his contract this past December and gave him a 10 percent increase in his pay.
Lopez reported in his 30-days before the election report that Salazar has contributed $4,000 to his campaign in apparent violation of a clause in his BISD contract which prohibits him making a "gift" to a public servant in connection with his employment.
Lopez is running against Luci Longoria, Juan Pacheco and Roland Guerra for Position One. But judging by his expensive full-color full-page and half-page ads, Lopez sees Longoria as his main opponent and has hammered on the lawsuit theme constantly. This Sunday, Presas-Garcia, who is not even running in this year's election, has been also singled out by Lopez and former trustee Rick Zayas on the lawsuit issue.
Zayas merely points out that the women have sued the district and that there had been a move to  remove them from the board. What he doesn't say is that the proposal to remove them was raised by Salazar but was never considered by the board or voted on.
Zayas has a long memory. It was Longoria, after all, who pulled off a surprise victory over him four years ago and apparently he has not gotten totally over it. He is also representing former coach and Athletic Director Joe Rodriguez in his lawsuit against the release by the district of a forensic audit which questioned his role as a vendor of athletic equipment and charged that then-AD Tom Chavez uses favoritism in the awarding of the $450,000 contracts to firms represented by Rodriguez.
The plot thickens.
The law firm picked by Baltazar to defend the district, the board majority, and legal counsel Salazar is Colvin, Chaney, Saenz and Rodriguez. So far, the district has paid the firm more than $200,000 for their efforts. Another firm, from Houston, is also getting paid to oversee the local firm's work and has been paid about the same amount that the local firm has been compensated.  The law partner in the local firm – Tony Rodriguez – is the son of candidate "Coach" Rodriguez.
Why is it that no one is taking "Coach" Rodriguez to ask on that issue?
Not only does Zayas and Lopez weigh in about the women's lawsuit. Local blogger and wanna be opinion leader Robert Wightman questioned the fact that Bowman was allowed to use the Spanish article "La" in front of her name and charged that by using it Bowman somehow stained the gains of Latina women everywhere.
We have grown accustomed to Withman's bombastic charges and would write that off as a case of vagina envy, but his attack on Bowman is particularly galling since he himself legally changed his name when he was in Dallas in hopes of attracting the Hispanic vote.
A Dallas Observer article pointed out in a 2002 article that:
"Yes, just two years ago, he ran for Dallas County district judge as the first openly gay Republican to seek that office. And yes, he is now running for the U.S. Senate seat held (then) by Kay Bailey Hutchinson as the first openly gay Democrat to seek that office.
Yes, he has developed a reputation as an utterly contemptuous courtroom lawyer under the name Robert Wightman. And yes, he is running for the Senate under the name Bobby Wightman Cervantes, adding his Nicaraguan mother's maiden name to take advantage of the burgeoning Hispanic vote."http://www.dallasobserver.com/2000-03-02/news/impossible-dreamer/
 In the past, Wightman has lit into Presas-Garcia and Longoria as he now does against Bowman. But the statements he makes about Bowman denigrating Latina women ring hollow in light of his own attempt to curry favor with the the nHispanic vote.
But that really doesn't matter to him. In one scratch of his poison pen, he tries to discredit the nearly three-decade record in education and coaching that Bowman dedicated to the students of the district. Reputations done;t matter to this queer bird. He has insulted just about everyone in the city and hasn't stopped there, accusing the Bush and Obama administrations of  conspiring to entrap him in a credit-card scheme and asking the federal courts to appoint a special counsel to investigate the presidents, the FBI Director and the Texas government under Rick Perry and Texas Supreme Court Justice Wallace Jefferson.
The court found that Wightman's factual allegations are conclusory and unsupported, representing the type of "bizarre conspiracy theories" and "wholly insubstantial" claims contemplated by the D.C. Circuit and others that had dismissed similar claims.
The court said that even though it recognized that pro-se litigants are "generally entitled to the benefit of less stringent than those applied to attorneys, in fact, Wightman is a disbarred attorney who "is presumed to have a knowledge of the legal system and needed less protections from the court."
The court found that Wightman had failed to show that he had a right to the appointment of a special prosecutor or that the FBI, defendants, or any other government official or agency owe him a duty to investigate the alleged criminal conduct. The Court concluded that Wightman has failed to satisfy his burden and demonstrate that he was entitled to mandamus relief, and his request for a writ of mandamus was also denied.
In the past, Zayas was close to Wightman and even collaboraed with him in some cases. Since then, there has been a falling out between the two and Wightman went as far as charging that Zayas' support for the reinstatement of a BISD lawsuit against HealthSmart esas based on his belief that everyone was going to "make a lot of money."
Now, with Zayas entering the fray, he joins Lopez and Wightman in bashing two woman candidates and a sitting female trustee. Get over it, guys. Let the voters decide.