No Kay Blog

An interesting contrast comes to my inbox today courtesy of Google Alerts, pointing to two articles on San Antonio's MySA.com. They both have to do with Kay Bailey Hutchison, and they both have to do with Africa.


The first story, Then & Now: Fiesta serves royally, is about Fiest San Antonio. It mentions that Senator Hutchison, long before going off to Washington, was a participant in this formal affair. In fact, she "represented the University of Texas at Austin as Duchess of the Pharaohs during Fiesta in 1964."


The second story isn't quite so light. Called American shares horrific images he saw in Darfur, it's about a young man named Brian Steidle:

The former Marine Corps captain was an American monitor for the African Union from September 2004 to February 2005. Instead of a weapon, he carried a camera and captured almost 1,000 images of burned and looted villages, starving refugees and the bloody bodies of people who had been tortured and executed.

Steidle, 29, was in San Antonio on Saturday to share his photos and his experiences as part of the "Tour for Darfur: Eyewitness to Genocide," sponsored by the Save Darfur Coalition.

...Steidle saw villages of 20,000 people burned to the ground, civilians whose ears were cut off and eyes plugged out, and women who had been gang raped. And half a world away in the United States, there was apathy.

"On the worst day, I saw 37 villages burned in the same day," he told a group of about 35 at UTSA. "It's a large-scale military operation to drive out or kill all the black Africans in Darfur. I believe we can stop this."

Okay, so you see the (somewhat tenuous, perhaps) Africa connection with the Eqyptian Duchess of Pharoahs, but you're probably wondering: What's this have to do with Sen. Hutchison? This:

John De Mott, a senior at UTSA who attended the talk, said he's already called U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas. Her office sent him a form letter thanking him for his concern about health care.