I've written relatively little about the congressional race here in CD22 this year -- an oversight due in large part do to a string of family situations that have kept me from being nearly as involved as I would have wished. That said, today's article in the Houston Chronicle about the race deserves to be noted.

And I think the first line of the story is critical.

Since moving to Sugar Land last summer, Pete Olson has restricted his job search to a seat in the U.S. House.

Yeah, that's right. Pete Olson doesn't have a job. He has a wife, kids, and two houses (the family kept the one in the DC suburbs when Pete carpetbagged back to CD22). Heck, I suppose he may even have two mortgages, which I'm sure is tough to manage if you don't have job other than campaigning for Congress in a district where you have not been physically present for nearly two decades.

And this is why so many of us are opposed to Pete Olson. We already have a Democrat carpetbagger congressman who we want to get rid of in 2008 -- we don't want to replace him with a Republican carpetbagger, even if Olson is much closer to our political views.

Olson, a former staffer for two Republican U.S. senators from Texas, has had a two-fold answer. One, he grew up in the Clear Lake part of the district and attended Rice University and the University of Texas law school, so this is his home. Two, no one should begrudge his nine years as a Navy pilot and Pentagon worker and another nine years on the U.S. Senate staffs of Phil Gramm and John Cornyn.

And Pete Olson is quite disingenuous in his argument. No one I know "begrudges" him his military service. Indeed, all of us honor and respect it. But many of us who support Shelley Sekula Gibbs do have a problem with the fact that for the decade after that military service Olson has been a resident of the Virginia suburbs, owned his only home there, been a licensed driver there, and a registered voter there. Yes, he has been a top aide to two fine Texas senators, but we have concerns about the strength of his connection and commitment to our district.

And I always find it interesting that folks trot out this argument -- that Dr. Sekula Gibbs has not always been a conservative.

Sekula Gibbs acknowledges that she has reversed her position on abortion; she now says it should be illegal. She voted on the council to fund pavilions for day laborers, then opposed funding them because, she said, she learned that they made neighborhoods no safer and were used mostly by illegal immigrants.

In 2005, she did not strongly advocate for Houston police officers to question criminal suspects about immigration status. She did in 2006, as she ran for Congress and immediately after a policeman was killed by an illegal immigrant he had detained. Conservative and liberal council members, saying Sekula Gibbs was exploiting an officer's death for political gain, left their public meeting in protest when she spoke about changing the city's law enforcement policies on immigrants.

I'll be the first to recognize that there are elements of her past record that are less than conservative. But I also recognize that her increased conservatism over time, and her decades of service to our community here in CD22 for the last 20 years.

Besides, Ronald Reagan was at one time wrong on abortion. I think he did just fine.

And then there is this question that I like to ask -- after a loss in the runoff, what would these two candidates most likely do.

If she were to lose the election, I know for a fact that Shelley Sekula Gibbs will stay in our community, and continue to serve the people here as a respected medical professional.

Pete Olson? I have every reason to suspect that he will put the house in Sugar Land back on the market and head back inside the Beltway -- most likely as an employee of one of the lobbyists or politicians who contributed the seed money to start Olson's campaign in the first place. In other words, he'll go home again.

That dichotomy makes my choice in the runoff on April 8 really clear.

In the end, though, following the runoff I will support either of these candidates over Nick Lampson, because either of them is more representative of my views on the critical issues facing America than the incumbent is. I encourage my fellow voters to do the same.

UPDATE Welcome to readers of Ben DumbAss from RedState. As you've seen, my post takes exactly the opposite tack of what he claims. Let's hope he is more honest in his other posts -- and less touchy when others call him on a blatant lie.

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