Rick Perry's emergencies

If you had the slightest doubt about Governor Zoolander running for president, you can put that aside now.

Legislation requiring women seeking an abortion to first have a sonogram is an emergency that merits expedited consideration by the Legislature, Gov. Rick Perry told anti-abortion activists on Saturday.

A bill backed by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Houston state Sen. Dan Patrick will be granted emergency status, Perry told more than a thousand anti-abortion protesters at a rally. They had gathered at the Capitol on the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

[...]

The governor has previously announced four other emergency items for legislators to consider: eminent domain reform, ending "sanctuary city" policies that don't require police to check the immigration status of people they stop or arrest, a voter identification bill, and calling for an amendment to the US Constitution that would mandate a balanced federal budget.

The issues that Perry has given emergency status are important to his base of conservative activists and to the tea party movement.

Harold Cook has the lightest response, but this is really no laughing matter.

Tomorrow the Texas Senate will take up his first "emergency" -- voter ID -- in a 'committee of the whole' session.

It will eventually pass, and the only question is the level of opposition the minority will be able to muster. Whatever that amount is, how intense it may be, it will still only be symbolic.

Voter ID has the sole intention -- no matter how loudly or often Republicans claim it is something else -- of stifling Democratic turnout. Even prominent Republicans say that it will place a likely-insurmountable hardship on many of the elderly. But then that's just how they roll.

Moving forward, Democrats in Texas will have to make sure their voters have proper identification according to the legislation that will be crafted. Voters, for their part, are going to have to accept responsibility for making certain they are "qualified" to cast a ballot ... according to the GOP's definition of the word.

This additional voting requirement still won't stop disqualifications at polls, particularly those run by GOP election judges, nor will it end the thuggish tactics of the King Street Patriot/True the Vote denizens.

But it's going to be the new reality, just like community colleges closing, a hundred thousand teachers across Texas hitting the unemployment lines, and Medicaid patients dying because the the state no longer wants to pay for their care.

This is what a majority of Texans voted for last November. How do you like it so far?

Update: Burka, on the governor's priorities ...

I suspect that most governors, like 48 or 49 out of 50, would be embarrassed to fast-track such proposals when their state was facing a $27 billion budget deficit that is partly the result of the governor’s own policies, but nothing seems to be too blatantly political to embarrass Perry. And I think the reason no one really is wringing their hands over the governor’s upside-down priorities is that we long ago ceased to expect anything more.

And Gary Denton, on the V-ID bill ...

1) The legislation does not provide any alternatives to photo identification examples of identification that will no longer be acceptable to voter include student id cards, Medicaid/Medicare cards, expired driver’s licenses, expired passports, expired military id cards, birth certificates, official government letters, and employer id cards even if issued by a governmental entity.

[...]

9) Implementing redistricting plans and extremely strict photo id laws right before a Presidential election is a recipe for disaster in voter confusion.

The people most impacted by this bill will be students, (those who have) recently married (or) recently moved, very low income, elderly, legal immigrants, handicapped, (and) mainly urban dwellers who don't drive a car. These groups all lean Democratic so the Republicans count this bill as a success, getting any edge possible for elections.

And John Tanner, on why the V-ID bill will not withstand a court challenge.

Sunday Funnies

The final Countdown

Keith Olbermann was MSNBC's most popular personality and single-handedly led its transformation to an outspoken, left-leaning cable news network in prime time. Despite that, he often seemed to be walking on a tightrope with his job. Friday night, it snapped.


Olbermann returned from one last commercial break on "Countdown" to tell viewers it was his last broadcast, and read a James Thurber short story in a three-minute exit statement. Simultaneously, MSNBC e-mailed a statement that "MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract." The network thanked him and said, "we wish him well in his future endeavors."

Neither MSNBC President Phil Griffin, Olbermann nor his manager responded to requests to explain an exit so abrupt that Olbermann's face was still being featured on an MSNBC promotional ad 30 minutes after he had said goodbye.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The shock and awe was apparent in our household as well as everywhere else online I reached for details. Josh Marshall, who had been on the program in the first segment, was no less taken aback than everyone else.

No leaks, even with what must have been a late-in-the-day decision. They all kept a damn good secret, didn't they?

Various reports have Olbermann being let go because of Comcast's swallowing of NBC Universal earlier in the week, that he got fired because he said no to another  extension of his contract ($30 million for four years, signed in 2008 to make sure he was with the network through the 2012 election), and/or that he quit because Jeff Zucker was also shown the door in the wake of the Comcast-NBC merger. Anderson Cooper led his 9 pm (Central) broadcast on CNN with the news and reaction, most of it indicating that KO's mercurial personality had as much to do with his departure as anything else.

I would believe any of those versions. I would also observe that one thing MSNBC has been very good at over the years is throwing out their top talent if it doesn't toe their line. See Donahue, Phil and Banfield, Ashleigh and Shuster, David for evidence.

I'm a huge fan and I'll miss Countdown, but I'm not too concerned about KO's future and not just because money isn't the be-all-and-end-all for the dude (MSNBC is paying him his remaining contracted $14 mil). In six months -- after his non-compete expires -- he'll have an hour on Oprah's network, or HBO or someplace else where they aren't afraid of the brutal truth. He'll be wielding another very large, very loud megaphone, tormenting the Right into another derangement syndrome simply by relentlessly exposing their lies and hypocrisy.

And the same goes for Maddow, and Schultz and O'Donnell and Seder and Uyger and Stein and ...

Enjoy your sabbatical, Keith, and we'll see you when you get back.

Update:

Friday’s separation agreement between MSNBC and Mr. Olbermann includes restrictions on when he can next lead a television show and when he can give interviews about the decision to end his association with the news channel.

[...]

The decision was completed one year to the day from the last time NBC decided to end a relationship with an on-air star: Conan O’Brien. Mr. O’Brien agreed in the deal not to start up a new television show for nine months, and not to grant interviews for five months. The executives involved in the discussions with Mr. Olbermann said his agreement was not dissimilar to Mr. O’Brien’s.

The Texas budget cluster

The news coming out of Austin is so bad it is truly unfathomable.

A Sugar Land prison unit would be closed, funding for Brazosport Community College would be eliminated and thousands of jobs would be cut under a base budget presented late Tuesday night to state lawmakers dealing with a massive shortfall and the prospect of no new revenue this session.

The budget proposes nearly $5 billion less for public education below the current base funding. It is also $9.8 billion less than what is needed to cover current funding formulas, which includes about 170,000 additional students entering the public school system during the next two-year budget cycle. Pre-kindergarten would be scaled back.

Higher education funding, including student financial aid, would be slashed.

The proposal wouldn't provide funding for all the people projected to be eligible for the Medicaid program and would slash Medicaid reimbursement rates for health care providers.

Community supervision programs would be cut and a Sugar Land prison unit would be closed. Funding would be eliminated for four community colleges including Brazosport near Lake Jackson.

Thousands of state jobs would be cut.

The state wants to sell the land where the Fort Bend minimum security facility is located to developers. Let's pick it up from the TexTrib:

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie, laid out the first grim round of proposed cuts on Wednesday — aimed at balancing the budget without new taxes or tapping the Rainy Day Fund — even some of his Republican colleagues couldn't stifle their objections. House Democrats went a step further, calling the cuts "akin to asking an anorexic person to lose more weight."

Pitts didn't sugarcoat the proposed cuts, which strike a potentially devastating blow to public education and health care, eliminate 9,000 state jobs and shutter two state institutions for people with disabilities, one prison unit and three Texas Youth Commission lock-ups. He acknowledged the cuts are painful, and that this budget proposal slashes every state function that isn't a completely necessary service ...

No new taxes, no existing tax increases, no using the Rainy Day fund, but every state fee that you can think of -- and many you haven't -- is going up. No more sales tax holidays. Traffic violation fees to the state increase 50%. Vehicle license fees, vehicle registration fees, vehicle inspection fees, driver license renewal fees, hunting and fishing license fees, state park admission fees ... on and on.

Even the Republicans are whining about the budget cuts.

No-new-taxes and limited government may be a GOP refrain, but not necessarily when implemented in Republican lawmakers' backyards.

Three of four GOP lawmakers whose community colleges would lose state funding under a starting-point, bare-bones budget proposal publicly decried the proposed losses Wednesday.

Their worries joined broader concerns by Democrats over the proposal that would meet a budget shortfall estimated to be at least $15 billion without new revenue, instead relying on cuts in areas including public and higher education and health and human services.

"Reality has set in today, members. We have seen what the budget is going to look like, and we've got to go from now campaigning to governing this state of Texas," said Rep. Jim Keffer, R-Eastland, whose district includes Ranger College, one of those slated to lose state funding. "To me, we've gotten off on a wrong foot."

He called the college-closing proposal "the height of irresponsibility."

Considering that Republicans have been in control of the Texas Senate since 1996, and the House since 2003, and Keffer himself has been in Austin since '96 ... who do you think he's talking about?

The community college flap is a telling slice of the debate to come as school districts, teachers, groups that advocate for vulnerable Texans, lawmakers and others gauge the effect of the budget shortfall. ...

The proposal provides no new funding for growth in any area, including public and higher education or Medicaid, Pitts noted. One school finance expert, Lynn Moak, said the public education cutbacks could cost 100,000 school district jobs over two years.

The only thing that was spared the knife was border security.

"We're already as a state 50th in per capita spending, so you've got to ask yourself when you see a base budget like this, at what point is this budget akin to asking an anorexic person to lose more weight?" he asked.

Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, said, "The leadership has said that we want less government and we want to balance this budget through reduction. … Texans, whether you're old - seniors - whether you're young, in between, you're going to feel the pain. This the paradigm they've created. And now the question is whether or not Texans find that acceptable."

Rural Texas will be hammered the hardest by this budget, as the state and county governments are typically one of the largest -- if not the largest -- employer. Rural Texas went overwhelmingly for the Republicans in 2010.

Thus, Texans who voted for the GOP are getting exactly what they voted for. Texans who did not vote in the last election are also getting it. Hard.

The next two years of this debacle may teach some of them their folly. Then again, with the quality of Texas public education already poor and getting worse, they still may not learn the lesson.

Kuffner has a easy-to-digest list of the budget cuts, some of which are actually good ideas. The NYT's "What's the Matter With Texas?" has four point/counterpoint op-eds from Texas experts (if you count Talmadge Heflin as one of those, that is). And the Legislative Study Group has a five-page summary (.pdf) detailing how the budget cuts will affect Texans, which is the easiest and best resource currently available. Print it out, make a few extra copies, and take it to your next club meeting.

And keep in mind: this is what a very large majority of Texans voted for. They have, in fact, been voting for it for several years now.