Monday, May 06, 2013

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance thinks the state is a safer place without Wayne LaPierre in it as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff patiently explains to those who don't know Texas politics that there exist Democrats in this state outside of Austin.

Cartoon outrages carried over into a second week in Texas, with the NRA blowing into town for the weekend. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs is so old that he remembers when protesting a gun nut convention was all about Tom DeLay.  

WCNews at Eye on Williamson posts about the Texas GOP's greed and cruelty as they hoard billions of dollars and deny health care to millions of Texans: They could if they wanted to, but they don't.  

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes that Ted Cruz is a bigger jerk than John Cornyn, although Cornyn has many years of bad deeds compared to Cruz's short tenure.

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw provides an update on The Texas Taliban: Hard at work in Washington D.C. and Austin.

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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

On The Move explains why you're paying too much for your car insurance.

The Texas Green Report announces that over 1000 people have switched from TXU and its coal-fired power.

BOR endorses the Austin ISD school bonds for the May election. TFN Insider adds a few more endorsements for the same election, while Concerned Citizens has an endorsement for San Antonio.

Texas Vox documents climate change denial at the Legislature.

The TSTA warns about profiteers masquerading as reformers.

Harold Cook unmasks the second worst church in the world.

Sunday, May 05, 2013

Good morning, NRA

Nick Anderson, killing it as usual.


Click, view, absorb, repeat.

This is a national story now. Bill Maher also smacks 'em down: "The Axis of Assholes".

Bill Maher coined the perfect term. Rick Perry, Ted Nugent, and Sarah Palin are the axis of a**holes. From bashing charity events because they weren’t invited, to running campaign ads suggesting that Obama isn’t a Christian then cozying up to the president after your lack of regulatory oversight causes one of your towns to blow up, to blaming Obama for veterans’ suicides when you were a coward who refused to serve your country, these three are a**holes. In fact, they are three of the biggest a-holes in American politics. 

At Ground Zero, there were conversations described as civil and spirited.

"How many of your members supported universal background checks?" asked Aaron Black, an activist who flew in from New York to protest. He cited polls showing the number as high as 92%.

"I've told you three times today, I don't believe there's a 92% —" (NRA board member Todd) Rathner said.

"You have not told me three times," Black said.

"It's a bogus number," Rathner said. "If you explain to people that universal background checks require registration, that number would plummet."

"What endgame do you see?" asked Jeff Hunter of Houston. "Is the NRA going to form militias when the government comes to get your guns?"

"If there's no registration, we don't have to worry about it," Rathner said.

Black gave credit to Rathner for engaging the protesters. "This guy thinks he's representing gun owners? He's not representing gun owners. He's representing gun manufacturers."

He tried to confront Rathner with autopsy photos of 16-year-old Brishell Jeffries, one of three teenagers killed in a drive-by shooting in Washington, D.C., in 2010. "Gun violence is so sterilized, and dumbed down and Disneyfied, that no one cares. It didn't even faze this guy."
Rathner acknowledged a problem with violence in America, but said he doesn't blame the guns. Protesters, he said, have been misinformed by the media.

"I'm comfortable debating it, but I'm not going to change their minds, and they're not going to change mine," said Rathner, a gun lobbyist from Tuscon, Ariz., and self-described "Jewish redneck."

I'm so old that I remember when protests at Houston NRA conventions were all about Tom DeLay.

Thanks for coming, gun nuts, and we hope you spent a lot of money while you were here. Now GTFO and make room for the OTC. (Was it just a year ago that the big story was the Chronicle's un-coverage of the oil and gas confab?)

Update: More pics, and not of the inside of the GRB.

Sunday Funnies (half-cocked edition)

Friday, May 03, 2013

"We weren't sent (to Austin) to govern like California"

The Speaker throws the Teabaggers a bone.

House Speaker Joe Straus suggested in a Thursday interview that a Senate proposal to take $5.7 billion from the rainy day fund for water, transportation and education is too costly and represents an effort to “punt” lawmakers' responsibility by placing the issue on a ballot for voter approval.

“We weren't sent here to govern like California,” said Straus, R-San Antonio.

His comments came days after the House torpedoed an effort to take $2 billion from the rainy day fund for water projects, without resorting to a constitutional amendment.

But that House roadblock didn't make Senate Joint Resolution 1 any more attractive to Straus — although he said he is firmly committed to paying for a water plan, which he said is of prime importance.

“How the members want to fund it is the question. It will be funded,” Straus said. 

When all else fails, play the Cali card. Hey, it's been working great for the governor, right?

This is the same strategy employed by the Speaker with regard to Medicaid expansion and a bushel full of legislation now on the Sine Die countdown: "Something needs to be done, but I haven't a clue what it might be".

This is how you know there will be a special session: when something passes the Senate by unanimous consent but is --apparently -- DOA in the lower chamber.


Senators unanimously backed SJR 1, which would provide $2 billion for water, $2.9 billion for transportation and $800 million for public education.

Dedicating the money through a constitutional amendment would prevent the expenditures from counting against the state spending cap. The cap applies to state tax revenues that aren't constitutionally dedicated to other purposes.

[...]

Straus said, “I would say that SJR 1 is a no-go in the House.”

The Speaker has shown exemplary non-leadership throughout the 83rd Session. The Dems have managed once again, at critical moments, to outmaneuver the majority via parliamentary procedure, and the TP Caucus just says no to everything as usual. Faced with blockage he can't dissolve, Straus has decided to file his nails and coast to the end, content to let his lieutenants do the lifting.

With the Legislature entering its home stretch, key lawmakers are trying to figure out how to direct money from the rainy day fund to help build massive reservoir and pipeline projects.

Among the possibilities: Reviving some version of a bill that was killed Monday with a parliamentary maneuver and bringing it back to the House floor, where a spirited debate is likely to ensue; kicking the issue over to voters, as the Senate has proposed; or trying for a hybrid of rainy day fund and general revenue fund money to seed the revolving water fund.

That last option is the most likely, said state Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio, who has played a behind-the-scenes role on water issues.

That Statesman piece also makes clear that legislators don't want to come back for a special.

“We are not going to leave the Capitol till we agree on some funding at the state level to facilitate construction called for in the state water plan,” Larson said.

Backers of the water plan are also making an appeal on drought grounds: Owing to Texas’ ongoing drought, legislators from South Texas, West Texas and Central Texas “will be hard pressed to vote against the plan,” Larson said.

Some members from each party are worried they could face a special session to deal with water, if they cannot pass a bill in the regular session, which ends May 27.

State Rep. Byron Cook, R-Corsicana, a member of the speaker’s leadership team, shuddered at the idea of extra days of lawmaking.

“That’s a looming hammer hanging over all of us,” Cook said. “It will create an added incentive to get it done.”

Yeah. We'll see.

Sidestepping the vigorous debate in the House, senators last week unanimously passed a resolution calling for voters to consider a constitutional amendment transferring roughly $6 billion from the rainy day fund for water, roads and public education.

Their leader, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, has at times seemed disengaged on the water issue. On the day the Senate took up the resolution, Dewhurst was in Houston to address a lunch-time gathering of the Pachyderm Club.

Dewhurst is still depressed over losing to Ted Cruz last year.

After the passage of the resolution, Dewhurst’s office issued a press release noting that he started talking to senators about improving the state’s infrastructure last summer. But kicking the decision over to voters, rather than leading senators to make a spending decision that could alienate tea party activists, appeared to be preferable for a man who lost his 2012 U.S. Senate primary to Ted Cruz, a tea party favorite.

The Lege is always full of surprises, especially as the session grinds down and sleep-deprived politicos get testy. But I don't see the Republicans making the hard choices to govern effectively for the state's citizens. Color me skeptimistic, but something -- in the homophobic words they so often use -- is going to have to get shoved down their throats.

Thursday, May 02, 2013

Nick Anderson's response to Rick Perry's cartoon pique

WaPo:

Nick Anderson, the Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist for the Houston Chronicle, rendered his commentary Tuesday, in which Texas Gov. Rick Perry is depicted as getting more outraged over a cartoon — by Sacramento Bee cartoonist Jack Ohman — than the actual oversight and regulation issues involving the West, Tex., fertilizer plant that exploded last month, killing at least 15 and injuring scores more.


Asked to share the thinking behind his cartoon, Anderson tells Comic Riffs: "I just have a question: Why do people seem more offended by a cartoon than they are by the lax regulatory climate that likely contributed to or even caused this tragedy?"

Nick Anderson is all over the governor lately. And his question is just common sense for everyone except the top two elected officials in Texas.

But for a state that has sent Louie Gohmert and Steve Stockman to Washington... and would like to send Ted Cruz to the White House (ain't hap'nin, but Lord, please let 'em nominate him) , it's just par for the course.

Until Battleground Texas get geared up, this tincture of craven and stupid is all on you, Republicans. And with Greg Abbott waiting in the wings, I doubt you're going to manage to do any better in 2014. In the meantime, we'll watch as Houston hosts the NRA's national convention this weekend, with a parade of Cruz, Ted Nugent (who soiled himself rather than go to Vietnam, and now blames military suicides on Obama), Sarah Palin, and Rick Santorum ahead of the very worst America has to offer.

The nation's premier gun-rights organization, with nearly 5 million members, expects more than 70,000 to attend the convention.

[...]

The NRA caps off Saturday night with a "Stand and Fight" rally featuring conservative commentator Glenn Beck.

Apart from the calls to the ramparts, the convention's heart rests in the 400,000 square feet of exhibit hall space where more than 500 firearms companies, hunting outfitters, gun antique collectors and others will display their wares. In addition, seminars feature topics such as "home defense concepts," "methods of concealed carry," and "advanced sausage processing - BBQ & smoke cooking techniques."

A response? Yes.

Outside the convention center, an array of gun-control advocates is expected to demonstrate opposition to the NRA and its lobbying prowess.

"I don't think it's a losing battle at all," said Heather Ross, an organizer for the "Occupy the NRA" group that plans to lead the reading of names of 4,000 gun-violence victims under a #NoMoreNames banner at Discovery Green, across from the convention center. The list will start with the 26 victims of gunman Adam Lamza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last December.

Texas is not as uniformly pro-gun as most people believe, Ross insisted.

"The concept that we're all a bunch of gun-toting crazies is inaccurate," she said. "That's largely pushed by people elected to office."

The day is coming when this virulent strain of Republican rabies will come under control, but it won't come soon enough.

Wednesday, May 01, 2013

"This is why I don't think we have a strong president"


Cenk Uygur, “Edge Show” host Mark Thompson, The Nation’s Lee Fang, and comedian Jimmy Dore criticize President Obama’s inability to deliver on his first-term promise to close Guantanamo Bay. During a White House Press conference, Obama renewed his dedication to closing the prison. “I think it’s one of the great failed promises of this presidency,” Thompson says. “This is why I don’t think we have a strong president,” Cenk says. “This is an executive decision. [Obama] shouldn’t have any conversation with Congress about this.”

It is one of the enduring mysteries to me how closing Gitmo can possibly be so difficult or why it is even controversial. Republicans either are too scared to treat the captives legally, or they simply want to kill them all (as if that would solve anything). Obama's capitulation to the pants-crapping cowardice of the GOP is to say, "well OK; since you have screamed so much about it, we'll let you have your way".

Obama reminds me of one of those parents who refuses to discipline their shrieking, wailing child in the restaurant. You know, just let them cry themselves out.

Bullshit. Take that little urchin out to the car and whip his ass until he understands how to behave. Yeah, it's old school but it's how I was raised. And don't tell me about how people call DHS on parents like that, or that children can sue their parents as part of the analogy.

Republicans -- in addition to being cowards -- are bullies. Stand up to them and they will back down. Don't... and they'll keep up their act. Somebody's got to find their spine once in awhile, and we are way overdue for a discovery among the political class.

You have to hope it happens before Ted Cruz gets elected president, anyway.

It's just amazing to me that it takes a man with a broken back to demonstrate the kind of courage needed to slap Republicans across the face with their hypocrisy.