John McCain's $520 Ferragamo shoes have been the buzz of the blogosphere this morning, but in Texas, a $520 pair of shoes for a lawmaker is nothing. After all, everything is bigger in Texas and one ethically-challenged State Representative, John Davis (R-Houston), recently spent a cool $1,537.15 on his footware.
Many Democrats have written off Texas, just like other Southern, right-wing enclaves, such as Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia.
But Texas has a history of progressives from Jim Hogg to Jim Hightower,
Ma Ferguson to Molly Ivins, Ann Richards to well, there is no parallel to Ann Richards.
Precinct by precinct, pockets of progressive thought popped up in unlikely places in 2006.
Dallas, for example, where the Dems swept the ballot.
This would be no surprise to Molly Ivins. Follow me below the fold to watch as Texas legislators are caught on camera blatantly voting as many as four times, using absent legislators voting devices.
Interesting and slightly disturbing expose from a local CBS affiliate out of Texas, which shows many in the state senate (including Kossack favorite Noriega) voting up to 4x apiece, on their own behalf, and then on behalf of colleagues who are not present.
Especially delicious considering that the Texas state senate is currently considering the requirement of ID cards, a Publican tactic used to disenfranchise the poor, the black, and the elderly citizens of our country.
Okay, I usually laugh and blow off the usual asshattery that is the government of the proud state of Texas. It is a vaudville show full of prat falls and jumbled justice jousting. But for the most part, I figured the monkeys we had in Austin were not wholescale frauds. How wrong I was. How very, very wrong.
The Texas House of Representatives, steaming about Speaker Tom Craddick’s repeated declarations that he has absolute power over who may speak in the 150-member chamber, boiled over after midnight Monday morning with some members walking out into capitol corridors echoing with cheers and catcalls where state troopers rushed to separate dissident camps
UPDATE - Link to local TV report KEYE TV
The fate of some 30 major bills pending before Monday midnight’s statutory end of the session seemed bleak following the walkout and at least one former member argued that the $153 billion state budget may also hang in the balance if a quorum of members does not return to allow it to be formally signed.
Tempers have flared openly since Friday when Craddick refused to recognize members who wished to call for a vote on whether to dump him and elect a new speaker - something that hasn’t happened to a sitting speaker since 1871.
talk about bringing the issue of voter fraud suppression down to earth... here you have not only THE definitive picture of what karl rove, scott jennings, susan ralston, alberto gonzales, monica goodling, kyle sampson, paul mcnulty, and the rest of the push-for-a-one-party-state crowd have been working so diligently to achieve, but also the clearest picture yet of what kind of a person it takes to stop it...
Johnny Castle and Baby could have taken lessons from Texas Speaker of the House Tom Craddick and Joe Pojman of Texas Alliance for Life. With the Speaker's one-man rule of the House facing an unprecedented challenge from within his own party, with the passage of a high-impact antiabortion bill at stake, and with the Texas legislative session in its final days, Craddick and Pojman were caught dancing the political payola polka.
"One of the sources of irritation with the Speaker this session is the amount of blood spilled and floor time that has been committed to socially conservative issues," but Craddick and the "pro-life" lobby are longtime partners — and one good move deserves another.
In the Texas Legislature, dirty dancing is only politics as usual.
A couple of months ago, a Karl Rove disciple by the name of Florence Shapiro introduced Texas Senate Bill 785. Shapiro's bill required doctors to make detailed reports to the state about women who had abortions. The Senate passed it after removing sections making targets of judges who issued judicial bypasses, and even sending women to jail for failing to reveal highly personal information about their private lives to the state.
But now the bill is in the House, all the dangerous and intrusive provisions have returned with a vengeance, and the vote is tomorrow.
Should this legislation succeed, the confidentiality of personal information, and medical privacy as we know it, will become a thing of the past for women in Texas. And doctors, instead of inspiring confidence in their patients, will be forced by law to pressure women with emotional blackmail.
Action Alerts for May 14-15 for the Texas House and Senate include:
GOOD BILL THAT NEEDS TO BE APPROVED BY BOTH HOUSES:
ACTION ALERT CSSB 439 by Deuell attempts to correct legislation which allows medical providors to withdraw patients from life support over the objection of their families and prior to decisions by ethics or medical review committees. The bill was placed on the Senate Intent Calendar on May 10th. It needs to be passed and go to the house. This is a life and death matter which could impact any Texan if left unaddressed.
BACKGROUND ON THE BILL: Author’s Intent:
Currently, if a physician refuses to honor an advance directive or treatment decision, the physician's decision must be reviewed by an ethics or medical committee, during which time life-sustaining treatment is required to be provided to the patient. Some hospitals are withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from patients before they can be transferred to an alternative facility, often resulting in their death.
A Texas State Representative called for a "challenge" to the 14th Amendment and blamed illegal immigrants for increases in communicable diseases following debate on a border security bill in the Texas House of Representatives Monday night.
State Rep. Leo Berman (R-Tyler), who made national news late last year for introducing a slew of anti-immigrant legislation — including one bill which would strip legally born children of immigrants of rights to state services including public education — made the comments during a point of personal privilege following the passage of House Bill 13, a border security bill which passed to engrossment 140-5.
"This is probably the only time you are going to hear anyone talk about illegal aliens on the floor of the House of Representatives because we've been shut out of this bill at every turn," Berman said.
During his remarks, Berman railed against Rep. David Swinford (R-Dumas), chair of the House State Affairs Committee, and said that Swinford "unilaterally decided no illegal alien legislation would be heard on the floor of the House this year."
Read it and weep. All that stands between democracy in Texas and the most vile voter disenfranchisement legislation imaginable is state Sen. Mario Gallegos' freshly transplanted liver:
A Senate committee has passed the controversial, partisan-charged voter identification bill, but Democrats are vowing to do whatever it takes to block it.
Their success will depend on whether Sen. Mario Gallegos Jr., D-Houston, who has missed most of the session recuperating from a liver transplant, can make it back to work for the vote.
The settlement means providers will receive bigger Medicaid payments and that more will be done to bring health care providers to underserved areas, call centers will be improved, and there will be more PR-type outreach.
All that is great. What's even better, though, is that this cost less than the "billions" that were estimated and that were left on the table during the first leg of the appropriations process.
The big question now is, what about the money the settlement isn't going to cost?
Yes. That's right. Dan Patrick, the reichtwing radio talk show host whose "baby buying" bill was first reported by TexasKaos' moiv and has since brought widespread condemnation of Patrick, the Texas GOP and (of course) Texas, walked out on the very first Muslim prayer held in the Senate and then had the audacity to call himself tolerant!
As some of you who follow financial-related diaries here might know, I've been writing a lot about interchange fees lately. The main reason for this is I'm doing some work with UnfairCreditCardFees.com, which is a coalition of small businesses standing up to the credit card industry's unfair tactics. This week in CQ Weekly (one of those insidery DC publications you can't get unless your employer pays for it) there's an article about my pet subject -- the interchange fee.
The article is called "Lobbying War Brewing Over Credit Card Fees." If you want to find out why we cannot let the few Republicans who are interested take this issue away, and what kind of underhanded tactics that VISA is using to prop up its punitive card fees, follow me below the fold.
Texas Senator Rodney Ellis (D-Houston) announced today that he has eleven signatures in the Senate to block debate on Voter ID legislation under consideration by the Texas House.
At the press conference announcing this, Senator Ellis was joined by representatives of Common Cause, The People for the American Way, Advocacy Incorporated, the League of Women's Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union.
This is literally some of the best news to come out of this session. We should be very, very grateful to Senator Ellis and the 11 others who have agreed to block consideration of Voter ID legislation in the Senate. They are true Texas Heroes.
Here's some of what Ellis had to say at a presser today:
