Does anyone else ever get the feeling that we're in an alternate dimension, where Barack Obama is like the Mirror Universe version of Ronald Reagan?
Okay, I'm reading the whole thing (don't worry, my idiocy radar is turned off for this - you know what you're going to get when you read rags like Vanity Fair). I will probably wait to go off on parts of it. But these things have to be addressed:
VF: What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life?I'd like to have that same question answered about Barack Obama. Remember, in terms of actual experience as an executive level elected official, Sarah Palin was the only candidate in the November race with anything to speak of.
I have to turn this one around on Joe Biden.
VF: Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency?
Sigh. Senator-elect Al Franken.
The court decision is here.
I like Jonah Goldberg's reaction.
More on this from a Houston news station.
The Surpreme Court's decision on Ricci vs DeStefano came out today, and it's being hailed in some circles as a SCOTUS slam in nominee Sonia Sotomayor's direction. It seems, though, with a 5-4 split that the Court is affirming the line of thinking about Sotomayor being a carbon copy of David Souter, whom she would replace.
Good explanation via Peter Kirsanow:
The Supreme Court in Ricci held that before an employer can engage in intentional racial discrimination (i.e., throwing out the results of the promotional exam in which the highest scorers were white) for the claimed purpose of avoiding or remedying an unintentional disparate impact, it must have a strong basis in evidence to believe it will be subject to disparate-impact liability (not just sued) if it fails to take the race-conscious discriminatory action.Best quote (from Justice Anthony Kennedy):
"Whatever the City’s ultimate aim—however well intentioned or benevolent it might have seemed—the City made its employment decision because of race. The City rejected the test results solely because the higher scoring candidates were white."And SCOTUSBlog's (essential daily reading; check out the liveblog of today's decisions) Tom Goldstein chimes in with what he thinks the decision says about the Court's opinion of Sotomayor. Sample:
The Court indicates that the state of the law before today’s ruling was “a difficult inquiry,” and that its “holding today clarifies how Title VII applies.” It rejects the plaintiffs’ outright attack on the Second Circuit’s decision as “overly simplistic and too restrictive.”Read more...
Everyone else is doing it.....
H/T to RightWingSparkle: Kevin Jackson on Anita MonCrief. For those too consumed by other things these days (and believe me, I understand!!), here's a bit of background. Basically, MonCrief is a former ACORN employee who decided to blow the whistle on ACORN's mismanagement and corruption. Her very enlightening blog post can be found here.
Ironman at The Next Right has some thoughts.
Clearly, right-wing "moralizing" is only a problem for the right. The left gets away with murder - literally.
Well now, there's something I didn't expect at all. Nothing like a little controversy from inside the movement to kick off another blistering weekend spent in the safety of my first world, air-conditioned, not-green-compliant home.
Okay now, this is an initiative to get excited about.
Believe it or not, there are other things to blog about. My husband and I maintain a personal blog here: http://texas-traveler.blogspot.com/
I'm in no mood to discuss this in great detail. Between the Horns losing tonight, Barack Obama's...well, Barack Obama, and general dissent and insanity in quarters where it benefits NO ONE, I'm just a touchy, angerball of a blogger tonight.
Check it out here.
A pretty major grassroots endorsement of Governor Perry, whose campaign was kicked off Saturday with a leadership conference in Austin.
Coming later today - a post on the 2010 Republican primary in Texas.
Well, they avoided the main constitutionality question concerning the Voting Rights Act, but the US Supreme Court ruled for Northwest Austin M.U.D. #1, saying it can bypass the pre-approval requirement when moving polling locations. A lower court had ruled otherwise.
The Voting Rights Act requires all or parts of 16 states with a history of discrimination in voting to get approval in advance of making changes in the way elections are conducted.
Writing for the Court, Chief Justice Roberts clarified that the Court is not ruling on the larger constitutionality of this provision (Section 5).
Justice Clarence Thomas, however, said, "The violence, intimidation and subterfuge that led Congress to pass Section 5 and this court to uphold it no longer remains." Given the opportunity, Thomas would have ruled Section 5 unconstitutional altogether.
A small victory for liberty, to be sure, but a victory nonetheless. The Court ruled for the M.U.D. with only one dissenting vote.
Read the full brief here.
Previous posts.
(H/T @frankreilly and @wbaustin via Twitter)
Lou Gehrig was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis 70 years ago today. That's the same disease my mother was diagnosed with last September, and the same disease that killed my grandmother in 1979.
Go to Covering All the Bases to see what you can do to help fight this awful disease.
Gehrig's bio, from Wikipedia:
Henry Louis "Lou" Gehrig (June 19, 1903 – June 2, 1941), born Ludwig Heinrich Gehrig, was an American baseball player in the 1920s and 1930s, chiefly remembered for his prowess as a hitter and the longevity of his consecutive games played record, and the pathos of his tearful farewell from baseball at age 36, when he was stricken with a fatal disease. Popularly called "The Iron Horse" for his durability, Gehrig set several Major League records. His record for most career grand slams (23) still stands as of 2009. In 1969, Gehrig was voted the greatest first baseman of all time by the Baseball Writers' Association. Gehrig was the leading vote-getter on the Major League Baseball All-Century Team, chosen by fans in 1999.
A native of New York City, he played for the New York Yankees until his career was cut short by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), now commonly referred to in the United States and Canada as Lou Gehrig's Disease. Over a 15-season span between 1925 and 1939, he played in 2,130 consecutive games. The streak ended when Gehrig became disabled with the fatal neuromuscular disease that claimed his life two years later. His streak, long believed to be one of baseball's few unbreakable records, stood for 56 years until finally broken by Cal Ripken, Jr., of the Baltimore Orioles on September 6, 1995.
Gehrig accumulated 1,995 runs batted in (RBI) in seventeen seasons with a lifetime batting average of .340, a lifetime on-base percentage of .447, and a lifetime slugging percentage of .632. Three of the top six RBI seasons in baseball history belong to Gehrig. He was selected to each of the first seven All-Star games (though he did not play in the 1939 game, as he retired one week before it was held), and he won the American League's Most Valuable Player award in 1927 and 1936. He was also a Triple Crown winner in 1934, leading the American League in batting average, home runs, and RBIs.
Well, isn't that just benevolent of Bill Powers?
Too bad a permanent tuition freeze isn't in his plans. Nor is an audit conducted by an independent firm (or, say, the Texas Comptroller's office). I wonder if they've given any thought to things they could cut from the budget.
But no, none of those things would keep UT among the "best universities in the nation." Goodness knows, to be "competitive," keeping costs high and the budget unwieldy is the only way to go.
Check out some of the comments on that Statesman post, incidentally. As usual, the public confuses the university's athletic budget and income as things handled by the UT administration, a concept not readily debunked by the UT administration (better to let them all blame Mack Brown instead of Bill Powers, right?).
It's a shame we can't get the Legislature to stop carrying water for the UT lobby long enough to address the issue at hand - lack of accountability. Tuition regulation, regular audits by the Comptroller, and subjecting university systems to sunset review. That's all I'm asking for.
Victor Davis Hanson is right when he says that we've casually thrown around the terms "Orwellian" and "Orwellianism" for awhile now. He's also right when he states that no, really, it's starting to get a little too 1984-ish around here these days.
Read more...Of course, I knew about this, but Governor Perry signed the bill today in Houston, so it got some national attention.
"Reports of injuries, shootings, and killings are flooding the internet. Twitter has been an invaluable source - those in Iran who still know how to access it are updating regularly with picture evidence. People are being brutally beaten. Tonight will be another night without rest for so many in Iran no older than I am. Tonight there is a Green Revolution."
For more information:
PICTURES:
here and here
NEW INFORMATION:
Here - near constant updates
Here - ONTD_political live post
ON TWITTER:
@StopAhmadi,
Spin spin spin.
The majority of political news changes meaning depending on who is reading, or writing, about it. This is why blogging is not an effective tool for changing hearts and minds, and is primarily used for punditry and journalism.
Texas' leftist blogs would have you believe, for instance, that the upcoming special legislative session, which will cost Texas taxpayers about $30k+ a day, is something to blame Texas Republicans for. Their rhetoric flatly ignores the four-day back-mic chubbing led by rogue Democrats. They seem to have forgotten the role Democratic Rep. David Leibowitz played in the last-minute killing of legislation that would have protected Texas from a costly special session by letting TXDOT and TDI continue under a safety net.
Their own party is split into factions right now, leading members angry because rogue stalling tactics killed important Democratic legislation. A caucus chairman who couldn't control his caucus. Members pitted against each other because of their party's monomaniacal efforts to kill one, just one, bill and prevent legitimate debate.
The Legislature has ONE constitutional mandate each session - to pass a balanced budget. That happened. Now the Legislature has to come back because Democrats ensured the death of TXDOT and TDI without more deliberation. Imagine the outcry, and long-term cost to taxpayers, if TXDOT did shut down? (TDI is another matter - we're better off without it)
Play on, leftists, play on. Your fiddling will be a nice accompaniment to your inevitable downfall....
I don't use such bombastic allegorical terms lightly, so when I tell you that Orientation Advisors behaved like the Gestapo to prevent incoming UT freshmen from reading flyers handed out by Young Conservatives of Texas last night, please understand that I'm not exaggerating.
YCT member Brianna Becker gives a full account of the incident on the YCT blog.
Incoming freshmen at the University of Texas are required, as a part of their orientation to the university, to undergo "diversity training." Needless to say, there's no "intellectual diversity" component in this training, and it is straight-up liberal indoctrination. Lots of jokes could be made about Texas A&M's fish camp and the way students come out die-hard-gig-'em-Aggies-for-life, but at least, to my knowledge, fish camp is about traditions. At UT, freshmen orientation is about solidifying a way of thinking and keeping out intellectual diversity at all costs.
Clearly, given what happened when members of Young Conservatives of Texas attempted to offer a differing viewpoint to UT freshmen (at one point, an orientation advisor brandished a table leg to keep the YCT members from the freshmen), there's more going on in "diversity training" than meets the eye.
One OA, in the course of the evening's events, asserted that just being at the University of Texas means a person has an open mind. Oh, really? That's why, at UT, Texas Independence Day celebrations were shut down by the administration? That's why, at UT and so many other universities, Ann Coulter and David Horowitz are booed out of the auditoriums? That's why, at UT and other prominent Texas universities, the stated long-term goal is a physically diverse student body, but there is no one championing an intellectually diverse campus?
The message is being sent through diversity training programs that "if you've never been oppressed, you're part of the problem." Of course, that message prevails in the sociology classroom as well, but someone must have figured out that it would work better to get them while they're still in a giddy glow about getting into their first choice school instead of waiting for the doldrums of classroom life. Diversity training makes assumptions about upbringing based on skin color. And have you seen the lengths some schools have gone to in diversity training on religion?? Let's not even start talking about the way "diversity" initiatives, including "training," perpetuate racial and ethnic stereotypes. Or how diversity training is used at some universities to "fix" conservative students.
(oh, and, did the UT administration miss this study about how diversity training doesn't work?)
Luckily, as the YCT members at UT discovered, the freshmen coming to UT aren't sheep, and several of them noticed right off that something was amiss. If an authority figure is trying to keep you from reading something (to the point of actually taking flyers from students in line!), there's probably something there worth your time. If nothing else, it'll help you keep an open mind. And after, it's UT. Having an "open mind" is practically an admission requirement.
Any gasping and heavy sighs of disappointment you hear are all feigned. No one can be surprised at Governor Perry's confirmation that yes, Virginia, there WILL be a special session. We just don't know yet when, or what will be on the call.
Knock 'em dead, Rep. King! From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
The new transportation taxes proposed this session failed to acknowledge current economic times, the recession, growing unemployment and the credit crisis. Texas families already pay an average 32.7 percent of their limited income to the government in local, state and federal taxes.
Texas families and businesses simply have no more money to give to government, and particularly not now. Senate Bill 855 and House Bill 9 sought to authorize new tax options that included additional fees for car registration and vehicle emissions. The final version called for local elections to impose a motor fuel tax up to 10 cents per gallon, up to a doubling of the driver license fee from $24 to $48, and up to a $60 vehicle registration fee.
These new taxes and fees would raise billions, but they would hit low-income families and small businesses the hardest. There are other less regressive options that make better economic sense.
The Travis County Republican Party is hosting a "Tea Party Tuesday" networking opportunity tonight at 360 Primo in the Arboretum. 5:30 to 7pm, casual come-and-go. Bring a friend, have the chance to meet other Republicans and liberty-minded folks in Travis County (YES, they exist - trust me!!). Tea, coffee, and stronger drinks available for purchase (and I highly recommend the gelato!).
Also, the Austin Tech Republican club will meet tomorrow at 11:30am at 360 Primo for their regular monthly meeting. Tomorrow's meeting will feature a Texas legislative update and the usual opportunity to meet other conservative techies in north Austin.
Take that, recession! The Statesman is reporting that the city of Austin led the nation in job growth from April 2008 to April 2009. It ain't a perfect picture, but hey, I'll take it.
Read more...
The Austin area had the nation's strongest job market among big cities last month, according to data released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Among the 38 metro areas with a work force of at least 750,000, only Austin gained jobs from April 2008 to April 2009, the bureau said.
It was the third month in a row Austin had earned that distinction.
Austin added 3,400 jobs in that period, a 0.4 percent gain that brought the regional
job count to 781,400.
In January, Austin, Houston and San Antonio were the only large metro areas that had more jobs than a year earlier.
But Houston and San Antonio have been losing jobs since then.
Austin's job picture isn't all rosy: The area has been losing manufacturing and construction jobs at an accelerating pace, but those losses are being offset by gains in
government, retailing and services fields.
Central Texas is holding up better in the recession than other technology hubs.
In April, the Silicon Valley area lost jobs at a 4.4 percent annual rate. Portland, Ore., was down 4.7 percent, Seattle was down 3.4 percent, and Raleigh, N.C., was down 3.3 percent.
Some smaller cities also racked up gains, including Midland, up 2.2 percent, and Odessa, up 2.9 percent.
The Morning Joe Crew talks unions.
Do you still need proof of the liberal bias in mainstream print media?
Look no further than Texas Monthly magazine's Top Ten Best and Worst Legislator list for the 81st Legislative Session.
The truth of the matter is that we're all biased, we all have our opinions, and the story of the 81st legislature is going to differ depending on who is talking. What qualifications do you set forth to determine what is "best" and "worst" about an elected official? For me, tax-hiking, government-growing, self-important acolytes or seekers of power at the expense of constituents would equal worst - clearly Texas Monthly has a different idea.
That's not to say that I can't agree with some of their choices - Rep. John Otto and Rep. John Zerwas do deserve the kudos given. Zerwas in particular, if for no other reason than his calm, collected response to increasingly hysterical Democratic efforts to chub the Local and Consent Calendar and prevent a vote on voter identification legislation.
But being an "insurgent Republican" (the moniker given to Plano Rep. Brian McCall) is not good enough to make someone one of the "best" legislators. In Sen. Carona's case, his hysterical grasping of straws to make the case for higher taxes is touted as "defiant and resolute" support for his own ill-conceived legislation. Again, not good enough. The salivating over Sen. Watson, who represents only the far-left in Austin instead of his entire constituency, and the blind eye turned toward Republicans whose power play took precedent, is enough to expose Texas Monthly's intentions: champion moderates and liberals, largely ignore conservatives except where you can't, and pretend that you don't have an agenda when nothing could be more obvious.
Looking at the worst list, most of it isn't surprising (except possibly Rep. Dunnam's addition), and the reasoning penetrates even my biased and cynical reading of the list. But gutting Sen. Tommy Williams simply over the two-thirds rule (an archaic tool used by the Senate to prevent actual debate) was a bit uncalled for.
I'm just another pundit, really, and I don't yet have a best/worst list for the session - admittedly, I would like to give my bias a chance to relax into a relatively objective view of what was a roller-coaster of a legislative session. But Texas Monthly has to worry about timeliness, and selling issues, and the short political memory of the vast majority of citizens would quickly lose interest if the TM staff didn't get on the ball early.
Ratings of legislators will come out shortly from several organizations, and I for one look forward to seeing how they compare. That's a better judge, in many ways, when you have a political agenda to begin with. Rarely if ever does a legislator cross the partisan line to represent all factions fairly and with grace, which appears to be the criteria for Texas Monthly's list - there are possibly a handful in the Texas House today, and a couple of them receive no attention for their efforts. As it should be.
Elections for the board of the Pedernales Electric Co-Operative are taking place right now, and end on June 12. The Travis County Republican Party has endorsed candidates in this race:
The Travis County Republican Party endorsed the candidacies of Sandy
Jenkins and Linda Kay Rogers for the District 1 and District 6 positions,
respectively, on the Pedernales Electric Cooperative Board. The elections are
now underway and end June 12.
"In the view of the committee that reviewed these candidates, the next
PEC Board will need to move past issues that have been settled with regard to
transparency and openness," said Rosemary Edwards, chairwoman of the Travis
County Republican Party. "We feel confident that Jenkins and Rogers will do much
more than other candidates to improve the coop's bond ratings which will lower
interest rates for bond payments and therefore lower the charges that ultimately
fall upon ratepayers.
"Opponents in the race appear to want to make PEC an environmentalist
proving ground with no consideration of cost to the residents who rely on PEC
power. We think Jenkins and Rogers offer a more reasonable and measured choice
than their radical environmentalist opponents who have no consideration for the
ratepayers," Edwards said.
The Acton Business School's Jeff Sandefer has some rather surprising advice for parents and students. Via the John Pope Center's Clarion Call:
Your son or daughter wants advice about which college major to pursue. You
respond: What about a business degree? No, it is not as enriching as liberal
arts or as rigorous as physics, but at least it would prepare your child for a
rewarding career, right?
Logical, understandable—and dead wrong. If your child is interested in
business, the worst thing you can do is encourage him or her to get a business
degree—either undergraduate or MBA.
What standing do I have to say this? I am a successful entrepreneur who,
for over twelve years taught at the graduate level at a major Texas public
university. In other words, I’ve been inside the “belly of the beast” of higher
education, observing business school classes, analyzing curriculum, and
listening to professors in the faculty lounge in unguarded moments. In other
words, I’ve seen parts of academia that parents, students, and donors never
visit.
Pics in this post were taken by myself and members of my household throughout the legislative session. I think they capture the theme quite well. Please excuse the blurriness in some - cell phone cameras only do so much.
Snakes! Provided by the Sweetwater Chamber of Commerce in honor of the annual Rattlesnake Round-Up.
Two lobbyists having a lightsaber duel.
Citizens lined up to testify on SB 362, the voter identification legislation, before the Committee of the Whole Senate in March.
Passing HCR 16, changing the official state dinosaur. Yeah.
A citizen holding up the Republic of Texas flag at Rep. Creighton's press conference on HCR 50, the sovereignty/10th Amendment legislation, in early April.
Governor Perry addressing the RightOnline blogger conference on May 23.
The first-ever rally for tax increases (the TLOTA) at the State Capitol, held on May 29. In this photo are Senator Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth), Senator Kirk Watson (D-Austin), Senator John Carona (R-Dallas), Rep. Vicki Truitt (R-Fort Worth) and Rep. Mike Villareal (D-San Antonio). The "Texas Not Taxes" sign is being held up behind Sen. Carona by Americans for Prosperity's Peggy Venable - about 30 grassroots activists showed up to be "anti-protesters" against the taxes proposed by Carona and Truitt.
Dead legislation! This is a stack of dead bills the morning of sine die on June 1. The black spot you see is an eyepatch, put there in honor of Rep. Rene Oliviera (D-Brownsville).
Mourning some dead legislation on sine die.
The Texas State Capitol on sine die, June 1, 2009. Beautiful day in Austin!!
After 2005's Summer of the Special Session(s), I think it's perfectly natural for Texas political junkies to take about a five minute breather when the gavel falls on sine die before they begin wondering if the governor is going to call everyone back to address some major issue.
The chaos and headaches that came out of the 80th legislative session in 2007 were enough to hold us over for two years, and the last couple of weeks certainly seem like plenty to hold us now until 2011. Unfortunately, the Democrat shenanigans in the House and the mudslinging from a certain Dallas senator wreaked enough havoc to leave some serious unfinished business behind.
Now, Governor Perry said several times in the last few weeks that the one thing he would be ready to call a special session over would be windstorm insurance. I was at an event over Memorial Day weekend at the Capitol where he said that very thing to a room full of bloggers and live-Tweeting activists. The legislature passed a windstorm insurance bill, and it seems like that crisis is averted.
But the legislature adjourned sine die without addressing the sunset problem. Five state agencies hang in the balance because legislation enabling them to continue was left to die on the vine. TXDOT, for instance, died at midnight Sunday night, when the bill was postponed in a wrangle over the conference committee report - it was likely to die regardless, with Carona's filibuster threat, and Pickett saved us all from that nightmare. There was still a chance to save TXDOT, the Texas Department of Insurance, and the others with HB 1569, the "safety net" bill that would allow the agencies to continue operating and undergo the sunset process again in 2011. But that bill was, for lack of a better word, chubbed into oblivion on Sunday night as well, by Rep. David Leibowitz (D-San Antonio).
A last-minute Hail Mary by Rep. Jim Pitts (R-Waxahachie), HCR 291, passed the House but didn't get traction in the Senate. HCR 291 was a resolution that would extend through 2011 the agencies that would receive federal stimulus funds - meaning TXDOT and TDI. Despite the overwhelming support in the House, there were serious questions raised about the constitutionality and legality of HCR 291 - the 29 members who voted against it were very concerned about this, and a point of order was raised and overruled. After passing the resolution, the House did some more ceremonial singing and dancing before adjourning sine die just after 6pm.
Meanwhile, the Senate was immediately concerned about HCR 291. They recessed for the better part of two hours, each of the caucuses met twice to consider what to do, and ultimately the entire Senate rejected HCR 291 before adjourning around 9pm. The post-sine die response to all of this from newly-elected President Pro Tem of the Senate Sen. Steve Ogden (R-Bryan) was that the blame for the Legislature's failure to save TXDOT, TDI, and the others lay with the House. Speaker Straus brushed off that criticism.
While most politicos and political junkies are now either literally or figuratively sleeping off the 140 day wrangle, the questions have already been asked.
1 - Are the Texas Dept. of Transportation, and the Texas Dept. of Insurance, and the other agencies, effectively dead? - More or less. There are things that can be done, including an executive order from the Governor, to keep these agencies alive. The way sunset works: an agency undergoes sunset review during the interim prior to the session before the official sunset date set for that agency. The Sunset Review Board gives recommendations, and a bill is crafted and filed to fine-tune the agency. The legislature debates and votes on that legislation. The agency is then either shut down or continued. If the bill does not pass, for whatever reason, the agency is then subjected to a systematic shut-down. The date of sunset for TXDOT, TDI, and two others is Sept. 1, 2010. This means that unless something is done, beginning Sept. 1 of 2009 (this year), the agencies' services and duties will be assigned to other agencies, and they will operate on "skeleton crews" through the final sunset date. The Texas Racing Commission has an extra year; their sunset date is Sept. 1, 2011.
2 - Will there be a special session? According to Governor Perry in this morning's press conference, maybe and maybe not. As stated above, the windstorm insurance legislation that primarily concerned the governor passed and is being sent to his desk. Scuttlebutt at the Capitol yesterday held that if there is a special, Gov. Perry will wait until after the veto period (the 20 days after sine die) and the July 4 holiday to call it. Speaker Straus has stated that he doesn't think there's a need for a special. Lt. Gov. Dewhurst is mum so far. But the final authority lies with the governor, and so far, he's playing it down. I'll have another post on a special session and what it could mean for Gov. Perry later today.
3 - Whose fault was this, really? Lots of fingers to point, and I'll probably miss a few, but the first one has to aim at Sen. Carona. The TXDOT sunset bill, HB 300, passed the Senate with his local option tax increase attached, and the House was adamantly opposed to the tax from the get-go (they let the House version die without a floor debate prior to the chubbing, grassroots efforts and the chubbing killed the Senate version while it was in the House, and the House voted to instruct the conference committee on HB 300 to reject the tax provision). TXDOT died because of DFW rail and taxpayer-funded lobbying efforts to raise taxes unnecessarily. The Texas Dept. of Insurance bill died thanks to chubbing - it's only hope was the safety net bill. And finally, Rep. David Leibowitz, and doubtless some of his Dem colleagues in the House, get a portion of the blame as well. Killing the safety net bill ensured the final death of those agencies and if we get a special session, that's the ultimate reason why.
Honestly, the chubbing was the big killer and big problem of the final days of the 81st session. Time-wasting in the House in an effort to prevent legitimate debate on voter identification legislation (read: Democrats trying to avoid taking a vote on a popular issue that would have cost them seats) also prevented a good deal of important legislation from passing, both good and bad. If the legislature is called back, if Governor Perry overlooks the possible political backlash from a special session to address these major issues, it won't be difficult to figure out who is to blame, but it also won't matter. The work has to get done, whatever that looks like, and the fact remains that neither chamber came out of this smelling like spring bluebonnets.
Blue Dot Blues will return in full swing....well, probably tomorrow. After all, looks like we will have a special session to save TXDOT and TDI.
The conference cmte report on HB 300, the TXDOT bill, was eligible in the House at 11:40pm. At 11:40pm(-ish), there was a motion to postpone it. The safety net bill was brought up instead, valuable time was lost, and HB 300 died when the gavel fell in adjournment.
Well, except effectively kill the TXDOT sunset bill before Carona had the chance to give his whiny filibuster.
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