Abbott2 Gov Greg Bak
bak no lnx 4 24
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pow --> mofo heat death, razor wire river
no merri
started as AG, incub trump judges
2024 ~ desantis?
prolly neglect on regular culture war BS
see heartbeat abortion bounty hunter
got covid at superspreader fundraiser
see fucking pow paxton
see voter suppression/student suppression
bak 4 24
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an 1 25
Of the 11 Texas Republicans who lost their seats this year in Gov. Greg Abbott’s quest to create a school voucher program, none went down swinging quite like state House Rep. Steve Allison.
Last session Allison, a former Alamo Heights ISD board president, was one of 21 Republicans in the Texas House who joined Democrats in stripping school vouchers out of a broader education funding bill.
The move turned him from a longtime ally of the governor into an overnight political target, drawing a deluge of attack ads from his own party’s leaders in his primary race.
In the face of that fight, Allison’s long record as a conservative lawmaker has quickly been overshadowed by his unusual cross-party efforts to keep public education in the spotlight.
The roughly $4.5 billion that Texas lawmakers approved for public schools last session never made it into districts’ hands after the governor demanded school vouchers be included in the legislation. Even after losing his primary, Allison tried unsuccessfully to rally lawmakers back to pass a school funding bill over the summer.
“When [schools] have to lay off staff, lay off teachers, discontinue programs, that is moving towards a breaking point,” Allison said in a Dec. 18 interview. “The money was there this last session. And for it to be held up over this voucher scheme that could have just been separate, it’s really heartbreaking.”
In a stunning rebuke to his party’s leaders, this fall Allison joined forces with the Democrat running for his seat who shared his views on school finance.
He’s also been speaking out about a messy 88th legislative session that left public schools scraping for money while Abbott cashed campaign checks from a billionaire voucher proponent and Attorney General Ken Paxton sought taxpayer dollars to cover his own legal defense.
“I’ve been asked several times if I regret my vote on Paxton’s impeachment, or regret my position on school vouchers, and I don’t regret either one one bit. I’d do the same thing again,” Allison said. “Integrity is so important and I think we’re missing that … I’m not haunted.”
When state lawmakers return to work on Jan. 14, House District 121 will be represented by a new face. Republican Marc LaHood, who defeated Allison in the primary, and is a member of the conservative wing who found success in a district that’s elected moderates.
While wrapping up his final weeks in office, Allison spoke about a changing Republican Party, rifts with party leaders and lessons learned from six years in the Texas House.
San Antonio Report:When you were first running in 2018, the incumbent, then-Speaker Joe Straus, had just been through his own disagreements with the party’s conservative wing, and a crowded field of Republicans signed up to run for his seat. What was on your mind when you joined that race?
Steve Allison: Education. Education was terribly important. And then I thought it was important — and the encouragement I was receiving was — that Joe Straus was well-respected in our district and had done a good job. I think there was a strong interest in having someone older and more experienced, that had been around, to try to fill that role. My background in business and education and transportation, and my experience at the capitol, seemed to fit. I wasn’t planning on it at all, it just kind of snowballed.
SAR:So even though the party as a whole was shifting right, this district was still in the market for someone more moderate. What do you think changed in this election?
Allison: I think I’ve got a pretty conservative voting record… so to be labeled a RINO [Republican in Name Only], or Democrat sympathizer, more recently. Even sometimes to be called a moderate, I guess I do kind of tend more there.
But I think we’ve seen it around the country — we saw it in this primary in particular — a lot of outside influence. A tremendous amount of money and mailers and campaign efforts came from outside [the district], some pro-choice, some pro-voucher, and some just on extreme conservative issues. Then the governor picked up on that, and that changed everything.
There was a feeling, really up until this election, that House District 121 was changing and becoming a more middle, moderate — however you want to describe it — that there was a Democrat increase. I won the first two times by seven or eight percentage points, and the last time by 10. But then you see this time LaHood won it by just under five. So what does that say? … That kind of supports the fact, I think, that this district is still a little more middle of the road.
SAR: You’ve been working on public education issues in Texas for a long time, well before running for a seat in the legislature. How have those policy discussions changed in recent years?
Allison: When I first got involved… it was primarily over school finance. That’s when recapture and Robin Hood started [which is the practice of redistributing property tax dollars from wealthy districts]. Alamo Heights was one of the original Robin Hood districts and it was devastating. What’s frustrating is, it’s come full circle. This was back in the ’90s, and it’s where we are again: There’s a funding issue.
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no lnx
Republicans have a death wish for us all
Greg Abbott’s 'gullibility' exposed after he shares 'fake' story about made-up Texas city
Sabrina Haake, Raw StoryJune 09, 2024
In the 1850s, British naturalist Charles Darwin proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection. In his book, On the Origin of Species, Darwin presented years of data, notations he’d made while observing plants and animals in their natural habitats.
Over decades of painstaking observation, Darwin discovered that organisms with traits that favor survival tend to leave more offspring, causing survivalist traits to increase in frequency over time among successful species. In a word, Darwin concluded, successful survival of all living organisms requires them to adapt.
Species that fail to adapt? They go extinct, some more rapidly than others.
We are approaching unsurvivable temperatures
Last year was the hottest of the past 170 years, which is when meteorologists first began tracking global temperatures. According to NASA, the 10 warmest years since Darwin’s 1850s have all occurred during the last decade, with the same predicted for 2024.
Dead monkeys are falling out of trees in Mexico. Other primates are dying, along with toucans, parrots, insects, bats and one million other species. Animals are dying from heat and dehydration at such alarming rates that even Fox News has reported on it — though they have not yet found a way to blame President Joe Biden or the border.
ALSO READ: Justice delayed is not always justice denied
Last week, avoiding the words “climate change,” Fox News quoted thedirector of an eco-conservation park in Mexico saying they’d “never seen a situation like what’s happening right now.” The conservation park resuscitates and rehydrates dying animals for re-release into the wild, but if heat like this continues, the director predicted, “there is not going to be much we can do for the animals.”
As animals go, so go we
Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology report that a “wet-bulb” temperature of 95° F — a measure that considers both heat and humidity — is the absolute limit of human survival. The human body temperature is around 98° F, allowing for a constant balance between heat loss and heat gain. But there’s a temperature/humidity point at which the human body can’t lose heat fast enough. At that point, everything in the body, from enzymes to organs, including kidneys, lungs, heart and brain, begins to shut down.
According to MIT, a sunny area with 50 percent humidity and no wind will hit an unlivable wet-bulb temperature of 95°F when the thermometer reaches only 109 °F.
Last year, temperatures in many U.S. cities, especially in Texas, Florida and Arizona, repeatedly exceeded 109 °F, to say nothing of newly uninhabitable regions in Mexico, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Many U.S. cities will again surpass 109 °F this year, causing heat-related deaths and illness. Between 2004 and 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, heat-related deaths in the U.S. increased by a whopping 439 percent.
Oil-funded Republicans refuse to adapt
No serious debate remains about what is causing the climate to change. Scientists have known, for decades, that this point was coming. We have the technology to reduce carbon emissions and re-develop an energy grid with sufficient capacity; engineers and scientists calculated years ago that there’s more than enough wind, solar and hydro power to meet the needs of all people — and manufacturers — on earth.
ALSO READ: Michael Cohen, Red Finch and the fateful moment Trump lost the jury
The intelligent adaptation to dead animals falling from the sky would be a transition to renewable energy as quickly as practicable, blending a graduated mix of alternative fuels with decreasing reliance on petrofuels.
But instead of modeling Darwin’s survival of the fittest and adapting new energy strategies, Republican governors of southern states — states experiencing climate change at accelerated rates — are modeling what happens when species refuse to adapt.
Emboldened by former President Donald Trump, these strutting dodo birds are attacking climate science while at the same time seeking extraordinary federal funding for climate mitigation. (President Biden: awarding climate mitigation funds to governors who lie about climate science is self-defeating.)
Darwinism on display
In Florida this spring, cities such as Miami were hit with extreme heat even before the arrival of summer.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, addicted to culture wars and language bans, just signed a law that removes the words “climate change” from state publications, forbids the construction of offshore windmills and halts the state’s clean energy goals.
To DeSantis, people concerned about climate change are “radical green zealots.” Meanwhile, his state’s beloved manatees are disappearing, storm-battered Floridians can’t afford property insurance and buildings are collapsing in coastal cities.
In Texas, another of the most threatened U.S. states when it comes to sea level rise, hurricanes and extreme heat, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott refers to Biden’s climate efforts as “an attack” on Texas jobs, and he vowed to “fight” the “climate agenda.”
Even though Texas has ranked first in the number of billion-dollar disasters per year since 2001, Abbott has vowed to “exclude renewables from any revived economic incentive program,” and he supported bills to lower support for wind and solar projects while forcing renewable energy to subsidize fossil fuel expansion.
Livestock farming, a major methane contributor, creates deplorable lives for the animals while simultaneously warming the planet. There are humane solutions that could alleviate both problems. What are Republican governors doing? They are banning or trying to ban cruelty-free meat produced in a lab — dictating to everyone else what they can and cannot eat, and effectively mandating animal cruelty and methane emissions at the same time.
The list of GOP maladaptions goes on. Republican leaders are attacking science overall, while on a parallel crusade to delegitimize truth, the rule of law and democratic institutions. They’re turning American ignorance into a malignant tumor hellbent on killing its host.
DeSantis and Abbott deserve Darwin Awards
DeSantis and Abbott, along with Republican attorneys general in 19 states who just asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block climate action, are entertaining know-nothing voters, attacking climate science frontstage and collecting donations from Koch Industries’ backstage. It’s all performative ignorance, like watching Cro-Magnon men show up at a ballet, dragging women by the hair.
The unfortunate twist is that, as long as we share the same planet, the Cro-Magnon is dragging all of us by our hair.
Darwin Awards commemorate idiots who protect our gene pool by dying in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species’ chances of long-term survival.
We need a parallel award when the most ignorant members of a species doom the rest of it.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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8 23 sep families/ dads
kid killer razor wire saw blade buoy
stunt
https://www.alternet.org/abbott-blasted-busing-migrants-chicago/
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tex trib an 4 24
Secretary of State of Texas - Wikipedia
since jan 2023 appt by abbott Jane Nelson - Wikipedia
Jane Gray Nelson[1] (born October 5, 1951)[2] is an American businesswoman and former educator[3] who serves as the Secretary of State of Texas since 2023. She was a Texas state senator who represented Texas Senate District 12. She was elected to the Senate in 1992 after serving two two-year terms (1988–1992) on the Texas State Board of Education. In 2023, Governor Greg Abbott appointed Nelson to succeed John B. Scott as Secretary of State.[4] She was sworn in to that office on Saturday, January 7.
when David Dzul approached his principal about setting up a voter registration drive on campus in 2019, he quickly realized why voting participation rates are so abysmal among his peers.
Texas high schools have long been required to distribute voter registration forms to older teens twice a year. But Dzul said that wasn’t happening at Houston’s DeBakey High School, and he initially couldn’t nail down who the school’s designated voter registrar was — or if the school was even complying with the decades-old state law at all.
*Get the data and visuals that accompany this story →
Dzul was trying to galvanize civic engagement after hearing about low participation rates among young voters at a meeting of Mi Familia Vota, a group that encourages Latinos to cast ballots. He eventually organized a group of peers to track classmates when they turned 18 years old, help them register and follow up with a link to confirm they could cast a ballot in the next election.
“I don’t think the administration supported the initiative so much as they tolerated it,” Dzul said. “They weren’t actively setting up tables and telling students to register, but they allowed us to occupy space and get volunteer deputy voter registrars into the schools.”
Texas is home to about 409,000 18-year-old U.S. citizens, according to 2022 U.S. Census Bureau data. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 39.6% of Texans ages 18 to 24 were registered to vote in November 2022. And that was the biggest decline in voter registration for any age group compared to the previous midterm election in 2018.
And even once younger adults are registered, they cast ballots at lower rates than other age groups. During the 2022 midterms, only 49% of registered Texas voters between 18 and 24 participated. That compares to 86% of voters 65 and older.
Research has found that voting is habit-forming, and high schools are a critical training ground to initiating that pattern. The 2023 Harvard Youth Poll found that two-thirds of 18-to-29-year-olds who definitely plan to vote said their high school education made voting feel important. But only 47% of less committed voters in that age group feel that way about their high school education.
“Starting that habit early is a predictor of lifelong voting,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “We want the students to start this process early and then bring that forward through their civic lives.”
The 1983 law requiring high schools to distribute voter registration forms to students who are 17 years and 10 months old or older was intended to boost turnout among young voters. But the secretary of state’s office, which was charged with creating the instructions to implement the law, doesn’t track compliance. And schools that fail to distribute registration forms to eligible students aren’t penalized.
The University of Houston’s Election Lab estimated in 2021 that only a quarter of schools were complying with the law, though that number is not conclusive. Some high school seniors told the Tribune they had never been given a voter registration form at school, and nonprofit leaders said they have spoken to school administrators who are unaware of the law.
https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/Ju_c3l31PGJEbF6O9deLLFuU4io=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/083e5d01308f5e953fdc0f1750f0059f/0405%20DeBakey%20HS%20Voting%20JB%20TT%2003.jpg)}:
Tania Cora, left, education coordinator at the Harris County Elections Department, provides guidance on how to use a voting machine at DeBakey Civics Club’s voter education conference in Houston. Only 49% of registered Texas voters ages 18 to 24 year old participated in the 2022 midterm election. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune
And many critics of Texas voting laws — including new limits passed in 2021 — say getting registered outside of school isn’t very friendly to teenagers. While other states have online voter registration, Texans must complete a paper application, creating a possible barrier to young people who do everything — from shopping to banking — digitally.
State lawmakers in 2021 also restricted how educators can teach current events and history. The law, designed to keep “critical race theory” out of Texas public schools, also prohibits teachers from discussing “a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” Without defining “controversial,” the law created widespread confusionabout what topics teachers could and could not legally cover.
“It’s not enough to just tell people, ‘voting is important,’” said Maggie Stern, who promotes youth civic engagement through the nonprofit organization Children’s Defense Fund Texas.
“Young people are motivated by the issues affecting their community, so as they understand the ways elected officials have power over those issues, they are more motivated to vote — that piece of civics education is really lacking in Texas.”
*:{[How a fraction of voters decide who runs Texas]
Efforts to change Texas’ legal landscape
Kevin Brown can still vividly remember learning how to vote in his government class as a high school student in San Marcos in the mid 80s. A nonprofit brought a voting booth into his classroom and taught students how to punch in their selections. Students ran a mock election, and the tally was shared the following day in the morning announcements.
Brown, who now serves as the executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators, said administrators took civics education seriously when he later became a public school teacher. They wanted to develop citizens who would be engaged with the world and the issues around them.
Now, he has trouble imagining a school running a mock presidential election without raising concerns that doing so might create controversy. Senate Bill 3, the same 2021 law that limits lessons about racism in American history, also prohibits teachers from giving students class credit for any public policy advocacy.
“That produced a really big chilling effect on anything related to civics education,” Stern said. “It has really deterred a lot of schools who used to be doing this work from having any sort of conversation with students around voting and civic participation.”
/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/9e3b4d04e4c8158c4986b03909ec2a0a/0405%20DeBakey%20HS%20Voting%20JB%20TT%2010.jpg)
TaKasha Francis, who won the Democratic nomination for judge of a state district court, speaks to DeBakey Civics Club students on the importance of voting. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune
SB 3 requires the Texas Education Agency to create a civics training program that will outline the knowledge and skills students are expected to have. The program is supposed to be implemented no later than the 2025-2026 school year. A TEA spokesperson said the agency is in the “planning phase” for developing the program.
:{Although public school students in Texas are required to take a government class to graduate, many students say they do not learn about civic engagement or voter registration in the course. That’s despite the fact that the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills states that students who complete the class should be able to “describe the voter registration process and the criteria for voting in elections.”}:
“It’s a daunting task to learn what is a primary, what is a general election and who are all the candidates running,” said Ashton Sanchez, a senior at Sam Houston Math, Science and Technology Center High School in Houston. “We need to find a way to integrate that into the classroom.”
Voting rights advocates argue that the state should do more to ensure students are registered to vote, for example, by documenting compliance with the high school voter registration law.
Katya Ehresman, voting rights program manager at Common Cause Texas, noted that some states reward schools that register students. Tennessee acknowledges schools that reach a certain voter registration threshold, and Pennsylvania has a governor’s civic engagement award to celebrate schools that register 85% of eligible students to vote, for example.
:{Common Cause also recommends that the secretary of state’s office mail each school voter registration applications, instead of requiring schools to request them twice a year. Rep. Mary González, D-Clint, introduced a bill in 2021 that would require the secretary of state to mail the applications directly to all high schools, but the bill never got a hearing before the House Elections Committee.}:
Alicia Pierce, spokesperson for the secretary of state, said mailing applications is expensive and that it might not address noncompliance.
“I’m not sure you would get much better results,” Pierce said. “If it just shows up at their door and they weren’t already planning to use them, then you just have these registration forms sitting there.”
Student action
Some students have taken matters into their own hands. Rice University has partnered with the League of Women Voters to create an internship program where students, most of whom are in the Houston Independent School District, organize voter registration drives at their high schools. The goal, according to Rice University professor Melissa Marschall, who leads the program, is to get students to take ownership of the activity and encourage their friends to register.
“I’ve never heard of a school where the principal takes charge of the event, because technically, most of them are not trained as deputy voter registrars,” Marschall said. “We prioritize events with peer to peer civic education.”
About 130 students applied to the internship and 10 are participating, Marschall said. She said she hopes the program makes it easier for organizations like the League of Women Voters to enter schools. The organization has historically relied on relationships with administrators, who are not always amenable to welcoming outside organizations. Administrator turnover, which has increased this year due to the state’s takeover of HISD, creates additional hurdles.
/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/660305a9d339f3b5a26576fc65e72db5/0405%20DeBakey%20HS%20Voting%20JB%20TT%2017.jpg)
DeBakey Civics Club Vice President Mihir Relan fills out a voter registration form. Some Texas high school students have organized voter registration drives to increase the participation of younger voters. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune
At Round Rock High School, a student chapter of Junior State of America has taken the lead on organizing a voter registration drive. Junior Indira Moparthi recalled an uphill battle to create a drive during her freshman year. She said administrators rejected the idea because they thought the event would be partisan.
“Seniors and parents got involved, and a petition went around saying we weren’t supporting a particular political party,” Moparthi said. “Finally the administration signed off.”
For some students, school is the only place where they can gain critical information about voting. Among immigrant families who have historically been marginalized for voting, civics participation is rarely talked about in the household.
For Dzul, whose parents did not grow up voting in the U.S., it was frustrating to see 18-year-olds who could vote fail to take advantage of their right. That motivated him to create a civics club, which has continued to hold registration drives since he graduated.
“We need to get more power to marginalized communities, and voter registration is the first step to getting people that power,” Dzul said
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The U.S./Mexico border crisis has been a source of major tension between the Biden Administration and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. President Joe Biden, on Friday, January 26, declared that he will "shut down" the United States' southern border if necessary.
In an article published by The Nation on January 30, progressive legal expert Elie Mystal is vehemently critical of Abbott's handling of the border crisis in Texas — even comparing his actions to a "Civil War reenactment."
"The flash point for this crisis is, of course, the border,' Mystal explains. "I have written before about Eagle Pass, Tex., as a place along the Rio Grande where it is popular for immigrants to make the crossing. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has erected a series of sadistic obstructions across this part of the river — including buoys ringed with razor wire and underwater traps — meant to maim and even drown people trying to swim across the river. Should people, and their children, survive Abbott's gauntlet, Texas officials on the other side have been accused of pushing them back into the river, or denying the survivors medical aid or even water."
Mystal warns that tensions between Abbott and the Biden Administration go way beyond a "constitutional crisis."
"People will say Texas is merely 'causing a constitutional crisis' as opposed to spoiling for civil war," Mystal argues. "But that is the wrong frame. There is no 'constitutional' crisis here, because there is nothing up for reasonable interpretation."
The legal expert continues, "Texas is violating the Constitution, as well as a court order, and it's doing so in order to continue to hurt desperate people.… This is not a legal crisis: This is a rebellion against federal authority and the basic human decency that it's trying to provide…. If Gov. Abbott tries to further obstruct the operations of the federal government and continues to violate the Supreme Court's order, he should be arrested for treason."
READ MORE:Trump calls on 'all willing states' to blatantly defy SCOTUS border ruling in Texas
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WALSH KIRK BLAZE?
In response to a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing Border Patrol agents to cut razor wire Texas laid along the border with Mexico, right-wing pundits are claiming the Biden administration has sparked a second American Civil War. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, two members of the court’s conservative block, sided with the three liberal justices in ruling for the federal government.
The issue stems from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to stretch razor wire over dozens of miles along the state’s southern border, a cruel policy that has failed in its stated objective of deterring unauthorized border crossings. The Biden administration opposes the measures, and has ordered the Border Patrol to remove the barriers. The stand-off between Border Patrol and the Texas National Guard escalated earlier this month, with federal officials blaming Abbott for the deaths of a mother and her two children who drowned in the Rio Grande. (Texas authorities dispute this version of events.)
For his part, Gov. Abbott pledged that Texas will “continue to deploy this razor wire to repel illegal immigration.” Although it may appear that Abbott is in direct defiance of the Supreme Court, the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explained that the ruling overturned an “order saying Border Patrol COULDN’T remove Texas razor wire to process migrants. It didn’t affirmatively rule that the Border Patrol COULD remove Texas razor wire.” Or, as the New Republic's Matt Ford put it, the Supreme Court “lifted an injunction” on the Department of Homeland Security, so there's “nothing in this case for Texas to obey or defy at the moment.”
This simmering confrontation is the new backdrop for an old story. During election years, conservative media outlets generally ramp up their attacks on immigrants. Separately, over the last year, conservatives have become increasingly comfortable calling for, threatening, or warning about a coming civil war in the country. Responses to the recent court ruling have married these two trends.
As the news broke on January 22, conservative YouTube streamer Tim Pool said it “looks like a Fort Sumter-esque type scenario,” referencing the first battle of the Civil War, adding that “it does feel like it could be escalating to this federal versus state conflict.”
That evening, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson posted on X (formerly Twitter), asking: “Where are the men of Texas? Why aren’t they protecting their state and the nation?”
The same night, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) wrote that “the feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground.”
Then on January 23, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon appeared to favorably reference that post, saying “as Clay Higgins said” there is “kind of a civil war between the federal government and the state of Texas.”
Hours later, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk fantasized about Gov. Abbott openly defying the court’s ruling at the barrel of a gun.
Video CitationFrom the January 23, 2024, edition of Salem Media Group's The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble
“So someone says right here, ‘Charlie, what would happen if Texas ignores the ruling? Will the government go to war with Texas?’” he asked.
“The federal government would come in, and some people would say, ‘Well, that's the seeds of a civil war.’ Is that what you want? Where does this end?” Kirk added moments later. “By the way, I'm all on board.”
“If we had an actual governor of Texas that was willing — 100% defy this,” Kirk continued, before advising Abbott on the logistics.
“If you're going to defy, here's how it works: press conference flanked by your most loyal Texas Rangers. ‘I am ignoring the Supreme Court's decision,’” Kirk said, adopting Abbott’s point of view. “‘I will enforce the border of Texas. If you're going to arrest me, you have to go through the Texas Rangers.’”
“If we had more governors on the border, it would be even more powerful,” he added, implicitly invoking the Confederacy. “Get every red state on board. Fly in every Republican governor.”
On Wednesday afternoon Abbott issued a statement invoking “Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” which he claimed is “the supreme law of the land.” Throughout the day, at least nine governors backed Abbott on X, even if they fell short of Kirk’s demand that they travel to the border. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp all posted their support for Texas, as did Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
In the same episode, Kirk told his audience that they had “better buy weapons,” and “have a lot of guns at your disposal.”
That afternoon, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh echoed Kirk. “Red state governors will need to ignore the Supreme Court and do what needs to be done to protect their citizens and the border,” Walsh said. He later added, “The last civil war was unimaginable until it wasn't.”
In the early evening, Bannon returned to the topic with guest Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). “That Supreme Court decision that was made has now put the federal government at war with the state of Texas,” Greene said.
“If they fund a war in Ukraine when Zelensky is raising the white flag, asking for peace talks in Switzerland, and they weaken our border policy while the federal government is at war with Texas, that is truly, possibly the start of a civil war in this country,” she added.
Blaze TV’s Steve Deace also invoked the memory of the Civil War. “Basically, the Supreme Court has told Texas your choices are: be invaded or secede,” Deace said.
Video
CitationFrom the January 23, 2024, edition of BlazeTV's The Steve Deace Show
On January 25, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade adopted the same framing on Fox & Friends.
Video
CitationFrom the January 25, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
“It feels like almost like a soft civil war,” Kilmeade said. “You’ve got all the Republicans saying, ‘Can we secure our borders?’ the Democrats saying, ‘I want this to go away’ and blaming Republicans, the President against the governor of Texas — the most independent state in the union. I mean, this is getting a little crazy.”
Fox News sounded little different than the fringe. “This is a constitutional crisis,” said conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, in a video titled: “Supreme Court Decision Provokes Civil War in Texas.”
The story was the same in the right-wing blogosphere, too, with conservative news site PJ Media asking, “Is Joe Biden Mounting a Civil War at the Border?”
Conservative influencer Jordan Peterson posted: “So is it the case that@TheDemocrats are truly ready to go to war with Texas?”
While right-wing media figures fantasize about a new civil war, their rhetoric has real implications for immigration policy. They are stoking xenophobia and nativism, and endorsing cruel policies that are already injuring and killing some of the most vulnerable people in the world.
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1 24 judd ymail
*The Federal Government has broad constitutional powers in determining what aliens shall be admitted to the United States, the period they may remain, regulation of their conduct before naturalization, and the terms and conditions of their naturalization… Under the Constitution, the states are granted no such powers." — Takahashi v. Fish & Game Comm'n (1948)
For decades, the Supreme Court has been clear that the federal government, not the states, has the power to regulate immigration. Since 2021, however, Texas has been spending billions annually to impose its own vision of immigration policy — an effort known as "Operation Lone Star." Using members of the Texas National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety, "Operation Lone Star personnel work around-the-clock to detect and repel illegal crossings." Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) has pledged to "hold the line" at the southern border due to alleged inaction by the Biden administration.
Over the years, Operation Lone Star has become increasingly aggressive. In 2024, it has brought the country to the precipice of a Constitutional crisis.
:{:{The epicenter of the confrontation between Texas and the federal government is Shelby Park, a municipal park in Eagle Pass, Texas, that abuts the Rio Grande River. In this map of the area, submitted by the federal government in a legal filing, the area of the park is defined by the yellow line and the river:}:
pix]
Texas has seized control of Shelby Park, enclosing the entire 47 acres in razor wire and denying entry to the U.S. Border Patrol.
*Texas National Guard soldiers wait nearby the boat ramp where law enforcement enter the Rio Grande at Shelby Park on January 27, 2024 in Eagle Pass, Texas.
Access to Shelby Park is important to federal authorities because it is used as a "staging area for policing and interdiction operations along the Rio Grande." This includes the use of a boat ramp in the park to access the Rio Grande.
Texas' seizure of Shelby Park and refusal to allow federal officials access have created an extremely dangerous situation. On January 12, three migrants — a woman and two children — drowned in the Rio Grande near the park. When Border Patrol agents went to Shelby Park to address the situation and help other migrants in distress, guardsmen from the Texas National Guard refused to let them enter, saying "they had been ordered not to allow Border Patrol access to the park."
The legal battle between Texas and the federal government over Shelby Park began when Texas sued the federal government for cutting and removing some of the razor wire it installed along the Rio Grande. Border Patrol argued that the razor wire was putting its agents and migrants legally entitled to claim asylum at risk. Texas argued that the federal government was illegally destroying its property. The state eventually won an injunction from the Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals, prohibiting the federal government from disturbing Texas' razor wire. The federal government, however, appealed to the Supreme Court. On January 22, in a brief order, the Supreme Court sided with the federal government and lifted the injunction.
Texas' response to the Supreme Court order has been alarming. Abbott issued a statement stating that "[t]he federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States." Compact theory was championed by John C. Calhoun, one of the staunchest defenders of slavery. It essentially views states as "independent sovereigns" that are free to reject federal authority. It was used to justify the "nullification" of federal laws and, ultimately, secession from the union by Southern states.
As law professor Steven Vladeck notes, the specific constitutional argument Abbott is advancing makes even less sense. This is the key excerpt from Abbott's letter:
I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.
Abbott is claiming that he can simply declare an "invasion" and grant himself authority that "supersedes any federal statutes." This is legal hogwash.
Article I, § 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution declares that "no State shall, without the Consent of Congress… engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay." In this case, Texas is not being invaded. Migrants, many of whom have legitimate claims of asylum, presenting themselves at the border is not an invasion. Illegal border crossings are something that occurs under every administration and does not constitute an invasion. Further, Abbott is not responding by engaging in "war." He has not invaded Mexico. He has put up some razor wire. But his actions are, according to Vladeck, "antithetical to the constitutional structure of our federal system," which establishes the supremacy of federal law.
Notably, Texas is not yet defying the Supreme Court's January 22 order. That order simply lifted the Fifth Circuit injunction preventing the federal government from removing the razor wire installed by Texas in Shelby Park. The Supreme Court hasn't yet ordered Texas to do anything.
But Texas is continuing to interfere with the federal government's access to Shelby Park, in clear violation of the Constitution and federal law. On January 23, the Department of Homeland Security wrote a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), demanding "the ability to access the border in the Shelby Park area that is currently obstructed by Texas." In a January 26 response, Paxton rejected the Department of Homeland Security's request and informed the federal government that Texas will continue "to protect its southern border against every effort by the Biden Administration to undermine the State’s constitutional right of self-defense."
The conflict that Texas is creating with the federal government will almost certainly end up back at the Supreme Court. And Texas is inviting a constitutional crisis by signaling that it is prepared to ignore the Supreme Court if it does not get its way.
The new confederacy
The radical and dangerous legal theories being advanced by Texas previously provoked a Civil War and have been broadly rejected for more than a century. So, one might expect Texas to get little support from other states. That is not the case.
On January 25, the Republican Governors Association released a letter — signed by 25 Republican governors — "supporting Texas' constitutional right to self-defense." The governors write that they "stand in solidarity with our fellow Governor, Greg Abbott, and the State of Texas in utilizing every tool and strategy, including razor wire fences, to secure the border." They also explicitly endorsed compact theory, which was used to justify secession. "The authors of the U.S. Constitution made clear that in times like this, states have a right of self-defense, under Article 4, Section 4 and Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution," the governors write. "Because the Biden Administration has abdicated its constitutional compact duties to the states, Texas has every legal justification to protect the sovereignty of our states and our nation." The letter was signed by every Republican governor except Phil Scott (R-VT).
Former President Donald Trump is also supporting Abbott. Trump called on "all willing States to deploy their guards to Texas to prevent the entry of Illegals."
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), and numerous members of Congress have also aligned themselves with Abbott. Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) said Texas should tell the Supreme Court to "go to hell." Roy was so proud of this remark, he made a special graphic for his social media accounts.
Inviting chaos
Claiming that Texas has a duty to ignore the authority of the federal government unsurprisingly attracts dangerous extremists. "A trucker convoy of 'patriots' is heading to the U.S. border with Mexico next week," Vice reports. The group, which has dubbed itself "God's Army," believes they are "on a mission to stand up against the 'globalists' who they claim are conspiring to keep U.S. borders open and destroy the country."
A fundraising effort for the group has already raised more than $113,000. "Once willing to die defending this country, now willing to die protecting my family from what this country has become," one anonymous donor wrote. The convoy is being heavily promoted by far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. “There’s a war literally happening now for America,” Jones said.
The convoy is expected to reach Eagle Pass on February 3.
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Texas businesses are rebelling against draconian GOP rule - Alternet.org
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twenty-two House Republicans have signed on to a motion filed in federal court requesting to be allowed to join Governor Greg Abbott in defending the Texas Republican against a federal government lawsuit alleging his 1000 feet of razor wire and floating buoys constructed of circular saw blades, designed to prevent migrants from crossing into the United States from Texas, are illegal.
They have invoked the Bible’s Book of Genesis, including Noah’s Ark, to make their case.
“In a motion filed on behalf of U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, and other GOP members, lawyers for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation have asked to be part of the case and targeted how a key law is interpreted in it,” the Houston Chronicle reports.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation is the right-wing organization The New York Times last year profiled as “The Texas Group Waging a National Crusade Against Climate Action.”
RELATED: Supreme Court in Hand, Far Right Wing Prepares to ‘Take the Reins of Government’
The buoys, deployed on the Rio Grande river, may have led to the deaths of two migrants, possibly including a child.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas called the buoys “barbaric,” and in video showed they are constructed of circular saw blades. In that video Congressman Castro also points to Governor Abbott’s razor wire fences.
Sawyer Hackett, a senior advisor to former Obama Cabinet Secretary Julián Castro, referred to the floating fences as “razor wire death trap buoys.”
“A key point to the Arrington group’s defense is whether the 1,900-mile Rio Grande should be defined as a navigable waterway despite being used by thousands of boats every year,” The Chronicle explains. “They point to a court case from 1870 that suggested that the term navigable waterway is intended to mean moving commerce from one state to another or to a different country and not just one where any small boat occasionally uses the river.”
READ MORE: Critics Blast Top US Conservative Think Tank President for Applauding Italy’s Election of ‘Neo-Fascist’ Prime Minister
That’s where the Bible and Noah’s Ark come in.
“Indeed, if one takes the Book of Genesis literally, then the entire world was once navigable by boats large enough to carry significant amounts of livestock,” the proposed amicus brief reads. “Under the federal government’s theory, these anecdotes would render any structure built anywhere in Texas an obstruction to navigation subject to federal regulation.”
Governor Abbott has had a long partnership with the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
In 2016, as NCRM reported, Abbott while at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, unveiled a major policy plan toalter the U.S. Constitution, adding nine amendments,the result of which could have lead to same-sex marriage bans and an end of LGBTQ protections.
According to Congressman Arrington, the list of signatories to his amicus brief include: Rep. Jodey Arrington, Dr. Michael Burgess, Rep. August Pfluger, Rep. Brian Babin, Rep. Andy Biggs, Rep. Roger Williams, Rep. Lance Gooden, Rep. Beth Van Duyne, Rep. Jake Ellzey, Rep. Vern Buchanan, Rep. Chip Roy, Rep. Nathaniel Moran, Rep. David Rouzer, Rep. Pete Sessions, Rep. Ronny Jackson, Rep. Sam Graves, Rep. Clay Higgins, Rep. Michael Cloud, Rep. Keith Self, Rep. John Carter, Rep. Jeff Duncan, Rep. Kat Cammack.
Watch the video above or at this link.
'Very scary': Former RNC staffer dishes on the more terrifying members of GOP's right-wing
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How the Texas AG’s office became a pipeline for conservative federal judges
María Méndezand The Texas TribuneAugust 08, 2023
"
How the Texas AG’s office became a pipeline for conservative federal judges" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
The Texas attorney general’s office is often in headlines representing a conservative voice in legal fights over health care, abortion and immigration — and more recently, regarding suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment.
But it was once a quiet state agency that mostly collected child support and defended the state in bureaucratic lawsuits.
Over the course of more than two decades, the office has become a well-known champion of a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and a pipeline for conservative federal judges. Nine federal judges appointed by former President Donald Trump had worked in the Texas attorney general’s office beginning in 1999, according to a Texas Tribune review of the office’s recent history.
These judges have been key in deciding cases in favor of conservatives on a wide range of issues, including abortion, COVID-19 vaccine requirements and immigration policies, through the framework of constitutional originalism. This framework argues that judges should rely solely on the text of the nation’s founding documents, and how it was publicly understood at the time of their writing, to answer essential questions about applying the law to modern life.
Here’s a timeline of how the office transformed under the leadership of now high-profile Republicans Sen. John Cornyn, Gov. Greg Abbott and Paxton. For an in-depth history of the office, you can read the Tribune’s three-part series here.
1998: John Cornyn elected attorney general
John Cornyn became the first Republican to win an election to the Texas attorney general’s office since the Reconstruction era of the late 1800s. He left his seat on the Texas Supreme Court for the role.
He stepped into the job just as attorneys general across the country began to gain more power, working across state lines on issues like suing tobacco companies for the public health costs associated with smoking.
In Texas, Cornyn created the solicitor general’s office, an elite, specialized unit of lawyers to handle state and federal appeals all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The office drew young, smart lawyers with the promise of courtroom experience.The office also began to slowly wade into more political lawsuits over topics like abortion laws and religion in schools.
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2002: Greg Abbott elected attorney general
Like Cornyn, Greg Abbott left the Texas Supreme Court and was elected attorney general. But Texas Republicans now controlled the state Legislature and every statewide office. Under Abbott, the attorney general’s office more clearly championed conservatism.
Lawyers who felt politically alignedflocked to the office, including Ted Cruz,who was hired by Abbott as solicitor general and is now one of Texas’ two U.S. senators. Under Abbott and Cruz’s leadership, the office defended conservative principles in federal cases about abortion, voting and guns — even if they did not directly involve Texas.
Read more about how the agency came to draw conservative lawyers and leaders in the first part of our series here.
2008: President Barack Obama elected
Republicans had lost the White House and Congress, but they found power in the Texas attorney general’s office. Under Abbott, Texas brought more than 30 lawsuits against the Obama administration in six years.
Texas’s federal legal fights, which often argued that Obama had overstepped the power granted to the president in the U.S. Constitution, included attempts to:
Stop the Affordable Care Act, the federal expansion of government-subsidized health care.
BlockDeferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, protections for young people who entered the country illegally with their parents.
Guard businesses against environmental regulations intended to stave off climate change. CPP?
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2014: Ken Paxton elected attorney general
Paxton, a former Republican state lawmaker, quickly pushed the office further to the right.
Paxton, who found early support among advocates of religious liberty, joined a conservative Christian legal movement against federal LGBTQ+ protections, which gained traction after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark ruling establishing protections for same-sex marriage.
His office began strategically filing lawsuits in remote areas of Texas where just one judge hears most cases, ensuring any cases would be heard by a conservative judge.
Read more about how Texas took on the Obama administration in the second part of our series here.
2016: President Donald Trump elected
After Obama failed to prioritize judicial appointments, Trump entered office with more judicial vacancies than almost any president in U.S. history.
By then, Cornyn and Cruz had gained influence on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and nominated a class of young, conservative lawyers to become judges, many of whom had worked in the Texas attorney general’s office.
Nine federal judges appointed by the Trump administration from 2018-20 had previously worked in the Texas attorney general’s office under Cornyn, Abbott or Paxton.
Trump also appointed seven conservative judges to single-judge divisions in Texas, hugely expanding the number of venues where Paxton could file cases and effectively handpick the judge who would hear it. And with four former Texas attorney general employees appointed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Texas also increased its odds of getting favorable appeals rulings.
Lawyers like Jonathan Mitchell, a private lawyer and solicitor general under Abbott, have also taken advantage of the increasingly conservative roster of judges. Mitchell, for example, scored a victory with a Trump-appointed judge in a case that blocked confidential contraception access for minors in Texas.
2020: President Joe Biden elected
The Texas attorney general’s office has continued barraging the federal government with lawsuits over issues such as environmental protections and immigration policies.
The office now sees itself as at war with “the forces that want to destroy the American order, root and branch,” as Aaron Reitz, former deputy attorney general, said in November 2021. “Our soldiers are lawyers, and our weapons are lawsuits, and our tactic is lawfare. This is the project that we’re engaged in.”
Although conservative judges have not always taken up or supported the cases, the office has succeeded in delaying the rollout of federal policies amid ongoing lawsuits.
2023: Paxton impeached
In June, the Texas House of Representatives voted to impeach Paxton after he asked the Texas Legislature to fund a $3.3 million settlement in a lawsuit brought on by former employees.
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A House committee launched an investigation into the matter, resulting in 20 articles of impeachment listing a yearslong pattern of alleged misconduct. Paxton was suspended from his role and is awaiting a Senate impeachment trial scheduled to begin Sept. 5.
Paxton has faced criminal investigations, legal battles and accusations of wrongdoing for years. But he had eluded consequences and remained popular with Texas voters.
A handful of top agency employees took leaves of absence to defend Paxton. But the office has continued launching legal challenges against new federal smog regulations and protections for transgender student athletes under interim attorneys general appointed by Abbott.
And if a Republican is elected to the presidency in 2024, Texas conservatives could make further inroads in the judicial system, including in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Read more about how Trump helped cement Texas’ influence in federal courts in the third part of our series here.
Eleanor Klibanoff contributed to this story.
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an 7 23
as the heatwave currently plaguing Texas prevails, San Antonio Mayor Mark Nirenberg's frustration with Texas state lawmakers grows, Politico reports.
According to Reuters, President Joe Biden recently "instructed the Department of Labor to ramp up enforcement of on-the-job heat hazards" in states like Texas "by increasing inspections at construction and agriculture sites, and to issue Hazard Alerts that inform employers of their responsibilities and employees of their rights during extreme heat."
Last month, Texas Public Radio (TPR) reportedTexas Republican Governor Greg Abbott passed a bill — which opponents call the "Death Star Bill" — that "poses serious health risks" to construction workers, "bars cities and counties from passing regulations that are stricter than state ones," and "overturns local rules such as ordinances in Austin and Dallas that mandate rest breaks for construction workers."
Politico reports Nirenberg, on Sunday's segment of CBS' Face the Nation, said, "We're certainly grateful for a president now that's treating this heatwave with the urgency that I think is necessary. Especially given the fact that one of the challenges that we have is, cities in Texas are fighting our legislature and our state government for local control. We're trying to protect residents and workers, and they are doing everything they can to prevent that from happening."
READ MORE: 'No end in sight' for massive heat wave plaguing Texas, New Mexico: NWS
Politico's full report is available at this link. Reuters' report is here (subscription required).
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https://www.democracynow.org/2023/7/24/texas_border_abbott razor
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/7/28/greg_casar_thirst_strike
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https://www.alternet.org/texas-public-schools-2659732308/
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Houston schools eliminate librarians and 'repurpose' libraries into 'discipline centers'
David Badashand The New Civil Rights Movement July 27, 2023
The Houston Independent School District, the largest in Texas and the eighth-largest in the United States, will eliminate librarian positions in 28 schools and turn libraries into what are being called “discipline centers,” according to Click2Houston.
Mike Myles, the state-installed schools superintendent and former charter schools CEO, earlier this month announced cuts of up to 600 central office positions.
Texas has a $32 billion state surplus but rather than allocate needed funds to public schools, lawmakers in the majority-Republican state legislature, at the behest of Governor Greg Abbott, just delivered a massive property tax cut.
The move to gut librarians and massively reduce access to books and other material does not appear to be budget related, as librarians will be allowed to apply for other positions.
READ MORE: Nancy Mace Tells Prayer Breakfast About Refusing Sex With Her Fiancé This Morning: ‘I’ll See Him Later’
KHOU reports libraries at those 28 schools “will be repurposed into ‘team centers’ where students who had to be removed from class due to behavioral issues will be placed to watch their class virtually.”
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Former HISD librarian and Manager of Library Services, Janice Newsum, says, “When students engage in reading as an activity of choice, they are not only building that reading muscle, but they are also developing their vocabulary they are understanding a bit about the world that exists outside their block radius.”
Mayor Sylvester Turner appeared to suggest the schools that are losing their librarians are already underserved.
“You don’t close libraries in some of the schools in your most underserved communities, and you’re keeping libraries open in other schools,” Turner said.
Watch Click2Houston’s report below or at this link.
: report
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https://www.alternet.org/environment/solar-texas/
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texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed legislation earlier this week that "poses serious health risks" to construction workers, Texas Public Radio (TPR) reports.
Per TPR, HB 2127 — known as the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act — "bars cities and counties from passing regulations that are stricter than state ones. It also overturns local rules such as ordinances in Austin and Dallas that mandate rest breaks for construction workers."
Republican State Rep. Dustin Burrows, who proposed the "Death Star Bill," insisted "the law is needed to end 'the current hodgepodge of onerous and burdensome regulations,'" but TPR notes "for construction workers in two of the state's fastest-growing cities, advocates say, it poses serious health risks."
READ MORE: Neither 'compassion' nor 'leadership': Greg Abbott blasted for calling shooting victims 'illegal immigrants'
Mario Ontiveros told TPR "he once saw a co-worker lose consciousness and fall from a ladder," and due to his previous "safety training," the Texas construction worker "was the only one on the job site who knew how to help — performing CPR and asking his co-worker basic questions to keep him conscious — until paramedics arrived, he said."
The Texas Tribune reports:
Texas is the state where the most workers die from high temperatures, government data shows. At least 42 workers died in Texas between 2011 and 2021 from environmental heat exposure, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Workers’ unions claim this data doesn’t fully reflect the magnitude of the problem because heat-related deaths are often recorded under a different primary cause of injury.
Furthermore, according to TPR, "Research published in 2018 — eight years after Austin passed its rest-break ordinance — found that construction workers were 35% more likely to get a break because of the rule."
Daniela Hernandez, state legislative coordinator for Texas advocacy group Workers Defense Action Fund, said, "We know that workers do pass out and experience heat stress and different types of heat illnesses."
READ MORE: Gov. Greg Abbott leaves experts stunned as he injects politics into Texas' criminal justice system
Paul Puente, executive secretary of the Houston Gulf Coast Building and Construction Trades Council, said the "Death Star Bill" is expected to "strike down construction-worker protections in southeast Texas," and "negatively impact construction safety as a whole," even though "labor unions can still negotiate for rest breaks."
He emphasized "Science has already shown that individuals need to have time to take a break, collect their thoughts, and then return back to work to ensure a safe working environment," and "Without allotted rest breaks in extreme heat," he told TPR "workers can easily become fatigued, disoriented, dehydrated — effects that endanger their lives."
Calling the state "unsafe" for construction workers, Puente added, "when you're trying to encourage businesses to come to your state, this is not a good look."
TPR reports the law is set to go into effect Sept. 1.
READ MORE: 'Absolutely insane': Texas Governor Greg Abbott seeks pardon for man convicted of murdering BLM protester
Texas Public Radio's full report is available at this link. The Texas Tribune's report is here.
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same weekend PU truck plows into migrants
https://www.alternet.org/texas-state-rep-almighty-shootings/
https://www.alternet.org/texas-democrat-greg-abbott-explain/ dem call out
gop wants more guns https://www.alternet.org/texas-lawmaker-god-responsible-shooting/
https://www.alternet.org/she-had-no-face/
an 5 23
no lnx vid twt
texas Governor Greg Abbott declined to say whether he would support measures to reduce gun violence during an appearance on Fox News Sunday.
Abbott's remarks come a day after eight people were murdered in Saturday's mass shooting — the 199th so far in 2023 — at the Allen Premium Outlets in Allen, Texas.
Speaking with anchor Shannon Bream, Abbott blamed "the government" for the massacre.
READ MORE: 'Now it’s God’s fault': Texas Republican slammed for claiming 'the almighty' controls shootings
"And I'll be going up to Allen [DOGGED BY UVALDE FUNDRAISER FAIL?] later today to begin the process, uh, providing hope and, and healing. But I gotta tell you that there are questions that are lingering that the families want answers to, and that is, why did this happen? Why did the government do this? How did this happen? And I know that those families need an answer as quickly as possible," Abbott said. "And then the last thing I'll tell you, and, andI just wanna reiterate my gratitude and the gratitude of all Texans for the swift response of that police officer — you had just a single police officer who had to confront, uh, that dangerous gunman — and did the right thing by taking swift action to eliminate the gunman. [just happened to be there on another case?] And we are great for that officer's heroism."
Bream addressed recent Fox News polling showing that reasonable restrictions have enormous public support.
"Just out from Fox News. When you ask people what they wouldfavor, background checks for guns, enforcing existing gun laws, legal age to 21, requiring mental health checks, flagging people for danger to self, all of those score at more than eighty percent. Are there things that you would consider in Texas or that you think Congress should consider at a federal level along those lines?" Bream asked.
"Well, on the federal level, as you know, some laws were passed last year to begin to address this. At the state level, listen, this is something that we've been grappling with over the past year. And there are some potential easy solutions such as passing laws that we're working on right now to get guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals [AA?] and to criminals into increased penalties for criminals who possess guns," replied Abbott, who has loosened firearm laws in the Lone Star State in spite of the recent spikes in violence.
READ MORE: 'So we’re legislating nothing': Texas Democrat stumps GOP sponsor of anti-'tyrannical government' bill
"But, Shannon, we need to, to recognize a reality. What we've seen across the United States over the past year or two. And that is a, an increased number of shootings in both red states and blue states. Shannon, we've seen an increased number of shootings in states with easy gun laws as well as states with very strict gun laws," Abbott continued. "I think that the state in which the largest number of victims, uh, have occurred this year is in California where they have very tough gun laws where 11 people died."
That statement is demonstrably false. According to WiseVoter.org, California ranks 44th in terms of gun deaths per capita, with 8.5 per 100,000. Texas, however, sits at 26th, with 14.2 per 100,000.
"And so one thing that we can observe very easily, and that is there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of anger and violence that's taking place in America," Abbott stated. "And what Texas is doing in a big-time way, we are working to address that anger and violence by going to its root cause, which is addressing the mental health problems behind it."
But the governor was not quite finished.
"One, one last thing about this, Shannon, and that is, it truly seems today that America is more divided than we've been in decades," he declared, adding that "we gotta find a way in this country where we can once again reunite Americans as Americans and come together as one big family, and in that regard, find ways to reduce violence in our country."
Watch the clips below or at this link.
READ MORE: 'She had no face': Witness and father recalls 'carnage' from Saturday’s Texas mass shooting
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keep covid powers?
https://www.alternet.org/greg-abbott-2659320086/
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ercot fail
https://www.alternet.org/greg-abbott-emergency-measures-energy/
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an ah 1 23
the 2022 midterms went much better than expected for the Democratic Party, with Democrats slightly increasing their U.S. Senate majority and winning key gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona. Republicans flipped the U.S. House of Representatives, but their new House majority under Speaker Kevin McCarthy is only in the single digits — not the 40-seat or 50-seat supermajority that pundits at Fox News and Fox Business were predicting.
However, two states where Democrats suffered major disappointments were Florida and Texas. Florida is known for close elections, but Gov. Ron DeSantis campaigned from the far right and was reelected by 19 percent. MSNBC’s Joy Reid has argued that Florida shouldn’t be considered a swing state anymore — it has become a full-fledged red state.
Texas has long been a red state, but Democratic strategists believed they were making headway when their candidates only lost in Texas by single digits in statewide races in 2018 and 2020. President Joe Biden lost the Lone Star State by about 6 percent in 2020 compared to the double-digit losses Democrats typically suffered in statewide races in Texas during the 1990s and 2000s. But in 2022, incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott defeated Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke by 11 percent.
READ MORE: **'Tone of humility': Florida columnist issues dire warning to Ron DeSantis**
Journalist Luisita Lopez Torregrosa, in an article published by the Texas Observer on January 4, offers a Texas/Florida comparison. Both states, she notes, were bad for Democrats when it came to statewide races in 2022. But Torregrosa stresses that from a demographics standpoint, there are major differences between Florida voters and Texas voters.
Texas, Torregrosa observes, is a state in which non-Hispanic whites are now a minority. Democratic strategists have long fantasized about flipping Texas, based on its demographics. But so far, that hasn’t happened.
“Texas has been a majority-minority state for close to two decades, but Latinos command far less political and economic influence here than they do in Florida,” Torregrosa notes. “Non-Hispanic white Texans make up about 39.4 percent of the state’s 30 million population. Latinos account for nearly half, around 40.2 percent, with Blacks making up 13.2 percent, Asian-Americans 5.5 percent, and American Indians 1.1 percent.”
A Florida/Texas comparison, according to Torregrosa, underscores the fact that there is no “one-size-fits-all” model where U.S.-based Latinos are concerned. Florida has a large Cuban and Cuban-American community, while Texas’ Latino community is heavily Mexican and Mexican-American/Chicano.
READ MORE:**Where woke goes to die': Why Florida is now a red state**
“With a dominant contingent of conservative Cubans and Venezuelans, Florida Latinos enjoy more power in their state and in Washington than Latinos do in Texas,” Torregrosa explains. “Florida’s 27-member congressional delegation is 26.5 percent Latino. Latinos occupy high-level statewide and county posts and make up around 20 percent of the state legislature in Tallahassee. By comparison, Latinos are under-represented in Texas. Only 19 percent of the state’s congressional delegation — the second largest in the country — are Latino. The state legislature is 61 percent white, though the state is only 39.4 percent white. There is, to be sure, Latino local political power in many Texas communities, especially around the Rio Grande Valley, but the state is run by primarily white Republicans.”
For Democrats, one of the most discouraging things about the 2022 election results in Florida was the fact that DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio fared well in some of the state’s most heavily Latino counties.
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, with a 19-point reelection landslide, got about 77 percent of the vote in the ten precincts with the heaviest Latino populations,” Torregrosa observes. “The only notable exception came in Central Florida, where Puerto Ricans continue to support Democrats. The Puerto Rican population in Florida has grown substantially since Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, and thousands migrated to Florida.”
During the 2016 GOP presidential primary, Donald Trump chastised former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail (Bush is a fluent Spanish speaker who has had no problem being interviewed in Spanish on Univision). But in 2022, GOP groups in Florida aggressively targeted Latino voters with Spanish-language ads.
“Abbott and DeSantis each orchestrated the right-wing agenda with an eye beyond their states,” Torregrosa says of the 2022 midterms. “Abbott has done so relatively quietly, DeSantis visibly and volubly all over the country. Both men easily won reelection, but DeSantis’ landslide has more repercussions. He turned Florida crimson red and polished the Republican brand, giving himself a springboard to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination should he decide to defy his former mentor and now rival, former President Donald Trump…. For now and the foreseeable future, Abbott and DeSantis will continue to advance their brand of radical conservatism.”
READ MORE:**'Christian' Greg Abbott celebrates Christmas by bussing asylum-seekers into frigid Washington DC**
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cruel stunt
https://www.alternet.org/greg-abbott-migrants-christmas-dc/
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new report refutes Greg Abbott’s claim that his office was unaware of DeSantis’ migrant stunt
October 21, 2022
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's (R) office was aware of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' migrant stunt despite previous claims that it had no involvement in helping him, KSAT-12 report...
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an 10 22
no lnx twt
'Macabre': Texas schools send out DNA kits after Greg Abbott signed law following Uvalde massacre
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement October 17, 2022
Texas school districts have begun distribution of DNA kits to parents after GOP Governor Greg Abbott signed a law mandating they be made available in the wake of the horrific mass shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 students and two teachers were slaughtered in May.
“The state Legislature passed a law in spring 2021 requiring the Texas Education Agency to give inkless in-home fingerprint and DNA identification cards to each public school system in Texas,” The Houston Chronicle reports. “The kits will be made available at each primary-level campus. The cards are intended to be kept by guardians who can give them to law enforcement in order to potentially help find missing or trafficked children.”
The kits are available to any parent or guardian who requests them. They can be used to identify the bodies of their children in the event of another school mass shooting, or other event where it is difficult to ID a child.
READ MORE: ‘Ghoulish’ Greg Abbott Slammed as a ‘Monster’ for ‘Inhumane’ Response to Deaths of 50 People Locked in Tractor-Trailer
Brandi Smith, an Emmy award-winning anchor and reporter at KHOU responded to the news, saying on social media that a “follower forwarded me the email about the DNA kits he received from Clear Creek ISD last week. He identified himself as retired Army and added these kits were used prior to soldiers deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan. Let that sink in.”
Gun violence prevention activist Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, blasted the move.
“Texas Gov Greg Abbott is choosing to send DNA kits to schools that parents can use to identify their children’s bodies AFTER they’ve been murdered rather than pass gun safety laws to proactively protect their lives,” she wrote, urging Texans to vote for Democrat Beto O’Rourke in the gubernatorial race.
Last month Everytown, the grassroots “movement of parents, students, survivors, educators, gun owners & concerned citizens fighting to end gun violence and build safer communities,” posted a chart showing the relationship between strong gun laws and lower gun violence.
READ MORE: ‘Taking Us All for Fools’: Critics Decimate Greg Abbott’s Claims and Defense of His Actions in Wake of School Shooting
“The states with the strongest gun laws—like California—have the lowest gun death rates. That’s not a coincidence,” the group, which includes Moms Demand Action, writes.
California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, believed to be mulling a potential 2024 presidential run, also criticized prioritizing DNA test kits over changing gun laws.
“Greg Abbott’s solution to gun violence? Send DNA kits to schools so parents can identify their kids’ bodies AFTER they’ve been shot and killed.”
On its website, Everytown ranks the Lone Star State 34th in the country for “Gun Law Strength,” adds, “Texas has weak gun laws. The state does not require a person to pass a criminal background check before purchasing a firearm from an unlicensed seller. Texas also allows people with carry licenses to carry concealed firearms on college and university campuses. Texas even allows some staff and teachers to carry firearms in K-12 schools.”
“In an average year, 3,647 people die by guns in Texas,” the group notes.
READ MORE: ‘I Apologize for Interrupting Your Press Conference’: Tearful Texas Democrat Urges Greg Abbott to ‘Do Something’ on Guns
Incumbent Governor Abbott is running for re-election against Democrat Beto O’Rourke. FiveThirtyEight reports the Texas Republican is polling about seven points higher than the former U.S. Congressman.
“Some families have found the [DNA test kits] program chilling, considering that police asked parents waiting to find out if their children were slaughtered at Robb Elementary on May 24 to provide DNA samples to help identify the dead,” The Houston Chronicle reports.
“When you put it in the light of Uvalde, it’s one of the most macabre things you could think about,” Bob Sanborn, president of the nonprofit Children at Risk, told The Chronicle.
“Among the countless chilling details to emerge from the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas,” The New York Times reported back in May, “was this: The authorities had asked parents waiting in agony for news about their children to give DNA samples.”
“The request suggests that some of the 19 children who were killed may have been so severely wounded and grouped so closely together that they were difficult to identify, according to experts in medical forensics.”
Confirming the Times’ suggestion, NBC News also reported in May, after the Uvalde mass shooting – the deadliest shooting ever at a Texas public school – that, “Many of the bodies were in bad shape.”
Eulalio Diaz Jr., a justice of the peace forced to act as a medical examiner in Uvalde, “tried to spare the parents as much pain as possible, hoping to positively identify the murdered children through descriptions their parents gave of clothing they wore to school that day, of photos parents showed him.”
“But it wasn’t enough,” NBC added. “The bodies were too shot up. The Texas Rangers ordered DNA swabs of family members.”
Earlier this month Uvalde families joined together, saying, “Greg Abbott has abandoned us.”
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also texas az reverse freedom rides; own libs just helping sanct states smirk, cheer
https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/us-attorney-doj-ron-desantis/
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an 10 22
A Texas newspaper is calling out Gov. Greg Abbott (R) for his lack of accountability where his leadership flaws are concerned.
During his recent debate with Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke, Abbott resorted to blaming President Joe Biden for many of the issues in his state.
Now, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has released a report to remind Republican governor of his own timeline and shortcomings. The editorial board has received comments from other Texans who have weighed in with their take on the recent debates.
READ MORE: Watch: Greg Abbott faces boos at site of Uvalde shooting as he arrives to meet with Biden
One of the glaring facts is that Abbott has been in office for two terms; eight years whereas Biden has not even been in office for one full presidential term.
Bonnie Hromcik of Benbrook, Texas insists some of the issues Abbott is blaming Biden for should have been addressed long before he took office following the 2020 presidential election.
"Biden has been president for only two years," Hromcik pointed out. "Abbott has been Texas governor for eight years, the same time Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton have been in office. If they could clear things up on the border, fix the power grid and address so many other things they blame on Biden, why haven’t they already?"
So, what is one of the reasons for the ongoing problems in Texas? The newspaper believes "insanity" is part of the problem. "Insanity is voting for the same people and expecting a different outcome," she added.
The latest comes as O'Rourke's ad campaigns intensify with highlights of Abbott's presumably failed leadership in the state of Texas over the course of his two terms as governor.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/gov-greg-abbott-refused-connect-texas-recent-devastating-rain-and-flooding
no lnx many vids
gov. Greg Abbott refused to connect Texas’ recent devastating rain and flooding to climate change. National TV networks largely stayed silent as well.
Special PROGRAMS
CLIMATE & ENERGY
WRITTEN BY TED MACDONALD
PUBLISHED 08/25/22
Between August 21 and August 22, nearly 15 inches of rain fell over the Dallas/Fort Worth area, leading to severe flooding and at least one death and marking the second-highest rainfall amount ever recorded at the area's airport. This record-breaking, extreme rainfall event was bad enough for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to sign a disaster declaration on Tuesday. But he refused to connect the flooding to climate change, and in reporting on the event, national TV networks largely stayed silent as well.
Over a two-day period from August 22 to 23, news shows on TV networks ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC aired 61 combined segments or weather reports on Texas’ extreme rainfall and flooding. Only 10 of them (16%) mentioned climate change.
This is despite the fact that the event is being talked about as a “1-in-1,000-year flood,” and scientists are linking this event to climate change. According to the Texas Tribune:
The rise in average temperatures brought by climate change can strongly affect extreme precipitation events by increasing the intensity of rainfall during storms, climate scientists have found. Such events could become more frequent in the coming decades as the effects of climate change worsen.
In Texas, rainfall intensity has increased by about 7% since 1960. And the risk of extreme precipitation events across the state is increasing even as the Western half of the state has generally seen a flat or declining trend in precipitation totals over the past century, according to a 2021 report by the state’s climatologist.
Texas could experience 30% to 50% more events of extreme rain by 2036 compared to 1950-1999, the report found.
In general, climate change has helped worsen precipitation and flooding worldwide.
NBC was the only corporate broadcast TV news network to mention climate change while reporting on Texas’ extreme precipitation event
NBC mentioned climate change in 4 of its 9 segments (44%) on Texas’ extreme precipitation event. Of those 4, 3 came on their morning news program Today, and one was on its evening news program NBC Nightly News. A good example came from the August 23 edition of the third hour of Today, where both NBC’s Sam Brock and NBC’s weather anchor Al Roker linked the event to climate change.
Video Citation From the August 23, 2022, edition of NBC's Today
ABC and CBS, meanwhile, aired 9 segments and 6 segments, respectively. None of these segments connected the event to climate change.
Cable news networks CNN and MSNBC aired only a combined 6 climate segments
MSNBC mentioned climate in only 3 of 11 segments (27%). A good example came during an interview with Beto O’Rourke on the August 23 edition of The ReidOut, where he stated, “We're there for those who are undergoing the worst flooding and the worst rainfall that we've seen in a thousand years in this part of Texas. But, Joy, to your point, these are the consequences of our emissions, our inaction in the face of the consequences of climate change, and our inability to take the right steps, the action necessary to confront this before it's too late.”
Video From the August 23, 2022, edition of MSNBC's The ReidOut
CNN mentioned climate change in only 3 of its 26 segments (12%) on Texas’ extreme precipitation event. Of those 3, 2 came on the August 22 and 23 editions of The Lead with Jake Tapper. The other came during the August 23 edition of New Day.
National TV networks do a much better job of connecting climate change to extreme heat and drought events than to other extreme weather
While all extreme weather events are deadly and carry their own climate connections, national TV news has done a much better job this year connecting climate change to extreme heat and drought events than to other extreme weather. Over a five-day period between August 12 and 16, 57% of combined segments on global extreme weather events mentioned climate change. The large majority of these climate mentions came in segments on extreme heat or drought. Additionally, over another five-day period between July 19 and 23, 40% of combined global extreme heat segments mentioned climate change.
Contrast this with extreme precipitation events. Over an eight-day period between June 14 and June 21, these same networks aired 49 combined segments on flooding in Yellowstone National Park. Only 7 of these Yellowstone segments (14%) mentioned climate change.
This discrepancy occurs even though over the past five weeks, there have been five 1,000-year rain events. All of these events have hit abnormally dry areas. Writing in The Washington Post, Matthew Capucci notes that “the weather facing the nation bears the fingerprint of a warming world. While it seems contradictory, both drought and flooding are closely tied to human-driven warming and are altering our environment and how we interact with it.”
These extremely rare precipitation events are not new, either. For example, extreme rainfall in Newark, New Jersey, last year due to Hurricane Ida was a 1,000-year event. Destructive Western European floods in 2020 were a 500-year event. Going further back, 2017’s Hurricane Harvey in Texas was a 1,000-year event. Given these facts, there’s just no excuse for TV news not to be connecting these extreme precipitation events to climate change.
National TV news also shows a bias toward the Northeast legacy media and power corridor when it comes to extreme precipitation events
While these extreme precipitation events are occurring all across the U.S., it’s generally the Northeast U.S., where major media outlets are located, that receives the brunt of coverage. Evlondo Cooper of Media Matters made this point last year while discussing Hurricane Ida:
Unlike coverage of Hurricane Ida’s landfall in Louisiana at the end of August -- which included few climate mentions, discussions about the need to shore up vulnerable infrastructure against the new climate normal, or calls for political action -- national cable news coverage of Ida’s impact on the Northeast was more substantive, and even included in-depth discussions about the need to improve and protect valuable infrastructure on the East Coast.
Cable news coverage on September 2 mentioned that climate change drove Ida’s destructiveness dozens of times, and 26 segments mentioned the storm’s impact on infrastructure or the need for climate resiliency. Throughout the day, cable news hosts featured public officials from impacted communities in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania who made the case for why their areas needed more climate-resilient infrastructure.
It’s the poorest communities, and those that generally have contributed the least to climate change, that will be hit the hardest by climate-fueled weather events. TV networks are willing to make the rain and flooding connection to climate change in places like New York, and they need to do it in places like Texas and the Southeast too.
Greg Abbott is a climate denier. National TV news should not follow his lead on climate silence
Abbott, like many of his fellow Republicans in Texas, is a climate denier. It’s no surprise that he ignored the climate links to the recent flooding event. However, he holds office in a state that, in addition to the recent bout of rain and flooding, has suffered through climate-fueled drought and extreme heat this summer; suffered a polar vortex two years ago that proved that the state's electrical grid is not prepared for climate change; and suffered through the deadly Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
TV networks need to do a better job of linking the climate crisis to extreme weather events and also discussing how we can solve this crisis and better prepare for these events in the future. It should not be following the lead of someone who peddles antiquated climate denial views.
Methodology
Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original episodes of ABC’s Good Morning America and World News Tonight; CBS’ Mornings and Evening News; and NBC’s Today and Nightly News as well as all original programming on CNN and MSNBC for any of the terms “precipitation,” “storm,” “disaster,” or “weather” or any variations of either of the terms “flood” or “rain” within close proximity of any of the terms “Texas,” Dallas,” “Fort Worth,” or “Tarrant” from August 22, 2022, through August 23, 2022.
We counted segments, which we defined as instances when Texas’ historic rain and flooding event was the stated topic of discussion or when we found “significant discussion” of Texas’ rain or flooding event. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed the rain or flooding event with one another. We also included weather reports, which we defined as instances when Texas’ rain or flooding event was the stated topic of discussion by a meteorologist in front of a green screen.
We did not include passing mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker mentioned the rain or flooding event, or teasers, which we defined as instances when the host or anchor promoted a segment about the rain or flooding event coming up later in the broadcast.
We then reviewed each segment or weather report for mentions of the terms “climate” or “global warming.”
THE LATEST
Right-wing media erroneously claim Biden “facilitated” search of Mar-a-Lago
08/25/22 2:05 PM EDT
Gov. Greg Abbott refused to connect Texas’ recent devastating rain and flooding to climate change. National TV networks largely stayed silent as well.
08/25/22 2:01 PM EDT
4chan users baselessly claim Google Maps is showing a trafficking operation
08/25/22 1:54 PM EDT
Steve Bannon rails against student debt forgiveness then brags about his Ivy League degree
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Right-wing organization Today is America is fueling an extremist network of young conservative influencers
08/25/22 …
Next page
IN THIS ARTICLE
Broadcast Networks. cable
National TV networks get better at linking climate change to extreme weather events, but still largely fail to mention solutions
08/18/22 2:42 PM EDT
National TV networks do a poor job of mentioning causes of (and solutions to) climate change in segments on global extreme heat
07/27/22 3:32 PM EDT
National TV networks mention climate change in 32% of segments on global extreme heat
07/19/22 3
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appt ~ blm cop
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/greg-abbott/
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/greg-abbott/
req vol cutbacks, gov silent
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an 7 222
lt **Governor Dan Patrick**, a far-right Republican, is comparing migrants crossing the border into Texas to Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that killed 2335 people. He is calling it an “invasion” and says that gives the state the right to “put hands on people.”
Patrick, who because of Texas’ unique structure is more powerful than the governor, told Fox News on Tuesday, “we are being invaded, and if we’re being invaded under the constitution I think that gives us the power to put hands on people and send them back. Put hands on people and send them back,” he said repeatedly.
“These people are a danger to America,” Patrick said in a rant. It was unclear if he was referring to migrants or President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
READ MORE:
The Lt. Governor, who has hawked the racist “great replacement theory” repeatedly, and used the term “invasion” repeatedly, told Fox News that Texas is now spending $4 billion annually on the border, while Texas National Guardsmen and Texas Rangers complain of being called up to serve, having to abandon their regular jobs, for no apparent reason.
“This is the biggest danger we have, to your family,” Patrick says of the fentanyl crossing the border. “It’s all on Biden,” he claimed.
Last week **Texas Governor Greg Abbott** drew extensive criticism for using thedeaths of more than 50 migrants packed into an 18-wheel tractor-trailer as a political opportunity to attack President Biden. Even some conservatives attacked Abbott for his inhumane remarks..
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/ulvade-2657408378/
some neglect uvalde, fundraiser, video to nra conf, parents ref to meet w/ him
...After 10 people were killed in a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, in 2018, Gov. Greg Abbott suggested considering a “red flag” law. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick nixed it.
After 23 people were killed at a Walmart in El Paso and seven people were killed in Midland-Odessa in 2019, Patrick discussed expanding background checks. Instead, the Legislature passed permitless carry.
But after Uvalde, neither Patrick nor Abbott indicated any interest in reforming the state’s gun laws. On Fox News, Attorney General Ken Paxton said it’s unreasonable to think we can “stop bad people from doing bad things.”
“We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly,” he said. “That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”
While Democrats expressed their outrage — some more immediately than others — none of this came as any surprise to people who study gun issues.
Poliquin’s research shows that Republican-dominated states tend to pass legislation in the wake of mass shootings that make guns more readily accessible. Democrat-led states don’t see a statistically significant increase in gun laws of any kind after these events, in part, Poliquin hypothesized, because they already have strong gun control laws.
Republicans in Texas are acting on their party’s ideology around guns, which emphasizes more guns in more places as a deterrent to acts of violence. And even if that doesn’t reflect public opinion, they have no reason to anticipate backlash in the voting booth.
[Gov. Greg Abbott speaks at a press conference at Uvalde High School on Wednesday, May 25, 2022 in Uvalde. Twenty one people were killed after a gunman after a high school student opened fire inside Robb Elementary School on Tuesday where two teachers and 19 students were killed.
Even conversations about compromise are enough to rile up the faithful, and in a polarized and gerrymandered state like Texas, the political fringes are where a politician's career can be made or lost.
“The more the gun control advocates try to put in place what they euphemistically call common sense gun laws … those of us that believe in the Second Amendment and everything it was set in place to protect tend to hold much tighter,” Hupp said. “We recognize what their ultimate goal is, which is to completely disarm citizens.”
Donna Howard, one of a minority of Democrats in the state Legislature, said Texas’ approach to gun policy reminds her of the bumper stickers she would see in the 1960s: “America: Love it or leave it.”
It feels like her fellow legislators are telling her — and any Texans who want gun control — “if you don't like it, you can just leave,” she said.
“That’s not something I have felt until recent years,” she said. “This is my home, and the fact that what I believe and people like me believe, and the way we would like to have society structured, is just totally discounted, it feels like we don't matter.”
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/29/texas-mass-shootings-self-defense-gun-ownership/.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/greg-abbott-is-a-murderer/
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/greg-abbott-starve-immigrant-babies/
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/greg-abbott/
kick kids out of school
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no lnx
Republican neofascists are playing a dangerous game that will rip America apart
Thom Hartmann April 28, 2022
Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on Disney, while his colleague in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott, is on a jihad against the parents of trans children.
This is how fascism progresses through its later stages toward tyranny.
Democracies typically don’t turn into fascist oligarchies by being invaded or losing wars. It usually happens from within, and is driven by an alliance between demagogic politicians, corrupt religious leaders, bigoted street brawlers, and some of the wealthiest people in society.
First, fascists identify groups of people they believe are both vulnerable and sufficiently powerless that they won’t be able to fight back. Typically, these are racial, religious, political or gender/sexuality minorities.
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Enormous efforts go into demonizing the people the fascists have identified; members of the group who’ve committed crimes are heavily publicized, while “think tanks” and fascist allies in the media identify malicious “reasons” for those folks’ “deviance.”
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Efforts by members of the demonized groups to achieve parity or equality in society are characterized as a “theft” of privilege and assets from the majority, legitimizing both verbal, legal, and physical attacks on members of the group.
For example, the billionaire Murdoch family’s top-rated morning show, Fox & Friends, recently wandered into a discussion about white people being “marginalized” by the possibility of our public schools teaching the actual racial history of America.
“[T]hey are not only trying to raise up minorities and make sure the playing field is even,” Brian Kilmeade said, “they’re trying to take down the white culture!”
Kilmeade, in full “White people are the victims!” mode, went on:
“Why are we being marginalized on a daily basis…? And it’s not even subtle! It’s actually out there! It is written in black-and-white!”
It’s played out this way in every democratic country that has fallen to tyranny from within. It’s how it happened in the 1930s in Italy, Germany, Japan and Spain, and today in Hungary, Poland, Egypt, Russia, The Philippines, and Turkey, among others.
More recently, Swanson Food Heir Tucker Carlson went on a rant about the Great Replacement Theory.
After identifying targeted minorities — for today’s GOP that includes Black people, trans kids (and their parents), pregnant women, and Democrats — and encouraging legal and physical violence against them, fascists move to the second major step: seizing enough economic and political power that they can reshape society itself.
This requires bringing in morbidly rich people and enlisting the aid of big business.
So, first, they go after the biggest businesses. One of the biggest businesses in Florida is Disney, so Ron DeSantis tried to get them on his bigoted side. They didn’t go along with it, so now, in typical strongman fashion, DeSantis feels he has to destroy them to save face.
As German industrialist Fritz Thyssen writes in his book I Paid Hitler, he pressured German President von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor, and then lobbied the Association of German Industrialists, that country’s and era’s version of the US Chamber of Commerce, to donate 3 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi Party for the 1933 election. It brought Hitler to power.
Hitler’s sales pitch to the German people was that Jews, gays, and socialists had “stabbed Germany in the back” and were trying to “strip” good white Christian Germans of their “rights” and twist society to conform with their “perverted” ideas and lifestyles.
Hitler blamed the 1933 economic crisis on German minorities, Jews and gays, and accused Germany’s second largest political party of complicity with them; the German people went along with him. Once the Nazis took power, they changed election laws in such a way that they would never again lose.
Republicans and rightwing billionaires, of course, are doing much the same thing right now in America. One wonders if they’ll have the retrospective angst that haunted Thyssen until the day he died. He wrote about it in I Paid Hitler:
“I am not a politician, but an industrialist, and an industrialist is always inclined to consider politics a kind of second string to his bow — the preparation for his own particular activity. In a well-ordered country, where the administration is sound, where taxes are reasonable, and the police well organised, he can afford to abstain from politics and to devote himself entirely to business.
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“But in a crisis-ridden state, as Germany was from 1918 to 1933, an industrialist is drawn, willy-nilly, into the vortex of politics. After 1930 the aspirations of German industry may be summed up in one phrase: ‘a sound economy in a strong state.’ This was, I remember, the slogan of a meeting of the Ruhr industrialists in 1931. …“I, too, approved this slogan, 'To surmount the crisis it was necessary to reinforce the authority of the state.’ … I believed that by backing Hitler and his party I could contribute to the reinstatement of real government and of orderly conditions, which would enable all branches of activity — and especially business — to function normally once again.”
Unlike Thyssen, who volunteered to support Hitler’s rise to power with massive financial and business backing, Disney is pushing back against DeSantis’ efforts to remake society in an American neofascist mode.
Unless they soon cave in, Disney’s executives probably won’t one day write in their memoirs, as Thyssen did in his:
“But it is no use crying over spilled milk. The strong state of which I then dreamed had nothing in common with the totalitarian state or, rather, caricature of a state, erected by Hitler and his minions.
“Not for an instant did I imagine that it was possible, one hundred and fifty years after the French Revolution and the proclamation of the Rights of Man, to substitute arbitrary action for law in a great modern country, to strangle the most elementary rights of the citizen, to establish an Asiatic tyranny in the heart of Europe, and to foster anachronistic aspirations of conquest and world dominion.”
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This is not America’s first brush with oligarchic fascism, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. President Franklin Roosevelt and Vice President Henry Wallace struggled with it in the 1930s with Charles Lindberg’s infamous Nazi-aligned America First movement.
In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.”
As if he had a time machine and could see the “conservative” media landscape today, Wallace continued:
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”
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But Disney refused to use their media platform to advance the fascists’ agenda. It has only, however, slowed them down a bit.
Ultimately, as fascists gain more power and grow bolder, nothing is off the table. This is the threshold we’re approaching today, where they don’t just trash minorities and march through the streets displaying weapons and huge flags, but began asserting justification for violence and even murder.
Alleging crimes against the majority’s children is a fascist favorite, as Hitler charged with his repeated attacks on Jewish teachers, leading 15% of the nation’s teachers and professors (including a guy named Albert Einstein) to flee the country when he began his attacks on education in 1933.
Fascist politicians start alleging the most vile of crimes by the groups they hope to destroy: words like “grooming” roll off their lips with a smarmy ease.
Soon vigilante groups set out to destroy those accused, sometimes politically, sometimes physically.
German Nazis were particularly fond of accusing people they intended to destroy or kill of sexual “crimes.” As Thyssen wrote:
“General von Fritsch’s affair is also a good sample of the peculiar methods used by the Hitler regime. Fritsch was to be ‘liquidated.’ To achieve this, it is said, the head of the Gestapo personally reproached him with practising homosexuality.
“Fritsch, who denied this from the very start, was ordered to call at the chancellery of the Reich, where he was to be unmasked in the presence of the Supreme Leader. … It seems certain that General von Fritsch has subsequently committed suicide. I can at least say that whatever the actual circumstances of his death may have been, he was anxious to die.”
While history usually sides with the victims of fascists, as we’re seeing today with the people Putin is starving to death in Mariupol, that’s small comfort as they confront terror and death.
DeSantis, Abbott and the other Republican neofascists are playing a dangerous game, using Disney as a proxy for the racial and gender minorities they want as whipping boys. It’s a high-stakes political game that has torn societies apart and destroyed millions of lives in the past.
Standing against them are their victims and the Democratic Party, albeit hobbled in their efforts by the perfidy of Manchin and Sinema. This autumn’s elections may well be the last chance for people of good will who believe in American values and eschew fascism to rise in opposition.
Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, regularly double-check your own registration to make it through a voter purge if you live in a Republican-controlled state, and volunteer to help out inside the Democratic Party or through any of the great groups fighting for a more just America.
Time is short, as Fritz Thyssen and Vice President Wallace would tell you were they alive today.
===
===
flex trumps facts?
no lnx
Greg Abbott's border inspections found 'zero drugs, weapons, or any other type of contraband': report
[Dallas, Texas / United States - 05 30 2018: Texas Governor Greg Abbott holding a press conference to unveil his school safety plan following a school shooting at Santa Fe High School (Shutterstock).]
Uriel J. García , James Barragán , Mitchell Ferman and The Texas Tribune April 22, 2022
State troopers ordered by Gov. Greg Abbott to inspect every commercial truck coming from Mexico earlier this month — which clogged international trade with Mexico — found zero drugs, weapons or any other type of contraband, according to data released by the Department of Public Safety to The Texas Tribune.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/21/greg-abbott-texas-border-inspections/.
Earlier this month, Abbott ordered troopers to thoroughly inspect every commercial truck coming from Mexico’s four border states in what he described as an effort to stop illegal drugs and migrants from being smuggled into Texas. His order for increased state inspections was part of his response to the Biden administration’s announcement that it willlift Title 42 — the pandemic-era health order used by federal immigration officials to expel migrants, including asylum-seekers, at the U.S.-Mexico border. The expiration of the order is expected to increase the number of migrants seeking entry to the U.S.
:{
}:
Over eight days, starting April 8, troopers conducted more than 4,100 inspections of trucks. Troopers didn’t find any contraband but took 850 trucks off the road for various violations related to their equipment. Other truckers were given warnings, and at least 345 were cited for things such as underinflated tires, broken turn signals and oil leaks.
DPS Director Steve McCraw said at a Friday news conference with Abbott that the reason troopers hadn’t found any drugs or migrants in commercial trucks is because drug cartels “don’t like troopers stopping them, certainly north of the border, and they certainly don’t like 100% inspections of commercial vehicles on the bridges. And once that started, we’ve seen a decreased amount of trafficking across bridges — common sense.”
But Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group for human rights in the Americas, said it’s not likely cartels stopped the smuggling of drugs because of the state’s inspections. He said many illegal drugs smuggled into the United States are hidden in small compartments or spare tires of people’s vehicles going through international bridges for tourists. He said if smugglers were trying to hide illegal drugs in a commercial truck, it’s most likely federal immigration officials found them before the trucks were directed to the DPS secondary inspections.
:{
}:
“It just seems odd to me that DPS would be that much of a deterrent for smugglers deciding whether to bring something after already passing through the gauntlet of CBP,” he said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection routinely inspects commercial cargo coming from Mexico for illegal drugs and people being smuggled as soon as truckers cross the international bridges. CBP called Texas’ inspections duplicative and “unnecessary.”
The state inspections created a backlog of 18-wheelers on both sides of the border, with truckers reporting delays of several hours up to a few days, when it usually takes between 20 minutes and a couple of hours for commercial trucks to cross after they’ve been inspected by CBP. The delays also resulted in rotten produce and lost business for grocers.
The state’s inspections at eight commercial bridges that connect Texas cities with Mexican cities in Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas ended Friday after Abbott signed agreements with the four Mexican governors that they would increase security measures to prevent the smuggling of drugs and migrants. Abbott has said he would bring back the secondary inspections if the governors’ security initiatives don’t decrease the number of migrants attempting to cross the border.
Abbott said the deals with the four governors were “historic,” calling them an example of how border states can work together on immigration. But three of the four Mexican governors said they will simply continue security measures they put in place before Abbott ordered the state inspections.
Mexico is among the United States’ largest trading partners. The total trade between the two countries amounted to $56.25 billion in February, according to recent government data. Texas’ biggest ports of entry — Port Laredo, Ysleta, Pharr International Bridge, Eagle Pass, El Paso, Brownsville International Bridge and Del Rio International Bridge — accounted for nearly 65% of the total trade between the U.S. and Mexico in 2021.
Reporters James Barragán and Mitchell Ferman contributed to this report.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
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pissed about title 42 lifted, so
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott — who is running for reelection in the 2022 midterms — made it much more difficult for goods and produce to enter the United States from Mexico when he ordered “enhanced safety inspections” of commercial vehicles at the Texas/Mexico border. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee running against Abbott, has slammed the Republican governor’s political stunt as bad for business. And journalists Alicia Wallace and Vanessa Yurkevich, reporting for CNN in an article published on April 16, describe some of the difficulties that Abbott has inflicted on the supply chain.
“A week-long protest by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott against President Biden’s recent immigration policy reached a resolution on Friday, (April 15), but the gridlock it created has resulted in hundreds of millions of lost dollars and delays in shipments of everything from avocados to automobile parts that will have a longer-term impact,” Wallace and Yurkevich explain. “On Friday, Abbott reversed course on an order he put in place last week that required lengthier ‘enhanced safety inspections’ of commercial vehicles entering Texas. The efforts, he said, were to help stop the flow of illegal contraband and human trafficking.”
The CNN reporters add, “Abbott’s move, which Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller criticized as ‘political theater,’ ultimately created a logjam of trucks between the U.S. and its largest goods trading partner. Vegetable producers say their produce is spoiling in idling trucks and they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars.”
On Tuesday, April 12, O’Rourke held a news conference at an empty warehouse in Pharr, Texas, blaming Abbott for the fact that it was empty and telling reporters, “This should be full of produce and imports that are going to be picked up by U.S. truckers to be taken deeper into this country. But as you can see, right now, it is empty. It’s going to make it harder to keep people employed, to hire people and to keep this economy going here locally and across the state of Texas.”
O’Rourke and Miller aren’t the only ones who are criticizing Abbott’s political stunt. Dante L. Galeazzi, CEO and president of the Texas International Produce Association, told CNN that Abbott used businesses and goods “as bargaining chips,” resulting in 30-hour waits for some commercial trucks entering Texas from Mexico — and causing a lot of fruits and vegetables to spoil.
Galeazzi told CNN, “It could take a week or longer, up to probably three weeks, before the supply chain realigns.”
According to Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, losses for fruit and vegetable producers are estimated to exceed $240 million thanks to Abbott — and Americans can expect to spend more on strawberries, avocados and asparagus.
Jerry Pacheco, president and chief executive officer of the Border Industrial Association in New Mexico, told CNN, “This is not just a localized issue. It’s going to hit you in St. Louis or up in Seattle. We’re connected to a global supply chain…. It’s a bad time to be adding this to consumers’ pockets to pay out their pocketbook.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major headache for the world’s supply chain, aggravating inflation in the U.S. and other countries. And while Abbott’s stunt at the Texas/Mexico border was obviously designed to rally the MAGA base and benefit him politically, it was terrible from a business and economic standpoint.
Matthew Hockenberry, an assistant professor at Fordham University in The Bronx, told CNN, “There’s so much supply instability right now…. The amount of supply uncertainty is so high that to add another straw here to the camel’s back is a dangerous proposition.”
===
bussed immigrants to DC?
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/greg-abbott-shredded-shuttling-migrants/
===
an 4 22
former Trump administration hardline immigration officials are pressuring Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to declare that their states are being "invaded" from Mexico to give thousands of state troopers and National Guard members sweeping new authority to turn back migrants, essentially bestowing enforcement powers that have been a federal responsibility.
That push comes as the Texas Republican governor is preparing to announce on Wednesday “unprecedented actions” to deter migrants coming to Texas in light of the Biden administration's decision announced last week that it will end Title 42, a public health law that has limited asylum to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
As San Antonio's KSAT reports, it's not known whether Abbott, who is up for reelection in November and is already installing more border barrier and allowing troopers to arrest migrants on trespassing charges, supports the aggressive proposals former Trump officials are pushing.
Border Patrol officials say they are planning for as many as 18,000 arrivals daily once the health policy, known as the Title 42 authority, expires in May. Last week, about 7,100 migrants were coming a day to the southern U.S. border.
"The way former Trump immigration officials see it," according to KSAT, "Texas and Arizona can pick up where the federal government leaves off once the policy ends. Their plan involves a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution to have the National Guard or state police forcibly send migrants to Mexico, without regard to immigration laws and law enforcement procedures. Border enforcement has always been a federal responsibility, and in Texas, state leaders have not been pushing for such a move."
Tom Homan, the former acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement under former President Donald Trump, said at a border security conference in San Antonio last week he had spoken with Abbott but gave no indication about whether the two-term governor supported the idea.
On Tuesday, while addressing conservative talk radio station KCRS, Abbott said this about the possibility of him invoking the authority: "We’ll be taking unprecedented action. Congress has to stop talking about it, has to stop complaining about it, has to stop going to the border and looking at it. Congress has to take action, just like Texas is taking action.”
In Arizona, the Center for Renewing America, a conservative policy think tank that includes Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hardliner and former Homeland Security official under Trump, has argued that states are entitled to defend themselves from immediate danger or invasion, as it is defined by the “invasion clause,” under the “states self defense clause.
===
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an 3 22
no lnx no twt
Texas librarian fired for refusing to remove books that had been banned: ‘That was censorship’
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaking at the WTTC Global Summit 2016]
Alex Henderson March 23, 2022
Far-right culture warriors in Texas have been declaring war against books that offend them not only in public schools, but also, in public libraries. And in Llano County, Texas, librarian Suzette Baker has been fired from her position as head librarian for the Kingsland Branch Library for refusing to remove some books that had been banned.
Baker told KXAN-TV, an NBC affiliate in Austin, “The books in my library in Kingsland were not taken off the shelves. We did not move them. I told my boss that was censorship.”
According to Baker, a local group wanted to remove books they called “pornographic,” including one about a transgender teen — and Baker maintained that there was nothing wrong with that book.
Baker told KXAN, “It is her biography of her life growing up as a transgendered teenager, and obviously, this group thought that was too much for their children to read…. No one is forcing their kids to read anything.”
Leila Green Little, described by KXAN reporter Nabil Remadna as a “patron of the Llano County libraries,” speaks highly of Baker — telling the station, “I always thought she was extremely professional, very knowledgeable, has a strong character, and did her job well to the best of my knowledge.”
Little has set up a GoFundMe page for Baker, raising more than $17,000 as of March 23. And she has a problem with the way in which books are being removed from the Llano County Library.
Little told KXAN, “I have now counted 12 books that I know have been removed from Llano County Library, and I can’t get clarification from the library system on why…. There are very clear rules that should be followed with regards to censorship to books in the public library. Those rules were not followed.”
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===
an 3 22
Governor Greg Abbott‘s use of the Texas National Guard to protect “some of the wealthiest private ranches” as a part of his $2 billion a year border security mission is being blasted – by some of the very service members ordered to stand guard “outside ranches with wealthy or politically connected owners.”
“We really don’t understand why we are there,” one service member told The Texas Tribune. “We’re essentially mall security for ranches that already have paid security details to protect them.”
The Texas Tribune’s investigation into the program reveals the National Guard members deployed to protect those wealthy ranches “have widely decried the mission as aimless, political and oversized.” It reportedly was stopped last month after the Tribune started its investigation – and started filing document requests.
“Earlier this year,” in one example, “about 30 Texas National Guard members were ordered to stand watch outside some of the most prestigious private ranches in South Texas, more than an hour’s drive away from the Mexico border, as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s highly touted mission to curb illegal immigration,” the Tribune reports.
Included among those wealthy ranches being protected are “the sprawling and renowned King Ranch and the GOP-connected Armstrong Ranch.”
The Armstrong Ranch is “the property of a longtime Republican family that has hosted GOP leaders like Karl Rove, former Gov. Rick Perry and former Vice President Dick Cheney,” who made it infamous when, as Vice President, he shot his host, accidentally, in the face.
Overall, Abbott has deployed 10,000 troops for his wider “border security mission,” named “Operation Lone Star.” Many of them “have said they were not given a clear task or adequate training, equipment or lodging.”
These are not voluntary deployments nor are they full-time service members who would be performing regular duties anyway and just happened to get sent elsewhere.
“Abbott kicked off Operation Lone Star last March and ramped up its scale in September, leading to involuntary deployments with only a few days notice for part-time troops who have civilian jobs, lives and families.”
Should anyone think the presence of the National Guard is a good idea or necessary to nab migrants crossing the border, not only were many stationed 80 miles from the border, but they do not have legal authority to cross into the private land they reportedly are protecting to make arrests.
Another Guard member says it looks “crazy” to have them protecting rich ranchers.
“These ranchers have enough money to do private security or have private security guard these gates,” the Guardsman told the Tribune. “The optics are just kind of crazy.”
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**Greg Abbott** — Received somewhere in the range $9 million from a tort against a homeowner whose tree branch fell and permanently paralyzed him while was jogging.[7] As Texas attorney general he has supported tort reform that would substantially cap the amount of tort payments.[8]
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/texas-power-outage/
fail 70k ppl
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guar no fail to hedge to --> [surge charge? pvt pred corp?]
Help me get through the winter': Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pleads with crypto miners as severe winter weather arrives...Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is reportedly pleading with crypto miners to help the state get through the bitter winter in the event the electric power grid fails.
According to Bloomberg...
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an 1 22
no lnx twt
The 'radicalized, weaponized' Texas GOP is pushing Republicans all over the US to the extreme right: journalist
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas speaking at the 2021 Young Latino Leadership Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Arizona,]
Alex Henderson January 31, 2022
Although Texas is still a red state, it is by no means the reddest of the red. Trump carried Texas by about 6% in the 2020 presidential election compared to 43% in Wyoming, 26% in Alabama or 30% in Idaho. And former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who is running for governor in the 2022 midterms, came within striking distance of Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas’ 2018 U.S. Senate race, losing by only 2%.
Texas Republicans, however, haven’t responded to Democratic gains in their state by becoming more moderate, but rather, by becoming increasingly extreme. And journalist Wajahat Ali, in an op-ed published by the Daily Beast on January 30, argues that Texas Republicans are having a destructive influence not only in Texas, but all over the United States.
“Everything is bigger in Texas, including a radicalized, weaponized and emboldened GOP’s audacious abuse of power to fuel their culture wars and subvert democracy,” Ali warns. “If you want to see a sneak preview of the GOP’s national project to maintain white, minority rule, then look no further than Texas, the second-most populous state in the nation, that now serves as a trendsetter for Republican state legislatures across the nation.”
Ali continues, “Texas Republicans, led by Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz, are committed to one-upping their colleagues by introducing the most extreme versions of voter suppression, open carry laws, anti-abortion bills, and critical race theory (CRT) bans…. The Lone Star State has become the ‘laboratory’ for GOP politicians and their hard-right agenda, according to Democrat Ben Chou, who is running to be commissioner of Harris County Precinct 4.”
Chou believes that Abbott and Cruz are trying to “one-up” far-right Republicans in other states, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Houston-area Democrat told the Beast, “This is all for a national platform for when they go into the Republican primary.”
Abbott, Cruz and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, according to Ali, are pandering to the extreme right in a variety of ways— from voter suppression to anti-vaxxer extremism.
“Texas serves as a warning for Democrats across the nation to pay particular attention to state legislature races,” Ali writes. “Currently, both houses in Texas have a Republican majority. As a result, the GOP controls redistricting.”...
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/abbott-2656224077/
ercot fail 2x?
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omfg, HOW MUCH OF THIS WAS TEED UP BY CPP BS? ANTI-GUBMINT
no lnx an 11 21
'Pro-death cult strikes back': Right-wing judges block Biden’s vaccine rule for big companies
Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams November 08, 2021
Progressives concerned about workplace safety and public health responded with dismay after a federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily blocked the Biden administration's attempt to require workers at companies with 100 or more employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19 or tested weekly.
Citing "grave statutory and constitutional" problems with the rule, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued the stay in response to a joint petition filed Friday by a coalition of businesses, conservative advocacy groups, and the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah.
That legal challenge, and separate lawsuits from Republican-led states, came just one day after President Joe Biden announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would begin enforcing its newly unveiled Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) in the coming weeks. Companies with at least 100 employees have until December 5 to require unvaccinated workers to wear masks indoors, and by January 4, they must require vaccinations or administer weekly tests.
Decrying the decision of the "right-wing Fifth Circuit," labor journalist Steven Greenhouse said on social media that "it's terrible for worker safety and public health that three conservative activist judges have suspended Biden's... new rule requiring workers at companies with more than 100 workers to get vaccinated or tested."
"OSHA's mission is to protect workers' health," Greenhouse continued, "but the appellate judges seem to forget that Covid has killed thousands of meatpacking, retail, and other workers."
More than 750,000 people in the U.S. have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic started last March, and the disease continues to kill nearly 1,100 people per day, most of them unvaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Recent studies confirm that vaccines save lives.Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services analyzed the relationship between county-level inoculation rates and Covid-19 outcomes among U.S. seniors and found that vaccines helped ward off 265,000 infections, 107,000 hospitalizations, and 39,000 deaths during the first five months of 2021.
And in September, CDC researchers found that individuals in the U.S. who were not fully vaccinated last spring and summer were 11 times more likely to die after being infected with the coronavirus—and over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized—than those who were fully inoculated.
Greenhouse said that "the judges evidently sympathize with[Texas Republican Gov.] Greg Abbott's let-people-die stance—that it'soverreachfor OSHA to act strongly to protect workers from Covid."
David Michaels, a leader of OSHA during the Obama administration, also rebuked the federal appeals court, describing its decision as legally dubious and politically motivated.
"The same activist court that refused to stay Texas' law that permits bounty hunters to sue anyone who aids an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy has stayed an OSHA rule that is clearly within OSHA's authority, will save lives, and make workplaces safe," he told the New York Times.
According to the Times, "At the core of the legal challenge is the question of whether OSHA exceeded its authority in issuing the rule and whether such a mandate would need to be passed by Congress."
The newspaper reported:
The suit against the mandate stated that President Biden "set the legislative policy" of substantially increasing the number of Americans covered by vaccination requirements, and "then set binding rules enforced with the threat of large fines."
"That is a quintessential legislative act—and one wholly unrelated to the purpose of OSHA itself, which is protecting workplace safety," the suit said. "Nowhere in OSHA's enabling legislation does Congress confer upon it the power to end pandemics."
Corporate executives asked, and the Biden administration agreed, to delay implementation of OSHA's new ETS "until after the New Year, citing concerns about worker shortages during the important holiday season," Reuters noted.
Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda, meanwhile, said in a statement that the Labor Department, home to OSHA, is "confident in its legal authority" to issue vaccine requirements.
The vaccine rule for companies with 100 or more employees "applies to 84.2 million workers at 1.9 million private-sector employers," Reuters reported. "OSHA estimates that 31.7 million of [those] workers are unvaccinated and 60% of employers will require vaccinations, up from 25% today, resulting in another 22.7 million employees getting vaccinated."
Several million additional workers are covered by the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for employees of the executive branch, federal contractors, and staff at healthcare facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding. OSHA officials say they are considering expanding the jab-or-test rule to include companies with fewer than 100 workers.
"The Occupational Safety and Health Act explicitly gives OSHA the authority to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them," Nanda said. "We are fully prepared to defend this standard in court."
The Fifth Circuit panel's two-page order directs the Biden administration to respond to the request for a permanent injunction against the rule by 5 p.m. ET Monday.
As the Times noted, it remains unclear whether the court's stay "would be a procedural blip for the Biden administration or the first step in the unwinding of the mandate."
The newspaper explained that "after both sides have filed briefs, the court will decide whether to lift the temporary injunction, allowing the rule to proceed as planned, or whether to grant a permanent injunction. OSHA could then take the case to the Supreme Court."
While some legal experts argue that the Labor Department has the regulatory authority to compel private employers to protect the health of workers and the broader public through mandatory vaccination amid a deadly global pandemic,Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, told Reuters that "there will be so much litigation it will never see the light of day."
Twenty-four attorneys general threatened to sue the Biden administration over the rule back in September, and several followed through immediately after it was published in the federal register on Friday.
In addition to the petition filed with the Fifth Circuit, attorneys general in 11 states—Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming—filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
And in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the states of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia sued, with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis saying at a press conference that "the federal government can't just unilaterally impose medical policy under the guise of workplace regulation."
Roughly 70% of U.S. adults are fully inoculated against Covid-19, and about 80% have received at least one shot, according to the CDC. Recent polling shows that a majority of U.S. adults favor Covid-19 vaccination requirements, with only about one-fifth to one-quarter of respondents opposed.
OSHA, Reuters pointed out, is "fighting history. The agency has issued 10 ETS over its 50 years. Of the six that were challenged in court, only one survived entirely intact."
Donald Verrilli, U.S. solicitor general during former President Barack Obama's administration, however, told the news outlet that the Biden administration "wouldn't move forward unless they thought that they could defend it legally... I think the constitutional challenges are all going to fail."
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dead of night
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/texas-gerrymandering/
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no lnx many
GOP pushes strategy to prolong the pandemic
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott feels the heat: analysis
Amanda Marcotte and Salon October 12, 2021
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, has once again proven his stalwart commitment to aiding the virus that causes COVID-19 in its goal of spreading as far as possible. Late Monday, the Republican state leader issued an executive order banning all entities in the state — including private businesses — from requiring employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. (All other vaccine requirements remain untouched, because the "principled opposition" to vaccine mandates is an inch deep.)
As many folks who wish hypocrisy still mattered have pointed out, Abbott's ban violates his party's supposed commitment to a low regulatory environment for businesses by interfering with private businesses who wish to institute vaccine requirements. When it comes to the conflict between being pro-business and pro-virus, however, it was never any contest with Republicans. All other GOP principles fall before the newfound Republican commitment to making sure COVID-19 infects as many human bodies as it can.
Abbott, of course, did not admit that he was preventing businesses from enacting basic health and safety standards. Instead, he presented the ban as a defense of business, accusing President Joe Biden of "bullyingmany private entities into imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, causing workforce disruptions that threaten Texas's continued recovery." That's is just a small taste of the doublespeak that the entire executive order is written in.
Abbott is not standing up for businesses or the economy.
:{
}:
Biden's vaccine mandate was quietly welcomed by many businesses who want to have normalcy-returning mandates but want someone else to blame when Trumper employees whine about it.And their worry about worker shortages was unfounded, as most vaccine resistant workers will get the shot rather than lose their job. Abbott's claims about economic recovery are also hot air. The sluggish recovery is due to the ongoing pandemic and will only bounce back if more people get vaccinated.
No, it's quite clear what's going on and has been going on with Republicans fighting every effort to get the pandemic under control: The GOP wants to prolong the pandemic because they think doing so will help them in the 2022 midterms.
Abbott himself is up for reelection in 2022, and, at first blush, it might seem a weird strategy to practically make the virus his running mate. (Though the coronavirus has tough competition in an "ew, gross" contest with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.) But Abbott is making a smart, if deeply evil and downright murderous, bet. Voters, especially fairweather voters, tend to blame everything on the party that controls the White House, even if the blame for any problem actually falls on the opposition. If the pandemic is still a problem in November 2022, then there's a very real chance that large numbers of Democratic voters, already demoralized by the lack of legislative progress on other fronts, simply won't show up to vote. That will make it easier for Republicans to sweep the midterms.
A new Axios-Ipsos poll demonstrates that the "prolong the pandemic" strategy is working for Republicans. Trust in Biden on the pandemic has fallen to 42%, down 10 points from where it was 6 months ago. Most of the trust has slipped with Democrats and independent voters. Americans are also getting depressed, with 30% saying it will be more than a year before life returns to normal, which is triple what the number from June.
The COVID-19 culture war isn't just demoralizing Democratic and potential Democratic voters. It appears GOP leadership sees this issue as a way to invigorate their own base, whose entire political reason for existing is increasingly just to "own the liberals."
Anti-vaccine and anti-mask protests, which are getting rowdy and even violent, started off as a classic right-wing Astroturfed phenomenon, but it's since gained a lot of traction among ordinary conservatives who aren't getting paid to throw tantrums at perplexed school board members. Culture war provocations over Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head floated earlier this year by Fox News weren't getting the job done — but freaking out over masks and shots really gets the juices going for the worst Americans, i.e. the people the GOP needs to turn out at the polls.
Vaccine mandates are a threat to the "victory through infecting our own voters with COVID-19" strategy for Republicans, for one simple reason: They work. As a White House report released last week details, "organizations with vaccination requirements have seen their vaccination rates increase by more than 20 percentage points and have routinely seen their share of fully vaccinated workers rise above 90%." Despite conservatives floating threats of mass walkouts, the paper-thin "principled" opposition to vaccines disappears the second that conservatives face an actual consequence for refusing to vaccinate.
The Biden administration has fallen far short of where it should be in terms of vaccine mandates, both slow-walking the employer mandates and completely sidestepping the possibility of banning the unvaccinated from planes before the holidays. Still, even the threat of vaccine mandates is starting to have an impact. As the report notes, the rate of unvaccinated Americans has been cut by one-third since Biden first started issuing mandates.
Republicans are in a race against time in their efforts to reduce vaccination rates to the point where the pandemic is still a live issue next November. COVID-19 rates are falling, down 24% in the past 14 days nationally and down 39% in Abbott's home state, which continues to have one of the highest COVID death rates in the nation. This is mostly because of vaccination, but also because so many Americans have been infected that it's adding to herd immunity. It's still unclear if there will be another winter surge or if the virus is finally running out of the unimmunized bodies it needs to remain a serious threat. There is a strong possibility that the end of the pandemic is closer than many Americans think.
So by making it as hard for Biden to get shots into arms faster, Republicans are keeping COVID-19 cases high to keep Biden's approval ratings low.
If that doesn't change — or if it gets worse with another surge — there's a very real chance that this pandemic makes the already dim prospects for Democrats in 2022 even worse. And that, in turn, sets the stage for Donald Trump to cheat his way back into the White House in 2024. So it's no wonder that power-hungry Republicans are betting big on their prolong the pandemic strategy, even if it comes at the cost of killing their own voters. Big risks lead to big rewards. For the Republicans, setting themselves up for permanent one-party minority rule is the biggest prize.
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covid spike
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/texas-schools/
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Greg Abbott's office spiraled into chaos after being caught off-guard by Trump's demand for an election audit
October 02, 2021
Former President Donald Trump reportedly sent Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's (R) office into a frenzy as state officials tried to determine how serious he was about pursuing the audit.
The debacle began on ....
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921
scathing ad slamming Greg Abbott was pulled from football broadcast at the last minute: report
On Saturday, September 18, a scathing Lincoln Project ad attacking Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was scheduled to air during ESPN's broadcast of a football game between the University...
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Musk loves Texas’ right-wing 'social policies' — at least according to Greg Abbott
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mebbe we shd've let the sombitches secede when we had the chance(s):
iterative voter suppression consolidates power minority rule
texas kill roe and voting in one day?! abbott
tx ct ordered baby jail reboot in 1 wk?! backed by scotus (no names ruling?]
https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/big-lie/
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rove takeover pioneer?
tex state scotus backed gov idiocy on mask mandate
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/15/world/covid-delta-variant-vaccine
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officially authoritarian voter suppress, CRT, __, nat'l guard on border, arrest dems who fled to DC
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/border-wall/
Gov. Greg Abbott promised 'transparency' for border wall donations. But donors don’t have to use real names
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/texas-history-book/
cdv
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/texas-history-book/
cdv
In the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney proclaimed that Black people have "no rights that the white man is bound to respect." Today's Jim Crow Republican Party, and the white right more broadly, have taken the spirit of those words and updated them for the 21st century, effectively by arguing that "white people are not bound to respect historical truth or established facts — at least not as they pertain to Black and brown people in America".
As the next step in their war against multiracial democracy, the Republican Party and its allies have launched a moral panic about "critical race theory." Of course, their version of "critical race theory" is a type of racial bogeyman or psychological projection, a function of white racial paranoia about the "browning of America" and the threat of "white genocide."
Facts do not matter in the right-wing echo chamber. It is of no importance that the white right's version of "critical race theory" has nothing to do with the scholarly paradigm of the same name.
As the truism holds, history is written by the victors. To that end, in dozens of states across the country, the white right is engaging in an Orwellian campaign of rewriting school curricula to prevent the teaching of "critical race theory" -- which in practice means stopping any serious engagement with America's real and often uncomfortable history of racism and white supremacy.
For example, in Florida, a law was recently passed mandating a survey of students and faculty in public colleges and universities to determine their political beliefs. Of course, Florida has also banned the teaching of "critical race theory."
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, perhaps the single most influential voice on the white right, recently suggested that cameras should be placed in classrooms to ensure that no teachers will deploy "critical race theory" or other facts and arguments deemed to be "unpatriotic."
The Republican-controlled Texas Senate recently passed a bill eliminating a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement and other human rights struggles be taught in public schools. The bill also removed a condemnation of the Ku Klux Klan from course requirements as well.
As Yahoo News reports, the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Projectand "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."
This Republican legislation has been met with widespread outrage. But that reaction should just be the beginning. The next step involves doing the harder work of understanding why so many other (mostly white) Americans actually believe that "critical race theory" and the teaching of America's real history should be banned. Understanding these beliefs and motivations is essential to defeating American neofascism and its white supremacist social and political project.
Many Americans have been propagandized by their schools, news media, the internet, churches and other social institutions to believe in a large set of interlocking lies and myths about the country's past and present. To intervene against these lies often causes emotional pain and/or narcissistic injury to those who hold such beliefs.
This dynamic is especially powerful for those who are emotionally, psychologically, financially and politically invested in defending and protecting white privilege and white people's control over almost every aspect of American life. In that context, the personal truly is political: Whiteness, as a concept and a social force, has become linked at an individual level to the maintenance of white power.
How does this right-wing fantasy machine work? The Root has exhaustively documented how some of America's most widely used history textbooks misrepresent the real history of the color line and distort such topics as chattel slavery, the Civil War, the civil rights movement and social injustice more generally, through the use of what sociologist Joe Feagin has called the "white racial frame."
Michael Harriot offers this analysis:
So when Mitch McConnell and 38 Republican senators sent a letter to the secretary of education decrying the ghastly prospect of white students having to learn actual facts about slavery, it was not unexpected. For centuries, this country's schools have perpetuated a whitewashed version of history that either erases or reduces the story of Black America down to a B-plot in the American script. It's why they hate Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project and anything factual — because the white-centric interpretation of our national past is so commonly accepted, white people have convinced themselves that anything that varies from the Caucasian interpretation must be a lie. …
This is why they oppose expanding the historiography of our national story. American schools have never taught a version of history that wasn't racialized. But, apparently, it's perfectly fine if the racial narrative skews toward whiteness. They can't be opposed to learning a different historical perspective because they never learned history; they were spoonfed fiction in bite-sized morsels.
To be fair, it's understandable why they are so adamant about what they believe in.
Imagine you are a white man. Now imagine what it's like going through 12 years of school, four years of college, graduate school and an entire career that made you one of the most powerful people on the planet. Now imagine a group of Black journalists, led by a Black woman, told you that you don't know shit.
To that point, the right-wing echo chamber consistently repeats neo-Confederate "Lost Cause" myths, such as the oft-repeated lie that the Civil War was fought over "states' rights" rather than white-on-Black chattel slavery.
The right obsessively depicts the Democrats as "the party of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow and slavery". This is a deliberate distortion of history because the pro-slavery, pro-segregation faction of the Democratic Party became solid Republicans after the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Right-wing propagandists also love to claim that Martin Luther King Jr. was a "Republican," or at least espoused Republican values. This is a ludicrous allegation: In contemporary terms King was a democratic socialist or progressive who opposed racism, poverty, military adventurism and injustice of all kinds. King would have viewed the modern-day conservative movement as a great force for evil in American society and the world.
Black conservative propagandists play an important role in the right-wing echo chamber, validating racist fantasies that slavery was a "gift" to Black people because it brought them to America. In this twisted perception of history, chattel slavery is understood as a "necessary evil" because it gave Black people Christianity and taught them the value of "hard work".
These same Black conservatives love to repeat the vicious lie that the Democratic Party is a type of "plantation." In reality, the plantations of the antebellum South were prison camps, charnel houses and places of torture, rape, suffering and death. Black conservative propagandists frequently announce that they are special and uniquely capable of "thinking for themselves," as compared to the vast majority of Black people who support the Democratic Party and are therefore deemed to be ignorant or uninformed.
The campaign against "critical race theory" — and against teaching America's real history — must be understood as part of a larger fascist strategy of attacking public schools and other institutions of learning with the aim of creating compliant followers and a public that is not equipped to participate in democracy — or to defend it.
This plan involves placing white supremacists, QAnon conspiracists, Trump supporters and other right-wing extremists — to the degree those categories of people can be separated — on local school boards and library advisory councils, banning "controversial" books, and the surveillance or intimidation of teachers deemed too "liberal" or suspected of "politicizing" the classroom, i.e., by refusing to teach right-wing dogma and other lies.
The fascist assault on education and critical thinking also involves think tanks, right-wing activists and advocacy groups, along with a network of wealthy funders committed to remaking American society to fit their racist, theocratic and plutocratic vision.
The Texas Republicans' attempt to literally whitewash the Ku Klux Klan out of American history is so ridiculous that it approaches parody. That doesn't make such historical erasure and distortion any less dangerous. Those dangers are further amplified by the crisis of democracy caused by the Jim Crow Republicans and ascendant neofascist movement.
As historian Timothy Snyder warned in a recent essay in the New York Times:
Democracy requires individual responsibility, which is impossible without critical history. It thrives in a spirit of self-awareness and self-correction. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is infantilizing: We should not have to feel any negative emotions; difficult subjects should be kept from us. Our memory laws amount to therapy, a talking cure. In the laws' portrayal of the world, the words of white people have the magic power to dissolve the historical consequences of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression. Racism is over when white people say so.
We start by saying we are not racists. Yes, that felt nice. And now we should make sure that no one says anything that might upset us. The fight against racism becomes the search for a language that makes white people feel good. The laws themselves model the desired rhetoric. We are just trying to be fair. We behave neutrally. We are innocent.
When viewed in the aggregate, these attacks on "critical race theory" and the teaching of America's real history echo some of the worst aspects of the country's past. In his book "Trouble in Mind", historian Leon Litwack details how history was taught during the Jim Crow reign of terror:
The history to which Black children were exposed in the classroom and the primers made a virtual gospel of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon institutions and ways of thinking and acting…. What little they learned of their own history consisted often of disparaging caricatures of Black people as the least civilized of the races — irresponsible, thoughtless, foolish, childlike people, satisfied with their lowly place in American life, incapable of self-control and self-direction. The history of Black people was a history of submission gladly endured and of services faithfully rendered. Transported from the darkness of heathen Africa to the civilized and Christian New World, grateful slaves found contentment and happiness…. The treatment of emancipation depicted Blacks passively waiting for Massa' Lincoln to strike off their shackles. And Reconstruction saw the enthronement of Black ignorance and inexperience, with the Ku Klux Klan in some account redeeming Anglo-Saxon civilization from alien rule. The history lessons taught in public schools were calculated to produce patriotic citizens, albeit with a distinctive southern bias.
The Jim Crow Republicans and the white right view this approach to American history as admirable, something to be resuscitated from the dustbin of the country's past.
In the self-serving stories told by the Ku Klux Klan, that terrorist organization had noble origins, represented "Christian values," did charity work and helped the poor, served the community by dealing with drunks and other miscreants, and protected "white families" as well as the "good Blacks". This is the fake history that the Jim Crow Republicans want to see taught to America's young people.
The neofascist movement understands that if it wins the battle over the teaching of the past, it can in turn control the future. In total, the right wing's moral panic over "critical race theory" resembles the kind of hearts-and-minds indoctrination favored by the great villains of history. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler and Goebbels would be proud to see their legacy continued.
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==
pow bak 919
former AG so escalator , poster boy for AG?
raga run by?
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gov. Greg Abbott says power grid better than ever as Texans asked to cut back electricity use
Mitchell Ferman The Texas Tribune
June 17, 2021
"Gov. Greg Abbott says power grid better than ever as Texans asked to cut back electricity use" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday afternoon that Texas' main power grid “is better today than it's ever been" — even as residents were on their third consecutive day of being asked to reduce electricity use.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the main power grid, is urging conservation through Friday, as a number of power plants were inexplicably offline at the same time as the state was experiencing record June demand for electricity.
As of Wednesday, when Abbott made his first public comments about this week's grid conditions, ERCOT officials have still not said why so many power plants were unexpectedly offline. Approximately 12,000 megawatts of power generation were offline Monday afternoon — enough to power 2.4 million homes on a hot summer day. That's several times more than what ERCOT would typically expect to go down during June.
Approximately 9,000 megawatts of electricity were still offline as of Wednesday afternoon, an ERCOT spokesperson said.
ERCOT officials are working to determine why so many units were down this week. Some experts theorized that the deadly winter storm in February may have caused damage to plants that is causing new complications, but ERCOT officials did not offer any details.
Abbott, however, said Wednesday that power generation plants were down for repairs.
“They got repairs done now, before [the] real heat of summer hits," Abbott said in response to a power grid question during a press conference the governor held about plans to build a border wall at the state's boundary with Mexico.
Abbott's office did not immediately respond to questions for comment about his power grid statements Wednesday.
Power plants typically make maintenance repairs during the fall and the spring months ahead of the more extreme weather seasons. In April, just two months after the winter storm, Texans were asked to conserve electricity when a significant amount of plants were down for maintenance.
Power grids must keep supply and demand in balance at all times. When Texas' grid falls below its safety margin of excess supply, the grid operator starts taking additional precautions to avoid blackouts. The first precaution is to ask the public to cut back electricity usage.
ERCOT officials said it “appears unlikely" that the ERCOT grid would need to implement outages, like it did in February, to reduce strain on the grid this week.
Earlier Wednesday, officials with ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission, which oversees ERCOT, briefed members of the Texas House's Democratic and Republican caucuses in separate calls about the grid conditions.
Peter Lake, the PUC chair, told House Democrats that officials still cannot explain why so many power generators were offline — but said the agency is working to find out.
“We don't know if it's because of residual damage from the winter event, we don't know if it's because there was a maintenance delay because of the winter event," Lake said. “We don't know if it's a function of the mechanics of the market and the economics of the current market, but … we've got to figure that out."
Cassandra Pollock contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/16/texas-power-grid-ercot-greg-abbott/.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
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consulted for what exactly?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/abbott/
no lnx
Greg Abbott consulted an infamous climate change denier before Texas energy debacle: reporter
Alex Henderson March 17, 2021
Gov. Greg Abbott has drawn a great deal of criticism from Texas Democrats, including former Rep. Beto O'Rourke, over his response to the Lone Star State's recent energy debacle — which found millions of Texas without heat, electricity and running water during freezing temperatures. And according to Madlin Mekelburg, an environmental reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, one of the people Abbott consulted before the cold snap was Joe Bastardi — a meteorologist known for being a climate change denier.
Abbott, during the crisis, claimed that green energy was to blame for the widespread power outages that Texas was suffering. But as O'Rourke pointed out, only a fraction of Texas' energy comes from wind power — the state is much more reliant on fossil fuels. And the state's power grid, O'Rourke stressed, suffered across-the-board problems because it hadn't been properly winterized.
Bastardi, reporter Abigail Rosenthal notes on the My San Antonio website, is someone who was recommended to Abbott by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Fox News' Sean Hannity. The meteorologist has said that if changes in climate occur, they do so naturally — claiming that use of fossil fuels has nothing to do with it. Scientists all over the world, however, have been warning that fossil fuels are a key factor in climate change.
Hannity, in fact, wrote the forward for Bastardi's book, "The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War" — which has drawn a great deal of criticism from scientists. Bastardi has appeared on Hannity's show more than once.
Mekelburg reports that Abbott and Bastardi spoke on February 12, which was a few days before the freezing temperatures arrived in Texas. And Bastardi, according to Mekelburg, told the Texas governor to expect "a winter version of a Category 5 hurricane."
During the cold snap, major Texas cities like Houston, Austin and San Antonio experienced afternoon highs of around 33F or 34F — which wouldn't be unusual for Pittsburgh or Detroit in February, but was unusually cold for cities in South Texas. Unlike states that were used to coping with icy, freezing weather, Texas did not winterize its power system — and its power grid failed.
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coke for votes [vs no food and water for AA voter lines]
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/greg-abbott-2651059181/
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who said small price to pay to keep gubmint out of our business?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/green-new-deal/
Author and environmentalist Naomi Klein argued in a New York Times column Sunday that Republicans rushed to attack the Green New Deal as disaster struck in Texas because the popular push for a sweeping transformation of the U.S. energy system poses a genuine threat to the deregulated, fossil-fuel dependent status quo that left the Lone Star State vulnerable to extreme weather driven by the climate crisis.
"Texans are living through the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one that has also stood in the way of effective climate action," Klein wrote. "Fortunately, there's a way out—and that's precisely what Republican politicians in the state most fear."
Klein characterized the ongoing power, water, and food crises in Texas as the consequence of "an energy-market free-for-all" stemming from "a fateful series of decisions [that] were made in the late-'90s, when the now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically deregulate Texas' electricity sector."
"As a result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private energy companies," Klein wrote. "Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the grid and build in redundancies for extreme weather. Today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks or weatherize their infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike)."
In the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri, ordinary Texans are beginning to see the direct impact of the deregulatory push on their material wellbeing as electric companies hit them with bills topping $17,000—"a consequence," Klein argued, "of leaving pricing to the whims of the market."
Alluding to her previous work on "the shock doctrine"—a term she coined to describe how the right has exploited past disasters to force through unpopular privatization and austerity agendas—Klein noted that "large-scale shocks... become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else's expense."
"I often quote a guru of the free market revolution, the late economist Milton Friedman," Klein wrote. "In 1982, he wrote about what he saw as the mission of right-wing economists like him: 'Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."[gop sez BO cos chic guy]
The difference between past shocks such as the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis and the current emergency in Texas, Klein argued, is that "Republican ideas are no longer lying around—they are lying in ruin."
Texas' Republican Gov. Greg Abbott attacked the Green New Deal—a proposal that has not even been implemented—in an appearance on Fox News last week because he knows its promise to "create millions of union jobs building out shock-resilient green energy infrastructure, transit, and affordable housing" is "extremely appealing" to Texans as they "suffer under the overlapping crises of unemployment, houselessness, racial injustice, crumbling public services, and extreme weather," Klein wrote.
"All that Texas' Republicans have to offer, in contrast," Klein added, "is continued oil and gas dependence—driving more climate disruption—alongside more privatizations and cuts to public services to pay for their state's mess, which we can expect them to push in the weeks and months ahead." [death spiral]
As The Houston Chroniclereported last week, Republican members of the Texas state legislature are already signaling that "one of the most immediate reforms they will push for is recalibrating the state's electricity grid to ensure more fossil fuels are in that mix and fewer renewables."
But Klein contended that "unlike when the Republican Party began deploying the shock doctrine, its free-market playbook is no longer novel."
"The horrors currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of the climate crisis and the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure in the face of that crisis," Klein wrote. "So of course the Green New Deal finds itself under fierce attack. Because for the first time in a long time, Republicans face the very thing that they claim to revere but never actually wanted: competition—in the battle of ideas." twt
in recent days, as Common Dreams has reported, progressive advocacy groups such as the youth-led Sunrise Movement and Greenpeace USA have made the case that—contrary to the GOP's bad-faith attacks—a Green New Deal is precisely what's needed to help Texas equitably recover from the present emergency and build the resilience necessary to withstand future climate-driven disasters.
"Many people across the country are realizing for the first time that fossil fuels are not only polluting, they are unstable. Millions of Texans are being let down by coal, oil, and gas right now," Greenpeace climate campaigner Ashley Thomson said last Thursday.
On Monday, activists with the Sunrise Movement of Texas are expected to rally at the state capitol in Austin to demand immediate relief for struggling Texans, the resignations of Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas.), and passage of a Green New Deal that would "make our state and country more resilient to future disasters, and create millions of good union jobs in the process of transforming these necessary structures."
"Texas is the perfect example of what happens when our politicians cater to fossil fuel executives instead of the young people who have been shouting from the rooftops for years, warning of an impending climate emergency like this," said Chante Davis, a 17-year-old Sunrise Movement leader and Houston resident.
"I've survived three once in a lifetime storms in my 17 years of life," added Davis, whose family moved to Texas in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. "We need change, and the Green New Deal is the obvious, urgent solution. As our communities come together to fill the void of our government, our leaders must invest in us to provide jobs that directly address the crises we face."
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an 121
"The NRA says it's moving to Texas. Bankruptcy experts say it may be more of a legal move than a physical one." was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
The National Rifle Association filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy Friday and said it would eventually reincorporate in Texas — a move experts say is a legal maneuver to escape an aggressive lawsuit being pursued by the New York attorney general.
Officials in Texas — which is known as both a gun-friendly and debtor-friendly state — welcomed the NRA's announcement Friday, embracing the NRA's stance that it is fleeing a “toxic political environment" in New York.
In August, New York's attorney general filed a lawsuit against the organization alleging decades of fraudulent use of the NRA's funds by its executives. New York Attorney General Letitia James accused NRA leaders of knowingly signing off on fraudulent statements.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, in atweet, celebrated the announcement: “Welcome to Texas — a state that safeguards the 2nd Amendment." Other conservative Texas lawmakers also welcomed the news.
But bankruptcy experts said the NRA's filing is less of a physical relocation and more of a legal play to avoid a potentially disastrous case in New York.
The move to Texas, legal experts said, will likely be on paper.
“They probably figured they'd have a more friendly judge in Texas," said Josh Wolfshohl, a bankruptcy attorney at Porter Hedges LLP in Houston.
“They're trying to do a preemptive strike" against New York, said Sidney Scheinberg, a bankruptcy attorney at Godwin Bowman PC in Dallas. “It's a clever maneuver. Whether it's going to work, I don't know."
Filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy pauses pending litigation, and the New York attorney general's case will now be battled in a Dallas bankruptcy court instead of a civil court in New York.
“I suspect the NRA's plan is to consolidate pending litigation in the bankruptcy court," said Kevin Lippman, a bankruptcy attorney at the Texas-based Munsch Hardt Kopf & Harr PC law firm. But, he said, New York could challenge the move and try to bring the case back.
Texas also has one of the most generous homestead exemptions in the country. NRA executives who might receive judgments against them stemming from the New York suit could feasibly move to Texas, “buy a very nice home, and no one could ever take it away from them," Scheinberg said.
The NRA said it would seek to reincorporate in Texas, pending court approval. While it was chartered in New York, the organization's headquarters and much of its operations are in Fairfax, Virginia.
“There will be no immediate changes to the NRA's operations or workforce," the NRA said in a statement.
Nevertheless, Texas politicians jumped on the move as proof that Texas is attracting new businesses and organizations due to its business-friendly regulatory environment.
“Welcome to Texas," state Sen. Dawn Buckingham, R-Lakeway, wrote in a tweet tagging the NRA. “Unlike New York, we protect and uphold our citizens' right to bear arms."
“This is a wonderful place for [the NRA] both financially and for our community," said Andi Turner, legislative director for the Texas State Rifle Association.
Texas Democrats, meanwhile, criticized the move. U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, criticized Abbott for “courting" the NRA “instead of taking meaningful actions to reduce gun violence in Texas."...
==
some county he size of sm state?!
Gov. Greg Abbott Is Closing All But One Dropoff Location For Mail-In Ballots In Each County
Abbott is closing all but one ballot drop-off location in each of Texas's 254 counties, severely limiting voting access.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/texas-counties-can-offer-only-one-drop-off-ballot-location-federal-appeals-court-rules-upholding-gov-greg-abbotts-order/
Emma Platoff, The Texas Tribune Oct. 13, 2020
"Texas counties can offer only one drop-off ballot location, federal appeals court rules, upholding Gov. Greg Abbott's order"was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas counties may collect mail-in ballots at only one location, a federal appeals court ruled late Monday, once again upholding an order from Gov. Greg Abbott that restricts voting options.
Abbott in July acted to lengthen the early voting period and allow voters to deliver completed absentee ballots in person for longer than the normal period. But after large Democratic counties including Harris and Travis established several sites where voters could deliver their ballots, Abbott ordered Oct. 1 that they would be limited to one.
A number of civil rights groups sued in at least four lawsuits, calling the order an act of voter suppression that would disproportionately impact low-income voters, voters with disabilities, older voters and voters of color in Democratic counties. A federal judge on Friday sided with those groups, blocking Texas from enforcing the ruling.
But a three-judge panel on the conservative U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appealstemporarily halted that ruling on Saturday and on Monday gave a more formal word on the matter in a written opinion.
“Leaving the Governor's October 1 Proclamation in place still gives Texas absentee voters many ways to cast their ballots in the November 3 election. These methods for remote voting outstrip what Texas law previously permitted in a pre-COVID world," wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan for the panel of three judges all appointed by President Donald Trump. “The October 1 Proclamation abridges no one's right to vote."...
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wiki
AG
Attorney General of Texas
:{Tenure
Abbott resigned from the Texas Supreme Court in 2001 to seek the position of Lieutenant Governor of Texas.[3] His campaign for Lieutenant Governor had been running for several months when the previous attorney general, John Cornyn, vacated the post to run for the U.S. Senate.[3] He then switched his campaign to the open attorney general's position in 2002. Abbott defeated the Democratic nominee, former Austin mayor and current state senator Kirk Watson, 57% to 41%.[17] Abbott was sworn in on December 2, 2002, following fellow Republican Cornyn's election to the Senate.2002 election}:
Abbott expanded the attorney general's office's law enforcement division from about thirty people to more than one hundred.[3] He also created a new division called the Fugitive Unit to track down convicted sex offenders in violation of their paroles or probations.[3]
In 2003, Abbott supported the Texas Legislature's move to cap non-economic damages for medical malpractice cases at $250,000, with no built-in increases for rising cost of living.[18] The statute allows nuances for higher awards in cases of wrongful death or when more than one health care institution is involved.[18]
Abbott has spoken out against concerns such as voter fraud, infringement on the right to bear arms, and President Barack Obama's health care reform. When asked what his job entails, Abbott says: "I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home."[19] Abbott has filed suit against various U.S. agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (including challenges to Obamacare), and the Department of Education, among many others.[3]
Abbott filed thirty one lawsuits against the Obama administration.[20] According to The Wall Street Journal, from Abbott's tenure as Attorney General through his first term as Governor, Texas sued the Obama administration at least forty-four times, more than any other state over the same period; court challenges included carbon-emission standards, health-care reform, transgender rights, and others.[21] The Dallas Morning News compared Abbott to Scott Pruitt, noting that both Attorneys General had repeatedly sued the federal government over its environmental regulations.[22] The Houston Chronicle noted that Abbott "led the charge against Obama-era climate regulations."[23]
Abbott has said that the state must not release Tier II Chemical Inventory Reports for security reasons, but that Texans "can ask every facility whether they have chemicals or not."[24] **Koch Industries**has denied that their contributions to Abbott's campaign had anything to do with his ruling against releasing the safety information.[25]
In March 2014, Abbott filed a motion to intervene with three separate Federal Court suits against Baylor Scott & White Medical Center - Plano, in which patients alleged that the hospital allowed Christopher Duntsch to perform neurosurgery despite knowing that he was a dangerous physician.[26] Abbott cited the Texas Legislature's cap on malpractice cases, along with the statute's removal of the term "gross negligence" from the definition of legal malice, as reasons for defending Baylor.[27]
Lawsuit against Sony BMG
Main article: Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal
On November 21, 2005, Abbott sued Sony BMG.[28][29] Texas was the first state in the nation to bring legal action against Sony BMG for illegal spyware.[28][29] The suit is also the first filed under the state's spyware law of 2005.[28][29] It alleges the company surreptitiously installed the spyware on millions of compact music discs (CDs) that consumers inserted into their computers when they played the CDs, which can compromise the systems.[29][30] On December 21, 2005, Abbott added new allegations to his lawsuit against Sony-BMG. Abbott says the MediaMax copy protection technology violates the state's spyware and deceptive trade practices laws.[28][31] He says Sony-BMG offered consumers a licensing agreement when they bought CDs and played them on their computers.[28][31] However, Abbott alleges in the lawsuit that even if consumers reject that agreement, spyware is secretly installed on their computers, posing security risks for music buyers.[28][31] Abbott said, "We keep discovering additional methods Sony used to deceive Texas consumers who thought they were simply buying music," and "[T]housands of Texans are now potential victims of this deceptive game Sony played with consumers for its own purposes."[28][31] In addition to violations of the Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act of 2005, which allows for civil penalties of $100,000 for each violation of the law, the alleged violations added in the updated lawsuit, on December 21, 2005, carry maximum penalties of $20,000 per violation.[31][32]
Separation of Church and state
Main article: Van Orden v. Perry
On March 2, 2005, Abbott appeared before the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., where he defended a Ten Commandments monument on grounds of the Texas State Capitol. Thousands of similar monuments were donated to cities and towns across the nation by the Fraternal Order of Eagles, who were inspired by the Cecil B. DeMille film The Ten Commandments (1956) in following years.[33] In his deposition, Abbott said that "The Ten Commandments are a historically recognized system of law."[34] The Supreme Court held in a 5–4 decision that the Texas display did not violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and was constitutional.[35]
After Abbott's oral arguments in Van Orden v. Perry, Justice John Paul Stevens commented upon Abbott's performance while in a wheelchair, "I want to thank you [...] for demonstrating that it's not necessary to stand at the lectern in order to do a fine job."[6]
Gun policies
In January 2013, following the approval by New York governor Andrew Cuomo of the further strengthening of the state's gun laws, Abbott advertised on news sites to internet users with Albany, NY, and Manhattan ZIP codes suggesting gun owners should migrate to Texas. His political campaign provided the funding. The two messages read: "Is Gov. Cuomo looking to take your guns?" while the other said: "Wanted: Law abiding New York gun owners looking for lower taxes and greater opportunity."[36] The adverts linked to a letter on Facebook in which Abbott stated such a move would enable citizens "to keep more of what you earn and use some of that extra money to buy more ammo."[36]
In February 2014, Abbott argued against a lawsuit brought by the National Rifle Association to allow more people access to concealed carry of firearms, as Abbott felt this would disrupt public safety.[37]
Support for ban on sex toys
As Attorney General, Abbott defended Texas' ban on sex toys.[38] He said Texas had a legitimate interest in "discouraging prurient interests in autonomous sex and the pursuit of sexual gratification unrelated to procreation."[38]
Opposition to same-sex marriage
As Attorney General, Abbott fought to prevent courts from legalizing same-sex marriage.[39] In 2014, he argued in court that Texas should be allowed to prohibit same-sex marriage because LGBT individuals purportedly cannot procreate. He said that as "same-sex relationships do not naturally produce children, recognizing same-sex marriage does not further these goals to the same extent that recognizing opposite-sex marriage does."[38] He also argued that gay individuals can marry individuals of the opposite sex, thus there is no discrimination against LGBT individuals.[38] He suggested that same-sex marriage was a slippery slope where "any conduct that has been traditionally prohibited can become a constitutional right simply by redefining it at a higher level of abstraction."[38]
2006 election
In the November 7, 2006, general election, Abbott was challenged by civil rights attorney David Van Os, who had been his Democratic opponent in the 1998 election for state Supreme Court. He won re-election to a second term by a margin of 60% to 37%.[40]
2010 election
Abbott ran for a third term in 2010. He defeated the Democratic attorney Barbara Ann Radnofsky of Houston and the Libertarian Jon Roland once again. Radnofsky was also the unsuccessful Democratic candidate opposing U. S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in the 2006 general election. Abbott defeated Radnofsky by a margin of 64% to 34%.[41] He was the longest-serving Texas attorney general in Texas history.[42]
In July 2013, the Houston Chronicle alleged improper ties and oversight between many of Abbott's largest donors and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, of which he was a director.[43]
Governor of Texas
2014 election
Main article: 2014 Texas gubernatorial election
==
...Each of the 11 Greenpeace activists involved in the ship channel protest, along with the 20 others who were also arrested, now face years in prison and a permanent criminal record for “interrupting”Big Oil’s operations for 18 hours. So rather than protecting our fragile environment and constitutional rights, America’s power elites are defending corporate profits — from us!
When did We the People vote to outlaw peaceful public protest against corporate excesses? When did we demand that lawmakers in Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas make it a felony for us to assemble and speak out at corporate sites to protest profiteers who’re running roughshod over our values, livelihoods, environment and … well, our lives?
Answer: Never. Yet, behind our backs, for-sale lawmakers in those states and many others are taking big bucks from oil giants, utilities, industrial ag outfits and other for-profit entities to pass corporate-written laws that criminalize protest actions against their greed. The laws assess inordinate jail time and exorbitant fines for the vague offense of “interrupting” or “interfering with” the operations and infrastructure of corporations that despoil, contaminate, violate and otherwise abuse us, the planet and everything else that gets in the way of another dime in profit.
Where did these anti-democratic, corporate-coddling laws come from? ALEC, the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council, which convenes closed-door tete-a-tete sessions to link its corporate members with a nationwide network of whorish state lawmakers willing to do tricks for them. In January 2018, ALEC produced a model bill called the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, which would effectively sledgehammer peaceful protestors of corporate wrongdoing as though the demonstrators were terrorists. Suddenly, virtually identical versions of ALEC’s plutocratic/autocratic bill were introduced in 22 state legislatures. Nine have already been enacted, usually with little public notice or participation.
The Texas version, which took effect Sept. 1, was used just 11 days later to slap harsh felony charges on the Greenpeace protestors and the 20 others who were also arrested during the nonviolent symbolic shutdown of the Houston Ship Channel.
The two primary sponsors of the Texas anti-democracy legislation are ALEC adherents. The corporate powers that formally lobbied it through the legislature included Chevron, Dow, Exxon, Koch Industries, Shell and various industry consortiums, ranging from pipeline builders to poultry factories. And the legislation was forcefully backed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose top industrial donor group is — surprise! — oil and gas, which pumped more than $10 million into his 2018 election campaign.
...
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/texas-governor-busted-sending-racist-call-to-arms-a-day-before-el-paso-attack-take-matters-into-our-own-hands
no lnx
Texas governor busted sending racist call-to-arms a day before El Paso attack: ‘Take matters into our own hands’
Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story August 23, 2019
On Thursday, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) tweeted out a message of unity and promised to work to reduce violence in his state, in the wake of the shooting in El Paso that left 22 dead and dozens more injured:
Today we had hearings responding to the tragic shooting in El Paso.
We focused on community healing, combating domestic terrorism, reducing hateful ideologies, & keeping guns out of hands of deranged killers while respecting 2nd Amendment rights.
We’ll keep TX safe.#txlege pic.twitter.com/ymct4aiSgK
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) August 22, 2019
But this was decidedly not the attitude Abbott had just one day before the shooting took place, when, according to the Texas Signal, he sent out a letter peppered with racist attacks on Hispanic immigrants — and a menacing, violent suggestion that Texans “take matters into our own hands.”
“Just three weeks in June, 45,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended crossing the Mexican border into Texas!” said the letter. “That amounts to the entire population of Galveston – every three weeks. In just six months, we’d add the population of Arlington!
“If we’re going toDEFEND Texas, we’ll need to take matters into our own hands,”the letter continued. “Theproblems of illegal immigration never reach swanky limousine-liberal neighborhoods in New York and California!”
The El Paso shooter’s manifesto made it abundantly clear that he was motivated to kill by a hatred of Mexican migrants, who he saw as invaders. He drove hours across the state to reach the border city for his massacre.
Republicans have relied on increasingly warlike rhetoric to describe undocumented immigrants and lawful asylum seekers, encouraged by President Donald Trump.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/leaked-audio-shows-oil-lobbyist-bragging-about-success-in-criminalizing-pipeline-protests/
no lnx
Leaked audio shows oil lobbyist bragging about success in criminalizing pipeline protests
Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams August 20, 2019
As a growing number of states move to pass laws that would criminalize pipeline protests and hit demonstrators with years in prison, an audio recording obtained by The Intercept showed a representative of a powerful oil and gas lobbying group bragging about the industry’s success in crafting anti-protest legislation behind closed doors.
Speaking during a conference in Washington, D.C. in June, Derrick Morgan, senior vice president for federal and regulatory affairs at the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), touted “model legislation” that states across the nation have passed in recent months.
AFPM represents a number of major fossil fuel giants, including Chevron, Koch Industries, and ExxonMobil.
“We’ve seen a lot of success at the state level, particularly starting with Oklahoma in 2017,” said Morgan, citing Dakota Access Pipeline protests as the motivation behind the aggressive lobbying effort. “We’re up to nine states that have passed laws that are substantially close to the model policy that you have in your packet.”
Friends of the Earth
Big Oil is now using its political power to try and criminalize protests of oil & gas infrastructure.
"This legislation has potential to punish public participation and mischaracterize advocacy protected by the First Amendment."https://theintercept.com/2019/08/19/oil-lobby-pipeline-protests/ …
Oil Lobbyist Touts Success in Effort to Criminalize Pipeline Protests, Leaked Recording Shows
In leaked audio obtained by The Intercept, AFPM conceded its behind-the-scenes role in crafting state laws to criminalize oil and gas pipeline protests.
theintercept.com
The audio recording comes just months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law legislation that would punish anti-pipeline demonstrators with up to 10 years in prison, a move environmentalists condemned as a flagrant attack on free expression.
“Big Oil is hijacking our legislative system,” Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network said after the Texas Senate passed the bill in May.
As The Intercept‘s Lee Fang reported Monday, the model legislation Morgan cited in his remarks “has been introduced in various forms in 22 states and passed in… Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota.”
“The AFPM lobbyist also boasted that the template legislation has enjoyedbipartisan support,” according to Fang. “In Louisiana, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the version of the bill there, which is being challenged by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Even in Illinois, Morgan noted, ‘We almost got that across the finish line in a very Democratic-dominated legislature.’ The bill did not pass as it got pushed aside over time constraints at the end of the legislative session.”
===
==
10/18
Oliver points to RAGA (Repulican Attorneys General Association) and DAGA (Democratic Attorneys General Association), the partisan associations that “sound like twins from Dutch folklore that teach children right from wrong” and raise funds via somewhat questionable ties to corporations. Further, AGs belonging to one party have increasingly teamed up across states to sue the federal government (blocking actions such as the Medicaid expansion under the Obama Administration) and this has become a point of pride for some, such asTexas’ Greg Abbott (“I go into the office, I sue the federal government and then I go home”) and his successor, Ken Paxton, a man seriously outshone by his wife, the “pistol packin’ momma.”
Diving further into how Paxton’s conservative views have affected his work in office, and later on the surprising statistics of how few people actually vote for AG when confronted with the choice on a ballot, Oliver makes his case for awareness of these races.
“So please, before Nov. 6, just think about your AG race. You can do it, you’ve got nine days left,” said Oliver. “I know we’ve all been asked to think about a lot this year from Supreme Court nominations to gun control, to the energy of Pete Davidson’s penis—it’s been a lot and now I am adding research your state AG race to the list—but it is honestly worth it. If you do it, you’ll frankly be amazed at the kind of tidbits you may find.”
===
https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/heres-what-we-know-about-the-texas-voter-citizen-checks-and-its-not-what-donald-trump-claimed/
Alexa Ura, The Texas Tribune
Jan. 25, 2019
“Texas officials flag tens of thousands of voters for citizenship checks”was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
The Texas secretary of state’s office announced Friday it would send local election officials a list of 95,000 registered voters who the state says counties should consider checking to see whether they are U.S. citizens and, therefore, legally eligible to vote.
In an advisory released Friday afternoon, the office said it was flagging individuals who had provided the Texas Department of Public Safety with some form of documentation — including a work visa or a green card — that showed they were not a citizen when they were obtaining a driver’s license or an ID card. Among the individuals flagged, about 58,000 individuals cast a ballot in one or more elections from 1996 to 2018, the secretary of state’s office said.
It’s unclear exactly how many of those individuals are not actually U.S. citizens and whether that number will be available in the future. In its notice to counties, the secretary of state’s office said the names should be considered “WEAK” matches, using all capital letters for emphasis.
That means counties may now choose to investigate the eligibility of the individuals who were flagged, which would require them to send a notice asking for proof of citizenship within 30 days, or take no action. By law, the counties aren’t allowed to automatically revoke a voter’s registration without sending out such a notice.
It’s possible that individuals flagged by the state — who provided DPS with documentation that indicated they were authorized to be in the country — could have become naturalized citizens since they obtained their driver’s license or ID card. A spokesman for the secretary of state said officials are “very confident” that the data received from DPS is “current.”
In announcing the review of the rolls, Secretary of State David Whitley — who was appointed to the post last month after serving as deputy chief of staff to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott — immediately handed the data over to the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who said his office will “spare no effort in assisting with these troubling cases.”
But without additional verification, you can’t say these individuals all engaged in illegal voting, said Chris Davis, the head of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.
“People get naturalized,” Davis said. “It’s entirely too early to say that.”
The numbers were released just a few weeks into a legislative session during which lawmakers may take up proposals to require some form of citizenship verification before registering to vote. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 rejected states’ efforts to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Other federal courts have knocked down more recent efforts.
“Integrity and efficiency of elections in Texas require accuracy of our state’s voter rolls, and my office is committed to using all available tools under the law to maintain an accurate list of registered voters,” Whitley said in a statement.
But Beth Stevens, voting rights legal director for the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the announcement echoed efforts around the country to remove eligible voters from the rolls.
“The secretary’s actions threaten to result in tens of thousands of eligible voters being removed from the roles, including those with the least resources to comply with the demand to show papers,” Stevens said.
In a state where about 15.8 million Texans are registered to vote, the AG’s office has recently pursued a small number of convictions of illegal voting by non-citizens. Past reviews of the voter rolls by other states ultimately found that only a small number of the thousands of non-citizens they initially flagged had actually voted. For years, researchers have found that voter fraud is rare and claims that non-citizens are voting in large numbers have not been substantiated.
Read related Tribune coverage
- Trump election fraud commission bought Texas election data flagging Hispanic voters
- Judge blocks Texas secretary of state from giving voter information to Trump commission
==
Congratulations are in order for Jim DeMint: Saying that his move signals a “new mission” for the Tea Party, the former senator has gone from presiding over one of the most well-funded institutions in the dark-money ecosystem to advising one of the most radical. DeMint, the Republican who retired from the Senate in 2013 to run the Heritage Foundation has been named a “senior advisor” to the Convention of States Project—a nationwide effort backed by billionaires like the Kochs and the Mercers to revise the United States Constitution without the approval of Congress.
A hero to Tea Party Republicans, DeMint was already perceived to have led Heritage away from its policy-oriented beginnings, and according to Politico, his continued support for Trump drove a wedge between him and the Heritage Foundation’s board of directors. They voted early last month to remove DeMint as president of the organization amid a broader debate in the conservative establishment over what posture to take towards an increasingly volatile Trump administration.
“The Tea Party needs a new mission,” DeMint told *USA Today*, of his new role. “They realize that all the work they did in 2010 has not resulted in all the things they hoped for. Many of them are turning to Article V,” a legal loophole that would (theoretically) allow state legislators to bypass Congress. At the Convention of States Project, DeMint will join another former senator, Tom Coburn, who now travels to state legislatures across the country lobbying lawmakers to pass resolutions demanding that Congress hold a convention to amend the constitution. It’s not clear whether DeMint will be working as a lobbyist like Coburn. The Convention of States Project did not immediately respond to Fusion’s request for comment. >Various activist groups have sought to amend the constitution on specific points through an Article V convention before, but few have been as well-funded or as ideologically driven as the Convention of States Project, steeped in evangelical Christianity and backed by millions of dollars in dark money. Between 2011 and 2015, the group’s budget more than tripled to $5.7 million—buoyed by donations from the Mercer Family Foundation and various donor-advised funds linked to the Koch brothers. (Eric O’Keefe, a longtime Koch operative, co-founded the Convention of States Project’s parent organization, Citizens for Self Governance, and serves as chairman of its board of directors.) Two thirds of state legislatures (so, 34) must pass resolutions petitioning Congress to hold an Article V convention in order to make it happen; so far, 12 have passed the Convention of States application.
“Convention of States is a much more radical approach to a constitutional convention” than earlier efforts, Arn Pearson, General Counsel at the Center for Media and Democracy, told Fusion. “Their budget has increased dramatically. This is their effort to push the state agenda as far as they can while they hold peak power.”
One Convention of States lobbyist (a member of the Utah legislature in his spare time) lauded Texas governor and Article V proponent Greg Abbott’s plan for several proposed amendments, including one that would prohibit Congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within a single state—a proposal that would effectively negate what little remains of progress made during the New Deal and the Civil Rights eras. “I see these guys as the new Confederacy,” Pearson said. “They want to have it so that states are no longer bound by federal law. They want the ability to opt out.”
“People are disgusted with Washington,” DeMint told *USA Today*. “They are ready to move power back closer to home.” A fitting cause for the gentleman from South Carolina—although, actually, the preferred terminology these days isn’t “states’ rights” but “local control.
===
==
==
backed cruz, condemnd trump on anti woamn stuff then supported? 35K$ trump U
http://www.mystatesman.com/news/opinion/herman-gov-greg-abbott-fires-elector-who-took-pass-donald-trump/yxcAuW0aj8qRULZcBCw2YK/
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/koch-brothers-donald-trump
...his past January, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the multimillionaire protege of the Koch brother's Plutocratic Kingdom and American Legislative Exchange Council darling, revealed to a startled nation that he has penned not one but NINE new amendments to the Constitution of the USA. Forget the Bill of Rights, Abbott is proposing a Bill of Sale, effectively transferring the title of our national government from The People to The Plutocrats. The upshot of his "tweaks" would be outlawing government actions that restrain corporate abuse of workers and consumers, while also preventing future Congresses from meeting crucial public needs such as health care, voter rights, and restoration of our national infrastructure.
One could call Abbott and his Founding Father pretentious and ludicrous—which both are—but he's not the force behind this diabolical, ideological tampering with our Constitution and our people's ideals of fairness and justice. ALEC, at the direction of the Kochs and their corporate cohorts, wrote this Bill of Sale.
Convening an explosive convention, permitted under Article V of the Constitution, is a longtime dream of those elites seeking an American Kochistan, and ALEC is spearheading a hodgepodge of right-wing groups that—believe it or not—are alarmingly close to succeeding. An ALEC/Koch affiliate with the cumbersome acronym of BBATF (Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force) came out of the Tea Party maelstrom in 2010 and is now aggressively pushing governors and state legislatures to endorse such an Article V convention. At the convention, they would attempt to rewrite our nation's fundamental governing document by adding a balanced budget amendment, along with Abbott's other eight. Together these changes would enthrone the "moneyed corporations" that Jefferson and other founders abhorred as destroyers of America's democratic possibilities.
Absurd? Of course. Even the late Phyllis Schlafly, who was the head of the right-wing Eagle Forum, called this push "a prescription for political chaos," adding, "Alas, I don't see any George Washingtons, James Madisons, Ben Franklins, or Alexander Hamiltons around who could do as good a job as the Founding Fathers, and I'm worried about the men who think they can."
Well, ALEC and the Kochs sure do think they can. But their diabolical schemes don't stop with Gov. Abbott and changing our Constitution, they want to take over our country's entire political system. Having already spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get their policy pushing puppets like Abbott into office, the Koch's want to bend the will of the people as well. They recently started a new program that they call Grassroots Leadership Academy that gives how-to lessons in everything from mounting successful protest actions to recruiting middle-of-the-road voters.
Using Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," they are training thousands of people to become organizers and political activists. This so-called "grassroots" outfit has been set up by the gabillionaire Koch boys to train cadres of right-wing corporatists to spread their ideological laissez-fairydust across the land. The academy is run through Americans for Prosperity, Charlie's and Davie's political wing, which put up $3 million to get it going. About 10,000 people have gone through some of the training sessions in three dozen states. The brothers' grandiose scheme is to take over the Republican Party and use it as their tool to rebuild America itself into a Kochlandia, ruled by the superrich.
The academy's curriculum is loaded with such corporate nonsense as a course titled "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels." Attendees are indoctrinated with two overarching lessons: (1) freewheeling corporate power—unrestrained by labor, environmental or other public protections—GOOD; (2) Social Security, unemployment benefits, and other social programs—BAAAAAAD!
Koch Kollege for right-wing social engineers is peddling a status quo agenda of corporate elitism and trickle-down ideology, which the vast majority of Americans have openly rebelled against. It's like trying to sell chicken salad made out of chicken manure.
===
https://movetoamend.org/corporate-rule-examples-2
State Denies Texas Community’s Anti-Fracking Rights
The elections of November 2014 brought anti-fracking triumphs in Ohio and California communities, but the ultimate victory was won in the city of Denton, Texas. Denton is the most heavily fracked community in the U.S. with 275 urban wells. It sits above the Barnett shale and is considered the birthplace of this mining technology. The vote was a convincing 59% in favor despite the oil and gas corporations outspending supporters ten to one in this heavily Republican city.[1]
These votes in support of local bans encouraged opponents of hydraulic fracturing everywhere. It’s estimated that more than 15 million Americans live within a mile of an oil or gas fracking well.[1] Hydraulic fracturing or hydrofracking or “fracking” involves the high-pressure injection of millions of gallons of chemical-laced water and sand into deep rock formations setting free oil or natural gas that can’t be captured through conventional drilling.
Frack Free Denton, a citizen group, said: “Simply put, without the ban, fracking will continue unchecked all across Denton less than 200 feet from homes, schools and playgrounds. The negative health and safety impacts of living close to fracking are well established. Fracking requires heavy truck traffic, poses risks of industrial-scale accidents, uses undisclosed proprietary chemicals, and has permanently contaminated over one billion gallons of Denton’s fresh water.”[3]
Community activists used creative means against their well-funded adversaries, captivating residents through puppet shows, flash-mob dances, original tunes by the Frackettes trio, and coffin races.
Fracking Bans Banned by Texas Legislature and Governor
The oil and gas corporations and their industry-wide front groups, the Texas Oil and Gas Association and the Texas Land Office, immediately rose up to whine, initiating a lawsuit against the ban claiming it is “inconsistent with state law and therefore violates the Texas Constitution.”[2] But that legal assault on a community’s right to define its future and protect its citizens’ health and safety will not be necessary. State’s lawmakers passed and Governor Greg Abbott signed a law in mid-May 2015 declaring null and void Denton’s hard-fought victory by forbidding and preempting local laws against fracking.
pix Texas fracking wells.
Despite a Texas Home Rule Law that grants local jurisdictions authority to zone-out industrial activity deemed harmful, this recent law subordinates the people to corporate authority. It denies citizens the power to protect their community. Corporations and their complicit politicians claim that such democratically defined protections take away corporate “rights.”
Indeed, U.S. courts granted corporations plenty of legal rights and powers over the past 200 years—rights associated with their property and profits that gave them great power over people, workers and nature--rights equal to those of “persons under law.” More recently, the Supreme Court granted corporations and wealthy individuals the right to donate without limit in our electoral campaigns. Corporate actors used and use these illegitimate “rights” to foil people’s self-governance. The corporate initiated lawsuit against Denton’s fracking ban is merely the most recent assault on our diminished democracy.
“It was the oil and gas industry’s contempt for impacted residents that pushed Denton voters to ban fracking… and now the oil and gas industry, through state lawmakers, has doubled down by showing every city in Texas that same contempt,”[4] said Sharon Wilson of Earthworks and a Texas organizer for the Denton ban.
Move to Amend applauds the people of Denton for building a movement to assert the community’s rightful self-governing authority. MTA’s national grassroots work seeks to legalize such actions, end corporate rule, and make democracy real.
To learn more:
1. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/05/birthplace-fracking-boom-votes-ban-denton-texas
2. http://www.myfoxdfw.com/story/27272660/denton-residents-could-ban-fracking-in-historic-vote
3. http://www.commondreams.org/election-2014-fracking-bans-ballot
4. http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/05/19/banning-fracking-bans-texas-picks-gas-drillers-over-local-democracy
==
Top Industries
Uncoded
$18,189,627.66
Oil & Gas
$6,765,469.14
Securities & Investment
$2,608,708.83
Lawyers & Lobbyists
$1,792,317.03
Real Estate
$1,429,384.36
Health Professionals
$1,157,404.27
Building Materials & Equipment
$968,000.00
Computer Equipment & Services
$795,937.77
Miscellaneous Finance, Insurance & Real Estate
$734,417.00
Automotive
$676,955.03
Telecom Services & Equipment
$668,085.76
Hospitals & Nursing Homes
$651,526.79
General Contractors
$607,442.55
Beer, Wine & Liquor
$586,983.07
Food & Beverage
$582,510.75
Insurance
$560,584.64
Retail Sales
$550,555.63
Miscellaneous Energy
$467,409.00
Nonprofit Institutions
$450,000.00
Chemical & Related Manufacturing
$428,941.47
Miscellaneous Finance
$405,550.00
Commercial Banks
$390,750.00
Retired
$378,500.00
Food Processing & Sales
$361,500.00
Railroads
$343,821.00
Accountants
$336,660.00
Candidate Committees
$327,736.88
Miscellaneous Services
$313,377.80
Home Builders
$253,000.00
Miscellaneous Manufacturing & Distributing
$236,000.00
Other/Single Issue Groups
$226,568.88
Tribal Governments
$205,000.00
Business Associations
$200,318.49
Payday/Title Loans
$195,208.44
Electric Utilities
$195,183.12
Construction Services
$179,850.00
===
Summary
| In-State | $39,712,090.57 |
|---|---|
| Out-Of-State | $2,961,137.05 |
| Unknown State | $4,791,017.12 |
| Party Committee | $73,187.55 |
| Leadership Committee | $0.00 |
| Personal Funds | $389,486.88 |
| Individual Contributions | $39,065,699.62 |
| Unitemized | $0.00 |
| Public Funding | $0.00 |
| Non-Contribution | $0.00 |
| Institutions and Companies | $0.00 |
| Other | $18,215,127.66 |
| Total Contributions | 50564 |
==
Top Contributors
| SIMMONS, HAROLD CLARK | $900,000.00 |
|---|---|
| ANWAR, SYED JAVAID | $528,941.75 |
| HILES, NANCY & MARCUS D | $525,000.00 |
| ALBRITTON, MARY & ROBERT | $500,000.00 |
| WARREN, KELCY LEE | $455,000.00 |
| STEELE, BRANDON T | $444,835.45 |
| REES JONES, TREVOR D | $426,100.00 |
| HILDEBRAND, JEFFERY D | $401,261.46 |
| HUNT, RAY LEE | $400,000.00 |
| FRIEDKIN, THOMAS DAN | $382,705.03 |
| HOLT, PETER M | $350,000.00 |
| MCNAIR, ROBERT C | $350,000.00 |
| WALTON, ALICE LOUISE | $350,000.00 |
| RAY II, JAY RICHARD & CARISSA | $350,000.00 |
| NORTH CYPRESS MEDICAL CENTER OPERATING CO | $305,908.06 |
| FROST, KATHALEEN WALL | $301,000.00 |
| FLORES, JAMES C | $300,000.00 |
| MEWBOURNE, CURTIS W | $300,000.00 |
| MORIAN, S REED | $250,439.30 |
| HOLT, JULIANNA HAWN | $250,000.00 |
| STAI, DIAN GRAVES OWEN | $250,000.00 |
| TROUTT, KENNY A & LISA C | $250,000.00 |
| MCLANE JR., DRAYTON | $250,000.00 |
| ROWLING, ROBERT | $250,000.00 |
| RICHARD R SCOTT 1991 TRUST | $235,000.00 |
| LONG, MICKEY L | $205,781.96 |
| HILL JR, ALBERT GALATYN (AL) | $200,000.00 |
| KINDER, NANCY G | $200,000.00 |
| FOSTER, PAUL L | $200,000.00 |
| GREEHEY, WILLIAM E (BILL) | $200,000.00 |
| RAY, RICHIE | $200,000.00 |
| PITCOCK JR, JAMES DOUGLASS (DOUG) | $200,000.00 |
| KINDER, RICHARD D & NANCY G | $200,000.00 |
| BASS, LEE M | $200,000.00 |
| RAPIER III, GEORGE M | $200,000.00 |
| TEXANS FOR LAWSUIT REFORM | $193,826.06 |
| LOCKE LORD BISSELL & LIDDELL | $171,886.34 |
| KLEINHEINZ, JOHN B | $155,000.00 |
| Q INVESTMENTS | $150,183.38 |
| AT&T | $150,000.00 |
| PEROT JR, HENRY ROSS | $150,000.00 |
| HIRSCH, LAURENCE E (LARRY) | $150,000.00 |
| FERTITTA, TILMAN J & PAIGE | $150,000.00 |
| GREATER HOUSTON PHYSICIANS MEDICAL ASSOCIATION | $150,000.00 |
| HAUG, DAVID L | $150,000.00 |
| FROST, HOLLOWAY H (HOLLY) | $135,000.00 |
| HAMMONDS MANAGEMENT TRUST | $131,000.00 |
| PHIL ADAMS CO | $126,000.00 |
| MITCHELL, LEE ROY | $125,000.00 |
| STEDMAN, STUART WEST | $125,000.00 |
| PICKENS JR, THOMAS BOONE (T) | $112,500.00 |
| DANIEL, JAMAL | $110,000.00 |
| COURSON, HAROLD | $110,000.00 |
| GOOD GOVERNMENT FUND | $109,000.00 |
| TROUTT, KENNY | $108,427.31 |
| HEAVIN, HOWARD (GARY) | $107,377.80 |
| NAU III, JOHN L | $106,437.19 |
| MARTIN III, RUBEN S | $105,804.60 |
| SUERTE PAC | $105,000.00 |
| FERTITTA, TILMAN J | $104,000.00 |
==
Perry HomesContran CorpAbbott, GregMt Vernon InvestmentsSilver Eagle DistributorsBP CapitalTexans For Lawsuit ReformMarketing Investors CorpRepublican State Leadership CmteVinson & Elkins
Campaign Finance
$41,150,165 Received
federal data covers from 1989 roughly through Q2 2014
state-level data is not available in bulk for 2014. for current state data, browse http://followthemoney.org/
- #### Top Industries
OpenSecrets.org and FollowTheMoney.org classify contribution data into about 100 industries.
$4,639,860$4,220,724$2,625,245$2,102,592$2,043,823$1,529,773$1,238,275$1,125,950$973,205$736,820Lawyers/Law FirmsOil & GasReal EstateSecurities & InvestmentHome BuildersCommercial BanksHealth ProfessionalsBeer, Wine & LiquorMisc FinanceAutomotive
80% of the total amount raised came from an identifiable industry.
- #### In State vs. Out of State
contributions from individuals, in dollars
- #### Individuals vs. PACs
in dollars
- #### Top Contributors
PAC Color BlockOrganizations' PAC(s)Employee Color BlockAssociated IndividualsIncludes contributions from an organization’s employees, their family members and its political action committee.
$1,700,265$972,500$675,000$550,000$489,622$484,674$375,000$325,000$316,377$304,460Perry HomesContran CorpAbbott, GregMt Vernon InvestmentsSilver Eagle DistributorsBP CapitalTexans For Lawsuit ReformMarketing Investors CorpRepublican State Leadership CmteVinson & Elkins
http://influenceexplorer.com/politician/greg-abbott/c03455b21a6341079742026cc48d6a08
Gregory Wayne "Greg" Abbott (born November 13, 1957) is the Texas Attorney General, and is the second Republican since Reconstruction to serve in that role. Abbott was sworn in on December 2, 2002, following John Cornyn's election to the U.S. Senate. Prior to assuming the office of attorney general, Abbott was a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, a position to which he was initially appointed in 1995 by then-Governor George W. Bush. He is noted outside the state of Texas for successfully defending the right of the state of Texas to display the Ten Commandments in front of the state Capitol in Austin in a 2005 United States Supreme Court case known as Van Orden v. Perry.
Source: Wikipedia
==
9/15
jade helm atlernet
http://www.alternet.org/5-conservative-hoaxes-lies-and-absurd-urban-legends-have-made-america-stupider
==
disenfranchise
Greg Abbott, the Republican Attorney General of Texas, issued a stern warning this week to members of an international delegation expected to be on hand to monitor voting at polling places around the country on Election Day.
In a letter to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which works to ensure the integrity of elections, among other tasks, Abbott warned the diplomatic poll-watchers that their involvement in U.S. elections could have strong legal repercussions.
"It may be a criminal offense for OSCE's representatives to maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place's entrance," he writes. "Failure to comply with these requirements could subject the OSCE's representatives to criminal prosecution for violating state law." Such a restriction makes election monitoring highly difficult.
Concerns among Democrats have mounted in the wake of reports that right-leaning groups, such as the Tea Party-aligned True The Vote, had plans to dispatch armies of poll-watchers seeking to root out invalid votes. Opponents warn that the volunteer "poll challengers" will engage in intimidation of legitimate minority voters who tend to vote Democratic.
In his letter, Abbott takes issue with the OSCE's supposed opposition to voter ID laws, which won't be in place in Texas after being rejected by a federal court, and adds that the group's efforts at polling places are neither needed nor acceptable.
"If OSCE members want to learn more about our election processes so they can improve their own democratic systems, we welcome the opportunity to discuss the measures Texas has implemented to protect the integrity of elections," he writes. "However, groups and individuals from outside the United States are not allowed to influence or interfere with the election process in Texas. This State has robust election laws that were carefully crafted to protect the integrity of our election system. All persons -- including persons connected with OSCE -- are required to comply with these laws."
Abbott's opposition is consistent with a growing trend of conservative distrust toward the United Nations and other international organizations. On Tuesday, Florida GOP Senate candidate Connie Mack said that the U.N. should be defunded and "kicked off of American soil." In a statement, Mack appeared to suggest that the broader U.N., and therefore presumably the OSCE as well, was driven by nefarious motives.
“The very idea that the United Nations -- the world body dedicated to diminishing America’s role in the world -- would be allowed, if not encouraged, to install foreigners sympathetic to the likes of Castro, Chavez, Ahmadinejad and Putin to oversee our elections is nothing short of disgusting," he said.
UPDATE: 3:10 p.m. EST -- Ambassador Janez Lenarčič, director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), responded in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying that Abbott's threat put the state of Texas at odds with an agreement between the body and state authorities.
“The threat of criminal sanctions against OSCE/ODIHR observers is unacceptable,” Lenarčič said. “The United States, like all countries in the OSCE, has an obligation to invite ODIHR observers to observe its elections.”
Lenarčič took issue with insinuations that officials in the group would meddle with elections, reiterating that they were bound by national laws and regulations, as well as their own strict code of conduct.
“Our observers are required to remain strictly impartial and not to intervene in the voting process in any way,” Lenarčič said. “They are in the United States to observe these elections, not to interfere in them.”
A release relaying Lenarčič's comments pointed out that the OSCE has observed five previous U.S. elections since 2002, all without incident.
CORRECTION:This article originally reported that the OSCE was created by the United Nations. While the OSCE and UN partner on some operations,they are independent organizations.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/24/greg-abbott-texas-un-elections_n_2010081.html
---
8/13
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) explicitly referenced Texas Republicans' gerrymandering tactics in a court brief earlier this month, acknowledging that districts were redrawn in 2011 to minimize the clout of Democratic voters.
In July, Attorney General Eric Holder filed a statement of interest, arguing that the state should be required to undergo some form of preclearance with districting plans. A month before, the United States Supreme Court had struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, meaning that the Texas redistricting plan was no longer subject to federal preclearance requirements.
In his filing, Holder called on a judge to review the districting proposal, and cited "evidence of intentional racial discrimination that was presented" in another lawsuit,Texas v. Holder in 2012. The 2012 ruling denied the state preclearance to enact a potential voter identification law, and Holder used the suit as a springboard for suggesting that similar federal approval would again be necessary.
"In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party's electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats," read a court brief filed by Abbott.
Abbott also qualified the tactics, noting that partisan districting decisions are still constitutional, despite "incidental effects on minority voters." The brief cites *Hunt v. Cromartie*, a South Carolina case in which it was decided that "[a] jurisdiction may engage in constitutional political gerrymandering, even if it so happens that the most loyal Democrats happen to be black Democrats and even if the State were conscious of that fact."
Partisan gerrymandering, while legal, is an often frowned upon. Before John Paul Stevens' 2010 retirement, the then-Supreme Court justice criticized the practice, asserting that it is "very, very harmful to the community at large."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/14/greg-abbott-gerrymandering_n_3757385.html
===
wikifluff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott
Gregory Wayne "Greg" Abbott (born November 13, 1957) is an American lawyer and politician, and currently serves as the 48th Governor of Texas. He was the 50thAttorney General of Texas. He is a Republican.
Abbott was only the second Republican to serve as Attorney General of Texas since Reconstruction. Prior to assuming the office of attorney general, Abbott was a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, a position to which he was initially appointed in 1995 by then-Governor George W. Bush. He is noted outside the state of Texas for successfully advocating the right of the state of Texas to display the Ten Commandments in front of the Texas State Capitol in Austin in a 2005 United States Supreme Court case known as Van Orden v. Perry.
Contents
- 1 Early life, education, and early law career
- 2 Judicial career
- 3 Attorney General of Texas
- 4 Governor of Texas
- 5 Election history
- 6 Personal life
- 7 References
- 8 Further reading
- 9 External links
Early life, education, and early law career
Abbott was born on November 13, 1957 in Wichita Falls, Texas of English descent. His mother, the former Doris Lechristia Jacks, was a homemaker, and his father, Calvin Roger Abbott, was a stockbroker and insurance agent.[2][3] When he was six years old they moved to Longview and the family lived in the East Texas city for six years.[2]
At the beginning of junior high school, Abbott's family moved to Duncanville in Dallas County. In his sophomore year in high school, his father died of a heart attack, and his mother went to work in a real estate office.[2] He graduated from Duncanville High School.[4] He was on the track team in high school and won every meet he entered his senior year.[5] He was in the National Honor Society and was voted "Most Likely to Succeed".[5]
In 1981, he earned a Bachelor of Business Administration in finance from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and the Young Republicans’ Club. He met his wife, Cecilia Phelan, while attending UT.[2] In 1984, he earned his J.D. degree from the Vanderbilt University Law School inNashville, Tennessee.[2] He commented about his marriage, that "San Antonio is also where Cecilia and I got married at Our Lady of the Lake, 31 years ago. Our marriage wasn’t just the joining of two families. It was a uniting of cultures: My Anglo heritage and Cecilia’s Irish and Hispanic heritage. We may have come from different cultures but we realized that we share the same foundation: “Dos casas. Pero, una fundacion."The story of my family is as old as the story of Texas itself: the uniting of cultures to create one unique people, Texans."[6]
He went into private practice, working for Butler and Binion, LLC between 1984 and 1992. Abbott’s political career began in Houston, where he served as a state trial judge in the 129th District Court for three years.[7]
Abbott became a paraplegic when an oak tree fell on him while he was running following a storm in 1984.[7][8] He had two steel rods implanted in his spine, underwent extensive rehabilitation at TIRR Memorial Hermann in Houston, and has used a wheelchair ever since.[9][10] He sued the homeowner and negotiated an insurance settlement worth more than US$10 million, resulting in payouts of US$14,000 a month.[11] Abbott later championed laws capping punitive damages to two times the amount of economic damages awarded plus US$750,000.[12] While the current law caps punitive damages, which are meant to punish gross negligence or bad faith, the law still allows payments for medical costs, potential lost wages, economic damages and noneconomic losses, such as pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life. Matt Hirsch, a spokesman for the Abbott campaign, said the attorney general did not seek punitive damages in his lawsuit.[13]
Judicial career
Then-Texas Governor George W. Bush appointed Abbott to the Texas Supreme Court, and he was thentwice elected to the state's highest civil court—in 1996 (two-year term) and 1998 (six-year term). In 1996, Abbott had no Democratic opponent but was challenged by Libertarian John B. Hawley of Dallas. Abbott defeated Hawley 84%-16%.[14] In 1998, Abbott defeated Democrat David Van Os 60%-40%.[15]
In 2001, he went back to private practice and worked for Bracewell & Giuliani LLC.[16] He was also an adjunct professor at University of Texas School of Law.[17]
Attorney General of Texas
2002 election
Abbott resigned from the Texas Supreme Court in 2001 to seek the position of Lieutenant Governor of Texas.[2] His campaign for Lieutenant Governor had been running for several months when the previous Attorney General, John Cornyn, vacated the post to run for the U.S. Senate.[2] He then switched his campaign to the open attorney general's position in 2002. Abbott defeated the Democratic nominee, former AustinMayor and current State Senator Kirk Watson, 57%-41%.[18] Abbott was sworn in on December 2, 2002, following fellow Republican John Cornyn's election to the U.S. Senate.
Tenure
Abbott expanded the Attorney General's office’s law enforcement division from about thirty people to more than one hundred.[2] He also created a new division called the Fugitive Unit to track down convicted sex offenders in violation of their paroles or probations.[2]
Abbott has spoken out against concerns such as voter fraud, the right to bear arms, and President Barack Obama’s health care reform. Abbott said that when asked what his job entails, he explains 'it’s gotten simplified'. "I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home."[19] Abbott has filed suit against various U.S. agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (including challenges to Obamacare), and the Department of Education, among many others.[2]
Abbott has said that the state must not release Tier II Chemical Inventory Reports for security reasons, but that Texan citizens "can ask every facility whether or not they have chemicals or not".[20] Koch Industrieshas denied that their contributions to Abbott's campaign had anything to do with his ruling against releasing the safety information.[21][2 ^teens ^blown up?]
In 2014, Abbott argued against a lawsuit brought by the NRA to allow more people access to concealed carry of firearms, as Abbott felt this would disrupt public safety.[22]
Lawsuit against Sony BMG
Main article: Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal
On November 21, 2005, Abbott sued Sony BMG.[23][24] Texas was the first state in the nation to bring legal action against Sony BMG for illegal spyware.[23][24] The suit is also the first filed under the state’s spyware law of 2005.[23][24] It alleges the company surreptitiously installed the spyware on millions of compact music discs (CDs) that consumers inserted into their computers when they play the CDs, which can compromise the systems.[24][25][26] On December 21, 2005 Abbott added new allegations to his lawsuit against Sony-BMG. Abbott says the MediaMax copy protection technology violates the state's spyware and deceptive trade practices laws.[23][27] He says Sony-BMG offered consumers a licensing agreement when they bought CDs and played them on their computers.[23][27] But, Abbott alleges in the lawsuit that even if consumers reject that agreement, spyware is secretly installed on their computers, which pose security risks for music buyers.[23][27] Abbott said "We keep discovering additional methods Sony used to deceive Texas consumers who thought they were simply buying music", and "Thousands of Texans are now potential victims of this deceptive game Sony played with consumers for its own purposes."[23][27] In addition to violations of the Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act of 2005, which allows for civil penalties of US$100,000 for each violation of the law, the alleged violations added in the updated lawsuit, on December 21, 2005, carry maximum penalties of US$20,000 per violation.[27][28]
Van Orden v. Perry
Main article: Van Orden v. Perry
On March 2, 2005, Abbott appeared before the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., where he defended a Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds. Dozens of similar monuments were donated to cities and towns across the nation throughout the 1960s by the Fraternal Order of Eagles, who were inspired by the 1956 epic The Ten Commandments; in doing so, they gained the support of the film's director Cecil B. DeMille.[29] The Supreme Court held in a 5-4 decision that the Texas display did not violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and was constitutional.
After Abbott's oral arguments in Van Orden v. Perry, Justice John Paul Stevens commented upon Abbott's performance while in a wheelchair, "I want to thank you … for demonstrating that it’s not necessary to stand at the lectern in order to do a fine job".[5]
2006 election
In the November 7 general election, Abbott was challenged by civil rights attorney David Van Os, who had been his Democratic opponent in the 1998 election for state Supreme Court. He won re-election to a second term 60%-37%.[30]
2010 election
Abbott ran for a third term, and campaigned for other Republican candidates in 2010 including Jim Landtroop, the Plainview insurance agent. While on his Plainview stop, Abbott cited his and Landtroop's mutual opposition to the health care plan signed into law in March 2010 by President Barack Obama.[31] He defeated the Democratic attorney Barbara Ann Radnofsky of Houston and, the Libertarian Jon Roland once again. Radnofsky was also the unsuccessful Democratic candidate opposing U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in the 2006 general election. Abbott defeated Radnofsky 64%-34%.[32] He is the longest-serving Texas Attorney General in Texas history.[33]
In July 2013, the Houston Chronicle alleged improper ties and oversight between many of Abbott's largest donors and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas of which he was a director.[34]
Governor of Texas
2014 election
Main article: Texas gubernatorial election, 2014
On July 8, 2013, Governor Rick Perry announced that he would not seek a fourth full term.[35]
On July 14, 2013, speaking near the Alamo on the 29th anniversary of the accident that left him a paraplegic, Abbott formally announced his intention to run for Governor of Texas in the 2014 Texas gubernatorial election.[36] In the first six months of 2011, he raised more funds for his campaign than any other Texas politician, reaching US$1.6 million. The next highest fundraiser among state officeholders was Texas Comptroller Susan Combs with US$611,700.[37]
In February 2014, while speaking on the dangers of corruption in law enforcement, Abbott compared the South Texas area to a Third World country[38] that "erodes the social fabric of our communities and destroys Texans' trust and confidence in government."[39] Abbott further said that he does not consider corruption "limited to one region of Texas […] My plan is to add more resources to eliminate corruption so people can have confidence in their government."[39]
Abbott criticized Ted Nugent's infamous "subhuman mongrel" comment directed at President Barack Obama by saying "This is not the kind of language I would use or endorse in any way. It's time to move beyond this, and I will continue to focus on the issues that matter to Texans."[40]
Abbott won the Republican primary on March 4, 2014, with 1,219,903, or 91.5 percent of the ballots cast. The remaining approximately 103,000 votes were divided among three minor candidates. He faced state Senator Wendy Davis of Fort Worth, who polled 432,065 votes (79.1 percent) in her Democratic primary contest against a lone opponent.[41]
Abbott promised to "tie outcomes to funding" for pre-K programs if elected governor,[42] but he said he would not require government standardized testing for 4-year olds, as Davis has accused him of advancing.[43]When defending his education plan, Abbott cited Charles Murray: "Family background has the most decisive effect on student achievement, contributing to a large performance gap between children from economically disadvantaged families and those from middle class homes."[44] A spokesman for Abbott's campaign pointed out that the biggest difference in spending is that Davis has proposed universal pre-K education while Abbott wants to limit state funding to only programs that meet certain standards.[44] Davis' plan could reach US$750 million in costs and Abbott has said that Davis' plan is a "budget buster" whereas Abbott's education plan would cost no more than US$118 million.[44]
Overall, Abbott said the reforms that he envisions would "level the playing field for all students [and] target schools which don't have access to the best resources." He has called for increased accessibility to technology in the classroom and mathematics instruction for kindergarten pupils.[39]
Abbott received US$1.4 million in campaign contributions from recipients of the Texas Enterprise Fund, some of whose members submitted the proper paperwork for grants.[45]
Abbott received the endorsement of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram,[46] Dallas Morning News,[47] the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal[48] and the Tyler Morning Telegraph.[49]
Tenure
Abbott was sworn in as the governor of Texas on January 20, 2015.[50][51]
Abbott declared February 2, 2015 to be 'Chris Kyle Day,' after the United States Navy SEAL who was the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history who was portrayed in the highly successful and controversial filmAmerican Sniper.[52][53][54] This came exactly two years after Kyle was shot and killed.[52] Abbott held his first meeting as governor with a foreign prime minister when he met with the Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny on March 15, 2015 to discuss trade and economic relations.[55]
Abbott on April 28, 2015 asked the State Guard to monitor the training exercise, Jade Helm 15, amid Internet-fueled suspicions that the war simulation is really a hostile military takeover.[56][57][58][59][60]
Election history
On November 4, 2014, Abbott defeated Wendy Davis by 21 points. According to exit polls he received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote and 50 percent of Hispanic men, a majority (54 percent) of women voters, and 62 percent of the votes of married women (75% of women in Texas are married).[61][62][63]
A week after his election, Abbott announced that Carlos Cascos, of Brownsville, the county judge since 2007 of Cameron County in far South Texas, will become the Secretary of State of Texas. In the same election in which Abbott defeated Wendy Davis, Cascos, a Republican, won a third term as county judge but will resign in January 2015, pending confirmation by the Texas Senate, to become secretary of state.[64]
|
Greg Abbott electoral history |
Personal life
Abbott is married to Mexican-American Cecilia Phalen Abbott, the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants.[70][71] Abbott's election as governor of Texas makes Cecilia Abbott the first Latina to be the First Lady of Texas since Texas joined the union.[71][72] Abbott and his wife have one adopted daughter, Audrey.[16][70][71] The Abbotts were married in San Antonio in 1981.[2] She is a former school teacher and principal.[7] He is the first elected governor of a U.S. state to use a wheelchair since George Wallace of Alabama, 1983–87.[73]
Abbott knows some Spanish words but is not fluent.[74][75]
References
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Unknown to Most, Cecilia Abbott Could Make History". The Texas Tribune. Retrieved November 8, 2014.
- ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXMonthSweany102013_2-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXMonthSweany102013_2-2) d(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXMonthSweany102013_2-3) e(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXMonthSweany102013_2-4) f(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXMonthSweany102013_2-5) g(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXMonthSweany102013_2-6) h(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXMonthSweany102013_2-7) i(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXMonthSweany102013_2-8) j(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXMonthSweany102013_2-9) k(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXMonthSweany102013_2-10) Sweany, Brian D. (October 2013). "The Overcomer". Texas Monthly (Austin, Texas). Retrieved October 31,2014.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Person Details for Gregory Wayne Abbott, "Texas, Birth Index, 1903-1997" — FamilySearch.org". Retrieved November 8, 2014.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ vote-smart.org.[dead link]
- ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-WashPostReid10302014_5-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-WashPostReid10302014_5-2) Wilson, Reid (October 30, 2014). "The likely next governor of Texas is full of Lone Star swagger. Don’t be surprised if he runs for president.". Washington Post (Washington, D.C.). RetrievedOctober 31, 2014.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ http://www.statesman.com/weblogs/first-reading/2014/feb/19/ted-nugent-greg-abbott-and-subhuman-mongrel-who-pr/
- ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXAttyGenBio_7-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-TXAttyGenBio_7-2) "oag.state.tx.us". oag.state.tx.us. Retrieved October 14,2013.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Accident set Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott on a path toward politics, May 31, 2010, The Dallas Morning News, Retrieved October 27, 2010
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- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Office of the Secretary of State. 1998 General Election.http://elections.sos.state.tx.us/elchist.exe (accessed December 15, 2006)
- ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-CeciliaAbbottGovCamp_70-1) "Cecilia Abbott". http://www.gregabbott.com/. Greg Abbott for Governor. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
- ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-UraTXTrib03162014_71-1) c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Abbott#cite_ref-UraTXTrib03162014_71-2) Ura, Alexa (March 16, 2014). "Unknown to Most, Cecilia Abbott Could Make History". Texas Tribune (Austin, Texas). RetrievedOctober 22, 2014.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "New first lady of Texas advocates for Hispanic population". Retrieved November 8, 2014.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Greg Abbott’s election in Texas opens possibilities for disabled - OnPolitics". OnPolitics. Retrieved November 8, 2014.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ MacLaggan, Corrie (September 5, 2013). "Many Texans Choosing TV en Español". Retrieved June 13, 2015.
- :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Sweany, Brian (July 15, 2013). "Greg Abbott Makes His Move". Retrieved June 13, 2015.
Further reading
- Gonzalez, John W. "Abbott has friends and foes in disabled community." Houston Chronicle. July 29, 2013.
External links
- Governor Greg Abbott Official state website official state site
- Official website
- Greg Abbott at DMOZ
- Profile at the Texas Tribune
- Coverage at the Texas Observer
| Legal offices | Legal offices | Legal offices |
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Preceded by | Associate Justice of the Texas Supreme Court 1995–2001 | Succeeded by |
Preceded by |
2002–2015 | Succeeded by |
| Party political offices | Party political offices | Party political offices |
Preceded by | Republican nominee for Governor of Texas | Most recent |
| Political offices | Political offices | Political offices |
Preceded by Rick Perry |
2015–present | Incumbent |
| United States order of precedence (ceremonial) | United States order of precedence (ceremonial) | United States order of precedence (ceremonial) |
Preceded by | Order of Precedence of the United States Within Texas | Succeeded by :{Mayor of city in which event is held}: |
Succeeded by :{Otherwise John Boehner | Succeeded by :{Otherwise John Boehner | Succeeded by :{Otherwise John Boehner |
Preceded by | Order of Precedence of the United States Outside Texas | Succeeded by |
|
Current statewide political officials of Texas |
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Current governors and executives of U.S. states and territories |
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| Authority control |
- 1957 births
- 20th-century lawyers
- American politicians with physical disabilities
- American Roman Catholics
- Governors of Texas
- Living people
- People from Duncanville, Texas
- Duncanville High School alumni
- People from Houston, Texas
- People from Wichita Falls, Texas
- People with paraplegia
- Republican Party state governors of the United States
- Texas Attorneys General
- Texas lawyers
- Texas Republicans
- Texas Supreme Court justices
- University of Texas at Austin alumni
- Vanderbilt University Law School alumni
- People from Wichita County, Texas
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replaced by paxton
**Joint Sting Operation Leads to Arrest of 16 Suspected Child Predators**
Monday, July 20, 2015 – Cleburne, Texas
The Texas Attorney General’s Office (OAG) today announced the arrest of 16 suspected child predators following a joint sting operation between the OAG’s Child Exploitation Unit, the Johnson County Special Crimes Unit and Sheriff’s Office, and the Cleburne and Burleson Police departments.
**Attorney General Paxton Statement on Two Year Anniversary of HB 2**
Friday, July 17, 2015 – Austin, Texas
“Two years ago this weekend, House Bill 2 was signed into law, recognizing the dignity of life in the womb at 20 weeks, as well as the need to improve both sanitary conditions and the quality of care available to Texas women. I was proud to co-sponsor House Bill 2 in the Texas Senate and help elevate the Lone Star State as a leader for life, and I’m proud to have led the effort to defend portions of HB 2 in court."
**Media Advisory: Clifton Lamar Williams scheduled for execution**
Wednesday, July 15, 2015 – Austin, Texas
Pursuant to a court order by the 114th Judicial District Court of Smith County, Clifton Lamar Williams is scheduled for execution after 6 p.m. on July 16, 2015. In 2006, Williams was convicted and sentenced to death for the capital murder of ninety-three-year-old Cecelia Schneider.
Wednesday, July 15, 2015 – Austin, Texas
“The Office of the Attorney General has launched an official investigation into Planned Parenthood following the release of a video that details the organization’s calculated slaughter of human babies to maximize the available body parts they plan to sell."
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2013?
Donald Trump and former President George W. Bush have in common? They both want Greg Abbott to be the next governor of Texas. Both men are among contributors in Abbott’s latest campaign finance report, which covers fundraising over the last six weeks. Trump, the millionaire developer and high-profile birther, gave Abbott $25,000 last month. Bush contributed $5,000 in July to the attorney general’s gubernatorial campaign. Some of the donations had been reported before. But disclosure of money raised in July is new — and includes several billionaires.
During July, Abbott raised $1 million. Republican challenger Tom Pauken, former state GOP chairman, raised $44,395. During the same period following her headline-grabbing filibuster against an abortion bill, potential Democratic opponent Wendy Davis raised $412,000.
Abbott’s biggest givers include Dallas investor and nuclear-dump owner Harold Simmons, who gave $150,000; California investor Peter Thiel, the initial big investor in Facebook, $100,000; Dallas billionaire and yachting enthusiast Darwin Deason, $100,000; and Fort Worth oilman and investor Lee Bass, $100,000.
The reports give a snapshot of the initial round of political fundraising following the regular legislative session. Although politicians were not allowed to raise money during a regular session, they could do fundraising during special sessions. During the full six-week period from June 26 through July 30, Abbott raised $4.2 million to launch his campaign for the Republican nomination for governor. During that same period, which followed her filibuster that attracted national attention, Davis raised $1.3 million. Of Davis’ money, 37 percent came from outside Texas. Of Abbott’s total during the six weeks, 8 percent came from outside Texas.
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ecowatch.comhttp://ecowatch.com/2015/05/19/texas-prohibits-local-fracking-bans/?utm_source=EcoWatch+List&utm_campaign=4f7022ec41-Top_News_5_19_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_49c7d43dc9-4f7022ec41-85920373
It’s Official: Texas Prohibits Local Fracking Bans
Earthworks, Denton Drilling Awareness Group, Earthjustice and Natural Resources Defense Council
Yesterday Texas Gov. Abbott signed HB 40 into law. Written by former ExxonMobil lawyer Shannon Ratliff, the statute forces every Texas municipality wanting common sense limits on oil and gas development to demonstrate its rules are “commercially reasonable.” It effectively overturns a Denton ballot initiative banning fracking that passed last November.
“HB 40 was written by the oil and gas industry, for the oil and gas industry, to prevent voters from holding the oil and gas industry accountable for its impacts,” said Earthworks’ Texas organizer Sharon Wilson. Wilson, who played a key role in the Denton ballot initiative, continued, “It was the oil and gas industry’s contempt for impacted residents that pushed Dentonvoters to ban fracking in the first place. And now the oil and gas industry, through state lawmakers, has doubled down by showing every city in Texas that same contempt.”
By a 59-41 percent vote, including 70 percent of straight ticket Republican voters, the residents of Denton banned hydraulic fracturing within city limits. The ban was a last resort after more than five years of fruitlessly petitioning oil and gas companies, the city and the state for help. “By signing HB40 into law, Governor Abbott just declared that industry profits are more important than our health, our homes and our kids,” said Adam Briggle, president of the Denton Drilling Awareness Group and a leader in the Frack Free Denton effort. He continued, “The letter of Texas law now says no city can ‘effectively prevent an oil and gas operation from occurring,’ no matter the threat to families’ health and safety or damage to private property.”
The City of Denton is fighting a lawsuit brought against it by the oil and gas industry over its ordinance. Until HB40, attorneys for the city felt fairly confident their ordinance would stand. The Denton Drilling Awareness Group and Earthworks have intervened in the case in support of the city. They are represented by Earthjustice, attorneys from the Natural Resources Defense Counsel and the Texas law firm Brown & Hofmeister, LLP.
“The Texas courts have upheld a long tradition of local control, so the Governor and the Legislature took matters into their own hands. Now, they have capitulated to the greedy but powerful oil and gas industry at the expense of their own constituents’ health, well-being, and property rights,” said Earthjustice attorney Deborah Goldberg, who is co-counsel for the citizen groups and successfully defended the town of Dryden, New York, in a similar court case. “We have been proud to represent the proponents of Denton’s ban, and we know they will regroup and fight back against this legislative over-reach.”
“The people of Denton exercised their democratic right to keep a nasty industrial process out of their community–and now big oil and their friends in high places are steamrolling them, along with everyone else in Texas,” said NRDC attorney Dan Raichel, co-counsel for the citizen’s groups. “The interests of a powerful industry should never take priority over the health and safety of American families. Texans should be able to keep dangerous activities and chemicals away from their homes, schools, and hospitals—just as hundreds of other communities across the country have already done.”
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==
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (R
in a new governor's race ad against state Sen. Wendy Davis (D).
Abbott's Thursday attack has a Star Wars theme, accusing Davis of being someone who will "threaten gun rights... promote higher taxes... And remove freedom from the galaxy..."
Watch the ad above.
The ad emerges days after Abbott rejected Davis' request to participate in a series of six debates. At a Wednesday evening campaign event in Dallas, Davis said Abbott was "hiding" from more head-to-head events because he is "too afraid to speak for himself" and "explain his record." Abbott's campaign told the Houston ChronicleTuesday that he was "already committed" to two televised debates and therefore had to "respectfully decline."
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Last week, allies of Greg Abbott -- the Tea Party[actually beat dewhurst?] wacko who is running to become the next governor of Texas -- covered bus stops and phone booths with posters depicting Abbott's Democratic opponent Wendy Davis as "Abortion Barbie."
We're not talking about a relatively tame little sketch here. We're talking life-sized pictures of a mostly naked Barbie doll with Wendy's face plastered on it --complete with a pair of scissors and a plastic baby stuck in its belly.
==
TX GOV: If demographics are destiny, then Democrats believe at some point they should be able to turn ruby red Texas blue. Texas is now a “majority-minority state.” Whites only make up 45% of the state population (!!!). And yet, Democrats have ZERO statewide officeholders. They hope that changes in 2014 when they shoot for the big prize – governor, with rock-star-of-the-left state Sen. Wendy Davis, who faces off against state Attorney General Greg Abbott. Make no mistake, Abbott is the favorite here. But Davis, who was launched to fame because of her ability to delay passage of a Texas abortion law, will be able to raise a ton of money from the left. The question will be, can she mobilize Latinos, who make up four-in-10 Texans, and peel off some white women. And most importantly, can Davis be seen as more than a one-issue candidate?
==
Gregory Wayne "Greg" Abbott[1](born November 13, 1957) is the Texas Attorney General, and is the second Republican since Reconstruction to serve in that role. Abbott was sworn in on December 2, 2002, following John Cornyn's election to the U.S. Senate. Prior to assuming the office of attorney general, Abbott was a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, a position to which he was initially appointed in 1995 by then-Governor George W. Bush. He is noted outside the state of Texas for successfully defending the right of the state of Texas to display the Ten Commandments in front of the state Capitol in Austin in a 2005 United States Supreme Court case known as Van Orden v. Perry.
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Some state attorneys general have already weighed in on the climate fight. Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt signed onto a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to take up a case that challenges existing EPA greenhouse gas regulations. Other attorneys general, including Scott Pruitt from Oklahoma, have asked the federal government to grant states more authority to regulate natural gas drilling, or fracking. Texas' attorney general Greg Abbott, has petitioned the Supreme Court to take up his federal lawsuit challenging EPA's authority to regulate pollution.
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The Chamber of Commerce vs. Climate Science
The business lobby's challenge to carbon regulations probably won't convince a court of law. The court of public opinion is another matter.
—By Kate Sheppard
| Mon Mar. 1, 2010
LAWSUIT
William Kovacs, the US Chamber of Commerce's vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs, last year famously called for a "Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" on climate change. Kovacs was referencing the lightning-rod 1925 court case that made it illegal to teach anything other than divine creation in Tennessee public schools—and he wanted a similar public hearing in which climate science would be put on the stand. The remark drew plenty of bad press, and Kovacs soon recanted his "inappropriate" analogy. But it looks like the chamber is angling for that monkey trial after all, by way of a lawsuit it's filed against the Environmental Protection Agency that could be the first wave of a big-business assault on greenhouse gas regulations.
At issue is a scientific finding issued by the EPA last year concluding that greenhouse gases are a threat to human health, due to the lower air quality, extreme weather events, and heat waves caused by rising temperatures. The chamber announced its intent to sue the EPA last month in an attempt to have the endangerment finding, as it's known, tossed out. The big-business lobby has been joined by a collection of trade groups like the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Mining Association; free-market think tanks such as FreedomWorks and the Competitive Enterprise Institute; and the attorneys general of Texas, Alabama, and Virginia.
===
Greg Abbott, Texas Attorney General, Threatens To Arrest International Elections Observers [CORRECTED]
The Huffington Post | By Nick WingPosted: 10/24/2012 2:06 pm EDT Updated: 10/25/2012 3:12 pm EDT
Greg Abbott, the Republican Attorney General of Texas, issued a stern warning this week to members of an international delegation expected to be on hand to monitor voting at polling places around the country on Election Day.
In a letter to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which works to ensure the integrity of elections, among other tasks, Abbott warned the diplomatic poll-watchers that their involvement in U.S. elections could have strong legal repercussions.
"It may be a criminal offense for OSCE's representatives to maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place's entrance," he writes. "Failure to comply with these requirements could subject the OSCE's representatives to criminal prosecution for violating state law." Such a restriction makes election monitoring highly difficult.
The OSCE announced earlier this month that it would send 44 observers to polling places around the country on Election Day in order to monitor possible disputes that could arise in the voting process. The move came in response to a petition from liberal-leaning voting rights groups, including the NAACP and ACLU, that suggested the OSCE's presence could help combat what they fear will be a concerted effort to suppress votes from supporters of President Barack Obama.
Concerns among Democrats have mounted in the wake of reports that right-leaning groups, such as the Tea Party-aligned True The Vote, had plans to dispatch armies of poll-watchers seeking to root out invalid votes. Opponents warn that the volunteer "poll challengers" will engage in intimidation of legitimate minority voters who tend to vote Democratic.
In his letter, Abbott takes issue with the OSCE's supposed opposition to voter ID laws, which won't be in place in Texas after being rejected by a federal court, and adds that the group's efforts at polling places are neither needed nor acceptable.
"If OSCE members want to learn more about our election processes so they can improve their own democratic systems, we welcome the opportunity to discuss the measures Texas has implemented to protect the integrity of elections," he writes. "However, groups and individuals from outside the United States are not allowed to influence or interfere with the election process in Texas. This State has robust election laws that were carefully crafted to protect the integrity of our election system. All persons -- including persons connected with OSCE -- are required to comply with these laws."
Abbott's opposition is consistent with a growing trend of conservative distrust toward the United Nations and other international organizations. On Tuesday, Florida GOP Senate candidate Connie Mack said that the U.N. should be defunded and "kicked off of American soil." In a statement, Mack appeared to suggest that the broader U.N., and therefore presumably the OSCE as well, was driven by nefarious motives.
“The very idea that the United Nations -- the world body dedicated to diminishing America’s role in the world -- would be allowed, if not encouraged, to install foreigners sympathetic to the likes of Castro, Chavez, Ahmadinejad and Putin to oversee our elections is nothing short of disgusting," he said.
UPDATE: 3:10 p.m. EST -- Ambassador Janez Lenarčič, director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), responded in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying that Abbott's threat put the state of Texas at odds with an agreement between the body and state authorities.
“The threat of criminal sanctions against OSCE/ODIHR observers is unacceptable,” Lenarčič said. “The United States, like all countries in the OSCE, has an obligation to invite ODIHR observers to observe its elections.”
Lenarčič took issue with insinuations that officials in the group would meddle with elections, reiterating that they were bound by national laws and regulations, as well as their own strict code of conduct.
“Our observers are required to remain strictly impartial and not to intervene in the voting process in any way,” Lenarčič said. “They are in the United States to observe these elections, not to interfere in them.”
A release relaying Lenarčič's comments pointed out that the OSCE has observed five previous U.S. elections since 2002, all without incident.
CORRECTION:This article originally reported that the OSCE was created by the United Nations. While the OSCE and UN partner on some operations,they are independent organizations.
At issue is a scientific finding issued by the EPA last year concluding that greenhouse gases are a threat to human health, due to the lower air quality, extreme weather events, and heat waves caused by rising temperatures. The chamber announced its intent to sue the EPA last month in an attempt to have the endangerment finding, as it's known, tossed out. The big-business lobby USCoC has been joined by a collection of trade groups like the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Mining Association; free-market think tanks such as FreedomWorks and the Competitive Enterprise Institute; and the attorneys general of Texas, Alabama, and Virginia.
Just how well-founded are fears of voter fraud?
There have been only a small number of fraud cases resulting in a conviction. A New York Times analysis from 2007 identified 120 cases filed by the Justice Department over five years. These cases, many of which stemmed from mistakenly filled registration forms or misunderstanding over voter eligibility, resulted in 86 convictions.
There are "very few documented cases," said UC-Irvine professor and election law specialist Rick Hasen. "When you do see election fraud, it invariably involves election officials taking steps to change election results or it involves absentee ballots which voter ID laws can't prevent," he said.
One of the most vocal supporters of strict voter ID laws, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, told the Houston Chronicle earlier this month that his office has prosecuted about 50 cases of voter fraud in recent years. "I know for a fact that voter fraud is real, that it must be stopped, and that voter id is one way to prevent cheating at the ballot box and ensure integrity in the electoral system," he told the paper. Abbott's office did not immediately respond to ProPublica's request for comment.