There are few things more relevant to voters than their legislators behavior on the job.

Charlie Geren’s bill – HB 2377 – updates a law that never should have been passed in the first place, at least, not if government transparency matters.

Geren’s bill would update a law that makes it illegal for audio or video taken by the legislature of the legislature to be used in campaigns.

This law stands against government accountability. The Texas Taxpayer pays for the video and audio equipment, the operators, the legislative website, the capitol building and pays and its upkeep; the Texas taxpayer pays the hefty pensions of legislators when they retire, as well as their salaries, and everything else involved.

The only reasonable explanation for this law is that legislators are doing official legislative business that would get them in trouble if their voters knew about it, such as when Reps. Harless, Hildebran, and Huberty gang tackled Rep. Capriglioni for introducing a bill that would make it easy for average Texans to look at their legislator’s government contracts, and those of his family.

At that particular hearing Rep. Cook instructed members of the public not to take pictures or make recordings, while assuring them that the state was recording it for them. He didn’t mention that the state made it illegal for these shenanigans to make it into a campaign, as long as the only recordings are state-owned. That way, senior legislators like Cook can sit by with impunity while reformers like Rep. Capriglioni are intimidated.

Also, Geren’s bill made it out of the House without a vote on Local and Consent Calendars. Local and Consent is designed to streamline non-contentious bills, or bills of a very local nature. This bill is not local, and should be contentious. If it isn’t legislators aren’t representing voter’s interests.

This is a law designed by legislators to keep Texas voters where many of them live – in the dark.

Senator Tommy Williams is trying to turn our state savings account into dedicated spending, which is like dedicating the the kid’s college account or the retirement account to new boat payments.

The Legislature is in a mad dash to use the last of the post-election Obama political wave to spend money in ways Texans would never have approved of in the past, and will not approve of in the future. In the spirit of Obama, it is being done in a very devious way, with long-lasting harm. They are trying to put it into the state constitution.

This is as disastrous as it is treacherous. Can these people not be trusted with a savings account? The answer is clearly no. We created the savings account in case of state disasters, and all they’ve done since it was created is try to spend it on recurring items. Now they are making a hard push to put it into the constitution.

The lesson? Never leave a pile of money anywhere near the Texas legislature. They can’t take their eyes off of it, and all of the talent associated with the legislature – staffers, consultant, lobbyists – will not rest until a way is devised to spend it. Legislators spending money creates loyalties and coalitions. Figuring out ways for them to do so does the same. That is why they constantly want to do it, and don’t much care what it’s for.

Additionally, the gambling crowd wants the savings account wiped out because the Speaker of the House wants a revenue crisis to try to ram gambling expansion through on the back of. Healthy savings accounts and revenue crises do not go together.

But what exactly is going on with the Tommy Williams spending bomb?

Texas has a spending cap that is tied to the size of our economy. The Legislative Budget Board tells us how much our economy has grown each year, and therefore, how much non-dedicated spending can grow.

And, what is non-dedicated money? Non-dedicated money is the money legislators play with and make deals with, because dedicated money is spent specifically already. Federal dollars for specific programs are an example of dedicated dollars.

Basically, the Williams spending bomb will siphon off a large piece of the state savings account in order to pay for things that have, for round-about a century or two, come out of non-dedicated general revenue.

We know that spending new piles of money will entrench legislators politically and financially, but is there any other upside for them in structuring it this way? Yes, very much so.

This is because there is a big push for our legislature not to bust our spending cap. In fact, there will be a vote soon to legalize busting the cap. In this vote there is a decent chance that the Democrats and the 20 Democrats elected as Republicans will vote it through. (By the way, this would be on top of the water and transportation fund the Tommy Williams spending bomb is designed to fund. And ,after the RDF is $6 billion short, and the spending caps have been usurped, where do you think the money will come from that gets spent over and above the spending cap? Well, the first  of it will come from the RDF, finishing the job of destroying it, and the rest, the gambling lobby hopes, will come from the phony projections of new revenue they will get with expanded gambling.)

The magic of the Williams Spending Bomb is that it lets legislators spend like drunken sailors without busting the spending cap. This is because it will turn the $6 billion they’ve been scheming for out of the RDF into dedicated funds, which means it will not count against the spending cap. Thus, the savings account, created for emergencies, will be decimated, and legislators could say they didn’t bust the spending cap.

Any legislator that votes against busting the spending cap but votes for the Tommy Williams spending bomb is double-dealing. We have to many legislators interested in looking like they are serving principle, but really serving power, and recklessly, as far as the future of our state is concerned.

Here’s to hoping these legislators are haunted by this very scheme next time they are nobly describing to family members and friends what they do for a living.

The gambling lobby obsessively pushes expansion, and their only real argument in the revenue it will provide. But even that is a scam, and for reasons you have probably never heard before. Suffice it to say, if you have heard the figure “$3 billion” and assumed that was the amount the legislature would have if gambling were expanded, you’ve been had. It’s not even close.

Here’s why:

Slot machines make the lion’s share of the money in casinos, and are all the horse racing industry even wants to legalize. They are the real money maker for all of the gambling clans.

And – drum roll, please – 93 cents of every dollar spent on slots IS NOT TAXABLE.

How can this be? The explanation lies in two words that no competent legislator should be ignorant of: “Prize pool”.

“Prize pool” is why the general revenue argument is deceptive. What is a prize pool?

A prize pool is the stack of cash casinos must keep around to pay out big winners. After all, they can’t just go out and spend everything. What happens when lightening strikes and someone actually hits the jackpot?

They must have a huge amount of cash on hand, and this prize pool isn’t considered traditional revenue for casinos. It is much more like  infrastructure – like cement mixers are for construction companies.

Prize pool dollars are not taxable by the state of Texas.

And how much of the money spent on slots goes into the ‘prize pool”, becoming untouchable for taxation purposes? Ninety-three cents on every dollar. Ninety-three percent – leaving only seven cents on every dollar that is actually taxable.

But, gee-golly Beav, what about the GR bonanza the gambling lobby says expanded gambling will bring? An illusion.

This is why they always talk about how much money Texans spend in Oklahoma, instead of talking about revenue to the Oklahoma legislature. If you don’t know about prize pools, you’ll naturally assume that virtually all of every dollar Texans are spending in Oklahoma will be taxable.

We keep hearing about a $3 billion spent on slot machines out of state. Let’s reasonably project a 15% tax rate for revenues on expanded gambling.

In another industry, that would mean close to $450,000,000 to GR.

The first thing to notice is that even this number doesn’t come close to justifying the level of angst the gambling lobby tries to create daily about not getting these revenues. No problem can be fixed with this kind of money, though many would be created, the chief of which is that the state of Texas would lose a huge amount of self-respect.

And, this number doesn’t even approach the damage we’d do to our state with expanded gambling with depressed productivity in the areas around casinos, law enforcement costs, and social service costs.

However, even this pathetic amount wouldn’t make it into GR.

This is because 93% of the $3 billion lost on slots would go into the prize pool, leaving only $210,000,000 of taxable revenue. Taxed at a rate of 15%, this would give the state of Texas around $32 million in new revenues. Thirty-two  million. Yep.

And that is a drop in the bucket compared to the law enforcement and social services costs we would create for ourselves.

So, picture the dreams of a revenue bonanza that the gambling lobby has tried to create in your mind for lo these many years. Then, realize the kind of GR money we are really talking about.

Then, try to imagine what your parents or grandparents would think about someone who pretends to be your friend but has tried to so badly disorient you for their own monetary gain.

Then, for Texas, please remember the term “prize pool” the next time the same song and dance is trotted out.

A pro-union, anti-legislative watchdog bill passed out of the Senate yesterday – Kel Seliger’s SB 346.

The fact that six Senators voted against it is noteworthy, since the Senate prefers to project an air of harmony to the watching world. Most Senate bills are unanimous, a few contentiousness bills follow party lines, or are within one or two votes of unanimous. To give you an idea of things, Brian Birdwell, Ken Paxton, and Donna Campbell all voted against this bill.

What’s in the bill?

Well, the establishment has always lamented that donors to legislative watchdogs are just as protected by the Citizens United decision as the kinds of donors who enrich PACs like American Crossroads. The establishment hates being watched, so they don’t like watchdogs, and they want to bully watchdog donors.

This bill would make it so that 501c4 legislative watchdogs who also have a PAC must disclose their donors.

However, there is a big carve-out for labor unions. They get a pass. See, labor unions work with the establishment, centralizing money and power in capitol towns. That makes them allies, even to their so-called political “enemies” who work with the establishment.

Legislators on the wrong side of this issue have shown favoritism for unions over government accountability, shown contempt for free speech, and have voted for a bill that is unconstitutional. This is a vote.  Rhetoric doesn’t change Texas. Their votes do. remeber that when they try to spin their way out of this vote, using words, soon.

Senator Birdwell has eloquently described the several ways in which this bill is unconstitutional in a “Reason for Vote” entered into the Senate Journal, beginning at the bottom of page 923.

There are some strange happenings in the pro-life world this session.

First, Texas Alliance for Life (TAL) strangely withheld support for a fetal pain bill being promoted by Texas Right to Life’s (TxRTL), something that seemed a no-brainer for them.

Now this.

Texas Right to Life (TxRTL) is going one step further regarding TAL’s end-of-life-care bill. Right to Life is  not just withholding support, they are expressly opposing to the bill. This is strange.

Pro-life groups don’t get involved in very many bills in a given session. As a general guideline, they support bills that protect life and oppose bills that endanger life.

Sometimes pro-life groups differ about whether to get involved with a bill. But for one pro-life group to judge a bill pro-life enough to push, while the other groups judges it anti-life enough to oppose, is strange.

It is definitely worth examining.

The letter published on the TxRTL website explains the opposition to TAL’s bill.

The letter says up front that, “Current Texas state law allows for doctors and hospitals to withdraw life-sustaining treatment from any patient for any reason after providing ten days notice despite an advance directive, a surrogate’s decision, or a patient’s expressed wishes.”

So, the letter published by TxRTL concedes that there are currently no limitations on withdrawal of life-sustaining support by doctors and hospitals.

Then the letter goes on to use some fairly tortured logic to conclude that the limitations TAL’s bill puts on “pulling the plug” are somehow worse than the current situation in which there are no limitations.

This is a pretty odd claim on its face. After all, incrementalism is one of the first lessons in the Legislative Strategy 101 textbook. Even if you think a thing is very wrong, getting the law to admit it is a little wrong is a moral victory, at least.

On incrementalism, think of anti-marriage liberals, some of whom are now admitting their ultimate goal is to eradicate the institution of marriage. First, they slackened divorce laws, removing much of the weight from the decision to get married or divorced. This cheapened our view of marriage.

Then, they were for civil unions, now gay marriage, and soon polygamous marriage. If you think not, read Jillian Keenan’s article at Slate magazine, seriously advocating for polygamous marriage just this week.

But back to Texas. What is the claim being made against doctors having to follow criteria designed to limit their discretion to “pull the plug”? Basically, the letter published by TxRTL seems to give two arguments.

The first it is that the limitations on pulling the plug created by the bill aren’t effective.

Again, what happened to incrementalism? This bill would, at worst, be a botched attempt to limit something bad. Pro-life legislators and groups can always come back next session and talk about how the first attempt at a good deed failed, and roll out version 2.0.

The second argument against TAL’s bill comes later. It is confusing at best, and, at worst it is disingenuous.

The letter says, “SB303 puts power – power unspecified under current law – into the hands of a facility, leaving no real recourse or say to the patient whose life is at stake.”

“Unspecified” is the weasel word in this sentence. It suggests “specifying” powers is somehow a bad thing here. True, the new law specifies a doctors right to pull the plug, but it does so in an attempt to limit what TxRTL’s own website says is currently unlimited discretion to pull the plug.

It’s not like you can only legally do things that are “specified” by the law – as if “specifying” a doctor’s right to pull the plug creates that right. In fact, it’s closer to the opposite.

For example, there is no law that says Texans can eat cereal for breakfast. Our right to eat cereal for breakfast is a broad, unspecified power that we have, just like doctors currently have a broad, unspecified right to pull the plug.

Our right to eat cereal for breakfast would only become legally “specified” if it were being limited. Suddenly we would have a list of what kinds of cereal we could eat for breakfast and which ones we could not.

Specifying a doctor’s right to pull the plug is about limiting that right, not creating it.

Later, the letter complains that SB303 doesn’t extend by enough days the hospital transfer time in a disputed case of care removal. It extends it, but not enough? And this makes it a threat to the dignity of life, not just a bill to sit on the sidelines for? Strange.

Both of the big pro-life advocacy groups have done many good things for the protection of life in Texas, and will likely do much more. We have one of the most successful pro-life lobbies in the country. By all accounts, the drama this session is not normal course – at least not this level of drama.

Many good people rely on the genuineness of these groups.

In the end, these groups have taken on duties to the unborn, the disabled, the elderly, and to God. Here’s to hoping competition doesn’t interfere with these noble duties.

– letter against SB303 published by Tx Right to Life

–Slate magazine legalize-polygamy propaganda

Gambling expansion is dead-on-arrival this session.

Still, the gambling lobby is pressing on anti-gambling Reps for the future. They’d have them believe the legislation has a chance, but they know it doesn’t.

In all likelihood it is an attempt to pressure Reps into waffling on gambling to weaken them for their next primary. After all, the gambling lobby needs a major makeover in the Legislature if it is to ever have hope of expanding gambling.

If turning pro-gambling isn’t dangerous in primaries, then why are Reps like Drew Darby, Charlie Geren, and Susan King being so careful to shape the way they say they are yes votes on gambling expansion? They’re on Team “Let Texans Decide”, but careful as they can be about how they frame their support for gambling expansion.

And that’s what this silly and defunct “Let Texans Decide” push has been all about – gambling expansion. The gambling lobby has not paid for the expensive statewide campaign just to get to know Texans better, whatever their position on gambling expansion is. Their messaging would suggest that all they want is to know what Texans think.

Texans have a little more common sense than to believe that.

Gambling expansion would enrich unscrupulous and politically-hyperactive gambling oligopolies, it would attract boatloads of new prostitution and drug use, as gambling always does, and it will cost us more money than it will bring in.

Texas would also come to look like a third world country from the highways, with the emergence of the terrible gambling advertising we see in neighboring states.

“Let Texans Decide” has been a high dollar, coordinated, and professional attempt to expand gambling in Texas, and it has failed.

The real “Let Texans Decide” happens every primary, when Texans consistently elect anti-gambling legislators. The gambling lobby knows this, and would like to set the “no” votes and weak “yes” votes up to lose primaries. We will never have  a more liberal cycle in Texas, and still gambling expansion failed.

The gambling lobby would love to get yes votes into the House by loosening up the current Rep’s situation.

It is a Texas Democrat ritual to misleadingly compare small, homogenous states to our huge, multicultural state to try to drum up support for more spending and bureaucracy.

“Texas on the Brink!!!!!” is the scare-name of their “study”, and Garnett Coleman pushed it on KUHF FM in Houston. (The exclamation points are added for effect)

While he admitted Texas has very affordable housing compared to other states, he went on to make several unintelligent comparisons that paint Texas in a bad light.

One of them was a comparison of carbon dioxide output and hazardous waste.

To use cumulative stats to compare states of drastically different sizes is dumb. It is like comparing the overall food intake from a family of two with that of a family of 10, and then pretending the big family are gluttons for eating more food cumulatively.

Of course Texas puts out more carbon dioxide than other states. It is one of the two biggest states.

Additionally, Texas produces oil, which is a big reason our economy is so good. If Texas quit producing oil it would not reduce the output of carbon dioxide and hazardous waste worldwide, because countries that would like to destroy us would simply pick up the extra business.

Plus, carbon dioxide scare-mongering came out of the now-humiliated and discredited “global warming” social fad. The scientists who stood behind that movement now admit the word hasn’t been warming after all.

The other two stats are just as worthless.

Percentage health insurance and high school graduation rates are hugely effected by Texas’ multi-culturalism.

Elitist liberals may like to impose their values on everyone, but the fact is, immigrants come to this country with their own values. One of them is that many of them don’t like to accept handouts. As a result, Texas has a huge number of people who qualify for Medicaid who don’t accept it. Good for them.

Additionally, assimilating cultures don’t have the same social stigma attached to graduating from high school.

Last time this kind of tired argument was hauled out, an Iowa blogger undressed it completely. It was focusing on standardized test scores, not graduation rates but the underlying point that if you control for ethnic diversity, you get the real picture, and Texas comes out very well.

And again, liberal elites have kids with lots of degrees, lots of debt, and no jobs right now, so let’s not judge anyone’s paradigm too harshly.

“Texas on the brink” is goofy and misleading. People vote with their feet about the quality of states, and Texas is winning in a landslide.

–Coleman interview

It’s almost as if consultant and Texas Medical Association (TMA) lobbyist Bryan Eppstein runs the anti 1st Amendment caucus.

What else would you say about a consultant with so many clients aggressively on the wrong side of the 1st Amendment?

The latest example is SB 346, authored by an Eppstein client and pushed along by a bunch of other Eppstein clients. The bill would unconstitutionally apply reporting requirements to some groups and not others.

One of the armload of constitutional precedents this bill would violate says you cannot treat some corporate entities different than others. This bill carves some corporate entities out of its hefty, unconstitutional reporting requirements – the unions. This is a Republican-authored pro-union bill.

The bill’s author Kel Seliger, like many Republicans in the Eppstein stable, is the kind of Republican that might be a Democrat if Texas weren’t so conservative. A pro-union, anti-free speech bill isn’t such a stretch for this kind of Republican.

Another first amendment precedent SB346 tramples is the “significant purpose” test from the landmark U.S. Supreme Ct. decision in Buckley v Valeo. It established that heavy reporting requirements are only constitutional if the “major purpose” of an organization is the nomination and/or election of a candidate. Seliger’s SB 346 would apply these requirements to groups that aren’t even allowed to directly campaign. What’s his justification? If the group is connected to a PAC, well, it should be treated as part of it.

This is interesting corporate precedent. Maybe Obama could pick up on Seliger’s idea and decide that charities and money-losing businesses set up by people who own wealthy businesses should just be considered part of the business and taxed accordingly.

It’s Seliger’s own logic. If any of the same people are involved in two corporations, treat them both like they are the one with the higher governmental burden, be it taxes or reporting requirements.

Eppstein clients Bob Deuell, Charles Schwertner, and Tommy Williams all voted for this anti-first amendment, anti-corporate bill.

Eppstein’s other hat is TMA lobbyist. TMA is the Texas chapter of crucial ObamaCare partner, The American Medical Association. Senator Duncan, who voted for this bill, has received tens of thousands of dollars from TMA. So has Senator Robert Nichols, who also voted for this bill.

Senator Kevin Eltife also voted for this anti-free speech bill. While he isn’t an Eppstein client, he gave to Eppstein clients last election cycle – Chuck Hopson, Jeff Wentworth, Craig Estes and Joe Straus.

Senators Van de Putte, Zaffarini, and Lucio, Jr. joined the anti-first amendment crew, and all received large amounts of contributions from health care related PACs in the 2011-2012 political cycle.

This isn’t the first attack on free speech, either. Eppstein client Byron Cook tried to get AgendaWise shut down last year when we reported his office was breaking the law.

Becca Aaronson, a Texas Tribune writer, demonstrated the coldness of the pro-abortion community when she wrote, “Abortion opponents believe fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks gestation because they reflexively respond to stimuli, but there is no scientific consensus.”

“Reflexively respond to stimuli”? Wow. What a phrase. I ‘reflexively responded to the stimuli’ of my razor cutting my face this morning, but there is no scientific consensus about whether or not that is pain either.

It is chilling to see the pro-abortion community admit that babies in their mother’s wombs “reflexively respond to stimuli” and remain resolved to keep their sex options loose by protecting a practice worse than the awful practice of American slavery.

Why would a lack of scientific consensus about a baby feeling the pain of his own dismemberment mean anything besides calling a halt to all abortions until we are sure they aren’t feeling pain? For the last four decades our selfish sides have triumphed politically. The tie always seems to go to sexual license. No wonder liberals have no impulse to protect this country. The version of America they aren’t protecting doesn’t deserve protection.

And when are Texas pro-abortion cowards going to drop their scrubbed scientific vocabulary, designed to distance them from their own evil? ‘Fetus ‘means ‘baby’, a baby who needs the protection of his mother, father, and law enforcement. ‘In-utero’ means ‘in his mother’s womb’.’“Gestation’ means ‘growth’. ‘Reflexive response to stimuli ‘means ‘feeling pain’.

In the story, Rep. Sarah Davis promotes removing emotion from this debate as an overall improvement.

If killing a child in his mother’s womb isn’t supposed to be emotional, we should all have lobotomies to remove our ability to feel emotion. If Davis is right, human emotion is just like wisdom teeth.

Kermit Gosnell has turned the stomachs of everyone with the courage to face his story, not just pro-life people. The dirty little secret is, it isn’t because he was more brutal to the children than other abortion providers. It was because he didn’t keep the brutality hidden from sight. It was the same brutality. Gosnell pulled the curtain back on abortion, period, and it is worse than a horror movie, and still some in media, government, entertainment, and elsewhere are protecting it anyway.

For the House to increase funding to $75 million is unconscionable. Speaker Straus’s pretention to being pro-life would end now if he had any shame at all.

One ridiculous moment of propaganda in the story was when it was suggested pro-abortion pressure was scared legislators after last session.

There isn’t an issue with more grassroots clout that the pro-life side of the abortion debate. When pro-lifers want to organize a rally in Washington D.C. they break records, awing the news media so much that they have to black it out.

When pro-abortion forces try to organize events they get a small band of professional liberal fools to spew hate reminiscent of the movie “The Exorcist” to cover for their lack of turn out. The news media over–covers these gatherings, zooming in to avoid a telling photo op with the pathetic turn out.

Anderson’s most telling line of all was the one in which she said that researchers estimate that 30,000 lives were saved by the removal of funding last session. Of course, she wrote it in a much colder, more technical way – following Sarah Davis’ advice not to act like a human about this issue. Anderson wrote, “The researchers estimate that 144,000 fewer women received health services and 30,000 fewer unintended pregnancies were averted in 2012 than 2010.

Whether the pregnancy is averted before or after life is created doesn’t much matter to them.

Have pro-life leaders in the legislature outlived their will to fight? Has pleasing the principalities and powers become so important to them that they’ve become useless? We’ll have to see.

Last week members of the House State Affairs Committee voted to give illegal aliens state issued drivers IDs. The move is another in a long string of moves signaling that Republicans in the Texas are in desperate need of some leadership.

How bad has it gotten? Many Republicans are pushing a water slush fund that nobody asked for, believing the lobby’s story that there will be a water crisis in 50 years if we don’t rush this monstrosity through the lege. Of course, they are conveniently ignoring the fact that the lobby wouldn’t tolerate the attachment of a single anti-slush fund amendment.

Meanwhile, on illegal immigration, an issue insiders perpetually try to downplay the huge popularity of, they are working against their constituents with Robert Alonzo’s (D) HB 3206, designed to give illegal aliens state-issued driver’s licenses.

Don’t be confused when insiders try to lie about this issue. This is a step towards amnesty, a rewarding of law breaking, disdain for immigrants using legal channels, and another heaping spoonful of abuse to people who follow the rules.

Why is this being done? Simple.

Texas politics has two gangs who try to steal from average citizens. One gang, we’ll call them the Donkeys, organize non-rich people. The other gang, we’ll call them the The Elephants, organizes rich people. Both crews are about stealing from law-abiders. The two crews are in competition for who gets to steal the most from hard-working, law-abiding Texans, but when the law-abiders rise up, the gangs cooperate to keep them down.

Right now the Elephants are scared because the Donkeys have gotten the upper hand in the federal government. This hasn’t happened in Texas, but the Texas Elephants scare easily, so they are panicking anyway. Since the only thing the Elephants know how to do is give other people’s money away, they’ve decided they need to start giving stuff to non-rich thieves. That is what this driver’s license bill is about.

Citizenship is a bundle of rights. These rights, because of the success of the Donkeys over the last 80 years, come with a huge amount of money and benefits attached.

Immigration is a license to participate in the party that the two gangs have created, funded by booty from law-abiders.

The Donkeys have always tried to make it easier for illegal immigrants to vote. Now, the Elephants in Texas, long attracted to the making their labor force legal, are being convinced this is the right time to cooperate with the Donkeys. This is more dangerous for the Elephants than the Donkeys, because the Elephants make a show of representing the law-abiders. If the law abiders left them they’d never win another election, but the Elephants are betting they won’t.

State Rep. Jonathan Stickland exposed State Rep. Larry Gonzales for putting politics before the families of military personnel. It was revealed Gonzales blackballed Stickland’s HB 202, designed to help the families of soon to be deployed military personnel.

Gonzales was discussing his own bill related to military personnel, HB 1004, before the House when Stickland began quizzing Gonzales on both HB 1004 and HB 202.

During the interchange, Stickland revealed that he has enough votes to pass his bill, but that Gonzales, a member of the Local and Consent Calendar Committee, has “tagged” his bill. He is rumored to have been bragging about tagging this bill.

“Tagging” is when a committee member marks a bill he or she wants to die in committee. Though informal, these tags are respected by the other committee members.

When confronted, Gonzales tried to cover by saying the companion Senate bill, SB 260, had already passed through the Senate so, technically, the House could vote on it.

That is, before Stickland shamed Gonzales for putting politics before families of deployed military.

It would be easy to underestimate just how much commitment to Texans this kind of thing required of Stickland. The legislature is full of tricks and games to consolidate power in the hands of special interests and keep citizens unaware. Stickland exposing the practice of “tagging” was a rare act of genuine courage against a corrupt political establishment.

Serving the interests of the powerful is the coward’s way forward. Joining Gonzales in this is Claire Cardona, blogger for the Dallas Morning News. Just this morning she joined in, mocking Stickland for speaking truth to power, the thing the fourth estate used to do before they became nursemaids for the most powerful and corrupt elements of society.

If Gonzales has any sense he will make sure SB 206 passes.

If he doesn’t, Texans know exactly who to blame for the death of a bill to give the children of deploying military personnel excused absences from school in order to spend extra time with their parent, who may not make it back alive.

The Wichita Fall School Board looks to have violated the Open Records Act by holding a pro-CSCOPE meeting with the Wichita Country Republican Women, according to a story in the Times Record News, a Wichita Falls newspaper.

The meeting was an apparent attempt by a pro-CSCOPE school board to tamp down growing opposition to CSCOPE, a highly controversial anti-American curriculum resource that has worked its way into school districts all over Texas.

This meeting was called ahead of a June meeting in which the school board will decide whether to renew or cancel the district’s CSCOPE contract.

Less than a year after the CSCOPE renewal vote, in May of 2014, there will be a school board election. Filing to run for the school board is usually done 60-90 days before the election. Current occupants of the seats up for re-election in May 2014 are Allyson Flack, Bob Payton, and Kirk Wolf. All three seats are at-large, meaning anyone ion the district can run for them.

The news story included extensive excerpting from the Texas Open Meetings Act that show meetings called by school boards must be open, with proper public notice provided.

The pro-CSCOPE school board thought it could skirt the requirements by not answering questions at the meeting. However, the school board failed to restrain itself in that way. The Times Record News article includes the text of a question read and answered by a school board member.

After the meeting Delores Culley, Wichita Falls County Republican Women’s President, seemed surprised that the pro-CSCOPE school board would expect to such a meeting to convince parents and concerned citizens to support CSCOPE, whose list of anti-American propaganda smuggled into Texas districts is long and unseemly.

Culley seemed unimpressed, saying, “That was the most brain-numbing bunch of stuff I’ve sat through in my life.”

–Times Record News article

Last week’s news that the IRS under the Obama administration had been targeting conservative groups leading up to the 2012 election wasn’t shocking. What’s interesting is Texas Republican House leadership is acting in a similar manner.

Obama’s little helper in the Texas House is Charlie Geren, who will be working today to disclose donors to tax exempt groups like the 501c3 and c4 groups Obama’s IRS targeted.

One of the most powerful tea party networks in the state resides in Geren’s backyard and they were targeted by the IRS. Over the last two election cycles Geren has seen his liberal Republican buddies lose at the hands of a more educated citizenry.

Not troubling to Geren or the bill’s author Senator Kel Seliger is the bill’s unconstitutional violation of the first amendment right to free speech.

Before now, the concept of the Obama Administration targeting conservative non-profit groups was hard for some conservative activists to face. For conservative activists who fear being criticized it wasn’t so much unbelievable as it was hard to say, or even think. Hopefully, the IRS news has given them the courage they need to face the facts.

Matt Krause (R- Tarrant County) gave a rousing speech yesterday, opposing the passage of SB 346, a House leadership bill designed to silence critics and privilege unions. The law passed, and represents one of the most forward examples of the Chicago politics Joe Straus and his team have tried to smuggle into Texas.

In his speech Krause cited a bad situation in California that led to same sex marriage opponent donors being harassed.  This is in the wake of the anti-conservative IRS scandal, in which non-profit applications with conservative names were targeted for obstruction by the IRS.

Senate Bill 346 is just the Texas version of this national story, a story that Rush Limbaugh blasted over America’s airwaves, and which the politically-engaged are talking about everywhere.

At bottom, it is the Chicago way, politics bereft of honor and respect for the constitution, in which strong-arming is considered a virtue. It’s a style of government that has much in common with most of the governments in the history of the world, and much less in common with the American experiment. Joe Straus and his leadership team have made it their business to bring this kind of politics to Texas.

The good news is, Texas is proving to be made of stronger stuff than Illinois and California. Most of the Straus Team’s efforts have failed, but it isn’t for lack of trying.

Straus’s Team want to trample the constitution with SB 346, but they also want to create a water slush fund for cronies to buy land or provide services that they can sell to the state at huge prices. In search of ever higher taxes by which to create and expand government power, they have tried to use the Rainy Day Fund, but have been stuffed so far.

Newly-outed Team Straus member Phil King offered an amendment to a bill recently that would define emails sent by Tea Parties as political contributions, triggering reporting requirements with the Texas Ethics Commission and steep fines for non-compliance. This is responsive to a Speaker Straus directive from the 81^st legislature, in which he commissioned investigation into adding blogs and other internet communications into the definition of political advertising.

The slowed growth of the powerful education bureaucracy from the 82^nd Legislature being reversed despite the fact that the doomsday predictions about these “cuts” have proven themselves to be false propaganda.

Straus and his team of liberal Republicans have partnered with Democrats to run the Texas House. His Republicans are well to the left of a majority of voting Texans. They are also well to the left of the versions of themselves that campaign for public office every two years.

But perhaps even worse, they are trivializing and eroding rule of law in Texas, carrying out a legislative strategy that would make Texas a land ruled by men, not laws, slowly reversing the American experiment. It has been successfully done in pockets of our country, the really corrupt places like Chicago, where laws are just cute little obstacles for those in power to ignore. We’ve seen it in the White House for the past four years.

These politics have been harder to implement here, because Texas has been a state of fighters since before we were a Republic or a state. Texans will die for righteous causes – fighting for them is easy. It’s in our blood.

Texans today have much to fight. There is a breed of politicians that would not only make us a land of high taxes, hazardous overregulation, and an immoral legal code; they would make us corrupt. Good thing Texans fight back.

State Rep. Lyle Larson wrote an opinion piece in the Dallas Morning News in a plea to bring back the good ol’ days when special interests passed crony laws without blowback and always fumbled the conservative legislation they were elected to pass.

The Wall Street Journal did a good job of putting Larson’s fable in perspective, pointing out that “dark money,” the devil term invented by the Texas ruling class for money spent by the accountability groups they want to intimidate, is less than 1% of overall election spending.

The lobby is resisting the change that an era of greater accountability will inevitably bring – an era of diminished legislative ability to give connected people gifts from the Texas treasury. The lobby is very slow in learning this isn’t the purpose of the Texas treasury, as they have always assumed.

The WSJ pointed out that the bill Larson is lobbying Governor Perry not to veto was passed out of the Senate, then recalled by two thirds of Senators when they realized what they had done. Speaker Straus then broke with the long-held practice of returning the bill to the Senate in such circumstances, and the House passed it with a coalition of Democrats and the Speaker’s liberal Republicans.

Fifty-one Republicans voted with Texans, in favor of government accountability, and against this attack on the first amendment from Larson, Straus, and the Texas ruling class.

If any government is going to show how to preserve the experiment of western government in the 21^st Century, it is Texas. It is a good sign that there is so much support for government accountability in the Texas House and Senate.

– WSJ article

– Larson’s DMN lobby piece

Why is CSCOPE being given the time and room to plot it’s next move? CSCOPE has broken trust with Texas parents and taxpayers in every possible way.

Intrepid parents and taxpayers like Donna Garner, Janice Van Cleave, Women on the Wall, and Americans for Prosperity-Texas are finding out just how bad the picture really is. Let us review.

CSCOPE got massive amounts of tax money to develop “time management” tools for teachers, even though a calendar and a pen still cost about $15 at Wal-Mart.

They were also tasked with creating a “professional development” tool to help teachers teach the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). This is the basic knowledge tested in the STAAR test.

What on Earth this “professional development tool” was ever supposed to be is anyone’s guess. The TEKS are the nuggets of knowledge kids need to know for the STAAR test, and they are on the Texas Education Agency (TEA) website.

As it turns out, CSCOPE pretty much just cut-and-pasted the TEKS off of the TEA website and called this their “professional development tool”.

At some point they also began developing curriculum – embarrassingly sub-standard curriculum that was also peppered with anti-Americanism and anti-Christianism. This aspect of CSCOPE has gotten most of the headlines, and rightly so, but it is just one part of what is wrong with both CSCOPE and the regional Education Service Centers (ESCs) that have perpetrated CSCOPE on Texans.

This curriculum is what CSOPE is no longer allowed to use, curriculum that included burka-wearing day for young Texas girls, communist flag-making day for school kids, and other such activities.

It is inconceivable that a group that would do such things would be allowed continued access to Texas classrooms by our elected officials, but that is what is happening right now.

CSCOPE tried to keep anyone from finding any of this out by making school districts sign non-disclosure agreements, binding them to not showing anyone the “tool”. This is very weird, and it turns out to be illegal. Parents have the legal right to see what their kids are being taught.

Since these “tools” were bought and paid for by the Texas taxpayer, we expected to be done paying for them.

Not so. CSCOPE is now renting their glorified calendar and cut-and-pasted TEKS to school districts. They also hold seminars to teach people how to use these masterpieces of learning technology.

If you think this sounds like a scam, it’s because it does.

Best of all, the TEA has these time management tools downloadable on its website. The TEKS are there too, which is what the “professional development” tool is.

This all means that CSCOPE is 100% obsolete.

What about it’s origins?

“CSCOPE”  is actually a product of a 501c3 non-profit corporation called TESCCC. The Board of TESCCC are the directors of these regional Education Service Centers (ESCs). The ESCs were given around $180 million in education grants to create these “tools”, and they contracted the work to TESCCC, who produced CSCOPE.

School districts are still paying rent for CSCOPE, and for absolutely no functional reason.

Some districts are pulling this continuing CSCOPE funding. Many are not.

Are parents and taxpayers powerless? No.

Parents and taxpayers can check to see if their ISD has pulled CSCOPE funding and use. If the Superintendant is protecting it, parents can organize to elect school board members who promise to hire a new Superintendant who will cut CSCOPE off.

When the CSCOPE controversy first hit, Sen. Patrick quickly emerged, saying he was pushing for more regulation of this obsolete, wasteful, anti-American, anti-Christian, and incompetent taxpayer leach.

“Regulate CSCOPE!” was not then a rallying cry that satisfied Texans. It still isn’t, despite Sen. Patrick’s recent press conference that failed to generate any sense of finality for the many Texas parents and taxpayers following this drama.

Instead of getting rid of this taxpayer parasite, the now-taskless-but-well-funded CSCOPE has been put under the State Board of Education’s purview.

The Attorney General is an elected official who has actually borne his teeth to CSCOPE, saying he will investigate them and kick them out of Texas if he finds illegality.

These days the executive branch is, hands-down, a better bet than the land-of-comically-low-expectations that is our legislative branch.

–AFP article “CSCOPE or C-SCAM?” (AFP has done excellent work on CSCOPE all session)

“The world is going one direction, and the Texas Republican Party is going in another.”

This was written by Paul Burka in a recent blog post, and should be the rallying cry of every Texas Republican in their 2014 campaigns.

If true, it’s an excellent reason for Texans to be hopeful, and excellent reason for conservative donors nationwide to pour money into Texas.

The “world”, at least, the western one being referenced in Burka’s quote, is doing its best to self-destruct right now.

We spend money we don’t have, and can’t seem to stop. Western debt is beyond ominous, scares everyone, and yet capitol press corps everywhere help protect and expand special interest spending on and issue by issue basis.

The western world, under liberal rule, is dumping its heritage. Liberals have bullied the quiet majority into fighting for its inheritance with one hand tied behind its back, leaving leftist culture warriors with the vast majority of of passion and hope.

Texas isn’t immune to the cultural drift; we consume the same pop culture as everyone else. Still, Texas somehow resists the leftward goose step of the West, shuffling at our own pace and in our own direction.

Is it because Texas was once a Republic, and agreed to enter the United States, but only on it’s own terms? Is it because Texans got their foothold from Mexico, post-Spanish imperialism, and not primarily from native Americans? It’s hard to know.

The point is, Texas doesn’t bother much with the winner’s guilt that cripples the rest of the West, and Texans are contrarian to boot. This provides advantages in times like these since directing herd mentality is the left’s primary weapon in the culture war.

Burka wrote his session round-up with a sincere special interest morality, as one might expect from an honor-roll court journalist such as him.

In his world, legislators prove they are serious not by serious thinking about how to make this broken system work again, but by feeding it whatever it demands. Good job Tommy Williams for raising automobile registration fees, says Burka. Good job Joe Straus for telling Texans we can’t cut our way to prosperity and sticking to it. Bad job, Legislators, for not embracing ObamaCare via Medicaid expansion like so many other states.

Burka laments that conservative Republicans, while still very legislatively limited, have the political momentum. This is true.

Ted Cruz is the standard for statewide office seekers. Moderate statewide candidates will immediately feel the discomfort of his voter-pleasing shadow.

The pesky Texas grassroots isn’t going away; it is getting smarter. Local leaders are providing a service to their state and country that few others could do. The ruling class cannot discredit them. Their only option is to collect them.

To the extent they are successful, they will be surprised to find: 1) these people aren’t easy to streamline into special interest sausage factory hands, and 2) in the event they do fall in line, the grassroots they leave behind aren’t naive.

Perhaps Burka’s words could be slightly modified for a state rallying cry: “The world is going in one direction, and Texas is going in another.” It’s hopeful, and it fits the Lone Star state like and old pair of jeans.

Keep Texans Working, a business lobby grassroots initiative, gave a statement lauding the budget as responsible and fiscally sound, just as most of the Texas conservative movement said the exact opposite.

In a letter to Rick Perry signed by AFP-Texas, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, Young Conservatives of Texas and many other groups, conservatives pointed out the many ways in which the budget was irresponsible.

The letter speaks of how both HB 1025 accelerates K-12 school  funding growth, and so does HB 10. The first does it out of the Rainy Day Fund, the second comes out of general revenue.

The letter also points out how tax cuts offered are, for the most part, temporary, and fall short of the Governor’s marker. In addition, wildly popular constitutional spending limit legislation was nowhere to be seen, even after a 2012 GOP primary ballot proposition saw spending limits poll slightly better than a proposition asking for the repeal of ObamaCare.

The legislature also raised its own pension in the budget, done in conference committee, outside the light of a normal vote. This was done by raising judicial salaries, since legislator pensions are pegged to judicial salaries.

The budget also paved the way for $2 billion from the Rainy Day Fund to be used for a ”water infrastructure bank”. The Rainy Day Fund is our emergency savings account, and the proponents of more water infrastructure have claimed water will be an emergency – in 50 years.

Veteran East Texas grassroots leader JoAnn Fleming released a letter to the Governor asking him to veto the budget, calling it a threat to a strong Texas.

Even an elected politician, State Representative Jonathan Stickland, was forthright about the nature of this budget. Stickland published a picture of himself on Facebook holding two stacks of paper, one in each hand. In the left hand is a large stack that is the normal state budget. In his right hand is a 245 page document that legislators were given one night to read before voting on. It was an “out of bounds spending” resolution, designed to give the legislature authority to add spending that neither the House nor the Senate had considered or adopted. This is a very Washington DC way for our legislature to do business – and very reckless.

Keep Texans Working’s statement started with:  “We applaud the Texas Legislature for passing a fiscally sound and balanced state budget that lives within our means while still addressing several key economic priorities such as water infrastructure development, significant tax relief for Texans, ending some diversions for future transportation infrastructure improvements, and maintaining a healthy balance in the state’s Rainy Day Fund for future emergencies.”

Keep Texans Working seems to be the business lobby’s attempt to go populist, website and all. Their statement on the budget gives a good picture of how out of step they are with the Texas conservative movement.

–TX conservative movement letter to the Governor on the budget

–Keep Texans Working statement on the budget

A hack Washington DC writer named Brent Budowsky revealed the low quality of the national Democratic push to make progress in Texas. Budowsky is a former Lloyd Bentsen staffer.

In The Hill, an activist DC newspaper, Budowsky used a scattershot approach of stock race-bating tactics to attempt to smear prominent Texas Republicans as “anti-minority”.

In a fit of hack prophecy, Budowsky was kind enough to inform us that a wave of angry minorities shall flood voter booths in 2014 – and he sees seven men carrying seven horns of oil, walking among seven golden lampstands.

This is predictable. The national Democrat machine has traditionally had success by sewing hatred between ethnic groups.

Unfortunately for them, racial tension in Texas is much lower than other states, and for any number of reasons.

For one thing, victimhood grows on rocky soil in Texas – it is incompatible with the spirit of the state. Our state was born in struggle, long-odds, a pioneering spirit, and risk-taking.

Also, the Americans who first came to Texas weren’t imperialists, cultural or otherwise. They were individuals trying to build lives for their families, invited by the Mexican government, and uninterested in imposing any grand vision on the people who were already here.

The Texas War for Independence was mostly a result of dumb governance, not from any mounting sense of oppression or tension. All at once the Mexican government tried to levy big taxes on people who had lived for a long time without them. If you’re going to do that, you had better have the muscle on the ground to enforce them, which the Mexican government didn’t.

This will be the second time in recent memory an earnest attempt to “turn Texas blue” has taken place. Four years ago was the culmination of a notoriously expensive and failed push by the Democrats to turn Texas blue.

The current attempt was put together back when Obama felt like he could run through mountains. Hugely ambitious and arrogant, the audacity to try to turn Texas blue fit with the spirit of that moment .

Now they’re stuck with the project in the face of an unpopular President who is losing allies daily. And with ammo like Budowsky’s bad hit piece, the future is not bright for this project.

–Budowsky article

Reported on by The Blaze in an article entitled, “Guess who said Michelle Bachmann ‘did nothing’ as Tea Party Caucus Chair?”,  Karl Rove used his appearance on George Stephanopoulos’ show, alongside Arianna Huffington, to give Michelle Bachmann a raspberry on her way out of office. He also offered political advice to the same Tea Party he has promised to target with his PAC in primaries.

Several members of the liberal panel were doing thinly-veiled touchdown dances at the news that Michelle Bachmann will not run for re-election.

The authentic Tea Party offers the only real opposition to the bi-partisan ruling class. Rove pointed out that the ruling class Democrat was no longer needed to run against Bachmann now that the ruling class can again control this Republican district with a Republican.

Of course, Rove made it sound like the Democrat was licking his chops to run against a Tea Party candidate but is afraid of a ruling class Republican.

This goes right along with Rove’s narrative that the Tea Party was to blame for the monumental underachievement that Rove quarterbacked in 2012.

You remember 2012, right? All of the Tea Party-preferred presidential candidates were buried under a mountain of ruling class cash, the establishment bought the nomination, and Romney ushered in a huge Democratic win.

This was, of course, hot on the heels of the Tea Party tsunami of 2010.

Since Rove was one of the architects of this failure, one in which the GOP’s base was not secured, he really has no other choice but to push this mythology. The only alternative is to admit he was and is wrong.

Rove said that Bachmann achieved nothing as Tea Party caucus chair, and that now maybe the Tea Party can get someone who can.

Of course, this is on Rove’s definition of “doing things”, which means passing legislation.

As an authentic outsider, Bachmann always stood little chance of passing much positive legislation. The bi-partisan ruling class made sure of that. It’s when the outsiders win the big positions that this starts to happen. An outsider’s job at this stage is to make it harder for the establishment to quietly mislead average Americans and to help build for the future.

What Bachmann did do was stick to her principle from a visible perch, giving definition to the battle going on in DC between ruling class Republicans and Tea Party Republicans.

Rove is undoubtedly right about the Tea Party Caucus. There are plenty of ruling class-owned-and-operated conservative fakes to choose from, and the establishment will be happy to co-opt the Tea Party caucus if one is elected.

If this happens, you’ll see two things happen side-by-side: The Tea Party caucus will lose it’s prophetic voice and start to “win” over hyped, mostly symbolic victories.

In other words, the Tea Party Caucus would start to look just like the Republican Party.

The grassroots’ strength is on the ground inside districts. Once enough seats are won, conviction conservatives will, at last, have no trouble “doing things”.

–Blaze post and video