Yes, friends in a move that is sure to rock Texas politics two incumbent Republicans, want to get re-elected by giving us, effectively, an appraisal cap:
Houston State Senator Dan Patrick (R-Houston) and Representative Dwayne Bohac (R-Houston) will present a plan to address skyrocketing property tax bills to the Select Committee on Property Tax Relief and Appraisal Reform which meets today in Houston at the Lone Star College in Tomball.
Both Patrick and Bohac plan to introduce a number of bills next session addressing appraisal reform. One measure will be presented for the first time at Monday's meeting. The bill calls for homesteads to be reappraised every two years rather than every year.
[snip]
The Bohac-Patrick Plan will limit, by law, homestead appraisals to a minimum of every two years, thereby having the practical effect of a 5 percent appraisal cap.
A couple of months ago, a Karl Rove disciple by the name of Florence Shapiro introduced Texas Senate Bill 785. Shapiro's bill required doctors to make detailed reports to the state about women who had abortions. And the Senate passed it, too - but only after removing sections that made targets of judges who issued judicial bypasses to minors, and sent women to jail for failing to reveal highly personal information about their private lives to the state.
But now the bill is in the House, all the dangerous and intrusive provisions have returned with a vengeance, and the vote is tomorrow.
Another bill by Sen. Dan Patrick pressures even women pregnant through sexual assault, or those whose fetuses are diagnosed with severe anomalies, to examine ultrasound images before being allowed abortion care.
Should this legislation by Shapiro and Patrick succeed, the confidentiality of personal information, and medical privacy as we know it, will become a thing of the past for women in Texas. And doctors, instead of inspiring confidence in their patients, will be forced by law to pressure women with emotional blackmail.
(According to sources much better informed than I, several important bills -- good, bad and downright ugly -- are expected out of committee in the next couple of days. Updated information below the flip. -- moiv - promoted by moiv)
As reported by the Dallas Morning News and Vince at Capitol Annex, Warren Chisum's HB 175 -- a "trigger bill" to make abortion a felony in Texas should Roe v. Wade be overturned -- appears to have gone down for the count.
A stiff anti-abortion bill is probably gone for the legislative session, dragged down partly by a budget analysis that showed outlawing all abortions would cost the state more than $400 million in health care costs over the next three years.
[:::]
The cost from ending abortions in Texas would come from an estimated 63,000 more births, of which 67 percent are likely to be supported by Medicaid, according to projections from the nonpartisan Legislative Budget Board.
Based on current abortion rates of about 78,000 a year, the board estimated that if abortion were illegal, 20 percent of women would go to a state where the procedure was legal. The remainder, based on projections, would carry their pregnancy to term and require medical and social support.
While Warren Chisum says his bill failed to make the cut because "It got hung on a bad vote in committee," and Vince Liebowitz wonders whether "some in the Legislature are simply tired of voting for bad public policy time and time and time again," a projected bill for $400,000,000 in social services was just as likely the real sticking point for the solons of the Tax Relief State.
A total abortion ban might not make it onto the floor this session, but there are plenty more insulting, intrusive and just plain dangerous anti-woman bills where that one came from -- all coming soon to a legislative chamber near you.
The deadline for filing new bills in the Texas Legislature passed some weeks ago, but State Senator Dan Patrick is so very special that he's been granted a very special suspension of the rules to file yet another of his very special anti-abortion bills. His Texas Baby Purchasing Act of 2007 drew more snickers than sponsors, and his co-effort with Rep. Warren Chisum to ban abortion entirely remains in committee, but the legislative session's not over yet. And the religious right never gives up.
Women in Texas already are denied abortion care until after a doctor warns them of nonexistent risks of breast cancer and mental illness, after which they must spend at least 24 hours pondering misinformation that no responsible physician would have given them, nor ever did, until forced by law to do so. Patrick's SB 920, to be heard in the Senate Committee on Health & Human Services on April 24, adds yet another moralistic barrier by denying a woman abortion care unless she examines an ultrasound image of her pregnancy, whether she wants to see it or not.
Patrick (left), a Christian conservative talk show host and first-term senator who broadcasts his radio show from the Capitol, had his own vasectomy performed live and on the air. Had a compulsory ultrasound viewing been a part of that procedure, we would all be grateful that the fact-challenged Patrick is one publicity hound who didn't have a television gig.
Women who seek abortion care deserve to have much more medical privacy than that, along with a lot more respect for their constitutional rights.
Yes. That's right. Dan Patrick, the reichtwing radio talk show host whose "baby buying" bill was first reported by TexasKaos' moiv and has since brought widespread condemnation of Patrick, the Texas GOP and (of course) Texas, walked out on the very first Muslim prayer held in the Senate and then had the audacity to call himself tolerant!
"I think that it's important that we are tolerant as a people of all faiths, but that doesn't mean we have to endorse all faiths, and that was my decision," he said later, "I surely believe that everyone should have the right to speak, but I didn't want my attendance on the floor to appear that I was endorsing that."
Patrick was the only Texas Senator to walk out on him.
Ok, let me get this straight. You want to show your tolerance for religious freedom...by turning you back literally on it and walking out it?!? The man, like his buddy Rick Perry, is either a bumbling idiot or a political genius. I'm going with idiot.
What adds to the irony is the fact that the lawmaker who invited the Muslim cleric, Imam Yusuf Kavakci of the Dallas Central Mosque, was a Jewish woman and fellow Republican, Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano.
So go ahead, Dan. Explain to everyone in only your delusional, "baby buying" world how your actions make sense. Explain how a Jewish woman can invite and listen to a Muslim cleric but a fundamentalist Christian cannot. Explain why she has no problem this occured before the holy Jewish celebration of Passover but you and your fellow wingers are incensed a Muslim man spoke at the Senate days before Easter. Exactly when would it be ok for a Muslim man to speak, Dan?
On April 2, both House and Senate committees of the Texas Legislature will begin considering a number of bills affecting a woman's medical privacy, her control over her own bodily integrity and other aspects of reproductive rights. As always, the position taken by the medical community differs dramatically from that of organizations and politicians serving the Christian right. In fact, it's often hard to tell that they're even talking about the same legislation.
While the practice of medicine has undergone fundamental changes during the last 500 years, the religious doctrines inspiring and promoting anti-woman legislation currently pending in the Texas House and Senate have not.
Texas physicians who dwell in 21st century reality are coming forward to defend a woman's right to reproductive health care. But since many Texas lawmakers and their supporters on the religious right still seem to inhabit a world of fantasy, those doctors are going to need all the support they can muster.
Blogging has a lot in common with playing the slots. We spend endless hours researching, writing, and then refining what we've written before pulling the lever one more time by hitting "submit." Most of the time we're lucky just to break even, but once in a while we hit the jackpot.
While driving home from work, I often listen to news radio and catch up with what has happened during the day. Last Thursday afternoon, KRLD 1080 alerted me to an upcoming story that already sounded familiar.
Lawmaker wants to pay women for choosing adoption over abortion
A proposal by state Sen. Dan Patrick would pay pregnant women $500 for choosing adoption over abortion.
The anti-abortion Houston Republican said Senate Bill 1567 would provide an incentive to forgo abortion, but critics questioned whether such payments would be viewed as baby selling or coercion.
That story sounded so familiar because I had posted it online in the wee hours of that very morning.
Senator Dan Patrick (R., Houston) has introduced Texas Senate Bill 1567, captioned
"Relating to the creation of the adoption incentive program." The text of the bill can be found here, in html,.pdf and Word formats.
Sen. Dan Patrick has figured out that adoption tax credits have a serious limitation: they don't do anything at all to increase the number of newborn babies available for adoption in the first place. But Senator Dan's the man with a plan to even out the shortfall.
Under Patrick's SB 1567, AKA the Texas Baby Purchasing Act of 2007, women would qualify for a $500 payment from the state within 60 days of signing away all parental rights to their newborn children.
If Patrick gets his way, childbearing in the service of the state won't be just some creepy Handmaid's Tale fiction anymore. How's that for some Republican family values?
With the advent of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the US House, many pro-choice Americans have breathed a sigh of relief. But except for the Hyde Amendment, the most effective attacks on reproductive freedom have come not from Congress, but from statehouses under the control of Republicans and anti-choice Democrats.
Last year Louisiana's Democratic governor, Kathleen Blanco, signed a trigger law that would ban all abortions in that state if Roe v. Wade is overturned. This year, several states will consider such trigger laws, as well as numerous other bills to place more immediate restrictions on access to safe and legal abortion care.
As state legislative sessions begin, the perennial anti-choice assault is already well underway. We still have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep.
Texas state representatives Frank Corte and Warren Chisum, long considered two of the state's worst lawmakers but hailed by Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick as "Texas Heroes," [pdf link] are working once again to turn their obsessive and unseemly fascination with the reproductive functions of women they will never meet into public law and policy.
Joined this year by Houston's own Rush Limbaugh, new state senator Dan Patrick, they remain hell-bent on exerting even greater control over the bodies of Texas women. But only because Jesus likes it that way.
Sen. Dan Patrick has figured out that adoption tax credits have a serious limitation: they don't do anything at all to increase the number of newborn babies available for adoption in the first place. But Senator Dan's the man with a plan to even out the shortfall.
