Johnny Castle and Baby could have taken lessons from Texas Speaker of the House Tom Craddick and Joe Pojman of Texas Alliance for Life. With the Speaker's one-man rule of the House facing an unprecedented challenge from within his own party, with the passage of a high-impact antiabortion bill at stake, and with the Texas legislative session in its final days, Craddick and Pojman were caught dancing the political payola polka.
"One of the sources of irritation with the Speaker this session is the amount of blood spilled and floor time that has been committed to socially conservative issues," but Craddick and the "pro-life" lobby are longtime partners - and one good move deserves another.
In the Texas Legislature, dirty dancing is only politics as usual.
A couple of months ago, a Karl Rove disciple by the name of Florence Shapiro introduced Texas Senate Bill 785. Shapiro's bill required doctors to make detailed reports to the state about women who had abortions. 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.
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?
(Rep. Morrison's Austin office phone is: (512) 463-0456. Sen. Shapiro's is (512) 463-0108. If you have a few moments, give them a call and politely explain you think that medical records should stay private. - promoted by boadicea)
Molly Ivins once called Texas the national laboratory for bad government. To cite only one example, laws regulating abortion just don't come much worse than ours.
There is a growing trend for politicians to dodge this powder keg issue by mouthing innocuous-sounding platitudes about "reducing the number of abortions." But with a Christian right-approved Democratic initiative as political cover, two Republican state legislators are leading a full-on charge, mounted for battle on a Trojan donkey.
Should they succeed, the confidentiality of personal information, and medical privacy as we know it, will become a thing of the past for women in Texas.
I have never been a fan of TAKS or TASP and lightseeker summarized it best here:
[This] bullshit policy of using dubious high stakes testing as a club on public schools is both a fraud and a conscious attempt to distroy them. The short of it is that schools have been burdened with more and more strigent requirements and simultaneously starved of needed resources. In other words, set up to fail and thus justify privitization.
Ms. Shapiro reinforces this concern with this unfortunate comment:
It should be easier and quicker to close poor-performing charter schools, she said, and she wants lawmakers to appropriate facility funding, for the first time, to help high-performing charter schools.Shapiro [signaled this] "is not a code word for eliminating accountability."
Accountabilty has been code for holding public schools to standards and then not funding them to meet those standards. "No Child Left Behind", like George Bush, did come out of Texas.
How about we hold the Lege accountable for its role in the demise of the Texas public education system? Why isn't there a "TAKS" for the Lege?
The Republican Lege led by Rick Perry has shown an appalling lack of vision when it comes to education, treating school children as a cost center rather than an investment. Each year they have applied band-aids to the gaping wound that is our school system and then act scandalized when we accuse them of bleeding us dry.
