Yesterday, as you might have read, a federal judge ruled that several elements of Texas’s abortion reform laws were unconstitutional (although not the section that restricted abortions after 20 weeks). As you might recall, RedState spoke with Lt. Governor Dewhurst after the bill finally passed, and we spoke to him again yesterday:
Short version: Texas is going to fight the court case, Texas is expecting to win this, but pro-abortion groups are going to be pushing back whenever possible, so pro-life activists need to stay on top of the situation.
The coach of a Texas high school football team has been accused of bullying in a formal complaint after his team beat another school 91-0.
MyFoxDFW.com reports a parent of a player on the Western Hills High School football team claims Aledo High School football coach Tim Buchanan encouraged his players to bully their opponents by running up the score. Buchanan learned of the online complaint against him Saturday, the day after his team beat Western Hills in a 4A matchup.
Apparently Aledo is scary good this year. The other team’s football coach blanched at the accusation, of course; and it’s not as if the Aledo coach was trying to be obnoxious about it:
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas and the face of the angry right, has been criticized, lambasted and lampooned for putting the nation through a 16-day government shutdown and the prospect of a financial default.
HOUSTON — Ferdinand Frank Fischer, III would be a great name for a Mexican monarchist trying to reclaim the crown of Emperor Maximilian, but it’s a lousy name for an ambitious [Democratic] American politician from a Latino district of San Antonio.
That’s why Fischer ditched it years ago, trying on a couple of monikers before building a name for himself as Trey Martinez Fischer, politician on the rise.
The trick worked, as it has for so many starlets, but now he is easily startled by questions of authenticity and vanity. When he found out that Gov. Rick Perry had used the term “charlatans and peacocks” to describe a group of politicians – Fischer among them – who were threatening to impeach Regent Wallace Hall, he bristled.
The below does not even remotely represent the amount of video that got shot at this year’s RedState Gathering: in fact, it does not even remotely represent the amount of video that RedState shot at this year’s Gathering, or the amount of video shot of Governor Rick Perry. But the Governor had some time to talk with me on some of the issues involving Texas lately, and I was happy to talk with him:
The national Democratic party fucking hates Texas.
Pardon my French, but they do. National Democrats hate Texans, they hate the Texan economy, they hate the Texan oil industry that fuels the economy and gives the people jobs, they hate the part-time – and apparently very successful – Texan system of government, they hate Texan culture, they hate Texan religiosity, they hate Texan swagger, they hate Texas’s ongoing population boom, and they hate hate hate hate HATE the way that Texan Republicans can get Latinos to vote for Republican candidates. And what national Democrats hate most of all is that Texans largely and visibly consider the East and Left Coasts to be essentially run by the human equivalent of yapping Pomeranians.
None of this makes life easy for Texas Democrats, I’m sure.
As you recall, the abortion reform HB2 bill finally passed late Friday night/Saturday morning, over the … vociferous? vehement? I know: vicious – objections of Democrats. Short version: ban on abortions after 20 weeks and abortion clinics are now subject to new health and safety requirements. Lt. Gov. Dewhurst spoke to RedState just after the vote was made:
To sum up the interview: Dewhurst noted that both the ban and the new health/safety requirements are pretty much in line with most of the rest of the country at this point, and wasn’t particularly shy about observing that the entire controversy was blatantly politicized by the Democratic party. The term ‘mob rule’ was used several times by Dewhurst to describe HB2 opponents, and it’s hard to argue with that; from what I saw, the protesters rather badly wanted to be a mob. Unfortunately for them, Texas wasn’t particularly interested in letting them.
The law will be formally signed by Governor Rick Perry some time this week; it will undoubtedly be challenged, but it’s pretty popular and the bill was designed to be hard to kill in the courts. Score this one as a pretty solid win for pro-lifers, folks.
PS: DO NOT MAKE SIGNS FEATURING VULGAR LANGUAGE AND GIVE THEM TO YOUR PREPUBESCENT DAUGHTERS. I am amazed, and a little sickened, that I have to mention this.
A spokesman for Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis, who stood and spoke for more than 12 hours to help kill the bill last week, says she won’t filibuster the legislation a second time.
US News and World Report went on to spout pro-abortion* propaganda: I assume that people don’t feel like reading it. Anyway, the major problem for Davis and the Democratic party here is that, simply put, the American people are fine with limiting late-term abortion. They are also highly amenable to the argument that minority women should not be expected to bleed out on filthy examination tables simply so that white women can enjoy unlimited access to abortion – and, believe me: pro-lifers know by now to point that out, and there’s an increasing number of felony cases that catalog just those sorts of atrocities. Continue reading Wendy Davis keeping head down during Texas special session.
Via Rare comes a report that police have arrested one of the first responders to last month’s fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas.
More details here, but I want to offer a serious caution: there is even less information than usual right now about the arrest, whether it is justified, or even whether it’s germane to the original explosion. What we know is that a guy was arrested, and that the charge is “possession of a destructive device” (reportedly a pipe bomb). Obviously, IF this story checks out then it changes pretty much everything that we knew about the incident… and, bluntly: a bunch of people who wanted to use this to score partisan points are going to have to apologize to both the State of Texas and Governor Rick Perry. Personally. I note this not to be a jerk, but… actually, no, I note this pretty much just to be a jerk. Continue reading Was the West, Texas fertilizer explosion… arson? Domestic terrorism? Don’t know the right term, sorry.
