Zippidy Doo Da

I'm not stupid, I'm from Texas!

Monday, July 16, 2012

Chupacabra Report

I see in the Thomas Voting Reports “How Texans Voted” that 180 of the 185 House Democrats that voted against the 33rd GOP attempt to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act voted for a motion to oust members who voted to repeal from the Federal employees Health Benefits Plan:


“This taxpayer-subsidized, privately operated plan covers nearly all present and retired House members and senators, civil servants, federal retirees and their family members. The plan provides lawmakers with key benefits their constituents would lose if the 2010 law is repealed, such provisions against coverage denials based on pre-existing conditions, lifetime caps on benefits and premiums based on gender and age. Under this Democratic motion, members voting to rrepeal the 2010 law would have to leave the federal plan soon after repeal takes effect.”

Well, the vote failed along party lines, but I like this sort of thing. It must have caused some faces to turn red on the tory side of the aisle. Good. Some palpitations might even lead to a come-to-Jesus moment for some of those making hay trying to deny healthcare to less-fortunate Americans.

This reminds me of when Mickey Leland was in the Texas Legislature and the Republicans were trying to pass a bill requiring women to notify their husbands before they could get an abortion. Leland introduced an amendment that exempted women who were married to graduates of Texas A& M University, of which there were, and still are, many in the legislature.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

The Armed Citizen

Boy, 3, fatally shoots father with handgun


Associated Press

SALEM, Ind. — Police say a 3-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed his father after finding the man's loaded handgun in a southern Indiana home.

Indiana State Police Sgt. Jerry Goodin says the 33-year-old Martinsville man had brought his gun with him Friday to a home he was remodeling in Salem, about 25 miles northwest of Louisville, Ky.

Goodin says the man, his wife, their three children and a juvenile relative were at the home when the 3-year-old boy apparently found the gun and it accidentally discharged, fatally wounding the man. No one else was injured.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Perry to turn down $100 million in Medicaid funding



DALLAS (AP) — Gov. Rick Perry said Monday that Texas won't establish an online marketplace for patients to shop for insurance or expand Medicaid, two key elements of the federal health care overhaul.




Tuesday, July 10, 2012

"To a Texas Republican, hearing both sides means both the right wing and the far right wing get their say."

-Democratic consultant Jason Stanford, on the race for Kay Bailey Hutchison's Senate seat, in which the GOP candidates have spent $25,000,000 as opposed to $130,000 on the Democratic side.

Sunday, July 01, 2012

Chupacabra Report

News that Gets My Goat..

-Jim Ellis, formerly an aide to Tom DeLay and head of DeLay’s PAC Americans for a Republican Majority, pleaded guilty Thursday to making an illegal campaign contribution in the 2002 election. Ellis received four years probation and a $10,000 fine. In return for the guilty plea, prosecutors dismissed conspiracy and money-laundering charges against him. Tom DeLay remains free on bail pending appeal of his conviction and three year jail sentence for money laundering. If DeLay’s conviction stands up in state court, I expect him and whoever it is paying his legal fees to go the Supreme Court, which recently threw out Montana’s ban on corporate campaign contributions.


-Rex Tillerson, the new head of Exxon/Mobil spoke before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last week and in a break from his predecessor admitted that fossil fuel use contributes to global warming and is changing the climate, saying “yes, fossil fuels are warming the planet, but we’ll adapt to climate change and rising sea levels.” "Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around -- we'll adapt to that. It's an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions."

Tillerson said that lazy journalists are scaring the public, and that people are illiterate and don’t understand science and engineering. Would he say that people in his industry have been dishonest in denying climate change or is it just that geologists and engineers don’t understand climate science and ecology? This reminds me again of what Upton Sinclair said about how. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" I don’t see how people who call themselves ‘conservatives’ can square that with changing the weather, which is a lot more crucial to our well-being than, say, the tax rate on capital gains.


-I heard Texas Attorney General and Major Tool Greg Abbott on the news bragging about their only win in the Supreme Court ruling affirming the Affordable Care Act as Constitutional. The ruling apparently will allow Texas and other states to continue keeping poor people off Medicaid. Still, Abbot is 0-for-five in his Federal suits by my count (on Voter ID, Re-districting, Planned Parenthood ban, and EPA rules.) I wonder if Texans for Lawsuit Reform will cut him off over frivolous lawsuits.