Chupacabra Report

News that Gets My Goat

-Been a lot of news coverage of open carry activists this week, especially after the NRA asked them to tone it down because they were scaring people by carrying their mini 14s and shotguns into stores and restaurants. Actually, I was disappointed to hear that they are prohibited from packing at the GOP Convention at the Fort Worth Convention Center. I thought it would be fitting if the tory wingnuts who have done so much to advance our rights under the Second Amendment had to take their chances with armed delegates preforming inadvertent ‘drop tests’ with their handguns while they fall all over themselves applauding Greg Abbott, Danny Goeb and Rafael “Ted” Cruz.

-The Chronicle followed the Primary Election with their usual editorial deploring the low voter turnout. Here’s some:

“The numbers are pathetic. In a state with more than 26 million residents, the combined turnout in last Tuesday's runoffs was 951,461 voters. That's lower than the March 4 primary number of 1.8 million, lower than the 1.3 million turnout in the last primary runoffs in July 2012. All three of those numbers pale in contrast to the number of registered voters in this state - 13.6 million, according to the Secretary of State's office.

“Dan Patrick, the Houston state senator on the verge of taking charge of arguably the most powerful elective office in Texas, won his lieutenant governor's race Tuesday with 65 percent of the votes cast. Those 65 percent account for a paltry 3.5 percent of registered Texas voters.

“What the dismal numbers mean, of course, is that a small percentage of the voting-eligible population exerts an outsized influence on how we educate our children, how we spend our tax money, how we invest in our future. A large majority of Texans allows someone else to make those decisions for them”

Fact is, Texas is not really a “red state,” it is merely a non-voting state; much like how it is not really a job-creating state, it’s just that it has a high birthrate, which makes for a lot of service jobs.

-Last week, Dallas suburb Farmers Branch Texas spent $1.4 million to finally put to rest their ill-conceived city ordinance banning home rentals to illegal immigrants. This from the Dallas Morning News:

“More than seven years after beginning a divisive attempt to ban immigrants in the U.S. illegally from rental housing, a united City Council decided to cut its losses Tuesday — paying $1.4 million to the lawyers who fought the effort.

“Farmers Branch previously had spent more than $6 million defending the ordinance, which was never enforced.

“The legal battles galvanized many Hispanics to fight back, twice filing Voting Rights Act lawsuits.

“In 2012, a federal judge sided with the 10 Hispanic plaintiffs in the second suit and established single-member council districts in the city. That resulted in the election of the first Mexican-American on the council.

“In addition to the millions of dollars it spent on expenses related to the illegal immigration lawsuits, the city spent about $850,000 to fight the two voting rights suits.”

This city of 29,000 residents, with an annual budget of $90 million, has approved three property tax hikes in these past seven years.