I’m awarding my first-ever Tweet of the Day Award to Andrea Grimes, for her brilliant assessment of certain Texas doctors who legislate.
The MDs of the Texas Senate
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Category Archives: Texas
Welcome to Our Dystopia: The Health and Freedom of Millions of Texas Women Depends on One Woman Talking Nonstop for 13 Hours
There is something very dystopian about the notion that the health, dignity, and safety of millions of women rests on the back of one woman, who must stand and talk without water or bathroom breaks for thirteen hours, in order to protect said women. Margaret Atwood didn’t write this. This is real. This is the Texas lege.
–Monique Daviau, on Texas Sen. Wendy Davis’ 13-hour filibuster, currently in progress
Cathie Adams is a Stain on Texas’ Honor
I did not know who Cathie Adams was until a moment ago, and I can pretty much guarantee that history will not care who she is. All that matters is that she is vile, despicable, and yet another embarrassment to the great state of Texas. At least she doesn’t hold elected office.
Anyway, she tweeted a few sentiments that apparently emerged from a rift between our universe and one that would allow someone to think this is an acceptable thing to say:
Stinky stalking feminists wearing orange shirts are FEW in the Tx Senate gallery.
— Cathie Adams (@cathieadams) June 24, 2013
Who bought the orange shirts for the feminazis to wear in the Tx House and Senate galleries to express support for abortion?
— Cathie Adams (@cathieadams) June 24, 2013
Very very sad to see children in tow of feminazis wearing orange. Train up a child…
— Cathie Adams (@cathieadams) June 24, 2013
As my friend Lynn said, “Class, Texas. Talk about lazy smear tactics. Calling people ‘Feminazis?’ Really? In 2013?”
I’ve already expended too much mental energy on this waste of space. I’m actually glad, though, that she and people like her are talking, because we are not going to forget what you said and the kind of people you are.
The Citizens’ Filibuster Here in Austin is Far Stronger than the Fools Running the Legislature
Over the past few days, something truly remarkable has happened here in Austin. As the Republican-controlled state legislature has used a special session to consider yet more scientifically-baseless and needlessly oppressive bills regarding abortion rights, thousands of people crowded into the Capitol building to stage a citizen’s filibuster. I am in awe of the many brave and tireless people who are standing up to the people who claim to be “pro-life” but in reality could not care less about the life of anyone who isn’t a wealthy donor. I have nothing, nothing at all, but contempt right now for the liars, fools, and cowards in the Legislature who are supporting these bills, and a similar level of disdain for the people who support them. Lest you think Texas is a cesspool of adherents to a dying ideology, though, the thousands of people who donned orange and crowded the building are a testament to everything that is good and right about Texas. Do not give up on Texas. We may surprise you yet.
For some excellent coverage of what has been going on at the Capitol, I highly recommend Julie Gills’ blog:
- Women In Texas And Abortions Rights Part 1, June 20, 2013
- Texas Women Part II: Education, Access, Resources, June 20, 2013
- Texas Women-You Can’t Shut Them Down, June 21, 2013
- Updates on HB60 and Uprisings in North Carolina, June 21, 2013
- The Citizen’s Filibuster Continues, June 23, 2013
- Signal Boost: An Open Letter to Anyone Ready to Write Off Texas: Don’t, Because it’s *Your* Future at Stake, June 23, 2013
- So We Go Forward, June 24, 2013
State Rep. Senfronia Thompson offered an amendment that would exclude rape and incest victims from the 20-week abortion ban, but Republicans weren’t having any of it. Rep. Thompson even brandished a wire hanger to illustrate the seriousness of what Republicans are trying to do. It was no use, though, as Republicans in the Texas House generally don’t like to consider consequences like that.
A few lowlights from the past few days:
– 
Rep. Jodie Laubenberg (R-Murphy) wins my first-ever Facepalm Award, because she doesn’t know what rape kits do. Proving that she is not only dumb, but also immune to self-awareness, she voted against insurance coverage for prenatal care in 2007 because the beneficiaries of such coverage “[are] not born yet”:
A priceless exchange occurred between Harper-Brown cohort Jodie Laubenberg of Rockwall and Dallas Dem Rafael Anchía. Laubenberg proposed to enforce a three-month waiting period before expectant mothers could begin receiving prenatal and perinatal care under CHIP. Anchía pointed out that the eligibility change would kick nearly 100,000 children out of the CHIP program. “That is absolutely untrue!” Laubenberg shot back, proving her point by waving a sheet of paper. Then again, “That is absolutely untrue!”
“You know,” Anchía replied, “I can hear you yelling, but just because you yelled, it doesn’t make it true.” Anchía pointed out the consequences of denying health care to the unborn. “You do know, don’t you, that these are U.S. citizens?”
“But they’re not born yet,” Laubenberg, a “family values” conservative, retorted. Dukes, standing behind Anchía at the back mic, whipped her head around in a shocked double take. Anchía, smelling blood, observed, “You have an anti-life amendment,” which set Laubenberg off on a loud tirade in which she claimed to be the most pro-life member of the House.
– State Rep. Jonathan Stickland (R-Crazytown) wants to make sure we all know that he was not trying to threaten anyone when he tweeted that he is thankful for the “right 2 protect ourselves & the 2nd amendment” amid all the liberals crowding around the Capitol. Stickland, who apparently “brings his gun to work every day,” thinks that anyone who might connect his reference to the right to own a gun to any sort of threatening posture is simply engaging in an “illogical liberal attack.”
Some days u r extra thankful we still have the right 2 protect ourselves & the 2nd amendment-Today is 1 of those days #txlege
— Jonathan Stickland (@RepStickland) June 23, 2013
If we take Stickland at his word, then he needs to work on the clarity of his writing skills, or at least his tweeting skills. In the same article on his site, however, Stickland wrote that “only liberals would depict legislation that increases the standard of care women are receiving in health clinics as a ‘war on women,'” thus establishing that Stickland is either too dishonest or too stupid to be taken seriously by grownups.
– Finally, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst warned on Sunday that the governor will call a second special session of the Legislature, which is normally supposed to wrap everything up in May, unless it passes “certain items.” He didn’t specify the “items,” but he and most other Texas Republicans suck at being subtle.
Texas Embarrasses Itself Again. About Reproductive Rights. Again.
Via picardfacepalm.com
The Texas Senate passed three new abortion regulations today, during a special session that was supposed to be about things like jobs or the economy. Apparently, Texas legislators can’t focus on jobs so long as they are distracted by thoughts of unregulated ladybits. These regulations serve no purpose other than to make operating a clinic that provides abortion services either impractical or impossible, and driving them out of business. (The fact that this is a direct regulation on business that is likely to eliminate jobs probably isn’t lost on state Republicans. They just don’t care.) Here’s as good a summary as I can manage off the top of my head (copied from a series of Facebook comments), so some of this may not be 100% accurate.
The first regulation requires abortions to take place in ambulatory surgical centers, which are facilities that provide outpatient surgical care and must conform to a set of health and safety standards geared towards procedures involving anesthesia and incisions. Abortions generally don’t involve either of those things, so requiring them to take place in an ambulatory surgical center means that either (1) existing ASCs must take in existing abortion providers, or (2) facilities that currently provide abortions must meet state requirements for ASCs, even though they will never perform a surgery. Existing ASCs have no reason to start providing abortions, and nearly every incentive not to be targeted by protesters, and upgrades to ASC certification would cost current providers thousands upon thousands of dollars and give ideologues on the bodies that handle licensing endless opportunities to find ways to deny them. There is no reason for this regulation except to drive abortion provers out of business.
The second regulation requires doctors providing abortions to have admitting privileges to a hospital within 30 miles. I’m not sure what goes into getting admitting privileges, but I think it generally involve doctors who routinely work at or with that hospital. Again, this requirement serves no purpose but to make life harder for abortion providers. More and more doctors who provide abortions travel to clinics around the state, so this regulation would force them either to undertake an unreasonable and unsustainable level of admitting privileges, or stay within a 30-mile radius of wherever they are. The one plausible justification I’ve heard for this is that doctors who perform abortions need admitting privileges to local hospitals in case complications occur that require an immediate trip to the emergency room, but that’s not true, from what I’ve read.
The third regulation requires doctors to administer RU-486 in person. I’m not sure how that particular drug is administered. I know it’s more than just a pill or an injection, but so is chemotherapy, and nothing requires doctors to do that personally. Same goes for pain medication infusers. In fact, we entrust most routine procedures to nurses and medical techs, not to mention physician’s assistants and nurse practitioners. Unless administering RU-486 requires monitoring and reactions to complications on par with open heart surgery (I’m sure it doesn’t), this is just another way to make it difficult for doctors.
This is about controlling women’s sexuality. Period. I have yet to see an argument against abortion, along with the trumped-up arguments against birth control and reproductive care, that didn’t eventually boil down to “she shouldn’t have had sex.” The argument flagrantly fails to take into account the myriad ways people can become pregnant, the non-birth-control benefits of the pill, or the fact that people are redefining the very definitions of “birth control” and “abortion” as we go along. At this point, given all the information out there, I have to conclude that people who still oppose abortion on the grounds I’ve heard cited are either lying or are too dumb to have an opinion worth taking seriously.
Photo credit: Via picardfacepalm.com.
The BAMF in Baytown
Do. Not. F***. With Dorothy Baker (© Good Morning America)
A mother in Baytown, Texas deserves a hearty BAMF designation, not only for selflessly protecting her kids, but also for thinking quite quickly when faced with something that’s supposed to be an urban legend. Via Good Morning America:
While Dorothy Baker and her 2-year-old and 5-year-old sons were shopping Friday at a CVS in Baytown, Texas, a man identified as Ismael Martinez allegedly hid out in her unlocked van, police said.
When the family got back into the car, Baker said Martinez “popped up out of the backseat and said that if I didn’t want my kids to get hurt, that I would do exactly what he said.”
Martinez, 54, allegedly pulled a knife on Baker while she was driving and demanded she stop at an ATM for money, she said.
When she refused, Martinez allegedly became violent, she said.
Baker said she fought back, refusing to compromise the safety of her children.
“She’s got a cut that goes across her chest, and she grabbed the knife and he bit her hand,” Baker’s husband, Charles Flugence said.
“I took my fist and I hit him in the face, and I told him to get out of my car,” Baker said.
Baker intentionally drove her van into a telephone pole in hopes of sending Martinez through the front windshield, according to the Baytown Police Department crime report.
Police said she managed to dial 911 while she grappled with the suspect in hopes that a dispatcher might hear what was going on in the car and find a way to help, ABC station KTRK-TV in Houston reported.
“I thought, ‘If you swerve and hit the pole, he’s not wearing a seatbelt, he’ll go through the windshield or at least hit his head, and you can stop him. You can do something to make sure that he doesn’t hurt your kids,'” Baker told KTRK-TV. “That’s all I was thinking of really, was just to get him away from my kids.”
Police said Martinez eventually jumped out of the van and tried to flee. But before Baker knew it, she had run her car into him.
“I didn’t mean to run him over,” she said. “I was just trying to stop him so he didn’t hurt anybody else.”
Her goal was to keep her kids safe, but she may also go down in BAMF history:
“You don’t come after people with kids,” she said. “I told him he messed with the wrong witch.”
I wouldn’t fault her at all if, in the moment, she didn’t use the word “witch.”
Photo credit: © Good Morning America
Texas is #26!!!
Today’s random Texas statistic: this is the 26th-largest subnational governing body, as measured by area, in the world.
Alaska clocks in at #7, and I doubt anyone is ever going to overtake the winner, Russia’s Sakha Republic, which takes up a large percentage (about 24%) of Siberia. You could fit roughly 4½ Texases in the Sakha Republic. On the other hand, the greater Austin area has more people than the Sakha Republic, so we might be evenly matched in a game of pick-up basketball.
Yeah, that’s, uh, big.
Photo credit: By TUBS [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Texas Made Its Bed, and Now It Has to Lie in It
After FEMA denied the state’s request for aid for the West fertilizer plant explosion, Texas Governor Rick Perry had the gall to say the following:
The day of the West memorial service, President Obama stood in front of a grieving community and told them they would not be forgotten. He said his administration would stand with them, ready to help. We anticipate the president will hold true to his word and help us work with FEMA to ensure much-needed assistance reaches the community of West.
Rick Perry is not a man to mince words about his disdain for the federal government when it suits his momentary needs. He has no right to act surprised all of a sudden when that same government refuses to help the man who has said time and again that his state doesn’t need them (except, of course, when he does need them).
This is really about a Texas business avoiding regulatory obligations, killing a bunch of people through neglect, and then asking the feds to help clean up. They should be begging OSHA for forgiveness, not asking FEMA for money. If “freedom” from regulation is a Texas value, the rebuilding of West’s infrastructure is the cost Texas hoped to pass on to the rest of the country.
I’m reminded of the talk after the Oklahoma tornado about whether we, as a people, should support relief efforts there even though Oklahomans keep electing people who have nothing but contempt for the very notion of government aid until the moment they need some. My position was, and still is, that we owe them assistance and relief, but that we should not let them forget that their own elected representatives would probably deny it to them had they but lived a few hundred miles in any direction.
Now that the federal government is denying aid to a state that elected a guy who gives lip service to secession, a big part of me wants to say I told you so. Well, I guess I just said it. If so many Texans are so unenamored of the federal government, let us all lie in the bed they made.
Shorter version of what I just said: if you voted for Rick Perry and dare to say anything other than “we don’t need FEMA anyway,” you deserve to get punched in the throat.
One final thought: sooner or later, the lawsuits will start rolling in against West Fertilizer Company and whomever else might be civilly liable, asserting injury claims, wrongful death, and property damage. The odds are very good that Rick Perry will call these suits “frivolous,” or seek to undermine them in some other way. It’s fine to expect the nation’s taxpayers to foot the bill in Perryland, but I’m not so sure the private sector should ever have to pony up.
Photo credit: By Shane.torgerson [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Asparagus!
U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is a national embarrassment.
A visibly infuriated Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) tore into Attorney General Eric Holder after his time expired in a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday. The exchange, about the FBI’s investigation into deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, marked a low point in congressional civility.
Gohmert alleged that the FBI failed to question Tsarnaev in a “thorough enough” manner despite a tip from Russia that he had been “radicalized,” even as the federal government was “going after” Christian groups like that of Billy Graham.
“You’ve made statements as matters of fact–,” Holder began in response.
“You point out one thing that I said that was not true,” shot back Gohmert.
[Procedural assertions, ya-ta ya-ta ya-ta]
Gohmert asked again for a point of personal privilege and said that Holder was “wrong on the things that I asserted as fact.” The other members of the committee disputed that his contention was a point of personal privilege.
“The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus,” said Gohmert, in a malapropism for the ages.
(Emphasis added) I didn’t actually hear the word “asparagus,” but that’s not really the point.
Gohmert, whom George Lopez called “fucking crazy” just yesterday, represents the district in east Texas from which 1/2 of my family originates. That is my shame (because of Gohmert, not my family).
For my part, it does not sound as though Holder was calling Gohmert a liar, but that seems to be Gohmert’s takeaway here. Saying that a person said something that is not true is not the same thing as calling them a liar. He might have just been saying Gohmert was misinformed, or at worst, ignorant. I’m okay with that.
“The Wild West approach to protecting public health and safety”
It is unsurprising, while still disappointing, that Texas lawmakers, along with many citizens, seem to have learned nothing at all from the disaster in West, Texas a few weeks ago. Many have used it as an opportunity to rail against government regulation.
Even in West, last month’s devastating blast did little to shake local skepticism of government regulations. Tommy Muska, the mayor, echoed Governor Perry in the view that tougher zoning or fire safety rules would not have saved his town. “Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said.
Raymond J. Snokhous, a retired lawyer in West who lost two cousins — brothers who were volunteer firefighters — in the explosion, said, “There has been nobody saying anything about more regulations.”
Texas has always prided itself on its free-market posture. It is the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage. It boasts the largest city in the country, Houston, with no zoning laws. It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes. Some Texas counties even cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there.
***
As federal investigators sift through the rubble at the West Fertilizer Company plant seeking clues about the April 17 blast that killed at least 14 people and injured roughly 200 others, some here argue that Texas’ culture itself contributed to the calamity.
I actually am sympathetic to the argument that additional regulations would not have prevented the explosion, but not in a way that reflects favorably on Governor Perry or anyone else who sides with him. The problem is not a lack of regulations. The problem is that our “business-friendly” culture in Texas has no intention of enforcing the regulations we already have. Spare us the bullshit about not needing more regulations until you have at least tried to do your damn job.
The New York Times quoted my torts professor from UT Law, Thomas McGarity, who sums it up far better than I ever could:
The Wild West approach to protecting public health and safety is what you get when you give companies too much economic freedom and not enough responsibility and accountability.
The greatest irony of West, perhaps, is that the fertilizer involved in the explosion is regulated by the Department of Homeland Security, because it is explosive. If someone had stolen fertilizer from the plant and blown it up somewhere else, these anti-regulation types might be singing a very different tune. Why is an explosion allegedly caused by greed and incompetence that much different from one allegedly caused by terroristic intent?