zoux posted:

I went to SU in Georgetown because my grades guaranteed me a scholarship and nobody told me about Williamson County!

Randandal posted:

I'm amazed your encouragement of drunk driving doesn't result in more calamity.

the article posted:

Perry's office has said his operation and possibly hotter weather caused the decline, but federal officials say it is more likely due to a reassignment of Border Patrol agents, a crackdown on human smuggling networks and an international publicity campaign warning immigrants not to come.

the article posted:

"The numbers don't matter to them because the goal was for Perry to resurrect his presidential ambitions," said state Rep. Armando Walle, D-Houston, calling for a hearing to re-evaluate the surge. "That was the only goal of this operation."

Jiro posted:

This is what I'd like to know as well. All of our local news outlets had started up food drives and letting people know that they hadn't even been compensated for the work they had been ordered to do. Our local food banks opened their doors to help feed them till they were supposed to be paid. I hope Wendy Davis capitalizes on this to turn it against Perry and Abbot.

Jiro posted:

Greg Abbott: Elect me because my old lady is from your peoples. Happy now?

twitter sidebar posted:

A drink every time Abbott mentions Obama #YourVoiceYourFuture

SirKibbles posted:

Texas right wing education seems to be purposely trying to make people dumber, making them easier to trick and isolating them from the rest of the country that rightfully says what the hell when they try and claim Moses wrote the constitution. That's getting a little presumptuous I admit.

"Republican Party of Texas 2012 platform posted:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

zoux posted:

Patrick, as chair of the Education Committee, is also the author of the massive curriculum program change that is going into effect this fall. I can go into the (boring) specifics if anyone cares but suffice it to say it's replacing a system that was showing results with one that's a complete disaster.

Shifty Pony posted:

Whenever I feel like being sad/angry I try to list out in my head all the awful things that the new legislature, LTGov, and Gov are going to do.

I'm guessing tree protection ordinances are going to be a target, as well as things like the Austin bag ban, any city non-discrimination laws, and of course school funding.

zoux posted:

Federal judge ruled that the Voter ID law in Texas constitutes a poll tax. Ha!

Badger of Basra posted:

Is that turnout of registered voters or turnout of eligible voters?

quote:

"Since paving roads is too expensive and there is not enough funding to repave them all, our only other option to make them safer is to turn them into gravel roads," TxDOT spokesman David Glessner said.

zoux posted:

Bill Paxton as Sam Houston

quote:

(b) The sale of a firearm or hunting supplies is exempted
from the taxes imposed by this chapter if the sale takes place
during a period:
(1) beginning at 12:01 a.m. on the Saturday of the last
full weekend in August and ending at 12 midnight on the following
Sunday;

Sheng-ji Yang posted:

SirKibbles posted:

http://www.sacurrent.com/Blogs/archives/2015/03/05/uber-is-out-company-to-leave-san-antonio-despite-revised-regulations

So many people freaking out about this:

ReidRansom posted:

Heh, apparently there are discussions toward eliminating daylight savings time in Texas going on in some committee or another. I'm not opposed to the idea.

posted:

“Pediatricians are asking children away from their parents, ‘Do you have guns in your house?’ and then reporting this on the electronic health records, and then the federal government, frankly, has access to who has guns and who doesn’t,” Spitzer said in a recent interview.

zoux posted:

I've several times put off phone calls while driving because of the Austin hands free ordinance.

ReidRansom posted:

You're a reasonable person though. The world is full of people who aren't. Sure, some may stop, but most people careless enough to text while driving are probably gonna keep at it.

zoux posted:

So tonight is the House deadline for [procedural stuff that you don't care about anyway] that means that midnight tonight is the last day for House Bills to get passed. There are 71 bills on the calendar before the anti-gay marriage bills so the House D's are chubbing like crazy. Tune into the stream and watch the circus: http://txlege.texastribune.org/livestream/

Svanja posted:

So are portions of San Marcos and I-35. I think parts of San Antonio may have been as well.

quote:

HB 1018
Author: Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth
Purpose: Prohibit the production, sale and possession of powdered alcohol
How it died: Passed House committee, but did not come up on House floor

Nonsense posted:

The creator is full of poo poo and kids will just snort it.

Jiro posted:

Was San Antonio really that fed up with a progressive style mayor since Castro left? Or was this just more of an influential northwest rich side of San Antonio finally getting a candidate in office to look out for them? Lord knows La Cantera hurts for money. Also the Brownsville turnout sounds about right everyone in the Valley is poo poo for voting when its not an election year.

Xibanya posted:

I'm normally wary of monopolistic chains by default but goddamn do I love HEB.

e_angst posted:

One more thing that shouldn't be forgotten: The influence of Evangelical Christians in Texas. Texas is the home of an absolute poo poo-ton of very rich (hustler) preachers and their congregations. DFW has several Christian broadcast networks headquartered there (and have offices for the stations that aren't headquartered there). Houston has the biggest mega-Churches in the world. Texas was so crazy-Christian that we had Blue Laws that effectively kept almost all stores closed on Sundays until 1985.

So you've got a lot of churches that are sitting on a ton of tax-free money, with large congregations that will vote however they want to. So they get to push things like abstinence-only education (which is basically a graft program to pay Evangelicals lots of money to provide educational services for a thousand times their actual price).

quote:

Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.