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May 30, 2009
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Around Texas
Presidential News
National News
Beating Back Efforts to Undermine Parental Rights
Around Texas
 

Democrats Spend Third Straight Day Stalling the House

House Democrats spent a third straight day Sunday tediously debating routine and noncontroversial bills, chewing up time in hopes of derailing a controversial voter identification bill.

 

Senate Tradition Has Been Abused

by Editors of the San Antonio Express News

Two years ago, the Texas Youth Commission was a national embarrassment. An internal investigation by the agency in early 2007 had uncovered sexual abuse at the West Texas State School in Pyote. But that was only the beginning.

 

Democrats' TacticsTake Down Voter ID Bill in Texas House

Democrats appear to have stalled business in the House long enough to prevent consideration of a divisive measure to require photo identification for voting, after a long, lost weekend of legislating.

 

McLeroy Opposed as Board of Ed Leader

Senate Democrats say they have more than enough votes to remove Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education Tuesday when McLeroy's confirmation reaches the Senate floor.

 

School Board Reins Yanked from McLeroy

In a rare rejection of an appointment by the Texas governor, the Senate Thursday ousted Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education, with his supporters claiming the Bryan dentist was the victim of his strong religious beliefs.

 

Who Says They Don't Listen?

by Michael Quinn Sullivan

Anyone who thinks lawmakers don't move to fix unintended problems in legislative initiatives should see what State Rep. Jerry Madden of Plano did. He took what could have accidentially been a joke on the taxpayers, and fixed it to become a cost-saving initiative good for everyone.

 

Texas Republican Speaker Joe Straus Criticizes Democrats

Republican Speaker Joe Straus broke away Monday from the Democrats who lifted him to power, calling them "obstructionists" and criticizing the partisan gridlock he says they have brought to the Texas House.

 

State Representative Dan Flynn's Statement Regarding Actions of the Texas House

While I know there are widely varying opinions about "Voter ID" please remember that the "Block" is not from the folks on the list not wishing to suspend the rules of the House.

 

Social Promotion Change May Doom School Accountability Bill

Gov. Rick Perry has warned legislative leaders that he may veto a wide-ranging school accountability bill if it scraps the state's longtime rules to curtail social promotion - the practice of automatically passing students regardless of achievement.

 

Capitol Journal: Texas Democrats Filibuster Voter ID Bill for Fifth Day

House members learned the hard way Tuesday that red ties and butterflies may be free, but killing a voter ID bill is expensive.

 

Texas House Feeling the Pain

Little known: When state Rep. Edmund Kuempel had a heart attack, the guy who found him punched in "911" three times on his cell phone without getting an answer, though he still was able to help save the Seguin Republican.

 

Surprised at Lack of Support

by Michael Quinn Sullivan

Thought you might be interested in seeing this e-mail Vicki Truitt sent earlier this morning to her supporters. Apparently she is finding there aren't many people, that many actual taxpayers, interested in hiking taxes and raising fees during the worst economic climate in recent memory. Just don't seem to be that many families eager to see their cost of living rise so projects can be funded that aren't required to reduce congestion! (The Truitt/Corona language on HB300 has no requirement for congestion relief; just more spending.)

 

Rep. Jim Jackson's Tactical Analysis of Memorial Day Bill Killing

Many people have heard or read from news sources about the 4 to 5 days of delay over Memorial Day weekend that some Democratic members of the Texas House have used to slow the legislative calendar in order to kill the Voter ID Law for voter integrity.  Some have even told me they watched some of the action or inaction on the streaming video.

 

June 2009 Texas Eagle Forum News & Notes

June 1 is the last day of the 81st Legislative Session in Austin. Hundreds of bills never saw the light of day in the waning days of the session, including the Ultrasound Bill, due to House Democrats invoking a five-day stall so the Voter ID bill would never come up before the May 26th deadline. In the final week, legislators scrambled to cut and paste some of these bills as amendments onto other bills.

 

Read more State News....
Presidential News
 

Obama Makes His First U.S. Supreme Court Pick: From Souter to Sotomayor

Barack Obama has ended the well publicized speculation concerning the identity of his first Supreme Court nominee by naming to the critical High Court seat a well publicized contender - Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor has been tapped to take the seat of retiring Justice David Souter. Souter, a George H.W. Bush appointment, turned sour on the Court and has been a staunch Reconstructionist - an opponent of the Constitutionalist theory necessary if our Constitution and culture are to survive and thrive. What can we expect of Sotomayor? We offer a preliminary view.

 

Obama's Idea of Justice

by Patrick J. Buchanan

When you think about it, Sonia Sotomayor is the perfect pick for the Supreme Court -- in Barack Obama's America. Like Obama, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action, she thinks "Latina women," because of their life experience, make better judicial decisions than white men, that discrimination against white men to advance people of color is what America is all about, that appellate courts are "where policy is made" in the United States.

 

U.S. to Take Majority Stake in General Motors

The White House is driving General Motors Corp. toward a bankruptcy reorganization that would grant the government as much as a two-thirds stake in the battered automaker, while consigning bondholders and unions to minority shares.

 
Read more Presidential News....
National News
 

Pelosi Refuses Queries on CIA Dispute

In her first news conference since accusing the CIA of lying to her about the use of harsh interrogation techniques, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday refused to answer questions on the controversy, telling reporters only that she stands by her earlier statements.

 

Dick Cheney's Compelling Witness

by Editors of TheWashington Times

An extraordinary scene played out Thursday with what amounted to a Lincoln-Douglas-style debate between a popular sitting president and an unpopular former vice president. The former veep won, hands down.

 

Powell Says GOP Must Expand Its 'Very, Very Narrow Base'

Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Sunday that he will not leave the Republican Party, although he thinks its future is threatened by a shift too far to the political right.

 

California Court Upholds Gay-Marriage Ban

The state Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, but also decided that the estimated 18,000 gay couples who wed before the law took effect will stay married.

 

Justice Sotomayor?

by Gary Bauer

Today, President Obama announced Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee to replace retiring liberal Supreme Court Justice David Souter. We know Judge Sotomayor is a liberal who once declared that the courts are "where policy is made." Obama assured us during the campaign for the presidency that he would appoint judges with "empathy" - judges who knew, in the president's words, "what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old." Sotomayor certainly fits that description.

 

Coming This Summer: Health Care Wars

by Newt Gingrich

The Washington battle that will most directly and profoundly affect you and your families' lives is the battle for the future of our health care system, which will play out this summer.

 

How the Sonia Sotomayor Nomination Battle Will Be Waged

Seeking to block her confirmation to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor's critics will call her some combination of the following: radical, pushy, racially insensitive and lacking judicial smarts.

 

Texas, Florida Offer GOP Models for the Future

Texas Sen. John Cornyn is an upbeat kind of fellow, but when it comes to the Republican Party's current political standing, he is distinctly downbeat.

 

Cheney Shows the Way

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Dick Cheney is giving the Republican Party a demonstration of how to fight a popular president. Stake out defensible high ground, do not surrender an inch, then go onto the attack.

 

Sen. Cornyn Statement On Sonia Sotomayor

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a member of Senate Judiciary Committee, issued the following statement following President Obama's nomination of Federal Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  

A Voice For Our Values

by Gary Bauer

Our phones started ringing off the hook yesterday as major reporters from leading news agencies rushed to get our reaction to the president's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. The widely read Washington insider publication Politico asked for a column with my take on the nomination. Today, the Washington Times published an op-ed I wrote encouraging senators to thoroughly scrutinize Sotomayor's judicial philosophy and temperament.

 

The Left's Assault On Freedom

by Gary Bauer

After insulting the integrity of the men and women of the CIA by accusing the Agency of lying to Congress about what she knew about waterboarding and when she knew it, Speaker Nancy Pelosi jetted off to communist China. She's there to engage real torturers and abusers of human rights in Beijing about the urgent need to combat climate change. In fact, the need is so urgent that, according to Speaker Pelosi, "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory ... of how we are taking responsibility."

 

Discrimination Case Could Pose Problems for Sotomayor

by Seth Stern

A reverse discrimination lawsuit filed by a group of Connecticut firefighters is shaping up to be the most contentious case in which Sonia Sotomayor participated, one sure to provoke sharp questioning when the Senate begins consideration of her nomination to the Supreme Court.

 

Career Lawyers Overruled on Voting Case

Justice Department political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to documents and interviews.

 

Lawyers Tag Nominee as 'Terror on the Bench'

Lawyers who have argued cases before Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor call her "nasty," "angry" and a "terror on the bench," according to the current Almanac of the Federal Judiciary -- a kind of Zagat's guide to federal judges.

 

Read more National News.... 

 
 
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Beating Back Efforts to Undermine Parental Rights

tim06

 Tim Lambert
 
The last couple of weeks, the Texas legislature has heard from home school parents, who are the driving force to defend and protect parental rights in Texas. On May 14 we sent an Alert to our list asking home schoolers to call their state senators in opposition to HB 1232, a bill requiring mental health screening for certain children and the sharing of health care information with CPS and other agencies.

Following the Senate hearing on HB1232, it was clear that senators needed to be made aware of the risks associated with the bill. Home school parents went to work, shoulder-to-shoulder, with other parents who value their rights and their privacy. Within twenty-four hours, the proponents of the bill were brought to the negotiating table, where they added strict parental consent measure for each specific agency with which the parent is being asked to share information. Also added was the ability for the parent or child to withdraw without penalty, along with protections against bias based on race, religion, or a number of other factors and a complaint line where people who participate in that program can complain if things go badly. Finally, all mental health screening language was taken from the bill, and agencies involved are warned that nothing in this bill shall be interpreted so as to allow school-based mental health screening.
 
 
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