Before you go out and buy that Sig Sauer compact 9mm in the two-tone finish and present it to your favorite Texas college student, you might consider what the Texas Legislature is now being forced to consider. Texas colleges and universities could be slapped with a huge insurance rate increase if concealed carry becomes law .
The Texas Tribune reports that Houston Community College expects a whopping increase in liability insurance if forced to allow firearms on HCC campuses:
The Houston Community College Board of Trustees passed a resolution this month strongly urging lawmakers to vote against allowing concealed handguns on campus. Along with safety concerns, the letter states that there could be a “fiscal burden.” That burden includes a possible increase in liability insurance payments: They could rise by as much as $780,000 to $900,000 per year, said Dan Arguijo, spokesman for Houston Community College.
The enrollment at HCC campuses is a bit over 48,000 students. The University of Texas at Austin’s total student population is just shy of 50,000. Texas A&M’s population is over 46,000. One wonders how the liability rates at the big state schools would be affected.
The Texas Lege is currently walking along the thin ledge of budgeting the state’s higher education systems with a dangerously deficient bank account. But that hasn’t deterred the stubbornly persistent State Senator Jeff Wentworth, the author of the concealed carry bill which appears to be dying in the Senate. Wentworth switched parliamentary gears and attached a concealed-carry amendment to a bill that purports to reform financing of public and higher ed institutions. If the bill survives and becomes law, and the insurance increases turn out to be as significant as the HCC Board thinks they will be, Wentworth and the Texas Legislature could take credit for producing one of the more ironic pieces of legislation in its history. It’s a history with a full share of irony, not to mention folly and foolishness. In large part, the credit for such tradition goes to a consistent and dependable group of state politicians who consider irony as something best learned in a home economics class.
This subject popped up on the radar screen recently, after Keith Olbermann spent one of his Comments talking about a U. T. survey which reveals, among other things, that a lot of Texans firmly grasp all the “intelligent design” evidence that says dinosaurs were the personal pets of Adam and Eve.
What Olbermann has tapped into is nothing short of “Texas Stupid.” It has been part and parcel of Texas culture at least since the time when Texans decided to blow off Old Sam Houston’s advice and to throw in with the Confederacy. And we all remember how well that little adventure went…..
“Texas Stupid” reared up its rather sloped head in the immediate aftermath of the ’08 election, when gun sales in the Lone Star State went through the roof, because folks literally bought into the notion that “Obama’s gonna take your guns.”
Two things:
1) The massive rush to buy firearms spiked the price of firearms up…again. This means that Bubba, along with a certain Texas-expatriate shootist, will each have more difficulty in buying that coveted Desert Eagle .50 caliber in titanium finish.
2) I’d rather be sent as an evangelist to proselytize the Taliban than be the one who attempts to pry firearms out of the hands of your average Texan.
“Texas Stupid” also covers several statewide organizations and movements such as the KKK, the John Birch Society, and the New Secessionists. I’m tempted to throw the Tea Party folks in there as well, except that I know a few people who would consider themselves tangential teabaggers, and they are anything but “Texas Stupid.” Actor Chuck Norris, however, fills the bill nicely. Gubenatorial candidate Debra Medina is certainly not T.S.; but her notion that you can just wipe out all property taxes and pay for stuff like roads and schools and W.I.C. cards by sales-taxing anything that makes you pull out your wallet, why that puts her in the camp named “Texas Crazy.” And that is exactly why her appeal is growing, even among certain progressive, yellow-dog tumbleweeds. That “We Texans” slogan, combined with the fashionable apparel in her campaign’s virtual gift shop, cannot help but endear Texans of all political stripes to her cause. “Texas Crazy” is at the root of the most delightful aspects of Texas culture. But its shadow side is also at the root of Texas’ darker historical moments. Triumph and tragedy, Lone Star-style, often come from this quirky, sometimes bizarre, and usually amusing condition.
Examples of Texas Crazy run the spectrum between twisted satire and twisted behavior.
Charles Whitman was Texas Crazy. So is Kinky Friedman’s “The Ballad of Charles Whitman,” which is tucked into the Kinkster’s unique remembrance of Charlie’s U.T. sniper spree in 1966:
There is a complex interrelationship and interdependence between these two conditions, T.S. and T.C.
Janis Joplin, a T.C. luminary, fled her hometown of Port Arthur after high school, not so much to get the refinery smell out of her hair, but to get away from her Texas Stupid tormentors, which included this guy. Yet ol’ shell-head went on to become one of the great Texas football coaches in both college and pro arenas. His gig with America’s Team landed him in the Texas Crazy camp, especially the time he called a Dallas radio sports-talk show to rag on the Mighty San Fran 49’ers the week leading up to the NFC championship game. “Jeez, Jimmy, why’d you go rile up Steve Young and that nasty West Coast bunch by saying you’ll whip their butts with no problem? What are you? Crazy!?” Crazy like a fox, since the ‘Boys smoked San Fran and went on to win their second straight Super Bowl. Speaking of San Fran, that’s where Janis went to break through some big barriers in the field of blues rock, making her singular mark as only a T.C. white girl could. Looking back now, one can see how Texas Crazy fueled her ascent, while the shadowy memory of Texas Stupid was always close by, waiting to envelop her.
If there is a Poster Boy for Texas Crazy, it would have to be this guy:
Ross’ theme song in the ’92 presidential election was Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” And, well, he was. In a good way, mostly. He had quite a few of us stirred up and ready to vote for him until the vice presidential debate came along and revealed that his VP-picking skills left a lot to be desired. Then came the stunning meltdown on 60 Minutes where he began talking spies, threats on his family, a GOP plot to ruin his daughter’s wedding, and after that, well….Hello, President Clinton! Still, Perot leveraged enough of the vote to swing the election for Ol’ Bubba, which is a significant accomplishment, especially for someone so richly imbued with Texas Crazy.
If real, meaningful, socio-political change is ever going to grab hold in the Lone Star State, folks there are going to have to seize on this great historical legacy of Texas Crazy, a force so formidable it could unite otherwise disparate citizenry into a movement strong enough to repel this current rising tsunami of Texas Stupid. The good news is it already seems to be happening, given the (albeit) narrow defeat of Board of Education Chairman Don McElroy, the most recent poster boy for Texas Stupid. We’ve already covered some of his board’s handiwork; now that he’s out, all he can do is look back admiringly on his accomplishments, which mainly come down to having history textbooks add a little spitshine to the thunder mug we all remember as Joe McCarthy.
But it’s going to take more effort, a heckuva lot more effort over the next few years, and probably the next few decades. The T.S. crowd is as entrenched as they’ve ever been, and only a broad-based alliance of committed (or recently committed) Texans can turn the tide. Imagine the Junction Boys working hand in hand with the Texas Tornados. Or Jim Hightower forming an alliance with Debra Medina. I know it’s crazy to imagine such things, but it’s Texas Crazy. And that is what the state needs most at the moment.
Debra Medina, the feisty Republican running for governor, promises Texans that she will liberate them from their property taxes.
“I talk about that for freedom reasons first,” Medina said at the Jan. 29 gubernatorial debate.
“We’ve surrendered private property ownership to the ever-growing state — we lease our property in the form of ever increasing rents known as property taxes,” she wrote on her campaign Web site. “We’ve forgotten that ownership is an essential element of freedom.”
A call to eliminate property taxes might resonate with many taxpayers, beleaguered by the demands for more money from schools, cities, counties, emergency districts and more when their wallets are thin.
But critics say the freedom Medina promises would come at a huge cost to local taxpayers because they would lose a critical element of control over the governments closest to them.
As envisioned by Medina, the property taxes now paid by Texans — $39 billion as of last year — would be replaced with a sales tax applied to more services and to real estate transfers.
Texas would be the only state not to have local property taxes, if Medina’s plan were to be adopted, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington.
The state would collect the sales tax dollars and redistribute them to local governments based on “sharing formulas,” according to the campaign’s Web site. Campaign officials did not provide someone to explain Medina’s plan.
The practical effect would be to make local governments beholden to state government for every tax dollar and thus concentrate decision-making power in the Texas Capitol, said Kail Padgitt, a staff economist for the Tax Foundation.
“Cities and schools and other governmental entities would be at the mercy of us in Austin, and they would have no local control, which is one of the banner themes in Republican politics,” said state Rep. Rene Oliveira, D-Brownsville, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
And it’s not Sarah Palin. Her name is Debra Medina and right now she’s polling right at 16% in the GOP primary race. Here she is:
She has participated in the Texas Tea Party movement and she spoke at last summer’s gathering of Texas secessionists at the State Capitol. And yes, she did call for secession. Here is her speech:
The two big planks of the Medina platform deal with property taxes and gun ownership. Medina refers to property taxes as “rent” being paid to the state. So the elimination of property taxes is an essential step to take in her framework of property ownership. Her revenue-raising alternative is to broaden the base of the Texas state sales tax. One thing she is unclear about is whether she is in favor of taxing the food Texans buy at the grocery store, which is currently sales tax exempt.
Gun ownership and the training of Texas citizenry in the use of guns follows right behind the property tax issue. Gun ownership is a sacred right in the Lone Star state; generations of Texas youth–myself included–have grown up learning to use firearms. My dad (a liberal, Yellow-Dog Democrat) was merely following through on his paternal responsibility when he put a .22 rifle in my little hands and then taught me the safety rules that naturally precede going out to the country and doing a little plinking. And plinking naturally preceded learning how to hunt. It also led to target shooting, which is a favorite sport among gun owners. Medina has tapped into a fundamental vein of Texas culture here, as she speaks to the irrational fear that Barack Obama is going to come and take people’s guns away. In the words of Mr. T, I pity the fool that would ever attempt to take guns away from Texans.
Then comes the issue of sovereignty (secession), which began to catch fire primarily in the southern states soon after the election of Barack Obama as President. Medina says this on her website:
Texas must stop the over reaching federal government and nullify federal mandates in agriculture, energy, education, healthcare, industry, and any other areas D.C. is not granted authority by the Constitution.
One wonders if this would include federal ag subsidies and EPA restrictions on what power companies and other industries might dump in Texas waterways or expel into the atmosphere (not that the EPA’s regulations are all that stringent or enforced.) What about the protective FDA regulations that (should) call for sanitary conditions in meat packing plants? Would she opt out of the federal highway and transportation system? If so, how will Texas continue to maintain its highway infrastructure? Wouldn’t such a move necessitate handing even more Texas roads over to private toll road companies?
Debra Medina will likely lose the primary, but perhaps force Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison into a run-off. Win or lose, she is likely going to remain an active force in Texas politics. Like Sarah Palin, Deb Medina won’t fade back into the scenery. And though Deb isn’t the beauty pageant type, she is an attractive, outspoken, glasses-wearing female politician. Expect her to run again in ’14. Depending on how bad or good things get between now and then, she may have a fighting chance to win. And if she does, the normally whacked-out state of affairs known as Texas politics will become even crazier.
I know. You’re wondering, given the current situation, how getting even crazier might be possible. But I look at the current occupant of the governor’s mansion and think back to 1978, when an unheralded oilman named Bill Clements came out of nowhere to clobber the Democratic candidate for governor, John Hill. Clements’ win was historic: he was the first Republican governor to be elected since Reconstruction. I remember the atrocious, ham-handed way he attempted to govern, how the Lege had to school him a bit, how coarse and pugnacious his speeches and press statements were, and I remember thinking then that his election set an all-time low in Texas politics. Little did we know that this was only the initial stage of sinking for the good ship “Political Gravitas.” The ascendancy of George W. Bush and Karl Rove to the Texas political main-stage heralded the onset of new lows. And amazingly, W.’s understudy, Rick Perry, has plumbed uncharted depths in his secessionist rantings, his selling off Texas roads to private toll road firms, and his Big Pharma connections with Merk that relate to his attempt to require that all Texas girls be immunized with Merk’s HPV vaccine, Gardasil.
The one thing Debra Medina would seem to offer that is sorely lacking in the governor’s office at the moment is integrity. Watch her in action and it becomes apparent that she truly believes in and is passionate about her intent to honestly represent “We Texans.” If the incumbent wins re-election, as the polls suggest he will, then maybe the stage will be set for 2014, when another victorious candidate might just swoop in from the margins. Perhaps, in the long term, that is what Debra Medina is counting on.
From the Dallas Morning News, but originally reported by Traci Shurley of the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram:
What do the authors of the children’s book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and a 2008 book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation have in common?
Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.
In its haste to sort out the state’s social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children’s author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain “very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system.”
Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
Bill Martin Jr.’s name would have been included on a list with author Laura Ingalls Wilder and artist Carmen Lomas Garza as examples of individuals who would be studied for their cultural contributions.
Hardy said she was trusting the research of another board member, Terri Leo, R-Spring, when she made her motion and comments about Martin’s writing. Leo had sent her an e-mail alerting her to Bill Martin Jr.’s listing on the Borders .com Web site as the author of Ethical Marxism. Leo’s note also said she hadn’t read the book.
“She said that that was what he wrote, and I said: ‘ … It’s a good enough reason for me to get rid of someone,’ ” said Hardy, who has complained vehemently about the volume of names being added to the curriculum standards.
In an e-mail exchange, Leo said she planned to make a motion to replace Bill Martin and sent Hardy a list of possible alternatives. Hardy said she thought she was doing what Leo wanted when she made the motion.
Leo, however, said she wasn’t asking Hardy to make any motions. She said she didn’t do any “research.”
“Since I didn’t check it out, I wasn’t about to make the motion,” Leo said, adding that she never meant for her “FYI” e-mail to Hardy to be spoken about in a public forum.
Hardy said that her interest was in paring down that list and she didn’t mean to offend anyone.
For some, however, the mix-up is an indicator of a larger problem with the way the elected board members have approached the update of state curriculum standards.
Board members will take up social studies standards again in March. They plan a final vote on updates in May.
Hardy’s motion is “a new low in terms of the group that’s supposed to represent education having such faulty research and making such a false leap without substantiating what they’re doing,” said Michael Sampson, Martin’s co-author on 30 children’s books.
The social studies standards update, which started last spring when groups of educators met to suggest revisions, has brought criticism from the right and the left about politicizing the process. As trustees worked their way through a draft this month, political ideas like imperialism, communism and free enterprise were at the heart of some of the changes.
The Spoetzel Brewery in Shiner, Texas, celebrated 100 years of beer-making by combining two recreational staples of the Lone Star State lifestyle: beer and bottle rockets. Specifically, a 100 bottle rocket salute. It looked like this:
Austin’s City Council voted yesterday to proceed with an agreement with a solar development company to install a photo-voltaic solar array near Webberville by 2011, which would make the city the owner of the nation’s largest such utility-sized installation. Citizens would have the option of buying solar energy at a locked-in price. While council members noted that such a major reach for solar power was a tough decision to make in the tough economy, but ultimately, they agreed that the future benefits of this clean energy source were worth pursuing.
Somewhere, I wonder, might there be a certain former Austin mayor watching city cable, pensively sipping a Coke Zero, and wondering what might have been if she had only been able to be strong enough to ram through her own idea of cheap, renewable energy. The South Texas Nuclear Project remains one of the great, disastrous boondoggles in Austin and Texas history. Cost overruns were just the tip of the radioactive iceberg. Brown and Root, the first contractors contracted to build the nuke plant by their friends in high places, soon proved themselves not up to the task. Enter global nuke specialist Bechtel. Not much improvement. Meanwhile most of the parties that had signed on to the project had come to their senses and decided to bail out. No such luck with Austin’s Coke-sippin’ mayor, who got crossways first with environmentalists and then other people who began to realize that the STNP was going to suck such massive amounts of money down it’s gaping, maw-like radioactive core that you might as well stick a 20 dollar bill in the utility bill envelope every time you turned on the air conditioner in August.
It took a lot of lawyers over a lot of years along with a lot of Austin’s city bank account to extract the city from the STNP in the best possible way, which was not “best” and barely possible. Hopefully Gemini Solar Development Company, the contractor for the solar array installation, has a lot more on the ball than just “good friends in high places.” But to sink to STNP levels they’d have to go about their daily planning and installing duties with a spleef of Jamaican weed in one hand and a bottle of Jim Beam in the other. And have a good friend on the city council who backed them enthusiastically despite their screwups, as if the soft drink in her hand was laced with some sort of psychotropic additive.
Yes, it’s true. Some of us still remember the STNP, and some of us still remember the demolition of the Armadillo World Headquarters as well. It appears we’ve got a good start on making good on one huge Austin screw-up. Maybe something can be done to remedy the other atrocity.
This Tumbleweed Life 
