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December 24, 2009
December 14, 2009
The Tattlesnake – A Stake Deep in the Heart of GOP Texas Edition
Judging by this, Lone Star state Republicans may have much to fear in the future.
I’ve made plenty of fun of Texas and that breed of Texan that keeps electing crooks and nitwits like Tom DeLay and Junior-clone Rick Perry against their own best interests, but it seems things have gotten bad enough down there that even Houston, the nexus of Bush Oil Country, has elected a lesbian Democrat, former City Controller Annise Parker, as Mayor rather than face a corrupt and/or dumb Republican. (Albeit that Houston has been trending Dem for some years and the last mayor was a Democrat.) Although Parker has some past ties to the energy industry, her most recent non-political gig was running a bookstore and she is regarded as fairly liberal, at least by Texas standards.
It’s no secret the GOP has raped the state from one end to the other, giving massive tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations while cutting social safety-net programs to the bone, eviscerating the educational system, and putting workers at the mercy of employers – it was the neocon corporatist blueprint for what King Junior tried to do in Washington, but didn’t quite succeed at entirely. Now that the economy has gone all to hell, fed-up Texans are worse off than most of the nation, and they have no one to blame but the laissez-faire policies of the Republican Party.
Sure, the voting machines have been rigged and districts redrawn to keep the GOP in perpetual power, but even that may not be enough to underwrite the Republican Party’s future in Texas.
The Tattler’s prediction: Within ten years all the major state offices will be held by Democrats, as well as the two US Senate seats. Texas was, at one time, a populist state; I think it will be returning to those roots – who knows, maybe the great Jim Hightower will end up in office again, if he can stomach campaigning one more time.
Houston biggest US city to elect openly gay mayor
Monica Rhor, AP Writer
December 13, 2009HOUSTON – Houston became the largest U.S. city to elect an openly gay mayor, with voters handing a solid victory to City Controller Annise Parker after a hotly contested runoff. [...]
Parker, 53, has never made a secret or an issue of her sexual orientation. But it became the focus of the race after anti-gay activists and conservative religious groups endorsed Locke and sent out mailers condemning Parker’s “homosexual behavior.”
Read the rest here.
“Anti-gay activists and conservative religious groups” couldn’t defeat an openly gay woman in TEXAS?! Oh, yes, the doom come soon for the GOP.
© 2009 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org
July 7, 2009
April 16, 2009
The Tattlesnake – Short Cuts in New Ruts Edition
Double-Dipping Teabag Hag: The Ol’ Tattler’s failing peepers can’t be sure, but I believe I saw the same woman who was sporting the insulting ‘Kerry Band-Aid’ at the GOP convention in NY circa 2004 wearing a hat adorned with hanging teabags yesterday at one of Fox News’ corporately-sponsored tea parties. Just a quick impression: She’s probably the head of the Pig Whistle, Louisiana, chapter of the DAR, the treasurer of the local ‘I Love Sarah’ Fan Club, chairwoman of the county Republican Party, and a good Southern Baptist who, in the name of the Lawd, beats her kids regularly “just to keep the li’l buggers in line.”
BTW, shouldn’t the videos of these astroturf ‘spontaneous events’ be repackaged by some bright young Republican sociopath into a TV reality show called “Just How Stupid Are You?”
Meantime, over at Rachel Maddow last night, a good point was made – I think by Ana Marie Cox — about the anti-tax FNC Teabag Party nonsense. She pointed out that most of these dismal events were held in public parks – in other words, land paid for and maintained by taxpayer funds. If you hate taxes and government so much, go hold your damn teabag party or your own private property and don’t make those who think you’re nuts foot the bill, not only for the land, but the clean-up afterwards. And would all of those tax-haters sprouting gray and white hair at those FNC rallies please return their Social Security checks and refuse medical treatment courtesy of the government?
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March 3, 2009
Bush’s Presidential Library to Open
George W. Bush’s Presidential Library, slated to open April 1, 2009, will be a storefront in the Oil Country strip mall in Dallas, Texas, located between a payday lender and an Army recruiting office and across the street from the Piggly-Wiggly. The only reading matter on the shelves, aside from an autographed copy of ‘My Pet Goat,’ will be Junior’s collection of Christmas and birthday cards from Ken Lay, Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay and other GOP luminaries, with a ‘Win the War on Terror’ video game and a ‘Watch This Drive’ putting green in the back. Visitors will be required to remove their shoes before entering and it will be open from 10 to 4 daily. Admission fee will be your common sense or a hundred shares of Halliburton stock — unless you’re a friend of the family, a Blackwater mercenary, or a member of the Carlyle Group. Then admission is free.
July 29, 2008
The Tattlesnake — The Pickens That Ain’t Slim Edition
Let’s Stop T. Boone’s Clever Greenmail Plan
“I’m doing it for America.”
– T. Boone Pickens on his plan to wean us off of oil, as quoted by David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times, July 9, 2008.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus9-2008jul09,0,7890733.column
“Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
“Patriotism, n. … In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.”
– Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary.”
Maybe you’ve seen the TV commercial by now: a reassuring Texas twang drones on in the background clicking off the environmental crises we face in the future as images of black clouds boiling out of smokestacks and abandoned oil derricks fill the screen. At the end of the ad, a homely man with the plain weathered face of a Steinbeck Okie tells us he’s T. Boone Pickens and admits he was an ‘oilman all his life,’ but now he’s seen the environmentally-green light and there’s no time to fiddle around – this is an ‘emergency we can’t drill our way out of’ and we have to start work today to solve our energy problems. He then informs the audience that in the next few weeks he’ll be unveiling his ‘Pickens Plan’ for sustainable energy.
The casual viewer might think: ‘Whoa, things are bad enough that a former Panhandle oilman has turned into Mr. Green Jeans, and isn’t it nice of him to come up with a plan to save us all and spend his money to promote it!’
Time to toss a big bucket of ice-cold reality on this slop: 1.) Pickens is a diehard Republican who co-funded the demented Swift Boat group that helped elect Bush in 2004, and he’s made carloads of money from the petroleum business. 2.) Rich oilmen don’t run $58 million dollar advertising campaigns unless there’s a huge profit for them at the end of the line. 3.) Pickens currently owns the largest wind farms in Texas and he’s aching to expand; he also holds leases on vast natural gas deposits, two major alternative-energy legs of his ‘Pickens Plan.’ 4.) Word is, this molasses-mouthed slickster will be trying to change Texas law – not difficult for a wealthy Republican — so that he’ll be the only wholesale dealer of wind and solar energy in the state, selling it to the various power companies there. And he plans to extend this model into other states; if successful, he’ll eventually become the largest dealer of green technology in the country. 5.) This means Pickens will be setting the price for environmentally-safe power in the future, at the expense of the rest of us.
If this sounds like the recipe for another Enron disaster, well – it is. The power may be green, but the results will be the same – screw the consumer blue.
We are going to have to convert to sustainable alternative technology if we expect to survive, but, for god’s sake, let’s keep the market from being cornered by the oily likes of known predators like T. Boone Pickens.
April 5, 2008
Nearly 200 Women and Children Removed from Mormon Compound in Texas
Michelle Roberts,The Associated Press, April 5, 2008
ELDORADO, Texas – Child welfare officials have now removed nearly 200 women and children from a secretive West Texas religious retreat built by polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, authorities said Saturday.
The investigation began after a 16-year-old living there complained of physical abuse. A search warrant authorized state troopers to enter the retreat run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and look for evidence of a marriage between the girl and a 50-year-old man.
The warrant said the girl had a baby eight months ago, when she was 15.
State Child Protective Services on Friday removed 52 girls from the compound. Marleigh Meisner, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that another 131 residents were removed overnight and that by Saturday afternoon 137 children and 46 women were being housed and interviewed.
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March 7, 2008
The Great Texas Dildo Wars of 2008
Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon, March 7, 2008
Editor’s Note: Visit the URL below to see a classic video essay on the current legal aspects of dildo possession and sale in the state of Texas.
Well, I celebrated too soon the new-found legality of female masturbation in Texas. One should never underestimate the lengths to which wingnuts will go to control female sexuality. The Texas attorney general Greg Abbott, who apparently has nothing better to do than to separate women from their dildos, has asked the 5th Circuit Court to rehear the sex toy case.
I’m trying to imagine the mindset of a man who doesn’t realize that when you try to take dildos away from women, basically everyone with a brain and/or a sense of humor is going to assume it’s because you’re afraid you can’t handle the competition.
But I am routinely reminded that we face opposition to sexual liberation, the most prominent face of which is the anti-abortion movement that protests clinics and waves bloody fetus signs from street corners. That movement is made up of people who claim to be in it not because they are misogynists who fear female sexuality, nor because they are control freaks who can’t stand the idea of someone else having fun. They are in it, they say, because they want to save the unborn babies.
Take, for example, their opposition to making emergency contraception available over the counter. For most of us, this one was a no-brainer: Better contraception access means fewer unintended pregnancies, which translates into fewer abortions. Over-the-counter emergency contraception, then, means the abortion rate goes down — and since fewer abortions means more “babies saved” in anti-choice-speak, “pro-life” people should embrace it, right?
March 2, 2008
The Texas Star: Obama Campaign Keeps Rising
Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet, March 1, 2008
Like a good soldier, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) dutifully campaigned in Texas on Friday, delivering a gritty, determined and focused speech on her qualifications to be commander in chief to 1,000 people at a midday rally in Waco, a poor, small city in the state’s Bible Belt.
But while Clinton stood on a stage with retired top military officers and veterans from conflicts dating back to World War II, including ex-NATO commander Wesley Clark, her opponent Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) held what could only be described as a political rock concert Friday night in San Antonio, where perhaps 5,000 people turned out in a city whose large Latino population has been touted as one of Clinton’s strongholds.
Indeed, as Dorothy Dean, a longtime political organizer in Dallas who ran Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns in the southern part of that city and delivered historic Democratic turnouts in prior elections, said in an interview Thursday, the state seems poised for an Obama victory on Tuesday, March 4 — not because there is anything wrong with Clinton, but because Obama has touched a deeper, once-in-a-generation nerve.
“I know Hillary. I have talked to her personally,” Dean said. “I have nothing against her. She is knowledgeable. She’s smart. She knows what she’s doing. But this is a new wave. It’s a new day. It’s a new time. And the people have heard the same old promises. They don’t know if Obama can deliver. But at least they want to give him a try.”
Dean, who has worked in local politics for four-plus decades explained.
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Texas ‘Bizarre Claims’ Couple Deported
‘Bizarre Claims’ Couple Deported
By Walt N. Ponde
The Corpus Christi Sun-Journal
December 24, 2009
SPECIAL TO THE SUN-JOURNAL — The strange tale of illegal immigrants Jose and Maria Natividad has finally come to an end after a federal judge yesterday ordered the couple deported to Mexico.
They were arrested on the streets of Corpus Christi last Tuesday while seeking a place they could stay for free. Because they had no money and were unemployed, police initially charged them with vagrancy and loitering until a Spanish translator – the Natividads speak no English – discovered they were illegally in this country. The case was then turned over to U.S. immigration authorities.
INS agents told federal prosecutors that due to their age difference – Jose is 60 and Maria is 15 – they wanted Jose charged with statutory rape and transporting a minor across national borders for immoral purposes, but federal immigration Judge Ben Dayeau found that their marriage was legal under Mexican law, and ordered the deportation without additional charges filed. The local vagrancy and loitering charges were also dropped.
But that was after Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) investigators uncovered what Judge Dayeau called, “the most bizarre claims that have ever been heard in my courtroom.”
Nine-months pregnant Maria Natividad told DFPS social workers that she had never consummated the marriage with her husband, that she was a virgin, and that her pregnancy was the result of divine intervention. As the DFPS report put it, “Mrs. Natividad claims she was impregnated by God and that her unborn son is the Messiah or second coming of Jesus Christ as promised in the New Testament of the Bible.” Interviewed separately, Jose Natividad concurred with his wife’s story.
DFPS spokesman Rod N. Staph told the Sun-Journal that under ordinary circumstances it would have ordered a complete physiological and psychological examination of Mrs. Natividad, but that recent state immigration restrictions prevented that. “She’d be in a hospital right now,” Staph said, “except a new state law prohibits hospitals from treating undocumented immigrants.” Instead, DFPS recommended the couple be deported as quickly as possible.
In Austin, Gov. Rick Perry reacted to the judge’s ruling, telling reporters, “The people of Texas don’t want to pay for another illegal Mexican mother to have her baby here, no matter what kind of crazy tale this woman is telling. If born here, their child will then be an American citizen, and it will make it more likely this couple, who have no useful skills, no money and can’t speak our language, will stay here and We the People will have to pay for them. The tough new immigration laws I signed protect Texas and America from these illegal bloodsucking deadbeats and their welfare babies.”
Texas religious leaders contacted for comment all agreed that Mrs. Natividad’s assertions were improbable at best, with Good Samaritan Baptist Church of Dallas pastor Ballman Gilead summing up their feelings: “This is, frankly, nuts. We know the second coming will happen in the Middle East and it won’t be a child of poor Mexican parents, you can be sure. This Natividad couple are just using this wild story to try and get a free ride from the U.S. taxpayer.”
Mindy Putts, a translator for DFPS, said that as she was helping the Natividads on an INS bus bound for Mexico early Thursday morning, Mrs. Natividad turned to her and said in Spanish, “I would ask God to curse this state of Texas for its lack of Christian decency and hospitality, but I see that He has anticipated my request.”
On her Facebook page, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin responded to the Natividad controversy by writing, “Controlling our borders is controlling our great American national destiny, and nothing is too important for that goal.”
© 2009 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.