TexasTowelie
TexasTowelie's JournalState Sen. Perry bill on illegal immigration targets 'sanctuary cities'
AUSTIN – Anticipating that President Barack Obama will grant amnesty to as many as 4.5 million undocumented immigrants and their children, state Sen. Charles Perry has filed a bill aimed at ending what he called “sanctuary cities” that encourage illegal immigration to Texas.
Fox News and the New York Times reported late last week that as early as this weekend Obama plans to help immigrants living illegally in the United States get temporary legal status – without congressional approval, a possibility Perry blasted on Monday.
“It is shameful, arrogant and unconstitutional for our President to pursue this catastrophic policy through executive action, rather than allowing our democratically elected officials debate its merits in the halls of Congress,” Perry, R-Lubbock, said after filing Senate Bill 185.
“SB 185 is a common sense measure that will address the ongoing problem of sanctuary cities in Texas and hopefully open up dialogue on what other measures we can at a state and federal level to solve our crisis in illegal immigration,” Perry said in a statement.
Read more: http://lubbockonline.com/filed-online/2014-11-17/sen-perry-bill-illegal-immigration-targets-sanctuary-cities#.VGq6jhbuPoE
[font color=green]The text of the bill is available at http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/84R/billtext/pdf/SB00185I.pdf#navpanes=0 .
If I am reading the bill correctly it indicates that any municipality or county that does not enforce state immigration laws then they are ineligible to receive any grant funding from the state. (subsections A. and H.)[/font]
Halliburton To Buy Baker Hughes For $34.6 Billion
Source: NPR
Halliburton, the world's second-biggest oilfield services company, said today it is buying Baker Hughes, the world's No. 3 oilfield services provider, for $34.6 billion.
Bloomberg reports: "With the agreement, Halliburton eliminates a chief rival and expands its business portfolio and reach at a time when falling oil prices have pushed the industry into a downturn. The merger will likely draw intense antitrust scrutiny, especially where North America businesses overlap."
In a statement announcing the deal, Halliburton Chairman and CEO David Lesar said the merger would save the company $2 billion annually.
Once finalized, Baker Hughes shareholders will receive 1.12 Halliburton shares plus $19 for each share they own. That values Baker Hughes shares at $78.62 per share. The company's stock price has fallen more than 30 percent since June, and stood last week at $51. Baker Hughes shareholders would own 36 percent of the combined company.
Read more: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/11/17/364754308/halliburton-to-buy-baker-hughes-for-34-6-billion
Border Patrol agent pleads guilty to harboring immigrants
A Laredo-based U.S. Border Patrol agent who dated a woman who was using fraudulent work documents pleaded guilty Monday to harboring immigrants who were in the country illegally.
Border Patrol agents conducting surveillance on a house in Laredo in July 2013 saw agent Roberto Cantu Rodriguez, 35, drive up in a Border Patrol vehicle, according to court documents.
It turned out that Rodriguez’s girlfriend and five other immigrants who were in the country illegally were living at the house. This summer, agents detained those residents and in September, Rodriguez was indicted.
Four voluntarily returned to Mexico and two were prosecuted for illegal reentry, according to court records. Rodriguez had been paying his girlfriend’s bills and rent, according to the plea agreement.
He’ll face up to five years in prison and and a $250,000 fine when sentenced. That date has not been set.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/Border-Patrol-agent-pleads-guilty-to-harboring-5899352.php
Man Charged With Rape, Murder In 2012 Attack On Teen Lesbian Couple Appears In Court--No Hate Crime
SINTON, TEXAS--Days after a horrific attack on a teenage lesbian couple in South Texas that left one of them dead, David Malcom Strickland approached mourners at the park where the incident occurred, according to police.
Strickland, who at the time lived near the park in Portland, Texas, outside Corpus Christi, told the mourners that his girlfriend knew one of the victims. Strickland asked the mourners for details about the investigation and was observed searching the grass near the crime scene, witnesses said.
Nearly two years later, Strickland allegedly delivered a letter to a business in Portland in which he implicated another man in the June 2012 shooting that left 19-year-old Mollie Olgin (above right) dead and her then-18-year-old girlfriend, Kristene Chapa (above left), seriously wounded. As it turned out, the man implicated in the letter was a former roommate of Strickland's, from whom Strickland had been charged with stealing firearms in Utah. The letter led police back to Strickland, who was arrested this June and charged with capital murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated sexual assault and aggravated kidnapping in the attack on Chapa and Olgin.
On Friday, with Chapa and about 20 pro-LGBT protesters gathered outside, Strickland made an appearance in court. The protesters carried rainbow flags and signs suggesting the incident was an anti-gay hate crime. but San Patricio County District Attorney Michael Welborn told The Corpus Christi Caller-Times he doesn't believe it was motivated by anti-gay bias.
Read more: http://www.towleroad.com/2014/11/strickland.html
Cross-posted in the Texas Group.
Man Charged With Rape, Murder In 2012 Attack On Teen Lesbian Couple Appears In Court--No Hate Crime
SINTON, TEXAS--Days after a horrific attack on a teenage lesbian couple in South Texas that left one of them dead, David Malcom Strickland approached mourners at the park where the incident occurred, according to police.
Strickland, who at the time lived near the park in Portland, Texas, outside Corpus Christi, told the mourners that his girlfriend knew one of the victims. Strickland asked the mourners for details about the investigation and was observed searching the grass near the crime scene, witnesses said.
Nearly two years later, Strickland allegedly delivered a letter to a business in Portland in which he implicated another man in the June 2012 shooting that left 19-year-old Mollie Olgin (above right) dead and her then-18-year-old girlfriend, Kristene Chapa (above left), seriously wounded. As it turned out, the man implicated in the letter was a former roommate of Strickland's, from whom Strickland had been charged with stealing firearms in Utah. The letter led police back to Strickland, who was arrested this June and charged with capital murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated sexual assault and aggravated kidnapping in the attack on Chapa and Olgin.
On Friday, with Chapa and about 20 pro-LGBT protesters gathered outside, Strickland made an appearance in court. The protesters carried rainbow flags and signs suggesting the incident was an anti-gay hate crime. but San Patricio County District Attorney Michael Welborn told The Corpus Christi Caller-Times he doesn't believe it was motivated by anti-gay bias.
Read more: http://www.towleroad.com/2014/11/strickland.html
Cross-posted in the LGBT Group.
EMS: 18 suspected K2 overdoses in downtown Austin on Monday
5:45 p.m. update: Medics had responded to 18 reports of suspected K2 overdoses downtown by about 5:30 p.m. Monday, according to Austin-Travis County EMS.
The agency first noticed an increase in the number of calls that appeared to be related to K2 over the weekend but had not tracked precisely how many incidents there were until today, said EMS Capt. Darren Noak.
Medics took 15 adults to the hospital, while two refused treatment and another ran away, paramedic Rick Rutledge said. No one’s condition was considered life-threatening.
The calls have been centered in the east downtown area, between Congress Avenue and Interstate 35, Rutledge said.
Read more: http://www.statesman.com/news/news/crime-law/ems-reports-spike-in-k2-overdoses-in-downtown-aust/nh856/
[font color=green]Some sage (or is that catnip?) advice from TxT--Keep It Real![/font] 
Crisis talks held over Texas A&M-Galveston food complaints
A Vice President from Chartwells catering which provides food services for students at Texas A&M at Galveston flew in to the Gulf coast city last week for crisis talks after loud complaints about the quality of their food served to students.
Photos posted online by students showed undercooked chicken, apparently moldy salad dressing and out of date condiments, among other problems at the university cafeteria.
Diners questioned by KTRK last week said they had to check every mouthful before they ate it.
A town hall-style meeting was held during Thursday's dinner service where a Chartwell's VP answered questions from the students and the students governing body, according to Texas A&M.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/Crisis-talks-held-over-Texas-A-M-food-complaints-5898438.php
How Do You Memorialize a Mob?--The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas
Gainesville, Texas, is a patriotic small town. It's also the site of one of the nation's worst acts of mob violence—a history some citizens would like to forget.
Two years after the incident, news of the Great Hanging made its way east. This depiction, from the Feb. 20, 1864, issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, is apocryphal—the victims were actually hanged one or two at a time.
On the gray, rainy morning of Oct. 1, 1862, about 70 men were roused from their homes in Gainesville and corralled inside a vacant store, under arrest on suspicion of treason. Within 13 days, approximately 80 more men had been captured. The town’s citizen’s court, made up of prominent community leaders, immediately found seven men guilty by majority vote and promptly hanged them from an old tree. As tensions mounted, a mob grew angrier outside the store, worried that the remaining men were not just seditious but bandits, John Brown supporters, or friendly to the Indian tribes that frequently attacked the area.
Within a little over a week, 40 men had been hanged and another two shot trying to escape the rope. The Great Hanging of Gainesville entered history as the largest act of mob violence in American history.
Memories of the event almost immediately began to fade. Families of the men who’d been hanged moved away or stopped talking about it. Newcomers flooded the town, which grew from 250 residents during the Civil War to more than 12,000 by the turn of the century. While two men—one a member of the jury and the other with full access to court records—wrote accounts of the hanging in the 1870s and 1880s, neither account was publicly available until the 1960s. Court records of the trial were lost by the 1920s. Around the 100th anniversary of the Civil War, in 1964, the Texas Historical Commission erected a pink granite marker conveying an account sympathetic to the mob, based on what is now known to be incomplete information. Over time the marker has become largely illegible.
Gainesville, meanwhile, has chugged along as a charming small Texas town. In 2012 Rand McNally named Gainesville the “Most Patriotic Small Town in America.” Each year the town invites some 30 Medal of Honor recipients on an expense-paid trip to Gainesville, allowing the town to call itself the nation’s only Medal of Honor Host City. There’s a historical marker to honor the pioneers who first brought cattle to the area and established the town, and the old State Theater movie house still stands on East California Street, though it no longer shows movies. Leonard Park features baseball diamonds, a pool with water slides and a small zoo that grew out of a volunteer community circus. A Confederate memorial greets visitors at the entrance. Downtown, the Cooke County Courthouse boasts memorials to Confederate soldiers and to veterans of World War II.
Read more: http://www.texasobserver.org/great-hanging-gainesville/
Hegar Resigns Senate Seat; Dec. 6 Special Election Set
State Sen. Glenn Hegar, the Katy Republican who will become state comptroller in January, notified Gov. Rick Perry on Friday that he will resign his Senate Seat as of Dec. 5, paving the way for a special election to fill his seat.
Hegar won 58.4 percent of the vote on Election Day to succeed Comptroller Susan Combs. He was widely expected to resign from his seat early to allow for a special election to take place sooner, allowing his replacement to join the Legislature during next year’s legislative session. If not for his move to comptroller, Hegar’s Senate term would have lasted until 2016. A Dec. 6 special election to fill his seat was announced Friday afternoon.
“I am extremely honored, humbled, and grateful to the citizens of Texas who have elected me as their next comptroller, and I look forward to serving the taxpayers of this great state,” Hegar wrote. "I extend my deep and profound gratitude to the constituents of Senate District 18 for allowing me to be their voice in the Texas Senate for the last 8 years."
The possibility of a special election to replace Hegar has been the subject of speculation for more than a year, when it became clear Hegar planned to run for comptroller. That strategizing among those interested in replacing him intensified in March, when he won the Republican primary and became the immediate front-runner in the general election.
Read more: http://www.texastribune.org/2014/11/14/hegar-resigns-senate-seat-special-election-expecte/
[font color=green]It looks like I'll have to hop on the bike to ride to my polling location once more this year. The lead contender in the race appears to be State Rep. Lois Kolkhorst (R).[/font]
Despite State Order, Charter Schools Stay Open
FARMERS BRANCH — On a recent Wednesday morning, Branch Park Academy looked like any other bustling suburban middle school.
Beyond a packed parking lot, a banner hanging near the entrance boasted that the school had earned the “highest academic distinction” from the Texas Education Agency. Inside, students’ voices drifted from their classrooms.
By law, those students were not supposed to be there at all.
In June, the state education agency revoked the charter of the Honors Academy Charter School District, which runs Branch Park Academy and six other schools. While some individual campuses, like Branch Park, had met state academic standards, Honors had failed to do so over all for three consecutive years, meaning that, under a 2013 law, it could no longer operate as a public school.
Read more: http://www.texastribune.org/2014/11/17/despite-state-order-charter-school-stays-open/
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Gender: MaleHometown: South Texas. most of my life I lived in Austin and Dallas
Home country: United States
Current location: Bryan, Texas
Member since: Sun Aug 14, 2011, 03:57 AM
Number of posts: 112,689
