Austin, Texas is a university town and consequently a hotbed of liberalism, so inevitably some of the old-time natives of the area will take exception to the newcomers’ politics.
A Texas couple determined to find out who had been damaging a sign in their front yard proclaiming their support for President Obama’s re-election bid caught the offender on Wednesday. Tom Priem, a software support engineer in Austin, told FoxNews.com he and his wife, who live on a block where political signs dot front yards, were fed up with seeing only their Obama sign repeatedly defaced.
“The sign had holes poked in it like somebody had stuck a knife through it,†Priem said Friday. “At first I thought it was somebody who didn’t like Obama.â€
“We were making fun of it, saying the deer must be a Republican.”
– Tom Priem, Austin resident
Priem said he even called a city hotline to document the incident in case a more insidious offender was to blame. He couldn’t believe his eyes when his wife showed him the surveillance photo she snapped seconds after the campaign sign was destroyed – by a buck.
The varmint’s vandalism began about 10 days ago and it’s unclear what the animal has against the sign.
A 6-year-old boy was attacked by a mountain lion while walking near the lodge at Chisos Basin in Big Bend National Park with his family Sunday night.
The boy suffered non-life-threatening injuries — scrapes and puncture wounds to his face, according to park officials.
His father was able to fight off the cat by stabbing it with a pocket knife.
The attack occurred on February 5th. Mr. Hobbs stabbed the lion with a Spyderco Calypso pocketknife with a 3″ blade. Better to have any weapon on hand than no weapon.
A Texas mother received a felony conviction, five years probation, parenting classes, a small fine, and a scolding from a judge who has vocabulary problems (“quarrel” for “era”) for spanking her two-year-old daughter.
A judge in Corpus Christi, Texas had some harsh words for a mother charged with spanking her own child before sentencing her to probation.
“You don’t spank children today,” said Judge Jose Longoria. “In the old days, maybe we got spanked, but there was a different quarrel. You don’t spank children.”
Rosalina Gonzales had pleaded guilty to a felony charge of injury to a child for what prosecutors had described as a “pretty simple, straightforward spanking case.” They noted she didn’t use a belt or leave any bruises, just some red marks.
As part of the plea deal, Gonzales will serve five years probation, during which time she’ll have to take parenting classes, follow CPS guidelines, and make a $50 payment to the Children’s Advocacy Center.
She was arrested back in December after the child’s paternal grandmother noticed red marks on the child’s rear end. The grandmother took the girl, who was two years-old at the time, to the hospital to be checked out.
Some people certainly think that spanking children is always inappropriate and excessive. Let’s hope that even more people think that intrusions by the state into relations between parents and children in circumstances not involving grave and serious injury are inappropriate and that everyone would think that a felony conviction over an ordinary spanking is outrageously excessive.
Iowahawk catches Paul Krugman lying with figures and nails his slimy hide to the barn door.
Please pardon this brief departure from my normal folderol, but every so often a member of the chattering class issues a nugget of stupidity so egregious that no amount of mockery will suffice. Particularly when the issuer of said stupidity holds a Nobel Prize.
Case in point: Paul Krugman. The Times’ staff economics blowhard recently typed, re the state of education in Texas:
And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.
Similarly, The Economist passes on what appears to be the cut-‘n’-paste lefty factoid du jour:
Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:
South Carolina – 50th
North Carolina – 49th
Georgia – 48th
Texas – 47th
Virginia – 44th
If you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country.
The point being, I suppose, is that unionized teachers stand as a thin chalk-stained line keeping Wisconsin from descending into the dystopian non-union educational hellscape of Texas. Interesting, if it wasn’t complete bullshit. …
[A] state’s “average ACT/SAT” is, for all intents and purposes, a proxy for the percent of white people who live there. In fact, the lion’s share of state-to-state variance in test scores is accounted for by differences in ethnic composition. Minority students – regardless of state residence – tend to score lower than white students on standardized test, and the higher the proportion of minority students in a state the lower its overall test scores tend to be.
Please note: this has nothing to do with innate ability or aptitude. Quite to the contrary, I believe the test gap between minority students and white students can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic status. And poverty. And yes, racism. And yes, family structure. Whatever combination of reasons, the gap exists, and it’s mathematical sophistry to compare the combined average test scores in a state like Wisconsin (4% black, 4% Hispanic) with a state like Texas (12% black, 30% Hispanic). …
So how does brokeass, dumbass, redneck Texas stack up against progressive unionized Wisconsin?
2009 4th Grade Math
White students: Texas 254, Wisconsin 250 (national average 248)
Black students: Texas 231, Wisconsin 217 (national 222)
Hispanic students: Texas 233, Wisconsin 228 (national 227)
To recap: white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin.
According to Wikipedia, descriptions of the effect of the illegal drug MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine) better known as Ecstasy include:
A general and subjective alteration in consciousness
A strong sense of inner peace and self-acceptance
Diminished aggression, hostility, and jealousy
Diminished fear, anxiety, and insecurity
Extreme mood lift with accompanying euphoria
Feelings of empathy, compassion, and forgiveness towards others
Feelings of intimacy and even love for others
Ecstacy has been referred to as the “Love Drug” and as the “Hug Drug.” People who do too much Ecstacy and become overly mellow are pejoratively known as “E-tards.”
It should be no surprise, then, that police in Palmview, Texas recently found Ecstacy being marketed under the Obama brand.
Years later, after driving the House Majority Leader out of office, and serving as key ammunition for democrats to use to overthrow the GOP majority in Congress with corruption charges, the last undismissed count of the contrived and partisan indictment of Tom Delay by radical Austin, Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle has been demolished by an Appeals Court ruling noting that the alleged illicit financial cooperation between two political entities involved checks, and the Texas statute applied only to cash.
The Austin American Statesman story does its best to give all possible credit to the theory that the contribution of money by one Republican political organization to another really was a form of money-laundering in a deliberate attempt to evade the law. The story fundamentally incorporates also the dubious premise that opportunistic interpretations of the the arcane technicalities of state campaign finance regulations really make the victims of their unique and partisan application genuinely culpable. And it fails to note the rather important point, that though Mr. Delay was nominally and formally involved with the Texas organizations, he was actually in Washington, DC, serving in the very active role of House Majority Leader, and obviously far too busy with Congressional leadership to be personally in charge of the financial operation and details of those local organizations.
It also fails to mention that a previous grand jury declined to find in favor of Earle’s proposed indictment, and that, in an unusual and highly controversial prosecutorial move, Earle empaneled another grand jury and tried again.
We win,” said Dick DeGuerin, DeLay’s lawyer. .. it means every crime Ronnie Earle indicted Tom DeLay for was not a crime.”
Where does Tom Delay go to get his reputation back?
Where does America go to get two years of a democrat majority in Congress back?
Former State Representative (54th District Texas, R) Dr. Suzanna Gratia-Hupp testifies before a Senate Committee including Chuck Schumer to her own tragic experience with the consequences of gun control restrictions on law-abiding citizens carrying concealed weapons, and concludes by identifying the most important basis for the Constitutional right of citizens to keep and bear arms.
Things went wrong for 19-year-old Cameron Sands of Fort Worth on Tuesday. Upon breaking into a house in Grand Prairie, Sands found himself confronted by the homeowner. News reports are conflicting. Some say that he fired unsuccessfully at the homeowner. Others say that he merely brandished a gun. In any case, either while drawing his pistol from the waistband of his trousers, or while holstering it after taking a pot shot at the robbery victim, Mr. Sands mishandled his weapon and shot himself in the lower abdomen. Police arrived to find Mr. Sands had succumbed to his injury just outside the house.
