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88th Texas Legislature

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Biff Tannen

Biff Tannen 46060

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1 hour ago, Evil Bill Obrien said:

Gotta love it when the guy who's pushing all the anti-trans and anti-drag show stuff to "protect the children" is about to get arrested for sexual assault of a staffer who isn't much older than said children...

The public at large will never see this.  Every accusation is a confession YET AGAIN.  This country needs to be shaken by the collar until they see what is happening.  It's fucking infuriating.  All you have to do is pay the tiniest bit of attention and you can see that Rs are the absolute worst people.  It's not difficult.

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StassneyHorn
StassneyHorn

I vaguely remember some rumblings about Talarico. I think he’s going to be a huge presence in years to come. Loved this exchange he had, shows he does his homework, didn’t seem like he was talking at,

SubliminalHorn
SubliminalHorn

And this is the best we’ll get out of the brainwashed republicans. Just get them to not vote. They’ll never vote for a Democrat because, well, they don’t even really know why, but they won’t. Just do

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ChuckNorrisActionJeans

ChuckNorrisActionJeans 2692

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27 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

The public at large will never see this.  Every accusation is a confession YET AGAIN.  This country needs to be shaken by the collar until they see what is happening.  It's fucking infuriating.  All you have to do is pay the tiniest bit of attention and you can see that Rs are the absolute worst people.  It's not difficult.

yes but I'm gonna need more confirmation than a tweet starting with "word on the street is..." and two replies

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Satchel

Satchel 6982

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Given that only 5% of the UT student population is black and 4% of the faculty is likewise, why is this kind of legislation necessary in a minority majority state? I know people get upset when people like me want to punish sports programs of schools located in states that still traffic in policies steeped in racism, but what other choices do we have? 
 

The current draft of the bill prohibits public colleges and universities in Texas from having a DEI office or hiring employees or outside contractors to “perform the duties” of a DEI office. The expansive bill blocks any public office that promotes efforts “designed or implemented in reference to race, color, or ethnicity.” It also bans training or activities “designed or implemented in reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation” — except those required under state or federal law.

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YGIFS

YGIFS 19456

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In 2010, I helped start an Academy for 'Rising Leaders', housed at the University of Texas.  It is for students between their Junior & Senior year of high school.  90% of them are students of color.  90% of them are first generation students for college in their families.  90% of them come from families below the median income level in their community and 90% of them were/are in the top 5% of their class.  They come from all over Texas.  We have put 1000 students through the program.  They spend a week on campus going through the rigors of everything from policy design, interpersonal communication, business etiquette, financial aid tips, resume crafting, and negotiation.  Our speakers have included governors, cabinet members, billionaires, and NFL legends.  We have now placed students in all 8 Ivies, Cal Tech, MIT, Duke, Georgetown, Duke, Stanford, U. of Chicago, and a couple hundred at the University of Texas.  

These students have gone on to careers that will echo throughout their families for generations.  Not a month goes by that I don't get a call or email from one of them telling me something great they have done followed by an inquiry about what they can do to help the program/younger students.  I have spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars over the years and it is the most fulfilling thing I have ever done in higher ed, and I have done a lot.  We have enabled an army of smart people to do great things.  And almost everybody involved was a White Republican.  But they saw the benefit in helping the state's overlooked.  

This morning at our spring council meeting, we were informed we have been targeted to be eliminated due to the "DEI" nature of our mission.  My board consists of two GOP cabinet secretaries, 2 GOP state supreme court justices, 2 UT Board of Regents members-both Republicans, the first Hispanic Republican from Texas elected to Congress since reconstruction, and the head of the THECB appointed by Abbott.  Imma go out on a limb and assume my team will win.  And I'm gonna make damn fucking sure we serve as a boilerplate example of how to take this bullshit head on.  And oh yeah, I got 3 billionaires on my team, how many you got Briscoe?

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Pescado_Rojo

Pescado_Rojo 19557

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5 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

In 2010, I helped start an Academy for 'Rising Leaders', housed at the University of Texas.  It is for students between their Junior & Senior year of high school.  90% of them are students of color.  90% of them are first generation students for college in their families.  90% of them come from families below the median income level in their community and 90% of them were/are in the top 5% of their class.  They come from all over Texas.  We have put 1000 students through the program.  They spend a week on campus going through the rigors of everything from policy design, interpersonal communication, business etiquette, financial aid tips, resume crafting, and negotiation.  Our speakers have included governors, cabinet members, billionaires, and NFL legends.  We have now placed students in all 8 Ivies, Cal Tech, MIT, Duke, Georgetown, Duke, Stanford, U. of Chicago, and a couple hundred at the University of Texas.  

These students have gone on to careers that will echo throughout their families for generations.  Not a month goes by that I don't get a call or email from one of them telling me something great they have done followed by an inquiry about what they can do to help the program/younger students.  I have spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars over the years and it is the most fulfilling thing I have ever done in higher ed, and I have done a lot.  We have enabled an army of smart people to do great things.  And almost everybody involved was a White Republican.  But they saw the benefit in helping the state's overlooked.  

This morning at our spring council meeting, we were informed we have been targeted to be eliminated due to the "DEI" nature of our mission.  My board consists of two GOP cabinet secretaries, 2 GOP state supreme court justices, 2 UT Board of Regents members-both Republicans, the first Hispanic Republican from Texas elected to Congress since reconstruction, and the head of the THECB appointed by Abbott.  Imma go out on a limb and assume my team will win.  And I'm gonna make damn fucking sure we serve as a boilerplate example of how to take this bullshit head on.  And oh yeah, I got 3 billionaires on my team, how many you got Briscoe?

You said Duke twice...

9945d634-c9a2-4298-9945-bacd40cb3a49_tex

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BevoAbyss

BevoAbyss 2165

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1 hour ago, The Original Greaser Bob said:

I drove our Delta 88 (the big car) to prom.

Nice ride. Hope the prom was fun!

My dad bought a brand new Delta 88 (20 feet of American steel) with a massive trunk in 1974. Just to drive the family from Texas to Disneyland and to see relatives in LA. And then to SF, Sequoia Nat'l Park, Vegas, Grand Canyon, Meteor Crater, and Petrified Forest Nat'l Park and back home. That was our most epic family vacation.* (Our D88 was a hard top version of the car below.) 

*Parents divorced 5 years later and the nuclear family suburban utopia was over ... 

d88.jpg

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Mo Horn

Mo Horn 8933

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Might as well just cancel SXSW, Austin City Limits, and close down most of 6th street. Sorry broadway fans, Bass will no longer be bringing in shows. All local news anchors are out of jobs. Oh, and I hope next time hot wheels is giving an address on TV, there better be police ready to arrest him. 

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Gap03

Gap03 3374

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2 hours ago, Mo Horn said:

Might as well just cancel SXSW, Austin City Limits, and close down most of 6th street. Sorry broadway fans, Bass will no longer be bringing in shows. All local news anchors are out of jobs. Oh, and I hope next time hot wheels is giving an address on TV, there better be police ready to arrest him. 

Nahh - it's limited to cross-dressing performers:

Quote
Sec. 43.28.  CERTAIN SEXUALLY ORIENTED PERFORMANCES
  PROHIBITED. (a) In this section, "sexually oriented performance"
  means a visual performance that:
               (1)  features:
                     (A)  a performer who is nude, as defined by
  Section 102.051, Business & Commerce Code; or 
                     (B)  a male performer exhibiting as a female, or a
  female performer exhibiting as a male, who uses clothing, makeup,
  or other similar physical markers and who sings, lip syncs, dances,
  or otherwise performs before an audience; and
               (2)  appeals to the prurient interest in sex.

So it could definitely end impacting Kiss or Poison, but unfortunately wouldn't catch this (as much as I'd love it if it did):

giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e477o4g87ussube1c2lb4

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Pescado_Rojo

Pescado_Rojo 19557

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7 minutes ago, Gap03 said:

Nahh - it's limited to cross-dressing performers:

So it could definitely end impacting Kiss or Poison, but unfortunately wouldn't catch this (as much as I'd love it if it did):

giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e477o4g87ussube1c2lb4

Man, someone needs to give this gif the Looch treatment. 

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 55816

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The day that the state budget is debated is one of the longest events in the months-long legislative session. This year, the budget bill itself, House Bill 1, is nearly a thousand pages long, and the debate process that began on Thursday tends to stretch for many hours, often well into the morning. Lawmakers will introduce hundreds of amendments—some consequential, some frivolous, a handful downright nonsensical—in a process that’s useful both to serious representatives looking to advance their policy agenda or deliver on services for constituents, and to legislative trolls who know that the amendment process is a great way to nab some extra attention for themselves. 

On Thursday, however, state representative Bryan Slaton, a Republican who represents Royse City in North Texas—and who is one of the most active of legislative trolls—was surprisingly absent from the budget debate, with his office in the Capitol locked up and dark (when I stopped by Thursday evening, there was paper taped up over the windows). While there’s been no confirmation of the reason Slaton turned out to be a no-show, the absence of a lawmaker whose amendments have been introduced is notable. 

Slaton’s name may be familiar to a Lege-watcher; while he’s only in his second term, the Royse City representative earned himself the dubious distinction of being named “The Cockroach” in Texas Monthly’s 2021 Best and Worst Legislators issue, a title given to lawmakers “who come to Austin just to muck things up.” Because he didn’t appear in the House on Thursday, however, certain parts of the debate process will go un-mucked. One needn’t be present to prefile amendments, and Slaton did introduce 27 of those, but other ways to gum up the legislative works—repeated points of order, floor action, and so on—do require a lawmaker to be physically in the chamber. 

In order to get a better feel for the impact a single legislator can have on the workings of the institution, let’s take a closer look at what Slaton has proposed thus far this session. Some of the more than two dozen amendments he filed to HB 1 are fairly unremarkable. For instance, it’s not unusual for lawmakers of both parties to attempt to move money in or out of the state’s Alternatives to Abortion program, which aims to deter pregnant Texans from seeking abortions. Slaton is one of a handful of Republicans who introduced an amendment to bolster funding for the program, attempting to buttress it with $2 million from the state’s grants for the Texas Commission on the Arts.


But that’s not the sort of amendment that makes headlines, and Slaton has filed plenty of attention-grabbers. Notably, he introduced an amendment that would ban state universities from using public funds “to host, support, or advertise a satanic ritual.” (The amendment offers no definition of “satanic,” and there are no known instances of Texas universities using state funds to promote Satanism on campus.) Other Slaton amendments would bar Texas universities (both state schools and private institutions that receive public money, which is virtually all of them) from hosting events that “support or encourage abortion,” hosting drag performances, or teaching “gender modification” procedures—which are, again, left undefined in the amendment (would mastectomy procedures count?). In addition to these attempts to carve out new exceptions to the First Amendment, there are also a bunch of amendments that would move money around—taking $50 million from the “Create Jobs and Promote Texas” fund, for example, and moving it to the Texas Railroad Commission. Slaton also proposed to dictate what the state comptroller’s annual e-newsletter must say: it would have to remind Texans of “the right to bear arms”!

Most of these measures are what lawmakers tend to refer to as a big waste of time—but without Slaton present, the amendments are unlikely to go anywhere, as other lawmakers typically don’t speak up for someone else’s troll amendments. That’s good, if you like a more efficient Legislature, but less great if you’re a member of the opposition party hoping that members of the troll caucus might yield some benefits for you. In 2021, Democratic representative Erin Zwiener, of Driftwood, tweeted her thanks to Slaton for “filing nonsense amendments,” as the time spent debating them allowed her party to slow down parts of the legislative calendar that would have otherwise advanced “awful anti-LGBT legislation,” as she put it. She included a screenshot of one such amendment from Slaton that session that would have added to Texas law the declaration that “sex means the physical condition of being mail [sic] or female.” Slaton’s continued absence today would mean there will be 27 fewer opportunities for Democrats to take advantage of his “nonsense.”

The fact that Slaton wasn’t at the Capitol on Thursday doesn’t affect other legislation that he’s introduced. Those bills are unlikely to become law for other reasons—mostly because they’re just as unserious as his amendments—but let’s take a quick look at them. Several would impose Slaton’s ideals of morality as a standard for the state; for example, House Joint Resolution 128 proposes a constitutional amendment (to be voted on in November) that would allow married couples with ten or more children to be exempt from property taxes, provided that neither spouse has ever been divorced. His HB 858 would amend part of the penal code to remove an existing defense that can be used by those prosecuted for distributing “materials harmful to a minor” if the materials were given out for scientific or educational reasons. Slaton would prefer that Texas law allow no such justification. 


Combating the “sexualization” of young people is an important legislative priority for Slaton generally; in HB 151, he would—among other things—remove an existing defense to child pornography laws that would prevent, say, a nineteen-year-old from being prosecuted for having explicit photos of her seventeen-year-old boyfriend. (Slaton’s bill does preserve an exception if the adult in possession of the photos is married to the child in question.) HB 4129, another Slaton special, amends language in the existing business and commerce code for an “erotic performance”; where it now says “an individual younger than eighteen years of age” is barred from seeing such performances, it would instead simply say “a child”— seemingly an attempt to remind Texans that seventeen-year-olds are children in the eyes of the law. 

Slaton doesn’t limit himself to particular topics when it comes to trolling, though. In HB 5212, he’d require that morgues established using funding from Operation Lone Star “post a sign indicating the designation as the Joseph R. Biden Morgue in a conspicuous place reasonably likely to be viewed by all persons” who enter. In House Concurrent Resolution 54, he’s got an arch bill that would “respectfully notif[y] the federal government of a series of alleged boating accidents” that resulted in the loss of all ammunitions and firearms in the counties his district encompasses, apparently out of fear that the feds are going to create a weapons registry. (There were no boating accidents that destroyed all weapons and ammunition in the landlocked counties.) HB 154—which Slaton coauthored with a pair of his fellow Republicans—would prevent a Texas governor from mandating face masks during a disaster, even if that disaster involves, say, a deadlier and faster-moving pathogen than COVID-19. Slaton has also filed a bunch of bills that take familiar GOP topics—such as restricting the rights of transgender Texans or the ability to obtain an abortion—and escalate them far beyond his party’s current positions. HB 2709, for example, would allow for Texas to execute anyone in the state who uses emergency contraception. 

Even if Representative Slaton returns to work at some point this session, those bills are nonetheless unlikely to become law. But if you’ve been wondering how the sausage does—and doesn’t—get made, lawmakers like Slaton are a part of the puzzle. 

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/bryan-slaton-legislative-troll-look-like-and-what-happens-when-hes-absent/

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mchookem

mchookem 16727

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12 hours ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

MQS is shocked, shocked to hear the rumors about Bryan Slayton. A well-known GOP operative responds. Shots fired. 

 

so i have now also seen/heard 'disturbing allegations' re: Mr. Slaton through a completely non-surly connected source, not the above tweeter...friend of a friend of a friend who works at the lege. the 'r' word was tossed out (rape, not rumor. well, also still rumor...a rape rumor!) 

might get interesting, we shall see. i'm sure we'll all be completely shocked! 🙄🤨 #notshockedatall

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YGIFS

YGIFS 19456

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Briscoe,

Seriously.  Take a timeout buddy.  I know a guy you used to blow.  You have personally asked me to introduce you to a bartender to buy drugs.  Maybe sit the next couple a plays out cocksucker.  

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 90543

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24 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

Briscoe,

Seriously.  Take a timeout buddy.  I know a guy you used to blow.  You have personally asked me to introduce you to a bartender to buy drugs.  Maybe sit the next couple a plays out cocksucker.  

I want to see Briscoe going after other Republicans.  

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