So by now, you probably heard about this:
http://www.rawstory.com/...
Two Republican gay rights groups said on Thursday they had been denied booths at the party’s upcoming Texas convention after being told their sexuality runs counter to the party’s views.
The Metroplex Republicans and the national Log Cabin Republicans said at a news conference in Fort Worth that state GOP leadership had denied them permission for the booths at the June 5-7 convention.
“It’s time that the Texas GOP’s hypocritical policies and procedures are replaced by new ones that match the general opinion of Texan Republican voters,” Log Cabin Republicans of Texas Chairman Jeffrey Davis said.
The Texas Republican Party did not respond to requests for comment. - Raw Story, 5/29/14
And guess who had a hand in that:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
But for the Log Cabin Republicans, one of the groups being shut out this year, the fight for a spot at the convention goes back decades. And the key figure responsible for legalizing the policy barring the organization, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (R), is now running for governor.
In 1996, the Log Cabin Republicans also wanted to have a booth at the convention, as well as an advertisement in the event's program. When the Texas Republican Party said no, the group sued them. A lower court ruled in favor of the gay conservative group, but the Texas Supreme Court stepped in and sided with the state party.
The court was made up of seven Republican and two Democratic justices. And as Progress Texas notes, one of those Republican justices was Abbott.
"What I'm most frustrated about is that the Republican Party of Texas has gone to such extraordinary lengths to keep some other Republicans from having a 6-foot booth," Dale Carpenter, who was then head of the Log Cabin Republicans, told The Dallas Morning News at the time.
Not only was Abbott on the court, he was the one who wrote the opinion denying Log Cabin Republicans a booth.
Abbott disagreed with the Log Cabin Republicans' complaint on free speech grounds, saying the Texas GOP was not acting as a public entity even though its delegates were chosen under state election laws.
"Because the Republican Party's conduct in denying LCR a booth and advertisement at the convention is an internal party affair rather than an integral part of the election process, the Republican Party is not a state actor under the undisputed facts of this case," wrote Abbott. "Therefore, LCR cannot maintain its state constitutional claims against the Party, and the district court abused its discretion in issuing an injunction based on these claims." - Huffington Post, 5/30/14
Here's something else you should know:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/...
Texas can keep secret the name of its supplier for its execution drugs, the state attorney general determined after law enforcement argued that suppliers face serious danger.
In the decision, Attorney General Greg Abbott's Office cited a "threat assessment" signed by Texas Department of Public Safety director Steven McCraw that says pharmacies selling execution drugs face "a substantial threat of physical harm."
Thursday's decision was a reversal for the state's top prosecutor on an issue being challenged in several death penalty states. It came the same day that Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said his state should consider creating its own laboratory for execution drugs rather than relying on "uneasy cooperation" with outside sources.
Under Abbott, who is also the Republican nominee for governor in the nation's busiest death penalty state, the Texas Attorney General's Office had since 2010 rejected three similar attempts by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to keep secret its source of the drugs used to carry out lethal injections.
While courts have consistently refused to stop executions over the privacy issue, lawyers for death row inmates say they need the information to verify the drugs' potency and protect inmates from unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. - My San Antonio, 5/30/14
Now here's what you should know about that:
http://www.motherjones.com/...
Greg Abbott, the Republican attorney general of Texas, has many of the usual suspects funding his gubernatorial campaign: Energy tycoons, construction company magnates, leveraged buyout moguls, sports team owners. But one of his biggest backers hails from an industry not typically known for bankrolling political campaigns. J. Richard "Richie" Ray is the owner of a compounding pharmacy, one of those loosely regulated entities that have been mixing up lethal injection drug cocktails for prisons as these pharmaceuticals have become harder and harder to obtain. According to a new report from the nonprofit Texans for Public Justice, Ray, the owner of Richie's Specialty Pharmacy in Conroe, Texas, has given Abbott $350,000 to help him defeat democratic challenger Wendy Davis.
Ray's big investment in Abbott comes as death row inmates and good-government groups are trying to force Texas to disclose the supplier of its lethal injection drugs, thought to be a compounding pharmacy. The pharmacies themselves are under fire for selling tainted and mislabled medicine that has killed dozens of people in recent years. During Abbott's tenure as AG, he has already taken on one Texas compounder, ApotheCure, after three people in Oregon died after taking painkillers from the pharmacy that were eight times more potent than the label indicated. (In 2012, Abbott settled state civil charges against the company.) Last summer, tainted medicine from an Austin compounding pharmacy caused blood infections in 17 people; two deaths are suspected to be related to the products, which are still under investigation.
In the midst of all this controversy, Richie Ray has become a major donor Abbott's campaign. He gave $100,000 in June 2013, just before the state bought several doses of compounded pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy. (By comparison, Ray has given only a little more than $40,000 to Rick Perry's campaigns.) Ray's pharmacy is not supplying execution drugs to the state, according to the Texans for Public Justice report, apparently because his pharmacy isn't certified as a "sterile" facility. However, Richie's is a member of the Professional Compounding Centers of America (PCCA), a Houston-based national trade group that not only owns the lab that tested some of the state's compounded execution drugs for purity but also sold Woodlans the raw materials to make one of the drugs.
Ray himself is active in fighting tougher regulation of compounding pharmacies. He's the director of the Texas Pharmacy Association PAC and chairman of the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists' federal PAC. His employees are the top donors to the campaign of Sen. John Barasso (R-WY), a doctor and the Senate's leading defender of compounding pharmacies like ApotheCure. - Mother Jones, 5/28/14
Yeah, pretty awful. Now here's two things you should look forward to. First there's this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The soon-to-be published memoir from state Sen. Wendy Davis has a title and a cover.
Davis, the Fort Worth Democratic senator who shot to national prominence after filibustering a Texas bill restricting abortion access, has titled her first book Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir, according to the publisher's website.
The memoir is scheduled to be released on Sept. 2 by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, two months before the general election in which Davis and Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott are both vying to replace Gov. Rick Perry. It is expected to cover Davis’ life story, including her Texas upbringing and struggles as a single mother, which included briefly living in a trailer and later graduating from Harvard Law School. The book is likely to address questions raised by critics about whether Davis ever exaggerated the difficulties she faced in balancing her career ambitions and her family life.
Penguin describes the 272-page book as “a deeply personal memoir by one of the country’s brightest new political stars, Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis.” - Huffington Post, 5/27/14
And then there's this:
http://blog.chron.com/...
Sen. Wendy Davis and Attorney General Greg Abbott have agreed to a statewide televised debate this fall in Dallas.
The one-hour WFAA-Texas Tribune Debate forum will be broadcast on Gannett Co. Inc television stations WFAA in Dallas-Fort Worth, KHOU in Houston, KVUE in Austin and KENS in San Antonio. It will be streamed at TexasTribune.org and on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s site.
WFAA said the debate also will air on London Broadcasting Co. television stations in Waco-Temple-Bryan, Tyler-Longview, Corpus Christi, Beaumont-Port Arthur, Abilene-Sweetwater and San Angelo.
Abbott was the first to agree to debate dates this month, saying he had agreed to forums in Dallas on Oct. 3 and in McAllen on Sept. 19. - Houston Chronicle, 5/28/14
The Dallas debate is scheduled for September 30th. The Log Cabin Republicans should back Davis' campaign as a way of getting back at Abbott. Plus Davis supports marriage equality so she should be an obvious choice for them. If you would like to donate and get involved with Davis' campaign, you can do so here:
http://www.wendydavistexas.com/