Intrepid parents and taxpayers like Donna Garner, Janice Van Cleave, Women on the Wall, and Americans for Prosperity-Texas are finding out just how bad the picture really is. Let us review.

CSCOPE got massive amounts of tax money to develop “time management” tools for teachers, even though a calendar and a pen still cost about $15 at Wal-Mart.

They were also tasked with creating a “professional development” tool to help teachers teach the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). This is the basic knowledge tested in the STAAR test.

What on Earth this “professional development tool” was ever supposed to be is anyone’s guess. The TEKS are the nuggets of knowledge kids need to know for the STAAR test, and they are on the Texas Education Agency (TEA) website.

As it turns out, CSCOPE pretty much just cut-and-pasted the TEKS off of the TEA website and called this their “professional development tool”.

At some point they also began developing curriculum – embarrassingly sub-standard curriculum that was also peppered with anti-Americanism and anti-Christianism. This aspect of CSCOPE has gotten most of the headlines, and rightly so, but it is just one part of what is wrong with both CSCOPE and the regional Education Service Centers (ESCs) that have perpetrated CSCOPE on Texans.

This curriculum is what CSOPE is no longer allowed to use, curriculum that included burka-wearing day for young Texas girls, communist flag-making day for school kids, and other such activities.

It is inconceivable that a group that would do such things would be allowed continued access to Texas classrooms by our elected officials, but that is what is happening right now.

CSCOPE tried to keep anyone from finding any of this out by making school districts sign non-disclosure agreements, binding them to not showing anyone the “tool”. This is very weird, and it turns out to be illegal. Parents have the legal right to see what their kids are being taught.

Since these “tools” were bought and paid for by the Texas taxpayer, we expected to be done paying for them.

Not so. CSCOPE is now renting their glorified calendar and cut-and-pasted TEKS to school districts. They also hold seminars to teach people how to use these masterpieces of learning technology.

If you think this sounds like a scam, it’s because it does.

Best of all, the TEA has these time management tools downloadable on its website. The TEKS are there too, which is what the “professional development” tool is.

This all means that CSCOPE is 100% obsolete.

What about it’s origins?

“CSCOPE”  is actually a product of a 501c3 non-profit corporation called TESCCC. The Board of TESCCC are the directors of these regional Education Service Centers (ESCs). The ESCs were given around $180 million in education grants to create these “tools”, and they contracted the work to TESCCC, who produced CSCOPE.

School districts are still paying rent for CSCOPE, and for absolutely no functional reason.

Some districts are pulling this continuing CSCOPE funding. Many are not.

Are parents and taxpayers powerless? No.

Parents and taxpayers can check to see if their ISD has pulled CSCOPE funding and use. If the Superintendant is protecting it, parents can organize to elect school board members who promise to hire a new Superintendant who will cut CSCOPE off.

When the CSCOPE controversy first hit, Sen. Patrick quickly emerged, saying he was pushing for more regulation of this obsolete, wasteful, anti-American, anti-Christian, and incompetent taxpayer leach.

“Regulate CSCOPE!” was not then a rallying cry that satisfied Texans. It still isn’t, despite Sen. Patrick’s recent press conference that failed to generate any sense of finality for the many Texas parents and taxpayers following this drama.

Instead of getting rid of this taxpayer parasite, the now-taskless-but-well-funded CSCOPE has been put under the State Board of Education’s purview.

The Attorney General is an elected official who has actually borne his teeth to CSCOPE, saying he will investigate them and kick them out of Texas if he finds illegality.

These days the executive branch is, hands-down, a better bet than the land-of-comically-low-expectations that is our legislative branch.

–AFP article “CSCOPE or C-SCAM?” (AFP has done excellent work on CSCOPE all session)

The Wall Street Journal did a good job of putting Larson’s fable in perspective, pointing out that “dark money,” the devil term invented by the Texas ruling class for money spent by the accountability groups they want to intimidate, is less than 1% of overall election spending.

The lobby is resisting the change that an era of greater accountability will inevitably bring – an era of diminished legislative ability to give connected people gifts from the Texas treasury. The lobby is very slow in learning this isn’t the purpose of the Texas treasury, as they have always assumed.

The WSJ pointed out that the bill Larson is lobbying Governor Perry not to veto was passed out of the Senate, then recalled by two thirds of Senators when they realized what they had done. Speaker Straus then broke with the long-held practice of returning the bill to the Senate in such circumstances, and the House passed it with a coalition of Democrats and the Speaker’s liberal Republicans.

Fifty-one Republicans voted with Texans, in favor of government accountability, and against this attack on the first amendment from Larson, Straus, and the Texas ruling class.

If any government is going to show how to preserve the experiment of western government in the 21^st Century, it is Texas. It is a good sign that there is so much support for government accountability in the Texas House and Senate.

– WSJ article

– Larson’s DMN lobby piece

In his speech Krause cited a bad situation in California that led to same sex marriage opponent donors being harassed.  This is in the wake of the anti-conservative IRS scandal, in which non-profit applications with conservative names were targeted for obstruction by the IRS.

Senate Bill 346 is just the Texas version of this national story, a story that Rush Limbaugh blasted over America’s airwaves, and which the politically-engaged are talking about everywhere.

At bottom, it is the Chicago way, politics bereft of honor and respect for the constitution, in which strong-arming is considered a virtue. It’s a style of government that has much in common with most of the governments in the history of the world, and much less in common with the American experiment. Joe Straus and his leadership team have made it their business to bring this kind of politics to Texas.

The good news is, Texas is proving to be made of stronger stuff than Illinois and California. Most of the Straus Team’s efforts have failed, but it isn’t for lack of trying.

Straus’s Team want to trample the constitution with SB 346, but they also want to create a water slush fund for cronies to buy land or provide services that they can sell to the state at huge prices. In search of ever higher taxes by which to create and expand government power, they have tried to use the Rainy Day Fund, but have been stuffed so far.

Newly-outed Team Straus member Phil King offered an amendment to a bill recently that would define emails sent by Tea Parties as political contributions, triggering reporting requirements with the Texas Ethics Commission and steep fines for non-compliance. This is responsive to a Speaker Straus directive from the 81^st legislature, in which he commissioned investigation into adding blogs and other internet communications into the definition of political advertising.

The slowed growth of the powerful education bureaucracy from the 82^nd Legislature being reversed despite the fact that the doomsday predictions about these “cuts” have proven themselves to be false propaganda.

Straus and his team of liberal Republicans have partnered with Democrats to run the Texas House. His Republicans are well to the left of a majority of voting Texans. They are also well to the left of the versions of themselves that campaign for public office every two years.

But perhaps even worse, they are trivializing and eroding rule of law in Texas, carrying out a legislative strategy that would make Texas a land ruled by men, not laws, slowly reversing the American experiment. It has been successfully done in pockets of our country, the really corrupt places like Chicago, where laws are just cute little obstacles for those in power to ignore. We’ve seen it in the White House for the past four years.

These politics have been harder to implement here, because Texas has been a state of fighters since before we were a Republic or a state. Texans will die for righteous causes – fighting for them is easy. It’s in our blood.

Texans today have much to fight. There is a breed of politicians that would not only make us a land of high taxes, hazardous overregulation, and an immoral legal code; they would make us corrupt. Good thing Texans fight back.

Obama’s little helper in the Texas House is Charlie Geren, who will be working today to disclose donors to tax exempt groups like the 501c3 and c4 groups Obama’s IRS targeted.

One of the most powerful tea party networks in the state resides in Geren’s backyard and they were targeted by the IRS. Over the last two election cycles Geren has seen his liberal Republican buddies lose at the hands of a more educated citizenry.

Not troubling to Geren or the bill’s author Senator Kel Seliger is the bill’s unconstitutional violation of the first amendment right to free speech.

Before now, the concept of the Obama Administration targeting conservative non-profit groups was hard for some conservative activists to face.

For conservative activists who fear being criticized it wasn’t so much unbelievable as it was hard to say, or even think. Hopefully, the IRS news has given them the courage they need to face the facts.

The meeting was an apparent attempt by a pro-CSCOPE school board to tamp down growing opposition to CSCOPE, a highly controversial anti-American curriculum resource that has worked its way into school districts all over Texas.

This meeting was called ahead of a June meeting in which the school board will decide whether to renew or cancel the district’s CSCOPE contract.

Less than a year after the CSCOPE renewal vote, in May of 2014, there will be a school board election. Filing to run for the school board is usually done 60-90 days before the election. Current occupants of the seats up for re-election in May 2014 are Allyson Flack, Bob Payton, and Kirk Wolf. All three seats are at-large, meaning anyone ion the district can run for them.

The news story included extensive excerpting from the Texas Open Meetings Act that show meetings called by school boards must be open, with proper public notice provided.

The pro-CSCOPE school board thought it could skirt the requirements by not answering questions at the meeting. However, the school board failed to restrain itself in that way. The Times Record News article includes the text of a question read and answered by a school board member.

After the meeting Delores Culley, Wichita Falls County Republican Women’s President, seemed surprised that the pro-CSCOPE school board would expect to such a meeting to convince parents and concerned citizens to support CSCOPE, whose list of anti-American propaganda smuggled into Texas districts is long and unseemly.

Culley seemed unimpressed, saying, “That was the most brain-numbing bunch of stuff I’ve sat through in my life.”

–Times Record News article

Gonzales was discussing his own bill related to military personnel, HB 1004, before the House when Stickland began quizzing Gonzales on both HB 1004 and HB 202.

During the interchange, Stickland revealed that he has enough votes to pass his bill, but that Gonzales, a member of the Local and Consent Calendar Committee, has “tagged” his bill. He is rumored to have been bragging about tagging this bill.

“Tagging” is when a committee member marks a bill he or she wants to die in committee. Though informal, these tags are respected by the other committee members.

When confronted, Gonzales tried to cover by saying the companion Senate bill, SB 260, had already passed through the Senate so, technically, the House could vote on it.

That is, before Stickland shamed Gonzales for putting politics before families of deployed military.

It would be easy to underestimate just how much commitment to Texans this kind of thing required of Stickland. The legislature is full of tricks and games to consolidate power in the hands of special interests and keep citizens unaware. Stickland exposing the practice of “tagging” was a rare act of genuine courage against a corrupt political establishment.

Serving the interests of the powerful is the coward’s way forward. Joining Gonzales in this is Claire Cardona, blogger for the Dallas Morning News. Just this morning she joined in, mocking Stickland for speaking truth to power, the thing the fourth estate used to do before they became nursemaids for the most powerful and corrupt elements of society.

If Gonzales has any sense he will make sure SB 206 passes.

If he doesn’t, Texans know exactly who to blame for the death of a bill to give the children of deploying military personnel excused absences from school in order to spend extra time with their parent, who may not make it back alive.

How bad has it gotten? Many Republicans are pushing a water slush fund that nobody asked for, believing the lobby’s story that there will be a water crisis in 50 years if we don’t rush this monstrosity through the lege. Of course, they are conveniently ignoring the fact that the lobby wouldn’t tolerate the attachment of a single anti-slush fund amendment.

Meanwhile, on illegal immigration, an issue insiders perpetually try to downplay the huge popularity of, they are working against their constituents with Robert Alonzo’s (D) HB 3206, designed to give illegal aliens state-issued driver’s licenses.

Don’t be confused when insiders try to lie about this issue. This is a step towards amnesty, a rewarding of law breaking, disdain for immigrants using legal channels, and another heaping spoonful of abuse to people who follow the rules.

Why is this being done? Simple.

Texas politics has two gangs who try to steal from average citizens. One gang, we’ll call them the Donkeys, organize non-rich people. The other gang, we’ll call them the The Elephants, organizes rich people. Both crews are about stealing from law-abiders. The two crews are in competition for who gets to steal the most from hard-working, law-abiding Texans, but when the law-abiders rise up, the gangs cooperate to keep them down.

Right now the Elephants are scared because the Donkeys have gotten the upper hand in the federal government. This hasn’t happened in Texas, but the Texas Elephants scare easily, so they are panicking anyway. Since the only thing the Elephants know how to do is give other people’s money away, they’ve decided they need to start giving stuff to non-rich thieves. That is what this driver’s license bill is about.

Citizenship is a bundle of rights. These rights, because of the success of the Donkeys over the last 80 years, come with a huge amount of money and benefits attached.

Immigration is a license to participate in the party that the two gangs have created, funded by booty from law-abiders.

The Donkeys have always tried to make it easier for illegal immigrants to vote. Now, the Elephants in Texas, long attracted to the making their labor force legal, are being convinced this is the right time to cooperate with the Donkeys. This is more dangerous for the Elephants than the Donkeys, because the Elephants make a show of representing the law-abiders. If the law abiders left them they’d never win another election, but the Elephants are betting they won’t.

“Reflexively respond to stimuli”? Wow. What a phrase. I ‘reflexively responded to the stimuli’ of my razor cutting my face this morning, but there is no scientific consensus about whether or not that is pain either.

It is chilling to see the pro-abortion community admit that babies in their mother’s wombs “reflexively respond to stimuli” and remain resolved to keep their sex options loose by protecting a practice worse than the awful practice of American slavery.

Why would a lack of scientific consensus about a baby feeling the pain of his own dismemberment mean anything besides calling a halt to all abortions until we are sure they aren’t feeling pain? For the last four decades our selfish sides have triumphed politically. The tie always seems to go to sexual license. No wonder liberals have no impulse to protect this country. The version of America they aren’t protecting doesn’t deserve protection.

And when are Texas pro-abortion cowards going to drop their scrubbed scientific vocabulary, designed to distance them from their own evil? ‘Fetus ‘means ‘baby’, a baby who needs the protection of his mother, father, and law enforcement. ‘In-utero’ means ‘in his mother’s womb’.’“Gestation’ means ‘growth’. ‘Reflexive response to stimuli ‘means ‘feeling pain’.

In the story, Rep. Sarah Davis promotes removing emotion from this debate as an overall improvement.

If killing a child in his mother’s womb isn’t supposed to be emotional, we should all have lobotomies to remove our ability to feel emotion. If Davis is right, human emotion is just like wisdom teeth.

Kermit Gosnell has turned the stomachs of everyone with the courage to face his story, not just pro-life people. The dirty little secret is, it isn’t because he was more brutal to the children than other abortion providers. It was because he didn’t keep the brutality hidden from sight. It was the same brutality. Gosnell pulled the curtain back on abortion, period, and it is worse than a horror movie, and still some in media, government, entertainment, and elsewhere are protecting it anyway.

For the House to increase funding to $75 million is unconscionable. Speaker Straus’s pretention to being pro-life would end now if he had any shame at all.

One ridiculous moment of propaganda in the story was when it was suggested pro-abortion pressure was scared legislators after last session.

There isn’t an issue with more grassroots clout that the pro-life side of the abortion debate. When pro-lifers want to organize a rally in Washington D.C. they break records, awing the news media so much that they have to black it out.

When pro-abortion forces try to organize events they get a small band of professional liberal fools to spew hate reminiscent of the movie “The Exorcist” to cover for their lack of turn out. The news media over–covers these gatherings, zooming in to avoid a telling photo op with the pathetic turn out.

Aaronson’s most telling line of all was the one in which she said that researchers estimate that 30,000 lives were saved by the removal of funding last session. Of course, she wrote it in a much colder, more technical way – following Sarah Davis’ advice not to act like a human about this issue. Anderson wrote, “The researchers estimate that 144,000 fewer women received health services and 30,000 fewer unintended pregnancies were averted in 2012 than 2010.

Whether the pregnancy is averted before or after life is created doesn’t much matter to them.

Have pro-life leaders in the legislature outlived their will to fight? Has pleasing the principalities and powers become so important to them that they’ve become useless? We’ll have to see.

What else would you say about a consultant with so many clients aggressively on the wrong side of the 1st Amendment?

The latest example is SB 346, authored by an Eppstein client and pushed along by a bunch of other Eppstein clients. The bill would unconstitutionally apply reporting requirements to some groups and not others.

One of the armload of constitutional precedents this bill would violate says you cannot treat some corporate entities different than others. This bill carves some corporate entities out of its hefty, unconstitutional reporting requirements – the unions. This is a Republican-authored pro-union bill.

The bill’s author Kel Seliger, like many Republicans in the Eppstein stable, is the kind of Republican that might be a Democrat if Texas weren’t so conservative. A pro-union, anti-free speech bill isn’t such a stretch for this kind of Republican.

Another first amendment precedent SB346 tramples is the “significant purpose” test from the landmark U.S. Supreme Ct. decision in Buckley v Valeo. It established that heavy reporting requirements are only constitutional if the “major purpose” of an organization is the nomination and/or election of a candidate. Seliger’s SB 346 would apply these requirements to groups that aren’t even allowed to directly campaign. What’s his justification? If the group is connected to a PAC, well, it should be treated as part of it.

This is interesting corporate precedent. Maybe Obama could pick up on Seliger’s idea and decide that charities and money-losing businesses set up by people who own wealthy businesses should just be considered part of the business and taxed accordingly.

It’s Seliger’s own logic. If any of the same people are involved in two corporations, treat them both like they are the one with the higher governmental burden, be it taxes or reporting requirements.

Eppstein clients Bob Deuell, Charles Schwertner, and Tommy Williams all voted for this anti-first amendment, anti-corporate bill.

Eppstein’s other hat is TMA lobbyist. TMA is the Texas chapter of crucial ObamaCare partner, The American Medical Association. Senator Duncan, who voted for this bill, has received tens of thousands of dollars from TMA. So has Senator Robert Nichols, who also voted for this bill.

Senator Kevin Eltife also voted for this anti-free speech bill. While he isn’t an Eppstein client, he gave to Eppstein clients last election cycle – Chuck Hopson, Jeff Wentworth, Craig Estes and Joe Straus.

Senators Van de Putte, Zaffarini, and Lucio, Jr. joined the anti-first amendment crew, and all received large amounts of contributions from health care related PACs in the 2011-2012 political cycle.

This isn’t the first attack on free speech, either. Eppstein client Byron Cook tried to get AgendaWise shut down last year when we reported his office was breaking the law.

“Texas on the Brink!!!!!” is the scare-name of their “study”, and Garnett Coleman pushed it on KUHF FM in Houston. (The exclamation points are added for effect)

While he admitted Texas has very affordable housing compared to other states, he went on to make several unintelligent comparisons that paint Texas in a bad light.

One of them was a comparison of carbon dioxide output and hazardous waste.

To use cumulative stats to compare states of drastically different sizes is dumb. It is like comparing the overall food intake from a family of two with that of a family of 10, and then pretending the big family are gluttons for eating more food cumulatively.

Of course Texas puts out more carbon dioxide than other states. It is one of the two biggest states.

Additionally, Texas produces oil, which is a big reason our economy is so good. If Texas quit producing oil it would not reduce the output of carbon dioxide and hazardous waste worldwide, because countries that would like to destroy us would simply pick up the extra business.

Plus, carbon dioxide scare-mongering came out of the now-humiliated and discredited “global warming” social fad. The scientists who stood behind that movement now admit the word hasn’t been warming after all.

The other two stats are just as worthless.

Percentage health insurance and high school graduation rates are hugely effected by Texas’ multi-culturalism.

Elitist liberals may like to impose their values on everyone, but the fact is, immigrants come to this country with their own values. One of them is that many of them don’t like to accept handouts. As a result, Texas has a huge number of people who qualify for Medicaid who don’t accept it. Good for them.

Additionally, assimilating cultures don’t have the same social stigma attached to graduating from high school.

Last time this kind of tired argument was hauled out, an Iowa blogger undressed it completely. It was focusing on standardized test scores, not graduation rates but the underlying point that if you control for ethnic diversity, you get the real picture, and Texas comes out very well.

And again, liberal elites have kids with lots of degrees, lots of debt, and no jobs right now, so let’s not judge anyone’s paradigm too harshly.

“Texas on the brink” is goofy and misleading. People vote with their feet about the quality of states, and Texas is winning in a landslide.

–Coleman interview