So proud to be in Austin today

[Dawn Meredith]

I have had court all morning so was not able to join the HUGE rally at the state cap. in support of a woman's right to choose today,
but just saw a pic on fb and it is HUGE. Wendy Davis, her organizational skills and all the women there in support have done Austin proud today.
Time for Rick Perry to hang it up and go golfing with W. (Instead of running for a fourth term).
Progressive women of Austin-and elsewhere- rock!

Dawn

[Keith Millea]

Published on Monday, July 1, 2013 by The Huffington Post

Dispatch from Austin

by Cecile Richards

The Texas Legislature is back at the Capitol today, trying to pass a bill that would wipe out access to safe and legal abortion for millions of women in the state.

These are some of the most extreme abortion restrictions in the country. They could shut down 36 of the state's 42 health centers that provide abortion and, in some cases, also

(Photo: eschipul/ Flickr)

provide lifesaving cancer screenings and birth control.

If this all sounds familiar, it's because we've seen this bill before.

Governor Perry and his allies couldn't pass these dangerous restrictions during the regular session. And even after they bent every rule, silenced the very constituents whose lives would be affected by the bill, and voted in the middle of the night when they hoped no one was watching -- they couldn't do it on take two. The entire country saw how that ended: with Texas Senator Wendy Davis on her feet, hundreds of thousands of people on the edge of their seats, and the rest of us cheering like crazy in the Capitol rotunda.

So Governor Perry decided that if at first you don't succeed -- and if on the second try, you still don't succeed -- just cross your fingers and hope no one will notice that you're going for a hat trick.

Unfortunately for Governor Perry -- we noticed.

Once again, he'll have to answer to the vast majority of Texans who oppose this bill, and the thousands of folks who show up at the Capitol to deliver that message in person. And once again, he'll have to answer to hundreds of thousands of people watching the situation unfold from all over the country -- all over the world, in fact -- through YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

As Mom once said: The lord's eye may be on the sparrow -- but everyone else is looking at Texas.

The truth is, what's happening here has already lit a fuse. In the first minutes of the citizens' filibuster, something started that can't be stopped. The second we tasted victory in Austin, anything became possible. And now, spurred on by the good people of Texas and beyond, folks all over the country are standing up to attacks on women's health, saying once and for all: Enough is enough. They're calling it "pulling a Wendy Davis."

We've reached a turning point for supporters of women's health. And the best news? It's delivered a new generation of organizers -- the young people who tagged along with a friend, surprised everyone by volunteering to testify, then came back the next day with their own crowd in tow, promising: "You've got to see this. Trust me." They're here -- and they're not going anywhere.

So as the clock ticks down on the second special session, we'll tell Governor Perry -- as many times as it takes -- that nobody should be taking medical advice from Texas politicians.

But all of us on the ground here in Austin have another message -- one for everybody in this country who believes that we're all better off when we value women and trust them to make their own health decisions: You're not alone. And our fight is just getting started.


Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

[Magda Hassan]

Texas Lawmakers Too Busy Targeting Abortion Providers to Deal With Exploding Fertilizer Plants

More than two months after the deadly explosion in West, Texas, the state has done almost nothing to prevent future disasters.

By Tim Murphy
| Fri Jul. 5, 2013 3:00 AM PDT





Searchers sift through the wreckate at the West Fertilizer Co. on April 18th. Ron Jenkins/MCT/Zuma
In the two and a half months since an explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer storage facility left 15 first responders dead and at least 200 people injured, two things have become clear. The disaster could have been avoided if the proper regulations had been in place and enforcedand state and federal agencies don't appear to be in a hurry to put those regulations in place or enforce them.
Texas, whose lax regulatory climate has come in for scrutiny in the aftermath of the West explosion, went into a special session of its state legislature on Tuesday to push through an omnibus abortion bill designed to regulate 37 abortion clinics out of existence. But the 2013 session will come to a close without any significant action to impose safeguards on the 74 facilities in the state that contain at least 10,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate.
Lawmakers in Austin have a handy excuse for punting on new fertilizer regulations: That would be intrusive. State Sen. Donna Campbell, the Republican who helped to shut down Democratic Sen. Wendy Davis' filibuster of the abortion bill on procedural grounds, told the New York Times that lawmakers should be wary of monitoring chemical plants more closely because there's "a point at which you can over regulate."
As the investigations into the West blast have shown, though, over-regulation is hardly a risk in Texas. The disaster was notable for just how little regulation there actually was and how little it was enforced. Since the April 17 disaster we've learned that:

• The Texas Department of State Health Services, which tracks the storage of dangerous chemicals, says it is prohibited from regulating those chemicals and that any regulations must come from local officials. Except...
  
• West is in McLennan County, which, like 70 percent of counties in the state, had been statutorily prohibited from adopting its own fire code until 2010, when it reached a high-enough population threshold. It has not adopted one since.
  
• Texas is one of just four states without statewide standards for fire safety and storage at chemical facilities.
  
• Free from the constraints of fire codes, the West Fertilizer Co. stored ammonium nitrate in wooden boxes and didn't even have a sprinkler system.
  
• A statewide cap on property taxes means that even if they were allowed to have fire codes, most rural Texas fire departments are unable to afford the equipment needed to fight fires at the chemical facilities that are located disproportionately in rural counties.
  
• The company didn't notify local planners of the presence of dangerous chemicals on site until 2012at least six years after federal law would have required them to do soand the town's volunteer firefighters were never briefed on how to handle a blaze at the facility. One firefighter tried to look up the information on his smartphone en route to the blaze but gave up.
  
• West Fertilizer Co.'s "worst-case release scenario," according to documents provided to the Environmental Protection Agency, did not allow for the possibility of fire or explosions.
  
• The site hadn't been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985, when, after finding five "serious violations," the company was fined $30. (That's $64.95 in today's dollars.) The 28-year lag between inspections isn't so bad, considering OSHA has the manpower to inspect each chemical facility in the US about once every 129 years.
  
• West Fertilizer Co. was insured for just $1 million, the same amount of liability coverage the state requires of bounce house operators. However, this was $1 million more than is required by the state for chemical storage facilities.
  
• The facility was storing an explosive product that doesn't actually have to be explosive.
  
• It understated the amount of said explosive material it was keeping at the site by 56,000 pounds (or about 50 percent).
  
• The company did not work with the Department of Homeland Security to develop security procedures as required by federal law, nor did DHS ever instruct it to do so. It did provide information on the site's explosive contents to the Texas Department of Health Services, but that agency did not pass that information along to DHS, nor was it required to.
  
• West Fertilizer Co. had no security guards, alarm system, or perimeter fencing despite the fact that it was a storage facility for the primary ingredient of improvised explosive devices, and had been robbed 11 times (presumably by meth manufacturers) in 12 years.
  
• In that same period, police responded to five different reports of ammonia leaks from the facility.
  
• In the 11 years since the US Chemical Safety Board recommended the EPA regulate ammonium nitrate, the source of the West fire, the agency has made no move to do so. It is not included on the agency's list of hazardous chemicals, and by extension, it's not included on Texas' list either.
  
• The facility was less than 3,000 feet away from two schools and a dense residential area and there are no federal or state laws on the books that would have prevented it from getting closer.
  

In other words, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit for Texas lawmakers to tackle to prevent future Wests. And yet, in the wake of the explosion, the state of Texas has taken exactly one concrete step to prevent future disasters from happening: It created a website that allows people to determine if there's a chemical plant in their neighborhood. That's information that should certainly be available to the public, but it shouldn't be confused with a step that's making those plants safer.
The Texas state fire marshal offered to issue voluntary best-practices recommendations for counties without fire codes, and to inspect chemical facilitiesagain, voluntarilyif the owners so wished, but the effect of that is hampered by the fact that rural counties, where most chemical facilities are located, are still prohibited under Texas law from enacting fire codes. A bill that would have ended that prohibition, which Gov. Rick Perry declined to throw his support behind, went nowhere this session. It is not being considered at the special session.
Legislators also talked about suggesting that facilities put up some signs to notify people about the presence of potentially hazardous chemicals nearby.
The only public statements on West from the state's top lawmakers in the last month came when the Federal Emergency Management Agency turned down Texas' request for $17 million in disaster assistance for the disaster it did nothing to prevent on the grounds that Texas has the money to pay for it. (And it doesTexas' rainy day fund is set to hit $8 billion by 2015.)
Maybe if pro-choice activists really want to stop Texas from regulating clinics they should just start calling them "fertilizer plants."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013...ation-laws

[Dawn Meredith]

Donna Campbell. A name to remember for the next election. People have been so brainwashed by the likes of Rush Dittohead about "overregulation" when in fact the
minimal amount of regulation is staggering. An informed electorate is the only way to rid the nation of these criminal bastards. That and getting people to actually care,
which is the hardest thing.

Reading this made me ill.

Dawn

[Magda Hassan]

SAT JUL 06, 2013 AT 04:34 PM PDT

Follow the Money Rick Perry & Abortion Edition

byDemSignFollow

• 23 Comments / 23 New
  

While it is truly hard to keep up with the sheer amount of graft, giveaways, turning of blind eyes, and special favors that has emanated from Rick Perry's 13 years in the Governor's mansion, when following the tale of SB5/SB1 it is hard to miss the crucial results of one of theprovisions:

#SB5 requires every abortion provider to be licensed as an ambulatory surgery center. This requirement will costs providers about $1 million and will have to comply with 117 pages of regulation. It is expected that all but five clinics would not be able to afford to stay open because they simply cannot afford to comply with these regulations.

Wait, an ambulatory surgery center, that's just the religious right chipping away at abortion around the edges, right? No one could possibly stand to gain from this provision, could they? Follow me below the fold.
Thank you Houston Chronicle for following the money:

If the bill passes, only five Texas abortion clinics would remain openthose that are already equipped as ambulatory surgical centers, advocates say. But a question remains: would the 420 other ambulatory surgical centers that exist in Texas begin performing the operation? Abortion rights advocates predict that the demand for the procedure won't disappear with passage of the law.One company that will be faced with that decision is United Surgical Partners International, based in Addison, TX. Their vice-president of government affairs is Milla Perry Jones, Gov. Rick Perry's sister. She is also on the board of the Texas Ambulatory Surgical Center Society.

So if this bill passes, it provides Rick Perry's sister's company an opportunity to move into a new field, one where poor women can be charged an exorbitant rate for a desperate procedure. Expect abortions in Texas to continue, just at 2-3 times the previous going rates.5:23 PM PT: Rec List? Thank you.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/06...n-Edition#