Office of the Governor

It's thirsty work being Rick Perry. You have to stand in the warm May sun outside a gun shop and wax poetic about the virtues of firearms, laissez-faire capitalism and how much California blows. It's no wonder then that you would promptly hightail it across town to the local brewery. After all, what could go better with guns than beer?

The correct answer is whiskey of course, but there's no commercial distillery in Shiner, where Governor Perry gave a warm Texas welcome to Shield Tactical, which is both the state's newest firearms retailer and a refugee from California's gun regulations.

In the Golden State, "it's like before you put up your range you have to be worried about whether the noise level is going to bother the 10-headed duckmouse," Shield Tactical's John Harrington explained to The New York Times. In Texas, "it's an iota of bureaucracy."

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Nope.

Its been almost four years since the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles, in hopes of making a bit more scratch, rolled out a line of customizable license plates. Drivers can now select from a large buffet of completely legal plate designs celebrating Dr Pepper, Jesus, the late Dale Earnhardt and restrictions on abortion rights. You can even adorn your bumper with a University of Oklahoma license plate, which is downright unnatural.

Conspicuously absent from the menu of offerings is the Confederate flag, which is by design. The DMV rebuffed an effort by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson to introduce such a plate back in 2011 on the grounds that it might offend some members of the public.

The Confederates could not sit idly by while their honor was once again besmirched and so, true to form, they rebelled. They stayed in the union this time but filed a strongly worded federal lawsuit.

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Have you ever been drunk? Have you ever wondered about how drunkenness affects your maze-completing ability? Have you ever wanted to test your drunken maze-completing ability using a taxpayer-funded smartphone app that constantly shames you about your drunkenness?

If you answered yes to all those questions then you're in luck. Yesterday, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission unveiled its Intoximaze app, which was developed "to support the TABC's public safety efforts during Spring Break and throughout the year."

Here's how the TABC describes it in yesterday's press release:

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Greg Abbott's acting strangely. It wasn't even two weeks ago that the Attorney General seemed to have given up his day job suing the Obama administration and just started trolling liberals full-time. But then, in a turn that was completely unexpected, Abbott was seized by an bout of reasonableness

The day after his liberal-trolling Facebook post implying that public school students should receive instruction in firearms and the Bible, he announced his support for a smart, we daresay progressive, update of the Open Meetings Act. Today, he threw his support behind SB 1292, an uncharacteristically reasonable proposal that would require pretrial DNA testing of all biological evidence in death-penalty cases.

"There's no reason to test these items more than a decade after the crime was committed," Abbott said Tuesday at a news conference alongside the bill's author, Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat. "We shouldn't live with suspense. The family of the victim shouldn't have to through this time after time after time in order to get certainty."

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Environment Texas organizer Jennifer Rubiello makes the case for conservation at a press conference this morning at Winfrey Point.

Policymakers in Austin, having finally come to terms immensity of the state's water challenges, are about to throw some serious cash at the issue. But the vast majority of this, more than 96 percent, is going toward building new reservoirs and pipelines.

Trammell S. Crow, among others, has a problem with that. He stood on a wind-blown Winfrey Point this morning, wearing a yellow checked shirt and loud, particolored tie that only a real estate scion could pull off, in support of a new report by Environment Texas calling for fully half of any state water funding to go toward conservation.

Crow -- who lately has split his philanthropic efforts between turning the local Earth Day celebration into one of the nation's largest and trying to boot illegal immigrants out of Farmers Branch -- was joined at White Rock Lake by SMU engineering professor Andrew Quicksall; Richard Grayson, a local fly fishing guide and Texas Rivers Protection Association board member; Jennifer Rubiello, a local organizer for Environment Texas; and Ordinary Citizen/Concerned Mother Tracy Wallace.

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In his column Sunday, the Morning News' Steve Blow wrestled with the the problem of hell, or at least the conservative Protestant vision of it. How, the question goes, can a supposedly loving, forgiving God condemn souls to an eternity of unbearable torment?

Blow's answer is that God doesn't. Without delving too deeply into theology, he concludes it's simply not plausible and not in line with what most Christians believe.

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The United States Bullion Depository was, according to Wikipedia, an unintended byproduct of a 1933 executive order banning the private ownership of large quantities of gold. Those who didn't move their gold to Switzerland sold it to the Federal Reserve, which found that it didn't really have any place to store it. Hence, Fort Knox.

State Representative Giovanni Capriglione, a Southlake Republican, wants Texas to take a more deliberate approach to its collection of precious metals. He filed a bill on Friday to create the Texas Bullion Depository, which, as the name implies, is where the state will store its vast gold reserves. You know, just so the Texas economy can continue to thrive in case of a "a systemic dislocation in a national and international financial system, including systemic problems in liquidity, credit markets, or currency markets," to quote from the bill.

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One of the few areas of bipartisan agreement in Austin this legislative season is that the state needs to take major steps to meet the state's long-term water needs. The arithmetic -- exploding population + historic drought + increasingly stressed water supply -- is simply too stark to ignore. The momentum right now is behind proposals to set aside $2 billion from the state's Rainy Day Fund to pay for future water projects.

The consensus starts to break down when it comes to how much of Texas' water needs will be met through conservation. The state's recently updated water plan, which forecasts usage and supply over the next half century, is actually mildly ambitious on that front, calling for reductions in water usage to account for 24 percent of needed water supplies. Another 10 percent would come from recycled water.

That's the plan, anyway, but when it comes to what state water planners actually plan on funding, conservation barely registers.

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Via.

Last week's City Council meeting, at which City Manager Mary Suhm was alternately grilled and applauded over her side deal to allow natural gas drilling on city parkland, was an amazing piece of political theater. How could it not be, what with Vonciel Jones Hill donning her preacher voice and comparing Suhm to Jesus on the cross?

But why does the spectacle have to stop in the council chambers? Why can't Hill and Angela Hunt trade barbs after-hours, in a public online forum updated in real time?

Soon, they may be able to. Attorney General Greg Abbott today threw his support behind a bill filed today that will, as he phrased it in a press release, "bring the Open Meetings Act into the 21st century." That sounds boring but the legislation, filed by Senator Kirk Watson, an Austin Democrat, would require that any written communication between members of a city council or other state or local governing body happening in an online forum be easily accessible by the public.

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Yesterday, Collin County state Representative Jodie Laubenberg filed a bill that would ban all abortions after 20 weeks, calling it the "Preborn Pain Act." The bill is premised on deeply questionable science which claims that fetuses can feel pain at that point in a pregnancy, and ignores a heap of other science that strongly indicates otherwise.

Governor Rick Perry, who's a big fan, released a statement reiterating his support for the bill, writing that Texas "has a responsibility to prevent the needless suffering of our most vulnerable citizens." In case you didn't understand who he was talking about in the previous sentence, he adds, "[W]e will continue to do everything we can to protect the lives of the unborn, until abortion is finally a thing of the past."

Today, the Texas Tribune ran the results of a survey they conducted back in February with UT Austin. It found that a majority of Texans support the "fetal pain" proposal. But they also support access to abortion, and 39 percent of those surveyed think abortion should be available "always as a matter of choice." How can both those things be true?

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