And Governor Perry, immediately cut the funding!
(Reuters) – A federal appeals court declined on Thursday to reconsider a ruling that would allow Texas to withhold funding for women’s healthcare from Planned Parenthood’s clinics because the organization also performs abortions.
Texas Governor Rick Perry said after the order by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans that the state would immediately stop paying program participants that are affiliates of abortion providers.
“Today’s ruling affirms yet again that in Texas the Women’s Health Program has no obligation to fund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that perform or promote abortion,” the Republican governor said in a statement. “In Texas we choose life, and we will immediately begin defunding all abortion affiliates to honor and uphold that choice.”
Don’t Mess with Texas, and yes, that includes the Useless Nations and their “election monitors”
Via The Hill:
Texas authorities have threatened to arrest international election observers, prompting a furious response from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
“The threat of criminal sanctions against [international] observers is unacceptable,” Janez Lenarčič, the Director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), said in a statement. “The United States, like all countries in the OSCE, has an obligation to invite ODIHR observers to observe its elections.”
Lawmakers from the group of 56 European and Central Asian nations have been observing U.S. elections since 2002, without incident. Their presence has become a flashpoint this year, however, as Republicans accuse Democrats of voter fraud while Democrats counter that GOP-inspired voter ID laws aim to disenfranchise minority voters.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott further fueled the controversy on Tuesday when he sent a letter to the OSCE warning the organization that its representatives “are not authorized by Texas law to enter a polling place” and that it “may be a criminal offense for OSCE’s representatives to maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place’s entrance.”
The letter goes on to accuse the group of having met with liberal organizations that oppose Voter ID laws. The OSCE put out an interim report last week saying that “recent state-level legislative initiatives to limit early voting and introduce stricter voter identification have become highly polarized.”
Texas! Best damned governor AND the best damned Attorney General in the country!
What? States’ rights upheld? Who woulda thought it? Maybe there’s hope after all. (And I don’t mean that “hope and change” kind of hope, either.