08.13.14
What’s Happening
Must see TV as John Oliver destroys the payday loan sharks and the Texas politicians that profit from them (tip to Perry, Payday loansharks again).
The Texas GOP is now worried about how to pay for Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s political stunt, Senators Discuss Funding of National Guard Deployment.
A panel of state senators on Tuesday debated the merits and tactical strategies of Gov. Rick Perry’s decision to send Texas National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, and the senators also discussed how the deployment would be funded in future months.
Republicans at the Senate Finance Committee hearing decried the federal government for abandoning its responsibility to secure the border, saying the Texas government should petition Washington for reimbursement over the next few months. But several Democrats pointed the finger at Perry, criticizing him for what they called an unnecessary deployment, undertaken for political reasons, that they said would be difficult to fund.
“The border has got to be secured. We’ve got to stop this,” said Committee Chairwoman Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound. But the federal government would have to step in to make the effort sustainable, she added. “Month by month, we’re draining state resources that should go to education, should go to highways, should go to water, and we can’t do it forever.”
Democratic Sens. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa of McAllen and Judith Zaffirini of Laredo emerged as the strongest critics of the deployment. Hinojosa said giving more funding to the Texas Department of Public Safety, which ramped up its border presence in June, would have been more effective than sending in the National Guard. Hinojosa voiced concerns that the National Guard’s concentration in the Rio Grande Valley would simply encourage smugglers and traffickers to move to Laredo and other points north.
“Those are issues that I think were not really thought out and planned out,” he said.
Obviously nothing about this was planned out. And Nelson’s crocodile tears about education, highways, and water are laughable. She certainly hasn’t cared about those for several budget cycles now.
Once again I’m reminded of how bad our media has become, even the SCLM, NPR Is Laundering CIA Talking Points to Make You Scared of NSA Reporting.
Worse, Temple-Raston knows all of this. Back in 2012, NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast her profile of Recorded Future and its claimed ability to predict the future by gathering internet data. At the end of her report, she noted that the firm has “at least two very important financial backers: the CIA’s investment arm, called In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures. They have reportedly poured millions into the company.”
That is the company she’s now featuring as some sort of independent source that can credibly vindicate the claims of U.S. officials about how Snowden reporting helps terrorists.