Are You Muslim or 'Merican?

        I became quite incensed over a blog post by The TexasFred Blog. Essentially it is a tactless, and illogical attack on the Muslim community in Texas, and the United States. While it was evidently written to support both Irving, Texas Mayor Beth Van Duyne and the State bill "American Laws for American Courts", it only shows the sad ignorance and intolerance of it's author. The State bill forbids the use of foreign laws in the judgments of American judges, something which is already against the law. Though not stated explicitly, this bill is intended to target the Islamic Tribunals which have recently become popular among Muslims in areas including the DFW metro-plex. The tribunals are voluntary, non-binding mediators which use Shariah law to inform their decisions, and would be completely unaffected by the state bill, though they oppose it on the basis that it targets their religion and free expression of it.

         I could create a whole sepreate blog dedicated to explaining how ridiculous the bill is and makes its supporters look. "TexasFred"'s handling of  it is adolescently asinine. The vast majority amounts to yelling at people as he sits on his porch drinking Natural Light out of a 24 can pack. The only real argument he makes in his post is that Muslims are "liars to the core". As evidence he provides only a mishmash of decontextualized versus from the Quran, a whole host of grammatical exclaimatories, and American patriotism a facist would aspire too. It edifies absolutely no one in any possible way. It is an uninformative though passionate rant, on an issue that is extremely compelling when debated with logic and general good will towards people even if they are a little different. 

Texas spending on Pre-K

An editorial written in The Dallas Morning News caught my eye today, it discussed two proposals in the State Legislature in regards to funding Pre-Kindergarten. The author of the editorial very clearly favoured the more expensive bipartisan plan put forth by Eric Johnson (D, Dallas) and Marsha Farney (R, Georgetown), as oppose to the proposal made by Governor Abbott. Despite being clear about their position, the author does a very good job of explaining why theirs is the right position without slinging mud. In fact they even praise Governor Abbott for focusing on the issue at all. The use of diplomacy in this piece was surprisingly refreshing. Essentially, the only real issue with Abbott's proposal is that it doesn't go far enough. Though they didn't provide any hard data, nor do they cite any specific studies, they do provide very intuitive, logical evidence for spending more when it comes to Pre-K in Texas.
  Of course, one of the main stays of the majority Republican party is low taxes, and presumably, spending more money requires bringing in more money. Despite the bipartisan authorship of the more expensive but more assertive proposal, I'm not sure the Republican legislators will see a need to spend the extra money if they have the option of an only adequate, but more affordable system. Perhaps though, the data that does exist, showing that Texan students are falling behind, will incline law makers to rethink either the amount of money they tax the citizens, or as a compromise, re-purpose already existing funds to the increasingly important sector of Education. Texas has had a very business-friendly tax environment for many years, and it's served us well; it's very likely helped Texas stay on the top end of the economic metrics throughout the recent recession. However, perhaps it's time to refocus our State's investment from big business, and into the education of its citizens.        

Hay! I Found Some Water!

     In scanning the Texas Tribune, I came across this article written on February 11th, 2015. Summarily, it's about an unregulated patch of underground water that is essentially up for grabs in Hays County. A large Houston company, wants to pump the water from the ground, and sell it to the rapidly expanding City of Buda. But of course it's never as simple as that. Residents of Hays County, and particularly those who live near where the pumping would occur, are worried that by pumping excessive amounts of water from the aquifer, it will place too heavy a strain on an already burdened water supply.
      While it raises the obvious issue of natural resources, this article also touches on an equally important issue in politics, namely the public interest vs. business profits debate. But until the question of how exactly the pumping will effect the residents of Hays County, the larger, more ideological, debate will go around in conjecture driven circles.