{"id":6868,"date":"2014-10-24T03:42:03","date_gmt":"2014-10-24T03:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=6868"},"modified":"2014-10-24T03:42:03","modified_gmt":"2014-10-24T03:42:03","slug":"sen-patrick-getting-scarier-all-the-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=6868","title":{"rendered":"Sen. Patrick getting scarier all the time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n<p>The more I read about Texas&#8217;s next probable lieutenant governor, the more concerned I become over our state&#8217;s future.<\/p>\n<p>Dan Patrick is likely to be elected to the No. 2 position among all Texas politicians on Nov. 4. He&#8217;s the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor. He&#8217;s a state senator from Houston who&#8217;s running against his colleague, Democratic state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio.<\/p>\n<p>Mother Jones has\u00a0assembled a glossary of some of the more outrageous things Patrick has said and done during his time in the Senate.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"QdBj37YSZk\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2014\/10\/dan-patrick-texas-lieutenant-governor\/\">Man Who Believes God Speaks to Us Through &#8220;Duck Dynasty&#8221; Is About to Be Texas&#8217; Second-in-Command<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);\" title=\"&#8220;Man Who Believes God Speaks to Us Through &#8220;Duck Dynasty&#8221; Is About to Be Texas&#8217; Second-in-Command&#8221; &#8212; Mother Jones\" src=\"https:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2014\/10\/dan-patrick-texas-lieutenant-governor\/embed\/#?secret=IAzgu59RFJ#?secret=QdBj37YSZk\" data-secret=\"QdBj37YSZk\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>OK, before we go any further, I&#8217;ll concede that Mother Jones is not friendly toward Patrick or those who agree with his world view.<\/p>\n<p>But some of this stuff is utterly mind-blowing.<\/p>\n<p>He talks about immigrants bringing &#8220;Third World diseases&#8221; into the United States; he walked out of a Senate invocation that was being delivered by a Muslim cleric; he once joked, in 1992, that Asian-American broadcast journalist Connie Chung&#8217;s show &#8220;Eye to Eye&#8221; should be called &#8220;Slanted Eye to Eye&#8221;; he once declared &#8220;there is no such thing as separation of church and state.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Mother Jones lists other bizarre statements that have flown out of Patrick&#8217;s mouth\u00a0over the years.<\/p>\n<p>He comes from a radio background, which I suppose\u00a0says plenty\u00a0about how a guy with a machine-gun mouth\u00a0occasionally lets the rhetorical bullets fly with abandon.<\/p>\n<p>Some folks find him\u00a0entertaining, I suppose.\u00a0I prefer someone who is more thoughtful.<\/p>\n<p>If he wins &#8212; and it&#8217;s looking as though he will &#8212; he&#8217;s going to turn the Texas Senate, over which the lieutenant governor presides, into a much-less collegial body. Patrick has all but guaranteed that by vowing to do away with the two-thirds rule &#8212; which requires at least 21 senators to support a bill before it goes to a vote; the idea is to promote bipartisan support for legislation. He&#8217;s also suggested he&#8217;ll appoint only Republicans to committee chairmanships, doing away with the custom that lieutenant governors of both parties have followed of appointing members of the minority party to lead Senate committees.<\/p>\n<p>Texas&#8217;s legislative branch of government &#8212; at least one half-half of it &#8212; is likely to become a hostile work environment for those who don&#8217;t like the way it&#8217;s going to be run.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=jkanelis\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The more I read about Texas&#8217;s next probable lieutenant governor, the more concerned I become over our state&#8217;s future. Dan Patrick is likely to be elected to the No. 2 position among all Texas politicians on Nov. 4. He&#8217;s the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor. He&#8217;s a state senator from Houston who&#8217;s running against his &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=6868\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Sen. Patrick getting scarier all the time<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,18],"tags":[1255,2770,4701],"class_list":["post-6868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-news","category-state-news","tag-dan-patrick","tag-leticia-van-de-putte","tag-texas-senate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}