Will house hearing be too late?
June 14, 2010
Jason Embry
Conference moves expected soon, Perry is in China and you need to watch these Herman videos.
The Statesman’s Ralph Haurwitz has a pretty thorough look this morning at where things stand on conference realignment. House Higher Education Committee Chairman Dan Branch tells him he hopes schools wait to decide their fate until after his committee holds a Wednesday hearing on the issue. “I’m feeling confident that these institutions will not take any final action before the Wednesday hearing,” Branch told the American-Statesman. “They respect the Legislature and understand that we’re going to have a hearing.”
Haurwitz continues, “While Pac-10 Conference representatives flew from one Big 12 stop to the next issuing informal invitations, Texas A&M has not spurned that league’s offer but is still weighing its options and considering the Pac-10 and the Southeastern Conference, an A&M school spokesman told the Statesman Sunday. Pac-10 Commissioner Larry Scott and deputy commissioner Kevin Weiberg flew in a private plane and made stops at College Station, Lubbock and Austin to hand out invitations to join their conference. Others, however, are fighting hard to preserve what’s left of the Big 12 after announced exits by Colorado (which is leaving for the Pac-10) and Nebraska (Big Ten). ‘The Aggies are trying to slow this down,’ a top Big 12 school official said Sunday afternoon.”
• From the Houston Chronicle’s Brent Zwerneman: “Texas A&M has grown starry-eyed for the Southeastern Conference, an Aggies insider said Sunday, and A&M considers its overall athletic endeavors grander than the death of a conference rivalry game on Thanksgiving. A&M’s board of regents likely will meet late this week — perhaps as soon as Thursday — to decide the Aggies’ sporting future, a person with knowledge of the situation said. And that future appears to be the SEC, as the powerful league to the east is prepared to lure A&M away from the clinging-to-hope Big 12, a proposed Pacific-10 affiliation and its storied league rivalry with Texas.”
• Gov. Rick Perry is off to China this week. From the Statesman’s Laylan Copelin: “China has invited the world to the Shanghai Expo, hoping it will be the largest world fair ever. Texas is responding by paying $425,000 to sponsor ‘Texas Week’ at the USA Pavilion. As tourists are exposed to Texas-style entertainment, Perry and a delegation of business leaders want to expose Chinese companies and officials to the benefits of buying from or building in Texas. Two members of Austin-area chambers of commerce also will make the trip… Texas is trying to expand on its record as the nation’s leading exporting state. Mexico dwarfs Texas’ other trading partners, but China is second in exports to and third in imports from the Lone Star State.”
• My lasting impression from the Texas Republican Party state convention, and it’s not a surprise: Immigration is the issue that matters most to the GOP base. It’s not even close.
From Gary Scharrer’s story in the San Antonio Express-News: “Texas Republicans on Saturday adopted another get-tough policy on immigration and bilingual education that some say will make it hard for the party to attract votes from the state’s ever-growing Hispanic population. The platform encourages state lawmakers to create a Class A misdemeanor criminal offense ‘for an illegal alien to intentionally or knowingly be within the State of Texas.’ It opposes amnesty ‘in any form leading to citizenship for illegal immigrants.’”
• In case you didn’t see it in yesterday’s Statesman, here is my story about former party vice chairman David Barton’s four-page letter arguing that Joe Straus should not be House speaker.
• And I found in conversations with delegates and alternates that they weren’t exactly buzzing with anticipation about a Perry presidential run (which is good, since Perry says he’s not running).
• Wayne Slater had a good take on the convention’s siege mentality. “For all the Republicans’ success in Texas, the barbarians are apparently at the gate: liberals, atheists, socialists, Hollywood, the media, a White House at work on wrecking the country and ruining their lives.Everywhere you looked at the Dallas Convention Center, people were wearing their victimhood.”
• And while I suggest you read Ken Herman’s column about the convention, I highly, highly recommend you watch the three videos he made while there in Dallas. You can read the column and watch the videos here.