Tag Archives: Texas

News

Texas Governor shoots coyote with concealed handgun to save dog

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He's got the slide locked back, explaining gun safety rules.

Story here from CBS News. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

Pistol-packing Texas Gov. Rick Perry has a message for wily coyotes out there: Don’t mess with my dog.

Perry told The Associated Press on Tuesday he needed just one shot from the laser-sighted pistol he sometimes carries while jogging to take down a coyote that menaced his puppy during a February run near Austin.

Perry said he will carry his .380 Ruger – loaded with hollow-point bullets – when jogging on trails because he is afraid of snakes. He’d also seen coyotes in the undeveloped area.

When one came out of the brush toward his daughter’s Labrador retriever, Perry charged.

“Don’t attack my dog or you might get shot … if you’re a coyote,” he said Tuesday.

Perry, a Republican running for a third full term against Democrat Bill White, is living in a private house in a hilly area southwest of downtown Austin while the Governor’s Mansion is being repaired after a 2008 fire. A concealed handgun permit holder, Perry carries the pistol in a belt.

“I knew there were a lot of predators out there. You’ll hear a pack of coyotes. People are losing small cats and dogs all the time out there in that community,” Perry said.

“They’re very wily creatures.”

He did what he had to do, so that his daughter wouldn’t be hurt by the loss of her pet. He’s a man – it’s his role to protect his family. If only every man took that responsibility to protect their family as seriously. It’s not the government’s job to ban guns and take over the responsibility of protecting a man’s family. It’s the man’s responsibility to protect his family.

I’ve never fired a Ruger before. Are they any good?

News

How Texas cut costs by reforming medical malpractice suits

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Here’s some great news from the conservative state of Texas. (H/T Caffeinated Thoughts)

Excerpt:

The Texas Legislature in 2003 adopted sweeping changes to its civil justice system that significantly altered when, where and how many lawsuits could be filed. In the medical malpractice area, those reforms were basically threefold.

[…]First, to sustain a lawsuit against the medical care provider, an expert report was required within 120 days of filing the suit stating that the doctor being sued committed a medical error that caused injuries.

[…]Second, noneconomic damages were capped to control arbitrary awards on pain and suffering or loss of consortium.

[…]The third significant tort reform was to prohibit the introduction into evidence of phantom damages.

[…]These common-sense reforms have led to a massive increase in the accessibility of health care in Texas, huge growth in the capital infrastructure of hospitals and clinics, hundreds of millions of dollars more each year in charity care and Texas’ adding more than 16,000 new doctors in just six years.

And in reducing the actual number of suits to those in which claims are meritorious — a recent Harvard study concluded that up to 85% of all lawsuits brought against medical providers were frivolous — we have created a more equitable system of justice.

I wish I lived in Texas – that’s a real red state, except for stupid Austin. By the way, I got this story out of the round-up at Caffeinated Thoughts. There are couple of great articles in there, like one on the North Korean gulags. It’s worth a look. Shane always links to very interesting articles.

Commentary

Flush with victory on death panels, Sarah Palin moves on to tort reform

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She's writing things that make me very happy!
She's writing things that make me very happy!

From her Facebook page. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

So what can we do? First, we cannot have health care reform without tort reform. The two are intertwined. For example, one supposed justification for socialized medicine is the high cost of health care. As Dr. Scott Gottlieb recently noted, “If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he’ll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.” [1] Two examples of these “economic structures” are high malpractice insurance premiums foisted on physicians (and ultimately passed on to consumers as “high health care costs”) and the billions wasted on defensive medicine.

And look – she has experiences to appeal to:

Many states, including my own state of Alaska, have enacted caps on lawsuit awards against health care providers. Texas enacted caps and found that one county’s medical malpractice claims dropped 41 percent, and another study found a “55 percent decline” after reform measures were passed. [4] That’s one step in health care reform. Limiting lawyer contingency fees, as is done under the Federal Tort Claims Act, is another step. The State of Alaska pioneered the “loser pays” rule in the United States, which deters frivolous civil law suits by making the loser partially pay the winner’s legal bills. Preventing quack doctors from giving “expert” testimony in court against real doctors is another reform.

SHE WANTS TO REGULATE TRIAL LAWYERS. YAHOO!

This is the third editorial she has written that has gotten me excited. She is citing scholars! She has footnotes! What more could a conservative man want? And I like her tone a lot more than Ann Coulter. She is trying to persuade her opponents, not to back them into stubborn opposition regardless of the facts.

Previous posts:

You know what? I think she is going in the right direction. Like a female Fred Thompson, she is getting used to vocalizing conservative policies and principles – which is exactly what we need to do to capitalize on Obama’s failures. I love it when women write passionately about what they think, especially when women take positions that support men, marriage and family by arguing for limited government and free market capitalism.