Free Republic

Archeologist explains link between bones found in Ethiopia, Texas Lucy's bones on display at Houston museum By Pamela LeBlancAMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFFSaturday, December 22, 2007 One roamed the forests of East Africa 3.2 million years ago. The other lived in Central Texas more than 9,500 years ago. What's the connection between two skeletons found a world apart? That was the question on a recent visit to Houston, where the famous older skeleton is on display. Though not complete, Lucy does have enough pieces, especially skull bones, for scientists to predict her measurements. This model at the Houston Museum of Natural Science shows...

Original Texans? Austin-area find adds to debate over early man By ERIC BERGER Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle Science Writer The verdant Central Texas cove was Shangri-La for people living 13,000 years ago. Fed by permanent springs, the area between the Edwards Plateau and lower coastal plains offered ample game from both ecosystems, and its limestone held an abundant supply of flint-like rock, or chert, ideal for making Stone Age tools. "This is an absolutely special place," University of Texas archaeologist Michael Collins said as he recently surveyed the rolling ground occasionally pockmarked by meticulously terraced digs. It's special in bounty ...

Toast It’s no longer a question of whether Hillary! Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2016; it’s only a question of when she will drop out of the race rather than face humiliation a second time: Democrats are seeing warning signs after a new poll showed Hillary Clinton losing three swing states and deep in negative territory on questions of character. One Democratic strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity described the poll results as “the canary in the coal mine.”The poll, from Quinnipiac University, surveyed voters in Colorado, Iowa and Virginia. President Obama won all three...

TV bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman knows there are some fugitives even he can’t bring to justice. The star of CMT’s “Dog and Beth: On The Hunt” admits he probably would not be able to capture escaped Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — and doesn’t even plan to try.

ABC News(WASHINGTON) — One of the Republican party’s top supporters is showing his support for Ted Cruz.  The endorsement was announced Friday in a statement from the Cruz presidential campaign. "U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, today received the endorsement of Brent Bozell, conservative stalwart and president of the Conservative Victory Committee,” read the statement. Bozell released a video announcing his support of Cruz's candidacy for President.VIDEO"Make no mistake: If the Republican Party repeats what it has done the last two presidential elections, Republicans will lose. I guarantee it," Bozell said in the video. "On the other hand, if we nominate...

For conservatives, intellectualism can often be a stumbling block.A politician may be a gifted orator with a logical, detailed message, but reason cannot be forced on those with an agenda, especially when that agenda is wrapped up in bromidic insults instead of facts.Once distracted from the flow of their thought processes, and unwilling to engage in emotional demagoguery, conservative often stumble when accosted or caught off guard.Which is why it is gratifying to see presidential candidate Ted Cruz perform so well in a recent standoff with leftist activist group Code Pink.Protestors stormed a campaign event where Cruz was speaking against...

Two low-profile Texas brothers have donated $15 million to support Sen. Ted Cruz, a record-setting contribution that amounts to the largest known donation so far in the 2016 presidential campaign. Farris and Dan Wilks, billionaires who made their fortunes in the West Texas fracking boom, have given $15 million of the $38 million that the pro-Cruz super PAC, Keep the Promise, will disclose in election filings next week, according to sources outside the super PAC with knowledge of the giving. The siblings earned their riches with the sale of their company Frac Tech for $3.5 billion in 2011, and since...

A local justice of the peace was removed Thursday from an examining trial in the case of a Hewitt biker accused of engaging in organized crime in relation to the shootout at Twin Peaks restaurant. Joe Carroll, senior judge of the 27th Judicial District Court, granted a motion to recuse Justice of the Peace W.H. “Pete” Peterson from the case involving Matthew Clendennen after Clendennen’s attorney, Clinton Broden, filed a complaint against Peterson. Peterson set the initial $1 million bonds for the 177 bikers arrested in the aftermath of the May 17 shootout, and he was on the scene that...

A Texas appeals court has dismissed one count of the two count indictment of Governor Rick Perry, leaving open the question of whether the presidential candidate will ever go to trial. The court dismissed the coercion charge, which was based on the dubious notion that Perry acted criminally when he vetoed funding for the Democratic party's arm in Travis County - the Public Integrity Unit. Perry wanted the head of the unit, Rosemary Lehmberg, to resign following her arrest for DUI and subsequent drunken rants against officers that were caught on tape. The prosecutor in Travis country ruled that Perry's veto was...

Perry still faces trial on second charge, abuse of powerA Texas appeals court Friday dismissed out one of the two counts against former Gov. Rick Perry in the abuse-of-power case against him. Austin's 3rd Court of Appeals said in a ruling Friday that Texas' law regarding the "coercion of a public servant" violated Perry's First Amendment right to freedom of speech and dismissed the charge. "As to this ruling we respectfully disagree with the district court -- the statute on which the "coercion of a public servant" is based, as written, and as we are bound to construe it, violates...

The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that Houston City Council must repeal the city's equal rights ordinance or place it on the November ballot. The ruling comes three months after a state district judge ruled that opponents of Houston's contentious non-discrimination ordinance passed last year failed to gather enough valid signatures to force a repeal referendum. "We agree with the Relators that the City Secretary certified their petition and thereby invoked the City Council's ministerial duty to reconsider and repeal the ordinance or submit it to popular vote," the Texas Supreme Court wrote in a per curiam opinion. "The legislative...

A gag order in a criminal case arising from a shootout at a biker gathering in Waco is unconstitutional, overly broad and should be lifted, attorneys for 16 media organizations argued in a brief filed Friday with a Texas appeals court. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 15 other organizations, including The Associated Press, filed the "friend of the court" brief in support of a motion by an attorney for one of 177 people arrested after the shooting.

Oil and gas producers in one of the most active drilling areas in the country have had to make concessions to not disturb species such as the lesser prairie chicken and the dunes sagebrush lizard. Now industry officials in parts of Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico may have four other species to contend with: make way for the Cascade Caverns salamander, the Arizona toad, the alligator snapping turtle and the Rio Grande cooter. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday it is giving what it calls “status reviews” to the four amphibians and reptiles found in the Southwest as...

Presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) sure does want to shut down a lot of the federal agencies he hopes to one day run.The firebrand conservative and GOP presidential candidate has defined his young Senate career by almost reflexively opposing increased government spending and programs . . ."I think we should shrink the size and power of the federal government by every and any means possible," he told the Daily Caller in 2012. -- snip -- The State DepartmentMost recently, Cruz threatened in a letter to President Obama to hold up State Department nominees and hold all bills that fund...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPTRUSH: I want to welcome back to the program, Senator Ted Cruz from Texas, and Republican presidential candidate. You did something today I don't think I've seen before. This was a direct hit on your Senate leadership over a number of things, Senator. What spawned this today, and look, rather than me describe it for people, just tell everybody what you did and why you did it. CRUZ: Well, Rush, it's great to be back with you. Today the Senate took up the Export-Import Bank, a classic example of cronyism and corporate welfare. The leader of Senate Republicans, Mitch...

I’m not going to excerpt it for you, despite the length. You need to watch it all; if you can’t spare 20 minutes, at least watch the middle third where he gets into corporate cooptation of the one-party state. This is one of the most brutal attacks — not incorrect, mind you, just brutal — you’ll ever see by a senator on his colleagues, starting with his own majority leader. Sample quote: “[This majority] does get things done, but it listens to one and only one voice: That is, the voice of the Washington cartel, of the lobbyists on K...

This strategy isn’t entirely new. They started talking about targeting tea partiers in primaries in late 2013 and followed through in last year’s midterms... The difference last year was that they stuck to open seats rather than going after incumbents. Evidently they’ve decided now that “progress” towards the dream of renewing the Ex-Im bank and passing a gigantic amnesty ensuring all the cheap legal labor they could possibly want isn’t happening fast enough. It’s simply not sufficient to fill vacancies in the House with corporatist business-class Republicans. To move their agenda, they need to start replacing some of the people...

The Texas Supreme Court gave Friday the Houston city council 30 days either to repeal a civil-rights ordinance allowing opposite-sex bathroom use or place it before the voters on the November ballot. The 12-page decision says that the council ran afoul of the city charter when it refused to act after the city secretary certified a year ago the signatures submitted by a pastor-led coalition, which had moved to force a vote on the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO). Houston Mayor Annise Parker came under fire last year after the city moved to subpoena sermons and other documents from five...

A Hispanic Texan who is a life-long Democrat and lives in the border town of Laredo came out to the airport to give Donald Trump a message. Draped in an American flag, he told Breitbart Texas he is ready for something different and would vote for Trump in the 2016 Texas Republican Primary. “I’m sick of this administration, I’m ready for something better, I was raised a Democrat but this administration makes me want to throw up,” said Joseph Diaz, a 50-year-old high school art teacher, just before he watched 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump take off from a Laredo,...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz offered some surprisingly strong opinions on the politics of “Star Trek” in an interview published Thursday in The New York Times Magazine, arguing “it is quite likely that Kirk is a Republican and Picard is a Democrat.” “Let me do a little psychoanalysis,” Cruz says when asked about the fictional space captains from the landmark 1960s television series and its ”Next Generation” follow-up, which aired some 30 years later. “If you look at ‘’Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ it basically split James T. Kirk into two people. Picard was Kirk’s rational side, and William Riker was...