Chad’s Morning Brief: Abbott Slams Texas Cities Attempting to California-ize Texas, Britain Warns of Terror Attacks, and Other Top Stories
Here is your Morning Brief for January 9th, 2015.
Abbott Slams Cities That Infringe on Private Property Rights
During his speech Thursday at the Texas Public Policy Foundation Greg Abbott discussed what he saw as Texas being California-zed by cities. According to the Houston Chronicle, it's an issue that Abbott plans to watch and do something about.
Gov.-elect Greg Abbott on Thursday took aim at local regulations affecting tree cutting, plastic bags and fracking, saying that they are contrary to his vision for the state.
“Texas is being California-ized and you may not even be noticing it,” Abbott told the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an organization in favor of limited government. “This is being done at the city level with bag bans, fracking bans, tree-cutting bans. We’re forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules nd regulations that is eroding the Texas model.”
Abbott took particular aim at tree-cutting measures, saying they amount to "collectivism." Numerous Texas cities, including Houston and San Antonio, have tree ordinances.
"Now think about it — few things are more important in Texas than private property rights. Yet some cities are telling citizens that you don’t own some of the things on your own property that you have bought and purchased and owned for a long time. Things like trees. This is a form of collectivism," Abbott said.
"Some cities claim that the trees on private property belong to the community, not to the private property owner. Large cities that represent about 75 percent of the population in this state are doing this to us," Abbott said, and referring to the organizations’ name, added, "Unchecked overregulation by cities will turn the Texas miracle into the California nightmare faster than you can spell TPPF."
Besides tree-cutting regulations in various cities, Denton voters approved a fracking ban that is being challenged by the oil and gas industry and the state.
Austin, Laredo and South Padre Island have plastic-bag bans, and Dallas has imposed a 5-cent environmental fee on paper and plastic sacks to be collected by retailers.
Legislative efforts in the past to infringe on cities’ rule-making authority have met with pushback from those citing the need for local control.
"My vision is one where individual liberties are not bound by city limit signs," Abbott said. "I will insist on protecing unlimited liberty to ensure that Texas will continue to grow and prosper.”
The question for some may be this, if a local law isn't in direct conflict with a state law, should the state come in stop the local entity? I'm all for private property rights and I'm all for local control. The problem for some of these cities is that they are violating people's rights and in many cases doing it without people noticing.
Britain Warns of Mass Attack
The head of Britain's MI5 has warned that Al Qaeda... the group President Obama said was defeated... is plotting to attack targets in the West according to Reuters.
Al Qaeda militants in Syria are plotting attacks to inflict mass casualties in the West, possibly against transport systems or "iconic targets", the head of Britain's MI5 Security Service said on Thursday.
Speaking after gunmen killed 12 people in an assault on a French satirical newspaper, MI5 boss Andrew Parker warned a strike on the United Kingdom was highly likely.
"A group of core al Qaeda terrorists in Syria is planning mass casualty attacks against the West," Director General Parker said in a rare public speech at MI5 headquarters in London. His last public speech was in October 2013.
In the speech, planned before the killings in Paris, Parker said seasoned al Qaeda militants in Syria aimed to "cause large-scale loss of life, often by attacking transport systems or iconic targets" in the West.
Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people by attacking the United States with hijacked passenger planes on September 11, 2001. Militants inspired by the group killed 52 commuters in London on July 7, 2005 with suicide bombs.
Al Qaeda's leader Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces in 2011, and the threat posed by the network to the West seemed to recede in recent years.
But spies in Europe and the United States have been troubled that al Qaeda militants from Pakistan have appeared in wartorn Syria, in what some intelligence analysts say could be part of a plot to mount a major attack against the West.
Thursday's stark warning from one of the West's most influential spymasters mirrors a growing concern among Western political leaders and their Arab allies about the threat from the cauldron of militant groups in Syria and Iraq.
"DARK PLACES"
Parker said around 600 British extremists had traveled to Syria, many joining the militant group which calls itself "Islamic State" and has taken control of swathes of Iraq and Syria.
The group, an offshoot of al Qaeda, has beheaded two U.S. journalists and an American and two British aid workers in an effort to put pressure on a U.S.-led international coalition bombing its fighters in Syria.
Islamic State militants in Syria were plotting attacks on Britain and making sophisticated use of social media to incite British nationals to carry out violence, Parker said.
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