Texas Voter Photo ID Law Doesn't Include Veterans' Photo ID

Texas Republicans have made it harder for young, homeless and traumatized veterans to vote.

MySanAntonio: The new Texas voter photo ID law does not list veterans' identification cards as one of the government issued photo IDs allowed to cast a vote in Texas.

Ann McGeehan, director of the Secretary of State's elections division, said last week at a seminar in Austin that photo ID cards issued by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs are not acceptable forms of military ID to vote, according to a recording provided by the Texas Democratic Party.

Jordy Keith, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state, backpedaled Friday on that determination.

Veteran Suicide Rate Hits New High

After eight deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and a facing a ninth deployment back to Afghanistan, army ranger Staff Sgt. Jared Hagemann kills himself. 'No way' that God would forgive him for what he'd seen, done, he told wife.

KOMO News Seattle, WA

KOMO News:A soldier's widow says a fellow Army Rangers wouldn't do anything to help him before he took his own life - after eight deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army found Staff Sgt. Jared Hagemann's body at a training area of Joint Base Lewis McChord a few weeks ago.

A spokesman for the base tells KOMO News that the nature of the death is still undetermined. But Staff Sgt. Hagemann's widow says her husband took his own life - and it didn't need to happen. "It was just horrible. And he would just cry," says Ashley Hagemann.

More U.S. soldiers and veterans have died from suicide than from combat wounds over the past two years. The U.S. Army suffered a record 32 suicides in July, the most since it began releasing monthly figures in 2009. That number includes 22 active duty soldiers and 10 reservists. Over the first seven months of 2011, about 160 active-duty and reserve soldiers have committed suicide, which is about on par with the number of troops taking their own lives during the same months in 2009 and 2010.

Since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 1,100 soldiers have taken their own lives, with the numbers escalating each year for the last six years. Last year alone, 301 soldiers committed suicide -- a new record.

An average of 18 veterans commits suicide every day and five of those are already getting treatment at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). 300,000 of the U.S. military veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, according to a recent study.

New statistics from the VA show that veterans make up 20 percent of the 30,000 suicides in the United States each year. In 2010, more than 134,000 people made calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Of those callers, 61 percent identified themselves as veterans.

Current TV To Become A 24-Hour Liberal News Network

Current TV president David Bohrman says Current TV owners Al Gore and Joel Hyatt wants to transform his channel into a 24-hour liberal news network.

“Al Gore and Joel Hyatt got the brilliant idea to go and try to hire Keith [Olbermann],” Bohrman told CNN’s Howard Kurtz Sunday. “They did, and discovered lightning.”

“And all of a sudden, they realized that that was going to be the destiny of what the network is,” he added. “And so they hired me to completely transform the network from a bunch of taped documentaries that have been cycling through the day, to a live news analysis, discussion television network that’s going hopefully 24 hours a day, talking about the events of the day and finding other people with something to say like Keith.”

“But with Olbermann not only as the host of Countdown, but the chief news officer of Current, is this going to be an all-liberal network?” Kurtz asked.

“I think it will provide a fair amount of time for liberal viewpoints to be made. It’s not going to be exclusively liberal viewpoints, and we’re going to try not to hide behind the word ‘progressive,’ that I think so many liberals do, and then the people on the right, the conservative world, scoff at,” Bohrman explained.

Gov. Perry's Miracle - All Hat, No Cattle?

Texas Governor Rick Perry is some sort of economic genius, according to Rick Perry, but it’s worth taking a closer examination at his record as governor.

On issues across the board, from Perry’s support for ending Social Security and Medicaid to Texas' pollution record to low tax job creation and his proposal that Texas secede from the United States, the Republican governor has amassed a record of far-right political positions.

Texas, economists note, has long been a low-tax, loose-regulation state, but it hasn’t always thrived—between 2008 and 2010, after the U.S. economy collapsed, the state’s unemployment rose faster than in high-tax Massachusetts.

The New Republic:

The Texas’s unemployment rate, remains over 8 percent, ranked twenty-fourth in the country for unemployment, slightly worse than liberal New York’s. What’s more, not all of those vaunted jobs are great jobs: Texas has the highest percentage of minimum-wage workers in the country, and its per-capita income still sits below California’s.

What is clear is that Texas’s population has been exploding, leading to disproportionate job growth. In the past decade, the state added more people than anywhere else, partly due to fast-growing Hispanic families, but due also to migration from other states. So why are people flocking to Texas?

It could be the state’s lower taxes, though that probably isn’t a big driver: As Brad DeLong of University of California, Berkeley, has noted, Texans pay, on average, 26 percent of their income in taxes, not much lower than the 28.5 percent average in California.