Texas House in chaos; skirmish as Speaker refuses votes

Stumbled upon this story; and to my surprise, nothing on A2K about it yet. What on earth is going on in Texas?

Chaos In Texas House Over Speaker Fight

That story is long and messy, but from what I understand, the basic situation is as follows:

• Republican Speaker of the Texas House Tom Craddick has made himself so unpopular that a significant number of his own party's representatives are ready to vote with the Democrats to oust him from his position.
  
  
• Thing is, someone needs to propose the vote, a so-called "motion to vacate". Such a motion is called a "privileged motion", and in order to speak to the House to make it, a lawmaker must first be "recognized" by .. the Speaker.
  
  
• So what Craddick did was just refuse to "recognize" any lawmaker to propose such a vote. As long as he can prevent the House from voting on his position, he cant be ousted.
  
  
• Confronted with Craddick's refusal to allow a vote on his own position, Republican Rep. Fred Hill then asked for a House vote to appeal that decision.
  
  
• Such a vote would have required a two-thirds majority, but again Craddick simply refused to let it take place: "The speaker's discretion to recognize a member on a motion on any matter is unappealable."
  
  
• Craddick's move to simply not allow a vote is legally highly dubious, and House parliamentarian Denise Davis counselled him against it. In fact, when he ignored her advice, she resigned in protest - along with the assistant parliamentarian. She ended up fleeing the chamber near tears and locking herself in an office.
  
  
• Craddick solved that by having two of his allies step in as replacement-parliamentarian and assistant parliamentarian, and ignoring the objections over the legality of that.
  
  
• When questions became too pointed, Craddick at one point suspended the whole session for hours, with news coming in that Craddick supporters were being flown back to Austin.
  
  
• At that decision, the chamber broke out in fury, with lawmakers sweeping to the front as Craddick hustled back to his office suite. Representatives trying to overtake the speaker's podium were physically restrained by House sergeants-at-arms as they tried to grab the microphone.

Is that more or less it? Did I get that right?

WTF? What is this, a banana republic?