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September 11th, 2021:

Paxton sues several school districts over mask mandates

Sep 11th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
15 comments

Whatever, dude.

Best mugshot ever

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Friday that he filed a lawsuit against Richardson ISD, following through on his pledge to sue school districts who mandate masks.

The district defied Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order prohibiting local entities from requiring masks. The RISD trustees voted last week to affirm Superintendent Jeannie Stone’s decision to require face coverings, after they were forced to close an elementary school because of a spike in COVID-19 cases and a sixth grader was admitted into the intensive care unit.

Paxton noted in a release that the office anticipates filing additional lawsuits against the districts flouting the governor’s order. This could include Dallas ISD — the first to openly defy Abbott.

“Not only are superintendents across Texas openly violating state law, but they are using district resources—that ought to be used for teacher merit raises or other educational benefits—to defend their unlawful political maneuvering,” Paxton said in a statement.

[…]

Richardson is among the first Texas districts to be sued by Paxton. Friday he also filed suit against the Galveston, Elgin, Spring and Sherman school districts, according to his office.

He has railed against the dozens of school districts and counties who stood firm on mask mandates, repeatedly posting on social media that he would sue them all. Paxton’s office maintains an ever-evolving list of local entities that are mandating masks.

Meanwhile, Abbott’s order is tied up in both state and federal courts as districts and advocates push for mask mandates to be local decisions.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins is locked in a legal fight with the state over his decision to impose a local mask mandate for businesses and schools.

Disability Rights Texas recently escalated the legal battle, filing a federal lawsuit against Abbott, alleging his order unfairly harms children with disabilities.

Richardson trustees also recently voted to join an existing multi-district lawsuit challenging Abbott’s ban, which argues the governor’s executive order exceeds his authority and infringes on local control.

Paxton’s move could have federal implications, as well. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights recently opened investigations into five states that prohibit mask mandates, saying such bans may violate the federal law meant to protect students with disabilities.

Department officials indicated they had not opened an investigation into Texas because its ban isn’t currently being enforced because of court orders.

Again, neither Ken Paxton nor Greg Abbott has the power to enforce mask mandate bans. Even if Paxton gets a judge to rule in his favor – the score so far is tilted pretty heavily against him – local DAs can and should thumb their noses at him. It’s not clear to me where these lawsuits have been filed – in this press release he said there were three of them, but didn’t get more specific than that. There may be more coming, so eventually we’ll sort it all out. In the meantime, Paxton can go pound sand. The Chron, Reform Austin, and KXAN have more.

UPDATE: Here’s the Trib story, which notes that the lawsuit against Galveston ISD was brought in Galveston County, as one might expect. That’s probably true of the others, each filed in their home county, but it would still be nice to have that confirmed.

Going after the snitch sites

Sep 11th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

I approve of this.

When an anti-abortion group last week created a “pro-life whistleblower” website encouraging people to anonymously report violations of Texas’ new six-week abortion ban, a group of politically active Texans noticed one potentially fatal flaw.

“They’re trying to use the internet to retaliate against people who were raised on the internet,” said Olivia Julianna, an 18-year-old student and activist from Sugar Land who is among the leadership of a group called “Gen Z For Change.” The group was formerly known as “TikTok for Biden.”

Olivia, who goes by only her first and middle names on social media due to safety concerns, said the goal was clear: “This website, if we can mess with them in any way, if we can stop even one woman from having a lawsuit filed against her or waste even a second of their time, we need to do it.”

The tip site was meant to help enforce Senate Bill 8, the Texas law that went into effect at the start of this month that prohibits abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before most women know they’re pregnant.

The law has so far avoided being blocked by the courts because the government does not enforce it. Instead, it puts enforcement in the hands of any private citizen who wishes to sue an abortion provider or others who “aid or abet” someone getting an illegal abortion, with a possible reward of at least $10,000 per successful suit.

Olivia was one of several young left-leaning activists who immediately took to social media to sabotage the site by flooding it with false reports and other information — some suggested anti-Gov. Greg Abbott sayings. Others recommended off-the-wall responses or nonsense.

She and other members of Gen Z For Change — Generation Z is typically defined as those who are now 18 to 24 — quickly got to work.

“It would be really, really bad and morally wrong of all of you to go to ProLifeWhistleblower.com and send in an anonymous tip that is fake,” Olivia sarcastically told her more than 137,000 followers in an Aug. 23 video she posted on TikTok. “It would be even worse if your anonymous tip was about Greg Abbott.”

Another popular content creator and Deputy Executive Director of Gen Z for Change, Victoria Hammett, 22, saw her video and found it “absolutely brilliant” and encouraged her followers to do the same.

“Wouldn’t it be so awful if we send in a bunch of fake tips and crashed the site?” she said in a TikTok that’s been liked over 240,000 times.

Create a morally reprehensible website, you’re going to face some consequences. Three cheers for the activists who are giving them the response they deserve.

And it’s not just the Gen Z activists, too.

After a Texas law restricting abortion went into effect Wednesday, an antiabortion organization had hoped to out those involved in unlawful procedures by collecting anonymous tips online.

But Texas Right to Life’s website, ProLifeWhistleblower.com, which invited people to inform on those obtaining or facilitating abortions, has not stayed up for long, as website registration providers have said the online form to submit “whistleblower” reports violates their rules. On Monday, the organization confirmed that the website redirects to its main page as it seeks to find a new digital home for the form.

“We’re exploring various long-term plans for the domain registration,” the group’s spokeswoman, Kimberlyn Schwartz, told The Washington Post. “For now, ProLifeWhistleblower.com is redirecting to TexasRightToLife.com only while we move hosts.”

After hosting provider GoDaddy booted the group from its platform last week, the site’s registration changed to list Epik, a Web hosting company that has supported other websites that tech companies have rejected, such as Gab and 8chan. The site went offline Saturday, however, after the domain registrar told the Texas organization that lobbied for the abortion ban that it had violated the company’s terms of service.

After speaking with Epik, which never hosted the site, Texas Right to Life agreed to remove the form, Epik general counsel Daniel Prince said Monday. By late Saturday, the website had redirected to Texas Right to Life’s main page.

But Schwartz said the group still hopes to solicit tips.

“It will be back up soon to continue collecting anonymous tips,” she said, adding that the group is reviewing its options, including seeking another company to register the site’s domain.

Prince said Epik would no longer offer its services if the group continues to collect private information about third parties through its digital tip line.

I’m sure they will eventually find a hosting company that is sleazy enough to allow them to use their services. Putting all of the politics aside for a moment, however, that bit about “[collecting] private information about third parties” should raise some serious data privacy red flags. I guarantee you, the owners of the snitch site have no plan to protect any of that data, and any information they do get will be at serious risk of being abused. Merrick Garland, as you formulate your response, please take note of that as well. The Current has more.

The Census and gentrification

Sep 11th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

Some population trends of interest in Houston.

People of color led Houston’s growth over the last 10 years, but that trend wasn’t reflected across all the city’s historic Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Census data released earlier this month paints a changing map of Houston’s racial demographics. In some neighborhoods, such as the historically Black Third Ward, the changes are stark — a byproduct of ongoing gentrification. In other neighborhoods, such as Sunnyside and the Near Northside, the shifts are subtle but hint at the beginnings of a similar process.

The data confirms what residents have known for a long time: The changes are nothing new, and the stakes are high, experts say.

“This is a crisis of enormous proportions,” said Assata Richards, director of the Sankofa Research Institute. “It’s not just that people have lost their communities, communities have lost their people. Housing rates have increased, opportunities have decreased and the protections for naturally occurring affordable housing aren’t there.”

Black people now make up just 45 percent of Third Ward, a drop from 71 percent in 2010, according to the census bureau. Both numbers increase about 10 percent if you remove the census tract that houses the University of Houston.

Third Ward saw its Black population drop about 15 percent to 8,045 residents, though the neighborhood’s overall population grew about 35 percent, census data shows. The white population rose about 170 percent, from 1,283 residents in 2010 to 3,465 in 2020. White people make up about 20 percent of the neighborhood’s 17,706 residents.

“It’s like a flood. A hurricane has hit the city, and the flood has washed away African Americans from historic neighborhoods,” said Richards, who lives in Third Ward. “I’ve seen the disappearance of Black people at the parks, at the post office, at the corner store. The places in our community are being reshaped and are beginning to become foreign to me. It has a very disorienting effect. These are my neighbors and family members and people I love.”

The gentrification occurring in Third Ward is happening in other racial and ethnic enclaves throughout the city. Second Ward saw its Latino population drop about 25 percent, from 10,802 residents to 8,111 over the last 10 years. The white population rose to 2,572 from 1,711 residents in 2010, an increase of about 50 percent.

Despite Houston adding nearly 94,000 Latinos over the last decade, almost none of that growth occurred in the East End, Near Northside or Northside, traditional Latino strongholds. Nearly every census tract in those areas lost at least some portion of its Latino residents, regardless of whether there was an increase in white residents.

That’s why experts say the issue is larger than just a matter of white people moving into a neighborhood historically occupied by a particular racial or ethnic group.

In fact, the white growth in Third Ward and other areas inside Loop 610, such as the East End and the Heights, is mostly an anomaly. The white population in Houston decreased by about 30 percent over the last decade, though Houston’s overall population rose by 10 percent. That growth was driven almost entirely by people of color and not limited to neighborhoods in the urban core.

“What happens when it becomes more profitable for a landowner to sell than it is to rent is that the people who were long-term renters end up displaced,” said Dr. Quianta Moore, of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “Some look at gentrification as neighborhood revitalization and say that’s not a bad thing, but regardless of the definition you use, it’s always problematic when people are forcibly displaced from their neighborhood.”

“When you have economic factors that drive and uproot people out of a neighborhood … there’s a negative psychological harm and increased morbidity and risk of death,” Moore said, citing “Root Shock,” a 2004 book by Dr. Mindy Fullilove.

The main problem here is real estate prices rising at too fast a rate, which makes a lot of older and historic neighborhoods, including and especially Black and Latino neighborhoods, unaffordable for current residents. I’d love to see more stories that go into the policy changes that could be made to try to reverse, or at least slow down, these trends. Denser development and more investment in transit would surely help, but I don’t claim to be smart enough to know the particulars. I’ve seen much of Inner Loop Houston transform from a place where anyone could live to a place where most people can’t afford to live in my thirty-plus years here. There’s been a lot of positive change, in terms of food and amenities and arts, but we need that to be the reality for all of Houston.

UH officially joins the Big XII

Sep 11th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Long time coming.

Hello, Big 12.

In a historic day, the University of Houston has accepted an invitation to join the Big 12 Conference.

The Big 12’s presidents voted unanimously Friday to formally invite Houston, BYU, Cincinnati and Central Florida to form a 14-team league.

UH will begin play in the Big 12 as early as fall 2023.

“Joining the Big 12 Conference is a historic step in our institutional journey and signifies the tremendous growth and success attained academically and athletically over the last decade,” UH chancellor Renu Khator said in a statement. “Our expectations for our University remain high, our aspirations continue to be bold, and we embrace this new opportunity to compete at the highest levels in all we do.”

[…]

As members of the American Athletic Conference, Houston, Cincinnati and UCF must give 27 months’ notice if they plan to leave the league and pay a $10 million exit fee.

BYU is an independent in football and could join sooner.

What the Big 12 will resemble in a few years remains uncertain. Texas and Oklahoma said they will honor current contracts until 2025 when television rights with ESPN and Fox run out. Both schools would have to pay a buyout of $80 million to leave early.

See here for the background. Scheduling could be a little chaotic over the next season or two until everyone gets where they’re going. I’d bet a nickel on all the moving parts settling into their new places in time for next fall, but there’s a lot that could cause delays. I assume the AAC will now go trawling for some new members, so there’s still more to this story. In the meantime, congrats to the Coogs for finally catching the car they’ve been chasing since 1996.