Initial thoughts on the 2024 primary

Some opening considerations as we peruse the final unofficial voting data. Before you read my words, go check out Stace, Campos, Reform Austin, and the Texas Signal. Here we go:

– Final turnout in Harris County was 176,396 for Dems and 203,085 for the GOP. About 59% of Dems voted early, about 54% of Republicans voted early, which means that 2024 was most like 2022 for Dems in terms of when the vote happened, and pretty similar to four of the six most recent primaries for Republicans. Maybe early voting turnout is trending higher for primaries as it finally did for city elections, but remember that in 2028 Dems won’t have an incumbent President on the ballot, and I am extremely hesitant to guess what effect that might have.

– I still don’t have an exact total of registered voters yet, so I don’t know what turnout as a percentage of RVs was. I expect we’ll have that when the official canvass comes out. In terms of volume, 2024 was slightly higher than 2018 and 2022 for Dems and slightly better than 2020 for Republicans.

– Most of the comparisons people make for the Dem side is with 2016 or 2020, but I think 2012 is the closest comparison, since it was the last time we had a Presidential primary with an incumbent President with no serious challengers. As far as that goes, President Biden got 84.59% of the vote statewide, which compares reasonably favorably to President Obama’s 88.18% that year. Obama’s opponents were the definition of no-names – I’ll give you $1 right now if you could name any of those people without clicking that link or using Google. That said, Stace noticed some less than stellar numbers for Biden in some heavily Latino counties, and a cursory glance on my part affirms this. I’ll wait to see Stace’s analysis, but it’s fair to say there’s work to be done.

– Or maybe it was just one of those weird things.

A little-known Democratic presidential candidate vowing to put former President Donald Trump on trial for treason went viral after his unexpectedly strong Super Tuesday performance in South Texas.

Armando Perez-Serrato, a Californian running a protest campaign against President Joe Biden, racked up thousands of votes in at least three Rio Grande Valley counties’ Democratic primaries, peeling off support for the incumbent.

Perez-Serrato, who also wants to give Trump the death penalty, according to his website, landed nearly 5,000 votes in Hidalgo County’s Democratic primary, coming in second place with 15% of the vote. Biden won around 66% of the vote there.

Perez-Serrato also performed unexpectedly well in neighboring Cameron County, garnering nearly 2,000 votes and coming in second place with 11%. In Webb County, he pulled 14% of the electorate, or 2,500 votes.

[…]

Other than being staunchly anti-Trump, Perez-Serrato’s platform includes a 50% bump in monthly social security checks and recognizing an independent Palestinian state, which some social-media onlookers said might have contributed to his Tuesday surprise.

I look forward to the New York Times sending a reporter to a diner in Brownsville asking Perez-Serrato supporters about their reasons for their preference.

– As noted yesterday, Rep. Jarvis Johnson and Molly Cook are in the primary runoff for SD15. They are also two of the four candidates that filed for the May 4 special election – to be held on the same day as the HCAD election, which is the uniform election date for May – along with Michelle Bonton and Todd Litton. No Republican, no randos, just those four Dems. The primary runoff is May 28, which means the possibility of the primary winner and the special election winner being two different people is still in play. It seems to me that the idea situation is for the special election to go into a runoff with Johnson and Cook as the candidates, so that the eventual loser of the primary runoff can withdraw from the special election runoff and save us all the bother. Light a candle or two for this between now and May 2, will ya?

– Colin Allred avoided a runoff for US Senate, Julie Johnson avoided a runoff in CD32, and outside of SD15 there are like seven legislative runoffs. Turnout for the Dem primary runoff will be brutally small. There just aren’t that many races. One place where there won’t be a runoff is in Johnson’s soon-to-be-former legislative district, HD115, where Cassandra Hernandez won with 58% in a three-candidate field.

– Annette Ramirez will face Desiree Broadnax in the Tax Assessor runoff. I like her chances – she led Broadnax by 23 points, and the two trailing candidates (Jerry Davis and Danielle Keys) were more experienced and better fundraisers. Broadnax may have gotten a first-candidate-listed-on-the-ballot benefit.

– The total runoff lineup for Harris County Dems: SD15, HD139, HD146, 14th Court of Appeals Place 3, 486th Criminal District Court, Tax Assessor, and Constable Precinct 3. Tax Assessor and the two judicials are countywide, the others will depend on where you live.

– Republicans have seven Congressional runoffs, five in blue districts plus CDs 12 and 23, and multiple runoffs for SBOE, State Senate, and State House. There will be a lot more billionaire theocrat money getting spent.

– Gillespie County did finish its hand count of primary ballots by yesterday before noon, so good for them. They only had 8K ballots to count, which made it possible to do in a non-hopeless time frame. I’d bet if they counted again, they’d get different numbers, but I suppose as long as no one sues no one will ever have to consider that possibility in an official capacity. Votebeat provided a recap of the adventure.

Bruce Campbell, chairman of the Gillespie County Republican Party, predicted that results from the 13 GOP precincts would start trickling into the county elections office by 8:30 p.m.

By 9:30 p.m., he expressed surprise that none had returned.

Shortly after, he informed county Elections Director Jim Riley it might be hours before workers finished hand counting the thousands of early and mailed ballots — a task they’d begun at 7:30 that morning in a glass-walled tasting room at a winery called The Resort at Fredericksburg.

“Are you kidding me?” Riley said.

Campbell wasn’t kidding, or even hedging. In the end, the counting took all night long.

[…]

It was not the efficient process Republicans envisioned, though one carried out with no visible calamity. From start to finish, the process took almost 24 consecutive hours and involved around 200 people counting ballots. It remains to be seen if any of the candidates on the ballot will challenge the results, or whether this count will withstand next week’s official canvass. Texas law only requires that elections conducted on electronic tabulation equipment undergo a partial recount, so there is no such requirement here.

“You saw how this went,” Riley told Votebeat at 5 a.m., when all party members had departed the office. “This was a circus.” He said he’d withhold judgment on whether the count was accurate because he didn’t have eyes and ears in the rooms where it happened.

For their part, the Democrats conducted their primary with the help of the county using the same machines they’ve used for a few years. Even with paperwork delays and a minor glitch at one polling location, the party was finished counting all of its ballots — around 700 of them — by 10 p.m. It was a light year, as many reliable Democratic voters in the bright red county chose to vote in the Republican primary in order to participate in a contested sheriff’s race.

Campbell said the party’s “original goal” was to have “enough volunteers that we finished counting before the Democrats did.”

“Clearly, that didn’t happen,” he said.

They’re ready to do it again. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way. I’ll have more thoughts tomorrow.

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Three Ken Paxton updates

I missed these in the recent news rush, but spotted them all more or less at once via the Google News app on my phone. Doomscrolling for the win, I guess.

Whistleblowers: Texas Supreme Court must reject Ken Paxton’s ‘scheme’ to delay depositions.

A crook any way you look

Once again in front of the Texas Supreme Court, embattled Attorney General Ken Paxton is asking the state’s highest civil court to toss out his pending, court-ordered deposition or at least greatly limit the scope of what can be asked of him under oath by four former agency employees who argue they were wrongfully terminated after approaching the FBI to report Paxton’s possible misconduct in helping a campaign donor.

Responding to Paxton’s motion to the Supreme Court on Thursday, attorneys for the whistleblowers laid out a litany of arguments to derail what they said was Paxton’s “repugnant ploy” to keep delaying the proceeding in hopes to avoid addressing the whistleblowers’ claims on the record for the first time since the issue arose in 2020.

While Paxton argues the Travis County state District Court ruling mandating his sworn testimony is unnecessary after he filed a motion stating he wouldn’t challenge the facts in the case and would accept any judgment, the whistleblowers maintain that there remains a dispute in the case and that Paxton is not immune under any legal statute to evade the ordered deposition.

“The trial court did not abuse its discretion; it kept OAG (Office of Attorney General) from abusing the judicial system,” the whistleblowers’ attorneys wrote. “The court refused to endorse OAG’s disloyal scheme to orchestrate a judgment against the state of Texas just so the attorney general and a few of his close colleagues can avoid depositions.”

In January, Paxton had also sought the high court’s intervention to delay his deposition, resulting in a divided ruling forcing Paxton and three of his deputies to comply with the lower court’s order.

[…]

This time around, however, Paxton has altered his request, arguing that a motion to unequivocally accept a final judgement in the case negates the need for the depositions, and if the testimonies were to continue, they should focus on a future settlement and not on the events leading the whistleblowers to approach law enforcement.

“This case then took an extraordinary turn when plaintiffs refused to take “yes” for an answer,” Paxton’s attorneys wrote to the court last month. “Although OAG has both consented to and moved for entry of judgment against itself, plaintiffs have remarkably opposed entry of judgment in their favor.”

Paxton’s current appeal paused the depositions that were previously scheduled to begin with Paxton on Feb. 9.

[…]

“Unable to construe OAG’s pleading as an admission that OAG violated the Whistleblower Act, the trial court cannot lawfully find such a violation until plaintiffs prove it,” the lawyers wrote in advocating for the unencumbered depositions.

The attorneys are also taking issue with Paxton seeking the Supreme Court’s assistance after the Legislature rejected funding his previous settlement.

“It would be inequitable for the state’s judicial branch to assist its executive branch in engineering a judgment that its legislative branch views as a sham,” the attorneys wrote.

Additionally, the whistleblowers on Thursday pointed out several areas of a potential settlement that are yet to be addressed, including the possibility of reinstating the employees with full compensation and benefits, forcing Paxton to amend “retaliatory” personnel and investigation records, and ensuring Paxton refrains from further retaliation against the four whistleblowers.

In closing, the whistleblowers asked that the high court enforce the deposition order, which Paxton had appealed for that court’s intervention twice in January. Paxton’s second, and current request, seeking to stop the depositions came one day before Travis County state District Court Judge Catherine Mauzy ruled to allow the case to continue.

See here and here for some background. For no particular reason, I’m going to use a Catholic analogy to illustrate why SCOTx should reject this latest ploy. Whether you’ve ever been a Catholic or not, you are probably aware of the sacrament of confession, in which the penitent confesses their sins to a priest and receives absolution, which clears the stain of their sins from their soul and puts them back in position to enter heaven, at least until they sin again, once they complete their penance, usually depicted in pop culture as reciting some number of Hail Marys and Our Fathers. The thing about confession is that it’s not actually a get-out-of-sin-free card. Turns out, you have to actually mean it in order to be absolved. If you’re still in a state of sin, you cannot be absolved. That may mean that you are still doing the thing you’ve confessed to – still cheating on your wife, committing securities fraud, that sort of thing – but it also may mean that you haven’t renounced the thing you’ve confessed to, admitted to its sinfulness, and promised to not do it again. In other words, if you confess to a thing but continue to claim – publicly, or in your heart – that you are innocent and never actually did that thing, you don’t get the absolution you seek. You’re still a sinner before God and your soul remains in mortal jeopardy. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to see how this applies to this legal proceeding.

Judge blocks Texas from collecting info on transgender children receiving gender-affirming care.

A Texas judge on Friday temporarily blocked state Attorney General Ken Paxton from forcing an LGBTQ+ advocacy group to hand over information about transgender children receiving gender-affirming medical care.

The ruling came just one day after PFLAG National went to court to try to stop Paxton’s office from getting the information.

Travis County District Court Judge Maria Cantú Hexsel said in an order that providing the information would harm PFLAG and its members in several ways, including violating their rights of free speech, association and protection from unreasonable searches. Additionally, the judge said, it would be a “gross invasion” of privacy.

A hearing was scheduled for March 25 to give the attorney general’s office a chance to make the case for why Friday’s order shouldn’t continue.

See here for the background, and here for a statement from Lambda Legal. I suppose it’s possible Paxton could try to get this order lifted, but I don’t see any further news on this as yet. Spectrum News has more.

Texas court tosses Paxton lawsuit against Yelp over labeling of ‘crisis pregnancy centers’.

A Bastrop County state District Court on Friday shot down Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit against Yelp for labeling “crisis pregnancy centers,” which often counsel women against having abortions, with disclaimers stating that they “typically provide limited medical services” and do not provide abortions.

After the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 dismantled federal abortion protections established in Roe v. Wade, Yelp posted disclaimers on its site to alert potential customers that the centers “may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.” In February 2023, Yelp updated the notices to state that the crisis pregnancy centers do not provide abortion services.

The attorney general’s office sued Yelp on Sept. 28 for supposedly violating Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act, arguing that the notices were “misleading and often untrue because pregnancy resource centers frequently do provide medical services with licensed medical professionals onsite,” though that information does not directly contradict the language of the notices.

Republican Judge Reva Towslee-Corbett dismissed all claims against Yelp “with prejudice,” which means that the court’s decision was based on the merits of the case and that Paxton cannot file the same lawsuit in the 355th District Court again. Towslee-Corbett also granted Yelp’s objection, thereby agreeing that the state of Texas did not have the jurisdiction to bring its claims.

“We are pleased with the court’s decision, which rightfully recognizes the case should never have been filed in Texas,” said Haynes Boone media law attorney Laura Prather, who represented Yelp. “We are dedicated to protecting our clients’ right to free speech.”

[…]

In an emailed statement, Yelp stood by its decision to label the pregnancy centers and called the lawsuit meritless.

The company noted that Paxton had referred to labels stating the centers do not provide abortions as “accurate.” Yelp called the lawsuit filed by Paxton’s office a concerning attempt to subvert First Amendment rights.

I missed that story when it happened, but I have written about the concentrated bullshit that is crisis pregnancy centers before. Everything Yelp said was true, and even some Republican judges don’t like to tolerate lying. I hope that Judge Towslee-Corbett doesn’t have to run again until 2028, because we know how Ken Paxton reacts to judges who don’t kowtow to him.

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Art Car Museum announces its closure

Bummer.

Leaders of the Art Car Museum announced their intention to close after nearly 30 years in its Houston Heights location, according to a statement on its website. The announcement comes not long after both the museum’s founders, Ann O’Connor Williams Harithas and her husband James Harithas, passed away in 2021 and 2023.

The Art Car Museum is a contemporary art museum that was founded in 1998 to showcase the growing art car movement, which, according to the Art Car manifesto published by James Harithas in 1997, turns cars from a “factory-made commodity into a personal statement or expression,” and represents the changes in “popular consciousness.”

The Art Car Museum mixes the traditions of fine, folk and public art together to cultivate its aesthetic, and it exhibits not just art cars and other vehicles, but also artwork of other mediums from artists around the world.

The museum’s founder, Ann Harithas, comes from a legacy Texas ranching and oil family, and has founded two other museums with her husband James, The Station Museum in Houston (which has been temporarily closed since 2022) and the Five Points Museum of Contemporary Art in Victoria, Texas.

The Art Car and Five Points Museums have been kept alive by a trust that Ann Harithas’ children opened after her death in 2021, in order to fund the two years of exhibitions she had planned, according to a story in Texas Monthly on the family. But the couple did not create their own foundation before their deaths to keep the three museums going, nor did they leave instructions for their heirs on what to do with the properties. The futures of each museum are uncertain, although there is reportedly an emphasis on keeping the Victoria museum in operation above the other two.

There have been alleged talks with local and regional art organizations on how to continue the Art Car Museum’s legacy, according to the museum’s website. When available, those in charge will share the details publicly, the statement reads.

I’ve only been to the Art Car Museum once, I took the girls there when they were little. It’s small, more for adult enthusiasts than for kids. The actual space it’s in is nothing special – near the train tracks, next to a gas station, no street parking anywhere nearby – but its contents are unique and very much a part of Houston. I would like to think that there’s a place for its treasures somewhere in town, perhaps in more than one spot but still available to the public. Hopefully we’ll hear more soon. CultureMap has more.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of February 4

The Texas Progressive Alliance is basking in the warmth of spring training games as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading

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Primary 2024 results: Democratic headlines

It’s going to be a late night and I have a couple of long days ahead of me, so I’m going to do some quick summaries based on what I now know, and will come back later to fill the gaps.

– President Biden was over 90% in Harris County in early voting. The statewide results were very scattered – as of almost 10 PM there were still multiple counties whose early votes, let alone Election Day results, were not yet posted – but he was at about 86%.

– Colin Allred was at 60% statewide and almost 70% in Harris County and was already declared the winner for the Senate primary.

– Rep. Lizzie Fletcher had over 80% in Harris County and over 70% total, winning renomination easily. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee was at 62%, far outpacing the one poll we had in that race. Amanda Edwards was at 35% and that dude who dropped out was at 2%. Melissa McDonough and Marquette Greene-Scott were both cruising to victory. In Dallas, Rep. Julia Johnson was just about 50% for CD32 when I last looked; Brian Williams was comfortably in second with about 21% in case she fails to stay above the magic number.

– Rep. Jarvis Johnson was at 39% in early voting in SD15, with Molly Cook at 20% and Todd Litton at 16%; no one else was over ten percent. The one big State Senate primary outside of Harris County was in SD16 in Dallas, where Sen. Nathan Johnson turned back Rep. Victoria Neave.

– Rep. Harold Dutton was over 60% (sigh), but HD146 was very close, with Rep. Shawn Thierry just under fifty percent and Lauren Ashley Simmons only a few points behind. Thierry could climb above 50%, but I think this one will go to a runoff. In HD139, Angie Thibodeaux and Charlene Ward Johnson were leading, likely by enough to make it to overtime.

– I’m sure you already knew this before you started reading, but Sean Teare blew out incumbent DA Kim Ogg, with over 78% of the early vote. That’s an even stronger win than County Attorney Christian Menefee (74%) and Sheriff Ed Gonzalez (70%). For Tax Assessor, Annette Ramirez was the clear leader with just over 40%, with Danielle Bess, Jerry Davis, and Desiree Broadnax all bunched up for the second slot in the runoff.

– A few incumbent judges were trailing: Justices Gordon Goodman, Peter Kelly, and Jerry Zimmerer (currently in second place and a runoff with Velda Faulkner), and judges RK Sandill, Mike Engelhart, Robert Schaffer, Brittanye Morris, Ramona Jackson, and Julia Maldonado. Other incumbents were leading. Nicole Perdue, Ashley Mayes Guice, and Fran Watson were leading for three of the open benches, while Vivian King and Gemayel Haynes were headed to a runoff for the other.

– Katherine Culbert was leading for Railroad Commissioner, while DaSean Jones and Bonnie Lee Goldstein were leading for the two contested Supreme Court seats.

– Based on the Harris County Elections Twitter feed, I think Election Day is going to be well below early voting in turnout. If the last hour was strong and Dems had a fairly sizeable majority of the E-Day vote, they could make it to 200K total in the county, but I’m guessing they will fall short of that. They could still outdo the Republicans with a more modest majority of the E-Day vote. We won’t know that until early in the morning.

That’s all for now. I’ll circle back to this tomorrow. Based on what happened in some of those Republican races, there are a few pretty good legislative pickup opportunities.

UPDATE: As of 4:30 AM, with some vote centers still unreported, Lauren Ashley Simmons had taken the lead in HD146 and was at 49.79% of the vote. It’s possible she could end up winning without a runoff. Wow.

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Primary 2024 results: Republican headlines

It’s going to be a late night and I have a couple of long days ahead of me, so I’m going to do some quick summaries based on what I now know, and will come back later to fill the gaps.

– The Former Guy was at about 78% statewide and 76% in Harris County. Nikki Haley was at 17 and 18 percent, respectively. When the party’s over…

– Rep. Tony Gonzales in CD23 was the only threatened Congressional incumbent; he was leading with about 46% and could maybe avoid a runoff, with Brandon Herrera next in line. State Rep. Craig Goldman was leading the pack in the open CD12, while Brandon Gill actually had 57% (just early votes so far) in the cattle call that is CD26. That’s kind of impressive.

– All three Court of Criminal Appeals Justices that were targeted by Ken Paxton were losing, with two of them getting crushed and Michelle Slaughter down by a more respectable margin of about seven points. I never thought it possible to feel a twinge of sympathy for Sharon Keller, but here we are. Worst judge John Devine was leading in his Supreme Court race, but just by two points. It would not suck if he lost, even if just in the primary. Railroad Commissioner Christi “I’ll Show You How A Real Nepo Baby Does It” Craddick was leading in her multi-candidate race, but just at about 53%.

– The legislative races are a mess. Some of the incumbents targeted by Greg Abbott and/or Ken Paxton are losing, some are winning, some others are headed to runoffs. Rep. Steve Allison in HD121, the Sarah Davis of Bexar County, appears to be going down. That’s now very much a top-tier pickup opportunity. I’ll have to sort through the rest to see what else might be available.

– Rep. Lacey Hull appears to be a winner over Jared Woodfill in HD138. You know how I feel about that one. Rep. Jacey Jetton was losing in his race in HD26. You know how I feel about that one, too.

– Speaker Dade Phelan had a tiny lead in HD21 after trailing by a slightly larger but still tiny amount in early voting. It’s a three-person race and this one looks sure to be a runoff. Someone with a more extensive knowledge of Texas legislative history will have to tell us who the last sitting House Speaker to lose re-election was. Not Gib Lewis, at least.

– What’s the over/under on how long it takes hand count their ballots?

UPDATE: As of 4:30 AM, there are still some Harris County votes to be counted. Looking at the details of the statewide primary, the only other unreported results are from Gillespie County, where eight of 14 precincts are in (Harris has 475 of 545 in). Great job, Gillespie County! Speaker Phelan fell back behind his challenger and heads to the runoff as the second-place finisher. Not great for him.

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Today is Primary Day 2024

From the inbox:

Election Day for the first-ever Joint Primary Elections in Harris County is tomorrow, March 5. More than 500 vote centers will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for voters to cast their ballots. Voters can cast their ballots at any vote center in Harris County under the countywide polling place program. For a list of vote centers and wait times, go to www.HarrisVotes.com.

“Over 211,000 votes were cast during the 11-day Early Voting period,” said Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, the county’s chief election official. “It is always exciting to witness voters embracing the early voting option. For those who have not voted yet, they still have [today].”

Political parties conduct primary elections to select candidates for the November general election. While this is a presidential election year, voters will vote for candidates vying for federal, state, and local positions. In Harris County, the Democratic Primary has 119 races, and the Republican Primary has 122. However, voters will only see from 56 to 65 contests on their ballots, depending on where they are registered and the primary election they are voting in. Click here to view and print a sample ballot.

“Thanks to the collaborative efforts of everyone involved, we have reached this historic moment. The hard work of both the Republican and Democratic parties, along with my incredible team, has prepared us for our inaugural joint primary elections,” added Clerk Hudspeth.

Election Day Tips:

– You can take your printed sample ballot or any written materials with you into the voting booth
– The use of phones or cameras is NOT allowed within 100 ft. of the voting area
– The following forms of photo ID are acceptable when voting in person:

  • Texas Driver’s License issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS)
  • Texas Election Identification Certificate issued by DPS
  • Texas Personal Identification Card issued by DPS
  • Texas Handgun License issued by DPS
  • United States Military Identification Card containing the person’s photograph
  • United States Citizenship Certificate containing the person’s photograph
  • United States Passport (book or card)

Voters who do not possess and cannot obtain one of these forms of photo ID may fill out a Reasonable Impediment Declaration (RID) at a vote center and present another supporting form of ID, such as a utility bill, bank statement, government check, or voter registration certificate.

Unofficial election results will be posted at www.HarrisVotes.com as they come in on election night, starting after 7 p.m. with early voting and ballot-by-mail results. Official results will be posted after the canvass is completed.

Stay connected on social media at @HarrisVotes for news and updates.

You can find a map of vote centers here and an alphabetical list of them here. There are 545 centers, you can vote at any of them, and for the most part they’re pretty close together so if for whatever the reason you don’t like one, there are plenty of other options. There are plenty of stories out there about early voting turnout, none of which seem to account for the fact that how much voting is done early can vary greatly. Happy voting if you haven’t done it already, and I’ll be back tomorrow with results.

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The Fifth Circuit remains extremely on brand

Of all the Fifth Circuits in the world, they’re the Fifth Circuitest.

A new law empowering state authorities to arrest and deport migrants seeking asylum in the United States may soon take effect after an appeals court stepped in to override a lower court order blocking the law.

The 5th U.S.Circuit Court of Appeals’ order would set aside the lower court ruling in seven days. If the Supreme Court does not intervene by then, the law, known as Senate Bill 4, could take effect while the legal battle over whether it is constitutional plays out in court. The conservative appeals court did not explain the decision, issued Saturday.

The law, passed last fall by the GOP-led Legislature, would push the bounds of state enforcement of immigration law long left solely to the federal government. The law would make it a crime to enter the state from Mexico without permission, and it would allow any law enforcement officer in Texas to arrest migrants they suspect of entering illegally and empower judges to order their removal.

[…]

Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said the 5th Circuit appeared to be forcing the Supreme Court’s hand.

“Just to drive this home, the Fifth Circuit is effectively *forcing* #SCOTUS to rule *by Saturday* on whether it will allow the most aggressive attempt by a state to create its own immigration policy to go into effect,” Vladeck wrote on social media. “Another high-stakes emergency forced by the court of appeals.”

See here for the background and here for Prof. Vladeck’s commentary, which includes an image of the order, which calls for an expedited hearing on the merits of the case but didn’t specify a date. Forcing SCOTUS to take action was always the plan here, since as noted existing precedent from the ancient days of 2010 would make this a slam dunk for the feds. But SCOTUS has different members now, and its majority is happy to throw out precedents it doesn’t like, so why not shoot the moon. It’s utterly cold blooded, and it may well work. TPR and the Trib have more.

UPDATE: SCOTUS did the thing.

The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily halted a new state law on Monday evening allowing Texas police to arrest people suspected of crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally from going into effect.

The nation’s highest court stayed a decision from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that would have allowed police to enforce the law as soon as this Saturday. Last Saturday, the New Orleans-based appeals court reversed a lower court’s ruling that had previously halted the new state law.

The Supreme Court issued a temporary stay until March 13 while the court considers whether it will allow the state to enforce Senate Bill 4.

Everything remains on a short timeline. We’ll see what happens from there.

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Abortion and IVF roundup

Texas IVF patients are dealing with a lot of uncertainty right now.

Heather Burzlaff has four embryos in a freezer in Dallas and she doesn’t know what to do with them.

After seven years of medications, egg retrievals and waiting, the embryos are all the 38-year-old Flower Mound resident has left from the grueling in-vitro fertilization process, which resulted in no children. The embryos have genetic abnormalities that make it virtually impossible for them to result in a viable pregnancy. It’s a heartbreaking reality many IVF patients face in the pursuit of starting a family.

States away, the Alabama Supreme Court decided frozen embryos created through IVF — each only a cluster of cells made from a fertilized egg stored outside the uterus — are legally children and people can be held liable for their destruction. Already, Alabama clinics have halted IVF treatments while they determine whether they’re at legal risk.

Texas has issued no such ruling. But IVF patients like Burzlaff are scrambling to make a plan for their embryos in case that changes. Does she move her embryos to another state? Does she budget to pay for their storage for the rest of her life? Does she implant them at a point in her menstrual cycle when she’s least likely to get pregnant?

Burzlaff and her husband are in the middle of the adoption process through the foster care system. The Alabama decision, she said, adds another layer of complications to an already draining situation.

“The paperwork alone is overwhelming. Now you throw this into the mix and I just kind of want to shut down and stop,” Burzlaff said. “I don’t even want to build my family anymore. It’s too much.”

Texans raised concern over the future of IVF after the fall of Roe vs. Wade in 2022, but doctors and politicians alike assured them the procedure would not be a target of abortion restrictions. The move by Alabama’s top court has undone any sense of security IVF patients had.

[…]

Whether Texas will follow Alabama’s suit is yet to be seen. When asked during an interview on CNN whether IVF patients in the state should be worried, Gov. Greg Abbott said he supports IVF but that the question was complex.

Southern Methodist University professor and health law expert Seema Mohapatra said, at least in her reading of current Texas law, embryos have to be implanted in a pregnant person in order to be considered a child. That doesn’t mean legislators won’t try to change the definition of a child.

“Do I think there might be attempts? Yes. Do I think that they’re going to be successful? I would be surprised,” Mohapatra said. “But there’s a lot of things that have happened in Texas that I would not have thought would have happened two years ago related to abortion restrictions.”

Can’t imagine where the anxiety is coming from. I wouldn’t keep my frozen embryos here if I had the means to move them elsewhere. I don’t know what will happen in the next legislative session relating to IVF, though I do know that a “wrongful death” lawsuit that could easily end up threatening IVF directly is working its way through the legal system right now. I do know there will be a vocal constituency in favor of being consistent with their “life begins at conception” zealotry and applying it to IVF.

There will also be at least one bill to protect IVF.

A Texas lawmaker who is pursuing fertility treatments is calling on Gov. Greg Abbott to protect access to in vitro fertilization after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children.

Rep. Mihaela Plesa (D-Plano) said she became concerned about the status of IVF in Texas after the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling. She’s urging Texans to sign her petition to encourage lawmakers to protect and improve access to fertility treatments.

Plesa said access to IVF is a reproductive right — and one that is very important to her personally as she tries to start family.

“My mother is my hero,” Plesa said. “She’s the strongest woman I know, and I just hope to be able to be… a strong mother like her one day.”

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled last week that frozen embryos have the same rights as children under state law. The ruling was prompted by a wrongful death suit where three Alabama couples undergoing fertility treatment sued after their frozen embryos were destroyed.

“We really have to be careful when the judiciary essentially is now coming into your doctor’s office, because these are not medical professionals,” she said.

[…]

The largest hospital in Alabama stopped providing IVF treatment as a result of the ruling. Plesa said she wants to prevent something like that happening in Texas.

“That’s going to make this process more inaccessible, more expensive,” she said.

Plesa said she plans to file bills during the next legislative session to keep IVF legal in Texas.

Someone ask Greg Abbott if he’d support such a bill. You won’t get a straight answer, but ask anyway.

The fight over IVF is even bigger than just who gets to have a baby.

When Republican Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida announced on NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday that he fully supports IVF because it is necessary to “create great families, which is what our country desperately needs,” and that IVF “helps them breed great families,” he gave away this darker game. This isn’t just about forcing pregnant people to carry babies; it’s also about the “domestic supply of infants” problem that the 14th Amendment was expressly crafted to redress: a sordid history of power and money and ownership of children, still baked so deeply into adoption and foster care that you almost don’t notice when the state coolly lays claim to the entire contents of a “cryogenic nursery.”

Nothing about this should shock you, at least not if you’ve been reading Dorothy Roberts. This is the two-step wherein the state forces women to have babies they cannot raise, does nothing to help support them, then swoops in to seize the babies when their parents are seen as endangering them—a phenomenon that of course predominantly hurts poor women and women of color. The state also ensures that adoptions flow in the direction of more “worthy” parents, which means heterosexual and Christian parents, a regime also built into the legal framework. The list of people who cannot assert autonomy and control over their potential children has, in the course of a few weeks, now expanded from LGBTQ+ parents, single parents, poor parents, and parents of color to anyone who has started the process of IVF in Alabama.

When Republicans insist that life begins at conception, and also that seven cell clusters constitute “life,” what they are saying—what they were always saying—is that we as a society need babies so badly that somebody should always be entitled to take control and custody over somebody else’s baby, and indeed of every potential baby. Because, at the end of the day, your babies don’t belong to you; they belong, variously, to God, to the GOP, to the state, and to those who want to raise them in your stead. That isn’t just about controlling women, then, or about fertility and the power to make economic and health decisions about one’s own life. This is about the government endlessly making determinations about who is fit to take your children away from you and raise them as their own. This is the Handmaid’s Tale version of religion, as Dorothy Roberts has long warned, and it’s embodied deeply in U.S. history and in long-standing policies. It is why women can be left to die of sepsis outside the ER, then be blamed by the government for having made bad choices. Their babies never really belonged to them in the first instance. And what Alabama established two weeks ago is that doctors and patients will have to make choices in the IVF context that privilege potential lives over their own family autonomy.

You may think all of this sounds very alarmist. I’ll remind you that many of the alarms that folks in the reproductive rights space have been ringing, pre- and post-Dobbs, have been coming true. I’ll also note that Republicans had the chance to give real protection to IVF this past week, in which they literally had to do nothing, and they failed to do so. When they show you who they are, etc etc etc.

To be fair, the Alabama Legislature is now trying to clean up the mess that their Supreme Court created. But they haven’t addressed the “embryos are actually children” issue in their state constitution, which is what that court based its decision on, and as such I think this will rear itself again.

Remember also that what happens in one wingnut state often gets copied elsewhere.

What could other states do?

There are a host of existing mechanisms that could be used to curb access to IVF.

Similar lawsuits to Alabama’s wrongful death case could be filed in other states. Louisiana already has a law that treats viable embryos as “judicial persons,” effectively meaning that embryos cannot be destroyed, though they can be transferred out of state. That law hasn’t stopped health care providers in the state from offering IVF, though it has made the process more cumbersome, physicians in the state said. They now have to send all excess embryos, including ones that will likely never be used for pregnancy, to out-of-state storage facilities.

Some legal scholars suggested that the Louisiana law could be leveraged in an argument for broader fetal personhood — the idea that a fetus, or even an embryo should be given the same legal rights as a person — and in turn reinterpreted to limit access to IVF. But so far, there are no pending cases in the state.

Laws granting legal protection to embryos — particularly so-called “fetal personhood” laws, which are on the books in 11 other states — could be interpreted to outlaw the discarding of embryos, making IVF, if not directly illegal, effectively impossible to provide. But those laws vary in their expansiveness, noted Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis who studies the anti-abortion and fetal personhood movements.

Georgia’s fetal personhood law, for instance, only applies to embryos in the uterus and at six weeks of pregnancy and later, meaning it is unlikely to affect IVF. But an Arizona law, currently on hold while being litigated in federal court, applies personhood more broadly, including embryos. If upheld, multiple legal experts said, that is a law with the potential to undercut access to IVF.

More important, Ziegler said, is the makeup of individual courts and their willingness to embrace the same legal reasoning as Alabama’s. She pointed in particular to Florida and South Carolina, where members of the respective supreme courts have expressed interest in fetal personhood.

“You need a particular kind of group of people to make a ruling like this,” Ziegler said. “Definitely not just justices who are conservative but who are also interested in taking on this question at a time when doing so will be controversial and divisive.”

In other words, how crazy is your state’s judiciary? I actually think the Texas Supreme Court, as currently constituted, would be reluctant to go full Alabama here. That’s a good thing, because a case where that could happen is being litigated as we speak, and it will arrive at their doorstep one of these days. But it’s also of very limited comfort, because we have a Governor and a Legislature who can’t be trusted, and an Attorney General who likes seeking revenge on judges who dare to rule against him. If we don’t succeed at making the judiciary we have now better, it will absolutely get worse.

And finally, bringing things back to abortion for a minute.

Telehealth abortions continue to grow in popularity, even in states where anti-abortion activists try to ban them, according to new data published today.

Abortions obtained through virtual providers accounted for 15 to 16 percent of all abortions conducted between July and September of last year—amounting to about 14,000 abortions each month—up from 11 percent of abortions, or about 8,500, in December of 2022, according to the report, prepared by researchers from Ohio State University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the Society of Family Planning. The increase is partly thanks to the rise of shield laws, which protect providers who virtually prescribe and mail abortion pills to people in states with abortion bans, according to one of the report’s co-authors, Ushma Upadhyay, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

Five states—Massachusetts, Colorado, Washington, New York, and Vermont—passed laws last year that protect telehealth providers who help people elsewhere in the country get abortions, according to Upadhyay. California enacted its shield law last month. As the New York Times reported last week, while these laws have not yet faced legal challenges, many expect them to. But in the meantime, they’re serving as the key to abortion access for people across the country: The Times reports that Aid Access, one of three main organizations providing telehealth abortions, serves about 7,000 patients a month, about 90 percent of whom are in states with abortion bans or severe restrictions. Advocates say telehealth abortion can also be particularly significant for low-income people and those in rural areas who may otherwise have difficulty accessing abortion clinics.

You can be sure that some of the activity to challenge those shield laws will come from Texas. We can do something about that this November, and again in 2026. It would be nice if we did.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

One more look at primary turnout

Here’s the Derek Ryan report on early voting in the primaries, which sent me off into a rabbit hole yesterday.

Early voting is over. (Thank goodness! Early voting is always the busiest point of the entire two-year election cycle for me.)

The final early voting numbers are in…actually, that’s not entirely accurate…there are likely still some counties who have not posted their final early voting rosters. But from what has been posted, the numbers are as follows:

Democratic Primary: 596,933 votes cast and 3.3% statewide turnout.
Republican Primary: 1,222,390 votes cast and 6.8% statewide turnout.

That gives the Republicans a 625,000 vote advantage over the Democrats.

Approximately 148,000 more votes were cast early in the Republican Primary this year compared to the 2020 Republican Primary. On the Democratic side, turnout was about 60% of the total cast in 2020 (but again, 2020 had a competitive presidential primary). It’s also worth noting that turnout in the Democratic Primary was lower than it was in 2022 at this point (596,933 this year compared to 620,107 in 2022).

More votes were cast in the Republican Primary than in the Democratic Primary in three of the five largest counties: Harris, Tarrant, and Bexar. Harris and Bexar are blue counties and Tarrant County is likely a slightly red county, though it did vote for Joe Biden in 2020. In the other two large counties, Dallas and Travis, turnout was higher in the Democratic Primary.

There’s more, so click over and read the rest. The main thing that this got me thinking about is something I’ve touched on here already, which is how much of the primary vote is cast early. I reviewed some numbers in Harris County before, but I wondered if looking at other counties might tell me something. So I went and looked at a bunch of county election sites, and this is what I can tell you.


Year       County     EV%
=========================
2012   Dallas Dem  45.71%
2016   Dallas Dem  36.09%
2020   Dallas Dem  40.59%

2012   Dallas GOP  41.82%
2016   Dallas GOP  37.62%
2020   Dallas GOP  48.61%

2012    Bexar Dem  56.19%
2016    Bexar Dem  47.90%
2020    Bexar Dem  53.78%

2012    Bexar GOP  56.20%
2016    Bexar GOP  46.62%
2020    Bexar GOP  58.64%

2012   Travis Dem  42.66%
2016   Travis Dem  42.33%
2020   Travis Dem  49.48%

2012   Travis GOP  42.33%
2016   Travis GOP  37.56%
2020   Travis GOP  54.66%

2012  El Paso Dem  52.90%
2016  El Paso Dem  32.80%
2020  El Paso Dem  50.16%

2012  El Paso GOP  50.07%
2016  El Paso GOP  28.95%
2020  El Paso GOP  50.11%


2012  Tarrant Dem  46.78%
2016  Tarrant Dem  42.98%
2020  Tarrant Dem  46.16%

2012  Tarrant GOP  45.65%
2016  Tarrant GOP  44.92%
2020  Tarrant GOP  55.56%

2012   Collin Dem  53.57%
2016   Collin Dem  44.23%
2020   Collin Dem  51.06%

2012   Collin GOP  54.61%
2016   Collin GOP  51.31%
2020   Collin GOP  62.31%

2012   Denton Dem  43.79%
2016   Denton Dem  41.95%
2020   Denton Dem  51.30%

2012   Denton GOP  50.32%
2016   Denton GOP  48.81%
2020   Denton GOP  62.42%

2012   Montgy Dem  39.38%
2016   Montgy Dem  36.56%
2020   Montgy Dem  43.21%

2012   Montgy GOP  49.99%
2016   Montgy GOP  46.19%
2020   Montgy GOP  56.50%


2012  Ft Bend Dem  42.61%
2016  Ft Bend Dem  37.45%
2020  Ft Bend Dem  49.80%

2012  Ft Bend GOP  56.35%
2016  Ft Bend GOP  42.75%
2020  Ft Bend GOP  66.21%

I looked at the big Democratic counties, then some Republican counties, and I wanted to check the two big suburban counties that flipped from red to blue during this time, but the Williamson County elections archives were a mess and I abandoned it. I’m throwing a lot of numbers at you and there’s a good amount of chaos in there, but the one thing that stood out to me is that in every county I checked except El Paso, Republicans were more likely to vote early in 2020 than Democrats were. Before 2020 it could go either way, and the level of early voting could fluctuate quite a bit – that was one of many things I didn’t expect – but there was definitely a pattern in 2020, and it was that Republicans voted early more than Democrats did.

Does that mean anything for this year? I have no idea. If we do see something similar to 2020, then Dems are likely to make up some ground, at least as a share of the total vote even if the absolute gap doesn’t shrink by much. If we don’t, then this was a lot of effort to no clear end. Which, to be fair, is a good summary of what blogging is in general.

To put it in mainstream media terms, here are the three main takeaways: One, every election is different. Two, primaries are weird. And three, be careful about drawing conclusions about final turnout from early turnout data. I have recent experience in that. (Note: Ryan himself doesn’t make any claims about final turnout, he just presents the existing numbers. I’m trying to be careful myself.)

One last tidbit: Harris County has provided 17.13% of the statewide Democratic early vote total, and 8.91% of the statewide Republican early vote total. I’ll report back on what those final numbers are when we have them.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Getting revenge is the best revenge

I have one thing to say to these Republicans.

Rep. Glenn Rogers

State Rep. Glenn Rogers is mad as hell, and he’s not being shy about it.

“Kiss my ass!” he recently told a statewide Republican official who had endorsed his primary opponent.

“Beware of this belligerent run on power,” he warned his followers on social media.

The Graford Republican is quoting Winston Churchill, calling out “grandiose lies” by his well-funded primary opponent, Mike Olcott, and challenging Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller to a duel in a text message as he seeks to hang onto his House seat.

[…]

He’s among a group of Republicans facing heat from big names in their party in a primary that has pitted former allies against each other, prompted big spending and left a pile of hurt feelings in its wake. Incumbents like Rogers have become targets over two key votes last year: on whether to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton and whether to allow school vouchers. Many feel those attacks ignore conservative records built up over years.

Rogers is facing conservative backlash on both. Since he was first elected in 2020, he has voted against the creation of a private school voucher program, a priority issue for GOP Gov. Greg Abbott. The proposal would have diverted state funds to private or church schools for parents who want to exit the public school system and want help paying for part of tuition. The resistance of 21 Republicans, most of them rural, led to the repeated failure of the proposal last year.

Advocates have said the public schools in Rogers’ House District 60, a mostly rural area west of Fort Worth covering Palo PInto, Stephens and Parker counties, would lose more than $3 million if vouchers were to pass.

And like the majority of his fellow House Republicans, Rogers supported the impeachment of Paxton on charges of bribery and unfitness for office. In the months since he was acquitted by the Senate, Paxton has campaigned hard against the GOP lawmakers who accused him of corruption.

Now Rogers has found himself in the crosshairs of just about any Republican with any official power in Texas — except for House Speaker Dade Phelan, who is facing his own well-funded GOP primary opponent in Beaumont. In addition to Abbott, Paxton and Miller, Olcott has the support of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi. On Tuesday, he received the endorsement of former President Donald Trump.

That has been frustrating for Rogers, who called the governor’s recent decision to endorse his pro-voucher opponent “a single-issue endorsement” in an interview with a local CBS station. The endorsement ignored his efforts to fight for his district and ignored his voting record, he said.

“It doesn’t seem to matter about the integrity of the candidate, what their legislative productivity is,” he said. “It’s simply, ‘Do you support vouchers and I’ll endorse you.’ I think that’s unprecedented. I’ve been a very strong supporter of his, and we differ on this one issue, and he’s chosen to endorse my opponent.”

Other Abbott and Paxton targets are similarly upset.

Rep. Ernest Bailes, R-Shepherd, lamented the governor’s “vindictive nature” against Republicans he said were simply trying to represent their constituents’ best interests.“Governor Abbott is expending an astronomical amount of resources this campaign cycle, in order to unseat members who serve their districts, instead of his will,” Bailes wrote in a Facebook post Monday. “He made one trip to my district last week and [is] coming back again later this month, in order to do his absolute best to make sure that our next representative is someone who has sworn fielty to his agenda, rather than that of representing this district.”

[…]

In some cases, Abbott’s and Paxton’s focus on single issues has pitted them against each other in primaries.

Rep. Travis Clardy, R-Nacogdoches, opposed vouchers, but also opposed impeachment, earning him the backing of Paxton. That forced Paxton to defend himself from backlash from many conservative voucher supporters on X.

“I’m not ashamed at all. Travis Clardy took a lot of bullets to stand up for me,” Paxton wrote. “However, you feel about him, he stood with me and the voters of Texas, and I appreciate that.”

Meanwhile, Clardy had harsh words for Abbott, who endorsed him in past races, but has now come out strongly against him for his anti-voucher vote.

“Threatening and bullying is not effective leadership,” Clardy told the Texas Monthly last year. “I think you can go over and review the entire lexicon of Dale Carnegie and Zig Ziglar and not find bullying and threatening as a desired tactic. But here we are. And I don’t get it.”

To Reps. Rogers and Bailes and Clardy and Stan Lambert and anyone else who opposed vouchers and/or supported impeachment and now are being attacked and vilified by Abbott and Paxton and their billionaire theocrat enablers, there’s only one thing you can do whether you survive this primary or not. You must do everything in your power to oppose Abbott and Paxton and whoever else is on that same train with them in 2026. Easy enough to do in the next primary, but you have to do it in the general as well, because we know they’ll survive their primaries. Do that however you want – voting third party, writing someone in, and skipping those races are all options if supporting the Democrat is a bridge too far – just be loud and proud about it and tell everyone who supported you to do the same. These guys are never going to stop coming after you as long as they’re in power. The one way to fix it is to get them out of power.

Up to you. Stand up for yourself, or take all this abuse and reward the abusers by trotting back to them and forgetting it ever happened. Which one will make it easier for you to look in the mirror going forward?

One more thing:

Rogers also has the endorsement of the Associated Republicans of Texas, a 50-year-old political group that has endorsed most of the targeted Republicans in the House primaries and had upwards of $3 million cash on hand last month.

Jamie McWright, president of the organization, said the group’s focus is to elect pro-business Republicans that represent their districts and can win in a general election against a Democrat.

“There is no litmus test, there is no scorecard, there is no conservative ranking for us,” McWright said. “We really do look for business-minded conservatives who want to come to Austin and get things done. We believe in a big-tent Republican party, and winning where we can with Republicans.”

And while a healthy primary that forces discussion on the issues is nothing new in Texas politics, McWright said, it’s “extremely disheartening” that the especially divisive tenor of this cycle threatens to confuse and deter the participation of “thoughtful Republicans” in the entire process.

“I think you’ve got a lot of really good Republican voters who may end up staying home because they’re so confused,” she said. “And I think anytime we discourage people from voting, we’re hurting our own democracy. And that’s just a real shame.”

The same advice applies to groups like the Associated Republicans of Texas, except I would insist that they do support the Democratic opponents of Abbott and Paxton in 2026. I know, Democrats can’t win statewide in Texas, blah blah blah. You know what might help? Having a couple hundred thousand Republicans vote Democratic in those races. I mean, assuming that groups like ART have that kind of actual clout. If they’re nothing but a clearinghouse for a few big-money donors, then yeah, just whine impotently and keep on keeping on. But if you do have a decent number of likeminded supporters, and you want to effect change, well, that’s how you do like. Like I said, up to you and the person looking back at you in that mirror.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

HISD kids still not getting the Internet access they lost

Just another thing by the wayside.

Houston ISD has not provided at-home internet service to the vast majority of students who relied on a free Verizon program that the district canceled three months ago, leaving some of Houston’s most vulnerable children disconnected.

About 50 of the 1,000 students who were relying on the program for at-home internet have received T-Mobile hotspots that the district offered as a replacement to needy students, according to email records and a district spokesperson.

HISD officials said the hotspots remain available to students. But district leaders and staff have not successfully coordinated to outfit children with the new service since November.

“If school staff identify a student who needs home internet access, staff should contact the campus technologist so that HISD can provide a hotspot for that student,” HISD Chief Communications Officer Leila Walsh wrote in an email.

HISD promised the T-Mobile hotspots after district leaders opted to end the Verizon program, citing an unacceptable amount of training required for school officials carrying out the effort. Roughly 56,500 students and 2,500 teachers across 36 HISD campuses received iPads or laptops equipped with data plans since the initiative launched in 2020, Verizon officials said.

Most students at participating schools connected their computers at home to wireless internet installed by their families. However, HISD officials determined about 1,000 students regularly used internet service built into the devices for web access, indicating their families may not have wireless internet at home.

Verizon shut off the built-in internet service on its donated devices on Nov. 17, three weeks after HISD decided to no longer participate in the program. Schools and students were allowed to keep the provided laptops and tablets, but their data plans were deactivated.

In the weeks after students lost internet access, HISD officials acknowledged they had fallen short on communicating with families about the hotspot opportunity. HISD Chief Technology Officer Scott Gilhousen told the Houston Landing in early December that it “will be for us to communicate more with our campuses to inform them that there are opportunities.”

But emails obtained by the Landing through a public records request also show few campus leaders requested hotspots for their students.

[…]

The T-Mobile hotspots HISD promoted as a replacement to the Verizon services cost the district $15 per student per month, the Houston Chronicle reported.

HISD officials said they are looking into more permanent solutions for addressing internet access disparities.

“We are having conversations with community partners so that we eliminate the digital divide for entire neighborhoods, not just individual students,” Walsh said.

See here (third story) and here for the background. All but one of those 50 students cited who were able to get new hotspots did so because one teacher (Brad Wray, who is also on the District Advisory Committee) took it upon himself to go through the process from start to finish, which included him driving to HISD’s central office to pick up the hotspots and distribute them to the kids. Not exactly a stretch to say there’s gotta be a better way to do it than that. But first HISD needs to get its act together and decide that this is a thing they want to do. Less talk, more do.

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Weekend link dump for March 3

“On top of fewer shows and virtually no pilots, the available acting gigs pay less than they used to amid rising cost of living, talent sources say, making it hard for many working actors to afford their rent or mortgage and support their families.”

“There’s no way to overreact here: it’s as bad as it sounds. And while last week’s decision is of course about IVF, we can’t be fooled into thinking that’s the reason for the ruling. Anti-abortion activists, lawmakers and judges have a very clear plan they’re rolling out right now—and fetal personhood undergirds all of it.”

“White evangelicals today are no longer marginal, although they recognize the advantages of portraying themselves that way. The rhetoric of victimization follows from that, and I suspect that one of the reasons they are drawn to Trump is that he speaks the language of victimization better than anyone I’ve heard. It’s always about him, of course. He’s the victim. But evangelicals understand and identify with that vocabulary.”

“Biden’s Plan B on Student Loan Forgiveness Is a Massive and Improbable Success”.

“The reason why David Weiss reneged on a plea deal was to chase this bribery claim. The reason why David Weiss charged Hunter Biden with a bunch of felonies rather than resolving this in a diversion and misdemeanors was because he wanted to chase the false claims floated by someone dallying with Russian spies.”

“How No Labels’ Spoiler Bid Suddenly Entered Full Meltdown Mode“. Good.

“Wealthier, urban Americans have access to more local news – while roughly half of US counties have only one outlet or less”.

A long scholarly article about the many “drunkonyms” in the English language.

“The greatest scorer in major-division women’s collegiate history is not [Caitlin] Clark, but Lynette Woodard of Kansas. You’d never know this, however, because the old NCAA had no respect for Woodard’s era, so it canceled it, and asterisked it.”

Also out there is Pistol Pete Maravich, and I’m glad to see that his son Jaeson is a fan of Caitlin Clark and rooting for her on her quest. He’s right that it’s a very different game now than it was in 1971, but all sports evolve and records take on different meanings as a result.

And another name to know is Grace Beyer, who has already eclipsed everyone and is still out there pouring them in for the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy, a small NAIA school in St. Louis.

Boy, the grift is strong in Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

“As I have written about before, that’s how you get the very concept of a Middle Ages in the first place. It is a pretty European-centric way of delineating things, because it starts with the “fall” of the Roman Empire in 476, and the ends …. IDK like maybe in the sixteenth century?[1] Maybe in the late fifteenth? Basically if you can see Protestants you’ve gone too far.”

The pros and cons of the next MLB expansion.

RIP, Peg Lee, Houston chef, educator, founder of the Rice Epicurean cooking school, known as Houston’s Julia Child.

RIP, Stacy Wakefield, wife of former MLB pitcher Tim Wakefield. She dies of pancreatic cancer four months after her husband died of brain cancer. My deepest condolences to their families.

Just a thought experiment that may or may not have any present-day salience.

“Three prominent progressive outlets sued OpenAI on Wednesday, alleging the company violated their copyright protections in an extension of the battle lines drawn between news publishers and AI companies.”

RIP, Richard Lewis, comedian and actor best known for Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Truly, the things that trigger conservatives are a wonder to behold.

“We are currently renovating our booths at Holsten’s. This is your once in a lifetime chance to own the original booth that the Soprano Family sat in for the final scene of the famous show!”

Congratulations to Shohei Ohtani and his wife, whose existence is the only thing we currently know about her.

“CVS and Walgreens will start dispensing mifepristone, one of the medications used to induce an abortion, in stores this month.”

“The 18-year-old son of U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert was arrested in Colorado on suspicion of stealing identity documents among other charges, police in the town of Rifle said.”

Let them fight.

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Final 2024 Primary Early Voting totals

Off we go to Primary Day.


Year    Mail    Early    Total
==============================
2012   7,735   30,142   37,877
2016  13,034   72,782   85,816
2020  22,785  116,748  139,533
2024  14,661   87,591  102,252

2012  17,734   60,347   78,081
2016  20,780  110,365  131,145
2020  22,801   82,108  104,909
2024   6,285  102,686  108,971

As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Eleven totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.

It was a pretty good final day, though not quite as gangbusters as 2012 or 2016. Both of those saw more than half of all early votes come in on the last three days. In 2020, about 46% of all EV turnout came in on the last three days, and this year it was about 43%. Does that mean anything? Hell if I know. I’m just telling you what the numbers are. Republicans came in slightly ahead of 2020, when they didn’t have an active Presidential primary, but behind 2016 when they did. Dems fell short of their active 2020 but ahead of 2016, which was also an active primary but a weirder one than 2020 was. The main takeaway I have from all this is another reminder that every election is its own unique thing.

How can we put this primary into context? Here’s what final turnout has been for every Dem primary since 2002, including turnout as a percentage of registered voters:


Year   Turnout     Pct
======================
2002    95,396   5.15%
2004    78,692   4.35%
2006    35,447   1.89%
2008   410,908  22.71%
2010   101,263   5.38%
2012    75,150   3.95%
2014    53,788   2.70%
2016   227,280  10.92%
2018   167,982   7.47%
2020   328,426  13.86%
2022   167,179   6.64%

I don’t think there should be any difficulty passing 2018 and 2022 in total turnout, so this year will be at least the fourth best primary in that regard, with a reasonable chance to be the third best given how past Presidential year patterns have gone. In terms of turnout as a percentage of registered voters, I think it will slot in as fourth best, with a more remote chance of passing 2016 as third best. I don’t know what the current total of registered voters is for Harris County, but we were just shy of 2.6 million as of last November, so probably right around 2.6 million. Again, looking at the three most recent Presidential year primaries and their early vote share, I don’t think topping 2016 is likely, but topping ten percent is in play:

At 51.78% (2012) EV, final turnout = 197,474
At 44.19% (2020) EV, final turnout = 231,391
At 38.54% (2016) EV, final turnout = 265,314

I feel like we’re more likely to be close to fifty percent of the vote being in already – again, I feel chastened by my 2023 experience – and so while I think we’ll reach 200K votes, I’m not expecting more than that. Please, by all means, prove me wrong.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Crypto miners really don’t want to tell us how much energy they consume

And for now at least, they don’t have to.

U.S. officials this week indefinitely withdrew a survey aimed at gathering information on the crypto-mining industry’s power use, hindering attempts to understand the sector’s impact on grids and energy prices at a time of record activity.

Riot Platforms, among the biggest U.S. bitcoin miners, and industry group Texas Blockchain Council, sued to stop mandatory data requests after a new survey went out this month by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) to assess crypto-mining’s electricity use.

As a result, U.S. officials canceled the emergency survey and are negotiating an agreement with the bitcoin mining plaintiffs to end the lawsuit, said two sources familiar with the situation. Crypto critics said halting the survey could create new vulnerabilities to the U.S. electrical grid, and one environmental group called industry opposition to the survey “reprehensible.”

[…]

The EIA began its survey of 82 miners the week of Feb. 5, requesting details about operations and energy use. Members of Congress, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, had requested a survey for more than a year.

“The department is asking crypto-miners to report basic information about their energy usage — like other industries have done for decades — so the public and lawmakers better understand how crypto-mining’s electricity use and carbon emissions affect the power grid and environment,” Warren said in an email to Reuters.

The memo from EIA Head Joseph DeCarolis requesting approval of the survey from the Office of Management and Budget said, “We feel a sense of urgency to generate credible data that would provide insight into this unfolding issue.”

The mining industry’s lawsuit, filed on Feb. 22, claimed the survey’s fast-track approval process was unlawful and its scope, including questions about precise geographic locations of miners and commercial partners, posed threats to their businesses and hard assets if made public.

On Friday, the EIA agreed to halt the survey for over a month until March 25 and sequester the data it received so far. Later that day, a U.S. federal judge in Waco, Texas, ordered a temporary restraining order against federal agencies and the survey.

This week, the survey was withdrawn, according to sources who asked to remain anonymous because of the ongoing legal dispute. The sides reached an “agreement-in-principle,” to be finalized by March 1, court records show.

See here and here for more about the lawsuit, and here for more on the judge’s pause order. The good news for those of us who would like to know this information is that we ought to get it eventually, after some formalities have been completed. KERA has a nice long story about this.

In a letter Monday, EIA Administrator Joseph DeCarolis said the agency intends to continue a process it had already begun under the Paperwork Reduction Act’s notice-and-comment procedure whether to request the Office of Management and Budget to approve data collection of the type described in the emergency data collection.

“If EIA decides to go forward with proposing an information collection covering data of [that] type, … EIA will publish a notice in the Federal Register setting forth the proposed information collection. … That would trigger a public comment period of at least 30 days, after which the Director of OMB could make a decision whether or not to approve the information collection,” DeCarolis’ letter states.

That process could take up to a year to complete, according to Thomas Cmar, a senior attorney for Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization. Cmar said the Feb. 22 lawsuit by the Texas Blockchain Council and Riot Platforms “was about the timing and the process that the government followed to put out a survey.”

“The EIA collects this type information from every energy user in the U.S., so there is no question that they have the authority to collect this information,” Cmar said. “It’s just a question of whether this industry is willing to cooperate by making this information publicly available to the extent it should be publicly available.”

In an email Wednesday, Lee Bratcher, president and founder of the Texas Blockchain Council, shared Electric Reliability Council of Texas data showing what he called “how helpful bitcoin miners are when demand for power increases.”

Bratcher said bitcoin miners in Texas make up over 95% of what ERCOT calls “large flexible loads.”

“There is about 2,450 [megawatts] of bitcoin mining in Texas, but this load isn’t adding to peak demand since, as the data shows, miners curtail their consumption during peak demand,” Bratcher said in his email.

During those times of curtailing consumption, bitcoin miners such as Riot Platforms can sell their prepurchased power back to the grid for millions. As The Texas Tribune reported in January, Riot made $32 million by reducing its energy use last August.

Cmar called it a loophole in Texas law and another reason — along with lack of regulations — that crypto miners are coming to Texas.

“More and more, the price that Texans will pay for power will be controlled by the big bitcoin mining facilities [due to] the massive percentage they use from the grid,” Cmar said.

[…]

The EIA is primarily a research organization that takes data from energy users and puts out reports. Those reports show how much energy different industries use, where it is sourced from and how much they are paying for it. It’s a well-established process, year after year, that Cmar said state regulators around the country rely on to do their energy planning.

By the EIA initiating the emergency data collection, Cmar said, they were trying to “level the playing field” by requiring crypto mining companies to start reporting their energy usage.

“The lawsuit in Waco seems to be trying to push it as long as possible,” Cmar said.

There’s more, so read the rest. I’ll be very interested to see what data we get, whenever we do get it. I feel reasonably confident that the general public would support some sort of regulatory scheme that would limit how much energy the coinminers can use and especially how much money they can get by reducing their energy usage, which is a thing they can take advantage of but the rest of us can’t. Allowing everyone to benefit instead of just a chosen few would also be popular, I daresay. None of this will happen under the current regime, of course. You know what that means.

Posted in Legal matters, The great state of Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Starr County DA disciplined for that self-induced abortion murder charge from 2022

It’s something. Not much, but something.

A Texas prosecutor has been disciplined for allowing murder charges to be filed against a woman who self-managed an abortion in a case that sparked national outrage.

Starr County District Attorney Gocha Ramirez agreed to pay a $1,250 fine and have his license held in a probated suspension for 12 months in a settlement reached with the State Bar of Texas. Ramirez will be able to continue practicing law as long as he complies with the terms of the January settlement, which was first reported by news outlets on Thursday.

The case stirred anger among abortion rights advocates when the 26-year-old woman was arrested in April 2022 and charged with murder in “the death of an individual by self-induced abortion.”

Under the abortion restrictions in Texas and other states, women who seek abortion are exempt from criminal charges.

Measures to punish such women — rather than health care providers and other helpers — have not picked up traction in legislatures where the idea has been raised.

Ramirez announced the charges would be dropped just days after the woman’s arrest but not before she’d spent two nights in jail and was identified by name as a murder suspect.

But a State Bar investigation found that he had permitted an assistant to take the case to a grand jury, and knowingly made a false statement when he said he hadn’t known about the charges before they were filed.

“I made a mistake in that case,” Ramirez told The Associated Press in a phone interview Thursday. He said he agreed to the punishment because it allows his office to keep running and him to keep prosecuting cases. He said no one else faces sanctions.

See here and here for the background. For reasons unclear to me, the AP story and the Trib story that followed up on it do not mention the name of the woman who had been arrested. It was reported at the time, you can see it in those earlier links and it will be in the Tags of this post, but I’ll follow their convention for the body of the post. This all happened after SB8, the vigilante bounty hunter law that banned abortion after 6 weeks was passed, but before the Dobbs decision was handed down. Not that it made any difference, I’m just noting it for context.

I’m glad the State Bar took action and I hope this serves as a reminder of what the current state of law is in Texas, but I can’t say I’m impressed. The fine is chump change, and while there was the threat of harsher action if the plea deal wasn’t accepted, it all just feels like the lightest of slaps on the wrist. If this is meant to be a deterrent for the next DA, one who may be more venal than Gocha Ramirez (who strikes me as more inept than anything else) was, then I have my doubts it will hold them back. I hope that hypothetical is never put to the test.

I would also caution anyone who might take comfort from the note that bills aimed at punishing women who self-induce abortions – you know, like by taking mifepristone – have not yet gained traction. I say “yet” deliberately, because this is a one-way ratchet, and I see no evidence that an abatement is coming. The true believers have only just begun. Do not give them the benefit of any doubt.

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The worst judge in Texas

I admit, the competition for this is fierce, and we should draw a distinction between state and federal jurists, but no matter how you define it, Supreme Court Justice John Devine is a strong contender for the title.

Speaking to a group of East Texas voters in September, state Supreme Court Justice John Devine cast himself as the antidote to his “brainwashed” colleagues on the all-Republican bench.

Their “Big Law” backgrounds, he said, had taught them to worry more about legal procedures — “standing, timeliness, or whatever else” — than their duty to uphold the Constitution.

“At times I feel like they would sacrifice the Republic for the sake of the process,” Devine said in the speech, a recording of which was obtained by The Texas Tribune. “My concern is that they all bow down to the altar of process rather than to fidelity to the Constitution. And when I say that, it’s not meant to be malice towards my colleagues. I think it’s how they were trained — how they were brainwashed.”

Particularly egregious, he said, was their ruling against Jeff Younger, a former Texas House candidate who had for years waged a public war against his ex-wife over their young child’s gender identity. In 2022, Younger asked the court to stop his ex from moving their child to California, which had recently passed a refuge law shielding parents fleeing from states that restrict gender-transitioning care for minors from prosecution.

The court declined to hear Younger’s lawsuit, which two justices argued was riddled with errors and based on “tenuous speculation” that the ex-wife would violate a standing court order that already prevented her from pursuing gender-transition therapies for the child.

Devine was still angry at his colleagues when he spoke at the September event.

“I’m not going to stand here sanctimoniously and say, ‘Well he didn’t cross a T or dot an I,’” he said of Younger. “We are talking about great constitutional issues here that will determine whether we survive as a representative republic or not. Are we going to just have it stolen from us? Over process for crying out loud?”

The audio is a rare glimpse into Texas’ typically-insular high court and window into the judicial philosophy of Devine, a former anti-abortion activist whose tenure as a jurist has been shaped by his religious beliefs and deeply conservative politics — sometimes, his critics say, at the expense of his impartiality.

Those concerns are now the focus of an unusually heated primary election for the relatively unknown Texas Supreme Court. Devine is the only justice with a challenger in the statewide, March 5 race, and his opponent, Second District Court of Appeals Judge Brian Walker, has centered his campaign on questions about Devine’s ethics dating back to the mid-1990s.

“We have a judge who just continues to violate ethical rules and the code of judicial conduct that’s written by the Texas Supreme Court itself,” Walker said in an interview. “And if the people can’t trust that judges are going to follow even their own rules, then they’ll have very little confidence that the rule of law truly will prevail.”

It’s a long story and you should read the rest, after you pick yourself up from the floor at the notion that Devine’s “impartiality” is only sometimes affected by his wacko beliefs. In addition to being terrible at his job and totally unconcerned with the law, Devine is also a walking ethics violation and good pals with a couple of horrible sex offenders. You don’t have to be even a moderate to think he’s completely unfit to be a judge, but as a Planned Parenthood clinic defender in the 90s, my grudge against John Devine is decades long and as deep as the ocean. To whatever extent the Find Out PAC is serious about their mission, getting John Devine off the bench has to be a top priority. If you can’t raise a couple million bucks to oust that guy in the year 2024, then I don’t know what we’re doing here.

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PFLAG sues Paxton over intrusive data requests

Time for more deep breathing.

A crook any way you look

An LGBTQ advocacy group is suing the Texas attorney general after his agency requested information that the group said would reveal the identities of its members, including those who sought to stay anonymous in recent suits.

The suit, filed Wednesday by PFLAG, argued that the requests violate its members’ right to free speech, to petition and to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The group accused Attorney General Ken Paxton of targeting people who have fought new anti-transgender laws in recent cases against the state.

Members of the group have previously sued the state over a new law that bans common medical treatments for transgender youth, as well as transition surgeries, which are rare. Their challenge against the ban, known as SB 14, is pending before the Texas Supreme Court.

The plaintiffs in that case include five families who used pseudonyms to protect their identities.

In the new suit, PFLAG asked a judge to block the request. If not, the group asked the judge to extend the deadline and refine its scope.

“The attorney general’s demand of PFLAG National is just another attempt to scare Texas families with transgender adolescents into abandoning their rights and smacks of retaliation against PFLAG National for standing up for those families against the state’s persecution,” said Karen Loewy, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, which is helping represent PFLAG in the suit. “We will fight to protect them.”

[…]

The request focused on information that may show how Texans are accessing transition care after the ban.

For example, in a sworn statement tied to a suit challenging the ban, PFLAG CEO Brian Bond had said that members’ families have been asking the group for “alternative avenues to maintain care in Texas.” The AG’s office requested all documents, meeting minutes and communications pertaining to Bond’s affidavit.

It also asked for any communications with a group of hospitals and clinics in and outside of Texas.

The list includes providers who were issued similar demands from Paxton last year that became public after one of them, Seattle Children’s Hospital, sued to block the request in a case that’s still pending.

The Houston Chronicle reported last month that QueerMed, a Georgia-based telehealth clinic, had also received a demand.

Both were among the list of entities whose communications Texas requested from PFLAG. The others were Texas Children’s Hospital; Baylor College of Medicine; QueerDoc and Plume Health, both telehealth clinics that provide gender transition care.

Bond also mentioned that families had asked his group for help figuring out their “contingency plans” after the ban.

Families were looking for providers “in the event that their primary providers stop providing gender-affirming care or leave the state as a result of SB 14 (Texas’ transition care ban),” Bond said in his affidavit.

The state asked PFLAG for a list of all such providers and any recommendations or referrals the group has made.

See here, here, and here for more on the lawsuit over the ban on gender affirming care, here and here for more on Paxton’s harassment of out of state clinics and hospitals, and here for more on the litigation to stop DFPS investigations into the families of trans kids. Ken Paxton will leave no stone unturned to harass, bully, and torment every one of these people.

I support this litigation and am hoping for the best, but I can’t say I’m very optimistic about it. Ask me again after SCOTx rules on the SB14 lawsuit. We’re going to need some intervention at the federal level because the opportunity to make changes in the state are too far out at this point. It’s going to be bad and it’s going to get worse until then.

I also don’t think you can read this story and not see the parallels with the fight for abortion access and the increasingly despotic attempts to criminalize out of state travel for the purposes of getting abortion care. Ken Paxton and his ilk would like nothing more than to have power over health care providers in other states, to threaten and intimidate them in any way so as to get them to stop providing services they don’t like. As long as he has power, he’s not going to stop trying to achieve that. Texas Public Radio has more.

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The Panhandle wildfires

Scary stuff.

A blanket of snow and rain that descended over the Texas Panhandle on Thursday helped firefighters to quell the spread of the largest wildfire in the state’s history, which has engulfed more than 1 million acres of land and killed at least two people.

But firefighters are racing against the clock to temper down the flames before the weekend, when weather forecasters predict another round of gusty winds and low humidity could again create dangerous fire conditions for the remote region in the top corner of Texas.

The National Weather Service in Amarillo has issued a fire weather watch for Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening, leaving firefighters desperate to rein in the massive blaze before windy conditions return to the region. Friday is expected to be warm and dry.

“We are concerned if we don’t secure everything in the next 48 hours, there is potential it will spread again,” said Adam Turner, public information officer with Texas A&M Forest Service, on Thursday. He said crews are trying to put out as much of the fire now so more areas are secure before winds pick back up.

The Smokehouse Creek fire alone, which broke out Monday afternoon about 65 miles north of Amarillo, surpassed the million acreage mark and spreads across Texas and Oklahoma. It is larger than the East Amarillo Complex fire in 2006, which blazed through 906,000 acres of land and used to hold the record for the state’s largest wildfire.

The Smokehouse Creek fire was followed by a second one to the west called the Windy Deuce fire, which burned 142,000 acres of land across multiple counties north of Amarillo.

Firefighters have only managed to quell the Smokehouse Creek fire by 3%, a figure that has largely remained unchanged since Wednesday. The Windy Deuce Fire in Moore County is 50% contained as of Thursday afternoon, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service, which is tasked by the state to respond to wildfires. Texas A&M Forest Service officials said Thursday they had turned over management of the two wildfires to a federal incident management team because of their massive size.

The cause of the fires is unknown at this time and still under investigation, according to Karen Stafford, Texas A&M Forest Service Fire Prevention Program Coordinator.

The fires have ravaged nearly 2,000 square miles. The winds initially pushed fires to the east, but a cold front abruptly shifted the winds to blow the whole fire line to the south, which made the situation more dangerous.

Two other fires in the region continue to burn but are now largely contained. A third, smaller fire in Hutchinson County was about 10% contained as of Thursday evening. Another nearby smaller blaze was 100% contained, according to the Forest Service. Wildfires have become more frequent and severe in the Western United States because of warmer and drier conditions, factors that are worsening because of climate change.

There’s more, and I’ve got a bunch more links below. This is bad, and as you can see from the map it’s all close enough to Amarillo to potentially have an impact on a big population center (the city of Amarillo has 200K people, and the greater metro area has about 270K). All we can do is hope for the best from the weather and refer to these resources if you want to help in some way.

More info:

Texans in the Panhandle recall towering smoke and darkened skies as wildfires crept near their towns
Texas wildfires: how to help and how to stay safe
Wildfires ravage cattle country, threatening Texas’ agriculture economy
Texas Panhandle wildfires: Officials describe devastating damage, urge precaution as inferno continues
Record winter heat, dry air helped drive Panhandle fire risk
North Texas firefighters deploy to the largest fire in state’s history

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Flying taxis coming to an airport near you

Possibly in time for the FIFA World Cup.

The Houston Airport System says they plan to bring air taxis to the area within the next two years, just in time for the FIFA World Cup in 2026.

“Right now we’re looking at identifying landing and take-off locations for eVTOLs at all three of our airport locations in Bush, Ellington, and Hobby,” Houston Airports Chief Operating Officer Jim Szczesniak said. These eVOTL – electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle – air taxis could hold five passengers, including the pilot, and have space for luggage. There are also plans for autonomous eVTOLs, where the pilot is driving the vehicle from afar, so the small aircraft can take up more passengers.

The planes take off vertically, like a helicopter, but they don’t have combustion engines. Houston Airport System officials, such as Szczesniak, are already making plans for when the technology becomes a reality.

[…]

Szczesniak believes that the service would operate like a ridesharing service, such as Uber, offering rides to and from the airport at a similar price rate to an Uber Black. Approximately 2 million passengers are dropped off at Bush each year. If just one percent of them take air taxis, that would mean an estimated 55 air taxi operations per day, according to Szcezsniak.

The air taxi market is projected to reach $1.5 trillion globally by 2040, according to a study by Morgan Stanley Research. Last summer, the Federal Aviation Administration released an implementation plan outlining the steps it and others will need to safely enable air taxis soon, with a rollout arrival date of 2028.

Houston Airports is in talks with aircraft designers, and manufacturers who are purchasing eVTOLs, and the FAA to successfully launch the integration of these air taxis. United Airlines, which has a hub at Bush International Airport, recently purchased 200 eVTOLs for $1 billion from Archer Aviation, an aircraft manufacturer. It also signed an agreement with another eVTOL maker, Eve Air Mobility, to purchase up to 400 air taxis.

See here and here for some background. A critical piece of missing information here is how much they expect this service to cost. If that back-of-the-envelope estimate is accurate and this is intended for, well, the one percent, then it’s probably going to be pretty expensive, like well over a hundred bucks per person. I’m sure the lawyers are already hashing out what kind of liability waiver one is going to have to sign before embarking. Does any of this sound tempting to you? Leave a comment and let us know. Hat tip to the CityCast Houston podcast for the heads up.

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Dispatches from Dallas, March 2 edition

This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.

This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, we have a grab bag of election news, school news, Dallas city politics, school district news, eclipse news, and zoo babies.

This week’s post was brought to you by Apple Music’s Celtic Essentials playlist, in honor of the North Texas Irish Festival, where I hope to spend a significant part of my weekend.

Also, if you haven’t voted early, please get out and vote in the primary election on Tuesday.

Let’s get right into the grab bag of news for this week, starting with primary news:

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2024 Primary Early Voting, Day Ten: Down to the wire

Here we go, the penultimate day and the day where we really see the uptick in early voting:


Year    Mail    Early    Total
==============================
2012   7,458   23,080   30,538
2016  12,202   53,302   65,504
2020  21,658   82,365  104,023
2024  14,002   65,756   79,758

2012  16,968   47,152   64,120
2016  18,876   79,276   98,152
2020  21,340   65,793   87,133
2024   5,709   80,435   86,144

As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Ten totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.

Here’s the Derek Ryan report through Wednesday. Not a whole lot to say. I think we’re on track for 100K Dem early votes, and 105-110K early Republican votes. Dems did surpass the final 2012 turnout as expected, and are about 7K away from surpassing final early turnout from 2016. The numbers are about where I thought they’d be – they don’t feel loud, but they’re perfectly fine. I’m surrounded by advertising – multiple mailers every day, I’m stalked all over the web and social media by more candidates than I can keep track of, and the other day when we briefly had the KHOU 6 PM news on I saw commercials for Kim Ogg and Judge RK Sandill. Good thing I’m not listening to the radio, I can only imagine how many ads I’d have consumed by now.

I said I’d look back at past primaries to see how final turnout compared to early voting. Here’s what I have, and I must say I was a little surprised:


Election   Early    E-Day    Total  Early%
==========================================
2012 D    38,911   37,575   75,150  51.78%
2012 R    79,507   84,473  163,980  48.49%

2014 D    31,688   22,100   53,788  58.91%
2014 R    77,768   61,935  139,703  55.67%

2016 D    87,605  139,675  227,280  38.54%
2016 R   134,827  194,941  329,768  40.89%

2018 D    92,847   75,135  167,982  55.27%
2018 R    85,925   70,462  156,387  54.94%

2020 D   145,148  183,338  328,426  44.19%
2020 R   107,589   88,134  195,723  54.97%

2022 D    99,514   67,665  167,179  59.53%
2022 R   108,219   85,172  188,391  57.44%

I stopped at 2012 because early voting was still pretty new and novel in 2008, and I didn’t need any more non-Presidential years so I skipped 2010. I have three thoughts about these numbers: One, Republicans generally vote more in primaries than Democrats, even as Democrats have been the bigger share of the November vote since 2016. Two, Republicans have voted more heavily in the EV period than Dems in two of the last three Presidential cycles, which I admit surprises me a little. Given the recent Republican push for Election Day voting only, we’ll see if that trend continues. And three, I’m shocked at how much of the vote has been on Election Day overall, especially in the Presidential years. Given the supersized share of early voting in November in recent years, this was not at all what I expected.

Now, none of this means I’m going to make a prediction about what final turnout will look like this year. I’ve learned that lesson. History suggests that half or more of the Dem vote will still be out as of Friday night. I have no idea what it will be this year, but if you want to guess that Tuesday will be about half the total, at least for Dems, I won’t shake my head at you. I just won’t join you out on that limb.

One more day to go, the busiest day of the EV period. I assume some number of you are saving yourselves for Tuesday, because past history clearly suggests a lot of folks do that. If you haven’t voted yet, when are you planning to do so?

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SB4 blocked by federal court

Good.

A federal judge in Austin on Thursday halted a new state law that would allow Texas police to arrest people suspected of crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally.

The law, Senate Bill 4, was scheduled to take effect Tuesday. U.S. District Judge David Ezra issued a preliminary injunction that will keep it from being enforced while a court battle continues playing out. Texas is being sued by the federal government and several immigration advocacy organizations. Texas appealed the ruling to the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ezra said in his order Thursday that the federal government “will suffer grave irreparable harm” if the law took effect because it could inspire other states to pass their own immigration laws, creating an inconsistent patchwork of rules about immigration, which has historically been upheld as being solely within the jurisdiction of the federal government.

“SB 4 threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice,” Ezra wrote.

Ezra also wrote that if the state arrested and deported migrants who may be eligible for political asylum, that would violate the Constitution and also be “in violation of U.S. treaty obligations.”

“Finally, the Court does not doubt the risk that cartels and drug trafficking pose to many people in Texas,” Ezra wrote in his ruling. “But as explained, Texas can and does already criminalize those activities. Nothing in this Order stops those enforcement efforts. No matter how emphatic Texas’s criticism of the Federal Governments handling of immigration on the border may be to some, disagreement with the federal government’s immigration policy does not justify a violation of the Supremacy Clause.”

See here, here, and here for the background. I don’t think this ruling will come as a surprise to anyone, it’s completely consistent with existing precedent. Of course the goal for Greg Abbott and the radicals he represents is to overturn that precedent on the whims of the current SCOTUS, and that may well pan out for them. In the meantime, they’ll go scurrying to the Fifth Circuit for its usual concierge service. Don’t expect this law to be on hold for too long once they get a crack at it. I would love to be wrong about that. The Chron and the Current have more.

Posted in La Migra, Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Firefighter back pay update

Just tell me what the bill’s gonna be.

Mayor John Whitmire

The city of Houston and its firefighters are nearing an agreement to resolve their bitter, yearslong pay dispute, with specifics expected to take additional weeks or months to finalize, according to city and union officials.

The city typically renegotiates contracts with the firefighters union every few years, but the two parties were unable to reach an agreement in 2017, leading to an ongoing legal battle and leaving the firefighters without a contract ever since.

Mayor John Whitmire’s administration previously set an end-of-February deadline to resolve all aspects of the dispute and outline a plan to finance the substantial payments. While both sides expressed satisfaction with the progress of the negotiations, Whitmire acknowledged the city is unlikely to meet this target.

“The negotiations are complicated and ongoing,” Whitmire said. “We are taking additional time to gather the necessary information and reach a successful conclusion: the best outcome for the City of Houston and our firefighters.”

Still, both City Attorney Arturo Michel and firefighters union president Marty Lancton told the Chronicle they are hopeful they can finalize basic terms in the coming days, possibly at their next meeting Thursday afternoon.

These terms will cover the total back pay the city will pay to firefighters split into broad categories such as base pay, special pay and interest. They will also likely touch on their future contracts for the next three years, according to Michel. However, developing the agreement to the extent that firefighters of various classifications know their exact compensation may take two to three more months, he said.

[…]

The Greater Houston Partnership recently estimated the back pay owed to firefighters could cost the city between $500 million and $600 million. Michel said covering these costs would likely involve a mix of general fund dollars and debt issuance. He added that depending on the bond type, its issuance may require approval from a judge or a referendum from voters.

See here for the previous update. How we pay for this will be almost as important as how much we pay. I figure it would complicate things greatly if a future referendum on bonds for the back payments fails to pass. I think the odds of that are very low, but I do hope someone contemplates a Plan B for just in case. You never know.

UPDATE: Last night around 8:30 PM this hit my inbox.

The City of Houston and the Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association have reached a tentative agreement that will resolve all outstanding pay issues for Houston firefighters dating back to 2017. The announcement comes just seven weeks into Mayor John Whitmire’s term.

“A world-class city like Houston deserves a well-funded fire department to attract and retain talented individuals who are willing to risk their safety for us during our times of need,” said Mayor Whitmire. “Houston’s fire department should be at or near the top among the major cities in our state. This agreement resolves a long – festering pay dispute with firefighters, avoids further unnecessary litigation costs, and allows us to move forward together.”

The Mayor’s sentiments reflect his views to assist and support all City departments and employees. Mayor Whitmire urges “all Houstonians to support every effort to fund public safety in Houston.”

“During my campaign, I committed to Houstonians that I would resolve this issue beginning on my first day in office. I am pleased that we have reached this tentative agreement within the first two months. I will ask City Council members and all Houstonians to support this arrangement once final details are settled with our partners at the Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association.”

Mayor Whitmire also noted that each side made important compromises to reach this agreement and thanked both parties for their efforts over the last two months.

No details in this or the identical press release from the HPFFA that I also received. I’m sure we’ll learn more soon enough. Congratulations on getting to an agreement. Now we await the price tag.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

NASA needs more Mars simulation astronauts

Your next job opportunity.

CHAPEA mission 1 crew (NASA/Josh Valcarcel)

NASA is seeking applicants to participate in its next simulated one-year Mars surface mission to help inform the agency’s plans for human exploration of the Red Planet. The second of three planned ground-based missions called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) is scheduled to kick off in spring 2025.

Each CHAPEA mission involves a four-person volunteer crew living and working inside a 1,700-square-foot, 3D-printed habitat based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The habitat, called the Mars Dune Alpha, simulates the challenges of a mission on Mars, including resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, and other environmental stressors. Crew tasks include simulated spacewalks, robotic operations, habitat maintenance, exercise, and crop growth.

NASA is looking for healthy, motivated U.S. citizens or permanent residents who are non-smokers, 30-55 years old, and proficient in English for effective communication between crewmates and mission control. Applicants should have a strong desire for unique, rewarding adventures and interest in contributing to NASA’s work to prepare for the first human journey to Mars.

The deadline for applicants is Tuesday, April 2.

https://chapea.nasa.gov/

Crew selection will follow additional standard NASA criteria for astronaut candidate applicants. A master’s degree in a STEM field such as engineering, mathematics, or biological, physical or computer science from an accredited institution with at least two years of professional STEM experience or a minimum of one thousand hours piloting an aircraft is required. Candidates who have completed two years of work toward a doctoral program in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, completed a medical degree, or a test pilot program will also be considered. With four years of professional experience, applicants who have completed military officer training or a bachelor of science degree in a STEM field may be considered.

Compensation for participating in the mission is available. More information will be provided during the candidate screening process.

See here and here for some background. The first CHAPEA mission “launched” on June 25 last year and are scheduled to be on that mission for a little more than a year. I presume the crew’s entry into the habitat will be after the first crew emerges, though you’ll get started with training and whatnot before then. If you have the background and the interest, why not check it out? On the list of unique experiences, this would be pretty high up there.

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2024 Primary Early Voting, Day Nine: Two more to go

A slight uptick yesterday in early voting, with the two big days to come.


Year    Mail    Early    Total
==============================
2012   6,719   19,324   22,752
2016  11,367   45,552   56,919
2020  19,400   66,322   85,722
2024  12,448   55,456   67,904

2012  15,239   39,482   54,721
2016  17,964   62,072   84,036
2020  20,393   55,499   75,892
2024   5,162   68,231   73,393

As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Nine totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.

Dems should easily reach final overall turnout from 2012 today. I was asked in the comments of a previous post about comparisons to 2022, and you can see those numbers along with the 2018 numbers here. Both are greater than 2016 but less than 2020, and I’d guess that 2024 tops them, though not by a huge amount.

Here’s the Derek Ryan report through Tuesday. He speculates that final Dem primary turnout statewide will be around where 2022 was, which I will note was one of the best off-year primary totals for Dems in this century, and wonders why the Senate race hasn’t generated more interest. Not that much money spent in it is my guess for that, while the Republican primary is awash in money from voucher vultures and Paxton pimps. That’s my explanation for why the Harris County GOP is running slightly ahead of the Dems despite having fewer local races of interest. Presidential primary plus oligarch cash goes a long way.

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Paxton sues Pornhub under the currently-enforceable state anti-porn law

Welp.

Way more indecent

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton this week sued a major online porn distributor in an effort to enforce a new state law mandating age verification and purported health warnings on adult websites.

The lawsuit, filed in state court in Austin on Monday, accuses the adult-entertainment company Aylo of violating House Bill 1181, a new state content-warning law for websites. A Montreal-based company, Aylo runs a number of major online porn brands, including Pornhub.

Among other rules, HB 1181 requires that porn websites “use reasonable age verification methods” to “verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18 years of age or older.” It also orders such websites to post controversial health warnings that pornography “weakens brain function,” “is proven to harm human brain development” and “is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses.”

According to the lawsuit, minors who visit Aylo’s pornographic websites are either “immediately presented with sexual material” or “are asked to complete the trivial step of clicking an ‘enter’ button.” As a result, the suit says, Aylo has completely failed to comply with HB 1181.

The suit seeks an injunction forcing Aylo to use age verification and display the required health warnings. Texas also wants hefty fines, including $1.6 million in civil penalties plus $10,000 per day dating back to Sept. 19, 2023 — the day when the Fifth Circuit first greenlit the law.

[…]

Last year, a coalition of porn-industry insiders — including a free-speech group focused on pornography — won an injunction blocking the law.

Their original suit, filed in federal court in Austin, described HB 1181 as part of a “long tradition of unconstitutional — and ultimately failed — governmental attempts to regulate and censor free speech on the internet.” Rather than imposing new content restrictions, “Texas could easily spread its ideological, anti-pornography message through public service announcements and the like,” the suit argued.

U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra, a Reagan appointee, ultimately found those arguments persuasive. Among other factors, he determined that rules requiring health warnings in 14-point font were overly burdensome and ambiguous, as “text size on webpages is typically measured by pixels, not points.”

In his ruling from August, Ezra also cited Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a longstanding standard that protects online publishers from liability for content produced by third-parties. Without explaining its reasoning, the conservative Fifth Circuit overruled that injunction, including with a one-page administrative stay in September. Those orders paved the way for Texas to enforce the law, including with this latest suit.

See here, here, and here for the background. It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where Aylo will want this to actually get to a courtroom, because it sure seems like they’d lose. What they would surely prefer is either a quick settlement or to drag things out for as long as possible in the hope that the Free Speech Coalition eventually succeeds in getting the law permanently blocked. I don’t know what their risk tolerance is or whether the timeline of the federal lawsuit is amenable to that strategy. We’ll see how this plays out. Bloombeg Law has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The state of robotaxis in 2024

Good read.

A driverless Cruise car sits in traffic on Austin Street in downtown Houston on Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. Photo: Jay R. Jordan/Axios

In 2023, it almost felt as if the promise of robotaxis was soon to be fulfilled. Hailing a robotaxi had briefly become the new trendy thing to do in San Francisco, as simple and everyday as ordering a delivery via app. However, that dream crashed and burned in October, when a serious accident in downtown San Francisco involving a vehicle belonging to Cruise, one of the leading US robotaxi companies, ignited distrust, casting a long shadow over the technology’s future.

Following that and another accident, the state of California suspended Cruise’s operations there indefinitely, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation of the company. Since then, Cruise has pulled all its vehicles from the road and laid off 24% of its workforce.

Despite that, other robotaxi companies are still forging ahead. In half a dozen cities in the US and China, fleets of robotaxis run by companies such as Waymo and Baidu are still serving anyone who would like to try them. Regulators in places like San Francisco, Phoenix, Beijing, and Shanghai now allow these vehicles to drive without human safety operators.

However, other perils loom. Robotaxi companies need to make a return on the vast sums that have been invested into getting them up and running. Until robotaxis become cheaper, they can’t meaningfully compete with conventional taxis and Uber. Yet at the same time, if companies try to increase adoption too fast, they risk following in Cruise’s footsteps. Waymo, another major robotaxi operator, has been going more slowly and cautiously. But no one is immune to accidents.

“If they have an accident, it’s going to be big news, and it will hurt everyone,” says Missy Cummings, a professor and director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center at George Mason University. “That’s the big lesson of this year. The whole industry is on thin ice.”

MIT Technology Review talked to experts about how to understand the challenges facing the robotaxi industry. Here’s how they expect it to change in 2024.

The first challenge given is that right now at least the robotaxis are so much more expensive than regular old human-driven taxis. That’s partly because of the plethora of new technology that these vehicles carry, partly because of the need for remote human operators for those that don’t have emergency drivers, and as one quoted expert put it “These companies are competing with an Uber driver who, in any estimate, makes less than minimum wage, has a midpriced car, and probably maintains it themselves”. I wrote a long time ago when Uber was in the robotaxi space that switching to autonomous vehicles would completely upend their existing business model, as they would now have to own, maintain, store, and insure their entire fleet rather than depend on their drivers to provide it. I’m sure at some point as the technology matures and other costs subside that this model will make more sense than and be more competitive with the existing one. I just don’t know how long that will take and if the companies that are pursuing this will be willing to spend the money and incur the losses it will take to get there. The Cruise experience isn’t a good omen for them. Go read the rest.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The state of robotaxis in 2024

Texas blog roundup for the week of February 26

The Texas Progressive Alliance knows that banning IVF won’t be the end of it for the forced-birth zealots as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading

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2024 Primary Early Voting, Day Eight: That was Tuesday

We are at the point of the early voting calendar where I begin to run out of clever intros.


Year    Mail    Early    Total
==============================
2012   6,381   16,371   22,752
2016  10,970   34,419   45,389
2020  18,503   54,325   72,728
2024  10,440   47,185   57,625

2012  13,509   33,563   47,072
2016  16,433   49,692   66,125
2020  19,690   47,281   66,971
2024   4,454   57,913   62,367

As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Eight totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.

I don’t really have a lot to add at this point. Final total turnout in the 2012 Democratic primary was about 76K, and we’ll probably reach that on Thursday. Final early voting turnout for 2016 was about 86K, and if we don’t reach that on Thursday we’ll get there and more on Friday. Dems still have a lot of mail ballots out, I’d guess maybe 5K of them get returned by Friday, but it could be more. Overall I’d say this is going more or less as I thought it might. What do you think? Have you voted yet?

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The HPD suspended cases situation

I don’t know what to make of this.

A review of sex crimes cases suspended with an internal code citing a lack of personnel has expanded department-wide to include more than 264,000 cases, Police Chief Troy Finner said Monday.

The dropped cases makes up about 10% of the department’s 2.8 million filed since 2016, Finner said. About 100,000 of those are property crimes, he wrote.

Doug Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers Association, said he was concerned about the latest revelations. The union president said Monday at least three of the department’s division Standard Operating Procedures included directives about when to use the code to close cases.

The divisions included auto theft, vehicular crimes and major assaults and family violence, Griffith said. The major assault guidelines were signed off on by Finner Dec. 1, 2023, Griffith said.

[…]

Griffith said employees were instructed they could use the code on misdemeanor cases with little solvability. He said other cases could be suspended using that code, but those could be reopened if someone reaches out to the department seeking charges, Griffith said.

“But that’s incumbent on victims reaching out to authorities, which is a problem,” Griffith said.

Griffith previously said about 2,000 sexual assault cases had been dropped because of the lack of personnel code, before Finner revealed it was closer to 4,000.

This is building on an earlier story about the use of the code on sexual assault cases.

The Houston Police Department’s review into sexual assault investigations revealed the number of closed cases since 2021. Police administrators have launched an investigation to determine who was closing out cases using the code to signify lack of personnel, Griffith said Wednesday, one day before Chief Troy Finner is set to address the cases in a Thursday afternoon news conference. But there’s no reason to believe sexual assault investigators were the only ones who’ve used it, Griffith said.

“We didn’t even know there was such a code,” Griffith said. “We don’t know how many other types of crimes were cleared this way. It’s a large investigation to see how many and what types of cases this affects.”

Griffith didn’t have specific numbers of investigators in the sexual assault crimes unit, but said most investigative units were down between 10% to 15%. He explained that the department provides codes to close cases in many different instances – perhaps a complainant wants to withdraw charges, or maybe investigators run out of leads in another case, Griffith said. But lack of manpower shouldn’t be a reason, he argued.

The department investigated between 20,000 and 23,000 felony cases each year since 2021.

Griffith said he suspects someone started intentionally using the code and then, for whatever reason, a supervisor allowed it to continue.

[…]

In January, a new group, the Harris County Sexual Assault Response Team, released a report showing of the more than 2,200 sexual assaults reported to the county’s largest law enforcement agencies over nearly two years, 60 led to convictions while hundreds more remain unresolved.

The response team was created in 2021 after state lawmakers passed a law requiring counties to establish unified groups that share resources and information about local sex crimes. The law, Senate Bill 476, requires the team to create a protocol on how sexual assaults should be investigated and an annual report detailing the number of sexual assaults reported, investigated and prosecuted in a given year.

Sonia Corrales, deputy CEO for the Houston Area Women’s Center and one of the members of the new response team, said she wasn’t sure whether the report is connected to Finner’s announcement. But she said she is hopeful that through the review, leaders are doing what they can to make sure victims of sexual assault get the help they need.

“I hope by looking at this, we can get to the root of the problem and address the issue,” she said.

I mean, I can totally understand how HPD could get overwhelmed at times and do something like this as a matter of triage. The fact that the use of this code continued long after investigators were told to stop doesn’t say much for oversight within the department. That the solve rate for sexual assaults was barely three percent is mind-boggling, and we wouldn’t even know that figure if it hadn’t been for that new state law. This revelation unfortunately explains a lot, not in a good way.

As bad as all this is, at least now we know about it and can try to do something about it. The Mayor is going to spend more money on HPD because that’s what he promised during his campaign, and that should have some effect. But if we’re not using our police resources effectively and we’re not tracking results and holding them accountable when those results are unsatisfactory, then we’re not going to get anything different. Up to Mayor Whitmire and HPD leadership what happens from here.

Posted in Crime and Punishment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

You’re not going to fall for Greg Abbott’s BS about IVF, are you?

Let’s count the ways in which he dodged and weaved.

Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday that he supports Texas families having access to in vitro fertilization treatments and has “no doubt” the state will address issues raised by a recent controversial court ruling out of Alabama. Abbott did not call on the Legislature to take specific action to protect IVF treatment.

“Texas is a pro-life state, and we want to do everything possible that we can to maintain Texas being a pro life state,” Abbott told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday. “But at the very same time … we as a state want to ensure that we promote life, we bring more life into the world and we empower parents to be able to have more children.”

Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under a state law that allows parents to sue for wrongful death of minor children.

“Unborn children are ‘children’,” Alabama Supreme Court Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the ruling, “without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics.”

[…]

The ruling applies only to Alabama and does not impact the legality of IVF treatment in Texas. But it has opened thorny questions about “fetal personhood” — the legal concept that a fetus should be afforded the same rights as a living child — that many Republicans have tried to sidestep, especially in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential elections.

In Sunday’s interview, Abbott voiced his support for former President Donald Trump’s statement on the issue, in which Trump said he strongly supports the availability of IVF “in every State in America” for couples “who are trying to have a precious baby.”

[…]

Abbott said Texas wants to make it easier, not harder, for people to have babies, and IVF “is a way of giving life to even more babies.”

“I think the goal is to make sure that we can find a pathway to ensure that parents who otherwise may not have the opportunity to have a child will be able to have access to the IVF process and become parents and give life to babies,” Abbott said.

But Abbott, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, said there were specific scenarios and fact questions that would need to be parsed, including what happens to the frozen embryos if the person who created them died or the couple got divorced.

“These are very complex issues where I’m not sure everybody has really thought about what all the potential problems are,” Abbott said. “And as a result, no one really knows what the potential answers are.”

The article also reminds us of a wrongful death lawsuit filed in Galveston by a man who alleges that three women helped his ex-wife get an abortion. It was a wrongful death lawsuit in Alabama that led to the anti-IVF ruling, and the plaintiff’s lawyers in this suit include extreme forced birther Jonathan Mitchell, who I assure you knows exactly what he’s doing here.

As for Abbott, note that nowhere in that word salad of his does he ever say that the Alabama Supreme Court decision was wrong or bad or even that he disagreed with it. No, they just went a little further than he’d have gone, that’s all. Nothing to worry your pretty little head about. He’s not going to propose any specific laws to prevent what happened in Alabama from happening here, nor does he voice any support for a national law to protect IVF, like the one that Republicans blocked in the Senate in 2022. (To be fair, Abbott is far from alone in not knowing how to respond to this.)

Also, too, he does not mention that the Texas Republican Party platform “[calls] on Texas schools to teach the “dignity of the preborn human” and that life begins at fertilization”, which is exactly the thing you have to believe in to get to a court ruling against IVF on the grounds that all of those frozen embryos are actually real live children. Nor does he mention the Life At Conception Act, introduced last year in the House and featuring 17 cosponsors from Texas, which declares that “the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual comes into being”. And while Abbott is out there being mealy-mouthed, his buddies at CPAC are applauding the Alabama ruling and calling on other Republicans to support it.

So yeah. Don’t be a chump. Greg Abbott may want you to think he’ll protect access to IVF, but literally everything about him says otherwise. What are you going to believe? Reform Austin, Axios, and the WaPo have more.

Posted in Show Business for Ugly People | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Preparing for the World Cup

FIFA requires real grass for its World Cup stadia, so NRG will be installing grass in 2026.

The World Cup won’t hit Houston for another 28 months, but NRG Stadium and city officials already are preparing for the seven matches coming to town in June and July of 2026.

NRG Stadium is one of 16 stadiums in North America — 11 in the United States, three in Mexico and two in Canada — hosting the next World Cup with Houston getting a Round of 32 match on June 29 and a Round of 16 match on July 4. The stadium’s five group stage matches will be on June 14, 17, 20, 23 and 26.

The stadium itself is undergoing some improvements, including a $34 million project to upgrade the sustainability and efficiency of the building. That will include all the lighting throughout NRG Park being replaced with LED lighting and the stadium lights being improved to make sure it properly covers the wider soccer pitch.

The most noticeable change will be the grass field required by FIFA for all World Cup matches. The plan is for grass to be installed in the stadium at the beginning of May 2026 to give it more than a month to settle.

“To put it in layman’s terms, we’re going to have one of the greatest grass fields that you can have,” said Chris Canetti, president of Houston’s World Cup host committee. “This is a requirement for the FIFA World Cup. We will have a substantial system that’s put in place for this grass field. We’re going to build it as though it was going to be permanent. However, it’s going to have to be taken out at the end.”

The Texans originally played on grass inside the stadium before replacing it with artificial turf in 2015.

“Whether or not a grass surface can exist in the future is certainly not for us to determine,” said Canetti, deferring to the Texans.

See here for some background. As I recall, the reason why they replaced the grass that had been in then-Reliant Stadium was that they had a hard time keeping it alive, and eventually decided it wasn’t worth the effort. They’ll only need it for seven games in a three-week stretch so one would think this is well within reason, but I’m sure everyone here is aware of that history.

Did I say “NRG Stadium”? Because it won’t be called that while the FIFA folks are in town.

NRG Energy is paying a lot of money for its name to be on the Houston Texans stadium, but none of that will be apparent when World Cup matches are played in NRG Stadium in 2026.

FIFA refuses to acknowledge corporate stadium names, despite many naming rights agreements being in place long before host cities even put in a bid to lure the tournament to town.

So, due to FIFA regulations, the seven matches at NRG Stadium actually will be played at “Houston Stadium.” It will be the same for all 16 stadiums hosting World Cup matches. SoFi Stadium will be called “Los Angeles Stadium”, the Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium will be designated “Dallas Stadium”, even though it’s located in Arlington, and MetLife Stadium gets the even clunker moniker “New York/New Jersey Stadium.”

“Going way back to the bid process, there’s always things that you work through before you even bid for an event, so we are super thankful to our corporate community, especially NRG in this case for stepping up and agreeing even before we put the bid in to help us with this,” Harris County Houston Sports Authority CEO Janis Burke said.

[…]

FIFA’s rules require stadium signs to be covered and not referred to during game broadcasts unless those companies strike separate agreements with the governing body. Deals struck outside of FIFA are considered “ambush marketing” that devalues their own sponsorships.

“We consider ambush marketing to be a priority in our brand protection work, as this practice puts FIFA’s commercial program directly at risk by effectively devaluing official sponsorship,” the organization posted on its website. “The World Cup tournaments are the result of significant efforts to develop and promote the tournaments, something which would not be possible without the financial support of our commercial affiliates. Ambush marketers try to take advantage of the goodwill and positive image generated by the FIFA tournaments without contributing to their organization.”

Well, we certainly wouldn’t want to mess with FIFA’s marketing integrity. I’m wondering if NRG will get some kind of rebate for this period, like how the cable company will offer to prorate your monthly bill when there’s an extended outage. Oh, and speaking as a New York boy, they could have done worse than “New York/New Jersey Stadium” – they could have called it “Tri-State Metropolitan Area Stadium”.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

2024 Primary Early Voting, Day Seven: Week 2 begins

Week Two is where the action really begins, though usually you don’t see the first hint of it until Wednesday. Let’s check the board:


Year    Mail    Early    Total
==============================
2012   6,295   13,763   18,058
2016  10,180   28,367   38,547
2020  16,651   44,349   61,000
2024   9,281   40,016   49,297

2012  13,339   28,411   41,750
2016  14,681   40,537   55,218
2020  18,949   39,216   58,165
2024   4,291   48,728   53,019

As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Seven totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.

Republicans had a slightly better day than Democrats but they’re still within shouting distance of each other. Dems also still have about 16K mail ballots that haven’t been returned yet. Republicans have returned about half of their mail ballots so only have about 4K more to go. That could help make up some of the difference.

Here’s the Derek Ryan report, which runs through the weekend. Through Sunday, 521,000 people have voted in the Republican Primary (2.9% of all registered voters), and 257,000 people have voted in the Democratic Primary (1.4% of all registered voters). Out of curiosity, I went back to my six day report and calculated that as of the weekend, Harris County was responsible for about 15.1% of all Democratic primary votes statewide, and 8.4% of all Republican votes. That’s more or less in line with recent figures for Dems, and a furtherance of the decline for Republicans. I don’t know if that means anything, I’m just noting it for the record.

I feel like I saw more “I voted” posts on Facebook yesterday among my friends than on previous days. Have you voted yet? If not, when?

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments