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February 26th, 2023:

Weekend link dump for February 26

Feb 26th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

“No one has a playbook in politics for shooting down UFOs that are not aliens.”

“Bill Watterson, the creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, is releasing a dark and adult graphic novel later this year.”

“After years of Marvel and Star Wars movies and shows inundating screens big and small, Disney is putting the brakes on the output of some of its biggest franchises and brands”.

RIP, Richard Belzer, comedian and actor best known for Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

“NASA isn’t announcing the existence of extraterrestrial life. But if the last two weeks show anything, it’s if the agency ever breaks such news, the world may have trouble understanding.”

RIP, Barbara Bosson, actor best known for Hill Street Blues, Murder One, and the immortal Cop Rock.

“Kevin McCarthy makes sensitive security footage available to the insurrectionists’ propagandist”.

RIP, Hugh Harris, known as “The Voice of NASA” for his time as public affairs officer there.

RIP, B.J. “Red” McCombs, San Antonio businessman and former owner of the San Antonio Spurs, who brought that franchise to town before they joined the NBA.

Yes indeed, let them fight.

“It is against free speech to stop us from fixating on the genitals.”

“Let’s just get this out of the way: the Hays Code was awful. It was sexist, racist, homophobic nonsense that set film back decades and reinforced a lot of cruel moralizing that weakened the gaps between art and faith, thus ensuring decades of culture war bullshit. It baffles me that I even have to say this in 2023. Anyone who knows anything about the history of Hollywood is well aware of how the code caused so much damage to the art form of cinema. Yet a tedious strain of online scorn and politically tangled discourse has seen way too many people acting as though what pop culture needs in the 21st century is a return to mandated puritanism.”

“As privilege discourse has attempted to trundle on over the past few years, it has really stagnated. We circle back over the same ground constantly, but don’t spend much time discussing what a good life truly means, who is getting what they want out of the world, and which of us is really enjoying ourselves. Who are life’s winners, in other words, and who are the losers.”

“Isn’t it comforting to have your worst suspicions confirmed?”

Assholes of a feather flock together.

“I have studied the Soviet and the Russian economy for over four decades. I believe there are four reasons the sky has yet not fallen in on the Russian economy.”

RIP, Duangphet Phromthep, one of the 12 boys rescued from a flooded Thai cave after a weekslong operation that drew global attention in 2018.

“Ten Dazzling Celestial Events to See in 2023″.

This will be the final season of Succession, so enjoy it while you still can.

Abortion funds remain protected from prosecution

Feb 26th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Good news, in the kind of world where this is needed at all, for now.

A federal judge issued a favorable ruling for Texas abortion funds, indicating they likely cannot be criminally charged for helping people travel out of state to terminate their pregnancies.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman temporarily blocked prosecutors in eight counties from pursuing charges against anyone who helps someone get an abortion outside of Texas. But his ruling indicated he believes the laws he has enjoined them from enforcing may not actually be in effect at all.

This lawsuit, filed two months after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, was brought by abortion funds, nonprofit groups that help pay for abortions and related expenses, including out-of-state travel, hotels and child care.

After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the funds stopped paying for Texans to leave the state, citing their fear of being prosecuted under the state’s intersecting abortion bans. In the lawsuit, they cited examples of Attorney General Ken Paxton and state lawmakers expressing an intent to bring charges against abortion funds.

But Pitman ruled Friday that Paxton could not enforce Texas’ abortion bans against anyone who helped pay for an abortion out of state and dismissed him from the suit.

Pitman analyzed Texas’ three abortions laws: the ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, commonly known as Senate Bill 8; the so-called trigger law, which went into effect in July; and the pre-Roe statutes, which were in effect before the U.S. Supreme Court deemed them unconstitutional in 1973.

Since SB 8 is enforced through private civil lawsuits, neither Paxton nor local prosecutors play any role in enforcing that statute, Pitman noted.

Paxton and the district attorneys do have the power to enforce the trigger law, which comes with a sentence of up to life in prison and a minimum $100,000 penalty. The law criminalizes anyone who performs an abortion, except to save the life of the pregnant person.

But it cannot be enforced beyond state lines, Pitman found.

The law “does not express any intent, much less a clear one, to apply extraterritorially,” he wrote. “Accordingly, there is no plausible construction of the statute that allows the Attorney General or local prosecutor to penalize out-of-state abortions.”

That leaves only the pre-Roe statutes, which come with sentences of two to 10 years in prison for anyone who performs or “furnishes the means for” an abortion. Pitman found that the laws could potentially be interpreted to criminalize someone in Texas who helped someone pay for an abortion out of state.

“In other words, if an abortion takes place outside of Texas, a plausible (albeit unlikely) construction of the statute authorizes prosecution for ‘furnishing the means’ of that abortion if that ‘furnishing’ takes place in Texas,” Pitman wrote. “The pre-Roe laws prohibit ‘furnishing the means’ within the state, and do not necessarily limit that prohibition to abortions which occur in Texas.”

Pitman enjoined the named district attorneys — who represent Travis, Washington, Blanco, Burnell, Llano, San Saba and Caldwell counties — and a county attorney, representing Burleson County, from enforcing the pre-Roe statutes against the abortion funds while the case proceeds.

There is no civil penalty associated with the pre-Roe statutes, so Pitman dismissed Paxton from this line of inquiry — and thus the entire suit.

But in the ruling, Pitman also argued that the pre-Roe statutes have been repealed and therefore cannot be used to prosecute anyone.

See here for the background. I assume the Travis County DA, which was never going to willingly prosecute anything abortion-related, is there for technical reasons having to do with where state government and by extension the AG reside. This Reuters story has a couple of paragraphs that add a bit of clarity:

Pitman’s order, which is preliminary, will remain in place while abortion funding groups, including Fund Texas Choice, The North Texas Equal Access Fund and The Lilith Fund for Reproductive Equity, move forward with a lawsuit seeking to block enforcement of the laws.

The order applies only to five individual local prosecutors who are named as defendants in the case, though the groups have said they will seek to expand their case to include a class of all local prosecutors in the state. Pitman said that he could issue an order applying to a broader group of prosecutors in the future, after they have had a chance to appear in court.

In other words, this is a first step and there will be more cases like these to get injunctions against other prosecutors while the case gets argued on its merits for a final ruling. And then there will be appeals – there was no indication in the news as of Saturday that an appeal was planned, but by now we all know how this goes. I expect there to be more news about this, in the medium term if not the short term. Isn’t everything so much simpler now that the question of abortion access has been left up to the states? Reason has more.

Harris County libraries to eliminate fines

Feb 26th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Good.

Harris County residents no longer will have to pay late fees on overdue library books, formalizing a policy the 26 branches of the county library started during the pandemic.

Harris County Commissioners Court voted unanimously on Tuesday to approve a measure making the elimination of late fees permanent, following Houston City Council’s decision last month to do the same at the Houston Public Library.

“The county will join the city of Houston, New York, San Diego, Nashville, Baltimore, San Francisco, and League City,” Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis said.

More than 1.8 million people have library cards with the Harris County Public Library system. The library’s roughly 2 million items were checked out more than 9.5 million times last year.

Late fees make up less than 1 percent of the library’s annual budget, according to Edward Melton, executive director of the Harris County Public Library system.

“During the pandemic, we stopped taking fines,” Melton said. “It’s really a very minor impact that we have on our budget, but we do see that with not having fines, people are more prone to bring back materials and also use the library, because that’s one of the barriers in terms of people not coming back.”

See here for the background; sadly, the link to my favorite (and relevant to this issue) Bloom County comic has expired, because Facebook be like that. I don’t think I had considered before how little of their budgets library fines must be. Not surprising, since they’re ten cents a day and are capped at three bucks total, but still. Some cultural axioms just get very deeply internalized. Anyway, good for HCPL, and good for the Houston library system for leading the way.

A bigger House

Feb 26th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Proposals like this come along every few years.

The size of the House of Representatives hasn’t kept up with population growth for a very long time—in fact, it hasn’t even tried to—but one congressman has a solution.

Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon just introduced a bill that would increase the House to 585 members from its present 435 following the next census in 2030, reducing the number of constituents each representative would have and, hopefully, making government more responsive and more reflective. While the proposed change wouldn’t take effect for another 10 years, we’ve envisioned how it would have affected congressional reapportionment following the 2020 census in the map at the top of this story (click here to enlarge).

Up until the 1910s, the House had increased in size nearly every decade as the population grew, but with only a two-year exception—when Alaska and Hawaii first became states—it’s been stuck at 435 members since 1913. At the time, America’s population was just one-quarter of what it currently is, yet the number of seats in the House has been frozen in place by law since 1929. Consequently, the number of constituents in the average House district has grown from 210,000 after the 1910 census to 761,000 today, and that number could pass 1 million in the coming decades if the law does not change.

[…]

The House’s large ratio of constituents to representatives is also a major outlier among advanced democracies, and scholars have long noted that the size of the lower chamber in most country’s parliaments tends to correspond to the cube root of their population. If the U.S. adhered to that formula, the House would now have about 690 seats, making it more than one-half larger than it is today.

Blumenauer’s bill doesn’t expand the House quite that much; rather, he explains his 585 figure by noting that 149 total seats have shifted between states during reapportionment since the current cap of 435 was reached and adds one more to keep an odd number of members. Nonetheless, his proposed one-third increase could still go a long way toward making the chamber itself more representative of America’s diverse population.

It’s been a few years, but I’ve seen proposals like this before. They’re philosophically sensible but there are practical obstacles, such as creating the office space for all those extra people, and that’s before you get to the resistance any number of folks would have to a very literal expansion of government. I noted this mostly to point out that here in Texas, the problem is even more exacerbated at the state level, mostly in the Senate. Twenty years ago, there were 31 State Senators and 32 members of Congress, which meant that they each represented about the same number of people. But as Texas has gotten six more members of Congress after the last two Census counts, the gap between the size of a Senate district and a Congressional district is growing. Given the continued growth of Texas, it makes just as much sense to expand the size of the Legislature – yes, both chambers, for the same reasons as cited above. And also for the same reasons, it ain’t gonna happen. Look for me to write another post like this in another decade or so, and we can acknowledge the same outcome for the same reasons once again. Daily Kos has more.