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March 12th, 2023:

Weekend link dump for March 12

“If this were any other state, Presley might arguably be an outright favorite to win this race. The problem, of course, is that he happens to be running in Mississippi, which has among the highest levels of racial polarization in the nation.”

“Japan discovered it has 7,000 more islands than previously thought thanks to advanced survey mapping technology.”

“That is because the lab leak is still missing the key element of the U.N. cholera story that made it more than just a bunch of rumors: an actual, coherent theory of the case that could be refuted or confirmed.”

“In other words, it means that the music I think of as cool is, now, officially, no longer cool. It has become so wholly and officially un-cool that it can now be played as harmless background noise in a Big Box store in the white western suburbs of Philadelphia.”

“So, this isn’t One Weird Trick to solve it, it’s a reminder to neurodivergent folks that a lot of politeness is a performance of a lie so that people, especially white people, can survive cognitive dissonance and pretend nothing is bad if we all just use our company manners.”

What the dogs of Chernobyl can teach us.

RIP, Judy Heumann, renowned disability rights activist.

“How Attacks Against Obamacare Turned Into Tools to Protect Abortion Access”.

Peak TV was awesome. Trough TV, not so much.

Is your tap water turning you gay? Spoiler alert: No, it is not.

RIP, Gary Rossington, guitarist and last surviving founding member of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“Toblerone is no longer Swiss enough to feature the Matterhorn on its packaging”.

RIP, Barbara Everitt Bryant, first woman to lead the US Census Bureau.

Keeping track of time on the moon is trickier than you might think.

“The real lesson of the 2022 election is that the country is ready to move on from extremists and traitors. And yet they’re going right back to it because it’s who they are.”

“The World Baseball Classic, right now, is a half-measure, and most of its problems can be traced to it being played in March. You’re not getting the best players, you’re not getting the biggest audience, in March. By moving half the event into the summer, you can address those problems and start the Classic on its way to becoming what MLB wants it to be: baseball’s World Cup.”

RIP, Lee Ellis, former Houston restauranteur. I can attest that both the chicken and the donuts at Lee’s Fried Chicken and Donuts, which was in my neighborhood, were very good.

“The bewildering descent of Scott Adams and Dilbert“.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately.”

RIP, Ian Falconer, stage designer and author/illustrator of the Olivia children’s books, which our family dearly loved.

RIP, Chaim Topol, actor best known for playing Tevye in the stage and screen versions of Fiddler on the Roof.

Three reasons to believe that COVID evolved naturally, not in a lab”.

“Pfizer ready to launch RSV vaccines for older adults, pregnant women in US, Europe”.

RIP, Robert Blake, actor best known for the TV show Baretta and for being acquitted of the murder of his wife.

Lock him up.

A great story about Malachy McCourt – author, actor, raconteur and man-about-town – written by one of my high school classmates.

The next frontier in forced birth litigation

This is truly wild, and potentially very scary.

A Texas man is suing three women under the wrongful death statute, alleging that they assisted his ex-wife in terminating her pregnancy, the first such case brought since the state’s near-total ban on abortion last summer.

Marcus Silva is represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general and architect of the state’s prohibition on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. The lawsuit is filed in state court in Galveston County, where Silva lives.

Silva alleges that his now ex-wife learned she was pregnant in July 2022, the month after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and conspired with two friends to illegally obtain abortion-inducing medication and terminate the pregnancy.

The friends texted with the woman, sending her information about Aid Access, an international group that provides abortion-inducing medication through the mail, the lawsuit alleges. Text messages filed as part of the complaint seem to show they instead found a way to acquire the medication in Houston, where the two women lived.

A third woman delivered the medication, the lawsuit alleges, and text messages indicate that the wife self-managed an abortion at home.

The defendants could not immediately be reached for comment. Silva’s wife filed for divorce in May 2022, court records show, two months before the alleged abortion. The divorce was finalized in February. They share two daughters, the lawsuit said.

[…]

The lawsuit alleges that assisting a self-managed abortion qualifies as murder under state law, which would allow Silva to sue under the wrongful death statute. The women have not been criminally charged. Texas’ abortion laws specifically exempt the pregnant person from prosecution; the ex-wife is not named as a defendant.

The legality of abortion in Texas in July 2022 is murky. The state’s trigger law, which makes performing abortion a crime punishable by up to life in prison, did not go into effect until August. But conservative state leaders, including Cain and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have claimed that the state’s pre-Roe abortion bans, which punish anyone who performs or “furnishes the means” for an abortion by up to five years in prison, went back into effect the day Roe v. Wade was overturned in June.

The legal status of these pre-Roe statutes remains a contentious question. In 2004, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that those laws were “repealed by implication,” which U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman reaffirmed in a recent ruling. But Cain and others have repeatedly argued that the Legislature restored those laws into effect with recent abortion legislation. This issue went before the Texas Supreme Court, but the case was dismissed before a final ruling.

In 2021, the Legislature passed a law making it a state jail felony to provide abortion-inducing medication except under extremely specific circumstances.

Joanna Grossman, a law professor at SMU Dedman School of Law, said this lawsuit is “absurd and inflammatory.” Since the pregnant patient is protected from prosecution, there is no underlying cause of action to bring a wrongful death suit in a self-managed abortion, she said.

“But this is going to cause such fear and chilling that it doesn’t matter whether [Mitchell] is right,” Grossman said. “Who is going to want to help a friend find an abortion if there is some chance that their text messages are going to end up in the news? And maybe they’re going to get sued, and maybe they’re going to get arrested, and it’s going to get dropped eventually, but in the meantime, they will have been terrified.”

But it’s possible this lawsuit could get traction, said Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a law professor at South Texas College of Law.

“It’s scary to think that you can be sued for significant damages for helping a friend undertake acts that help her have even a self-medicated abortion,” Rhodes said. “Obviously, the allegations would have to be proven, but there is potentially merit to this suit under Texas’ abortion laws as they exist now.”

Mitchell and Cain intend to also name the manufacturer of the abortion pill as a defendant, once it is identified.

“Anyone involved in distributing or manufacturing abortion pills will be sued into oblivion,” Cain said in a statement.

At first I thought this was an SB8 lawsuit, but it’s not. This is a lawsuit under the “wrongful death” laws, which would make this a lot broader, not to mention not having a $10K cap on how much you can sue for. Among other things, if the plaintiff wins, it would legally establish that a third party can claim an injury when a woman has an abortion. If the alleged father can do that – and bear in mind, the father could be a rapist or an abuser – then who’s to say that a would-be grandparent couldn’t make a similar claim. There are free speech implications as well, if even discussing abortion with a pregnant woman could land you in legal jeopardy. There’s some existing litigation out there about the First Amendment rights of abortion funds, but nothing has been decided yet. All this may sound far-fetched and overly dramatic, but look at the lawyers leading this charge, and what Briscoe Cain – who has said before that he doesn’t just want to make abortion illegal, he wants to make it “unthinkable” – is saying. If anything, I’m not being dark and paranoid enough.

What happens from here is hard to say, but one thing for sure is that these three women are going to be facing many thousands of dollars in legal bills, which among other things may put pressure on them to settle. Again, I’m quite certain that’s all part of the plan. This needs to be much bigger news, and not just in Texas. I’d really like to see national groups and national political figures make a big deal out of this, and not just for fundraising purposes, except to assist the defendants. This is what SCOTUS has unleashed on us, and it’s what these zealots want. We can’t afford to give an inch. The Chron has more.

Court blocks phony “defunding” claim again

From the inbox:

A Travis County District Court temporarily blocked Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar’s determination that Harris County defunded the Precinct 5 Constable’s office in violation of state law. The order means the Comptroller’s determination as to Harris County’s budget is currently legally ineffective; he’s prohibited from reinstating it.

“I’m glad the courts are blocking Comptroller Hegar from his misguided attacks on Harris County,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “Comptroller Hegar violated the law. It’s clear. We’re prepared to fight this in the courts until he does the right thing by the people of Harris County and withdraws his determination. We’re seeing a pattern of state officials trying to get in the business of disrupting Harris County government to score political points. We are not going to stand for it; the five million residents of Harris County deserve better.”

Today’s ruling blocks Comptroller Hegar’s determination that Harris County violated Chapter 120. He made that determination by taking the Precinct 5 budget for the County’s 2022 short fiscal year, annualizing it, and then reasoning that because that annualized number was greater than Precinct 5’s budget for fiscal year 2023, the county violated Chapter 120. That is legally incorrect, even applying the Comptroller’s own math. Chapter 120 requires that if a county’s overall budget decreases from one budget year to the next, a prohibited funding reduction occurs only if the police agency’s share of the county’s overall budget has decreased over that same period. Harris County did not violate that standard because using the Comptroller’s math, Harris County’s overall budget decreases from his annualized version of the 2022 short fiscal year budget to the County’s fiscal year 2023 budget, while Precinct 5’s share of the County’s budget increases.

The next hearing is set for March 23, 2023. A copy of the county’s lawsuit is available here.

See here and here for the background. There’s a Chron story, but it’s mostly this press release plus some others. As was the case the last time around, it looks like this flimsy pretextual claim by the Comptroller is going to get stopped. Hopefully he’ll concede and withdraw the claim like he did the last time. And then hopefully he won’t go for a three-peat. Hopefully.

Muskville, Texas

What did Bastrop do to deserve this?

Elon Musk is planning to build his own town on part of thousands of acres of newly purchased pasture and farmland outside the Texas capital, according to deeds and other land records and people familiar with the project.

In meetings with landowners and real-estate agents, Mr. Musk and employees of his companies have described his vision as a sort of Texas utopia along the Colorado River, where his employees could live and work.

Executives at the Boring Co., Mr. Musk’s tunnel operation, have discussed and researched incorporating the town in Bastrop County, about 35 miles from Austin, which would allow Mr. Musk to set some regulations in his own municipality and expedite his plans, according to people familiar with Mr. Musk’s projects.

They say Mr. Musk and his top executives want his Austin-area employees, including workers at Boring, electric-car maker Tesla Inc. and space and exploration company SpaceX, to be able to live in new homes with below-market rents.

The planned town is adjacent to Boring and SpaceX facilities now under construction. The site already includes a group of modular homes, a pool, an outdoor sports area and a gym, according to Facebook photos and people familiar with the town. Signs hanging from poles read “welcome, snailbrook, tx, est. 2021.”

Mr. Musk, his former girlfriend, who is the singer Grimes, Kanye West and Mr. West’s architectural designer discussed several times last year what a Musk town might look like, according to people familiar with the discussions. Those talks included broad ideas and some visual mock-ups, according to one of the people, but haven’t resulted in concrete plans.

Representatives for Mr. West, who goes by Ye, and Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Under Texas law, a town needs at least 201 residents before it can apply to incorporate, then approval from a county judge. Bastrop County hasn’t received an application from Mr. Musk or any of his entities, a spokeswoman said.

Chap Ambrose, a computer programmer who lives on a hilltop overlooking the new Boring and SpaceX facilities, said he believes “they want it to be secret. They want to do things before anyone knows really what’s happening.”

Mr. Ambrose has been seeking information from Boring and the county about the company’s research and testing of its tunneling machines and how that might affect groundwater and wells in the area.

He has sent drones over the area seeking clues to other structures Boring and SpaceX are building and what they plan to produce in their factories. Drone footage and YouTube videos he posted show the construction of tunnels between the Boring and SpaceX parcels that run beneath a public road.

[…]

Last June, Robert Pugh, then Bastrop County’s director of engineering, complained in an email to Clara Beckett, the county commissioner in charge of planning, that staffers had been “regularly hounded” by employees and contractors of Boring and Starlink, a SpaceX unit. They want the county to “expedite and approve permit applications that are incomplete and not in compliance” with the county’s regulations, Mr. Pugh wrote.

Mr. Pugh left his job that same month and didn’t respond to requests for comment. Ms. Beckett didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The planned town would sit in Bastrop County. An entity called Gapped Bass LLC, of which state records show Boring’s Mr. Davis serving as president, now owns more than 200 acres there, all purchased within the past two years. SpaceX has purchased about 60 more acres. The land was previously owned by longtime ranchers and other Texas families.

As of last year, Boring employees could apply for a home with rents starting at about $800 a month for a two- or three-bedroom, according to an advertisement for employees viewed by the Journal and people familiar with the plans. If an employee leaves or is fired, he or she would have to vacate the house within 30 days, those people said.

The median rent in Bastrop, Texas, is about $2,200 a month, according to real-estate listing company Zillow Group Inc.

Executives have discussed opening the houses to all employees of Mr. Musk’s companies.

Gapped Bass has filed paperwork with Bastrop County to build 110 more homes in the planned town, which it calls “Project Amazing.”

Bastrop County officials approved street names such as “Boring Boulevard,” “Waterjet Way” and “Cutterhead Crossing,” according to county meeting documents.

Boring plans to convert a home on the property into a Montessori school for as many as 15 students, according to correspondence between a Boring company official and a county government employee.

See here for some background. Believe it or not, there’s a lot more in this story. WSJ articles are usually paywalled but the link I got for this let me right in, so if you can go read the rest. The Austin Chronicle has a summary, and contains this bit of interest, some of which is farther down in the story:

In meetings with landowners, Musk and his employees describe his vision as a utopia along the Colorado River where Musk’s employees can live and work.

Of course a “utopia” or “paradise” centered on the Colorado probably doesn’t bring to mind images of hundreds of thousands of gallons of wastewater being poured into said river, but that is evidently what Musk and his people envision. Musk-owned tunneling company the Boring Co. has applied to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) for permission to discharge up to 140,000 gallons of industrial treated wastewater into the Colorado every day.

That’s how Bastrop local Chap Ambrose, whose house overlooks Musk’s property, found out about this utopian vision – a letter from TCEQ informing him of his neighbor’s wastewater request and of his own ability to publicly comment on the request. Led by Ambrose, a grassroots coalition of Musk’s neighbors called Keep Bastrop Boring hosted a meeting March 8 at the Bastrop Public Library to share their research, and their plans to show up at the TCEQ’s public meeting to discuss the Boring permit 7pm, March 21 at the Hampton Inn in Bastrop. (Anyone can comment.)

This is just the latest in not-helpful ideas Musk has presented in Central Texas. In April last year, we reported that ten Austin city employees flew out to Las Vegas to meet with representatives of the Boring Co. in relation to potential tunnels needed for Project Connect, although Boring Co. has no experience with public transit systems. That communication seemed to fizzle out, as have the many projects Boring Co. has attempted with cities nationwide.

Putting aside whatever animus I may have for Elon Musk, I don’t want anyone dumping 140,000 gallons of industrial treated wastewater into the Colorado River every day. I hope that request gets denied. And all respect to Chap Ambrose for Keep Bastrop Boring. May he succeed in his quest, at least as far as this goes. Daily Kos has more.

Chron story on the anti-Open Beaches bill

Glad to see it.

A bill that would reshape future legal battles over Texas’ public beach boundaries is stirring backlash from advocates and former state leaders, who claim the proposal would give beachfront property owners the green light to vacuum up pieces of the state’s public beaches.

Senate Bill 434, filed last month by state Sen. Mayes Middleton of Galveston, would give private property owners the upper hand in legal disputes over public beach access between their residences and the Gulf of Mexico.

Such disputes are governed by Texas’ Open Beaches Act, which has long established the public’s right to use privately owned beach area extending from the vegetation line — the beach’s inland boundary, where sand gives way to foliage — to what’s known as the “mean high tide line” along the water.

Under current law, property owners can only scrap a public easement in front of their property — thus blocking the public from passing through it — if they offer legal proof that the area shouldn’t be covered by the easement.

Middleton’s bill would upend the law, shifting the legal “burden of proof” to the state or anyone looking to establish that a public easement exists on someone’s beachfront property. Critics say the change would embolden property owners to fence off beach area long accessed by the public — access that could only be regained through legal action.

Middleton did not respond to a request for comment. He defended his legislation in a statement to the Galveston County Daily News last month, arguing it would “not in any way take away our open beaches or limit them.”

“Right now, all over the state of Texas, if the state claims your land as theirs — then they have to prove it. But, sadly, on beachfront property, if Texas claims the property as theirs, it’s presumed to be the state’s — unless the landowner is able to refute the rebuttable presumption,” Middleton said. “My bill is a beachfront private property rights bill that makes beachfront land treated like land in the rest of the state and changes the presumption so that the state must prove it is state lands and the landowner no longer has the burden of proof.”

See here for the argument against, as presented by former Land Commissioners Dewhurst, Patterson, and Mauro. I have no reason to trust Sen. Middleton on this, and that’s even without me already being a steadfast Open Beaches Act supporter. I don’t know what the odds are of this bill passing, but I would take it seriously, as it’s the kind of thing that may get by because no one gives it all that much thought. To that end, the sunshine may help. Reform Austin has more.