Measles update: Hello, Ohio

Posted on March 29, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Put another state on the board, Johnny.

A measles outbreak in Kansas doubled in less than a week to 23 cases and has “a possible link” to outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico that have sickened more than 370, the state health department said Wednesday.

And health officials in Ohio say a single case identified in Ashtabula County has spread to nine others. Even before these two growing clusters were reported, the number of measles cases in the U.S. had already surpassed the case count for all of 2024, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

[…]

In Ohio, 10 cases are in Ashtabula County and a separate visitor in Knox County exposed people there and in several other counties, the state health department said. A measles outbreak in central Ohio sickened 85 in 2022.

“Given the measles activity in Texas, New Mexico, and other states around the country, we’re disappointed but not surprised we now have several cases here in Ohio and known exposure in some counties,” said Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff. “This disease can be very serious, even deadly, but it is almost entirely avoidable by being properly vaccinated.”

That story is from Wednesday, so the case count is outdated and we don’t know yet if this outbreak is related to any of the others. But it looks now like the Kansas and Oklahoma outbreaks are indeed connected to Texas.

Twenty-three measles cases have been reported in Kansas, and the state health department said they could be linked to an ongoing outbreak that has infected at least 379 people across Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

“The confirmed cases in Kansas have a possible link to the outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico. While genetic sequencing of the first Kansas case reported is consistent with an epidemiological link to the Texas and New Mexico outbreaks, the source of exposure is still unknown,” Jill Bronaugh, communications director for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said in an email Wednesday.

Children account for 21 of the Kansas cases, and 20 of the cases are in people who are unvaccinated.

[…]

Tuesday’s update from the Oklahoma State Department of Health indicates links with the Texas and New Mexico cases.

“All cases are linked through exposures to household or extended family; and initial cases reported exposure to the measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico. At this time, no cases have resulted from exposure to public settings,” the agency said.

The bottom line is that while this outbreak started in a tiny and isolated West Texas county among a small Mennonite community, it has spread well beyond that by now.

Meanwhile, back in West Texas, there’s a new problem for doctors and health officials to deal with.

Medical disinformation connected to the West Texas measles outbreak has created a new problem. Children are being treated for toxic levels of vitamin A.

Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock confirms it is treating children with severe cases of measles who are also suffering from vitamin A toxicity. According to the hospital, they have admitted fewer than 10 pediatric patients who were all initially hospitalized due to measles complications but have elevated levels of vitamin A that is resulting in abnormal liver function.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directed the CDC to update its measles guidance to promote the use of vitamin A. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, recommended in an article published March 2 on FOX News to take vitamin A under the supervision of a physician for those with mild, moderate and severe infections.

During a March 4 interview on Fox News, Kennedy suggested that therapies such as the use of cod liver oil — which contains vitamins A and D — were “working” in treating measles patients.

There are reports from the West Texas area that cod liver oil is in high demand and a big seller at area pharmacies.

But the hospital is informing the public to reduce consumption of vitamin A and has warned that excessive amounts of it may result in significant adverse effects.

There is no evidence that taking vitamin A will prevent measles.

CNN has more on this.

Vitamin A is most useful for measles support in people who have a specific deficiency, and studies suggesting its use mainly draw on evidence from low-income countries where that deficiency is common. The patients in West Texas are generally well-nourished, said Dr. Lesley Motheral, a pediatrician in Lubbock, so experts say it’s unclear how beneficial the vitamin might be in this setting.

Vitamin A has an important role in immunity and vision. It’s fat-soluble, so when someone takes too much, it can accumulate in organs like the liver. Excess vitamin A can cause dry skin and eyes, blurry vision, bone thinning, skin irritation, liver damage and other serious issues. In pregnant women, excess vitamin A can lead to birth defects.

Patients with toxicity can receive supportive care like fluids for low blood pressure or moisturizers for dry skin and eyes, Motheral said. But more serious damage will need to be evaluated and given further management.

“Recovery for patients with acute toxicity can be rapid when the vitamin is discontinued,” she said. “Chronic toxicity can affect bones, brain and of course the liver. … Sadly, some of the more serious problems with vitamin A toxicity are not always reversible.”

The Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association for dietary supplement and functional food manufacturers, issued a statement Wednesday warning parents against using high doses of vitamin A to try to keep their children from getting measles.

“While vitamin A plays an important role in supporting overall immune function, research hasn’t established its effectiveness in preventing measles infection. CRN is concerned about reports of high-dose vitamin A being used inappropriately, especially in children,” the statement says.

I dunno, man, I feel like we’ve had folk wisdom about the dangers of too much of a good thing for literally the entirity of human civilization. I know no one trusts doctors and scientists anymore, but could they maybe read the story of King Midas? I’m just saying.

And the fun doesn’t stop there for the people trying to respond to this thing.

The Lubbock public health director said Wednesday local efforts to fight a measles outbreak will be affected by the federal government’s announcement that it’s pulling $11 billion in COVID-era funding for public health departments.

A brief notice sent to Texas local public health departments late Tuesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services, or DSHS, provided no real specifics.

“DSHS was notified that the federal grant funding for Immunization/COVID, Epidemiology Laboratory Capacity (ELC/COVID), and Health Disparities/COVID, is terminated as of March 24, 2025,” the notice from DSHS Associate Commissioner Imelda Garcia, stated. “The Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS or System Agency) is issuing this notice to pause all activities immediately. Please do not accrue any additional costs as of the date of this notice.”

DSHS did not respond to requests for details on exactly how much is unspent COVID-19 era grant money or how many local health departments will be impacted. The grants were issued to help states shore up their public health systems following the pandemic.

But Katherine Wells, Lubbock’s public health director, said it will definitely impact her office’s work combating the spread of measles. Lubbock has been using three grants to help pay for extra temporary staff, a part-time nurse and a full-time epidemiologist to help with vaccinations, answering phones and working with testing of patients. Two of the city’s three grants were not to expire until 2026.

“It’s kind of crazy to have this funding cut,” Wells said. “I don’t have a savings account in public health.”

I would like to point out that the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which is a subsidiary of the Governor’s office, has the power and the funds to direct resources to affected areas in times of emergency. This is how Houston got funds for post-Beryl and derecho cleanup, for example. Greg Abbott could help out here, is what I’m saying. To be fair, he shouldn’t have to, because those funds should never have been cut in the first place. Maybe someone should let Donald Trump know that this is hurting his voters. My point here is that this doesn’t have to be the final word, and the burden doesn’t have to fall entirely on Katherine Wells’ shoulders.

And finally, here’s your Texas case update.

The number of measles cases in Texas has reached 400 infections as of Friday, March 28 — a jump of 22% since the state’s last update on cases Tuesday.

The Texas Department of State Health Services said a total of 41 people have been hospitalized. One school-age child who was not vaccinated died in February.

[…]

As of Friday, almost all of the cases have been in the South Plains and Panhandle regions of western Texas, with the exception of 10 cases in Lamar County, about 100 miles northeast of Dallas.

But Tarrant County health authorities have warned that there’s a “high risk” of measles cases here due to lower vaccination rates. The virus is so contagious that if one person has it, up to 9 out of 10 people nearby will become infected if they are unvaccinated.

[…]

Here are the latest numbers by Texas county, with increases since Tuesday:

Andrews: 1 (new)
Cochran: 8 (up from 7)
Dallam: 7 (up from 6)
Dawson: 14 (up from 13)
Ector: 4 (up from 2)
Gaines: 270 (up from 226)
Garza: 1
Hale: 1
Hockley: 2 (up from 1)
Lamar: 10 (up from 5)
Lamb: 1
Lubbock: 23 (up from 10)
Lynn: 1
Martin: 3
Terry: 38 (up from 37)
Yoakum: 15 (up from 13)

That’s a big increase from Tuesday’s report – 73 new cases, mostly in Gaines County, though that bump in Lamar, northeast of Dallas and hundreds of miles from the initial outbreak, should be worrying. Not much else to say at this point, but do go read Your Local Epidemiologist for a final word. She notes that we’re on the five-year anniversary of COVID-19, and for a variety of reasons we are in a much worse position to deal with outbreaks exactly like this one, even though we know a lot more about how to handle them. On that grim note, have a nice weekend. The Chron has more.

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Maria Rojas’ attorneys get a chance to speak

Posted on March 29, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

And surprise surprise, they say the charges against their client are long on bluster and short on facts.

When the Texas Attorney General’s office announced its first arrest under Texas’ abortion laws, the court filings and press statements painted a shocking picture.

Maria Rojas, a Houston-area midwife, was portraying herself as a doctor and using untrained employees to perform illegal abortions for cash, pushing unwitting women into terminating wanted pregnancies, the records said, citing a monthlong investigation involving surveillance, search warrants and first-hand witnesses.

But at a court hearing Thursday, Rojas’ lawyers got their first opportunity to tell their side of the story. They described an above-board telemedicine-based medical practice that offered a range of services, including maternal health care appropriate for a midwife, and argued the state’s investigator has no first-hand knowledge of Rojas performing the acts of which she is accused.

The investigation was marked with “complete shoddiness and lack of thoroughness,” and the arrest affidavit was filled with “conjecture,” “wild conclusions” and “rank speculation,” Marc Hearron, senior counsel with the Center for Reproductive Rights, told the judge.

Lawyers for Rojas also have raised concerns about irregularities in the criminal case, including that she was held on an arrest warrant, rather than a criminal complaint, which is much more common. She has not been indicted yet by a grand jury.

“I would believe if the attorney general had a solid case, they would have filed charges,” said Nicole DeBorde Hochglaube, who is representing Rojas in her criminal case. “They have yet to do so.”

[…]

Rojas was brought to the courtroom from the jail Thursday morning in a pink jumpsuit and orange slide sandals, much to the surprise of her attorneys, who said they didn’t realize she would be in attendance.

During the hearing, she was informed she could be discharged on bond, and her lawyers asked if she could return to the jail to be processed out. When she returned to the courtroom after lunch, she had changed into a blue tracksuit. After the questioning from Hilton, she was escorted home by her lawyer.

Rojas had been held on a $1.4 million bond, which is surprisingly high, said Eric Davis, chief of the trial division at the Harris County Public Defender’s Office.

“Somebody with no prior criminal history, on a non-homicide case or a non-child sex assault case, it’s really unusual,” Davis said. “It signals to me they may be thinking about charging her with something higher. That bond we’d expect with murder or a high charge like that.”

Davis has worked as a defense attorney for 30 years, and said the high bond isn’t the only unusual thing about this case. He has rarely, if ever, seen someone arrested and held only on an arrest warrant, as Rojas and her associate were.

It’s standard practice for a criminal complaint to be filed, laying out what someone is charged with and allowing the defense to begin requesting discovery. It’s so uncommon to hold someone on just an arrest warrant, several defense attorneys said they couldn’t even speculate on why Paxton’s office might be taking this path. Davis said it could mean they’re gathering more evidence or deciding exactly what charges to bring to a grand jury, but he couldn’t be sure.

“It doesn’t take much to file a complaint, so why are they waiting?” he said. “It’s standard practice.”

DeBorde Hochglaube told reporters this lack of clarity has made it hard for her and fellow lawyers to begin preparing their defense.

“We don’t even have the charges you would ordinarily have in a criminal accusation,” she said. “It’s simply an arrest warrant, nothing more.”

See here and here for the background. Nicole DeBorde Hochglaube was for awhile one of the Ken Paxton special prosecutors, so she knows a thing or two about his bullshit. The fact that the prosecutors are doing everything in their power to hide their cards for as long as possible is very telling. If they were confident in their case and their evidence, they wouldn’t be acting like this. Instead, they’re acting like winning the public relations battle is what really matters to them. Don’t be fooled.

The hearing on Thursday was about the order to close Rojas’ clinics, which will remain in effect through the end of this case. The same judge will be hearing both the civil and criminal cases – Waller is a small county. There’s no trial date set for either case, so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next. The Chron has more.

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Dispatches from Dallas, March 29 edition

Posted on March 29, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

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: congressfolks on both sides of the aisle making controversial statements; we may have Colin Allred to kick around for one more Senate race; North Texas-related news from the Lege; the latest about the Tarrant County Jail death investigations (nobody died this time); our Republican overlords are trying to investigate a Plano mosque out of town; the Keller ISD split plan dies without even a whimper, but the lawsuits aren’t over; the Sands people aren’t getting a casino in their planned Irving resort (yet); the Tarrant County DA won’t prosecute the Modern; The National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington is now open; and music news from the Metroplex including my favorite music festival in these parts. And more!

This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Dead Can Dance. Their last album was came out in 2018 but they did tour in 2022, so there’s hope still for more music from them. If you’re into goth, post-punk, darkwave, classical-adjacent, or early-adjacent music and you don’t know them, check them out.

Let’s start with some national news with local connections and go on from there:

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Commissioners Court keeps Menefee for now

Posted on March 28, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Seems reasonable.

Christian Menefee

Harris County Commissioners have opted to keep Christian Menefee as the county attorney until Gov. Greg Abbott calls an election to fill the late U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner’s seat in Congress.

Menefee has served as county attorney for more than four years, and recently announced a campaign to replace Turner, who died March 5 following “enduring health complications” at 70 years old.

[…]

Under state law, Menefee’s campaign filing and announcement triggered his automatic resignation from his position as county attorney.

“Resign to run” laws in Texas dictate that certain local office holders cannot announce campaigns for another seat more than a year and 30 days before the next election. If they announce any sooner, they’re forced to step back from their current position.

Menefee, who recently won another term as county attorney, filed for Congress hours after Turner’s funeral.

However, another law holds that the person is allowed to hold their position until a successor is named. Abbott’s office hasn’t yet called an election to replace Turner, who represented a solidly Democratic congressional district.

The absence of a representative in the seat effectively leaves the Democrats shorthanded. Republicans currently hold the majority in the U.S. House by a slim margin.

Donna Davidson, a legislative and campaign lawyer based in Austin, said she has seen instances where office holders announce a campaign for another position and are replaced immediately. Others, however, have been allowed to stick around, she said.

“It really just depends,” Davidson said. “Let’s say you’ve been a very effective county attorney. They don’t necessarily want to make a change if they don’t have to.”

The commissioners, who are in charge of naming Menefee’s replacement until an election is called, decided on Thursday to not take action to replace him given the disruption choosing a new county attorney might cause.

See here and here for the background. If the law doesn’t require Menefee to step down and be replaced right now, then this is the sensible thing to do. If Abbott’s in no rush to schedule the election, then Menefee doesn’t need to be in any rush to resign. Once the election is on the calendar, then he and the Court can do their thing. I suppose it’s possible someone could sue to force him to resign now, but I’m not sure who would have standing, let alone that there’s a good legal argument to be made. So, barring anything unexpected, this is where we are for now.

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New York county clerk refuses to file judgment against Dr. Carpenter

Posted on March 28, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Here we go.

A county clerk in New York refused Thursday to file a more than $100,000 judgment from Texas against a doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas, setting up a potential challenge to laws designed to shield abortion providers who serve patients in states with abortion bans.

A Texas judge last month ordered Dr. Margaret Carpenter, who practices north of New York City, to pay the penalty for allegedly breaking that state’s law by prescribing abortion medication via telemedicine. The Texas attorney general’s office followed up last week by asking a New York court to enforce the default civil judgment, which is $113,000 with attorney and filing fees.

The acting Ulster County clerk refused.

“In accordance with the New York State Shield Law, I have refused this filing and will refuse any similar filings that may come to our office. Since this decision is likely to result in further litigation, I must refrain from discussing specific details about the situation,” Acting Clerk Taylor Bruck said in a prepared statement.

New York is among eight states with telemedicine shield laws, which were considered a target for abortion opponents even before the standoff between officials New York and Texas.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul last month invoked her state’s shield law in rejecting Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s request to extradite Carpenter to Louisiana, where the doctor was charged with prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant minor.

Hochul on Thursday praised Bruck’s refusal and said “New York is grateful for his courage and common sense.”

See here, here, and here for the background. We’re basically following a script right now, and everything has gone as one would expect. When the federal courts get involved, that’s when we start ad libbing. Stay tuned.

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Modified Montrose construction to begin on Monday

Posted on March 28, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Ready or not, here it comes.

Workers will break ground Monday on the first phase of a hotly debated plan to revamp Montrose Boulevard from Allen Parkway to West Clay Street.

The final roadmap retains the original intent to include an expansive new underground drainage system, but many other aspects of the redesign shifted after months of back-and-forth protests and incoming Mayor John Whitmire’s total overhaul of the leadership of Montrose’s Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone.

The reconstruction, planned by the Montrose TIRZ and Gauge Engineering, will be completed by MC2 Civil LLC for just under $17.9 million. The contractor is expected to take until mid-2026 to finish its work. In the meantime, the TIRZ has promised that at least two lanes of the thoroughfare will be open at all times, one for cars going in each direction.

“The Montrose TIRZ is committed to minimizing disruptions and keeping the community informed,” said Matt Brollier, chairman of the Montrose TIRZ.

The TIRZ board holds public meetings on the third Monday of every month. Many of these meetings have been filled for over a year with familiar faces either advocating to preserve Montrose Boulevard’s lane width and existing trees, or pushing for the original redesign plan, which would have increased pedestrian and bicycle accessibility while planting more trees than the number tapped for removal from both sides of the road.

See here, here, here, here, and here for the background. You know where I stand on this, so I’ll just shrug and move on, as there’s not much else to be done on this front. I’m a little surprised that the DOGEbags didn’t try to claw back the funds for it. Let’s hope this is better than we think and that the disruption is minimal. Good luck, y’all.

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Beware the trojan “abortion exceptions” bill

Posted on March 27, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Jessica Valenti warns us.

Texas Republicans are poised to pull a fast one: They’ve convinced Democrats and doctors to support a bill they claim will protect life-saving abortion care and ‘clarify’ the state’s ban. But the rapidly advancing “Life of the Mother” legislation is a Trojan Horse—there’s a 100-year-old ban hiding inside, ready to be revived and used to prosecute abortion funds, helpers, and possibly even patients.

Legal experts I spoke to in Texas called it “the most dangerous” anti-abortion bill currently before the legislature. So how has this flown under the radar?

Blame a mix of GOP sleight-of-hand and pro-choice politicians so eager for a win—and so desperate to ease the suffering of Texas women—that they’ve missed the fine print. To be fair, it’s not an easy catch: What’s happening is buried in a maze of dense language and historical statutes. I’m going to do my best to lay it out for you, so please stick with me—this one really matters.

Chances are, you’ve heard about Senate Bill 31: It’s been framed as Republicans’ oh-so-generous move to ensure doctors can provide life-saving abortions without fear of civil or criminal charges. Texas newspapers and national headlines describe it as a bill that will “expand protections” and “clear confusion” around the state’s ban, while lawmakers on both sides of the aisle claim it will save women’s lives. The Texas Medical Association has endorsed the bill, as have anti-abortion groups.

In short, SB 31 is being sold as a rare moment of bipartisan agreement—a good-faith effort to help doctors and patients.

The truth, however, is that Republicans are exploiting Texans’ desperation to stop women from suffering and dying—using that urgency to pass a law that will ultimately broaden their power to punish.

At the heart of this deception is a 1925 abortion ban. This Texas law made performing an abortion a felony unless it was done to save the patient’s life. But unlike the state’s modern bans, the century-old law also made it a felony to help someone “procure” an abortion—and it didn’t explicitly protect patients from prosecution. (Remember this for later.)

Obviously, this 1925 ban was unenforceable for decades under Roe v. Wade—but after Dobbs, Texas Republicans argued it could go back into effect. Attorney General Ken Paxton, in particular, was eager to use the law: the same day Roe was overturned, he issued an advisory declaring the 1925 ban enforceable—and repeated the claim in an updated advisory three days later.

Why was he so eager to dust off a 100-year-old law? In part, because it would let the state start prosecuting people immediately. (Texas’ trigger ban couldn’t be enforced until the Supreme Court issued its formal judgment in Dobbs, which could take months.) But more importantly, Paxton knew that reviving the century-old ban would dramatically supercharge his ability to prosecute. Remember, the 1925 law would explicitly allow Paxton to prosecute abortion funds that help patients ‘procure’ care, and open the door to targeting patients.

What Republican legislators did next made it even clearer that the punishment was always the point: the ultra-conservative Texas Freedom Caucus started sending threatening letters to companies that promised to reimburse employees for out-of-state abortion travel—citing the 1925 ban. They also targeted abortion funds, warning that donors, employees, and volunteers could be prosecuted under the 100-year-old law.

Thankfully, Texas funds sued to stop that from happening. Paxton lost the legal battle in 2023, when a federal court ruled that the zombie ban had been “repealed by implication.” (Translation: you can’t enforce a nearly century-old ban when newer laws have already replaced it.) And while Paxton and Texas Republicans continued to claim the old ban was still on the books, that federal ruling blocked them from enforcing it.

You have to imagine Paxton was livid—abortion funds are the ones helping patients access out-of-state care and abortion pills, and the court had just shut down his best shot at punishing them for it.

That brings us to the present day, where Republican legislators have figured out how to give Paxton exactly what he wanted: the legal firepower of that 1925 ban.

Here’s how it works. The “Life of the Mother” bill—the one Republicans claim will clarify Texas’ abortion ban—wouldn’t just amend the current law. SB 31 would also add so-called ‘clarifying’ language to the 1925 ban. Why? Republicans will say they’re just being thorough—protecting women and doctors in every abortion statute. But here’s what they won’t admit: amending the 100-year-old law negates the argument that the ban is no longer in effect. (At least, that’s what they’ll argue in court.)

In other words, anti-abortion politicians get the best of both worlds if this bill passes: they get to look like they give a shit about women’s health and lives, while expanding the state’s power to punish.

The Chron editorial board also sang the praises of SB31, though they did note that they had heard of the concerns regarding that 1925 law. They just mentioned it in passing, though, so either they don’t take that concern seriously – and to be fair, it is at least possible this is correct – or they didn’t hear this from someone who did see the danger.

I will note two things. One is that the author of SB31 is Sen. Bryan Hughes, who was the author of 2021’s SB8, the vigilante bounty-hunter anti-abortion bill that turned out to be the tip of the Dobbs iceberg, and also of the omnibus voter suppression bill, which is still being picked apart by the courts today. Hughes is smart and competent, which given his extremist views makes him highly dangerous. We can’t help what the newspaper editorial boards do, but I really hope someone is explaining the danger to legislative Democrats. They won’t be able to stop SB31, but they need to know how to attack it and they need to commit to not voting for it if this 1925 law provision remains.

And two, regardless of what happens with SB31, there are lots of other attacks on abortion access in the hopper, with several of them having broad and far-reaching potential consequences for abortion pills and online advocacy. Again, the Republicans have the votes to pass any bill they want. All I’m saying is, don’t give up the moral high ground. It’s all we’ve got. The Observer has more.

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Yeah, we won’t get the CD18 election until November

Posted on March 27, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

That’s the conclusion to draw from this Trib story.

Rep. Sylvester Turner

Three weeks after U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner’s death and just over a month before the state’s next uniform election, Gov. Greg Abbott has not yet called a special election to fill the seat representing parts of Houston, a Democratic stronghold, in Congress.

Turner, who previously served in the Texas House for nearly three decades before becoming mayor of Houston, died March 5, two months into his first term representing Texas’ 18th Congressional District. His funeral was held in Houston on March 15.

Turner was elected to Congress last year after his predecessor and political ally, former U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, died in office after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Abbott has the sole authority to call a special election to fill Turner’s seat for the rest of the two-year term. State law does not specify a deadline for the governor to order a special election. If called, the election must happen within two months of the announcement.

But the Republican governor has little incentive to send another Democrat to Congress.

[…]

The next scheduled election date in Texas is May 3. According to the state election code, Abbott would have to order the special election by March 28 for it to take place in May. But the practical deadline to call a May 3 election may have already passed, due to how much time the state needs to program voting machines and prepare and mail ballots.

The Texas Secretary of State’s office did not respond to a question about how much time the state generally requires to carry out an election.

Chad Dunn, a longtime Democratic Party lawyer, argued that there was plenty of time for the state to execute a special election on May 3 if Abbott ordered it.

While Texas law does not set a deadline for the governor to call a special election, Dunn added, “the assumption of Texas laws is that the state doesn’t want to be without representation in Congress.”

Historically, states were “eager” to ensure their entire delegation was present in Congress, Dunn said. Extreme partisanship in the broader political climate has changed that.

“Rather than pursue the interests of their state,” he argued, “some partisan governors are not moving expeditiously with replacement elections in these circumstances because they think that benefits their political party.”

In February 2021, after the death of U.S. Rep Ron Wright, R-Arlington, Abbott called a special election to fill Wright’s seat on the third day after his burial, or just two weeks after his death.

Abbott called a special election to fill Jackson Lee’s seat just over a week after her funeral, and 17 days after her death.

In those cases, however, there were several months before the next uniform election date.

Abbott could also declare an “emergency” special election, which allows for an election to take place outside the May or November uniform election dates.

He called for an emergency election on June 30, 2018 to replace former U.S. Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Corpus Christi, who resigned that April. Then, Abbott pointed to the recovery from Hurricane Harvey as justifying an emergency election.

See here for the previous update. The Houston Landing concluded that it was already too late for Abbott to call and election for May. I’m not sure why this is so confusing, but if it isn’t already too late it will be soon, and there’s nothing to indicate that Abbott cares. So here we are.

With all due respect to Chad Dunn, the solution here is not for Texas governors to act in less blatantly partisan fashion when scheduling these elections, it’s to update the election code to limit their discretion. The Lege could limit the amount of time that governors have to suck their thumbs, or they could mandate that any vacancies created at least X days before a uniform election date requires an election to be scheduled for that date. There may be other ways to do this as well, but the specifics don’t really matter. The point, which has been made repeatedly over the last, oh, eight years or so, is that in political matters, laws >>> norms. Getting a Legislature in place that can take that action is a separate matter, but when we do, put this on the list of things for them to address.

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The forthcoming travel ban and the MLB season

Posted on March 27, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Just a little cloud hanging over Opening Day, that’s all.

President Trump’s expected travel ban on more than three dozen countries could prevent some Astros and other Major League Baseball players from Cuba and Venezuela from coming into — or leaving — the United States.

The big picture: Trump’s travel ban would mean that Cuban and Venezuelan major and minor league baseball players with P-1 visas — non-immigrant visas for internationally recognized athletes and entertainers — could face new difficulties in the U.S., immigration lawyers say.

  • Without a special exemption, those players would have a hard time returning to the U.S. after games against the Toronto Blue Jays or after playing in winter baseball leagues in Mexico, Venezuela or the Dominican Republic.

Catch up quick: Trump signed an executive order in January requiring the State Department to identify countries “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient” that a travel ban is needed.

  • The order gave the State Department 60 days to complete the report, which was due Friday.
  • Countries that could be subject to the harshest visa restrictions include Afghanistan, Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Syria and Venezuela, news reports said.

The latest: A White House official tells Axios no decisions have been made, and an MLB spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Zoom in: On Opening Day last year, the Astros had 16 players born internationally — including Cuban- and Venezuelan-born stars — the most in the league, according to MLB.

  • Across the league, 18 players from Cuba and 58 from Venezuela were on Opening Day rosters in 2024.
  • The league’s total doesn’t count the many players in the minor leagues and those who were called up or signed later in the 2024 season.

It’s unclear which players hold P-1 visas, but the Astros’ 2025 roster includes second baseman José Altuve of Venezuela and outfielder Yordan Alvarez of Cuba.

Opening Day (non-Japan version) is today, so enjoy it while you can. I’m sure MLB is doing what it can to avoid problems, and there’s nothing more that Donald Trump likes than being sucked up to, but who knows what could happen. A potentially bigger issue is with the minor leagues, which are stuffed with even more foreign-born players who for the most part don’t have the financial resources to deal with lawyers and paperwork as might be required to ensure safe passage. Like I said, I don’t know what happens next. But it’s Donald Trump, so expect the worst.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of March 24

Posted on March 27, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance is glad for the distraction of March Madness as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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Measles update: Hello, Kansas

Posted on March 26, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Put a new state on the board, Johnny.

State health officials report the number of measles cases is growing in Kansas this year as cases climb nationwide.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) reported on March 20 on its website that a total of 10 confirmed measles cases are confirmed in the state. All of the cases are being reported in people who are below the age of 17 with the majority in the five to 10-year-old age group.

“As of March 21, 2025, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) is reporting ten (10) cases of measles within Grant, Morton and Stevens counties. All these cases are in children aged from 0-17. Nine (9) of the individuals were not vaccinated, and one (1) is under-vaccinated having only received 1 out of the 2 doses of the recommended MMR vaccine. There have been no hospitalizations or deaths among the cases. Due to the highly contagious nature of measles, additional cases are likely to occur in the outbreak area in Kansas and in surrounding counties, especially among those that are unvaccinated.”

The KDHE confirmed the first case of measles in a Kansas resident since 2018 on March 13. Multiple other cases were identified earlier this week in Morton and Stevens Counties in southwest Kansas.

The Topeka Capital-Journal adds some details.

Kansas is now up to 10 confirmed cases of measles, all of which have been children who are either unvaccinated or under-vaxxed.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment on Monday reported 10 cases of measles, spread across Grant, Morton and Stevens counties. The update came through the Kansas Health Alert Network.

The alert said all 10 cases are children ages birth to 17 years old. Nine weren’t vaccinated, while one child was under-vaccinated with only one of the two recommended doses of the MMR vaccine.

“Due to the highly contagious nature of measles, additional cases are likely to occur in the outbreak area in Kansas and in surrounding counties, especially among those that are unvaccinated,” the KDHE alert said.

[…]

Kansas officials told The Capital-Journal last week that epidemiologists have not been able to establish a link to the outbreak affecting west Texas. The three Kansas counties with cases are all in the southwest corner of Kansas, about 375 miles from the outbreak epicenter of Gaines County in the Texas panhandle.

Well, we did expect this outbreak to go national. This may or may not be evidence of that, but if it does turn out that this outbreak is completely independent of the Texas one, is that in any way good news? I sure don’t think so. The point remains, there’s a lot of measles out there, and it’s finding unvaccinated children like Republicans find excuses for leaking confidential national security information when one of them does it. Ars Technica has a good roundup of local coverage of the Kansas outbreak. I’ll keep an eye on this to see if we do get a ruling one way or the other on the possible connection.

Before I move on, let me join this Kansas opinion columnist in offering kudos to Sen. Roger Marshall for his statement that Kansans talk to their doctors about their vaccination status. It’s not much, and Sen. Marshall is not at all a good example to follow in general on health matters, but this is the right thing to do and it’s more than what Texas’ Republicans have been doing.

Meanwhile, here’s your Texas update.

The measles outbreak in western Texas is continuing to grow with 18 cases confirmed over the last five days, bringing the total to 327 cases, according to new data published Tuesday.

Nearly all of the cases are in unvaccinated individuals or in individuals whose vaccination status is unknown, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS). At least 40 people have been hospitalized so far.

Just two cases have occurred in people fully vaccinated with the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine, according to the data.

In the Texas outbreak, children and teenagers between ages 5 and 17 make up the majority of cases at 140, followed by children ages 4 and under accounting for 105 cases, according to the data.

[…]

It comes as another case of measles was confirmed in New Mexico, bringing the total to 43, according to data from the state Department of Health. The majority of cases are in Lea County, which borders Gaines County — the epicenter of the outbreak in Texas.

Additionally, two cases of measles were confirmed in Erie County, Pennsylvania, on Monday. A media release from the Erie County Department of Health said the cases were linked to international travel and there is not a high risk of exposure for the general population.

We get these updates twice a week, and it seems to me that the Tuesday updates show smaller growth than the Friday updates. Not exactly sure why that is, but that’s what it looks like to me.

And now we have an Oklahoma update.

The Oklahoma State Department of Health has released a situation update on measles cases in the state.

As of Tuesday, March 25, there are 9 cases in Oklahoma, with seven confirmed and two more deemed “probable” among unvaccinated people in northeastern Oklahoma.

Two cases that were previously reported as probable have been upgraded to confirmed.

The OSDH said confirmed cases show symptoms consistent with the standard definition of measles, and they have a confirmatory test result.

The probable cases lack a confirmatory test result, or like to a lab-confirmed case, according to the OSDH.

It was determined that no cases were through public exposure.

This story clarifies that last sentence for me a bit, saying “none of the reported cases have resulted from exposure to public settings and public exposure has been limited due to the effected individuals isolating after recognizing their exposure”. I’m still not sure how alarming that is. All of the stories that were accessible to me were from local TV station websites, so there’s no more information that I was able to find. Perhaps this will make it into the next national stories.

And there will be more stories.

“I’m worried it’s getting worse,” Katherine Wells, director of public health for Lubbock, told NBC News.

Many people aren’t getting tested for measles, and efforts to increase vaccination in the affected areas have gotten a lukewarm response, Wells said during a media briefing by the Big Cities Health Coalition on Tuesday.

Wells said she thought it could be a year until the outbreak is controlled.

The outbreak that started in West Texas in late January has now infected 309 people in 14 Texas counties. “All of the cases in these counties are related to each other,” Wells said, adding: “We are going to see mini outbreaks” as the virus spreads unchecked.

Perhaps that’s what we’re seeing in Kansas. Or for that matter in Oklahoma, where the illnesses are in the eastern end of the state while in Kansas they’re in the west. Whatever you want to call it, it’s happening.

And finally, in case you needed further evidence that RFK Jr is the fucking worst.

A fake website meant to look like a CDC webpage was put up sometime this month and quickly taken offline, but not before diligent information manipulation researchers noticed several signs that it was likely connected to Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The site falsely suggested a link between vaccines and autism, using “testimonial” videos made by CHD and long-debunked scientific disinformation. While the site has been taken down, the question remains: what, exactly, was the plan here?

The fake website, RealCDC.org, was first spotted in late January by intel threat researcher Kyle Ehmke. While the page displayed no content then, he noted it was administered through the same Cloudflare account as CHD’s website and other domains related to CHD.

By March 20, according to Ehmke’s later research, and as corroborated by archived versions of the site, the page was populated with content meant to look exactly like an official CDC website, replicating its fonts, links, and presentation.

But there was a crucial difference: the fake site included a series of papers and other purported evidence claiming “increased risks of various chronic conditions, including ASD [autism spectrum disorder]” from vaccines. It also included testimonial videos from parents claiming their children had been sickened by vaccines, with scaremongering titles like “MMR Vax Gave My Son Autism,” “We Signed His Life Away,” and “Mother of 3: I Will Never Vaccinate Again.” The videos featured on the site are all hosted by Children’s Health Defense.

The site also contained accurate information about the fact that vaccines don’t cause autism, making what Dr. Bruce Gellin, who previously directed HHS’ vaccine program, described to the New York Times as “a mixture of things that are legitimately peer-reviewed and things that are bogus.” Among the papers was one authored by former physician Mark Geier, whose license to practice has been suspended or revoked in every state where he once held one, and his son David, who has no medical training; both Geiers have a long history in the anti-vaccine movement and as witnesses in court cases attempting to link vaccines and autism.

The site was also independently investigated by E. Rosalie Li, the founder of the Information Epidemiology Lab, which studies information manipulation and malign influence, especially around the intersection of public health and national security, and who, in addition to the Cloudfare account, found further evidence linking it to Children’s Health Defense. Both Li and Ehmke found that RealCDC.org redirected to CHDstaging.org, which has been used by Children’s Health Defense to power projects like its community discussion forum and a site promoting Vaxxed 3, the latest installment in a series of films promoting discredited claims about COVID-19 and vaccine safety. Overall, the CHD sites and RealCDC use “identical infrastructure,” Li says, “that would be unlikely if they were just random websites” unrelated to one another.

“You click on the videos and it goes to the CHD website,” she told Mother Jones.

This has been another edition of “RFK Jr is the fucking worst”. Tune in again for the next edition, which is sure to happen sooner or later.

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New teacher evaluation system approved by HISD

Posted on March 26, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

We’ll see how it goes.

Houston ISD’s state-appointed board unanimously approved a new teacher evaluation system Thursday that will go into effect for the next school year.

The model, which will be used to evaluate the district’s roughly 11,000 teachers, looks similar to the current system that emphasizes classroom observations and student test score growth. However, the district plans to use the evaluation scores to partially determine the salaries of many employees starting in 2026-27, a change that has angered the district’s largest teachers union.

HISD board members, who have been supportive of Superintendent Mike Miles’ academic and labor proposals since they started running the district in mid-2023, voted 8-0 to adopt the updated evaluation model. Critics of the system have said the regular classroom observations amount to micromanagement and feed into a misguided pay-for-performance system.

“I’ll say no evaluation system is perfect, and I think any of us in the community who work in an organization, lead an organization, understand that,” board member Michelle Cruz Arnold said. “But from what I’ve seen so far, the attempt to try to recognize the concerns and address how we’re going to incorporate feedback and continue to improve is really important to me.”

Under the system, 45 percent of a teacher’s evaluation score will be based on 10 to 20 brief classroom observations by campus administrators. Another 35 percent will depend on how much their students’ performance improves on various tests, including exams given throughout the school year and the state’s primary standardized exams, known as STAAR.

Another 15 percent is tied to lesson planning and professionalism measures, with the final 5 percent is linked to campuswide success.

HISD spent several months gathering recommendations from over 3,000 teachers and leaders, district administrators said.

The final version does not include a controversial student survey component, which would have partially tied teacher evaluations to feedback from their students. District leaders said they removed student surveys after most campus-level committees opposed it.

[…]

Houston Education Association President Michelle Williams spoke in front of the board Thursday, arguing the district will continue “hemorrhaging” experienced teachers and won’t be able to attract high-performing educators at some higher-scoring schools with the system.

“I’ve worked under many evaluation systems but TES is by far the worst I’ve seen,” Williams said. “It’s inequitable. It penalizes teachers with high-achieving students, emerging bilingual students and frankly, parents of children.”

See here and here for the background. The Chron has some further detail.

HISD teacher MinhDan Tran criticized the sincerity with which a 2024 survey, which drew more than 8,000 teacher respondents, collected feedback on the extent to which teachers agreed with statements regarding the evaluation system’s components.

“You didn’t get real input from teachers about this evaluation system,” she said. “Your fake survey didn’t give teachers any real choice. It was like choosing if you prefer to be eaten by sharks or electrocuted by a sinking boat. Bring back consultation with the union so that the professional teachers can have input on how we teach our kids.”

The system would sort teachers scores’ in a “target distribution,” with 3% sorted into the Unsatisfactory evaluation level; 12% in Progressing I, 25% in Progressing II; 40% in Proficient I; 12% in Proficient II; 5% in Exemplary I; and 3% in Exemplary II. The distribution is “to ensure that not only are the assessments across grade bands and disciplines similarly rigorous,” according to the system’s guidebook.

“Every group has roughly the same target distribution. For example, approximately 40% of Group A teachers will receive an effectiveness level of Proficient I,” the system’s guidebook reads. “This is the same percentage of Proficient I teachers in each of the other categories. This is approximate given there are teachers who fall into multiple Groups.”

Carnegie Vanguard High School senior Hira Malik objected Thursday to the target distribution in the evaluation system.

“I truly believe that the targeted distribution system is just another chaotic evaluation tactic designed to scare staff and pit them against each other for a better rating,” Malik said. “Why is competition being prioritized more than healthy cooperation? Classrooms are being micromanaged with scripted lessons that don’t give students the individualized mentorship they need. Is this what success looks like? Is this what learning is?”

In its score composition, the Teacher Excellence System’s components is not much of a departure from the district’s current system. The system bases 35% of a teacher’s rating on student test scores and learning objectives and 45% on “Quality of Instruction” — including routine shorter walkthroughs and a formal classroom observation that would be required for new teachers and teachers who score below a certain threshold the previous year. Fifteen percent would be devoted to a “planning and professionalism” component (under the current system’s “Quality of Instruction” umbrella) and a final 5% to how a teacher contributes to their campus’ action plan.

Danya Serrano, an educational researcher, expressed concern regarding the extent to which the system incorporates standardized exams amid a shortage of certified teachers.

“Research shows that value-added models based on teacher evaluations and higher test scores are biased, unreliable, invalid, unfair and not transparent,” she said.

We are familiar with the certified teacher shortage. I will say again, I am strongly opposed to rank and yank evaluation systems, which punishes any organization lucky enough to have an abundance of high performers and fosters an environment of competitiveness rather than cooperation. We would not evaluate students via a system that ensures some number of them must fail, so I don’t know why we’d want to evaluate teachers that way. Or any other workers, for that matter.

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Some good news for UST

Posted on March 26, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Situation update.

The University of St. Thomas in Houston seems to have turned a corner with its finances in 2024, though its position remains precarious as the school posted a deficit in its operating budget for the seventh consecutive year, according to the institution’s most recent annual audit.

A massive increase in donations and endowment earnings improved St. Thomas’ overall standing, said Julee Gard, a university CFO in Illinois who studies the financial health of small and mid-sized private schools. That contributed to a $15.8 million boost in assets, improving on worrisome reports when available financial resources fell by a combined $30.7 million in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, she said.

“One year does not make a trend, obviously, but if the prior two years were the start of a really bad trend, they certainly turned that around,” Gard said. “I think it shows relative stability.”

The private Catholic university released its 2024 audited financial statement this month, ahead of a crucial site visit in its once-a-decade reaccreditation process. Financial sustainability is considered a major factor in the review – and St. Thomas’ audit by an independent group showed that asset improvements and cash flows “ended in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.”

St. Thomas officials similarly pointed to growing assets as a sign of a better financial outlook. The 2024 fiscal year ended with $227 in net assets between cash, investments, property and other means, according to the audit. The endowment, which makes up the majority of the assets at $146 million, performed well, Gard said.

And while a gap persisted between earnings and spending for core operations, those operating losses narrowed to $5.8 million in 2024, down from $11.9 million in 2023 – as the university still increased financial support to students.

[…]

Gard, at University of St. Francis in Illinois, said the 2024 financial statement was more promising. She analyzed the document using an index she created to assess the health of small and mid-sized private institutions. Gard doesn’t use the model to predict school closures, though about 85% of schools that closed since 2016 had performed in the lowest threshold of her index immediately before shutting their doors, she said.

St. Thomas was in that lower threshold in 2022 and 2023 but scored this year in a middle “yellow” zone, according to her analysis.

The index speaks most to liquidity: While most of St. Thomas’ holdings are not cash and some donations and endowment amounts are restricted, a portion could be converted to cash if necessary, Gard said. Schools that are most financially unstable are usually those that take loans against the endowment, which wasn’t the case for St. Thomas, she said.

On its face, a negative cash flow appeared to be the most concerning issue for St. Thomas but was actually misleading, Gard said. A $15 million cash shortfall – the worst it’s been in seven years – includes amounts spent to pay down accounts and accrued liabilities.

“That’s not a sign of deteriorating financial health,” she said.

Gard’s analysis found a decrease in available cash reserves, however. She and other experts also agreed that it’s a best practice for universities to keep their operating revenues and expenses even. Investments that are used to cover the losses are dependent on the stock market.

“I would not say that this is … a rosy picture, but they’re making it work,” said Brown, the Texas A&M professor.

See here and here for the background. I appreciate that UST is able to provide a college education for a modest price. For the sake of their students, I hope they continue getting their finances in order and are able to carry on with that mission.

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An early overview of the CD18 special election

Posted on March 25, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Whenever it may be.

Rep. Sylvester Turner

After a whirlwind week of campaign announcements, endorsements and articles by national media, voters in Congressional District 18 could be forgiven for thinking Election Day is right around the corner.

In fact, the candidates vying for attention and support still do not know when Election Day will be, though it likely will not be until near the end of the year.

“There isn’t even an election called yet, and (Christian) Menefee has come out with full-blown endorsements and money commitments to set himself up as the frontrunner,” University of Houston political analyst Nancy Sims said last week.

Menefee – the 36-year-old, twice-elected Harris County Attorney – filed as a candidate for the seat the evening of March 15, just hours after the funeral for Congressman and former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner concluded. That decision also triggered a clause in the Texas Constitution forcing his resignation as county attorney.

By the following Monday morning, a New York Times article about his candidacy appeared online and a list of endorsements by well-known local and state Democrats followed soon after. A Houston politico had declared Menefee the “frontrunner” for the race by midday, even though only one other person had made their candidacy known for what is expected to be a crowded ballot.

“I had to move quickly,” Menefee said of the days following Turner’s death on March 5. “I definitely took some time to process and grieve. Sylvester, Congressman Turner, Mayor Turner, was a friend and mentor.”

Menefee was the fastest, but he was quickly joined by Isaiah Martin on Monday. The 26-year-old Democrat ran briefly for the seat in the 2024 cycle, but he dropped out ahead of the Dec. 2023 filing deadline. That short-lived campaign left him with $174,000 in cash on hand for a second bid for the seat.

“We are the cash-on-hand leaders in this race, and we wanted to get out of the gate really quickly to build on that,” Martin said.

Fifth Ward community advocate James Joseph filed for the seat soon after, and former At-Large City Council Member Amanda Edwards announced her candidacy with a press conference Wednesday morning.

“I had to start shifting gears fairly quickly, but the good thing is, I wasn’t starting from scratch in terms of my knowledge of the district and my relationships in the district,” Edwards said. “It was just a matter of getting things together with enough time to launch an effective launch. We had to move pretty swiftly, and for me, it was unexpected.”

Four others – Democrat Kivan Polmis, Republican Cyrus Sanja, Independent Derrell Sherrod Turner and Independent Khristopher Beal – also have filed to run. They are unlikely to be the last to join the race.

At-Large City Council Member Letitia Plummer and state Rep. Jolanda Jones, D-Houston, have released statements saying they are strongly considering whether to join the race.

[…]

At the moment, however, the actual date for the special election to complete Turner’s term remains unknown. The Texas Constitution gives Gov. Greg Abbott the authority to set the election at his discretion. The only restriction is that the special election must be held on a uniform election date at least 36 days after Abbott’s call.

Abbott must call for the election by March 31 for it to be held on the next uniform election date on May 4. The only other uniform election date this year is November 4, and a runoff election will be required the following month if no candidate achieves 50 percent of the vote on Election Day.

Abbott is unlikely to be in a hurry to hold an election in the heavily Democratic district, Sims said. The vacancy grows the narrow GOP majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, giving Congressional Republicans slightly more wiggle room as they work to pass priorities of President Donald Trump, Sims said.

The ongoing session of the Texas Legislature does not end until June 2, and Abbott likewise may hold off to keep any state representatives or senators considering a bid for the seat from being disadvantaged by the work in Austin, Sims added.

“I don’t expect the governor to call for the special election for another month or two,” Sims said.

Despite the uncertainty around Election Day, Sims said the speed of campaign announcements is good political strategy. It gives the candidates more time to raise money, secure endorsements and fend off other would-be challengers.

That speed, however, is frustrating for those waiting to know the details of the election before announcing their own campaigns.

Plummer is subject to the same “resign to run” rule that forced Menefee to give up his seat. While she would like to run, Plummer said she does not want to abandon her position on City Council until she has a clear picture of the state of the race and implored voters to wait to make up their minds about candidates.

Plummer also expressed frustration with Menefee’s campaign and the host of Democratic endorsements he quickly pulled together, a list that includes Precinct 1 County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Lee Carter.

“What’s happened … could not have been done in one day,” Plummer said. “That’s all planning. That takes two months to put together, to roll out with this much. That wasn’t planned in one day. That was planned way beforehand, which to me asks the question, did we know something was wrong with Turner? Was he already deemed as the next person to take that seat? And is it really fair for a person to get the nod without asking the community?”

Menefee rejected Plummer’s implication, but acknowledged the political need for a swift launch had made for an awkward start to the campaign for all of the candidates.

“The suggestion that this came before the passing of Sylvester Turner is untrue, it’s unfortunate and I think we should be better than that in our politics,” Menefee said.

See here for the previous update. This is a reminder that filing paperwork with the FEC is not the same as filing to run once the election has been called. We’ll see what the field looks like when that happens. I think I had an earlier “last date for Abbott to call this so it can be had in May” in mind than March 31, but that works for me. I’m glad this article noted that CM Letitia Plummer (and any other Houston City Council member) would have to resign to run as well. I was pretty sure that was the case but hadn’t gone looking for the exact wording of the relevant laws.

As it happens, March 31 is also the fundraising deadline for Q1, so even though I wasn’t planning to take a look at Congressional campaign finance reports in April, I will be doing so for the special election hopefuls. That will only tell us so much – people will have had maybe two weeks tops to raise money – but it will tell us something. By then we’ll also know if we’re in a sprint or a slog.

UPDATE: The Landing story has been updated to say that it is officially too late for Abbott to set this election for May. Shameful, but hardly unexpected.

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Draggieland unbanned

Posted on March 25, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked Texas A&M University System from enforcing a ban on drag shows being held at its special event venues.

This means Draggieland will go on as planned on Thursday at the flagship university’s Rudder Theatre in College Station.

Draggieland is an annual pageant where contestants wear clothing or makeup that often, but does not always, run counter to their expected gender identity. The contestants dance and answer questions afterward about what drag and LGBTQ culture means to them. It has repeatedly sold out the 750-seat venue since it started in 2020.

In her ruling, Judge Lee H. Rosenthal said the student group that organizes Draggieland, the Queer Empowerment Council, was likely to succeed in showing the ban violates the First Amendment.

“Anyone who finds the performance or performers offensive has a simple remedy: don’t go,” Rosenthal wrote.

The students said while their fight isn’t over, they were overjoyed by the decision and vowed to share that joy by putting on the best show possible Thursday.

A&M regents passed a resolution last month banning drag performances across all 11 campuses, complying in advance with Donald Trump’s fever dreams. There had been a bill to ban some drag shows that passed in the 2023 Legislature, but it was ruled unconstitutional by a different federal district court judge; it’s now in the unholy hands of the Fifth Circuit. Also in 2023, West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler cancelled a student drag show, making similar arguments about inappropriate content or whatever. That has survived judicial scrutiny so far because that show admitted children, while Draggieland is advertised as for adults only. I personally don’t think that should matter – if a teenager wants to attend and it’s OK with their parents, I don’t see the problem – but that’s where we are now. Oh, and that ban implemented by UT regents, I hope it meets a similar fate in court soon, once there’s a plaintiff with a live complaint.

Texas A&M is the defendant here, and I suppose they could file an emergency appeal to block the Thursday show, but my guess is they won’t. They may yet appeal this ruling so future shows can be banned or at least more tightly regulated, but that’s a problem for another day. For now, go enjoy the show if you’re there to see it. The Chron, The Barbed Wire, and the Texas Signal have more.

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Walz and Beto host Fort Bend town hall

Posted on March 25, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

In case you’re looking for something to do.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke are coming to Fort Bend County for a Congressional town hall event Thursday.

The town hall will take place from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in Rosenberg but a location in the city has not yet been named. Powered by People, a grassroots organization founded by O’Rourke in 2019, is the host. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.

“This is your chance to ask questions, get real answers and be part of the conversation that shapes our future. The location will be announced the day before,” according to a listing for the event posted to the Powered by People website.

Attendees can register for the town hall on the Powered by People website.

I don’t know if this is going to be one of those “empty chair” town halls that have been all the rage, but go ahead and register so you can find out. If it’s in CD22, an empty chair is both better and smarter than the incumbent Congressman.

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Let’s renegotiate that lease

Posted on March 24, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

How sweet it is, for the Texans.

As county leaders and officials with Bob McNair’s nascent football team were closing in on a deal for a new football stadium in the early 2000s, the Texans landed a late concession that would prove to be a financial triumph for years to come.

The Harris County-Houston Sports Authority, a joint city-county venture responsible for financing all of Houston’s major sports stadiums, would take out bonds to build the new football facility for the Texans and Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo. It would pay off the debt over several decades, mostly with money from increased taxes on rental cars and hotel rooms. The tenants would each pay $1.5 million a year in rent that would go toward the bonds as well, and contribute some money from the events they hosted, including taxes on parking and tickets.

But there was a late snag in the negotiations: Financial analysts approving the framework wanted the tenants to guarantee more money. To address that snag, the Texans agreed to pay a higher rent, upping their annual payment from $1.5 million to $4 million over the course of the 30-year contract.

In exchange, the team would get a major tax break. Instead of paying taxes on parking and ticket sales, it would receive rebates from the sports authority – and the rebates would not be capped. They were in addition to a rebate on local sales taxes for all NFL-related transactions.

These concessions have proved costly for local officials – and a boon to the Texans. From 2002 through 2023, the rebates have totaled roughly $58.9 million in today’s dollars, adjusting for inflation. The sales tax rebates have added another $58.5 million to the team’s coffers, helping to wipe out – nearly entirely – the rent the team agreed to pay over two decades ago.

As the Texans consider whether to push for public money to build a new football stadium, a Houston Chronicle analysis shows the team’s current lease agreement with the county has dramatically benefited the team and its billionaire owners, saving them over $100 million when compared to their Houston professional sports peers, the Astros and the Rockets.

[…]

The result for the Texans is one of the best rent structures – if not the best – in the NFL. Geoffrey Propheter, a professor of public finance at the University of Colorado Denver who studies stadium financing, said the only NFL teams who pay less either own their stadiums or have to cover maintenance costs. The Texans’ average rent payment is what you would expect from about two McDonald’s locations in Houston, he said.

“Being the landlord of a McDonald’s would be a wiser investment than being the landlord for the Texans under the current lease terms,” said Propheter.

Yeah. And as the story notes, the Texans have not had to pay much in maintenance costs for NRG. They want a new stadium, they can pay for it.

Posted in Elsewhere in Houston | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Let’s renegotiate that lease

Council to vote on short-term rental ordinance

Posted on March 24, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

I confess, I missed that this was in the works.

Sebastien Long’s Lodgeur Inc. leases dozens of Houston apartments on a short-term basis, serving business travelers, recovering cancer patients, professional baseball players and people going through divorces or remodeling a permanent home after a storm. They’re not spring breakers or human traffickers, Long says.

His business could be crushed if the Houston City Council passes an ordinance that he maintains is basically useless aside from imposing excessive $275-per-unit annual registration fees, detrimental to someone who deals with multifamily homes.

“We’re looking to continue to grow, but this ordinance could slow us down,” he said. “Uncertainty is a killer.”

As it turns out, residents who have dealt with raucous party houses taking over their single-family neighborhoods also think the ordinance is useless. They say it doesn’t have enough teeth to weed out the bad apples — offsite operators who don’t care about illegal activity or code violations in residential areas.

The Houston City Council is set to vote on the ordinance on Wednesday, March 26. If it passes, some short-term rental operators say they’re contemplating forming an alliance and suing the city.

That’s exactly what Houston officials don’t want. Advocates on both sides of the issue speculate that the reason the ordinance is so watered-down and spent months under review by the city’s legal department is that the municipality wants to protect itself from litigation.

[…]

Under the latest version of the proposed ordinance, crafted by the Administration and Regulatory Affairs Department and reviewed by the city’s legal department, short-term rental owners or operators would have to register and pay an annual fee of up to $275 per unit. They have to notify the city of all platforms on which the unit is listed and can’t operate in an area if it violates that neighborhood’s deed restrictions. A 24-hour emergency contact must be provided. Registration can be revoked if two or more regulations are violated resulting in convictions within a year.

A requirement for $1 million of liability insurance was removed in the latest draft.

Jason Ginsburg, a real estate attorney who formed Houstonians Against Airbnb to pre-empt a property owner from operating short-term rentals in his neighborhood, said the ordinance represents “a bare minimum of effort by the city.

“This draft falls short of even moderate protections for neighbors,” he said. “Even if you can get a nuisance STR’s certificate revoked, which would be difficult enough under the draft, there is no penalty for multiple revocations. In other words, even if the STR is ticketed, prosecuted, and convicted for two noise violations in 12 months, the only consequence would be the loss of registration for a year. Basically, the STR owner would have to rent the property long-term for just one year, then could go back to business as usual.”

The ordinance bans owners and operators — but not occupants — from promoting events, Ginsburg pointed out, and there’s no consequence for exceeding maximum occupancy. The maximum penalty for violating general requirements, such as not listing an emergency contact, is a $500 fine.

“Most owners or operators will just risk the fines if there’s no threat to the underlying business,” Ginsburg said.

Long also took issue with the ordinance, noting that it targets property owners, not operators who handle day-to-day management.

“This is misaligned with reality,” he said. “Owners of large apartments typically contract operators to run STRs.”

The short-term rental business provides temporary housing for numerous reasons, Long explained. It’s imperative that hosts know their clients, require identification from each guest and install noise-monitoring devices.

“Our guests are quiet, and we actually have the data to prove it,” he said.

Further, Houston’s proposed ordinance holds property owners liable for guests’ actions, even if unauthorized visitors commit a crime.

“This discourages operators from reporting illegal activity, fearing they’ll lose their permit,” Long said.

Long suggests a “trusted operator system” granting immediate, temporary approval for pre-vetted operators who already pay hotel occupancy taxes. He said he also thinks the ordinance should require basic safety measures such as the empowerment of Houston police to remove problem guests and the implementation of human trafficking prevention measures, as set forth in the city’s hotel ordinance.

The ordinance was introduced in December, with stories from the Chron, Houston Public Media, the Houston Landing and the Leader News. Ginger has noted in recent editions of Dispatches from Dallas that both Dallas and Fort Worth are in the middle of litigation over their own STR ordinances. I too would like to see Houston avoid that fate.

As for this proposed ordinance, I basically agree with the quoted critics, that the main focus should be on rooting out the relatively small number of bad actors. The ordinance author, CM Julian Ramirez, says that a ban on STRs isn’t legal – I for one would argue it’s also not desirable – but I can’t quite tell what the goal of this ordinance actually is. I’m not sure we have a good model from other Texas cities to follow. I expect someone will tag this, the question to me is whether there will be further amendments proposed. We’ll see next week.

UPDATE: I have been informed by CM Ramirez that the ordinance was actually authored by the city’s Administration and Regulatory Affairs department, along with Legal. I appreciate the clarification.

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

El Paso’s wastewater recycling plant

Posted on March 24, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Dealing with our state’s water needs will require lots of different types of solutions.

By 2028, El Pasoans will begin receiving water from a $295 million advanced water purification plant that will convert treated wastewater into drinking water, the first facility of its kind in the nation, El Paso Water officials said.

The concept of treating sewage water to drinkable standards and returning it back into a city’s drinking water system is far from new. But El Paso will be the first city with a large-scale treatment plant that treats wastewater to drinkable standards and then deposits the water directly back into the city’s drinking water system.

El Paso Water’s new facility, called the Pure Water Center, will sit next to the utility’s R.R. Bustamante Wastewater Treatment Plant in the Lower Valley, just south of the Ysleta-Zaragoza International Bridge. The plant will produce up to 10 million gallons of drinking water per day when it’s up-and-running. That’s enough to meet about 9% of the city’s demand for water on an average day.

“This is the ultimate level of water recycling,” said Gilbert Trejo, El Paso Water’s vice president of engineering, operations and technical services. “What’s the most efficient and cost-effective way to produce a drought-proof, drought-resilient water source? It’s this project.”

[…]

Many cities for decades have utilized plants that treat wastewater into drinking water, then release the water back into the environment – such as a riverbed or reservoir – and re-capture the water months or years later and place it back into the drinking water system.

“The modern practice of water recycling really got going in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s,” said David Sedlak, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

He pointed to a water recycling plant in Orange County, California, that produces 70 million gallons of drinking water daily from wastewater, and has been recycling wastewater since the 1970s. Another treatment plant in Northern Virginia began utilizing potable water reuse technologies in the late 1970s to provide drinking water to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., amid population growth.

And since 1985, the Fred Hervey Water Reclamation Plant in northeastern El Paso County has converted millions gallons of sewage every day into potable water that’s used for industry and irrigation, but also to be pumped back into the underground Hueco Bolson aquifer that’s a key source of drinking water for El Paso.

“El Paso Water customers have known and have been supporting water recycling projects since the 1960s, when the first drop of reclaimed water reached Ascarate Golf Course. And then Fred Hervey Water Reclamation facility in 1985,” Trejo said.

The difference between El Paso Water’s new Pure Water Center – called a direct potable reuse facility – and similar indirect potable reuse water treatment plants like the Hervey facility is that this new plant in El Paso removes the “environmental buffer.” That means the treated wastewater goes directly into the city’s drinking water system instead of out into the environment first.

Sedlak said the environmental buffer has been a kind of psychological barrier that’s made indirect potable reuse acceptable to water consumers in the U.S. for years. Still, water pumped directly back into the drinking water system may be cleaner than water released into nature and later recollected, he said.

“Culturally, people feel very comfortable with the idea of putting the water in the environment and retaking it,” Sedlak said.

“Until people started thinking about, ‘Gee, you know, sometimes when we put the water out in the environment, it gets dirtier,’” he said. “You put it out in a river or lake or reservoir, and that lake or reservoir has got agricultural drainage water coming in, or it’s got housing or it’s got industry upstream, and suddenly the water gets dirtier.”

Customers often prefer the taste of recycled water because it’s more purified and has less salt than most other water sources, especially in cities in the southwestern U.S., Sedlak said.

We face a lot of challenges for water in this state, between population growth, climate change, increased demand from data centers and (ugh) cryptominers, old infrastructure, and just the fact that a significant part of the state is in a very dry climate. Solutions include conservation, fixing leaks, desalinization, and more. I hadn’t thought about the “psychological barrier” of putting treated wastewater back into the environment rather than just use it for drinking straightaway, but I suppose this is a sign that we need to get over ourselves and do whatever works. We’re going to need a lot more of this.

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

Weekend link dump for March 23

Posted on March 23, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

“But as delegates gathered for the opening of the 69th Commission on the Status of Women this week, they faced one major obstacle: an American administration that is dead set against a gathering like this and instead sees fighting gender equality as a top priority.”

“Polish abortion rights activists opened a center across from the parliament building in Warsaw on Saturday where women can go to have abortions with pills, either alone or with other women.”

“You don’t get paid as one of the girls on The Bachelor.”

“Trump Vowed To End Surprise Medical Bills. The Office Working on That Just Got Slashed.”

“NASA, Yale, and Stanford Scientists Consider ‘Scientific Exile,’ French University Says”.

“Yet when it comes to protecting the economy and our people from clear and present dangers like disease (the work of agencies such as NIH, CDC, FDA, USDA, USAID), environmental degradation (e.g. EPA, Dept. of Interior), and severe weather (e.g. NOAA/NWS), the new administration is throwing caution to the wind and allowed the DOGE wrecking ball to swing wildly and indiscriminately.”

“Here’s a look at three [alternatives to Instagram]. Some are stand-alone apps, while others are built on existing, often decentralized platforms. While none has the critical mass that makes Instagram a powerhouse — yet — they’re also a lot less annoying.”

Kate on The White Lotus is exactly the kind of Austin person that the “Keep Austin Weird” crowd has complained about ruining their city since whenever it was they got there. I originally pegged her and her husband as actually living in Williamson County, but I’ve come around to the view that they live on the far west side of Travis County, maybe in Bee Cave or Steiner Ranch. Seriously, I half expected to see Evil MoPac get a writing credit for that episode. The Barbed Wire has some thoughts as well.

“This Baseball Team Recently Broke a 79-Year-Old Record. Why Didn’t Anyone Notice?”

“No one in opposition to Trump has any power in Washington, DC. But that’s not the only locus of power. And again, that’s critical.”

“Nobody that I’ve talked to understood the devastation that having this administration in office would do to our lives.”

“What’s alarming here to me as a leader in the farm community and civil rights work is that it’s the farmer that is the first getting affected, and it was the farmer that delivered for this president. They were all in for Trump, and they are the first in line to be affected.”

“He saw her as a funny, caring, hard-working woman who came legally, not one of the “illegals” who the president he supported promised to deport.”

RIP, Lenny Schultz, comedian and actor who kept his day job as a high school gym teacher for the first decade of his standup career.

“The Trump Department of Justice asserted in court Tuesday that, under their theories, the President’s removal power is so all-encompassing that he could fire all female agency heads, as well as those over 40 years old. The startling admission came in response to a federal judge’s hypothetical. ”

“I want to do a better job of savoring the games as they are, not as part of the bigger stories.”

“The problem with the language of “crisis” is that it simply doesn’t prepare supporters of the republic for the reality of the situation, which is a series of long fights, some high profile and some not, many of which will have unclear and complicated outcomes.”

“Navajo Code Talkers disappear from military websites after Trump DEI order”.

Elbows up!

“I have a confession. Despite tracking antiabortion fake clinics and their seedy dealings for more than four years now, I sometimes get tricked by one. They’re just that devious and deceptive that even I can get duped. With that unfortunate fact in mind, this post aims to provide a check list of what to look for if you’re just not sure that center near you actually provides or refers for abortion.”

“The Military Ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext. Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.”

“Dark energy, a mysterious force that scientists believe is behind the accelerated expansion of the universe, is weakening — which could result in the universe over the course of billions of years collapsing on itself, according to new research.” As if I didn’t have enough to be worried about.

“Pirate’s Booty founder stages Long Island mutiny, declares he’s mayor and tries to fire village staff”. It’s bad enough we have DOGE, now we have DOGE cosplay.

“This is not what I saw for my career or for my evening, but Paul Weiss’ decision to cave to the Trump administration on DEI, representation, and staffing has forced my hand. We do not have time. It is either now or never, and if it’s never, I will not continue to work here.”

RIP, George Bell, former Virginia law officer, actor, and Harlem Globetrotter who at seven foot eight was America’s tallest man.

RIP, Wings Hauser, actor best known for the movies Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling and Vice Squad, father of actor Cole Hauser.

RIP, Kenneth Sims, College Football Hall of Fame defensive lineman for the Longhorns, also played eight seasons in the NFL.

RIP, George Foreman, two-time heavyweight champion, pitchman and grillmaker, ordained minister, all around interesting person. Oh, and he did a guest voice on Garfield and Friends, too. Don’t mess with Texas, and rest in peace.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | 4 Comments

Yet another part of the omnibus vote suppression law struck down

Posted on March 23, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

It’s taken awhile, but I can’t argue with the outcome.

A federal judge in San Antonio has ruled that the state of Texas’ ID requirements for mail ballot applications are unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez on Thursday found that the provisions in the state’s 2021 voter security law SB1 discriminate against voters with disabilities.

Mail-in voters are principally people over the age of 65 and people with disabilities. Since the law was enacted, many voters reported having their ballots rejected because they didn’t provide an ID number, or the number they provided did not match the one the state had on file.

“The problem with that is that many Texans have more than one department of public safety ID number,” said Victor Genecin, an attorney with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. “So the first hurdle for a voter who’s applying for an absentee ballot is they may not know which number is in the election system. And even if they do know which number is in the election system and they put it in correctly, the election system may not have the number right.”

Genecin cited testimony at trial, where the Texas Secretary of State conceded that more than 650,000 registration records in their system were incorrect.

He added that expert testimony at the trial estimated that more than 2 million people were unable to vote due to the ID restrictions.

The ruling ordered the Texas secretary of state to remove the requirements from mail-in ballot applications. However, the ruling came just weeks before Texas’ municipal elections, so they will remain in effect through May 3.

Judge Rodriguez also struck down provisions of SB1 that require those who assist voters to swear an oath under penalty of perjury.

“Normally when somebody says to you, ‘would you help me?’ you either step up to help them or you don’t. But you don’t say, you know, ‘what’s wrong with you? Why do you need help?’ You just help,” Genecin said. “And so the idea that that people who are disabled must explain why they’re unable to vote without assistance is offensive in itself.”

Genecin added that part of the oath is that the assister must swear to be understanding that if the voter turns out not to be eligible for assistance, then the vote could be invalidated.

“So it puts the assister in the position of having to evaluate whether the voter is eligible for assistance, and the word ‘eligible’ is not defined anywhere in the statute,’ he said.

This lawsuit was filed in September 2021, and recently its provisions on vote harvesting and certain bans on assisting voters were struck down as unconstitutional. The state has appealed those rulings and will surely appeal this one, where they get to be coddled by the Fifth Circuit. You do what you can and you hope for the best. A copy of the ruling is embedded in the story.

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The uncertified teacher boom

Posted on March 23, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

The Lege creates problems for the Lege to try to fix.

Lawmakers want to turn the tide on the growing number of unprepared and uncertified teachers by restricting who can lead Texas classrooms. But school leaders worry those limits will leave them with fewer options to refill their teacher ranks.

Tucked inside the Texas House’s $7.6 billion school finance package is a provision that would ban uncertified teachers from instructing core classes in public schools. House Bill 2 gives districts until fall 2026 to certify their K-5 math and reading teachers and until fall 2027 to certify teachers in other academic classes.

Texas would help uncertified teachers pay for the cost of getting credentialed. Under HB 2, those who participate in an in-school training and mentoring program would receive a one-time $10,000 payment and those who go through a traditional university or alternative certification program would get $3,000. Special education and emergent bilingual teachers would get their certification fees waived. Educator training experts say it could be the biggest financial investment Texas made in teacher preparation.

District leaders, once reluctant to hire uncertified teachers, now rely on them often to respond to the state’s growing teacher shortage. And while they agree with the spirit of the legislation, some worry the bill would ask too much too soon of districts and doesn’t offer a meaningful solution to replace uncertified teachers who leave the profession.

“What’s going to happen when we’re no longer able to hire uncertified teachers? Class sizes have to go up, programs have to disappear…. We won’t have a choice,” said David Vroonland, the former superintendent of the Mesquite school district near Dallas and the Frenship school district near Lubbock. “There will be negative consequences if we don’t put in place serious recruitment efforts.”

The story goes into the reasons for the shortage of certified teachers: Teacher pay in Texas is below the national average, teachers complain of high workloads (the Lege does like imposing mandates), small rural districts have trouble attracting new teachers while fast-growing suburban districts can’t hire them fast enough. The pool of certified teachers is small, and the problem was greatly exacerbated by COVID, when teachers left the profession in droves. Uncertified teachers, who are in theory supposed to get certified with resources from the state and their district, became the de facto solution after their hiring was enabled by the 2015 “district of innovation” law. But now, ten years after that law was passed, the Lege wants to tighten it up.

And I get it, that was supposed to be a means of giving districts some flexibility, not a permanent workaround to a labor shortage. Plenty of research shows that students perform better overall with certified teachers. But in typical legislative fashion, the bill being put forward doesn’t really solve the problem and will likely cause even more disruption in the short term. It’s a long story and I’d have had to excerpt a ton of it to get all of that across, so go read the rest. And follow the action, because this is going to be a fight and the final form of HB2 is likely to change quite a bit between now and when it passes.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Immersive art lawsuits

Posted on March 23, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Fascinating.

Immersive art experiences transform how audiences interact with creativity, and legal experts on Monday discussed how copyright law is protecting these dynamic works of art.

At a South by Southwest session, two legal experts explored the complexities of copyright in immersive, interactive art installations worldwide.

The immersive art industry, which includes Meow Wolf, teamLab, Van Gogh and Monet immersive art shows, is expected to generate $144 billion in revenue in 2025 and grow to $412.7 billion by 2030, according to Mordor Intelligence, a market research firm. It reports that the major market players are teamLab, Meow Wolf, Secret Cinema and Culturespaces

“Copyright does not require a work to be static or frozen to be fixed,” said Ben Allison, managing partner of Bardacke Allison Miller in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

He mentioned a 2023 case, Tangle Inc. v. Aritzia Inc., in which the court recently held that copyright protection extends to kinetic objects that can be manipulated. The case involved Tangle, a toy maker, that created a sculpture that can be twisted into various shapes, suing Aritzia, a store that used sculptures similar to the toy in its displays.

“Ballet is copyrightable, symphonies are copyrightable,” Allison said. “The fact that that environment is shape-shifting and movable with the wisdom of the user does not erase the fact that it is fixed in this tangible … medium of expression.”

Breanna Contreras, vice president of Legal for Meow Wolf Inc. in Santa Fe, New Mexico, said interactive and changeable works can receive copyright protection despite their dynamic nature. She cited the court in the teamLab vs. Museum of Dream Space case, which determined that immersive art installations with interactive elements are entitled to copyright protection based on the fixed elements and creative choices, even if the user experience varies.

In that case, Contreras said teamLab, a Japanese company, prevailed in enforcing its copyright against Museum of Dream Space because of the creative and original nature of its digital artwork pieces and the evidence that the museum copied them.

Contreras also discussed the Berne Convention, an international agreement that standardizes basic copyright protections across member countries. It stipulates that content creators don’t need to register their work in every country to receive protection. Instead, under the Berne Convention, copyright should be automatically recognized internationally.

Meow Wolf imagines and creates new immersive worlds. Contreras said Meow Wolf has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in London against Wake the Tiger, a London-based immersive artwork creator. Meow Wolf, which has five locations in the U.S., claims Wake the Tiger stole its artwork. In a BBC story, Wake the Tiger has denied the claims.

Contreras said more copyright lawsuits involving immersive environments will hit the courts in the coming years.

The panelists explained that work created entirely by AI is not eligible for copyright protection and only human authorship qualifies.

“An inanimate object or an animal is incapable of creating a copyright,” Contreras said.

So, Contreras said, artists and creators using AI platforms need to be transparent about their use of AI when registering for a copyright. Failing to disclose AI involvement could invalidate a registration, she said.

Couple of things here. If you blinked at the claim that the “immersive art industry” is “expected to generate $144 billion in revenue in 2025 and grow to $412.7 billion by 2030”, you’re not alone. Turns out, that Mordor study is about the Immersive Entertainment industry, which according to them includes VR and AR gaming, among other things. That makes a lot more sense to me. All due respect to immersive art, but that’s a lotta money.

On that front, I will note that Meow Wolf exists in Houston and is on our short list of places to visit soon. I’ve actually gotten a bunch of press releases from them about various openings and exhibits but haven’t had the chance to try them out yet. My wife and I did visit ARTECHOUSE, which is in the Heights near MKT. It was cool, we enjoyed it, we’ll visit again when there’s a new exhibit. Houston now has a few of these immersive art places, all pretty recent additions to the scene. CityCast Houston reviewed four of them, including Meow Wolf and ARTECHOUSE, if this intrigues you.

Anyway, this caught my eye, and if that prediction comes true I’m sure there will be some cases of interest for me to follow. I do enjoy a novel lawsuit.

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The measles outbreak is going to go national

Posted on March 22, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

That’s the concern, anyway.

With its measles outbreak spreading to two additional states, Texas is on track to becoming the cause of a national epidemic if it doesn’t start vaccinating more people, according to public health experts.

Measles, a highly contagious disease that was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, has made a resurgence in West Texas communities, jumping hundreds of miles to the northern border of the Panhandle and East Texas, and invading bordering states of New Mexico and Oklahoma.

Based on the rapid spread of cases statewide — more than 200 over 50 days — public health officials predict that it could take Texas a year to contain the spread. With cases continuously rising and the rest of the country’s unvaccinated population at the outbreak’s mercy, Texas must create stricter quarantine requirements, increase the vaccine rate, and improve contact tracing to address this measles epidemic before it becomes a nationwide problem, warn infectious disease experts and officials in other states.

“This demonstrates that this (vaccine exemption) policy puts the community, the county, and surrounding states at risk because of how contagious this disease is,” said Glenn Fennelly, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Texas Tech University. “We are running the risk of threatening global stability.”

[…]

“This is a very multi-jurisdictional outbreak with three states involved and about seven or eight different local health departments, in addition to some areas where the state serves as the local health department. There are a lot of moving parts,” said Katherine Wells, director of public health for the City of Lubbock, during a Tuesday meeting of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a national organization for large metropolitan health departments.

Most of Texas’ measles cases are in unvaccinated school-aged children and are concentrated in the Mennonite community in Gaines County, which traditionally has low vaccination rates.

Wells said efforts to increase the vaccination rates in Gaines County, which is about 70 miles from Lubbock, and the surrounding region have been slow as trust in the government has seemingly reached an all-time low.

“We are seeing, just like the rest of Americans, this community has seen a lot of stories about vaccines causing autism, and that is leading to a lot of this vaccine hesitancy, not religion,” she said.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the politicization of vaccines and overall weariness to health mandates like quarantines and masks. Public health officials are now battling misinformation and public resistance to measles.

Wells said because the state can’t stop people from traveling, she fully expects this outbreak to last a year, and the surrounding states and the nation should prepare themselves for a potential spread.

“Measles is going to find those pockets of unvaccinated individuals, and with the number of cases and ability for people to travel, there is that risk of it entering other unvaccinated pockets anywhere in the United States right now,” Wells said.

[…]

New Mexico’s public health officials started spreading awareness of vaccinations immediately after they learned Texas had its first measles case and before New Mexico got its first case.

“We started setting up clinics and getting the ball rolling,” Jimmy Masters, the southeast region director for the New Mexico Department of Health, said. “Let’s see what we can do to get people in the doors and vaccinated beforehand.”

Nearly 9,000 New Mexicans have received measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine shots between Feb. 1 and March 10. During that same time period last year, officials vaccinated 5,342 people.

Texas has held multiple vaccination clinics in the outbreak area, but according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, only 350 doses have been administered.

New Mexico has also emphasized its Vaxview website that keeps track of residents’ immunizations, allowing concerned people to check within seconds if they need a shot. Texas has a vaccine tracking program known as ImmTrac2, but it’s an opt-in program that doesn’t have most adult records. If someone doesn’t opt in by age 26, their records will not be retained.

“We told people to contact us to ensure their vaccine status is up to date,” Masters said. “If they aren’t sure, just call the health office so we can find out for them. And if they don’t have their records updated for the vaccine, then we can ask them to come in and take advantage of the clinics or come in as walk-ins.”

Because of this, most of Lea County is considered immunized, Masters said, so public health officials in New Mexico don’t view the outbreak as rapidly evolving.

Back in Texas, the opposite is playing out. Advice from public health officials is seemingly ignored, and vaccine efforts are struggling.

Can’t imagine why. Kudos to New Mexico for its response to the outbreak. There’s a reason the numbers are climbing at a much faster rate in Texas than over there.

As far as vaccine messaging goes for Texas, I regret that I have to share this story with you. It’s one of the roughest things I’ve read in a long time.

The Texas parents of an unvaccinated 6-year-old girl who died from measles Feb. 26 told the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense this week that the experience did not convince them that vaccination against measles was necessary.

“She says they would still say ‘Don’t do the shots,’ ” an unidentified translator for the parents said. “They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be.”

The couple, members of a Mennonite community in Gaines County, spoke on camera in both English and Low German to CHD Executive Director Polly Tommey and CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker.

“It was her time on Earth,” the translator said the parents told her. “They believe she’s better off where she is now.”

“We would absolutely not take the MMR,” the mother said in English, referring to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination children typically receive before attending school. She said her stance on vaccination has not changed after her daughter’s death.

“The measles wasn’t that bad. They got over it pretty quickly,” the mother said of her other four surviving children who were treated with castor oil and inhaled steroids and recovered.

The couple told CHD that their daughter had measles for days when she became tired and the girl’s labored breathing prompted the couple to take her to Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock. There, the girl was intubated and died a few days later. The other children came down with measles after their sister died.

Mother Jones had this story earlier. Like many people, I’m a fan of crime fiction. I picked up an Agatha Christie novel in high school and have devoured murder mysteries and similar stories ever since. That includes a large number of stories with truly repugnant depictions of all kinds of violence. After Olivia was born, I found I just couldn’t handle stories that included violence committed against children. It was too much, and the escapist pleasure I had gotten wasn’t there. It was too close to home. I still feel that way, so maybe I’m just too sensitive for this discussion.

I am at an absolute loss to comprehend this reaction by those parents. I can’t quite bring myself to be mad at them, as they have suffered the worst loss imaginable, however bizarre I find their reaction to it. I am incandescent with rage at these fucking ghouls from that RFK villains’ lair who exploited them like this, plus the local anti-vaxx doctor playing some perverted Pied Piper role, Ben Edwards. I don’t recognize myself as being from the same species as them. I do not know what to say. NBC News has more, if you can stomach it.

deep breath Okay, let’s move on to the updated case count.

The number of measles cases associated with an outbreak in western Texas has grown to 309, with 30 cases reported over the last three days, according to new data released Friday.

This means the total number of Texas cases linked to the outbreak in roughly two months has surpassed the number confirmed for the entirety of last year in the U.S., which saw 285 cases nationwide, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Almost all of the cases are in unvaccinated individuals or in individuals whose vaccination status is unknown. At least 40 people have been hospitalized so far, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS).

Just two cases have occurred in people fully vaccinated with the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

Children and teenagers between ages 5 and 17 make up the majority of cases, at 130, followed by children ages 4 and under accounting for 102 cases.

[…]

The CDC has confirmed 378 measles cases this year in at least 17 states: Alaska, California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont and Washington. This is likely an undercount due to delays in states reporting cases to the federal health agency.

The Star-Telegram has a listing of the counties that reported cases, of which three are new – Garza, Hale, and Hockley. They also have a nice embedded map of the counties that have reported cases, which shows how close together they mostly are, and why Lamar County is such an outlier. The Chron confirmed that Oklahoma’s count is still at four – hoping for the best for y’all – and also had this forehead-smacking anecdote:

The New Mexico Department of Health reports 38 measles cases. The outbreak in this state remains confined to Lea and Eddy counties. Both share a border with Texas.

On Tuesday, the agency reported concern after a Texas traveler with an active measles infection visited Guadalupe and Valencia counties in the first part of the month, staying in a hotel, eating at a local restaurant and visiting a local Catholic church.

Jesus Christ. Stay the fuck at home when you’re sick, people! What are we doing here?

To bring it back to where we started, here’s another view of the trajectory of this outbreak.

As measles cases in West Texas are still on the rise two months after the outbreak began, local public health officials say they expect the virus to keep spreading for at least several more months and that the official case number is likely an undercount.

But there’s a silver lining, officials say: More people have received a measles, mumps and rubella vaccination this year in Texas and New Mexico, which also has an outbreak, compared to last year — even if it’s not as high as they would like. And pharmacies across the U.S., especially in Texas, are seeing more demand for MMR shots.

[…]

Texas’ outbreak, which has largely spread in undervaccinated Mennonite communities, could last a year based on studies of how measles previously spread in Amish communities in the U.S. Those studies showed outbreaks lasted six to seven months, said Katherine Wells, director of the public health department in Lubbock, Texas. Lubbock’s hospitals have treated most of the outbreak’s patients and the public health department is closely assisting with the response.

“It being so rural, now multistate, it’s just going to take a lot more boots on the ground, a lot more work, to get things under control,” Wells said during a media briefing this week. “It’s not an isolated population.”

[…]

If the outbreak goes on until next January, it would end the United States’ status of having eliminated measles, which is defined as 12 months without local virus transmission, said Dr. William Moss, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University and executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center.

“We’re only three months in. I think if we had a strong response where the messaging was clear that measles vaccination is the way to stop this outbreak, I would be surprised if it went for 12 months or more,” said Moss, who has worked on measles for 25 years, mostly in Africa. “But we’re not seeing that type of response, at least from the federal government.”

[…]

Still, there are signs the outbreak has had an effect on vaccinations, especially locally.

Between Feb. 1 and March 18 last year, New Mexico Department of Health registered 6,500 measles vaccines. During that timeframe this year, more than 11,600 measles vaccines were administered in New Mexico — about half given to adults and half to children.

Southeast New Mexico, where the outbreak is located, represents a large portion of the count, with 2,369 doses administered.

In Texas, at least 173,000 measles doses were given from Jan. 1 to March 16, compared to at least 158,000 over the same timeframe last year, according to the state health department. That includes more than 340 doses in given by public health in the West Texas outbreak area as of March 11.

Texans must opt-in to the state’s immunization registry, so most people’s vaccinations are not captured in the Texas Department of State Health Services numbers, department spokeswoman Lara Anton said.

“We don’t know if more people are opting in or if this is a true reflection of an increase in vaccinations,” Anton wrote in an email. “It may be both.”

Pharmacy chains Walgreens and CVS told The Associated Press that they’re seeing higher demand for MMR vaccines across the U.S., especially in the outbreak areas.

A little bit of hope, I suppose. You do have to wonder where we’d be if we had a competent and non-evil Presidential administration, but that’s too deep a rabbit hole for me to climb into right now.

It’s Saturday, so let’s end with some music.

I am acquainted with Boiled In Lead thanks to my former roommate and bridge partner Stephen, who played the “From The Ladle To The Grave” CD on which this song appears many times during our time together. The refrain to this song has run through my head many times over the last few years. Thumbs up to that CD, by the way, if you liked what you just heard.

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Senate passes Dan Patrick’s THC ban bill

Posted on March 22, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

You may want to stock up now if this would affect you.

The Texas Senate on Wednesday passed a state ban on all forms of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, advancing a priority of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to crack down on the state’s booming consumable hemp market six years after lawmakers inadvertently permitted its rise.

Senate Bill 3 — which Patrick called among his “top five” bills over his 17 years in the Legislature — would outlaw products with any amount of THC, ranging from gummies and beverages to vapes and flower buds, which are currently sold at more than 8,300 locations around the state. Current Texas law allows hemp-derived products that contain less than 0.3% of THC.

“Kids are getting poisoned today,” Patrick said in the Senate chamber as the vote neared.

He used similar language Wednesday morning. “This is a poison in our public, and we as a Legislature — our No. 1 responsibility is life and death issues,” Patrick said at a morning news conference, alongside members of law enforcement and advocates for families who saw loved ones develop behavioral health problems after consuming supposedly-legal THC products. “We’re going to ban your stores before we leave here, for good.”

The vote was 24 to 7.

“I believe this bill goes too far, in that it would put out of business the consumable hemp industry in Texas,” state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin said during debate of the bill, arguing that concerns related to sale of low-THC products should be addressed through stronger regulations.

The Texas House has yet to consider its hemp proposal, House Bill 28, which would impose stricter oversight and licensing requirements for the hemp industry rather than ban THC altogether. If the House passes its proposal, the two chambers would have to reconcile their differences before the legislation could become law.

State Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, the lead author of SB 3, said that the Senate and the House were “philosophically aligned” and that there was time to work out any policy differences.

[…]

The hemp industry lobbied fiercely against a total prohibition on THC, urging lawmakers to instead impose “thoughtful regulations,” such as restricting THC sales to Texans 21 and older, requiring tamper-proof packaging and barring sales within a certain distance of schools.

Mark Bordas, executive director of the Texas Hemp Business Council, said that lawmakers were conflating consumable hemp, which, by legal definition, has a low concentration of THC, with higher potency marijuana.

Certain bad actors are “operating in the black market, in the shadows,” he said, arguing that the state needed greater oversight of the industry as a whole to block those manufacturers and retailers — rather than a total prohibition.

“We have a common enemy. We know who’s doing wrong,” Bordas said. “We’d both like to eliminate them, but the problem is, the lieutenant governor and Senator Perry are going to eliminate the entire business — including over 7,000 licensed dispensaries.”

The industry also highlighted roughly 50,000 jobs and billions in tax revenue that would be lost if lawmakers quashed the hemp market entirely. And critics argued that instead of addressing public health concerns, a ban would push consumers into an unregulated black market, easing access to more potent products.

“Bans don’t work,” Bordas said, a point that was echoed on the Senate floor by state Sen. José Menéndez, D-San Antonio. “All it’s going to do is encourage the bad actors to fill the vacuum.”

Still, he said that the industry believed “cooler heads will prevail” in the House.

See here for the background. My rule of thumb is that anything that sends Dan Patrick into hysterics should be viewed with high levels of skepticism. My advice to Mark Bordas and the Texas Hemp Business Council is that Dan Patrick is not in any way your friend, and whether those “cooler heads” do prevail or not this session, he’ll never stop coming for you. Your best bet is to organize and rally people to vote against him. Cannabis polls well. What have you got to lose?

Before we go, I have to note this bit of unintentional comedy:

“Don’t you know who I am?!?” “No. Now show me some ID or GTFO.”

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Make America hungry again

Posted on March 22, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

They’re working on it.

The San Antonio Food Bank expects to lose $3 million due to federal funding cuts, leaving officials at the nonprofit saying they’re not sure how they’ll make up for that shortfall and that they are worried they won’t be able to meet local demand.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture this week ended two pandemic-era programs that provided more than $1 billion nationally for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farms, ranches and other producers.

Those cuts coupled with recent layoffs of federal workers by the Trump administration has San Antonio Food Bank president and CEO Eric Cooper bracing for an increase in demand and feeling “incredibly anxious.”

“This is where you feel the squeeze at both ends, that pressure of resources diminishing and also the demand increasing,” Cooper said. “That’s not where you want to be. It’s going to be a difficult year for us.”

About $660 million of the $1 billion went to schools and childcare centers to buy food for meals through the Local Foods for Schools Program.

The Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which helped fund food banks and other relief organizations to aid the food insecure, was also eliminated. The San Antonio Food Bank was in line to receive $3 million in funding from that program, Cooper said.

The $3 million is about 20% of the Food Bank’s annual food purchase budget of $14.5 million. The Food Bank’s total annual budget is $43 million.

Celia Cole, CEO of Feeding Texas, the state association of food banks, said funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program expires in May and that the third round of funding, which was eliminated, was expected to bring $34 million to Texas.

“We’re hopeful the decision to cut the funding didn’t have anything to do with concerns about the program itself,” Cole said. “This has been a program that’s always had really strong bipartisan support at the federal level, so we’re hopeful we can continue to work with the White House and (Agriculture) Secretary (Brooke) Rollins to continue, whether it’s through this program or some other program, to strengthen the connection between local agriculture and food security.”

Cooper also expressed optimism in Rollins. In addition to schools and food banks, more than 120 food producers statewide will be affected by the elimination of the programs, according to Cooper.

“She’s a Texan,” he said. “She understands agriculture. She knows rural communities need support and strengthening.”

Kevin Elstner and his wife Sadie, who own Elstner Meat Processing in Weimar, said the elimination of the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program is a blow to their company because 70% of their annual income – “hundreds of thousands of dollars” – is generated by doing business with food banks, including San Antonio’s.

“It affects everybody, it’s a big trickle effect,” Kevin Elstner said. “We’ve got to cut down our staff and we have a lot of cattle we have on feed we’ve been holding for these different programs. It really affects us.”

Sadie Elstner described their food bank contracts as “basically the only income we could count on.” She said the company recently bought “a lot of expensive equipment” to fill its orders.

“We are really, really in a bind with that right now,” she said.

But Rollins and USDA officials signaled the two programs won’t be resurrected.

“The COVID era is over – USDA’s approach to nutrition programs will reflect that reality moving forward,” a USDA spokesperson said in a statement, per the Associated Press.

Just a reminder that Brooke Rollins has spent her career as a wingnut think tank apparatchik. “Real world experience” is not something she has. I understand needing to appeal to her, I’m just saying to guard your optimism. Also, San Antonio is really getting kicked around by Trump and Musk and DOGE. Not that anyone is doing well by them, but it really does suck for San Antonio.

Far as I can tell from Google, this Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program does not appear to have been a program that the Houston Food Bank depended on. But there are plenty of other food banks around the country that are feeling the effects of this cut. And not just them – as noted, the food being purchased came from local farmers, so this is a blow to them and to Texas farmers.

Texas farmers are taking yet another hit from President Donald Trump’s administration during the early weeks of his second term in the White House.

The administration has already cut foreign aid programs that have left farm exports stalled at ports like in Houston, and tariffs have rattled farmers already struggling through drought and diseases like the bird flu outbreak.

Now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has eliminated a pair of programs with about $2 billion that helped community food banks and schools buy fresh food from farms and ranches. In a Fox News interview, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins called the programs “nonessential” and “an effort by the left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that was not necessary.”

However, the cut will have real impacts in Texas, according to reporter Tom Orsborn. The nonprofit San Antonio Food Bank stands to lose about $3 million just because of the cuts to one program called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program.

Cuts to that program and the Local Food for Schools program, combined, will cost Texas about $200 million used to buy locally grown food, according to research from Reuters.

Texas Agriculture Commission Sid Miller, a Republican and big Trump advocate, is a big supporter of farm-to-school and farm-to-food-bank programs but said he understands why the Trump administration is re-evaluating the federal programs.

“I support a fair and consistent approach, which is precisely what the Trump Administration is implementing,” Miller said. “This is not a final decision—it’s a reassessment. There’s always room for refinement, and we may see a revised version of the policy down the road that is even better for agriculture producers.”

Sure, Sid. I’m sure the best and the brightest within the Trump administration are hard at work at coming up with a refined and revised version of this program as we speak. This is what you farmers voted for. Hope you’re happy.

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The Pauline Road Fire

Posted on March 21, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

This is a little close for comfort.

Montgomery County Judge Mark Keough declared a local state of disaster as a 2,000-acre wildfire in Sam Houston National Forest prompted over 900 home evacuations and school closures.

The disaster declaration comes as fire crews on Thursday continued working to extinguish the Pauline Road fire, roughly 50 miles north of Houston. The fire was 20% contained as of 8:45 a.m., according to Texas A&M Forest Service officials.

“I have determined that extraordinary measures must be taken to alleviate the suffering of people and to protect or rehabilitate property both public and private,” the disaster declaration reads.

The notice is effective immediately through at least the next seven days.

Lone Star College campuses in Montgomery County are operating as normal, according to school officials.

The wildfire, which started Wednesday evening, prompted evacuations for residents living west of Cleveland near Grant Lake. Several shelters in the area were accepting those forced to evacuate, including animals and livestock.

Here’s a map of the Sam Houston National Forest, which shows the fire area in its southern region, between Conroe and Cleveland a bit north of State Highway 105. The Chron has a resource page here with more data. I could get to a spot on SH105 close to the fire in about an hour’s drive. I must say, it hadn’t really occurred to me that I’d be that proximate to a big fire.

More from HPM:

The Pauline Road fire— which first ignited in the Sam Houston National Forest on the southwestern corner of San Jacinto County Wednesday afternoon— was 20 percent contained early Thursday. It wasn’t immediately clear how the fire ignited.

“We are expecting the humidity to drop, the wind to pick up and the temperature to rise a little bit, which is not helpful for fire fighting efforts,” said Jason Millsaps, executive director of Montgomery County’s emergency management department. “What we saw yesterday was a very fast moving head on this fire. That’s very possible again today.”

Montgomery County Judge Mark Keough said that overnight crews made efforts to protect structures and the areas within the path of the massive fire. No structures had received damage as of Thursday morning.

[…]

The cause of the fire was still under investigation. It wasn’t immediately clear if any controlled burns were conducted in the area at the time the fire started, said Matthew Ford, a public information officer with Texas A&M Forest Service.

“Right now we have multiple resources on scene with more throughout the day,” Ford said.

A later update says that there were two controlled burns within hours of the fire breaking out, so that may be the cause. This fire is not the biggest one currently active in the state, but the larger ones out there are almost completely contained. This one still has a ways to go.

Which has an effect on the greater area.

Thursday morning, the National Weather Service has placed much of Southeast Texas under a red flag warning because of the increased risk of fast-spreading fires caused by low humidity, dry vegetation and especially breezy winds.

The red flag warning, which is in effect from 1 p.m. Thursday to 7 p.m., applies to Harris, Trinity, Madison, Walker, San Jacinto, Polk, Burleson, Brazos, Washington, Grimes, Montgomery, Liberty, Colorado, Austin, Waller, Houston, Chambers, Wharton, Fort Bend, Jackson, Matagorda, Brazoria and Galveston counties.

After the passage of the latest cold front, weather service forecasters on Thursday expect the region to face blustery north winds 10 to 15 mph with gusts as strong as 25 mph. The fierce winds, like blowing on kindling to start a small campfire, could hasten the growth of a wildfire or spread its flames and embers.

Meanwhile, the dry air and rain-starved vegetation provide ideal conditions for fires to rapidly develop in intensity and get out of control. Relative humidity levels will sink to as low as 18%, the weather service said. More of Southeast Texas is becoming “abnormally dry,” a precursor stage for drought, according to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor data.

The Eyewall discussed the dry and windy conditions much of the state faces now last week, with a warning about wildfire risk. Not much to do except pay attention, respond to alerts and updates as needed, and hope they contain this quickly. Stay safe out there.

UPDATE: As of 4:30 PM yesterday, the fire was almost 50% contained. So hopefully by the end of the day today it will be largely under control.

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Order issued to temporarily close Maria Rojas’ clinics

Posted on March 21, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

This was expected.

A Texas court has temporarily shut down a group of Houston-area clinics run by a midwife accused of performing illegal abortions and practicing medicine without a license.

Waller County Judge Gary W. Chaney on Tuesday signed an order blocking Maria Margarita Rojas and her employees from providing any medical services, including abortion.

[…]

The clinics identified in the order are the Maternal and Child Healthcare and Research Center, Clinica Latinoamericana in Waller, Cypress and Spring, and Houston Birth House.

The stay will be in place until a hearing March 27 at which the judge will decide whether to grant a longer-lasting injunction.

See here and here for the background. All three of the defendants are also charged with practicing medicine without a license, which by itself would be sufficient to get a court order to close the clinics, at least pending a full hearing. There’s no news stories that I could see on this case, everything in Google News was at least two days old when I looked yesterday, so keep reading Jessica Valenti and stay skeptical at least until we hear from a defense attorney.

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Eric Dick arrested on misdemeanor assault charge

Posted on March 21, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

In the news again.

Eric Dick

Well-known Houston lawyer and Harris County Department of Education Trustee Eric Dick faces a misdemeanor assault charge, adding to his legal and ethical troubles.

The Houston Police Department arrested Dick on March 7 for hitting a female family member with his hand, according to a criminal complaint. Publicly available court records do not provide details about evidence obtained by police, statements made by witnesses and any injuries sustained by the alleged victim.

[…]

The criminal case is the second filed against Dick in the past year. Prosecutors in Hawaii charged him in May 2024 with four misdemeanor counts of attempting to unlawfully practice the law. Dick has pleaded not guilty.

Hawaii News Now reported in October 2023 that Dick’s law firm sent flyers advertising his services to residents affected by the devastating Maui wildfires, a potential violation of strict Hawaii rules and laws related to lawyers who aren’t licensed in the state soliciting potential clients.

See here for the previous Eric Dick update. He was released on his own recognizance, and I’m going to assume that some kind of plea or diversion deal will eventually be worked out. I hope that the alleged victim is safe. Beyond that I will just say that Eric Dick is the main character in some cursed reality show that we are all forced to be informed about. I hate this timeline. The Chron has more.

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Menefee and Edwards

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Christian Menefee has gotten off to a strong start in his candidacy for CD18.

Christian Menefee

In his congressional campaign’s first 24 hours, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee has raised contributions from more than 5,000 supporters and garnered endorsements from some of the state’s top Democratic leaders.

Menefee’s team announced Monday it had collected $100,000 from 2,000 donors in the six hours after unrolling his candidacy to represent Texas’ 18th congressional district. On Tuesday, the campaign announced it had raised more than $200,000 from more 5,000 donors. The average donation was around $40, his campaign said.

Also on Tuesday, his team unveiled endorsements from former U.S. Reps. Beto O’Rourke and Colin Allred, Harris County Commissioners Rodney Ellis and Leslie Briones, and Houston Controller Chris Hollins, along with several Houston City Council members.

“The enthusiasm we’re seeing in the first few hours is a clear message that people want bold, progressive leadership in Washington,” Menefee said in a Monday statement. “This momentum sends a powerful signal that we’re ready to challenge the status quo and lead Texas’s 18th District into a new era of leadership that prioritizes the needs of working families.”

The agility of Menefee’s fundraising was described by University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus using one word: “Stunning.”

There’s a premium on raising money early, Rottinghaus added — it indicates not only power, but a sophisticated campaign operation.

“It demonstrates that he’s the one to set the tone,” Rottinghaus said.

See here for the background. I said when Menefee made his move that I had not expected him to join this race because it meant giving up a lot for an uncertain outcome. But having this kind of groundwork laid before getting in helps. It is impressive, and speaks to a high level of preparedness. No guarantees, of course, but one would surely feel more confident with this kind of start.

Another reason to go in with that level of preparation is the expectation of strong opposition. And here it is.

Amanda Edwards

Former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards will run for the 18th Congressional District following the death of U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, Edwards announced Wednesday.

“My commitment to this community has never wavered, and I will continue to fight for the opportunities and resources our district needs,” Edwards said in a social media post. “We need the next generation of new leaders in Washington to combat Trump’s attacks on jobs, healthcare, and education.”

In an interview with The Texas Tribune, Edwards focused on the importance of the community and said she would bring new ideas and a fresh approach to the “turmoil” in Washington. She said President Donald Trump’s reversals of executive orders has caused angst and concern in the district.

Republicans control all branches of the federal government, and Democrats have been listless since Trump’s victory in November. Since falling out of power, Democrats have not messaged to supporters how to donate or how to focus their attention, Edwards said.

“Right now we’re not hearing that strategic vision on the defensive side,” she continued. “I don’t believe that sitting aside at this time is the right answer.”

Edwards unsuccessfully ran for the seat twice last year. She faced off against U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in the 2024 Democratic primary. Jackson Lee won the primary but died before the general election, opening the party’s nomination anew. Edwards came in second place in that race to Turner, the former mayor of Houston.

You know I’ve been an Edwards fan, and I expected her to enter the race. I like that all of the candidates so far have adopted a confrontational attitude towards Trump and his sycophants. Lord knows, we’re going to need all of that and more. Edwards has had a bit of hard luck in her quest for CD18 – she thought she was running for an open seat in 2024, and wound up not only running against Sheila Jackson Lee at the last minute but then facing off against Sylvester Turner in the precinct chair race. Now she gets to square off against Christian Menefee and his formidable opening bid. Whatever happens, you can’t say she had an easy path. We don’t know who else might join this as-yet-unscheduled race – the story notes that Rep. Jolanda Jones is thinking about it, and as I said before this is basically a free shot for legislators as they can keep their seats unless and until they win – but my guess is that the field is already pretty crowded. If there is a May election set, which would have to happen soon, we’ll get a definitive answer then. The Press, Campos, and the Chron have more.

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Bill to ban cellphones at schools proposed

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

It’s got a lot of support early on.

Rep. Caroline Fairly

Lawmakers want Texas to join a growing number of states in restricting public school students from using their cellphones during the school day, answering calls from educators who say the state needs to remove distractions from the classroom.

Under House Bill 1481, introduced by Rep. Caroline Fairly of Amarillo, K-12 public school students wouldn’t be allowed to use their cellphones during the regular school day. It comes as at least eight states have enacted similar bans in the past two years, including Democrat-led states like California and Republican-led states like Arkansas.

The bans come as parents have become more worried about the negative mental health impacts of cyberbullying and youths’ social media use.

The bill is co-sponsored by a majority of the Texas House, including both Democrats and Republicans. Fairly, a Republican and the only Gen Z member of the Texas Legislature, said she introduced the legislation because she was “born into these devices” and understands the distraction they can cause in the classroom.

“When you see what is being pushed on social media and the distraction it causes in the classroom, there is a need for our government to support our educators in this,” Fairly said in an interview with The Texas Tribune on Tuesday.

Fairly added she hopes the ban will help improve students’ mental health and academic outcomes.

A growing body of research in recent years has suggested that cellphone use in schools can cause students to have trouble engaging in the classroom and have shorter attention spans. Several Texas school districts already have cellphone bans in place. Rancier Middle School in Killeen ISD, about 75 miles north of Austin, is one school that did so recently.

[…]

Some who testified Tuesday said that barring students from using their phones during the entire school day was too restrictive. An earlier version of the bill, filed in December, banned cellphone use during “instructional time” rather than the “school day,” meaning it left the door open for students to use their devices when they were outside the classroom.

Tricia Cave, a lobbyist for the Association of Texas Professional Educators, told committee members that while her organization backed the original version of the bill, they do not support the new language banning cellphone use throughout the entirety of the school day. She said while she still supports the purpose of the bill, the new language is “overly prescriptive.”

Rep. Alma Allen, D-Houston, said during Tuesday’s hearing that she worried a cellphone ban was a step too far and would make it more difficult for students to contact law enforcement or their parents in situations where their safety was threatened. She referenced the mass shooting at Uvalde Elementary School in 2022, when students called law enforcement to alert them.

Some who testified Tuesday also said the bill would create an “unfunded mandate” by forcing school districts to comply with a new policy while not being provided the funds to do so. Mary Lowe, co-founder of the nonprofit Families Engaged for Effective Education, said that by adding a new requirement for school districts without new funding, HB 1481 would also take away some local control from these districts to determine their own cellphone policies.

Fairly said she is open to adding new funding to the bill.

I’m not opposed to this, which you can file under “easy for you to say” since my youngest is about to graduate and I won’t need to worry about it. I can believe that cellphones are a distraction, and as someone who grew up well before they existed, I know the kids can make it through the day without them. I also understand the security objection, and I support giving schools some flexibility and all of the funding they might need to make this happen. I wish there were more research to show what the best practices were, but there’s going to need to be some experimentation to figure out what those are, so we may as well try. If this passes, it would go into effect in the fall of 2025, so we’ll get some data right away. I trust there will be plenty of research done as we go.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of March 17

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance stands with Mahmoud Khalil as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Off the Kuff notes that the Trump “Justice” Department has dropped the redistricting lawsuit filed by the Biden Justice Department after the 2021 redistricting.

SocraticGadfly talked about the end of an era at Southwest Airlines, looking at the end of “your bags fly free” — and other items Southwest announced.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project reports from a protest at a Houston Tesla dealership & says the next protest will take place when you organize it.

======================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Candidus shows how Donald Trump today resembles King George III, as documented by the authors of the Declaration of Independence.

Your Local Epidemiologist answers some questions about the MMR vaccine.

The Austin Chronicle reported from a SxSW panel on modern cars and the amount of our personal data they hold.

Law Dork worries about SCOTUS taking up a case involving state bans on conversion therapy.

The Houston Press looks at the ethos behind “pay what you can” theater tickets.

The Texas Signal notes some bad polling for school vouchers.

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Third Houston measles case documented

Posted on March 19, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Again, we hope that’s all there is.

The Houston Health Department has confirmed the city’s third measles case, months after identifying two cases in adults which marked the first measles cases since 2018.

The Houston Health Department Sunday reported an unvaccinated infant had been exposed to measles during international travel, a news release states. The infant was hospitalized and has since been discharged and was recovering at home, it said.

[…]

The recent confirmed case is not connected to the measles outbreak in West Texas and is not related to the cases confirmed in January, the release states. Since the outbreak, one child has died from measles after being hospitalized in Lubbock.

The first two Houston cases were from January. As hoped, there was no further spread. We can hope for more of the same this time. The Houston Landing has some more information about the affected family, who had been exposed to the measles while travelling internationally. Cases are up in many countries around the world in addition to the US.

And then there was this over the weekend:

On Wednesday, a woman gave birth in a Lubbock, Texas, hospital in the middle of a deadly and fast-growing measles outbreak. Doctors didn’t realize until the young mother had been admitted and in labor that she was infected with the measles.

By that time, other new moms, newborns and their families at University Medical Center Children’s Hospital in Lubbock had unknowingly been exposed to the virus, considered one of the most contagious in the world.

Hospital staff are scrambling with damage control efforts — implementing emergency masking policies and giving babies as young as three days old injections of immunoglobulin, an antibody that helps their fragile immune system fight off infections.

A 2021 study found that the therapy is highly effective in protecting exposed newborns from getting sick.

“These babies didn’t ask for this exposure,” said Chad Curry, training chief for the University Medical Center EMS. “But at the end of the day, this is the only way we can protect them.”

Neither Curry nor UMC representatives could give an exact number of exposed newborns.

It’s unclear when the woman tested positive for measles. Public health officials are casting a wide net in an effort to contact everyone who may have been exposed to this particular patient. Viral particles can live in the air or on surfaces for up to two hours.

We’ll just have to see what effect that has. All my sympathies to the public health officials in Lubbock now dealing with this.

Those stories were from before Tuesday, when we got the latest case numbers.

Texas Department of State Health Services reported Tuesday that the state has now seen 279 measles cases amid the outbreak, an increase of 20 since the agency’s last update on Friday. New Mexico health officials reported 38 cases as of Tuesday morning.

In Texas, 36 people have been hospitalized amid the outbreak, which is still centered in the South Plains region, according to DSHS data. One school-aged child has died, the first measles death in the United States since 2015. New Mexico has reported two hospitalizations and one death, an unvaccinated adult.

[…]

More than two-thirds of cases have been in Gaines County, a small county along the New Mexico border. But there have been some cases in the Panhandle and as far as Lamar County, located northeast of Dallas along the Oklahoma border.

Gaines County remains the epicenter of the outbreak and reported 17 new cases on Tuesday. The county has reported a total of 191 cases amid the outbreak, according to DSHS data.

Cochran, Lamar and Lubbock counties each reported one new case. Cochran County has now reported a total of seven cases amid the outbreak, while Lamar and Lubbock counties have each reported five.

No new infections which reported in the other seven counties that have seen cases amid the outbreak. Of those seven counties, Terry County has seen the most cases with 36.

Of the 279 cases, 88 have been in children younger than 5 years old and 120 have been in children and teens between 5 and 17.

Only two cases have been seen in people who received at least one dose of the MMR vaccine prior to an infection.

Per the DMN, Oklahoma is still reporting four cases, same as their initial report. This is a slightly smaller bump than we’ve been getting, but it’s just a half-week’s worth of data, and there’s no particular reason to think things are slowing down. If the next three or four reports show a tapering off, then we’ll have something.

And once again, we must remind you, measles is bad.

Dr. Alex Cvijanovich has been a practicing pediatrician for more than 20 years. She says she’s still haunted by the memory of a teenage boy she treated at the start of her career in Utah.

The boy had contracted measles as a 7-month-old, when he was too young to be vaccinated. “He got the virus from a child in his neighborhood who was unvaccinated,” says Cvijanovich, who now practices in New Mexico.

It was a relatively mild case of measles, and the infant recovered. She says he grew up to be a healthy, bright kid — an honor student.

Then in middle school, he started to develop troubling symptoms. “He started getting lost between classes, lost like he couldn’t find what class to go to next,” Cvijanovich says.

Worried, the teen’s parents took him to a series of doctors to figure out what was wrong, until a pediatric neurologist finally suspected a condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, or SSPE. It’s a degenerative neurological condition that typically develops seven to 10 years after a measles infection. It is almost always fatal. Cvijanovich was part of the hospital team that confirmed the diagnosis.

“The problem is that there is no treatment for it,” she says. “And he basically became more and more incapacitated over time.”

Some 18 months after his initial diagnosis, she says, the teenager died.

SSPE was once considered quite rare. But Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in New York City who wrote a history of measles, says data from outbreaks in the U.S. over the past several decades suggests that may not always be the case.

“It turns out that in some age groups, especially in kids under about age 2, it’s much more common than we thought,” Ratner says.

For example, a review of measles cases in California found that, between 1988 and 1991, SSPE cases occurred as frequently as 1 in every 1,367 cases in unvaccinated children under age 5. Another study that looked at U.S. outbreaks between 1989 and 1991 put the rate of SSPE at roughly 1 out of every 4,600 measles cases.

Vaccination prevents not just SSPE, but also other serious complications that measles can cause — including pneumonia and severe brain swelling.

Those are long odds, to be sure. But how much do you want to increase the risk of death to your child? And note that in this case, the victim was someone who had been too young to get vaccinated, who was infected by someone who was unvaccinated by choice. How would you like to feel responsible for that? ABC News has more.

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More on Paxton’s abortion arrests

Posted on March 19, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

From Mother Jones.

In what appears to be the first arrests of healthcare providers for allegedly violating a post-Roe v. Wade state abortion ban, Maria Margarita Rojas, a midwife working in the region around Houston, and her employee, medical assistant Jose Manuel Cendan Ley, were taken into custody by Texas authorities on Monday.

Court records from Waller County, west of Houston, show that law enforcement initially accused Rojas with practicing medicine without a license, but on Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he was adding the illegal performance of an abortion to her indictment—a second-degree felony in Texas, carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Ley is facing the same charges.

The New York Times reports that court documents allege that Rojas “attempted an abortion” on a woman on two occasions in March and was “known by law enforcement to have performed an abortion” on another patient this year. In his press release, Paxton claimed that Rojas ran a network of clinics in towns around Houston that “unlawfully employed unlicensed individuals who falsely presented themselves as licensed medical professionals.” The website for the network, Clinicás Latinoamericanas, advertises urgent care services, treatment for chronic illness, and dietary counseling to a Spanish-language community. Paxton’s office said it had filed for a temporary restraining order to shut down the clinics.

On Tuesday, Paxton announced that a third person associated with the clinics, nurse practitioner Rubildo Labanino Matos, whose license is currently on probation, was arrested on March 8 and charged with conspiracy to practice medicine without a license.

[…]

The case against Rojas appears to represent the first time a healthcare provider has been arrested and jailed on charges of providing an illegal abortion. A website for a birthing center linked to Clinicás Latinoamericanas says Rojas was born in Peru, received her Texas midwife certification in 2018, and has attended “over 700 births in community-based and hospital settings.” The birthing center opened the same year Rojas got her license. Its website describes the center as focusing “on providing comprehensive care to pregnant woman and their families…Women here are treated with love and respect, empowering them to fulfilling their desire for a natural childbirth.”

Rojas’ friend and fellow midwife, Holly Shearman, reacted to the charges with shock, the New York Times reported. “They’re saying that she did abortions or something?” Shearman told the Times. “She never ever talked about anything like that, and she’s very Catholic. I just don’t believe the charges.”

According to Bloomberg, Rojas’ bail has been set at $1.4 million, and Ley’s at $700,000.

See here for the background. Here’s more from Slate.

Paxton likely picked Rojas for a reason: not just to send the message that “every life is sacred,” as Paxton told the press, but also to signal that midwives who provide abortions are unsafe, unqualified, and dishonest. Paxton’s strategy fits into a pattern of pre-Roe prosecutions, all while concealing the ways in which the criminal law related to abortion has become far harsher than it was before 1973.

Few details about Rojas’ case are publicly available, but Paxton arrested her and a staff member, alleging that they worked in four clinics across Texas’ Waller County. According to Paxton, Rojas and her colleague provided illegal abortions and falsely held themselves out as licensed medical professionals. (Rojas herself has been a licensed midwife since 2018, but Paxton appears to allege that she identified as a physician.)

The fact that Rojas is not a physician is central to Paxton’s strategy: He claims that the prosecution will protect women from unlicensed and presumably unsafe providers. His office seems to be hearkening back to horror stories like that of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who was convicted of murder in 2013, and was accused of killing viable infants who were born alive, illegally dispensing opioids, and killing several patients. To date, Paxton hasn’t laid out evidence that Rojas harmed her patients beyond employing unlicensed staff.

The more we understand the history of criminal abortion laws, the less surprising Paxton’s move is. The physicians who crusaded in the 19th century to criminalize abortion throughout pregnancy claimed to protect unborn life, safeguard marriage, and ensure that white Protestant women, rather than Catholic immigrants, populated the nation. The laws these doctors championed sometimes seemed to authorize the punishment of women as well as doctors. But in and beyond the 19th century, prosecutors mostly charged providers, not patients, believing the testimony of the latter to be necessary to get enough evidence for a conviction.

And not all providers faced equal consequences. As historian Alicia Gutierrez-Romine has shown in her study of abortion in California, licensed physicians, who were more likely to be male and white, were less likely to face prosecution—or to face prison time if they were criminally charged. The same wasn’t true of midwives or physicians of color. Prioritizing the prosecution of a midwife like Rojas doesn’t seem like anything new.

The law in many states reinforced prosecutors’ tendency to single out some providers. State statutes included an exception for the life of the patient, which could apply either when patients intended to terminate a pregnancy or when someone required care after a miscarriage or stillbirth. Often, states exempted physicians from prosecution if they acted in good faith to protect the life or health of their patients. That wasn’t true for midwives like Rojas. Criminal laws, after all, had been designed by physicians and preserved their prerogatives. It was also easier to target midwives, who had less financial pull or political power. And in any case, prosecutors were more likely to act when a provider hurt women or seemed likely to. For decades, as historian Leslie Reagan has shown, prosecutors primarily went forward in abortion cases when a provider inadvertently killed a patient.

Paxton seems to be reading from a similar playbook, suggesting that his office is protecting women, and stressing that neither Rojas nor her employees were licensed physicians. Of course, as far as we know, he isn’t arguing that Rojas killed any patients, or endangered anyone, beyond allegedly holding herself or her employees out as possessing credentials they lacked.

If Paxton’s move in some way reflects past practice, Texas’ law and others like it are generally more punitive than what came before. Texas laws, for example, prescribe penalties far harsher than anything typical before 1973, including penalties of $100,000 per abortion and sentences up to life.

Besides, the deference to licensed physicians that defined the old regime is gone. Texas law requires doctors who intervene to protect a patient to show that their actions were objectively reasonable; good faith isn’t enough. That increases the risk for any provider addressing an emergency: The experts the state will tap to determine whether a procedure is reasonable could well come from organizations like the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which maintains that abortion is never medically necessary, and which has sent a member to the state’s Maternal Mortality Board.

There’s more from Daily Kos, the Texas Signal, the Houston Press, and Jessica Valenti. Again, we don’t know very much right now, and most of what we do know has come from either Paxton or the police, and neither should be taken as credible. At some point we will see the actual charges and we will hear from the defense attorneys, and then we can begin to draw some conclusions. Assume bad faith and bad motives by Paxton, and you won’t go wrong.

UPDATE: Here’s some new reporting from the Chron.

An anonymous one-sentence complaint submitted to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission in January started the investigation into a Texas midwife and her assistant who this week became the first person charged with performing illegal abortions under the state’s ban on the procedure.

“Hello. I wanted to file a complaint of a clinic in Texas that is offering abortions,” the tipster wrote on Jan. 17. “I know 1 person that they charge 1,300 for the abortion and as of right now [redacted] is there to get an abortion as well.”

The tip gave the clinic’s address as a 40750 Bus US-290 in Waller, the location of the Clinica Waller LatinoAmerica, a business the Texas Attorney General’s Office said is owned by Maria Margarita Rojas.

[…]

On Monday, the AG’s office also asked for a restraining order against Rojas’ four clinics – located in Waller, Cypress, Spring and Hempstead. In a petition seeking the order, lawyers for the AG’s office said the clinics were illegal operations that placed “the lives of unborn children and their mothers at risk.”

The petition, however, provides little detail about how state authorities investigated Rojas. The only evidence the petition cites is the one-sentence email the health commission received on Jan 17, and a slightly longer follow-up email the agency received on Jan. 23.

In the second email, the tipster appears to name two patients whose names are redacted in court filings.

The tipster wrote that one person sought an abortion in September 2024, when she was 3 months pregnant. Another woman sought an abortion in January, when she was 8 weeks pregnant, the tipster wrote.

“I know that this been occurring for a long time about the facility and I know that in Texas abortions [should] not be performed,” the email read. “Both abortion were not for any medical complication they were both made for irresponsibility of not wanting to protect themselves using birth control.”

It’s unclear from the filing if state investigators identified the tipster, who consented for the tip to be sent to other agencies.

Not a whole lot to go on there, and I don’t want to speculate ahead of the evidence. As I said, we’ll know more soon enough. This story notes that as of time of reporting, no restraining order against Rojas’ clinics had been issued.

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