Off the Kuff | Knowledge Is Good

Steven Hotze enters the impeachment chat

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

A crook any way you look

Houston conservative activist Steve Hotze filed a lawsuit Friday challenging the gag order issued by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial, arguing the policy violates free speech protections under the Texas Constitution.

In a petition filed in Travis County District Court, Hotze also is seeking to block a rule that bars Paxton’s wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, from participating in private deliberations or voting in the trial. Both provisions are among a package of rules adopted by the Senate ahead of the trial, which is set to begin Sept. 5. The rules were approved on a 25-3 vote.

Hotze, an ultraconservative GOP donor who has long supported Patrick and Ken Paxton, argued the gag order “unreasonably restricts speech by prohibiting communication with an elected official.” The order prevents both sides from making public statements that carry the “substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing the trial.” Violators face $500 fines and jail time.

“For all practical purposes, the Senate is saying we don’t want to hear from you Texans, even though we were elected to represent you,” said Jared Woodfill, Hotze’s attorney.

[…]

In the rule requiring Angela Paxton to recuse herself, Senate lawmakers cited a part of the Texas Constitution that bars members from voting on matters in which they have “a personal or private interest.” In his petition, Hotze argued the rule singles out Angela Paxton while ignoring conflicts of other senators. He noted that state Sens. Charles Schwertner and Mayes Middleton were allowed to fully participate in the trial, despite supporting Ken Paxton’s primary opponents in last year’s GOP primary.

“Every senator presiding over General Paxton’s impeachment trial has a bias or partiality for or against General Paxton,” the lawsuit reads. “Party affiliation alone raises partiality concerns. The Democrats in the Senate have worked to defeat General Paxton for years and most of the Republican senators have supported General Paxton.”

The lawsuit, which marks the first legal challenge to any part of the impeachment proceedings, names Patrick and the Texas Senate as defendants, along with the Senate sergeant-at-arms. Patrick oversees the Senate and will serve as the presiding officer, a role similar to that of a judge, during Ken Paxton’s trial.

A spokesperson for Patrick did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Joining Hotze on the lawsuit is Allesan Paige Streeter, a Collin County resident who lives in Angela Paxton’s district and voted for her last year, according to the petition.

“By excluding Senator Paxton from the impeachment process, Ms. Paige is left without representation in a matter of state wide importance,” the petition reads.

Former state Rep. Molly White, a Republican who represented Central Texas, and talk radio host Sam Malone are also listed as plaintiffs.

I’m sitting here with my mouth hanging open, trying to formulate words. It’s harder than you might think.

Okay, first, how do any of these geniuses have standing to sue? This is a political process, and the decision to exclude Angela Paxton – which, as I have pointed out, doesn’t change the math for convicting Ken Paxton, because she will still count as being present, so the two thirds needed to convict him accounts for her as well – was handled according to Senate rules. Courts as a general matter do not get involved in that sort of thing. Maybe if you squint real hard you can see how the constituent might have some grounds for complaint, but by that logic then anyone in the state could file a similar lawsuit over the fact that the Attorney General they voted for has been suspended from office. But what the hell do the other two have to do with anything? If you look at what the lawsuit claims, it’s basically “no one will talk to them about the impeachment trial” and they’re both supporters of Ken Paxton. This is some quality Jared Woodfill lawyering right here.

Second, the invocation that this process is rife with political conflicts of interest, which is the same argument for barring three Dem Senators from serving as “jurors”, has a certain appeal. But once you open that can of worms, then the logical endpoint is that the impeachment process is itself impossible. Literally everyone is conflicted. The simple argument for why Angela Paxton is more conflicted than everyone else is that she’s literally his wife. I can see the case for not singling her out like that, once you accept the “everyone is conflicted” premise. But the Senate made its choice in the rulemaking process and then ratified it by vote. If the courts can step in and second guess that kind of thing, then again, I don’t see how any impeachment could ever happen.

Third…no, that’s enough. All of us are getting dumber by the minute as we contemplate this. It’s time to touch some grass. I’ll keep an eye on this, you go enjoy your weekend. You’re welcome.

Posted in Legal matters, Scandalized! | Tagged Angela Paxton, Dan Patrick, impeachment, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, Senate, Steven Hotze, Texas | Comments Off

Feds to sue over Abbott’s river wall

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good, but you’ll forgive me if I keep my expectations low.

The Department of Justice is ready to sue Gov. Greg Abbott over the floating buoy barrier he deployed in the Rio Grande to block migrants from crossing the river from Mexico into Texas near Eagle Pass.

The DOJ sent Abbott a letter on Thursday warning that the state’s buoy barrier is unlawful.

“The State of Texas’s actions violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties,” the department wrote, according to a copy obtained by Hearst Newspapers.

Assistant Attorney General Todd Kimm and Jaime Esparza, United States Attorney for the Western District of Texas, go on to write that the wall of buoys violates the Rivers and Harbors Act, which prohibits the creation of any obstruction to the navigable capacity of waters of the United States. They further point out that Texas did not seek authorization from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deploy the barrier, which is required by the law.

“This floating barrier poses a risk to navigation, as well as public safety, in the Rio Grande River, and it presents humanitarian concerns. Thus, we intend to seek appropriate legal remedies, which may include seeking injunctive relief requiring the removal of obstructions or other structures in the Rio Grande River,” the letter states.

This is adjacent to, but not the same as, the pushing children into the river atrocity. The question I have is simply this: What enforcement mechanism will be used once the court order is in hand? Because we have Republican-controlled states already defying federal court orders, and I figure I’ll be named the next CEO of TwitterX before Greg Abbott willingly complies with this. So what happens then? Anyone want to speculate on a peaceful, law-abiding solution to this crisis? I’m not sure I can. The Trib has more.

UPDATE: On brand and as expected.

Posted in La Migra, Legal matters | Tagged Army Corps of Engineers, border, bouy barrier, Eagle Pass, Justice Department, lawsuit, Mexico, Rio Grande, Texas | 1 Comment

Weekend link dump for July 23

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

“Cult films are the lifeblood of so many cinephiles, and imagining a world without them points to a bleak and sanitized existence. Ross has a point. Streaming apps have become one of the dominant methods of consuming entertainment, effectively killing the rental market and continuing to choke out cable television. Cult classics existed before home video, and certainly before streaming, but we still have to wonder: Does the bleak future of streaming suggest a world without new cult classics?”

“America’s aging houses of worship face a stark choice: sell, redevelop, or pray for a miracle.”

“I recently spent a day at the Library of Congress, reading Goofus and Gallant strips from over the years, and found that the panels are remarkable windows into history. They chart the shifting freedoms and boundaries of childhood, and illustrate how adults’ expectations of kids have changed over the decades.”

“Anti-LGBTQ laws in the US are getting struck down for limiting free speech of drag queens and doctors”.

“It was the culmination of a bizarre shift for Rasmussen Reports. After two decades of fairly consistent right-leaning polling of elections and political issues, the firm had stopped acting like a normal pollster. Rather than simply asking Americans about their beliefs in conspiracy theories and fringe views, Rasmussen Reports has amplified those beliefs, lending them its legitimacy as a household name in politics — to the delight of right-wing politicians and influencers eager for new material.”

“To my mind, though, the anti-Semitism is almost the least interesting part of this. Kennedy is a full-of-himself conspiracy theorist and bullshit artist. The whole line of thought he’s spouting here is textbook. He makes these pretty outrageous claims. Each link in the chain of his argument comes in a factitious wrapping of bullshit.”

RIP, Jane Birkin, actor, singer, activist, namesake of the Hermès Birkin designer handbag, mother of actor Charlotte Gainesbourg.

“Alabama Republicans Are Daring the Supreme Court to Uphold Its Own Voting Rights Ruling”.

“Never make contact with a public toilet, never ever, ever cross a picket line. What was the third one? Oh yeah, never wear musk oil to the zoo.”

“Benjamin Franklin was so busy as an inventor, publisher, scientist, diplomat and U.S. founding father that it’s easy to lose track of his accomplishments. So add one more to the roster: his early work in printing colonial paper currency designed to counter a constant threat of counterfeiting.”

“The struggle to work enough to qualify for union health coverage is huge for actors, as the responses to a tweet by WGA member Caroline Renard highlight. Renard pointed out that it takes $26,000 a year in earnings on SAG-AFTRA jobs to qualify for insurance, and 87% of members don’t qualify in any given year. There were plenty of working actors ready to tell their stories.”

David Tennant is a mensch.

Boy, that story about The Dress sure took a dark turn.

“The latest Threads update adds a ‘follows’ tab, but it doesn’t do what you’d like”.

“While there is little doubt that many a Mesozoic mammal became a meal for a dinosaur, it may come as a surprise to learn that some mammals also dined on dinos.”

“Two Jupiter-like planets, known as PDS 70b and PDS 70c, are already known to orbit the star.
But astronomers also spied a cloud of debris within the orbital path of PDS 70b, which could represent the building blocks of a new planet that is actively forming or already formed. The scientists believe their direct image may be the strongest evidence to date showing that two exoplanets can share the exact same orbit.”

“The premise of the rule of law is that everyone is subject to it and no one is above it. And so, I hope that when we get through this agonizing period in American history, we will be able to say that everyone was treated fairly under the rule of law and that no one escaped criminal accountability for offenses against the United States just because of an office they once held or a certain kind of privilege.”

RIP, Kevin Mitnick, legendary hacker and author.

Netflix’s password sharing crackdown seems to be working pretty well.

A closer look at that “small town” video.

RIP, Tony Bennett, legendary singer.

“Kevin Maxen, an associate strength coach with the Jacksonville Jaguars, has become the first male coach in a major U.S.-based professional league to come out as gay.”

RIP, André Watts, award-winning pianist and one of the first Black superstars of classical music.

“In other words, I don’t think the timing of the trials or verdicts matters as much as we might think. It’s true that it would be better to have the trials and have a newly inaugurated Trump disappear them than to have them never held at all. But that’s a bit more of a moral victory than I have an appetite for. What it all comes down to is that you have a judicial and an electoral track. They may move in parallel. But a Trump victory on the electoral track will inevitably cancel a Trump defeat on the judicial one. The salient point to take from this is that Trump’s fate rests ultimately on the outcome of the election.”

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged linkdump | Comments Off

A different kind of campaign finance violation

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The July reporting period sure has been eventful.

Mayoral hopefuls state Sen. John Whitmire and U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee have accepted campaign donations from city contractors during prohibited periods, breaking a Houston ordinance designed to limit donors’ influence at City Hall.

The law in question bars city vendors from donating to any candidate within 30 days after a contract award. In at least 11 instances, however, Houston’s mayoral candidates accepted donations — totaling $38,000 — from representatives of these companies during blackout periods, according to their latest campaign finance reports and a log of contractors compiled by the city secretary.

Whitmire is involved in five of these cases, three of which concern contributions from Locke Lord, the law firm where he serves as counsel. Jackson Lee also received five such donations, and attorney Lee Kaplan received one. Most of the companies that made the contributions are long-term contractors, and some are frequent donors in local elections.

By law, if candidates have unknowingly violated the ordinance, they have 10 days to return the money. The ordinance defines contractors as donors who are corporate officers and directors or those with a sufficient ownership stake in the business. Out of the 11 contributions, six — totaling $22,000 — had the donors’ names explicitly listed in the city secretary’s logs of prohibited individuals.

Whitmire’s and Jackson Lee’s campaigns acknowledged their mistakes and promised to refund the money. Kaplan’s team said it is still reviewing the documents but would also give back any donation that violates the rules.

This marks the second time this week that the three campaigns have promised to return money they were not supposed to take. Before the latest revelations, they also admitted to receiving contributions that exceeded legal limits, with Jackson Lee expected to return at least $63,800 in excess donations.

[…]

Longtime political consultant Nancy Sims said that while candidates should regularly check the city secretary’s contractor list, companies are also responsible for monitoring their blackout periods. Many of these firms’ political insider status makes their infractions of ethics rules even less forgivable.

“You shouldn’t have contributions going to anyone that may be governing when your contract is up for review. The burden should be on the contractor to alert the candidates,” said Sims, now a lecturer at the University of Houston’s political science department. “These are experienced contractors that do lots of business with the city. They should know better.”

[…]

“There’s no enforcement mechanism to impose penalty. They’re just going to say, ‘Oh, we didn’t know. We’re going to refund it,’” Sims said. “Whether it’s somebody having over-donated, or it’s a question of how much money can be transferred from other accounts, or the contractor payments, there’s no enforcement mechanism to make all of these rules stick.”

“In any case, these contribution ordinances at the city of Houston need revisions,” she continued. “But they have to wait until after this election for that to happen. So maybe it’s a question voters need to be asking the candidates.”

Chris Bell, a former Houston City Council member, agreed with Sims that the city’s ethics laws need strengthening. As the former Ethics Committee chair, Bell drove a series of ethics reforms about two decades ago, including preventing those who raise money independently of a campaign — so-called soft money — from coordinating with the candidate.

As campaigns grow pricier and fundraising competition heats up, Bell said he sees an increased risk of ethical boundaries being overstepped.

“You really have to avoid a ‘pay to play’ system. If you’re not careful, that’s what you’ll end up with, where only the people who are in a position to give large sums of money are able to get anything done,” he said. “You have to have enough rules on the books so it doesn’t get completely out of control.”

See here for more on the July Mayoral finance reports. I knew about this ordinance, but as with the January non-filers, I don’t remember this being such an issue in past elections. Whitmire’s campaign suggested that part of the problem from their perspective was them juggling two different sets of finance rules between his state and city treasuries. I buy that as a reason, but it was still his choice to run this campaign, so.

I agree with Nancy Sims that much of the responsibility to know and follow this law should fall on the city contractors, who are there every year, unlike the candidates. In the spirit of what she and Chris Bell had to say, I have four points to make:

1. As with the issue of candidates, often first-timers, screwing up some fairly simple things on the finance reports, there ought to be a technical solution to this problem. By which I mean, as long as the city is maintaining a list of its contractors and knows when the blackout dates are, the software for creating and filing the reports ought to automatically check for disallowed donors, as well as for excess donations, missing or incorrect information, and so on. Obviously this has to be developed and tested first, but hey, the next city election will be in 2027. There’s plenty of time to get this project funded and off the ground, with the interim reporting periods available for testing. The main thing it would take to make it happen is a Mayor who pushes for it. Hmm, where do you think we might find such a Mayor?

2. Any review of the existing campaign finance system needs to be holistic, taking everything into account and making sure the whole thing makes sense and is as easy as possible to understand. Words like “byzantine”, “arcane”, or even “complicated” should never be used in talking about it. Avoid just bolting on new regs to the existing system, which is already all of those things. Again, this is a job for a Mayor.

3. No system, no matter how easy to grasp or use, will be effective without consequences for non-compliance. To me, the simplest path forward on that is to put some of those consequences on the donors themselves. Possibilities include banning them from making contributions for a cycle or more, or in the case of contractors ban them from doing business with the city for some period of time. I guarantee you, with the proper consequences, enforcement and compliance will be much easier.

4. That said, we have to be careful to not overreach. Neither SCOTUS nor the Texas Supreme Court are likely to be very sympathetic to regulatory overreach here, given Citizens United and the general anything-goes philosophy of campaign finance in this state. Chris Bell can testify to personal experience with that, given the elimination of the previous campaign contribution blackout in the city. Push for what will work, what will make compliance easier and simpler for everyone, and it can work. Push past that and risk a lawsuit you’re likely to lose, which will end up simplifying the rules by getting rid of most if not all of them.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged campaign finance reform, campaign finance reports, Chris Bell, Election 2023, Houston, John Whitmire, Lee Kaplan, Mayor, Sheila Jackson Lee, Texas | 1 Comment

The Brandon Cammack files

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The impeachment trial of Ken Paxton may help answer some questions about one of the more brazen (alleged) attempts by Paxton to help his buddy Nate Paul.

A crook any way you look

More than a year before Ken Paxton would be impeached by the Texas House, a state Senate committee began poking around an issue that could help determine whether the Republican attorney general remains in office or not.

At issue was Brandon Cammack, a five-year lawyer hired by the attorney general’s office in 2020 to investigate whether a Paxton friend — Austin real estate investor Nate Paul — had been mistreated in a federal investigation into Paul’s businesses.

Paxton has argued that Paul raised important questions that required investigation. But for high-ranking whistleblowers in Paxton’s office, Cammack’s hiring was one example of Paxton’s extraordinary willingness to misuse his power to help Paul.

At a February 2021 meeting of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Joan Huffman — an influential Republican from Houston — asked Paxton how Cammack had come to be hired.

The question was an important one. In fall 2020, eight executives in Paxton’s agency met with FBI agents and state investigators to accuse Paxton of misusing his official authority to help Paul by hiring Cammack and by taking other unusual actions. Cammack, they alleged, misrepresented himself as a special prosecutor to secure 39 subpoenas intended to harass law enforcement and prosecutors investigating Paul.

Paxton referred Huffman’s question to his top aide, First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster, even though Paxton was directly involved in hiring and supervising Cammack and Webster was working elsewhere when Cammack was hired.

Standing next to Paxton, Webster replied that the Travis County district attorney’s office had asked for help investigating Paul’s claim that search warrants for his home and businesses had been improperly doctored in 2019.

Webster said Cammack was hired by the attorney general’s office as an “outside counsel” to assist the Travis County district attorney’s office with its investigation of Paul’s claims. Cammack later became a special prosecutor when he “worked with” the district attorney’s office to get the grand jury subpoenas, Webster said.

“I’ve interviewed [assistant district attorneys] from Travis County and seen documents from Travis County that prove the fact that the Travis County DA’s office made Brandon Cammack a special prosecutor,” Webster said. “We did not make Brandon Cammack a special prosecutor, that was within the purview of the Travis County DA’s office.”

Travis County prosecutors say Webster’s portrayal was not true.

Margaret Moore, the district attorney at the time of Cammack’s hiring, said her office did not ask Cammack to investigate the case or seek any subpoenas.

“We didn’t even know him,” Moore said.

Gregg Cox, who worked in high-level positions for the Travis County district attorney’s office until 2020, said Cammack obtained the subpoenas on his own.

“There was no invitation, there was no request, there was nothing that would have authorized the use of a special prosecutor or the issuance of grand jury subpoenas,” Cox said.

“They’re trying to justify something that was done inappropriately by falsely describing it,” Cox said.

As the Texas Senate prepares for Paxton’s impeachment trial in September, Webster’s comments could come under scrutiny by some of the same senators who heard his testimony in February 2021.

This is a long story, and it boils down to whether Paxton hired this green attorney to act as a “special prosecutor” for the sole purpose of throwing sand into the gears of the FBI investigation of Nate Paul, and also whether he then lied about it to the Senate when they asked him. We first heard the name “Brandon Cammack” almost three years ago, and he and this saga were a big part of the House General Investigations Committee’s hearings, which were explosive in their own right and then led to the impeachment itself. I’m sure the feds will be watching this. Paxton minion Brent Webster may have his own legal stuff to sweat about because of this as well. I cannot wait for this trial to begin.

Posted in Scandalized!, That's our Lege | Tagged Attorney General, Brandon Cammack, Brent Webster, bribery, District Attorney, FBI, impeachment, Jeff Mateer, John Cornyn, Ken Paxton, Margaret Moore, Mitte Foundation, Nate Paul, Senate, special prosecutor, Texas, The Lege, Travis County | Comments Off

Flying cars update

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

They’re coming, part one.

Aviation startup Alef Aeronautics recently received Federal Aviation Administration approval to test its flying car.

Details: The all-electric “Model A” is designed to take off and land vertically, putting it in the emerging category of eVTOL — electric vertical takeoff and landing — aircraft.

Alef expects to sell the Model A for $300,000 a piece, and says it has received hundreds of pre-orders.

Reality check: “Flying cars” have captured the public’s imagination since one appeared in the 1974 Bond flick “The Man With the Golden Gun” — but such projects usually fizzle out.

Flying cars tend to be both bad cars and bad airplanes.

Case in point: The Alef is being designed to have 200 miles of road range or 110 miles of airborne range, and can carry a max of just two people.

Those aren’t impressive numbers. Today’s best electric cars are topping 300 miles of range, while even your basic four-seat Cessna 172 can cover over 600 nautical miles without refueling.

Plus, the Alef is limited to just 25 mph while in driving mode.

The bottom line: eVTOLS are coming, but they probably won’t be privately owned — think more “Uber for the skies” than “car I can fly.”

Hold that thought, because here’s part two.

Joby Aviation has been cleared by the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) to start flight tests on its first production prototype air taxi, the company wrote in a press release. It’s a large step in the company’s aim to start shipping the eVTOL aircraft (electric vertical takeoff and landing) to customers in 2024 and launch an air taxi service by 2025.

“The aircraft will now undergo initial flight testing before being delivered to Edwards Air Force Base, California, where it will be used to demonstrate a range of potential logistics use cases,” Joby wrote.

The aircraft can take off and land like a helicopter, then tilt its six rotors horizontally and fly like an airplane at up to 200 MPH. It’s designed to carry a pilot and four passengers over a distance up to 100 miles on a charge — enough range for most types of air taxi operations. At the same time, Joby claims it’s nearly silent in cruise mode and 100 times quieter than conventional aircraft during takeoff and landing.

Joby’s first production prototype recently rolled off the company’s assembly line in Marina, California. The plant was built in partnership with Toyota, Joby’s largest investor with a $394 million stake. Cementing that relationship, Joby announced that it was appointing Toyota North America CEO Tetsuo (Ted) Ogawa to the board of directors.

Here’s more.

The production prototype eVTOL — Joby’s third full-scale prototype — also received a special airworthiness certificate issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and can now begin flight testing.

“This first aircraft coming off our pilot manufacturing line is a really, really big deal for the company,” JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby, told TechCrunch. “We have spent many years building the processes and procedures and capabilities as an organization to be able to deliver this level of of aircraft. We’ve been building since 2017, but to be able to build with this level of rigor is a huge step forward. It prepares us for this next stage of the certification process.”

Joby has already flown more than 30,000 miles since 2019 on pre-production prototype aircraft. This latest iteration builds on that experience and puts the company closer to achieving type certification with the FAA. Type certification means that the FAA approves of Joby’s aircraft design and component parts, and that the design is compliant with the agency’s standards for airworthiness and noise.

Joby nearly has three out of the five necessary stages of the type certification process underway, according to Bevirt. The final step after type certification would be production certification, which will allow Joby to mass produce eVTOLs under FAA-approved designs.

[…]

Bevirt wouldn’t say where Joby intends to commercialize air taxi operations first, but he did say that the company has been working closely with the Japan Civil Aviation Bureau, which Bevirt describes as “extremely forward leaning.”

“We’ll be continuing to engage with them on our path to bringing the service to Japan,” he said.

I’ve blogged a lot about flying cars, most recently two years ago. Looking back, it seems like there have been a lot of prototypes, and not much that came anywhere close to the market. These two at least look to be more realistic in the short to medium term. I can see the use case for “flying taxis” – we do already have helicopters for that purpose, almost entirely for the very rich because those things are super expensive – and if they’re electric then that at least makes them somewhat less objectionable. Safety, not just for the passengers and pilots but also for the people on the streets below since these are intended for urban areas, as a way to beat the traffic, remains a big question, and even if the price for a ride is a lot less than for a helicopter it’s still not going to be cheap. Just know that when these things do come to Texas, the only rules for them will come from the feds and from the Legislature, since the cities will be barred from putting any restrictions on them unless they can prevail in their litigation against the Death Star bill. Look, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s two tons of debris about to fall on your head.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged air taxis, Alef Aeronautics, California, electric cars, eVTOL, Federal Aviation Administration, flying cars, Japan, Joby Aviation, taxis, Texas, The Lege | 2 Comments

Paxton attorneys seek to bar three Democratic Senators from the impeachment trial

Posted on July 22, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Why stop at three? Why not try to bar them all?

A crook any way you look

Lawyers for suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton are pushing to disqualify three Democratic state senators as jurors in his upcoming impeachment trial.

Paxton’s lawyers filed a motion Friday that asks Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to disqualify Sens. Nathan Johnson of Dallas, Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio and José Menéndez of San Antonio, arguing they have a proven bias against Paxton.

“Like numerous courts around the country, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has held for almost a century that potential jurors with a bias or prejudice against the accused are disqualified from serving on his jury as a matter of law,” the motion said. “Jurors José Menendez, Roland Gutierrez, and Nathan Johnson have such a bias and have proclaimed it loudly, time and again.”

The motion cites a number of critical public statements that the senators have made about Paxton over the years, including some in recent weeks. For example, it points to an MSNBC interview last month in which Gutierrez, who is also a candidate for U.S. Senate next year, said the evidence the House gathered “could not be refuted.”

“No one who has publicly declared the charges against a defendant irrefutable can even play at impartiality, let alone serve in an impartial manner,” Paxton’s lawyers argued.

The motion also cites a Tuesday tweet from Johnson reacting to news that a pro-Paxton political action committee had recently given $3 million to Patrick, who is presiding over the trial. Johnson called the donation “obscene.”

The tweet not only proved Johnson’s bias but also violated a gag order Patrick had issued the day before, according to Paxton’s lawyers.

[…]

The impartiality of senators has long been a source of debate given that Paxton is a former senator himself, his wife currently serves in the chamber and they have their own relationships with senators. Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, is even referenced in the articles of impeachment as an unwitting “straw requestor” for an attorney general’s office legal opinion that helped Paul. Hughes has not been disqualified.

We have seen plenty of comparisons to the criminal justice process in the course of this impeachment. That’s understandable, since this is a trial and it kind of follows the trial process we’re all familiar with, but it’s limited in its applicability. In a real criminal trial, any potential juror who knew personally anyone on the prosecution or defense would immediately be excused. We obviously can’t do that here, there would literally be no one left to serve on the “jury”.

Does any of the facts alleged cross some kind of line? Nobody knows, but Dan Patrick gets to decide, based on whatever vibes he’s feeling. It’s not like there’s going to be an appeals process to sort it out. My best guess is that Patrick won’t want to have to deal with this, but again, who knows? We’re so far into uncharted waters we don’t even remember what the navigation tools we have are for.

Posted in Scandalized!, That's our Lege | Tagged Bryan Hughes, Dan Cogdell, Dan Patrick, impeachment, Jose Menendez, Ken Paxton, Nathan Johnson, Roland Gutierrez, Senate, Texas, Tony Buzbee | 3 Comments

This is what I mean by building trust

Posted on July 22, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Not great, HISD.

Some Houston ISD teachers at schools in Superintendent Mike Miles’ New Education System were upset Monday morning to wake up to contract offers with lower salaries than what they expected and, in some cases, lower than what they earned before.

Miles has said since he arrived June 1 that teachers at the 28 NES schools, mostly in northeast Houston, will make an average of about $85,000 per year, a statement that appears to hold true after salary tables were released over the weekend. A wide pay range, however, will see some educators, such as elementary elective teachers, make $63,000 while a third-grade reading teacher at the same school will earn at least $20,000 more.

The previous, traditional salary schedule did not differentiate teachers’ pay based on grade level or subject matter.

Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said such disparities “disenfranchise” educators, saying teachers “come to work together as a team to make students successful, and to value one more than the other is not a good way to build a cohesive unit or foster morale.”

Miles, however, says districts need to “maximize their effectiveness by aligning compensation to what they value.”

[…]

[Miles] noted that for a majority of NES teachers, the salaries will be significantly higher than what they would have received otherwise, even before taking the $10,000 stipends that teachers will also receive into account.

“That’s a pretty doggone good salary, even for experienced, veteran teachers,” Miles said.

At least one longtime teacher, however, was offered a salary lower than what she would have received under the previous salary schedule.

“If I had known I was going to take a pay cut, I wouldn’t have applied for that position,” said the 30-year veteran, an elective teacher at an NES high school who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

The elective teacher was set to make $80,500 next year under the old payment plan. On Monday morning, she woke up to a contract offer sent the night before for $77,000. The teacher said she likely would have retired had she known about the pay cut, but because the salary tables were posted online after the July 14 deadline to resign, she feels she has no choice but to carry on.

The $10,000 stipend offered to NES teachers does little to soften the blow, she said.

“I don’t work for a stipend — I work because I love what I do,” she said. “The paycheck looks good when you give us the stipend, but if you’re going to cut my regular pay, then that’s a problem. It’s a sign of disregard for us with experience.”

Miles has previously stated that no NES teacher would earn less than they did the year before, and when asked about the teacher’s case, he said it was likely due to a mistake in the human resources office, where 40 positions were cut earlier this month as part of a massive reorganization of the central office. He denied that the reorganization had anything to do with the error and said the teacher should raise the issue up the proper “chain of decision-making” so that the situation can be rectified.

He has said supporting teachers is critical to the success of the NES program, which, in addition to generally higher salaries and stipends, provides them with prepared lesson plans along with “teacher apprentices” and “learning coaches,” who handle noninstructional duties such as making copies and grading papers.

But some teachers say the criteria by which their salaries were decided was never made clear to them. One teacher at a different NES high school, who also requested anonymity, said he has worked in the district for six years and expected to make $85,000, as that was the average number that has been presented since Miles was appointed superintendent June 1.

Instead, he woke up to a contract offer for $83,000, $2,000 above the minimum for a teacher of government, economics and AP courses with three years of experience. He described the opaque process as “trying to fly a plane while building the plane.”

“I’m appreciative (for the higher salary), but I’m also disheartened, because how this process has played out has been piecemeal and they’re cutting corners,” the teacher said.

The teacher said educators across the district relied on a draft of a salary table for NES middle school teachers — shared at an informational meeting with administrators last month — to make an educated guess as to what their own pay would look like. When the salary table for NES middle schools was posted online over the weekend, however, those salaries were all $2,000 lower than what was presented.

Miles said he was unaware of a different salary table being distributed and that the salary tables have not changed.

Let me state up front that the non-positive experience of two employees doesn’t mean that everything is messed up. There’s not enough data to draw that conclusion, and some of the facts presented appear to be in dispute. This may all turn out to be much ado about very little.

That said, when you as a top manager make a claim that the “average salary” of your base employee is going to increase, people will interpret that to mean that all of those salaries are going to go up. That’s not how the math works, but it’s very much how the psychology works, and it’s because of the way that information was communicated. You could have said “most salaries will go up”, you could have said “many people will get pay raises”, you could have said “these positions will see salary increases” – there are any number of ways to be clear, if implicitly so, that some people will fare better than others, and some people will be worse off than before.

But that’s not what HISD did here, and the fact that people did not find out about this until after the deadline to resign suggests that they were trying to distract from, if not outright hide, this reality. Maybe these examples cited are the result of clerical error or misunderstanding, but if so the proximate cause of those issues was the speed in which HISD acted, which didn’t give people time to figure out all the changes going on around them.

Yes, I know, HISD had to act fast in order to be ready for the new school year, which starts in just a few weeks, and yes I know they want to get the Miles plan implemented right away so as not to lose time in hopefully improving student outcomes. I get that and I agree that some of this was inevitable as a result. It’s still on Mike Miles and his team, as well as the TEA, to minimize these problems and make them right as quickly as possible as well. More to the point, it’s on them to be as clear as they can be about what will happen to the people of HISD, none of whom asked for all these changes to be visited on them.

It’s about building trust. If the people of HISD feel they’re getting the short end of the stick, especially if they feel they were misinformed about getting the short end of the stick, it will do the opposite of building trust. And whatever the NES ultimately achieves in the classroom, if people feel like they were mistreated in getting there, the first thing they’re going to want to do when they regain the power to do it is to get rid of the NES. If Mike Miles want this thing to last, which was not his legacy in Dallas, he needs to pay more attention to that. Houston Landing has more.

PS: This isn’t about whether or not certain types of teachers “should” be paid more than others. I’m not taking a side in that debate, at least not here. The issue here is about how HISD’s actions were communicated. They could and should have done better.

Posted in School days | Tagged Board of Managers, HFT, HISD, HISD Board of Trustees, Houston, Mike Miles, Mike Morath, New Education System, Texas Education Agency | Comments Off

Farewell, ERIC

Posted on July 22, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Into the unknown…

The Texas secretary of state submitted its exit notice Thursday to a national coalition that is one of the best tools to combat voter fraud, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Votebeat.

The withdrawal from the program comes after Republican leaders pushed the effort and approved legislation to stop using the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, a program 27 states use to check duplicate voter registrations and clean voter rolls. The campaign to withdraw was underway among members of the Texas Republican Party and Republican lawmakers for more than a year but was rooted in misinformation and election conspiracy theories.

According to the secretary of state’s resignation letter, the state’s exit will be effective in three months, in accordance with the program’s bylaws. By then, a law approved by the Texas Legislature this session, authored by Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, will have gone into effect. That legislation directs the secretary of state to build its own version of a multistate cross-check program or to find a “private sector provider” with a cost that won’t exceed $100,000. Hughes did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.

Alicia Pierce, the secretary of state’s spokesperson, said the state could not stay in ERIC because it must now comply with the requirements in the Hughes legislation. She also pointed to previous exits from the coalition by eight other Republican-led states since 2022: Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, Missouri, Iowa and Virginia, all of which faced similar political pressure.

“As fewer states are participating, the costs are increasing and the amount of data we’re going to receive will be reduced,” Pierce said.

Nonetheless, Texas law still requires the state to participate in a multistate data-sharing program to clean its voter rolls, which is what led the state to join ERIC in 2020. When the state stops using ERIC in October, it will be in violation of that requirement unless it finds an acceptable substitute, which won’t be easy.

[…]

State Rep. John Bucy, a Democrat from Austin, said the announcement Thursday was frustrating because ERIC is an effective tool.

“The GOP push to get out of ERIC shows they’re not committed to safe and accurate elections as they claim, but instead are committed to placating extremists in their party that perpetuate the big lie,” Bucy said in a text message.

Bucy successfully added two amendments to Hughes’ bill to withdraw from ERIC in an effort to add some “guardrails” to the law. Those provisions require that a new system used by the secretary of state complies with the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and all state and federal laws relating to the protection of personal information. Private vendors must do a background check for each employee of the system.

See here for the past history. I predict that in 2025 the Secretary of State comes back to the Lege and pleads for help in figuring out what to do next, because it’s confusion and grifters from here. Good luck with that.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged Bryan Hughes, Election 2020, Election 2022, Election 2024, Electronic Registration Information Center, Jane Nelson, John Bucy, Secretary of State, Texas, The Lege, voter registration, voter suppression | Comments Off

July 2023 campaign finance reports: Harris County

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Previously:
Congress
SD15
City of Houston, part 1

January 2023 reports are here. Not all of these people are on the 2024 ballot. I am not including JPs and County Court candidates. Some potential opponents have already filed finance reports, others have just filed their designation of treasurer reports. I did not include the latter.

Lina Hidalgo, County Judge

Rodney Ellis, County Commissioner, Precinct 1
Adrian Garcia, County Commissioner, Precinct 2
Tom Ramsey, County Commissioner, Precinct 3
Lesley Briones, County Commissioner, Precinct 4

Kim Ogg, District Attorney
Sean Teare, District Attorney
Christian Menefee, Harris County Attorney
Ed Gonzalez, Sheriff
Joe Danna, Sheriff
Mike Knox, Sheriff
Glenn Cowan, Sheriff
Ann Harris Bennett, Tax Assessor

Alan Rosen, Constable Precinct 1
Jerry Garcia, Constable Precinct 2
Sherman Eagleton, Constable Precinct 3
Mark Herman, Constable Precinct 4
Samantha Hutchinson, Constable Precinct 4
Ted Heap, Constable Precinct 5
Don Dinh, Constable Precinct 5
Silvia Trevino, Constable Precinct 6
May Walker, Constable Precinct 7
William Wagner, Constable Precinct 7
Gary Hicks, Constable Precinct 7
Phil Sandlin, Constable Precinct 8

Teneshia Hudspeth, County Clerk
Marilyn Burgess, District Clerk

Alexandra Mealer, County Judge


Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
======================================================
Hidalgo         308,805    263,145   51,400     79,391

Ellis           842,786    192,512        0  5,088,044
Garcia, A       875,179    433,933        0    783,975
Ramsey          110,935     69,854        0    995,114
Briones         790,509    313,925        0  1,179,611

Ogg              55,695     28,571   48,489    274,748
Teare           748,317    102,192        0    608,269
Menefee         266,626     29,719        0    424,716
Gonzalez         60,230      8,162        0     63,173
Danna             3,865     32,853   30,452        240
Knox             26,300      8,872   10,000     11,035
Cowan             6,275      3,078        0      3,196
Bennett               0      3,559        0      8,420

Rosen            10,000     24,895        0  1,306,176
Garcia            5,000      2,674        0     54,069
Eagleton         85,985     62,682  119,650     82,462
Herman          201,067     89,551        0    620,869
Hutchinson            0          0        0          0
Heap             96,278     59,885    8,044    100,854
Dinh             69,661     21,533        0     48,527
Trevino           3,150      4,270        0     26,871
Walker                0          0        0          0
Wagner                0          0        0          0
Hicks             1,417        127        0      1,290
Sandlin             500      9,765        0     70,733

Hudspeth          1,800     11,829        0         19
Burgess          11,196     10,532    5,207     10,641
Wyatt             

Mealer                0    161,679        0     27,258

I fully expect Judge Hidalgo to build her treasury back up; she does have plenty of time for it. I was a little concerned about her spend rate – there were a lot of recurring expenses for consulting and campaign services, about $23K total to two law firms plus Bob Stein for legal services (almost certainly related to the ridiculous 2022 election contest), and $50K in loan repayment to Rodney Ellis’ campaign. Hopefully at least the legal fees will go away soon.

As for Alex Mealer, she paid $75K to the Republican Party of Texas, who I’m guessing is paying her lawyers in this mess, and $33K to a pollster. She made contributions to the Mike Knox and Mary Nan Huffman campaigns, and also to someone named Sean Cheben, who is running for HCC. Watch that name, he’s someone not to vote for. Oh, and her campaign subscribes to the Houston Chronicle. I’m gonna shut my mouth right here.

Commissioners Court is three-quarters of what I’d expect. Commissioners Ellis and Garcia have always been strong fundraisers. Commissioner Briones is clearly following in their path. I guess Commissioner Ramsey figured he had enough cash on hand to be able to take it easy this period. I’m assuming this is a one off, he is on the ballot next year. We’ll see what his January report looks like.

Sean Teare’s total for his primary challenge to Kim Ogg is eye-popping, easily the most interesting number in this post. Among his contributors:

– Defense attorney Dan Cogdell, currently trying to salvage Ken Paxton’s term as AG, who gave $10K. Another person who listed herself as an employee of the Buzbee law firm kicked in $1,000.
– Mike Doyle, new HCDP Chair, $50. I assume it’s that Mike Doyle, anyway.
– Zach Fertitta, 2012 Dem candidate for DA who lost in the primary, $1000.
– One person who listed their employer as the Harris County DA’s Office, and one person with the Harris County Public Defender, $500 for the first and $200 for the second. I’ll leave their names out of it.

What makes it even more surprising is Ogg’s paltry total by comparison. I have to wonder if she will take this as a warning sign, or if she’ll just keep on doing what she’s doing.

I’m glad to see a strong total from Christian Menefee. I don’t expect him to face a serious challenge, but he’s done great work, he’s got a big future, and I hope to see him grow a base of support. This is a good start towards that.

As noted above, several Constables have challengers in the queue. I could not tell if Samantha Hutchinson is a Democrat or Republican – neither Google nor Facebook was of assistance. Don Dinh is a Democrat, and he’s off to a good start. I assume that Wagner and Hicks are Dems, it would be weird in Precinct 7 for them not to be. Constable May Walker didn’t file a report in January – at least, not as of when I posted about it – but as you can see, she’s not doing any fundraising. She still needs to file reports, but at least you can see why it might have gotten skipped. I have to wonder if she’s going to make a retirement announcement – she was first elected in 2004, she could be ready to hang them up. I’m just speculating here. Treasurer Carla Wyatt also did not have a report as of when I looked.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged Adrian Garcia, Alan Rosen, Alexandra Mealer, Ann Harris Bennett, campaign finance reports, Carla Wyatt, Christian Menefee, Commissioners Court, Constable, Democratic primary, District Attorney, District Clerk, Don Dinh, Ed Gonzalez, Election 2022, Election 2024, Gary Hicks, Glenn Cowan, Harris County, Harris County Attorney, Harris County Clerk, Harris County Judge, Harris County Sheriff, Harris County Tax Assessor, Harris County Treasurer, Jerry Garcia, Joe Danna, Kim Ogg, Lesley Briones, Lina Hidalgo, Marilyn Burgess, Mark Herman, May Walker, Mike Knox, Phil Sandlin, Rodney Ellis, Samantha Hutchinson, Sean Teare, Sherman Eagleton, Sylvia Trevino, Ted Heap, Teneshia Hudspeth, Tom Ramsey, William Wagner | 2 Comments

Paxton gets to fight his State Bar case after impeachment

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

It’s just one thing after another.

A crook any way you look

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won’t have to fight an ethics lawsuit over his challenge to the 2020 presidential election results until after his impeachment trial.

Paxton’s lawyers on Tuesday asked the Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas to delay oral arguments in the case, which were originally set for Sept. 13, until after his impeachment trial. They are also representing Paxton in impeachment, the lawyers argue, noting it would be difficult to handle both cases at once.

“It is the first [impeachment] of a statewide elected official in over 100 years, and it presents extraordinarily complex issues which require extensive preparation. It would therefore prove difficult for counsel to provide competent representation in this matter as well without postponing argument,” wrote matter as well without postponing argument,” wrote Judd Stone and Christopher Hilton, two lawyers on leave from Paxton’s agency in order to defend him against impeachment.

The state bar disciplinary committee that filed the lawsuit will not oppose the request to postpone, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday.

Paxton’s impeachment trial, in which senators will vote on whether to remove him from office, is scheduled to kick off Sept. 5. It is likely to take two to three weeks, according to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who will preside over the trial.

This means the state bar case is unlikely to resume until at least October.

See here for the previous update, which was about the hearing in Judge Blair’s courtroom. I missed his ruling, which came in January. This now-rescheduled hearing is Paxton’s appeal of Blair’s ruling. Note that all of this is about whether the hearing on the disciplinary charges against Paxton can proceed. The actual disciplinary hearing, if it is eventually allowed to proceed, would come many months later. It is what it is.

I don’t have a problem with this being pushed back till after the impeachment trial. Amusing as it would have been for them to overlap, this is the proper way to go, even for Ken Paxton. And it does keep the story in the news longer, so there’s that. I had originally written a post about how the hearing was going to overlap, based on a Texas Lawyer story, which is now obsolete. That original post is now beneath the fold if you’re curious.

Continue reading →

Posted in Legal matters, Scandalized! | Tagged Brynne VanHettinga, Donald Trump, Election 2020, Jim Harrington, Kaufman County, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, Lawyers Defending American Democracy, President, SCOTUS, Solicitor General, State Bar of Texas, Texas, Texas Civil Rights Project | 3 Comments

Dispatches from Dallas, July 21 edition

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week in news from the Metroplex, a big police expose in the DMN, the seventh anniversary of the July 7 Dallas police ambush, Six Degrees of Clarence Thomas and his Cowboys connection, how Dallas is dealing with state regulation of cities’ ability to regulate, short-term rentals, Texas Monthly’s deep dive on Highland Park real estate dealings, and the candidate plans for the DMA’s expansion. Plus: the season opening of cricket, the opening of Meow Wolf in Grapevine, and some baby cranes.

If you take nothing else away from this post, please read this Dallas Morning News expose on the investigation into former DPD officer Christopher Hess, who ultimately killed a woman on the job. He was indicted for aggravated assault and DPD fired him at that time. While Hess was acquitted, the lawsuits around the killing of Genevieve Dawes continue.

This story is not about Dawes and what Hess did to her. This story is about all the times DPD could and should have stopped him for abusing citizens before he got to the point of killing one. (Accordingly, consider yourself warned for police violence and homicide in the story. I did not watch the videos; the story was enough.)

To go with the investigation, I give you a handful of law enforcement headlines in Dallas area news sources I read from the last two weeks: Dallas police officer gets 5-day suspension for making challenge coin decried as racist; Civilian driver killed during Forth Worth police chase; In Unrelated Cases, 3 People Have Died Following Arrests by Dallas Police in 2023; Cases dismissed against 3 former Tarrant County jailers charged in jail beating; Former Sanger officer indicted on excessive use of force charges (in Denton County); Fort Worth police officer shot and killed man before identifying himself, body cam footage shows; and in one piece of not-so-terrible news, Dallas police chief fires officer who was arrested on family violence assault charge. Police violence is so normalized in the Metroplex, and probably where you are too, that none of those headlines excite any notice. Yet they add up to cases like the Christopher Hess story that really shock the conscience.

I don’t have an easy answer to what we do about police violence, but something needs to be done. Probably a lot of somethings, and I need to figure out where I can put my shoulder to the wheel on this issue.

In other news:

This month was the seventh anniversary of the July 7, 2016 ambush on DPD officers. The DMN has a retrospective and the Dallas Observer has a piece on the use of “killer robots” like the one that ended the July 7 standoff. And here’s an op-ed by Brian Williams, one of the contenders for Colin Allred’s House seat, who was the trauma surgeon in charge at Parkland Hospital the night of the ambush. The juxtaposition between the July 7 anniversary and the Hess investigation is strange but they’re related in some obvious ways; the shooter in the July 7 attack was motivated by police shootings of Black men. The fact that someone got angry enough about police brutality to shoot cops doesn’t excuse police brutality any more than police brutality excuses shooting the police.
Speaking of Brian Williams and his run for Colin Allred’s seat, earlier this week Axios’ Dallas newsletter devoted some space to his race against Julie Johnston and their respective fundraising prowess.
Our host brought you the latest on Ken Paxton earlier this week. I’ll note another couple of stories for you: first Texas AG Ken Paxton reports post-impeachment $1.7M personal ‘fundraising record’, three-quarters of which came from a handful of donors (Texas Tribune coverage). Some of the same folks are also putting a lot of money in Dan Patrick’s coffers. And the Dallas County GOP has condemned the impeachment alongside its colleagues in Collin County.
One of my favorite beats, Six Degrees of Clarence Thomas, has been pretty active recently. Propublica has an explainer on the tax games involved in how Crow’s yacht trips with Thomas were accounted for. And it turns out that Jerry Jones gave Thomas a Super Bowl ring in 1994. It could now be worth $100K, and he did file the proper paperwork on it. The paperwork is now lost because the Court no longer has files from before 1998. And you’ve almost certainly seen the story about how lawyers with business in front of the court were paying one of Thomas’ aides by Venmo. (For what? Unclear.) You may not have seen, because it’s not nearly as obviously corrupt, the news that Leonard Leo helped fund a PR push for Thomas in 2016, around the 25th anniversary of Thomas’ confirmation. Speaking of Leo, the expanding Judiciary Committee inquiry into let’s-not-call-them-bribes gifts to the Justices has led to letters requesting information from Leo, Paul Singer, and Robin Arkley II, who arranged the 2008 trip that Justice Alito took that’s under investigation.
Here’s a Watchdog story from the DMN: former Mayor Laura Miller’s efforts to help a man coming out of a shelter were stymied when the non-bank app he was using, Chime let someone steal $9500 from his account. Y’all, be wary of all these unregulated banks. There are reasons we have bank regulations; neo-banks or financial apps or whatever you want to call them don’t want to be bound by those regulations. When you use a non-bank financial app, even Paypal, you’re risking your money. Keep it in mind.
In the ComoFest shooting that I led with two weeks ago, two suspects have been arrested. Based on the warrant, it sounds like the shooters had a beef with someone in the crowd but they claim they didn’t intend to shoot randomly. Somewhat related, the DMN has the autopsy report for the Allen shooter. Key findings: he was shot three times and tested negative for drugs and alcohol.
Here’s a good explainer from the Guardian about the shenanigans around election administration in Tarrant County: How Texas Republicans are catering to election deniers in this county. They do a lot of good work in tying things together including context like Crystal Mason’s case.
The Dallas North Tollway continues to expand toward Oklahoma following the suburban sprawl northward in a way that will seem mighty familiar to Houston readers.
There’s going to need to be a cleanup at the Dallas Executive Airport after last November’s fatal air show crash. It’s not clear whether the Commemorative Air Force, which hosted the show, or the taxpayers will end up paying for the cleanup. (Morgan Freeman narrator’s voice: It’s going to be the taxpayers.)
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson was going to protest the DCAD appraisal of his house but decided not to at the last minute. Everybody deserves a fair appraisal on the value of their home, and I get being mad at a $33K appraisal, but a 5,000sf house near White Rock Lake is going to cost you in taxes.
Let’s you and him fight is what North Texas cities are saying about Houston’s suit to overturn HB 2127, the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act , aka the Death Star. The City of Dallas doesn’t want to talk about it with the media either. In case you thought that wasn’t enough interference in local law this session, Governor Abbott also signed SB 1017, which says you can’t ban or limit the use/sale/lease of engines based on fuel source. This is a problem for the city’s plan to get rid of gas-powered lawnmowers and landscaping equipment. We can’t do anything that might cost the oil companies money or help with climate change even though we’re in a record-breaking heat wave that’s also the coolest summer of the rest of our lives, most likely.
Atheist Group Sues Fort Worth, Claiming Free Speech Violation. Metroplex Atheists wants to hang banners from the lightposts downtown for an event in August, just like they did in 2019. They’re getting the runaround from the city this time. I wish them much success; it’s hard enough to be an atheist in North Texas without unconstitutional governmental discrimination.
Here’s an interesting news item I’ll be interested in seeing more about: Elon Musk’s X Corp. sues Dallas County entities over alleged Twitter data scraping. They’re identified only by IP. As an observer of Twitter with no dog in the hunt, I wonder whether this is a PR exercise or technical incompetence of some sort.
Dallas passed a short-term rental ban back in June and unsurprisingly, folks are big mad. Things I did not know: Marriot International lists about 160 properties in the city of Dallas as short-term rentals and they say they’ll abide by the law. Also, here’s a DMN article on the distribution of STRs. There are only 17 of them in my zip code; half of the STRs in the city are in five zip codes. It looks like 40% of the registered STRs will end up banned; it looks like there may be three times as many unregistered STRs (about 6000, per the Marriot article) as registered STRs (about 1900, per the distribution article).
How are things going with the ransomware attack on the City of Dallas, you may ask? Our library is still a shambles but they are cycling books in and out again (I have new ones). But problems continue, particularly in areas involving permits. The DMN says there were still almost 900 delayed permits as of June 30. We need to have to have a fence repaired/replaced, so I’m about to have some close personal experience with this particular problem.
Meanwhile in the other Dallas-area IT problem center, the courts, they’re still not paying everybody (DMN; Dallas Observer). I really wish they’d resolve this problem and pay all those people.
You may have seen that Rev. Jesse Jackson is stepping down from the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. You may not know that Jackson’s successor, Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes, is a minister here in Dallas. The DMN has more.
This deep dive from Texas Monthly isn’t on an important subject like the DMN police investigation, but it’s still pretty interesting: The Queen of Highland Park. It’s all about Dallas’ toniest realtor and really, also, about changes to the Dallas real estate market, some of which are Dallas-specific and some of which are national. Spend your lunch on this one; unless Dallas snobbery puts you off your feed, it should be safe to eat while reading.
Our host noted that scooters are back. Apparently we still hate them according to 311 complaints. I’ll probably have more to report when I get my hair cut in Deep Ellum in a couple of weeks. They used to be all over that part of town and were a nuisance to park around.
Speaking of Deep Ellum, it’s now on the National Register of Historic Places. Unfortunately, as mentioned in the article, this registration doesn’t protect the buildings. That’s a function of state and local laws.
If you’re interested in architecture and museums, take a look at the six finalist designs for the expansion of the Dallas Museum of Art. A winner is expected next month.
Two other items about area museums: first, the Lege has committed a million dollars for the National Juneteenth Museum in Fort Worth, which is one of the few worthwhile things to come out of the regular session. And second, a group is trying to get funds for a permanent Mexican American Museum in Dallas in next year’s bond propositions.
The DMA is one of the arts boards that the DMN reviewed this year as a follow-up on their 2016 analysis of the boards’ diversity. Click through for the graphics and to see how all of the big Dallas arts organizations are doing better.
Major League Cricket has started in DFW and the Texas Super Kings had a 69-run win against the Los Angeles Knight Riders. I’m going to have to ask my Aussie friends whether that’s as good as it sounds.
Friends of mine have been singing the praises of Meow Wolf for years, and now it’s finally open in Grapevine. I’m waiting until the first rush of visitors dies down to brave it, but if you can’t wait, here’s the Texas Monthly review and the Dallas Observer preview.
In honor of Jackson Browne’s performance here in Dallas this week, here’s a sweet story about how Browne helped Stevie Ray Vaughan make Texas Flood. We didn’t hit this Browne gig but he’s a favorite of my husband’s, so I took note of this story for him.
Presented without commentary, because what can you say?: This is what AI thinks a typical home in Dallas looks like.
Last but not least, the Dallas Zoo has hatched its first whooping crane chick. Prepare to click through and say “awww”.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged Dallas, guest post, linkdump, Texas | Comments Off

July 2023 campaign finance reports: City of Houston, part 1

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The July finance reports for the City of Houston in an election year is when you first get a real feel for who’s actually running for what, and which of them has a campaign that might be worth watching. The filing deadline is still a month away, and even for the highest-profile races there may still be some surprises, but the vast majority of competitive candidates are now known to us. And because there are so many of them, I’m going to split this up. I’ll start with the Mayoral hopefuls.


Candidate     Raised      Spent     Loan     On Hand
====================================================
Whitmire     371,517  1,618,255        0   9,893,611
JacksonLee 1,218,886    182,604        0   1,033,982
Kaplan       478,479    360,759  300,000   1,356,488
Garcia     3,295,664    399,845        0   2,890,818
Gallegos      60,348     43,406        0     151,794
Khan          58,750     33,714   85,000     108,308
Broze         10,827      3,104        0       6,998
Houjami          585        107        0         294
Mbala            200          8        0         326
Williams
Martinez
Caldwell
Daniel

As before, you can find all of the reports that I downloaded in this Google Drive folder. You can find all of the candidates in the Erik Manning spreadsheet; Erik Manning is a god among men for putting this together so I don’t have to.

The above is a very different list than what we saw in January, with multiple comings and a few goings. You can sort them as you see fit, but to me the MJ Khan line is the divider between “candidate that has some legitimate reason to be here” and “who is this person and why are they running for Mayor”.

It would seem that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s first foray into city campaign fundraising had a couple of glitches at first.

After U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee jumped into the race for Houston mayor in April, her campaign worked fast to neutralize the fundraising advantage held by competitors, including state Sen. John Whitmire.

It may have gone a little too fast, a campaign spokesperson acknowledged Tuesday. More than half a dozen people or companies gave contributions to Jackson Lee that exceed the city’s legal limit and one donation wrongly was attributed to a dead woman.

In response to questions from the Houston Landing, a spokesperson said Jackson Lee’s campaign had informed Houston City Secretary Pat Daniel it plans to refund the excessive contributions, but the problems put an asterisk on Jackson Lee’s highly anticipated first report since entering the race.

[…]

At least six individuals donated above the $5,000 individual limit, according to the report. Meanwhile, the campaign also disclosed receiving $20,000 from a company, C&W International Fabricators LLC, and $25,000 from the Border Health PAC, which is affiliated with McAllen businessman and Texas political megadonor Alonzo Cantu.

Texas election law sets no limit on contribution amounts for state races, but Houston’s ethics code imposes tighter rules on candidates running for city office.

Cantu, who serves as a University of Houston regent, also gave Jackson Lee $5,000 as an individual. He has become a major player on the state’s political giving scene in recent years, according to Texas Monthly.

The problems are being resolved, which is what you want. That they happened and got reported on is not what you want. Looking at SJL’s report, I still see the $25K and $20K contributions mentioned in the Houston Landing story, though the contribution originally attributed to the late Mattelia Grays now appears to be in her daughter’s name. I assume this means there will be a corrected report still to come, but it took until Wednesday for this report to be posted, so who knows. Also, without the PAC donation corrections, it seems her cash on hand looks to be a little higher than it really is. Still a lot, and as noted SJL already has a ton of name recognition, but the numbers are what they are.

There were some other examples of this from other candidates as well.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who boasted last week of a fundraising haul of over $1.2 million in three months, listed at least $63,800 in contributions that exceeded legal limits in her campaign finance report submitted Monday. Meanwhile, state Sen. John Whitmire has received $5,000 beyond the permissible limit from the Houston Police Officers’ Union.

[…]

Whitmire, who portrays himself as a law enforcement ally and often highlights endorsements from local police union groups, disclosed two contributions from the Houston Police Officers’ Union PAC — $5,000 and $10,000 respectively. His campaign spokesperson, Sue Davis, acknowledged the oversight and said the campaign would refund the excess $5,000.

[Lee] Kaplan reported a donation in which the amount went slightly above the cap at $5,162.70. His campaign manager, Jennie Johnson, said the team would refund the part of any donation that goes over the legal limits.

By law, candidates have eight days to amend their campaign finance reports.

Whitmire’s corrected report, which shows the refund of the excess contribution from the HPOU, showed up in the system late Wednesday and is in the Google folder with the others. Off the top of my head, I don’t recall this many instances of such incorrect donations in the past. I’m not sure what the underlying cause may be, I don’t think there’s that much more money being raised this year than in 2015 or even 2009. We’ll need this same level of scrutiny for the 30-day and 8-day reports as well, especially to look for donors who have already maxed out giving more.

Also, I really didn’t expect Lee Kaplan to be such a prominent player in the race, but so far he has been. I keep trying to think of something to say about Lee Kaplan, and this is all I’ve got right now.

Gilbert Garcia’s initial report did not list a cash on hand total, though he later posted an updated report that had it. He has not loaned his campaign any money, but at the bottom of his individual contributions listing, there are several entries for himself, totaling $3,030,000. That means he collected about $265K from other people.

Derek Broze is a variant on the non-filer candidates I wrote about. He filed his report on time, but all it consists of is the summary page, with the topline totals. Everything after that, from the subtotals on page 3 to the end, is blank. Do you, like I did, ask yourself what kind of person could think that giving money to Derek Broze’s Mayoral candidate is a good idea? Well too bad, his report won’t tell you. The “doesn’t know how to file a finance report” contingent is at least as big as the “non-serious candidates who never file a report” contingent. In a better world, the software for filing these reports would have built-in error checking and data validation, which would prevent any candidate from filing this kind of largely empty report. Maybe someday we’ll get there.

None of the other “who are these people” candidates filed reports, which is consistent with the type. It’s also fine by me, there are a ton of other reports to review and it’s not like these would provide much value. I’ll have more as we go.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged campaign finance reports, Chanel Mbala, Derek Broze, Election 2023, fundraising, Gilbert Garcia, Houston, John Whitmire, Lee Kaplan, Mayor, Naoufal Houjami, Robert Gallegos, Sheila Jackson Lee | 1 Comment

Hearing in the lawsuit to clarify exceptions to Texas’s harsh anti-abortion law

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Here’s hoping for some good news.

One woman could barely get words out through her tears. Another ran to the restroom as soon as she was done, wordless, wretched sobs wracking her tiny body. A third threw up on the witness stand.

These are believed to be the first women in the country since 1973 to testify in court about the impacts of a state abortion ban on their pregnancies. They almost certainly won’t be the last.

Speaking to a packed Travis County courtroom Wednesday, three women detailed devastating pregnancy losses and said medically necessary care was delayed or denied due to their doctors’ confusion over Texas’ abortion laws.

They’re challenging a clause in the state’s abortion ban that says a doctor can perform an abortion only if they believe the patient has “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy” that puts the patient “at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

Doctors have reported delaying necessary pregnancy care for fear of violating the law, which allows doctors to be punished by up to 99 years in prison, a $100,000 fine and the loss of their medical license. The lawsuit, brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights, asks a judge to temporarily block the law from applying to medically necessary abortions and ultimately clarify when a medical emergency justifies an abortion.

Texas is asking District Judge Jessica Mangrum to dismiss the case, arguing these women have only their doctors to blame for any disruptions to their care.

At the end of each tearful testimony, lawyers for the state asked the women the same questions: Did Attorney General Ken Paxton tell you you couldn’t get an abortion? Did anyone, working in any capacity for the state, tell you you couldn’t get an abortion?

[…]

Over the past few decades, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the attorney general’s office have found themselves in a courtroom just like this one countless times, arguing over the legality of Texas’ abortion laws. Historically, abortion providers were named on the lawsuits and testified on the stand, in an effort to spare the women most impacted by these laws from the pain of public testimony.

But there are no more abortion clinics in Texas. These women took the stand Wednesday because there is no one else left to speak for them.

At a press conference after the hearing, Molly Duane, senior counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said it was difficult to have to walk these women through the worst moments of their lives, but “they did it to hold the state of Texas accountable.”

“As a lawyer, you generally don’t want to cry during work but it was hard not to,” Duane told The Texas Tribune afterward. “It helps people understand how abortion actually is health care. Because I can say it, and doctors can say it, but when these women say it, people can see themselves.”

For the women who took the stand, reliving their experiences for the sake of a courtroom full of people was deeply painful. They stood together after the hearing, comforting each other and rubbing each others’ backs, leaning on their partners and each other for support.

“I was horrified by how willing the cross examination was to ask over and over again about the most horrific thing that’s ever happened to me, seemingly with nothing but callousness,” Zurawski said after the hearing. “I survived sepsis, and I don’t think that today was much less traumatic.”

During the most recent regular legislative session, Texas passed a law that provided some additional protections for doctors who perform abortions in cases of ectopic pregnancies and previable premature rupture of membranes, both of which can be fatal if left untreated. The law goes into effect Sept. 1.

Assistant Attorney General Amy Pletscher said while these women’s stories are “indisputably tragic,” they do not warrant a judge taking steps to modify the laws.

“Any future harm is purely hypothetical and therefore does not warrant injunctive relief,” Pletscher told the judge. “Given the nature of plaintiffs’ past experiences, it is understandable that they are seeking to place blame, but the blame directed at defendants is misplaced. Rather, plaintiffs sustained their alleged injuries as a direct result of their own medical providers failing them.”

Standing before the judge Wednesday, Duane said the state has long argued that clinics do not have standing to challenge abortion law and claimed it is unlawful to challenge abortion laws before they go into effect. But now that the Center for Reproductive Rights has brought a suit with plaintiffs who are directly harmed as a result of the trigger law, the state still says there are no grounds for a suit.

“It begs the question: Does the state think that the only person who would have standing to challenge an abortion law is a woman who comes to court with amniotic fluid or blood dripping down her leg?”

See here for the previous update on the lawsuit, and here for more on that one little “loosening” law, which wouldn’t have helped any of these women had it been in effect. This suit isn’t about blocking the full extent of the new abortion restrictions, just to clarify what the exceptions for the life of the mother mean. And of course the state’s entire defense is basically “sucks to be you, get a better doctor”. I do think the plaintiffs will get their injunction, but once it goes to appeals then it’s anyone’s guess. CBS News, ABC News, the Chron and Daily Kos have more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged abortion, Amanda Zurawski, Center for Reproductive Rights, EMTALA, hospitals, lawsuit, SCOTUS, Texas, Texas Medical Association, The Lege | 1 Comment

San Antonio likely to sue over “Death Star” law

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

We welcome your participation.

That’s no moon…

San Antonio likely will sue the Texas over the so-called “Death Star bill,” recently passed state legislation limiting municipalities’ ability to exercise their right to home rule, City Attorney Andy Segovia told the Express-News.

Segovia told the daily his office is exploring legal options and is in talks with its counterparts in Houston, El Paso, Dallas and Austin. Staff is weighing whether San Antonio should file its own lawsuit or join Houston in a complaint filed earlier this month.

Under House Bill 2127, municipalities are barred from passing local ordinances that exceed current state laws that govern business, agriculture and other areas. For example, Dallas mandates that contractors schedule 10-minute water breaks for construction workers. However, under the bill, the city would be forced to scrap the law since it exceeds state regulations, according to a KXAN report.

San Antonio City Council was considering a similar water-break ordinance. However, that proposal has been amended only to include contractors directly hired by the city to avoid a conflict with HB 2127, which goes into effect Sept. 1, the Express-News reports.

The state argues the law makes doing business in Texas easier by streamlining the number of ordinances companies must keep up with.

However, in its lawsuit, Houston argues that HB 2127 violates the Texas Constitution, which states that cities have the right to home rule. Critics also maintain that the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature passed the bill to punish large municipalities such as San Antonio and Houston, which tend to be under Democrats’ control.

“This notion that 2127 is going to create consistency is way off the mark,” Segovia told the Express-News. “If anything, it’s going to add confusion and chaos statewide.”

See here for more on the Houston lawsuit. I don’t know if there’s a technical advantage to joining the Houston lawsuit or filing their own, but I trust they’ll figure out what works best for them. San Antonio says they don’t plan to roll back their existing ordinances that may be blocked by the Death Star law, which may wind up generating litigation from those who would want the existing ordinances tossed. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, a lot of lawyers are going to make a lot of money as a result of this legislative session. News 4 San Antonio and the San Antonio Report have more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged Greg Abbott, Houston, lawsuit, local control, Ron Nirenberg, San Antonio, Senate, Sylvester Turner, Texas, The Lege | 1 Comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of July 17

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance is too heat-addled to say anything clever as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged blog roundup, TPA | Comments Off

July 2023 campaign finance reports – State races

Posted on July 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

At this point, the only state race I’m watching is SD15. This is partly because of the Mayor’s race connection, partly because there are two active challengers to the possibly outgoing/possibly staying incumbent, and partly because I don’t have enough information to follow other races yet. Unlike other systems, the TEC doesn’t have an easy way to search by position, or to list all filings for a particular cycle. Because of that – or at least because I haven’t figured it out – I’m only able to look for candidates by name, which doesn’t help me at all if I’m looking for potential primary challengers in HD 142 or 146. If you know better let me know, otherwise I’ll come back to this in January when we have all of the primary filings in hand.

Anyway. As I said, there’s one race I’m watching closely and that’s SD15. Here’s what we have:

John Whitmire, SD15
Molly Cook, SD15
Karthik Soora, SD15


Candidate     Raised       Spent       Loan     On Hand
=======================================================
Whitmire      371,517  1,618,255          0   9,893,611
Cook           59,786     13,489          0      51,039
Soora         180,949     52,950          0     127,393

I haven’t posted any City of Houston reports yet – I’m still working on them, with the Mayoral reports up next once they’re all available – but I can say that John Whitmire posted identical totals, and what look to me to be identical reports, for both his Senate and Mayoral campaigns. It’s all the same money, so I presume this is okay under state law. I briefly scrolled through the reports and didn’t see any individual contribution over $5,000, which is the city’s contribution limit. I assume that as long as he’s keeping track of what’s being used for what it’s all kosher.

(UPDATE: The Chron found at least one example of a contribution that exceeded city contribution limits. I’ll have more on this in the Mayoral finance report post.)

Karthik Soora had a nice haul. I saw a lot of small-dollar donations, and also quite a few from outside Houston and from other states. Many of his donors had South Asian names, which is probably one part personal network and one part good usage of mailing lists. He also collected about $80K from people with the surname Soora, including $10K from himself. There was another $1500 or so in in-kind donations from himself. Sometimes that sort of thing is one-time only, so we’ll see what his January report looks like. His cash on hand is paltry compared to Whitmire’s, but Whitmire is about to spend a bunch of that cash on the Mayor’s race, and who knows what his total might look like if he comes out on the losing end of a runoff and has to decide whether to run for his old seat again.

Molly Cook raised a bit more than $100K through the eight-day report for the 2022 primary. Her July 2022 repot showed another $55K raised, but some of that was before the primary and some was after. I didn’t go through it all to try to suss it out. She had about $11K on hand in her January 2023 report but didn’t show any money raised during that period. I assume she’ll have a name recognition advantage over Soora in March, but it’s hard to say how much of one and it’s hard to say how much it would matter if Whitmire is running again. It would also not surprise me if one or more new candidates jump in if it looks like we’re about to get Mayor Whitmire, and let’s not forget that in that instance there will also be a special election. There may be a lot of opportunity to raise cash for this seat.

As I said, this is the only state race for now that I’m focusing on, in part because it’s the only one whose players are all known to me at this time. There’s action in the Harris County races already, and we also get to marvel at how a handful of billionaires are keeping Ken Paxton afloat, and there’s so much more there that we don’t know. We’ll at least know who’s running for what state office when the January reports get published. I’ll be back then for those, and of course I’ll keep the other reports coming in the meantime.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged campaign finance reports, Democratic primary, Election 2022, Election 2023, Election 2024, fundraising, HD142, HD146, Houston, John Whitmire, Karthik Soora, Ken Paxton, Mayor, Molly Cook, SD15, Senate, Texas | 1 Comment

Pushing children back into the river

Posted on July 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Does the ICC at the Hague have a 911 line?

Officers working for Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative have been ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande, and have been told not to give water to asylum seekers even in extreme heat, according to an email from a Department of Public Safety trooper who described the actions as “inhumane.”

The July 3 account, reviewed by Hearst Newspapers, discloses several previously unreported incidents the trooper witnessed in Eagle Pass, where the state of Texas has strung miles of razor wire and deployed a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande.

According to the email, a pregnant woman having a miscarriage was found late last month caught in the wire, doubled over in pain. A four-year-old girl passed out from heat exhaustion after she tried to go through it and was pushed back by Texas National Guard soldiers. A teenager broke his leg trying to navigate the water around the wire and had to be carried by his father.

The email, which the trooper sent to a superior, suggests that Texas has set “traps” of razor wire-wrapped barrels in parts of the river with high water and low visibility. And it says the wire has increased the risk of drownings by forcing migrants into deeper stretches of the river.

The trooper called for a series of rigorous policy changes to improve safety for migrants, including removing the barrels and revoking the directive on withholding water.

“Due to the extreme heat, the order to not give people water needs to be immediately reversed as well,” the trooper wrote, later adding: “I believe we have stepped over a line into the inhumane.”

I think we crossed that line awhile ago. I don’t want to share a planet with people who would do this. I’m too numb to say anything else right now. My God, we need to vote some people out of office.

Posted in La Migra | Tagged border, DPS, Greg Abbott, immigration, Rio Grande, Steve McCraw, Texas, Texas National Guard | 8 Comments

Patrick issues gag order in impeachment trial

Posted on July 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

My, my, my.

A crook any way you look

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Monday issued a wide-ranging gag order ahead of the impeachment trial of suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton, saying “out-of-court statements” by both sides could jeopardize the trial in the Texas Senate.

The order, which went into immediate effect, cites what Patrick called “particularly egregious” statements that “pose a serious and imminent threat” to the impartiality of Paxton’s trial, which begins Sept. 5.

Violators can be found in contempt of court and punished with up to six months in a county jail and a fine of up to $500, the gag order said.

The order prohibits parties — including members of the Senate and House and their staffs, witnesses and attorneys — from making statements that they “reasonably should know” will have a “substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing the trial.”

That includes, among other statements, those “concerning the expected testimony” or “character, reputation or credibility” of witnesses, parties or attorneys involved in the trial, and “any opinion” as to whether the articles of impeachment should be dismissed or sustained, the gag order said.

The order also bars statements about the “identity or nature” of evidence that may be presented at the trial, statements about subpoenas issued in the matter, or statements about “any information” that could “create a substantial risk of prejudicing” the trial.

Patrick said the sweeping order was justified because, unlike in civil or criminal trials, the jury — 30 of the 31 senators — cannot be replaced if there is evidence that their impartiality is tainted. Senate trial rules barred one potential juror — Paxton’s wife, Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney — from participating in deliberations or decisions in the impeachment trial, citing a conflict of interest.

The order cites comments made by attorneys for both Paxton and the House impeachment managers, including Paxton lead attorney Tony Buzbee’s claims that the House investigation was an “evil, illegal and unprecedented weaponization of state power,” and a claim by one of the House’s lead prosecutors, Rusty Hardin, that his team had uncovered allegations that “will blow your mind.”

Patrick, who is acting as judge in the impeachment trial, was required to issue a gag order under impeachment rules that were approved by the Texas Senate last month. Paxton, who was suspended from office upon a 121-23 impeachment vote by the House, would be permanently removed from office if two-thirds of senators agree.

On the one hand, that’s going to make this a whole lot less fun, since let’s face it the sniping was pure political joy. Who doesn’t want to see all these fancy lawyers tearing into each other? On the other hand, and I hate to say this, but that’s basically Dan Patrick’s point, and I can see where he’s coming from. This is a circus, gag order or no, but it’s supposed to ultimately deliver a verdict we’re meant to accept as legitimate. A little decorum will make that a tad bit easier to achieve. So we all get too cool our jets until September. Boring, but there you have it. The Statesman has more.

UPDATE: I’m sure this is nothing.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is presiding over the impeachment trial of suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton, received $3 million in campaign support last month from a top group campaigning against Paxton’s impeachment.

In a campaign-finance report published Tuesday, Patrick — who is not up for reelection until 2026 — reported a $1 million contribution and a $2 million loan from Defend Texas Liberty PAC. The political action committee was by far his biggest benefactor on the report, which covered Patrick’s fundraising from June 19-30. It was the first opportunity state officials had to fundraise since the House impeached Paxton in late May.

Patrick’s Senate has scheduled a trial to begin Sept. 5 to determine whether to permanently remove Paxton from office. Patrick has been acting as presiding officer of the trial — effectively the judge — and the fundraising period partially overlapped with the Senate’s deliberations over the trial rules.

[…]

The PAC’s stance on Paxton’s impeachment is well-known. Shortly after the House impeached Paxton, Defend Texas Liberty PAC sent text messages to GOP voters asking them to call their state senators and tell them to “stop this madness and end this witch hunt.” It has also made clear it will politically target House Republicans who voted for impeachment.

“Defend Texas Liberty will ensure that every Republican voter in Texas knows just what a sham the Texas House has been this session and just how absurd this last minute Democrat led impeachment effort is,” the group said in a May 26 tweet.

Who among us could possibly think that Dan Patrick is anything but fair, impartial, and impervious to the whims of billionaires?

Posted in Scandalized!, That's our Lege | Tagged Dan Cogdell, Dan Patrick, Dick DeGuerin, impeachment, Ken Paxton, Rusty Hardin, Senate, Texas, The Lege, Tony Buzbee | 3 Comments

July 2023 campaign finance reports – Congress

Posted on July 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

What a difference three months has made. Back in April you could have counted the races and candidates of interest on your fingers. Now with the larger Senate race, the openings in CDs 18 and 32, and a few other candidates of interest, there’re more to keep track of. We’re a long way from approaching 2018/2020 energy, but there are some positive signs. Here are the names and numbers of interest at this time:

Colin Allred – Senate
Roland Gutierrez – Senate
Heli Rodriguez-Prilliman – Senate
John Love – Senate
Thierry Tchenko – Senate

Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Pervez Agwan – CD07
Michelle Vallejo – CD15
Sheila Jackson Lee – CD18
Amanda Edwards – CD18
Francine Ly – CD24
Sam Eppler – CD24
Sandeep Srivastava – CD24
Henry Cuellar – CD28
Julie Johnson – CD32
Brian Williams – CD32
Alex Cornwallis – CD32
Justin Moore – CD32
Melissa McDonough – CD38


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
Sen   Allred        8,822,896   3,090,934       0  5,731,962
Sen   Gutierrez
Sen   R-Prilliman      23,062     22,153   35,063        908
Sen   Love             43,675     43,926    6,015      1,004
Sen   Tchenko          57,160      6,633        0     50,526

07    Fletcher        583,726    284,404        0  1,621,028
07    Agwan           221,855    144,619        0     77,236
15    Vallejo         171,019     42,195  100,000    140,541
18    Jackson Lee      40,519    146,874        0    239,166
18    Edwards         600,213     30,972        0    569,240
24    Ly               25,571     16,335    4,843      9,235
24    Eppler          137,701      8,990        0    128,710
24    Srivastava      216,945      6,946  493,233    213,591
28    Cuellar         512,858    166,829        0    393,772
32    Johnson         411,636     24,908        0    386,727 
32    Williams        363,452     41,273        0    322,178
32    Cornwallis      104,434      4,903  104,350    101,164
32    Moore            77,013     11,024        0     65,970
38    McDonough        25,854     24,255   23,851      1,599

As noted before, Colin Allred got off to a fast fundraising start, outpacing Ted Cruz by quite a bit. He also spent a lot of money – I hope that’s mostly startup costs and not what his normal burn rate will look like for the next couple of quarters. It’s still pretty damn impressive, though he and Cruz are close together in cash on hand thanks to the large outlays by Allred. It’s good to see and I hope it continues, but do remember that Beto outraised Cruz in 2018. Money helps but it ain’t determinative.

Sen. Gutierrez officially entered the race in July so he doesn’t even have an FEC account link yet. His January TEC report, which was the most recent one I found for him, showed him with $309K on hand. I’m sure he’ll make an announcement about his fundraising sometime before the next deadline.

Both John Love, who also has a Q2 report for CD06, and Heli Rodriguez-Prilliman reported nearly identical amounts raised as in April. In his case, perhaps this is a sign that he’s switching races; in hers, perhaps it’s a sign she’s dropping out. I’ll let you know what I think after I see the Q3 reports.

There are a couple of other names with Senate accounts, and one that drew my eye: Thierry Tchenko is a Houston person, whose personal Facebook page is here. I don’t know him at all and was surprised to see his name because I just hadn’t encountered it anywhere before I went looking for the finance reports. I’m hardly the be-all and end-all of anything, but I know a lot of people, I go to all of the quarterly HCDP CEC meetings, I attend plenty of other events at which People Who Are Running For Things like to come to, I see and hear a lot of news, and I’d never heard of him before now. He seems like a good person and I’d love to hear more about his candidacy for City Council or the State House, but the Senate is several degrees more difficult and it’s extremely difficult to see how someone like him can hope to make it to the runoff of the 2024 primary for this race. Thierry, if you or someone you know reads this, you can reach me at kuff-at-offthekuff-dot-com, drop me a note I’ll be happy to talk to you.

There are two new names for CD07 who are listed as candidates but have not filed any reports yet, Lakeisha Simon and Noor Mobeen. I couldn’t find anything about Simon on Facebook or via Google other than her statement of organization as a candidate. Noor Mobeen is a doctor who immigrated to the US as a child. As with Thierry Tchenko, I know nothing of either of these people.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, now running for Mayor of Houston, had $30K in contribution refunds on her report, presumably for people who didn’t want to contribute to her Mayoral campaign. I did not see anything in her disbursements that looked like a transfer to her Mayoral campaign. Maybe that means she’s hedging her bets a teensy bit? Just a thought.

Amanda Edwards sent out a press release touting her $600K haul since dropping out of the Mayor’s race. While Rep. Jackson Lee still has a foothold in the district with her campaign account remaining full, Edwards’ decision to hop over the fence looks like a genius move right now, as that’s not only a huge total for her but there’s no one else out there. I did see one more name associated with CD18, Daryl Barnes, who has no report yet and had no presence on the web I could find. So like I said, Edwards has the CD18 field to herself, pending whatever decision Sheila Jackson Lee ultimately makes.

There are two new names in CD24. One is Sam Eppler, a math teacher from Dallas who appears to have his act together more than the others so far. Sandeep Srivastava was the Democratic candidate in CD03 in 2022, who raised a bit of money but didn’t overperform the Dem baseline in that district. He originally threw his hat into CD32, but changed course after that. $200K of what he reported as having been raised is listed as a loan; the rest of that loan total is from his previous candidacy.

Three of the four names for CD32 have appeared in previous posts; the fourth is Alex Cornwallis, who ran for SBOE12 in 2022 and appears to be entirely self-funded out of the gate. We’ll see how that goes from here. State Rep. Julie Johnson raised her total in a small window between special sessions, so it’s even more impressive for that. Which doesn’t diminish Dr. Brian Williams’ total, but he did have more time to collect it. Again, we’ll see how they do in Q3. There were three other listings without filings for CD32, I don’t feel like noting them at this time.

I met Melissa McDonough at an event, I think it was the Q2 CEC meeting, and got a business card from her. Just had a quick chat, we each wanted to talk to lots of people, but I met her and she met me. She hadn’t really raised any money yet, her website is a placeholder, and CD38 is unproven as even a fringe pickup opportunity at this time, but I’m noting her here partly because I want CD38 to draw some interest, and partly to note that it’s very much possible for these unknown-to-me candidates to have interacted with me in some form. Let’s see if that has happened with any of them by the time the Q3 reports have been filed.

I’ll have other reports soon. Let me know what you think.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged Alex Cornwallis, Amanda Edwards, Beto O'Rourke, Brian Williams, campaign finance reports, CD06, CD07, CD15, CD18, CD23, CD24, CD28, CD32, CD38, Colin Allred, Congress, Daryl Barnes, Democratic primary, Election 2018, Election 2022, Election 2024, Francine Ly, fundraising, Heli Rodriguez-Prilliman, Henry Cuellar, John Love, Julie Johnson, Justin Moore, Lakeisha Simon, Lizzie FLetcher, Melissa McDonough, Michelle Vallejo, Noor Mobeen, Pervez Agwan, Roland Gutierrez, Sam Eppler, Sandeep Srivastava, Senate, Sheila Jackson Lee, Ted Cruz, Texas, Thierry Tchenko | 4 Comments

An HISD threefer

Posted on July 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

How much is discretion worth to a school principal?

To Jessica Campos, Pugh Elementary School used to feel like a family.

The 350-student school that her 10-year-old daughter attends had a tight-knit community with near-constant communication between staff and families, Campos said. One teacher, who had a knack for turning lessons into sing-along songs, even became a family friend.

But that feeling quickly evaporated when new Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles named the Denver Harbor school as one of 28 campuses targeted for immediate overhaul. Miles, appointed as the district’s superintendent in June, replaced Pugh’s principal, required all teachers to reapply for their jobs and ordered several changes to campus operations.

“We know what we had was good,” Campos said. “(Central office staff) are not in our school. They’re not experiencing what our children are experiencing. They’re not in the classroom watching how our teachers are interacting and how they’re delivering the curriculum to our kids.”

For two-plus decades, HISD has embraced an organizational model commonly known as “decentralization,” a system that gave principals at schools like Pugh lots of authority over spending, staffing and operations at their campus. The model rested on the idea that principals — not central office administrators — best understood what their students needed in a district as diverse as HISD.

But that approach is changing at dozens of campuses under Miles, who Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath chose to lead HISD as part of state sanctions against the district.

[…]

Forest Brook Middle School Principal Alicia Lewis said she often had to make “very tough decisions” about resources at her campus on the district’s northeast side. Now, she’s only responsible for spending $100 per student on instruction-related costs.

Giving up some power is a welcome give-and-take for Lewis considering what she says she’s receiving in return: new projectors, new whiteboards, computers for every student and reduced class sizes.

“When you’re making budgeting decisions on your own, there are times where you have to say, ‘I want this, but I can’t have this,’” Lewis said. “Now we’re saying, ‘We’re in heaven,’ where we are getting some of the things that we could not get before.”

But for Campos, any future benefits to Pugh families remain hypothetical, while the downsides are clear to her. She said campus-level decision-making was key to forging a school culture that fit her community, which is mostly made up of Spanish-speaking families.

The previous principal regularly hosted coffee chats with parents where Spanish was the default language, Campos said. Bilingual teachers helped her daughter, who has dyslexia, make more than a grade level’s worth of progress in reading last year, she said.

Now, she’s concerned about the new principal’s lack of Spanish fluency and worries the district may not rehire many of the teachers who she feels have served her daughter well.

HISD leaders instituted a decentralized model in the 1990s, arguing that the approach would raise student achievement and bring more equity to the district.

The cornerstone of the plan involved allocating millions of dollars to campuses — with schools serving higher-need students getting more funds — and generally allowing principals to spend the money as they saw fit after consulting with teachers and families.

In theory, a school system structure that gives principals final say over staffing, class schedules and other decisions can be equitable, researchers say. The model allows campuses to cater to students’ specific needs and gives extra funding for higher-needs children, such as those with disabilities or who are learning English.

In reality, though, outcomes have been inconsistent across the state’s largest district. And, as far as researchers can tell, the model has not translated into benefits for Houston’s students.

“If we look at trends before and after decentralization came into effect in the way they enacted it here in HISD, we did not see increases in student pass rates or test scores,” said Erin Baumgartner, director of Rice University’s Houston Education Research Consortium, or HERC. The organization conducted extensive research into HISD’s decentralization effort in the late 2010s.

I’ve noted this tradeoff for principals before, and one can certainly make a case for them giving up some local control for financial and other benefits. Indeed, the research shows that the decentralized model did not deliver on its promises, so that’s another argument for trying it a different way. This doesn’t mean that the opposite, top-down approach will be better – surely it could be, if the plan and the structure are sound – but it may also be that in the grand scheme of things both approaches are roughly the same from an outcomes perspective, and the real key to doing better lies elsewhere.

We’ll get some evidence on that soon enough. I’m highlighting this in part because it again speaks to my concerns about how sustainable the Miles Plan is. Nothing succeeds like success, and if test scores shoot up that will go a long way. But in the end, when we have our district back, people are going to have to want to continue this. If they don’t like the school experience under this scheme, or still feel scarred from how we got there, then they may want to go back to what they had before even if the outcomes weren’t as great. The community has to buy into the plan, and it’s on Mike Miles and the Board of Managers to sell it. Results only go so far. Trust matters, and they have to build it.

Which is why stories like this are troubling.

Since the Texas Education Agency appointed Miles to lead the school district, he has faced community protests by citizens opposed to the state agency’s takeover. But he has maintained that schools are embracing his changes.

But interviews, email correspondence, and audio recordings of campus meetings that the Texas Observer obtained contradict Miles’ public relations message that there is widespread teacher support for his program. Teachers, parents, and community members from nine of the 57 schools we spoke to said they had no opportunity to weigh in; teachers were threatened with losing their jobs if their campus did not join the program.

“Our hours will change. Our schedules will change. Our curriculum will change. But we have no input in it,” said Michelle Collins, a teacher at DeZavala Elementary School. “Neither do parents.”

According to the state education law, a Shared Decision Making Committee (SDMC) composed of parents, community representatives, teachers, other campus personnel, and a business representative is required to be “involved in decisions in the areas of planning, budgeting, curriculum, staffing patterns, staff development, and school organization.”

While Miles has publicly asked principals to obtain school input, SDMC committee members from five schools in the program confirmed with the Observer that they never met to discuss the issue. SDMC members and teachers from other schools reported that even when they did meet, they did not have a vote in the decision. One teacher said their staff voted not to opt in, but then later saw their school’s name included in the list of 57 schools in the news.

See here, here, and here for the background, and read on for their evidence. This may have been more of a communication failure than anything else, but it’s still a problem. Again, at some point the people will get the opportunity to vote on all this. They will remember their experiences, good and bad.

Finally, let’s bring it back to the nuts and bolts of what Miles has in mind.

At least one-third of Houston ISD campuses will use a new curriculum based on the “science of reading” when school resumes in August, following a national trend that has seen more districts embrace phonics-based instructional methods that teach students how to break down and understand words.

HISD will distribute a reading curriculum, acquired and modified by the Texas Education Agency to align with state education standards, by the New York-based company Amplify to the 85 schools in or aligned with Superintendent Mike Miles’ New Education System. The curriculum was already piloted in six HISD schools last school year, and former Superintendent Millard House II already planned on expanding it to 64 more.

After district materials initially suggested that only NES or NES-aligned schools would receive the curriculum from the district, Miles said that HISD will make the curriculum available to any school that requests it.

Amplify says its Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum, the basis for the Texas-specific version used at over 100 districts across the state, is “grounded in the science of reading.”

While there is no universal definition for that broad expression, according to Jorge Gonzalez, a psychology professor at the University of Houston’s College of Education, the phrase “represents five decades of research on reading, reading development and best practices for reading instruction” that has led to a better understanding of the way children best learn to read.

The science of reading, however, is different than its instruction, Gonzalez said, which “is where the controversy begins because how the science of reading translates into the science of instruction is still being developed in many ways.”

I learned to read via phonics and I’m biased in its favor. If HISD is moving towards the current best practices for reading education, that’s all to the good. Again, the outcomes will tell us if we’re doing this right or not. It’s a bit more complicated than that and you should read the rest, but given the strong need to improve reading capability in HISD, I’m encouraged by this.

Posted in School days | Tagged Amplify, Board of Managers, HISD, HISD Board of Trustees, Houston, Houston Education Research Consortium, Mike Miles, Mike Morath, Millard House, New Education System, phonics, reading, standardized testing, Texas Education Agency | 1 Comment

Some data points in the “future doctor shortage” story

Posted on July 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

From The 19th:

The landscape of American health care has undergone an extraordinary transformation in the past several years, with the end of federal abortion protections allowing states to end access to the procedure, and the concurrent rise in bans on gender-affirming care. States that pass one such restriction are more likely to pass the other: Since last June, 13 states have begun enforcing near-total bans on abortion; the procedure is outlawed at six weeks in Georgia, and more bans are on the horizon. And so far, 20 states have passed laws targeting gender-affirming care, largely focusing on minors. Seventeen of those laws passed in this year.

Increasingly, the availability of often vital medical care depends on where you live. The barrage of bans has created a conundrum for medical professionals: Is it worth staying somewhere — no matter how much it feels like home — without the legal freedom to provide health care as they were trained or to receive care themselves? And if health care workers do leave, what do they owe to the people they leave behind?

In few places is the tension more pronounced than Texas, the second-largest state in the nation. Since last summer, the state has enforced a near-total abortion ban. More recently, the state passed a law banning gender-affirming care for minors, which will take effect this fall. Already, Texas leadership has been taking action against hospitals that offer gender-affirming care for minors. Most recently, the attorney general initiated an investigation into Austin-based Dell Children’s Medical Center. Doctors who previously staffed the center have left their jobs as a result.

Physicians who provide adolescent medicine — a field that involves treating minors for conditions as varied as irregular periods and eating disorders — are making plans to leave Texas. Doctors like Shamshirsaz, a hospital-based physician whose job focuses on complex pregnancies, are realizing they cannot continue to practice in Texas.

As a result, many medical professionals worry, comprehensive health care in Texas — home to world-renowned health care institutions but also a place already lacking in nurses, family physicians and mental health specialists — could become incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to come by. Similar patterns, they said, will emerge in other states where lawmakers have worked to restrict access to reproductive health care despite the objections of most medical providers.

“You’re seeing a lot of doctors who don’t want to practice in states like Texas and Idaho. They feel like they can’t,” said Sam Dickson, a physician who moved from Texas to Montana largely so he could continue providing abortions after Roe was overturned. “If you just have a brain drain … to states where doctors are able to practice in a way that’s consistent with their training, that’s going to result in disparities in health outcomes down the line.”

[…]

Already, medical schools are collecting data showing just that. Across the board, 2023 figures show a decrease in medical students applying to residencies — the multi-year training program for newly graduated doctors — in states with abortion bans. In Texas, the drop is particularly sizable.

Starting in 2022, months after the state’s six-week abortion ban took effect, the number of medical students applying to Texas-based OBGYN residencies fell by 10.4 percent, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges — while across the country, the number of applicants increased. The share of medical students applying to Texas-based residencies of any kind fell by half a percent that year.

The trend has continued: In 2023, Texas saw a 5.4-percent decrease in applicants to its medical residency programs, with a 6.4-percent decrease for OBGYN, specifically. Both of those are significantly larger decreases than the national average.

[…]

There is early evidence indicating the impact the state’s policies have had, said Meredithe McNamara, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale University who has tracked access to adolescent medicine in different states. She’s spoken to colleagues in Texas who are preparing to leave the state because of its restrictions on gender-affirming care. That sort of exodus is hardly unusual. The exact same thing has happened, she pointed out, in other states that passed restrictions on care for minors, or where the state government has specifically targeted trans health care.

She pointed as well to data from the American Board of Pediatrics showing that already, in states where the legislature has seriously considered a ban on gender-affirming care, the ratio of adolescent medicine providers to patients is far lower. Currently, Texas has only .5 providers per every 100,000 potential pediatric patients in the entire state. For contrast, Massachusetts has 3.2 such providers per 100,000 patients. Despite having less than a third the number of people as Texas, Massachusetts is home to more adolescent medicine clinicians.

As bans take effect and hostility increases, McNamara noted, the inequality between states will only grow, affecting access not only to reproductive health care, but to the other medical services.

“The thing that’s really heartbreaking is that families are so comforted when they get this care — not just gender-affirming care, but adolescent medicine and the full spectrum of what we provide. We are not afraid of complexity or suffering, and we don’t really buy into this stigma of a lot of things adolescents deal with,” she said. “It is just really sad and totally unnecessary that access to that care would be harmed.”

The impact will likely be more severe in parts of Texas where health care was already more difficult to come by: rural areas, places with higher rates of uninsurance, and places where fewer doctors already practice.

See here, here, and here for previous entries in this series. I’d focused on the abortion ban before, but the ban on gender affirming care is also a factor. Even with the promise and now reality of litigation and the decent chances for a favorable ruling, that effect will just get bigger over time.

I actually think the rural parts of the state won’t be affected all that badly because they’re already in crisis mode and have been there for years, due in large part to the refusal to expand Medicaid. There’s only so much worse it can get, only so much lower the doctors-to-population ratio can go. It’s precisely in the urban and suburban parts of the state, where the growth is, that people will begin noticing how much harder it is to find a doctor and get on their schedule. The key thing is that someone is going to have to point this out and then point the finger of blame at the Republicans who have made it happen. Put this in the folder of what a pro-abortion rights campaign could look like.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged abortion, American Board of Pediatrics, Association of American Medical Colleges, lawsuit, Medicaid, SCOTUS, Texas, The Lege, transgender rights | 2 Comments

Another Paxton roundup

Posted on July 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

We’ll start with this big Chron story about yet another allegation of unethical legal conduct by Ken Paxton.

A crook any way you look

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is suspended from duty as he awaits his impeachment trial, jeopardized his office’s prosecution of a GOP activist when he took a private meeting with him, court documents and other records obtained by the Houston Chronicle show.

A week before the 2022 Republican primary, Paxton met privately with Matthew Ocker, whom Paxton’s office had been prosecuting on charges the activist kicked and choked his disabled teenage daughter, court records show.

Paxton’s office acknowledged the meeting happened at a Gulf Coast hotel but said the attorney general didn’t know at the time that Ocker, 46, was facing criminal charges, according to an internal memo obtained by the Chronicle.

But other documents show that Ocker communicated for at least a month with one of Paxton’s closest advisers about his child abuse case before his face-to-face meeting with the state’s top lawyer. Ocker has pleaded not guilty in the case, which is now pending under a different prosecutor.

It’s not clear what the men discussed at the meeting, which Ocker attended without legal representation. But when his defense lawyer, Daniel Palmitier, learned about the extent of the meeting, he asked a judge to remove the child abuse case from Paxton’s jurisdiction, according to court documents. The judge indicated the private meeting with Paxton also concerned him.

Palmitier declined to discuss the details of the case. A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The 2022 meeting raises concerns for Amanda Peters, a former prosecutor and professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, who reviewed documents referencing the meeting at the request of the Chronicle.

“The rules of ethics are clear. As soon as you know an opposing side has a lawyer, you are not to talk to him,” Peters said. “If it were me, as a prosecutor, I would walk out of the room.”

Law professor Geoffrey Corn agrees Paxton’s behavior was problematic if he knew Ocker had a lawyer.

“It’s just bad lawyering,” said Corn, who teaches at Texas Tech University. He added he believes Paxton’s conduct with Ocker mirrors his willingness to “skirt the rules” in acts outlined in the impeachment charges.

Both law professors said the hotel meet-up may have violated Texas disciplinary rules for attorneys, which prohibit lawyers from talking to other lawyers’ clients, unless the excluded attorney has explicitly consented. The records do not indicate if Paxton knew that Ocker had a lawyer, but both law professors said it would be unlikely for a criminal defendant to be unrepresented, and either way, Paxton should have asked.

Palmitier declined to say whether he submitted a misconduct complaint to the State Bar about Paxton.

A lawyer from the AG’s office said in court that Paxton often meets with voters, so he didn’t think the Ocker meeting should be viewed as a hindrance in his child abuse case.

[…]

The Hays County District Attorney recused himself from the child abuse case, saying Ocker believed he had unjustly targeted him, and asked the AG’s office to take over.

Ocker then began complaining to a top AG official raising similar concerns about Paxton’s prosecutors, according to copies of Facebook messages referenced in court, which the Chronicle obtained through an open records request.

In June 2021, he wrote to Michelle Smith, identified in court records as a senior adviser to Paxton, that “the AG’s office is totally out of control” and “Ken has lost my support.”

Smith, who worked as a campaign manager for Paxton and his wife, Angela, during her run for state senate, responded swiftly.

“Let me help,” she said.

Days later, she followed up saying she had asked people to “look into” Ocker’s situation.

Weeks of messaging ensued during which Ocker continued to disparage Paxton’s office.

Smith wrote back saying she had spoken with Brent Webster, Paxton’s first assistant, to answer a question about his case.

Ocker wrote at one point, “He (Paxton) can talk to me. He’s not prosecuting the case,” according to a court transcript.

Smith later helped coordinate Paxton’s Port Aransas schedule so that Ocker could meet with him between events, records show.

She texted Paxton’s executive assistant, Tommy Tran, and asked him to find a “quiet spot” for Ocker and Paxton to meet amid a day of campaigning at the Plantation Suites and Conference Center. She did not mention in the text that Ocker had a pending criminal case.

Smith told the Chronicle she had no knowledge of Ocker’s case or the meeting between Paxton and Ocker.

Apart from his Texas grassroots activism, Smith said she did not know Ocker well. However, Facebook posts show Smith and Ocker commented back and forth, discussing politics, dog names and, in one case, she expressed interest in buying a pecan cutting board handcrafted by Ocker.

There’s a lot more, so read the rest, though be aware that the story contains a description of the abuse allegations against Ocker, and they’re pretty upsetting. The basic gist is that Ocker sought to undermine the prosecution against him by engaging in this bit of ex parrte communication with Paxton, who seemingly didn’t know the story behind the guy’s request but also didn’t have anyone check the guy out first. In the end, the AG’s office withdrew from the case, which is now back in Hays County where there’s a new District Attorney. In the end, this may have been much ado about not much, at least from a practical perspective. But it still says something about Ken Paxton.

So does this.

The House impeachment team is looking into several financial deals that Paxton has made over the course of his long political career.

The Dallas Morning News reports that Paxton’s stake in a company called WatchGuard Video is currently the subject of impeachment investigators. WatchGuard (now owned by Motorola) provides bodycam technology for law enforcement and has $33 million in sales since 2014. Paxton was an early investor in the company back when he was just a state representative.

When the company landed a contract with the Texas Department of Public Safety in 2006, it jumpstarted their business. Investigators are looking into whether Paxton helped WatchGuard get the contract, though the former CEO Robert Vanman of the company denies Paxton did so. Paxton failed to disclose his investment on his ethics form, though he did amend it in 2008 when his investment became public.

Vanman has contributed $5,500 to Paxton and his wife’s political campaigns since 2009. In 2016, WatchGuard began building a $44 million campus in Allen, the district where Paxton was a representative and his wife, Angela, is currently a state senator.

Paxton’s holdings with WatchGuard were put in a blind trust when Paxton became attorney general in 2015.

That blind trust is also under investigation. Between July 2021 to April 2022, the Paxton’s went on a real estate spending spree totaling $3.5 million. The properties they bought include a huge ranch in Oklahoma, plots in resort towns in Utah and Hawaii, and townhouses.

See here for more on that spending spree. I don’t have anything to add to this, I just like collecting stories that validate my view of this asshole.

And finally, on a more prosaic note.

Harriet O’Neill, a Republican former justice on the Texas Supreme Court, has joined the team of lawyers who will be prosecuting suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton during his Senate impeachment trial.

O’Neill, who served 12 years on the state’s highest civil court before stepping down in 2010, is an accomplished attorney who also served as a state district judge and as a justice on the Houston-based 14th Court of Appeals. In 2002 and 2006, she was named the appellate justice of the year by the Texas Association of Civil Trial and Appellate Specialists.

O’Neill said she was proud to join the legal team, which also includes prominent Houston lawyers Dick DeGuerin and Rusty Hardin, assembled by House impeachment managers to present the legal case for impeachment in a trial before the Texas Senate to begin Sept. 5.

“The facts in this case are clear, compelling and decisive, and I look forward to presenting them before the members of the Texas Senate,” she said in a statement.

[…]

In a separate development in the impeachment case, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — who presides over the Senate and is serving the role of judge in the impeachment trial — issued a discovery order Wednesday requiring House impeachment managers to share relevant information and documents with Paxton’s legal team.

The order was requested by Paxton’s lead defense lawyer, Tony Buzbee, who had accused the impeachment team of withholding information vital to the defense.

The discovery order requires impeachment lawyers to turn over documents, including business records and law enforcement reports, that are relevant to the impeachment proceedings. It also ordered impeachment lawyers to turn over physical evidence, photographs, and government and business records that will be used in the trial.

Impeachment lawyers will also have to disclose to Paxton’s defense team any known convictions of people they plan to call as witnesses and the names and addresses of expert witnesses.

After receiving Patrick’s order, House impeachment lawyers said they had already planned on submitting the information to Buzbee.

“Paxton’s lawyers ignored our efforts to cooperate, instead filing their unauthorized demands and trying to create a spectacle in the media,” DeGuerin and Hardin wrote in a statement. “The Lieutenant Governor has ordered us to produce exactly what we intended to produce from the beginning and we are happy to comply.”

No matter what happens in this trial, we will always have the acrimony between Team Hardin/DeGuerin and Team Buzbee/Cogdell. Though really it’s the Tony Buzbee Show all the way. I hope someone is regularly buying Dan Cogdell a nice stiff drink.

Posted in Crime and Punishment, Scandalized! | Tagged Dan Patrick, Dick DeGuerin, DPS, Harriet O'Neill, impeachment, Ken Paxton, Matthew Ocker, Nate Paul, Rusty Hardin, Senate, Texas, The Lege, Tony Buzbee, WatchGuard | 1 Comment

The non-filers

Posted on July 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I of course have some thoughts about this.

Nearly a quarter of candidates running for Houston City Hall positions still have not reported how much money they raised and spent for their campaigns last year, missing the January deadline by six months.

About 70 people have filed paperwork that allows them to raise money for mayoral or City Council campaigns, including 41 who filed the form in 2022.

Once candidates file that form, they are required to report campaign finance details every January and July, showing how much money they have raised from supporters, how much they have spent on their campaigns and how much they have in the bank. The candidate’s signature on the form acknowledges that they know about the reporting requirements.

The candidates have until Monday to file their July reports, but 10 of the 41 who filed to run last year still have not filed their January reports. Those reports show financial activity for the last six months of 2022.

They are Koffey El-Bey, who is running in District B; Lloyd Ford Jr., District D; Mark McGee, District H; Ralph Garcia, District I; Melanie Miles, At-Large 1; Obes Nwabara, At-Large 2; James Joseph, At-Large 3; John Branch Jr., At-Large 4; Charles Onwuche, undeclared; and Rickey Tezino, mayor.

“I’ve never experienced that many that were untimely,” said former City Attorney David Feldman, who enforced the reporting laws under former Mayor Annise Parker. “That’s disregarding the process. The whole idea is to have full disclosure.”

Feldman said the city used to send letters to candidates who failed to file reports, and that usually led to compliance. If it did not, Feldman said, city attorneys would forward the matter to the city’s ethics commission, which could pursue enforcement. The violation is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine up to $500.

It is not clear if the city still sends those notifications or enforces the reporting requirements.

[…]

Miles, from the At-Large 1 race, and McGee, in District H, said they would file the reports showing they raised and spent $0 now that they knew they were required.

“This is my first time running for office, so this is my first time filing a campaign finance report,” McGee said. “That was just an oversight.”

Miles said she checked with the Texas Ethics Commission, the state body that regulates campaign finance, and a representative told her the agency is more lenient with local officials because they do not get reminders and alerts about the reports, like state candidates.

The treasurer for Branch said he tried to file the report in person in January. The secretary’s office said it has no record of a submission.

Ford said he did not think he had to file one because he had just started the campaign, but he filed his treasurer declaration last August and was required to show his activity for the following six months.

Nwabara could not recall why he did not file the report, and he said he had no additional comment. Tezino said he dropped out of the mayoral race once U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee announced her bid, though that was four months after the report was due. He said he plans to run for Jackson Lee’s congressional seat now.

First, let me say that I think the percentage of candidates who either don’t file reports or screw up how they do their reports will be largely no different this cycle than it has ever been. What I believe is different about this cycle, what David Feldman is noticing, is that there are more people who filed their designation of Treasurer report before January 1, which means they had a requirement to produce a January finance report. What has increased is the number of people filing before January, probably because in years past you couldn’t raise any money before then because of the now-illegal blackout period. I’m willing to bet that the number of people who failed to file July reports and 30-day reports has been more or less consistent over time, and the number of people who fail to file those reports this year will also be in line with that. But nobody other than the incumbents and some past candidates who still had money in their accounts ever had to file January reports before, and now they do if they make their candidacies official earlier. Check this total again in 2027 and see how it compares then and we’ll see.

Anyway. In my observation, the people who fail to file campaign finance reports, at whatever juncture in the cycle, fall broadly into three categories. The first, and I believe largest, group, is the unserious candidates. They never have any real presence in the campaign – you’ll rarely if ever see them at candidate events or other civic-type meetings that attract candidates, they don’t have websites or Facebook pages or if they do they never get updated, no one really knows who they are. Some of them are the perennial types who always file for elections for reasons that no one who isn’t them could articulate. They’re basically flotsam.

Some of them are like Melanie Miles and Mark McGee (who the article says is running in H but who is listed as “undeclared” on the Erik Manning spreadsheet; I live in H but have not seen any campaign presence from him), who didn’t raise or spend any money in their first reporting period as candidates and thus didn’t file an all-zeroes finance report. They were obligated to and should have known they needed to but they didn’t. Usually these people file the next report and so it’s basically no harm no foul.

The third group are candidates who are active and serious and appear to have their act together and yet for some reason I cannot fathom are unable to file a report on time, and sometimes they don’t file at all. It’s like there’s some level of dysfunction there, and I find it very disappointing. Every election there’s at least one candidate like this, and I have no idea why. It just is.

I don’t claim this covers every case. One-time screwups happen, and sometimes there are reasons we just don’t know about. Be all that as it may, we’re about to be up to our eyeballs in campaign finance reports. I’ll be doing my thing with them over the next week or two.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged campaign finance reports, David Feldman, District H, Election 2015, Election 2023, Houston, Houston City Council, James Joseph, lawsuit, Mark McGee, Mayor, Melanie Miles, Obes Nwabara, Rickey Tezino, Texas Ethics Commission | 1 Comment

HCA Healthcare hacked

Posted on July 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

A national breach with Houston connections.

HCA Healthcare, which operates more than a dozen hospitals in the Houston area, announced that personal information from as many as 11 million patients nationwide has been stolen in a data breach and could be sold online.

The company did not say how many patients in the Houston area could be affected by the theft, but the list of affected hospitals includes 11 HCA Houston Healthcare locations, Woman’s Hospital of Texas and Texas Orthopedic Hospital.

The list of stolen personal information was posted in an online forum on July 5. It includes patients’ names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and information about their appointments, the company said in an online statement about the data breach.

The theft does not appear to involve any credit card or bank account numbers, any clinical information such as medical records or any sensitive information such as passwords, Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers, the company said.

HCA Healthcare said it is working to identify exactly which patients are affected. The company said it will notify those patients by mail in the coming weeks and will offer them complementary credit monitoring and identity protection services.

The theft appears to be from an external storage location that HCA Healthcare uses to automate the formatting of emails. The company said it has not detected any malicious activity on its own networks.

[…]

Based in Nashville, Tennessee, HCA Healthcare operates 180 hospitals across the United States, including 48 in Texas. It also operates approximately 2,300 medical clinics, emergency rooms, surgery centers and urgent care clinics nationwide.

Its HCA Houston Healthcare network includes the Clear Lake, Conroe, Kingwood, Mainland, Medical Center, North Cypress, Northwest, Pearland, Southeast, Tomball and West hospitals, as well as the Woman’s Hospital of Texas and the Texas Orthopedic Center.

It didn’t interrupt daily operations, so probably not some kind of malware/ransomware, and it appears that the data in question is not the most sensitive or personal data, which is good. My best guess would be some kind of cracked password or credential stuffing situation, or possibly a vulnerable or misconfigured system that allowed the attacker to gain entry. Whatever the case, it seems like the attackers perhaps weren’t interested in anything beyond the data they grabbed. Could have been worse, I guess, but there’s clearly room for improvement here. As the story notes, hospital systems have been a frequent target of attackers lately, and you can see from this story how extensive the reach can be.

I’ve been following these stories in large part because I worry about an attack on the city of Houston or Harris County or HISD. As such, I noted this with a great deal of interest.

Houston City Hall is weighing measures to bolster security at the facility after an audit identified lapses in procedures and an elected official said a belligerent man with a criminal past berated city workers last week.

Controller Chris Brown’s office released a June 27 audit that recommended the city improve its processes to remove badge access from ex-city workers, monitor training for its third-party security vendor and complete daily logs. Those fixes would be relatively inexpensive, Brown said.

As council discussed the audit Wednesday, Mayor Pro Tem Dave Martin said an angry man berated staff on two different floors last week.

[…]

In the controller’s audit, investigators said one lapse they found was that 1,507 former city workers were still on the city’s “active” badging list, more than half of whom had left the city more than six months earlier. The General Services Department now has implemented a process to allow monthly reviews of separated employees, the audit said.

Auditors with the controller’s office also found a door where the magnet was not working properly and had been left unsecured. The city said it replaced the door.

“In my mind, you put those two together — you have a disgruntled former employee, and you have very easy access with no gate, it gives the opportunity,” Brown said.

At-Large Councilmember Sallie Alcorn said she thinks the city should act now to correct the lapses, instead of waiting to do so after something worse.

I skipped the details of the angry dude – I feel confident that Council will take action on that since it affected them directly – but the audit has my interest. Badge access shouldn’t have much effect on cyber security, unless those badges are also smartcards that are used as a second factor for network access. Regardless, my concern is that if account management is this lax for badge access, what is it like for network logons? Having a bunch of idle accounts is a risk. I’m totally speculating here, these two functions may be separate, or maybe network logons are maintained better, but I wanted to bring it up. I hope all of the Mayoral candidates have cybersecurity for the city high on their priority list. It’s strictly a defensive posture, but we’ve had plenty of examples of what the downside risk is.

Posted in Elsewhere in Houston, Technology, science, and math | Tagged Chris Brown, cybersecurity, Dave Martin, Harris County, HCA Healthcare, hospitals, Houston, Houston City Council, ransomware, Sallie Alcorn, Texas | Comments Off

Weekend link dump for July 16

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

“Fox Faces FCC License Threat Over False Election Claims & Jan. 6 Attack”. Actions have consequences.

Speaking of which, Disbar Him.

“Nearly two-thirds of all physicians reported being harassed over COVID-19 advice.”

“WNBA players have long lagged in earning power compared with the NBA, and that has often meant having to leave their families to take offseason work overseas, leaving them to navigate child care and secure enough funding and sponsorships to sustain their careers. To address that, two WNBA players — Breanna Stewart of the New York Liberty and Napheesa Collier of the Minnesota Lynx — are founding a new professional women’s basketball league to give top players an option to play domestically in the offseason.”

“Musk’s ultimate problem is that he does not value any Twitter user that doesn’t pay the company in some way. Those yet to stump up for Twitter Blue are, at best, freeloaders, or at worst, people ideologically opposed to him and everything he stands for. He — like Reddit’s Steve Huffman — believes Twitter to be the owner of the content on Twitter, and that those using Twitter should be grateful that they get to access the website at all.”

Some thoughts on Hugo Award nominations from John Scalzi.

“Even Trump Judges Are Ruling in Favor of Trans Rights”.

“We are social scientists who study the relationship between science and society. Through our work, we’ve noticed more scientists seem empowered to advocate for a wide range of policy issues. We’re interested in how the surge in science activism may be changing the norms of scientific research.”

Dylan Crews is a mensch.

“A cultural revolution has been sweeping through the U.S. Army—and the remarkable thing is it’s barely been noticed, as a deeper revolution had already taken hold very quietly. Starting this past March and continuing into the fall, all nine Army bases that are named after Confederate generals have been, or will be given, new names more in keeping with American values and the look of the U.S. military today.”

James Lewis, the only person convicted in connection with Chicago Tylenol murders, has died.

“The historical relationship between economic data and consumer surveys is broken”.

On the life of William “Billy” Hoy, one the first Deaf players in MLB history, who was for his career and much of his life called “Dummy” because of his deafness. He was not the only MLB player to carry that unkind nickname.

“Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta—the creators of AI language models ChatGPT and LLaMA, respectively—for stealing information from her book The Bedwetter, according to a pair of lawsuits filed Friday in a U.S. District Court.” She has two co-plaintiffs and others, possibly many others, may follow.

RIP Twiga, oldest Masai giraffe in captivity.

The world’s tiniest violin is still way more than he deserves.

RIP, Jimmy Weldon, actor, voice actor, children’s TV host, inspirational speaker.

RIP, Milan Kundera, novelist best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Tommy Tuberville is a malevolent idiot.

“If coverage of legislative and judicial politics should be about the wielding of power, it should conceive of that power less as a game for insiders and more as an instrument that affects people in the real world.”

And speaking of the Court, its main character keeps on keeping on.

“Taylor Swift isn’t the only one rerecording classics. A wide range of musicians are heading back to the studio to retrace the past and reclaim ownership of their work.”

RIP, Belle Ortiz, educator and longtime advocate for mariachi music.

“I apologize for using my flatulence as a medium of public commentary in your presence.”

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged linkdump | Comments Off

An early peek at Mayoral fundraising so far

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Campaign finance reports are officially due Monday, and there are some in the system now. Candidates are free to say how they’ve done before their reports get posted, and the Chron asked some of the Mayoral candidates what we should expect when we see theirs.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee topped the mayoral field in the latest fundraising period, as state Sen. John Whitmire struggled with the constraints of the Legislature.

The quest for Houston’s top job got off to its earliest fundraising start in history, with top candidates already raking in millions by this time last year. Since then, however, the arrival of new contenders like Jackson Lee and the subsequent dropoffs of others have caused a reshuffle in the race.

As November’s election draws near, five of the key contenders for Houston’s top job — Jackson Lee, Whitmire, former Metro chair Gilbert Garcia, attorney Lee Kaplan and City Council member Robert Gallegos — offered the Chronicle an early look at their 2023 fundraising results ahead of the official July 15 reporting deadline.

At this stage of the race, where polls mean little and all tout a diverse voter base, money alone often distinguishes real contenders. Here are the candidates’ fundraising sums and cash on hand so far, according to their campaigns:

Whitmire: raised $1.5 million since October 2022; account balance at $9.9 million.

Jackson Lee: raised $1.2 million since April 2023; declined to disclose her account balance.

Garcia: raised about $170,000 from donors since March 2023, plus $3.1 million of his personal contribution; account balance at $2.9 million.

Kaplan: raised about $2 million since January 2022 and lent $300,000 of his own money to the campaign; account balance at $1.2 million.

Gallegos: raised about $60,000 since February 2023; account balance at around $160,000.

Like I said, we’ll see lots of reports beginning Monday. I’ll be sure to do my usual peeking at them. In the meantime, this gives you an idea of where we are, and it’s what I meant when I said that Jack Christie or any other later entrants would be starting well behind. If you don’t already have good name ID or a bunch of your own cash to get started, you don’t have a lot of time to catch up, and plenty of local donors have already picked a side. Good luck from there.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged campaign finance reports, Election 2023, fundraising, Gilbert Garcia, Houston, Jack Christie, John Whitmire, Lee Kaplan, Mayor, Robert Gallegos, Sheila Jackson Lee | 1 Comment

The scooters come back to Dallas

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

We’ll see how it goes this time around.

Electric scooters had a rough go in Dallas following their 2018 introduction. The “micro-mobility” options pissed off plenty and led to a spike in hospitalizations.

So in 2020, the two-wheeled vehicles were yanked from the streets. Critics pointed to cluttered sidewalks and argued that the devices posed serious public safety concerns.

Well, now the e-scooters are back, baby — with proponents hoping they’re here to stay.

Dallas’ Shared Dockless Vehicle Program officially returned on May 31 following a soft launch the week before. This time around, local leaders have updated restrictions and rules for a (hopefully) improved experience. But while some commuters have anxiously awaited the e-scooters’ revival, not everyone is a fan.

On May 31, then-Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Omar Narvaez discussed local scooter history during the program’s official relaunch.

“It was pretty scary. We had scooters all over the place,” he told reporters, according to KERA. “They looked like litter, and they were in trees. They were cut in half. They were thrown in rivers. And that was a problem.”

Still, some research indicates that certain residents want them back.

Nearly 40% of respondents who took a Downtown Dallas Inc., survey last summer said they prefer to scooter, bike or walk around downtown, said Jennifer Scripps, DDI’s president and CEO. That number represents a 21% increase compared to a survey conducted four years earlier.

DDI hopes that the e-powered wheels will stay for good.

“They are a much-needed transportation alternative within our thriving Downtown community,” Scripps told the Observer via email.

[…]

Scripps said DDI worked in tandem with the city on revised rental regulations that are aimed at protecting pedestrians and riders alike. There are fewer scooters on the streets this time around, too.

The program’s rules include:

Only three companies — Lime, Bird and Superpedestrian — can operate in Dallas.

Certain areas, including some public spaces and parks, are considered no-ride and slow zones.

The hours of operation for e-scooters run from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Dallas riders face a 20-mph speed limit and must be at least 16 years old.

E-scooters and e-bikes have to be parked properly, such as in designated corrals.

DDI’s field operations team has counted a few dozen recent cases in which paths or streets were blocked by scooters, Scripps said. As of last week, fewer than a dozen reports had been made about sidewalk-riding-or-parking on DDI’s See Say app.

See here for some background. As the story notes, one of the downsides to the e-scooter experiment was the injury risk associated with them, which I daresay was largely a combination of inexperienced riders, a lack of dedicated lanes, and vehicle drivers who paid them no more attention than they pay bikes. Cars and trucks are by far the bigger hazard, but the scooters did incur their own havoc. We’ll see what we have learned from the experience.

It’s fascinating to me that while scooters have returned to Dallas and remain mainstays in Austin and San Antonio yet have never been on the map for Houston, though it did look like they were coming at one point. I don’t know if that’s a function of the scooter companies, the Mayor’s office, some other factor I don’t know about, or what. We’ve done a great job building out our bike lane infrastructure, which if given the choice between the two would have been an easy pick for me, but I’m still curious as to why it has played out this way and if that will ever change. I do agree with Ms Scripps, scooters ought to be a part of at least the downtown mobility environment. What do you think?

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged Austin, B-Cycle, bicycles, bike trails, Bird, Dallas, dockless bikes, electric bicycles, Houston, Lime, San Antonio, scooters, Superpedestrian, Texas | 3 Comments

Tuberculosis

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

It’s making an unfortunate comeback.

Before 2020, advances to eradicate TB, which is spread person to person through the air, were underway globally. It was considered by many public health experts to be a feasible goal, since tools are available to identify and treat it. But the prevalence of the disease in Mexico, and immigration along the border, has made it a longtime health concern in these communities.

In areas with high traffic of immigrants, such as Cameron County, TB is a serious health concern. Cameron sits at the southernmost tip of Texas, and each year millions of people cross to and from Mexico at the four border crossings in the Brownsville region. Brownsville is the county’s seat and largest city. In 2019, before COVID-19, Texas’ 32 border counties had an average TB incidence of 8.4 cases per 100,000 people — more than double that of the state overall and nearly triple the national rate.

Since the pandemic began, though, some tuberculosis clinics in border areas have been performing fewer tests, receiving fewer referrals from local hospitals and providers and treating fewer patients. [TB program supervisor with Cameron County’s health department Narciso] Lopez and others who do this public health work every day on the ground agree it’s not likely less TB is circulating. Instead, they say, COVID-19 testing and treatment have claimed so much attention and energy that TB has been pushed off the radar, threatening to reverse decades of progress in eliminating it.

Lopez said his county’s tuberculosis department usually gets around 40 to 60 patients a year.

“And then, all of a sudden, we went down to 20 during the COVID pandemic,” he said.

The numbers seem to be bouncing back. In 2022, Lopez said, the county’s clinics saw 35 TB patients. But that’s still lower than pre-pandemic levels.

Hidalgo County, which neighbors Cameron to the west, experienced a similar trend in 2020, when its number of confirmed TB cases was cut in half from the previous year, dropping from 71 cases to 36, according to Jeanne Salinas, tuberculosis program manager of the county health department. The county also performed hundreds fewer TB tests.

Since 2020, Salinas said, tuberculosis has been “overlooked” as a diagnosis for patients reporting “prolonged cough or cough with blood, losing weight [and] having fevers.” After COVID-19 became everyone’s overriding concern, these patients — who included new immigrants as well as people who regularly traveled across the border for work or to visit family on the other side of it — were tested for COVID-19. Salinas said it was only if the symptoms persisted that patients would perhaps be evaluated for tuberculosis. This lag time allowed the illness to progress in individual patients and potentially spread in the community.

This reflects a nationwide trend. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. tuberculosis incidence rates “decreased steadily” from 1993 to 2019. In 2020, though, there was a “sharp” decline of nearly 20% in recorded cases, which the CDC materials suggest may be due to “delayed or missed TB diagnoses or a true reduction in TB incidence related to pandemic mitigation efforts and changes in immigration and travel.” But because TB is more contagious than COVID-19 (its particles stay in the air longer), steps like masking and distancing are less effective. So, Salinas argues the former.

This story was from a couple of months ago and it’s been sitting in the drafts. I looked at it again, and did a Google news search to see if anything had changed since then but didn’t find anything, so I figured I’d go ahead and hit publish. TB tends to be a disease of poverty, and as noted the rates are higher in Texas near the border. It’s curable and detectable by test, and as with other respiratory diseases its spread can be mitigated, but all that requires health care infrastructure that we lack in the rich parts of the state, let alone immigrant communities along the border. Basically, it’s another problem the state isn’t going to do anything about. And now we know, since the session is over, it’s not even on the radar.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged Cameron County, Centers for Disease Control, coronavirus, Hidalgo County, Texas, Texas Department of State Health Services, tuberculosis | 1 Comment

UT professors sue over TikTok ban

Posted on July 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I can’t wait to see how this one plays out.

A group of college professors is suing Texas for banning TikTok on public-university computers and phones, saying it has undermined their ability to teach students and research one of the world’s most popular apps.

Texas last year joined more than two dozen other states in banning the app on government-owned devices, with Gov. Greg Abbott saying the short-video app, which is owned by China-based company ByteDance, could be used by the “Chinese government … to attack our way of life.”

Because the ban covers faculty phones and campus Wi-Fi networks, the professors said the ban immediately halted research projects into TikTok and derailed their plans to lead classes discussing the app’s benefits and risks.

In a lawsuit filed in Austin on Thursday against Abbott and top Texas officials, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, an advocacy group whose members include professors in Texas, argued the ban had infringed on their academic freedoms and constitutional rights.

“The government’s authority to control their research and teaching … cannot survive First Amendment scrutiny,” the complaint states.

The lawsuit is the third so far this year to challenge state TikTok bans on constitutional grounds. In Montana, TikTok and a group of creators on the app filed separate lawsuits saying a state law banning TikTok on all devices violated Montanans’ right to free expression.

Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which filed the suit on the coalition’s behalf, said the ban is not a “sensible or constitutional response” to critics’ worries that the app could be used for propaganda or espionage.

“The ban is suppressing research about the very concerns that Governor Abbott has raised, about disinformation, about data collection,” Jaffer said. “There are other ways to address those concerns that don’t impose the same severe burden on faculty and researchers’ First Amendment rights,” he added, as well as their “ability to continue studying what has, like it or not, become a hugely popular and influential communications platform.”

[…]

Dave Karpf, a board member of the coalition, said Texas’s ban had already had a chilling effect on university scholars eager to scrutinize how TikTok works. He also worried it marked a new step toward infringing on educators’ ability to teach about concepts that state politicians oppose.

“The idea that just by virtue of living in that state, since they’re technically government employees, that research will be expressly forbidden — that’s a precedent we need to confront now, because it’s a catastrophically bad idea,” he said.

“The amount of TikTok usage at UT-Austin is going to fall an imperceptible level by saying professors can’t use them in class,” he added. “I just don’t even understand what threat they’re trying to solve.”

See here, here, and here for the background on the Texas ban, and here for more on the Montana lawsuit. In that first link above, I suggested the possibility that professors at Texas public schools might sue over First Amendment concerns. It sounds to me like they have a decent case to say that the Abbott ban, which is surely legal in the context of banning the app from state-owned devices, is being interpreted too broadly by public universities. This is a federal complaint; I found case information but not a copy of the suit itself here. Federal cases take a long time to litigate but I would expect that the plaintiffs will request a temporary restraining order that will allow them to resume their work. I’ll keep an eye on this. CNN has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged ByteDance, China, Coalition for Independent Technology Research, cybersecurity, Greg Abbott, Knight First Amendment Institute, lawsuit, Montana, Texas, Texas A&M, TikTok, TSU, TxDOT, UH, University of North Texas, UT | Comments Off

Jack Christie?

Posted on July 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Yeah, I dunno.

Jack Christie

Former At-Large City Councilmember Jack Christie is considering a run for mayor, and attorney Tony Buzbee said he has not ruled out a run despite taking on Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment defense.

Christie, a Republican who also served as Spring Branch ISD board president and a trustee for the State Board of Education, said supporters are encouraging to get him in the race.

“I’m considering it, but far from signing up,” said Christie. “They’re laying out a plan that they think can be a winnable political campaign … I’m honored that I’d be considered within a very good group of candidates.”

The former council member said he does not have a particular timeline in mind to make a decision. Candidates have until Aug. 21 to file for a place on the November ballot.

[…]

City elections are nonpartisan, but the field so far is mostly made up of Democrats and left-leaning candidates. Christie, a Republican, could seek to consolidate conservative voters.

I’ve been saying for awhile that I believe there’s room for a Republican in the Mayor’s race. It’s just that I believe that the Republican that there’s room for – the kind of Republican that other Republicans will want to vote for – is a modern Trumpist Republican, the kind of person who participates in Republican primaries. Whatever you think about Jack Christie, unless something has drastically changed he ain’t that. Neither is fellow former Council member MJ Khan, who is in the race.

I could be wrong about this. It may be that the typical Republican voter will vote for anyone in a City of Houston race who claims the GOP label, even if they’d normally see them as a dirty RINO in a primary context. It may be that City of Houston elections have a disproportionate number of non-Trumpist Republicans in them, the businessman types who were the bulk of the party in the 80s and 90s and aughts. It may be that the Trumpist Republican City of Houston voters are so freaked out by the idea of Mayor John Whitmire or Mayor Sheila Jackson Lee that they’ll hold their noses and vote for the dirty RINO as a talisman to ward off the the likelihood of a Whitmire-Jackson Lee runoff and give them something to look forward to in December. Maybe they’re more pragmatic than I give them credit for, which is not very much.

Like I said, I dunno. I’m skeptical of all of the reasons I cited above, but these are strange times. I don’t know what these people might do. I doubt that either Christie or Khan is likely to be a threat to anyone in the Mayor’s race. They don’t have money, they don’t have name recognition, and I really don’t think they’ll have activist energy. But we’ll see.

As for Tony Buzbee, if you had your sound turned on you would have heard my eyes rolling all the way to the back of my head. To borrow from Olivia Rodrigo, he’s the biggest fame-fucker in the city. And if I have to write about him again, I’ll tell you how I really feel.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged Election 2023, Gilbert Garcia, Houston, Houston City Council, Jack Christie, John Whitmire, Lee Kaplan, Mayor, MJ Khan, Robert Gallegos, Sheila Jackson Lee, Tony Buzbee | 8 Comments

San Marcos sanctioned in Trump Train lawsuit

Posted on July 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

What a cluster.

A federal judge has sanctioned San Marcos for failing to preserve phone and email records from a former employee related to the October 2020 “Trump Train” incident involving a Biden-Harris campaign bus.

Campaign staffers and volunteers filed suit against San Marcos in June 2021, accusing the city of not providing assistance or a police escort when the bus was surrounded by a pro-Trump caravan on Interstate 35. The lawsuit alleges that members of the San Marcos Police Department laughed and joked about it when they were asked for help during the highway confrontation.

The plaintiffs asked the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to issue sanctions against the city for failing to preserve evidence related to the incident, specifically citing electronically stored information from three people who no longer work for the city.

Magistrate Judge Mark Lane ruled that the city should have preserved the email account and cell phone of Cole Stapp, a former city deputy marshal, after he was served with a subpoena. Stapp left the department in November 2021.

“San Marcos failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it,” Magistrate Judge Mark Lane wrote, calling the city’s actions “completely out of line.” The plaintiffs were harmed by the city’s actions, he ruled.

“Further, the court expresses its dismay and disappointment in counsel for San Marcos’s failure to achieve their client’s compliance with a properly issued preservation letter,” Lane said in the order issuing sanctions. He said it is “without question” that the city was obligated to retain the phones, phone records, text messages and emails of any employee who may have relevant information. “At this, San Marcos failed miserably,” the order said.

But he ruled that while the city was negligent, there was no proof that the city was “motivated by bad faith.”

See here for more on the San Marcos shenanigans, and here for the most recent update I have on the litigation. The trial for the remaining defendants is scheduled for March. I’m just hoping to eventually get some accountability here. The Current has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged Brandon Winkenwerder, CD21, Chase Stapp, Congress, David Gins, Donald Trump, Election 2020, Eric Cervini, FBI, Joe Biden, lawsuit, President, San Marcos, Texas, Texas Civil Rights Project, Timothy Holloway, Wendy Davis | Comments Off

Lawsuit filed against anti-trans gender affirming care law

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

No time wasted on this one.

Several families with transgender children are asking a judge to block a new Texas law that would stop minors from accessing many types of transition-related health care, including puberty blockers and hormone therapies.

The families argue the new law, which goes into effect Sept. 1, violates their parental rights by stopping them from providing medical care for their children and discriminates against transgender teens on the basis of sex. Several doctors have also joined the lawsuit, arguing the law interferes with their licensure and ability to practice medicine.

The lawsuit, which was filed in state court Wednesday, relies on legal arguments similar to those that have halted or blocked restrictions in several states, including Florida, Arkansas and Tennessee.

“The attack that Texas legislators and the governor have launched against transgender youth and their families and providers is stunning in its cruelty,” said Paul D. Castillo, senior counsel for Lambda Legal, which filed the lawsuit. “They are actively ignoring the science, dismissing best-practice medical care, intervening in a parent’s right to care for and love their child, and explicitly exposing trans youth in Texas to rampant discrimination. This law is not just harmful and cruel, it is life-threatening.”

All major medical associations support the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat gender dysphoria, the distress someone feels when their gender identity doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. But in recent years, conservative groups have launched an all-out war on gender-affirming care, branding it “genital mutilation.”

Earlier this year, Republicans in the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 14, which Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in June. The law stops transgender minors from accessing puberty blockers, hormone therapies or transition-related surgeries, which medical experts say are rarely performed on children. Children already receiving this care are required to be weaned off in a “medically appropriate” manner, the law says, which many doctors say would be unethical.

“The science on gender dysphoria lacks sufficient high-quality evidence documented, and there’s a growing list of harms, established side effects that accompany patients,” state Rep. Tom Oliverson, a Cypress Republican who sponsored the bill in the House, said during debate on the bill. Oliverson has said the bill was written to withstand expected court challenges.

Although the law has yet to go into effect, health care options for transgender minors are already narrowing in Texas. In May, Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital announced it would discontinue hormone therapy and other gender-affirming care treatments. The same month, adolescent health specialists at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin parted ways with the hospital after Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an investigation into the hospital.

Some families have decided to leave Texas to ensure their children can continue to receive health care.

“Because my daughter might need puberty blockers in the next few months, I am temporarily relocating out of state with her and my other child,” said one of the plaintiffs, identified in the lawsuit as Mary Moe, who is the mother of a 9-year-old transgender daughter. “I am heartbroken to have to take my children away from their home and their father, even temporarily. But I know that Texas is not a safe place for my daughter if this law forbids her access to this care.”

See here for some background on the now-blocked Arkansas law, though after that a panel at the Sixth Circuit allowed Tennessee’s ban to take effect; this made the two judges on the panel who voted that way to be the first federal judges to find this kind of law to be constitutional. See here for my previous update on the Texas law, which was high on my list of laws that would draw lawsuits. And finally see here for a copy of the complaint, which was filed in state court and not federal court, which looks to me to be different than the actions taken in the other states for which there has been a ruling so far. I’m not sure why this route was chosen, but there’s nothing to stop other plaintiffs from filing in federal court as well.

Not much to say here that hasn’t already been said. This law is extremely hurtful to a group of already marginalized people, it is based on fear and lies, and it’s both a significant step back in civil rights as well as a stark reminder that “parental rights” just means “I get to do what I want with my kids but you have to do what I say with yours”. I think we can predict how the early rounds of this will go, so as always it’s just a matter of what the State Supreme Court says. We’ll find out soon enough. Here are the press releases from the ACLU of Texas and Lambda Legal, both of which contain multiple quotes from plaintiff families. The 19th, TPR, the Chron, the Texas Signal, Reform Austin, the Current, and the Press have more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged ACLU of Texas, Arkansas, Florida, Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, Lambda Legal, lawsuit, puberty blockers, SCOTUS, Tennessee, Texas, The Lege, Tom Oliverson, Transgender Law Center, transgender rights | 2 Comments

Over the counter birth control pill approved

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

A big deal, and a long time coming.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the first ever over-the-counter birth control pill in the United States Thursday, a huge advancement in contraceptive accessibility amid an ever more restrictive abortion landscape.

“Approval of this progestin-only oral contraceptive pill provides an option for consumers to purchase oral contraceptive medicine without a prescription at drug stores, convenience stores and grocery stores, as well as online,” the agency said in a statement.

It also pointed out that “almost half of the 6.1 million pregnancies in the U.S. each year are unintended” — a statistic the approval of over-the-counter Opill may improve.

Final approval seemed likely after an advisory panel unanimously recommended that the pill become available without a prescription in May.

Hearings earlier this spring were replete with questions about climbing rates of maternal mortality and the adverse outcomes associated with unintended pregnancy. But the abortion landscape, critical background to any conversation about accessibility of contraception, was all but absent.

See here for some background. The Associated Press adds some details.

Ireland-based Perrigo did not announce a price. Over-the-counter medicines are generally much cheaper than prescriptions, but they aren’t covered by insurance.

Many common medications have made the switch to non-prescription status in recent decades, including drugs for pain, heartburn and allergies.

Perrigo submitted years of research to FDA to show that women could understand and follow instructions for using the pill. Thursday’s approval came despite some concerns by FDA scientists about the company’s results, including whether women with certain underlying medical conditions would understand they shouldn’t take the drug.

FDA’s action only applies to Opill. It’s in an older class of contraceptives, sometimes called minipills, that contain a single synthetic hormone and generally carry fewer side effects than more popular combination hormone pills.

But women’s health advocates hope the decision will pave the way for more over-the-counter birth control options and, eventually, for abortion pills to do the same.

That said, FDA’s decision has no relation to the ongoing court battles over the abortion pill mifepristone. The studies in Perrigo’s FDA application began years before the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, which has upended abortion access across the U.S.

With some states curtailing women’s reproductive rights, the FDA has faced pressure from Democratic politicians, health advocates and medical professionals to ease access to birth control. The American Medical Association and the leading professional society for obstetricians and gynecologists backed Opill’s application for over-the-counter status.

The main thing about this is that it should make the pill easier for more women to get, which in turn should help prevent more unwanted pregnancies, no small consideration in this day and age. That said, we know that the same forced-birth zealots also hate birth control and will both exploit the legal system and harass pharmacies to limit the impact of this decision. There’s always a backlash, so be ready for one here as well. The 19th has more.

Posted in National news | Tagged abortion, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American Medical Association, birth control, Catholic Medical Association, contraception, FDA, Opill | Comments Off

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