Off the Kuff | Knowledge Is Good

Weekend link dump for June 22

Posted on June 22, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

#OrangeIsTheNewPrisonReformHashtag. I guess that’s kind of long as hashtags go.

The OJ Simpson saga cast of characters, 20 years later.

“Hillary Clinton would start out as a favorite — albeit not a heavy one — over Jeb Bush or any other Republican due, in large part, to the built-in advantage Democrats currently enjoy in the electoral college.”

We die a lot differently than we used to.

Where the wild things inhabit tame spaces, and how you can help scientists understand it better.

From the Can’t Sleep, Clowns’ll Eat Me department.

“A Missouri firm that unsuccessfully sued its bank to recover $440,000 stolen in a 2010 cyberheist may now be on the hook to cover the financial institution’s legal fees, an appeals court has ruled.” Be very careful about what you sign, people.

Don’t want to give a guy your number? Give him this number instead.

RIP, Casey Kasem. Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.

What Dianne Anderson and Samantha Field say.

RIP, Tony Gwynn, all-time great hitter and all-around good guy. Cancer truly sucks.

Dr. Jen Gunter schools miserable excuse for a human being George Will on rape.

Oh, God, are people going to start taking Tom Friedman seriously again? Please, just make it stop.

I was watching the Rockets versus the Knicks twenty years ago during the OJ car chase. I’m still pissed they interrupted the game for that.

Speaking of basketball, do NBA teams treat their dance squads any better than NFL teams treat their cheerleaders?

Don’t chase your dog, let your dog come to you. There’s a Zen koan in there somewhere.

Democrats are not in disarray, as is usually the case.

“Seventy years after D-Day […] almost 70 World War II veterans continue to serve as senior-status federal judges.”

RIP, Stanley Marsh III, founder of the Cadillac Ranch on Route 66, and unfortunately also a sex predator.

Why the Patent Office canceled the trademark for the Washington-based NFL team.

Get ready for the Bitcoin Bowl. I wonder if they will pay out in bitcoins.

“Am I sounding a little testy here? You bet. We all make mistakes. But we are talking about people in public life—writers, politicians, academics—who got the biggest strategic call in many decades completely wrong. Wrong as a matter of analysis, wrong as a matter of planning, wrong as a matter of execution, wrong in conceiving American interests in the broadest sense. None of these people did that intentionally, and many of them have honestly reflected and learned. But we now live with (and many, many people have died because of) the consequences of their gross misjudgments a dozen years ago. In the circumstances, they might have the decency to shut the hell up on this particular topic for a while. They helped create the disaster Iraqis and others are now dealing with. They have earned the right not to be listened to.”

The more you pay your CEO, the worse the performance you tend to get.

“Screw technicalities, though; what Clayton Kershaw just did was far more impressive than going 27-up, 27-down and relying on your defense in order to do it. Clayton Kershaw just threw one of the most dominant performances in the history of baseball.”

“For those wondering, [Vin] Scully has apparently announced 7% of all no hitters in the 139 years MLB has been tracking them which is insane.”

“Remember, there are two main angles here. The first is that McCain’s track record on his signature issue is genuinely atrocious. But the second is that McCain remains absolutely convinced of his own self-righteous credibility.”

“So get excited libertarians and lovers of truly awful fiction that doesn’t feature sparkly vampires or Tom Hanks solving medieval puzzles. Ron Paul, action movie star, is on his way.”

RIP, Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar and saver of many lives.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged linkdump | 1 Comment

A Greg Abbott threefer

Posted on June 22, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Trail Blazers: Dallas appeals court rules fired prosecutor can pursue whistleblowing case against Greg Abbott’s office

You want to be the boss, you get to deal with boss problems

In May 2009, a former assistant attorney general in Greg Abbott’s office sued the Office of the Attorney General in Dallas County court, claiming she’d been fired for refusing to lie under oath about a Dallas County judge. Five years later, the Dallas-based Fifth Court of Appeals has ruled that Ginger Weatherspoon can go forward with her lawsuit.

The AG’s office has spent years trying to get the suit tossed, claiming, among other things, that Weatherspoon didn’t make a “good faith” effort to blow the whistle to the right links in the chain of command. A three-justice panel disagreed, and issued an opinion Monday written by Justice David Evans that said Dallas County Judge Martin Hoffman did the right thing last year when he refused to grant the AG’s office its request for summary judgment.

Weatherspoon’s initial filing in 2009 garnered media attention because of its explosive content: She claimed she refused to sign a “false affidavit” filled with “a number of misrepresentations and mischaracterizations” about David Hanschen, who, at the time, was a Dallas County family court judge involved in a pretty nasty tussle with the Abbott’s office over child support.

Long story short: Hanschen was letting men take DNA tests to determine whether kids at the center of child-support battles were actually theirs. As the judge told the Dallas Observer in April 2008, “In my court, the truth does not have a statute of limitations.” But Abbott’s office disagreed, and would file emergency court orders in attempts to stop the DNA tests. Megan Feldman wrote that “supervising attorneys within the office’s Child Support Division launched a concerted campaign to collect affidavits from nearly a dozen staff lawyers — in some cases exerting pressure on them — with the apparent goal of filing a complaint alleging judicial misconduct against Hanschen” and another family court judge.

Weatherspoon said she was among those being pressured into signing an affidavit critical of Hanschen. The problem was, she “never witnessed Judge Hanschen treat an AAG adversely in court or issue a prejudicial ruling against an AAG,” said her lawsuit. She also said that “Judge Hanschen never threatened the AG’s office,” despite what the affidavit alleged.

“A managing attorney with the OAG, Paula Crockett, told her they intended to use the affidavit as evidence to have the judge recused from hearing cases involving the OAG,” says the recap issued by the appeals court Monday. “The affidavit was also going to be used to support a judicial misconduct complaint against the judge. Weatherspoon refused to sign the affidavit stating that she believed it misrepresented various facts regarding her conversation with the judge and mischaracterized the tone and nature of the conversation.”

Weatherspoon continued to refuse to sign the affidavit, despite mounting pressure from regional attorneys in the AG’s office. And in the end, she says, that’s why she was fired.

You can see the full opinion at the link above. Gotta admit, I hadn’t heard of this before, but it sure doesn’t sound good for Abbott, especially when he’s made a big deal about ethics and transparency.

Waco Tribune editorial: Attorney general decision hinders public from readily learning of chemical threats

We can think of lots of good reasons why everyday, ordinary Texans should know whether a plant in their neighborhood has stockpiled enough chemicals to blow out a crater and flatten homes and schools. Topping the list: the decided allergy that state leaders have about regulating industry — even when such industry poses a possible threat to the lives of state leaders’ own constituents.

That’s why we have trouble understanding the reasoning behind state Attorney General Greg Abbott’s abrupt decision to refuse to give the public key information about where plants stockpiling ammonium nitrate are located. More than a year after fire at the West Fertilizer Co. ignited a huge supply of ammonium nitrate that killed 15 people, injured hundreds and destroyed homes, schools and a nursing home, the attorney general suddenly says the Texas Homeland Security Act forbids the state’s health agency from any longer releasing inventory reports on such facilities because the fertilizer might be used to make bombs.

Supposedly, this will deter terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who legally got ahold of some 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, which he detonated in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people and destroying the structure, payback for the federal government’s role in the Branch Davidian siege near Waco in 1993.

Ordinarily, we’d agree with the attorney general’s logic on why the location and amount of such explosives should be kept secret. The problem is the state’s dread of regulating and enforcing regulations ensuring people are safe. Even now, our state lawmakers hem and haw over whether they should regulate dangerous chemicals where people live, work and play. Amazing.

Not surprisingly, all this undermines the intent of the federal Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act of 1986, which allows citizens to access information on what chemicals are stored and used in their neighborhoods. The act — signed into law by President Ronald Reagan — was designed to help the public be proactive after a deadly mix of gases escaped a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, killing thousands. Happily, for the moment federal trumps state, allowing local residents to gain such relevant information from the Waco-McLennan County Office of Emergency Management.

[…]

The attorney general’s decision is definitely at odds with growing efforts to prevent another West, including last month’s federal task force report, prompted by the 2013 explosion. It concludes that “communities need to know where hazardous chemicals are used and stored, how to assess the risks associated with those chemicals and how to ensure community preparedness for incidents that may occur.” If the state of Texas continues to balk at ensuring such plants are safe, the public needs to know more, not less, to better protect itself from devastating possibilities.

Did I say something about transparency? Yeah, maybe not. And if you think that Governor Greg Abbott would support stronger regulations on fertilizer plants, well, I’ve got a load of fertilizer to sell you.

Statesman: Texas must pay legal fees in redistricting case, judge rules

In a scolding order, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., told the state of Texas on Wednesday to pay almost $1.1 million in legal fees to lawyers who represented Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis and several minority rights groups in a case challenging district boundaries drawn by the Republican-led Legislature.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer’s order criticized lawyers in state Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office for submitting a legal brief that devoted more effort to complaining than it did to answering the legal issues in the fight over lawyer fees.

“Texas basically ignores the arguments supporting an award of fees and costs,” Collyer wrote, noting that state lawyers instead presumed the request to be frivolous and expressed “indignation at having to respond at all.”

“This matter presents a case study in how not to respond to a motion for attorney fees and costs,” said Collyer, who was appointed by President George W. Bush.

In her order, Collyer found that lawyers’ fees are “uncontested and reasonable,” and Davis’ attorneys are entitled to $466,680 and other lawyers should get more than $600,000.

Not been a great week for Greg Abbott, has it? PDiddie and Rick Hasen have more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged Attorney General, child support, Dallas County, DNA, Election 2014, Governor, Greg Abbott, lawsuit, redistricting, Texas, Wendy Davis, West | Comments Off

Company operating SH 130 may default

Posted on June 22, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Oops.

The company behind a privately operated Texas toll road that sports the country’s fastest speed limit is dangerously close to defaulting on its debt, according to a credit rating agency.

According to a report released this week by Moody’s Investors Service, the SH 130 Concession Company, which operates the 41-mile southern portion of State Highway 130, is low on cash and scrambling to get an upcoming payment deadline waived,

The private consortium behind the project owes more than $1 billion and lacks the funding to pay off an upcoming debt payment due on June 30, according to the report. The report adds that the company has “depleted all but $3.3 million of available liquidity reserves.”

[…]

The company’s projections for traffic and toll revenue were overly optimistic. In October, Moody’s downgraded $1.1 billion of debt tied to the project by five notches, from B1 to Caa3, considered junk status. The financial situation has not markedly improved, according to the rating agency’s latest report.

“Fiscal 2013 revenue performance was about 60 percent below original forecast and fiscal 2014 is likely to be 70 percent below the original forecast,” the report states.

Company officials are working with the project’s lenders on waiving a portion of this month’s debt payment while not triggering an official default, according to the report. The company is also attempting to restructure its debt based on a new traffic and revenue study, according to the report.

See here, here, here, and here for the background. One hopes this new traffic and revenue study will be more reality-based than the previous ones were. I for one have always thought that the problem here is that this road is out in the middle of nowhere, but hey, I’m no expert, so what do I know? The Highwayman and EoW have more.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged Cintra, SH 130, SH 130 Concession Company LLC, Texas, toll roads | 1 Comment

The Texarkana experience

Posted on June 22, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

The city of Texarcana literally sits on the border between Texas and Arkansas, partly in one state and partly in the other. That means that some of its residents may be eligible for a health insurance subsidy under Arkansas’ Medicaid expansion/privatization hybrid. Or they may be in Texas and be screwed like anyone else.

It’s constitutional – deal with it

Arkansas accepted the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. Texas did not.

That makes Texarkana perhaps the starkest example of how President Obama’s health care law is altering the economic geography of the country. The poor living in the Arkansas half of town won access to a government benefit worth thousands of dollars annually, yet nothing changed for those on the Texas side of the state line.

[…]

None of the low-income Texarkana residents interviewed realized that moving to the other side of town might mean a Medicaid card. In fact, health researchers and those who work with the poor expect very few Americans to move between states to take advantage of the law.

“It’s impossible to understand what it is to move when you have nothing,” said Jennifer Laurent, the executive director of Randy Sams’ Outreach Shelter, where Ms. Marks is staying until she puts together enough savings from her two low-wage jobs to find her own place. “To risk everything — losing your bed, your sense of community — for an uncertain benefit? There’s no way you want to risk that.”

Research on other expansions of government benefits has borne that out: A study in the journal Health Affairs looked at the “welfare magnet hypothesis” and found no evidence that it exists.

“I’m sure, anecdotally, that some people will move,” said Benjamin Sommers, an assistant professor of health policy and economics at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the study. “But is this a major budget issue for states expanding Medicaid? Will there be a major wave of people moving to get insurance? Probably not.”

[…]

Indeed, until the Supreme Court ruling, the Obama administration had intended for the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act to be universal, covering all adults earning up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line, about $15,500 annually for a single adult or $32,000 for a family of four.

That’s the way it is working out on the Arkansas side of the border, where health clinics and social service agencies are signing up eligible residents, even though this corner of the state is largely Republican and broadly resistant to the health care law.

The expansion is already having an effect on the city’s biggest provider of charity care, the nonprofit Christus St. Michael Health System. “We’re seeing more patients with a payer,” said Chris Karam, its president, referring to those with health insurance coverage.

On the Texas side, though, it’s business as usual. “It makes me mad,” said Mr. Miller, who is not receiving any federal benefits at the moment despite his array of illnesses. “They need to quit playing games with people’s lives. Rich people. Government people.”

Yeah, that would be nice. I believe I’ve mentioned once or twice that there’s an election this fall in which issues like this will be at stake. One hopes the people of Texarkana will recognize the opportunity that gives them. The rest of us, too.

Posted in Show Business for Ugly People | Tagged Arkansas, Election 2014, health care, health insurance, Medicaid, Texarkana, Texas | 1 Comment

Saturday video break: Careless Whisper

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Back to the 80s, a time and place we’ve visited more than a few times, and one of the biggest hits by Wham!.

I wasn’t a big fan of Wham! back in the day, but this was the song of theirs I liked the most. I was amused when it made Dave Barry’s “Book of Bad Songs” due to objections to the line about guilty feet not having rhythm. That always mad sense to me. Anyway, here’s a cover by Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright:

Vocal harmony almost always adds something positive to a song. Any other cover versions of this out there that you like?

Posted in Music | Tagged cover songs, videos | 1 Comment

HISD passes its budget

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

They restored a lot of funding, but it’s the changes to magnet school funding that everyone is talking about.

Bouncing back from recent cash-strapped years, the Houston school board Thursday approved a bigger budget that gives raises to all employees, provides more money to campuses and may require a tax rate increase.

The board, over complaints from passionate parents, also voted 5-4 to overhaul the system for funding the district’s beloved magnet schools. Superintendent Terry Grier’s plan to standardize the haphazard funding for the specialty programs will slash some schools’ budgets and boost others over the next three years.

The board will not set the tax rate until October, but the district’s financial chief, Ken Huewitt, said he estimates needing a 1-cent or 2-cent hike, depending on the final tally of property values. The increase is tied to the district’s voter-approved 2012 bond program.

Any rate increase would come on top of the 3 cents the board added last year to fund operating expenses, which put the rate at $1.1867 per $100 of assessed value. With property values rising across the city, many taxpayers would feel an even bigger hit if the rate goes up as expected.

[…]

Grier’s plan to standardize magnet school funding drew the most controversy, bringing roughly 60 parents, students and community members to the board meeting to speak in opposition. The proposal funds programs with the same theme – such as fine arts or engineering – by the same amount per pupil, instead of the current arbitrary system.

Critics say the new formula does not take into account what the programs need to thrive and could cripple some of the district’s best schools.

“It is 40 years of inequity, and it is time we do something,” Skillern-Jones said, speaking for the narrow board majority, which also included Wanda Adams, Paula Harris, Greg Meyers and Manuel Rodriguez Jr.

Opposing the measure were Anna Eastman, Mike Lunceford, Harvin Moore and Juliet Stipeche.

See here and here for the background. I still don’t know what to think about the magnet funding changes because I’m still not clear on what the formula is and what it’s supposed to achieve. I’m not necessarily opposed to this change, and I recognize that any essentially zero-sum alteration will have winners and losers, I just don’t feel like HISD had communicated this well enough to objectively evaluate it. At this point all I can say is that I hope the schools that lost money aren’t adversely affected, and that if there are negative effects that the Board revisits the issue as soon as possible. Hair Balls and School Zone have more.

Posted in School days | Tagged budget, HISD, HISD Board of Trustees, Houston, magnet schools, property taxes, Rhonda Skillern-Jones, schools, Terry Grier | 1 Comment

Another entry for the judicial election files

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Get Wallace Jefferson on the phone for me, will ya?

Three justices on the Tennessee Supreme Court are facing an election-year attack, not for any particular decision they have authored or even for any unpopular opinion they have espoused. No, in an ugly campaign in Tennessee that appears to be getting ever uglier, Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, who is also the state’s lieutenant governor, is attempting to oust three state Supreme Court justices in their Aug. 7 retention elections, chiefly for the judicial outrage of having been appointed to the high court by a Democrat. Under Tennessee law, the governor appoints Supreme Court justices, and then they come up for retention elections every eight years thereafter. This is a pretty common set-up in states that elect their justices.

Former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen appointed justices Gary Wade, Cornelia Clark, and Sharon Lee to the high court. They are all up for retention in two months and Ramsey, seemingly unable to get past the first few entries in the “Stock Campaign Insults” dictionary, has mounted a statewide assault targeting the three as “soft on crime” and “anti-business.” As the Shreveport Times notes, Ramsey is going after the three jurists “despite the fact that the Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission that Ramsey helped to appoint found them qualified to retain their posts.” Ramsey is a member of the Republican State Leadership Committee, which has a history of targeting judicial races across the country and calls the Tennessee race “high on our radar.”

Ramsey is arguing that he clairvoyantly knows that the Supreme Court as constituted will overturn limits on payouts in medical malpractice and other civil lawsuits that ensure “you’re not going to be punished by some jury that gives you some exorbitant return on the lawsuit.” And he’s also grumpy that in 2011 the Supreme Court vacated the death sentence of murderer Leonard Edward Smith because of ineffective counsel. (Smith ultimately got a life sentence in exchange for the death penalty being dropped.) But beyond the usual bellyaching about the suckiness of some court decisions with which he personally disagrees—or hopes to disagree with someday—there’s all sorts of speculation in the Tennessee press about what Ramsay is really attempting to achieve with this campaign. If even one of the incumbents loses, it will shift the balance of the court to a majority-Republican institution. The Shreveport Times posits that since the state Supreme Court justices pick the state attorney general, the purge may be an effort to create a “Republican” majority on the five-justice court to ensure that there is a newer, more Republican, attorney general. Ramsey pretty much just up and said so at the state GOP’s annual fundraiser in Nashville last week: “Folks, it’s time that we had a Republican attorney general in the state of Tennessee.”

Or it may not even be that targeted. As the editors suggest, “since the Republican Party now has supermajorities in both legislative houses and holds the governor’s office, perhaps the campaign only is an effort to complete the trifecta with the addition of the judicial branch.”

Sam Venable, a columnist at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, pointed out last week that purging the entire state of all those with a “D” behind their name—or anyone seated by anyone with a “D” behind his or her name—“is completely understandable, of course. It’s what politicians do. It’s how they live, breathe and have their being.” And of course this is true. Smearing judges who can’t, or won’t, smear back is politics pure and simple. The problem for the justice system is that the only solution to a bad guy with a well-financed attack campaign is to construct a good guy with a well-financed ad campaign. After all, the enduring lesson of the Iowa Supreme Court meltdown of 2010 is that dignified silence doesn’t win elections. And so the Tennessee Bar Association is, in an admirably bipartisan fashion, getting itself organized to finance and promote a counterinitiative to keep the judicial seats as judiciously as possible. That this is bipartisan is good. That it is happening at all (lawyers raising money for the judges before whom they will appear) is a disaster.

Note that Tennessee is using the appointment-with-retention-election system for picking judges, which is often cited as a nice, safe way to get partisan politics out of the judicial selection process. Until some people decide they don’t like the judges that the governor of the other party selected, so they’re going to work to defeat them so that the governor of their preferred political party can name replacements. Note that since these are retention elections, these judges don’t have opponents, so they technically exist outside the partisan voting process, and definitely aren’t affected by straight-ticket voting. And yet they’re affected by the partisan voting process anyway, because the people who are the most interested in the outcome of these elections are smart enough to know who plays for which team. The lack of a label on the actual ballot does not deter them. Which is what I’ve been saying all along.

I keep harping on this issue because there continue to be so many examples of why the “solutions” that so many people like to propose to “fix” the judicial selection process don’t actually work they way their advocates claim they would. The root of all problems in the judicial election process is the influence of money in judicial elections. You have to address that problem if you want to have any chance at success. I can’t see any path to a solution for judicial elections that doesn’t involve strictly limiting campaign contributions and/or public financing of judicial elections. As we currently live in a Citizens United world, that will probably require a Constitutional amendment allowing for such limits on campaign spending first. Hey, I never said this was going to be easy. The alternate path is an appointment-only system for all judicial positions, which needless to say has its own hurdles to overcome – there are thousands of judgeships in Texas, so just having a system that can scale to such a degree is daunting, and of course there’s politics aplenty any time one person gets to hand out goodies like these. My preferred approach is to overhaul the campaign finance system first, since that would also help make for better non-judicial elections, and then deal with whatever problems remain. That’s a journey of a thousand miles, and the sooner we take that first step without going down needless detours, the better.

Posted in Show Business for Ugly People | Tagged campaign finance reform, Election 2014, judicial races, Tennessee | Comments Off

Reading and writing and operating systems

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Religion, politics, and operating systems – three things sure to start a spirited discussion.

By January 2016, when the Houston Independent School District’s latest tech initiative hits full stride, the district will issue laptops to every high school student and teacher in the district. All 65,000 of those laptops will run Windows 7 and cloud-based Office 365. For Microsoft, that’s sweet news: a solid little victory in the digital war for global domination.

As every tech geek knows, Microsoft, the world’s third-largest technology company, is embroiled in a three-way war with the first- and second-largest, Apple and Google. Each of those behemoths hopes to establish its own computing ecosystem as the world’s digital default, to be the system that everyone everywhere just seems to use on the fast-growing array of devices that connect to the Web. (Coming soon: Dog collars! Home thermostats! Cars!)

In the last two years, elementary, middle and high schools have been among the war’s hottest fronts. In part, that’s simply because K-12 education is a fast-growing, largely untapped market: According to analyst Phillip Maddocks of Futuresource, a research and forecasting company, only about 25 percent of U.S. students and teachers are currently equipped with devices such as laptops or tablets.

But that number is bound to rise. Last year, President Barack Obama announced the creation of the federal ConnectEd program, with a goal of making high-speed broadband available to 99 percent of American students by 2017. In January, Obama’s State of the Union address included a call to bring American classrooms up to date. Soon after, a group of private tech companies, including Apple and Microsoft, committed to donate $750 million in devices, software, training and Wi-Fi – as well as to offering deep discounts.

For those tech companies, such efforts are one part altruism, one part gold rush. As the remaining 75 percent of American students obtain devices and Wi-Fi, their hardware, software and habits are up for grabs.

“The scale is what’s so new,” says Cameron Evans, chief technology officer at Microsoft Education. “Before, there were always five computers in the back of the classroom. Until 2012, that was acceptable.”

As the story notes, Apple has been the leader in this space, but they’ve been vulnerable lately thanks to the high profile flop in Fort Bend and some embarrassing security failures in Los Angeles. Both were more due to design and implementation flaws than anything else, but they still look bad. Microsoft and Google have been competing on price and on compatibility, and have made some inroads. I know this is somewhat heretical to say, especially for an IT guy, but to some extent the OS and hardware don’t really matter. Basic concepts, about things like security and programming and how to use various apps, don’t really change that much from one device to the next. Of course, from the vendors’ perspective, they’re trying to lock in preferences. From my perspective, I’d like to see kids get experience with multiple platforms. Mostly I hope they get a solid curriculum that really takes advantage of the technology available to them. We’re still figuring out how to do that, so I hope we stay flexible and open-minded about it.

Posted in Technology, science, and math | Tagged Apple, computers, Fort Bend ISD, Google, HISD, Houston, iPads, Microsoft, schools | Comments Off

Feral hogs cross the border

Posted on June 21, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

You can’t stop them, and hoping to contain them is not looking so likely, too.

If nothing else, the voracious wild hogs that years ago destroyed the lucrative melon and cantaloupe harvests in this isolated border city — and are now ruining the alfalfa, corn and oat crops — have discriminating tastes.

“They like vanilla. It really attracts them,” Leonel Duran, an animal control agent for the state of Chihuahua, said as he stirred two bottles of Vera Cruz vanilla extract into a blue barrel of fermented corn.

When the concoction was ready, the crew hauled it to a large octagonal trap in a fallow field near the dry, narrow channel of the Rio Grande. The mix was quickly spread inside, followed by dry corn and stale rolls.

With the sun going down, the wily, nocturnal hogs would soon be up, and drawn to the trap.

The people who farm the oasis-green irrigated croplands around here, just across the border from Presidio, are just the latest to suffer from hog predations.

Omnivorous and intelligent, the non-native beasts now roam almost all of Texas, as well as most of the continental United States and Hawaii.

Some 5 million feral hogs are found throughout the country and in almost every habitat, spreading as far north as Canada from their original territory in the South.

“They have expanded their range from 17 to 39 states in the last 30 years, and cause damage to crops, kill young livestock, destroy property, harm natural resources, and carry diseases that threaten other animals, as well as people and water supplies,” said Edward Avalos, a U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary, noting in a news release that hogs cause an estimated $1.5 billion in damage and control costs each year.

In April, the USDA launched a $20 million hog-control program, a move some see as a long overdue.

“We’ve been singing about pigs from the choir loft for years. Congress finally caught on. They didn’t hear us, they heard the landowners,” said Mike Bodenchuk, state director for Texas Wildlife Services, a federal-state cooperative.

We’ve been exporting feral hogs domestically, so I guess this was the natural next step. I’m sure that somewhere Ted Cruz is muttering incoherently about “sealing the border”. Beyond that, the most interesting thing I learned from this story is that El Paso is the only one of Texas’ 254 counties to not have any hogs in it. I don’t know what your secret is, El Paso, but good luck maintaining that.

Posted in Around the world | Tagged feral hogs, Mexico, Texas, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, USDA | Comments Off

Friday random ten: Lockjaw and The Chief

Posted on June 20, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Names that start with E often come with nicknames. That’s the lesson we learn this week.

1. Mighty Mighty – Earth Wind & Fire
2. All Because of You Days – Echo and the Bunnymen
3. Leapin’ On Lenox – Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis
4. Keep On Truckin’ – Eddie Kendricks
5. Two Tickets To Paradise – Eddie Money
6. Hypnotized – Eddie “The Chief” Clearwater
7. Keep Playin’ That Rock ‘N’ Roll – Edgar Winter’s White Trash
8. Joe-Bob Rag – Elana James
9. Ship Of Fools – Elvis Costello
10. I’d Rather Go Blind – Etta James

As I did last week with the name Dave, I probably could have put together a list this week based entirely on variations on the name Ed, but I didn’t want to repeat myself so quickly. I’ll save a rerun of that one for later.

Posted in Music | Tagged Friday random ten, theme lists | Comments Off

Council adopts its budget for next year

Posted on June 20, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Might be the last easy budget for a couple of years.

The Houston City Council agreed to boost funding for after-school programs, add cameras to catch illegal dumpers and give $1 million to each district council office to spend on projects for their constituents during a marathon session Wednesday to approve Mayor Annise Parker’s $5.2 billion budget.

The budget was approved in a 14-3 vote that followed council members slogging through 63 amendments they and their colleagues had proposed to Parker’s spending plan for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

Council members interested in new programs bested those interested in controlling spending, despite ample discussion of the deficits looming in the coming years.

Parker said council’s decisions concern her, given the warnings of trouble ahead, and said some “naivete” exists around the table on budgeting.

“Council members were clearly in a mood to spend rather than save,” she said. “They see the economy, they see things are picking up. They also see a lot of needs and they want to respond to those needs, and it’s very hard to say, ‘But we have a rainy day down the road, you need to put some money aside for that.'”

[…]

The largest amendment passed Wednesday was Councilman C.O. Bradford’s idea to give each of the 11 district council members $1 million to spend on local issues, from mowing overgrown lots to fixing sidewalks to razing dangerous buildings.

“I don’t want this splashed around the media as a slush fund. That’s not what it is,” said district Councilwoman Ellen Cohen, who supported the amendment. “This is discretionary funds we can use in our district to expedite some of the issues. I have 80 civic clubs in my district. I promise you I hear from all of them what they need.”

The $11 million will be drawn partly from money that would have been saved for next year in Parker’s budget, and partly from the city’s capital spending plan, which comes to a vote soon. Parker said council members’ spending requests from the funds, to be legal under the City Charter, will need her approval. Expenditures topping $50,000 will need council approval, as with all other city spending.

Next year is when some deferred debts kick in and we have to deal with them, which will be a whole lot of no fun for the whole family. The money that Council chose to spend via their amendments has a lot of merit to it, and it wouldn’t have made that much difference for next year if they had chosen to bank it all instead. But it would have made some difference, and when we’re dealing with this next year we’ll feel like every little bit helps. As such, I fully expect the 14 Council members that supported this budget to not only support but also advocate for repealing the revenue cap so that they won’t be artificially and recklessly constrained by that poor decision ten years ago. It would be mighty inconsistent to support more spending now followed by needlessly maximal cuts later. We’ll know who tries to have it both ways soon enough.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged Annise Parker, budget, Clarence Bradford, Ellen Cohen, Houston, Houston City Council, revenue cap, Stephen Costello | 5 Comments

DeLay gets his day before the CCA

Posted on June 20, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Looks like he might have had a pretty good day, too.

Who are YOU to judge me?

Oral arguments in Tom DeLay’s decadelong legal fight with the Travis County District Attorney’s office heated up Wednesday as Republican judges on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals questioned whether prosecutors could prove the former House majority leader illegally funneled corporate money to state candidates.

[…]

Presiding Judge Sharon Keller, one of the panel’s eight Republicans, was outspokenly doubtful about prosecutors’ ability to prove DeLay and his associates illegally funneled $190,000 in corporate donations to seven GOP candidates for the state Legislature in 2002.

The money was donated to DeLay’s state political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, and made its way into a Republican National Committee corporate donations account. Checks totaling the same amount then were distributed from a different RNC account to the state candidates.

[Travis County Assistant District Attorney Holly] Taylor said the scheme is illegal under state law, which bans corporate contributions to campaigns, but Keller and her colleagues were less sure.

“It seems like your theory of prosecution has some internal inconsistencies,” Keller said, referring to the money laundering argument. Judge Elsa Alcala also asked about the unprecedented nature of the state’s case, saying the original intent of the money laundering law was to target drug trafficking: “When I see this case, my first reaction is, ‘What are you talking about?’ ”

“The first time something happens, it’s still a crime,” Taylor responded.

Seriously, when was the last time Sharon effing Keller expressed that kind of skepticism in any prosecutor’s case? It’s like Dave Wilson not being a flaming homophobe – it’s just not in her nature. I have never bought into the idea that the CCA would be pro-Republican on DeLay’s behalf, but if this is how they actually go it will be hard to dismiss that idea. We won’t know till 2015 on that, so we’ll see. What do you think, am I reading too much into this? Texas Politics and Texas Public Radio have more.

Posted in Scandalized! | Tagged Court of Criminal Appeals, Election 2002, Sharon Keller, Texas, Third Court of Appeals, Tom DeLay, TPJ, Travis County, TRMPAC | Comments Off

Special session for border security?

Posted on June 20, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

What could possibly go wrong?

State Sen. Dan Patrick, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, joined some of his conservative colleagues on Tuesday in calling for “immediate action” to address the surge of undocumented immigrants crossing into Texas.

“The Texas Department of Public Safety has indicated that sustained operations along our southern border will require $1.3 million per week,” Patrick said in a statement. “I am calling on the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House to immediately allocate $1.3 million a week in emergency spending for the rest of the year for added border security through Texas law enforcement.”

A call placed to the Legislative Budget Board about whether a special legislative session would be necessary to set aside such funding has not yet been returned. Patrick’s statement did not specifically say whether he supports calling a special session on border security, which some of his GOP colleagues have suggested.

[…]

Last week Attorney General Greg Abbott, the state’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, wrote U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and asked for $30 million for a state-based border security initiative. The U.S. Border Patrol, he said, was overwhelmed by the influx of undocumented immigrants, including about 160,000 who have crossed into Texas in the U.S. Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector since October, including about 33,500 unaccompanied minors.

“With the Border Patrol’s focus shifted to this crisis, we have grave concerns that dangerous cartel activity, including narcotics smuggling and human trafficking, will go unchecked because Border Patrol resources are stretched too thin,” he wrote.

[Rep. Jonathan] Stickland said he and others would consider tapping into the state’s Rainy Day Fund for the state-based border security initiative if the federal government did not provide relief. Details of the plan would probably be debated should a special session be called, he added.

“This is a crisis situation depending on who you are talking to,” he said. “I haven’t heard any price tag — I have just heard people say this is a top priority. Depending on what we’re talking about, there are a number of different ideas. We need to start having these discussions and start figuring out what’s on the table.”

In a statement last week, state Sen. José Rodríguez, D-El Paso, said more resources on the border won’t properly address the crisis on the border.

“What we are dealing with is an influx of children fleeing from Central American violence; imagine a situation so dire that you allow your children to travel a dangerous journey — thousands of miles — to a foreign land,” he said. “What is needed are not more “boots on the ground” or any other euphemisms for the militarization that both impacts border residents’ daily lives and is inadequate to deal with the specific issue at hand.”

I confess, I have not followed this particular issue closely. My longstanding opinion about border and immigration issues is that we have a supply and demand problem, in that vastly more people want to enter the US than we allow to enter by legal means, and just as having an excessively low speed limit on a stretch of otherwise open road leads to a lot of people speeding, having excessively stringent limits on legal immigration leads to a lot of people finding other ways in. If we had a system that was more realistic, more compassionate, and more flexible about the demand to immigrate, we’d have far, far fewer people trying to enter illegally. For that reason, I believe the people that insist we must “secure the border” as a precondition for doing anything else have it exactly backwards and are exacerbating the problem. Of course, I also believe that a lot of these “secure the border” people have no interest in solving the problem, but instead have an interest in exploiting it. That’s a whole ‘nother story, so let’s leave it at that.

Anyway, the immediate political issue appears to be resolved for now, so that will likely quiet the talk about a special session. If it does come up again, remember that Rick Perry – who has the sole discretion to call a special – will do what he thinks is best for Rick Perry. If he thinks it would be beneficial to his Presidential campaign (I still can’t say the words “Presidential campaign” in the context of Rick Perry with a straight face), then he’ll call it. If not, he won’t. He’ll take into account the wishes of his fellow Republicans, but his own needs come first. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Texpatriate, Stace, and Burka have more.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged border, Dan Patrick, David Dewhurst, DPS, Election 2016, Greg Abbott, Homeland Security, immigration, Jonathan Stickland, President, Rick Perry, special session, Texas, The Lege | Comments Off

Bad signs of the times

Posted on June 20, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

I don’t even know what to say.

Cypress-Fairbanks ISD will spend $55 million to tighten school security, including installing strategically placed panic buttons on campuses and replacing existing entry windows with bullet-resistant glass – upgrades experts call a necessary but unfortunate sign of the times.

Voters overwhelmingly approved the improvement, which will be completed districtwide by 2020, in a $1.2 billion bond election in May.

“We know that students are No. 1 and our staff is No 1. We’ve got to protect them,” said Roy Sprague, associate superintendent for facilities. “How do you put a price tag on someone’s life?”

Cy-Fair plans to add security vestibules to the front office area of 50 schools to keep unapproved visitors from gaining access, upgrade security cameras and install lockdown buttons and stand-alone emergency phones at all schools – widely considered the best practices in school safety. They’re also moving forward with one of the latest trends since 20 children and 6 adults were shot at Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012 – installing bullet-resistant glass at the front of schools.

This will make Cy-Fair, Texas’ third largest school system, one of the only districts in the region with bullet-resistant glass, although others are considering a more budget-friendly alternative of laminating existing windows with a coating to slow intruders.

When I was a kid in school in the 70s and 80s, the violent crime rate was a lot higher than it is now. And yet here we are, spending millions on panic buttons and bullet-resistant glass. The story notes that “the recent focus on school safety has led to a proliferation of vendors and products – meaning better, cheaper choices for schools”. I suppose the least we could do is be grateful that we’re getting a good deal for our millions. I’m going to stop here because I’m too depressed to continue, but if you want to keep going then read this dKos post for more.

Posted in School days | Tagged bullet-resistant glass, Cypress-Fairbanks, Houston, schools, Texas | Comments Off

Dave Wilson reminds us again why elections matter

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Because now when he does crap like this, it’s as an elected official and not just a yahoo crank of long standing.

Dave Wilson

Dave Wilson, an anti-gay activist who won a contested race for a seat on the Houston Community College board last November, wants HCC to cancel its plans to sponsor a float in this month’s gay pride parade.

“Regardless of what has happened in the past, it is my position that HCC should not lend its name or taxpayers’ money to this parade,” Wilson said in an email to HCC Chairwoman Neeta Sane and the rest of the board. “My religious beliefs consider homosexual behavior to be a sin.”

[…]

The annual Houston Pride Parade, which last year drew 400,000 people, is scheduled for June 28. Wilson said he wants the board to vote on whether HCC’s participation is appropriate.

“If the KKK had a parade, I would hope the college wouldn’t lend its name to that,” Wilson said in an interview. “I don’t want to take any part in it, but I’m just one of nine. I want the opportunity to vote on it. I’m not going to unilaterally force my will onto somebody.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, no vote was scheduled for Thursday’s meeting. The chancellor has the necessary authority and has decided HCC will participate, spokeswoman Fritz Guthrie said.

The system has sponsored a float in the parade for years. It participates in a variety of community events, from Juneteenth celebrations to the annual Cesar Chavez parade, Sane said.

“It’s reaching out to all cross sections of our community,” Sane said. “I’m pretty comfortable about HCC being out there.”

As are all decent human beings. I trust the rest of the board will follow the lead of Chancellor Cesar Maldonado and Chairwoman Sane, but again, the reason we’re even talking about this is because Wilson managed to deceive enough voters to sneak in under the radar. Under any other circumstances, no one would be paying attention to the ravings of a nutcase. I sure hope Vince Ryan can prove his case when it goes to court next month. A copy of Maldonado’s email to Wilson, which was embedded as an image in Wilson’s email for some reason, and Wilson’s reply to Sane, on which he bcc’ed me, is beneath the fold.

Continue reading →

Posted in Local politics | Tagged Cesar Maldonado, Dave Wilson, Election 2013, gay rights, HCC, Houston, Houston Pride Parade, Neeta Sane | Comments Off

HISD prepares its budget

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Teacher pay raises and magnet school funding changes are the main points of interest.

Terry Grier

Thanks to rising property values, all Houston ISD employees would receive raises and schools would get more money for supplies, field trips or tutors next year under a budget proposal drawing complaints for its long-term cuts to some popular magnet programs.

For property owners, next year also is expected to bring the first round of a tax rate increase tied to the construction bond package passed by voters in 2012, according to HISD’s financial chief, Ken Huewitt.

The school board is set to vote Thursday on the district’s $1.7 billion operating budget for the upcoming school year. Trustees will not adopt the tax rate until October, but Huewitt projects it will rise by 1 or 2 cents. The amount depends on the district’s final property values, which aren’t certified until August.

Huewitt said he likely could keep the rate hike to a penny if the board doesn’t add more money to schools’ budgets. However, some trustees have said schools need additional funds particularly after state budget cuts in 2011 led to job losses.

Any tax rate increase would come on top of the 3-cent hike the board approved last year to help fund low-performing schools and raises.

The current tax rate is $1.1867 per $100 of assessed value. The owner of a $200,000 home pays $1,720 in taxes, with the district’s tax breaks.

“I think it’s a very good budget,” Huewitt said. “All along we’ve been talking about what our priorities are. If we really believe an effective teacher in every classroom is important, we’ve got to put our money where our mouth is.”

Under Superintendent Terry Grier’s budget proposal, teacher salaries would increase by at least $1,100 with some rising by double that amount, Huewitt said. Other staff would get a 3 percent raise.

[…]

Generating the most controversy is Grier’s plan to standardize funding for magnet programs and other specialty schools, which have themes like fine arts or serve gifted students. Some schools would gain tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars over three years. Others would lose the same amount.

Softening cuts to the specialty schools, Grier has proposed upping the budgets for all campuses by $55 per student.

Some school board members have said they want to double that extra money for all schools and hope to amend the budget proposal Thursday.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to get more money to our schools – which would be great because they desperately need support staff and librarians and counselors,” said school board president Juliet Stipeche.

See here and here for the background, and these two K12 Zone posts for more on the revised magnet funding formulae, which remain subject to further change. It’s nice that there’s more money being put into the budget for magnet school programs, but I still don’t understand, and I suspect a lot of other people don’t understand, what the bottom line is. It would be very helpful if HISD could explain, in sufficiently small words, what the district’s vision for its magnet school program is and what the factors are that affect how a given school is funded for it. Maybe it will be a little clearer after the budget is adopted, but the overall lack of communication on this has made the process a lot harder than it needs to be.

Posted in School days | Tagged budget, HISD, HISD Board of Trustees, Houston, Juliet Stipeche, magnet schools, property taxes, schools, Terry Grier, The Lege | Comments Off

Firefighters union rejects contract deal

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Oops.

The contract rejected Tuesday by 93 percent of the roughly 2,900 firefighters voting would have taken a similar approach, granting a pay raise in exchange for concessions on members’ ability to take leave. With the no vote, as of July 1 members of Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association Local 341 enter an “evergreen” period under their prior contract that would run through 2016 unless a new agreement is approved.

The evergreen situation would provide no raises, but imposes few effective caps on how many firefighters can take time off, raising questions about whether the department’s proposed $507 million budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1 includes enough money to cover overtime costs, and whether HFD will repeat the fiscal woes of recent months.

“Make no mistake about it, this is a resounding statement that the firefighters are together on this. That the concessions are too high, that giving back was enough,” said fire union president Bryan Sky-Eagle, whose team negotiated the deal. “I’m very optimistic we’ll go back to the table and find out what went wrong and try to fix it.”

Parker said the city is willing to return to the bargaining table. She said it is far from clear, however, that the union will be able to win more favorable terms from a city council that opposed hiking HFD’s overtime budget earlier this year and is poised to vote Wednesday on several items that would cut her proposed $2.4 billion general fund budget.

“If they want to come back with the idea of significant pay raises in the next year, I’m just going to have to say it will be seriously impacted by what Council does, and my sense of the mood of Council is they’re not wanting to put a whole lot more money in the budget,” the mayor said.

See here for the background. Sky-Eagle negotiated the deal with the city, so I can only wonder where the disconnect was. The issues with overtime are real and not going anywhere on their own, so one way or another this is going to have to be dealt with. I presume they’ll figure it out eventually. The Chron editorial board has more.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged Annise Parker, Bryan Sky-Eagle, budget, HFD, HFRRF, Houston, Houston City Council, HPFFA, pension fund | 1 Comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of June 16

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance thinks it’s the Republican Party of Texas’ platform writers that need some therapy as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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

More talk about bathrooms

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

The HOUEquality webpage returns to a familiar topic.

1.) Over 180 cities and municipalities across the country have implemented nondiscrimination ordinances, some have been in place for decades. There are no reports of incidents of sexual assault or rape causally related or attributed to the prohibition against discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression. In fact, there are substantiated reports of transgender people being threatened and assaulted when forced to use the restroom that is inconsistent with their gender identity.

2.) Sexual predators are going to behave as you would expect sexual predators to behave – without regard for the law. No ordinance or enacted legislation is going to spur on someone who is already committed to breaking the law. Assault of any kind was illegal in Houston before the passage of HERO, and it remains illegal today.

3.) The sad reality is that study after study shows that sexual assault of children is rarely committed by a stranger. It is overwhelmingly a crime committed by someone with an already existing relationship with the victim (a parent, a family member, a coach, a neighbor, etc). While cases of stranger rape and sexual violence occur, sexual violence is most often perpetrated by someone known to the victim and not a stranger in the bush or the bathroom.

4.) The Houston Independent School district, the largest school district in Texas and the 7th-largest in the country, implemented a comprehensive nondiscrimination policy which extends to both students and facility in 2011. Since that time, there have been no reports of assaults as a result of their policy.

Be sure to follow this link at the bottom of their page for a lot more debunkings of this pernicious lie. That’s the right word to use here, “lie”. The people making these claims know they’re untrue. They know they have no evidence whatsoever to suggest otherwise. Yet they do it anyway, and don’t seem to care at all about it. You have to wonder how people that call themselves devout Christians can put themselves in such a grave state of sin with so little concern. I suppose that’s between them and their God. All I know is that I’m going to call it as I see it. Everyone who makes these “bathroom predators” claim is lying, and they should be held accountable for it.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged Annise Parker, gay rights, HOUEquality, Houston, Houston City Council, transgender rights | Comments Off

The Mayoral succession process starts in San Antonio

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

With the confirmation as Housing Secretary seemingly in the bag for San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, the process of naming an interim Mayor has begun. Not too surprisingly, there’s some conflict about this, though the issue at the root of the conflict may not be what you expected.

CM Ivy Taylor

City Council is set to approve Thursday a procedure to select a replacement for Mayor Julián Castro as pressure is building against the appointment of Councilwoman Ivy Taylor, the perceived front-runner for the interim seat.

A Taylor administration would be historic. If appointed, the councilwoman would be the first black person to hold the city’s highest office.

But she’s the lone member of the existing council to have voted against last year’s controversial expansion of the nondiscrimination ordinance, which added protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The prospect of a Taylor appointment is provoking concern in San Antonio’s LGBT community.

“I don’t think she’s representative of this entire city. She doesn’t support equality for LGBT people, and it’s very bothersome,” activist Daniel Graney said. “I don’t think she should spend one day in the mayor’s office because of it.”

Taylor joined then-council members Carlton Soules and Elisa Chan — who had infamously called gays “disgusting” during a secretly recorded private staff meeting — in dissenting votes.

At the time, Taylor said the vitriolic discourse from nondiscrimination ordinance opponents made her “cringe” but was also unhappy that supporters painted “anyone with religious objections as bigots hiding behind religion.”

Graney said the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community would likely reach out to council members and ask them to consider appointing Councilman Ray Lopez, who voted in favor of the ordinance in September.

Taylor said in an interview Friday that if she were appointed mayor, she would uphold the bolstered nondiscrimination ordinance and wouldn’t work to undo it.

“That ordinance passed, and it is the law of the land, and I don’t have an issue with upholding the law of the land,” she said. “We have other pressing issues. By no means would I be interested in reassessing that.”

It’s fine by me that Dan Graney and the LGBT community are pushing back on the possible elevation of CM Taylor, who had the chance to do the right thing last year but chose instead to stand in the way. Advocates of San Antonio’s non-discrimination ordinance worked with religious leaders to address their concerns. If CM Taylor was more unhappy with the rhetoric of some NDO supporters than she was with the vitriol of its opponents, that says something unflattering about her. It’s nice of her to pledge to uphold the law if she’s elevated to the Mayor’s office, but boy howdy is that a low bar to clear. I hope San Antonio City Council members give a lot of consideration to other alternatives. Lone Star Q has more.

Posted in Show Business for Ugly People | Tagged City Council, Election 2015, Elisa Chan, gay rights, Ivy Taylor, Julian Castro, Mayor, San Antonio, transgender rights | Comments Off

Today’s the day for Tom DeLay at the CCA

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Apologies for the excessive alliteration. I got on a roll and couldn’t stop.

Who are YOU to judge me?

DeLay’s appellate lawyer, Brian Wice of Houston, and Travis County prosecutor Holly Taylor will argue Wednesday before the state’s highest criminal court in Austin over whether the jury’s verdict should be reinstated or if DeLay will be exonerated.

A victory by DeLay ends the marathon case, but if prosecutors prevail with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Wice says he has another point to appeal — that the $190,000 transaction for which he was convicted could not have been money laundering because a check, not cash, was used. The 3rd Court panel did not address that point in its opinion last fall.

[…]

In her appeal, Taylor argued for the state that the two Republican judges used “selected” evidence to second-guess the jury improperly. Wice, meanwhile, countered that “the state’s unprecedented gambit (to create a criminal offense) was correctly unmasked by the court of appeals.”

Over the years, both sides have taken turns complaining about the partisanship surrounding the case, often getting judges removed on allegations of political bias. DeLay also objected to being tried in Travis County, citing its Democratic leanings.

Given that backdrop, DeLay’s lawyers would now seem to have the advantage of arguing before a court with eight Republican judges and one Democrat, who was elected as a Republican before switching parties.

But the state’s highest criminal court also ordered DeLay’s trail, criticizing a 3rd Court panel for trying to short-circuit the legal process several years ago by ruling prematurely on DeLay’s cash vs. check defense during pre-trial arguments.

In their briefs for Wednesday’s oral arguments, Taylor recounted evidence she thought the 3rd Court ignored and Wice criticized prosecutors’ handling of the case, including a last-minute indictment rushed through a grand jury in one day after three years of investigation.

See here and here for the most recent entries in this long-running saga. I’ve said before that to whatever extent there’s a pro-Republican lean on the CCA, I think their pro-prosecution urge outweighs it. Be that as it may, if the CCA rules against DeLay I don’t think he’s going to get much joy re-litigating the “checks aren’t cash” argument. The CCA addressed that before, though apparently not in a “that’s all there is, there ain’t no more” fashion. One way or the other, we are approaching closure on this.

Posted in Scandalized! | Tagged Court of Criminal Appeals, Election 2002, Texas, Third Court of Appeals, Tom DeLay, TPJ, Travis County, TRMPAC | Comments Off

There’s an app for alternate mobility in Houston

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

This makes a lot of sense.

Technology companies might soon upend Houston’s paid ride market, but they’re already adding new options for getting around the region.

Local groups and software developers are tapping into Houston’s sophisticated traffic management system to offer solutions beyond heading onto the freeway. The hope is that better information will help people decide when their best option is to walk, grab a bus, ride a bicycle or share a ride. And when they drive, real-time information can help them choose the best route – and to find a parking spot.

“Not only is there individual benefit but collective benefit,” said Nick Cohn, global congestion expert for the mapping company TomTom.

Austin-based RideScout [launched last] Monday in 69 cities, including Houston. The free smartphone app connects people with other services nearby, such as Metro buses and trains, taxis, ZipCar car rental locations and B-Cycle kiosks.

Laying out the options could help some people avoid solo car travel by picking transit or a carpool.

“When people in Houston realize they can commute in and are going to be (a passenger) in a car and not behind the wheel and when they get downtown realize they can ride transit or take a cab … it frees them up,” said Joseph Kopser, co-founder and CEO of RideScout.

[…]

Metro and Houston B-Cycle have their own smartphone apps that help link interested riders to their services. The problem is these apps focus on one product rather than laying out all the options, Kopser said.

“This was no different than the airlines 15 years ago,” Kopser said. “They all had websites, and when you were searching for flights you had to go to all the different websites.”

Since then, sites have emerged that gather fares from all carriers and then show users options. Kopser said RideScout is aiming to provide the same service for travel around cities. The app displays all of the services, as well as ridesharing and traffic data, on one map.

Houston can be – how can I put this delicately? – a challenging city to navigate, especially if you’re new or just visiting here. One of the unsung values of public transportation is that it’s a lot friendlier to visitors than driving in an unfamiliar city is. Connecting the dots on our transportation network will make getting around easier and less stressful for a lot of people. The app is available here, and according to their blog they have information on Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and El Paso as well.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged B-Cycle, cellphones, Houston, Metro, RideScout, Texas, Zipcars | Comments Off

On defining success

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

It depends on what your goals are.

Suppose you were a Texas Democrat and a realist.

You want your candidates to win in November and to break the spirit-killing string of losses that started after the statewide elections in 1994.

But you have been scratching for reasons that this year will be different, from the two women at the top of the Democratic ticket to the Battleground Texas organizing efforts to the current Republican tilt to the right that — to Democrats, anyway — seems out of step with mainstream voters.

But the realist within is thinking about Nov. 5, and how to keep the embers going on the day after an election that — unless there is an upset — will mark another set of Republican victories.

Short of winning a statewide election, what would constitute good news for Texas Democrats in November?

Jeremy Bird, a founder of the Battleground Texas effort to build a Democratic grassroots organization in the state, has his eyes on volunteers, energized activists and the sorts of activity that could expand through 2016 and 2018. His group started a little over a year ago with talk of a six-year plan to make Democrats competitive in Texas. The somewhat unexpected rise of state Sens. Wendy Davis and Leticia Van de Putte as political candidates could accelerate that effort, even if neither takes office. His measure of a win, short of a victory: “Better than Bill White.”

White, a former Houston mayor, was the Democratic candidate for governor in 2010. He received 42.3 percent of the vote — better than any Democratic candidate for governor since Ann Richards’ loss in 1994, when she received 45.9 percent.

“Closing the margin is important; getting back to the Ann Richards numbers in 1994,” said Richard Murray, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “There’s not much opportunity for pickups in the Legislature, but closing the margin would help set the table for 2016.”

Glenn Smith, who managed part of Richards’ first campaign for governor in 1990, is not a fan of this kind of thinking.

“It’s my extremely strong opinion that you play every contest to win,” said Smith, who now runs the Progress Texas PAC, which supports Democratic candidates and causes. “You set everything on winning. There is nothing else. If you start even mentally thinking that we’re okay at 46, then you might end up at 42. You can’t get in that mind-set. It’s true in sports, in every competitive walk of life — you have to set a course to win. You can’t begin cutting the goal to something short of winning, or your plans will suck.”

I’ll settle this: They’re all right.

Look, there’s no question that winning is always the goal and that losing is failure. There are no consolation prizes, no moral victories, and no partial credit. Greg Abbott will govern the same way whether he wins by one vote or one million votes, just as Rick Perry did when we were all calling him “Governor 39%”. So will Dan Patrick, and so will the rest of them. Another shutout means another four years of the same old shit we’ve had since George Bush was first elected.

That doesn’t mean all losses are created equal, however. Democrats haven’t just lost every statewide election since 1996, we’ve lost them badly. Here are the top five statewide Democrats by percentage of the vote in the Rick Perry era:


Year      Candidate     Office    Pct
=====================================
2002          Sharp     Lt Gov  46.03
2002        Mirabal     Sup Ct  45.90
2008        Houston     Sup Ct  45.88
2008         Strawn        CCA  45.53
2006          Moody     Sup Ct  44.88

It’s about changing the perception almost as much as it is about winning. Winning obviously does that splendidly, and it comes with a heaping helping of other benefits, but after all this losing, coming close will mean something, too. Going from “Democrats last won a statewide election in 1994” to “Democrats came closer to winning statewide than they had in any election since 1998” matters. It will make recruiting and fundraising a lot easier, and not just for the star candidate or two at the top but for candidates up and down the ballot. It virtually guarantees that Hillary Clinton contests the state in 2016. It puts Ted Cruz squarely in the crosshairs for 2018.

As such, I respectfully disagree with Jeremy Bird. Doing better than Bill White isn’t progress. We need to do better than John Sharp. I’ve been reluctant to say stuff like this out loud – it’s not my place to set expectations – but the question was going to come up sooner or later. It’s not just about vote percentage, either, but also about turnout, since that’s what Battleground Texas’ mission is. I’ve talked at length about turnout and how Democratic levels of turnout have been flat in the last three off-year elections. I can’t say offhand what a minimally-acceptable level of improvement in that looks like to me, but I feel confident saying that if we’re achieving Sharp levels of vote percent, we’re doing fine on turnout.

Let’s also acknowledge that the original mission of Battleground Texas was to make Texas competitive in future Presidential elections, and that when they first showed up Wendy Davis was just another State Senator and we were all (okay, I was all) doing fantasy candidate recruitment for Governor. Davis’ arrival on the scene and BGTx’s integration with her campaign changed their focus, but they were never supposed to be about 2014. The whole point was that unlike traditional campaign machines, BGTx would stick around and keep working for the next election and the one after that. Obviously, having serious candidates that have generated real excitement at the top of the ticket has jumpstarted BGTx’s efforts, but it’s reasonable to expect that BGTx has their own metrics and their own timeline.

So yeah, they’re all right. And just because I’ve drawn a line somewhere doesn’t obligate anyone to recognize or respect it. We all agree that winning >>> losing, but beyond that it’s all open to interpretation.

Posted in Election 2014 | Tagged Battleground Texas, Bill Moody, Bill White, Court of Criminal Appeals, Election 1994, Election 1998, Election 2002, Election 2006, Election 2008, Election 2010, Election 2014, Election 2016, Election 2018, Governor, Greg Abbott, Hillary Clinton, John Sharp, Leticia Van De Putte, Lite Gov, President, Sam Houston, Senate, Supreme Court, Susan Strawn, Ted Cruz, Texas, turnout, Wendy Davis | Comments Off

HISD hires its defenders for the teacher evaluation lawsuit

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

I have to say, I’m a bit uncomfortable with this.

Earlier this year, seven teachers sued the Houston Independent School District in federal court over their evaluation system.

That system uses a statistical formula and student test scores to grade teachers.

At its meeting this week, the Houston school district decided to hire a high-profile law firm to fight that case.

The board will pay those legal fees with a grant from Houston billionaire John Arnold, who helped created that same system to grade teachers.

With a 6-2 vote, the trustees approved hiring the law firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, LLP, to defend Houston’s teacher evaluation system in federal court.

“I think there’s the potential for this to be a high-profile case and I think it’s important for the district to have the best representation possible in this and any situation that we confront through the legal system,” said HISD Trustee Anna Eastman.

See here for the background. I have no issue with HISD being represented by top-notch counsel, and I can certainly see the merit in having what is likely to be an expensive legal bill covered by someone other than the taxpayers. But this raises an important and uncomfortable question: Whose interests are being represented by Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher – HISD’s, or John Arnold’s? If the HISD Board of Trustees finds itself in disagreement with John Arnold over the legal strategy employed by Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, who will the lawyers listen to? If the Board decides they want to negotiate a settlement, but John Arnold insists on pushing through to a verdict, whose opinion carries the day? What if Arnold threatens to cut off the spigot and leave HISD with the remaining bills if they don’t do things his way?

Maybe I’m being overly dramatic here, but my point is that lawyers represent clients, and this arrangement has the potential to complicate that relationship. Perhaps the Board has thought all this through and gotten an agreement in writing from all relevant parties about who gets to approve the decisions that will need to be made during this process. If they haven’t however, then all I can say is that billionaires tend to think they’re in charge, especially when it’s their money being spent. I just hope everyone went into this with their eyes open.

One more thing:

These particular outside lawyers just won a groundbreaking case in California.

There a judge ruled that California’s teacher tenure, firing and discipline procedures are unconstitutional.

That decision was controversial, to say the least, and there’s a good possibility it may not survive appeal. That doesn’t really have anything to do with the main point of this story, I just wanted to mention it.

Posted in School days | Tagged Anna Eastman, EVAAS, HISD, HISD Board of Trustees, Houston, John Arnold, lawsuit, standardized testing, Texas AFT | 2 Comments

Once again, where are the jobs Rick Perry was trying to poach?

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Politico revisits a familiar subject.

California corndogs are the best

Since as early as February of last year and as recently as April of this one, Perry has made eight trips to six different states, all of which have one very particular thing in common: They’re run by Democratic governors. Perry has used his visits to hammer on a consistent theme: Texas is a great state for business; the state he’s currently in is not; so wouldn’t it make sense then for all those companies that aren’t currently located in the Lone Star State to correct their error? Earlier this month, Perry made plain the politics behind his accumulated frequent-flier miles. “Blue-state governors need to be looking over their shoulder,” he told a Fox News panel.

Perry’s focused national tour is built around a message that’s tailor made for a presidential campaign whose central issue will likely be a lagging economy. The “Texas miracle,” the idea that Perry’s policies produced job growth in the worst climate since the Great Depression, first emerged in his initial failed campaign and has lived on ever since, buoyed by the fact that the state’s unemployment rate remains below the national average. But as any number of progressive-minded opponents will tell you, that “miracle” is most likely due in large part to the state’s wealth of fossil fuels. Hardly an advantage Perry can claim credit for. But tempting CEOs to relocate southward? For that he’ll gladly take an attaboy.

Poaching companies is nothing new. States have been bad-mouthing and out-bidding each other for decades in the hopes of luring more business, often with little to show for it. But according to Greg Leroy, the executive director of Good Jobs First, a D.C.-based non-profit devoted to exposing what it considers the folly of government subsidies often given in the name of attracting companies, Perry’s campaign stands on its own. “I’ve been covering this for 30 years and there’s no precedent for what he’s doing,” says Leroy. “Nobody’s been as aggressive. Nobody’s done it as personally. He’s really taking it to a new low.”

[…]

The ideological fuel powering Perry’s trips out of state says that, unlike the weather, that vague term known as a “business climate” can be engineered, and that no one’s done a better job of parting the clouds than Texas. But Leroy and nearly a century’s worth of data suggest otherwise. As does the most recent pelt in Perry’s poaching tour, which also happens to be the biggest such prize in his political career.

[…]

Then, in late April, Perry got the big score that seemed to justify all his travels when Toyota announced it had selected Plano, a Dallas suburb, as the home of its new North American headquarters. “Toyota understands that Texas’ employer-friendly combination of low taxes, fair courts, smart regulations and world-class workforce can help businesses of any size succeed and thrive,” a glowing Perry said the day the announcement was made.

Toyota was a coup for two specific and related reasons. It meant 3,000 new jobs for Texas and 3,000 fewer for California, the state where Perry’s trip had begun and Exhibit A in his campaign against what he sees as business-killing taxation and regulation. It seemed the epitome of a red state offering safe harbor to a beleaguered company that had finally had enough abuse at the hands of a grubby-handed blue state. Yet just a few days after the announcement, Toyota began quietly offering a counter-narrative.

In an extended interview with the Los Angeles Times, Toyota’s North American chief executive Jim Lentz gave a more nuanced explanation for why the company left California. The true reason for his company’s move, Lentz explained, came down to something much simpler: not sending the wrong signal to his employees. Toyota, Lentz said, wanted to consolidate management that was spread out over three states. Choosing California was never an option because it was already the home of Toyota’s sales and marketing and Lentz said that he didn’t want to give the impression to the rest of the company that “sales was taking over.”

“It may seem like a juicy story to have this confrontation between California and Texas,” Lentz told the Times, “But that was not the case.”

That left four candidates: Plano, Charlotte, Denver and Atlanta. In an op-ed he published a week later in the Dallas Morning News, Lentz mentioned that low taxes were part of a “wide range of criteria” that led him and his company to choose Texas, but he also made a point to mention that the decision was a matter of “simple geography.” Greater Dallas is in the Central Time Zone, has a nearby airport with direct flights to Japan and sits close to the multinational’s large American base of manufacturing. In other words, Texas was not, as Perry would have it, the most desirable choice because of taxes, regulation or the $40 million in subsidies it offered as a cherry on top. Instead, Toyota picked Texas in large part because of the one enormous advantage the state has enjoyed ever since the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo: It sits smack in the middle of the country.

Yes, the Toyota story started falling apart even before the ink was dry on Perry’s self-congratulatory press release. I’m glad Politico followed up on that angle – and there’s still more to it, which we’ll get to in a minute – but as has been the case with all of these stories, no one ever seems to ask the question: where are the jobs Perry has been so busy trying to poach? Toyota was looking like the first real coup, before it all came crashing down in a landslide of boring corporate minutiae, but what else is there? I have long been of the belief that the answer is basically “nothing”, but it would be nice to have some newsgathering organization try to figure it out for themselves.

As for the other angle on Toyota, here’s the Observer.

Rick Perry’s office refuses to release any information about the $40 million it’s offering Toyota to relocate to Texas, despite providing the Observer with similar information last year for a $12 million grant to Chevron.

The Observer and the Houston Chronicle both filed open records requests with the governor’s office after Perry announced in April the $40 million incentive grant to Toyota from the Texas Enterprise Fund. The governor’s office promotes the Enterprise Fund as a “deal-closing” program that helps bring jobs to Texas. But in some cases evidence suggests that the fund does little but line the pockets of companies planning to move to Texas anyway. For example, the Observer reported last year Chevron already had plans to develop an office tower in downtown Houston, provided scant justification that it was considering other locations in its application and told the governor’s office that it planned to use the $12 million grant to pay for employee relocation perks.

It would be interesting to know if something similar happened with the Toyota grant. Especially since company executives have said the $40 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant had little to do with the relocation from California to Plano.

I can’t be the only one who thinks that if there was something in this information that made Rick Perry look good he’d have released it by now, right?

Posted in Show Business for Ugly People | Tagged California, Election 2016, Plano, President, Rick Perry, Texas, Texas Enterprise Fund, Toyota | Comments Off

Cheerleading is now a sport in Texas

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

This is a real thing.

Cheerleading will finally get its tryout from the University Interscholastic League.

After a hearty debate and a failed first vote, the UIL Legislative Council approved a one-year pilot program to hold a league-sanctioned cheerleading competition for the 2015-16 school year.

Crowning state champions in each of the state’s six classifications, the “Game Day Cheer” competition will be the first cheerleading event in the league’s history.

“As big as cheerleading is in Texas, I feel like a lot of people will gravitate to this,” Highland Park cheerleading coach Jason McMahan said. “Not only because it’s new, but also because it gives them an opportunity to showcase their athletes and their abilities vs. just their home crowd seeing them on the sidelines.”

[…]

Passage of the proposal wasn’t easy.

After squeaking through the UIL’s Standing Committee on Policy on Tuesday, the concept faced similar skepticism and criticism from many on the full council on Wednesday.

Normally, the league moves at a glacial level, with a proposal waiting six months between approval from a subcommittee to a final vote. The cheerleading concept, however, was fast-tracked — with league staff asking for its approval less than a day after moving out of committee, in an attempt to get the event launched for the upcoming school year.

Many of the 32-member council didn’t like the speed of that process, with only seven members — including Duncanville ISD Superintendent Alfred Ray and Katy ISD’s Alton Frailey — initially voting in favor of the pilot program.

“The main reason that I can support this is that we can keep our kids involved and we can keep them safe,” said Frailey, the former DeSoto superintendent.

Richardson ISD Superintendent Kay Waggoner originally voted against the proposal, concerned with the readiness of districts to pay for additional expenses and provide oversight to another activity.

Only when implementation of the pilot was pushed back to the 2015-16 school year did the program gain approval.

“I think the folks around this table were concerned on how it would affect their budget on such short notice, and how it might affect their student body because of other activities that they’ve signed up for,” Breithaupt said. “To give more detail as we move forward, so that they can share it with people they represent, I think that’s fair.”

An earlier story has some of the background on this.

“It’s a controversial topic — it just is,” UIL executive director Charles Breithaupt said. “I’m just interested in doing what’s best for an activity that’s kind of been ignored, to be honest with you. Give them a state championship for all the things that they do.”

Game Day Cheer would differ from a competitive cheerleading event, Breithaupt said. The elements of the UIL contest would mimick what cheerleaders do during a pep rally or on the sidelines, without the high-flying tosses and difficult gymnastics found in competitive cheer.

In a 2012-13 National Federation of State High School Associations survey, 32 states held girls’ “competitive spirit squad” competitions, with 116,508 students participating nationwide, the ninth-most popular girls’ athletic activity.

[…]

Bringing cheerleading under the umbrella of the UIL has gained momentum over the last 18 months. In a letter to the UIL in January 2012, the Texas Medical Association asked the league for oversight of cheerleading, saying it would “be a bold move to ensure we have a state system focused on injury prevention under consistent, evidence-based safety guidelines.” As a result, the league’s medical advisory committee recommended in April 2013 that cheerleading be included in the list of activities that abide by the UIL’s safety and health regulations.

A former football coach and athletic director, Breithaupt said his opinion evolved from that point.

“If we are going to make them comply with all the other standards, to me it just makes sense,” Breithaupt said. “It’d be like, for example, if we said, ‘OK, we don’t sanction lacrosse, but we are going to require you to follow all of our rules.’”

You may be shaking your head about this, but the UIL is just following the official recommendation of the American Medical Association.

The American Medical Association adopted a policy declaring cheerleading a sport at its annual meetings Monday, weighing in on a long-lasting debate with a solid reason in mind: giving cheerleading “sport” status at high schools across the country would make it safer by increasing training and safety measures to protect its participants.

Cheerleading, according to the AMA and other independent researchers, is the leader in catastrophic injuries in female athletes, and considering it a sport would help increase training and awareness among coaches, parents, and cheerleaders themselves, the AMA said.

“These girls are flipping 10, 20 feet in the air,” Dr. Samantha Rosman said at the meeting, according to the Associated Press. “We need to stand up for what is right for our patients and demand they get the same protection as their football colleagues.”

[…]

The American Academy of Pediatrics designated cheerleading a sport two years ago, and 35 states and Washington D.C. have declared it a sport at the high school level. The AMA policy means that it will push remaining states and sports bodies to adopt the designation.

You can now add Texas to the list of adopters. As that article above noted, concussions are a big issue in cheerleading, and unlike in other sports, the risk is even higher in practice than at games. One of the effects of the UIL declaring it a sport is that practices can now be regulated in the same way as other sports. Hopefully, that will help reduce the injury risk.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged American Medical Association, cheerleading, concussions, schools, Texas, Texas Medical Association, UIL | Comments Off

Of course some people will split their votes

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

It’s just a matter of how many of them do so, and if the races in question are close enough for it to matter.

Sen. Leticia Van de Putte

Democrats are hoping the Republicans will eventually make some of the mistakes Democrats themselves made back when they were on top and the GOP was trying to break down the doors of power. They ran candidates — particularly at the national level — who were too liberal for conservative Texas Democrats to stomach. They developed a split between conservatives and liberals that made it possible for Republicans to peel away the conservatives and form the beginnings of what is now a solid Republican majority.

The notion behind the current Van de Putte proposition is that — to Democrats — Patrick is so extreme that even some Republicans will rebel and vote for the Democrat. In a debate with Patrick this year, San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro said the Houston Republican would be the Democrats’ “meal ticket” in November.

The differences between the two top candidates (there are also a Libertarian, a Green and an independent in the race) are stark: gender, ethnicity, party, ideology, roots. She is likely to attack his positions on immigration, health care, abortion, equal pay and education. He is likely to attack her positions on some of those same things, characterizing her as a liberal who wants to expand government and poisoning his darts with the unpopularity of the Democratic president.

To be the only Democratic statewide winner in November, Van de Putte would need to make sure Patrick doesn’t perform as well as Greg Abbott. And that requires one to imagine the voter who will vote for Abbott and then turn and vote for Van de Putte — who will vote against Wendy Davis for governor and against Patrick for lieutenant governor. Republicans are betting there won’t be many of those. Democrats are hoping that women and minorities will have an allergic reaction to his rhetoric and positions, creating an opportunity for their candidate.

It happened before, but this was a different state when voters elected George W. Bush, a Republican, and Bob Bullock, a Democrat, to the top two positions on the ballot. It nearly happened again four years later, when Bush won re-election against Garry Mauro by 37 percentage points and Republican Rick Perry beat Democrat John Sharp by less than 2 points in the race for lieutenant governor.

It’s true you have to go back to 1994 to find an example of a party split at the top of state government, but you don’t have to go back nearly that far to find a significant split in how people voted for those two offices. Just in 2010, more than 300,000 people voted for Bill White and David Dewhurst. That always gets overlooked because the races were not close in 2010, making White’s effort little more than a footnote, but the point is simply that people – many people – can and will split their vote in the right set of circumstances.

We also saw plenty of examples of this in 2012, though not at the statewide level. Congressman Pete Gallego, State Rep. Craig Eiland, and *ahem* State Sen. Wendy Davis all won races in districts that voted majority Republican otherwise. In Harris County, some 40,000 people voted for Mitt Romney and Adrian Garcia, while in the other direction another fifteen or twenty thousand voted for Barack Obama and Mike Anderson. In all of these cases, those ticket splitters very much did matter – the first three could not have won without them, while the latter two could have gone either way, as Harris County was basically 50-50 that year. This is why the efforts of Battleground Texas mean so much. Democrats have to get their base vote up, or else it won’t matter how much crossover appeal Leticia Van de Putte – or Wendy Davis, or Sam Houston, or Mike Collier – may have. It’s not either-or, it’s both or nothing.

Posted in Election 2014 | Tagged Adrian Garcia, Battleground Texas, Bill White, Bob Bullock, CD23, Congress, Craig Eiland, Dan Patrick, David Dewhurst, Election 1994, Election 1998, Election 2010, Election 2012, Election 2014, George Bush, Governor, Greg Abbott, Harris County, HD23, Leticia Van De Putte, Lite Gov, Mike Anderson, Pete Gallego, SD10, Senate, Texas, The Lege, turnout, Wendy Davis | Comments Off

On cops and the revenue cap

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

Mayor Parker again calls attention to the city’s stupid revenue cap and the things it will prevent the city from doing if it is left in place.

Mayor Annise Parker

If Houston voters do not want police pulled from the streets next year, Mayor Annise Parker says, they better think twice about a cap on city revenues they imposed a decade ago.

That is the message the mayor has pushed in the days following the release of a study on the Houston Police Department’s operations that showed the understaffed agency ignored 20,000 cases with workable leads last year.

“We need more police officers. The only way we can have more police officers is to have more tax revenue to pay for them,” Parker said. “It’s really easy to say, ‘Well, the government should spend less money.’ We’ve been funding the police department by one of the most efficient, effective uses of resources anywhere to get us to today. I can’t fund the Houston Police Department with less money.”

Unless voters adjust the revenue cap, soaring property appraisals are expected to force a cut in the property tax rate next year, carving millions of dollars from the city budget in the fiscal year that begins July 1, 2015. The cap limits the growth in city revenues to the combined rates of inflation and population growth. As a result, Houston faces a projected $142 million gap between expected revenues and expenses in its general fund next summer, a figure that tops the $137 million shortfall the city had to close during the economic recession, when Parker laid off 776 workers.

As Parker prepares to ask voters to reconsider the revenue cap next year – in May at the earliest, or perhaps November – the staffing study is an obvious tool.

See here and here for the background. I’m glad this article makes it clear that the revenue cap would mean that the city is forced to reduce the property tax rate, because so far most of the emphasis has been on spending cuts. The reason for the spending cuts is because the city is essentially forbidden from having a year in which revenue growth is especially robust. In the absence of this cap, if the city has a particularly good year – you know, because the economy is humming, new construction is on a roll, or maybe just because we’ve fully recovered from a downturn – we could invest that extra revenue in ways that would not otherwise be available to us during normal years. What the revenue cap does is it imposes a priority above all others, to roll back the property tax rate until we’re back into normal territory. And if we have any unexpected costs or unmet needs or wish list items? That’s just too bad.

So if you think we should take extra revenue and use it to help meet our pension obligations? Too bad, we can’t do that.

If you think we should take extra revenue and use it to bolster the city’s reserve fund? Too bad, we can’t do that.

If you think we should take extra revenue and use it to fix more roads? Too bad, we can’t do that.

If you think we should take extra revenue and use it to hire more cops? Too bad, we can’t do that.

Now of course, we can try to do those things from the more limited amount of revenue that the cap would allow us to have, once we’ve cut property taxes. In normal times, this might not be that big a deal other than being a lost opportunity. Unfortunately, it’s happening at a time when the city has some deferred debt payments coming due, and every dollar we reduce from available revenue means that much less is available for the city’s normal and ongoing obligations. Tax cuts come first, everything else gets in line after it. This is of course exactly what the wealthy proponents of the revenue cap, all of whom will benefit greatly from the ensuing reduction in the tax rate, had in mind from the beginning. They want to be the city’s top priority, and this is the means by which they can achieve that. You have to hand it to them, it’s a pretty clever trick.

Having said all that, I do agree with this:

City Councilman C.O. Bradford, a former police chief, said he does not support raising the cap without more work to find savings in all city departments.

“You cannot show me in that work demands analysis where it said the $5 billion operating budget for the city of Houston requires more money. It doesn’t say that,” Bradford said. “It says we need more police officers, not more money. I’m not willing to make that big hop yet because we haven’t done the necessary groundwork to support ‘more money.'”

Councilman Stephen Costello, who chairs the council’s budget committee, agreed. The police staffing study cautioned against rushing to hire more officers without ensuring no police are doing jobs civilians could do, he said, adding the study examined only part of the department.

“You can’t just use one work demands analysis that’s not totally complete to justify raising the cap to bring in more police officers,” Costello said. “There are plenty of areas of efficiency available to us.”

I too am skeptical about the need to spend more money on HPD, at least without having a much better idea about how they’re spending the money they have now. Regardless of what happens with the revenue cap or with anything else, we really need to put the Public Safety portion of the budget under closer scrutiny, in the same way we put the rest of the budget under closer scrutiny back in 2010. If you want to cite the consultant’s report as a reason to get rid of the revenue cap, that’s fine, but these are really two separate issues and should be dealt with as such.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged Annise Parker, budget, Clarence Bradford, Houston, Houston City Council, HPD, property taxes, revenue cap, Stephen Costello | 3 Comments

Perry appoints Pratt replacement

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

As expected.

Alicia Franklin

Gov. Rick Perry on Friday appointed Houston family lawyer Alicia Franklin as presiding judge of Harris County’s 311th state District Court, a position left vacant in March after the resignation of disgraced freshman jurist Denise Pratt.

Franklin won a May 27 Republican primary runoff against Pratt, who appeared on the ballot despite her resignation, which came after a deadline to withdraw her name and later was revealed to be part of a deal with the Harris County district attorney to avoid indictment. She will face Democrat Sherri Cothrun in the November general election.

Franklin, who applied for the appointment, said she has already consulted with the visiting judges who have been hearing cases in the 311th since Pratt’s resignation and plans to work with them closely during her transition. The 36-year-old, who has no prior judicial experience, said she also has sought the advice of other family court judges about how they run their courts and keep their caseloads manageable.

“I’m very, very excited and eager to get started,” Franklin said.

See here for the full Pratt archives if you need a refresher. It’s been pretty standard for nominee to get appointed in a situation like this. Would have been interesting to see what Perry would have done if Pratt had managed to win the runoff, but we’ll leave that for the alternate-history books. I’ll be voting for Sherri Cothrun in November, but I wish new Judge Franklin all the best in straightening out Pratt’s ginormous mess. All the people that have been adversely affected by Pratt’s disastrous term in office will thank you for whatever progress you can make. Texpatriate has more.

Posted in Election 2014 | Tagged Alicia Franklin, Denise Pratt, Election 2014, Harris County, judicial races, Sherri Cothrun | Comments Off

Comcast wants to use your routers

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

For a massive WiFi network.

Comcast is expected to flip a switch Tuesday in Houston that will turn 50,000 of its customers’ home Wi-Fi routers into a massive network of public Wi-Fi hotspots.

Comcast residential Internet subscribers with one of the newer cable modem/wireless router combos will show a public network called “xfinitywifi.” Other Comcast customers will be able to connect to it free.

By the end of June, there will be 150,000 such hotspots in the greater Houston area. It’s part of an initiative that will see 8 million Wi-Fi hotspots accessible to Comcast customers around the country by the end of the year.

The move could also lay the foundation for Comcast to get into the wireless phone business with a network that blends Wi-Fi and traditional cellular service.

Amalia O’Sullivan, Comcast’s vice president of Xfinity Internet Product, told the Houston Chronicle that the goal is to make it easier for “friends and family” to use each other’s Comcast home Wi-Fi networks.

“Instead of coming over to your house and saying, ‘Hey, what’s your Wi-Fi password?’ your friends can just connect to the Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspot,” O’Sullivan said.

The free network will be on by default for customers who have an Arris Touchstone Telephony Wireless Gateway Modem, which Comcast has been distributing for about two years in Houston. The black plastic device is tall, narrow and has the word Xfinity on the front. It costs $8 a month to rent, and is the standard equipment being issued to Comcast customers who don’t buy their own modems or routers.

Comcast spokesman Michael Bybee said the Xfiniti Wi-Fi hotspot will broadcast only in those cases where customers are using the Wi-Fi feature of the Arris device. Customers who have their own Wi-Fi routers won’t be broadcasting the hotspot.

Bybee said the network will be activated in “waves,” with the first 50,000 switched on Tuesday afternoon. The remaining 100,000 will be phased in through the month.

Customers were notified of the plan in a letter last month, Bybee said. An email notification will be sent after the service begins.

Remember the discussion about municipal WiFi a few years ago? That never happened, but this appears to be a successor to it. There are some details to be worked out, so we’ll see how it all goes. Dwight Silverman has been all over this, with technical details including how you can turn this off if you want to. One thing he clarified for me is that if you bought your own router, as I did, you’re not affected by this.

Extremetech considers some of the implications of this.

Will Comcast Xfinity WiFi slow down your connection to the internet?

The more curious bit is Comcast’s assertion that this public hotspot won’t slow down your residential connection — i.e. if you’re paying for 150Mbps of download bandwidth through the Extreme 150 package, you will still get 150Mbps, even if you have five people creepily parked up outside leeching free WiFi. This leads to an interesting question: If Xfinity hotspot users aren’t using your 150Mbps of bandwidth, whose bandwidth are they using?

There are two options here. Comcast might just be lying about public users not impacting your own download speeds. The other option is that Xfinity WiFi Home Hotspot uses its own separate channel to the internet. This is entirely possible — DOCSIS 3.0 can accommodate around 1Gbps, so there’s plenty of free space. But how big is this separate channel? 50Mbps? 100Mbps? And if there’s lots of spare capacity, why is Comcast giving it to free WiFi users rather than the person who’s paying a lot of money for the connection? And isn’t Comcast usually complaining about its network being congested? At least, that’s the excuse it used to squeeze money from Netflix, and to lobby for paid internet fast lanes.

With 50,000 hotspots enabled in Houston today, 150,000 more planned for the end of the month, and then 8 million more across Xfinity hotspots across the US before the end of 2014, we can only assume that Comcast has a lot of extra capacity. Either that, or it’s intentionally trying to clog up the network for its paying customers — perhaps so it can levy further charges from edge providers like Netflix, or so it has some ammo in the continuing battle for net neutrality.

I figure sooner or later there’s going to be some kind of vulnerability that may expose data on the accompanying home networks. I’m just cynical that way. Are you a Comcast user that has been or will be affected by this? What do you think about it?

Posted in Technology, science, and math | Tagged Comcast, Houston, Internet, municipal WiFi, net neutrality, WiFi | 2 Comments

Weekend link dump for June 15

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

We really shouldn’t provide tax incentives to give CEOs even higher pay than they’re already getting.

If nothing else, Seattle’s $15 minimum wage will provide some objective data on the effect of such increases on employment.

It’s not enough to just exercise. You have to enjoy exercising, or it doesn’t count.

On integrating transgender students (or not) into women’s colleges.

Better health care coverage, please.

Read whatever books you want. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it.

The movie Frozen has been a boon for Norway’s tourism industry.

“Since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in March 2010, the health care industry has gained nearly 1 million jobs—982,300, to be more precise—according to Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates released on Friday.”

The decline and fall of NOM is beautiful to watch.

The lurkers support Ron Fornier on background (see here for the oldtime Internet reference).

All about WalMart, in chart form.

What Charlie Pierce says.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Mariano Rivera are the Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen of this year’s Stanley Cup Finals.

You’ve gotta fight for your right to wear sneakers to jury duty.

Why cheerleading is a sport, at least from a medical perspective.

On redshirting your kid. No, not in the “Star Trek” sense.

Fox News makes you dumber. Film at 11.

The Definitive Guide to Every Hillary Clinton Conspiracy Theory (So Far). The over/under on how long it takes before that page is out of date is one week.

RIP, Bob Welch, former pitcher for the Dodgers and A’s.

George Will makes his case for being the worst human being on the Washington Post’s horrible op-ed page this week.

An appropriate eulogy for Eric Cantor’s political career.

Missed this last week: RIP, Chester Nez, last surviving Navajo Code Talker.

It can’t be said too often: Good ideas don’t need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.

“Here’s a particularly depressing number that highlights just how often school shootings are occurring: The shooting near Portland is the 74th school shooting since the Newtown massacre in December 2012, according to the group Everytown for Gun Safety, which is aimed at promoting gun control measures. Fully half of those shootings have occurred so far this year, and it is only the second week of June.”

RIP, Ruby Dee, actor and civil rights leader.

Yeah, Fox News really is that bad for America.

Grumpy Cat to star in Lifetime Christmas movie. Because of course he is.

“I also suspect that like the politicians who represent them, [conservatives] pay lip service to the gentle lifestyle and all-American values of small towns, but their affection doesn’t quite extend as far as actually going to live there.”

In case you were wondering what the deal is with that iPhone fitness ad with the “Go, you chicken fat, go” song.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged linkdump | Comments Off

I repeat: Greg Abbott owns the RPT platform

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

This is what I’m talking about.

You want to be the boss, you get to deal with boss problems

At its state convention in Fort Worth last week, the Texas GOP amended its platform to include support for reparative therapy “for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle.”

In response to the headline-grabbing plank, a spokesman for Davis’ campaign confirmed this week in an email to Lone Star Q that the Democratic gubernatorial nominee would back a statewide ban on reparative therapy for minors similar to laws that have passed in California and New Jersey.

Meanwhile, Abbott dodged a question about his party’s support for reparative therapy during a visit to East Texas on Wednesday. KYTX Channel 19 reports that Abbott “stopped short of condemning” the reparative therapy plank but said the issue isn’t near the top of his agenda.

“First is jobs, second is schools, three is roads, transportation and water, and four is making sure our border is secure,” Abbott told KYTX reporter Field Sutton.

“It sounds like reparative therapy is pretty far down on that list,” Sutton said.

“Well, if government does what it’s supposed to do, and then gets out of people’s way, everyone is a whole lot happier,” Abbott responded.

Objection, Your Honor, non-responsive answer. Look, this isn’t about whether or not Greg Abbott would meddle in the affairs of the Legislature if he gets elected Governor. That’s not the point. The point is that as Governor, the bills the Legislature passes, which may include bills on things like banning sanctuary cities, rescinding the Texas DREAM Act, and authorizing “reparative therapy” in some form, will come to Greg Abbott’s desk for his signature. Does he sign them, or does he veto them? It’s a simple question. Abbott knows this, and he knows he doesn’t want to answer it. He’s following the lead of Republicans elsewhere on this. Reporters like Field Sutton need to know this too, and need to not let him get away with it.

Posted in Election 2014 | Tagged Election 2014, gay rights, Governor, Greg Abbott, immigration, Republican Party, Texas, Wendy Davis | Comments Off

Another taxi survey

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

From the inbox:

Vehicle for hire industry survey

The City of Houston has retained Taxi Research Partners to conduct a study of demand within the vehicle for hire industry in Houston. The study will review current market conditions, identify key players and stakeholders in the industry and will establish a baseline for demand for those services.

This will allow for an initial review of market conditions and assist in data collection, including the identification of correct market “players” for electronic data requests. Additionally, the study will identify elasticity and cross elasticity of demand between different modes of transportation within the vehicle for hire industry.

Please take a moment to complete the survey by using the link below. Whether you are completely satisfied with the service or if you believe there is a need for improvement, your response is vital to the success of this study. All responses will be held in the strictest confidence, so please comment freely.

Survey Link:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HoustonTaxi

Thank you,

City of Houston Administration & Regulatory Affairs Department

There have been at least two other studies done in Houston, one a taxi study done for Houston commissioned by the Administration & Regulatory Affairs Department, one a taxi demand study commissioned by Uber. I’m not sure what we might learn from this that we didn’t already learn from those, but there’s the link if you want to participate.

Meanwhile, the study process has begun in Austin, and The Highwayman observes the state of play in Houston while noting that all things considered the dispute here has been pretty low-key.

It’s important at this point to note a few things about the status of the negotiations, and this issue in general.

City officials and both sides have been at this debate for more than a year.

Uber and Lyft are not operating legally in Houston, so long as they accept money for rides without having a taxi medallion.

They are, however, doing background checks on their drivers, though not the detailed ones cab drivers face.

The city commissioned a $50,000 study, city staff poked holes in and generally disagreed with a lot of findings, which is reflected in their suggested rule changes.

The added delay is happening because until recently the city’s largest taxi-limo company, Greater Houston Transportation Company, would not negotiate, saying the entrants were rogue operators, period, end of story.

If the city just bars the proverbial gates and refuses to let Uber and Lyft in, everyone is going to end up in court. They’ll likely end up there if they let them in, too, unless Houston finds compromise where no one else has seemed to.

Not that it is a guarantee they will abide, but the sooner Houston has a good set of laws that cover everyone, the sooner everyone will follow them.

Taking all of those things into consideration, by the standard set in some other places, this has been smooth. The change taking place is hugely disruptive to the paid-ride market, and Uber and Lyft have racked up 160 citations by last count.

Will mediation and some extra time help things along? Or has our somewhat smooth path just been the precursor to the upheaval?

See Wonkblog for what that upheaval has looked like elsewhere. Things may get more contentious here, but not like that.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged Annise Parker, Department of Administration and Regulatory Affairs, Houston, Houston City Council, Lyft, polls, taxis, Uber | Comments Off

Would you let Reliant turn off your air conditioning?

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Charles Kuffner

In the name of conservation, of course.

“Our objective is to have more and more customers participate so we can make a material difference in an event when the state needs us to make a difference,” said Elizabeth Killinger, senior vice president and retail regional president for Texas at NRG, Reliant’s parent company.

The program, which Reliant calls Degrees of Difference, is geared toward customers who use Nest, the Google-owned thermostat that can be controlled remotely over a wireless Internet connection.

Under the voluntary program, when electricity demand gets especially high, Reliant – through Nest – could remotely turn off customers’ air conditioning for around 30 minutes or less in an effort to reduce electricity consumption.

Reliant would then pay customers 80 cents for every kilowatt-hour of electricity they’ve avoided using, based on comparisons to their historic usage.

Officials at Reliant and Nest stress that the program is purely voluntary, and participants don’t lose much control, since they can easily override the adjustment and turn the air back on. But they doubt that will be necessary.

“Most folks aren’t really going to notice when their air conditioner pops off for a short time like this,” said Ben Bixby, general manager at Nest Energy Services.

[…]

The plan may seem counterintuitive. Reliant, after all, makes money when customers use electricity. But during periods of peak demand – generally, late afternoon in the summer – companies like Reliant can face extraordinary wholesale costs from power generators, which can charge up to $5,000 per megawatt-hour of power.

That figure is poised to increase to $7,000 in June and $9,000 next year. During normal conditions, wholesale prices from generators are generally below $100 per megawatt-hour.

“If we run into a circumstance where there’s not enough generation, and prices are rising, customer participation will help us reduce our costs,” Killinger said. The upside for Reliant is that the money it saves exceeds the value of the credits it would dole out to customers.

There’s already a program in place like this for large industrial and commercial power users, but residential users create a lot of demand, too. Basically, Reliant is looking to keep the peaks below a certain level, above which it becomes really expensive for them to provide the power needed. It reduces their costs, so they can provide an incentive to their customers to participate, and it may mean less need to build more power plants down the line. It’s a win all around if enough people agree to participate. We have a Nest at home, though we’re not currently using Reliant. I suspect we’d be willing to do this but haven’t discussed it with Tiffany yet. What do you think?

Posted in Technology, science, and math | Tagged conservation, ERCOT, Houston, Nest, Reliant Energy, Texas | 2 Comments

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