On cryptomining and power plants

Posted on November 4, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I say again, there’s a political opportunity here, and it involves being on the right side of an issue.

About 150 angry residents gathered in a conference center here on Monday for a public meeting hosted by the state environmental agency regarding Constellation Energy’s proposal to build a new 300-megawatt power plant alongside two existing power plants that border residential neighborhoods.

But it was not only the power plant stirring up controversy. Marathon Digital, a Florida-based cryptocurrency company, operates a 300-megawatt Bitcoin mine on Constellation Energy’s property. For months, residents have complained about the constant noise emanating from thousands of fans cooling Marathon’s computers that run round-the-clock processing Bitcoin transactions.

The unyielding low-frequency sound waves have caused loss of sleep, and residents believe it may also be responsible for a host of unexplained health problems that have arisen since the Bitcoin mine opened in 2022.

At the meeting, a representative from Constellation, two of the company’s environmental consultants and five officials from the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality responded to questions for about 50 minutes before listening to dozens of official public comments from residents of Granbury and neighboring towns.

“It’s not right. Y’all moved in on top of us. We didn’t move in on y’all,” said Nick Browning, looking directly at the Constellation Energy representatives as he delivered his remarks. For more than 30 years, the 81-year-old has lived about 800 feet from the property where Constellation Energy started building power plants in the early 2000s.

Constellation’s plan is to erect eight new turbines powered by natural gas to generate electricity. The company applied for air permits to release more than 796,000 additional tons of carbon dioxide per year. To sequester that amount of CO2 would require planting nearly 12 million trees and allowing them to grow for 10 years, according to EPA estimates.

The permit also proposes increased emissions at the site for a host of other pollutants, including particulate matter, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds.

By their presence alone, the crowd of largely white elderly and middle-aged Texans — several donning Trump campaign attire — showed that fossil fuel power plants can face opposition from all political stripes, especially when tied up with loud Bitcoin mines. United by concern for how more air emissions coupled with noise pollution could impact their health, the community also expressed mistrust in the process itself, believing that the meeting was for show, and the permits will be approved.

“What I’m hearing,” said Jim Brown of Granbury, “is as long as the government is OK with it, the public just has to submit.”

[…]

In an effort to bolster grid reliability, the Texas Legislature passed a loan program, the Texas Energy Fund, designed to help more gas-fired power plants come online.

Voters approved the program in a statewide election in 2023, and last month, the Constellation Energy expansion, known as Wolf Hollow III, was among more than a dozen selected projects that could receive taxpayer-funded loans if agreements are finalized.

In a statement, Constellation Energy said that the power from its new addition “would be prohibited from directly serving industrial load,” such as Bitcoin. The company said it is “sensitive” to noise concerns, and that currently, no expansions of Bitcoin mining are planned.

But Jackie Sawicky, a founding member of the Texas Coalition Against Cryptomining, told Inside Climate News that even if the new generation does not directly power Bitcoin, Wolf Hollow III would be replacing the energy capacity that Wolf Hollow II has set aside for Bitcoin, since both the mine and the new power plant have a capacity of 300 megawatts.

Sawicky said that the Texas Energy Fund is “another handout” for the fossil fuel industry and by extension the Bitcoin mining companies that she said “ingratiate themselves on our grid.”

Shannon Wolf, a Republican precinct chair for Hood County, where Granbury is located, said at the meeting that she voted for the ballot proposition to create the Texas Energy Fund. But she said she does not support Wolf Hollow III being built in an area “surrounded by ranches and farms and churches and an elementary school.”

“I am worried about what’s going to happen as a result of these pollutants,” Wolf said.

Another point of contention at the public meeting was how often Wolf Hollow III would operate, with the company saying it is designed as a peaking plant that only turns on when required to meet electricity demand. Constellation said the new power plant would be limited to operating only about 40% of the year.

“It’s not really clear who’s going to monitor that,” Adrian Shelley, Texas director for the nonprofit Public Citizen, said at the meeting.

See here and here for some background. I’m hard pressed to think of a worse reason to approve 796,000 additional tons of carbon dioxide per year. If everyone else’s experiences with the TCEQ are any indicator, this will indeed be approved.

This story is from September; I drafted this back then and then didn’t get around to posting it because there’s been so damn much news. I’m trying to clear out anything I have in the drafts that had election valence, so here we go. I’ve said before, Democratic candidates need to be showing up in places like Granbury to express their support for the people who are fighting these pernicious effects of sprawling cryptomining. It doesn’t matter that these are deep red places or that the issues involved are more local than state or federal, the point is to seek out common ground and give those people a reason to see you a little differently. Of course it will be a tough sell, and you shouldn’t expect much, but there’s nothing to lose by doing so. A message along the lines of “we don’t agree on much but on this we are in complete agreement, if you vote for me I will stand with you and will do everything in my power to fight this” at least has a chance of reaching some people and maybe winning a few votes. I don’t see any downside to it.

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Weekend link dump for November 3

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Have you voted yet?

I didn’t think we needed a “Brady Bunch” reunion series, and after reading this I’m glad we didn’t get it.

Drinking coffee may or may not be good or bad for you. Hope that helps.

The lesson I take from this is that you should never click on a Facebook ad. I admit that might be a tad bit overzealous, but only a tiny bit.

How SiriusXM is planning for the retirement of Howard Stern.

“Abortion Is on the Ballot in These 10 States”.

“But here’s the big problem that no one talks about very much: Simple and defensible decisions by pollsters can drastically change the reported margin between Harris and Trump. I’ll show that the margin can change by as much as eight points.”

“If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women, will become collateral damage to your rage.”

RIP, Jeri Taylor, Emmy-nominated scribe, producer, director and showrunner behind Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager.

“See, he wants to show that he’s like Gideon — a defiant hero smashing false idols. But since there weren’t any such false idols lying around — or, rather, none of the sort that he would recognize as such — he had to bring his own. He had to make his own. Jonathan Cahn literally built an altar to the Goddess Ishtar. He made unto himself a graven image.”

“At the very least, we can all agree that if Tony Hinchcliffe did unwittingly tip the election for Kamala, it would be, by far, the funniest thing he’s ever done.”

“More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions [to the Washington Post] by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters.”

“You think it’s nothing to do with you, but people look at you — how you look, how your last name is. They are not going to ask you are you a U.S. citizen or not.”

“Are we finally ready to face the sexual abuse of men and boys?”

RIP, Teri Garr, Oscar-nominated actor and national treasure, known for many great roles in Young Frankenstein, Tootsie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mr. Mom, and Friends. I rarely include videos in these roundups, but:

“Barbara Pierce Bush, the daughter of former President George W. Bush and granddaughter of former President George H.W. Bush, spent part of her weekend in Pennsylvania campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris with just days to go before the 2024 presidential election.”

“After two hours of driving around, I’d used the Turning Point app to identify two dead people, one missing college student, an elderly woman with a protectively hostile son, a closet Democrat, and one Trump supporter who needed no persuasion.”

“It is not sufficient for your campaign to apologize. It is important that you, personally, apologize for these comments.”

RIP, Leon Cooper, Nobel prizewinning physicist who did groundbreaking work on superconductivity and in understanding how memory and the brain work.

RIP, George Chandler, D-Day veteran who served aboard a British motor torpedo boat during the invasion of Normandy.

“Remember, what happens in the booth, stays in the booth. Vote Harris-Walz.”

“Sure, The Borg have been a bit of a problem. Their tendency toward mass assimilation and the stripping of individuality and personal freedom doesn’t exactly jibe with our idea of what makes a great leader. But let’s be honest. Kathryn Janeway hasn’t been perfect.”

“Her life was at risk. Alabama didn’t care.”

“Donald Trump Talked About Fixing McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines. Lina Khan Actually Did.”

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Final November 2024 early voting: Definitely short

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Early voting is done, and I have to say, we didn’t get to where I expected we would:

2024

2020

2016

2008 and 2012

The numbers after eight days of early voting are

Mail = 57,059
In Person = 1,175,901
Total = 1,232,960

I thought we’d get at least 200K votes cast on the last days but instead we got 130,717, of which 127,930 were in person. The early total is not only well short of the 1,435,221 total early votes from 2020, it’s short of the 1,264,811 votes cast in person. We did average 97,992 in person votes per day, which is well above the 70,227 in person day rate from 2020, but those six extra days more than made up for it.

I’m really not sure what to make of this. We need about 420K votes on Tuesday to match the overall turnout from 2020. That feels like a stretch but it isn’t impossible. We had over 400K votes cast on Election Day in 2008 and 2012. I admit that feels like another era, but it still means that about 74% of the vote was cast early. That’s a small uptick from 2016, so not really an outlier. I guess the question is, did the conditions in 2020 – COVID, the extra week of early voting, the push for mail ballots, the convenience of drive-through voting, the urgency of ejecting Trump – mostly change people’s behavior in terms of when and how they voted, or did they also get people out to vote who wouldn’t have voted otherwise and thus maybe aren’t bothering this year?

My gut says it’s more the former than the latter, but I’ve been led astray before. I also don’t have the data on how many old reliable voters there are out there who are waiting for Tuesday. The regular voters who haven’t shown up yet, I expect them to turn out. The rest, I have no idea. Did you vote differently – mail versus in person, early versus Election Day, drive through versus anything else – in 2020 than this year? Let us know about it in the comments. And as the man once said, hold onto your butts.

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Houston re-ups its membership in H-GAC

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

It’s hard not to get really effing discouraged sometimes.

Houston City Council voted 9-4 to renew its membership in the Houston-Galveston Area Council Wednesday after fiery discussions over whether the city’s continued involvement violated the city charter.

Council Members Tarsha Jackson, Abbie Kamin, Edward Pollard and Letitia Plummer voted against renewing the city’s H-GAC membership. Council Members Julian Ramirez, Tiffany D. Thomas and Twila Carter were all absent from the meeting.

H-GAC is the 13-county regional planning body made up of more than 100 Houston-area governments that is responsible for distributing federal funds for major projects that include infrastructure, climate mitigation and workforce development.

Wednesday’s vote to remain part of H-GAC comes after Houstonians in November enthusiastically approved a ballot measure that was meant to give Houston and Harris County “population-proportional” representation on the council, or leave the organization entirely.

Advocates of the measure argued that Houston and Harris County have been shortchanged on funding decisions for flood relief and overruled on major decisions such as the Interstate 45 expansion, despite being home to the majority of the region’s residents.

[…]

City Attorney Arturo Michel said Wednesday that withdrawing from H-GAC was not as simple as Proposition B laid it out to be. A decision not to renew, Arturo argued, would violate state and federal laws that dictate that a region’s largest city must be part of a metropolitan planning organization — in this case, H-GAC’s Transportation Policy Council.

Michael Moritz, an organizer with Fair For Houston, the organization that championed Proposition B, said that while he appreciated the council’s discussion, he was “disappointed” with Michel’s interpretation of the laws.

Michel repeatedly stated that withdrawing from the Transportation Policy Council would require approval from Gov. Greg Abbott and a three-fourths vote from the council’s membership. In actuality, federal transportation code indicates that representatives of 75% of the area’s population — not 75% of the council’s members — must approve a redesignation, a point that Michel himself clarified toward the end of the discussion.

Because Houston makes up more than 25% of the area’s population, the city essentially has veto power over any redesignation agreements, Moritz said. Given that the Transportation Policy Council will have to renegotiate its structure to accommodate new members from Austin County and the Woodlands by 2026, he argued the renewal vote offered a good opportunity for Houston to exercise its leverage.

“The campaign’s position is that the city should not be renewing its membership now, it should be issuing notice to the TPC that the city is in violation of its charter and that it holds leverage over redesignation, and that good faith negotiation is the solution,” Moritz said.

See here for the previous update. Mayor Whimire’s answer for this, which seems to be his answer for a lot of things, is that he’ll go ask his buddies in Austin for help in fixing this, whatever that means. Maybe he can get something done – again, first we need to know what that “something” might be – but my concern here is what it has always been, which is that Greg Abbott and the Republicans in the Lege have no incentive to help Houston out. Why would they? They don’t care about Houston. We’re an unruly and disagreeable force that they want to contain and control.

I have sympathy for CM Sallie Alcorn, who is currently serving as the H-GAC Chair and who would be in a very awkward position if the city had held out. She’s one of the good guys and she’s doing what she can to make things better. The bigger problem here is that now for the second time in less than one year of the Whitmire administration, we are blatantly ignoring the outcome of a clear and decisive election. It was bad enough that Metro under Whitmire’s chosen Chair decided that the 2019 election didn’t happen. Now City Council, minus the four members listed above, has voted to ignore the 2023 election. What do we need to do around here to make an election count?

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John Devine continues to be an ethical quagmire

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

This guy, I swear.

In January 2022, Elvie Kingston’s dementia took a turn for the worse. The 76-year-old millionaire and longtime conservative activist was declared by a doctor to be partially incapacitated, after which she signed legal documents that removed her family’s right to make decisions about her health and finances.

Two years later, those powers remain almost entirely in the hands of a state Supreme Court justice and his wife.

Justice John Devine has said Kingston is essentially family. In public political appearances, he’s described their relationship as loving — like mother and son — and said he and others helped rescue Kingston “from a really dire situation.”

But legal experts say Devine’s control of Kingston’s trust is a clear violation of Texas ethics rules that prohibit judges from overseeing the trust or estates of non-family.

At the same time, his wife, Nubia, serves as Kingston’s legal guardian. The arrangement gives the Devines broad control over Kingston’s personal, financial and medical decisions — despite objections from Kingston’s niece and three of her friends, who say she was once close with the Devines but, in the years before her mental health declined, made it clear that she didn’t like or trust them.

“She didn’t want anything to do with them,” said Dorothea Hosmer, who said she has been Kingston’s close friend for 25 years. “So when I found out John Devine basically has control of her, I was dumbfounded.”

[…]

In August 2022, Kingston’s niece, Michelle Hartman, filed a complaint against John Devine with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, accusing him of flagrantly violating the judicial ethics code and using her aunt’s trust for his own financial benefit. The commission declined to comment on the complaint or confirm any related investigation.

In court filings, however, Nubia Devine accused Hartman of trying to exploit her aunt’s finances. She said, under Hartman’s watch, Kingston was living in squalid conditions that posed an “imminent danger” to her health and necessitated that Nubia Devine step in.

John Devine said through an attorney that he has fully complied with all disclosure requirements as set out in the trust and under Texas law. Nubia Devine and her attorney did not respond to requests for interviews or a detailed list of questions.

A spokesperson for the Texas Supreme Court said “the court is aware of the claims involving Justice Devine and has no comment on the matter.” The court did not respond to a follow-up question about whether any exemption was granted to Devine that would allow him to continue serving in that role.

The Texas Code of Judicial Conduct states that “a judge shall not serve as executor, administrator or other personal representative, trustee, guardian, attorney in fact or other fiduciary, except for the estate, trust or person of a member of the judge’s family, and then only if such service will not interfere with the proper performance of judicial duties.”

Devine has for years faced questions about his ethics as a judge. He is one of three Republicans on the all-GOP Supreme Court who is up for reelection this year, running against Harris County District Court Judge Christine Weems.

Earlier this year, Devine was confronted by a private media firm working for his GOP primary opponent about his relationship with Kingston. He denied that he was violating ethics rules because they considered each other family. “She’s held me out to be her son for 30 years,” he said, according to a video of the exchange.

Legal and judicial ethics experts disagree. “The rules are pretty clear,” said Heather Zirke, director of the Miller Becker Center for Professional Responsibility at the University of Akron School of Law. “A judge can serve in that capacity for their own family. But serving as a trustee or administrator for a non-family member still creates the potential for a conflict of interest and serving as a trustee or administrator for a non-family member is prohibited by the Code of Judicial Conduct.”

There’s also the Pressler matter, which the story touches on later, his utter lack of objectivity, his focrd birth fanaticism, and so on. There were already plenty of reasons to vote the guy out. But if you needed one more, there you go.

UPDATE: Still want one more reason to vote for Christine Weems in her race against John Devine? OK, here you go.

Christine Weems, a six-year district court judge in Harris County running for Texas Supreme Court Justice John Devine’s seat, has been endorsed by every major Texas newspaper. But the only thing people want to know about her is her cameo in the comedy cult classic “Office Space.”

Aside from her 24-year passion for law, Weems is a self-proclaimed theater lover and even runs her own theater company with other law professionals in Houston. In fact, her penchant for acting is just as long as her law career. Her side acting gig first started when she submitted her picture on a lark to become an extra on a little movie that was filming in Austin the summer between her first and second year of law school.

That movie happened to be “Office Space” a satirical film about the work life of a group of weary individuals working in a software company in the late ’90s, written and directed by Mike Judge, of Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill fame.

“I joke about how when I was at the polls in 2018 and 2022 campaigning [for district judge] and I would tell people, ‘Hey, Christine Weems for the 281st Civil District Court,’ they would keep walking and the second I yelled I was in ‘Office Space,’ half of them would turn around and come back to me,” Weems told Chron.

“I think everybody has this idea of judges, it’s not like we’re not people, but people look at you as a job and not a person,” Weems added. “I mean, I’ve been endorsed by every major newspaper in Texas, the Houston Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, The San Antonio-Express News, but the thing that resonates with everybody was that I was in “Office Space.'”

Scroll down to see a still from the movie with her in it. That’s awesome.

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Nevaeh Crain

Posted on November 2, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

ProPublica said it had two stories of women who died after being unable to get an abortion during a miscarriage. This is the second one.

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.

Hours later, she was dead.

Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency.

But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.

“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University.

Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions, but still, doctors told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients with complications.

In states with abortion bans, such patients are sometimes bounced between hospitals like “hot potatoes,” with health care providers reluctant to participate in treatment that could attract a prosecutor, doctors told ProPublica. In some cases, medical teams are wasting precious time debating legalities and creating documentation, preparing for the possibility that they’ll need to explain their actions to a jury and judge.

Dr. Jodi Abbott, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine, said patients are left wondering: “Am I being sent home because I really am OK? Or am I being sent home because they’re afraid that the solution to what’s going on with my pregnancy would be ending the pregnancy, and they’re not allowed to do that?”

There is a federal law to prevent emergency room doctors from withholding lifesaving care.

Passed nearly four decades ago, it requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients in medical crises. The Biden administration argues this mandate applies even in cases where an abortion might be necessary.

No state has done more to fight this interpretation than Texas, which has warned doctors that its abortion ban supersedes the administration’s guidance on federal law, and that they can face up to 99 years in prison for violating it.

[…]

Crain is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, ProPublica found.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has successfully made his state the only one in the country that isn’t required to follow the Biden administration’s efforts to ensure that emergency departments don’t turn away patients like Crain.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the administration issued guidance on how states with bans should follow the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. The federal law requires hospitals that receive funding through Medicare — which is virtually all of them — to stabilize or transfer anyone who arrives in their emergency rooms. That goes for pregnant patients, the guidance argues, even if that means violating state law and providing an abortion.

Paxton responded by filing a lawsuit in 2022, saying the federal guidance “forces hospitals and doctors to commit crimes,” and was an “attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”

Part of the battle has centered on who is eligible for abortion. The federal EMTALA guidelines apply when the health of the pregnant patient is in “serious jeopardy.” That’s a wider range of circumstances than the Texas abortion restriction, which only makes exceptions for a “risk of death” or “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

The lawsuit worked its way through three layers of federal courts, and each time it was met by judges nominated by former President Donald Trump, whose court appointments were pivotal to overturning Roe v. Wade.

After U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee, quickly sided with Texas, Paxton celebrated the triumph over “left-wing bureaucrats in Washington.”

“The decision last night proves what we knew all along,” Paxton added. “The law is on our side.”

This year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the order in a ruling authored by Kurt D. Engelhardt, another judge nominated by Trump.

The Biden administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, urging the justices to make it clear that some emergency abortions are allowed.

Even amid news of preventable deaths related to abortion bans, the Supreme Court declined to do so last month.

Paxton called this “a major victory” for the state’s abortion ban.

He has also made clear that he will bring charges against physicians for performing abortions if he decides that the cases don’t fall within Texas’ narrow medical exceptions.

Last year, he sent a letter threatening to prosecute a doctor who had received court approval to provide an emergency abortion for a Dallas woman. He insisted that the doctor and her patient had not proven how, precisely, the patient’s condition threatened her life.

Many doctors say this kind of message has encouraged doctors to “punt” patients instead of treating them.

Since the abortion bans went into effect, an OB-GYN at a major hospital in San Antonio has seen an uptick in pregnant patients being sent to them from across Southern Texas, as they suffer from complications that could easily be treated close to home.

The well-resourced hospital is perceived to have more institutional support to provide abortions and miscarriage management, the doctor said. Other providers “are transferring those patients to our centers because, frankly, they don’t want to deal with them.”

See here for the story of Josseli Barnica, the first woman who died during a miscarriage because she wasn’t allowed an abortion that ProPublica wrote about. I skipped the details of Nevaeh Crain’s case in this post because they’re pretty gruesome; take care when you read the rest of the story, as you should. There are lots of people who are and should be held responsible for their deaths, but you have to give a special shoutout to Ken Paxton for really going above and beyond. He sure had a lot to say when the Dobbs ruling was handed down and when the EMTALA ruling that allowed criminal charges to be filed against doctors who would have helped Josseli Barnica or Nevaeh Crain was handed down. He hasn’t had much to say about their deaths – Republicans in general have been resoundingly silent about them . One of the usual forced birth stooges was there later in the story to claim that the anti-abortion law he helped pass was clear and the doctors were wrong, because that’s what they tell themselves. We sure don’t have to believe them. The evidence is right there in front of us.

Oh, and plenty of women have faced criminal scrutiny following a miscarriage since Dobbs. It can get so much worse, and it will if we’re not able to change course.

I’m heartbroken for these women and their families. I’m also furious. And I know there will be more of these stories for as long as this travesty of a law is in effect and the elected officials who put it in place remain in power. You know what to do and why to do it.

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

Paxton takes his fight against the State Fair gun ban back to district court

Posted on November 2, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

As threatened and expected.

Howdy, folks

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton intends to continue challenging the State Fair of Texas’ gun ban, despite the fair ending last week, according to new court filings.

Paxton filed a motion Monday to dismiss his appeal against the court’s decision to block a gun ban by the State Fair of Texas. The Texas Supreme Court ruled in September to deny Paxton’s emergency motion for temporary relief of the ban after the motion was previously denied by the Dallas County District Court and the Fifteenth Court of Appeals.

“Because the State Fair ended on October 20, the State no longer wishes to pursue this appeal from the denial of a temporary injunction,” the filing states.

However, the state intends to continue challenging the ban in trial court, the filing states.

“Texans have a right to lawfully carry and the City of Dallas has no authority to contract their rights away to a private entity,” Paxton said after the Texas Supreme Court denied his appeal in September. “This case is not over. I will continue to fight this on the merits to uphold Texans’ ability to defend themselves, which is protected by State law.”

This gun ban comes one year after a shooting at the State Fair’s food court where three people were injured.

See here for the previous update; Ginger noted this in Friday’s Dispatches. The fight up until now had been over a restraining order – the merits of the case have yet to be adjudicated. That’s what will happen in district court, a full trial before the judge in which a permanent injunction will (or won’t) be issued. You will recall that SCOTx rejected Paxton’s appeal for the temporary order on the highly technical grounds that his argument was total bunk; go back and read that previous post to see why. I have to assume Paxton will amend his argument in response to SCOTx’s gentle feedback, but who knows? This may be another one of those “hi, it’s me, Kenny, asking you to please give me what I want” situations, and who’s to say that will be unsuccessful. We’ll know when SCOTx gets another crack at it.

UPDATE: Here’s his next move.

Three fairgoers have joined Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in suing the State Fair of Texas and the city of Dallas over the fair’s policy banning all firearms from its properties.

Monday’s filing is the latest maneuver from Paxton in an ongoing battle surrounding the State Fair and its gun ban. In September, a day before the event kicked off, the Texas Supreme Court denied Paxton’s request to overturn the policy — stating it has no role to “decide whether the State Fair made a wise decision” — after a Dallas district court judge allowed the gun ban to stand.

Paxton filed the update naming the newest plaintiffs in his ongoing case before the Dallas district court, which is expected to have another hearing next year.

In it, Paxton accuses State Fair and city officials of violating state law that bars most government bodies from prohibiting weapons on their properties. Paxton also says officials violated the constitutional rights to bear arms of fairgoers Maxx Juusola, Tracy Martin, and Alan Crider. They ask for up to $1 million in civil damages and to allow people to carry guns on the fairground.

A million dollars, good grief. Should we expect to see an amicus brief from Doctor Evil? Anyway, there you have it. I don’t think it improves his case any – the city of Dallas is still not involved here – but it will eventually be up to SCOTx and the Lege.

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Compost those pumpkins

Posted on November 2, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

News you can use.

The day after Halloween, the city of Houston will roll out its annual effort to keep pumpkins out of landfills where they would contribute to the production of harmful greenhouse gases.

The city’s Solid Waste Management Department recently announced the return of its pumpkin composting drop-off program Nov. 1-Dec. 6.

This is the fourth year the city has implemented the collection effort as more locations and extended hours have been added, according to a news release.

The program is an effort to cut down on waste after the jack-o-lantern-styled accoutrements from decorative experiments, the emptied shells from baking or the retired gourds from festivals and pumpkin patches fall out of season.

Used up pumpkins and the accompanying seeds and pulp usually end up in the trash in a landfill where it can become a toxic threat to the environment, said Kay McKeen, the executive director and founder of SCARCE, an Illinois-based environmental education organization that started its own Pumpkin Smash events, which collected residents’ expired pumpkins for compost.

The goal of programs like the Pumpkin Smash, held in November, is to educate people about the importance of composting, McKeen said.

[…]

In 2023 the Houston program collected and composted more than 16,000 pounds of pumpkins and with more locations and longer hours of operation, the city is hoping to create more awareness of its importance.

Mark Wilfalk, director of the city’s solid waste management department, said the city hopes to pursue additional funding to build on and expand composting initiatives.

All pumpkin waste can be dropped at the following locations:

Reuse Warehouse, 9003 N. Main St., Houston, Tuesday – Friday 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. (open every 2nd and 4th Saturday of the month from 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.)

Westpark Recycling Center, 5900 Westpark, Houston, Monday – Saturday 8 a.m.-5 p.m.

See here for some background, here for more on the city’s program, and here for more on SCARCE, which includes a nice explainer of why you want to keep pumpkins out of the landfills. You might find some other local efforts for this – there’s a house in my neighborhood that collects post-Halloween pumpkins for composting as well, they’re already advertising for it. The pumpkins also make pretty good feed for various types of livestock, as I understand it. Point being, as with your Christmas tree, you have far better options than throwing them in the trash. Please take advantage of them.

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November 2024 early voting Day Eleven: One more day

Posted on November 1, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Hard to believe, it seems like this election has been going on since the late 90s, but we have one day of early voting to go. Your early voting results through Thursday, Day Eleven:

2024

2020

2016

2008 and 2012

The numbers after eight days of early voting are

Mail = 54,272
In Person = 1,047,351
Total = 1,101,623

A small uptick from Wednesday but still less than 90K total. We’re going to need over 300K votes today to match the early vote total from 2020. I do think we’ll get a bigger Election Day turnout than we got in 2020, if only because it’s hard to imagine getting a smaller share of the vote on Election Day. Between tomorrow and Tuesday we’ll need about a half million votes to match the final tally from 2020, and we’ll need more than that to equal turnout as a percentage of registered voters. We’ll see what today brings. Anyone out there who still hasn’t voted yet? I voted on Wednesday.

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Is this the year Tarrant County finally goes blue?

Posted on November 1, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Maybe.

“Tarrant County is the 15th-largest county in the country, so it should get a lot of attention. And it’s the third-largest county in Texas, so it makes sense that there would be a lot of focus there,” said Mark Hand, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. “The reason there is and should be so much focus on Tarrant County is that it’s one of the very few large counties where Republicans have held power for a long time, and that’s now very much contested.”

In 2020, Tarrant voters narrowly supported President Joe Biden over incumbent Trump, turning the county blue by just over 1,800 votes. Biden is the second Democratic presidential candidate to win the county following Lyndon B. Johnson’s victory in 1964. Former Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke also won the county in 2018, beating Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

Meanwhile, all countywide positions continue to be held by Republicans.

As Election Day approaches, voters, candidates and political experts alike are wondering: Will Tarrant swing back to red or continue trending toward blue? Is the future of Tarrant County purple?

James Riddlesperger, a political science professor at Texas Christian University, said there’s reason for Democrats to think they might be more competitive in Tarrant County than ever before.

“Certainly, the numbers over the last several election cycles show that Tarrant County is narrowing in its gap between Republicans and Democrats,” Riddlesperger said. “But, on the other hand, all things being equal, you would have to say that the Republicans have a fairly significant advantage in Tarrant County simply because of the kind of voting habits of Tarrant County over the last third of a century, where Republicans have been so firmly in charge.”

Riddlesperger said a variety of factors could influence whether Tarrant County tilts blue again at the top of the ticket this election cycle — or not.

Voting patterns can be hard to change, Riddlesperger said. And the history of Republican support in Tarrant has positioned the party’s candidates for success thanks to greater political experience, resources and favor, he added.

“Those are some of the things that are kind of stubbornly holding on in Tarrant County,” Riddlesperger said. “The only thing we know for sure is that Tarrant, like all counties, will change over time, but you can’t really predict which direction it will change.”

The political landscape looks different than it did in 2020, he noted. Four years ago, one of the top issues on voters’ minds was COVID-19, and many people were troubled by Trump’s response to the pandemic. With the current election, top issues include reproductive health, changing perceptions of the economy, and the Israel-Hamas war.

Riddlesperger said changing voter demographics could also lead to new voting patterns in Tarrant. As older voters die, young voters of newer generations replace them, he said.

“The electorate in Tarrant County isn’t the same as four years ago. We’ve had a lot of migration in Tarrant County,” Riddlesperger said. “It’s growing rapidly, so we’re going to have more voters, and some of those new voters are not going to be as steeped in the history of Tarrant County as the voters who were four years ago.”

There’s a table in this story that shows how up until 2016, Tarrant County was an eerily accurate predictor of what percentage of the vote the statewide candidates would get. Beto overperformed by a little more than a point in 2018, then Biden in 2020 and Beto again in 2022 outperformed by more than that in Tarrant, carrying the county and 2018 and 2020 but falling short in 2022. I covered all of that here. What this basically means is that Tarrant, like Harris and pretty much all of the big urban counties, is now more Democratic than the state as a whole is. And what that means is that whether Tarrant goes blue, either at the top of the ticket or all the way down, is at least partly a function of how Dems are doing overall. If this trend continues and if statewide Dems are consistently getting 45-46%, then I think there’s a decent chance some Democratic candidates for county office could break through.

I don’t know what the odds are, and I don’t know if the hard-right turn of the Tarrant GOP, exemplified by its County Judge and Sheriff and especially its noxious Republican Party Chair, will help or hinder that trend. As is the case with Harris, much of Tarrant’s county government is up for election in 2026, so continuing that trend and making a bigger push to win statewide would be a big help. It’s not just the symbolic value, it’s the removal of power from some bad actors, and also potentially putting a significant number of legislative seats in play. I’ve said before, the margin of partisan advantage that Tarrant Republicans get in their State Rep districts look a lot like what Dallas Republicans were getting in the 2010s, and we know where that ended up when Dallas County finally got too blue to sustain them. Dems don’t have a path to taking over the Lege without taking a big part of Tarrant County with them.

So yeah, outside of the Harris County-involved races and the State Rep districts of interest, I’ll be keeping an eye on Tarrant County. How Dems do there matters, for this election and the next.

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Dispatches from Dallas, November 1 edition

Posted on November 1, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth: more on the Roberson case; election updates and the HERO amendments; the latest on Crystal Mason; the new Dallas police monitor; updates on the Marvin Nichols reservoir and the GAF shingle plant; more from the nuns in Arlington, who are maybe not nuns any more; the War on Christmas comes to. or maybe for, Neiman Marcus; a local JFK tour that’s longer and more expensive than I expected; where to get your OG Lu-Ann Platter fix in the Metroplex; and more.

The mister and I voted this week. We had to get up and be in line at about 7 AM to get in and out quickly. We’d planned to vote Friday on the way out of town to the Texas Renaissance Festival (we had a great time) but the line was over an hour long. Early morning was the only time the election judges were seeing short lines. We were both in and through the line in under half an hour even with the Dallas ballot, which isn’t as long as the Houston ballot but wasn’t short either.

This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Apple’s shoegaze and dreampop essentials, which seemed right for Halloween, which is when I’m writing this post.

I know the biggest story this week is really the upcoming election, but I’m stuck on the role that the Robert Roberson case is playing in Texas politics. I said last week that I was really glad that Jeff Leach was interfering in the trial, but I didn’t know he’d also asked the judge to consider a new trial and that the request was an ethics violation. I still appreciate Leach acting on a matter of conscience (and hope the State Bar treats him accordingly) but I’m not enjoying watching Ken Paxton question Leach’s, or well, anybody’s ethics and ask Leach to resign, a standard Paxton won’t live up to in his own cases. Also I was sad to read that the maternal family of Roberson’s child still wants him executed.

Last but not least, it turns out, unsurprisingly, that the allegations about sexual abuse and some other matters brought up in Paxton’s brief about the Roberson case weren’t in the actual court records. This is because they weren’t part of the prosecution’s case but were merely mentioned in the prosecution’s notes. Pretty sure Paxton doesn’t consider accusing Roberson of molesting a baby without sufficient evidence to bring it to trial an ethical lapse.

In other news, starting with next week’s election:

  • The Dallas Observer got the editor of SMU’s student paper to write up her observations about voting and the election at SMU. KERA, meanwhile, talked to Black women voters in South Dallas about their concerns in the 2024 election.
  • Today I learned from this Texas Tribune piece that even though it’s legal for folks convicted of misdemeanors to vote, the only counties that help prisoners vote are Dallas County and Harris County.
  • Crystal Mason has filed an appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeals over her conviction for illegal voting. Click through to read the Tarrant County DA’s mealymouthed statement on the case and if you’re in Tarrant County, remember to vote against him when he’s on the ballot.
  • The Texas Tribune has fundraising numbers for Texas elections and I noted the numbers for a couple of local races: Rep. Angie Chen Button raised $1.6 million last month, which was a lot more than challenger Averie Bishop; my state rep, Rep. Morgan Meyer, raised $1.5 million, some of which I have seen in the form of multiple flyers; and Democratic Rep. Mihaela Plesa of Dallas hauled in ten times as much money as her Republican challenger, though the Tribune gave no figures at all in this race.
  • Lots of talk about what I have taken to calling the STUpid amendments (not my coinage, but amusing nonetheless), aka the HERO amendments, aka Monty Bennett wanting to ruin Dallas. D Magazine frames their piece around the Dallas Regional Chamber debate between the HERO folks and former city officials and the things the HERO team doesn’t say. The DMN is all about the unintended consequences of the amendments, which the D Magazine folks think is an unwarranted assumption of good faith on the part of Dallas HERO. The DMN also has five things to know, one of their many articles breaking down the big issues into bite sized questions and answers.
  • KERA has a piece on the Judicial Fairness Political Action Committee, which is nominally going after judges who grant bail too often but actually only endorses business-friendly appellate judges. Who’s giving the money behind the PAC? Ken Fisher, a billionaire Trump supporter; Ross Perot, Jr.; ConocoPhillips; Jeffery Hildebrand, an O&G billionaire; and Phillip Huffines, twin brother of right-wing Republican Don Huffines.
  • Quinn Yeager’s Substack has a guide to intermediate state appellate courts. Scroll down to find out about the relevant courts in Texas and what will be on your ballot.
  • Interested in early voting numbers in north Texas? The Dallas Observer has some early numbers for Dallas County and the Fort Worth Report covers similar turf for Tarrant County.
  • KERA reports on voting machine issues in North Texas. The expert verdict is that it was mechanical problems, not election interference.
  • If you’re in Tarrant County and want to track your vote, the Star-Telegram has you covered.
  • Sam Eppler, the Democrat who’s running to unseat my congresscritter, Beth van Duyne, in CD-24 reports sign stealing and dog-poop leaving on his supporters’ lawns. I can’t speak to the dog poop on the porch, but the local Facebook groups are full of reports of Democratic signs being stolen or defaced (with some photos of the latter), so I believe that much.
  • If my reports do not convince you that Tarrant County GOP Chair Bo French is an asshole, click through and scroll down to see what he’s saying about Democrats on Xitter. Using “gay” as a slur and the slur that starts with r for folks with intellectual disabilities is not cool.
  • The suburb of Keller has a mayor who was born in Puerto Rico but he still supports Trump even after what that DMN article I’m linking called a “raucous” rally with the bigoted comic. The Star-Telegram also covers the mayor’s Xitter post. I’m sure the leopards won’t eat his face when the time comes. Meanwhile, the DMN has a piece on young Latino political activists who are trying to turn out Latino voters in this election.
  • In the spring elections, a lot of people were very mad because talking about education policy made school boards look like they were pro-Democrat. Turns out what’s bad for Democratic geese is also bad for Republican ganders: the board president of Mansfield ISD endorsed a Republican candidate for the State House and is now in hot water because it might appear that the board is illegally supporting him.
  • It’s not too early to talk about the May elections for 2025. Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker has confirmed she’s running for her third term.
  • Two of our local congressfolks have questions for the medical examiners in Dallas and Tarrant counties following on from the UNT Health Science Center body-selling scandal. I hope Marc Veasey and Jasmine Crockett get some answers on how it all happened from the counties’ side and how to keep it from happening again.
  • The DMN has an interview with/profile of Michele Andre, Dallas’ new police monitor. It all sounds good in theory, but given how badly the previous police monitor did before she was pushed out, as alluded to in the piece, I’m not really confident Andre will be able to significantly improve police conduct or community relationships.
  • DISD is considering converting a historic Black elementary school in South Dallas whose campus closed in 2013 into a proposed $50 million career institute. I wish South Dallas good luck in obtaining and enjoying this school.
  • Plano ISD is closing four schools and will be selling three campuses: two elementary and one middle school. This is part of the ongoing story of demographics and declining enrollment in public schools in north Texas.
  • A side effect I hadn’t considered to the DEI ban for Texas universities: Tarrant College cancelled a Hispanic Heritage Month event because it might break the law.
  • Parkland Health, the public health system that operates Parkland Hospital here in Dallas, has had a data breach that may affect up to 6,500 Texans.
  • This report on Fort Worth’s annexation of some land in Parker County interested me because it reported that the fiscal impact for the first five years would be negative as infrastructure is built out. I’d be interested to learn when the tax increases would outpace the infrastructure increases, but the article doesn’t tell me that.
  • The city of Dallas does annual audits; next year’s audit will focus on, among other things, the failure of Dallas’ lead abatement program, the city’s zoning application process, and the creation of affordable housing.
  • Two items around north Texas water infrastructure came up this week. First, the city of Dallas broke ground on a new pumping station on the Trinity River that should reduce flooding in Dallas. Second, on Wednesday afternoon there was a public meeting about the upcoming Marvin Nichols reservoir in east Texas that saw more than 200 attendees and 38 public speakers, most of whom were against Marvin Nichols. The Star-Telegram also has the story.
  • The latest on the GAF shingle plant in west Dallas is that residents protested the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s upcoming renewal of the plant’s air permit at a public meeting last week. The meeting probably won’t have any effect on the renewal process, unfortunately, but at least they got to say their piece. Meanwhile, protestors who tried to block the road to the plant on Earth Day as an act of civil disobedience were found guilty of obstructing the roadway and fined $97 each. They plan to appeal.
  • The Arlington nun story has taken a turn this week. When last we left the nuns, they had rejected a Papal order to put themselves under the governance of Mother Marie of the Incarnation and instead affiliated themselves with the Society of Saint Pius X, a group that was so traditionalist Catholic that they were in schism with the Vatican for a while. The Vatican and Mother Marie have had enough, though, and they dismissed the women from monastic life over their refusal to follow Mother Marie’s directives. Part of the offense is that the nuns have put the property of the monastery in the hands of a foundation, which Mother Marie referred to as expropriating Church property. Her comments may be grounds for a civil lawsuit. The ongoing interplay of lay and canon law is absolutely fascinating to me. The DMN and the Star-Telegram also have the story.
  • The founding pastor of Koinonia Church in Arlington was arrested in July on sexual assault charges, and had been replaced by an interim pastor until this week. Now Ronnie Goines is back preaching and the interim pastor has resigned by request.
  • According to a volleyball coach and athletic coordinator for a Fort Worth ISD high school, Fort Worth City Council member Elizabeth Beck bullied them and threatened their jobs if they didn’t put her daughter on the volleyball team. It looks like Beck will be up for election again in May 2025, so Fort Worth voters may need to look into this case further and keep it in mind when voting next spring.
  • The War on Christmas is coming for Neiman Marcus, which is now calling its fantasy gift catalog the Holiday Book instead of the Christmas Book. I find this particularly amusing since Stanley Marcus, the name brand founder and long-time leader of the store, was Jewish by heritage and religious practice.
  • This week I learned that Cutting Edge Haunted House in Fort Worth is the spookiest haunted house in America according to USA Today.
  • You may remember that PETA made some allegations about animal abuse at the SeaQuest aquarium in Ridgmar Mall in Fort Worth. The aquarium has now shut down after police and federal agency inquiries.
  • KERA has a story on historic preservation in Dallas. I didn’t know that the Texas Theater, which is where we go for repertory films and live score silent films, played a role in the JFK assassination saga.
  • Restaurant Beatrice, a Cajun restaurant in Oak Cliff that the mister and I like, is the first restaurant in Texas to earn a B corp certification for environmental performance, accountability and transparency. I’m delighted for them and hoping to go back soon.
  • This is a lovely tribute to the retiring head of the Nasher Sculpture Center by a friend and fellow artist.
  • I went to Medieval Times, the cheesy faux-medieval entertainment with food that has an outpost in Dallas, recently. So I was really interested to learn about how falconry saved the falconer at Medieval Times. I’m not an expert by any means, but I’ve been watching people fly birds at fairs and festivals around the country for three decades now, and I was impressed by the Medieval Times’ falconer’s control and artistry. Now I’m even more impressed.
  • Speaking of JFK, as we were earlier, a Texas Monthly writer did the $800, 8-hour JFK tour on offer by a local obsessive. I’ve been to the Book Depository museum but I don’t need that much JFK, so I’m glad someone else did it and I could read about it.
  • Last, but not least, for our old skool Texans: if you want to eat a Lu-Ann platter just like the good old days, there’s a location on I-820 in Fort Worth where you can do exactly that.
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November 2024 early voting Day Ten: Slower so far than I expected

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We’ve got two days of EV remaining. Your early voting results through Wednesday, Day Ten:

2024

2020

2016

2008 and 2012

The numbers after eight days of early voting are

Mail = 51,477
In Person = 961,273
Total = 1,012,750

The in person totals this week have been 97K, 92K, and 85K, in that order. Not the way I expected. Still higher than any day after Week 1 in 2020, but the daily in person average is now at 96K, below where I would have expected. The daily average in 2020 was 70K, but there were those six extra days of voting. At this point I think we’re likely to fall short of the 1.4 million early votes that I had originally expected, but it could still happen if Friday is robust. That’s eminently possible, but we’ll see what today brings first. If you want some more, see Lone Star Left‘s summary so far, and the San Antonio Report on why some people think a blue Texas goes through Bexar County.

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Josseli Barnica

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Remember her name.

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.

Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.

ProPublica is telling these women’s stories this week, starting with Barnica’s. Her death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”

The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said “our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Barnica’s care.

Like all states, Texas has a committee of maternal health experts who review such deaths to recommend ways to prevent them, but the committee’s reports on individual cases are not public and members said they have not finished examining cases from 2021, the year Barnica died.

ProPublica is working to fill gaps in knowledge about the consequences of abortion bans. Reporters scoured death data, flagging Barnica’s case for its concerning cause of death: “sepsis” involving “products of conception.” We tracked down her family, obtained autopsy and hospital records and enlisted a range of experts to review a summary of her care that ProPublica created in consultation with two doctors.

Among those experts were more than a dozen OB-GYNs and maternal-fetal medicine specialists from across the country, including researchers at prestigious institutions, doctors who regularly handle miscarriages and experts who have served on state maternal mortality review committees or held posts at national professional medical organizations.

After reviewing the four-page summary, which included the timeline of care noted in hospital records, all agreed that requiring Barnica to wait to deliver until after there was no detectable fetal heartbeat violated professional medical standards because it could allow time for an aggressive infection to take hold. They said there was a good chance she would have survived if she was offered an intervention earlier.

“If this was Massachusetts or Ohio, she would have had that delivery within a couple hours,” said Dr. Susan Mann, a national patient safety expert in obstetric care who teaches at Harvard University.

Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion.

But in the wake of deaths related to abortion access in the United States, leaders who support restricting the right have not called for any reforms.

[…]

Amid the deluge of evidence of the harm, including research suggesting Texas’ legislation has increased infant and maternal deaths, some of the ban’s most prominent supporters have muted their public enthusiasm for it. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who once championed the fall of Roe v. Wade and said, “Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness,” is now avoiding the topic amid a battle to keep his seat. And Gov. Greg Abbott, who said early last year that “we promised we would protect the life of every child with a heartbeat, and we did,” has not made similar statements since.

Both declined to comment to ProPublica, as did state Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose commitment to the ban remains steadfast as he fights for access to the out-of-state medical records of women who travel for abortions. Earlier this month, as the nation grappled with the first reported, preventable deaths related to abortion access, Paxton celebrated a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that allowed Texas to ignore federal guidance requiring doctors to provide abortions that are needed to stabilize emergency patients.

“This is a major victory,” Paxton said.

When SB8, the vigilante bounty hunter law, passed in 2021, I said it was just a matter of time before some nice white suburban lady who already had kids died as a result of this. Josseli Barnica isn’t white, but she fits otherwise. And as far as that part goes, we saw what happened with Kate Cox and Amanda Zurawski, and we see Ken Paxton twirling his mustache as he fought off EMTALA on the grounds that requiring hospitals to save these women’s lives would be a crime in Texas.

I don’t know what more to tell you, so I’ll turn it over to Jessica Valenti.

I am heartbroken, but more than that I am just so angry. I am angry that this young beautiful woman is dead. I am angry that her now-4 year-old daughter will grow up without a mother. I am angry that we have to live in a country where our lives are treated as disposable. And I am really, truly furious about what I know will come next.

Anti-abortion groups will rush to send out tweets and press releases with phony condolences, insisting that Texas’ law allows life-saving care. They will blame doctors for not acting quickly enough, the hospital for not giving providers clear enough guidance—even pro-choicers for ‘scaring’ doctors out of treating patients. Anything to shirk blame and to wash the blood off their hands.

We cannot let that happen.

When Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America comes out with a statement promising that abortion bans protect women, I want you to remember that they lobbied against exceptions for women’s lives. When the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) claims that Josseli should have been given care, remember that the ‘care’ they’re referring to isn’t an abortion—but a forced c-section or vaginal labor. That’s because these groups believe abortion is never necessary to save a person’s life. They use language and push for laws accordingly.

Most of all, I want us to remember—and for all Americans to know—that these organizations and legislators knew this would happen. They knew women would suffer and die as a result of their laws and decided to pass them anyway. There is no press release or talking point that can paper over that truth: they decided our deaths were an acceptable trade-off for a political win.

When I say that the anti-abortion movement planned for deaths like Josseli’s, I mean it literally. In October 2022, I warned that conservatives had launched a preemptive messaging campaign to blame doctors and abortion rights activists for women’s deaths. Today, two full years later, we’re watching Republicans insist that it’s not bans endangering women, but pro-choice “misinformation” about the laws.

They didn’t just plan to avoid responsibility for our deaths, though—they planned to cover them up.

There is a reason that Republicans are disbanding maternal mortality review committees, or stacking them with anti-abortion activists. In Texas, where Josseli was killed, Republicans put a well-known extremist on the state’s maternal death board just a few months ago: Ingrid Skop has made a career out of arguing that maternal mortality statistics can’t be trusted and that abortion bans won’t lead to maternal deaths.

This comes at the same time that well-funded anti-abortion groups are sowing distrust in maternal mortality statistics across the country, laying the groundwork to argue that the inevitable spike in post-Roe maternal deaths is just bad data.

There’s more, both of the original story and of Jessica’s post, so read them both. I wish I had something simple and effective to say here, but it’s the same thing I’ve been saying all along: Nothing will change until we start winning more elections, and in particular till some of the people imposing this on us start losing them as a result of this. We’re working on it for this year, and we’ll have much more to do in 2026. The Conversation has a longer look at how these laws affect doctors around the country, and The Slacktivist has more.

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Jolt Initiative gets a reprieve from Paxton harassment

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Good news for now.

Still a crook any way you look

A nonprofit focused on increasing Latinos’ civic participation can continue its work without fear of being shut down by the state after a federal judge granted a stay on Oct. 24 in a lawsuit the group filed against Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The move came after both sides agreed to put the case on pause while the courts resolve a separate lawsuit involving the tool Paxton’s office had used to investigate Jolt, the Latino engagement nonprofit. Last month, a federal judge ruled in a case involving Spirit Aerosystems that the “request to examine” tools the attorney general’s office had used to investigate businesses and nonprofits, including Jolt, was unconstitutional.

Jolt had said in its initial request for a temporary restraining order that Paxton’s investigation would irreparably harm the organization and its associates by disclosing personal information and potentially placing its workers, volunteers and associates in harm’s way.

“If Jolt were forced to disclose confidential information to the Attorney General, it would be considered a betrayal of the trust that Jolt has earned from the Texas Latino community,” the organization’s lawyer, Mimi Marziani, wrote in the lawsuit. “It would make it more difficult for Jolt to associate with others and carry out its mission effectively, and it would likely put Jolt employees and others associated with the organization in danger.”

See here and here for some background. It seems likely to me that Spirit Aerosystems will win its case based on the initial ruling, but I Am Not A Lawyer and I don’t know what else is at stake here. This agreement may also cover the inevitable appeals that will take place after there’s a final ruling, which if true means we’re probably years out from a resolution. All that is fine by me, and I assume fine by the Jolt Initiative. The Star-Telegram has more.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of October 28

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance is here to ask you again if you have voted as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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“Scandal of epic proportions” in the bankruptcy courts

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

This story is bonkers.

Usually confident to the point of coming across self-righteous, Houston Bankruptcy Judge David Jones’ voice quivered as he stated repeatedly, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what is going to happen next. I just don’t know.”

The chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit had just published notice that it was investigating possible misconduct by Judge Jones over allegations that he had been involved in a multi-year secret romance with a former bankruptcy partner, Elizabeth Freeman, at Jackson Walker. The Dallas-based firm had been paid more than $20 million — fees often approved by Judge Jones — for its role in dozens of high-profile bankruptcies in which Jones served as judge or mediator.

“I’m going to send a letter tomorrow announcing that I am resigning,” Jones told The Texas Lawbook in an interview one year ago Tuesday. “I didn’t think my personal life was anyone’s business. We never discussed cases. It never impacted a single decision I made. But I guess I have to resign. I have no idea what I am going to do next.”

Jones, who handled more large corporate bankruptcies from 2019 to 2023 — including North Texas-based companies such as Neiman Marcus and J.C. Penney — than any other judge in the U.S., officially resigned Oct. 15, 2023. The 365 days since have been pure chaos in the Houston bankruptcy courts, which is one of the three busiest courts in the nation for business bankruptcies.

“The whole thing is a mess, a complete fiasco,” said Royal Furgeson, the former dean at the University of North Texas at Dallas College of Law. “The stress that Judge Jones and this situation has created for his fellow judges and for the lawyers and law firms is tremendous. The future of some excellent Texas lawyers and law firms is at risk. And it all could have been easily prevented by some simple disclosures and recusals.”

The fallout during the past 12 months has been intense, including:

  • The U.S. Trustee, the federal watchdog over bankruptcy proceedings, is seeking to force Jackson Walker to return between $18 million to $22 million in legal fees it was paid in 33 different bankruptcy cases involving Freeman in which Jones was either the judge or the mediator. The case is scheduled to go to trial Dec. 16.
  • The U.S. Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into the matter, ordering many of the lawyers and Houston federal court officials involved to preserve their records. As a result, Jones took the Fifth
    Amendment against self-incrimination when asked about his relationship with Freeman during a deposition earlier this month.
  • Two federal lawsuits brought by creditors in cases handled by Judge Jones and that involved Freeman accuse the judge, Freeman, Jackson Walker and the law firm Kirkland & Ellis of a conspiracy to favor debtors at the expense of creditors and to funnel tens of millions of dollars in legal fees to the defendants.
  • Two investment firms, Fidelity and Apollo Global Management, filed court documents three months ago in Sanchez Energy’s bankruptcy claiming they would not have accepted a 2020 settlement agreement pushed by Judge Jones, who mediated the dispute in which Freeman was a lawyer for the debtor, Sanchez, which is now called Mesquite Energy. The two lenders want to participate in the claw back of fees against Jackson Walker.
  • And just three weeks ago, Houston Bankruptcy Judge Marvin Isgur, whom Jones has described as his mentor and best friend, referred Jackson Walker to a federal district judge to consider disciplinary action for ethical breaches that Judge Isgur said “defiled the very temple of justice” by not disclosing the relationship between Freeman and Jones years earlier.

“What we have here is a scandal of epic proportions, all brought about by failures to disclose,” Nancy Rapoport, former dean of the University of Houston Law Center and a bankruptcy law expert, wrote in a law review article for Emory University’s Bankruptcy Law Developments Journal. “Judge Jones absolutely should have recused himself from cases involving Ms. Freeman. Ms. Freeman should have disclosed the relationship, and she shouldn’t have appeared in cases assigned to her romantic partner. Jackson Walker should have disclosed the relationship once it became aware of it (and it should have done more than take Ms. Freeman’s word for it that the relationship had ended).”

“It’s hard to avoid the conjecture that the lawyers who should have disclosed chose not to do so at least in part because of the financial and strategic benefits of being employed in those cases,” wrote Rapoport, who is now a law professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Dallas lawyer Randy Johnston, an expert on legal ethics, said that “the facts in this case are devastating.”

“What happened here are almost certainly clear ethical violations and breach of fiduciary duties by the judge, the lawyers and Jackson Walker,” Johnston said. “If I was a Jackson Walker lawyer right now, I would need a change of underwear.”

Multiple efforts to seek comments from Jackson Walker, Judge Jones and Freeman were unsuccessful.

Jones has argued that he has judicial immunity from all legal claims. Jackson Walker has claimed that Freeman lied to them about her relationship with the judge and that it did nothing wrong. Jackson Walker has also argued that if the U.S. Trustee or attorneys in that office knew of the relationship before it was publicly reported and failed to act, it cannot now try to claw back Jackson Walker’s legal fees.

Legal experts say the questions in nearly all of the related cases come down to this: When did the lawyers know about the relationship between Jones and Freeman, and what, if anything, did they do about it?

This is a story for subscribers only, but Ginger is a subscriber and gave me a PDF of it. Some googling pointed me to stories in Bloomberg Law and Reuters with more details if you want to know more. This story was also reported in Texas Lawbook, but it too requires a subscription.

Anyway, you get the basic outline, and the rest is that there’s a big mess to clean up, the parties responsible for the mess don’t want to be held responsible for it, and so on. I’m not sure what shocks me more, that a lack of disclosure of a personal relationship by a judge and a person with lots of business before that judge turned into an ethical quagmire, or that it was possible for the judge in question to be accountable for it. Who even knew that could happen? Maybe we should broaden that idea to include more federal courts. Crazy, I know, but it just might work.

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Once more, with feeling: There was no fraud in the 2022 election

Posted on October 30, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The Chron provides a coda to that accursed election and all of the bullshit that followed.

When Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced in August that she had found no evidence of election rigging during the 2022 midterm elections, it capped nearly two tumultuous years of speculation and finger-pointing from state and local Republican leaders.

For 21 months, Ogg’s office had been investigating claims that local election workers intentionally withheld ballot paper from Republican voters during the November 2022 midterm elections. As the probe continued, a string of lawsuits and state legislation filed over the matter continued to sow doubts about election integrity in the nation’s third-largest county.

But according to interviews with election workers and documents related to the investigation, Ogg’s office and the Texas Rangers – who assisted in the probe – had likely known there was no election tampering for at least a year before Ogg informed the public.

Court records show that by the fall of 2023, the Ranger who led the election-rigging investigation had no suspect and no evidence of such crimes after interviewing more than a dozen witnesses. Meanwhile, legal bills for the election workers under investigation had added up to more than $700,000, all of which the county will pay with taxpayer funds.

Harris County prosecutors presented information related to the matter to a grand jury on Feb. 1 of this year, but they also did not name a suspect or an alleged offense, according to court records. The grand jury’s term ended that day, and six additional months passed before Ogg told the public the investigation was over.

A spokesperson for Ogg, a Democrat who lost her primary election and has only a few weeks left in office, did not respond to multiple requests from the Chronicle to interview her. In the past, Ogg has said that she was simply following state law, but her critics claimed she was instead continuing a pattern of targeting fellow Democrats with whom she disagrees.

Voting rights advocates also said that the drawn-out nature of the investigation ended up bolstering Republicans’ continued efforts to make Texas voting laws among the most restrictive in the nation in the name of election security — and to target Harris County.

“When ballots are being counted, you want it to be swift and accurate,” said Emily Eby French, policy director for the nonprofit Common Cause Texas. “And we should expect the same of investigations into elections. And it is frustrating when that doubt is left open.”

The impact of the lingering doubts in Harris County was profound.

As Ogg’s probe began, nearly two dozen Republican candidates who had lost their local races quickly filed lawsuits contesting the election results, prompting lengthy court battles. State lawmakers also abolished the office in charge of administering local elections, leaving the task to two different locally elected officials rather than a sole appointed one. Election duties are now in the hands of the county clerk’s office, while voter registration is the job of the county tax-assessor collector.

Meanwhile, Republicans criticized Harris County elections administrator Cliff Tatum and his staff for staying largely silent on the problems at the polls in 2022 and declining to testify about them before the Legislature — even though those same workers were under criminal investigation the entire time and were advised by their attorneys to remain silent, according to their legal bills.

Tatum declined to be interviewed for this article, as did numerous other former county election workers.

Ogg’s spokesperson, Joe Stinebaker, would not address why she waited so long to inform the public of her findings. In a statement to the Chronicle, he said that she opened the investigation “to comply with state law.” He also claimed that the probe did in fact confirm “intentional fraud” by one former county election worker, Darryl Blackburn.

However, Stinebaker was actually talking about unrelated misconduct that the Texas Rangers dug up about Blackburn. The Rangers say he lied on his timesheets and stole money from the county while holding a second job in the private sector during his time at the elections office.

Blackburn’s lawyer has called the accusations an “abuse of power” by Ogg’s office and said he is innocent.

Blackburn has been charged with tampering with government documents and theft, which are felonies. He’s not accused of trying to suppress anyone’s vote.

While it remains unclear why Ogg waited so long to announce the outcome of the investigation, a strikingly similar situation that occurred 1,600 miles away in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, offers a contrast to her approach.

On the same day as Harris County’s ballot paper shortage, more than a dozen of the 143 polling stations in Luzerne County also ran out of paper. Republican activists there also claimed that stations in right-leaning areas were disproportionately impacted. And the local district attorney, Republican Sam Sanguedolce, agreed to investigate.

Seven months later, Sanguedolce announced the findings in a lengthy report. The shortages were solely the result of high staff turnover and inexperienced election workers, the report said. In addition – just as the data showed in Harris County – there was no basis for complaints that the paper shortages had been concentrated in Republican neighborhoods.

“This would be about the stupidest way to try to criminally influence an election,” Sanguedolce told a Pennsylvania news outlet.

Ogg would not announce her findings for 14 more months.

See here, here, and here for some background. This is a long quote but there’s a lot more, so go read the rest, if only to infuriate yourself again about how stupid and dishonest this whole experience was. The paper shortage was a screwup, no question. But that’s all that it was, and in the end the effect was minimal. We deserved better.

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Teacher certification cheating ring busted

Posted on October 30, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Yikes.

Three Houston ISD employees are among the five people charged in connection with a scheme to help hundreds of people cheat on state teacher certification tests, Harris County prosecutors said Monday.

Prosecutors said longtime Booker T. Washington High School boys basketball coach Vincent Grayson led a cheating ring in which people typically paid about $2,500 for help fraudulently obtaining a teacher license. As many as 400 people might have illegally obtained a teacher certification in Texas since 2020 through the cheating ring, which netted the organizers about $1 million, prosecutors said.

The scheme involved conspirators taking and administering tests on behalf of aspiring certified teachers, prosecutors said. Investigators believe the hundreds of participants are spread throughout the state, with some likely still in classrooms. The licenses likely helped school employees get promotions, earn higher salaries and keep their teaching jobs, prosecutors said.

“To me, the damage is not just to the education system, which is under great duress right now, but it’s actually to to the families of the children who go to those schools, who trust the government to educate their kids and keep them safe for eight hours a day,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said during a press conference Monday.

Grayson did not immediately respond to a text or phone call from the Houston Landing. His lawyer, Cheryl Irvin, declined to comment, telling the Landing that “I don’t know hardly anything” about the details of the indictment yet.

The arrests come amid a rise in uncertified teachers getting hired in Texas public schools, as fewer people enter the teaching profession through traditional college education programs. Certified teachers must complete a bachelor’s degree, a Texas university education preparation program and a state certification exam.

In a statement Monday, Texas Education Agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky wrote that the department “will review any and all information shared by law enforcement and pursue appropriate action against any educator involved in this scheme.” The State Board of Educator Certification will decide on any punishment, Kobersky said.

You can read on for the details. It’s not hard to understand why such a thing might exist – the motivation is more or less the same as the motivation to hire someone to take your SAT, for one example. This has allegedly been going on for awhile, so I wonder how long it was in operation before it was discovered. I assume there was some amount of time taken for the investigation, but one presumes they would want to shut it down before too many more possibly unqualified teachers benefitted from it. This will be handed off to the next DA, so we’ll see what happens. The Chron has more.

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It’s crawl-out-from-under-a-rock season

Posted on October 30, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

As predictable as the end of Daylight Saving Time around here.

Three Houston-area Republicans have filed a lawsuit alleging that “tens of thousands” of people should be purged from the Harris County voter roll amid a national push to cast doubts on the November election.

Steven Hotze, Joseph Trahan and Caroline Kane are accusing Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Ann Harris Bennett of failing to remove ineligible voters, claiming that the list of Harris County registered voters includes people who are disqualified from voting for a broad range of reasons, including those who have moved out of Harris County, are deceased or are registered at a commercial address where they do not reside, according to court documents.

[…]

Hotze is no stranger to election lawsuits. A federal judge rejected Hotze’s effort in 2020 to toss out 127,000 ballots cast by Harris County voters at drive-thru locations. Hotze is also facing multiple felony charges in connection with an assault related to conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, in which he is accused of conspiring with others to threaten an air conditioning repairman they believed had fake ballots in his vehicle. The man was allegedly held at gunpoint.

The two other plaintiffs are candidates on the November ballot. Trahan is the Republican nominee for Texas State Senate District 15, while Kane is running as the Republican nominee for U.S. House of Representatives District 7.

According to their petition, the plaintiffs are seeking a judicial declaration that Bennett has repeatedly violated the Texas Election Code “due to multiple instances of ill-advised and illegal alterations of election procedures.”

They argue “countless” discrepancies have arisen when comparing the list of Harris County registered voters against the National Change of Address database, a resource that contains records of individuals who have filed a change-of-address with the U.S. Postal Service.

The petition goes on to say those alleged discrepancies could be used in court to toss out election results: “A Court will be unable to ascertain whether these specific voters did or did not cast a legal vote in the specific election that is eventually contested in Harris County.”

The lawsuit was filed on Oct. 18, three days before the start of early voting in Texas.

Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee reacted to the lawsuit in a social media post Monday, telling the plaintiffs: “My office will fight back — see you in court.”

But just last week, Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, put out a news release reassuring voters that Texas elections are secure.

“Texas leads the way when it comes to election security, and I want voters to know our state and county officials are ready for the November election,” Nelson said in a statement.

Hotze is a felon-to-be, the others are non-entities. I guarantee you the lawsuit in question is hot garbage, the sort of thing that would embarrass a first-year law student. The point is to put on a show for the dead-enders. I’m old enough to remember when Hotze was just another moralizing scold, warning anyone who couldn’t get out of earshot about the imminent demise of society at the hands of degenerates and scofflaws. Bigger names, like Bill Bennett, wrote books on the subject. They were right about the threat to our civilization, they were just completely wrong about who the degenerates were. I like to remind myself of that every once in awhile. Anyway, this will be headed for a legal trash can in short order. And hopefully Hotze will be headed for the jail cell he deserves not long after.

UPDATE: This is an excellent point.

The most glaring issue with these non-citizen voting efforts is the timing. If non-citizen voting and voter list maintenance is as big of an issue as Republicans claim — which experts have explained time and time again that it is not — why did Republicans wait so long to address it? The answer, of course, is that there is no real issue with widespread non-citizens voting or voter list maintenance, David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research told TPM. These various efforts are merely attempts to sow seeds of distrust in the election system in case Trump loses next month, he said.

“There’s good reason for suspicion as to why these cases were filed when they were filed,” Becker said, “and that’s knowing that they would almost certainly lose. And that’s because it’s being done more to fuel false claims about an election being stolen that presumably they expect their candidate to lose.”

Justin Levitt, an election law scholar and professor at LMU Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, also pointed out that the fact that the courts have so quickly shut down these programs and dismissed lawsuits challenging voter rolls is simply evidence that the justice system is working as it should.

“This is exactly what you’d expect, that programs that are clearly unlawful that we’re known to be clearly unlawful are getting shut down and shut down quickly,” he said. “Despite the efforts of a few to sow confusion and disorder, the most important thing for the public to know, the most important thing for the voters to know is that the attempts to create chaos aren’t working.”

That story is about how similar efforts have been easily defeated in courts around the country. This one should meet the same fate here.

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November 2024 early voting Day Eight: Second Monday

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We’re in the second and final week of early voting. There are now four days of EV remaining. Your early voting results through Monday, Day Eight:

2024

2020

2016

2008 and 2012

The numbers after eight days of early voting are

Mail = 45,916
In Person = 783,850
Total = 829,766

As I thought, the second Monday of 2024, with 96,919 in person votes, exceeded the second and third Mondays of 2020 (74,827 and 52,175 in person votes, though the second Monday in 2020 also had 17K mail ballots arrive) and the second Monday of 2016 (69,323). The second Monday totals were less than any day in Week 1 for 2020 and for 2016 other than the first Monday. That was also true for 2024, but the dropoff was obviously smaller than it was in 2020. We’re still averaging a bit more than 110K in person votes for each of the six weekdays in 2024, compared to a bit less than 106K for the first five weekdays (remember that initial four-day week) in 2020. That gap will widen as we go. I think Tuesday and Wednesday will be similar to Monday, with an uptick on Thursday and a bigger step up on Friday. That’s a typical pattern, anyway. Have you voted yet?

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Why are we subsidizing privatized HOA trash collection?

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Mayor Whitmire says he’s on the lookout for waste in the budget. May I suggest he look here?

Mayor John Whitmire

Houston has subsidized the private trash collection of some affluent neighborhoods for almost 40 years, a policy that could complicate the city’s consideration of a monthly garbage fee to help head off a looming budget deficit.

Experts warn that implementing a garbage fee without ending the $3.3 million annual sponsorship to homeowner associations and civic clubs, representing some 47,000 households, could result in an additional burden on lower-income communities.

The city has given participating associations $6 per household each month for their private garbage collection since the 1980s, resulting in neighborhoods with higher average median incomes receiving more frequent services, in part, on the taxpayers’ dime.

The subsidy presents the city with a conundrum amid the Whitmire administration’s efforts to eliminate a budget deficit that is expected to top $200 million in fiscal 2025.

Keeping the subsidy while imposing a garbage fee on the 437,000 households whose trash is collected by the city could provide an incentive for more neighborhoods to switch to private services, which would leave lower-income residents paying for more infrequent service.

Do away with the subsidy and some of those HOAs and civic clubs could decide to change to city collection, raising the question of whether Houston has the capacity to add new neighborhoods to existing routes.

Mayor Sylvester Turner unsuccessfully tried to eliminate the subsidy eight years ago and faced criticism from affected residents. The idea has not been publicly raised since.

[…]

The city spends more than $3.3 million a year to subsidize private garbage collection for residents who live within participating civic or homeowners associations – accounting for 10 percent of the households needing garbage collection services.

District G residents represent almost 45 percent of all sponsored households with more than 21,000 participating residents, according to data from the Solid Waste Management Department. District E has the second highest number of participants, 19,000 people.

Together, the city subsidies total more than $2.9 million annually for the two council districts, which have the second and third highest median incomes in the city.

Private trash collection comes with varying benefits depending on the company, but can include two pickups per week, no limit on the number of trash cans and back door collection service. Taking away the subsidy could have wide-reaching effects for some HOAs, an administrator for Lakeside Island told the Landing.

Matt Garvis has worked for Lakeside Island, a neighborhood association in West Houston, for nine years and lives in the area’s larger Lakeside Improvement Association. Prices for garbage collection and constable service have increased in recent years, prompting a recent internal vote to increase the annual fees, he said.

Without the garbage subsidy, the HOA would have an approximate $40,000 hole in its budget, he said.

The subsidy has been at $6 since its inception and reasonably could be raised to compete with inflation, District G Councilmember Mary Nan Huffman told the Landing. Huffman lives in an HOA-represented neighborhood that receives the monthly subsidy, and questioned the viability of a citywide fee.

“What would happen if you don’t pay your garbage fee?” she asked. “Are they going to stop picking up your trash?”

The subsidies save the city money, Huffman said, because it would cost more per household to pick up the trash itself. Houston’s 311 service center data shows that missed trash pickup was one of the most frequent problems reported by residents.

“Even if you know, say, all the neighborhoods in District G decided that they wanted to go back to city trash, the city doesn’t have the capacity to take on these neighborhoods,” Huffman said.

Garvis did not think neighbors would be as upset about the cancellation of the subsidy if they had the option to keep private services without paying the city fee. He said some residents likely would want to switch providers if the city fee was cheaper, but he echoed the concern that the city does not have the capacity.

“I don’t know how many neighborhoods would call their bluff,” he said.

Yeah, I don’t believe that a bunch of wealthy neighborhoods are going to give up their fancy specialized trash collection service in favor of the city’s trash pickup if they suddenly stop getting a $6 monthly check from the city. (*) I understand why they wouldn’t like losing out on that subsidy – it doesn’t say how it came to be a thing in the first place; my best guess is it’s one of those “it’s good to be rich” situations – but my response to that is “too bad”. This to me is where a Mayor Whitmire can really make a difference. I look forward to seeing what he does.

(*) Seriously, how does this work? Do they get a $6 monthly reduction on their water bill or property taxes? Is there a direct payment to each household? Or is there an annual lump sum given to the homeowners’ associations?

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New Sports Authority board chair

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Noting for the record.

Harris County-Houston Sports Authority chairman J. Kent Friedman is stepping down, he confirmed to the Chronicle on Friday morning.

Mayor John Whitmire requested Friedman be replaced by Juan C. Garcia as chair, according to city council agenda documents. Garcia’s confirmation will come before Houston City Council on Wednesday.

Friedman presided as chair over the organization, which is in charge of financing the city’s professional sports stadiums and protecting city and county credit ratings, since 2003.

Friedman said he will step down sometime next week, but did not offer more details about his exit. A spokesperson for the sports authority referred questions about Friedman’s departure to City Hall.

All the sports authority’s board of directors members are appointed by city and county leaders. Garcia’s confirmation will also have to be passed by Harris County Commissioners Court, according to council agenda documents.

Garcia’s appointment will come before the commissioners Tuesday, according to agenda documents.

Garcia, a lawyer, is also extensively involved in RODEOHouston. He has served the organization as an executive committee member, board of director member, risk management committee member and lifetime president, according to a copy of his resume provided by Whitmire’s office.

[…]

Friedman’s exit from the organization marks another high profile departure in recent weeks. The Board of Directors recently moved to fire longtime CEO Janis Burke, who led the organization for 18 years, after she came under fire for transparency and facility maintenance concerns by Whitmire and other top sports executives.

Burke’s interim replacement is Chris Canetti, who serves as the World Cup host committee president. The sports authority board plans to gather a committee to hunt for a permanent CEO.

See here for the background. Friedman’s one of those guys who feels like he’s been around since the Allen Brothers, but I suppose all things do eventually come to an end. I remain agnostic about the personnel changes and curious about the original motivation for canning Janis Burke. Still waiting for someone to speak out of turn about that one.

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November 2024 early voting Day Seven: The weekend

Posted on October 28, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Just going to get right into it here. Your early voting results through Sunday, Day Seven:

2024

2020

2016

2008 and 2012

The numbers after seven days of early voting are

Mail = 44,805
In Person = 686,937
Total = 731,742

We have surpassed the final early voting totals from 2008 and 2012. The Saturday total of 75,778 was slightly more than it was in 2016 and the first Saturday of 2020, and the Sunday total of 45,165 was more ahead of the 2020 and 2016 totals than Saturday was. My prediction for this week is that the daily totals will exceed by a considerable amount the Week 2 and Week 3 daily totals from 2020. Have you voted yet?

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Cruz files FEC complaint over Allred ads

Posted on October 28, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I’m laughing.

Not Ted Cruz

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign manager filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission Thursday, accusing U.S. Rep. Colin Allred’s campaign of illegally coordinating on television ads with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Cruz’s campaign cited a series of ads running in Texas paid for by the DSCC and Allred’s campaign they claim cost $10.6 million, exceeding the $2.8 million cap on coordinated expenditures between a candidate and their party. Campaigns and national committees like the DSCC can spend in excess of that amount on so-called “hybrid ads” that include generic party messaging, but Cruz’s campaign is claiming the four ads in question do not qualify under FEC rules.

“Colin Allred’s campaign is illegally coordinating with Chuck Schumer and the DSCC. We are calling on the FEC to immediately investigate and put a stop to this flagrant violation of federal law,” Cruz’s campaign said in a statement.

Allred’s campaign referred questions to the DSCC, which said the ads followed existing FEC guidance on what is and is not allowed in hybrid ads.

“The DSCC is running the same kind of advertisements that the (National Republican Senatorial Committee), the Republican National Committee and Republican members of the FEC all argued are legal — and that are being run by Republican Senate campaigns across the country,” a DSCC spokesperson said.

[…]

Earlier this year Democrats challenged the NRSC’s practice of running ads for individual candidates that looked like fundraising appeals, allowing them to get cheaper ad rates and save millions of dollars on advertising. The FEC deadlocked 3-3 along party lines, and the practice has been allowed to continue, opening the door for both parties to run the type of “hybrid” ads in question, the DSCC is arguing.

However, Cruz’s campaign is claiming the ads do not devote equal time to “generic” candidates and issues, and Cruz and Allred themselves. Under FEC rules, hybrid ads are required to be “equally divided” between the two, they say.

In their complaint, Cruz’s campaign counted the number of seconds devoted to Cruz and Allred versus the amount given over to generic campaign issues like abortion. In one instance they write, “the ad features 14 seconds of ‘generic’ content and 13 seconds addressing ‘clearly identified federal candidate[s]’.”

This is hilarious to me for three reasons. One is that “14 seconds of ‘generic’ content versus only 13 seconds of ‘clearly identified federal candidate[s]'”. Like, how do you even measure that, what counts as “generic”, and how is that not sufficiently “equal” by any reasonable definition? Two, you may recall that there have been three complaints filed against Cruz for his podcast-related activities, one back in April with the FEC and the others with the Senate Ethics Committee (one in April and one in July), with no action taken on any of them. I don’t know what his expectations are, but I would advise him to keep them modest. And three, the FEC has been a morass for decades now thanks in part to the Republican appointees’ unwillingness to do anything and in part to the fact that the FEC has limited authority to begin with. If the self-proclaimed hugely bipartisan US Senator Ted Cruz thinks that our campaign finance laws and the enforcement mechanisms we have for them are inadequate, well, he is better positioned than the rest of us to Do Something about it. Please do let me know when he does. The Trib has more.

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Abortion and the High Plains

Posted on October 28, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Good stuff.

Morgan Kirkpatrick was exhausted.

The longtime Lubbock resident and State Board of Education candidate spent most of her morning with other local Democratic candidates campaigning door-to-door ahead of early voting next week. From there, she went to Mahon Library in downtown Lubbock, where more than a dozen volunteers were already writing postcards to voters for her campaign.

Out of chairs, the former teacher opted to sit on the floor and get to work. Yes, she was physically drained, but she is even more tired of seeing Republicans run unopposed in local elections in Texas’ South Plains region her entire adult life.

“It’s hard because the Democratic Party doesn’t have the infrastructure here like the Republican Party does,” said Kirkpatrick, 39. “Democrats here have always felt like we had to be quiet. But if we were a little louder, people would understand this is a battleground that’s up for grabs.”

Democrats have long imagined a blue wave would roll in to break through the conservative landscape in the heart of the South Plains. It hasn’t happened.

In 2016, 66% of voters in Lubbock County elected former president Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Beto O’Rourke inched a little closer in 2018 — O’Rourke received 35% of the vote in the county while U.S. Senator Ted Cruz had 64%. Trump won the county again in 2020 over President Joe Biden. Gov. Greg Abbott handily won the county over O’Rourke in 2022.

In fact, it is conservative population centers like Lubbock and Amarillo, about 125 miles north, and the state’s suburbs that have kept Democrats from winning any statewide race in two decades.

Still, Democrats in Lubbock — women in particular — are hopeful this year. Fueled by a mix of enthusiasm for Vice President Kamala Harris’s nomination and ire over abortion restrictions and other far-right policies, left-leaning women are hoping it’s enough to break through conservative strongholds.

“I feel like Harris has given us reason to envision a win,” Kirkpatrick said.

[…]

Abortion is not on the federal ballot this year, but it is in 10 states, according to KFF. It’s also on the ballot in Amarillo, a city that has consistently voted for Republicans each election cycle. Voters will decide if the city should put in place a “travel ban” like Lubbock’s that restricts the use of the city’s roads for a woman seeking on abortion in another state.

If it passes, people can be sued by Amarillo residents for a minimum of $10,000 if they “aid and abet” a pregnant woman seeking an abortion. This can be by providing transportation, donating to abortion fund networks, or offering any information that would lead to an abortion, regardless of where the person giving the instructions is located.

According to the KFF survey, abortion has become the most important issue for women under 30. The so-called sanctuary city ordinance has far-reaching consequences for people and businesses that violate it, as any organization that uses the mail for items that could produce an abortion would be declared criminal organizations, among other reasons. The ordinance has been criticized as turning neighbor against neighbor by city leaders.

“There is so much more that unites us than divides us,” said Lindsay London, co-founder of the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance, or ARFA. “And we’re seeing that voters are ready to embrace that at both the local and national level.”

ARFA, a nonpartisan organization, has been at the forefront of the fight against the ordinance. London said she sees a similarity in how Harris’s campaign has brought together “reasonable” people from across the political spectrum through shared values.

I’d say that the big suburbs like Montgomery County are more responsible for Texas remaining red just because there’s a lot more people there, but the margins in the counties that include Lubbock and Amarillo (and I’ll throw in Abilene as well) are awe-inducing:


        Lubbock      Potter      Randall     Taylor
Year   GOP  Dem    GOP  Dem    GOP  Dem    GOP  Dem
====================================================
2008  68.0 31.3   69.2 29.8   80.9 18.3   72.3 26.7
2012  69.9 28.8   71.5 26.9   83.4 15.2   76.1 22.5
2016  66.3 28.3   68.5 26.7   80.0 15.4   72.7 22.0
2020  65.3 33.1   68.5 29.8   78.5 19.8   71.7 26.5

2020 represented a little bit of progress, but there’s still a long way to go. I’ve been an advocate for Democrats putting resources into these cities, with the pitch that they have more in common with the big cities than they do with the surrounding rural areas. Start at the local level and work your way up as needed, but get some different perspectives out there and fight them on the issues. Maybe there will be some evidence from this year’s returns to encourage the development of that approach. I’ll be sure to take a look. I’ll also be sure to plug my interview with Lindsay London of the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance because they’re doing great work and they deserve your attention.

Anyway, there’s a lot more to this story so give it a read. Whatever happens this year, if we’re going to be serious about winning in 2026 and 2028, we need to have a plan for this part of the state as well.

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Weekend link dump for October 27

Posted on October 27, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Have you voted yet?

Netflix is going all in on Stranger Things Season Five.

“As the need has grown, so has Elevated Access. The organization has continued to enlist volunteer pilots and offer free flights to patients who need reproductive health care, such as abortions and gender-affirming care, but who don’t have access to it where they live, whether due to bans or lack of resources. Elevated Access completed 400 flights in its first 18 months, according to Bonanza. In the past 12 months, it’s completed 1,200.”

I just watched the trailer for the new “Wallace and Gromit” movie. I am ridiculously excited about this.

“Donald Trump is full of stories about his negotiating prowess. Most of them are fiction, and even the ones based on a grain of truth are twisted and exaggerated to fit his standard heroic narrative:”

Attention, Dominion Voting Systems: Call your lawyers ASAP.

I feel like at some point there needs to be real consequences for this kind of bullshit, consequences that are felt directly by the offender. I have no idea what that might look like, and it may very well be the case that no such thing exists in a form that is congruent with our representative democracy. I do hope someone smarter than me is thinking about it, because this shit has to be stopped.

“But to Retzlaff, playing on Saturday was a chance to represent his faith on a stage that is not exactly teeming with people like him. Utah has one of the smallest Jewish populations in America, and at BYU, there are only two other Jewish students. That puts Retzlaff in a strange position: He represents one of the university’s smallest minorities and is also one of its most famous students.”

“The men once known as the Central Park Five—five men who were wrongfully convicted of rape and assault over 30 years ago—filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump on Monday in federal court, alleging the former president acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth when he attacked them during the presidential debate in September.” They have a good case.

RIP, John Kinsel Sr., World War II veteran, Navajo Code Talker. Only two original Code Talkers are still with us now.

“The WNBA players’ union has opted out of its collective bargaining agreement, a historic move aimed at securing higher salaries for players amid a record-breaking year for women’s basketball.”

RIP, Bob Yerkes, longtime Hollywood stuntman who got his start in the circus as a trapeze artist and tightrope walker.

“I just admit that I feel very uninformed to not know that there is a National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum.” Same.

Let them fight.

“I’m a few sizes below the average size of a woman in the UK, and I’m seen as a ‘plus-size heroine.’ Making it about how I look is reductive and boring.”

“A federal judge ordered Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday to hand over a long list of lucrative assets to two Georgia election workers who won a defamation verdict stemming from the former New York City mayor’s 2020 election lies.”

RIP, Fernando Valenzuela, iconic pitcher for the LA Dodgers, later one of their Spanish-language broadcasters. That he died on the eve of a Dodgers-Yankees World Series, after the legend of Fernandomania was forged in the last such Series in 1981, is just incredibly poignant.

“A survey by the Lupus Research Alliance found that a third of lupus patients reported difficulties filling HCQ prescriptions between March and May 2020. That can mean severe complications, including hospitalization—a frequent area of Covid transmission. Trump’s claims about hydroxychloroquine weren’t just another case of buffoonery, Mahler says, but a source of real harm in people’s lives.”

“A list of all the ways DeSantis has tried to meddle in Florida’s abortion ballot measure”.

RIP, Lyda Obst, author, columnist, editor, film producer, longtime advocate for women in Hollywood.

Wishing Matthew Sweet all the best.

RIP, Elizabeth Francis, Houston resident who at the age of 115 had been the oldest living person in the US. She had a sister who lived to be 106; they were in the record books as the oldest living siblings at the time. Her mother died in 1920, which is to say 104 years ago. That’s how long Elizabeth Francis lived.

“An industry group representing cable and internet providers sued along with two others on Wednesday to block a U.S. Federal Trade Commission rule that requires companies to offer simple cancellation mechanisms for subscriptions.”

RIP, Ron Ely, actor who played Tarzan in the 1960s TV series of the same name, and later hosted game shows and the Miss America pageant. Mark Evanier remembered him fondly.

RIP, Amir Abdur-Rahim, men’s basketball coach at the University of South Florida.

RIP, Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of the Grateful Dead.

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Comparing early voting apples to apples

Posted on October 27, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The Chron’s writeup of the first five days of early voting is an incomplete picture.

Is turnout up or down in Texas in the 2024 election? It depends on how you look at it.

Since early voting began Monday, more than 3 million of the 18.6 million Texans registered to vote have already cast their ballots, with many counties across the state reporting long lines at the polls.

When compared to the last presidential election in 2020, the percentage of voters showing up to the polls in person is higher this year. But the overall voter participation rate this cycle is lagging when factoring in mail-in ballots, which soared in popularity amid the coronavirus pandemic.

[…]

In Harris County, in-person participation is slightly down from 14% to 13% of registered voters. Polling places in some Houston-area counties, especially Fort Bend and Montgomery, are surpassing or meeting 2020 turnout numbers.

Despite the high volume of voters, Texas’ overall participation rate is lagging slightly behind 2020. In the first three days of early voting, 15.1% of registered Texas voters cast ballots, slightly down from 15.7% in 2020, according to the Secretary of State’s office.

That decrease can be in part attributed to a quirk of the 2020 election, when many voters used mail-in ballots amid the coronavirus pandemic.

In this year’s election, only 221,417 mail ballots had been cast as of Wednesday, less than half of the mail ballots that were cast in the first three days of early voting in 2020.

[…]

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said it’s too early to tell whether statewide turnout offers good or bad news for Democrats’ hopes in the hot race for U.S. Senate between Ted Cruz and Colin Allred. More than half of all voters are expected to choose early voting.

Suburban areas like Fort Bend and Denton County, north of Fort Worth, have trended towards Democrats in recent cycles and are currently leading in turnout. And while overall turnout is similar to 2020 levels so far, urban areas could steadily catch up over the weekend, when most rural counties opt to close early voting sites.

There are potential trouble spots for Democrats. The number of votes cast in Dallas and El Paso Counties as of Wednesday decreased from 2020, even though both have registered thousands of new voters.

“Democrats are hoping for blockbuster turnout, and this isn’t necessarily it so far,” said Rottinghaus.

Rottinghaus also noted that the gender gap in voters so far appears to be on par with in 2020.

Some election officials have noted that higher turnout has been sustained into the third and fourth days of early voting, rather than tapering off after the first few days as in past elections.

There are three things that I would add to this:

1. The drop in mail ballots means little to nothing in terms of total output. This is because 2020 was such a singular year and there was so much more of a focus on (and a fight about) voting by mail thanks to COVID. I would bet substantial money that the vast majority of still-living and still-in-Harris-County people who voted by mail in 2020 but are not voting by mail this year will vote in person. Someone with access to the voter rosters in both years could do a spot check on this now, looking to see what the mail voters from 2020 are doing this year.

I’m old enough to remember that the unprecedented surge in early voting in 2008 led to some wildly optimistic projections about the final vote tally, based on past early-versus-Election-Day comparisons and the misplaced belief that the surge in early voting meant a commensurate surge in overall turnout. That just wasn’t the case. A lot of people had changed their behavior, casting an early ballot where before they had voted on Election Day. That was indeed a result of the enthusiasm a lot of Democrats had in 2008 – I lost track of the times I heard a first-time early voter say some variation of “well, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, at least I voted” that year – but these were reliable voters speaking. It was a shift in when people voted that caused the early voting numbers that we had not seen before.

2. That same shift in behavior, caused in large part by anxiety over COVID and the fear that the longer one waited the more one risked getting sick and not being able to vote, that drove not just voting by mail but also the huge first (four-day) week turnout. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, this time with mail ballots included: In 2020, the first four days of early voting saw an average of 128,021 ballots cast per day. For the remaining 14 days of early voting, that daily average was 67,205. If you want to be generous and exclude the four weekend days, where there would be fewer mail ballots, the daily average was 73,627. That’s a huge dropoff.

The general pattern in most years is a big first day (which includes all of the mail ballots that were received before in person voting started) and a mostly consistent in person showing up to the last day or two, with the last day usually being the biggest in person day of the whole cycle. That wasn’t true in 2020, though the last day was the biggest in person day after the first week. In 2008 and 2012, more total votes were cast in the first five days than the last five days (this is comparing weekdays to weekdays). In 2016 there were more total votes cast in the first five days than the last five, but that was entirely attributable to the 61K mail ballots that had arrived by Day One. The in person total was slightly higher in the last five days.

The point I’m making here is that the comparison from here on out will be very different because the pace of voting slowed down quite a bit in 2020 after that first week. The coverage of early voting so far doesn’t make that clear – it leaves one with the feeling that we will still be trying to catch up to 2020 all next week when in fact we’ll be running well ahead of it. That may or may not get us ahead of the “turnout as a percentage of registered voters” number, but we’ll be right around it. That’s a question better answered later anyway.

3. And that brings me to the third point, which is that – again, driven by the COVID conditions and fears – many more people voted early in 2020 than in other years as a share of the overall turnout. In 2008 and 2012, 63% and 65% of the total vote (mail and in person) was cast before Election Day. In 2016, it was 74%. In 2020, it was a whopping 88% of the vote. Basically, almost no one voted on Election Day in 2020 – about 204K total people, not much more than the 169K votes cast on the first day of Early Voting.

The trend in voting behavior has been more people voting early over time. This isn’t just the case for Presidential elections but for all elections, including the city elections (I very much underestimated the early vote share in both the November election and the December runoff in 2023) and even those dumb HCAD elections this year. So I do expect there to be a higher early vote share than 2016’s 74%. I just don’t expect it to be as big as 2020’s 88% was. Some people do still like to vote on Election Day. My completely out of thin air guess for this year is that about 80% of the total vote will be cast before November 5. I’m saying all this to say that while Early Voting is a big part of the story, it’s not the whole story. Whatever we get in early voting this year, I would be cautious about projecting what it means for the final number based on what happened in 2020. Look back a little farther than that and see if it affects your opinion. It is also the case that someone with all of the relevant voting rosters could look and see how many people who had voted reliably in past elections had not yet done so this year. That would be a better tell.

Hope this helps. I’ll be back on the daily EV tracking tomorrow. Have you voted yet?

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UTSA poll for October: A little weird

Posted on October 27, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Not really sure how to explain this other than to say polls be weird sometimes.

A new survey from UTSA’s Center for Public Opinion Research indicated that in bright blue San Antonio, support has been growing for Democrat Colin Allred in his uphill race against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

A UTSA poll conducted Oct. 15-20 indicated that Allred’s lead over Cruz in San Antonio increased slightly in the past month, from a 44-28% race in September, to a 48-30% race in the most recent survey.

Statewide, polls shows Cruz leading the race by about one percentage point.

But higher turnout in more Democratic areas could have an impact on the race.

So far, Texas’ major urban centers including San Antonio have been exceeding turnout expectations in the first days of early voting — giving new hope to some Democratic campaign professionals who believe Texas could be closer to turning blue than they initially thought.

The UTSA poll, which launched at the beginning of this year, has made some changes to its methodology since the last survey: This time it used only San Antonio voters, instead of voters from across Bexar County, to avoid confusion about questions that only pertain to San Antonio voters.

Since the UTSA poll is new, whether it reliably predicts the outcome of San Antonio’s vote remains untested, and it’s also unclear how the change in methodology will affect its results — but in a community where local polling is scarce, it gives a rare window into local voter sentiment ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

The survey was conducted using online surveys to query 656 San Antonio likely voters in both English and Spanish. It has a margin of error of +/- 3.8%.

“This is probably largely a name recognition thing,” said Bryan Gervais, the center’s director and an associate professor in UTSA’s Department of Political Science and Geography, who pointed to Allred’s steady rise locally since UTSA’s first survey in June.

Allred’s growing support comes as the same respondents to UTSA’s poll indicated their overall preference for Democratic candidates has weakened over the past month.

In UTSA’s September survey, San Antonio was riding the high of a new presidential nominee in Harris, and displaying overall enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket.

The October survey showed Harris leading Trump 49-34% among San Antonio voters, down from her 54-35% lead in September.

Voters in the September survey said they’d choose Democratic candidates over Republican candidates 51-35%. In October, that margin had decreased to 46-36%.

Though UTSA’s past surveys excluded residents outside of San Antonio when asking San Antonio-specific questions, Gervais said the decision to switch from Bexar County voters to San Antonio voters was needed for overall clarity.

On this polling memo, residents outside of Bexar County were removed from the September responses to allow for apples-to-apples comparisons.

See here for the September poll and here for the poll memo. The “don’t know” responses ticked up two points in the Presidential race since September, which to me says this may be a sample issue. I don’t know how you get that combination of Allred’s growth and Cruz’s shrinkage without the Presidential numbers going along. For what it’s worth, the “don’t know” contingent in the Senate race is still a lot higher than in the Presidential one, though it inched down a bit from September. I said I’d look for their October poll results after the September one came out, so here it is. I wish them well with this endeavor going forward.

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Cruise partners with the Houston Food Bank

Posted on October 27, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Of interest.

The Houston Food Bank and autonomous vehicle company Cruise launched a program to deliver produce and non-perishable items to expecting mothers in the city.

The deliveries are a part of the Houston Food Bank’s Food Rx program, through which people can receive a food prescription when referred by a designated Healthcare Partner or when they commit to a Community Health Program that improves their health and well-being.

“This innovative program will be very insightful and impactful, and partnership with Cruise allows us to leverage new technology to support at-risk new and expectant mothers with essential food packages delivered right to their doorstep, ensuring they have what they need to care for their families,” said Brian Greene, president/CEO of Houston Food Bank, in a statement.

Cruise will provide the autonomous vehicles with safety drivers to deliver packages of produce and non-perishable to those who are pregnant and high-risk, according to the news release. Houston Food Bank spokesperson Paula Murphy said in an email that the mothers must be signed up for the program, along with their healthcare provider who deems them at high risk, to be eligible.

There will be 180 deliveries to provide 6,000 meals. Murphy said the food deliveries will happen every two weeks, with the next delivery being Oct. 25.

The vehicles will serve several places in Houston in certain ZIP codes.

[…]

Cruise returned to Houston for on-road testing in June after a seven-month pause due to safety concerns involving the company’s vehicles posing potential risks to pedestrians.

See here for some background on Cruise. I assume the reason for the inclusion of the safety drivers is partly because Cruise is very much still working out the kinks in their autonomous driving systems and partly so that a human can actually bring the food to these women’s front doors and not just to the street in front of their house or the parking lot of their apartment. It’s a cool idea and a clever way to generate some goodwill after the debacle that was Cruise’s initial rollout. I hope it all goes well.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

November 2024 early voting Day Five: The average so far

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We’re at the end of the first week of early voting – I was able to wait for the Day Five report before writing this, so I’m caught up for now. It was a very busy week. Let’s take a look:

2024

2020

2016

2008 and 2012

The numbers after five days of early voting are

Mail = 40,189
In Person = 570,609
Total = 610,798

In the first (four-day) week of early voting in 2020, the in person total was 453,637, which is an average of 113,409 per day. It dropped considerably from there, but there were two more weeks to go, so it made up for it in volume. For this five day week, the average was 114,122 in person votes per day. That’s a little ahead of the pace, and week 2 is likely to increase that, as that is the normal pattern for early voting. We’ll see what the weekend looks like as well. I remain comfortable in my estimate that we can get to 1.4 million in early voting.

Have you voted yet? I think Friday’s total of 112,978 in person votes, the third highest of the week, was pretty impressive considering how many people were occupied with rally-related activities. I’ll be voting early next week. Keep on keeping on.

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Ken Paxton also doesn’t care if we execute an innocent man

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Shocking, I know, from such a moral paragon.

A week after death row inmate Robert Roberson was set to die, the extraordinary quest to save his life has morphed into a deepening political battle between Texas House lawmakers and the state’s leading Republicans as they trade bitter accusations and push conflicting narratives around his guilt — or likely innocence.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday condemned the bipartisan Texas House committee that forced a delay of Roberson’s execution, saying it “stepped out of line.”

Attorney General Ken Paxton, in a graphic press release Wednesday, insisted on Roberson’s guilt and accused the committee of pursuing “eleventh-hour, one-sided, extrajudicial stunts that attempt to obscure the facts and rewrite his past.”

Lawmakers, in return, blasted Paxton for publishing a “misleading and in large part simply untrue” summation of Roberson’s case.

State Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, along with Reps. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, Rhetta Andrews Bowers, D-Rowlett, and Lacey Hull, R-Houston, issued a 16-page, point-by-point rebuttal on Thursday to Paxton’s release, including citations and exhibits shown at trial and since recovered during the appeals process.

The Office of the Attorney General attached the autopsy report of Roberson’s 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, whom he was convicted of killing, and a statement from the medical examiner who performed it. But Paxton otherwise referred broadly to the trial record and did not acknowledge any of the new evidence presented in Roberson’s appeals.

“There are no new facts in the OAG’s statement, only a collection of exaggerations, misrepresentations and full-on untruths completely divorced from fact and context,” Moody wrote on social media Thursday.

[…]

The argument to carry on with Roberson’s death sentence as pushed by Paxton, the state’s top law enforcement officer, relied on a sometimes misleading and incomplete summation of his trial — itself, Roberson’s advocates say, tainted by a discredited shaken baby diagnosis, incomplete medical records, uncorroborated and prejudicial allegations of sexual abuse, bias against a man with undiagnosed autism, and non-credible testimony about Roberson’s history.

Roberson’s supporters point to reams of new scientific and medical evidence that suggest Nikki died from undiagnosed pneumonia, which suppressed her breathing and was worsened by medications that are no longer prescribed to children, leading to bleeding and swelling in her brain.

The lawmakers in Thursday’s rebuttal refuted Paxton’s claims that Nikki had extensive bruising when Roberson brought her to the hospital, and that she died not only from being violently shaken, but also from “blunt force head injuries” caused by beating.

The autopsy photos, they said, show “almost no outward injuries” — a fact the state acknowledged at trial when asking the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy to explain the “large discrepancy” between “what you see on the outside and what you see on the inside.” The lack of external injuries, in fact, is what led a doctor to diagnose shaken baby syndrome, the lawmakers wrote.

In response to Paxton’s claim that Roberson had a history of violence and domestic abuse, the lawmakers argued that the witnesses who gave that testimony at trial had serious credibility issues and provided no corroborating evidence.

They also condemned Paxton’s reference to another inmate’s claim that Roberson had admitted to molesting his daughter — a report so dubious that even the prosecution did not include it in its case.

“By including this information, the OAG has repeated a lie with, at best, a complete indifference to the truth,” the lawmakers wrote. “The ‘jailhouse snitch’ here wove a tale so outrageously contrary to the evidence that prosecutors didn’t use it at trial.”

And they highlighted the “mountain of evidence and changed science that’s accumulated since Robert’s trial — the same changed science that caused the Court of Criminal Appeals” to overturn another shaken baby conviction out of Dallas County this month.

Roberson’s attorneys issued their own 27-page rebuttal Thursday in response to Paxton’s release.

See here for some background. There’s a long and well-documented history of Ken Paxton just flat lying about stuff – he’s still fighting a State Bar discipline hearing because of his lies in litigation to overturn the 2020 election – and the list of times when he was, let’s say casual about the truth is even longer. Some of the people responding to this have been clear about what Ken Paxton is for a long time, others are chiming in because this time he’s lying about something they care about. I would tell those folks that you can’t trust a liar and should not let liars gain and hold power, which perhaps is some advice they could apply to both the current election and the one in 2026. Be that as it may, this is where we are. I don’t know how this resolves, but I do know what the right course of action is.

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Uplift Harris 2.0 upheld in district court

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

This is the opening act. The main event comes later.

A judge on Thursday sided with Harris County’s latest iteration of a guaranteed income program, denying Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office’s application for a temporary restraining order aimed at stopping the initiative from moving forward.

The ruling comes a month after Paxton sued to prevent the county from launching the program.

Harris County has spent much of 2024 trying to use some of its federal COVID-19 recovery funds to provide financial support to struggling residents. Its first attempt was Uplift Harris, a guaranteed income pilot program designed to send $500 monthly payments to low-income residents who met the eligibility criteria and were chosen by a random lottery. After the initial program was blocked by the state, the county made modifications to the plan and tried again, renaming it the Community Prosperity Program. Thursday’s ruling could allow the rebranded program to move forward.

[…]

The Community Prosperity Program works by providing selected residents with a preloaded debit card that limits spending to categories such as housing, utilities and groceries, the county said.

“Harris County addressed the State’s concerns about Uplift Harris, but the Attorney General still felt the need to sue the County again,” Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said in a statement on Thursday. “This shows that the Attorney General’s lawsuit is not about the law; it’s about using people living in poverty as a means to score political points.”

See here for the previous update. Not to be flip, but a district court judge in Harris County approved the original Uplift Harris program, so there was little reason to think this lawsuit would go any differently. All that matters is the Supreme Court. We’ll get there when we get there.

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November 2024 early voting Day Three: Let’s not overanalyze this

Posted on October 25, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Lone Star Left caught my eye on Wednesday as they looked at the statewide early voting data so far.

All day, I waited for a full update from the Secretary of State (SoS) regarding the Day 1 early voter turnout. Three major counties and ten small rural counties are still not showing their results on the SoS website for Day 1 of early voting. Are the reporting counties slow? Is it the SoS’s fault? That’s unclear at the moment, but we’re already starting to see some numbers from Day 2 coming out, so let’s talk about where we’re at.

Bell, Hays, and Smith are the three major counties that still don’t appear on the SoS website.

Hays County is blue.

Bell County is on the verge of blue.

And Smith County is trending blue, but it will probably be a few more cycles until we can talk about it flipping.

Discounting those three counties plus the smaller, rural ten, here is what the SoS is reporting:

Day 1, in-person votes: 886,526

Day 1, in-person + mail-in votes: 1,049,166

In 2024, we beat the 2020 record for in-person voting by over 130,000 votes, and that’s still without several counties reporting.

I do not think we’ll hit the 1.1 million in-person + mail-in vote record we set in 2020. We’ll probably come close, but due to COVID-19, there were likely many more mail-in votes in 2020. That’s okay because our in-person voting for Day 1 will likely be close to 1 million, a new record.

There is also more good news regarding Day 2. We’ll get to that.

I want to gently point out that despite the “Texas is not a red state it’s a non-voting state” mantra, a high turnout election is not necessarily one that favors Democrats. Exhibit A for that is 2020, a year in which we shattered turnout records and yet Republicans easily won all the statewide races and held serve in the Legislature. Joe Biden came closer than any Democratic Presidential candidate to winning since Bill Clinton, but other Dems still lost by 8-11 points. We have a way to go.

Early voting returns, especially the first couple of days’ worth, can give you some idea of the overall level of enthusiasm, but one must be careful in what conclusions one draws. Josh Marshall sums it up well.

The big reality making it much much more difficult this cycle is that in 2020, voting heavily polarized around Democrats voting early and by mail and Republicans voting on Election Day. Democrats are now much less worried about COVID and Republicans — apart from Trump — are far more focused on getting their voters to vote early. Because of that it’s really a certainty that Republicans will put up better early voting numbers and Democrats “worse” ones than in 2020. We’ve known that now for literally years. Somehow a decent number of people seem to have forgotten that. But we shouldn’t. Again, it would be shocking if Republicans weren’t doing “better” in early voting than they did in 2020. So that in itself really doesn’t tell us anything. The key is we have no good way to predict what the shift “should” be. There’s no baseline. 2020 can’t be a baseline and 2016 or 2012 can’t either because early and mail voting is a rapidly evolving part of American elections. Eight and twelve years ago is ancient history as far as early voting goes.

Indeed, Republicans are voting early. That doesn’t mean they’re headed towards a better outcome, but it is preferable for them to the alternative, which if nothing else increases their risk. We expect the hardcores to vote. We work on everyone else. If you have access to the voter files and you know who has and hasn’t voted before and you know why the previous non-voters didn’t vote before (they have turned 18 or become citizens or moved here since the last election, or they could have voted but didn’t, or they weren’t even registered), then you can draw some inferences and make some plans. The rest of us are mostly guessing.

On a side note, Hays is definitely blue as of 2018/2020 – it was quite close in 2016 but just missed. As for Smith and Bell, these are the Presidential numbers from this century:

Smith


Year     Vote     Pct   Margin
==============================
2004   53,392  72.48%   33,322
2008   55,187  69.36%   31,461
2012   57,331  72.02%   35,875
2016   58,930  69.52%   36,630
2020   69,080  69.02%   39,465

Bell


Year     Vote     Pct   Margin
==============================
2004   52,135  65.39%   24,970
2008   49,242  54.51%    8,829
2012   49,574  57.51%   14,062
2016   51,998  54.74%   14,197
2020   67,893  53.30%   10,879

The “Vote” and “Pct” numbers are for the Republican Presidential candidate, and “Margin” is the difference in votes between him and the Dem Presidential candidate. I think we can say that Bell is trending blue, though not very quickly. Smith, I’m not seeing it. I’d love to be able to say that, but I’ll need to see some favorable data from this year first.

Here’s your Day Three daily dose of data:

2024

2020

2016

2008 and 2012

Day Three 2024 remains ahead of the 2020 pace, with 111,151 in person votes and 3,884 mail votes, for a total of 115,035. In 2020, and note that Day Three then was a Thursday – tomorrow is the last day we can reasonably do this – there were 105,123 in person votes, 6,260 mail votes, and 111,383 overall. Day Four for 2020 was Friday and we’re completely out of sync after that so I’ll need to come up with another gimmick. Be that as it may, we’re at 353,462 in person votes so far, with 34,379 mail votes for a total of 387,841. At this rate, which will probably slow down a bit, perhaps beginning with the weekend, we’d get to 1,413,848 in person early votes. Which would put us on track for about 1.8 million overall, in line with the 2020 turnout rate with the increase in voter registration. Have you voted yet?

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Multiple settlements of AstroWorld injury lawsuits

Posted on October 25, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Noted for the record.

The start of a trial over injuries suffered during the 2021 Astroworld concert has been delayed until February, after more than 300 of the plaintiffs reached settlements with LiveNation and concert headliner Travis Scott, one of the lawyers involved in the massive litigation said.

The settlements does not end the civil proceedings stemming from the concert tragedy, where masses of people were crushed together and some killed as Scott performed, but will require a host of lawyers to designate another round of so-called bellwether plaintiffs to test the strength of the remaining cases.

The result of the first trial could determine how much other victims receive in future trials or settlements.

Court filings show six cases, with two alternates, were set for trial this week. Records about the settlements, and on which cases, were not immediately available.

Scott West, who represented Ezra Blount, Astroworld’s youngest casualty in the wrongful deaths suits, said hundreds of cases, including his own, remain.

The bulk of the cases were settled with an undisclosed lump sum Friday and earlier this month, with West saying the dollar amounts weren’t addressed in court. Special masters appointed in the cases will divide the funds based on their claims.

“All cases are not created [equal],” West said. “We may have somebody who’s had double neck surgery and somebody who had a broken arm. Those cases don’t have the same value.”

The remaining plaintiff lawyers will decide which suits will be set for trial in February. West pointed to a recent ruling by the Supreme Court of Texas ordering the deposition of Live Nation CEO Michael Rapinoe to proceed, likely by then. The company tried to prevent it with a petition for writ of mandamus.

See here and here for some background. All of the wrongful death cases were settled before going to trial, and it won’t surprise me if the same thing happens here. There’s still a lot that has to happen for that, but it’s what I expect.

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