The less-than-expected hurricane season (so far)

Posted on September 7, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Sure hope this doesn’t jinx anything.

Although the historical peak of the Atlantic hurricane season is around Sept. 10, based on data since the 1850s, storm experts are giving the next two weeks of tropical development a 60% chance of being below normal.

In early April, months before hurricane season started, some of the nation’s preeminent hurricane forecasters at Colorado State University had released their annual hurricane season outlook, which warned of an extremely active season with an unprecedented number of named storms and hurricanes.

But this hurricane season has not performed as initially forecast. A slower-than-expected start to La Niña, an African monsoon that places tropical waves in cooler waters off the coast of West Africa, and a robust Saharan dust season have been some of the factors hindering tropical development in recent weeks.

Peak activity in the Atlantic begins in late August and stretches through early October, with September typically the most prolific month for tropical development. But tropical activity in the Main Development Region, located between the Cabo Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa and Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, is not likely to churn out a named storm through the middle of next week. This area of the Atlantic, on average, accounts for nearly 75% of all Category 3 or stronger hurricanes, including Hurricane Beryl’s explosive intensification in early July.

This revised outlook from Colorado State University takes into consideration multiple factors, from sources like the National Hurricane Center and guidance from global weather forecast models.

See here for some background. The Eyewall has been tracking the lack of activity, which I’m sure we’d all agree is a fine thing. Sometimes the lower-probability outcomes work out for you. Of course, the fact that there haven’t been a ton of storms doesn’t and shouldn’t obscure the fact that Hurricane Beryl did plenty of damage to Houston. If there are no more named storms from here on out – Ernesto in August was the last one so far – this will still be seen as a bad season here. The number of storms is one way to measure risk, but it’s not the only one, and it’s not necessarily the most important one.

Posted in Hurricane Katrina | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

And then there were three Speaker challengers

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I know nothing about this guy.

Rep. David Cook

Mansfield Republican David Cook said Tuesday he intends to run for Texas House Speaker, becoming the third person to challenge the chamber’s current leader, Beaumont Republican Dade Phelan.

Cook, who has served two terms in the House since 2021, made his announcement in an email to Republican incumbents and nominees seeking election to the chamber next year. The news was first reported by The Texan, a state politics news website.

In his email, Cook committed to naming only Republicans as leaders of House committees, a crucial point to hard right GOP leaders who feel Phelan has ceded too much power to Democrats by continuing the chamber’s long-standing tradition of naming members of both parties to lead the legislative panels.

But Cook said Democrats will “have the opportunity work their bills and see them considered fairly, as preserving the rights of the minority party remains part of facilitating the orderly transactions of business in the Texas House.”

State Reps. Tom Oliverson of Cyprus and Shelby Slawson of Stephenville have also thrown their hats in the ring.

See here and here for some background. Rep. Cook, like Rep. Slawson, is in his second term in the House, which is not usually the profile of a future Speaker. These days, with this Republican Party, I doubt that matters. The main difference I see between Cook and his rivals is that he’s in a relatively purple district; HD96 went 55.2 to 43.6 for Abbott over Beto in 2022. Not particularly competitive, but hardly a deep crimson, and given that it’s in Tarrant County, it’s not impossible to imagine it being on the “districts to watch” list in, say, 2028. That would offer some high comedy if the Speaker were trying to fend off a Democrat for his seat, but suffice it to say several things would have to happen for that to be in play. Anyway, we can put this on the back burner where it belongs until January. The Fort Worth Report has more.

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Endorsement watch: Mayor Turner for CD18

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The Chron is getting an early start on endorsements this year.

Sylvester Turner

Dabbing at his eyes, former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner recalled the final conversation he had with the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee in an interview with KHOU11’s Len Cannon.

“I said ‘Sheila, you have left it all on the field,’” Turner said choking back tears. “Your work is done.”

Turner’s, apparently, is not.

When he joined a crowded slate to replace Jackson Lee, he quickly amassed the blessings of her children, this editorial board, and, eventually, the majority of about 80 Democratic precinct chairs tasked with choosing a candidate for the November general.

Why would he want to run? After nearly three decades in the Legislature and two terms as Houston’s mayor where he missed no opportunity to shout out his Acres Homes roots, wasn’t he done? He said as much in 2023 when he told the media he wasn’t interested in heading to Congress. But given the sudden loss of Jackson Lee, the frantic timeline to find a replacement and the potential long-term consequences of anointing an incumbent in a heavily Democratic district where people tend to hold onto their seats, he felt he had to step in.

Ultimately, we’re glad Turner did decide to run, offering himself as a “bridge,” a lawmaker who can hit the ground running and see through a few projects under the bipartisan infrastructure bill and other bills before handing over the baton.

[…]

He cited his perseverance through his own health challenges as proof that he still has the grit to tackle the job with the same “energizer bunny” zeal that Jackson Lee did.

“I went to radiation Monday through Friday for six weeks, 7:30 in the morning,” he said of his 2022 fight against bone cancer while mayor. “We didn’t change my schedule.”

If anything, the experience energized him more, he says.

“I’ve had the best medical care someone can find,” he told the editorial board. He contrasted that with his own father’s experience as a painter and yard man battling cancer without health insurance. Many residents of the 18th district share such experiences. Parts of the district have a roughly 20-year life expectancy gap compared with wealthier parts of Harris County and the district is also the site of a cancer cluster.

“That’s what motivates me,” he told us.

If all goes well today, I’ll be doing an interview with Mayor Turner this afternoon, to be run next week. I’ve already done one with Erica Lee Carter, who is running in the special election; that will also run next week. I supported Amanda Edwards in the precinct chair election, but I’m fine with Turner as the next full-term representative in CD18. I expect him to do a good job and be the kind of hard-working, ever-present member of Congress we’re used to. And then, probably in 2028, we’ll elect someone new. I hope whoever comes next follows in those same footsteps.

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Dispatches from Dallas, September 6 edition

Posted on September 6, 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, a DFW representative jumps into the House Speaker’s race; Tarrant County keeps making it less easy for people to register and vote, but has to roll back occasionally; the Texas Tribune catches an illegal land transfer to a religious school; Dallas needs to give its next City Manager some actual goals; school district news; the latest from the Tarrant County jail; Dallas gets a sovereign citizen cop-killer; Daniel Perry’s north Texas domestic violence case; Dallas civil rights hero Juanita Craft gets a headstone; and how the FBI investigated a Dallas man for selling missile secrets to the Daleks, no cap.

This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Kelly Lee Owens, whose new album is out this week.

  • KERA has an analysis of changing voting patterns in North Texas. Like me, their analyst doesn’t expect any blue waves to take Texas this year, though the suburbs are becoming more competitive for Democrats. At the same time, Republicans are making inroads into urban Latine populations.
  • The race to kick Dade Phelan out of the Speaker’s chair is on, and David Cook (R-Mansfield) has joined it. More from the Star-Telegram and the Texas Tribune.
  • Tarrant County Commissioners forced voter registration tables outside of county buildings back in July, but they’ve now reversed that policy so folks can register inside and neither registrars nor prospective voters are risking heat stroke. The byplay between County Judge Tim O’Hare and Commissioner Gary Fickes, a Republican, mentioned in the article is pretty interesting. I recommend clicking through and reading, and trying not to let Tarrant GOP chair Bo French get your blood pressure up too much.
  • Speaking of voter registration, the Star-Telegram editorial board would like folks to ignore the Fox News lies about registering undocumented aliens and chill out about registering folks to vote.
  • In related news, Tarrant County Commissioners voted on party lines not to expand early voting locations as County Election Administrator Clint Ludwig requested because some of the locations were on college campuses. Apparently, according to County Judge Tim O’Hare, that’s a method of trying to get some groups to vote at the expense of others. More from the Star-Telegram.
  • The Star-Telegram columnist Mac Engels explains what he thinks it will take to get gambling in Texas and why Jerry Jones is more likely to get another Super Bowl ring than a casino.
  • Meanwhile, the DMN has an op-ed on the “Y’all Street” phenomenon and what it means for both the bankers and the city. It’s mostly a puff piece, as you’d expect, but I didn’t know Ross Perot Jr. was involved in building a tower for Goldman Sachs, so I did learn something.
  • I’m going to be keeping an eye on the transfer of land in Mineral Wells from a public junior college to a private religious school documented in this Texas Tribune/ProPublica investigation. We all know transferring value and assets from public education to private religious schools is what our Republican overlords want. As citizens and taxpayers, we should be compensated for the land or the land should be returned to the college district. Somehow I doubt that the sort of vigorous enforcement that our law-and-order state government likes will apply in this case.
  • The Dallas Morning News thinks the next City Manager is being set up for failure. Specifically, there’s no data-driven accountability and no specific goals, which puts the pressure Monty Bennett is placing for a poll for public feedback on the position in a slightly different light. I like the DMN’s example of DISD’s superintendent’s goals and criteria as an example of how to measure the work of a chief executive. But mostly I agree we have a leadership vacuum in our city at the council/mayor level and we’re going to have to solve that to make the City Manager do their job well.
  • The DMN also has an update on ForwardDallas land-use plan that is not zoning. I still don’t understand what it’s doing but whatever it does, it’s going to happen sooner rather than later because the City Council is voting on September 25. In theory I like what I hear about the goals of ForwardDallas, but I don’t like the fact that nobody can explain to me what it is.
  • The squeaky wheel gets the grease: after a lot of opposition from my neighbors, it looks like Skillman Southwest Library is off the chopping block. Apparently Skillman ranked eighth out of the city’s 30 libraries in circulation last fiscal year, which is a good reason to save it. It looks like the money to save it will come from the city’s infrastructure investment fund, which is meant to put money in underserved areas. Skillman Southwest is not in an underserved area. We’ll see whether the library survives when the Council passes the final budget in two weeks.
  • Grand Prairie, a suburb between Dallas and Forth Worth, has a “do not use water” notice after firefighters used foam to put out an industrial fire on Tuesday and the foam ended up in the water system. Until the water is pronounced safe, you’re not supposed to drink, cook with, or bathe in city water. The DMN has an explainer, including the point that this is not a boil notice.
  • Actions have consequences: between flattening property values and the Tarrant Appraisal District’s decision to freeze residential property tax values for 2025, the city of Arlington is looking at budget cuts in 2025 and 2026. Unfilled positions will be eliminated, departments will be merged, and some items will be deferred into a bond issue next year.
  • Fort Worth ISD is holding steady on its tax rate despite a proposal to cut it because things are going badly in the district at the moment. (Isn’t that when you need to increase expenditures in schools?)
  • Grand Prairie ISD’s new superintendent started a few weeks ago, but he was put on administrative leave on Wednesday. It’s not clear why and at least one of the trustees thinks it’s political. I’ll be keeping an eye on that.
  • Texas Monthly tells us about being a queer student in Southlake-Carroll ISD. It’s not pretty.
  • The Dallas County Juvenile Department has been in an uproar for a while. The Dallas Observer explains their education program for juvenile offenders in custody.
  • You may remember the case of a woman in Euless who tried to drown the children of a Palestinian family back in May. She’s been indicted for attempted capital murder of a person under 10 and injury to a child.
  • According to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner, the cause of death for Chasity Bonner, who died in the Tarrant County Jail in May, was atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. She was 35 years old.
  • Tarrant County Sherriff Bill Waybourn wants a third-party review of his policies and body cameras for jailers after the Anthony Johnson case. Johnson died in the jail in April. Video cameras aren’t doing anything for folks dying in jail; if they were going to do anything useful, Waybourn wouldn’t want them and the county commissioners sure wouldn’t give him the money.
  • One of the biggest stories in Dallas this week, though more on the “it bleeds, it leads” principle than anything I’d usually write about, was the tragic killing of a police officer in Oak Lawn. The shooter was himself killed on the freeway in Lewisville; it appears he was a “Moorish sovereign citizen”. The DMN has a harsh editorial about the anti-Americanism of sovereign citizen beliefs and actions which I commend to your collective attention. Our host and I have been griping about these folks for close to a quarter-century now, and we’ve watched a number of tragedies when sovereign citizen types have been asked to live by the same laws the rest of us do. While I am often not a fan of the police, they don’t deserve to be executed by delusional folks with a grudge against the government and they also don’t deserve to be the instrument of suicide, which seems like what happened here.
  • Texas Monthly has an explainer about the Justice Department suit against RealPage, the Richardson-based software company and apparent Sherman Act anti-trust violator.
  • I didn’t know that Daniel Perry, whom our only governor pardoned for murdering a BLM protestor in Austin, had a record of domestic violence for beating up his sister when he was 18 and living in Carrollton. I certainly didn’t know, but am not surprised, that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles was aware of his record when they recommended Greg Abbott make the politically-motivated pardon.
  • I remember posting about these two gay dads in the city of Aurora out in Wise County some time ago, but I had not caught up with them in a while. So this update was welcome. If you’ve forgotten this case, it was the one where their landlord, the town administrator, tried to run the restaurateurs out of town and get CPS to take away their kid, and the investigation into that showed that not only had she probably been responsible for burning down City Hall twice, she’d embezzled a quarter-million dollars or so from the city. Only in small-town Texas.
  • Juanita Craft is one of Dallas’ civil rights icons and a key figure in desegregating the State Fair and Dallas ISD. She was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Austin, a historic Black cemetery, and a headstone has finally been installed at her grave.
  • New footage of the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas after the assassination has been found and is going up for auction.
  • In other auction news, Heritage Auctions here in Dallas is selling props and costumes from Game of Thrones.
  • Apparently there’s a gang of Pokemon card rustlers in Texas that has hit stores across the state, including in the Metroplex. Like Magic cards before them, some single Pokemon cards can be worth hundreds of dollars, so a case full of cards can be make-or-break for stores.
  • This week I learned that one of our local eccentrics, the guy who used to run the Texas Triffid Farm (RIP), was investigated by the FBI in 1987 for selling weapons manufacturing secrets to the Daleks. For those of you too young to remember the Cold War, it was a deeply weird time. Also, if you’re that kind of nerd, click through for the Harlan Ellison cameo in this story.
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Paxton sues Bexar County over voter registration drive

Posted on September 5, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

As promised/threatened.

Still a crook any way you look

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Wednesday followed through on his threat to sue Bexar County over a new program that will mail out voter registration forms to unregistered voters.

Bexar County commissioners approved the proposal on Tuesday during a commissioners meeting.

The county will enter into a $392,700 contract agreement with firm Civic Government Solutions to print and mail about 210,000 voter registration application forms to unregistered voters.

Paxton had previously warned that he would sue the county if it approved the proposal.

Precinct 1 Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores spoke in defiance of Paxton on Tuesday.

“The word ‘integrity’ was used in a statement by the attorney general regarding our voter rolls and [to] ensure only eligible voters can vote. And that’s exactly what we are trying to pass today and why I was proud to second it — so we can encourage and make sure Americans exercise their right to vote,” she said.

[…]

[Paxton] also argued Texas counties have no statutory authority to print and mail state voter registration forms.

The lawsuit asked for an injunction to prevent the program from taking effect.

See here for the background. My boring prediction is that Paxton will fail at the district court level – he’s the kind of lawyer who does way better in front of a friendly judge than a skeptical one, and in a non-trivial number of the cases he files he cares more about the headline than the result – but will get bailed out by SCOTx, who will find some fig leaf to justify his claims. I will be happy to be proven wrong about that latter part. Not much else to say – we’ve seen this movie many times before, and while there’s always some doubt about how it ends, the basic plot contours are extremely familiar. The San Antonio Report and the Trib updated their stories from yesterday to reflect this development, and the Current has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Texas SCOPE Act partially blocked

Posted on September 5, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

One of the many Internet/social media-related laws passed in the last legislative session(s) has been partially put on hold by a federal judge.

A handful of new laws went into effect Sunday, including the Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment Act, despite multiple lawsuits to block the law’s enforcement. However, on Friday a Texas judge granted a preliminary injunction on certain requirements of the new law that aims to protect minors from “harmful content and data collection practices.”

Rep. Shelby Slawson (R-Texas) said the bill, passed during the 88th Texas Legislative Session, aimed to keep kids younger than 18 safe online while empowering parental involvement, the Chronicle previous reported.

On Friday, United States District Court Judge Robert Pitman issued an order stating the “preliminary injunction is limited only to HB 18’s monitoring-and-filtering requirements.”

“Plaintiffs have shown that HB 18 is a content-based statute and is therefore subject to strict scrutiny,” Pitman said. “As to the monitoring-and-filtering requirements, HB 18, plaintiffs have carried their burden in showing that the law’s restrictions on speech fail strict scrutiny, are unconstitutionally vague and are preempted by Section 230. Because Plaintiffs also show that the remaining equitable factors weigh in their favor, the court preliminarily enjoins Paxton from enforcing the monitoring-and-filtering provisions.”

In July, tech company NetChoice and the Computer and Communication Industry Association filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Ken Paxton to prevent the law from going into effect. Last month, the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a separate lawsuit alleging the SCOPE Act infringed on more than just children’s rights. Introduced by Slawson as House Bill 18, the act requires digital service providers to follow these guidelines:

• Digital service providers must register the age of the person creating an account for the platform and prevent the person from altering his/her age at a later date
• A minor’s parent and/or guardian must notify the digital service provider of the minor’s age or successfully dispute the registered user’s age

The SCOPE Act says digital service providers must implement a plan to “prevent the known minor’s exposure to harmful material” such as:

  1. self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, and other similar behaviors
  2. substance abuse and patterns of use that indicate addiction
  3. bullying and harassment
  4. sexual exploitation, including enticement, grooming, trafficking, abuse, and child pornography
  5. advertisements for products or services that are unlawful for a minor, including illegal drugs, tobacco, gambling, pornography, and alcohol; and
  6. predatory, unfair, or deceptive marketing practices

In Pitman’s 38-page order, he said plaintiffs did “not show that the remaining provisions of HB 18 unconstitutionally regulate a meaningful amount of constitutionally protected speech or otherwise fail strict scrutiny.”

See here for some background on this lawsuit, and here as well as the link in the Chron story for more on the other lawsuit, which was filed in late August and escaped my notice. The data collection rules and age verification requirements for digital service providers will remain in place while this case is being litigated, though the outcome of the other case might affect that. I assume the state will appeal – it’s what they usually do – so we’ll see what kind of malice the Fifth Circuit can get up to this time. KXAN has more.

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Amanda Zurawski on the trail

Posted on September 5, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I’m very glad that she’s doing this, and even more upset that she is in the position where she has to.

Credit: Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune

Amanda Zurawski didn’t want to go into politics. She wanted a baby girl.

Her name would have been Willow. But when Zurwaski was 18 weeks pregnant, her water broke. The fetus wouldn’t survive, but, citing Texas’ abortion laws, her doctors refused to terminate the pregnancy until she eventually developed sepsis three days later.

After nearly dying Zurawski sued the state over its abortion laws and lost, but captured the attention of the nation. Now, she’s at the forefront of Democrats’ battle against anti-abortion legislation and leaning into a new and unexpected path for herself, born out of an anger over her own experience and a desire for change.

“My future is going to be in the political world. I just don’t know what it looks like yet,” said Zurawski, who quit her job earlier this year to focus on the presidential campaign. She’s not ruling out running for office herself.

As Democrats continue to lean into abortion as one of the central pillars of their messaging this cycle, Zurawski has ballooned into one of the party’s most prominent messengers on reproductive rights. She has crisscrossed the country on behalf of the Democratic presidential campaign telling her story of losing her pregnancy and confronting Texas’ restrictive abortion laws. She spoke during counterprogramming to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and on the main stage of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. She was a delegate for Texas as the party formally nominated Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

“I’m very proud of everything I’ve done. I’m very hopeful, and I think that we are making change,” Zurawski said in an interview last week amid a packed schedule at the DNC. But she added, “I would trade my personal platform to have Willow.”

There’s more, so read the rest. I don’t have anything insightful to add. I just hope people listen to her and heed what she says. And I thank her for her service.

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Now trans Texans can’t get their birth certificates updated

Posted on September 4, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

This is getting uglier.

The Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) made an unannounced policy change Friday, modifying its requirements for Texans seeking to change the sex marker on their birth certificates.

The DSHS website previously said the agency would accept a certified court order to change a person’s sex marker on their birth certificate, according to an archived version accessed via the Wayback Machine. That is no longer listed as an accepted document for VS-170, the DSHS form required to make such a change.

“Trans Texans no longer have an option to amend their birth certificate to reflect their gender identity. We are still working with our legal partners to understand these changes,” read a social media post from the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT).

KXAN reached out to the DSHS for comment on the change, and whether it was directed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to make the change. Previously, Paxton directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to refuse court orders that require the agency to allow Texans to change the gender marker on state-issued IDs.

That policy change by DPS also included a directive for DPS employees to submit the court orders to the Attorney General’s office for its records. It is unclear if the DSHS policy change also includes a similar directive.

Texas law permits changes to birth certificates if proven “by satisfactory evidence to be inaccurate.” However, it doesn’t allow state agencies to make substantive policy changes without 30 days’ notice and a public comment period.

In order to obtain a court order for a sex marker change, transgender Texans have to submit evidence to a family court judge. In Travis County, this includes a letter from a medical professional or therapist.

In 2023, the Texas House declined to pass Senate Bill 162, which would have prevented changes to the sex marker on a minor’s birth certificate but still allowed an adult Texan to update their own.

This follows the DPS directive on drivers’ licenses. The word for this is “erasure”, and it’s being done in an extralegal manner, in defiance of existing court orders, without a law in place to mandate it, and without following required processes. The brazenness is breathtaking. I would like to think this is unconstitutional, but that would necessitate the Fifth Circuit and SCOTUS agreeing with that assessment, and I don’t think I can bring myself to believe that. I don’t know what to do about this right now, and it is incredibly upsetting. The Trib has more.

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

Paxton versus the State Fair

Posted on September 4, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

First there was this.

Howdy, folks

The state and its third biggest city are set to square off in court over a ban on guns at Texas’ most celebrated tribute to itself — the State Fair.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Thursday that he is suing the city of Dallas and state fair officials for its new policy of banning all firearms from the fairgrounds.

The Attorney General’s lawsuit asks a Dallas County District Court to order the City of Dallas and state fair officials not to enforce the gun ban at the Fair during its run from Sept. 27 until Oct. 20.

“Neither the City of Dallas nor the State Fair of Texas can infringe on Texans’ right to self-defense,” Paxton wrote in his statement. “I warned fifteen days ago that if they did not end their unlawful conduct I would see them in court, and now I will.”

The City of Dallas said it disagreed with Paxton’s allegations against its interim city manager.

“The City was not involved in the State Fair of Texas’ announcement of its enhanced weapons policy,” a Dallas spokesperson said in a statement. “The State Fair of Texas is a private event operated and controlled by a private, nonprofit entity and not the City.”

Karissa Condoianis, a state fair spokesperson, said Friday that fair officials were standing by their decision.

“The State Fair of Texas will continue to prioritize providing a safe and secure environment for our millions of fairgoers, as well as our staff, vendors, and volunteers. As a private, not-for-profit organization leasing Fair Park for our annual State Fair, we believe we have the right to make this decision and maintain that it is the correct decision to protect the safety of our patrons,” she said.

Fair officials announced the new gun ban last month, a year after a shooting at the fair injured three people. Paxton’s suit says that since Fair Park is owned by Dallas, the policy change violates state law, which allows licensed gun owners to carry in places owned or leased by governmental entities, unless otherwise prohibited by state law.

According to the filing, Paxton is seeking fines for each day the policy is still in place. In his 15-day ultimatum letter to the interim city manager, he acknowledged that some buildings located on the Fair Park premises, like the Cotton Bowl and other buildings that are used for scholastic events are areas where guns are prohibited by state law.

Paxton is suing the city of Dallas because the State Fair is on Dallas-owned land, but the policy is that of the State Fair, which is a private entity and has the right under Texas law to ban firearms. The law here is unclear.

The city of Dallas, which owns Fair Park, entered into a 25-year contract with the State Fair approved in 2002 to lease the park to fair organizers every year for the fair’s 24-day run.

The State Fair of Texas is a private nonprofit organization, with the fair itself being one of the organization’s biggest fundraisers every year.

According to Texas Government Code, a state agency or political subdivision — like Dallas — can not ban a licensed gun owner from property that is government owned or leased, unless it’s a protected gun-free zone such as a school or courthouse.

“The rule in Texas is, with a few exceptions, you can take guns anywhere that you want,” said Mirya Holman, a University of Houston political science professor who studies state policymaking on contentious issues like gun rights. “And private entities can say, ‘we don’t let firearms on this property,’ because they’re controlling their own property.”

Paxton cited this law in arguing Dallas is responsible for the gun ban, which he said makes the new policy illegal. That has to do with the concept of preemption, Holman said — the idea that the state’s authority supersedes local governments.

“Paxton is threatening the city of Dallas with fines for not allowing firearms onto the State Fair property,” Holman said. “That’s a more rare form of preemption that exists, but it is something that the state of Texas has threatened to use before, and it means that local government officials would themselves pay a financial price for engaging in this action.”

[…]

Texas Penal Code lays out the legal framework around concealed and open carry. It’s a criminal offense to carry a firearm on a property without the “effective consent” of the property owner, up to a Class A misdemeanor.

The penal code doesn’t really define “property” or “owner,” so the question of who has the right of consent over allowing guns on a property is complicated, said [David] Coale, the appellate attorney.

“We have a situation where, in good faith, you have two different entities that can argue they’re the owner of this property for purposes of denying effective consent,” Coale said.

Lawmakers may not have had this specific situation in mind when crafting that law, he added — and Paxton’s office said as much in an August 2016 opinion about a similar issue concerning a complaint over two unnamed nonprofits with offices on government property.

Paxton concluded a political subdivision wouldn’t be liable for signs banning handguns handguns on government-owned property leased to a private business.

He reiterated that same position in November 2016, ruling that the Fort Worth Zoo could legally ban firearms despite being on public land.

The attorney general also found that a license holder who took their gun onto that kind of property wouldn’t be subject to criminal penalties.

Those opinions aren’t legally binding, however, and it’ll be up to the courts to decide.

“The real fix here is for the Legislature to figure out what it wants to do about this, and either put a definition of ‘owner’ in that includes, excludes or does something else with Fair Park,” Coale said.

I think we know what the Lege is likely to do, but that won’t affect this matter. And clearly, 2016 Ken Paxton is not the same as 2024 Ken Paxton. I have no idea what the courts will make of this – it will surely go to the Supreme Court if Paxton loses in the early rounds, but if the city of Dallas loses they may decide to settle and get out rather than pursue the matter to the ends of the earth.

As for the State Fair, they’re not budging.

A State Fair of Texas spokesperson released a statement Saturday affirming their commitment to prioritizing the fairgoers’ safety and asserting their right to enforce and uphold their decision to ban guns.

“The State Fair of Texas will continue to prioritize providing a safe and secure environment for our millions of fairgoers, as well as our staff, vendors, and volunteers,” said a spokesperson. “As a private, not-for-profit organization leasing Fair Park for our annual State Fair, we believe we have the right to make this decision and maintain that it is the correct decision to protect the safety of our patrons. Due to pending litigation, we will make no further comments at this time.”

The fair’s updated policy comes after 23-year-old Cameron Turner opened fire and injured three people at the fair last year.

Yeah, let’s not forget that part. Normal people would likely presume that they are safer in a public space where there are fewer guns, not more guns. We’re not dealing with that here. We’ll see what the courts make of this.

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Paxton versus Bexar County

Posted on September 4, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I’m sorry to make Ken Paxton the main character today, but he kind of is.

Still a crook any way you look

Bexar County is moving forward with plans to hire an outside company to find and register potential voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election — something Attorney General Ken Paxton has said he’ll sue the county to stop.

The move came after a roughly three-hour discussion in which nearly every elected Republican in Bexar County signed up to raise concern about the potential for the move to help Democrats more than Republicans.

Commissioners voted 3-2 in favor of the plan, with Commissioner Grant Moody (Pct. 3) casting the lone “no” vote and Commissioner Tommy Calvert (Pct. 4) abstaining amid concerns about the contract selection process.

Tuesday’s agreement calls for spending $393,000 to hire Civic Government Solutions LLC, which buys data from various sources to create a database of unregistered voters that wouldn’t normally appear in commercial voter files.

The company then mails out prefilled voter registration forms with prepaid return envelopes to those potential voters — the type of work normally done by political parties, campaigns and nonprofits.

But in the midst of various efforts by the state to purge potentially ineligible voters from its rolls, Bexar County is among a number of large urban counties exploring ways to take a bigger role in helping register new ones.

In a county with 1.27 million registered voters, CGS plans to make contact with 210,000 potential new voters ahead of the 2024 election, according to its contract with Bexar County.

In the coming years, it will also contact another 15,000 to 20,000 newly identified residents who’ve moved to the area.

After hearing from at least a dozen local Republicans, Commissioner Justin Rodriguez (Pct. 2), who brought the idea forward, said he didn’t invite a “bus full” of Democrats to make the case for hiring the company, because it would have injected partisanship into a nonpartisan issue.

“This is about democracy … we need for people to somehow have a better, easier way to access the elections department,” Rodriguez said.

Ahead of the meeting, Paxton said in a letter to Bexar County commissioners stating that counties don’t have the authority to print and mail state voter registration forms. If commissioners didn’t abandon the idea, he vowed, “I will see you in court.”

Larry Roberson, chief of the civil division of the Bexar County District Attorney’s office, dismissed the idea that the county was doing anything illegal.

“Paxton can sue, but I read through the letter,” Roberson said. “I found it to be misleading at best.”

I’m sure that’s true, but it doesn’t mean he’ll lose in court. If you put aside rampaging Republican paranoia about “non-citizens” registering to vote – as a reminder, voter registrations go through multiple verifications, including by the Secretary of State, before they are finalized – it’s hard to see what’s so objectionable about this. But being unobjectionable and being allowed in Ken Paxton’s Texas are two different things. The latter will be decided by the Supreme Court, and I know how I’d bet on that.

As noted elsewhere, Harris County is considering a similar idea; it’s not clear to me they’ll follow through, but there’s still time. This is where I say again that we need to restore and strengthen a federal Voting Rights Act, and we need to make sure it doesn’t get struck down by a corrupt federal judiciary. If we have the trifecta to make that happen in 2025, there better be no hesitation. Getting a better government in this state is next up. The Trib and the Current have more.

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Judge Hidalgo advocates for the Flood Control tax hike

Posted on September 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I’ve got my eye on this.

Judge Lina Hidalgo

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo in her State of the County address on Thursday made her first public push for a proposed tax hike that would create more funds for infrastructure maintenance.

Hidalgo said in her first in-person State of the County address since 2019 that while the county’s investment in storm resiliency projects and other flood control efforts has increased since Hurricane Harvey, the total amount allotted for maintenance has remained unchanged. Harris County, she said, will struggle to maintain the $5 billion it has scheduled in new projects over the next five years without the increase.

“We can actually turn the page on flooding, and there are some other ways worth trying,” Hidalgo said. “So we now have an item on the November ballot where voters can allow us to invest in maintenance so we’re maintaining the projects we’re building.”

The proposal would increase the Harris County Flood Control District’s tax rate to 4.8 cents for every $100 in property value. For someone who owns a $400,000 home, the increase would amount to roughly $60 more per year and would generate somewhere in the ballpark of $113 million in revenue for the flood control district.

Harris County’s tax rate has steadily declined since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a high rate of 57 cents in 2021, the most recently adopted tax rate was just 49 cents in 2023.

[…]

The ballot proposal is even supported by Republican Commissioner Tom Ramsey, who butted heads this week with county Democrats over an initiative to increase voter registration across Harris County.

“We have known for 30-plus years that flood control was underfunded when it came to maintenance,” Ramsey said when Commissioners Court voted to put the proposal on the ballot. “We are today saying that’s not acceptable.”

See here for the background. I would love to see some polling on this. It’s clear that any kind of tax hike is a no go for some voters, regardless of its purpose. But for many voters it matters what the funds are intended for, and I suspect that a large majority here support the idea of spending more money on flood mitigation. The details matter, as does how it is presented to the voters, and whether or not there’s an organized opposition. I assume there will be a funded campaign for this proposition, but whether or not there’s an anti group is not yet clear. This could go either way, but it’s not up to chance. It’s up to the campaign or campaigns, and all that remains to be seen.

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Can we get some help with these water repairs?

Posted on September 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Can’t hurt to ask.

Houston officials are seeking assistance from state lawmakers to help pay for some of the $4.93 billion in water utility improvements needed to prevent people from suffering widespread boil water notices and mass water loss, should aging infrastructure lead to catastrophic failure down the road.

Josh Sanders, Mayor John Whitmire’s chief of intergovernmental relations, said city officials will not be asking for the money from the state all at once, but rather will seek funding to aid individual projects, such as replacing the line that transports untreated water to the city’s East Water Purification Plant, as a part of that total price tag. Erin Jones, spokesperson for Houston Public Works, said there are no plans to charge Houstonians more money for their water usage to offset the cost of improvements to the utility, nor is there a study taking place to determine the need to raise water costs.

Sanders and other city officials plan to attend committee hearings Sept. 3 in Austin to lay out Houston’s needs.

Houston Water Utility consists of a puzzle of water and wastewater treatment facilities and wastewater lift stations, along with the veins of pipes winding underground that provide water to more than 5 million residents across the Houston region. The highest profile users include the Texas Medical Center — the largest in the nation — and the area’s 622 petrochemical facilities, which represent 44% of the facilities in the country.

The utility malfunctioning could spell trouble for millions. The east plant supplies water for 65% to 70% of city residents, and if the line that carries raw water to be treated at the plant fails, it could mean that many residents will be without water.

[…]

Houston Water has three main issues when it comes to making the fixes to its water utility. Two of the most critical involve the East Water Purification Plant — which treats between 300 million to 310 million gallons of water a day.

The East plant needs another pipe for raw water to replace the 70-year-old one in place. The plant also needs to be rebuilt entirely.

Then comes the need to address leaky pipes in Houston that have been the center of the city’s water billing issues. Houston’s water loss alone could supply a city of 900,000 — like Fort Worth or San Jose — with water, Eyerly said.

One of the lawmakers Houston is working with is state Sen. Charles Perry, a Lubbock Republican who’s led the charge for water-related initiatives at the state level.

Perry chairs both the Water, Agricultural and Rural Affairs, and the State Water Implementation Fund committees, which could both prove beneficial in leveraging state dollars.

See here for some background. Suffice it to say that I don’t have a whole lot of faith in the government of Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick doing anything to help the city of Houston. They don’t like us, they don’t care about us, they see no benefit to themselves in lifting a finger for us. That said, being unwilling to help is not the same as being actively antagonistic, and to the extent that they’re more the former than the latter, I could see legislative efforts being successful. This was a point of emphasis for Mayor Whitmire during the campaign, and I expect him and his team to lean on that in the coming sessions. I hope their optimism is justified. And I also hope they’re lobbying the members of Congress that represent Houston, because federal aid will be needed as well.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of September 2

Posted on September 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes everyone had a good Labor Day as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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Water, water, everywhere

Posted on September 2, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

All due to leaks.

Texas’ most populous cities lost roughly 88 billion gallons of water last year because of aging water infrastructure and extreme heat, costing them millions of dollars and straining the state’s water supply, according to self-reported water loss audits.

The documents show that bigger municipalities are not immune to water issues often seen in smaller, less-resourced communities around the state. All but one big city saw increased water loss from last year’s audits.

While cities are losing water because of inaccurate meters or other data issues, the main factors are leaks and main breaks.

Here’s how much each of Texas’ biggest cities lost last year, according to their self-reported audits:

  • Houston: 31.8 billion
  • San Antonio: 19.5 billion
  • Dallas: 17.6 billion
  • Austin: 7.1 billion
  • Fort Worth: 5.9 billion
  • El Paso: 4.8 billion

Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth and El Paso must submit water loss audits to the Texas Water Development Board yearly. Other water agencies must do audits only every five years, unless the city has over 3,300 connections or receives money from the board.

“What we have right now is not sustainable [or] tenable,” said Jennifer Walker, National Wildlife Federation’s Texas Coast and Water Program director.

The cities of Houston and Dallas saw the biggest increase in lost water reported. Houston saw a 30% jump from last year’s audit, while Dallas saw an increase of 18%.

[…]

Last year, voters passed a proposition that created a new fund specifically for water infrastructure projects that are overseen by the Texas Water Development Board.

The agency now has $1 billion to invest in projects that address various issues, from water loss and quality to acquiring new water sources and addressing Texas’ deteriorating pipes. It’s the largest investment in water infrastructure by state lawmakers since 2013.

Walker calls the $1 billion a “drop in the bucket.”

Texas 2036, an Austin-based think tank, expects the state needs to spend more than $150 billion over the next 50 years on water infrastructure.

While some of the Texas Water Fund must be focused on projects in rural areas with populations of less than 150,000, Walker said the bigger cities could also receive some funding.

This story is from a few weeks ago. The Chron just had a recent story about the situation here, which not surprisingly will cost a boatload of money to remediate. The city will seek some assistance from the state on that, which I’ll blog about separately. The scope of this, both in terms of geography and cost, really requires federal intervention to deal with. I’m sure plenty of other states and cities are facing similar issues, and climate change will just exacerbate the problem; it’s not like we’re going to have water to spare. We did a lot of infrastructure work under President Biden, we’re going to need to do more under President Harris (we all know it’ll never happen under the other guy). It would be a good idea to be talking to our members of Congress about this, it’s not going to happen on its own.

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Weekend link dump for September 1

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

“The Must-Carry Solution for the Media’s Google Problem”.

“The funniest component of the Trump campaign’s media strategy so far is its commitment to dipshit outreach.”

You do have to wonder what Cheryl Hines is thinking these days.

“Maybe that’s because some of his supporters have discovered that Trump campaign donations are going into a mysterious black hole—a scam so large that it makes Trump University and the Trump Foundation look like peanuts.”

“Spotify Has a Fake-Band Problem. It’s a Sign of Things to Come.”

“The federal courts are full of judges who could retire but won’t. Little can be done about it.”

“We all know these stories. And while we many not remember all of the names, we remember Kate Cox’s because her story was told so extensively and publicly. So we all know who Kate Cox is and we all know her story. Anti-abortion white evangelicals know this too. But they try their very hardest to pretend they don’t. Her story is exactly where they don’t want to look, where they never want to look.”

“The widely varied pros and cons of the Electoral College have already been aired and debated extensively. But there is another problem that few have recognized: The Electoral College makes American democracy more vulnerable to people with malicious intent.”

“With Jack Smith not seeking Cannon’s removal at this time, I think we can say that the MAL case is unlikely to go to trial until 2026 at the earliest, if Trump loses the election.”

“Thirty years after the release of their captivating debut album, Oasis have announced they are reuniting – news that has delighted middle-aged fans and a whole new generation alike.” I’m pretty sure if they come anywhere near Houston my wife (who was a grad student in Manchester in the 90s) is going to want to see them.

RIP, Scott Thorson, former lover of Liberace and key witness in the trial for the 1981 killings known as the Wonderland Massacre.

“An environmental advocacy organization called for the investigation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. following the resurfacing of an interview where his daughter said he cut a dead whale’s head with a chainsaw.” I’m sorry, I’m going to need to lie down for a minute.

RIP, Leonard Riggio, founder and longtime chair of Barnes & Noble.

“However, more than 12 months later, Tesla’s network (with nearly 30,000 fast-charging plugs in the U.S. and Canada) is still pretty much inaccessible to folks who own non-Tesla EVs. Software delays and hardware shortages are apparently to blame.”

“Two bits of news came out of the letter Mark Zuckerberg sent to Rep. Jim Jordan this week (and how people responded to it), neither of which are what you’re likely to have heard about. First, Donald Trump seems to be accusing himself of rigging the 2020 election against himself. And, second, Mark Zuckerberg has absolutely no spine when it comes to Republican pressure on Meta’s moderation practices. He falsely plays into their fundamentally misleading framing, all to win some temporary political favors by immediately caving to pressure from the GOP.”

“Georgia Republicans start the steal“.

Wishing Chet Lemon and his family all the best.

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Senate Dem Caucus requests feds to investigate voter suppression matters

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

There’s plenty of material to work with.

A group of Democratic state lawmakers on Friday asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate potential violations of federal law and civil and voting rights related to Texas state leaders’ recent voter roll purge, raids of Latinos’ homes in connection to alleged election fraud, probing of voter registration organizations and ongoing scrutiny of groups that work with migrants.

“Collectively, these actions have a disproportionate impact on Latinos and other communities of color, which is sowing fear and will suppress voting,” twelve Texas senators wrote in the letter. “We urge the DOJ to investigate Texas … and to take all necessary action to protect the fundamental rights of all Texans and ensure all citizens’ freedom to vote is unencumbered.”

The request for federal authorities to intervene is the latest escalation in response to what Texas leaders have often described as efforts to secure elections.

The efforts, however, have just as often provoked condemnation and worries from civil rights groups and Democrats that the state is violating Texans’ rights and trying to scare people away from the polls.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, a large Latino civil rights organization founded in 1929, made a similar plea to the feds earlier this week. Several of the group’s elderly members were the targets last week of search warrants related to an investigation into alleged election fraud being conducted by Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office.

“These actions echo a troubling history of voter suppression and intimidation that has long targeted both Black and Latino communities, particularly in states like Texas, where demographic changes have increasingly shifted the political landscape,” the letter states. “The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy, and LULAC stands firm in its commitment to defending that right for all Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity.”

The Justice Department had received LULAC’s letter, a spokesperson confirmed Friday but declined to comment further.

See here, here, and here for some background; there’s way too much ground to cover to do it all. I’m reasonably confident that the DOJ will pick this up and do something with it. I’m far less confident that there will be any actual enforcement of the law that they will be able to accomplish. What leverage do they have, and what are the odds that a Paxton handmaiden judge and the Fifth Circuit wouldn’t provide a restraining order against it? The more lawless and brazen that Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton get, with the boost from their cheerleaders on the bench, the more I’m convinced that coming up with some way to curb that behavior needs to be a top priority. I don’t have a good idea about what can or should be done, and I’m fully aware that anything done here could be wielded against blue states in the future by a Republican administration. But right now it feels like there are few to no checks and balances on the state of Texas (and to be fair, on many other red states), and that’s not sustainable. I would like to see more talk about this by national Democrats, because it’s going to take all of us to do something about it.

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Shawn Thierry confirms our suspicions

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Don’t let the door hit you, etc etc etc.

State Rep. Shawn Thierry, a Houston Democrat who was defeated in her primary earlier this year, announced Friday she is switching to the Republican Party.

Thierry was ousted by primary challenger Lauren Ashley Simmons in the May runoff after she sided with Republicans last year on a handful of bills opposed by the LGBTQ+ community, including a measure barring gender-transitioning care for minors. She delivered an emotional speech from the House floor explaining why she broke with her party, remarks that went viral.

In a statement, Thierry said she switched parties because the Democratic Party “has veered so far left, so deep into the progressive abyss, that it now champions policies that I cannot, in good conscience, support.”

“I am leaving the left because the left has abandoned Democrats who feel betrayed by a party that has lost its way, lost its commitment to hard working families,” Thierry said.

Thierry was announced earlier this month as the director of political strategy for the U.S. wing of Genspect, an international anti-trans policy group. Founded in 2021 by an Irish psychotherapist, the group is part of a broader network of organizations that oppose gender-transitioning care for minors, and its members have testified in favor of bills across the world that would ban or limit the practice.

[…]

State Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, a San Antonio Democrat who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, said Thierry had “chosen to continue to betray the values and priorities of her constituents” and “once again put money and title above principle.”

“If Thierry looks at a party taking away the freedom for women to control their bodies, cutting healthcare for millions, and led by a racist, petty convict and says I want in on that mess, I think that says more about Shawn Thierry than about the Democratic Party,” Martinez Fischer said in a statement. “Adios.”

What a massive upgrade the voters in HD146 gave themselves. Just stunning to contemplate.

The thing about this is that before Thierry went all JK Rowling, she was more or less a normie Dem legislator. As recently as the fall of 2022, she was being touted by Planned Parenthood for being “a champion for maternal health policies”, and celebrated the year before by the Planned Parenthood Action Fund for being one of five co-authors of HB3825, a “critical step towards restoring patient access and repairing the reproductive health care safety net across the state following a decade of political attacks”. I wonder, now that she’s a Republican, will she repudiate all of this work she once did? Does she now oppose all abortions and restrictions on guns? Does she support restrictions on voting rights and mass deportations and private school vouchers? Does she regret voting to impeach Ken Paxton? I’m just asking.

Not that I really care – believe me, I plan to spend zero time thinking about Shawn Thierry ever again. We got the better of this deal by far. The Chron has more, if for some reason you want to read more.

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Can we un-stack the Lottery odds?

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Maybe. Not sure this goes far enough.

After assisting investors who stacked the odds to guarantee winning a $95 million Lotto Texas jackpot last year, Texas Lottery Commission officials said they have changed their procedures to prevent another such occurrence in the future – but not before state lawmakers, citing Houston Chronicle reporting, ripped into agency leaders for helping the group orchestrate a giant payday at the expense of everyday players.

“You collaborated with a group of sophisticated players,” Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Plano

Republican, said during a legislative hearing last week. “A significant percentage of lottery sales in Texas is to lower-income individuals, and I think they were taken advantage of.”

“There’s no question in my mind that the integrity [of the lottery] was lost in this process,” added Sen. Tan Parker, a Flower Mound Republican. “I’m even more concerned with the report that it seemed as if staff was supportive of and working with the organization.”

[…]

In response to the resulting publicity, the Gov. Greg Abbott-appointed lottery commissioners directed the agency’s executive director to study the issue of wholesale, or syndicate buyers, and recommend policy changes. Director Ryan Mindell and lottery commission Chairman Robert Rivera declined interview requests.

But at a lottery commission meeting earlier this month, Mindell said the gaming industry had seen growing activity from so-called purchasing groups, including in Indiana, Maryland, and Oklahoma. “With modern analytical tools and large amounts of funds at their disposal, every lottery game in the country, and likely the world, will be analyzed in one form or another by these types of groups,” he said.

He also told the commissioners that despite media scrutiny of last year’s Lotto draw, “the integrity of the game was not compromised,” noting that every ticket purchased had the same mathematical chance of winning. Mindell, however, did not address the fact that if a single player buys up all ticket combinations, other players are, at best, competing for only half the advertised jackpot.

Still, he added, “it is also clear these activities harm the perception of the Lotto Texas game.” So in the future, Mindell said, if a retailer makes a sudden request for more terminals, the application would be reviewed by the agency’s legal staff and the executive director. Under such rules, he said he would reject a similar request in the future.

“This will prevent rapid deployment of terminals to retailers who do not have a record of sustained sales, who may be acting in response to temporary demand,” Mindell said. He added that he also was tweaking lottery terminal software to inhibit investor sales, though he declined to elaborate, saying it would compromise the game’s security.

[…]

When Galveston Republican Sen. Mayes Middleton tried to pin down the lottery director on the growth of controversial online “courier” companies that have sprung up in Texas, Mindell gave him incorrect information.

While such companies are licensed or prohibited in several states, Texas officials have taken a hands-off approach, asserting they have no authority to regulate the businesses. The entities, with names like Jackpocket, LotteryNow and Lottery.com, take ticket orders and payment over a phone app.

Then, because Texas law requires lottery tickets to be purchased in-person, they dispatch couriers to state-licensed brick-and-mortar outlets to complete the transaction. Most of the companies, however, have collapsed the model by spinning off affiliated entities to acquire retailer licenses from the Texas Lottery Commission, meaning they can both take orders and process the sales in-house.

See here and here for the background. I had previously expressed some confusion about the logistics of buying 26 million Lottery tickets in the span of a few days. That last paragraph above helps me understand it better. Seems to me a lot of the grunt work can be eliminated by combining the retailer and the purchasing agent. It also seems clear that the simplest way to put these companies out of business is to prohibit that form of ownership. Will the Lege go that route? We’ll find out in a few months.

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Another Paxton bullying attempt gets knocked down

Posted on August 31, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Oh for four. I like that.

Still a crook any way you look

A Travis County judge on Thursday denied an effort from Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office to question the leader of a Brownsville organization that provides migrants with humanitarian aid, delivering the state’s top civil lawyer another courtroom defeat in a series of actions targeting groups that work with migrants and immigrants.

Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of the 459th Civil District Court denied a request from Paxton’s office to take the deposition of a Team Brownsville representative. Team Brownsville provides water, shelter and other basic necessities to asylum-seeking migrants.

In court filings, the state argued that it had “a reasonable basis” to believe that Team Brownsville was among non-governmental organizations at the Texas-Mexico border helping immigrants enter the country.

Gov. Greg Abbott directed Paxton’s office in 2022 to investigate the role of such groups “in planning and facilitating the illegal transportation of illegal immigrants across our borders.”

Paxton’s office said in the filings that “former board members and volunteers” had accused Team Brownsville of poor financial accountability for money it receives from the government and donors as well as potential improper use of funds but did not further detail any alleged wrongdoing.

Paxton’s office did not immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment.

Aron Thorn, a lawyer with the Beyond Borders Program at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the group was “proud” to represent Team Brownsville.

“We are thrilled with the judge’s ruling denying this baseless petition,” Thorn said in a statement. “Organizations like Team Brownsville provide essential services to people seeking safety at the border. They fill a critical need in Texas border communities that are unable to care for immigrants. Any effort to end their services is an attack on that very care.”

Add this to the rulings against his attempts to harass FIEL, Catholic Charities, and Annunciation House. The latter has been appealed to SCOTx; I don’t know if any of the others have been or will be. I’m just happy to celebrate every time Ken Paxton fails.

Posted in La Migra, Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Trib overview of HD112

Posted on August 31, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

A top pickup opportunity for Dems, which could slam the brakes on vouchers for at least this session. Also an interesting race in its own right.

Averie Bishop

Rep. Angie Chen Button, 70, is living the American Dream. After immigrating from Taiwan to Texas for graduate school at 24, she improved her English, climbed the corporate ladder and was elected to the state House, where she has served eight terms as the only Asian American woman in the Legislature.

Averie Bishop, 28, is living her own version of the American Dream. Her mother fled poverty in the Philippines and moved to Texas where she worked as a maid and married a bus driver. The two worked hard so Bishop could eventually go to college and law school, and, in 2022, become the first Asian American to be crowned Miss Texas.

These two women — Button a Republican, and Bishop a Democrat — say their stories reflect the opportunity and upward mobility that have drawn so many immigrants to Texas. Now they face off this November in a rare election featuring two Asian candidates, vying for the seat in House District 112, which is poised to be one of the state’s most competitive legislative races.

Button has held on to her seat representing a slice of Dallas’ northern suburbs through several tough elections, since being first elected in 2008. She is a formidable incumbent with strong relationships with state officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who is counting on her reelection in part to push through school voucher legislation in the coming session. Bishop, meanwhile, enjoys the name recognition and social media platform associated with her historic beauty pageant win, and could ride the Gen Z wave boosted by Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket.

The winner will be the only Asian woman in the Legislature and also one of six members to ever serve in the 150-member Texas House. No Asian American has ever been elected to the Texas Senate. The match up is only the second time in Texas history that two Asian candidates have faced off for a legislative seat, marking a milestone for the state’s fastest-growing racial group which is proving to be a small but burgeoning political force.

That last sentence is not true, as Rep. Hubert Vo has defeated Republican Lily Truong in each of the last two cycles. I suspect they meant to say “only the second time in Texas history that two female Asian candidates have faced off for a legislative seat”, as they reference Rep. Button’s first race, in which she defeated Democrat Sandra Phuong Vu Le. A pedantic point, but that’s what we’re here for.

I’ve mentioned Averie Bishop before, as she is an impressive candidate who has “future star” potential as far as the eye can see. But you have to win the race in front of you first, and Rep. Chen Button has run ahead of the Republican baseline in her district, which just barely went for Trump in 2020. Bishop had made a name for herself before this race, and she’s done the things you want a candidate to do in it. If you’re in the Dallas area, see what you can do to help her campaign. If we want to move forward, this is the kind of race we have to win.

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Dispatches from Dallas, August 31 edition

Posted on August 31, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week, in recent news from Dallas-Fort Worth, we have election news, including the state of the Dallas charter amendments; voter registration news, including Crystal Mason and that Fox report about illegal aliens in Tarrant County registering; what’s up with area school districts; the latest Tim O’Hare shenanigans, including the ones with implications for FWISD; everybody who’s quitting their academic and civic posts this summer; updates on the local environment; the DMN on Y’all Street; some local history; and new food at Cowboys games plus the State Fair food winners. And more!

This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Howard Jones and ABC, whom we saw last week in Oklahoma City.

The last two weeks have seen a lot of news about the election, mostly focusing on the Democratic National Convention and its fallout on the presidential race. There have also been some developments in North Texas elections that you may not have heard so much about.

Here in Dallas we continue to wrangle with the charter amendments, particularly the three sponsored by Dallas HERO. Dallas HERO and its supporters are now suing the city and most of the council over the ballot language for the amendment suite and the city’s counter-proposals. (DMN) One of the citizen plaintiffs is a paralegal working for one of the businesses belonging local troublemaker Monty Bennett, the money man behind Dallas HERO. D Magazine has an overview of the whole thing. Meanwhile, the Dallas Observer had a piece last week about how Dallas is already having trouble hiring more police. One of the amendments requires the city to hire between 900 and 1000 officers; the current goal is to hire something like 250 in the near term.

To hire that many officers, to fund their pensions (already an issue) and to support them materially, the city would have to give up a lot of other things it’s currently doing. That’s before we get to the demand that half of additional revenue over what we have currently budgeted would go to the police. We have a goal to cut unsheltered homelessness in half by 2026 that would have to go. The Dallas library has already lost its online access to newspapers; the advice is to get a card at the Houston library. Budget cuts may already force the closure of some neighborhood libraries. If you’ve been reading this column regularly or following Dallas politics in other ways, you know we’re past our fat years of COVID money from the federal government and into our lean years. Dallas HERO is going to direct most of what we get to Dallas PD if their amendments pass. It will absolutely wreck our city budget until we have a chance to undo it in the next charter update ten years from now.

We all know the answer: vote against these jackasses. And vote against anything that involves Dallas HERO or Monty Bennett, who doesn’t even live in Dallas but wants to tell us how to run our city.

In other news, starting with elections:

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The current state of voter purging

Posted on August 30, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We’ll start here, and there’s a lot to unpack.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday announced that the state has removed over 1 million names from the Texas voter rolls, mainly people who moved out of state or died but including 6,500 who Abbott described as potential noncitizens.

“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated,” Abbott said in a statement. “We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting.”

Abbott added in a social media post that the removed names are being passed on to the attorney general’s office for possible criminal charges.

The governor’s announcement came five years after a botched attempt in 2019 to purge up to 100,000 suspected noncitizen voters led to the resignation of a Texas Secretary of State and a settlement with voting rights organizations setting parameters for future cleanups.

Ashley Harris, attorney for the ACLU of Texas, said the group has unresolved questions about the accuracy of the state’s latest data because the organization has not been allowed to review it.

Several local election officials in 2021 had warned that the state’s data continued to wrongly flag people who became citizens through naturalization.

“Gov. Abbott’s recent announcement about voter registration list maintenance lacks context, and instead points to routine voter list maintenance that does not provide evidence of wrongdoing by any voter,” Harris said. “Any attempts to point to this data as evidence of criminal wrongdoing is part of a pattern of voter intimidation and suppression by the state of Texas and certain elected officials.”

[…]

The people removed since the new law went into effect in December 2021 included: Over 6,000 who have a felony conviction, over 457,000 who are dead, over 463,000 whose addresses may have changed and who did not respond to a request for confirmation, over 134,000 who confirmed they moved, and over 19,000 who requested to cancel their registration.

Those removed from the voter rolls also include 65,000 who failed to respond to a notice requesting that they attest to their eligibility to vote after a secretary of state investigation indicated they may be ineligible.

Over 6,500 were removed because they are “potential noncitizens,” and of those, about 1,900 had cast votes in Texas elections, according to a statement from Abbott.

Inclusion on that list does not prove a person is a noncitizen, as the list includes people who failed to respond to a request from the secretary of state’s office for them to submit proof of citizenship within 30 days. Those who have recently moved may not have seen the notices.

Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said he doesn’t understand why Republicans are touting the latest numbers as a big headline. He said the number of potential noncitizens removed is “miniscule in context” with the overall registration numbers and is probably an overcount that includes naturalized citizens.

“The reason he (Abbott) and others are trying to undermine confidence in our election system is to give a reason to suppress legitimate votes through draconian legislation,” Saenz said. “And to, in advance, call into question an election outcome they don’t like. That’s what we saw in 2020.”

The Trib was also on this. We remember that 2019 purge attempt. There was another one in 2021, which led to litigation that was eventually Fifth Circuited. Some of this is indeed needless chest-thumping over normal business, but some of it has malicious intent, mostly over the “non-citizen” allegations, which are now articles of faith in the election-denial crowd. It’s hard and exhausting to always be arguing against lies and bullshit, and it has a corrosive effect that benefits the liars. It’s just where we are.

But fight we might and so we do.

Abbott’s announcement, coming just weeks before the deadline for registering to vote in the November election, has prompted confusion by voting rights groups and some Texans who say they were surprised to learn recently that they had been flagged for potential removal by their local elections offices. But most of the people identified by the governor appeared to have died or moved and not participated in recent elections, and the figures Abbott cited aren’t out of line with totals reported annually by the secretary of state’s office, according to a review by Hearst Newspapers.

Civil rights advocates have pressed for access to the underlying data behind the purges, saying they are concerned that eligible voters could be ensnared. In a letter to Secretary of State Jane Nelson on Wednesday, they specifically raised concerns that eligible voters could be getting wrongly identified as noncitizens and that ongoing removals would violate a federal “quiet period,” which prevents removals from voter rolls in the 90 days before an election.

Democratic lawmakers warned on Thursday that the removals could mirror a botched 2019 effort to remove noncitizens from the rolls, and they urged supporters to check the status of their own voter registration.

State Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, blasted state leadership for not sharing the underlying data.

“We’ve asked to see the list of the people who have been kicked off the rolls, people who have been suspended, why they were suspended,” Wu said at a news conference in Houston. “They have so far completely ignored those requests.”

A spokesperson for the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s office, which is responsible for overseeing the county’s voter rolls, said they have not carried out any sort of unusual purge of records this year.

“Records have been canceled if a voter moved out of Harris County or if we have been notified of a voter’s death,” she said.

Jacquelyn Callanen, Bexar County elections chief, said the county had conducted only its routine maintenance, removing around 40,000 names last year.

People move and people die, and there have always been processes in place to remove them from the rolls as warranted. The “non-citizens are registering to vote!” canard, goosed this year by one of the usual suspects, is dangerous in part because there are also a lot of checks in place to prevent non-citizens from getting registered, and in part because a lot of the people who end up getting flagged in the purges that Abbott likes to tout are people who registered after being naturalized for whom that data is obsolete, or just people unlucky enough to share a name and birth date with a non-citizen. You might be surprised how often that can happen in a state with 30 million people. And lest we forget, there are other bad actors out there trying to cause mayhem on their own. We don’t pay our election administrators enough.

How many people actually end up on the business end of this, and what effect it might have on turnout, are hard to know. I suspect it’s a lot more noise than consequence, but as noted above I fear the cumulative effect. Even more so, I fear the opportunity for SCOTUS to do more damage to existing voting rights, a fear that I can’t yet quantify. Check your voter registration status, hell check it for everyone you know, and let’s keep moving.

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Lawsuit filed over Texas anti-ESG law

Posted on August 30, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Very interesting.

A coalition of progressive business organizations is suing Texas over a 2021 law that blocks the state from investing in and contracting with companies that boycott the fossil fuel industry.

The suit, filed in federal court in Austin on Thursday by the American Sustainable Business Council, argues that the law infringes on the companies’ free speech and association rights and does not allow banned companies due process. The law, it argues, constitutes viewpoint-based discrimination that allows the Texas comptroller to punish speech he dislikes. Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar and Attorney General Ken Paxton are named as defendants.

“Among ASBC’s many projects are efforts to encourage sustainable investing and sustainable business practices,” lawyers for the council write in the suit. “These are all cornerstones of the modern Texas economy. Yet, SB 13 takes aim at, and punishes, companies that speak about, aspire to, and achieve this goal.”

Republicans pushing SB 13 contended that doing business with companies that boycott fossil fuel-based energy companies has a negative effect on the Texas economy.

“S.B. 13 seeks to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not being used to promote an agenda that hurts the state’s energy sector and economy as a whole by prohibiting investments by certain state entities in companies that boycott these energy companies,” the bill analysis reads.

As of this month, there are almost 370 businesses and investment funds, including Blackrock, Inc and HSCBC Holdings, PLC, that the comptroller’s office has blacklisted for their boycotts of the oil and gas industries.

[…]

In Thursday’s suit, the business council argues that SB 13 forces members “to choose between their First Amendment rights and their ability to compete for investments from and contracts with” the state. It also argues the law is written so vaguely that council members can’t determine whether their actions or expressions constitute a boycott.

SB 13 is similar to a 2017 law that blocks state investments and certain contracts with companies that boycott Israel. In 2019, after a federal judge blocked enforcement of the law, finding that it would violate the First Amendment, lawmakers narrowed the law to exclude small businesses and small contracts.

See here for some background. Remember when Mitt Romney was out there saying that corporations are people? If they are, then they have First Amendment rights, and so here we are. Chron business columnist Chris Tomlinson adds on.

The complaint filed in Austin on Thursday argues that 2021’s Senate Bill 13 was designed to boost investment in fossil fuel companies and violates businesses’ First Amendment prohibition against discrimination based on viewpoint and the 14th Amendment right to due process.

The council, representing thousands of businesses and investors, filed the suit on behalf of financial technology firms Etho Capital and Sphere, which prioritize environmentally responsible investing. The blacklist prohibits them from expanding business in Texas.

“Laws like SB 13 not only inhibit economic growth and innovation but also set a dangerous precedent for the role of government in business affairs,” Etho Capital CEO Amberjae Freeman said. “Etho Capital believes that responsible investing is not just good for the environment but also for long-term economic growth.”

[…]

Hegar has placed dozens of investment funds and 16 large firms on the list, including the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, along with HSBC, UBS, BNP Paribas, NatWest Group and AMP Limited. Etho Capital’s Climate Leadership ETF and Sphere’s 500 Fossil Free Fund are on the list of banned securities.

BlackRock, UBS and other companies have protested their inclusion, pointing to tens of billions of dollars invested in the oil and gas industry. But Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Hegar insisted on their inclusion without explaining why or how they might get off it. Thus, the complaint about due process.

“SB 13 is not just a misguided policy; it is an unconstitutional attack that stifles free speech and punishes businesses for prioritizing responsible investments,” David Levine, president and cofounder of the council, said. “By challenging SB 13, we aim to protect the rights of all businesses to operate freely and responsibly.”

Democracy Forward, a national legal organization that defends civil rights, represents the firms.

Banning major financial firms gives local governments fewer choices for bond offerings, loans and other financial services. Larger firms tend to offer better terms. TXP, an economic analysis firm hired by the Texas Association of Business Chambers of Commerce Foundation, calculated that SB 13 costs Texans $270 million a year in debt-related costs alone.

SB 13 is only one example of a nationwide movement to force corporations to do business with fossil fuel companies. Dozens of state legislatures have passed laws blacklisting companies for implementing environmental, social and governance safeguards. Courts have already stopped Oklahoma and Missouri from imposing similar statutes.

I’m old enough to remember when Republicans thought it was a bad idea for the government to “pick winners and losers” in business. Those were the days. I’m a little surprised that it’s taken this long for a lawsuit like this to be filed, but better late than never. As with most litigation these days, I don’t have much optimism once it gets to the appellate level. We’ll see. The Trib and Bloomberg Law have more.

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Metro to kill Inner Katy line

Posted on August 30, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

This is such bullshit.

What was promised…

The Metropolitan Transit Authority will further reduce its previously planned bus rapid transit efforts while boosting police presence on its routes and increasing its investment in so-called microtransit under its proposed fiscal 2025 budget.

The draft spending plan, unveiled on the agency’s website Thursday, includes a $973 million operating budget and $598 million in capital expenses.

That represents a 6.3 percent increase in the operating budget and 42.2 percent increase in capital spending.

The proposal calls for $7.2 million for 175 new security positions and increasing hiring incentives for the Metro Police Department, along with $10.3 million focused on more reliable service. According to Metro, those reliability investments will increase bus service by up to 3 percent.

Those investments include $1.9 million on microtransit services and funding to launch an additional curb-to-curb service route.

The proposed budget also will “de-scope” some projects, including the Inner Katy bus rapid transit line. The project will now be a high occupancy vehicle lane from the Northwest Transit Center to downtown, and comes after the agency opted to pause its planned University bus rapid transit line, citing cost and changing ridership. Both projects were part of the voter-approved MetroNext plan.

[…]

The University and Inner Katy BRT lines were key features of the MetroNext plan, which the agency’s previous leadership had said would drastically change public transit in Houston. Voters in 2019 approved $3.5 billion in bonds for the initiative. None of those bonds have been sold.

I stand by what I said before, that this Metro board is nullifying the 2019 election and lying to our faces about it. There was an HOV lane component to that referendum, but this wasn’t it. We were promised an expansion of rapid transit, we voted to approve that promise, and now it is being taken away because this Mayor and the Metro board members he appointed don’t want to do that. I am thoroughly disgusted.

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Different HISD bond referendum poll, different result

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Not a big surprise, but that doesn’t mean one is right and the other is wrong.

Just days apart, two polls related to Houston ISD’s proposed $4.4 billion school bond forecast clashing results, with a new survey released Tuesday suggesting voters might reject the record-breaking package.

The latest survey, released Tuesday by the Texas American Federation of Teachers, shows just over half of 736 likely voters surveyed said they would vote against the proposal for billions in campus, technology and security upgrades. About 30 percent of likely voters surveyed said they would support the bond, while nearly 20 percent said they were undecided or would not vote on the proposal.

Leaders of the Houston Federation of Teachers, a local affiliate of the Texas AFT union, have vocally opposed the bond, though the poll was conducted by Z to A Research, a public opinion research company catered to Democratic campaigns and causes.

The results arrive five days after Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research released a poll showing nearly three-quarters of about 1,900 HISD residents would back a school bond package that does not raise property tax rates. That survey did not ask respondents whether they would support HISD’s exact proposal, which had not been finalized at the time of the poll. The district’s $4.4 billion plan does not include a property tax rate increase.

[…]

The wide gap between the two polls’ findings may stem from some key differences in the structure of the surveys, including question wording, sample size and methodology.

The Texas AFT poll asked directly about HISD’s current bond proposal, while the Rice survey asked more broadly about support for a school bond that does not raise property taxes.

“Question wording is everything,” Z to A Research Founder Nancy Zdunkewicz said. “People behave differently when they have the actual ballot language in front of them.”

Additionally, the Rice poll questioned more than double the number of residents compared to the Texas AFT poll. Rice targeted all adult residents of HISD, while the Texas AFT surveyed likely voters, a group that skews slightly older and whiter than the full district population.

See here for the background. While this poll is closer to my own belief of where this issue stands, it’s still approaching the question in a curious way. Here’s the poll memo, which asks the first question as follows:

“Do you support or oppose a property tax increase in Houston Independent School District to fund $4.4 billion in bonds to update and repair HISD buildings and for new technology?”

There are three problems with this. One, HISD promises that the bond won’t necessitate a tax increase. You can believe them on that or not, but if the driver of opposition to the bond is the possibility of higher taxes and that point is in dispute, that casts doubt on the question’s premise. Two, we all know that the people leading the opposition to this bond aren’t making any tax increase arguments about it. They’re arguing that Mike Miles can’t be trusted – “no trust, no bond” – and that we should wait until he’s gone to pass a bond. Go read this story about Rep. Sylvia Garcia’s town hall about the bond referendum – this is what Ruth Kravetz was saying, and the issue of property taxes wasn’t a main point. People will make arguments they’re less fond of to win an election, but there’s no way this won’t be fought about Mike Miles and the takeover.

And three, for all the quibbles that I had with that Kinder poll, the main point they made is that people will still support the bond if the tax increase is modest. Support drops off pretty quickly once the amount of the increase gets beyond nominal levels, but the point here is that the “tax increase” issue is not binary. How much of an increase matters. You can certainly argue that HISD is not being honest about the need to raise taxes, but it’s a lot harder to say by how much. Also, too, even in that Z to A poll, more Democrats still said they’d support the bond than oppose it even with a tax increase. This is why this election won’t be fought on the “tax increase” turf – that’s not the main issue for the biggest bloc of voters, who under normal circumstances would greatly support the bond. The reasons people aren’t supporting this one are unique to our current situation. That’s what the opponents really want to talk about, but it’s not what is reflected in this question.

The next question listed in the poll memo is a straightforward presentation of the referendum language, which is what I want to see in a poll, but only “after hearing the arguments from supporters and opponents of the bond”. They do not present any data about what happened when they asked that question before presenting the arguments for and against, which either means they didn’t ask – which would be a very strange omission, as surely you want some idea of how effective those arguments are – or they just don’t tell us what the numbers are, which suggests to me that they look pretty good for the bond up front. That’s surely not what the opponents want to lead with.

Look, I can believe that most voters can be persuaded to vote against the bond. The opponents have a lot of material to work with. But when you put forward this kind of question and tout its results, you assume that 1) the voters will actually hear your anti-bond arguments, which is a tough assumption in a Presidential election year, let alone this one; and 2) you’re making the actual arguments the other side will make on their behalf. You can’t assume that – they may do a better job of advocating for themselves than you will, or maybe they’ll be less forthright about their position, or maybe they’ll find a distraction to focus on and fight on turf you weren’t expecting. You’re making a lot of assumptions, and you haven’t even told us what those supporter and opponent arguments were. I’m sorry, but I have my doubts about your numbers.

Again, I think this election is nowhere near as favorable to the bond as the Kinder poll suggested. I think the past record of bonds plus the clear level of opposition to this one strongly implies that this will be a tough sell for HISD, though not an impossible one. All I’m asking for is a poll that asks the appropriate questions for the issue at hand. Surely someone can produce that for me. The Chron has more.

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Katy ISD keeps doing Katy ISD things to library books

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I suppose it’s useful to be reminded, as we slog our way through another Year Of Mike Miles, that the suburban school districts around us have their own unique set of dysfunctions.

The Katy ISD board of trustees passed a measure Monday that adds books on gender fluidity to the list of banned book topics in the district.

Five of the seven board members voted to approve the changes to the book banning policy. Rebecca Fox and Dawn Champagne, who spoke out against the measure, abstained from voting.

Board president Victor Perez and trustees Amy Thieme, Morgan Calhoun, Lance Redmon and Mary Ellen Cuzela all voted in favor of the ban.

The measure, according to district documents, mandates the removal of all books in elementary and junior high libraries that “contain material adopting, supporting or promoting gender fluidity.” Parents would have to opt-in for high school students to access the literature.

Gender fluidity, according to Perez, is the “view that gender is a social construct that espouses the view that a person can be any gender or no gender, i.e. non-binary, espouses a view that an individual’s biological sex should be changed to match a gender different from that person’s biological sex, hormone therapy or other medical treatments or procedures to temporarily or permanently alter a person’s body so that it matches a gender different from that person’s biological sex.”

The gender fluidity ban is an extension of the book ban passed in August of 2023, whereby the board of trustees banned all books containing “sexually explicit material.”

Champagne said she didn’t support the policy. She thinks it’s a potential violation of Texas law and could open the district to lawsuits, given that Perez’s definition is too general and sweeping.

For example, she said, A.A. Milne’s beloved character Winnie the Pooh is technically genderless. “The character has a male voice and we think of him as male, but its name is ‘Winnie,’ which is usually a girl’s name,” she said. “You can’t tell what he is.”

[…]

Amanda Rose, president and founder of Katy Pride and a Katy ISD parent, noted that the new ban would prevent their child from reading books about families like theirs.

“To know that my child may not be able to see their family structure represented in a public school library is gut-wrenching,” Rose said. “Imagine having to tell your child, someone that loves deeply, that books about families like theirs are not welcome in their school library: the place that should be accepting to everyone.”

Katy ISD is a multi–time offender in this category, so none of this is a surprise, however much of a disgrace and disappointment it is. In this case, it’s like Katy ISD saw what they were doing in Fort Bend and took it as a challenge.

I mean, once again, we know what the problem is and what the solution is. Three of the five trustees that voted for this mess were elected last year with the help of the Harris County GOP. The rest of us need to make this a priority. The Press

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New COVID vaccine available

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

In case you missed it.

The Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday it has greenlighted updated COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna for the 2024 fall season. The decision clears the way for distribution to begin for the latest version of the shots earlier this year than last year.

Moderna and Pfizer’s shots were revised this year to target the KP.2 variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as part of a now-annual process undertaken by the FDA and health authorities around the world to update the vaccines to protect against newer strains of the virus.

“Given waning immunity of the population from previous exposure to the virus and from prior vaccination, we strongly encourage those who are eligible to consider receiving an updated COVID-19 vaccine to provide better protection against currently circulating variants,” said Dr. Peter Marks, Director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

Similar to previous seasons, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending that all Americans ages 6 months and older get a shot of the “updated 2024-2025 COVID-19 vaccine” to protect against another expected surge of the virus this fall and winter.

In a presentation to the American Medical Association earlier this month, CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen recommended starting to administer COVID-19 shots this year as soon they are available.

“Then the administration should continue through September, October, November, those are the months you really want to be paying attention to,” she said.

Both Moderna and Pfizer say they expect the first shots from their vaccines to become available in the coming days around the country. Another updated vaccine from Novavax is also expected to get the FDA’s authorization this year.

“FDA has committed to moving swiftly on regulatory authorization. We expect to have authorization in time for peak vaccination season,” Novavax said in a statement.

It’s been quite a busy summer for COVID – just anecdotally, I know lots of people who’ve had it recently, and I’ve seen many more postings on social media or other announcements as well. The good news is that while infections are up, hospitalizations and deaths remain relatively low. Make no mistake, a lot of people are still dying from COVID, but far fewer than in the early days, before the first vaccines and their widespread acceptance, and the hospitals are able to keep up.

I’m getting uncomfortably close to the point at which my age becomes a COVID risk factor, and we’re planning to travel to see family over the holidays, so you better believe we’ll be getting our latest boosters. I was asked if I wanted to get a flu shot the other day when picking up a prescription at CVS. I’ll be double-dipping the next time I’m there. Here’s some useful guidance to help you make your plan for a shot. Don’t miss out.

Posted in Technology, science, and math | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of August 26

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance is not going back as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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Election monitors coming

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

::rolls eyes::

The Secretary of State’s Office will again assign state inspectors to observe the handling and counting of ballots and monitor election records in Harris County, the state agency said while releasing a new audit outlining problems with the county’s elections in 2021 and 2022.

The audit, released late Friday, found that in those years, Harris County election officials did not follow state-mandated rules related to voter registration list maintenance; failed to adequately train election workers, which led to problems at the polls; and violated the law when it failed to estimate and issue the required ballot paper at some polling locations.

Harris County failed to adequately train election workers on how to properly set up and operate the voting system, the audit found, which “may have impacted the high percentage of equipment malfunctions” in the November 2021 constitutional amendment election. The county then did not adequately address these training issues prior to the March 2022 primary, the state said.

Former Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the audit’s findings. Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, who took over running elections last September after state lawmakers passed a law eliminating the election administrator position in the state’s most populous county, said in a statement that her office “will continue to ensure that the concerns that plagued the now-defunct Elections Administrator’s Office are not revisited.”

In the audit report, the Secretary of State’s Office said current Harris County election officials, who didn’t oversee the elections included in the audit, have worked to address the problems and correct the county’s procedures.

[…]

Hudspeth has presided over multiple county-wide and municipal elections, including a primary and a runoff election, since taking over last September. Although a storm left at least a dozen locations without power during the primary runoff election in May, voting wasn’t disrupted.

Speaking on a panel at the annual training for election officials hosted by the Secretary of State’s Office in Austin earlier this month, Hudspeth said her office has created a compliance team made up of roughly four people familiar with every step of the election process and responsible for properly documenting it. After each election, that team also digitizes election records and labels them to be used for auditing purposes or during election challenges, if necessary.

“It makes it easier for us to identify when the audit comes, what we need to pull together,” Hudspeth told hundreds of Texas election officials who gathered at the event. “Not every audit is exactly the same. It doesn’t always look the same. It isn’t always the same exact information, but what we have learned over time, is to put a process in place.”

Emphasis mine. The fact that the audit was released on Friday afternoon tells you all you need to know about what it did (and more importantly, didn’t) say. Harris County has had some issues conducting elections in past years, but it was all human error and the response from the state has been wildly out of proportion. We all know where that comes from. The burden of that once again falls on County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, and as much as she doesn’t deserve that, we’re lucky to have her. I very much hope this will be the end of it.

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FBISD’s restrictive new library book policy

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

As dumb and misguided as this is, the good news is that there’s a straightforward solution to it.

The Fort Bend ISD board voted to approve a library book policy on Monday that critics have called the “most restrictive in the state of Texas.”

The board voted 5-2 to approve the policy that allows the superintendent to have sole authority to remove content from library shelves, meaning that the mandated library materials review committee will be optional going forward.

Critics, who turned out to oppose the vote, said this library policy could result in hundreds of books being taken off Fort Bend ISD library shelves.

“I cannot believe that an independent American public school has reached this point,” Dhruti Pathak said. “This policy is appalling to me.”

Pathak, an Elkins High School student, grew up in Saudi Arabia, where she saw the impacts of censorship “firsthand.”

“We are definitely headed in an extremist direction,” said parent Anna Lykoudis-Zafiris.

Thirteen stakeholders spoke against the policy at public comment before the deciding vote. One speaker, student Christopher Pontiff, was honored at the beginning of the meeting.

“I do want you all to consider the hypocrisy of restricting information while congratulating me for the very design that advocated for the openness of information,” Pontiff said.

He then brought silence to the room, asking the board to look at parents standing in opposition to the policy for the two minutes left on his clock. Board president Kristin Tassin attempted to move along with the commenters, but Pontiff declined to yield his time.

[…]

An earlier version of this policy came across the dais in April, when the board voted to table the vote and edit the policy in workshops and board policy committee meetings. The policy was discussed again in June during a board workshop before returning to discussion during the Aug. 12 board workshop.

During this time, the policy edited to address some of the community’s concerns, such as banning books that “stimulate sexual desire” among minors, a vague statement without directions as to how that would be decided.

The updated policy mandates that content must not “promote sexual activity among minors or contain graphic images or explicit descriptions of sex acts or simulations of such acts,” and does not describe what “simulations of sex acts” means.

The policy also stipulates that library books “foster growth in… aesthetic values and societal standards,” two terms that are not defined.

It also mandates that content not promote “unlawful” activity, such as illegal use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs by minors. The original policy proposed that content in elementary schools must not depict or describe nudity in a way that “appeals to prurient interest,” but it was amended to remove that sentence and then add a new sentence that read instead that no depictions of sexual activity promoted the touching of genitals amongst minors.

Prurient, according to the Miriam Webster dictionary, is defined as “arousing, or appealing to sexual desire.”

The policy was edited to add the term “or superintendent’s designee” in some areas to allow the superintendent to delegate the library materials tasks to someone else, which trustee David Hamilton said came in response to community feedback. Still, the policy as written does leave the authority with the superintendent to either make decisions himself or to choose who to delegate those decisions to.

Critics have said that this measure allows for pressure to be inflicted on the superintendent from the board if someone wants a book removed immediately, without a formal reconsideration process, which would be allowed by this policy.

Trustee Shirley Rose-Gilliam was concerned that this policy was putting the superintendent in a difficult situation.

“I sure hope that we are not going to put Dr. Smith in a situation where we are going to have a board member that wants a book off the shelf, and then he is the one that is going to have to have to do that,” Rose-Gilliam said.

Trustee Rose-Gilliam was not speaking hypothetically, as her fellow trustee David Hamilton is the driving force behind this policy and also a major filer of complaints about various books. You should read the rest of the article – the Press also has a good, comprehensive report – and also this post by Franklin Strong, whose work I’ve cited here numerous times as the co-founder of the Texas Freedom to Read Project and tireless analyst of school board trustee races. FBISD Trustee Hamilton has attacked Strong in his pro-censorship rants on social media, so you can see where this is going.

The answer here is what the answer always is: You gotta vote these nutjobs out. Five trustees voted for this policy. They may not all be as bad as David Hamilton, but they supported his work. People are more aware of this threat to the freedom to read now, and they are speaking out and putting pressure on their school boards, with an admirable boost from affected students themselves. That’s all great and wonderful and necessary, but it’s not sufficient. The problem trustees need to be voted out and replaced with people who are on our side. I don’t know how to be any more explicit about this.

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Watch out for Waymo

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We’ve talked a lot about Cruise’s so far ill-fated attempt to do robotaxi service, mostly because it was briefly available in Houston (and may be again soon), but the most successful purveyor of such services out there has been Waymo. And they keep growing.

Waymo is now providing more than 100,000 paid robotaxi rides per week in the U.S., according to a LinkedIn announcement by co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. That’s double the 50,000 weekly paid trips the company reported in May.

A spokesperson for the Alphabet-owned driverless vehicle venture told CNBC on Tuesday that San Francisco now “serves the most trips” among the cities where Waymo operates its commercial service: San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Los Angeles.

Last month, Alphabet announced that it was investing an additional $5 billion into Waymo, which started as a self-driving project at the company in 2009.

On Monday, Waymo revealed details about its new, “generation 6” self-driving system, which should enable the company to offer driverless services in a wider array of weather conditions and without requiring as many costly cameras and sensors in its vehicles.

Waymo, which boasts around 700 vehicles in its fleet today, operates the only commercial robotaxi service in the U.S., Waymo One.

They’re mostly in the San Francisco area and Phoenix, but as that Monday story notes, they’re looking to expand.

Alphabet-owned Waymo revealed details about its newest “generation 6” self-driving technology on Monday. Its new driverless tech, integrated into Geely Zeekr electric vehicles, should be able to handle a wider array of weather conditions without requiring as many costly cameras and sensors on board.

The company invited CNBC to its Mountain View, California, garage to see the new robotaxis in development. Satish Jeyachandran, Waymo’s vice president of engineering, said the team is “confident we can bring this generation to market much faster than the prior generation,” citing advances in machine learning technology and semiconductor performance.

Waymo’s commercial robotaxi service first went live in late 2018 in the U.S. The company previously integrated its driverless systems into Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans and fully electric Jaguar I-PACE SUVs.

Executives are sharing details about the forthcoming robotaxis as Waymo works to scale its existing service, Waymo One, within the Sunbelt cities of San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin, Texas, and Los Angeles.

Waymo has been testing in Austin and offering ride-booking services since March. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a preliminary investigation into their vehicles in May, over “reports that the company’s cars caused traffic problems, including crashes, in a number of cities”. That appears to still be ongoing. No current indication of when actual robotaxi service would come to Austin, but you can get on the waitlist now, if that’s your thing. I’m perfectly happy to let other cities do the beta testing here. Let us know when and if it’s ready for prime time.

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More on Paxton’s “election fraud” raids

Posted on August 27, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

It’s just wild stuff.

Cecilia Castellano

A Democratic candidate for the Texas House on Monday dismissed as “nonsense” a state investigation into a vote harvesting scheme that led authorities to confiscate her phone and search the homes of a legislative aide and elderly Latino election volunteers.

Cecilia Castellano, who is running to succeed state Rep. Tracy King, D-Uvalde, made the remarks during a news conference that featured some of the South Texans who were served search warrants last week.

Latino civil rights leaders and state lawmakers also said on Monday they will ask the federal government and Texas Senate to investigate the raids.

League of United Latin American Citizens leaders have said authorities searched the homes of elderly Latino election volunteers pre-dawn with guns drawn and scant information about their probe. They have blasted the raids executed by Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office as an effort to intimidate Latino voters.

Without naming him, Castellano said the state’s top Republicans had publicly endorsed her opponent, former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin Jr.

“Do not get distracted by this nonsense,” Castellano said. “Despite the challenges, I refuse to be silenced.”

[…]

LULAC officials plan to file formal complaints with the U.S. Justice Department, seeking a federal review of the state’s investigation and raids, said Gabriel Rosales, LULAC’s Texas state director.

“We didn’t break any law,” Rosales said. “All we did was go out there to increase the political participation of the Latino community.”

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, said he and another lawmaker planned to request a state inquiry from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Such a review is unlikely to be granted by Patrick, a staunch Republican who presides over the Senate.

See here for the background. It’s hard to imagine a valid need for armed pre-dawn raids on the homes of a bunch of elderly folks. What exactly were those DPS troopers expecting to find? One wonders where we might be now if one of the cops had shot someone, or if one of the targets had suffered a heart attack from the stress. I hope the Justice Department responds quickly and firmly, if only to ensure that this isn’t some half-assed fishing expedition. Reform Austin and the Current have more.

UPDATE: From Texas Public Radio.

[87-year-old LULAC member Lidia] Martinez said her LEE High School area home was raided not long after she woke up at 5:30 a.m. last Tuesday.

She said seven armed men and two armed women were at her home for hours searching and questioning her about voter registration, LULAC, and Medina.

She said she helps seniors register to vote or helps them with their mail-in ballots if they need it, but she did not do anything illegal. She said she does not fill anything in for anyone on voter forms.

“They questioned me for three hours,” she said. “At one point, they had me outside in front of all my neighbors while they searched the living room, and they never let me get dressed. It was just very embarrassing, intimidating harassment. They searched everything in my house.”

Shameful. I don’t care what you think you’re doing, there’s no call to treat an 87-year-old like that.

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What’s in a (community college) name?

Posted on August 27, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

So what should we call you, HCC?

Houston Community College may consider changing its name as the institution expands its offerings to include bachelor’s degree programs, administrators said at a Wednesday board meeting.

The possibility is already a hotly debated topic among the board’s trustees, with early discussions yielding split opinions on the necessity and prudence of such an undertaking. Several members agreed that the words “community college” on a baccalaureate diploma might be a tough sell for employers with a plethora of college graduate candidates. Other trustees called a change a distraction, especially with the institution in the hot seat to improve its graduation and retention numbers for better funding from the state Legislature.

“I’m taken aback about why we are even talking about this when we have a whole lot of work to do,” District III Trustee Adriana Tamez said.

“Before you came on board, with all due respect, chancellor, according to my colleagues, the sky was falling here at HCC,” she said later, referencing Chancellor Margaret Ford Fisher’s hiring this year.

A name change would most likely drop “community” from the institution’s brand, mirroring the same action taken at Dallas College in 2020 and other community colleges before that. Lone Star College, for example, evolved from North Harris Montgomery Community College District, and South Texas College was known as South Texas Community College McAllen.

Ford Fisher argued that the board couldn’t undo what it did with the approval of its two new bachelor’s degree programs, which begin classes this fall. Community colleges are increasingly widening their offerings amid changing workforce needs, and four-year universities are exploring the same with certificate programs, she said.

In June, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges approved the college’s request to offer baccalaureate degrees in artificial intelligence and robotics as well as healthcare management. The name change would help differentiate the school and represent its offerings in both associate’s and bachelors degrees, the president said.

I confess, I missed that earlier story about HCC offering some baccalaureate options, though I did see the story about Sam Houston State gearing up to do some certificate programs. I have no objection to them experimenting and expanding their offerings, though I’m not sure how good a fit any of it is. I’m ambivalent about the idea of a name change. I can see how it might make sense, but maybe we should wait a bit and see how this bachelor’s thing works out before we fully commit to the concept. I would also prefer to not spend too much money on the rebranding, if possible.

If we do go down this road, I think “Houston College” makes the most sense as the new name. It’s consistent with other schools of this type, and it’s not a recent innovation – the community college in San Antonio has been “San Antonio College” since at least the 80s when I was a student at Trinity. We’ll cross that bridge when and if we get to it.

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Another Loving County election tossed

Posted on August 27, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Wow again.

The Texas Eighth Court of Appeals overturned results in a third race in the November 2022 general election in Loving County, Texas, the least-populous county in the United States, after a district court overturned two other close races in a 2023 ruling.

This sparsely populated pocket of Texas has a 2020 census population of just 64 in the 671-square-mile county — “home to more wildlife than voters” as Justice Lisa Soto of the Eighth Court of Appeals commented in the court’s opinion. “There, perhaps more than anywhere, does the maxim ‘every vote matters’ ring true.”

That is why three losing candidates in the county’s 2022 general election sued the winners over the extremely close results. The candidate for County and District Clerk had lost by just 12 votes, while the race for Precinct 2 Commissioner came down to a mere six. And the race for Justice of the Peace ended in a dead tie with a 2-vote margin in the runoff.

Their particular challenge focused on the actual residency of 26 of the roughly 110 registered voters in the tiny county.

In its 2-1 decision published Friday, Soto, writing for the majority, agreed that 10 people of those contested people had not made Loving County their legal residence at the time they cast their vote.

Soto was joined in the majority opinion by Chief Justice Jeff Alley. Justice Gina M. Palafox dissented.

“Determining residency under the Election Code has long depended on several factors, including a person’s volition, intent, and action,” Soto wrote.

All ten people whose votes were thrown out had ties to the county, and visited to varying degrees, but they had designated addresses outside the county as their primary residence on various documents, from driver’s licenses to utility bills.

They could have moved permanently to Loving County, and many of them wanted to, but they did not fully do so prior to the election, making it an incomplete action, Soto said, regardless of volition and intention.

[…]

Judge David Rogers of the Midland County District Court ruled in December 2023 that under the terms of Texas election law, 10 illegal votes had been counted in the election while two voters had been legally barred from participating.

He then ordered a redo of the elections for Justice of the Peace and Precinct 2 Commissioner, since the margin of victory in both elections was less than ten. But Rogers upheld the results of the County and District Clerk election, since a 12-vote margin of error still left the incumbent with the win after removing the illegal votes.

However, the appeals court overruled Rogers’s decision on the two people prevented from voting in the local races.

Both of them updated driver’s licenses and voter registration to their Loving County addresses after they moved there in August 2022 — demonstrating “volition, intention, and action” — but they were given limited ballots due to not being on the voter rolls when they came to vote. As such, Soto said, they should have been allowed provisional ballots to cast their vote in the local races, and Rogers wrongly held that the limited ballots were proper.

The appeals court overruled Rogers’ decision not to order a redo of the County and District Clerk election.

“Upon subtracting the number of voters who illegally cast ballots and adding the two eligible voters who were improperly prevented from voting in the Loving County and District Clerk race, the differential now equals the margin of error in that race (12),” Soto wrote. “Accordingly, we remand the proceeding for the trial court to void that election and order a new election for Loving County and District Clerk as well.”

See here for the previous update. One wonders how much electoral chaos there needs to be in Loving County before the state takes an interest. At this point, as far as I know, there have been no new elections scheduled for Loving County as this matter had still been ongoing. That will presumably remain the case if this gets appealed to SCOTx. Who knows how long it may take to resolve this. Enjoy the uncertainty, y’all. Texas Standard has more.

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