HISD kids still not getting the Internet access they lost

Posted on March 4, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Just another thing by the wayside.

Houston ISD has not provided at-home internet service to the vast majority of students who relied on a free Verizon program that the district canceled three months ago, leaving some of Houston’s most vulnerable children disconnected.

About 50 of the 1,000 students who were relying on the program for at-home internet have received T-Mobile hotspots that the district offered as a replacement to needy students, according to email records and a district spokesperson.

HISD officials said the hotspots remain available to students. But district leaders and staff have not successfully coordinated to outfit children with the new service since November.

“If school staff identify a student who needs home internet access, staff should contact the campus technologist so that HISD can provide a hotspot for that student,” HISD Chief Communications Officer Leila Walsh wrote in an email.

HISD promised the T-Mobile hotspots after district leaders opted to end the Verizon program, citing an unacceptable amount of training required for school officials carrying out the effort. Roughly 56,500 students and 2,500 teachers across 36 HISD campuses received iPads or laptops equipped with data plans since the initiative launched in 2020, Verizon officials said.

Most students at participating schools connected their computers at home to wireless internet installed by their families. However, HISD officials determined about 1,000 students regularly used internet service built into the devices for web access, indicating their families may not have wireless internet at home.

Verizon shut off the built-in internet service on its donated devices on Nov. 17, three weeks after HISD decided to no longer participate in the program. Schools and students were allowed to keep the provided laptops and tablets, but their data plans were deactivated.

In the weeks after students lost internet access, HISD officials acknowledged they had fallen short on communicating with families about the hotspot opportunity. HISD Chief Technology Officer Scott Gilhousen told the Houston Landing in early December that it “will be for us to communicate more with our campuses to inform them that there are opportunities.”

But emails obtained by the Landing through a public records request also show few campus leaders requested hotspots for their students.

[…]

The T-Mobile hotspots HISD promoted as a replacement to the Verizon services cost the district $15 per student per month, the Houston Chronicle reported.

HISD officials said they are looking into more permanent solutions for addressing internet access disparities.

“We are having conversations with community partners so that we eliminate the digital divide for entire neighborhoods, not just individual students,” Walsh said.

See here (third story) and here for the background. All but one of those 50 students cited who were able to get new hotspots did so because one teacher (Brad Wray, who is also on the District Advisory Committee) took it upon himself to go through the process from start to finish, which included him driving to HISD’s central office to pick up the hotspots and distribute them to the kids. Not exactly a stretch to say there’s gotta be a better way to do it than that. But first HISD needs to get its act together and decide that this is a thing they want to do. Less talk, more do.

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Weekend link dump for March 3

Posted on March 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

“On top of fewer shows and virtually no pilots, the available acting gigs pay less than they used to amid rising cost of living, talent sources say, making it hard for many working actors to afford their rent or mortgage and support their families.”

“There’s no way to overreact here: it’s as bad as it sounds. And while last week’s decision is of course about IVF, we can’t be fooled into thinking that’s the reason for the ruling. Anti-abortion activists, lawmakers and judges have a very clear plan they’re rolling out right now—and fetal personhood undergirds all of it.”

“White evangelicals today are no longer marginal, although they recognize the advantages of portraying themselves that way. The rhetoric of victimization follows from that, and I suspect that one of the reasons they are drawn to Trump is that he speaks the language of victimization better than anyone I’ve heard. It’s always about him, of course. He’s the victim. But evangelicals understand and identify with that vocabulary.”

“Biden’s Plan B on Student Loan Forgiveness Is a Massive and Improbable Success”.

“The reason why David Weiss reneged on a plea deal was to chase this bribery claim. The reason why David Weiss charged Hunter Biden with a bunch of felonies rather than resolving this in a diversion and misdemeanors was because he wanted to chase the false claims floated by someone dallying with Russian spies.”

“How No Labels’ Spoiler Bid Suddenly Entered Full Meltdown Mode“. Good.

“Wealthier, urban Americans have access to more local news – while roughly half of US counties have only one outlet or less”.

A long scholarly article about the many “drunkonyms” in the English language.

“The greatest scorer in major-division women’s collegiate history is not [Caitlin] Clark, but Lynette Woodard of Kansas. You’d never know this, however, because the old NCAA had no respect for Woodard’s era, so it canceled it, and asterisked it.”

Also out there is Pistol Pete Maravich, and I’m glad to see that his son Jaeson is a fan of Caitlin Clark and rooting for her on her quest. He’s right that it’s a very different game now than it was in 1971, but all sports evolve and records take on different meanings as a result.

And another name to know is Grace Beyer, who has already eclipsed everyone and is still out there pouring them in for the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy, a small NAIA school in St. Louis.

Boy, the grift is strong in Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

“As I have written about before, that’s how you get the very concept of a Middle Ages in the first place. It is a pretty European-centric way of delineating things, because it starts with the “fall” of the Roman Empire in 476, and the ends …. IDK like maybe in the sixteenth century?[1] Maybe in the late fifteenth? Basically if you can see Protestants you’ve gone too far.”

The pros and cons of the next MLB expansion.

RIP, Peg Lee, Houston chef, educator, founder of the Rice Epicurean cooking school, known as Houston’s Julia Child.

RIP, Stacy Wakefield, wife of former MLB pitcher Tim Wakefield. She dies of pancreatic cancer four months after her husband died of brain cancer. My deepest condolences to their families.

Just a thought experiment that may or may not have any present-day salience.

“Three prominent progressive outlets sued OpenAI on Wednesday, alleging the company violated their copyright protections in an extension of the battle lines drawn between news publishers and AI companies.”

RIP, Richard Lewis, comedian and actor best known for Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Truly, the things that trigger conservatives are a wonder to behold.

“We are currently renovating our booths at Holsten’s. This is your once in a lifetime chance to own the original booth that the Soprano Family sat in for the final scene of the famous show!”

Congratulations to Shohei Ohtani and his wife, whose existence is the only thing we currently know about her.

“CVS and Walgreens will start dispensing mifepristone, one of the medications used to induce an abortion, in stores this month.”

“The 18-year-old son of U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert was arrested in Colorado on suspicion of stealing identity documents among other charges, police in the town of Rifle said.”

Let them fight.

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Final 2024 Primary Early Voting totals

Posted on March 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Off we go to Primary Day.


Year    Mail    Early    Total
==============================
2012   7,735   30,142   37,877
2016  13,034   72,782   85,816
2020  22,785  116,748  139,533
2024  14,661   87,591  102,252

2012  17,734   60,347   78,081
2016  20,780  110,365  131,145
2020  22,801   82,108  104,909
2024   6,285  102,686  108,971

As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Eleven totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.

It was a pretty good final day, though not quite as gangbusters as 2012 or 2016. Both of those saw more than half of all early votes come in on the last three days. In 2020, about 46% of all EV turnout came in on the last three days, and this year it was about 43%. Does that mean anything? Hell if I know. I’m just telling you what the numbers are. Republicans came in slightly ahead of 2020, when they didn’t have an active Presidential primary, but behind 2016 when they did. Dems fell short of their active 2020 but ahead of 2016, which was also an active primary but a weirder one than 2020 was. The main takeaway I have from all this is another reminder that every election is its own unique thing.

How can we put this primary into context? Here’s what final turnout has been for every Dem primary since 2002, including turnout as a percentage of registered voters:


Year   Turnout     Pct
======================
2002    95,396   5.15%
2004    78,692   4.35%
2006    35,447   1.89%
2008   410,908  22.71%
2010   101,263   5.38%
2012    75,150   3.95%
2014    53,788   2.70%
2016   227,280  10.92%
2018   167,982   7.47%
2020   328,426  13.86%
2022   167,179   6.64%

I don’t think there should be any difficulty passing 2018 and 2022 in total turnout, so this year will be at least the fourth best primary in that regard, with a reasonable chance to be the third best given how past Presidential year patterns have gone. In terms of turnout as a percentage of registered voters, I think it will slot in as fourth best, with a more remote chance of passing 2016 as third best. I don’t know what the current total of registered voters is for Harris County, but we were just shy of 2.6 million as of last November, so probably right around 2.6 million. Again, looking at the three most recent Presidential year primaries and their early vote share, I don’t think topping 2016 is likely, but topping ten percent is in play:

At 51.78% (2012) EV, final turnout = 197,474
At 44.19% (2020) EV, final turnout = 231,391
At 38.54% (2016) EV, final turnout = 265,314

I feel like we’re more likely to be close to fifty percent of the vote being in already – again, I feel chastened by my 2023 experience – and so while I think we’ll reach 200K votes, I’m not expecting more than that. Please, by all means, prove me wrong.

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Crypto miners really don’t want to tell us how much energy they consume

Posted on March 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

And for now at least, they don’t have to.

U.S. officials this week indefinitely withdrew a survey aimed at gathering information on the crypto-mining industry’s power use, hindering attempts to understand the sector’s impact on grids and energy prices at a time of record activity.

Riot Platforms, among the biggest U.S. bitcoin miners, and industry group Texas Blockchain Council, sued to stop mandatory data requests after a new survey went out this month by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) to assess crypto-mining’s electricity use.

As a result, U.S. officials canceled the emergency survey and are negotiating an agreement with the bitcoin mining plaintiffs to end the lawsuit, said two sources familiar with the situation. Crypto critics said halting the survey could create new vulnerabilities to the U.S. electrical grid, and one environmental group called industry opposition to the survey “reprehensible.”

[…]

The EIA began its survey of 82 miners the week of Feb. 5, requesting details about operations and energy use. Members of Congress, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, had requested a survey for more than a year.

“The department is asking crypto-miners to report basic information about their energy usage — like other industries have done for decades — so the public and lawmakers better understand how crypto-mining’s electricity use and carbon emissions affect the power grid and environment,” Warren said in an email to Reuters.

The memo from EIA Head Joseph DeCarolis requesting approval of the survey from the Office of Management and Budget said, “We feel a sense of urgency to generate credible data that would provide insight into this unfolding issue.”

The mining industry’s lawsuit, filed on Feb. 22, claimed the survey’s fast-track approval process was unlawful and its scope, including questions about precise geographic locations of miners and commercial partners, posed threats to their businesses and hard assets if made public.

On Friday, the EIA agreed to halt the survey for over a month until March 25 and sequester the data it received so far. Later that day, a U.S. federal judge in Waco, Texas, ordered a temporary restraining order against federal agencies and the survey.

This week, the survey was withdrawn, according to sources who asked to remain anonymous because of the ongoing legal dispute. The sides reached an “agreement-in-principle,” to be finalized by March 1, court records show.

See here and here for more about the lawsuit, and here for more on the judge’s pause order. The good news for those of us who would like to know this information is that we ought to get it eventually, after some formalities have been completed. KERA has a nice long story about this.

In a letter Monday, EIA Administrator Joseph DeCarolis said the agency intends to continue a process it had already begun under the Paperwork Reduction Act’s notice-and-comment procedure whether to request the Office of Management and Budget to approve data collection of the type described in the emergency data collection.

“If EIA decides to go forward with proposing an information collection covering data of [that] type, … EIA will publish a notice in the Federal Register setting forth the proposed information collection. … That would trigger a public comment period of at least 30 days, after which the Director of OMB could make a decision whether or not to approve the information collection,” DeCarolis’ letter states.

That process could take up to a year to complete, according to Thomas Cmar, a senior attorney for Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization. Cmar said the Feb. 22 lawsuit by the Texas Blockchain Council and Riot Platforms “was about the timing and the process that the government followed to put out a survey.”

“The EIA collects this type information from every energy user in the U.S., so there is no question that they have the authority to collect this information,” Cmar said. “It’s just a question of whether this industry is willing to cooperate by making this information publicly available to the extent it should be publicly available.”

In an email Wednesday, Lee Bratcher, president and founder of the Texas Blockchain Council, shared Electric Reliability Council of Texas data showing what he called “how helpful bitcoin miners are when demand for power increases.”

Bratcher said bitcoin miners in Texas make up over 95% of what ERCOT calls “large flexible loads.”

“There is about 2,450 [megawatts] of bitcoin mining in Texas, but this load isn’t adding to peak demand since, as the data shows, miners curtail their consumption during peak demand,” Bratcher said in his email.

During those times of curtailing consumption, bitcoin miners such as Riot Platforms can sell their prepurchased power back to the grid for millions. As The Texas Tribune reported in January, Riot made $32 million by reducing its energy use last August.

Cmar called it a loophole in Texas law and another reason — along with lack of regulations — that crypto miners are coming to Texas.

“More and more, the price that Texans will pay for power will be controlled by the big bitcoin mining facilities [due to] the massive percentage they use from the grid,” Cmar said.

[…]

The EIA is primarily a research organization that takes data from energy users and puts out reports. Those reports show how much energy different industries use, where it is sourced from and how much they are paying for it. It’s a well-established process, year after year, that Cmar said state regulators around the country rely on to do their energy planning.

By the EIA initiating the emergency data collection, Cmar said, they were trying to “level the playing field” by requiring crypto mining companies to start reporting their energy usage.

“The lawsuit in Waco seems to be trying to push it as long as possible,” Cmar said.

There’s more, so read the rest. I’ll be very interested to see what data we get, whenever we do get it. I feel reasonably confident that the general public would support some sort of regulatory scheme that would limit how much energy the coinminers can use and especially how much money they can get by reducing their energy usage, which is a thing they can take advantage of but the rest of us can’t. Allowing everyone to benefit instead of just a chosen few would also be popular, I daresay. None of this will happen under the current regime, of course. You know what that means.

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Starr County DA disciplined for that self-induced abortion murder charge from 2022

Posted on March 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

It’s something. Not much, but something.

A Texas prosecutor has been disciplined for allowing murder charges to be filed against a woman who self-managed an abortion in a case that sparked national outrage.

Starr County District Attorney Gocha Ramirez agreed to pay a $1,250 fine and have his license held in a probated suspension for 12 months in a settlement reached with the State Bar of Texas. Ramirez will be able to continue practicing law as long as he complies with the terms of the January settlement, which was first reported by news outlets on Thursday.

The case stirred anger among abortion rights advocates when the 26-year-old woman was arrested in April 2022 and charged with murder in “the death of an individual by self-induced abortion.”

Under the abortion restrictions in Texas and other states, women who seek abortion are exempt from criminal charges.

Measures to punish such women — rather than health care providers and other helpers — have not picked up traction in legislatures where the idea has been raised.

Ramirez announced the charges would be dropped just days after the woman’s arrest but not before she’d spent two nights in jail and was identified by name as a murder suspect.

But a State Bar investigation found that he had permitted an assistant to take the case to a grand jury, and knowingly made a false statement when he said he hadn’t known about the charges before they were filed.

“I made a mistake in that case,” Ramirez told The Associated Press in a phone interview Thursday. He said he agreed to the punishment because it allows his office to keep running and him to keep prosecuting cases. He said no one else faces sanctions.

See here and here for the background. For reasons unclear to me, the AP story and the Trib story that followed up on it do not mention the name of the woman who had been arrested. It was reported at the time, you can see it in those earlier links and it will be in the Tags of this post, but I’ll follow their convention for the body of the post. This all happened after SB8, the vigilante bounty hunter law that banned abortion after 6 weeks was passed, but before the Dobbs decision was handed down. Not that it made any difference, I’m just noting it for context.

I’m glad the State Bar took action and I hope this serves as a reminder of what the current state of law is in Texas, but I can’t say I’m impressed. The fine is chump change, and while there was the threat of harsher action if the plea deal wasn’t accepted, it all just feels like the lightest of slaps on the wrist. If this is meant to be a deterrent for the next DA, one who may be more venal than Gocha Ramirez (who strikes me as more inept than anything else) was, then I have my doubts it will hold them back. I hope that hypothetical is never put to the test.

I would also caution anyone who might take comfort from the note that bills aimed at punishing women who self-induce abortions – you know, like by taking mifepristone – have not yet gained traction. I say “yet” deliberately, because this is a one-way ratchet, and I see no evidence that an abatement is coming. The true believers have only just begun. Do not give them the benefit of any doubt.

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The worst judge in Texas

Posted on March 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I admit, the competition for this is fierce, and we should draw a distinction between state and federal jurists, but no matter how you define it, Supreme Court Justice John Devine is a strong contender for the title.

Speaking to a group of East Texas voters in September, state Supreme Court Justice John Devine cast himself as the antidote to his “brainwashed” colleagues on the all-Republican bench.

Their “Big Law” backgrounds, he said, had taught them to worry more about legal procedures — “standing, timeliness, or whatever else” — than their duty to uphold the Constitution.

“At times I feel like they would sacrifice the Republic for the sake of the process,” Devine said in the speech, a recording of which was obtained by The Texas Tribune. “My concern is that they all bow down to the altar of process rather than to fidelity to the Constitution. And when I say that, it’s not meant to be malice towards my colleagues. I think it’s how they were trained — how they were brainwashed.”

Particularly egregious, he said, was their ruling against Jeff Younger, a former Texas House candidate who had for years waged a public war against his ex-wife over their young child’s gender identity. In 2022, Younger asked the court to stop his ex from moving their child to California, which had recently passed a refuge law shielding parents fleeing from states that restrict gender-transitioning care for minors from prosecution.

The court declined to hear Younger’s lawsuit, which two justices argued was riddled with errors and based on “tenuous speculation” that the ex-wife would violate a standing court order that already prevented her from pursuing gender-transition therapies for the child.

Devine was still angry at his colleagues when he spoke at the September event.

“I’m not going to stand here sanctimoniously and say, ‘Well he didn’t cross a T or dot an I,’” he said of Younger. “We are talking about great constitutional issues here that will determine whether we survive as a representative republic or not. Are we going to just have it stolen from us? Over process for crying out loud?”

The audio is a rare glimpse into Texas’ typically-insular high court and window into the judicial philosophy of Devine, a former anti-abortion activist whose tenure as a jurist has been shaped by his religious beliefs and deeply conservative politics — sometimes, his critics say, at the expense of his impartiality.

Those concerns are now the focus of an unusually heated primary election for the relatively unknown Texas Supreme Court. Devine is the only justice with a challenger in the statewide, March 5 race, and his opponent, Second District Court of Appeals Judge Brian Walker, has centered his campaign on questions about Devine’s ethics dating back to the mid-1990s.

“We have a judge who just continues to violate ethical rules and the code of judicial conduct that’s written by the Texas Supreme Court itself,” Walker said in an interview. “And if the people can’t trust that judges are going to follow even their own rules, then they’ll have very little confidence that the rule of law truly will prevail.”

It’s a long story and you should read the rest, after you pick yourself up from the floor at the notion that Devine’s “impartiality” is only sometimes affected by his wacko beliefs. In addition to being terrible at his job and totally unconcerned with the law, Devine is also a walking ethics violation and good pals with a couple of horrible sex offenders. You don’t have to be even a moderate to think he’s completely unfit to be a judge, but as a Planned Parenthood clinic defender in the 90s, my grudge against John Devine is decades long and as deep as the ocean. To whatever extent the Find Out PAC is serious about their mission, getting John Devine off the bench has to be a top priority. If you can’t raise a couple million bucks to oust that guy in the year 2024, then I don’t know what we’re doing here.

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PFLAG sues Paxton over intrusive data requests

Posted on March 2, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Time for more deep breathing.

A crook any way you look

An LGBTQ advocacy group is suing the Texas attorney general after his agency requested information that the group said would reveal the identities of its members, including those who sought to stay anonymous in recent suits.

The suit, filed Wednesday by PFLAG, argued that the requests violate its members’ right to free speech, to petition and to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The group accused Attorney General Ken Paxton of targeting people who have fought new anti-transgender laws in recent cases against the state.

Members of the group have previously sued the state over a new law that bans common medical treatments for transgender youth, as well as transition surgeries, which are rare. Their challenge against the ban, known as SB 14, is pending before the Texas Supreme Court.

The plaintiffs in that case include five families who used pseudonyms to protect their identities.

In the new suit, PFLAG asked a judge to block the request. If not, the group asked the judge to extend the deadline and refine its scope.

“The attorney general’s demand of PFLAG National is just another attempt to scare Texas families with transgender adolescents into abandoning their rights and smacks of retaliation against PFLAG National for standing up for those families against the state’s persecution,” said Karen Loewy, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, which is helping represent PFLAG in the suit. “We will fight to protect them.”

[…]

The request focused on information that may show how Texans are accessing transition care after the ban.

For example, in a sworn statement tied to a suit challenging the ban, PFLAG CEO Brian Bond had said that members’ families have been asking the group for “alternative avenues to maintain care in Texas.” The AG’s office requested all documents, meeting minutes and communications pertaining to Bond’s affidavit.

It also asked for any communications with a group of hospitals and clinics in and outside of Texas.

The list includes providers who were issued similar demands from Paxton last year that became public after one of them, Seattle Children’s Hospital, sued to block the request in a case that’s still pending.

The Houston Chronicle reported last month that QueerMed, a Georgia-based telehealth clinic, had also received a demand.

Both were among the list of entities whose communications Texas requested from PFLAG. The others were Texas Children’s Hospital; Baylor College of Medicine; QueerDoc and Plume Health, both telehealth clinics that provide gender transition care.

Bond also mentioned that families had asked his group for help figuring out their “contingency plans” after the ban.

Families were looking for providers “in the event that their primary providers stop providing gender-affirming care or leave the state as a result of SB 14 (Texas’ transition care ban),” Bond said in his affidavit.

The state asked PFLAG for a list of all such providers and any recommendations or referrals the group has made.

See here, here, and here for more on the lawsuit over the ban on gender affirming care, here and here for more on Paxton’s harassment of out of state clinics and hospitals, and here for more on the litigation to stop DFPS investigations into the families of trans kids. Ken Paxton will leave no stone unturned to harass, bully, and torment every one of these people.

I support this litigation and am hoping for the best, but I can’t say I’m very optimistic about it. Ask me again after SCOTx rules on the SB14 lawsuit. We’re going to need some intervention at the federal level because the opportunity to make changes in the state are too far out at this point. It’s going to be bad and it’s going to get worse until then.

I also don’t think you can read this story and not see the parallels with the fight for abortion access and the increasingly despotic attempts to criminalize out of state travel for the purposes of getting abortion care. Ken Paxton and his ilk would like nothing more than to have power over health care providers in other states, to threaten and intimidate them in any way so as to get them to stop providing services they don’t like. As long as he has power, he’s not going to stop trying to achieve that. Texas Public Radio has more.

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The Panhandle wildfires

Posted on March 2, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Scary stuff.

A blanket of snow and rain that descended over the Texas Panhandle on Thursday helped firefighters to quell the spread of the largest wildfire in the state’s history, which has engulfed more than 1 million acres of land and killed at least two people.

But firefighters are racing against the clock to temper down the flames before the weekend, when weather forecasters predict another round of gusty winds and low humidity could again create dangerous fire conditions for the remote region in the top corner of Texas.

The National Weather Service in Amarillo has issued a fire weather watch for Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening, leaving firefighters desperate to rein in the massive blaze before windy conditions return to the region. Friday is expected to be warm and dry.

“We are concerned if we don’t secure everything in the next 48 hours, there is potential it will spread again,” said Adam Turner, public information officer with Texas A&M Forest Service, on Thursday. He said crews are trying to put out as much of the fire now so more areas are secure before winds pick back up.

The Smokehouse Creek fire alone, which broke out Monday afternoon about 65 miles north of Amarillo, surpassed the million acreage mark and spreads across Texas and Oklahoma. It is larger than the East Amarillo Complex fire in 2006, which blazed through 906,000 acres of land and used to hold the record for the state’s largest wildfire.

The Smokehouse Creek fire was followed by a second one to the west called the Windy Deuce fire, which burned 142,000 acres of land across multiple counties north of Amarillo.

Firefighters have only managed to quell the Smokehouse Creek fire by 3%, a figure that has largely remained unchanged since Wednesday. The Windy Deuce Fire in Moore County is 50% contained as of Thursday afternoon, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service, which is tasked by the state to respond to wildfires. Texas A&M Forest Service officials said Thursday they had turned over management of the two wildfires to a federal incident management team because of their massive size.

The cause of the fires is unknown at this time and still under investigation, according to Karen Stafford, Texas A&M Forest Service Fire Prevention Program Coordinator.

The fires have ravaged nearly 2,000 square miles. The winds initially pushed fires to the east, but a cold front abruptly shifted the winds to blow the whole fire line to the south, which made the situation more dangerous.

Two other fires in the region continue to burn but are now largely contained. A third, smaller fire in Hutchinson County was about 10% contained as of Thursday evening. Another nearby smaller blaze was 100% contained, according to the Forest Service. Wildfires have become more frequent and severe in the Western United States because of warmer and drier conditions, factors that are worsening because of climate change.

There’s more, and I’ve got a bunch more links below. This is bad, and as you can see from the map it’s all close enough to Amarillo to potentially have an impact on a big population center (the city of Amarillo has 200K people, and the greater metro area has about 270K). All we can do is hope for the best from the weather and refer to these resources if you want to help in some way.

More info:

Texans in the Panhandle recall towering smoke and darkened skies as wildfires crept near their towns
Texas wildfires: how to help and how to stay safe
Wildfires ravage cattle country, threatening Texas’ agriculture economy
Texas Panhandle wildfires: Officials describe devastating damage, urge precaution as inferno continues
Record winter heat, dry air helped drive Panhandle fire risk
North Texas firefighters deploy to the largest fire in state’s history

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Flying taxis coming to an airport near you

Posted on March 2, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Possibly in time for the FIFA World Cup.

The Houston Airport System says they plan to bring air taxis to the area within the next two years, just in time for the FIFA World Cup in 2026.

“Right now we’re looking at identifying landing and take-off locations for eVTOLs at all three of our airport locations in Bush, Ellington, and Hobby,” Houston Airports Chief Operating Officer Jim Szczesniak said. These eVOTL – electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle – air taxis could hold five passengers, including the pilot, and have space for luggage. There are also plans for autonomous eVTOLs, where the pilot is driving the vehicle from afar, so the small aircraft can take up more passengers.

The planes take off vertically, like a helicopter, but they don’t have combustion engines. Houston Airport System officials, such as Szczesniak, are already making plans for when the technology becomes a reality.

[…]

Szczesniak believes that the service would operate like a ridesharing service, such as Uber, offering rides to and from the airport at a similar price rate to an Uber Black. Approximately 2 million passengers are dropped off at Bush each year. If just one percent of them take air taxis, that would mean an estimated 55 air taxi operations per day, according to Szcezsniak.

The air taxi market is projected to reach $1.5 trillion globally by 2040, according to a study by Morgan Stanley Research. Last summer, the Federal Aviation Administration released an implementation plan outlining the steps it and others will need to safely enable air taxis soon, with a rollout arrival date of 2028.

Houston Airports is in talks with aircraft designers, and manufacturers who are purchasing eVTOLs, and the FAA to successfully launch the integration of these air taxis. United Airlines, which has a hub at Bush International Airport, recently purchased 200 eVTOLs for $1 billion from Archer Aviation, an aircraft manufacturer. It also signed an agreement with another eVTOL maker, Eve Air Mobility, to purchase up to 400 air taxis.

See here and here for some background. A critical piece of missing information here is how much they expect this service to cost. If that back-of-the-envelope estimate is accurate and this is intended for, well, the one percent, then it’s probably going to be pretty expensive, like well over a hundred bucks per person. I’m sure the lawyers are already hashing out what kind of liability waiver one is going to have to sign before embarking. Does any of this sound tempting to you? Leave a comment and let us know. Hat tip to the CityCast Houston podcast for the heads up.

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Dispatches from Dallas, March 2 edition

Posted on March 2, 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, we have a grab bag of election news, school news, Dallas city politics, school district news, eclipse news, and zoo babies.

This week’s post was brought to you by Apple Music’s Celtic Essentials playlist, in honor of the North Texas Irish Festival, where I hope to spend a significant part of my weekend.

Also, if you haven’t voted early, please get out and vote in the primary election on Tuesday.

Let’s get right into the grab bag of news for this week, starting with primary news:

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2024 Primary Early Voting, Day Ten: Down to the wire

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Here we go, the penultimate day and the day where we really see the uptick in early voting:


Year    Mail    Early    Total
==============================
2012   7,458   23,080   30,538
2016  12,202   53,302   65,504
2020  21,658   82,365  104,023
2024  14,002   65,756   79,758

2012  16,968   47,152   64,120
2016  18,876   79,276   98,152
2020  21,340   65,793   87,133
2024   5,709   80,435   86,144

As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Ten totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.

Here’s the Derek Ryan report through Wednesday. Not a whole lot to say. I think we’re on track for 100K Dem early votes, and 105-110K early Republican votes. Dems did surpass the final 2012 turnout as expected, and are about 7K away from surpassing final early turnout from 2016. The numbers are about where I thought they’d be – they don’t feel loud, but they’re perfectly fine. I’m surrounded by advertising – multiple mailers every day, I’m stalked all over the web and social media by more candidates than I can keep track of, and the other day when we briefly had the KHOU 6 PM news on I saw commercials for Kim Ogg and Judge RK Sandill. Good thing I’m not listening to the radio, I can only imagine how many ads I’d have consumed by now.

I said I’d look back at past primaries to see how final turnout compared to early voting. Here’s what I have, and I must say I was a little surprised:


Election   Early    E-Day    Total  Early%
==========================================
2012 D    38,911   37,575   75,150  51.78%
2012 R    79,507   84,473  163,980  48.49%

2014 D    31,688   22,100   53,788  58.91%
2014 R    77,768   61,935  139,703  55.67%

2016 D    87,605  139,675  227,280  38.54%
2016 R   134,827  194,941  329,768  40.89%

2018 D    92,847   75,135  167,982  55.27%
2018 R    85,925   70,462  156,387  54.94%

2020 D   145,148  183,338  328,426  44.19%
2020 R   107,589   88,134  195,723  54.97%

2022 D    99,514   67,665  167,179  59.53%
2022 R   108,219   85,172  188,391  57.44%

I stopped at 2012 because early voting was still pretty new and novel in 2008, and I didn’t need any more non-Presidential years so I skipped 2010. I have three thoughts about these numbers: One, Republicans generally vote more in primaries than Democrats, even as Democrats have been the bigger share of the November vote since 2016. Two, Republicans have voted more heavily in the EV period than Dems in two of the last three Presidential cycles, which I admit surprises me a little. Given the recent Republican push for Election Day voting only, we’ll see if that trend continues. And three, I’m shocked at how much of the vote has been on Election Day overall, especially in the Presidential years. Given the supersized share of early voting in November in recent years, this was not at all what I expected.

Now, none of this means I’m going to make a prediction about what final turnout will look like this year. I’ve learned that lesson. History suggests that half or more of the Dem vote will still be out as of Friday night. I have no idea what it will be this year, but if you want to guess that Tuesday will be about half the total, at least for Dems, I won’t shake my head at you. I just won’t join you out on that limb.

One more day to go, the busiest day of the EV period. I assume some number of you are saving yourselves for Tuesday, because past history clearly suggests a lot of folks do that. If you haven’t voted yet, when are you planning to do so?

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SB4 blocked by federal court

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

A federal judge in Austin on Thursday halted a new state law that would allow Texas police to arrest people suspected of crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally.

The law, Senate Bill 4, was scheduled to take effect Tuesday. U.S. District Judge David Ezra issued a preliminary injunction that will keep it from being enforced while a court battle continues playing out. Texas is being sued by the federal government and several immigration advocacy organizations. Texas appealed the ruling to the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ezra said in his order Thursday that the federal government “will suffer grave irreparable harm” if the law took effect because it could inspire other states to pass their own immigration laws, creating an inconsistent patchwork of rules about immigration, which has historically been upheld as being solely within the jurisdiction of the federal government.

“SB 4 threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice,” Ezra wrote.

Ezra also wrote that if the state arrested and deported migrants who may be eligible for political asylum, that would violate the Constitution and also be “in violation of U.S. treaty obligations.”

“Finally, the Court does not doubt the risk that cartels and drug trafficking pose to many people in Texas,” Ezra wrote in his ruling. “But as explained, Texas can and does already criminalize those activities. Nothing in this Order stops those enforcement efforts. No matter how emphatic Texas’s criticism of the Federal Governments handling of immigration on the border may be to some, disagreement with the federal government’s immigration policy does not justify a violation of the Supremacy Clause.”

See here, here, and here for the background. I don’t think this ruling will come as a surprise to anyone, it’s completely consistent with existing precedent. Of course the goal for Greg Abbott and the radicals he represents is to overturn that precedent on the whims of the current SCOTUS, and that may well pan out for them. In the meantime, they’ll go scurrying to the Fifth Circuit for its usual concierge service. Don’t expect this law to be on hold for too long once they get a crack at it. I would love to be wrong about that. The Chron and the Current have more.

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Firefighter back pay update

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Just tell me what the bill’s gonna be.

Mayor John Whitmire

The city of Houston and its firefighters are nearing an agreement to resolve their bitter, yearslong pay dispute, with specifics expected to take additional weeks or months to finalize, according to city and union officials.

The city typically renegotiates contracts with the firefighters union every few years, but the two parties were unable to reach an agreement in 2017, leading to an ongoing legal battle and leaving the firefighters without a contract ever since.

Mayor John Whitmire’s administration previously set an end-of-February deadline to resolve all aspects of the dispute and outline a plan to finance the substantial payments. While both sides expressed satisfaction with the progress of the negotiations, Whitmire acknowledged the city is unlikely to meet this target.

“The negotiations are complicated and ongoing,” Whitmire said. “We are taking additional time to gather the necessary information and reach a successful conclusion: the best outcome for the City of Houston and our firefighters.”

Still, both City Attorney Arturo Michel and firefighters union president Marty Lancton told the Chronicle they are hopeful they can finalize basic terms in the coming days, possibly at their next meeting Thursday afternoon.

These terms will cover the total back pay the city will pay to firefighters split into broad categories such as base pay, special pay and interest. They will also likely touch on their future contracts for the next three years, according to Michel. However, developing the agreement to the extent that firefighters of various classifications know their exact compensation may take two to three more months, he said.

[…]

The Greater Houston Partnership recently estimated the back pay owed to firefighters could cost the city between $500 million and $600 million. Michel said covering these costs would likely involve a mix of general fund dollars and debt issuance. He added that depending on the bond type, its issuance may require approval from a judge or a referendum from voters.

See here for the previous update. How we pay for this will be almost as important as how much we pay. I figure it would complicate things greatly if a future referendum on bonds for the back payments fails to pass. I think the odds of that are very low, but I do hope someone contemplates a Plan B for just in case. You never know.

UPDATE: Last night around 8:30 PM this hit my inbox.

The City of Houston and the Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association have reached a tentative agreement that will resolve all outstanding pay issues for Houston firefighters dating back to 2017. The announcement comes just seven weeks into Mayor John Whitmire’s term.

“A world-class city like Houston deserves a well-funded fire department to attract and retain talented individuals who are willing to risk their safety for us during our times of need,” said Mayor Whitmire. “Houston’s fire department should be at or near the top among the major cities in our state. This agreement resolves a long – festering pay dispute with firefighters, avoids further unnecessary litigation costs, and allows us to move forward together.”

The Mayor’s sentiments reflect his views to assist and support all City departments and employees. Mayor Whitmire urges “all Houstonians to support every effort to fund public safety in Houston.”

“During my campaign, I committed to Houstonians that I would resolve this issue beginning on my first day in office. I am pleased that we have reached this tentative agreement within the first two months. I will ask City Council members and all Houstonians to support this arrangement once final details are settled with our partners at the Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association.”

Mayor Whitmire also noted that each side made important compromises to reach this agreement and thanked both parties for their efforts over the last two months.

No details in this or the identical press release from the HPFFA that I also received. I’m sure we’ll learn more soon enough. Congratulations on getting to an agreement. Now we await the price tag.

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NASA needs more Mars simulation astronauts

Posted on March 1, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Your next job opportunity.

CHAPEA mission 1 crew (NASA/Josh Valcarcel)

NASA is seeking applicants to participate in its next simulated one-year Mars surface mission to help inform the agency’s plans for human exploration of the Red Planet. The second of three planned ground-based missions called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) is scheduled to kick off in spring 2025.

Each CHAPEA mission involves a four-person volunteer crew living and working inside a 1,700-square-foot, 3D-printed habitat based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The habitat, called the Mars Dune Alpha, simulates the challenges of a mission on Mars, including resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, and other environmental stressors. Crew tasks include simulated spacewalks, robotic operations, habitat maintenance, exercise, and crop growth.

NASA is looking for healthy, motivated U.S. citizens or permanent residents who are non-smokers, 30-55 years old, and proficient in English for effective communication between crewmates and mission control. Applicants should have a strong desire for unique, rewarding adventures and interest in contributing to NASA’s work to prepare for the first human journey to Mars.

The deadline for applicants is Tuesday, April 2.

https://chapea.nasa.gov/

Crew selection will follow additional standard NASA criteria for astronaut candidate applicants. A master’s degree in a STEM field such as engineering, mathematics, or biological, physical or computer science from an accredited institution with at least two years of professional STEM experience or a minimum of one thousand hours piloting an aircraft is required. Candidates who have completed two years of work toward a doctoral program in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, completed a medical degree, or a test pilot program will also be considered. With four years of professional experience, applicants who have completed military officer training or a bachelor of science degree in a STEM field may be considered.

Compensation for participating in the mission is available. More information will be provided during the candidate screening process.

See here and here for some background. The first CHAPEA mission “launched” on June 25 last year and are scheduled to be on that mission for a little more than a year. I presume the crew’s entry into the habitat will be after the first crew emerges, though you’ll get started with training and whatnot before then. If you have the background and the interest, why not check it out? On the list of unique experiences, this would be pretty high up there.

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2024 Primary Early Voting, Day Nine: Two more to go

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

A slight uptick yesterday in early voting, with the two big days to come.


Year    Mail    Early    Total
==============================
2012   6,719   19,324   22,752
2016  11,367   45,552   56,919
2020  19,400   66,322   85,722
2024  12,448   55,456   67,904

2012  15,239   39,482   54,721
2016  17,964   62,072   84,036
2020  20,393   55,499   75,892
2024   5,162   68,231   73,393

As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Nine totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.

Dems should easily reach final overall turnout from 2012 today. I was asked in the comments of a previous post about comparisons to 2022, and you can see those numbers along with the 2018 numbers here. Both are greater than 2016 but less than 2020, and I’d guess that 2024 tops them, though not by a huge amount.

Here’s the Derek Ryan report through Tuesday. He speculates that final Dem primary turnout statewide will be around where 2022 was, which I will note was one of the best off-year primary totals for Dems in this century, and wonders why the Senate race hasn’t generated more interest. Not that much money spent in it is my guess for that, while the Republican primary is awash in money from voucher vultures and Paxton pimps. That’s my explanation for why the Harris County GOP is running slightly ahead of the Dems despite having fewer local races of interest. Presidential primary plus oligarch cash goes a long way.

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Paxton sues Pornhub under the currently-enforceable state anti-porn law

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Welp.

Way more indecent

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton this week sued a major online porn distributor in an effort to enforce a new state law mandating age verification and purported health warnings on adult websites.

The lawsuit, filed in state court in Austin on Monday, accuses the adult-entertainment company Aylo of violating House Bill 1181, a new state content-warning law for websites. A Montreal-based company, Aylo runs a number of major online porn brands, including Pornhub.

Among other rules, HB 1181 requires that porn websites “use reasonable age verification methods” to “verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18 years of age or older.” It also orders such websites to post controversial health warnings that pornography “weakens brain function,” “is proven to harm human brain development” and “is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses.”

According to the lawsuit, minors who visit Aylo’s pornographic websites are either “immediately presented with sexual material” or “are asked to complete the trivial step of clicking an ‘enter’ button.” As a result, the suit says, Aylo has completely failed to comply with HB 1181.

The suit seeks an injunction forcing Aylo to use age verification and display the required health warnings. Texas also wants hefty fines, including $1.6 million in civil penalties plus $10,000 per day dating back to Sept. 19, 2023 — the day when the Fifth Circuit first greenlit the law.

[…]

Last year, a coalition of porn-industry insiders — including a free-speech group focused on pornography — won an injunction blocking the law.

Their original suit, filed in federal court in Austin, described HB 1181 as part of a “long tradition of unconstitutional — and ultimately failed — governmental attempts to regulate and censor free speech on the internet.” Rather than imposing new content restrictions, “Texas could easily spread its ideological, anti-pornography message through public service announcements and the like,” the suit argued.

U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra, a Reagan appointee, ultimately found those arguments persuasive. Among other factors, he determined that rules requiring health warnings in 14-point font were overly burdensome and ambiguous, as “text size on webpages is typically measured by pixels, not points.”

In his ruling from August, Ezra also cited Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a longstanding standard that protects online publishers from liability for content produced by third-parties. Without explaining its reasoning, the conservative Fifth Circuit overruled that injunction, including with a one-page administrative stay in September. Those orders paved the way for Texas to enforce the law, including with this latest suit.

See here, here, and here for the background. It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where Aylo will want this to actually get to a courtroom, because it sure seems like they’d lose. What they would surely prefer is either a quick settlement or to drag things out for as long as possible in the hope that the Free Speech Coalition eventually succeeds in getting the law permanently blocked. I don’t know what their risk tolerance is or whether the timeline of the federal lawsuit is amenable to that strategy. We’ll see how this plays out. Bloombeg Law has more.

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The state of robotaxis in 2024

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Good read.

A driverless Cruise car sits in traffic on Austin Street in downtown Houston on Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. Photo: Jay R. Jordan/Axios

In 2023, it almost felt as if the promise of robotaxis was soon to be fulfilled. Hailing a robotaxi had briefly become the new trendy thing to do in San Francisco, as simple and everyday as ordering a delivery via app. However, that dream crashed and burned in October, when a serious accident in downtown San Francisco involving a vehicle belonging to Cruise, one of the leading US robotaxi companies, ignited distrust, casting a long shadow over the technology’s future.

Following that and another accident, the state of California suspended Cruise’s operations there indefinitely, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation of the company. Since then, Cruise has pulled all its vehicles from the road and laid off 24% of its workforce.

Despite that, other robotaxi companies are still forging ahead. In half a dozen cities in the US and China, fleets of robotaxis run by companies such as Waymo and Baidu are still serving anyone who would like to try them. Regulators in places like San Francisco, Phoenix, Beijing, and Shanghai now allow these vehicles to drive without human safety operators.

However, other perils loom. Robotaxi companies need to make a return on the vast sums that have been invested into getting them up and running. Until robotaxis become cheaper, they can’t meaningfully compete with conventional taxis and Uber. Yet at the same time, if companies try to increase adoption too fast, they risk following in Cruise’s footsteps. Waymo, another major robotaxi operator, has been going more slowly and cautiously. But no one is immune to accidents.

“If they have an accident, it’s going to be big news, and it will hurt everyone,” says Missy Cummings, a professor and director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center at George Mason University. “That’s the big lesson of this year. The whole industry is on thin ice.”

MIT Technology Review talked to experts about how to understand the challenges facing the robotaxi industry. Here’s how they expect it to change in 2024.

The first challenge given is that right now at least the robotaxis are so much more expensive than regular old human-driven taxis. That’s partly because of the plethora of new technology that these vehicles carry, partly because of the need for remote human operators for those that don’t have emergency drivers, and as one quoted expert put it “These companies are competing with an Uber driver who, in any estimate, makes less than minimum wage, has a midpriced car, and probably maintains it themselves”. I wrote a long time ago when Uber was in the robotaxi space that switching to autonomous vehicles would completely upend their existing business model, as they would now have to own, maintain, store, and insure their entire fleet rather than depend on their drivers to provide it. I’m sure at some point as the technology matures and other costs subside that this model will make more sense than and be more competitive with the existing one. I just don’t know how long that will take and if the companies that are pursuing this will be willing to spend the money and incur the losses it will take to get there. The Cruise experience isn’t a good omen for them. Go read the rest.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of February 26

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance knows that banning IVF won’t be the end of it for the forced-birth zealots as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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2024 Primary Early Voting, Day Eight: That was Tuesday

Posted on February 28, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We are at the point of the early voting calendar where I begin to run out of clever intros.


Year    Mail    Early    Total
==============================
2012   6,381   16,371   22,752
2016  10,970   34,419   45,389
2020  18,503   54,325   72,728
2024  10,440   47,185   57,625

2012  13,509   33,563   47,072
2016  16,433   49,692   66,125
2020  19,690   47,281   66,971
2024   4,454   57,913   62,367

As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Eight totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.

I don’t really have a lot to add at this point. Final total turnout in the 2012 Democratic primary was about 76K, and we’ll probably reach that on Thursday. Final early voting turnout for 2016 was about 86K, and if we don’t reach that on Thursday we’ll get there and more on Friday. Dems still have a lot of mail ballots out, I’d guess maybe 5K of them get returned by Friday, but it could be more. Overall I’d say this is going more or less as I thought it might. What do you think? Have you voted yet?

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The HPD suspended cases situation

Posted on February 28, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I don’t know what to make of this.

A review of sex crimes cases suspended with an internal code citing a lack of personnel has expanded department-wide to include more than 264,000 cases, Police Chief Troy Finner said Monday.

The dropped cases makes up about 10% of the department’s 2.8 million filed since 2016, Finner said. About 100,000 of those are property crimes, he wrote.

Doug Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers Association, said he was concerned about the latest revelations. The union president said Monday at least three of the department’s division Standard Operating Procedures included directives about when to use the code to close cases.

The divisions included auto theft, vehicular crimes and major assaults and family violence, Griffith said. The major assault guidelines were signed off on by Finner Dec. 1, 2023, Griffith said.

[…]

Griffith said employees were instructed they could use the code on misdemeanor cases with little solvability. He said other cases could be suspended using that code, but those could be reopened if someone reaches out to the department seeking charges, Griffith said.

“But that’s incumbent on victims reaching out to authorities, which is a problem,” Griffith said.

Griffith previously said about 2,000 sexual assault cases had been dropped because of the lack of personnel code, before Finner revealed it was closer to 4,000.

This is building on an earlier story about the use of the code on sexual assault cases.

The Houston Police Department’s review into sexual assault investigations revealed the number of closed cases since 2021. Police administrators have launched an investigation to determine who was closing out cases using the code to signify lack of personnel, Griffith said Wednesday, one day before Chief Troy Finner is set to address the cases in a Thursday afternoon news conference. But there’s no reason to believe sexual assault investigators were the only ones who’ve used it, Griffith said.

“We didn’t even know there was such a code,” Griffith said. “We don’t know how many other types of crimes were cleared this way. It’s a large investigation to see how many and what types of cases this affects.”

Griffith didn’t have specific numbers of investigators in the sexual assault crimes unit, but said most investigative units were down between 10% to 15%. He explained that the department provides codes to close cases in many different instances – perhaps a complainant wants to withdraw charges, or maybe investigators run out of leads in another case, Griffith said. But lack of manpower shouldn’t be a reason, he argued.

The department investigated between 20,000 and 23,000 felony cases each year since 2021.

Griffith said he suspects someone started intentionally using the code and then, for whatever reason, a supervisor allowed it to continue.

[…]

In January, a new group, the Harris County Sexual Assault Response Team, released a report showing of the more than 2,200 sexual assaults reported to the county’s largest law enforcement agencies over nearly two years, 60 led to convictions while hundreds more remain unresolved.

The response team was created in 2021 after state lawmakers passed a law requiring counties to establish unified groups that share resources and information about local sex crimes. The law, Senate Bill 476, requires the team to create a protocol on how sexual assaults should be investigated and an annual report detailing the number of sexual assaults reported, investigated and prosecuted in a given year.

Sonia Corrales, deputy CEO for the Houston Area Women’s Center and one of the members of the new response team, said she wasn’t sure whether the report is connected to Finner’s announcement. But she said she is hopeful that through the review, leaders are doing what they can to make sure victims of sexual assault get the help they need.

“I hope by looking at this, we can get to the root of the problem and address the issue,” she said.

I mean, I can totally understand how HPD could get overwhelmed at times and do something like this as a matter of triage. The fact that the use of this code continued long after investigators were told to stop doesn’t say much for oversight within the department. That the solve rate for sexual assaults was barely three percent is mind-boggling, and we wouldn’t even know that figure if it hadn’t been for that new state law. This revelation unfortunately explains a lot, not in a good way.

As bad as all this is, at least now we know about it and can try to do something about it. The Mayor is going to spend more money on HPD because that’s what he promised during his campaign, and that should have some effect. But if we’re not using our police resources effectively and we’re not tracking results and holding them accountable when those results are unsatisfactory, then we’re not going to get anything different. Up to Mayor Whitmire and HPD leadership what happens from here.

Posted in Crime and Punishment | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

You’re not going to fall for Greg Abbott’s BS about IVF, are you?

Posted on February 28, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Let’s count the ways in which he dodged and weaved.

Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday that he supports Texas families having access to in vitro fertilization treatments and has “no doubt” the state will address issues raised by a recent controversial court ruling out of Alabama. Abbott did not call on the Legislature to take specific action to protect IVF treatment.

“Texas is a pro-life state, and we want to do everything possible that we can to maintain Texas being a pro life state,” Abbott told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday. “But at the very same time … we as a state want to ensure that we promote life, we bring more life into the world and we empower parents to be able to have more children.”

Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under a state law that allows parents to sue for wrongful death of minor children.

“Unborn children are ‘children’,” Alabama Supreme Court Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the ruling, “without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics.”

[…]

The ruling applies only to Alabama and does not impact the legality of IVF treatment in Texas. But it has opened thorny questions about “fetal personhood” — the legal concept that a fetus should be afforded the same rights as a living child — that many Republicans have tried to sidestep, especially in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential elections.

In Sunday’s interview, Abbott voiced his support for former President Donald Trump’s statement on the issue, in which Trump said he strongly supports the availability of IVF “in every State in America” for couples “who are trying to have a precious baby.”

[…]

Abbott said Texas wants to make it easier, not harder, for people to have babies, and IVF “is a way of giving life to even more babies.”

“I think the goal is to make sure that we can find a pathway to ensure that parents who otherwise may not have the opportunity to have a child will be able to have access to the IVF process and become parents and give life to babies,” Abbott said.

But Abbott, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, said there were specific scenarios and fact questions that would need to be parsed, including what happens to the frozen embryos if the person who created them died or the couple got divorced.

“These are very complex issues where I’m not sure everybody has really thought about what all the potential problems are,” Abbott said. “And as a result, no one really knows what the potential answers are.”

The article also reminds us of a wrongful death lawsuit filed in Galveston by a man who alleges that three women helped his ex-wife get an abortion. It was a wrongful death lawsuit in Alabama that led to the anti-IVF ruling, and the plaintiff’s lawyers in this suit include extreme forced birther Jonathan Mitchell, who I assure you knows exactly what he’s doing here.

As for Abbott, note that nowhere in that word salad of his does he ever say that the Alabama Supreme Court decision was wrong or bad or even that he disagreed with it. No, they just went a little further than he’d have gone, that’s all. Nothing to worry your pretty little head about. He’s not going to propose any specific laws to prevent what happened in Alabama from happening here, nor does he voice any support for a national law to protect IVF, like the one that Republicans blocked in the Senate in 2022. (To be fair, Abbott is far from alone in not knowing how to respond to this.)

Also, too, he does not mention that the Texas Republican Party platform “[calls] on Texas schools to teach the “dignity of the preborn human” and that life begins at fertilization”, which is exactly the thing you have to believe in to get to a court ruling against IVF on the grounds that all of those frozen embryos are actually real live children. Nor does he mention the Life At Conception Act, introduced last year in the House and featuring 17 cosponsors from Texas, which declares that “the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual comes into being”. And while Abbott is out there being mealy-mouthed, his buddies at CPAC are applauding the Alabama ruling and calling on other Republicans to support it.

So yeah. Don’t be a chump. Greg Abbott may want you to think he’ll protect access to IVF, but literally everything about him says otherwise. What are you going to believe? Reform Austin, Axios, and the WaPo have more.

Posted in Show Business for Ugly People | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Preparing for the World Cup

Posted on February 28, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

FIFA requires real grass for its World Cup stadia, so NRG will be installing grass in 2026.

The World Cup won’t hit Houston for another 28 months, but NRG Stadium and city officials already are preparing for the seven matches coming to town in June and July of 2026.

NRG Stadium is one of 16 stadiums in North America — 11 in the United States, three in Mexico and two in Canada — hosting the next World Cup with Houston getting a Round of 32 match on June 29 and a Round of 16 match on July 4. The stadium’s five group stage matches will be on June 14, 17, 20, 23 and 26.

The stadium itself is undergoing some improvements, including a $34 million project to upgrade the sustainability and efficiency of the building. That will include all the lighting throughout NRG Park being replaced with LED lighting and the stadium lights being improved to make sure it properly covers the wider soccer pitch.

The most noticeable change will be the grass field required by FIFA for all World Cup matches. The plan is for grass to be installed in the stadium at the beginning of May 2026 to give it more than a month to settle.

“To put it in layman’s terms, we’re going to have one of the greatest grass fields that you can have,” said Chris Canetti, president of Houston’s World Cup host committee. “This is a requirement for the FIFA World Cup. We will have a substantial system that’s put in place for this grass field. We’re going to build it as though it was going to be permanent. However, it’s going to have to be taken out at the end.”

The Texans originally played on grass inside the stadium before replacing it with artificial turf in 2015.

“Whether or not a grass surface can exist in the future is certainly not for us to determine,” said Canetti, deferring to the Texans.

See here for some background. As I recall, the reason why they replaced the grass that had been in then-Reliant Stadium was that they had a hard time keeping it alive, and eventually decided it wasn’t worth the effort. They’ll only need it for seven games in a three-week stretch so one would think this is well within reason, but I’m sure everyone here is aware of that history.

Did I say “NRG Stadium”? Because it won’t be called that while the FIFA folks are in town.

NRG Energy is paying a lot of money for its name to be on the Houston Texans stadium, but none of that will be apparent when World Cup matches are played in NRG Stadium in 2026.

FIFA refuses to acknowledge corporate stadium names, despite many naming rights agreements being in place long before host cities even put in a bid to lure the tournament to town.

So, due to FIFA regulations, the seven matches at NRG Stadium actually will be played at “Houston Stadium.” It will be the same for all 16 stadiums hosting World Cup matches. SoFi Stadium will be called “Los Angeles Stadium”, the Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium will be designated “Dallas Stadium”, even though it’s located in Arlington, and MetLife Stadium gets the even clunker moniker “New York/New Jersey Stadium.”

“Going way back to the bid process, there’s always things that you work through before you even bid for an event, so we are super thankful to our corporate community, especially NRG in this case for stepping up and agreeing even before we put the bid in to help us with this,” Harris County Houston Sports Authority CEO Janis Burke said.

[…]

FIFA’s rules require stadium signs to be covered and not referred to during game broadcasts unless those companies strike separate agreements with the governing body. Deals struck outside of FIFA are considered “ambush marketing” that devalues their own sponsorships.

“We consider ambush marketing to be a priority in our brand protection work, as this practice puts FIFA’s commercial program directly at risk by effectively devaluing official sponsorship,” the organization posted on its website. “The World Cup tournaments are the result of significant efforts to develop and promote the tournaments, something which would not be possible without the financial support of our commercial affiliates. Ambush marketers try to take advantage of the goodwill and positive image generated by the FIFA tournaments without contributing to their organization.”

Well, we certainly wouldn’t want to mess with FIFA’s marketing integrity. I’m wondering if NRG will get some kind of rebate for this period, like how the cable company will offer to prorate your monthly bill when there’s an extended outage. Oh, and speaking as a New York boy, they could have done worse than “New York/New Jersey Stadium” – they could have called it “Tri-State Metropolitan Area Stadium”.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

2024 Primary Early Voting, Day Seven: Week 2 begins

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Week Two is where the action really begins, though usually you don’t see the first hint of it until Wednesday. Let’s check the board:


Year    Mail    Early    Total
==============================
2012   6,295   13,763   18,058
2016  10,180   28,367   38,547
2020  16,651   44,349   61,000
2024   9,281   40,016   49,297

2012  13,339   28,411   41,750
2016  14,681   40,537   55,218
2020  18,949   39,216   58,165
2024   4,291   48,728   53,019

As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Seven totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.

Republicans had a slightly better day than Democrats but they’re still within shouting distance of each other. Dems also still have about 16K mail ballots that haven’t been returned yet. Republicans have returned about half of their mail ballots so only have about 4K more to go. That could help make up some of the difference.

Here’s the Derek Ryan report, which runs through the weekend. Through Sunday, 521,000 people have voted in the Republican Primary (2.9% of all registered voters), and 257,000 people have voted in the Democratic Primary (1.4% of all registered voters). Out of curiosity, I went back to my six day report and calculated that as of the weekend, Harris County was responsible for about 15.1% of all Democratic primary votes statewide, and 8.4% of all Republican votes. That’s more or less in line with recent figures for Dems, and a furtherance of the decline for Republicans. I don’t know if that means anything, I’m just noting it for the record.

I feel like I saw more “I voted” posts on Facebook yesterday among my friends than on previous days. Have you voted yet? If not, when?

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

SCOTUS has its hearing on the stupid social media censorship law

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Some modest hope, perhaps, that we’ll get a not-terrible ruling.

The Supreme Court cast doubt Monday on state laws that could affect how Facebook, TikTok, X, YouTube, and other social media platforms regulate content posted by their users. The cases are among several this term in which the justices could set standards for free speech in the digital age.

In nearly four hours of arguments, several justices questioned aspects of laws adopted by Republican-dominated legislatures and signed by Republican governors in Florida and Texas in 2021. But they seemed wary of a broad ruling, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett warning of “land mines” she and her colleagues need to avoid in resolving the two cases.

While the details vary, both laws aimed to address conservative complaints that the social media companies were liberal-leaning and censored users based on their viewpoints, especially on the political right.

Differences on the court Wednesday emerged over how to think about the platforms — as akin to newspapers that have broad free-speech protections, or telephone companies, known as common carriers that are susceptible to broader regulation.

Chief Justice John Roberts suggested he was in the former camp, saying early in the session, “And I wonder, since we’re talking about the First Amendment, whether our first concern should be with the state regulating what we have called the modern public square?”

[…]

The precise contours of rulings in the two cases were not clear after arguments, although it seemed likely the court would not let the laws take effect. The justices posed questions about how the laws might affect businesses that are not the primary targets of the laws, including e-commerce sites like Uber and Etsy and email and messaging services.

The cases are among several the justices have grappled with over the past year involving social media platforms. Next month, the court will hear an appeal from Louisiana, Missouri and other parties accusing administration officials of pressuring social media companies to silence conservative points of view. Two more cases awaiting decision concern whether public officials can block critics from commenting on their social media accounts, an issue that previously came up in a case involving then-President Donald Trump. The court dismissed the Trump case when his presidential term ended in January 2021.

The Florida and Texas laws were passed in the months following decisions by Facebook and Twitter, now X, to cut Trump off over his posts related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

Trade associations representing the companies sued in federal court, claiming that the laws violated the platforms’ speech rights. One federal appeal struck down Florida’s statute, while another upheld the Texas law. But both are on hold pending the outcome at the Supreme Court.

See here for my previous update on this, and here for a good explainer about the issue. That “other federal appeals court” was of course the Fifth Circuit, which provides concierge service to Ken Paxton and his cronies.

More from TPM:

These cases grew out of endless conservative complaints about “shadow banning” and “censorship,” platforms’ policies that conservatives claim are single-mindedly aimed at tamping down right-wing influence. It’s a natural outgrowth of the Republican Party’s grievance politics, and ramped up after the COVID-19 pandemic, when anti-vaxxer content on social media became a huge point of contention.

Monday’s arguments centered on laws out of Florida and Texas that would guide and restrict the platforms’ content moderation decisions, and demand platforms provide individualized explanations for those decisions to the affected users. The oral arguments over challenges to the pair of laws are just the first on the Court’s docket this term to deal with these issues; another challenging the Biden administration’s practice of flagging misinformation to tech companies will be argued next month.

The Florida law in particular is quite sprawling, including provisions that the platforms cannot “censor” any “journalistic enterprise” or “willfully deplatform a candidate” for office. It also potentially extends beyond the traditional social media sites, prompting many justices to ask how the law may be applied to messaging carriers like Gmail or marketplaces like Etsy.

Questions about the breadth of the legislation consumed much of the hearings, with some justices clearly mulling remanding at least the Florida case to address the further flung applications.

But perhaps the most interesting moments in the proceedings arose when the right-wing justices’ long-held reflexive positioning came into conflict with a newer strain of their ideology: old-school, free market, pro-business conservatism vs. the new age, Trumpian culture wars. The Court’s Republican appointees are a microcosm of the same dynamic playing out in the party at large, as the old guard fights to retain relevance amid the influx of MAGA politicians and their new, often vindictive, priorities.

[…]

For all but the most dedicated culture warriors, the Florida and Texas laws may ultimately prove too sprawling for them to get behind. The justices spent much of the arguments debating the knock-on effects of the laws and of questioning how, if one of these tech platforms chose to opt out of serving Florida or Texas rather than complying with the law, it could even manage to do it.

But the issue isn’t going away. As long as a sizeable chunk of the right-wing legal world cares greatly about punishing companies it views as enemies — and as long as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals happily rubber stamps these suits on the way up — the pro-business justices and the culture warriors on the Supreme Court will continue to be locked into their internecine battles.

There’s another case before SCOTUS involving the federal government’s ability to contact social media companies to ask them to take action on specific things they identify as misinformation. That case will be heard on March 18. Never a dull moment. Law Dork and Slate have more.

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Paxton’s revenge against the CCA

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I have three things to say about this.

A crook any way you look

The three incumbents running for their seats on Texas’ highest criminal courtwere not well known political figures outside of the legal community. That was until they earned the ire of Attorney General Ken Paxton in response to a 2021 opinion over a voter fraud case.

Now, the three female Republican justices on the Court of Criminal Appeals, Presiding Judge Sharon Keller, Judge Barbara Hervey and Judge Michelle Slaughter, find themselves in the position of having their conservative credentials questioned in “low-information elections” in which they’re up against Paxton’s political machine.

“The Court of Criminal Appeals, who I am concerned was put there by George Soros ‘cause no one knows who they are, they’re all Republicans but even Republicans don’t know who they are,” Paxton told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson last month, referring to the Democratic mega donor.

The three incumbents, who have nearly a century of combined experience practicing criminal law, as prosecutors and jurists, have been accused by Paxton’s allies of abandoning their judicial duties and stripping the attorney general’s power to enforce voter fraud — a consequential issue for the modern-day GOP under former President Donald Trump.

Three years ago, a case stemming from Paxton’s effort to override a Jefferson County district attorney who declined to prosecute a sheriff over 2016 campaign-finance allegations was before the criminal appeals court. In a 8-1 decision, the court said the Office of the Attorney General violated the separation of powers in the Texas Constitution by trying to prosecute election cases without the permission of a local prosecutor.

The timing of the opinion was such that this primary is the first opportunity for Paxton to seek political retribution against some of the eight Republican judges who he believes ruled against him.

“It’s sad because he wouldn’t know me from madam. I’m sure he doesn’t know anything about me,” said Hervey, wondering whether Paxton had actually read the opinion he railed against publically. “That’s really pathetic.”

[…]

The three incumbents have received financial support from Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a committee that Paxton has labeled a political enemy. The challengers all have the backing of a new PAC, Texans for Responsible Judges, but the three have not received contributions from the group, according to the most recent campaign finance reports.

Wendy Watson, a faculty member of the University of North Texas’ Department of Political Science, views these races as a referendum on Trump and his false claims of voter fraud.

“This is a loyalty test,” Watson said. “You didn’t let Ken Paxton prosecute voter fraud, that must be because you are okay with voter fraud. Right?”

These races are “low-information elections,” races in which voters don’t know either of the candidates well, Watson said. So any tidbit of information that a voter may get from someone, no matter how wrong or skewed, may end up being the deciding factor behind a cast ballot.

[…]

Judge Hervey has been on the bench since 2001, prior to which she worked as a Bexar County assistant criminal district attorney for 16 years.

Her experience with and knowledge of criminal law are crucial to the operation of the court, she said. On top of her duties as a judge, Hervey co-chairs the Judicial Commission on Mental Health and runs an education program that provides legal courses and assistance to judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and court personnel.

“I think experience and dedication to these things are important to move the needle forward,” Hervey said.

On the controversial opinion, Hervey put it in simple terms: “Eight of us decided it was a good idea to follow the Constitution.”

See here for more on what this fight is about and here for an earlier story on the same subject. Now on to my three things.

1. The story also refers to Paxton’s “revenge tour” against Republican legislators who voted to impeach him. I’m not dumb enough to try to guess what Republican primary voters will do, but I will take a moment to imagine a world in which Paxton’s fevered efforts land with a giant thud as he largely or even completely fails to oust those traitors who dared oppose him. I may as well wish for a pony while I’m at it, but it is a nice thought.

2. Justice Hervey has been around Republican politics for a lot longer than I’ve been in any form of politics. I respect her experience, and I think her summary of the case in question is impeccable and pithy. That said, her quotes in this article are quaint to the point of preciousness, and I have to ask if she’s actually met any modern day Republicans, because they don’t care about any of that crap. I fear she is in for a rude awakening.

3. I need one more excerpt for this one:

Meanwhile, Slaughter received $15,000 in campaign contributions from Texans for Lawsuit Reform, the group that has earned the ire of Paxton, in addition to smaller individual donations. The committee donated the same amount to Keller and Hervey.

Fifteen K? Seriously? I’m old enough to remember when TLR was pumping millions into legislative races so as to tip the balance of power in their favor. Fifteen K isn’t enough to affect a small-county Justice of the Peace race. It wouldn’t cover the postage for a targeted mailer in Harris County, let alone the mailer itself. Whatever happened to TLR?

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Are we talking hockey in Houston again?

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

It appears we are.

Billionaire restaurateur and casino magnate Tilman Fertitta sees a professional hockey team as the next building block for the downtown Houston economy.

The owner of the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets and the Golden Nugget casino empire said everything from hotels to restaurants to retail in the core of the fourth-largest city would benefit from hockey’s presence. A National Hockey League franchise is the last remaining major professional sport that doesn’t have a presence in Houston.

“We are talking to the NHL, but it’s got to be good for both of us,” Fertitta said during an interview with Bloomberg News in Houston on Tuesday. “We just know that when there’s a concert downtown, how it activates downtown, we know what the Astros do for downtown, we know what even soccer does for downtown.”

Although Fertitta has been courting the NHL about bringing a team to Houston since he bought the Rockets for $2.2 billion seven years ago, he said discussions have recently turned more serious. Fertitta noted that he’s open to helping bring in either an expansion franchise or acquiring a team from another market.

[…]

Outlying suburbs of Houston have reached out to Fertitta about helping them attract an NHL team but he said boosting the downtown district — where he owns restaurants that include Morton’s The Steakhouse, McCormick and Schmick’s and The Palm — has been a goal of his for decades.

See here, here, and here for some background. As you can see at that first link, as recently as one year ago the door appeared to be closed. I suppose a lot can change in a year. The Chron adds on.

Houston is the nation’s largest city without a pro hockey team, with no club having skated at Toyota Center since the American Hockey League’s Aeros moved to Des Moines, Iowa, after the 2012-13 season. The prospect of an NHL franchise in Houston has been bandied about for more than 30 years — the Minnesota North Stars looked at Houston in 1993 before relocating to Dallas, team chairman Jim Lites told the Chronicle in 2018 — with rumblings picking up in recent years.

[…]

Last October, Rockets president of business operations Gretchen Sheirr told the Chronicle the ongoing renovations at Toyota Center included “making sure it’s hockey ready” with an “ice machine” needed for it to become an NHL venue.

During a news conference before the recent NHL All-Star Game in Toronto, commissioner Gary Bettman said the league, while not actively engaged in the process of expanding, had received expansion interest from cities including Houston, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Kansas City and Salt Lake City, which he described as the “most aggressive” suitor. Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith has made no secret of his desire to bring the NHL to his state and last month formally requested the NHL “initiate an expansion process.”

As for a potential franchise on the move, the future of the Arizona Coyotes, the subject of relocation rumors for two-plus decades, reportedly will be addressed in “the next few weeks,” per a recent report from Daily Faceoff. Last May, a referendum in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe for an entertainment district that would have included a new arena for the Coyotes was defeated resoundingly.

Since the 2022-23 season, the Coyotes have played at Arizona State’s Mullett Arena, which has an NHL-low capacity of 4,600 and is not seen as a long-term home. Marty Walsh, executive director of the NHL Players Association, recently blasted the Coyotes’ situation, saying that playing at a college arena was “not the way to run a business” and “the players want to play in an NHL arena.”

So who knows. It’s all theoretical until Commissioner Bettman says expansion and/or a franchise’s relocation is happening, and even if one of them does happen Houston is not necessarily first in line. But we are seeking to he at the table. Houston Public Media has more.

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2024 Primary Early Voting, Day Six: On to week 2

Posted on February 26, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Five more days of early voting to go. Here’s where we are after the weekend:


Year    Mail    Early    Total
==============================
2012   6,055   11,580   17,635
2016   8,850   23,384   32,234
2020  15,101   36,719   51,820
2024   7,643   33,276   40,919

2012  12,915   24,000   36,915
2016  12,203   32,641   44,844
2020  16,528   32,638   48,166
2024   3,620   40,220   43,840

As a reminder, Dem totals are on top, Republican ones on the bottom. Here are the Day Six totals for this year, and here are the final totals from 2012, 2016, and 2020.

Dems had a few more votes than Republicans over the weekend, but not enough to take note. We are either now receiving or now counting mail ballots on Saturday; all of the years before this show zero mail ballots for the weekend period. Not sure what changed or why, but there it is. Dems will surpass their final EV total from 2012 today, and they could surpass the 2016 final total before Friday. 2020 is out of reach barring a big surge, but the final total should be a respectable percentage of what it was that year.

For whatever the reason, I’m feeling squeamish about making projections. Maybe the 2023 race has scared me off. I’ll run some numbers later in the week to see where we stand in a bigger-picture context. At this point, I’m comfortable with my initial evaluation that we’d exceed 2016 and fall short of 2020. Beyond that, it’s up in the air. Have you voted yet?

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

El Paso rallies around Annunciation House

Posted on February 26, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

They will need all this support and more.

El Paso leaders on Friday denounced Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s threat to shut down Annunciation House, a network of migrant shelters that has been in operation for almost 50 years.

“An attack on one is an attack on all,” U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said during a news conference at the shelter’s office, which was packed with supporters.

Annunciation House operates several shelters in El Paso, helping immigrants and refugees who are experiencing homelessness with various needs, including food and housing, and providing information on how to complete legal documents to claim asylum in the United States.

The nonprofit, which opened its first shelter at a local Catholic Church and receives support from the church, said it has helped hundreds of thousands of refugees who have come through El Paso by feeding and keeping them off city streets.

[…]

“Is there no shame to refer to houses of God, houses of hospitality as stash houses,” Ruben Garcia, the director of Annunciation House, said at the press conference.

El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said that Garcia’s organization and others who do similar work are invaluable to the city because those groups step in to help local and federal authorities handle large numbers of migrants entering the city. Leeser said that part of El Paso’s culture is to be a welcoming place, including for vulnerable people who are seeking a better life.

“This won’t slow us down because we can’t,” the mayor said. “We continue to have people coming into our country, we continue to have people that need a shelter, need a warm meal, need clothing, and the city will not turn its back on anybody.”

El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said local elected officials have Garcia’s back and will support him.

“I want to say right now, you mess with Ruben, you mess with Annunciation House, you mess with us,” he said.

See here for the background. I love the spirit here, but they’re going to need a lot more help in addition to a hoped-for injunction following the March 7 court date. El Paso Matters provides a longer look at what Annunciation House does and what the stakes really are.

Annunciation House is among numerous faith-based organizations in El Paso and Juárez who provide food, donated clothes and medicine, temporary shelter and connection to the city’s and county’s federally-funded migrant assistance centers.

Paxton has support among the religious right and in the past appealed for more Christian involvement in politics. Wesevich said on Friday that Paxton should “dust off his Bible and read through it sometimes.”

In a statement released ahead of the press conference, Annunciation House said its work in El Paso comes “out of the scriptural and Gospel mandate to welcome the stranger.”

“Annunciation House’s response to the stranger is no different from that of the schools who enroll children of refugees, the clinics and hospitals who care for the needs of refugees, and the churches, synagogues, and mosques who welcome families to join in worship,” the statement read.

Bishop Mark Seitz from the Catholic Diocese of El Paso said their work is about “shared human dignity” and the El Paso community will not surrender the identity of the borderlands to inhumane immigration policy.

“We will not be intimidated in our work to serve Jesus Christ in our sisters and brothers, fleeing danger and seeking to keep their families together,” Seitz said.

Investigators with the Attorney General’s Office went to Annunciation House’s office on Feb. 7 and served the organization with a request to examine records related to its operations, according to court records. They demanded the organization release within one day documentation about the nonprofit’s clients.

The state denied the nonprofit’s request for an extension, Wesevich said.

In response, Annunciation House sued the Attorney General’s Office, asking a state judge to determine which documents the nonprofit is legally required to release. Judge Francisco Dominguez of the 205th District Court in El Paso on Feb. 8 also granted Annunciation House a temporary restraining order that blocked the attorney general from enforcing the order for records.

[Attorney Jerome Wesevich of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid] wrote in a Feb. 8 email to the Attorney General’s Office that it was impossible to comply with the deadline and there were concerns about the legality of certain aspects.

He elaborated on Friday that Annunciation House has not refused to provide any documents to the attorney general, but that the court needs to decide when and what documents to provide under the law.

“It’s a very sensitive matter for us to provide somebody’s medical record to a government agency,” Wesevich said. “We don’t control what happens to those documents after they leave us.”

This process could have been handled in a few emails, but it instead appears that Paxton is using the request for documents as a pretext to close Annunciation House, Wesevich said.

[…]

Escobar, Garcia and Marisa Limón Garza, executive director Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center of El Paso-Juárez, connected the Attorney General Office’s actions to other actions by the state, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s controversial Operation Lone Star and the recent signing of SB 4, which makes it a state crime to illegally cross the border from Mexico. Immigration law enforcement is typically a federal issue.

Closing down Annunciation House will hamper faith-based groups’ ability to recruit volunteers because of the possible legal liability, a concern Garcia raised last year when El Paso and West Texas leaders called for immigration reform from visiting U.S. senators.

“This is not just migrants, refugees, people who got here yesterday,” Limón Garza said. “This is a documented person driving their sick mom, who’s undocumented, to La Fe (health clinic). I just want you to understand that.”

Everything Paxton is doing here – the bullying and intimidation and extreme rhetorical escalation – is dangerous and will indeed lead to far worse things if it’s not stopped now. People of genuine faith, not this bizarre travesty of whatever it is that Paxton and his allies call “faith”, should be appalled and alarmed and ready to fight back. In the same way that everything that pro-choice advocates have said would happen following the fall of Roe v Wade has come true and continues to come true, what Annunciation House’s defenders are saying will come true. Look at what Ken Paxton is doing and see the truth of it yourself.

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That other guy in CD18 drops out and endorses SJL

Posted on February 26, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Obviously earth-shaking news.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee

Robert Slater, the longshot candidate challenging U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in the upcoming March primary, said he will suspend his campaign Sunday and endorse the incumbent congresswoman.

Slater, a Houston chef and businessman, faced long odds in the Democratic primary dominated by Jackson Lee, who has represented Texas’ 18th Congressional District since 1995, and former City Councilmember Amanda Edwards. Jackson Lee led Edwards by a 43% to 38% margin among likely voters in a recently published University of Houston poll, while Slater garnered just 3% support.

“I don’t have the benefit of having 28 years of an incumbency and name ID,” he told potential voters in a video posted to social media Saturday.

Slater had centered his campaign on equal access to education and health care and criminal justice reform. His campaign website says he hopes to advocate and be a leader for Black youth in Houston.

Here’s the video, which is not where he announced his departure from the race; it appears to be at some group event, I see a couple of Dem candidates for other offices in the background. Slater had no finance report as of January, which is interesting since the first image on his campaign Instagram account is a request for donations. He’s hardly the first low-profile candidate to do that sort of thing.

As to what effect this may have on the race, my guess is little to none, since he’s still on the ballot anyway and was barely a blip in the polls. I have no idea what a Robert Slater voter looks like, but it’s probably not someone who is well attuned to politics and/or not a fan of SJL’s to begin with. I looked at his social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok; no Twitter as far as I can tell) and I didn’t see him mention this anywhere as of Sunday evening. Are we even sure his supporters will find out about this? If by some chance you are a Slater supporter and have received some communication about this, please do leave a comment and let us know.

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The Houston Avenue hullabaloo

Posted on February 26, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

It seems like every new Mayor makes at least one dumb self-inflicted error early on in their tenure, because being Mayor is hard and there are lots of things that need to be done with priority. I’d say this goes into that column for Mayor Whitmire.

Mayor John Whitmire

Houston Public Works announced Thursday that the cost of restoring Houston Avenue after Mayor John Whitmire ordered the street returned to its previous condition will be around $230,000 – more than double the expense of installing the new medians in December.

More than two weeks following the start of work removing the medians and curbs, officials finalized the cost of reconstruction. In addition, public works said an overhaul of the asphalt surface along the street is planned – for an additional $500,000.

Comparing that with the initial $100,000 cost to install the medians, critics of Whitmire’s decision – who argued it was a rush to judgment – said the updated cost is unfortunately borne by city residents and visitors.

“Reactionary politics has a hefty price and a lack of planning results in wasting taxpayer dollars,” said Gabe Cazares, executive director of the advocacy group LINKHouston, which argues for more walkable and bikeable streets.

[…]

Though just a three-block stretch of road northeast of the central business district, the happenings on Houston have led to questions about other upcoming projects, funded locally and with federal dollars. While signaling that he wants to hear more feedback from residents, Whitmire has not said whether any reviews he has requested will affect other projects.

As those reviews and Houston Avenue redo proceeds, Cazares said the hope is the kerfuffle over Houston Avenue can act as a “learning opportunity,” for officials “to hear all of the perspectives of the community, and not just those with whom they agree.”

There’s a lot of backstory to this that I didn’t have the time or space on the blog to cover as it was happening, but there are a couple of stories about it all linked in this post about the new Metro Chair. This story here notes that Mayor Whitmire cited an incident involving a Metro bus running into the median as a reason for ordering the removal, but Metro’s own investigation later concluded that the cause of the accident was driver error and it could have been avoided. This too speaks to the Mayor’s rush to action rather than seek input and make a more studied decision. The issue here isn’t really whether this median on Houston Avenue made sense, it was about the dumb and needless way in which the decision was made to rip it out just a few months after it was installed.

We know Mayor Whitmire has been in politics forever, and even his critics would agree that he knows how things work and has learned from his experiences over the years. I say that to say that I hope he learns quickly from this experience, because he’s already stirred up a constituency that likes to speak up and make themselves known. There’s also, I’d venture to say, a non-trivial amount of overlap with those folks and the people who voted for Whitmire last year. And there are also more reasons to be concerned.

Houston’s former chief transportation planner David Fields was forced out of his job, city documents obtained by Axios show.

The big picture: Fields’ sudden departure came a month after Mayor John Whitmire took over City Hall with a different vision for Houston’s transportation future from that of his predecessor, Sylvester Turner, who hired Fields in February 2020 to help usher the city away from car dependency.

Driving the news: Axios obtained an interoffice memo from Planning and Development Department interim director Jennifer Ostlind that shows Fields resigned Feb. 5 “in lieu of termination of employment.”

When Fields resigned from his role in the department, Whitmire’s director of communications Mary Benton told the Houston Chronicle that “he was not asked to resign.”

“The mayor was not part of the discussion with David Fields,” Benton told Axios late Friday. “I was told that he was not asked to resign. I was not part of the conversation with the planning director or [interim] planning director.”

Ostlind did not respond to requests for comment.

The intrigue: During one of Fields’ last public appearances at a Bicycle Advisory Committee meeting Jan. 24, he indicated he had been told to continue business as usual.

He was out of a job less than two weeks later.

Again, it’s not about the decision itself. Mayors bring in new people, that’s totally normal. But saying this person who had been working to change the city’s operating assumptions about transportation hadn’t been asked to resign when he totally had been is again a dumb unforced error and more reason for people who liked the new direction and also voted for Whitmire to be concerned. Is anyone likely to change their vote in 2027 over the forced exit of David Fields? No, but these are the bricks from which narratives are built. Now would be a good time to stop adding to that foundation. Houston Landing has more.

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Weekend link dump for February 25

Posted on February 25, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

“Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin is a most unfortunate 39-minute program centered on the first Black character introduced by cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. The Peanuts franchise has programmed the show for Black History Month, that much is clear. But are we honoring Franklin for breaking down racial barriers and integrating the most popular comic strip of all time? For blazing a path followed by Beetle Bailey’s Lt. Jack Flap? Or will it suffice to consider the special problems in representation presented by Charlie Brown’s Black friend?”

“Just picked up my Cybertruck today. The advisor specifically mentioned the cybertrucks develop orange rust marks in the rain and that required the vehicle to be buffed out.”

“Who knew untreated stainless steel might not be such a good idea for the exterior of a motor vehicle, especially considering that cars typically get left sitting outside in all weather for 95 percent of their lives? The whole automotive industry, that’s who.”

“The 2023 Hugo Fraud and Where We Go From Here”.

“Mexico is suing US gun-makers for arming its gangs − and a US court could award billions in damages”.

“Why Does the Devil Look like a Goat? How the Symbolism Miscasts Goats as Evil”. Seriously, goats are awesome and this slander against them cannot stand.

“It might be fitting that the sleaziest case will go first. But this prosecution ought not to be diminished. It also involves alleged criminal actions taken to influence an election—or prevent an election from being influenced by Daniels’ claim that Trump had a tryst with her at a 2006 charity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe while his wife, Melania, was home with 4-month-old Barron. And here’s an important fact: The Justice Department and a federal court have already declared that a crime occurred in the commission of this $130,000 payoff.”

“In life we constantly need to make choices on the basis of available options. Often they are imperfect or even bad options. The real options are the ones that have some shot at success. That’s life. Klein’s argument really amounts to a highly pessimistic but not unreasonable analysis of the present situation which he resolves with what amounts to a deus ex-machina plot twist. That’s not an argument. It’s a recipe for paralysis.”

““What determines a good human life?” is a good question and a vitally important question. You don’t want your government supplying the answer to that question. Because any government providing an answer to that question will end up imposing an answer to that question.”

“Both of these offers seem like they should be illegal. Because they should be illegal. But they’re just the flip side of what’s already happening—wealthy patrons buying figureheads who will do exactly what they want in office.”

Don’t watch CNBC. Jim Cramer isn’t even the worst of it.

RIP, Robert Reid, former NBA player for the Rockets who was a key member of the 1981 and 1986 Finals teams.

“It made no sense. He was never hateful, until he was. He was always caring, until he wasn’t. He was proud of me—the first to graduate with a BA, much less an MA in Education, until he decided the Education Department was a part of a conspiracy. He was always the man who I could count on when I called, but he died a man I didn’t recognize.”

It would seem that Wheel of Fortune is running out of comprehensible puzzle solutions.

“In Alabama, women can now be forced to have babies they don’t want and can’t have babies that they do.”

“The Alabama ruling is a reminder that, whatever Alito might have said in Dobbs, the attack on abortion rights was always going to put women’s ability to make other reproductive decisions in jeopardy, and IVF is just the beginning.”

Lock him up. Again and again as needed.

“Dominion Voting Systems is entitled to review personal communications and text messages of Newsmax Media journalists in its defamation suit against the conservative media company, a Delaware judge ruled last week.”

Bridgit Mendler is a more interesting person than you might have thought.

“Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones did it two years ago. Rudolph Giuliani did it just before Christmas. Now there’s a very good chance that before March 12, Donald Trump will join them in filing personal bankruptcy. Trump would do so for the same reason as Jones and Giuliani — to delay paying court-ordered awards for defamation.”

“Somehow almost a decade after this whole thing started we’re shocked to see, wow, Weiss’s office was being led around by another cat’s paw of the Russian intelligence services. We’re shocked. But why are we shocked? Every last person among the serious people of the nation’s capital and the sprawling thing called elite received opinion has egg on their face. And it’s not even clear they fully realize it yet.”

“A federal judge has ruled that pillow magnate and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell must pay out a $5 million prize he offered to anyone who could disprove his dispute of the 2020 election results.”

RIP, Flaco, the famous Central Park Zoo owl who went missing after a vandal tampered with the bird’s exhibit more than a year ago.

RIP, Golden Richards, former NFL wide receiver mostly for the Dallas Cowboys.

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We have our HCAD candidates

Posted on February 25, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Here they are, from the County Judge’s office:

Place 1

Ramsey Isa Ankar
Katherine Ballard Blueford-Daniels
Era N. Ford
William Reinhardt Frazier

Place 2

Jevon German
Janice W. Hines
Melissa Louise Noriega
Austin Ryan Pooley
Kyle Anthony Scott

Place 3

Oluwapelumi Adebola Adeleke
James J. Bill
Melody Genneane Ellis
Mark V. Goloby
Amy Ngo Lacy
Ericka McCrutcheon

I told you about some of these folks in the last update. I can also tell you, thanks to research done by my friends Ashleigh and Rosie and commenter Souperman, that Ramsey Ankar, James Bill (who left a comment on that post), and Janice Hines are Dems of varying flavor, while Amy Ngo Lacy is a Republican. Now let’s talk about the new names on the list.

A couple of them are familiar. Kathy Blueford-Daniels is a former HISD trustee who just finished serving a term as an appointed HCAD Board member. She is eligible to run because she is no longer an elected official. Melissa Noriega of course is a former At Large #3 City Council member and State Representative in HD145.

The rest I had to search for. Here’s what I can tell you:

If you search for “Era Ford”, you’re going to get a lot of automotive results. I can confirm there’s someone by this name registered to vote in Harris County and living in HD147. After that, we’ll have to wait.

Jevon German was a candidate for HISD Board of Trustees in District II in 2019, getting 9.5% of the vote in a race ultimately won by Kathy Blueford-Daniels. Judging from his Facebook page, he’s likely a Democrat.

I didn’t find anything at first when I searched for “Oluwapelumi Adebola Adeleke”, but when I took the middle name out I got here, which told me this person was a graduate of the Harvard Business School. Looking at the other search results I saw a LinkedIn profile for a Houston person and Harvard Business School grad named Pelumi Adeleke. That can’t be a coincidence, right? And sure enough, Pelumi Adeleke on Facebook has a cover photo announcing her candidacy for the HCAD Board of Directors. Scrolling down a bit I see she attended an HCDP meet-the-candidates event in 2022, so I’d say she’s a Dem.

Mark Goloby apparently ran for Governor in 2022 as a write-in, gathering all of 394 votes. (This is one of those times when the exclamation “Geez, I could have done that!” seems appropriate.) He still has a website that clearly IDs him as a Republican.

Melody Genneane Ellis is strangely hard to pin down on Google, but fortunately I had a better resource at my fingertips: a group of pals I’ve been chatting with about this race. The consensus there is that she is the sister of Commissioner Rodney Ellis. I can confirm there’s only one registered voter named “Melody Ellis” in Harris County, and Commissioner Ellis mentions having a sister named Melody in a few Facebook posts.

So there you have it. We have ourselves a field. I’m told the Houston GLBT Political Caucus will screen for endorsements after the primary. I remain hopeful we will eventually get some news coverage of this race. I will of course keep an eye on it, and my plan is to eventually do some interviews. Let me know if you have any questions.

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Let them fight

Posted on February 25, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Let them fight.

A crook any way you look

A $95.3 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan that passed the Senate overnight has sparked a battle between two of Texas’ most prominent Republicans, with Attorney General Ken Paxton calling U.S. Sen. John Cornyn an “America Last RINO” and Cornyn raising Paxton’s ongoing legal troubles.

Paxton went after Cornyn on social media early Tuesday for supporting the foreign aid bill, writing it is “unbelievable that (Cornyn) would stay up all night to defend other countries borders, but not America.”

Cornyn, a former attorney general, responded: “Ken, your criminal defense lawyers are calling to suggest you spend less time pushing Russian propaganda and more time defending longstanding felony charges against you in Houston, as well as ongoing federal grand jury proceedings in San Antonio that will probably result in further criminal charges.”

[…]

Paxton followed that with another post calling Cornyn an “America Last RINO” who “has once again joined hands with the Biden administration to fund and prioritize foreign wars over the national security crisis at the southern border.”

Just a reminder that Cornyn has already endorsed The Former Guy for President, so it’s not like he’s some pinnacle of integrity. He’s just ever so slightly on a different level of terrible.

Let them fight.

House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, is using a new ad to tackle head-on a major issue in his primary: Ken Paxton’s impeachment.

In the direct-to-camera spot, Phelan outlines the alleged misdeeds that led to Paxton’s impeachment last year — including an extramarital affair — and says “Vengeful Paxton is the reason” why Donald Trump recently endorsed Phelan’s primary challenger.

“If Paxton will break an oath to his wife and God, why would he tell Trump — or you — the truth?” Phelan says in conclusion.

That was from a week or so ago. Speaker Phelan is almost certainly in a world of trouble electorally, but at least he’s going down the right way.

All I can say to the Republicans out there that are tired of Ken Paxton and his bullshit is simply this: Assuming he’s on the ballot again in 2026, whether from a jail cell or not, the one thing you can do is not vote for him ever again. That ought to be easy enough for you in a primary, but it also means that when he wins that primary anyway you must not vote for him in November. Vote third party or skip the race if you can’t bear the idea of voting for the Democrat, but that’s what you must do. It’s as simple as that.

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At long last, the KLOL documentary

Posted on February 25, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

IYKYK.

As announced exclusively in the Houston Chronicle, the long-awaited 101 KLOL Houston rock documentary, “Runaway Radio,” directed/produced by first-time filmmaker and Texas media blogger Mike McGuff, will be released this month with a special Houston screening in early March.

The documentary, distributed by Dark Star Pictures, covers the wild 34 years (1970 to 2004) of one of the country’s greatest Album Oriented Rock (AOR) stations.

The film will be available to rent or buy on all major video-on-demand (VOD) platforms, including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, and cable/satellite, starting February 27th.

On March 2nd, there will be a 6:30pm screening in the Houston area at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema LaCenterra in Katy.

The film world premiered in November 2023 at the music documentary festival Sound Unseen Minneapolis.

“When I started this documentary, we were in a recession, followed by a global pandemic when we finished it,” McGuff said. “Based on those who have seen the movie at film festivals, it will be worth the wait!”

“The KLOL documentary shows the rest of the world why this station is still talked about to this day,” said KLOL’s first program director Pat Fant who signed the station on in August 1970. “It will be the last word on a Houston media legend. We didn’t just play the music, we were a part of it. Our promotions became spectacles. Our on-air personalities were the host presenters of the non-stop performance that was KLOL.”

The film explores the many on-air personalities and behind-the-scenes players that made the station famous and the winner of the top rock station in America by Billboard Magazine. From the wild station promotions, the music, and the radio wars, the family-owned station faced against ABC Radio-owned 97 Rock KSRR.

See here for the background. I contributed to that Indiegogo campaign way back when, though I’ve long since forgotten at what level and what I was promised. I’ll try to go to that screening, but if not I’m sure I’ll watch it one way or another. KLOL was a part of my life for more than a decade in a way that I just can’t imagine any local radio station being for anyone nowadays. Whatever you think about that form of media and its place in history, I’m glad it’s being documented and remembered. It was something else. CultureMap has more.

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