Interview with Al Lloyd

Al Lloyd

We wrap up our tour of the Houston City Council At Large #4 landscape today with Al Lloyd, who was one of the first candidates out of the gate when the seat became open. Lloyd is a Houston native and Bellaire High School grad who got his start in the automotive industry, as a mechanic and in fixed operations management, and later owned and operated businesses in sports injury rehabilitation and home health care. There were some issues with his WiFi connection as well, though not as much as with the Boykins interview. Here’s what we talked about:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Jordan Thomas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Dwight Boykins, Houston City Council At Large #4

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where the stars at night are big and bright. Next week we get into the race we’ve been waiting for the longest, the special election in CD18.

Posted in Election 2025 | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The recall effort is out there collecting signatures

Good luck, you’re gonna need it.

After more than a year of posting to social media and reaching out to news media, Ethan Hale stood alone — aside from a Houston Public Media journalist — at the Houston City College campus on Monday, seeking more than 63,000 signatures for an effort to recall Mayor John Whitmire from office.

“I don’t think he’s taking the city on a good path. I think we’re funding the wrong things. We’re not funding the right things,” said Hale, who took the semester off to focus on the recall effort. “I feel like he’s kind of anti-democratic. I think a lot of us in this effort would say that much, but I think it’s gonna be worth it.”

Over the course of the first hour of canvassing, Hale collected about ten signatures. The number might have been higher if more of his fellow students were willing to share their addresses, a required component for the petition.

He held clipboards with misspelled signature forms reading “petiton.” The Houston City Secretary did not immediately respond to a question about whether those forms would be valid despite the misspelling.

According to Hale, there are “probably 100-plus” people involved in the recall effort, including four in leadership positions and “people scattered throughout a whole bunch of groups … maybe 200 to 300ish.” The group is primarily motivated by opposition to Whitmire’s mobility policies — including the removal of traffic safety features and cyclist infrastructure — as well as increased funding for the Houston Police Department, among many points of disagreement.

[…]

While the first hour of canvassing took place on the community college campus, Hale said the signature collection will focus on commuters on METRO’s Red Line light-rail route. The recall organizers highlighted the canvassing event in Midtown on their social media pages, but Hale said there were also “at least a few” canvassers in other parts of the city, though he was unable to name the neighborhoods they were working in.

Over the past year, the effort to recall Whitmire from office was the subject of multiple news stories from local media outlets, including Houston Public Media. In March, the group began reaching out to reporters with the stated goal of raising public awareness and fundraising. Hale subsequently added his name to the ballot for an upcoming special election to fill a seat on the Houston City Council.

The group has stated different fundraising goals over time. In April, one organizer told Community Impact the group had raised $3,600 of a $250,000 goal. In June, the same organizer told Houston Public Media they had raised more than $1,500 of a $100,000 goal. Hale said the group had raised $4,500 as of June, and the effort would rely heavily on volunteers.

To put the recall question on the ballot in May, the organizers need to collect more than 63,000 signatures in a 30-day window. By contrast, amendments to the city charter require 20,000 signatures in an 180-day window.

Successful efforts to place charter amendments on the ballot — like Propositions A and B, giving the city council more power over policymaking and pushing the city government to obtain more representation in a regional planning group — barely met that threshold in 2023 with 23,665 verified signatures and 20,482 verified signatures respectively.

See here for the previous update. In re: the claims about fundraising, I will just note again that Recall Houston did not file a campaign finance report for July. Maybe they will file one in January, and we can clear up just how much money they have raised/did raise, but as of today none of those figures can be verified. And even if one of them is accurate, none of them are anywhere close enough to finance this effort.

Asked about the difficulty of the task, Hale acknowledged the possibility of failure.

“I think this is a Hail Mary play,” Hale said. “The odds, they’ve been stacked against us from day one. But I think, to me, it doesn’t matter. It’s about doing what’s right, even if we might fail. But we’re gonna put them on blast. We’re gonna get the eyes on everything going on in the city.”

Whatever you think about this effort, a viable attempt to do a recall on Mayor Whitmire would be fascinating, and historic. It might be the most exciting thing to happen in Houston politics since Orlando Sanchez almost unseated then-Mayor Lee Brown in 2001. I’m firmly in the non-Whitmire camp, and I can envision the energy this would bring, if it were real. We have grievances to air, that’s for sure. I don’t mean to dump on Ethan Hale and this effort, because they are trying to do a very hard thing with little to no help. Maybe they can build some support for whoever will run against the Mayor in 2027, which would certainly have value. It remains to be seen whether all this will have been worth the effort. I’ll get back to you on that when I see how many petitions they gathered to turn in.

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HISD wants you to read its own coverage of itself

Oh, good lord.

Houston ISD is looking to lessen its reliance on external news media and instead lean more on its own internal news team, according to the 2025-26 District Improvement Plan obtained by Chron. The shift comes amid mounting community frustration over transparency, ongoing staffing cuts and broad district changes.

The internal plan outlines HISD’s intention to prioritize its in-house news platform, HISD Now, citing challenges posed by misinformation and the viral nature of social media content.

HISD, led by Superintendent Mike Miles, sent the plan to the District Action Committee (DAC) ahead of its Tuesday meeting. The DAC is composed of a diverse group of stakeholders, including parents, teachers, campus staff, community members, and business leaders. The 2025-26 document lists 36 members.

The plan cites the evolving media landscape as a driving factor, noting that “the viralness of information—especially misinformation—has grown exponentially.” It warns that “people seem to be more willing to believe almost anything that supports their point of view regardless of the facts,” complicating the district’s ability to communicate effectively.

“Our efforts to persuade and inform in this type of media environment have suffered from the immediacy of misinformation and entertaining social content,” the document states.

In response, HISD plans to prioritize its own media platform, HISD Now, over traditional news outlets. At the time of writing, the district’s live news channel had yet to air a live report but aims to be fully operational by the 2025-2026 school year, with goals including 50,000 YouTube subscribers and consistent weekly coverage in local media.

The district’s communications plan includes hiring a mobile news crew, building a two-month content calendar and marketing HISD Now beyond employees and parents—signaling a major shift away from traditional media toward district-controlled messaging. It does not provide details on the cost of hiring a news crew to expand the platform.

The district’s media push follows news of the district cutting nearly 450 employees amid ongoing enrollment declines.

Here’s an image from the story that I assume comes from this District Improvement Plan. I’ll discuss the goals on the other side:

Just curious, but I wonder what happens if they don’t meet those goals of 50K subscribers and HISD Now being “repeated (whatever that means) in local print or television media 5 times a week”, or the number of parents who believe the district is headed in the right direction increases by fifteen percent? If any of this is tied to Mike Miles’ next incentive package, we ought to know that. Well, first we ought to know how much this is costing and how many of those recently terminated employees could have been retained if the district wasn’t doing this. Maybe we’ll read a story about that on HISD Now. I’ll blog about it if that happens. Will that count towards the five-times-a-week goal? Who knows? Is this a dumb idea? That one I think we do know.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of October 6

The Texas Progressive Alliance never shuts down as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading

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Interview with Dwight Boykins

Dwight Boykins

Next up for Houston City Council At Large #4 is a familiar name, Dwight Boykins. That name is familiar because Boykins served two terms on City Council, in District D, having been elected in 2013 and 2015. The amended terms limit law passed in 2015 allows Boykins, who made an unsuccessful run for Mayor in 2019 instead of a final term in D, one more term on Council. In addition to his time on Council, Boykins is the founder and principal of a consulting firm, and served as Director of Government Affairs at TSU. I spoke to him in 2013 for that election, which you can listen to here, and you can listen to this interview here. Please note, his WiFi connection was spotty and at one point the connection was lost and had to be re-established.

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Jordan Thomas, Houston City Council At Large #4

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play. One more from Houston City Council At Large #4 coming at you tomorrow.

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Tarrant County redistricting map gets cleared

Can’t say I’m surprised.

An effort to stop Tarrant County’s new commissioner precincts was shot down Thursday.

Multiple groups suing the county over the maps asked Judge Megan Fahey to enact an injunction against the county’s new maps, claiming that the map is not legally valid because it focuses on population and partisanship without consideration for other state constitutional requirements for redistricting.

It was part of a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters of Tarrant County and the League of United Latin American Citizens Fort Worth Council 4568.

The lawsuit alleges the county’s mid-decade redistricting is unconstitutional, naming Tarrant County, the commissioners court and County Judge Tim O’Hare as defendants.

Karla Maradiaga, a staff voting rights attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said she believes the evidence presented was sufficient to achieve a temporary injunction.

“We believe that the evidence provided by our witnesses and our experts were sufficient to show that we would likely get relief on the merits and that the motion should have been granted,” Maradiaga said.

Still, plaintiffs in the lawsuit weren’t surprised, she said.

“Unfortunately, they were not surprised by the outcome,” she told KERA News. “I think they live on a daily basis with these policies and just how opaque they are.”

[…]

Maradiaga said the denial means attorneys suing the county will need to take “a two pronged approach moving forward.”

“We need to do more work at kind of explaining that law and why it doesn’t apply as the county has framed it,” Maradiaga said. “Then also continuing to provide more evidence, to seek more evidence, particularly from the county … to put before the judge about why we are right on the law and on the facts.”

See here for the previous update. With the failure of the federal lawsuit as well, this means that the new map, which was designed to draw one of the two Democratic commissioners out of their seat, will be in effect for 2026. At least, that’s what I think it means. I’m not sure what to make of that last comment above. Might there be another lawsuit, with different plaintiffs and/or a different argument? Maybe, I guess, but we’re now about a month out from the start of filing season for the primaries, and I don’t think that would be enough time for a new suit to get heard, even if everything moved at maximum speed. I could be wrong, but my money at this point is on the new map being used. That’s a bad outcome and I wish it weren’t true, but it’s where we are.

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

The 2025 constitutional amendments

There’s a bunch of them, but not many I’d recommend.

On Nov. 4, Texas voters will get the final say on 17 constitutional amendments — usually listed as statewide propositions at the top of the ballot — including billions of dollars in property tax cuts for homeowners and businesses.

Earlier this year, a two-thirds majority of the state Legislature passed the joint resolutions calling for the constitutional amendment elections, along with the state’s budget for the next two years, which includes $51 billion for property tax cuts.

Texas lawmakers have used multibillion-dollar budget surpluses, the result of inflation and temporary federal stimulus dollars during the COVID-19 pandemic, to pay for tax cuts in recent years. Proponents of tax cuts and bans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have said they will maintain Texas as a competitive, business-friendly state and contribute to economic growth.

But some lawmakers and budget analysts have raised concerns that passing more tax cuts, especially on school district taxes which the state helps pay for, could be unsustainable.

“We always have to kind of balance giving folks tax relief versus making sure that we still preserve revenue for those public services,” said Shannon Halbrook, a fiscal policy director for the left-leaning Every Texan.

With lots of tax cuts and tax bans, especially through these upcoming constitutional amendment elections, the state and local governments could face a hard time paying for public services such as education, health care, and infrastructure needs in the future, Halbrook said.

Officials with Texas cities and counties say they are already being forced to either cut spending or raise taxes and fees to make up for budgets stretched thin by economic uncertainty, inflation, strict state limits on property tax collections and uncertainty around future federal funds. That’s why some Texans, like voters in Austin, will also see local propositions asking them to approve increasing local property tax rates.

If the constitutional amendments are approved, a majority of state lawmakers and Texas voters would need to pass new constitutional amendments to undo measures. Constitutional amendments are the only ballot propositions Texans get to vote on at the state level and will appear on the top of voters’ ballots, above any local races or measures they may be deciding.

Read on for the details. Most times I’m generally neutral-to-favorable on the bulk of the proposals. This year, I range from “eh, maybe” to “no” to “oh, hell no”. None of these could be on your ballot without some Democratic support, and there are a number of Dem reps who have some explaining to do as far as I’m concerned. All of the items in the second group above and the first three of the last group are all strong “No”s, the rest I will need to figure out and see who endorses what. Go read about these propositions and be prepared to vote accordingly. Some of the last batch of props failed, so don’t take anything for granted. The Barbed Wire, which has a few brief takes on the proposals, has more.

Posted in Election 2025 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Interview with Jordan Thomas

Jordan Thomas

We continue our journey through Houston City Council At Large #4 with Jordan Thomas, who is a familiar presence on Twitter with the Houston urbanist community. Thomas served as Chief of Staff to now-former Council Members Amanda Edwards and Letitia Plummer, and now works as a Project Manager at Grid United, an independent electric transmission company. He has been a union organizer with SEIU, on the Board of Directors of LINK Houston, and on the Board of the ACLU of Texas. He’s a big transit and infrastructure policy wonk and we go into that in the interview, which was done in person so there’s a bit of background noise on this one:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where mornings are always cool and crisp. More from Houston City Council At Large #4 coming at you.

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Wesley Hunt says he’s running for Senate

Sure, why not?

Rep. Wesley Hunt

Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Houston, entered the Republican primary for U.S. Senate on Monday, complicating an already contentious race between two of the biggest names in Texas Republican politics.

Hunt, a close ally of President Donald Trump, has laid the groundwork for a potential run for months. While the second-term congressman spent the summer publicly avoiding the fray between Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton, groups affiliated with Hunt dropped some $6 million on ads boosting his profile around the state. And Hunt’s allies have been busy pressing the case that he would carry stronger appeal than Cornyn among the MAGA-dominated primary base, while bringing none of Paxton’s political baggage to the general election.

“The U.S. Senate race in Texas must be about more than a petty feud between two men who have spent months trading barbs,” Hunt said in a statement. “With my candidacy, this race will finally be about what’s most important: Texas.”

A 43-year old former Army captain, Hunt will need to quickly familiarize himself to voters outside his Houston district, as he looks to outpace two opponents who have been elected statewide numerous times. He will also have to overcome the war chest of groups like the National Republican Senatorial Committee — Senate Republicans’ multimillion-dollar campaign arm — which is backing Cornyn and recently discouraged Hunt from entering the race.

Cornyn senior adviser Matt Mackowiak said in a statement that Hunt’s “quixotic quest for relevancy” would only boost Democrats by sparking a more expensive primary “that will endanger the Trump agenda from being passed.” The Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC allied with Majority Leader John Thune, also maligned Hunt’s entry into the race.

“It’s unfortunate that Wesley Hunt has decided to abandon President Trump’s efforts to protect the House majority and instead pursue his political ambitions, also turning his back on the Texans who entrusted him with their vote,” SLF Communications Director Chris Gustafson said. “With every credible poll showing him in a distant third place, the only person celebrating today is a giddy Chuck Schumer.”

But Hunt believes the disapproval of establishment groups will not matter to Texas voters.

“Washington does not get to dictate what happens in Texas,” he said. “Bureaucrats in D.C. do not choose Texas’ leadership; Texans do. This race will be settled by Texans, not entrenched political figures from inside the beltway.”

The Paxton campaign was more receptive to Hunt’s entry.

“We welcome Wesley Hunt to the race,” Paxton adviser Nick Maddux said in a statement. “Primaries are good for our party and our voters, and Wesley and General Paxton both know that Texans deserve better than the failed, anti-Trump record of John Cornyn.”

The most important Washingtonian who could determine the outcome of the primary — President Donald Trump — has not endorsed any candidate.

[…]

Hunt’s decision to run for Senate also creates a vacancy in his 38th Congressional District, which voted for Trump by 20 percentage points last year. The 38th District will become one of at least seven open districts that favor Republicans, between retirements and the creation of new seats via mid-decade redistricting. The glut of competitive primaries will likely drive up ad prices for primary candidates in many Texas media markets, including those running statewide.

It’s fine by me for there to be a massive friendly fire competition for the Senate nomination. If it goes to a runoff and it gets even nastier, so much the better. I don’t really think that materially changes the odds in November, but I figure that chaos is usually to the advantage of the underdog, so bring it on. Hunt is the kind of guy who could have been a substantive member of Congress, someone who served for a long time and had a lot of legislation with his fingerprints on it, but Republicans don’t care about any of that these days. Whatever happens in that primary, it’ll be about vibes and whatever deranged things Trump says between now and then. I doubt he can win, but that’s not my concern.

In terms of electoral performance, the new CD38 is about the same as the old CD38. Hunt got some bonus points as the incumbent, so maybe his departure will make it a tiny bit easier for a Dem to win. Let’s see who comes forward for this seat, and how the current Dems do with their fundraising. If nothing else, I’d like to make the national Republicans sweat this one a little. Daily Kos and the Chron have more.

UPDATE: A few choice quotes from Rep. Hunt from the DMN.

“Texans want somebody who’s going to be an America First freedom fighter,” Hunt said. “They want somebody who’s going to support their Second Amendment rights. They want somebody who’s going to support border security, and they want somebody who endorsed President [Donald] Trump first in the country, before it was cool.”

[…]

Cornyn and Paxton have been trading shots for months, with Paxton questioning Cornyn’s conservative bona fides and Cornyn casting Paxton as ethically unfit for office.

Hunt said the back-and-forth has turned off Texas Republican primary voters, who would see him as a worthy option.

“People are sick and tired of hearing about a blood feud between Ken Paxton and John Cornyn,” Hunt said. “What I have seen from the primary voter in Texas is that they’re looking for an alternative and I’m that guy.”

[…]

Hunt is mounting his first campaign for statewide office, and running in a state as large and diverse as Texas can be challenging. He said his efforts would intensify.

“You have to work hard,” Hunt said. “What I have to do is focus on getting my name ID up statewide, which is what I’ve been doing for the past few months.”

[…]

Hunt said he expects much of the GOP establishment to be against him.

“They’re already against me,” Hunt said. “That means I’m right over the target zone, because the establishment swamp does not pick the leader of Texas. Texans do.”

Hunt said that if elected he would move to draft legislation “to give gun rights back” to Texans and “counteract the gun control legislation” Cornyn helped craft after the Uvalde school shooting.

Cornyn has rejected criticism the bill represented an infringement on the rights of law-abiding American gun owners.

Hunt said Cornyn has been in office too long.

“When John Cornyn first entered into public office, I was two years old,” Hunt said. “The United States Senate is not a retirement community, and it’s time for change, and it’s time for new leadership.”

Hunt said one of the reasons he got into the race is because Paxton isn’t fighting hard enough against Cornyn.

“Ken Paxton is a conservative warrior,” Hunt said. “Nobody’s going to argue with you on that, but the issue is that somebody has to fight for this seat, and you can’t sit back and do nothing.”

Boy, if you could have seen me shaking my head as I read this. I recognize the words he spoke as being English, but they have no meaning. A lot of self-hype and no small amount of self-delusion, but no meaning. Well, I will agree that I’m tired of the Cornyn ads that have been infecting football games, and I dread when Ken Paxton starts running his own. Now I also have to dread Wesley Hunt ads, when all I want to do is watch football. Who’s going to pass a law about that? Not Wesley Hunt, that’s for sure.

UPDATE: These quotes from The Downballot are brutal.

NOTUS’ Reese Gorman reported in July that Hunt had tried to pressure Cornyn to retire by spreading a rumor that Donald Trump might tap the senator to lead NASA. Hunt’s attempts to elbow Cornyn out while positioning himself as the best candidate to stop Paxton, though, did not have the desired effect.

“They’ve pissed off the White House because they’re so badgering,” a GOP operative told Gorman. “The way they’ve gone along operating is very arrogant and unsophisticated, and they’ve been told by multiple folks they need to pump the brakes.”

One unnamed member of the Lone Star State’s gigantic GOP House delegation also said of Hunt, “There’s 25 of us in the delegation, and I’d say he is the least liked out of everybody.”

You should always be wary of anonymous negative quotes like these, as they can serve an agenda, and that admonition to “pump the brakes” is something many an ambitious young political has been told by the old guard. Still, someone on the Republican side doesn’t like this guy, and if his pitch is basically that he’s the guy who can rescue the party from these two tainted squabblers, I’d say it needs some work.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Measles isn’t done with us yet

The Texas outbreak may be over, but there are other outbreaks out there.

One of the largest measles outbreaks in the U.S. is now centered in bordering areas of southwestern Utah and Arizona.

In Southwest Utah, all but one of the 27 confirmed cases are among unvaccinated, school-age kids, the Southwest Utah Public Health Department reported. In Mohave County, Arizona, which health officials believe is connected to the Utah outbreak, there have been 42 confirmed cases of the highly contagious virus.

An NBC News investigation, done in collaboration with Stanford University, has found that much of the United States doesn’t have the vaccine protection to prevent outbreaks of communicable diseases such as measles.

About 79% of kindergartners in Washington County, Utah, are vaccinated against measles, according to NBC News data. That’s only slightly higher than rates in Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the 2025 outbreak earlier this year — and well below the 95% level of herd immunity experts say is needed to protect against an outbreak.

“I’ve worked for this health department for about 18 years, and we’ve never seen a case of measles that I know of up until this point,” said David Heaton, the public information officer for the Southwest Utah Public Health Department. “We are just at that low rate of (vaccine) uptake that does leave us open for this kind of an outbreak.”

Heaton said many community members were vaccine-hesitant before the pandemic, but Covid mandates made some people even more reluctant to get their shots.

“About a month ago, we started getting cases where we could see evidence of community spread, meaning that there was measles being passed on the ground in our five-county district,” said Heaton.

Cases have been steadily increasing in the district of more than 287,000 people and more are expected, health officials said.

The Mohave County Department of Public Health, which borders Utah, first announced a case on Aug. 12. Of the 42 confirmed cases, one child has been hospitalized.

In a statement, the Arizona Department of Health Services said that it’s working closely with officials in Mohave and Utah in a coordinated response to the ongoing outbreak. “This is the highest number of cases we have seen since the 1990s.”

The Arizona outbreak is primarily in Colorado City and the surrounding area, which is separated geographically from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon. The rural area, which was founded in the 1930s and associated with fundamentalist Mormon leader Warren Jeffs, has a history of isolation.

“This is exactly what you expect to see when you have a highly infectious vaccine-preventable disease drop into a community with low vaccination rates, almost inevitable,” said Dr. Bob England, a former Arizona public health official affiliated with The Arizona Partnership for Immunization.

As of the 2024-25 school year, not a single school in Mohave County had kindergarten classes with herd immunity protection against measles.

Different states, same story. The total number so far is a lot smaller than what we saw in Texas, but this one is still new and the potential for growth is there. I wish everyone who is working to stop this all the best, and I wish everyone who has a kid they haven’t vaccinated would come to their senses.

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Interview with Alejandra Salinas

Alejandra Salinas

We move this week into Houston City Council At Large #4, one of two special elections on my ballot (and yours if you’re in CD18), to fill the seat left vacant by Letitia Plummer after she announced her candidacy for Harris County Judge. There are fifteen candidates in this race, a mix of Democrats, Republicans, and various others, including a write-in. I’ve got four interviews lined up for you, and the first one is the first candidate to make herself known for the race, Alejandra Salinas. Salinas is an attorney who served on the legal defense team for Harris County elected officials who had to fend off the whiny sore loser election challenge lawsuits in 2022. She is a past president of the College Democrats of America, and serves on the boards of Greater Houston LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce, Second Mile Haiti, a non-profit that works to provide pre-natal and family care to mothers and families in Haiti, and C. 60, a non-profit dedicated to the restoration of LULAC’s first clubhouse in Houston. Here’s the interview:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where mornings are always cool and crisp. More from Houston City Council At Large #4 coming at you.

Posted in Election 2025 | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Texas Victory Consulting poll of CD18

This is interesting on a couple of levels.

As the community prepares to decide who will represent Congressional District 18, understanding current voter preferences is essential. This poll, fielded September 27 to October 2, 2025, conducted with 557 respondents between ages 45 to 75, all verified voters who have participated in the last three Democratic primaries, offers a precise snapshot of the electorate.

The survey was distributed to 5,000 likely voters residing in Congressional District 18 and carries a margin of error of approximately ±3%. These results provide valuable insights into the mindset of highly reliable voters who will shape the outcome of this special election. This timely snapshot not only shows current preferences but also highlights the critical segments campaigns should prioritize in the closing weeks. Given the narrow margins among top contenders, targeted outreach and voter contact over the coming days could shift the trajectory of the race.

Candidate Performance

Christian Menefee currently leads the field, with 29.8% indicating their support. His coalition is anchored heavily by women, who make up 66.3% of his supporters. With 56 men (33.7%) and 110 women, Menefee demonstrates strong credibility among highly engaged voters, giving him an early advantage.

Amanda Edwards follows closely, securing 23.9%. Edwards’ base is also majority women, with 90 women (67.5%) and 43 men (32.5%). Her long-standing community ties and proven record of leadership continue to resonate strongly within the district.

Jolanda Jones shows notable momentum, especially in recent weeks. She has risen to 18.9%, with 80 women (76.2%) and 25 men (23.8%) supporting her. Jones’ campaign has generated late energy, particularly among women voters, positioning her as a serious contender in what remains a fluid race.

Undecided voters remain a significant bloc, totaling 22.8%. Among them, 83 women (68.5%) and 40 men (31.5%) reflect the district’s heavy female electorate. This group represents the true pivot point of the race, and their eventual decision will likely determine the outcome.

Carmen María Montiel maintains 5.9%, all of whom are women. While her share of the vote remains limited, her presence demonstrates niche but consistent backing.

George Foreman IV registers 0.5%, entirely male. While numerically small, this support illustrates the potential for alternative or outsider candidates to attract attention within a highly engaged electorate.

There’s some more to the memo but this is the main point of interest. There were a couple of internal campaign polls released in September, and a Hobby Center poll from early August that also had Menefee and Edwards on top. You know my spiel about polling for special elections, but this caught my eye for several reasons. One, that it “was distributed to 5,000 likely voters”, from which the 557 responses came. All were in the age range of 45-75, and all were basically Dem primary voters. We don’t know how it was worded or how many candidates were listed. Isaiah Martin is not mentioned in this memo, so either his support was negligible or, well, I’m not sure. That Republican Carmen Montiel got almost six percent of the responses suggests that this was either an unusual sample of Dem primary voters or that party affiliation wasn’t mentioned.

Like I said, I don’t know how this was presented, what the questions looked like, how many candidate names were given – it makes no sense to mention sixteen names, but any omission is a distortion, no matter how small. I figure we’re likely to see another Hobby Center poll, maybe a Chron/KHOU poll, of this race and the At Large #4 race. We are now seeing some real campaign activity – at least I am, from Menefee, Edwards, Jones, and Martin. Early voting starts in two weeks, so look for a lot more of that now.

Posted in Election 2025 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Who asked for this task force?

Other than Greg Abbott, anyway.

State and Harris County law enforcement will join forces on a task force aimed at cracking down on repeat violent offenders, whom police leaders say are fueling much of the region’s crime problem, Gov. Greg Abbott announced at a Wednesday news conference.

The task force will help pool resources and go after repeat offenders through a combination of extra patrols in high-crime areas, additional investigative resources and new intelligence strategies, said Freeman Martin, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

“This is an all-in effort from law enforcement across the entire county,” Abbott said.

But it’s not yet clear exactly what the initiative might entail, or how long it might continue.

Abbott’s acknowledged crime was going down in Houston and said he has a positive relationship with many local leaders, including Houston Mayor John Whitmire. But the task force will help drive down crime further, Abbott argued.

“Citizens in the area remain concerned about crime,” Abbott said.

[…]

The new task force model is coming to Houston first because of state leaders’ positive relationship with local law enforcement and leaders, but Abbott said he expected other counties, large and small, across Texas, might receive similar attention in the future.

Abbott shot down a question about whether the initiative might’ve been aimed at staving off President Donald Trump’s administration from sending military into Harris County, saying the president knows the situation is under control locally.

[…]

Sydney Zuiker, Houston Crime Stoppers senior director of programs and special projects, and Houston Police Officers Union Executive Director Ray Hunt said they had data showing repeat offenders were driving a majority of crime in Harris County.

Abbott didn’t say whether the initiative would include additional funding or bring in more officers, instead describing it as a pooling of resources to focus on repeat offenders.

“Houston can be the national model of major American cities,” Abbott said.

Representatives of several constable’s offices, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office and the Houston Police Department attended Wednesday’s news conference, standing behind the governor. Officials with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office confirmed ahead of the news conference that they hadn’t been invited.

Not present at this press event announcing this amorphous and metric-free task force: The Mayor, the Sheriff, the District Attorney, the Chief of Police, any of the elected Constables. I can feel the hot waves of collaboration and synergy all the way from my house.

I mean, there may be some meetings at which some people agree to some things that may have some crime-fighting benefit. I could see that happening. Maybe they’ll publish a report and post about it on Twitter. Or maybe the press conference that announced this bag of slurry was the whole point, and now Greg Abbott is free to go do something he actually cares about, like sit in a luxury box for a UT football game. Your state leadership, hard at work over here.

Posted in Crime and Punishment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Weekend link dump for October 5

“In 1982, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared that Apartheid is a heresy. Not only that it was a bad policy, or a violation of human rights, or a denial of the fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Not even that it was merely a sin. It was found to be heresy — a grave theological mistake and a lie.”

“The Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce are impeding much-needed fixes to the system used to track firefighters working in remote, active blazes, the investigative arm of Congress has found.”

“I feel like we’re to blame. Honestly, I feel foolish. I can’t believe I fell for it, knowing who we were dealing with. I just could not wrap my head around the idea that they could screw this up any more than they already have. And they have, in glorious proportion. It would have been so easy for them to embrace this community and watch it embrace you back, but Fisher is salting the earth here, just like he did in Oakland.”

“The records show that Noem quickly expedited more than $11 million of federal money to rebuild a historic pier in Naples, Florida, after she was contacted by a major financial supporter last month. The pier is a tourist attraction in the wealthy Gulf Coast enclave and was badly damaged by Hurricane Ian in 2022.”

“Small solar-panel kits that can be assembled as easily as an Ikea bookcase and plugged into a regular residential outlet could be coming soon to New Hampshire and Vermont.”

“According to data compiled by intelligence platform PeakMetrics, nearly half of the early posts about Cracker Barrel’s logo change appeared to be generated by bots.”

“Why the case against James Comey may end in humiliation for Trump’s DOJ”.

Can this marriage be saved…from ChatGPT?

“AI is fueling violent threats against women judges”.

“This is a tricky story to talk about for obvious reasons, but it’s also yet another sign of a decades-long pattern of errors at the hands of Oprah Winfrey, one of the most influential women on the planet and a noted fan of what can most charitably be described as woo-woo wellness. Winfrey spent many years on her legendary talk show sharing unchallenged anecdotes and anti-science propaganda under the guise of helping her audience ‘live their best lives.’”

“And but so still, again, I am at least pleased to see that we are all in apparent unanimous agreement that cold-blooded murder is a Very Bad Thing and that it should remain a crime — something regarded as both immoral and illegal. Maybe that ain’t much, but in 2025, I’ll take what I can get.”

“Right-wing extremists have killed 112 people over the decade, according to a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies—and that’s more than the number of deaths committed by left-wing extremists and jihadists combined.”

“Trump Claims ‘No Downside’ to Avoiding Tylenol During Pregnancy. He’s Wrong.”

“An Oral History of David Letterman’s Top Ten List on Its 40th Anniversary”.

“Are homer-reliant teams worse in October, when the weather gets chillier, the pitching gets better, and the pressure ratchets up? No.”

“My bet is that this shutdown will break the 35-day record, with no partial shutdown asterisks.”

“If there’s a real lesson from the shutdowns and hostage-taking dramas of the Obama era, it’s that the public blamed Republicans for their shutdown antics in the moment but the general climate of dysfunction and austerity it caused was taken out on the party in power, i.e., Obama and the Democrats.”

“PEN America released its list of the most-banned books of the 2024-2025 school year on Wednesday – and warned that the number of books challenged or banned in public school districts across the country has risen exponentially in the past two years.”

RIP, Jane Goodall, scientist and activist whose work on chimpanzees was groundbreaking and influential. And you’ve never heard about the controversy involving a Far Side comic, well, there you go.

“I will note that this settlement is not “free” money – my work, along with the work of thousands of other authors, was stolen to feed an LLM whose function is at the heart of Anthropic’s current $180 billion-plus market valuation. This settlement is, bluntly, the absolute minimum Anthropic could get away with paying.”

“President Donald Trump’s deportation army is growing by the day, and a shocking number of its foot soldiers don’t even work for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The vast majority, in fact, come from other law enforcement agencies.”

“Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life. And someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

“This gives China more leverage on us.”

Lock him up.

For shame, Apple. For shame. Do better!

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | 1 Comment

A brief news roundup from the current redistricting trial

What the label says, three news stories I could find that had coverage of the redistricting trial.

From the Trib.

When Texas first proposed redrawing its congressional map earlier this summer, critics decried it as a political power-grab to appease the president, while state leaders claimed it was necessary after the Department of Justice raised concerns about some majority non-white districts.

But now that the map is in federal court, the two sides have swapped stances.

The state now claims they acted for purely partisan gain, which the U.S. Supreme Court has said is lawful, while a group of individuals and advocacy organizations argue the Department of Justice’s involvement reveals unconstitutional racial motivation.

These plaintiff groups, who are also suing over the 2021 maps, have asked a district court in El Paso to block the maps from being used in the 2026 election. The nine-day hearing kicked off Wednesday, with state Rep. Joe Moody, a Democrat from El Paso, testifying that his Republican colleagues absolutely had partisan goals.

“But how you get there matters,” he said. And in this unusual mid-decade redistricting, the Legislature’s path to gain more Republican seats in Congress “depressed the ability of Black and Hispanic voters to elect their candidates of choice,” he said.

Moody testified alongside state Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat who spoke about the impact of the changes on her city’s historic Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Other state legislators are expected to testify for the plaintiffs’ side over the next four days, before the state presents its witnesses.

The plaintiffs claim that state lawmakers intentionally diluted the voting power of Black and Hispanic Texans by breaking up majority non-white districts at the urging of the Department of Justice.

This letter from the DOJ, which came after President Donald Trump began pressuring Texas to redraw its congressional map, has become a major conflict point. In the letter, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon directs Texas to redraw four “coalition districts,” in which multiple racial groups together form a majority.

Dhillon cites a 2024 ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that said an individual racial or ethnic group must make up a majority of a district to bring a voting rights lawsuit. The ruling did not direct states to redraw their existing districts where multiple racial groups make up a majority. In fact, to do so would potentially violate the Constitution, several legal experts told the Legislature at various points during the process.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Steven Loomis, an assistant attorney general representing the state, rejected the letter as irrelevant, noting that Dhillon is not a lawmaker, didn’t play a role in drawing the maps and her claims “don’t bind the Texas Legislature.”

But Gov. Greg Abbott said in several television interviews that this letter, and the court ruling, was what pushed him to add redistricting to the special session agenda, which the plaintiffs’ lawyers played repeatedly at the hearing. Moody testified that it was his understanding that the letter from the DOJ was “what set the special session,” as it gave state leaders the “checkbox” they needed to proceed.

The state maintains that they were motivated entirely by pressure from Trump’s team to add more Republican seats, and that race didn’t play a factor. Loomis pointed to statements from Democratic lawmakers who called the process “pure politics” and a “fascist power grab” to show they agree this was motivated by GOP goals.

The plaintiffs are also arguing that the state racially gerrymandered, meaning race was the predominant factor in how they drew some of the districts. They pointed to several districts that are now just barely over 50% of one race, claiming the state moved some people into certain districts based on their race to meet a performative threshold.

These districts were drawn as “window dressing,” to allow lawmakers to claim they were helping voters of color while actually diminishing their ability to elect their candidate of choice, Moody said.

From Spectrum News:

Throughout the summer, Republicans lawmakers again and again claimed that the entire process was race-blind, hoping to sidestep any concerns about unconstitutionally considering race in the redraw.

But the plaintiffs’ lawyers questioned the validity of those claims at Wednesday’s hearing, and honed in on a central question that’s hung over the entire process: Who drew Texas’ new congressional map? And did they consider race while doing so?

Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, drew Texas’ 2021 maps. Many assumed he would draw the 2025 map as well, but early on, Republican leaders sidestepped questions about his role in the process.

State Rep. Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican who carried the House version of the map, told colleagues he wasn’t aware if Kincaid had drawn the map, while committee chair Rep. Cody Vasut said he didn’t know who Kincaid was.

Senate redistricting committee chair Sen. Phil King, a Weatherford Republican, faced blowback when he revealed toward the end of the process that he and Kincaid had chatted three times in recent months.

“We visited a few minutes,” King told lawmakers. “I specifically told him: ‘Don’t tell me anything you’re doing with regard to map drawing. Don’t tell me about the details of any map if you’re involved in it.’”

Moody and Alvarado both expressed frustration over not knowing who was drawing the map or what data they consulted in doing so. In the 2021 redistricting process, the state demographer and the attorney general’s office were on hand at all the hearings to answer questions, but no similar services were offered this time, they said.

Nina Perales, a lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund who is representing some of the plaintiffs, said it was a “legislative shell game” to figure out who had drawn the map.

These questions may soon be answered: The state has said it will call Kincaid as a witness next week.

And from KDBC in El Paso:

Inside the courtroom, Stephen Ansolabehere, a Harvard University professor, presented an analysis of 31 general election results since 2020, revealing that districts with minority groups as the majority population do not always elect their preferred candidates, if the results are considered under the new congressional lines.

Meanwhile, Loren Collingwood, a University of New Mexico professor, found that race and turnout are related, with voting being polarized among different racial groups.

Abbott’s attorneys questioned Ansolabehere’s methodology, arguing that his use of averages does not reflect changes in voting behavior over time.

Texas State Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins of San Antonio also testified, alleging that a proposed map was not shown during public hearings. “I felt there was nefarious activity going on,” she said during her testimony.

Gervin-Hawkins claims that the redistricting committee had only a five-hour notice for a special meeting, during which the bill was moved forward to the Texas House of Representatives in just 46 minutes.

That’s what we know for now. There was a hearing scheduled for yesterday as well, and the next one will be tomorrow. I’ll be interested to hear what Adam Kincaid has to say. I’ll do another one of these when there’s enough stories to warrant it.

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Paxton says he’s gonna enforce that Ten Commandment law so hard, you guys

I have three things to say about this.

Attorney General Ken Paxton promised to “vigorously enforce” the state’s Ten Commandments display law in a legal advisory sent to Texas public school districts, his office announced Wednesday.

Paxton said his office and the Texas Education Agency will closely monitor compliance with the law. Any school district that fails to meet the standard set in Senate Bill 10 is subject to legal action, he said.

“Texas law has spoken clearly: The moral foundation that shaped our nation deserves a prominent place in our classrooms — now more than ever,” Paxton wrote in the advisory. “As Attorney General, I will do everything in my power to defend this statute and ensure that Texas children may once again see, each day, the timeless truths upon which our laws and liberties were built.”

The assertion that the Ten Commandments served as the “foundational principles that have built this nation” has faced pushback from several legal scholars who say there’s little-to-no evidence that the Ten Commandments influenced the American legal system or the formation of the U.S.

That hasn’t stopped state officials from trying to add the commandments to every public school classroom in Texas.

The law went into effect Sept. 1 statewide. Paxton’s guidance reiterates that the commandments must be legible from anywhere in the room and can only contain the exact text of the Ten Commandments as laid out in the statute, with no additional text or imagery.

[…]

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery in San Antonio sided with the families in late August and temporarily blocked the law from going into effect for the districts in the lawsuit, which included Houston ISD, Fort Bend ISD and Cypress-Fairbanks ISD.

Paxton is currently appealing Biery’s decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. As the appellate case plays out, a new case was filed — also in San Antonio district court — with 15 families suing school districts including Conroe ISD. Paxton’s office has not responded to questions about whether it is representing those districts.

There is an evidentiary hearing on the plaintiffs’ request for injunctive relief set for Nov. 5 in San Antonio on the case filed last week.

See here for some background. My three things:

1. Putting aside the ludicrous notion that the Ten Commandments is the basis for our laws – as commenter Mainstream noted, there are no laws in this country that require you to believe in God, not worship something other than God, observe the Sabbath, obey your parents, not tell a lie, not commit adultery, not covet your neighbor’s house, wife, or property – there’s also that matter of the “exact text” of the Ten Commandments. There are in fact multiple versions of the Ten Commandments, depending on your religious faith. I once tried to explain this to someone who was advocating for allowing the Ten Commandments in schools, by saying that as a Catholic school kid the Ten Commandments I grew up being told to obey were almost certainly different than the ones she knew. She didn’t know what I was talking about.

2. That third lawsuit was filed in late September. I wish it could get a hearing sooner than that, but for a federal complaint that’s pretty reasonably quick. I hope the judge rules from the bench then and there, it’s not like this case differs from the previous one.

3. It would be very nice for there to have been a statewide injunction, but this is what we’ve got. It would also be nice for there to be more lawsuits filed, to cover a lot more school districts. Easier said than done, I know.

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

UT considers accepting a protection racket

Choose very carefully, y’all.

The Trump administration has asked the University of Texas at Austin to agree to a “set of operating principles” — which reportedly include adopting a stricter definition of gender, a five-year tuition freeze and a cap on international student enrollment — in exchange for preferential access to federal funding, the University of Texas System confirmed on Thursday.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that the Trump administration sent a letter to UT-Austin and eight other universities asking them to join a “compact” that would qualify them for the benefit. The schools would also have to ban the use of race and sex considerations in admissions and hiring, cap enrollment of international undergraduate students at 15%, and require applicants to take the SAT or a similar test. The Texas Tribune has not reviewed the Trump administration’s letter.

In a statement to the Tribune, UT System Board of Regents Chair Kevin Eltife said the system was honored UT-Austin was selected to be part of the Trump administration’s proposal.

“We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact immediately,” he said. “Higher education has been at a crossroads in recent years, and we have worked very closely with Governor Abbott, Lt. Gov. Patrick and Speaker Burrows to implement sweeping changes for the benefit of our students and to strengthen our institutions to best serve the people of Texas.”

Faculty leaders, however, voiced alarm. Pauline Strong, who heads the UT-Austin chapter of the American Association of University Professors, urged Eltife and University President Jim Davis to reject the deal.

“It trades autonomy for subservience, academic freedom for censorship, gender science and history for ideology, and the best interests of UT students and faculty for the favor of an administration intent on destroying our university,” Strong said in a statement to the Tribune. “The requirements laid out in this letter will be the beginning rather than the end of the Trump administration’s demands of our institution. Chairman Eltife and President Davis, we implore you to take a stand for Longhorn pride and academic excellence. Do not participate in a race to the bottom for once-proud institutions of higher education. Just say no!”

I will just note that there’s a lot of classical literature out there that addresses the matter of making a deal with the devil. I hope Chair Eltife is sufficiently versed in these matters. Here’s one approach that he might find appealing.

Either you find the idea of this entirely revolting, or you see it as an easy way to do something messy that you want to do. As such, I’m not going to argue this on the merits, there’s no point. I will make three observations and then get out:

1. Like, have some pride, man. The University of Texas is a revered institution. It will long outlast this tawdry moment. Act like you care about that.

2. As with all protection rackets and mob bosses, there is no satisfying Trump. You don’t pay him off and then see him go away. He will come back for more. What will be demanded of you next time around?

3. Donald Trump will not be President forever, and the Republicans will not be in the majority in Congress forever. There could – really, there should – be some consequences for acquiescing in this embarrassing way when another regime is in power. Maybe you, Kevin Eltife, will not be at UT when that happens, and it won’t be your mess to deal with. But see point #1. How do you want to be remembered in this moment?

Posted in National news, School days | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Buzbee sues NFL on behalf of other McNair son

I didn’t know there was another McNair son.

Houston attorney Tony Buzbee has sued the NFL in New York Supreme Court, claiming the league conspired to remove Cary McNair from the McNair family business interests, including the Texans.

In a release issued Saturday, Buzbee’s law firm said its lawsuit alleges that the NFL and Texans’ principal owner Cal McNair worked to boot his brother Cary from some of the family’s business interests, including the board of the trust that owns the Texans. The lawsuit argues the alleged plot came in response to McNair’s “questions and critiques” about scandals within the Texans organization.

[…]

On Sept. 8, Buzbee sent a five-page letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell requesting mediation and claiming that Cary McNair, 66, the eldest son of Janice and the late Bob McNair, had lost more than $60 million as a result of his expulsion from the trust and family businesses.

In that letter, Buzbee argued that Cary McNair’s alleged ouster could have come in response to concerns he raised about the sexual assault scandal involving accusations against onetime Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson and a 2023 Kentucky case in which minority owner Javier Loya agreed to accept a charge of  “harassment with intent to annoy.”

[…]

Cary McNair never played a role in the Texans organization, which is owned by the McNair family, but he worked on other family business interests and was fired by the family from those businesses not long after the court case ended.

Cary McNair also apparently filed a petition in probate court to have his mother declared incompetent after she’d had a stroke, and asked for a legal guardian to be appointed. That ultimately did not succeed. I didn’t know any of this – I follow the Texans from enough distance to not be fully briefed on McNair family drama – and I don’t have any stake in the outcome. I’m just rubbernecking, that’s all. Tony Buzbee is the local legal world’s most prominent chaos Muppet, and I can’t help but look.

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Parker’s poll puts her in the lead

From the inbox:

Annise Parker

A poll recently conducted by LRP shows former Houston Mayor Annise Parker in strong position to win the March 2026 Democratic primary for Harris County Judge. Voters know and like Parker, which earns her majority support and a commanding lead over Houston City Councilwoman Dr. Leticia Plummer. If Parker can create and maintain a fundraising advantage to communicate these political advantages, she will secure the Democratic nomination and enter the general election for Harris County Judge with strong momentum.

Here are the key findings from the poll:

1. Parker is firmly ahead in the Democratic primary race for Harris County Judge. Currently, 53% of Democratic primary voters vote for Parker, 15% vote for Plummer, and 20% are undecided. In addition to earning majority support and an almost 40-point lead, Parker has twice as much strong support than Plummer has in total support.

2. Parker leads among every measurable demographic group by double digits, including men (+33 points over Plummer) and women (+41); white (+45), Black (+30), and Latino/a (+37) voters; and in every Harris County Commissioner precinct (+44 Precinct 1; +29 Precinct 2; +43 Precinct 3, +29 Precinct 4).

3. Nearly a decade after she served as mayor, Parker’s image and brand remain strong. Sixty-four percent of Democratic primary voters have a favorable impression of Parker; only 16% of voters cannot rate Parker. Comparatively, 37% of voters have a favorable impression of Plummer, and 57% cannot rate her. And as with the ballot, Parker has stronger favorable ratings than Plummer among every measurable demographic group.

The poll was conducted in the first week of August, with 500 modeled likely 2026 Democratic primary voters. There are of course multiple caveats to apply here: It’s an internal poll, we have no further data or the wording on any of the questions, it’s anybody’s guess what the primary electorate will look like, and so on. You also don’t know that the field is set, which might make this a theoretical exercise more than anything else. Another footnote on the memo said that “Former Congresswoman Erica Lee Carter was also included in the survey ballot”, and that she got nine percent of the vote. Who knows what another candidate or two might mean.

With all that said, any poll that shows your candidate with over fifty percent of the vote is a strong one. I’m sure there will be public polls of this race in the coming months – neither candidate has really started campaigning yet, another caveat to this – and I will be very interested to see how those compare to this result. I also would have been very curious to see what the polling of a Lina Hidalgo-Annise Parker matchup, with or without other candidates, would have looked like. Early on, I’d have made Judge Hidalgo a strong favorite. More recently, not so much. We’ll never know, and honestly I’m fine with that as things turned out. You shouldn’t take this poll too seriously, but thinking about what might have been and what is yet to come is still worthwhile.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Ogg gets sued for “political targeting”

I dunno, man.

Two conservative Houston firebrands have joined together in a lawsuit accusing former District Attorney Kim Ogg of using her former office to target political opponents.

Blogger Aubrey Taylor, the man once charged with injuring late U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s campaign manager, and Steven Hotze, the founder of the Liberty Center for God and Country and other conservative organizations, filed a lawsuit last week in a Houston federal court.

The lawsuit accuses Ogg, former First Assistant District Attorney Vivian King and Gerald Womack, the campaign manager, of participating in conspiracies to violate their constitutional rights.

Half of the lawsuit repeats Hotze’s earlier claims from a suit filed in January, alleging that Ogg’s political motivations spurred charges against him over accusations he planned a 2020 attack on an air-conditioner repairman who was wrongly suspected of moving illegal ballots. It also adds accusations from Taylor, who in 2023 was indicted on an injury-to-an-elderly-person charge over an October 2023 confrontation with Womack.

Hotze withdrew the earlier lawsuit to file the new one alongside Taylor. Taylor had previously sued Womack for assault in a Harris County court. That case was dismissed earlier this year, according to court records.

Ogg and Womack declined to comment for this story.

Taylor and Hotze claim that their complaints against Ogg are buoyed by her successor’s decision to drop the criminal cases against them.

“When the DA’s office uses our taxpayer dollars to go after someone because of their political views or even their First Amendment speech, that is, you know, a weaponization of the office that is contrary to everything most folks in this county believe,” said Jared Woodfill, who is representing both men.

[…]

The lawsuit claims evidence that could have exonerated Taylor was destroyed or lost, and that Ogg’s office pushed for charges to be filed despite reservations from police investigators and line prosecutors.

During a hearing in Taylor’s criminal case, a former intake prosecutor, Michael Abner, testified that he initially declined charges against Taylor and afterward received a call from King, who said she disagreed with his decision.

“I don’t think she said I need to indict the charge,” Abner testified, according to a transcript. “She just disagreed and I believe said something along the lines of I need to look into this further.”

An HPD detective testified that Womack refused to immediately hand over surveillance video to police and that the object that Taylor was hit with, a metal trophy, went missing from Womack’s building after the confrontation.

Taylor’s attorney asked a judge to find there was prosecutorial misconduct in the criminal case. However, the charges were dismissed before Judge Aaron Burdette made any rulings.

I think we can all agree that the previous regime had issues, and one of them was in their intake process. There’s a big gulf between incompetence and maliciousness, however. I think the plaintiffs will find it challenging to prove the latter. There’s a hearing scheduled for December, I’m sure we’ll learn a lot more then.

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The state of mosquito research

Really interesting stuff.

Under a microscope, a mosquito can look stunning. Their blue-green iridescent scales, purple bands, and attractive spotted wings shimmer—dazzling enough to forget, for a moment, the insect lives to take a sip of your blood.

Mosquitoes range in size, from smaller than your pinky fingernail to a commanding presence in your palm, but it takes a skilled eye and a steady hand to sort the most dangerous species.

At the Arbovirus-Entomology Laboratory of the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), getting a close-up look is a key step in an active statewide effort to keep vector-borne diseases at bay—and alert the rest of the country when a major outbreak is looming.

The US has proved successful in driving away some of the most common mosquito-borne diseases, like malaria and yellow fever, during the 20th century. With less worries about insect-borne illnesses, there are few local and state health agencies in the US investing in active efforts to find and eliminate dangerous insects. Now, these old diseases are starting to creep back in, and new ones are lurking in stagnant puddles, garbage dumps, and culverts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that the rates of infections spread by animals has more than doubled over the past 20 years. Yet, the picture of these illnesses across the US is spotty at best, and they are likely far more prevalent than we may realize.

However, Texas has been looking out for mosquitoes since 1954, and it’s still a priority. “Texas and Florida are the most vulnerable…A lot of times, we’re the ones that see the first human cases of emerging diseases because of our climate, the vectors that we have, and the population levels,” said Bethany Bolling, who manages the zoonotic virology group at DSHS. “We have active programs throughout Texas that are weekly collecting mosquitoes. We’re monitoring the population levels. We monitor the species, where they are. And then we’re also looking for pathogens.” The state spends $755,000 per year on its arbovirus surveillance program and employs seven molecular biologists on the team.

But the US as a whole is not investing enough to contain the threat, and even Texas is scrambling to keep up. This year, West Nile virus, which is mainly spread by mosquitoes from the Culex genus, has been detected in 37 states—including TexasMassachusetts and Utah—causing at least one death. The CDC has tallied at least 500 cases across the country this year so far.

The US is also contending with a dengue outbreak in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands that began last year. The disease is spread by Aedes mosquitoes, and since 2024, health officials have detected locally acquired cases in Texas, California, and Florida.

There have been at least 60 cases of Chikungunya found in travelers returning to the US this year but no local spread so far. The disease, also transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes, arrived in the Americas in 2013.

The US typically sees about 2,000 malaria cases per year in travelers coming into the country, but in 2023, health officials identified the first locally acquired malaria cases in 20 years in Florida and Texas.

Many of these infections don’t have cures, so preventing them in the first place remains the most effective tactic. Yet, at a time when the US public health system needs more money, staff, and research to stay ahead of these diseases, the Trump administration is pulling it apart, with across-the-board job cuts at the CDC, and more targeted cuts aimed at global vector-borne disease monitoring and research into the role of climate change. Federal health officials are also undermining confidence in vaccines, a critical tool that could help limit the damage from vector-borne disease.

And as the researchers in Austin have learned, there’s only so much they can do from the lab.

The rest of the story is about what the scientists are doing to learn more about mosquitoes and fight the diseases they spread. The challenges they face include a lot of friction from the Trump administration, from budget cuts to anti-vaxxism to climate change denialism. The financial stuff flows downhill and makes it harder for them to get help from county governments, who don’t have the cash to assist. They carry on anyway, and isn’t it good once in awhile to read a positive science-based story out of Texas?

Posted in Technology, science, and math, The great state of Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Talarico rakes it in

Impressive.

Rep. James Talarico

State Rep. James Talarico raised $6.2 million in the first three weeks of his bid for Senate, his campaign announced Wednesday, a massive haul that far outpaces the earliest fundraising numbers tallied by recent Democratic statewide hopefuls.

The staggering total establishes Talarico as an immediate fundraising juggernaut and gives him an early edge over his rival in the Democratic primary, former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, who announced a $4.1 million haul over the three months since his July 1 campaign launch.

Last cycle, when he kicked off his challenge to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Allred took two months to bring in the $6.2 million Talarico raised in three weeks. Beto O’Rourke, who set a new standard for Democratic fundraising in his 2018 run against Cruz, needed nine months to raise that same amount.

Talarico’s donations came from more than 125,000 individual contributors across more than 230 Texas counties and all 50 states, according to his campaign. Almost every contribution — 98% — was for $100 or less, with teachers making up the largest share of donors. Talarico’s campaign said it was the most a Senate candidate of either party has raised in the first quarter of their campaign in Texas history.

[…]

Allred’s haul came from more than 100,000 donations averaging $32 each, according to the former Dallas congressman’s campaign, which reported zero corporate PAC donations.

“Colin’s campaign is powered by working people, not special interests,” Allred campaign manager Dan Morrocco said in a statement. “This is a grassroots movement with real staying power.”

See here for the background. Give Talarico his props, that’s a lot of money in a short period of time, and it suggests he will have the ability to raise a lot more. Allred’s total isn’t bad either, and would be reasonably impressive on its own without Talarico in the race. Another way to look at this is that the two of them have combined to raise over $10 million in Q3, and that sure sounds like some enthusiasm on our side to me. Maybe Terry Virts can make that even more impressive, we’ll see. Now we need for some of that – okay, a lot of that – to trickle down to the other races. We can do this. I’m very much looking forward to seeing the Q3 fundraising reports. The Barbed Wire has more.

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Bexar County processing new voter registrations again

Good news.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Bexar County is once again processing new voter registrations, after a months-long delay caused a backlog of 52,000 registrations to wait in limbo.

Early voting starts Oct. 20 for the Nov. 4 election.

Elections Administrator Michele Carew told reporters Monday that all outstanding applications will be processed before then, and new voters should receive their registration card in the mail before Election Day.

[…]

While most of the state has little on its ballot this November, Bexar County is voting on a pair of big-ticket ballot initiatives, Props. A and B, that could decide the future of a new downtown Spurs arena and East Side rodeo grounds.

It also had one the biggest backlogs of unprocessed registrations among the counties rolling over, according to Votebeat.

Carew said Monday that she didn’t see any evidence Props. A and B were drawing a rush of new voter interest.

Rather, a normal amount of new registrations stacked up into a big backlog because the state system had stopped accepting them for its TEAM update, and then weeks later, Votec also went down.

“There was a time period where nobody was allowed to put in any type of voter registration to the system,” Carew said. “That snowballed with Votec closing, and that’s when we had to completely halt.”

Texas election officials were all in Austin for a conference right after the Votec news, Carew said, and immediately began huddling with the Secretary of State’s office on a plan for this November.

Bexar County will use the free TEAM system this election, then transfer to a new private vendor, VR Systems, which has some additional features.

Though local leaders have gone to great lengths to avoid using state’s system in the past, Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai said that in this case, they’re lucky for the state’s help.

“They have been engaged, responsive and supportive throughout this process,” he said.

See here for more on the Bexar issues, and here for more on similar problems at the state level. I’m glad to hear that this is getting resolved, and that the state was a good partner in doing so. A low bar to clear, but we take nothing for granted these days. I hope the new system Bexar County implements has fewer problems than the old one.

Posted in Election 2025 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Second Baptist’s shenanigans

Let them fight.

For nearly 50 years, the RevEd Young led a Houston conservative megachurch that now boasts 94,000 congregants, $1 billion in assets and high-profile members like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, leading oil executives and prominent business leaders.

That ended on May 26, 2024, when Young said he was stepping down as senior pastor of Second Baptist Church. His son, the Rev. Ben Young, would replace him. At the time, the congregation accepted the transition of power.

More than a year later, Second Baptist is now at war with its own members. In April, a group of congregants, calling themselves the Jeremiah Counsel, filed a lawsuit against church leaders. They claim the church fraudulently passed bylaws that not only allowed Ben Young to be named senior pastor behind closed doors, but stripped the congregation of all voting rights — consolidating power in the hands of a few trustees selected by the Youngs. They want the old bylaws reinstated.

Second Baptist may have the financial means to fight it out in court, but so does the opposition.

Jeremiah Counsel’s leaders include Doug Bech, a retired securities lawyer and founder of Raintree Resorts International who has personally given millions of dollars to the church over the last 36 years; Edd Hendee, founder of the nationally known restaurant, Taste of Texas; and Jim Montague, retired president of IP Petroleum Company.

“Right now a little group of people, mostly family members, can do what they wish with the assets of Second Baptist, and we could not legally stop it,” said Archie Dunham, a longtime church member, a former executive at ConocoPhillips and supporter of the Jeremiah Counsel.

Second Baptist’s spokesman and lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. However, in court filings, the church fought back against the allegations.

“A small group of disgruntled members of the church, unwilling to file this case in their own names, formed… a sham corporation used as a surrogate to pursue their ultimate goal of remaining in or controlling church leadership,” the church wrote.

The church recently secured a protective order that could ban the general public from seeing certain court documents. A trial is set for February.

It’s unclear who will emerge the winner in the court battle. What is clear, experts say, is what this case is all about — the balance of power in one of the region’s largest and more influential churches.

“There are different variations, but it’s always the same,” said Matt Anthony, an Irving attorney who specializes in church and nonprofit law. “It all boils down to who has the power.”

[…]

Unlike most civil suits in Harris County, the church lawsuit – upon Second Baptist’s request – was transferred to Houston’s nascent business court. The courts, created statewide in 2024, don’t have a long enough history to predict how they’ll receive such a lawsuit, said Anthony, the attorney specializing in church and nonprofit law.

Second Baptist requested the business court because of the scale of financial assets in play, according to the church’s documents.

See here for some background. You can read the rest, it’s mostly an inside-baseball story. I have no dog in this fight. I’m kind of amused that this will be heard in the dumb new business court, which has Abbott-appointed judges. Seems fitting.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of October 1

The Texas Progressive Alliance wonders if it really is decorative gourd season yet as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading

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Interview with Desmond Spencer

Desmond Spencer

We wrap up our tour of the HCC districts with Desmond Spencer, one of two opponents to incumbent Renee Jefferson Patterson in District II. (The other opponent is Kathy lynch Gunter, who had also run for this seat in a special election in 2022; you can listen to the interview I did with her then here.) Spencer is an Air Force veteran who founded a consulting firm to help underserved and disadvantaged applicants navigate the graduate school admissions process after his service. He is a policy advisor to Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia and for the last two years has been an adjunct professor of Texas government at HCC. Here’s what we talked about:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where large language models go when they don’t know what to say. Next week we get into the Houston City Council At Large #4 race.

Posted in Election 2025 | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Rep. Gina Hinojosa said to be running for Governor

All righty.

Rep. Gina Hinojosa

Texas state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, an Austin Democrat, has told at least two donors that she’s running for governor next year, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: A Hinojosa win in the Democratic nomination would set up a battle with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, seeking a fourth term, for the state’s Latino vote.

What they’re saying: “I’m running for governor,” Hinojosa told an Austin-area Democratic donor in an email. The donor did not want to be identified because it was a private exchange.

  • Hinojosa’s campaign did not respond to an interview request, but Austin political consultant David Butts, an adviser to her campaign, tells Axios “she’s going to get in” — likely in the next couple of weeks.

[…]

💰 Follow the money: Abbott’s campaign has a king’s ransom available to buy ads and mobilize voters — more than $86 million in cash on hand as of mid-July.

  • Hinojosa’s campaign, by contrast, had a shade under $25,000 in cash on hand in its mid-July filing.
  • Several other Democrats have already said they’re running, including Andrew White, a Houston businessman and son of the late Gov. Mark White. He has not yet filed a campaign finance report this election cycle.
  • The filing deadline for primary candidates is Dec. 8.

Zoom in: The daughter of legal aid lawyers from Mission, Hinojosa went to high school in Brownsville before heading to Austin to attend the University of Texas — she graduated from the Plan II Honors program and then earned a law degree from George Washington University.

  • She was elected to the Austin ISD school board in 2012 and first won her House seat, which covers central Austin, in 2016.

See here for the first mention we had of Rep. Hinojosa’s potential candidacy. She would join Andrew White, Benjamin Flores, and Bobby Cole if she follows through. Which I expect she will, as this very much has the feel of a rollout. And then, as is the case for everyone else running statewide, she’ll need to start raising some money. I look forward to the formal announcement.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Zoox seeks broader regulatory approval

Another step towards offering their robotaxi service.

Zoox has asked federal regulators for an exemption that would allow the Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company to commercially deploy its custom-built robotaxis, which lack traditional controls like pedals and a steering wheel.

The exemption request was first reported by Bloomberg. A Zoox spokesperson confirmed that it has submitted a petition for a “555 exemption” and continues to work closely with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration through this new exemption process.

An NHTSA spokesperson told TechCrunch that Zoox applied for a temporary exemption from eight Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards applicable to its passenger car equipped with an automated driving system. The NHTSA is reviewing Zoox’s application and will publish a notice seeking public comment after the agency conducts its initial review.

The request follows two milestones that put Zoox closer to operating a commercial robotaxi service.

Earlier this month, Zoox launched a free robotaxi service that is open to the public in Las Vegas. And in August, the NHTSA gave Zoox an exemption to demonstrate its custom-built robotaxis on public roads.

While the August exemption cleared up a long-standing debate over whether Zoox’s custom-built autonomous vehicles complied with federal motor vehicle safety standards, it only covered research and demonstrations on public roads. This latest application is separate and would broaden the scope and pave the way for Zoox to launch a commercial robotaxi service.

That Bloomberg story is paywalled, or I’d have used it as the source. Zoox is currently doing a demo in Las Vegas, in a limited area and using fixed routes. The goal of this approval is to let them compete as a proper robotaxi service, where cities like Austin are in the wings. Since it seems that these things are designed to be easy and not too expensive to manufacture, they could ramp up very quickly once they get that approval. Which I expect they will, though how long it will take is not clear to me.

As noted, Zoox is demo-ing in Las Vegas. Here’s one person’s experience with that.

I test rode Zoox on two trips around the Vegas strip on a course prescribed by the company and one trip from the Resorts World casino to the Luxor hotel, a distance of 3.17 miles.

I summoned a Zoox for a ride to Luxor like I would an Uber, Lyft, or Google’s Waymo: I opened the app and entered my origin and destination. The primary difference is that rides are limited to a few select destinations, not an entire service area. Another is that the service is currently free. Zoox has not provided any information on pricing once paid rides begin.

Unlike Waymos, which are retrofitted Jaguar SUVs, Zoox are purpose-built. The car has floor-to-ceiling clear doors on each side. There is no steering wheel and no pedals. The car can hold four people, two on each side facing each other. That is great for conversation, but if more than two of you get motion sickness when traveling backwards, Zoox is not the vehicle for you.

The seats in the Zoox vehicles are public-transit comfortable, which is to say they’re not. Within a minute of sitting down, my back was uncomfortable. Within 10 minutes, my butt was numb.

The interior is spartan. Each side of the Zoox has two Qi charging pads. Of course, there are cupholders. There is also a touch-screen panel that shows the time remaining on the trip. I could adjust the temperature and play music from its selected stations.

On one ride, my Zoox suddenly slowed to a crawl. I couldn’t see an obvious reason and Zoox public relations didn’t respond to a request for an explanation. It eventually unglitched and the rest of the ride was uneventful. On another ride, it correctly waited as an ambulance took a left across our path. The human driver behind us wasn’t patient, honking immediately after the ambulance passed.

One nice touch: Zoox doesn’t have the annoying ticking of the turn-signal indicator while you wait to make a turn. That shows the value of a purpose-built car; you don’t have to carry forward elements that were built for a different era.

Otherwise, the rides were unremarkable — which is the way it should be. After riding Waymos around San Francisco, I have no qualms about riding in autonomous vehicles (AVs). They are safe drivers, sometimes annoyingly so. AVs follow the rules as if a DMV tester were riding shotgun, evaluating every maneuver.

I dunno. I’m not the target audience for this – I’d rather take public transit if available, and if not I’ll just get a human-driven vehicle. I do believe that autonomous vehicles will be safer than human-driven vehicles – Waymo’s track record so far shows that they already are very safe – but there are enough bugs to work out in the overall experience that I’m in no rush. I don’t mind talking to a driver, I don’t mind listening to their choice of music, I’d like to be able to deal with a person if something unexpected comes up. You do you, but I have no desire to be a beta tester or early adopter.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Interview with Renee Jefferson Patterson

Renee Jefferson Patterson

We continue our visit with the candidates for HCC Trustee. Today we move into District II, where incumbent Renee Jefferson Patterson was appointed to fill the seat earlier this year after Charlene Ward Johnson was elected to HD139. Patterson is herself an HCC graduate, and is the founder and owner of a premier design firm specializing in luxury residential, commercial, and construction design, after having spent fifteen years in HR in the energy industry. She was a candidate for Houston City Council District B in 2019, which had a bit of drama associated with it. She’s now running for her first full term as Trustee against two opponents. Here’s what we talked about:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, which has powers beyond the comprehension of mortal men. More from HCC tomorrow.

Posted in Election 2025 | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Redistricting trial 2.0 begins

And they’re off.

This week, a trio of federal judges will consider whether Texas can use its new congressional map in the 2026 election, marking the first legal test for the districts produced by a summer of intense partisan clashing.

State lawmakers redrew the electoral lines with the goal of adding five more Republican seats from Texas to the GOP’s narrow House majority. But a cadre of individuals and advocacy groups now argue this unusual mid-decade redistricting is unconstitutional on several fronts, including that lawmakers illegally relied on race and drew a map that violates Black and Hispanic voters’ rights to equal protection.

They are asking the court to stop the state from using the map for the fast-approaching midterms, which would likely mean reverting to the most recent version passed in 2021 and used in each of the last two elections. The state, meanwhile, argues the new lines should stand because they were drawn with the nakedly political — yet court-sanctioned — motive of winning more GOP seats, without regard for race.

The hearing, which begins Wednesday in El Paso, will stretch for nine days. The three-judge panel, which is also overseeing an ongoing lawsuit against the four-year-old maps, will then issue a ruling on whether the new districts can be used in the midterm and, if not, which map should be used instead.

As both sides, and all three judges, are acutely aware, time is short. The filing deadline for candidates is Dec. 8, with other election administration deadlines approaching even faster.

“All of this, every part of this, is about the clock right now,” said Justin Levitt, a voting rights expert at Loyola Law School. “The plaintiffs want an answer as soon as possible. Texas wants to stall like crazy. All of this is about what’s going to get a court to deliver an answer before the next election.”

The case turns on a familiar argument, with plaintiffs arguing in one of their motions for a preliminary injunction that, if the districts are allowed to stand, “Latino and Black Texans will be irreparably harmed, deprived of their right to exercise their voting rights on equal terms with Anglo Texans.”

As with the 2021 map, the state is rebutting those claims by contending the maps were drawn “race-blind.” Their court filings have also embraced the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling that the courts cannot intervene to stop partisan gerrymandering, as long as the map in question abides by other constitutional protections.

It was Trump’s demand for more GOP seats and the ensuing “political arms-race that motivated Texas legislators to redistrict mid-decade, not race,” the state wrote last week. Quoting Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the state said, “as is often the case, ‘when Donald Trump says jump, the Republicans simply ask how high.’”

[…]

It will be up to the three judges to sort through similar claims from the different plaintiff groups to determine whether the map should be allowed to remain in effect.

A preliminary injunction is typically an extraordinary measure, granted by a court only when they believe the plaintiffs are likely to succeed at trial and there is potential harm to wait that long to intervene.

These same players, from the judges to the plaintiffs to many of the witnesses, have been locked in litigation with each other for four years. Because the judges have yet to rule on the 2021 maps, it’s hard to predict how they might handle this request, Levitt said.

But returning to El Paso so soon after the monthlong trial concluded, it’s safe to anticipate some tension from everyone involved, he said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the three-judge panel hearing this case is crazy frustrated,” he said. “Four years of [this case], and then Texas just comes in with an Etch-A-Sketch redraw that basically erased their work.”

See here for the previous update. I have no idea what to expect. I do think there’s a fighting chance that the plaintiffs could get an injunction, but I have a hard time believing that the Fifth Circuit and SCOTUS would allow it to stand. One tries to be hopeful anyway. We’ll see how combative the hearing gets. Michael Li shares an excellent guide to the claims and districts that will be at issue, and Houston Public Media and Democracy Docket have more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Rep. Rosenthal to run for RRC

A bit of a surprise, at least to me.

Rep. Jon Rosenthal

State Rep. Jon Rosenthal, D-Houston, announced Monday that he is running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission — the powerful agency that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry — rather than seeking reelection in next year’s midterms.

Rosenthal has served in the Legislature’s lower chamber since 2019 and is an oilfield mechanical engineer by trade. He said both those experiences uniquely qualify him to oversee Texas’ energy industry.

“I’m running for Texas Railroad Commissioner to bring accountability and common-sense solutions to an agency that desperately needs both,” Rosenthal said in a statement. “Texans deserve a commissioner who understands both the technical and policy sides of energy. That’s me.”

The commission is made up of three members who are elected to serve six-year terms, staggered so that one seat is on the ballot every two years. If Rosenthal emerges as the Democratic nominee, he would be in line to face Commission Chair Jim Wright, a Republican who has announced for reelection and will have to make it out of his own primary next year.

Rep. Rosenthal is a top-tier Good Guy – he’s good on policy, he’s good on being involved with GOTV efforts, and he’s just a good person. I haven’t spoken to him about this, so I don’t know if he decided there was a real chance to win this cycle, if he’d rather take a big leap than spend another session in the hell that the Lege has become, something else, or some combination. Whatever the reason, he’ll be an asset to the ticket and a massive upgrade over any of the current incumbents. As of the July finance report, he had $42K on hand, so he has some work to do there. I wish him all the best.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Interview with Monica Flores Richart

Monica Flores Richart

This week we will feature the HCC Trustee races and candidates. Three Trustees are up for a six-year term, though only two of them have opponents; trustee Cynthia Lenton-Gary has no challenger for District VII. The incumbent in District I is Monica Flores Richart, who did us all the huge favor of beating Dave Wilson in 2019. (Wilson has since claimed another one of his warehouses as a residence and is the Trustee in District IV; we’ll deal with him again in 2027.) Richart is an attorney who has also served as a political consultant, and she worked in the Harris County Clerk’s office on projects to implement countywide voting, extended voting hours, and greater accessibility to underserved communities. She now has a MAGAfied opponent who is being backed by Dave Wilson, which makes this a very important race. I’ve known Monica for almost 20 years, I think she’s one of our most thoughtful elected officials, and I urge you to support her re-election. My interview with her from the 2019 campaign is here, and my interview with her for this year’s campaign is below:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, which is part of any nutritious breakfast. More from HCC tomorrow and Wednesday.

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Recall Houston says it will start collecting petition signatures

Okay.

Mayor John Whitmire

Could Houston voters soon decide the fate of Houston Mayor John Whitmire?

Experts say it’s an extremely long shot, but a group of Houstonians will start collecting signatures next week to remove the mayor from office.

Mayor Whitmire has been in office for more than a year and a half.

Recall for Houston was formed soon after he took office, and you might see its members out and about collecting signatures around town starting on Oct. 6.

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t worried about the future of the city,” Alejandro Alegria with Recall for Houston said. “Whitmire has already done an immeasurable amount of damage.”

[…]

Perhaps the biggest hurdle for the group’s effort is that, based on the city’s current population, members would need to collect more than 63,000 signatures within 30 days just to get the recall on the ballot.

That’s more than 2,000 signatures a day.

All of those signatures must be from registered voters in the city of Houston.

“They’ll have to probably collect about 100,000 signatures to be certain that they have enough valid signatures during the 30-day window,” Jones explained. “What will happen is that you’ll have people that will sign but they won’t be registered voters or they won’t be registered in the city of Houston.”

See here, here, here, and here for some background. I will note that the group’s name is Recall Houston, not “Recall for Houston”, but that’s the least of their problems. I will also note that they did not file a finance report for July, so at least as of then they had no funds with which to carry out this effort. That seems like a pretty big obstacle, but perhaps they have been busy working on that, in a manner sufficiently under the radar that no one noticed it.

They did say they would start this effort in the fall, so kudos for that. I suppose the reason for beginning now is so that canvassers can station themselves at early voting locations, which at least eases the concern about ensuring that only registered voters are signing; the Houston-versus-not-Houston issue can be dealt with by asking people if they’re voting in the At Large #4 race, I suppose. Easier said than done, if you’ve ever hung out at a busy EV location, and this will require a lot of volunteer (or paid person) time and effort, but it is a strategy. We’ll see how it plays out for them. Oh, and if they succeed, I presume this means that the recall election itself would be next May. Campos has more.

Posted in Election 2025, Election 2026 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The National Weather Service is basically broken

It’s being held together by duct tape and twist ties, and it’s all the fault of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, all those Project 2025 assholes, and every cowardly Republican in Congress.

Some National Weather Service staffers are working double shifts to keep forecasting offices open. Others are operating under a “buddy system,” in which adjacent offices help monitor severe weather in understaffed regions. Still others are jettisoning services deemed not absolutely necessary, such as making presentations to schoolchildren.

The Trump administration’s cuts to the Weather Service — where nearly 600 workers, or about 1 in every 7, have left through firings, resignations or retirements — are pushing the agency to its limits, according to interviews with current and former staffers.

The incoming head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has promised to prioritize filling those jobs, and the White House recently granted the Weather Service an exemption from a government-wide hiring freeze. But as the Atlantic hurricane season peaks and wildfires ramp up in the West, hundreds of positions remain vacant, staff said. Forecasters are currently watching two storms, including one that could pose a threat for the eastern United States by early next week.

So far, exhausted employees have maintained weather monitoring and forecasting almost without interruption, staff said. But many are wondering how much longer they can keep it up. If the government shuts down next week when funding runs out, many employees could also find themselves working without pay, at least temporarily.

“We have a strained and severely stretched situation,” said Tom Fahy, legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents the agency’s workers. The Weather Service has a famously dedicated workforce, he said, but workers can put in only so many long hours and extra shifts. “There’s a breaking point.”

Fahy said two offices — one in California’s Central Valley and another in western Kansas — no longer have enough staffing to operate around the clock. And, he added, “there are still a dozen offices across the country that are operating on reduced staffs.”

John Sokich, who worked for the Weather Service for 45 years before retiring in January, said the agency is “unfortunately, incredibly adept” at keeping its forecasts and warnings going in strained circumstances. Still, he compared the Weather Service these days to a sprinter forced to extend an all-out race from 200 yards to a mile.

“They’re going to run out of gas,” Sokich said. “They’re going to start missing things. They can’t sustain that level of effort for much longer. You just can’t sprint a mile.”

[…]

Even before this year’s losses, the Weather Service was considered understaffed, employing roughly 4,300 people — 200 below ideal personnel levels, agency leaders said at the time. But the sudden cuts were unprecedented in the agency’s recent history, Fahy said. Between 2010 and 2015, for example, roughly 600 workers left the Weather Service through attrition and retirement — this year, the same number vanished in a matter of months.

“In my time here, the agency has never, ever been below 4,000,” said Brian LaMarre, who worked for the Weather Service for more than three decades before taking a position as chief meteorologist with Inspire Weather. “This is uncharted waters.”

As a result, some local forecasting offices lost the ability to operate 24/7, cut back on launching weather balloons or staggered shifts ahead of extreme weather. Over the summer, the Weather Service grew so concerned about diminished forecasting teams that the agency offered to cover moving expenses for any workers willing to transfer to hard-hit offices in coastal Texas and Louisiana, among other places.

Now, midway through a hurricane season that forecasters initially expected to bring as many as 19 named storms, staff are finding ways to keep things running, they said — often at significant cost to their work-life balance and physical and mental health. Managers are picking up forecasting shifts. In a bid to ensure robust forecasting, some offices are sharing their employees remotely with understaffed locations, at times requiring those staffers to work overtime or through weekends.

I’ve said multiple times that we’ve been very lucky to avoid a major hurricane so far this year. Big storms like Gabrielle and Humberto have gone out to sea. That luck may be running out. We may pull through this time, but who knows how much longer the overworked staff at the NWS can hold on. Just imagine the next big storm entering the Gulf of Mexico and bearing down on our shoreline. How much confidence would any of us have in the information available? It’s just a matter of time before we find out.

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