Weekend link dump for October 12

“One national survey of more than 1,800 higher education staff members conducted by consulting firm Tyton Partners earlier this year found that about 40% of administrators and 30% of instructions use generative AI daily or weekly — that’s up from just 2% and 4%, respectively, in the spring of 2023.”

“The fact that Tilly Norwood and the company behind ChatGPT are simultaneously engendering such controversy is not a coincidence: This is an existential moment for human-created entertainment as we know it. If actors, talent bookers, and studio executives cannot hold the line now, at this very moment, the battle to preserve the humanity inherent to art will be irredeemably set back.”

“Artificial intelligence is rapidly spreading across the economy and society. But radiology shows us that it will not necessarily dominate every field in its first years of diffusion — at least until these common hurdles are overcome. Exploiting all of its benefits will involve adapting it to society, and society’s rules to it. ”

“Autism doesn’t excuse asshole behavior. But – here’s the thing – society is far kinder to assholes than it is to autists.” That’s an older link, though one I just recently came across. Here’s a more recent one on a similar topic that you should read, too.

Let there be ties in the NFL. Make overtime 15 minutes again if you want, but quit worrying about weird outliers.

“But now we have an actual, crystal-clear example of government officials using direct threats to pressure a tech company into removing disfavored speech—and suddenly, the free speech warriors have gone mysteriously quiet.”

Bari Weiss is proof that “merit” no longer has any meaning.

“Over the weekend, Portland’s 50-year-old Saturday Market unfolded as usual on the banks of the Willamette River; 9,000 people ran the Portland Marathon; the Portland Thorns soccer team beat the Bay Football Club 2-1 in front of a nearly 17,000 fans, and Powell’s City of Books, perhaps the world’s greatest bookstore, was jammed full of readers scanning bestsellers while sipping lattes and kombucha. True, it did not open until 2 p.m. on Friday, but on investigation, it was determined that Treebeerd’s Taproom never opens until 2 p.m.”

“Any lawyer—really, any careful reader—who makes it through even the first paragraph of the document can see that this is incorrect. The “compact” is quite explicit: Universities that do not sign on to this thing thereby “elect[] to forego federal benefits.” What benefits? Well, that same first paragraph lists quite a few specific “benefits”: “(i) access to student loans, grant programs, and federal contracts; (ii) funding for research directly or indirectly; (iii) approval of student and other visas in connection with university matriculation and instruction; and (iv) preferential treatment under the tax code,” which means 501(c)(3) status. This compact is a “reward” in exactly the same sense that it is “rewarding” to purchase protection from the Mafia. The compact is an open, explicit threat.”

Cry harder.

“A federal workers union is suing the Trump administration for inserting language into Department of Education employees’ out-of-office email messages blaming Democrats for the government shutdown.”

RIP, Ike Turner, Jr, Grammy-winning producer and the son of Ike and Tina Turner.

Jane Goodall left us all a little gift.

“I’m sorry that we dug up old tweets and yelled at celebrities for the stupid jokes they made ten years ago. But I’m not sorry about Louis CK. It wasn’t an overreaction of the times. What he did was wrong. In 2018 and in 2025.”

“Trucks from the First Nation could soon be transporting food, furniture and even critical minerals south of the [Canadian] border along ancestral pathways once used to move buffalo hides and pemmican across the plains—without paying taxes or tariffs.”

“The only world in which [Letitia] James’s activities would merit this level of attention is the political one. And that is precisely the point.”

“Psychiatrists have joined other public health groups in calling for the removal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary.”

“The tariffs have impacted interlibrary loans in various ways for different libraries.”

Happy 99th birthday, Opal Lee, Grandmother of Juneteenth.

“Arch is all over our televisions. He is the most well-known active college football player. Your casual fan uncle has no idea who Trinidad Chambliss, Fernando Mendoza or Dante Moore is, but he knows Arch. That he is playing so poorly — or at least that he is not dominating, and his team is losing — makes him a Classic Flop: a guy who can’t live up to the hype. And we love mocking guys who can’t live up to the hype.”

RIP, Ronnie Rondell, stuntman and actor whose movie credits include Lethal Weapon, Thelma and Louise, and Star Trek: First Contact. He was also the man who was on fire in the photo on the Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here album cover; scroll down in the story to see for yourself if you’re not familiar. This story is from August but I only just heard about it, so.

Put this guy very high on the list of people who need to be very thoroughly investigated when the power shifts back.

RIP, Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, Loyola Chicago men’s basketball team chaplain, iconic sports figure, national treasure.

RIP, John Lodge, singer, songwriter, and bass guitarist for The Moody Blues.

RIP, Diane Keanton, Oscar-winning actor, director, producer, known for too many good roles and movies to list.

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The latest UH/Hobby poll has some red flags for Republicans

First, the headline stories, which don’t interest me much.

Ken Paxton and John Cornyn are effectively tied in the Republican primary race for U.S. Senate, with 34% of voters backing Paxton and 33% supporting Cornyn. 22% support Wesley Hunt.

Jasmine Crockett leads an expanded field of potential and declared candidates in the Democratic Senate primary, with 31% of the vote. Beto O’Rourke and James Talarico have 25% each, followed by Colin Allred at 13%. Crockett and O’Rourke have not formally entered the race.

Allred holds a slight lead over Talerico in a head-to-head matchup between the leading announced Democratic candidates, 46% to 42%.

I will continue to side-eye the inclusions of Beto and Rep. Crockett in these polls, at least until such time as there’s at least a rumor that they’re thinking about getting in. I think the Allred-Talarico situation is fluid, as Talarico’s name ID is still not where it needs to be. That said, don’t underestimate Allred.

What I’m more interested in, part 1.

Survey respondents who voted in the 2024 presidential election had over the course of the year been asked who they voted for in the 2024 presidential election. In this September survey the respondents were asked if they could vote again today in the 2024 presidential election, who would they vote for, with the options being Republican Donald Trump, Democrat Kamala Harris, Libertarian Chase Oliver and the Green Party’s Jill Stein, with additional options of saying they were unsure or would not vote.

Figure 9 provides the distribution of who the respondents that voted in the 2024 presidential election voted for, with 56% reporting that the cast a ballot for Trump, 43% for Harris and 1% for other candidates. When asked again in September how they would vote if they could turn back time and go back and do it all over again, 49% say they would still vote for Trump, 45% for Harris and 2% for other candidates, with 2% saying they are unsure how they would vote and 2% saying they would not vote.

In all, Trump’s vote share dropped from 56% to 49% (a 7 percentage point decrease) while Harris’s vote share rose from 43% to 45% (a 2 percentage point increase). While Trump bested Harris by 13 percentage points among these voters in November 2024, if the election were held today among these same voters, he would defeat Harris by only 4 percentage points.

[…]

Figure 10 draws on the data in Table 9 to display the range in the percentage point decline in Trump’s vote among 15 key socio-demographic sub-groups. In no case did Trump’s vote intention increase among any of these sub-groups. Trump lost the least ground among Republican (2 percentage points), Black (3 percentage points), Silent Generation/Baby Boomer (4 percentage points), and White (5 percentage points) voters. Trump lost the most ground among Democratic (10 percentage points), Latino (12 percentage points), Gen-Z (16 percentage points) and Independent (20 percentage points) voters.

While Trump’s advantage over Harris among these Latino voters in 2024 was 8 percentage points (53% to 45%), if these Latino voters could vote again for president, Harris would lead Trump by 11 percentage points among Latinos (52% to 41%), marking a 19 percentage point shift. This finding suggests that any modeling of Latino voter behavior based on Trump’s unprecedented success with Texas Latino voters in 2024 could be significantly overestimating the 2026 Latino vote intention for Republican congressional candidates in the recently redrawn Texas U.S. House districts. And, as a result, Republicans may have a more difficult time than expected defeating Democratic incumbents Henry Cuellar in the 28th Congressional District and Vicente Gonzalez in the 34th Congressional District, while also suggesting that Republican victories in the 9th, 15th, and 35th Congressional Districts, though still the most likely outcome, are not nearly as certain as they would be if Latino voters cast ballots for Republican candidates in 2026 in the same way that they did back in 2024.

I’ve been talking about this for awhile. I’ll stipulate, it’s one poll, with a subsample of voters, and next November is a long way off. But this result is consistent with what we’ve seen in national polling, and I have to ask, what do you think is likely to happen that will make these disaffected Trump voters go back to him? I think it’s more likely that these numbers get worse for Republicans between now and then.

Part 2:

Based on a combination of a prospective intention to participate in the November 2026 general election and a past record of participation in the 2022 and 2024 general elections, a total of 1,183 registered voters (with a margin of error of +/- 2.85%) were determined to be likely to vote in the November 2026 U.S. Senate election.

In all, 12 unique two-candidate November 2026 election scenarios were evaluated, featuring three potential Republican candidates (Cornyn, Hunt, Paxton) and four potential Democratic candidates (Allred, Crockett, O’Rourke, Talarico). The vote intention for each candidate as well as the proportion of likely voters who reported that they were unsure how they would vote is contained in Table 11.

Figure 11 displays the Republican margin of victory in these 12 hypothetical November 2026 races (in no instance did a Democratic candidate lead in vote intention). With this election still more than a year away, much of this vote intention is explained by partisanship, although within the relatively constant support for Republican and Democratic candidates based on partisanship, there is some variation in the Republican candidates’ margins of victory.

The GOP candidates’ margins of victory range from 1 percentage point to 6 percentage points, with a median margin of victory of 3 percentage points. The four races where the Republican candidate enjoyed the largest lead were Cornyn vs. Crockett (6 percentage points), Hunt vs. Talarico (6 percentage points), Hunt vs. Crockett (5 percentage points), and Hunt vs. Allred (5 percentage points). The four races where the Republican candidate enjoyed the smallest lead were Paxton vs. Allred (1 percentage point), Paxton vs. Crockett (2 percentage points), Cornyn vs. Allred (2 percentage points) and Hunt vs. O’Rourke (2 percentage points).

Among the three Republican candidates, the top performer was Hunt, with leads of 6, 5, 5, and 2 percentages points, followed by Cornyn, with leads of 6, 3, 3, and 2 percentage points. The weakest performer was Paxton, with leads of 3, 3, 2, and 1 percentage points. Hunt’s average margin of victory was 4.5 percentage points, Cornyn’s was 3.5 percentage points, and Paxton’s was 2.25 percentage points.

Among the four Democratic candidates, the top performer was Allred, with margins of defeat of 1, 2, and 5 percentage points, followed by O’Rourke with margins of defeat of 2, 3, and 3 percentage points, Talarico with margins of defeat of 3, 3, and 6 percentage points, and Crockett with margins of defeat of 2, 5, and 6 percentage points. Allred and O’Rourke both had an average margin of defeat of 2.67 percentage points, followed by Talarico with a margin of defeat of 3 percentage points and Crockett with a margin of defeat of 4.33 percentage points.

You can click over and see the individual results, but filtering for the two declared Dems and the two original Republicans – sorry, I don’t think Wesley Hunt will win – we get

Cornyn 48, Talarico 45
Cornyn 48, Allred 46

Paxton 49, Talarico 46
Paxton 48, Allred 47

Again, one poll, it’s early, etc etc etc. But these are some encouraging numbers. Now we have to build on them.

UPDATE: Here’s the Chron story on this poll.

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The latest Loving County shenanigans draws a response

Are we sure this isn’t all just performance art?

Local, state and federal officials have called for separate inquiries a week after a Houston Chronicle investigation detailed how a group of people from out-of-state was moving to wrest political control of a sparsely populated, but oil-rich West Texas county.

Their leader, Malcolm Tanner, calls his movement the Melanated People of Power. In numerous social media posts, he has declared his intention to take over Loving County’s government by moving in enough of his supporters, who he has attracted there by promising free homes and a $5,000 monthly stipend.

“Not too often do you see a brother that looks like me come into the county and take the entire county over,” he said in a July TikTok post. “Well, I have taken the entire county over, out here in Loving County, Texas. When these elections hit in 2026, we’re going to wipe the board. Everybody that I selected will be elected.”

News of the plan has alarmed Texas officials. “What is happening in Loving County should concern every Texan,” U.S. Rep. Chip Roy said in a written statement. In a separate Oct. 6 letter, Roy, a Republican whose Hill County-area district does not include Loving County, asked the U.S. Attorney’s office to investigate.

“We write to request immediate action and coordination among agencies to address serious election irregularities and threats of manipulation in Loving County,” added state Sen. Kevin Sparks, R-Midland, and Rep. Brooks Landgraf, R-Odessa, in an Oct. 3 letter to Secretary of State Jane Nelson, whose office oversees elections, and Attorney General Ken Paxton. “We urge your offices to use all available authority to investigate and address election fraud in Loving County.”

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Paxton suggested he was already on it. “My office is taking a very serious look at this situation,” he wrote on Oct. 1.

District Attorney Sarah Stogner, whose sprawling West Texas jurisdiction includes Loving County, said that her office, too, had begun scrutinizing Tanner, who according to public records is based in Indiana. “We are actively investigating a plethora of potential crimes into what he is doing,” she said. Tanner has not been charged with any crime.

[…]

In their letters, Roy, Sparks and Landgraf also cited what they said were long-standing criminal and electoral problems in Loving County that extended beyond any new challenges Tanner may present to the community. Some of the county’s problems are self-made.

“The county is facing increased interstate theft operations, including oilfield thefts, human trafficking and other illicit activity” often tied to gangs, Roy wrote, adding that local law enforcement hasn’t received enough support to pursue the crimes.

Meanwhile, “multiple court rulings from recent election cycles have confirmed illegal voting, fraudulent registrations, and improper election conduct,” Sparks and Landgraf wrote. “Repeat offenders have been identified across multiple cycles, with many illegal votes in 2022 and 2024 directly tied to county officials.” Landgraf referred questions to Sparks, who did not respond to requests for an interview.

[…]

The roiling political waters also have contributed to the defunding of local law enforcement agencies. Last year, county commissioners, whose members had been sparring with the sole constable and sheriff, cut the sheriff’s salary in half and eliminated two of his six deputy positions. They slashed the constable’s salary from $126,000 to $30,000.

Police say the cuts make crime fighting a challenge. But even when deputies arrest people, the county has struggled to prosecute cases, said Stogner, who took office in January.

At the time, she said, Loving County had dozens of cases pending, some of them years old. Many had languished because of the fraught local politics, as well as the difficulty of convening juries in a jurisdiction of a few dozen residents.

“It has been a struggle getting a grand jury seated in Loving County,” she said. “And I don’t think they’ve had a criminal jury trial there in the past 30 years.”

See here for the background. First of all, Chip Roy, Loving County has plenty of money, as this story also noted. It’s drowning in money, which is the single biggest reason why its local politics are so effed up. They did indeed defund their police, which despite being illegal in Texas is a subject that no one in state leadership seems to want to address, for some odd reason. Are you going to propose deploying the Texas National Guard, where they might actually be of use in dealing with a crime wave and a dysfunctional local government?

But all of this is just a sideshow. The real question is why does Loving County need to exist as its own political entity? Its tiny population is also a big part of the problem here. Loving County used to be part of Reeves County, its neighbor to the southwest, which has a much more normal population of around 12,000. Why not just disband it as a county and merge it back into Reeves? Seems to me that would solve a whole lot of these problems. Who’s with me on this?

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Dash for sale

Of interest.

Houston Dynamo and Dash Owner Ted Segal is in “advanced talks” to sell the Dash for $120 million to the RHC Group, according to Sportico.

The Dynamo and Dash declined to comment on the story to the Houston Chronicle.

A group led by Segal bought the Dynamo and Dash, along with Shell Energy Stadium, in 2021.

The RHC Group is described on its website as “an investment and philanthropic platform dedicated to empowering organizations, programs and individuals at the intersection of sports, entertainment and the community.”

Richard Hsiao, 24, is the founder of the RHC Group.

Sportico reports Hsiao is the son of a businessman who is imprisoned in China on charges including embezzlement. Xiao Jianhua, a billionaire in China and Hsiao’s father, was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2022 after being charged with embezzlement and bribery, according to the BBC. The NWSL is “currently seeking additional information on the source of RHC’s money,” Sportico reports, but notes sources say the organization “was funded via money from the independent wealth of Hsiao’s mother.”

[…]

Hsiao announced on his Instagram in July that RHC Group had become the majority owner of Aris BC, a basketball team in Greece.

The RHC Group website lists three pillars for the company: women’s sports; emerging and established sports leagues and teams; and entertainment and consumer trends.

LinkedIn post from the RHC Group from last year on the NWSL Championship says the following: “It’s clearer than ever that continuing to invest in women’s sports pays off – we’re excited about the future and the growth that lies ahead.”

The Houston Dash first began play in the 2014 NWSL season. Reports that Segal was looking at potentially selling the Dash first emerged in January.

Richard Hsiao is clearly not your typical sports team owner, but he does have some experience with that, so here’s hoping he’ll do well if this deal goes through. The Dash have not been as successful overall as the Dynamo have been, and they were one of the NWSL clubs that fired a coach for abusive behavior – as it happens, few months after Segal bought the team – so they could benefit from having an owner that might be more focused on them. We’re going to be Dash season ticket holders next year after two years of doing the same for the Dynamo, so I’m rooting for them to emerge from this in a better place. Good luck, y’all.

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Three ridiculous voting and election stories

“Silly season” doesn’t begin to cover this stuff.

Item 1: Paxton sides with Texas GOP, against secretary of state in lawsuit seeking to close primaries

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Last month, the Republican Party of Texas sued over a state law that allows anyone to vote in any primary election, regardless of party affiliation.

On Thursday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton responded, not to defend the state law, but to side with the GOP in asking a federal judge to strike down parts of the election code that allow for open primaries.

“The unconstitutional law stopping the [Republican Party of Texas] from closing its primaries is completely indefensible and a slap in the face to the Republican Party and voters,” Paxton said.

This is the latest in a string of cases where Paxton, as the state’s top lawyer, has not only declined to defend a state law, but actively campaigned for the courts to strike it down.

Earlier this summer, the Department of Justice sued Texas over a law providing in-state tuition for undocumented college students. Paxton agreed to a consent decree striking down the law just six hours after the suit was filed.

Paxton indicated in a press release that he hoped to see a similarly swift resolution in this case, discouraging the Secretary of State’s office from “fighting this lawsuit with expensive out-of-state lawyers.”

Typically, the attorney general’s office defends state laws when they are challenged. But investigations from The Texas Tribune and ProPublica have identified at least 75 times when his office declined to defend state agencies in court; in other cases, Paxton’s office has hired expensive private lawyers to take on Big Tech companies and other high-profile litigation.

Paxton’s office gave Secretary of State Jane Nelson less than an hour’s notice that they would be siding against her agency in the lawsuit, a lawyer for Nelson said in a brief filed Thursday afternoon. She intends to oppose the motion, the brief said.

The GOP argued in its original lawsuit that the state’s open primary system, in which people can vote in either primary, regardless of party affiliation, is a violation of their rights under the First Amendment. They want a closed primary, where voters must register with a party before gaining access to the first, and in many cases, most important, round of voting.

The suit alleges that crossover voting, where people affiliated with one party vote in the other primary, leads to the selection of more moderate candidates and gives non-party members unfair influence.

“In Texas, Republicans, and only Republicans, should select Republican nominees,” Republican Party of Texas Chair Abraham George said in a brief statement posted on social media.

[…]

Texas has more than 18 million registered voters, all of whom would have to re-register with a party affiliation. The state would have to redesign its forms and software to allow for party affiliation.

“Re-registering the entire state’s universe of voters would be impossible in a five-month to six months,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “There’s no way to get around that.”

See here for the background. Insisting on being allowed to do the impossible is pretty much baked into the modern Republican Party. Good on Jane Nelson for standing up for her office. I wish her luck. The hand-picked judge for this case is our old buddy Matthew Kacsmaryk, so expect the usual level of deferential treatment.

Item 2: How the Texas GOP’s bid to block lawmakers from the ballot defies a century of court precedent

The year was 1930, and Texas Democrats had a problem.

State Sen. Thomas B. Love had declared his intention to run for governor as a Democrat, just months after he campaigned for Republican presidential nominee Herbert Hoover. For this unacceptable breach of party loyalty, the State Democratic Executive Committee wanted him off the primary ballot.

But they could do no such thing, the Texas Supreme Court said, ruling that Texas’ election laws “jealously guard the voters’ power” by compelling state political parties to place otherwise qualified candidates on the ballot, regardless of their adherence to party rules or loyalty tests. The state’s high court has repeatedly upheld this ruling, remarking in 1958 with some frustration that “no other holding would comport with sound public policy.”

But 95 years after Democrats were forced to keep Love on the ballot, Republicans are on the brink of testing the issue once more.

The State Republican Executive Committee is meeting Saturday to decide whether to censure lawmakers they consider insufficiently loyal, over infractions that include voting for an establishment-aligned speaker candidate over a rival backed by the House’s rightmost faction. Under party rules passed last year, these censures could bar candidates from the Republican primary ballot for two years.

As private ideological groups that run state-sanctioned primaries, political parties occupy a liminal space in our democracy. Courts have struggled to balance their free speech rights with their role as government actors, allowing parties to remove candidates from the ballot in some states while striking down such efforts in others.

But in Texas, the courts have been consistent: Party leadership cannot enforce its own purity tests to remove candidates from the primary ballot. The state party’s willingness to consider testing this precedent has frustrated even some staunch Republicans.

“We’re the party of less government and local control,” Smith County GOP chair David Stein said. “I don’t want 64 members of the SREC deciding who gets elected out of Smith County, Texas. That’s up to our voters, and I feel very strongly about that.”

[…]

Most cases where parties have been allowed to remove someone from the ballot involve candidates who are plainly antithetical to the party’s values, like [David] Duke, or a member of the opposing party seeking an electoral advantage, Kang said. In Texas, the lawmakers facing censure are longtime Republican elected officials, including current and former speakers of the House, who represent one of the party’s major factions.

“This is a much tougher case, when it’s someone in the mainstream of the party, and what party leadership is trying to do is enforce some sort of orthodoxy or party-line position that isn’t necessarily the consensus view within the party,” Kang said.

Some county GOP parties have condemned this effort as undemocratic, noting that it’s exactly the type of party-level control that voter-led primaries intended to get rid of.

“Such a concentration of authority in a small, centralized body resembles not the open democracy envisioned by our Founders, but instead echoes the undemocratic practices of the old Soviet Politburo, where a handful of elites determined who could or could not stand for election,” Burrows’ hometown Lubbock County GOP wrote on Facebook.

GOP megadonor Alex Fairly has vowed to tap into his $20 million political action committee to challenge any potential removals. The effort is “not only unlawful, it’s disastrous for the Republican Party of Texas,” he said in a statement.

A group of seven House Republicans facing potential censure, led by Burrows, sent party leadership a letter Wednesday asking them to reconsider.

“It sends a message that loyalty to the grassroots and to the national conservative agenda is subordinate to the whims of the local or state party insiders rather than Republican primary voters,” they wrote. “Candidate choice in Republican primaries must rest with the people, not party bosses.”

See here for more on Alex Fairly, the would-be billionaire overlord with some modicum of self-awareness. I say embrace the chaos, Republicans. Let their be a big ripping fight over who are the Real Republicans for everyone to see. If it gets a few people unaccountably mad at their colleagues, it’s all to the good.

Item 3: Dallas County GOP’s push to hand-count 2026 ballots could upend voting for Democrats

Republicans in Dallas County, one of Texas’ largest voting jurisdictions, say they want to count ballots in their coming March primary by hand, if they can afford to, a change that could delay the reporting of election results and have far-reaching consequences for all of the county’s 1.5 million voters.

The decision could force Dallas Democrats, as well as Republicans, to return to casting ballots at their assigned local precincts, rather than countywide vote centers, which would require finding scores of additional polling locations and hundreds more workers. It could also vastly increase the cost of holding both primaries, an increase that the parties would have to be prepared to cover on their own.

Cost is one reason why Dallas County Republicans decided in 2023 against hand-counting ballots. At the time, Jennifer Stoddard Hajdu, then the county GOP chair, estimated the party would need more than $1 million to hand-count the more than 70,000 ballots cast in the 2024 primary.

Two years later, Hajdu is still skeptical. “I just think there are so many parts to this that it’s going to be very difficult to get it done,” she said.

But Allen West, a former Florida congressman and Army veteran who is the new chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party, said that the size of the challenge shouldn’t deter the party. He said that party members distrust electronic voting equipment, and that the county’s problems with some of its electronic pollbooks last year contributed to the renewed push to hand-count ballots.

The Dallas County Republican Party’s executive committee voted in September to hand-count primary ballots, and set a goal to raise $500,000 to get it done, West said.

“Let’s not forget this is the way it used to be done,” West said, referring to hand-counts and precinct-based voting. In the Army, he said, “we don’t take that excuse of anything being too hard.”

Calls for hand-counting ballots have grown in recent years amid skepticism and misinformation campaigns about machines used for voting and tabulating ballots. But experts agree and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines.

In Gillespie County, in the Hill Country about 80 miles west of Austin, Republicans spent months training hundreds of workers to hand-count ballots in 2024. Republicans also designed ballots that couldn’t be tabulated by machines, and paid the printing costs.

On Election Day that year, 350 workers spent nearly 24 hours counting more than 8,000 ballots. In 12 out of 13 precincts, the party found errors in their tallies. And since state law does not require a post-election audit of ballots that are counted by hand, those results have yet to be checked for accuracy.

Even so, Gillespie County Republicans are planning to hand-count their primary ballots in 2026.

In Austin, Travis County Republicans hand-counted 2,000 mail-in ballots in 2024, which was a fraction of the total ballots cast. The group reported discrepancies in its own count that had to be corrected. Officials there told Votebeat that they have yet to decide if they’ll do so again in 2026.

In Williamson County, north of Austin, Republicans considered hand-counting for the 2026 primary, but have now decided against it. The county is home to about 450,000 registered voters.

“Once the logistics started to get fleshed out a little bit more, that’s when reality hit,” said Michelle Evans, the Williamson County Republican Party chair. Evans said requirements in state law mean it’s difficult to do a hand-count “without an extreme amount of manpower and a budget that we may not be able to fulfill.”

See here for more on the Gillespie County experience. Trying to argue facts with Allen West is like trying to explain linear algebra to a cat, so I’m not going to bother. I will just say that the position of the Dallas County Democratic Party should be that they do not support anything that would prevent them from doing countywide voting centers. I wish them, and all the poor souls in the Dallas County Elections office, all the best.

UPDATE: The censure effort was much ado about not much.

The Texas GOP has voted to censure five of its own in the Texas House yet stopped short of banning them from the 2026 primary ballot, rejecting an untested provision that some House members say would have violated their constitutional right to appear on the ballot.

The State Republican Executive Committee, the party’s governing board, met in the state Capitol on Saturday to consider whether to reprimand 10 Republican House members for being insufficiently conservative. In the end, the board rejected half of the censures and dismissed attempts to bar them from the March primary, a deescalation of intraparty tension that reached a fever pitch at the start of this year.

Whatever. Please keep the discord going, you guys. Fight more among yourselves, it’s good for the rest of us.

Posted in Election 2026, Legal matters, Show Business for Ugly People | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Another Kerrville flooding lawsuit filed

I wish them luck.

The family of a man killed in the July 4 floods in Central Texas has sued the RV park where he and his wife were staying, alleging the campground’s owners knowingly placed its guests in an area that carried a high risk of flooding.

The lawsuit filed this week by the children of Jeff Ramsey, 61, of Lewisville, Texas, alleges their father’s death was caused by the negligence of the owners and operators of the HTR TX Hill Country RV park and campground, where at least 37 people died. Ramsey, whose body has not been found, is presumed to have died along with his wife, Tanya, after the Guadalupe River surged to record levels, sweeping away RVs, trailers and vehicles at the park in Ingram.

The legal action, which is among the first taken by relatives of the Texas flood victims, alleges that HTR TX Hill Country’s owners and managers did not instruct Ramsey and other guests to evacuate despite an imminent flood threat. The company also did not establish proper plans to respond to emergency floods, the lawsuit states.

Jeff Ramsey and Tanya Ramsey, 46, were awoken by heavy rain in the early morning of July 4 and were unable to leave their camper due to the rapidly rising water, the lawsuit states. Ramsey made a final call to his children to tell them he loved them before floodwaters surrounded their camper and swept it away, the lawsuit adds.

It also alleges that the Davis Cos., a Boston-based real estate firm that owns HTR, and a managing partner of HTR Resorts, Minh Tran, housed guests in a “known floodplain with a history of dangerous flooding.”

“This tragedy was both foreseeable and preventable,” attorneys at Webster Vicknair MacLeod, which is representing the Ramsey family, wrote in a news release. “By disregarding repeated emergency alerts and keeping guests in harm’s way, these companies … placed profit over people.”

[…]

Washington Post investigation found that HTR TX Hill Country was the site of the largest known cluster of deaths from the July 4 floods. It also found that Tran had dismissed concerns about flooding at a 2021 city council meeting, when HTR Investors — the company that had just purchased the park — was planning upgrades to its campgrounds that would have left RV sites in the Guadalupe’s high-risk floodway, known as “Flash Flood Alley.”

The company said the tiny homes it was adding to the site were portable, despite being built with roofed porches and stairs.

The Post also found that a dozen campgrounds in surrounding Kerr County had RV lots within the river’s floodplain. Seven of those, including HTR, sat at least partly within an even more dangerous floodway.

In August, the parents of another victim living at HTR filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the park and its general manager. Several more families of people killed at the park and one survivor joined that suit last month. HTR said again in statements to local news outlets that it rejected the “fundamental premise” of that lawsuit.

See here for more on that first lawsuit. I don’t have much to add here, this remains a terrible tragedy that really didn’t get adequate attention during the special sessions. It will be interesting to see, at the start of next summer, the news stories about the reopened camps and what measures they have or haven’t taken to mitigate risk and improve safety, and the items that the Lege didn’t address. The Hill Country is a beautiful place, but I don’t know that I’d want to sleep anywhere within a mile of the Guadalupe River, not without some real reassurances about alerts and preparedness.

On the subject of that first lawsuit, there are now more plaintiffs, as noted above.

The families of 12 Hill Country flood victims have been added to the lawsuit against a Hill Country campground

They were added to an amended court petition, originally filed by the family of Jada Floyd, seeking at least $1 million in monetary damages from the HTR TX Hill Country Resort.

The lawsuit alleges the Kerrville resort’s owners, developers, general manager and management companies were negligent in the preparation and evacuation related to flooding on July 4.

“Defendants were objectively aware of the extreme risk posed by the conditions which caused Plaintiffs’ injuries,” the petition said, “but did nothing to rectify them.”

[…]

The defendants in the petition are listed as The Davis Companies Inc., investors of the HTR TX Hill Country; HTR Kerrville, which owns the land of the resort; Blue Water Development, believed to be the company that operates the resort; and Ilana Callahan, the general manager of the campground.

According to the suit, the defendants continued to operate the resort despite being aware of the risk of flooding and allegedly did not warn guests of this risk.

“Defendants lacked proper plans, protocol, and equipment to respond to the flooding,” the lawsuit states. “Defendants failed to implement sufficient infrastructure improvements and maintenance to establish and maintain a safe means of egress from the property to safety.”

The suit stated that there were 11 Flash Flood Warnings from officials between July 2 and July 4, which “were ignored” by the defendants.

“Surviving guests of the HTR TX Hill Country Resort campground report that it was someone honking a car horn that awoke them, and they were barely able to escape with their lives as the water rose from ankle deep to waist deep in minutes,” the lawsuit alleges.

Again, not that much to add here, I’m just keeping an eye on this. If these lawsuits actually go to trial, I expect they will be riveting, heartbreaking, and likely very revealing about just how much danger a lot of people over many years had no idea they were in.

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Endorsement watch: Chron for Menefee in CD18

Special election endorsement #2 is in the books.

Christian Menefee

Let’s get this out of the way: the 18th Congressional district is a storied district with a rich legacy of trailblazing Black Houston leaders from Barbara Jordan to Mickey Leland and Sheila Jackson Lee. The district, created in 1972, slices through large swaths of north, northeast and northwest Houston as well as the historic Black hub of Houston, Third Ward.

That said, who in their right mind wants the job now?

After two incumbents in a row died suddenly while in office, Gov. Greg Abbott showed just how much he valued the district by slow-walking the special election to fill the empty seat until this November. In the meantime, his party redistricted the whole thing, meaning that whoever wins this race would face a primary next year in a dramatically different district. Not to mention the winner, likely to be a Democrat, will head to a U.S. House of Representatives where Democrats have little to no voice on the floor.

So again, who wants it?

Well, plenty of people. Sixteen to be exact.

We’d love to tell you about each of them but we’ll cut to the chase and share our pick:

Christian Menefee.

The accomplished Harris County Attorney has made a name for himself taking on Republican state leaders. Not only has he challenged Attorney General Ken Paxton and former State Comptroller Glenn Hegar in court when they wanted to discount thousands of votes or accuse the county of defunding law enforcement, he’s won.

Now, Menefee, 37, promises to bring his legal acumen to Washington, D.C., hoping to spearhead Democrats’ still emergent strategy to take on the overreaches of President Donald Trump’s administration. Again, he’s already had some success here, helping the county claw back nearly $20 million in public health funding that Trump tried to cancel earlier this year.

“Those lawsuits can be incredibly powerful,” he told the editorial board.

It’s unusual to run a campaign for a lawmaking seat with the hopes of focusing on the courtroom strategy but we believe that this reveals his deep thinking about the political reality of our moment.

I’ll cut to the chase too and say you should go read the rest. They have good things to say about the other top contenders – in their star rating system, Menefee is given four stars, Amanda Edwards and Jolanda Jones get three and a half, and Isaiah Martin gets three – and give a “people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing that they like” nod to Republican Carmen Montiel. If you do read the whole thing you’ll see why I rolled my eyes at that part of it.

I’ve got interviews with the top four contenders set to roll next week. I’m also awaiting the October finance reports, which should be mostly up by the end of next week, to see who’s been doing what. Polling suggests that this will end in a runoff between Menefee and either Jones or Edwards. Isaiah Martin is running a good campaign and I’ve been favorably impressed by him, but he’s having trouble getting traction with the wider (and older) electorate, who’s not quite ready to trust someone as new to the scene as he is.

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Interview with Robbie McDonough

Robbie McDonough

At the end of my HISD interview cycle, I noted that I had reached out to District V candidate Robbie McDonough but had not heard back from him. That happens sometimes, campaign-related email addresses are not always reliable. Well, McDonough reached out to me earlier this week, having found the email that had fallen through the cracks, and so we had that interview. That happens too, and I’m glad we were able to work this out. McDonough is an attorney and an HISD parent, and made his issues with Mike Miles plain in an op-ed he wrote for the Chron last year. 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
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Jordan Thomas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Dwight Boykins, Houston City Council At Large #4
Al Lloyd, 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 the occasional detour off the beaten path is welcomed. Next week as noted we get into the race we’ve been waiting for the longest, the special election in CD18.

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Checking in on SD09

Our attention here in Houston is focused on the long-overdue special election in CD18, but it’s not the only special election of consequence on the ballot. One could argue that the special election in SD09, which was called to fill the vacancy left when Kelly Hancock was appointed as Comptroller, is more consequential as there is the (unlikely, but not non-existent) chance of a partisan flip. I was intrigued by this Quorum Report story from this past week:

Taylor Rehmet

Special election to succeed Sen. Hancock creates strange bedfellows and possibility of an upset

The race pits some top capitol insiders and the “new right” in Tarrant County against the local establishment

The special election for Senate District 9 in Tarrant County is anything but normal.

The safe Republican seat vacated by acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock includes two Republicans – former Southlake Mayor John Huffman and Patriot Mobile Chief Communications Officer Leigh Wambsganss along with Democrat and labor leader Taylor Rehmet.

It’s a race pitting the Austin establishment and the county’s new right coalition, who back Wambsganss, at the urging of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick against the Tarrant County establishment who support either Huffman, or more quietly Rehmet.

Huffman was mayor of one of the most conservative cities in the county’s hot bed of conservativism. Yet he’s being attacked for backing Black Lives Matter activists. That’s the allegation, anyway.

That’s the free excerpt, so I can’t tell you if the possible upset hinted at is Rehmet or whichever of the two wingnuts is the “wrong” one. In a year where Democrats have been overperforming in special elections around the country, you’d think that a district that Donald Trump won 58.0 – 40.6 last year and Ted Cruz won 55.6 – 43.6 in 2018 might draw some more attention, but so far not really. I found nothing remotely recent in a Google News search for “Taylor Rehmet”, and I sure haven’t been getting any emails or other notices about that race.

That may be a reflection of, or a consequence of, the fundraising. In the 30-day reports, John Huffman reported raising $575K, with $393K on hand. Leigh Wambsganss raised $844K, with $617K on hand. And Taylor Rehment…raised $70K, with $31K on hand. That’s not a good way to win a district that’s larger than a Congressional district.

Fundraising is always on the candidate first and foremost, but this should be a featured election, and the radio silence about it surely isn’t helping. Where’s the TDP? Where are the Democratic Senators? Sen. Roland Gutierrez was recently stumping for Rehmet, which is very much to his credit. Senators Sarah Eckhardt and Nathan Johnson each contributed $1,000, and State Rep. Chris Turner kicked in $500 (former State Rep. Lon Burnam added $250), to theirs as well. But we can do better than that.

There’s still time, and if the overall Democratic vote is more or less in line with the normal-year partisan level, Rehmet should be in good position to make the runoff. The main problem is that with an underfunded campaign and an off year special election, there’s no mechanism to ensure a normal-ish partisan mix. In a district like this, in a year like this, it would be embarrassing if Rehmet couldn’t break thirty percent, which ought to be enough to qualify for overtime. I’m too far away to have any feel for this. I sure hope Rehmet can get there. I just wish there were more eyes on this one. Let’s please not be an outlier for the wrong reason.

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Endorsement watch: Chron goes with Jordan Thomas

The Chron makes their recommendation for the City Council At Large #4 special election.

Jordan Thomas

Voters should try to find someone among the current crop of candidates who has the vision and knowledge to actually make something productive out of a largely undefined role — a Houstonian who can use their position at City Hall to drive the change our city needs even as just one vote out of 16.

That is why we endorse Jordan Thomas for At Large 4.

More than any other candidate, Thomas has a real sense of how our municipal government can make Houston a better, more resilient place to live.

“I almost feel like we’re directionless, and someone out of the 17 voices that sit on City Council needs to be painting a positive vision of the future,” he said during the endorsement meeting. “For me, in a word, that is urbanism. We need a more dense city to combat our sprawl. We need a city that attracts the workforce of the future, not the jobs of yesterday.”

Thomas combines a youthful passion — he’s 36 — with a wonky knowledge about urbanism and road safety. At a time when more Houstonians die in car crashes than homicides, we need someone who will be an unabashed advocate for smarter road design, better sidewalks, and cutting the red tape that forces developers to build suburban-style construction in our urban core.

Houston is testing the limits of how sprawl can deliver growth and affordability, and Thomas is one of the few local politicos plugged into the national movement pursuing bipartisan policies to lower the cost of housing and help cities deliver services in an efficient, effective manner. His campaign website might as well be a think tank in miniature, filled with whip-smart ideas for tackling housing, infrastructure and flooding. Incumbents at City Hall should give it a read.

[…]

Finally, we endorse Thomas because he has the unique ability to fill a much-needed role at City Hall — dedicated opposition.

Since the election of John Whitmire, we have watched as the City Council has been cowed by our strong mayor system. With 50 years of political experience, Whitmire has had little difficulty using his power to steamroll his opponents and force his allies to fall in line. Behind the scenes and off the record we hear elected officials and civic leaders muttering about how the mayor has gone astray, but few are brave enough to speak up out of fear that they’ll earn his ire and political punishment.

The city is worse off as a result. Political silence means the mayor has little incentive to stop unilaterally altering infrastructure projects, or substituting anecdotes and personal opinion for data and community input. He has not been challenged to explain his many surprise decisions about road projects, or lay out plans to solve the city’s financial woes in a way that doesn’t cut services to the bone.

Meeting with the editorial board, Thomas said he wants to be the “tip of the spear” — someone who can give voice to community concerns about the Whitmire administration, rally much-needed effective opposition, and use Council’s new powers from Proposition A to force votes on key policies. Iron sharpens iron, and having Thomas at City Hall would help make Whitmire a better mayor.

But Thomas is no mere obstructionist. He demonstrates a depth of knowledge about municipal policy that eclipses many longtime elected officials, and a real sense about how Houston can and should navigate a changing energy landscape that threatens to undermine our economic success and civic well-being.

We don’t have any illusions about the uphill battle Thomas faces to win this race. He has done little fundraising and has a dearth of serious endorsements. But Thomas is a candidate for this moment. He is the sort of candidate this City Council needs today — someone with policy chops, much-needed courage of conviction, and an optimistic vision for Houston’s future.

That’s an interesting rationale, to say the least. Might raise an eyebrow or two in the Mayor’s office, if any of them are reading the Chronicle. Can’t say I’m unhappy with it, that’s for sure.

The Chron used its star rating system in this endorsement, giving Thomas four stars, Alejandra Salinas three and a half, Dwight Boykins two and a half, Al Lloyd and Martina Lemond Dixon two stars each. I wonder how many of the other candidates were in for the interview.

Anyway. Speaking of interviews, here are the interviews I did with AL4 candidates:

Alejandra Salinas
Jordan Thomas
Dwight Boykins
Al Lloyd

I’ve got a post in the works for the thirty day finance reports, which I will have up in the next day or two.

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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.

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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.

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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 , , , , , , , | 8 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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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?

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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.

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