Off the Kuff | Knowledge Is Good

PragerU videos? Seriously?

Posted on November 24, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Once again I have to ask, what the hell is going on at HISD?

A Friday lesson intended to teach students at dozens of Houston ISD schools how to think objectively included a video that mocked the idea of human-caused climate change from PragerU, a Florida nonprofit criticized for pushing biased, conservative viewpoints.

Meant to help students discern fact from opinion, the seven-minute clip encouraged viewers to “do your own research,” citing examples that push back on the idea that humans have caused climate change.

PragerU, the video’s creator, describes itself as “the world’s leading conservative nonprofit that is focused on changing minds through the creative use of digital media.” It has published content on the supposed dangers of gender-affirming care and how slavery may have benefitted Black people. Despite the name, it is not a university.

The video was included in PowerPoint slides created by HISD for a course called the “Art of Thinking,” a feature of Superintendent Mike Miles’ new program for 85 schools. The lesson plans, obtained by the Houston Landing, means the video likely reached students at the 73 overhauled elementary and middle schools.

HISD will discontinue the use of PragerU content going forward, Chief Communication Officer Leila Walsh said Tuesday in response to questions from the Landing. The district had included the video with the intent of helping students assess the reliability of information and recognize hidden biases, using examples they may encounter in the real world, she said.

“The lesson was designed to help students think critically about the accuracy and subjectivity of information. After speaking with the curriculum team, they have decided to no longer use PragerU video content,” Walsh wrote in an email.

Parents from Pugh and Wainwright elementary schools confirmed their fifth-graders had been shown the PragerU video in class on Friday. Three teachers also supplied the district-created lesson plans to the Landing. The parents said they were disturbed by the content, but said it was the first time they were aware of a video from the conservative nonprofit appearing in a lesson.

“In a way, they’re already subliminally telling our kids to totally dismiss the whole global warming thing,” said Jessica Campos, whose daughter attends Pugh.

The video includes many short skits meant to help students understand objective thinking, several of which take aim at climate change. One example points out that temperature fluctuations occurred prior to industrialization, and another implies climate change believers think the world will end in 12 years.

“Some of it was legit and some of it seemed weird or out of place and it was all rather fixated on beating down the idea of climate change,” said Texas State Climatologist and Texas A&M Professor John Nielsen-Gammon, who reviewed the video at the request of the Landing. He said humans definitely are causing changes to the earth’s climate and the world definitely will not end in 12 years.

University of Texas at Austin College of Education Professor David DeMatthews added that, to him, it was a red flag that HISD would include any content from PragerU in a lesson.

“A lot of the material that (PragerU) provides is highly controversial, highly biased and is not really aligned with historical, or even, at times, scientific consensus around particular issues,” DeMatthews said.

Un-fucking-believable.

Let me make two points very clear. One is that in a world where the HISD Superintendent had any accountability, the elected Trustees would be well within their rights to call the Super onto the carpet and demand answers about who thought shoving propaganda down students’ throats was a good idea and why haven’t they been fired already. They would be within their rights to make it clear that the Super’s job was on the line over this as well. We do not live in that world, which is how we end up with a wishy-washy non-answer from the communications officer instead. I am incandescent with rage about this.

And two, if “parents rights” means anything, then as an HISD parent I have the right to object to this kind of “content” being shown anywhere in an HISD classroom. Which, again, if we had a functional Board that was responsive to the will of the stakeholders and which had actual oversight of the Superintendent, would result in some accountability. Again, I am angry to the point of wanting to smash things.

I don’t know what else to say. Because we have no way to effect any change at HISD right now, because there is no forum for expressing our views in a way that will be heard and taken seriously, this is just another thing that happened that Mike Miles doesn’t even have to acknowledge. And I’m supposed to accept that this guy is the savior of our schools. Un-fucking-believable.

Posted in School days | Tagged Board of Managers, HISD, Houston, Mike Miles, New Education System, PragerU, propaganda, schools | 13 Comments

The business brief against the state abortion ban

Posted on November 24, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Would like to see a lot more co-signers on this.

Forty Texas companies and business leaders are entering the fight against Texas’ abortion ban, filing a brief with the Texas Supreme Court that argues the “ambiguity” in the law’s medical exceptions cost the state an estimated $14.5 billion in lost revenue every year.

Austin-based dating app giant Bumble is leading the effort, submitting an amicus brief ahead of the high court’s arguments in Zurawski v. Texas. Lead plaintiff Amanda Zurawski is challenging the state’s abortion ban after she nearly died of sepsis due to a pregnancy complication. She says the Texas abortion ban’s medical exceptions are too vague, preventing her doctor from providing a medically necessary abortion until she had nearly died.

“We feel it’s our duty not just to provide our workforce with access to reproductive health care, but to speak out – and speak loudly – against the retrogression of women’s rights,” Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd said. “Texas’s confusing medical exceptions increase business costs, drive away talent, and threaten workforce diversity and well-being.”

Dozens of other companies signed onto the brief, including South by Southwest, Zilker Properties, ATX Television Festival, and Central Presbyterian Church.

The brief cites research from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) to arrive at their claim that Texas’ abortion ban costs the state nearly $15 billion annually. They assert that the ban translates to women earning less, taking more time off work, and leaving the workforce.

IWPR’s research estimates more than 80,000 women between 15 and 44 could enter the workforce without the abortion ban.

“An uncertain and confusing Texas regulatory environment is creating professional and personal difficulties for those who work and travel in Texas, as well as adversely impacting employee recruitment and retention, and creating obstacles for attracting new businesses, visitors and events,” law firm Reed Smith explained.

See here for the previous update, and here for that cited research. I appreciate the effort, though I’m always a bit leery of studies like this and don’t know how much impact these briefs can have. I think there’s a chance the plaintiffs can prevail in this lawsuit – not a great chance, maybe fifty-fifty at best, but a chance. Even a total victory will mean only a small loosening of the extreme anti-abortion law, so the best case here is limited. Vital, to be sure, but still a huge step back from where we once were. The only way forward, to truly get back to a better place, is at the ballot box, here and at the national level. Knocking out Ted Cruz, for example, would be massive. I care a lot about this case and will keep paying attention to it, but we’ve all got to keep our eyes on the bigger goals. We need to win more elections. There’s no other way to do it. Texas Monthly, which takes a closer look at Bumble’s angle on this, has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged abortion, Amanda Zurawski, Bumble, Center for Reproductive Rights, Election 2024, EMTALA, hospitals, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, lawsuit, Supreme Court, Texas, Texas Medical Association, The Lege | 1 Comment

Thanksgiving video break: It’s about Alice

Posted on November 23, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

We don’t have many traditions here but we like the ones we have.

I am as always thankful for my family and friends, my health, the fact that I still get enjoyment from things I’ve done for a long time like this blog, and for you my readers. Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving however and wherever you celebrate it.

Posted in Music | Tagged Thanksgiving, videos | 7 Comments

Yet another effort to kill the Voting Rights Act

Posted on November 22, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Just a reminder that the Fifth Circuit isn’the only home for terrible appellate judges.

A divided federal appellate panel took a pipe to the knees of the Voting Rights Act Monday, handing down an eyebrow-raising decision that would severely curtail the effectiveness of the landmark civil rights law.

Two of the judges on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals panel — one appointed by Donald Trump and one by George W. Bush — ruled that individuals can no longer bring lawsuits under the VRA. They assert that only the U.S. attorney general can bring enforcement actions under the law.

If the decision holds, VRA cases would nosedive even under Democratic administrations due to limited resources, and would likely stop completely under Republican ones. Currently, voting rights organizations usually collaborate with individual voters to bring VRA claims, one of the last tools with which to challenge gerrymandering on the federal level.

Chief Judge Lavenski Smith, another Bush appointee, dissented and would have preserved the private right of action under the VRA.

The case originated as a VRA lawsuit brought by the Arkansas State Conference NAACP and Arkansas Public Policy Panel alleging racial gerrymandering in the map dividing the districts for the Arkansas House of Representatives. It names state officials, including Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R), as defendants.

Judges Raymond Gruender and David Stras, in changing the nature of the VRA as we know it, rejected both Supreme Court guidance on the topic as well as legislative history. The justices had discussed Section 2 — the part of the law under which vote dilution cases are brought in court — in a 1996 case over a different part of the VRA. They rested that decision on their assumption that the private right of action applied to Section 2 as well.

But that wasn’t enough for Gruender and Stras.

“Taken at face value, these statements appear to create an open-and-shut case that there must be a way to privately enforce § 2,” they wrote. “If five Justices assume it, then it must be true. The problem, however, is that these were just background assumptions — mere dicta at most.”

They also make short work of the legislative history. Both the Senate and House Judiciary Committees in 1982, when Congress amended the statute, wrote that Congress had “clearly intended” for individuals to be able to sue under Section 2 of the law.

“There are many reasons to doubt legislative history as an interpretive tool,” they shrugged, adding: “Nor is it clear how the 1982 Congress could possibly have known what a different set of legislators thought 17 years earlier.”

[…]

The case will likely reach the Supreme Court, a venue that has been particularly hostile to the VRA under John Roberts’ stewardship, but which batted back a major challenge to the law in a surprising decision last session. The VRA, even one weakened by the Supreme Court, remains so essential to this kind of litigation because the Court shut the federal courthouse doors to partisan gerrymandering cases, leaving only racial ones available.

“Until the Court rules or Congress amends the statute, I would follow existing precedent that permits citizens to seek a judicial remedy,” Smith wrote. “Rights so foundational to self government and citizenship should not depend solely on the discretion or availability of the government’s agents for protection.”

A copy of the opinion is embedded in the story. I Am Not A Lawyer, but I do know Calvinball when I see it. Sorry to ruin your Thanksgiving with this kind of news, but here we are. The Associated Press has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged Arkansas, Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, Justice Department, lawsuit, NAACP, redistricting, Voting Rights Act | Comments Off

The Mike Miles effect so far

Posted on November 22, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

A couple of explainers from the Chron. First up, this one about what has actually happened so far in HISD since Mike Miles took over.

Superintendent Mike Miles has made sweeping changes in Houston ISD since he was appointed by the Texas Education Agency in June to run the largest school system in the Lone Star state.

Nearly six months into his tenure, Miles has championed systemic reforms and swiftly implemented policies, some of which have sparked great pushback and turmoil among families, teachers and school communities across the district. For his part, the new superintendent says the drastic changes are necessary to significantly improve academic achievement, especially among Black and Hispanic students, by raising expectations and providing high-quality instruction.

The Chronicle has compiled below a recap of the biggest changes so far in HISD under Miles.

Most of what’s in there is familiar, but given how fast everything has happened and how many stories there have been about what’s been going on, you’d be forgiven if there were one or two things you’d forgotten or missed the first time around. I have a hard enough time keeping up.

Two, there’s this story about the District of Innovation stuff and what the relevant laws are that the district’s DoI application are meant to do.

Texas has dozens of laws governing how school districts must operate, but districts can opt out of almost all of them through the process of becoming a “District of Innovation.”

Since the Legislature established the status in 2015, nearly every eligible school district in the state earned the DOI designation. Houston ISD has been one of a few dozen hold outs, but the district is now on the verge of becoming a DOI after the District Advisory Committee voted Tuesday in favor of the plan outlining the exemptions the district wants to seek.

The HISD Board of Managers is expected to vote on the plan during its regular meeting Dec. 14. If at least two-thirds agree, it would go into effect immediately.

The plan would exempt the district from seven state regulations, including ones regulating the school start date, the certification of teachers and teacher evaluations. Here’s why education policy experts say these regulations exist and why HISD is seeking an exemption to them:

Again, you probably know most of this already, but you might have missed a few things in your attempt to drink from the firehose. If the net effect is that you feel dizzy and a little disoriented, I don’t think that’s accidental.

Posted in School days | Tagged Board of Managers, District of Innovation, HISD, Mike Miles, New Education System, schools, Texas, Texas Education Agency | Comments Off

Dispatches from Dallas, November 22 edition

Posted on November 22, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, it’s the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination; the Bishop of Tyler gets the sack; Elon and Ken Paxton going after Media Matters in Fort Worth; voter turnout; filing news; schools and universities; assorted haters and bigots; Dallas area cybersecurity; “amortization”, environmental justice, the Lege and the Dallas City Council; the difference between D Magazine and the DMN on bribery lawsuits; and more, including a new zoo baby!

This week’s post was brought to you by Ludovico Einaudi, whose music is a good soundtrack for working.

As most people know, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated here in Dallas on November 22, 1963. This was an event that shaped the history of the city and the nation, for good and ill. In the flurry of coverage surrounding the anniversary, I found a few gems. Here’s a somewhat defensive DMN story about Dallas needing to embrace having been the City of Hate to get over the assassination. I don’t agree with everything in it; for one thing, it’s pretty clearly directed at white Dallas. But it was interesting to read from someone who was a child here in Dallas when it happened and is still in the journalism business. The Star-Telegram has a slate of stories, the most interesting piece of which, to me, anyway, was trying to figure out who Lee Harvey Oswald’s pallbearers were. Apparently the reporters on the scene did the duty, except for the DMN’s guy, who was afraid he’d get fired for supporting (in the casket) a (dead) Communist, but now they’re not sure who a couple of the men in the photos were. The Washington Post has reminiscences from a surviving Secret Service agent who has a new book out. And here’s a fascinating piece from the Guardian on the anniversary that spends a fair amount of time talking about how the conditions that surrounded the assassination are the national norm in 2023.

Meanwhile, in Tyler, the (now former) Bishop, Joseph Strickland, a notorious archconservative and complainer about the Pope, was relieved of duty on November 11. This was another story with international coverage (Guardian; NPR; Washington Post.) If you’re not Catholic or simply don’t get the intricacy of canon law, Texas Standard has a good explainer.

Since Tyler is right around the corner from Dallas, it’s gotten outsized coverage from the local news, like this reaction piece from local Catholics and this analysis piece from one of the DMN’s religion reporter. Although there was a lot of advance reporting on a march in Tyler in support of Bishop Strickland, there hasn’t been much coverage of it since (this short WFAA report was about it) and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the last news about it. While I’m not Catholic, I am a medievalist by training, and I know that grumbling about Papal rulings without following through is a pastime with a centuries-long history.

In other news:

A last-minute entry in North Texas news today: as you’ve probably seen, Elon Musk is suing Media Matters in a federal district court in Fort Worth over the unsurprising news that adverts on former-Twitter are showing up next to hate speech. Alongside that, Collin County’s poster boy for Getting Away With It, AG Ken Paxton is also going investigate Media Matters. I suspect our host will have some commentary about this but for the moment I want to send you to two social media posts, if you can read them. First Ken White, aka PopeHat, has suggests that part of the venue shopping here is that the Ninth Circuit, which is where former-Twitter has its business, applies anti-SLAPP statutes. Unsurprisingly, Texas does not. And for the Explain It Like I’m 5 Crowd, Kathryn Tewson has a plain-words (literally) explainer on Bluesky about how bad this lawsuit is.
Voter turnout in north Texas was up in 2023, which was a pleasant surprise in an off-off-year election. The DMN has the numbers for Dallas County and KERA has them for Collin County. Just as an aside, it’s appalling that our voting system plans for and is funded on the assumption that most people won’t vote, even above and beyond the hassle of registration.
We’re now into the filing period for the 2024 elections and it’s time to find out who’s in and who’s out. As our host noted, Congressman Pat Fallon (CD 4), after a little flip-flopping about going back to the Texas Senate, is running for re-election. Other area incumbents also running for re-election: Ramon Romero, Democrat, HD 90; Tony Tinderholt, Republican, HD 94; Salman Bhojani, Democrat, HD 92; David Cook, Republican, HD 96. The Fort Worth Report is good for these short announcements.
On the school beat, you may remember that poor trans kid in Sherman who was about to be screwed out of his starring role in Oklahoma by local bigots. The situation was so awful that the DMN editorial board and one of the Star-Telegram’s columnnists scolded Sherman’s schools. The second piece gets to what turned out to be the heart of the matter: the school board superintendent and one of the board members turned out to be bigots with a history of mixing in reactionary politics. The board’s about-face got national coverage (NY Times) and as of last week, there’s third-party investigation of the whole shebang that may threaten the superintendent’s job. He has a history of this kind of thing: apparently he threatened to spike a Legally Blonde production over the question of gay or European. I’m glad Max got his role back but I’m also glad the superintendent’s homophobia isn’t going unchallenged.
Here’s a grab bag of other local school news:
- Keller ISD faces a $27 million budget deficit. Now they’re pushing lawmakers for funding. That’s for next year and includes the loss of COVID funds.
- These Fort Worth ISD schools could be among first considered for closures. 48 schools are less than 70% full. This is in part a demographic issue, because we’re moving into Gen Z having kids and Millennials’ kids aging out of the school system. But my inner economic historian also wants to point out that in precarious economic times, parents have fewer kids.
- Related: Plano ISD may close school buildings, restructure campuses as enrollment dips. No percentages, but the story notes that district enrollment dropped by more than 6,000 students over the past 12 years.
- Also in Plano: What Just Happened in Plano ISD?. Franklin Strong’s newsletter covering some real shenanigans among book banners in Plano ISD. Three of my niblings graduated from Plano West, so this is personal for me.
- These Are the Right-Wing Ideologues Taking Over School Boards. If you’ve been reading up on DFW right-wing types, you’ll see a lot of familiar names.
- How much does private school cost in Texas? School choice battle reignites debate on cost. Per the article, the median tuition at Texas private schools was just over $9,800 in the 21-22 school year; this school year the average cost for private schools for kids with special education needs is more than $19,000.
- In case you were curious: Fort Worth-area teachers make how much? New report details top-paying school districts. The numbers are nicely laid out in a chart.
Also we have a couple of news items about university education:
- Collin College won the lawsuit filed against it by former history professor Michael Phillips, whose contract wasn’t renewed. The school said there’s no expectation that one contract leads to another, but also this is why we have tenure, which our current state government would like to end. Pick your story: KERA; DMN; Dallas Observer.
- TCU increases tuition past $60K after $1B fundraising campaign. Cost now tops Harvard. Yikes.
From the schools, we’ll turn to the outright bigots and other nasty types in DFW. I have to admit I didn’t expect a name and shame report from the Star-Telegram (picking up the names from the Texas Observer). The Texas Tribune has a piece about Texit that, like every one of these stories, has a lot of familiar names, specifically in this case Don Huffines. And the Dallas Observer has a bittersweet piece about a real estate company helping queer families to flee Texas. A number of queer/trans friends of mine or friends with trans kids have left Texas in the last few years and I’ve kicked into some GoFundMes for people who were fleeing. I’m glad there’s someone out there who can help those folks.
Let’s turn to the internet and cybersecurity (or lack thereof) beat. Dallas City Council just agreed to spend $2.1 million on security, including hardware, software, and consulting. Meanwhile, Dallas County is looking for a new IT head, in case you know anyone who’s looking for that job. And, unsurprisingly, local mortgage servicer Mr. Cooper has reported that customer data was exposed in their recent breach. (They service our mortgage; we have not yet heard if we need additional protection.)
Here are three related stories about environmental justice in Dallas. First is the latest on the long saga of Shingle Mountain. Now that the mountain of shingles has been removed and the soil has been remediated, residents want a park, but their council member thinks that plan is premature. Meanwhile, in West Dallas, we have more on the the GAF shingle plant, where the EPA is ready to sample air, soil, water, and more to determine how much pollution is in the area. The DMN and the Dallas Free Press have more on the EPA study. Meanwhile, the city is talking about an ordinance to do away with “amortization” or forced closure, in part because in the regular session the Lege passed SB 929, which requires warning of zoning changes to affected businesses. Doesn’t sound so bad until you understand the law was written by Rep. Tan Parker (R-Flower Mound) and targeted by demographics at the city of Dallas. This D Magazine piece ties it all up for you. Meanwhile Dallas council member Omar Narvaez (D6) is telling his constituents who want him to oppose the version of the ordinance that would keep citizens from filing for amortization of polluters and nuisances in their area that influencing city processes may be illegal and is against his code of ethics. If that’s really how he feels, I’m not sure why he’s on the council, since voting on what city processes will be is part of his job.
I’m bringing you two versions of the same related story about a developer whose conviction for bribing Dallas City Council members was vacated. First, from the DMN, Retrial delayed for developer caught up in Dallas City Hall bribery scandal. Second, from D Magazine, Ruel Hamilton’s Federal Bribery Trial Is Back in Court. The DMN apparently thinks Hamilton accidentally stumbled into a bribe-extraction routine instead of, you know, bribing the council members. The conviction was vacated on a technicality around the judge’s instructions around bribes vs gratuities. In related news, the crime is what’s legal.
In Dallas police news, the police association (technically not a “union”) is mad at the oversight board because the members aren’t pro-cop enough. Also through an update to that one, I found out that Mike Mata, the head of the association, is resigning to go to the private sector, which I can only think of as a good thing. Also, Chief Garcia thinks we need more cops. Part of the staffing problem is the perpetual underfunding of pensions for police and firefighters, a point which Mata makes in his interview with the DMN.
Following on our host’s recent post about abortion news, I have three local items for you. First, the DMN investigates Inside the nationwide web of activists helping Texans get abortions, which sounds like a nasty expose but I found surprisingly sympathetic to the activists doing some difficult work. Next, there’s an amicus brief in Zurawski v. Texas from businesses alleging that the ambiguity in the law, the ambiguity that means nobody knows how close a pregnant individual has to come to dying before the life of the mother is considered threatened, costs an estimated $14.5 billion in lost revenue every year. You know and I know that nobody cares about doing bidness these days as long as culture warriors can pwn the libs. Meanwhile, I commend to your attention, with appropriate warnings, this op-ed by (an anti-choice) local talk radio host in the Star-Telegram and this pro-adoption op-ed by Governor Abbott in the DMN. If the latter piece didn’t come from a reactionary misogynist hater, I might buy that there are no implications about abortion in its existence. I trust Greg Abbott on, well, anybody’s rights about as far as I can throw him, though. When you lie down with culture warriors, you get up covered in slime.
Now it’s time for Six Degrees of Clarence Thomas. As you may have heard, the Dems on the Judiciary Committee were outplayed, or let themselves be outplayed, and the vote on subpoenaing Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo, and Robin Arkley II was cancelled. Meanwhile, we did get some, but not enough, forward movement in the ethics arena, in terms of a so-called ethics code, more of an ethics pledge, that the Supreme Court planned to follow, as long as nobody tries to make them. You can pick where you get your national coverage but I like Chris Geidner of Law Dork. Meanwhile, I have also read up on the Crystal Clanton case, in which a protegee of the Thomases said some racist garbage on social media, and it was OK ethically for her to be a clerk in name brand federal courts because the judges did their due diligence and didn’t believe the accusations. Due diligence in this case apparently consisted of asking people like the Thomases, who told people that Clanton wasn’t a racist.
The current state of the Fairfield Park eminent domain suit is that the judge’s appointed evaluators say it’s worth almost $420 million. Todd Interests, the current owner, bought it over the summer for about $103 million. Pick your article: DMN or Star-Telegram for more.
Speaking of other people’s land, this week I learned about the Marvin Nichols reservoir proposal, which is going to cost $4.4 billion and flood 66,000 acres of forest in northeast Texas. If you know about it and have feelings, the link will tell you how to comment for a report going to the Lege.
Now, on a lighter note, here’s the latest on the duelling Lockhart BBQ lawsuits.
I’m not sure how I feel about Spice Dr. Pepper but since it’s a limited edition only for people who collect Pepper Perks, I probably will never try it.
Blind Lemon Jefferson is the subject off several exhibits and lectures as part of Deep Ellum’s sesquicentennial.
And last but not least, cute critter news: a juvenile loggerhead sea turtle has been moved to the Children’s Aquarium in Fair Park. Poor baby had been hit by a boat, has spinal damage, and has to wear a special buoyancy backpack to swim properly. And in zoo born news, the Dallas Zoo has welcomed a Linne’s two-toed sloth pup. No name or gender for the pup yet, but they’re strong and active and eating solid foods.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged Dallas, guest post, linkdump, Texas | 1 Comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of November 20

Posted on November 22, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance broke its calculator trying to figure out how many turkeys Jimbo Fischer could buy now as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged blog roundup, TPA | Comments Off

Runoff early voting begins Monday

Posted on November 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

From the inbox:

Early voting for the December 9 Joint Runoff Election begins Monday, November 27, and runs through Tuesday, December 5. Vote centers will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. each day except Sunday, December 3, from noon to 7 p.m. On Election Day, Saturday, December 9, the vote centers will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. The deadline to apply for a ballot by mail is Tuesday, November 28 (received, not postmarked).

“Harris County will open 41 vote centers during Early Voting and 450 on Election Day. Registered voters can vote in the runoff election even if they did not vote in November,” said Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth. “More than 450,000 people voted in the November 7 election out of the more than 2.5 million registered voters in Harris County.”

City of Houston races include Mayor, At-Large Position 1, At-Large Position 2, At-Large Position 3, At-Large Position 4, Controller, and three single-member districts: Council Member District D, Council Member District G, and Council Member District H.

“The number of contests in which a voter can cast a ballot vary and are dictated by the residence and political subdivision where a voter is registered to vote,” added Clerk Hudspeth. “Voters should be aware that only citizens registered to vote within the legal boundaries of the City of Houston can vote on the contests offered by the City of Houston. A “Houston” postal address does not guarantee that a voter lives within Houston proper.”

Information regarding the City of Houston candidates in the Runoff Election can be found at https://houstontx.gov/2023-runoff-election.html.

Also on the ballot are the City of Bellaire Mayor and the City of Baytown, Council Member District No. 4.

Sample Ballots for the December 9 Joint Runoff Election will be available before Thanksgiving at www.HarrisVotes.com.

For news and updates, follow us on social media at @HarrisVotes and @HarrisCoTxClerk.

A map of the voting centers for early voting is here; the interactive map is not ready yet. A fact sheet for the runoff is here. The final official election results are now up and I’ve gotten my hands on the precinct data. I’m aiming to have some numbers for you early next week.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged early voting, Election 2023, Harris County, Harris County Clerk, Houston, runoff, Texas | Comments Off

Three stories about abortion

Posted on November 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

All from Texas Public Radio, which has been doing a great job with these.

Big Bend area group plans anti-abortion pregnancy centers in Presidio, Alpine.

A local nonprofit formed earlier this year is seeking to open two new anti-abortion pregnancy centers that the group says will help address the Big Bend region’s persistent lack of maternal care resources.

The Presidio Pregnancy Center plans to open two facilities in the region – first in Presidio and later in Alpine – that would operate as affiliates of Care Net, a national religious group that opposes abortion and oversees a network of more than 1,000 pregnancy centers across the U.S.

Local advocates for the plan say the facilities, often called “crisis pregnancy centers,” would offer much needed social support and educational resources for pregnant people in a region that has been described as a “maternity care desert.”

But critics, including at least one prominent medical trade group, have argued that such facilities often provide misleading or false health information to pregnant people.

The local group’s representatives have outlined their plans to area officials and community members over the past few months as they seek funding for the facilities.

At an Oct. 11 meeting that included representatives from the state health department, the nonprofit’s board president Lynette Brehm said the initial Presidio location would offer everything from free pregnancy tests to “coaching” and classes about what to expect before, during and after childbirth.

“One of the things we learned in talking with women that have had their pregnancies here is they felt very much alone,” she said. “Yes, maybe they had abuela or mom, but they kind of wanted to have some agency over their pregnancy.”

Brehm said the center would employ community health workers to provide “non-clinical, community-based support services” that “add and enhance” standard medical care that people should receive when they’re pregnant.

In an interview, Brehm said the center would not provide any kind of actual medical care, but rather would focus on services like pregnancy training, helping women find an obstetrician and signing up for Medicare or Medicaid.

In its presentations and promotional materials, the local group has not discussed the issue of abortion at length. One version of the group’s website doesn’t mention abortion at all, while another version states the center’s aim is to provide “a safe confidential place where a woman can receive compassionate care to make a life-affirming choice.”

Brehm said the center would not refer any of its clients to abortion providers.

“We want to help that mom become a healthy mom,” Brehm said. “At the end of the day, she’s going to have that decision though, but we will hope that she can see that she can do it, and we’ll be there to help her.”

That “medical trade group” is the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a group of people who do provide actual medical care, unlike this collection of yahoos with a storefront and Google access. It’s such a level of self-parody that I don’t even know where to start. But not only does this not help with the acute lack of access to prenatal and maternity care in the region, it makes the problem worse by giving the impression that something has been done. It’s a complete farce.

Texans highly motivated to travel to New Mexico for abortions.

It’s 2:45 in the morning, and the Sunset Limited is pulling out of Amtrak’s San Antonio station heading west.

The passenger train is just one of many ways that Texans are traveling to New Mexico where abortion remains legal.

Since September 1, 2021, when the Texas fetal heartbeat law went into effect, many pregnant women in Texas have been forced to flee the state to find abortion care.

Some women are able to afford an airline flight; many others are not. Driving is an option if there’s access to a dependable car that can cross hundreds of miles of Texas desert. There is the bus, but Amtrak is even cheaper and has the advantage of being more comfortable.

From San Antonio, the train takes about 12 hours to arrive at the El Paso station. From there, it’s a short rideshare trip to the closest abortion clinic in New Mexico.

Women’s Reproductive Clinic is less than a mile across the state line. Inside the waiting room, there’s a large yellow sign that reads “Welcome East Texans to New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.”

We’ve discussed New Mexico and abortion for several years now, with a more recent focus on the efforts to make it illegal in some fashion to travel to places like New Mexico from Texas to get an abortion. I would think that under the “abortion travel ban” ordinances that some counties have passed – none along the route of the Sunset Limited, as far as I know, yet – in theory the conductors and ticket-takers and food vendors and train cleaners and pretty much everyone else would be legally liable. That would be civil liability,. if the matter were ever relevant and pursued, but criminal liability is hardly off the table. Are we going to make abortion interrogations a part of the TSA security checks at some point? That may sound ridiculous, but look around. Lots of things that used to sound ridiculous are increasingly part of the mainstream now.

San Antonio abortion doctor who challenged SB8 treating Texans in New Mexico.

Sitting in his Albuquerque, New Mexico office, Dr. Alan Braid remembers what things were like before Roe v. Wade when he was practicing medicine in San Antonio. He said things were bad.

“I remember distinctly a 16-year-old girl. She had someone had hacked her vagina with old rags and put a catheter in her uterus for her to abort, and she died of sepsis and organ failure,” Braid said.

The 78-year-old Braid said that the memories of treating other failed attempts at illegal abortions in 1972 still haunt him, and he doesn’t want to go back to that.

“We would see women who sought care either in Mexico or someone who would do that in San Antonio, and they died,” he said.

When SB8, the Texas fetal heartbeat law passed in 2021, Braid decided he wasn’t going to leave Texas. He was going to stay and fight it.

He continued to perform abortions and wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post challenging someone to sue him over it.

Braid wrote, “I acted because I had a duty of care to this patient as I do for all patients, and because she has a fundamental right to receive this care.”

A judge eventually threw out the SB8 lawsuits filed against Braid. The judge ruled the people had no connection to the prohibited abortion and weren’t harmed by it. They didn’t have standing.

This didn’t overturn SB8 but weakened it considerably. Then came the leaked Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, and Braid knew it was time to leave Texas.

“If we’re going to continue, where should we go? New Mexico was the first place we thought of. So, Dobbs came out June 24, (2022). We saw our first patient here August 15,” said Braid.

Braid’s entire practice, including his San Antonio staff, made the move to New Mexico. And he took the name with him.

“’Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services.’ We decided to just keep the name. It would just be easier for our patients to find us,“ he said.

Braid says Texans are still finding their way to his office. 85 percent of his business comes from Texas.

Alan Braid is a goddamn hero. That is all.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged abortion, Alan Braid, Alpine, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Amtrak, crisis pregnancy centers, El Paso, New Mexico, Presidio, Texas | 1 Comment

Installing the ice

Posted on November 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Just in case.

While Toyota Center undergoes several years of renovations, an upgrade that will not be immediately seen could prove to be among the most important.

When listing plans for future phases of renovation, Rockets president of business operations Gretchen Sheirr included “making sure this building is ready for anything, which includes making sure it’s hockey ready.”

The Rockets plan to add the “ice machine” that would be needed for Toyota Center to become an NHL venue, though there are no immediate plans to bring the NHL to Houston.

That addition would be the only change needed for hockey, with the arena and the favorable downtown location widely considered to be the NHL standards. No construction would be necessary.

[…]

Toyota Center does not have the equipment to produce NHL-quality ice. Portable machines can be brought in, as with the NHL’s annual Winter Classic outdoor games or with ice shows. That would be about a four-day process in an arena and unlikely for an NHL venue.

Adding the equipment needed to make Toyota Center suitable for the NHL, however, sounded to be more of a plan than a possibility.

See here and here for some background, and here for more on the Toyota Center renovation plans. For all the stories about how there are no plans for expansion in the NHL and how other cities would also be in the running if there were, there’s also been a lot of recent stories about how Houston would be ready to make a pitch for an NHL team. You know, in case it happens. And who knows, in a few years, maybe it will. We’ll be ready if it does.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged Gary Bettman, hockey, Houston, NHL, Toyota Center | 2 Comments

Time for another chat about voter registration and turnout

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Let’s do it.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Texas Democrats came away from Beto O’Rourke’s surprisingly narrow 2018 defeat to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz with a simple plan: register to vote the millions of nonvoting Texans that demographics suggest lean Democrat and electoral victories will follow.

Harris County, the biggest, bluest population center in the state filled with unregistered potential voters, would be the linchpin of that strategy.

Recent statewide defeats and turnout percentages below the national average in Harris County and the state as a whole, however, indicate that gameplan has not entirely panned out.

The first part — registering voters — has worked. Since 2014, Texas’ population has grown by 3 million people. More than 3.5 million people have been added to the state’s voter rolls in that time. More than 500,000 of those new registrations came from Harris County.

The growing voter rolls only shrank the county’s overall turnout percentage, however.

Fewer than one out of five registered voters in Harris County cast a ballot in last week’s elections, which featured an open mayoral seat in Houston and a host of state constitutional amendments, among other local races. Harris County’s turnout in the 2022 gubernatorial election was 9 percent points lower than in 2018.

[…]

Statewide, O’Rourke’s return to the top of the ticket in a 2022 challenge to Gov. Greg Abbott also saw depressed voter turnout.

Even in 2020, which saw Texas’ highest turnout percentage this century and a record number of raw votes, Texas still found itself in the bottom handful of states for turnout.

“The problem isn’t just registration, the problem is turnout of registered voters,” said Mike Doyle, chair of the Harris County Democratic Party.

Doyle said he found the low turnout last week concerning heading into 2024, but not insurmountable.

[…]

“Getting folks registered, great,” Doyle said. “That’s always part of our strategy, but if we already have a registered voter that’s not turning out and we know when they turn out they’re going to vote Democratic more likely than not, that’s an easier target.”

Those efforts will be focused in state House of Representatives districts controlled by Democrats, Doyle said.

The story is more about strategy than numbers, and I’m a numbers guy. I’ll get to that in a minute. I just want to note that I had some thoughts about what Harris County Democrats should be aiming for in 2024. As far as that goes, I’m pretty satisfied with current Chair Mike Doyle.

I’ve done variations of this post before, so I’m going to keep this simple. If you want to compare numbers in local and state elections, I suggest going back a little further than 2014. This is what things have looked like in Texas since 2002. I’m separating the Presidential and non-Presidential years for more meaningful comparisons.


Year   Registered     Turnout      Pct
======================================
2002   12,563,459   4,553,979   36.24%
2006   13,074,279   4,399,068   33.64%
2010   13,269,233   4,979,870   37.53%
2014   14,025,441   4,727,208   33.70%
2018   15,793,257   8,371,655   53.01%
2022   17,262,143   8,102,908   45.85%

2004   13,098,329   7,410,765   56.57%
2008   13,575,062   8,077,795   59.50%
2012   13,646,226   7,993,851   58.58%
2016   15,101,087   8,969,226   59.39%
2020   16,955,519  11,315,056   66.73%

And here it is for Harris County:


Year   Registered     Turnout      Pct
======================================
2002    1,875,777     656,682   35.01%
2006    1,902,822     601,186   31.59%
2010    1,917,534     798,995   41.67%
2014    2,044,361     688,018   33.65%
2018    2,307,654   1,219,871   52.86%
2022    2,543,162   1,107,390   43.54%

2004    1,876,296   1,088,793   58.03%
2008    1,892,656   1,188,731   62.81%
2012    1,942,566   1,204,167   61.99%
2016    2,182,980   1,338,898   61.33%
2020    2,431,457   1,656,686   68.14%

A couple of things to note. One, at both the state and Harris County level, there was more growth in voter registration between 2012 and 2016 than there had been between 2002 and 2014. Voter registration was basically flat between 2002 and 2012. As I’ve said before, in Harris County that was largely due to having a collection of Tax Assessors who were more interested in throwing people off the voter rolls than in registering new voters. Statewide, the effort of Battleground Texas got things moving a bit in 2014, and various groups that sprung up post-Trump like Swing Left took it from there. Those efforts continue today.

As far as turnout goes, the main thing to note is that even as 2022 was a step back from 2018, it was still a step forward from before 2018. We’ll see how 2024 compares to 2020, but 2020 similarly stands way out in comparison to every election before it.

There’s not really much more to say at this point, and bringing in the admittedly unexciting turnout from the 2023 Mayor’s race is a tangent at best – the conditions are just too different for any comparisons. Texas’ turnout is not going to rival any state that has universal mail voting or same-day registration, but I think we are in a generally higher-turnout era than we were in a few years ago. That’s all hypothetical until we get more data points, and the next opportunity for that is next November. I’m sure I’ll check in with another roundup of these numbers at that time.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged Battleground Texas, Beto O'Rourke, Election 2002, Election 2004, Election 2006, Election 2008, Election 2010, Election 2012, Election 2014, Election 2016, Election 2018, Election 2020, Election 2022, Election 2024, Greg Abbott, Harris County, Swing Left 7, Ted Cruz, Texas, turnout, voter registration | 6 Comments

Sure, Jared

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The campaign ads will write themselves.

Rep. Lacey Hull

Prominent anti-LGBTQ+ attorney and former Harris County GOP chair Jared Woodfill is running for the Texas House and to replace House Speaker Dade Phelan.

Woodfill announced his candidacy for House District 138 this week, touting his legal challenges to COVID-19 mandates and LGBTQ+ legislation, and the four “Republican sweeps” that Harris County Republicans saw during his tenure as the local GOP’s leader from 2002 to 2014.

He’s running against incumbent Republican Rep. Lacey Hull, who was first elected to represent the northwest Houston district in 2020 with backing from Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston. Hull was ranked as one of the most conservative members of the Texas House this year based on an analysis of voting records by Rice University political scientist Mark Jones.

Woodfill’s campaign has already tried to frame Hull as a Republican in Name Only — RINO — by citing D ratings from two conservative activist groups. His campaign also accuses her of conspiring with Phelan — a longtime nemesis of Woodfill and other ultraconservative Texas Republicans — to “undermine” conservative legislation and impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton.

[…]

Woodfill has for years been at the helm of conservative Christian and anti-LGBTQ+ movements in Houston and Texas. In 2015, he and well-known Houston GOP powerbroker and anti-gay activist Dr. Steven Hotze played key roles in the defeat of an ordinance that would have extended equal rights protections to LGBTQ+ Houstonians, during which they compared gay people to Nazis and helped popularize “groomer” rhetoric.

The two have remained close, leading a pro-Paxton fundraising group during the attorney general’s impeachment this summer and spearheading legal challenges to COVID-19 closure mandates and election results in Harris County. Woodfill is also representing Hotze in a criminal investigation stemming from a 2020 incident in which a private investigator, allegedly acting at Hotze’s behest, held at gunpoint an air-conditioning repairman who he believed was transporting fake ballots.

Woodfill has faced his own legal issues: He has for years been at the center of an ongoing lawsuit in which a man accuses Woodfill’s former law partner and Southern Baptist leader Paul Pressler of decades of sexual abuse. In March, The Texas Tribune reported that Woodfill testified under oath that he was alerted in 2004 about child sexual abuse allegations against Pressler, who Woodfill was representing at the time in an assault lawsuit that was settled for $450,000. Despite that, Woodfill continued to work with Pressler, providing him with a string of young, male personal assistants who worked out of Pressler’s home. The lawsuit is set for trial early next year.

We know that Woodfill is a piece of shit, and he is also a pedophile enabler. There are very few people I’d like to run a campaign against more than him. I hope this primary is so ugly and nasty it makes the entire state want to take a shower.

Beyond that I will just say this: As the story notes, Lacey Hull won re-election last year by a 57-43 margin. That was better than Greg Abbott, who carried the district 54-44. It was also better than Ken Paxton, who carried it 53-44. Go ahead and tie yourself to Paxton, dude. In 2020, HD138 was more purple, as Trump beat Biden 52.0 to 46.6. I’ve fallen into the trap of rooting for the worse Republican to win in a primary on the theory that they’ll be easier to beat in the general before, but this time I think it might be different. I’m willing to take that chance if the Republicans in HD138 are willing to throw away an objectively stronger candidate who is also an incumbent in favor of this bucket of toxic waste.

Also, too: Stephanie Morales, who was a fine and hard-working candidate who didn’t get enough financial support, will be running again. If she doesn’t get a lot more love from the donor classes, especially if she ends up against Woodfill, that will be a shocking and unfathomable failure on our part. We cannot screw this one up.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged Election 2020, Election 2022, Election 2024, Harris County, HD138, Jared Woodfill, Lacey Hull, Paul Pressler, primaries, Steven Hotze, Texas, The Lege | 2 Comments

Warfarin update

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Warfarin is a toxicant that has shown promise in reducing the feral hog population. A few years ago the Lege asked for a study on its effects before it could be approved for more general use. We now have the results of that study.

There are mixed results from a study on the effectiveness of using toxicants to reduce Texas’s feral hog population. The good news is a warfarin-based toxicant has proven to be an effective tool. The bad news is it is very time-consuming.

“We saw a high level of reduction in individual sounders that were feeding on toxic bait,” said Mike Bodenchuk, state director for the Texas Wildlife Service. Bodenchuk helped spearhead a two-year study on the effectiveness of using poison on feral hogs.

“The legislature directed us to study whether or not the toxicant would be effective in landowner use. So, our study was to use landowners to apply the toxicant,” said Bodenchuk. “We were directed to do it in multiple regions and in multiple seasons.”

Bodenchuk says if landowners followed the very precise protocols for use of the toxicant it was effective at reducing the pig population. The bad news is the process is time-consuming. It takes six weeks to set up the traps and properly bait the hogs.

“This isn’t a single-feeding type of bait. It requires multiple feedings,” said Bodenchuk.

Those multiple feedings involve luring the pigs into an area to eat while slowly adding the warfarin-based toxicant until they receive a lethal dose. The protocol can easily be disrupted, greatly reducing the effectiveness of the baiting process.

“If landowners tried to cut corners on that process, reduce the time, go too fast then their efficacy goes down. We actually had one bunch of pigs, someone shot at them while they were using the feeder and they quit using that feeder,” said Bodenchuk.

See here for the previous update in this saga, which was in 2017. I don’t know what the next steps might be, so I can’t say whether this moves the use of warfarin any closer. It sounds like it could be helpful, but isn’t a panacea. You can see more in this A&M AgriLife report on the study.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged Ag Commissioner, feral hogs, Scimetrics, Sid Miller, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Department of Agriculture, Texas Wildlife Services, The Lege, warfarin | 4 Comments

Weekend link dump for November 19

Posted on November 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

“Return To Work: List of First TV Series To Restart Production After SAG-AFTRA Strike”.

“Why Is the Entertainment Industry So Desperate To Own Dead Celebrities?”

“Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. SpaceX employees say they’re paying the price for the billionaire’s push to colonize space at breakneck speed.”

“As more abortion bans have gone into effect across the country, it has become far more difficult to perform a standard element of gynecological care: screening patients for domestic abuse.”

“Well, so much for getting to the bottom of the story of Crystal Clanton, the judicial law clerk accused of sending racist texts. And so much for all the talk about having Supreme Court justices abide by the code of conduct that covers other federal judges. In this case, at least, the mechanism to enforce that code turned out to be toothless. The judicial discipline system is better at self-protection than self-policing.”

“Still, one can take a hard, law-and-order line on sentencing and still be opposed to locking up innocent people. Indeed, you could make a strong argument that you can’t be authentically “law-and-order” without vigorously opposing the incarceration of innocent people. And yet many self-described law-and-order politicians seem to be okay with it — or at least have little interest in knowing when it has happened.”

“The book, I suppose, offers a moral about extravagant Christmas displays, and as November arrives and the first of my neighbors cover their houses in thousand-dollar LED extravaganzas, it’s a not-unwelcome message. But it’s a bit of a disappointment to see the Grinch reduced to the role of child throwing a tantrum. Losing a contest and storming off in a huff is certainly relatable to kids—indeed, more than one cheery holiday get-together in my house has been darkened by a child doing that exact thing—but it’s not diabolical. It’s not stealing the freaking Christmas tree. It’s hard to imagine a child listening to this sequel with the same fear and trembling with which they respond to the original. More likely, kids will nod sagely and identify the Grinch as that most familiar of childhood archetypes: the sore loser. It’s a dispiriting fate for perhaps the greatest elemental force of malevolence in children’s literature.”

“Trump could try to blame his lawyers for Jan. 6. But it just got a lot more difficult“.

We may get to see Coyote vs. Acme after all.

“I wish I could wrap this up with a neat little formula — with One Simple Trick that lets us know how to find what’s worth keeping from creepy comedians, or from theologians who were serial-rapists or enslavers. And, more importantly, with the secret key that would assure us that we were able to learn only the Good Things from Bad People, wholly distinct and compartmentalized from all the awful things they chose to do because knowing those Good Things didn’t stop them from doing them. But I don’t know what that formula is. I suspect there isn’t one.”

RIP, Peter Seidler, owner of the San Diego Padres.

“The percentage of kindergartners who are fully vaccinated declined from 95 percent in the 2020-2021 school year to 93 percent in 2021-2022—below pre-pandemic levels. Since schools still require routine vaccinations, more families than ever before are asking permission for their school-aged children to skip the shots, as well. Requests for exemptions increased in 41 states, and in 10 states, more than 5 percent of parents made such requests. That exemption rate is significant, because when more than 5 percent of a given population is unwilling to be vaccinated, “herd immunity” is compromised and outbreaks are possible.”

It would be a good idea for David Zaslaz to just stop talking for awhile.

“At no point does Representative Santos appear to have owned a Maserati, despite telling campaign staff otherwise.”

“Attorneys for Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the mother-daughter election workers who are suing Giuliani, claim he severely harmed them by falsely accusing them of ballot tampering and are seeking $15.5 million to $43 million in compensation, plus punitive damages and potentially interest.” I hope they get all that and more.

But he’s so “nice”. So very “nice”.

“Chinese President Xi Jinping signaled that China will send new pandas to the United States”.

RIP, Roger Kastel, artist who created the iconic movie posters for Jaws and The Empire Strikes Back.

“It may not get a lot of attention. In a way it doesn’t matter since I don’t think anyone cares that George Santos going to do serious time in prison. But in addition to the mistake he made not resigning soon after the original New York Times report last December, he made another big mistake staying in office until this week’s House Ethics report was released.”

RIP, Bert Levinson, educator, coach, Staten Island Sports Hall of Famer. I knew Mr. Levinson (he will always be Mr. Levinson) through the Hall of Fame Warriors Baseball Camp, which was the defining feature of my summers as a kid. Truly a legend.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged linkdump | Comments Off

Harris County elections update

Posted on November 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

No news is good news.

By all accounts, Harris County pulled off a smooth local election last week under its newly reconfigured election administration. But officials didn’t have time to revel in it before a judge took them to task for the serious mistakes that marred its election one year ago.

Nonetheless, Harris County officials say they believe they’re now on a path to deliver a successful 2024 presidential election under a new election chief, County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, and are clear-eyed about the work they still have to do.

[…]

The problems last year in Harris — the third most populous county in the country — were not unprecedented or large in scale, but the long wait times and the ballot paper shortages at about 20 polling locations could have been avoided with better planning, experts say. Harris County provides voting on Election Day through countywide vote centers, which allow voters to go to any location to cast a ballot, unlike a precinct-based system. At these vote centers, each voter’s ballot is printed to reflect the local races based on where they live.

Bruce Sherbet, Collin County elections administrator, who has been running elections in Texas for over two decades said, to be on the safe side, it is best practice to plan for more than just the additional 25% supply of ballot paper that the election code mandates.

“You have to go at least 50% over that number. You just can’t take the risk of running low. And if you do run lower, you’ve got to have a really robust and good training curriculum to tell your workers to monitor their stock,” he said.

By the time the November 2022 general election came around, the county elections office had already seen its first leader step down, voters were still getting used to new equipment, and the then–newly appointed election administrator, Tatum, had less than three months to prepare. Logistical problems surfaced.

“The elections office had too many Election Day voting centers [in 2022], relative to the resources they had available,” said Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University who has done research into election supply allocation and vote centers. “And the biggest problems were at the newest voting locations where there was no history of voting.”

The primary and presidential election will rely on the county’s ability to train what is likely double the number of election workers and run many more polling locations, and based on the county’s performance this off-cycle election year, it may be positioned to do that well in 2024, Stein said.

[…]

The problems last year in the heavily Democratic county prompted Republican state lawmakers to pass legislation abolishing the elections administrator position — only in Harris. The county sued the state to prevent it from taking effect, but couldn’t beat back the new law.

Despite the county’s effort to challenge the law in court, it went into effect on Sept. 1, placing Hudspeth in charge of administering elections and Ann Harris Bennett, the county’s tax assessor-collector, in charge of voter registration heading into the presidential election. Lawmakers have signaled they’re watching closely.

See here for some background, and remember that I covered a number of these topics when I interviewed County Clerk Hudspeth. I have total faith in her ability to run the elections.

That doesn’t mean I think it was a mistake to switch to an Elections Administrator. Many counties use them, there’s nothing particularly controversial about that. If you were designing county government from scratch, I can’t imagine you’d separate the tasks of voter registration from conducting elections – you would of course put them under the same office. Isabel Longoria didn’t work out, Cliff Tatum had a very short initiation period before the November 2022 election, and we were breaking in these new machines with the more complicated process and equipment. There were challenges and we should have done better, but it didn’t have to work out this way.

As it happens, this past week was when SCOTx heard the appeal of the original injunction that blocked the law abolishing the Harris County Elections Administrator’s office, which SCOTx put on hold pending said appeal. At this point, given everything that has gone on, while I continue to oppose the law that was passed to abolish the Elections Administrator’s office and am rooting for Harris County to prevail on the principle that the Lege should not be allowed to pass a law that targets one and only one county for perpetuity, I don’t want any more change to how we conduct our elections. Whatever happens in this case, please keep things as they are for at least the next few years. What we need right now is some continuity. Make Harris County elections a little more boring, please.

Posted in Election 2023, Local politics | Tagged Clifford Tatum, Election 2022, Election 2023, Election 2024, elections administrator, Harris County, Harris County Clerk, Harris County Tax Assessor, Isabel Longoria, lawsuit, paper ballots, Supreme Court, Teneshia Hudspeth, Texas, The Lege | 1 Comment

Whitmire and SJL on Prop B and H-GAC

Posted on November 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Of interest.

Houston’s two remaining candidates for mayor appear to have cooled their earlier support of local Proposition B now that it has been approved by voters and the candidates find themselves an election away from becoming the person in charge of carrying out its promise.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and state Sen. John Whitmire both endorsed the proposition to require Houston to leave the Houston-Galveston Area Council if the regional planning body fails to offer it proportional voting power. It was approved overwhelmingly Nov. 7, but in a Wednesday forum hosted by Transportation Advocacy Group – Houston, both Jackson Lee and Whitmire said the path laid by the proposition will be difficult for the city to navigate.

“As it’s presently conducted, it is not the best pathway forward, but I will not rush to judgment before I assess how we can come together and have those monies distributed to ensure we’re unified as a region,” Jackson Lee told dozens of elected officials and transportation advocates from around the region gathered in the Royal Sonesta ballroom.

Whitmire joked about the proposition’s promise to make the regional council more fair to Houston and argued that during upcoming negotiations the city needs to ensure it is being fair to governments in the surrounding region, as well.

“Yes, we got the petition to be fair to Houston. Who the heck wouldn’t sign that petition?” Whitmire said.

Both noted the risk of losing federal funding distributed by H-GAC if Houston simply withdrew from the council, concerns that were outlined in an August memo sent by City Attorney Arturo Michel to Mayor Sylvester Turner.

[…]

The next mayor’s negotiations with H-GAC will be a crucial first step to funding any large transit projects in the city of Houston, both said.

In a room populated with officials from surrounding cities and counties, both candidates expressed interest in unity with H-GAC partners in the interest of improving transit across the region.

We are headed into Thanksgiving week so I’m going to keep this brief.

The stated intent of the Fair For Houston/Prop B organizers was for this item to lead to a new agreement via negotiations. It does not specify any numeric requirements. This has been covered before. As long as everyone goes into the negotiations in good faith, and so far that seems to be the case, we ought to be able to come to an agreement.

The question of what happens if the negotiations fail and Houston exist H-GAC remains an open question, at least to me. The Fair For Houston/Prop B organizers have said they consulted with lawyers on this. Maybe some further consultation is in order.

But seriously, I think everyone wants this to continue to work. So, you know, work towards that goal. If you don’t want to be the Mayor that has to deal with a exit from H-GAC, then don’t be that Mayor.

There’s also some stuff in the story, which you can read for yourself, about the two candidates’ approach to the I-45 project. Suffice it to say that I prefer SJL’s approach to Whitmire’s. Your mileage may vary.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged Election 2023, Fair For Houston, HGAC, Houston, I-45, John Whitmire, Mayor, runoff, Sheila Jackson Lee | Comments Off

“Solar For All” grant

Posted on November 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

From the inbox:

Earlier this year, the Biden Administration announced a $7 billion national “Solar For All” grant competition via the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to help expand solar energy production across the country. Harris County leaders enlisted a coalition of cities and counties throughout Texas to submit a joint application, including the cities of Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio and Travis, Dallas, and Tarrant counties.

The application, which Harris County Commissioners voted to submit last month, envisions a $400 million investment to “transform the Texas clean energy landscape for residents and workers” by increasing “solar and storage, [as well as] clean energy jobs.”

The plan would include putting rooftop solar on residential homes; a county owned and operated corporation that aggregates and negotiates the price of energy on behalf of residents; and community hubs that would provide an “island” of energy in the event that the state power grid goes dark. All told the 5-year project would benefit over 11 million people across Texas.

Harris County’s plan would also:

“Strengthen community resilience to power system failures during natural disasters, [which] can and will save lives.”

“Deliver distributed solar to over 46,245 low-income and disadvantaged community households.”

“Provide an average of $17 million in annual household electricity bill savings—a program-wide 26% average reduction from current average statewide bills.”

The grant competition was announced in late June, and the joint application was agreed to at the end of August. The email I got wasn’t clear about the rest – there’s clearly a press release somewhere that I can’t find – but I infer that the grant application will be filed in the near future. (This post was drafted in October, so perhaps by now it already has been.) It all sounded cool enough that I wanted to make note of it, so here you are. I’ll keep an eye on it going forward.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged Austin, Commissioners Court, Dallas, Dallas County, Environmental Protection Agency, Harris County, Houston, San Antonio, solar energy, Tarrant County, Travis County | Comments Off

Vouchers die another death

Posted on November 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

What a great use of everyone’s time these special sessions have been.

The Texas House on Friday voted to strip school vouchers from the chamber’s massive education funding bill, effectively gutting Gov. Greg Abbott’s top priority from the legislation.

The House voted 84-63 in favor of an amendment offered by Rep. John Raney of College Station, which removed the provision of the bill allowing some parents to use tax dollars to send their children to private and religious schools. Twenty-one Republicans, most of whom represent rural districts, joined all Democrats in support.

They are: Raney, Steve Allison of San Antonio, Ernest Bailes of Shepherd, Keith Bell of Forney, DeWayne Burns of Cleburne, Travis Clardy of Nacogdoches, Drew Darby of San Angelo, Jay Dean of Longview, Charlie Geren of Fort Worth, Justin Holland of Rockwall, Kyle Kacal of College Station, Ken King of Canadian, John Kuempel of Seguin, Stan Lambert of Abilene, Andrew Murr of Junction, Four Price of Amarillo, Glenn Rogers of Graford, Hugh Shine of Temple, Reggie Smith of Sherman, Ed Thompson of Pearland and Gary VanDeaver of New Boston.

The outcome was an embarrassment to Abbott, who spent seven months lobbying two dozen Republicans who signaled opposition to vouchers in a test vote during the regular legislative session in April. His various strategies included holding events at private schools in rural areas, tying vouchers to increased public school funding, calling two special sessions dedicated to education, threatening to support primary challengers to Republicans who opposed vouchers and announcing a breakthrough deal with the holdouts that did not appear to exist.

None of it worked.

Just four of the former Republican holdouts opposed the anti-voucher amendment on Friday: Trent Ashby of Lufkin, Brooks Landgraf of Odessa, Angelia Orr of Itasca and David Spiller of Jacksboro. But Thompson was a new anti-voucher vote, bringing the governor’s net gain to three.

The future of school vouchers is now in doubt; Abbott has said he will veto any education legislation that does not contain vouchers. The governor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Emphasis mine, because I felt like it. Abbott has threatened to continue calling special sessions until this passes, and maybe he’ll actually do that. At least as likely, he’ll campaign against all these Republicans. That will be the bigger test. But man, for a guy who’s won a bunch of elections Greg Abbott sure does take a lot of Ls. I’ll never stop celebrating that.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged Andrew Murr, Angelia Orr, Brad Buckley, Brooks Landgraf, Charlie Geren, David Spiller, DeWayne Burns, Drew Darby, Ed Thompson, Ernest Bailes, Four Price, Gary VanDeaver, Glenn Rogers, Greg Abbott, Hugh Shine, Jay Dean, John Kuempel, John Raney, Justin Holland, Keith Bell, Ken King, Kyle Kacal, Reggie Smith, schools, special session, Stan Lambert, Steve Allison, Texas, The Lege, Travis Clardy, Trent Ashby, vouchers | 5 Comments

The Houston-Area Crime Gun Intelligence Center

Posted on November 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

This sounds promising.

When Houston-area law enforcement officers announced in September that they recovered 79 guns during an investigation into a group of suspected gang members, they had a pretty good idea of how those guns had been used — but they didn’t know where they’d come from.

Prosecutors would later charge one suspect, Tyrone Raymond Bolton, with using a firearm to traffic drugs. Another, Vandross Bynum, allegedly brandished a gun during an unspecified “crime of violence,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas. Both acts were serious violations, earning the suspects charges in federal court, yet law enforcement still lacked a crucial piece of information that could help prevent future crimes.

At a press conference announcing the charges, there were “literally hundreds of years of law enforcement experience,” said Fred Milanowski, former special agent in charge of the Houston field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “But nobody could definitively say exactly how those violent gangs got their hands on those 79 guns,” he added.

That may be about to change. By early 2024, ATF and other local law enforcement agencies will formally launch the Houston-Area Crime Gun Intelligence Center, an intelligence hub dedicated to collecting and analyzing data related to guns used in crimes.

Currently, ATF traces each of the roughly 12,000 crime guns recovered by law enforcement each year in the Houston metro area. But that data has never been collated and analyzed as a whole. Now, the Crime Gun Center’s team of 12 analysts, supplied by six local and federal agencies, will compile that trace data into a larger database – an effort already underway with the center currently in a “soft launch.”

Advocates and law enforcement officials hope this more robust approach to studying gun crime, which Milanowski called a “unique” supplement to existing efforts, will result in more muscular and targeted interventions.

“If we can commit more resources to gathering intelligence, digesting what is valuable and then going after it in an effective and efficient manner, then we’re really going to help reduce violent crime in Harris County,” said Daniel Dellasala, a lieutenant and commander of the Crime Scene Investigations Unit at the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, one of the center’s participating agencies.

Analysts will track the guns’ original purchaser, whether those purchasers ever sold the gun, and whether the purchasers or the buyers were ever involved with other guns recovered by law enforcement, among other factors. Collectively, this data will alert law enforcement to broader trends in how perpetrators of crime are sourcing their weapons – and support investigations on an individual level.

“Unless you have dedicated people that are just looking at this, that stuff just falls through the cracks at law enforcement,” Milanowski said. “They may not even be aware that their guns aren’t properly being traced, or they’re incompletely being traced. But these analysts now are looking at every gun that’s coming into the department.”

ATF is prohibited by provisions in a 2003 federal appropriations bill from sharing trace data with individuals or agencies outside law enforcement, according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety. But law enforcement officials hope the data they collect will help them stop violent crime through internal data analysis, highlighting opportunities to intervene at the source and stymie the flow of weapons into criminal hands.

“As this project expands, we’re going to have two years’ worth of a really good dataset on how violent crews and gangs in the Houston metro area are getting their guns,” Milanowski said. “That just wouldn’t have been possible if there wasn’t a dedicated group of people looking at that crime gun intelligence.”

This sounds like an excellent idea, and I’m optimistic it will have a positive effect. It joins the new Houston gun violence tracker and the UTMB grant to study ways to reduce firearm violence as new tools in the kit for hopefully making some progress in this fight. The main question I have is why none of this had ever been done before. Some of that is national politics to be sure, but not all of it. Better late than never, but there’s a ton of ground to make up. I look forward to seeing what they can do.

Posted in Crime and Punishment | Tagged ATF, Everytown, FBI, gun control, guns, Harris County Sheriff, Houston, Houston-Area Crime Gun Intelligence Center, HPD, Texas | Comments Off

MLB owners approve A’s move to Las Vegas

Posted on November 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

It’s still not fully resolved, but this is going to happen, like it or not.

Major League Baseball owners voted unanimously Thursday to allow the Oakland Athletics to move to Las Vegas, paving the way for the second relocation of a baseball team in the past half-century.

The potential move, which comes after more than two decades of failed efforts to secure a new stadium in the city to replace the aging Oakland Coliseum, needed backing from three-quarters of teams at the quarterly owners meetings. It received unanimous support despite unanswered questions about the team’s near-term future and stadium plans.

“Today is an incredibly difficult day for Oakland A’s fans,” Athletics owner John Fisher said. “It’s a great day for Las Vegas.”

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred echoed Fisher’s sentiments, saying: “I know — I know — this is a terrible day for fans in Oakland. I understand that. And that’s why we’ve always had a policy of doing everything humanly possible to avoid a relocation. And I truly believe we did that in this case. I think it’s beyond debate, that the status quo in Oakland was untenable. Those of you who have been in the building understand what I’m talking about. And I absolutely am convinced that there was not a viable path forward in Oakland.”

The move is not yet finalized. Legal challenges from a teachers union in Nevada regarding the $380 million the state has committed to the construction of a $1.5 billion stadium on the Las Vegas Strip still could scuttle the move, but winning approval from owners marks a significant step toward Oakland losing its last major men’s professional sports team.

Prior to the Montreal Expos moving to Washington, D.C., in 2005, the last MLB team to relocate was the Washington Senators, who became the Texas Rangers in 1972. The Athletics moved to Oakland from Kansas City in 1968 and have won four World Series in their 56 seasons in the city.

After announcing in 2021 plans to pursue a “parallel path” in which it would weigh stadium deals in Oakland and Las Vegas, the team chose Vegas in April 2023, with Manfred saying MLB would waive its relocation fee, estimated to be around $300 million.

[…]

In a letter sent to half the MLB owners last week, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao said the city had procured $928 million in funding for a stadium and surrounding development and wanted to keep the team.

The Athletics’ lease with the Oakland Coliseum expires after the 2024 season, and the team has yet to solidify plans for where it will play before the Las Vegas stadium is ready in 2028. Manfred said extending the lease in Oakland is an option, though the city — which owns half the stadium, while the Athletics own the other half — has said in order to do so that it would need to keep the A’s name and move to the front of the line for a potential expansion franchise.

“We are disappointed by the outcome of this vote,” Thao said in a statement. “But we do not see this as the end of the road. We all know there is a long way to go before shovels in the ground and that there are a number of unresolved issues surrounding this move. I have also made it clear to the commissioner that the A’s branding and name should stay in Oakland and we will continue to work to pursue expansion opportunities. Baseball has a home in Oakland even if the A’s ownership relocates.”

The lack of a home for three seasons is far from the only reservation about the Athletics’ move. Not only would they be leaving for a smaller media market, but the team would also remain a revenue-sharing recipient, a point of contention in recent years. The new stadium, located at the site of the old Tropicana hotel, is slated to be built on a 9-acre parcel, which would be one of the smallest in MLB. While the A’s released renderings of a Las Vegas stadium, they did not include a dome or retractable roof, which would be necessary to combat the city’s summer heat.

See here for some background. Las Vegas, which like a decade ago had zero major league sports teams, has done spectacularly well with their expansion NHL Golden Knights and the WNBA Aces, and while the NFL Raiders remain a mostly bad team it’s still the NFL, and people will put up with a lot. The soon-to-be Vegas A’s are, I suspect, something else. The owner is terrible, the team sucks and has no clear path towards anything better, and there’s not going to be a stadium for at least the next three years, forcing the team to play in a AAA ballpark in the interim. The long-term plan involves attracting a significant number of tourists and visitors to the A’s home games. There’s still a drive to hold a referendum on revoking the public funds that have been earmarked for the stadium they intend to build. I’m having a hard time seeing how this ends well.

That’s Rob Manfred’s problem. I’m just going to sit here and watch the (likely) disaster as it unfolds. Effectively Wild discusses the impeding move, and there’s more from Joe Sheehan, Yahoo, and ESPN.

Posted in Baseball | Tagged Baseball, Las Vegas, MLB, Oakland, Rob Manfred | Comments Off

On to the runoff

Posted on November 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Here we go.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is trying to do something no Houston mayor has done in 46 years: flip the result between a general election and a runoff.

Jim McConn last achieved the feat in 1977, erasing a 9.9-point deficit in the first round to win a “stunning” victory, as the Chronicle described it at the time. The top finisher in Houston’s last 20 mayoral elections, though, either has won outright or gone on to win a runoff.

The historical trend is one of several obstacles that Jackson Lee, who trailed state Sen. John Whitmire by 6.9 percentage points in November’s contest, must overcome to become mayor. The congresswoman also faces a steep financial deficit and ominous poll numbers.

Houston has lackluster turnout in municipal elections, but the voting base usually gets even smaller in runoffs. About 252,000 people voted in the first round, fewer than in the last open mayoral election in 2015, despite population growth and about 189,000 new registered voters.

The city typically sees about 15 to 20% of November votes drop off in a second round, set for Dec. 9 this year. That makes it more difficult to gain ground, rendering runoffs mostly a get-out-the-vote battle.

“The primary focus of the runoff will be turnout, and who can get their voters most excited,” said Nancy Sims, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. “On the list of things to do in the holiday season, picking the next mayor falls where on that list?”

For what it’s worth, there were more votes cast in the 2001 runoff than in the 2001 general election. That doesn’t mean anything for this race this year, but it is a reminder that the thing that usually happens is not always the thing that does happen.

While it remains the Mayoral race that drives the bulk of the turnout, it can be useful to look at the other races to see if they might have some effect on the marquee event. There are runoffs in Districts D, G, and H. I’d say the D runoff helps SJL, the G runoff helps Whitmire, and the H runoff is more or less a wash – it’s probably lean Whitmire, but it will have less turnout than the others. There are no HISD runoffs, which might have helped SJL. There are five other citywide runoffs, all with Democratic and Republican candidates, all but one with a Black candidate (that includes Black Republican Willie Davis, who is the oddball among them). You can argue either way who that might help; my guess is that it’s more or less a wash again.

I have no particular reason to disagree with the notion that Whitmire is the favorite in the runoff. He had the most votes in November, and this is not a situation where the other candidates were there to challenge him. I have no idea what the supporters of the other candidates will do, and as of this writing I haven’t seen reports or press releases to say that any of them have picked a side for the overtime round. The basics of this race favor Whitmire. Whether that matters in the end, we’ll see.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged Election 2001, Election 2023, Houston, John Whitmire, Mayor, runoff, Sheila Jackson Lee, turnout | 19 Comments

And now for the H-GAC negotiations

Posted on November 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Prop 2, the Fair For Houston ballot item, passed easily last week. The item charges the city of Houston to negotiate with H-GAC for a revised system of “proportional voting”. Those negotiations are next on the docket.

Legal questions remain, however, about what proportional voting privileges for Houston could look like and whether the city can legally leave H-GAC, should negotiations for more representation on the organization fail.

The language of the charter amendment was very intentional, said Ally Smither, communications director for Fair for Houston, the organization that spearheaded Proposition B.

It does not prescribe any numbers or percentages needed for representation to be considered “proportional.” The language is intended to lead to a solution through negotiation, she said.

Houston City Council Member Sallie Alcorn, who is also H-GAC’s Chair-Elect, said she was “grateful” for the way the ballot initiative was worded.

The lack of a binding number of voters needed to reach proportionality could help ease tensions ahead of negotiations, she said, and it prevents either side from feeling too top heavy.

Houston City Council Member Amy Peck, Houston’s other representative on H-GAC’s board of directors, agreed. The open-ended wording, she said, will prevent negotiators from being boxed in at the very start.

Despite the lacking definition of proportionality, Alcorn said she knows any negotiated changes to H-GAC’s voting structure will have to be substantive in order to honor the essence of the proposition.

“It’s not going to be a one-for-one, but it’s not going to be something just very nominal,” she said. “It’s going to have to reflect the voters’ wishes.”

Alcorn and Peck questioned what a proportional voting structure would mean for membership on H-GAC. Alcorn suggested that a solution may include the use of weighted voting, where population size could determine the amount of votes an H-GAC representative could cast, as opposed to adding new members to the council.

Until negotiations begin, however, the potential outcome is up in the air.

Not every member of H-GAC believes a proportional voting structure is best for the organization.

Waller County Judge Trey Duhon, the outgoing chair of H-GAC’s board of directors, expressed concern about the consequences of proportionality.

“Strictly proportional representation destroys the whole intent of a regional coordinating council,” he said. “Because then Houston and Harris County would basically just dictate the agenda.”

Despite his concern, Duhon said H-GAC is prepared to negotiate with Houston whenever the city approaches the organization to do so.

Alcorn, Peck, Duhon and members of Fair For Houston all expressed the hope that Houston remains a part of H-GAC. Entering negotiations in good faith, Alcorn said, is key.

“It behooves us all to stay together,” she said. “And I think that that is certainly the goal that I will be approaching negotiations with.”

You can still listen to my interview with the Fair For Houston campaign leaders., in which we discuss this topic. We also discuss what happens if negotiations fail, which has been a question raised by others as well. The intent is clearly to get to a new consensus, and the comments made by the various H-GAC members in this article are encouraging. We’ll know soon enough if they can get somewhere that works for everyone. I remain hopeful.

Posted in Election 2023, Local politics | Tagged Amy Peck, Election 2023, Fair For Houston, Harris County, HGAC, Houston, Sallie Alcorn, Trey Duhon | 1 Comment

TikTok ban lawsuit has its day in court

Posted on November 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Looks like it was a pretty good day for the plaintiffs, but as we know that’s the first very small step in a long journey.

A federal judge seemed skeptical of the state’s reasoning to ban TikTok on Texas public university campuses at a Wednesday hearing on a lawsuit filed by a group of professors over the new directive.

In December 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott banned the use of TikTok on government-issued cellphones and laptops, joining more than 30 U.S. states that have issued similar directives over cybersecurity concerns. The state’s ban led public universities across Texas to block access to TikTok on their Wi-Fi and wired networks — but the professors behind the lawsuit, filed in July, argue the bans halted their plans to teach about and research the app’s benefits and risks.

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who is representing the professors, argued the ban threatens public university faculty’s freedom of speech by limiting their research projects.

Proponents of the ban have noted that TikTok is owned by the China-based company ByteDance, and that the Chinese Community Party has, in at least one case, accessed data from the app to identify and locate protesters in Hong Kong. The Biden administration, too, issued a TikTok ban on federal government-issued mobile devices earlier this year.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman asked the professors’ attorney Wednesday why the ban should be tossed if other states and the federal government have similar measures in place. Jaffer argued the federal ban concerns executive agencies, not public universities whose professors feel their work is now limited.

In terms of cybersecurity concerns, Jaffer said privacy concerns hold true for most major social media apps, including Instagram and X, the site formerly known as Twitter. The state has not proved TikTok is a distinct threat worthy of banning when other social media apps are still allowed, he said.

“The defendants haven’t established that their concerns are real and not conjectural,” he added.

Instead of a ban, Jaffer said the professors he represents propose universities issue separate laptops or create a separate Wi-Fi network for researchers and faculty studying TikTok.

Todd Dickerson, the state’s assistant attorney general, argued that professors who wish to study or research TikTok can do so on their personal devices. But Jaffer said the ban also applies if a professor is conducting state work on their personal devices.

“Essentially what Texas is saying here is public university professors should be required to do their jobs on their own time, on their own dime,” Jaffer said.

See here, here, and here for the background. Just so we’re all clear, this is about the ban of TikTok on state university WiFi networks and devices. No one is arguing that there’s anything problematic about the bans on state or federal government-issued devices. I’ve said from the beginning that there’s a reasonable First Amendment claim here, the question is whether the state’s claim that the ban is reasonable and has limited effect will carry the day. Expect an appeal regardless of the ruling.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged ByteDance, China, Coalition for Independent Technology Research, cybersecurity, Greg Abbott, Knight First Amendment Institute, lawsuit, Texas, Texas A&M, TikTok, TSU, TxDOT, UH, University of North Texas, UT | Comments Off

Appellate hearing of the State Bar discipline lawsuit against Ken Paxton

Posted on November 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Big day.

A crook any way you look

Whether the Texas State Bar can take away Attorney General Ken Paxton’s law license could hinge on whether appellate justices believe the organization is trying to control what lawsuits he files on the state’s behalf — or whether the group has the jurisdiction to punish him for pushing false theories in a lawsuit over the 2020 presidential election.

Lawyers for Paxton argued before a three-justice panel of the Texas Fifth Court of Appeals on Wednesday that the bar overstepped its bounds when it sued the attorney general last year for professional misconduct. A disciplinary committee for the State Bar of Texas, the organization that regulates law licenses in this state, alleged the attorney general made “dishonest” representations in a widely condemned lawsuit — quickly rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court — that tried to throw out election results from former President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss in four battleground states.

Paxton’s lawyers argue that, by suing him, the bar is “attempting to control the Attorney General’s decision going forward about what types of lawsuits to file, and what kinds of legal theories to pursue,” Lanora C. Pettit, principal deputy solicitor general, told justices Wednesday.

That argument drew skepticism from Justice Erin Nowell.

“That’s a big leap,” Nowell said.

Paxton’s unsuccessful attempt to intervene in four other states’ elections leaned heavily on discredited claims of election fraud in those swing states.

The Texas bar has argued its conduct rules for lawyers apply to Paxton, too.

“The underlying attorney discipline case here is about ethics,” Michael Graham, an attorney representing the state bar, told justices. “The substantive questions at the heart of that attorney discipline case, like any other, have nothing to do with politics or anything else. They have everything to do with whether an attorney is engaged in professional misconduct and, if so, what’s the appropriate disciplinary sanction for that misconduct?”

A Collin County judge hasn’t ruled on the merits of the case but sided with the bar earlier this year when he ruled the group has the ability to sue — a decision Paxton quickly appealed. The appeals court is weighing whether to reverse the lower court’s ruling, but did not rule Wednesday.

The bar’s actions raise questions about whether any elected official who is also a lawyer could have their law license threatened if a member of the public doesn’t agree with them, Justice Emily Miskel said — with which Graham disagreed.

“General Paxton, for instance, has been Attorney General for almost a decade now, and to my knowledge, there’s not a raft of complaints or attorney disciplinary actions against him for filing suits,” Graham said.

But there might be if the bar is successful, Miskel said.

“If it’s effective, then everybody should (file a grievance against) any elected official who happens to be a lawyer because it’s a great way to get a second bite at the apple of a policy decision you don’t like,” Miskel said.

That may be the case, Graham said, but such a complaint would still have to pass muster with the bar.

See here for the previous update. This hearing was delayed by the impeachment trial. The Chron adds some details.

A three-judge panel of the Dallas court who heard the case against Paxton — consisting of Democratic Justices Erin A. Nowell and Nancy Kennedy and Republican Justice Emily Miskel — said they would issue their decision at a later date.

The outcome could test the bar’s ability to sanction elected officials and is one of several misconduct suits it filed against Texas lawyers who fought the 2020 presidential election results.

Also in the crosshairs are Paxton’s second-in-command, Brent Webster, and Dallas attorney Sidney Powell, who recently pleaded guilty over efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in Georgia.

A state district court judge ruled against Paxton in January, and the third-term Republican quickly appealed to the 5th Court of Appeals in Dallas. His law license is potentially at stake, though the state constitution does not require the attorney general to be licensed to practice law. Paxton did not appear in the courtroom Wednesday.

[…]

Webster faces a nearly identical suit by the bar, which was allowed to move forward this year by the El Paso appellate court after a district court initially dismissed it. Webster, now the first assistant attorney general, has appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.

The bar disciplinary committee also went after Powell, who joined Trump’s legal team after his 2020 presidential election loss, brought a number of unsuccessful lawsuits aiming to overturn the results and spread conspiracy theories about it. For example, she falsely claimed that Dominion Voting Systems machines used software created “at the direction” of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to rig elections.

State District Judge Andrea Bouressa of Collin County threw out the bar’s suit against Powell in February over “numerous defects” in the way bar attorneys made the filing, and in May refused the bar’s request to reconsider her decision.

The bar appealed to the 5th Court of Appeals, the same one hearing the Paxton disciplinary case appeal Wednesday.

Earlier this month, a coalition of lawyers sent a letter to the state bar, urging the organization that oversees state lawyers to suspend or disbar Powell after she pleaded guilty last month in a Georgia election interference case. In that case, she agreed to a plea deal involving six years of probation, fines and the requirement she write an apology letter to the state and its residents.

See here for the latest on Powell and here for the latest on Webster; I don’t know when that appeal may happen. I am of course rooting for all three of them to face some consequences, which I hope will be the revocation of their law licenses. Trying to steal an election is a big deal and should be treated as such. We’ll see if the courts here are up to that challenge.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged 5th Court of Appeals, 8th Court of Appeals, Brent Webster, Brynne VanHettinga, Collin County, Dominion, Donald Trump, Election 2020, Georgia, Jim Harrington, Ken Paxton, Kyle Hawkins, lawsuit, Lawyers Defending American Democracy, Milam County, President, SCOTUS, Sidney Powell, Smartmatic, Solicitor General, State Bar of Texas, Texas, Texas Bar Foundation, Texas Civil Rights Project, Williamson County | 3 Comments

I have basically no idea who’s running for office right now

Posted on November 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Candidate data, where are you?

Next year’s primary campaigns are starting to take shape after numerous candidates filed for office on Saturday, the first day to sign up for a spot on the March 2024 ballot.

Voters will weigh in on the nominees for the U.S. presidential race, along with Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s seat. Important Harris County positions will be on the ballot, too, including two commissioners, district attorney and county attorney.

[…]

With incumbent Democratic Tax Assessor-Collector Ann Harris Bennett not seeking reelection, Republican Mike Wolfe and Democrat Annette Ramirez have each filed to take on the open seat.

Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, an incumbent Democrat, filed for reelection on Saturday, later posting on X, formerly known as Twitter: “The past 7 years have been challenging, but rewarding in so many ways! It is my sincere hope that I will have the opportunity to continue serving and protecting our communities!”

Two Republicans — Joe Danna and Glenn Cowan — have filed to challenge Gonzalez. Houston Councilmember Mike Knox, a Republican former police officer, is also expected to file to run for sheriff.

See here for some background. In years past, both the HCDP and Texas Democrats webpages have maintained some listing of candidate filings, as has the Harris County GOP. As of Wednesday evening, none of them had anything. The Secretary of State also keeps a listing of the filings that have been sent to them, but again there’s nada. I was at the HCDP CEC meeting on Tuesday and was told that a candidate listing is in the works, and I’m sure the SOS will have something eventually – I can’t be the only person who cares about this – but in the meantime, it’s excruciating. I may have to drive by the HCDP office this week to see who’s signed their filing wall. If you have any data that I’m not aware of, please tell me in the comments. I’ll stay on this as we progress.

UPDATE: Thanks to Manny in the comments, there is now a spreadsheet with filings on the HCDP page. I just missed it. Still don’t see anything on the SOS page.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged Ann Harris Bennett, Annette Ramirez, Christian Menefee, Commissioners Court, Democratic primary, Desiree Broadnax, District Attorney, Ed Gonzalez, Election 2024, filing deadline, Glenn Cowan, Harris County, Harris County Attorney, Harris County Sheriff, Harris County Tax Assessor, Joe Danna, Kim Ogg, Michael Wolfe, Mike Knox, primaries, Rodney Ellis, Sean Teare, Texas, The Lege, Tom Ramsey | 3 Comments

Rep. Pat Fallon has a whirlwind 48 hours

Posted on November 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

First there was this on Monday, which was a little weird and meant at the time that three Republicans from Texas were leaving Congress after this term.

Rep. Pat Fallon

U.S. Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Sherman, is quitting Congress and running for his old seat in the Texas Senate.

Fallon filed Monday for Senate District 30, a seat that is newly open after its incumbent, Sen. Drew Springer, R-Muenster, announced Tuesday he would not seek reelection. That means Fallon will leave Congress at the end of his current term.

Fallon quickly earned the support of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the powerful presiding officer of the upper chamber.

“At the end of the day, the decision came down to, If we lose Texas, we lose the nation,” Fallon said in a brief interview. “It’s just terribly important to ensure that Texas has written a great success story and I want to keep moving that forward.”

Fallon held the state Senate seat for two years prior to Springer. He called those “the best two years I ever spent” in politics.

Fallon gave up the seat to run for Congress in 2020 after former President Donald Trump tapped then-U.S. Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Heath, to be director of national intelligence.

Senate District 30 is a solidly Republican district that stretches from the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs up to the Oklahoma state line.

[…]

Frisco trauma surgeon Carrie de Moor is already running in the GOP primary for SD-30. She was originally running against Springer before he announced his retirement.

Rep. Fallon would have joined Reps. Michael Burgess and Kay Granger in heading for the hills, though in his case he was switching venues rather than calling it a career. I’ve been using the conditional tense throughout this post because on Tuesday we got this.

U.S. Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Sherman, has ended his run for his old seat in the Texas Senate, just 24 hours after announcing his campaign.

Instead, Fallon’s staff confirmed he will seek reelection to Texas’ 4th Congressional District, which extends from the Dallas suburbs to the Red River in the border with Oklahoma.

Fallon began a tele-town hall Tuesday evening by assuring his constituents he would be staying in Congress. He said his family, especially his oldest son, was not onboard with his decision to leave.

“I really am truly looking for my best and highest use for the conservative cause because I do think in my hearts of hearts that’s the best, best, path forward for our country,” Fallon said.

[…]

Fallon suggested during the tele-town hall that Patrick courted him to run for SD-30. Fallon lamented divisiveness in Congress and said there was “a part of me that did want to return home to Texas.”

But after filing for SD-30 on Monday, Fallon said he had a conversation with his family and was taken aback by how strongly his oldest son felt about his decision to depart Congress.

“He said, ‘I really want you to stay,'” Fallon said.

Well okay then. Next time talk to the family first, that’s the clear takeaway here. And that’s probably the last time I’ll write about CD04 until Rep. Fallon really does leave. More, if you really want it, from the Trib.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged Carrie de Moor, CD04, CD12, CD26, Congress, Drew Springer, Election 2024, John Ratcliffe, Kay Granger, Michael Burgess, Pat Fallon, primaries, SD30, Senate, Texas | 1 Comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of November 13

Posted on November 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance applauds the efforts and results in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, and elsewhere as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged blog roundup, TPA | Comments Off

More plaintiffs in the lawsuit to allow exemptions to Texas’ super strict anti-abortion law

Posted on November 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

SCOTx will take up that appeal soon.

When Kimberly Manzano’s doctor first noticed some irregularities with her pregnancy, she turned to God, praying constantly for good news. When the diagnosis worsened, she and her husband sought comfort in the Bible’s Book of Hebrews — the book of hope.

And when her doctor finally determined her baby could not survive outside the womb, she asked her pastor for advice.

“He said, ‘if you believe your doctor to be a godly man, take what the doctor says as clarity from God in your decision,’” she recalls.

Manzano and her husband, both devout Christians, decided the most loving thing they could do for their son was terminate the pregnancy. It was a difficult decision for the couple, who both considered themselves anti-abortion before this.

But that decision, between the Manzanos, their doctor and God, would now have to involve another party — the state of Texas.

Although continuing the pregnancy put her at greater risk for infection and illness, Manzano’s life was not currently in danger, so her doctor would not terminate her pregnancy. Texas’ abortion laws have no explicit exceptions lethal fetal anomalies.

So she and her husband bought last minute flights to New Mexico. Her doctor refused to send her medical records to the clinic, instead requiring her to serve as the go-between.

“I was grieving, I was processing all of this, and then I was also feeling like a criminal,” she recalled recently. “It’s dehumanizing … and it shouldn’t be like this for health care.”

On Tuesday, Manzano and six other women joined an ongoing court challenge to Texas’ abortion laws, bringing the total number of plaintiffs in the lawsuit to 22, including two doctors. The new plaintiffs, like the other patients on the lawsuit, allege they were denied abortion care in Texas for their medically complex pregnancies, including cases where the fetus was not expected to survive after birth. The suit, filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, claims the state’s near-total ban on abortion violates their rights under the Texas Constitution.

After an emotional hearing in July, a Travis County judge granted a temporary injunction that protected doctors who, acting in their “good faith judgment,” terminate complicated pregnancies. The Texas Office of the Attorney General immediately appealed that ruling, putting it on hold until the Texas Supreme Court hears the case later this month.

“The harms to pregnant women in Texas is continuing every single day,” said Molly Duane, senior staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “As more people learn about the lawsuit, they continue to tell us the same things are happening to them.”

Manzano’s experience changed her mind about abortion, and she said she’s sharing her story in hopes of educating people who don’t realize how restrictive the state’s abortion ban is.

“I think I was really naive, thinking the world was one way and going through this and seeing it’s not like that,” she said. “But in the end, God knows my heart. He knows why I’ve been through this and I’ll have to stand before him one day, and no one else.”

See here for the previous update. I don’t know what to expect from the Supreme Court. I can’t say I’m optimistic, but I do have some hope. We’ll see how foolish that is. If there’s a good ruling, great. Whether there is or there isn’t, we need to make this an issue in 2024 in ways that we didn’t last year. Even a full victory here means that abortion is still about 99% illegal. It just means that the women in the worst possible positions won’t have to travel out of state and worry about roadside vigilantes to save their lives and be properly cared for.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, abortion clinics across Texas immediately closed their doors. This marked the culmination of a decades-long effort to stop Texans from terminating unwanted pregnancies within state lines.

But immediately, the ruling opened a new question about how the law’s narrow exceptions should be applied to medically complex pregnancies. The law allows abortions only when the patient “has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

Doctors who perform a prohibited abortion face up to life in prison, leading some to delay or deny care because they were unsure if the patient qualified. Some hospitals, fearing legal liability, have increased restrictions on when they allow a doctor to terminate a pregnancy.

As more and more women came forward with stories of wanted pregnancies derailed by medical complications, Gov. Greg Abbott said the Legislature should “clarify what it means to protect the life of the mother.” The Texas Legislature went so far as to affirm doctors’ ability to treat ectopic pregnancies, a nonviable pregnancy where the embryo implants outside the uterus, and preterm premature rupture of the membrane, when a patient’s water breaks before viability.

But the lawsuit from the Center for Reproductive Rights says these protections are not enough to ensure doctors feel safe acting on their best judgment in individual cases.

At the court hearing in July, Dr. Ingrid Skopp, a prominent anti-abortion doctor, agreed patients had received “suboptimal care” since the law went into effect, but said nonetheless, the “law is quite clear.”

“The fault lies with the physicians [who] are not being given guidance by the organizations that usually will give them guidance, the medical societies and the hospital societies,” she said.

The Texas Medical Board, which is a defendant in this case, has not offered clear guidance to doctors on how and when they can terminate pregnancies.

“What is universal in all of the states where abortion is prohibited, and I include in that states that have 6- or 12- or 15-week abortion bans, is that medical exemptions all look pretty similar to Texas’ and in every state, no doctor knows how to interpret them,” said Duane.

The Center for Reproductive Rights has argued that, under the law’s medical exception, women carrying nonviable pregnancies should be able to access abortions in Texas. But as the plaintiffs’ experiences make clear, that’s rarely how doctors and hospitals interpret the law. This has led some women to carry nonviable pregnancies to term, as The Texas Tribune documented in a story last month. Others, like Manzano and Mathisen, have traveled to abortion clinics out of state.

I dunno, the fact that the state is fanatically pursuing its defense of this basically-no-exceptions interpretation, plus the fact that any doctor who might go their own way risks life in jail on a murder charge suggests to me that there’s a little more at play than just a lack of clarity from the Texas Medical Association. Plus, and I’m just spitballing here, I’d bet that any guidance from the TMA that deviated even an inch from what the wingnuts think would be met with overwhelming aggression and threats of legislative action – see, for example, Ken Paxton’s flamethrowing at the State Bar of Texas – and as such it’s easy to see why the TMA has chosen to take the easy way out. It’s not ideal and far from courageous, but who needs that shit? I totally understand why they’d want to let the courts take first crack at it. What might have made a difference would have been for some of the doctors who support generally banning abortion to call for real clarity about what constitutes proper care and the need to let doctors do their jobs. Any idea where we could find such people, Dr. Skopp?

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged abortion, Amanda Zurawski, Center for Reproductive Rights, EMTALA, hospitals, lawsuit, Supreme Court, Texas, Texas Medical Association, The Lege | Comments Off

Paxton whistleblower lawsuit unpaused again

Posted on November 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

A crook any way you look

A Burnet County district judge ruled Tuesday that the Ken Paxton whistleblowers’ case can proceed in Travis County, while Paxton’s recently launched legal challenge to the revived lawsuit remains pending.

The ruling by Judge Evan Stubbs could allow the whistleblowers’ attorneys to subpoena Paxton and his top aides.

The ruling came a week after Stubbs temporarily halted the whistleblower lawsuit at the request of Paxton’s office. The office argued the whistleblowers were violating a tentative settlement they reached earlier this year by restarting work on it after Paxton’s acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial.

Neither Paxton nor the whistleblowers attended the hearing, which featured extensive debate over whether the terms of the settlement had been met even though the Legislature still has not approved its $3.3 million payout. Stubbs expressed skepticism as Paxton’s side argued the whistleblowers were effectively trying to unwind a final agreement.

“If it were truly, actually and finally settled,” the judge said, “then I don’t think we’d be here.”

[…]

The two sides faced off for over four hours in a courtroom here Tuesday, arguing over whether Stubbs should grant Paxton’s request for a temporary injunction that would further derail the Travis County case. At the end, Stubbs denied the request for a temporary injunction and scheduled a Dec. 14 hearing on a separate motion, filed by the whistleblowers, to change the venue of the Burnet County case to Travis County.

Stubbs also dissolved the temporary restraining order that he issued last week, paving the way for the Travis County case to come back to life.

“I’m not saying you can’t go forward with your case in Travis County,” Stubbs told the whistleblowers’ lawyers, adding the caveat that another judge may disagree.

After the hearing, a lawyer for one of the whistleblowers, Tom Nesbitt, said there was “no restriction” on the case moving forward in Travis County. The lawyers declined to comment on their next steps, but they had given notice they planned to subpoena impeachment records and take depositions shortly before Paxton sued them in Burnet County.

A lawyer for Paxton’s office, Bill Helfand, said after Stubbs’ ruling that the office may appeal his denial of the temporary injunction. Stubbs advised him to move swiftly with any appeal.

See here for the background. I take back what I said about the judge in this case. I’m still not sure he needed to pause the lawsuit and hold this hearing, but he handled it expeditiously and fairly, and so I have no further complaints. As we have seen in other cases, Paxton is a king of getting delays so I tend to think he’ll appeal, but we’ll see. Get those subpoenas ready, fellas.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged Attorney General, Blake Brickman, bribery, budget, Burnet County, David Maxwell, FBI, impeachment, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, Mark Penley, Nate Paul, Ryan Vassar, Senate, Supreme Court, Texas, Texas Whistleblower Act, The Lege, Travis County | 1 Comment

HISD moves towards District of Innovation status

Posted on November 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

One more step to go, which ought to be a mere formality.

The Houston ISD District Advisory Committee voted in favor of the “District of Innovation” plan Tuesday, putting the state’s largest school district one step closer to obtaining the designation.

The plan, if given final approval next month, would allow the district to start the upcoming school year as early as the first Monday in August, expand the number of days in the school year and hire uncertified teachers without obtaining waivers every year from the Texas Education Agency.

The 60-member committee is made up of educators, community members and public education advocates, with approximately one third appointed by the superintendent, one third appointed by the school board and one third of elected members.

The appointed HISD Board of Managers still needs to approve the plan with a two-thirds majority vote before it can go into effect. The board is expected to vote on the plan during their regular meeting on Dec. 14, according to a media release from the district.

HISD and Cypress-Fairbanks are the only two districts in the Houston area that have not obtained the designation, although both are in the process of pursuing it. Nearly every eligible school district in Texas is a DOI, and almost all of them have exempted themselves from laws requiring them to start the year in late August and hire certified teachers and administrators.

The committee approved the proposal in a 41-18 vote after about 45 people spoke during the meeting, largely against the adoption of the plan. Several attendees asked the committee to vote no because they did not trust the unelected Board of Managers and superintendent to use the exceptions to benefit the district, and many others spoke out against hiring uncertified teachers.

“Under normal circumstances with an elected board, I might not care about whether HISD turned into a DOI,” HISD parent Anita Wadhwa said. “However, Miles and this board don’t have the … trust of the public to be able to be given free rein on all choices made for my daughters. There’s no indication that if we give them an inch, they won’t take a yard.”

[…]

The vote comes after the district’s DOI planning committee removed three exemptions that were initially included in the proposal. The plan no longer would allow HISD to hire uncertified teachers without parental notification, life requirements for class size waivers from the Texas Education Agency and eliminate a designated behavior coordinator from each school.

See here, here, and here for the background. This earlier Chron story goes into more detail about the revisions to the DOI plan. I think we can expect it to pass as is with unanimous support from the Board of Managers. My opinion remains the same, roughly what parent Anita Wadhwa and teacher Jennifer Mathieu Blessington (later in the article) said. As with everything else, we have to hope it works. Houston Landing has more.

Posted in School days | Tagged Board of Managers, District Advisory Committee, District of Innovation, HISD, Houston, Mike Miles, schools, Texas Education Agency | Comments Off

Rep. Michael Burgess not running for re-election

Posted on November 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

No great loss.

Rep. Michael Burgess

U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, a Dallas-area Republican who has held his post for two decades, will not seek re-election next year, he announced Monday.

“It has been the honor of my life to have gone from a small-town doctor delivering babies, with no prior political experience, to elected to represent my friends and neighbors in the United States Congress,” the Lewisville Republican said in a statement Monday afternoon.

Burgess, 72, first won the seat in 2002 after House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who had held it since the mid-1980s, retired — defeating Armey’s son for the seat. Burgess has since held the comfortably Republican seat in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs without facing serious competition.

An obstetrician by trade and Congress’ longest-serving doctor, Burgess emerged as a key GOP voice on health care issues.

Burgess — who once chaired the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health — comes from a family of physicians who left Canada to the United States to avoid that country’s health care system. During the Obama administration, Burgess was a staunch critic of Democratic efforts to reform the U.S. health care system. During the Trump administration, Burgess became a crucial figure in GOP efforts to unwind the landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known as “Obamacare.”

You can see why I say he’s no great loss. And speaking of losing, that last sentence omits the crucial qualifier “unsuccessful”, as in the “unsuccessful GOP efforts to unwind the landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”. What a thing to have such a long career with so little to show for it.

Be that as it may, Burgess joins Rep. Kay Granger in heading for the exits. Also like Rep. Granger, his district CD26 was deep red in 2012 and has trended blue since, but remains on the far edges of competitiveness. It went 58.5 to 40.0 for Trump over Biden in 2020, and 61.2 to 37.4 for Abbott over Beto in 2022. Burgess’ departure may make the GOP spend some insurance money to prevent anything weird from happening, and also like with CD12 it may have the downstream effect of opening a competitive State House seat by enticing a current incumbent there to try for a promotion. I’m sure more than a few Republicans will at least kick the tires on this one. Hopefully a Dem who can raise a few bucks will do the same.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged CD12, CD26, Congress, Election 2020, Election 2022, Election 2024, Kay Granger, Michael Burgess, primaries, Texas | Comments Off

Two more HISD stories

Posted on November 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Houston ISD’s elected board currently has no power. People ran for the trustee posts anyway.

Two incumbents, Dani Hernandez and Patricia Allen, maintained their seats Tuesday, both winning reelection easily against a sole challenger.

Meanwhile, two incoming trustees, Savant Moore and Placido Gomez, clinched their roles with no challenger after the officials currently holding the positions opted not to run again. HISD canceled the elections for the one-candidate races in September.

It remains uncertain whether the new trustees will have a chance to gain policy-making power before their four-year terms expire. By June 2025, TEA will either announce a timeline for the transition back to an elected board or extend the placement of its appointed board members, according to a state document explaining the HISD intervention.

Those who ran for the trustee roles said they hope the transition of power happens sooner rather than later and that they will be ready to serve should that happen.

“Even though there isn’t voting power for the elected trustees, somebody still needs to be in place in case TEA does decide to give power back to the elected trustees in two years,” said Hernandez, who was reelected to represent District III on Houston’s southeast side. “We are still the voice of the community and still making sure that the voice of the community is heard.”

Moore, a parent of three children attending schools that have been overhauled under new Superintendent Mike Miles’ HISD transformation, said he chose to run because he wanted to have a role in the conversation about how to steer Texas’ largest school district. The father is a preacher at a Baptist church in the Sunnyside neighborhood and began regularly attending school board meetings about a year ago. He was elected to represent District II spanning much of north Houston.

“At first … I was a parent at the meetings. Now, I’m an elected official and, one day, I’ll have the power to vote. And so, that day, policies can be changed,” Moore said. “But until that day happens, I’m going to continue to be a voice and continue to be a bridge for my community.”

[…]

Once the three goals are met and TEA initiates the transfer of power back to an elected board, trustees will regain control of the body gradually, replacing the appointed board of managers over three years, with three trustees serving in year one, six in year two and all nine in year three. TEA said there was no information it could share clarifying when that transition will begin.

Current District II Trustee, Kathy Blueford-Daniels, did the math about the likely upcoming timeline and decided to cede her seat.

“Because I’ve been so outspoken against the takeover and even attending the meetings, I felt that I probably would be one of the latter ones rolled on (to the board in a transition of power). And that probably will not be until another three, four years, which means it will be time to run again,” Blueford-Daniels said. “I felt like I could be more vocal from an activist perspective as opposed to a trustee.”

I don’t have anything to add to this other than to say I’m glad we still have good people running for and winning HISD Trustee elections. You can still listen to my interviews with several of the people named in this story:

Kathy Blueford-Daniels
Dani Hernandez
Judith Cruz
Plácido Gómez

We asked 15 HISD students about big changes on their campuses this year. Here’s what they said.

This has not been the senior year Jayla London expected — and she wants people to know it.

Jayla, student council president and cheer team captain at Houston ISD’s Yates High School, has seen huge changes to her Greater Third Ward campus under the district’s overhaul launched by Superintendent Mike Miles. Many of her favorite teachers are gone, the campus feels more stressful and her library access is limited.

“Honestly, I just want the public to know what happens inside of the schools,” Jayla said. “It’s common to see what the news is putting out there and what the people who are running the show are putting out there. But, ultimately, I feel like the voice of those actually experiencing it matters more than all of that.”

With two months of classes in the books, the Houston Landing wanted to hear from students experiencing Miles’ dramatic revamp of HISD schools in real time.

Over the past three weeks, the Landing interviewed 15 high schoolers from 14 campuses, asking for their first-hand accounts of the changes. Two students attend a campus covered under Miles’ plan to overhaul 85 schools, including 11 high schools. The other 13 teens go to schools that aren’t part of the program, though they still reported major differences this year.

Together, the students’ insights pull back the curtain on what school looks like under state-appointed leadership.

Every student said their school felt different compared to last year — in most cases, drastically so. Although specifics varied, some common themes emerged: stressed-out teachers, tired students, new operational policies and more regimented lessons.

Miles, who was appointed as HISD’s superintendent by Texas Commissioner Mike Morath in June, has said the changes are needed to boost student learning after more than a decade of mostly stagnant test scores, with wide gaps along lines of race and income.

The students, however, aren’t impressed. Asked to rate the changes using a letter grade, the students produced an average score of C, with grades ranging from A- to F. Ultimately, they offered mixed reviews about a key question: Are students learning more this school year?

Here’s what the students told us, in their own words. Their responses were lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

I encourage you to read the rest, it’s very illuminating. Do bear in mind this is a very small sample, and there may be others with differing opinions who didn’t get interviewed. However you want to look at it, I sure hope Mike Miles reads this. I don’t expect him to do anything if he does, but I still want him to read it.

Posted in Election 2023, School days | Tagged Board of Managers, Dani Hernandez, Election 2023, HISD, HISD Board of Trustees, Houston, Judith Cruz, Kathy Blueford Daniels, Mike Miles, Mike Morath, Patricia Allen, Placido Gomez, Savant Moore, Texas Education Agency | Comments Off

Another look at Cruise

Posted on November 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

While we wait to see what happens.

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

Cruise employees worry that there is no easy way to fix the company’s problems, said five former and current employees and business partners, while its rivals fear Cruise’s issues could lead to tougher driverless car rules for all of them.

Company insiders are putting the blame for what went wrong on a tech industry culture — led by [38-year-old CEO Kyle] Mr. Vogt — that put a priority on the speed of the program over safety. In the competition between Cruise and its top driverless car rival, Waymo, Mr. Vogt wanted to dominate in the same way Uber dominated its smaller ride-hailing competitor, Lyft.

“Kyle is a guy who is willing to take risks, and he is willing to move quickly. He is very Silicon Valley,” said Matthew Wansley, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who specializes in emerging automotive technologies. “That both explains the success of Cruise and its mistakes.”

When Mr. Vogt spoke to the company about its suspended operations on Monday, he said that he did not know when they could start again and that layoffs could be coming, according to two employees who attended the companywide meeting.

He acknowledged that Cruise had lost the public’s trust, the employees said, and outlined a plan to win it back by being more transparent and putting more emphasis on safety. He named Louise Zhang, vice president of safety, as the company’s interim chief safety officer and said she would report directly to him.

“Trust is one of those things that takes a long time to build and just seconds to lose,” Mr. Vogt said, according to attendees. “We need to get to the bottom of this and start rebuilding that trust.”

[…]

Mr. Vogt began working on self-driving cars as a teenager. When he was 13, he programmed a Power Wheels ride-on toy car to follow the yellow line in a parking lot. He later participated in a government-sponsored self-driving car competition while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 2013, he started Cruise Automation. The company retrofitted conventional cars with sensors and computers to operate autonomously on highways. He sold the business three years later to G.M. for $1 billion.

After the deal closed, Dan Ammann, G.M.’s president, took over as Cruise’s chief executive, and Mr. Vogt became its president and chief technology officer.

As president, Mr. Vogt built out Cruise’s engineering team while the company expanded to about 2,000 employees from 40, former employees said. He championed bringing cars to as many markets as fast as possible, believing that the speedier the company moved, the more lives it would save, former employees said.

In 2021, Mr. Vogt took over as chief executive. Mary T. Barra, G.M.’s chief executive, began including Mr. Vogt on earnings calls and presentations, where he hyped the self-driving market and predicted that Cruise would have one million cars by 2030.

See here for the previous entry. We still don’t have a clear timeframe for when Cruise might un-suspend its operations, not that they ought to be in any rush. Indeed, it seems to me that rushing has been their main issue all along, given that the likes of Waymo was not as out there as they were. And I for one am just fine with the idea of a heavier hand by regulators. I do think autonomous vehicles have the potential to be a big upgrade on safety, given how capricious human drivers can be. But that doesn’t mean they’re ready for that now, and that doesn’t mean we should be conducting public beta tests when we’re not sure they’re sufficiently close to being ready. If the Cruise experience sets everything back a year or two, I don’t consider that to be a bad outcome.

CNBC has a bit more:

But the [Cruise launch in San Francisco] has been plagued by problems. The cars have driven into firefighting scenes, caused construction delays, impeded ambulances and even meandered into active crime scenes.

“There have been 75 plus incidents,” said San Francisco fire chief Jeanine Nicholson. “It’s like playing Russian roulette. It’s impacting public safety and that’s what we need to fix.”

San Francisco city attorney David Chiu said, “there are still some glitches that need to be worked out.”

“And this is with only a few hundred vehicles,” Chiu said. “The idea that thousands of vehicles could be hitting our streets in short order is what gives us concern.”

[…]

Before Cruise’s permit was revoked, CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa took a ride in one of its autonomous vehicles. She also gave Waymo a try and offers a comparison of the two very different rides. She sat down with Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise, who was optimistic the company could get past these recent hurdles.

“It will be very commonplace for people who are in major cities to get around town in a robotaxi over the next few years” Vogt said.

That’s 75 incidents since August, which sure seems like a lot. The aforementioned interview can be seen here if you’re interested.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged Austin, California, Cruise, driverless cars, General Motors, Houston, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, pedestrians, Phoenix, San Francisco, Texas | Comments Off

November 2023 Texas School Board Election Recap

Posted on November 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

From Franklin Strong:

Since Tuesday, headlines across the country have highlighted crushing defeats book-banning school board candidates, often associated with Moms for Liberty, suffered on Election Night. That trend carried over into Texas elections, too— but only to an extent.

Let’s jump quickly into the good, bad, and mixed results from Tuesday night.

The Worst: Cypress-Fairbanks ISD

There’s no sugarcoating this one.

In my Book-Loving Texan’s Guide to the November School Board Election, I called Cy-Fair ISD the race to watch in this cycle. The district was one of the first in the state to feel the anti-“woke” wave in November of 2021, when three candidates swept onto the board by campaigning against “critical race theory.” This year, the remaining four seats were open, and allies of those three anti-woke candidates were hoping to take full control of the board. Those stakes, along with the sheer size of the district,1 made this Tuesday night’s most consequential election.

And the odds were not on the good guys’ side. All the book banners needed was one win out of the four seats; they had massive financial advantages2 and the vocal support of the Republican Party. On top of all that, in two of the races, multiple strong candidates threatened to split the pro-education votes.

Nonetheless, I was cautiously optimistic because of the amazing work done by two groups in the district, Cypress Families for Public Schools and Cy-Fair Strong Schools. Those groups organized early, and they worked hard, knocking on doors, hosting events, strategizing.

But it wasn’t enough.3 Cypress Families for Public Schools endorsed a slate of four candidates, all women, called All4CFISD. Only one, incumbent Julie Hinaman, won.

[…]

So the other side didn’t just luck into their wins, and it would be a mistake to ignore the strategy they used to attract voters in a relatively high-turnout election. In an excellent post-mortem published this week, local leader Bryan Henry pointed out that mostly involved activating the partisan instincts of local Republicans.

That took two forms: on one hand, anti-public-education group Texans for Educational Freedom blasted the district with mailers suggesting the (bipartisan) All4CISD candidates were wild-eyed liberals, Marxists, and aligned with conservatives’ worst nightmares (Beto O’Rourke, New York teachers’ unions). It was a slimy, negative move that echoed Texans for Educational Freedom’s deceptive tactics in previous races. But for the framing to work, the reactionary candidates also had to come off as traditional, even institutional, candidates to draw in Republicans who (in other districts) have been reacting against extremist trustee candidates. To that end, they distanced themselves from Indemaio—one of the district’s most prominent book banners—and courted and received endorsements from institutional Republicans, including Ted Cruz.

You’ve probably seen the headlines saying that nationally, book-banning was a losing issue on Tuesday, with Moms for Liberty losing the majority of races where they endorsed a candidate. The Cy-Fair conservative bloc’s decision to run as buttoned-up Republicans rather than fire-breathing book banners made sense given that national mood, and it certainly worked on Tuesday.

See here for some background. Two of the three wingnut winners (plus one of the good guys) did so with less than fifty percent of the vote, which had led me to say they were headed to runoffs, but Cy-FAIR ISD doesn’t do runoffs, so that’s that. There were some good results elsewhere, including in HISD, and despite losing the forces for good in Cy-Fair made some progress and laid groundwork for the next elections. The main point here is that we need some better strategies for winning in areas like that where just coming in as Democrats and progressives can be alienating for at least some of the voters we need to persuade to win. That has to be driven by the locals, and it may be that the best thing those of us who are on the outside can do is just follow their lead, which may mean largely being quiet. That’s very much not in our nature and goes against a lot of instincts, but the success of the wingnuts in portraying themselves as the mainstreamers needs to be a lesson to absorb and adapt to.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged Books, censorship, Christine Kalmbach, Cy-Fair ISD, Cy-Fair Strong Schools, Cypress Families for Public Schools, Cypress-Fairbanks, Election 2021, Election 2023, Frances Ramirez Romero, gay rights, George Edwards, Julie Hinaman, Justin Ray, Leslie Martone, Ted Cruz, Texas, Todd LeCompte, Tonia Jaeggi | 1 Comment

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