Off the Kuff | Knowledge Is Good

NEW Houston requests retraction of bad KHOU story about paper ballot issues

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

From the inbox:

Houston Leaders Call on Channel 11 To Retract Discredited Report On 2022 Election Paper Shortages

Two New Investigations Debunk Central Claims Presented to the Public by KHOU; Deeply Flawed and Misleading Report Used As Basis by Gov. Abbott and Election Deniers to Call for New Harris County Election, Continues to be Used as Justification for Anti-Democratic State Bills Targeting Harris County

Today, New Economy for Working Houston and Greater Houston LULAC Council called for Houston CBS affiliate KHOU to immediately retract an analysis it aired on Jan.30 implying that 121 voting locations in Harris County ran out of paper on election day last year. The request comes as two separate and independent investigations by the Houston Chronicle and Houston Public Media found that while there were technical glitches on election day, there is no evidence voters were systematically disenfranchised nor that any issues were significant enough to change the outcome of any contested race.

A day after KHOU’s report aired, Governor Abbott used the KHOU report to raise the possibility of calling a new election. Local State Sen. Paul Bettencourt has exploited the story to imply malfeasance. Making matters worse, the analysis has been exploited by partisan elected officials to justify dangerous bills, including SB 823, SB 1750, SB 1039, and SB 1993, which are now poised to pass the state legislature. These bills create a way for partisan state officials to strip Harris County residents of its authority to have local officials conduct elections and will criminalize the routine work of public servants in Houston, creating a culture of fear and making the process of running elections – already a complicated process in the state’s largest county – even harder.

The request for KHOU to retract its now discredited analysis is being made in a letter addressed to News Director Liz Roldan.

Key facts driving the request include the following:

It is not true that 121 locations ran out of paper in Harris County, as KHOU’s story implies. The Chronicle and Houston Public Media investigations both independently found only 20 polling places ran out of paper “some for only 15 minutes and others for up to three hours.”

KHOU’s report left out vital context about the differences between the 2018 and 2022 elections in its comparison of turnout at voting locations. Between those years, the County moved to countywide voting (a large percentage of voters do not vote at their home precinct), a key fact omitted in its analysis.

KHOU failed to prove in its reporting that election day glitches systematically hindered voting and affected the outcome of the elections. Despite a major marketing campaign to find disenfranchised voters by political operatives, to this day, there have not been any voters able to testify under oath that they could not cast their vote.

KHOU’s own political experts have distanced themselves from the analysis. According to KHOU analyst and Rice University political science professor Bob Stein, “I know I work for Channel 11, so it’s going to be a hard thing to say…but they didn’t ask the obvious question: did it impede voting?”

About New Economy for Working Houston

New Economy for Working Houston (NEW Houston) is a non-profit organization that brings together the power of grassroots organizing and public policy innovation to win a just economy for Gulf Coast working families. We seek to build an inclusive regional economy where workers and neighborhoods thrive, and where people of color, immigrants, women, and low-income residents have an equal voice and share equally in regional prosperity.

See here for some background, and here for a copy of the letter, signed by Hany Khalil, Executive Director of the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation, and Chair of New Economy for Working Houston (NEW Houston), and by Dr. Sergio Lira, President, Greater Houston LULAC Council 4967. You can learn more about NEW Houston here; I’ve gotten a few emails from them, mostly about the bad election bills that have been moving through the Lege. There’s not much besides mission statements on the website now, but we’ll see where they go from here. I don’t expect much from this effort – news organizations usually need a pretty big shove to retract a story – but it’s worth the effort to try.

Posted in Election 2022 | Tagged Election 2022, election contest, Greg Abbott, Harris County, judicial races, lawsuit, LULAC, New Economy for Working Houston, paper ballots, Paul Bettencourt, Texas, The Lege, voter suppression, voting centers | 4 Comments

Dan Patrick reminds everyone who’s in charge

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

In case you forgot.

Online sports betting isn’t coming to Texas any time soon, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Saturday.

The state House narrowly advanced a bill this week that would allow Texans to vote on legalizing the practice, a milestone for the gambling industry’s push to expand in the Lone Star State. Supporters had already expected an uphill climb in the Senate, but Patrick put an end to any remaining speculation on Twitter.

“I’ve said repeatedly there is little to no support for expanding gaming from Senate GOP,” Patrick tweeted. “I polled members this week. Nothing changed. The Senate must focus on issues voters expect us to pass. We don’t waste time on bills without overwhelming GOP support. HB 1942 won’t be referred.”

Still, gambling advocates say the bill’s passage in the House — by a vote of 101 to 42 — shows the potential to advance the legislation in future sessions.

State Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano and the author of the legislation, has argued that Texans already have easy access to illegal forms of online betting, where they spend millions of untaxed dollars every year. He said legalizing the practice would “allow these people to come out of the shadows” and put them under a “regulatory framework that will protect Texans who are already doing this now.”

This is the reason I have always been dismissive of all the breathless pre-session articles about how the gambling industry is gearing up and hiring millions of lobbyists and citing polls that show public support for gambling and economic studies that say it will literally rain honey on us all if we authorize casinos and sports books. There’s one person you have to convince in the state, and that’s Dan Patrick. Until he is no longer in charge, gambling isn’t going anywhere. Maybe – I know, this is crazy talk, but stay with me – the gambling interests should focus a bit more on that in the next election.

(Yes, I know, Patrick always cites the level of support in the Senate, and I’m sure he’s right about that. But then, the Republican Senate caucus is an army of his clones, so there’s a chicken-and-egg question there. If Patrick changed his mind, would his minions follow? It’s an interesting question, one we’ll almost certainly never get an answer to. That said, if Mike Collier were presiding over the Senate this session, it wouldn’t surprise me if there remained some entrenched opposition among the mini-Patricks. But at least then we’d have some clarity, and the lobbyists could turn their attention to those individual Senators.)

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged casinos, Constitution, constitutional amendments, Dan Patrick, DraftKings, gambling, Jeff Leach, Lite Gov, Senate, Sports Betting Alliance, Texas, The Lege | Comments Off

Who you calling “groomer”?

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Bryan Slaton is the poster boy for that epithet.

Bryan Slaton

In public, former state Rep. Bryan Slaton was a conservative champion unafraid to ruffle feathers and pick fights, even with Republicans he deemed insufficiently conservative.

A self-described “bold and brave Christian-Conservative” who’d worked as a youth pastor, Slaton featured a picture of his wife and infant son on his campaign website. On social media, he railed against “groomers,” saying their efforts to sexualize minors needed to be stopped.

Away from the public eye, however, the Royse City Republican fell far short of the morally upright life he sold to voters — a guise ripped away by a scathing 16-page report that detailed his inappropriate sexual conduct with a 19-year-old legislative aide who worked in his Capitol office.

Slaton invited the woman to his Austin apartment late on a Friday night and poured her enough alcoholic drinks that she felt dizzy and had double vision, leading to unprotected sex, after which the woman reportedly purchased emergency contraceptives against a potential pregnancy, the report by a House investigative committee found.

Slaton resigned Monday and was expelled from the House by a unanimous vote Tuesday, but his hypocrisy has cast a harsher light on Republican-led efforts to crack down on supposedly grooming-related activities, including drag performances, gender-affirming care for transgender minors and classroom discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity.

LGBTQ advocates are pointing to Slaton to redirect attacks back on the GOP, saying conservative Republicans were so busy policing drag artists and transgender Texans that they missed abuse — and so-called “grooming behavior” — by one of their own.

Rep. Jessica González, D-Dallas, said those who voted to expel Slaton should also oppose legislation he supported that would ban transgender adolescents from receiving puberty blockers and hormone therapy, on which the House is scheduled to vote on Friday.

“It’s no surprise that the man obsessed with children’s bodies — especially transgender kids — is a predator,” González said in a statement. “The courage to stop a predator has to extend to opposing his crusade to fixate the entire state on children’s genitals. He’s been calling my community ‘perverts’ and ‘groomers’ for years — when it turns out he should’ve invested in a good mirror.”

To this all I would add is “And Paul Pressler and his enabler Jared Woodfill, too”. The rest of the story is various Republicans mumbling excuses and dodging questions about Slaton. I don’t care about that. Remember the name Bryan Slaton, and remember why we remember the name. Shitty people in politics is a universal problem, just like shitty people in any other part of life is, but the Bryan Slaton type of shitty people is a Republican problem.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged Bryan Slaton, expulsion, gay rights, HD02, Jessica Gonzalez, sexual harassment, Texas, The Lege, transgender rights | Comments Off

Weekend link dump for May 14

Posted on May 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

“Even as the SAT and its chief rival, the ACT, have become less important in admissions, they are becoming more universal for a different purpose: as a measure of high school achievement. More and more high schools have turned to the SATs and ACTs as their standard assessment tool for their students’ progress, entirely separate from the college admissions process. The result is a standardized testing landscape that has been shaken up, and whose future looks murky, at best.”

“Memo to the Media: You Are Not Obligated to Cover a Crackpot Like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.”

“One key area the WGA is keen to bring attention to is the total lack of transparency from streaming services over viewership numbers, a process that has left many writers and showrunners unable to negotiate for fairer pay.”

“This isn’t a safe place to practice medicine anymore.”

RIP, Newton Minnow, former FCC Chair who in the early 1960s famously decried the state of American television as a “vast wasteland”.

RIP, Vida Blue, multi-time All Star and 1971 MVP pitcher for the A’s and Giants.

RIP, Chris Strachwitz, self-described “song catcher” whose label helped record and preserve an incredible quantity of music from the southern United States and Mexico.

“Netflix Users Are Trying To Game The System To Prevent Their Favorite Shows From Getting Canceled“. See that earlier story about lack of transparency from streaming services? This is where it takes us.

The mystery of the pink beret-wearing insurrectionist has been solved.

“A battery holds energy to be used later. Aquifers can be leveraged to do something similar: They can exploit the insulating properties of the Earth to conserve thermal energy and transfer it to and from buildings above ground. The temperature of water in an aquifer tends to stay fairly stable. This provides a way to heat and cool nearby structures with energy stored in water, instead of burning natural gas in furnaces or tapping into fossil-fuel-derived electricity to run air conditioners.”

“Here are a few of the wildest ways that Hollywood coped—for better or, mostly, for worse—with the 2007–2008 writers strike, producing some compelling, unexpected, and ultimately weird work along the way.”

RIP, Joe Kapp, former NFL and CFL quarterback, first Latino quarterback to lead a team to the Super Bowl.

“Clark is part of Archiving The Black Web, a group of digital archivists seeking to preserve the stories of Black people and extend existing archival practices to the digital sphere. This group and others hope to document not just the content created on the platform but how Black people use it for communication and community. They see an urgency to preserving Black Twitter in a world in which Black history and Black women’s cultural labor are undervalued or unacknowledged — and where the future of Twitter seems unknown.”

“This was a civil trial, not a criminal one, so Trump is not a convicted sexual assailant. But for the first time, a court of law has assessed the credibility of the former president against that of one of his accusers.”

“Sometimes the truth wins out.”

RIP, Deacon Jones, former MLB player, scout, and coach, first Black man recognized by the Hall of Fame, longtime executive/face of the franchise for the Sugar Land Space Cowboys.

Two headlines: George Santos Charged With Wire Fraud, Money Laundering, False Statements, George Santos Surrenders to Face Federal Criminal Charges. This really was quite a week, wasn’t it?

RIP, Denny Crum, Hall of Fame college basketball coach who led the Louisville men’s team to two NCAA championships.

“The point, as you can see, isn’t to remediate any specific set of concerns. It’s to get a news organization into the posture of a supplicant. That both defangs the news organization from playing its proper role.”

RIP, Jaclyn Zeman, actor best known for her long stint on General Hospital.

“Part of why so many men turn out to be like that — creepy and unsafe — is because the self-appointed and/or nominally God-ordained Moral Instructors spend more energy policing women for potential violations of their alleged ideal form of femininity than they spend teaching men forms of masculinity that don’t make them creepy and unsafe.”

“One thing last night made clear is that not only doesn’t “fact-checking in real time” work on Trump, it’s actually JUST WHAT HE WANTS. Allow me to explain…”

RIP, Hodding Carter III, journalist and civil rights activist who was the spokesperson for the State Department during the Iran hostage crisis.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged linkdump | 2 Comments

House passes bill to ban gender affirming care for minors

Posted on May 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Friday was a bad day.

Texas has taken a major step toward banning transgender minors from getting puberty blockers and hormone therapy — care that medical groups say is vital to their mental health — after the state House gave Senate Bill 14 initial approval Friday.

Trans Texans and LGBTQ advocates consider the bill one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in this year’s legislative session. It would ban trans people younger than 18 from getting certain transition-related care. Kids already accessing treatments would have to be “weaned off” in a “medically appropriate” manner, the bill says. It also bans transition-related surgeries, though those are rarely performed on kids.

The House’s vote to advance the bill followed over five hours of pushback from Democrats, who had successfully delayed the bill on a technicality twice last week. On Friday, Democratic lawmakers once again tried to raise points of order, a parliamentary maneuver aimed at delaying or defeating bills, but their efforts failed this time. Some Democrats, though, defected and voted in favor of the bill.

The initial vote was 92-48, though three Democrats later said they accidentally voted in favor and meant to oppose the bill. Still, nine other democrats voted for the bill, according to the vote record. State Rep. Charlie Geren of Fort Worth was also listed as voting against the bill — the only Republican to do so — even though he is a co-sponsor of the legislation and later tweeted that he was proud of its initial passage.

As SB 14 advances, Texas — home to one of the largest trans communities in the country — is moving ever closer to joining over a dozen states in restricting transition-related care for minors. The American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal have already raised legal challenges against several of them. And judges have so far blocked the efforts to limit these treatments for trans youth in Alabama and Arkansas.

Pending one more final vote in the House, SB 14 would return to the Senate, which has already passed a version of the legislation that mandates an abrupt cutoff as opposed to a tapering off process.

Trans Texans, their families and medical groups say transition-related care is critical to supporting the mental health of trans youth, who are already facing higher risks of depression and suicide than their cisgender peers. Getting access to these treatments, they say, is time intensive and requires multiple medical evaluations. Parents are included in decisions about what treatments, if any, are best for individual children.

“The bill in front of us today is banning health care,” said state Rep. Mary González, D-Clint, while advocating for a failed amendment that would have largely foiled the legislation. “Politics shouldn’t determine health care, period.”

Some Democratic lawmakers, including the nine openly LGBTQ state representatives, stood outside the chamber prior to debate and read letters from trans youth who would be affected by SB 14 and their families. And earlier in the day, LGBTQ Texans and their allies marched to the Capitol to protest the legislation, just over a week after state police forcefully booted scores of them from the Capitol and handcuffed two.

“We’re rising up. The whole LGBTQIA community is fighting back against a group of people who, at their core, don’t want us to exist,” said Danielle Skidmore, a longtime Austin resident and trans woman who came to the Capitol on Friday to protest the bill.

[…]

Several Democratic lawmakers voted for the bill, according to the vote record: state Reps. Alma Allen of Houston, Rhetta Bowers of Rowlett, Harold Dutton of Houston, Tracy King of Batesville, Armando Martinez of Weslaco, Suleman Lalani of Sugar Land, Mary Ann Perez of Houston and Shawn Thierry of Houston. Democratic state Reps. Christian Manuel of Beaumont, Penny Morales Shaw of Houston and Jessica González of Dallas initially voted for the bill, according to a record of the vote, but quickly said those were accidents and that they meant to vote against it.

Thierry, the lone Democrat to publicly speak in favor of SB 14 during Friday’s debate, said she voted for it with “an open heart and clear mind.”

“As a thoughtful legislator, mother, woman of faith and child advocate, I have made a decision to place the safety and well-being of all young people over the comfort of political expediency,” she said.

See here and here for some background. Before we go further, you need to read this Twitter thread from DMN reporter Lauren McGaughy, who has been following up with all of the Dems that had apparently voted Yes on SB14. In short, nearly all of them have said their Yes vote was in error and that they will be voting No on third reading. Tracy King and Shawn Thierry are the only two who confirmed that they intended to vote Yes, while Harold Dutton – who had been voting against most of the Dem-offered amendments to weaken SB14, unlike the others – hadn’t replied as of when I drafted this. I’m very glad to hear this, as I was about to be massively disappointed in some of these people. With some of them, let’s just say this wasn’t so shocking. Shawn Thierry has gone on some kind of bizarre heel turn – she was out there voting for book bans earlier, too – and I look forward to supporting a primary opponent against her. And Harold Dutton is still Harold fucking Dutton. Tracy King has the excuse of representing a district that Greg Abbott won in 2022, for what that’s worth. He qualifies as a disappointment.

Anyway. For those of you thinking well, it’s just drawing a distinction between adults and minors, I will remind you that the Senate passed a bill that would have outlawed this care for adults as well. Once you decide that it’s okay to ban safe and effective medical care for people because you don’t like it, there’s no obvious boundary for that. Cutting off ongoing treatment for however many kids is especially heinous.

(Yes, I believe the Dems who say their vote was in error. It happens. McGaughy confirmed with Charlie Geren that his No vote was in error, too.)

There will surely be litigation over this, as there has been in other states, and at some point SCOTUS will get to decide how much value they believe trans people have. Given their previous lack of care about who gets to access what kind of health care, I’m not optimistic, but it’s all we have until we vote in a different government. Until then, here’s a statement from the All In For Equality Coalition:

The Texas House voted today to advance Senate Bill 14, which will ban evidence-based, life-saving health care for transgender adolescents in Texas.

S.B. 14 bans puberty blockers and hormone therapy, which have been used and proven to treat gender dysphoria for decades.

Hundreds of Texans came to the State Capitol on May 2 to oppose the bill banning essential health care for trans youth — and were met with violence and arrests. The All in For Equality coalition condemned the clearing of the Capitol by authorities.

The bill passed the Texas House late Friday evening by a vote of 92 to 48.

The following quote can be attributed to Ash Hall (they/them), Policy & Advocacy Strategist at the ACLU of Texas:

“This is a dark day in Texas. Our legislature has turned its back on science, parents, and the safety and lives of children. Our hearts break for transgender young people in our state who have repeatedly been attacked by their own government for callous political gain. This legislation is vicious, it’s cruel, and it’s blatantly unconstitutional. The bigotry and discrimination in this bill will not stand up in court and it will not stand the test of time. Transgender people have always existed and always will, and the vast majority of Texans do not support harming them or cutting off this life-saving health care.”

The following quote can be attributed to Ricardo Martinez (he/him), CEO at Equality Texas:

“I am beyond angry that we must keep showing up to defend the dignity, privacy and liberty of our neighbors. Banning health care that literally saves lives should not be an option. The public debate about the value of our lives is not legitimate and it is out of touch with true Texas Values. This is part of a nefarious plan to eliminate us from public life. But it won’t work. We will not stop fighting for our rights. Not now, not ever.”

The following quote can be attributed to Emmett Schelling (he/him), Executive Director, Transgender Education Network of Texas:

“Today was ugly, but I am reminded that one of the fundamental parts of our trans experience is the deep understanding that we are all we have. Queer and Trans Texans are united in the fight to build a world in our vision on our terms.”

The following quote can be attributed to Sarah Warbelow (she/her), Legal Director for the Human Rights Campaign:

“Ill-informed and ill-intentioned politicians are prohibiting Texas parents from accessing best practice medical care for their children. S.B. 14 will be devastating to trans youth and their families – and it’s just the first of the many anti-LGTBQ+ bills that Texas lawmakers are working to pass. When this bill becomes law, Texas families will be banned from accessing medically necessary, safe, age-appropriate health care backed by decades of research and supported by the entire American medical establishment. Legislators are sending a clear message that Texas is not a safe place for LGBTQ+ people. We will not stop fighting these discriminatory measures.”

The following quote can be attributed to Shelly Skeen (she/her), Senior Attorney, Lambda Legal:

“Texas legislators seem hell-bent on the targeting of transgender Texas youth, their families, and their doctors. It was not enough to threaten parents with charges of child abuse for following their doctor’s orders, but now they want to block access to all medically necessary care against well-established standards, peer reviewed research, and the advice and recommendations of every major medical association. This bill risks the health, well-being, and very lives of trans adolescents in the Longhorn State. First and foremost, Texas legislators need to listen to transgender adolescents, their families and their doctors instead of passing discriminatory laws that endanger our community. Trans youth in Texas deserve protection from legislators, not harm that endangers their futures.”

The following quote can be attributed to Marti Bier (they/them), Vice President of Programs at Texas Freedom Network:

“I am floored by the cruelty and moral hypocrisy of this bill. Access to transgender health care can be lifesaving for transgender youth; this evidence-based health care is supported by every major medical association nationwide. Still, members of our State Legislature are determined to insert themselves in the private health decisions made between loving, affirming families and their trusted medical providers. This has been a devastating day for our community and the families this bill will undoubtedly displace or tear apart. We will never stop fighting alongside our partners to create a future where transgender youth, adults, and their families are safe and free to exist in their own home state.”

If you or someone you know needs mental health resources or support, please visit:
— Trans Lifeline at (877) 565-8860 or https://www.translifeline.org
— Trevor Project at 866-488-7386 or https://www.thetrevorproject.org/

One more thing: The story reference a recent poll that among other things indicated that a majority of respondents claimed not to know any trans people. I’m here to tell you, you’re probably wrong about that. Your kids or your grandkids likely have a friend or classmate who is trans. Some of the fellow parents you met at your kids’ schools are the parents of a trans kid. Your coworkers, your neighbors, your high school and college classmates, the people you know from church or your favorite restaurant, they have trans people in their lives, or maybe they’re trans themselves. Maybe they haven’t let you in on that knowledge, and if so you can ponder the reasons for that, but they’re there. They’re not going away. And they have every right to live their lives. It would help them a lot if the state got off their backs and out of their doctor’s offices. That’s not much to ask.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged ACLU of Texas, Alabama, Alma Allen, Arkansas, Charlie Geren, Equality Texas, Harold Dutton, Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, lawsuit, Mando Martinez, Mary Ann Perez, Mary Gonzalez, puberty blockers, Rhetta Bowers, SCOTUS, Shawn Thierry, Suleman Lalani, Texas, Texas Freedom Network, The Lege, Tracy King, Transgender Education Network of Texas, transgender rights, Trevor Project | 1 Comment

Time for some Colin Allred profiles

Posted on May 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The Trib paints him as calm and collaborative, very much the opposite of the dramatic show horse Ted Cruz.

Rep. Colin Allred

U.S. Rep. Colin Allred is gearing up to challenge U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2024 election, and the Democrat’s measured approach poses a sharp contrast to Cruz’s bellicose style.

Allred doesn’t shout during committee hearings or deride those he disagrees with — both signature Cruz moves. He hasn’t made headlines for epic political showdowns, nor has he positioned himself as a leader of an ideological movement.

Colleagues instead describe Allred as level-headed, eager to work across the aisle and accessible to constituents in his Dallas-based district.

“Knowing how to work with everyone, knowing how to listen to people, how to engage, how to come up with solutions, and really, how to bring people together — that’s what leadership is,” said U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a Houston Democrat whose friendship with Allred grew after both flipped Republican-held seats in 2018. “And frankly, that’s the leadership we need in our state right now.”

Allred’s path to Congress wasn’t typical but has deep roots in his district.

A Dallas native, Allred was born to a single mother who taught in Dallas public schools. The Hillcrest High School football star played for Baylor University on a scholarship before deferring law school for four seasons as an NFL linebacker for the Tennessee Titans beginning in 2007.

After attending law school at the University of California, Berkeley, Allred became a civil rights lawyer and served in the Office of General Counsel for the Department of Housing and Urban Development under then-Secretary Julián Castro, another Texas Democrat.

Allred’s history has been integral to his campaigns and his time in office. He was the first member of Congress to take paternity leave from office and is part of a bipartisan group working to advance paid parental leave legislation.

“I never knew my father, so I made a promise to myself a long time ago that when I became a dad, I would do it right,” Allred said in his campaign announcement video.

[…]

Allred made a mark as an affable colleague shortly after arriving in Congress, according to others who were first elected in 2018. He was selected co-class president in his freshman term, and in his second term was elected to represent early-term candidates to Democratic leadership. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark named him as one of her 10 deputies in December.

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, also joined Congress after the 2018 election and said Allred was someone who could “turn down the temperature” in sometimes volatile internal discussions on gun safety legislation and trade agreements with Canada and Mexico.

“Colin was always a voice of reason, a voice of commonsense solutions, but also someone whose input was always very strategic and thoughtful,” Escobar said. “The Democratic Caucus is definitely a big tent, and we have very diverse views.”

There’s more, and they eventually get into what a huge douchebag Cruz is (they used slightly more delicate language) and how Allred will attack him for it. Allred is likeable but not well know, gets stuff done, reaches across the aisle, etc etc etc. You may wonder how any of this will get him votes, but we have four elections’ worth of evidence now showing that some number of Republican voters will not vote for certain Republican candidates in statewide races, and Ted Cruz is definitely one of them. Allred will need maximal Democratic turnout and enough of those “I’m not voting for Ted Cruz” Republicans to have a shot.

In the meantime, the Washington Post is reporting that State Sen. Roland Gutierrez still “intends” to run for Senate as well. I don’t have a WaPo subscription, I’m getting this from the Daily Kos morning digest for Thursday. I’m fine with there being a contested primary – it’s never too early to start campaigning in earnest – but we’ll see. Gutierrez is still saying he’ll make an announcement after the Legislative session ends on May 29.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged CD32, Colin Allred, Democratic primary, Election 2024, Roland Gutierrez, SD19, Senate, Ted Cruz, Texas | 1 Comment

The national cannabis oversupply problem

Posted on May 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

A fascinating look at a big problem in the cannabis market.

Along the West Coast, which dominated U.S. marijuana production long before states began to legalize it, producers face what many call the failed economics of legal pot.

There is vast supply, thanks to great growing conditions and a wealth of expertise, but any surplus remains officially trapped within each state’s borders due to the federal ban on marijuana. Prices have plunged and producers have struggled.

“I’m at rock bottom,” said Jeremy Moberg, who owns CannaSol Farms in north-central Washington and, like many licensed growers, complains that the state’s 37% cannabis tax leaves virtually no profit margin for producers. “I’m tired of running a failing business.”

No one in the industry expects a fractured Congress to help out anytime soon by legalizing the drug, allowing pot businesses to deduct expenses or even just easing banking restrictions that frequently cut them off from loans or credit.

Instead, some are pinning their hopes, however faint, on President Joe Biden’s administration clearing the way for marijuana trade among states that have legalized the drug. That would allow the West Coast — with its favorable climate and cheap, clean hydropower for indoor growing — to help supply the rest of the country, they argue.

[…]

Twenty-one states have now legalized the recreational use of cannabis by adults. Sales just began in Missouri, are expected to begin in July in Maryland and totaled $300 million in the first year of New Mexico’s program.

How states have set up their markets has implications for how their industries are doing now — and how they might fare should businesses be allowed to sell out of state.

Washington and Colorado were the first states to legalize recreational marijuana in 2012. Many of the early regulations Washington adopted to keep the Justice Department at bay — including restricting the size of growing facilities and banning out-of-state investment — remain in place.

That has helped some smaller growers thrive. But it could hamstring those hoping to compete in an interstate marketplace alongside larger, more efficient producers from Oregon or California, who operate under fewer limits.

In Oregon, where sales began in 2015, large growers have achieved some economy of scale that could give them a leg up in a broader market. But in the meantime, the state’s oversupply is considered the nation’s worst.

In February, the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission reported marijuana businesses were sitting on about 3 million pounds (1.36 million kilograms) of unused cannabis, as well as 75,000 pounds (34,000 kilograms) of concentrates and extracts.

Steve Marks, then the commission’s executive director, said Oregonians already buy as much weed as they can use. Federal inaction poses “an existential crisis” for Oregon’s industry, he warned.

“Cannabis in Oregon is like corn in Iowa,” said TJ Sheehy, an analyst for the commission. “If you put a box around Iowa and said you can only grow corn in Iowa to sell to Iowans, you’d have exactly the same dynamic.”

None of this has anything to do with Texas right now, of course, because we only allow a narrow medical use of cannabis. As you well know if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, it’s highly unlikely that situation will change in any meaningful way as long as Dan Patrick is in charge of the Senate. But nothing lasts forever, and things will eventually change, so it’s worth considering what the prospects for Texas-grown cannabis might look like some day. If the federal restrictions remain in place, then Texas growers would have sole access to the Texas market. Good for them in terms of limiting competition, not so good in terms of growth potential. If the federal restrictions are removed or at least weakened, then established suppliers will be racing in to meet the demand we’ll surely have. Not so good for the local growers, though being the “locally sourced” option can be an advantage, but potentially great for the consumers, who will have more choices and thus hopefully lower prices.

All this is theoretical, of course. At the rate we’re going, the rest of the country may be growing and selling cannabis before Texas ever gets around to allowing it here. I’ll leave it to you to decide how business friendly that would be.

Posted in National news | Tagged California, cannabis, Colorado, Dan Pope, Joe Biden, Justice Department, marijuana, Oregon, Texas, The Lege, Washington | Comments Off

One gambling bill makes it out of the House

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

It will enjoy a brief and beautiful life, like the first snowflake falling onto the street, before dying of starvation and neglect in the Senate.

Photo by Joel Kramer via Flickr creative commons

In dramatic fashion, the Texas House on Thursday gave final approval to legislation that would let voters decide whether to legalize online sports betting across the state.

The proposal needed 100 votes to pass and got exactly that when the roll was first called. A subsequent verification of the vote, which took several minutes as the clerk ticked through every member, produced 101 votes in favor of House Joint Resolution 102.

It is one of two proposals to expand gambling that have headlined the past two days in the lower chamber. Another, more ambitious piece of legislation, House Joint Resolution 155, would let voters decide whether to legalize casinos in Texas. The final consideration of that proposal was delayed until noon Friday as supporters continued working to find 100 votes.

Regardless, both proposals face long odds in the Senate, where Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has repeatedly said there is not enough support. And Friday is the deadline for the House to give final passage to its bills, meaning the casino legislation is running into a time crunch.

On Wednesday, the House initially approved both proposals, but neither received the two-thirds majority that proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution need to make it out of the chamber. That left them in an uncertain position heading into Thursday.

The author of the sports-betting legislation, Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, gave an emphatic final speech on the House floor Thursday, reiterating his argument that many Texans are already betting on sports, only illegally.

“Every single one of them are criminals … under Texas law, and I believe that we should pass this bill to let them come out of the shadows and to carefully and safely regulate this,” Leach said.

The sports-betting legislation was able to clear the 100-vote threshold after several members changed their votes Thursday. At least five voted yes on HJR 102 on Thursday after voting no a day earlier.

A day earlier, the House passed the casino proposal by a vote of 92-51 and then the sports-betting proposal by a 97-44 vote. Both resolutions need a two-thirds majority from the House and Senate, followed by voter approval, to amend the state constitution.

See here for some background. I invite you to think of some other activities that are legal in other states and draw many Texans to them to partake in them because doing so would make them criminals here in Texas while I tell you that the casino bill ultimately went down.

The high-profile push to bring casinos to Texas this legislative session ended Friday after supporters acknowledged that they did not have enough votes to advance it out of the state House.

One of the authors of casino legislation, Rep. John Kuempel, R-Seguin, postponed consideration of his bill until Nov. 29, dooming its chances ahead of a midnight deadline to move it out of the lower chamber.

As the stories note, legislation to expand gambling made it farther this year than it ever had before, and that’s not nothing. It still faces the same immovable object in the Senate, and I don’t see anything to suggest that’s going to change. My advice to the casinos would be to work to remove said immovable object electorally, rather than continue to bash their heads and their seemingly limitless wallets against the wall every two years. I don’t see how that would be a worse strategy than what they’ve been doing for however long. The Chron has more.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged casinos, Charlie Geren, Constitution, constitutional amendments, Dade Phelan, Dan Patrick, DraftKings, gambling, Greg Abbott, horse racing, Jeff Leach, John Kuempel, Senate, Sports Betting Alliance, Texas, The Lege | 2 Comments

Houston still doing well sheltering the homeless

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good news.

As she waited for the results of a yearly census of the Houston area’s homeless population, Ana Rausch clicked open an email detailing the soaring number of eviction filings in Harris County. This March, 6,600 households had evictions filed against them, compared to a pre-COVID average of 3,800.

As the vice president of program operations for the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County, which coordinates the region’s homelessness response, she viewed the data with some worry. She hoped the count wouldn’t show a corresponding increase in homelessness.

Now that the results are in, she is relieved, she said. During a year that saw both evictions and funding for Houston’s programs combating homelessness soar, 2023’s overall count stayed flat from the year before, with the number of people living in tents, cars and other places unfit for habitation down and the number of people in shelters up.

Every year, thousands of volunteers fan out across the country to take stock of their regions’ homeless populations. It’s this census, known as the Point-in-Time Count, that has brought Houston national recognition for its success in reducing its homeless population by roughly two-thirds since 2011.

The 2023 results, released Wednesday morning, showed the count of people living in tents, cars and other places unfit for habitation dropped 17 percent in the Houston area, to 1,200 people from 1,500 the year before. At the same time, the number of people living in shelters increased 18 percent, to 2,000 from 1,700. In the past year, shelters lifted the social distancing measures that sharply reduced the number of beds available during the pandemic.

[…]

Mayor Sylvester Turner also trumpeted the reduction of people living on the streets, in vehicles or in other unsheltered situations. Such a result “does not happen by mistake,” he said in a release. “Rather it’s the result of making it a top priority, enhancing our invaluable partnership with Harris County and the community, and strategically funding data-proven, holistic housing solutions.”

In 2022, Houston, Harris County, the Coalition for the Homeless and their partners poured resources into a strategy of closing down homeless camps by offering everyone in them housing. The strategy has required opening a navigation center, where people moved out of a camp can stay while awaiting their permanent housing, and renting out units where people can stay longterm with supportive services such as caseworkers. The city, county and their partners housed 2,500 people in 2022, and more than 9,000 people who had been without homes were housed through their programs on the night of the count.

In a year when inflation spiked and many eviction protections ended, “We suspect that we might be somewhat unique and remarkable in the fact that we saw our unsheltered count go down,” said Catherine Villarreal, director of communications for the Coalition. However, many cities have yet to release their results from this year’s count, so it’s to be seen how Houston’s results compare.

See here for some background. These counts aren’t perfect – people couch-surfing with friends and acquaintances will be missed, for example – but the big picture is there, and it’s a good one for Houston. There will always be more work to do, but we have done a lot to improve this situation for thousands of people. We should be proud of that. Axios has more.

Posted in Elsewhere in Houston | Tagged Coalition for the Homeless, Harris County, homelessness, Houston, Houston-Harris County Homeless Encampment Response Strategy, National Alliance to End Homelessness | Comments Off

The bracted twistflower

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Gotta save our wildflowers, y’all.

By Alison Northup, CC BY 4.0

The bracted twistflower, a Texas wildflower threatened by growing urban sprawl, was declared a threatened species Monday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The tall, bright purple flower, which has seen significant decline across its range in the rapidly developing I-35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio, will receive protection under the Endangered Species Act. Close to 1,600 acres across four Texas counties — Uvalde, Medina, Bexar and Travis — have been designated critical habitat for the plant.

The protection, which comes after the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit in 2021 against the federal agency, will lead to the development of a recovery plan to reintroduce the plant and prescribe conservation actions. It will also make removing, cutting, digging up or harming the plant illegal.

“Very few busy Texans in the world today pause to think about these plants … but they still play an absolutely essential role in our world,” said Michael J. Robinson, senior conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The once thriving Hill Country wildflower blooms in the spring and requires specific soil that is only found near the edge of Glen Rose and the Edwards Plateau region. It also needs subsurface water and a mix of sun and shade that’s provided by ashe juniper trees and live oaks. Its lavender-colored flowers supply nectar and pollen for Texas bee species.

“This is a species that could be recovered within a few decades if its remaining habitats are managed appropriately,” Chris Best, state botanist for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Texas, said in a press release.

Conservationists say wildflower populations are increasingly separated from each other to the extent that pollinators like bees that ensure reproduction can’t make it from location to location, which increases the loss of genetic diversity and hurts the plant’s ability to adapt to other threats.

The Endangered Species Act defines a threatened species as “any species which is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” The wildflower has lost habitat to development, hungry white-tailed deer and non-native grazing animals.

It’s the second Texas plant the federal agency has listed under the Endangered Species Act this year. Last month, it added the prostrate milkweed, a rare Texas plant crucial for the survival of monarch butterflies, to the endangered list last month. All 24 known populations of prostrate milkweed are found within eight miles of the Rio Grande.

See here for more about the prostrate milkweed. I thought at the time that there would be litigation of its place on the endangered list, as one of the reasons for its endangerment is the border wall, but so far nothing as far as I can tell. Then again, its official listing was on March 30, so maybe it just hasn’t happened yet. The bracted twistflower will be listed later this month, and hopefully there will be no potential for controversy with it.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged Bexar County, bracted twistflower, Center for Biological Diversity, endangered species, Medina County, Monarch butterfly, prostrate milkweed, Texas, Travis County, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Uvalde County | Comments Off

FDA set to approve over the counter birth control pill

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

An influential advisory panel recommended that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve an oral contraceptive pill for over-the-counter use without an age restriction.

While hormonal birth control is available without a prescription in many other countries, this medication, Opill, would be the first such option in the United States. The vote, conducted after a day-and-a-half discussion this week, is a significant step toward making birth control more widely available now that abortion is not federally protected.

The FDA is not obligated to accept the panel’s recommendation but is likely to do so, with a decision expected this summer. The vote means that hormonal birth control could be available without a prescription later this year.

In their review of the manufacturer’s data, FDA scientists surfaced concerns about whether people would know how to properly use the medication without the advice of a physician, highlighting in particular whether people would understand how often to take the medication, the proper way to consume it, the correct dosing, and what medical conditions might render them ineligible for the drug.

Opill, which is made of progestin, is not recommended for people who have had breast cancer. Some FDA scientists also worried that the drug may be less effective for people with higher body weights, who were not considered to the same extent when the drug was first approved in 1973.

But in their discussion this week, the group of scientists advising the FDA — including doctors and biostatisticians — argued that the value of making a safe and effective oral contraceptive more readily available outweighed those concerns. Making the pill an option without a prescription could make it easier for people who otherwise don’t have access to hormonal birth control: minors who are unable to to involve their parents, people who don’t have a regular health care provider, or those whose nearby clinics and health centers don’t provide oral contraceptives.

The over-the-counter birth control pill — which should be taken at the same time every day — is also more effective than other non-prescription methods, such as condoms or diaphragms.

“It’s really an access issue,” said Dr. Katalin Roth, a professor of medicine at George Washington University. “Making it over the counter is the right thing for women.”

There is another factor in all this, one that went unspoken in the official proceedings.

However, there’s another incredibly salient factor that was largely absent from the presentations: the current U.S. abortion landscape.

Per the Guttmacher Institute, 26 states have abortion schemes categorized as “restrictive,” “very restrictive” or “most restrictive.” In many of those states, abortions are virtually inaccessible.

Such a climate makes the accessibility of contraception a critical concern, particularly for girls and women who live in states with the most restrictive regimes. As it is, contraception has been linked to expanded educational opportunities and higher income for women and better outcomes for children; a 2012 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that one-third of the wage gains women have made since the 1960s stem from the availability of birth control.

Though separate processes, targeting contraception has long been part of the anti-abortion movement, even if its activists sometimes muddied their stance so as not to alienate supporters.

“When emergency contraception first came about, some pharmacists refused to fill prescriptions and said that emergency contraception is an abortifacient, which it isn’t,” Carole Joffe, a sociology professor at the University of California, Davis’ center for global reproductive health, told TPM. “Then it escalates — some were at one point refusing to fill prescriptions for regular birth control.”

Immediately after the anti-abortion movement had its historic victory in the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, right-wing lawmakers started eyeing intrauterine devices and Plan B, also known as the morning-after pill, to restrict next.

“Going after contraception is such an overreach — but that’s what social movements do,” Joffe added. “When they win one battle, they think they can win more.”

There is of course opposition to this proposal.

Major medical groups, such as the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, are backing the request.

But groups like the Catholic Medical Association are opposed, and not just on religious grounds.

In addition to questioning the safety of making a birth control available without a prescription, that group argues that easier access would help sex traffickers and that skipping the requirement to see a doctor would harm women’s health in other ways.

“It eliminates the need to see a physician for young ladies to see a physician for the prescription,” says Dr. Timothy Millea, who head’s the association’s health care policy committee. “That will eliminate the screenings for ovarian cancer, for cervical cancer, for sexually transmitted infections.”

An FDA assessment also raised questions about taking a health professional out the equation. FDA scientists questioned whether women would take the pill every day at the same time, as they’re supposed to, and whether women who shouldn’t take the pill because of certain health problems would know that.

But proponents dismiss those concerns, arguing there’s plenty of evidence that women can easily handle it. Pills are available without a prescription in more than 100 other countries.

“We think the evidence is quite clear,” says Dr. Jack Resneck Jr., the AMA’s president. “First of all, oral contraceptives have been used safely by millions of women in the United States and around the world since the 1960s.”

Moreover, while regular exams are important, “they’re not necessary prior to initiating or refiling an oral contraceptive,” Resneck says.

I don’t have any commentary here, just adding this to the Things To Watch in the coming weeks, as the FDA preps its final decision. We’re past the point where the Lege can do anything ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be other opportunities. The forced birth zealots don’t like contraception either, and they’re not going to go away.

Posted in National news | Tagged abortion, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American Medical Association, birth control, Catholic Medical Association, contraception, FDA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Opill | 3 Comments

Cruise comes to Houston

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I’m genuinely curious to see how this goes.

Cruise, a General Motors autonomous vehicle subsidiary, is bringing its self-driving cars to Houston with the goal of offering driverless rides.

The cars will begin testing next week, said Megan Prichard, Cruise’s vice president of ridehail.

“We designed the technology to launch first in San Francisco with the idea that we would see all sorts of challenges: everything from roller skate parties, to heavy traffic to raccoons in the roads,” Prichard said. “And we thought that if we designed our technology for a dense urban environment, that we would be able to then pick it up and put it into other cities around the country and around the world with only a little bit of fine tuning.”

Initial tests will be supervised drives, with a Cruise employee in the vehicle as a backup safety driver while the vehicle learns about Houston streets. The company did not specify where it would be tested in Houston, and the first drives will be closed to the public. Prichard said there was no timeline for when rides to the public will be offered. The company declined to say how many vehicles it planned to have in Houston.

After launching in San Francisco last year, the company started running its autonomous vehicles — a fleet of Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles equipped with sensors — in Austin and Phoenix.

Prichard said the company is expanding to Houston because it’s a large and growing metropolitan area.

“The area that we operate (in) will be the area that we determine to be safe, and the hours that we operate will be the hours that we determine to be safe. And then we’ll expand that out over time,” Prichard said.

See here and here for some background. While the Cruise app rolled out in Austin in January, they only began testing the cars on the streets there in March, and that was not yet the public rollout. As such, I have no idea how it’s gone in Austin, so I don’t have any basis for predicting how it might go here. For that matter, and for all the hype about autonomous vehicle delivery services in Houston, I have not seen any reporting on how that’s been received by the public. I haven’t seen any stories of spectacular failures, so that’s a positive sign. I’m still unsure how big the market actually is for any of this. You can specify a driver who doesn’t talk to you when you order an Uber, so how is this any different? Like I said, I don’t know, and I’m looking forward to finding out. Does this appeal to you at all? Leave a comment and let me know. CultureMap, which answers one of my questions by noting that a Cruise ride would be cheaper than an Uber, and Bloomberg have more.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged Austin, California, Cruise, driverless cars, General Motors, Houston, Lyft, National Association of City Transportation Officials, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Phoenix, San Francisco, Texas, The Lege, Uber | 3 Comments

Fort Cavazos

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

For a number of reasons, Tuesday was a good day.

General Richard E. Cavazos

One of the U.S. military’s largest bases has been renamed after the Army’s first Hispanic four-star general.

Fort Hood, located about 70 miles north of Austin, Texas, was redesignated on Tuesday as Fort Cavazos in honor of the late Gen. Richard Edward Cavazos, a Texas native who served in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

“General Cavazos’ combat proven leadership, his moral character and his loyalty to his Soldiers and their families made him the fearless yet respected and influential leader that he was during the time he served, and beyond,” Lt. Gen. Sean Bernabe, III Armored Corps Commanding General, said in a statement.

“We are ready and excited to be part of such a momentous part of history, while we honor a leader who we all admire,” Bernabe added.

The redesignation is part of an effort by the Department of Defense to rename military bases and other sites with titles linked to members of the Confederacy.

A slew of military installations and nine Army bases are getting new names, including Fort Hood, which was named after the Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood, who commanded troops during the Civil War.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other supporters had urged the military to rename the base after Cavazos, who was raised in Kingsville, Texas, and commanded troops at Fort Hood.

Born to Mexican-American parents, Cavazos was commissioned to the Army after graduating from high school and went to fight in the Korean War. There, he was a member of the Borinqueneers, a famed unit of mostly Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican soldiers. He later led troops in the Vietnam War.

Cavazos earned the Silver Star and two Distinguished Service Cross awards for his service during the two conflicts — for actions such as evacuating wounded soldiers before having his own injuries treated during the Korean War and exposing himself to enemy fire while leading attacks in the Vietnam War.

“I truly believe that a lot of us got home because of the way he conducted himself,” Melvin “Brave” Brav, who served under Cavazos, told the San Antonio Express-News.

Cavazos eventually ascended to the rank of four-star general and led the U.S. Army Forces Command, making him one of the highest-ranked Army officials at the time.

Outstanding, well deserved, and long overdue. You can learn more about Gen. Cavazos by clicking on the embedded picture. And just as a reminder, not everyone supported this.

The renaming of bases became a heated political issue in the final months of the Trump administration, when the former president blasted the idea, accusing others of wanting to “throw those names away.”

Trump had vetoed the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which included the Naming Commission, but in the waning days of his administration, Congress delivered its first and only veto override during his tenure, approving the legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support.

And the renaming comes at a time when Gen. Lloyd Austin, the country’s first Black secretary of defense, has identified racism and domestic extremism as some of the most pressing issues facing the country and the armed services.

“The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies. But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks,” Austin said at his confirmation hearing.

The fact that this happened on the same day that a jury found The Former Guy liable to the tune of $5 million for his assault on E. Jean Carroll is just *chef’s kiss*. Throw all those names right into the trash, I say. We should have done it decades ago. And if somehow your butt remains in pain because of this, just drive a few miles north of Fort Cavazos to Hood County, where that slimeball Confederate’s legacy still lives on. However much we do, it’s still not enough.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged Confederacy, Congress, Defense Department, Donald Trump, Fort Cavazos, Fort Hood, Hood County, Lloyd Austin, Texas | 1 Comment

Dispatches from Dallas, May 12 edition

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week in DFW-area news, two big stories: the mass shooting in Allen and local election results. Plus, updates on the Dallas ransomware situation, Tarrant County jail troubles go to the feds, Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, robotaxis, a great exhibit at an area museum, and mayo beer.

First, local elections: The city of Dallas had all fourteen seats and the mayor’s office on the ballot. All the incumbents (the mayor and 12 council members) won (Archive link), with only one of the open seats proceeding to a runoff. In Fort Worth, per Fort Worth Report, Mayor Parker and most of the council also cruised to re-election and there’s going to be a runoff in D11, the new Hispanic-opportunity district. Arlington kept its mayor and the majority of its council and approved bonds for streets and parks. Denton recalled one council member (archive link), presumably over ignoring the voters on marijuana decriminalization. Local blogger Mark Steger sums up the Richardson elections; Richardson also kept most incumbents and passed a bond issue for additional funds to replace their city hall, which was due for refurbishment before it burned down.

In school board elections, the DMN summarizes results in Collin and Dallas counties (Archive link), which mostly favored incumbents, which was good news after last year’s beatdown by reactionary Patriot Mobile candidates and the like. Frankin Strong has a good summary of statewide news including where anti-reactionary forces failed in North Texas: Keller ISD and Grapevine-Colleyville ISD.

I’m not a fan of Dallas mayor Eric Johnson, but he was the only choice on the ballot. My council member (D10) was term-limited out and I live in a part of Dallas that’s a stronghold of the business Republican, so it’s unsurprising that even the candidate I voted for was a little conservative for my taste. He lost, though, and the somewhat more conservative but at least not utterly reactionary Kathy Stewart will be my council member. Meanwhile in RISD elections, the incumbent in at-large place 6 survived a reactionary challenger, which I consider enough of a victory to make up for both D10 and the mayor.

But at least I voted! A lot of people don’t, and the complaints are legion (Dallas Observer; DMN; Fort Worth Report). Looks like the numbers in the cities are about 10% of registered voters, which as that Dallas Observer story demonstrates, means hundreds of votes are deciding council seat elections. We could solve part of this problem by moving municipal elections to November, when more people vote. But since the people who could move elections keep getting re-elected in May, that’s not likely to happen.

The second big story this week is the mass shooting at the outlet mall in Allen. I assume anyone interested enough to follow Charles’ blog is aware of the outlines of the story, but here’s the DMN update on the story from the 10th (Archive link). Unsurprisingly the killer had a history of “mental illness” and his guns were legally acquired. He was wearing a patch signifying right-wing extremist views and his social media was full of Hitler love and related opinions. And half the victims were of Asian descent (Archive link). Everybody and their dog is upset with Texas Republicans who won’t do anything about guns, but of course, as Charles noted yesterday, we can’t even get the Lege to pass a bill to keep from selling assault weapons to young folks who can’t drink legally in the wake of a mass murder.

Meanwhile, since the mass shooting in Allen, we also saw an apparent attack on folks outside a migrant shelter in Brownsville that killed eight people. And in North Texas we had a shooting on a DART train that killed one and injured two (Archive link). That was just Sunday. Plus, of course, the inevitable copycat threats.

Andrea Grimes has the best take on the whole thing: “If I die by gun violence, don’t pray for me. Politicize me.”

In other news:

Charles has covered recent news on the ransomware attack on the City of Dallas. Today the city says it may take months to clean all city computers (Archive link). I’m glad our library is fine-free and I have a stack of books to work through before the IT folks get to it.
Here’s a little DMN coverage of the upcoming Senate race between hometown boy Colin Allred and Ted Cruz (Archive link). Most of this is conventional wisdom about how much it sucks to be a Democrat in Texas but I think the DMN’s political reporter may be on to something about the difference between Allred and Beto. I appreciate Beto’s positive campaigning, but he didn’t hit Cruz hard enough. Allred has come out of the gate saying what we all know is true: Cruz is awful and he’s in it for himself. Allred has a fine line to walk being positive vs bringing Cruz’s many chickens home to roost; his opening video did a great job of emphasizing both points. While Allred isn’t my congressional rep (I wish) his local profile suggests he has a good chance of threading that needle.
Again as Charles noted, notorious sex pest Bryan Slaton was expelled from the Lege Tuesday. I hope we’ve seen the last of him, but I doubt it. I’ll be keeping an eye out for a new election in Slaton’s district, not to mention seeing who scoops him up as a lobbyist. My condolences to his former constituents, except the ones who voted for him.
Speaking of hater Republicans, the Tarrant County Judge is going after a bar that hosted an all-ages drag show. He’s asked the Comptroller to rule whether Tulips, a venue I haven’t been to yet but one that’s hosted a number of concerts I’m interested in, is operating as an unlicensed sexually-oriented business. This is the same county judge who ran off a nationally-acclaimed election administrator because he’s an election denier, so take his suggestions with a mountain of salt.
In economic news, the Dallas Fed says Texas is losing its cheap housing advantage. Having bought two houses and sold one in the state in the last fifteen years, I’m not surprised. The price of our (free standing) new construction condo in Austin went up by half in the eight years we owned it and its current estimated value is about another half again of what we sold it for; and our house in Dallas has gone up about half in estimated value in the not-quite five years since we bought it. Near southeast Austin was hot because of the Oracle facility but I can’t tell you why northeast Dallas is this hot.
I’ve been watching this story for a while but it’s now coming to a head: Fort Worth activists work with Texas A&M to seek federal investigation of Tarrant County Jail. In particular this request was driven by the county’s handling of the case of Robert Miller, where the county supposedly hired a third-party expert to review the autopsy after he died in jail and the Star-Telegram questioned the results. No autopsy report was sent to the expert and nothing happened. Unsurprisingly, the Sheriff’s office did not respond to information requests for the linked story. Read the whole thing; it’s pretty grim. I’ll continue to keep an eye on this case and hope for some forward motion from the feds.
Robotaxis are coming: GM’s Cruise to Expand Robotaxi Service to Dallas and Houston (Archive link). “Cruise initially will offer rides to employees and have a safety driver, then open it to the public once the service is established. When the cars are truly driverless, Cruise will charge fares, a spokeswoman said.” More for somebody else.
You knew there was going to be a Clarence Thomas & Harlan Crow update. So here’s the ProPublica story about Harlan Crow paying for Thomas’ great-nephew, whom Thomas raised, at expensive private schools and laying out about $100,000. Crow, meanwhile, has told the Senate panel looking into the apparent corruption involved in his gifts to Thomas to to kiss off (Archive link). For commentary on all this, I recommend Dahlia Lithwick and Chris Geidner. Also, in case you can’t get enough of Clarence and Ginni Thomas, PBS has a Frontline documentary out on them.
In cultural news: Nearly 100 works make for a once-in-a-generation show of Mayan art at the Kimbell. The Kimbell is the best museum in the DFW metroplex and one of the best in the state despite its small size. This is going to be a fantastic show; I look forward to seeing it. If any of you reading this will be in the area this summer, check it out. The Kimbell is worth a visit even without a blockbuster exhibit and the general collection is free.
We Try Martin House’s Mayonnaise Beer … ‘for Some Reason’. I like mayo on my sandwiches, but … no.
Sad news from the zoo: Dallas Zoo elephant dies. Ajabu was seven and died of a viral infection that is often fatal. There’s no reason to suspect Ajabu’s illness was related to any of the zoo’s problems earlier this year.
Last, but not least, for my fellow Gen Xers: Frankie Goes to Hollywood biopic Relax in the works. I’m here for it.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged Dallas, guest post, linkdump, Texas | Comments Off

You didn’t get your hopes up about that “raise the age” bill, did you?

Posted on May 11, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Psych.

The unexpected elation felt this week by gun control advocates and families of Uvalde shooting victims dissolved to despair Tuesday, when a bill that would raise the age to legally purchase semi-automatic rifles lost its newfound momentum and was left off the Texas House’s agenda ahead of a key deadline.

Barring an unexpected development, the delay likely ends the bill’s chances of becoming law.

The proposal has long faced stiff odds in a state that has regularly loosened gun restrictions in recent years. But on Monday, in the aftermath of the deadly shooting in an Allen shopping mall, a House committee unexpectedly advanced the legislation in an 8-5 vote that included two Republicans supporting it.

That left little time for the bill to be added to the House’s calendar, however. The final day the House can pass bills is Thursday, and the chamber’s agenda must be approved 36 hours ahead of when they convene. That creates a de facto deadline of around 10 p.m. Tuesday for the measure to be placed on the calendar.

When that hour arrived Tuesday night, House Bill 2744 remained off the list.

The measure’s supporters, particularly parents of children who died at Robb Elementary in Uvalde who have been advocating for it all session, pushed until the end. Minutes before 10 p.m., a small group stood outside the House chamber holding signs and chanting and calling for the bill to be heard on the House floor. Even then, they could be heard faintly from the back of the chamber.

“2-7-4-4,” they yelled. “Put this bill on the floor.”

There were less than a dozen of them, but they could be heard inside the House chamber — their chants carrying loudly enough that Capitol staffers closed the doors to the second-floor viewing gallery.

Perhaps the loudest was Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son Uziyah Garcia was shot to death by an AR-15 in one of Robb’s classrooms. When the clock passed 10 p.m., a few Democrats left the chamber and hugged him. Soon after, witnesses in the Capitol said, a Department of Public Safety trooper approached with a decibel monitor, informed him he was being too loud and escorted him out of the building. Cross continued chanting the bill’s number as he left.

“This is just another fucking attempt to slow and stop us,” Cross said on Twitter. “2744 may have died tonight, but we will never stop!

“Texas fucked with the wrong parents!”

\Another parent, Kimberly Mata-Rubio, who lost her 10-year-old daughter Alexandria “Lexi” Aniyah Rubio in the shooting, vowed to travel to the districts of House Speaker Dade Phelan, Calendars Committee Chair Dustin Burrows and Select Committee on Community Safety Chair Ryan Guillen and “share Lexi’s story, and the disrespect shown to Uvalde families.”

“This isn’t over,” she said. “We will regroup, re-strategize and come back stronger.”

[…]

As it became clear Tuesday afternoon that the bill was again in danger, proponents voiced their frustration. Some left signs urging its passage outside the Calendars Committee’s meeting room. Others protested outside the office of Rep. Ryan Guillen, R-Rio Grande City, the chair of the committee that advanced the bill Monday.

Guillen could not be immediately reached for comment about whether the committee report had been sent to the calendars committee or whether it would be before the deadline.

“I’m sickened that HB 2744 will not be brought to a full House vote,” said Rep. Jarvis Johnson, a Houston Democrat who voted to advance the bill Monday as a member of the select House committee. “For once, the legislature seemed to listen to its constituents & do the right thing after getting this bill out of committee.”

Lawmakers could use other approaches to revive the proposal. But advocates are realistic that the measure will most likely ultimately fail. Even if it were to pass the House — a tall request — it would still need to advance through a Senate that’s perhaps even more skeptical of the idea.

See here for the background. This was as unsurprising as a genital-obsessed youth pastor turning out to be a sex predator, just to pick an analogy at random. I have nothing but love and empathy for the Uvalde parents, who have done everything they can to get the gun-humping Republicans to Do Something about all the murdered children our state keeps producing, but that’s too tall a task for anyone. The only thing we can do is vote them out. We did get a couple of the committee members to support this incremental step forward, so there has to be some room for persuasion. Until such time as we can grow enough Democrats to win on sheer numbers, we’re going to have to persuade some Republican voters to switch sides in at least some races because of the gun issue – or the abortion issue, or the marijuana issue, or the gambling issue, whatever may work for them – if we ever want to change how things are done here. The next chance to do that is next year. Same story, next election. The Chron and the Current have more.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged Dade Phelan, Dustin Burrows, gun control, guns, Jarvis Johnson, Ryan Guillen, Senate, Texas, The Lege, Tracy King, Uvalde | 4 Comments

Another Dallas ransomware update

Posted on May 11, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

More specific info, but still a lot we don’t know.

Dallas’ top information technology official says the city hasn’t found any signs yet that personal information from employees or residents have been leaked after a cyberattack last week.

Bill Zielinski, Dallas’ chief information officer, told council members Monday during a public safety committee meeting that monitoring is ongoing to see if any personal information stored by the city shows up elsewhere, such as on the dark web. If it does, the city plans to on the dark web. If it does, the city plans to directly contact people affected.

The city’s network is still being restored after last Wednesday’s ransomware attack, and city servers and devices may need to be replaced to make sure they aren’t corrupted, Zielinski said. He offered no timeline on when all impacted city services will be restored, said state and federal officials are in contact with the city as an investigation continues, and declined to give specific details related to the ransomware attack.

“The city cannot comment on specific details related to the method or means of the attack, the mode of remediation or potential communications with the party launching the attack,” Zielinski said. “Doing so risks impeding the investigation or exposing critical information that can potentially be exploited by the attacker.”

Zielinski said the city intentionally took electronic systems, services and devices offline after detecting the ransomware early Wednesday to prevent it from spreading.

See here and here for the background. Putting my cybersecurity hat on, everything said here is more or less normal and expected. It sounds to me like they are not paying any ransom but instead are restoring and rebuilding their affected assets. That takes longer, but it doesn’t put you into any kind of relationship with the attackers. I can’t tell for sure if they know (or reasonably believe) that personal data was exfiltrated or if they’re not sure. Notifying people who have been affected is the normal course of action, if needed. There are various services to monitor the dark web to look for the presence of this kind of data; I presume they are using such a service for this purpose. They may or may not have hired a third party firm to verify their systems are no longer compromised and to do a full incident report; they may have that capability themselves or already have a contract with a firm that does this kind of work for them as a part of business as usual.

Zielinski had a closed-door meeting with the Council, in which I presume he gave them much more detail. What I would want to know is 1) how exactly did this happen – we have the basic information, but we need to know how it went once the first machine was compromised, how it spread to other machines; 2) what security controls failed or were missing that could have stopped or minimized this; and 3) what did we learn from this so we can prevent a repeat occurrence – obviously, better employee training is key, but better blocking of the type of program used in the compromise and better endpoint detection and response could be on the agenda as well. Hopefully Dallas will share their experience with other cities, counties, school districts, and other entities that could learn from it. We all need to be in this together. WFAA and NBCDFW have more.

Posted in Technology, science, and math, The great state of Texas | Tagged Dallas, ransomware, Texas | 1 Comment

FDA approves RSV vaccine

Posted on May 11, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

After a 60-year scientific quest, the world has its first vaccine to protect against respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV – and more are on the way.

On Wednesday, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Arexvy, made by GSK, which is designed to be given as a single shot to adults 60 and older.

It could be available for seniors as soon as this fall, pending a recommendation for its use from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which next meets in June.

“Older adults, in particular those with underlying health conditions, such as heart or lung disease or weakened immune systems, are at high risk for severe disease caused by RSV,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, in a statement. “Today’s approval of the first RSV vaccine is an important public health achievement to prevent a disease which can be life-threatening and reflects the FDA’s continued commitment to facilitating the development of safe and effective vaccines for use in the United States.”

Although RSV is a disease that’s often associated with babies and young children, it can also be dangerous for seniors. In the US, an estimated 159,000 adults 65 and older are hospitalized each year with RSV, and an estimated 10,000 to 13,000 die as a result of their infection.

“RSV certainly is an important disease in the elderly. In some years, the burden of RSV disease comes close to the burden of flu in the elderly. And this is really a wonderful development,” said Dr. Ruth Karron, a professor of international health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved in the development of the vaccine.

[…]

Three other RSV vaccines for older adults are also in the final phases of testing.

The FDA is expected to make a decision on Pfizer’s RSV vaccine for older adults by the end of May. The agency is also reviewing Pfizer’s maternal vaccine to protect infants and is expected to make a call on that one by the end of August.

Moderna is finishing its Phase 3 trial of an mRNA vaccine for RSV in older adults and expects to submit the results to the FDA for approval within the next few months.

Bavarian Nordic, maker of the Jynneos mpox vaccine, says it will report results from a Phase 3 trial of its RSV vaccine for older adults this year.

Paul Chaplin, president and CEO of Bavarian Nordic, says there’s a saying in Britain that you’ll wait a long time for a bus, and then four will show up at once. The race to the finish line for an RSV vaccine is a little bit like that, he says.

“We’ve been waiting decades for a safe effective RSV vaccine, and there’s been numerous attempts that have failed,” Chaplin said.

“And I know GSK will likely get the first approval, but there are others coming through, including us. And I just think it’s fantastic, because RSV is a huge unmet medical need that a lot of people underestimate the importance of, and we will hopefully now have a number of effective vaccines that will help protect people.”

We’ve discussed RSV before, often in the context of other viruses. I’m a few years away from being in the group of people for whom this vaccine is recommended, but who knows, that could change any time. I’m glad we’ll have this option. The story of how we got to where we are, and the disastrous first attempt at an RSV vaccine in the 60s, is worth your time to read. And if you are in that group that ought to get this shot, please do yourself the favor and do it.

Posted in Technology, science, and math | Tagged coronavirus, FDA, flu, hospitals, RSV, vaccinations | Comments Off

Texas blog roundup for the week of May 8

Posted on May 11, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance had a brief craving for tea and crumpets over the weekend but it seems to have passed in favor of the weekly roundup.

Continue reading →

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

Slaton expelled

Posted on May 10, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

A fitting end to his disgraceful tenure.

Bryan Slaton

The Texas House unanimously voted to expel Bryan Slaton on Tuesday, one day after the Royse City Republican submitted his resignation after an internal investigation determined that he had sex with a 19-year-old aide after getting her drunk.

After a solemn, sometimes angry and tearful recounting of Slaton’s “graphic” and “offensive” behavior, the House voted 147-0 for expulsion, making Slaton the first member of the Texas Legislature to be removed from office since 1927.

Support of two-thirds of the House was needed for expulsion.

Slaton’s nameplate was immediately removed from his desk and from the vote tally board at the front of the House chamber.

[…]

Ahead of the vote, members of the committee told the House that Slaton had not disputed the allegations and still had not expressed remorse or regret. They also said Slaton likely committed multiple crimes, including providing alcohol to a minor.

“This Texas House is not going to hear from multiple complainants about serious and alarming facts and then turn the other cheek or simply slap a member on the wrist,” Rep. Andrew Murr, a Junction Republican who leads the investigating committee, told the House.

“My heart breaks,” Murr said, his voice growing thick. “I suspect that yours does too.”

In a heartfelt speech, Rep. Ann Johnson, D-Houston, said Slaton had exhibited a “systematic pattern of manipulation” and questioned whether the aide was able to consent at the time of the encounter after Slaton supplied her with several large mixed drinks. And she excoriated Slaton, calling him the “type of man who steals innocence” and who was “not worthy of a position of trust.”

[…]

Although Slaton resigned Monday, unless expelled he was entitled to his House salary and per diem, Murr said. Until voters elect a replacement, Slaton also would have continued to sit on assigned committees and count toward establishing a working quorum of the House.

See here and here for the previous updates. I applaud this action, and the committee and its investigator, former Judge Catherine Evans. I hope that Slaton is forever viewed as a filthy predator, that the Travis County DA pursues criminal charges against him – as of last night when I drafted this, I didn’t see anything in the news to that effect, but there’s plenty of time for something to happen – and I hope that the five former members of his staff who refused to cooperate with the investigation never find employment in the Capitol again. I feel a strong urge to wash my hands right now. Good fucking riddance.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged Andrew Murr, Ann Johnson, Bryan Slaton, Dade Phelan, expulsion, HD02, sexual harassment, Texas, The Lege | 5 Comments

House to vote on doomed casino gambling bill

Posted on May 10, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

You do you, but remember that we’re living in Dan Patrick’s world, and he’s not going to let this happen.

Photo by Joel Kramer via Flickr creative commons

After weeks of uncertainty, legislation authorizing casino gambling in Texas was cleared to come to a vote of the full 150-member House this week despite the potential of a bleak reception in the Senate as the Republican-dominated 88th Legislature heads to a finish later this month.

A proposed constitutional amendment by Rep. Charlie Geren that would authorize as many as seven resort casinos in Texas – including two in the Fort Worth-Dallas area – was placed in the House lineup for a Wednesday vote, along with a measure backed by the state’s professional sports franchises that would allow sports betting in Texas.

Geren, a Fort Worth Republican and speaker pro tempore of the Texas House, acknowledged that the gambling legislation had been cleared for a House vote during a late-afternoon meeting of the House Calendars Committee on Monday but he declined further comment before Wednesday’s House session to vote on the measures.

“I’ve got a lot more on my mind besides that gambling bill right now,” Geren told Fort Worth Report.

The fate of gambling legislation this session has been the subject of a weeks-long guessing game among lawmakers and lobbyists, with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the presiding officer of the 31-member Senate, showing resistance to authorizing gaming in Texas.

The gambling measures won approval in the House State Affairs Committee on April 3 but it’s been unclear if the House Calendars Committee, the legislative clearing house that approves bills for a vote of the full House membership, would want to force a House vote if gambling faces a dead end in the Senate.

A number of lawmakers interviewed as recently as this week said they had seen no signs of movement on the gambling front, and several said they believed the issue appeared dead for the session, a repeat of the same fate that has befallen other gambling measures in previous Legislatures.

Nevertheless, hordes of gambling lobbyists led by the Sands Corporation of Las Vegas have waged a fierce effort to overcome past defeats and push casinos and sports betting through the latest legislative session, which ends May 29.

I will admit, getting this to a floor vote is an accomplishment, since previous efforts all died without getting that far. Having a Patrick minion file a gambling expansion bill, albeit a more limited one, was an accomplishment. Getting Greg Abbott and Speaker Dade Phelan on the record in favor of expanded gambling was an accomplishment. You know what’s still missing? Dan Patrick’s support. He claims it’s a lack of support from the Senators themselves, but come on. We know who’s the dog and who’s the tail here.

Maybe I’m wrong and Dan Patrick will let this come to a vote in the Senate. It’s an interesting question whether the support would be there for it if Patrick weren’t bigfooting things. Until I hear the words come out of his oily little mouth, or he finally loses an election, I will continue to believe that no gambling expansion legislation will pass in Texas. I haven’t been wrong to do so yet.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged casinos, Charlie Geren, Dade Phelan, Dan Patrick, DraftKings, gambling, Greg Abbott, horse racing, Lois Kolkhorst, Senate, Sports Betting Alliance, Texas, The Lege | 1 Comment

Dallas ransomware update

Posted on May 10, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

As of the weekend, things still weren’t great.

A ransomware attack from a prolific group called Royal has caused outages for many of Dallas’ systems for the past three days.

Websites remained down and first responders continued to rely on emergency backup plans heading into the weekend. The city said 911 and 311 calls were still being answered and it doesn’t believe residents’ and vendors’ information has been leaked.

“Much progress has been made, but the recovery process is ongoing,” Dallas officials said in a Friday news release.

The breach comes just months after Royal targeted the Dallas Central Appraisal District, forcing them to pay $170,000.

[…]

Experts have described Royal as a sophisticated “gang” that gains access to victim networks through phishing about two-thirds of the time. They say it’s one of many “opportunistic” groups who encrypt data and threaten to publicly release it unless a ransom is paid.

Dallas first disclosed Wednesday that it was hit by a possible ransomware attack affecting 311 and municipal courts and significantly impacting police and fire operations. The next day, the city said Dallas’ Information and Technology Services department had “isolated the issue” and was gradually restoring service, prioritizing “public safety and resident-facing departments.”

The city repeated in the Friday evening news release that ITS and cybersecurity vendors were continuing to work “nonstop to swiftly isolate a virus and gradually restore service.” A timeline for when systems will be restored was unclear.

A city of Dallas spokesperson did not answer questions Friday about how the attack happened and if Royal made any demands, saying staff was “dedicated to operations” and was unavailable for interviews.

It’s not clear if the city will pay Royal, but experts said it’s not wise to do so as attackers can come back and may not decrypt all of the data.

“If you pay a ransom to one group or one gang, others might come back in a couple months,” said Jess Parnell, vice president of security operations of Virginia-based Centripetal Networks, a cybersecurity company.

See here for the background. Whether it’s a good idea to pay the attackers or not – they are known to negotiate, and there are services to broker deals when needed – is a decision based in part on how prepared your organization was for such a catastrophe. Good backups, and stopping the spread of the malware before it can infect too much, definitely help. We’ll see where Dallas is; it kind of sounds to me like they’re trying to recover on their own.

If they do decide to pay the ransom, it could be expensive.

“According to this government alert a few months ago, this group asked their victims for between one and ten million dollars in bitcoin,” said Kevin Collier, an NBC News reporter on cyber security issues.

Southern Methodist University cyber security expert Mitch Thornton agreed the ransom demand could be that large.

“It certainly is within the range of what I’ve heard from these ransoms,” Thornton said.

City officials have said the attack is from a group called Royal. In a statement late Friday, the city said city information technology employees and vendors have worked to contain the virus and restore service. The statement said progress has been made but recovery is ongoing.

Outside experts said the Royal ransomware has been evolving as defense efforts worked to stop it.

Training warns employees not to click on suspicious emails that could unleash ransomware.

Thornton said corrupt online ads can now be a culprit in a scheme called “malvertising.”

“There’s increasingly better screening in our email readers so these threat actors can get around that by placing these ads on web pages when you are browsing around,” he said. “I’m not saying that’s what happened here but there have been cases of the Royal ransomware being distributed through these malvertisments.”

“Ransomware is becoming really big amongst hackers because it works; because people really do pay the ransoms,” said Paul Bischoff with the cyber security website Comparitech.com.

His site published a list of $70 billion worth of U-S government ransomware payments reported between 2018 and 2022.

“Our estimates are probably a lot lower than what is really happening because people are not reporting it to the FBI,” Bischoff said.

The extortion threat could be public release of seized confidential information or stopping service delivery, which has occurred in Dallas.

“Ransomware actors are using multiple extortion types,” Thornton said.

There is definitely a risk of data that was exfiltrated being uploaded to a public forum or made available for sale. An investigation ought to give an idea of what data might have been taken, but you may not have the time to complete that before you have to pay or risk the data being published. Someone may have to make a tough decision soon.

That story has a list of Dallas city services that were affected by the attack and what your alternate options are. Bleeping Computer has more on this type of attack.

While it may seem counterintuitive to target a local government, Bill Siegel of ransomware incident response firm Coveware told BleepingComputer that approximately 35% of public sector cases they handled paid a ransom.

This includes local governments, schools, police, or other publicly funded entities.

“Historical, public sector victims pay ransoms in 35% of cases we have handled. That is 10 percentage points less that the broad, all industry average as of Q1 2023 (45%),” Siegel told BleepingComputer.

“I would add that the actual rate is likely even lower as public sector victims are much less likely to engage external IR help, especially if they are very small, so there are likely a large volume of incidents where the public sector victim just deals with the impact and does not even bother considering engaging the cyber criminal responsible.”

And as we’ve seen before, government sites, especially from smaller cities and counties and school districts, can be easier targets because they have fewer dedicated resources for IT and cybersecurity, which includes employee training to avoid being victimized by phishing. Of course, they also have less money to pay in ransom. The bad guys do know that going in.

Anyway. As I said, I sure hope other government entities in Texas are paying attention to this. If they’re not careful or just unlucky, they could be next.

Posted in Technology, science, and math, The great state of Texas | Tagged Dallas, ransomware, Texas | 1 Comment

Slaton resigns

Posted on May 9, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good riddance.

Rep. Bryan Slaton

Rep. Bryan Slaton resigned from the Texas House on Monday after an investigation determined that he had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a 19-year-old woman on his staff, providing her with enough alcohol before their encounter that she felt dizzy and had double vision.

Pressure had mounted on the Royse City Republican to resign since Saturday, when the House General Investigative Committee released a 16-page report finding Slaton had engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with his aide. The committee of three Republicans and two Democrats recommended that Slaton be the first state representative expelled from the body since 1927.

[…]

Slaton, 45 and married, was among the most socially conservative lawmakers in the chamber and had been one of this session’s loudest voices for cracking down on drag shows and decrying drag artists as “groomers” who want to sexualize kids.

The committee report said Slaton had invited the 19-year-old woman to his Austin apartment late March 31 and gave her a large cup of rum and coke, then refilled it twice — rendering her unable to “effectively consent to intercourse and could not indicate whether it was welcome or unwelcome.”

In other questionable actions, Slaton also provided alcohol to the aide and another woman under the age of 21 on several occasions, the report said.

The report also alleged that after Slaton and the woman had unprotected sex in the early hours of April 1, Slaton drove her home, and she later went to a drugstore to purchase Plan B medication to prevent a pregnancy. Slaton, a staunch abortion opponent, later tried to intimidate the woman and her friends into not speaking about the incident, the report said.

See here for the previous update. I skipped a bunch of paragraphs about Slaton’s buddies in the Republican Party finally turning on him, because I absolutely do not have to hand it to them. I’ll be honest, I wanted to see the House have the expulsion vote, in part because he didn’t deserve to leave on his own terms, and in part out of morbid curiosity to see if anyone would still side with him, even as the worst people in the state other than himself had already told him to get lost.

I urge you to read the committee’s report about Slaton’s extremely sleazy and gross actions in this matter if you haven’t already. That highlighted bit about the young woman in question buying a dose of Plan B was the item that made me the angriest when I read it. Because, of course, while Plan B is still legal in Texas – indeed, it’s Greg Abbott’s advised treatment for rape victims, so that he and his fellow forced birthers don’t need to pass a rape exception to our extreme anti-abortion law – there were bills filed in this session that would greatly limit access to Plan B, or even possibly make its purchase and use a felony on par with murder. I’ll give you three guesses which legislator filed that latter bill. By my count, he filed or sponsored at least four even more anti-abortion bills this session, because that’s the kind of moral exemplar Bryan Slaton is. I’m not the praying type, but if I were I’d definitely be beseeching a higher authority to spare this girl the indignity of being impregnated by this horrible man.

Anyway. He’s gone, and as I said, good riddance. One asshole less in the Lege, which is always a fine thing. He likely won’t be replaced until November – if for some godawful reason we have a special session Abbott can call for an expedited election to fill his seat. If we’re very lucky, whoever does replace him will be slightly less of an asshole. I’m not terribly optimistic.

UPDATE: From the DMN:

In a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott and chief House clerk Stephen Brown, Slaton said his resignation was effective immediately. Slaton did not mention the House General Investigating Committee’s Saturday report recommending his expulsion.

“I look forward to spending more time with my young family, and will continue to find ways to serve my community and all citizens across our great state,” he wrote.

Slaton, R-Royse City, said “it has been an honor” to represent District 2, where he won elections in 2020 and last year.

[…]

On Monday, Murr said he still planned on Tuesday to ask the vote to expel Slaton.

“Under Texas law he is considered to be an officer of this state until a successor is elected and he takes the oath of office,” Murr said in a social media post.

Under the state Constitution, lawmakers may be expelled for “disorderly conduct.” Each chamber is left to define what constitutes such conduct.

The General Investigating Committee began receiving complaints about Slaton’s behavior April 5, the report notes.

Former Harris County District Judge Catherine Evans, now a lawyer in Houston, was retained to investigate the allegations against Slaton. Evans provided the panel with the report early last week.

Slaton, who appeared before the committee for 90 minutes on Thursday, has expressed no regret and shown no remorse for his conduct, a “fact” the report called “egregious.” After meeting with the committee, he did not answer reporters’ questions about his presence before the panel.

Glad to hear the expulsion vote will still be held, even if it’s mostly pro forma at this point. And again, I cannot emphasize enough what an asshole Bryan Slaton is.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged abortion, Andrew Murr, Bryan Slaton, contraception, Dade Phelan, expulsion, HD02, Plan B, rape, sexual harassment, special election, Texas, The Lege | 4 Comments

Reactions to Allen

Posted on May 9, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

There’s nothing I can say about the weekend massacre in Allen that hasn’t been said many times by many people. My heart is broken for the victims and their families, and my rage is ever-stoked by the sheer indifference exhibited by our so-called leaders. I just have a couple of things to note here in partial response.

Uvalde families have another reason to be angry.

Democrats and relatives of Texas mass shooting victims lambasted the state’s GOP leaders over the weekend after they again rejected gun restrictions in the wake of another massacre.

A gunman wielding what appeared to be an assault-style rifle killed eight people on Saturday afternoon at Allen Premium Outlets, a mall in a suburb about 20 miles north of Dallas. He injured seven others, three of whom are in critical condition. The victims included children as young as 5.

The shooting occurred less than a week after sheriff’s deputies in San Jacinto County reported that a lone gunman armed with an AR-15-style weapon killed five people at a neighbors’ house.

Republicans expressed grief over the mall shooting, offering prayers and condolences to families who lost loved ones. They praised law enforcement for responding and killing the shooter quickly, but they did not address the weapon he used.

”They don’t have any answers to this,” said Manuel Rizo, who lost his 9-year-old niece, Jacklyn “Jackie” Cazares, in last year’s mass shooting at a Uvalde elementary school.

The attack at Robb Elementary was also carried out by a lone gunman armed with an assault-style rifle. The shooter bought his gun days after he turned 18, prompting calls from victims’ families to raise the age for purchasing the weapons in Texas. Republican state lawmakers have declined.

“They’re just going to ignore the facts, issue their thoughts and prayers, go through their checklist and hope that this goes away,” Rizo said.

I get emails from the Dallas Morning News with daily digests and breaking news and stuff like that. Here are the contents of two of those breaking news alerts on Monday. First one:

The Houston office of the South Korean consulate confirmed Monday that Cho Kyu Song, 37, Kang Shin Young, 35, and their child were killed. The child’s age was not immediately clear.

According to a letter from New Song Church, based in Carrollton, a 5-year-old child of the couple survived. The child was injured and was being treated at a hospital, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported.

And the second one:

A security guard, an engineer, 3 children among the Allen mall shooting victims

Two Cox Elementary students, fourth-grader Daniela Mendoza and second-grader Sofia Mendoza, were killed Saturday.

Their mother, Ilda, remains in critical condition, according to an email from Wylie ISD Superintendent David Vinson.

Here’s a profile of the victims from the Trib. Just so we all know who we’re talking about here. Who we’re losing every time one of these mass shootings happens.

Later in the day, we got this news.

In a surprise move days after the Allen mall shooting and hours before a key legislative deadline, a Texas House committee on Monday advanced a bill that would raise the age to purchase certain semi-automatic rifles.

The bill faces an uphill climb to becoming state law, but the vote marked a milestone for the proposal that relatives of Uvalde shooting victims have been pushing for months.

Several relatives of children who were killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting last year sobbed when the committee voted 8-5 to send it to the House floor. Republican state Reps. Sam Harless and Justin Holland joined with Democrats on the House Community Safety Select Committee to advance the bill.

Less than two hours earlier, some of the relatives of Uvalde victims had urged the committee chair, Rep. Ryan Guillen. R-Rio Grande, to give House BIll 2744 a vote before a key deadline Monday.

“One year ago today, my daughter had her communion. About a month later she was buried in that same dress,” Javier Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter Jacklyn was killed in the Uvalde shooting, said during an emotional press conference. “Mr. Guillen, and anybody else who is stopping this bill from passing, sad to say but more blood will be on your hands.”

Monday marks the last day House bills can be voted out of committee in the lower chamber. House bills that don’t meet that deadline face increasingly difficult odds at becoming law, though there are some avenues through which measures left in committees could be revived.

HB 2744, filed by Democratic Rep. Tracy King, whose district includes Uvalde, was debated before the House select committee last month during a hearing in which relatives of Uvalde victims shared emotional accounts of lives torn asunder by gun violence.

Monday’s legislative deadline falls two days after a gunman in Allen, a Dallas suburb of about 100,000 people, killed eight shoppers at an outdoor mall with AR-15-style rifle — the same type of weapon used by the gunman in Uvalde, where killed 19 children and two teachers were killed.

Because the man identified as the gunman in Allen was 33, raising the age limit for semi-automatic rifle purchases likely wouldn’t have kept that gunman from purchasing such a weapon. But Saturday’s shooting renewed calls for tightening some gun laws in a state whose lawmakers have loosened firearm restrictions despite repeated mass shootings.

That is true. You know what else is true? None of the false promises made by Greg Abbott about “mental health”, and none of the faux-security “school hardening” bills – you know, the ones that put more restrictions on doors than on guns, those bills – would have done anything to deter this shooter, either. It’s going to take an actual commitment to address the problem, and that begins with having a government in place that sees these shootings as problems. See what I mean about there not being anything to say that hasn’t been said before?

This Twitter thread takes you through the action yesterday that led to the committee vote on HB2744. Here’s a quote for you:

Rep. Guillen, who chairs the House Select Committee on Community Safety where HB 2744 is pending, just told reporters he is now considering having a vote on the bill. When asked what changed, he said “Nothing”.

That’s turncoat Republican Ryan Guillen speaking there. I have nothing at this point, either. Even if this bill makes it out of the House, there’s no way Dan Patrick gives it a vote in the Senate. High marks for trying, but the problem is bigger than this. DAily Kos has more.

UPDATE: Received the following statement in my inbox from Asian Texans for Justice:

“Instead of supporting what we’re asking for – gun safety legislation which 83% of AAPIs support, Texas statewide leaders are blaming mental health alone. The reality is that our state’s lax gun laws allowed someone who sympathizes with Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists to easily get a gun and kill and injure over a dozen people. We need the state legislature to take immediate action on gun reform that will make our communities safer, such as passing HB 2744, which would increase the age to buy a semi-automatic rifle from 18 to 21.

Asian Texans for Justice calls on local law enforcement to exhaust all measures to determine whether the gunman was truly a lone actor or if he worked in concert with other individuals or organizations who aided and abetted these horrendous actions.

We urge Governor Abbott and the Texas Legislature to focus their priorities on issues that better serve Asian and Pacific Islander Texans, and keep all Texans safe.”

I agree.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged Allen, Asian Texans for Justice, Dan Patrick, Greg Abbott, gun control, guns, Justin Holland, Roland Gutierrez, Ryan Guillen, Sam Harless, Texas, The Lege, Tracy King, Uvalde | 2 Comments

We ask again if the HISD Board should bother doing anything right now

Posted on May 9, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I think the answer is still mostly No, but there’s some nuance to that.

The Houston Independent School District board met Thursday to discuss potential cuts to the district’s $2.2 billion budget as it faces a growing a growing deficit and a looming takeover by the Texas Education Agency.

Superintendent Millard House II has already walked back plans to slash school budgets by roughly $40 million after an outcry from the Board of Trustees, which insisted against campus-level cuts. That leaves cuts of just $15.3 million to the HISD central office with the district facing a projected $118 million deficit that could rise to $258 million by the 2024-2025 school year, as enrollment drops and pandemic-related funds dry up.

Most of those $15.3 million in savings would come from closing unfilled positions. The district had previously proposed reducing small school subsidies and high school allotments, along with returning to an attendance-based school funding policy that was suspended due to COVID-19, before those suggestions were nixed by the board.

HISD expects enrollment to continue to decline by nearly 3 percent between this school year and the next, from roughly 189,000 students to 184,000. The district’s enrollment has already fallen by about 31,000 students since the 2016-2017 school year, according to HISD data.

“As enrollment declines, that’s an impact to our revenues. That’s less money coming in than we have to be able to spend,” said Jim Grady, a consultant who presented the proposed budget to the board.

[…]

It’s not clear how the impending state takeover will affect the budgeting process, but the local board is moving forward with their plan to lay out a financial plan as normal. Another, final budget workshop is scheduled for May 18.

See here for some background. I’ve spoken in favor of the Board doing as little as possible in the time it has left, so as to leave the difficult and surely unpopular decisions that will need to be made about the looming deficit and the likely need to close some schools (seriously, what are we doing about that enrollment drop?) to the unelected overlords who will soon have to run the place. But maybe that’s too simple. Maybe it’s better to do at least some of the easier and more straightforward things on their own, in part because they will be done anyway and in part to perhaps head off some weird directions that the Board of Managers could take if given full discretion over these initial conditions. Give them slightly less room to do things we wouldn’t have considered, as well as less room to build up political capital for making the “hard” choices that really aren’t that hard. The Board of Trustees exists as a decision-making entity until June 1, and the district needs to pass a budget by June 30. My position is maybe more in flux now than it was before, but I’m still comfortable saying to the Board to not overthink this. Do the easy things, and pass on the rest.

Posted in School days | Tagged Board of Managers, budget, HISD, HISD Board of Trustees, Houston, Mike Morath, Millard House, schools, Texas Education Agency | 1 Comment

A tale of two Propositions A

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I usually write my own sentence or two to introduce the article I’m linking to and commenting on, but honestly I can’t do any better than the lede of this story.

Proposition A, the wide-ranging police reform measure also known as the Justice Charter, went down in flames Saturday night, with a wide margin of voters casting a ballot against the measure.

Opponents began celebrating just minutes after early vote totals posted.

“The defeat of Prop A is a victory for local families, for local businesses and our quality of life,” wrote San Antonio SAFE PAC Co-Chairs Eddie Aldrete and April Ancira in a statement. “San Antonio is one of America’s unique, great cities and today our citizens professed with a loud and unequivocally clear voice we want to keep it that way.”

Ananda Tomas, executive director of ACT 4 SA, which gathered more than 38,000 signatures to get the measure on the ballot, said Saturday night she thought it would be a tighter contest — early vote totals came in with more than 75% against Prop A.

With all 251 vote centers reporting, election day voters had reduced that lead to just under 72%.

But the “grassroots effort” was no match for the police union’s money and political reach, Tomas said. “It’s just big, monied interest and misinformation that’s out there.”

The Current adds on.

In addition to decriminalizing abortion and low-level pot possession, Prop A would have codified cite-and-release for Class C misdemeanors such as petty shoplifting and vandalism. Additionally, it would have codified SAPD’s current ban on police choke holds and no-knock warrants.

Prop A’s backers were outspent 10-to-one by opponents including the powerful San Antonio Police Officers Association and deep-pocketed business interests.

Indeed, Prop A’s fatal flaw may have come down to the difficulty explaining exactly what it would do amid a barrage of ads depicting it as a step toward rampant crime and violence in the streets.

“We still have to do a lot of public education. We’ve been doing it for several years and we’re going to continue,” Ananda Tomas, executive director of police reform group Act 4 SA, told reporters at the Prop A watch party. “We know when we’re at the doors and we break all of these things down, that folks are with us.

High-profile leaders including San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg and most of city council also declined to back Prop A. Proponents accused the mayor of backpeddling on his prior support of cite-and-release.

“The challenge with Proposition A is that I think it mischaracterizes what cite-and-release was about,” Nirenberg previously told the Current. “Cite and release has always had officer discretion. Prop A effectively removes officer discretion, and again, theft and property damage are not victimless crimes.”

Tomas said she was disappointed with the the mayor’s decision to campaign against Prop A. However, she said that she and fellow progressives aren’t giving up in their fight for criminal justice reform.

I had mostly described San Antonio’s Prop A as being about marijuana decriminalization, but it was a lot more than that, I think to its detriment. I get the appeal of trying to address these things systematically, but this is one of the downsides of that approach (see also: Obamacare and Build Back Better), in which the more controversial and less popular aspects of the package are weaponized against it. It also may be the case that the electorally successful marijuana reform referenda from 2022 benefitted from being more under the radar, while this effort was regularly topline news. I don’t think most of the individual components of Prop A are any less popular on their own – marijuana decriminalization, not pursuing abortion-related prosecutions, banning choke holds, that sort of thing. It’s just that proponents of them will need to strategize further in advancing them. (How many of them will be to a city or county’s discretion following this legislative session is another matter.)

Meanwhile, it was a different story in Austin.

The May 6 election made it clear: Austin is ready to dramatically expand civilian oversight of police.

With about 78,000 voters turning out for the May 6 election on two police oversight propositions with the same name (Austin Police Oversight Act), the progressive Prop A got approval from a resounding 70% of voters, per unofficial voting numbers. Prop B, which copy-pasted language from Prop A and then edited it to reduce oversight powers, received support from only 20% of voters.

As we observed from early voting numbers, turnout overall was not spectacular. In 2021, when a GOP-aligned PAC Save Austin Now was able to get a measure on the ballot to increase police staffing, roughly twice as many people cast a vote (and the police association-backed measure lost). A little more than 10% of Austin voters showed up this election, which is not atypical for a May election without high profile offices on the ballot.

Still, the passage of Prop A – which seeks to grant the Office of Police Oversight a whole lot of freedoms, including greater access to Austin Police Department’s internal affairs investigations – marks a huge stride for the city, and possibly the beginning of litigation over the legality of some of the measure’s language. If a court does eventually throw certain elements of the measure out, the undisputed parts of the ordinance will still stand.

I was vaguely aware of Austin’s referenda, but saw much less news of them than I did the props in San Antonio, for whatever that’s worth. I’m not saying this is the only way forward – indeed, as I have said before, what we really need is a better state government, because even this path forward is increasingly narrow and hostile – but what was tried in San Antonio didn’t work, and seem unlikely to be viable elsewhere. Let’s learn what we can from what happened and make the best of it going forward.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged abortion, ACT4SA, Austin, choke holds, Election 2023, Ground Game Texas, local control, marijuana, police, Ron Nirenberg, San Antonio, Texas, The Lege | 1 Comment

Lawsuit filed against FAA over SpaceX launch and explosion

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I can only imagine how Elno feels right now.

Conservation groups sued the Federal Aviation Administration [last] Monday, challenging its approval of expanded rocket launch operations by Elon Musk’s SpaceX next to a national wildlife refuge in South Texas without requiring greater environmental study.

The lawsuit comes 11 days after SpaceX made good on a new FAA license to send its next-generation Starship rocket on its first test flight, ending with the vehicle exploding over the Gulf of Mexico after blasting the launchpad to ruins on liftoff.

The shattering force of the launch hurled chunks of reinforced concrete and metal shrapnel thousands of feet from the site, adjacent to the Lower Rio Grand Valley National Wildlife Refuge near Boca Chica State Park and Beach.

The blast also ignited a 3.5-acre (1.4-hectare) brush fire and sent a cloud of pulverized concrete drifting 6.5 miles (10.5 km) to the northwest and raining down over tidal flats and the nearby town of Port Isabel, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

SpaceX hailed the launch as a qualified success that will yield valuable data to advance development of its Starship and Super Heavy rocket, major components in NASA’s new Artemis program for returning astronauts to the moon.

But Monday’s lawsuit said the April 20 incident marked the latest in a series of at least nine explosive mishaps at Boca Chica, disrupting a haven for federally protected wildlife and vital habitat for migratory birds.

Noise, light pollution, construction and road traffic also degrade the area, home to endangered ocelots and jaguarundis, as well as nesting sites for endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles and critical habitat for threatened shorebirds, the suit says.

The disturbances show the FAA violated federal law by permitting expanded operations at Musk’s Starbase in Boca Chica without mandating the full environmental impact study (EIS) normally required for major projects, the lawsuit asserts.

The 31-page complaint seeks to revoke the FAA license and require an EIS.

The FAA’s chief of staff for the Office of Commercial Space Transportation had stated in a June 2020 email that the agency planned to conduct an EIS, but the FAA “subsequently deferred to SpaceX” and performed a less rigorous review instead, according to the lawsuit.

[…]

SpaceX had vigorously opposed subjecting its Starbase to an EIS review, a process that typically takes years. An EIS involves extensive analysis of the project at stake and alternatives, along with mitigation plans to curb or offset harmful impacts. It also entails public review and comment and often re-evaluation and supplemental study.

The FAA granted its license following a far less thorough environmental assessment and a finding that SpaceX activities at Boca Chica pose “no significant impact” on the environment. The lawsuit challenges that finding as a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act, contending that the assessment and mitigation measures incorporated into the license fall short of the law’s requirements.

According to the Associated Press, Musk “said his company could be ready to launch the next Starship in six to eight weeks with the FAA’s OK”. Requiring an EIS would be a big kink in those plans.

The Trib adds some more detail.

The lawsuit was filed in Washington, D.C., on Monday by five plaintiffs, including the Center for Biological Diversity and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas. The groups argue that the FAA, which authorizes rocket launches, should have conducted an in-depth environmental impact assessment before allowing SpaceX to proceed with its plans and claim the agency delegated that task to SpaceX.

They are asking the court to suspend SpaceX’s five-year license, granted by the FAA.

“We want to see the FAA cancel the permits until they’ve figured out how they can either minimize or at least mitigate the environmental damage the rockets are doing,” said Michael Parr, president of the American Bird Conservancy.

The goal of the lawsuit is to protect wildlife and front-line communities, Parr said. Shorebirds such as piping plovers that live near the SpaceX facility are sensitive to the heat, noise and smoke from the rocket launches, he said.

The Boca Chica area is biologically diverse, the groups state in the lawsuit, and an essential habitat to many species, including federally protected wildlife such as migratory birds.

“It’s vital that we protect life on Earth even as we look to the stars in this modern era of space flight,” Jared Margolis, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a written statement. “Federal officials should defend vulnerable wildlife and frontline communities, not give a pass to corporate interests that want to use treasured coastal landscapes as a dumping ground for space waste.”

[…]

Juan Mancias, chair of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, said the FAA also failed to consider that the land SpaceX chose for its launch site is sacred to his tribe, which he calls “the original people” of that land. SpaceX’s facility has made it harder for the tribe to access the beach, hold traditional ceremonies and leave offerings to their ancestors, according to the lawsuit.

“We’re humans. We have a human right to take care of our lands and our villages and all they’re doing is digging up our bones and digging up our ceremonial sites,” Mancias said.

I’ll keep an eye on this one. The Musk/SpaceX history with Boca Chica Village goes back a few years and has been a mixed bag for the area. Musk is now trying to claim another piece of Texas for himself. What could possibly go wrong? TPR, CNBC, and the Current have more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged American Bird Conservancy, Boca Chica Village, Cameron County, Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, Center for Biological Diversity, Elon Musk, Federal Aviation Administration, lawsuit, SpaceX, Starbase, Texas | 1 Comment

The sore loser election contest lawsuits have been delayed

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

This obituary of local Republican activist and professional election denier/vote suppressor Alan Vera was far too kind to him – Votebeat did a better job of accurately capturing his “achievements” – but it did contain one useful piece of information, which I will note here so that when the question comes up later we’ll know the answer.

Vera was also a key witness in the upcoming trial to decide an election contest challenge brought by GOP judicial candidate Erin Lunceford, who lost her race against incumbent 189th District Judge Tamika Craft by 2,743 votes.

Lunceford’s legal team was relying on Vera to explain several types of alleged voting irregularities and asked for an extension on the trial date because of Vera’s death. Judge David Peeples said the trial would likely be postponed from mid-June to early August.

Guess they need time to find someone who can make shit up with as much flair. Anyway, it was in one of the parts of the Chron stories that I didn’t quote from in these posts that said the trial was expected to start in mid-June. Now it will be in August, barring any further delays. You would be forgiven if you had missed this update, as no normal person would bother reading a story like this, but I did and now you benefit from that sacrifice. You’re welcome.

Posted in Election 2022, Legal matters | Tagged Election 2022, election contest, Erin Lunceford, Harris County, judicial races, lawsuit, Tamika Craft, Texas | Comments Off

Weekend link dump for May 7

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

“Whatever the outcome is, the drastic step is a warning sign for what may be in store in the coming years. For decades, a series regular on a TV show has been the holy grail for rank-and-file working actors because of the guaranteed income and a chance at a career- and life-changing experience if the series is a hit. If more shows start to dramatically reduce the number of series regulars, with the majority of roles available being guest-starring and recurring, the impact will be profound, with fewer actors being able to make a living and qualify for health insurance.”

“This whole situation highlights one of the hidden benefits of recognizing corporations to have rights, that corporate rights also serve as a check on government tyranny.”

“This whole spectacle is an example of the idea that introducing payments for a good or service can change the thing we’re buying.”

“The real problem with our battles against disease is that no one is in charge. We can all name the generals who led almost every war we’ve fought: Washington, Grant, Pershing, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Westmoreland, Abrams, Schwarzkopf, Petraeus, and so on. Can you name who won or lost the war against the Spanish flu? Against polio? (Not the vaccine makers Salk and Sabin. I mean the generals.) We can’t because we have no Pentagon for disease. No one is in overall charge. War is a public calling, but American medicine is a privatized mess. When we need a huge effort for the public good from it, we can’t muster it. In fact, we get the opposite — hospitals hoard ventilators and make it hard for their staffs to go where the outbreaks are. We have a patchwork of agencies with very defined, very limited purviews: the CDC, the FDA, the NIH. Even the CDC has a small staff whose job is mostly to investigate outbreaks and make recommendations to local health departments and local hospitals. Imagine the FBI, cut to a third of its size, with no guns, handcuffs or powers of arrest, plus an inclination to publish scholarly papers instead of busting heads. That’s the CDC.”

RIP, Otis Redding III, singer and son of Otis Redding, Jr.

RIP, Larry “Gator” Rivers, longtime Harlem Globetrotter.

“Comcast Cuts the Cord: Cable TV Customers Drop Below 50% of Company’s Connectivity Clients for First Time”.

RIP, Mike Shannon, longtime broadcaster and two-time World Series champion for the St. Louis Cardinals.

RIP, Tim Bachman, co-founding guitarist and vocalist for Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

RIP, Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian folk music icon whose best known songs include “Sundown”, “If You Could Read My Mind”, and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”.

The writers are on strike, and longtime Writers Guild member Mark Evanier explains the stakes.

A brief history of bleeping.

Republicans really don’t want young people to vote.

Tucker Carlson is an even bigger asshole than you thought.

A longtime mystery involving one of Jeopardy!‘s early champions has finally been solved.

“Nice Twitter handle you got there. Be a real shame if something happened to it.”

“Greene’s attack on Weingarten’s status as a mother is a window into what certain people really mean when they invoke parents’ rights. Let’s explore that below.”

RIP, Eileen Saki, actor best known for playing Rosie the bar owner of M*A*S*H.

RIP, Don Sebesky, prolific arranger and conductor of theatrical music, winner of three Grammy and two Tony awards.

RIP, Barbara Bryne, stage actor best known for her work in Stephen Sondheim productions.

“Harlan picked up the tab” is a phrase we keep hearing a lot. One wonders if Clarence Thomas has ever paid for anything in his adult life. “Sugar Justice”, indeed.

“The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday licensed the first-ever vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, completing an elusive quest that has been decades in the making.”

Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. Now lock them the hell up.

“No mention of Ginni, of course.”

“Republicans are not just willing to shoot their hostage. For many it’s too fun an opportunity to let slip by.”

“Perhaps if I tell them that the footage came from a combination of WikiLeaks and Hunter Biden’s laptop, it will alleviate their concerns.”

“Besides making it harder to identify (and block) people who paid $8 for Twitter Blue to get an Elon-approved blue checkmark, Musk’s new verified label gives him cover in case any celebrities decide to sue him for implying they were fans of Twitter Blue.”

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged linkdump | 2 Comments

An example of how a pro-abortion rights campaign could go

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

This was from last week, and I’ve been thinking about it since.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, one of the five women suing Texas for abortion access blamed the state’s Republican senators for her near-death experience when she was denied reproductive care in the state.

“I nearly died on their watch,” Amanda Zurawski said, naming U.S. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who both sit on the committee. “And furthermore, as a result of what happened to me, I may have been robbed of the opportunity to have children in the future — and it’s because of the policies they support.”

[…]

The state’s ban allows for exceptions only when there is “substantial” risk to a mother or if a fetus has a fatal diagnosis. But many doctors and hospitals have been fearful of intervening even when there is a clear danger because of the stiff penalties for anyone who violates the ban, including potential prison sentences of up to 99 years, tens of thousands of dollars in fines and the loss of medical licenses.

Zurawski was 17 weeks pregnant when she was diagnosed with a condition called cervical insufficiency, which had caused her to dilate too soon for her baby to survive. The morning after her water broke, Zurawski still hadn’t gone into labor, but doctors in the emergency room told her there was nothing they could do for her because the baby still had a heartbeat.

Zurawksi later developed sepsis, a life-threatening condition, and the hospital agreed to perform the abortion. After delivering and losing her daughter, Willow, Zurawski developed a secondary infection and was entered into the intensive care unit, where she spent three days.

Zurawsi testified that she is still dealing with “paralyzing trauma” from the “preventable harm” she suffered, which she said “has already made it harder for me to get pregnant again.”

“I may have been one of the first who was affected by the overturning of Roe in Texas, but I certainly will not be the last,” she said.

“You have the power to fix this,” she said, addressing the panel of senators. “You owe it to me and to Willow and to every other person who may become pregnant in this country to protect our right to safe and accessible health care, emergency or no emergency. Your job is to protect the lives of the people who elected you, not endanger them.”

See here and here for more on the lawsuit, and here and here for more about the polling and politics stuff. Ms. Zurawski is as sympathetic and compelling a spokesperson as one could want. This was a wanted pregnancy that was derailed by medical issues – all of which happened after 15 weeks, by the way – and she suffered greatly and nearly died because doctors couldn’t treat her due to Texas’ laws; she may now be unable to get pregnant again as a result. You could argue, as the forced birthers are already doing, that the fault lies with the doctors, who just misinterpreted the laws. But when it’s your profession and a 99-year prison sentence on the line, no one is going to put themselves out on a limb. This is, again, the intent of the law, as embodied by the likes of Sen. Angela Paxton and her opposition to any exceptions for the life of the mother.

The bottom line here is that I believe that a vast majority of Texans would agree with the position that Ms. Zurawski should not have had to go through all that, she should have been able to get the care that she needed, which in this case was an abortion. There was a clear medical need, any reasonable person would have expected to receive it, and if the laws are an obstacle to her and her doctors then those laws should be changed. That’s what her lawsuit is about. If there were a way for there to be a statewide ballot proposition for this specific issue, I’d expect it to pass.

But just adding in an explicit “health of the mother” exception to our laws as they exist now, while being popular and clearly needed, would still leave Texas in a far more restricted place for abortion access than it was even two years ago. Note that we are only talking “health of the mother” exceptions; rape and incest would still not be an acceptable reason for an abortion. And, not to put too fine a point on it, there would still be absolutely no “abortion because it’s my choice and my body and this is what I want” allowance. No Democrat running against Ted Cruz or any other forced-birth Republican in 2024 is going to stop at this point in their abortion rights advocacy. They don’t believe in anything so limited, and their existing supporters would be rightly upset at such a change in their posture.

And so that’s the challenge. Plenty of people would support the Zurawski exception. Fewer, quite a bit fewer, would support – and more crucially, be willing to vote for politicians who support – the pre-Dobbs landscape. Note that Zurawski herself is not calling for just “health of the mother” exceptions – she wants “to protect our right to safe and accessible health care, emergency or no emergency”. How do we get the majority that is surely there for something narrow into a majority for something broader? Like I said, this is what we need to be working on. Daily Kos and Slate have more.

Posted in Election 2024, Legal matters | Tagged abortion, Amanda Zurawski, Angela Paxton, Election 2024, John Cornyn, lawsuit, polls, SCOTUS, Senate, Supreme Court, Ted Cruz, Texas, The Lege | Comments Off

House Investigations committee recommends expelling Rep. Slaton

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Wow.

Rep. Bryan Slaton

A House committee has recommended the expulsion of Republican state Rep. Bryan Slaton after finding that he engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with a subordinate, then acted to thwart an investigation into the matter.

In a speech from the floor, Rep. Andrew Murr, R-Junction, chairman of the House General Investigating Committee, said Slaton’s behavior was “induced by alcohol” that the representative provided the 19-year-old woman.

“Rep. Slaton then acted systematically to influence that subordinate and multiple witnesses to obstruct the investigation,” Murr said.

Murr said expelling Slaton was necessary to protect the “dignity and integrity” of the Legislature.

After Murr’s speech, clerks distributed the investigative committee’s report on Slaton, which detailed the panel’s findings and its recommendation of expulsion. Members sat silently for about 10 minutes and read it as Slaton remained seated at his desk, occasionally peering at his phone.

Speaker Dade Phelan then resumed normal legislative business. The speaker, who typically does not participate in chamber debates as its presiding officer, said in a written statement he would stick to that role.

“I will withhold public comment until my colleagues have the opportunity to deliberate and then vote on the General Investigating Committee’s recommendations,” Phelan said.

The decision to remove Slaton will ultimately be up to the full House; the Texas Constitution allows members to be expelled with a two-thirds vote of the chamber. Murr on Saturday filed House Resolution 1542, the legislation which would remove him.

The House has not expelled members in nearly a century. Members removed Reps. F.A. Dale and H. H. Moore in 1927 on the grounds of “conduct unbecoming any member.”

See here and here for the previous updates. I have to say, I wasn’t expecting this. Obviously, this is an extremely rare situation (side note: I sure hope someone does a little reporting to find out what “conduct unbecoming any member” meant in 1927), so I doubt anyone was expecting it, least of all Slaton. QR has a copy of the report now, but it’s behind their paywall; hopefully a public copy will be made eventually. In the meantime, I invite you to watch this brief speech about the report and its recommendation by Rep. Murr:

Rep. Murr delivers results of the House General Investigating Committee concerning the conduct of Rep. Bryan Slaton
#txlege

— Lege TV (@legetv) 12:40 PM – 6 May 2023

I also want to remind you of who Rep. Slaton is:

Slaton took office in 2021 after defeating Rep. Dan Flynn, a longtime Republican state representative whom Slaton had challenged multiple times and considered too moderate.

His political campaign was largely funded by West Texas oil and gas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. The two are among the biggest donors to some of the most socially conservative lawmakers in the Legislature, including far-right opponents to lawmakers who vote against their political interests.

Slaton is known as one of the most conservative members in the chamber, frequently rankling House leaders, and this year fought a losing battle to amend House rules to prohibit Democrats from leading legislative committees. The issue has been a major concern for ultraconservative grassroots Republicans who do not want Democrats leading key legislative debates.

Last year, he called for a blanket ban on minors at drag shows, saying it was necessary to protect children from “perverted adults.” He has also proposed giving property tax cuts to straight, married couples — but not same-sex couples or those who have been divorced — based on the number of children they have.

“Perverted adults”, indeed. The response we should all make now any time a wingnut talks about “filthy” books or drag shows or whatever else we need to “protect” children from is “You mean like Bryan Slaton?” Good riddance – I hope; we’ll see on Tuesday – to a truly awful legislator and even worse human being. Oh, and remember that the biggest moneybags in Republican politics helped foist him on us.

In the meantime, it’s still not clear what if anything the committee is doing with the allegations against Rep. Jones. Maybe the session will end and we’ll just assume they took no action, or maybe we’ll find out that they reviewed written reports but took no testimony. Not a whole lot of time left to find out.

UPDATE: The committee’s report can be found here, which I got via the DMN story. It’s 16 pages long, and you really should read it. It’s worse than I thought. Slaton actively tried to cover his tracks, none of the other staffers in his office (all male) cooperated with the investigation, his lawyer tried to delay things…it’s bad. The Trib story has been updated with details from the report since I wrote the original post. If the Travis County DA reads the report, there are multiple crimes they could try to indict Slaton for.

Two other items of interest. One is that the committee’s recommendation that Slaton be expelled was unanimous. Two, the report notes that the reason there have been so few expulsions over the years is that most members caught up in serious forms of misconduct have resigned before they could be expelled. Slaton, who has denied all responsibility in this incident, doesn’t appear likely to do that.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged Andrew Murr, Bryan Slaton, Dade Phelan, expulsion, HD02, HD147, Jolanda Jones, sexual harassment, Texas, The Lege | 4 Comments

A ride down the West 11th bike trail

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I’ve been riding the West 11th bike trail since it opened, mostly to go to some of my favorite lunch places. It’s been great, modulo the occasional hazards like trash/recycling bins out for collection and delivery trucks or construction vehicles parked there or protruding from a driveway. I had never biked along West 11th before because the two-lanes-each-way vehicular traffic moved far too fast and too recklessly to ever feel safe enough. I’d take one of the side roads, or if I wanted to cross at a light I’d go to White Oak or 14th, depending on what my destination was. The dedicated lane on 11th is a better experience than all of those, and I appreciate being able to cross Studewood at a light as well, as that can be tricky and occasionally death-defying otherwise.

Early on in the path’s existence I set out to take a ride and pause for some pictures along the way, to document the experience. I’m finally getting around to publishing them now – it’s been a busy few weeks in the news, in case you hadn’t noticed – so while the pics themselves are a bit old, I now have more experience to speak from. So come ride along with me, and see what the fuss is about.

The first evidence of what was to become the trail was the painted “bike lane” indicators on Michaux, followed by the installation of a lane divider/crossing path on White Oak. You don’t see it as much now, but in the first few weeks it was common to see people approaching this intersection, from either street, and only realizing upon arriving there that they can’t turn left. When it happened to me, I made the forced right, then turned left on Norhill onto Usener, left onto Usener, and left again onto Michaux, and then finally right onto White Oak to continue on my way. I saw one person turn left into the oncoming traffic lane – fortunately, there was no oncoming traffic – and then slide over. Seems like most people in the ‘hood have figured this out now, which is good.

Of course, West 11th is the opposite way on Michaux. I just went that way to take the first photo. This is Michaux approaching 11th. I don’t really know what the little lane is for. I guess it’s a bit of a protection if you’re turning right (east) onto Pecore, which is what 11th becomes at Michaux. But there’s no separated bike lane that way, at least not at this time, so who knows.

You have to turn left (west) from Michaux to get into the bike lane. 11th used to be two lanes beginning or ending here, with the eastbound right lane being right turn only except for the #30 bus.

At Studewood. The concrete lane separator comes and goes, mostly to allow access to various driveways but also for right-on-red turns. I’ve been conscious of this as a driver along 11th, which I didn’t really have to be before because there were never any bikes. I’ve not had any issues with cars wanting to turn right yet. It’s no different than on non-bike lane streets like White Oak, to be honest.

At Heights Blvd. The “wide turn” sign is there because of the bike lane on Heights, which now has a concrete separator that looks like a platform right there. I’ll have a better look at it on the way back. Note the “no left turn” sign onto Heights southbound – as with the White Oak situation, not everyone has figured this out yet. That left was a real hazard before the bike lane, but it does mean if you’re coming this way you either need to turn at Yale, or scoot over to a side street to access Heights southbound from there. Note also the bank of lights on the far end of Heights, with the one lone (and hidden by the bus stop sign) light on the sidewalk. I don’t quite understand that design decision – there were two sets of lights before this, as really there are two intersections. If you want to have only one bank of lights, I might have argued that it belonged at the first intersection, not the second one. Anyone have a theory about this?

At Yale. I saw several other bikers while out on that initial ride, and I see regular bike traffic now. This guy was turning left onto Yale, which is why he wasn’t in the same lane as me. I can’t think of any other wrong-way biker I’ve seen since then.

Here we are at the junction of the north-south Heights Bike Trail, which will connect you to the MKT Trail to the south. I turned around here because I was just out for funsies and didn’t have a destination in mind. Note the “stop for pedestrians” sign, which exists at a number (but not all) of the cross streets now. The vehicular traffic has actually been quite good about respecting this, which is very nice. Before the West 11th lane diet and the trail, people going along the Heights trail often felt like they were taking their lives into their hands crossing here, as four total lanes of cars would whip by, often at speeds over 40 MPH. People had been calling for a traffic light at this intersection, but the trail and the lane reduction, which has definitely led to lower speeds, and the “stop for pedestrians (and, implicitly, bikes)” sign have done the trick.

At a few points along the concrete lane dividers, there are some vertical visual markers of the bike lane, presumably to remind drivers of the lane’s existence. Clearly, someone needed that reminder.

This is the platform for what I thought was a B-Cycle location in construction, on the south side of Heights. There’s an identical thing catty-corner on the north side. Given what’s going on with B-Cycle now, I’m not sure of the purpose of the platform anymore. But there they are.

So that’s a small taste of what the ride is like on West 11th. Someday when the North Main lane has been built – here’s an April 18 update that says initial construction begins in June, so this is not far off – I’ll do a similar ride. Let me know what you think.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged B-Cycle, bicycles, bike lanes, construction, Heights, Houston, MKT Trail, North Main, pedestrians, sidewalks, urbanism | 1 Comment

Feds rebuke hospitals that didn’t do emergency abortions

Posted on May 6, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Relevant to our interests.

Two hospitals that refused to provide an emergency abortion to a pregnant woman who was experiencing premature labor put her life in jeopardy and violated federal law, a first-of-its-kind investigation by the federal government has found.

The findings, revealed in documents obtained by The Associated Press, are a warning to hospitals around the country as they struggle to reconcile dozens of new state laws that ban or severely restrict abortion with a federal mandate for doctors to provide abortions when a woman’s health is at risk. The competing edicts have been rolled out since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion last year.

But federal law, which requires doctors to treat patients in emergency situations, trumps those state laws, the nation’s top health official said in a statement.

“Fortunately, this patient survived. But she never should have gone through the terrifying ordeal she experienced in the first place,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said. “We want her, and every patient out there like her, to know that we will do everything we can to protect their lives and health, and to investigate and enforce the law to the fullest extent of our legal authority, in accordance with orders from the courts.”

The federal agency’s investigation centers on two hospitals — Freeman Health System in Joplin, Missouri, and University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City, Kansas — that in August refused to provide an abortion to a Missouri woman whose water broke early at 17 weeks of pregnancy. Doctors at both hospitals told Mylissa Farmer that her fetus would not survive, that her amniotic fluid had emptied and that she was at risk for serious infection or losing her uterus, but they would not terminate the pregnancy because a fetal heartbeat was still detectable.

Ultimately, Farmer had to travel to an abortion clinic in Illinois.

“It was dehumanizing. It was terrifying. It was horrible not to get the care to save your life,” Farmer, who lives in Joplin, said of her experience. “I felt like I was responsible to do something, to say something, to not have this happen again to another woman. It was bad enough to be so powerless.”

Farmer’s complaints launched the first investigations that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, has publicly acknowledged since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year. Across the country, women have reported being turned away from hospitals for abortions, despite doctors telling them that this puts them at further risk for infection or even death.

[…]

Nationwide, doctors have reported uncertainty around how to provide care to pregnant women, especially in the nearly 20 states where new laws have banned or limited the care. Doctors face criminal and civil penalties in some states for aborting a pregnancy.

But in a letter sent Monday to hospital and doctors associations that highlights the investigations, Becerra said he hopes the investigations clarify that the organizations must follow the federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA.

As you may recall, EMTALA has been the subject of contradictory court rulings, which likely gives it an eventual date before SCOTUS. The status of that federal law, which now depends on where you are, and its inherent conflict with various draconian state laws, surely contributes to confusion over what is and is now allowed, but it’s not just about confusion. It’s also about the very understandable reluctance of doctors and hospitals to put themselves on the line for a potential murder charge and life in prison when they’re not 100% sure they’re in the clear. As we have said many times, the vagueness and broadness of many state laws is intentional. We have that lawsuit in Texas that seeks clarity on these matters, and that will be of great importance when it comes to a courtroom. In the meantime, a strong push by the CMS to ensure access where it can is appreciated. We need much more than that, but as of right now that’s about the best we can hope for.

Posted in National news | Tagged abortion, EMTALA, hospitals, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, lawsuit, Missouri, Texas, U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Xavier Becerra | Comments Off

The I-45 project will be old enough to vote before it is finished

Posted on May 6, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Isn’t that nice?

Often called a once-in-a-generation project, the planned $9.7 billion-plus rebuild of I-45 from downtown Houston north to Beltway 8, including a total reconstruction of the downtown freeway system, is expected to take a generation to build.

A child born today would drive along the completed freeway around the time they graduate from high school in 2042, according to a new schedule released by state highway officials.

“Just kill me now,” joked Reuben Shuvalov, 42, who commutes to an accounting job in downtown Houston from his home in Spring.

Cleared for development following a two-year pause and lifting of a lawsuit by Harris County, the Texas Department of Transportation is finalizing the sequence of construction across three segments, broken into at least 10 separate projects to remake portions of I-45, key intersections and nearby local streets. Officials updated the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s Transportation Policy Council on April 28, including expected start and finish years.

[…]

“That is just how the development of how the plans are coming along,” said Varnua Singh, deputy district engineer for TxDOT’s Houston office.

Work will be phased based on numerous factors, including funding, the need for some work to precede other parts of construction, and drainage in some spots prior to construction of depressed sections of the freeway on the east side of downtown.

As a result, the first project considered part of the larger rebuild is an $86.1 million project to upgrade drainage through EaDo, just east of Interstate 69 between I-45 south of downtown and Buffalo Bayou.

“The drainage is the first piece,” Singh said. “That is why we are trying to get it out the door.”

That work precedes construction south of downtown, where the first major project is the rebuilding of I-69 between Texas 288 and I-45, expected to cost $584.8 million and start in 2025. That rebuild, through the area where the two freeways converge, will take roughly five years, during which work will begin on nearby segments to Spur 527 and where I-10 and I-45 separate north of the central business district.

It is that 2027-2031 period when many of the projects will be active work zones that worries some about the effects on downtown jobs and businesses.

“Past freeway projects typically only affected one or two spokes at a time, and downtown employers just dealt with it since it only affected a portion of their employee base,” said Tory Gattis, a senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, which advocates for business-focused downtown development. “But with the normalization of remote and hybrid work, as well as this project affecting all the freeways coming into downtown, it could definitely be the tipping point to major employers following Exxon to the suburbs or just going more remote so their employees won’t have to fight their way downtown as often.”

See here for the previous update. All of the first batches of work will be on or south of I-10, so we’ve got that going for us. Hey, remember when driverless buses cruising along at 100 MPH were going to relieve us of all our traffic concerns? Those were the days. The Press has more.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged construction, Harris County, Houston, I-10, I-45, I-610, Stop I-45, Texas, TxDOT, US59 | 2 Comments

More HISD departures

Posted on May 6, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Gonna be a very different district when we get it back.

Three more senior staff members at Houston ISD are departing their high-ranking posts at the district as the Texas Education Agency prepares to appoint new leaders to govern the largest school district in Texas.

Police chief Pedro Lopez Jr., chief of schools Denise Watts and chief talent officer Jeremy Grant-Skinner will leave the district this month or next, according to public records. Watts’ last working day is June 14 and Grant-Skinner’s is May 31, according to resignation forms obtained through a public records request, which show that both submitted their resignation in April.

Lopez, meanwhile, has been selected to serve as top cop in Killeen, a city roughly 75 miles north of Austin.

Killeen city manager Kent Cagle last week selected Lopez to lead the Killeen Police Department following a nationwide search that netted 20 applicants, according to a press release from the city.

[…]

The departure of three chiefs from HISD comes as the takeover of the 186,000-student district has stirred confusion and concerns among parents, teachers and other community members.

The state agency plans to suspend the powers of Superintendent Millard House II and HISD elected trustees on or after June 1, replacing them with appointed managers to govern the district for at least two years.

One other member of the superintendent’s cabinet has already departed the district ahead of the takeover.

Max Moll, former chief engagement officer, left his position at HISD in April, noting in a Twitter thread that he was grateful for House’s steadfast leadership in challenging circumstances.

“His leadership is inspiring, focused, and selfless, and Houston will be worse-off because of his potential departure,” Moll wrote on social media. “I still believe in the power of public education and its ability to transform lives. (Houston ISD) will continue to shape the future of our city and, for that reason alone, we all must ensure its next chapter is successful. Our city, students, and families deserve nothing less.”

While all three of these people were in senior leadership positions, none of them were longtime HISD employees, all being hired between 2020 and 2022. We were between Superintendents for much of that, and some level of turnover is always going to happen. It’s still the case that their replacements will be hired by a Superintendent that will not be picked by the elected Board. The effects of this takeover will be longer-lasting and more far-reaching than just in the classroom.

Posted in School days | Tagged Board of Managers, Denise Watts, HISD, HISD Board of Trustees, Houston, Jeremy Grant-Skinner, Mike Morath, Millard House, Pedro Lopez, Texas Education Agency | Comments Off

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