Time for another Cruise update

Posted on August 22, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Driverless taxi service Cruise got the full go-ahead in San Francisco.

In a win for the autonomous vehicle industry, California regulators have given the green light to Cruise and Waymo to offer commercial robotaxi services across San Francisco 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The commission voted 3-1 in support of the expansions; Commissioner Genevieve Shiroma cast the sole “no” vote.

The California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) votes in favor of the AV companies come in spite of mounting opposition from residents and city agencies that have urged caution and a more incremental approach to expansion. Since AVs hit the streets of San Francisco, there have been numerous instances of vehicles malfunctioning and stopping in the middle of the street — referred to as “bricking” — blocking the flow of traffic, public transit and emergency responders.

Cruise and Waymo both offer limited paid services in San Francisco — Cruise charges for driverless rides at night, and Waymo charges for its robotaxi service throughout the city at any time of day, but with a human safety operator present. The permit extension allows the companies to expand their services significantly and with no limit on the number of robotaxis they can put on the roads.

While Cruise and Waymo have both said they would expand incrementally, and not all at once, scale is vital for the companies’ success. Developing, testing and deploying AV tech has cost Cruise and Waymo millions of dollars. Waymo has had to pull back on operations this year after Alphabet issued a slew of layoffs in the first quarter. In July, the company shut down its self-driving trucks program to shift all its available resources to ride-hailing. If either Waymo of Cruise are to get a return on their investments, they need to grow exponentially in San Francisco and beyond.

The CPUC ended up voting to grant the permit expansions because it did not anticipate the robotaxi services to result in significant safety risks. The agency’s primary role is to promote the public interest by ensuring safe, reliable and affordable utility services. As long as Cruise and Waymo’s services meet those requirements, the CPUC doesn’t have the authority to limit them.

Hold that thought on expansion for a minute. This isn’t quite the end of the line for Cruise and Waymo, as San Francisco’s City Attorney has filed motions with the CPUC to pause the firms’ plans to charge for robotaxi rides in the city at all hours, which is to say to limit their hours of operation for now. A day later, the robotaxi companies were ordered to scale back their fleets by half following a crash with a fire truck. I don’t know how long that will last, I’m sure this will be moving ever forward, but there are still some bumps in the road.

For a more comprehensive look at what’s happening, Vox interviewed a local reporter who’s been on this beat and is a regular rider of these vehicles as part of it. She had some observations about other issues:

Well, have there been any problems yet with these robocars?

That’s an understatement, honestly. It’s pretty crazy. These cars will just get caught. Let’s say there are 10 fire trucks coming down to stop a blaze in San Francisco. The Cruise cars don’t know what to do. They’ll just brick up on the street and not move. The issue with that is that they’ll be blocking traffic. They’ll be blocking the emergency vehicles.

So they crumble under pressure.

They definitely crumble under pressure. And they were put to the test this Friday. San Francisco has this pretty famous music festival called Outside Lands. Tens of thousands of people attend. It’s a really big event for the city. And Cruise and Waymo were still operating around the park where the festival was held.

This was day one of the new world that we were living in in San Francisco.

Day one of the new world. And they had a meltdown. As many as a dozen stalled Cruise cars blocked the streets in a neighborhood in the north part of the city. The company said that it was because all of the people at Outside Lands disrupted the cellphone signal or the signal that the Cruise cars use to operate.

The robots blamed the people.

Yeah, the robots blamed the people. A lot of people said that the robotaxis just couldn’t handle the floods of people walking on the street. They’ll just stop. And it’s kind of funny to see because the cars kind of look clueless. And there’s no driver in them either. So you really can’t yell at them to move or honk at them either. I think something that people don’t talk enough about too, with Cruise, is that they’re such cute little cars, that it really, truly is comical when they mess up.

This reporter is the same one who wrote about people having sex in Cruise robotaxis, because why not? There’s no one else in the vehicle to stop them. I will note that way back in 2018 I blogged about the issue of who is responsible for cleaning self-driving vehicles. It’s still not clear that there’s an answer to that question. Ride with caution, and maybe some Lysol, if you must.

Why do I keep writing about this stuff? Well, it fascinates me, and it’s coming our way. Cruise is operating in Austin, and Waymo is right behind it. Dallas is also in their sights. I have other questions about what all this means – like, for example, where are all the robotaxis kept at night when they’re not in use? – and I’m sure I’ll have more.

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Who votes in Houston elections?

Posted on August 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The short answer is old people.

When Houston residents head to the ballot box this November to elect a new mayor and city government, fewer people may actually show up than in Seattle, a city with a third of our population.

About 1 in 5 registered voters in Houston typically participate in municipal elections, and even that figure omits residents who are eligible to vote but are not registered. Seattle, a city of 750,000 people, saw 265,000 people turn out in its November 2021 mayoral election; Houston’s 2019 contest garnered 241,000. In some council districts — where members represent 210,000 constituents — as few as 6,000 people voted.

As a result, the voting base collectively looks far different from Houston’s broader population, skewing dramatically older, whiter and more conservative. Two demographic disparities stand out: The median municipal voter in Houston is over 60 years old, meaning half the electorate was born before Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. And in a city where 47 percent of residents are Latino, only roughly 18 percent of the city’s voting base will share that background.

The share of city voters 65 and older (38%) is nearly triple the group’s share of Houston’s voting age population (14%), per census figures.

“From my perspective, (municipal turnout) is really a national scandal,” said Phil Keisling, a former Oregon secretary of state who studied municipal voting in United States’ 30 largest cities in 2016. “The fact that nobody was tracking this when we did the study was telling. The fact that nobody tracks it now on any systematic basis, I think, is remarkably sad.”

Keisling’s study found Houston ranked 18th out of the top 30 cities in municipal turnout at the time, though it fared better than Austin, San Antonio and Dallas. Houston fared worse in its age gap — its average voter was 19.6 years older than the average voting-age citizen, fourth worst among those 30 cities.

I’m a bit pressed for time, so I’m going to bullet-point this.

– I did a similar study after the 2013 election, a whole series of posts about who votes in the city elections, and I did include a look at the age ranges of city voters. I’m having some technical issues with the site right now that are hampering my ability to search so I don’t have those links at hand, but the short answer is that I found the same basic result. City elections are dominated by older voters, with youth share a much smaller percentage than it would be even in a non-Presidential even-year race. I have no doubt that is still the case.

– Greg Wythe said a long time ago that the way to change who votes in Houston elections, which would also change who gets elected to City Council, is to move these elections to even-numbered years. We could do them exclusively in Presidential years now if we wanted. This is discussed later in the story. While that would easily push turnout to well over 50%, probably over 60%, it is fair to say that the city races would get drowned out in that context. I’m not saying that’s a reason not to do it, just that it would be an effect of doing it, and we should be clear on that.

– Dallas and San Antonio do their city elections in May of odd-numbered years, which is why their turnout is even worse than ours. Austin used to do it that way, but their elections are now done in Novembers of even years. They have a lot more turnout now, not surprisingly.

– The comparison to Seattle may be shocking, but the conditions in Seattle are quite different, which makes this comparison specious at best.

Washington votes by mail every election.

If you are registered to vote in Washington, there is no need to request a ballot. Your ballot will be automatically mailed to the address where you’re registered to vote.

I guarantee it would increase turnout in Houston if we could do this. That is not up to us. This was also discussed later in the story.

– I have spoken to many (mostly younger) candidates over the years that have said they intend to increase youth turnout. Most if not all of those candidates didn’t have a lot of money available to them to make good on those plans. Changing the turnout equation is hard. As noted above, the biggest levers we could wield are not in the control of the candidates; the city could choose to move its elections to even years, but I have yet to see a candidate advocate that as part of their platform.

– As I have said before, we have a lot more registered voters now than we did in 2015, when we switched from elections every two years to elections every four years. In between then and now, we have had the highest turnout even-year elections in Harris County history. I believe that at least some of this will spill over into this year’s race. I expect we will get a boost in absolute numbers just from the larger voter pool, and maybe we’ll get a bit more from the recent spate of higher-turnout voting. I’m more confident about the first part of that.

I promise to try to return to this topic, maybe do another study if I can find the time, after this election. In the meantime, let me know what you think.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Lawsuit filed over anti-porn law

Posted on August 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Here’s another one I missed. My God what a wretched session this was.

A consortium of adult entertainment advocacy groups, including the online giant Pornhub, is suing the state of Texas ahead of its pending enforcement of a new law requiring adult sites to verify the ages of users and display a health warning to those accessing their content.

In legal papers filed in the Western District of Texas federal court on August 4, Pornhub, Free Speech Coalition and others argue that Texas’ HB 1181 violates their users’ constitutional rights by imposing flimsy, overly broad and easily circumvented security requirements on sites in the name of “allegedly protecting minors.” Signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott this past June, HB 1181 goes into effect on September 1 and requires users to verify their age using “government-issued identification” or “a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an individual.”

The law also requires sites to display a lengthy health warning that describes pornography as “potentially biologically addictive” and “proven to harm human brain development”—both of which are claims the lawsuit calls “controversial” and “factually false.”

“[HB 1181] joins a long tradition of unconstitutional—and ultimately failed—governmental attempts to regulate and censor free speech on the internet,” the complaint states.

The plaintiffs describe Texas’ age verification requirement as “the least effective and yet also the most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’ stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.” Court documents also note that individuals under 18 can use virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxy servers such as the “Tor” browser as easy workarounds to digital age verification. The complaint goes on to call Texas’ law “incurably vague,” and says such measures are likely to have a chilling effect on adult users afraid of having their personal information stolen or made public. It ends by asking the court to declare the contents of the law unconstitutional and prohibit Texas’ attorney general from enforcing it.

KXAN adds some details.

The law does not apply to social media websites or search engines.

The websites will be required to ask their users to transmit one of the following:

  • digital identification;
  • government-issued identification; or,
  • public or private transactional data (mortgage, pay stub, etc.).

“Despite impinging on the rights of adults to access protected speech, [the law] fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also the most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors,” the lawsuit states.

The FSC’s attorneys also list out several means by which a minor could bypass the requirement. They also claim that content filtering on devices by parents and guardians of minors is more effective solution.

“But such far more effective and far less restrictive means don’t really matter to Texas, whose true aim is not to protect minors but to squelch constitutionally protected free speech that the State disfavors,” the lawsuit states.

The law also requires adult websites to display three warning notices to users that FSC claims to be “lengthy, controversial, and factually false.”

All of the notices start with “TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING.” However, the lawsuit claims that the Texas Department of Health and Human Services never approved such notices.

Those warnings claim the following:

  • “Pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function.”
  • “Exposure to this content is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses.”
  • Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography.

“The Act’s “health warning” requirement is a classic example of the State mandating an orthodox viewpoint on a controversial issue,” the lawsuit states. “Texas could easily spread its ideological, anti-pornography message through public service announcements and the like without foisting its viewpoint upon others through mandated statements that are a mix of falsehoods, discredited pseudo-science, and baseless accusations.”

In addition to the notices, the law also requires adult websites to display the phone number for the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

So, two things. I fully agree with the plaintiffs that the messages that adult websites would be forced to display are at best misleading and more likely just moral panic propaganda. On free speech grounds, that should be blocked by the courts. The problem is that states have passed laws requiring doctors and clinics to provide at best misleading and often outright false medical information about abortion to patients who are seeking abortions, and the courts have generally allowed this. As such, I can’t say I’m optimistic for a good outcome here. Being right isn’t always the right answer.

The other thing is that this sounds like a data privacy debacle in the making. What do you think is going to happen when a bunch of websites are suddenly in the business of processing and maintaining passport and drivers license images and data? It’s true that these websites already handle credit card transactions, but that’s much more mature technology, and there’s plenty of banking and financial regulations in place to assist people who get that information stolen. Plus, you know, you can replace a credit card a lot more easily than a drivers license or passport, and a credit card isn’t intrinsic to your identity. This is a bad idea on multiple levels, and yet I fear it will be allowed to go forward. Time to invest in a VPN, y’all. Vice, TPR, and the Current have more.

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

What if Houston gets too hot?

Posted on August 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Some cheery thoughts from the Wall Street Journal.

Houstonians pride themselves on how they tolerate heat. This summer, the heat has become intolerable.

Businesses and residents in America’s fourth-largest city have moved much of life indoors, changing work and spending habits. Some residents say they are reminded of quarantining during the pandemic’s early days: ordering in groceries, avoiding social commitments and looking for ways to stay entertained from the couch.

The result is a dent to the local economy that could become an annual pattern if summers stay hotter for longer.

“This year is different, people are staying home,” said Barbara Stewart, a professor of human development and consumer sciences at the University of Houston.

[…]

Employees at small- and medium-size businesses in the tourism, arts and entertainment and sports and recreation industries in Texas averaged 19.6 hours on the job a week between mid-June and mid-July, a 20% decline from the average during comparable weeks from 2019 to 2022, according to an analysis from Luke Pardue, an economist at payroll platform Gusto.

If the weather pattern so far this summer continues through August, Texas’ gross state product this year will be reduced by roughly $9.5 billion, making a small dent in the state’s growth rate, according to Ray Perryman, an economist and president at the economic research and analysis firm the Perryman Group. That estimate assumes average temperatures in the state this summer will be roughly 2.6 degrees above the long-term average since 1900, Perryman said.

Samuel Westry, a real-estate agent in the greater Houston area, said some of his clients have been reluctant to attend property showings in person. Technology, such as virtual visits, have helped business continue, but it is harder to get people to buy without a face-to-face visit, he said.

The weather has also made it tough to look presentable.

“God forbid the air conditioner is out at a house that I’m showing or the electricity is off,” he joked, adding that he has been keeping an emergency towel and deodorant in the car.

That there are economic effects of climate change is not a surprise, but for Houston there are psychological effects as well. Matt Lanza sums it up:

Houston’s biggest advantages, what have helped it grow as much as it has in the past 50 years, have been better weather than the frozen North and cheaper housing. Neither of those are necessarily true any more – certainly, there’s much more room for debate – and now we’re in a forced-birth anti-LGBT book-banning state whose ruling party actively hates big cities and is working to destroy us. I know what the best answer for some of this is, but there’s no guarantee we’ll get there any time soon. You can see what the problem is.

Posted in Elsewhere in Houston | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Weekend link dump for August 20

Posted on August 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Find someone who loves you as much as a bunch of right-wing billionaires “love” Clarence Thomas. Love giving him lavish gifts, anyway.

““Overconfidence,” the committee concluded, had “dulled faculties usually so alert.””

“Twitter Is Auctioning Off Old Items with Former Logos — and Even Selling Desk Chairs — Amid X Rebrand”.

Ten things to do before you resign your job.

If you still don’t understand what the WGA strike is about, read this and then we can talk.

“I’m going to say something that might make me a bit unpopular. From where I sit, Attorney General Merrick Garland has taken a logical and reasonable legal path all along.”

Jodie Sweetin is a mensch.

“So, with all that in mind, let’s consider Turn-On, one of the great examples of a noble failure in television’s long history. Even if you don’t like it, you have to appreciate what it represents.”

Disbar him.

“A powerful lobbyist convinced a federal agency that doctors can be forced to pay fees on money that health insurers owe them. Big companies rake in profits while doctors are saddled with yet another cost in a burdensome health care system.”

“I think we can all agree Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on.”

“Retired NFL star Michael Oher, whose supposed adoption out of grinding poverty by a wealthy, white family was immortalized in the 2009 movie “The Blind Side,” petitioned a Tennessee court Monday with allegations that a central element of the story was a lie concocted by the family to enrich itself at his expense.”

“A healthy climate is included in your constitutional rights, at least if you live in Montana. On Monday, District Court Judge Kathy Seeley sided with the 16 young plaintiffs who sued Montana three years ago, arguing that its pro–fossil fuels legislation violated their right to a safe environment.”

Lock them up. Lock them all up.

“After hottest summer on record, heat-related illnesses are now being tracked nationwide”.

Lock him up, too.

“More than any other lawyer in America, Giuliani should have known that getting mixed up with Donald Trump—especially in Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election—would likely land him in his present state: an indicted felon who, at age 79, may spend the rest of his days in a federal courthouse, then prison.”

“Despite smashing box office records and becoming a cultural phenomenon, “Barbie” is banned in a growing number of countries around the world.” (The story lists four, so maybe that sentence is overstating things a bit. I suspect that list may yet grow, however.)

RIP, Jerry Moss, Grammy winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who co-founded A&M Records with Herb Alpert.

“After the devastating fires that destroyed the town of Lahaina and killed over 100 people, wealthy tourists staying in undamaged areas of Maui are continuing to demand activities while recovery efforts are underway.”

RIP, Lolita, oldest orca still held in captivity.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | 1 Comment

Part of the omnibus voter suppression law struck down

Posted on August 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Some good news.

A federal judge in San Antonio ruled this week that it is illegal for Texas elections officials to reject mail-in ballots and the applications for them over ID mistakes on elections paperwork.

The requirement was part of a sweeping voting bill that state lawmakers passed in 2021, mandating that voters provide either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number when submitting mail-in ballot documentation. The number they include has to match the one on their voter registration record.

Elections officials have since rejected nearly 40,000 submissions over errors related to that requirement, according to the ACLU of Texas. The number written by voters often didn’t match county files, or they forgot to include a number entirely.

U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez said Thursday that the provision violates the Civil Rights Act by rejecting absentee applications and ballots based on errors that “are not material in determining whether voters are qualified under Texas law to vote or to cast a mail ballot.”

The court still needs to issue a final opinion and order in the coming weeks further expanding on the decision and telling the state how to comply. Spokespeople for the offices of the Texas Secretary of State and attorney general did not respond to requests for comment.

The ACLU of Texas, one of several civil rights groups that challenged the law in court, called the ruling a “win” for Texas voters.

“The court’s ruling sends the clear message that democracy only works when it includes all of us,” the group tweeted. “No exceptions.”

ACLU Attorney Savannah Kumar said the ruling will alleviate a burden for Texans who rely on mail-in ballots to exercise their right to vote, especially elderly people and those with disabilities.

See here and here for some background. A copy of the judge’s order is here, and more information on the case is here. Note that this was a motion for summary judgment by the plaintiffs, which was granted in part and denied in part; there will be a hearing for the parts that were denied, with the judge in the order asking for a “pared-down” witness list from the plaintiffs. I don’t know nearly enough to say how this all worked, and I assume there will be appeals. I do know that a full order is forthcoming, and that the trial for the rest of the case is set for September 11.

I know this case is the combination of multiple lawsuits. I don’t know if the suit filed by the Justice Department remains separate from this one or if it too was consolidated. Nobody ever thinks of the poor non-lawyer blogger trying to follow all this stuff. I’ll try my best to keep up with this anyway. I haven’t even mentioned all of the mail ballots that were disqualified in the 2022 cycle, mostly in the primaries when everyone first encountered this new law, but I trust you all remember that. I know I remember how many times I explained to my off-at-college daughter, who was voting for the first time, what she needed to do to make sure her vote counted. (Which in the end it did, assuming that the sore losers from that election don’t succeed in throwing it out.) One little-remarked aspect of all that was that there were plenty of Republican voters whose absentee ballots got junked as a result of this; by the end, I’d say Dems were better at educating their voters about what they needed, but I doubt it was much more than a wash for both sides. I also doubt that the Republican authors of the law cared.

I don’t have the energy to write about it now, but at the same time as this ruling came down, a federal judge in Georgia struck down parts of that state’s voter suppression law, too – you remember, the one that criminalized giving water to people in line to vote? Yeah, that. It’s bullshit that anyone has to deal with this stuff, but so far at least the courts have done the right thing. The ACLU of Texas, the Austin Chronicle, and Democracy Docket have more.

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

More cities’ responses to the Death Star law

Posted on August 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Some good reporting from El Paso Matters.

That’s no moon…

In 2015, El Paso became the second city in the country to safeguard its workers by passing a historic wage theft ordinance. Now, as a sweeping new state law aimed at handicapping Texas’ more liberal city governments is set to take effect Sept. 1, that protection is facing an existential threat.

[…]

In July, the cities of Houston and San Antonio filed a joint lawsuit against the state of Texas, claiming that the law violates the state constitution and infringes on the rights of home-rule cities to pass their own ordinances. And now 32 local elected officials across Texas, including in El Paso, have signed onto an amicus brief in support of the cities, filed by Local Progress and the Public Rights Project.

While these local leaders say they can’t yet know the full impact of the law on their municipalities, they believe the law will undermine their ability to meet their constituents’ needs, voiding a slew of local ordinances and leaving governments vulnerable to litigation.

Laura Cruz Acosta, spokeswoman for the City of El Paso, said the law’s vagueness makes it hard for officials to know precisely which ordinances will be impacted until a court determines that a local policy is in conflict with a state counterpart.

“This creates a situation where local laws can be preempted when there is no state regulatory counterpart and ultimately seeks the repeal of the constitutional home rule provided to cities,” she said. “It also delegates the courts to identify which of El Paso’s laws (if any) are preempted, which can be a costly and time-consuming process.”

In El Paso, the city’s non-discrimination ordinance — which prevents discrimination based on race, sexual orientation, reproductive health actions, hairstyle, or texture regarding employment, housing, and public accommodation — and wage theft prevention ordinance face a likely invalidation. A minor-focused curfew ordinance, established in 1996 and amended in 2006, could also face the chopping block.

So, too, could policies dealing with the agriculture code, drought conditions, overgrown lots when dealing with insects and bees, predatory lending of businesses out in the county, injuries at special events, the insurance code and the occupations code, safety at outdoor festivals and sporting events, natural resources dealing with uncontrolled burns, trash and tire dumping, heavy trucks oil, gas, and propane lines, said El Paso County Commissioner David Stout.

Stout was among four El Paso-based local officials who signed onto the recent amicus brief in favor of Houston and San Antonio’s lawsuits. He’s also gone to state legislature committee meetings to advocate against the bill. He believes HB2127 will tie the hands of local elected officials, stripping them of the ability to produce innovative and nuanced responses to their constituents’ distinctive needs.

“We’re elected to try to protect our people from things like natural disasters, to other types of crises, to support our workforce, to provide safe housing, to make sure that we have clean, potable drinking water, and so many other things,” he said. “The solutions to all those types of issues look differently from city to city and from county to county.”

The law can preempt not only policies put in place by elected officials but also those approved by voters. For Stout, the law is an “aggressive” act of voter suppression, a move he believes is aimed at nullifying the voices of progressive voters yet may end up hurting conservative municipalities and voters.

“The implications of HB2127 are really far-reaching… destroying the idea of home rule, destroying the idea of local control and really, democracy,” Stout said. “It’s the very definition of state interference. Why should a group of legislators who have rarely or never been to El Paso tell my community what’s best for us?”

The legislation would also remove governmental immunity, leaving counties and cities open to civil litigation by any member of the public that believes their ordinances contradict state policies.

“It’s going to be expensive for local governments to defend and handle and many instances where the express county authority to regulate is unclear,” Stout said. “The bill might possibly chill the county’s will to enact a rule of order for fear of liability to the county or the county official.”

[…]

About an hour’s drive from Austin is the small, red-leaning city of Belton, Texas, home to about 25,500 residents. “A decade ago at the county level, there was not a single elected official who was a Democrat,” said the city’s public information officer Paul Romer. “That has changed, but it is still a place that most would describe as having traditional values.” One Republican representative from the city of Belton, Hugh Shine, was one of the sponsors of HB2127.

But during a July 11 city council meeting, as the city broached the topic of HB2127, the discussion was far from supportive. “We’re quite concerned about the implications of that,” Belton City Manager Sam Listi said. “House Bill 2127 contradicts the Home Rule amendment of the Texas Constitution, is unnecessarily vague, and forces the cities to prove their authority to enact ordinances.”

Benton Place 6 Council Member Wayne Carpenter said that after spending several hours reading the Home Rule, enacted for more than 100 years in the Texas Constitution, he determined that HB2127 violates the Constitution.

“It’s designed to basically punish large cities, which we are not,” he said. “What San Angelo may need, San Antonio doesn’t need, and what Houston needs or doesn’t need, really doesn’t apply to most things in Belton. I think this is a very dangerous precedent.”

Stephanie O’Banion, another Benton council member, testified in the legislature against the bill. “It’s a terrible bill on multiple levels, but in this role for cities, it’s a terrible stripping of our ability to serve our community, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense,” she said.

The city of Belton decided unanimously to have an amicus brief ready to file in support of the lawsuit when the time was right.

“We’re still waiting to see what happens,” Romer said. “The one-size fits all model of government is too restrictive. Communities understand their local issues better than state or federal officials. Autonomy should be preserved, not restricted.”

See here, here, and here for the background. I’d still like to see cities fully join the litigation, but they may or may not for whatever the reason. Having a variety of local officials send in (hopefully multiple) amicus briefs is close enough. I’m especially heartened to see a smaller city like Belton assess the effect of this litigation, and I’d really like to see a lot more reporting done on that. Texas has 43 cities with at least 100K people, and another 32 with between 50 and 100K. How many of them have done what Belton did, and how many of them reached similar conclusions? Have the plaintiffs been reaching out to them?

There’s a huge opportunity here, both for legal strategy and for future politics. This malignant bill is so large and broad and overarching that it surely will have some negative effect on all of these place. It may be that they can’t fully assess the potential for negative effect precisely because of the law’s vagueness and its enabling of civilian vigilantes. Cities need to band together and fight back if they want to continue as cities. And really, we need more media outlets looking at this and asking questions of their local officials. I know a lot happened this session, and we still have the voucherriffic special session to come and then we’re into election season etc etc etc, but this stuff is important. Let’s not let this get lost in the barrage.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on More cities’ responses to the Death Star law

Averie Bishop to run for the Lege

Posted on August 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Nice.

Averie Bishop

Last year’s Miss Texas is entering another competition where she’ll be judged on her talents, leadership abilities and appearance. But this time it won’t be a beauty pageant.

Averie Bishop became the first Asian American winner of the Miss Texas competition in its 85-year history. Now she’s running for the Texas House.

Bishop, 26, filed as a candidate in Texas House District 112, north of Dallas. She’s running in the Democratic primary. If she wins, she will face Rep. Angie Chen Button, a Richardson Republican. Chen Button did not respond to a request for comment.

[…]

Although the job of Miss Texas has most commonly been held by white women who don’t take controversial political stances, Bishop chose diversity and inclusion for her platform. The move came as Gov. Greg Abbott and Republican lawmakers in Austin have in recent years promoted legislation restricting how Texas teachers can discuss the history of racism in America and repealing diversity policies at the state’s colleges and universities — policies Bishop has spoken out against.

I had referred to Averie Bishop as a future legislator when I first wrote about her, and Ginger wrote about this in the August 19 Dispatch. I didn’t realize that future could potentially be this soon. HD112 is a genuine swing district and will surely be a top Dem priority next year. Bishop, as noted in that earlier story, has strong pro-choice credentials. If abortion is going to be a winning issue for Dems in this state, that’s a district where it ought to happen. Legislative races are often more multi-dimensional than that, and incumbent Rep. Angie Chen Button has been an over-performer, including in 2022. This one ought to be a hard-fought matchup. Reform Austin and Mark Steger have more.

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Yet even more Paxton revelations

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

It’s been awhile since I last said Wow, but here I am again saying it.

A crook any way you look

Drew Wicker did not like what he was hearing.

The personal assistant to Attorney General Ken Paxton stood in his boss’s kitchen in summer 2020 as Paxton expressed his desire for granite countertops with a contractor who estimated a $20,000 price tag for the upgrade.

“I will check with Nate,” the contractor said after Paxton agreed to the cost, according to Wicker. When Paxton brought up other fixes he wanted for his Austin property, the contractor said he’d have to check with Nate about those, too.

Nate, Wicker understood, was Nate Paul, the Austin real estate investor Paxton had been meeting frequently with that spring and summer to discuss Paul’s various legal problems, including his claim of mistreatment by police after a raid at his home. To Wicker, the conversation sounded as if Paul would be paying for the renovation.

Wicker was so uncomfortable that he raised the issue with Paxton about a week later as they ate burgers at a Plano restaurant. Paxton assured Wicker he was paying for the renovations personally.

Three years later, those granite countertops have emerged as a key piece of evidence in the impeachment case against Paxton, who is accused of misusing the attorney general’s office to help his friend Paul fend off a federal investigation into his flailing real estate empire. And Wicker — Paxton’s aide who grew into a family friend — has become one of the key witnesses in the case against his former boss. Among the 20 articles of impeachment laid out by the Texas House is an allegation that Paul paid for not just countertops but an extensive renovation of Paxton’s Tarrytown property in exchange for the attorney general’s help with his legal issues.

As one of the aides who spent the most time at the attorney general’s side, Wicker proved an invaluable source as a House committee investigated Paxton in secret this spring before recommending he be impeached.

“I’m going to give you the best recollection, and then I’m going to trust that the evidence points where it shall,” Wicker told his interviewers. “And if that ends up being that (Paxton) conducted illegal business, then I love the man all the same and I hope that that gets adjusted, but he also needs to be held to account.”

First, be sure to click the link and see the picture of Drew Wicker. He looks exactly like the person saying these things in this story. Second, we’ve all read stories about arrogant rich people who forget that their household staff are actually people and thus say and do the worst things around them because they think there’s no one to witness any of it. I’m just bringing that up for no reason at all. Third, and this has as much to do with the fact that the impeachment managers have literally dropped thousands of pages of evidence on us all, partly in response to defense claims that all the charges are made up baloney, I wonder if any of this has come as a surprise to the defense team. This isn’t a criminal case so I presume the rules of discovery are different. It may be that Tony Buzbee and Dan Cogdell are getting some nasty surprises these days, perhaps because their client wasn’t fully truthful with them, perhaps because there’s just so damn much stuff to plow through. Maybe all their bluster and motions for dismissal have just been the best they can do in these obviously difficult circumstances. But if in the end Tony Buzbee gets thoroughly clowned by the impeachment managers, I will not be upset.

One more thing from this story:

Wicker, by chance, also discovered evidence that Paxton had resumed an extramarital affair with a Senate staffer that his top deputies thought was over.

The relationship between Paxton and the woman is central to the impeachment case. House investigators allege that Paul hired her in June 2020 as a favor to Paxton, allowing her to move from San Antonio to Austin.

At a meeting with senior staff in September 2018, with his wife by his side, Paxton disclosed that he had a relationship with the woman, but that it was over and he had recommitted to his marriage, the Associated Press previously reported.

But Wicker, visiting the Omni Barton Creek hotel with his family in summer 2020, ran into Paxton getting off the elevator with a woman who was not his wife.

“No words were said,” Wicker recalled. “Paxton walked out, shook my hand, shook my father’s hand and the lady walked out, didn’t acknowledge us or say anything.”

Wicker said he reported what he saw to Marc Rylander, the Paxton senior adviser who had told him about the affair when he started the job. Wicker described what the woman looked like.

“Great,” Rylander replied. “She’s back.”

I just find that so poignant. Drew Wicker is not my kind of person – the story talks about how he was disappointed to not get to do more policy stuff with Paxton, and we all know what that means – but I can totally empathize with him for that moment. Nobody deserves to have that crappy a boss.

Anyway. Go read the rest of that story – I can’t say I was shocked because I have lost my capacity to be shocked by Ken Paxton, but I did let loose a “holy crap!” when I started reading it. Read also this Trib story about what the prosecution has been up to, that story I linked above about the thousands of pages of evidence so far, for which there’s another Trib story as well – TPR has three key takeaways for you if you’d like a brief summary – and finally, if you’d like to get mad at Ken Paxton all over again but for a different reason, read this Andrea Grimes piece about just how consistent Paxton is in his beliefs, and the absolutely disgusting places that leads him to. Be warned, it will make you very, very mad.

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Texas takes another shot at Planned Parenthood

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

They have a cheat code available, so they use it.

Right there with them

For more than a decade, the state has been trying and failing to chase Planned Parenthood out of Texas.

Texas restricted and then banned abortion. The state removed Planned Parenthood affiliates from state-funded health programs and turned down federal dollars rather than allow Planned Parenthood to receive them. Planned Parenthood has been cut out of funding for cancer screenings, contraception, HIV prevention and sex education.

Despite this concerted effort from the highest levels of state government, Planned Parenthood’s clinic doors have remained open in Texas.

“My mantra is, every day that I show up to the clinic, I’m winning,” said Dr. Amna Dermish, the chief operating and medical services officer at Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas.

But now, the organization is facing a potentially existential threat from its longtime tormentor.

Last year, the state filed a federal lawsuit claiming Planned Parenthood improperly billed Medicaid for $10 million in payments during the period when the state was trying to remove the organization from the program.

Texas is seeking more than $1.8 billion in reimbursement, penalties and fees.

Planned Parenthood has called the lawsuit meritless, pointing out that there was an injunction in place that allowed it to continue to bill Medicaid during that time.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a conservative who previously worked on anti-abortion cases as a religious liberty lawyer, [heard] arguments from both sides [on Tuesday] in Amarillo.

“We have weathered a lot of storms, but we’ve always been able to come through and be there for our patients,” Dermish said. “That ultimately is why I come to work every single day, and it’s just my biggest fear if one day we’re not able to do that.”

Here are a couple of stories about the hearing. I will note that this all started in 2017 with an attempt to claw back $10 million in payments. The state gets to $1.8 billion by asking for penalties and interest payments and so on. How good is their case? From the second report on the hearing:

Jacob Elberg, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in health care fraud, described Texas’ argument as weak.

He called the False Claims Act the government’s most powerful tool against health fraud. Cases involving the law in recent years have included a health records company in Florida and a Montana health clinic that submitted false asbestos claims.

Elberg said it is “hard to understand” how Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, was knowingly filing false claims at a time when it was in court fighting to stay in the program and Texas was still paying the reimbursements.

“This just isn’t what the False Claims Act is supposed to be about,” said Elberg, faculty director at Seton Hall Law School’s Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law.

That doesn’t really matter, though, because as noted the state has a cheat code. This is Ken Paxton going to Amarillo to ask one of his favorite judges to give him some candy. The Fifth Circuit will give him some more candy and will ask him if he’d like a pony as well. In the end, SCOTUS may or may not step in and take some of the candy away. This is the world we live in now.

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Dispatches from Dallas, August 19 edition

Posted on August 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, it’s another grab bag. We have followups to the Southwest Airlines religious liberty case, the ransomware attack on the city of Dallas, and the DPD evidence-mishandling scandal; a former Miss Texas leaps into North Texas politics; HB3 and school security officers in North Texas; book banners in Fort Worth; Farmer’s Branch moves to a 4×10 work week; State Fair news; the Kalita Humphreys theater; and more.

This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Omar Sosa & Seckou Keita, which you can sample in their Tiny Desk concert.

And in DFW-adjacent travel news, over the last weekend we visited the tourist mecca of Oklahoma City to enjoy True Nature: Rodin and the Age of Impressionism at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. We also ran across the Myriad Botanical Gardens, an award-winning garden mostly in a conservatory, which was nice to escape the rain (!). I commend them both to your attention if you end up in OKC.

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The lawsuit over the gender affirming care ban had its hearing

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Hoping for a quick ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.

Medical experts pushed back against Texas lawmakers’ assertions that puberty blockers and hormone therapies are experimental and put young transgender patients at risk as they testified Tuesday in a hearing that seeks to block a new law banning such medical treatment for kids.

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a doctor who treats adolescents and has been providing gender-affirming care for 17 years, said the body of medical research demonstrates these treatments have a high success rate in improving mental health outcomes of trans youth. But in her clinical work, the evidence is more obvious.

“Recently, I had one of my patients tell me, ‘If you had not allowed me, and helped shepherd me through these interventions, I don’t think I would be here,’” said Olson-Kennedy, the medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

She added that hundreds of her patients have expressed the same sentiment in her nearly two decades treating roughly 1,100 young patients.

[…]

Dr. Aron Janssen, a psychiatrist at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, testified to the evidence that psychotherapy alone cannot alleviate gender dysphoria, asserting that puberty blockers or hormone therapy is medically necessary. By restricting access to these treatments, young patients will have worse outcomes, Janssen said.

“There’s an intense improvement we see amongst these kids,” Janssen said of his clinical experience.

Texas lawmakers’ efforts to restrict gender-affirming care in Texas followed nearly identical campaigns from other Republican-led state legislatures. Across the country, 19 other states have passed similar legislation. Prohibiting doctors from providing gender-affirming care to trans youth is widely popular among Republican voters — over 85% of registered GOP voters in Texas supported these restrictions to some degree, according to an April poll by the Texas Politics Project.

But the wave of new legislation invited a series of lawsuits across the country seeking to block the laws from going into effect. Those suits have largely proved successful in federal courts.

See here for the background. As the story notes, this lawsuit is in state court, which I’m guessing is for the purpose of getting a faster result, hopefully a restraining order blocking enforcement of SB14. Testimony was scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the press releases I received from the ACLU of Texas. They have a brief update on the proceedings here. The state put on its case yesterday, and that was the end of the hearing. Now we wait for the judge.

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Harris Health bond officially on the ballot

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

Harris County voters will be asked to approve a $2.5 billion bond issue from the Harris Health System to fund the rebuilding and upgrading of several hospital district facilities, including an expansion of Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital.

Harris County Commissioners on Thursday voted unanimously to put the bond request on the November ballot.

“I think that means something in the eye of the county that all commissioners from all backgrounds considered this to be something that is urgently needed for the future health of this county.” said Dr. Esmaeil Porsa, president and CEO of Harris Health System.

The Harris Health board of trustees unanimously voted to recommend the bond package to Commissioners Court in April, with health system leaders underscoring the importance of the proposal.

“This is a once in a lifetime type of project,” Porsa previously told Houston Landing.

See here and here for the background. I’m glad to see that it passed unanimously, that will help blunt any opposition if it arises. I expect this will pass easily enough, but that’s still nice to see.

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It’s going to be a challenge tracking changes in the maternal mortality rate

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

We expect maternal deaths to rise post-Dobbs, especially in states that have effectively banned abortions. But collecting the data to document what’s happening will not be easy.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, doctors have warned that limiting abortion care will make pregnancy more dangerous in a country that already has the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized nations.

The case of Mylissa Farmer, a Missouri woman, is one example. Last August, her water broke less than 18 weeks into her pregnancy, when her fetus was not viable. She was at risk for developing a life-threatening infection if she continued the pregnancy. Yet during three separate visits to emergency rooms, she was denied abortion care because her fetus still had a heartbeat. Doctors specifically cited the state’s new abortion law in her medical records and said they could not intervene until her condition worsened. She eventually traveled to Illinois for care.

Even for people who don’t develop sudden life-threatening complications, doctors note that carrying a pregnancy to term is inherently risky because rapid physical and hormonal changes can exacerbate chronic health conditions and trigger new complications. If more people are forced to continue unwanted pregnancies, there are bound to be more pregnancy-related deaths: A study by the University of Colorado estimates a 24% increase in maternal deaths if the United States bans abortion federally. They predicted the increase would be even higher for Black patients, at 39%. Currently, 14 states have total abortion bans.

Additionally, when abortion is illegal, it makes the procedure more dangerous for those who still try to terminate their pregnancies. The World Health Organization found that unsafe or illegal abortions account for up to 10% of maternal deaths worldwide.

As the United States enters its second post-Roe year, advocates say it’s important to gather data on the impact abortion bans are having on the health of pregnant people to help both policy makers and voters understand the life-or-death consequences of the restrictions. Without such accounting, they say, the public may remain ignorant of the toll. Maternal mortality rates would be a crucial gauge of impact.

Despite the stakes, experts say, at least in the short term, it may be difficult or impossible to track the number of lives lost due to limits on abortion access.

ProPublica spoke to four members of state maternal mortality review committees. Here are some of the challenges they see to drawing any clear conclusions from maternal mortality data in the near future.

The challenges include inconsistent data, which may not include any indication of whether an abortion was available, interference from anti-abortion states, small sample sizes, and the fact that some women in anti-abortion states can still access abortion care. I think the story is going to be told more by anecdote, at least at the beginning. Any individual story about a woman dying after being denied an abortion will have an effect. There are already tons of stories of horrific near misses, some of which resulted in permanent damage to the woman in question; the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Texas have told some of those stories, and they’re far from alone. The data will be there, but it will take time and effort to fully understand it.

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Still more Paxton revelations

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I have three things to say about this.

A crook any way you look

In new allegations revealed Wednesday, Texas House investigators accused suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton of engaging in a complex cover-up to hide his relationship with real estate investor Nate Paul as senior aides grew increasingly concerned about Paxton’s willingness to use his office to benefit Paul.

The subterfuge allegedly included Paxton and Paul creating an Uber account under an alias so they could meet each other and so the attorney general could visit the woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

And once Paxton learned several high-ranking officials in his office reported his behavior to the FBI, the House impeachment managers alleged, he took immediate steps to cover up his relationship with Paul, including wiring a $122,000 payment to a Paul-affiliated company in an effort to hide home renovations that Paul had provided for free.

The allegations, outlined in a series of filings with the Texas Senate’s court of impeachment, shed new light on the relationship between Paul and Paxton that is at the core of his impeachment proceedings.

Among the new claims: Top deputies in the attorney general’s office persistently warned Paxton that Paul was a “crook” and that there was no merit to his claims that he had been unfairly treated by law enforcement, and that the two met at least 20 times in spring and summer 2020, sometimes discussing the FBI investigation into Paul’s faltering real estate empire.

Paxton “blindly accepted Paul’s conspiracy,” impeachment managers alleged. “Senior Staff urged Paxton to stay away. But when it came to Paul, Paxton was immune to reason.”

Paul was arrested in June on federal felony charges of lying to financial institutions to secure business loans.

Responding to Paxton’s pretrial motions that seek to dismiss all 20 articles of impeachment, including four that will not be included in the Sept. 5 impeachment trial, House managers also detailed multiple actions in which Paxton allegedly sought to use his office to benefit Paul.

They alleged that Paxton conducted a “sham criminal investigation” into Paul’s “adversaries,” routinely overriding concerns from agency staff who told him that Paul was a “criminal” and that Paxton needed to “get away.”

Instead, House managers alleged, Paxton became increasingly “entangled in Paul’s web of deceit” and “went to great lengths” to hide his relationship with Paul — using a burner phone and secret email accounts, ditching his security detail and using the fake Uber name to be “ferried to his lover’s or Paul’s properties more than a dozen times.”

In response to Paul’s favors — including allegedly employing the woman and paying to remodel Paxton’s home — Paxton “continually abused the power of his office to advance Paul’s aims,” House managers alleged.

In one instance, Paxton allegedly told agency staff that he did not want the office to assist law enforcement “in any way” with an investigation into Paul, who Paxton claimed was being “railroaded” and needed “unprecedented” access to sensitive information about his case.

After meeting with “alarmed” senior staff, Paxton allegedly demanded files about Paul’s criminal case that included an unredacted FBI letter that identified individuals involved in a 2019 raid on Paul’s home and businesses.

“Paxton held onto the file for more than a week,” House managers wrote. “Ultimately, OAG did not disclose the information to Paul. But Paxton did.”

[…]

In a written response, filed with the Senate on Tuesday and made public Wednesday, the impeachment team challenged other pretrial assertions from Paxton’s lawyers, who claimed the articles of impeachment were deficient because they failed to list specific laws that Paxton allegedly broke.

“Impeachable offenses need not be indictable crimes,” the House team argued. “Impeachment in Texas seeks to protect against conduct that undermines the integrity of the office, disregards constitutional duties and oaths of office, abuses government process and power, and adversely impacts the system of government.”

What’s more, the team argued, many of the articles listed particular crimes, and several detailed “how Paxton abused his office for his own personal benefit or that of Nate Paul and business entities controlled by Paul.”

More broadly, the managers emphasized that the impeachment trial is not a criminal or civil proceeding, as Paxton’s side has implied. In one new filing, the managers wrote that an impeachment trial is “a unique, if not mostly Political, with a capital ‘P’, proceeding — i.e., an action by the representatives of the people challenging official actions that are contrary to the public interest.”

That view aligns with the view that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who leads the Senate and is acting as judge in the impeachment trial, offered in a TV interview Tuesday.

“It’s not a criminal trial. It’s not a civil trial. It’s a political trial,” Patrick told the Fox affiliate in Houston.

See here and here for more on the defense motions, and here for more on what kind of proceeding this is. The three things:

1. I don’t know about you, but any activity in which one feels the need to use burner phones and fake Uber accounts seems to me to be not on the up and up. Everyone deserves privacy, even elected officials, but these are not things that most people do in the course of their normal business. In a vacuum there may be legitimate reasons for that sort of thing, but in this context it’s just damn suspicious. Also, too, taking all these steps to cover one’s tracks almost always requires doing some amount of lying, by necessity to people you know. I’m just saying.

2. I’m glad we settled the question about what kind of trial this is. It had been keeping me awake at night.

3. In the end what I think this all comes down to is how many Republicans are there in the Senate who have decided they’ve had enough of Ken Paxton’s shit? He’s been their low scorer in the last two elections, his biggest supporters are the rich guys who love to throw millions of dollars in attacks against other Republicans, and while he’s had his successes in the courts, he’s no legal genius. Anyone can file a lawsuit with these Trump judges he has access to. I don’t know what will happen with the impeachment trial, but I think it’s a matter of whether the evidence is enough to convince at least nine of those people that they can do better, they don’t need this. We’ll see. The Chron has more.

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Fifth Circuit rejects some mifepristone restrictions, upholds others

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Typical.

A Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals panel handed down a decision Wednesday batting down challenges to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) initial approval of abortion drug mifepristone, but reinstituting restrictions that the agency has lifted in recent years.

The three-judge panel reversed the most headline-grabbing part of Donald Trump-appointed district court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision, in which he ruled that the FDA’s 20-plus-year approval of mifepristone should be nixed.

The anti-abortion groups who brought the suit had argued that alterations to the drug’s disbursement regime in 2016 qualified as “reopening” the question of that initial approval, giving courts the opportunity to revisit it. The Fifth Circuit panel rejected that claim.

“They do not alter FDA’s basic assumption that mifepristone is safe and effective, subject to certain conditions for use,” the panel wrote of the 2016 changes.

The panel held the same on the 2021 alterations to the drug’s regime, where the FDA, most significantly, removed the in-person dispensing requirement.

“As with the 2016 Amendments, removing the in-person dispensing requirement does not change the basic concept of allowing women to use mifepristone,” the judges wrote.

But, the judges were very willing to question the FDA’s decision-making, including on fairly technical clinical aspects. For example, the judges gave the greenlight to reimposing restrictions that the FDA lifted in 2016 — including expanding the on-label gestational window in which the drug can be used — because they quibbled with how the agency determined that the changes were safe.

The ruling is also replete with histrionic messaging about the danger of mifepristone, talking points that have been a ubiquitous and long-lived tactic of the anti-abortion movement and have resulted in restrictions that major medical groups have long critiqued as based in politics and not medical necessity.

[…]

The Supreme Court had previously issued a stay in the case, meaning that mifepristone will remain fully accessible until the high Court either issues its own ruling or declines to hear the likely coming appeal from the Fifth Circuit.

See here for the previous entry. I’m a bit pressed for time, so read the rest of the story, which contains some prime Fifth Circuit winguttery about abortion, and the ruling, which is embedded. Given the stay, nothing has changed from a practical perspective, and I don’t think much has changed in terms of what SCOTUS will ultimately be asked to do. Either they’re willing to YOLO their way towards more abortion restrictions while also making all of Big Pharma nervous, or they’ll pull it all or mostly all back, on whatever pretext they find suitable. We’re just going to have to wait and see. Mother Jones, The 19th, and the Trib have more.

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New frontiers in bad ideas

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Private dams. No, seriosuly.

A private dam proposed on the South Llano River, a major tributary to the Highland Lakes, is the center of a debate in the Hill Country this week as a public hearing set for Thursday evening approaches.

It all started in 2018 when then-CEO of Phillips 66, Gregory Garland, filed an application with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, to dam up the river and create a private pool.

But under extraordinary drought and low river flow conditions, neighbors are worried about the strain this may put on a scarce resource.

[…]

The proposed size of Garland’s private recreational pool, filed under Waterstone Creek LLC, is 12 acre-feet of water — roughly 3.9 million gallons. That’s enough water to cover an entire football field with water nine feet deep.

KXAN obtained this satellite image from Garland’s application of the proposed reservoir overlaid on the South Llano River, suggesting a dam wide enough to stretch across the entire channel.

The Lower Colorado River Authority, or LCRA, told KXAN the landowner has a 10-year contract to purchase 16 acre-feet of water per year from the state agency. A hydrologist estimates the landowner is purchasing this quantity of water from the LCRA to keep the impoundment full and offset evaporation losses, even though this water is upstream of the Highland Lakes reservoirs from which the LCRA typically distributes water.

The LCRA contract yields a total of more than 50 million gallons of water over the 10-year period that could otherwise flow into the Highland Lakes. That amount equals enough water to fill Austin’s Deep Eddy Pool 86 times.

TCEQ’s draft permit for the project states the landowner cannot store water during low-flow conditions, as it may prevent water from reaching downstream senior water right holders.

A hydrologist told KXAN when a reservoir is full, the landowner would allow excess water to spill over and travel downstream. But if the reservoir is not full during prolonged drought conditions, any water that flows in is stored in the reservoir even though the water legally belongs to someone downstream with senior rights.

We tried to get answers to how the landowner would navigate this problem, but were unable to reach Mr. Garland after leaving multiple messages.

The whole thing gets shadier from there, if you can believe it. It’s not clear to me from the article what the process is for determining whether this dumb idea should go forward or not – there was a public meeting last week, and there will be at least one more – but hopefully a little attention will help affect it. Go read the rest and if you live in the area by all means call your State Rep and State Senator to let them know how you feel. There was a Bloomberg story on this that appeared in the business section of the Saturday Chron print edition if you want to know more.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of August 14

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance is now also waiting to see what a grand jury in San Antonio does to rid us all of a political crook as it brings you this week’s roundup. On a more serious note, the TPA stands with the people of Hawaii as they recover from that terrible wildfire last week. Here’s how you can help if you are so inclined.

Continue reading →

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Judge temporarily blocks law abolishing Harris County Elections Administrator

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

A good first step, but we’re far from finished here.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office on Tuesday appealed the decision of a judge to temporarily block a new law passed by Republicans to abolish Harris County’s elections chief position. The decision earlier Tuesday by a Travis County district judge found that the law is unconstitutional and would disrupt this fall’s elections.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office filed its appeal in the Texas Supreme Court, keeping Travis County District Judge Karin Crump’s order from taking effect.

The law, which would have forced the county to eliminate the county’s elections administrator and transfer all election duties to the county clerk and the tax assessor-collector, is set to take effect Sept. 1, weeks before early voting begins for the county’s November municipal elections.

Nonetheless, Harris County officials said the earlier injunction was a “win” for the county and “local officials across the state.”

Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee filed the lawsuit in Travis County District Court last month and argued the law, Senate Bill 1750, violates the Texas Constitution because it was used by the Legislature to single out one county. Menefee asked Crump to prevent the law from taking effect.

Crump agreed and in her ruling added, “Not only will this transfer lead to inefficiencies, disorganization, confusion, office instability, and increased costs to Harris County, but it will also disrupt an election that the Harris County EA [elections administrator] has been planning for months. The Harris County Clerk and the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector have had no role in preparing for the November Election.”

Those were the same concerns Menefee detailed in his initial filing to seek an injunction.

“Without court intervention, the public’s selection of their elected representatives — the core process on which our democracy rests — will be risked in Harris County,” the filing says.

At a Tuesday news conference celebrating the decision, Menefee called the law an “existential” threat to county sovereignty.

“The Texas Constitution says what it says,” he said. “This filing is much bigger than this particular law.”

Menefee said Harris County’s lawsuit is “reining in misguided legislators” whom he said “aren’t playing in good faith anymore.”

See here and here for some background. I have expressed concern about the county’s argument in this lawsuit before. The Chron story addresses the point that had been concerning me.

The Texas Legislature approved the measure in May, taking an unprecedented step to remove a local official by targeting just one county without its consent.

Under SB 1750, the duties for overseeing elections in Harris County revert back to two elected officials, the county clerk and the tax assessor-collector, who ran elections until Commissioners Court voted in 2020 to create an elections administrator position. The administrator is appointed by a five-member commission that includes the county judge, the tax assessor, the county clerk and the chairs of the Harris County Republican and Democratic parties.

While more than half of Texas’ 254 counties have appointed elections administrators — including Bexar, Tarrant, Dallas and Collin — SB 1750 was written to apply only to counties with a population over 3.5 million on Sept. 1, 2023. Harris County is the only county of that size.

There’s two points here. One is the “without its consent”. I’ve said that the laws are full of statutes written to cover a particular county or city, but it is the case that these laws were written with the input of those cities and counties. I don’t know how much that matters, but it is a difference. The other one is the setting of a date for the population stipulation. My understanding is that is something that hasn’t been done before, and the key here is that it really does ensure that only Harris County could ever be the subject of this law. Without that “on September 1, 2023” condition, this law could eventually affect Dallas or Bexar counties, and maybe others later on. That wasn’t the intent of the law, which again goes to Harris County’s argument.

Will that work with the Supreme Court? I don’t know. As has so often been the case in recent legislative years, we’re in uncharted waters. I don’t care to guess what SCOTx will make of this. Harris County has filed a motion for temporary relief preserving the trial court’s injunction while the appeal is pending in response to the state’s appeal, which automatically put the ruling on hold. The goal is to keep the current setup for the 2023 election, which really ought to be an easy call. But we’ll see.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Wildfire disaster declared

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Stay safe, y’all.

Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a wildfire disaster declaration for about 75% of Texas counties, allowing them to use all available state resources to respond to any new fires as the state continues to bake under triple-digit temperatures.

The declaration was issued Friday as wildfires continue to spark across the state: The Texas A&M Forest Service, which monitors wildfire conditions, reports that at least 8,500 acres of Texas land have burned since Aug. 1.

The governor’s declaration covers 191 of the state’s 254 counties, including Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Midland and Travis. Many counties across the state have issued their own burn bans, according to the Forest Service.

“As we continue to respond to wildfire conditions across the state, Texas is ready to provide any additional resources and aid to impacted communities,” Abbott said in a press release. He also encouraged residents to remain weather aware and follow the guidance of state and local officials.

On Sunday, the Forest Service responded to 17 new requests for assistance on wildfires that burned 445.8 acres across the state. Last week, the agency raised its wildfire preparedness to Level 4, which indicates a large number of fires that are difficult to control and recommends a “heavy commitment” of resources from state and local officials to address fire danger.

Wildfires have destroyed homes, buildings and forests statewide. Last week, a brush fire in Cedar Park, about 20 miles north of Austin, tore through apartment complexes and townhomes, forcing evacuations in Williamson County and surrounding areas. Earlier this year, an Eastland County sheriff’s deputy was killed trying to rescue others when a massive, wind-whipped wildfire swept into Eastland, about 120 miles west of Dallas. Hundreds of families evacuated their homes.

The extreme heat and dryness this summer have not only put most of the state into drought, it’s also greatly increased the risk of wildfires, as Space City Weather pointed out over the weekend. Not a whole lot we as individuals can do, so be aware and be safe. Hopefully better days are coming soon.

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Todd Interests rejects “final offer” by TPWD for Fairfield State Park

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Off to court next, I guess.

The developer who purchased the site of a now-former state park has rejected the state’s final offer to purchase the property.

Dallas-based Todd Interests became the owner of the Fairfield Lake State Park property, about 70 miles east of Waco, at the start of June. The previous owner, Vistra Energy, sold the 5,000-acre property, including the park, five years after closing its power plant by the lake.

Negotiations for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to purchase the property failed. TPWD had leased the land for the park from Vistra for 50 years. The new owner announced intentions to cancel the lease and turn the property into a private community with multi-million dollar homes and a golf course.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission voted June 10 to acquire the property from Todd Interests through eminent domain. As part of those proceedings, TPWD submitted an offer to the developer.

In a statement Tuesday, Shawn Todd, CEO of Todd Interests, announced he has rejected that offer, saying it was below what his company had initially paid for the property.

“Not only was the offer below what we paid for and have already put into the property, and hundreds of millions below fair market value, it was accompanied by an $85 million appraisal that we are told will be the offered amount in condemnation proceedings,” Todd said.

While Todd has not revealed the exact amount he purchased the property for, he previously told KXAN it was “just north” of $100 million. Vistra had initially listed the site for more than $110 million.

The developer said the property is worth a lot more than what he paid for, though. In June, he told KXAN his bank had appraised the value of the property’s water rights alone at $238 million.

In his statement, Todd said TPWD has hired an outside law firm to represent it in eminent domain proceedings. The law firm, Todd said, has made allegations that fish in the lake are potentially contaminated with toxic materials from the former coal-fired power plant, and that historical sites were recently discovered on the property.

“Sadly, these statements and actions are consistent and a part of the continued false narrative created by TPWD and its leadership designed to artificially drive down the value of our property,” Todd said.

In a statement provided to KXAN, TPWD said it is using “due diligence” in an attempt to purchase the property, including inspections, environmental assessments and an appraisal report.

“TPWD filed an application for a temporary injunction to gain access to the property to determine whether there are environmental concerns,” Cory Chandler, deputy communications director for TPWD, told KXAN.

Chandler said TPWD and its legal counsel “have not alleged there is any contamination in Fairfield Lake State Park,” other than instances already documented by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

The temporary injunction, filed Aug. 7 in Freestone County, asks for a temporary restraining order to allow state crews onto the property for inspections, surveys and tests.

See here for the previous entry. I will note that Freestone County, where the park is located, opposes the use of eminent domain to retain the park for the state. I don’t know how much weight that carries, but there it is. I have the full statement from Todd Interests beneath the fold. I’ll be interested to see what the courts make of this.

Continue reading →

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More on the shitty people who prop up Ken Paxton

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

There’s no end to these assholes, part 2.

A crook any way you look

In late June, about a dozen conservative Gen Z influencers converged on Fort Worth for a few days of right-wing networking. They hit local night spots, posed for group photos and met a far-right Texas billionaire and Donald Trump’s former campaign chair.

And then they took to social media to rally their many followers behind a new, controversial film about human trafficking before turning their support to impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The event was sponsored by a fledgling company, Influenceable LLC, that recruits young, conservative social media figures to promote political campaigns and films without disclosing their business relationship. On its website, the company touts itself as the “world’s largest network of digital activists” and offers clients the power to “cultivate a community of influencers to leverage their credibility” with audiences.

Photos from the event show that Influenceable has powerful allies. Among the speakers were Brad Parscale, who recently moved to Texas after years running the Trump campaign’s digital strategy, and Tim Dunn, the West Texas oil tycoon who has given tens of millions of dollars to ultraconservative movements and candidates in Texas — including Paxton.

Now Influenceable appears to be recruiting young conservatives to parrot claims that the attorney general is the victim of a political witch hunt and, more recently, to promote a series of videos alleging that the Texas Legislature is secretly controlled by Democrats intent on destroying Paxton and other conservatives.

The company’s emergence comes amid Republican initiatives to connect with young Americans who tend to be more supportive of liberal policies.

And while legal experts said Influenceable’s methods don’t appear to run afoul of campaign finance and political advertising rules, the company has already irked some Republicans who say its approaches are deceptive and harmful to democracy. State Rep. Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress, said he may propose new laws to strengthen disclosure requirements because of companies like Influenceable, saying they create “manufactured outrage” and further polarize the country.

“It disgusts me,” Oliverson said in an interview. “It calls into question the value and the validity of their entire message as an influencer. … I think they should all be investigated. I think the company should be investigated, and I think all of these influencers should be outed.”

See here for some background. Let’s all make a note of this, to see if Rep. Oliverson follows up on his words next session. Beyond that, all I can say is read the rest. It’s a long and detailed and increasingly mind-scrambling story of shitty people doing shitty things to help an even shittier person. I didn’t have the fortitude to make it all the way through, maybe you’ll do better than I did.

Posted in Scandalized! | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Allred and Gutierrez talk issues

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

They mostly agree on things. They have some different priorities and some differences in approach, and in some cases one would go farther than the other, but in the end they’re quite similar.

Rep. Colin Allred

U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Dallas and state Sen. Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio both think they have the platform needed to unseat U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the conservative powerhouse who is seeking reelection next year.

Each brings a different profile to the race. Allred is a former NFL player and civil rights attorney from North Texas who was first elected to Congress in 2018. Gutierrez is an immigration lawyer from South Texas who has served in the Texas Legislature since 2008, first in the House and then in the Senate.

Allred openly touts his bipartisan credentials in a closely divided U.S. House. Gutierrez, meanwhile, has become an outspoken Democrat in a Texas Senate where Republicans dominate.

Their differences extend to the issues, according to recent interviews with the two candidates. While they generally agree on many Democratic priorities, they diverge on the best way to address some of them, including gun control, immigration and health care.

To be clear, the primary could still grow. State Rep. Carl Sherman, D-DeSoto, has been considering a run and is expected to announce his decision soon.

Allred and Gutierrez spoke to The Texas Tribune to lay out their policy positions ahead of the Democratic primary in March.

You can read on for their positions on multiple issues, but really, the differences are mostly small. The important thing is that both would be solid Dems and a trillion times better than Ted Cruz. As for Rep. Carl Sherman, as I said before I cannot understand why he would enter this race, as he would have no path to victory I can see.

Meanwhile, here’s a good story about why Sen. Gutierrez is running.

Sen. Roland Gutierrez

It was a Wednesday in late May of last year, and state Sen. Roland Gutierrez stood outside of a small home in Uvalde, talking to a family that couldn’t stop crying.

Gutierrez, eyes sunken from a night of little sleep after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, was weeping himself. U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro was standing nearby, watching Gutierrez closely as he spoke.

“It’s very hard to know what to say in those moments without babbling or without saying nothing,” Castro said. “People really appreciated his presence there.”

Perhaps it was because Gutierrez, 52, knows grief well.

He was only 9 months old when his mother died from an infection after a routine surgery. He doesn’t remember Diamantina Gutierrez, whose name means glitter in Spanish. But he saw the impact of her absence every day in his three older brothers’ eyes, the hurt and the anger they carried. He internalized it.

Long before a teenage gunman murdered 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in his Texas Senate district, Gutierrez knew what it was like to see other people’s pain and desperately want to take it away. He knew that there were no magic words to make things better.

Like so many others, Gutierrez separates his life into two periods: Before May 24, 2022 and after. He was always rowdy and liberal, but the school massacre turned him into something of a single-issue lawmaker. He focused almost exclusively on gun control and police accountability bills that had no chance of passing in the conservative Senate, where he represents a district stretching from San Antonio to Big Bend.

His politics alienated his GOP colleagues, who rejected Gutierrez’s proposals both based on policy and his confrontational approach. They’ve scolded him for speaking out of turn on the Senate floor. They have been offended by his suggestions that their lack of support means they do not care about Texas children in the same way he does.

Now that it’s clear the Texas Legislature will have none of it, Gutierrez is doing anything but backing off. Instead, he’ll showcase the same issues in his race against Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

It’s clear we have two terrific candidates in this race. We listen to them, we pick one, we unite behind him, and we go beat Ted Cruz. Who’s up for that?

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Printed menus are back

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Those QR code menus that we all either got to experience or had to put up with (as one sees it) from the pandemic are on their way out.

Like many ambitious restaurants around town, the newly opened Pastore leaves no detail unturned: Customers are handed cold towels that chill in a fridge set precisely at 40 degrees, white tablecloths are pressed just-so and the head chef sources free-range chicken from an artisanal meat purveyor to make his sausage-filled ravioli.

The QR-code menu, that pixelated black-and-white matrix once a fixture during the pandemic, never had a chance at Pastore.

“It made sense to have QR codes during the COVID years,” said Nina Quincy, the president of Underbelly Hospitality, the company behind the seafood-leaning Italian restaurant in Regent Square. “But I think menus are a really important part of the dining experience. You hold it in your hands, so it involves all the senses.”

The contact-less QR codes looked like the future of dining when they served as a cost-savings measure and public health precaution. But today, many Houston restaurants are ditching digital menus in favor of old-school paper menus — sometimes spending thousands of dollars on custom-designed stationery, leather-bound books and even personalized memos for diners to take home.

The use of QR-code scans dropped 27 percent in the U.S. in April and May when compared to the same period in 2021, according to MustHaveMenus, a platform providing menu management and printing services to the hospitality industry.

QR codes are still prevalent, especially at more casual establishments, but the biggest reason, say restaurant owners and operators, is that people simply got tired of them and wanted paper menus. In other words, it took the joy out of dining.

“People will pick up the phone when given any reason, but if it’s a paper menu, maybe they’ll leave it in their pocket or bag,” Quincy said.

[…]

The QR-code menu isn’t completely dead, however, said Devin Handler, the vice president of marketing of Denver-based Tag Restaurant Group, which counts Guard & Grace among its four concepts.

The group’s more casual restaurants rely on QR codes, which Handler said allows customers to order quickly and find other types of information like why a service fee is included or catering services that would look too messy on a paper menu. Restaurants also can update their digital menus more quickly without having to print new ones.

“The paper menu feels like we curated it for you,” said Handler, who oversees all the Tag restaurant menu designs. “But the QR codes are more flexible. I think the future is a blend.”

That sounds about right to me. I’m more of a casual-dining, counter service kind of guy, where a single menu on the wall and/or some laminated ones where you order are sufficient. I don’t mind a QR code menu but some restaurants did them better than others – some of them were clearly optimized for iPhones and not Androids – and there’s nothing more frustrating than such a menu that needs to be greatly enlarged to be readable with only a tiny portion of the menu on the screen at a time as a result. I’m sure the user experience wasn’t that high on the priority list three years ago when these things first came into common use, but it’s 2023 now, we can do better. Or we can go back to the old analog ways, that’s fine too. What do you think about this?

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Galveston redistricting lawsuit gets underway

Posted on August 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

This could be a big one.

Former Commissioner Stephen Holmes

n the home of Juneteenth, the culmination of Galveston County’s decade-long effort to undermine the political power of Black and Latino voters is on trial.

In the only county-level redistricting case which the federal government has stepped into, this week saw the start of what is expected to be a drawn-out court hearing examining whether the county violated the federal Voting Rights Act and unconstitutionally used racial gerrymandering in 2021 when drawing commissioner court districts. The new maps ultimately reduced the voting strength of the coastal county’s residents of color.

The trial before Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a Trump appointee who has given each side 40 hours to make their cases, opened to a packed courtroom in the federal courthouse on Galveston Island. It will focus on how the county capitalized on its first opportunity to redraw precincts without federal oversight to dismantle the sole commissioner precinct in which Black and Latino voters made up a majority of the electorate

It will trace how the court chopped up Precinct 3, where Black and Latino residents had been able to build political coalitions and select their representative on the court. In the redistricting cycle after the 2020 census, a district that sliced the middle of Galveston County down to the island, including diverse pockets of four cities where most of the county’s Black population lives, became a much smaller district limited to the northwestern end of the county that includes majority-white communities.

Black and Latino communities were split up so that white voters could make up at least 62% of the electorate in each of the four precincts. Because white voters in Galveston — like Texas generally — tend to support different candidates than Black and Latino voters, the new map effectively quashed their electoral power.

The new map doesn’t just leave Black and Latino voters with less opportunity to influence elections, it eliminates their influence altogether, said Sarah Xiyi Chen, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project.

“At the end of the day, there is no meaningful dispute that for decades Galveston County’s Black and Latino community has been able to elect the candidate of their choice continuously and now under the challenged map, that community has zero opportunity,” Chen said in court. “You cannot get less opportunity than zero.”

Residents challenging the map, including claims of intentional discrimination, have been joined by three local branches of the NAACP, a local LULAC chapter and the U.S. Department of Justice, which found the commissioners court’s move to dismantle Precinct 3 so grievous that it stepped in four months after the map was adopted.

During opening arguments, the federal government pitched the case as a textbook case, falling squarely within the framework used to enforce a key section of the Voting Rights Act that the U.S. Supreme Court had recently reaffirmed.

Quoting from the high court’s June decision, DOJ attorney Catherine Meza said the court had “iterated the essence” of vote dilution claims, like the one they’ve raised against the county, as a certain electoral structure that minimizes or cancels out the votes of people of color.

“That is precisely what occurred here in Galveston County,” Meza said.

The case also offers a look back at another of the high court’s voting rights rulings — its 2013 decision to upend what was known as preclearance, a long-established protection that required changes to voting maps to clear federal reviews before taking effect.

[…]

In legal filings and in their opening arguments, Galveston County’s attorneys have dropped in challenges to legal precedent that allows voters to use the Voting Rights Act to protect coalition districts where politically cohesive racial groups combine their voting strength as they do in Galveston and in diverse suburban communities.

The county’s litigation team includes lawyers with the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group that has regularly challenged voter registrations and made false or unsupported claims about voter fraud. In a factsheet distributed to reporters at the Galveston County trial, the organization plainly argued that extending the VRA’s protections to include multiracial coalitions “would transform the law from protecting against race discrimination to protecting political coalitions.”

It’s an issue voting rights experts have warned could be a key fight in the litigation over the mapmaking from this redistricting cycle and one that could play out in future appeals of the Galveston case, possibly up to the Supreme Court, which has not yet weighed in on the issue.

And even though the Supreme Court recently rejected Republican arguments that the Voting Rights Act places too much emphasis on race, including a pitch for race-neutral tests, the county’s attorneys indicated they are hoping to wedge open the door to relitigate that as the case is appealed through the federal courts.

At the close of opening arguments, already hitting the court’s time limit, [attorney representing Galveston Joe] Russo briefly hinted they’d be making that case for a wholesale change of the VRA.

“The time for the need for race-based legislation is over,” he said.

See here, here, and here for some background. Democracy Docket has a long summary of the case if you want a deeper dive. The plaintiffs survived a motion to dismiss in April, with the judge granting that they had standing to sue and setting the trial date. As noted, the recent SCOTUS ruling on Alabama’s Congressional redistricting, which that state is doing its best to defy, could be a big factor here. It could also be the means to give SCOTUS a second whack at fully dismembering the VOting Rights Act, so don’t get too optimistic. Expect that it will be a few months before we get a decision, and after that we begin the appeals process. You know the drill, we’ll be following it again when the Texas legislative and Congressional redistricting cases get to trial. KUHF has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Too many bicyclists are dying in traffic this year

Posted on August 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

We’ve got to do better.

A fatal crash [in late July] cemented what cycling advocates had been warning about for months – Houston is going backwards when it comes to erasing roadway deaths of bicycle riders.

“With few exceptions, trying to share the road on Houston’s streets is like swimming with sharks,” BikeHouston Executive Director Joe Cutrufo said, in an email. “There’s no protection, there’s no goodwill, there’s no accountability.”

[…]

The death is the 12th roadway fatality in Houston involving a cyclist. With five months of the year to go, that is already more than the number of cyclist deaths last year and more than every year of the past decade except 2019 – when deaths in the city spiked to 16.

Cyclists for months have been sounding the alarm, saying too many places in the city remain a danger zone for riders. Drivers too often are aggressive, inattentive and encouraged by highway and road designs to mash the accelerator, they said.

Between Jan. 1 and July 31, 2022, Houston logged eight cyclist fatalities. Based on that rate, 2023 is on on pace for 19 deaths across Houston, as the city, county, state and nation makes a priority of reducing roadway deaths.

“We’re on pace to double last year’s death toll,” Cutrufo said. “What is the next mayor going to do to ensure this doesn’t happen again?”

Houston approved a “Vision Zero” pledge aimed at eliminating roadway deaths, developing an action plan in late 2020. Officials have touted new projects to make roads safer for all users with expanded sidewalks and bike lanes.

Though the projects have at times been controversial, with drivers complaining about losing lanes to protected bike paths, Cutrufo said the projects are working as planned despite the uptick in deaths.

“We’re not seeing drivers killing bicyclists in the places where we’ve built safe streets with separated bikeways, so we really need to see the next mayor double down on multi-modal streets that accommodate all Houstonians, not just cars and trucks,” Cutrufo said.

I’ve ridden quite a bit on the new West 11th bike lane. It’s opened up a lot more of the area to me, just because now I feel safer travelling it by bike. And just as a reminder to you, the driver, when I bike to these destinations – almost always places to eat – I’m not taking up a parking place. You’re welcome.

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Another data point on ransomware

Posted on August 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

And other cybersecurity incidents, from the FBI.

A series of cyberattacks across Texas, including some in the Houston region, are part of a growing statewide and national trend of increasingly sophisticated groups working through computers to steal money and information, according to officials in the FBI.

In 2022, for instance, the FBI received more than 21,800 complaints of a cyberattack called a business email compromise scheme, totaling around $2.7 billion in reported losses, said Connor Hagan, a spokesperson for the FBI’s office in Houston. Of that total, around 1,900 were in Texas with about $260 million in losses. That’s an increase from about 1,600 victims in Texas as recently as 2020, according to FBI data.

“The fraudsters have become more sophisticated,” Hagan said. “And because they’re continuing to evolve, we’re seeing new things each day.”

The FBI tips comprise just one type of cyberattack, Hagan said. Ransomware attacks accounted for another 2,300 complaints totaling more than $34.4 million in losses.

Texas ranked third in the number of total victims of internet crimes and fourth in the reported losses from those schemes, according to the FBI’s 2022 Internet Crimes Report.

[…]

Several other Texas-based institutions have been affected by ransomware attacks in recent months. Cybercriminals use malware software to prevent institutions from accessing files on their computers, which they can then use to demand a ransom or auction off to the highest bidder.

Stephen F. Austin University, for instance, was hit by a ransomware attack from a group called Rhysida, according to the Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel. The same group later claimed responsibility for stealing personal data from Lumberton ISD, according to the Beaumont Enterprise.

Some part of the uptick in cybercrimes in Texas is just because of the growth of technology in recent years, Hagan said. But cybercriminals have also tended toward the schemes because they are relatively easy to execute and profitable, he said. Many of those committing them tend to live overseas, such as Knighten in Brazil, which makes prosecuting them harder.

See here for more on the SFA attack. As a pedantic matter, “malware” is a portmanteau of “malicious software”, so “malware software” (which I’ve never seen anyone say) is redundant. I keep writing about this stuff because I continue to be worried that the vast majority of our local government entities are not prepared for or well defended against a serious cyber attack. Remember what happened to Dallas, y’all. This is bad. The real problem is that making it less bad is expensive and time consuming, and very few local government entities are even modestly well-positioned for that. We really need another truckful of federal funds to address this, but that ain’t happening right now. I just hope we’re not trying to dig out from the wreckage when we do finally get around to doing something about it.

Posted in Crime and Punishment, Technology, science, and math | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Another data point on ransomware

Weekend link dump for August 13

Posted on August 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

“In short, hand-counting ballots isn’t as easy as it sounds.”

“A successful prosecution does not hinge on what Trump BELIEVED about the 2020 election. If Trump is convicted, it will be based on his ACTIONS.”

“America’s worst gerrymander may soon finally die”.

Who knows when the Emmy Awards will happen.

Well, that’s one way to soften the blow of bad news.

“After weeks of giving Earth the silent treatment, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft is once again communicating with mission control from billions of miles away.”

RIP, William Friedkin, Oscar-winning director of The French Connection, The Exorcist, and more.

“It’s not about winning or preventing fraud. It’s about getting publicity or attention. It’s about grifting, convincing others to donate to their cause.”

He might have committed some light technical violations of the Constitution. No biggie.

Disbar him and lock him up. I don’t care in what order.

“In a victory for LGBTQ rights, a broad swath of the U.S. population of gay and bisexual men on Monday became newly able donate blood, thanks to the implementation by the American Red Cross of a landmark recent change in Food and Drug Administration policy.”

“The irony is you need to go to office but every meeting is via Zoom.”

“At this point, there is both everything and nothing to say about Trump; the indictment is both unprecedented and precedented, astonishing and unsurprising. Many of the words written and spoken about his subversion campaign have stressed its enormity—and yet I increasingly can’t shake the conclusion that too many reporters and editors have normalized it, at least implicitly, by covering Trump as in any sense a normal candidate for 2024.”

“Meet the Brains Behind the Malware-Friendly AI Chat Service ‘WormGPT’”.

A great story about the Soul Asylum “Runaway Train” video, which featured multiple images of “missing” children and which was credited with helping to find many of them. This story is about what happened to several of those runaways. Well worth your time.

We’ve all had bad days. Peggy Jones had a worse day than you did. Link via The Bloggess.

RIP, Robbie Robertson, guitarist/singer/songwriter, collaborator with Martin Scorsese, leader of the Band.

There’s a really simple solution to this problem, if only these “moderate Republicans” would realize it.

“The Clop ransomware gang is expected to earn between $75-100 million from extorting victims of their massive MOVEit data theft campaign.”

RIP, Johnny Hardwick, actor who voiced Dale Gribble on King of the Hill.

“Remember the call in which then-President Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and demanded he find him 11,780 more votes and threatened him with prosecution if he didn’t. That call alone should be more than enough to send Trump to prison for years. In its own way it’s worse than almost everything else noted in the federal indictments. It is so stunning that I’m writing this post just to step us back and refocus our attention on just how stunning it is.”

What happened in Hawaii this week is just heartbreaking. Via my buddy Steve, a/k/a Linkmeister, here’s how you can help.

On the matter of Kenneth Chesebro, the coup-plotting attorney who was just trying to do the best lawyering he could for his client and who could possibly object to that, I am reminded of the Lawrence Block classic The Ehrengraf Defense. A short, snappy tale about what a truly dedicated attorney will do for a client in need.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | 1 Comment

One losing Republican drops his sore loser lawsuit

Posted on August 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Interesting.

A Harris County GOP judicial candidate dropped his lawsuit challenging his November election results, one of 21 similar pending lawsuits brought by defeated Republican candidates.

Dan Spjut lost the race for the Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 10 judicial seat to Judge Juanita Jackson by 24,135 votes.

Spjut dropped his lawsuit Thursday morning, as closing arguments were underway in the first of the 21 lawsuits to go to trial.

[…]

According to court filings, Spjut “no longer desires to prosecute this suit.”

Spjut originally filed his lawsuit on Jan. 6, the deadline to challenge the November races.

See here for more on the just-concluded lawsuit. The list of all original sore losers is here. It’s hard not to wonder and speculate why Spjut did what he did. Maybe he just wanted to move on. Maybe he took a job he likes or is moving out of town or is in some other position where he couldn’t or wouldn’t want to run again if it came to that. Maybe he watched this case and said “these clowns have nothing, I’m wasting my time”. Maybe some day we’ll find out. In the meantime, one down and twenty to go.

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Harris Health moves closer to a bond issue

Posted on August 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Almost certainly coming soon to a ballot near you.

Harris County Commissioners on Tuesday briefly discussed a $2.5 billion bond proposal from the Harris Health System to fund the rebuilding and upgrading of several hospital district facilities, including the replacement of Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital.

Commissioners did not take any action on the proposal Tuesday afternoon, but will vote on it at a special meeting Aug. 17. The bond would require approval of Harris County voters in the November election.

The Harris Health Board of Trustees unanimously voted to put forth the bond proposal to Commissioners Court in April, with health system leaders underscoring the importance of receiving the money.

“The need is urgent,” Dr. Esmaeil Porsa, president and CEO of Harris Health System, said Wednesday. “The need is pervasive.”

“Without immediate public investment, our hospitals and emergency rooms will continue to exceed capacity on a daily basis,” Dr. Arthur Bracey, Harris Health System Board of Trustees chairperson, said in a news release. “We need to act now to address the immediate needs but also prepare for the inevitable growth in demand as Harris County grows.”

[…]

Harris County Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey raised questions about the proposal during Tuesday’s meeting.

More than 80 percent of the proposed bond money, exceeding $2 billion, would be used to replace and renovate LBJ Hospital, Ramsey said.

He questioned if LBJ was located within the floodplain, and whether it made sense to build a new hospital in the same location, as proposed, on floodplain land.

Ramsey also questioned whether it would make more sense to first fund the renovation and addition of community clinics across the county to alleviate pressure on the hospitals and then later focus on hospital renovations.

Ramsey said he has previously raised these questions during conversations with Harris Health officials. He discussed them again Tuesday, he said, to make the court aware.

Porsa said the phased construction and renovation plans begin with LBJ because it faces the greatest need. The hospital was almost shut down two years ago because of ongoing infrastructure issues, Porsa said.

See here for the background. The bond would allow for a third Level I trauma center in Harris County, which is definitely needed. We’re going to have a pretty busy ballot this November, with multiple referenda in addition to the city races. I’ll be keeping an eye on them all as we go.

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The Astros meet the President

Posted on August 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Bill Kelly, Director of Government Relations for Mayor Sylvester Turner, got to visit the White House with the Astros to celebrate their winning the World Series last year. Here’s his report on what that’s like.

For anyone who has ever worked in government, visiting the White House is more than just the federal executive’s recognition of an achievement. You are literally sitting in the seat of power, standing shoulder to shoulder with people who the entire nation are acknowledging. You are getting time with the Chief Executive – the leader of the free world – who scripts the narration of this national notice.

Being included today in an East Room ceremony gave me a sense of history, a pride and appreciation of accomplishment, and a reflection of the people who actually made it happen.

The Astros players entered a packed East Room and filed into position. These men regularly take the field as the center of attention as tens of thousands of in-person fans stand to applaud along with millions more watching them on video feeds. There aren’t many times where their entrance is not the main event.

But when the President of the United State follows you on stage, with Jim Crane and Dusty Baker in tow, the importance of the moment became clear.

The national attention and honor was being given to our hometown baseball team by our President.

Much of what happens was expected – in this case a Baker/Biden “old dudes get it done” vibe and well timed jokes. The thanks given to the fans and an appreciation for the championship accomplishment was acknowledged by everyone who has paid for a ticket to a game.

But today’s event went off script, specifically and intentionally by the President. After reading off the teleprompter for his introductory remarks, the President decided to have a human moment when he got to the part about the Astros work for the community of Uvalde.

[…]

Of all the handshakes and selfies, of all the pomp and history, the real recognition was that the most powerful man in world thanked the best baseball team in world for trying to support the fallen worlds of these families. That is what I will remember most.

Gotta say, that would be a bucket list item for me. Go read the rest.

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Sore loser election contest lawsuit trial concludes

Posted on August 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Up to the judge now.

Attorneys made their closing arguments Thursday in a case aimed at throwing out Harris County’s November election results, the first to go to trial out of 21 pending lawsuits brought by defeated Republican candidates in hopes of convincing a judge to order new elections.

At the end of the eight-day trial, GOP attorneys summarized their claims that thousands of voters were prevented from voting in November, while thousands of illegal ballots were counted that shouldn’t have been. The defense team berated the GOP for failing to get testimony from a single voter who was unable to cast a ballot, arguing their case instead was built on a stream of non-expert witnesses whose allegations about voting irregularities fell apart under scrutiny.

The contestant in the lawsuit, GOP judicial candidate Erin Lunceford, lost to incumbent 189th District Judge Tamika Craft by 2,743 votes — a 0.26 percent margin, much narrower than most of the contested races in which some candidates trailed the winners by up to 35,000 votes.

Judge David Peeples, a visiting judge from Bexar County presiding over all 21 pending cases, told attorneys not to expect a ruling for at least a month; his decision likely will be appealed immediately.

While Lunceford’s case initially centered around allegations that up to 3,000 voters were turned away from 29 polls on Election Day, it gradually broadened into a collection of over a dozen grievances more closely resembling an unofficial audit of the November election conducted by members of the Harris County Republican party.

The judge will sort through numerous disputes, as the two sides in the case don’t agree on what the GOP needs to prove in order to win, whether a key election code statute applies to Harris County or even whether the race was a close one.

See here and here for the background. I’ve spent a lot of time dunking on the claims that there were voters on Election Day who had almost 800 places to go vote but never got to do so because a small number of locations had temporary printer problems. I will admit that I had some trepidation that I was being lulled into a false sense of security and the plaintiffs really did have at least a few people who would tell tales of tragedy and woe, which still might not add up to much from an evidentiary perspective but would be rhetorically powerful. I needn’t have worried. In the end the evidence was nothing but dorm room bull session theorizing. I suppose the judge, or in the end the Supreme Court, could still buy it, but I can sleep well knowing that they had nothing. They started with nothing, they ended with nothing, they showed us nothing along the way. Whatever happens from here, never forget that. Texas Standard has more.

Actually, one more thing:

Yeah, I don’t understand that either.

Posted in Election 2022, Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Fair For Houston gets its item on the ballot

Posted on August 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Glad to see it.

The city of Houston is one step closer to potentially reshaping its relationship with the influential Houston-Galveston Area Council after officials verified Thursday that a charter amendment campaign had met the threshold for appearing on the ballot.

Advocates hope to use a charter amendment to force the city to renegotiate its voting share at the area council, which they say gives small, outlying counties a disproportionate say in using hundreds of millions of federal dollars.

City Secretary Pat Daniel confirmed this week that the charter campaign had collected more than the necessary 20,000 signatures, an administrative staffer in her office said Thursday. The next step will be for City Council to formally place the amendment on the Nov. 7 ballot. Mayor Sylvester Turner has set an Aug. 21 special council meeting.

Campaigns said they do not anticipate any obstacles securing council approval, which they characterize as a pro forma step.

The charter campaign, which spent $103,000 collecting signatures in the first half of the year, is motivated by a sense that Houston and Harris County have been disadvantaged as the area council votes on how federal infrastructure funds should be doled out across the region.

Campaigners have pointed to the area council’s votes to send Houston just 2 percent out of $488 million in storm mitigation funds last year, and in favor of the Interstate 45 expansion that has aroused neighborhood opposition.

There’s a reason Houston keeps getting stiffed in area council votes, campaigners say. Houston and unincorporated Harris County have 57 percent of the area’s population but only 11 percent of the votes at the council, according to an analysis by the firm January Advisors.

The charter amendment would require Houston to enter into negotiations to make the area council’s voting share reflect the region’s population distribution. If those negotiations break down, Houston would be required to exit the area council and form a new one.

See here for the previous entry. My feelings about this remain the same. I hope to get my questions answered when I interview someone about this. So far there’s no organized opposition to this effort but I will be at least a little surprised if that remains the case. If nothing else, the other counties will surely want to put up a fight against it. I’ll keep an eye on it.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Amtrak seeks partnership with Texas Central

Posted on August 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Hey look, a sign of life!

The largely stalled initiative to construct a high-speed railway between Houston and Dallas is up and running again.

Amtrak and Texas Central, the Dallas-based company behind the long-planned project, announced Wednesday they are exploring a potential partnership to further study and possibly advance the idea of building a 240-mile railway that could transport passengers between the state’s two largest cities in a matter of about 90 minutes. The companies said in a joint news release they have submitted applications with several federal grant programs to pay for additional analysis and design work, which has been funded by private investments since the bullet train plan was hatched a decade ago.

“This high-speed train, using advanced, proven Shinkansen technology (from Japan), has the opportunity to revolutionize rail travel in the southern U.S., and we believe Amtrak could be the perfect partner to help us achieve that,” Texas Central CEO Michael Bui said in the news release. “We appreciate Amtrak’s continued collaboration and look forward to continuing to explore how we can partner in the development of this important project.”

The project appeared to have fizzled out last year, because land acquisitions along the proposed railway reportedly slowed and previous Texas Central CEO Carlos Aguilar resigned. The plan has gotten significant pushback from rural landowners along the proposed route, but a Texas Supreme Court ruling last June gave Texas Central the legal authority to acquire land through eminent domain, offering a glimmer of hope to supporters.

The news release issued Wednesday included endorsements from Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson. The potential collaboration between Texas Central and Amtrak also drew praise from the Greater Houston Partnership, an economic development organization for the region.

If the bullet train comes to fruition, it is expected to create thousands of jobs while also benefitting the environment. The project would lead to the removal of 12,500 cars per day from Interstate 45 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 100,000 tons per year, according to Amtrak and Texas Central.

The planned Houston station for the railway is the site of the former Northwest Mall at the convergence of U.S. 290, Loop 610 and Interstate 10.

“The Houston business community continues to believe the best way to achieve economic growth and lower the cost of transportation for consumers is to foster innovation and competition,” Bob Harvey, the president and CEO of the Greater Houston Partnership, said in a statement. “Faster, safer and more reliable connections between our region and other parts of Texas are vital to our continued economic growth. We are hopeful this new partnership will accelerate the development of this project, and we look forward to working with all stakeholders throughout this process.”

See here and here for some background. This press release from Mayor Turner adds some details.

The City of Houston is supportive of the announcement of a landmark agreement between Amtrak, the national rail operator, and Texas Central Railway (Texas Central) a high-speed rail service, marking a significant step forward in the development of a state-of-the-art rail system between Dallas and Houston. This agreement will facilitate crucial planning and analysis associated with the implementation of the highly anticipated high-speed rail service, connecting two major economic hubs in 90 minutes, and promoting sustainable transportation solutions for the region.

This development signifies a significant commitment to advancing transportation infrastructure in our great state. By leveraging the expertise and resources of both entities, we can harness the full potential of this ambitious project, which will have far-reaching benefits for the city of Houston and the entire region.

“This collaboration between Amtrak and Texas Central is a momentous milestone for the City of Houston,” said Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston. “Our city is committed to advancing transportation initiatives that support economic growth and enhance quality of life for our residents. This agreement will accelerate the planning and analysis necessary for the successful implementation of a modern, efficient, and environmentally sustainable rail system connecting Houston and Dallas. I commend all parties involved for their dedication to this transformative project.”

Our understanding is Texas Central and Amtrak have worked together since 2016, when the two entities entered into an agreement to provide through-ticketing and other support services for the high-rail service. They have already submitted applications to several federal programs, including the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure Safety and Improvements (CRISI) grant program, the Corridor Identification and Development program, and the Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail (FSP-National) grant program.

Reading this made me realize that there was a similar Amtrak/TCR partnership announcement in 2018. Not clear to me what’s different this time around, but here we are anyway. There have also been discussions of possible expansions of existing Amtrak service in Texas, and again it’s not clear to me how any of that ties together. At this point, I’m just glad to see something that looks like forward motion. We’ll see what it means from here. The Chron, Axios, and CultureMap have more.

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