[Travis County Democratic] District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg was arrested and charged with drunken driving Friday night in Northwest Travis County…
According to the arrest affidavit, a witness called 911 just after 10:45pm to report a four-door Lexus wandering into the bike lane and then into oncoming traffic while traveling southbound on FM 620 near Comanche Trail. The car was being driven by Lehmberg, according to the affidavit.
Lehmberg told the deputy that she’d had two vodka drinks earlier in the evening and that she was on a prescription beta-blocking drug. According to the arrest affidavit, there was an opened bottle of vodka in the passenger area of the vehicle within reach.
(Sorry for linking to the Austin Chronicle but a lot of the original stories on the arrest no longer seem online.)
Here’s a pro-trip, boys and girls: If you you find yourself driving around at night (well, any time, but especially at night) while drinking from an open vodka bottle (she evidently had a blood alcohol level of .239), you have a problem, and you should seek professional help and/or check yourself into rehab.
Like, the next day.
Eventually Lehmberg spent 45 days in jail and declined to run for reelection, but wasn’t removed from office.
But the thing I remember most about the Lehmberg case was her in restraints…
Eh, not quite like that
…screaming “Call Greg!” (Dwight even bought me a bumper sticker.) The “Greg” in this case was then Travis County Sheriff Greg Hamilton, who Lehmberg obviously believed would get the charges dismissed.
Ten or twenty years before, that might have happened, but one big reason it didn’t happen in Lehmberg’s case was dashcam footage. (Another was that Travis County LEOs seemed to hate Lehmberg’s guts.)
Speaking of “Call Greg!”, many of the videos of her arrest I previously linked to seem seem to be dead. (It seems more likely for a book to survive 100 years than an online video to last 10.) So here is sort of a compressed “greatest hits” of Lehmberg at the booking station, including the magic phrase:
Some valuable takeaways still true ten years after the fact:
Being drunk makes you stupid.
Belligerent entitlement and threats don’t make police any more likely to let you off (unless, perhaps, your last name is “Biden”).
No, seriously, shut the fuck up. When arrested, remain silent except to ask for your lawyer.
DWI is expensive, even if you don’t kill anybody. At a defensive driving class many moons ago, the instructor noted that it would be cheaper to hire a limo to drive you to Dallas, stay in a five-star hotel, dine at the city’s most expensive restaurant, down three bottles of their most expensive champagne, and have the limo driver drive you back than it would be to pay the legal fees to successfully fight a DWI in court.
I did a search to see what Lehmberg was up to after leaving office, but I couldn’t find out anything. It’s like she dropped off the face of the earth. Hopefully she got some help for her alcoholism.
It’s easy to get discouraged over the obscene metastasis of creeping social justice infecting our institutions. Even though only something like 15% of Americans back radical leftwing social justice, it often gives the impression of moving from victory to victory.
But it’s important to note that forces of American liberty have won important victories against the woke Borg. Indeed, the good guys have recently taken scalps in the realm of higher education, and those victories are worth noting.
proactive alumni group working to curb diversity, equity and inclusion at the Virginia Military Institute has been given credit for prompting the school’s DEI chief to quit.
An article in The Washington Post largely cites the actions of proactive alumni, most notably members of “The Spirit of VMI” group, for the decision by Jamica Love to leave her post.
“Love, 49, who leaves her position at the end of June, was the highest-ranking Black woman at the nation’s oldest state-supported military college. But she faced intense backlash from some alumni and cadets as soon as her hiring was announced in May 2021,” the Post reported June 1.
While the Post’s article suggested the dislike of DEI at VMI is due to disgruntled white male alumni, former students there have told The College Fix in recent years they seek to preserve honor and meritocracy at the institute in the face of equity programming. They also said they reject the argument the institute is steeped in racism and sexism.
As The College Fix previously reported, the controversy dates back to a 2021 consultants report that accused VMI of “institutional racism and sexism” and recommended the implementation of new DEI measures.
Last year alumni began actively writing to state lawmakers about their concerns, including Gov. Glenn Younking, as well as voice complaints on social media.
Earlier this year, alumni said they will withhold donations as VMI implements DEI programming.
Texas A&M University has been at the focus of a media firestorm this past month after the school walked back the terms of a job offer extended to journalism professor Dr. Kathleen McElroy.
The saga began with the publication of a story by Valerie Munoz, a Texas A&M journalism student, in Texas Scorecard that highlighted the school’s recent decision to hire McElroy as the new department head overseeing the school of journalism. The university offered McElroy tenured status similar to her present faculty position at the University of Texas.
The story pointed to McElroy’s advocacy for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) measures in both academic settings and newsrooms, drawing a contrast between the journalism professor’s approach to education and new state public policy measures passed by the Texas Legislature this year banning DEI offices in public universities.
In addition, the story reported on a statement by McElroy on her approach to journalism, that she opposes the equal representation of all sides of an issue in news reporting if one side is deemed “illegitimate.”
After the story broke, the university began walking back elements of the job offer, causing McElroy to decide to take the details public.
In an interview with the Texas Tribune, McElroy, who is black, stated she felt she was being “judged by race” and maybe gender after the school decided to rescind the tenure offer and instead offer a one-year contract and at-will employment terms. She said she didn’t believe other people would face the same bars or challenges and that she felt “damaged” by the entire process.
The story has since snowballed into national headlines, and outrage over the hiring process has resulted in the resignation of both the university’s interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Jose Luis Bermudez and President Katherine Banks.
If Bermudez and Banks are backers of social justice, and it very much appears they were, their departures (and scalps) are also welcome.
The Texas A&M Faculty Senate recently voted to create a fact-finding committee to investigate the circumstances surrounding the alteration of the job offer extended to McElroy. Shortly after that, Banks tendered her resignation to Chancellor John Sharp, writing that the mass negative press on the incident led to the decision.
“The recent challenges regarding Dr. McElroy have made it clear to me that I must retire immediately. The negative press is a distraction from the wonderful work being done here,” Banks wrote.
Numerous reports placed blame on “outside groups” improperly influencing hiring decisions at the school, a claim reportedly started by the faculty senate. That turned attention to one organization of former Aggies in particular, The Rudder Association (TRA).
According to its website, TRA is “a group of dedicated Aggies committed to preserving and perpetuating the core values and unique spirit” of the university.
In a series of press statements on the group’s website, TRA pushed back on reports characterizing its members, which includes taxpayers, tuition payers, and donors to the school, as “outside influence.” In addition, the group said that university regents and elected officials should not be characterized as such either.
Firing by firing, progress is made.
The bad news, of course, is that McElroy is still at UT…
2009 – The Obama-Biden administration takes office
November 1, 2013 – China / BHR:
Hunter Biden, business associate, and Chinese investors agree to create Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd. (BHR), an investment fund controlled by the Bank of China, to focus on mergers and acquisitions, and investment in and reforms of state-owned enterprise.
December 4, 2013 – China / BHR
Vice President Biden travels with Hunter Biden on Air Force 2 to China and meets CEO of BHR, Jonathan Li. Shortly thereafter, BHR’s business license was approved and Hunter Biden was a board member.
February 5, 2014 – Kazakhstan
Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani businessman, meets with Hunter Biden at a hotel in Washington, D.C.
April 15, 2014 – Ukraine
Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, appoints Biden business associate to their board of directors.
After initially killing a bill on July 12, 2023 that would have increased the penalties on child sex traffickers, the Democrats who completely control the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee reversed course one day later and voted to advance the bill.
With a final vote of 6-0, including two abstentions from progressive Democrats, the bill now moves to the Appropriations Committee, after which, if it is approved, can move the bill to be voted upon by the entire State Assembly. If passed, SB 14 will make trafficking of minors a serious felony that would qualify under California’s three strikes law, which keeps dangerous, serial criminals off the streets, and make individuals convicted of the crime ineligible for early release.
I highlight the two abstentions by Democrats. Even after a nationwide uproar over their willingness to block harsh penalties on those who traffic young children for sexual slavery, these two Democrats, including Assembly Majority Leader Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), still could not bring themselves to vote for the bill.
State Senator Charles Schwertner (my state senator) has his DWI charges dismissed. Still, he hardly crowned himself in glory. At least he didn’t yell “Call Greg!” (It did make me wonder what Rosemary Lehmberg is doing today, and if she ever conquered her alcoholism…)
A detailed look at the recording of one of my favorite albums of all time: Peter Gabriel III.
Just what does electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples of the Moon” sound like? You know that scene in a 70s SciFi dystopia where someone’s face gets ripped off to reveal they’re a robot? It sounds like that.
GWAR plays for NPR. So on one side you have horrible monsters who are unbearable to listen to, and on the other side you have GWAR…
Dr. Gal Luft, the “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, told the NY Post last week that he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals linked to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with the Biden benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.
“I told the DOJ that Hunter was associated with a very senior retired FBI official who had a distinct physical characteristic—he had one eye,” Luft said.
That FBI official is widely believed to be former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who gave $100,000 to a trust for two of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s grandchildren in 2016 shortly before telling Hunter, “I would be delighted to do future work with you.”
Now, Biden’s DOJ has charged Luft with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Act (FARA), as well as Iranian sanctions violations. He’s alleged to have conspired with others to act in China’s interest, including recruiting and paying a former high ranking U.S. government official to support policies beneficial to China.
Democrats are turning the federal justice apparatus into banana republic keystone cops to hide their own crimes.
Speaking of Hunter: “How reckless Hunter Biden photographed himself driving at 172mph while behind the wheel of his Porsche en route to a days-long Vegas bender with prostitutes and pictured himself smoking CRACK while behind the wheel.” No doubt left-wingers will crow about how Hunter is “living his best life.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Federal judge blocks Biden’s censorship schemes. “Terry Doughty, a Louisiana federal judge, issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking certain federal agencies and officials, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, from communicating with social-media platforms.” Good.
“When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” [Georgia State House Rep. Mesha] Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”
“For far too long, the Democrat Party has gotten away with using and abusing the black community,” she added. “For decades, the Democrat Party has received the support of more than 90% of the black community. And what do we have to show for it? I represent a solidly blue district in the city of Atlanta. This isn’t a political decision for me. It’s a moral one.”
After months of caterwauling and posturing, the Texas Legislature’s property tax plan ended up about where it began, with additional rate compression, an increased homestead exemption, and an appraisal cap.
The Texas House and Senate put the final bow on their recently announced deal on property tax relief to put to bed the months-long standoff — after which the pair adjourned sine die for the third time this year. The plan is expected to be signed quickly by Gov. Greg Abbott.
The toplines of the $13 billion deal are:
More than $7 billion to compress school district Maintenance & Operations rates
An increase of the standard homestead exemption to $100,000
A three-year trial run for a 20 percent appraisal cap on commercial and non-homestead residential properties valued at or below $5 million
A $1.47 million increase to the state’s franchise tax exception
The creation of three elected positions on Appraisal Review Boards in counties above 75,000 population
That compression is on top of the $5.3 billion already passed in the 2024-2025 state budget to continue the 2019 reform.
The new compression and the homestead exemption — should it be approved by voters in November — will be effective this tax year. The appraisal cap will begin next year and run through the end of 2026 unless continued by the Legislature.
Estimates project the reform will provide a $1,200 “savings” for the average homeowner in Texas — meaning a reduction from what tax bills would yield without the reform, not a reduction from the previous year’s tax bill.
Good news, if long in coming.
You know the “incident” Austin City Council used as an excuse to end DPS patrols? It never happened.
The City of Austin canceled its recently-resumed partnership with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) on Tuesday after allegations were made that officers pointed a gun at a child during a traffic stop — but DPS has now released body camera footage disputing that claim.
The patrol partnership that deployed DPS officers throughout the capital city to assist the ailing Austin Police Department was set to resume this month after a May pause to bolster enforcement at the border as Title 42 expired. But city officials — Mayor Kirk Watson and Interim City Manager Jesús Garza — abruptly canceled the partnership on Tuesday.
The onus for that decision was an allegation made by Carlos Meza and his son Angel that during a Sunday evening traffic stop, DPS officers pointed their sidearms at the child.
DPS said that did not happen. The agency released three angles of footage of the incident.
The Texas Department of Transportation is attempting to withhold documents concerning the agency’s use of materials related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG).
Responding to a tip from a whistleblower, Texas Scorecard sought agency records that would either confirm or debunk allegations that the agency has been pushing a “woke” agenda on its 12,861 employees.
Texas Scorecard sent an open records request to TxDOT under the Texas Public Information Act (PIA). This request sought to unveil whether or not TxDOT employees are being paid to discuss such issues.
Specifically requested were communications referring to DEI and ESG in the possession of the Texas Department of Transportation commissioner, chief of staff, director of human resources, and/or the director of the DEI section.
Obviously TxDoT must be hiding considerable social justice subversion.
A northeast Texas school district has adopted new policies related to the continued hot-button topics of restroom accommodations for transgender students and pronoun usage by school employees.
On June 28, the Keller ISD board of trustees voted 5 to 0 with one abstention to establish a new pronoun policy wherein “district staff, educators, and other district employees shall not promote, encourage, or require the use of pronouns that are inconsistent with a student’s or other person’s biological sex as it appears on the individual’s birth certificate or other government issued record.”
Additionally, the school district shall not compel any employee or “other students to address or refer to students in any manner that would violate the speaker’s constitutionally protected rights.”
Prior to the vote, the board engaged in back-and-forth discussion of hypotheticals, such as if a teacher is asked by a student to be referred to by a pronoun that does not correspond with their biological sex.
“The policy is pretty clear,” board President Charles Randklev said of the hypotheticals. When asked if the trustees will support teachers who might come to them with concerns following the passage of the pronoun policy, he said that “this board has always supported teachers.”
Randklev added that the new policies “lay the groundwork for protecting kids and educators.”
“I also think they basically help us get off to a good start for the upcoming school year.”
The board did pass an additional bathroom policy that will “maintain separate restrooms” based on biological sex, but will make accommodations for students who are “seeking privacy” such as in a single-use bathroom.
This move by Keller ISD comes on the heels of a federal judge’s ruling in 2022 that Texas had the ability to vacate the Biden administration’s guidance on allowing people to use restrooms based on their gender identity that do not correspond to their biological sex.
A small public school district in the Rio Grande Valley is the latest to face a state takeover under Texas law, but district officials have vowed to fight the Texas Education Agency (TEA) in court.
Located on the U.S.- Mexico border west of McAllen, the La Joya Independent School District (LJISD) operates 38 schools and serves 24,804 students. However, enrollment has steadily declined over the past decade and the district has been embroiled in multiple scandals.
After an FBI investigation into corruption in Hidalgo County, five LJISD officials pled guilty last year to federal charges that included theft, bribery, money laundering, extortion, and wire fraud.
In January 2022, Trustee Armin Garza admitted to participating in a kickback scheme regarding a district energy-saving plan under which he received more than $234,000. Later, central office administrators Luis Morin and Alex Guajardo would both also plead guilty for their part in the conspiracy.
In a separate case, trustee Oscar Salinas pled guilty to federal extortion charges related to kickback payments he received from contracted vendor L&G Engineering. After discovering that L&G Engineering’s chief operating officer supported a political opponent, Hidalgo County Commissioner Everardo Villarreal, Salinas demanded additional funds and threatened to cancel a contract with Villareal’s wife. When the CEO refused, Salinas voted to terminate the contract.
Another LJISD administrator, Rodrigo Lopez, pled guilty to federal charges of theft and bribery in August 2022 in relation to contracts for athletic equipment. Lopez also served as the mayor of Penitas, Texas.
Earlier this year, TEA officials notified La Joya ISD Board President Alex Cantu and interim Superintendent Beto Gonzales that investigators had substantiated allegations related to fraud and violations of conflict of interest and contract procurement laws.
Those who have been following the blog for a while know that fraud in border school districts and Hidalgo County (still Democratic Party strongholds) has been a recurring theme.
By approving a new wealth tax last year, Massachusetts voters might have dented the Boston Celtics’ chances of chasing down a National Basketball Association (NBA) championship.
Grant Williams, a talented power forward drafted by the Celtics in the first round just four years ago, declined to re-sign with Boston this summer. Instead, he’ll be playing next season in Dallas, where his new contract won’t be subject to Massachusetts’ so-called “millionaire’s tax.”
Williams told The Athletic that his decision to sign a $54 million deal with Dallas over a $48 million offer from Boston was “a little strategic” and that the gap between the two offers was larger than it might seem.
“In Boston, it’s…$48 million with the millionaire’s tax, so $54 million in Dallas is really like $58 million in Boston,” Williams said.
In Texas, which has no state income tax, Williams can keep more of his earnings, though it is worth noting that professional athletes unfortunately owe taxes in states where they play road games. His new state’s tax situation gives Williams a nice incentive to move, considering Massachusetts would have taken 9 percent of those earnings—thanks to its 5 percent flat income tax and newly created 4 percent tax on income in excess of $1 million.
I may be late to this party, since the story broke several days ago, but I think this video is worth covering to highlight all the things the Allen PD officer (whose name, as far as I can tell, hasn’t been released yet) did right.
He instructed others to get to safety before moving to engage the shooter.
He paused to get a better weapon out of his car and take a moment to assess the situation.
He maintained constant communication with the dispatcher to let other officers know where he was all the time to reduce the possibility of friendly fire.
He constantly moved toward the sound of gunfire to engage the target.
He maintained solid trigger discipline throughout running to contact.
He engaged the shooter from behind cover, and continued controlled fire until putting him down.
As far as things to be improved on, he did slow noticeably while moving toward contact, so maybe better cardio is in order. But I’m hardly one to cast aspersions here…
In one of those periodic, inexplicable outbreaks of a U.S. Representative deciding that he needs to run for President, former Texas Congressman Will Hurd has announced he’s running for President.
Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd announced Thursday that he’s throwing his hat in the ring for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Hurd, who was first elected to his congressional seat in 2014 and did not run for reelection in 2020, now enters the crowded presidential field of 13 other candidates as a major underdog.
The former congressman has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump and said last month that a race between President Joe Biden and Trump would be a “rematch from hell.”
“Someone like me, right, a dark horse candidate, can pull this off,” Hurd, 45, told “CBS Mornings” Thursday. “One, you can’t be afraid of Donald Trump. Too many of these candidates in this race are afraid of Donald Trump. But we also have to articulate a different vision.”
In a video announcing his candidacy, Hurd listed illegal immigration and inflation as chief among his motivations to run.
“Our enemies plot, create chaos, and threaten the American dream. At home, illegal immigration and fentanyl stream into our country. Inflation, still out of control. Crime and homelessness growing in our cities,” Hurd says in the video.
The big question, of course, is “why?”
2020 saw no shortage of former or current House members running for President. Names like “Joe Sestak,” “John Delaney,” “Seth Moulton,” and “Tim Ryan,” were introduced to the voting public and promptly forgotten, garnering neither fame nor delegates. Eric Swalwell made no impression on the race, and promptly returned to being known for irritating people and screwing Chinese spies. Former three-term Texas congressman Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was already famous for raising a lot of money by not being Ted Cruz, losing to Ted Cruz, and then raising a lot of money to run for President, only to drop out before the first votes were cast. Objectively the most successful was Tulsi Gabbard, who earned two whole delegates by being photogenic, moderately heterodox, and the candidate not named “Biden” or “Sanders” to stay in the race longest. The “heterodox” part would cause her to leave the party that openly loathed her.
The three-term Texas congressman bit would make O’Rourke the obvious point of comparison for Hurd’s run, but there are two problems. The first is that Hurd objectively pulled off a more difficult feat than O’Rourke in winning three very tight races in TX-23, the only true 2012-2020 swing-district in Texas. By contrast, O’Rourke was running in a safe Democratic district backed up by scads of in-law money. The second is that Hurd doesn’t have the huge, high-profile, big money race to draw on a network of contributors like O’Rourke had. I also suspect that he’ll get an order of magnitude less fawning glossy magazine profiles than O’Rourke got, assuming he gets any. (He may get a few, as he’s just the sort of soft, no-hope Republican the national media loves to pump up.)
Hurd was a squishy three-term congressmen from a squishy swing district, and in terms of accomplishments, that’s not chicken feed. It’s an open question whether a more conservative Republican could have captured and held the seat at the time (though Hurd was a border control squish, and Texas Hispanics have very much taken a hard right turn on the issue since, so, maybe). But that a national political figure does not one make.
So that brings us back to the central question: Why is Will Hurd deluding himself into running for President? He seems to be running as the Trump Derangement Syndrome candidate (the Liz Cheney Lane, if you will), and that’s good for, oh, maybe 2% of the Republican base (and 50% of “conservative” D.C. pundits). That’s the land of has-beens and never-beens like John Kasich and Evan McMullin. Looking at the current 2024 field, there’s no-shortage of “Not Trump” candidates. I see Hurd possibly doing better than Vivek Ramaswamy (running in the Andrew Yang Outsider With Ideas Slot), and running about even with Miami mayor Francis Saurez for the “Who?” slot. And at this point, being an unknown, he’s less loathed than Chris Christie. He’s not even doing as well as Doug Burgum, and no one’s heard of him.
As I’ve written before, there is practically zero appetite for squishy moderates in the Republican primary, and less than that for someone running on the “I Hate Trump” platform. Hurd’s chances essentially amount to “Maybe if everyone else gets hit by a bus.”
My suspicion is that Hurd has been recruited to run by the same sort of left-leaning special interests that fund things like The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project to generate soundbites for an MSM that will inflate his campaign’s profile solely to go “Look! Republicans hate Trump too!”
Then there’s this little tidbit: “Before his career in politics, Hurd was an undercover CIA officer working in counterterrorism.”
There was a time that would have been considered a plus in Republican politics. That was before the Russiagate hoax and Hunter Biden’s laptop (among many others) showed how the deep was willing to meddle in domestic politics. Now it’s a giant red flag.
Expect Will Hurd’s run to be every bit as successful as Tim Ryan or Seth Moulton’s attempts.
It’s déjà vu all over again in the Texas Legislature on the first day of the second called special session ordered by Gov. Greg Abbott to deliver property tax relief, continuing a month-long stalemate that itself followed a months-long standoff.
On Tuesday, Abbott ordered a new special session after time ran out on the first one — this one to focus solely on property taxes.
Both chambers moved quickly on their respective blueprints, which are almost identical to the way the first special session concluded.
The House advanced the same bill by Rep. Morgan Meyer (R-Dallas) that passed one month ago: 16.2-cent rate compression using the entire $12.3 billion to buy down school district Maintenance & Operations rates. The lower chamber referred their plan to committee and then stood at ease until Friday morning. The Ways & Means Committee then voted out the bill and constitutional amendment unanimously.
Over in the Senate, the initial plan for this special session is almost entirely the same as what it passed last week during the first — $12.7 billion to combine compression, a $100,000 homestead exemption, an increase in the franchise tax exception, and a reduction in the school district voter approval rate.
The only alteration in the bill comes in relation to local option homestead exemptions (LOHE) — a mechanism that allows taxing units to establish an up to 20 percent homestead exemption off the top. Bettencourt said this was in response to Pasadena ISD’s cancellation of its 10 percent LOHE, something the school district did in anticipation of the Legislature raising the homestead exemption.
Prefacing this passage, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Tuesday evening, “We will pass the same bill that we passed to the House last week that cuts school property taxes for the average homeowner by nearly 43%, almost double the tax cut one would receive with only compression.”
Patrick also said that the upper chamber will continue to insist upon a homestead exemption and again threw cold water on the suggestion by Abbott that property taxes could be eliminated in Texas.
“[T]o do so would require increasing the sales tax dramatically, which clearly has no support from the legislature or the people,” Patrick said, building upon his statement from a month ago that the idea was a “fantasy.”
“The only other pathway is using current sales tax dollars, which can never be achieved. The Governor mentions that cutting the tax rate is a lasting tax cut. It is not. As soon as sales tax flattens or declines in any year, property tax rates would skyrocket. The only tax cut that is lasting is a homestead exemption, which is locked into the Texas Constitution.”
There should be an obvious compromise here of somewhat lower compression with a bigger homestead extension. This is why you need conference committees. Last session, of course, the House passed its own property tax relief, then Speaker Dade Phalen adjourned, eliminating the possibility of a conference committee. I don’t blame Patrick for failing to fold in the face of that power play.
One significant change tacked onto the Senate’s constitutional amendment is language providing for a supplemental payment to teachers — $2,000 to urban teachers and $6,000 to rural teachers. The addendum came after an hour and a half of deliberations by the senators while the body stood at ease.
Yeah, I don’t like teacher’s raises being shoved into a property tax relief bill. Teacher raises should be paired with anti-SJW/anti-CRT/anti-tranny legislation for best effect, just to make teachers unions come out against pay raises for teachers….
There’s a clear path to coming to a compromise agreement on lower Texas property taxes, but Abbott, Phalen and Patrick have to walk it.
Busy as hell and I have a cold, but I soldier on. LinkSwarm! Russian coup! Texas! Pedophiles! Portland! Braaaaiiiinnnnnns!
I cover the world!
“The owner of the Wagner private military contractor made his most direct challenge to the Kremlin yet on Friday, calling for an armed rebellion aimed at ousting Russia’s defense minister. The security services reacted immediately by calling for the arrest of Yevgeny Prigozhin…Prigozhin claimed early Saturday that his forces had crossed into Russia from Ukraine and had reached Rostov, saying they faced no resistance from young conscripts at checkpoints and that his forces ‘aren’t fighting against children.'” Unconfirmed reports of fighting elsewhere in Russia. Developing…
The City of Dallas is requiring employees to undergo taxpayer-funded transgender reeducation training any time one of their co-workers comes out as “transgender.”
According to internal documents obtained from the City of Dallas by The Dallas Express, “non-transitioning” employees are being forced to undergo reeducation training “to support an inclusive and productive workplace environment for all employees.”
The City of Dallas’ “gender transition toolkit” explains that a transitioning employee should find a “trusted” supervisor or manager as a “first point of contact” to help them through their workplace transition.
The document includes a list of gender terms and definitions. It then moves on to require employees to work with gender-confused co-workers, allowing the “transitioning” employee to use whichever bathroom or locker room at work they feel most comfortable with, ignoring the comfort of other employees.
Speaking of pedophiles: “A former CNN television producer who had pleaded guilty to luring a 9-year-old girl into illegal sexual acts was sentenced Tuesday to more than 19 years in prison and an additional 15 years of supervised release during a U.S. District Court hearing in Vermont. John Griffin of Stamford, Connecticut, pleaded guilty in federal court in December to using interstate commerce to entice and coerce the girl to engage in sexual activity at his Vermont ski house.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
In the summer of 2020, Portland, Oregon, became the poster child for American urban disaster zones. During the day, tens of thousands of citizens protested peacefully against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But everything changed after dark. Nonviolent demonstrators with jobs, school assignments, and kids to raise went home; hundreds of anarchists swarmed in to take their place and waged a low-grade insurgency against the city. They fought pitched battles with the cops—throwing rocks, frozen water bottles, fireworks, buckets of excrement, and even Molotov cocktails. They attacked coffeehouses, immigrant-owned restaurants, mom-and-pop retail stores, banks, museums, churches, bus stops, and the Multnomah County Democratic Party headquarters with baseball bats, crowbars, and hammers. Most were military-age white males wearing all-black clothing and hiding their faces. The violence kept up, night after night, week after week, and month after month, into the winter, long after the rest of America had calmed down. My city had become the most politically violent place in the country, and I got worried e-mails from people I knew around the world—even in the Middle East!—asking me if I was okay and why on earth this was happening.
A crime wave followed. Shootings and homicides exploded 300 percent between 2019 and 2022, robberies rose 50 percent in 2022 alone, vehicle thefts hit record highs, and work-order requests for graffiti removal shot up 500 percent between 2020 and 2022. The City of Roses suffered 413 shootings in 2019 but 1,306 in 2022 and nearly twice as many homicides as San Francisco, though Portland is only three-fourths its size. Meantime, statewide crime actually declined from 2019 to 2021.
The homelessness crisis also intensified. The slow-motion collapse of Oregon’s mental-health infrastructure, a dramatic surge of cheap and deadly fentanyl and a far more potent and addictive form of psychosis-inducing meth, and a crippling housing shortage led to the formation of more than 700 tent cities in residential neighborhoods and business districts across the city.
But while it’s too soon to declare that Portland’s troubles have passed, the worst may now be over. Despite ongoing woes, Portland looks and feels much better than it did in dystopian 2020. The riots stopped, and the crime wave seems to have peaked, with shootings down by nearly 40 percent and homicides down more than 50 percent in the early months of 2023. A sober mood shift has taken over the city. Voters passed a ballot measure to restructure city government, while the three newest elected officials on the city council are steering Portland in a different direction. The city, county, and state are taking steps to reverse the decline.
Portland is suffering a serious livability crisis. Eighty-eight percent of respondents in early 2022 told the Portland Business Alliance that the quality of life is worsening. Portland is hardly the most dangerous city in America: the homicide rate in St. Louis is more than four times higher, with 65 murders per 100,000 people, compared with Portland’s 15 in 2022. Portland’s rate peaked at more than double the national average, but of all the cities with higher crime rates than Portland, only Chicago gets as many national headlines. That’s probably because Portland’s increase in crime was the worst in the country. No other city’s homicide rate rose so spectacularly. And unlike St. Louis, Baltimore, and other notorious hot spots, Portland was recently a destination city that touted its high quality of life as a reason to move there.
Of late, though, rather than attracting new residents, Portland has actually lost population, either to the suburbs or out of state. “I’ve never seen money move out of here,” commercial real-estate salesman Stu Peterson told Willamette Week. “Nobody ever wanted to leave Oregon. It’s a beautiful place. Most evacuees are high-wage earners who are fed up with the crime, taxes, and homelessness, in that order. There’s an ugly spiral.” Real-estate agent Justin Harnish described a client who left downtown Portland for the suburb of Lake Oswego after she saw a woman stab another woman in the face with scissors.
Accompanying the crime wave is a drastic staff shortage at the Portland Police Bureau. Portland now has fewer than 800 sworn officers, a smaller number than it had decades ago, when the city was barely half the size it is now. And with the surge in violent crime, the police have little time to deal with anything that isn’t life-threatening. Prioritizing shootings and other emergencies, they’re forced to neglect break-ins, stolen cars, vandalism, and just about everything else. The traffic police unit has been defunded, reduced to a single full-time traffic cop—not for ideological reasons but because the city has no one to staff that division.
Part of the blame rests with the months of demoralizing anti-cop violence in 2020, but Portland would probably be short of police officers anyway. Every city agency, from fire and rescue to the transportation bureau and the public defender’s office, faces staff shortages now. And while a shrunken police force didn’t cause Portland’s crime wave on its own, a police department that can barely react to anything but emergency calls aggravates the problem. Criminals behave as though they can get away with essentially anything and commit far more crimes than they would if they were investigated, arrested, and prosecuted swiftly. The Woodstock neighborhood, where Joe Biden won 88 percent of the vote, is considering hiring its own private security force.
Snip.
I spent more time talking to my neighbors that year than I ever had before or have since. A lot of us suddenly became friendlier outside our houses, and we weren’t talking about sports and the weather. Residents and business owners alike worried about where things were headed and expressed dismay at the city’s inability to defend itself. I didn’t talk with a single person who thought that everything was okay, that city hall was on top of it, or that the anarchists were not a menace. And nobody could understand why the homeless camps at the elementary school down the street or at the park hadn’t been cleared. No, I didn’t conduct my own scientific public opinion survey, but it was obvious that regular people were nearing the end of their rope and that the status quo was bound to be upended.
In 2021, that’s exactly what happened. A tsunami of outrage inundated the mayor, the city council, and the police bureau. Phones rang nonstop. Furious citizens shouted at meetings. Newspaper editors published scathing letters, and journalists at mainstream outlets covered distressed neighborhoods and interviewed disgruntled citizens while largely ignoring the activist set that booed every conceivable solution and told civilians that the problems were in their heads. Lawsuits against the city proliferated. Polls showed city council members languishing on political death row, with approval ratings in the teens.
Though most residents still wanted accountability for bad cops and citizen oversight of the police bureau, the complaints were primarily about crime, about how the police hardly ever show up anymore, and about disorder dragging neighborhoods down. Even some of the fashionable middle-class neighborhoods endearingly satirized in the Portlandia comedy series were enduring weekly gunfire.
In the fall of 2022, 82 percent of Portland respondents in an Oregonian poll said that they wanted more cops. If some Portlanders felt overpoliced a few years ago, hardly anyone felt that way after the chaos, with a mere 15 percent saying that they wanted fewer officers in 2021.
Before the city council elections got going in 2022, voters fired repeated warning shots in public opinion surveys. An overwhelming 85 percent of respondents said that they found the city council ineffective, with a clear majority describing it as “very ineffective.” For a while, it looked as though Portland was gearing up to fire every single official in a landslide election.
Two city council members, Dan Ryan and Jo Ann Hardesty, ran for reelection last year. Ryan managed to defy expectations and win despite the temper in the city, though it’s easy to understand why: he set aside his ideological views and changed with the times. Though he first ran during a special election in early 2020 on a campaign promising to cut police funding, he soon reversed himself. Anarchists vandalized his home seven times because he refused to cut the police budget.
Hardesty didn’t fare as well. Pushing bills to defund the police and opposing the cleanup of homeless camps, she put herself wildly out of step with her constituents. Mingus Mapps, a moderate on the council who had easily dispatched the left-wing populist Chloe Eudaly two years earlier, endorsed Hardesty’s challenger, Rene Gonzales, and bluntly said: “It is time to put ideology aside and elect people who will fight for Portland. I need colleagues who use debate, reason, and logic to solve our many crises.” Gonzales said, “Our once beautiful city is struggling in ways that were unfathomable a short time ago. . . . City hall’s ineffective, ideologically driven policies are ruining the city we used to proudly call home.” Gonzales won, and Portland replaced the city council’s last progressive firebrand with a centrist. It was the kind of event that marks the end of an era.
Sounds a lot like Austin, except for the sobering-up part. (Also, it’s good to read Michael Totten again. He seemed to disappear from view for several years. Probably because he was writing for The Bulwark…)
Speaking of Portland, the homeless drug addict who said that living on the streets of Portland was “too easy” is now back with her family and getting treatment. They thought she was dead…
Just hours after Gov. Greg Abbott finally ended the COVID-19 disaster declaration, he announced that he won an appeals case against the Biden administration for attempting to enforce vaccine mandates on the Texas National Guard.
In January 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden to stop him from forcing the Texas Army National Guard and the Texas Air National Guard to get coronavirus vaccinations.
Over a year later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued its ruling that the Constitution and laws of the United States deny Biden the power to punish members of the Texas National Guard if they refused to get injected with the vaccine.
Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham stated in his opinion that he rejects the president’s assertion of power over the members because they were not called into national service.
In this case, President Biden imposed and then repealed a mandate requiring State militiamen to take the COVID-19 vaccine. And now that the President has rescinded the vaccine requirement, he wants to retain the power to punish militia members who refused to get the shots while the mandate was in effect—all without calling them into national service. We reject the President’s assertion of power because it would undermine one of the most important compromises in the Constitution. If the Constitution’s text, history, and tradition make anything clear, it’s that the President can punish members of the Texas militia only after calling them into federal service.
In Paxton’s lawsuit, he argued that neither the president nor federal military officials can force the state’s National Guard to comply with vaccination mandates.
“Neither the President nor federal military officials can order the Governor of Texas and non-federalized National Guardsmen to comply with a vaccination mandate or to direct a particular disciplinary action for failure to comply,” Paxton’s office wrote in a press release. “President Biden is not those troops’ commander-in-chief; Governor Abbott is.”
There seems to be no constitutional limit statists won’t override in their eternal, all-encompassing quest for dominion over others. Eternal vigilance is still the price of freedom.
