Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! First up: The rest of the nation gets to see what an incompetent hypocrite Austin’s current mayor is:
Austin Mayor Steve Adler is the latest powerful democrat to prove they’re a complete hypocrite:
In a November 9 Facebook video, Austin mayor Steve Adler advised the public to “stay at home” but failed to disclose he was broadcasting from a timeshare in Cabo San Lucas. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. But wait! It gets better (worse?)!
Adler and 8 family members took a private jet to his Mexican getaway. All of this was the day after Adler reportedly hosted a small wedding for his daughter at a hotel in Austin.
The Mexico trip with family came the day after Adler hosted a small wedding for his daughter at a trendy South Congress Hotel with 20 attendees. Adler says he consulted with health authorities prior and that guests had to undergo COVID-19 testing and practice social distancing.
Is there a “consult with health authorities prior and undergo COVID-19 testing” exception to the lockdown rules? Of course not! Laws are for the little people…
The complete absence of Joe Biden’s coattails is forcing the usually delusional Democrats to get perilously close to the truth during this self-examination. Whether the activists speaking the truth will be listened to by the Elders of the Village in the Democratic Party remains to be seen. It should also be noted that those elders are very elderly and may not be amenable to alterations in a narrative they’ve been crafting regarding themselves for decades.
Some more hard truth:
Some worry that the party, once rooted in the working class but now run and funded largely by college-educated liberals, may be losing its touch with blue-collar voters of all races outside major metro areas.
“We’re such a Beltway party that we can’t even fathom that there are a lot of Mexicans in the [Rio Grande] Valley who love Donald Trump,” said Chuck Rocha, a Texas-raised Democratic strategist who runs Nuestro PAC, a super PAC focused on Latino outreach. “Biden won, and that’s great, but everything underneath Biden was a huge catastrophe.”
The Democratic Party has been gleefully refashioning itself as a coastal elite party for quite a while now. They traded blue-collar workers in the heartland for celebrities. Who needs to worry about jobs in Ohio when you’re partying with Beyoncé, right?
They didn’t get anything about why Donald Trump won in 2016, then they spent four years making up lies about why it happened because those lies allowed them to remain in their coastal bubbles and not get any hard glimpses at reality.
Their sense of entitlement from 2016 never went away, and they think that they’ve been somewhat vindicated by the apparent Biden victory. That victory is illusory, however. It took four years of the mainstream media being more corrupt than ever before combined with an election year global pandemic and a healthy dose of voter…irregularities to bring about this result. It really didn’t have anything to do with the Democrats and their ideas being wildly popular.
Because they aren’t.
Democrats are so blinded by their hatred for President Trump that they are unlikely to learn anything from this election.
Liberal idiots in Minneapolis keep making the same mistakes over and over again. “In case you didn’t do the math, that’s a 63% increase in the number of homicides, compared to 2019, and the year is not over yet. Just a few more holistic victims of community-based murders”
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, France’s president from 1974 to 1981, dead at age 94. He was a French conservative, which meant he was significantly to the left of Walter Mondale. He wasn’t the worst leader in France’s history, but was a big fan of a centralized EU, having helped craft a (rejected) constitution for it in 2004.
Spanish bank Banco Sabadell’s acquisition of UK’s TSB goes horribly wrong thanks to amazing IT stupidity:
Experts at the time warned that Sabadell was significantly overpaying for TSB while underestimating the potential costs of integrating the new business into its existing IT platform. But Sabadell ignored the warnings and went ahead with the operation, believing that it would serve as a catapult onto the international scene as well as cement its place as a pioneer in Internet banking. In both cases, the exact opposite happened.
Branded the “biggest IT disaster in British banking history,” the botched IT upgrade led to hundreds of thousands of customers being unable to access their online accounts for weeks on end. Standing orders, payrolls, mortgage instalments and other payments and transfers failed. Thousands of customers fell victim to fraud attacks. Even when the bank tried to apologize, it sent apologies out to the wrong people, in the process breaking the EU’s new data protection laws.
At the root of all this chaos was Sabadell’s stubborn determination to get the new IT system up and running as swiftly as possible, in order to save millions of euros in monthly fees it was having to pay to TSB’s former parent company, Lloyds Bank plc, to use its old legacy IT system. Sabadell’s Proteo4UK system was not even close to being ready to roll out at TSB, as IBM consultants brought in to try to remedy the problems have since attested. But senior management went ahead anyway, adopting, as one insider put it, a hope-and-pray attitude.
That “move fast and break things” paradigm might work fine if you’re a free social media startup, but not if you’re a bank and your buggy, incomplete code handles people’s money.
Thomas Sowell remembers Walter E. Williams. “He was my best friend for half a century. There was no one I trusted more or whose integrity I respected more.”
I’ve been meaning to do this roundtable on Austin’s future for a while, but the press of events (and fiddle-farting around on getting the right set of questions) delayed things until the headline rush toward election day finally made me send the questions out.
Last week I submitted these questions to various Austin political observers, and here are their answers:
What do you think drove the original lifting of the camping ban ordinance: An actual desire to help the homeless, virtue signaling, a desire to channel graft to their cronies (or leftwing causes), or something else?
Terry Keel (Former Travis County Sheriff and State Rep): Decriminalizing petty crimes and protecting homelessness as a lifestyle choice is one of the new mandatory forms of virtue-signaling in the U.S. for liberal politicians like Austin’s mayor and council. It is a box they have to check, regardless of its obvious detrimental effects on surrounding property owners, businesses, and the homeless themselves. It just took a little longer for the political trend to reach us in Texas than it did in the large cities on the east and west coasts.
Michael Quinn Sullivan (former CEO, Empower Texans): The Austin City Council seems perpetually vacillating between which virtues to signal. On the one hand, they are relentlessly handing out taxpayer dollars as corporate welfare to multinational corporations. On the other, they want to appeal to the leftist granola-crunching hippie culture that lives completely disconnected from the real world. The result are policies that have made Austin unaffordable and unlivable.
Dennis Farris (retired APD): I think what drove them to Repeal the ordinance was a group of anti police activists who wanted to take some power away from APD. Its apparent it wasn’t well thought out because look at the outcome. You also have to look at who is profiting from the money the city is throwing at the homeless issue. 120 million plus in budgets 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.
Adam Cahn (Cahnman’s Musings): The pre-camping ordinance repeal status quo wasn’t great. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there was a genuine reform effort. That effort was really easy for Casar et. al. to co-opt for purposes of graft.
Basically, a bunch of well meaning people who should have known better turned out to be chumps who got played for suckers by Casar.
Who is the primary driver of the homeless policy: Mayor Steve Adler or Councilman Greg Cesar?
TK: It was inevitable that they’d both push for it, though from different perspectives. Adler takes his cues from the same progressive special interests/think tanks guiding other big-city liberal mayors. Adler actually spent Austin taxpayer dollars to travel to Los Angeles to learn how to emulate that city’s homeless policies – among the worst in the nation from any sane perspective. In that regard, he has succeeded in causing more harm to Austin than any Mayor in Austin’s history. I believe Greg Cesar’s motivation is more from deeply held extreme left-wing philosophical beliefs. He’s smart enough to know that the policy is detrimental to everyone, including the homeless. But it serves his purpose because it creates a stark picture of misery which he uses as fodder to support his assertion (a false one) that American society is failing – and capitalism in particular, is a failed system – and that local government needs to redirect more tax dollars to the issue.
MQS: Steve Adler doesn’t appear to be the mayor; he seems to be Greg Cesar’s spokesman.
DF: Greg Casar is the puppet master driving every decision made in city hall.
AC: Greg Casar is the primary driver of everything that happens at City Hall.
Why has the city council not responded to the huge outcry from city residents at the explosion of homeless camping all across Austin?
TK: The Mayor and city council have shifted hard left and believe political changes in Austin leave them largely unaccountable to traditional middle-class values and the concerns of ordinary local business owners. For example, they really don’t care that Strait Music Company is now living a nightmare along Ben White Boulevard. Until ordinary voters in Austin – including democrat voters – hold them accountable, politicians like our current mayor and council will continue to tune them out. Unlike the old days, in recent years, most Austin citizens couldn’t even name their council member or mayor. That may be changing. You can be sure the mayor and council are watching nervously to see what happens to the incumbents in this current election and recall effort.
MQS: Leftists thrive on chaos. What the citizens see as a problem with explosion of homeless “camping” is what the council members see as a feature. The worse the problem they created becomes, the bigger the government solution council members (think they) can impose.
DF: They haven’t responded because they don’t know how to govern. When 10-1 was first announced former Mayor Leffingwell told me it was going to be a bad idea because they would elect a bunch of activists and not people who know how to govern and they will do something because of their activism and won’t be able to fix it even though they know its wrong because the activism rules how they think.
AC: Denial and groupthink.
Who has benefited the most financially from the explosion of homelessness?
TK: The mayor and council’s policies have ballooned Austin’s homeless population, which is a windfall for social service providers who receive a portion of the record-setting spending of millions by Austin. This spending in turn draws more homeless to Austin and keeps the problem and spending growing.
MQS: As always, government.
DF: The cronies who are running ECHO [Ending Community Homelessness Coalition]
AC: The social-services industrial complex and their assorted hangers-on are a good guess, but it wouldn’t surprise my if the honest answer is nobody.
Why was the vote to partially defund the police unanimous?
TK: The current mayor and council are all committed democrats or socialists, and they bow at the anti-police altar because they perceive their political survival as hinging on falling in line with that new political trend. The endorsement of the Austin Police Association used to be the most sought-after political endorsement of every candidate running for local office here. But recently there’s been a well-funded, nationwide progressive political trend in city politics and within the democrat party to demonize law enforcement. That caught Austin’s police union completely by surprise this election cycle.
MQS: The Austin City Council is the least diverse group in Travis County, if not in Texas. They engage in GroupThink to a degree that would make even George Orwell’s characters blush.
DF: Because Casar bullied them and if they even spoke out against the move they were threatened by the activists. I truly believe at least 5 council members do’t believe what they voted on but were afraid what would happen if they didn’t. See answer 4.
AC: Groupthink.
Do you approve of the Keel proposal to put Austin policing under control of the DPS?
TK: If enacted properly – including withholding a portion of tax dollars from Austin’s city government to fund the new APD division of DPS, this proposal would prevent what is happening right now: (1) Austin’s council shifting local tax dollars away from public safety to fund controversial leftist social programs; and (2) burdening statewide taxpayers with supplementing Austin’s local law enforcement by making it necessary for the governor to assign state troopers to make up for APD’s depleted funding. The seat of state government is by express terms of the Texas Constitution a constituent issue for all Texans. Every city in Texas derives its power and authority from the State of Texas, via our state Constitution and statutes. Local governments are creatures of the state, which determines what powers they have, what their obligations are, what privileges they hold, and what restrictions are held to limit their power. It is not the prerogative of local Austin politicians to turn the capital city into a Portland-type of chaos. The legislature has not just the authority – but a duty – to step in and act.
MQS: No; it is a bad idea. Austin voters – actively or through apathy – gave themselves this city council; they must live with the consequences. Why should taxpayers around the state be forced to subsidize Austin’s bad decisions? Letting DPS do APD’s job would reward the city council decisions. Mr. Keel’s proposal, while no doubt well intentioned, is an untenably dense bureaucratic solution, creating new functions and offices inside state agencies overlapping with the city offices… It’s the kind of “Republican” solution that empowers Democrats by duplicative and expanding government.
Rather than look for a bailout from King Greg and the Legislature, concerned residents of Austin (like Mr. Keel) should spend time and energy convincing their neighbors of the need for better thinking… or even just the need for right-thinking people to participate. The city council did not emerge from a vacuum; they and their bad ideas were voted into office by a knowing and willing electorate.
DF: Yes I fully support the proposal put forth by Terry Keel and Ron Wilson.
AC: If it were up to me, the legislature would revoke the city council’s charter in its entirety, but the Keel proposal is a reasonably decent stopgap.
Do you think Austin’s overburdened taxpayers might actually approve the rail bond?
TK: Yes, Austin’s voters may actually vote for this ill-conceived proposal if history is any guide to voting in Austin. Whether things have gotten so bad here with the current mayor and council that there will be some sort of local political awakening by voters, one can only hope.
MQS: One would hope not.
DF: If the same groups that came out to vote in the run off and defeated 2 moderates for county and district attorney then the bond might pass. They don’t see it as raising their taxes if they rent but ultimately will increase the rent they pay.
AC: My guess would be no, but Austin voters have disappointed me in the past.
If it is approved, where do you think the money will actually end up going?
TK: It will be largely wasted on legal, engineering and environmental special interests and studies.
MQS: The pockets of multinational corporations selling the latest version of snake-oil.
DF: Not to the intended projects. ATX has a history of mismanaging bond money. Look at the 90 million dollar main library that cost 120 million.
AC: Details remain to be seen, but “down the rathole” is a good macro-category.
How bad do you think crime in Austin will get if Jose Garza is elected DA?
TK: Look to Philadelphia for your answer. What Philadelphia is experiencing with [DA Larry] Krasner is exactly what’s in store for Austin if Garza is elected. In short, crimes like narcotics and certain thefts will be decriminalized and there will be zero death penalty prosecutions for the most horrific crimes. Crime victims will be a secondary consideration, subordinate to criminal defendants. The relationship between the DA’s office and the police will be dysfunctional, with the DA’s new priority being to aggressively seek criminal charges against arresting officers for perceived use-of-force violations.
MQS: Crime will be a lagging indicator, but the policies he is endorsing will no doubt have negative consequences. Let’s be clear here, though. The nice people in Terrytown and the tony neighborhoods that subsidize the Austin left might be inconvenienced, but they will be mostly sheltered. The brunt of the problems will be felt by Austin’s poorest and most vulnerable people – the one’s Garza and the rest of the virtue-signaling left claim to be helping. That’s the way it is with bad government policy, anyway. The poor are made poor, and the vulnerable become more so. Mr. Garza’s policies will simply continue that trend.
DF: I think crime is already getting bad but once elected he’s promised to not prosecute drug offenses. Most of the property crime and many of the robberies and homicides are committed to feed a drug habit or over drugs. He seems more interested in going after the cops than the criminals. Forget ever seeing another death penalty case in TC.
AC: Bad.
Do you think things will get better or worse after the November election?
TK: If President Trump is reelected, Texas holds or expands Republican rule in the statehouse, and the incumbent Austin city council members are all tossed, things could be looking up for Austin, Texas. Anything less than that, life in the city will be worse.
MQS: That light you think you see at the end of the tunnel? It’s a train.
DF: Either way it gets worse. If President Trump wins the left will riot in the street and if Joe Biden wins the far left socialists will influence him or figure a way under the 25th amendment to remove him and push this country more socialist where everything is free until they run out of our money. He’s definitely got something wrong with him.
AC: Better. One way or another (lege override/May election), the camping ordinance probably gets reinstated in ’21. In addition, even if it’s only one or two seats, changing the ideological composition of council will at least break up the groupthink.
Thanks to all of the above for taking time to participate.
Here’s a Texas Public Policy Foundation roundtable on homelessness, with a focus on the problem in Austin.
I’ve cut out five minutes of nothing-at-all at the beginning.
Filmmaker Chris Rufo has produced a documentary called America Lost, and he notes it’s not a housing shortage issue. “About three-quarters of those on the street have a substance abuse problem, and about three-quarters also have some sort of mental illness.”
Michele Steeb, who ran the St. John’s homeless shelter for women and children in Sacramento, said she saw about the same ration: 80% addicted, 75% with mental illness, and 50% lack a high school diploma or GED. Neither Austin nor Sacramento has put a dent in their homeless problem. Affordable housing doesn’t do it. “Around 70% of them need deep, individualized interventions.”
Texas Republican congressman Chip Roy. “if you have perspectives that don’t involve big government programs, you’re accused of ignoring the problem.” He says that when you get the federal government involved without policy innovation, you end up with problems. Says Austin Mayor Steve Adler’s policies have made the problem a whole lot worse. “We’ve seen a 45% increase [in homelessness] from 2019 to 2020. It’s a direct result of the policies the city council adopted”
Roy: “What doesn’t work is patting yourself on the back as the leftist mayor of Austin, Texas and saying ‘Look how important I am about focusing on the homeless,’ while you’re letting the homeless suffer in the streets.”
Rufo: “If you don’t have a local government that is willing to enforce the law, create rules, and maintain public order, you’re wasting your time.”
Homeless people say they can’t get access to the services Austin provides because they fear for their safety just walking four blocks.
“[T]hey will lose the lifeblood of the revenues they receive from property taxes in Texas,” Abbott explained. “What this does, in English, is it is going to defund cities and cities’ ability to operate at all if they try to defund law enforcement.
“We believe in law enforcement in Texas and we are not going to allow a replication of the types of policies we’ve seen destroying cities like Seattle and Portland and others.”
Abbott accused such liberal precincts of “caving to the forces of socialism” even as crime increases, and added that some are allowing their municipalities to be “hijacked.”
“So Texas is laying down a marker and that is, whether it be the city of Austin or another city, such actions are not going to be tolerated. In Texas, we embrace law enforcement, we will not accept turning power over to these socialistic forces that seek to abandon the rule of law and abandon the law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line to keep our communities safe.”
However, unlike Abbott’s various Wuhan Coronavirus mandates, this will require the Texas legislature to enact, which won’t happen until next year. And Socialist Austin city councilman Greg Casar says it won’t deter his anti-police agenda.
Meanwhile, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell blasted Austin’s defunding vote and asked Gov. Abbott to send more law enforcement. “In the correspondence, Gravell blasts Austin City Council members for cuts to the Austin Police Department valued at $150 million — including some $20 million in immediate budget cuts and a transfer of several departments away from police oversight to civilian functions, such as interacting with the homeless and dealing with mental health-related cuts.”
It always seems to go back to the decision to make Austin bumsville, doesn’t it?
“There were thousands of pounds of trash, human waste, and needles washing through our backyards and the creek bed.”
Kevin Ludlow struck a nerve after posting his time-lapse video of the Windsor Park creek, which runs from Cameron Rd., into the neighborhood behind Ludlow’s house, and continues east. It even runs past a new community pool and water park.
The video in question:
The portion of creek bed which runs the length of the Heritage at Hillcrest apartment complex, behind his back yard, and down a couple of blocks further is prime real estate for the city’s growing homeless population because of its shade and relative seclusion.
Since the beginning of 2020, Ludlow noted the population of homeless individuals living in the creek bed grew to a few hundred people until its apex a couple of weeks ago. A storm came on July 31, causing the creek to flood and wash the piles of debris further down the area.
The issues that have arisen downtown and in the city’s business-heavy districts have been well-documented, but it has extended beyond these areas.
Snip.
In his video, Ludlow was able to record footage of campers smoking crack and shooting up heroin. Multiple times, campers became confrontational over his documentation.
He added that because regular syringes can be hard to come by, campers turn to insulin needles — which are much smaller both in length and tip — of which he’s found numerous on the ground.
He underscored, “I’m a pretty progressive-left guy, but [allowing homeless camping] has helped nobody, especially the homeless.”
Snip.
Back in October, Austin Police Department Chief Brian Manley reported statistics showing a 15 percent increase in violent crimes wherein both the victim and the suspect were homeless from July through September of 2019 compared with the same time frame the previous year.
Austin’s homeless problem has been growing for decades, but a watershed moment occurred last year.
In June of 2019, the Austin City Council approved the rescission of its public camping and lying ban. It went into effect in July and has led to a massive uptick in the unsheltered homeless population ever since, as more transients made camp on public property ranging anywhere from parks, sidewalks, underpasses, and more.
The city’s stated intention was that the policy change would bring the homeless population into sheltered facilities wherein they could receive whatever aid they needed.
In this year’s homeless population survey, the city recorded a 45 percent increase in its unsheltered population and an 11 percent decrease in those sheltered. There was an unmistakable incentive to leave shelters or the woods and live on the streets.
The city eventually reinstated some of the restrictions in place before July 2019 but stopped well short of fully reinstating the ban. The issue has grown substantially and fractured the community and its elected council considerably.
Read the whole thing.
Speaking of crime and the homeless:
Adler emails his Senior Policy Advisor to confirm homeless crime stats as reported by the Statesman. Adler is advised that the Statesman did them a favor by not emphasizing the 5 yr homeless crime rise & instead focusing on the violent crime by the non homeless. That figures. pic.twitter.com/oTIqsUQU5n
Things that make you go “hmmmm”: “Austin council member Jimmy Flannigan has received more than $17,000 in contributions from members of a real estate development company that has worked on several city projects, as well as a lobbying firm that has many real estate, business and events clients, according to his latest campaign finance report.”
Speaking of Jimmy Flannigan:
This must be the email that got Jacob Aronowitz his new position as Jimmy Flannigan's field director. ATX you have been warned. pic.twitter.com/leJLtPt3rG
“Funding that upholds our dignity.” What bilious, gaseous nonsense. What he probably meant to say is “the graft that lines our pockets.”
Cahnman floats a radical solution: revoke the City of Austin’s charter, abolish the city council and have functions carried out by the county and state.
KXAN has obtained a letter signed Wednesday from Austin City Clerk Jannette Gooddall which states that the petition effort to place reinstating Austin’s public camping ban on the November ballot was “insufficient.” The city’s analysis indicates that the petition effort did not gather the total legally required number of signatures to bring the measure to a vote.
More than a year ago, in an effort to decriminalize homelessness, Austin City Council voted to repeal a previous city ban on camping, sitting, and lying down in most public spaces. This petition from local group Save Austin Now aimed to reverse the council’s action from last year by barring camping downtown and near the UT campus, placing a citywide ban on panhandling at night, and restoring the ban on sitting or lying down in public. While Save Austin Now believes these changes will make the community safer, [this sentence fragment is sic – LP]
Save Austin Now identifies as an educational nonprofit and is led by Matt Mackowiak (the chair of the Republican Party for Travis County) and Cleo Petricek, who has been vocal about her opposition to the city’s recent policies related to homelessness. The Save Austin Now website notes that its leadership includes Austin Police Association President Ken Casaday, president of UT safety group SafeHorns Joell McNew, and former Austin City Council Member Ora Houston.
There are loose cannons among Austin Republicans; Matt Mackowiak is not among them. He’s a safely mainstream conservative Republican. I have a hard time believing that so many signatures from his petition drive would be invalid, as he strikes me as the sort of guy who would dot all the is and cross all the ts.
Save Austin now launched a mailer campaign during the pandemic, mailing letters to many Austin households and asking them to mail back in their signatures.
Save Austin Now delivered the petition signatures they gathered to the city on July 20 for the city to count and determine the validity of the signatures. Mackowiak said three-quarters of the signatures Save Austin Now collected on this petition effort came to them by mail.
He also said Save Austin Now was notified by the city clerk’s office of this decision Wednesday and has requested more information on why the clerk reached the conclusions she did.
“I simply do not believe that of the 24 thousand or so [signatures] that we turned in that five thousand of them are invalid,” Mackowiak said. “I just do not believe it, I reject it entirely.”
He explained that Save Austin Now did not even turn in petitions to the clerk that were not properly signed or that were from people who didn’t live within the city of Austin. Mackowiak said his group removed hundreds of petitions that did not have all the required information.
Snip.
In the letter sent Wednesday, the city clerk’s office said the raw count of total signatures on the filed petition from Save Austin Now was 24,201.
As is allowed by the Texas Election Code, the Austin City Clerk’s office used a random sampling method to verify this petition, using a sample size of 6,051 signatures.
In Austin, the minimum number of signatures required to place a petition measure on the ballot is 20,000. The clerk’s office wrote that based on the random sample results, the petition did not meet the required amount of signatures from valid voters. Of the 6,051 signatures, the clerk said that 1,147 were disqualified for signing more than once and another 1,106 were disqualified for other reasons, leaving 4,904 unique signatures from qualified voters in the sample.
So where are all those Democrats screaming “Count every ballot!” over this one? The City of Austin is going to deny the will of the public via sampling?
I smell a rat.
I hope Mackowiak and Save Austin Now file a lawsuit over this, and force the city to explain each and every petition that was rejected. Discovery over just what communications Gooddall received from mayor Steve Adler and his cronies would be worth the cost of such a lawuit all by itself. .
Worrying trends in the community spread of the Covid-19 virus may prompt further action to shut down commercial activity or beef up enforcement measures against reported health and safety violations. It’s a critical decision for businesses that may have to quickly shut down, scale back or alter their operations on the fly once again.
Local public health and government officials have repeatedly stressed that they want to prevent the seven-day average of new Covid-19 hospitalizations from topping 70 per day. That threshold could put the area back to “Stage 5,” when only essential businesses should be open.
“We have not made the determination to enter Stage 5 yet,” interim Austin-Travis County Health Authority Mark Escott told county commissioners during a July 7 briefing.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler said that 69 new hospital admissions on July 6 puts the area on the edge of the “trigger place for us” — that seven-day moving average reaching 70 hospitalizations per day.
Under the city’s updated risk-based guidelines, what matters is the region’s trajectory on hospitalization rates as it passes that benchmark.
“If we went screaming into 70, then we need to pull back or we would overwhelm the hospitals,” Adler said on a July 6 Facebook Live broadcast. “If we were able to slow down the trajectory, then we have more space.”
“One of the things we’re going to have to make a determination on this week is just how rapidly we’re moving,” he added.
Escott said the entry to Stage 5 could happen at 70 hospitalizations per day all the way up to 123 hospitalizations per day “depending upon the trajectory of the curve.”
“This is the piece that we’re waiting on an update on from UT tomorrow,” Escott said, referring to the University of Texas at Austin.
While the rest of Texas moves to open up, The People’s Republic of Austin seems determined to keep businesses down:
As Texans across the state suffer and struggle to provide food for their families under prolonged government-ordered shutdowns (even with the governor’s trickled reopening of businesses), one Central Texas county is continuing their lockdown into the summer.
On Friday, Democrats Austin Mayor Steve Adler and Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt extended their stay-at-home orders on citizens; Austin’s order will last until May 30, but the county’s order will drag on until June 15.
The order is an updated version of the officials’ original decree from March. It states, “All persons may leave their residences only for Essential Services and Essential Activities.”
The order prohibits all public and private gatherings, tells “non-essential” businesses to cease operating, and says all citizens over the age of six “shall wear some form of face covering” when going out in public.
Violating the order “may be punishable through criminal enforcement,” with citizens potentially being fined up to $1,000 or even thrown in jail for six months.
It is questionable what effect the order will have because it largely conflicts with Gov. Greg Abbott’s recently updated statewide order that allows for limited reopening. According to Abbott, local officials like Adler and Eckhardt cannot impose more burdensome guidelines than his statewide executive order.
Despite including criminal punishments in the order, the officials admitted their limitation, stating in the order numerous times that “no civil or criminal penalty will be imposed for failure to wear a face covering,” and that their punishments could be “limited by state order.”
Translation: “We don’t have any power, but we want Austin and Travis County businesses to know that we truly want to bankrupt them.” Because letting drug-using transients sleeping on the sidewalks wasn’t doing enough to drive away business.
(Speaking of bankruptcy, the lockdown seems to have claimed popular Austin restaurant Shady Grove.)
Last Friday, Mayor Steve Adler announced his extended, questionably legal stay-at-home order, in which he “encourages” restaurants and businesses of 75 capacity or less to record an “activity log” of all customers that come in. That means collecting “contact information for all inside or sit-down customers and employees including the dates and times they were present in the business and the location where they sat or were served [in] a restaurant or reopened service with seating.”
Though keeping a log isn’t mandatory, a business could potentially pay a devastating price if they don’t obey.
“In the absence of [such] a log, Austin Public Health may need to publicly release, without limitation and in its discretion, the location where people with confirmed infections have been, with relevant dates and timeframes, so as to otherwise trace contacts,” the order reads.
In other words, for the businesses who don’t follow the order, the city government can determine if they were exposed to the coronavirus and has unlimited power to publish their names to the public.
Evidently Adler thinks business owners just stand around all day, and thus have time to be his unpaid Stasi agents, as opposed to having to serve customers, manage stock, and generally keep the business running. Adler’s never let reality get in the way of his grand ideas.
Mayor Steve Adler, Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt and Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell all signed shelter-in-place orders Tuesday. The orders take effect at midnight and runs through April 13.
The orders dictate that all residents must remain in their home unless performing essential activities, such as buying groceries, pet supplies and other items needed to work from home. People can also leave their homes to exercise and walk their pets as long as they comply with social distancing rules, the order states. Travel is also permitted when needed to take care of another person or pet at another home.
Since I live in Williamson, I’m definitely included in the lockdown area. Harris County (Houston), Dallas County, and Bexar County (San Antonio) are all under similar lockdowns.
HEB, our local supermarket chain, has taken to queuing people six feet apart outside before you can even get into the store. Yesterday stock was somewhat picked, and there were limiting quantities on just about all items, but you could find all the staples if you were willing to make substitutions. (Didn’t try to get toilet paper, but I did find a bottle of rubbing alcohol.)
I’m better equipped for this than most people. My job allows me to work from home, I have dogs, books, and video games to keep me occupied, and this will give me a jump on doing my taxes…
Austin on Tuesday joined other major Texas cities in closing bars and restaurant dining rooms to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, which has now resulted in the state’s first death.
Dr. Mark Escott, director of Austin-Travis County Health Authority, also announced that pubic gatherings in the Texas capital are now limited to 10 people, following recommendations released a day earlier by the Trump administration. That’s more restrictive than similar measures taken in Dallas, which on Monday ordered that public gatherings should not exceed 50 people.
Those shutdowns are scheduled to last through May 1st. “Food establishments must now close common dining areas and are encouraged to give take-out, delivery or drive-thru options.”
Six weeks is a long damn time for a restaurant or bar owner, many of whom just barely scrape by. I wonder how many restaurants and bars this will drive into bankruptcy.
With all these draconian bans coming down, do you think the city of Austin will do anything about the illegal encampments of transient drug users Mayor Steve Adler has lured here?
Fox News host Laura Ingraham reported Wednesday evening that she obtained a chain of State Department emails stemming from a standard request for comment from New York Times journalist Ken Vogel, whose reporting helped generate scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Hunter Biden, 49, is the son of Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, and Republicans have called for him to testify during the Ukraine-related Senate impeachment trial against President Trump.
On May 1, 2019, Vogel contacted State Department official Kate Schilling about a story he was working on regarding an Obama administration meeting in January 2016 with Ukrainian prosecutors and mentioned the name of the CIA analyst believed to be the whistleblower whose complaint sparked impeachment proceedings that led to two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
“Democrats Warn That American People May Tamper With Next Election.” “‘When the Founders wrote that founding document thing, they never imagined there would be electoral outcomes that Democrats did not agree with.’ Democrats also said they even have hard evidence that the 2016 election was compromised by Republicans voting for Trump.”
Final Brexit bill passes. The EU is reportedly quite eager to hurt its largest trading partner to spite its face…
Giant warehouse explosion in Houston. No reports of injuries, but the explosion was said to be heard 20 miles away… Update: Now hearing it was a manufacturing facility, with a propylene tank as the suspected cause, with two dead and one missing.
The Chinese government has placed the city of Wuhan under quarantine in an attempt to stop the spread of the deadly, pneumonia-like virus called 2019-nCoV.
According to a Chinese news bulletin, all passenger transportation out of the city has been temporarily suspended. That means that the city’s 11 million residents, hundreds of whom have fallen ill and at least nine of whom have died from the viral outbreak, are trapped unless they receive special permission to leave.
The virus quickly spread to nearby Japan, Thailand, and South Korea, and a traveler from Wuhan also carried it to the U.S.
In the face of a global outbreak, the Chinese government has been trying to maintain control of the narrative, censoring media and deleting social media posts that don’t align with its official statements.
Last coronavirus death count is 26 people, with more than 30 million people under quarantine. By contrast, the 2014-2016 west African Ebola outbreak killed more than 11,000 people.
Smear someone as a “white nationalist” on the says so of the SPLC, just because they want to enforce border control laws? Enjoy your $5 million lawsuit.
Hungary’s Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen has stated that such programs “ha[ve] no business in universities” as they represent “an ideology, not a science,” with a market profile “close to zero.” Similarly, Orban’s Chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said, “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women. They lead their lives the way they think best [and] the Hungarian state does not wish to spend public funds on education in this area.”
Media estimates of 22,000 for the Second Amendment rally are probably too low. “I think when all is said and done, the crowd of gun rights supporters attending Lobby Day on Monday probably was double the official figure and approached 50,000.”
In addition to Steve Adler all but personally inviting every transient drug addict in the state to take up residence in Austin, the killer was out on personnel recognizance bond after committing a burglary, thanks to yet another Austin City Council decision.
Amazon sues to stop to stop Microsoft $10 billion “war cloud” project for the Pentagon, evidently because President Trump is a big meanie who didn’t let them get the contract. Eh, Pentagon procurement bidding is pretty opaque under the best of circumstances, much less under the zillions of possible variations on setting up a cloud infrastructure. There’s no way whether to determine this is a real grievance or just sour grapes over losing a big contract.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald charged with hacking in Brazil. Though in this case, “hacking” seems to amount to “publishing embarrassing information about members of the Brazilian government.”
In praise of Christopher Tolkien. It’s probably only a matter of time until Disney buys the Tolkien estate now…or someone far worse.