A petition filed in the 455th Travis County District Court on Apr. 8. calling for the removal of Travis County District Attorney José Garza was granted Friday afternoon by Dib Waldrip, the 433rd District Judge in Comal County and Presiding Judge of the 3rd Administrative Judicial Region.
Waldrip, who was appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to serve as the Presiding Judge of the 3rd Administrative Judicial Region in 2022, was assigned the case on Apr. 10 before granting the application for the issuance of a citation with an order for Garza to answer and appear in Travis County District Court on May 16.
Additionally, Waldrip appointed the Office of the Bell County Attorney and the Honorable Jim Nichols to represent the State as “a qualified and appropriate prosecuting attorney from within the region.”
Nichols is a Republican.
According to the court records, Nichols was selected by Waldrip after considering available options in accordance with Texas’ statute stating “the county attorney of the jurisdiction serves as counsel for the State in actions to remove an officer, except when such an action seeks removal of a prosecuting attorney.”
KXAN reached out to Waldrip, Abbott and Nichols about the matter and will update this story once a response is received.
The petition argues “Incompetency and official misconduct” related to the policies enforced by Garza about the who and what criminal offenses his office prosecutes.
Specifically, the petition references three issues supporting these allegations:
Defendant singles out law enforcement officials by automatically, indiscriminately, presenting charges against them to grand juries;
Defendant maintains a “do not call to testify” list of law enforcement officials who he deems unfit to testify and disqualifies from serving as witnesses for the State of Texas and
Defendant refuses to prosecute a class or type of criminal offense under state law.
The 21-page petition goes on to detail policies and evidence that allegedly show violations of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure such as presenting cases to grand juries that are not supported by probable cause and discriminatory practices specific to law enforcement officers.
Because the ground invasion wasn’t enough, the Biden Administration has been flying illegal aliens into American cities, wages for Americans are down, San Francisco continues inching toward sanity, some crime news, and Fisker looks farked. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has revealed that the Biden administration has flown at least 320,000 migrants into the United States in an effort to reduce the number of crossings at the southern border, according to Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“The program at the center of the FOIA litigation is perhaps the most enigmatic and least-known of the Biden administration’s uses of the CBP One cellphone scheduling app, even though it is responsible for almost invisibly importing by air 320,000 aliens with no legal right to enter the United States since it got underway in late 2022,” wrote Bensman.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had initially refused to disclose information about the flights, which use a cell phone app, CBP One, to arrange.
“Under these legally dubious parole programs, aliens who cannot legally enter the country use the CBP One app to apply for travel authorization and temporary humanitarian release from those airports. The parole program allows for two-year periods of legal status during which adults are eligible for work authorization,” Bensman continues.
The flights resulted in illegal immigrants being placed in at least 43 American cities from January through December 2023.
Under the terms of their release, migrants are able to remain in the US for two years without obtaining legal status, and are meanwhile eligible for work authorization.
How many Americans realized they were voting for this invasion when they voted for Biden?
A new witness could testify Fani Willis warned lover Nathan Wade’s former business partner to stay quiet about their affair, an explosive new court filing claims.
“They are coming after us. You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us,” Willis is alleged to have warned Terrence Bradley in a September 2023 phone call.
The call was overheard by Cobb County, Georgia, prosecutor Cindi Lee Yeager, according to court papers filed Monday by Trump co-defendant David Schafer.
The tide continues to turn in San Francisco. “‘Progressivism Is Out’: San Franciscans Pass Ballot Measures Requiring Drug Testing for Welfare, Expanding Police Surveillance.”
San Francisco voters who’ve grown tired of the crime, homelessness, and drug use plaguing their left-wing city overwhelmingly approved a pair of ballot measures on Tuesday that will expand police powers and require welfare recipients to be screened for drugs.
Proposition E, which authorizes police to use surveillance equipment — cameras, drones, and even facial-recognition technology — without prior permission from an oversight body, passed with 59,818 votes, or 59.9 percent. The proposition will also loosen restrictions on police chases and require that officers spend less time on paperwork and administrative duties.
Proposition F, which mandates that anyone receiving public-assistance benefits be screened for a substance-abuse disorder, passed with 63,295 votes, or 63 percent.
As part of the proposition, public-assistance recipients found to be drug-dependent could be offered treatment. If it is made “available at no cost, the recipient will be required to participate to continue receiving” public benefits, according to the proposition.
“Progressivism is out—for now,” the San Francisco Chronicles’ website read in bold letters on Wednesday morning, “Voters make it clear: S.F. can no longer be called a progressive city.”
The approval of both propositions was a big win for San Francisco’s embattled mayor, London Breed, who placed both measures on the primary ballot in an effort to tamp down on crime and to take aim at drug addiction and overdose deaths in the city. She told reporters on Tuesday that passage of the two measure will allow her administration to “continue the work we’re doing” to improve public safety, according to the Chronicle.
With San Francisco turning slightly sane, Austin may vie with Seattle, New York and Chicago for the title of America’s Most Insane Radical Leftwing City.
In June 2023, The Daily Signal’s Fred Lucas reported that the Indian Health Service (IHS), which falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, is collaborating with the ACLU, Demos, and several other left-wing organizations to register new voters. In order to expand the reach of these efforts, the Biden administration designated an Arizona-based Indian Health Service (IHS) facility as an official voter registration hub in October.
According to Arizona Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Native Health of Phoenix, which caters to “urban Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and all other individuals,” will “assist individuals in the voter registration process.” The administration confirmed that the IHS facility would be one of five designated as voter registration sites by the end of 2023.
Much like young voters, Native Americans heavily favor Democrats.
4. Department of Agriculture
The USDA is another federal agency directing its efforts at potential Democrat voters. Earlier this month, emails obtained by The Daily Signal show the agency was colluding with Demos as early as August 2021 to work on turning out voters.
As The Federalist’s M.D. Kittle reported, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service “encourages all state agencies administering the child nutrition programs to provide local program operators with promotional materials, including voter registration and non-partisan, non-campaign election information, to disseminate among voting-age program participants and their families.”
One of the “ideas” recommended by the agency is for “[s]chool food authorities administering the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in high schools, and adult day care centers and emergency shelters participating in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) to promote voter registration and election information among voting-age participants and use congregate feeding areas, such as cafeterias, or food distribution sites, as sites for the dissemination of information.”
Sweden officially became part of the NATO alliance Thursday, two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused the nation to overhaul its non-alignment policy.
Snip.
“It’s official – #Sweden is now the 32nd member of #NATO, taking its rightful place at our table. Sweden’s accession makes NATO stronger, Sweden safer, and the whole Alliance more secure. I look forward to raising their flag at NATO HQ on Monday,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on X Thursday. Hungary ratified Sweden’s ascension into the alliance last week, becoming the final NATO country to do so.
The nordic country applied for NATO membership in May 2022, about three months after Russia began its war in Ukraine. The admission of Finland and Sweden expands NATO to 32 members.
As Peter Zeihan noted, “in the Swedish military, every day you wake up, you prepare for one thing: the war with the Russians.” Good job, Putin!
Blaze Media journalist Steve Baker was arrested by the FBI and brought to a Texas federal courtroom in handcuffs, a belly chain and foot shackles to face four nonviolent misdemeanor charges for being at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021…
“There’s nothing in there about my behavior,” Mr. Baker told The Epoch Times. “It’s all about my words. Everything. It’s all about stuff I said before, stuff I said after, and that’s it. No more complicated than that.”
Mr. Geyer said his client’s arrest shows an “unprecedented shift in Department of Justice policy [after it] had spent decades adhering to special protections for journalists.”
Speaking of people who shouldn’t be getting taxpayers subsidies, Harvard “We Hate Jews” University wants $2 billion in taxpayer-backed bonds.
Recall effort against Dallas’ Democrat-turned-Republican mayor Eric Johnson fails. Number of signatures to have a recall election: 103,595. Number of signatures submitted: Zero.
Now that the dust has settled a bit, here are some more election tidbits from Tuesday’s primary, most gleaned from The Texan’s tracking page.
President Trump got more than twice as many primary votes as Joe Biden.
Ted Cruz got more than twice as many votes (1,979,327) as all the Democratic Texas Senate candidates combined (964,250). And even more votes than Trump (1,808,823).
Trump and Cruz both won all 254 Texas counties. Joe Biden lost sparsely populated Loving County to Frank Lozada one vote to zero, and King County (small and overwhelmingly Republican) either hasn’t reported Democratic votes or didn’t hold a Democratic primary. (Both Trump and Cruz got over 70 votes in Loving County.)
Republican incumbent Christi Craddick won her Railroad Commissioner’s race without a runoff at 50.4%.
If you compare the topline race primary results of 2022 (Texas Gubernatorial race) to the Presidential primary results of 2024, Republican votes are up just over 365,000 (2,323,754 in 2024 vs. 1,954,172 for 2022), but Democrats are down over 96,000 votes (979,179 for 2024 vs. 1,075,601 for 2022).
The Ken Paxton slate for the Court of Criminal Appeals (David Schenck, Gina Parker, and Lee Finley) all won over their respective incumbents fairly handily.
The previously reported Gonzalez/Herrera runoff was the only Texas U.S. House race where the Republican incumbent was pulled into a runoff; all the others won with ease.
2022 saw Republican Monica De La Cruz beat Democrat Michelle Vallejo in U.S. House District 15, the only swing district in Texas after redistricting, by nine points. November is going to see a rematch between the two, as both won their primaries. Given the ongoing border crisis (TX15 runs down to Rio Grande Valley) and both Texas Republican and Trump inroads into Hispanic voters, I would not expect Vallejo to improve on her previous showing.
Harris County DA Kim Ogg lost her Democratic Party primary to the more radical, Soros-backed Sean Teare. “Although Ogg had financial support from billionaire donor and criminal justice reform activist George Soros during her first campaign in 2016, Soros did not assist Ogg in her 2020 re-election bid and threw his support to Teare this election cycle. The Soros-funded Texas Justice and Public Safety PAC spent over $1.5 million in the final weeks of the campaign to help Teare unseat Ogg.” Democrats also seethed that Ogg let investigations of corruption among Judge Lina Hidalgo’s staffers go forward. How dare she not treat Democrats as above the law? Teare will face Republican nominee Dan Simons, a former assistant district attorney and defense attorney, in November. Bonus: Ogg had trouble voting because her lesbian girlfriend already cast her ballot for her. As commentor Leland noted, does Harris County not follow Texas voter ID laws?
Travis County residents are evidently delighted with more rapes and murders, as they just voted to keep Jose Garza DA.
The 2024 primary election was a major success for school choice advocates in Texas. Several opponents of education reform lost outright, others went to runoffs, and still more were electorally weakened.
Corey DeAngelis, a school choice advocate and head of the American Federation for Children Victory Fund, released a statement touting six wins and four forced runoffs in the 13 races where his PAC was engaged.
Throughout multiple called special sessions in 2023, the Republican-led House alternatively delayed and killed Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts to create school choice in Texas. Ultimately, these efforts culminated with 21 Republicans voting for an amendment by John Raney (R-College Station) to strip school choice from an omnibus education measure.
Accounting for retirements and with the runoffs still to be decided, only a handful of incumbent Republicans who sided with the teachers’ unions to kill school choice during the legislative session will be returning to Austin in 2025.
As covered yesterday, anti-school choice incumbents defeated include Reggie Smith, Travis Clardy, Glenn Rogers, Ernest Bailes and Steve Allison, while those driven into run-offs include Justin Holland, John Kuempel, Gary VanDeaver and DeWayne Burns
Some State Board of Education news. “Pat Hardy, a former teacher and a veteran representing District 11, which covers parts of Fort Worth, lost her seat to challenger Brandon Hall, a youth pastor.” Also: “Another incumbent, Tom Maynard of District 10, which includes Williamson and Bell counties, will go into a May 28 runoff against Round Rock school board member Mary Bone, who describes herself as a conservative champion for Texas kids.” If Bone wins, she’ll probably make a good State Board of Education member, but Round Rock ISD desperately needs more conservatives on the board.
A lawmaker rumored to be eyeing the speakership in the Texas House is employed by a bank that has connections to current House Speaker Dade Phelan and disgraced former Speaker Dennis Bonnen.
State Rep. Cody Harris, a Republican from Palestine, was first elected to the House in 2018. At the time, he was a real estate broker for Liberty Land & Ranch LLC.
In August of 2021, however, Harris added a new item to his resumé—Vice President of Business Development for Third Coast Bank.
The career change is notable given the bank’s ties to the current and former speaker.
In late 2019, Third Coast Bank acquired Heritage Bank, where Bonnen had served as President, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer. He currently sits on Third Coast’s Board of Directors.
Phelan’s brother Lan Phelan was a director of Third Coast from 2013 until at least 2016, according to filings with the secretary of state. A 2021 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed that the bank’s Beaumont location was leased from Phelan’s family investment firm.
Additionally, the most recent personal financial statement from Dade Phelan shows that he owns shares in Third Coast.
George Soros has set his sights on Texas yet again.
Newly released campaign finance reports show George Soros in the top ten political donors in Texas.
Texas’ latest campaign finance reports show liberal billionaire George Soros has been pouring money into political action committees rather than funding candidates directly.
Soros contributed a total of $2,562,000 across several PACs between August and December 2023, making him one of the top 10 contributors in Texas.
Receiving over a million dollars from Soros, the Texas Majority PAC boasts the motto “let’s turn Texas blue.” The organization seeks to elect statewide Democrat officials by researching the most effective strategies to accomplish this goal.
Texas Organizing Project PAC received a quarter of a million dollars from Soros. Placing their mission’s emphasis on black and Latino voters, TOP focuses on reaching the minority communities in Texas to shift the state’s political leaning. However, TOP has also been linked in recent years to bailing out hundreds of inmates with severe criminal records.
After TOP was linked to Soros in the past, former candidate for Harris County Judge Alexandra Mealer posted on social media, saying “TOP works year around to elect candidates in favor of dismantling the criminal justice system so no surprise on [Soros donation].”
Soros also contributed to the Hidalgo County Democrat Party, which aims to emphasize elections at all levels rather than only those on a larger scale.
CTX Votes, Dallas County Democratic PAC, Cameron County Democratic Party Executive Committee, and Planned Parenthood Texas Votes PAC all listed Soros as a top contributor, with CTX Votes and Cameron County receiving over 94 percent of their total contributions from Soros.
In addition, Soros was in the top 10 contributors for both First Tuesday and the Texas Justice & Public Safety PAC.
One particularly interesting race is that for Harris County DA, where’s backing a primary challenger to incumbent Kim Ogg, whom he had previously supported.
Vying for her third term as Harris County district attorney, Kim Ogg faces a challenge in the Democratic primary from a former prosecutor who is backed by Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and groups funded by billionaire criminal justice reform donor George Soros.
Ogg’s challenger, Sean Teare, worked for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) until February of last year, most recently as head of the Vehicular Crimes Division. After announcing his candidacy, his campaign raised $785,000 in the first six months of 2023, while Ogg trailed behind at $56,000. According to the most recent campaign finance reports, Ogg took in $282,000 compared to Teare’s $279,000 in the second half of the year.
Official campaign finance reports also show that Teare is receiving assistance from the Texas Justice and Public Safety PAC, a political action committee that has received most of its funding directly from Soros. The PAC, which previously supported the campaigns of Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza and Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot, provided polling services to Teare.
Teare’s reports also show coordination with the Texas Organizing Project, a criminal justice reform group that often posts bail for suspects and supports candidates who will work to end the cash bail system.
On the campaign trail, Teare has criticized Ogg for “weaponizing the DA’s office” against political opponents.
After an investigation into an alleged bid-rigging scheme for a COVID-19 vaccine outreach contract in 2021, a Harris County grand jury issued felony indictments for three of Hidalgo’s staffers, which Teare and Hidalgo have blamed on Ogg.
A day after news broke in November 2023 that the Texas Rangers had issued new search warrants related to the case, at a press conference Hidalgo accused Ogg of leaking the warrants to the media. She also used the press conference, which took place on county property and was live-streamed on the Office of the County Judge’s official social media accounts, to announce her support for Teare, which drew a new criminal complaint and an ethics complaint against Hidalgo.
For more on ethics complaints against Hidalgo, see here. And here. And here. And here. And here.
In an interview with FOX 26 Houston this week, Ogg lambasted Teare for not revealing that after leaving his post at the HCDAO he went to work for the Cogdell Law Firm, which represents Hidalgo’s indicted former staffer Alex Triantaphyllis. According to Ogg, Teare was still a senior staffer at the HCDAO at the time prosecutors were building the cases against Hidalgo’s staff.
“The notion that I should turn a blind eye simply because it was committed by a Democrat is not just offensive. It’s dangerous,” said Ogg.
That is, in fact, exactly what Soros-backed social justice tools expect
Teare’s campaign website features Hidalgo’s endorsement along with those of state Rep. Gene Wu (D-Houston) and a group of Harris County Democratic Party (HCDP) precinct chairs.
On the Republican side, Dan Simons seems to be running for DA, but his campaign doesn’t have a website up yet. An odd decision, since he filed fr the race over a month ago and primary day is less than two months out.
Having seen the devastating toll letting a Soros-backed DA run your county has taken on Harris County thanks to high levels of violence from criminals put back on the street, you would think the Harris County GOP would be doing more to make sure it doesn’t happen again…
How do you know that a prosecution is politically motivated? When a DA actually makes convicting a police officer a campaign promise. That’s what happened with hard left, Soros-backed Travis County DA Jose Garza charging Austin Police officer Christopher Taylor with murder for the police shooting death of Michael Ramos. That case just resulted in a second mistrial.
The jury deciding the fate of Austin Police Department Officer Christopher Taylor deadlocked after several days of deliberations, prompting state District Judge Dayna Blazey to declare a mistrial.
Prosecutors accused Taylor of first-degree murder in the shooting death of Michael Ramos during a confrontation in April 2020. Taylor shot Ramos as he fled from officers in a vehicle.
Local media reported on Wednesday that jurors heard testimony for three weeks and deliberations had reached their fifth day. Earlier this week, the judge gave the jury a special instruction for deadlocked panels after they signaled they were unable to reach an agreement.
While the government cannot try someone again on the same charge if the defendant is acquitted, a hung jury means prosecutors can seek to try Taylor again to secure a conviction. It is unclear whether the state will choose to take the case to trial again.
The indictment of Ramos was among a set of investigations reopened by Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza after he was elected on the promise of “accountability” for police officers accused of misconduct. Garza won his first term in 2020, the same year protests against police violence overwhelmed the country.
Snip.
[defense attorney Doug] O’Connell consulted with the jury and confirmed that the final vote was eight jurors in favor of acquittal and four in favor of conviction after 34 hours of deliberation. He said Garza was “unable to fulfill his campaign pledge” to secure a guilty verdict against Taylor.
“(Taylor) wants to get this case over with. He wants to be able to get on with his life. This has been hanging over him for over three years now. He distinctly remembers when Mr. Garza came out while he was on the campaign trail and made Chris and this shooting a campaign issue,” O’Connell said.
O’Connell also referenced the recent shooting death of APD Officer Jorge Pastore.
“Chris is very loved, not only by his family but by his coworkers and his friends. I venture to guess that they’re all very frustrated, and for his officer friends and coworkers of course they’re still grieving at the loss of Officer Pastore last weekend, so I imagine this is going to also be difficult for them to deal with,” O’Connell said.
He added that Garza has brought indictments against more law enforcement officers than his three most recent predecessors combined.
It is the second time this year a mistrial has been declared in the case. The first time, the judge determined an impartial jury could not be formed due to jury intimidation.
On similar grounds, Taylor’s defense sought to move the trial to a different county, citing evidence that someone had attempted to intimidate potential jurors by leaving leaflets on their cars.
The defense team even provided affidavits from high-profile attorneys, such as former Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore, supporting the contention that a fair and impartial trial for Taylor cannot be held in Austin due to biased media coverage.
While [prosecutor Dexter] Gilford condemned the police response to the call at the Rosemont at Oak Valley Apartments off Pleasant Valley Road, he admitted Ramos wasn’t perfect.
Gilford said Ramos “burglarized cars” and “was alleged to have been involved with credit cards.”
Then Gilford called Ramos’ half-sister, Clavita McMillan-Brooks, to the stand. She said Ramos was a “jokester” and that their relationship was strained, largely because of his struggles with substance abuse. She’d talked to him about getting sober the last time she saw him.
“He wanted to,” she said, “but he didn’t know how to.”
Travis County Medical Examiner Dr. Keith Pinckard told jurors cocaine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, bath salts and marijuana were all detected in his body during an autopsy.
During cross-examination, Taylor’s attorneys suggested Ramos acted unpredictably as a result of his drug use and his previously documented bipolar disorder.
The gold Prius that Ramos was driving had been reported to police a day before the shooting.
Naturally the Austin hard left named the “Mike Ramos Brigade” in his honor.
Garza’s hostility to APD officers has been well documented. Normally two mistrials would mean the dismissal of all charges against the person being charged. Given what a political football Garza has made of the case, and how much he (and other Soros-backed DAs) hates cops, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Garza try to try Taylor for a third time.
Beset with controversy that has culminated in a looming removal trial for incompetency, Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzales resigned his office, mooting the case, and immediately announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for United States senator with the intent to challenge incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
For those unclear on Texas geography, Nueces County is on the Texas gulf coast, and includes Corpus Christi. Trump beat Biden there by a few points in 2020, but Gonzalez won the DA race by three points.
Gonzales has faced criticism from law enforcement organizations and other groups who have described him as “soft on crime,” dismissing high rates of criminal cases and facing a barrage of other accusations such as failing to qualify for office by properly executing a bond and being suspended by the State Bar of Texas for failing to pay annual dues.
The removal lawsuit, brought by attorneys with Citizens Defending Freedom (CDF) on behalf of CDF State Director Colby Wiltse, was endorsed by Nueces County Attorney Jenny Dorsey and was set to go to trial after a district judge approved the case to move forward.
“This is a great day for justice in Nueces County,” Wiltse said in a press release. “Mark Gonzalez, like many of the Soros-aligned District Attorneys across the country redefined the role of the district attorney in the name of social justice, often at the cost of public safety in the communities they swear an oath to protect.”
Gonzales was quick to pivot out of the controversy and into a new political endeavor: launching a campaign for U.S. Senate. He published a campaign video on YouTube wherein he briefly characterized the effort to remove him as “bull—” and stated, “I was such a threat, they tried to remove me from office.”
He joins front runner candidates state Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D-San Antonio) and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX-32) in the Democratic primary race for Texas’ U.S. senator, as well as nine other contenders.
Gutierrez only joined the race in July, so I’m not seeing any polling on him yet. Having two candidates with Hispanic surnames probably helps Allred.
Vacancies in the office of district attorney are filled by gubernatorial appointment for the remainder of the unexpired term, meaning Republican Gov. Greg Abbott will decide who the next Nueces County district attorney will be.
Hopefully he’ll appoint someone who will actually, you know, indict criminals.
Speaking of Soros stooges, Dwight made me aware of GarzaWatch, aimed at Soros-backed Travis County DA Jose Garza and backed by some of the Save Austin Now people (Cleo Petricek and Matt Mackowiak), among others. We’ll see if that effort bears any fruit…
The City of Austin will again be on the search for someone to head its police department after Chief Joseph Chacon announced his intention to retire next month.
Chacon had been in charge of the Austin Police Department (APD) since September 2021, when he was appointed as the permanent chief after serving on an interim basis following Brian Manley’s retirement earlier that year.
“Working at APD has been the privilege of my life,” said Chacon. “Being the Chief of Police is something that I never thought would have been possible, and it has been the pinnacle of my career.”
In a letter to the department, Chacon said he first began considering retirement a few months ago and ultimately decided his 25-year run at APD was nearing its end.
APD Chief of Staff Robin Henderson will be named interim police chief once Chacon’s retirement becomes effective in the first week of September.
Then comes the more interesting part: The stalemate between police who want to do their jobs and the Austin victimhood identity politics establishment who want to prevent them from doing that continues:
During Chacon’s tenure, APD has been marked by staffing hemorrhage; a labor contract dispute with the city council; and a thorny relationship with Travis County District Attorney José Garza, who’s taken an active approach in prosecuting officers for alleged misconduct.
Garza’s uncle, Jesús Garza, is the interim city manager.
As of March APD has seen 89 officer departures, leaving the department 300 positions down from its 2019 staffing level. In 2020, the city council’s $150 million APD budget cut and redirection removed authorization for 150 patrol positions.
Austin’s police and elected officials have spent much of the last 12 months in a prolonged standoff over a new labor contract.
The Austin City Council, led by Mayor Kirk Watson, rejected a four-year agreement with the Austin Police Association in favor of a one-year extension of the now-expired deal. That leaves APD employment to be governed by Chapter 143 of the Local Government Code.
The impasse came largely over how much authority to vest in the Office of Police Oversight (OPO).
The city’s “reimagine policing” activists wanted to make the OPO significantly stronger, including enabling it to conduct investigations into alleged officer misconduct rather than its current role of simply fielding complaints and observing the process.
You remember the “Reimagining Police” initiative, don’t you? If not, this should refresh your memory.
In 2021, the OPO and its former head Farah Muscadin were found by an arbitrator to have violated the police labor agreement — just the latest chapter in a string of actions by the OPO that’s strained a contentious relationship.
The two sides remain at an impasse, and APA has no intention of giving in to the progressive activists’ demands.
Good.
Kirk Watson was elected mayor in large measure due to his promises to get crime under control and cut back on the radical Social Justice agenda driving the city. So far he hasn’t done much to deliver on those promises.
[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.
he Austin City Council on Wednesday voted to fire City Manager Spencer Cronk following his response to the winter storm earlier this month. The council voted 10-1 in a special called session, with only Natasha Harper-Madison (District 1) voting against Cronk’s firing.
Natasha Harper-Madison is an ultra-lefty sort, which makes me slightly more assured that firing Cronk was the right move.
Cronk’s termination is effective Thursday, Feb. 16. He will receive a one-year severance of $463,001.50, under a City ordinance in which he was hired in 2018. The council has appointed Jesus Garza, who served as Austin’s city manager from 1994 to 2002, to serve as interim city manager.
This is where things get interesting. The city of Austin has an Assistant City Manager, Veronica Briseno. Normal procedure is that the Assistant City Manager takes over as Acting City Manager while a permanent replacement is found. Why was that not done here? Could it have something to do with the fact that current Travis County DA and Soros-backed leftist tool Jose Garza is Jesus Garza’s nephew?
What are the odds?
I mean, it’s just plain odd to hire someone who was last city manager 20 years ago. That’s like thinking that M. Night Shyamalan is a sure thing to helm a big budget movie because Signs made a lot of money.
Howdy! Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! I spent six days up in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, visiting relatives and buying some 180 books, some for myself and some to deal. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm!
We keep hearing that it’s impossible rig government unemployment statistics, but something funny is going on.
A superficial take of today’s jobs report would note that both jobs and earnings “blew past expectations, flying in the face of Fed rate hikes”, and while that is accurate at the headline level, it couldn’t be further from the truth if one actually digs a little deeper in today’s jobs numbers.
Recall that back in August, September, and October we showed that a stark divergence had opened between the Household and Establishment surveys that comprise the monthly jobs report, and since March the former has been stagnant while the latter has been rising every single month. In addition to that, full-time jobs were plunging while part-time jobs were surging and the number of multiple-jobholders soared.
Fast forward to today when the inconsistencies not only continue to grow, but have become downright grotesque.
Consider the following: the closely followed Establishment survey came in above expectations at 263K, above the 200K expected – a record 7th consecutive beat vs expectations – and down modestly from last month’s upward revised 284K…
… numbers which confirm that at a time when virtually every major tech company is announcing mass layoffs…
… the BLS has a single, laser-focused political agenda – not to spoil the political climate at a time when Democrats just lost control of the House as somehow both construction (+20K) and manufacturing (+14K) added jobs according to the BLS, when even ADP now reports that these two sectors combined shed more than 100,000 workers in November.
Alas, there is only so much the Department of Labor can hide under the rug because when looking at the abovementioned gap between the Household and Establishment surveys which we have been pounding the table on since the summer, it just blew out by a whopping 401K as a result of the 263K increase in the number of nonfarm payrolls (tracked by the Household survey) offset by a perplexing plunge in the number of people actually employed which tumbled by 138K (tracked by Household survey). Furthermore, as shown in the next chart, since March the number of employed workers has declined on 4 of the past 8 months, while the much more gamed nonfarm payrolls (goalseeked by the Establishment survey) have been up every single month.
What is even more perplexing, is that despite the continued rise in nonfarm payrolls, the Household survey continues to telegraph growing weakness, and as of Nov 30, the gap that opened in March has since grown to a whopping 2.7 million “workers” which may or may not exist anywhere besides the spreadsheet model of some BLS (or is that BLM) political activist.”
A non-profit bankrolled by some of the nation’s largest corporations and left-wing billionaire George Soros is conducting a racial census of House and Senate staff as part of its effort to establish a “Bipartisan Diversity and Inclusion Office,” according to internal emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Senate and House staff received emails from a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies starting in July asking them to confirm their “racial and ethnic identity” as part of an alleged data collection effort. In at least two cases, senior congressional staffers who declined to provide their races were told by the researcher that the organization’s current data indicated they “may identify as white” and asked the staffers to update if the information was incorrect.
Information collected by the group will be used in its annual report that lobbies for “structural changes on Capitol Hill that would allow for more people of color to be hired in senior positions,” a previous report from the group states. That report is made possible in part by millions of dollars in donations to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies from Apple, Google, Meta, Pfizer, the Soros-backed Open Society Foundation, among dozens of other large corporations and nonprofits.
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ survey is part of a broader trend by left-wing organizations to pressure workplaces and governments to increase affirmative action policies. Often couched in promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” those policies have received criticism for coming at the expense of competence and offering advantages based on race instead of merit.
Rush was charged with a second-degree felony, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon family violence. An emergency protection order was issued against him, and he was soon back on the streets after making a $40,000 bond, KVUE reported.
“For $4,000, you can get out, go home, watch Netflix after trying to murder your ex-girlfriend — are you kidding me?” one of the customers said.
So in addition to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and possible attempted murder, our super-genius lawyer also violated section 46.03 of the Texas penal code by carrying a gun into a bar. And he bonded out. For all that Democrats blather about “gun violence,” they don’t seem top treat gun felonies with any seriousness when they actually occur. Thanks, Soros-backed DA Jose Garza!
But it turns out that Rush didn’t just go go home to watch Netflix, as he was found dead on Thursday.
In one meeting, Deon Jackson went from South Carolina’s Berkeley County school superintendent to unemployed.
His firing came at the hand of a newly-elected school board, which appears to have declared a judgment day for woke practices in its district.
In its first meeting after the Nov. 8 election, the board fired superintendent Jackson and school counsel Tiffany Richardson. Then it hired Anthony Dixon as superintendent and retained Brandon Gaskins as counsel. And before the day was over, the board banned teaching critical race theory and created a board to review library books for pornographic content.
Moms for Liberty, an activist group that supports parental rights in education, endorsed six of the board’s nine members. Many Moms for Liberty candidates won school board elections this November.
Speaking of disinformation, CNN carries out more mass layoffs, including Chris Cillizza. Let’s have a moment of silences for his careerOK that’s enough.
Legal Insurrection conducts a 2024 presidential preference poll. Not surprisingly, DeSantis comes in first and Trump second. Nikki Haley third over Ted Cruz is a mild surprise. Greg Abbott ranked dead last, tied with Liz Chaney, is a much bigger one.
