#TheGremlinZoo #SCOTUS #TXPol #USPol #OnlineAgeRestriction

From AP News.com: Supreme Court upholds Texas law aimed at blocking kids from seeing pornography online

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-porn-age-verification-texas-12a73197796fe8c4bef0d888259543cf

Dallas woman speaks volumes without saying a word

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMWJvGA9NPQ

#LindaMarieFord #Dallas #WFAA #RIP #USPol #Texas #TXPol

Apparently Gov. Abbott didn't veto SB3 until time was almost up. Literally 11th hour thing. I'm guessing he was weighing not signing it and letting it go through, but that explains the late page update.

And Lt. Gov. Patrick is BIG MAD about the veto. His speech shows he's either lying about the dangers of THC, or he's never been high and actually believes that shit.

#TXpol #TXlege

Last week Cruz vs Carlson, this week Abbott vs Dan Patrick.

Texas’ THC ban thrown out: Gov. Abbott calls special session to address $8B industry 🍀

Abbott, a Republican, stayed quiet for most of his 10 years in office on the issue of medicinal or recreational THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive compound in marijuana.

@dallasnews

🆓🔗: https://archive.ph/eN5Ip

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2025/06/22/texas-thc-ban-thrown-out-gov-abbott-vetoes-bill-to-outlaw-the-8b-growing-industry/

#Texas #USPol #Dallas #Austin #TXPol #THC #Cannabis #KBHarper

if you’re a teacher, firefighter, policeman, or any other kind of public employee in #texas you may want to consider making sure you have a backup plan for your pension because up to 10% of your money is about to be shipped to china

#crypto #cryptocurrency #strategicBitcoinReserve #pension #Teachers #firefighters #TX #TXpol #gregAbbott #tedcruz #johncornyn

On December 25th, 2022, the 614 residents of Ingleside on the Bay, Texas, woke up to a yellow Christmas.

It was the culmination of a decade of Texas Republican maneuvering, multimillion-dollar business deals by an unelected board of port commissioners, and systemic failures in state monitoring.

https://www.thexylom.com/post/i-was-having-a-good-time-how-did-a-small-town-in-south-texas-get-hit-with-two-oil-spills

#texas #energy #environment #climate #health #txpol #photography #news #journalism

@ai6yr Promoting to #TXPol #Texas

NEW: A rainbow coalition of Texas Coastal Bend residents tried every tool in the regulatory process to stop the crude oil export industry. Did they ever have agency?

The finale of a three-part series produced by The Xylom and co-published by Drilled Media, Floodlight, and Deceleration News.

https://www.thexylom.com/post/you-need-to-air-out-your-dirty-laundry-an-anatomy-of-a-tceq-public-hearing

#texas #txpol #climate #energy #health #environment #oilandgas #photography #journalism #news

#TXPol #Measles #Vaccines

Amid measles outbreak, Texas is poised to make vaccine exemptions for kids easier

https://apnews.com/article/texas-vaccines-measles-outbreak-exemptions-rfk-ab4aea44661153a789472f9d7fa8d17b

#TXPol #GOP #GunBuyBacks

From AP.com: Texas Republicans want to block cities' gun buyback programs

https://apnews.com/us-news/san-antonio-texas-bob-hall-legislation-government-programs-3ce3effe94512a086fbf7721336da00a

#TxLege #TxPol #Texas

SB 1257, Bill Attacking Insurance Coverage for Transition-Related Care has passed the 89th session of the Texas Legislature and has been sent to Gov Greg Abbott's desk for his signature.

Fuck you Texas GOP and the horse you rode in on. You can't stop me from becoming the shapeshifting bog witch that I am.

Burn the Witch
by Radiohead

🎶Red crosses on wooden doors
And if you float you burn
Loose talk around tables
Abandon all reason🎶

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI2oS2hoL0k

Public officials at all levels are propping up a Texas Bitcoin mining boom that’s threatening water and energy systems while afflicting locals with noise pollution.
#Bitcoin #Crypto #Texas #TXpol
https://www.texasobserver.org/the-crypto-racket/

@WrenArcher

>According to the release, Brooke Slusser, a San Jose State women’s volleyball player and Texas native, was “forced” to share a locker room and an apartment with her transgender roommate without her knowledge.
>
>During her testimony in favor of SB 240, Slusser said she wasn’t aware that her teammate was transgender. Her teammate, Blaire Flemings, said in an interview with The New York Times that she disclosed her transgender status to her coach, but didn’t talk to Slusser about it.
>
>“I did not want this to be the first thing that people know or think about when they get to know me,” Flemings told The New York Times.
>
>Flemings’ gender was non-consensually disclosed to the public in a 2024 article written by a right-wing activist. As that story gained traction online, Slusser appeared on national television to speak out against her teammate and other trans athletes.
>
>“We were lied to and deceived. I was traumatized from this situation. I am now doing online school and not attending SJSU anymore,” Slusser said.

Manufactured Outrage. It's not that you *didn't know* your fellow teammate was a trans woman. It's that you *knew* your fellow teammate was a woman, and then, later, that she was trans. *That's* what bothers you, Slusser. That trans women are women. That your internal schema for "woman" was found to be incomplete, and rather than expand your schema, you doubled down.

>“I’m not for that,” said Menéndez [Democrat, Houston] in response to Middleton’s statement [about "fairness in sports," "naked men" in women's locker rooms]. “I’m trying to keep people from getting hurt of all kinds. I just don’t want us to pass a bill that’s going to potentially put a $5,000 fine on someone because they had to use a restroom.”

Democrats continuing to be fucking useless.

#txlege #txpol #texas #trans #lgbt

@Flipboard @bolts@journa.host

Huh. That's a pretty hyperlocal story for me, seeing as I live in Tarrant county.

>After accusing the sheriff’s office of violating the law last fall in light of Bolts’ reporting, Texas jail regulators now say there’s nothing they can do about the failure to commission independent investigations into deaths in jail custody, which have spiked on Waybourn’s watch. At least 70 people have died in jail custody since the sheriff took office in 2017, compared to 25 deaths in the eight years prior.

A near-tripling in the death rate is awful. Tarrant county certainly hasn't tripled its population since 2017.

>After the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office listed the Fort Worth Police Department as the agency looking into jail deaths, Bolts filed a public records request last year seeking Fort Worth police investigations into county jail deaths. Last October, the department said it had no records of those investigations, with a Fort Worth police spokesperson saying, “I’m told that the Tarrant County Sheriff Department investigates those.”

The notion that FWPD could serve as an impartial investigator of its county-level co-party is itself tenuous. The Thin Blue Line protects itself, and even getting information out of them through Texas' Public Information Act is a pain.

>In one case involving a death ruled to be from “natural” causes that occurred in the fall of 2022, the police department apparently didn’t send its review letter to the sheriff’s office until this month, with the letter from a Fort Worth detective dated April 14, 2025 concluding that the sheriff’s office investigation was “consistent, thorough, and complete.”

I.e., once FWPD knew that Bolt was sniffing around, they scrambled to cover their asses.

>Brandon Wood, director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, said that he hadn’t been aware of Tarrant County’s failure to seek outside investigations into jail deaths until Bolts’ reporting last October—despite his agency being copied on emails from the sheriff’s office stating the Fort Worth Police Department would conduct an “independent review,” according to records Bolts obtained this month.

So even the regulators consider themselves members of the Thin Blue Line.

>One measure filed by state Representative David Lowe, a former corrections officer and Republican who represents Tarrant County, would create an advisory committee to review in-custody deaths and make recommendations to reduce preventable deaths, while also mandating a detailed and publicly available annual report on deaths that occurred in county jails. Another bill filed by Salman Bojani, a Democratic House member who also represents Tarrant County, would mandate that death investigation records be maintained as vital state records. Nicole Collier, another Democratic House member from Tarrant County, also filed a bill to clarify that the Texas jail commission must appoint a third party law enforcement agency to investigate jail deaths, and require information about those investigations be published on the commission’s website. Collier has said that the legislation was prompted by the failure to conduct independent investigations into Tarrant County jail deaths.

Guys. Guys! You're just piling reporting requirements on, not actually tackling the behaviour itself -__- You *already have* a committee dedicated to this effort, and it *is not working*. You *cannot* expect law enforcement, of any stripe, to investigate itself.

>In the years after the Sandra Bland Act required independent investigations for jail deaths, the Rangers conducted the bulk of them, including in Tarrant County. But that changed in 2021, after the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office hired the Ranger who investigated the deaths of many people in the county jail, including Myers. That same year, the sheriff’s office tapped the Fort Worth Police Department.

Case. In. Point.

#Texas #TarrantCo #Tarrant #dfw #FortWorth #txpol #txlege

https://www.texasobserver.org/whos-paying-for-public-school-vouchers-1998/

Calling all #texans #texan #texas to read this 1998 article from @TexasObserver #TexasObserver about school #vouchers. If we have any hope of stopping this monstrosity, we've gotta understand its roots. Consider this 1998 article a prophetic post-mortem of how school vouchers finally got through the Lege #txlege. Then subscribe to The Texas Observer and start organizing outside of the two-party right-wing duopoly. (#txpol)

================================

>Bullock wouldn’t discuss his recent resignation from the voucher PAC Putting Children First. But his aide, Tony Proffitt—who has worked for Bullock since long before he moved from the comptroller’s to the lieutenant governor’s office—said the Lieutenant Governor still supports a “very limited voucher program,” and that he left Putting Children First because, as was first reported by the Dallas Morning News, “it was engaging in partisan activity.” The specific partisan activity was a January 19 letter from Putting Children First Chairman Jimmy Mansour to Betsy DeVoss, the founder of the Amway company [2025 Editor’s Note: Betsy DeVos married the son of the founder of Amway]. The letter refers to last session’s “tremendous momentum for our forces, as evidenced by Lt. Governor Bob Bullock joining our effort.” And it mentions plans “to gain two additional seats in the senate, where we currently hold a slim majority.”

Lolwut? "I left the PAC because it was doing PAC things." Were PACs, in the 1990s, genuinely considered to be "non-partisan" entities engaged in "non-partisan" activities? Or is that just Bullock grasping for straws?

(Reading ahead: grasping for straws)

Also, I guess Betsy DeVoss has been entangled in Christian Right politics for a while.

>“They assured him it wouldn’t be partisan,” Proffitt said. “Bullock still believes that a child who has been refused admission to another public school, after leaving a low-performing public school, should be allowed to attend a private school—as long as it doesn’t have a religious program.”

Why do I get the feeling that reading this 1998 article is gonna have me pining for the right-wing of the 1990s? (Yes, I know Bullock was a Democrat; No, Democrats are not, and never have been, left-wing).

>And in all likelihood, he has known and knows about Putting Children First, which until last year operated as a thoroughly partisan political action committee called “The A+ PAC for Parental School Choice.”

The rhetoric is the same, even 30+ years ago.

>Although A+ focused on the House and Board of Education, it also worked to ensure that the Senate over which Bullock presided would have a Republican majority, giving at least $20,000 to the unsuccessful candidacy of Bob Reese and at least $5,000 to Senator Steve Ogden, who trounced a woefully underfunded Democratic opponent.

Those numbers are fucking quaint.

>(Besides directly electing Republican candidates in the past two sessions, the PACs’ targeting of vulnerable incumbent Democrats has driven the cost of campaigns so high that the limited funding resources of Texas Democrats are constantly exhausted.)
>
>...
>
>It is in general elections that PACs make a big splash, and in the last election A+ PAC (Mansour, Leininger, Walton, and several big, out-of-state funders) made sure that conservative Republican candidates were awash in money. So Putting Children First has been bi-partisan thus far. But the last time these funders got together as the A+ PAC, the contributions were indeed “imbalanced.” The A+. PAC provided a total of $8,500 to Democratic House candidates. To Republicans, it contributed $587,445. As with the Putting Children First money, almost all the A+ Democratic money went to minority, inner-city Democrats, who now find themselves in the seemingly awkward position of accepting contributions from corporate and Christian right funders whose explicit and much-announced goals include making the Democrats a minority party, and reducing funding for public education. In this battle, “vouchers” are simply a means to an end—and that end is defined by Republican funders.

*Dingalingaling!* (that's a bell) Democrats underfund Texas (even when they ruled it, apparently). Also, water is wet. If you think the Democrats have learned in the intervening 30 years, they haven't.

>I asked Glen Lewis, an African-American Democrat from Fort Worth, if he had any misgivings about such funding, considering that most of the $685,000 Leininger spent on lobbying and campaigns last session was used against Democrats and Democratic Party interests. “I didn’t go to them,” Lewis said, “they came to me because I was interested in the issue.” Lewis, one of three Democrats who remain on Putting Children First’s Legislative Advisory Council, said he favors vouchers because of the extremely poor performance of the inner city public schools that his constituents are forced into. (The other Democrats still with Putting Children First are Ron Wilson, of Houston, and Laredo Representative Henry Cuellar, who sent Mansour a letter complaining about the letter that provoked Bullock’s resignation.) I asked Lewis if he had any objection to accepting campaign contributions from a group whose huge investment in elections is moving the state’s political center farther and farther to the right. “Texas politics?” Lewis said. “How could it get any farther right than it already is?” (For the answer to that question, Representative Lewis will only have to watch the next two election cycles.)

Yowza. I find it fitting that #FortWorth #Dallas #dfw creeps up here. In Fort Worth, *nobody* wants to send their kids to public school. Everybody fights over slots in private schools. One would have thought that democrats would look at the rightward slide they were in and come to the conclusion that, perhaps, veering leftward might have been the harder, but more foundationally sound, choice to make.

Also, not surprised to see that Cuellar was a shithead even back in the 1990s.

>He said he will take advantage of whatever resources are available to pass voucher legislation that will allow students to transfer from low-performing public schools to high-performing public schools. “I have a different agenda. The Republicans are in this for the privatization and the free market aspect. I want to improve the public schools,” Garcia said. “I support increasing teacher salaries and decreasing class size to eighteen.” But until schools, and in particular inner-city schools, are improved, Garcia said, he will work to pass a voucher bill that will require school districts with high academic performance to accept students from schools with low academic performance.

This is the *escape* mindset. It is a corrosive poison that has embodied the body politic of Texas for decades. We will not *escape* these problems. We must *meet* them, head on.

>“I have seven students in my district who want to transfer to suburban schools that refuse to admit them,” Garcia said. “They think if they accept these seven students, they’ll have a whole wave of transfers and their standards will fall.”

The classism and racism of suburbia strikes again. May we all read The Color of Law, please.

>Garcia’s pragmatic argument may seem to make principled liberal opposition to vouchers seem somewhat precious. But in historical perspective, the battle over school vouchers is not finally about vouchers at all; it’s about real racial integration in Texas (and U.S.) public schools.

Yep.

>Short term, these guys will use inner-city children as a first step, and even spring for a few tickets for poor minority kids to attend rich majority schools. In the long term, as Republican Representative Rick Williamson said after the House came as close as ever to passing a voucher program in the 1997 session, losing only on a tie vote (67-67): “We’re going after the whole system.”

And that is exactly what was done.

Subscribe to the Texas Observer, y'all.

@TexasObserver

>But sheriffs’ reluctance may not matter soon. Legislation has passed the Texas Senate and is pending in the House that, in its current form, would compel sheriffs of counties with 100,000 residents to “request, and as offered” sign a 287(g) deal with ICE or “an agreement under a similar federal program.” (More than 80 percent of Texans live in counties with a population of at least 100,000 residents.)
>
>The legislation presently does not specify what kind of 287(g) agreement sheriffs must apply for or accept, nor does it clarify what other similar agreements could substitute for 287(g).
>
>“What is a similar federal program to 287(g)? That’s up to the Trump administration, and that’s up to Stephen Miller—and then our local sheriffs will be bound by that,” Etter said. “It’s really left up to the imagination of the federal government.”

If it's up to Stephen fucking Miller, then it's literal #Nazi shit. And the "but money" excuse of so-called "hesistant" sheriffs is just political posturing to ensure they get their share of the spoils.

#ice #immigration #txlege #txpol

@oconnell

>Ground Game Texas, the organization that helped get marijuana decriminalization on the ballot in Austin, San Marcos and other places throughout the state, said in a statement it will continue to "craft policies that respond to [the court's] ruling."
>
>"These decisions don't change the fact that the people of Austin and San Marcos spoke with one voice," executive director Catina Voellinger said. "It doesn't change the fact that for years, the ordinance protected residents from arrest and criminalization over low-level possession. And it definitely doesn't change our commitment to this fight."

Catina Voellinger? I recognize that name! If she's still fighting, then #austin #atx should absolutely stand along side her to ensure that APD continues to deprioritize marijuana "crimes," if nothing else. I'm not convinced that trying to play "by the book" with the very state apparatus that writes the book is a worthwhile strategy though. Grassroots organization in #texas is the same story, consistently, over decades: local victories, overruled by the state. The grassroots needs to aim higher than putzing about locally or tailing the Democrats. It needs to build its own party to seize state power.

#txlege #txpol #thc #marijuana #cannabis

@TexasObserver

>For those top two, this is a time for cementing legacies, and they seemingly have no intent of leaving anytime soon. Abbott is singularly focused on passing school vouchers into law—a policy goal that eluded his two GOP predecessors. And if he wins a fourth term in 2026, he’ll be on the precipice of surpassing his predecessor Rick Perry as the state’s longest serving top executive.

That could do with an editor's note, now that vouchers have passed the house and the Senate has picked it up. The Senate may end up making changes that punt the bill to Conference Committee for reconciliation, but the odds of the Republican party not ultimately approving HB2 and sending it to Abbott for signing are slim.

>But, as always, the party will start to convince itself that the next election will be different. And, of course, one can always find reason for a shred of optimism. The 2024 cycle was a disaster for Democrats all across the country. And the shellacking of Beto O’Rourke in 2022 came on highly unfavorable terrain for a Democrat in Texas.
>
>The 2026 elections could play out similarly to the 2018 anti-Trump midterms that fueled Dems’ best performance in recent history. That made for rough sledding for junior U.S. Senator Ted Cruz. If Paxton, the GOP’s weakest statewide general-election candidate, does win the Senate primary, he could fare even worse than Cruz, should Dems field a compelling opponent (far from a given).
>
>Paxton’s Senate bid also means that the attorney general’s office will be up for grabs. The winner of the GOP primary will all but certainly be someone with no statewide profile, quite possibly a far-right Paxton acolyte without the benefits of incumbency. Those odds could be the closest to even that a Texas Dem is going to get.

The Dems aren't gonna save Texas. There is no Purple Wave coming. Tailing the Republicans is the only strategy that the Democrats here know, and nobody that likes what the Republicans are selling is ever gonna be satisfied with Republican Lite.

#texas #txlege #txpol #uspol

#SchoolVounchers passed the #txlege last night / this morning -__- This is gonna hit rural areas harder and faster than it does suburban and urban areas. The domino effect is exactly what these ghouls want, eventually siphoning off *all* public monies for education into private hands.

#txpol #texas #CharterSchools #privatization #education #PrivateSchools #grifters