A couple for the historical record:
Former Texas congressman Sam Johnson.
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Archive for the ‘Texas’ Category
Obit watch: May 28, 2020.
Thursday, May 28th, 2020Obit watch: February 19, 2020.
Wednesday, February 19th, 2020Several people mentioned this one to me over the weekend, but I couldn’t find a good obit. Lawrence sent me one from the Midland Reporter-Telegram, but I thought it was incomplete.
It seems like about five minutes after I hit publish on yesterday’s obit watch, the NYT put their obit up. Timing. The secret of comedy.
So, without further delay: Clayton Williams, the man who, as Lawrence put it, “could have changed the course of Texas politics and history, if he’d just been able to keep his mouth shut”.
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I recall one campaign ad in which he promised to introduce convicts to “the joys of busting rocks”.
But during the campaign, he repeatedly sabotaged himself.
His comment about rape came early in the campaign, when he was sitting around a campfire in bad weather with reporters he had invited to his ranch. He compared the bad weather to rape, saying, “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”
An Associated Press report quickly made the comment national news. He said he was joking and, Texas Monthly reported, was apologetic “but not contrite.”The comment didn’t sink his campaign immediately. But in the end, it added to the weight of other blunders.
He bragged about going to prostitutes as a young man, saying that doing so was the only way to get “serviced” in the 1950s. At a debate, he refused to shake hands with Ms. Richards, a gesture widely criticized as poor sportsmanship.
When a poll showed Ms. Richards, a recovering alcoholic, gaining on him, he responded by saying, “I hope she hasn’t gone back to drinking again.” He then vowed to “head her and hoof her and drag her through the mud,” as if she were cattle.
And if all this hadn’t sealed his fate, especially with Republican women, he disclosed in the final days of the campaign that he had not paid income taxes in 1986, thanks to an oil bust that had touched off a recession — even though just four years later he was pouring $8 million of his own money into the race for governor. Ms. Richards made hay with that disclosure.
Mr. Williams blew a massive lead, and lost the election. He was the last Republican to lose a governor’s race in Texas.
An entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded more than two dozen companies, Mr. Williams had a business portfolio that also included farming, ranching, banking and real estate concerns.
He even dabbled in telecommunications. In 1984, he and his second wife, Modesta (Simpson) Williams, founded the first all-digital long-distance company in Texas, ClayDesta. He starred in his own television commercials, which were filmed on his Alpine ranch.
When proposed legislation threatened the business, he galloped up to the state capitol on a horse to hold a news conference opposing the bill. (The bill died.)
For the Texas A&M graduates in my audience, he was also a loyal Aggie, who gave a lot of money to the school.
You don’t see color like that much these days.
The (Houston) Chronicle of our times.
Friday, August 23rd, 2019Two stories from HoustonChronicle.com (not chron.com, which is basically imitation Buzzfeed these days):
Gerald Goines, the Houston Police Department officer at the center of the botched drug raid scandal, has been charged with two counts of felony murder. His partner, Steven Bryant, has been charged with tampering. (Apparently, that’s “tampering with a government record”, though I saw some early reports claim it was “witness tampering”.)
Lawrence has been on the botched drug raid story like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst exhibition, so I’m going to direct you over there for coverage and background. If the HouChron is too obnoxious for you (in terms of subscriptions and ad-blockers) here’s coverage from KHOU (with equally obnoxious auto-play video).
In other news, the paper would like for you to know that you can buy guns.
Okay, that’s not quite 100% fair. You can buy Bushmaster M4 assault rifles.
Okay, that’s still not quite fair. You can buy Bushmaster M4 assault rifles…from DPS employees who bought them from the agency.
The paper apparently found two – yes, two – M4 rifles for sale on “online gun forums” “recently”. That’s two out of “over 1,000” sold since September of 2016. DPS has also sold “over 2,000 SIG Sauer P226 pistols”, and a total of 5,254 guns during that time. So it looks like there’s about 2,000 guns not accounted for in this count. Shotguns? “high-powered rifles equipped with accessories worth thousands of dollars”?
So it sounds like you can buy up to three guns on your way out the door. But:
Does this mean you can buy more after you retire? That’s how I read it: it sounds kind of like how my Dad got an old Ford F100 pickup, by signing up for the waitlist at Brown and Root and paying $800. Except for guns.
Also according to the paper: the SIGs were going to DPS troopers for $350 each, and the Bushies were going for “$401-$601 each”. It’s not clear what the difference is between the $400 and the $600 Bushies, but: Mike and I have spent the past few weekends at gun shows, and you can get a pretty nice Smith and Wesson M&P-15 (not the M&P15-22, but the .223/5.56 one) for under $600 if you shop carefully. Right now, CDNN will sell you a SIG P320 for $350, and they have P226s with a factory optic for “too low to print – call”. (I would, but they’re closed now.) At least one DPS guy who was selling his Bushie (the ad’s been taken down now, according to the paper) was asking $975 for his.
I only note this story because it seems like a giant nothing burger, except for (maybe) the question of whether the state is getting a good deal by letting retired troopers buy these guns, instead of selling them to licensed gun dealers for credit towards replacements. But if CDNN is selling AR pattern rifles to the public for $600, and SIGs for $350, I doubt DPS is going to get anything close to that on a wholesale deal with any vendor.
Many small bloodsucking insects.
Wednesday, August 21st, 2019I think I’ve managed to keep on top of the Austin City Council and Travis County Commissioners lists.
But I let the list of Texas Congressional reps fall into disrepair and obsolesce. And I didn’t think the list of Texas Senators needed to be updated, either.
It seems that the House and Senate IT people (or whoever is in charge of the websites for reps and senators) have been doing a lot of reconfiguration and standardization. Even if the senator or rep hadn’t changed since 2016 or so, there were still broken links to district maps and contact forms. Plus it seems like these folks move office locations about as often as…well, as something that moves a lot.
Anyway, I’ve spent a good chunk of my spare time for the past couple of days updating the Senators and Representatives lists. Just in case you want to make use of those for a specific purpose, such as contacting your rep to explain that a magazine ban is going to cost him his seat in Congress. You know, the usual.
The next bunch of free mental CPU cycles are going to spent going back over the commissioners and city council lists, just to make sure they haven’t slipped in any changes. (It looks like Jeff Travillion has hired some staff members since he took office, and I’ve updated his entry.)
If you good folks notice anything that’s wrong or broken or out of date, please contact me and I’ll get it fixed ASAP.
In the meantime, UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#55 in a series)
Friday, April 26th, 2019We have now come to the point where I have done as many of these as I have “Art, damn it, art!” watches. (And more of these than Art Acevedo watches.)
The mayor of Edinburg, Texas, and his wife have been arrested on charges of election fraud and illegal voting.
Edinburg is in the southern part of the state, in the area generally called the “Rio Grande Valley”.
More:
Nearly 20 people have been arrested since last year in connection with the fraud case. Prosecutors said the scheme — involving Mr. Molina, his wife and paid campaign workers — was largely carried out by having numerous voters who did not live in Edinburg claim they were residents, including many who stated they lived in an apartment complex Mr. Molina owns.
According to court documents, Mr. Molina and his wife were both registered as volunteer voter registrars in the 2017 election and were authorized to help people fill out voter registration applications. Several of those with false addresses were signed by Mr. Molina and included his voter registrar number, according to the criminal complaint.
This does not exactly strike me as being a genius scheme.
The Mr. Garcia mentioned above is Richard Garcia, the former mayor, who Mr. Molina defeated by 1,240 votes in the 2017 election.
Obit watch: March 11, 2019.
Monday, March 11th, 2019Bill Powers, former University of Texas president.
Quoting Lawrence:
Powers is probably most famous to BattleSwarm readers for his central role in the UT admissions scandal, in which well-connected students were admitted to the University of Texas despite not having the necessary grade averages or test scores. Powers eventually resigned over the scandal.
The UT admissions scandal was not only real, but several of the state’s most powerful politicians (including then-speaker Joe Straus) and media outlets conspired to bury the story.
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to see how the Statesman addressed this in their obituary. Hint: you will need a (metaphorical) shovel.
Sidney Sheinberg, film executive best known as an early and influential supporter of Steven Spielberg.
Just being a celebrity’s kid doesn’t automatically get you an obit watch. But if the child had an interesting life outside of, or in relation to, their famous parent: absolutely, I’ll mention it here.
In that vein: Julia Ruth Stevens, Babe Ruth’s daughter. She was 102. Ruth adopted her when he married Claire Hodgson, his second wife. (He had a daughter, Dorothy, from his first marriage to Helen Woodford. Ms. Woodford died in a house fire in 1929: Ruth married Ms. Hodgson in 1930, she adopted Dorothy, and the family lived together.)
Claire Hodgson Ruth died in 1976 and Mrs. [Dorothy Ruth – DB] Pirone died in 1989. Mrs. Stevens ultimately became the spokeswoman for the Ruth family.
She was at Yankee Stadium in May 1998 for the unveiling of a postage stamp portraying Ruth admiring one of his home run drives. That August, she threw out the first pitch at a Red Sox game in Fenway Park at ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of Ruth’s death.
She was at Fenway Park in October 1999 to toss the first pitch before the decisive Game 5 of the American League Championship Series. Having lived for many years in Conway, N.H., she had become a Red Sox fan.
“I went to see the Red Sox beat the Yankees tonight,” she said.
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Freeda Foreman, one of George Foreman’s daughters, passed away over the weekend. She was 42, and had a 5-1 record as a professional boxer.
Edited to add: prompted by the exchange with Lawrence below, here’s a little lagniappe for you.
Lord Nelson.
Thursday, February 21st, 2019
Why are they being cut off? Would you believe…they didn’t file their anti-human trafficking paperwork in time?
According to an October 2018 letter from the governor’s office that was obtained by the Statesman, CELOC [Circuit Events Local Organizing Committee – DB] missed the deadline to submit a required human trafficking prevention plan by 30 days before the 2018 U.S. Grand Prix. Bryan Daniel, the governor’s executive director of economic development and tourism, wrote that because CELOC failed to meet the deadline, its application for reimbursement had been rescinded.
The plan was due Sept. 19, but CELOC did not submit it until Oct. 3.
“In this case, the law is clear that if a human trafficking prevention plan is not submitted 30 days prior to an event, a reimbursement from the Major Events Fund cannot be issued,” Abbott spokesman John Wittman said in an emailed statement. “The State of Texas and COTA have a productive partnership that has had a tremendous economic impact on the city of Austin and the state as a whole, and our office is already working with COTA on next year’s race.”
As much as I enjoy seeing these people cut off from their state subsidy, I have a feeling we haven’t seen the end of this, and that somehow somebody’s going to figure out an end run to get them their $25 million.
Item #2:
Did the Honorable Mr. Erskine think he was Clint Eastwood? And why wasn’t Dr. Andrews in court?
Turns out…
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According to the Statesman, the DA’s office doesn’t think this is a huge problem: Dr. Andrews did a total of ten autopsies in cases that are still pending. But in eight of those, “the cause of death could not be reasonably disputed by the defense“.
Flaming hyenas update.
Wednesday, February 13th, 2019Good news: Carlos Uresti has been sentenced to five years in federal prison for bribery.
Bad news: this sentence will run concurrently with his existing 12 year sentence from last year, so he won’t actually be doing any additional time.
Administrative note.
Wednesday, November 7th, 2018I get a lot of hits on the contact information for Austin City Council members page.
Just so everyone knows, I will be updating that and the other contact pages, but not until after the new folks take office, which I think will be January.
As the flaming hyena turns.
Thursday, October 25th, 2018Remember Dawnna Dukes? Remember what an enormous nothing-burger that whole thing turned out to be?
She’s suing the Statesman, Margaret Moore (the current Travis County DA) and Rosemary Lehmberg (the previous DA), “an investigator with the state auditor’s office”, and three former aides.
The fact that she’s proceeding pro se with a defamation suit is not a good sign. But I Am Not A Lawyer: I’d ask Ken White for his take, but he’s pretty busy these days.
On the other hand, she’s probably proceeding without a lawyer because she’s broke:
The 12-term Austin Democrat said investigative stories by the Statesman, followed by corruption charges that were eventually dismissed, left her financially ruined — saddled with a $187,000 legal bill, deprived of consulting contracts and unable to find additional work.
As a result, her lawsuit said, Dukes’ credit cards were canceled, her car was repossessed and her home and East Austin commercial properties were foreclosed upon.
“The trauma due to financial hardships and loss of reputation aggravated (Dukes’) health issues and, to this day, there is still a lingering inconsolable grief caused by her substantial loss,” the lawsuit said.
Dukes also blamed her legal trouble for her defeat in the Democratic primary in March.
I’ll try to keep an eye on this one. Especially the discovery portion of it: that should be a lot of fun.
Yes, we have no bananas…
Friday, September 21st, 2018Public service announcement.
Friday, July 27th, 2018If you need to do something with a car title, like a title transfer, please be aware of the following facts:
Universal Auto Title Service on Justin Lane in Austin is “permanently closed”. Their former location has a sign in the window directing you to the county tax assessor’s office on Airport Boulevard, which is open from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM.
While it is true that the Airport Boulevard office is open from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM, they will not do any transactions involving vehicle titles after 4 PM.
If you are thinking about going to one of the many tax assessor’s satellite offices, such as the one in Oak Hill, those are all “temporarily closed” (except, I believe, the one in Pflugerville). (I did a sorry job of covering this, for which I apologize: there was a flap, with several arrests, because some employees of the various satellite offices were apparently diverting money into their own pockets.)
There is apparently a title and registration service still open in Oak Hill. I’ll report later on.