Headlines / Quote of the Week
Fri., Oct. 11, 2024
All About that Drought: It basically didn’t rain in September and, who knows, it may never again. So the Barton Springs-Edwards Aquifer Conservation District declared a Stage III critical drought last week. Drought restrictions will begin November 1, by which time large, yawning cracks may have opened throughout the city, revealing demons, lizard people, etc. (or maybe we’re just in the Halloween spirit). “It may get worse before it gets better,” the District’s general manager, Tim Loftus, said. “And it’s anyone’s guess as to when that might be.”
No Crisis For You!: Do you hate the Supreme Court as much as we do? If not, consider this – this week the so-called justices refused to overturn a lower court ruling that prohibits emergency abortions for women experiencing a medical crisis. Texas law allows doctors to perform abortions when the life of the mother is in danger, but doctors say the law is dangerously vague and that lawmakers and the Texas Medical Board have refused to say under what conditions they may lawfully terminate a pregnancy.
Leak Deleaked: Thank god, a malfunction at the Longhorn Dam on Pleasant Valley Road that could have drained Lady Bird Lake like a leaky bathtub has been fixed. “We experienced a control system malfunction at Longhorn Dam, which affected the operation of the bascule gate, a movable drawbridge-like gate allowing precise water level control,” Austin Water’s Martin Barbosa told KUT News. Barbosa said it was an isolated event.
Out of the Blue: Residents across the state jolted awake in terror last week when a dreaded Blue Alert alarm sounded on their phones at 5am. The alert warned that a gunman who had shot the police chief of Memphis, Texas, remained at large. But there was little reason to be concerned for those of us in Austin, since Memphis, Texas, is approximately seven hours away by car, leading some to question the value of what they consider an unnecessary volume of Blue, Amber, and Silver alerts, KUT reports.
More Uvalde Videos: New videos of police officers responding to the 2022 Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde were released this week. But according to the Texas Tribune they don’t really add anything to prior news reports which described how officers waited for 77 minutes outside a school classroom before confronting an 18-year-old gunman who, by then, had killed 19 children and two teachers.
Paxton Takes a Whack At Voters: Our elected Attorney General Ken Paxton is still looking for ways to stop voting. On Monday, Paxton asked U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to provide the citizenship status of over 450,000 registered Texas voters. What Paxton could do in the unlikely event that he finds noncitizen registered voters is not clear. Federal law states that he can’t remove voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election once they’re registered.
Immigrant Families Lose FAFSA Access: The Texas Tribune reports that a glitch in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid has caused students from immigrant families to lose opportunities for student financial aid. FAFSA, which determines eligibility for financial aid, was updated this year but its early version didn’t allow parents without Social Security numbers to submit their financial information. The glitch was repaired after several months but because the financial aid is awarded on a first-come, first-served basis, immigrant families lost out.
Not Cruising to Victory: When Sen. Ted Cruz appeared on Fox News to praise JD Vance’s debate performance Oct. 1, he closed with what The Dallas Morning News described as “an urgent warning” about his own reelection prospects. “We’ve had now two polls in the last two weeks that show this as a one-point race,” Cruz said. “And in fact, we’ve had two polls that show the Democrat winning.” Now Cruz is attempting to soften his hardline Republican image ahead of the Cruz and Colin Allred debate Oct. 15.
Money Flows to Allred: Meanwhile, Colin Allred raised $30 million for his Senate campaign in the third quarter. That wasn’t as much as Beto O’Rourke raised for his campaign in the same quarter in 2018, but it still outpaced Cruz over the same three-month period this year, the Texas Tribune reported. Overall, Cruz and Allred have raised at least $132 million this cycle, much more than the $90 million Cruz and O’Rourke had amassed at this point in 2018.
Cruz Quiet on Abortion: With the polls and money as they are, this week Allred’s campaign started airing a TV ad blasting Cruz for his anti-abortion record. Cruz’s campaign has repeatedly refused to answer abortion-related questions from the Texas Tribune over the last weeks, the outlet reported. Among the unanswered questions, he hasn’t said whether he’d support a federal abortion ban, what he thinks of Texas’ lack of exceptions, or whether he believes an embryo created through IVF constitutes a person.
What Makes a Terrorist: The Texas Observer took a closer look at Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent decision to designate a Venezuelan gang as a foreign terrorist organization. Reporter Francesca D’Annunzio wrote that it’s another way Abbott is using the border to test the bounds of his authority. Normally the U.S. State Department designates terrorist groups, but a bill that took effect last fall appears to make Texas the only state with its own legal definition for a foreign terrorist organization. Republicans in Arizona, Louisiana, and South Carolina are following suit with efforts to define several Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
The Point in Progressives Visiting: Texas Monthly posed a question last week. Why are national progressives campaigning in Texas? Kamala Harris hasn’t spent money campaigning in Texas and author Dan Solomon says that makes sense, as history suggests she won’t win here. But Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders rallied young voters at a series of events, seemingly careful to avoid saying more radical things that might hurt the moderate image of Colin Allred. Solomon concluded that based on the last presidential election, it would take roughly half a million more Democrats voting in Texas to turn the tide, and while “anything is possible,” he predicts young progressives will soon “join their more seasoned fellow partisans in waiting for the state to go blue in the next election, or the one after, or maybe the one after that.”
Quote of the Week
“I gotta win, Howard. I gotta win. I gotta win.”
– Kamala Harris voicing to Howard Stern what we’re all thinking
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