Texas Progressives talk Abbott, ACLU, 1A, Goeb, Beto, Eric Johnson, rivers and dams

Texas Progressives remind you to be careful as a late heat wave continues to hang around and make sure that if you have kids in late-summer sports practices, that their coaches are taking care, too.

With that, and a dead-quiet Gulf of Mexico, we bring you this week's roundup.



Texana

SocraticGadfly agrees with ACLU of Texas and others that Abbott's anti-terror task force has an anti-immigrant problem, but can't  understand why the ACLU didn't also call Abbott out for being anti-First Amendment.

Will the GOP legiscritters who hate urban fees for, or bans of, plastic shopping bags listen to their alleged core rural constituents, who say the bags kill horses and livestock?

Monarch butterfly populations continue to decline, but grassroots efforts are trying to reverse that. 

As the dog days hit, a reminder that climate change will greatly increase Texas' electric demands. Sidebar: the vauntedly independent ERCOT has an Achilles heel: Not being connected to other grids means it has less room for error. (In a bad cold snap in early 2011 in West Texas, it had to get electricity from MEXICO.

The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority is draining four lakes, worried about the age, safety, etc., of dams and spillways. The cost to properly fix all six dams/spillways? $180 million. Property owners, seeing the lakes of their "lakefronts" about to disappear, are pissed off. Get pissed off at yourselves for supporting low-tax, cheap-gummint Tex-ass, even with one spillgate already failing. The GBRA has proposed the idea of special taxing districts, but homeowners have to sign on, of course. The Observer has warned that the potential failure of largely unregulated dams is a statewide problem.

The Great God Pan Is Dead finds the Texas connection to the George Washington High mural controversy.


Texas politics

TXElects reports that SBOE member Ruben Cortez has announced a primary challenge to State Sen. Eddie Lucio.

Scott Braddock expounds on the state of the Bonnen-MQS saga.

Gadfly has his updated take on Bonnen vs Mucus vs Dems.

Off the Kuff would love to not have to address the "Beto should run for Senate!" question any more, but today is not the day that will happen.

Gov. Strangeabbott replaced the incompetent hack David Whitely as Secretary of State with the PR hack from the Workforce Commission, Ruth Hughs.

Danny Goeb, I mean Dan Patrick, has a heart.


Dallas

New mayor Eric Johnson, showing himself to be the neoliberal sucker/idiot he was already known to be, is down with the city throwing recruitment dollars at Uber to get them to move their headquarters to Big D. No way Uber has 2,500 HQ full time employees, does it? Wiki says it only has 11K overall in the US. Meanwhile, also at the Dallas Observer, Jim Schutze is becoming a bit of a soft touch for Johnson. (That said, Schutze missed a good chance to kick the hypercapitalist hypocrites Jennifer Staubach Gates and Lee Kleinman right in the nads. They and their constituents hate appraisal districts, even when they base appraisals on sales of neighboring properties. But, they want their own houses, if they sell, to go for at least that much.)

Schutze still wants to know where Police Chief Hall is hiding.


Houston

David Bruce Collins talks about being at the initial meeting of Green Party of Houston.

Jeff Balke finds the bright spots in Houston traffic.

Marina Kormbaki documents her efforts to navigate Houston without a car.


National

A Shell plant in Pennsylvania essentially bribed workers to attend a Trump rally.

Brains talked about Beltway stenos vs. Bernie in his weekly Dems 2020 update.