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Texas Observer
After Special Election Win, Molly Cook Gears Up for Senate Seat Runoff
The ER nurse and community organizer wants to bring “the Capitol to the people and the people to the Capitol.”. Last weekend, emergency room nurse and community organizer Molly Cook won a special election for Senate District 15 to serve the remaining seven months of John Whitmire’s term, who became Houston mayor after holding the seat for over 40 years. In a very low-turnout affair with 3 percent of registered voters casting ballots, Cook beat State Representative Jarvis Johnson by 14 percentage points. The win could give her a needed boost as she faces off against the frontrunner Johnson in the May 28 runoff for a full four-year term. The Texas Observer met with newly elected Senator Cook to learn about her plans heading to the runoff and her vision for serving Texans.
Distillers Want to Decriminalize Making Booze at Home
Modern moonshiners are caught between the interests of the federal government, spirits industry bigwigs, and even the Federalist Society. In 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the 21st Amendment ending 13 years of Prohibition, he was not primarily motivated by the hysteria around organized crime, nor the tragedy of the thousands who died ingesting toxic denatured alcohol. It was the Great Depression and the U.S. government needed money.
The ‘Remnant Alliance’ Is Coming for a School Board Near You
Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”. Articles cannot be rewritten,...
Rick’s Requiem: The Serious Impact of an Unserious Politician
A version of this story ran in the May / June 2024 issue. It’s been a decade since the pride of Paint Creek, James Richard Perry—yes, that’s Rick—occupied the Texas governor’s mansion. In that time, Perry launched a second failed presidential bid, cha-cha’ed on national TV as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars, served as former President Donald Trump’s energy secretary (after previously calling the same Donald Trump a “cancer on conservatism”), and ducked a congressional subpoena on the Ukraine impeachment investigation.
Small-Town Politics, National Consequences
A version of this story ran in the May / June 2024 issue. Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”
Surviving Baptistland
A well-known warrior in the #ChurchToo movement reveals in a new book how she escaped from an abusive Texas home and an abusive Southern Baptist church. Christa Brown, a former Texas appellate attorney, is revered as perhaps the best-known of the brave women (and men) who blew the whistle on abusive clergy and coverups at churches in the powerful Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). She began her quest at age 51, by bravely sharing her own story of being repeatedly sexually abused as a teen by her youth pastor, Tommy Gilmore, the man she’d gone to for counseling at her church in Farmers Branch. She first came forward as a whistleblower in 2009.
Standing Up for All Texans’ Stories
The new Alliance for Texas History calls for working everyone’s stories “into the fabric of Texas history.”. Nearly 150 members of the new Texas Alliance for History, including university professors and students, community historians, and staff members of historical sites and museums gathered Saturday at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth for the event, “Looking Back, Moving Forward.” Their collective goal: to form a group dedicated to sharing untold stories of Texas history, efforts that seem even more crucial in an era when various efforts to diversify the state’s historical record are under fire.
Bordering on Cowardice
A version of this story ran in the May / June 2024 issue. In an otherwise strong State of the Union address this March, President Joe Biden breathed new life into a term the immigrant rights movement has spent years pushing out of the Democratic vocabulary. He was stumbling over a sentence; right-wing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was heckling him from the audience about a young woman in Georgia who’d allegedly been killed the month prior by a non-U.S. citizen. Apparently parroting Greene, Biden confirmed that the woman, Laken Riley, had been killed “by an illegal.”
Editor’s Letter: Introducing Our May/June Issue
A version of this story ran in the May / June 2024 issue. This is my first time writing to you in this space, though I’ve been writing for y’all for the last eight years. I started my journalism career as an intern here at the Observer in 2016. My only qualification then was that I worked at a migrant shelter and spoke Spanish, and the hiring editor found that intriguing. For months, I struggled to find my footing. But one day the Observer found itself in need of a series about federal immigrant detention, perhaps the only topic for which I had sources and was qualified to cover. I wrote that series and was rewarded with a cub reporter job assisting our former border and immigration ace Melissa del Bosque. Later, I graduated to full-fledged staff writer, then assistant editor, and today I write to you as the Observer’s interim editor-in-chief.
An East Texas County Fights a Bitter Battle Over a Reborn Hospital
Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”. Articles cannot be rewritten,...
70 Years of Skewering
A version of this story ran in the March / April 2024 issue. Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”
Did Texas Police Violate First Amendment Rights of Pro-Palestine Protesters?
A UT professor and expert on freedom of expression weighs in on the controversial arrests of 57 individuals, including a journalist, at a campus demonstration. In a statement to the Observer, a UT-Austin spokesperson said that about half of those arrested were unaffiliated with the university. “Thirteen pro-Palestinian free speech events have taken place at the University largely without incident since October,” wrote Brian Davis, the spokesperson. “In contrast, this one in particular expressed an intent to disrupt the campus and directed participants to break Institutional Rules and occupy the University.”
Texas Exotic Hunts Are Dangerously Unregulated
Addax antelope for $8,000, scimitar-horned oryx for $7,500—both endangered species advertised as available to hunt at a private game reserve in Texas as of April 2024. The scimitar-horned oryx, a species declared “Extinct in the Wild” 24 years ago, was reintroduced into Chad’s Ouadi Achim Faunal Reserve in February 2023 thanks to conservation breeding programs but is still listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Another species currently listed as “Extinct in the Wild” (the Pére David’s deer, originally native to China) is also available to hunt, according to information posted online by Greystone Castle Sporting Club in Mingus.
An Unwinnable Drug War
A version of this story ran in the March / April 2024 issue. I was born and raised in Mexico and lived at the Texas-Mexico border for eight years. As a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville, now the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, I began to research Mexican organized crime groups that operate transnationally. Since 2009, I have studied illicit networks involved in U.S.-bound migration and the drug trade. My interests have to do mainly with the fact that I started my U.S. academic career as an immigrant, some of my relatives arrived here as undocumented immigrants, and because my father and brother were victims of extortion by Los Zetas in 2006.
The SpaceX Land Swap Is Only the Latest Texas Public Park Giveaway
(Ivan Armando Flores/Texas Observer) Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”
‘There Have to Be Limits’: Lawsuit Urges Scorching Prisons to Cool Down
New plaintiffs have expanded a 2023 lawsuit against TDCJ, accusing the agency of “cooking [prisoners] to death." Last June, Bernhardt Tiede suffered a likely stroke while living in a prison cell that regularly got up to around 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The 65-year-old—whose story inspired the 2011 Richard Linklater film “Bernie”—is housed at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville. Now, several new parties have joined and expanded a lawsuit Tiede filed last year against the prison system and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton related to its inadequate heat safety measures.
Poem: elegy for the [insert school shooting] children’s f—
To submit a poem, please send an email, with the poem as an attachment, to [email protected]. We are looking for previously unpublished works of no more than 30 lines, by Texas poets who have not been published by the Observer in the last two years. Pay is $100 on publication.
‘Forever Chemicals,’ Religion, and Family Tragedy in Texas
Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”. Articles cannot be rewritten,...
The Epic Texas Panhandle Fire Is Just a Preview
Texas officials go to bat for oil and gas while the climate-fueled Smokehouse Creek Fire still rages. On February 26, a tiny flame sparked a mile north of the ranching community of Stinnett, Texas. This part of the Texas Panhandle is sparsely populated—Hutchinson County has 20,000 people and roughly the same number of cows—so no one saw the smoldering patch of tall, dry grass where two county roads intersect. By the time area residents took notice of the smoke, it was too late: The fire had already spread into fallow fields and untamed barrow ditches, morphing into a monster in mere hours. By evening, the blaze—soon dubbed the Smokehouse Creek Fire—had reached 62 square miles. Firefighters were dispatched from all over Texas and beyond to try to prevent the entire Panhandle from going up in smoke.
In Travis County, a Fight over Bail Hearings Has Big Stakes for Criminal Defendants
Some arrestees in Austin lack legal representation at a stage that can determine their cases’ outcome. The ACLU and some officials want to change that. In Travis County, the magistration process—the initial bail hearing after someone is arrested—isn’t cinematic. Arrestees are either led to a small room within the jail’s central booking area, or a Travis County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO) employee might bring a computer to their holding cell. At the end of a short conversation, during which the arrestee can either remain silent or try to plead their case to get released on a personal bond instead of cash or surety bail, a magistrate—a judge who handles pre-trial hearings—determines the conditions of release.
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