Tabla de contenidos para May/June 2019 en The Texas Observer

Cut Off I've worked on population health diabetes programs in the Rio Grande Valley (“Life and Limb,” March|April issue). One of the primary issues we ran into was the inability to afford medication. The reference [in the story] to the man ignoring instructions and working while his foot healed is most likely because the man had to work. There is not an option to rest, because if you don't work you don't have money for treatment. The same goes for the last quote about skipping meals and using unprescribed medicines. Many patients self-medicate or share medications because they could not afford medicines. The Valley has a huge population of diabetics who want to be healthy, but cannot afford to be. ¶ For those who know someone with diabetes who is…

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton knows how to rile up his base — a skill he demonstrated in March when he made a stink about a Chick-fil-A in San Antonio. After City Council voted to block the anti-LGBTQ sandwich chain from opening in the airport, Paxton sent an indignant letter to Mayor Ron Nirenberg. “The Constitution’s protection of religious liberty is somehow even better than Chick-fil-A’s chicken,” he wrote. Nirenberg said he's "withholding comment" until the city attorney reviews the letter. Which of the following has not occured at a Texas Chick-fil-A? a. A naked man challenged customers to a fight in the parking lotb. A fistfight broke out after one customer accused another of loitering in the drive-thru lanec. A man lost 140 pounds in a year on the…

TITLE/ORGANIZATION National director of the Remembrance Project THE CAUSE Using personal tragedy to foment fear of an “illegal alien” crime wave NOTABLE ACCOMPLISHMENT Getting President Trump to create an office for victims of immigrant crime ALLIES Donald Trump, Steve King, Steve Bannon, Dan Patrick MONEY QUOTE “We are not anti-immigrant. We are against illegal aliens trespassing upon our soil.” ON MARCH 15, 2019, DONald Trump sat behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office and signed the first veto of his presidency, blocking a resolution passed by Congress that would have reversed his declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border. Before he signed the veto, Trump looked to his right and addressed Sabine Durden, whose son was killed in 2012 by a drunk driver who was in the…

WHEN I FIRST PICKED UP A COPY OF THE TEXAS OBSERVER I was an undergraduate at UT-Austin, working in the periodicals section of the LBJ Library. Back in the early 2000s, students still mostly did their research the old-fashioned way, by turning pages in books and magazines and journals. One of my jobs was to get the magazines onto the shelves for my peers. It was dull work, except for the chance to explore a wild assortment of publications. There was the splinter communist paper that favored enormous fonts and screaming headlines about U.S. imperialism in North Korea. There were weird, obscurantist, post-structuralist academic journals that used 30 words when three would’ve sufficed. I cut my teeth, or more appropriately paper-cut my fingers, on Harper’s, the New Yorker, Dissent, the…

THE TERM: “Turned French” WHO’S USING IT?: Michael Quinn Sullivan, CEO of Empower Texans As Texas House members debated a budget bill on the floor in late March, there was none of the usual fireworks or bomb throwing. Michael Quinn Sullivan, the head of the right-wing enforcer group Empower Texans, was disappointed. “It felt like the Republicans have been turned French and equipped with a white flag,” he complained on Twitter. He meant that the GOP had gone soft. Wimped out. Surrendered the culture war with a cry for mercy rather than a fight to the death. As Empower Texans saw it, lawmakers were spending too much money on frivolous things like public education and flirting with liberty-restraining notions of raising the smoking age to 21. They were not devoting…

Texas is, by and large, run by the petroleum and petrochemical industries. Spindletop ensured that the flow of money from the oil and gas lobbies to the Legislature, Republicans and Democrats alike, would never stop. THE TANK FARM OWNED BY THE INTERCONTINENTAL TERMINALS Company in Deer Park burned for four days, producing a cloud of thick black smoke that rose a mile above greater Houston. The ITC site boasted a storage capacity of 13 million gallons, mostly byproducts of oil refining. When the fire was finally put out, what was left in the burned tanks started evaporating at ground level, setting off monitors that detected the cancer-causing chemical benzene in the working-class suburbs nearby. ¶ Regulators mounted up. Ryan Sitton, one of three members of the Texas Railroad Commission, which…

TEARS OF THE TRUFFLEPIG by Fernando A. Flores FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX $16; 336 PAGES IT’S THE NEAR FUTURE IN SOUTH TEXAS, AND THINGS HAVEN’T GOTTEN any better. A global food shortage has killed 20 percent of the world’s population and spawned riots in American cities. The legalization of drugs has failed to stop the bloodlust of cartels. The border wall that Donald Trump has dreamed about now exists — there are two walls, in fact, one on each side of the Rio Grande — but it hasn’t stemmed the flow of contraband between the United States and Mexico.¶This is the vision of Fernando A. Flores, who was born in Reynosa and grew up in the Rio Grande Valley. His debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, follows a well-received book of…

What is left to belong to? I belong to you, painful hinge of the school bus door, you teeth belittling teeth. I belong to the mud-crusted back right paw. Until history dries hard in the sun & no one comes to pick it up. Years now I have come here. You can tell who never stops being terrified. You can tell who never learns where the launched ball will not fall & who with their small dead offering tries again for love. You know which hump means harm. There may have been meaner dogs somewhere out there, but he was the meanest I’d ever seen & for such a long time he was ours. Jenny Browne is the 2017-18 Poet Laureate of Texas and a 2019-20 Fulbright scholar in creative…

TED CRUZ HAS FINALLY FOUND THE COURAGE TO CALL OUT the Trump administration. He’s demanding that the president and his bureaucrats stop providing cover for the ethanol industry and stand up for fossil fuel rights. Oil companies have long complained that the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which requires refineries to blend ethanol into their gasoline, is killing their bottom line. Refiners that don’t have the capacity to blend ethanol are required to buy regulatory credits known as RINs from those that do. The industry wants the EPA to make it easier to wiggle out of compliance, which would save refiners hundreds of millions of dollars. In February, Cruz and four other senators threatened in a letter to derail the confirmation of the EPA’s then-Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler if he didn’t…

Hillman hopes officials fix the law soon, given the high stakes: "If prosecutors don’t play by the rules, then the whole system falls apart.” ERIC HILLMAN THOUGHT THE LAW WAS CLEAR WHEN HE DIScovered new evidence that could help the man he was prosecuting in 2014. Then a prosecutor in the Nueces County DA’s office, Hillman was investigating the case of David Sims, a man charged with “intoxication assault” after flipping a golf cart and injuring a young passenger. But a witness who police hadn’t spoken to told Hillman that Sims wasn’t drunk; the witness blamed the accident on horseplay, not booze. Hillman knew the information could help in Sims’ defense. Hillman figured he was obligated to tell Sims’ attorneys. A landmark, half-century-old U.S. Supreme Court case requires prosecutors to…

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I. THE MIND OF KEILAN BANKS IS PERPETUALLY CAUGHT between two worlds. In one of them — what many of us would call the “real world” — he attends art school at a community college in Kilgore, a small town just southwest of Longview in East Texas. He works at a local Walmart four days a week wrangling shopping carts. The other world is one that Keilan alone can see: a frightening, shadowy place where faceless figures manifest and winged devils circle overhead. Disembodied voices sound from all directions, Keilan says, urging him to hurt himself. Every so often the two worlds collide. And when they do, it can be explosive. One morning last year, in late June, Keilan drove from his home in west Longview to a nearby trailer…

WHEN TEXAS CITY INDEPENDENT SCHOOL District Superintendent Rodney Cavness heard about the shooting at Santa Fe High School on the morning of May 18, he sped the 30 minutes down the road to do what he could to help. Cavness is a gruff conservative who once promised to put President Obama’s guidelines for transgender students’ bathroom use “straight to the paper shredder.” His shaved head, broad shoulders and trimmed silver goatee give him the appearance of a retired WWE wrestler. That dark day last spring shook something loose in Cavness: It was time to stop hemming and hawing and get serious about securing his schools. In the aftermath of shootings, school administrators have been under immense pressure from parents to do something, anything, to provide a sense of safety. That…