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1. OVERALL EPISODE THEME: ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:
2. The next election is the General Election on November 3^rd, 2020
   1. “… [A]sk not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country!” ~ John F Kennedy, Inaugural speech, January 20, 1961
3. VOTING FAQ
   1. VOTETEXAS.GOV – Texas Voter Information
   2. HARRISVOTES.COM­ – Countywide Voting Centers
   3. Make sure you are registered to vote!
   4. On the possibility that the courts make you eligible to vote by mail on Election Day due to the Covid-19 virus, make sure that you are ready with an application to mail in. These are available from HARRISVOTES.COM­.  Follow directions carefully.
   5. For personalized, nonpartisan voter guides and information, consider visiting VOTE411.ORG    Ballotpedia.com and Texas League of Women Voters are also a good place to get election info.
   6. If you are denied your right to vote any place at any time at any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
   7. HarrisVotes.com (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965), Harris County Clerk
   8. VOTETEXAS.GOV – Texas Voter Information
   9. HARRISVOTES.COM – Countywide Voting Centers
      1. HARRIS CTY – IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED FOR VOTING: Do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain one of these IDs?
         1. Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
         2. A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
         3. Current utility bill
         4. Bank statement
         5. Government check
         6. Paycheck
         7. A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
   10. You may vote early by-mail if
       1.  You are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
       1. Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
       1. Sick or disabled;
       1. 65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
       1. Confined in jail, but eligible to vote.
       1. Make sure you are registered:
   11. Ann Harris Bennett, Tax Assessor-Collector & Voter Registrar
       1. CHECK REGISTRATION STATUS HERE
          1. CLICK How to register to vote in Texas
       2. Outside Texas, try Vote.org.
4. We’re going to have a lot more very specific information on mail-in voting in Harris County a little further into the show.
5. … Homeless encampments get cleaned …, By Emma Whalen | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM/HOUSTON | 9:40 AM Aug 17, 2020 CDT | Updated 9:40 AM Aug 17, 2020 CDT
   1. Using funding from the city’s federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security funding, City Council approved the purchase of six pickup trucks with trailer combinations and two rear loaders for heavy material for the city’s solid waste department. The vehicles were used Aug. 13 to clear debris and power-wash homeless encampments throughout Houston without disturbing residents’ belongings, Mayor Sylvester Turner said.
   2. “We want to treat them with the dignity and respect they rightfully deserve. Just because you are homeless doesn’t mean you need to be living in unsanitary conditions,” he said.
6. Texas put hundreds of hours into finding and arresting police brutality protesters. Lawyers call it a “witch hunt.” – Two days of unruly protests at the Texas Capitol in May left graffiti on the historic building and cuts and bruises on state police officers. Since then, the Texas Department of Public Safety has spent the summer naming and arresting suspects, the majority of whom are accused of misdemeanors. by Jolie McCullough | TEXASTRIBUNE.ORG  | Aug. 21, 202012 PM
   1. Nearly a month after Keegan Godsey attended an unruly protest against police brutality at the Texas Capitol in May, state police officers arrested the 23 year old at gunpoint while he was getting into a car in Austin, his lawyer said.
   2. He’s accused of spray painting the doors of the historic building.
   3. More than a month after that, Texas Department of Public Safety officers showed up at the home of Jordan Teal’s grandmother, guns drawn, and interrogated the 18 year old’s relatives, his attorney said.
   4. State police believe he threw a water bottle at an officer during the May protest.
   5. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick indicated this week that without intervention from the state’s law enforcement agency, the Austin protests would have turned into unfettered chaos. DPS Director Steven McCraw, the state’s top cop, said days after the unrest in May that “violent extremists” who exploited the protests to cause destruction would be pursued.
   6. Since then, DPS has arrested more than a dozen Texans as part of its highly publicized, resource-laden investigation into the Capitol protests. Special agents have spent hundreds of hours this summer poring through social media posts, surveillance footage and YouTube videos to identify protesters they believed engaged in criminal activity, the agency said. The department has also publicly announced arrests and repeatedly offered up to $1,000 in cash for the public’s help in naming the often-masked Capitol protesters seen in grainy screenshots investigators pull from compiled footage.
   7. But protesters’ attorneys call the DPS probe an unparalleled political “witch hunt” against protesters in which the state’s police force is using tactics far too aggressive for the suspected crimes. Several have argued the reaction is an attempt to distract the public from recently heightened criticism of American law enforcement’s use of force against Black people and instead bolster the perception of officers as protectors.
   8. “I think it’s completely f***ing absurd that they’re wasting time and energy to be tracking down kids with petty misdemeanors to throw them back in jail during COVID,” said Austin defense attorney Carl Guthrie. “If anyone has any ideas that politics don’t affect policing, I hope that … gets put away.”
   9. The majority of the 14 people DPS says have been jailed as part of the investigation so far are suspected of only misdemeanor crimes, like pushing onto closed Capitol grounds or tossing water out of a bottle onto an officer, according to DPS press releases and arrest affidavits. But some are facing felony charges and years behind bars for allegedly kicking the door panel of a police SUV or hitting an officer with a tossed water bottle.
   10. Most are accused of participating in a riot. And some were arrested multiple times for actions during the same protest, with new warrants issued weeks or months after initial arrests and police taking people from their cars and homes and putting them back into jail. Nearly half of the arrestees are Black. Almost all are in their teens or early 20s, according to DPS releases and court records. At least one other DPS case has already been rejected by prosecutors.
   11. DPS reported 11 officers were injured with cuts and bruises from assaults during Capitol protests that weekend, and tens of thousands of dollars worth of property damage was done. The agency dismissed accusations against the department in an email to The Texas Tribune Wednesday, saying there was no indication of officer misconduct or complaints filed. The agency said descriptions of arrests and interrogations told by defense attorneys and protesters were “riddled with inaccuracies or completely false.” No further specifics were given by Friday afternoon when asked about falsehoods. …
7. More Than 550,000 Primary Absentee Ballots Rejected In 2020, Far Outpacing 2016, By  Pam Fessler,   Elena Moore | NPR.ORG |  August 22, 20205:00 AM ET
   1. … That’s far more than the 318,728 ballots rejected in the 2016 general election and has raised alarms about what might happen in November when tens of millions of more voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, many for the first time. …
   2. The numbers are also significant because of large partisan differences in how Americans plan to vote this fall. Democrats have expressed more interest than Republicans in voting by mail — 47% to 28% in the Democracy Fund/UCLA survey. Forty-eight percent of those who intend to vote for Joe Biden say they will use mail-in ballots, compared with 23% of Trump supporters. …
8. More info on General Election voting in the Year of Covid from Roxanne Werner, Director, Community Relations
   1. I got this question from a reader on my blog post: It would be nice to have the address of the early voting clerk’s office. I assume it would be the address downtown. It would also be nice to know if it can be dropped off at any early voting site during early voting or whether the only option is to take it downtown and deal with lines and traffic. Thanks.
      1. AUTO RESPONSE : Hand Delivered, in-person by the Voter to the Early Voting Clerk’s office.  For the November 3, 2020 general election, the hand-delivery period has been extended.  You may deliver your own personal ballot to the Early Voting Clerk’s Office during regular business hours any time after you receive and mark it.  Please contact your local Early Voting Clerk’s Office at the phone number listed at the bottom of this notice if you have questions about their hours of operation.  You may also hand-deliver your own personal ballot to the Early Voting Clerk’s Office on Election Day between the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.  You may only hand-deliver your own Carrier Envelope and not the Carrier Envelope for another individual. You will be asked to present an acceptable form of photo ID listed in Section 63.0101(a) of the Texas Election Code.  If you do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain an acceptable form of photo ID, you can execute a Reasonable Impediment Declaration and provide a supporting form of identification listed in Section 63.0101(b) of the Texas Election Code.  Also, if you have a Voter Registration Certificate containing the Disability Exemption (E) notation, you may present it.  You will be asked to sign a signature roster.
   2. When will absentee/mail-in ballots be mailed out?
      1. They will begin to be mailed out mid to late September – this is after all of the candidate and entities deadlines and the time our office takes to create the actual ballot.
   3. When should the last mailed ballots arrive to voters? When should people expecting mailed ballots begin to inquire after them if not received?
      1. Mail ballots will continue to go out up until the last applications that were received by the deadline has been processed. I would typically say 7-10 days after your application has been mailed you can call to check on it – 713-755-6965.
   4. If someone receives a mail-in ballot but decides to drop it off in person, where precisely should voters be able to drop off a completed mail-in ballot?
      1. Ballots can be dropped off at any of our offices locations, listed above. Voters will need an ID similar to voting. They aren’t able to be dropped off at a polling location.
   5. If someone receives a mail-in ballot but decides to vote in person, my advice has been to bring the ballot to a polling place so that it can be “spoiled” and accounted for; they can then vote normally at the polling place. Is this correct?
      1. That’s correct – if you change your mind, please bring your ballot to the polls. Otherwise, you will need to vote a provisional ballot at the polling location.
   6. Is there a way to “track” your ballot so that you know it has arrived at the proper destination?
      1. We should have updates on this soon – so stay tuned! For now, I would let people know to call our office at 713-755-6965 and we can let you know what stage in the process your ballot is in.
   7. Is there a way to know that your ballot has been counted?
      1. Mail ballots are counted just like all of the other votes.
   8. To what extent are these rules determined by the State and to what extent are they determined by County?
      1. That’s a tougher thing to outline, but most of the laws are at the state level – guidelines for returning mail ballots, dates for voting, etc. Happy to answer any specific questions too.
   9. This brings up the question, to what extent will your answers apply to other Texas counties, and how much variation are we likely to see?
      1. A lot of the basics are similar, but the details in these questions are kind of specific. For example, not all counties have this many locations that are they able to drop off like Harris County was. But I would recommend anyone check out their local election officials website, or give them a call to verify.
9. Trump pledges to send ‘sheriffs’ and ‘law enforcement’ to polling places on Election Day, but it’s not clear he can, By Fredreka Schouten | CNN.COM | Updated 12:40 PM ET, Fri August 21, 2020
   1. President Donald Trump on Thursday said he would send law enforcement officials to polling locations to guard against voter fraud in November’s election, although it’s not clear he has the authority to do so. …
   2. Federal law prohibits intimidation at the polls and makes it illegal for any “civil” or “military” federal officer to order “troops or armed men” to polling places, unless needed to “repel armed enemies of the United States.” …
   3. If Trump did so, it likely would trigger legal action from Democrats, who would claim the move amounted to a voter-suppression tactic. And it would have echoes of a case that resulted in a federal court decree that for decades sharply restricted the Republican National Committee’s “ballot security” work without prior judicial approval.
   4. The 1982 decree arose from a Democratic National Committee lawsuit that accused the RNC of trying to suppress votes in New Jersey by, among other things, posting armed, off-duty police officers at the polls in Black and Latino neighborhoods. The decree expired in 2018, and this election marks the first presidential contest since 1980 that the GOP presidential nominee and the RNC will work together on poll-watching. …
   5. On Friday, Kristen Clarke, who oversees the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, called Trump’s pledge “an old and familiar tactic pulled right from the Jim Crow playbook and often specifically targeted at Black voters and voters of color.”
   6. She said her group would “use every tool in our arsenal to block thinly veiled efforts aimed at discouraging participation by eligible voters this election season.” …
10. “A second Trump term might injure the democratic experiment beyond recovery”, Opinion by the Editorial Board | WASHINGTON POST | August 21, 2020
    1. Excerpt: Four years ago, after Mr. Trump was nominated in Cleveland, we  [the Washington Post Editorial Board] did something in this space we had never done before: Even before the Democrats had nominated their candidate, we told you that we could never, under any circumstances, endorse Donald Trump for president. … [W]e said [Donald Trump was], “uniquely unqualified” to be president.
    2. “Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together,” we warned. “His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.”
    3. The nation has indeed spent much of the past three-plus years fretting over whether that experiment could survive Mr. Trump’s depredations. The resistance from some institutions, at some times, has been heartening. The depth of the president’s incompetence, which even we could not have imagined, may have saved the democracy from a more rapid descent.
    4. But the trajectory has been alarming. The capitulation of the Republican Party has been nauseating. Misbehavior that many people vowed never to accept as normal has become routine.
    5. A second term might injure the experiment beyond recovery.
    6. And so, over the coming weeks, we [the Editorial Board of  the Washington Post] will do something else we have never done before: We will publish a series of editorials on the damage this president has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term. And we will unabashedly urge you to do your civic duty and vote: Vote early and vote safely, but vote.
    7. He has sought to undermine confidence in democracy itself, lying about the prevalence of fraud, floating the possibility of delaying the election and even suggesting he may not accept its results.
    8. These are high crimes and misdemeanors, as the framers of the Constitution understood the term. But this time it is up to us, the American people, to remove Mr. Trump from office.
    9. If Joe Biden prevails in November, and Democrats control both houses of Congress, Trump’s new methane regulations will probably be reversed. Barring that, methane presents an ominous preview of what Americans can expect from four more years of Trump: An invisible, deadly, possibly existential threat, ignored for flashier distractions.
11. Forget the Trump tweets. This is the Trump action that might actually kill us. Opinion by Catherine Rampell, Columnist | WASHINGTONPOST.COM | August 17, 2020 at 5:48 p.m. CDT (crampell@washpost.com)
    1. If you want to understand the long-term consequences of the Trump presidency, forget his Twitter feed. Instead, think about methane.
    2. Methane is the main ingredient of natural gas. When released into the atmosphere, it traps 80 times as much heat as its better-known greenhouse-gas cousin, carbon dioxide, over 20 years. Because of methane’s potent heat-trapping abilities, this “super-pollutant” is the sleeper issue of climate change.
    3. Unfortunately, scientists don’t know precisely how much methane is being released because there hasn’t been adequate measurement. But recent studies suggest emissions are much greater than previously believed. In fact, recent research estimates that the fossil-fuel industry emits about 13 million metric tons of methane annually. That’s 80 percent higher than estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. In heat-trapping terms, it is roughly equivalent to total carbon dioxide emissions from all of the United States’ remaining coal-fired plants. …
    4. Much of the methane emitted into the atmosphere comes from undetected leaks in oil and gas operations. So, in 2016, the Obama administration finalized new regulations to detect and plug methane leaks from wells, pipelines and storage tanks. These totally reasonable regs were supported by energy companies such as Shell, BP and ExxonMobil; they knew methane leaks were a black eye for the fracking industry, which has marketed natural gas as a more climate-friendly alternative to coal. …
    5. On Thursday, the Trump administration rolled back the rules anyway. In so doing, it provided a useful encapsulation of virtually every awful theme of this administration — and what’s at stake if President Trump gets reelected.
    6. The new rules … are not merely anti-science, but anti-measurement. That is, the rollback’s primary initial impact is to keep Americans in the dark about a climate-damaging pollutant.
    7. “How could we as an advanced society not want to measure these emissions?” asks Michael Greenstone, director of the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. “This is such a concerted effort to stick our heads in the ground.” …
    8. Then, to the extent the administration did rely on data in justifying its methane deregulation, it cooked the books.
    9. It did this by using accounting gimmicks in its official regulatory cost-benefit analysis. In technical documents, the administration said it was no longer taking into account harms that climate change might have outside U.S. borders; and also that it was changing the “discount rate” — that is, reducing how much weight it placed upon future costs. It was Trump’s trademark isolationism and short-termism, made mathematically explicit.
    10. The result? The Obama-era estimate of methane’s social costs were ratcheted down from about $1,400 per metric ton to just $55 under a Trump accounting scenario. Incidentally, the Trump administration was admonished for this same phony math in a court case blocking a related environmental rule last month. …
    11. So, too … is deregulatory action that disproportionately harms low-income families and people of color. As is Trump’s claim that such harms are necessary to help businesses, even though major businesses themselves reject the “help.”
    12. Similar dynamics played out with the administration’s rollback of automotive fuel-economy standards (which were supposedly designed to help automakers, even though major auto companies opposed the rollback); and of mercury emissions regulations (likewise opposed by the utility plants Trump claimed to be aiding).
    13. More broadly, the new methane rules are emblematic of this administration’s faulty assumption that there’s always a trade-off between what’s good for the economy and what’s good for public health. In fact — whether we’re talking about controlling the novel coronavirus or curbing climate change — the twin goals are complementary. In the long-run, a healthy populace (and environment) are necessary for a healthy economy.