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Regulators from the Public Utility Commission said the state’s beleaguered grid operator ERCOT will have three business days, instead of 60, to release information about power plant outages through September. Even so, ERCOT isn’t expected to include information about the root causes of failures in its reports. “There’s usually never anything published that’s like, ‘This is what broke and why,’ unless it’s in an investigation and there’s a settlement,” ERCOT expert Caitlin Smith told the Texas Tribune.
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Former State Sen. Wendy Davis and others traveling on a Joe Biden campaign bus that was followed and surrounded by supporters of former President Donald Trump last October are suing members of that so-called “Trump Train.” They’re also suing San Marcos law enforcement for failing to respond. The plaintiffs argue that the action constituted an illegal act of political intimidation.
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San Antonio has been targeted with more scam phone calls related to COVID-19 stimulus checks than any other U.S. city. A study by tech firm Hiya showed the number of stimulus scam calls has doubled in each of the past two months, with San Antonio’s 210 area code most frequently targeted, followed by Dallas’ 214 and Fort Worth’s 817. The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office last week fired a lieutenant who posted photographs of herself at the January 6 coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol building. The images of Lt. Roxanne Mathai in Washington, D.C. first surfaced months ago, at which point Sheriff Javier Salazar promised to terminate her employment. Mathai posted that the day of the coup was “the best day of my life” aside from the birth of her children. — Abe Asher
YOU SAID IT!
“I do know for a fact that lawsuits are being planned and that teams are being staffed right now. The state of Texas is going to be spending a lot of money defending itself in court.” — Henry Flores,
St. Mary’s University professor emeritus who’s testified in dozens of voting-rights cases, on the likelihood Texas will pass a sweeping voter restriction bill.
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That Rocks/That Sucks
YouTube Screen Shot / Flashpoint
ASSCLOWN ALERT
You can almost always count on assclowns breaking news at the National Religious Broadcasters convention. And right-wing evangelist Hank Kunneman and My Pillow guy Mike Lindell certainly didn’t let us down at the NRB’s annual gathering this month in Dallas. During a live taping of the show Flashpoint, the conspiracy-peddling pair egged each other on as they tried to good naturedly one-up each other in their favorite pastime: pretending Donald Trump won the 2020 election, Right Wing
Watch reports. Kunneman — a self-declared prophet who incorrectly called the 2020 election and just can’t seem to let it go — fell all over himself to praise Lindell for his continued peddling of Trumpwon conspiracy theories, according to the news site. At one point, Kunneman even likened the pillow salesman to John the Baptist. “There’s a scripture that says, ‘There was a man sent from Heaven, and his name was John,’” the evangelist said. “There’s a man sent from Heaven named Mike Lindell that God is using to wake up America with a different kind of awakening, and it’s called a great awakening to the truth.” We’re not sure that any higher authority — biblical or not — would use the word “truth” to describe the pipedreams and prevarications Lindell has spent months spreading. But, hey, it’s living. Or something. — Sanford Nowlin
The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) is demanding that the Archdiocese of San Antonio add 12 clergy to a list of priests accused of sexual abuse. The clergy are all Marianists who SNAP leaders say worked in San Antonio at some point during their careers. Only six of the twelve are still living. SNAP is also asking the Archdiocese and St. Mary’s University President Thomas Mengler to actively search for victims of the accused abusers.
A federal court has found a San Antonio resident guilty of an April 2020 social media hoax in which he posted on Facebook that he’d paid a person with COVID-19 to lick groceries at local supermarkets. Christopher Charles Perez, arrested by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Taskforce last year, has now been convicted of two counts of spreading hoaxes and false information. He faces up to five years in prison on each. — Abe Asher
The John the Baptist of conspiracy mongering Assclown Alert is a column of opinion, analysis and snark.
Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session of the Texas Legislature for July 8, at which point Republicans are again expected to try to push through a sweeping, anti-democratic voting bill that Democrats stymied by walking out at the end of the regular session. Democrats are vehement in their ongoing opposition to the bill.
Flickr / Ed Schipul
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