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HThe Texas Supreme Court ruled last Friday that the state’s child welfare agency can resume investigations into parents who provide gender-affi rming care for their children. However, the court said a hold on the probe of a family now suing to stop the policy can remain in place. While the ruling is a blow for LGBTQ+ advocates, the court also said Gov. Greg Abbo has no authority to order the state child welfare offi cials to conduct such investigations.
HThe U.S. Treasury Department has launched a probe into Gov. Greg Abbo ’s use of federal COVID-19 relief money to fund his border crackdown. Abbo ’s Operation Lone Star has already cost Texas $4 billion, a quarter of which was CARES Act money intended for the state’s pandemic response. Treasury Department offi cials said the agency hasn’t ruled out clawing back the funds.
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HThe U.S. set a record for antisemitic incidents last year, and Texas was a signifi cant reason why. The Anti-Defamation League documented 2,717 reports of antisemitic incidents in the country last year — a 34% increase over 2020 and the highest number since the organization started tracking incidents in 1979. New York, New Jersey and California had the highest number of incidents, followed by the Lone Star State and Michigan, which were tied. .
Legendary Market Square restaurant Mi Tierra has unveiled an altar to street entertainer Hispanic Elvis. The performer, whose real name was John Cisneros, was a regular at the iconic eatery until he fell ill earlier this year with COVID-19 and an esophagus infection. He died in March. The altar, which joins memorials to Selena and former Mi Tierra workers, will be up for two weeks. Plans for a permanent memorial are in the works. — Abe Asher
YOU SAID IT!
— Mara Posada
Planned Parenthood South Texas Public Aff airs Director Mara Posada at San Antonio’s Bans Off Our Bodies rally.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s deafening whistle
Assclown Alert is a column of opinion, analysis and snark.
If case anyone’s still unclear on just how much lower Gov. Greg Abbo is prepared to go in his pursuit of a third term, it should be apparent by now that there is no bo om.
Need more proof? Abbo ’s rhetorical response last week to the infant formula shortage gripping the United States was not to urge calm, explain what he was doing to shore up supplies or unveil a plan for needy Texans to gain access.
Instead, the Republican governor issued a statement with National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd accusing the Biden Administration of turning a “blind eye to parents across America” by feeding “critical supplies to illegal immigrants before the very people he took an oath to serve.”
Abbo was not alone in sharing his outrage that the federal government had the gall to supply formula to infants in immigration detention centers rather than le ing them succumb to malnutrition so that red-blooded American babies could be prioritized. GOP fringe players including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have also worked themselves into a tizzy over the past few days over the notion that immigrant babies are less worthy of being kept alive.
Speaking of fringe players, it bears mentioning that Judd, who co-issued the statement with Abbo , was outed in a recent USA Today report for espousing the great replacement theory — you know, the white supremacist belief that lefties promote immigration because they want to undermine Western civilization by le ing in people of color.
Like much of Abbo ’s recent actions around immigration, the governor’s inference that immigrant children are less worthy of formula goes beyond dog-whistle racism. It’s a shrill, deafening police whistle blown at top volume. Texas’ electorate ignores this assclown’s pandering to white supremacists at its own peril. —
Sanford Nowlin
Instagram / @GovernorAbbott
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San Antonio City Council voted 8-3 last week to approve a new fi ve-year contract with the city’s police union, dismissing concerns that the contract doesn’t provide for enough civilian oversight of police. Mayor Ron Nirenberg said the pact includes improved accountability and transparency measures while signifi cantly boosting pay. Three council members disagreed, noting that San Antonio remains the only major city in Texas without an independent citizen review board into police misconduct.
The baby formula shortage that’s aff ected families across the nation has been particularly acute in San Antonio. Data from the retail software fi rm Datasembly used in a New York Times report shows that San Antonio is experiencing the highest rate of shortages of formula of any city in the country — over half of SA’s regular supply of baby formula was depleted as of May 10. Congress turned its a ention to the issue last week, but experts say a quick resolution appears unlikely. San Antonio’s new Ready to Work job training program has begun taking applications. The initiative, funded to the tune of $189 million by a 2020 vote, is expected to train up to 16,000 residents by its 2025 completion. Some 800 people were already pre-enrolled prior to its offi cial launch on Monday. To qualify for the program, residents must be 18 years of age or older and make less than $34,000 per year. —
Abe Asher

Find more news coverage every day at sacurrent.com


Sanford Nowlin
Fair and Accurate?
An activist asked the San Antonio Report to correct what he said were fi ve errors in its reporting on the Brackenridge Tree plan. The news site only agreed to one.
BY ABE ASHER
Controversy continues to circle around the city of San Antonio’s plan to cut down more than 100 trees in Brackenridge Park to rebuild an aging wall.
Late last month, Assistant City Manager David McCary apologized to activists for claiming that the tree-cu ing proposal was not in part also a plan to chase off migratory birds who roost in the park.
The fi ght over the trees has also led to a dustup over how local media is reporting on the plan. In late February, Robert Rivard, founder of the San Antonio Report and former editor-in-chief of the San Antonio Express-News, published an opinion piece arguing that “disinformation” is responsible for delaying the implementation of the city plan.
In the article, Rivard expressed disbelief that city offi cials hadn’t removed ribbons and other signage from endangered trees and opined that “good work is being lost in the noise of protest.” The claims rankled activists working to save the trees.
A week-and-a-half later, Deceleration News — an environmental blog co-run by former Current editor and Sierra Club organizer Greg Harman — tweeted that it had requested a series of corrections on Rivard’s piece.
The fi ve corrections Deceleration News requested ranged from Rivard’s characterization of plans for a new events center at the site to the scope of the bird population targeted for removal. In the end, San Antonio Report editors made just one.
To Harman’s mind, four of the fi ve requested corrections pointed out factual errors in the story, not instances where his opinion diff ered from Rivard’s. For example, he pointed out that Rivard said some of the trees scheduled for removal aren’t native, yet a permit request for the project states that all the trees are native.
“The Report does really important work,” Harman said in an interview with the Current. “There’s good journalists there. But I felt like at a moment where we knew the city was manipulating the public by spreading untruths and we needed journalists to step in and hold them accountable and dig in on the story, he was taking shots at the activists.”
The single correction, noted at the bo om of the article, reads “Correction: This column has been updated to correctly state that the trees are being measured by diameter, not girth.”
The San Antonio Report didn’t provide a public rationale for why it declined to make the other corrections, which were supported by video, public records and past reporting supplied by Harman. Deceleration News also maintains that the spirit of the column violated the San Antonio Report’s policy against “doing harm.”
“This is something I’ve seen that is very, very common, where Bob writes about things like, ‘activists are to blame for stuff ,’” Harman said. “When, in fact, the job of an activist is to decry an injustice. That’s it. After that, the community’s conscience needs to kick into gear and decide what’s right and what’s wrong … I thought the tone of it was off ensive.”
San Antonio Report Editor-in-Chief Leigh Munsil said the site reviewed each of Harman’s requests before making its fi nal decision to issue just a single correction.
“We are always happy to engage with readers on our reported content, as well as our opinion columns,” Munsil wrote in an email to the Current. “We gave the full request on this column a fair hearing, and it led to the correction we ended up approving.”
Harman said he’s unconvinced by the Report’s explanations for why staff neglected to make the rest of the corrections or address the tone of the column.
“That all felt protective of Bob in a way that I think hurts the brand of the outlet, to be frank,” he added.


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