Gulf Chemical may be the most brazen polluter in Texas. An Observer review of thousands of pages of court records and internal agency documents, and interviews with a former company executive reveals a company that operated outside the law for almost four decades, even as citizens, activists and TCEQ’s own investigators pleaded for action.
In November, even as Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott was threatening to string up international election observers if they got too close to the polls in Texas, Abbott’s staff was preparing a report that throws a bucket of water (fluoridated, I’m sure) on the whole 10th Amendment/Agenda 21/state sovereignty business that now consumes Texas Republicans.
The book is a hilarious yet hellish account of wasted days and wasted nights in Brownsville, which Martinez depicts as a dirt-poor land of extreme machismo, where growing up means having to contend with a drug-smuggling father and the hijinks of two sisters who bleach their brown hair blond and call themselves “Mimi” in a fruitless effort to pass as Caucasian.
Reporter breaks journalistic convention by sharing entire drafts with ‘customers’ in University of Texas press office.
In my downtown Austin neighborhood, fall Friday nights are filled with memories of growing up and the rite of passage that is high school football.