Depending on whom you ask, Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins’ repeated refusal to allow Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott into a local corruption investigation is either bold or stupid. Either way, it’s unusual. Abbott has offered prosecution assistance to local district attorneys 226 times since 2007, when lawmakers first gave him permission to do it. In all but 16 cases, he’s been invited in. And Watkins didn’t decline politely.
Emily Ramshaw
Emily Ramshaw was the editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune from 2016 to 2020. During her tenure, the Tribune — billed “one of the nonprofit news sector’s runaway success stories” — won a Peabody Award, several national Murrow Awards and top honors from the Online News Association.
Before joining the Tribune in 2010 as one of its founding reporters, Ramshaw spent six years at The Dallas Morning News, where she broke national stories about sexual abuse inside Texas’ youth lock-ups, reported from inside a West Texas polygamist compound and uncovered “fight clubs” inside state institutions for the disabled. The Texas APME named Ramshaw its 2008 star reporter of the year. In 2016, she was named to the board of the Pulitzer Prizes.
A native of Washington, D.C., and the product of two journalist parents, Ramshaw graduated from Northwestern University in 2003 with dual degrees in journalism and American history.
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Energy
TribBlog: PUC Chairman Won’t Seek ERCOT Job
Smitherman says while it’s probably legal for the state’s top energy regulator to seek the ERCOT chief executive job, “it just doesn’t feel right to go forward.”
Posted in
Higher Education
TribBlog: Gay Jesus Resurrected
A theater student’s production of Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Christi — canceled amid protest at Tarleton State University — will see the stage after all, at Fort Worth’s Rose Marine Theater, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Posted in
Energy
The Applicant
Can an energy regulator who’s on the board of an entity he oversees make a play for the top job there? Industry and government sources say that’s what Barry Smitherman, the chairman of Texas’ influential Public Utility Commission, is doing, though Smitherman won’t say whether he’s in the running.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
“I Won’t Stop Dispensing Justice”
Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins won’t go so far as to compare his support to the near-divine fervor of President Obama’s. But Watkins, who gained national prominence for using DNA evidence to exonerate nearly two dozen wrongfully convicted people in one of Texas’ notoriously tough-on-crime jurisdictions, will come close. “It’s a religious experience to vote for Craig Watkins,” Texas’ first African-American D.A. says without irony. Like Obama, he says, other Democratic candidates are “hanging their hats” on his re-election — and on the minority voters he draws to the polls. Like Obama, he’s got “a big target” on his back. “I’ve got to fight the political attacks coming at me from all directions,” he insists. “I’ll say it publicly: If you throw punches at us, we’ll drop a bomb on you.”
Posted in
State Government
The Runoffs: HD-14
“The 2011 session is no time to test the learning curve a freshman member,” says state Rep. Fred Brown, R-College Station. But former Brazos County Tax Assessor-Collector Gerald “Buddy” Winn thinks new leadership is precisely what this Central Texas House district needs — even if he’s “not the shiniest penny in the pile.”
Posted inState Government
The Runoffs: Our Final Four
With a few days to go before the April 13 runoffs, we check in on the last four on our list: three of them with incumbents in Bryan, El Paso, and Lubbock defending their seats, and a fourth for an open seat, also in Lubbock.
Posted in
Health care
The $27 Billion Question
The debate over how much federal health care reform will cost Texas put the state’s health and human services chief on the defensive on Wednesday, as he presented a budget estimate that is 20 times higher than federal projections.
Posted in
Health care
TribBlog: Health Care Price Tag Growing?
State officials painted a grim picture of how much the federal health care reform will cost Texas, and cautioned lawmakers on Wednesday that the price tag will likely grow.
Posted inState Government
The Runoffs: CD-17
It’s money versus geography and name ID in the race between the two top finishers in the five-way GOP primary in this conservative-leaning congressional district. The winner will face U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco.
