A new exhibit titled “77 Minutes in Their Shoes” honors the victims of the Robb Elementary shooting. (Sarah Sudhoff)
(UVALDE, TEXAS) — When authorities were trying to identify the victims of the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, many of the children could only be identified by the shoes they were wearing that day.
“How often do you take your child to school and not pay attention to what they’re wearing that day?” Kimberly Rubio, mother of victim Alexandria “Lexi” Rubio, said to ABC News.
A new exhibit titled “77 Minutes in Their Shoes” underscores this question to raise gun violence awareness while honoring the 21 victims of the Uvalde mass shooting on May 24, 2022. The exhibit, which runs Jan. 10 to Jan. 19 at the Canopy Projects Gallery in Austin, is a collaboration between Houston artist Sarah Sudhoff and Lives Robbed, a gun violence prevention non-profit created by families of the children killed in the Uvalde mass shooting.
“I thought, ‘What are children wearing when they’re gunned down in schools? And how do we bring this to the attention of Americans?’ And so that’s kind of how the idea was born,” Rubio, who is also president of Lives Robbed, said.
The “77 Minutes” in the exhibit’s name refers to how long the gunman was in the school before police confronted him and ended the massacre.
Sudhoff, a Cuban American artist whose work often merges themes of motherhood and gender with social issues like gun violence and domestic violence, told ABC News that the exhibit was partly influenced by others showcasing the clothing women wore on the night they were sexually assaulted.
However, in this exhibit, photographs of the shoes and portraits of family members with the shoes will be on display. Thirteen of the 21 families participated in the exhibit and all photographs were shot by Sudhoff.
The photographer said she chose to print the images on sheer fabric hanging from the ceiling so that the public can experience the portraits in a more direct manner.
“These portraits are on fabric, and they are thin and you can see through them and maybe you’ll see somebody else through them,” Sudhoff said.
She added, “I intentionally did not make them rigid, I did not make them hard, I wanted you to see the public through them, I wanted them to move because these families are still evolving, they’re on an endless journey, they’re on this unfortunate, heartbreaking journey, and they’re constantly moving and shifting and morphing.”
Although “77 Minutes in Their Shoes” honors the victims of the mass shooting, Rubio said creating the exhibit still posed moments that were emotionally challenging.
“The hardest part was when we took the photos at Robb Elementary featuring the three moms [Rubio, Veronica Mata, and Gloria Cazares] and our girls’ shoes,” Rubio said. “That was difficult—to be back at Robb, to think about taking them to school that morning and the shoes they were wearing, walking into that school and never walking back out.”
The exhibit’s opening weekend also includes panels tackling topics such as gun violence prevention, legislation, art activism, and grief. Arnulfo “Arnie” Reyes, who taught at Robb Elementary School and was the sole survivor of classroom 111, is speaking on a panel titled “The Classroom After Tragedy” to talk about his former students and his recovery.
“It’s always important for me to be one of the voices that supports this and speaks on behalf of the students that are no longer here … I might have a little bit more of an impact just because I was there,” Reyes said to ABC News.
Reyes said he tries to spread awareness and support the families of the victims every opportunity he gets, and he hopes that by participating in the exhibit, that he can continue to advocate for his students and inspire change.
“I would like for people to come with an open mind to see the shoes, to see this is all they have left,” Reyes said. “Something that I said from the beginning is that I would try to do anything that I can do to not let these babies die in vain, and I hope that people join me in that journey to not let anybody else die in vain and to change things.”
HENDERSON COUNTY — Henderson County Sheriff’s arrested a man wanted in South Central Oklahoma on Monday. According to our news partner KETK, Clovis Reeves was wanted by the Hughes County Oklahoma Sheriff’ Office was for possession of a controlled substance and attempting to elude a peace officer with a dangerous weapon.
Officials said Henderson County Sheriff’s Office Sergeant Patrick Johnson received information that Reeves was hiding in the Wagon Tree subdivision in Athens. Johnson found Reeves white Ford F350 flatbed pickup in a ditch near a house on Buggy Hub Trail. Reeves was at this house and was arrested for an outstanding Oklahoma arrest warrant. He was found to be in possession of suspected methamphetamine. Reeves is currently awaiting arraignment at the Henderson County Jail.
RUSK – The Rusk Rural Water Supply Corporation has issued a boil water notice for multiple county roads after a main like leak happened on Tuesday according to our news partners at KETK. This means that Rusk Rural Water Supply customers on CR 1608, 1609 and 1630 should bring their water to a vigorous rolling boil for at least two minute before cleaning or consumption. Officials will notify the public when the notice can be rescinded. Rusk Rural Water Supply can be contacted for any questions at 903-683-6178 or at 1055 N Dickinson Dr. in Rusk.
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ETOILE – The Nacogdoches County Sheriff’s Office said that a homemade bomb was found during a traffic stop near the former Etoile Independent School District campus on Monday night.
According to our news partner, deputies conducted a traffic stop near County Road 560 and FM 226 at around 10:15 p.m. on Monday because of an alleged motor vehicle violation. When the deputies approached the vehicle they allegedly smelled the odor of marijuana and saw multiple firearms in plain view, a sheriff’s office press release said. The deputies and Texas Department of Public Safety state troopers searched the vehicle and reportedly found the following items: Two rifles, one of which was reported stolen, two handguns, marijuana and drug paraphernalia, suspected MDMA and a homemade explosive device.
HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Harris County had the highest real GDP of any county in the state in 2023, according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The county’s real GDP was nearly $430 million, which was around $125 million more than second-place Dallas County. Montgomery County and Fort Bend County also rounded out the top 10 while Brazoria County and Galveston County give the Houston metro area five spots among the top 20 Texas counties in GDP. Nationally, only Los Angeles County in California and New York County in New York had higher GDPs than Harris County. Harris County itself is also greater than a majority of the 50 states.
When including the entire Houston metro area, the region has a real GDP of about $550 million. However, that is only seventh in the country and second in the state behind the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The region’s real GDP growth rate from 2022 to 2023 ranked third among metropolitan areas with at least 1 million people behind Seattle and Oklahoma City. Among all metropolitan areas, the Beaumont-Port Arthur area and the College Station-Bryan area rank in the top 20 for GDP growth.
DALLAS – The Dallas Morning News reports that a few years ago, with the nation in the throes of a pandemic, Sen. Nathan Johnson’s effort to add 1 million low-income Texans to Medicaid drew support from a handful of Republicans in the GOP-dominated Texas Legislature. Most of those lawmakers are gone from the Capitol, an exodus that strips away at the Dallas Democrat’s slim hope of seeing Texas join 40 other states and Washington, D.C. in expanding Medicaid under the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Even so, Johnson filed his bill for the upcoming session — his third try — just in case the leaders of an increasingly conservative Texas Legislature change their minds. “I just want a million people to get health insurance, I want health insurance premiums to come down, and I want to do it without levying any new tax on the people,” Johnson said.
“The strategy is to present something that would allow Republican leadership to say, ‘This is a win for all of us.’ I think if there were a signal from leadership, then we would see Republicans fall in line behind this,” he said. Senate Bill 232 would create the Live Well Texas program, which would expand Medicaid while adding elements passed in other conservative states – including incentives to encourage self-sufficiency through health savings accounts, employment assistance and rewards for healthy behaviors. Additionally, the legislation seeks to increase reimbursements to health care providers who see Medicaid patients, potentially expanding access to care for Medicaid patients by bringing more hospitals, doctors and others to the program. In 2021, Johnson’s Medicaid-expansion bill had no Republican support in the Senate, but nine GOP House members joined 67 Democrats as co-authors of an identical House bill. The legislation was bottled up in a committee. Johnson tried again in 2023, but the effort gathered less bipartisan momentum during a particularly contentious session. “I was very serious about passing it when I first filed it, and we had a really good run at it, but I don’t see how the situation has improved,” Johnson said. “But I want something out there to say that if this state wants a conservative way to bring home its own tax dollars and improve the health of its population and bring down health premiums and stabilize family finances and help set people on a path to independence, there is a way to do it that has conservative bona fides.” Opponents of expanding Medicaid say the program is mismanaged, financially unstable, too expensive and fosters government reliance. They also argue that expansion does not improve health outcomes and prioritizes able-bodied adults over children and adults with disabilities who rely heavily on the program.
(NEW YORK) -- Federal health officials have begun collecting samples of aged raw cow's milk cheese across the U.S. to test for bird flu, the Food and Drug Administration announced.
Sample collection started at the end of this month and is expected to be completed by the end of March 2025, the FDA said Monday. If needed, the agency said it will extend the collection period.
It comes after the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a federal order earlier this month that raw milk samples nationwide would be collected and shared with the agency to be tested for bird flu.
The FDA said it plans to collect 300 samples of raw cow's milk cheese that has been aged for at least 60 days from warehouses and distribution centers across the country.
Samples will be tested with a PCR test, which looks for genetic material from the virus, and will be completed within one week of collection, according to the FDA. Samples that indicate the presence of the virus will undergo viability testing.
Viability testing will be done by injecting part of the virus into an embryonated egg and analyzing if it grows or multiplies.
Raw milk cheese is made with unpasteurized milk. In the U.S., cheese can be made from raw milk but must be aged a minimum of 60 days to lessen the risk of any pathogens that may be present, per the FDA.
Samples that test positive for viable virus will be "evaluated on a case-by-case basis," the FDA said, and the agency may issue actions "such as a recall, follow-up inspection or other possible responses to protect public health."
The FDA has previously warned of the dangers of drinking raw milk, which does not undergo pasteurization -- a process that kills viruses and bacteria. The agency currently considers unpasteurized soft and hard cheeses, as well as other products made from unpasteurized milk, a "high-risk choice."
Past studies from federal health officials have shown that pasteurization effectively kills the bird flu virus. Nearly all, or 99%, of the commercial milk supply produced on dairy farms in the U.S. follows a national pasteurization program.
Pasteurization has been a practice in the U.S. for more than 100 years and kills harmful bacteria and viruses by heating milk to a specific temperature over time, the FDA notes.
The U.S. has been facing an outbreak of bird flu, or avian influenza, since April, when the first human case was reported.
Almost all confirmed cases have had direct contact with infected cattle or infected livestock. Most bird flu cases in the U.S. have been mild, and patients have typically recovered after receiving antiviral medication.
TYLER – The city of Tyler says in a release that in preparation for the Downtown Improvement Plan’s construction, paid parking meters in Downtown Tyler are being removed. Until construction begins in areas that affect these parking spots, patrons may park for free for up to two hours. Downtown Ambassadors will be on a routine patrol to enforce the two-hour parking limit. The Main Street department encourages businesses to communicate this change to their employees. Ideally, employees of businesses should utilize off-square parking?and parking garages to allow customers and visitors to park in spots closest to retail and business. Continue reading Downtown Tyler paid meters transition to free two-hour parking
(NEW YORK) -- Nearly half of U.S. states are set to raise their minimum wage at the outset of 2025, boosting pay for millions of workers stretching from California to Maine.
In all, 21 states will raise their wage floors on Jan. 1 in keeping with inflation-adjusted increases or as part of scheduled hikes that take effect at the beginning of each calendar year.
The pay increases will affect about 9.2 million workers, who will gain a combined $5.7 billion over the course of 2025, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, or EPI.
After the wave of wage hikes, Washington will become the state with the highest minimum wage, offering workers $16.66 per hour. Workers in California and New York will enjoy the second-highest wage floor, as both states implement a minimum hourly wage of $16.50.
Pay increases set to take hold in the new year will bring the wage floor to $15 an hour or higher in Washington, D.C., as well as 10 states, among them Delaware, Illinois and Rhode Island. Those areas play host to one of every three U.S. workers, EPI found.
Overall, the states set to raise their minimum wage on Wednesday include: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.
The nation's highest wage floors will take effect in some of the nearly 50 cities and other localities that will impose minimum pay hikes.
Twenty-nine cities in California will see pay hikes, including a $17-an-hour wage floor that will take effect in Oakland. Seven localities in Washington will increase their minimum wage, among them the country's highest wage floor: $21.10 an hour in Tukwila.
The latest round of pay increases, however, will not affect more than a dozen states concentrated in the South that lack a minimum wage or offer a minimum wage that does not exceed the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour.
The last federal minimum wage hike took place in 2009, when Congress raised the pay floor to its current level. When adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage stands at its lowest level since February 1956, nearly 70 years ago, EPI found.
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(NEW YORK) -- As world leaders mourn the death of former President Jimmy Carter and remark on his political and policy legacy, doctors are remembering his efforts to prevent disease, and his legacy in furthering global public health.
The 39th president spent five decades working to eradicate a parasitic disease, helped organize a major-drug donation program, and made advancements addressing the mental health crisis in the U.S.
Dr. Julie Jacobson, currently a managing partner of the nonprofit Bridges to Development, helped to provide funding for the Carter Center's work in the Americas, Nigeria and Ethiopia while she worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for over a decade.
"He was hugely influential, I think particularly for the diseases that most of the world doesn't appreciate even exist," Jacobson told ABC News of Jimmy Carter's work. "He was a true champion for the neglected tropical diseases, which are some of the most common infections of people who live with the least resources. And he found these diseases and then really wanted to do something about them, and used his voice, his influence, his passion, to continue to push forward where others were really not interested."
Near-eradication of Guinea worm disease
Following his loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, Carter founded the Carter Center in 1982, a non-profit organization that "seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health," according to the Center's website.
Among the organization's many efforts, the Carter Center helped spearhead a successful international campaign with the goal of eradicating dracunculiasis, also known as Guinea worm disease, a parasitic infection caused by consuming contaminated drinking water.
Water from ponds or other stagnant bodies of water can contain tiny crustaceans commonly known as water fleas, which in turn can be infected with Guinea worm larvae, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
About one year after infecting a human host, the Guinea worm creates a blister on the skin and emerges from it, which can cause burning pain, fever and swelling, according to the CDC and the World Health Organization.
"Nobody else wanted to take it on," Jimmy Carter told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos during a 2015 interview on "Good Morning America". "So, I decided to take it on."
In 1986, Guinea worm disease afflicted 3.5 million people every year in 21 African and Asian countries. Disease incidence has since been reduced by 99.99%, to just 14 "provisional" human cases in 2023, according to the Carter Center.
Jacobson said that success is even more remarkable because there are no vaccines available to prevent Guinea worm disease and no drugs to treat it. Tracking Guinea worm disease, according to Jacobson, involves following possible cases for a year to determine if they are infected, checking to see if infected humans have any infected water sources near them, and monitoring the community as a whole.
"To think that you could eradicate a disease without any tools is really still just a crazy idea, but he did it with perseverance and working with people in the grassroots within communities and putting together teams of people to go and work with people in those communities and empower the communities," Jacobson said.
The Carter Center says if efforts are successful, Guinea worm disease could become the second human disease in history to be completely eradicated, after smallpox, and the first to be done without the use of a vaccine or medicine.
Carter told ABC News during the 2015 interview that eradicating the disease entirely was his goal: "I think this is going to be a great achievement for, not for me, but for the people that have been afflicted and for the entire world to see diseases like this eradicated."
Mass drug distribution for river blindness
The Carter Center also works to fight other preventable diseases, including the parasitic infections schistosomiasis and lymphatic filariasis – more commonly known as snail fever and elephantiasis, respectively – as well as trachoma, which is one of the world's leading causes of preventable blindness. It's also working with the governments of Haiti and the Dominican Republic to eliminate lymphatic filariasis and malaria from the island of Hispaniola, which both countries share and which is "the last reservoir in the Caribbean for both diseases," according to the Carter Center.
Carter and his organization also played a part in organizing a major drug-donation program to help eliminate onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness, which is transmitted to human through repeated bites of infected blackflies, according to the CDC.
Pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. had been implementing field studies in Africa which showed that the drug ivermectin was effective at treating river blindness in humans. The Carter Center partnered with Merck to mass-distribute ivermectin, brand name Mectizan, "as much as needed for as long as needed" in Africa and Latin America. To date, the Carter Center has assisted in distributing more than 500 million treatments of Mectizan, according to Merck.
In 1995, Carter negotiated a two-month cease-fire in Sudan to allow health care workers there to more safely help eradicate Guinea worm disease, prevent river blindness, and vaccinate children against polio.
"When we have known solutions, it is ethical to make sure they're available to the people who need it most," Dr. Usha Ramakrishnan, chair of the Department of Global Health at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, told ABC News. "And that's where we were with river blindness. There was a treatment, but improving access to medications, making it affordable, reaching the people they need was very much along the lines of the work [the Carter Center] was doing."
Addressing mental health
Carter was also committed to tackling mental health issues. During his presidency, he created the Presidential Commission on Mental Health, which recommended a national plan to care for people with chronic mental illness.
Although it was never adopted as policy by the Reagan administration, the plan's recommended strategies were adopted by some mental health advocacy groups to "make gains in the 1980s," according to one study.
Carter also signed into law the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, which provided funding to community mental health centers.
After his presidency, Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter continued working to improve access to mental health.
Ramakrishnan said the Carters' work helped to reduce some of the stigma associated with mental health.
"There continues to be a lot of stigma, but they truly got it out [in] the conversation and mainstreaming mental health as an important aspect of health and well-being," Ramakrishnan said. "There's still a lot of challenges, and there are many capable people that they have mentored and trained who are carrying that mantle forward."
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The House Ethics Committee on Monday cleared two Texas Republican congressmen — Wesley Hunt of Houston and Ronny Jackson of Amarillo — for violating campaign finance law by allegedly spending campaign money for personal use.
In a statement, the committee said it unanimously decided to close the investigations, including ones against two other representatives for the same accusations. The committee said in several investigations it resolved Monday, there was evidence that the member’s campaigns did not fully comply with campaign finance standards, as well as reporting or recordkeeping requirements for campaign spending.
“However, there was no evidence that any member intentionally misused campaign funds for their personal benefit,” the committee said in a statement.
The investigation began in March when the Office of Congressional Ethics, a nonpartisan group of professional staffers, sent campaign finance reports from the two representatives to the committee for investigation. They were accused of using campaign funds for private club memberships. Jackson spent nearly $12,000 since 2020 on membership at the Amarillo Club, and Hunt spent over $74,000 between April 2022 and January 2024 at the Post Oak Hotel, including membership fees at its exclusive Oak Room club.
The committee opened an identical investigation in 2022 into Jackon’s use of campaign funds to pay club dues. Then, Jackson’s lawyers said in an email to the committee that the membership included event space for fundraising.
In a written response to the ethics office regarding the 2024 investigation, Jackson said that he did not violate ethics rules. According to the ethics office report, the Amarillo Club declined to give information that could confirm Jackson used the club for strictly campaign reasons.
Hunt provided documents related to his Oak Room expenses, but they were heavily redacted, according to the office. He declined to sit for an interview by the office, but his lawyers said he did nothing wrong.
“I commend the House Ethics Committee for their swift resolution of this matter and extend my gratitude for their thorough and diligent work,” Hunt said in a statement. “From the outset, I have maintained confidence that this issue would be resolved in our favor.”
Jackson echoed Hunt in a statement.
“I did everything by the book and have fully complied with the committee since these false allegations were first referred by the OCE in 2021,” he said. “I am glad to put this ridiculous, partisan, and politically motivated matter behind me, and I am looking forward to working alongside President Trump to improve the lives of my constituents and all Americans.”
The ethics committee also said the existing law and guidance from the Federal Election Commission is “often ambiguous” and provides gray areas of spending. The committee updated guidance on personal use of campaign funds and related recordkeeping requirements. In the statement, the committee said it provided relevant members with a copy of the updated guidance, as well as specific findings and recommendations for their campaign activity.
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Most Texas drivers will no longer be required to have their cars pass an annual safety exam after state lawmakers removed the rule from Texas code.
Texas is one of 15 states that mandate annual inspections for noncommercialcars. That will change on Jan. 1becausethe Texas Legislature approvedHouse Bill 3297, which eliminates most vehicle safety inspections, in 2023.
Supporters of the bill called the safety inspections time consuming and inconvenient. Opponents of the bill say it could set Texas drivers, and future Texans, on a dangerous path.
“The majority of our business is centered around making sure people’s vehicles are safe,” said Charissa Barnes, owner of the Official Inspection Station in San Antonio, to lawmakers earlier this year. “We need to make sure that their cars, the people joining us in Texas, are safe.”
What did the Legislature change?
The Legislature repealed provisions in state law that mandate annual vehicle inspections. However, the $7.50 fee remains intact under a new name: the inspection program replacement fee. That fee will be paid at the time the vehicle is registered with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles.
The 17 Texas counties that require emissions inspections will still mandate annual emissionstests regardless of the bill becoming law. They are Brazoria, Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, El Paso, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris, Johnson, Kaufman, Montgomery, Parker, Rockwall, Tarrant, Travis and Williamson counties.
Who is affected?
All Texas noncommercialdrivers outside of the exempted counties stand to be affected by the legislation. According to the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles, there are 26 million registered cars in the state. Annual inspections are used to determine if certain features of a car, such as the tires, seat belts or brakes, are safe to drive with.
A study mandated by the Texas Legislature in 2017 shows that cars with defects, such as bald tires or bad brakes, were three years older than the average registered vehicle, which is nine years old.
Almost a quarter of the people surveyed in the study were asked by a mechanic to fix slick or defective tires during an inspection, potentially preventing more accidents. Another report found that defective cars in Texas were more than three times as likely to be involved in a crash that resulted in a fatality.
Texas roadways are notoriously dangerous. At least one person dies on a Texas road each day. According to the most recent state data, 4,283 people were killed in auto crashes in Texas during 2023. Based on the reported crashes in 2023, one person was killed on a Texas roadway about every two hours.
Who influenced the bill’s outcome?
Republican Rep. Cody Harris of Palestine and Sens. Mayes Middleton of Galveston and Bob Hall of Edgewood sponsored the bill to do away with annual vehicle inspections.
“These inspections are a waste of time for Texas citizens and a money-making Ponzi scheme used by some shady dealerships to upsell consumers with unnecessary repairs,” Harris said in a statement to ABC 13 in Houston. “Texans are responsible, fiercely independent, and I trust them to keep their cars and trucks safe while on the road.”
Other groups and businesses — such as former Texas Sen. Don Huffines’ Liberty Foundation, Continental Automotive Group, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Texas Conservative Coalition and Tesla — were all witnesses in favor of the bill. Huffines, whose family owns a car dealership empire in North Texas, has been a vocal supporter of the bill.
Representatives with the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas, the Dallas Police Association, the Houston Police Officers’ Union, the Texas State Inspection Association, Toyota Motor North America and more spoke against the bill.
How much will it cost Texans?
Drivers will still be paying the annual $7.50 when they register their vehicles. The money will go toward the Texas mobility fund, general revenue fund and the clean air account.
For drivers with new cars — either the current model or preceding model year that has not been previously registered in Texas or another state — there will instead be an initial fee of $16.75 to cover two years.
All commercial vehicles in all of the state’s 254 counties will still be required to pass an annual vehicle safety inspection and pay the safety inspection fee.
The Texas transportation department estimates that the state’s economy lost $51.4 billion due to car crashes in 2021.
What alternatives were considered?
No alternatives were considered for the bill, but there was some pushback from other lawmakers. Sen. Nathan Johnson, a Dallas Democrat, spoke against the bill on the Senate floor before it passed.
“It’s really not going to take any time, and if they want to sell me a windshield wiper while I’m there, I’m OK,” Johnson said. “I would at least vote this bill down until one of you brings out a study that says they’re not effective. The evidence I’ve seen says they are.”
Johnson urged fellow members to vote the bill down, saying people’s lives are at stake.
The bill passed on a 109-32 vote in the House chamber and a 20-11 vote in the Senate. Gov. Greg Abbott signed it into law in June 2023.
What’s next?
The legislation goes into effect Jan. 1.
Disclosure: The Texas Public Policy Foundation, Tesla and Toyota Motor North America have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Don Huffines owns a network of car dealerships. His brother owns and operates the dealerships.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
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Texans who worked with Jimmy Carter remembered him as a principled and compassionate leader — the last Democrat to win the state in a presidential election. Carter died Sunday afternoon at his Georgia home at age 100.
The peanut farmer turned politician was praised for philanthropic efforts that continued well into his ninth decade after a single-term presidency that began with his 1976 defeat of Republican President Gerald Ford.
“He’s exactly the kind of human being that needs to be president,” John Pouland, Carter’s state coordinator for the 1976 Democratic primary, said soon after learning that Carter would receive hospice care. “He lived the life that he felt was the right way to live as a Christian.”
Born and raised in Plains, Georgia, Carter actively served in the Navy for eight years before returning to his home state to take over the family’s peanut-growing business after his father’s death in 1953.
Carter went on to serve in the Georgia Senate and as governor before winning the 1976 presidential election. Texas’ 26 electoral votes helped put Carter over the top, a victory he couldn’t repeat in his landslide loss to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Carter became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Brownsville during a campaign stop in the closing days of the 1980 election season.
He praised the area’s farmland, viewed during a low-altitude plane trip from Houston; extolled his record on education; and boasted about appointing more than 200 Hispanic Americans to senior positions, “more than any other previous administration in history.”
With the polls pointing toward defeat, his speech in Brownsville also veered into the philosophical, with Carter speaking about the burden of making “the final judgment in the loneliness of the Oval Office.”
“Sometimes it has been a lonely job, but with the involvement of the American people, it’s also a gratifying job,” he said in the Nov. 1, 1980, speech.
He ended up losing Texas by nearly 14 percentage points, starting a losing streak for Democratic nominees that has lasted through the next 10 presidential elections.
A pair of Texans may have played a part in that defeat. In 1980, former Texas Gov. John B. Connally Jr., ran for the Republican nomination to challenge Carter. When Connally lost, he threw his support behind GOP nominee Ronald Reagan.
That summer, Connally and former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes took a trip to the Middle East, meeting with heads of state in various capitals. In the midst of the campaign, the Carter administration was embroiled in the Iranian Hostage Crisis, in which 52 Americans were held captive in Iran. Nightly news of the crisis strained Carter’s support and left him vulnerable to charges of ineptitude. During the trip, according to Barnes, Connally told the Middle Eastern leaders to deliver a message to Iran that Reagan would give them a better deal if they waited to release the hostages until after the election.
Barnes kept silent about the trip for decades, only revealing it to the New York Times in March after it was announced that Carter had entered hospice care. Connally died in 1993.
Connally told an Arab leader in their first meeting, “‘Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president and you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter,’” Barnes told the Times. “He said, ‘It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.’ And boy, I tell you, I’m sitting there and I heard it and so now it dawns on me, I realize why we’re there.”
Former Carter aides have speculated that they might have won if they had returned the hostages before the election. The 52 Americans were released on the day Reagan took office.
Former President Jimmy Carter speaks at a dedication for the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas on April 25, 2013. Credit: REUTERS/Mike Stone
Texans were introduced to Carter in the 1976 Democratic primary, when he faced U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, a politically established Texan.
“The ‘Jimmy who?’ line was not made up,” Pouland said. “We probably heard that refrain more than anything.”
Carter defeated Bentsen — the Georgian was established as the party’s standard bearer by the time Texas held its primary — and Pouland attributed Carter’s success to his Navy service and Christian values, characteristics that appealed to Texas voters.
At the time, Texas was at the tail end of a century-long, post-Civil War era of domination by Democrats in state politics. There were 133 Democrats in the 150-member state House, and 28 in the 31-member state Senate. The most significant political divides were among liberal and conservative Democrats, not Democrats and Republicans. But in presidential politics, Republicans had made inroads. Richard Nixon had won the state by 33 percentage points four years earlier, breaking a streak for three straight Democratic victories. Carter won the state with 51% of the vote.
But the state was changing fast as conservatives flocked to the GOP. The state elected its first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Bill Clements, two years after Carter was elected. Pouland said Carter served as a model for attracting moderate Southern Democrats, something former President Bill Clinton tried but failed to replicate.
Garry Mauro, a former Texas land commissioner who worked for Carter’s 1976 presidential bid, remembered the candidate as genuine and earnest.
Mauro said it never occurred to Carter to filter people out, and he didn’t restrict access to himself even as his campaign built momentum. Mauro recalled numerous occasions when he dialed a campaign number, only to have the candidate’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, answer the phone.
“He really was the people’s president,” Mauro said.
Carter’s influence on Texas Democrats was immense, reshaping the state party’s power base to accommodate new faces on his team, Mauro said.
“Jimmy Carter empowered a whole new generation of leadership in Texas,” Mauro said.
His many years in politics did not change Carter’s altruistic outlook, Pouland added, and Carter took an active role in advancing human rights through his nonprofit organization, the Carter Center, after leaving office.
Carter, Pouland said, “went to his same church, worked on his same farm, kept his same friends and continued to live his life as an example for the very thing that he was an advocate of, and that was compassion.”
Though Carter was the last Democrat presidential candidate to win Texas, his legacy is still evident in the party, said state Rep. John Bryant, D-Dallas.
“He was committed to human rights and gave Democrats the confidence to be for human rights and for peace and for honesty in government,” said Bryant, who served as Carter’s campaign manager in Dallas County during Carter’s first presidential campaign.
Bryant points to Carter’s post-presidential years as some of his most impactful.
“Instead of serving on corporate boards, or making big speaking fees, or playing golf, he was going to Habitat for Humanity. He was at the [Carter Center]. And he wrote 30 books, the proceeds of which went to nonprofits,” Bryant said, adding that Carter was “just a great example for how to live a life devoted to the public interest.
“He lived his faith. He practiced what he preached,” Bryant said. “That’s very important for the country to see that.”
In August 2007, Carter joined South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu in calling Texas to stop the execution of Kenneth Foster, an inmate who was on death row for acting as the getaway driver during a killing. Then-Gov. Rick Perry commuted Foster’s sentence to life in prison hours before the execution was scheduled.
After the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, Carter joined four other former presidents — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton and George H.W. Bush — in appealing for donations to help in the recovery. The effort raised more than $41 million in response to the costliest natural disaster of 2017, when extreme flooding in Houston and the surrounding area caused more than $125 billion in damage.
Carter maintained his commitment to service through his life, helping to build and repair Dallas homes for Habitat for Humanity as a 90-year-old in 2014.
“No matter what your faith may be, we are taught to share what we have with poor people,” he told The Dallas Morning News at the time. “It’s very difficult to cross that divide between people that have everything and people that have never had a decent house. Habitat makes it easy to cross that line.”
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
Cedar Park (Yahoo) – A disturbing case of competition gone wrong has emerged from Cedar Park, Texas, where a high school cheerleader has been charged with felony animal cruelty after allegedly poisoning a classmate’s show goat.
Aubrey Vanlandingham, 17, a senior at Vista Ridge High School, was arrested on November 22 following an investigation into the death of a show goat named Willie. She was released the same day after posting a $5,000 bond.
According to police, security footage from October 23 at the school’s barn facility captured a female student using a drench gun to administer toxic pesticide to the six-month-old goat. The animal died approximately 21 hours later, suffering through convulsions and respiratory distress before succumbing to the poison.
Initially denying any involvement, Vanlandingham later confessed when confronted with surveillance footage. The arrest affidavit reveals a particularly cruel sequence of events, with the suspect returning to the scene twice to photograph and video record the suffering animal. The goat ultimately died in the arms of its owner’s daughter, who was reportedly Vanlandingham’s classmate.
During police questioning, Vanlandingham claimed she “doesn’t like cheaters,” referring to the family who owned the goat, her competitors in a local Future Farmers of America (FFA) livestock show. She also admitted to beginning her poisoning campaign three days before the goat’s death.
Laboratory tests conducted on November 6 confirmed the presence of phosmet, a common agricultural pesticide, in the goat’s stomach contents.
The case has sent shockwaves through the FFA community, where students compete for substantial rewards. These competitions offer scholarship opportunities worth thousands of dollars and cash prizes ranging from $50 at local events to $30,000 at larger state fairs.
/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/2df936abd2586a157500427eced1d998/Jimmy%20Carter%20REUTERS%2002.jpg "Texans remember Jimmy Carter, the last Democrat to take the state’s presidential election")