MONITORING THE SITUATION (6/01/26)
3 stories we are watching closely and somewhat nervously.
Several situations reached monitor-worthy status this week, all of them right here in Texas.
Travis County Democrats Have Buyer’s Remorse Over Their Felon Chair.
HB 2038 Update: How Many “Qualified” Foreign Doctors Have Fake Degrees?
Texas Finally Finds Something It Can Verify, Just Not What We Asked For.
Travis County Democrats Have Buyer’s Remorse Over Their Felon Chair
The Travis County Democrat Party elected a transgender chair with a criminal record and now they want a do-over.
Jessica Cohen was born Steven William Hurwitz, yet official state records say “female.”
So a person was sworn into county party leadership on an identity that doesn’t match their birth certificate. That’s about as progressive as it gets.
The Democratic Party’s new Travis County leader is facing a crisis of confidence. Jessica Elizabeth Cohen, 54, has been in office less than six weeks. But her extensive criminal past has set off alarm bells.
She also slashed a woman. Who was black. In the face.
Mayfield was the victim of felony aggravated assault on February 17, 1990. Mayfield said her assailant pointed a gun at her head, called her a nigger, threatened to kill her, and slashed her face with a knife. Steven William Hurwitz (Jessica Cohen’s name before gender transition) then age 18, was sentenced to deferred adjudication, ordered to serve 90 days in jail and 10 years on probation, perform 240 hours of community service, and avoid Mayfield. His probation was terminated October 17, 1995.
The precinct chairs are revolting it would seem.
The Bulldog also pulled the driving record of Mx. Cohen, which is best described as a body of work.
This is the same Democrat Party preparing to launch James Talarico into a U.S. Senate race on the theological premise that God is, in fact, transgender.
Doubling down on weird is one way to describe it.
Republicans just gotta vote in November! Never mind that the voter rolls list men as women – that’s a tiny error. Once the vote is routed through closed-source voting software, the results are guaranteed to be accurate.
It’s actually kind of poetic how Democrats elected the felon, vetted the felon, sat next to the felon at meetings, and only checked the criminal record after the gavel was already in her hand.
The party of believing women just stopped believing one of their own!
Update with statement from Travis County GOP chair Jennifer Fleck:
HB 2038 Update: How Many “Qualified” Foreign Doctors Have Fake Degrees?
Texas spent 2025 quietly opening the door to foreign doctors who never have to pass an American residency. The pitch was that these are “qualified” professionals coming to save rural Texas with amazing healthcare, with 224 of Texas’ 254 counties eligible to fast track foreign doctors from wherever!
It was a terrible sales pitch. There was even a Freudian slip in the rollout that gave us a good LOL.
Did you know India recently seized 100,000 forged certificates in a single bust?
You may have missed it.
HB 2038 sailed through the Legislature and onto the governor’s desk last year, sold as a fix for the doctor shortage in rural Texas counties. Again, the absurdity of the scheme cannot be understated - flood the rural parts of the state with physicians trained somewhere you’ve never heard of, skip the residency Americans must do, and call it compassion.
A “qualified doctor,” they kept saying.
About that.
A massive fake university certificate racket uncovered by Kerala Police has triggered a political firestorm in Australia. An Australian senator has accused Prime Minister Antony Albanese’s government of failing to act against foreign students allegedly using purchased degrees to study and work in Australia.
Senator Malcolm Roberts, known for alleging degree rackets in Indian universities, has linked the Kerala bust to what he claims are systemic failures in Australia’s student visa enforcement.
Kerala Police last month dismantled a sprawling pan-Indian network that produced and distributed forged university certificates, including foreign degrees. Mathrubhumi reported that at least 11 people were arrested across multiple Indian states, and investigators said the racket might have supplied fraudulent documents to more than 10 lakh individuals nationwide.
The case has drawn sharp attention in Australia, where Senator Malcolm Roberts has linked the Kerala bust to what he claims are systemic failures in Australia’s student visa enforcement. In a post on X, Roberts cited the recent seizure of around 100,000 forged certificates and claimed that more than one million may have been used for jobs overseas.
A million-plus fake degrees already shipped overseas for jobs.
For jobs “overseas.”
Read that part twice.
Now ask yourself where “overseas” is. Australia caught it. The story created, in India Today’s words, a “political firestorm” in Australia because their leaders were forced to answer for who exactly they’d been credentialing.
Texas? Silence.
We need Rep. Tom Oliverson at a podium explaining how Texas plans to tell a real degree from one of the 1,000,000 fakes a foreign cartel just printed.
The bust got almost zero coverage in the country actively passing laws to import the very people most likely to be holding a forged degree.
Wild.
Texas Finally Finds Something It Can Verify, Just Not What We Asked For
The state of Texas still can’t be bothered to figure out who’s actually living illegally in subsidized housing, who’s stealing public benefits, or which H-1B “companies” even exist.
But soon, they’re going to make sure 17-year-olds get parental approval to download the fart soundboard app.
Texas’s law requiring app marketplace operators like Google and Apple to verify all users’ ages and seek parental permission before minors can download apps or make in-app purchases can go into effect for now, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
That would be Senate Bill 2420, your Republican legislature’s latest five-second solution to a problem nobody asked them to solve this way. The bill orders Apple and Google to verify the age of every user, demand parental consent before someone under 18 can install anything, and require every app developer to rate their apps in one of four state-approved age categories. I’m sure they thought very hard about those categories.
A federal judge in Austin had this to say about the fun new law:
The Act is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book.
They tell you Texas requires a photo ID to vote. It doesn’t, really. There’s a sworn-statement exception you can sign with a utility bill in hand. The photo ID law is there to make you feel good. Meanwhile the closed-source machines counting the ballots — apparently, that is too complex and technical to regulate for Republicans.
So voting, like millions of illegal aliens everywhere, the state can’t manage to get a handle on. But that podcast app on your phone? That is getting verified without exception.
How will they verify your age? Lawmakers didn’t say! It’s left up to big tech to surprise us with their latest “mandated” intrusion into your privacy. To protect the children, of course.
We’ll be monitoring this whole situation.
Oh man... depressing way to start the week :-(
Excellent writing, by the way. At least I got a few laughs in between my crying and hitting my head against the wall.
Excellent article! What's Governor Abbott going to do about HB 2038? Just wait for all of the lawsuits to roll in of people being injured or killed by fake nurses and doctors?