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THIS WEEK: As a teenager, Bobby Moore couldn’t tell time. According to court filings, Moore repeatedly got sick from eating out of neighbors’ garbage cans in his Houston neighborhood, apparently unaware that the rotting food kept poisoning him. For the past year, the Harris County DA’s Office has argued that Moore, who was convicted in the 1980 murder of a Houston convenience store clerk, is too intellectually disabled to execute. But that hasn’t stopped Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from fighting to have Moore executed.
Must-Reads

The Lede
Chuco Style

  • The suits are flashy, the dancing is mesmerizing and the enchiladas are hot. For members of this El Paso club, borderlands identity runs deep.
     
  • The pachuco subculture originated in the El Paso-Juárez area and spread westward with migration. Zoot suits, or tacuches, have always been the most distinguishing feature.
     
  • Mexican Americans in El Paso have long straddled multiple worlds. The pachuco lifestyle celebrates these differences while passing on Chicano pride to the next generation. 
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From the archives
Dennis the Menace

  • Angleton Republican Dennis Bonnen is likely the next Speaker of the House in Texas. In 2007, Patrick Michels wrote that Bonnen was perhaps the Legislature’s biggest impediment to cleaning up the Texas environment.
     
  • From the story: “Bonnen has raised willful ineffectiveness to an art form. He is refusing to give hearings to 42 House bills and 8 Senate bills in his committee. While other committees have met 15 or 20 times, Environmental Regulation has heard bills on just nine days. Bonnen didn’t even call his first meeting until mid-March. It has grown so bad that pro-environment legislators write bills in ways that try to avoid Bonnen’s committee, betting instead on a brighter future in committees like Government Reform and Regulated Industries.”

What’s Happening at the Observer

  • The Texas Observer is participating in #GivingTuesday on November 27! Thanks to NewsMatch and the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, every dollar you donate on #GivingTuesday will be matched. Join us for this global day of giving and your gift will go twice as far toward helping produce ass-kicking, rabble rousing journalism in Texas.
     
  • The Texas Observer staff invites you to join us for our holiday BBQ on Friday, December 7 at 6 p.m. We’ll be hosting folks at our offices in east Austin, where you’ll get an opportunity to see where the work of our reporters and editors is done (and maybe take a picture with our life-size Molly Ivins cut-out). Tickets are available for $150 and include Micklethwait BBQ dinner and beverages (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic). All proceeds from the evening go back to fund the Observer’s award-winning investigative reporting.
     
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