You know how on Law and Order a witness will try to give a complicated, nuanced, occasionally evasive answer to a yes/no question, and the lawyer asking the question, whether McCoy or a hotshot defense attorney, interrupts to emphasize that "yes" or "no" are the only valid answers? Wouldn't it be nice to have one of them cross-examine whoever is reponsible for this?
I think I may have finally found an election in which I'd fervently wish for a viable third-party candidate:
The Gossips hear that former City Council member Gabriel Vasquez and his new wife, Lisa Diamond, who is chief of staff for Council Member Shelley Sekula Gibbs, just purchased a home in Mangum Manor. That would allow Gabe to run as a Republican against State Senator John Whitmire in Senate District 15. Gabe is a former Democrat who switched to run as a Republican for City Controller and was soundly defeated. Whitmire who would be well funded is expecting an opponent due to his coming back to Texas to break the impasse over redistricting in the Texas Senate. But the Gossips think that Vasquez would unite the Democrats for Whitmire in a District that is strongly Democratic and also a majority minority district.
Quitmire versus the Party Switcher? Praise Jeebus I live in Mario Gallegos' district and won't find myself in the voting booth with that decision to make.
The best option, of course, would be for a better Democrat - like, say Garnet Coleman or Jessica Farrar - to knock off Quitmire in the primary, then beat whichever Republican runs in the general. Too early to say if that'll happen, but we may as well start rooting for it now.
This is a very strange story.
A state lawmaker and his wife are to face their former maid in a Houston court today in a battle over custody of the woman's 20-month-old son.State Rep. Talmadge Heflin and his wife, Janice, contend that they have cared for the boy since shortly after his birth, according to court documents.
The parents, however, say there is no reason he should be taken away. Mariam Katamba and Fidel Odimara argue that Heflin, a Houston Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, is using his "political position to threaten" them.
The Heflins say the boy has spent most of his life with them and that they "are the only care-givers the child has known," court papers show. They also argue that the parents might endanger the boy and "have shown little or no interest in the child since birth."
The parents said Tuesday they provided for and took care of the child, including staying with him during a two-month hospital stay, while the Heflins visited once.
Katamba, a native of Uganda who lived with and worked for the Heflins, said Janice Heflin later offered to baby-sit the boy after Katamba found another job. Katamba said she never wanted to give him up.
"They always take my child to Austin, Texas, whenever I am off," Katamba stated in an affidavit. "When I protested about their denying me my child, they then brought the (lawsuit)."
Yeesh. This is like a storyline out of The Practice. I don't really have anything to add to this, but I'll be very curious to see what happens. Very strange.
Smoke 'em if you got 'em, 'cause you may not be able to in as many places as before.
Councilwoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, the only physician on the City Council, is studying smoking ordinances in other cities with an eye toward proposing what would be Houston's first outright ban on smoking in workplaces, bars and restaurants."The ban would be on smoking in public places — anyplace that conducts business and where people would gather, not in residences," she said. "Smoking and secondhand smoke are dangerous for all Houstonians, and that's why we are looking to move forward."
Mayor Bill White, who controls the council's agenda, said he might support adjusting the city's existing smoking restrictions, but would not commit to a full ban.
"I support the efforts taken so far," White said. "Whatever we do is going to have to be incremental and over time."
But Councilman Gordon Quan believes that, if proposed, such an ordinance has a strong chance of passage.
"I don't know how the sides are going to line up, but I was at a Quality of Life Committee meeting a while ago, and there was a lot of support," he said Tuesday.
"I know it has been on the back burner for a while," Quan added. "But I think the fact that other major cities are doing it, and that it hasn't hurt their businesses and convention trade, is a good thing. Concerns with secondhand smoke have also been raised by the medical community."
Houston is the only major metropolitan area in Texas that has not banned smoking in either eateries or workplaces, although many Houston businesses voluntarily have limited smoking.
The city does ban smoking in elevators, restrooms and certain retail establishments; requires workplaces to accommodate nonsmoking employees; and sets special ventilation standards for places that allow smoking.
El Paso barred cigarettes inside all workplaces, restaurants, and bars in 2002; Dallas followed with a restaurant ban in 2003; San Antonio and Austin banned workplace smoking earlier this year.
I worked for a summer in a "family" restaurant whose non-smoking section consisted of two tables in the back. If I ever die of emphysema, it'll be because of that experience. As such, I'm pretty sympathetic to people who complain about smoke in eateries. That said, I can't think of a whole lot of places to eat in Houston where there's any noticeable smoke. This is one of those times where voluntary restrictions have worked pretty darn well, and I think we ought to tread very carefully here before we muck with it.
Of course, given the widespread voluntary compliance with no-smoking zones, enforcing it for restaurants and workplaces shouldn't be that big a deal. Where the controversy will be kicked up, and rightfully so, is here:
Restaurant owners do express that fear, and particularly worry about partial bans that limit smoking in restaurants but not bars. They fear exempted businesses would have a competitive advantage.Sekula-Gibbs said her proposal would group bars with restaurants, so restaurants wouldn't lose business to bars subject to looser smoking restrictions.
She said she is consulting the various interests before drafting a specific proposal, and does not have a timetable. "We are gathering data from other cities on comparable language and gathering input from stakeholders, people with an interest in individual health and businesses.".
She anticipates opposition from restaurants and smokers.
"Certain people look at smoking as an individual right," she said. "They have to understand that they would still be allowed to smoke, just not in public areas."
I have a much bigger problem with enforcing a smoking ban in bars. This is not to say that I have ever enjoyed spending a few hours in a smoky bar. I go to the non-smoking shows at the Mucky Duck whenever possible. But it seems to me that if bars attract smokers, then there's a reason for it, and those of us who don't smoke ought to respect that. Whatever it was that made the restaurant industry in this town determine that banning smoking was the winner hasn't afftected the pubs. I think that's telling us something.
What I do know is this: Sekula Gibbs is right when she says there will be opposition to this. I still think the City Council has bigger things to worry about than cigarettes. If we must debate this issue, can it at least wait until we've gotten the city's financial health in better shape?
A lawsuit has been filed in federal court in Houston which alleges that there is an organized campaign to harass and intimidate black elected officials.
HEMPSTEAD, Texas – Six black Waller County leaders filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against white county officials and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, alleging "an extensive illegal reign of terror against African-American" officials.Justice of the Peace Dewayne Charleston, who says he has been a target of discrimination, claimed that District Attorney Oliver Kitzman had been behind much of it.
Charleston said when Kitzman lost a battle earlier this year to keep students at historically black Prairie View A&M; University from voting in Waller County, the intimidation by Kitzman against those who spoke out against him increased.
"The whole thing just shows a pattern of seeking to undermine the civil rights of African Americans," Charleston said.
The lawsuit accuses Kitzman of a campaign of "repression and intimidation" toward blacks with a goal "to intimidate, harass, oppress, malign, beleaguer and torment plaintiffs in order that they might become discouraged from participating in any aspect of the political process in Waller County."
Kitzman told The Associated Press Tuesday that the allegations are baseless.
"It is absolutely, totally false," said Kitzman, who still hadn't seen the lawsuit but had heard about some of the allegations in it. "I don't see any foundation for those allegations and earnestly do not believe that those allegations are well founded."
[...]
Kitzman, who served as the district attorney for three counties – including Waller County – from 1967 to 1979, returned to the office in January 2003 after decades as a judge. Kitzman said he returned to the district attorney's office in Waller County because he thought his "services were needed."
"I thought it was not being run efficiently and that I could do better," said Kitzman, who is known for his hands-off approach in 1973 to a brothel in Fayette County. A rookie television consumer affairs reporter managed to stir up enough political and public pressure to close the Chicken Ranch brothel, one of Texas' worst-kept secrets.
The house of prostitution ultimately inspired a book, stage play and movie: "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas."
I'm slapping my forehead over here. I can't believe that I had no idea of Kitzman's connection to the Chicken Ranch. It all makes a weird kind of sense now.
Herschel Smith, who describes himself as a Waller County community activist and is another of the plaintiffs, said since Kitzman returned as district attorney the racial climate has changed."Any time that African-Americans run for public office, there is some form of retaliation, intimidation, threats toward them because they do not want African-Americans to take their rightful place in this county," he said.
Besides Kitzman, the lawsuit names County Judge Owen Ralston, Waller County Sheriff Randy Smith, Waller County Commissioners and the Concerned Citizens of Waller County, a nonprofit organization.
Smith said he would not comment on the lawsuit until he was served with it. Ralston was at a meeting in Houston and did not immediately return a message left with his office Tuesday.
The lawsuit claims civil rights violations, conspiracy, malicious prosecution, infliction of emotional distress and libel.
It does not ask for a specific monetary amount but seeks compensatory and punitive damages and asks that the defendants named in the lawsuit be prevented from targeting blacks or "arresting or permitting the arrest of any individual where there exists only the uncorroborated word of the district attorney."
Kitzman raised a huge stink last fall when he attempted to prevent students at historically black Prairie View A&M; from voting in Waller County elections on grounds that they did not meet residency requirements. He was wrong on the law and eventually reversed himself. You can find a ton of info on this by Googling +"oliver kitzman" +"prairie view a&m;" +voting, but here are a few relevant results:
Burnt Orange Report
Black America Web
Austin Chronicle
More Austin Chronicle
Texas Secretary of State
Political State Report
More Polstate
Daily Texan Online
UPDATE: Chris Elam has some insight on this.
UPDATE: Greg joins in. I'll chime in with those two plus Kevin that the Chron coverage was bad (this is why I linked to the AP feed from the Morning News), but they did in fact have their own story. It's not unusual for the Chron to have an AP story initially and a staff-reported one later.
If the letters to the editor are any indication, no one is buying Tom DeLay's flip-flop on METRO. The letters are reproduced below for posterity. In all fairness, it should be noted that one of the letter writers is Mike Fjetland, who is also running against DeLay in November. I believe an editorial footnote which mentions that fact is in order for this sort of thing, but as we know the Chron often lets its guest contributors slide on matters of self-identification.
MORE...Suppose you're an incumbent Congressman, and you're locked in a tight and expensive battle for reelection against another incumbent Congressman (thanks to the magic of redistricting). One day you take your kid to school and see a ton of signs for your opponent plastered all over the place, which they shouldn't be as this is a school and all. You call a press conference to denounce the inappropriate sign-placing instead of calling your opponent and telling him to take back his signs.
And then it turns out that your opponent had a pile of his signs stolen the previous night. And it turns out that you yourself were once cited by the police for participating in sign-stealing in your last election. Which your opponent knows all about, and is now reminding everyone about.
Oops.
That's how Pete Sessions' day has gone today. You can see the police report here, or if you don't like Adobe Acrobat you can see it in JPG form here and here. Once again, I say "Oops".
UPDATE: Josh Marshall has more background on Sessions' sign-stealing citation, and some reaction from Sessions' campaign manager.
The Bonassus notes that the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame is going to honor the 143 Jewish men who have played in the bigs. I don't really have anything to add to this except to note that this is as good a time as any to plug the excellent documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, which I was lucky enough to see in the theaters a couple of years ago. Two thumbs up.
Actually, there is this to comment on:
A Ph.D. in Social Welfare, Abramowitz took his research a step further. He found that Jews, who made up about 2 percent of the U.S. population during the 20th Century, comprised just 0.8 percent of baseball players through the 2002 season.They had hit 2,032 homers -- 0.9 percent of the major league total. Their .265 batting average is three percentage points higher than the overall average. Jewish pitchers are 20 games over .500, with six of baseball's first 230 no-hitters (four by Koufax, including a perfect game, and two by Holtzman).
The one stat in which Jews fall short is stolen bases, with a total of 995 through 2002 -- fewer than Rickey Henderson did all by himself.
"Obviously," Abramowitz said, "it's because they were honoring the Eighth Commandment."
I just thought that was amusing, albeit another example of Commandment Confusion. Anyway, those of you in the Cooperstown area later this month should drop in for a visit. Sounds like a cool exhibit.
Political Wire asks the following:
Q. Which state is most over-represented in the Electoral College?
The answer is Wyoming, whose 3 electoral votes cover just over 500,000 people, or about 167,000 per person. California, with over 35 million people and 53 electoral votes, has a ratio of one EV to nearly 670,000 people.
They're not the most screwed in terms of Congressional representation, though. That dubious honor falls on Montana, whose population of 917,000 is nearly double Wyoming's, but they both have one solitary member in the House. Delaware, South Dakota, Utah, and Mississippi all have over 700,000 people per representative as of the 2000 reallocation.
Personally, I think the problem here is that we're forced to play a zero-sum game when it comes to allocation Congressfolk every ten years. I think a better answer, or at least one that allows for more equal representation in all 50 states, is to drop the rule that restricts Congress to 435 total members. Let each state have a number of Congressfolk that's proportionate to the state with the least population. If that means finding more office space every ten years - and it will, since the fastest growing states are adding population at a much faster clip than Wyoming is - then so be it.
Awhile back, in a moment of boredom, I put together this spreadsheet that reallocated Congressfolk and electoral votes based on 2000 Census populations and one Congressperson per population of Wyoming, which was 493,872 at that time. California gains 16 representatives, while Texas gets ten more, New York nine, Florida seven, Illinois and Michigan six each, and Ohio and Michigan five each. Every state except for North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming gain a representative and an equivalent number of EVs. (Washington DC, with a population between Wyoming and Vermont, stays pat with 3 EVs.) The House would wind up with 569 members, nearly a third more than what it has now.
Now, I don't expect anyone to rush to adopt such a proposal. It's more for your amusement than anything else, though if someone did put it on the table I'd be first in line to advocate for it. It's certainly clear that the people of most states deserve more representation, so I could see this getting some support.
By the way, I should note that I didn't fill in the values from the 1990 Census, so I can't say how the 2000 election might have been different under this scheme. I can say that using the 2000 apportionments, Bush would have won by a slightly larger margin, 345-327 (there would be 672 EVs, with 337 needed to win), not too surprising since his margin would have been 278-260 with 2000 Census numbers. If anyone wants to dig out that data and do the math, I'll be happy to post an update.
We know, as Ginger among others has noted, that the national political conventions don't bring in that much money to the host cities. It happened in Boston, and it's expected to happen in New York (if Zoe's research is any indication, it could be even worse for NYC). That surely doesn't seem to have dampened any city's efforts to lure conventions or to build bigger and more expensive convention centers. The San Antonio Current has a two-part look at the history of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center and the related efforts to add on a convention hotel for some disputedly large amount of money. If even tourist-oriented cities like San Antone can't turn a profit here, which cities should?
I must say, this bit has me curious:
According to the City's adopted annual budgets, the Convention Center's operating costs have consistently outstripped revenues. In 1993-94, operating costs for the center were $14 million, versus $2 million in revenue. The years 1994 through 2001 saw operating costs climb from $8.5 million to $10.7 million, and revenues increased from $2.5 million to $4.8 million. Last year, operating costs had climbed to $18.3 million, versus revenue of $6.2 million.[...]
The City's five-year financial forecast for 2005-2009 predicts tourism will inject $7.2 billion into the local economy. Tourism ranks as San Antonio's second largest industry, employing more than 86,000 people, with an annual payroll of $1.37 billion. In 2003, more than 425,000 convention delegates booked by the Convention and Visitor's Bureau brought an estimated $383.5 million in direct expenditures in San Antonio.
Now, obviously, the cash from those 425K delegates mostly comes from things like hotels, rent cars, food, and entertainment (putting any qualms I may have about how they arrived at those numbers aside). It seems to me, though, that if you're only taking in $6.2 million in convention center revenue from 425,000 convention delegates, then maybe the problem isn't entirely one of a shrinking convention business. Maybe San Antonio needs to look at its cost model and see if they need to boost their fees a little.
Anyway. There's lots of good stuff in those two Current articles, so check them out.
UPDATE: Jesse points out why conventions, at least national political conventions, are bad for business. For what it's worth, in my experience a lot of this is also true for big technical conventions like Microsoft's MEC. On the plus side, if it's in the right city, one can meet some cool people.
Becky Klein is running against Rep. Lloyd Doggett in the new CD25. Nobody thinks she's going to win, but an array of corporate benefactors are throwing money her way anyway because she might someday be the head of the FCC.
Why is Klein such a draw? Because administration officials have said that in the event of a second Bush term, she would be considered by the president, for whom she served as a senior policy adviser when he was governor, as a candidate to be the next head of the Federal Communications Commission. And even if that does not work out, she is expected to receive a seat on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should a vacancy occur.Klein, who stepped down in January as chairwoman of the state Public Utility Commission, is challenging Doggett in the newly created Congressional District 25, which snakes 350 miles from the southern end of Austin to McAllen on the Texas-Mexico border. As of June 30, according to federal records, Klein had raised about $450,000, compared with more than $1.1 million raised by Doggett.
But much of her money has come from a highly motivated group of executives from companies -- many of them ones she once regulated as head of the utility commission -- that are investing not so much in her current congressional campaign as in the right to be considered Friends of Becky.
"Washington is all about relationships, and her relationships are far, wide and deep," said a senior executive at a large telephone company who is a supporter and spoke only if not identified. "Washington is also about getting in early -- that's the way the game is played.
"She's not going to win the race," the executive added.
Other supporters said that contributing to her campaign was a no-lose proposition; if she beats the odds to win, they would be happy, if surprised. But they acknowledged that as a first-term member of Congress, Klein would have less power to affect their interests than if she were appointed to a top regulatory job, as they expect.
Gene Kimmelman, a senior director at Consumers Union, put the matter more succinctly: "Clearly, the companies are investing in the future. This is an interesting story about how Washington works."
Well, isn't that special? There's your next frontier in campaign finance - buying futures in candidates. All they need is a way to hedge against the risk that her friends in high places may themselves fall out of power and it could turn into a nice little investment vehicle.
Nathan notes that Becky got started funraising as she was leaving her job with the PUC, something she now denies doing. That's the thing about email, Becky - like roaches, you can never truly eradicate emails.
UPDATE: Seth notes that Becky Klein, by far, has the worst disclosure rate for campaign contributions of any House or Senate candiadate. (Ted Poe, running against Rep. Nick Lampson, is fourth worst in the House races and sixth worst overall.) As noted elsewhere by Political Wire, disclosure comes from the contributors, not the candidates, and I believe small donors are not required to disclose their information, so there's only so much you can read into that. Still, she's way, way out of whack with other candidates, and based on this story, I'd bet it's not because she's a champion of the grassroots.
Greg also piles on.
After months of increasing pressure, Gov. Rick Perry on Monday approved spending $561 million to restore some of the cuts made last year in health care for the poor.The money will reduce by half the estimated shortfall for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. It will also restore Medicaid benefits to some pregnant women and maintain personal-attendant aid for disabled and elderly Texans.
Some of the money will maintain current reimbursement rates for doctors and other health care workers who provide services to Medicaid clients. And $25 million will be used to draw down additional federal funds to help hospitals that serve high numbers of indigent patients.
[...]
"This does not restore the 147,000 children who have lost CHIP coverage since Sept. 1, nor are dental and vision benefits to be restored to the CHIP package," Best said.
Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, said it's about time Perry acted to restore some of the health care cuts made last year.
"This is a victory for the people of the state of Texas and a victory for those who advocated these cuts never occur and then advocated for their restoration," said Coleman.
Coleman said he'd like to see Perry go further and use $1.3 billion in available revenue to restore other health cuts.
"What this shows is that this was bad public policy to begin with," Coleman said.
"They've really cheated these families out of needed services for the last year."
Comptroller Strayhorn must be on vacation, since I can't find any story that contains a reaction from her. I'm glad the Governor has finally taken a step towards doing the right thing, but he's got a long way to go. I hope this doesn't ease the pressure on him to finish the job.
Today's special guest star is Rep. Scott Hochberg from SD 137. Scott is a Rice grad, a go-to player in the House on all things education, and one of the all around good guys in Austin. Check out the brief intro here and the thorough analysis of the race here, and as always if you like what you see, let him know it.
A group of Texas writers, musicians, artists, and other interested people are raising some money to run a full-page NYT ad with the aim of letting people know that President Bush does not speak for everyone in Texas. You can see the ad here, the full list of participants here, and you can fill out this form if you'd like to add your name to the project and the ad. I can't say this is the best use of your discretionary political money, but spreading the idea that Bush isn't as beloved back home as one might think does have its merit. Check it out. Via Sarah.
Still working my way through Fifty Years of the Texas Observer - these things do go in fits and starts sometimes, you know? The book is divided into sections, with an intro and an afterword by founding editor Ronnie Dugger. Section one was about people ("Heroes and Hucksters"), while section two, which I've just finished is about places ("Local Angles"). This one has a lot of humor in it, which I find to be one of the stronger parts of TO's writing. Subjects include:
- A "startling expose of how Governor John Connally's plot to bankrupt liberals and other heavy drinkers" with a new alcohol law that mandated airplane-style single serving bottles.
- An amusing look at the battles faced by the crew that filmed the satirical movie Viva Max! (based on a novel by Jim Lehrer, yes, that Jim Lehrer), about a ne'er-do-well Mexican general who recaptures the Alamo after his girlfriend tells him that "his men wouldn't follow him to a house of ill repute". It contains this wonderful description of the Daughters of the Alamo, who did their best to keep those Hollywood ruffians from soiling their shrine:
Mrs. Scarborough pointed out that: "We are not little old ladies in tennis shoes." And several of her companions, one of whom had come straight from the country club and still wore golf shoes, nodded solemn agreement.
- The story of the world's largest cake, to celebrate the Sesquicentennial in 1986
- And my favorite, the story of a gambler who was convicted of premeditated murder after he bashed a loan shark's head in with the frozen body of his poodle (whom the loan shark had previously killed for failure to repay a debt).
There are other stories from various locales, ruminations on change, loss, and getting by in the world. The one online entry is from 2001, The Wounds of Waco, about a cameraman named Dan Molloney who was unfairly blamed for tipping the Branch Davidians about the ill-fated raid on their compound and never recovered from it.
The next section is called "The Political Tumult". I can already see a few themes to discuss. More later. Remember, there are book signings coming up in Austin and San Antonio in September.
In this corner, we have the Statesman's Lasso blog, which features permalinks, categories, archives, and (yes! finally!) an RSS feed. More of a linker than a thinker, and author Bill Bishop does refer to himself in the third person, but a good source for Texas news and occasional insight. Easily meets the minimum requirements for a real blog.
And in this corner, we have the Chronicle's Olympics blog. No permalinks, no archives, no feed, dumbass scrollbar-within-the-page interface, and worst of all, the wit and wisdom of John Lopez, who has discovered to his shock that not everyone in those foreign countries speaks English. What more need one say?
The Kerry campaign has given $3 million each to the DCCC and DSCC. Smart move, since money spent on battleground Congressional and Senate races - like Nancy Farmer and Joe Hoeffel - should also give a boost to the top of the ticket. Way to go, guys!
This Sunday Chron article on property tax variances was a bit of a disappointment to me. I don't think it's any great secret that some municipalities in Harris County, like Southside Place, have lower taxes than others - I mean, isn't that the reason for Southside Place's existence? What else is there? I guess I was hoping for an article on why property valuations can vary so much within a neighborhood, but that isn't what I got. Alas.
The discussion of municipal utility districts (MUDs) was interesting enough.
Municipal utility districts, which install and operate water and sewer systems in many new neighborhoods outside incorporated cities, frequently charge homeowners $1.50 to $2.50 per $100 assessed valuation to pay off the costs of the infrastructure. That leads to neighborhood property tax bills that are wildly inflated for several years until the MUD costs come down.The new neighborhoods of Village of Northgate Forest and Cypress Mill Park are the two most heavily taxed areas of Harris County, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of county and Harris County Appraisal District tax records. Both have high MUD taxes, driving their overall tax burden skyward.
The total tax bill for a home in Northgate Forest, for example, is $5.36 per $100 assessed valuation, meaning a $500,000 home was taxed last year at nearly $25,000 after homestead exemptions. By comparison, a similarly valued home would have been taxed at about $11,000 in Houston or $9,500 in Southside Place.
The developers of Northgate Forest recognized they would have trouble attracting buyers with such high taxes, so they agreed to pay all but $1.25 of the subdivision's $2.79 MUD taxes.
"We knew that we could not sell these lots with a $2.79 or $3 rate," said Doug Shannon, the general manager of the Northgate Forest Development Company. "So that's why we subsidize it down to $1.25."
I don't have any problem with the concept of MUDs. Seems perfectly fair to me that new housing in previously undeveloped areas should be responsible for the startup costs of extending utility services like water to them. And I have no problem with developers subsidizing those costs for their customers. That's the free market at work, isn't it?
Questions that weren't addressed but which I'm curious about anyway: How does new development, especially dense townhouse development, in existing populated areas affect utility services? Is there a cost to extend or expand water and sewage to city blocks that now may have a lot more people living in them, and if so who's paying for it? I've been wondering about this since the inner-loop boomlet began.
Recently, I posted about Tom DeLay's apparent change of heart regarding METRO. This led to speculation that DeLay's about-face was caused in part by Richard Morrison's aggressive campaigning on local issues such as transportation alternatives. Kevin then commented that Morrison isn't "credible", which drew some strong responses, and got me to thinking: What makes a candidate "credible" in the first place?
We can argue about whether a candidate is credible on a set of issues or not, but to me a credible candidate is one who has the resources and capability to have a shot at winning. What criteria can we use for that?
Let's start with money. Morrison has nowhere near the cash DeLay has, but he has raised over $200,000 so far, which is double what DeLay's previous opponent raised (I'm not counting the amount Tim Riley loaned to his campaign here). He's had a lot of success raising funds online, though a good portion of his cash still comes from in state and in particular in the Houston metro area. The DCCC may invest in him. He'll never match DeLay's firepower, but he's certainly not unarmed like some of DeLay's opponents have been.
Then there's polling data. We don't have much of that, but at least one poll suggests that Morrison isn't that far behind DeLay. Given that DeLay has won all his recent elections by 25-30 points, being within 10 is a pretty strong statement. He's still in a sizeable hole, of course, and will have a lot of work to do to get his name out, but at the very least Morrison is in a good position to do a fair amount better than any DeLay challenger in recent memory.
There are a number of other things in a campaign that can make a candidate look credible - professional operations, volunteer forces, etc - and my limited experience here suggests that Morrison is doing about as well as he could be. He certainly made a big splash at the State Convention a few weeks back - there were Morrison T-shirts and stickers everywhere, and the event at his hospitality suite was overflowing. These are all subjective measures, of course, and one can certainly differ in one's interpretation of them.
What clinches it for me, though, is how Tom DeLay has reacted to the Morrison campaign. We know he's opened campaign offices in the district for the first time in a long time. We know he's switched positions on teachers' retirement pay and now on METRO, both of which are issues that the Morrison campaign has highlighted. These events suggest to me that DeLay finds Richard Morrison to be a credible candidate. Who am I to argue with him about that?
Albert Hollan, a Democratic candidate for judge of the 400th District Court in Fort Bend County, is a wee bit upset. He's upset because Cliff Vacek, his opponent, was just appointed to the bench they're both running for. The incumbent judge, Bradley Smith, resigned on Friday and was immediately appointed to a brand-new, created-with-federal-grant-money "sanctions court". Smith had announced much earlier that he was not running for reelection, in part because Vacek had a ton of money left over from an earlier run for Fort Bend County DA to run against him in the GOP primary. By jumping from one judgeship to another less than three months out from the election, Smith has cleared the way for the man who chased him off and screwed Hollan in the process. Sweet, huh? As Hollan notes, now his opponent gets to put the (i) next to his name on the ballot and gets to change his campaign signs to say "Keep Judge Vacek" even though he probably won't try a single case before November.
I've reproduced an email sent by Hollan to his supporters, which was forwarded to me over the weekend. Juanita has some of the background - she also promises a full article next week - and Hollan's email has some more. They do run a tight ship down there in Fort Bend, don't they?
By the way, consider this post to be an extension to my earlier complaint about the utter lack of local election coverage in the Chronicle. I've searched their current and archived pages for all three of the principals in this post and found zilch on any aspect of the story. Thanks, Chron!
MORE...Man. I had no idea that people still leased telephones.
Twenty years after the government's breakup of the Bell monopoly, nearly 1 million consumers still lease their telephones from an affiliate of AT&T;, paying anywhere from $4.45 a month for an old-style rotary phone with "conventional bell sound" to $20.95 a month for a cordless phone with built-in digital answering machine. The result: Customers spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a piece of equipment that can be purchased for as little as $10.AT&T;'s Web site touts numerous benefits to leasing, including portability (you can take your phone with you if you move anywhere in the continent) and free accessories like long cords.
But consumer advocates say the program takes advantage of consumers, particularly elderly people, who may be easily confused over their options. According to an AARP survey from 1998, the latest year for which figures are available, 6 percent of people 75 or older leased their phone, compared with 2 percent under 65.
"It is such a rip-off," said Chris Baker of AARP's Public Policy Institute. "It's one of the things older people really depend on, and the fact they get abused is pathetic."
I'm sure the old rotary phone in my grandmother's kitchen was a leased phone. Hell, the thing was probably integral to the structure of the house. For all of the crap I had to deal with the last time we moved phone service, at least I wasn't asked why I didn't want to consider phone repair insurance. I can understand why AT&T; still offers the service - it's got to be a cash cow for them - but I'm just boggled that anyone would still take them up on it.
Gary Farber points to this Wired article about something called "Vedic math" - what that is, they never really tell us - which has some practical application if you're interested in quickly solving some arithmetic problems. Since the example given is presented more or less as magic, and since I believe in de-mystifying math, I feel the need to do a little explaining.
Here's the cited example:
Shetty did not know the original Sanskrit verses, but he did know how to crack the square of 85 in less than a second. "To find the square of any number ending with 5, just put 25 on the right-hand side," he said. "Take the number that precedes five. In this case it is 8. Add 1 to it. So in this case it becomes 9. Multiply 8 and 9. You get 72. 7,225 is the square of 85. It's easy."
Here are two simple reasons why this works. Let x be "the number that precedes five" as stated above. Then the number you want to square can be represented as 10x + 5. Squaring that gives
100x^2 + 100x + 25
which can be rewritten as
100 * x * (x + 1) + 25
which is what happens when you take the number that precedes 5 (that's x), add one to it (x + 1), multiply them together, and put the result to the left of the 25 (which is to say, multiply that result by 100). Note that this will work whatever your choice of x is - the formula holds for squaring 1235 or 6587465125, just as it did for squaring 85.
Method two:
Notice in the example cited that you can express the number "85" as both "80 + 5" and "90 - 5". With that in mind, let x + 5 represent a number that ends in 5 (the number x is therefore a multiple of 10, such as 80). The expression x + 10 - 5 then represents the same number. The square of x + 5 can then be written as
(x + 5) * ((x + 10) - 5)
Multiply it out to get
(x * (x + 10)) + ((x + 10) * 5) - (x * 5) - 25
Rearranging and multiplying out the second term, we get
(x * (x + 10)) + (x * 5) - (x * 5) + 50 - 25
which reduces to
(x * (x + 10)) + 25
Which again is the desired formula. In this case, you're recognizing that "the digit to the left of the five" is in the tens place, so adding one to it is really adding ten to the actual number it represents. Going back to the example, this is just saying that to square 85, you multiply 80 and 90, then add 25. And again, this works for whatever number-ending-in-five you want to square, though of course the bigger that number, the harder it'll be to do in your head.
Now, if you're like me, the next thing to pop into your head after working through this is "I wonder how it works in general". For example, what's the magic formula for squaring two number that end in 6? Using Method One, we square 10x + 6 to get
100x^2 + 120x + 36
which we rewrite as
100x^2 + 100x +20x + 36
and then reduce to
100 * x * (x + 1) + 20x + 36
Expressed in words, this is "Take the digit next to the six, add one to it, and multiply those two numbers, then multiply that by 100. Now multiply that number by 20, add 36 to that, and add the two new numbers you got for the answer." In practical terms, to square the number 86, do the same thing as before to get 7200, then add 160 (for 8 times 20) and 36, to get a final answer of 7396. Piece of cake, right?
A little noodling around will show that for the cases of numbers ending in 6 through 9, the formula will always start with the 100 * x * (x + 1) term and will always end with the square of the last digit (36, 49, 64, and 81). The middle term will be 20 times the difference between that number and 5, multipled by the last digit. That means the middle term for the case where the number ends in 7 will be 40x (20 times the difference between seven and five, which is two, times the original digit which we represent as x in the formula), 60x for 8 and 80x for 9. The formula is the same for the cases of numbers ending in 4, 3, 2, and 1, except you subtract the middle term instead of adding it - e.g., the formula for squaring a number that ends in 4 is
100 * x * (x + 1) - 20x + 16
Maybe I'm the mutant here, but I think working through this easy little bit of algebra to learn what these formulas are (and I hadn't even known they existed before I read that article) is way more fun than learning a bit of rote memorization that's only useful in one specific case. Whoever said that math is hard is really missing out.
Has anyone noticed an upswing in dogs and cats cohabitating lately? Rivers running upstream? I'm at a loss for how else to explain this.
Houston leaders responded with enthusiasm Friday to an apparent warming of relations between U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and the Metropolitan Transit Authority."I consider this to be a real positive, and perhaps a turning point, for improved mass transit in our region," Mayor Bill White said. "Metro has established a good relationship with Mr. DeLay, which is critical to getting the mass-transit funding we need."
DeLay, who has opposed Metro rail plans for more than a decade and blocked federal funds for the Main Street light rail line that opened in January, told the Texas Transportation Summit here that he's impressed with the agency's commitment to explore possible alternatives for future lines.
"Metro's new leadership, it's becoming clearer by the day, has a vision for a mobile Houston region, and the kind of open minds and flexible management style it will take to realize that vision," DeLay, R-Sugar Land, told attendees Friday morning.
Harris County Judge Robert Eckels called DeLay's comments a welcome development: "It is good for the city to see a Metro board and a mayor that are interested in working with Tom to really get the solutions for transit in our community."
[...]
"The majority leader is challenging us to work together as a region," said Garrett Dolan, vice president of the Greater Houston Partnership."He's painting a picture for us to look at innovative rail solutions, and we are 100 percent behind the idea."
Previously, DeLay has suggested that Metro needs a more advanced system than light rail.
After his speech, DeLay said he was pleased "they are finally doing something that Metro has never done: They are holding a forum to look at all forms of technology and how those technologies fit into the mobility in Houston, and how it will benefit the taxpayers in getting the biggest bang for the buck."
I want to see what happens next before I make any judgments about DeLay's apparent shift in attitude. Suffice it to say for now that I still don't see any reason to trust him.
Not everyone is on board with this New Attitude.
While the transit authority's relationship with DeLay appears to be warming, another of Metro's congressional critics offered his strongest comments yet against rail.Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, suggested during a Thursday discussion with other Texas representatives at the Irving summit that the quickest way to reduce the highway funding shortfall would be to abolish federal assistance for mass-transit projects. One of the major themes of this year's Texas Transportation Summit is what to do about road needs that are far outpacing the government's ability to pay for them.
Culberson said revenues from the federal gasoline tax should be limited to the Highway Trust Fund. A portion of the tax drivers pay at the pump now goes to the Federal Transit Administration.
"Transit is taking 11 percent of the money but they don't contribute a nickel," Culberson said. "It's carrying less than 1 percent of the traffic. I'm afraid rail in Houston is going to be a white elephant and a boat anchor around the neck of taxpayers."
Though Culberson spoke out vigorously last year against Metro's rail referendum, his comments about ending federal subsidies for mass transit appeared to surprise other panelists and many in the audience.
"If Houston wants to give us a little more of that transit money for Dallas, we'd be glad to take it," said Rep. Martin Frost, D-Dallas, who earlier had alluded to the fact that Dallas got ahead in building light rail because of Houston's failed past plans.
More of the same old same old. Maybe they're playing good cop/bad cop, I don't know. Like I said, I want to see what comes next. I can't help but feel there's a shoe dangling somewhere, and I want to see where it drops.
As of yesterday afternoon, I am now an official Deputy Voter Registrar for 2004 in Harris County. You can do it, too - it's as easy as dropping by the Harris County Tax Office and filling out a form. I now have a bunch of voter registration signup forms in my car and will start pestering people shortly. You are asked to either let the new voter mail in the form himself or herself, or deliver it to the Tax Office in person within five days. Voter reg cards take three to four weeks to be mailed out, so the deadline for getting registered is October 4. Your deputization is good through the end of the year.
The nice lady at the tax office said she's been swamped with deputization requests and new voter reg cards. We'll see if that translates to higher turnout this year. If you want to know more, or you live in Houston and want to register, let me know.
There are many things about the Houston Chronicle that I'd change if I were given the freedom to do so. If I were limited to just one thing, I'd see to it that they never printed anything by Michelle Malkin ever again. If you want to know why, read this and follow the links. As far as I'm concerned, any publication which uncritically prints Michelle Malkin is not worthy of being called "respectable".
I guess you could call this I Got My Mojo Workin' But It Just Don't Work On You:
The head of a multistate drug ring that paid a voodoo priestess for protection from federal agents might want a refund.John Timothy Cotton, 39, is facing a life sentence after being convicted of drug trafficking. Cotton was accused of leading a Houston-based organization that netted an estimated $43 million over 10 years, dealing crack cocaine in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Kansas.
"This was probably the largest drug-trafficking case prosecuted by this office in several years," said U.S. Attorney Donald Washington.
Most of the drugs came from Colombia and the Dominican Republic, where Cotton shipped at least $500,000 on one occasion in a car stuffed with cash, Washington said. Cotton and other members of the drug ring paid thousands of dollars for voodoo hexes against federal agents and for protection, Washington said.
"They paid what they called a spiritual adviser -- what we would call a voodoo priestess -- large amounts of money for blessings to protect their drug-trafficking business ...," Washington said. "If I were them, I would ask for my money back."
Better hope they kept the receipt. And is it just me, or is anyone else mildly alarmed by the fact that the U.S. Attorney's office has been categorizing voodoo priestesses?
It boggles my mind that there are no airport shuttle vans outside of a few select locations in Houston. Thankfully, that may be about to change.
"Airport passengers look for this kind of service, and we don't have it," Houston Aviation Director Richard Vacar told City Council's Transportation, Infrastructure and Aviation Committee.Of the nation's 60 busiest airports, only eight do not allow door-to-door shuttle van service, Vacar said. Two of those airports, Hobby and Bush Intercontinental, are in Houston.
Vacar said shuttles would likely cost half of what taxis charge to carry people because the shuttles can transport eight or more passengers.
Airport officials have made similar proposals since the 1980s, but they never came to fruition because of intense opposition from the city's taxi companies, which claim they would lose business to the shuttles.
Jerry Brady, president of Liberty Cab Co. in Houston, asked council members to approve his proposal to permit taxi companies to have vans that could carry up to 10 passengers when necessary, instead of allowing shuttle companies to operate at the airports. He said this plan would be more fair than giving "an exclusive contract" to shuttle companies.
J. Wellington Masseh, president of the Independent Cab Operators of Houston, told council members that the shuttle proposal "would drive many of us out of business."
[...]
Vacar said a consulting company hired by the airport system concluded that taxi companies would not be seriously hurt by shuttle services. According to the consulting company, Leigh Fisher Associates of Burlingame, Calif., taxis now transport 6 percent of the passengers at Hobby and 4 percent at Bush.
The introduction of shuttle services would reduce taxi companies' share at Hobby to 5.3 percent and to 3.2 percent at Bush.
Most passengers drive their cars and park at the airports, Vacar said. He said shuttles would help ease traffic congestion as Houston's airports continue to grow and get busier.
I agree that this proposal would put some cabbies out of work. I'll be sorry when that happens, but at the risk of sounding heartless, that's how a free market works. We don't have a free market in the airport-transportation business right now, and speaking as someone who'd never drive to the airport again if there were a viable alternative, we need one.
I have to say, I'm surprised it's not the private satellite airport parking lot lobby that's leading the fight against this, because I think they're the ones who'll take it in the shorts when a real shuttle comes online. 95% of people already drive and park, a proposition that's both annoying and expensive. Even at $20 each way, the shuttle would be cheaper than parking at Intercontinental for anything longer than a weekend trip, or at a satellite lot for anything approaching a week or more, at least for solo flyers. The only times we've ever taken a cab have been when we got someone to drive us to the airport but couldn't get someone to pick us up on arrival.
I'm rooting for this to happen. I'll be interested to see if Mayor White plays an active role. Seems to me this should fit with his overall "get Houston moving" theme. What do you say, Mister Mayor?
Julia Child has stirred her last pot.
Julia Child, whose warbling, encouraging voice and able hands brought the intricacies of French cuisine to American home cooks through her television series and books, has died. She was 91."America has lost a true national treasure," Nicholas Latimer, director of publicity for the famed chef's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, said in a statement. "She will be missed terribly."
Child died at 2:50 a.m. Friday at her home in an assisted-living center in Montecito, a coastal town about 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles, said her niece, Philadelphia Cousins.
"She passed away in her sleep," Cousins said. "She was with family and friends and her kitten, Minou. She had cookbooks and many paintings by her husband Paul around the house."
Child, who died two days before her 92nd birthday, had been suffering from kidney failure, Cousins said.
[...]
Her custom-designed kitchen -- including small utensils, personal cookbooks and six-burner Garland commercial range -- is on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
I've been to that exhibit at the Smithsonian. It's very cool. Julia Child was indeed a national treasure. May she rest in peace.
The longest primary election is finally over. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez has conceded defeat in his legal challenge to primary recount winner Henry Cuellar after the Texas State Supreme Court once again rejected his appeal.
Rodriguez threw in the towel late Wednesday after the Texas Supreme Court again rejected his request that it hear his appeal from a lower court. Just as it did last week, the state's highest court said it has no jurisdiction over election cases.The congressman had said he was thinking about moving his battle to federal court, but eventually he decided to surrender and start looking ahead.
"I don't intend to pursue any further legal action on the 2004 election," he said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "Instead I will focus on electing Sen. (John) Kerry as president and working toward my own 2006 congressional election.
"This appeal process was serious business to ensure the integrity of the election process and to make sure the person with the most legal votes actually won," Rodriguez said. "In the end, that did not happen."
Cuellar, a former Texas secretary of state under GOP Gov. Rick Perry, will meet Republican Jim Hopson in the November general election.
Rodriguez led by 145 votes immediately after the March 9 primary.
But Cuellar took the lead in a recount after more than 200 previously untallied ballots were discovered in Webb County, where he lives, and neighboring Zapata County.
Rodriguez sued in April, alleging irregularities in the "casting, counting and recounting" of ballots. He later amended the suit, claiming some voters didn't live in the district.
Cuellar successfully challenged the amended lawsuit, saying it raised new claims after the filing deadline.
But a panel of the 4th Court of Appeals in San Antonio later ruled 2-1 that Rodriguez had the right to question the legality of the votes.
However, a 5-2 vote in July by the full appeals court said Rodriguez was trying to bring a different allegation to trial. That decision came along party lines, with the Republican majority ruling against Rodriguez.
The two former friends battled each other because of a new, Republican congressional map.
Cuellar, 48, had planned to run again against Rep. Henry Bonilla, who narrowly beat him in District 23 in 2002, but last year's GOP-led redistricting made Bonilla's district more solidly Republican by including voters in San Antonio's well-to-do northern suburbs.
Interestingly, if you look at the new map (available here, click on PLANC01374), CD 23 is the least Republican of the districts drawn to be GOP-majority, with a statewide DPI of 43.2%; the Voting Age Population is only 36.5% Democrat, however. Given the bridges that Rodriguez burned in Laredo, I almost think he'd be better served taking on Henry Bonilla in 2006 instead of rematching with Cuellar, though really neither one seems particularly realistic to me. State Rep. Richard Raymond is the guy I want to see run against Bonilla some day.
The cost of building Minute Maid Park, Reliant Stadium and Toyota Center rose by $37.2 million this week when the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority voted to issue new bonds.Issuing the bonds was necessary to persuade one of the three major investment rating agencies, Moody's, not to downgrade the authority's bonds from investment grade status to junk bonds, said Ric Campo, chairman of the authority's finance committee.
The new bonds were needed to make up for declining hotel and car rental tax revenues, which the authority receives to pay off bond debt. In 2002 and 2003, the revenues sagged 10 percent.
To meet the annual payments for $900 million in previously issued bonds, the authority had projected annual 3 percent increases in hotel and car rental tax revenues.
"September 11 came and the recession came, and the hotel and car rental taxes have not been growing 3 percent. They're declining," said Oliver Luck, sports authority executive director.
The three sporting venues cost $1.036 billion to build. (Reliant Stadium cost $500 million, Minute Maid Park, $286 million, and Toyota Center, $250 million.) With the bond issuance, the price tag has now risen to $1.073 billion.
Many of those who supported building the venues said the county's residents would not pay the bills — they would be borne by visitors who stayed in local hotels and rented cars.
"The taxpayers of Harris County really aren't affected," said Sue Millican, the authority's chief financial officer.
But Paul Bettencourt, Harris County tax assessor-collector, has estimated that about half of car-rental taxes are paid by county residents and businesses and about one-third of the taxes collected by the sports authority come from within the county.
"It's just three, four, five years after the elections, and already they're selling more bonds," he said. "This is a big concern to me, and it should be to taxpayers."
Learning from History.
The Dallas Cowboys and Arlington are closer to an agreement on the financing of a $650 million football stadium that would make this city the new home of America's Team.Both sides said Tuesday that they agreed on all major issues but would not discuss specifics.
[...]
The City Council voted Tuesday night to pass a resolution outlining some details of the financing plan. That resolution, described as a formality, has to go to the state comptroller's office before a financing plan can be presented to voters.
That document says the city would pay for its share of the stadium with a half-cent sale tax increase, a 5 percentage-point rental car tax increase, and a 2 percentage-point hotel-tax increase. Also, a $3 tax would be added to the parking fee at the stadium, and a tax on each ticket sale of up to 10 percent would be levied.
Be sure to check back in a few years when the city of Arlington issues some new bonds to help cover its debt.
What do you do when you promise to cut your costs but you don't want to actually cut them? Transfer them to another department and claim it as savings anyway.
Gov. Rick Perry last year ordered state agencies to reduce their budgets 7 percent and promised that he would lead the way by cutting his own office by 14 percent.Part of Mr. Perry's cost savings was achieved by transferring the salaries of two maids, a cook and a porter at the Governor's Mansion to the Texas Building and Procurement Commission, according to state records obtained through an open records request by The Dallas Morning News. All remained assigned to the governor.
In addition to those four posts, Mr. Perry's office reassigned the salaries of five other staffers for mail support, purchasing and information systems to the procurement commission. They, too, maintained their duties for the Republican governor.
Press secretary Kathy Walt said the salaries of the transferred personnel – amounting to $300,000 annually – were part of the equation used by the governor in January 2003 to achieve his 14 percent cost savings.
She said the workers were moved for greater efficiency and because Governor's Mansion upkeep is overseen by the procurement commission.
The mail, purchasing and computer tech workers were made available to other agencies, although they still fulfilled their duties at the governor's office, she said.
"It means they were probably being asked to work a little bit harder when they were moved. Their duties were likely to increase," Ms. Walt said.
What a great boss. Who knew that Perry's hair was actually pointy? Via Carefully Selected Garbage.
In a Playboy interview, which we'll all read because that's what we all buy Playboy for, right?
According to Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Google Inc. is now being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an interview its founders gave one week before the company filed with the SEC to go public. The investigation could delay Google's much-anticipated initial public offering.Under SEC regulations, company officials are barred from talking publicly about the company in the lead-up to an IPO. Google's unconventional auction-style float is expected any day now. The Playboy issue with the interview hits newsstands Friday.
According to the newspaper, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page talk at great length about how going public might influence the culture at the widely successful search engine. They also talk about the controversial decision to track customers' Web activity in an attempt to offer customized advertising on Google's new e-mail service.
More background here. As of this morning, there's still doubt as to whether publication of the interview violated SEC rules.
The only thing I can imagine that would be better than Britney Spears at the national GOP convention would be the national "family values" crowd throwing a hissy fit over the Britster's appearance. No excuse for poor TV ratings here!
Say what you want about Richard Morrison, the man is fearless.
If fundraising is any indicator, Morrison shouldn't be brushed off too lightly: "For the people that said we could raise no money and money would be hard to raise, we've already raised more than $300,000, and we've raised more money than all of DeLay's [previous] opponents combined!" he told the cheering crowd. Of course, Morrison only has about half of that still in the bank. DeLay, by contrast, has already spent more than three times what Morrison has raised and still has about $1.3 million in cash on hand.And the money must be translated into actual votes. Morrison cited a Democratic National Committee poll showing him about 10% behind, although he tried to spin that positively, saying that the 49%-39% numbers were not good for an incumbent. More troubling for Morrison: In the only poll that counts, an election, DeLay received 15,490 in an uncontested Republican primary back in March. On the Democratic side, Morrison and opponent Erik Saenz could only muster up 10,223 votes between the two of them, only 7,303 of which went to Morrison. Clearly, he'll need a staggering level of support from independent voters – hard to come by these days in our politically polarized nation.
Still, don't try to tell that to Morrison or the people signing checks at Scholz. He's still convinced that hard work can take him over the top: "My attitude is, if Glen walked up to me right now and said, 'Morrison, I guarantee you a victory if we could cut off your right arm,' I'd say, 'Glen, go in there and get the machete and bring it out here cut it off.' That's what it's going to take from each one of you, that kind of dedication."
Via The Stakeholder. It's never a bad time to contribute to Morrison's cause. Houstonians may want to check out this fundraising brunch for him in September.
On a side note, I got a rambling and slightly bizarre email (sent to a mailing list I'm on) from Mike Fjetland, the independent candidate in this race. Here's part of his pitch, in which he tries to make the case that only he can beat The Hammer:
Democrats, who make up a maximum of 35% of District 22, don't have enough votes to elect a Democrat in a district gerrymandered by DeLay whose talents are limited except for twisting boundaries and dumping Democrats --(it's a 63% GOP district)....BUT (importantly) Democrats DO have enough votes to defeat DeLay IF they combined their votes (35%) for the independent with Fjetland's existing moderate Republican base (20% he received in 2000/2002 GOP primary) = Fjetland stomps DeLay 55% plus (35% + 20% plus).
I guess you could claim that the two GOP primaries represent a poll that indicates 20% of the CD22 Republicans would be willing to vote for Fjetland. I'm not sure that this constitutes a representative sample, but there's a more fundamental problem with Fjetland's math. If as he asserts 65% of the voters are Republican, then 20% of those voters represents 13% of the total, which when added to his assumed amount gives 48%. That leaves 52% for DeLay, which needless to say is still enough for him to win. Fjetland would have needed 23% of the primary vote to get over the hump. Admittedly, that isn't that much more than what he says he got, but a quick check of the Historic Election Returns shows the following:
2000 Republican Party Primary ElectionU. S. Representative District 22
Tom DeLay(I) REP 41,901 83.32%
Michael Fjetland REP 8,385 16.67%
-----------
Race Total 50,286
2002 Republican Primary ElectionU. S. Representative District 22
TOM DELAY(I) REP 22,379 79.85%
MIKE FJETLAND REP 5,645 20.14%
-----------
Race Total 28,024
You can draw your own conclusions. No sale here, Mike.
The Chron editorializes about the financial woes of the Harris County Sports Authority.
The Harris County-Houston Sports Authority is not responsible for economic factors that make the sale of $37.2 million in new bonds necessary. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 depressed travel worldwide. If all goes well, the bond sale will relocate financial liability to out years when hotel and car-rental taxes should have climbed appreciably.However, the authority is responsible for issuing around a billion dollars in stadium debt on the mistaken proposition that tax revenues, on average, would rise 3 percent per year. Over 2002 and 2003, the authority's tax revenues declined 10 percent.
Faced with the prospect of having its stadium bonds degraded to junk status, the authority voted to issue more debt to ensure repayment of old debt that financed Minute Maid Park, Reliant Stadium and Toyota Center.
Most of the hotel and car-rental taxes are paid by visitors. "The taxpayers of Harris County really aren't affected," Sue Millican, the authority's chief financial officer, told the Chronicle.
Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt notes, however, that county residents and business owners pay about half of all car-rental taxes and an estimated one-third of combined hotel and car-rental taxes. Now local taxpayers will pay more to retire stadium debt without getting more value for their money.
About $15 million in proceeds from the sale of additional bonds are to be used to boost the authority's cash reserves set aside for making bond payments in economic downturns. The authority hadn't been able to make the required cash reserve increase because of the decline in tax collections and might soon have had to dip into the fund to make bond payments. (Insurance would pay off the bonds in the unlikely case of a default.)
But every new bond sale adds interest and principal to the debt. The more debt the authority takes on, the more the financing of the new stadiums comes to resemble that of the Astrodome. Though obsolete and seldom used, that facility still carries tens of millions of dollars in debt.
The county's three fine new sports venues are wonderful assets. They contribute to redevelopment of the central city. Without them, Houston would not have hosted this year's Super Bowl or All-Star Game.
After those gigantic events, however, hotel and car-rental taxes should not be lagging. Add the Sports Authority to the list of government agencies that underestimate cost and overestimate revenue — a list that, unlike tax revenues, grows inexorably.
Here's the original story, as noted by Kevin. There's a lot of ground to cover here.
First, full disclosure. I supported these initiatives, and on balance I still support them. I can offer a lot of weasel words about intangibles and world-class and stuff like that, but to be honest, I'm a sports fan and I like these new venues. I'm glad we have them, I'm glad they've been instrumental in bringing big events to Houston (my sketpicism about the trumpeted cash infusions those benefits supposedly bring notwithstanding), and I think Houston would lose something without them. That's just how I feel about it.
That said, there's no question that they were sold with a lot of disingenuousness about cost and benefit. Research about the little-if-any economic benefit of publicly funded stadia was fairly new when the first referendum was on the ballot, but by the third time it should have been (but wasn't) common knowledge. We all deserved a better debate about municipal priorities, and we didn't get it.
Second, it'd sure be nice to get the same kind of followup data on economic benefit projections from the All-Star Game and the Super Bowl that we did for these tax projections. Sure, it's easier to get the actual data on tax collections. My point is that if it's so hard to get the real numbers on special event economic benefits, maybe we ought not to make such specific projections beforehand, since they apparently can never be falsified. For what it's worth, by the way, note that the one post-ASG number we did get was $10 million short of the projection.
Since we do now know that the Sports Authority was all wet (and I have to say, it's hard to disagree with Paul Bettencourt's assertion that the Authority has done the work it was supposed to do and should now be disbanded), it would be instructive to know where in particular they were wrong. Maybe there's an opportunity for improvement buried within, I don't know. If nothing else, I'd like to know if the Super Bowl and the All-Star Game had any effect on the 2004 projections, and if the midyear numbers are currently on track. Will we face the same problem next year because one wildly optimistic prediction led to another?
I suppose there's one consolation here. Sooner or later, the economy really will get better, and the tax collections will start to catch up once again to the projections. At least we can be comforted by the fact that this time when everyone influential has had a chance to forget the lessons of this particular saga, there aren't any more stadia to be built. We'll have to find a new way to repeat history.
Jesse points to this initially promising but ultimately frustrating article about the race in CD17 between Rep. Chet Edwards and Arlene Wohlgemuth. What's frustrating about it?
In the campaign, Edwards is trying to position himself as a moderate Democrat who is equally ready to back his party or the president on issues.His campaign is trying to portray Wohlgemuth as being right of Bush and the Republican Party on issues. His efforts have been helped by several leading Republicans in Wohlgemuth's home area abandoning their party in the race because they see her as being too conservative.
[...]
Edwards' campaign may get a boost from defections among Republicans. Some leading Republicans in Wohlgemuth's home of Johnson County publicly split with her during the Republican runoff campaign to find a candidate for the race to fill her State House seat, and the bitterness lingers.
In the waning days of the election, photos mysteriously appeared that showed one candidate as a cross-dresser.
The photos of candidate Sam Walls, a backbone of the Republican Party in the county and considered one of the area's greatest benefactors, in women's clothes helped give the race to a candidate favored by Wohlgemuth. Texas newspapers reported that Walls had for years been a cross dresser and said Walls in a statement called the activity a "small part" of his past.
In addition, some voters in Johnson County see Wohlgemuth as too strongly aligned with fundamentalist Christians. These voters have taken to calling hard-core religious conservatives Talibaptists, a play on the name of the fundamentalist Islamic group the Taliban.
Emphases mine. Would it kill the reporter to name any of these Republicans/voters that he keeps alluding to? Maybe furnish a quote or two? I haven't been teased this badly since my last foray into a singles bar. I want to believe, really I do. A little actual evidence would go a long way, you know?
And what does the Sam Walls thing have to do with the Wohlgemuth-Edwards race? I suppose "some voters" might hold the fact that a Wohlgemuth ally was the beneficiary of Walls' embarassment against her, but once again, who are these voters and what are they themselves saying? This feels like a big ol' red herring to me. Show me there are voters who might base their November decision on this, don't tell me.
I can already hear some of my readers proclaim that this is an example of the perniciousness of the liberal media. All I can say is that if this is the best the so-called liberal media can do, I don't know why you bother getting upset about it. How could anything this ridiculous be worrisome?
And finally, after all that basically content-free buildup, the story then shoots down its own hypotheses.
Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said despite defections in the Republican camp, Wohlgemuth will not suffer significantly for it come election day."Wohlgemuth does bother people as sort of being aggressively and thoughtlessly conservative," Jillson said.
"While there is plenty of time left for finger pointing among the Republicans, when push comes to shove on election day, if they turn out, I expect them to vote for Arlene Wohlgemuth," he said.
The redistricting did not greatly change the percentage of Republicans in the district, but it did erase traditional areas of support for Edwards around a military base and among some rural communities.
Political observers have said the new district lines mean that if a Democratic incumbent does well, that candidate can easily get 47 percent of the vote, but 51 percent or more may be impossible.
So now the author has trotted out an expert to say that although "some people" might not like Arlene Wohlgemuth, they'll vote for her anyway. What was the point of this article again?
Kenny Boy Lay and Jeff Skilling made their first joint appearance in awhile, in court.
Former Enron Chairman Ken Lay won't get his requested September trial date.Lay and his former second-in-command Jeff Skilling were in federal court Wednesday for a pretrial hearing. It was the first time the two had appeared together to face their multiple criminal charges, and when Lay entered the court he winked at Skilling, who smiled back.
U.S. District Judge Sim Lake did not set a trial date for Lay, Skilling and their co-defendant ex-Chief Accounting Officer Rick Causey. Instead, the judge asked the three to make all their arguments about why each wants to be tried separately and said he will likely rule on that by early October.
"It's too soon to set this case for trial. We're dealing with what could be life sentences here," Lake said. He said the case is extraordinarily complex. But the judge also noted Lay deserves the quick trial he has requested.
Lay has asked that he be tried alone, and the other two said they will do so. It is common for conspiracy defendants to ask to be separated, and often they are unsuccessful.
Lay wants a quick trial, but Skilling and Causey don't.
While Lay wants a trial in the next few months, prosecutors have asked for one trial for all three defendants in March 2005.And Skilling and Causey want the trial a year after that, in March 2006, if not later.
One of the big differences between the Lay approach and that of his two co-defendants is that Lay's charges focus on only a few months of his reign right before Enron's bankruptcy while the other two face charges that focus on a variety of activities over several years.
Lawyers for Skilling and Causey have complained that the volume of documents and possible evidence they have to sift through is massive, and it's the reason they need another year before going to trial.
They have also complained that the government has not pointed out documents that could help the defendants.
The fun is just beginning. I'd almost prefer to see Lay's trial severed from Skilling and Causey's just because having all three of them go at it at once might be too much concentrated excitement. We'll see what happens.
The lawsuit to remove a Bible display from outside the Harris County Civil Court building (first noted here) has been decided for the plaintiff, with an appeal pending. As I noted in my original post, I support this ruling, though I can't say it's high on my priority list. Given that Harris County is already on the hook for court costs, and given the probability that the ruling will ultimately be upheld, I wish they'd cut their losses and quit wasting my tax money on this frivolity. But this is a red-meat issue for the GOP, and County Attorney Stafford knows where his bread is buttered.
As always, former judge John Devine provides a little unintentional comedy:
Former state District Judge John Devine, a leader of the drive to restore the monument from its dilapidated state, disagreed. "The Bible is a book of three faiths," he said, citing Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
For some reason, this quote reminds me of that classic line from The Blues Brothers: "We got both kinds, country AND western!" I also suspect there might be a few Jews and Muslims who'd take exception to that claim. But who's counting?
Milton brings his non-Christian perspective to the case. It's worth your time to read it.
So there's been a lawsuit filed in the Rodney Alexander race, claiming that the last-minute party-switcher violated Louisiana state law by essentially filing for the race twice, once as a Democrat then again later as a Republican. I don't know the merits of this suit, but there sure would be some poetic justice in Alexander getting booted. He's already seen his entire staff quit, plus his consultants as well, according to that Stakeholder post.
If Alexander loses the court fight, there will still be a Republican (a gentleman named Jock Scott who is currently being pressured by the NRCC to drop out) and a Democrat (a woman named Tisa Blakes) in the race, so at least that result won't utterly deprive the voters of a choice. You never know what may happen in a case like this, but at least that argument won't hold water.
MyDD has a bunch of info. For the record, I don't object to party-switchers. It happens all the time, and Lord know we Democrats have been parading a few former Republicans in various Congressional races (Ginny Schrader and Steve Brozak, to name two). Last minute shenanigans to thwart competition are another matter. If Alexander had switched when he was first rumored to be contemplating it, I wouldn't have liked it, but that'd be life in the big city. This was a sleazy trick, and it'd serve him right if he got nailed for it.
