As noted yesterday, Republicans in Texas are once again threatening to remove the power to investigate election code violations from the Travis County District Attorney's office to the Attorney General, presumably on the theory that they won't have to worry so much about the fine points of corporate campaign cash with a fellow traveller in charge of enforcement. Partisan interests aside, I think there's actually a decent case to be made for this. For one thing, the AG shouldn't have any of the jurisdictional problems that Ronnie Earle faces:

The election code allows Earle to prosecute Colyandro because he lives in Austin. It also gives Earle jurisdiction over out-of-state defendants. But because Craddick and DeLay live in Texas, but outside of Travis County, their local district attorneys would have jurisdiction over election code violations.

Earle could argue for jurisdiction in Craddick's case if he has a dual residence. It's unclear if the speaker's apartment provided in the Capitol would qualify.

Even if (God forbid) the Republican Party remains the only game in town at the state level for the next generation or so, I don't think this will be the panacea they're hoping for. Sure, the current AG would never have touched the TRMPAC case, but that's because he's up to his eyeballs in conflicted interests. Will that be true for the next scandal, or the next AG? And again, remember the nature of people who run for Attorney General. When the chips are down, their own ambition will trump the greater good of their party and its image. I think that will be even more true in the one-party-state scenario, since taking down a colleague may be the only way to create a job opening.

No, if the Republicans want to make sure that no one ever gets in trouble for throwing around corporate campaign contributions again, their best bet is to decriminalize it, as they're also talking about doing. I think (I could be wrong here) that would necessitate a constitutional amendment, which would have to be approved by the voters in a referendum. I can just imagine how that puppy would get marketed - "Buying access: It's not just a good idea, it ought to be the law!" Do you think they'd also remove the adjoining restriction on donations from unions, or will they simply tell us that corporate cash is Good and labor cash is Bad? I'd better stock up on batteries for my Unintentional Comedy Meter just in case.

Related to the previos item, John Colyandro, one of the three individuals indicted so far in the TRMPAC investigation, has filed a motion to dismiss the charges against him.

John Colyandro contends he couldn't have improperly received the contributions because he wasn't a candidate, officeholder or political committee.

Texas law states that only officeholders, candidates and political committees are capable of illegally accepting contributions.

The motion was made Tuesday by an attorney for the former executive director of Texans for a Republican Majority. That's a political action committee with ties to Republican U-S House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Sugar Land.

Colyandro was indicted in September, along with two other DeLay associates who helped raise money to secure a Republican majority in the Texas House in 2002.

Gregg Cox of the Travis County district attorney's office told the newspaper he hasn't reviewed Colyandro's pleading but had been expecting such motions.

Via The Daily DeLay, Sears has joined Diversified Collections Services in making a deal with the Travis County District Attorney's office in the TRMPAC case.

Prosecutors have agreed to drop an illegal campaign contribution charge against Sears, Roebuck and Co. in exchange for the company's cooperation with a state investigation of contributions to a Republican political action committee.

A Travis County judge signed off on the agreement today.

[...]

The agreement calls for Sears to cooperate with Texas "in its prosecution and investigation of any other person for any offense related to the corporate contribution" that Sears made.

The agreement also said that Sears has certified that it has enacted additional internal policies and adopted a plan to strengthen its policy against making illegal political contributions in any state. The agreement also said Sears will modify its company Web site to provide for public access and disclosure of corporate contributions made by Sears.

In addition, [Sears senior vice president Robert J.] O'Leary said Sears will contribute $100,000 to the University of Texas for a campaign finance law awareness program.

You know how some people have fretted that traffic cameras would lead to less privacy? This is the sort of thing we worry about.

Dallas police have joined with private businesses in the city's Deep Ellum entertainment district to watch the area by camera.

Dallas police will be able to monitor crowds from 16 cameras on the roofs of three businesses in Deep Ellum. The businesses and police will share the footage via the Internet.

"The intent is not just to provide real-time video images but to provide a history of what happened," Chief David Kunkle said. "This is part of making the city of Dallas safer."

While police say crime in the area is down about 12 percent since last year, several high-profile fights and robberies have made some visitors nervous. Business owners have asked for additional police presence.

"It's one of many steps aimed to make Deep Ellum safer in 2005," said Mark McNabb, executive director of the Deep Ellum Association.

Virtual Surveillance of Plano donated about $20,000 worth of equipment and services for the pilot project. The cameras will remain in place indefinitely.

This pretty much speaks for itself.

Public Citizen is writing to provide the Department of Justice with significant new information regarding possible violations of 18 U.S.C. §201 (“Bribery of public officials and witnesses”) by current and former Westar Energy, Inc. executives and its D.C.-based lobbyists and current and former members of the U.S. House of Representatives. This new information has recently been uncovered in an investigation by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (“ethics committee”).

On June 17, 2003, Public Citizen submitted a complaint concerning possible criminal violations of anti-bribery statutes by lobbyist Richard H. Bornemann; Westar Energy (previously known as Western Resources) executives David C. Wittig, Douglas T. Lake, Douglas R. Sterbenz, Douglas R. Lawrence, Anita Jo Hunt, Caroline A. Williams, Richard A. Dixon, Kelly B. Harrison, Larry D. Irick, Peggy Lloyd, Bruce Akin, Paul R. Geist; and U.S. Representatives Tom DeLay (R-Texas), W.J. “Billy” Tauzin (R-La.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas).

Meanwhile, via The Stakeholder and Greg, I see that Republicans in both DC and Austin are working hard to make sure that this sort of thing Never Happens Again.

In the aftermath of back-to-back ethics slaps at House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, House Republicans are preparing to make it more difficult to begin ethics investigations and could remove the GOP chairman who presided over the admonishments delivered to DeLay last fall.

A House leadership aide said a package of rules changes to be presented to the House when the 109th Congress convenes Tuesday could include a plan that would require a majority vote of the ethics panel to pursue a formal investigation. At present, a deadlock on the panel, which is evenly split between the two parties, keeps the case pending. The possible change, the aide said, would mean that a tie vote would effectively dismiss the case.

[...]

In Texas, state Republican legislative leaders and party officials are considering some maneuvers of their own in light of the investigation. One proposal would take authority for prosecuting the campaign finance case away from the Democratic district attorney in Austin and give it to the state attorney general, a Republican. Another possible move would legalize corporate campaign contributions like those that figure into the state case.

Schoolkids are saying sayonara to milk cartons.

Encouraged by a milk industry study that shows children drink more dairy when it comes in round plastic bottles, a growing number of schools are ditching those clumsy paper half-pint cartons many of us grew up with.

Already more than 1,250 schools have switched to single-serving bottles. While that is still a tiny fraction of the nation's schools, it is a significant jump from 2000, when there were none, according to the National Dairy Council.

"Those damn square containers are awfully hard for kids," says New Hampshire Agriculture Commissioner Steve Taylor, who has watched the trend spread to some 320 schools in New England. "Teachers say you can spend the whole lunch period just walking around and opening those containers."

Although plastic long has been the favored packaging for soda and other drinks, schools sought bottled milk only after a 2002 Dairy Council study found milk consumption increased 18 percent in schools that tested bottles. The study also found that children who drank bottled milk finished more of it.

The change to plastic brings schools closer to overall milk packaging trends. In 2001, more than 82 percent of the nation's milk was packaged in plastic, up from 15 percent in 1971, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

1. It would be nice to know that the schools are also taking steps to ensure that those plastic bottles get recycled. No mention of that in the article, though.

2. One thing you could do with the old cartons that you can't with the bottles: After drinking the contents, close the spout, fold down the tented top, place the carton on the floor, and stomp on it as hard as you can. If you do it just right, it makes a very loud and satisfying BANG! as the carton pops like a balloon. Not that I'd advocate such behavior for the school cafeteria, of course. I'm just saying.

3. Will they still include the pictures of missing kids on the bottles?

I never knew that the University of Texas at Arlington had ever had football, but they did, up until 1985. Now they're talking about reviving it, and this Star Telegram article details the story. A couple of bits to comment on:

The initiative began with a UTA Student Congress referendum that proposed a $2 per semester hour increase in the Student Athletic Fee. This spring, UTA's student body passed the measure by a 2-to-1 margin in the largest student-voter turnout ever for a one-day vote at UTA.

The fee increase is expected to bring in an extra $1.25 million per school year. Josh Warren, UTA's former student body president who kickstarted the athletic fee increase to help fund sports expansion, called that a conservative estimate.

The student leaders were well-spoken and well-informed. Rather than brush off the Student Congress, UTA President Jim Spaniolo, who is also pursuing a mid-sized Special Events Center that could be used for concerts and basketball, became serious. In August, UTA hired Chuck Neinas of Neinas Sports Services, a sports consultant firm based in Boulder, Colo., and paid him $23,000 to conduct a sports-expansion feasibility study.

[...]

Though it might sound strange, Warren, who did most of the research and wrote much of the initiative to increase the Student Athletic Fee, isn't a raving football fanatic. When Warren looked at the U.S. News & World Report's annual list of the country's best colleges and universities, he noticed that schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Cal-Berkeley and Stanford didn't sacrifice academics for football.

Warren and his student-leader peers set out to increase student pride, fill a vacant fall social calendar and give graduates a reason to make donations to their alma mater and return to campus from time to time. The student leaders wanted a more traditional college experience. Their goal is to create "Mavericks 4 Life."

The return of football, in their estimation, achieves all of that.

"It seemed like we were missing something, a certain atmosphere," said Warren, who is ribbed by friends that say UTA stands for UT-Almost. "When I talked to alumni, I got the same feeling. They weren't coming back to campus."

UTA Athletic Alumni Association president Brian Happel was a kicker for the Mavericks in the early 1980s, and he and his group were approached before the athletic fee increase was put up for vote.

"You have students that aren't experiencing what their high school classmates are experiencing in college," Happel said. "They've come here and see what they're missing. They feel shorted compared to their high school classmates. I think a football program would help draw students to campus, and I think it will help retain students and help graduates give back to the university."

I also find the student-led referendum to be interesting. There's a parallel to our city referenda on stadium building, but it feels to me like the students were more open about what they were asking their colleagues to spend on. Sure, there's still the idea that they'll make money back on this, in the form of increased alumni giving, but I get the overall impression that they really were looking for an experience and not an investment. I hope they get what they think they're paying for.

More on the money angle:

If and when UTA brings back football, the university can't expect to make money from the program -- definitely not at first, and probably not ever. Of the six [Division I-AA Southland Conference] schools that have football programs, only McNeese State made a profit in the 2002-03 academic year. And McNeese State, which led the SLC in average attendance at 16,414 per game, barely did that.

Of the 10 Division I-A football programs in Texas, only five -- SMU, TCU, Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech -- showed a profit in 2002-03. The football programs at Baylor, Houston, North Texas, Rice and UT-El Paso were in the red.

Tom sent me an email with a link to Andrew Ferguson's article on Jack Abramoff in the Weekly Standard. I'd seen the link before, but the getting around to reading and blogging about it part got lost in the holiday shuffle. I can't beat Mark Schmitt's take on the piece, but there are a couple of things to add.

First, as noted by The Stakeholder, there are some local angles to the Abramoff/Mike Scanlon/Ralph Reed story that could stand a bit of investigation. Despite the strong ties these three scoundrels have to Tom DeLay - Scanlon is DeLay's former press secretary - the Houston Chronicle hasn't touched this at all. Do an archive search on 'Jack Abramoff' + 'TomDeLay', and you'll get four hits, all of which were articles picked up from the Washington Post. There may be nothing there, of course, but I rather doubt it.

Second, I got a good laugh out of this bit from the Ferguson piece:

After College Republicans, Abramoff brought the same theatricality to his other activist jobs. "His greatest strength was his audacity," says the writer and political consultant Jeff Bell, who worked with Abramoff and Norquist at a Reaganite group called Citizens for America in the mid-1980s. "He and Grover [Norquist] were just wildmen. They always were willing to throw the long ball. Jack's specialty was the spectacular--huge, larger-than-life, almost Hollywood-like events." As the group's chairman, Abramoff staged his greatest spectacular in 1985, a "summit meeting" of freedom-fighters from around the world, held in a remote corner of the African bush. Among the summiteers was Adolfo Calero, a leader of the Nicaraguan contras, and playing host was a favorite of the 1980s conservative movement, the Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi, who fought bravely against the Cuban occupiers of his country but turned out, alas, to be a Maoist cannibal.

Anyway, the Ferguson piece is a good read, so check it out. I've noted before that Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, the authors of The Hammer, think that the Abramoff/Scanlon Indian gaming scandal will be the thing that finally brings Tom DeLay down. I think it's way too early to think that, or even to think that he will be brought down by anyone other than maybe the voters some day, but keep it in mind.

UPDATE: The Stakeholder adds on.

My comments have been infested by a particularly obnoxious troll over the past couple of days, someone who seems to think that because I allow feedback, he's free to leave offensive and racist remarks and that I am somehow obligated to let him. Normally, I'd ban such a person, something I've only had to do three previous times in the three years I've run this site, but since he posts from multiple IP addresses, that wasn't a workable option. Given no other choice, I've decided to take the drastic and unfortunate step of closing comments for the time being. I'm not happy about this, but with a sick kid at home, I've got neither the time nor the inclination to clean up after this joker. Until further notice, please send feedback to the email address listed above. My sincere apologies to you all.

UPDATE: After soliciting some feedback from friends, I've decided to reenable comments going forward, but with moderation in place. That means I'll have to approve comments before they're visible on the site, something that is done normally for older posts by the MT Blacklist plugin. You should see a message of some kind saying that your comment will appear after it has been approved. Still not as good a solution as having the obnoxious troll go away and bother someone else, but better than throwing out the baby with the bath water. Again, my apologies for the inconvenience.

Meet Melissa Noriega, wife of State Rep. Rick Noriega (D, Houston), who will be filling in for her husband while he is on active military duty in Afghanistan.

Melissa Noriega, 50, is a special projects manager for the Houston Independent School District. She said she has refused to travel at work because she did not want to leave her son alone, but she said she feels a responsibility to fill in for her husband in the Legislature while he is on active duty.

"This is really an honor, both that my husband would trust me with the responsibility and we've also gotten a lot of feedback from the district. This isn't something we just did," she said. "We've been discussing it with precinct judges and community leaders."

A state constitutional amendment passed last year allowing legislators who are called up to active military duty to designate their replacement until they return or their term of office expires. Noriega won re-election last year while on active duty in Afghanistan.

When asked why her husband chose her as his temporary replacement, Melissa Noriega said, "For one thing, I'll give it back."

The procedures for how she will replace him are not completely in place. But most likely he will be sworn in from Afghanistan when the Legislature convenes Jan. 11. Then he will notify the House chief clerk and parliamentarian of his choice of surrogate.

The full House has the power to reject Noriega's choice, but in this case is expected to seat Melissa Noriega to serve in her husband's place.

Remember the Trans Texas Corridor? Turns out that until three months ago, the guy who is now Governor Perry's legislative director worked for the firm that won the first construction bid.

As a government affairs consultant for Cintra, Dan Shelley was to be paid if the road deal went through, a spokesman for the governor said. But Mr. Shelley agreed to give up all rights to that money – an amount the governor's office could not detail – when he joined Mr. Perry's staff as legislative director.

The spokesman, Robert Black, said Mr. Shelley was never paid any money by Cintra. After joining the governor's office, he said, Mr. Shelley had no contact about the project with Cintra or the Texas Transportation Commission, the Perry-appointed board that picked the company.

"The governor's office had no influence at all over who won the contract for the Trans-Texas Corridor," Mr. Black said.

Mr. Perry has made the Trans-Texas Corridor, a network of tollways and rail lines across the state projected to cost $175 billion, the centerpiece of his transportation policy. An opponent of the plan said Mr. Shelley's previous employment for Cintra added to questions about the project.

"From the very beginning, this was going to be a railroaded project," said Corridor Watch founder David Stall. His group opposes the governor's proposal and wants to ensure that the development process is open to public input. "The governor had an agenda. It's all predetermined."

Mr. Shelley, a lobbyist at the time, began consulting for the company in December 2003, roughly three months after Cintra was named to a list of three possible Trans-Texas Corridor contractors, the governor's office said. When Mr. Shelley joined the governor's staff nine months later, his lobbying firm – which includes his daughter and son-in-law – did not take over the Cintra contract or the promised pay, Mr. Black said.

State records show Mr. Shelley – a lawyer and former state legislator who serves as Mr. Perry's liaison to lawmakers – and his firm were not registered with the state as lobbyists for Cintra, as required for individuals who have contact with state officials that's intended to influence government decisions.

"Dan Shelley gave advice to Cintra" about doing business in Texas, Mr. Black said. "He didn't lobby, nor did he try to influence anyone else's decisions, other than Cintra's."

Texas Transportation Commission Chairman Ric Williamson said Mr. Shelley approached Texas Department of Transportation officials about a year ago, seeking a meeting about his work for Cintra and possibly other Spanish companies. The visit was brief, and it was the only known business contact between Mr. Shelley and the transportation department, Mr. Williamson said.

"The visit he made to TxDOT was not in the nature of a specific project," Mr. Williamson said. "It was along the lines of, 'These guys may want to do business in Texas. Can you spend some time with them?' "

Several months later, the state hosted a tour in Dallas and other Texas cities, explaining potential projects to about 20 representatives of Spanish companies. They included several from Cintra's then-parent company, Ferrovial Agroman.

"There should be an appearance question from your point of view. But from my point of view, there is none," Mr. Williamson said. "I can guarantee you Dan Shelley didn't lobby me for anything to do with Cintra."

Getting back to Corridor Watch for a second, it seems that among the opponents of the Trans Texas Corridor are the Republican Party of Texas. Campaign issue, anyone?

Thanks to KF for the heads up.

State Rep. Harold Dutton (D, Houston) has what I think is a smart proposal: Make possession of an ounce or less of marijuana a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by a fine but not prison.

Texas law currently calls for six months in jail for possession of less than two ounces of marijuana, a class B misdemeanor. Dutton's measure would maintain that designation for possession of between one and two ounces of pot, but would cut that to a class C misdemeanor, the equivalent of a traffic ticket, for possession of one ounce or less.

"We've been tough on crime for the last decade or so, and now it's time to be a little bit smart on crime," Dutton told 1200 WOAI news.

Dutton's law would not reduce punishments for possession of largest amounts of marijuana.

"People who have a joint of marijuana should not be facing a class B misdemeanor, which ties up our justice system," Dutton said.

Currently, Texas police can handcuff, book, and jail suspects for as much as a couple of seeds of marijuana on the floorboard of their car or in an ash tray in their home. This bill would enable officers simply to write the suspects a ticket and send them on their way. It would also eliminate the drivers license suspension which currently accompanies a drug possession conviction in Texas.

"the data that we have indicates that sixty to seventy percent of people arrested under current Texas drug laws have one joint or less," Dutton said. "Putting these people in jail doesn't make Texans any safer, and doesn't make any sense.

"We're not going to tie up our courts with this any longer. We'll turn it over to municipal courts and you can pay the fine and go on."

Dutton said his measure does not call for tougher penalties for people with repeated tickets for possession of one ounce of less of marijuana.

He says he wants to 'take the sting out of the law.'

"We need to be smart on Texans pocketbooks, and leave the criminal justice system to more heinous crimes. To give people 180 days in jail for having two seeds of marijuana on their floorboards seems to be a waste of the state's time and money, and a waste of the lives of the people who have to suffer that punishment," he said.

Dutton said his bill is not 'decriminalization' of marijuana, simply a more common sense approach to dealing with the problem.

UPDATE: Grits has a clarification on the nature of Dutton's bill from 2003.

Jerry Orbach, best known for playing Lennie Briscoe on Law and Order, has died from cancer.

Orbach died Tuesday night in Manhattan after several weeks of treatment, Audrey Davis of the public relations agency Lippin Group said.

When his illness was diagnosed, he had begun production on NBC's upcoming spinoff Law & Order: Trial By Jury, after 12 seasons playing Detective Lennie Briscoe in the original series. His return to the new show had been expected early next year.

On Broadway, the Bronx-born Orbach starred in hit musicals including Carnival, Promises, Promises (for which he won a Tony Award), Chicago and 42nd Street.

Earlier, he was in the original cast of the off-off-Broadway hit The Fantasticks, playing the narrator. The show went on to run for more than 40 years.

Among his film appearances were roles in Dirty Dancing, Prince of the City and Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Orbach is expected to appear in early episodes of Law & Order: Trial by Jury, for which he continued as Briscoe in a secondary role, when the series premieres later this season, Davis said.

"I'm immensely saddened by the passing of not only a friend and colleague, but a legendary figure of 20th Century show business," said Dick Wolf, creator and executive producer of the "Law & Order" series, in a statement. "He was one of the most honored performers of his generation. His loss is irreplaceable."

It's gotten to the point that Orbach literally stops traffic, because drivers hit the brakes to give him a shout-out. But his biggest fans are the men in blue.

"The police? Oh, my God. It's a straight-up love affair with the man," says Jesse L. Martin, who plays Briscoe's partner, Detective Ed Green. "It's as if he really is a detective."

"The police treat me very nicely," Orbach, 68, confirms. "If it's raining and I can't get a cab, sometimes a squad car will come by and they'll say, `Where you going?' I say, `I don't want to get you guys in trouble.' They say, `Get in the back. We'll pretend you're under arrest.' "

[...]

Last year, the New York Landmarks Conservancy decreed Orbach a Living Landmark, an honor generally bestowed only on quintessential New Yorkers. "It means they can't tear me down," Orbach says.

The Stakeholder points to this WaPo article which shows just how seriously the House Republican leadership takes its ethics.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert is leaning toward removing the House ethics committee chairman, who admonished House Majority Leader Tom DeLay this fall and has said he will treat DeLay like any other member, several Republican aides said yesterday.

Although Hastert (Ill.) has not made a decision, the expectation among leadership aides is that the chairman, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), long at odds with party leaders because of his independence, will be replaced when Congress convenes next week.

The aides said a likely replacement is Rep. Lamar S. Smith, one of DeLay's fellow Texans, who held the job from 1999 to 2001. Smith wrote a check this year to DeLay's defense fund. An aide said Smith was favored for his knowledge of committee procedure.

As Boffoblog noted, Lamar Smith's favorite thing to say to Tom DeLay is "Thank you sir, may I please have another?" Which is to say, he's well qualified for the job.

UPDATE: Greg has a fine suggestion:

[H]ere's a great idea for a reform measure that House Dems could offer ... why not lead the fight for a rule that dictates of House members to refund all contributions from fellow members when under review with the Ethics committee? And why not fight for a similar one that dictates a refund to all donating members of the House should a vote for censure or worse reach the House floor?

UPDATE: Silly me. The House Ethics Commission still has a purpose - to investigate Democrats for alleged violations committed in 1997. Payback time, baby! Thanks to N in Seattle for the reminder.

I'm not following the ins and outs of the race for DNC Chair very closely, but I'm impressed that Donnie Fowler took the time to stump for himself at MyDD. Whatever else his qualifications may be, he's demonstrated he knows how to reach out to a pretty vocal and opinionated constituency. I say that's a point in his favor, one he shares with Simon Rosenberg. That's the sort of thing I want in the next chair, whomever he or she may be.

Via Anne, I see that Metro is thinking about a shuttle that would serve the Rice Village/Medical Center area. Just for the record, I thought of it first.

To provide a slightly different perspective than what is expressed there, it seems to me that a short-route shuttle would (along with the light rail) serve the area better than a bus route would have. For one thing, a short route means more frequent service, possibly with smaller, cheaper vehicles, depending on the ridership projections. And as I said before, this is something where the merchants of the Village could be enlisted to help, since their current alternative is charging customers to park.

As for the contention that publicly-financed rail systems benefit a few a lot but cost everybody a little, it seems to me that one could say the same thing about any publicly-financed projects, including roads. How many of my gas-tax dollars are funding constructions or expansions in far-flung suburbs, none of which I'm likely to use? I guarantee I've already taken the light rail more often than I'll ever drive on any part of the Grand Parkway. Even the great boondoggle known as the Katy Freeway expansion will have little direct benefit to me, since I almost never drive it west of Highway 6 and might not even venture on it west of Loop 610 more than once or twice in a normal month. Yet even though I think there's a better way to do that project, I'd never argue that since it will benefit some people a lot more than others it shouldn't be done at all. I say it all evens out in the end, or at least it should. There may be other reasons to advocate against these things, but that's not a line of argument I'm willing to accept.

I'm a little behind the times in commenting on this story about the sad current state of affairs with the Astrodome. Tom thinks that demolition is the Dome's ultimate fate and that it's past time for us to recognize that. But there's little political will for that:

[T]he thought of doing away with [the Astrodome] is anathema to politicians.

While the county never intended to rush into demolishing the Dome, the looming warm-glow images of Earl Campbell, Nolan Ryan and everyone's first rodeo all have pushed them into treating that idea like some sort of cloud-cuckoo-land fantasy hardly worth mentioning.

"If in the end there is no viable use for this building, we don't need to keep it just for its own sake," [County Judge Robert] Eckels says in an interview. Envisioning the backlash even such an innocuous statement might trigger, he quickly adds, "And the headline shouldn't be 'Eckels Thinks We Ought to Tear Down the Dome,' because I don't think that's going to happen."

Got it. The county is definitely, absolutely, utterly committed to keeping the Dome. If it can. Which it can. Hopefully.

How do you do that, then? Well, I think a little public pressure on the right individuals, aided by the inevitable outcry at the prospect of the Dome's doom, would go a long way. Who are the right individuals? The three people who are primarily responsible for the Dome's predicament, who not coincidentally are the three biggest benefactors from the events that led to that same predicament. I speak of Bud Adams, Drayton McLane, and Bob McNair.

Six hundred grand a year is small potatoes to these guys, especially when measured against the money they've made off the taxpayers of Harris County and elsewhere. Adams in particular is said to be more and more concerned about his legacy as he ages. Why not have Mayor White, Judge Eckels, and a few other heavy hitters ask them to set up an Astrodome Historical Preservation Foundation, supported by their initial generosity and future fundraising events, and see what they say? It's not like we're any worse off if they laugh politely and throw everyone out of their offices.

I see this as the lowest cost plan, and as long as the air conditioning bills are being paid, you can still give tours of the Dome to whoever might care to see it up close. It preserves a piece of Houston's history, and it leaves the old Dome parking lots in place for Reliant Stadium's use. What have we got to lose by trying this?

Forty four thousand dead. I have no words.

Here's how you can help.

From one of the many snarky year-end wrapup stories in the Chron comes this tidbit:

LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT: Astros pitcher Roger Clemens was ejected from his son's youth league game after an umpire accused Clemens of spitting a sunflower seed at him.

David King, president of tournament organizer Triple Crown Sports, said “Mr. Clemens was a non-aggressor and a victim of mistaken identity and confusion” by an upset umpire.

Clemens was asked to leave son Kacy’s game Saturday in Craig, Colo., when a 22-year-old ump said the Houston Astros pitcher spit a sunflower seed at him. Moments earlier, Kacy was called out on a stolen base attempt — the fielder later admitted he missed the tag — and the Rocket watched the rest of the contest from a parking lot.

“Mr. Clemens never raised his voice, never physically confronted our official, nor was he ever on the field of play,” King said in a written statement, underlining those words.

“Mr. Clemens was unjustly asked to leave the field of play,” King said. “For all of this, we apologize to Mr. Clemens.”

Anne has some thoughts on this piece as well.

Eddie Layton, the longtime organist for the Yankees, has passed away.

Layton died Sunday, the New York Yankees said. The team did not know his age.

Layton joined the team in 1967 when the club began using organ music at Yankee Stadium and played until his retirement after the 2003 season.

Tucked away in a booth on the press box level, Layton entertained fans for decades, often by hitting just a few notes. He'd reward outstanding plays with a brief rendition of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and would sound a short trill after high-and-inside pitches.

"Eddie Layton was a treasured member of the Yankee family and, as a gifted musician, he made Yankee Stadium a happier place," owner George Steinbrenner said. "Eddie was a dear friend who will be missed by all who come to Yankee Stadium."

Layton also performed as the organist for the New York Knicks and Rangers for 18 years. He wrote scores for soap operas, played at Radio City Music Hall and was a member of the New York Sports Hall of Fame.

Restrictions on using cellphones while driving are on the agenda for the 79th Lege.

In the upcoming 79th Texas Legislature, lawmakers will consider bills by [Sen. Rodney] Ellis and fellow Democrat Rep. Jose Menendez of San Antonio, that allow only hands-free cell phones while driving, except for calls to emergency responders.

Under Menendez's House Bill 237, violators could pay fines ranging from $25 to $100 outside a school crossing zone and $125 to $200 inside a school zone.

[...]

Taking a different approach, Sen. Kel Selinger, R-Amarillo, is seeking to ban the use of all telephones while driving for those under 18 with restricted licenses for novice drivers.

There seems to be a fairly compelling public safety case for restricting cellphone usage, even handsfree usage, while driving. I can go along with that, though I have to wonder how effectively such restrictions will be enforced - a passing cop should be able to see a phone pressed to your ear, but will he or she be able to tell if you've got an earbud and speakerphone going or if you're just talking/singing along with the radio? I hope someone has thought that part of it through.

Boffoblog points me to this WaPo article updating the College Republicans fundraising scandal. I must say, I'm still waiting for someone to do a little forensic accounting and figure out where all the money went. As I noted here, it just doesn't add up. I believe it's not just the seniors who are getting ripped off here.

Boffoblog also points me to Pudentilla, who notes that Response Dynamics, the firm used by the CRNC for its controversial fundraising pitch, is no stranger to precisely that sort of controversy. There's also a pointer to CRNCTruthCaucus, which appears to be the writings of an extremely disgruntled College Republican. He in turn points me to an update on Jack Abramoff, the College Republican alumnus and Tom DeLay crony who is currently getting grilled over his sleazy ripoffs of Indian tribes. Apparently, Abramoff's old buddies with the CRNC gave him ten grand two years ago. Wonder what that was about.

Anyway. Here's a precious little clip from that WaPo story on Abramoff:

Until the power lobbyist's downfall this year, Abramoff spent about $1 million annually in funds largely provided by his tribal clients to lease four skyboxes -- two at FedEx Field and one each at MCI Center and Camden Yards. Season after season, he kept them brimming with lawmakers, staffers and their guests, part of a multimillion-dollar congressional care and feeding project that even the brashest K Street lobbyists could only watch with awe or envy.

Lobbyists entertain lawmakers and their staffs routinely -- so much so that congressional rules limit the extent of it to avoid the appearance of impropriety. But Abramoff and the lobbyists who worked for him took spending for this form of hospitality to unprecedented heights. They used tribal money, records and interviews show, to pay for events that appeared to be designed more to help House Republicans' campaigns and Abramoff's overall lobbying effort than the Indians' legislative causes. Some members of Congress involved actively opposed Indian gambling.

"Jack Abramoff had one of the biggest schmoozing operations in town," said Rob Jennings, president of American Event Consulting Inc., an organization that raises funds for Republicans.

[...]

Abramoff's most powerful ally on the Hill, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), another gaming opponent, held a fundraiser in the MCI Center box for the performance of the Three Tenors on May 7, 2000, according to the list of events maintained in Abramoff's office. The list also shows he held an event in a box at FedEx Field on Sept. 18, 2000.

DeLay spokesman Stuart Roy said that DeLay's fundraising aides remember sending out invitations for the Three Tenors event to reward donors and that the event probably occurred. There was no obligation to report the use of the box under federal law, he said, because the site was used for an event that benefited DeLay's state political action committee.

The office found no record of the use of Abramoff's box for a fundraiser at a Redskins-Dallas Cowboys game on Sept. 18, 2000, as listed in Abramoff's records. "We don't have anything indicating it was offered or utilized," Roy said. "We just don't know."

Just what we all need - more ways to get repetitive stress injuries.

But as the popularity of text messaging — on BlackBerries, cellular phones and other handheld devices — explodes across the United States, some fear for the health of America's thumbs. All that thumbing at tiny handheld keyboards, experts on ergonomics and hand therapists say, can have painful consequences for a digit that was hardly designed for such tasks.

The thumb, which through human history has been the essential counterpart to fingers for grasping items, has taken on new prominence, working solo as a communications enabler for millions, perhaps billions, of text messagers around the world.

"The thumb is not a particularly dexterous digit," said Alan Hedge, a professor of ergonomics at Cornell University. "It's really designed to use in opposition to the fingers. It is not designed for use in getting information into a system. People who use their thumbs a great deal for these kinds of tasks surely risk developing painful conditions."

Texting is in its infancy in the United States, where the thumb's principal communication task is still signaling approval or disapproval by pointing up or down. But in Japan, where the craze started, millions of members of the oyayubi-zoku, or thumb tribe, are among the world's leading "textperts."

Nowhere has thumb use been taken to greater lengths, according to "On the Mobile," a study conducted for cell-phone giant Motorola. The report found that Japanese texters have begun using their thumbs for other tasks normally assigned to fingers, like pointing and ringing doorbells.

This is a shock.

Reggie White, a fearsome defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers who was one of the great players in NFL history, died Sunday, his wife said. He was 43. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Via Rick Perry Versus The World, George Bush has a noisy new neighbor in Crawford.

The so-called Motor City Madman is officially turning Texan.

Michigan rocker and hunting activist Ted Nugent said he plans to get a Texas driver's license soon.

Nugent said he'll officially become a Texas resident in 2005, after moving his family to the Crawford area about a year and a-half ago.

The rock guitarist is at his Michigan house in Concord, near Jackson, during the holidays to prepare for his Whiplash Bash tour.

Nugent also said he plans a New Year's hunting excursion with Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Nugent, who said he supports President Bush “100 percent,'' said his new home is “right around the corner'' from Bush's ranch.

Nugent also said he's working with the Texas fish and game department, where he writes for a state publication on bow-hunting.

Nugent plans to keep his Michigan property.

UPDATE: Ah, good. The Nuge is still a Michiganiac" at heart and hasn't forgotten his pledge to run for the Governorship there in 2006. They can have him. Thanks to PerryVsWorld for the catch.

If you have to ask why The Yule Log is an institution in New York City every Christmas, you'll never understand.

The Christmas morning yule log special on WPIX - a four-hour tape of a log blazing brightly in a fireplace - is not for the fainthearted. The unextinguishable electronic hearth is a beloved New York tradition, but it would be a stretch to call it soothing. Even with Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby crooning carols on the audio track, the pulsing flames mesmerize, but less like a snifter of brandy than like a double dose of methamphetamine.

In fact, staring at the yule log for an extended period may induce the kind of seizures that in December 1997 struck hundreds of Japanese children who watched a Pokémon cartoon with too many flashing lights and Pikachu. This year the yule log will also be shown in high-definition television on WPIX's digital channel, WPIX-DT (channel 12). The HDTV version provides "a very sharp image of flames," said Ted Faraone, a WPIX spokesman. Parental discretion advised.

Memory can be misleading, of course. Apparently, the fire has always burned fast and furiously. Mr. Faraone said the yule log had not been speeded up or tampered with when it was digitally remastered in 2001, the year WPIX brought it back after a 12-year hiatus. He insisted that the tape was the same one that was made in 1970, a loop that runs just under seven minutes.

[...]

The original, first shown in 1966, was a black-and-white 17-second loop that was filmed at Gracie Mansion when John Lindsay was mayor. That clip, though, was too short and needed to be redone. But after a film crew accidentally set fire to an Oriental rug by removing the safety grate for an unobstructed view of the flames, the station was not invited back for a reshoot. Eventually, a television studio with a working fireplace was found in California, and the station created the image that has allowed a generation of apartment-bound New Yorkers to re-enact "Christmas in Connecticut." (Or "Fahrenheit 451.")

For some, the yule log is an easy, pleasantly cheesy backdrop to tree trimming and gift-wrapping. But it is also a Dadaist joke: television as the hearth, not just metaphorically but literally.

Whatever the reasons, there is no question that the yule log is cherished by viewers. When WPIX decided to stop showing it in 1989, the station was flooded with complaints and a grass-roots lobbying campaign sprang up to bring it back. Ersatz and, at some level, deeply pathetic, the television yule log became one of those mourned New York landmarks that make up the city's shared nostalgia, like the Automat and Ebbets Field. (And someday, no doubt, the Naked Cowboy in Times Square.)

This DMN article on blogs post-election has been making the rounds lately. You'd think they might have talked to a couple more representatives of the home state, since Texas is chock full of political blogs, but they didn't. At least they didn't talk to Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus, so we can be grateful for that.

For the record: I ain't going anywhere, and I anticipate exactly as much advertising revenue here in 2005 as there was in 2004. Glad to have this opportunity to clear that up.

Have a holly, jolly Christmas;
It's the best time of the year
I don't know if there'll be snow
but have a cup of cheer
Have a holly, jolly Christmas;
And when you walk down the street
Say Hello to friends you know
and everyone you meet

Oh, ho, the mistletoe
hung where you can see;
Somebody waits for you;
Kiss her once for me
Have a holly jolly Christmas
and in case you didn't hear
Oh by golly
have a holly, jolly Christmas this year

(Note to Sue: I drafted this before I read your post. Great minds think alike, I guess.)

They were coy about it at first, but disappointed backers of City Proposition 2 have filed suit to force its implementation.

Two separate lawsuits filed late Wednesday ask judges to order city officials to enact Proposition 2 as soon as possible, and to declare that it should become part of the city's charter.

"It's really a sad day when Mayor Bill White refuses to comply with state law," said Bruce Hotze, one of the main backers of Proposition 2.

White, who offered a competing Proposition 1 that voters approved by a higher margin, charged that the legal action amounts to an effort by backers of Proposition 2 to win in court an election they lost at the polls. He and all City Council members are named defendants in the lawsuits.

The plaintiffs are Hotze, one of two Houston brothers influential in local conservative politics, former Councilman Carroll Robinson, and Jeff Daily, who narrowly lost a bid for council in 2003.

"It's disappointing to see that Mr. Hotze and two former political candidates are bringing a lawsuit, which in the opinion of our lawyers, has no merit," White said in a written statement. "It's a waste of taxpayer dollars, since we have to pay to defend against it."

One lawsuit, filed with the 1st Court of Appeals, asks that the city be ordered immediately to implement Proposition 2. The other suit, in the court of state District Judge Tad Halbach, asks for a legal determination that Proposition 2 should be enacted.

The plaintiffs said they included the appeals court suit because that court can issue an immediate order without waiting for the determination by the trial court.

Here's the Chron story on the anti-traffic camera bill filed by State Rep. Gary Elkins (R, Houston). It appears to have bipartisan support.

State Rep. Gary Elkins of Houston, a Republican who led opposition to camera enforcement of red lights in the 2003 Legislature, already has filed a bill to kill the ordinance council passed this week. At least two Democratic lawmakers, Sylvester Turner and Garnet Coleman, also oppose it.

"We are very supportive of the city on a lot of things it wants to do, but the city has got to know the Legislature has been adamantly opposed to red-light cameras during at least the last five sessions," Elkins said.

Elkins said he has met with many area legislators, and there is "overwhelming support" to put a roadblock in the way of Houston's ordinance. The city hoped to start using cameras to issue tickets in at least 10 dangerous intersections by April, and to expand the program to as many as 50 intersections.

Elkins said he is worried that vendors of camera systems, who are frequently paid a portion of ticket revenues, will manipulate the timing of traffic lights to issue more tickets and maximize profits.

Such accusations were leveled against vendors in California lawsuits that led to the dismissal of hundreds of tickets.

"The potential for greed will lead to a potential for manipulation," Elkins said.

The city has not yet decided if it will pay a vendor chosen through competitive bidding a flat fee or a percentage of ticket revenues.

The Democratic legislators voiced privacy concerns.

"There's been a proliferation of cameras to monitor people, particularly by cameras controlled by the government," Coleman said. "What (state) legislators make decisions on and what the city makes decisions on are totally different. We as state legislators look out for things like privacy rights."

Mayor Bill White said it will be one of his top priorities in the legislative session to convince lawmakers not to fight Houston's ordinance, citing national studies that show red-light cameras have increased safety in many of the more than 100 cities that use them.

"If the people in Austin don't want us to use technology, then we'd be happy if the state gave us more money to hire more officers," White said.

It takes a special kind of geek to appreciate the fact that a reporter for E! Online even knew who J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter, is, much less cared to write a story about why he's the only original member of the Justice League of America to not have a movie made or in the works about him. For what it's worth, I only know because of a stash of my uncle's old comics from the 50s and 60s that my grandmother had saved and which I loved reading as a kid. (I still have some of them. They're not in very good shape, but I have them.) Via Mark Evanier.

I'm always grateful to hear of a really dumb law being passed someplace other than Texas.

Alarmed by glimpses of sweaty citizens in the buff, the city council in the southeastern city of Villahermosa has adopted a law banning indoor nudity, officials confirmed on Wednesday.

The regulation, which takes effect on Jan. 1, calls for as much as 36 hours in jail or a fine of $121 for offenders in the Tabasco state capital, 410 miles east of Mexico City.

"We are talking about zero tolerance ... for a lack of morality,'' said city councilwoman Blanca Estela Pulido of the Revolutionary Institutional Party, which governs the state and city.

Opposition party councilman Rodrigo Sanchez said in an interview that the measure, part of a larger series of prohibitions, "tramples on the rights of the citizens by taking laughable measures such as contemplating penalties for citizens who walk around nude inside their houses."

"I have no idea how you detect the naked. You'd have to have a big operation to try to bring it under control," he added.

Pulido said she was confident that citizens who catch a glimpse of offenders would report them to police -- though the law also threatens jail for peeping Toms.

The city on the southern Gulf of Mexico is noted for its swelteringly hot, humid climate.

"The majority of houses have a lot of ventilation and we give ourselves the luxury of going naked," Pulido said. "Because we walk past the windows, you see a lot of things."

Jim Henley has a couple of interesting posts on the nature of Santa Claus and how a parent deals with it. Something for me to think about in the coming years (I'd better get started on my story about why we said Santa exists when he doesn't). Check it out.

Check out the ad that the Public Campaign Action Fund is running in the Houston Press this week. It'd be cool to see more of that in the future. Nice job, folks.

State Rep. Gary Elkins (R, Houston) has filed a bill to outlaw the use of traffic cameras by municipalities for the purpose of assessing civil fines to red-light runners. As Grits notes, the bill that outlawed assessing criminal penalties via such cameras passed with 103 votes, so there's a pretty good chance this one will pass as well.

To answer some of the comments in this post, I do think these cameras will work more or less as advertised, and I do think they will have a positive effect on red light violations. My concerns are as follows:

1. Using cameras in this manner is another invasion of privacy. The opportunities to misuse them will be there and will be taken, and the temptation to use them for things they weren't originally intended for will be great. All of that makes me wary.

2. Once these cameras become a proven revenue generator, the temptation to tweak their timing so as to increase the number of violators the snare will be powerful, and will affect both the city and the private company the city has outsourced this work to.

I'm not convinced that the positives outweigh the negatives, and in the absence of written guidelines up front which detail everything about where and for how long camera data is stored and who has access to it, I can't approve of this.

The Chron reports that President Bush increased his share of the Hispanic vote in Harris County by several percentage points.

In 16 precincts where more than 90 percent of voters are Latino, the GOP share ticked up by as much as nearly 9 percentage points between the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Though Democrats held on to at least 60 percent of the Latino votes in the precincts, the erosion of the historically Democratic hold speaks to the Republican grab for the fast-growing Latino vote, said Marc Campos, a Democratic consultant who compiled the analysis.

Campos has worked in Houston's political trenches since the first flex of Hispanic muscle here; he says he believes GOP policies are fundamentally unfriendly to Latinos. But Campos also thinks Bush has honed his Latino appeal while Democrats have taken the group for granted.

"The battlefield now is in the Hispanic community. They know it. We don't know it," he said.

"Give credit to Bush when he became governor of Texas. He was not going to visibly alienate the Hispanic community. He knew he needed them. He spoke Spanish, made key appointments, surrounded himself with Hispanics and didn't embrace the anti-immigrant Pete Wilson agenda," said Campos, referring to the former Republican governor of California.

1. The best performance in these precincts actually comes from Tax Assessor Paul Bettencourt, who generally outperformed Bush's 2004 totals. Bettencourt was a high-profile and generally well-regarded incumbent as well as the top vote getter overall in Harris County (607,000 votes and 58.3%, compared to 585,000 and 54.7% for Bush), so this isn't that much of a surprise. Bettencourt's average percentage in the 16 Hispanic precincts was 33.5, compared to 26.0 for Bush 2000 and 31.7 for Bush 2004.

2. The next best performance came from Railroad Commissioner Victor Carillo, the lone Hispanic Republican in a contested race. He averaged 29.1 in these precincts. Close behind him were Sheriff Tommy Thomas (28.6) and DA Chuck Rosenthal (28.5).

3. The remaining candidates, all judicial, did at best marginally better than Bush 2000, with the one candididate who faced a Hispanic Democrat, Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Mike Keasler, doing significantly worse than Bush 2000 (22.1). In descending order: Scott Brister 26.6, Evelyn Keyes 26.1, Bill Burke 25.4, Sharon McCally 25.1.

I don't mean to minimize any of Campos' points. My point is that candidates matter, and other Republicans' success with this demographic varied greatly. Democrats shouldn't minimize what Bush did, but they shouldn't overgeneralize it, either.

In Houston, the first major race to attract newly registered and tuned-in Latino voters was the 2001 mayoral bid by Orlando Sanchez, a Republican and a Cuban immigrant. At grass-roots political gatherings in the barrios, Sanchez spoke in his native Spanish about his dream of becoming the first alcalde Latino (Hispanic mayor) of Houston."

"We knew we couldn't grow his vote by targeting traditional Hispanic Democrats," says GOP consultant Hector Carreño, who ran Sanchez's Hispanic effort.

"We had to target the new voters. ... These voters had never been targeted by anyone. They were literally an open canvas."

Sanchez lost a runoff by 5,000 votes. But his appeal to Latinos caught Democratic operatives by surprise.

By bringing a little-known council member within striking distance of an incumbent mayor with solid downtown support, the election underscored the profound impact Latinos could have, Carreño said.

I confess, I was never much of a Seinfeld watcher, so I never knew anything about Festivus. Turns out the show's writers didn't completely make it up.

The actual inventor of Festivus is Dan O'Keefe, 76, whose son Daniel, a writer on Seinfeld, appropriated a family tradition for the episode. The elder O'Keefe was stunned to hear that the holiday, which he minted in 1966, is catching on. "Have we accidentally invented a cult?" he wondered.

Maybe.

To postulate grandly, the rise of Festivus, a bare-bones affair in which even tinsel is forbidden, may mean that Americans are fed up with the commercialism of the December holidays and are yearning for something simpler. Or it could be that Festivus is the perfect secular theme for an all-inclusive December gathering (even better than Chrismukkah, popularized by the television show The O.C.).

Or maybe, postulating smally, it's just irresistibly silly.

There are times when I really pity headline writers. How can you possibly title a story about giving the gift of plastic surgery for Christmas without dipping into the Big Bag O' Cliches?

It's the season of giving and getting, and in Houston that means plastic surgeons are working overtime performing face-lifts, breast augmentations, liposuctions and tummy tucks.

Much of their business is from husbands and boyfriends giving their loved ones everything from major cosmetic surgeries to stocking stuffers such as collagen treatments and Botox injections.

That's the case with Kendra Schroeder of Pasadena, whose husband gave her a new pair of breasts as an early Christmas present at Thanksgiving.

The 26-year-old leasing agent says she couldn't wait to collect on her gift; Dr. Franklin Rose performed her augmentation surgery two weeks ago, just in time for holiday parties.

"I never had breasts, and I wanted something there," said Schroeder, whose husband is a chemical plant operator and spent $7,000 on the operation. "It's the most expensive Christmas gift I've ever gotten and probably always will be. I feel very loved that he was willing to do that for me."

Here's a story about an outgoing District Attorney. Can you tell what's missing?

When Terry McEachern goes to court after Jan. 1, he´ll be gazing up from the defense table instead of the prosecution table he´s occupied for nearly 20 years as district attorney for Hale and Swisher counties.

After losing his bid for re-election in November, the 54-year-old career prosecutor and former college football player has been setting up shop in the Skaggs Building, where he´ll focus on family, personal injury and criminal law.

“The juries I´ve worked with have been absolutely fantastic and I´m looking forward to seeing jurors again - this time from the defense side of things,” said McEachern, who grew up on a Swisher County farm and who has garnered a 90 percent conviction rate as prosecutor - three points over the state average.

[...]

Among the things he´s “proud of” during his 19-year tenure as DA, McEachern cited:

•Establishment of the SANE program for sexual assault victims.

•Setting up the second accident reconstruction program in the state, which led to a stiff sentence for a drunk driver in a multi-fatality accident near 24th and Joliet several years ago.

•Serving as a board member for the Texas DA & County Attorney Association.

•Receiving the Department of Public Safety´s Director´s Award in 1995 - the highest civilian honor accorded by the DPS.

•And establishment of the first victim´s assistance program in Hale County.

“But what´s given me the most satisfaction,” he said, “has been seeing some of the people who worked for me rise to positions of higher authority.”

Lauri from Tres Chicas (who has some prior experience with former DA McEachern) caught this, and she has a coda to add. I found her post at Grits for Breakfast.

If you wanted to secure the naming rights of the new Saint Arnold Brewey tanker, I'm afraid you're too late. The winning bid was $970.

St. Arnold's chief executive, Brock Wagner, won't reveal the name of the winning bidder until Jan. 1 during a brewery tour, but he did say that "Robo-Gonzo," the pseudonym used by the winner, is a longtime supporter of the brewery.

"He's still trying to decide if he'll name the fermenter for himself or give it to his wife for a Christmas present," Wagner said.

The Houston City Council has approved traffic cameras for certain intersections as a way to combat red light running.

The ordinance cannot go into effect for at least 120 days, which would presumably give the city enough time to choose a vendor through a competitive bidding process and begin issuing citations around April, said City Attorney Arturo Michel.

Houston officials have said they would like to install the cameras at about 50 dangerous intersections, but they may start with as few as 10.

Mayor Bill White, a proponent of using the cameras, said all intersections with cameras would be clearly marked.

The Lege may still have the final word:

because of long-standing opposition by the Texas Legislature and a 2002 opinion by then-state Attorney General John Cornyn, only one Texas city uses the cameras.

The Legislature has for the past several sessions turned down requests to allow cities to use cameras to catch violators. In 2003, the House voted 103-34 not to allow cities to use cameras to issue criminal citations to red-light violators.

In 2002, Cornyn said a proposal by the city of Richardson to use cameras to issue civil citations to red-light runners would violate the state constitution because the offense was already a Class C misdemeanor that could only be regulated by the state.

To get around state restrictions, state Rep. Linda Harper-Brown, R-Irving, inserted an amendment in the 2003 transportation bill giving cities the right to regulate transportation matters civilly or criminally.

Michel said this provision gives the city legal authority to issue civil citations. In addition, he said Houston's civil violation is technically different from the state's criminal violation. He said the ordinance cites people for being inside an intersection during a red light, while the criminal violation cites violators for driving through an intersection line during a red light.

Councilwoman Addie Wiseman, one of two council members to vote against the ordinance, accused Michel of "splitting hairs," saying she is not convinced the ordinance will pass legal muster.

State Rep. Gary Elkins of Houston, who led opposition to cameras at intersections during the 2003 session, has said there would be "overwhelming support" in the upcoming 2005 session to pass a law prohibiting Texas cities from using cameras for traffic-light enforcement.

Councilwoman Ada Edwards said she voted against the ordinance because the civil citations would not do enough to deter drivers from running red lights.

Kevin Hayden has announced a new set of blog awards called The Perranoski Prize, which is intended as a complement to Wampum's Koufax Awards (nominations for which close at 5 PM Eastern time today, so don't dawdle if you haven't made your choices known yet). He's got some interesting and rather challenging categories, so there should be a decent opportunity to give a little love to some blogs or bloggers who might otherwise get overlooked. Check it out and nominate away.

Ken Pomeroy says that the NCAA is fixing to tinker with the RPI formula for ranking basketball teams. ESPN has the story.

Road wins will carry more weight in the Ratings Percentage Index after unanimous approval by the NCAA championships committee last month.

Iowa athletic director Bob Bowlsby, chair of the NCAA Tournament selection committee, said 70 percent of home teams win during the regular season, making it imperative to factor that into the power rating system.

"Winning on the road is going to be more valuable than a win by the home team," Bowlsby said. Bowlsby declined to specify how much of an impact road wins would have in the overall RPI formula.

[...]

"Go to the RAC (at Rutgers) and see how tough it is to win there," Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun said. "Rutgers is dangerous at Rutgers, but they don't have a great reputation (nationally). We played Rice last year down there in a tough game.

"It's going to help the teams like Rice, that comes here this year because if those teams are good enough to beat us here, then they're good enough to go to the NCAA Tournament, and they should get extra credit for that," Calhoun said.

Bowlsby reiterated that the selection committee uses the RPI as one of many factors and doesn't solely pick or seed teams on the numbers. He said eliminating the RPI wasn't discussed.

Some coaches think it should be -- and not just those whose teams land on the NCAA bubble.

"We shouldn't even talk about the RPI because it's not important anymore, it really isn't," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said.

"We're going to see that the RPI will be like those eight-track tapes," Krzyzewski said. "It served its purpose. You shouldn't use the RPI to make scheduling moves. You should just play good teams. This isn't a formula game. It's a tournament game. We determine a champion. We finished in the top of the RPI in three of the last six years and have only one national championship. If it were football (with the BCS), we'd have a couple more."

Anyway. Ken shows that by tinkering with only a part of the RPI formula and not all of it, you will get some unintended consequences. Read his analysis for more.

By the way, as long as we're speaking of formulas used to determine postseason selections, I note that the Associated Press poll will no longer be used in the BCS rankings.

Rather than use another poll in the formula, a BCS official said Tuesday night that the BCS commissioners are considering appointing a blue-ribbon committee of athletic directors and other executives to name the teams that will play in the national championship game.

The concept, although foreign to college football, is not foreign to the NCAA as a whole. Many NCAA postseason playoff participants are named by committees, including March Madness.

Texas Democratic Party Chair Charles Soechting has a message for Talmadge Heflin and especially his attorney Andy Taylor. While I think he's touched on all the important issues in this unprecedented power grab, I disagree with his choice of rhetoric. The problem with invoking a term like "McCarthyite" is that it's an immediate invitation for nominally disinterested parties to dismiss you as a partisan crank and for your opponents to distract from your points by seizing on your invective.

The case against Heflin and Taylor is simple and direct:

1. Talmadge Heflin refuses to accept the will of the voters in HD149.

2. Talmadge Heflin and Andy Taylor are seeking to have their buddies in the Legislature subvert the will of the voters in HD149.

3. By recklessly throwing around baseless accusations of voter fraud without a single shred of evidence to back it up, Talmadge Heflin and Andy Taylor are insulting the integrity of the voters in HD149.

Piece of cake. Do not give in to the temptation to call them names. Let their actions speak for you. We're right and they're wrong, and that's all anyone needs to know.

Tired of reading about bad things in the athletic world? Read this article about Rice University senior guard Jason McKrieth and feel better about sports and life. Found on the Owlzone fan board.

Longtime conservative activist and textbook critic Mel Gabler has died at the age of 89.

Gabler, who died Sunday, was a conservative who emphasized accuracy and a Christian perspective in his critiques of children's schoolbooks. With wife Norma, he started reviewing classroom textbooks for accuracy and content after finding errors in one of their son's texts in 1961.

The Gablers founded a nonprofit Christian-focused group, Educational Research Analysts, to examine textbooks under consideration for adoption by the Texas State Board of Education.

"There's no way of knowing a total impact of it, but certainly publishers have had to exercise a lot more editorial responsibility than they would have if Mr. Gabler had not done the work he did," Neal Frey, a senior textbook analyst for the Gablers' group, said.

The Gablers met repeatedly with state board members and textbook publishers. They tallied an annual roll sheet of the number of factual errors found in history, math, science and other books each year.

The state in 1992 fined textbooks publishers about $1 million for hundreds of errors the Gablers found in 10 U.S. history books after publishers and the state had approved them. The couple had earlier questioned why, in one history book, movie star Marilyn Monroe received six pages while the United States' first president George Washington had only a few paragraphs.

Grace Shore of Longview, a former education state board member, said she didn't always agree with the couple, but "I think all of us looked at things more carefully because of the Gablers."

"They were the first, as far as I know, to try to get the textbooks to be better," she said.

Today, the tool of the censor is not only moral outrage, but a canny manipulation of the market. Mel and Norma Gabler are well known to anti-censorship groups for the textbook "hit lists" they compile and distribute to parents, librarians, and church and civic groups around the country. Working full-time, the Gablers and staff review and pass judgment on textbooks covering subjects from literature to biology to math. A special report from People for the American Way includes the following quote from Mel Gabler: "When a student reads in a math book that there are no absolutes, suddenly every value he's been taught is destroyed. And the next thing you know, the student turns to crime and drugs."

(First spotted, prior to the appearance of any wire report, at Kimberly's place.)

Clay Robison follows up on his thin story from last week on Governor Perry's efforts to line up endorsements now ahead of his purported primary challengers, Kay Bailey Hutchison and Carole Keeton Strayhorn. No actual politicians yet, but the usual assortment of conservative activists are putting themselves officially in Perry's corner.

Perry's endorsement list includes 18 leaders from a cross-section of conservative groups.

They include former Texas Republican Chairwoman Susan Weddington; Kelly Shackelford of the Free Market Foundation; Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Home School Coalition; Cathie Adams, president of the Texas Eagle Forum; and leaders of the Texas Christian Coalition and anti-abortion groups.

"They know I have governed as a conservative by fighting to eliminate a $10 billion budget shortfall without raising taxes and signing into law sweeping lawsuit reforms that are protecting Texas patients and Texas employers," Perry said.

Spokesman Dave Beckwith said Hutchison is "one of the most conservative senators in Washington" and has strong voting records with the American Conservative Union and the National Right to Life anti-abortion group.

The Chron has a front page story today on the efforts of Rice prof Dan Wallach and two of his grad students in identifying a security hole in the new Google Desktop Search application (since patched). Not much new info from the NYT story I noted yesterday, but there is one thing of interest to note:

Wallach said Google's Desktop Search is the only local search engine that was vulnerable to this type of attack. Last week, Microsoft launched its test version of a desktop search engine as part of its MSN Toolbar Suite. Microsoft's version does not attempt to seamlessly integrate PC searches with those of the Internet.

UPDATE: The Google Blog acknowledges Wallach's contribution.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will hit bookstores on July 16.

"We are delighted to announce the publication date," which also will take place in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, said the joint announcement by Nigel Newton, the chief executive of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc in England, and Barbara Marcus, the president of Scholastic Children's Books in the United States.

"J.K. Rowling has written a brilliant story that will dazzle her fans in a marvelous book that takes the series to yet greater heights. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince delivers all the excitement and wonder of her best-selling Harry Potter novels," they said.

[...]

The 2005 publishing date means that fans will be spared the seemingly interminable three-year wait between Potter IV, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Potter V, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which came out in summer 2003.

The publishers' statement and Rowling's Web site did not say whether the new book's length would top the industrial-sized 870 pages of Order of the Phoenix.

Movable Type 3.14 has been released to address the problem of excessive server load when one is under attack from a comment spammer. From the Movable Type blog:

Because these attacks are increasing in both frequency and severity, we strongly recommend that all Movable Type users install this update. This is particularly important for any installation that is visible to the public on the web.

Slacktivist has started posting his analysis of the "Left Behind" books again. Today's installment: Buck Williams as Arthur Dent. Check it out.

Looks like the federal prosecutors for the money laundering trial of former Westar CEO David Wittig aren't as good as the ones here on the Enron task force.

The federal fraud trial of former Westar Energy Inc. chief executive David Wittig and his top deputy -- accused of trying to loot the company -- ended today in a mistrial after jurors could not reach a verdict on more than half the charges.

U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson decided not to hear the jury's verdict on the remaining charges, all of which related to money laundering. The jury deliberated for more than six days after a trial that lasted more than seven weeks.

The jury deadlocked on a single charge of conspiracy, and several counts of wire fraud and circumventing internal accounting controls. Robinson had directed the jury to resume deliberations on Friday after they initially reported they could not reach a verdict on those counts.

Wittig, of Topeka, and former Westar executive vice president Douglas T. Lake, of New Canaan, Conn., each faced a total of 40 counts related to allegations they tried to loot the largest electric utility in Kansas. The pair left Westar late in 2002; Wittig resigned, and Westar's directors placed Lake on an indefinite and unpaid leave.

Because the court did not record a verdict, prosecutors can retry the case. Robinson scheduled a status conference for Jan. 4 to discuss how to proceed.

In the midst of this article on the various Texas-based bowl games and how they position themselves in the market, Dale Robertson makes a remarkable (to me, anyway) observation:

Understandably, the SBC Cotton Bowl and the Alamo Bowl have been made a tad nervous by Houston's lofty aspirations. Texas' largest city has by far the best stadium in the state and probably the entire country, which gave it sufficient confidence to enter the fray when a fifth BCS bowl briefly seemed to be in the offing.

[I]f you're the Big 12 and the SEC, wouldn't you rather spend New Year's Day in Reliant's modern, luxurious, protected-from-the-elements environs instead of the cold, bare-bones Cotton Bowl?

"Our stadium is out there; it's an issue," concedes Cotton Bowl president Rick Baker. "It's something our board will have to look at, at the appropriate time. But Fair Park has been our home for 68 years, and the mayor has indicated (the city of Dallas) wants to keep us by making improvements."

There's a security hole (which has now been fixed) in the Google desktop search tool.

The glitch, which could permit an attacker to secretly search the contents of a personal computer via the Internet, is what computer scientists call a composition flaw - a security weakness that emerges when separate components interact. "When you put them together, out jumps a security flaw," said Dan Wallach, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice in Houston, who, with two graduate students, Seth Fogarty and Seth Nielson, discovered the flaw last month. "These are subtle problems, and it takes a lot of experience to ferret out this kind of flaw," Professor Wallach said.

The Chron has an op-ed today on the subject of Christmas music and why it's the same thing every year.

Consider that in the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers' annual ranking of the 25 most-performed holiday songs, oldies but goodies dominate. The tune that claimed this year's No. 1 spot, The Christmas Song (a.k.a. Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire), hails from the mid-1940s. Not far behind it are two songs — Winter Wonderland (No. 3) and Santa Claus Is Coming to Town (No. 4) — that go back even further, to 1934. Other decades-old favorites in the Top 10 include Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, White Christmas, Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let it Snow! and I'll Be Home for Christmas.

The closest you'll come to something "contemporary" is a pair of songs from the '70s: Jose Feliciano's Feliz Navidad and Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime. The latter, at No. 22, barely made the cut — pretty shabby for a former Beatle.

[...]

Plenty of new Christmas songs are written and recorded every year by established artists (this season, for example, has offerings by the country singer LeAnn Rimes, the roots-minded vocalist Chris Isaak and the modern-rock group Barenaked Ladies). But these tunes hardly ever work their way into the public ear through avenues like shopping-mall background music, soundtracks to television holiday specials or, perhaps most significant, the playlists of the many radio stations that switch to an all-holiday format after Thanksgiving.

Part of the problem is that the rules of the modern-day recording industry dictate that a song must indeed be "worked" — that is, positioned with stations — over weeks, if not months. The Christmas season doesn't afford such a generous allotment of time, so labels simply spare themselves the effort.

But even if a label were to make the big push, it would still find itself catering to a small piece of the pie. That's because audiences these days are deeply divided by genre. When Bing Crosby sang Irving Berlin's White Christmas in 1942, he could be sure that his crooning would be heard all over the country. Billboard magazine, which began tracking popular songs in earnest in the '30s, didn't even introduce a separate country music chart until 1944. The trade journal now has more than 40 charts, covering everything from rock to rap, classical crossover to contemporary jazz.

UPDATE: Matt in the comments suggests digital cable for some exposure to non-retreaded Christmas music. That's a fine idea, but I should warn you, that's where I heard this stuff. Caveat auscultator and all that.

In the comments to this post, Kevin says:

I thought all those crossover voters were going to be the end of Tom DeLay in his race against Richard Morrison, whom many people here called "credible." Oh, wait, yeah, that didn't really pan out.

Let's take a look at Fort Bend County, the home base for both Richard Morrison and Tom DeLay. There are 99 precincts in Fort Bend which featured the CD22 race on the ballot. How do the Morrison/DeLay vote totals compare to those in the Presidential race?

              DeLay   Morrison     Bush    Kerry

Vote Total   58,444     46,151   70,489   40,730

Vote Pct      55.88      44.12    63.38    36.62

OK, so that's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. There wasn't much Presidential campaigning going on in Fort Bend, and maybe it was George Bush who was winning Democratic crossovers. Let's compare the Morrison/DeLay results to those of the Cliff Vacek/Albert Hollan race for the 400th District Court Judge. Surely a downballot race like that will reflect partisan identity with some accuracy.

              DeLay   Morrison    Vacek   Hollan

Vote Total   58,444     46,151   66,255   39,480

Vote Pct      55.88      44.12    62.66    37.34

It's the same all the way down the line. Here's Morrison versus all the other Democrats who ran in those 99 precincts in Fort Bend:

Candidate     Votes      Percent

================================

Morrison     46,151        44.12

Sharp        41,624        39.60

Molina       41,269        39.12

Kerry        40,730        36.62

Hollan       39,480        37.34

Scarborough  39,438        38.17

Van Os       39,296        37.22

A spreadsheet with all the data I collected is here so you can check my math. Please note that all vote percentages shown are just for the two-party totals, so they won't match the official results.

Now, of course, CD22 includes parts of Harris, Galveston, and Brazoria Counties, none of which I've performed this analysis on. Maybe Fort Bend is an outlier. Just because Morrison did better in his part of Fort Bend than any other Democratic candidate, that doesn't mean some other Democrat couldn't have done better still in his place. And in the end, Morrison's efforts weren't enough. But not credible? No crossover support? I think we can say that myth is, in the words of Jamie and Adam, totally busted.

Poker tournament busted in Texas City at a nightclub owned by former Texas City Mayoral candidate Frank Skaggs.

Texas City police received a tip about the "Texas Hold 'Em" tournament planned for Dec. 5 at Shenanigans. They broke it up and arrested Skaggs, 71, and club manager Milessa Hill, 36, charging both with operating a gambling establishment.

Sgt. Brian Goetschius said the tournament was illegal because it was held in a public place. He said Skaggs charged participants a $20 entry fee, which was to go toward the winnings.

The Express News gives a preview of the 79th Lege and the election challenges it must resolve before it can get down to business. They focus on Tom Craddick and his professed desire to get past the partisan rancor that marked the 78th Lege.

"This is the speaker's committee. Most of them are speaker loyalists and, as such, would not be prime candidates to study the evidence with strong, independent eyes and ears," said Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, one of Craddick's sharpest critics.

Even some of Craddick's fellow Republicans privately echo the complaints now heard from many of Craddick's Democratic foes — that he deliberately put junior lawmakers on the panel who would be less willing to resist the speaker's pressure.

The speaker's backers, including Democrats, say Craddick is upholding the integrity of the House, not maneuvering to predetermine the panel's decisions.

[...]

Craddick hasn't spoken publicly on the issue, which Heflin has said he interprets as the speaker giving tacit approval to launch the challenge and have fellow House members decide it.

Democrat Pete Laney dealt with three election challenges in the decade in which he preceded Craddick as House speaker. In each case, he consulted with Republicans and named both party caucus chairmen to the committees. None of those challenges succeeded.

Craddick's critics note the speaker has yet to communicate with Democratic Party caucus Chairman Jim Dunnam of Waco, who said that "traditionally, caucus chairs or people elected to represent their party had input" in the naming of such panels.

None of the five Republicans and four Democrats that Craddick named to his committee has more than 10 years in the House; two have just completed their first terms. Two of the Democrats were named committee chairmen by Craddick last term, making them part of his leadership team.

One of them, Rep. Helen Giddings, D-Dallas, was one of the few Democrats who did not join the exodus to Oklahoma last year, where 51 Democrats fled to delay, but ultimately not stop, the GOP redistricting effort.

One Houston Democrat, Rep. Sylvester Turner, whom Craddick named speaker pro tem, said he is confident the panel "will vote based on the evidence, because they are aware that the integrity of the institution must always prevail."

Apparently, this is old news, but I hadn't realized it until I saw a promo on USA while watching a "Law and Order: SVU" rerun: Ving Rhames is going to play Kojak in a new series set to debut in March.

In his first series lead, Rhames, 45, will take over the role made famous by Telly Savalas, who set a new standard for pop-idol man-charm.

"In a world of Magnum, P.I. [Tom Selleck] and Mannix [Mike Connors], here was this unattractive, but sexy, bald guy," says USA programming chief Jeff Wachtel. "It was revolutionary at the time."

USA has ordered eight hourlong episodes, to launch in March. Shooting begins in January in Toronto. Rhames' Kojak movie, which wrapped this summer, will serve as the two-hour premiere.

USA was combing the library of new parent NBC Universal for possible remakes. Scripts were written for four '70s series: Wonder Woman (which starred Lynda Carter) and renegade-cop shows Baretta (Robert Blake), McCloud (Dennis Weaver), and Kojak.

After deeming Kojak the best fit, USA's brain trust gave the classic series a new spin by deciding to make the gruff, street-wise hero a black man.

There's not much I can really say about this Chron article on Tom DeLay. As sleazy and unprincipled as he is, he didn't get where he is without being a damn good politician, and we'd do well to remember that. His fellow Republicans in Congress enjoy the power he's given them too much to care about anything else, so until such time as he becomes a liability, he'll have their support.

The best part about this article comes at the end, where John Culberson gives us a transcendant moment of unintentional comedy.

Next year, when the House votes on a national retail tax, a balanced budget amendment and other pet projects of House Republicans, DeLay will get the credit, said Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston.

Meet Ashley McElhiney, the head coach of the Nashville Rhythm of the American Basketball Association. At 23, she's not only one of the youngest head coaches out there, she's the only woman coach of a men's professional team.

McElhiney turned 23 in July and had never coached before taking this job, but she has been much too busy with the Nashville Rhythm to worry about detractors.

"Honestly, it really doesn't matter right now," McElhiney said. "To me and my players right now, I am just the coach. As far as what everyone else says, it doesn't bother me either way. On this job or any other job, I'll know what my purpose is."

McElhiney couldn't have started much better, coaching the Rhythm to six straight wins to open the season and a 9-2 record.

Owner Sally Anthony, a singer who also has her own record label and a Web site promoting female artists, wanted to hire a woman to break down another barrier. General manager Daniel Bucher insists they found the right person for this market.

"If it was a publicity stunt, we would have done something really wacky," Bucher said.

The key to McElhiney's early success has been a 10-man team that cares more about her as a person than as a woman. The roster is stocked with players who either already knew McElhiney or had mutual friends.

Pete finally picks up the gauntlet I dropped on him awhile back regarding the BBC list of cheesy movie lines, and as expected, he comes up with a much better product. Check it out.

Olivia received the following letter in the mail today, postmarked from Wilkes-Barre, with no name in the return address.

Dear Olivia,

HO! HO! HO! My elves are very excited, my reindeer are restless, and all because Mrs. Claus posted the list with the names of the new born babies that I will be visiting this year.

I must say, you do bring a special joy to Santa, and I am sure a much greater joy to all who know you, far greater than all the presents that I can bring.

On this first Christmas, there will be many surprises under the tree just for you. I am getting ready for my trip, so I will be coming to your house soon. I send you my best wishes for a very special holidat season.

Merry Christmas,

Santa

Do you think that somewhere on the org chart in Redmond, WA, there's a position for Director of Ironic Developments at Microsoft?

Microsoft Corp. disclosed plans Thursday to offer frustrated users of its Windows software new tools within 30 days to remove spyware programs secretly running on computers. But it might cost extra in coming months.

In a shift from past practice, the world's largest software manufacturer said it may charge consumers for future versions of the new protective technology, which Microsoft acquired by buying a small New York software firm. Terms of the sale of Giant Company Software Inc. weren't disclosed.

[...]

Microsoft, whose Windows operating systems have often been criticized for lax security, traditionally has given consumers — at no charge — separate programs to improve security. It also has increasingly built other protective tools, such as firewall software, into Windows to repel hackers.

Did I mention that the 2006 elections have already begun? Governor Perry certainly seems to think so.

Gov. Rick Perry reportedly has been seeking support from other top elected Republican officials for his 2006 re-election race, apparently trying to defuse potential opposition in his party's primary. U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn are considering running against Perry for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

Luis Saenz, director of Perry's political committee, would neither confirm nor deny the endorsement roundup, reported to the Houston Chronicle by a Republican source with no direct connections to either Hutchison or Strayhorn.

"We're renewing old supporters and gathering new supporters," Saenz said Friday.

"The governor's committed to running for re-election in 2006, and he will be prepared. Governor Perry's getting great support at all levels," he added.

I'm sure there will be plenty more of this as we go along. Meanwhile, the Rick Perry Versus The World blog has two posts of interest.

UPDATE: Greg is not impressed.

The Daily DeLay has a long excerpt from a National Journal article about Tom DeLay's status from the perspective of the other members of the House. This bit, about the implementation of the "DeLay Rule", is pretty intriguing.

[Some GOP sources] contend that DeLay and his allies made what one veteran aide termed "colossal" misjudgments by pressing the issue last month. Insisting on anonymity -- in part, because of the continuing fear of crossing DeLay -- these sources contend that DeLay has now exhausted his one "vote of confidence" from members. As another well-placed aide said, "DeLay has used his last arrow."

A telltale sign that the DeLay team is preparing for a sustained public-relations battle came when his communications director, Stuart Roy, announced this month that he will be departing Capitol Hill to join the Washington office of the DCI Group, a corporate public-affairs firm with a grassroots focus. In an interview, Roy said that he expects to remain "heavily involved in DeLay's political operations," though final details have not been settled.

Federal Election Commission auditors have concluded that the 2002 campaign of Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) received $369,100 in “apparent corporate contributions” from two companies controlled by Renzi — a finding that the Renzi campaign vigorously disputes.

Calling the FEC’s audit report “off the mark,” Renzi’s campaign insists that the Congressman did nothing wrong and was merely utilizing his own personal funds to make loans to his campaign — a practice that is legal and appropriate.

“The FEC has accepted an audit report that incorrectly characterizes personal loans Congressman Rick Renzi made to his 2002 campaign,” the Renzi campaign said in a statement issued Friday.

Between December 2001 and June 2002, the Renzi campaign received several loans totaling $585,100 from Renzi & Co. Inc. and the Fountain Reality Development Inc., two companies that the Arizona lawmaker owns and runs, according to the 24-page FEC audit report. After a lengthy inquiry — which included an examination of selected bank statements, canceled checks, as well as portions of the 2001 tax returns for both Renzi and the corporations — the FEC concluded that $359,100 of the total appeared to have been made “using impermissible corporate funds.”

But Renzi aides insist that the money was Renzi’s all along. “Federal law permits candidates to use personal funds to make loans to their campaign, and that’s what happened here,” Renzi spokesman Matthew Ash said.

At the heart of the dispute between the Renzi campaign and the FEC is whether the money that came from Renzi’s two subchapter S corporations constituted prohibited corporate contributions, or whether they were in fact his own personal funds, to use as he saw fit.

A subchapter S corporation is a general corporation that has elected a special tax status with the Internal Revenue Service. They are typically used by small business owners and entrepreneurs who want to be taxed as if they were sole proprietors or partners.

In defending Renzi’s transactions to the FEC, the Renzi campaign maintained that the money Renzi transferred from his two companies to his campaign represented repayments of loans he had previously made to the corporations.

Ash said Renzi had made the “made these loans with the advice of his expert accountants,” said Ash, who provided a letter from Robert Scott, a Maryland-based Certified Public Accountant, attesting to the fact that Renzi had never received any sort of personal loans from any of his companies.

The letter states that Renzi may draw money out of so-called “S” corporations at any time once it has been reported to the IRS.

“The money loaned to the campaign came personally from Congressman Renzi,” Ash said. “It’s as simple as that.”

The FEC audit staff concluded that $216,000 in loans “likely were made with permissible funds, while loans totaling $369,090 were made using impermissible corporate funds.”

The FEC auditors supported their conclusions with a detailed flow chart and a chart analyzing the dates, amounts and permissibility of the various transfers of funds from the companies to the Renzi, and subsequently his campaign.

The audit report also suggested several other potential problems, including a misstatement of financial activity, a failure to itemize 13 contributions totaling $20,475, a failure to disclose $134,500 in transfers of joint-fundraising proceeds and inadequate disclosure of the occupations and employee information for 200 contributions totaling $132,800.

The Renzi campaign emphasized that the report “does not constitute a finding of violation” and noted that Renzi’s legal team did not have the opportunity to testify before the FEC to prove that the loans were appropriate.

The FEC audit report notes that the FEC “may initiate an enforcement action, at a later time, with respect to any of the matters discussed in this report.”

I haven't blogged much about the Trans Texas Corridor before, but with the announcement yesterday that an agreement has been reached to build the first piece of the corridor, a toll road between San Antonio and Dallas, I think there will be a lot to say in the future.

The long-term partnership with the consortium, led by Spanish toll road operator Cintra and San Antonio-based Zachry Construction Corp., is at once shockingly new for Texas and historically familiar. Spaniards, after all, built the first road in Texas, the El Camino Real about four centuries ago, some of it in the same corridor where Interstate 35 now lies and where Cintra and its partners would start the turnpike. But handing over a major state highway project to private operators, this in a state that could not even build toll roads until recent years, breaks new policy ground.

[...]

The consortium, in the first phase of what could be a decades-long partnership, would construct more than 300 miles of four-lane turnpike (with ample room for expansion) from the Oklahoma border to the east side of San Antonio, leaving a gap only for Texas 130 near Austin. The road would tie into the south and north ends of Texas 130, a tollroad currently under construction by Lone Star Infrastructure. Lone Star's primary partner is Fluor Enterprises Inc., which was the lowest ranked of the three bidders Thursday.

[...]

Officials expect that construction could start on the first segment from the south end of Texas 130 to San Antonio by 2007. The other four segments would begin in 2009 and 2010, with completion of the entire route by the end of 2014. Cintra and Zachry, along with about 16 other subcontractors, would also build other segments of the I-35 alternative, including a connection to Mexico either through the Rio Grande Valley or Laredo sometime after 2025. The "conceptual" plan submitted by Cintra recommended that extension go to the Valley (rather than the hometown of the man Perry defeated in 2002, Tony Sanchez), but a final decision on that route is likely years away.

The specific path of the entire project, in fact, is still a work in progress. The Transportation Department, in conjunction with Cintra and federal highway regulators, plans to narrow that route down to a 10-mile-wide corridor by late spring. The final route would likely be as close as possible to urban centers, officials said, but still far enough enough to be largely free of city traffic.

[...]

Just how Cintra and Zachry can afford to lay out $7.2 billion, and still make a profit remained unclear Thursday.

Jose Lopez, United States and Latin America director for Cintra, said the toll rates would be comparable to current Texas toll rates, which generally fall between 10 cents and 20 cents a mile for passenger cars and three to four times that for large trucks. And he said the company's financial plan did not include making money off concessions along the roads such as fast food restaurants, souvenir stores or gas stations.

Cintra and Zachry believe that if they build it, the drivers will come. One possible incentive: the 2003 legislation that allowed the state to build the Trans-Texas Corridor, or let someone else build and operate it, allows speed limits on the road of up to 85 miles per hour.

Here's what the Express News has to add.

The Trans Texas Corridor is huge and costly. The $184 billion endeavor is eventually supposed to crisscross the state with 4,000 miles of 10-lane highways and rail lines in swaths up to a quarter-mile wide.

Officials will have to charge tolls to finance bonds and pay for operations and maintenance. They'll also have to confiscate farmlands and wildlife areas.

"This is just one of those things that is painful and there's not an awful lot we can do about it," said commission Chairman Ric Williamson.

Motorists now pay from 10 cents to 20 cents a mile to use toll roads in Houston and Dallas, and Cintra says that will be a starting point to decide its fees on the route it will build along Interstate 35.

Cintra will have to rely on traffic congestion on I-35 to drive frustrated motorists to its toll lanes.

As a result, Texas will likely limit expansion of the interstate — probably to six lanes — to ensure a lucrative market for the company.

"They need to have an expectation that they can get a profit," Williamson said. "And we shouldn't be ashamed of that."

Besides, Williamson added, the Transportation Department couldn't afford to do much more on I-35 anyway.

Another fun thought from the Star Telegram:

Cintra officials said tolls will probably be similar to current rates on such roads as Dallas' President George Bush Turnpike. At 20 cents per mile, a trip from Fort Worth to Austin would cost about $40 each way, but the toll would be higher for trucks and other vehicles with more than two axles.

The road would be open to all traffic, but the emphasis would be on getting large trucks off congested highways.

Trans Texas Corridor supporters predict that trucking companies will pay tolls for a reliable, high-speed road. The projected speed limit on the Trans Texas Corridor is 85 mph, and trucks would be allowed to carry 50 percent more cargo.

Oh, and doesn't the idea of sharing the ride with supersized rigs tooling along at 85 MPH just make you want to rush right out onto that new toll road? I shudder to think what the casualty rate is going to be like.

One last thing, getting back to all the land that will have to be bought up before any concrete is poured: Better start buying now, or risk seeing huge cost overruns come construction time.

Like Greg, I expected the mayorless local elections next year to be duds. Turns out there's more to look forward to than I thought. I'll add a couple of thoughts to Greg's:

1. I, too, like Jay Aiyer, though I don't know him nearly as well as Greg does. I've also met Sue Lovell and think well of her. Both would make a fine choice for At Large #2.

2. Peter Brown was the one City Council candidate that I wanted to meet and talk to last time around but didn't get a chance. I can understand Greg's reluctance about him, as I've heard he was rather non-dynamic on the stump, but I suspect some of Jolanda Jones' connections will make him appear the more palatable alternative to the wingnut Jeff Daily.

3. For some reason, I thought Mark Lee was a Republican. I'm glad to see that impression was wrong.

4. Is it too early to speculate where Gordon Quan might seek office next? The dude's won three citywide races, so he should be a decent candidate wherever he might choose to throw his hat. According to the Voter Registration database, he lives in CD07 and HD134. I'd be more than happy to see him go after either of those seats.

5. Yes, I know, technically there will be elections for Mayor and City Comptroller next year. I'll go out on a limb here and say no way in hell do either Bill White or Annise Parker draw serious, well-funded opponents. Gotta wait until 2009 for any action there.

Prentiss Riddle gets into the "Houston: It's Worth It" game by giving us thirteen things he'll miss about our fair city now that he'll no longer need to travel here on a regular basis. A couple of things I'd add to his fine list:

1. Right across the street from the Brazos Bookstore is another great independent, Murder By The Book. You want to find a great mystery/detective/thriller novel, these are the folks to talk to.

2. Not far from El Paraíso, at Fairview and Montrose, is La Mexicana, where to wash down your authentic Tex Mex breakfast or lunch you can order a genuine original Coca Cola, made as God intended it with real cane sugar. Ask 'em for a "Mexican Coke", since that's where they're bottled, and enjoy the buzz.

3. Any discussion of art in Houston ought to include a shout-out to Giant Presidential Head sculptor David Adickes, whose workshop is just northwest of downtown. Be sure to catch his giant cello at the Lyric Center in the Theater District, too.

There's always more, of course, but the fun is in finding it for yourself. This will get you started, I think. Thanks to Scott for the tip.

The Chron's Jonathan Feigen comes out in favor of Calvin Murphy returning to the broadcast booth next year.

For the Rockets to bring Murphy back will be a tough, perhaps even courageous move. But the jury said he was not guilty. And if anyone can shine past the charges, if anyone's strength of personality and style and exuberance can lead viewers past the scandal and back to the show, it is Murphy.

[...]

There will be others who will struggle to leave the story behind. Some never will. But by bringing Murphy back, the Rockets will not be selling out for a few wins.

They would not be endorsing his lifestyle. They would be standing by a guy — found not guilty — that has been part of the family for more than 30 years.

We punish the guilty, not the accused. To take the Rockets away from Murphy would be stabbing him not in the back but in the heart.

The Rockets can understandably struggle with the decision. But after that, they need to bring him back and plug him in.

Judicial Watch is a bunch of crackpots, but they can be useful.

A lawsuit filed by a watchdog group seeks to block the state from making more payments to a Las Vegas law firm hired a year ago to draft legislation to legalize video slot machines.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday by Russ Verney of the national watchdog group Judicial Watch, contends that the state exceeded its authority when it agreed to spend lottery proceeds to pay the firm.

The Texas attorney general's office hired the law firm Lionel, Sawyers and Collins to develop legislation that would effectively legalize a form of casino gambling.

"We believe that it is an abuse of the public trust to allow government officials to use lottery funds that are supposed to go to public education as their own private piggy bank," Verney, who heads Judicial Watch's southwestern regional office in Dallas, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for a story in Wednesday's editions.

[...]

Republican Gov. Rick Perry and his staff were trying to draft a package of legislation to overhaul the state's property-tax-reliant school finance system. Legalizing video slot machines was a key component of the plan because they could bring the state more than $1 billion over a two-year budget cycle.

The proposed legislation, which lawmakers ultimately rejected during a special legislative session in the spring, envisioned allowing as many as 40,000 video slots at Texas' racetracks and Indian reservations.

Any change in state law would have to be in harmony with federal laws governing American Indian tribes and gaming. That was when the state's lawyers decided they needed outside help, according to the state auditor's office.

Lottery Commissioner James Cox, who worked in Las Vegas during the 1970s and 1980s, recommended that the state contact the law firm. Because none of the firm's lawyers who would be working on the Texas project was licensed to practice in the state, the attorney general's office hired the firm on behalf of the lottery commission.

Cox has defended the decision to hire the firm, which represents gambling venues such as the MGM Mirage, Aladdin Gaming and the Horseshoe Hotel and Casino.

The state first agreed to pay the firm $100,000. The fee ceiling was later raised to $250,000, and the firm's bills to the state have topped $350,000.

To date, the firm has been paid $176,373 from the attorney general's account. However, because of controversy raised by lawmakers when the arrangement first came to light last spring, no additional checks to the firm have been cut.

State owes money to gambling consulting firm

Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a Republican who first proposed legalized video slots two years ago, has refused to reimburse the attorney general's office the $176,343 it had essentially loaned the lottery to pay the law firm's first installment. Strayhorn has also served notice that unless she gets the expressed go-ahead from legislative leaders, she won't pay the $187,125 the firm says it is owed for work done for the state since March.

The figure is more than $113,000 above what the contract calls for.

The state had first agreed to pay the firm $100,000. The fee ceiling was later raised to $250,000, and the firm's bills to the state have topped $350,000.

To date, the firm has been paid $176,373 from the attorney general's account. But because of controversy raised by lawmakers when the arrangement first came to light last spring, no additional checks to the firm have been cut. And State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn has refused to reimburse the attorney general's account with money from the lottery commission.

The Texas attorney general's office on Wednesday defended its decision to hire a Las Vegas law firm to assist with legislation to expand gambling and denounced a lawsuit seeking to limit additional payments to the firm as "misguided."

The comments by Angela Hale, communications director for Attorney General Greg Abbott, came one day after the regional head of a national watchdog organization filed a suit alleging that the state overstepped its authority when it agreed to pay the firm as much as $250,000 for legal advice.

[...]

Russ Verney, who heads the Dallas office of Judicial Watch, said at a news conference in Austin that he filed the lawsuit because the attorney general's office and the Texas Lottery Commission had no business hiring private lawyers to rewrite state laws.

He also said that the state was, in effect, paying the firm to lobby for the legislation, which also runs counter to state law.

In a written statement, Hale rejected those arguments.

"Russell Verney's claims are misguided, riddled with factual and legal errors and insupportable in both fact and law," Hale said. "Contrary to his claim, no lottery commission dollars have been spent, period. Secondly, contrary to his claims, no money has been spent for lobbying."

[...]

In his lawsuit, filed in the 126th District Court in Travis County, Verney contends that the lawyers for the Las Vegas firm attended legislative hearings on proposed video slot-machine legislation, offered testimony and had discussions with lawmakers and their aides.

"That's lobbying, pure and simple," Verney said.

Kinky Friedman says he will announce his candidacy for Governor in early February.

Coming soon outside the Alamo: Writer, singer and showman Kinky Friedman launching his candidacy for governor live on cable TV.

Friedman said Wednesday he expects to appear on MSNBC's "Imus in the Morning" on Feb. 3 or 4, accompanied by the band Asleep at the Wheel, of Western swing fame, and a clutch of child fiddlers.

Friedman said he chose the program to formally declare his hopes — which he has touted for more than a year — because Imus is an old pal and "a lot of geezers watch his show in Texas."

"This could be a very long shot," said Friedman, who said his "main consultant" is his father, Tom, who died more than two years ago.

Friedman, a Chicago native who turned 60 last month, must clear legal hurdles to appear on the November 2006 ballot. Independent hopefuls for governor must file a declaration of candidacy by Jan. 2, 2006, then apply for a ballot position within 30 days after spring primary runoffs.

Any independent candidate would need to get signatures from 45,540 voters who didn't vote in either primary, equal to 1 percent of the votes cast for governor in November 2002.

UPDATE: The Kinkster's pending announcement has already caused at least one moral dilemma. Expect more to follow.

Former Texas State Democratic Party Chair Molly Beth Malcolm is contemplating a run for DNC Chair.

Malcolm is the first woman to consider the job to succeed Terry McAuliffe, who plans to step down next year. Nearly 450 DNC members will vote in February on the high-profile job that carries even more political importance with Republicans controlling the White House and Congress.

A petition to draft Malcolm was circulated last weekend at a meeting of state Democratic Party chairs in Florida. Former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, a potential candidate for the DNC job, noted during the session the lack of women candidates for the post.

In a telephone interview, Malcolm said the petition drive surprised her but added that the party has been losing ground with women and needs to put them "in a substantive role, not just a speaker's role."

Among the potential DNC candidates are former presidential candidate Howard Dean, defeated Rep. Martin Frost of Texas, former Clinton adviser Harold Ickes and party activist Donnie Fowler. Former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer said Tuesday that he is considering whether to join the race.

Malcolm, a Republican-turned-Democrat, served as the party's Texas chairwoman from 1998 to 2003.

I suppose the fact that I don't know any of this is damning in and of itself, though in her defense, the state party chair isn't particularly visible. My point here is simply that the Texas Democratic Party has been very much on the skids for the last ten years, and four of those were with MBM in charge. What did she do to slow or reverse that decline, and in what ways are we better off now than we were before she took over? Like I said, I don't know.

This is not to say that she doesn't have anything going for her. Being a woman, a Texan, and a former Republican means she ought to have some appeal to constituencies that could use some attention paid to them. All well and good, but what else you got? This can't be about who you are. It's got to be about what you can do.

UPDATE: Greg is thinking along the same lines, with an added twist.

SixApart says the following about comment spam:

We're in the process of identifying all the separate issues involved, coming up with some concise and effective recommendations, and then outlining our plan going forward. We're also going to be reaching out to the weblog community as a whole with information we've learned from both our experience with Movable Type and our background in running the TypePad service. There are a variety of ways to deal with spam, ranging from technical to legal to social methods, and we'll discuss them all.

I actually thought things had been easing up around here, as I've only had to de-spam a handful of onesy-twosie comments this week. Then I logged into my domain host to check my status and found the following general announcement:

Posted: Dec 15th, 2004 - 04:06:31 PM PST (3 hours 6 mins ago)

We have seen a significant increase in weblog comment spam lately. Movable Type installations seem to be the worst hit, but Greymatter is also affected. The increase in comment spam has been causing a lot of server instability. We have begun blocking connections from the IP addresses we have found to be the origins of most of the spam, but that will most likely only work temporarily. We request that everyone with a weblog application installed please do what you can to reduce the likelihood of your site being a target. Install any applicable anti-spam plugins or disable comments on your weblog altogether. Let us know if you have any questions.

Comment spams blocked:         50977

Comment spams moderated:        6274

(BTW, if you're a Nucleus user, comment spam has invaded your turf now, too. Kevin has some help for you.)

UPDATE: Via Michael, we have an important update on the situation from Jay Allen, who is the new Product Manager for Movable Type (congrats!) at SixApart. I'll be looking for their patch soon.

UPDATE: And more from Jay.

Good news and bad news from the FCC.

Federal regulators voted today to give airline passengers high-speed Internet connections while they fly.

The unanimous vote by the Federal Communications Commission means air travelers could be surfing the Web by 2006.

"If there is a theme for this meeting, it is that we want (new technologies) on the land, in the air, and on the sea" FCC Chairman Michael Powell said. "We are pushing the frontiers in order to bring the information age to all corners of the world."

The FCC also voted to solicit comments from the public about ending the ban on in-flight use of cell phones. Among the issues to consider are whether passengers want to be surrounded by cell phone conversations.

"The ability to communicate is a vital one, but good cell phone etiquette is also essential," Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said. "Our job is to see if this is possible and then let consumers work out the etiquette."

George Strong says (via Greg) that Chris Bell is taking serious steps towards making a run for the Governor's office in 2006. I think Bell would make a great Governor, but I'm not so sure about him as a candidate in the wake of the whole DeLay thing. He's not going to get much crossover support, so he'd have to do real well among independents. If he can make the case that his ethics complaint against DeLay was based on genuine reform/good government principles and not partisan payback, he'll have a chance. That's a tough thing to do, though, and the House Ethics Committee's parting shot against him for allegedly exaggerating part of his complaint won't help.

That said, if Bell is going to run and if he is going to portray himself as a reformer, I think he'll find a lot of material to work with. The GOP has controlled everything other than the State House since 1998 (the House since 2002), and I believe he could get some traction on the theme that it's time for some new ideas in Austin, especially if school finance reform in the 79th Lege fails miserably. With the regular session set to start in less than three weeks, the time to get started on that is just about here.

Paul Glastris has highlighted another area that's ripe for some reformist rhetoric, and that has to do with giving tax breaks to big companies as an incentive to get them to relocate to your city/state/whatever (or worse, to pacify them when they threaten to leave). Ed Kilgore weighs in on this topic.

I have always, however, believed that the economic development philosophy that underlies most corporate subsidies is deeply flawed, and should in fact become a point of attack for Democrats nationally and in the states. The Progressive Policy Institute's Rob Atkinson has been a consistent critic of development strategies based on individual corporate subsidies and on the theory that lowering business costs (as opposed to improving the overall business climate, which includes a good environment, first-class public education, strong research institutions, and a highly trained workforce) is the right way to attract private investment and good jobs. The DLC has also promoted this advice to state policymakers near and far, noting that if low business costs were the true measure of economic development potential, then Mississippi would be the economic dynamo of the nation and the world.

I was going to headline this post Traffic cameras run into a red light, but thankfully, I decided against it.

City Attorney Arturo Michel said he expected today's scheduled vote on the ordinance to be delayed, because City Council members and city residents still have questions about the proposal. Officials tried to answer them Tuesday.

Michel said owners of ticketed cars could appeal their fines either to a city hearing officer or to a municipal court.

In addition, owners who were not driving their cars at the time a violation was photographed could file a sworn affidavit with the city to get the citation dismissed. The catch would be that the owner would have to provide the city with the name and address of the driver so that person could be cited.

In cases involving company-owned vehicles, the citation would be sent to the company, which would be liable for the fine, Michel said. It would be up to company officials to decide how or whether to seek reimbursement from employees or customers who ran lights in company-owned cars.

Lawyers for Andrea Yates are arguing before an appeals court that false testimony from a prosecution witness tainted her case and helped wrongfully convict her.

During the trial, [Dr. Park] Dietz, a California psychiatrist and prosecution witness, told defense attorney George Parnham under cross-examination about having consulted on a Law & Order episode in which a woman with postpartum depression drowned her children in a bathtub.

Dietz testified the program in question aired shortly before Yates drowned her children. Yates had told others that she frequently watched the program with her husband, Rusty.

"It could have made a difference. It was the only piece of evidence that gave her a firm, rational plan," McKinney said.

The prosecution maintains that Dietz' testimony about the mythical L&O episode was a small part of their overall case and they would have gotten the conviction anyway even without it. Maybe so, but it's my opinion that Andrea Yates' defense was hurt by this. It's impossible to play the what-if game, but I don't think the state should be aided by a lie, even if it was an unintentional lie. I believe the right course of action is to order a new trial. I don't have a lot of faith that the 1st Court of Appeals will see it that way, but one can hope.

Just a reminder that nominations are still being taken for the annual Koufax Awards (current nominations thread is here), and that it would really help the fine folks who do this award every year if you donated a few bucks to help them defray their server and bandwidth costs. No pressure here, just a suggestion.

If there's one thing I don't understand about the guilty plea copped by former Lee Brown chief of staff Oliver Spellman over a bribery charge, it's this:

Spellman, charged just last week, admitted that he accepted $2,000 from a consultant in July 2002 while serving as former Mayor Lee Brown's chief of staff.

"While I was in that position, I knowingly and willingly accepted money from an individual in return for favor in winning government contracts," Spellman said.

Insurance companies are complaining about the proposed traffic cameras in Houston because they won't get to know who the actual red light runners are.

"We're questioning the wisdom here," said Mark Hannah, spokesman for the Austin-based Insurance Council of Texas, a nonprofit group that represents the state's insurance industry.

"If a person runs six traffic lights in Houston, and all he is doing is paying fines, wouldn't people be better off if the insurance companies knew about this guy and his insurance rates reflected his driving?" Hannah said. "It's just a matter of time before someone gets killed."

Sophie Harbert, spokeswoman for State Farm Insurance in Texas, said Houston's proposed ordinance could increase auto insurance rates in the area.

"Obviously people who repeatedly run red lights would pose a higher risk," Harbert said. "If there's no way for us to know that's going on, then it could potentially increase costs for everyone."

Is this a great day for eccentric Texas stories or what?

Scheduled for completion in May, a 60-foot concrete statue of the Lone Star hero will tower over a 10-acre park in Angleton, not far from the site of Austin's early Brazoria County settlements.

The statue, created by Houston sculptor David Adickes, will be only a few feet shorter than "Big Sam," the gargantuan concrete-and-steel image of Sam Houston erected near Huntsville in 1994.

While the Houston statue was erected to honor the warrior-statesman's 200th birthday, the monument in Angleton is going up simply because promoters thought it was time to honor Austin.

"Basically what we're doing," said Sehon Warneke, president of the Stephen F. Austin 500, the group sponsoring the project, "is building a world-class park to honor a world-class person."

"Don't Mess With Texas": It's not just a great anti-littering slogan, it's a potential cash cow for the state.

Without enough lawyers to pursue all the dealers of unauthorized "Don't Mess With Texas" gear, the state transportation agency will announce today that it has entered a licensing agreement to sell the authentic, trademarked version.

T-shirts, mugs and hats featuring the popular catchphrase are already being offered on the litter campaign's Web site. Under an agreement, Direct Mark of San Marcos produces and sells the merchandise, and the state agency recoups 8 percent of gross sales for the tidy roads campaign.

The merchandise likely will be found soon on store shelves, too.

"Don't Mess with Texas" was created by an Austin advertising firm in 1986 and made its television premiere during the Jan. 1, 1987, Cotton Bowl game. The campaign gained attention with high-profile Texans such as country singer Willie Nelson and boxer George Foreman delivering no-nonsense warnings to litterbugs.

As the slogan grew popular, appearing on everything from breath-mint tins and refrigerator magnets to T-shirts, the Transportation Department decided in October 2000 to register it as a trademark.

It recently stepped up enforcement to protect it.

Over the last year and a half, about 30 cease-and-desist letters have gone out to merchandisers, but no lawsuits have been filed.

You've always wanted to have a brewery fermenter named after yourself, right? Well, here's your chance, courtesy of Houston's own Saint Arnold.

On Monday, the microbrewer began auctioning naming rights for a new fermenter, a 17-foot-tall, 2,500-gallon stainless steel tank. When the auction on eBay ends on Dec. 20, the highest bidder will get his or her name painted on the tank.

Brewery CEO Brock Wagner says company names and "impolite" names won't be allowed, but the fermenter could be named after a pet.

Very interesting article on the Trans Texas Corridor, the $183 billion network of toll roads, railroad tracks, and pipelines, and the transportation geek who actually looked at the details and figured out it's mostly a crock. We could use a few more people like Erik Slotboom to check these things out. Thanks to Ellen for the tip.

You know what to do. Remember, only blogs that get nominated in this round make it to the finals voting, so if you don't speak up here, you can't complain about a missing choice later on. And please think about helping Team Wampum defray their server and bandwidth costs. Now go nominate!

Nice article on Lupe Valdez, the new Sheriff of Dallas County. I sure look forward to the day when the Harris County GOP chair has to look for a reason why his candidate just lost a race like that. I admit, though, that I didn't read the headline in quite the same fashion as Kimberly.

Early last week, TxDOT presented some new options for renovating the Elysian Viaduct as part of a longstanding plan to extend the Hardy Toll Road into downtown. Later in the week, we learn that many of the affected neighborhood residents to whom these schemes were unveiled liked them very much.

Now, I'm on record as supporting the Hardy extension into downtown, as I believe such a reconfiguration would (eventually) move some traffic off of I-45 to there, and thus stall (hopefully forever) the perceived need to widen I-45 south of Loop 610. Having said that, I don't want that to cause excessive displacement or damage to the existing neighborhood. The I-45 widening that I oppose would directly impact me and my neighbors, and I have no desire to impose that on any fellow Inner Loopers. If that makes TxDOT's project more expensive and time-consuming, so be it. I don't know what the best answer is, but I wish the Near Northsiders well in finding it and getting TxDOT to implement it.

Why are some large damage awards by juries treated differently than others? Read Dwight and find out.

Via The Stakeholder, I see that attorneys representing two of Tom DeLay's indicted cronies are none too happy about the squealer.

Charges were dismissed Thursday against California-based Diversified Collection Services, Inc., accused in the campaign finance investigation that has so far resulted in indictments against three associates of U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Republican. The company agreed to aid prosecutors in the ongoing investigation.

DCS made a $50,000 contribution to Texans for a Republican Majority, a political action committee with ties to DeLay. The use of corporate money for political purposes is illegal in Texas, except for administrative costs.

According to the agreement, DCS "approved the contribution on the basis of false and misleading information provided by the fundraiser that solicited the contribution."

Jon Shaver, vice president of DCS' board of directors, said the company received a written solicitation suggesting "that this would be an appropriate contribution and we believed that."

Rusty Hardin, an attorney for Washington fundraiser Warren RoBold who is charged in the case, said his client did not mislead DCS while fundraising for the Republican group.

"The irony is that they (District Attorney Ronnie Earle's office) have never met him, talked to him or gotten his side of it," Hardin said. "Luckily this system requires a judge and jury to decide who's committed a crime."

Attorneys also bristled at part of the agreement that states DCS "acknowledges that the basis for the Texas prohibition against corporate contributions is that they constitute a genuine threat to democracy."

Joe Turner, an Austin attorney who represents John Colyandro, the former executive director of the GOP group, called the language in the agreement "totally inappropriate."

"He's coerced these corporations into conceding his view of the law," Turner said of Earle. "It really has a chilling effect on any future contributions by corporations."

Elsewhere, the Chron has a profile of Ronnie Earle. Will these nice stories help to blunt the noise machine? I sure hope so.

This is the best article I've seen by a non-Houstonian about what there is to like here. The writer was inspired to visit by the Houston: It's Worth It campaign, and the best evidence that he gets it is right here:

"Zoning, schmoning. There is a kind of urban anarchy here that gives the city a real punch." (From No. 815.)

It's true: The greater metropolitan area is truly a geography of nowhere, a crazy quilt of strip malls and strip clubs and gas pumps and houses. But the sneaky thing about Houston is that the city's heart isn't to be found in one place; it's in a thousand small places and subtle pleasures. Trouble is, most outsiders don't have the time to assemble the scattered pieces. Only with time does mishmash become mosaic.

(I'm the same way. Take a map of inner-loop Houston and draw a red line along I-45 to downtown, then TX-288 to the South Loop. I'm very familiar with everything to the left of the line, and mostly unfamiliar with everything to the right. Houston's a big place, and that's just how it is.)

The point is, in every part of Houston there's something worth seeing, eating, or doing. It's just that much of it is a bit of a secret unless you're with someone who already knows about it.

One other point:

[W]alking is the way to meet a city, and in this, Houston thwarts the pedestrian. The place is simply too diffuse and too auto-oriented. It's also not easy to find reasonably priced lodging that both has character and is in a place where a wanderer can ramble from the front door.

Via Kevin.

I've mentioned before that I love the new MT Blacklist, which in my mind is worth the price of upgrading Movable Type by itself. Seeing how much comment spam I've gotten in the month or so since I upgraded ( 45493 spams blocked, 6220 spams moderated), I'd literally be doing nothing but cleaning up unwanted comments if this tool weren't in place. Thank you, thank you, Jay Allen.

That said, there are a number of things I'd like to see in the next release:

1. Please bring back the ability to manually run a de-spam on the last n comments. I say this because today I was hit by a couple hundred spams where the spambot varied the IP address, commenter name, and commenter email address for just about all of them, meaning that I couldn't despam more than one or two at a time. All of them pointed to the same domain, so under the old tool once I'd added that domain to my master list, I could've simply despammed them all at once. With the new version, I had to go after each comment. I eventually wound up just deleting most of them through the regular MT interface, but that meant checking a bunch of boxes manually. Not nearly as neat or as satisfying.

(Ignore the struck paragraph, I'm an idiot. Just check the relevant comments and click on "De-spam checked comments" at the bottom of the screen. I should have known there'd be no reason why something as useful as that had been removed.)

2. In the List Items view, it would be lovely to be able to sort by Hits, and also by Last Hit. For that matter, it would be lovely if the Last Hit value gave the time as well as the date.

3. Yesterday, I cleaned out a bunch of spams from over 24 different subdomains of "de.lv", whatever that is. All of the subdomains started with the letters "route". MTB gave me the choice of adding all 24 subdomains to my master blacklist or simply blocking "de.lv", which would have some unknown-to-me effect on potentially valid sites. I chose a third way, by crafting a URL pattern of "route[\^s]*\.de.lv" and adding it manually. It would have been way cool if MTB could have analyzed those two dozen subdomains and suggested an addition like this to me instead. Surely someone who has no clue about regular expressions would be greatly helped by that kind of functionality.

4. Also yesterday, after banning many variant subdomains of "netdims.com", I finally just blocked the root "netdims.com" domain. Though it probably doesn't hurt much to have them there, all of my previously added sub.netdims.com patterns are now superfluous. I'd love to have a tool within MTB that looked for this sort of duplication and gave me an easy way to remove it.

5. Going back to the first item on my wish list, if I could have had the option of viewing all comments whose Author value matched a certain pattern, I could have zapped pretty much everything without resorting to a manual mass delete or wishing for the old manual de-spam functionality. I'm sure I could do this sort of thing thru mySQL, but there's a reason I don't; namely, I know squat about mySQL. Hey, if I were a mySQL god, I wouldn't really need MT Blacklist, right?

(Also no longer relevant now that I've discovered the functionality I should have spotted on Day One. Sheesh, that's embarrassing.)

Anyway, Jay, that's my wish list. I thank you again for a great plugin, and I hope my suggestions are useful to you.

Mary Hardin-Baylor, which knocked off my alma mater Trinity in the opening round of the Division III NCAA football playoffs for their first win ever over the Tigers, makes me feel better about that loss by upsetting perennial powerhouse Mount Union.

In just his third career start, freshman quarterback Josh Welch guided Mary Hardin-Baylor into the Division III championship game.

Welch threw a 24-yard touchdown pass to tight end Walter Sharp on fourth down with 49 seconds to play, lifting the Crusaders to a 38-35 comeback victory over Mount Union on Saturday. It was just the third loss in 123 games for the Purple Raiders, who have won six of the last eight Division III titles.

"It just fell into my hands," said Sharp, who fought off two Purple Raiders to make the catch in swirling snow. "I just squeezed the ball as hard as I could and my teammates jumped on top of me."

Mary Hardin-Baylor (13-1) outscored Mount Union (12-1) 17-0 in the fourth quarter.

The Crusaders will play for their first championship in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl on Saturday in Salem, Va., against unbeaten Linfield, which beat Rowan 52-0 Saturday.

"This is the ultimate at this time," Crusaders coach Pete Fredenburg said. "We obviously want to win the national championship, but to come here and beat Mount Union is unbelievable."

Mount Union's previous two losses were in the 1999 semifinals to Rowan — a 24-17 setback after 54 straight wins — and to St. John's (Minn.) in last year's title game. That 24-6 loss snapped the longest win streak in NCAA history at 55 games.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison lashes out against big campaign contributions after being asked by Governor Perry supporters not to challenge him in 2006.

"We didn't expect that reaction," El Paso businessman Ted Houghton said. "That's when the meeting fell apart, unfortunately. Our point was, we like what we have for El Paso and we like what we have for the state of Texas.

"We're not going to get into a (shouting) contest with her, but it fell all apart," Houghton said. "We did not expect that."

After word of Hutchison's comments in the private luncheon began circulating, her spokesman confirmed that the senator condemned the role of large donations in the Texas political system.

"Senator Hutchison is appalled that people are being strong-armed, feel they have to hand over huge contributions in order to be heard in the state's political process," spokesman Dave Beckwith said Friday. "What she's been hearing around the state is encouragement -- to provide the leadership to clean up that system."

That statement -- perhaps the harshest yet from the Hutchison camp as she considers a 2006 Republican primary showdown with Perry -- brought a swift response from the governor's campaign.

"Others can deal in the Washington-style politics of personal destruction and blind ambition to do what is best for themselves, but Governor Perry will continue to be a strong, ethical and effective leader for El Paso and Texas as a whole," said Luis Saenz, Perry's campaign director.

[...]

El Paso businessman Woody Hunt said he reminded the senator that El Paso had not fully participated in state politics in the past and has long been neglected. He and others decided to open up their checkbooks and become players.

"We need to be better connected to the state. We need to be able to have access. We need to be able to communicate," said Hunt, who's donated almost $200,000 to Perry in the past four years, campaign finance records show. "And we endeavored to do that, and we thought we were succeeding."

He and others told Hutchison that she and Perry are both doing good jobs for El Paso.

[...]

"It was obvious by the way she was inching up in her seat that she was fixing to let everybody have it," one of the business leaders said. He did not want to be identified because he has supported both Perry and Hutchison and doesn't want to stay in the crossfire.

"She did lambaste the idea of large contributions of the nature that we had been encouraged to make. She said she would never be a party to that," he said.

[...]

Houghton, Hunt and others fear that a bruising primary battle between Perry and Hutchison would turn incendiary and threaten the Texas Republican Party.

"We don't want to go through a process where the Republican Party devours itself in internal conflict, which, in this case, is unnecessary," Hunt said. "We have two people doing a very good job where they are.

Now, of course, KBH isn't exactly pure here. She's got six million bucks in her Senatorial campaign war chest, and she didn't get that by holding bake sales. She also stands to be a big beneficiary of a proposed change to campaign laws which would allow her to use that money in the gubernatorial race. I know she'd say there's no need for her to disarm unilaterally, but one does have to start somewhere.

Anyway. It's a little sick to be this excited about an election matchup in 2006 that isn't even a sure thing yet, but hey. We all need something to look forward to.

For the record, none of the teachers that I had at this famous understanding and caring high school referred to his students by number instead of by name. Maybe things changed when they moved to the new building, I don't know, but I was always a name.

By the way, counting her and Julia and apparently this guy, that's at least four bloggers who are also Stuyvesant graduates that I (now) know of. Not that there's a competition for this sort of thing. Yet.

(Via Yglesias.)

Here's another log for the still-not-yet-set Hutchison-for-Governor fire: KBH calls for stem cell research in Texas universities.

"There are embryos in place today that are going to be thrown out," she said. "I don't want to see something in place be destroyed that could be used for a useful purpose."

Hutchison noted that California voters recently approved a $3 billion bond package to fund stem-cell research.

Gov. Rick Perry's spokesman Robert Black said the governor supports the position of President Bush, whose policy bans federal funding of research on human embryos destroyed after Aug. 9, 2001.

Black said Perry has other ideas for bolstering Texas universities' research.

"The governor is going to unveil an aggressive technology-research initiative that will put the state in a favorable position," Black said without elaborating.

Hutchison said that there should be ethical restrictions on research but that the governor and Legislature should talk about permitting this type of research in Texas.

She discussed it in the context of boosting the research and status of Texas' universities and medical schools. She noted that Texas is already far behind California, where some campuses have more Nobel laureates than all Texas schools.

"California, quite frankly, they are a leader," she said. "That's the model I've been trying to use."

Texas has 236 members in the prestigious national academies of science, engineering and medicine, far fewer than California. Hutchison praised an initiative to get Texas' scientists, engineers and doctors to work together.

Tired of the same old Christmas songs every year? Looking for something new and unusual? John Waters has the CD for you.

"I've always loved Christmas albums. I collect them," Waters said during a phone interview from his home in Baltimore. "Really, this was just an excuse to find some of the Christmas songs I love the most. And these are songs that are completely out of print and hard to find, legally even."

Take, for instance, Santa Claus Is a Black Man. Waters hunted high and low for a copy of the funky song, credited to "Akim & the Teddy Van Production Company." Waters' staff had to hunt down the writer and the publisher of the track, as well as a usable recording of it.

"I ended up bidding on a 45 of Santa Claus Is a Black Man on eBay," said Waters. "At times, it was like a snipe hunt. We literally found some of these people in retirement communities."

What's your favorite Christmas CD? My four standards are A Christmas Spanking by (who else?) the Asylum Street Spankers, Christmas Caravan by the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Merry Texas Christmas, Y'all by Asleep At The Wheel, and the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas.

The list of Enron unindicted co-conspirators can be made public. Well, sort of.

U.S. District Judge Sim Lake originally accepted the list from the government under seal but defense attorneys asked that it be made public. One hundred and fourteen is an unusually long list of unindicted co-conspirators, a label which identifies people the government says helped commit the crime but who the government has so far decided not to charge in this case.

Since the Houston Chronicle revealed December 3 that the list had been filed under seal, lawyers for various ex-Enron executives have been trying to learn whether their clients are listed.

Lake ordered that the defense lawyers, who have the government's list, may make public the names of people who have already been convicted and people who have already been disclosed as co-conspirators in publically-filed documents in Enron prosecutions.

[...]

Lake also ordered that the defense lawyers could not publicly reveal any one of the 114 who has not been convicted or named in public documents as conspirators.

The judge did say that if there is a co-conspirator on the list who has been told by the government that they are a target or has entered into an agreement with the government, then defense attorney can tell those people individually that they are on the list.

But otherwise, some on the list cannot even be informed that they are on the list.

"Nothing in this order prohibits either the defendants from seeking to speak to individuals on the list . . . or individuals from refusing to speak to the defendants," Lake wrote.

Don't look now, Houston. The Super Bowl could be back real soon.

The NFL was so impressed by the show Houston put on for Super Bowl XXXVIII that commissioner Paul Tagliabue vowed the game would return to the city. It might happen as early as 2009.

Houston, Atlanta, Miami and Tampa Bay have been selected as finalists to host Super Bowl XLIII. Jacksonville, Detroit, Miami and Phoenix will host the next four games.

The 2009 site will be awarded at a meeting of the league owners in May.

Speaking of money:

By most accounts, Houston's most recent Super Bowl effort was an overwhelming success. The NFL and the Super Bowl Host Committee predicted an economic impact in the range of $250 million to $300 million.

The Mickey Mouse Club is being released on DVD. Reviewer Bruce Westbrook is not impressed.

Mouse Club discs have the first five shows from 1955, along with featurettes and intros by film critic Leonard Maltin. Sounding like he misses Ovaltine, Maltin describes being among baby boomers who first lapped up Walt Disney's after-school fare in the '50s.

Though Maltin exalts the show's innocent fun, he also prepares viewers for uncomfortable time-warp elements.

One is what he calls "a '50s approach to gender-appropriate jobs." This occurs in "What I Want to Be," a segment inspiring boys to be airline pilots — and girls to be hostesses. Plugging TWA, it's also as bloated with product-placement as The Apprentice.

Elsewhere, two Cub Scouts take an "air boat" ride through the Florida Everglades with an American Indian whose tribe is said to be still at war with the federal government. The irony of him ferrying uniformed Anglo kids seems lost on the narrator.

[...]

The in-studio entertainment isn't much better. Even Maltin admits it "may seem quaint to children today." Well, duh. In fact, even baby boomers may stumble over its time-trips.

Wearing goofy Mickey hats that were popular at the time, the fresh-faced Mouseketeers are a diversity-challenged bunch, and the poor things desperately need a jolt of the liberating rock 'n' roll soon to engulf their generation. Here, they're stuck doing tap-dances to the kind of songs deemed "swinging" by their elders.

In sketches and scripted repartee, they also act broadly and pointedly for the new medium of television, which doesn't require projecting to the back rows.

[...]

Yet the cast didn't do all that much, with the show often veering from their vaudevillian bits to filmed features. These included serialized adventures, kid-geared travelogue "newsreels" and, like Pee-wee's Playhouse, vintage cartoons introduced with great fanfare.

Elsewhere, did you know that the classic 70s public TV kids show Zoom had been revived? I didn't. Unfortunately, that revival has now been axed.

WGBH-TV has decided to pull the plug on its long-running children's television show Zoom.

The once-pioneering interactive series made by, for and about children is ending production with its 2005 season, the victim of an increasingly competitive children's programming market and a young audience restless for innovative TV offerings, says Kate Taylor, the show's executive director.

"Kids are looking for the next new thing," Taylor said. "The competition is always putting out new shows and so is PBS, because kids want that."

The final season, which was taped over the summer, will air April through June of next year.

[...]

The show was based on the original WGBH Zoom series that ran for seven seasons on public television in the 1970s. It began a second run in 1999 in a new format at a time when children's programming was primarily animated.

Ahem. May I suggest to whomever may be listening that this would be a fine thing to give the DVD treatment to? There's apparently a mostly out-of-print Best Of video, but surely we can do better than that. Right?

The Governor's plan to overhaul school finance with help from gambling revenue took a hit yesterday, as Attorney General Greg Abbott ruled that two of the three Indian tribes in the state are off limits according to federal law.

Abbott, in an opinion requested by Rep. Frank Corte, R-San Antonio, said the federal Johnson Act specifically bans slot machines from Indian lands unless exempted by another federal law, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

Abbott said neither the Alabama-Coushatta tribe of Livingston nor the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (Tigua) tribe of El Paso is exempt under the gaming law or the Tribes of Texas Restoration Act.

"Because the Restoration Act does not explicitly exempt these two tribes from the Johnson Act, it appears they may not possess or use VLTs on their lands," Abbott said.

Is one of the companies that was indicted along with DeLay cronies Colyandron, Ellis, and Robold about to turn state's evidence on The Hammer? Well, via the Stakeholder, one of them is at least talking to Ronnie Earle.

A company that made a $50,000 contribution to a Republican political action committee has agreed to cooperate with a state investigation into possible illegal campaign contributions in exchange for the dismissal of charges against it, according to a motion approved by a judge Thursday.

Diversified Collections Services, Inc. was one of eight corporations accused of giving a total of $190,000 to Texans for a Republican Majority during the 2002 legislative campaign. The use of corporate money for political purposes is illegal in Texas.

Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle said in the motion to dismiss that the company agreed to cooperate with the state "in its prosecution of any other indicted person for any offense related to the corporate contribution."

Here's a little more from the Chron.

The company also agreed to support a "nonpartisan, balanced and publicly informative program or series of educational programs related to the role of corporations in American democracy."

Court filings signed by District Attorney Ronnie Earle said he agreed to drop the prosecution because the company convinced him it donated the money based on "false and misleading information provided by the fund-raiser that solicited the contribution." It also said an officer who authorized the donation is no longer with the company.

Via Polstate, a county by county comparison of the two-party Presidential vote in Texas for 2000 and 2004. I actually started some work on this very topic myself just before leaving town for Thanksgiving. You can see my spreadsheet here. I've added in data calculating the Republican Partisan Index (RPI - see explanation here) to get a feel for which counties are becoming more Democratic and which are becoming more Republican. In the spreadsheet, a negative RPI means that county voted more Democratic than the state overall, and a positive RPI means the county voted more Republican than the state overall. A negative "RPI Change" number means that county became more Democratic between 2000 and 2004, at least in terms of the Presidential vote. Note that this does not necessarily mean anything in absolute terms. For example, the infamous Glasscock County, which Lasso has noted as being one of the five most Republican counties in America, actually saw an increase in Democratic votes and a decrease in Republican votes between 2000 and 2004, making them the only county in Texas for which that was true. Of course, in absolute terms, the vote went from 528-39 in favor of George Bush to 488-44 in his favor. Not something on which to hang one's demographic Stetson, that's for sure.

Anyway. From my perspective, the counties of greatest interest are (in no particular order) Travis, Hays, Dallas, Fort Bend, Harris, Caldwell, Williamson, Bexar, Tarrant, and El Paso. I'll have some more organized thoughts on these places in the coming weeks, probably after the holidays.

Inside the mind of Gerald Allen, the Republican state legislator from Alabama who has introduced legislation that would ban the use of state funds to purchase any books or other materials that "promote homosexuality", from "A Chorus Line" and Tennessee Williams to William Shakespeare. By the way, in case you think he's just some fringe nutball who doesn't really represent the mainstream Republican Party, consider this:

Earlier this week, Allen got a call from Washington. He will be meeting with President Bush on Monday. I asked him if this was his first invitation to the White House. "Oh no," he laughs. "It's my fifth meeting with Mr Bush."

It's time once again for the best neighborhood Christmas festival in Houston, Lights in the Heights.

The festival, which was born almost two decades ago as a way for neighbors to get to know each other, has ballooned into one of the most anticipated events in the Heights community, and this year, organizers say, should be no different.

"It's mind-boggling to think that we could have up to 10,000 people here," said Sharon Greiff, co-chair of the civic group's Lights in the Heights committee. "We try to keep it fresh every year, and people just keep responding to it."

This year's 17th edition will take place Saturday from 6-9 p.m. along Euclid and Woodland between Norhill and Beauchamp.

[...]

A variety of musicians will perform on porches and in front yards along Euclid and Woodland, as well as on the festival's main stage on Norhill.

"We've got everything from traditional to eclectic," Greiff said. "We'll have school bands performing, then down the street you may here some traditional Russian music. It's a unique mix, and almost everything will be taking place right in people's front yards."

The Chron has a little bit more on the House panel which will decide the three electoral challenges. There's more on panel vice-chair Craig Eiland here. Steve Wasserman of KPRC joins the list of anti-Heflin editorialists. The Austin Chronicle summarizes things and notes some grousing over the prospect of these challenges.

All of that is small potatoes compared to a December 8 story from Capitol Inside, in which Talmadge Heflin pleads his case to the State Republican Executive Committee and claims to have the tacit support of Speaker Craddick for his challenge. Click on the More link to read the full piece. Thanks to KF for the heads-up.

Capitol Inside
December 8, 2004

Heflin Tells SREC that Speaker
Didn't Try to Discourage Contest
BY Mike Hailey

State Rep. Talmadge Heflin told state GOP leaders this past weekend that he wouldn't be contesting his failed re-election bid if Speaker Tom Craddick would have asked him not to challenge the outcome in the Texas House.

The Houston Republican took his fight for political survival to a meeting of the State Republican Executive Committee, which voted to support Heflin's move to take back the House seat that Democrat Hubert Vo appeared to wrestle away from him in the general election last month.

Heflin used the setting to make his case to have Vo's 33-vote victory overturned by House members on grounds that the election was tainted by fraudulent voting. The 22-year legislative veteran reiterated the charges that lawyer Andy Taylor has been airing over the past couple of weeks, contending that votes were cast by people who don't live in the west Houston district, people who voted twice and others whose votes were illegal for other alleged reasons.

The most compelling part of Heflin's talk to the group may have come when he mentioned Craddick - a longtime ally who had appointed the Houston lawmaker to the the powerful House Appropriations Committee chair after Republicans seized control of the lower chamber after the 2002 elections.

Heflin reportedly told the governing board that he was a team player -and that he would have dropped the election challenge if the Speaker had asked him to do so. But Heflin indicated that he decided to pursue the challenge after Craddick did not try to persuade him to drop it.

The speaker's office has insisted for the past month that Craddick planned to stay out of the fray over the disputed Houston race and two other election contests that have been filed by Karnes City lawyer Eric Opiela and State Rep. Jack Stick of Austin. Craddick has already replaced Heflin on the budget-writing panel with State Rep. Jim Pitts, a Waxahachie Republican, in order to keep the appropriations process on track with the regular session set to convene in January.

The unique nature of Heflin's election contest has sparked a flurry of speculation at the Capitol over potential strategies, purported deals and guarded predictions about what might transpire when the House determines who won the race.

Craddick this week appointed a special committee to review the evidence in the three separate cases and named Dallas Republican State Rep. Will Hartnett as the master of discovery who will oversee the chamber's inquiry into the contested elections. Insiders on both sides of the partisan divide immediately began trying to dissect the committee lineup in an attempt to get a read on the speaker's potential position. State Rep. Terry Keel, an Austin Republican, will chair the Select Committee on Election Contests and Democratic State Rep. Craig Eiland of Galveston will serve as its vice-chairman. Hartnett is the chairman of the House Judicial Affairs Committee while Keel chairs the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee. While Hartnett and Keel are House leaders and Craddick allies, neither have been considered a member of the speaker's inner circle.

Eiland is highly respected among both Republicans and Democrats, but he's fought the Republican majority on issues ranging from state spending to tort reform to redistricting. While Eiland has worked with members of the majority party, he's also a loyal Democrat who rarely backs down from the positions he embraces. Hartnett, Keel and Eiland are all lawyers.

The committee has five Republicans and four Democrats. GOP members are State Reps. Mary Denny of Aubrey, Suzanna Gratia Hupp of Lampasas, Phil King of Weatherford and Larry Phillips of Sherman. The Democrats include State Reps. Helen Giddings of Dallas, Ryan Guillen of Rio Grande City and Alan Ritter of Nederland. Giddings and Ritter chair the House Business & Industry and Pensions and Investments committees respectively. King has been one of Craddick's most loyal lieutenants in the past two years as the Regulated Industries Committee chairman and the sponsor of congressional redistricting. Denny chairs the Elections Committee. Hupp has been leading the Select Interim on Child Welfare & Foster Care. Phillips is completing his first term while serving as vice-chair of the Transportation Committee.

While the committee will weigh evidence that Heflin and the other two election challengers bring before it, perceptions of public opinion may have as much or more sway over the final decisions. Heflin's appearance before the SREC appears to be part of a Republican strategy designed to counter newspaper editorials calling on the veteran lawmaker to drop his challenge and to accept the defeat. Initial news stories on the prospect of a House contest referred to the fact that an election outcome hasn't been overturned since the year Heflin was elected to the lower chamber. The articles have pointed out that the partisan vote that led to a special repeat election in 1982 appeared to spark the voters' wrath.

Heflin supporters now face the challenge of convincing not only House members but their constituents as well that justice won't be served if he loses his seat. There's already speculation about possible partisan retaliation against Republicans who don't vote to overthrow the election results in the Houston race and Democrats who don't back Vo tooth and nail.

One school of thought has been that the speaker - while disappointed that his old friend and ally went down in defeat - won't like the idea of having the regular session began on a note that could divide the chamber throughout it. While Heflin didn't say that Craddick encouraged him to pursue the contest, he apparently left some SREC members with the impression that he had at least tacit support from the speaker when he didn't try to get him to withdraw the challenge.

Even without the eyebrow-raising reference to the speaker, the SREC would have likely voted to back the challenge given its partisan nature and the bitter rivalry between the two parties. Whether or not it gave a truly revealing clue of Craddick's mindset on the election challenges remains to be seen.

KHOU asks the question "Who watches the Harris County Toll Road Authority?"

It's no secret that more than a dozen new toll roads are proposed over the next 20 years. Some are already under construction.

What many may not know is the Harris County Toll Road Authority, unlike TxDOT, can build a toll road anywhere it wants without public approval.

"Communities have a right to have a say in that," said Polly Ledvina, Citizens' Transportation Coalition.

Tuesday afternoon, a handful of neighborhood leaders went to city council looking for support.

"If we don't figure out what to do they're going to pave over my neighborhood, the Heights neighborhood and your neighborhoods," said Margaret Dover, Citizens' Transportation Coalition.

"Like the speaker says, all these roads are pointed right at our neighborhoods," said Mark Goldberg, Citizens' Transportation Coalition. "All the traffic in the surrounding county will be coming through our neighborhood."

"I believe that Mayor White will try to do the right thing. I don't know he has the power to," said Ken Lindow, Citizens' Transportation Coalition.

He doesn't.

Here's something you don't see every day: Tom DeLay returning campaign contributions.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's legal expense fund accepted improper contributions from two registered lobbyists in 2001 and this week returned the checks, totaling $3,500, fund trustee Brent Perry said Tuesday.

House rules prohibit lobbyists from making contributions to a member's legal defense fund. The Tom DeLay Legal Expense Trust has raised more than $900,000 since its creation in 2000, said Perry, a Houston attorney.

The reimbursement was prompted by Public Citizen, a Washington-based watchdog group, which combed through DeLay's fund and identified the improper contributions.

[...]

Perry said he returned a $1,000 check from Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota. In 2001, Weber's clients included the government of Greece and Microsoft, according to Public Citizen. Also returned were $2,500 from Locke, Liddell & Sapp, Perry said. The Texas law firm was registered to lobby Congress in 2001.

Despite his lightning-quick acquittal, the consensus remains that Calvin Murphy is finished as a public figure.

"We remain committed to re-evaluating his situation at the end of the season regarding his future with the organization and that of the broadcast team," said Tad Brown, Rockets senior vice president of marketing and sales, in a statement issued by the club.

Yet doubt remains in the minds of many.

"I can't see how he can come back to be on TV, to be a public face of the team," said one league executive not with the Rockets.

"No way. Not at all," said another.

[...]

"The Rockets could not put him back in that role even if they wanted to," said [Elvin] Hayes. "That life is over for him. ... It's possible in all of us to say, `I forgive.' But you can't erase the human mind."

Three jurors initially wanted to convict Murphy of some of the six counts based on testimony from a single daughter who they thought was more credible than the other four, juror Richard Shields said.

After discussing inconsistencies in her testimony, however, the jurors agreed there was reasonable doubt about the truth of her statements.

"We had to go on (District Judge Michael) McSpadden telling us not to convict if we had a reasonable doubt," said Shields, 48, one of the jurors who initially wanted to convict.

Ellen Burg Holloway, 47, also thought one daughter was more believable than others, but said some of that daughter's testimony was contradicted by her mother's statements.

I've gone back and forth on the conventional wisdom here, so take my thoughts with the usual grain of salt. Calvin Murphy could come back, but right now it's not looking good for him. I've no doubt the Rockets will keep an ear to the ground (was there any reporting of the reception Murphy got at last night's Rockets game on the TV news?), and for what it's worth, there's a SurveyUSA poll commissioned by KPRC which says 68% of Houstonians agreed with the not-guilty verdict. I'd put odds on the Rockets quietly parting ways with Murphy after the season is over, but you just never know.

UPDATE: Here we go: Murphy gets warm reception at Rockets game.

"Glad to have you back," said one fan as Murphy signed an autograph.

"Get your job back next year, man," said another.

That seemed to be the general consensus as Calvin, dressed in a bright purple suit, waved and blew kisses to the crowd.

"Calvin's probably the best color commentator in the game," said Jason Gound, a Rockets fan. "My wife watches Rocket games mainly because of Calvin and just the personality he brings to the game."

"He's been here for years, I mean everybody loves him," said Sanyika Scott, another fan. "That was just, that was just the past, you know
what I'm saying. It's over now and we can put that behind us."

Though I've added the newer blogs that I'm currently aware of, I know I'm clearly remiss in updating the Texas Political Bloggers page. Please feel free to help me out and leave any sites I've overlooked in the comments. Thanks.

Take this test and see how well you can do placing states on a blank map. Pretty cool. I got 92%, average error 11 miles, and 268 seconds to complete, but I think I got an easy draw. I'll try again another time and see. Via Ginger.

I don't know who the author of this blog is, but I'll be interested to see what he or she has to say about the 2006 GOP gubernatorial primary as it approaches. His or her initial thoughts on the race are here. Check it out.

As long as I'm talking about this race, an unidentified guest poster at BOR has some poll numbers. As commenter KM notes, though, don't put too much stock in them, since this was a poll of "Texas adults" rather than "GOP primary voters". I do think that Hutchison would be leading Perry, and Perry would be leading Strayhorn, but I think it would closer in each case than these numbers indicate.

Apply for federal money to pay for an undercover narcotics task force, then when the officer you've hired to rid your county of drugs turns out to be dirty and blows a hole in your budget with the mess he's created, apply for more of the same money to prosecute him for his sins. That's what's going on in Swisher County, home of Tom Coleman and the Tulia drug bust. Scott has the details.

Did you know that Charles Shulz drew a second comic strip in the 1950s, before "Peanuts" really took off? I didn't. The strip was a one-panel, three-day-a-week affair called "It's Just A Game", and it featured something you never saw in "Peanuts": grownups. Mark Evanier has the details.

Kinky Friedman talks about stray dogs, olive oil, killing off his fictional alter ego, and running for Governor in 2006 on a platform of "dewussification". I'm especially pleased to see that he's got some new quips for this sort of interview. Share and enjoy.

Houston has hosted the Super Bowl and the MLB All-Star Game, and in 2006, we're going to get the NBA All-Star Game.

The Rockets scheduled an 11 a.m. news conference for the announcement, but the Rockets had been considered certain to land the event for more than a year, following the city's host duties of the baseball All-Star Game and Super Bowl.

When attending the Toyota Center basketball opening last season, Stern said he had been "beaten down" by the Rockets' lobbying effort.

[Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau president Jordy] Tollett estimated the three days of events would bring $60 million to $70 million to the city's businesses and tourism industry.

House Speaker Tom Craddick has named the panel to investigate and rule on the three House challenges. Republican Terry Keel of Austin is the chair, while Democrat Craig Eiland of Galveston is the vice chair. Will Hartnett (R, Dallas) is the "master of discovery". The panel consists of five Republicans anf four Democrats, presumably not counting Hartnett as there'd be six GOPers with him.

The Republicans are playing for keeps here. Check out this email sent out by State GOP Chair Tina Benkhiser, which throws charges of fraud by Democrats all over the state (and again I have to ask: if the Democrats are that good at stealing elections, why didn't they steal more of them?) without any evidence to back up her claims. You think that panel's going to come under some pressure to deliver? It sure looks that way to me.

UPDATE: Forgot to note that one of the panel members is Phil King (R, Weatherford), the author of last year's re-redistricting bill who testified in the federal lawsuit against that bill "I would look at each district and say, 'How could I make this district more Republican?'" Just something to keep in mind.

Wow, that was fast.

Hall of Fame basketball player Calvin Murphy was found not guilty today of charges he molested five of his daughters.

Jurors deliberated just two hours before clearing Murphy on all six counts.

KHOU, in its report at 6, noted that Murphy will remain on leave from his Rockets' broadcasting gig until after the season, at which point the team will review the situation (read: hold their finger in the air). Conventional wisdom, which I've generally agreed with, is that he's finished. Now I'm less sure. Marv Albert came back from his sex assault case, and he pled it out. Murphy was accused of a more heinous crime, but he got that fast-track acquittal, and I'll bet there will be juror quotes soon about how they just didn't believe the accusers' stories. He may yet commentate again. Stranger things have happened, that's for certain.

In case you're wondering what overconfidence by the Republican-controlled Congress will look like, Denny Hastert's refusal to bring the intelligence reform bill up for a vote because it can't pass on Republican votes alone is a good place to start. I don't think that everything the 9/11 Commission recommended needs to be adopted, but you know, it just might be in the public interest to have a discussion about what they proposed. What's Hastert afraid of?

The Stakeholder notes that if the bill doesn't pass today, it may never pass. They have a form you can fill out to send to Hastert and friends if you think they need to hear a dissenting voice or two.

I'm sorry, but any list of cheesy movie lines that does not include a single Schwarzenegger quip is simply not representative. Not that they don't have some cheesy lines here, but come on. Who were these so-called "moviegoers" that they surveyed? And why do so many of them care about a line from "The Postman"?

Anyway. Would someone please roust Senor Cromulent from his birthday weekend hangover and tell him there's important business here for him to deal with? Thanks.

Some proponents of vouchers for private schools think 2005 may be their year in the Lege.

One lawmaker already is plotting ways to get school vouchers through the Legislature next year. Earlier this month, on the first day to file bills, Rep. Frank Corte, R-San Antonio, submitted a proposal for a pilot voucher program that would include the Houston and Cypress-Fairbanks districts.

Corte said he's also looking at a must-pass bill — the reauthorization of the Texas Education Agency — as a vehicle for his voucher program. Corte said that if his proposal, House Bill 12, gets stuck in committee, he's prepared to attach it as an amendment to the TEA sunset bill or another education or school finance bill.

"I will be looking at any legislation to see if it's something that fits in the same category," said Corte. "My staff has been looking at sunset for TEA."

The education agency bill will be one of the main pieces of legislation next session, particularly since it coincides with efforts to write a new education funding law.

"We're probably at a better position this term than any time before to try to bring (vouchers) to fruition," said Corte.

[...]

The TEA sunset bill likely will end up before a House-Senate conference committee, which will settle any differences passed by the separate chambers. If vouchers are added to the bill in that committee, it could hold the education agency hostage because conference committee reports cannot be changed on the House or Senate floors; they must be voted up or down.

"If they get into playing that kind of chicken, we'll play," said Richard Kouri, a lobbyist for the Texas State Teachers Association.

[...]

Corte has had some success in getting controversial legislation through. Last session, he passed a bill requiring a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions.

More development in an overlooked part of town, thanks to the light rail line.

"The area's been slow to develop," said Bob Parsley of realty firm Colliers International. "But we're beginning to see an overall acceptance in the marketplace for being south of 610."

Indeed, home builders, industrial developers and land speculators are jockeying for still-vacant parcels just beyond the Metro terminus, fueling a land rush in this long-neglected area.

Houston developer Frank Liu, who's building new homes nearby, owns about 60 acres surrounding Metro's Fannin South station, the last stop on the city's 7.5-mile light rail line connecting downtown with this area just south of Reliant Stadium.

While he's not yet ready to tip his hand, Liu controls enough land in the area to create a sizable community where folks could live, work and shop.

"The great thing about that piece of property is that it's so close to the rail stop and so close to the Medical Center," Liu, president of InTown Homes, said. "You just can't go wrong."

[...]

"Land costs are just a fraction of what they are in the Medical Center," said David R. David of Warehouse Associates, a real estate firm building warehouses in the area and attracting more medical users than ever before.

The company has leased space to a DNA lab, surgical center and a dialysis facility.

In 2001, when the company built its first project there, medical firms didn't want to move south of the Loop, which was then seen as too far from the Medical Center.

"We're seeing more demand for our sites," David said. "Today, I think we're a politically acceptable location for medical support."

[...]

"We were attracted to the area primarily because of its proximity to the Medical Center and Reliant Center," said Joel Scott, who manages the partnership and is a principal in Terramark Communities, a Houston-based real estate development firm.

[...]

Dozens of $200,000 townhomes line the streets near Link Valley, a neighborhood off Stella Link that used to be known by the nickname Death Valley.

And Chancellor Properties recently completed Villas at Coronado, a 344-unit apartment complex on the Lakes at 610 just south of West Bellfort.

The new project is around 80 percent occupied, according to O'Connor & Associates, a research firm.

Even more interesting is the apparent trend of Med Center support businesses being willing to move out as long as they're near a rail stop. Driving in that vicinity is so awful that any viable alternative will look mighty attractive. This certainly counts as viable.

Even with the lull of the Thanksgiving holiday, November was my busiest month ever, with over 63,000 hits. I had a similar buildup, though with much smaller numbers, around the 2002 elections. I do expect things to drop off - December numbers are already slower, and we're nowhere near Christmas yet. But that's OK. I feel I've got a great audience here, and as always, I really appreciate your readership. I know of at least one colleague who's shutting things down post-election, but there will be none of that here. Too much to talk about, and it's still fun to do.

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  151: 101 klol

  135: off the kuff

  130: walton and johnson radio

  128: hubert vo

  123: kermit washington rudy tomjanovich

  121: lupe valdez

  117: what happened to klol

  103: talmadge heflin

  103: election 2006

Well, I got on her case for not having one, so the least I can do is announce that Avedon now has an RSS feed. It's in my Bloglines subscriptions and it should be in yours. Thanks, Avedon!

(Oh, and Judith Reisman? Cripes. Does everything old have to be new again? Didn't know about the Steve Stockman connection, but it fits. Click through the links and you'll see what I'm talking about.)

The defense has already made its case to move the Lay/Skilling/Causey trial elsewhere. Now the prosecution has responded.

In a 54-page memorandum, the Enron Task Force argued that although ex-Chief Executive Officer Skilling commissioned a poll that showed one-third of the potential jury pool called him negative names, that also means two-thirds had nothing negative to say about him.

"Enormous numbers of Houston residents have scant knowledge of Skilling, much less negative sentiments that would disqualify the entire community from being able to provide 12 fair and impartial jurors and alternates," said the papers filed by task force director Andrew Weissmann and his four-lawyer team on this case.

[...]

Prosecutors argued Friday that the law requires a far more extraordinary amount of presumed prejudice in an area for a trial to be moved. The government said even a large volume of pre-trial publicity and a jury pool exposed to it do not mean a fair trial cannot be had.

Media coverage has been nationwide, even global, prosecutors argued. And they say, "The Constitution does not require a jury comprised of people who do not read the newspaper; it requires a jury of people who have not formed unshakable opinions and will base their verdict on the evidence and the law."

[...]

A limited survey conducted by the government showed a majority of those polled in Phoenix and Houston were aware of the Enron case — 70 percent in Phoenix and 90 percent in Houston. The government argued that another city, where publicity would become intense if the trial were moved, would be no better.

Sen. Jeff Wentworth, the special master for the Senate challenge against Sen. Mario Gallegos, has recommended dismissal for the challenge based on his reading of state law.

[Wentworth] based his recommendation on the qualifications for a state senator described in the state constitution and not on residency requirements outlined in the election code.

In contesting the election, Susan Delgado had contended that Gallegos lived in the 11th District, even though he represents the 6th.

"I have determined that the contestant's petition does not state the grounds necessary to maintain the contest and recommend to the Senate Committee on State Affairs that it refuse to hear testimony or other evidence presented in person by the parties," Wentworth said in a report filed with the committee Friday.

[...]

Deon Daugherty, a spokeswoman for State Affairs Chairman Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, said a meeting is tentatively scheduled to review Wentworth's report Dec. 15.

"They do have to respond in some way to the recommendation," Daugherty said.

But she said the committee can either accept Wentworth's recommendation as is or vote to proceed with the hearings.

Elsewhere, Hotshot Casey examines the history of residency laws and the general tendency to overlook them. I guess the violation has to be pretty darned egregious before it becomes an issue. Gallegos is my State Senator, and until this challenge came up, I had no idea there was any question about where he lived. I think tighter requirements would be a good idea, but it's not at the top of my wish list right now.

After I found out how much better a fit Costco is for my moral values than Walmart is, we became Costco members and have been very happy with it (their online photo center is worth it by itself). Having now read where Costco's political donations go, I'm even happier with our choice. Check out Choose the Blue and see for yourself which party you're supporting by the products you buy.

The City of Houston is one step closer to installing cameras on several high-accident intersections in order to catch those who run red lights.

Houston City Attorney Arturo Michel said Friday that the city has concluded it can issue civil citations, even though the Texas Legislature overwhelmingly voted in 2003 to deny cities the power to issue criminal citations based on camera enforcement.

Michel's ruling paves the way for the City Council to vote on whether to install cameras at intersections with high accident rates. The council is expected to vote on the matter Dec. 15, and the cameras could be in place two months after that, officials said.

[...]

In September 2003, the Dallas suburb of Garland became the first municipality in Texas to install cameras at traffic lights, citing violators for the civil violation of being inside an intersection during a red light rather than the state-regulated criminal violation of running a red light.

Houston plans to follow the same strategy, Michel said.

[...]

Houston's current standard criminal fine for running a red light is $215, and the proposed civil fine would be $75. The civil violations would be assessed against the owner of the vehicle, regardless of who drove the car through the red light.

There are of course privacy concerns, and the issue of a private subcontractor jigging things to create more tickets (since they get a slice of the revenue) and boost their profits. I share those concerns, but it is hard to argue with Mayor White's statement that "no one has a right to run a red light". Put me in the opposition camp for now, but I want to know the details of the implementation before I commit.

One thing I definitely have a quibble with:

"The Houston Police Department last year recorded more than 5,000 accidents caused by motorists running red lights," said Mayor Bill White, who wants to install the cameras. "People overwhelmingly in our community complain about the lack of enforcement at red lights. It's a better idea to use technology rather than taking police officers out of patrols to sit at intersections."

(I should note, before Michael or Ginger leave a comment, that the actual intersection of the I-10 service road and Studemont does see its share of crashes. Since it's a T-intersection (the service road terminates at Studemont), it's not really speeding that's the main cause, though; it's - wait for it - red light runners.)

Fritz Schranck has some experience with traffic light cameras as part of his job with the state of Delaware. He writes about it here and here. The first one in particular has a perspective not really explored in the Chron story. Check them out.

So now anybody who is anybody is coming out against a toll road in the Heights.

"There are no plans to build a toll road there," said County Judge Robert Eckels.

Residents have voiced concern about reports that an abandoned Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad right of way, now owned by the Texas Department of Transportation, would be used for a toll road through the area.

That won't happen, but the county hasn't ruled out building a link along part of the right of way farther to the west between U.S. 290 and Interstate 10, said Art Storey, director of the county's public infrastructure department, which oversees the Harris County Toll Road Authority.

It was never the county's intention to build a toll road on the right of way, he added.

[...]

As to the worries about a toll road in the Heights, Mayor Bill White said, "I have not met an elected official who wants it built. I'm confident there will be no plans to build a toll road."

Commissioner El Franco Lee, whose Precinct 1 includes part of the Heights, said such a road won't become a reality "if it requires my vote."

The authority is studying whether it would be useful to build a toll-road connector from U.S. 290 to I-10, but it would be located west of the Heights in an industrial-commercial area, Storey said.

That connector, he said, might be built along part of the MKT line before linking up with I-10, possibly around Washington Street.

And, um, what's up with this?

The connector would be built only if the Texas Department of Transportation decided to expand U.S. 290 and turn it into a toll road, Storey said.

Reader Eric G points me to this Mystery Pollster post which notes that the Associated Press exit poll for texas, which had originally claimed that 59% of Texas Hispanics had voted for George Bush, has been revised.

In the Nov. 3 BC-ELN--Texas Glance and BC-TX Exit-Poll Excerpts, The Associated Press overstated President Bush's support among Texas Hispanics. Under a post-election adjustment by exit poll providers Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, 49 percent of Hispanics in the state voted for Bush, not a majority. The revised result does not differ to a statistically significant degree from Bush's 43 percent support among Texas Hispanics in a 2000 exit poll.

The revised BC-TX-Exit-Poll Excerpts showed that 20 percent, not 23 percent, of all Texas voters were Hispanic. They voted 50 percent for Kerry and 49 percent for Bush, not 41-59 Kerry-Bush.

Mystery Pollster has a good explanation for what probably went wrong in this poll, plus a number of links to check out. Obviously, 49% support is still higher than I'd like to see, and it represents a wake up call to the Democratic Party, but given Bush's outperformance in Texas of the other statewide Republicans, it's perhaps not indicative of a true trend. That doesn't mean we don't have our work cut out for us in 2006, though, that's for sure.

UPDATE: Ruy Teixeira notes that the estimate of Bush's Hispanic support nationally has dropped from 44% to 40%.

Via Anne, I see there's good news for those like me who are appalled at the idea of a toll road cutting through the Heights.

The mayor also agreed to work on an agreement on possible community uses, including a bike-and-hike trail, for the right-of-way being acquired by the County Toll Road Authority through the Heights.

"Our elected officials won't support a toll road built through the Heights over community objections. I've spoken with Harris County officials about exploring uses such as walking and bicycling trails," Mayor White said.

Well, speaking for myself as a Heights resident, I favor light rail in general, and favor in principle a line close enough to walk to from my house. This article that Anne linked about the noise of such a line does raise a good point, though. My experience riding the light rail suggests that ours is a pretty quiet train, but it's by no means silent. I haven't heard any screeching noises (the train runs right past my office, so I see and hear it every day), but that may change as the system ages. If this is a serious proposal and not just a bit of speculation, then I would expect my neighbors to raise the noise issue and to be rather demanding about it, and we'd oppose or support depending on the reassurances we got. Fair enough?

Calvin Murphy testified in his own defense yesterday, but not for long.

Reading verbatim from court documents, defense attorney Rusty Hardin asked Murphy whether he "intentionally and knowingly engaged in sexual contact" with his daughters "by touching the genitals ... with the intent to arouse or gratify your sexual desire."

"Absolutely not," the 56-year-old former TV commentator said, biting his upper lip and appearing to fight back tears. "No, I did not."

Murphy repeated his denial after Hardin read each of the six indictments. Then Hardin ended the testimony abruptly.

"They can have you now. Pass the witness," he said.

The star witness' direct testimony, lasting less than five minutes, came in stark contrast to the rest of the four-week trial, in which minute details of Murphy's family life have been described and debated.

[...]

Prosecutors Lance Long and Paula Storts appeared surprised when state District Judge Michael McSpadden told them to begin their cross-examination just moments after Murphy got on the witness stand.

Long paused for a moment and shuffled papers before beginning to ask Murphy about his unusual family tree, which includes 14 children by nine women.

[...]

After about one hour and 15 minutes, Long ended his cross-examination, making Murphy one of the trial's briefest witnesses.

Hubert Vo is ready to serve, while Andy Taylor keeps flapping his gums.

"Andy Taylor and Talmadge Heflin are the last two people who just won't take Vo for an answer," said Kelly Fero, a Democratic strategist and unpaid adviser to Vo.

In his petition, Heflin contends the election was marred by voting irregularities, including a number of votes cast illegally by people living outside Harris County. He also has questioned Vo's residency, alleging Vo lives in Sugar Land.

Vo said he was ready to "move on forward to serve the people of my district."

"We haven't had any concrete evidence from Mr. Heflin's side yet, so we're not sure what they're talking about," he said.

Taylor replied that Vo "will see lots of concrete and specific evidence once we are before the House committee, trying this case."

The Star Telegram gets woozy at the thought of Yet Another Bitter Partisan Battle In The Lege When There's Real Work To Do, but is curiously wishy-washy about it.

Finally, the Austin Chronicle joins the growing list of those who think the other challenges, by Eric Opiela and (especially) Jack Stick, are just there to provide cover for the Heflin squabble, as the House Republicans could then dismiss those two and say "see! we were reasonable!" I'm sure some of my Republican friends will say this is just more hyperventilating paranoia by us poor downtrodden Democrats, but then some of my Republican friends thought the very idea of a House challenge by Talmadge Heflin was also just so much hyperventilating paranoia. If the House winds up tossing out Heflin's case with the contempt it deserves, I'll be more than happy to say that you told me so. In the meantime, I'd rather be prepared for all eventualities.

The Stakeholder has a nice piece about the recent $100K donation from a private prison company to his favored charity. In case you're not sure why that's a bad thing, this WaPo story will help you sort it out.

Also via the Stakeholder, Chris Suellentrop makes a great point about the current Congress and their corrupt leader.

The vote on the DeLay rule has settled a little-noticed debate, which predated the November election, over the nature of the GOP's corruption: Was it procedural or substantive? Liberals tended to argue the former, as James Traub did in an essay for the New York Times Magazine in October. By ignoring procedural and democratic niceties, Traub argued, the Republican leadership "has been able to convert smaller minorities into more effective control—and more extreme policies." Conservatives, with some exceptions, worried more about ideological corruption, about the betrayal of the ideals that catapulted Republicans to power. What's the use of a Republican Congress, some wondered, if it spends like a Democratic one?

Conveniently, the DeLay vote has enabled liberals and conservatives to agree: Are congressional Republicans out-of-touch plutocrats, concerned only with using the power of incumbency to perpetuate their rule? Or are they ideological traitors who have forsaken the principles that got them elected in the first place? The answer is yes.

Finally, Ginger kindly forwarded me this profile of Ronnie Earle.

Justice of the Peace Guy Herman was sitting in his office one day when a prosecutor walked in to file charges for improper campaign-finance reporting. Against himself.

The man was Ronnie Earle, the Travis County district attorney, bringing a self-incriminating complaint for tardy reporting in 1981 and 1982.

"He had missed the deadline by a day," says Mr. Herman, now a Travis County probate judge. "He could have filed that report late and nobody would have paid any attention. But instead he came in and said, 'I violated the law and should be fined.' So I fined him."

$212 to be exact.

According to the nifty MT Blacklist main page, which is integrated into MT 3.x, I've blocked or deleted over 30,000 comment spams, all (presumably) since I upgraded to MT 3.121 on November 19. That's over 2000 a day. I'm in awe.

Now, I used to get plenty of comment spam before the upgrade, but I didn't think it was that much, though with MTB 1.65 there was no way to keep count. It does seem like many of the rejected comments contained domains which I had previously blocked via wide-ranging regular expressions (variants of "texas holdem" being the big offenders; the MTB upgrade apparently ignores any personalizations you'd made to the Master Blacklist, so the recent big spammers appear explicitly), so maybe I was getting attacked with that kind of fervor but was blissfully unaware of it.

However you slice it, anyone who is not using MTB is a sitting duck. The new built-in interface, with automated blacklist updating and forced moderation of multiple comments and comments on old posts, is worth the price of the MT upgrade by itself. If you're on the fence about upgrading Movable Type, that right there is the best reason I can give you to do it.

This is good to see.

Two men were banned from events at The Palace for what the Detroit Pistons say is their involvement in last month's NBA brawl.

John Green and Charlie Haddad were sent letters informing them of the ban, which also includes events at DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston, Pistons spokesman Matt Dobek said Wednesday. The Clarkston site is another holding of the Palace Sports and Entertainment organization.

Apart from Pistons games, the Palace hosts figure skating competitions and concerts. The DTE Energy Music Theatre holds concerts.

Green, of Oakland County's West Bloomfield Township, is accused of lobbing a cup at Indiana Pacers forward Ron Artest on Nov. 19, sparking the brawl. Haddad, of Burt, ran onto the court that night, Dobek said.

[...]

"That's ridiculous. Are they going to ban Artest and the other Pacers who ran into the stands and beat up on our fans and the people that live in this community," Shawn Smith, Green's attorney, said Wednesday. "They're completely picking on the little guy. ... It's not fair."

The Sports Economist has some thoughts on this that are worth reading. He's quite right about the responsibility the teams have for policing their venues. Via Tom.

Here's an update to the College Republicans story I've noted recently (see here and here). Looks like CRNC President Eric Hoplin is coming under pressure to get his organization out of the ridiculous contract they've signed with Response Dynamics (RDI), the firm that handled their direct mail. He's still being weaselly about it, though.

Before those critics could offer a resolution condemning the fund-raising practices and calling for immediate termination of the contract, however, Eric Hoplin, chairman of the CRNC, pushed through a verbal resolution that he said would have the group out of their contract by April.

The RDI contract will be "terminated," Hoplin said at the board meeting as he hammered the gavel after passing the measure, according to several state chairmen who attended the New Orleans meeting.

Exactly when the contract will be ended is unclear. The resolution was not written down, and a spokeswoman for the College Republican group offered no details.

"We are now working with our legal counsel on our contract with RDI," said Alison Aikele, communications director for the group.

Some state chapter chairmen remain concerned about their relationship to RDI.

"I don't care if the CRNC gets sued for breach of contract, this is about right and wrong," said Dan Centinello, chairman of the New York College Republicans, who was among those pushing for an immediate end to the RDI contract. "To prolong this is just wrong."

[...]

College Republicans became one of the country's best-funded independent "527" committees this election year. The group raised more than $6.3 million before the election and nearly $15 million since 2001, according to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group.

However, nearly 90 percent of the money raised went directly into the fund-raising operation, according to filings with the IRS. Most of that was paid to RDI and four affiliated firms. The College Republican organization's financial records indicate more expenses than revenue over the past three years, and Centinello said he was concerned that the CRNC might have been locked into a shoddy contract.

Tilman Fertitta and his Downtown Aquarium have added four white tiger cubs to their list of attractions. Having not been to the aquarium myself yet, I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm glad to see that the article touched on the controversy that all this caused, though.

Fertitta moved forward with the tiger facility despite concerns by Houston's City Council earlier this year about the appropriateness of having wild animals at a restaurant.

"There was some (contention)," said council member Carol Alvarado, whose district includes downtown. "It was the concern of some of the City Council members to mix wild animals with a restaurant complex.

"The fact that people from the AZA (American Zoo and Aquarium Association) helped to design it and (approved) it, hopefully that will ease a lot of the concerns raised."

City Council approval, however, was only needed for a temporary permit. Long-term approval for the exhibit included getting zoo association and U.S. Department of Agriculture accreditation and meeting city building codes.

The aquarium got accreditation from the zoo association in September — albeit on the basis of its aquarium, not its tiger facility — and from the USDA in November. The association will send inspectors in early 2005 who will focus on the tiger exhibit.

Fertitta defends the addition of the tigers, saying the downtown facility is much more than an eatery.

"The second floor is a restaurant, the first floor is an aquarium," he said. "We're more of an entertainment company than a restaurant company."

There are twenty-seven candidates on the ballot for the Baseball Hall of Fame - twelve newcomers and fifteen holdovers. Only one newcomer is a sure thing, and that's Wade Boggs. He won't be the most talked-about candidate, though. If there's a Hall of What Might Have Been, Darryl Strawberry would be a first-ballot, inner-circle inductee. We're stuck in the real world, however, and here it's not close. Two great seasons, a couple of darned nice ones, lots of time missed to injuries and other things, and only one 100-game season after the age of 29. Ah, Darryl. Yankee fans will look fondly on your contributions to the '96 and '98 championships, and Met fans will curse your name forevermore. Better luck in the next life.

Anyway. With so little heft at the top of the ticket this year (and next), it's as good a chance as the likes of Bert Blyleven and Rich Gossage will ever get. Those two guys, plus Boggs, Ryne Sandberg, and Tommy John (my holdovers from last year) would be my choices. Jim Baker and Joe Sheehan go into more detail. Sheehan thinks that Blyleven is finally picking up some momentum, thanks in part to relentless support from the analyst community. Like him, if that's so I think it's a good thing. We'll see if it matters soon enough.

I'm just boggled by this article on "extreme commuting".

"The sun isn't even up," says Sandra Foster, 42, who's been making the 85-mile trip into Manhattan for nearly a year to her job as an information-technology recruiter. "The last thing anyone wants to do is chat."

Foster is one of 3.4 million Americans who endure a daily "extreme commute" of 90 minutes or more each way to work. They're among the fastest-growing segment of commuters, according to a Census study, Journey to Work, released in March. Their commute times are more than triple the national average of 25.5 minutes each way.

For many extreme commuters, the distance is so far they actually travel through several weather zones — from the edge of the Mojave Desert to the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, or from Pennsylvania resort towns in the Poconos to midtown Manhattan.

Extreme commuting is being driven by strong forces. And this year's surge in gasoline prices hasn't deterred people from driving longer distances to get to work. Workplace shifts make it easier to telecommute, use flextime or work part time. Accelerating prices for close-in housing push people farther from cities to find affordable homes.

And government planners, desperate to keep traffic moving, are spending billions to improve mass transit, including far-flung routes for express buses and commuter rail lines. Whatever the outlook, extreme commuters are pounding out the corridors of what will become the next generation of suburbs.

(Thanks to Anne of blogHOUSTON for the last two links.)

From 32 votes to 33.

The recount, which began Tuesday, gave Vo a winning margin of 33 votes out of of more than 40,000 cast. The additional vote came from a mail-in ballot not credited to Vo in previous counts, election officials said.

The vote now stands at 20,695 for Vo to 20,662 for Heflin.

"We didn't expect the outcome to change, because all of the illegal votes are still included in the recount total," said Heflin's lawyer, Andy Taylor. "Once you subtract all the illegal votes from the total, it will show that Representative Heflin has more legal votes than his opponent."

Via Political Wire, the state of Florida liked its early voting experiment so much, it is talking about getting rid of Election Day.

Florida's election supervisors, impressed by the success of early voting, proposed dramatic reforms Tuesday that would eliminate Election Day, replace it with an 11-day election season and do away with precincts.

The association of the state's 67 chief elections officials voted in concept at its annual winter meeting in Orlando to informally present the idea to the Legislature and to start rallying support for what its members concede would be a sea change in how Floridians vote.

[...]

This past election season marked the first time that Florida used early voting across the state and it was a proven success, as some voters waited in line for hours in order to cast their ballot ahead of Election Day.

Election supervisors say the experience showed them they could move away from the traditional Election Day and a precinct structure many believe is outdated. Instead of hundreds of precincts in a county, for example, voters could go to any of a few super-voting sites equipped with enough machines and personnel to keep lines at a minimum.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any serious objections to this which don't have to do with tradition. I'd like to see precincts kept for data purposes, but other than that, I'd be happy to see this adopted universally. Anyone disagree?

It's stories like this that make one truly proud to be associated with Rice University.

As if a plain old thong wasn't enough to accentuate what isn't covered, a Rice University MBA student has shed some neon light on the skin with a glow-in-the-dark version.

Beau Carpenter, an avid runner who also works at NASA, initially thought of creating glow-in-the-dark jogging clothes, but practicality evaporated when thongs captured his attention during his Internet research. He enlisted Chris Harris, an electrical engineering student at Rice, and Marcus Brocato, a chemistry lab manager at the Houston private university, to develop the GloThong.

"Being guys, it didn't take us long to gravitate to them," Carpenter told the Houston Chronicle in Sunday's editions. "My co-workers find it endlessly entertaining."

The thongs have lightweight, water-resistant batteries that, when fully charged, illuminate the straps for two hours in various neon colors, including blue, pink and yellow. Wearers can use a wall adapter to charge them up, but car chargers are available for those on the go.

They were a hit when the team recently took their invention to a topless bar in Dickinson.

"The women liked the product so much that they lined up to give us their real names and cell numbers," Carpenter said.

The thong will be available for $49.95 by mid-December, but the group intends to expand their offerings to include luminescent bras and bikinis.

"We're selling attention," Carpenter said. "You kind of feel like Cinderella until the Glo runs out."

So what happened while I was out of town?

There are now three contested House races.

They have been filed by state Rep. Talmadge Heflin, R-Houston, state Rep. Jack Stick, R-Austin, and attorney Eric Opiela, R-Karnes City, who ran for an open seat in South Texas.

Circumstances are different in each case, but all the Republicans say illegal votes were cast, and they are asking the GOP-controlled House to investigate and possibly overturn the Election Day results.

All three are being supported in their challenges by state Republican Party Chairwoman Tina Benkiser.

"Voter fraud undermines the faith of the people and, as a result, we support Opiela, Heflin and Stick in combating the effects of possible voter fraud in their districts," she said.

Note also that Talmadge Heflin has the full support of the State GOP. He's not just some disgruntled loser making trouble for poor ol' Tom Craddick, despite Craddick's gosh-darned best efforts to warn him off. At what point do you think "By any means necessary" will be written into the official party platform?

The BOR guys speculate (here and here) that the most recent challenge, by outgoing Rep. Jack Stick, is nothing more than cover for the real target, which is Heflin's seat. Hotshot Casey is thinking along the same lines. Meanwhile, Greg does the math and sees blaming the voters as Heflin's only viable strategy.

More on the Stick challenge in this Statesman article.

Stick's allegations of problems "reconciling" voter information from Election Day has Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir stumped.

"It's a false accusation," she said. "I just did a recount (for White)."

Stick could not be reached for comment late Monday. But he wrote in his five-page filing with the secretary of state that he was protesting the result pending the release of election data that would show whether any voters cast more than one ballot, lived outside the district or were ineligible to vote. Stick wrote that it would be another two weeks before the election data would be available.

DeBeauvoir said she also saw a follow-up letter from Stick to the secretary of state claiming she had not released voter registration information to Stick.

The county clerk said she's not the voter registrar but that Travis County is probably current on all information related to the election.

"I have never received any kind of written or oral request from Jack Stick for information," she said. "We're done and up-to-date. I don't know why Jack Stick would accuse me."

While the Heflin-Vo recount is underway and expected to finish later today, the recount in the third challenged race has ended with no change in the result.

Republican Eric Opiela gained four votes Monday in a recount for State Representative District 35, but still lost to Democrat Yvonne Gonzalez Toureilles by more than 800 votes.

In the recount Monday, Opiela gained 31 votes in Bee County and one in Karnes County. But he lost 28 in Jim Wells County.

Gonzalez Toureilles gained 17 votes in Jim Wells County, had no change in her total in Karnes County, but lost 9 votes in Bee County.

The final tally in the district, which also includes Goliad, McMullen, Atascosa and Live Oak counties, was 23,146 for Gonzalez Toureilles and 22,288 for Opiela. Only the votes in Karnes, Bee and Jim Wells counties were contested.

[...]

Opiela said the challenge brought out what he called irregularities in Bee, Karnes and Jim Wells counties.

"In Bee and Jim Wells, the high number of irregularities during Election Day contributed to the decision," Opiela said. "We want to make sure every vote was counted and that illegal votes are not counted and that's why we filed an election challenge."

Gonzalez Toureilles was in Austin for a legislative orientation and could not be reached for comment.

Opiela said he received several calls from voters in Jim Wells and Bee counties who were concerned about the race's outcome.

"We noticed in this county (Jim Wells) one of the boxes had a different serial number and that concerned us with the security of the boxes," he said.

Jim Wells County Clerk Ruben Sandoval said one election judge didn't completely fill out the combination form or sign-in sheet for voters in Precinct 14.

Finally, on an unrelated matter, the Corpus Christi Caller Times ponders the sad fate of unloved Craddick disciple Vilma Luna.

House Speaker Tom Craddick missed a wonderful opportunity to reward a Democrat who has, at great political risk, stuck with him during tough times. His failure to tap State Rep. Vilma Luna as chairwoman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee had to have stung.

Instead, Craddick named Jim Pitts, a Republican from Waxahachie, as chairmanof what is perhaps the most important committee in Austin, particularly in a session when public school finance will be job one.

[...]

Craddick, the top Republican in a GOP-dominated chamber, could have shown true bipartisanship by naming Luna, the Corpus Christi Democrat who was among the few in her party not to participate in the two walkouts during last summer's special sessions on redistricting. The walkouts denied the GOP leadership the quorum necessary to push through the redrawing of congressional lines that eventually resulted in ousting four of five targeted Texas Democratic congressmen.

But Luna stayed in Austin, one of a few Democrats to do so. Several of those Democrats later paid the price, such as high-profile State Rep. Ron Wilson of Houston whose loss was attributed to his support for Craddick's legislation.

Like Luna, Wilson gave Republicans bipartisan weight by voting for an appropriations measure that met the GOP leadership's requirements of producing a state budget that had no new taxes, even at the cost of cutting the Children's Health Insurance Program.

Thanks to KF for several links.

The Lege has until October 1 to fix school funding. Or else.

Judge John Dietz of Travis County ruled Tuesday that the funding system is operating as an unconstitutional state property tax and is inadequate to meet the high standards lawmakers have set for students.

He gave lawmakers until Oct. 1 to fix the system. If they fail to come up with a plan, he said he would halt state funding.