Sleepin' Heavenly Peas

Tinsel Toons

Merry Xmas from Ayn Rand

Twenty more, if you can stomach them.  Too late as a season's greeting for all my Republican friends this year, but next year...

The conservo-libertarian goddess also has some reviews of family movies.

“101 Dalmatians”
A wealthy woman attempts to do her impoverished school friend Anita a favor by purchasing some of her many dogs and putting them to sensible use. Her generosity is repulsed at every turn, and Anita foolishly and irresponsibly begins acquiring even more animals, none of which are used to make a practical winter coat. Altruism is pointless. So are dogs. A cat is a far more sensible pet. A cat is objectively valuable. —No stars.

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”
An industrious young woman neglects to charge for her housekeeping services and is rightly exploited for her naïveté. She dies without ever having sought her own happiness as the highest moral aim. I did not finish watching this movie, finding it impossible to sympathize with the main character. —No stars.

“Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory”
An excellent movie. The obviously unfit individuals are winnowed out through a series of entrepreneurial tests and, in the end, an enterprising young boy receives a factory. I believe more movies should be made about enterprising young boys who are given factories. —Three and a half stars. (Half a star off for the grandparents, who are sponging off the labor of Charlie and his mother. If Grandpa Joe can dance, Grandpa Joe can work.)

Fifteen more, including "How the Grinch Stole Christmas".  (Three stars.)  Happy holidays!

Scattershooting lame ducks

-- So how about that Obama?  He's had a pretty good seven weeks since all the Democrats who ran away from him got trounced in early November.

You think he can keep it going in 2015?  Do you think Annise Parker can mimic his success strategy?  You know, ram through a few controversial initiatives, avoid losing some of them in court?

2015 is going to be a pivotal year for both Obamacare and HERO.  No bets taken yet.

-- Nothing lame whatsoever about the Texas Observer's Best of 2014.  They've had a very good year.  A good sixty years, for that matter.

-- Stephen Colbert taught us all a lesson in how to go out on top.  That duck sure wasn't lame.

-- Texas Comptroller Jethro Bodine Glenn Hegar has a report due in late January.  Since he's a farmer and not an accountant, I certainly hope Susan Combs has been doing his homework for him.  There's only the future of Texas riding on his predictions of what kind of money the state will have, revenue-wise.  And that will impact whatever Governor Greg Abbott has claimed he'll be able to do without raising taxes.

Boy, that Rick Perry was one dumb lucky bastard, wasn't he?

Lanier's legacy

I'm not joining the chorus of others in mourning the recent passing of former Houston mayor Bob Lanier.  He was certainly a man who made himself very wealthy as a real estate speculator (if you can call knowing where the highways were going to be built and then buying land there 'speculating').  And he spread that wealth around amongst his buddies, quietly tipping them off to potential deals.  That would be called 'insider trading' if someone investing in the stock market did it.  Used to be a crime, don't know if it still is.  If it is, a mostly white Harris County grand jury isn't likely to indict anyway.

Lanier set the standard for how Houston is now governed: of, by, and for the developers.  And in the early '90's, those guys didn't cotton to the idea of a monorail for mass transit -- no matter what the voters of Houston said -- so when Lanier decided to challenge five-term mayor Kathy Whitmire (after she had fired him from Metro), the race wasn't even close.  She came in third, and Lanier bested Sylvester Turner 53-47 in the runoff, with the city split precisely along racial lines.  Oh, and now we have term limits for Houston municipal offices.

Lanier took his 1991 election to run City Hall as a mandate to kill the monorail, and he diverted the money into road projects (surprise!) and large numbers of new police officers.  Though he angered suburbanites by annexing Kingwood, many locals were forgiving, bestowing plaudits on Lanier for the drop in Houston's crime rate as a result of his change in policy direction.  The facts are, however, that crime fell dramatically all across the United States during Lanier's tenure as mayor -- which coincided with the Clinton White House years -- and that drop was due to an extensive variety of social and economic factors, not just more cops on the streets.

It's worth footnoting that there is academic disagreement on precisely which causes may have produced the most effect.  And for the record, one of them wasn't Bill Clinton's economy, stupid.  Crime has continued to fall, worldwide, even as the economy has both worsened and improved over the past twenty years.

Lanier rode the non-partisan nature of Houston's municipal elections as far as anyone has.  He was the kind of conservative, pro-business, law-and-order Democrat that Republicans could love.  A neoliberal, in other words.  Annise Parker has carried on much of this fine Bayou City tradition.  A handful of 2015 mayoral wannabes from both sides of the so-called aisle are already lined up in the same queue.  I've identified some of them, but you're smart enough to know who they are without my reminding you.  The Ds and Rs behind their name mean absolutely nothing in the context of how we do City Hall elections, and that's how Houstonians have (apparently) always wanted it.  As we should know from recent history, all these armadillos bumping around in the middle of the road produces voter turnout in the low double digits.

So let's give Bob Lanier praise for shrewdly becoming a very rich man based on insider information.  And setting a local governmental standard that so many of Houston's 1%, uncontent with just being wealthy, now strive for.  And maybe a few nice parks in town.  And that's about it.