Sunday Funnies (Irony Surge for Mother's Day edition)

Congratulations to Melissa Noriega who finished first in a field of eleven, with over 46%, in her race for Houston City Council yesterday, and to my friend Muse who managed her successful campaign. Runoff coming in June.

Your mother and art deco

It's an excellent way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Take your mother:



The old City Bank building at 1001 McKinney, built in 1946 but incorporating some of the century's earlier art deco architecture.

On Mother's Day, the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance hosts a walking tour of some of downtown Houston's best art deco buildings. It features the city's finest examples of 1920s, '30s and '40s architecture. Some of the art deco deco gems have been restored; others are still waiting for attention. The tour will also explore art deco designs that have been lost, using historical photographs and descriptions. Sites include the Peden Co. Building, the City National Bank Building (now 1001 McKinney) and the Banking Hall of the Gulf Building, now part of JPMorgan Chase.

• What: Downtown Deco Walking Tour

• When: 2 p.m. Sunday

• Where: Meet at Christ Church Cathedral, 1117 Texas Ave.

• Tickets: $10 (on sale at 1:30, prior to walk)

• Information: www.ghpa.org

Michael Moore's letter to Treasury: SiCKOs

From Michael Moore:

I know you all are aware of the controversy surrounding my recent trip to Cuba with a group of 9/11 heroes for my upcoming movie SiCKO and the subsequent letter I received from the Treasury Department letting me know I'm now being investigated. Well, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you my letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. I just put it in the mail this morning...

May 11, 2007

Secretary Paulson,

I am contacting you in light of the document sent to me dated May 2, 2007, which was received May 7, 2007 indicating that an investigation has been opened up with regards to a trip I took to Cuba with a group of Americans that included some 9/11 heroes in March 2007 related to the filming of my next documentary, on the American Healthcare system. SiCKO, which will be seen in theaters this summer, will expose the health care industry’s greed and control over America’s political processes.

I believe that the decision to conduct this investigation represents the latest example of the Bush Administration abusing the federal government for raw, crass, political purposes. Over the last seven years of the Bush Presidency, we have seen the abuse of government to promote a political agenda designed to benefit the conservative base of the Republican Party, special interests and major financial contributors. From holding secret meetings for the energy industry to re-writing science findings to cooking the books on intelligence to the firing of U.S. Attorneys, this Administration has shown time and time again that it will abuse its power and authority.

There are a number of specific facts that have led me to conclude that politics could very well be driving this Bush Administration investigation of me and my film.

First, the Bush Administration has been aware of this matter for months (since October 2006) and never took any action until less than two weeks before SiCKO is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and a little more than a month before it is scheduled to open in the United States.

Second, the health care and insurance industry, which is exposed in the movie and has expressed concerns about the impact of the movie on their industries, is a major corporate underwriter of President George W. Bush and the Republican Party, having contributed over $13 million to the Bush presidential campaign in 2004 and more than $180 million to Republican candidates over the last two campaign cycles. It is well documented that the industry is very concerned about the impact of SiCKO. They have threatened their employees if they talk to me. They have set up special internal crises lines should I show up at their headquarters. Employees have been warned about the consequences of participating in SiCKO. Despite this, some employees, at great risk to themselves, have gone on camera to tell the American people the truth about the health care industry. I can understand why that industry's main recipient of its contributions -- President Bush -- would want to harass, intimidate and potentially prevent this film from having its widest possible audience.

And, third, this investigation is being opened in the wake of misleading attacks on the purpose of the Cuba trip from a possible leading Republican candidate for president, Fred Thompson, a major conservative newspaper, The New York Post, and various right wing blogs.

For five and a half years, the Bush administration has ignored and neglected the heroes of the 9/11 community. These heroic first responders have been left to fend for themselves, without coverage and without care. I understand why the Bush administration is coming after me -- I have tried to help the very people they refuse to help, but until George W. Bush outlaws helping your fellow man, I have broken no laws and I have nothing to hide.

I demand that the Bush Administration immediately end this investigation and spend its time and resources trying to support some of the real heroes of 9/11.

Sincerely,

Michael Moore

This doctor agrees with Moore's take in the film, even if the Bushies don't. Is it possible that the US government has a more important investigation to conduct? Yeah, I didn't think so either.

Beaumont Enterprise (Hearst) replaces publisher

Two months ago the owners of the Beaumont Enterprise pushed the man who had been its president and publisher for nearly twenty years -- a man I worked directly for in my first corporate career -- into involuntary retirement.

(This post is going to be more than a little "inside baseball", so if you're looking for one of my usual amusing or curmudgeonly pieces, this won't be it.)

Let me set up the history: Upon graduating from Lamar University with a degree in management, I went to work for the Enterprise in 1981 as a retail advertising account executive. I called on a cross-section of Beaumont's retail establishments -- tire stores, restaurants, liquor stores, dress shops and so on -- for the purpose of their ad placement in the newspaper. I thought it was the best job in the world. I got to use both sides of my brain all day long: salesman, artist, business consultant, budget writer, creative writer, and so on. The newspaper was owned by the publications subsidiary of the Jefferson-Pilot insurance company, and the publisher at the time was a rather non-descript man named Gene Cornwell (there is a chronology of Enterprise publishers from the newspaper's inception here -- reg. req.) He was soon replaced by Harold Martin, the head of Jeff-Pilot Publications, which sold the Enterprise to Hearst in 1984. Upon the ownership change, George Irish -- who is now the senior executive for Hearst Newspapers in New York -- became the publisher of the Enterprise as well as the group publisher of Hearst papers in Laredo, Midland, and Plainview. It was Irish who came to me in 1986 and asked me to go to Plainview and become the advertising director, in line to succeed the Daily Herald's publisher, a 64-year-old who had just had five bypasses.

So I did, but not before I married my beautiful wife of now 20+ years. Irish and Aubrey Webb, the general manager of the Enterprise -- he had been the advertising director before Hearst's purchase and was my immediate superior through the mid-Eighties -- both came to our wedding.

When Irish went to San Antonio and became the publisher of the Light, Webb succeeded him as publisher of the Enterprise, in 1988. Both men were in their early forties.

These two pretty much set the stage for both my rise as a Hearst newspaper executive as well as the fall. I left Plainview for Midland and a job as the national advertising manager of the Reporter-Telegram in 1988 after telling Irish I couldn't take it in Plainview any longer, both the town and the man I worked for. He plucked the ad director out of Midland to be Plainview's top dog, but passed me over for the seat that was vacated. I finally left the newspaper game for good in 1992; Irish's Hearst career continued to flourish.

Irish's history as corporate hatchetman has been well-documented: when Hearst announced it would buy its larger cross-town rival San Antonio Express-News, late in 1992, they also declared that they would kill the Light if no buyer was found. Three months later, as its now-suddenly-final edition was rolling off the presses, George Irish jumped up on a desk in the newsroom and told the Light employees: "You are released."

Irish left for New York and most of the Light's employees headed for the unemployment line. He -- perhaps I should rightly say Frank Bennack, now-former president of Hearst and himself a former San Antonio Light publisher -- continued this method of eliminating jobs in San Francisco in 1999 (Hearst sold the Examiner and bought the Chronicle) and tried it again most recently in Seattle but the Blethen family, owners of the Seattle Times, the paper in joint operating agreement with Hearst's Post-Intelligencer, thwarted them.

The federal judge in California who got involved as the San Francisco newspaper negotiations commenced, and then devolved, put both Bennack and Irish under oath and later declared that he found their testimony "simply not credible". A good reason why is that Irish's sworn testimony contradicted his own hand-written notes, which were displayed on an overhead projector in court.

After this embarrassment, Irish was promoted to senior vice president of the Hearst Corporation.

Back in Beaumont, Webb promptly went to sleep at the switch for the next couple of decades. The Enterprise, which in 1981 had a Sunday circulation of nearly 115,000, started a slow downward spiral similar to all US newspapers but particularly those classified in the industry as "community" papers (under 100,000 circulation). Hurricane Rita nearly finished off the newspaper in 2005, sending its staff fleeing for several weeks. The paper couldn't put out a print copy for ten days and didn't have enough circulators to deliver the paper for weeks and weeks after that. Prior to Rita the newspaper was at 70,000 copies on Sunday; currently it stands at just under 59,000. Part of this decline has been exacerbated by the flourishing of two weeklies in the market, both owned by wealthy attorneys and engaged in a pitched battle for readers and advertisers themselves.

The numbers -- ad revenue must be suffering mightily as a result of the circulation decline and the two lower-priced competitors -- finally forced Irish to cashier his old buddy Webb. "Publisher emeritus" is what the company does when they don't have the courage to just fire someone.

The new publisher of the Beaumont paper has his own rather checkered history of legal issues regarding circulation. Here's an explanation of what was going on that got the Mississippi state attorney general's attention.

I'll probably keep up with what the old guys I used to work with in the paper business are up to, but I'll try not to bore you any more with it.

GOP Senators were for immigration reform before they were against it

Jonathan Singer:

Despite the fact that the Republicans' nativist language did not save their congressional majorities as some in their ranks expected and that such positions actually hurt the GOP in a number of instances, Republicans in the Senate appear to be drifting even further to the right on immigration -- a position that runs almost completely contrary to current polling.

Who's among the reality deniers? A couple of guys who want to be nominated for president, naturally ...

The cynicism and opportunism of these Republican Senators -- chief among them McCain, Martinez and Brownback -- is quite remarkable even if it were predictable. Each of the three aforementioned Senators, who are walking away from last year's bill, not only voted for it when it came to the floor but were among the bill's six co-sponsors.

Like the science on global warming, like the refusal to believe in evolution, like the need for fools like Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz to resign, the truth keeps slapping the GOP in the face but they just don't get it:

This move also carries great potential downsides for the Republicans, who could be on the verge of losing the Hispanic vote for years to come. Hispanic voters, many of whom were repulsed by the GOP's resort to nativist language last cycle, gave Democratic congressional candidates close to 70 percent of their vote, up between 10 and 15 percent from just two years earlier. In the Demember special election in Texas' 23rd congressional district, Democrat Ciro Rodriguez upset Republican incumbent Henry Bonilla in no small part as a result of the support of Hispanic voters.

And it's not just Hispanic voters who could be turned off by GOP antics on immigration reform. As mentioned above, polling quite clearly indicates that the public favors creating an arduous path towards legalization and perhaps even citizenship for those here unlawfully. At the same time, just a very small, however vocal, minority supports mass deportations. So while Republicans in the Senate play games, backing away from their own compromise of just one year ago to placate their extremist base, it's quite clear that both in the short run and the long run they're in for a rude awakening as voters' unhappiness with their shenanigans comes home to roost.

Then again, if the Republicans can succeed in disenfranchising the voting rights of large portions of the population likely to vote against them, then they may well succeed in holding onto power.

I have written previously that "illegal immigration" isn't an issue the Republicans in power are really interested in addressing. The whining about it, however, has reached uncomfortable decibel level out here in "the heartland". I have listened to the GOP's soft suburban base complain about it for years even as they themselves hired undocumented workers to cut their lawns, care for their parents, and clean their offices.

The hatred for Latin people lately and by my observation seems to be reaching an unprecedented level. An inability to comprehend the history of the United States -- a nation that exists in its present form only because of immigration -- as well as another American tradition, racism, lies at the center of the rightward bluster.

Were it not for uncontrolled European immigration, the North American continent (from Mexico to Canada, just to be clear) would be populated with the people indigenous to it -- brown people. Were it not for the slave trade by those same European immigrants, there would likely be millions fewer Africans calling themselves Americans.

And that's exactly the way many of the conservative Europeans would like it to be.

It will never happen. There is nothing anyone can do to stem the surge of people of all races who will come to America for a chance at a better life, legally or not.

Their choices are to keep raging against the tide, or learn a little tolerance.

Don't count on any intellectual breakthroughs from either the Republican base nor those who wish to lead them.

Mecom Fountain may light up again soon

What the Mecom Fountain looked like before vandals cut the lights off.

The lights of Mecom Fountain, one of Houston's showiest landmarks and a bright spot on the city's grandest thoroughfare, have been dark for seven months. Last fall, someone stole the fountain's 264 light bulbs and the bronze canisters that encased them.

Why?

"Hard to say," says Mark Ross, deputy director of facilities for the Parks and Recreation Department, which is responsible for the fountain's upkeep. "Precious metal theft is in vogue for sure."

But what began as an elaborate act of vandalism has grown into a community effort to bring light back to the fountain's three immense bowls.

A photo from one of the recent Iraq War protests.

"It's our Trevi Fountain, our Golden Gate Bridge," says Peter Brown, the exasperated city councilman at large who's been fielding complaints ever since the fountain went dark. "It's the urban icon that helps define this city."

Sanford Criner, board chair of the Hermann Park Conservancy, calls the 1960s fountain "one of the most, if not the most, beautiful and recognizable civic landmarks after dark in the city."

This is my part of town. We lived just south of the Texas Medical Center from the time we returned to Houston, from Treasure Island, Florida, in 1993 until two months ago when we moved to West University (just west of the TMC skyline; I photo'd here).

This fountain is precisely what Councilman Brown says it is.

When it broke a few years ago and sat silent and empty for a long period of time, it was as sad a time then as it is now at night. Rumor had it at the time that an anonymous benefactor wrote the city a $1 million check for the repairs after learning that the fountain might not work again for years, if ever.

This time all it needs to be re-lit is $100,000 (and some security guards to keep the bronze vandals away from it).

Clemens to make comeback as Bush's war czar

There's just too much irony for me lately to take things seriously ...

After trying in vain to enlist a traditional military man to assume the bizarre post of “War Czar,” President Bush announced today that he had “pitched” the job to Roger Clemens, who has accepted.

Bush had to outbid the New York Yankees for Clemens, who will now be the highest paid employee in the United States Government, at $32 million per year.

The president wasted no time in anointing Clemens with a patented Bush nickname to reflect his new role, in this case “Clemenza.”

Indeed, Bush is counting on the intimidating presence of Clemens, known as “The Rocket,” to singlehandedly defeat the war on terror. As the president, himself a former owner of baseball’s Texas Rangers, put it: “anyone willing to throw splintered bats, and 96 MPH fastballs at people’s heads, is just the kind of sonuvabitch we haven’t had around here since the departures of Rummy and Wolfowitz.”

Clemens also has certain perks in his contract, including only having to show up to work every fifth day, and not making any of the long road trips to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Even with such limitations, the consensus is that Clemens’ effort and performance will far exceed that of all other Bush appointees put together.

Bush has also promised to give Clemens the use of the private jet now utilized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Clemens, for his part, was quite honest in admitting that his decision was strictly “about the money” — “after all, unlike with the Yankees, it’s obvious that here I have absolutely no chance of winning.”