The Weekly 'Good Night Irene' Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance, which has some experience in these matters, extends best wishes to the east coast as it recovers from Hurricane Irene. Here now is the roundup ...

Off the Kuff notes that Texas' unemployment rate is at its highest level since the days of the oil bust. Maybe firing thousands of teachers and other public employees isn't such a hot idea.

Bay Area Houston picks up and posts the video of the Sanger ISD administrators who poked fun at Rick Perry in a Hee Haw sing-along skit.

A Houston city council candidate has affixed hundreds of his campaign signs to utility poles -- in violation of both city ordinance and the utility company's rules -- throughout the city, many of them 20- and 30-feet off the ground. This candidate, an attorney, blames "overzealous volunteers" and makes no promise to remove them. This candidate's name is Eric Dick. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs asks the (hopefully obvious) question: does Houston really need another dick on city council?

How can you tell that republicans are batsh*t crazy? Rick Perry has jumped to the top of the polls. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme has warned you for years.

Libby Shaw at TexasKaos has a roundup of Rick Perry's vast network of crony capitalists for inquiring minds. See Icky Ricky Perry, the Master of Pay to Play Politics.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson shows that state Sen. Steve Ogden needs to check his facts about who's to blame for the budget impasse last session: Ogden's false equivalency.

This week on Left of College Station Teddy continues to look at Rick Perry's Texas. From tort reform that doesn't deliver on promises to water infrastructure neglect that has left Texas a dry state; from crony capitalism that benefits Perry's campaign contributors to the fact that the Lone Star State has the highest percentage of uninsured in the nation. It's hard to mess with Texas when Perry already has.

Neil at Texas Liberal will be taking part in a spoken-word event and concert in Cincinnati on Saturday, September 3 to mark the release of the Aurore Press book Living In The Lap Of Labor. This book is a collection of essays about working in America. Neil has an essay in the book and will be reading from that essay. While it is unlikely you will be in Cincinnati in the week ahead, Neil asks you to stop on by and say hello if you are in fact in town.

Happy 175th birthday, Big Greasy

An outstanding essay by Lisa Gray.

In 1836, the place that would become Houston wasn't much of a place. The land was swampy, flat grassland, part of the low-lying Fever Coast. Buffalo Bayou wasn't deep enough to handle big steamships. And the parcel of raw land along its banks wasn't even the founders' first choice for the town they intended to develop. But the land was available immediately, and brothers John Kirby and Augustus Chapman Allen were in a hurry to start making their fortunes.

From the very beginning, in other words, Houston was the city we know today: an unlikely place; a city created as much by accident as by planning; a city in a hurry.

Somehow John Kirby Allen persuaded the young Republic of Texas to make Houston its capital. (It helped that the Allens had been clever enough to name the place after Sam Houston, the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto, soon to be elected president of the Republic.) But the little boomtown didn't last long as the republic's capital: Even by the standards of the Texas frontier, Houston was too raw, too muddy, too prone to mosquito-borne plagues. Disgusted, the legislators packed up and moved in 1839. And thus was established another of Houston's patterns: In the blink of an eye, it went from boom to bust.

Over the next 60 years, Houston fashioned itself as an agricultural center, a place where cotton was processed and shipped, a Southern town not unlike other sleepy little places that peppered the state. When Houstonians hungered for culture and urban life, they traveled to Galveston, a bigger city with a bigger port.

But at the turn of the century, again more by chance than by planning, two world-shaking events in other places changed everything about Houston. First came the Great Storm of 1900, the hurricane that struck Galveston, killing an estimated 8,000 people; it is still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. Businesses grew leery of shipping into Galveston.

And there, Houston saw its chance. Houston's businessmen had already made sure the city was crisscrossed by railroads, and now they hurried to make it an even greater business hub, to dredge out Buffalo Bayou on a grander scale, to make Houston into that strangest of things: an inland port.

The second world-shaking event came only a few months later, in 1901, when oil was struck in Beaumont, at Spindletop -- a gusher like nothing the world had seen before. Suddenly oil seemed plentiful, a fuel not just for lamps but for cars. Suddenly Texans were rich. And suddenly Houston -- with its railroads and growing port -- was an oil town, hub of a brand-new industry.

And that's how we acquired another of our habits: We began seeing the town as a connection, not a destination. The city proclaimed itself "where 17 railroads meet the sea." From Houston, you could go anywhere. It wasn't a town where people sat still.

By 1930, Houston was Texas' biggest city. And after World War II, fed by demand for all things petrochemical, it grew even faster.

Unlike older cities, it was a place shaped largely by cars - a spread-out, sprawling megalopolis, full of single-family ranch houses with big grassy yards, not tight-squeezed apartment buildings. The roads were wide and smooth; sidewalks, when they happened, were an afterthought. When a brand-new highway (like U.S. 59), plowed through a long-established neighborhood (like the Fifth Ward), that was counted as the price of progress. Speed and movement were everything.

The city continued to defy the elements. Houston prided itself on vanquishing nature, in triumphing over actual conditions on the ground. Bayous were channelized and paved, the twisty, slow-moving rivers turned into fast-moving drainage ditches. The city air-conditioned itself on a scale that amazed the rest of the world -- most gloriously, in the Astrodome, the world's first domed stadium, a place where even the grass was synthesized from petrochemicals. We called it the "Eighth Wonder of the World."

Read the rest here.

Sunday Funnies

Stephen King's Maine radio station will "burn some feet"

Outstanding news:

BANGOR, Maine — Horror novelist and Bangor radio station owner Stephen King announced on Tuesday a new talk radio show featuring a former vice presidential candidate and a former Maine secretary of state’s communications director.

“We wanted to shake things up a little bit in the market,” King said.

King, the owner of Zone Radio Corp, said WZON 103.1 FM and 620 AM will launch “The Pulse Morning Show” on Sept. 12. The show will air 6-10 a.m. on weekdays and online at www.zoneradio.com. The station also is expanding its news department.

King said he was thrilled his station could grow at a time when others have had to cut staff and decrease the amount of programming and production.

Former journalist, Bangor Daily News columnist, and gubernatorial candidate Pat LaMarche will be joined on the show by Don Cookson, a former reporter and communications director under Secretary of State Matt Dunlap.

LaMarche was also the Green Party's vice-presidential candidate, with Ralph Nader at the top, in 2004.

LaMarche ... said the show would target politicians and public officials in Augusta and Washington, D.C., who push around Maine residents, especially those struggling with the welfare system.

“Nothing is more fun than standing up to a bully,” LaMarche said. “There’s an awful lot of bullying going on out there right now.”

What's great about this news -- besides King being a "job creator", that is -- is that the progressive media infrastructure continues to flourish, even at the local level.

Keith Olbermann and the new head of Current TV will be fleshing out the news division and filling the network with additional programming over the next year. Cenk Uygur left MSNBC and went back to his one-million-views-a-day online TV show "The Young Turks", and was replaced by the provocative Al Sharpton there permanently this week. Chris Hayes of The Nation has also picked up a weekend gig at MSNBC. The progressive blogosphere, which has always had the upper hand nationally and in Texas -- and even here in Houston -- is blossoming.

“We’d like to burn some feet once in a while — make some people a little bit angry,” King said. “There are some people who deserve to be taken to the woodshed from time to time.”

Yes, liberals who fight back simply enrage the Right even more. Judging solely from the responses I get here -- most of which, sadly, are so obnoxious that they never get published -- the pushback we perform has the same result.

Heh.

Dick's Signs

This Dick is going to get what he wants; a lot of free publicity. First, Greg:

Houston City Council candidate Eric Dick gets busted for his illegally-placed signs. Gotta love the “overzealous volunteer” excuse. If you ever see an overzealous volunteer of his, let me know. And if you see any more of his 20-foot high yard signs, feel free to submit them to the Empty Lot Primary. Here’s the collection of 30 Eric Dick signs posted around town posted there already, some illegally placed on utility poles and some merely posted on empty lots reflecting not one bit of human endorsement (save for the gaggle of six signs placed on a relative’s property). 

And Doug Miller, one of the best in the business:



Not cool, indeed. After I saw several of these in my neighborhood, I called Centerpoint Energy to ask about their policy. Here that is.

Let's review: an attorney who claims full knowledge of the city ordinance regarding campaign signs refuses to take responsibility for "overzealous volunteers" who have placed hundreds of his campaign signs so high off the ground that it will require a bucket truck to remove them.

Let's send a message: don't vote for this guy. Don't we have enough dicks on city council as it is?