Amy Price for Houston City Council

I'm delighted to be assisting Ms. Price -- in an unpaid capacity -- with her campaign for the At Large #4 position on council. From the press release (prepared in part by yours truly):

"I’m proud of every hot, muggy, mosquito-infested, unique, culturally rich mile of this city. And it’s the people who make it special," said Price.

"We are able and resourceful, determined and compassionate. And I know that if we work together, we can continue to keep Houston an example that will lead Texas and the nation out of these difficult times. 

"Houston has very fortunately avoided many of the challenges our state and country faces, but we haven't been immune to budget cuts, furloughed employees, and an uncertain forecast. It almost seems we’re watching from a far shore as our middle class shrinks, social services disappear, and our children face a future of fewer opportunities. It’s tempting to give up on fixing -- much less healing -- our society and just settle for holding our ground. But trying to hold ground is exactly how we’ve lost ground. It’s time to bridge the gulf between public policy and the democratic ideals that shaped this country, state and city, and our City Council needs someone who will represent the working class people of Houston. The wealthy special interests already are well-represented."

If you believe that the services city government provides, such as ...

• policemen and firemen having all the resources they need to do their jobs effectively;
• fixing potholes;
• picking up your garbage;
• and providing clean, safe, drinking water

... are not the kind of things that should be on a P/L statement, then Houstonians finally have that candidate. And her name is Amy Price.

That last part is the most important part of her campaign. Amy's opponents for At Large #4 are incumbent C.O. Bradford and Louis Molnar. Bradford, a former HPD chief, narrowly missed getting elected Harris County district attorney in 2008 before backing up and getting elected to the AL#4 slot in 2009. Here's a snip from the front page of Bradford's website:

Houston is about BUSINESS! A great number of people come here to start businesses, invest in businesses, and advance their careers.

What can and should the City be doing now? Tighten its belt, reduce spending, and provide relief for businesses and citizens. Businesses tend to flourish and citizens do better when they have as much free reign to operate legally and ethically as possible. Reducing some of the business burdens, especially while our local economy is sagging, is an incentive to reinvest, expand, and grow businesses when possible. In my view, this is how we help create more jobs, boost our local economy, and increase revenues.

Sounds almost like a Tea Partier talking, doesn't it? Since Bradford ran for DA as a Democrat in '08, he's been busy consorting with every manner of Republican as he eyes higher office (mayor in '13 against Annise Parker?). Rumors earlier this year were hot and heavy that he was going to take a shot this cycle, but Parker's war chest -- among other things -- must have scared him off.

Bradford wears the long-running scandals of the HPD crime lab around his neck like an albatross, yet that hasn't slowed his political career much. Do Houston voters just look over it or do they even know?

Here's a bit from Molnar's website:

Houstonians need City Council to use their tax dollars efficiently and wisely. This means we need to look for new ways to stretch our budget dollars. We need innovation to make our money go further, and we should encourage a culture of cost-savings. Our economy is not the same as it was a few years ago. Doing more with less is the new way of doing things, and it’s time we take a hard-line approach to the reality of today’s Houston.

Ah, an austerity lecture. The only thing that's missing is a few Teabaggers yelling "cut, cut, cut" in the background.

These two men are the living embodiment of "business as usual" at City Hall. They wear expensive suits, have already spent large amounts of money on their campaigns -- Bradford allegedly invested $5,000 in a campaign song -- and seem to be relishing the opportunity to continue cutting essential city services.

Price, a psychotherapist by profession and a violin teacher by vocation, is NOT going to be "business as usual". That much is certain.

Find Amy on Facebook here and follow Amy on Twitter here.

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