Astrodome will go away in plans by Rodeo, Texans

Without public release of the news, and still awaiting Harris County commissioners' seal of approval, RodeoHouston and the NFL's Texans want to do away with the Astrodome and replace it with green space and a shell of what it used to be (without a roof).

One rendering (with more to see when you click here):

At first blush, and even though this model greatly resembles my previous suggestions, I find myself still disappointed that the two tenants want to knock it down, fill up the hole, and build some Stonehenge-like image of the Dome in its place.  But if this is the preferred way the two wealthy benefactors of Harris County taxpayers' largesse can allow themselves to be inconvenienced to preserve anything of the old girl... so be it.  I suppose.

Wayne was first (in fact I saw his post before I read it in the paper).  Not many other initial reactions yet, but will update here as they come along.

What are your thoughts on this proposal?

Update: John Royal sounds a little bitter, but does note that...

County judge Ed Emmett told Mark Berman last night that the Rodeo/Texans plan was a non-story. 

And at that link, Emmett makes it plain that this isn't what commissioners want.

"I don't think so," Judge Emmett said. "If the decision were to be made to demolish the dome at some point in the future, we'd probably go out and get our own thoughts about how to do it and what to put up in its place.

"The dome belongs to the taxpayers of Harris County. It is paid off. The decision of what to do next is a decision to be made by Harris County Commissioners Court, four county commissioners and the county judge. Then if it involves a level of money that requires a bond, then we'd have to come back to the taxpayers and say 'do you approve this bond?'

"We tried that last fall. They did not approve it, 53-47(%). We're still waiting for better ideas to come forward."

Judge Emmett said converting the Astrodome into a useable facility should not be ruled out.

"I still think we need to find a way to repurpose the structure," said Judge Emmett. "It's the only structure in the world that has 350 thousand square feet of column-free space.

"The Livestock Show and Rodeo could use it. I've met with them. They said 'oh absolutely we could use it. Put all the food and kiddy rides and things like that in there.' The Offshore Technology Conference clearly could use it. They were way out of space this year.

"And the Texans, the fan experience before games, and if could get it done before the Super Bowl (in 2017), think about the week leading up the Super Bowl and the things you could do out there."

So Royal's bitterness is better understood in this context.

Don't blame the voters (last November) for not approving the use of taxpayer funds for a stupid plan that would've gutted the place. Blame those officials who put that idiotic plan up for a vote without pushing for realistic options. Blame the Rodeo and the Texans for vetoing anything that might make them share their valuable parking spaces. Blame Bud Adams, blame Drayton McLane.

The Dome has been doomed to death for a long time now. Maybe now it can be actually put out of its agony.

We get it.  They're all greedy, self-serving bastards.  The question remains: Now what?

Update: Swamplot breaks it down. And Culturemap Houston thinks it's a joke.

A roundup of reactions to the refugee crisis, and the president's Texas trip

-- Wendy Davis: Obama should visit border 'at some point'

“I hope that at some point in time he will make time” to visit the border, Davis said. “It’s one thing to see the numbers, it’s another thing to see it.”

-- Why 90,000 children flooding our border is not an immigration story

Just a few weeks ago, the United States was projecting 60,000 unaccompanied minors would attempt to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border by the end of the year. That projection is now 90,000, and it may be surpassed.

Virtual cities of children are picking up and fleeing El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala—some of the most dangerous places in this hemisphere. In Washington, the story has stoked the longstanding debate over border policy. But U.S. immigration policy is just a small part of this story. Yes, the U.S. immigration system is now bottlenecked with the influx, prompting emergency response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But changing U.S. border policy won't stem the root of the exodus.

"The normal migration patterns in this region have changed," Leslie Velez, senior protection officer at the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, explains. These people aren't coming here for economic opportunity. They are fleeing for their lives.

-- They are all "our" children

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has no interest in playing our political games with this issue. They produced a report titled Children on the Run which summarizes over 400 interviews they conducted with unaccompanied or separated children who arrived in this country illegally.

Our data reveals that no less than 58% of the 404 children interviewed were forcibly displaced because they suffered or faced harms that indicated a potential or actual need for international protection.

In terms of what harms they faced, the report says this:

Forty-eight percent of the displaced children interviewed for this study shared experiences of how they had been personally affected by the augmented violence in the region by organized armed criminal actors, including drug cartels and gangs or by State actors. Twenty-one percent of the children confided that they had survived abuse and violence in their homes by their caretakers.

-- Right-wing US chickens home to roost with border influx of young Ill Eagles

And the Reaganite anti-Communism of the 1980s, combined with conservative Catholics in both the U.S. and Latin America taking their cues from the papal ascent of John Paul II and kicking liberation theology, and a more liberal attitude toward birth control, to the curb had other consequences.

Result? On birth control? Guatemala having the highest birth rate in the Western Hemisphere. Honduras is second highest. They're both below a number of African and south Asian countries, but their rate is high enough to add to all the instability, with exploding populations.

On the rest of liberation theology? More liberal priests and bishops, and nuns, who challenged right-wing governments to do more for the poor, especially if they led protests and movements themselves, got reassigned. Ask Francis the Talking Pope about that, and his own involvement with the reassignments.

Of course, that ignores the more liberal church workers who, at least in places like Francis' Argentina, met the jails and torture cells of the right-wing dictators. Or sometimes, met their guns.

Take that, to a Texas lite guv candidate, The Stinking Anglo Formerly Known as Danny Goeb™.

So, yes, failure to actually go to the border may be Obama's Katrina moment, or at least something in the neighborhood. But, he's cleaning up a mess that's more Republican than Democratic.  (That's setting aside that neoliberal Democrats often went along for the GOP ride, especially on free trade.)

And, making it easier to throw the kids back across the border may be a short-term answer for the U.S. but it's not a long-term answer for us, nor any sort of answer at all for Central America.

-- Texans in Congress, blamed by Obama, seek audience over border crisis

“I told Rick Perry today, I said, I’m happy to listen to your ideas. But right now, the main problem I’ve got with respect to these unaccompanied children is I’ve just put forward a piece of legislation before Congress that would give us the resources to care for them and help deal with the border — all the things you say you want, Governor.

“And somehow I haven’t heard yet from the Republican delegation of Texas to say this is such an urgent problem that they’re going to move this quickly and get it done,” Obama said.

Williams, along with other Texas Republicans in Congress, rejected the administration’s $3.7 billion request earlier this week. The funds would allow for more border security and surveillance and provide aid to Central American countries the migrants are fleeing. It includes $1.8 billion for temporary care for young migrants – about 52,000 have been caught illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the last nine months. And it would add immigration judges and other assets to process asylum claims and speed deportations.

-- Disease threat from immigrant children wildly overstated

The vast majority of Central Americans are vaccinated against all these diseases. Governments concerned about health, and good parents investing in their kids, have made Central American kids better-vaccinated than Texan kids. 

-- Bundy-style militia leader in Texas: ‘Get Back … Or You Will Be Shot’

An activist who is rallying a Bundy Ranch-style militia to the Texas border to address the ongoing crisis there reportedly released a YouTube video in which he said those crossing illegally would be warned: "Get back across the border or you will be shot."

Operation Secure Our Border, with its own Facebook page, is being organized by members of the "Patriot" movement along with Oathkeepers and Three-Percenters, according to the San Antonio Express News. Those are some of the same militia groups that came to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's defense earlier this year.

The Express News and The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, both reported on a YouTube video featuring Chris Davis, who has been identified as the commander of the militia, in which he apparently explained how the border would be secured.

-- Obama makes lunch stop at Franklin Barbecue before departing Austin

Yes it's funny

Obama still should be planning a visit to South Texas.  Soon.

Update: The Field Negro, and his commenters, weigh in.

Border crisis spawns excessive stupidity, hatred

-- "Obama heads to Texas with no plans to visit border".  A mistake.  Potentially a grave one politically, no matter that those compassionate conservatives at Fox News are furiously using that fact as yet another opportunity to brand Obama as... what exactly?  As cruel and heartless as the city council members of League City and the commissioners of Galveston County?

Yes, Henry Cuellar is all but a Republican himself, but he's also correct.  Obama is letting them tar him with this.  He could put a stop to it by simply going to South Texas.  Yes, he would have to endure being with Rick Perry for several hours, probably the worst punishment imaginable, but to just keep to his fundraising schedule is simply awful.  Not as awful as detaining children in crowded conditions with the threat of deportation... but everybody has to suffer a little now.

Update: When John Cornyn can be the blind hog finding an acorn, then you have to know it's bad.

Update II: The DMN files a report on this afternoon's meeting.  And the photo -- Juanita Jean has it posted -- is indeed priceless.

-- Then there's Louie.

“If he wanted to, he could do what Woodrow Wilson did — and he’s certainly not one of my favorite presidents,” Gohmert said on Tuesday. “But after Pancho Villa’s gangs came across, I believe in Arizona, and killed some American families, he said, ‘That’s it.’ He sent John Pershing with troops into Mexico. And you can read some different versions. Tens of thousands of National Guard were put on the border. And Dan, nobody came in that we didn’t want to come in.”

Gohmert was likely referring to a March 1916 attack by Villa and his supporters against a detachment of the Army’s 13th Cavalry Regiment in Columbus, New Mexico. The Mexican revolutionary leader carried out the attack in order to gain supplies for his military campaign against the country’s U.S.-backed president, Venustiano Carranza.

Eighteen U.S. residents were killed in the attack. In response, Pershing and 5,000 Army troops pursued Villa’s forces in Mexico for nearly a year, to no avail.

Need not be said: Louie Gohmert is no "Black Jack" Pershing.  On the other hand, maybe we could send him into Mexico on horseback for a year; just no guns, ammo, or other 'soldiers'.

One drone, Louie.  One unarmed drone flying over your head about twenty feet off the ground with a camera on you.  No missiles, not even a BB gun.  And a canteen of cold water.  That's all you get.

-- It's also a little disappointing that Wendy Davis and Greg Abbott are skirmishing about something else at this moment.  A very important something else, but not worth a bus tour across the state right now.  Thank goodness (I suppose) that Abbott keeps responding inappropriately to the mess of his own making.

The "driving around" comment made a train wreck out of two-car pileup.  Just ridiculous.  What's to stop the terrorists from driving around and asking which of Abbott's cronies are storing explosive chemicals in wooden containers?  Or does he know that we will all just be lied to about it?

Still, both Davis and Abbott might ought to have been invited to that meeting Obama and Perry and "evangelical leaders" (sic) are holding in Dallas today.  Or maybe they should be down at the border themselves.  That is if anyone was interested in seeing the scope of the challenge, let alone be motivated to actually do something about it.  Was it just a few weeks ago that Davis -- and a bunch of Republicans -- called for a special session on the humanitarian crisis?  That really picked up a head of steam.

This moral dilemma on the Texas-Mexico border just doesn't appear to be a problem any of our elected leaders can seem to solve.  Speaking as an atheist, I thought the Bible was clear on how to respond to thousands of hungry, displaced children.  Why, the words of the Son of God even appear in red print in my New Testament, presumably so that they can be easy to read.

Is it a comprehension problem, or 21st-century revisionism as Matt Bors pans above, or something else that makes conservative Christians fail their faith in this regard?

Obama drags sack through Texas but won't go near the border

I can begin to see Wendy Davis' point in avoiding DC Democrats when they display the political tin ear that the president is also showing off this week.

The White House on Monday insisted most of the thousands of unaccompanied minors flooding across the border will be deported.

The firm position came as President Obama was set to travel to Texas, the center of a growing firestorm over the nation’s inability to prevent illegal immigrants from entering the country.

Obama is set to hold fundraisers in Dallas and Austin during the two-day trip, but he has no plans to visit the border, where officials have struggled for months to contain a wave of minors seeking refuge in the United States.

The president has come under criticism from members of both parties over the wave of immigrants, who have filled detention centers and overwhelmed a court system ill-prepared to handle the surge.

Yes he has, and that hasn't influenced him in the slightest apparent way.

Now before you think that I have decided to join Y'all Qaeda and make a run for the border... stop.  Those packs of crackers -- JMHO now -- need to be shot on sight themselves.  I mean to say hunted down and rounded up and beaten with hoses and fists by LEO and accidentally wind up dead, a few of them.  How else are we supposed to treat seditionists in America?  Shouldn't Joe Campos Torres get some payback after all these years?

All righty then, that's incited enough aneurysms in conservative brains (sic) for one morning.  But my work is not yet done here.

Obama's two fundraising stops in Dallas and Austin are to raise money for the DCCC (Congressional Democrats) and the DSCC (Senate Democrats) for the 2014 elections.

Officials from the Democratic National Committee say that the president will attend fundraising events on July 9 and 10 in Austin. As first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Texas filmmaker Robert Rodriguez will host the first event on July 9 at his Austin home.

[...]

Tickets for the Rodriguez-hosted fundraiser range from $5,000 to $32,400. Jessica Alba, Demi Lovato, Rosario Dawson and Danny Trejo are slated to make appearances at the event, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The president will stay overnight in Austin and appear at a July 10 fundraiser and roundtable discussion hosted by Aimee Boone Cunningham at her home. Cunningham serves as the assistant secretary of the Center for Reproductive Rights. Tickets for this event are $32,400.

And all of that money will be spent to help elect Democrats in places other than Texas.  Oh, perhaps Pete Gallego might get a few bones thrown his way, since he's in a tough race.  But that's it.

What might be even worse than the fact that Texas keeps getting milked like a rented goat is that there are wealthy Lone Star Democrats  who are willing to write five-figure checks to the DNC, but suddenly develop alligator arms when statewides like Davis -- and Van de Putte and Mike Collier and Sam Houston and on down the line -- could use just a little bit of that help.

Let that sink in for a moment: millionaire Democrats in Texas writing five-figure checks to DC Democrats don't think that Texas Democrats are worth writing a check to.  It's more important that a Democrat get elected to Congress in Ohio or Maryland or California than it is for a Texas Democrat to get elected to anything.

Folks, that's what's wrong with Texas, the Democratic Party, and our campaign finance system in this country as the three dysfunctions can be most perfectly photographed together.

Forget the fact that Latinos understand that Wendy Davis feels the same way as Obama AND Rick Perry, for that matter -- "send 'em back".  Overlook that she has already exhibited electoral weakness in south Texas in her primary even as Greg Abbott practiced early outreach to them.

But hey, this is supposed to be a rant on the president.

As Obama’s trip approached, the White House insisted Monday it was “not worried” about the optics of the president raising cash with Texan donors without going to see the developing crisis firsthand, even as Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) pressured Obama to go to the border.

“The president is very aware of the situation that exists on the southwest border,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday.

Obama has the difficult task of arguing that he does not “have to be there in order to see the problem and deal with it effectively,” said Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson.

“They have to work the optics as best they can because going to the border with Gov. Perry would provide him an opportunity to grandstand, which he would almost certainly do,” Jillson said.

What?!  Governor Conspiracy Theory would demagogue for the cameras in front of several thousand hungry brown children?!  Say it ain't so.

So yeah, it's a no-win situation for everybody involved.  Except for a few Democratic candidates running for office somewhere besides Texas.

Update: The Dallas Morning Views is kinder and gentler and still says the same as me.