18 November 2006
SEIU's arrested protestors socked with large bond
SEIU seems to be discovering that the local judicial system is not overly impressed with the organization's shipping in professional protestors to break our community's laws:
In an unprecedented transparent attempt to severely limit the right to peaceful protest and freedom of speech of low-wage Houston janitors and their supporters, a Harris County District Attorney has set an extraordinarily high bond of $888,888 cash for each of the 44 peaceful protestors arrested [Thursday] night. Houston janitors and their supporters, many of them janitors from other cities, were participating in an act of non-violent civil disobedience, protesting in the intersection of Travis at Capitol when they were arrested in downtown Houston Thursday night.
Breaking our community's laws with imported protestors and annoying the people who actually live here is starting to get expensive! Maybe that (along with Thanksgiving) is another reason that SEIU wants to go back to the bargaining table?
Incidentally, we're under the impression that courts set bail, not the district attorney. At least that's how it works on Law and Order: Criminal Intent!
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/18/06 12:42 PM |
Doctor-Congresswoman goes to Washington (cont'd)
Doctor-Congresswoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs' great comic (mis)adventure in Washington shows no signs of letting up!
And for Sekula-Gibbs, it's just one week down, seven to go.
"I'm a very small part of a very big team," she said. "I don't want to overstate that."
I think she meant "understate."
Certainly, her seatwarming in D.C. for a few weeks has been anything but understated!
It's bad enough when your abrasive manner leads professional staffers to flee. It's worse when you make reckless accusations about those professional staffers. It's worse still when you persist, generating headlines like this one:
Nope, not understated. At all. But definitely comical.
Interestingly, Isiah Carey has posted that Mayor White is already moving to erase Doctor-Congresswoman from the city payroll. That didn't take long!
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/18/06 12:13 PM |
Borders to open megastore in Galleria
Borders has announced plans to open a two-story store in the Galleria mall:
Borders will open a two-level, 27,000-square-foot store in Houston, Texas, in the middle of December. The new store will be in the Galleria Mall, located at 5061 Westheimer Road.
The store will feature 200,000 titles, a Seattle's Best Coffee cafe, and internet access via T-Mobile HotSpots.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/18/06 11:48 AM |
Mrs. White's Multiple Intellect Disorder (cont'd)
The blogger formerly known as Sedosi has caught Mrs. White in what appears to be a another case of Multiple Intellect Disorder.
Matt Bramanti over at Lone Star Times piles on.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/18/06 11:19 AM |
SEIU demonstrates downtown
I saw Miya Shay's 6pm KTRK-13 news report that the SEIU/janitor people were planning to demonstrate downtown last night, so I decided to go down and check the thing out.
What appeared to be a few hundred people were gathered outside the Chase tower.
They were making quite a racket, whistling and beating drums and playing music and occasionally breaking into chants.
All of the chants were in Spanish. That doesn't seem like a very effective way to communicate the message, whatever that message was. All I understood was, "When?! NOW!" a couple of times.
The demonstration seemed lawful. Unlike their previous protests, there was no attempt to disrupt traffic or otherwise interfere with the normal goings on downtown. Of course, there wasn't actually much foot or vehicular traffic downtown at 7pm on a Friday (can we say deserted?), so it's not clear that much would have been disrupted anyway.
Maybe the SEIU organizers shipped in from out of town to handle these matters are from cities where downtown is actually busy in the evening, and the protests therefore might get noticed.
There was quite a police presence, though. Given the previous protests, HPD obviously had to deploy manpower to handle any illegal nonsense. Unfortunately, that's manpower that's pulled away from fighting real crimes in the city during a crime wave. Thanks, SEIU! We appreciate it.
BACKGROUND: An L.M. Sixel column earlier this week made clear that SEIU is importing lots of outsiders to help with these protests:
Dozens of union organizers have come to Houston to participate in nearly nonstop protests, and more are coming.
[snip]
About 50 out-of-state union officials and janitors are to arrive in Houston this week to participate in an escalating series of actions, Tran said.
As Callie notes in the comments, some SEIU people are now indicating they want to go back to the negotiating table. That can happen when all you've managed to do with your imported protestors is annoy people (and when the freeloaders you've imported from elsewhere want some of mommy's Thanksgiving cooking!).
PREVIOUSLY: If a tree falls in the forest....
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/18/06 11:06 AM |
17 November 2006
Doctor-Congresswoman goes to Washington (cont'd)
During her short tenure in Washington, D.C., Doctor-Congresswoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs continues to spread the charm that made her such a hit among some former colleagues on City Council.
Meanwhile, a grown-up political reporter (the Washington Post's Charles Babington) dug up what seems like a pretty benign explanation for the "mysterious" computer activity:
Rep. Shelley Sekula-Gibbs (R-Tex.), who is warming the 22nd District seat for only a few weeks, said that former DeLay employees apparently deleted the office's computer files shortly before they walked out, en masse, on Tuesday.
The records dated from her assumption of the office Nov. 8 and did not involve matters related to the former majority leader, Sekula-Gibbs said in an interview in her unadorned office in the Cannon Building. Those who erased the records, she said in a statement, "have harmed the 22nd congressional district" and "brought shame to this office." She has asked for an investigation.
David James, DeLay's former chief of staff, who stayed to work for Sekula-Gibbs -- until Tuesday's walkout -- said last night that the office computers "were scrubbed and reconfigured by an outside vendor in the days immediately prior to her assuming office," as House policies require. The new congresswoman was given a copy of everything "electronically or in hard copy, or both," James said in a statement.
Whoops! Maybe the Doctor-Congresswoman and her former city council staff were too busy flying off the handle as if still in campaign mode to familiarize themselves with House policies. Of course, as Doctor-Congresswoman has been known to say, we're not (medical) doctors, so maybe we just don't understand.
In the KRIV-26 interview taped segment, Doctor-Councilwoman also complains about all the work that has gone undone while the office has been unfilled. While it is unfortunate that the Congressional seat has been unfilled for so long, it is worth noting that the professional staff had continued to be fully engaged in constituent service work -- at least up until something about the Doctor-Congresswoman led them to resign en masse.
In other news related to the Congressional district, the Chronicle's Kristen Mack reports today that popular Harris County Tax Collector/Assessor Paul Bettencourt has all but formally announced his intention to run for the seat in 2008:
Harris County Tax Assessor-Collecter Paul Bettencourt said he is seriously considering taking Lampson on in 2008.
Problem is, he would have to resign his county seat as soon as he announced for Congress. He has two years left in his term.
He says he's willing to do that because of the "magnitude of the (Republican) turnover" in Congress.
Bettencourt will be extremely popular among primary voters (and doesn't have the Doctor-Congresswoman's baggage of being a flip-flopper on the key issues of abortion and Houston's sanctuary policy), and a formidable general-election candidate. Jared Woodfill is surely right to call him the frontrunner for the seat in 2008.
BLOGVERSATION: Texas Safety Forum.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/17/06 08:23 AM |
Cabbies: What $6 fare?
The city's new $6 downtown cab ride program is underway, and there's even a website up and running with all the details. There's just one little problem:
Someone forgot to tell the cabbies:
City officials rolled out a program Wednesday that they said is "effective immediately" that institutes a flat $6 taxi fare for all points downtown. The fare, being promoted as Six in the City, is aimed at increasing cab use and applies for all trips in the freeway loop formed by U.S. 59, Interstate 45 and Interstate 10.
The word, however, has not filtered down to where it's most needed: Houston cabbies.
At one of downtown's busiest cab stands on Capitol at Milam in front of the Chase Bank Tower, some drivers awaiting passengers had heard about the pending change and some hadn't. All of them still were charging passengers according to the meter.
"I have no idea about the program. I've heard some of the drivers talking about a change coming, but nobody's told us anything yet," said Baraki Mohamed, who has driven a taxi here for nearly two years.
Ha ha ha! That's classic!
As for the confusion?
"We just got started this week," said Ted Bowen, public relations and marketing manager for the city Convention and Entertainment Facilities Department at the George R. Brown Convention Center.
"It'll take awhile for everything to be in place."
Folks who hail a cab downtown expecting to pay $6 and are charged more should contact Mr. Bowen for a refund.
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 11/17/06 06:10 AM |
16 November 2006
Lose an Eye: Mrs. White's Multiple Intellect Disorder
The blogger formerly known as Sedosi is plugging away again (yay!), with a new blog name and a new focus (and his real name, instead of the old nom de plume).
There's still a little of the old focus, though, hence this fine look at Mrs. White's Multiple Intellect Disorder.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/16/06 11:02 PM |
Janitors, Chevron, and the Greater Houston Partnership
SEIU isn't giving up on the janitor's strike; in fact, SEIU is determined to be successful in Houston so it can gain "a foothold into the south."
To that end, union organizers and janitors protested yesterday at the Chevron building, handcuffing themselves to the front door:
The SEIU focused on Chevron because it's a market leader in Houston, said SEIU spokeswoman Lynda Tran.
"If they were to instruct their contractors to pay higher wages and benefits, it would go a long way toward moving the business community here to follow suit," she said.
Why yes, Chevron IS a market leader in Houston. In fact, Chevron just won a "Houston's Greatest" award from the Greater Houston Partnership.
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 11/16/06 07:08 PM |
METRO cops bust elderly Chinese immigrant for consuming animal crackers
KTRK-13's Marvin Zindler reports that METRO's police force is doing its part to keep the city safe from bad guys:
A Houston woman was kicked off a city bus and arrested, and you're not going to believe her crime. You'd think this woman was one of the most hardened criminals of all time because of the way she was arrested.
With the serious crime we have - murders, aggravated assault, burglaries, robberies - a timid woman was arrested for the most horrible crime of all. This woman was arrested for eating animal crackers on a METRO bus. The municipal court ticket even cites her for eating animal crackers.
Li Li Chao, 68, is from the People's Republic of China. She just got her citizenship and was promptly busted on the bus. Her son tells what happened because Li Li doesn't speak English very well. He said two plain clothes METRO cops took her off the bus.
Jimmy Zhou said, "They took her off the bus. They gave her a ticket. My mom just caught the next bus."
Zindler spoke to the presiding judge, who spoke to the prosecutor, who agreed to drop the case:
"I asked the prosecutor to review the case. They reviewed the case, they called the officer and the prosecution has decided not to continue with the case," Judge Mejia explained. "So they have dismissed the case."
Nice. So the METRO undercover cops just wound up wasting everyone's time with this nonsense.
I wonder if the METRO cops were bored members of METRO's Elite Counterterror Force?
AWESOME CHRIS BAKER ON-AIR COMMENT: "I'm surprised they didn't Taser her!"
Us too!
UPDATE: It's worth noting that the same METRO that cut funding for security at the Park-and-Pillage lots apparently has plenty of money to crack down on those renegade elderly transit users who snack on animal crackers! Chief Lambert has his priorities.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/16/06 05:41 PM |
15 November 2006
Blown over newspaper boxes? There oughta be a law!
Did we ever find out if City Council passed the ordinance it was considering recently to regulate newspaper boxes? Because KHOU-11 has raw video of today's very windy conditions, and included in the video is a row of news boxes all on their sides, just blown right over.
Since Councilwoman Toni Lawrence was so concerned with the aesthetics of newspaper boxes, maybe she could also consider the dynamics of securing the things.
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 11/15/06 05:20 PM |
Doctor-Congresswoman scares off D.C. staffers
Roll Call is reporting (subscriber-only) that Doctor-Congresswoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs has already managed to rub some people the wrong way early in what will be a short tenure in Congress:
The woman who was sworn in this week as the interim Republican successor to ex-Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) was, shall we say, not a hit with holdover DeLay aides.
In fact, they showed their feelings about their new boss Tuesday by walking out of the office en masse and resigning, effective immediately.[snip]
She showed up to take over DeLay's old office on Thursday and, according to sources familiar the office dynamics, was "mean" to the staff. On Tuesday, at her new Member's open-house reception in the office, sources charged that she was less than pleased that neither President Bush nor Vice President Cheney showed up with the rest of the welcome wagon, despite the fact that others who stopped by included Texas GOP Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn and Texas GOP Reps. Kevin Brady and Michael Burgess. (Apparently, according to sources, she was under the impression that the president of the United States would be there to greet the seven-week Congresswoman.)
We hope Doctor-Congresswoman enjoys her short stay in Congress. One suspects that some former colleagues on City Council are not going to miss her much, and it doesn't sound as though professional staffers or anyone else in D.C. will either.
UPDATE: Of course, the useless Chronicle D.C. bureau reports nothing of this development in its coverage of the Doctor-Congresswoman.
BLOGVERSATION: Texas Safety Forum, Polimom.
RELATED: The Raw Story.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/15/06 11:05 AM |
Brent Fuller moves on to the Caymans
A reader passed along word and KTRH 740's crack City Hall reporter Brent Fuller confirms that today is his last day on the job for the news/talk station.
Fuller says he'll be moving to the Cayman Islands, where he'll continue to work in journalism.
We wish Fuller all the best. We're definitely going to miss his City Hall reporting.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/15/06 09:16 AM |
14 November 2006
HPD cracks down on rush hour french fry street marketers
The Chronicle's Ken Hoffman noticed that HPD managed quickly to clear the road of people who were obstructing traffic in the Galleria area:
Remember when I wrote about Bistro Moderne at the Hotel Derek giving away free french fries to motorists stuck in traffic at the corner of Westheimer and Loop 610 at Friday rush hour?
I predicted it wouldn't last long. While the fries were freshly made and quite fantastic, I saw a bad moon risin' — traffic jams and road rage and french fries don't mix.It lasted two weeks. The cops told them to knock it off.
It's too bad that HPD can't also efficiently rid the streets of vagrant beggars, protesting janitors, and Chronicle vendors, all nuisances that obstruct traffic without even offering frustrated motorists tasty food!
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/14/06 11:01 PM |
Saves you money!
Last week, the Chronicle's Loren Steffy wrote a nice column on the success of Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale.
Locally, we're so familiar with Mack that we don't always think about how he's built his successful business. As Steffy put it,
Little, though, has been written recently about what's become one of the top 100 furniture businesses in the country as ranked by Furniture Today, an industry publication.Perhaps it's because McIngvale is already an icon of Houston business. He and his story are so well-known that I almost hesitate to write about him for fear of stating the obvious. But his story is worth telling, or perhaps retelling, because it's one of those rare tales in which a small business on a shoestring budget burgeoned into a large and successful enterprise.
Steffy goes on to describe the successful marketer (that we know well) and the successful businessman (that we don't know so well). It's a good read.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/14/06 07:32 AM |
13 November 2006
Smile for the cameras!
KTRH 740's Brent Fuller reports that red-light cameras will be clicking away at ten more intersections today.
The new intersections covered by red-light cameras are:
East Freeway westbound service road @ Uvalde
Sam Houston Parkway southbound service road @ Beechnut
Bissonnet westbound @ West Sam Houston Parkway South service road
Hillcroft southeast bound @ Southwest Freeway service road
FM 1960 West westbound @ Tomball Parkway service road
Chimney Rock southbound @ Southwest Freeway service road
S. Gessner southbound @ Beechnut
Southwest Freeway northbound service road @ Fountain View
Westheimer eastbound @ West Loop South service road
Westpark eastbound @ Southwest Freeway service road
And the earlier intersections are:
John F. Kennedy @ Greens Road
Richmond @ Dunvale
Bellaire @ Wilcrest
Elgin @ Milam
Hillcroft @ Harwin
Bay Area Boulevard @ El Camino Real
Travis @ Webster
Hillcroft @ Richmond
Brazos @ Elgin
Pease @ LaBranch
Better stop running those red lights, or you're going to pay!
RELATED COVERAGE: KHOU-11, KTRK-13, Chronicle.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/13/06 12:26 PM |
12 November 2006
Food and drink roundup (11-12-2006 edition)
Let's start the week off with a food and drink roundup, shall we?
Alison Cook visits Catalan Food and Wine, and her inner foodie loves it. She also visits the Memorial Dr. edition of La Vista, which gives her inner foodie even more to celebrate. Read her blog. It's some of the best stuff over at Chron.com.
Robb Walsh also takes a turn at Catalan and explores how authentically Spanish its offerings are. He also partakes of the Polish cuisine at Polonia.
Ken Hoffman goes overboard at breakfast with IHOP's Jumbo Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruity. My goodness. 1400 calories. For breakfast. So...if one were just to eat one Jumbo Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruity a day and nothing else, would one lose weight? Call it the IHOP diet.
And Lance Scott Walker visits the Outpost Tavern, reportedly the place where the astronauts drink.
World Class, all of it. Enjoy!!
Posted by Callie Markantonis @ 11/12/06 10:39 PM |
Slampo: You can't break a dog from suckin' eggs
Slampo posted a fun roundup of comments from media and pols after the election.
The whole thing is worth reading, but what Slampo characterized as Rick Casey's early ad copy for Bill White's next campaign caught my eye:
But assuming he is able to keep a lid on crime, White will present something Democrats haven't had in a long while — a formidable candidate for governor with a story to tell and the money to tell it.
The story will be of competence, social progressiveness and fiscal conservatism.
He will be a Democrat who passed his own revenue cap and, if very modestly, cut the city's tax rate.
Maybe Rick Casey will have to be renamed Mrs. White! Then again, copying the real Mrs. White isn't much different from plagiarism, so maybe Casey's own name should remain affixed to the writing.
In any case, Mayor White has been a considerable improvement over the inept Lee Brown, but it is a stretch to call him a fiscal conservative (as his opposition to stringent revenue caps illustrates) and his record on crime is not good thus far (see Hurtt, Harold). The latter could hurt him if he tries to run statewide against a well-financed candidate.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/12/06 07:23 PM |
Berlin is not in France
UH Professor David Dow wrote an op-ed for today's Chron bemoaning the fact that Saddam Hussein will likely be hanged for his crimes. What caught my eye, though, is a rather glaring error in the piece:
Like Rudolph Hess, the former Nazi who was the sole resident of Spandau prison in France until he died at the age of 94, these aged monsters can become sympathetic figures, old men with walkers shuffling around prison yards who seem too gray and infirm to have committed the atrocities we know they did.
Spandau Prison was in Germany, specifically, in the Spandau borough of western Berlin. It's such a strange error...does an editor review op-ed submissions?
MORE: Hanging Saddam, The Dow Blog
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 11/12/06 06:10 PM |
Mrs. White takes care of her man
The Editorial LiveJournalists, once dubbed Mrs. White by Sedosi Alhambra for their tendency to trumpet the mayor's pet projects and priorities, have offered their unsurprising perspective on the city's new efforts to punish apartments where bad guys live:
The recent spike in violent crime in Houston has its epicenter in so-called "hot spots," mostly apartment complexes in the southwest and northeast sectors of Houston. After more than a year of negotiations and planning, City Council approved a measure that wisely requires those complex owners and others to become crimefighters as well as landlords.
It's a necessary measure. The Houston Police Department still struggles with a manpower shortage caused by the high retirement rate of officers. While expanded cadet classes and increased funding will provide some relief, immediate, additional effort must be made to combat crime in apartment complexes, where more than half of Houstonians reside.
This argument is a variant of, "we can't do what we really need to do (bring sufficient police manpower to bear) and fulfill one of the most basic duties of government, but we HAVE to do SOMETHING!" And so Mayor White and his Council have, to the cheers of the Editorial LiveJournalists.
Incidentally, if there are multiple "hot spots," then is it quite right to refer to them as a singular "epicenter?" Just wondering.
UPDATE (11-13-2006): On his radio program this morning, Councilmember Michael Berry asks if it's appropriate to treat apartment owners as OUTREACH for the Houston police department?
That's exactly how I would frame the question. Your thoughts?
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/12/06 05:54 PM |
[Previous 20 Entries] [Next 20 Entries]