Heads up, westsiders:
The Briar Forest entrance and exit ramps to the Sam Houston Toll Road in west Houston are closed today through Jan. 12 for re-striping.
Further lane closures are not expected, the Harris County Toll Road Authority reported.
A week seems like an awful long time to paint two ramps, doesn’t it? Anyway, you might want to take a detour.
We’ll have live video from LST’s NewsSkyJetChopper1 just as soon as we get it out of the shop.
Was it a probing mission, a diversion by drug smugglers, or something else? Whatever it was, it’s bad news:
A U.S. Border Patrol entry Identification Team site was overrun Wednesday night along Arizona’s border with Mexico.
According to the Border Patrol, an unknown number of gunmen attacked the site in the state’s West Desert Region around 11 p.m. The site is manned by National Guardsmen. Those guardsmen were forced to retreat.
The Border Patrol will not say whether shots were fired. However, no Guardsmen were injured in the incident.
Here’s video of KPNX’s story.
Last month, police in Paris shut down a string of soup kitchens. Their heinous crime? Serving pork, which could be seen (by French politicians and other morons) as “discriminatory” to Muslims and Jews.
Today, the ban has been overturned:
The administrative court said the distribution was “clearly discriminatory”, but could not be stopped because the organisers offered to feed anyone who asked for help.
Naturally, the mayor of Paris issued a bizarre statement clearly showing his preference for dhimmitude over charity:
“Faced by this initiative which stinks of xenophobia, I want once again to express city hall’s desire to fight all forms of discrimination, racism and anti-Semitism,” mayor Bertrand Delanoe said in a statement.
French politicians clearly need to rent an unoffended Jew for stuff like this.
[Hat-tip: Moonbattery]
A HISD bus driver protected a bus load of girls’ basketball team members from an apparent perv:
The gunman ran up to the bus driver’s window at a stoplight Wednesday night and flashed a gun. The alert HISD bus driver, Ann Lewis, tossed her microphone at the man and sped away to safety at Madison High School. The man followed in his car and was arrested by HISD police in the parking lot of the school. He had a loaded gun, pornography and condoms in his car.
Ooohhh, ick! Do you think this guy was trying to stop the bus the give the girls a bunch of tips on free-throws?
Two words: uh-no
Too bad the driver wasn’t packing more than a microphone…
They need to lock this perv up for good; just like other pervs.
Rep. Idi Pelosi, Speaker for life
It sure looks that way:
“We will not just break through a glass ceiling, we will break through a marble ceiling,” she said. “In more than 200 years of history, there was an established pecking order — and I cut in line.”
After calling herself “the most powerful woman in America,” Mrs. Pelosi flexed her right muscle like a weight lifter to much applause at an event yesterday titled a “women’s tea.”
“All right, let’s hear it for the power,” she screamed as the jubilant applause continued.
Um… yikes.
I know politicians celebrate their victories, and they have every right to. You generally hear things like “Now we’ll have the opportunity to advance our vision, blah blah blah…”
But to flaunt power for its own sake? That’s just creepy.
Yesterday evening, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst and House Speaker (tick tock tick tock) Tom Craddick cancelled today’s meeting of the Legislative Budget Board, issuing the following statement:
“We are firmly committed to delivering the nearly $14 billion in local school property tax relief approved by the legislature last May and promised to the people of Texas for the next biennium. It is clear, however, that we need more time to discuss the options for setting a new spending limit to allow for this tax relief with members returning to Austin next week. For this reason, we have decided to postpone tomorrow’s Legislative Budget Board meeting until January 11, at which time we will adopt the lowest spending limit recommended by the LBB.”
We turned to an anonymous yet well-informed Austin observer to read between the lines; here is his analysis:
I think that Craddick doesn’t want to take action on this prior to the [House Speaker] election because this is a hot potato. Whatever the LBB does they — and he — will be vulnerable to criticism. Criticism about budgeting and Constitutional fidelity are things he doesn’t need while he is working for re-election.
If they re-adjust last session’s numbers, they are tacitly admitting that the CLOUT lawsuit has merit and they were violating the Constitution.
If they DON’T re-adjust last session’s numbers, they are saying that they didn’t violate the Constitution, and they will be embarrassed when they lose.
If they use the state personal income method to calculate next biennium’s budget that is dictated by the statute (which is Unconstitutional, because the Constitution dictates the growth for the state economy method) they are in the same position.
If they ignore the statute, they have to explain why, which means they are agreeing with the CLOUT lawsuit that the statute is unconstitutional.
If they don’t set a new limit, the legislature is stuck with the limit enacted in the last session — which means they can’t spend the $15 billion surplus. That will be unacceptable to the members, and the LBB will say that the way for the Legislature to spend anyway is to declare an emergency and spend all the money. That is what they want to do, I think, because declaring an emergency avoids the limits on spending and allows the Lege to escape the threat of a repeat of the CLOUT lawsuit for the current session budget.
So there you go.
[Hat-tip: Anonymous yet well-informed Austin observer.]
The Boys in Blue are getting a tan:
The business of recruiting has become so competitive that law enforcement agencies like the Houston Police Department have no choice but to get creative.
The department wants to hire an advertising agency to oversee its recruiting efforts, but getting creative in HPD’s case also means leaving the country. Two officers are currently in Puerto Rico on a scouting mission for potential cadets.
The officers will return home Friday. Another trip is already in the works.
Lovely. Apparently Chief Hurtt isn’t the only one who likes to get some sunshine. If the Puerto Rico trip doesn’t turn up any promising young cadets, I suggest sending recruiters to the Swiss Alps, the French Riviera, or maybe Grand Cayman.
While the HPD brass are dispatching cops to, um, patrol the beaches, here’s what’s going on in Houston:
A man was shot in the head and killed in north Houston on Wednesday night.
In a separate incident, the Houston Police Department’s Homicide Division also is investigating a fatal shooting around midnight Wednesday in northeast Houston.
Good work, Chief!
The other day we alerted readers to an Anderson Cooper 360 special on CNN that touched upon the death of Cpl. Jonathan Bowling, who Edd Hendee blogged about here.
I’ve got it TiVo’d and haven’t had a chance to see it for myself, but by all accounts–including Darrell Bowling, Jonathan’s father–it was a solid bit of straight-up journalism, focused on the men and their families, not politics for or against the war.
The right-wing blogosphere would (correctly) be the first to jump on CNN if they had exploited this story to push a liberal agenda… so we ought to be the first to let them know we appreciate it when they get things right.
You can send Cooper and CNN feedback directly by clicking here.
If any of you saw the program, feel free to share your thoughts in comments.
Glory belongs to the bold, so here are my utterly ungrounded, retrospectively idiotic predictions.
What we know–Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte is leaving the post to become Deputy Secretary of State.
Here’s what’s coming:
You read it here first.
We haven’t had a chance yet to look the whole thing over, but the Austin American-Statesman appears to have acquired a draft report of Gov. Perry’s appraisal reform commission, set to be officially released next week.
Take a look at it yourself (30 pp, pdf) and tell us what you think.
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