Please pull up to the first window, comrade:

McDonald’s and its partner, also known as Sinopec, christened the new two-story Beijing restaurant, set beside a Sinopec filling station, with a ceremony that mixed traditional lion dancers and a Chinese- speaking Ronald McDonald.

Minutes later, Beijing resident Dong Tianwu and his daughter pulled up at the drive-through window in a Chinese-made Xiali compact and bought three meals and drinks.

“It’s certainly convenient,” Dong said. At a walk-in McDonald’s, he said, “if you take a child, sometimes you have to line up for hours and that’s a lot of trouble.”

Don’t even try to take two children.

At least the Times-Picayune seems to be recognizing that Lee Brown’s record isn’t all it’s cracked up to be:

Get in, get out is crime guru’s M.O. Wednesday, January 17, 2007
James Gill

Lee Brown, the consultant who is supposed to sort out New Orleans’ ineffectual Police Department, arrives with what are touted as unimpeachable credentials.

He was police chief in Atlanta, Houston and New York before becoming drug czar in the Clinton administration. After quitting that job, he returned to Texas as an academic and later served three two-year terms as Houston ’s first black mayor.

His principal talent, however, may be for gettin’ out while the gettin’s good.

He was police chief in New York, for instance, in 1991, when rioting broke out in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, after a car driven by the head of the local Hasidic sect ran over a 7-year-old black boy.

Two years later New York Criminal Justice Director Richard Girgenti issued his report on Crown Heights, which blamed “a leadership vacuum” at “the highest levels of the police department.”

The article goes on in this vein. Gill incongruously says that Brown’s experience may help New Orleans, although his record should speak for itself — the man is incompentent.

Gill also fails to note that in every single position Brown held, crime increased. It increased while he was police chief in New York and Houston. It increased while he was major of House. Heck, drug use went up while he was drug czar. New Orleans already has enough failed ex-public officials floating around. It doesn’t need to hire them from other cities as consultants.

Still, as I said, at least somebody pointed out Brown’s checkered past.

Run for your lives, but don’t take a plane, boat, train or car:

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee was tapped Thursday as chairwoman of a powerful House subcommittee responsible for overseeing the security of the nation’s transportation and critical infrastructure sectors.

As head of the House Homeland Security Committee’s Transportation Security and Infrastructure Protection subcommittee, the Houston Democrat will have authority to assess and oversee government efforts to protect the nation’s airports, seaports, rail lines and highways.

Jackson Lee will also have oversight over the Transportation Security Administration and the security of critical infrastructure such as hospitals, and chemical and power plants.

Her Royal Highness issued the following statement:

“I am extremely excited,” she said.

We here at Lone Star Times look forward to Sheila bringing her razor-sharp intellect, her unyielding integrity and her brilliant command of English to this committee.

It is almost too painful to read:

Former Mayor Lee Brown is headed to New Orleans to help the storm-ravaged city develop community-policing tactics he pioneered while he was Houston’s police chief back in the 1980s.

His consulting company, Brown Group International, will evaluate the New Orleans Police Department and help it improve its relationship with residents.

BGI’s specialties include public safety, homeland security, crisis management and government relations.

… Brown’s six-month consulting gig began earlier this month. Several New Orleans-based groups, including religious, business and civic organizations, are picking up the tab.

… After leaving the mayor’s office in 2002, Brown spent a year as a “scholar in residence” at Rice University writing a textbook on community policing. It has yet to be published. Brown said he’s done with the research, now he just needs to finish writing.

“It’s long overdue,” Brown said. “I would not give you a deadline. I’ve passed all the past deadlines.”

At least now he can show another city how it’s done before people there can refer to his book and figure it out for themselves.

[Courtesy the Houston Chronicle, emphasis in bold added by LST]

And you wonder why I beat my head.

One of two things happened here:

The Department of Homeland Security is wrongly keeping from Congress an investigative report that details the conduct of two ex-Border Patrol agents imprisoned this week for shooting a Mexican drug trafficker, two Houston-area congressmen charged Thursday.

The report is needed to back up a briefing given to the congressmen in September by the Homeland Security inspector general’s staff, said Rep. Michael McCaul, an Austin Republican whose district includes western Harris County.

McCaul said the inspector general’s aides told him and three Texas colleagues that the Border Patrol agents, Jose Alonso Compean and Ignacio Ramos, had admitted to investigators that they “intended to shoot Mexicans” and knew the man fleeing them was unarmed and posed no threat, when they fired on him 15 times near Fabens, Texas.

… McCaul has repeatedly pressed the inspector general for the report since September. An initial promise to deliver the report gave way to delays and shifting explanations for why it couldn’t be delivered, said McCaul, who chaired the Homeland Security Committee’s investigations subcommittee until Democrats regained control of the House earlier this month.

“We have been stonewalled and put off with delaying tactics over and over,” he complained.

[Tamara] Faulkner, a spokeswoman for [the Department of ] Homeland Security… declined to debate the congressmen.

She expressed puzzlement at the congressmen’s insistence on getting the report, calling it a “small, small piece of a very large puzzle.” The best source of information, she said, would be the trial transcript.

BENZION’S TRANSLATION OF FAULKNER: “Look, Congressman, I can’t help it that some dumbass on our staff got sick of listening to you guys yap at them last September and started lying in the hope you would just go away. I wish they hadn’t, because if you’ll just look at the facts of the case–as came out in the trial–you’ll see that these border patrol agents are clearly guilty. Instead, I’m stuck trying to figure out how to handle your demands for this supposed ’secret’ report. I need a drink.”

It’s either that, or this:

Rep. John Culberson, a Houston Republican also briefed on the case in September, offered a harsher assessment.

“It stinks of a cover-up, and I am deeply disappointed,” he said.

That’s what happens when you lie. It looks like you’re covering something up, even if you’re not.

And now you’ve got John Culberson and Edd Hendee as your worst nightmare.

I wonder if creating this sort of headache is a fire-able offense at DHS?

[Hat-tip: Houston Chronicle]

Compean and Ramos and Sutton and Poe and
Culberson and Bush and Gonzalez and
Hendee and Cornyn and 15 shots and
ILLEGAL DRUG SMUGGLERS and cover-up and
transcripts and OIG and DHS and
the jury pool and the judge and the lawyers
and NAFTA and the NAU and
the border, the border, THE BORDER!
Oh yeah–the TRUTH is out there…

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