Mayor White’s plan to effectively control business outside the city limits hit a snag in the state Senate:

AUSTIN — Mayor Bill White’s plans to clean up Houston’s air were dealt a blow Tuesday when the Senate tentatively passed a measure that would prohibit local governments from regulating pollution coming from outside their boundaries.

The man needs to remember that he is mayor, not king.

Talk about a killer course! You might want to cross this off your list of possible summer camps:

BOULDER, Utah - A man died of thirst during a wilderness-survival exercise designed to test his physical and mental toughness, even though guides had water. They didn’t offer him any because they did not want to spoil the character-building experience.

By Day 2 in the blazing Utah desert, Dave Buschow was in bad shape. Pale, wracked by cramps, his speech slurred, the 29-year-old New Jersey man was desperate for water and hallucinating so badly he mistook a tree for a person.

the 28-day course costs over $3,000 and is offered by a company run by Josh Bernstein, who hosts The History Channel’s “Digging for the Truth.”

Just a few days into the “adventure,” Buschow appeared to be in trouble:

“We were all desperate for water,” a camper wrote. “Every time (Buschow) would fall or lie down, it took a huge amount of effort to pick him back up. His speech was thick and his mouth swollen.”

“Every time he continued, he’d rush ahead, often in the wrong direction and so exhausting himself even more,” the camper wrote.

Some people vomited that day, including a man who got sick three times — a typical misery on the rigorous course, according to BOSS. Buschow was suffering from leg cramps about 2:30 p.m. and said he was feeling “bad.”

During a break, he mistook a tree for a person and said, “There she is.”

Just 200 feet short of a known water supply, Buschow tried to call Uncle, but the staff would have none of it:

By 7 p.m., as the sun descended and temperatures cooled a bit, the group approached a cave in Cottonwood Canyon, known to BOSS guides as a reliable source of water.

Buschow’s companions were carrying his possessions for him. Within earshot of people exhilarated about the pool of water, he collapsed for the last time.

“He said he could not go on,” staff member Shawn O’Neal wrote two days later in a statement ordered by the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office. “I felt that he could make it this short distance and told him he could do it as I have seen many students sore, dehydrated and saying ‘can’t’ do something only to find that they have strength beyond their conceived limits.”

O’Neal didn’t inform Buschow about his emergency water.

Authories concluded nothing criminal had occurred:

Noting Buschow signed liability waivers, the school said: “Mr. Buschow expressly assumed the risk of serious injury or death prior to participating.”

Garfield County authorities declined to file charges, saying there was insufficient evidence the school acted with criminal negligence. The prosecutor said participants knew they were taking a risk.

It was, after all, the dead guy’s own fault:

While regretting the tragedy, the school, known as BOSS, has denied any negligence and instead blamed Buschow, saying the security officer and former Air Force airman did not read course materials, may have withheld health information and may have eaten too heavily before leaving River Vale, N.J., for the grueling course.
. . .
In a Feb. 27 letter to the Forest Service, Bernstein said Buschow may not have trained properly, pointing to comments he made to another camper about drinking a gallon of water a day and eating cheesesteaks to bulk up before the expedition.

His brother, Rob Buschow, said: “It’s sickening when they blame the victim.”

Moral of the story: Lay off the cheesesteaks before your next death march.

We keep hearing about appraisal creep being a Harris County or urban problem, thus nothing is done about it. It looks like the guys in Taylor County are going to learn about it firsthand.

Some landowners may see ‘’shocking” increases in property values this year, Taylor County’s chief appraiser said Tuesday.

Heh, welcome to the club. But really, this isn’t new to Taylor County, it just hasn’t received the spotlight that KSEV was able to put on it in Harris County. For instance:

For the first time, taxable values in Wylie Independent School District passed the $1 billion milestone. Values in Wylie ISD jumped 16.1 percent this year - the biggest increase of any taxing entity in Taylor CAD’s jurisdiction.

Just 10 years ago, Wylie’s taxable value was $466 million, so values have more than doubled in a decade.

That’s right, appraised property values have doubled in 10 years. Sound familiar? The article even addresses the “huge” property tax decrease passed last year.

School district property tax rates are mandated by the Texas Legislature to decrease for the second year in a row, although higher appraisals will offset much of the decrease.

Petree said most taxpayers will pay less in school property taxes this year because of the decrease, but the savings will probably erode in the next five years.

Not only was the “huge” decrease offset, it will disappear completely without lower caps. There is a poll up at the site asking if the city and county should decrease their tax rates due to the significant increase in appraisals. Can you guess how that is going?

Appraisal cap legislation is all but dead in this legislative session. Perhaps the guys in the rural areas will read the article and decide it isn’t just a Harris County problem.
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Appraisal Protest Resource: One of the best tools for you to use in your protest is Edd Hendee’s appraisal protest form, brought to you by Lone Star Times.

I have a particular loathing for 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Incredibly, Virgin Atlantic Airlines is lending legitimacy to their rantings by offering “Loose Change” as an in-flight movie. [The link goes to Popular Mechanic's excellent rebuttal of this type of Nimrodedness; h/t littlegreenfootballs.]

Here is my letter to Virgin Atlantic customer service:

Dear Innocent Worker-Bee Reading This Email,

I’m curious…. if 19 terrorists had hijacked and crashed VIRGIN ATLANTIC flights into the World Trade Center on 9/11, would your corporate bosses still be showing an in-flight film designed to deny the truth of this event?

I doubt it.

So why are you showing “Loose Change”?

Do you not believe your industry colleagues over at United Airlines and American Airlines that this really happened? Do you suspect them of lying? Think this all some sort of guerrilla marketing campaign?

Perhaps you ought to call over to the pilots and flight crews at United and American and ask them if their friends and coworkers were actually murdered on September 11th, 2001, or whether they think they were part of a government conspiracy and are still alive, living with Elvis and Bigfoot on the sound-stage used to film NASA’s “moon landings” back in 1960’s and ’70’s.

I eagerly anticipate your generic response.

Sincerely,

David Benzion
Houston, TX

Feel free to contact Virgin Atlantic yourself here.

Did you hear the one about the lawyer who sued a dry cleaner for $67 million for losing his pants?

Plaintiff Roy Pearson, a judge in Washington, D.C., says in court papers that he’s been through the ringer over a lost pair of prized pants he wanted to wear on his first day on the bench.

He says in court papers that he has endured “mental suffering, inconvenience and discomfort.”

He says he was unable to wear that favorite suit on his first day of work.

He’s suing for 10 years of weekend car rentals so he can transport his dry cleaning to another store.

Putting the claim in perspective:

The ABC News Law & Justice Unit has calculated that for $67 million Pearson could buy 84,115 new pairs of pants at the $800 value he placed on the missing trousers in court documents. If you stacked those pants up, they would be taller than eight Mount Everests. If you laid them side by side, they would stretch for 48 miles.

A lot of folks are laughing it off, but not the defendants:

“The whole city is aware of this lawsuit,” said Bob King, who represents Fort Lincoln on the Advisory Neighborhood Commissions. “Everybody’s laughing about it.”

Everybody except the Chungs, who have spent thousands of dollars defending themselves against Pearson’s lawsuit.

“It’s not humorous, not funny and nobody would have thought that something like this would have happened,” Soo Chung told ABC News through an interpreter.

Her husband agreed.

“It’s affecting us first of all financially, because of all the lawyers’ fees,” Jin Chung said. “For two years, we’ve been paying lawyer fees. … We’ve gotten bad credit as well, and secondly, it’s been difficult mentally and physically because of the level of stress.”

Can you imagine how much this plaintiff would be suing for if they had lost the whole suit?

By the way, the defendants have offered $12,000 to this plaintiff for those pants. If you want to get a headache, read the entire story.

Hey flesh fanciers, it turns out that beauty contests are not unknown in the Arab world.

“Beautiful, beautiful!” the judge mutters quietly to himself, inspecting the group.

And just what is this judge looking for in his beauty queen?

“The nose should be long and droop down, that’s more beautiful,” explains Sultan al-Qahtani, one of the organizers. “The ears should stand back, and the neck should be long.

An interesting mental picture. Anything else?

The hump should be high, but slightly to the back.”

 

No, that’s not what they have in mind.

In Lebanon they have Miss Lebanon,” jokes Walid, moderator of the competition’s Web site. “Here we have Miss Camel.”

Yes friends, you too can have your hump judged in Saudi Arabia. Women may have to be covered, quiet, and subservient, but there is nothing stopping you from showing off some four-legged flesh.

Camels are also big business in a country where strict Islamic laws and tribal customs would make it impossible for women to take part in their own beauty contest.

After all, nothing warms the heart like a man and his camel.

“Bedouin Arabs are intimately connected to camels and they want to preserve this heritage. The importance of this competition is that it helps preserve the pure-breds,” said Sheikh Omair, one of the tribe’s leaders.

Look out Hollywood, here comes “Brokeback Sand Dune!”

“This one would fetch a million!” says Hamad al-Sudani, a camel-driver, admiring the heavy stud, or fahl.

A diary of dramatic desert devotion like no other.

LST readers have pointed out a recent column by William F. Buckley in which he wondered if the Iraq war would be the end of the Republican Party.

Whether due to the war or otherwise, the party does seem to be shrinking:

WASHINGTON — Public allegiance to the Republican Party has plunged during George W. Bush’s presidency, as attitudes have edged away from some of the conservative values that fueled GOP political victories, a major survey has found.

The survey, by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, found a “dramatic shift” in political party identification since 2002, when Republicans and Democrats were at rough parity. Now, 50% of those surveyed identified with or leaned toward Democrats, whereas 35% aligned with Republicans.

More troubling, though, may be a shift away from conservative views:

What’s more, the survey found, public attitudes are drifting toward Democrats’ values: Support for government aid to the disadvantaged has grown since the mid-1990s, skepticism about the use of military force has increased and support for traditional family values has decreased.
…
On social issues, the survey found that support for some key conservative positions was on the decline. For instance, those who said they supported “old fashioned values about family and marriage” dipped from 84% in 1994 to 76% in the recent survey. Support for allowing school boards to have the right to fire homosexual teachers has dropped from 39% in 1994 to 28%.

As others have pointed out, however, fluctuations in party allegiance are not that uncommon, and it doesn’t necessarily mean the end is near (for Republicans). It wasn’t too many years ago when folks were asking if the Democrat party would survive.

I don’t think this is as much about the Dems winning the war of ideas as it is about the Republicans too often abandoning their principles. Democrats benefit by default.

Follow-up:

Here’s the Buckley column referred to in the first sentence. Thanks to izquierdo for the link.

Ok, this certainly merits a fisking:

It’s the sort of Wild West stereotype that national publications love to print about Texas: After conferring in Austin with federal officials concerning the recent Virginia Tech massacre, Gov. Rick Perry opined that citizens with licensed concealed handguns should have the right to take them everywhere.

“I think it makes sense for Texans to be able to protect themselves from deranged individuals,” the governor said, ” whether they’re in church, or whether on a college campus or wherever they are. The idea that you’re going to exempt them from a particular place is nonsense to me.”

Texas law prohibits guns in bars, schools and most areas of courthouses and college campuses. Local governments and churches have the right to prohibit firearms from buildings and meetings. Private employers can ban employees from bringing weapons into the workplace.

It is true that private employers and churches can prohibit concealed carry. However, the burden is on them to provide proper notice by posting this sign at all entrances and exits. Accordingly, I’m not sure Perry was suggesting a change in the law with regards to churches.

Furthermore, local governments lost their ability to ban firearms in their facilities in 2003. Oopsie! I suppose the Chronicle actually needs to start looking at the law before they vomit up this dreck on their editorial page.

Most mass transit agencies, including Metro, do not allow passengers to bring firearms aboard buses and trains.

This reminds me of a little tune I once heard. It goes a little something like this:

♫WRONG, wrong WRONG, wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong WRONG…. WRONG! YOU’RE WRONG!♫

Metro used to prohibit concealed-carry on transit vehicles even with a permit. However, that was clearly illegal under state law, which provided no exceptions to for transit agencies. Accordingly, Metro was promptly sued. In 2005, Metro voted to drop the ban.

The Legislature just passed a bill that expands a resident’s right to use a firearm in self-defense at home, in vehicles and at other locations. The legislation would establish a legal presumption of self-defense for the shooter. After overwhelming approval by the House and Senate, the governor signed it.

Another bill moving through the Legislature would allow workers to keep licensed guns in their cars, even if they are parked at workplaces where their employer bans firearms. A third bill would make concealed handgun license records confidential. The records, owned by the public that paid for their creation, are properly classed as public documents.

These bills, should they become law, would encourage the proliferation of deadly weapons into every area of our lives, from the freeway to the shopping mall. Instead of putting the brakes on bad legislation, Perry’s latest comments only fuel the domestic arms race.

Goodness knows why the Chronicle thinks a presumption of self-defense is a bad idea. Don’t people being attacked in their homes deserve such a presumption? Furthermore, I don’t really understand why the Chronicle sees value in keeping CHL records public. Do they want criminals to have access to this information?

As for the guns in cars issue, I don’t see the problem either. You can already carry in a vehicle with a CHL, and I don’t see how an employer has a significant interest in banning guns from the parking lot. A hothead employee is unlikely to follow the restriction anyway.

Arming the public to the teeth will not prevent individuals like Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho from murdering innocents taken by surprise and terrorizing a campus. He bought his killing tools legally and probably could have qualified for a concealed handgun permit in Texas.

Seung-Hui Cho probably had a driver’s license too, and he could have gone nuts and run 30 people down on a crowded street had he wanted. Unless a person has a criminal record or has been institutionalized, there really isn’t a valid reason to start taking away legal privileges.

Rather, guns in every classroom, car and bar would only make it easier for deadly weapons to find their way into the wrong hands. The odds that an armed population could quickly take down a deranged gunman are much smaller than the chance of being shot by an otherwise law-abiding citizen who becomes emotional and loses control in a stressful public setting.

I’m not sure that the Chronicle can back up their odds with actual math. There are numerous cases of people with guns taking down degranged gunmen. I don’t know of any cases where a CHL holder has flipped off his rocker and started firing randomly in a crowded setting.

But I suppose if you proceed from a paternalistic mindset, that’s how you view the situation.

Let’s say you made oodles of campaign promises to secure more money for New Orleans, as Democrats did during the last Congressional elections. Do you:

a) Draft the “2007 Gulf Coast Recovery Bill” and send it to
the president, confident that it will be promptly signed, or

b) Draft the “2007 Iraq Troop Withdrawal and Gulf Coast
Recovery Bill” and send it to the president, knowing full well
he’ll veto it.

The Democrats obviously chose option “b.” They intentionally attached spending for the Gulf Coast onto the emergency funding bill, which included timelines for troop withdrawal in Iraq.

Bush has consistently said that he wouldn’t sign any funding bill containing troop withdrawals. He also (rightly) criticized Democrats for lumping together potentially meritorious spending together with troop spending, thereby ensuring that none of it could be debated on its own merits.

Obviously, the Democrats did this to score political points. Senator Mary Landrieu already has a headline on her website reading “President Vetoes Gulf Coast Recovery Bill,” even though every major newspaper described it as an emergency war funding bill. She and the rest of her party intentionally delayed aid to New Orleans simply to make Bush look bad.

I’m well aware that Republicans have used similar tactics before, so nobody can cast me as some wide-eyed idealist who believes the GOP is the only force for good in the world.

Still, let’s not pretend that the Democrats care about New Orleans. It’s all agitprop to them.

All I can say is “ha ha” like that kid from the Simpson’s:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been accused of indecency after he publicly embraced and kissed on the hand an elderly woman who used to be his schoolteacher.

Yeah, he kisses this poor old woman’s gloved hand and gives her a bear hug around her very modestly clothed body, and he is being indecent.

Typical…

But when you see this and think about the crackpots that think he is being “immodest”, consider the government he runs and what they are doing to this women (linked to a YouTube video) for being immodest.

She was screaming the following:

Girl (screaming): I am not coming. Let me go. You man! Don’t touch me! Let me go! I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!

Police (to people): Do not gather! Go!

Now please understand, when these girls/women go to the police station, it isn’t to just get a ticket. That’s what happens when you are veeery lucky. There is brutality involved. For not wearing a headscarf right. Or having a coat that hugs the curves of your body. Or wearing clothes that are too Western. Right now the Iranian government is having its’ annual summertime veil “crackdown” because those women are getting just a little bit sloppy with wearing them.

Please keep in mind, we are not talking about looking like Brittany Spears here…

  A mullah put it this way:

There are 3 groups of women:

The first group… he said are the women who are badly veiled who are like buses who everyone and anyone can ride.

The second group… are women who are wearing scarves without the Islamic overcoats; they are like taxis who only pick up certain passengers.

And finally, in the third group… there are women like my wife who are like donkeys who let only one person ride them!

When people ask me why I want the Islamofascist taken on, I tell them I want to prevent my girls from having to dress like this and be harassed by a bunch of guys that have real serious problems with women…

You know, as you advance in years, you tend to think that nothing in the news can make you raise your eyebrows (especially as they get thicker, broader and white). Think again.

In a city with trillions of American cockroaches, the Houston Museum of Natural Science has agreed to pay a quarter per bug — up to 1,000 — as it seeks to populate a new insect exhibit alongside its Cockrell Butterfly Center.

That’s right, folks. Gather up your pets and bring to the Museum for your reward. Nope, it’s not a joke.

“Absolutely, this wasn’t devised as a joke,” Greig said. “We needed more roaches for the exhibit, so I sent this message out to everyone in the museum asking people to bring them in. Well, someone decided to tell the press, and all hell has broken loose.

“But we really do need cockroaches.”

Now, I’ve been to said museum. Many times. I promise you that if you put down some of those little “roach motels”, you could have yourself an entire display in a matter of hours. Thinking about heading down to Hermann Park for a little picnic, are you?

What if the museum is overwhelmed with cockroach donations?

Fear not, there will be no cockroach genocide. (As if that were possible. Roaches have existed for about 300 million years, much longer than humans). Extras will be dumped in nearby park lands.

Enjoy your wine and cheese! Wonder if this guy is going to participate?

It’s Hump Day!

Concealed Handgun License Training– New licenses $100 (classes approximately every other week), recertification $80 (done weekly). Price includes all range fee, fingerprinting, notary work and photographs. Basic training available for persons who want a license but have little or no experience with a firearm. Ask about special group classes. Contact Austin Arrington 281-948-8373.

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