Houblog

Tory strikes again, over at Houston Strategies. In part 1 of a 2 part series, he discusses metro growth over the last 20 years. Key grafs:

Houston has been extremely aggressive in adding new freeway capacity. It has nine major radial freeways, three ring freeways (with a 180-mile fourth one on the way), and 16 major 4 or 5 level interchanges. Houston has almost twice as many freeway lanes per capita as Los Angeles. As state funding has become more limited in recent years, they have embraced toll roads to continue adding capacity.

The results? Houston has kept affordable housing within reach, with the lowest housing costs of any major city in America. While its job centers are dispersed, the vast majority have stayed within the core and the city limits, keeping up the commercial tax base and avoiding a Detroit scenario. Houston’s four inner-core job centers – Downtown, Uptown, Greenway Plaza, and the Texas Medical Center – combine to have more jobs than any other U.S. central business district outside of Manhattan.

To provide contrast, Portland - which essentially stopped freeway and HOV expansion and focused on light rail during the 1990s - had traffic congestion grow three times faster than Houston during that decade and has experienced a far sharper decrease in housing affordability, even with similar population growth rates of about 26% during the decade.

The full article is well worth reading, as I am sure part 2 will be on Thursday.

Note: title of this article was changed after publishing.

The New York Times has taken over the government.

“Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff — but it’s the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost on morons who don’t work for the New York Times, especially the knuckledraggers and mouth breathers who vote for Republicans,” said Keller. “And while we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, we just feel … well, that we’re smarter.”

“This is just, like, so totally awesome and cool,” said shadow Vice President Maureen Dowd.

I just can’t say how incredibly depressed the action of the LAT and NYT have left me lately. I haven’t even been able to bring myself to blog about it. This satirical article was all that lifted the gloom long enough to let me write this rant. It’s just common fucking damn sense that you don’t go blabbing about secure programs and troop deployments, but these jackasses would have published the details of every convoy leaving New York in WWII. They just do not get it.

They belong in jail.

I mean, I called them “AlQueda’s Intelligence Bureau” a few days ago but it was meant to be satire, not reality. Are they really working for the enemy or are they that damned stupid?

And the caller on Chris Baker’s ‘ show yesterday made me so damn mad I had to stop listening. I don’t remember if it was “David” or the guy after him. The publication was justified in his view because we don’t know that they’re not snooping in our financial records! A head totally empty of facts and conclusions; he was simply convinced that our government had to be evil because it had power. Well, excuse-fucking-me, I wasn’t aware that even the constitution required the goverment to hand the details of every spy operation over to each citizen, so we could judge for ourselves that it wouldn’t “infringe on our civil liberties,” nor that any one of us, whether intelligence analyst, civil servant, or newspaper editor, could decide on our own to go spreading those details all over the world.

Power? Baker’s caller needed to Iraq and place himself squarely in front of the jihadists who cut off people’s heads and talk to them about power. He’d quickly find out why Mao said, “Power comes from the barrel of a gun.” What a sad product of our indoctrination educational centers.

A century ago, Hearst newspapers tried, and succeeded, in starting the Spanish-American war just to win a circulation battle. Now they’re trying to lose us a war for much “higher minded principles.”

I hope Australia will be accepting immigrants after the fall of Rome….

I don’t have the time to do this justice, so here is an e-mail I received recently, raw. And frankly, it’s pretty damned raw.

Friends:

Consider this fact: in just the past year, more than 5,700 properties nationwide have been threatened by or taken with eminent domain for private development - a figure that compares with more than 10,000 examples over a five-year period preceding the Kelo argument, according to one of five reports released today by the Institute for Justice (which argued the Kelo case before the U.S. Supreme Court) and the Castle Coalition. Coupled with this increase in eminent domain abuse, however, has been a virtually unprecedented grassroots and legislative response to the most universally despised Supreme Court ruling in recent memory.

Friday, June 23, is the one-year anniversary of the now-infamous U.S. Supreme Court decision that stripped Americans of any meaningful federal constitutional protection for their private property. To mark that date, the Institute for Justice and the Castle Coalition issued four separate reports yesterday that

1) document the growing problem of eminent domain for private development,
2) chronicle the legislative response to Kelo,
3) demonstrate failed redevelopments that followed government’s use of force to acquire property, and
4) expose the common myths put forward by developers and cities defending eminent domain for private use.

In another document also released yesterday, the Castle Coalition offers property owners who face eminent domain abuse an “Eminent Domain Survival Guide.�

All are available at http://www.castlecoalition.org/kelo/index.html - check them out today!

Christina Walsh
Assistant Castle Coalition Coordinator
Institute for Justice
901 N. Glebe Road, Suite 900
Arlington, VA 22203
www.ij.org
www.castlecoalition.org

P.S. HELP THE CASTLE COALITION GROW! Forward this message to your friends. They can sign-up here: http://www.castlecoalition.org/join/index.html.

An average of 2,000 per year, to 5,700 — a 185% increase in ONE year. So much for Kelo “not having a major effect.”

No, that’s not a mistake above. The mistake was made in Austin. Check out the inventive response at the Lone Star Times.

Steven Den Beste makes some observations on the Wachowski brothers over on Chizumatic. Because his server will be going down soon (he’s moving to Portland), I have taken the liberty of posting it in full below.

20050111: Remember The Matrix? Remember the Wachowski brothers, who were responsible for it and co-directed it? They’re involved in a new film called V for Vendetta. And…

But I’m told that execs at Warner Bros. — a studio very hot right now — are concerned that this time out, Larry Wachowski’s personal life is going to get big time exposure. The reclusive Ws, who hail from Chicago, do not give interviews. One reason is that Larry, according to some reports, is rumored to have changed genders in recent years.

Even if he hasn’t gone the complete “Transamerica” route — I hope he’s caught Felicity Huffman’s amazing performance — Larry has lots of other issues. One reason he may not be walking the red carpet at a premiere any time soon is that he traded his wife in for a famous dominatrix named Ilsa Stix, aka Karin Winslow. Larry apparently isn’t satisfied with just the abuse Hollywood can heap on him.

Um… There must be something funny I can say about this. (He’s a shoo-in to direct the “Brokeback Mountain” sequel. SHUT UP! Or maybe to write it. SHUT UP, I said!)

Starling Hunter, over at The Business of America is Business is hosting this week’s Bonfire of the Vanities, in which he asks, “Why is this the worst post of the week?” Hey, he said my post was thoughtful… I’m just glad he didn’t notice it was rambling too.

Just one more small step in my master plan to take over the moon (”It’s a lunatic plan.”)

Update: Oh, so that’s my problem….

… or is it this?

That’s a bit of a provocative title considering the subject he wrote about, but I’m actually not aiming for a religious rationale or even supporting a position because of religion. It’s just that I happen to think John (from Pearland) spoke the truth brilliantly and succienctly in his letter to the editor published online today, and to me that is “gospel” in the sense of absolute truth.

The Chronicle’s Nov. 14 editorial “Bitter Pill,” which whined about the passage of Proposition 2, clearly illustrated the liberal, elitist, “we know best” attitude of the Chronicle.

The editorial stated that the passage of Prop 2 “came across as a direct attack on gays and on their struggle for a measure of legal equality,” and slapped at the 76 percent of voters who approved the proposition by calling it an “embarrassment,” and claiming that it “sends the wrong signal to businesses that thrive on intellectual capital and creativity.”*

Talk about elitism: The Chronicle profiles 76 percent of the voters as intellectually inferior, and shows how out of step it is from many of its readers.

Get over it, you lost.

(*Edit: Dont you just love the backhanded way of saying that straight people can’t be smart or creative?)
(more…)

Steven Den Beste’s thesis on the War has been updated by Iowahawk… and largely endorsed by SDB. Required reading for all but the hopelessly anti-war.

From Instapundit:

And, there is a curious twist to the story: Many residents of Alaska appear to support forfeiting the bridge money for hurricane relief. “This money, a gift from the people of Alaska, will represent more than just material aid; it will be a symbol for our beleaguered democracy,” reads a typical letter to the Anchorage Daily News.

Young, who made sure his state was one of the top recipients in the highway bill, was asked by an Alaska reporter what he made of the public support for redirecting the bridge money. “They can kiss my ear! That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” he replied.

If you needed any more proof that “pork” is about putting money in the hands of fatcat contributors, rather than helping constituents, this would seem to be it.

And if you think the federal level is the only one that’s true at, you are deluded. There’s a reason we don’t have zoning here. Support The Committee to Pave the Fifth Ward today!

Apparently Abnormal got the funniest e-mail the other day, and it’s oh-so-true, too!

Head over there and check it out!

Well, that is it, I'm packed, except for removing the HD's from the computers, personal toiletries, and the computer I am taking with me.  A few hours of sleep, then we cut the gas, unplug everything, pack the last items, put the dogs in the cages and run like hell.

You'll have to check this guy's log for excitement now.

Edit: I just checked NOAA's website. Oh. F*ck.  I was really beginning to think, maybe it would go to Matagorda and we'd miss the bullet…  Crap.  Well, say goodbye to the house.