The Noise Machine (10/27/09)

On the whole I'd rather kiss the iguana.

For a while there Musings was offering some decent analysis of the Mayoral. Then, she went into the tank for Parker and it's been all downhill since then. My favorite is the poll: "Is the Locke campaign trying to suppress votes or are they simply clueless?" Heh. Serious, in-depth criticism of the type you can only find in the blogosphere.

Sometimes you have to wonder what goes through the minds of those appointed to run psuedo-government agencies with huge budgets. Case in point: The following quip from Harris County Sports Authority board Chairman J. Kent Friedman in today's article on the difficulties faced by the Authority by ChronBlog's Bradley Olson:

“But no matter what happens here, there's absolutely no way the taxpayers of Harris County or the city of Houston could be negatively impacted.”

He goes on to say that only the bond investors would be impacted. That's just wrong. As Bradley detailed: $117 Million of the bonds have been converted to a loan, payable in 5 years. Since the HCSA is an arm of the County Government then taxpayers would be on the hook to pay off those debts. If they go bankrupt, more than just the bondholders would suffer, the County's debt rating would suffer as well...impacting taxpayers. What are these people thinking?

So far, Peter Brown is leading in every poll not conducted by one of the candidates. Since Brown wasn't considered, by experts, to be one of the favorites in the race, said experts are working overtime trying to explain this away. Weak support, bad poll filters....we'll see. *Maybe there is something to the idea of asking voters for their vote huh?*

For a bit of good news, we turn to Shannon Buggs report for ChronBlog that Continental is joining Star Alliance. This is good news for those of you who actually use your travel miles and don't forget about them....

Look out Houston, Quarterly numbers for energy companies are starting to come in and they're not good. Keep in mind that this is before cap n' trade retrenchment measures are taken. Those are still to come.