Hiatus

I'm going to quit blogging for a while to put my focus on issues of a personal nature. Be back soon.

If you hear "consensus" and science....

....run away. Huntsman is wrong, science doesn't HAVE consensus. For anyone familiar with the scientific model, consensus is a joke. Which is why all of the AGW climate change proponents are 100% wrong. There's plenty of evidence that the Earth is heating, what's not proven, or even supported by ANY credible scientific study, is that said increase is due to human activity.

Political blind spots

I'm not much for writing long, flowing tributes to days when bad things happened because, quite frequently, they end up looking like this:

The years of shame, Paul Krugman, New York Times

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

Bush's Fatal 9/11 flaw, Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast

George W. Bush thought al Qaeda’s attack was the major geopolitical event of our time. He was wrong.

It's funny to me that a large portion of Democratic activists are still fighting a losing battle against the Bush presidency, much in the same way I thought Republicans were foolish for continuing to fight against the Clinton presidency long after he was out of office. If anything, the disaster that has become the Obama presidency has made us realize that neither of the previous two presidents were as bad as the opposite side made them out to be. This political blind spot by Democrats is distracting them from the real story.... Rick Perry is on the rise, and he can (and probably will) BEAT Obama in 2012 if something doesn't change.

Non-sequitur

The problem with using this argument:

Global Commuter Stress is Growing, David Crossley, Bossiness Tomorrow

The annual global Commuter Pain survey, which IBM released today, reveals that in a number of cities more people are taking public transportation rather than driving

When making the argument that people should ride public transit in Houston is this..... For the most part, there IS no reliable, robust, flexible public transportation in Houston. If the MetroRail expansion gets Federal funding and moves forward there will be even less. Of course, Hoston Tomorrow has never let facts* get in the way of a chance to advocate for controlling people's lives and travel patterns so why should that start now?

  *The whole story is that there is plenty of money in the Rainy Day fund to cover the budgets of fire departments and no serious observer truly believes that they are going to run out of money.

Slamming the Port

OK, well...sorta.

County report criticizes Port administration, culture. Mike Morris, Chron.com

Port of Houston Authority officials operate with a culture of impunity, running the public agency like a private business, defying open meetings laws and employing other secretive policies, the Harris County Attorney's office said in a new report.

Some might say that "running government like a business is a good thing. Unfortunately, the Port Authority has been ran more like a slush fund than a business. Any rational business would have fired the board by now.

John Thornton gets some bang for his buck.

Ladies and Gentlemen....I give you the most biased piece of newsish ever.....


We Read Rick Perry's "Fed Up!" So You Don't Have To, The Texas Tribune.

A piece so odious that no staffer had their name attached to it. There are so many things wrong with this "summary" that I'm not even going to try to list them. What it basically amounts to is a public fisking, with no factual back up, and no thought of penning a balanced review.

In short: This is nothing more than a political hit-piece masked as journalism by a newsish organization that's increasingly reverting back to the industry standard for the type.

Where once they could be relied upon for some solid reporting, they're drifting further and further afield as time progresses. Think about this: When was the last time the Trib ran a piece on Perry that was genuinely important? It's been a while.

Something tells me that Thronton and that all Democrat board were demanding to start seeing some bang for their buck. After all, there's an election to be won coming up pretty soon.



There's a LOT more I could say about this but I won't. I'll finish with this: The Trib has turned out something that wouldn't make the cut on most solid political blogs*. And they've categorized it under "journalism".










*The key-word being solid, which means that you could expect to see something that bad (or worse) on this blog. It's why you read right?