Lone Star: As Texas as......Milwaukee?

How far the mighty have fallen.  Lone Star, a middling beer that is way more popular than it should be based solely on it's name and some clever marketing, will continue to be brewed by MillerCoors due to a recent Jury ruling in Milwaukee Wisconsin.

The Verdict is in. Lone Star Beer is Here to Stay. Chron.com

On Wednesday, after nearly two days of deliberation, a Milwaukee, WI  jury decided that MillerCoors will continue brewing Pabst Brewing Company's 21 beer labels, including Lone Star, according to NPR News.
MillerCoors did not want to renew its contract to brew for Pabst when it expires in 2020, saying it no longer makes financial sense, while Pabst argued the contract includes options for an extension and MillerCoors was essentially trying to put it out of business.

First off, a couple of points:

1. Lone Star is not a good beer, it is not a craft beer, it's cheap plonk.
2. Lone Star is not the "National Beer of Texas" it never has been.

Now, if you want to make a case for a true State Beer of Texas I would nominate Shiner Bock. For one, it tastes better, is actually brewed in Texas, is owned by Texans and has much deeper roots IN Texas than Lone Star ever had.

Yes, I know that Lone Star started in Texas, but those days are long behind them. And the beer market has moved on.

Lone Star is a carpet-bagger, an import, a relic from a by-gone Texas that some people seem to pine for while waddling around Austin looking for the next hemp store to open up.  A Texas that didn't exist.

Modern Texas is an urban sort, and while I disagree with the TLSPM that "all" of Texas vibrancy is found in the cities certainly some of it is.  But the wealth, and the history, are found in the increasingly empty wide-open spaces West of the Texas Triangle. Anything truly original can be found there as well.

What Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio truly are is replicators for European and outside culture.  Things will get invented in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, etc. and the Texas 4 will do their darndest to bring it to Texas, just about 2 years after the trend is dying out elsewhere. Cupcakes? Gourmet Donuts? Chicken and Waffles? Tapas?  Light Rail? Bike Lanes?

None of those things were invented in Texas, but they were brought to its cities.  That's OK in some cases, light rail and bike lanes being the obvious exceptions here) but to find something truly Texas original you usually have to travel to the hinterlands.

Luling and Lockheart didn't invent Texas Bar-B-Q (Mexican Vaqueros did that) but they sure perfected it prior to it being exported elsewhere. You can get a great bowl of Texas red in the cities, but a better one in many small town diners. For years all of these things were brought to the cities via the State Fair. City-dwellers would try them, restaurants would open up and a craze was born. Now people see things on the Internet, or spend two weeks traveling to Europe, and pine to find something here "just like I had over there" (Hint: This is not usually an honest request, it's more a brag that they've been there and you haven't).

The same myth-making, at a much more primitive level, has been falsely attached to Lone Star Beer.

And it's time, past time honestly, to end this myth once and for all.

With that in mind, and judging by the litter I see on the side of the road, it's time to give praise to the TRUE 'National Beer of Texas"

ALL HAIL MILLER LITE!


Sad, but true.

HALV: The HISD Mess is Rotten from the Top.

It doesn't matter who takes over as the Superintendent of HISD, as long as the board is staffed by low-functioning idiots.

HISD Trustees Vowed to Play Nice, but that didn't last long. Chron.com

Trustees Jolanda Jones and Elizabeth Santos engaged in a 30-second shouting match during a workshop Tuesday, with Jones shouting for Santos to "be quiet" and Santos calling Jones a "liar."

Children, Children, can't we all just get along?

With this group of mush-puddles in charge it's quite possible that HISD hasn't yet found the bottom of the hole it's digging for itself and the only solution might be for the State to come in, sweep it clean, possibly break it up and start from scratch.

Jones and Santos are the culprits in this story, but the entire group of them have been guilty of bad behavior at some point in the past. It's a combination of wanting, desperately, to run for higher office, ego and sheer childishness that drives this group, not some burning desire to "help the children" or other such nonsense that pops up in political ads.

And Houston voters, rarely taking the time to look that far down-ballot are not going to boot them out of office, so I'm afraid that it's going to lie at the feet of the State to make sure that the biggest city in Texas has a school district (or, districts, if they knew what was good for them) that can at least nominally perform it's duties.

As long as we keep running along with this gaggle of awful, HISD is never going to get better.

I'd say "do your duty" and vote them out "for the children" but I know that's not going to happen.  So the plea goes out to the Texas Education Administration.

Please, if not for the children do it for our sanity, and some peace and quiet.

HALV (Shocker!): Your Elected Officials in Houston Don't Think All That Highly of You.

It should come as a surprise to no one that immediately after the November 6th election results for Proposition B (The Firefighter Pay Equity Item) showed that it was going to pass overwhelmingly that Mayor Turner would begin moving to issue legal challenges to it. After all, he spent a lot of time in the run-up to the vote rallying his friends at the trough and Houston's Courtier Class to advocate against it, and it was one of the worst-kept secrets in Houston that he was not going to quit regardless of what the voters said.

Sure enough, on Wednesday, the story came out that Turner brow-beat the City Council into hiring a law-firm of his choosing to "study" the proposition in what is most-assuredly the first steps toward just ignoring the Proposition altogether, or filing a lawsuit depending on which path his lawyers tell him is the most likely to succeed.

In the Houston Chronicle story regarding the hiring of the law firm there were a couple of interesting nuggets.

Houston Council Hires Law Firm to Advise City on Prop B Legal questions. HoustonChronicle.com

First, and it needs to be said.  This headline is wrong. Turner is hiring the law firm, City Council has just approved the hiring. (by a narrow 9-7 vote)

Then there's this:

Neil Thomas, a Norton Rose partner in that office, served as treasurer for the anti-Prop B PAC, Protect Houston, and the firm contributed $15,000 to the committee’s coffers.

Any way you look at it that is a helluva return on investment.  For a measly fifteen grand Norton Rose has reaped a $500K pay day.  Whoever thought up this deal at the law firm needs a raise. They, correctly, identified Mayor Turner's penchant for a) being politically vindictive and b) paying off his political patrons and acted appropriately.  Good move by them.

Then, there's this:

The mayor initially planned to seek a contract with Norton Rose the morning after Election Day, but delayed the vote over concerns that hiring the firm would look like “a middle finger” to the voters, as District G Councilman Greg Travis put it. 

So, instead of an immediate middle finger to 59% of Houston voters they waited three weeks to extend the digit, relying on their dim view of the electorate to assuage the anger.

In other words, they (and the Chron) think you to be fairly daft.

Of course, the only way to prove them wrong is to show up during the next Mayoral election and remind Turner that you're not that daft, and send him and the nine city council members packing when their number comes up.  They are betting that people are both not paying much attention to this, and that they won't care when the time comes to head back to the ballot box.

Given Houston voter history this is not a bad political gamble. After all, they'll have the media on their side, so these issues can be white washed away, and most people are too busy in their daily lives. If they need a push in the right direction they can also rely on the unproductive class to give them a boost as well. There are plenty of people around with plenty of free time and access to the Internet after all.

Despite all of this it's not at all surprising that Turner is taking the confrontational path. Since coming back one of the key topics of this blog has been his pettiness toward political enemies, and his payback to his patrons. Of greater concern is that he is showing no willingness to engage with the Firefighters Union at all after the vote, signifying that, if he loses, he's willing to make drastic cuts to the department and place his political vindictiveness over the needs of Houstonians.

This leads to the uneasy realization that Houston potentially has a Mayor in City Hall that is more concerned with satisfying his need for revenge than ensuring the City is functioning properly.

If true, that's a problem.  A BIG problem for a big city that's facing a host of challenges that could potentially be beyond the grasp of the current Mayor to address. The other option is that he doesn't care about his constituents at all.

Either incompetent or indifferent the focus of this Mayor is on "I" not "we". Which, oddly enough, puts him in the same intellectual wheelhouse and most of the Houston Chronicle opinion scribblers.

Or maybe he has a master plan that's going to shock everyone and which will resolve this mess to the satisfaction of all, thus saving the City budget and sparing the citizens the indignity of being taxed until their eyes bleed.


Yeah, that's a reach. A huge leap of faith that Houstononians are going to have to make. For now there's no other choice.

BadMedia: I still can't open up a can of care in the Houston vs. Dallas (fake) rivalry.

Another day, another media driven story about how Houston hates Dallas and vice-versa.

Houston Folk are Now in Charge of Texas, Should we be Worried? Ron Reynolds, Dallas Morning News

The city can be a very insular, self-centered place, unconcerned with the goings-on of those not within the gravitational pull of Loop 610.

Meh. The truth is Dallas is a self-centered city as well, only concerned about it's Cowboys (who reside in Arlington) and keeping up an image burnished by a long-ago television show that was really good, and really inaccurate regarding Dallas as a whole.

Part of the problem is that there's never been a "Houston" television show. If there was it would be fascinating, depicting the life of the unproductive class riding around on the light-rail system from brain-session to brain-session endlessly trying to figure out a way to glom onto the next taxpayer-subsidized project in order to put food on the table.

But, I digress....

Both Houston and Dallas are fine places to work, and horrid places to live.

Houston has sprawl and swamp-heat and gross traffic, coupled with really bad services and inept municipal government that has trouble figuring out how to handle basic services, like fixing pot-holes for example.

Dallas has sprawl and North Texas weather, which brings the dynamic of snow into the picture and inept municipal government that has trouble figuring out how to handle basic services, like fixing pot-holes for example.

The old lie is that Dallas is white-collar while Houston chugs along with it's blue-collar dynamic. The truth is not that simple.  Both Houston and Dallas are ruled and controlled by a moneyed gentry, who are serviced by a courtier class whose sole job is getting themselves invited to parties on a semi-regular basis. You might know these people as "the media".

It's the media's job to prop up the gentry, what passes for nobility in Houston/Dallas, painting on them lavish praise and layers of respectability through the dodgy use of glossy pictorials about "best dressed" or "most philanthropic" or what not. What all this really means is that they have the money and connections to throw a helluva shin-dig at fancy places the writers wouldn't otherwise attend because they can't afford it.

Below the writers are the unproductive class.  They typically come from some money, somewhere up the familial food chain, they typically don't have "jobs" in the traditional sense but have been declared "experts" in fields such as public transportation and urban planning because they either a.) once wrote a blog that had some pretty graphs attached to it, or b.) have hung around "think-tanks" for long enough that the stink of respectability clings to them like the smoke smell in your clothes after you've barbecued a rack of ribs.

The unproductive class is especially sneaky, because they don't have jobs they can spend all of their time helping the politicians figure out how to divert more of your money to the moneyed gentry through tax takings while trying to convince you that it's "for the children".  Of course, when all of this turns out to be a boondoggle (see DART) they find someone to dutifully write a story about Dallas vs. Houston which gets the chattel all fired up and concerned that the sky is falling because Houston/Dallas has SOMETHING that Houston/Dallas doesn't have and it's threatening to blow Houston/Dallas' stink of world classiness into the garbage.

And, as we all know, losing world classiness is like losing a bond election. It will require Billions of dollars of self-sacrifice on your (not their) part to ever get it back.

It's the circle of Dallas/Houston Municipal life, and one of the keys to getting elected to local office is now to pledge fealty to the system.

From that perspective, Houston and Dallas are identical twins.

HALV: All in the name of transit.

After the last Harris County Election Cycle your local quasi-governmental groups are planning on going on a spending spree.

METRO Moves to the Next Phase of Developing a Regional Transit Plan. NPR

METRO Chairman Carrin Patman said they’re also expecting feedback from a new group of Harris County decision-makers.
“We have a new county government, there are some changes on the congressional level, and we need to take all those things into account,” said Patman. “Because some of the opinions of some of the stakeholders may have changed too.”

It should be of some interest to you that METRO considers their primary stakeholders to be elected officials and NOT the people who, you know, might or might not USE their services.

On the bright side, at least they're acknowledging now that people work in different places than downtown.  They're still seemingly focused on at-grade, inflexible solutions on moving people to those various locations, and it still seems like the Downtown area is still envisioned as the hub, but at least they understand that concept. 

Further in the article Metro CEO Tom 'What part of safety don't you understand?' Lambert talks about the public which raises the question of whether or not he means the "public" or designated "leaders" who have vested financial interests at stake in seeing the Danger Train go more places (among other things)?  I guess time will tell.

Given the history of Metro however their concern for the public is probably just limited to how big of a bond issue they think they can fleece the people into voting for.  Given the hue of the County right now I'm betting it's pretty big.  All they have to do is make either the "no new taxes" or "cup of coffee" argument and people will forget that money borrowed DOES eventually have to be paid back, with interest.

On a bright note, they do have one thing in place, a scrubbed and focus grouped name: METRONext  Ooooh....sparkly. 

They also have a timeline that is making the late Peter Brown smile in his grave as it's got a big chunk saved for "planning".  OF course, then there's delivery and beating down and opposition Public Education.  As we've seen in the past the latter is very important to the success of any plan. Fortunately they have the media ready to do that heavy lifting for them.  Mrs. White is dusting off her catapult and the Chron's way too many editorial writers are ordering various coffees to see just how many per month will cover the anticipated tax increases.

Now, if Mayor Turner could ONLY get the pillow-soft revenue cap lifted some fiscal omelettes could REALLY start getting cooked up.

Until then we have what METRO is calling "The Vision".

Whether it's a vision of true regional mobility or more toys for the wealthy to play in remains to be seen. Either way, you're going to hear that without this, Houston cannot be "world class"  and you don't want to stand in the way of Houston's World Classiness do you?  DO YOU?




I didn't think so.

First and Foremost: Give Thanks.

Before we get to Thanksgiving, with Turkey and stuffing and green-bean casserole and rolls and corn on the cob, and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and football and eating too much and falling asleep during the inevitable dog game before raiding the leftovers to make stuffing sandwiches.......

OK, you get the point.

I thought it wise to take a minute and think about the things that we're thankful for. Maybe, for some, it's little things, maybe, for others, it's big things.  The point is that we're all thankful for something, unless of course you're currently reading this blog with your foot trapped in a bear trap while being stung by bees and a family of hungry grackles is sizing up your right eye for dinner.  OK, then you might not be all that thankful.

But, for the rest of us, even those of us in the Houston area, we have cause to be thankful for something.  If you're having trouble thinking of anything we here at YDOP are here to help.  So, without Further Ado........


Harris County Democrats:  Well, this one is obvious, you're thankful that the last round of straight-ticket voting, coupled with some truly awful candidates (#firestanstanart Orlando Sanchez, etc.) and entrenched entitlement (Hi!! Ed Emmett!!!) have pretty much left you with a hammer-lock on county governance that's only slightly got you sweating because a) another flood event is surely coming and Sylvester Turner won't be able to rely on Emmett to bail him out this time and b) Oh shit, you actually have to govern!

The important bit to realize however is that you ARE in power so that should make your Tofurky and organically sourced, vegan side-dishes tasted almost a little-less like processed sawdust this year.

Harris County GOP:  OK, I have to admit this was a tough one.  But after much thought coupled with a weekend away in Lake Charles ruminating over vodka sodas (I'm lying, I didn't think about it at all) I've come up with a winner:

Be thankful that, because his law-offices were raided and stacks of documents removed, you're not going to have to live through an insufferable Jared Woodfill challenge of Paul Simpson's chairmanship.  Congratulations for that.  Of course, you're basically completely out of power now so winning the chair will feel a little like being named the Ringmaster of Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey's Circus AFTER it got shuttered but hey....avoiding that mess is something right?


Mayor Sylvester Turner:  You should be thankful that no-one who really matters has figured out yet that not only are you in WAY over your head here but also that you've not yet run out of political patrons who have supported your long career and will be wanting to reap the rewards of your victory before your next go-round.

Senator Whitmore hasn't come calling with his cronies yet and, believe me, after a lifetime in Texas politics he has a LOT of them who will be wishing to wet their beaks in the milk and honey of your victory.   And hey, you get to keep collecting the rain tax for your slush fund er...drainage projects so there's that.


Houston Fire Department: Be thankful that the few of you  who remain on the job after Mayor Turner enacts his revenge should be getting a rather large pay-raise.  You might want to spend this holiday season buttering up the current fire chief because he's going to be coming along with an axe soon to breaks some windows.

Another thing for which you should be thankful is that you appear to be fairly organized, and fairly harmonious in your opinions within the union.  It might help to channel that to form an early coalition around who you want to support in the next Mayoral race.

Houston Police Department: This one is simple. Be thankful that it surely won't be much longer before your anti-police Police Chief decides he's made enough progressive policy Tweets and decides to leave for a run for higher office.

Police Chief Acevedo: Be Thankful that you've made enough progressive policy Tweets that soon you'll be a viable candidate for higher office and can leave Houston to return to San Antonio.  I know we'll be thankful for that.

HISD School Board: Be thankful that it's the Holidays and people will stop paying attention to your corruption and dysfunction long enough for you to find an interim Superintendent who will be willing to rubber stamp your pet projects, your nepotism in hiring, and your generally awful stewardship of Houston's youth education.

Houston Chronicle: Be thankful you're still in business. That is all. I'd say something else but everything seems so excessive beyond that.

Houston Texans: Be Thankful that, even though he's not the greatest coach, Bill O'Brien appears to have hired a voodoo high priestess to put a spell on opposing coaches causing them to make exactly the wrong decisions in key moments, almost gifting you wins.

Houston Rockets: Be Thankful Carmelo Anthony is gone. and be thankful that Daryl Morey finally realized what an idiotic decision bringing him on was in the first place.

Houston Astros: Be Thankful that you're still the current best professional sports franchise in Houston, that you're still ran by competent management and that you still have a chance over the next couple of years to snag a World Series title or two.

Houston City Council: Be Thankful that Houston has a strong-Mayor form of government that hides your deficiencies behind those of Mayor Turner. Yes, we all know you're not very good, we just don't care much because you don't have any power to speak of.


And finally......

Houston-Area Political Bloggers: Be Thankful that Your Drink Order Please has returned to active blogging.  Because now the title of "Worst Local Blogger" is sewn up for at least as long as I want to keep this going.


Happy Thanksgiving y'all.  Spare a  soy plant, eat a real turkey.

HALV: OF COURSE the proposed Houston fire-fighter layoffs are avoidable.

But that wouldn't allow Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner to continue his temper tantrum.

Houston Layoffs Spurred by Prop B are Avoidable. Houston Chronicle.

You're looking at a Mayor who has no problem providing $6.7 Million dollars to his law partner and then claiming it's not a conflict of interest because it's his FORMER law partner, since Turner left the firm after becoming Mayor.

OK then.

Turner's entire political career has been about financially rewarding his patrons while trying (sometimes ineffectually) to punish his political enemies. He's a small man in a big city whose administration is about small ideas.

All he sees is a vote that went against his wishes, due in large part to organization and effective campaigning by a rival organization, so in his mind the only possible recourse is to punish the organization.

That this might actually lead to the deaths, or grave injuries, of some Houstonians doesn't even cross his mind. He doesn't care.  All that matters to him is balancing the political books back to what he perceives is his favor.

The Firefighter's union has to pay.  And pay they will, in the form of layoffs.

But the real people who pay will be Houstonians who should be able to rely on a fire department that has good response times and is sufficiently staffed.  That's not a component of Turner's political calculus however, and it probably never will be given the framework of his political education.

Something to think about during the 2019 Mayoral election.