Kinky: One More Victim of Katrina ’n’ Rita?

We feel relatively confident in predicting that the combined psychological wallop of the two hurricanes has pretty much shot to shit Kinky Friedman’s chances of getting on the ballot and/or being elected governor. We’ve always figured that it would be difficult for Friedman to round up the required signatures of 45,000 non-primary registered voters he needs to be voter-accessible in the November 2006 general election, but post-Katrina/Rita we suspect Texans are in a decidedly sober mood and probably even less inclined to cast their civic lot with a comedian (that is, someone who’s paid to be funny, as opposed to the inadvertent comedians who constitute the greater percentage of Texas politicians).

There’s a slight chance we could be wrong, though. Maybe Friedman has come up with some good one-liners about hurricane preparedness and emergency response. Lord knows we could use some. We still may save ourselves for Friedman---why (the hell) not?---and of course haven’t totally ruled out throwing the full editorial weight of Slampo’s Place behind his candidacy.

Otherwise, the hurricanes don’t seem to have altered the Texas political landscape, although we sense a small and potentially widening opening for someone. Gov. Rick Perry has some blame to share with local officials for the clogged evacuation (and shouldn’t coordinating mass movements on city, county, state and federal roadways be the ultimate responsibility of the governor, even if just to give him [or her] something to do in between failing to come up with politically and legally workable school finance plans?), but overall, like Houston Mayor Bill White and Harris County Judge Robert Eckels, Perry managed to project an air of calm normalcy, and got plenty of TV face-time doing so. These boys weren’t about to be “Nagin-ized,” or, in Perry’s case, “Blanco-ized.” But luck---the hurricane’s late tacking away from Galveston-Houston---played a big part in that (not that it did much for Beaumont-Port Arthur and Lufkin and Jasper).

Which leaves the action in the GOP primary. White’s profile, and maybe his star, rose, but we still don’t see a Democrat as electable statewide in 2006, even if he or she has $40 million of his or her own to blow. White, though, is certainly a comer, although we can’t remember any mayor of Houston ascending to high statewide office (if we recall correctly, Perry’s GOP primary opponent, the Semi-Tough Grandma, did serve as Austin’s mayor, several surnames ago).

We thought Kay Bailey Hutchison came off best of all. We’ve warmed to Hutchison over the years, primarily because of her disinclination to always strap herself to ideological mast of the Republican National Committee’s talking points and her willingness to show the occasional visible streak of independence. She sounded thoughtful and reasonable, before and after Rita.

And what about Lyda Ann Thomas, the mayor of Galveston? We don’t know whether she’s a Democrat, Republican or Rosicrucian, but if that ruler-wielding schoolmarm had told us to evacuate, we wouldn’t have wasted time asking when or where to. (Love the way she softened “the look” when she appeared on Larry King Live, and Larry seemed smitten, too: “We salute you, Madam Mayor!”) We were so taken we wrote her a Beach Boys song: "Lyda A-a-ann/Take my ha-a-and/And lead me from this/Doomed i(s)--la-a-and/Oh, Lyda Ann ... "

Correction Corner/Appended Fulsome Tirade: In our initial unrevised posting of Sept. 25, 2005, Slampo’s Place misstated the dates of some selected postings of the Houston Chronicle’s SciGuy blogger: Due to organic brain damage and a copy editor’s error, we wrongly listed some of his Thursday postings as coming on Friday and some of his Wednesday postings as appearing on Thursday. (Lately the days all kinda blur together, y’know.) Which does not detract from our point: that before Chronicle columnist Ken Hoffman starts goosing the local television news operations for supposedly needlessly whipping Houston-Galveston area residents into a Katrina-driven Rita frenzy, he should double-check the products of his own employer. Not to pick on this SciGuy---his stuff was just the most readily available---but he did raise the specter of a “truly horrific” outcome for the Houston area unless the hurricane adjusted track, and said forecast appeared after the freeway exodus had commenced. Which wasn’t necessarily “wrong” or even “bad.” However, we watched quite a bit of TV as the storm approached, in between boarding windows and storing away the seemingly endless amount of shit in our yard (like hundreds of thousands of other locals, we weren’t spending a whole lot of time reading blogs), and we don’t recall anyone---even Neil Frank at his most wound-up---proclaiming a possible “truly horrific” event.

We thought we’d leave the entire issue alone, but then we read the editorial in today’s (Sept. 27) Chronicle, which also claims with an apparently straight face that “television reports … added to Houstonians’ anxiety” (no specific examples offered). Then, about halfway through the long slog---check this out, if you haven’t--- the editorial breaks for commercial word on behalf of (tad da!) the paper’s very own SciGuy by quoting at length from a laudatory email about the blogger from an unnamed reader in Washington D.C. (was it Michael Brown?) … All this was from the same Chronicle editorial page that a little more than a week ago listed the No. 1 Katrina-taught “lesson” for Houston to be that local leaders should “presume the worst-case scenario.” Oh well. We don’t ask for consistency. Or logic. Or even facts …

And oh yeah: Slampo’s Place regrets the error.