Good for Business

The election of our new president already has had an invigorating effect on one small corner of the service economy, at least according to a story in Friday's New York Times:

Sales of handguns, rifles and ammunition have surged in the last week, according to gun store owners around the nation who describe a wave of buyers concerned that an Obama administration will curtail their right to bear arms.

And who else would be riding the crest of this retail surge but none other than Our Town's own former unfunny radio "personality" turned gun dealer:

“He’s a gun-snatcher,” said Jim Pruett, owner of Jim Pruett’s Guns and Ammo in northwest Houston, which was packed with shoppers on Thursday.

“He wants to take our guns from us and create a socialist society policed by his own police force,” added Mr. Pruett ... of President-elect Barack Obama.

Mr. Pruett said that sales last Saturday, just before Election Day, ran about seven times higher than a typical good Saturday.

Why do we get the feeling that Sr. Pruett was one of those "reverse Bradley Effect" voters?

Expunged, Purged, Deleted, Not Available

A sharp-eyed reader who wishes to be identified as “Anon.” points out that a Houston Chronicle op-ed piece to which we linked in our last posting apparently has been removed from the newspaper’s on-line archives---lost to history, much like the faces of wayward capitalist roaders that were excised from formal group portraiture during the Soviet era. The two-week-old piece in question was penned by a local lawyer named David Berg, who hopped upon his large white steed and, to a great flourish of trumpetry in his mind, called on Hillary Clinton to abandon her candidacy in favor of the callow Obama. (While reading this work we recalled that a perceptive political operative had once given the author the nickname “Static Cling” in recognition of his weather vane-like talent for attaching himself to the winning side in a local election after his candidate had lost.) Although the Feb. 21 op-ed itself is no longer available except in frayed and yellowed editions of the Chronicle's dead-tree product, proof of its existence does live on in an archived correction the newspaper ran the following day:

In the article "Road to redemption for Clintons: Embrace Obama," by David Berg, on Thursday's Outlook page, B9, a sentence was edited incorrectly. The sentence should read, "If she needs more proof, take it on faith from one who has lived here forever: She's going to lose the Texas primary, too."

Ben Reyes: You Can’t Go Home Again, According to UH Sociologist

We enjoyed the coverage of the relaxed, remorseful and clear-eyed Ben Reyes’ release from a Houston halfway house on Friday, although we’re wondering what happened to that old-man’s ponytail he was sporting when he was cut loose from the Big House earlier this year. (Maybe it’s just us, but did we not detect a glint in the old boy’s eye?)

Whatever you think about the FBI-stung former councilman, you’ve got to admire the way Reyes manned-up and did his time, without whining about the injustice of it all (at least publicly, as far as we know---we weren’t his cellmate). We hope he lands that construction job he wants, although being a citizen of the United States may render him unqualified for the work.

The Houston Chronicle, in effort to invest the occasion with more gravity than it demanded, engaged the services of Nestor Rodriguez, the University of Houston sociologist and quote-generating mechanism who’s becoming known in some quarters as “the Poor Man’s Bob Stein” (y’know, he’s a liberal arts perfesser---a Hispanic one, to boot---and in the Chronicle handbook liberal arts perfesser=”smart” and “knowledgeable,” on any and all subjects) to add some supposed perspective. According to Rodriguez

"It's a different Houston than when Ben Reyes started as a councilmember … It's more of a global city than it was before. Almost half of our Hispanic population now is foreign-born. There are leaders in the immigrant community now that don't even identify now with the U.S. political structure" [emphasis added].

Whoa, daddy. What you say?

Now, we don’t necessarily buy the truthiness of that observation. In fact, we hope the perfesser knows jack-squat of which he speaks. But we fear that he’s indeed right, or thereabouts, and we assume the “structure” with which these immigrant community leaders identify is the one south of the border, the one that barely supports the underpinnings of a civil society, the one in the land of la mordida and beheadings and kidnappings and round-the-clock unrest in the streets and melees at the presidential inaugural.

And they wonder why we’re pissed off about illegal immigration.

CAFR! (Annise Parker’s Michael Richards Moment)

We would have thought some wiseass was making this up if we hadn’t seen it with our own eyes: According to Fox 26 News, Houston Councilman Jarvis Johnson is demanding that City Controller Annise Parker cease and desist from using the acronym “CAFR” when referring to the city’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report.

Johnson tells Isiah Carey, the reporter who drummed this one up on what must have been an especially slow news day, that he was “taken aback” when he first heard this bureaucratese escape from Parker’s lips. And why is that? Because it sounds just like kaffir, a word not much heard on the streets of Houston but which has a wide variety of meanings in other cultures, including its use as a slur against blacks in South Africa and Jamaica.

“In short, it’s similar to the N-word,” Carey helpfully explained.

We can only assume he means “nitwit.”

“It’s just too close to a mean and hateful term, according to Johnson,” Carey further explained.

Johnson has “fired off” a memo to the controller asking that she refrain from using the acronym. In public and private.

According to Carey, a spokesperson for Parker said she was too busy to comment on the matter.

As we hope she’ll remain.