Wait, Wait ... Please Tell Us!

The Autobiography of an Execution, the new book by University of Houston law professor David Dow, received a light going-over by Dahlia Lithwick in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. It was an odd review. Lithwick, who reports on the Supreme Court and legal issues for Slate, appears to share Dow’s anti-death penalty views. And she seems to like Dow himself, at least at a critical remove, especially what she deems to be his regular-guyness. Not only, reports Lithwick (a graduate of Yale and Stanford Law), is Dow “a far cry from a shouting lunatic,” he’s also

... the farthest thing from a bleeding-heart abolitionist. He has a pickup truck, a taste for bourbon and a dog.

He’s got a dog? Damn, he’s a regular redneck!

And:

You’ll find Dow at least three stops past the Clint Eastwood mile marker on the Flinty Guy Highway. He is so bare-bones he won’t even use quotation marks.

Lithwick also seems to like Dow’s book, or the idea of Dow’s book, but there’s something about it that left her obviously uneasy, a matter to which she devoted the lower one-third of her review. Other reviews also have mentioned this rather large problem, although we’ve seen none that addressed it with anything near Lithwick’s intellectual honesty, so we’ll quote her at length here, despite the lapse in taste and tone at the conclusion of the passage:

Nobody but Dow could have told Dow’s story. The problem is, he cannot fully tell it either. As he explains in an author’s note at the start of the book, the demands of ­attorney-client confidentiality have forced him to use pseudonyms, attribute procedural details of certain cases to other cases, and alter the timing of some events, though he insists that the “basic chronology” is correct — and that he never changed the facts of the crimes. His publisher appends a letter explaining why this was done and a memorandum from an ethics professor explaining the legal basis for this choice. Whatever the legal issues, the result is a book that is less an autobiography of an execution than a powerful collage of the life of a death penalty lawyer.

In describing the fraught relationship between law and truth, Dow laments the fact that when it comes to the law, “the facts matter, but the story matters more.” But having created a brilliant, heart-rending book that can’t be properly fact-checked, Dow almost seems to have joined the ranks of people who will privilege emotion over detail, and narrative over precision.

For those who already oppose the death penalty, Dow’s book provides searing confirmation of what they already know to be true: the capital system is biased, reckless and inhuman. But had a prosecutor written a book arguing that the machinery of death is fantastic, just trust him, Dow himself would weep for strict adherence to facts, however ungainly. We’ve seen too many books lately suggesting that facts and sourcing matter little. It isn’t a trend to which lawyers should contribute.

Perhaps Dow just doesn’t care. He describes the impotence of witnessing the last breath of an innocent client: “I stood there. I was idle. I was a man making phone calls, a wordsmith, a debater, an analyst.” His book — not quite fact but not quite fiction — may be another lifeline back from a kind of helplessness that is its own death chamber.*

Hmm. Not quite fact but not quite fiction. "Faction," perhaps? This refusal to actually name names, as they used to say in the newspaper business, strikes us as a very peculiar conceit coming from a vigorous anti-death penalty advocate, even one who eschews quotation marks, since one of the objections raised to executions and by the defense bar in general is the elusiveness of witnesses’ memory and the (yes, proven) sometimes unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Not to mention the roundhouse accusation that politically pressed prosecutors ignore inconvenient facts and construct false narratives to assign guilt to a seemingly randomly selected capital defendants. (We’re not saying that’s outside the realm of possibility.)

You would presume that Dow has written his book to influence, or at least be considered in, the never-receding debate over capital punishment, despite the portion––and Lithwick suggests it’s a too-sizable one––the author devotes to chronicling T-ball with his 6-year-old son and recording how much bourbon and steak and how many cigars he's consumed. (We haven’t read the book, so we’re relying on Lithwick here.) But if there’s no possibility of fact-checking by an opponent, or even a reviewer, or any third party, what’s the point in the first place, other than the pursuit of self-glorification on the Flinty Guy Highway?

So readers must take The Autobiography of an Execution on faith. They should be cautioned, however, that at least a few of Dow’s “facts,” when tested in an adversarial proceeding by a much more seasoned and equally vigorous advocate, did not fully hold up.

*Ugh.

The Aloysius Chronicles, Part V: In Which We Catch the Doofus Houston Councilman from Pearland in Another String of, Um, Fabrications, All Documented.

Please read closely, for context and meaning, in case the State Board of Education one day mandates that Texas schoolchildren study the inspiring story of Aloysius D. Hoang:

More from the public record regarding the new city councilman from District F, Al Hoang, a man of many names and many addresses, who, as reported here back on Dec. 13, was not even eligible to vote in the district he now “represents” until Oct. 16, less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 general election, in which Hoang advanced to a runoff that he won on Dec. 12. Here’s how Hoang, who now claims to reside in a dwelling at 4403 Bugle in District F (which he acquired in March 2009 from a person who was listed as a campaign staffer) tried to explain away this nagging fact to the Houston Chronicle in a story published on Dec. 28:

In his e-mail [to the Chronicle] Monday, [Hoang] said he sent the Harris County voter registrar a form with his new address in May 2008 and went to the office in person to change it after learning his prior address, in Council District G, was still listed as his voting address.

“Maybe it got lost in the mail,” Hoang said.

Maybe it got lost in the mail. That appears to be the Hoang M.O.––blame somebody else when you get ensnared in your own tangled web of deceit. In this case, Hoang would be blaming either the U.S. Postal Service--a screw-up by that entity is certainly not out of the realm of possibility––or, should the mail service have come through, the office of the Harris County tax assessor-collector, which we believe is rated much higher in competence and customer satisfaction than the post office.

But neither is actually to blame, because on this matter Al Hoang is lying, if we could be so blunt. Hoang did indeed apply to change his voter-registration address in May 2008, but the application did not get lost in the mail. As you can see here, records of the Harris County Tax Office show that in May 2008 Hoang switched his registration address to 10001 Westpark, Apt. 83, in city council District G, where he remained registered to vote until he finally got around to changing it to 4403 Bugle, deep into his campaign and just before the election. Prior to this 2008 switch, Hoang’s voting-purpose address was 9527 Almeda Bent Ct. in Houston. At the time he was registered to vote there, he also was a homestead-exmeption-claiming owner of record of a home at 2702 Sunfish in Pearland in Brazoria County. The switch in voter-registration address in May 2008 came after Hoang lost a March 4 Republican primary race for a Harris County district judgeship* (at a time he was a homestead-exemption-claiming homeowner in Brazoria County, etc.). Hoang transferred full ownership of the Pearland home to his wife on March 5, 2008.

Hoang was also a homestead-exemption-claiming Brazoria County homeowner of record when he ran for and lost a race for an at-large Houston City Council position in 2003. On his campaign finance reports for that effort––which, curiously, did list dates for his contributions and expenditures, unlike his 2009 reports––he claimed an address of 1900 North Loop West #500, a businesss address of Hoang’s.**

So how did Hoang “learn” that he was still registered in District G when he was running for the Distrct F seat? We can’t say definitively, but he question of Hoang’s residency was already being raised when he applied for the change on Sept. 16, 2009. In fact, on Sept. 28 another candidate in the District F race, Robert Kane, filed a complaint with the city’s Chapter 18 Ethics Committee (not the council’s Ethics Committee) challenging the residency bona fides of Hoang, Hoang’s fellow campaign-finance scofflaw Khalid Khan, and another candidate, Joe Chow (whom Kane later removed from his complaint after Chow made a correction in appraisal district property records). As shown here, the Ethics Committee did not rule on the merits of Kane’s complaint but concluded on Oct. 29 that it was "without jurisdiction” to consider his claims and that “the City Council shall be the judge of the elections and qualifications of council members.”

We're pretty confident that neither of the city's ethics committees would be moved to do much about Hoang should someone complain at this late date (after all, the voters in District F--the people, yes!--have spoken, few as they were). However, as noted on the applications we all must complete and sign to take part in the democratic process, it is perjruy under both federal and state law to procure voter registration by giving false information. So if some eager young assistant district attorney or assistant U.S. attorney is looking for the easily-removable scalp of an elected official, we’d say: Look no further than City Councilman Aloysius D. Hoang!

*Not only did Hoang illegally seek this position, he also got in trouble with the Texas Ethics Commission for failing to file timely campaign finance reports. He was assessed a $500 fine for missing the report due Feb. 4, 2008, although the commission staff recommended waiver of that penalty, and another $1,500 for missing the report due on Feb. 25, a penalty reduced to $600 by recommendation of the oh-so-tough staff.

**In between making his illegal bids for Houston city council and a state district judgeship, Hoang dug into is pocket to to contribute $220 to the Republican National Committee on Jan. 26, 2006––using the Pearland address where he actually lived/lives. Despite this show of loyalty to the Republican Party, Hoang did not bother to vote for John McCain in the 2008 general election, or anybody else, according to the sign-in book of Precinct 566, after he went to the trouble of changing his voting address to the condo he owns in City Council District G.

Photo above: Hoang does Sinatra: “Yes, there were times/I’m sure you knew/When I bit off more than I could chew.” Photo ripped off from somewhere on the Internet and used without permission.

Problema Grande, Solución Obvia

The Sunday, January 10 edition of the Houston Chronicle brought front-page, banner-headline news of a “problem” in Our Town. (For some reason we don't care to know, we could find no evidence of this story anywhere on or in the paper's online edition as of 12:30 p..m. Sunday.) As with most “problems” “exposed” by formulaic journalism (that’s the set-‘em-up, knock-‘em-down kind that doesn’t tell you anything new or revealing about particular people with real names and addresses), this problem apparently can only be remedied by greater effort, and increased expenditures of taxpayers’ money, on the part of government.

This particular problem––the problem de jour, if you will––rests on the shocking “news” that many people in Houston, far too many people in fact, do not speak English. This state of affairs “adds burdens to police and public,” as the ungainly banner headline screeched, in a “city of global dialects.” (Dialects? Do they still use dictionaries at newspapers, or is that another archaic tradition that’s fallen victim to budget cuts?) That apparently results in situations in which officers who speak only English rely on “wrecker drivers, bystanders or victims’ children to act as translators if bilingual [read: Spanish-speaking] officers are not available.” This despite a Houston Police Department program that "pays $1.9 million annually in extra pay to 1,046 bilingual-certified officers,” among whose number are “904 officers certified as fluent in Spanish” and an unspecified (by the Chronicle) lot “who can speak Vietnamese, two dialects of Chinese and Korean.” (We’d hazard a guesstimate that the number of the latter two rounds up to about 3 or 4.)

To illustrate the pressing nature of this problem, the Chronicle notes that the Houston school district “has identified about 100 languages spoken in students’ home.” What that means, we suppose, is that the ideal HPD officer would be able to investigate and thwart crime in, oh, about 50 different tongues, although such skills would probably price an applicant far out of the police academy. But such deft linguists certainly would be an improvement over all these dumbass native-English-speaking officers who obviously aren’t cut out for police work due to their monolingualism. Their ineptitude contributes to the following tear-extracting vignettes, and “often,” supposedly:

The lack of bilingual officers often forces victims to recount intimate details of a sexual attack to a neighbor acting as translator for an officer, said one veteran HPD investigator....

Not to sound unfeeling or unsympathetic to crime victims, but isn’t the obvious and most cost-effective “solution” to this “problem” to have people who come to this country, legally or illegally but in either case out of their own free will, get cracking and LEARN SOME GODDAMN ENGLISH?

We suppose that would just be too much to ask.

Small Town, Global Village

From "Mineola Police Report," the Mineola Monitor, Jan. 6 edition:

Dec. 23 - A person reported that they bought an Ipod off the internet and sent their money to China and received some shoes in return. The matter was turned over to the FBI.

Blood’s Thicker than Mud: It’s a Family Affair*

When it comes to Gatesgate—the mock “scandal” that, having persisted long past its acceptable expiration date, is beginning to emit an unhealthy odor—our sympathies, limited as they are, lie with the cop. Unlike in this closer-to-home incident, which, based on the available public record, appears to have been an actual, authentic case of RACIAL PROFILING, one with near-lethal consequences for the profilee, the Cambridge, Mass. officer was not out trolling the streets for innocent black men to arbitrarily stop and hassle but was instead dutifully responding to an emergency call—one in which the race/ethnicity of the allegedly, possibly, but possibly not suspicious "gentlemen" (suspicious, that is, to the neighbor who didn’t recognize her neighbor—goddamn, lady!) was not even clear to the caller.

The best take on L’Affaire Gates has been one we initially saw voiced by none other than Mika Brzezinski, the comely sidekick to cable TV’s Morning Joe (it's probably been articulated elsewhere, we dunno), who suggested that had it been two women at the house in Cambridge the confrontation would ended much differently, or wouldn’t have grown into much of a confrontation at all (to which we’d say: most likely, but of course it depends on which two women you’re talking about). To embellish Brzezinski's theory with further truthiness we’d note that the two men in this manly meeting of the minds—a tall Boston-Irish cop and a short Harvard professor—are doubtless conditioned to being constantly deferred to by other men during the course of a normal day (cue T. Petty’s Won’t Back Down). Still, we must wonder what sort of Harvard professor would tell a cop, “I’ll step outside with your mama,” as the cop claims Henry Louis Gates did. (Answer: One who knew he could get away with it.) It’s a shame that Red Foxx is no longer with us, for many reasons—one of them being that he will not be available to portray Gates in the upcoming straight-to-DVD movie “High Noon on Ware Street.”

Having had some first-hand experience in police-community relations as a young person (a young white person), we know damn well that had we, even at our advanced years, suggested that we’d like to pursue a sexual relationship with a police officer’s mother, we, too, would not have beaten the ride downtown. More than likely we’d find our self face-down on the concrete with a bony knee in our back.

It was, of course, unwise for our president to wade into the matter, and in such seemingly uninformed manner, but as part of his lifelong quest to establish his bona fides as an Authentic Black Man he must occasionally offer up a little something for the brothers and sisters. Still, his gracious recovery the following day—and his manning-up and calling the officer from the department he had accused of acting “stupidly”—was welcome, and of near-perfect pitch. As for those Republicans fanning the noxious odor by calling on Obama to apologize to the cop: Yes, Obama should apologize, right after Bush and Cheney stand up and apologize for Iraq.

*Truism once propounded by Sly and the Family Stone, a multiracial musical combo from the late 1960s that later disintegrated because of the bandleader’s taste for cocaine.

Things We Never Knew … About Sir Allen Stanford and His Sticky Wicket

We’re sorry to admit that the name “R. Allen Stanford” wouldn’t have rung even a faint bell with us before we read this morning’s New York Times, wherein it was reported that a veritable panoply of federal agencies have been eyeballing a Houston-based money management firm and offshore bank operated by the “the flamboyant Texas billionaire.” We’re even sorrier that we hadn’t liquidated our piddling little E-Trade account and turned our life savings over to Mr. Stanford, whose talent for generating Madoff-sized returns for clients apparently aroused the feds’ interest.

According to the Times, which was following a Bloomberg report from earlier this week, the focus of investigations by the SEC, FBI and IRS appears to be how Stanford’s Antigua-based bank "could issue CDs that pay interest rates that are more than twice the national average." These felicitous yields apparently contributed to the good fortune enjoyed by the “well-heeled clients” of the Galleria-headquartered Stanford Financial Services (whose number, Forbes reported last year, include or included golfer Vijay Singh).*

We’ll await the verdict of higher authorities on whether Mr. Stanford has been in violation of banking or securities law or is simply the Unacknowledged Super Genius of the Western Hemisphere, but in the meantime we will state without equivocation that he certainly is an intriguing character, the kind that Our Town has been notoriously lax in producing of late.

As the Times noted, Mr. Stanford presents himself to the world as Sir Allen Stanford, a title bestowed on him by a former Antiguan prime minister. The anglophilia must run deep, as he’s also besotted by cricket, a sport of sorts that we do not believe was seen on the playing fields of Mexia, from whence Stanford hails, or at Baylor, where he was educated, or in the Houston of the 1980s, where he is said to have made his first serious money buying and selling distressed properties in the Oil Bust market. According to his biography on his firm’s Web site, Stanford no longer calls Houston home but resides in St. Croix on the U.S. Virgin Islands and “holds dual citizenship, having become a citizen of Antigua and Barbuda ten years ago.”

This 2003 Wall Street Journal story portrayed Stanford as a large presence on the small island, where magic can happen:

An Antiguan citizen since 1999, Mr. Stanford is underwriting the construction by a Chinese company of a majestic state hospital now mired in a corruption scandal and new executive offices for the government. He is spending undisclosed millions on a cricket stadium, hotel, cinema and restaurant---the Sticky Wicket---on the grounds of the airport.

"I love this place and its people", says Mr. Stanford. That relationship deepened four years ago, he says, when he met a local Catholic priest with wounds in his hands and feet that he believed to be the stigmata of Jesus Christ. As a memento of that life-changing experience, Mr. Stanford carries with him a vial with the congealed fluids drained from the priest's foot.

Where most balk at lending to a bloated and revenue-strapped government with a record of mismanagement and corruption---it hasn't presented audited national accounts to its Parliament in a decade---Mr. Stanford has ponied up about $65 million. In short, says a recent editorial in Mr. Stanford's Antigua Sun, he is that unusual benefactor who has eschewed personal profit to boldly answer John F. Kennedy's famous call: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Mr. Stanford's detractors say the government of Prime Minister Lester Bird has become so indebted to Mr. Stanford over the past 12 years that it is only a matter of time before the two-island nation of 70,000 sees another, less altruistic side of the voluble Texan. "This man has a lien on our whole country," says government opposition party leader Baldwin Spencer.

Although he no longer spends much time in the U.S, Stanford and his firm remain vitally interested in the operations of the U.S. government, according to this 2006 Bloomberg article, and gave generously to two disgraced super heroes known as The Torch and The Hammer:

In the past six years, Stanford Financial and its employees have made more than $2 million in donations to U.S. political candidates and parties, according to the Federal Election Commission and congressional and Internal Revenue Service records. Stanford gives to both Democrats and Republicans. Among its top beneficiaries have been former Senator Robert Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat who left office in 2003 amid ethics allegations, and ... Tom DeLay of Texas, who is resigning from Congress next month after having been indicted in an election-fundraising case, and Bob Ney of Ohio, who's under investigation in the scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Stanford Financial or its employees have contributed to the legal defense funds of the three lawmakers.

DeLay's committees paid for flights on Stanford's jets at least 16 times since 2003, including on Oct. 20, the day the former House majority leader was booked in a Houston courthouse on money-laundering charges ...

Members of the House Caribbean Caucus take annual trips to the region on Stanford's jets. Lawmakers are required to reimburse companies at a first-class commercial rate, which is often a fraction of the actual cost.

Then there’s the old school tie (NYT):

… Stanford has claimed ties to Leland Stanford, the former governor of California who started Stanford University in the 1800s. The university, however, has said there is no genealogical relationship between the two. (See Stanford Daily story)

Finally, we’d be remiss in not pointing out that despite his generosity toward noted global warming skeptic DeLay, Stanford is an environmentalist who, unlike you, has been getting his substantial shit together in advance of Doomsday (Forbes):

Stanford is a bit of a global-warming fanatic, trading information frequently with fellow warming-obsessive Ted Turner. His St. Croix house is built on a hill, the better, he jokes, to protect against rising waters from melting ice caps. Stanford has pledged $100 million for various environmental programs, including a marine sciences research institute in Antigua.

*(Bloomberg reported that Stanford International Bank Ltd., with $8.5 billion in assets and 30,000 clients, claimed returns on investment of between 10.3 and 15.1 percent every year from 1995 through 2008. And: "Stanford’s one-year, $100,000 CD paid 4.5 percent annual yield as of Nov. 28 ... A one-year, $10,000 CD purchased at JP Morgan Chase & Co. would earn 1.5 percent …" Apparently Stanford is not the kind of “bank” that lends money but instead “invests in a mix of equities, metals, currencies and derivatives,” although it claims its CDs are the same kind of instruments in which mopes like us park our money.

More Proof That Many of the Newspaper Industry's Wounds are Self-Inflicted

A month or so back we indulged in a lengthy reminiscence of our salad days at a daily newspaper in a small and comically corrupt town in southwest Louisiana (you remember it, right?), noting in passing that the paper was “swallowed into the Gannett maw” long after our departure.* Since that writing we have learned that the Gannett Corp. has now fully digested the property and shat forth the sparse leavings.

According to this blog item from The Independent, a locally owned alternative weekly in the Hub City (an actual alternative, not a delivery system for sex and restaurant ads), Gannett recently sold the building that had housed the newspaper for decades (the paper is the Opelousas Daily World; for some reason that is now obscure to us we thinly disguised it as the Atakapoulsa Tribune in our earlier posting). The Independent reported that the Daily World’s ad reps are now working out of the Gannett-owned Daily Advertiser down the road in the larger and somewhat more cosmopolitan Hub City, and its remaining employees---one reporter and a photographer---presumably will be stationed at another, less spacious location in Opelousas (that’s ah-pa-LOU-sas for you non-native English speakers).**

One reporter and a photographer! When we worked there three decades ago the paper had four news reporters, two photographers, one features writer, an editor and managing editor and a features-society editor/copy editor (the “society” goings-on there being of the scale to permit part-time copy-editing). It wasn’t the greatest operation going, but it was good place for young journalists to hone their craft and it had a bit of a rep. Founded just before World War II by two locals, it was the first paper in the United States printed on an offset press. During our brief time there it regularly beat out larger papers for awards, and it seemed to do a reasonably adept job of telling citizens what was going on in town (within the usual limits, of course).***

Gannett, which owns five papers in Louisiana, is also squeezing the life out of the aptly named Daily Advertiser, which has been one of the worst newspapers in the English-speaking world for as long as we can remember. Last month Independent reporter Leslie Turk authored a lengthy report detailing how Gannett has “ransacked” the still insanely profitable property to burnish its supposedly lagging bottom line and prop up less profitable papers elsewhere in the chain. Her story opens with a hilarious anecdote: Because the clerk who handled the public notices for the paper had been laid off and no one else in the cut-in-half classifieds department bothered to publish the agenda for the upcoming meeting of the city-parish council, the meeting had to be postponed. That’s damn funny!

Funny-sad, we mean.

Unlike all but a handful of monopoly dailies, however, the Daily Advertiser has actual competition for news and advertisers' dollars: the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, a solid, independently owned paper 50 miles to the west that has three reporters, a photographer and assorted stringers in the Hub City and regularly beats the hometown paper with the local news.

But you get the feeling that no one at the Gannett paper cares much about that side of its paper. While visiting our mother over the holidays we noticed that on two successive days the Advertiser ran banner stories that each had appeared as the main story in the previous day’s Advocate (as if no one would notice). The chain product is now so thin and devoid of news that our mother says she’d drop her subscription but for her pressing need to check the local obituaries.


*When we worked there it was owned by Worrell, a downscale small-paper chain out of Virginia; it then fell for a while into the more refined corporate hands of the New York Times, an arrangement that did not result in a hoped-for improvement in editorial quality.

**Home to slave trader and knife aficionado Jim Bowie before his move west, as well as the timeless Opelousas Sostan and the annual "Yambilee."

***We must share one more story from our tenure: Early one morning Tony Chachere, namesake of the now world-famous line of packaged Cajun spices (and whatnot) and then probably the town's most prominent citizen, was taken into custody for driving his automobile extremely fast the wrong way up a one-way thoroughfare. News of his arrest was displayed prominently on the paper's front page. As we made our rounds of the district attorney's office the next day the head man himself called us over and asked, "What y'all got against Uncle Tony?"

A Few Questions (and Sundry Points) about the Bellaire Police Shooting of Robert Tolan

These come from a sidebar to a comprehensive story headlined “Bellaire police under fire after shooting” by Charlotte Aguilar in the Jan. 7 edition of the weekly Bellaire Examiner. We’ve annotated them a bit and shuffled their order:

1. What was the origin of the stolen vehicle report that led police to Tolan? As we’ve noted, the Examiner’s competitor, the weekly Village News, reported this week that a Bellaire officer “mistyped one numeral” when entering into his laptop the license plate of the Nissan Xtera in which Tolan and a companion were riding. This miscue, according to the Village News, resulted in a “return” showing that the plate was for “a black Nissan that was stolen.” The newspaper offered no attribution for this explanation and characterized the officer’s mistake as “defying the law of probability,” although we believe it just meant to say that the odds against such a coincidence---alleged coincidence---would be extremely high.

2. What was the substantiation procedure for vehicle ownership? It took the Examiner 48 seconds to run the plate and determine it was the Tolans’ SUV on an online data search that requires a log-in and password. See No. 1.

3. Had Tolan and his companion been searched? Did all officers know they were unarmed? Perhaps the most important question of all, if the explanation offered for No. 1 by the Village News turns out to be true and the sequence that led to Tolan and his cousin lying face-down under police gun in the Tolan family driveway actually was triggered by a bizarre 1-in-1000 (or whatever) miscue. It leads to the following question:

4. Why was deadly force used instead of a Taser, which is standard Bellaire police issue? (Maybe they’re a little gun-shy about pulling the Taser because off all the bad publicity, but a Tasering and subsequent hectoring of the cops by Quanell X certainly would have been preferable to the bullet in the liver that Robert Tolan received.)

5. Were police following procedure in how they allegedly handled Mrs. Tolan’s protest about the ownership of the vehicle? To break it down further, why did Sgt. Jeffrey Cotton, who according to police was responding as backup to a call on a stolen vehicle, push Marian Tolan against the family’s garage door after she tried to tell the officers that the residence was the family’s home and the Nissan indeed belonged to her son? We haven’t seen any report of exactly what Mrs. Tolan said or did but wasn’t it apparent to the cops that the woman had emerged from the house, belonged there, and might have had some important information about what was happening in her front yard? (Cotton’s handling of Mrs. Tolan caused Robert Tolan to attempt to rise up from the driveway, leading the officer to fire his gun at least three times, striking Tolan once. In its public statement the Bellaire Police Department described this sequence like this: “An altercation ensued as officers attempted to detain and question these suspects [Tolan and his cousin]."

6. What was the content of the call for backup, and how many officers were at the scene at the time of the shooting?

We have a couple of questions we'd like to add:

7. Were Bellaire police under pressure because of a perceived holiday crime wave in the general area? Both weekly papers carry stories on local crime (as community papers should) and routinely identify suspects by race, a practice that we favor (journalisticaly speaking). In fact, the play story in the Examiner’s Dec. 24 issue was headlined “Be merry but wary: crime on the increase.” The paper reported that “Bellaire recorded three armed robberies last week alone” (it did not identify the suspects in these crimes by race) and quoted Bellaire police community relations officer Joe Quimby saying “crime is definitely up.” Which in a roundabout way brings us to the final question:

8. Was Tolan a victim of racial profiling, as his family and its lawyers claim? More precisely, why, as the Village News reported, did officer J.W. Edwards see fit to employ “a tactic used frequently by police,” that is, checking the plate of Tolan’s vehicle, after he spotted the 23 year old and his cousin leaving a Jack-in-the-box near the Tolan’s family home? From out here in the grandstand it looks bad for Bellaire, but whatever the answer isn’t it likely that a benign form of racial profiling might have worked to the advantage of all concerned? If we may: According to the 2000 Census, there were 131 black residents of Bellaire, or 0.8 percent of the 15,600 or so population (the number probably hasn’t changed much since the Census). We’ll buy you a six-pack if there are more than 25 African-American homeowners in the 90-percent-white city-within-a-city. The Tolans have lived in their house since 1994. Sneer at community policing if you must, but wouldn’t a longtime cop who had patrolled the streets for years and knew the community at least have it in the back of his mind that---oh yeah---a black family lives on this block, and might have taken Mrs. Tolan more seriously (or respectfully)?

Just asking. We await the answers that should be provided by an unbiased entity with subpoena power.

Modern Weaponry

A casual acquaintance has brought to our attention a recent memo from the director of Communities in Schools Houston announcing that the non-profit has launched a project to reward students "who think positively, demonstrate good conduct and improve their grades." Young scholars who comport themselves thusly can get two free "smiley face pins" a week: one for conduct, a second for good grades. But the author of the memo obviously knows that when it comes to today's youth one must be prepared for all eventualities:

If students use the Smiley face as a weapon and poke other students with it the students will be banned from the Smiley face project for a designated period of time based on [the teacher's] judgment.

Banned from the Smiley face project. Next stop: the penitentiary.

No Country for Old Men (Or Women)

A faded flier on a lightpost in southwest Houston. Note the very detailed description of the suspect, right down to the unkempt facial hair. The object here of course is not to promote or debunk stereotypes, but to catch a bad man who's beating up old people.

A Pre-Emptive Invasion, Based on a False Premise, With No Apparent Exit Strategy

And Greeted With Nearly Unanimous Credulity By a Compliant and Unquestioning Media

Where Have We Heard That Before?

We’ve held our tongue on the state’s raid and dismemberment of the Yearning for Zion Ranch, lest we be accused of endorsing child abuse in a public forum, but we can no longer stand by and jingle the change in our pockets after watching Channel 11’s Friday night coverage of the arrival in Brazoria County of some of the dispossessed-by-the-state-of-Texas FLDS children. For some reason the Belo-owned CBS affiliate thought it was newsworthy to show footage of the children as they were herded off the school buses and hustled into the foster care facility. The filming appeared to have been done from a helicopter hovering directly above the procession at a height of 40 or so feet (we could be off on this, but it was too damn close). Then one of the male anchors, we can’t remember if it was Greg Hurst or the other clown, offered up this unattributed “fact”: “Yeah, y’know, some of these kids had never ridden in a moving vehicle before!”* Now that the Therapeutic State has taken care of that alleged omission in their upbringing, we’re sure it won’t be long before some of these kids will be watching Teletubbies and pestering their foster parents (or whoever they end up with) to buy flat-screen TVs from Wal-Mart.

We’ve been surprised by the lack of sustained outrage, or even skepticism, on the part of politicians, journalists, pastors and other mainstream tastemakers (even, um, bloggers) over what seems to have been an egregious misapplication of police power by the state (of Texas), not to mention a gross violation of the Constitution. One person who been ringing the alarm is James Harrington of the Texas Civil Rights Project, who in in op-ed piece in Wednesday’s Houston Chronicle asked why the state is “so intent” on punishing the FLDS mothers and children (who, barring proof of actual documented child abuse, have a right to be left alone) and suggests the raid and its aftermath “may be a tragedy in the making.” In case you missed it, we’ll quote Harrington at length:

It is becoming increasing apparent that either officials were duped into obtaining a false warrant or obtained a warrant for which they knew there was no reasonable factual basis.

It is also clear the evidence Texas Child Protective Services has so far is slim, to say the least, and even that questionable evidence may have been manufactured.

If there was child abuse, it should be punished — that means the perpetrator and not the mothers and the children. It is the culpable man or men who should be arrested.

Nothing at this time suggests wrongdoing to justify mass separation of all the children from their mothers. Otherwise, all that happens is victimizing innocent children. So far, nothing has come to light that shows any grievous misconduct at the Eldorado ranch. In fact, it now turns out that the one alleged perpetrator has been in Colorado all the time.Yet, CPS convinced the judge that mass genetic testing was necessary and wants to move forward, removing children from their moms.

... One certainly can get the impression the officials may be motivated more by bias against the FLDS people because of their practice of plural marriage and their self-isolation in an enclave. It would not be the first time in American history that majority society has struck out against Mormons or other self-isolating religious groups.

Simply because their beliefs and lifestyle are very different, and maybe even incomprehensible to majority society, is no reason to leverage the law against them. Religious freedom is a cardinal tenet of the First Amendment. It may be hard to swallow for many "mainstream" folks, but it is essential to any pluralist democracy. And so is due process.

Amen. We suspect somebody’s going to be very embarrassed (and liable, too) when this shameful episode finally plays out (but not Greg Hurst!).

*Something we wish we could say---that we'd never ridden in a motorized vehicle.

Words Fail Her (And Us)

We suppose Wednesday’s “no contest” plea by Priscilla Slade (looking strangely like a younger version of Sanford and Son’s Aunt Esther in the daily newspaper’s front page photo of Thursday) brings her saga of taxpayer-funded home makeovers to an unsatisfactory conclusion, but as Official Grammarian-in-Residence of the Greater Houston Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area we remained unsettled by the tortured illogic of the “statement” the former TSU president was forced to deliver in court before she was allowed to, as she put it, “move on with my life to bigger and better things.” It was a strange little ditty that went something like this: "

"I accept responsibility as the president of Texas Southern University with regard to the expenditures described in the indictment as misapplications and not ensuring that Texas Southern University policies were followed. If I had the opportunity to do things differently, I would do so. My thoughts and prayers are with the Texas Southern University family to whom I apologize."

Ordinarily, a person admitting guilt or seeking credit would say she “accept[s] responsibility … for” some deed, not “accept[s] responsibility with regard to” the deed. The deletion of the preposition “for”---and you can bet it was deleted in whatever negotiations led to the parsing of Slade’s statement---also renders the second half of the first compound sentence nearly incomprehensible: “I accept responsibility … with regard to … not ensuring that Texas Southern University policies were followed.” Then check out the way the crimes for which Slade “accepted” responsibility with regard to are described: “the expenditures described in the indictment as misapplications … ” We know that "no contest" is not an admission of guilt, but this "statement" puts Slade about as far from an actual admission of responsibility/guilt/whatever as possible within the confines of the English language.

As we noted previously, that Mike DeGeurin (looking strangely like Prof. Irwin C. Corey in the daily newspaper’s front-page photo) is a hell of a defender. No wonder he and Aunt Esther were grinning so madly.

Teen Columnist Takes a Stand for Teens Everywhere, While Apparently Not Setting Such a Good Example Herself

Taking a break from her jihad against the hapless Chuck Rosenthal & Co. (which is OK as far as it goes, although at this point it’s just making the dead dogs bounce in the rubble), the daily paper’s Lisa Falkenberg this week took up the cause of 17-year-old Jeff Liu of College Station, who has embarked on a campaign to allow 17 year olds to vote in Texas’ party primaries if they will turn 18 in time to participate in the subsequent general election.

We’re certain that Mr. Liu is a smart guy with a high IQ and commendable SATs (has to be---he’s a Chinese kid from College Station!), but we’re afraid he’s pushing a dumb idea. It’s obvious that what this country needs at the moment is a constitutional amendment to raise the minimum age of enfranchisement to at least 35, if not 40, and we’re not so sure that a non-discriminatory literacy test of some kind---perhaps reciting the multiplication tables to 12, or declaiming a snatch of Longfellow---shouldn’t be required. Maybe the posting of a surety bond, too.

Yet Falkenberg is so geezed on Liu’s idea that she rang up the high schooler’s state rep, Fred Brown, R-College Station, a dunderhead of the first order (middling IQ, unimpressive SATs) who, perhaps caught up in an infectious moment of good feeling with the big-city columnist, said he’d be glad to sponsor legislation fulfilling Mr. Liu’s desire (which, as we didn’t know [middling IQ], is permissible in local- and state-conducted elections, despite the 26th amendment setting 18 as the minimum for participation in federal elections).

We thought it odd that the columnist would be pushing such a change and talking up the glories of enfranchisement because, as we noted earlier and as still seems to be the case, the name “Lisa Falkenberg” is nowhere to be found on the voter rolls of Harris County (the two clearly female Falkenbergs listed as registered both live in heavily Republican redoubts---place where we’d bet the columnist has never ventured---and neither bears the name “Lisa” or a close variation) This of course doesn’t mean she isn’t registered to vote: It’s possible that Lisa Falkenberg is a whatchamacallit, a pseudonym, and she’s actually registered under her real name, or perhaps she maintains her registration in some other county, one where she doesn’t write a twice-weekly column whose sometimes aim is to influence public policy. And if she’s not registered, we’re sure there’s a good reason: Maybe she’s a convicted felon and lost the right, or maybe she’s not a legal resident of the United States (which around here is no barrier to participation in the electoral process), or maybe---and we’re guessing this is the reason---she herself is just 17 (and you know what I mean).

Whatever the case, we can assure both Mr. Liu and Ms. Falkenberg that this representative democracy business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Take us, a longtime voter who on occasion even goes to the polls and may do so in one or the other upcoming party primary, unless we oversleep: Our state senator has not lived in our district for many months (which is OK---we don’t need a state senator except once every two years, if then) and has set his resignation date a ways off so he can anoint a successor, while our state rep seems to be some kind of stone gangster (a Gangster of Love, no doubt). Then there’s our city councilman, who apparently does not live in the city but supposedly has aspirations for citywide office. (Our bottom line on this residency question is this: “If we have to live in this dump, then you do, too, if you would presume to represent us.”)

So we’d suggest that Mr. Liu concern himself with matters more suitable for a 17 year old---trying to get laid, or trying to get into the Ivy League school of his choice, etc.---and bide his time until it’s his turn to mess up this world.

Mrs. Rosenthal Writes: My Erectile Dysfunction is Nothing but an Insane Inference on Your Part

A new character emerged from the wings over the weekend to briefly command center stage in the ongoing public spectacle of the Chuck Rosenthal Saga, a house with way, way too many mansions for us to fully enumerate in this limited space. It was none other than the previously unvoiced and possibly cuckolded Cindy (Mrs. Chuck) Rosenthal, who took pen in hand to author a very long letter to the Houston Chronicle in which she defended her husband the D.A. against what she claimed were “insane inferences” apparently assembled by the media out of thin air. Mrs. Rosenthal’s handiwork took up a sizable amount of space on the paper’s Saturday op-ed page---a volume of newsprint usually given over only to letters from flacks for trade associations who believe their products have been defamed, or to potential libel plaintiffs (a category that excludes both Mr. and Mrs. Rosenthal)---and it was hard to tell whether the writer’s presumed audience was the general public or the newspaper’s editorial leadership, or whether she was just muttering to herself (which we have been told can be therapeutic).

In case you were up in Lufkin on Saturday and couldn’t find a Chronicle, you can read the letter here---and it’s well worth a minute of your time---but we feel obligated to call attention to two of the choicest excerpts. For some reason Mrs. Rosenthal was moved to take issue with what seemed to us to be the media's fairly straightforward coverage of the $11,000 raise for Rosenthal executive secretary Kerry Stevens, the object of those recently revealed semi-amorous emailings from the district attorney, a raise which he recommended last year (pre- Saga) and which took effect a week or so ago. Mr. Rosenthal has acknowledged carrying on an affair with Ms. Stevens in the 1980s when he was married to an earlier wife, pre-Cindy, but has denied that he and his secretary have of late been conjoining in a manner that would violate the 7th Commandment, despite the intimate tone of his electronic communications to her. Mrs. Rosenthal, a former FBI agent who is, at the very least, the victim of emotional cuckoldry, will brook no suggestion that her husband showed favoritism to the Other Woman. (We previously noted that Stevens’ $78,000 salary did not seem too far out of line for the executive secretary of a big-city D.A., but close to $90,000 … that’s just too much). The very notion, in fact, is “ludicrous,” Mrs. Rosenthal wrote ( meaning, apparently, that the media should have ignored it altogether), and besides

… no one has the right to be upset about my husband's relationship with his secretary but me. I was the party aggrieved — no one else. Not once in any of these sensational inferential stories did anyone complain about the job Chuck did as district attorney for eight years (after all, Teddy Kennedy and Bill Clinton still did their jobs and still do!). It all relates to personal issues, and Chuck and I are dealing with those. Shame on the Chronicle and the tone of the media today, which only want sensational stories and not factually news-related stories.

I told friends that the only way to get Chuck out of the news was to bring Britney Spears to Houston because her life struggle seems to be of more interest to all of the media. But, the fact of the matter is, neither should be newsworthy. People's personal lives are not what newspapers should be about!

You’ve got to admit that it takes a peculiar talent to draw Clinton, Kennedy, and Britney into the Rosenthal orbit.

Then there was this:

… six to eight out of 1,100 to 2,800 e-mails (both numbers have been reported) are "questionable." The media is complaining about six to eight e-mails that Chuck did not originate or draft. What is the deal? I defy anyone at the Chronicle to pull out a pristine hard drive. We all get that junk all of the time. If the Chronicle looked at my hard drive, they would infer I had a serious case of erectile dysfunction! We cannot control what people send us, and, to me, six to eight out of those numbers is pretty darn good! Sometimes I get six to eight bad jokes or chain e-mails in a day! Instead of focusing on the six to eight that are bad, focus on the fact that 2,794 are good!

One thing we can safely infer from Mrs. Rosenthal’s letter is that she definitely does not have a case of erectile dysfunction, serious or mild.

Diversity in Action: A Tale from the Schoolyard

A young gentleman of our acquaintance has eagerly related to us information regarding a recent event at his very diverse (and highly rated) public middle school, a story that he believes deserves wider dissemination. We explained to the lad that while the story did not rise to the level of “news” as it is traditionally defined, it was the kind of “news” in which we have become increasingly interested, and we would do our part if he would “write up” an account. We instructed him to pretend he was a “reporter” and try to stick the “facts” as he witnessed them, without seeming to favor one side or another. This young man has been in the USA for only a couple of years and thus is not fully comfortable with the nuances and complexities of our difficult English language, yet he already possesses a talent for sequencing and chronology that far surpasses those of much older and more experienced native English writers with whom we’ve worked. We present his report here, with only the lightest touch of the editor’s hand, not to embarrass the young man but because … it’s interesting (a lot more interesting than, say, this prattle). The youngster’s title for his story was “The Race War,” a choice that may or may not reflect his mastery of the American art of hype. We cannot vouch for the veracity of all of the particulars, but then again it sounds real true. We have changed a name to protect the innocent:

The war started with a childish arguement during lunch. When this Asian kid said “Asians are the smartest race.” And then this white kid said “hell(x2) no, female dog!” [and] “F***ing Asian.”

Then all these Asian kids started to beat this white kid. Using the Asian martial arts such as Tae Kwon Do, Karate, Kung Fu, etc. And then reinforcements came from the other side of the school. Yelling “White Pride.”

However they didn’t fight they just stared at the fight. The kid who was getting beaten up saw these Mexicans laughing at him and said “D**n Mexican” and then the strongest and biggest kid came and joined the war.

That kid was a bully who was the violentest kid in the whole school (one time he brought a weed and guns to school and went to juvenile detention canter).

He said “Hey kid, I heard that you are talking sh** about Mexicans.” The kid who was getting beaten up literally shook by the time he saw the bully kid coming. When that Mexican kid came Arab kids said “ooh ….,” then the kid who was getting beat up said “shut up you F***ing terrorists.” Then the whole school surrounded the arena. When the teacher noticed that all the kids are gone, he ran to the courtyard and stopped the violent action. He gave 1 little detention to a Japanese kid who hit the pressure points to the white kid and then he gave 3 ISS (in-school suspensions) to all these white kids. That was the end of the Race War of 2007 at [Ambrose Bierce Middle School].

We suggested to the author that there was only one element missing from the story---a quote from Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg---but the boy apparently did not understand our lame attempt at jocularity.

Congo, Meet Oscar

Friday’s New York Times brought news of Congo, a four-legged denizen of the “well-to-do Ivy League town” of Princeton, N.J. One of six German Shepherds who populate the household of Guy and Elizabeth James, Congo last summer mauled a Honduran landscaper named Giovanni Rivera. Four of the Jameses' other pooches joined in the attack on Mr. Rivera (the couple says Congo was provoked when the dog-shy landscaper “became scared of [Congo] and grabbed Mrs. James.”). Mr. Rivera, who “received 65 rabies shots … and spent five days in the hospital after a three-hour operation, according to his lawyer,” has accepted a $250,000 settlement form the Jameses’ insurer. In October, a municipal court judge in Princeton Township “declared Congo vicious and the attack unprovoked.” Having made that determination, the judge had no choice under New Jersey’s “vicious dog” law but to order that Congo be put down.

But hold on---the bell tolls not for Congo, at least not yet. According to Times scribe Sarah Kershaw

State Assemblyman Neil M. Cohen, a Democrat from Union, has introduced legislation, which he calls Congo’s Law, that could spare the life of Congo and other dogs in similar situations by giving judges more discretion in meting out punishment.

And now, thousands of people from Princeton and elsewhere are petitioning the governor for a pardon. (There is precedent for such things in New Jersey.)

And during Congo’s trial …

The Jameses also submitted to the court dozens of letters from character witnesses and others who had come into contact with Congo during his 18-month life.

“I have had the pleasure of knowing Congo over the past two years and feel confident in stating that my relations with him have always been friendly and warm,” wrote one friend of the family.

Nevertheless, and despite the “more than 4,000 telephone calls, letters and e-mail messages on Congo’s behalf” that have deluged Gov. John “Speedy” Corzine’s office, the shepherd passes what could be his final days under a sort of Death Row/House Arrest arrangement while his masters appeal the judge’s decision to a superior court.

This story struck a faint bell, but we couldn’t immediately locate the source of that feeling of déjà vu. Then we remembered: It was just a few days ago that we had learned of a similar outpouring of testimonials on behalf of another Alpha Male who ran into legal trouble, Houston oilman Oscar Wyatt (once semi-famously rendered a soggy, Croce-esque canine cliché by Texas Monthly, or maybe it was Good Housekeeping, which described the old boy as “meaner than a junkyard dog.”) Thanks to the “amazing letters” attesting to the humanitarianism and all-around wonderfulness of the 83-year-old husband of redoubtable socialite Lynn, a U.S. district judge on Tuesday sentenced Oscar to less than the minimum dictated by federal sentencing guidelines for paying kickbacks to the regime of Saddam Hussein in return for oil- purchase concessions. According to the Houston Chronicle, a Wyatt attorney said he couldn't remember another time "when a judge had gone below an agreed-upon sentencing range."

Obviously the testimonials worked much to the favor of Oscar Wyatt, who will probably spend less than a year in prison while poor Congo awaits an uncertain fate in the New Jersey judicial system. Then again, Congo never donated $20,000 to the Houston Police Department after being impressed by an officer who had stopped him for a traffic violation, and thus was unable to secure a letter of recommendation from former part-time Houston mayor and part-time police chief Lee P. Brown.

War in Iraq Affords Opportunity for Another "Local Boy" to Get His Name in the Paper

The Wall Street Journal reported on its front page Thursday that a Houston businessman named Samir Itani is a “key figure” in what appears to be a wide-ranging federal investigation of fraud, kickbacks and price-gouging by contractors supplying food to the U.S. military in Iraq.

Mr. Itani---doesn’t ring a bell, does it?---is described by the WSJ as a Lebanese American who runs privately held American Grocers Inc. According to the Journal, Itani

has worked closely with a pair of Kuwaiti companies that lie at the heart of the U.S. government’s fraud inquiry. American Grocers supplied them with peanut butter and other food items, according to court records and corporate spread sheets. Investigators suspect the goods were overpriced.

The two Kuwaiti companies, Sultan Center and Public Warehousing Co. (the latter being the main contractor for providing food to American troops), appear to be intertwined, the Journal says, with “members of Kuwait’s powerful Sultan merchant family … among the largest stockholders in both.”

Sultan Center acted as middleman in supplying Public Warehousing with pepperoni, calzone, potato wedges and other American products made by Con-Agra Foods and other U.S. firms, which originally shipped the products to American Grocers. It’s unclear why American Grocers couldn’t ship the food directly to Public Warehousing, instead of adding Sultan Center as a middleman.

It’s also unclear why American Grocers was a necessary link in the food chain, at least according to the scenario the FBI has outlined. Itani was indicted in July by a federal grand jury in Houston on 46 counts of conspiracy to defraud the government, an event that rated just five paragraphs in the daily newspaper (Itani appears not to have generated much in the way of publicity prior to his indictment). The indictment alleges that American Grocers gained about $2 million from the false claims. In a lengthy news release following the grand jury action, the FBI summarized one part of the scheme:

Itani allegedly instructed an American Grocers employee to bill [Public Warehousing Co.] for the cost of trucking food products to its warehouse, when in fact American Grocers did not incur such costs. American Grocers directed its suppliers, according to the indictment, to ship products directly to PWC, bypassing American Grocers’ warehouse in the supply chain. At Itani's instruction ... the employee billed PWC for the bogus trucking costs by inserting the costs into invoices that American Grocers presented for payment to PWC. PWC paid the invoices, and pursuant to its government contract, billed the government for the moneys it paid to American Grocers, which included the bogus trucking costs. The government then reimbursed PWC for the bogus trucking costs PWC paid to American Grocers.

Peanut butter, calzone, Houston warehouse, fraudulent invoices, Sultan merchant family ... war in Iraq. Yes, we've lost our appetite now.*

*An indictment, of course, is not a finding of guilt. (Hey, we really believe that!)

Priscilla Slade is Still a Thief of the Public Purse, No Matter What a Jury of Her Peers Says

We saw that Priscilla Slade was thanking God for answering her prayers and hanging up the jury in the former TSU president’s trial for “misapplying” more than $500,000 in public funds.

If that’s so, and God was actually moved to deadlock the jury on Slade's behalf, then we again must conclude that God is one colossal ass.

When we were first informed of the judge’s declaration of a mistrial, but before we had sampled any media reports on his decision, we idlely wondered whether the jury had been hung along racial lines---whether black jurors had had pulled a nullification gambit, a la O.J. Then we saw a group of five or six jurors at a post-trial sidewalk news conference on Channel 13, all white except for one, and thought, “Shame on us for being such a cynical honky SOB!”

But we obviously weren’t alone in the thought, and the Chronicle undertook to address and apparently put to rest that very question---belatedly, but better late than never---in its Sunday follow-up, wherein the newspaper reported that just three of the 12 jurors were black and that the foreman and another white juror “emphatically said that neither race nor gender” were factors in the 6-6 deadlock.

Ok, we believe ’em, but we gotta have an answer. The seemingly popular notion that running up a $100,000 tab at Scott Gertner’s SkyBar and Grille is just the normal run of taxpayer-funded entertainment expenses for university presidents is flat bullshit.

So our suspicious mind next settled on the jury foreman, a white guy who’s a tax attorney. He’s been pretty accessible to the media since the mistrial was declared, and while we haven’t seen that he’s specifically revealed how he was leaning, he did speak disparagingly of the prosecution’s efforts---“They just didn’t get to the heart of the case”---and said that TSU needs someone like Slade “so they can get the right things done.”

Our question is: How did a tax attorney get on the jury? Or more to the point: How did the prosecution let a tax attorney get on the jury? Think about what a tax attorney does. We must agree with a former assistant county D.A. named Ricky Raven, quoted in a sidebar story in Saturday’s Chronicle saying “the battle in the courtroom is won and lost in jury selection.” Raven allowed that Slade attorney Mike DeGeurin “masterfully picks jurors … which may have won an advantage in Slade’s case.” Yes, quite often it’s all over when the jury is seated---the ability to read would-be jurors’ predispositions, proclivities and (most importantly) prejudices is the reason that Joe Jamail is today one of the state’s richest humans---and we’ve always thought the younger DeGeurin stood far out from the throng of blustering, sawed-off defense attorneys tottering around town in their cowboy boots with the 3-inch heels. He’s the guy we’ll call if we ever get caught spending $100,000 of taxpayers’ money on home furnishings.

This was a point made by two old black guys---both consummate barbershop bullshitters---whom we overheard discussing the case as we were dressing after a “workout” Saturday at our Y. One guy noted that “she didn’t do anything they all do,” meaning other university presidents, and he proceeded to click off the name of every local institute of higher learning----“Rice, U.H., Houston Baptist …”, except possibly for DeVry Business College, where he believed expenditures of the epic Slade scale were routinely incurred by university presidents in the pursuit of … well, being university presidents. The lockerroom dialogue between these two unclothed gentlemen rambled around on this point for a while until the pair came to a mutual agreement that Slade, whatever the merits of the state’s case, managed to slip free because she could afford to hire an exceptionally talented lawyer. "It's too bad if you're poor," said one before the conversation veered into a near reverential appreciation of Marvin Zindler.

Yep, it’s like our granddaddy always said: It’s nice to have God on your side, but it’s better to have a good lawyer.

Wherever Injustice Rears Its Head, City Councilman Jarvis Johnson Will Be There to Loose His Terrible Swift Sword, Or at Least to Write an Op-Ed Piece

City Councilman Jarvis Johnson, who when last we noticed him was pitching on behalf of a no-bid contract extension for an airport concessionaire, and previous to that was knee-deep in December's raging CAFR controversy (you remember it, do you not?), was accorded 14 or so inches* on the opinion page of Friday’s Houston Chronicle to explain why he motored over to Jena for Thursday’s big march. We’re not sure that anybody asked for or needed a justification from the councilman, or even noticed him there among the estimated 10,000 (according to the New York Times) or “tens of thousands” (according to lefty Amy Goodman of radio’s Democracy Now!) of protestors who took to the streets (street?) of the Louisiana town.

But there it is, as they say.

The councilman, of course, was way too young for Selma and Montgomery or even the Herman Short-TSU riot, so it’s understandable that he’d be moved by the opportunity to make his bones as a front-line combatant against injustice. And right here, lest we find our humble blog being linked by David Duke’s Web site, we’d like to stipulate into the record that we do believe there was an injustice committed in LaSalle Parish and that the prosecution of the “Jena Six” has been way out of proportion to the crime. Alleged crime.

Yes, there is an allegation of a “crime” at the back of all this, and while it may have been only one small crime in a string of crimes large and small dating back to the beginnings of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, somebody got hurt. There’s a lot of murk in the entire story---here’s a quick summation by Meagan McArdle---but there doesn’t seem to be any question that the six black boys stomped a white boy’s ass, and if you get knocked unconscious in a brawl, or somehow “fall” into unconsciousness, as has been suggested, then you have indeed suffered an illegal ass-kicking, whether or not you’re up and about three hours later, as the victim is said to have been. But the councilman, who’s quick to invoke the Scottsboro Boys and Jim Crow, gives the crime the following passing mention:

… a schoolyard brawl ensued as a direct result of several white students hanging nooses on a tree that certain whites assumed was reserved for Whites Only…**

A schoolyard brawl … and that’s it. The crime is just an inconvenient fact that doesn’t fit Johnson’s assumed narrative, which seems to be that this one episode in a backwards and out-of-the-way burg*** somehow means the entire nation is a seething cauldron of double standards and racist motive.

Most of the information we’ve gleaned on the story has come from listening to Goodman’s show on KPFT-FM, 90.1. Goodman’s been on the story for months (by contrast, our local daily newspaper, the largest daily newspaper in the region, belatedly decided to parachute a reporter in for some undistinguished wire service-style reportage on the protest) and despite her biases has been talking to all comers and occasionally wandered into the realm of even-handedness. Today we heard her interview the mother of the white schoolboy victim, a manager at the local Super Wal-Mart, who asked whether the protestors believed the Jena 6 should escape any punishment at all for the beating of her son. This is a good question (although we personally think the kid who’s already done 10 months while appealing his conviction has done more than enough time). It’s a question that possibly Councilman Johnson could answer in his next op-ed contribution.

In the meantime, we must agree with the councilman’s explanation for his trip to Jena:

Some might say a Houston City Council member has no business meddling in the affairs of an issue in Central Louisiana. I beg to differ, because if an injustice can happen in Central Louisiana, it can also happen in Northeast Houston in District B.

Yes, it sure can. It can happen anywhere. It can even happen in Durham, N.C.


* Rough estimate.

**The nooses and the Honky Tree are the sort of phenomena that give us pause whenever we start fantasizing about moving away to enjoy our old age in a quiet little town.

***We attribute some of our own interest in this story to our having once worked with a girl from Jena who told wickedly funny stories about the place (she was a female Junior Samples), most of which we cannot repeat on a family blog.

Project Row Houses: Not On Our Holiday Itinerary

We finally contracted the Christmas spirit, at least enough to get us up and about and putting our dollars in circulation. This spending and buying made us happy, and we vowed to let nothing shatter the illusion---not the cloud ceiling that seems to have been hanging just above our eyes for days, or the asshole-to-elbow traffic, or the stark realization that almost everyone we saw in a particular crowded commercial establishment was engaged in conversation on his or her cell phone.

Then we slipped up and read an editorial in the Houston Chronicle. Our Christmas cheer vanished.

The work in question was another in the editorial writers’ attempts to foist cultural enlightenment on readers, this time through the suggestion that this season would be an especially good time for outlanders to visit the Project Row Houses thing-a-ma-bob in the Third Ward. The suggestion was occasioned by the news earlier this month that “Third Ward, and the whole city, got an early Christmas gift” (we’re not the only hack working a tortured Christmas angle) when the Houston City Council approved a $975,000 "zero interest performance-based loan" to the non-profit Project Row Houses for the addition of 16 low-income rental units.

As the editorial explained, quoting a city housing official, a no-interest performance-based loan requires no repayment “if the nonprofits who [sic] get them care for their properties and use them as expected.”

So “gift” certainly is the correct terminology here.

The editorial came hard on the heels of a very approving profile of Project Row Houses in the Sunday New York Times, which called it possibly “the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country" and was generous in its depiction of Rick Lowe, the “lanky, amiable, remarkably youthful-looking 45-year-old artist” who founded the project.

Now we don’t have enough personal knowledge of Project Row Houses to judge whether it’s good, bad or indifferent. We probably should just assume, based on all the laudatory media coverage it’s received over the past decade or so, that Project Row Houses’ melding of “art” and neighborhood revitalization is as wonderful as advertised.

It all comes cloaked in a rhetorical finery that makes it almost impossible to question, anyway, without sounding like a mean-spirited crank.

Except … we know from long experience that when any person or institution gets the uniformly favorable and unquestioning treatment from the media---especially in Houston---he, she or it is nowhere near all that he, she or it is cracked up to be. This is an iron-clad rule, to which there are no exceptions. (We’d cite Enron as Exhibit A, but, hell, that’s ancient history.)

And somehow, in its giddy celebration of Project Row Houses’ big score at City Hall, the Chronicle failed to note a somewhat discouraging word about the project that was buried back in the newspaper a month ago. That was the “news” that Project Row House’s longtime financial director, Lajuanda Malone, had pleaded guilty to felony theft of more than $200,000 from the nonprofit and was tagged, as the paper put it in an uncharacteristically raffish turn of phrase, with “10 years in the state penitentiary” (is there not more than one?).

This was a very odd story. It appeared more than a month after Ms. Malone copped her plea---thus qualifying it not as “news” but as “olds,” as the jesters at blogHouston call such late-breaking items---and it was tamped back in the “Arts” page of the paper’s Sunday Zest section. Furthermore, as they say in law school, it was written not by a real reporter but by the paper’s art critic, in an unusual style that wouldn’t pass muster in a high-school journalism class. The story did offer some juicy bits that were screaming for a fleshing-out:

Prosecutor Lester Blizzard, chief of major fraud division in the District Attorney's office, said the actual amount was closer to $300,000, taken over a period of about five years. Malone was issued a credit card in Project Row Houses' name, Blizzard said.

"She proceeded to run up personal expenses for luxury items, things like vacations and tickets to (San Antonio) Spurs games.

(We notice that Malone is still listed as financial administrator on the Project Row Houses’ Web site, along with a link to her email address.)

We can only assume that this story was previously broken or covered by other media and the Chronicle was playing catch-up and burying the story. Otherwise, there’d be no excuse for it not to be on page one.

“Closer to $300,000” is a major theft and breach of the public trust, particularly for a non-profit that, according to its IRS filings, took in revenue of between $1.07 million and $925,000 annually from 2001 through 2003.

The New York Times reporter did take note of the unfortunate incident, sort of, in this chummy aside:

I said I had read that a woman, a former finance administrator for Project Row Houses, recently pleaded guilty to stealing more than $200,000 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. [A former Project Row Houses resident] paused, then said: “I remember a different woman taking something when she left. We were creating a set of value systems, a community, and sometimes people take from their community anyway. The amazing thing was that Rick never got mad. I would say, ‘It’s so wrong!’ And he just said, ‘Yeah, it happens; that’s part of working with people.’ ”

Now we wonder what happened with that “different woman.” And whether there was any discussion by city council of Lajuanda Malone’s theft and the apparent lack of oversight at Project Row Houses before the terms of this “loan” were approved (surely there was, and we just were not apprised of it).

What really got us about this story was the non-explanation offered by the apparently not-so-amiable Lowe, who told the Chronicle’s compliant art critic:

"It's a legal matter, and I'm not going to discuss it … We have a new executive director and new leadership. (This issue) is behind us. We are moving and rolling and in good shape."

Yeah, man, you’re an artist, a visionary. You can’t be bothered with explaining a serious theft from a non-profit that subsists on the kindness of taxpayers and charitable foundations.

That’s for suckers.