Late-Breaking Pre-Primary Non-News (With Hyphens!)

Non-news from nowhere, and points in between:

We recently went on at length regarding the re-rematch between state Rep. Al Edwards and challenger Borris Miles and noted that should we shrug our spindly shoulders and participate in the Democratic primary––as a nominal Democrat/committed independent it will depend solely on how we feel upon awakening tomorrow, most likely at 5:30 or thereabouts*––we would probably cast our lot with our new Facebook pal, Rep.-for-Life Edwards. Since that writing, we have moved–––or, more passively, been moved––from the “leaning somewhat” to Rep. Al to the “leaning strongly” to Rep. Al column. This oh-so-subtle shift occurred after we realized that almost everybody who’s anybody is against the Rev. Al (or, more positively, for his opponent, Borris the Third Ward Insurance Magnate). And when we say "everybody" we mean everybody from Mayor Annise Parker to the Houston Chronicle editorial board to what appears to be the entire labor-liberal Democratic Party establishment to a veritable host of Borris-believing lions and lionesses of Judah who've lent their names and faces to the pro-Borris propaganda (it's all phony,* BTW, as some Jewish bard from northern Minnesota once sang) that's been cluttering our mailbox (under the apparent and possibly proven assumption that a goodly number of white Democratic primary voters in District 146 are/will be Jews, although an endorsement by the publisher of the Jewish Herald Voice means bupkis to us, and we doubt it means a while lot to the two Jewish households on our block, but whadda we know). Yeah, we're sticking with Rep.-Rev. Al DESPITE the franked mailing we received from his legislative office last week touting a $5.7 million grant to the city from Rick Perry's Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs to help Houston's homeless "transition" to rental housing and "access services designed to enhance self-sufficiency ..." (In fairness to the Rev.-Rep. Al, he has sent us previous mailings from his legislative office, although these were mostly end-of-the-legislative-session wrap-ups that we found generally informative.)

On Sunday we received a warm and engaging personal call from Anthony Hall, the former city councilman, Metro chairman, city attorney and mayoral assistant, on behalf of his daughter, Ursula Hall, who's pursuing the Democratic nomination for a civil-court judgeship in the party primary. Hall's delivery was so slow and precisely enunciated that for a moment we thought he might be live on our telephone machine, but after we interjected an "Anthony?" and a "Hey, Anthony, are you there?" we deduced that the call was recorded, or else Hall has become extremely hard of hearing. In either case, there's nothing like an endorsement from your father to sway voters (and it probably will in the Democratic primary, given the elder Hall's party credentials). Ursula Hall's legal experience––or lack thereof––was the subject of a pretty decent recent offering from the Chronicle's Teen Columnist, who followed up with an equally interesting piece on the primary endorsements of inexperienced district criminal-court contenders by the lordly Coalition of Harris County Elected Democrats (perhaps motherhood has had a maturing effect on the young columnist, although, possibly because the subjects of her explorations were Democrats, she couldn't fully bring the hammer down to squarely nail it, y'understand). We're not wholly convinced that a criminal court judge needs past experience in the criminal courts any more than we believe that a daily newspaper columnist needs past experience as a daily newspaper columnist, but we suppose it couldn't hurt in either profession.

So do we have any predictions on Tuesday's primaries? Nah––all the polls and predictions seem about right to us, most especially this one from Prof 13, aka the Bob Lanier Professor of Public Policy at the University Houston, who based on the early-voting turnout for the GOP primary has the intra-party gubernatorial race a little tighter than other pollster/forecasters/all-knowing seers, with Mofo Perry at 44 percent, K.B. "Maybe You Like Us Both" Hutchison at 37 and D. "I Transcend All Attempts at Semi-Clever Nickname-ry" Medina at 19. On the D side, he guesstimates it as 65 percent for White, 18 for Shami and "others"--there are five such no-names––at 17 percent. Let us be the first, or possibly the 301st, to say that if somehow White gets below 60 percent and/or Shami cracks 25 percent, White loses. (God forbid he's forced into a runoff.) White needs to run up the score, like the Yates High basketball team. We think either of these possibilities is unlikely, but that's why we hold elections (in addition to picking our elected officials, etc.).

*If it's dark, rainy and gloomy outside we may give into our Burkean impulses and vote in the GOP election.
**And we don't mean just the Borris Miles propaganda.

Smucker (Rhymes with Pucker) for Guv

Ordinarily we assign no value whatsoever to pronouncements by "political consultants," be they Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or Rosicrucian. We've found, based on extensive past experience, that any utterance issued for public consumption by a hired-gun political type has only the most tenuous relation to the truth, or even thruthiness. However, the tart observations regarding hometown Dem gubernatorial contender Bill White that gut-punching, 'nad-slapping GOP consultant Allen Blakemore provided the Houston Chronicle's Joe Holley (or so Holley reported––we were not a party to the alleged conversation) certainly had the tang of truth, or truthiness, delivered, as they were, in the spirit of fun and bitter partisanship:

In addition to questioning White's business acumen, Blakemore wondered whether his mayoral persona — a wonkish guy with ears and hair made for radio — will effectively translate to a race for governor. “His schtick became, ‘I absolutely, positively couldn't be a politician and speak as poorly and to present as poorly as I do.' It's the old, ‘with a name like Smucker's, it's got to be good' routine.”

A mayor, Blakemore contends, can get away with portraying himself as a colorless, competent technocrat. It's harder, he says, for a statewide candidate in Texas, where the relatively weak office of governor is about symbol as much as substance.

This is pretty much in accord with our own trenchant insta-analysis, delivered in the spirit of fun, hard science and non-partisanship following the one and only televised debate between White and some foreign-sounding guy who definitely lacked Rick Perry's easy "Adios, mofo" insouciance. This synchronicity is most likely a case of weak minds thinking alike, or recognizing the painfully obvious.

Holley's story also touched, glancingly, on a matter we've long suspected would be raised when (not if) White sought statewide office, one that we don't remember getting a whole lot of traction when he first ran for mayor, although we were temporarily retired from the punditry and blogging game at the time ("blogunditry") and not paying full attention:

White's Republican opponent also will try to portray him as a less-than-successful businessman in years past. It's a tack his Democratic primary opponent, Houston hair-products magnate Farouk Shami, has attempted, charging that White's initial business venture, Frontera Resources, exploited contacts he made in the Energy Department to seek oil and gas opportunities in the former Soviet Union. His Republican opponent likely will make much of the fact that Frontera lost its assets in Azerbaijan after defaulting on a loan and that the company reported $23.8 million in losses in its two most recent quarters.

We did notice that White, whose primary pre-mayoral vocation was that of "trial lawyer," was quite insistent during this week's debate when plumping his business credentials, suggesting that he and his have been practicing a detailed line of rebuttal to that expected attack.

Despite these potential vulnerabilities, White remains a viable, highly marketable alternative to Mofo Perry, not having (at least thus far) gone out of his way to alienate the state's largest bloc of voters or questioned whether the U.S. government had a hand in 9/11.

So he's got that going for him.

Shami + White = Sleepy Time (With Mexican Sunshine!)

The lone televised Bill White-Farouk Shami debate before the Democratic gubernatorial primary*––an event watched by perhaps dozens of voters across Texas––was a major snooze-inducing disappointment, primarily because Shami failed to say anything really off-the-wall or lay down some of the gratuitous nastiness he'd been laying down when out of White's earshot. Of course, we're not 100-percent positive Shami didn't say anything truly outrageous, because, frankly, we had a difficult time understanding a lot of what the native of the West Bank (not of the Brazos) said.** In fact, we were hoping that White, after Shami had reeled off a long, winding, half-sensical ask-your-opponent-a-question query,*** which had something to do with "butadiene" and "benzene" (or, maybe, "Benzedrine"), was going to pause for a beat and reply, "Would you repeat the question?" Now that would have been nasty!

But that was not to be, because White was there not so much to debate Shami as to tune-up for his expected main bout with Rick Perry. Shami, however, was not a worthy sparring partner. White even seized on the relative sedateness of the hour-long (seemed like two,) encounter when he asked voters to note that he and the well-coiffed hair-care products manufacturer had "treated each other with respect"--not like those impolite Republicans who were "shouting" over one another and throwing gang signs, etc., during their debates.

We did not keep a scorecard, because this wasn't really a sporting encounter worthy of scoring, but we must offer the following observations, annotated by the cold light of morning:

1. White seemed up-tight and bit constricted in the early going, wearing a strained grin that he couldn't seem to wipe off until one or two questions in. He settled down later, but somehow he needs to project his sittin'-'round-the-council horseshoe persona. Otherwise, he just won't show when he debates Sr. Perry, the unacknowledged promotional genius of Texas politics.

2. Shami needs to learn how to pronounce "moratorium," especially since he's calling for one on executions. White wisely rejected that notion out-of-hand, knowing full well that no one's getting elected governor of Texas by promoting a stay on the death house action. The ex-mayor, who we suppose did not have to add that he's against executing the innocent, also set forth a rather stout defense of the current criminal justice system, which he described as "for the most part" just (or something close to that--our notes are squinchy and hard to read). We'd bet this did not sit well with the editor of the Houston Chronicle or his wife or their new favorite author, but it's unlikely to keep White from winning the newspaper's endorsement. It's also the correct position.

3. White also came on like a tough guy on potential voting abuse, declaring that any "non-citizen" caught voting should be "investigated," "indicted" and then "serve time" (Ouch!) ... but, of course, he couldn't bring himself to stray from the party line and endorse the display of a photo I.D. as a requirement for voting. This is why Democrats can't win a statewide election, in case you were wondering.

4. The one indisputable Shami-esque moment came when the hair-care magnate, in answering some question on border control, said––and we believe he was grinning wildly when he did––"Without Mexicans it would be like a day without sunshine." (By which he meant, if we can interpret: "A day without Mexicans--that is, people from Mexico, as opposed to Mexican Americans--is like a day without cheap, easily exploitable labor.") At first we weren't sure we had heard him correctly and scribbled in our notes, "w/o Mex.s=day w/o s-shine????", but according to subsequent news reports our ears had not betrayed us.

5. White will have a difficult go of it facing-off against Perry, who during the Republican debates was affecting a very pronounced Paul Newman-as-Hud swagger and smile. (Unfortunately, K. B. Hutchison is no Patricia Neal, either in the brains or the smouldering, self-possessed sexuality department, so their verbal confrontations lacked the snap of the movie's.). White, meanwhile, seemed to be channeling Arnold Stang, with a Texas accent, during the first few minutes of Monday night's debate.

So you got Hud in a top-down Caddy vs. some smilin' bald guy from Houston. How do you think the odds stand right now?

*The field also includes five other candidates who, as the debate moderator noted, "did not meet the criteria" to participate in the debate, meaning "they aren't rich like Shami and White."

**Unlike some minor local media celebs, we would never mock or belittle someone for the way they talked, because our parents raised us better, but we do believe that communication is one of the key duties of a governor and therefore he or she should have the ability to make himself or herself easily understood.

***Allowing candidates to "question" their opponents during televised debates is a horrible idea that needs to be abandoned immediately, as these question-posings are just another occasion for the candidates to deliver some of their canned ham.

The Nativist

As a senior though uncredentialed member of the Mainstream News and Infotainment Media (that's MNIM, pronounced mmm-nim, for short), we must again bound far ahead of the baying pack to boldly point out that the spectre of nativism has reared its somewhat uncomely head* in the Texas gubernatorial race. Given that this year marks the first time that a Palestinian-American Muslim (or ex-Muslim, depending on audience and day of the week) ex-hairdresser-turned-hair-care-products-manufacturer has sought the seat once held by such worthies as "Ma" Ferguson and G.W. Bush, perhaps it was to be expected that some candidate would rise up to declare that he is more of an "American" than the others. Perhaps not as expected, that candidate is not Deborah Medina (she's just like you, FYI) but is none other than Farouk Shami, the Palestinian-American Muslim (or ex-Muslim, depending on etc.) ex-hairdresser-turned-hair-care-products-manufacturer himself.

We first learned of this semi-revoltin' development from the Jan. 15, 2009 edition of the Indo American News [sic, no apparent hyphen], which we procure on a weekly basis while on culinary business in Our Town's newly designated Mahatma Ghandi District. According to the News' extensive page one coverage, Sr. Shami wrapped himself all up in red, white and blue back on Jan. 8, when he declared, "I am more American than others [and added] It is 'old thinking' versus 'new thinking,' and now is the time to make a difference" [punctuation corrected] while speaking to what the publication described as a "small group of influential Asian leasers--many South Asian––and media." The News did not elaborate on the Shami Man's claim, but fortunately Peggy Fikac of the Chronicle picked up the news-and-infotainment baton on Jan, 24 and reported with a straight face that that El Shami

reaches into his business background to discuss his current quest, including when he speaks against the notion that “one person is more … American than the other” based on whether the person was born here.

I would judge it by who pays more taxes, me or Rick Perry? Me or Bill White? Every year, I pay more than they ever made in their life. … And since I'm paying taxes, I'll be careful spending people's taxes.”

So that's it! Well, step to the front of line, Mr. Alleged Inventor of Amonia-Free Hair Lightener and of course the world-famous CHI Flat Iron. Perhaps only Bill Gates and Warren Buffet outrank the Faroukster when it comes to being a red-blooded American, although it's likely they have better tax accountants. (We should point out that as far as we know, no other gubernatorial candidate has raised the Fikac-ian "notion" that "one person is more ... American than the other," including Shami's fellow Democrat, Bill White––most certainly not Bill White. We also call your attention to the fact that Shami is actually running a seriously nasty slash-and-burn campaign against White [although not on the scale or with the interest-generation of the Hutchsion-vs.-Perry doings, of course], including, according to this straight-faced report from the Dallas Morning News, Shami's in-so-many-words accusation that White is a racist. Now we find it humorously ironic when white Democrats are hoisted on their own affirmative-action and identity-politics petards––ask Chris Bell, D-Houston, about his two rough hoistings––but this allegation is just patently ridiculous, undocumented BS, if you'll pardon our language.)

The unhyphenated Indo American News went on to report that while speaking to these influential Asians (we did not see Aloysius D. Hoang among their photographed number, in case you were wondering) and South Asians, Shami also

... reprimanded Governor Rick Perry for being out of touch with common people, citing his $12 million ranch and his son's lavish wedding in Las Vegas.

His son's lavish wedding in Las Vegas** ... yes, we must conclude that Farouk Shami is a real American boy, as acclimated to the soil as any 6th-generation Texas taxpayer, a regular William Jennings Bryan with a CHI Flat Iron.

*As regular and even semi-regular visitors to this place know, we are not of the opinion that "nativism" is an entirely bad thing, and at any rate consider it a poorly understood and badly misused term, facilely employed by agenda-bearing gum-beaters and fund-raising hacks to discredit those who might simply believe that English should be the sole language of instruction in the public schools––it's an assimilatin' thing––or that immigration is fine and even necessary so long as it's legal and accrues some benefit to those of us already here; said gum-beaters' prejudices having been conditioned by passing and superficial understanding of over-simplified and somewhat discredited Hofstadter-ian notions of American history.

**Which speaks to nothing more than Perry's taste, or lack thereof.

Photo above: Shami Does Brooklyn; photo lifted from some Web site about hair care in Brooklyn and used without permission (so sue me).

Shami Time! (Updated With the Latest)

Like most Texans––you could safely round the percent up to 99.9––we have devoted little of our short span of attention to the gubernatorial candidacy of Farouk Shami. But everything changes, as the venerable Shunryu Suzuki once observed, and so it was that last week, during a pilgrimage of several days to the unusually frigid ancestral hunting grounds in deep East Texas, we were forced to consider, at least in passing, the man who as of this moment could be the best-known Democratic candidate for governor from Houston. From Woodville far north to the near-Arcitc climes of Wood County, from whence we were forced to flee after being apprised of the mercury’s impending drop to 11 degrees F or thereabouts, Shami’s radio commercials––or commercial, as it seemed to be the same one, over and over––were in heavy rotation. As we punched the dial (or whatever it is you do with a digital radio) to and fro, searching for a tune to set our toes a tappin’ and slap a happy-ass smile on our sour and cold-benumbed puss, there seemed to be no escape from that friendly announcer’s voice touting the wonders of the Palestinian hairdresser-turned-manufacturer-of-hair-care-products––even on one of our favorite radio stations in the whole of Texas, which plays nothing but country music, mostly from the 1970s, that originally appealed to white men of our approximate age. Pushing north, heater roaring and radio blasting, singing loudly along to Kiss an Angel Good Morning or some other classic, we rode with Shami. (We usually ride with Jesus, but he had informed us it was too cold for him to make the journey.)

After the 5th or 6th hearing of his commercial, one small matter about the wonders of Shami began to bug us, a little, and that was his claim to have “brought,” past tense, 1,200 jobs to Texas by moving “his factories here from China.” Which naturally gives rise to several questions, at least in our mind: Why were these jobs in China in the first place, Sr. Shami? And have all of these alleged 1,200 jobs actually been filled with paycheck-drawing Texans, as of, say, last week? Does he actually have "thousands" of Texans on his payroll? And does Farouk Systems Inc. still have overseas manufacturing locations, and if so could Shami also bring those back to Texas? These are about the only questions we would have for Shami, should we ever be in a position to interrogate him, because the job-creation bit seems to be the end-all and be-all of his campaign––that and the success one can achieve smoothing-down even the unruliest of locks with the CHI Flat Iron.

Now we know these questions may never be plumbed or even asked, since the Texas political press, such as it is these days, most likely considers Shami a trifling annoyance, a fool and his money rapidly being departed, a mere sideshow to the big Perry-Hutchison Preliminary and the much-anticipated showdown between Bill White and The Winner of Perry-Hutchison Preliminary. That’s understandable. We don’t have to ring up Rice University’s Bob Stein to state the obvious: At the present time, Texans are not disposed to electing a Palestinian-American Muslim ex-hairdresser named Farouk as their governor, even if he promises each and every one of them a lifetime $40,000-a-year job with full benefits manufacturing CHI Keratin Hair Mist. As Shunryu Suzuki might observe, were he alive, things are changing, even in small-town Texas, where the jovial Middle Eastern owner-operator of the gas station-convenience store is now a stock figure, even a beloved character, on the social-commercial landscape. But they’re not changing that fast. Some day Texans may be ready to choose as their governor a Palestinian hair-care products manufacturer, even a gay Palestinian hair-care products manufacturer. But not this day.

However, since Shami is spending so much of his CHI-derived wealth on TV and radio commercials, money that might otherwise be invested in refining new hair-care products or upping the pay and benefits of his supposed 1,200 Texas-based employees, we believe the political press has the obligation to pursue these matters of public interest. At the very least, answers to these questions would provide fodder for Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News to lob an incendiary "gotcha” inquiry at Shami should he, Shami that is, be allowed access to the public airwaves for a debate with the other Democratic gubernatorial candidate from Houston and whoever else is on the primary ballot.

We also hope someone in the political press will clear up a recently arisen question regrading the pronunciation of the candidate’s last name. On his commercials and elsewhere we’ve only heard it pronounced to rhyme with “Mammy!”, as in the Shamwow! Super Shammy® (made in Germany--they make good stuff in Germany!). The other night, though, we saw a Channel 11 report on some big money-back guarantee Shami is about to offer voters (WARNING: REPORT INCLUDES BRIEF APPEARANCE BY RICE UNIVERSITY’S BOB STEIN) and heard Shern-Min Chow, whom we think is a graduate of Yale or some other Ivy League institution, repeatedly pronounce it sha-ME. Now “SHAM-me” is a name Texans can relate to, since so many take a shammy to their pick-ups after a good Turtle-Waxing, but sha-ME sounds too effeminate, even Frenchified, for a Texas governor.

It may be too late for this, but Shami should follow the lead of another Palestinian-Texan trailblazer, perriennial Houston office-seeker Sam Fayed, who changed his name to (something like) “Texas Sam Houston Fayed” for ballot purposes. We like the sound of Farouk “Sam Houston Lamar Tom Landry Earl Campbell Jose Texas” Shami. That should do it.

UPDATE: We learn from today's column by the Chronicle's Rick Casey that Shami has forsaken Islam to embrace all religions, or most all religions, or no religion. Shami has issued a statement. Stand by for further developments.