Who Is Khalid Khan, And why Does He Keep Sending Me These Slick Mailings That He’s NOT Reporting on His Campaign Finance Disclosure?

Yeah: As of Saturday past the postman (or woman––we no longer have a “regular” postal carrier, apparently) has dropped into our mailbox eight (ocho) professionally produced mailings touting the many and variegated wonders of Khalid Khan, candidate for the District F city council seat being vacated by the non-related and term-limited M. J. Khan, who seeks greater glory and a larger paycheck as city controller. That’s more direct mail than we’ve received even from media-mad mayoral candidate Peter Brown. In fact, that’s more mail than we’ve received from all candidates for all city offices, combined, in the current campaign season.

But, as also noted this very day by Greg of Greg’s Opinion, another of the large stable of handsome and talented bloggers who call District F home, Khalid Khan appears not to list any expenditures for printing and postage on the campaign finance report he was was required to submit to the city last week. According to our still-decent but not wholly infallible memory, all but one and possibly two of these mailings arrived before Sept. 24, the cutoff date for reporting on city candidates‘ most recent disclosures. And some landed in our box before Aug. 26, the day that Khan for some reason listed as the starting date for his report (the concluding date is Oct. 24, suggesting KK possesses powers of prognostication that would be invaluable in an elected official, or market analyst), although the latest report required of fund-raising and spending candidates was supposed to cover the July 1-Sept. 24 period.

Khan’s report is a a masterwork in other aspects: He signed an affidavit attesting that he had not received or spent over $20,000, thus allowing him to avoid filing his disclosure electronically, then blithely went on to list a total of $34,010 in contributions (all of KK’s donors appear to be fellow Muslims, which does not faze us in the least, but we’re sure this baleful lack of diversity could be bothersome to some of Our Town’s leading Diversicrats, who of course avoid genuinely diverse areas such Alief or Sharpstown when they’re out and about celebrating their own hearty embrace of diversity). Among the $5,939 in expenses Khan listed for his fanciful reporting period were payments for photography, a Web site, voter data and signage, but nothing to the direct-mail company whose presorted postage-paid stamp his mailings bear. Interestingly––sort of––the address listed for Khan’s designated treasurer, one Ray Cunningham, is the same as that of Khan’s travel agency.

One of Khan’s mailings––they all highlight his 6-point “crime prevention plan”––laughably claims he’s “restoring integrity to District F.” That suggests Mr. Khan possesses not only a sense of humor but a certain sense of noblesse, since, as Greg, titular impresario of Greg’s Opinion, points out, KK doesn’t exactly reside in District F. We had noticed that in his mailings Khan has artfully skirted the issue of residency–-if we remember correctly, it arose four two years back when KK pressed an unsuccessful challenge against incumbent non-resident Councilman M.J. Khan–-by declaring that he’s “proud to call Houston home” and “has made District F his home for business for 22 years.” (Robert Kane, another candidate in the District F race, says he’s filed a complaint with the city’s Ethics Committee challenging whether Khan and two other opponents, Joe Chow and Al Hoang, meet the residency requirement to run for the office. While residency is a legally squishy issue and difficult to enforce [although it really shouldn’t be], Kane has compiled cross-checked documentation suggesting that maybe they shouldn’t be on the ballot.)

Yes, we know: Khalid Khan probably has a better chance of dunking a basketball from a standing position that being elected to the city council, but his blatant disregard of the rules is bothersome, rules being for everyone and all that business. Somebody oughta do something about it ...

No Time for Vegans

Our defining moment of Wednesday’s Exercise in Sustained Bloviation, formally known as Day 2 of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s hearing on “The Mitchell Report: the Illegal Use of Steroids in Baseball,” came after one of the congressional gasbags---we didn’t catch the name, but we presume he’s a Democrat, since he was being extra-mean to Seven-Time Cy Young Award Winner R. Clemens---reeled off a list of “conditions” for which doctors recommend injections of Vitamin B12, the kind that R. says he was administered in the buttocks by ex-pal B. McNamee but which B. on Wednesday denied having ever administered to said buttocks.

The congressman asked R. if he had Alzheimer’s (“No,” replied R. unhesitatingly) or whether he was anemic (“No” again) or whether he was a vegetarian (“No I am not,” said a slightly grinning R., whose backyard barbecues were once the stuff of H-E-B commercials. [Hey, remember the one where he had A. Pettitte over?]) Finally, the honorable cut to the heart of the matter by asking R. if he were a vegan. R. requested that the congressman repeat the question, then a momentary look of confusion crossed the Seven-Time Cy Young Award Winner’s face before he declared---with a touch of pride, or so it sounded to us---“I don’t know what that is.”

Je Suis La Ville, La Ville Est Moi

We had seen the picture of Bill White sporting that pimpolicious Stetson (apparently bequeathed to him by the Red Foxx estate) at his inaugural, and we had read how the mayor quoted the theme song from The Jeffersons to underscore the direction in which Our Town is headed (“on up,” we believe it is). Yet we had no idea what an interesting speech the mayor had delivered until we went to the city’s Web site today looking for a nearby location where we could dump our Christmas tree for recycling and came across the text of his address. Although el alcalde failed to mention the indispensability of Carol Alvarado to Houston’s continued well-being, he did make a fairly extraordinary claim regarding his own stewardship of the city:

We gather on land first settled by dreamers and drifters and slaves.* They forged a new community in raw wilderness, just a half dozen generations ago.

From those humble beginnings Houston grew with unprecedented pace and prosperity.

Yet there has never been anything like the amazing progress made by this City since several of us first took this oath four short years ago.

Wow! Never? That’s a long time, my friend, but the mayor had some fun with numbers to back up the boast:

In little more than 200 weeks our urban area has added a quarter of a million new jobs.** Consider this: we have added about four times more jobs than our total population a century ago; the total new jobs we have added in four years is more than the total number of jobs within the city limits at the end of World War II, and even more than the total number of cars in the Metropolitan area back then.

… Even more than the total number of cars in Houston in 1945? Well, whatever. But we do enjoy The Jeffersons invocation. Come to think of it, Houston has always reminded us of George Jefferson: a short, balding dry cleaner trying to cover up his insecurities with strut and bellicosity.

Then there was the following, which we can only interpret as an offer of help to our love-besotted district attorney:

To my elected colleagues I issue a challenge: let us rush to help one another when we stumble on matters not affecting the public trust, and stumble we will. Let us remember that the large number of uncontested or lopsided City races and City bond issues in the last two elections reflects in part public perception of our effectiveness as a team.

Helping an elected official who stumbles may sound like a risky proposition. But remember the lesson that Dr. King taught in the sermon before his death. He said that the Levite who passed the wounded man without helping asked the wrong question. He asked himself, “If I help this man, what could happen to me?” The Good Samaritan asked, “If I don't help this man, what could happen to him?”

Or maybe that was the Alvarado reference.

He also mentioned Houston being home to Beyonce, which is always a crowd-pleaser.

*That is, real estate speculators and cheap labor.
**City government, of course, was responsible for the creation of all 250,000.

Passages: Lauck Slings Jacket Over Shoulder and Strolls into Fog; Cultural Coach Hangs Up Cleats; New Master of Irony Debuts at the Chronicle

“Short appreciation of Dan Lauck” was near the top of our blogging to-do list for many months, but something or other---our real-life to-do list, chronic lassitude, forgetfulness … forgetfulness … something---always intruded. Now we learn that Lauck has Parkinson’s and filed his last story as a regular for Channel 11 on Friday (as first reported here), so we best get it on. In honor of Lauck, we’ll keep it terse: The guy was one of the only (if not the only) local TV newshounds with an actual voice, a distinctive style of presentation (understated, laconic, ironic … Hemingwayesque!) that set him far above most of his peers. He could write---we weren’t surprised to learn upon his departure that he had reported at Newsday and The Washington Post before coming to Houston---and his stories were invariably interesting, usually telling us something about Our Town that we didn’t know. We always paid attention when he was on-screen.

Good luck to him.

Now for the happy news: next Friday apparently will mark the last appearance of the “Cultural Coach” in the Houston’s Chronicle’s baleful Star section (formerly “the women’s section”). The coach, whose column, best we can tell, appeared only in the Chronicle and the Fort Wayne Star-Sentinel (Houston=Fort Wayne w/good restaurants), opened her penultimate offering (not available from the newspaper's Web site, for some reason) by claiming to be on some “conservatives’ hit list” (an “uncomfortable and scary place to be,” she solemnly relates, sans adult editorial supervision) and then recounted the story of a “self-described conservative” named Lance Somebody or Other from Fort Wayne (natch) who, through sustained and respectful dialogue with the Coach, came to a greater understanding of other cultures and peoples. The Coach reported that she and Lance “are learning how to create an American family” (hmmm … there’s books you can buy with pictures, if you need a shortcut) before announcing that she was pulling the plug and moving her column to the Web “so I can provide in-depth answers and offer guest commentaries.” No explanation of whether the plug-pulling was voluntary.

The Coach’s columns were a perfectly realized expression of the diversity racket---almost everything she counseled boiled down to common sense and good manners, the stuff a reasonably well-raised 10-year-old could tell you but for which corporations pay $5,000 so self-styled diversity consultants can torture their employees for a half-day.

We especially enjoyed the letters the Coach allegedly received seeking counsel, usually attributed to some well-meaning but benighted white person in “Fort Wayne” or “Houston” who wondered why, for example, the black people at the Cineplex are always talking so loud and ruining the picture show for everybody else, or why the illegal Mexicans are always parking their 6 cars in the front yard and ruining the neighborhood for everybody else (oh, maybe we haven’t sent that one yet). A casual textual analysis of these letters suggested a striking stylistic resemblance to the Coach’s own prose … anyway, good luck to her.

But if you think the Coach’s departure signals the reassertion of some intelligence by the Chronicle brain trust, as our friend Banjo calls it, forget it. No sooner had the Coach announced her bowing-out than the newspaper, as part of its ceaseless effort to make customers out of people who can’t or won’t read, hustled a brand-new columnist into the Star section, a person named Whitney Casey (no relation to sabbaticzing Rick, we presume) who hosts a local TV show we have not seen called Great Day Houston. Casey’s charge, apparently, will be to give advice about relationships. Her debut was accompanied by a front-page plug and a typically gooey Star section profile, wherein “Whit” allowed that she counts Maureen Dowd and Peggy Noonan as her favorite columnists.

Whit’s first effort was devoted to the news that there are Web sites that young people can frequent in search of relationships, or maybe just to get laid (who knew!). You can read it here, if they have Internet access in the Texas prison system, but we feel duty-bound to call attention to this choice paragraph:

You won't find any BBWs or SSBBWs on the Web site DarwinDating.com. The site accepts only thin, fit, good-looking members and promises "no ugly, unattractive, desperate fatsos." It also notes: "Charles Darwin was a genius, but unfortunately very ugly." It is ironic that he wouldn't be able to join DarwinDating.com! Snap!

So whadaya think: Dowd or Noonan?