Daily - The Austin Chronicle (2024)

Billy Joe Shaver's taking the stage in 10 minutes.

Hope everyone's packing.

This just in from Reuters:

Bishop Under Police Guard After Gay Comment

Yeah, because you know how violent those crazy queers get, riots and everything. Thug life! Okay, you got me on Stonewall (but Judy Garland died, fer chrissakes).

"ROME: The head of Italy's bishops conference was under police guard after someone spray painted 'shame' on the doors of his cathedral over his comparison of gay rights to incest and pedophilia.

"A police spokeswoman said Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco was being accompanied by an escort after graffiti reading 'Shame on You Bagnasco' appeared at the San Lorenzo Cathedral in the northern city of Genoa on Monday."

Holy cats. "Shame on you"?? Next those militant hom*os will be chalking the sidewalk asking him where he got that fabulous robe. Somebody call out the OVRA!

Wango Tango! Did Ted Nugent do something more racist than wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt at Gov. Rick Perry's inaugural ball? He says not, but that may not be the end of Perry's embarrassment over the gonzo rocker.

On Thursday, March 20, the Nuge sat down with Evan Smith for an upcoming session of Texas Monthly Talks. Inevitably, the discussion turned to claims that he made racist comments onstage at Perry's victory shindig on Jan. 16 this year. The writer of such "classics" as "Yank Me, Crank Me" and "Cat Scratch Fever" was quick to say that he never said "All you dirty, stinking Mexicans should go back to where you came from" onstage, and the only thing he calls stinking is his guitar.

However, the furor around whether he made these comments at an event arranged by Perry could pale in significance in the shadow of his huge revelation that Perry is a "hardcore" fan who has seen him live around the state "for years." Even worse, the Nuge said that Perry's favorite love song is that classy ode to sex "Wang Dang, Sweet Poontang," with its immortal opening couplet "That Nadine, what a teenage queen/She lookin' so clean, especially down in between."

TODAY'S EVENTS

Austin Vogue Nights at Swan Dive

Austin Cantorum at Cloud Tree

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As we mentioned yesterday, Mike Martinez is creating a city charter review task force at this week's City Council meeting. Basically the city's constitution, the charter can only be amended by vote every two years; having been tinkered with last election, it's up for alteration again in 2008.

Who's leading the charge to rewrite it? Responsible Growth for Northcross, of all people. They're pissed about Toby Futrell's handling of the proposed Wal-Mart at Northcross Mall and think the city needs to rethink the council-manager form of government that she's grown her city manager office increasingly powerful under. As the world's most accurate encyclopedia notes, "Ideally, the manager is apolitical, but this is often difficult." You don't say!

RG4N is also opposing any raise for her as part of her performance evaluation scheduled Thursday. Seriously. If she "exceeds expectations" again, just what the hell are those expectations? Showing up?

Here's the presser:

RG4N CALLS FOR REVIEW OF AUSTIN CITY CHARTER AND OPPOSES RAISE FOR CITY MANAGER

AUSTIN, Texas, April 3, 2007 Responsible Growth for Northcross (RG4N), the group opposing the Northcross Mall redevelopment plan, is seeking a review of Austin's administrative form of government, and is opposing a raise for Austin City Manager Toby Futrell.

In a letter sent to the Mayor and City Council members today, RG4N is asking the city council to create a Charter Revision Committee to open a public dialogue about the city manager form of government which Austin currently operates under.

When Rep. Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton, opened today's House Environmental Resources Committee meeting by saying the first bill on the agenda was not an Austin-bashing exercise, he was probably right. The same could not be said for his management of the meeting.

The committee was supposed to be discussing House Bill 2910, a bill intended to prevent the city of Austin from dumping the residue from fresh-water treatment in a Cedar Park quarry. But Bonnen took every opportunity to attack Austin and its employees. He criticized obviously flustered Assistant City Manager Rudy Garza for almost every answer, asked a city engineer about policy decisions from 1987 that they were neither old enough nor qualified to talk about, regularly asked a second question before the witness had answered the first one, and even harangued an attorney for the city over their handwriting on their witness affidavit. He also kept calling the material to be dumped sludge, even after the committee was given a sample that showed it to be a brownish-gray powder, mostly calcium carbonate with residue from filtering lake water, including iron and aluminum.

Representatives and residents of Cedar Park received no such criticism.

Bonnen said the bill was just about making Austin be a good neighbor and expecting it to respect Cedar Park's desire to be ecologically minded like Austin. But there were audible gasps when the supposedly fair-minded committee chair said, "If the city of Austin had shown a level of consistency, this bill would never have got out of committee, and we'd be done."

The Statesman is reporting today that there are moves in the Lege to slow down the closure of contentious and scandal-wracked Texas Youth Commission facilities, because doing so would hit the rural economy too hard.

Sens. Kip Averitt, R-Waco, and Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, and Reps. Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, and Pete Gallego, D-Alpine (in whose district the Pyote facility that started the scandal lies), are trying to keep these remote facilities open under TYC or at least transferred to become adult prisons. Their stance goes against a common argument that the sheer remoteness of these facilities, and the difficulty of real oversight, was a key component in how the abuse was perpetuated and hidden. Many other legislators, including Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, and Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, have been pushing to build smaller, more modern, more manageable facilities nearer the urban centers from where the majority of young offenders come. This would make it easier for families to stay involved in rehabilitation and give greater access to off-site facilities, such as counselors.

Before the story ran, Shapleigh had a brutal rebuttal for the argument that closing or repurposing the facilities would be bad for the West Texas economy: "Great," he said. "Keep raping kids so we can keep our jobs."

The bloggers that be have decided that they would like an American League perspective to abut their brainy National League preview and have asked me to put together a few words as to how I think the American league is going to fall into the Fall.

Full disclosure: I’m a Red Sox fan. I grew up in Melrose, 25 minutes from Fenway Park. My dad had a couple of secret parking spots stashed in Kenmore Square (infinitely more valuable than season tickets). We could go from idea to seats in under an hour.

I’m pretty excited about this Red Sox season. I’m having a difficult time trying to remember the last time some gazillionaire invested $100 million into my summer. The signing of Daisuke Matsuzaka will hopefully pay its dividends over and over like solar panels. So, if David Ortiz can keep Manny Ramirez from chasing the ice-cream truck down Landsdowne Street and Curt Schilling can keep his trap shut and pitch like it’s his last contract year, I see no reason why this team won’t take the AL East.

"This happens every meeting," Rep. Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton, groaned this morning as another committee witness fell foul of a time-wasting glitch in the Lege's committee rules. Here's how it (doesn't) work:

If someone is attending a House or Senate committee, it's his right to speak for, against, or neutrally on any bill, as long as he fills out a witness affidavit. Simple enough? That person can also just fill out his form to say that, while he has a position on the bill, he doesn't want to speak.

But!

If the committee chair reads a person's name out and the person says out loud from his seat that he doesn't want to speak, he then has to step up to the mic, go on the record with his name and position on the bill - and say he doesn't want to say anything.

However!

If he nods, winks, waves wildly, or communicates through the mystery of interpretive dance that he doesn't want to testify, he doesn't have to get on the mic.

Confused? Don't worry; everybody is.