Oh, landsakes. I need nothing under my tree (or bush), friends, for Christmas and Chanukah have come early this year. Dolly and Amy in one video. And such sage sentiment. "She has all she needs but she is never satisfied. Ring a bell?"

This afternoon, police chief Art Acevedo terminated Sgt. Michael Olsen for his fatal shooting of fleeing suspect Kevin Brown.

Details are sparse right now, but reports have it Acevedo reversed the Internal Affairs finding Olsen's potential the use-of-force violation was inconclusive, in handing him an indefinite suspension.

In a move surprising no one, City Council Member Lee Leffingwell's campaign team issues a press release announcing his re-election intentions for 2008.

Leffingwell joins Jennifer Kim in being the second council member to make the formal announcement, but while Kim's facing opponents, Leffingwell hasn't drawn any competition yet – hence the laissez-faire nature of the announcement. ("Yeah, we'll have a kickoff – or something – in January, if we don't space it.")

Consultant Mark Nathan will be heading up campaign with former Leffingwell aide Andy Mormon, due back from Ghana any day now. Below the fold, the full release.

A small victory for the staff at the Texas Youth Commission: They're actually going to be getting paid for the job they're doing.

TYC acting Executive Director Dimitria D. Pope this morning ordered an end to the decision suspending overtime payments to staff and instructed them to be paid for additional hours worked over the last two months before Christmas.

Since its massive purges earlier in the year, the juvenile prison system has been dependent on overtime to operate. How dependent? The estimated overtime cost for October and November comes in at $1.4 million, roughly equivalent to the traditional annual overtime budget. According to TYC's director of public affairs, Jim Hurley, the agency knew the old overtime budget was irrelevant. After all, they had sacked a lot of staff and upped their staff-inmate ratios, meaning the overtime bill was inevitably going to skyrocket until the 2,024 empty positions could be filled. But this change in the model meant TYC was working on a new methodology to calculate how much they needed. Until it could be calculated, they suspended the payments, which was exactly what an overstretched staff, already working massively extended shifts, wanted to hear.

Talk about your good news/bad news moments. Attorney General Greg Abbott this morning proudly announced that, in the fiscal year ending Aug. 31, his office had collected $2.3 billion in child support. That's up $243 million from the previous year and the fifth year in a row that Abbott's people have managed to hunt down more delinquent payers.

Abbott has called "protecting Texas children … our top priority," and the child-support division has always been one of Abbott's favored departments since he took the post. That paid off in plaudits from the National Child Support Enforcement Association in August when the Texas system was named best child-support program in the nation. According to Abbott's press release on the occasion, that seems to be judged purely in financial terms, of how many dollars per employee were collected ($760,000 against the national average of $396,000) and how many parents (270,000) were taken off Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

If you're looking for the bad news, it's hard to find an upside to the fact that the Attorney General's Office had to hunt down $2.3 billion in child support. There are a lot of broken homes and unpaid bills in those stats.

There's a lot of talk from real estate developers about trying to make their big new structures as "Austin" as possible. Is it keeping the frontage of the old rail depot on Third and Lamar but leveling the building behind for apartments? Plastering pictures of guitars on the safety cloth around a building while you flatten the land behind it for lofts on Lamar?

It all depends on how you define Austin and preservation. In addition to its claims to musical and weirdness fame, our beloved 512 is a military town (did you know the distinctive circular Airport Hilton used to be the Strategic Air Command Center for the U.S. Air Force?) and a light-industrial center (we at the Chronicle should know: Our offices are in a converted brick-company showroom). Integrating these other traditions, and the architecture that came with it, is how local architect Michael Antenora shaped his approach to design and green construction.

Antenora's career-defining work was the redevelopment of the former Army Air Corps base at Penn Field. The mix of industrial renovation and people-friendly proportions has since become a distinctive component of the "Best of Austin" winner's commercial portfolio. Talking to Antenora recently, I discovered his viewpoint was that the project shouldn't be about flat-out demolition. "It was better to save the buildings and do something with them," he said. "But the question was: What?"

For Thursday, Nov. 29, 2007:

Item 2: Redeveloping city property along Montopolis for Austin Energy's energy control center. Oh, and stop snitching!

Items 3 and 4: $125,000 and $200,000 for wireless and biotech start-up cash for the University of Texas' tech incubator program. Because UT doesn't have enough cash.

Items 5 and 6: More than $100,000 in state grant funds to fight sexually transmitted diseases. Remember, chlamydia is not a flower.

Item 11: Proposed reforms to the Boards and Commissions system – only six years in the making!

Items 28-37: Today's Purchasing Office largesse encompasses a few 138-kilovolt potential transformers, the milling of hot mix asphaltic concrete pavement, a $2.2 million SF6 pad-mount switchgear and a $9.8 million 5000-ton water chiller. You know, in case company's coming.

Item 40: Adding a sidewalk cafe application fee.

(Interior: shot of sponsor Will Wynn with Toby Futrell)
"Do you remember that time in Paris?"
"That cafe!"
"That waiter!"
"Jean-Luc!"

Item 41: Revamping the East 11th/12th Street plan with the ARA, et. al, to include vertical mixed-use, public parking, and affordable housing. What were they doing before?

Item 42: Directing Futrell to establish a Waterfront Overlay Taskforce "to evaluate the current ordinance for inconsistencies and ambiguousness." Delicious irony aside, we all know what happened last time she was charged to do this. Apparently we've entered some Matrix-esque feedback-loop in the City Hall space-time continuum where Futrell's always rewriting the overlay ordinance …

Items 43-46: A bevy of enviro-minded items from council: creating a Hike and Bike Trail enhancement plan, standardizing Austin Energy green building participation and incentives, and calling for the “highest optimal levels of sustainability” in municipal construction projects and city buildings. How about capturing all the hot air on West Second there to go with districtwide cooling?

Some of you are going to snicker, but I’ve grown fond of Avenged Sevenfold for much the same reason that I’ve been listening to a lot of 101X lately: Teenagers have invaded my house. That means Linkin Park’s “Bleedin’ Out” and Rihanna’s “Shut Up and Drive” rank way up on my current Top 10 (which actually is more of a Top 6), and I can identify two members of Fallout Boy. None of these causes as much uproar around my house as the recent release of Avenged Sevenfold’s new self-titled CD.

Johnny Christ is 23 years old and on tour with Avenged Sevenfold, one of the hottest alt-metal bands around, but the bassist is quick to point out he did not drink the blood of a king cobra during their recent jaunt to Jakarta, Indonesia. Aside from that, life with the Huntington Beach, Calif.-based quintet suits him just fine, especially coming off the band's smokin’ summer, which included headlining both the Warped Tour and Ozzfest followed by their fourth release that went No. 1 immediately on MTV’s Total Request Live. Currently on tour to promote the album, Johnny Christ called from the road to chew the phat before their La Zona Rosa gig this Saturday, Dec. 1.

Because it’s only, you know, like, the biggest story ever, we continue Day 2 of our exhaustive coverage of Will Wynn’s weird road-rage incident. As Oct. 11 – the day the 18-wheels stopped – was a council Thursday, Wynn spoke to the traffic tie-up that morning from the dais. (Yet he managed to leave out anything about ripping the Monarch crew a new asshole. Funny, that.) What’s shocking was that such a horrific instance could have transpired right under our noses – and lest you think me hyperbolic, check the council meeting transcript, where Wynn calls it a “crisis” requiring its own ordinance passed in “emergency session.” Oh wait, since there are already, you know, laws regarding blocked traffic, guess that won’t be happening.

Read the relevant transcript after the jump.