Agenda highlights for the Thursday, August 23, City Council meeting.

Why So Short? edition

Item 4: Authorizing city staff the ability to negotiate and execute an ABIA contract for a low-income airline terminal. Seems some on council are increasingly pissed about vesting the "execute" function in staff, when only sparse guidelines exist – here, the "no-frills" rental to cost no less than $0.22 per square foot. Will push back come today?

Item 35: 10:30am presentation of the highlights and statistics of the Office of the Police Monitor. Hmm …

12pm Citizen Communications: More Southwest Key controversy, charter revision and city retaliation talk, and Three Minutes of Uncomfortable: CarolAnneRose Kennedy's III SAFE BLIND MOUTHS PRESIDENTIAL VISE ASPIRIN. ATIONS.

Item 42: 2pm presentation of the proposed Public Safety budget (Municipal Court; the Public Safety and Emergency Management Department; the Austin Fire Department; the Emergency Medical Services Department and, the Austin Police Department.)

Item 43: 3pm public hearing and possible action (?) "to receive comment on the profile of a new City Manager." Uhh, someone who's really smart and pretty and funny and trains unicorns and shits rainbows! Or, as our mayor, brain in Graceland last time we checked, says, one of the "rock stars … out there in municipal management." To-to-totally dude!

Items 46, 47: Zoning for the University Hills/ Windsor Park Neighborhood Plan Combining District

5:30pm Proclamations: "COA Boards & Commissions Recognition Event – to be presented by Mayor Will Wynn and to be accepted by Dave Sullivan and Dave Anderson." A hell of a joke in there, somewhere …

Much as we may all whine and complain about Capital Metro, it's a lot better than the bus services in many towns and cities. For a start, we have one, which knocks most places into a cocked hat.

The big issue is always the price of tickets, especially with the proposed fare hike. As of Jan 1, 2008, Capmetro is proposing to double the basic price to ride, from 50¢ to $1. "All other fares," they add on the website, "would be adjusted proportionately." Meaning, presumably, doubled.

But at least there's some chance for public input about public transport. Capmetro will be holding a series of community forums over the next week. They start tomorrow at the Conley-Guerrero Senior Activity Center, and then there's several more around the city, culminating in a public meeting with the board of directors on September 17.

See below the fold for times and dates, and have your say on what you want to pay.

Don't forget the John Henry Faulk B-day celebration tonight, going down at Zilker Park: check our Events page for all the details.

Be sure to get there early for the 6:30 homage to the Lounging Philosophers, an exchange which should be illuminating – espeically for one of the participants, City Council member Lee Leffingwell. Talking to Lee today, he said he agreed to take part in the festivities – except he didn't learn until today he'd be facing off against Save our Springs Alliance leader Bill Bunch (no hard feelings there, right?). Hell, we're even a little confused as to what exactly's going down – a reading, a re-enactment of Leffingwell's bruising face-off against Bunch over the defeated "clean water/clean government" amendments from last year, or just some all-around Springs loving. Show up tonight to find out.

While everyone else seems to be ignoring the September deadline for the Iraq surge, the highest ranking officer in the UK military seems to be standing by it.

According to The Scotsman newspaper, UK Chief of the General Staff Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt has called for the withdrawal of British forces from Iraq and their redeployment to Afghanistan. The UK currently has 5,500 troops in Iraq, located around Basra. Dannatt has called for them to move back to the airport, hand the area over to the Iraqis, and then withdraw. 2,000 of them would be free to join the existing force of 7,000 fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Can Karl Rove really help any Republican seeking elected office? Getting past the association with the Bush administration that most GOP presidential candidates are trying to avoid, is his rep as the campaign killer still really intact?

During the ’06 election, Chronic happened to be talking to a well-placed GOP campaign insider (and not some local apparatchik, either) and he (yeah, that’s the only clue you’re getting) recounted the story of the poll numbers. He had seen the gloomy internal Republican poll numbers, the ones that turned out be surprisingly accurate (i.e., that they’d lose Congress). However, Rove was wandering around, poo-pooing that data, and saying that he had his own research that showed a sunnier, Bushier future. "You have your numbers,” he would say, “but I have THE numbers."

What raised some eyebrows amongst the party operatives was that no-one seemingly ever got to see those mythical "THE" numbers. Which meant that either he was making up numbers for internal consumption (a trust-breaking cardinal sin amongst electioneers) or his radar was way off. Either way, that raised questions about whether he was a good campaign man anymore: because defending an incumbent and winning an all-bets-off race are totally different ballgames.

Of course, he’s as well known for his attack dog tactics and “schoolboy fun” approach to electioneering (also what was known in the Nixon era as ratfucking, so plus ça change). However, that was always done through proxies and cat’s paws (allegedly), so going on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and MSNBC’s Meet The Press to go after Hilary Clinton scarcely seems like the backstage manipulator of old.

Attorney General Greg Abbott issued a triumphant press release on Thursday that he had gained a permanent injunction against an unlicensed assisted living facility in Austin. “The Office of the Attorney General is committed to Texas seniors,” said Abbott. “Texans can rest assured that we will aggressively crack down on caregivers who violate the law.”

But let's check Merriam-Webster on that "aggressive" thing: "Marked by combative readiness … spreading rapidly." In October 2004, the Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services forwarded their files on Jeffery Duvall and Karl Like, responsible for Austin's Celebrate Life at Triple Oaks, to Abbott. DADS found four elderly residents in appalling conditions. One, according to Abbott, was kept in a sealed room with boarded-up windows. DADS closed the facility and moved the residents out, but has since informed Abbott that Duvall may have been running other unlicensed homes around the state.

Now, on the third anniversary of the original DADS inspection, there's finally a judgment. The Travis County District Court fined Duvall $72,000, plus $29,440 in attorneys’ fees and court costs, and bound him from running a similar facility until he gets a license. But three years? Where's the "combative readiness" and "spreading rapidly" there?

There's been a lot of speculation that Gov. Rick Perry is thinking about a run for the Republican vice-presidential nomination. First there was the recent trip by his campaign guy Dave Carney to New York to sniff around publishers. As Jim Moore (co-author with Wayne Slater of Karl Rove biographies The Architect and Bush's Brain) put it, "any time a governor or senator goes in search of a book deal, you know they're planning something." Then there was his recent foreign-policy-credentials-building trip to Israel – the first real international destination, as Moore noted, for then-governor and Perry role-model President George Bush. As Ed Sills, director of communications for the Texas AFL-CIO, told Chronic, "Does this sound like a man not interested in the vice presidency or the U.S. Senate?"

Now there's another development. Rep. Anna Mowery, R-Fort Worth, announced she was retiring at session's end, back in May. Fair enough, 20 years there must be enough for anybody. However, she then clarified this to say that she wasn't going to sit through the entire interim, and her resignation was effective as of August 13. This meant Perry had to schedule a special election to fill her seat for the rest of the session - the session with no session in it.

Now there's a few theories about why she did this. Maybe she just didn't want to be drawing that paycheck when she knew she wouldn't be serving her constituents next session. Maybe the commute was just getting to her. Or maybe it's that she didn't want to be stuck in a special session, and "no more lege" really meant "no more lege." Since Perry already said he might call one for an Iran divestment bill, did Mowery know something we didn't?

So the city of Austin would like to build a $4 million bicycle bridge on a southern section of MoPac to encourage southwest Austinites to use Loop 1 to commute to work. But the Austin American-Statesman's transportation columnist Ben Wear took a bold stand against it this morning. Pure boondoggle, he insists. Why? Well, the first reason he lists is, "I commute down North MoPac every day, have for years, and in all that time I don't remember ever seeing someone riding a bike down the shoulder. On Loop 360, yes, all the time, mostly for exercise and recreation. But MoPac? No. South side commuters can tell me whether they've ever seen anyone down that way on MoPac."

Now, to be fair to Wear, the city's bicycle manager Annick Baudet didn't help him out much – she told him that (his paraphrase) "People don't commute on MoPac, at least down south, because there's no separate (and safer) bridge over Barton Creek's deep gorge."

We here at Chronic have another theory: Perhaps bicyclists don't use MoPac to commute because of the signs at every entrance that specifically ban bicycles on that highway. Just a thought.

MINOR EDIT: Okay, we should have said almost every entrance. We checked out the south end of MoPac, and there is actually no sign right before the Barton Creek bridge. But the signs begin at the very next entrance, and anyway, the bridge's shoulder is so narrow that attempting to cross it on bike would be suicide, so the notion that bikes could commute there is theoretical at best. In any case, we're amazed that the person working the transportation beat at our daily paper thought that cyclists were avoiding MoPac purely by choice.

Straight from the "haven't you got bigger things to worry about?" files: it seems that the Crawford ranch (a.k.a. the world's biggest producer of cleared brush) has got into a sartorial kerfuffle.

Marques Harper wrote a fairly innocuous story for the Austin-American Statesman and the Waco Tribune Herald about President Bush's fashion statements. However, according to the Washington Post, the day after it ran in Waco, she got a call. From the White House.

It seems White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino phoned Harper to complain about him comparing the Presidential garb to Chuck Norris (seriously, like anyone can compare to the man Bruce Lee called America's best martial artist). The positive side is that at least the White House press office is keeping track of what the Central Texas media is saying.

All of which reminds Chronic of the last time former Clinton campaign adviser and Longhorn alum Paul Begala was in town, talking to the students of UT. "What's the difference between my ranch and his?" asked Begala of the crowd. "Mine actually has cattle on it."