As this prior postreported, Chevron-Texaco is balking at closing its purchase of the former Enron building in downtown Houston because Harris County Commissioners have not approved a tax abatement in favor of Chevron-Texaco. This Houston Chronicle article reports that Chevron-Texaco has put off the closing until after the Commissioners consider the tax abatement.
Copy and paste the following URL into your media player
http://texasdwi.org/multimedia/zero_0100.mpg
and then get ready to see the most gut wrenching commercial that you will ever see regarding the horrors of drunk driving. This site contains more information about the young woman who is the subject of the commercial.
Following this post here from last week, Daniel Drezner has an excellent blog discussion contending that last week’s attacks on Shiite Muslims reflect that Islamic fascists are becoming more desperate and less powerful.
The price of West Texas crude oil has climbed $10 in the last six months to its current level of $36.28, its highest level since the eve of the Iraq war. Meanwhile, the economy is expanding at a 4.1 percent annual rate, weathering the rise in oil and gas costs without the inflation and economic stagnation that occurred in much of the national economy after energy price spikes in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. This NY Times article addresses the reasons for this reversal in the normal countercyclical effect that high energy prices have on the rest of the national economy, and the point at which even higher energy prices would likely slow the economy’s expansion.
This NY Times article describes Lakewood Church‘s long term lease on the City of Houston’s Compaq Center, formerly the home of the NBA Houston Rockets, who have now moved to a new downtown arena, the Toyota Center.
Lakewood’s acquisition of the lease on Compaq Center was not easy. Immediately after the deal was announced, Fort Worth-based Crescent Real Estate Equities Company, the owner of Greenway Plaza, the five-million-square-foot high-end office complex that surrounds the arena, threw ecclesiastic concerns aside and sued Lakewood, contending that its proposed lease on the Compaq Center would violate deed restrictions on the arena. Of course, the new office building that Crescent wanted to build on the Compaq Center site did not violate those same deed restrictions. At any rate, the suit was settled last year, after the city agreed to overpay and buy 5.5 acres of land from Crescent in front of the City’s George R. Brown Convention Center for $33 million.