TxDOT just issued it’s spending plan for our state’s $1.2 billion road-building chuck of economic stimulus act. Despite the mess of undersized highways, half-arsed connector ramps and pot-holed streets that perpetuate some of the worst traffic in the country for a city our size, TxDOT has decided that Travis County will be getting exactly – wait for it - one project: a ramp at 183 and 290.

We can widen I-35 to six lanes in that a fantastic tourist destination Waco, or add lanes to FM50 in the vibrant city of Bryan, but god forbid we do something about the 70′s era clusterfuck that is I-35 in downtown Austin, or even, I don’t know try building a major-highway that doesn’t come to a screeching halt at a random stoplight? Instead, TxDot is going to (once again) ignore the needs of the capitol city, and build a connector ramp out in the ass-end of nowhere, I guess so the TxDOT higher-ups can get back Houston a littel bit faster. Thanks guys. I’d love to continue this rant, but I have to go get my oil changed on the northside, so I need to allow 45 minutes to get there in traffic.

Read the full report here.

If you’re bored post some other projects they might have considered in the comments. The ever-increasing number of stop-lights on 71 (on the way to the airport) come to mind. And if you’re really bored, you might ponder calling your representatives.

Following up the President can’t be an easy job, but seriously, I think the American people are above being addressed as if they were two years old these days.  Maybe that goes over well in Louisiana, but there’s a lot of stuff that happens there (shooting people at parades comes to mind) that we don’t need to practice on broader scale. This sums it up nicely though.

After watching Jindal,” one Democratic strategist emailed, “I’d pay a lot of money to be back watching a Palin speech.”

The best part is, this is supposedly the next golden boy of the GOP. Plain/Jindal 2012? Really guys?

More..

Gov. Big Hair looks like he’s in for a tighter-than-expected race next year.

Space-warrior-agnostic-computer-illiterate-monks, road tripping on another planet. Sort of. And a whole bunch of math. Fun math. Really. Plus, Neal Stephenson finally figures out how to write an decent ending in less than two thousand pages.

Apparently, it’s dismal science week on the site this week. Richard Koo, chief economist at the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo, seems to think there’s some similarities with Japan’s collapse of the 1990′s.

Like Japan in the 1990s, the U.S. is suffering what Koo calls a “balance sheet recession.” When asset prices collapse, the people who bought those assets with borrowed money are left with balance sheets underwater, and all they want to do is pay down debt.

“People are no longer maximizing profits the way it’s assumed in economics. They’re minimizing debt. The invisible hand of [economist and philosopher] Adam Smith works in the opposite direction,” he says.

More…

I grew up in a small town, and thus the kids who’s parents owned car dealerships were always the ones who had the big houses out by the lake, the new car every other month, and of course the raddest hypercolor shirts.

Well, that was then…

A record 881 U.S. auto dealerships closed in 2008, with Detroit’s three struggling automakers representing 80 percent of the decline, according to data released on Thursday.

Yowza. More here. Strikes me as yet another sign that we haven’t bottomed out yet.

Things are looking pretty bleak in the U.A.E as the Vegas clone (sans the sex, drugs and alcohol, of course), starts to implode.

I was dropping off some cleaning this morning at the Comet Cleaners on 15th and Guad. In the process I ran into a former co-worker as I was getting some coffee, which distracted me from my initial goal of getting some tacos at the Texadelphia next door.

We were walking out to our cars and suddenly I hear this big crash, as a Ford Explorer decided to use the Texadelphia as a covered parking spot. Apparently the guy was driving with one of those AirCasts on and got his foot stuck. I was one of the first people in the shop, but I was very disappointing in myself for the lack of  witty banter as we checked everything out – I mean this guy just used used a cheese steak shop as a garage, and i couldn’t think of a single cheese-related pun? Weaksauce. Apparently I’ll never be an action hero.

Everyone was fine, but it’s a damn good thing I didn’t stop in there for breakfast as planned. Had I been in there or been walking by when it happened, we could have become a very permanent fixture at a very marginal sandwich shop.