The Roves

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If in addition to Santa bringing me a Karl-Rove-Divorce for Christmas, we could get a Dick-Cheney-really-is-a-CIA-robot story, my holidays would be pretty much perfect. Texas Monthly sums up nicely.

Apparently Karl Rove, the champion of traditional marriage, is getting his second divorce. Yes, not one but TWO women in this world were willing to marry Karl Rove. You have no excuse for being single.

After 24 years of what I can only assume was marital bliss, Rove and his wife Darby were granted a Texas-sized divorce last week. Dana Perino, the family spokesperson, said that the couple “came to the decision mutually and amicably, and they maintain a close relationship and a strong friendship.” Wait. Dana Perino as in former White House press secretary Dana Perino? And now she’s reduced to being a family mouthpiece? Damn. Is no one safe from this shitty job market?

The saddest part here – multiple affairs ending in quickie-no-fault-divorce are fine in this state as long as it’s between a man and a woman. But god forbid we legally allow a loving marriage between two people of the same gender.

Refunds

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Ok, so the amendment blocking abortion funding was stripped out for time being, but….

As written, the Senate health care bill allows taxpayer dollars, directly and indirectly, to pay for insurance plans that cover abortion,” Nelson said in a statement. “Most Nebraskans, and Americans, do not favor using public funds to cover abortion and as a result this bill shouldn’t open the door to do so.”

And…

(Senator) Hatch argued Tuesday that the Senate proposal as originally written provides a loophole for the use of federal money to subsidize health insurance that would cover abortion. “Taxpayers should not be called upon to pay for abortion,” Hatch said.

Cool, so Senators, since you’re for allowing everybody to opt-out of  paying for anything they don’t agree with (like the aforementioned legal medical procedure),  I would like a refund for the portion of my taxes that you you used for that illegal The Iraq war you authorized back in 2002. If you need to wait till after you guys collect taxes in April, that’s cool, I know you’re a little short on cash of late.

While we’re at it, I’d also like a refund for what you spent on FEMA during hurricanes Katrina and Rita, on the Eastern European missile shield program, the secret CIA prisons, Dick Cheney’s man-sized safe and on those fancy presidential helicopters that your party signed off on. I found all these things (just to name a few) morally objectionable, and I really don’t feel comfortable with you using my tax dollars for them. Just shoot me an email and I’ll get you my Paypal info. Appreciate it.

Oh Kay…

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The staying in the Senate till you know if you’re going to get the governor gig, I get. It’s a dick move (see what i did there?), but the job market’s tough, and I’m sure losing that sweet Senate health insurance would be a real bummer. What I don’t understand is why anyone in their right-mind would want Dick Cheney’s endorsement, short of trying to get a subcontractor gig on the building of the next Death Star.

I’ve known Kay for many, many years. Most recently we’ve worked together over the last eight years while I was vice president and she was of course the senator from Texas, and part of the Senate Republican leadership.

At least from a PR perspective, I would’ve thought that we would’ve recognized those last eight years of failed foreign policy, draconian economics, and general road to wrack and ruin as not the best thing to reference in an endorsement speech, but hey, maybe that’s why I’m not a Republican.

Health Care

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I wish I could chalk it up to some grand confluence of life-events that have kept me from writing seriously lately, but I’ve been trapped in some strange nether region between not wanting to crank out pretentious blather and not giving a shit. Too much work at the moment, methinks. Or maybe I’ve just run out of shit to be angry about.

Well hell, we all know that’s not true.

Lets start with Republicans. This week house debate on the health care bill turned to serious issues when R’s, in their 60 second allotted slot, took issue with the size weight and number of sheets of paper used in the bill. An intelligent discussion on the merits of a public option? No we got protests on the weight of the bill. Awesome.

Republicans are making political theater of the bill’s bulk. Rep. Roy Blunt (R. Mo.) said the bill is longer than War and Peace (1,225 pages) and the King James Bible (1,291 pages). Rep. Michael Burgess (R., Texas) stood on top of a copy at a Capitol Hill rally this week to view the crowd. Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) uses a dolly to wheel it between Capitol Hill meetings.

Then of course, you have the whole thing coming down to a nail-biter of a vote because of, what else – abortion. I’m sorry but how the fuck can our priorities be this out of whack? I believe in a women right to choose, but I’d also like her to get good preventative care over the course of her lifetime? These are the choices we have to make? Could we work gay marriage, don’t-ask, don’t-tell, and maybe whether or not the Yankees pay their players too much into the bill as well?

About 40 moderate House Democrats say they will oppose the bill unless it ensures federal subsidies are not used to pay for abortions. Members who favor abortion rights said they will not allow the bill to exceed current restrictions on using federal money to finance abortions.

Can we please, just for a month or two, pretend like this isn’t one giant campaign and pass a meaningful law? After that we can go back to ethics investigations and congressional page scandals for as long as you guys want. Hell, bring back Ted Stevens just so you can kick him out again, but for the love of god, we really need to pass this thing.

Maybe this is a by-product of me getting most of my news off the internet and The Daily Show, but it seemed to me last year we were poised for grand intellectual debates in our houses of government, new eras of understanding, bi-partisanship, etc. Now we have the Fox News Tea Parties (I’d like to meet the evil genius behind that PR stunt), Town Hall meetings gone horribly wrong and let’s face it, a tone of Bush-era pessimism.

Maybe that’s the root of the lack of inspiration of late – it’s hard to see your hopes so horribly dashed. But at least it gives me something to be pissed about.

Governor Fail

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The Perry campaign’s journey into the world of instant online communication hit a major cyber-roadblock Tuesday morning, when the governor’s much-anticipated web announcement to officially kick of his re-election campaign fell victim to a database error that kept supporters and other curious web-watchers from being able to see the governor at all.

Multiple panicked reloads were powerless against the error: “Unable to connect to server,” it read. “Too many connections.”

More awesome than I can possibly put into words. More…

Houston's Sprawl

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The city of Houston covers 620 square miles,” he says. “You could put inside the city limits of Houston, simultaneously — I kid you not — the cities of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit.”

More from NPR about taming this monster. Is the sprawl a bad way to build a city? Yeah, but…

Noting the addition of a million people in 10 years, Glaeser says the city succeeds “by providing middle-income Americans with a really astonishingly high quality of life.”

Among the town’s advantages are an average work commute of less than 30 minutes and low housing costs. The National Association of Realtors puts the city’s average home price at around $150,000, Glaeser says. Other perks include a lack of state income tax and a vibrant restaurant scene.

Granted, it’s likely you’ll have to drive 45 minutes to get form on restaurant to the next.

Ghostfleet

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If you ever had the urge to rent a 132,000 ton cargo ship and go joyriding around the South Pacific, now’s your chance.

Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers – all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009. But their water has been stolen.  More

Trickery

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With the announcement on Friday that the U.S. Department of Education has accepted the proposal by the State of Texas for how it plans to spend $3.2 billion in education stimulus cash, Austin Independent School District (AISD) should be receiving an extra $12 million this year. Great news, right? Well, it might be, if  AISD wasn’t supposed to be getting $78 million.

Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett has calculated that’s the real sum that Congress intended. AISD, along with every other school district in Texas, was supposed to get a big stack of stimulus cash on top of their regular budget, not as a component of it. Instead what Gov. Rick Perry and the legislature did, Doggett argues, is “create an artificial cut in funding and then replace that artificial cut with money from the stimulus.”

Playing politics at the expense of our kids and our future well-being as a state. God-damned Disgusting.

Cronkite

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“I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor — not a commentator or analyst,” he said in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor in 1973. “I feel no compulsion to be a pundit.”

Would that we still had some of that in our broadcast news. Sad day.