Countdown to Prayerpalooza

The governor will give brief remarks, read scripture and offer a prayer in the middle of the seven-hour-long program, said Eric Bearse, spokesman for the event, called The Response.

Even the pandering is bigger in Texas.

Alice Patterson is the Texas state coordinator for The Response. And while The Response is explicitly a nonpartisan event, that hasn't kept Patterson from arguing that the Democratic Party is "an invisible network of evil." Hey, that could mean anything!

Controlled by demons! Demoncrats! It all makes sense now.

"They're intolerant, they're hateful, they're vile, they're spiteful," Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said of gay rights activists in April. "They're not the enemy. The enemy is simply using them as pawns. They are held captive by the enemy." Perkins, whose FRC was recently labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-gay rhetoric, has been named as a co-chair of The Response and will speak at the event. Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association's issues director, has taken things even further:

So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn't the Germans, didn't the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual soldiers basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.

All of which is false.

The AFA, which is co-sponsoring the event, recently launched a boycott of the popular Fox television program Glee because it is "glamorizing homosexual behavior."

But it's not just gay people and Democrats they hate; it's grizzly bears and killer whales and the Statue of Liberty and the Sun Goddess.

The recently emerging perception today, PrayerMania Eve, is that all of this attention being paid to Perry, his Response -- and particularly the vicious criticism he has endured -- is drawing legions of sympathetic Christians, previously turned off by the governor's public piety, to rise up and rally to his defense.

Yes, now the spin is that he's being persecuted for his religious beliefs, just like That Other Prophet, and he must be Saved.

I suppose if the Christian Soldiers rallying tomorrow in the football stadium can produce Perry to meet his critics face to face, then perhaps the cross, the nails, and the angry mob could be produced to give them what they want.

A martyr.

FAA goes back to work, no thanks to Congress

Not much to add to Loren Steffy here:

The 13-day shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration appears to have ended yesterday in a patchwork compromise, and although President Obama praised congressional leaders for “working together,” they really aren’t. It’s Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that deserves credit for breaking the stalemate.

As I wrote earlier, long-term FAA funding has been mired in a political debate over issues unrelated to agency funding. One pertains to how airlines unionize, and the other to federal subsidies for rural air service. Republicans in the House slipped the rural air provision into the emergency funding bill, and Democrats in the Senate refused to accept it. It was, in the words of Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a “procedural hand grenade.”

As I said earlier, rural air subsidies are definitely ripe for review, but they are always a political hot potato because no lawmaker wants to vote to eliminate subsidies in his or her own district. In other words, this isn’t the sort of measure that should be determining funding for the agency that oversees the entire commercial aviation infrastructure for the country. But as they did on the debt ceiling debacle, lawmakers gave politics precedence over national interest.

Relief came only after LaHood determined that he has the authority to waive the subsidy cuts, which essentially postpones them until Congress returns from vacation. That enables the Senate to approve the emergency funding by unanimous consent later this morning. But it’s important to realize that Congress did nothing to reach this temporary compromise. If the administration hadn’t intervened, 4,000 FAA workers would remain on furlough and thousands more private-sector construction jobs, including many here in Houston, would remain in limbo.

In the meantime, the shutdown has cost the government some $350 million in lost aviation taxes while lawmakers squabble over $16.5 million worth of route subsidies.

Once again, Congress has attempted to disguise dysfunction and delay as compromise. Lawmakers have resolved nothing, and taxpayers and the FAA will get to endure all this again when Congress returns from vacation.

The GOP is still whining that "card check" The Employee Free Choice Act legislation they continue to stall and obstruct is part of the problem, but that is -- as usual -- false, and a straw man argument.

The Tea Party's full-court assault on the rights of all Americans that aren't white and wealthy is slowing destroying this great nation.

Slow, hell. It's been pretty rapid from my POV.