The usual insomnia

-- As I have spent much of the past few days in the Texas Medical Center waiting while chemotherapy bags drained into my father-in-law, I understand this completely. My take is that it isn't even so much the time lost by the patient but by his caregivers.

Update (1/5): For those who have sent me their kind thoughts, an update on my father-in-law's condition is posted in the comments.

-- The contest for speaker of the Texas House occupies much blog bandwidth lately. Too many to link to; you can follow the play-by-play over in the Texas Blogwire in the right column. I do better with color commentary (though I'll be in Austin next Tuesday when the Lege convenes to watch the action, and post here about it). The conventional wisdom holds that Tom Craddick is toast. I don't think he is, yet. Here's my observation/projection as of the moment:

Jim Pitts will have a press conference in roughly twelve hours to announce that he and Brian McCall will join their forces to defeat Craddick under one flag -- his. Senfronia Thompson is poised to re-enter the race in order to manage a voting bloc of around fifty Democrats who committed first to her, then to McCall when she withdrew, but are lukewarm at best about Pitts.

If Senfronia controls those fifty-ish votes, she (and Texas Dems) are in a pretty sweet bargaining position. Unless, because the GOP loathes the idea of the Democrats controlling the outcome of the speaker's election, they suddenly coalesce again around Craddick. Then they have all the votes they need -- there are around ten or so Democrats who are firmly with the incumbent speaker -- and in the process ram it down everybody else's throats.

So my point is: pay close attention during the Capitol presser this afternoon to which Republicans are standing with Pitts. Not just the announced names of those who signed his pledge card, but which ones are actually standing there behind him. The ones that are not present are the real swing voters, and they are much more critical here than the Democratic members who have sold themselves out to Speaker Craddick.

Sylvester Turner, Harold Dutton, Dawnna Dukes, Kevin Bailey, Aaron Pena, etc. aren't even pawns in this game; they're drones -- the same as any of Craddick's mindless GOP supporters -- and as such they don't have the significant influence on the result that is believed. Honestly, only the Republican insurgents do. If Craddick buys back the support of the rebels -- literally buys them back, with promises of chairmanships, unfunded primary opponents in 2008 and so on like that -- then together with the Democratic sold-outs it's over.

This poker match is going to have the stakes raised several times over the next few days. Craddick is far from finished. And once the smoke clears next week there will be precious little "bipartisanship" to be had in this session, no matter the outcome.

Of course, I could be wrong about everything.

Update (90 minutes after this posting): Senfronia claims to have sixty votes, though McCall had less than that, and his tally had as many as 19 Republicans. I still think her number is closer to 50.

Update (1/5): No names and no supporters at the press conference yesterday. That's not good for anybody but Craddick.

-- It's Thomas Jefferson's Quran. You can't attach a value to irony this priceless.

-- The same with this level of deceit (though the price to ExxonMobil was apparently a paltry $16 million). Please remember this every time you need to fill your gas tank.

Happy National Hangover Day!

I didn't even consider a year-end rantrospective. My reputation as a curmudgeon is pervasive enough as it is. I still feel like giggling along with some of these ...

-- Bob Woodward snags a gallows Q and A with Saddam. A brief excerpt:

“In fact,” Saddam added, “I could empathize with George the elder, since I also had to suffer the indignity of two idiot sons.”

-- Never poke at an angry wildcat with a stick.

-- Speaking of stupid, here are the 2006 Darwin Award winners. No, Steve Irwin isn't listed, but he ought to be.

-- I thought we just said farewell to this douchebag ...

In what some called a desperate gambit to retain Republican control of the Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist announced today that he had examined a videotape and pronounced recovering Senator Tim Johnson dead.

"I will remain Majority Leader and the Republicans will continue to hold the Senate," he said in a press conference this morning.

-- the official statement from the president on the passing of Gerald Ford:

Laura and I were kind of saddened by the news of President Ford's death. The American people will occasionally admire Gerald Ford's devotion to duty, his character and the relatively honorable conduct of his Administration. The 38th President will be vaguely remembered by our nation. We offer our sympathies to Betty Ford and and some of President Ford's family. Our thoughts and prayers will be elsewhere in the hours and days ahead.

-- and yesterday's Funnies.

A Farewell to Douchebags

(Sorry; I know I promised to stay away...)



It seems so apropos that Butterqueen Crowley is the first one you see.

They will be counting down in Crawford in a few hours...

I'm confused. Was Gerald Ford hanged?

I wasn't particularly troubled by his pardon of Richard Nixon, but to execute him for that seems overly harsh.

Perhaps I'm mixing up my mainstream media propaganda campaigns.

Why are the flags at half-staff for Saddam's passing? Is there a reason why January 2nd is being declared a federal holiday for James Brown? When will CNN go back to their regular programming: Britney's beaver shots and the latest in the life of Brangelina?

Maybe I ought to just stick to the bowl games, you say? Pass.

Now I'm really outta here until next week.

Post-Christmas postpourri

-- Thanks for the memories, Saddam. You were good for us -- some of us, anyway. Though like any other dysfunctional relationship, you weren't good to us, and that's why we had to find someone new.

-- As an ice shelf 25 square miles in size breaks off from the Canadian Arctic, Bush's former interior secretary, Gale Norton, takes a job at Shell.

I'm so old I remember when this kind of cronyism generated outrage.

-- In other science news, the National Park Service is not allowed to give an estimate of the age of the Grand Canyon so as not to offend religious fundamentalists. You can also buy a book at the national park which explains how Noah's flood created the canyon. Really.

-- We're going to watch the Rockets play on New Year's Eve, a tradition we started back when they were still playing at Lakewood Church.

See you next year.

You may have noticed

that John Edwards declared. It's been omni-blog-present.

He sent me the embed code for this YouTube of his announcement (me and about a hundred billion other people):



Before that, he sent me an e-mail -- dated December 23 -- asking me to tell him what I thought about his Possibly Running for President. It was just simple text; no flashy pictures, the same kind of e-mail I would send to you -- and he signed it "Your friend, John."

He also has links from his website to MySpace and Facebook and an RSS feed and a blog and podcasts and a contribution page at ActBlue. To say that he hired some web-savvy people in the past five days (after asking me if I thought him running for president was a good idea) is a little understated.

In the video above -- it's filmed in New Orleans' 9th Ward -- he even worked in a slam on "the McCain Doctrine" of increasing troop strength in Iraq.

I like John Edwards a lot; he's certainly in my top three prospects (the other two are Wesley Clark and Al Gore). In fact I think he will very probably be on the ticket in 2008. He has the unqualified support of the biggest dog in Texas Democratic politics, Fred Baron.

John Edwards has kicked off the 2008 race in earnest, and will factor strongly in the Democratic nominee's selection.

One way or another.