I'm in Texas

It's interesting when you happen to be visiting a place when a national/international story breaks. We were in Rome/Florence during Pope-a-palooza and now Austin during the beginning of DeLay-gate. I've been checking out the Austin Statesman and have a link to video if you'd like to see something more than 15 second sound bites: Ronnie Earle & DeLay's lawyer: here.

Someone's making a film about this curious episode in American politics: story here.

Any guesses as to what the title of this film will be?

Goin' to Texas

I'm heading out on a crazy road trip to Austin. Don't forget about this blog while I'm gone. If someone would bring the paper in and water the plants in a couple days, that would be great. C-ya!

The Quote of the Day

"...if anyone is unconvinced by the realities discussed in your mature analysis [re differences between dems and repubs]; they should AT LEAST recognize the totality of the corruption involved in a Party, opposing Basic Electoral Fairness! And the real threat to us all that that represents! Any disagreements that lead to a weakening of the ONLY viable Party that supports Basic Electoral Fairness is tantmount to National Suicide!"
~ Trou

Quote of the Day

"How the tanker trucks get through when nobody else is moving is somewhat beyond me. But I like the idea. I think we should eliminate gas stations in this country and just have the government deliver the gas to our vehicles wherever we happen to run out."

- Neil Shakespeare

Quote of the Day

"In the last year, two things have doubled. The number of dead American troops in Iraq has doubled and you know what else doubled, Billy? The price of Halliburton stock."
- Phil Donohue to Billy O' Reilly

Fall is here

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird
I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
~ George Eliot

I was just in my car heading home from a Trader Joe's run,
listening to the radio when September Song by Lou Reed
came on and I remembered it was the first day of fall today.

Not Lou Reed but another great autumn song:

Yo La Tengo's Autumn Sweater mp3

Quote of the Day

"People's lives are hanging in the balance on this one. Women, and all the minority groups, the elderly and the disabled, millions of Americans, everything they've worked for today is in jeopardy if this man gets on the court."

- Molly Yard's remarks about the nomination of Bork to the Supreme Court. Ms. Yard died today at age 93 after spending decades of her life fighting for women's rights. Rest in peace and thank you, Molly.

Quote of the Day

"...one of the dark deeds of the Republican anarchists is their denigration of public service and their characterization of public servants as parasites, busybodies, incompetents. To the cheater, there is no such thing as honesty, and to Republicans the idea of serving the public good is counterfeit on the face of it - they never felt such an urge, therefore it must not exist."
- Garrison Keillor from Homegrown Democrat

[thnx, George]

Riley's Italian Cousin

When we were in Italy this past April, we found our cat's Italian cousin, Georgio, living la dolce vita.

Quote of the Day

"If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch." - Frank Rich

Message: I Care About the Black Folks

RL Burnside and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown

Rest in Peace...

Where I used to live, there was a great radio station that played everything good to hear. This is where I first listened to both Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and RL Burnside. Sadly, these men died recently.

Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown died at the age of 81. There's a good, short interview and sampling of his music here.

"Said Colin Walters, who is working on Brown's biography: "He is one of the most underrated guitarists, musicians and arrangers I've ever met, an absolute prodigy. I used to tell him that though he may not like the blues, he does the blues better than anyone. He inherited the legacy of great bluesmen like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, but he took what they did and made it better."

R L Burnside died at age 78. He didn't become a muscian until he was in his 40s.

"Born in Harmontown, Mississippi, Burnside became one of the perennial forbears of the Delta blues, with his thick, rhythmic slide style and graphic lyrics reflecting his life surrounded by poverty and violence. Burnside, himself, did jail time for murder."

It's Bad You Know Mp3

File in last panel labeled "poll numbers."

This is What I Consider Leadership

Gore Helps Airlift New Orleans Victims
By Duncan Manfield, AP

Al Gore helped airlift some 270 Katrina evacuees on two private charters from New Orleans, acting at the urging of a doctor who saved the life of the former vice president's son.

Gore criticized the Bush administration's slow response to Katrina in a speech Friday in San Francisco, but refused to be interviewed about the mercy missions he financed and flew on Sept. 3 and 4.

However, Dr. Anderson Spickard, who is Gore's personal physician and accompanied him on the flights, said: "Gore told me he wanted to do this because like all of us he wanted to seize the opportunity to do what one guy can do, given the assets that he has."

An account of the flights was posted this week on a Democratic Party Web page. It was written by Greg Simon, president of the Washington-based activist group FasterCures. Simon, who helped put together the mission, also declined an interview.

On Sept. 1, three days after Katrina slamed into the Gulf Coast, Simon learned that Dr. David Kline, a neurosurgeon who operated on Gore's son, Albert, after a life-threatening auto accident in 1989, was trying to get in touch with Gore. Kline was stranded with patients at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

"The situation was dire and becoming worse by the minute — food and water running out, no power, 4 feet of water surrounding the hospital and ... corpses outside," Simon wrote.

Gore responded immediately, telephoning Kline and agreeing to underwrite the $50,000 each for the two flights, although Larry Flax, founder of California Pizza Kitchens, later pledged to pay for one of them.

"None of the airlines involved required a contract or any written guarantee of payment before sending their planes and volunteer crews," Simon wrote of the American Airlines flights. "One official said if Gore promised to pay, that was good enough for them."

He also recruited two doctors, Spickard and Gore's cousin, retired Col. Dar LaFon, a specialist in internal medicine who once ran the military hospital in Baghdad.

Most critically, Gore worked to cut through government red tape, personally calling Gov. Phil Bredesen to get Tennessee's support and U.S. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta to secure landing rights in New Orleans.

About 140 people, many of them sick, landed in Knoxville on Sept. 3. The second flight, with 130 evacuees, landed the next day in Chattanooga.

Here's the first version of this story that started in the blogosphere and was picked up by AP:

MyDD

Driven to Tears

(Sting/Police)

How can you say that you're not responsible?
What does it have to do with me?
What is my reaction?
What should it be?
Confronted by this latest atrocity
Driven to tears
Driven to tears
Driven to tears

Hide my face in my hands, shame wells in my throat
My comfortable existence is reduced
To a shallow, meaningless party
Seems that when some innocents die
All we can offer them is a page in a some magazine
Too many cam'ras and not enough food
'Cause this is what we've seen
Driven to tears
Driven to tears
Driven to tears

Protest is futile
Nothing seems to get through
What's to become of our world?
Who knows what to do?
Driven to tears
Driven to tears
Driven to tears
Driven to tears
Driven to tears
Driven to tears

Cheney Visits Hurricane Devastated Area and is Not Greeted with Flowers and Candy

Watch This

"Are you getting a lot of that Mr. Vice President?" Since Cheney rarely ventures from his secret bunker and mostly for meetings with secret energy commissions and RNC fund-raisers, I think the answer is rather obvious. Thank goodness someone took advantage of this rare sighting of the VP.

(via Think Progress)

Way to go, Lance!

Lance Armstrong's cancer survivorship foundation is giving $500,000 to help cancer patients affected by Hurricane Katrina continue with their treatments. The money will be sent to hospitals and cancer centers, which will make the transportation arrangements for patients.

"If you've started treatment and you miss a week or two weeks, it's potentially fatal," Armstrong said. "For me and the foundation, we just looked at that and asked not just what can we do, but how does it fit into our mission?"

-snip-

Armstrong said he's been following the hurricane crisis on television and in newspapers.

"It just seems like help was late to come there," he said.

Just as people who are poor are hit harder by natural disasters, fighting to survive cancer is more challenging too. This is a laudable action by Armstrong and his foundation.