It's hard not to look at the black gold seeping across the Gulf of Mexico as an allegory of the sinking, gruesome Republican Party, in Texas and across the United States.

As Sarah Palin arrived in Austin, no doubt ready to rant against the socialists who are now tasked with cleaning up the oil spill, Florida's Governor split from the Republican Party after they snuffed out any last vestiges of moderation, principles sinking under the weight of the Tea Partier's rabid outcries.

We have elected officials in Texas who think that Obama's presidency is God punishing us, and SBOE members who want to remove Thomas Jefferson from the pages of history for political payback. Their own history, being written as we speak, will remember them as the bigots who continued to see only in color when the rest of the world had learned to love the goodness of the human soul.

And our fearless Governor, who perches in a $9000 a month rental property, sees coyotes in the same light as he sees the inmates on death row; a general disregard for any life other than that which might be growing in a woman's uterus.

Here we sit in Texas, burning the oil to save our beaches, to stop the ecological bleeding that comes from our selfishness and our haste to pull every last cent out of Mother Earth before we kill her off. We watch the Gulf burn and make a daily trade on our nation's equity more gruesome than those stated income loans doled out with a greedy grin by Goldman Sachs.

And after all that, at the end of the day, all we're left with is a dead coyote.

We interrupt this regularly scheduled, nearly-defunct blog to bring you an important announcement:

Bring your Democratic behind down to Kung Fu Saloon tomorrow, Tuesday, April 27th, for some blogtastic fun times with the ladies and gents from Burnt Orange Report, as well as myself. We'll be celebrating all sorts of hard-headed Taurean birthdays!

Facebook RSVP is here if you want to pre-screen the crowd, and don't forget the Twitter hashtag, #BlogBash.

Yup. We're bloggers, despite what the infrequency of posts on this blog might lead you to believe.

Today I received a postcard (yes, by traditional and what appears to have been air mail) from The Representative formerly known as Eliot Eliott Elliot Elliott Naishtar Naishtat.

Dated 12 April, 2010, The Representative talks briefly of his travels in Taiwan, where he was visiting Tai Pei and, evidently, Austin's sister city Taichung. Before you become outraged that you, too, can't have an all-expenses paid trip to our sister city, please note: Taichung paid for both The Representative and our Mayor to go. I learned this the hard way when I interrogated The Representative over a particularly ripe bowl of baby carrots at the last Final Friday.

At least he found time to write.



"What am I doing in Taiwan?!" The Representative asks.

I'm not exactly sure, but I think -- in fact, I know -- that this will go in my Favorite Postcards from Elliott Naishtat collection.

Should go for a mint on eBay someday (that's an online auction site, Representative).

Austin spends more money than all other metro areas per year. On the JB and Sandy Show this morning, I blame this on the fact that we have two square miles of bars in the heart of our city.