The best thing about hitting the bottom is that once you do, there’s nowhere to go but up.  Assuming you’re still alive after you hit.

The bad thing about the slide down is that you don’t know where the bottom is until you get there.  All the way down, you say to yourself, “How hard can it be?”

Lucky for us, we have some help reading the mile markers along the way.  The lastest help appeared in a NY Times/CBS News poll.  It appears republicans keep sliding, sliding, sliding….

In the past two weeks, W’s approval rating slid even lower - from 37% to 34%.  Public approval of W’s handling of the war on terrorism dropped from 54% to 46%.  To make it worse, the public is now evenly divided about which party could best handle the war on terror.  In other words - one half of the people believe that dimocrats can make the world a safer place to be.  That is a truly, truly scary thought. 

If you are scared spitless by that, try wrapping your head around this:  the number of respondents that said they will vote for a dimocrat over the republican candidate came out at 49% - 35%.  This number has been holding steady since mid-September.  If things don’t change, looks like there are going to be a whole flock of former congressmen buying condos in Virginia.  Virginia ought to put a special tax on them and require neighborhood notification.

One particulary disgusting result is that 79% said they believe House republicans care more about protecting themselves than protecting their teenage pages.  That’s just shameful.  Not surprising, but shameful.  Would you send your 16 year old son up to DC to work as a page?  Scuttling for cover, trying to blame the victim(s) and long-dead catholic priests flew just about as far as a lead balloon should. 

We call bulls*it on W for standing up for Speaker Hastert earlier in the week.  Bullsh*t on you W for not standing up for what’s right.  We’re not alone in calling bullsh*t - 51% of Americans don’t think the republican leadership acted properly in the Foley fiasco either.  Guess that’s another reason that 69% believed that members of congress think they are above the law and 38% think that republicans are more corrupt than dimocrats.

If you listen closely, you can hear Lincoln sobbing.

Check out this interesting conversation with Lou Dobbs in today’s Dallas Morning News.   

Tomorrow - Tuesday - is the last day you can register to vote if you want to vote in the November general election.  Surprising as that may be to some of you new to Texas, you can’t vote if you’re not registered.

All you Kinky people - assuming there are any out there after that abysmal performance during last Friday’s great debate - how hard can it be? 

To take some liberties with the immortal bards of the great Monty Python:

Every vote is sacred.  Every vote is great.  Whenever a vote is wasted, God gets quite irate.

Check out John Kelso’s latest on the Foley Follies.  

Truer words were ne’er writ.

We pity the dateless geeks and political junkies that stayed home last night glued to the boob tube watching the gubernatorial debate.  They were subjected to the absolutely worst thing on TV since Ted Turner started colorizing classic movies. 

We weren’t passing up a Friday night on the town, so we wasted perfectly good TIVO time and rack time watching it this morning.  There are scads of articles about the debate - here’s the MSM take from Statesman, the Houston Chronicle, an analysis from Dallas, blah, blah, blah.  Pink Dome has its usual dead on, snarky take.

This was the sorriest excuse weirdest format for a debate we’ve ever seen. That said, we thought it was kinda cute that Bell was on the left and She Who Will Not Be Named was on the right.  It was fun to watch who could get to the talking points first- the moderators (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) or the candidates. 

Ready or not, here’s our take:

Bell was surprisingly lucid.  Well, at least by screamin’, whiney liberal standards.  We won the bet ($100) with another blogger that he’d find a way to sneak Tom DeLay in there somewhere.  We knew we could count on the dimocrat for that. Get over it already.

Kinky was another surprise.  He was also surprisingly lucid - for someone totally unprepared.  One exchange with Perry was classic pot calling the kettle black.  ”Words matter” is the best the guv could do?  Riiiiight.  Forgot that taped “Mofo”, did ya?  Kinky’s best shot of the evening was his retort, “Leave one governor behind”.  A classic political TKO.

Perry looked sharp and sounded sharp. He really did, until he tried to convince viewers that property tax relief is real and that the Trans Texas Corridor is the best thing for Texas since sliced bread.  And what the heck did he have in his pockets?  The camera caught him rooting around in his breast pocket.  Was he feeling himself up or was he just trying to look Napoleanic?  Then, he was caught twice more. What was so all-fired important in his side pockets?  Crib notes?  Hope he wasn’t playing pocket pool.  And what was with his shoulder hitched up like that?  Eh, pilgrim?

SWWNBN was the surprise loser, taking second place to Kinky as looking the most unprepared.  She is capable of doing better.   We’ve seen her chew up people and spit them out with finesse and polish.  Last night, her responses were formulaic at best, trite at worst.  We said long ago she needed a new campaign staff and we haven’t changed our minds.  Tough luck for the tough old bird.

Overall, it made you want to stick sharp objects in your eyes and ears.  Now that we think about it, maybe that’s what the candidates are hoping for….deaf, dumb, and blind voters.

We’ve opined that Mark Foley belongs in jail because he’s a predatory pervert.  Who better to be the poster pervert for the congressional caucus on exploited children? 

We hope he likes to take showers with 50 other big, burly, sweaty, tattooed guys.  Hope he gets to enjoy playing drop the soap for a long, long, time.  

We figured that 10 years or so in the pokey is a fair punishment.  Let’s have him register as a sex offender - with neighborhood notification and a big ol’ sign in his front yard, too.  Good luck trying to find a condo in Virginia when you get out.  Let the punishment fit the crime and all that. 

Then, we ran across this item in the Star-Telegram.  Imagine our surprise when we found out David Dewhurst wants perverts like Mark Foley dead. That’s right.  DEAD.  Dewhurst is calling for the death penalty for serial child molesters.  Attorney General Greg Abbott wants them dead, too.  That’s one way to free up some prison space.

Mark Foley better hope none of those congressional pages were from Texas.  Things could get really interesting then, given the dust Abbott and Dewhurst are trying to kick up about perverts down here.  No Club Fed for you, just a cozy little cell in an overcrowded prison unit out in West Texas somewhere or on death row. 

Yipee ki ay.  We’re gonna tivo that trial for sure.

Oops!  He did it again.

We have to call bullsh*t yet again on Speaker Hastert.  According to WaPo, Hastert knew of Mark Foley’s predilliction for young boys for more that a year - yet chose to handle the matter in house - no pun intended.

We can think of no good reason why Foley wasn’t thrown under the bus years ago.  Oh wait.  Yes, we can.  Silly us.  A quick check with the Federal Election Commission website shows Foley was not sitting on the porch with the pups, he was running with the big dogs, some really BIG dogs.

Back to Hastert.  This is the same Speaker that thought searches of congressional offices for evidence of criminal wrong doing was an outrage against congress and the constitution (See Dirty Rotten Scoundrels). 

There’s yet another reason why this is so very disturbing.  If you can remember your civics class, you would know the Speaker of the House is second in line in succession to the President (after the Veep).   

Unfortunately, what we have wrought is a Speaker who believes it is permissable and forgivable for his fellow members to break the law.  We’re not talking drunk and disorderly laws.  We’re not talking about being Kennedy drunk.  We’re not talking about stashing cash in the freezer.  We’re talking about sending filthy and perverted emails to young boys.  You don’t have to take our word for it.  ABC News has the transcripts on line.

This is the guy we want sitting in the Oval Office in case the unthinkable happens?  Hastert is the guy our republican representatives voted to be their leader.  Is Hastert the guy our republican representatives think best represents their values (sorry to say, maybe he does at that) and the values of their constituents?

Think again.

Hells bells.  It was bad enough to find out our congress was chock full of thievin’, lyin’ greedy scoundrels - a la Abramoff, DeLay, Jefferson, and Ney.  Now we’ve got the Foley Fiasco to liven things up for November.

What is it with our elected representatives that they think they can do anything and everything with impunity?  

Bribery, greed, and gluttony are all apparently forgivable political stumbles these days.  You can cry and whine, admit your sins, and maybe, just maybe, salvage your political career.  Heck fire, even adultery is OK now - look at the political prowess of Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani. Both were caught breaking their vows of marriage - sometimes more than once.  Both are serious contenders for the ‘08 republican nomination. 

Given the current anything goes climate up in the beltway, we guess Florida’s Mark Foley thought sending dirty emails and instant messages to teenage pages would be OK, too.  This was not a one-time lapse of judgement.  Apparently, everybody in the House leadership knew about it for Lord knows how long, but in the good old boy, boys-will-be-boys, atmosphere up there, nothing was done about it. 

Nothing.  Nada.  Zip.  Zero. 

That is so wrong on so many levels.  What’s worse is that no one is calling for his head on a platter.  Now, the FBI has been called in and the political doublespeak is filling the airwaves.  We expect this response from dimocrats - the party of Ted Kennedy and John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi. 

We don’t expect this from the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.  Don’t even go there guys.  There is NO spin anybody can put on this to make it acceptable behavior. 

Sorry, congress.  You can’t condemn and condone this behavior at the same time.  Resigning isn’t good enough.  A 52 year old man that sends sexually explicit emails to 16 year old boys is a pervert.  Perverts belong in jail.  Period. 

Those that stood by and did absolutely nothing are equally as guilty.  Neither represent our values.  Neither represent our families.  Neither belong in congress.

End of story. 

Any of you in Wilco-land remember that movie from a few years back named The Neverending Story? Well, part of the plot was that this fantasy world would disappear if the Queen of the world did not get a name. All the little boy in the movie had to do was believe enough to give her a name.

Well, the Neverending story has come to Texas politics. It seems the Libertarians of Texas just might be living in a fantasy world with their currently out-of-fashion Goldwater-style conservatism. Without any other sane reason they were excluded from the gubernatorial debates, it seems like the King of the Libertarian land needs a nickname. All four of the guys allowed in had ‘em, so let’s help name James Werner so he’ll add some good ol’ fashioned conservatism to the Texas debates.

In fact to make it easy, they’ve even set up a site to give him a name. It looks like there you can peruse pictures of Mr. Outcast himself and vote on some nicknames, both clever and dubious. Right now, “Enough is Enough” is winning, but I like “Slim Gov’ment Jim”.