Texas

Last Thursday, former Vice President Al Gore joined the many voices that have been calling for a crash program-a "moon-shot" national effort to get us off of fossil fuels. Senator Obama applauded the speech saying "For decades, Al Gore has challenged the skeptics in Washington on climate change and awakened the conscience of a nation to the urgency of this threat."

At the moment, neither Senator Obama nor Senator McCain are taking as aggressive a position as Gore is taking. The energy industry doesn't know how to deal with this newest energy crisis. At the heart of the discussion is the impact of our current energy practices on our economic well-being and on national security.  read more »

Tuesday, March 4, around 8 p.m., Bill O’Reilly bounded across a chilly studio on the first floor of the News Corp. building on Sixth Avenue toward the desk at the back of the room.

There, the members of the Fox News Super Tuesday II political team—Brit Hume, Juan Williams, Bill Kristol, Nina Easton and Fred Barnes—were wrapping up another back-and-forth session, chewing over the night’s early returns. Mr. Kristol made an observation about the rationality of voters. A producer announced a break.  read more »

AUSTIN, Texas—Last night, at her final pre-election rally here in Texas, Hillary Clinton once again invoked the prospect of a 3 a.m. call to the White House.

She told a crowd of around 3000 at the Burger Center sports facility that they should choose whichever candidate they would prefer to answer such a call.

Clinton also said that there was a big difference between “rhetoric and reality.”

Those isolated moments aside, however, she largely abjured the kind of full-frontal attack she has made on Obama elsewhere in recent days.  read more »

Two things are obvious: If Hillary Clinton can somehow win both Texas and Ohio, she stays; if she loses both states, she’s tuna fish.

A third possibility—a split decision—will present Clinton the justification to push on if she wishes to, but without any clear way to win.

Let’s say Hillary wins Ohio (as the latest polls suggest she will) and falls just short in Texas (as polls also indicate). For the sake of it, let’s also say she wins Rhode Island, where the lower-income white Catholic voters among whom she has done so well elsewhere predominate, and fails in Vermont, a state rich with the reform-minded progressives who are so taken with Obama. In other words, let’s say Tuesday produces a tie—in states won, total popular votes, and delegates accrued.  read more »

AUSTIN, Texas—Feminist icon Gloria Steinem took to the stump on Hillary Clinton’s behalf here last night and quickly proved that she has lost none of her taste for provocation.

From the stage, the 73-year-old seemed to denigrate the importance of John McCain’s time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. In an interview with The Observer afterward, she suggested that Barack Obama benefits—and Clinton suffers—because Americans view racism more seriously than sexism.

Steinem also told the crowd that one reason to back Clinton was because “she actually enjoys conflict.”

And she claimed that if Clinton’s experience as first lady were taken seriously in relation to her White House bid, people might “finally admit that, say, being a secretary is the best way to learn your boss’s job and take it over.”

Steinem raised McCain’s Vietnam imprisonment as she sought to highlight an alleged gender-based media bias against Clinton.  read more »

LAKEWOOD, Ohio—Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio thinks Hillary Clinton should keep pursuing the Democratic nomination even if she emerges from Tuesday’s voting with a victory only in his state.

“In my judgment and if I’m asked, I’ll say to her that if she wins Ohio, I think she should continue this because Pennsylvania is another sizable state,” Strickland said in an interview with The Observer after a campaign event here with Bill Clinton. “We need to be thinking about what is going to happen in November. It will do no good to come up with a Democratic nominee if we don’t win in November. We’ve been through that before.”

When asked if there wouldn’t be overwhelming pressure from senior Democratic Party officials on Hillary Clinton to withdraw from the race if she were to lose Texas—no less a supporter than her husband has intimated that she wouldn’t be the nominee if she didn’t win both major states on March 4—Strickland grew adamant.  read more »

HOUSTON—Hillary Clinton contrasted herself with Barack Obama last night in a new way: she claimed to be more progressive on space exploration.

Houston is home to the Johnson Space Center, where NASA's manned spaceflight programs are based. And Clinton urged a large, fervent crowd at Delmar Fieldhouse to "be sure we have a president who wants to keep sending Americans into space so that we can continue to map the heavens."

"One of the differences" between her and Obama, Clinton said, is that she "want[s] Houston to remain the capital of the space race.”  read more »

Kaitlin Bell, an Observer intern who used to write about city government for the McAllen, Texas-based Monitor, has a fun interview with one of Hillary Clinton’s surrogates in South Texas.

Among other things, the surrogate – Billy Leo, the mayor of La Joya – says that the Obama organization down there is much better than the Clinton organization, but that the area’s Hispanic population is still very fond of the Clintons.

In South Texas, one of the state's remaining Democratic strongholds, people love the Clintons. They know Bill's favorite taco restaurant in McAllen, a city of about 150,000 on the Mexico border. They mobbed him at a Barnes & Noble last fall. They named a school after him.

So things should look pretty good for Hillary Clinton in next week's Texas primary.  read more »

AUSTIN, Texas—Bill Clinton told a crowd gathered in glorious sunshine here yesterday that his wife’s candidacy represented “change you can rely on.”

The former president also complained, as his wife started to fall behind in the polls, about the rules governing the Democratic contest in this state.

“The election process you’ve got takes the cake,” he told the crowd, citing the unusual combination of early voting, a primary and then caucuses on the evening of polling day.  read more »

SAN MARCOS, Texas—Barack Obama continued a sharp counter-offensive against John McCain on Wednesday night, bringing a day of intense campaigning to an end before a crowd of several thousand people here at Texas State University.

“There was no such thing as Al Qaeda in Iraq until he followed George Bush into war in Iraq,” Obama proclaimed. “All he’s done is follow George Bush into the quagmire.”

Obama’s comments came in response to remarks made earlier in the day by McCain, who had, in turn, been responding to something Obama had said during Tuesday’s MSNBC debate with Hillary Clinton. The Democratic front-runner had said then that he would, as president, reserve the right to reintroduce U.S. troops into Iraq, “if Al Qaeda is forming a base” there.

“I have some news,” McCain said sardonically in Tyler, east of Dallas, on Wednesday morning. “Al-Qaeda is in Iraq. Al Qaeda is called ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’.”  read more »

AUSTIN, Texas—Before Bill Clinton proceeded to the serious business of making a pitch for his wife here at Austin Community College, he had to clear something up.

The man who introduced Clinton, former State Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, badly mangled a saying involving a rooster and the dawn.

His point appeared to have something to do with the dangers of investing too much hope in the rhetoric of certain unnamed politicians, but the convoluted aphorism drew only bemused looks and muted laughter among the crowd.

Clarification, however, was at hand.  read more »

How’s the shampoo?” asked Patrick, the chatty, bespectacled 54-year-old bartender at Wol  read more »

Location: You recently turned 60. What’s that like?    read more »

Josh Rushing, the former Marine and Control Room star turned Al-Jazeera English reporter, spent near  read more »

Texas Pacific and Henry Kravis’ outfit, KKR, must have had hired the best press agents in the  read more »

The guy to complete the last big deal ordinarily gets to shout “King o’ the Mountain!&rd  read more »

If you support Rudy Giuliani, here’s what his campaign wants you to talk about:    read more »

Billionaire Karen Pritzker, heiress to the Hyatt hotel fortune, has expensive lodging tastes.  read more »

Number of New York veterans recovering in Texas that will receive a free shipment of New York's best food, courtesy of NYC elected officials and business leaders: 7.

Number of elected officials on hand for the announcement: 8.

The statement after the jump.  read more »

-- Azi Paybarah

Last weekend an old friend came by and surprised me with an offhand statement. She had been friends of the writer George W.S. Trow, who died last November at 63, and she said he had been in and out of mental institutions in the years before he died.

When I was young, all journalists of any ambition worshiped Trow because of his groundbreaking 1980 essay, "Within the Context of No-Context." As style, as vision, a theory, the piece had enormous impact. It was published in The New Yorker, and I'd read the New Yorker's eulogy to Trow, a loving piece by Hendrik Hertzberg (a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, whose name Carter dropped at Brandeis the other day during his speech, to get a little cred with the homeboys). Hertzberg's piece elided Trow's apparent miseries with oldfashioned ellipticalness:

He abandoned the house he had designed and built in upstate New York, and wandered in Alaska, Texas, and Newfoundland before finding a tenuous stability in Naples. Poignantly, for one whose life was delineated by intense and, on his part, generous friendships, his last years were shadowed by the loneliness he had written about so acutely. During that time, many of us had only fleeting glimpses: a message on an answering machine, with no return number; a secondhand report of a sighting. "A product consumed by a man alone in a room exists in the grid of one, alone, and in the grid of two hundred million," George wrote in his famous essay. "To the man alone, it is a comfort. But just for a minute."

The NYT obit on Trow was a little more forthcoming, referring to "a psychiatric hospital." But as film-commenter Ray Pride notes:

"The NY Times obituary had a number of seemingly coded passages and ellipses, one of which suggested that he hadn't been well. "In the last half-dozen years, Mr. Trow's nostalgia for a waning world grew into an enveloping despair, his friend Mr. Nugent said. Mr. Trow forsook his home in Germantown, N.Y., and roamed North America, from Texas to Alaska to Newfoundland, living a pared-down existence, never settling long in one place. After treatment in a psychiatric hospital, he expatriated himself to Italy." Still, "Context of No..." still provokes."

I wonder how much more Trow's eulogists knew on this score. Trow was a literary genius, with a burn rate like Stephen Crane and E.A. Poe; and literary geniuses often suffer from mental problems. I thought we were supposed to be past shame about these matters.

The trial and punishment of the late Saddam Hussein ought to have been accomplished with respect for  read more »

“Hello, I’m Ashley Bush,” said a fresh-faced brunette, extending an arm sheathed i  read more »

One more thing on my last post. Someone pointed out to me that Larry Littlefield at Room 8 recently raised the possibility that changing the 421a program might result in a residential real estate glut. But Littlefield thinks it should be an intended consequence. He writes:

There is a lot of stupid money out there. Shouldn't we get some to subsidize our housing, rather than using tax dollars?

Littlefield's proposal? Extend the program for one year, and then cut it off completely. Then:

A huge wave of new units, even huger than that already in the pipeline, would come on the market -- perhaps in a recession. Supply would exceed demand, and rents and sales prices would drop. Investors would lose, but you pay your money and take your chances. That's how Texas is so affordable.

I'm not so sure that creating a Houston-style real estate bust is exactly what Bloomberg had in mind when he proposed this, but I guess it's an idea.

-- Andrew Rice

A little story about me: Many years ago, back when George W. Bush was just the agreeable governor of Texas, I used to work for a Washington weekly newspaper called The Hill, covering the Democrats in Congress. I dealt with a lot of press secretaries and, as a result, ended up getting stuck on a lot of mass-email lists. I quit the job and moved to New York, but for a long time the all-capitalized subject lines kept materializing in my inbox: "DEMOCRATIC WHIP BONIOR ATTACKS..."; "SENATOR CLELAND PROPOSES..."

It seemed like it was more trouble than it was worth to unsubscribe, and gradually, as mailing lists got updated and press secretaries moved on, the press releases came less and less often. Eventually, one holdout remained: the Democratic Governors Association. No matter what I did, or what far corner of the world I went to, the DGA followed me, keeping me up to date on the doings of the likes of Jennifer Granholm and Rod Blagojevich. A lot of the press releases concerned New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, which was only natural, considering that he was the chairman of the organization from 2004 until earlier this month, and, as everyone knows, is interested in running for president in 2008. At first, these self-promoting missives were annoying, just more junk mail that squirmed through the spam filter. But eventually the DGA's persistent updates became kind of touching--reminders of a time when I was younger and peace and surpluses reigned throughout the land.

Then, just yesterday, something strange happened. Right around 5 p.m., a message popped up in my inbox. It was from the something called the "2008 Presidential Draft Committee," and the subject line read: "ADVISORY: NEVADANS TO MAKE MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT 2008." The message coyly disclosed that "more than 50 prominent Nevadans" would be unveiling something this morning, and noted that "Nevada is scheduled to be the second state in the nation to hold a nomination contest, a caucus."

Initially, I assumed this had to do with the fact I was writing the Politicker this week. But then I realized that the address this mysterious message came to, my personal email account, was not the same address I put up on this website. (Sorry--I learned my lesson about mailing lists...)

So lo and behold, I sit down at the computer this morning, and I am greeted by the following message:

NEVADANS CALL FOR RICHARDSON CANDIDACY

Form "Draft Richardson Committee"

Las Vegas, NV--Seventy prominent Nevadans called on New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson today to seek the Presidency in 2008.

"Nevada will be a lynch-pin in the Democratic Presidential nomination process in 2008 and many Nevadans believe Bill Richardson is the best choice to lead our party", stated "Draft Committee" Chairman Reynaldo Martinez, a resident of Incline Village, and former chief of staff to U.S. Senator Harry Reid.

I wonder how these grassroots activists will convince Richardson to run?

UPDATE: Commenter Bouldin notes the that release uses an archaic, and rather unfortunate (Freudian?), spelling of the word "linchpin."

-- Andrew Rice

As those inconvenient details about pre-Sept 11 Rudy Giuliani begin recirculating, it's worth noting how the mayor's supporters intent to get around all of that.

Here's what Marc Rotterman, a southern political operative who is supportive of Giuliani's presidential efforts, told me about why he's earning support from Republicans across the country.

"You got to put him in the top tier going into the game," said Rotterman. "I think it's very serious."

"I think after the recent elections, the Republican Party is looking for a leader who is fiscally conservative, who has the ability to pull people together and who can communicate correctly with the American people."

When asked how Rudy was able to attract big Texas donors, Rotterman said that they were responding in particular to his success in implimenting a fiscally conservative agenda in New York.

"I think spending is going to be a key issue in 2008, in scope and size of government."

--Jason Horowitz

Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, from a screenplay by Garrison Keillor, based on a st  read more »

For a brief moment last month, George W.  read more »

For the unfortunate victim of Dick Cheney’s quail-shooting misadventure, the experience of being b  read more »

Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, from a screenplay by Martin Hardy,  read more »

Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, from a screenplay by Martin Har  read more »

It was a few days before Christmas, and it was well past 7 p.m.  read more »

Brokeback Mountain is an American masterpiece.  read more »

You’re Not Clever   To the Editor:    read more »

You’re Not Clever

To the Editor:  read more »

Ben and I revisit the story of the Manhattan Twelve, the roundtable of conservative scholars whose decision to "suspend" their support of President Nixon in 1971 bears an intriguing resemblance the rebellion brewing among conservatives incensed by the Harriet Miers Nomination. (Hat tip to the New York Post's Ryan Sager who first noted the analogy, and whose book about the future of the Republican Party is forthcoming.)

Anna Schneider-Mayerson plumbs the reaction of the Federalist Society, the cozy klatch of conservative lawyers and scholars that has spent years building a pipeline to the federal judiciary, and finds widespread disenchantment with the Miers nomination. In the best quote category, Richard Epstein, the libertarian firebrand and legal scholar, fumes: "This woman comes from nowhere and has never been educated."

And, tying the ribbon around The Observer's Miers package, Simon Doonan hails the Texas blonde as an unlikely icon of 2006 spring fashion chic.

Jason Horwitz examines Mayor Bloomberg's growing anxiety about his legacy as he finishes up his first term in office and sprints toward his second.  read more »

On the opinion pages, Joe Conason salutes Mohammed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this year's recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

And Niall Stanage looks forward to the drama of a Clinton-Pirro battle for U.S. Senate.

Every decade or so, a young, very smart, often photogenic woman comes along and produces a book that  read more »

When word came that there was a protest in Central Park on Sunday afternoon to be carried out exclusively by naked girls, The Transom sprung into action, camera in hand.

But on arrival, there was only a huddle of shirtless old men. Some were on bicycles. Others merely stood around writing slogans on each other's backs... with permanent marker.

The demonstration, one of them explained, was being held in the name of a woman who had taken "her clothes off in protest of the Iraqi war and walked naked in the fountain." She'd been arrested, despite statute 245.01 of the penal code, which gives women the right to go topless, on account of equal rights and all. "It's pretty much a political thing," the man explained. "I'm a troublemaker."

The Transom's eyes had strayed by then, however. There were six boobs in the midst of the sausage fest.

Two of them belonged to Phoenix Feeley, a young 2k5 hippie with American flag shorts on and needles through her nipples. She'd also been arrested for exposing her chest, in a separate incident, and as far as she knew, that was the inspiration for the afternoon's protest. Phoenix wore rollerblades. She laughed sweetly as she explained the various slogans on her chest: "No War," for obvious reasons, and "I Am Art," for quite separate ones. "I think they're beautiful, don't you?" she said, looking over at the shirtless men nearby. "It is a man's right to be topless—topfree—and nobody stops him.... We're here, and we're gonna show that we can be topfree—that we can be on our bikes or on our blades and be part of traffic."

Phoenix's friend Dana, meanwhile, pictured below with her daughter, spoke to reporters and friends as the group prepared for its march around the park. "You can totally tell she was nursed as a child," Phoenix exclaimed as Dana's little girl bounded forth for a hug with arms akimbo.

"Leave people alone, you know? If we can do it, why can't they?" said one male bystander, on break from his job at a nearby bistro. "More fun for me!"

This kind of attitude seemed uncommon, weirdly enough, and to everyone's surprise, reporters from the Daily News appeared to be the only ones taking any pictures.

"I remember when I was in college, and it clearly mattered more to the people with the binoculars than it did it to me," said Chanita Baumhaft, a young fiction writer who sat happily topless on the curb with her boyfriend. "The gawker situation is not too bad."

Indeed, the protestors didn't win an audience until they started moving a little before 3 p.m. "Freeeeedddooooooom!" Phoenix cried, touching off on her rollerblades and overpowering even the massive Dominican Day Parade that was roaring wildly on Central Park West. The women moved swiftly, some of them traveling on their own wheels and others bouncing humbly in rental rickshaws. The men kept up, pedaling furiously with their helmets on and their shirts still absent.

After a few minutes, Phoenix announced that the people who could keep up would go ahead, and the rest would meet back at Columbus Circle after the journey had been made.

"This is amazing," said one teenage boy by the side of the road, as Dana bought an ice cream sandwich for her daughter. "This is better than the internet."

A pair of fully-clothed Texan women riding by in a tour buggy, however, did not find the display so amusing. "We don't have these in Texas, these naked women," one of them said. "I was like, ‘holy shit!' I was thinking that it's illegal!"  read more »

Apparently the police thought so too. As we made our way back to 67th and Central Park West to wait for the bikers to make their loop, an officer rolled by in a cruiser and said that he was looking for a protest. Needless to say, The Transom did not snitch.

The rain started to fall just as the girls rolled into Columbus Circle a half hour later, the ink on Phoenix's body starting to run a little, her nipple rings glistening. The protest dispersed as the downpour grew thicker, and before long, naked time was over. It was the best day. — Leon Neyfakh

My and Hilly’s first session of couples therapy seemed to be going well; we’d already covered th  read more »

My and Hilly’s first session of couples therapy seemed to be going well; we’d already co  read more »

On the morning of July 7, upon first hearing about the London subway and bus attacks, a thought occu  read more »

Richard Linklater’s Bad News Bears, from a screenplay by Mr.  read more »

Richard Linklater’s Bad News Bears, from a screenplay by Mr.  read more »

When faced, at the movies, with obnoxious fellow audience members who are talking or kicking the bac  read more »

When faced, at the movies, with obnoxious fellow audience members who are talking or kicking the bac  read more »

No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. Alfred A.  read more »

No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. Alfred A. Knopf, 309 pages, $24.95.    read more »

They've had a good run, but are gay men finally losing some ground as America's default arbiters of  read more »

Nightingale-Bamford School with my 17-year-old daughter.  read more »

Even as a nonpartisan redistricting proposal seems to be gaining steam in Albany, Congressman Joe Crowley wants to use New York as a model of partisan redistricting. The Queens Democrat plans to retaliate against Tom Delay's, whose allies redrew the lines in Texas to favor the Republicans.

"Texas needs a pushback," Crowley told Roll Call earlier this month. "There needs to be a pushback from our side, and New York is one place where it could happen."