So despite promising myself a long break from all things related to Sarah Palin, I broke down and read Todd Purdum’s lengthy article about the Alaska governor and former Republican vice presidential candidate in the new issue of Vanity Fair. I won’t dwell on the article, which you can read for yourself here, but Purdum ponders worthy questions — “What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded?” — while also writing an odd and puzzling paragraph about Palin’s “pheromonal reality.” Except for a nugget about Mark McKinnon, vice chairman of Austin’s Public Strategies, there is a whole lot of nothing new in Purdum’s article.

McKinnon enters the story when Sen. John McCain’s team, prepping an inattentive Palin for her Oct. 2 debate with Sen. Joe Biden, and fearing disaster, goes looking “for someone who could serve as a calming presence.” They find “Palin’s horse whisperer” in McKinnon:

“McKinnon had long admired McCain,” Purdum writes, “and had begun the Republican primary season helping him out — though warning that he would never work against Obama in the general election. But now McKinnon, whose role in helping prepare Palin has not been previously reported, and who declined to elaborate on it to V.F., changed his mind and quietly signed on. Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide, says that McKinnon was picked because ‘he’s got a lovely manner. You sort of want a guy who’s very easygoing, gives good advice, and doesn’t add to the natural nervousness.’ “

Palin, Purdum reports, “worked hard” getting ready for the debate, “and the results were adequate.” McKinnon, presumably, went back to not working against Barack Obama.

It’s hard to imagine Palin ever going beyond where she’s already gone. But who knows? She has “remarkable gut instincts about raw politics,” Purdum writes, as well as “the good fortune to have traction within a political party that is bereft of strong leadership, and whose rank and file often demands qualities other than knowledge, experience, and an understanding that facts are, as John Adams said, stubborn things.” Oh, and pheromones. Let’s not forget those.

UPDATE, 5:50 p.m. Friday: Say what you will about Sarah Palin, but apparently she is always going to get all “mavericky” on us. Her announcement today that she’s resigning as Alaska’s governor is a head scratcher. I would not have been surprised had she simply announced that she’s not running for re-election in 2010. But to resign after only a couple of years in office? Is she quitting out of frustration? Because of new ethics concerns? To escape blame for a weakening state economy? One thing’s certain; it’s a lot easier to fly around the country making tens of thousands of dollars giving speeches against this and that than it is to govern, which requires compromises and sometimes accepting that what you can get is good enough even if it’s not everything you want. I’m sure Palin’s supporters will spin her decision positively, but she sure looks done to me.

Every year, my neighborhood has a Fourth of July parade. The kids decorate their bikes and we walk around the block waving flags and blasting patriotic music on a boombox. And every year I’m tempted to buy myself a periwig, breeches, waistcoat and coat — the whole 18th-century ensemble — and read the Declaration of Independence before the parade starts. I think it would work as long as I kept to the Declaration’s first couple of graphs and the rousing conclusion about pledging lives, fortunes and sacred honor, but the litany of grievances against King George III might test my audience’s patience — certainly the kids would get restless, though jugglers might help, maybe fire-eaters. And I have no idea how a few of my more modernly sensitive neighbors would react to the bit about “merciless Indian savages.”

If asked to discuss the Declaration of Independence, I suspect most Americans would immediately mention the phrases “all men are created equal” and “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and pretty much be stumped to go beyond them. Some might add “We the people” to the mix, confusing the Constitution with the Declaration; a few might even throw out “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” jumping ahead 87 years to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. This conflation of phrases is forgivable. The Declaration, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address are each founding documents in their own way: The Declaration introduces our basic ideals, the Constitution establishes our government’s legal framework, and the Gettysburg Address announces that the Civil War shall lead us toward “a new birth of freedom,” a rebirth that redefined our nation in ways we still struggle to understand.

The power of the Declaration is not limited to its “self-evident” truths and “unalienable Rights.” I admire the fact that it exists as a tribute to reasoned argument. It is the Founders’ acknowledgment that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” demanded that they carefully explain to the world why they wanted to break with Britain and form their own government. It wasn’t for “light and transient causes” that they sought independence; they weren’t motivated by a mere fit of anti-government pique, as someone of the era might describe it. Independence was declared after “patient sufferance” and repeated neglect from a king and a Parliament “deaf to the voice of justice.” Oh, sure, some of the Declaration might be a little self-serving and “too much like scolding,” as John Adams described parts of it (Adams also regretted the removal of a section about slavery from the Declaration), but among all the things the Fourth stands for, it stands for a group of men gathered to debate and revise 1,300 words. Independence was not a given in July 1776: Many Americans were initially skeptical of declaring it. But those words sealed the deal. The least we can do is read them. No wig or breeches necessary. You don’t even need a parade.

“The Supreme Court is meant to be a legal institution, not a political one,” Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Monday during the bloviation phase of Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings — which reminded viewers that the worst part of being nominated to the Supreme Court is not the wide-ranging public and congressional scrutiny, but the having to sit through several hours of opening statements from every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. As the Twitter wag known as pourmecoffee tweeted Monday: “Sotomayor off to bad start: ‘Mr. Chairman, senators … I thought you would never shut your honorable pieholes.’ ”

Grassley is only partly right. Maybe the Supreme Court was never meant to be a political institution, but it is one. And it has been one ever since George Washington, who as the nation’s first president is the only chief executive to get to pick every member of the court, loaded it up with justices friendly to the Federalist view of the Constitution and the federal government. Washington’s appointments (there were six members of the Supreme Court during his presidency and he got to name 11 justices over the course of his two terms) contributed to the rise of partisan divisions that his successor, John Adams, deepened. As historian James MacGregor Burns writes in his new book, “Packing the Court,” Adams saw the Supreme Court “as a vehicle to crush opposition.” His leading opponents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, when they became president, likewise looked for justices supportive of their more limited view of the Constitution. So when someone like Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and a member of the Judiciary Committee, tells Sotomayor that justices should “have a judicial philosophy that reflects what our Founders intended,” which Founder or group of Founders does he have in mind?

It’s useful to remember that the Constitution represents the United States 2.0. Our first attempt at self-government, under the anemic Articles of Confederation, failed and that failure prompted the Founders to gather in Philadelphia in 1787 to craft a more centralized, more efficient federal government, though many Founders still had a strong affinity for the principles of confederation. At the Constitutional Convention, the Founders became the Framers, and what they framed was not immaculately conceived. The Constitution is often written in the squishy, vague language of compromise, which was necessary to its creation and ratification.

The Framers didn’t emerge all of one mind from the Constitutional Convention. There was a great deal of opposition to the Constitution, but in the end the arguments for it, and the addition of the Bill of Rights, led to its ratification. We rightfully revere the founding generation but its members weren’t infallible (see the Sedition Act of 1798 for one glaring example). They emphasized those parts of the Constitution that benefitted whatever argument they were making at the moment and ignored those parts that didn’t. They were against judicial activism and federal power, except when they weren’t. Who knows what any individual Framer would have thought about Sotomayor’s views on judicial supremacy or restraint, but they would have been familiar with the unsettled debate about them.

I was 8 years old and besotted by the exploits of astronauts and the promise of space travel when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon and famously declared his and NASA’s accomplishment “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Watching the ghostly images of Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin hop around on the moon for a couple of hours on that Sunday night 40 years ago, I was sure — I think most of us were sure — that we were watching only the beginning of human travel beyond Earth.

As I write this, I’m listening to the Apollo 11 mission in real time on the Web site, wechoosethemoon.org, sponsored by the JFK presidential library. Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins are in lunar orbit, and Aldrin is powering up the lunar module. He and Armstrong are less than seven hours away from landing on the moon. I’ve been listening to the Web site off and on for the past four days, and while there’s been a lot of checking of data about pitch, roll and yaw, and long silences interrupted by occasional static, it’s been great stuff for a space geek.

Yet, 40 years later, what did any of it mean? I wish I could say that it indeed meant a giant leap for mankind. I wish I could say that it led to a future of passenger service into orbit, to rotating space stations and moon colonies and trips to Mars and beyond. The world of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” didn’t seem at all far-fetched when the movie was released in April 1968, a short 15 months before Apollo 11, but it’s more far-fetched than ever today. The moon landing was an interesting and exciting chapter in the Cold War, but what was its historical impact, beyond maybe contributing to a nascent environmental sensibility thanks to photos of Earth floating in the loneliness of space? In his obituary published Saturday in the American-Statesman, Walter Cronkite is quoted as telling the Statesman in 1997 that the moon landing was the most important story he covered. With all due respect to the recently departed Cronkite, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Nixon’s Southern strategy during the 1968 election, Watergate, the sexual revolution, the Iranian revolution, the Reagan revolution, the arrival of home computing — all of which took place during Cronkite’s tenure as CBS’s anchor — changed American and world history far more than Apollo 11.

The future we thought Apollo 11 promised turned out to be fantasy, of course — as distant from reality as those jet packs we also thought would be part of our lives in the new millennium. Putting humans in space is expensive and dangerous. The longest anyone has stayed in space at any one time is 437 days, accomplished in the mid-1990s by cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov aboard the Mir space station. A trip to Mars would require a longer stay. The problems posed by radiation and isolation continue to confound NASA as it contemplates sending humans to Mars; simply provisioning a mission to Mars with enough food, water and oxygen is a challenge with no easy solution.

You probably have heard lamentations during the past week that we’ve been stuck in low-Earth orbit for the past 40 years. Nothing could be further from the truth. Since the last Apollo moon landing in 1972, humans have landed on Mars a half-dozen times (an image of the Martian surface from Viking 2 is pictured at right), Venus (an image of the Venusian surface from the Soviet Union’s Venera 14 is pictured below) and Titan, probed the atmosphere of Jupiter, orbited Saturn, flown by Mercury, Uranus and Neptune, landed on an asteroid and returned comet samples to Earth, and we are now on our way to Pluto. We have peered deep into the cosmos and are on the verge of reaching interstellar space. That all this has been done with probes and robots does not diminish the accomplishments of Spirit, Voyager, Hubble and other missions, which rival — and scientifically far exceed — the accomplishments of Apollo.

In lunar orbit with Apollo 11 in July 1969 was an unmanned Soviet probe named Luna 15. Its mission: To land on the moon, drill into the surface and return some soil to Earth — beating Apollo 11 back home if possible. Luna 15 crashed on the moon several hours after Armstrong and Aldrin completed their walk. But the Soviets’ next attempt succeeded; Luna 16 returned to Earth on Sept. 24, 1970, with about a quarter of a pound of lunar soil. Two other Luna probes also returned soil samples and two Soviet rovers roamed the moon’s surface in 1970 and 1973 — at a fraction of the cost of Apollo and with no risk to human life. Apollo was the greater adventure (maybe the greatest there ever was), but Luna was the future of space exploration.

Britain buried Harry Patch today. He died July 25, aged 111, and was the last surviving British soldier of World War I.

The man with the quintessentially English name lived through the horrors of the trenches and a slaughter that defies comprehension. At least 8.5 million soldiers were killed during the 1914-1918 war, including some 900,000 from Britain and its empire.

“It was not worth it,” Patch said last year. “It was not worth one life, let alone all the millions.”

Drafted in 1916, Patch fought at the third battle of Ypres (called “Wipers” by the Brits), which began July 31, 1917, and ended three months later with the British having advanced only about five miles. Six hundred thousand Britons and Germans were either killed or wounded. Patch was among the injured: Two months into the battle, on Sept. 22, a shell exploded over his machine-gun position, killing his three fellow gunners and seriously wounding him.

Patch, pictured here last Nov. 11, Armistice Day, described his memories of the Western Front in his book, “The Last Fighting Tommy”: “Mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood. … All over the battlefield the wounded were lying down, English and German all asking for help. We weren’t like the Good Samaritan in the Bible, we were the robbers who passed and left them. You couldn’t help them.”

Americans fail to appreciate the Great War’s importance. It was a true watershed in history, in which everything after was different from everything before. Its effects linger. We live in the world the war left behind.

There is no shortage of excellent histories of World War I. Just a few titles that come immediately to mind: “The Great War and Modern Memory,” by Paul Fussell; “The First World War,” by A.J.P. Taylor; “The Guns of August,” by Barbara Tuchman; “The Price of Glory,” by Alistair Horne; and “A Peace to End All Peace,” by David Fromkin.

And few other wars produced so much great literature, with Erich Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to All That” and Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” among the best known. Few writings resonate as deeply as the poetry the war inspired, however. One of the best and most powerful is Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” Owen was a British officer killed in action on Nov. 4, 1918, one week before the war ended.

In his poem, soldiers, “bent double, like old beggars under sacks,” are making their way from the front lines to the rear when they come under a gas attack. One fumbles with his gas mask, failing to put it on in time. He dies, “guttering, choking, drowning.” Owen ends:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I don’t know if Harry Patch ever read Owen’s poem but I think he would have agreed with its conclusion. The tragedy of World War I, a tragedy that Patch talked about when he talked of the war, is that for millions of his fellow soldiers — British, French, German, Italian, Russian, Turk — there was nothing sweet and proper about dying for countries that had gone insane.

“I’m afraid of Obama,” a woman tells Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis during a town hall meeting last week in Inglis’ South Carolina district.

“Why are you afraid?” Inglis asks. Off screen, a man shouts, “He’s a socialist!” A few seconds later, amid the din of dozens of rumbling voices, the same man (at least it sounds like the same man) says, “You should be afraid of Obama. We are all afraid of Obama.”

A group calling itself Anybody But Bob posted the Inglis video to YouTube. The group cut or severely trimmed most of Inglis’ answers, and its edits muddle the context of some constituents’ questions and comments. But the fear and paranoia in the video come through loud and clear — there are off-camera shouts about “martial law!” and puzzling questions about “curlicue” light bulbs and a “mandatory vaccination program” that might refer to a possible vaccine for the H1N1 swine flu — and are extraordinary.

And familiar. The worry and anger in the Inglis video and other town hall videos (they’re easily found on YouTube by searching “health care town hall”) are the contemporary version of the fearful talk I often heard as a child in the late 1960s about Russians, Red China (it was always “Red China,” never just China), race wars, hippies — and, yes, socialized medicine (Medicare was new at the time). The greatest threat to America was reflected in that last fear, the threat from an ever-growing government, which was filled with communists, subversives and, worse, bureaucrats who schemed to take away a person’s hard-earned money and freedom and give it to someone else. Many of those old fears sound comical 40 years later, and Medicare hasn’t turned America into a socialist gulag. No matter. The fear remains.

It was Inglis, by the way, who was told by a constituent at another town hall meeting to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” A similar moment happened at a recent town hall meeting hosted by U.S. Rep. Gene Green, a Houston Democrat. At about the 4:30 mark in the video attached below a man says, “I’m curious. In this room, how many people, by a show of hands, oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care?” Most of the people in the room raise their hands. Green responds, “Let me ask, how many of you have Medicare?” Some of the same people raise their hands, including a man in the front row who had shouted “Amen!” when he raised his hand in response to the first question.

Inglis tried to point out the contradiction in his constituent’s comment. Green leaves the matter alone. Not that the man in the front row would have seen any contradiction in raising his hand against a government-run health plan while benefiting from a government-run health plan. Fear has that effect on coherence.

It’s become a common question at health care forums around the country. A speaker wants to know where in the Constitution does Congress have the power to mandate health care.

A couple of examples from Wednesday:

“I see nowhere in the Constitution where health care is a right,” a man told U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, according to a report in Politico. “I want to hear it from (President) Obama. I want to hear it from (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi, about how this is about ‘We the People.’ “ And in Maryland, a local television station reported that a constituent ordered Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin “to cease and desist under the Eighth and Ninth Amendments and Article 1, Section 8, of the United States Constitution, to addressing health care legislation.”

It is true that the Constitution does not mention health care. There is nothing about Congress providing for blood letting, leeches or poultices, but this silence is meaningless, since the Constitution is silent about countless specific matters.

Article I, Section 8, however, gives Congress the power to provide for the “general welfare,” repeating part of the well-known preamble (“We the People … “). Congress also has the power “to regulate Commerce” and health care and the insurance of health care are commercial activities. So health care might not be a right, but it is a benefit Congress can bestow upon the people as a part of its constitutional powers.

How broad those congressional powers are has always been and will always remain a matter of sharp debate. Some framers of the Constitution (Madison, for example) saw congressional powers limited to those matters enumerated in Section 8 while others (Hamilton, for example) saw expanded powers. In 1937, the Supreme Court ruled that Social Security was constitutional under the welfare clause and declared that “(t)he concept of the ‘general welfare’ is not static … Needs that were narrow or parochial a century ago may be interwoven in our day with the wellbeing of the Nation. What is critical or urgent changes with the times.” Thus, if Social Security is constitutional, then why would a government-run health plan not be?

The “cease and desist” speaker in Maryland implied that the Eighth and Ninth Amendments would render any congressionally mandated health care plan unconstitutional. The Eighth Amendment, which deals with excessive bails and fines and cruel and unusual punishment, is irrelevant to health care. The Ninth Amendment says that just because some rights are listed in the Constitution and others aren’t doesn’t mean that the ones not listed don’t exist. To quote the amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” So maybe health care is a right after all, if we decide it is.

This morning, the members of the so-called Gang of Six — three Democrats and three Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee who have been trying to find a bipartisan compromise on health care reform — held a conference call ahead of Congress’ return to action on Tuesday and President Barack Obama’s health care speech before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. Democrat Max Baucus of Montana, the Finance Committee’s chairman, leads the group and he reportedly is eager to move forward on health care, and might be willing to do so without Republican support. Baucus, one of the Senate’s more conservative Democrats, may now doubt the sincerity of his Republican counterparts. Statements made by Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Mike Enzi of Arizona over the August recess have raised questions about their willingness to honestly seek bipartisan health care legislation.

What is striking about the Gang of Six is how unrepresentative of America as a whole it is. Each of its members comes from a mostly rural, sparsely populated state, and with the exception of Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, each comes from a state with demographics that don’t reflect most of the rest of the country, and certainly don’t reflect the demographic diversity of California, Texas, New York and Florida, the country’s most populous states. Baucus, Grassley and their fellow negotiators represent states with a combined population of 8,444,956, which is roughly the population of New York City (8,274,527), and represents only 2.8 percent of the U.S. population — or, to put it in regional terms, 34.7 percent of Texas’ population.

It’s not that the entire Finance Committee is so demographically outside the national norm. The committee’s 13 Democrats include Sens. Charles Schumer of New York (the nation’s third most populous state), Bill Nelson of Florida (fourth in population), Robert Menendez of New Jersey (11th), Maria Cantwell of Washington (13th) and John Kerry of Massachusetts (15th). Sens. John Cornyn of Texas (second in population) and Jon Kyl of Arizona (14th) are among the committee’s 10 Republicans. (None of the panel’s other eight Republicans comes from a state ranked in the top 25 of most populous states.) Yet all are standing outside the Gang of Six looking in.

As the health care debate prepares to move out of the town hall meetings of August and back to the committee rooms and congressional offices of Washington, here is a quick look at the six senators who might control the future of health care in America more than any other group or individual, with a brief demographic breakdown of the six states each represents. First, the Democrats, since they control the Senate:

Sen. Max Baucus, 67, of Montana (pictured above left)
Chairman of the Finance Committee and leader of the Gang of Six
Donations from the health care industry, January-June: $121,000
Montana’s population: 967,440
Percent white, not Hispanic: 88.2
Percent black: 0.6
Largest city: Billings (pop. 100,148)

Sen. Kent Conrad, 61, of North Dakota (above center)
Donations from the health care industry, January-June: $36,500
North Dakota’s population: 641,481
Percent white, not Hispanic: 89.9
Percent black: 1.0
Largest city: Fargo (90,056)

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, 65, of New Mexico (above right)
Donations from the health care industry, January-June: $2,000
New Mexico’s Population: 1,984,356
Percent white, not Hispanic: 42.3
Percent black: 2.8
Largest city: Albuquerque (505,949)

Now, the Republicans:

Sen. Charles Grassley, 75, of Iowa (above left)
Ranking Republican on the Finance Committee
Donations from the health care industry, January-June: $179,000
Iowa’s population: 3,002,555
Percent white, not Hispanic: 90.6
Percent black: 2.6
Largest city: Des Moines (193,886)

Sen. Olympia Snowe, 62, of Maine (above center)
Donations from the health care industry, January-June: $9,500
Maine’s population: 1,316,456
Percent white, not Hispanic: 95.5
Percent black: 1.0
Largest city: Portland (63,011)

Sen. Michael Enzi, 65, of Wyoming (above right)
Donations from the health care industry, January-June: $16,000
Wyoming’s population: 532,668
Percent white, not Hispanic: 87.3
Percent black: 1.2
Largest city: Cheyenne (55,314)

And for comparison’s sake, here’s a brief look at the United States, Texas and Austin:

United States
Population: 304,059,724
Percent white, not Hispanic: 66
Percent black: 12.8
Largest city: New York (8,274,527)

Texas
Population: 24,326,974
Percent white, not Hispanic: 47.4
Percent black: 11.9
Largest city: Houston (2,144,491)

Austin
Population: 725,306
Percent white, not Hispanic: 49.9
Percent black: 8.7

The source for all demographic data is the U.S. Census Bureau. Go here and here for details and additional information.

During the first half of 2009, the health care industry gave a total of $19.7 million to all members of Congress, according to USA Today, citing data from the Center for Responsive Politics. The total included $8.1 million given to lawmakers who are on the House and Senate committees that govern health policy. Go here for more information.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota are so sparsely populated that they have more senators (two each, of course) than U.S. representatives (one each). Maine has only two U.S. representatives, New Mexico has three, and Iowa, the most populous of the six states, has five. Texas has 32.

Money will flow.

This simple fact is sometimes forgotten amid the partisan rancor, distortions, and fearmongering that plague the health care debate — or it is willfully ignored, given our national delusion that we can have what we want without having to pay for it. Whatever ends up happening with health care — public option or no, nonprofit cooperatives or no, significant reform or incremental, or no reform at all — money will flow. It will either flow to the government in the form of taxes, or to insurance companies in the form of premiums, or, like now, to both. Our primary decision is to determine where our money should go and where it can be spent with the most efficiency and the most benefit for everyone.

Money flows. Money will flow.

And money is flowing, money of a different kind that is deeply influential, potentially warping to the health care debate, potentially damaging to what should be done, and always present.

In my previous post about the Senate Finance Committee’s “Gang of Six,” I listed the campaign contributions each of the group’s senators — Democrats Max Baucus, Kent Conrad and Jeff Bingaman and Republicans Charles Grassley, Olympia Snowe and Mike Enzi — has received from the health care industry through the first half of the year. It was a tiny but telling bit of information, offered without comment, about six senators whose work is crucial to the future of health care in America.

Following up on that post, here’s a look at the political donations Central Texas representatives have received from the health care industry through this year’s first six months:

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin: $66,175
U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio: $23,183
U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin: $16,950
U.S. Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock: $6,650

Doggett, a member of the Ways and Means Committee, one of three House committees working on health care, is fourth among the top five Texans on the money list. Listed first is U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, a Republican from Lewisville, who has received $105,450 in political donations this year from the health care industry. Burgess is a physician who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, another House committee working on health care, and chairs the Congressional Health Care Caucus, a group he founded that “strives to educate Republican Members and staff on the issues surrounding health care policy.”

Rounding out the top five Texans are U.S. Reps. Chet Edwards, D-Waco ($84,550); Pete Sessions, R-Dallas ($70,000); and Joe Barton, R-Arlington ($61,300). Barton is the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

No other Texas member of the House has received more than $50,000 in campaign contributions from the health care industry. Go here for the complete list of Texas reps and how much each has received.

One quick note: The Texas representative who’s received the least amount this year from the health care industry is Ron Paul, R-Lake Jackson. An obstetrician and gynecologist, Paul received $2,000 from January through June. But there’s a “but”: Since 1995, the health care industry has contributed $1,101,889 to Paul’s campaigns.

On the Senate side, John Cornyn, a member of the Finance Committee, has received $28,150 this year from the health care industry, while Kay Bailey Hutchison has received $1,000. Again, there’s a “but”: Hutchison has received $1,346,238 from the health care industry over the course of her 16-year Senate career. And Hutchison is running for governor not for re-election to the Senate.

All figures are from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks money in politics and how it affects elections and policy. Some groups that donate money support reform, at least to some degree; others oppose it. The figures listed here represent political donations from the health care industry, which includes health professionals (doctors, dentists, chiropractors, nurses), hospitals and nursing homes, health maintenance organizations, medical supply businesses and pharmaceutical companies. The data do not include donations from the insurance industry because donations from all insurers, not just providers of health insurance, are lumped together. Go here for information detailing donations from the insurance industry.

David Byrne is best known as the former frontman of Talking Heads, the article-free art band that emerged from New York’s punk and new wave scene in the mid- and late 1970s. Byrne’s repressed, wry lyrics, his throat-tight vocals, and the band’s nervous, eclectic rhythms quickly established Talking Heads as one of the most interesting and smartest groups around. The title of their flawless second album, 1978’s “More Songs About Buildings and Food,” pokes fun at Byrne’s obsessions and frequent subject matter. He’s a distinctive songwriter, with a sense of humor that is ironic but rarely sarcastic and never condescending.

Byrne (pictured left) is also a visual artist, filmmaker and author, and his new book, “Bicycle Diaries,” is an insightful travelogue and rumination about a life “hooked on cycling.” Some 30 years ago, Byrne began riding a bicycle to get around New York City and he eventually started carrying one with him on tour and trips to explore the various American and world cities and towns he was visiting. He is not “a racer or sports cyclist”; he’s simply someone who enjoys the view from his bike, and the casual pace of his pedaling has given him plenty of time over the years to think about the way cities are built and function. As he writes at the beginning of “Bicycle Diaries”: “Most U.S. cities are not very bike-friendly. They’re not very pedestrian-friendly either. They’re car-friendly — or at least they try very hard to be. In most of these cities one could say that the machines have won. Lives, city planning, budgets, and time are all focused around the automobile. It’s long-term unsustainable and short-term lousy living. How did it get this way?”

Early in “Bicycle Diaries” Byrne visits Sweetwater, a town about 40 miles west of my hometown of Abilene that’s best known in its part of Texas for its annual rattlesnake roundup (though the sprouting of hundreds of wind turbines around Sweetwater in the past few years may soon bring it recognition beyond venomous vipers). Sweetwater’s “frontier Puritan fundamentalism” fascinates Byrne:

“Between the early — for a New Yorker — dinner hours and the many dry counties around here I know we’re not in New York anymore. I enjoy not being in New York. I am under no illusion that my world is in any way better than this world, but still I wonder at how some of these Puritanical restrictions have lingered — the encouragement to go to bed early and the injunction against enjoying a drink with one’s meal. I suspect that drinking, even a glass of wine or two with dinner is, like drug use, probably considered a sign of moral weakness. The assumption is that there lurks within us a secret desire for pure, sensuous, all-hell-breaking-loose pleasure, which is something to be nipped in the bud, for pragmatic reasons. In a sense maybe loosening up was, for the early settlers, not something to be encouraged. … If life is hard, if you’re just getting by, then slipping off that straight and narrow path could have serious consequences. …
“I ride around the older part of town. A motel that was once on the main highway reiterates the moral message: if Jesus never fails, then by implication the problem must be with you.”

Byrne’s take on Sweetwater — with its “beautifully Spartan and purely functional” architecture, if you can call buildings made of cinder block and prefabricated metal siding architecture — reminded me of his underappreciated 1986 film, “True Stories,” which was set in the fictional Texas town of Virgil. Released during Texas’ sesquicentennial year, “True Stories” is narrated by Byrne and begins with a short, funny look at the state’s history, from dinosaurs to microchips. Like “Bicycle Diaries,” “True Stories” is a travelogue, too, but one that surrounds a touching story about one man’s search for a wife. John Goodman plays the lonely bachelor to a tender T.

Byrne’s perspective in “True Stories” is that of the outsider looking in. He’s a visitor passing through a strange land. He often adopts the same persona in “Bicycle Diaries.” As sometimes happens, visitors see things that are hidden in plain sight to a city’s longtime residents. Some outsiders misread what they see, sure; others, like Byrne, are often spot-on.

Cities have their geographic and physical attributes, but Byrne wonders whether cities also have psychological ones — unique sensibilities shaped by their infrastructure. “Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live?” he writes. “Yes, I think so. How does this happen? Do they seep in surreptitiously through peer pressure and casual conversations? Is it the water, the light, the weather? Is there a Detroit sensibility? Memphis? New Orleans? (No doubt.) Austin? (Certainly.) Nashville? London? Berlin?”

Byrne will be exploring some of these questions when he moderates a panel discussion and audience Q&A Sunday evening at the Paramount Theatre, 713 Congress Ave. Annick Beaudet, bicycle project manager for the City of Austin, architect and urban designer Jana McCann, and Rob D’Amico, president of the League of Bicycling Voters, will be joining Byrne for this event, which is titled “Where We’re Going and Where We’ve Been: Bicycles, Cities and Transportation in Austin.” It starts at 7 p.m. (doors open at 6 p.m.) and is free, but organizers require that you RSVP at www.austintheatre.org. Visit www.austinlibrary.org for more information.

Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, voted Tuesday against attempts by fellow Democrats Jay Rockefeller and Charles Schumer to add a government-run health insurance option to his committee’s version of health care reform — not because he opposes the idea of a so-called public option, he said, but because including a public option will guarantee a filibuster and he wants his committee to approve “a bill that can become law.”

Conventional wisdom says Baucus’ committee is working on what will become the Senate’s version of health care reform and that odds are against a public option. Still, some form of the public option may yet survive. Four other versions of health care reform — three in the House and one approved by the Senate health committee — include a public option, and the legislative process doesn’t end with the Senate Finance Committee’s work. It takes a slog to pass a bill.

And, in the Senate, it takes 60 votes to end debate on a bill so at least 51 senators can then pass it. The filibuster has been a part of the Senate practically since the body’s formation. (Go here for a history of the filibuster.) The filibuster of popular imagination — of a determined senator or group of senators speaking for hours on end to block legislation (think Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”) — no longer really exists. Cloture, a mechanism adopted by the Senate in 1917, has taken its place, and as the Senate has become more evenly divided since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and thus more partisan and hardened ideologically, the number of cloture votes has increased many-fold. What once was a rarity has become a regular part of the Senate’s legislative routine.

(There is no filibuster in the House because the House can limit debate by time. Each chamber sets its own rules and can change its rules whenever it wants.)

Democrats currently enjoy a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Not only do they have more than enough votes to pass a health care bill, but they also have enough votes to end debate on a bill. Republicans threaten to filibuster health care legislation (practically any health care legislation), but it’s not only Republicans who threaten the public option, it’s some Democrats, too. Specifically on the Finance Committee, it’s Baucus, Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, all three of whom voted against both public option amendments offered Tuesday.

You’ll recall that Baucus and Conrad were part of the Gang of Six, a bipartisan group of six Finance Committee members brought together this summer by Baucus to try to craft a bipartisan health care bill. It was never clear whether Republicans Charles Grassley and Mike Enzi were negotiating in good faith and they and Olympia Snowe voted against Tuesday’s public option proposals. Of the Gang of Six’s three Democrats, only New Mexico’s Jeff Bingaman voted for the Rockefeller and Schumer amendments. As I noted in a previous post — and I mention this for what it’s worth, and for what it might or might not now say — Bingaman has collected the fewest campaign contributions from the health care industry thus far this year ($2,000 compared with Baucus’ $121,000, for example) and comes from the only truly diverse state of the states represented by the Gang of Six.

And, again, for what it’s worth, and for what it might or might not now say, the health care industry gave Lincoln, who’s up for re-election next year, more than $350,000 from January through June, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

So is it time for supporters of a public option to give up in despair and await their biggest fear — “insurance reform” that benefits no one but the insurance companies and actually makes matters worse — to become reality? It’s hard to say. Like I said, a lot can happen in the weeks ahead, and there are a few politically tricky ways around a filibuster. For the moment, though, health care reform is in the hands of Max Baucus, a man who says he supports a public option, but not more than he supports the legislative process. Putting together a bill that can pass Congress is all well and good, but reform crafted solely to avoid a filibuster may be no reform at all.

This past weekend’s Texas Book Festival had downtown in and near the Capitol buzzing with talk about all things literary — fiction, nonfiction, children’s literature, authors, ideas, themes, you name it — reinforcing Austin’s reputation as a city of readers. Thousands of people attended scores of sessions Saturday and Sunday. The line of people waiting Saturday at the Paramount to see novelist Margaret Atwood, for example, ran north along Congress from the theater’s ticket office, turned east and up East Eighth, then turned back south down Brazos, stopping just before East Seventh. Yet, despite the number of people, everyone was quickly seated. The festival was impressively and efficiently run.

I went to about as many discussions or panels as the festival’s schedule makes possible — eight — though with a little juggling and by skipping lunch I could have perhaps squeezed in a ninth. Naturally, some sessions were more interesting than others. One highlight was Barbara Ehrenreich’s talk Sunday about her new book, “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.” During the first part of her discussion, Ehrenreich, a breast cancer survivor, sharply attacked the “cancer dogma” that has emerged over the past couple of decades. This dogma, she said, attempts to convince patients that “their terrible experience isn’t really a terrible experience” — that their cancer is in fact a life-affirming gift. “I’m not afraid of dying,” Ehrenreich said, “but I’m terrified of dying with a pink breast cancer teddy bear next to me.”

The best session I attended, however, was Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s Saturday morning discussion of some of the ideas he explores in his new book, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” Sandel showed why he’s one of Harvard’s most popular lecturers, engaging his audience in an insightful and accessible give-and-take built around Aristotle’s theory of justice.

Sandel began with this Aristotelian example: If we were handing out flutes, who should get the best ones? One member of the audience answered that the best flutes should go to the best flute players, which is exactly what Aristotle said. But why? Because the best flute players will use the flutes to produce the best music, a member of the audience said. Sure. We all agree that listening to an expert flute player is far more pleasing than listening to someone who doesn’t know how to play the flute as well, or at all.

Yet, that’s not Aristotle’s reason, Sandel said. Aristotle said the best flutes should go to the best flute players because flutes exist to be played well. That is what they are fundamentally for — that is their essential nature.

Which led Sandel to a discussion of golf — specifically, the legal case of Casey Martin, the former professional golfer whose congenital circulatory disorder made it painful for him to walk a golf course. Unfortunately for Martin, PGA rules prohibited the use of carts during a tournament so Martin sued for the right to use a cart under the American With Disabilities Act. His case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2001 ruled, 7-2, in Martin’s favor.

The court’s ruling hinged on the Aristotelian question of justice: What is golf’s essential nature? The court said that golf is fundamentally about hitting a ball from a tee into a hole in as few strokes as possible; walking the course or riding it in a cart does not alter golf’s fundamental nature. In other words, riding in a cart would not give Martin an unfair advantage because to win he still must hit the ball into the hole in fewer strokes than his competitors, the court said.

But, Sandel said, the Martin case was not only about fairness and rights, or golf’s essential nature; it was also about honor and recognition, other aspects of Aristotle’s theory of justice. Fear that the public would no longer honor and recognize golfers as athletes if Martin were allowed to ride a cart led several big-name golfers — Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Kite, among them — to oppose Martin’s lawsuit. No one doubts that golf is a game of skill, Sandel said, but golf’s place within the community as a sport depends on it being seen as an athletic event (despite the fact it “involves no running or jumping, and the ball stands still,” Sandel said) and not merely a game of skill. Otherwise, golf becomes like billiards. Billiards is a game of great skill, but the public doesn’t grant great pool players the same honor and recognition that it grants golfers because billiards doesn’t hold itself up as an athletic event.

Sandel then seamlessly took his audience from the Martin case to the debate about same-sex marriage, which, he said, also involves questions of marriage’s essential nature — its purpose — as well as honor and recognition — public approval. Is the purpose of marriage procreation, as some opponents of same-sex marriage argue (though no state has a fertility requirement for marriage)? Or is it about the formation of an exclusive, committed partnership, as supporters of same-sex marriage say (and as most state marriage laws reinforce)? When a state grants a marriage license, what public virtues is it recognizing and honoring?

Sandel said his hope with his book and lectures was to bring “philosophy into contact with the world,” and for at least 45 minutes Saturday morning at the Paramount he succeeded. He expressed regret that today’s public debates amount to either “ideological food fights” or “shouting matches on cable television,” when true democratic citizenship depends on a far more fair-minded, sophisticated public discourse.

President Barack Obama met with Senate Democrats Wednesday to try to stiffen their spines and boost their morale two weeks after Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts put an end to their filibuster-proof 60-vote majority. Brown was sworn in Thursday and his presence in the Senate gives Republicans 41 seats. Under Senate rules, 41 is a magic number, since it takes 60 votes to end debate on any given issue and move a bill or a nomination forward.

Obama consoled his fellow Democrats by reminding them that they still hold a substantial majority if not a supermajority over their Republican counterparts. He asked them to consider the absurdity behind a Village Voice headline that said Brown’s win gives Senate Republicans a 41-59 “majority” and he urged Democrats to buck up and keep working on their agenda.

(The Voice headline, by the way, was clearly inspired by the brilliant and deservedly famous Harvard Crimson headline, “Harvard beats Yale, 29-29,” that ran after Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds of its 1968 football game with Yale to tie a mighty Yale team that had won 16 in a row. The game is the subject of a prizewinning 2008 documentary that takes the Crimson headline as its title.)

I’ve written before on this blog about the filibuster, and any Google search will turn up several articles detailing its history and evolution. (Congressional Quarterly has a particularly good one here.) While the filibuster has been around for a long time — it popped up as a loophole possibility when the Senate changed its rules in 1806 to distinguish itself from the House, and was first used in 1841 — the filibuster as we know it today goes back only about 40 years to when Senate leaders, favoring sleep and a predictable schedule, decided to let virtual filibusters (simply signaling a refusal to end debate) take the place of real filibusters (talking for hours or days on end to delay, kill or force changes to legislation). No surprise then that the filibuster’s use has greatly increased over the past few decades now that filibustering no longer requires any work — no theatrical reading of the Constitution, the Bible or a grandmother’s recipes to the point of surrender, or compromise — and as partisan divides have deepened.

The filibuster can be a useful check on majority excess but today it’s more reflective of “the tyranny of the minority,” to quote Democratic consultant Peter Fenn, than it is a protection of the minority’s right to be heard. A check on power is a core American value, but what happens when that check no longer needs to be carefully considered or judiciously employed, when it has grown so great that it causes legislative paralysis on issues great and trivial and renders elections legislatively meaningless?

Each party is guilty, of course, of abusing the filibuster. Each condemns the filibuster when in control of the Senate and each uses it when in the minority. Each no longer sees the filibuster as a rarely taken path that sometimes leads to constructive delay and compromise. In our era of purity tests and partisan fits, when politicians fear that to compromise legislatively is to compromise themselves politically, the filibuster is primarily seen as a tool to indefinitely obstruct the other side’s agenda.

So, sorry, Mr. President. Nice pep talk you gave there, but that clever Village Voice headline writer is right. Senate Democrats may have the numbers, but unless something changes, Republicans hold the strings.

Two books released last summer about Afghanistan make it hard to be optimistic that America’s experience there will be any different from the British experience in the 19th century or the Russian in the 1980s. One of the books, “In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation,” by longtime BBC foreign correspondent David Loyn, surveys Afghanistan’s history from first official British contact in 1809 through the rise and fall and return of the Taliban. The other, “In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan,” by RAND political scientist Seth G. Jones, quickly goes over Afghanistan’s pre-Taliban history before concentrating on events since the U.S. invasion in late 2001. The two books complement each other so well that it’s hard to suggest reading one without also reading the other. Both are well-written, accessible and reasonable in length — together they are half the length of Stephen King’s recent doorstop of a best-seller, “Under the Dome.”

Both books left me with several nagging questions but none was as nagging as this one: Was U.S. support of mujahedeen fighters against the Soviet Union one of the biggest foreign policy mistakes in American history? By funding and arming Islamic zealots to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, the U.S. increased the power of Pakistan’s untrustworthy intelligence service, the ISI (a sponsor of terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere), set the stage for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, and inspired al Qaeda and other Arab jihadists to go global. Blowback is the CIA term for unintended (though not necessarily unpredictable) consequences, and “no country in the Middle East was more important to the birth of al Qa’ida than Afghanistan,” Jones writes.

Which brings me to Charlie Wilson, the former Texas Democratic congressman who died Wednesday, and whose role in what, thanks to George Crile’s 2003 book, is sometimes called “Charlie Wilson’s war” has been romanticized into legend. “Charlie did it,” Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq said when asked about the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, and Wilson (pictured below in Afghanistan in 1987) is celebrated in many circles as a Cold War hero.

President Carter called the Dec. 24, 1979, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” Fearing that the Soviets’ intentions went beyond Afghanistan, he declared that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States.” But the Soviets moved primarily to prop up Afghanistan’s nascent communist government against an Islamic insurgency and, as Jones writes, “there is little credible evidence that Soviet leaders wanted to expand their reach into Pakistan and Iran and to the Indian Ocean. Rather, they were concerned by the collapse of governance in Afghanistan and suspicious that the United States and Afghanistan’s neighbors would try to move into the vacuum.”

The Carter administration, despite dealing with a new, radical Islamic regime in Iran that would contribute to Carter’s defeat in 1980, jumped to support Islamic jihadists against the Soviets. Carter began covertly supplying money and weapons to the Afghan mujahedeen, a policy continued by President Reagan once he took over the White House in January 1981. The support was relatively low for the first few years of the Soviet occupation — about $60 million a year between 1981 and 1983, for example, according to Jones. Then Wilson, seeing the Soviets bogging down in Afghanistan and smelling a Soviet defeat, began pushing his colleagues on the House Appropriations Committee to dramatically increase the supply of money and weapons to the mujahedeen. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year began flowing their way starting in 1985. The Reagan administration, meanwhile, declared it official U.S. policy to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

Sarah Vowell is a great humorist and if you don’t immediately know her name, then you surely would recognize her uniquely gifted voice, heard on public radio’s “This American Life” and as Violet, the teenage superhero of Pixar’s “The Incredibles.” Vowell is also an excellent amateur historian, and her wit illuminates her love of American history in all its glory and controversy in her books “The Partly Cloudy Patriot,” “Assassination Vacation” and “The Wordy Shipmates.” She gives a reading tonight at 8 at the Paramount Theatre.

I tried to interview Vowell (pictured right) ahead of tonight’s Austin appearance, but, alas, she was unavailable. Since her most recent book, “The Wordy Shipmates,” explores the history and beliefs of the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (who are not to be confused with the Thanksgiving Puritans of Plymouth, thank you very much), I wanted to ask her if she had any thoughts on the controversy surrounding the State Board of Education’s reassessment of the social studies curriculum and the effort by the board’s religious conservatives to set textbook guidelines that support their view of America as a Christian nation. A good look at the controversy appeared two weeks ago in The New York Times Magazine in an article titled “How Christian Were the Founders?” The short answer: Very, kind of, in name only. Depends.

To say the United States is a Christian nation is to unfortunately simplify a rich, complicated cultural history — a history that’s far more interesting than the politically motivated notion supported by the education board’s Christian conservatives. Vowell relishes this complexity and all the contradictions and tangled arguments associated with it. And few groups in American history were as divided and disputatious as the Massachusetts Puritans. As she writes in “The Wordy Shipmates”: “I’m always disappointed when I see the word ‘Puritan’ tossed around for shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell.”

Vowell may not agree with the Massachusetts Puritans but she admires their intellectual rigor. These were the people who gave us Harvard, after all. “The United States is often called a Puritan nation,” Vowell writes. “Well, here is one way in which it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fanatically literary. Their single-minded obsession with one book, the Bible, made words the center of their lives — not land, not money, not power, not fun. I swear on Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston’s communitarian English majors.”

The enduring legacy of the Puritans is not that they left behind a Christian nation but that they planted the seed of American exceptionalism. Their particular brand of Christianity led them to see themselves as God’s favorites and New England “as a city upon a hill,” to quote from John Winthrop’s famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” The Puritans saw themselves as God-preferred exceptions. In addition to arguing that America is a Christian nation, the religious conservatives on the State Board of Education also want guidelines that reflect America’s exceptionalism — they share the Puritan view that we are a nation chosen by God to bring goodness and light to the world.

The official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (pictured above) featured the image of an Indian, naked save for a cluster of leaves shielding his privates. He holds a bow in his left hand and an arrow in his right. Drifting in a cartoon bubble over his head are these words: “Come over and help us.”

“The worldview behind that motto — we’re here to help, whether you want our help or not — is the Massachusetts Puritans’ most enduring bequest to the future United States,” Vowell writes. An entire history course could be constructed around a discussion of the words on that seal. What context created them? What did they mean? What consequences did they produce? Most important, how do they continue to inspire or haunt America?

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin talked about their best-selling book, “Game Change,” last night at the LBJ Library, at a discussion and book signing co-sponsored by the library, the LBJ School of Public Affairs, the Texas Book Festival and The Texas Tribune, and moderated by the Tribune’s Evan Smith. “Game Change” briskly captures the behind-the-scenes personal drama of the 2008 presidential campaign, a campaign that featured an extraordinary cast of characters going through a unique and riveting race for the White House. Heilemann (pictured below left with his co-author) and Halperin’s comments about their book were entertaining and insightful.

Since its publication a couple of months ago, a lot of attention has been focused on the book’s descriptions of the relationships between the candidates and their spouses. (In short: John and Cindy McCain’s marriage: hostile; John and Elizabeth Edwards’: not what it seems; Bill and Hillary Clinton’s: a puzzle, as always; and Barack and Michelle Obama’s: occasionally strained, but generally grounded and authentic.) But there is much more to “Game Change” than these juicy, marital bits. The book richly documents tensions within and between the campaigns — and within each candidate as each decides to run and then as each slogs through the long ordeal. There are terrific moments of hubris and doubt, and it’s fascinating to learn how much fears of potentially lethal revelations and pending political attacks, real and imagined, drove decisions and actions. A couple of excerpts are available here and here.

The book also documents many pivotal moments during the course of the campaign. Perhaps no moment was as dramatic or as important to the election’s outcome as the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the threat of financial collapse that followed. McCain was ahead of Obama in the polls coming out of the Republican convention. But, as Heilemann and Halperin noted last night, the financial crisis provided both candidates with a “real-time test of leadership” that Obama passed and McCain failed. Concerns about the economy changed the campaign’s evolutionary path, rendering extinct the campaign we might have had otherwise, one that perhaps would have turned on personal attacks against Obama even more fierce than they were and on Obama’s ability to effectively counter them.

Heilemann and Halperin gathered the material for their book by conducting some 300 interviews with more than 200 people. Most interviews, they said, took place after the nominating conventions and again after the general election. They wanted to talk to as many participants as possible while memories were still fresh, and some interviews lasted five or six hours. People interviewed ranged from junior-level staffers to some of the candidates and their spouses. Anonymity was granted, which has led some critics to raise questions about the book’s sourcing. Halperin said the promise of anonymity actually pushed their bar higher, and it was important to the authors that they confirm all their reporting with multiple sources. “We were as careful as you can be,” Halperin said, and both he and Heilemann pointed to the fact that no one has challenged or even seriously attempted to challenge the book’s accuracy — not even the Clintons, who are notoriously reactionary to any perceived criticism or slight.

Of course, no discussion of the 2008 campaign can occur without talking about former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Many audience members laughed when her name came up last night, prompting Halperin to jokingly note that America is divided into two kinds of places — those “where you mention Sarah Palin and everyone feels uplifted” and those “like Austin where you mention Sarah Palin and everyone laughs.”

Neither Heilemann or Halperin could say with any confidence whether Palin will run for president in 2012. She is not doing any of the traditional things someone planning a serious run for president would do, they said. She quit as governor, she joined Fox News as a pundit, she has made no serious effort to put together a national campaign staff or learn issues and policies. Then again, Palin is not a traditional politician.

“She does not seem to care” about her weaknesses, Heilemann told me Thursday morning as we chatted about “Game Change” over coffee and as Palin’s name came up toward the end of our discussion. Or it’s possible, he said, that Palin has “made a shrewd calculation that for the people who are her most devoted followers,” her weaknesses — her “substantive deficiencies” and her having written things in her book, “Going Rogue,” that “are demonstrably false” — simply don’t matter. “So much of what she’s about is the politics of resentment, the notion that liberal elites and the liberal media don’t understand average Americans,” Heilemann said. In her supporters’ view, any attack on Palin is an “attack of the elites on average Americans. And that makes her more of a heroic figure” to them.

I asked Heilemann whether he thought Gov. Rick Perry would run in 2012, a question that also came up during last night’s talk at the LBJ Library. “I believe two things,” Heilemann told me. “I believe that at this moment the people who are around Gov. Perry are not thinking about 2012. … At the same time, I believe that if Gov. Perry wins re-election in November, people around him will start thinking very seriously about him running for president.” I asked whether he thought voters outside Texas would support another Texan for the White House so soon after George W. Bush. Heilemann said an equally large, if not larger, problem for Perry to overcome was his having flirted with the specter of secession, and that if he were to become the Republican nominee in 2012, “secession would be a big thing that would get hung around his neck. …

“Someone who talks about secession cannot be president of the United States, almost by definition,” Heilemann said. “There are some things in politics that are pretty hard to flip flop your way out of. That’s a pretty tough one.”

“Both literally and metaphorically, Texas House Speakers live at the center of the state’s political universe.” So begins “The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics,” a new book from University of Texas Press that tracks the evolution of the office of the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives from 1846 to today — from what authors Patrick L. Cox and Michael Phillips call “the presiding speakership” of the 19th century to “the executive speakership” of the past 35 years.

It perhaps will surprise most readers to learn that the speaker of the Texas House wasn’t always the powerful figure in state government that he is today. Until Coke Stevenson controversially bucked precedent in the 1930s, no Texas speaker led consecutive legislative sessions. Speakers in the 19th century and through the Progressive Era of the early 20th century would preside over a session, then step aside so one of their colleagues could take his turn running the show next time. But since World War II, as Texas became more urban and its population grew and became more diverse, and as state government expanded to match the increasingly complex demands placed on it, the power of the office of Texas speaker has grown to match — and at times exceed — the power and influence of the lieutenant governor and governor.

Cox and Phillips will sign copies of “The House Will Come to Order” this evening during a book launch at Scholz Beer Garten, 1607 San Jacinto Blvd. The gathering is hosted by UT’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, where Cox is associate director. More information can be found at the center’s Web site.

I recently spoke with Cox (right) about his book, which developed out of an oral history project he and Phillips, a history professor at Collin College in Plano, started in 2004 when they began interviewing nine former speakers and then-Speaker Tom Craddick. Here’s an edited excerpt of my interview with Cox:

What were some of the key social changes in the state that increased the importance and power of the speaker?

Texas was primarily a Southern state both in culture and politics. It evolved through the 20th century to become a much more diverse, urbanized and industrialized state. … The demands on state government and state services changed as the state’s economy and population expanded. And we moved from being a small-government state with limited services to one that now, at least arguably speaking, provides more services and more regulation and more investment in, for example, education — although one can also argue that we’re still, by many measures, behind the national average.

What were some of the key institutional changes in the House that led to a stronger speakership?

One is the power of the speaker over a number of the administrative tasks associated with the House, and by administrative tasks, I just mean the day-to-day operations and running of the House and even the Capitol itself. The second thing is the expansion of committees, and the speaker’s power of assigning committee chairs and people to committees, both during the session and during the interim, because there are many more interim studies and committees that take place in this modern era. The essence is that the speaker is really part of the triumvirate now that presides over state government: the speaker, the lieutenant governor and the governor.

What are some qualities speakers must possess?

They have to have the political acumen to read the House membership, and not just what’s going on in the House of Representatives, but also how to interact with the governor and the Senate and lieutenant governor. I also think the modern speaker has to have a media presence; they have to be media savvy, because we’re in a very media-conscious age and the speaker has to have the ability to communicate their views and their positions.

Do you have a favorite speaker or does one stand out in importance?

I don’t think there’s one in particular. Perhaps Speaker (Pete) Laney was among the most successful in dealing with a very diverse agenda. But then I also look at Gib Lewis, who was speaker when the state was dealing with a number difficult issues — education, state finance, and growth of state government — and some challenging economic times back in the ’80s. Then there’s one of the earlier speakers, Reuben Senterfitt back in the ’50s. He only served a couple of terms but he was the first modern-era speaker to recognize the need to improve House administration and organization. He also was one of the first speakers to stand up and take the lead on policy initiatives in advance of the governor and lieutenant governor, and he really set a number of important precedents in that regard.

What was an important thing that you learned from the oral history project?

The one theme that consistently ran through the interviews was the acknowledgement that whoever was speaker, regardless of their politics, they always said they had to be a speaker who kept their finger on the pulse of the membership and as soon as they got too far away from that is when things went askew. The speaker really has to have a sense of the people who are there in the House. Speakers have their own agendas but they also have to have the sense of the multiple agendas and personalities in the House.

What does the future of the speakership look like?

It continues to expand. The influence of the speaker will continue to grow.

Earlier this month, I met Stephanie Saldana to talk about her recently published memoir, “The Bread of Angels.” Part of my interview with Saldana, who grew up in San Antonio but now lives in Jerusalem, appears in today’s Life & Style section. You can read it here.

Saldana’s memoir is subtitled “A Journey to Love and Faith,” and it is primarily about the personal transformation she experienced during the year she lived in Syria on a Fulbright fellowship — a year that included a month of religious studies at a desert monastery, where she not only reconnected with her Catholic faith but also later fell in love with a French novice monk. Saldana had just earned her master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School when she went to Syria, and part of the reason she was there was to explore the role of Jesus in Islam and maybe write a book on the subject. She studied the Quran in Arabic with a sheikha, a female scholar of the Muslim holy book, and “The Bread of Angels” relates fascinating stories about Jesus and Mary from the Quran.

Austin was one of Saldana’s last stops on a roughly month-long book tour and she said readers she met on her tour were deeply curious about Jesus and Mary in Islam. We talked about religion in the Middle East for a while and I thought I would share that part of our conversation here, since it didn’t fit within the space available for the article that appears in today’s paper:

Do you ever plan to write the book about Jesus in Islam?

I had not thought about it for a long time, but since I’ve been traveling in the country, there seems to be a huge thirst for this topic. One thing I would be interested in writing about is a travel book, which would be about the Muslim holy land — which would be sort of what we think of as the Christian holy land but really showing how so many of these sites have been Islamic at one time or another. The tomb of Lazarus, for example, the Chapel of the Ascension, the birthplace of Jesus, the tomb of Mary — I mean, half of these places were at some period Muslim sites. To really be able to trace this story I think would be fun.

Islam developed after Christianity. Did Muslims take over these sites?

In very few cases. Mostly, they just shared them. They still do. For example, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Muslims go there all the time. The Milk Grotto, where tradition says Mary stopped to nurse Jesus, Muslim women go there to pray for the birth of their children. Muslims visit all of the monasteries that have to do with Mary in the Middle East. There are more dramatic examples: The tomb of Mary, which is a church in Jerusalem, next to the tomb, if you look really carefully, there is a mihrab right in the wall, which shows the direction of Mecca. It looks totally Christian and it’s full of Christian pilgrims, but this is an example of where the history has been lost and you have to dig up references and find it again. But most of the time they were shared spaces.

It was interesting to discover in your book how Muslims see Mary, and Jesus.

She’s enormous in Islam.

Where did the stories in the Quran about her and Jesus come from? How did they develop?

Well, it’s really impossible to talk about that with Muslims in a polite way because for them the stories didn’t develop; they came from God. So that’s a difficult conversation to have. But I can say that after I read the Quran, I was astonished when I was traveling in Istanbul and I went to the monastery of Chora and there on the ceiling was the entire story of Mary from the Quran. I thought, what’s this doing in a Christian monastery? Well, it turns out that this story had been in some of the apocryphal gospels. Some of those stories were part of early Christian tradition, but then the church decided they were not part of …

When they were rejected.

Exactly. And then they were lost to most Christians. Even though to the church these gospels were apocryphal, they continued to be used in a lot of Middle Eastern monasteries far from the centers of power. So people could continue the traditions they wanted to without interference.

Some of the Christian sects in the Middle East, in Syria, that you write about, I don’t think most American Christians would recognize their practices.

And they’re ancient.

They go back to the origins of Christianity.

Right. And for me, this is a story that I feel has a real urgency because of the increasing migration of Christian communities from the region. Here’s a region that for most of the last few thousand years was extremely religiously diverse, and now very quickly, it’s losing that diversity. This isn’t just a region with Sunnis and Shias, but there are Kurds and Yazidis and Mandaeans and Assyrians and Greek Orthodox — I mean, the religious diversity is mind-boggling.

Is it inevitable that that diversity will disappear?

I would like to believe that it’s not inevitable but it certainly looks that way, especially since so much of it occurs in Iraq, and the war has sent so many of these communities fleeing. And a lot of them have been targeted, too, by religious extremists. In Iraq, you have the Mandaeans, followers of John the Baptist with really amazingly rich religious traditions, and unless their stories are told soon, they’ll be lost.

“Restrepo” is a new documentary that tightly focuses on a platoon of American soldiers defending a forward operating base in the remote Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. Co-directed by journalists Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, “Restrepo” takes its title from the isolated base, which was named in honor of Pfc. Juan Restrepo, a combat medic killed during a firefight early in the platoon’s 2007-08 deployment. The film, which is playing in several cities elsewhere, opens July 30 in Austin.

The platoon — 2nd Platoon — was part of Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade. Capt. Daniel Kearney commanded Battle Company and he appears in “Restrepo” not only explaining his company’s mission — and providing some limited context to a film that otherwise avoids looking more broadly at the war’s strategy and politics — but also negotiating with the valley’s elders and tribal leaders (as he’s shown doing in this photo).

Kearney, 29, is now a major currently stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia. He grew up the son of an infantry officer — the Army was “bred into me,” he says — and graduated from North Georgia College & State University, one of the country’s six senior military colleges for ROTC (Texas A&M is another). He served in Iraq as a lieutenant, leading a platoon of about 30 men, before being promoted to captain and sent to the Korengal Valley as commander of Battle Company in the spring of 2007.

I recently talked with Kearney about his experiences in Afghanistan and “Restrepo.” An edited transcript follows.

(I also recently spoke with Junger. That interview appears Sunday in the Statesman’s Life & Arts section.)

What is your current assignment?

Maj. Daniel Kearney: I work for the United States Army Special Operations Command and that’s really about all I can say.

Have you been back to Afghanistan since you were there in 2007-08?

I have. I’ve been back to Iraq and Afghanistan both. I just returned about four weeks ago from Afghanistan actually.

How have things changed in Afghanistan since your time in the Korengal?

When I was in the Korengal I was focused on the Korengal. I didn’t really know much that was going on outside of there. The biggest thing that has changed is that we’re no longer in the Korengal. (Note: The Army withdrew from the Korengal Valley in April, after five years; 42 Americans died fighting there.) I was over there when that transpired and I had some small piece in the pie of pulling out of the Korengal and getting those men used elsewhere. So it was kind of a chapter in my life that I was finally able to close the book on.

What are your thoughts about the withdrawal?

Everybody kind of feels a little bit bad that we did what we did down there and then you withdraw and you kind of, like, ask why were we there? But at the end of the day, it was never about the Korengal. It was really about the bigger mission, which was what was going on in the valley to our north, what was going in Asadabad and the larger population centers, and making sure that the government and the security could be in place there. We were in the Korengal to keep the enemy off-balance so they wouldn’t take away from what the government of Afghanistan and what the soldiers elsewhere and in Asadabad were doing. So we always knew it was going to happen sooner or later.

Would you consider the deployment to the Korengal a success?

Success is hard to define. …

Let me rephrase it: Did the deployment accomplish the mission’s goals?

I think I came there with incredibly lofty goals. I was expecting to go down there and tame the valley in a few months, and 15 months later I still hadn’t completely tamed it. So I didn’t achieve everything I wanted to, but in hindsight, and throughout the 15-month deployment, I think we achieved more than we thought we were going to be able to achieve after the first couple of months.

What reactions do you have when you see yourself in the film?

I don’t know. It is what is was. I wish I hadn’t cussed so much because I don’t want young kids to see me cussing and think it’s OK. I wish that I would have sounded more diplomatic. But I had nothing to hide. That’s the biggest thing about this. Once Sebastian and Tim were there, there was nothing that I was afraid of them seeing or showing on the screen because everything we did there and everything I did there was morally and ethically correct. So I don’t really critique myself.

What would you like for viewers of “Restrepo” to take away from the film?

I hope they walk away with an appreciation for what America’s most precious resource is out there doing. It’s not their dollars and cents and their tax money; it’s the young men and women of this country that volunteer to go out there and for 15 months at a time, or 12 months at a time, they live an unheard-of life that nobody will ever understand unless they go through it. And I hope that after seeing it they kind of do understand it and they have a better appreciation for what it is those young men and women are doing, because they’re all 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds that could be back here in the States chasing girls or chasing boys and drinking and getting a college education, but they chose to go do something else, something that offered them, I guess, some kind of more meaningful existence.

Do you think the public is engaged enough in Afghanistan?

Let’s just put it this way: I am surprised at the level of people coming out to go see this movie. I never would have imagined that this many people would have been that interested in it.

I recently interviewed Austin author Lawrence Wright about the excellent and thought-provoking film version of his one-man play “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” which airs at 8 p.m. tomorrow on HBO. Part of my interview with Wright will appear in tomorrow’s Life & Arts section.

Thanks to years of reporting and research for his 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” Wright has earned recognition as an expert on Middle Eastern Islamic radicalism in general and al Qaeda in particular. He and I talked for a little over an hour about “The Looming Tower” and “My Trip to Al-Qaeda.” Most of what we talked about had to be trimmed from today’s Life & Arts article but, I think, is too interesting to leave unpublished. Here is an edited transcript of the part of my interview with Wright (shown below interviewing Abdullah al-Shehri, a professor in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) that didn’t make it into print.

Austin American-Statesman: How does “My Trip to Al-Qaeda” relate to “The Looming Tower”? It’s not an adaptation.

Lawrence Wright: No. It’s my reaction to the experiences that I had in researching the book. The book took nearly five years to write. For at least two of those years, and maybe more, I was away from home.

Do you see “My Trip to Al-Qaeda” as theater, as lecture or seminar …

It’s hard to categorize. People are always saying, “You’re one-man play, or whatever you call it.” I don’t know exactly what to call it. I call it “nonfiction theater.” It’s just a term to try to understand it.

It is a play. It has structure. It is a performance. But it also has the nature of a conversation. What I like about doing these plays is the intimacy of the connection with people. It is journalism. I’m carrying information to them. But somehow actually standing in front of them and telling them about it and showing them and filtering it through my own experiences, it creates a kind of power that is hard to access in other forms of journalism.

Obviously some new footage was shot for the HBO film of “My Trip to Al-Qaeda.” What was the production process for the film? Why three years between the theatrical run and the broadcast of the film?

The short answer is raising money. It took a while to put it together. Then we still had to transform it from a theatrical to a cinematic experience.

Alex Gibney (the film’s director) and I met after one of my performances and he said he’d really like to make it into a film. It proved difficult to assemble the cash. We finally did get it. Then, with our really limited budget, we had to plan trips to England and to Egypt because we figured there were some key interviews in both places that could be used to enhance the movie experience.

Osama bin Laden’s brother in law, Jamal Khalifa, was an important source for you. I guess he put you one degree from bin Laden.

He was one of the people who was closest to bin Laden. They were best friends, and they were related and they spent a lot of very important moments together — on the battlefield and also as young men.

Jamal was a very complicated figure for me because I liked him so much. He had a great smile. He was full of humor. He seemed to me to genuinely want to separate himself from bin Laden and his ideas — not just in his conversations with me. He had published letters in the Saudi press denouncing bin Laden. So there was evidence of the genuineness of those feelings.

But he was being hampered in his business by the fact that he really couldn’t travel. He was afraid of being renditioned. He consulted me about it. He said he wanted to talk to the FBI, wanted to clear his name. I tried to make that possible. In the course of reporting the book, I had interviewed dozens and dozens of FBI agents. So I knew a lot of them. I made a number of calls over a period of a couple of years. What I was finally told by one of my sources in the FBI was the FBI was told they couldn’t talk to Jamal. The CIA had forbidden it.

He made an exploratory trip to Beirut to see what would happen and nothing happened. So then he traveled to Madagascar and he was murdered. I don’t know what happened. But nobody was ever brought to justice. Whether it was just a gang in Madagascar — what they stole was his laptop computers. They didn’t take his money. His family thinks it was a U.S. Special Ops assassination. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. I’ve been trying to find out. I’ve filed several FOIA (freedom of information) applications.