Shaking out the best of my notes from a wonderfully busy weekend at the 15th annual Texas Book Festival (visit The Reader blog for more festival coverage from my colleagues Joe Gross, Patrick Beach and Kathy Blackwell):

Laura Bush, who helped create the Texas Book Festival in 1995 and serves as its honorary chairwoman, discussed her best-selling memoir, “Spoken From the Heart,” Saturday morning with moderator Mark Updegrove. Camera flashes filled the Paramount Theatre with strobelike light during the first few minutes of Bush’s conversation with Updegrove, director of the LBJ Library and Museum.

Bush called reading her life’s “guiding passion” and talked about how books helped her fill long, empty hours when she was growing up in Midland, and how reading also served as a refuge during quiet, late afternoon hours in the White House when her day’s events were over and she was waiting for her husband, President George W. Bush, to return to the family quarters from the Oval Office.

The former first lady spoke warmly of the lifelong friendships she and her husband had made while growing up in Midland, and how those friendships sustained them during their time in the White House. And she spoke movingly of how family members of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks reached out to her for comfort and how she treasures the new friendships she’s made with many of those family members.

Asked by Updegrove about the monthlong “purgatory” of the 2000 election recount in Florida, Bush said she and her husband would retreat to their ranch near Crawford to try to escape the limbo they were in, and it was during those retreats that the future president became “the brush-clearing Zen master,” she said with deadpan humor.

As a West Texan, Bush surely would have appreciated novelist and retired reporter Bryan Woolley’s heartfelt ode to his native land during the panel “110 in the Shade: Writing About the Southwest” early Saturday afternoon in a Capitol Extension room. Woolley grew up in Fort Davis and his description of the region’s space and light was evocative, resonating with this native West Texan and stirring a longing to revisit one of the best places Texas has to offer. Even though Woolley now lives in Dallas, and has lived in cities his adult life, because that’s where the big newspapers and reporting jobs are, he said, “My soul still lives in the Davis Mountains.” And he said that when he dies, he’s asked his family to scatter his ashes in the Davis Mountains. “Even after death,” he said, “I will still want the space and light.”

Earlier during the panel, Woolley read from his slim memoir, “The Wonderful Room: The Making of a Texas Newspaperman,” about his days as a young reporter for The El Paso Times. He described a few of the crimes, suicides and fatal accidents he covered on the police beat. The audience was absolutely silent, mesmerized by Woolley’s spare, direct prose — though some in the audience squirmed uncomfortably at the gruesome details.

Woolley was joined by panel moderator Katherine Durham Oldmixon, Austin poet Carrie Fountain, Tom Miller, a journalist who lives in Tucson, and short story writer Martha Egan of Santa Fe, N.M. Fountain, a graduate of UT’s Michener Center for Writers, read a poem titled “The Continental Divide” from her award-winning debut collection, “Burn Lake.” Her poems are mostly set in New Mexico (Fountain grew up in Mesilla, N.M., near Las Cruces) and gracefully blend the past and present, the confessional with the historical.

The sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church was packed for conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke (right), who joked that a church sanctuary was “not a place where I’m accustomed to speaking” and worried about the appropriateness of the venue given the title of his new book, “Don’t Vote — It Just Encourages the Bastards.”

“So if lightning strikes us all …,” O’Rourke warned.

O’Rourke said we can look at politics as a version of the late-night sorority game Kill, Mess Around With (or what we will euphemistically call Mess Around With on this blog), Marry, and we can equate political power with the Kill part of the game, freedom with the Mess Around With part, and responsibility with the Marry part. The trouble, O’Rourke said, is that baby boomers have been controlling our politics for decades and that no generation in history has been as enamored with the power and freedom parts of the game or as unwilling to accept that responsibility is also part of the game as the boomers. And O’Rourke said he should know, since he is a boomer himself.

There were times when O’Rourke, preaching the virtues of a mostly unrestrained free market, seemed to confuse politics with government. He said at one point that politics never created a job. No, but government has — one only needs to consider defense spending, a perennial giant of a stimulus program. O’Rourke is a great wit, but behind the wit are a few arguments that buckle once the chuckles end.

O’Rourke closed with a crowd-pleasing anecdote about how unfair life is that I’m sure more than a few Austin parents will soon use on their own children. O’Rourke said that one day his 12-year-old daughter was whining on and on about how this wasn’t fair or that wasn’t fair and “I just snapped,” he said.

“I said, ‘Darling, you’re cute. That’s not fair. You’re smart. That’s not fair. Your family’s pretty well-off. That’s not fair. You were born in the United States of America. And that’s not fair. Darling, you should get down on your knees every day and thank God that life’s not fair.”

I started the festival’s final day Sunday in the Capitol Extension listening to James Hynes talk about his masterful new novel, “Next.” Hynes is a native of Michigan and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who moved to Austin in 1995. “Next” is his fourth novel — he’s also written a collection of darkly comic novellas called “Publish and Perish” — and a bit of a departure from the academic satires that have largely defined his career thus far, though the jabs at academia aren’t absent from “Next.”

You can broadly label “Next” a post-9/11 novel because it’s partly about the fear of the unexpected blistering our lives, and the festival had titled Hynes’ discussion “The Age of Anxiety.” Hynes noted that his novel is “not entirely about post-9/11 anxiety, but really more about the inevitable anxiety of a 50-year-old guy.”

That 50-year-old guy is Kevin Quinn, the editor of a University of Michigan academic journal who’s mired in middle-age nostalgia and melancholy. Without telling anyone, including his younger girlfriend who may or may not be pregnant with his child, and whom he is thinking of leaving, Kevin flies for the day from Ann Arbor to Austin for a job interview. He arrives hours early so he wanders downtown Austin, following an attractive young woman who reminds him of an old lover and reflecting on his life and where it might be going.

It would be easy to spoil “Next.” Let’s just say that as Kevin’s Ulyssean journey ends and he heads toward his interview, the novel pivots toward an ending that, while subtly foreshadowed, is still stunning when it arrives.

“Next” is not the first novel Hynes has set in Austin. His 2005 novel, “Kings of Infinite Space,” was set here, too, though Hynes called Austin “Lamar” in that book, “for some silly reason,” he said. In “Next,” Austin is Austin. Still, Hynes said that so many condo towers kept sprouting up while he worked on his book that after a while he gave up trying to keep its downtown scenes current. “At some point, I resigned myself to the fact that this was going to be a historical novel,” he said, laughing.

Hynes does use fictional names for some Austin landmarks. He began his session by reading a short passage in which Kevin visits Gaia Market — Hynes’ stand-in for Whole Foods. Kevin’s reaction to Gaia Market pierce the shopping aesthetic of Whole Foods. Hynes joked that one of the advantages of being a middling novelist who is not well known or whose books don’t sell well is that he has no need to fear being banished from Whole Foods because “nobody at Whole Foods is even aware of my ideological critique.”

I next went to the sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church on Lavaca Street to hear Karl Rove (right). The controversial campaign operative and former adviser to President George W. Bush filibustered at least 30 of his 45 scheduled minutes by reading from his memoir, “Courage and Consequence.” Rove read passages covering the origins of the working friendship between Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock and then-Gov. Bush, the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore, Bush’s arrival back in Washington late on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, and Bush’s visit to ground zero three days after 9/11.

An echoey sound system combined with the natural echo of a church sanctuary made it hard to understand Rove at times, at least for those of us sitting in the gallery. By the time he was done reading, there was time left for only three questions. The first asked was confused and pointless, something to do with politics as sport and winning as everything. The second question was related to the legitimacy of the Iraq war; for the only time during his session, I could hear and understand everything Rove said.

The question, mildly and politely asked, nonetheless prompted Rove to launch into a vigorous, nine-minute defense of the Bush administration’s interpretation of the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons capabilities and a pugilistic attack on congressional Democrats who accused Bush of lying about those weapons. Rove, growing more prickly as each second ticked by, said he warned Bush that the accusations threatened to turn into “a dagger in the heart of your presidency unless we can fight it from the top of this administration to the bottom.” He repeated the familiar administration line that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq may not have had an active weapons program but it did have the capability of reconstituting its biological and chemical programs and restarting its nuclear program and would have done so as soon as the West lost interest in policing Saddam’s regime.

Rove quickly dispatched the final question, about government spending. He did note that the administration’s struggle to control spending was not entirely a struggle with Democrats. Republicans in Congress love their earmarks, too, Rove said.

Austin author S.C. Gwynne (left) followed Rove Sunday afternoon. I’m a huge fan of Gwynne’s “Empire of the Summer Moon,” his history of Quanah Parker and the Comanches. So, so far, books by Austin writers — Hynes’ “Next” and Gwynne’s “Empire” — top my picks for the year’s best fiction and nonfiction.

Gwynne is from Connecticut and he said his book reflects “a Yankee’s love affair with the state of Texas.” A longtime journalist, first with Time magazine, then with Texas Monthly and now with the Dallas Morning News, Gwynne said his reporting skills were a natural fit for historical research, and he was pleased to discover that writing a book “is just slow reporting.”

I interviewed Gwynne as part of the Statesman’s coverage of the Texas Book Fesitval. You can read the interview here. It reflects many of the same things Gwynne discussed Sunday at the festival.

With the Rangers’ mighty bats silent and the team down 3-1 in the World Series, things are looking grim here in Mudville, Texas. So let’s turn instead to a baseball story from yesteryear that we’re happy to remember …

In May 1959, Jerry Craft had just arrived home in Jacksboro on summer break from Texas Tech when he got a phone call from a Mr. Carl Sedberry, manager of the semi-professional Wichita Falls/Graham Stars. Sedberry wanted to know if Craft was available to pitch for the Stars.

Sedberry had scouted Craft the previous summer when the right-handed Craft had pitched in the semi-pro Oil Belt League. Good pitchers are hard to find anywhere, but they were especially hard to find in small-town Texas. And Craft had a nasty dropping curve and splendid control. The Stars sure could use him, Sedberry said. Would he be interested in giving the Stars a tryout when the team played its first game of the season, against the Abilene Blues?

Craft had never heard of the Wichita Falls/Graham Stars or the Abilene Blues. Sedberry assured him that the teams were part of a popular, established league. So Craft, whose only other prospect at the time was to work all day on his family’s cattle ranch, agreed to drive to Wichita Falls for the Stars’ game with the Blues and give the team a try.

He was in for a life-changing surprise. The Wichita Falls/Graham Stars was an all-black team, part of the seven-team West Texas Colored League. Twelve years may have gone by since Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues, but in the segregated, Jim Crow Texas of 1959, teams and leagues were still white or black, and while black teams and white teams occasionally played each other, none was integrated.

Except, once Craft joined them, for the Stars.

With the help of Kathleen Sullivan, Craft writes about the two seasons he spent with the Stars in “Our White Boy” (Texas Tech University Press; $29.95). There are two changing, disappearing worlds in Craft’s book. We can bid good riddance to one, the racist, segregated world of 1950s Texas. But a nostalgia surrounds the loss of the other, the one in which summer for young men and men young at heart meant baseball, and dozens of small towns across Texas — towns like Haskell and Hamlin, Stamford and Aspermont — were thriving and vibrant enough to field their own baseball teams — before the big cities lured the young people away and television sealed everyone within the cocoon of their own living rooms.

It was a love of the game that prompted Craft to play for the Stars, not the need to make a statement of any kind. “The integration of the Stars is more meaningful to me now than it was in 1959,” Craft writes. “Back then, I was just happy to play baseball.”

Craft, 73, is a cattle rancher and the former mayor of Jacksboro, a small town halfway between Fort Worth and Wichita Falls. He was in Austin for last month’s Texas Book Festival. I had coffee with him and his wife, Pamela, and we spent a pleasant hour talking about his experience as the lone white player in an all-black league.

An edited transcript of our conversation follows.

I interviewed Sarah Vowell about her new book, “Unfamiliar Fishes,” for today’s Life & Style section. You can read the article here.

“Unfamiliar Fishes” is about the Americanization of Hawaii by New England missionaries and others in the 19th century and its annexation by the United States in 1898. The book was published last week, and Vowell will be in Austin Saturday for a book signing at BookPeople. A review from our friends at Kirkus Reviews can be read here.

Vowell (pictured right) was happy to be talking to “a real newspaper” when I called and not some online-only outfit, but I think she would agree that a blog can serve a useful purpose — like hosting a more complete transcript of a 25-minute conversation than the roughly 650-word article our print edition could accommodate. …

American-Statesman: What prompted you to write a book about Hawaii?

Sarah Vowell: The first time I went there I went to see the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and while I was there I toured the Iolani Palace, the mansion where the Hawaiian monarchs used to live in downtown Honolulu. I got interested in the story of the overthrow of the queen, and the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands by the U.S.

I had kind of been writing about and around the Spanish-American War era for, oh gosh, almost 10 years and Hawaii has this little part of that. I’m interested in that phase of our history just because it’s one where we became what we are now.

The year of the Spanish-American War, 1898, was an important year for America. What do we need to know about it?

It’s really when we became a world power, and fairly intentionally. There was this snowballing series of weeks over a four-month period when we invaded Cuba and the Philippines, and took over Guam and Puerto Rico — all these former Spanish colonies — and in the middle of that we annexed Hawaii.

Hawaii wasn’t a Spanish colony; it was its own independent nation. The decades leading up to annexation fascinated me, too, because it’s the story of almost eight decades of Americans in Hawaii Christianizing Hawaiians.

The difference between Hawaii and the other Spanish colonies we acquired was Hawaii was already so American because of these decades of American involvement and settlement. The missionary descendants overthrew the queen with the goal of handing the islands to the United States.

We simply weren’t made to live without gravity. That fact has always been the biggest challenge about space travel. Think rocket science is hard? Try building a toilet that works in zero gravity.

In “Packing for Mars,” Mary Roach, right, explores all the crazy, gross, odd and fascinating challenges that have confronted space engineers and scientists for the past 50 years of human space flight, and which make a trip to Mars a seeming impossibility. Roach — whose previous books include “Stiff,” about cadavers, and “Bonk,” about the science of sex — carefully researches the awkward details of life in space then describes what’s she found with enthusiasm and great humor.

Roach discusses and signs “Packing for Mars,” now available in paperback, tonight at 7 at BookPeople. I spoke with Roach shortly after she arrived in Austin Wednesday afternoon. Excerpts from our conversation:

You were a kid in the 1960s, during NASA’s heyday. Have you always been interested in space travel?

No, surprisingly enough. I was born in 1959 so I was pretty young then, but I don’t remember the moon landing. I was not at all a space-obsessed child. I’m a late bloomer to space flight.

What got you interested in the subject?

Years ago I had an assignment from Discover magazine about the neutral buoyancy tank, which is that huge tank where NASA trains astronauts for spacewalking. I got to the Johnson Space Center and it was just like the magical kingdom. There was just so much bizarre, amazing, interesting stuff going on. The day I was there they were rehearsing what would be a six-hour spacewalk. The rehearsals were amounting to 250 hours of time in the tank. I had no idea the amount of training and work that goes into living in space. That was when I started to understand a little bit about what goes on behind the scenes.

One question you always hear astronauts asked is, how do you use the bathroom in space. That question ties in with your fascination with the human body in all its messy glory.

Well, yeah. I have a chapter in the book about going to the bathroom in space — it’s only one chapter, but it picks up a disproportionate amount of the coverage of the book, which reflects, I think, a universal fascination. To me it was fascinating not just because of the tee-hee value but because it’s a wonderful example of the unbelievable challenges of life without gravity. The things we take for granted — you don’t really think of the toilet as something that requires gravity, but in zero gravity, the “material,” to use a NASA euphemism, doesn’t fall into the toilet. So you’ve got to completely rethink the toilet. That’s a fascinating thing.

The book underscores two things: You really aren’t aware how much you need gravity until you try to live without it. And so much for the glamorous life of an astronaut.

I know. It isn’t glamorous but I think most astronauts happily accept the inconveniences — the smells, the awkwardness, the lack of creature comforts — for the ability to be where they are, in this place with this amazing view that so few people have ever had. It’s like backpacking times a hundred. You know, backpacking is difficult. It’s a pain to sleep on the ground, you eat bad food, but it enables you to get to these amazing places that you don’t ordinarily get to.

The Iowa caucuses are in two weeks and Texas Gov. Rick Perry is touring the state in a bus that carries a slogan that matches the changed focus of his endangered presidential campaign: “Faith, Jobs and Freedom.”

Back in August, when Perry launched his campaign, the slogan plastered across the side of his bus was “Get America Working Again.” But with Iowa’s conservative evangelicals possibly up for grabs (60 percent of participants in the 2008 Iowa Republican caucuses called themselves evangelicals, according to polls at the time), faith has supplanted jobs in the slogan department, with freedom thrown in for good measure. (Freedom’s always good for good measure in presidential campaigns.)

In last week’s Republican debate in Sioux City, Perry called himself “the Tim Tebow of the Iowa caucuses,” comparing himself to the Denver Broncos quarterback who’s the talk and hype of the NFL after a series of come-from-behind wins (until Sunday’s big loss to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, that is). Perry is hoping for a political comeback as dramatic as Tebow’s late-game heroics. If he can pull enough evangelical voters his way to finish in third place or a respectably close fourth place in Iowa Jan. 3, Perry will be crowned the comeback kid and will have fresh momentum to carry him to New Hampshire on Jan. 10 and South Carolina Jan. 21.

Perry’s ability to come from behind remains to be seen, but his mix of faith and politics matches Tebow’s mix of faith and football in stirring controversy. (A “Saturday Night Live” skit this past weekend spoofed Tebow’s gridiron displays of religion: “Tim, I love you, but just take it down a notch, will ya, buddy,” Jesus, played by Jason Sudeikis, tells Tebow, played by Taran Killam.) When Perry, Tebow and other public figures trumpet their faith, I always think of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew and his criticism of the self-righteous who “love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.” Such public expressions of faith and piety — “all their works they do for to be seen of men” — contradict the personal and private relationship with God that Jesus teaches his followers.

By now, you have seen the 30-second campaign ad titled “Strong,” Perry’s exploitation of his faith for political gain. Verily, when thou art behind in the polls in Iowa and desperately need evangelical conservatives to vote for you else your campaign come to a grinding halt, go all-out demagogic:

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian,” Perry says. “But you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

“As president, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.”

Hundreds of videos spoofing Perry’s ad have popped up on YouTube since it first aired Dec. 6. I’ve watched about 10 of them. Only a couple are gems. My favorite, by “video blogger” James Kotecki, follows Perry’s script and turns it back on the governor: “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m an atheist, but you don’t need to sleep in every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when Rick Perry can be openly homophobic but our kids can’t openly celebrate evolution or learn science in school. …”

We began the day thinking Gov. Rick Perry was headed back to Texas to reassess his presidential run after his distant fifth-place finish in last night’s Iowa caucuses — meaning we began the day thinking Perry was about to call it quits. When a politician says he’s reassessing his place in a campaign, his campaign usually is done.

Then around 10:30 this morning Perry tweeted “Here we come South Carolina!!!” As I write this, it’s uncertain what some members of his staff knew about this decision, but, apparently, Perry’s still in the race. And emphatically so. Three exclamation points prove it.

So the campaign obituaries and analyses about how Perry’s debate performances sank his White House hopes are on hold or in some cases will have to be rewritten once South Carolina completes what currently appears inevitable.

Before he reversed course about his campaign, I was trying to think of the one thing I learned about Perry from his foray into national politics that I found most surprising. And this is what I kept coming back to:

He plays the piano. Who knew? As he told Parade magazine: “I played piano for seven years. But I broke my arm really bad unloading horses when I was 16, so I had to stop. Had it not been for the accident, I’d probably be playing piano in a little bar here in New York.”

(And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar / And say, “Man, what are you doin’ here?”)

He’s a big fan of Beethoven, whose music is a prominent part of his iPod. And Perry’s favorite movie is “Immortal Beloved,” a 1994 Beethoven biopic starring Gary Oldman.

Other than the surprise of his piano-man dreams, Perry’s campaign has reinforced what was clear in his 2010 book “Fed Up!”: For all his true-believer talk about the Constitution, Perry would like nothing more than to change it … repeatedly.

He has said he supports amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, ban abortion, allow prayer in school, require balanced budgets, end lifetime tenure for federal judges, allow Congress to override Supreme Court decisions, and repeal the 16th (income tax) and 17th (direct election of senators) amendments.

It’s a unique way of expressing his fidelity to the Constitution, but fitting of today’s conservatives. And now Perry has decided to keep going in a presidential race colored by candidates whose expressions of conservatism strain the word’s definition.

After a slight rewrite, my last blog item about Gov. Rick Perry’s piano playing was published Sunday as a column in the American-Statesman. Since then I’ve heard that Perry can also play the drums. Again, who knew?

The New Hampshire primary is today. Perry is polling only about 1 percent in New Hampshire, where he hasn’t campaigned all that hard. More importantly, he’s polling only 5 percent in South Carolina, where he will make his last stand when the state holds its primary Jan. 21.

Few appear to take Perry seriously anymore. He was a minor player in the two Republican debates this weekend in New Hampshire (even so, he created a stir and more ridicule for himself when he said he would send troops back to Iraq because Iran was poised to “move back in at literally the speed of light”). Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, guest Harold Ford, and correspondents Chuck Todd and David Gregory were talking about the New Hampshire primary. They mentioned Perry only once during the segment I saw, and it was to make fun of the poor guy. (Here’s video of the segment; the reference to Perry comes around the 8:30 mark.) Scarborough, the former Republican congressman from Florida, was the most mocking; Todd and Gregory had a good laugh at the governor’s expense.

Maybe voters in South Carolina will take Perry more seriously and give him a new look and make him the first anti-Mitt Romney candidate to experience a second surge in the polls. That’s the path out of Iowa and past New Hampshire Perry hopes he’s traveling. But unless things change dramatically in the next 10 days, the path he’s on is the path home.

Gov. Rick Perry accepted the inevitable today and ended his inept run for the presidency.

A Perry-Mitt Romney battle royale for the Republican nomination stretching deep into the primary season seemed a real possibility when Perry joined the Republican race in August. Perry’s campaign was flush with cash. He had successfully wooed the tea party and conservative Christians. He had a conservative record as governor that contrasted well with Romney’s more moderate record as governor of Massachusetts.

Then, the debates.

Those Republican debates. Endless and relentless.

The debates were Perry’s Achilles heel, brain and mouth. He was inarticulate, nonsensical and very much out his league. He played defense from the get-go — on calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme, on his push for an HPV vaccine. He started seriously falling in the polls after questioning whether opponents of Texas’ in-state college tuition program for children of illegal immigrants had a heart. He sealed his fate with an “oops” that tops presidential debate blooper history.

(“Energy. Energy,” I muttered to myself as Perry struggled to recall the third federal agency he’d eliminate. Promising to get rid of the Department of Energy, which was established in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter, is Republican boilerplate — has been for more than 30 years, ever since Ronald Reagan said he’d abolish it during the 1980 campaign.)

Perhaps if Perry had bothered to debate Bill White during the 2010 gubernatorial campaign he would have been better prepared for the Republican presidential debates. Perhaps if he had faced the press more often and newspaper editorial boards at all during his 2010 re-election campaign he would have been more practiced for the bigger race, sharper questions to come.

* * *

Perry and his wife Anita thought the governor’s White House run was divinely inspired and blessed. Job knows, the righteous suffer. But maybe the Perrys heard only what they wanted to hear when they sought heavenly advice on whether to enter the Republican presidential race, or maybe … well, let’s just say that God sometimes has a sense of humor and leave it at that.

The State of the Union address has become a tiresome pageant, overstuffed with partisan grandstanding, special guests and a laundry list of sometimes half-baked policy proposals.

You want courage in politics? Give me a president brave enough to spare us the dull spectacle.

I know, the State of the Union is too entrenched as a media event, and presidents like it for the attention it brings them. We are stuck with it.

The State of the Union’s a bully pulpit. President Barack Obama used it Tuesday night to again call for economic fairness. He wants the wealthy to pay a greater share of taxes; he wants new thinking about energy and innovation and productivity; he wants Congress to work together for the greater good. There was a lot of pundit blather after Obama’s speech about how he set forth his platform for re-election and crafted an implicit contrast between himself and his Republican rival - whoever that might be.

The Constitution - Article II, Section 3 - requires the president “from time to time” to give “the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” But the Constitution says nothing about an annual address, or whether the State of the Union even needs to be in the form of a speech.

I don’t know why Craig James is running for U.S. Senate. If I were paid to talk about college football at ESPN there’s no way I’d give it up to make a likely futile run for public office, but the former Southern Methodist University running back has quit his sweet gig at ESPN to belatedly join the Republican field seeking to replace Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who’s retiring.

James (pictured here in March 2010) may think he has name recognition working in his favor, but my guess is most Texans who recognize his name are unlikely to favor James with their vote. Eric Dickerson and James were the one-two punch of the great Pony Express backfield at SMU in the early 1980s but memories of booster slush funds, payments to players and an NCAA “death penalty” that forced SMU to kill its football program for two years cloud James’ gridiron glory. (James admits to taking “insignificant amounts” of money while at SMU, but he was five years gone from the university and not involved in the immediate violations that led to the school’s football program paying the ultimate price for its sins.)

More recently, James accused Texas Tech head coach Mike Leach of mistreating his son, Adam, a wide receiver, prompting Tech to fire Leach in late 2009. Leach responded by suing Tech, ESPN and James. James’ name is pretty much dirt in West Texas and the Panhandle.

James was in Austin for Thursday night’s Republican Senate debate with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz and former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert. He told the American-Statesman’s Ken Herman and other journalists before the debate that he’s basing his campaign on three simple principles: “God is God. Family is family. And the Constitution is the Constitution.”

This is a wordy expansion of standard Republican campaign fare. “God, family and the Constitution” has a better chance of fitting on a bumper sticker, but maybe James sees his formulation as an assertive final statement, one signaling strength and conviction — though the way he puts it, each principle begs further discussion rather than ends it.

Here, then, is where James’ Senate campaign begins: He filed to run at the last possible moment. What should be an asset in Texas — his football career, which also includes one pro bowl year (1985) with the New England Patriots — is a big liability. He is deeply disliked in a large, very conservative part of the state. His odds of winning the Republican Senate nomination appear worse than the odds the Patriots faced when they met the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XX. (James had five carries for one yard in that 46-10 blowout loss.)

And that is that.

The New England Patriots lost last night’s Super Bowl. Well, OK, the New York Giants won, but sometimes games are lost more than they’re won, and the Patriots lost Super Bowl XLVI.

The loss came with 4:06 left in the game when Tom Brady threw a little high and behind Wes Welker. Welker could have caught the ball (he got both hands around it) but Brady could have made a better throw, too. Welker may be taking most of the blame for the drop, but it was at least equally Brady’s fault.

Anyway, if any game can be boiled down to a single play, the Brady-Welker drop was the decisive play of Super Bowl XLVI. If Welker catches the pass, the Patriots are in position to score again. More important, they have a new set of downs that lets them run more time off the clock (the Giants had only one timeout left, plus the two-minute warning). If Welker catches the pass, the game’s all but over.

So now Brady and the Patriots have lost two Super Bowls after winning three in four years. For Brady, that fourth title that would put him in the same championship arena as Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw remains bitterly elusive.

* * *

For the next couple of days you’re probably going to hear a lot of talk about Brady’s tarnished legacy - about how he’s a pedestrian 6-6 in the postseason since winning his first 10 playoff games from 2001 to 2005.

Please. Brady’s legacy is secure. Statistically he’s gotten better since New England won its last Super Bowl seven years ago and he has carried the Patriots since returning in 2009 from a knee injury that cost him all but the first 7½ minutes of the 2008 season. His top receivers this year were two tight ends and a slot receiver who rarely catches passes thrown beyond 20 yards (a reason why Welker dropped Brady’s 23-yard pass last night?).

Brady hasn’t had a speedy receiver who can stretch the field since Randy Moss and he hasn’t had a threatening running game to take pressure off his passing since Corey Dillon rushed for more than 1,600 yards in 2004. Yet Brady threw for 5,235 yards (second most in NFL history) and 39 touchdowns this season. His passer rating was 105.6. Over the past three years, he has thrown for 13,533 yards, with 103 touchdowns and only 29 interceptions. His average passer rating the past three seasons is 104.3.

Like so many others who were 10-ish in the early 1970s, I immediately thought of Marcia Brady when I heard Wednesday that the Monkees’ Davy Jones had died of a heart attack at age 66. Forty years ago, kids, when our television viewing was limited to the three major networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — the best family option on Friday nights at 7 was “The Brady Bunch.” In December 1971, ABC aired what is possibly the series’ best-known episode [1], “Getting Davy Jones,” in which Marcia (Maureen McCormick), president of her school’s Davy Jones fan club, foolishly tells her classmates that she can get Jones to perform at the school’s prom. Long story short, after a round of misinterpretation, misunderstanding and misguided effort by Marcia, Jones not only agrees to sing at the prom but he also asks Marcia if he can go as her date.

The Monkees — the band — officially broke up the same year Marcia Brady got Davy Jones, though “The Monkees” — the TV show — had been off the air for almost four years. “The Monkees” was a flash in the pan; it first aired on NBC in September 1966 [2] and was cancelled only 17 months later, in February 1968. Jones was trying to establish a solo act when he made his guest appearance on “The Brady Bunch,” but by then he had major competition on the teen heartthrob front — David Cassidy of “The Partridge Family” was the new Davy Jones — and his eponymous 1971 solo album and the singles from it did not sell well.

“The Monkees” was never a ratings hit but the Monkees was a record-selling phenomenon. The show had been created to exploit and, to a lesser and subtler extent, spoof Beatlemania, and its madcap antics mimicked the Beatles’ first film, “A Hard Day’s Night.” Critics dismissed the Monkees as the Prefab Four, as opposed to the Beatles’ Fab Four, and lost no chance to point out that Jones and his band mates — Micky Dolenz, Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork — didn’t play their own instruments on their early records (though Nesmith was a guitarist and Tork a multi-instrumentalist, and Nesmith was soon writing songs for the band). The show’s producers had the last laugh on the critics. The Monkees’ first two albums — “The Monkees” and “More of the Monkees” — had a combined 31-week run atop the U.S. album charts in 1966-67, according to Billboard. Two other albums also hit No. 1.

Casting for “The Monkees” could have changed rock music. Stephen Stills auditioned for the show and came dangerously close to getting the role that eventually went to Peter Tork (a friend whom Stills recommended to the show’s producers after they rejected him). I say “dangerously close” because around the time he was trying out for the Monkees, Stills was also forming Buffalo Springfield with Neil Young, Richie Furay, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin. Put Stills in the Monkees and a whole chapter of rock music vanishes [3]. I’d like to think that Neil Young’s talent eventually would have brought him some version of the fame and respect he now enjoys but would there have been a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young [4] or a Poco or a Loggins and Messina if Stills had been cast as a Monkee? Doubtful.

I wrote a column for Sunday’s American-Statesman about the Supreme Court arguments this week on the constitutionality of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. Here are links to two articles I referenced in the column that you might find worth reading yourself: Ann Coulter’s “Three Cheers for Romneycare” and Los Angeles Times reporter David G. Savage’s story about Mary Brown, a Florida woman who played a key role in getting the issue of the individual mandate before the Supreme Court but who last fall filed for bankruptcy with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills.

In the column I briefly alluded to the idea that the individual mandate is misnamed — that it’s more incentive than forced requirement, since you can choose not to buy health insurance. The choice will cost you a small tax penalty (small relative to your income, and of course the more income you make the smaller the penalty relatively becomes), but no one is making you buy health insurance. That the individual mandate should be preceded by “so-called,” given that it’s a misnomer, has been brought up numerous times over the past couple of years, but this op-ed published last fall by William Leach, a former professor of public policy, excellently summarizes the point.

Specifically before the court is whether the Constitution allows the federal government to compel — pressure, if you like — citizens to buy health insurance and whether an expansion of Medicaid to cover more poor Americans violates the 10th Amendment. There is no shortage of articles providing background information about the issue: Check out The Washington Post and The New York Times for a couple of good articles explaining the arguments before the court.

Arguments begin today at 9 a.m. CDT and continue through Wednesday. First up is whether the court can even rule on the health care law, since the individual mandate doesn’t take effect until 2014. This argument will center around an 1867 law called the Anti-Injunction Act that prohibits lawsuits against a tax until the tax takes effect. If the court decides the mandate’s penalty is a tax, then it might also decide it has to wait a couple of years before it can rule on the health care law.

The court hears arguments on the constitutionality of the individual mandate Tuesday. Wednesday morning it considers whether the individual mandate’s constitutionality can be separated from the health care law as a whole — there is little debate that most of Obamacare is constitutional — and Wednesday afternoon takes up the law’s expansion of Medicaid.

And now we wait. Unless they surprise everyone and issue an opinion much sooner than expected, it’ll be late June before the Supreme Court’s nine justices reveal their decision on health care’s future.

The conventional wisdom coming out of three days of hearings [1] covering the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, is that the law’s individual mandate, if not the entire health care law, is in danger of being declared unconstitutional. My gut feeling since the court announced it would take up the health care law has been that the court’s five conservative justices will find an exception to judicial restraint and issue an activist decision striking down the law. But really, who knows? There are many paths the court can take.

So, after three days of arguments, here are a few thoughts:

The hypotheticals kicked around during Tuesday’s hearing on the individual mandate, that if the government can compel citizens to buy health insurance then what is keeping it from forcing citizens to buy broccoli [2], burial plots and cellphones, were ridiculous. They were imaginary arguments that should have been beneath the court’s justices.

The comments by Chief Justice John Roberts (cellphones) and Justices Antonin Scalia (broccoli) and Samuel Alito (burial insurance) got more media attention Tuesday than, say, the relevant 1942 case of Wickard v. Filburn, but, well, what can you say? Such is the nature of today’s politics and, apparently, jurisprudence.

I adapted my last blog entry into a column that ran Saturday in the American-Statesman. Here are a couple of brief thoughts generated by a few responses to that column:

Opponents of the health care law - of the law’s individual mandate, to be specific - have focused their challenge on the limits the Constitution places on the federal government. While there are limits on the government, the Constitution doesn’t limit federal power to the point where the government is impotent. This is the point Chief Justice John Marshall made when he wrote the majority opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824 and it’s part of the reason why I quoted Marshall’s opinion in my previous blog entry.

The Founders wrote the Constitution to strengthen the federal government because the weak government created by the Articles of Confederation wasn’t working. So the belief that the Constitution was written solely to limit government is inaccurate. The Constitution expanded government.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t limits on the federal government. But the primary limits are found in the division of government into separate branches, not exclusively or even mainly in the powers given each branch. …

It’s been widely commented that if the court’s conservative justices strike down Obamacare they will be rendering an activist decision. As The Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen put it, “If the Roberts Court strikes down this law … it ought to end any reasonable political debate about the source of ‘judicial activism’ in America.”

It’s not only that precedent should point the court toward upholding the health care law, but that precedent also should place a “heavy burden” on those who want the court to strike down the law. Jeffrey Toobin, writing in the April 9 issue of The New Yorker, takes Justice Anthony Kennedy to task for placing the burden “backward” during last week’s arguments on Obamacare: “The ‘heavy burden’ is not on the defenders of the law but on its challengers. Acts of Congress, like the health-care law, are presumed to be constitutional, and it is — or should be — a grave and unusual step for unelected, unaccountable, life-tenured judges to overrule the work of the democratically elected branches of government.” …

Obamacare fits my sometimes absurdist view of things. It has flipped the issue of health care for conservatives and liberals, with Republicans fighting an idea - the individual mandate - that originated with conservatives, and Democrats supporting an idea they once dismissed. Does anyone doubt that Republicans would support the individual mandate if it were part of, say, McCaincare, and Democrats would oppose it if a Democratic Congress and president had not passed it? It’s all part of the grand comedy that is politics.

And with that, I’m going to put the issue of health care aside. For now.

I hadn’t planned to take any special note of this weekend’s 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster. Nonetheless, I found myself watching “A Night to Remember” Saturday night on TCM. The movie, released in 1958, is based on Walter Lord’s 1955 book of the same title. It’s a good film, one I’d seen a couple of times before. It’s not so great that I set out to watch it again, but once I stumbled across it I stayed with it.

Then Sunday I found myself reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s “Unsinkable: Why We Can’t Let Go of the Titantic” in the April 16 issue of The New Yorker. Mendelsohn’s a fan of Lord’s book, calling it a detached but definitive account of the disaster that leaves “love stories, stolen diamonds, handcuffs, axes, and underwater lock-picking to others.” It’s a gentle knock of James Cameron’s “Titanic,” the 1997 blockbuster now back in theaters in a 3-D version, as well as many other movies and books that place doomed lovers within the doomed ship.

Ill-fated romance is not why we can’t let go of the Titanic, however. The sinking fascinates us, Mendelsohn writes, because “the Titanic seems to be about something” more than mere disaster: “But what? For some, it’s a parable about the scope, and limits, of technology … For others, it’s a morality tale about class, or a foreshadowing of the First World War—the marker of the end of a more innocent era. Academic historians dismiss this notion as mere nostalgia; for them, the disaster is less a historical dividing line than a screen on which early-twentieth-century society projected its anxieties about race, gender, class, and immigration.”

All of these things contribute to the Titanic’s grip on the imagination, but they are given consequence, Mendelsohn says, by the ship’s premature death. “If the Titanic had sunk on her twenty-seventh voyage, it wouldn’t haunt us in the same way,” he writes. “It’s the incompleteness that never stops tantalizing us, tempting us to fill in the blanks with more narrative.”

Memorable moments in sports have a way of distorting sports memories.

Friday, the baseball that rolled through the legs of first baseman Bill Buckner in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Mets sold for $418,250. The buyer - presumably a he, but maybe a she - wants to remain anonymous, according to an Associated Press story. The seller was Seth Swirsky, a songwriter who bought the ball for $64,000 a dozen years ago. The previous owner was Charlie Sheen, who had paid $93,000 for the ball in 1992. I have no idea why the ball lost a third of its value from 1992 to 2000, or why its value increased more than sixfold since it was last sold, but so goes the world of memorabilia, I suppose.

Anyone who watched Buckner’s error will never forget the play. “It really embodies the emotion of sports,” Chris Ivy of Heritage Auctions, the Dallas auction house that handled the sale, told The Associated Press. “That ball symbolizes both the thrill of victory for the Mets and the agony of defeat for the Red Sox fans. It really brings out a lot of emotion.”

That it does. What it doesn’t bring out, and what our memories and emotions obscure, is the reality of the game - indeed, of the entire 1986 World Series.

Before Buckner’s play the Red Sox already had lost three leads in Game 6 - a 2-0 lead in the fifth when the Mets tied things up 2-2, a 3-2 lead in the eighth when the Mets again tied the game, and a 5-3 lead three pitches before the slow-rolling grounder that cast Buckner into baseball infamy.

With two outs, pitcher Calvin Schiraldi, who played high school ball for Westlake and college ball for UT and who today coaches at St. Michael’s Catholic Academy here in Austin, gave up three straight singles by Gary Carter, Kevin Mitchell and Ray Knight that scored one run and put Mitchell on third, 90 feet away from tying the game. Red Sox manager John McNamara then pulled Schiraldi for Bob Stanley.

The next batter was Mookie Wilson. With the count 2-2 - with the Red Sox for the second time in the inning one strike away from winning their first World Series since 1918 - Stanley threw a wild pitch. Mitchell scored. Knight moved to second. The game was suddenly 5-5 with the winning run in scoring position. Buckner is neither hero or goat at this point. In fact no one is thinking of Bill Buckner right now. The goat in this moment is Bob Stanley.

Wilson fouls off the next two pitches. Then he hits, as Vin Scully called it, a “little roller up along first.” Buckner moves to field it and send the game to the 11th inning, where Boston might win, might not. Instead, the ball goes through his legs. Knight scores. New York wins 6-5. Schiraldi gets the loss (though who remembers that?), Stanley catches a break, Buckner catches lifelong hell.

There was still a Game 7 to play, still a chance for Boston to win the Series and for Buckner’s error to become a footnote. Instead, the Red Sox blew a 3-0 lead in the sixth and went on to lose 8-5. Schiraldi was also the Game 7 loser. But Game 7 might as well not exist as far as our memories of the 1986 World Series go. Or Calvin Schiraldi. Or Bob Stanley.

How often does Buckner dream of that slow grounder headed his way? Bend over, scoop it up, tag the bag, inning’s over. On to the next one. But his glove holds nothing. He turns to see the ball rolling behind him, forever behind him, forever rolling away.

A ball that will haunt the player blamed for Boston’s World Series loss. A ball that will cause us to forget everything that made that loss possible, both before Wilson’s hit and in the game after. A ball that will sell almost 26 years later for a ridiculous sum.

This month, Phil Collins — he of Genesis and “Sussudio” — received an honorary doctor of history degree from McMurry University in Abilene.

As an Abilenian born and raised, here’s what first struck me when I read about Collins’ honorary degree in the Abilene Reporter-News: McMurry gives honorary doctorates?

Then, of course, I thought, Phil Collins? In Abilene?

You wouldn’t necessarily know it by visiting Abilene or even living there, but Abilene is a college town. It’s the home of three church-affiliated universities — affiliations that explain why you don’t think of Abilene as a college town. There’s Abilene Christian University, affiliated with the Churches of Christ and the largest of the three Abilene colleges with around 4,700 students; there’s Baptist-affiliated Hardin-Simmons, with about 2,350 students; and there’s McMurry, the Methodist runt of the litter with only about 1,400 students.

The reason McMurry gave Collins an honorary degree to go with his seven Grammys and Academy Award — and this is the who knew? that counts — is because of his general interest in Texas history, his specific interest in the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, and his support for preserving the state’s history.

The result of all this interest is a book published in March titled “The Alamo and Beyond: A Collector’s Journey,” which Collins put together with the help of McMurry history professors Donald Frazier and Stephen Hardin.

The oversized, 400-page book documents Collins’ extensive collection of Texas artifacts. It’s published by State House Press, a small publisher of Texana located in Buffalo Gap a dozen miles south of Abilene, and isn’t cheap — $120 (though you can buy it online for $75). Austin’s Ben Powell was the book’s photographer.

Sales of the book at a May 11 book signing went to fund history scholarships at McMurry. Sales elsewhere — Collins also visited Dallas, San Antonio and Houston as part of a small book tour — helped out the Texas State Historical Society.

Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell, City Manager Marc Ott and Police Chief Art Acevedo, along with Sue Edwards, the assistant city manager for development services, and Rodney Gonzales, the deputy director of economic growth and redevelopment services who’s also the project manager for the city’s Formula One planning, are off to England today to see how an F1 race is run. They’ll be spending the weekend at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, a track located in the carefully cultivated English countryside between London and Birmingham.

Fire Chief Rhoda Mae Kerr was scheduled to go, but I’ve heard she’s changed her mind and decided to stay home. The Fourth of July and the days before and after it often are busy ones for the Fire Department and maybe Kerr wants to be in town in case a major fire breaks out. She was criticized last year for staying on vacation in Colorado when fires broke out in Bastrop County and elsewhere.

I won’t repeat here the details of what the American-Statesman reported last week (which you can read here and here) and what we said in an editorial criticizing the England trip as a junket (read the editorial here) other than to offer this summary: Circuit of the Americas, which is organizing the F1 race planned for Nov. 16-18 in Elroy, offered to fly two Austin officials to Silverstone and in quick order it was decided that no fewer than six needed to go on what city officials have called an educational, fact-finding trip.

The city says it is paying for four plane tickets at a reported cost of $5,556. (I don’t know how Kerr’s decision to stay home has affected that cost.) Circuit of the Americas is paying for Leffingwell and Ott’s travel, and picking up lodging for Acevedo et al.

Leffingwell and Ott, flying on Circuit of the Americas’ dime, will be seated comfortably in business class. The others are flying coach. According to USA Today’s Travel website, business class on international flights “falls short of first class but still exceeds the offerings of domestic first class.” Sounds very nice.

Meanwhile, coach is coach.

If you remember the “Seinfeld” episode where Jerry ends up in first class, sipping champagne, nibbling on fresh-baked cookies and cuddling with a tall beauty, while Elaine gets sandwiched into coach, you’ll enjoy imagining the mayor and Ott as Jerry, Acevedo as Elaine.

Watch highlights of the episode here.

Leffingwell and the gang get to repeat the experience Monday, when they’re scheduled to return home. Can’t wait to hear all the fun facts they’ve learned.