I was enjoying a nice salad of kale, chard and spinach, with a handful of almonds set aside for a snack, when I read about the new study that links a Mediterranean diet to a significantly reduced risk of heart disease. The health benefits of olive oil, nuts, fruits and vegetables, beans and fish have been suspected for years, but they now have been confirmed by a major study, at least as much as medical science, with its necessary caveats, is willing to confirm anything.

With Americans already encouraged to eat two or three servings of fish each week by the likes of the American Heart Association, and to eat less red meat, sugar and processed foods, the study published Monday by the New England Journal of Medicine seems likely to prompt more fish consumption in the United States, since for most Americans the option of going vegetarian is no option at all. Just be aware that you might not be eating the fish that you think you’re eating.

A survey released last week reinforced the suspicion that seafood is commonly mislabeled in the United States. From 2010 to 2012, the ocean conservation group Oceana conducted DNA testing on 1,215 seafood samples bought from grocery stores, seafood markets, restaurants and sushi restaurants in 21 states, including Texas, where samples were collected in Austin and Houston. One-third of the national samples tested (401 of 1,215) were not what they were labeled.

Nothing was mislabeled more than snapper, Oceana reported. Eighty-seven percent of the samples labeled snapper turned out to be a fish of another scale and three-quarters of the fish sold as snapper didn’t even belong in the snapper family. Tuna also was frequently mislabeled. Salmon, by contrast, was the fish species least likely to be mislabeled.

The group tested a few dozen fish samples from Austin and Houston. Based on these samples, Oceana concluded that “Texas had the second-highest seafood substitution rate in the country, with 49 percent of the 43 fish sampled in Austin and Houston found to be mislabeled.”

The 10th anniversary this month of the American invasion of Iraq put Iraq temporarily back in the news. Temporarily and barely. Few people pay attention to Iraq these days. Unless you happen to see it on an Associated Press wire feed you probably will never learn that at least 23 Iraqis died today in car bombings in Baghdad and Kirkuk. Since the United States withdrew its combat forces in December 2011, news out of Iraq seldom makes American newspapers beyond the occasional news brief or short story on an inside page.

Iraqis live in a state of un-peace. Sectarian violence between Sunnis and majority Shiites may have peaked in 2006, when the country was in a state of civil war, but it continues to claim thousands of lives each year. The violence often is blamed on Sunni insurgents, some of whom are affiliated with al-Qaida. Bombings killed at least 65 people across Iraq on March 19, the date in 2003 in the United States that the war began (it was March 20 in Iraq). According to Iraq Body Count, which scours media and official reports in an attempt to keep track of the number of Iraqis killed each day by bombings and gunfire, 370 Iraqis have been killed thus far in March. Some of the victims tracked by IBC probably are victims of plain old crime, but the overwhelming majority are victims of sectarian and politically motivated violence. A car bombing kills three here, an improved explosive device kills five there. Baghdad, Mosul, Musayyib, Kirkuk, Samarra. Police officers, government officials, truck drivers, teachers, diners, passersby. Everywhere and everyone are targets.

Last week was an extraordinary week. The Boston Marathon bombing and the explosion of the West fertilizer plant naturally dominated the news and pushed aside several stories that otherwise would have led the front page.

Locally, those stories included Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg’s drunken driving arrest (she says she won’t resign but I think she will; she just hasn’t worked through the stages of resignation yet) and former Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson’s arrest after a special court of inquiry found he hid evidence that might have exonerated Michael Morton and spared him from serving 25 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. And nationally, several gun proposals in the Senate failed to get the 60 votes needed to move forward, an Elvis impersonator was accused of sending letters laced with ricin to the White House and Congress, and the Supreme Court sided with the Fourth Amendment by ruling police must obtain a search warrant before drawing blood from a suspected drunken driver.

I wrote a column for today’s paper touching on a couple of thoughts I’ve been processing since last week’s Boston Marathon bombing. There are many other issues to ponder. Just to follow up the column with a few related items:

The Washington Post published a useful story last week headlined “Eight facts about terrorism in the United States.” The Post story relies in part on a report by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, released in December. The short takeaway: There were 226 fatal terror attacks in the U.S. between 1970 and 2011, with 21 fatal attacks occurring between 2001 and 2011. Bombs were the weapon of choice in most attacks.

The terror count includes the Fort Hood shootings but does not include most other mass shootings, since they largely fall outside the report’s definition of terrorism: “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation.” It might not count as terrorism but your odds of being killed by a firearm are about 1 in 25,000. Your odds of being killed in a terrorist attack? About 1 in 20 million.

Vanity Fair magazine contributor and former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald condemns the Republican response to the Boston Marathon bombing in a sharply worded critique posted April 26 on vanityfair.com. Read it here.

After slapping down a Glenn Beck-promoted conspiracy centered around erroneous reporting about Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the Saudi national who, for a few hours after the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, was mentioned as a possible suspect, Eichenwald focuses on how dishonesty and hypocrisy characterize Republican demands that the Obama administration declare Dzhokhar Tsarnaev an enemy combatant and deny him his constitutional rights. Referring to numerous examples, from Zacarias Moussaoui, whom the media often mislabeled the 20th 9/11 hijacker, to shoebomber Richard Reid, would-be presidential assassin Ahmed Omar Abu Ali and Iyman Faris, a naturalized citizen (like Tsarnaev) who plotted to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, Eichenwald points out how the Bush administration successfully tried hundreds of terrorism suspects as criminals in civilian courts and not as unlawful enemy combatants in military tribunals, and did so without a peep of criticism from Republicans.

“All of this unfolded without much criticism from the G.O.P. members of Congress,” Eichenwald writes. “But then something dramatic changed on January 20, 2009: a Democrat took the White House. And suddenly those same congressfolk decided that bringing terrorists to trial in civilian court placed the entirety of the United States in grave danger.”

In contrast to the record compiled by the civilian courts, the military tribunals Republicans favor over the Constitution and a history of success have been a miserable failure. “Even as hundreds of criminal cases against terrorists have gone to court,” Eichenwald writes, “only seven — yes, seven — military-commission trials have been held. Seven in 12 years. …

“So, why do Republicans always demand (since January 2009) that suspected terrorists be declared enemy combatants and tried before nearly inoperable military commissions, particularly when Obama’s policies are almost identical to Bush’s? There is no other possible explanation: it is pure politics, designed to make Obama appear weak on terrorism.”

I made the same case for civilian courts over military tribunals in a column I wrote last week, though not with the same cutting passion as Eichenwald. What is clear is this: Starting with the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago that killed 11 people, just to pick an arbitrary start date, civilian courts both state and federal have sent a variety of terrorists to prison as well as to the gallows and the execution chamber.

Federal terrorism charges have been brought against Tsarnaev. The state of Massachusetts just as easily could have brought murder charges against him. Either way, he’s headed toward a civilian trial and that’s where he should go.

It’s one of the most persistent and yet one of the most inaccurate and useless comparisons in politics, the declaration that the government should act like families and spend only the money it has available to it.

Here’s a Texas variation, from Chuck DeVore, vice president for policy at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, speaking Monday after the apparent death, by parliamentary point of order, of a proposal to create a loan program to help finance water projects by withdrawing $2 billion from the rainy day fund: “The Texas Legislature should live within its means just like every Texan must. And so it should only spend the general revenue it has available.”

DeVore’s foundation opposes spending money from the rainy day fund on water. I’m sympathetic to the argument that big infrastructure projects should come from general revenue, but the money in the rainy day fund is not borrowed money. The fund, which is projected to reach $12 billion in 2015, holds revenue stashed away in a savings account of sorts, and just as families dip into their savings — those that have savings — to help pay for the occasional big-ticket item, so too should the state occasionally use its emergency cash to meet major needs. Whether legislators stick to general revenue or take money from the rainy day fund to pay for water, they will be living within the state’s means either way.

Unlike the rest of us, who, with our mortgages, car loans and credit cards, live our lives in debt.

Debt is necessary — some debt anyway. American household debt in 2011 was 112 percent of disposable household income, which is annual income after taxes. This percentage compares with 49 percent in 1955 — a time when Americans were more frugal. Then again, Americans 60 years ago were satisfied with much smaller houses, and credit cards barely existed.

We have money to pay for food, clothing and entertainment only because we stretch paying off our houses and cars over years and decades and adjust credit card payments depending on a month’s various expenses. In this way we manage our debt burden and limit the hit to our paychecks. Only by juggling debt do we stay within our means.

It was sort of a special Texas edition of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” last night. First up was a segment about Sen. Ted Cruz and the not-so-favorable reputation he has aggressively earned after only a few months in the Senate:

“The Daily Show” is a little behind the curve commenting about and poking fun of Cruz, who’s been the subject of seemingly nonstop stories, columns, editorials and news segments since he took office in January. In February I posted an entry on this blog headlined “Ted Cruz finds the spotlight” and pointed to this paragraph in an American-Statesman editorial about Cruz (whom the Statesman endorsed over Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in last year’s Republican primary):

“We’re not surprised that Cruz has found the media spotlight. We expressed concern after his election that he seemed more interested in appearing on Sunday morning talk shows than in serving the people of Texas as a constructive legislator. We can’t say Cruz hasn’t been engaged thus far, but his engagement might soon set a Senate speed record for planting oneself on the margins.”

Cruz replaced Kay Bailey Hutchison, who retired after 20 years in the Senate with a conservative voting record, but also one that showed an occasional bipartisan spirit. Hutchison also was featured on “The Daily Show” last night, as a guest to talk about her book, “Unflinching Courage: Pioneering Women Who Shaped Texas”:

Naturally, Jon Stewart asked Hutchison about Cruz:

“Ted Cruz is very bright. Princeton graduate, Harvard Law School. He’s a bright person,” Hutchison said, starting to struggle to find her words. “And so I think that he is very committed to his cause of trying to keep America free and, uh, so …”

She trailed off. Stewart jumped in. “Everything you said could have described Lex Luthor.”

Hutchison laughed. Then she laughed again. She held up her hands in mock futility.

A brief discussion of the Senate’s increasingly poisonous atmosphere closed the interview. “You don’t miss it at all, do you,” Stewart asked.

“I don’t,” Hutchison said. “Not one minute. Not one minute.”

The National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre conjured another dystopic vision of America when he spoke last weekend in Houston during his group’s annual convention: “Lying in wait is a terrorist, a deranged school shooter, a kidnapper, a rapist, a murderer — waiting and planning and plotting — in every community across this country. Lying in wait right now.”

LaPierre’s speech in Houston echoed a feardinger of an essay he wrote in February for The Daily Caller, when he saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy a “hellish world” of hungry, thirsty disarmed survivors threatened by looters and social disorder. (A well-documented disaster myth appears to inform LaPierre’s post-disaster notion of rampant and widespread lawlessness.) Americans face a future of inevitable anarchy and chaos, LaPierre (pictured above) warned, and “to withstand the siege that is coming” we must arm ourselves against “terrorists, crime, drug gangs, the possibility of Euro-style debt riots, civil unrest or natural disaster.” Or as he phrased it in another litany earlier in the essay: “Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face — not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival.”

On the same day LaPierre was speaking to the NRA convention, the Texas House was celebrating “gun day” by passing a dozen bills that weaken already noodle-soft gun laws in the state and expand already expansive opportunities to own and carry a gun. Among the legislation passed May 4: A constitutionally dubious bill that would nullify new federal gun restrictions, should they ever come to pass, within Texas.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post published a story headlined “NRA lobbyist, arms dealer played key role in growth of civilian market for military-style guns.” According to The Post, in the mid-1980s Rene Carlos Vos, a Virginia arms dealer, sought the help of LaPierre, the NRA’s chief lobbyist at the time, to press Congress to pass legislation that would allow him to import 200,000 M-1 military surplus rifles from South Korea. Together the two men, with help from Republican Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and other members of Congress, “helped make a new, more powerful class of firearms more readily available to civilian gun owners” and as a result changed “the profile of American gun ownership.” The story involves questionable business associations, bribery allegations, investigations by the FBI, and the convening of a federal grand jury whose work came to an abrupt end when Vos died in a plane crash.

The Washington Post article brought to mind “Battleground America: One nation, under the gun,” Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore’s excellent 2012 New Yorker article that explores, in part, the transformation of the NRA in the 1970s from a sporting and hunting organization that supported gun limits to a powerful lobbying force that began pushing “a new interpretation of the Second Amendment” by decoupling “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” from the amendment’s “well regulated militia” preface.

The Washington Post story also helps explain why the guns at the center of today’s gun control debate have nothing in common with the guns I think of when I think of guns. Those guns include the .410-gauge single-shot shotgun I bought with some prize money I won at a livestock show when I was 10 or 11, the 12-gauge pump-action shotgun I used to hunt dove and quail, the .22 rifle I used to shoot jackrabbits on bored summer evenings (it’s a memory that horrifies me now), the .30-30 pump-action rifle that was the most exotic gun in our collective family arsenal.

None of the dozen or more guns in that arsenal bore any resemblance to the military-style weapons that have become an obsession to the point of fetish for LaPierre, Gov. Rick Perry and other gun owners and advocates. Each rifle, shotgun and pistol I think of when I think of guns seems quaint in contrast.

Quaint but just as potentially deadly. LaPierre reacted to the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in Newtown, Conn., by saying, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” [1] He repeated the line in The Daily Caller essay and in Houston. All it takes to stop that bad guy is one bullet in a good, old-fashioned revolver, however, not 30 bullets in a semiautomatic military-style rifle. Consider the case of Melinda Herman, a Georgia mother who defended herself and her two children against an intruder by shooting him with a .38 revolver.

Or consider Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, a movie hero to gun enthusiasts nationwide. He famously carried a .44 magnum handgun to keep the bad guys in check. It held six rounds.

[1] Slate magazine has been tracking the gun-related deaths that have occurred in the United States since the Dec. 14 Newtown shooting. The count as of May 6: 3,852.

Eventually the death toll from the collapsed garment factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, will stop climbing because eventually there will be no more bodies to pull from the rubble of what was an illegally augmented eight-story building that wasn’t designed for industrial use.

As of Wednesday, at least 803 workers died in the April 24 collapse. Nobody really knows how many bodies remain to be recovered.

The tragedy struck home recently when I noticed the label on one of my shirts, recently bought. Made in Bangladesh, it said.

It’s impossible to know whether the shirt was sewn by a worker killed in the Dhaka building collapse, but the worker who made my shirt is (or perhaps was) regarded as little more than a piece of lint by those who benefit most from a $20 billion Bangladeshi garment industry that makes clothes for American and European brands. The monthly minimum wage in Bangladesh is about $38, The Associated Press reports, in a very poor country where the per capita monthly income is about $65.

Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan … Poor countries are excellent sources of cheap, easily exploitable labor for manufacturers. And cheap labor translates into inexpensive clothes for Americans.

How expensive would our clothes be if they, or at least more of them, were made in the United States? Here’s a comparison that offers a clue: According to CNN, it costs $13.22 to make a denim shirt in the United States, compared with $3.72 in Bangladesh.

That’s a difference of $9.50.

The retail difference would be greater than $9.50, but would the denim shirt made in America be prohibitively more expensive than the one made in Bangladesh? Or would the price difference simply limit shoppers to buying one shirt rather than two or three (and maybe spending less overall)?

The March 25, 1911, Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York killed 146 workers. The fire led to dozens of safety and labor reforms in New York that later influenced federal workplace reforms, and improved workers’ lives (and livelihoods) nationwide.

I want to think the Dhaka building collapse will become Bangladesh’s Triangle Shirtwaist factory and force Western brands to demand the Bangladeshi government pass and enforce wage and work reforms, and that it will prompt American shoppers to pause their consumption long enough to consider the cost in lives of the inexpensive clothing that jam-packs their closets. But I’m under no illusion it will do so. Such is the power of profit margins and a few bucks saved over blood.

Voters on Saturday rendered a spilt decision on the Austin school district’s $892 million bond proposal, approving Propositions 1 and 3 while rejecting their even-numbered counterparts, Propositions 2 and 4. Proposition 1 proposes spending $140.6 million to renovate cafeterias, replace old air-conditioning units with energy-efficient ones, buy new school buses, computers and science equipment, and possibly put a $10 million solar project on an old landfill. Proposition 3, the biggest of the four bond propositions, proposes spending $349.2 million on repairs, renovations and maintenance. The two approved bond packages total $489.8 million.

The American-Statesman editorial board, of which I’m a member, recommended voters reject the four propositions. (You can read our school bond editorial here.) We struggled with the decision to oppose the bond proposals but in the end couldn’t bring ourselves to support any of them given the district’s rush to put the proposals together on a nine-month schedule rather than the typical 18, the questionable cost estimates spread across all four propositions, and the inclusion of several half-baked ideas (see, for example, the above-mentioned solar energy project: You can revisit the Statesman’s exploration of the four proposals here.) Several bond supporters countered that no bond package is perfect, which might be true, but the district’s propositions kept perfection at a distance, and never appeared to set perfection as a goal.

The meaning of Saturday’s results is muddled by the bond election’s mixed outcome, and by how narrowly each proposition was approved or rejected. The divided and tight results don’t speak well of the district’s leadership, though to read the results as a referendum on Superintendent Meria Carstarphen’s tenure or the school board’s direction is to read more into the results than probably is there. Maybe the one thing we can say is voters did their best to separate the district’s needs from its wants and leave it at that.

Turnout Saturday was 10.25 percent, which, though pathetic, was significantly higher than the 3.5 percent turnout for the last school bond election in 2008. It’s interesting to note where the votes for and against the propositions occurred. (Go here for a precinct-by-precinct look at Saturday’s election results.) With few exceptions, voters in precincts west of I-35 and south of Texas 71 strongly rejected all four bond proposals. The bonds also were opposed by voters in precincts north of U.S. 183, though opposition in North Austin was not as consistent as it was in South and Southwest Austin. Far North Austin voters clearly did not like Proposition 4, which proposed spending $168.6 million on career and technical education programs, fine arts and athletic facilities and a male-only campus, but were more divided on Propositions 1-3, especially in the precincts along MoPac north of 183 and south of Parmer Lane.

Central and East Austin voters generally supported the propositions, though voters in downtown precincts north of Lady Bird Lake, south of MLK, west of I-35 and east of Lamar Boulevard did not. And Precinct 210, in wealthy Tarrytown south of Windsor Road, again stood out as a West-Central Austin exception Saturday, just as it did last fall when voters there rejected the city’s $78.3 million affordable housing bond proposal, which failed citywide. Curiously, Tarrytown voters in Precinct 256 north of Windsor Road supported the school bonds and last fall’s affordable housing proposal. I’m not sure what to make of this Windsor Road divide, but here’s a note to self to watch it moving forward.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only person whose immediate reaction to Gov. Rick Perry’s reference to “charlatans and peacocks” in an email to four University of Texas regents was, “Well, he should know.”

Perry’s March 1 email was discussed Tuesday during a hearing in the Texas House. As the American-Statesman’s Ralph Haurwitz reported in today’s paper, the governor sent the email to buck up the regents who were under heavy legislative fire for allegedly micromanaging the University of Texas. The emails, Haurwitz reports (read his story here), show that Perry was “more deeply involved in the controversy concerning the University of Texas System Board of Regents than has previously been publicly known.”

Here’s what Perry — “rp” in the email — wrote to regents Brenda Pejovich, Alex Cranberg, Wallace Hall Jr. and Paul Foster:

I know you all get tired of being hammered by the charlatans and peacocks but the fight is being won … I’m reminded of the Battle of the Bulge (WWII) when only a few hundred yards were gained a day and fighting was viciously personal and brutal … the fight was for freedom but the real meaning for the infantryman was the one standing beside them in the fight … I pray you all aspire to that same respect and devotion!

Onward and Upward.

rp

A charlatan is a fraud or pretender. A peacock is a show-off. As a multigenerational Texan from Perry’s neck of the state woods, the governor’s exaggerated boot-wearing self irks me to no end. Perry is 11 years older than I am, but I’m pretty sure I grew up around the same kind of people he knew growing up — cattlemen, farmers, cotton pickers, oilmen, welders, homebuilders and so on — but I never ever knew anyone who squinted and preened Texas the way Perry does. George W. Bush’s act was similar, but Bush was a transplant and didn’t know better. Perry should.

Charlatans and peacocks indeed.

But the most amusing piece of Perry’s period-averse email is that parenthetical reminding the regents that the Battle of the Bulge took place during World War II. Devotion will win the day — through a last-gasp German counteroffensive and heavy armor. Through dark, thick forests and deep winter snows. And meddling legislators.

The May 23 Census Bureau report of Austin’s ascent to No. 11 on the list of most populous American cities appeared as I was heading to Annapolis, Md., for my nephew’s graduation from the Naval Academy and, a day later, to Washington, D.C., for a short visit. Austin passed Washington on the list of the nation’s most populous cities years ago, yet Washington, where I lived from 1988 to 1991, feels much bigger — much more like a city.

The same is true of San Francisco, which Austin passed on the most populous list in 2011. Like Washington, D.C., San Francisco has features we associate with major cities: great museums, convenient public transportation, multiple vibrant and walkable neighborhoods, professional sports teams. The same can be said to varying degrees of Seattle, Portland, Ore., Denver and Boston, all of which have fewer people than Austin (shown below in a photo taken by the American-Statesman’s Laura Skelding in October).

The difference is San Francisco et al. are part of metropolitan areas that are larger — in some cases, significantly larger — than the Austin metropolitan area that includes Travis, Williamson, Bastrop, Caldwell and Hays counties. This fact gets lost in reports about Austin’s population.

Austin ranks 11th in population, with 842,592 residents. The Austin-Round Rock metropolitan area, on the other hand, ranks 35th, with 1.7 million people, according to 2010 Census Bureau figures. The Austin-Round Rock area has doubled in population since 1990 but it remains far behind the D.C. area, for example, which ranks seventh with 5.6 million people, according to 2010 figures, or the San Francisco area, which ranks 11th with 4.3 million people.

I have lived in Austin for 22 years and first visited our beautiful city in 1978, when its population was about 332,000. Only once in Austin’s history — 1990 — did the city lose population, and then just barely. Austin has been growing steadily since. It will continue to grow. And growth will continue to bring challenges such as expensive housing and traffic congestion. But despite its growth and evolution, Austin remains largely suburban in character. I say that without judgment. It is what it is. It’s one reason why I love Austin. And it’s one reason why I don’t think of Austin as a city in the way I think of D.C. or San Francisco as cities.

One other thing to note about the latest census report: Despite Austin’s rapid growth, the city will remain just outside the top 10 most populous cities for at least a decade. As the American-Statesman’s Juan Castillo reported in Sunday’s paper, the 10th most populous city in the country is San Jose, Calif., and it has a considerable population lead over Austin. The Census Bureau estimates San Jose’s population is 982,765, 140,173 ahead of Austin’s 842,592. San Jose is growing, too, but not at the same rate as Austin. It should take another 10 or 12 years for Austin to take over the No. 10 spot.

And that is where Austin probably will stay for the rest of my lifetime, assuming current trends and city boundaries more or less hold. Dallas is No. 9, with a population of 1,241,162. That’s a 400,000-person lead over Austin, and Dallas is adding almost as many people each year as Austin. In the No. 8 spot is San Diego, which Dallas might pass around 2030 but Austin won’t pass, given current trends, for another 68 years.

The National Archives today launched Founders Online, which collects the papers of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin - about 120,000 documents in all, with more to come - on one website. The papers are annotated so references to people and events are explained. Editorial notes are added where background and context are needed. And best of all, the website is searchable.

To test the website’s capabilities I did a quick search centered around the debate on whether the Constitution should include a bill of rights. I clicked on Jefferson and typed in “bill of rights.” Letters to Madison, Washington, Edward Rutledge and several others appeared. I then did the same with Madison and Alexander. Easy.

Jefferson was in Paris during the Constitutional Convention and could comment on the convention’s result only from afar. There were things Jefferson liked about the Constitution and there were things he didn’t like. One of his biggest objections was the absence of a bill of rights. Madison supported a bill of rights but didn’t consider the lack of one a fatal flaw. He could go either way. “I have favored it because I supposed it might be of use, and if properly executed could not be of disservice,” Madison wrote Jefferson on Oct. 17, 1788.

Hamilton thought a bill of rights not only unnecessary but also potentially dangerous. Applying restrictions on the government implies the government has powers the Constitution does not give it. In Federalist No. 84 Hamilton questioned the wisdom of declaring “that things shall not be done which there is no power to do,” writing:

“ ’WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.’ Here is a better recognition of popular rights than volumes of those aphorisms which make the principal figure in several of our state bills of rights, and which would sound much better in a treatise of ethics than in a constitution of government.”

Hamilton lost the argument, of course, but I find his point compelling in this way: The Bill of Rights locked us into thinking that the rights it enumerates are the only rights we have. The Ninth Amendment (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”) tries to remind us that there are fundamental rights beyond the ones mentioned in the Constitution but as Jack Rakove, a history professor at Stanford University has written, the amendment “lies inertly … a joker that has never been played.”

My only complaint about Founders Online is its document collection is limited to the papers of the six founders everyone knows (or thinks they know). Some of the words of founders such as Rufus King, John Jay and Edmund Randolph exist on the website but only when they appear in letters written to Jefferson et al. The papers of these men and of dozens of individuals who contributed significantly to the nation’s creation deserve to be included.

But this criticism is minor considered against what Founders Online offers. It is an invaluable resource. Countless hours of reading await.

Imperial trumpets greeted Rick Perry as he stepped forward Monday afternoon to announce he wouldn’t seek a fourth full term as governor. Perry touts the state’s economy as his primary success as Texas’ political executive but his undisputed legacy as governor lies with the appointments he’s made. Dozens of former Perry aides and associates control the various state agencies and will remain in office long after Perry has ridden off into the Texas sunset, or north, west and east to seek national glory. These loyalists won’t dishonor the liege to whom they owe their careers (and padded fortunes).

Texas governors may be constitutionally weak but there’s nothing stopping them from fully exercising the limited power they have. Perry exercised his powers like few governors before him, not only with the appointments he was able to make but also with the veto given him. Perry vetoed bills with vigor, most famously in 2001 when he struck down 82 bills on one day. It has helped Perry that his tenure has been uniquely long and has mostly overlapped with David Dewhurst’s tenure as lieutenant governor. There’s been no one strong enough to push against him.

The next regular legislative session begins in January 2015 and will await Perry’s successor — presumably Attorney General Greg Abbott. Thus Perry is free to spend the next 18 months assembling the people and resources needed for an early-entry presidential run, unlike the 2012 race when he waited until August 2011 before joining the campaign.

Presidents and governors are the quarterbacks of the political world. They’re given too much credit when economic times are good and receive too much blame when economic times are bad, but that’s the way it is. Perry will claim the so-called Texas Miracle as his own, and why not? Any other politician would do the same. And he will leave office with a secure conservative record. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be a strong presidential candidate.

Perry’s problem two years ago, however, was not that he entered the 2012 race too late — he joined the crowded field the instant front-runner. The conventional wisdom holds that by waiting to enter the 2012 race Perry came in ill-prepared and thus unable to put his best foot forward. But as is well known, from “Adios, mofo” to flirtatious hints of secession to “oops,” Perry’s anatomical problem lies not with his feet but somewhere between brain and mouth. That is, Rick Perry’s primary problem as a presidential candidate, should he run for president in 2016, will be Rick Perry.

As it was last time. So it will be again. What Perry has to overcome to succeed nationally is himself.

*

By the time he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2015, Perry will have been governor for 14 years, 30 days. His time in office may already seem like an eternity to many Texans, but Perry’s tenure will lie just outside the list of top 10 longest serving U.S. governors. The list includes George Wallace, Edwin Edwards and Nelson Rockefeller but is topped by George Clinton - of the Founding Fathers, not of Parliament-Funkadelic. Clinton was governor of New York for 21 years, from 1777 to 1795 and again from 1801 to 1804, and holds the longevity record. (The members of the founding generation were just as reluctant to leave office as today’s politicians are.)

Clinton’s record may seem unbreakable, but a threat looms: Republican Terry Branstad has been Iowa’s governor for almost 18½ years. When his current term ends in January 2015, he will have been in office a total of 19 years, 11 months and 29 days. If Branstad runs for re-election in 2014 and wins, he will pass Clinton’s mark in early 2016. By then the Iowa caucuses will be history and Perry will know whether his second presidential run, should it happen, will be as short-lived as his first.

In the various looks ahead to whether Gov. Rick Perry makes another run for the White House, several observers noted that he may have blown his best shot at the Republican nomination by performing so disastrously in 2012, when the field included weak candidates, a few of whom were, if not outright jokes, then close to it. This observation holds that Perry will face a much stronger and more accomplished Republican primary field in 2016, and he will struggle to win the nomination no matter how prepared he is when he enters the race or how much he’s able to overcome 2012’s “oops” moment. The frequently mentioned list of possible 2016 Republican candidates includes Marco Rubio, Chris Christi, Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and, in the Republican version of the role Barack Obama played in the 2008 Democratic primary, Ted Cruz.

This is a stronger list than 2012’s, which included Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum. Christi and Bush ordinarily would appear to be the candidates to beat, and Cruz probably would best the field in any debate, but Christi and Bush are distrusted by the Republican base, while Cruz’s appeal is all base and little else thus far.

Rubio, thanks to his immigration reform efforts in the Senate, is on the outs with the Republicans’ tea party faction. He is said to have charisma but he keeps it pretty well hidden. His presence before the television cameras is less than commanding. As is Jindal’s. (What do Rubio and Jindal have in common? Memorably flat and shaky State of the Union rebuttals.) If Jindal runs he’d be seeking the nomination of the party he called “the stupid party” not that many months ago.

Paul may not live in the libertarian fantasy his father, Ron Paul, lives in, but few Americans, even conservatives, share his vision of government. And in 2012 Ryan was an ineffective vice presidential candidate; he did not set himself up well for a 2016 run.

So the Republicans who run in 2016 might be stronger candidates than those who ran in 2012, but each will have his vulnerabilities. Someone will win the nomination, of course, and a Republican candidate might even win the White House. While I doubt it’ll be Rick Perry, the opponents Perry will face, should he run, might not be as strong as some are saying they are.

As for the Democrats, their list pretty much begins and ends with Hillary Clinton. Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats don’t have a deep, young bench. If Clinton doesn’t run, then who is there? Andrew Coumo? Mark Warner?

Grapeshot has moved. Click here to see the latest entries, and if you use an RSS reader, be sure to update your feed.