Here in Texas, we have Republicans piled higher than the tops of our flash flood gauges. Crazy Republicans are our specialty.

Every once in a while, though, one of them gets a touch of wisdom in his head, popping up like a buttercup in a field of bluebonnets.

Buttercup of the week is DIck Armey, who is introducing amendments to the Homeland Security bill to prevent the establishment of Operation TIPS and nip off a planned national ID card program before it goes to seed.

Not only that, but he also wants to establish a Privacy Officer in the department to help safeguard civil liberties!

Did someone accidentally switch his brain with Lloyd Doggett's?

If that isn't enough, there's also yet another delightful parody of Operation TIPS, this one recruiting people to inform on the informers, and squeezing in a spoof of the "-chalking" phenomenon for good measure. (What's chalking? See Warchalking and Blogchalking)

So join the cause, chalk an informer! And chalk this up as a good day for Dick Armey, Texas Republican with a clue.

Not up to speed on Operation TIPS? Catch up in the archives, here and here.

Isn't it sad when your sidebars have more content than the main column of your front page?

My blog is so pathetic today.

Right outside the office I am working in right now in Princeton is a big, lovely tree. The kind of tree that has thinnish, bendy branches, but still manages to grow big and tall. It's windy here today, as a cold front blows into the region, and the tree is doing this amazing, joyous, swaying dance.

It's like the best day of this tree's life.

And I am thinking: this, this is what life should be like.

I don't know what that has to do with my pathetic blog day, exactly, but there you go.

Ruminating from Princeton, NJ

The ex-NSA-spook Cris, very nice guy that he is, just invited me to go out with him and his model girlfriend in Manhattan Friday night. Says Cris: "All her friends are models, and there are never enough guys."

Meanwhile in Austin, later this month Beck is playing at Westlake High School.

Famous people are playing at local high schools and I am being invited to hang out with models. Clearly I have crossed over into another dimension, one in which the standard rules of physics do not apply: the world...of teen movies!

Things like this are not supposed to happen in real life. I begin to wonder whether the jets and helicopters flying over Austin are not also part of this Hollywood-rules dimension. Maybe Top Gun is leaking into Teen-Movie Land.

Anyway, unless I need to make use of that night for plans with my local friends and acquaintances, I suppose I'll take him up on it. If nothing else, it should be interesting to see what New York clubland looks like from the beautiful-people perspective. And Cris is of the sort of friendly, personable disposition that essentially guarantees a fun and entertaining night.

And hey, if teen-movie rules continue to apply, when I get home to Austin I'll fall madly for the vaguely-geeky (but not too geeky, this is Hollywood) girl I'd always overlooked, just before the credits roll and the pop music kicks in. That could be cool.

Just don't let the pop music be Creed. Please. I'm begging.