Brian Clendinen brought up Joss Whedon's Firefly, which led to the follow up movie Serenity. Serenity is the first and best Space Western. 

By the way Lance, did you already do Austin and Elliott?

I wore out The Truth That Hurts. The iTunes single has much richer sound, I think it is a witty and well crafted song. Great harmonies.

Thanks Lance, I really enjoyed that cover.

It reminded me of a song I obsessed over in the early aughts, Goodbye (This Is Not Goodbye) by Over the Rhine. When I read the liner notes I learned Over the Rhine then often collaborated with The Cowboy Junkies.

You should check it out, it is a beautiful and moving song.

Another good one, about Elvis, recorded at Sun Studios, The King Knows How.

One thing I do not miss about Texas is the surface of Venus heat from St. Patrick's Day to Halloween. For Californians it is essentially a seven month heat wave, only hotter than they have ever seen before.

You either comes to terms with it or spend your life hiding in the very costly air conditioning. There is no third way on that.

Mitt has already answered the Obama team's speculation on his hypothetical behavior. Obama's decision to let the SEALS do what they do is commendable. That point seems undeniable to me, and those who deny him any credit come across as needlessly antagonistic, even small.

Romney strikes me as a classy guy, I would be shocked if he used the Ft. Hood incident as a political weapon. I think he has t0o much respect for the murdered servicemen, their comrades, and their loved ones to take that low road. And he is cagey enough to see that rhetoric blowing back on him.

When it comes to terrorism and drones and such, Obama has been kicking a__ and taking names. That is a bitter pill for conservatives to swallow, but we should man up and do just that.

Isn't the economy bad? I thought I heard that.

The Cramps, the Stranglers, Taylor Swift.

Speaking of comedy and the President, have any of you seen Key and Peele's skits starring Luther, Obama's anger translator?

Don't watch if profanity and disparaging remarks toward the GOP and the Tea Party will offend you.

Seriously, don't, there is plenty of both, but it is genius, very funny stuff.

Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns describes the Great Migration of 6 million Southern blacks between WWI and the end of the Civil Rights era. They fled Jim Crow to pursue a better life.

What most vexes me is the prospect of having to flee my home to escape this locust swarm of the very rich, the very poor, the public employees unions, and the feckless bureaucrats now laying waste to my home.

Failed governments and failed societies always produce refugees. This is the source of my empathy for illegals from south of the border.

What is alarming to me is that in the third generation of what should be an upward American arc I may well be one of millions of an emerging political and economic diaspora.

I ain't going down without a fight, but I may need to double my income in order to simply hold my ground.

In places like Manhattan, The City (San Francisco) and Coastal California, taxes, regulations, and real estate are a subtle form of violence.

I wish I had the sense to recognize this twenty years ago.

Troy, please thank your parents, they raised you to recognize a rigged game.

Allow me to cast this emerging migration in more personal terms. My hope is to shed light on the personal cost I must pay should I decide to leave.

I was born and raised in a small coastal working class town near Los Angeles. I live in my home town. In a given week I will drive past the exact location of my birth at least a dozen times. Every place I go holds meaning and memory for me.

What I see every day is a microcosm of both the wonder and the pathology that is life in Coastal California.

As a working class man with working poor roots my leaving here will be nothing short of banishment. I mean that in the classical sense.

I will forced off the land of my birth, forced from the place my ancestors fled to for a better life, from the place where I first fell in love, from my Beulah land, all by the forces Troy described above.

How will I sing the song of the Lord in strange land?

I would not be voting with my feet, I would be fleeing for refuge from the only place I want to be. 

The Durango to Silverton train in winter.

Any high hill overlooking LA at night.

The coast of Alaska from the deck of a ship.

The cliffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Underway near Alcatraz with the City Front and the Golden Gate Bridge in view.

Yosemite Valley.

In a good seat at a good theater just when the trailers start to run.

The sea.

Coffee brewing.

Night blooming jasmin.

The Arizona desert after the rain.

Pinaud Club Man aftershave, the kind a real barber uses.

Given Gretchen Wilson is headlining the Otter Creek Event Center at the Black Bear Casino Resort this weekend- I find Meghan's absence from the podcast no mere coincidence. 

Having lived in Austin (which is, Vatican-like, surrounded by Texas) for 12 years, I can tell you this is how Texans think things oughta be.

I see your point, I think it is  a good one.

I don't think the Tea Party employs revolutionary totems to reference white supremacy, far from it. I think they desire to return to first principles and an Edenic America. It is easy to disremember the less pristine institutions then extant.

I think those who are not racist are surprised and disappointed to find others put off by their hearkening back to an era wherein white supremacy was assumed and the very humanity of other races was denigrated and denied. 

If we all had a time machine, some of us would be more reluctant than others to hop in and set the dial to 1860 or 1776.

What little I have read about this story leads me to believe it is has no legs as news story.

I think it would make a very interesting long form piece of journalism. I would love to see Skip Hollandsworth or David Grann get his hands on it.

With four murders and race at the heart of it all, it is an awful tragedy.

I am glad you brought that up. I am just a smidge put off by the obtuseness or tone deafness of their adopting American Revolutionary symbolism. 

I am a American Mexican, my ancestors were vanquished in a war of conquest on my native soil. You don't hear me b--ching about it because what's done is done, and because I shudder to think what Confederates would have done with us had their ambitions for a slave republic extending to the Pacific Ocean been realized.

I will not ascribe untoward motives to those Tea Partyers who favor such symbols, I do appeal to them to remember that White Supremacy pervaded the entire populace then.

I certainly do.