Dave's Weekly Riff is back!  Here is my commentary on the passing scene...

As is always the case in the second term of a presidency, we're continuing to see the exodus of advisers from the Bush Administration.  Today's announcement was that Karl Rove himself (aka "Turd Blossum", "the Architect"), considered by many to be Bush's Svengali, is leaving at the end of the month.  Of course the conspiracy theorists are chalking it up to various nefarious purposes, but I think it is pretty reasonable to understand that he is both burned out and largely ineffective.

Rove's strength was supposedly as a master strategist and vote-producer, but I always thought that was overstated.  In 2004, we had a wartime President with a booming economy facing one of the worst candidates since, well, the last Massachusetts leftist the Democrats put up for President.  Rove's strategy always seemed to center on wedge issues and purely getting out the Republican "base" vote, never on expanding that base.  Yet even in states where such divisive issues as gay marriage were on the ballot, Bush still didn't poll as well as the ballot initiatives.

So while Rove goes down in history as having been the lead strategist for a two-term Presidency, he certainly leaves a mixed legacy as his candidate is mired with dismal approval ratings and the Congress sits in the hands of the opposition.

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Tiger Woods unsurprisingly won his 13th major at the PGA Championship in Tulsa on Sunday.  As he continues to dominate professional golf — he has amazingly never lost when leading after 3 rounds and is on track to eclipse Jack Nicklaus's record for major championships — one only needs to look at him to understand why.

In a sport filled with overweight non-athletes, Tiger looks like he could be a professional football player.  He's transformed his body and his swing in the past decade of dominance, and he's shown he's willing to do whatever it takes to be the best ever.  Nobody else seems to even approach that level of competitiveness, and it was especially evident in the 100+ degree heat at the PGA.

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Supposedly it is back on again:  Van Halen is once again talking about touring with its rightful lead singer, David Lee Roth.  I only hope they play Houston early in the tour, because these guys can't seem to fit their respective egos in the room for very long before they start hating each other again.  When it comes to straight-ahead rock music, those first 5 Van Halen albums are about as good as it gets.  Some of the Sammy Hagar-era stuff was listenable, but none of it approached the energy of the Roth-VH partnership.

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You should be happy to know (sarcasm sarcasm) that among the projects to spend your confiscated tax money that were greenlighted by "King Corruption" Jack Murtha was $2 million dollars in corporate welfare to Sherwin-Williams for a "paint shield" against "microbial threats".  No, I'm not joking.  And no, the Pentagon doesn't even want it.  Of course there are billions more in wasted money, but that just sums up what the government is all about these days.

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Mitt Romney won the Iowa Straw Poll this past weekend.  Yawn.

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When campaign finance reform was being considered as a hot political issue, then-Senator Fred Thompson often referred to the McCain-Feingold bill as "McCain-Feingold-Thompson".  Anyone else notice that he's not so enthusiastic in his promotion of that fact now?