Sleepless in Midland

Happy Birthday Mark Twain

For people over a certain age their strongest memory of Mark Twain might be Hal Holbrook's brilliant impersonation in Mark Twain Tonight. Younger products of our public education system may remember him as that writer whose use of the "N" word got his books banned from their school libraries.

Anyway, today is his birthday. He was born November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. (Via Britannica.com.)

Happy Birthday, young man!

Those secessionist petitions really must have scared Dems

Back in '04 lefties were circulating that Jesusland map with the suggestion that the enlightened, i.e. blue, states should secede and join Canada. It was a popular enough meme that the hippest among them wore T-shirts featuring the map.

This time around its the non-lefties signing petitions for secession. It really lit a fire under editorial writers, and the knee jerk reaction to brand the signers as kooks was swift. That suggests the movement really must have frightened some people.

They needn't worry. No one who signed that thing could have possibly thought an online petition -- through an administration website no less -- requesting that their state be able to break off from the U.S. would get the time of day from the administration. They merely used this device as a way to alert Obama to the news flash that he earned no respect from the people he punished in his first term.

Speaking of breakups, Igor Panarin doesn't get much press these days. He's the Russian academic and former KGB analyst who predicted that in 2010 the U.S. would break up into six entities -- Alaska would go back to Russia, Hawaii would go to Japan or China, and the other four would form separate republics. From WSJ in December, 2008:

Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

Well, he got the first part right. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama's voters still believe in miracles.

As for secession, it would simply trade one budget buster for another. Building a defense network would break the bank, even without Iron Domes over the major cities to protect citizens from Obama drones.

email irritants

Email isn't dead, it's just gotten irascible in its old age.

William Hanson, a self proclaimed etiquette and protocol expert, lists some characteristics of annoying emails in OMG – are your emails irritating?

His focus is on business correspondence, and here's his sampling of email annoyances:

1. OMG/LOL;
2. Smiley faces;
3. Spelling or grammatical errors;
4. Going AWOL without an auto-reply;
5. XXXs;
6. Terms of endearment like “Honey”, “dear” suggesting the relationship is closer than it is;
7. Corny lines such as “Happy Friday”.

The informality of a friend-to-friend email might excuse some of these. However, #3 really does interfere with the message. Throw in some fractured sentences and several "..."s, and the message can take longer to read than it's worth.

Note this one from the comments: "any e-mail that contains Fw: in the subject line more than twice gets a free ride to the trash folder." Yeah!

I'll add to that one of my own irritants: forwarded emails with a sentence at the top added by a forwarder that says something like this: "I haven't verified any of this, but if it's true, it's really scary!" Then at the bottom it says, "If you really care about the future of this country you'll forward this to ten people." You bet.

Mr. Hanson wrote as if he was (were?) relaying survey results, but there was no link or reference to any real survey. Therefore, I can't verify any of the above. But if you care about the future of this country you'll forward this to ten people.

Election provided a civic lesson for the young -- debt is good

The issue was very clear going into the presidential election three weeks ago -- do voters want a big government or a shot at a smaller government? A majority of voters let the minority know that they wanted the large and growing government the reelection of Barack Obama would ensure.

Here locally we've taught our youth a more direct lesson: Making do with what you've got is bad. Big spending with borrowed money is good. And so we see a headline like this: Midlanders pass largest bond in city’s history referring to the school board supporters' successful effort to get voter approval to add a $163 million bond to the existing taxpayer debt.

Maybe it's our educational system that's to blame, not just for that particular bond, but for the casual acceptance of debt as a part life. After all, that same educational system encourages college students to incur mountains of school loan debt.

Midland, Texas, is experiencing an economic boom in the boom/bust cycle that typifies the oil and gas industry. But a boom has a mind altering effect -- it creates the belief that things will be different this time. So when the bust occurs it comes as a big surprise.

Here's another headline to ponder: Texas voters’ local bond approvals create future generations’ debt legacy. That article concludes:

Media reports regularly indicate voters’ “overwhelming” approval of bond proposals. If voters fail to adopt new responsibility with regard to these decisions, perhaps the hindsight takeaway from the Nov. 6 election will become that not only did voters “overwhelmingly” approve bond proposals, but they overwhelmingly approved saddling future generations – including their children and grandchildren – with an unmanageable, unsustainable level of debt for decades to come.

Voters should start practicing this mantra, "But we did it for you," as those children and grandchildren grow up and vote with their feet to escape the debt they inherited from all those well intentioned citizens. See California.

Photo source.

Village of the Damned plays high school football

Maybe someone who follows West Texas high school football knows the story behind this. Take a look at these two photos from the Midland Reporter-Telegram issues of 11/24/12 and 11/26/12. Notice anything unusual about the players?

All of those young men seem to be sporting blond hair. Is that a coincidence? The odds are against it being a natural phenomenon.

They are identified as Greenwood High School football players, but they look like adolescent kids from the Village of the Damned, minus the scary eyes.

Maybe their mothers were impregnated by one of those fertility doctors who used blond sperm to impregnate his patients. But that's even more unlikely.

Perhaps the boys bleached their hair to intimidate their opponents.  Gorgeous George would be proud.

What they need now is a good Haka dance to really intimidate their opponents, perhaps to the tune of a Beach Boys song. Or they could just use their Village of the Damned powers to cause turnovers. Either way.

[How did you miss Bleach Boys?  Robo-ed.]

WWII story from the Battle of Britain

The things we learn from commenters.

Not long ago this blog featured an item about a bunch of British Spitfires that were buried by U.S. troops in 1945 in Burma to keep them from being found by the Japanese. David Cundall thinks he found them and wants to attempt to dig them up. See Digging Up Spitfires on these blog pages.

Roy Bishop saw the item and left a comment telling the story of a British pilot who took out a German bomber over London then parachuted onto the roof of a house down the road from where Mr. Bishop lived during the war.

In a followup comment he identified the pilot as Ray Holmes who was credited with saving Buckingham Palace from the bomber's attack. Wikipedia has an entry about Mr. Holmes. Here's the meat of the story from that article:

Sergeant Holmes was flying a Hawker Hurricane fighter when he spotted a damaged Dornier Do17 bomber of KG 76 apparently making a bombing attempt on central London. Avoiding the bomber's return fire, Holmes made a head-on attack on the Dornier, however upon firing discovered his machine guns failed. Holmes decided to ram the bomber hoping his plane could withstand the impact and cut through it. He cut the tail off the bomber with his wing, causing the bomber to crash near Victoria tube station. His Hurricane was badly damaged, crashing near the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Holmes bailed out injured.

Now that was a gutsy move.  Mr. Holmes died at the age of 90 in 2005.

The Spitfire is a beautiful plane and gets more attention these days than the Hurricane. But the Hurricane was a work horse, and it's credited with over 60% of the RAF air victories in WWII.

Thanks for a great story idea, Mr. Bishop.

Photo source.

Happiness for some too often requires unhappiness in others

This quote from Bertrand Russell popped up today:

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.

Doesn't that seem to nail that last Presidential campaign? The winner relied so heavily on a need by so many to make some many others unhappy.

Here's the quote page. And here's the same quote nicely overlaid on a photo of Mr. Russell.

The newspaper business is doing all right

There was some fretting a while back about the fate of newspapers after the internet invasion. Don't worry. Judging by today's Midland Reporter-Telegram, they're doing OK.

Newspapers are basically conduits for advertising, and I've long thought they should give newspapers to the customers for free. Still waiting on that one.  In any event, the Midland Reporter-Telegram for today, Thanksgiving day, November 22, 2012, is loaded with the advertising that butters their bread.

 
The newspaper that hit my driveway this morning weighed in at around 3.6 pounds -- see photos of scales. Strip out the advertising supplements and there's not enough left to tip the big scales. However, the trusty postal scales measure the newspaper portion at 4.5 ounces. Plugging this into a spreadsheet tells us that the newspaper portion comes to a little less than 8% of the total.  Put another way, the advertising outweighs the news 12 times.

The ad volume was substantially more then normal due to the holiday sales drive. But still, that must be a lot of advertising revenue coming into the MRT coffers this month. It will be a Merry Christmas in that office.

P.S. Zoom in on those Pitney Bowes postal scales and get a load of that 15 cent first class rate. According to this chart that was the rate between '78 and '81. Hmm, I wonder if weights have inflated, too. That could account for human weight gain. An ounce 30 years ago probably measures in at two or three ounces today.

The Latino Vote

Reading the political opinion pieces it's easy to conclude that to the strategists we are all just a number within some voting bloc. And one we've been hearing a lot about lately is the Latino bloc and how Latinos should fit comfortably within the Republican Party "because they have strong families, a great work ethic, are more religious than most Americans, and are conservative on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage."

That quote is from an article by Charles Murray who pokes a big hole in the theory. See The GOP shouldn’t count on tapping latent Latino conservatism. From a review of the surveys, he concludes:

Latinos aren’t married more than everyone else. ...

Latinos aren’t more religious than everyone else. ...

Latinos aren’t more opposed to gay marriage than everyone else. ...

Latinos are a little more opposed to abortion than everyone else, but not by a landslide. ...

Latinos aren’t more conservative than everyone else. ...

Latino men are only fractionally more likely to be in the labor force than everyone else, and those with jobs work slightly fewer hours. ...

Latino women are substantially less likely to be in the labor force than everyone else. ...

All the more reason for Republicans to dump the social issues and concentrate on getting the message out about the need for fiscal conservatism.

Soldier suicide averted by social media

There was a movie from the days before color in which a character was about to commit suicide. But she reached out by phone one last time before doing the deed. If I remember correctly, a telephone operator got the call, and from there a search ensued to track and find the girl before she did herself in. It took the entire duration of the movie to locate her -- about two hours -- and she was saved. I recall finding the whole thing rather humorous in the way some antiques are since the movie would have been over in about two minutes with modern technology.

But maybe not. Here's a story that's every bit as riveting. It's about a despondent soldier in Tennessee who was about to commit suicide. His buddy reached out to a military facebook page as a last resort. The site administrator saw it around 11:30pm and got busy trying to locate and get the guy help. It took almost six hours, but with the help of the internet and many people, including the guy's Executive Officer, he was found and made safe.

Read the whole story at Social Media Is Saving Soldiers' Lives In Ways You'd Never Expect. They should make a movie.

In case of fire exit before tweeting about it

Just had to share this.

Is is real?  Found it at HaHaStop.com so it must be.

Chocolate in the news

Have you had a chocolate fix today? If not, here's some chocolate news to pass the time until you can get the real thing.

BBC -- A researcher has concluded that countries that have the highest chocolate consumption are more likely to produce Nobel Prize winners. Excerpt:

The study's author, Franz Messerli of Colombia University, started wondering about the power of chocolate after reading that cocoa was good for you.

One paper suggested regular cocoa intake led to improved mental function in elderly patients with mild cognitive impairment, a condition which is often a precursor to dementia, he recalls. ...

"When you correlate the two - the chocolate consumption with the number of Nobel prize laureates per capita - there is an incredibly close relationship," he says.

American shool kids do so poorly relative to other countries.  Maybe all they need is a dose of chocolate.

Businessweek -- Cocoa demand rises. Supplies shrink. Link. Hmm. I wonder which way prices will go.

Wall Street Journal -- The New York Chocolate Show (Salon Du Chocolat) featured chocolate wine, chocolate bracelets, chocolate sculptures and bars made of wasabi, bacon, lemongrass and mint with prices up to $20 per bar. Link.

And finally, HuffingtonPost -- Chocolate as a religious experience. Link. Uh huh. Must have had some of that chocolate wine with communion.

Update: What is the optimal dose? Via.

So you think you've been in a fight

A boxing match is a punishing event. It's doubtful anyone would disagree with that statement, but just in case, take a look at these before and after photos of fighters.

They are from a book by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein titled At the Fights - Inside Professional Boxing.  To see more photos click here .

Via BusinessInsider.com.

a train, a parade float, four dead

The eyes of Texas were flooded with tears yesterday evening as news broke that a Union Pacific train barreled through a trailer/float loaded with war veterans and their families in Midland, Texas. News report can be found at Midland Reporter-Telegram. Some post-crash photos can be found here. (Browser note -- the photos load better with IE than Firefox.)

The Union Pacific spokesperson was reported as saying the crossing gate and lights were working, although it seems unlikely a test was performed in the few hours between the time of the crash and the publication of that statement. But just because it's a self serving statement doesn't make it false.

So the question on everyone's mind one day later is still, "How could this have happened?" Crash investigators are being very tight lipped so as not to tilt the question of liability too soon. All the rest of us can do is speculate, and it's hard not to suspect that in the excitement of the parade the truck driver might have forgotten section 2.12 from the Texas Commercial Driver Handbook:

2.12 RAILROAD CROSSINGS
Railroad crossings are always dangerous. Every such crossing must be approached with the expectation that a train is coming. ...

What a tragedy. The folks at Show of Support were simply trying to help wounded warriors, and this happens. What a tragedy.

Updated 11/28/12: Various reports identified Dale Andrew Hayden as the driver. And as for one possible explanation for the accident, see WSJ.com quoting the lawyer for Hayden's employer which owned the truck:

But Mr. Hayden assumed Midland police were controlling traffic at all intersections along the parade route, Mr. Fletcher said, citing his interview with Mr. Hayden and the driver of a second parade float.

But then from a later WSJ article:

AUSTIN—The railroad crossing in Midland, Texas, where four veterans died after being hit by a train this month was designed to give motorists at least 30 seconds of advance warning, according to a review of records filed with the Texas Department of Transportation.

A federal investigation has found that warning lights flashed and bells sounded for 20 seconds before a freight train struck a parade float carrying veterans and their families.

The plans date from an upgrade of the crossing that was completed in 1991.

Union Pacific Corp., the owner of the train, said the Texas transportation records are outdated and "do not reflect current conditions" at the Midland crossing. It added that federal investigators found that the parade float "proceeded onto the tracks eight seconds after the red flashing lights and bells activated" and that the crossing met federal requirements.

Lots and lots of finger pointing.

Jason Moore wins Unsung Hero award

Known in these parts as Captain Watchdog, Jason Moore has been an inspiration for frustrated taxpayers for many years. And it's great to see him get a national honor. The announcement appears at AmericansForProsperity.org which tells us he is the recipient of the The Vernon K. Krieble Foundation’s Unsung Hero Award:

The Vernon K. Krieble Foundation will award a $25,000 check to Jason at the State Policy Network’s 20th Anniversary Annual Meeting in Amelia Island, Fla., on Wednesday, November 14. Many excellent candidates from around the country were nominated for the award, but Jason stood out for his efforts as a “citizen watchdog.”

Jason vigilantly attends city, county and school board meetings with his camera in hand to hold public officials accountable on how they are spending tax payer dollars. His latest effort is to educate the public on the large local debt in Texas ($322 billion) and the local bond initiatives on the November ballot.

The $25,000 prize might help provide a cushion for him when we hit the fiscal cliff. But if nothing else, it certainly should move him up to "Sung Hero" status.

Congratulations, Jason! Thanks for all you do!

Sex between biographer and subject -- was that wrong?

Instapundit points to this item from Walter Russell Mead in which he condescendingly explains that a biographer shouldn't have sex with the subject of the biography if the subject is married to someone else.

Sorry, those tired old ethics were repealed during the second Clinton term when we learned that sex, lies and stained dresses were business as usual for busy executives.

It brings mind George Castanza's confusion when accused of having sex with the office cleaning lady. Was that wrong?

As for Paula Broadwell and General David Petraeus, don't-ask-don't-tell was the mantra of the day, but they mistakenly thought it applied to them. Like Castanza's situation, maybe no one told them otherwise.

Some timely quotes from Ronald Reagan

While Republicans lick their wounds, some of Ronald Reagan's one liners might serve as a salve. A list of 40 was posted last summer at TownHall.com, and here are a select few from that list that seem apt today:

37) "Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence."

27) "If you're explaining, you're losing."

26) "I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts."

24) "Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives."

19) "Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."

18) "It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so."

17) "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his."

8) "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

4) "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

3) "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

2) "We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much."

A trillion-dollar debt? Ah, the good old days. See the whole list here.

A new use for pennies -- floor covering

Most people who see a penny in the parking lot won't bother benging over to pick it up. But a creative tattoo artist in Garfield, Pennsylvania, had an idea -- use them for floor covering.

There was plenty of bending over for that project, but with a lot of help -- 300 man hours worth -- she covered the 800 square feet of her store floor with around 250,000 pennies.

Watch a video here.

Apparently, it is cheaper to pave the floor with money than to buy tile. Ben Bernanke must be proud.

More exercise equals less brain shrinkage

The test involved around 600 people in Scotland who were given an MRI at age 70 then again at age 73. From LiveScience.com:

"People in their seventies who participated in more physical exercise, including walking several times a week, had less brain shrinkage and other signs of aging in the brain than those who were less physically active," said lead author Alan J. Gow of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. "On the other hand, our study showed no real benefit to participating in mentally and socially stimulating activities on brain size, as seen on MRI scans, over the three-year time frame."

Of course there's the possibility that a shrinking brain makes a person less willing and able to exercise.

Network, the movie -- when network news was at its peak

A movie from 1976 ran on TCM the other night: Network, with Fay Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall and Marlene Warfield. Everyone over a certain age has probably seen this movie at least once, and if enough time has passed since the first time, the second time is just as refreshing; refreshing in the way a satire about an insane need for love, power, money and ratings at a TV network can be.

Watching it on the small screen the other day brought back some memorable scenes. The love scene between hard charging programing exec Diana Christensen (Fay Dunaway) and aging news producer Max Schumacher (William Holden) has to be seen to be believed. BTW, Fay Dunaway's character was so over the top yet believable that she won an Oscar for it.

Anyone watching this movie today will appreciate the timeless humor in the sub plot involving the Ecumenical Liberation Army. The ELA is a knockoff of the Symbionese Liberation Army with video taped bank robberies, a radical revolutionary agenda, and the whole lefty terrorist schmear.

Since the ELS consists of  wanted criminals, Christensen brings in the head of the local Communist Party, Laureen Hobbs (Marlene Warfield) as the liaison with an offer to let her put on the "Mao Tse Tung Hour" in exchange for a weekly real crime video from the ELA. The first show was a ratings success, so the network has to get more which leads to this must-see scene in which the suits sit in the ELA hideout negotiating a contract. The Communist Hobbs steals the scene when she delivers an angry rant:

"Don't F__ with my distribution costs! I'm making a lousy 215 per session and I'm already deficiting 15 grand a week with Metro. I'm paying William Morris 10% off the top! ... The Communist Party's not going to see a nickle out of this G__D__ show til we go into syndication!"

Who says Commies can't be greedy? Hey, what do you know, here's that scene at Youtube. The blond girl playing the radical hippie chick is supposed to be Walter Cronkite’s daughter. And that should close the circle on this whole crazy network news experience.

P.S. Peter Finch played Howard Beale with the ubiquitous, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!" But you knew that already.

West Texas Wildlife

Last Saturday (11-10-12) the Sibley Nature Center had a display of some animals and reptiles, maintained by Peeps and Creeps, that found a home in West Texas home.

The touchy feely critter you see here is a Tiger Salamander which is allegedly found in West Texas. Problem is, the little guy needs lots of moisture. Good luck with that.

You won't find much cat blogging here, but I'll make an exception with this one. It looks as if she is trying to say, "I would smile, but the taxidermist stuck me with this snarl."

Don't see many bears in the desert. This one is a stock market bear.

Six political illusions

A majority of voters decided the outcome of Tuesday's election which is going to keep Barack Obama in the White House for another four years. And that outcome has left many of us scratching our heads trying to figure out why so many voters would possibly want more of what we got the past four years. The voters seem to a mix with some needing a personal government who will provide them with the material things they want. While others are simply uninformed. There's a need for education of both groups.

Here's a stater. George C. Leef at TheFreemanonline.org lists and describes Six Political Illusions: A Primer on Government for Idealists Fed Up with History Repeating Itself. Here's the simple list:

1. The Philanthropic Illusion: the idea that government has money of its own.

2. The Voluntary Illusion: the impulse to want to believe that government action is not based on force.

3. The Illusion of the Frictionless State: the idea that the State can transfer resources with negligible overhead cost.

4. The Materialistic Illusion: that money alone buys public-policy results.

5. The Watchful Eye Illusion: the idea that the government has greater knowledge and wisdom than the public.

6. The Illusion of Government Preeminence: the belief that the government is the only problem-solving institution in society.

Responsible voters shouldn't be acting under these illusions. But simply telling deluded people that they are wrong won't accomplish anything. This is something they will have to learn on their own, even as the Obama administration constantly reinforces these illusions. There is plenty of real world evidence to aid in this learning process, however. But it will be long and hard.

Query. Are the public schools part of the problem or the solution?

A peek inside the Obama campaign machine

There was a satire on the WSJ opinion page the other day titled To All My Dear, Needy Friends in Politcs (behind the paywall). In it Francine Zorn Trachtenberg recounted the personal social media missives she got from so many famous Democrats who treated her like an old friend as they asked for her money or vote. She ended her piece saying she intends to reply to all her new friends with a request they they help her out on LinkedIn -- "I know they'll be glad to hear from me."

It's funny stuff, and she made a good joke of the things the Obama campaign did to get voters to the poll. But the campaign wasn't a joke, it was a well oiled political machine upgraded for the 21st century with expensive technology and huge databases. Time.com provided a glimpse at the gears in Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win. Excerpt:

The new megafile didn’t just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn’t just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign’s most important priorities first. About 75% of the determining factors were basics like age, sex, race, neighborhood and voting record. Consumer data about voters helped round out the picture. “We could [predict] people who were going to give online. We could model people who were going to give through mail. We could model volunteers,” said one of the senior advisers about the predictive profiles built by the data. “In the end, modeling became something way bigger for us in ’12 than in ’08 because it made our time more efficient.”

We've known for quite some time that our personal lives are no longer secret and that some businesses use that information to try to sell us something. Nevertheless it is a bit unnerving to acknowledge how efficiently the Obama machine used that information to manipulate his electorate. Are Republicans doing this?

Via Econlog.

Election results inspire Zawahiri

The slightly over half of Americans who voted Tuesday were pleased with the outcome. But they weren't the only ones. Ayman al Zawahiri has to be very happy, too.

He just told an al Qaeda affiliate in Somalia to take heart, buck up and stay the fight. From LongWarJournal.org:

"They were defeated in Iraq and they are withdrawing from Afghanistan, and their ambassador in Benghazi was killed and the flags of their embassies were lowered in Cairo and Sana'a, and in their places were raised the flags of tawhid [monotheism] and jihad," Zawahiri says, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group.

"After their consecutive defeats, they are working from behind agents and traitors," Zawahiri continues. "Their awe is lost and their might is gone and they don't dare to carry out a new campaign like their past ones in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Emphasis was added to that last sentence to drive home the point. This new era of lost awe and might started when Obama was elected in 2008. And on Tuesday a majority of Americans acknowledged with their votes that they are OK with it. Osama bin Laden was wrong. When people see a weak horse and a strong horse sometimes they pick the weak horse.

Zawahir must be doing the Islamic equivalent of toasting with champagne.

Memo to AP: You don't have to call him darlin', darlin'

Those words from David Allen Coe's mournful You Never Even Called Me by My Name spring to mind from this AP editor's pick from the morning paper: Tea party darling Cruz wins Texas' US Senate race.

Bless their msm hearts. They just can't hide their contempt for Tea Party supporters. But this is only the beginning. Get ready for a barrage of demeaning descriptors for any elected Republican who resists tax hikes.

A democracy can only exist until ... Quote of the day from Alexis de Tocqueville

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.” Link.

Have we reached that point in the history of this great democracy?

Update: Oops! The author of that quote was not Tocqueville. Sorry. There seems to be a question of who said it. It has been attributed to Tocqueville, Alexander Fraser Tytler, and others. But this research by Loren Collins, concluding that the quote is a composite of statements from various sources, seems credible.

 

Did voters lie to exit pollsters?

The Six Trillion Dollar Man just won reelection to the highest office in the land. Neal Boortz attempts to explain how he pulled it off:

Will somebody please explain how in the hell this makes any sense: Exit polling showed that the economy was, by far, the most important issue in this election for voters … yet, they vote for the SCOAMF?

I’ve outlined in detail the failures of the ObamaEconomy and the ObamaRecovery.  But even without that information, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to understand that Obama has been an abject failure when it comes to our economy and recovery.  So what is going on here?  Either people are lying about their top voting issue or they have absolutely no clue. Remember what I told you about the Dunning-Kruger effect? Incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. This is the only way to explain how people can go to the polls with the economy as their top voting issue and push the button for Obama.

These are the people who believe that it is possible to tax our way to prosperity and that the rich aren’t paying their fair share.  These are the people who believe that Warren Buffett pays less in taxes than his secretary.  And these people are now, officially, the predominant force in America.  Yesterday, they proved that.

Boortz certainly doesn't have a very high regard for Obamaphiliacs. He says they are clueless. However, the first reason he sites is the correct one. Voters lied. They simply said the economy was the factor because they didn't want to admit out loud that they want a big, nanny state government. Somehow our educational system has cranked out a generation of people who are convinced that government is the answer to all their wants and desires.

The majority has spoken -- the bastards

By all historical standards Obama should have been defeated easily on the basis of the economy alone. But the voters want him for four more years. That's sad news for the country as it tells us that the majority wants the European style of big government and big debt. Too bad we are copying them instead of setting an example for them. Maybe that's what leading from behind means -- following.

Get ready for slow economic growth and high government growth. Tax the rich? Yeah right. That will fix things.

Eventually the belt will have to be tightened. Republicans will have to do it, and they'll take all the heat for it. Then we'll see if Obama supporters will emulate the European style street riots.

(This post's title is a paraphrase of Hunter S. Thompson's remark after he was defeated by voters in his bid for some small office years ago.)

Add another reason to evict Obama -- Eric Holder

There are plenty of reasons to unelect Barack Obama. Chief among them is that it might provide an opportunity to repeal Obamacare.  It's also important to prevent Obama from sending any more liberals to the Supreme Court.

But right up there with those important reasons is the removal of Eric Holder. A short list of grievances against Holder would include Fast-and-furious, the gun running scandal that left hundreds dead and that looks suspiciously like an attempt to create an excuse to ban guns.

Add to that the case of the New Black Panthers who intimidated voters on video in 2008, a crime which Holder elected not to prosecute. But not to worry. King Samir Shabazz was enjoined from carrying a baton next time. Yeah, that's reassuring.

Let's not forget the meddling in Texas' redistricting which delayed the 2012 primary until late in the season. Then there was the blocking of voter ID laws. The baton Holder used for that beating was Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Texas didn't take this lying down, though, and sued to have it declared unconstitutional. Section 5 has outlived its purpose, and we'll know soon whether the justices agree.

In any event, Eric Holder has politicized the Attorney General's office like none before him. For the good of the country he and his boss need to go.

Voting is the best revenge

That was President Obama's charge to his fans the other day at a campaign stop. He has never demonstrated great skill at speaking beyond the teleprompter, and he was most likely talking off the script. But Obama has always treated those who disagree with him as the enemy, and he was probably very sincere.

That may not be a trait that every loyal Democrat shares. But enough do that just like Bush-derangement-syndrome, it should have a popular name. Almost every conservative has had the experience of witnessing a Democrat let loose an angry tirade about how awful someone is. Their facts may be wrong, and their double standard may be obvious, but their anger is very real.

That sort of thing is hard to overcome. And while many Democrats diverge on what issue to advance, the thing that unifies them is the enemies list -- the one percent, big business, bosses, Christians, global warming deniers, environmental plunderers, and so on.

Obama didn't start it, but he just keeps fanning the flames with his hateful, class warfare rhetoric. Maybe that will all end by the time votes are counted on election day. And we won't have to come up with a name for it.