Sleepless in Midland

Quick takes -- is Edward Snowden a hero or a villain? He's both

Edward Snowden's spy jinks may be old news now, but the question still lingers: Is he a hero or a villain?

Simple answer. He's both.

He alerted Americans that their own government was spying on them under the authority of the most routine of court orders, if they even had that. And that was information Americans were glad to know. Whether we were conducting nefarious operations or simply living clean lives didn't seem to matter -- our personal data were collected by the government and presumably will occupy some tiny amount of space in some huge hard drive forever. For that, Snowden is a hero.

But some of the commentators say Snowden may have exposed some super secrets to our enemies and done damage which will take decades to repair . We need some evidence of that, but if it's true, he's a villain.

He's a hero and a villain. He's like the hypothetical deviant who robs a man he saved from drowning. So the real question is what should be done with such an individual. Maybe they could give him the key to the city as he goes off to jail, but the irony in that might be too rich.

PBA -- uncontrollable laughter

This strange commercial crossed the screen while I was waiting for The Simpsons to come on last night. They were selling a drug, and the customer base apparently consists of people who have bouts of uncontrollable laughter. The malady is called PBA, they said, and there was a URL for PBAfacts that appeared in the commercial. (No hyperlink here. Their "Web Site Linking Policy" says linking to the site constitutes an agreement to the terms and conditions therein. I was struck with uncontrollable laughter.)

Anyway, the affliction may be real, and if so, knowing about it is a blessing. Anytime you laugh at someone inappropriately, there's a built in excuse. "I'm sorry, I must have PBA." If they protest, say, "Hey, I'm the victim here!"

As a last resort curse and claim Tourette syndrome.

Heroin usage on the rise in Massachusetts suburbs-- prescription opioids are the gateway drug

Kristina Lindborg was on Washington Journal the other day talking about her recent article at csmonitor.com titled Why heroin is spreading in America's suburbs. Excerpt:

Stronger heroin is only one reason behind the nation's growing addiction problem. The other – and more prevalent cause, say police and medical experts – is the nation's pill culture.

Ana's route to addiction is a familiar one, according to addicts: a progression from alcohol to marijuana to painkillers to heroin. There are variations on that theme: a sports injury and a prescription for opioids that goes on far longer than it should; a peek inside the family medicine cabinet to find a trove of prescription pills – such as Percocet, OxyContin, Vicodin, codeine – that can be used as recreational drugs.

Often the introduction comes through friends who want to share a high they have discovered. Or it happens at a college party where a variety of drugs are being offered.

Regardless of how it starts, it usually takes the same precipitous route. Once hooked, users look for doctors who will sell them prescription drugs and, failing that, turn desperately to the street, where the price can be as high as $80 for a single pill. When that becomes too expensive, users often resort to the drug that produces the same kind of high that painkillers do but is far cheaper: heroin.

The article is heavy on anecdotes, one of which tells the interesting story about how one group of young addicts looked down on "junkies" while convincing themselves they were using heroin merely to get them through the periods when they didn't have access to the prescription opioids.

The author makes a convincing argument. However, those needing statistics to be convinced should look elsewhere. For example, Ms. Lindborg says on the bottom of page 1 the following:

In Massachusetts, law enforcement authorities recently reported that 185 people have died of heroin overdoses in just the past four months – which didn't include numbers from the state's three largest cities. Nationwide, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), heroin use among persons age 12 and older nearly doubled between 2007 and 2012.

(Emphasis added by me.) But if you actually look at the SAMHSA study you find this:

The annual number of persons with substance dependence or abuse in 2012 (22.2 million) was similar to the number in each of the years from 2002 to 2010 (ranging from 21.6 million to 22.7 million), but it was higher than the number in 2011 (20.6 million). ... The number of persons with heroin dependence or abuse in 2012 (467,000) was approximately twice the number in 2002 (214,000).

Maybe she simply mistook 2002 for 2007.

In any event, a problem next door looks very large to those who see it, and this might be more of a suburban Massachusetts problem at the moment than a nationwide problem. Nevertheless, it would be wise to keep an eye on it should it spread.

Not too soon to get your April Fool's day pranks ready- video links

First up: 6 Mischievous Tricks & Pranks - for April Fools'. Some of these are funny, and some are down right cruel, especially the balance test that leaves the victim standing alone with half filled cups hanging from her teeth and balanced on the tops of her hands.

Next up, from a year ago, 5 Crazy Pranks To Play On April Fools Day! Part 4. Now these are cruel. Don't do them. In fact, don't even watch this video. Watch the next one instead.

This one doesn't offer any suggestions but recounts 10 hoaxes from April Fool's Days past. The best ones: The 1998 Burger King advertisement that the new Left Handed Whooper would feature ingredients that had been rotated 180 degrees for left handed people and the 1996 announcement that Taco Bell bought the Liberty Bell and would rename it Taco Liberty Bell.

Happy April Fools' Day!

Fox Friday 3-28-14

Once a week we view the goings on in the bone yard -- the undisclosed location where the Fox Cam captures the nocturnal critters scavenging for food.

He's not alone. Look at the spying eyes.

These are the glutenous critters that steal the foxes' food. What a sloppy eater Black Cat is. Calico is wagging his tail for the camera.

 Now there are a couple of nice poses.

The evening buffet lately consists of two frozen chicken drumsticks. It's difficult to make them out in the night photos. But there one is, partially thawed and glistening in the light. ... And it's gone.

Nice profile.

Old Crooked Tail on the left showing us his namesake feature. But look at the one on the right. Same night almost four hours later -- look at the straight tail -- is it the same fox? I don't think so.

For a good dose of bureaucracy bashing check out John Stossel's latest

John Stossel is always good at pointing out pointless government regulations and run-away bureaucracies. That may even be why he and ABC parted company.

Stossel's latest screed, Bullies Rule, is about a familiar subject, how government does more harm than good with all its rules and regulations. A case in point is the FDA. Their restrictions and delays are keeping good products off the market, and the gauntlet a new products are put through discourages companies from developing new ones.

His closing argument:

Like frightened kids in elementary school, we learn to accept this, to think it’s natural. But it’s not right that government forbids people in pain to make their own choices about what might help them.

Voluntary is better than force. Free is better than coerced. We’re better off when government is small and people are left to do as they please, unbullied.

Maybe it's that too many people don't have the confidence to make intelligent decisions and want government to do it for them.

Short takes -- We keep hearing about all those Republicans who didn't vote in 2012

We keep hearing remarks about all those Republicans who didn't vote in the 2012 Presidential election. There are those of us who believe Romney should have gotten more votes than he did, but there's something wrong with the theory that many Republicans stayed home on election day.

The fact is that Romney got more votes in 2012 (60,861,683) than McCain got in 2008 (59,934,814).

Obama is the one who got fewer votes in 2012 (65,600,425) than in 2008 (69,456,897). That was enough to get him elected both times, and Americans have certainly paid the price for that. But don't blame Republicans for that.

Spy vs. Spy -- Intelligence Report on Huawei and ZTE

So I was surfing through Amazon.com for phones and came upon one from ZTE. Doing a little due diligence on it I ran across this report from the House Intel: Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE (PDF). Apparently, Huawei Technologies Company was under a cloud of suspicion, and in an open letter published in early 2011 the company denied any security concerns and asked the U.S. government for an investigation into their corporate operations to clear their reputation. The House of Representatives took them up on it.

Here's an excerpt from the executive summary:

Despite hours of interviews, extensive and repeated document requests, a review of open - source information, and an open hearing with witnesses from both companies, the Committee remains unsatisfied with the level of cooperation and candor provided by each company. Neither company was willing to provide sufficient evidence to ameliorate the Committee’s concerns. Neither company was forthcoming with detailed information about its formal relationships or regulatory interaction with Chinese authorities. Neither company provided specific details about the precise role of each company’s Chinese Communist Party Committee . Furthermore, neither company provided detailed information about its operations in the United States. Huawei, in particular, failed to provide thorough information about its corporate structure, history, ownership, operations, financial arrangements, or management. Most importantly, neither company provided sufficient internal documentation or other evidence to support the limited answers they did provide to Committee investigators.

During the investigation, the Committee received information from industry experts and current and former Huawei employees suggesting that Huawei, in particular, may be violating United States laws. These allegations describe a company that has not followed United States legal obligations or international standards of business behavior. The Committee will be referring these allegations to Executive Branch agencies for further review, including possible investigation.

We've known, or at least suspected, that China has been spying on us for a long time. And those of us paranoid enough have wondered whether our own electronic devices are ticking time bombs waiting for the signal from home to participate in a DDOS attack or do something even more nefarious.

By the way, that last sentence of the quoted passages about referring the allegations to the Executive Branch may not have been necessary. The U.S. had been spying on Huawei since 2009 according to the Snowden leaks via Spiegel. Well, good. That's the kind of spying we expect from our government.

In any event, Huawei and ZTE phones are off my wish list. And apparently they're off many other Americans' lists, too, as those companies' sales in the U.S. are dwarfed by their sales in other countries.

But here's the twist. The U.S. has been active in the spy game, too. And at least one writer speculated that the leaks about America's spying would turn customers off U.S. made products, too.

So what's a consumer to do? If all of our electronics are spying on us, I suppose we have to choose which country we want stealing our communications. But here's a radical thought: snail mail. The NSA would really have to work to read our letters. In my case, I can barely read my own hand writing, and to pilfer and read my letters would require a level of physical energy that probably isn't there.  The USPS may get a second life. Let's not declare it dead just yet.

A suit to end the environmentalist "sue and settle" scheme

It has long seemed that environmentalist were less enthused about saving critters than in hurting business, the oil business specifically. And a federal bureaucracy shared that same goal.

So the tactic was for an environmental group to sue the government in a friendly jurisdiction, settle on terms friendly to the environmentalists, then inflict the terms of the settlement nationwide. It was a sneaky way to circumvent the legitimate procedures for making rules and regulations.

Finally, someone is trying to do something about it. See Stephen Moore's The Obama Administration's Push for More 'Endangered Species' Is Hurting U.S. Energy:

Oklahoma’s attorney general has filed what could become a landmark lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, arguing the so-called “sue and settle” procedure for listing animals and plants on the endangered and threatened list violates the federal Endangered Species Act.

Scott Pruitt filed the complaint late Monday on behalf of the state of Oklahoma and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance (DEPA), a national network of oil and gas companies.

The attorney general charges that “by entering into private settlements with special interest litigants, (the Fish and Wildlife Service) has attempted to circumvent the legislative and regulatory process and make fundamental changes to its (Endangered Species Act)-imposed obligations.”

It's about time someone tried to stop to these federal bureaucrats gone wild.

Matt Drudge's 1st quarterly estimated tax payment must have included Obamacare tax

This is an example of why the lefty media has earned so much disdain. As I finished checking my Yahoo mail early this morning the Yahoo default page showed up with a string of panels, each of which is a link to a story. The first one (before I turned off cookie permission) was the one shown in the photo.

Seems that Matt Drudge, as a self employed individual, pays an estimated tax each quarter as the IRS expects all self employed people to do. So he tweeted that he paid the Obamacare tax. Then lefties pounced on that because they assumed he was talking about his 2013 tax return. Here's the link to the Yahoo news item as it appears now.

Drudge's first quarterly estimated tax payment for 2014 will be due on April 15, 2014. Whether he paid an estimate of his Obamacare tax is something only he and his tax preparer know for sure. But since he said he did, we should probably take him at his word.

After all, the instructions for the 1040es clearly contemplate that. To wit:

Health care coverage.
When you file your 2014 tax return in 2015, you will need to either (1) indicate on your return that you and your family had health care coverage throughout 2014, (2) claim an exemption from the health care coverage requirement for some or all of 2014, or (3) make a payment if you do not have coverage or an exemption(s) for all 12 months of 2014. For examples on how this payment works, go to www.IRS.gov/aca and click under the “Individuals & Families” section. You may want to consider this when figuring your “Other taxes” on Line 12 of the 2014 Estimated Tax Worksheet. For general information on these requirements, go to www.IRS.gov/aca.

Meanwhile, the Yahoo headline is one of the reasons we should be just as skeptical of Yahoo news as with the other left leaning news outlets.

Washington Free Beacon's Tale of Two Cities contrasts Midland, TX, and Yuma, AZ

Fracking has been very good for Midland, TX, as well as many other cities in the vicinity of fields where the process is in use. Populations have grown. Incomes have gone up. And jobs have been plentiful. That's old news, but less well know is what's happening in the energy city of Yuma.

Washington Free Beacon contrasts the two cities:

As a result of Midland’s fracking-induced oil glut, the town’s increasing population is also enjoying a boost in personal incomes. Per capita income in the city increased by 25 percent between 2009 and 2011. ...

“Every state with shale development across the nation is outpacing the national average in terms job growth,” Energy in Depth spokesman Joe Massaro wrote on Thursday.

In contrast to the successes of those oil and gas boomtowns, Yuma, Ariz., is facing the highest unemployment rate of any U.S. metro area at a whopping 26.1 percent.

Yuma is the site of the Agua Caliente solar plant—the largest photovoltaic solar generation facility in the world.

Agua Caliente received a $967 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy (DOE) in 2011. According to DOE, federal financing helped create 10 permanent jobs.

The money came by way of the same loan guarantee program that financed the notorious—and now bankrupt—solar company Solyndra. ...

“It represents the difference between an industry which exists of its own accord, by providing goods and services that people actually want to buy, and an industry that exists only by the grace of government, which acts to mandate demand and subsidize supply,” said William Yeatman, an energy policy expert with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in an email.

Will voters wake up to the fact that central government planning isn't a viable economic arrangement? Larry Kudlow is right: free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity.

A magician plays tricks on dogs

You could say this is funny, or you could say this is cruel. Or you could say both and just have a good time!

It's a video of a magician making a treat disappear right in front of dogs' eyes. Here's the Youtube link.

Check it out. It's funny. Via Metafilter.com with the cute title, now you smell it... now you don't!.

Fox Friday 3-21-14. Now with bilingual signage! Also Chupacabra walks by.

The "No Cats" sign didn't do any good last week, so we started this week with bilingual signage. Maybe now those ravenous rascals will get the message. (Click on the thumbnails for the big picture.)

 Nope. Looks right at it, shows no respect for authority. Even tries to tip it over.

Then along comes Old Crooked Tail. He grabs the chicken leg, and he's gone.

 But then the rains came. The sign lettering was a thin layer of Elmer's Carpenter's Wood Glue on cardboard sprinkled with tiny reflective glass beads. It was just a joke anyway, but as you'll see farther down, one of the signs held up pretty well.

The next night:

 Fox sniffs around, narrows in, grabs the chicken leg, and he's gone.

Good profile of Old Crooked Tail. "Your letters are running. Want me to chase 'em?"

Five hours later a different fox swings by. Look at that straight tail.

One night something strange appeared on the scene.

A new critter came by. It has a bushy tail like a fox but a snout like a cat. Frankenfox? I'm going with Chupacabra.

What does the name "Castro" mean to you?

It's remarkable how comfortable the main stream media has become with Joaquin Castro's last name. He's just "Castro." See, for example the front pager on the right.

When people over a certain age hear "Castro" we think of Fidel. Fidel Castro was the leader of a revolution in Cuba in another century. He created a communist utopia which has been very successful for the leaders and a disaster for everyone else -- just like all other communist utopias before and since.

For the low information voter, Fidel was Che Guevara's Cuban boss.

But now, "Castro" is Joaquin Castro, the U.S. Representative from San Antonio, who arrived on the national scene at the 2012 Democrat convention. And with the wind of the main stream media at his back, he'll be a presidential candidate some day if racial identity politics mean anything.

Politico attempts to explain why Asians prefer Dems - plays the race card

Three academics writing in Politico attempt to provide an answer to: Why Are Asian Americans Democrats?. Their answer: Racism. Excerpt:

Republican rhetoric implying that the (non-white) “takers” are plundering the (white) “makers” has cultivated a perception that the Republican Party is less welcoming of minorities. That might help explain why Asian Americans, despite their “maker” status, prefer the Democratic Party—even if the GOP doesn’t discriminate against Asians specifically.

Distinctions between takers and makers isn't about race, so what makes it so? I blame the main stream media which is poised to pounce on anything that could remotely be called racist even if it isn't. These academics even provide an example of how influential media manipulation is. They conducted their own very unscientific survey among some Asian Americans with two different articles about the Arizona law that required police officers to ascertain people’s immigration status. The results they reported:

The result: When immigration was framed as an issue that teamed Hispanics and Asians together under the umbrella of common interest, 72 percent identified as Democrats and 28 percent as Republicans. But when immigration was framed as an issue that pitted Hispanics and Asians against each other, only 67 percent of Asians identified as Democrats and 33 percent as Republicans.

Five percentage points doesn't seem statistically significant. But nevertheless, their concluding remark purports to suggest a way for Republicans to get Asian votes:

The Republican Party could try to capitalize on divisions between Asian Americans and other minorities, emphasizing how Democratic policies benefit other groups at their expense. But doing that successfully would require a level of political dexterity that Republicans haven’t shown much of late.

Pit Asians Americans against Hispanics. My goodness, what would Republicans do without such sincere sounding advice from such helpful Democrats?

Obama threatens governors -- he's a real toughy at home, not so much elsewhere

Obama is like the school yard bully who tries to push everyone around, but when a bigger bully comes along he's helpless. There's a perfect example occurring right before our eyes.

There was a dinner last month in which President Obama hosted some state governors where he called for the governors to work with him on the economy, education, climate change and health care. But it wasn't all peaches and cream. Here's what Rick Perry said about it:

“As a matter of fact, he [Obama] said at that meeting, he said, ‘If I hear any of you pushing back, making statements about Washington spends too much money, you’ll hear from me,” ...

Well, this wasn't the first offensive thing Obama said as this is consistent with his tough guy approach. He tries to bully anyone who speaks out against him.

So it's almost funny to see the Russians mock him so ruthlessly:

Mr Surkov, a presidential aide who has reigned in Russia's media for Putin, joked that being on Barack Obama's "blacklist" was a "big honour".

Poor Barack. It's almost enough to make a person feel sorry for him.  But there he is, in way over his head.  Community organizing in Chicago doesn't provide much of a skill set for the real world.

Drone beer delivery for ice fishers shut down by feds

"We're from the government and we want to take your fun away." That's the message from the FAA to the beer distributor in Minnesota that used a drone to deliver beer to an ice fishing house.

Those Minnesotans must be a hardy bunch, not just because they fish on an ice covered lake, but because they drink cold beer while doing it. And with beer comes innovation. A brewer there came up with a way to get a pack of beer from the store to the ice fishers without having to actually do it by hand. Drones!

Now that's American ingenuity. Watch a video of the drone doing its thing at this youtube site.

Unfortunately, the feds shut them down. Apparently, there's a rule against using drones for commercial purposes, although commercial usage seems rather innocuous compared with what drones are used for by the government. One has to wonder whether if such a bureaucracy had been around when the Wright brothers' plane took flight they would have put a stop to that, too.  It could crash, you know.

Anyway, read more at Modvive.com. Via Mediabistro.com.

Hedge fund manager out to drive down Herbalife stock price through government

There's nothing morally wrong with betting that a stock will go down. People do that all the time. Some arrive to the decision to sell short through diligent research that others have missed. That's the admirable way. But some try to drive down the price of a stock themselves and even enlist the aid of government to do a job on the company. That seems to be the case when a hedge fund manager hired lobbyists to get the government's help in the process.

The story can be found at Heritage. See How One Hedge Fund Manager Is Using Washington to Destroy a Company. Excerpt:

Ackman has pulled out all the stops. He convinced a member of Congress to send a letter to the Federal Trade Commission demanding an investigation. He paid for protesters to travel to Washington for a rally. He contributed $10,000 to the League of United Latin American Citizens, which then came out against Herbalife (the executive director eventually gave that money back). He lobbied federal and state regulators, including the Securities Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, to investigate.

He claims Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. But he doesn’t need to prove that it is. He just needs to use the power of government oversight to raise doubts about the company.

He even had a U.S. Senator doing his dirty work. No need to play the name-the-party game here, he was a Democrat. But to be fair, we really don't know whether anyone else was offered the bait and just didn't bite. In any event, crony capitalism is a symptom of an unhealthy condition. An accompanying condition is voter blindness.

Good reason to become a prepper -- electrical grid vulnerable to sabotage

The sniper attack last year on a power plant in San Jose, California, wasn't nationally known until about a month ago. But it was a wake up call that put focus on the vulnerability of the electrical power supply in the U.S. While there are 55,000 power plants around the country, taking out only nine would incapacitate the whole system, according to a report released by the FERC. See Mail Online. Excerpt:

'Destroy nine interconnection substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer,' wrote FERC's director of external affairs Leonard Tao in a June memo that was only revealed publicly today.

Adding to the problem, the solution is not as simple as just protecting these nine stations because there are reportedly 30 stations that meet the necessary criteria but less than a third of them have to be attacked. Experts differ on the number of stations that would fall into said category- with others putting it closer to 100- but it does not diminish their concern.

Doesn't seem like a project for Al Qaeda as without electricity there would be no headlines. But eco-terrorists might be all in.

The silver lining, if there is one, would be that unlike an EMP attack our appliances and vehicles would still work. There would just be no electricity.

In any event, 18 months is a long time to go without power. After 9-11 there was a lot of focus on preparedness, but we had a different president back then. One has to wonder if our governments at any level have current contingency plans for something like that or whether we'll be on our own.  Maybe it's time to start listening to those preppers.

Fox Friday 3-14-14 -- heed the signage

Each night the cats must hide in the weeds waiting for the chicken leg to be put out for the foxes. Well, there was a surprise in store.

Read it and weep. "Does this mean me?" Yes, you felonious feline.

"Yeah, that's what I'm talking about!"

Unfortunately, the cats ignored the sign. Maybe some bilingual signage might be in order.

The fox doesn't come around every night, and when he does, it's not always at the same time. An irregular routine is probably part of an urban fox's survival kit even if it means missing a meal. The food goes out at roughly the same time each evening, and maybe some night the fox will get it. But not this night. Or any night this past week, for that matter.

Finally, here's an interesting shot. You can make one fox in the background, but there is a set of eyes trailing him (see yellow circle). Is it another fox? Maybe they are traveling in pairs again as we approach Spring.

So the Point of ObamaCare was to kill the insurance industry

One of the architects of Obamacare, Ezekiel Emanuel, has been busy writing articles touting his new book, and Robert Tracinski has done the dirty work of reading them and giving us a nice summation in What Was the Point of ObamaCare?. (Found at Betsy's Page.) Here's the answer:

Emanuel gives us one big answer to our question. What was the point of ObamaCare, if not to insure the uninsured? To destroy the insurance companies. ...

What is going to replace private health insurance, he says, is something called “accountable care organizations” or ACOs, about which he makes some very glowing and optimistic predictions, which are easy to make because “This health delivery structure is in its infancy,” so nothing has had a chance to go wrong yet.

The ACOs actually sound pretty much like a new and expanded version of the olds HMOs: an insurance company wedded to a network of preferred doctors and hospitals. And of course it will have many of the same problems.

Barack Obama told us early on that he intended to fundamentally change America as we knew it. Left unsaid was that the change would probably hurt more people than it helped. But what's amazing is that so many people voted for him not once but twice.

He must have been quite a character - The late Walter Bruhl

This comes to us by way of Washingtontimes.com in Last laugh: Marine vet fires off jokes from the grave with own obituary. The man wrote his own obituary which contained the usual did-this, did-that. But he threw in a few zingers to liven it up, so to speak. The best part comes at the end:

There will be no viewing since his wife refuses to honor his request to have him standing in the corner of the room with a glass of Jack Daniels in his hand so that he would appear natural to visitors.

Cremation will take place at the familes convenience and his ashes will be kept in an urn until they get tired of having it around. What's a Grecian Urn? Oh, about 200 drachmas a week.

Everyone who remembers him is asked to celebrate Walt's life in their own way, raising a glass of their favorite drink in his memory would be quite appropriate.

Instead of flowers, Walt would hope that you will do an unexpected and unsolicited act of kindness for some poor unfortunate soul in his name.

What a nice last wish. What a guy. See a jpg of what appears to be an original draft here.

Wendy Davis is fracking the Hispanic vote

Michael Barone makes an interesting observation in Wendy Davis' filibuster against late-term abortion ban repels Texas Hispanics.

The Hispanic vote is usually held over the heads of Republicans as a threat. And most reports do suggest that Hispanics favor Democrats at the polls. However Wendy Davis may produced a wedge issue: Abortion. She skyrocketed to fame following her filibuster in the Texas Senate over a bill that would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks.  And she cemented Turn-Texas-Blue Democrats in the belief that banning late term abortions were a part of the trumped up war-on-women.

Barone says that may not be sitting well with South Texas Hispanics.

But there are fissures in the Democratic coalition. Davis won the Democratic primary easily, by a 79 percent to 21 percent margin over Reynaldo “Ray” Madrigal, who spent little or no money and had no perceptible name identification. Yet Davis lost 26 of Texas' 254 counties to Madrigal, mostly heavily Hispanic counties in the Rio Grande Valley. ...

These numbers point to the conclusion that Davis' stand on the abortion issue, wildly popular among the Democrats' feminist left, is significantly unpopular among many Texas Hispanic voters -- most of them probably Catholic, but including a significant number of evangelical and pentecostal Protestants. National Democratic strategists may hope that Davis can build a Texas majority on a feminist-black-Hispanic base. But that Hispanic base looks shaky.

Actually, another big threat to Texas conservatives may be immigrants from failing Blue states who vote like they don't understand what caused the failure back home.

Ask Zelda -- the Dear Abby for spies

When it's about the NSA one never knows what's true or false. But like those good stories that arrive by email, some are so good we don't want to check them for fear that they're wrong.

Here's one at Glenn Greenwald's website written by Peter Maas, titled The NSA Has An Advice Columnist. Seriously. It's about "Ask Zelda" in SIDtoday, the NSA newsletter type bulletin. (SID is the Signals Intelligence Directorate spy shop within the National Security Agency.)

Mr. Maas reproduces a letter from a NSA employee who complained because his/her boss is constantly spying on the letter writer and the other employees and even uses snitches. Zelda's advice is quite good. Here's an excerpt:

Dear Silenced,

Wow, that takes “intelligence collection” in a whole new – and inappropriate – direction. …. We work in an Agency of secrets, but this kind of secrecy begets more secrecy and it becomes a downward spiral that destroys teamwork. What if you put an end to all the secrecy by bringing it out in the open?

Sigh. If only the NSA could see how their spying on the American public is contributing to this same downward spiral of trust of the government.

Another Obamacare lie exposed -- turns out even the uninsured don't like it

This ranks right up there with "If you like your plan you can keep your plan," although that one was merely intended to help us swallow it. This one was intended to get us to bite. One of the main purposes of Obamacare, we were told, was to get insurance coverage for all those people who didn't have it.

Never mind that many states had their own programs for allowing the uninsurable to get insurance. Texas, for example, has had one for several years. (I've wondered why it got so little attention. Maybe it's because they don't issue press releases, and reporters too busy Googling Kim Kardashian never learned about it.)

Anyway, all the clues are pointing to a miserably low number of uninsured people enrolling in Obamacare. The very people Obamacare proponents said they wanted to help don't want their help. We have to piece this together because Health and Human Services won't tell us how many of the uninsured they are insuring. Mary Katherine Hamm nails it in HHS: Why, no, we are not measuring the very metric ObamaCare was passed to improve. Excerpt:

The federal government is not even measuring the very number ObamaCare was created to bring down. How many times did we hear 47 million uninsured? How many times did we hear it was necessary to pass a huge revamp of the entire system to insure them? Later we heard the prediction for how many of those 47 million we’ll actually insure is quite underwhelming. Now, we ask: Hey, how many of the uninsured are we actually insuring?

A: “That’s not a data point we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way.”

There is no clearer dereliction of duty for this law. They created an irresponsible reform behemoth, they failed to implement it responsibly, they spent irresponsible amounts of money building a bunch of exchanges that don’t work, and now they’re not even responsible enough to bother checking how much help or damage they’ve done with the most straightforward metric available.

Helping the uninsured was something they hoped would happen. But it seems clear that the real goal was to place a vital industry under the government thumb.

Added: Yeah, calling it a "lie" was a little bit of hyperbole. But that's what the left did with George W. Bush when he relied on the available intelligence to contend Saddam Hussein had more weapons of mass destruction than were ultimately found. So we're playing by Alinsky's rules now.

Does Bob Dole deserve an apology from Ted Cruz?

Ted Cruz demonstrated a tremendous amount of courage when he worked his filibuster last year in an attempt to slow down the runaway Obamacare train. President Obama had an opportunity to throw in a delay and blame it on Republicans. But he didn't. And he demonstrated that he was oblivious to the technical incompetence of the "experts" in his administration.

But if you followed the msm coverage, Cruz was the villain. He was bringing down the Republican Party. The party needed to purge themselves of whacko birds like that to save itself. That was the narrative.

That phrase, "whacko birds," came from none other than John McCain who on Friday was complaining about Cruz's remark about Bob Dole at a CPAC 2014 talk on Thursday: Go to around 6:00 in the video and hear this:

We all remember President Dole, President McCain, President Romney. Look, those are good men, decent men. But when you don't stand and draw a clear distinction, when you don't stand for principle, Democrats celebrate.

That's what Cruz said about Dole, McCain, and Romney. Was that so bad? Cruz was explaining how to get young people to vote for conservatives and went on to tell how Obama's agenda would hurt young people by sticking them with the huge debt burden he created.

But McCain must be desperate for things to complain about. Cruz merely pointed out that Dole, along with McCain and Romney, lost their runs for presidency, a fact those three good, decent men should own. Instead of Cruz apologizing to Dole, let's first hear Bob Dole's apology for being a farm bill Republican. As for things McCain should apologize for, forget it. The list would be too long.

Fox Friday 3-7-14 Old Crooked Tail gives chase

The feral cats usually beat the fox to the food, but the fox does check in once or twice a week. And one night this week his timing was almost just right, and there was a confrontation.

Here we see Black Cat holding the drumstick. But wait, there's something moving over there ...

 
Boom! Old Crooked Tail charges full blast!

"Dang. Missed it by that much!"

 "Uh, excuse me. While I'm here, would you like to take get a closeup?"

Romney was right but Obama was elected

One thing the 2012 presidential campaign taught us was that honesty, decency, smarts and clear vision were not as important as style and coolness.

When Romney flagged Russia as a geopolitical threat during one of the debates, Obama mocked him. The media had Obama's back, and they were all wrong. But Obama won anyway.

Even the lefty websites are now admitting that Romney was right. But it's too late now, and it doesn't make any difference.

Matt K. Lewis makes that point quite nicely at DailyCaller.com. And he provides this refresher from Obama in the debate:

“I’m glad that you recognize that al-Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaida; you said Russia, in the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Here's more from Lewis:

Romney was telling the truth, while Obama was reflecting back the worries and immediate concerns of the people in “the cheap seats.” Advantage Obama.

"The cheap seats." That would be the low information voter. Clearly it was more advantageous to be wrong if that's what they wanted to hear:  Very depressing.

By the way, Obama, the 80s called. They want to tell you that America had a great president while you were in Choomland.

League of Women Voters sure had me fooled

I once thought the League of Women Voters was a non-partisan organization, and that their only mission was providing newspaper supplements with information about candidates. Boy, was I wrong.

My eyes were opened back when voter photo ID laws were becoming popular. The only people who would oppose that, in my opinion, were those who either didn't mind a little voter fraud in close elections; or (b) needed the votes of the very, very low information voter. The League of Women Voters was right in there swinging in a fight to prevent photo ID requirements.

And now, if you look at their website, you'll see support for all sorts of lefty political stuff, such as trying to undo the Supreme Court ruling on the Voter Rights Act, unleashing the EPA on carbon emissions, and support for amnesty for illegal immigrants, just to pinpoint a few.

Let's not forget this one found at Center for Competitive Politics: They oppose any laws that will stop the IRS from targeting Tea Party groups.

And you know what? LWV is a 501(c )(4) organization. Sigh. If only the IRS weren't so blatantly partisan in the way they dole out those classifications.

Quick tip -- advice for victims of the gay rights stampede

Gay marriage is here, not that there's anything wrong with that. But you know, it wasn't too long ago that it was still OK to joke about being gay -- see Seinfeld reruns. Now the subject of homosexuality is OK only so long as one speaks approvingly of it. Got a problem with gay marriage? If so, look out. The purveyors of political correctness will blow you over.

The gay rights movement is in such a stampede that it is trying to trample everything in its path. Even our president seems more interested in promoting world wide gay rights than genuine freedom.

Is a bully any less of a bully because he's pushing a cause that the majority views as correct? Watch out, there's a slippery patch up there on that high moral ground.

So here's the tip. As the community organizer in chief once said, "punch back twice as hard." So instead of trying to stop gay marriages, let them get married but don't let them get divorced. I don't know how to go about doing that, but oh, the humanity!

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Editor's note: "Will blow you over"? Geez! Might as well say they're trying to cram it down our throats! -- Robo-ed.