Sleepless in Midland

Is liberalism leading us to totalitarianism? Kevin Williamson sure thinks so.

Nationalreview.com writer Kevin D. Williamson doesn't mince words. He thinks modern day liberalism wants to silence dissenters with the threat of prison. First, see The Liberal Gulag where he says this:

The Left is calling on people to be prosecuted for speaking their minds regarding their beliefs on an important public-policy question that is, as a political matter, the subject of hot dispute. That is the stuff of Soviet repression.

But then Soviet-style repression has long been a dream of the American Left. Consider the abuses of psychiatry that were the great hallmark of the Soviet way, and then consider that there is a cottage industry today among left-wing psychiatrists arguing that conservative political views represent a form of mental disorder.

Next see the followup article, The Liberal Gulag, Again where he provides more examples of the liberal left betraying the beliefs of those who believe in freedom from repression. To wit:

As in the case of Mr. Weinstein, I am open to the argument that in a sane world Mr. Kennedy would not be taken seriously, inasmuch as he is a witless pile of ground chuck molded into the shape of a politician, but we do not live in a sane world. We live in this world, one in which Senate Democrats are working feverishly to repeal the First Amendment while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gleefully contemplates the prospect of building prison camps for political dissidents.

That is what you are voting for when you vote Democratic. If you are uncomfortable with that, then you should reconsider your affiliations. If you are not uncomfortable with that, then you have failed as a human being, but you should at least have the courage of your convictions and be as forthright as possible that you want to imprison people for thought crimes and political disagreement.

Mr. Williamson uses the word "liberal" when referring to lefties. However, lefties have moved on to "progressive," probably because they like the sound of it better. That's just as well because their present day beliefs are very much at odds with classical liberalism.

Obama uses Al Sharpton to carve a racial divide

Racial divisiveness has been on the rise since 2009, and the blame goes to Barack Obama. He garners 93% of the African American vote, and he needs a certain level of agitation to keep that number high.

Along comes Al Sharpton. In Al Sharpton Empowered, John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky contend that Sharpton became the tool Obama and Eric Holder used to help gin up racial friction. To wit:

Far from becoming the “refined agitator” his apologists now claim him to be, the 59-year-old Sharpton is merely an older rabble-rouser using slightly new tricks. At heart, he hasn’t changed. ...

Indeed, in King’s famous 1963 speech at the Washington Mall, he told of his “dream” that his four children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

That dream remains as noble as ever, but it won’t be advanced by the Reverend Sharpton and his “I have a scheme” method of activism. One of the saddest legacies of the Obama-Holder years will be that while they claimed MLK’s mantle as their own, they left the country more racially polarized than before and cynically worked overtime to give credibility to the Al Sharptons of the world.

[Emphasis added.]

So when we hear that Obama thinks that the nation is racist, it's of his own making. It has nothing to do with equality, and it has everything to do with political power.

Jihadists love death -- May they get what they seek

We went through this before -- how radical Islamists love death more than life and want to kill non believers to get to heaven. We heard it non stop after the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers. The subsequent events proved that they could be contained, but more recent events tell us we shouldn't have let our guard down. Those who said it will take a long time appear to be right.

Louis René Beres wrote a good article titled The Jihadists' Promise: Power over Death which examines the underlying motivation. Here's an excerpt:

In essence, Jihadi violence serves not only to advance the terrorist's delusion of immortality, but also to add, however perversely, an apparent and desperately needed erotic satisfaction, using religion as the justification.

This core point is not difficult to understand. Persuasive promises of immortality -- the desperate hope to live forever -- underlie virtually all major religions. Yet this point remains neglected or misunderstood in Washington, Jerusalem, and all other Western capitals.

The Jihadi terrorist claims to "love death," but in his or her mind, that "suicide" is anything but final. Ironically, these Islamist terrorists aim to conquer mortality by "killing themselves." The would-be killer has been promised that death will represent just a trivial and momentary inconvenience, a minor detour on just one more glorious "martyr's" fiery trajectory toward a life everlasting, in Paradise.

Mr. Beres contends that military action against them is only a temporary solution. That's probably right, and that's why it will take so long. There will likely be no finality until it passes out of style with its practitioners.

His solution?

A really good strategy needs to begin at the conceptual or psychological level. It is actually the Jihadists' fear of death that leads them to suicide, always in the hope that any short-term "dying" -- the vainglorious fantasy that "martyring" themselves -- will enable them to live forever in Paradise, and as beloved heroes on Earth. ... Going forward, our main task should be to systematically undermine these fantasies and doctrinal "underpinnings." In conjunction with the recommended nuanced persuasions of military firepower, it can be done.

President Obama's loyal team of psychology professors has been very successful at calculating how to persuade Americans during election time. It's probably too much to wish for, but if only they would apply their skills in the direction of dissuading Islamists from their murderous zeal they might actually be doing some good for the country.

Via Clarice Feldman who makes an interesting comparison of Jihadists and global warmists.

Andrew C. McCarthy explains why we've never heard of Khorosan -- it never existed

McCarthy contends that all of the various Islamic terrorist groups comprise "a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted in Islamic scripture that can project power on the scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the West." This is from The Khorosan Group Does Not Exist . More:

[Khorosan] is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the –Iranian–​Afghan border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it. ...

The global terror network must be atomized into discrete, disconnected cells moved to violence by parochial political or territorial disputes, with no overarching unity or hegemonic ambition. That way, they can be limned as a manageable law-enforcement problem fit for the courts to address, not a national-security challenge requiring the armed forces.

Sounds reasonable given what we've seen Obama do and heard what he's said during his terms of office. His credibility is near zero.

Post Script: Back on the home front, now that al-Qaeda has been splintered, the Department of Homeland Security is preparing for rising seas. See So have they found all the terrorists? Homeland Security is now helping to protect communities from the effects of climate change.

Fox Friday 9-26-14 -- Oh those beautiful foxes

Welcome to this week's Fox Friday, a collection of the best urban fox photos snapped at the Bone Yard hidden somewhere deep in Midland, Texas. Let's get started.

Old Crooked Tail posing as a pointer. Bless her heart, she's doing the best she can with that crooked tail.

Will you look at those beautiful tails?

The week is not complete without a showdown.

Left - the fox and Black Cat face off. Center - fox is right on top of the drumstick. Right - she leaves it for the cat. Go figure.

See you next Fox Friday.

SFGate asks why no antiwar protesters -- I'll tell you why, partisan politics

Here's SFGate's reasoning:

Maybe it’s war fatigue. Maybe climate change is consuming all the protest energy right now. Maybe momentum just needs to build.

Don't be silly. The reason is because a Democrat president gave the orders. The last Democrat president who ever got antiwar protesters was Lyndon Johnson. These days partisan politics prevails. The antiwar crowd hits the streets when there's a Republican in charge. But they go mute when it's a Democrat.

They were silent when Clinton bombed Yugoslavia. A progressive explained to me his support of that war was because he thought the UN had sanctioned it and because of the incessant TV coverage of the brutality. He was mistaken about the UN.

The UN did sanction the war in Iraq, but somehow that didn't seem to matter to the angry antiwar crowd. The real difference was the political party of the president who initiated it.

It was all partisan politics. Jonathan Gurwitz made that point in 2011 with Anti-war movement was really anti-Republican. (Gurwitz drew on the research of Dr. Michael Heaney of the University of Michigan and Dr. Fabio Rojas of Indiana University to make his point.)

SFgate says maybe the momentum needs to build. Just wait until there's a Republican president. It this thing is still going on, and there's no reason to think it won't, the antiwar momentum will build big time.

Politicians no longer even try to persuade

With that powerful weapon called Catalist, Democrats believe it isn't necessary to persuade those who don't agree. Just demonize them and motivate the low information voter to go vote for their guy/gal.

Eventually, the targets of this action will wise up. But there's also the old saw about how Democracy will last only as long as it takes for slightly over half the voters to realize they have the power to raid the treasury. It could be that we're there already.

In any event, the ability to persuade is no longer a talent politicians need. See Lost art of political persuasion for a nice discussion of this. Here's a excerpt.

In politics, the alternative to persuasion is playing to the base. You identify your natural supporters — libertarians, social conservatives, labor unions, soccer moms, Tea Party activists, or whomever — and then you throw as much raw meat at them as you can. You tell them whatever they want to hear, precisely as they want to hear it. You don’t worry that voters who aren’t part of your base won’t understand what you’re talking about, or may be offended by the words you use to make your points; in fact, offending other voters is one of the best ways to convince the base that you’re their guy or gal.

The writer, Herbert E. Meyer, contends that's a bad thing. But it's more a feature than a bug. It's the way politics has evolved now that the town square has been replaced by the Twitter page. But Democrats have been able to pull voters out of the wood works on election day by appealing to that base. It certainly didn't hurt to have the main stream media on their side, either. Republicans have lagged by trying to appeal to moderates and independents. Maybe they should try harder to appeal to their base.

Democrats to donors - we'll shut Rush Limbaugh up

Sandra Fluke certainly has gotten a lot of mileage out of her 15 minutes of fame. That 15 minutes was a result of an attempted shaming by Rush Limbaugh for her public pleas for free contraception. The latest from her comes to us from Breitbart.com which tells us the following: Democrats Launch Campaign to Get 'Rush Limbaugh Off the Air'. Here's an excerpt:

Using the subject header, "PETITION: Rush Limbaugh off the air," the hysterical email reads:

3OO,OOO Signatures Needed: Demand Rush Limbaugh’s sponsors pull their ads after his sexual assault comments.
Sandra Fluke has been the target of disgusting, sexist comments from Rush Limbaugh before. So his latest abhorrent rant is no surprise to her.
Stand with Sandra and help us hit 3OO,OOO signatures today to put real pressure on Rush’s advertisers to drop him once and for all:

Yes, the very same Democrats who joined President Bill Clinton's crusade to personally destroy every woman who accused him of harassment, assault, and rape (Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones [with whom Clinton settled out of court], Juanita Broderick) are accusing Limbaugh of being a rape apologist.

The truth is that Limbaugh was talking about a proposed policy at Ohio State that would require explicit permission between students before engaging in any kind of sexual activity.

Poor Sandra Fluke. She's a lightweight in a heavyweight fight. On the other hand, the urge to punish people for what they think, much less say, isn't all that unusual for people on the left.

So Hillary Clinton chummed it up with Saul Alinsky

While Hillary Clinton conducts her swing state listening tour, reporters still dig up nuggets from her past. Perhaps they're making up for their neglect in 2008. Regardless, on this occasion they've dredged up correspondence between Hillary and Saul Alinsky from the 60s. See The Hillary Letters Hillary Clinton, Saul Alinsky correspondence revealed. Following up on that is Stanley Kurtz with Why Hillary’s Alinsky Letters Matter in which he makes the case that Hillary was and still is a far lefty.

There really isn't anything earth shattering in the letters. We all knew Hillary was a lefty in college. So was about 90% of the college population in those days. But those who eventually got full exposure to the real world developed a more realistic attitude about the relationship between government and the people. Those who went into academia or government didn't.

Hillary remained a lefty, and although she's tried to follow her husband's guidance in trying to appeal to some on the right, she really never did a good job.

But as for the letters to Alinsky, that's ancient history. There's also an old college paper of hers circulating around that's pretty radical. But that's old news, too. Much more relevant are the things she's done or not done in recent years. Hillarycare, for example, or the flubbed 3am call from Benghazi are a couple of biggies.

Hillary is carrying around so much political baggage there's no room for a bunch of old letters. Let her put them in her scrapbook so she can read them in her old age and dream of the impossibly Utopian world she, Alinsky, and all the other community organizers must have imagined.

Catalist - a very scary Democrat weapon

Catalist is the database Democrats keep which contains information about every American. If we thought the NSA was scary, this is worse because it isn't just a nosy bureaucrat snooping into our life stories, it's a zealous progressive hell bent on advancing the lefty agenda.

They use this information to determine who might be persuaded to vote for Democrats, especially those who don't normally vote, and they target a very persuasive campaign directly at them. They were calling it Big Data in the 2012 election. It worked then, and it's getting bigger and better.

But the amazing part is that they don't target moderates or independents. They target people they determine would be sympathetic to the lefty agenda. So Democrats constituents ultimately turn out to be hard core lefties. Little wonder there's so much divisiveness these days.

Republicans don't have anything like it, at least not yet. And Republican candidates end up trying to appeal to moderates and independents but not conservatives. So far that's a strategy for failure.

Information about Catalist comes from J. Christian Adams. See CATALIST: Obama’s Database for Fundamentally Transforming America. Here are a few select excerpts:

During the 2012 election, a producer for a conservative news network received a knock at his door in a key swing state. Two neighbors were standing on his stoop campaigning for Obama. They weren’t there to talk to him — they were there to talk to his wife. They knew that she was employed in a profession which the Obama campaign had decided to microtarget: folks who deliver services to special needs children. The two neighbors were already armed with this personalized information. The Obama campaign didn’t just send a direct mail piece to the target or make a telephone call. Instead, the campaign matched a microtargeted demographic (special needs service providers) with a highly motivated Obama volunteer in close neighborly proximity to the target. Then they armed the neighbor/volunteer with data to visit the target. ...

Similarly, the data feeding the central Catalist database are coming from a wide swath of sources. Public records, pollsters, campaigns, non-profits, activist groups, unions, parties, commercial data — scores and scores of sources are feeding the central database data. ...

Not to mention databases probably made available to them by sympathetic social media types like Facebook.

You have your own individual voter file in Catalist. Everyone does. Under that file might be a massive amount of information about you — more than probably exists in any other database in the world. ...

Catalist allows customers to identify potential voters on the far ideological fringe, but who are usually unmotivated to vote. Catalist allows the left to then identify issues, concerns, or other lifestyle facts which would permit a customer to motivate the usually unmotivated on that fringe to vote.

Obama won reelection because he drove deeper into his ideological base than any Democrat ever had. His campaign largely ignored the middle and instead used Catalist data to wring out nearly every possible far-left vote they could.

Sigh. A few years ago the book 1984 was frighteningly prophetic. The present day equivalent is Idiocracy.

The Kurds have a weapon that strikes fear in the hearts of ISIS fighters -- female combatants

See ISIS fighters terrified of being killed by female troops:

WASHINGTON — Kurdish fighters battling ISIS desperately want more guns and armor, but they already have a secret weapon: The fanatics they’re fighting fear that if they get killed in combat by a woman, they won’t go to heaven.

“They have many female battalions, as you know who fought very bravely,” Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), who chairs the House International Relations Committee, told The Post of the Kurds.

You go, gals!

Via Lucianne.

Fox Friday 9-19-14 -- A good night in the Bone Yard

Oh the critters had fun this week.

Welcome to Fox Friday, the weekly display of the best of the urban fox photos from the Bone Yard, an undisclosed feeding station located in the heart of Midland, Texas. In previous Fox Fridays I've put forth several photos, and the posts may have been too busy, picture wise. This time there will only be one photo -- it's that good.

As the season changed the moisture came. And that may have accounted for all the activity this week. Typically one of two feral cats will get to the food first, and the foxes usually wait for left overs. However, a pair of fox visitors this week worked as a team and pulled a rope-a-dope on the cat. The daily food drop consisted of two frozen, raw chicken drumsticks. And while the cat guarded one of them, they circled around to distract him.

Look at that cat's fangs. You can almost hear him hissing as a fox grabbed the drumstick he couldn't cover. The cat ate all he wanted off of the other. Then one of the foxes returned and hauled off what the cat left. Everyone went away with something. It was a good night in the Bone Yard.

Media bias so pervasive even David Gregory notices

Gregory thinks reporters are simply too lazy to go against the narrative. (See David Gregory hits media 'laziness'.)

"Lazy." That's a charitable way of looking at it. Another possibility is that they are caught up in the fervor for the progressive agenda and don't want to do anything that might detour from the mission.

Gregory is free to admit it now that he's been relieved of his role in Meet the Press, although if he remains at NBC he'll still be beholden to the narrative. But who knows? Maybe he'll become another Bernie Goldberg, slamming the lefty media every chance he gets.

In any case, Gallop.com reports that their poll results show media's credibility is scraping the bottom. See Trust in Mass Media Returns to All-Time Low. Democrats are the outlier with over half thinking the media are doing it just right.

Back to Gregory. The NBC audience consists mostly of Democrats who expect the leftish bias. Any reporter who disappoints them ends up on the outs. Ask Sharyl Attkinsson.

Eric Holder's corruption now widely known

"Eric holder is the worst attorney general since Mitchell under Nixon which, to most veterans of the department, will tell you they consider to be the nadir of the justice department." That was Hans von Spakovsky quoting someone from the Clinton administration -- hear it at around 13:30 in this C-Span video.

There was the Marc Rich pardon, the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, Operation Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal, and more. This Attorney General represents all that can be wrong with a law enforcement agency, and unfortunately, it's the highest law enforcement agency in the country. It is a very bad thing when they don't follow the law.

Anyway, John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky penned an article published at Washingtontimes.com titled The injustice of Eric Holder -- Average Americans aren’t blind to the Justice Department’s politicization in which they cited a recent poll suggesting that many Americans have become aware of just how bad Holder is. They said:

About a third of respondents didn’t know who Mr. Holder is (37 percent). However, those Americans who knew Mr. Holder gave him the second-lowest “positive” rating of anyone or any organization on the survey at a mere 15 percent. Only Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio had a lower “positive” rating than Mr. Holder. The attorney general’s “positive” rating was less than half of the positive rating of the Republican Party and 27 points behind that of his boss, Mr. Obama, who was rated favorably by only 42 percent of respondents.

They're optimistic:

Contrary to what liberal elites think, the average American isn’t dumb and can see when someone is abusing his office and allowing politics to drive his decision-making. They may think they can fool the American people, but that is a mistake that many arrogant politicians and government officials have made in the past, and Mr. Holder is just another in a long line of such government officials.

Is that wishful thinking? Team Obama has done a pretty good job of fooling the American people up til now. But maybe people are finally waking up.

IRS tries to follow law when it can, according to Koskinen

We would shrug and say, "typical," if it were some banana republic. But it's the United States Internal Revenue Service. The IRS. The agency that collects taxes from you, me, and half the citizens of this great nation.

Mark Fitzgibbons calls it "outrageous." It's IRS Commissioner John Koskinen's statement that people in the IRS will obey the law whenever they can. In other words, they don't really have an obligation to follow the law, and there's not even an honor system with some sanction when they stray. They just do it whenever they can. See Outrageous IRS Commissioner False Claim: 'Whenever we can, we follow the law'.

Maybe we should be grateful for that. After all, what they've been caught doing is tampering with a presidential election. If they really wanted to harm the administration's political opposition and didn't have to honor any existing laws they could do some real damage not just to targeted individuals and entities, but to the nation as we know it.

I would like to remain optimistic. Some day, not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but some day we'll have a government comprised of honest, decent bureaucrats who love the country and the constitution more than they hate political opponents.

Who to believe, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or John Kerry

Did John Kerry ask Iran to join the coalition against terror groups? The answer depends on whom you ask. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says he did and that Iran declined. A US State Department spokesperson dodged the question:

“We’re not going to outline every discussion we, have, but to be very clear, we are not coordinating with, we do not want to coordinate with, we are not planning to coordinate with Iran in any way on Iraq, period,” Harf said.

So Khamenei must be right. Given Obama/Kerry's predilection for sucking up to our enemies we should probably be grateful that they didn't offer to hand over some long range missiles to sweeten the deal.

Are female democrats wising up?

One of Obama's voting blocs consisted of single women who, presumably, bought into the phony war-on-women meme. But look at this. The Gender Gap: Warning Signs for Democrats. Excerpt:

But the poll conducted Sept. 3-7 found that women’s Democratic preference had shrunk to a 47%-40% margin — down from 51% -37% a month earlier. The swing was especially sharp among white women, who gave Democrats a 4 point edge in August; in the new poll, Republicans enjoyed 48%-40% advantage.

Overall, females still favor Democrats, but at least the gap is narrowing.

Post Script: The original title to this post was "Are Women Getting Smarter about Politics?" Dems are often trying to brand someone who doesn't approve of the progressive agenda as stupid. Turning the tables, we have a voting group who might be turning against Obama and Democrats. Now that's smart. As for alternatives, Republicans have their problems. But that war-on-women crap was just plain dishonest.

California's welcome mat to illegal immigrants draws drug cartel

Jerry Brown said he welcomed illegal immigrants, and there's no question they heard and heeded. But here's a twist the governor might not have anticipated.

An editorial at investors.com alerted us to this. See As Businesses Flee, Jerry Brown's California Attracts A Different Kind Of "Investment". Excerpt:

When California Gov. Jerry Brown hung out the "all welcome" sign for illegals, Mexico's drug cartels heard him loud and clear. Raids on Thursday left lawmen declaring Los Angeles a cash-laundering mecca.

Roping off 100 blocks of downtown Los Angeles this week, federal agents from the U.S. attorney's office raided roughly 70 garment district businesses along with a few houses in tony Westwood and Beverly Hills.

The suspected crime was laundering money for Mexico's Sinaloa cartel. Agents hauled out $65 million in cash stuffed in duffel bags, suitcases and boxes, some of it blood-spattered.

The cash came from hostage ransoms, drug sales and alien-smuggling fees. Some of those arrested were charged with "various immigration offenses," according to the affidavit.

"Hostage ransoms, drug sales and alien-smuggling fees." Now those are businesses we shouldn't try to encourage. But it wouldn't be surprising to learn that these features were considered tolerable side effects of the more important goal of ultimately increasing the number of Democrat voters.

Fox Friday 9-12-14 -- Fox outfoxes feral cat

Welcome to Fox Friday, the collection of the best of the previous seven days of urban fox photographs at an undisclosed feeding station in central Midland, Texas.

The biggest problem the foxes have, at least at this particular station, is competition from feral cats. The cats have advantages over the foxes. Firstly, although they are both roughly the same size, the cats' claws and flexible arms give them an advantage in a one-on-one fight for food. Secondly, the cats have a better sense of timing as it sometimes seems as though they must be waiting out of sight for the food drop. Thirdly, the cats seem to have a better olfactory system. The nightly food ration consists of two frozen raw chicken drumsticks. The cats recognize it as food right away, however, the foxes sometimes step right over it, seemingly without realizing it's an edible meal, at least until it thaws a bit or a cat has already gnawed on it.

Let's start off with some shots from Monday night:

Hissss! Cat tries to scare the fox away but can't guard both drumsticks. Old Crooked Tail makes off with a meal. Tough luck, greedy cat.

Just few minutes later Old Crooked Tail sneaks back onto the scene, spies on the cat, and slips right by unnoticed. Pretty slick. Too bad the cat controlled the only drumstick left.

The next set came from the morning of 9/11. Last week some of the photos showed only the tops of some heads. So this week the camera was lowered by a couple of inches. Did anyone notice?

Old Crooked Tail sure did notice. She can't get over it. Here she is looking right at the camera as it snapped her photo. It has happened in the early days when they were getting used to the setup, but not since, until now.

Finally, this next one was cropped, and the thumbnail is larger to show off our subject.

Old Crooked Tail strikes a majestic pose as she surveys her territory. What a beautiful creature she is.

See ya next Fox Friday!

Developers end downtown tower project -- so without gov incentives will they move it to the burbs like they said?

The morning paper tell us that the developers have dropped out of the Energy Tower proposal that would have put one or two skyscrapers in the spot where the abandoned courthouse now sits in downtown Midland, Texas. See Energy Tower developers announce end of project.

There was huge citizen opposition to this project especially since the project viability seemed to depend on government incentives. Listeners to Robert and Kurt's morning radio show on KCRS heard the developer say last year that the government incentives weren't that important. If they didn't get them they would simply move the project to another part of town.

"Yeah, right," was the response many citizens had as it seemed that this was a project that couldn't happen without help from the government. So now we'll see.

If the plan wasn't dependent on taxpayer help then should go forward somewhere other than downtown, just like the developer said. But let's not hold our breath.

Editor's note: I'm holding my breath. Robo-ed.  |  Duh. Robots don't breathe.  Sleepless.

McCoy's crazy prices

McCoy's Building Supply seems to be trying to remain an old style hardware store, and for that I applaud them and give them some of my business.

But their prices are crazy. Here's an example. Yesterday I was shopping in the McCoy's in Midland, Texas, and noticed a short piece of 4" PVC pipe. The store price for a 10' piece is $18.99, but there was one piece that looked to be about 6'. It was just what I needed. So if I buy this I should get it cheaper plus there wouldn't be a bunch of pipe wasted, right?

Here's what's wrong with that thinking. The price for the 6' piece was $23.75, almost $5 more than the 10' piece. What gives? Apparently, some previous customer needed a short piece. So he/she had them cut off 4' and paid a per foot price plus a cutting charge. Now along comes a second customer looking to buy the 6' left over. So they charge him/her the cutting premium, too. It's a cutting fee double dip.

The principle of supply and demand says that no one buys that left over 6' piece unless they chop that price. That's what an old style hardware store would do.

Editor's note: Why didn't you just go to Lowe's and buy a 10' piece for $13.16 or a 5' piece for $9.58. Robo-ed. | I did! Sleepless.

Ben Carson is giving his opponents ammo to be used against him

There's a small effort underway to get Ben Carson to run for the Republican nomination for president. He would probably be a good president. But the Republican establishment is a tough nut to crack. Besides, a primary win requires a lot of people doing legwork on the ground, and without that a candidate, even the perfect candidate, doesn't have a chance. See Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson.

Then there's the Democrat attack machine and their war-on-women canard. Ben Carson was close to falling into a trap the other day with remarks about Ray Rice. See Ben Carson Defends Ray Rice: Don’t Start ‘Demonizing This Guy’.

If you read that short article you would see that he wasn't defending Ray Rice. He was merely saying that both Rice and his girlfriend need help -- a valid point. But never mind. Once Democrats and their media enablers get their hands on stuff like that he'll end up portrayed as waging his own personal war on woman.  Too bad.  He has a lot to offer the country.

Acura ad -- I did it my way. No, you copied someone else.

There's a TV commercial now airing for Acura TLX featuring non-Asian non-speaking actors portraying proud, happy, and exited car builders. The accompanying music is a punk rock version of "I Did It My Way."

Watch it here. That was the song Frank Sinatra made famous a couple of generations ago. Watch him sing it here when it was just a golden oldie.

Here's the thing. If you do it your way, don't you come up with your own song instead of redoing some old song you found on a top ten list from years gone by?

Maybe the message is that the Acura contains nothing new. And if you read the lyrics -- see the text at the Youtube site -- you might wonder if it's even appropriate. To wit:

Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew
But through it all, when there was doubt
I ate it up and spit it out
I faced it all and I stood tall
And did it my way.

They bit off more than they could chew, and ate it up, and spit it out. Yeah, that's what we want in a car manufacturer.

It's almost as ironic as the Mercedes commercial a few years back that featured Janice Joplin's "Oh Lord Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz" -- the satirical hippy jab at the people present day hippies would call "the one percent."

Obama delays exec order on illegal aliens so as not to mobilize opposition -- will voters forget between now and election?

For quite some time pundits have predicted that Obama would issue an executive order to legitimize millions of illegal aliens. Heck, Obama himself threatened it. The only question became: When?

Now we read that President Obama decided to wait until after the November elections. How convenient. The prevailing theory was that if he did it before the election potential voters would react by voting against Democrats in the November election.

So the thinking in the White House must be that he is going to do it anyway, but if he hasn't done it by election day, voters will vote like nothing happened. Could Obama be right?

Those people who never drank the Obama Kool-Aid would like to say "No." But if they've followed the news from the time Obama made the national scene they have to acknowledge the possibility that he could pull it off. P. T. Barnum's famous quote springs to mind -- "Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public." Barack Obama's whole agenda, reputation and persona is built on a low estimation of the voting public.

On the other hand, maybe he realizes that they're not that dumb and has some distraction in the works. My guess is that he expects some big victory over ISIS between now and then which will have his fans singing his praises. Then of course we should expect to see some trumped up outrage against Republicans: race riots; a war on women; or hatred of poor people. We've certainly seen that before.

Obama admin rejects idea of ISIS in Juarez, security beef up merely coincidental

Judicial Watch is all over this. Excerpt:

Intelligence officials have picked up radio talk and chatter indicating that the terrorist groups are going to “carry out an attack on the border,” according to one JW source. “It’s coming very soon,” according to another high-level source, who clearly identified the groups planning the plots as “ISIS and Al Qaeda.” An attack is so imminent that the commanding general at Ft. Bliss, the U.S. Army post in El Paso, is being briefed, JW’s sources say.

Homeland Security didn't respond to Judicial Watch's queries. However, Fort Bliss beefed up security. Quote:

Two days after JW broke the story on ISIS operating in Juarez, Ft. Bliss announced it was increasing security measures. A statement that went out to the media was rather vague, attributing the move to several recent security assessments and the constant concern for the safety of military members, families, employees and civilians. ...

The inaccuracies to the public appear to be part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to downplay the bloodshed that has long plagued the southern border and now the imminent threat of Islamic jihadists planning a strike as the 13th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil approaches.

Well, it's good that they're taking precautions. But El Paso, without any main stream media outlets located there, just doesn't seem like the type of target that would produce the world wide attention terrorist seek.  We'll see.

See also: If There’s No Imminent Threat To Our Southern Border, Why Is Ft. Bliss Stepping Up Security?

Fox Friday 9-5-14

Welcome to Fox Friday, a collection of the best photos of the urban foxes from the previous seven days from the secret feeding station in Midland, Texas. Fox Friday was a day late last week, so this one is a day short. No problem. The foxes strutted their stuff, and gave us some good shots. Let's get started.

Two foxes frequented the bone yard this week, Scrawny Tail and a reincarnated Old Crooked Tail. I say reincarnated because I believed for a while that one of the two dead foxes found in the street a few weeks ago was her. I'm glad to be wrong but still sorry about the loss of the two foxes. But let's not dwell on that.

Generally, the feral cats get first dibs on the food -- two frozen chicken drumsticks. On this night a cat got there first and was pigging out on a chicken leg.

Then along came a fox,  She grabbed the other drumstick, and she's gone. Nice going!

Good profile of a solo Scrawny Tail.

They have an advantage when they travel in pairs.Scrawny Tail stands guard while Old Crooked Tail scours the area. But see next.

Look at Scrawny Tail's defensive crouch. I haven't seen that before. A cat doesn't show up for another hour, but something sure got their attention. Whatever happened happened off screen, so we can only wonder. Thankfully it didn't stop them from coming back.

See ya next Fox Friday.

Farm bill's sugar high

This is one of the reasons why many people who vote for Republicans secretly hate them. The Democrat's claim that the Republican Party is the party of the rich is partly true, and it's drilled home when fat cats get corporate welfare.

Our own US Representative for Texas District 11 usually gets about 80% of the primary vote and about the same in the general election. He tells voters what they want to hear, he gets tons of free publicity from the local media, and he gets a million dollars per campaign season from interested parties. It's almost impossible to unseat an incumbent. The impossible has happened, but it won't happen here. By the way, he hates the idea of term limits.

But this isn't a rant about Agriculture Committee member and aspiring chairman, Mike Conaway. The subject here is an old one: Sugar and the way the Agriculture Committee allows the continuation of a depression era mechanism whereby the US pays millions of dollars each year to subsidize sugar producers and keep sugar prices high.

Kevin Williamson explains it very succinctly in Uncle Stupid’s Sugar Buzz. Excerpt:

It works like this: As I have argued here before, the United States does not have a government — it has a bank, and a very poorly run bank at that. The Bank of Uncle Stupid last year lent the nation’s poor, struggling sugar barons $862 million in order to improve their positively Dickensian conditions. With the fat harvest coming in, sugar prices are going down — and the public must, at all costs, be protected from low prices. If sugar prices take just another tiny little tick in a southerly direction, then an unusual provision built into the sugar barons’ loan agreements with the federal government kicks in: They don’t have to repay their loans in cash — they can repay them in raw sugar.

The government then sells that sugar at a steep discount to the ethanol industry which is responsible for such terrible ideas as the requirement that it be pumped it into our vehicle gas tanks.

Williamson ends with this:

Needless to say, your traditional brain-dead Chamber of Commerce–type useless Republican clock-puncher loves this stuff. So does Marco Rubio. If the so-called party of free enterprise cannot figure out a way to run against this kind of pillaging, then they do not deserve to win.

Here's an idea for a campaign slogan: Republicans! You'll get your money's worth!

By the way, the government caused high consumer price of sugar may be why food producers have replaced sugar with high fructose corn syrup. Yum!

Link via newmarksdoor.com.

Lost in America - 6,000 foreign nationals

We saw how long it took the FBI to track down Whitey Bulger. So how long do you think it will take ICE to track down 6,000 foreign nationals who came on student visas then disappeared?

See U.S. Government Lost Track of 6,000 Foreign Nationals of ‘Heightened Concern’:

Officials at the federal agency told ABC News there are more than 58,000 students who overstayed their visas over the past year. Approximately 6,000 of those foreign nationals were referred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for “follow-up,” as they’re of “heightened concern.” ...

Despite the commission’s recommendation 10 years ago, Edge said “we really have a lot more work to do” to fulfill it.

Ya think?

ICE agents, he continued, are working to locate the 6,000 students.

Since the 9/11 terror attacks, 26 foreign nationals in the United States on student visas have been arrested on terrorism-related charges.

Aw, let's give them the benefit of the doubt. They're probably out there just doing the jobs Americans won't do.

Chelsea Clinton's rags to riches story

Daniel Halper was on a C-Span panel the other day talking about his book, Clinton, Inc., among other things. And he made an interesting observation. I heard him say Chelsea Clinton was Hillary's campaign manager. However, the transcript says she's the "shadow campaign manager." So no official title. Nevertheless, that's a good gig for someone just out of college.

She does have a work history, however. She worked for NBC for two years pulling in a whooping $600,000 per year. Nice work, if you can get it.

Here's the C-Span link to the Daniel Halper video. Go to the 50.23 marker to get to the "shadow campaign manager" part.

But this rags-to-riches story does remind us of how far this little Arkansas girl with dead broke parents has come. She really pulled herself up by her boot straps.

She's a role model for little girls everywhere.

Good read of the day -- "The president who is uninterested in other people" by Michael Barone

We all like to psychoanalyze people in power, and Michael Barone appears to be no different. Here he is putting a microscope on Barack Obama in The president who is uninterested in other people.

It's probably not Obama's biggest problem, but it certainly contributes to the atmosphere that got the country into the situation it's now in. Barone contrasts Obama with Bill Clinton, Rudy Guilliani, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan and concludes that Obama isn't concerned enough about learning how another person thinks to be an effective negotiator.

They’re good at reading people, an essential quality for an executive and especially for a president. Recent presidents have had that quality in varying degrees. ...

The ability to read other people comes more easily if you’re interested in others, curious to learn what makes them tick. It comes harder or not at all if you’re transfixed with your image of yourself.

Wait a minute. Wasn't it George W. Bush who was supposed to lack intellectual curiosity?

Well, President Obama's greatest talent is convincing voters to believe the image is real. Unfortunately, that talent has limited utility when trying to work with other country leaders. In fact, it isn't a talent at all but a weakness if Obama himself believes that image. One has to wonder how many of Obama's hangers-on have figured out how to exploit that weakness.