With Congressional redistricting coming up in the next couple of years and with Craddick out of power now, you have to wonder if Midland will go back to the old days when it was part of three different congressional districts, each district being shared with a bigger population base than the Midland portion. Which virtually guaranteed a non-Midlander Congressman.

It looks like the Obama transition team has only now discovered what 83% of the population of New Mexico has known for years: Bill Richardson has a big problem with ethics.

"But Walser", you ask, "How can 83% of the citizens of New Mexico know that he has a big problem with ethics and still elect him Governor?"

Dude. It's New Mexico.

Credit where credit is due. He should be thrown under the bus. Better to blunder with the initial choice of Richardson and then jettison him than to push him through anyway.

The irony of ironies is that Hillary & Bill have the same pay for play....um...features....but won't be thrown under the bus. Richardson even supported Obama but, unlike Hillary and General Motors, Richardson isn't too big to fail.

....will be over on January 13, 2008 after he is sworn in. After that date, Straus, if he really does have 85 votes for Speaker, will be lucky to have his local San Antonio Express News writing balanced stories about him.

For those in a cave, here's the story on MyWestTexas.com.

Mark Steyn has a piece at NRO on Israel's current battle with Hamas.

...if you're as invested as most western elites are in the idea that all anyone wants is to go to university, get a steady job and settle down in a nice house in the suburbs, a statement such as "England's demise is on our agenda" becomes almost literally untranslatable. When President Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we deplore him as a genocidal fantasist. But maybe he's a genocidal realist - look at the threads linking North Korea to Iran and to Iran's clients in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza - and we're the fantasists.

Read the whole thing, and while you're at it, read this by Mona Charen, this by Victor Davis Hanson and this by the editors of NRO. Enlightening pieces, all.

Recently a Russian sage opined on the demise of the United States, with us fracturing into 6 different "states," each with different political and economic focus. Clearly the Russian elites have discovered "projection," the nasty disease that plagues our elites: the seeing (wrongly) in others your problems while being blind to being terminally infected with the problem yourself. From the WSJ by Leon Aron:

Such a predicament is most dangerous politically for a country whose population has become used to incomes increasing 8%-10% every year since 2000. Growing disappointment is sure to follow, first among the elites and then people at large.

Despite the reduction of the poverty rate to 14% from 20% in the last five years, tens of millions of Russians continue to live precariously: A recent poll found that 37% of all families have money enough only to cover food. Unemployment and inflation (already 14%, year-on-year, in November) may well push these people over the edge and into the streets.

Aron signals a need for great wisdom and caution in the coming Obama administration, neither trait being evident so far in the transition, in dealing with Russia. Read the whole article here as well.

Happy New Year.

Following up on ospurt's post on the most recent fiscal year reporting on the Midland Development Corporation, I went all of the way back to the beginning and have built a spreadsheet to be used to better illustrate the utter futility of our local Chamber's attempts to direct a portion of the local economy. When time permits I will begin posting the numbers and associated graphs, but the most striking thing is that since its creation in 2001 the Midland Development Corporation has soaked up roughly $31 million of your tax dollars.

And they have paid out in "Direct Incentives" just over $2.7 million dollars.

While paying themselves $3.2 million to do it.

Meanwhile, over $18,000,000 sits in the bank ready and waiting to go to the next Dean Baldwin Painting (Who knows? Google could always stop working.)

Curiously, the "multiplication factor" used in standard ChamberMath (TM) that takes any dollar that they spend and turns it (roughly) into the GDP of South Dakota is never applied to the $18,000,000 taken out of the economy and stuck in their bank account.

For those that are interested, according to their 2008 Fiscal Year End filing with the State Comptroller, the Midland Development Corporation ended fiscal 2008 with an unrestricted fund balance or unrestricted retained earnings of $18,833,999.00.

The MRT has selected their top news stories of 2008, and Jessica's Well gets a mention in the 3rd biggest story of the year, Dean Baldwin Painting.

Company officials failed to disclose that Dean Baldwin Painting owed back taxes to the state of New Mexico. They also failed to disclose the company was facing charges resulting in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at its Roswell facility that led to the arrest of 15 illegal immigrants working there. Both points first came to light within the community on the local blog -- Jessica's Well.

Not to put to fine a point on the bullet we dodged here, shortly after the deal got spiked in April, Dean Baldwin executives plead guilty to hiring illegals and paid out $550,000 in fines, and then in July the company got tagged for $227,353 for back wages and fringe benefits.

We're happy for the Hat-Tip.

First comes news that Apple's market share has slipped a bit in computer sales. It may be the current economic conditions. After all, why shell out several hundred more for a MacBook or MacBook Pro when that Sony Vaio or Dell Inspiron or Lenovo Thinkpad (the list gets pretty long here) does everything...more actually, counting software availability, than the Apple machines.

One of the big reasons why is that the purchase of a Mac indicates a higher level of refinement and taste of the owner. It is a computer, an object d' art, and a Vera Wang dress or Jimmy Choo shoes all rolled into one.

Just look at the now long-in-the-tooth Apple v. PC ads that Apple still runs. Has there ever been a series of ads other than these that relied solely on tearing down the competition? Which, in turn, has driven the Windows market share to its LOWEST POINT EVER!!!

89.6%.

Take that, rotund, bespectacled, non-black turtleneck-wearing PC users who can only dream of sitting with the cool kids in the cafeteria!

We know that image is important here. So c'mon Apple fans, admit it. This flyer in your paper made you throw up in your mouth a little bit didn't it?

One just shouldn't have to walk past a common Wal-Mart greeter in order to get to get to an Apple product. It just isn't right.

Whenever the price of a gallon of gasoline rises above $3 we begin to hear all of the thousands of participants in the petroleum supply chain referred to as "Big Oil"

But do you ever hear the press refer to the UAW or any other monster union as "Big Labor" even though those organizations have much more of a monopoliy on their respective industries than Exxon ever dreamt about?

The UAW has done to the domestic auto industry what the public employee unions have done to those big states also now looking for bailouts.

And we all know how the big teacher's unions have been looking out for the schools over the years, huh?

Monopolies are illegal for a reason. Big Labor should be subject to those laws also.

Senator Pat Moynihan, without doubt one of the most intelligent of all senators, said that the belief of the left is that policy makes culture and that of the right is that culture makes policy. Alan Greenspan, who sat at the feet of Ayn Rand, said after the Russian economic collapse in the late nineties that he was wrong to think that a taste of capitalism would make them law-abiding and democratic. Their culture won.

Peter the Great, the butcher, abdicated and left his palace, saying that he'd be back, invited by the people. He was a blood-stained psychopathic wretch and yet he was right. He was invited back.

Boris Johnson, now Mayor of London, toured China while a Member of Parliament. He dined with the newly wealthy Chinese and asked them if wealth would translate into political liberty, as western theorizers such as Hayek suggested. They were aghast at it because of the instability that it implied. Again, culture wins.

Rossiya, a large Russian television station, is running a poll for the greatest Russian ever. Stalin, the second biggest butcher in history, exceeded only by Mao, could hit number one. Lenin is also in the running. More here.

V. S. Naipaul, a very talented writer, wrote Among the Infidels, his tour of five Islamic countries twenty years ago. Over and over he talks about the Muslims' technological failures, and says that they may come to the West and pick up a skill, such as medicine or engineering, and yet not understand the liberties and freedoms of the west, the political currency that we have built up over millennia.

An old saying is that it takes a thousand years to get the peasant out of a man. I thought that was referring to my uncouth habits but more and more I think that it is a statement of how deeply our roots are drilled into us--throwing them away would be an act of such deracination that members of a proud people, such as the Muslims, would have to reject all that they'd been taught. Einstein said that common sense is the prejudices you've had drilled into you before the age of 18. This is only true if the common sense is common according to locality.

All of this indicates to me that our best hope for survival is not to win the hearts and minds of other people by a handshake and a group hug, but to have enough weapons to see them off if necessary.

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Perhaps we can get this fellow to be Fed Chairman--at least it would wouldn't be as expensive and would be more entertaining.

On vacation I'm reading a book called Scorn, by Matthew Parris. It's a gatherum omnium of disobliging things that people have said about other people throughout the ages, even translating ancient curses. The Brits do this well; their much vaunted civility and urbanity is a veneer on astonishing rudeness.

Arianna attended Cambridge and did very well there--someone said that the English colleges teach you how to argue and the America ones how to do things and succeed. She was a right-winger, writing articles in 1993 for National Review. She married Michael Huffington but then divorced and a year after the divorce he revealed that he was bisexual, for which read gay. Most of her wealth came from the divorce.

Pace that old joke about Jewish divorces: Why are divorces from gold-digging Greek women so expensive? Because they're worth it.

After shedding herself of someone who, it is said, she knew perfectly well was gay, sorry, bisexual, when she married him, she drifted to the left and now is known mostly as the proprietress of the Huffington Post, home of some of the moonbats who do not actually twitch in public or soil the furniture.

Someone, who is not credited, said of dear Arianna that she was the face that lunched a thousand shits.

Now you can read the Huffington Post without gritting your teeth.

And since it is widely known that the price of gasoline is set by turning a knob located somewhere on Karl Rove's desk.....or is it Dick Cheney's desk?.....then maybe a big, fat "Thank You" from everybody is in order.

I just love how us guys in the oil business are "gouging" the poor consumer whenever the price is over $3 per gallon, but when oil drops below $40/bbl then it is "the market".

Now comes a report that the Midland Development Corporation may be getting back into the business of operating the slushiest sort of slush fund. This is opposed to the general run-of-the-mill slush fund that they currently operate.

The MDC is considering re-starting a program that it discontinued a few years back of providing loans to small local businesses when it was determined that the MDC's taxpayer-funded resources were better utilized not bringing any large businesses to town.

Sucking roughly $4 million per year in taxes out of the local economy in pursuit of a few large scale rent-seekers hasn't panned out so well so the new idea is to make the system of taking hard-earned money and turning it into unearned money much more egalitarian.

The sole Lottery Winner recipient of funds from the earlier program was a local confectioner who was provided with what is called a "forgivable loan" by the High Priests of Economic Development. Everyone not in the business of "economic development" calls this a cash gift.

The MDC has been accumulating cash since the ED Sales tax was passed years ago making millions of dollars in taxes unavailable to those that paid them.

And, frankly, they have zero to show for it. And they know it.

Which brings pressure to do something with it. Like the creation of a fund of unknown size, to be administered by the as yet unknown, to be distributed based upon an unknown set of parameters. Because...because....because maybe this will work.

"I think the big questions in restarting it would be who is going to administer it, if we can get a bank to do that or someone who is qualified to analyze the credit worth of a small company," [MDC Board Member Doug] Henson said.

When you really don't plan on getting the money back anyway, isn't the whole idea of credit worthiness kind of non-operative?

Maybe I am being too harsh on the whole idea.

I mean, all it is is a quasi-governmental agency-based program of providing loans from a pool of funds to be administered by those who will feel political pressure to make loans but who are shielded from having to employ the usual standards of credit worthiness because the fund is backed by the taxpaying public.

What could possibly go wrong?

While channel surfing on vacation I came across some old news of Rosie O'Donnell saying that 9/11 was an inside job. It was of course a clip from The View and Hot Air has it here.

Merry Christmas. Rosie has passed the point of any serious consideration and is now merely the gift which keeps on giving. Among her comments, "This is the first time in history that fire has melted steel."

Then how do we make steel, Rosie? Dig it up in Bessemer flume?

While I am second to no one in my dislike of the bailout of the automakers (or of the financial "institutions"), let us consider whether the media has treated the automakers and their products as fairly as, say, our most recent contenders for the office of President and Vice-President from the Republican Party.

1. The Big 3 are building good cars and trucks. They are still getting pilloried for cars perceived to be of poorer quality (and many were) than the imports 20 or 30 years ago. Back then, there were really some bad cars being made. (By "bad" I mean poorly designed and/or unreliable and/or unsafe. I do not mean "bad" as it is used today: "I do not like this car and my friends would not be caught dead in this car, therefore it is bad.") But the bad cars were being made by nearly all manufacturers. Mercedes Benz's of the 70's and 80's are known for being (mostly) underpowered and ill-equipped for American roads. Toyotas were reliable, Japan having wisely focused on their strength in engineering (their best mechanical engineers were/are in the auto industry, not aerospace or energy as in the U.S.) but mind-warpingly boring.

Let's see. A thuggish and intractable union. Management which thinks that management consulting is an end in itself. GM has lost $72 billion in the last four years; Chrysler has been gasping for years. Only Ford thinks that it can go...through the end of 2009.

Although to be fair, considering the impossible structural difficulties that the Big Three face, in labor and state laws, it's amazing that they're doing as well as they are.

If it requires the bankruptcy of the Big Three to destroy the UAW and to slap some state legislatures upside the head, so be it. There will be a demand for cars, and workers who have paid attention will be able to find jobs building cars, if that's what they want to do.

One of the (many) things that amaze me is the gross sentimentality that adheres to the Big Three. There is nothing sacred about having a job making Detroit cars. Workers work, and who has not changed jobs over a lifetime? I know that union members don't intend to have any uncertainties in their lives, but for them to not have uncertainties means that we are taxed for their comfort. And I don't love them that much.

First the $700 billion to bail out imprudent lenders, paying the rich for their folly by taxing the poor. Now the Big Three. There are people actually whining that the Big Three must be bailed out because their advertising would stop. In the list of whining that comes quite near the top. California is complaining that its welfare state is insupportable and therefore must be supported by the more prudent states, such as Texas. It is slightly waggish of me to suggest that there is a very small debt owed to California for being a magnet for our greedy and lazy people, but not enough of a debt to bail them out for their folly for being a welfare magnet.

Let the Big Three die now for they will sooner or later, and later means more taxpayer money down the toilet.

Mark Steyn:

GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people...snip...So many areas of endeavor that once embodied the youth and energy of this great land are now old and sclerotic. I include, naturally, my own industry. I loved the American newsrooms you saw in movies like The Front Page, full of hardboiled, hard-livin' newspapermen. By the time I got there myself, there were no hardboiled newspapermen, just bland anemic newspaperpersons turning out politically correct snooze sheets of torpid portentousness.

Mr. Steyn is right on about the dying industries that once, recently, defined America to the outside world and on the rising industry of entitled, self-selected elites:

After two and a third centuries of republican experiment, America has finally worked its way back to the House of Lords.

Caroline Kennedy believes she is entitled to the seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton (she also of the ilk to select their last name for greatest political advantage. This is sexist...to my knowledge men are not afforded the same opportunity*.) Caroline will not have to run for the office for 2 years and, you know, actually have to campaign and try to get voters to elect her. New Yorkers may like this, the chance to test drive a Senator, especially since there will be no test drives down at the local boarded-up car dealer. But I doubt it.

Read all of Steyn's latest. In it you will find the latest, absolutely Steynianly perfect, description of the sadly-now-typical fawning "journalist" story on a public figure.

Sadly, the entitled self-selected elites have rarely produced anything of value. They know not how this country has prospered and will continue to drive this country further into the ditch. (And there won't be a shiny, new 4x4 Suburban to pull us out of the ditch, either.)

*Wait. I just remembered Gary Hartpence. There is a common thread here, but I am insufficiently caffeinated to find it. Yet.

Obama stated that he had never talked to Governor Blago. Perhaps it was bad editing of a sound bite that made it sound like that. I hope it was, but for a senator to say that he'd never talked to a governor is quite simply a bald-faced lie. Surely Mr. Obama meant that he'd not talked about who should take the senator's seat.

But in truth I don't want a connection between Governor Blago and his O'liness. Consider the alternatives. People scorned Sarah Palin--Christopher Buckley, the infinitely more interesting Christopher Hitchens, and friends, while ignoring her analog Joe Biden, who is even more embarrassing.

And let me be, for once, (more) generous to Mr. Obama: his demeanor has been infinitely better than I was afraid of with nothing of the triumphalism that lesser people would have showed. Lesser people being, in general, nearly all liberals. This is not to say that he's not a liberal.

Someone said that Obama is turning out to be an Eisenhower Republican. I have no idea where he got that one although I have to admit that his appointments aren't as awful as I was afraid they would be--especially after the video I saw of him telling ACORN unconvicted felons that they'd be in the White House setting policy.

Still, I'm glad that he chose Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. She is mean enough for the job and has the balls for it. But that is in and of itself a sad commentary.

In the last eight years of Bush Derangement Syndrome I've wondered if perhaps I was given to Clinton Derangement Syndrome. After all, that sorry pair can't be quite as bad as I remembered, can they? Those two terms--in memory every day I was shocked at the sleaze and vulgarity of the people but perhaps I was being too harsh. For a lot more people didn't find them repulsive enough to vote against.

So they stole things from the White House. So they stole $1046 of goods off The George Washington when they spent the night there. So Roger Clinton said, "My brother's got a nose like a vacuum cleaner." So the Hildebeest's secretary told her hair-burners who wanted payment, "The honor of doing the First Lady should be payment enough." I've known a few hair burners and I'm sure that the idea of doing her was either completely understood to be innocent or greeted with retching.

But sometimes we just need to have a walk down memory lane. And here it is.

Hillary needs

There is no question that being the first African-American elected President makes Barack Obama a transformative figure. He wasn't my choice but his election did answer a question as to whether an African-American could be elected President at all*.

So a mighty blow for equality has been struck. But don't think for a minute that this means the equal opportunity to fail.

As the first African-American President Obama was.....um....transformed....from a guy who just happened to be the 44th President into He Who Cannot Be Seen To Fail.

Such figures require a large "Underbus" to hold those who must "fail" in service to preserving the legacy of the transformative figure lest the transformative itself be seen to fail.

I think Rahm Immanuel is soon to be relegated to the Underbus.

* My answer was always, "Yes", but I was wrong. And stupid. And naive about the "real Amerikkka" according to my betters. The funny thing is that now that it has happened, according to my betters I am still wrong, stupid, and naive about the "real Amerikkka."

For the Big Three to survive the UAW must die. Otherwise they both die. Expensively.

Time Magazine, which is still publishing, has named the Chosen One, Barack Obama, as Person of the Year. Oooh.

All part and parcel of the ongoing Obama hagiography, which, like most hagiography, air-brushes the blemishes and extolls and magnifies and in some cases creates virtues.

I know an intelligent young woman who had not heard about any of the Chosen One's past associates except Jeremiah Wright. Not his association with ACORN, nor his association with the criminal Tony Rezko. She was astonished to find that ACORN was principally engaged in voter fraud. And she's a freshman at Rice, making As. Being a Rice student is no guarantee of sense but it is, to some extent, a guarantee of an IQ in three digits.

There will be fun with Obama's old fund-raiser Tony Rezko. Obama bought his house in Chicago below the asking price but it was the highest offer. Ms. Rezko bought the lot next door at full price, but the owner of both properties stated that they had to close the same day. This may mean nothing but is unusual. It would be quite illustrative to find out if there was a lien on the house to be satisfied out of closing.

Rezko was involved in fundraising for Obama and the criminal Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who by the way looks amazingly like George Stephanopolous.

Rezko was convicted of federal criminal charges and spent nearly six months in Chicago's Metropolitan Correctional Center. It's a tall monolith with slit windows, and he was held in solitary confinement, which he found so difficult that the day before Thanksgiving Rezko's attorneys petitioned U.S. District Court Judge Amy St. Eve to hurry his sentencing so he could get on with it and get out of the Shoe. She agreed and set his sentencing to be January 6, 2009.

On December 11, Judge St. Eve lifted the deadlines for sentencing, and set no new ones. This was two days after the FBI said that Rezko was cooperating to reduce his prison term. In other words, Tony's singing like a canary.

Again, there is no evidence that the Chosen One is involved with this although he has worked for Rezko and the other way round. And you may be sure that had a Republican president been in the same room with a crook like Rezko the left would have been howling. Recall the possibly pixilated moaning of Randi Rhodes about the "Bush Crime Family."

But is all this lucubration really necessary? Almost by definition Illinois politicians, and let's remember that Hillary is from Illinois, fail the smell test. I'm sure Louisiana is now feeling pleased to have another state to look down on in corruption.

Electing a Chicago Democratic machine politician as president is like selecting as Surgeon General the manager of a gay bath house.

I cannot abide a direct link to the New York Times, no matter how their business performance cheers me. So here is a link to the NYT, via Instapundit. Thanks, Glenn!

The Physicians' Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports physicians' work with patients, last month published the results of a survey on current medical practice conditions in the United States. Some 12,000 doctors responded, the vast majority of whom were primary care physicians.

Nearly half of them said they planned in the next three years to reduce the number of patients they see or to stop practicing altogether. While these doctors rated patient relationships as the most satisfying aspect of practice, over three-quarters felt they were at "full capacity" or "overextended and overworked."

Read the whole thing. With mandatory health care coming, and doctors leaving their practices and virtually no one in med school interested in primary care...well, if you haven't had the incentive to get in shape and take care of your health, now you do.

Energy, economy and now health care: when the government steps in to help you out, you are really on your own.

It isn't so surprising, really. Reading just a few Presidential-level daily security threat assessments is probably enough to change anyone's worldview somewhat.

More likely is that up until Candidate Obama became President-Elect Obama he was not so much in "The War is Wrong" business as he was in the "Bush is wrong/McCain is wrong" business just like every politician is in "The Other Guy Is Wrong" business.

Bush will be gone in six weeks and within a couple of years will begin to be treated much better by history than he has been by the infantile mainstream press.

And now President-Elect Obama has had thrust upon him the highest office in the land and is beginning to realize that he will be subject to all of the same constraints begat by reality that his predecessors in office were.

The swooning nutroots just knew that a President Obama would have them out of Iraq in a matter of months if not weeks.

The constraints of reality have intervened.

The Obama position on Iraq looks much more similar to the Bush position than it does to anything coming out of The DailyKos or the Puffington Host.

Gitmo? President Obama is theoretically a high-powered lawyer who is surrounded by other high-powered lawyers. And they have been advocating the closure of Gitmo for years now. Which means that they have had years to figure out what to do with everyone being held at Gitmo and would have no excuses for Gitmo still being open and holding prisoners 30 days after the new administration takes office.

I think reality will intervene here also. Gitmo is full of bad actors who are essentially men without countries. If they don't stay at Gitmo they have to go somewhere.

So I have to ask: How long does Gitmo continue to operate before those that think of President Obama as a *cough* Lightworker begin to feel betrayed or deceived?

(The original title of this post said Reality 1, Obama 0...but I don't actually know that Barack Obama didn't understand reality before the election but was playing to the tools and fools on the extreme left that wanted us out of Iraq, now, regardless of the slaughter that would surely follow.)

Remember how the left descended into the snarling rage of Bush Derangement Syndrome; it was ugly but ultimately funny. I think that it is important for the right not to sink to Obama Derangement Syndrome. First, because it will be convenient for the opportunistic left to denounce any criticism of Obama as being racist and therefore snarling about Obama will be used as a powerful tool to crush any sort of political or policy dissent. Also it's silly. It doesn't work. By all means point up Obama's unsavory connections--ACORN, Wright, Ayers, Rezko--or questionable dealings--voter fraud and credit-card fraud--but he is not and will not be responsible for everything that goes bad in the world and it would be foolish indeed to paint him as being responsible.

About six years ago The Dallas Morning News was so far sunk into Bush Derangement Syndrome that Dallasites were putting mock bumper stickers on their cars: "I had xxx and it's Bush's fault." The paper took the hint and backed off. There will be grousing enough on the right, particularly from the usual suspects who would rather grumble in ideological purity out of power than manage to effect some of their ideas.

That doesn't mean it is unfair to point out the bad things. When I heard that Rahm Emanuel would be White House Chief of Staff I felt like the kid watching the Frankenstein movie through his fingers. Did I dare follow any more news?

There is a story about Emanuel: supposedly, at a dinner, Emanuel was calling out the names of opponents, and with every name, he would shout, "Dead!" and stab the table with a knife. Makes you wish for James Carville, doesn't it?

As the world knows, nearly two hundred people were killed in Bombay, which is what Indians still call it instead of Mumbai, a fiat name. And the press wonders why? Why did it happen? Overpaid navel-gazers want to know, but not really.

It's very simple. Islamists hate the west. They hate America, Britain, and they hate Jews. They hate the growing financial sophistication of India and its links to the West. And they want us dead.

Which was apparent to me when the second plane hit the WTC on 9/11.

Why doesn't our media get it? Cannot they believe that they are hated too? Do they think it can be sorted out with a meet-and-greet? My biggest fear about the Chosen One is that he thinks that these things can be sorted out over a cup of strong tea but then he's callow in everything except voter and credit-card fraud, and stiffing workers.

The first WTC bombing told us what to expect but no one, including me, listened. For years we've had Muslims stating baldly that they wanted to die to kill Americans and Americans said, "No, they can't mean what they said," although some of them just died to prove it.

And now we have mass murder in India. I suppose that it will take some sort of mass murder in America to make these precious people get it.

Oh. That happened. September 11, 2001. And still they don't get it. Perhaps there's a reason that The New York Times, the flagship of polite, received opinion, is junk stock, just like their junk opinions, and will have to sell assets to meet debt repayment obligations which is still causing me a deep-seated glow of satisfaction. There is a reason that CBS, lowered even further by the big feet and ego but small worth of Katie Couric is thinking about buying news from CNN and blogging off it. Well, if you had that Couric woman eating 75% of your budget for nothing, what would you do? CNN has fallen behind Fox. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has not only saved that virtually unwatched network by appealing to a small cadre of glinty-eyed leftists but such success that it has had has infiltrated NBC too, which says more about the parlous state of NBC than of the success of MSNBC. And ABC has decreed that its journalists cannot wear American flag pins. Reuters refuses to use the word terrorists on the theory that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. I suppose that the murders don't count if you say they're for, er, freedom.

The news rooms of America have very much a fin de siècle feeling to them as the talking heads explain why what is happening cannot be happening as they take time out from the (bankrupt) Sharper Image stores or leg-waxing parlors to condescend to a public that increasingly doesn't care because the public knows there is nothing of value left in the MSM. All that remains is its own narcissistic and solipsistic view of the world.

I suspect that it is axiomatic that the useful idiots are the last to know that they are.

Wake up and strike terrorism with an iron hand, say Hollywood's stars shocked by the brazen terror attack that targeted Mumbai's poshest areas.

Oops. Did I say Hollywood?

I meant Bollywood. Hollywood is still asking us to ask ourselves why the Islamofascists hate us...as if they started planning the attacks of September 11th during the last year of the Clinton Presidency in anticipation of the impending election of then-Governor of Texas George W. Bush.

Although, we can expect our own 'stars' to take a much harder stance against international terror (or at least a softer stance towards any administration action against it) now that the Oval office is to be occupied by one of their own. A Lightworker, no less.

American action against terrorism abroad will be righteous again now that it is their man calling the shots.

Who knows, we may even get a slew of movies that don't (at best) infantilize the American soldier or (at worst) portray them as rapists and murderers stuck in Iraq because of their lack of education and opportunity.

Wait. Was that Hollywood? Or was it John Kerry...the Audie Murphy of the Vietnam War?

It was both.

But starting in late January the gloves come off. One deemed enlightened by the Plasticized-Americans of Hollywood will be in office and for good measure the Iranians have already called him a "house slave".

I'm thinking Dresden.

Do you suppose that the people who are simultaneously advocating hard for a re-introduction of the so-called "Fairness Doctrine" and also for a 60-seat "veto proof" Senate majority sense any irony at all?

Indianapolis - The Obama campaign says most of the payment issues that brought hundreds of upset campaign workers to the Indianapolis office Wednesday have been resolved.

Campaign spokesman Jonathan Swain says a few people showed up Thursday and made arrangements for payment by mail.

A few hundred people stood in line for several hours Wednesday waiting to get paid for working in the final days of the campaign. Many of those people said they were underpaid for the number of hours they worked.

There's more here.

Let's see. The attorney general of Ohio said sure, don't bother to check the IDs of people bussed in from shelters to register to vote and then to vote. And the Secretary of State of Nevada seized ACORN's records. It seems that they'd registered the Dallas Cowboys to vote.

In the county that I live in, the county Democratic chairman murdered a man in 1974 while DWI, was penalized $1500 and three years' probation, which was reduced to $500 paid and one year's probation served and by this we may know the value of a man's life. Then he was penalized by the State for running an gambling book out of a trust account. His latest? He altered official documents, colluding with the then-official to disqualify electoral competition. He is still the county Democratic chairman and very proud of it too. Except when he's dodging phone calls from people wanting to know when they will get paid for working elections.

I have no love for the Republican party, for I'm a conservative and they have thrown me under the bus, reveling in the orgiastic thrill of spending other peoples' money. And I have many other points of contention. But still, they don't come close to the breath-taking fraud and deception of the Democratic party. It seems that mouthing populist platitudes enwreathes them in a sanctity which excuses the basest of behavior.

I know that even without the voter fraud, the Chosen One would have been chosen by the electorate; the numbers proclaim it. But really. Stiffing bottom-rung vote canvassers? I'll bet the Chosen One didn't get stiffed when he was doing his community organizing. It seems that "community organizing" means fraud from both ends perpetrated against the law-abiding.

For a good while now I've been doing some study and reading on Urban vs. Rural/Suburban and its impact on our founding documents, political persuasion and policy. I guess this fascination started shortly after I read Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" in my attempt to understand what all our high paid consultants where trying to do with Downtown Midland. I've always known anecdotally that "City Folk don't think like us," but I never really had a good feel for how and why that is, until I started reading.

Peter Brown has a piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend that outlined some of the changes in perception and policy that may accompany the Country's first "Urban President."

There are a number of issues, many of them controversial, that have an urban/suburban/rural tilt:

Take guns, for instance. Urban dwellers, according to public opinion polls, are much more likely to favor stricter gun control than are those who live in exurban or rural communities.

Not surprisingly, those who live in cities see a need for more money to be spent on mass transportation. Those who live in suburban and rural areas, where a much larger percentage of people have cars, prefer new roads.

Those who live in cities are less likely to have widespread contact with military families, who disproportionately live outside of them. It is a reasonable assumption that this translates into lesser support for military spending than for those who live in the suburbs and rural areas.

The list could go on a lot longer.

And, to put it simply, birds of a feather flock together.

I'm starting to get the impression that Urban living has already quashed Liberty and Freedom as envisioned by the Founders, which explains why some 50% of the population (mostly Urban) doesn't see the coming socialist storm...they've been getting rained on for decades, so what's the big deal?

Ohh well... at least public transportation may be a bigger priority than new road construction, so I guess EZ Rider is safe for another 4 years.

You knew it was coming.

Here we are in November again, and it is time to take a peek at the 2007 final figures from the National Transit Database to see just how well EZ Rider performed last fiscal year:

All of these figures come from the National Transit Database

Now what about passengers?

The percentages breakdown like this: Fares: 11%, Local Taxes: 14%, State Taxes: 21% and Federal Taxes: 53%

So what is this in numbers anyone can understand? Well, according to the 2007 report it cost $4.89 for every bus UPT (unlinked passenger trip) [up from $4.52] and $15.66 for every para-transit UPT [up from $15.62]. UPT is a bureaucratic term, which basically means every time a passenger walks onto a bus. In Midland it takes, to make most cross town trips takes 4 UPT's to make a round trip on a bus and 2 UPT's on a para-transit. So in 2007 it cost $19.56 for every person who traveled on a fixed route and 31.32 for every person who traveled on a demand bus to make a round trip. In 2006 these figures were $18.08 and $31.24 respectively and in 2005 these figures were $21.40 and $24.32 respectively, in 2004 these figures were $24.72 and $34.90 respectively.

Costs didn't go up significantly in 2007, but remember, this data is only through September 30, 2007, which was before oil shot up to $140 a barrel. Fares increased slightly and State funding was flat, so our local government had to kick in quite a bit more, and the Feds really came to the rescue of our local governments with a significant funding increase.

As always, I wonder when that majority funding from the State and Feds might dry up?

In the MRT story relating the latest unemployment figures for the City and State, Willie Taylor, executive director of Workforce Solutions Permian Basin (a regional adjunct of the Workforce Commission) made the following statement:

"When you have the two lowest unemployment rates in the state, even if we see 4.5 or 5 percent, we're still doing better than the rest of the nation. We're still in great shape and we can thank the economic development group. They've done a great job diversifying the economy."

I'm sorry, but that is a perception of many in leadership around here, and the Bureau of Labor Statics data paints a different picture of the diversification efforts in Midland.

Since the December 2002 nadir of 9,800 employees, the Mining and Minerals Sector has added some 5,500 jobs. The MDC, with investments in NGSG, FloCO2, and FiberRod, would like to take some of the credit for that rise in employment diversity. Is this the Diversity we were promised and that everyone seems to think we've gained?

Total Non-Farm Employment has risen from 45,800 to 59,900 in the same time period, or about 14,100 jobs. Mining and Minerals make up a staggering 39% of that job increase.

The next biggest gainer is Business and Professional Services. That sector tacked on 2,900 jobs in that time frame. Though, I'm sure most of this is related to oil and gas with the resurgence of Lawyers, Landmen, Petroleum Engineers, and CPA's.

Manufacturing accounts for 1,100 of those jobs, but there has been no increase in manufacturing jobs in 16 months, so that isn't growing, and what we have is most likely Oil and Gas related.

Retail Trade accounts for about 1,100 jobs in that time too, but we don't target retail as a diversifying industry.

Speaking of target industries, Information Technology has experienced a 200 employee contraction in the last couple of years locally and Health care and Education has added a shade under 1,000 jobs.

For comparison, Odessa's non-farm employment increases in the Mining sector account for 57.4% of all employment growth in Odessa from December 2002 to October 2008.

So tell me again, just how good of a job has our Economic Development Group done diversifying the economy?

The Dallas Morning News Editorial Board finally came out and said what the Austin and Houston Editorial Boards wouldn't.....that for them, the Speaker's Race is all about shifting power in the State of Texas to the Metro Areas, and not about Craddick.

Here's the opening paragraph:

The contest for Texas House speaker has become a horse race. Handicappers are raising the odds against a fourth term for Midland's Tom Craddick - an outcome that could pay off for Texas' population centers.

and here's the closing paragraph:

The bulk of Texans live in metro areas. It's where the growth is. Dallas-Fort Worth has been adding a million people every seven years. Change is coming fast and can't reach the Texas House soon enough.

In persuasive writing, I was taught to lay out the thesis, or reason for writing the persuasive piece at the beginning of the writing assignment and then restate said thesis at the end. I think the Dallas Morning News Editorial Board did a fine job of following that rule.

I have though all along that the Craddick criticisms of "Absolute Power", being a "Loyalist" and not being a good "consensus-builder" was a ruse. The Dallas Morning News has all but said this is really about finding *anyone* that pursues a metro centric agenda. The way Craddick has navigated through various issues in Texas politics in his tenure, just makes a nice large mud pit for them to wallow in.

Just look at the Red/Blue breakdown for Texas, and the Nation and you can see the clear divide between Urban and Rural voting patterns and governing philosophies. The more rural you are, the more conservative you vote. This is not a new problem, the Founders foresaw the problem of Urban vs. Rural when they created our bicameral legislative branch as they tried to strike a balance between the two.

Leaders like Craddick, who make sure the Cities don't suck all of the tax resources out of the State without providing for the rural areas and work to return and preserve the representation in the US Congress due the Rural areas, don't come along very often.

Like Craddick said himself during his constituent conference call, "I believe I will be the last Rural Speaker in Texas." It seems the urban Editorial Boards are more than happy to hasten that prophecy along.

From the website of origin:

"On Election day twelve Obama voters were interviewed extensively right after they voted to learn how the news media impacted their knowledge of what occurred during the campaign. These voters were chosen for their apparent intelligence/verbal abilities and willingness to express their opinions to a large audience. The rather shocking video below seeks to provide some insight into which information broke through the news media clutter and which did not."

An Oregon woman who is out $400,000 after falling for a well-known Internet scam says she wasn't a sucker or an easy mark.

The election has left me in an anomalous state; I could not believe that America, or this much of America, would ignore Obama's unsavory past associations and actions. I figured that the usual suspects would: those who let themselves be flattered into servility, the pro