I don't usually like to claim jump another contributor's post, but not enough has been said about how a single article in the Reporter-Telegram has completely laid waste to the notion that our elected "fiscal conservatives" spend any less than any other elected officials anywhere else.

The bottom line is this: They may spend differently, but they do not spend less.

There is no greater example of this than the recent transportation bill that had in it everything for everybody including the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere". That particular project has now been de-funded, thankfully, but not because during this period of time when we are 1) Fighting a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 2) Rebuilding from the massively destructive Hurricane Katrina and a couple of little sisters, we have found higher priorities for the money. No, the Bridge to Nowhere became a liability by the simple fact that it became known to the general public. The fact of the matter is that the project was indefensible from the beginning whether or not we were fighting or war or recovering from a once per century storm. It simply made no sense to spend $320 million dollars on a bridge to link and island with a population of 50 to mainland Alaska. Period. (Alaska's Congressional delegation is entirely made up of Republicans, by the way).

If not for Oklahoma's Senator Tom Colburn, a man who acts on his philosophy of fiscal conservatism rather than just "approving" campaign ads that claim that he has them, this idiotic waste of taxpayer funds would still have the green light.

But, it just shows how easy it is to get money from the Feds. Even when the Republicans control every branch of government.

Midland's little slice of the Transportation bill is a great example of this, even if writ small. From the article:

"City Manager Rick Menchaca said the $250,000 provided in the legislature for downtown redevelopment has not been earmarked for any specific purpose yet, but there are a wide variety of ways the funds could be spent. "

See that? You can get money from the Feds without even telling them what you plan to do with it. And you will have the help of fiscal conservative Kay Hutchison, fiscal conservative John Cornyn, and fiscal conservative Mike Conaway along the way.

Okay....so our national level fiscal conservatives seem to be failing us when it comes to government spending.....but surely our locally elected fiscal conservatives will make sure the taxpayer's money is spent only on the highest and best uses, right?

"[City Manager Rick Menchaca] said the purchase of public art and 'interactive water fountains' is a possibility."

Now to be fair, the Magic Interactive Fountain of Revitalization may or may not happen, but just the fact that it is on the list of possibilities proves outright that Midland, Texas does not need or require these Federal funds.

The picture? Manneken Pis in Brussels. A statue of someone standing there, pissing, all day and every day seemed a good fit with a post on government spending. The fountain connection makes it even better.

(Yeah, yeah....I know. That statue is a great fit with bloggers in general, except that I don't post all day, every day. So there.)

Further to our Natalie's post below is this article.

But in a statement today, Sheehan accused "right-wing" sites of "spreading a false story that nobody bought my book at Camp Casey on Saturday. That is not true, I sold all 100 copies and got writer's cramp signing them. Photos were taken of me before the people got in line to have me sign the book. We made $2000 for the peace house."

...snip...

...And now the smear websites are circulating an article, with these photos, that Cindy gave a signing and nobody came. It's simply not true...

But the photog stands by the photo and the caption that ran with it:

"At the time the photos were taken 'maybe 5 people had come in,' Vucci says, and Sheehan was waiting for more to stop by, which they did individually as well as in very small groups. Therefore the wording of the caption is accurate in that Sheehan was waiting for people to show up at her signing."

Instead of "fake, but accurate" we are dealing with "real, but inaccurate"? How about real and accurate?

(An aside: "peace house"?)

Oink! I mean OINK!

"This funding will help revitalize downtown Midland," Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison said in a prepared statement. "Residents will enjoy a more beautiful downtown area and local business will benefit from increased economic development."

So The Transcontinental Republican Pork Express stops in Midland.

"This quarter-million will help in any number of areas," Menchaca said. He said last year the city of Midland received $1.5 million in federal funds and that number is somewhere between $6.5 and $7 million this year. He attributed the increase in funding to several factors, including legislative support from Rep. Mike Conaway, and Sens. John Cornyn and Hutchison, as well as the support of Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick. Menchaca said having a public affairs consultant based in Washington D.C. also has helped acquire federal funds.

So is a "public affairs consultant based in Washington D.C." paid like a grant writer? If a grant doesn't make they don't get paid. I'll bet it doesn't work that way here.

I am sure we can use the new bus stop shelters. We are not quite up to a 1:1 shelter to passenger ratio yet.

So where has the $8 to $9 million that the city has received over the last two years been invested spent, Mr. Menchaca? Inquiring, tax paying, voting citizens of Midland want to know!

Congratulations to the Trinity School of Midland Football team which won the State Championship defying both the odds and, apparently, the good Lord himself.

Cindy Sheehan tries again.

More Cigarette Revisionism.

More at Michelle Malkin.

Found at Roger L. Simon:

"Statistics show state motorcycle fatalities on the rise, with most involving riders 40 and older on bikes with the largest engines.

Nationwide, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's projected 2004 figures have motorcyclists 40 older involved in about 47 percent of 3,900 fatalities. They're also expected to account for more than 60 percent of the yearly increase in deadly crashes.

So the answer to having a midlife crisis is to cause an event that re-positions your life's mid-point to somewhere in your twenties?

Brilliant!

And you thought the sight of forty-something, white-bread oil execs in Harleywear was the most ridiculous part of all this.

And I thought you were dead.

I thought that the Chamber beat was my turf.

A couple of "Dog Bites Man" items in this article.

1. The possible re-financings of the airport and the stadium complex bonds that *cough* don't involve using any unforseen income windfalls generated by either. (This brings us back to the idea that we should convert half of the E.D. Sales Tax monies over to this debt reduction. If we can't bring any companies in because there is no surplus workforce to hire, we may as well pay down community debt.)
2. Approved a motion to proceed with Phase II of the feasibility study for a new or improved convention center and performing arts center.

Notice how the performing arts center has managed to crawl back into the picture, its....er...feasibility having been made more likely by the application of $17,000 towards the study made by a disinterested third party that calls itself the "Performing Arts Center in Midland Feasibility Study Committee".

So forget about all those original statements pooh-poohing the arts center. They have been made non-operative as of this point.

Cindy Sheehan suddenly realizes how her great crusade matches up against the release of the X-Box 360.

(Hat Tip: Sweetness & Light)

Yes, as bob has pointed out it's time again for our favorite terrorist, Jose Padilla! He seems to have some friends who are going down with him.

Indicted with him were Adham Amin Hassoun, who is detained in Florida; Mohamed Hesham Youssef, who is in prison in Egypt; Kifah Wael Jayyousi, who is also detained in Florida, and Kassem Daher, who is outside the United States but whose exact legal status is not known.

...snip...

Padilla's lawyer, Donna Newman, said in New York that her client denied all of the allegations and looked forward to being vindicated at trial.

"We are very happy about this indictment. It's what we've asked for. You don't hold American citizens without charges," Newman said. "Now we can go to court and challenge the government's assertions."

That should make ralph/media watchpup happy.

It seems that the feds are finally getting serious: here is a story on the conviction of an Al Queda terrorist in the US today as well.

The 12-member jury found Ahmed Abu Ali, 24, guilty of all charges in a nine-count indictment. He had been charged with conspiracy to assassinate Bush, conspiring to support and supporting al Qaeda, and conspiracy to hijack aircraft.

Thanks for the memories, bob! Go Feds!

Level headed anti-smokers reach another mutually beneficial compromise with their smoking counterparts:

"A STUNNED Italian actor had to stub out the cigarette he had lit up on stage after a spectator complained, forcing the theatre to change the script of an Arthur Miller play to make it smoke-free.

"This had never happened to me in more than 300 performances," the actor, Sebastiano Lo Monaco, said.

Italy has banned lighting up in all enclosed public places since January this year.

Lo Monaco was smoking, in line with the script, while playing the main character in Miller's A View from the Bridge at a theatre in the northeastern city of Mestre, when a woman from the audience shouted "Put out that cigarette".

After a 15-minute suspension, the performance resumed with a modified script and a non-smoking protagonist. "

The causal effect of smoke in an enclosed room filled with smokers is non-determinant enough that traditional statistical levels used to determine probable causation had to be.....well....let's face it...the standards were lowered until the level was finally reached where causation was "proved".

Now one guy is on stage and lights up a cigarette at the point in the show where the script calls for the actor to light up a cigarette and this moonbat goes nuts. She doesn't get up and leave. She wants the show stopped and for it to be re-started only when it is cigarette free.

Now what is more ridiculous? The fact that this is what she demanded?

Or the fact that she was accomodated?

More from Christopher Hitchens on the ridiculous "Bush lied" meme that the MSM is trying to rehabilitate both themselves and the Democratic Party with:

"What do you have to believe in order to keep alive your conviction that the Bush administration conspired to launch a lie-based war? As with (I admit) the pro-war case, the ground of argument has a tendency to shift. I saw two examples in Washington last week. An exceptionally moth-eaten and shabby picket line outside Ahmad Chalabi's event on Wednesday featured a man with a placard alleging that Bush had prearranged the 9/11 attacks. I know a number of left and right anti-warriors who have flirted with this possibility but very few who truly believe it. (Even Gore Vidal, who did at one point insinuate the idea, has recently withdrawn it, if only on the grounds of the administration's incompetence.)

But then there is the really superb pedantry and literal-mindedness on which the remainder of the case depends. This achieved something close to an apotheosis on the front page of the Washington Post on Nov. 12, where Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus brought complete gravity to bear. Is it true, as the president claimed in his Veterans Day speech, that Congress saw the same intelligence sources before the war, and is it true that independent commissions have concluded that there was no willful misrepresentation? Top form was reached on the inside page:

But in trying to set the record straight, [Bush] asserted: "When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support."

The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power.

A prize, then, for investigative courage, to Milbank and Pincus. They have identified the same problem, though this time upside down, as that which arose from the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, during the Clinton-Gore administration, in 1998. That legislation—which passed the Senate without a dissenting vote—did expressly call for the removal of Saddam Hussein but did not actually mention the use of direct U.S. military force.

Let us suppose, then, that we can find a senator who voted for the 1998 act to remove Saddam Hussein yet did not anticipate that it might entail the use of force, and who later voted for the 2002 resolution and did not appreciate that the authorization of force would entail the removal of Saddam Hussein! Would this senator kindly stand up and take a bow? He or she embodies all the moral and intellectual force of the anti-war movement."

Wow. Two of the vaunted Washington Post's big league, big name journos (and 90% of the nationally elected Democrats) absolutely stripped naked with two paragraphs. Read the whole thing.

I can see why the MSM is uncomfortable with blogs. A competing wordlview that was always there but is now widely accessible upsets their former monopoly on information.

Longer memories don't help their cause (or their Capital 'C' Causes) either.

Did Bush oversell the war with intelligence made out of whole cloth and drag uninformed legislators into a war?

Bryan Preston at Tech Central Station does something that the MSM doesn't seem to do and/or hopes that us commoners won't do. He simply Googles "Clinton Iraq 1998".

Ever wonder why the MSM bigs freak out at the term "Fair and Balanced"? Sure, they hate Fox News, but it also may be that to those used to determining what is reported, balanced just isn't fair.

Mary "Fake but Accurate" Mapes is dealt with by Little Green Footballs, including links to the WaPo and to a compete, great, well-written review of the story by Tigerhawk. Thanks to LGF, T'hawk and LGF's reader David. Love that book cover! (Update: More on this here from J's W reader and Big Time Blogger, Tim Blair. G'day, Tim!)

Mapes is flogging a book that flogs her story about flogging some fake, forged, faxed documents as "news" during the run up to the presidential election last year. She still thinks the docs were real. De Nile ain't just a river...

The cool part of this is that the blogosphere gets to flog the story again, too. A Whataburger in Clyde anyone?

From the WaPo:

After a year of silence about the biggest scandal in CBS News history, Mary Mapes has plenty to say -- about George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Les Moonves, her father, bloggers, the mainstream press and others who she believes contributed to her downfall.

What took her so long?

"I was extremely battered," she said in an interview yesterday. "I'd had months and months of having my head kicked around a soccer stadium by much of the Western world. I needed some time to regroup."

How about some whine with that "fax 'n' cheese" combo?

"...by much of the Western world"? Mary, maybe your hyperbolic thinking has a little to do with your downfall. It isn't that big of a deal. You got lied to and taken in by a shyster. You didn't listen to the document "experts" you called in. You didn't apply any of what you should have learned in J School on multiple sources and fact-checking. You wanted it to be true. Dan wanted it to be true. Bill said it was true. Maybe Bill and Dan drugged your Whataburger. Whatever. No matter what the cause, you screwed up. Deal with it. Your credibility is now less than zero. You hitched your wagon to that big, handsome, lovable ol' mule, Dan, who has just pulled you over a cliff. Only the mule survived the fall and you didn't.

As of 8 pm, the tally of early voters has Proposition 2, the "one man, one woman" marriage amendment passing in Midland County by a slim margin of 91% to 9%, while the "against" votes are winning in Travis County! My. State-wide the early voting looks to be about 75/25 in favor. The only county close to Travis' split is Hays where the "for" votes are slightly ahead of the "against".

There was a pretty good crowd at my polling place tonight at 6 pm, so we'll see what changes as today's votes get counted.

The confusingly worded economic-development-fund-isn't-really-debt proposition (#3) is running 51/49 in favor at the state level. I'm glad this blog was able to reach out and touch 49% of the voting public in the state.

UPDATE: At 9:15, Proposition 2 is at 76/24 state-wide, unchanged in Midland County and 40/60 in Travis.

At 10:10, with 57% of the precincts in, Prop 2 is at 77/23 state-wide, 96/4 in Midland County and 39/61 in Travis County. Prop 3 is 52/48 state-wide.

"Not Board Certified....."

Oh, wait. This isn't a caption contest.

Never mind.

"The constitutional amendment clarifying that certain economic development programs do not constitute a debt."

So are we to be for this or against it?

Brief Explanation: HJR 80 would provide that local economic development program loans or grants (other than debts secured by a pledge of ad valorem taxes or financed by the issuance of any bonds or other obligations payable from ad valorem taxes) do not constitute or create debt. Any provision of state constitutional law that may prohibit or limit the authority of a political subdivision of the state to incur debt does not apply to those loans or grants.

I'm thinking "agin." Why would we not want to recognize these debts as debts?

The price of gasoline, averaged across the country, is now less than it was before Katrina in August. This is getting a little coverage in the MSM, but is not a major story like the post hurricane prices were. Big Oil gouges public = news. Big Oil gets the job done repairing unprecedented hurricane damage = not news. Gas now cheaper than before the hurricane = very minor news.

UPDATE: The Captain noticed, too. Glad to be in such good company.

More and more I feel not only less entertained by today's "celebs" but actually let down by them.

Billy Crystal was on Letterman last night. Crystal is a funny guy and has always been one of my favorite comediens/light duty actors.

So on last night's Letterman he is doing the usual guest bit and veers off into showing pictures of himself with Bill Clinton (and Donald Trump and someone else I can't remember) at a golf tournament somewhere. Fair enough, Crytsal likes Clinton and pictures with Presidents are fun stuff. Crystal then goes on to say how much he respects Clinton. Okay, fine.

But then....

But then he falls victim to the idea we really need his opinion and says (paraphrasing), "I can't help but think that if he [Clinton] were in office today that, if we were in Iraq at all, we would at least know why."

What?

It immediately took me back to a spot-on observation by James Lileks:

"I get this feeling, over and over again: it is better that the right thing never come to pass than let the wrong men make it happen.

Bingo. Crystal didn't offer an opinion on the war. He basically said that he would feel better about had another President made the decision to act.

Crystal may have wandered back into the areas that actually made him a "celeb". I don't know. I was several channels away by that point. At least the wallboard guy on H&G TV sticks to what he knows.

Straight from the Department of Be Careful What You Ask For.....Former Cheney Chief of Staff Scooter Libby has been indicted in the case involving the "outing" of former CIA operative Valerie Plame (aka Mrs. Joe Wilson). This was much cheered by the anti-Bush crowd even though their enthusiasm was dampened by the fact that Karl Rove was not indicted, much less frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs (Ambassador Wilson's temperate words, not mine).

Mr. Libby has plead innocent. Now there will be a trial. In a trial people like Mr. Libby are then able to say things in their defense. Things will come out.

Things like this:

"Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely told WorldNetDaily that Wilson mentioned Plame's status as a CIA operative in at least three, possibly five, separate conversations in 2002 in the Fox News Channel's 'green room' in Washington, D.C., as they waited to appear on air as analysts.

Vallely and Wilson both were contracted by Fox News to discuss the war on terror as the U.S. faced off with Iraq in the run-up to the spring 2003 invasion.

Vallely says, according to his recollection, the first time Wilson mentioned his wife's job was around February or March of 2002 – more than a year before Robert Novak's July 14, 2003, column identified her, citing senior administration officials, as 'an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.'

'He was rather open about his wife working at the CIA,' said Vallely, who retired in 1991 as the Army's deputy commanding general in the Pacific."

What is that you say? Joe Wilson freely spoke about his wife's "covert" job with the CIA a full year before her name crossed any White House lips?

Do you suppose there will be any indictments for Loose-Lipped Joe?

More and more, the real story appears to be some within governmental agency's (in this case the Central Intelligence Agency) attempts to submarine a sitting President leading up to an election.

Hat Tip: QandO Blog