A debate review by Stephen Green.

Oh yeah, Green thought Romney did OK tonight and that McInevitableCain didn't. Good. And Huckabee was...go read the whole thing, along with his earlier drunkblog.

UPDATE: My earlier post was rethought and edited. Draw your own conclusions on the debate results from the linked commentary. I concur with where Mr. Green ends up.

Gun-grabber drops out of race and endorses Free Speech-abridger.

Meanwhile, in the Democrat primaries.....

When I was a kid I was introduced to Pascal's wager on God. Simplified, it ran something like this. If you believe in God and there is one, then you're okay. If you don't believe in God and there is one, then you've got trouble so it's a better bet to believe. Just in case. Even when I was a kid I figured that a God worth his salt might prefer a sincere worshiper, and as I got bigger I started to realize that this wager could be used on any religion, and indeed it is, including the newest one, Global Warming. And Pascal's wager assumed that the God, the default god, is the Catholic god of 17th century France. I don't know that Governor Huckabee would approve or qualify.

The weak spot in this is that it assumes that belief has no cost. For most Christians, the cost is one worth bearing, and is not something that I would try to dissuade anyone from so long as the respect is mutual. But since this wager is a logical proposition, it's interesting to see how it's been applied, and is being applied, today.

When this global-warming stuff started up, I instinctively disbelieved because I judged the source. I've said that judging truth by provenance is the sign of a snob, but when the Goracle says A, I instinctively say B. Let's never forget the value of experience. Remind me of something the Goracle has said in the last decade that wasn't a lie and I'll wait for five seconds' consideration before calling out, "Liar!" Two things that aren't lies, ten seconds, and so forth. Three things, a minute. But I'm not holding my breath.

Except when it doesn't.

Once I was knew, well, someone who put a finger to his lips and said that on reflection he thought he was a progressive. Ever since that time the word progressive has been in bad odor with me. My gut feeling is borne out.

One of the vicious murderers that the world would be much better off without is Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who was allowed in the US despite being on a terrorist watch list. He spoke against America, his host country and got away with it because he was speaking in Arabic. (One of the pig-stupid things about our government is its firing of a goodly number of translators of Arabic because they were gay. Well, I certainly understand how that obsession with flowers and fabrics might affect one's ability to translate a language. Give me a break.) In Rahman's great American tour he said it was peachy-keen to rob banks and kill Jews--always on about the Jews, aren't they? Recall that for years one of the biggest selling books in Arabic has been that old standby by Der Fuehrer Mein Kampf.

It was found that one of the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings was one of the Rahman's followers, and so Rahman came under governmental view, and was eventually convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison.

From which redoubt he spread orders and fatwas and blessings and was an inspiration to al Qaeda and one of the people that he used to send out his billets-doux was his attorney, Lynne Stewart.

Makes you want to burn every bed on earth, doesn't she?

No subsidies, no incentives....just good market-driven reasons to be downtown.

From the article:

This is the first privately driven project in the city's move to revitalize downtown, [MDC President] Henson said. He said Basic's presentation was for informational purposes.

Really? What about the entire city block directly west of the courthouse? With the exception of the old Midland Savings Building that stands like the Gibraltar-like testament that it is concerning government involvement, that whole block is changing for the better.

And then there is this factoid that keeps turning up:

A report created by TIP Strategies at the end of last year for the MDC, estimated 4,500 private sector office jobs have been created in the last five years and a similar increase would create full occupancy of Midland's entire existing inventory within seven years.

Possibly. I am hopeful that this turns out to be true. But the only signal that this should send to any governmental or quasi-governmental agency is to streamline the development process (read regulatory here) and then stay out of the way. If this demand truly does materialize it will be recognized by the pros in the business who will provide the supply for any real and actual demand.

Any outfit that first comes to our various Departments of Corporate Welfare pointing to this study and asking for handouts in order that they may alleviate this Impending! Office! Space! Crisis! is either undercapitalized to begin with or....well...just way too comfortable helping themselves to other people's money.

Godspeed, Basin Energy.

And Nixon was accused of the Imperial Presidency. This is a common complaint these days among leftist government types, after the Pentagon papers and the Church Committee, which gutted our intelligence agencies and is one of the reasons that we were caught with our pants down on 9/11. Do you recall Senator Church? I do, as a greasy, smug liberal who nowadays would be the object of scorn by the Kos Kiddies as not being progressive enough. He's no longer with us: someone strapped him to a table and read him the multiplication tables and the reality made his head explode.

But if we elect Our Empress, we cannot expect anything less than an Imperial presidency of the first order. Our Empress, not even installed in the Oval Office, has been accused of planting questions and she controls, quite ruthlessly, who has access to her. She limits her interviews in ways that would cause anguished howls of pain from the MSM were someone even vaguely on the right to try it.

I thought that I'd go a day without bashing her; in my saner moments I think there's nothing more to say. But I recall a graffito that appeared outside John Jay's house and think it, modified, to be appropriate: "Damn Hilary Clinton. Damn everyone that won't damn Hillary Clinton. Damn everyone that won't put up the lights in the windows and sit up all nights damning Hillary Clinton." It's my job, I say with a sigh and the back of my hand to my forehead. But I don't roll my eyes. You can, but I can't get away with it.

Comedy Central's series South Park, which actually has caused the book South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias to be written, is perhaps my favorite television show. If you've not seen it, you're missing something but be warned: it's not for the faint of heart. It stretches the word vulgar but its saving grace is that it's directed, nearly always, against those precious people who so irritate me.

In one episode, there is a worldwide contest on who can, frankly, produce the biggest turd. There is a Swiss body which determines it, and as things go on, Bono goes in for a shellacking, and we find that the weight of such a thing is measured in Courics. As in Katie. The woman who replaced Dan Rather and took CBS even lower. In other episodes Jennifer Lopez is savaged, as is Paris Hilton. For two years their Halloween episodes had pictures of Barbra Streisand in each corner. You've got to love that.

But back to our Empress, who draws me like a gut wagon draws flies. iTunes has for sale the episide "Snuke," which stands for Suitcase Nuclear Device, and it is quite disobliging to Mrs. Clinton. I warn you: Emily Post would not be amused. But I sure was.

I saw it on my TiVo and am buying it off iTunes, uncensored.

This article reminded me of the time I was driving my (at-the-time) 13 year-old son and his friend somewhere and, while I can't remember why...probably answering the question of where to plug in the charger for the iPod...I had cause to refer to "the cigarette lighter".

Puzzled looks.

"Cigarette lighter?"

"Yeah, right there."

"Where?"

"Right here", I said, pulling the punch down lighter component out of its round hole.

More puzzled looks. It dawned on me that they had absolutely no idea how a common car cigarette lighter works. So I punched it down let it heat and pop back out and then took it out and showed them the glowing red end.

You would have thought that I was Gandalf by the looks on their faces.

Which is a step in the right direction. But everything is a tradeoff, I suppose. They have traded ruining their lungs for ruining their ears.

(h/t: InstaPundit)

It amuses me tremendously when people I don't like start tearing pieces out of each other: win/win. In 1984 Apple Computer, as it then was, showed the commercial introducing the Macintosh at the Superbowl. It was directed by Ridley Scott (Bladerunner) and the commercial, which surely you've seen, is a riff on Orwell's Ninteen Eighty-four and Big Brother, which is of course a shot at Big Blue. Every year this commercial, shown only once, gets the award for being the best commercial ever released.

In case you've not seen it, here it is:

This may not be worksafe, only to protect your Very Important Business Computer from spewed coffee or Dr Pepper. You gotta love Photoshop. H/T Instapundit.

"Canadians United To Kill the Infidel and Drive the Jews to the Sea."

The Managed Competition Committee has begun meeting to try and discover ways to reduce the roughly $750,000 annual deficit that is run up by the ongoing operations of the Scharbauer Sports Complex. We wish them luck.

Ideally, we would love for them to find a bunch of unrealized or unexploited demand for the complex that could generate more revenue. And perhaps it is out there somewhere. But more likely, all of the uses of a new sports complex beyond that of 1) placating a minor league professional sports team that was threatening to leave Midland without...let us be frank...major public subsidies, and 2) watching the reaction of those rubes from Odessa when they see our stadium, and that were all heavily flogged as credible additional reasons as to why we needed this sports complex never existed in the first place.

Remember professional soccer? The design of the stadium precluded that from happening before the ground-breaking. And, yes, I know that the watching of professional soccer is only done by espresso-sipping, socialist, America-hating, Posh-and-Becks-loving Euroweenies and that 99.9% of West Texans would rather sit through a meeting of the Managed Competition Committee than a professional soccer match....but that is not the point.

So if the deficit is to be reduced it will likely fall to cost-cutting. But even then there will be two kinds of cost-cutting. There will be suggestions that will cut the cost to the city, i.e. reduce not the overall deficit but only the portion of the deficit that is paid for by the City of Midland. And there will also real cost cuts that reduce the overall deficit paid for by taxpayers, whether it be through taxes paid to the city proper or, say, through taxes paid to MISD that are then transferred to the city as "rent" for using the complex.

It is in the city's best interest to pursue both types of cost cuts because it will benefit from either one.

But on the other hand, any "cost savings" that are realized only by the redistribution of the existing burden between the existing taxing authorities, be it M.I.S.D. or the 4b Corporation really doesn't do anything for the taxpayers as a whole.

Again, we wish them luck. Here is hoping that the actual demand for the facility that the complex's proponents told us was assuredly there can be found.

I hold no particular love for John McCain, but if where I live, in Culo de Pecos, had a Republican primary, I'd vote for him.

He's irascible, which of course means that he has a temper problem. I've heard that he once got in a screaming match over who got to use a toilet in the exalted Senate john, and John started shouting the f-bomb, in the imperative mood, if you've a grammatical bent.

His record of service to America--refusing to be released before the others were, sticking to the first-in, first-out code of conduct--is honor of a very high order, and can be compared to the great detriment to other people running for president and I'm looking at the Clintons right now, but they're just first to my mind. McCain's honor is more than Romney's, whose flip-flops prove that he is not, despite what National Review says, a conservative but instead the product of consultancy groups.

That said, the position of President is too important to let that his war record be a free pass on all other behavior and attitudes; we must consider the man in toto.

There is much in his record that I do not love and would wish to be otherwise. McCain-Feingold is the worst one, and I had hoped that it would be struck down by the Supremes. No such luck. Also McCain has taken the stance that it would be a good idea to raise taxes against the tobacco industry to fund anti-smoking campaigns. I do not smoke--that, gambling and coke are the only vices that I have not in my interesting life worn the edges off of. And I loathe the smell, but the idea of taxing an industry to do itself in is repulsive and frankly chickenshit. He voted against the Bush tax cuts, saying that they had to be accompanied by a decrease in spending. I understand his thought but money being fungible and politicians being what they are, exacting a pledge not to spend from 535 hog-wild egotists who, as their tenure increases, feel themselves seated closer and closer to the right hand of God, if God is not beneath them already, is foolish. Cut taxes and enjoy growth.

I hold no particular love for John McCain, but if where I live, in Culo de Pecos, had a Republican primary, I'd vote for him.

He's irascible, which of course means that he has a temper problem. I've heard that he once got in a screaming match over who got to use a toilet in the exalted Senate john, and John started shouting the f-bomb, in the imperative mood, if you've a grammatical bent.

His record of service to America--refusing to be released before the others were, sticking to the first-in, first-out code of conduct--is honor of a very high order, and can be compared to the great detriment to other people running for president and I'm looking at the Clintons right now, but they're just first to my mind. McCain's honor is more than Romney's, whose flip-flops prove that he is not, despite what National Review says, a conservative but instead the product of consultancy groups.

That said, the position of President is too important to let that his war record be a free pass on all other behavior and attitudes; we must consider the man in toto.

There is much in his record that I do not love and would wish to be otherwise. McCain-Feingold, his refusal to vote for the Bush tax cuts, saying that they had to be accompanied by a decrease in spending. I understand his thought but money being fungible and politicians being what they are, exacting a pledge not to spend from 535 hog-wild egotists who, as their tenure increases, feel themselves seated closer and closer to the right hand of God, if God is not beneath them already, is foolish. Cut taxes and enjoy growth.

Allan Melvin has died at age 84. I know that you have probably never heard of him, but if you are over the age of 45 you absolutely know him.

Trying to determine who your nominee will be? Wondering if he or she has the staying power to make it past the conventions? Does their current rhetoric match their actions? Looking for a different point of view? Read this. The Texas primary is about 5 weeks away.

The New York Times is reporting:

A Texas cable provider, Grande Communications Holdings, has tapped Waller Capital to evaluate its strategic opportunities, according to The Deal.com. ...... The company could sell for as much as $400 million, The Deal said.

A Denver newspaper columnist is arrested for stalking a story subject. In Cincinnati, a television reporter is arrested on charges of child molestation. A North Carolina newspaper reporter is arrested for harassing a local woman. A drunken Chicago Sun-Times columnist and editorial board member is arrested for wife beating. A Baltimore newspaper editor is arrested for threatening neighbors with a shotgun. In Florida, one TV reporter is arrested for DUI, while another is charged with carrying a gun into a high school. A Philadelphia news anchorwoman goes on a violent drunken rampage, assaulting a police officer. In England, a newspaper columnist is arrested for killing her elderly aunt.

More here.

Theo Caldwell, National Post (Canada) Wednesday, December 26, 2007

An obvious choice can be unnerving. When the apparent perfection of one
option or the unspeakable awfulness of another makes a decision seem too
easy, it is human nature to become suspicious.

This instinct intensifies as the stakes of the give n choice are raised.
American voters know no greater responsibility to their country and to the
world than to select their president wisely. While we do not yet know who
the Democrat and Republican nominees will be, any combination of the
leading candidates from either party will make for the most obvious choice
put to American voters in a generation. To wit, none of the Democrats has
any business being president.

This pronouncement has less to do with any apparent perfection among the
Republican candidates than with the intellectual and experiential paucity
evinced by the Democratic field. "Not ready for prime time," goes the
vernacular, but this does not suffice to describe how bad things are.
Alongside Hillary Clinton, add Barack Obama's kindergarten essays to an
already confused conversation about Dennis Kucinich's UFO sightings,
dueling celebrity endorsements and who can be quickest to retreat from
America's global conflict and raise taxes on the American people, and it
becomes clear that these are profoundly unserious individuals.

To be sure, there has been a fair amount of rubbish and rhubarb on the
Republican side (Ron Paul, call your office), but even a cursory review of
the legislative and professional records of the leading contenders from
each party reveals a disparity akin to adults competing with children.

During World War II American planes set down on some of the South Pacific Islands and from these huge silver birds emerged--things. Things which the natives had never seen, natives who possibly had never seen a wheel. Things that they wanted: useful things, such as tents, food, and shovels. Things that they couldn't make or make as well. The Americans set up control towers, which the natives hadn't seen, and talked into radios, which, again, the natives hadn't seen, and goods dropped from the sky.

So the islanders thought that the goods came from the gods, and that therefore the gods would so bless them if they made, from what they had on hand, a great bird and a control tower and a radio and so on.

They made a fetish of the paraphernalia of the west--radios made of cocoanut shells and bamboo, fake uniforms with "USA" on them, control towers made of bamboo--all trying to coax out of the sky the goods that the airplanes had dropped during the war, but which were no longer being dropped because the war was over. But the Americans, mostly, had performed rituals which caused goods to fall. The islanders performed the same rituals, using mock-ups of American devices, calling on cocoanut radios in bamboo control towers, hoping to get goods to fall. It did not work. Sometimes they burned their crops to hasten the gods on, to bring them cargo. This was a cargo cult.

From the Houston Chronicle (AP Story, January 16, 2008, 10:15PM)

Democratic officials filed a complaint in federal court Wednesday and asked a judge to declare Midland City Councilman Bill Dingus, a Democrat, eligible to run.

The Republican Party of Texas sent a written notice this week to the state Democratic Party suggesting Dingus couldn't challenge Craddick, a Midland Republican, because he didn't resign from the City Council before filing to run for the House.

As to not leave you with the impression Craddick himself did this:

Craddick's office said the speaker had nothing to do with the letter received by the state Democratic Party from Republicans.

Of Note: Thanks to the wonder of the internet this is lighting up the RSS feeds for Midland, Texas, from multiple news outlets around the state with references to a story which will run in tomorrow's MRT, but the story isn't up on mywesttexas.com, yet.

Kinky Friedman said that Carol Keeton Mao Rylander Beria McClellan Grandma Dear Leader Strayhorn would win the governorship if all her ex-husbands voted for her.

If all the bimbos erupted (pace Betsy Wright)...

For all the talk about a "Midland Machine" in the last Mayoral election, it seems the good folks over at the Texas Observer (a left leaning Molly Ivins invention) have decided to expose the purported "Midland Machine" that is gearing up to defend Craddick's Speakership. In the course of the article, they even manage to throw Tom DeLay under the bus another time or two.

...the speaker's race is as convoluted as it is crucial. Since House members are the only ones who can elect the speaker, Texas voters are relegated to helping choose one of the House's 150 speaker electors. The game is made more circuitous by a 35-year-old law designed to prevent representatives from bribing their way onto the speaker's dais. This law prohibits wannabe speakers from giving anything of value to House candidates seeking powers that include electing the next speaker. Consequently, it falls to mercenaries, conscripts, and surrogates to prosecute this high-stakes battle.

Though we at the Well tend to shy away from calling out locals who are involved in the machinations of Local and State politics, the folks at the Observer aren't shy:

Those tracking Texas' biggest pending political bout would be wise to keep an eye on the political activities surrounding the likes of Tim Dunn, Ernest Angelo, David Porter, and Jeff Norwood. Midlanders understand better than most of us that what lies beneath the surface can make or break fortunes - political and otherwise.

JW's contributors don't hold a candle to the Observer when it comes to speculation and innuendo on the suspected backroom dealings and power of a "Midland Machine." Ohhh... and BTW, they're not a Blog, they are an award winning main stream publication.

Whaddaya mean, that I won't do anything with the big Mac confabulation going on? It didn't take me long to look at the thing.

This is what is being touted as being really, er, kewl, as one person I really like says so I hope she's being funny. The MacBook Air. The size is what grabs the eye but more important are some other things. One, the elimination of the optical drive, to save space of course, but also to make everything wireless. You can get an outrigger optical drive, just as you could get a floppy drive (remember those?) with the first iMac, but the software disk has a program, usable on other Macs or The Other Machine which lets that optical drive serve. And thing has no built-in Ethernet port either. One could say that Jobs started the death of the CD--I hope not for compressed audio bites--with the iPod, and here is another jab at physical media, including the DVD. (For a fascinating article on Google, which worships page views and destroys the distinction between content v Apple, which, through iTunes, respects content, see The Weekly Standard.)

What is more interesting, in the high-priced, the hideously overpriced $3100 model, is its large storage: a 64GB Flash drive, the sort in your camera, instead of the normal hard drive. The Intel Santa Rosa chip set has had drivers on silicon just for this for over a year; I knew it was coming and was waiting for a manufacturer to make one. A new firm, Crucial.com, was just formed and I suspect that this Mac was the reason. Others to follow. This, folks, is the way to go. Faster, more reliable, cooler, less power. And do you really want something hot and throbbing in your lap?

But what is the harbinger of the future of computing, and this is not hyperbole, is the large touch-pad. Apple's MacBook Pro, like the one I'm using now, has had the ability to understand two points of contact for a while, but it's an evolutionary improvement, rather than a quantum one. The iPhone, with its German touch-screen, pointed the way, to my mind, to the future. The iPhone's pinching and flicking motions are instantly natural, as is the feel of images "bouncing" off walls; dials which rotate past the click-detent, if there were one, and then click back into place. Setting the alarm is actually pleasant. Sensual. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I lead a simple life.

The MacBook Air is, I think, the second generation of this technology, employing in addition to the pinching and its obverse to expand, a three-fingered swipe, which flicks web pages, and I'm sure in the future, document pages, You can even rotate a photo by--rotating it.

Imagine this technology with a tablet computer. 2009? This, folks, is where portable computing is going.

The guided tour is here.

Expect the usual lull in postings to singles/dating websites.

Note to City Hall: This would be too much transparency in city government.

"Put the whole [contract with the new City manager] on the city's Web site, beat them to the punch," [City Attorney Keith Stretcher] said.

First let me submit that it is what is contained in the contract and not the fact that the contract is posted on the city's website that would likely determine whether a "punch" was coming or not.

Having said that, I believe that the move towards greater "transparency" (or whatever you would want to call it) is good. In the papered past, it would have taken a fair amount of effort to make available a copy of, say, the 2007-2008 city budget, for anyone who was curious enough to want to see it. Need to see the city code? Here it is.

Technology, for the most part has made it so that the only reason a document related to city or county business is not available is because a conscious decision has been made NOT to make it available.

For you map freaks out there, you will want to go have a look at the city's new interactive GIS Server for realtime mapping. You can view maps with all sorts of different data overlays from resident or development information to crime information.

It took no small effort nor expense to provide this service and the city is to be commended for doing it. It tooks some extra money, but the city has to maintain this information anyway and now we don't have to go down to city hall and take up some of the city's staff time to have a look at it. It is a great leveraging of information that they already had.

For those of you not familiar with the city's web site I suggest you visit it. There is a lot more useful information there than you realize.

But......(and you knew this was coming)

But here is what is missing from "Official Midland's" websites. Generally, these are all things that almost certainly already exist in digital form and could be published to the web with no more than a conversion to a PDF document and uploaded. Or at the very most would have to be scanned to a PDF and then uploaded. Either way, it would take a lot less expertise, time, and talent on the part of the city staff in charge of the website than did the interactive GIS mapping app that I love to play with.

If the city's website is lacking anything it is the ability for the public to go and research things yet to be decided.

For example, the city has shelled out big bucks over the years for various consultant's reports on things like the sports complex and, most recently, the feasibility study for a new or expanded Midland Center. Up to now we have had to read a really brief summary of these reports in the local paper or, as like in the "old days", go down to city hall and request a copy, taking up copy expense and staff time. Truly, does it make sense to announce on your website a public hearing on "Subject A" but not have a link so that you can actually read the big, expensive study done on "Subject A".

Literally, with a couple of clicks and 5 minutes time, the city's webmaster could post each and every consultants report received by the city. Click and upload (or scan, click and upload) is all it takes.

The Midland Development Corporation has kicked around the idea of starting a blog to combat our own "Joe Smith's I Hate Midland and Everything About It Blog." Let me suggest that they first merely try providing detailed information on their operations...complete financial statements to begin with...but once an economic development package is negotiated and executed why could they not dedicate a page on their website to each deal they have negotiated that had the following things:

1) A copy of the signed agreement or contract so that the terms can be seen by all of us that are paying the incentive to the incentee.

2) A fairly detailed executive summary of the rationale behind the incentive package. How much, how long, and...most importantly...a detalied explanation of why tax money needed to be spent on these incentive packages, i.e. why it would not have happened without a subsidy from the taxpayer. MDC Board members could take turns writing these "majority opinions" in defense of each package.

3) Ongoing updates on each project. The Countrywide package fell apart long ago and you can still go to the Midland Development Corporation's website and there is no mention of it. Anywhere. This makes me crazy. I presume that the Trace Engines incentive deal is working out as they had hoped but there is not any mention of that, either. Which should make the MDC Board crazy. If you go the MDC's site right now the newest news item is dated 11/30/2007. The one before that is dated 09/06/2007. And both of those news items are cut-and-pastes from the Reporter-Telegram's web site.

But while the MDC website almost seems designed to hide information concerning their operations, the city (by and large) is doing a good job with the amount of information they are providing through the website. They just need to be better at publishing the stuff that their inner selves would kind of like us to not see until later....if you know what I mean.

In fact, that ought to be the rule of thumb: If [Insert Governmental Agency Here] has a sense that a piece of information might cause some trouble if it got out to the public then it must be published*.

(* This does not apply to the usual practices concerning personnel or ongoing negotiations.)

On December 29 I made a few ungenerous, ungenerous because true, comments about a certain Dave Lindorff, a blood-thirsty leftist who wants to kill people who disagree with him politically. He tried to lie to say that it was a satire, but satire requires a departure from form.

Michael Moore openly lamented that Osama bin Laden didn't target people in Red States, in other words, that people who disagreed with him politically weren't killed instead of his fellow members of the left-wing sodality.

The Troofers are those left-wing nut jobs who protest daily outside the World Trade Center site moonhowling that it was an inside job put up by, you guessed it, Bushitler/Cheney/the Military Industrial Complex/right-wing-demon du jour. People who are protecting them from people who want to kill them.

As I have said before in these pages, many times, Islamism is a splinter of a warlike religion and it states quite unequivocally, and for those of you in Rio Linda, "unequivocal" means so that you cannot possibly misunderstand unless you're determined to misunderstand, that they want to die to kill Americans, and that they want to impose Sharia law on the world, even if means the death of mankind.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Bitch.

All right, I'm being the bitch--so sue me. But I'll give the woman one credit: she's mean enough to be able to look at foreign leaders in the eye and tell them exactly what she thinks. I worry, ceaselessly, endlessly, that she is mean enough to tell me what to do and I believe that deep in her heart of hearts she thinks that she can lose weight by countermanding the law of gravity.

But foreign leaders are properly concerned with the welfare of their countries, even if, especially if, as so often happens in the third world, they perceive their countries as being their own despotisms. Think Bob Mugabe. And since they understand that they're in it for Number One, meaning them, it is only fitting that we understand it that our president is in it for us, and not the sort of pat-a-cake touchy-feely president that the moonbats so love, in their insecure neediness, their fear that people who might hit back will not love them.

And to that end we need a president who has no fear of making people whose interests are not coterminous with ours unhappy. And she wouldn't mind doing that a bit.

This is one good venue for the exercise of the meanness which she has cornered the market on.

There. I said something good about Our Empress. Good, that is, for me.

If you watch the business news, the former Star Incentee of the MDC, CourtryWide is no more.

Hello Bank of America.

When I close my eyes and think of a Ron Paul rally, this is what I see.

I am, by far and large, a conservative. I don't like change for the sake of change because I'm a great believer in the law of unintended consequences: even the best-intentioned people can think hard and really screw things up.

This is why, I think, that the French are on their sixth republic in less time than we have had one, and this current one may fail soon. The French disdain Anglo-Saxons for our instinctive distrust of intellectuals, whom they love. And they have Ecole nationale d'administration publique, which graduates fewer than 100 people a year, and these graduates go on to run France. Into the ground. I can think of nothing more dangerous than deciding that we'll train a group of the very best and brightest and entrust them with our futures, and buzz off and leave them to it. The result is hubris.

I do not disapprove of change entirely, or really all that much. I tend, however, to like it slow and organic.

It is utterly banal to say that the entire Bible is vital to Western civilization. What a lot of people do not know is that virtuous Biblical characters would often not be virtuous modern characters in these times. Check out Exodus 21: you'll find that if you buy a Hebrew slave you can only keep him as a slave for six years, but if you give him a wife--the woman is chattel you see--the wife and the children shall be slaves too, and if he won't leave his family, then he goes before the judges and has his ear pierced with an awl and he is a slave for life.

These were the rules that the devout followed in the Bronze Age. And these are for Hebrews--I assume that gentiles don't get out after the sixth year. And women? Never.

Quoth Texas Soulja

Don't know if anybody saw Matthews this morning discussing the polls. I agree with his assertion that the cause for the anomaly is that people lied to the pollsters about their intentions, because they knew "Obama" was what they wanted to hear. But then, once they got into the secret ballot room, Archie Bunker came out.

Yes, that is the conventional wisdom and I do not doubt that's what people did. But analyze the logic of this.

People, and I'm sure that this is white people, and white male people, are now so afraid of the race question that they will do anything to avoid being considered a bigot--even making a judgment. I've written on this before and am proofing a bull on this to be published shortly.

I have heard people accused of racism if they did not instantly fall over themselves proclaiming a black's superiority in anything--it is of course a polemic used to silence people, to quiet an argument which might be inconvenient.

I can see it rising out of "Some of my best friends are Jews but..." (For reference, an introduction to a statement which might be considered offensive is called a "sir reverence." That's the second meaning. The first meaning is a lump of human feces. But I digress with a good digression.) And that statement about Jewish friends was, in general, the prolegomenon to a racist remark.

Once I heard someone stutter about the answering-machine message of my friend Ruby, trying to imply without saying it that Ruby was black. Well, yes. Big and black and smart and lots of fun and we used to go dancing in Midland and Garfield's on Garfield in 1985 saw one or two things. And I've heard people afraid to pronounce the word "gay"; well the word can be used. "Jewish" was used for decades instead of "Jew"--Jews are reclaiming the word Jew. People are so terrified of being called Archie Bunker that they lie. And don't even use perfectly good words.

I've heard feminists use this tactic to silence people too: "You're just a sexist if you don't agree that..." A version of this was used by the sculptor of Our Many Titted Empress' bust in the New York Museum of Sex in which he proclaimed that men are afraid of her sexual power. (Where's the barf bag?) No, men are afraid because she looks like one Lucy in Peanuts--that little girl who just begs to be backhanded.

This accusation of racism or sexism has become a polemical device of no little power, used to silence anyone who dares to render an opinion about an accredited victim group. An opinion that is anything but fawning. An opinion which includes a judgment. It is a vicious blow meant to destroy one's ability to think and to render a judgment of value. Relativism run amok--again.

Not only is this a sleazy rhetorical device and an assault on principle, but turn it on its head. It implies that it is impossible for any white male to do anything better than any black or woman, or black woman--a twofer--who decides to try it.

And that's bigoted.

Fox News gives us

Men Wheel Dead Roommate to Check Cashing Store, Arrested for Trying to Cash His Social Security Check

Hillary. The Movie.

You gotta love some things about our Empress. It's so seldom that we see perfection. Even Hitler wasn't perfectly awful--he got Herbert von Karajan to form a really good string section in the Berlin Philharmonic. But Our Empress is perfection of her own sort.

No, no, no. She's not Hitler. She does not have that genocidal rage. People in Arkansas kept dying around the Clintons, but that is not the same thing and I am not being sarcastic or snide. I am merely stating that I do not find a single solitary thing about her that I like. There are things I like about her husband. But her? Zero. Zip. Nada. Zilch.

Except that this, her blubbering, is funny. What a horrible actress, even worse than her with the Christmas presents. Well, to give the devil her due, consider the hurdles she must jump. I have a new respect for the fine acting in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Mark my words: Algore is the most powerful man in the world. He may have lost the 2000 election and he cracked up over it--the weight gain, that ill-considered beard, and you can see the loopiness when you compare his public bulls now with anything you can get off YouTube in say 1992 when he was in touch with reality. I actually agreed with him once or twice and he wasn't the calculating fraud he is now. But he hadn't broken then. Now he's even past the flight path of the moonbats. If you believe his stated aims. And would the Gorobot lie? Five times before breakfast just to keep in practice. I bet he lies to his dog. How is Tipper?

Here's a man who has managed to bang the drum on this Climate Change crap--more perhaps on that scam later; even the shifting nomenclature screams fraud--and major corporations and governments are falling into line with him. And the environment is quite beside the point, of course. It's the utter complete thrill of wielding more power than any other person in the history of the world.

Imagine this: controlling more wealth than any one else and the dollar is a fungible unit of power. And likely to have more power than anyone else, even in proportion to the wealth in the world. Stalin was said to be the richest person in the history of the world for he owned the Soviet Union. But if memory serves, Texas has a bigger economy than Russia does now, and Texas has the number two economy in the US and the US hasn't gibbeted this carrion but instead all the usual coercive suspects are lining up to do His will, and there are the Euroweenies, even the normally sensible Brits, falling all over themselves in a silly/serious/sententious leftie orgasm of "doing the right thing" which is properly read as making much noise about fulfilling their responsibilities to Mankind but while in reality stealing as much freedom and money from people as possible while telling them that it's for their own good. So what's new in that?

How would you like for the thermostat that controls the heating and cooling in your house to be set by city hall and not by you?

Sounds far-fetched, huh?

Not so much.

So how far back do you have to go to find a Midland City Council that is made up of a majority of registered Democrats?

We are just past the 20th anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom whipped the university for teaching the idea that in essence there are no cultures or ideas which are intrinsically better than other ones. That it is foolish to read the Great Books, written by wise people, thought to hold the secret to the Good Life, the examined life, the life informed by the thinking. Prestigious universities had since the 60s gradually managed to do away with core courses, which would educate students in the best of Western thought.

This is relativism. And it is the code of the day, when it is improper to say that one culture is better than another. Notice that it is impossible to say that Western civilization, and in particular, Anglo-American civilization, is better than other civilizations.

During my vacation, I passed through the ancestral home of the Carancahua Indians. Their idea of medicine was smearing fish oil on their bodies to repel bugs, they didn't have the wheel, and they ate each other. No written language. And they ate people. The Spanish explorers, admittedly looking for OPM and as much of it as they could get, still had in their backgrounds a culture which was roughly at the same time giving us Michelangelo and da Vinci. Notre Dame had been up for a while. Aristotle and Plato had taught us to think about the world and our place in it, to examine ourselves and our lives about 2000 years before that.

On September 11, 2001, something we all know about happened. This came from another culture, another world view.

The left at first condemned 9/11 as being horrible but you'll notice that they do not condemn the culture which made it possible and which demands it. In Egypt, the Islamic Group launched a campaign against tourism and Western culture in general, burning and bombing theaters, bookstores, and banks, and killing Christians. "We believe in the principle of establishing Sharia, even if this means the death of all mankind." It is, in today's culture, impossible to suggest that Islam is inferior to Western civilization. Although it manifestly is. It is suicidal not to say it is inferior.

Now I hear calls to elect Barack Hussein Obama as being the candidate who would be most pleasing to other world leaders. Who do not need to be tended to that way. I for one do not find it compelling to drop trou and bend over for Europeans. Angela Merkel in Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy in France have made nice noises to the US, and it's not because we sent them Hallmark cards. These are politicians who have looked at their countries and have seen their problems and have seen the problems with statism. In this they are our natural allies, operating on self-interest. I don't have a problem with that, because once you know that, (1) you can figure out which way they'll jump; (2) you don't feel hurt and angry all the time by having unwarranted hopes dashed. And (3) it's the adult view. Wanting to be hugged is a child's view. There is a word for preferring the good opinion of people one is talking with over serving the interests of one's principals and it is betrayal.

But, these people being who they are, how could it be otherwise? When all cultures are relative, when it is taboo to say that Western Civilization, particularly the Anglo-American one, really is better? We are the reason that slavery is not standard across the world. We are the economic engine of the world. We are the rights engine of the world. And this came from something--the ideas of the last several millennia. Which are no longer being revered in academia and no one is doing the heavy lifting of defending them.

I suppose I ought not be surprised at the road we've taken. First, relativism. Then the dismissal of the wise thought of the last millennia. Next, the elevation of popular entertainment to the status of culture. Following this, the inability to judge value, substituting tastes for principles. And this leads to the lack of courage to defend the good. And of course there will be sneering at people who do defend American values because they show up the morally lazy and culturally bankrupt. This is called deracination.

And so, from these deracinated people, who think our culture is no better than cannibals or murderous religious extremists, we have Barack Hussein Obama. The candidate of the needy, for the needy, and from the needy.

On this vacation I've been dipping into The New Criterion, a publication of small circulation. It's rather deep water for me, since I have no training in literature or the arts, or none that is significant. A friend once said that I should not dismiss my eclectic knowledge but I think that he was being kind, and did not consider that, at least in academic disciplines, eclectic means patchy--deep in some areas, shallow in others, and directed by self-indulgence. I can, for example, produce on command no fewer than six recordings of Mozart's 20th piano concerto but it took twenty years for me to really understand what was meant by "hubris" although I knew the Greek it came from. So The New Criterion can be slow going. But worth it.

The November issue is a review of the 20th anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. I've not read it, and do not have the patience for it but I do have the patience for commentaries on it, and for exegeses of it too. And from what I can make out, his idea is that in essence America is being destroyed by relativism, the idea that one culture or idea is as good as another. It's a nonsense of course.

Bloom whipped the university for teaching the idea that in essence there are no cultures or ideas which are intrinsically better than other ones. That it is foolish to read the Great Books, something that other great minds, such as Mortimer Adler, had thought held the secret to the Good Life, the examined life, the life informed by the thinking of bright people over the last several millennia. Good universities, or those perceived to be good, had since the 60s gradually managed to do away with core courses, which would educate students in the best of Western thought. My own university, Rice, had, by the 70s, replaced core subjects with Distribution, in which all courses were placed in groups, and there was a formula which you could apply which would assure that you could graduate as long as you had the courses for your major and enough courses spread out to meet Distribution. I for example never took history or English, thinking that I could read them on my own. I was therefore never subjected to the rigors of analytical reading, and until my forties read as though I were reading a thriller: a terrible loss. To meet distribution I took Latin, French, Greek and German--which qualified me for graduation and contributed mightily to the irritating tropes that I drop in here. I might know the word hubris in the Greek but wouldn't understand what the ancient Greeks meant by it, not having studied their plays. Which would have done me more good in translation to get the idea that those old Greeks had, no fools they, rather than struggling with the grammar and vocabulary. There is value in core courses.

And so I was not grounded in Western thought. And Rice was, at the time, mostly a science college, with students there for the math and science. Imagine a student going to another school, wanting to know what others had thought would lead to the Good Life in the past, oh, 3000 years, and being told that Plato was not as important as James Baldwin. Because Plato was an old dead white male and James Baldwin is none of them. And Baldwin liked looking at comely young men, so that was a twofer. Well, Plato did too but that didn't count. This is not to say that Baldwin had nothing to say; he did. But not to the exclusion of other, better writers.

After the upset loss to Barack Hussein Obama and Senator Edwards, that sleazebag trial attorney whose pimping his wife's terminal illness seems to have paid off, Our Empress in Waiting, Senator Clinton, gave a concession speech in which she declare it good news for the Democratic party in that people were showing interest in it.

The Kos Kiddies are, I suspect, to blame for her loss. I saw one moonbat with trembling lip complaining that Our Empress was not sufficiently left-wing--perhaps she had not installed razor wire on the top of her campaign bus. Some of them had determined to take her down which frankly bothered me for her negatives are the highest in the history of polling negatives and therefore would make her easier to beat, even by Mike Huckabee, and I have some reservations about him.

I have googled to find if the triage wards of the Des Moines hospitals were full after her defeat, but cannot find anything. But still I strongly suspect that blood was let.

2008 is a watershed year for our country. This presidential election cycle will be critical to the direction the country takes in 2009 and beyond.

Bedrock conservative principles are few and far between in the campaigns as I have watched so far. I remain optimistic that the ideas that the country was founded upon, since proven, remain relevant and attractive to at least a large minority, if not a majority, of its citizens.

Fred Thompson is taking this case to the people, via the internet, in the last few days prior to the first vote toward the nomination, the Iowa Caucus. While he is speaking to Iowans, he is talking to the rest of us as well. Watch candidate Thompson's video here or here.

Update: Just to add a little fuel to the fire and keep the comments coming, read this.

It is a shame that many of the commenters here have been long trained to not take a political speech at face value. That is what caused many to discount the words and works of Saint Ronald, to misunderestimate George W. Bush and now to discount what Fred Thompson has to say, preferring to focus on his head motion and whether or not he was reading.

Occasionally someone will come into your life that means and does what he or she says. Don't blow them off because you are not accustomed to dealing with someone who walks the (or their) talk. And certainly do not discount what they are saying just because you don't walk your talk.