Take a look at this MyWestTexas.com article on the recent Amateur Softball Association tournament held at the Ezell Softball Complex recently.

The numbers are pretty amazing:

The ASA 14 and Under Nationals has attracted 86 teams from about 18 states to the Freddie Ezell Softball Complex at Ulmer Park this week.

The week-long event is generating an estimated $44,000 in hotel and motel taxes for Midland, said Nancy Swallow, the sports director for the Chamber of Commerce Convention and Visitors Bureau.

According to her department's calculations, 4,876 room nights have been generated with 1,900 attendees staying in Midland hotels -- some checking in as early as Monday.

As far as a return on investment, the Ezell Softball Complex is head and shoulders above The Lemon Bowl.

If we must spend tax dollars on sports venues it would be better to create several high quality venues that can be used and promoted extensively by the masses.....the unpaid masses....rather than big complexes that only a very few events can utilize and that just don't draw any people.

With that in mind here is my suggestion to County officials regarding the Horseshoe: The next capital purchase you make needs to be some sort of softer flooring that can be easily laid down and picked back up. Then go out and buy as many volleyball net set-ups as will fit in the building.

Then let the local volleyball parents/fans/organizations go to work bringing in people for their's and the county's mutual benefit.

One big volleyball tournament will bring in more people than the constant parade of Gun and Blade shows combined.

McCain's message is that I don't "look like the other presidents on the currency"

Money Generated Courtesy of Festisite!

With about one in every 100 people suffering from epilepsy, Ruiz said, they estimate about 10,000 suffer in just the Midland area, though they're currently only serving about 80 clients who come from Midland, Odessa and surrounding areas.

I think a decimal point was misplaced.

There are things you can do individually, though, to save energy. Making sure your tires are properly inflated -- simple thing. But we could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling -- if everybody was just inflating their tires? And getting regular tune-ups? You'd actually save just as much!

The Chosen One's energy policy amounts to a Public Service Announcement from 1974.

I'm comforted.

Oh, yeah, and just chock full of Hope.

When Nansy Pelosi was first made Speaker of the House after the disastrous November election, I indulged in a spasm of hatred for the woman. After all, her smug left-coast elitism, her solipsism (is that redundant?) and most of all her self-righteous meddling and her willingness to interfere in anything so long as it is flashy and showy and, in what she is pleased to call her mind, makes her look good.

She was on The View. Elisabeth Hasselbeck had the guts to say the truth, the the Iraqi Surge was actually, er, working. That casualties were lower.

Some of it may be seen here.

Now Pelosi is merely a frivolous vote whore. Nothing that she has said has indicated to me that she has any interest in anything more than her posturing, which is calculated to play to her blinkered, leftist electorate; consequences mean no more to her than to Paris Hilton, but her wantonness is so much more destructive. Pelosi's remarks above are a nonsense, birdlime to the touchy-feely crowd who believe that a group hug will solve all problems. Odd, isn't it, that these are the people who are called useful idiots. And it's true that a group hug will solve all problems: that is if you're the one who's being hugged by useful idiots while your twin brother is making bombs which the useful idiots think won't be made or used.

I have a friend, a medical researcher who gets drugs past the FDA. He had used her in her capacity as a private attorney in the past and told me that she was intelligent and competent. He now has utterly no use for her. He is no fool.

If power can corrupt so entirely, turning her from a useful person into an autoproctological demagogue, it means that we are never safe.

Oh. I knew that.

--------------------------

Addendum July 30

Although I esteem this blog, no one could conflate it with The London Review of Books. And there's nothing wrong with that. Nonetheless this may be the first time that anyone has cited The National Enquirer for a story on the marital fidelity of that loathsome ambulance chaser John Edwards. I cite it because it's too much fun not to.

Warning: although NE states that Fox News has independently (their emphasis) confirmed its story, I don't find it on the Fox website, or at least in a reasonable time. And NE is not noted for sterling journalistic standards, although before you sneer too much, remember CBS and Dan Rather. His betrayal is worse than their sensationalism, nor is NE as tendentious or political as the sensationalism of Michael Moore, who, like all hard-left people, has designs on your your life, money, thought and freedoms, all of them, 24/7.

And in the ranking of supermarket tabloids, it is possibly the top of the heap, which is like saying that Oprah is the top of the heap of talk-show hosts, or that heart attack is top of the heap of terminal diseases.

Next time you're in line, you might pick up The Weekly World News. It is the single funniest thing on earth. Twenty years ago they were obviously making it all up, but now they don't even pretend that they're not. Which means that they're either writing for snotty people like me or that the unwashed masses are, in their experience, that credulous. Am example: "Fear of AIDS slashes vampire attacks." Yes, they're writing for an audience that gullible.

But then the university educated are going to vote for the Obamessiah. Who, actually, is the credulous demographic? When you take into consideration the supposed, and I emphasize supposed, intellectual abilities of the target audience.

I'm so confused. I may tear up my degree from Pricey Private University, go to Wally World and get a wife-beater shirt, a tattoo, grow interesting facial hair, and pitch the wine cellar in preference to a pony keg. My peeps might have more sense.

The London Times has a rather nice piece on The Man Who Would Be President, and if you read what Gerald Baker wrote, you'll find something which is not possible in America in a mainstream paper--it would be sneered out of existence by the smug elites closing ranks to protect the Anointed One from criticism. Or a question of substance. Or a funny look.

But times do change. Instead of having his ass walk on palm fronds, this hauls his ass:

Perhaps he feels it would be premature to put an American flag on the plane, or perhaps the change we can believe in is a new flag. Well, change, change, change. Just what sort of change? Going where? What's the roadmap? Would you vote for a president as a teenager goes shopping with daddy's credit card, not knowing what she'll come back with? Evidently more than half of the likely voters will.

Think of another person who goes by the single letter O. Sad, isn't it, when a talk-show host is of more substance than the Democratic presidential candidate. And she, at least, uses her own money to do good.

Fair Havens has reached their goal, but there is no reason not to continue to donate to this great cause.

As a native Midlander, one of the things that makes me proud is the philanthropic and community service spirit that is a major part of the fabric of our community. I know I owe the development of my "servant leadership" heart to the generosity of many Midlanders and Midland intuitions. I think there is no better example of that spirit, than Midland Fair Havens.

I've know about Midland Fair Havens since they started accepting clients in 1998. At the time I was single, and heavily active in a local Singles Ministry. I had the privilege to be involved in the spiritual and social support of several of Fair Haven's first clients. Most of what I did at the time was small and simple, but looking back, small, simple and kind meant a lot to those women and children.

Today, Midlanders can do something small and simple, give a few dollars. That small, and simple act will make a big difference in the lives of several single women and their children right here in Midland.

So what's the rare opportunity? I've volunteered to spend some time on the lift with Jimmy the "P". So come by in the middle of the night and drop a few bucks on a very worthy cause.

The well written story by Courtney Bacalso in the MRT today does a real good job of outlining the difficulties TRACE is experiencing and why they need to amend their development agreement.

From the story, it seems the investment in the aircraft maintenance program at MC has developed a good pool of skilled craftsmen and mechanics to produce the engines. Their engineering problem, won't be rectified quickly, or easily.

Developing engineering talent isn't a short time horizon process. Unlike funding community college based job training programs for skilled craftsmen, aircraft mechanics and call center employees, you can't produce engineers in a couple of years. Professional publications estimate the post K-12 education and intern experience investment needed to produce a competent professional engineer is approximately 10 years. On top of that, many individuals won't even attempt to become Engineers without receiving exceptional math and physical science instruction starting in the 7th or 8th grade. All the hype about the lack of engineering talent in the United States is real.

So how hard is it for TRACE to find aerospace engineers? Well, the State of Texas has 155 Professional Aerospace Engineers currently licensed, with close to 1/2 living out of state. In contrast, there are 2,755 Professional Petroleum Engineers and 2,705 Professional Chemical Engineers licensed in the State of Texas.

TRACE has the unenviable task of hunting in a very small pool for aerospace engineers willing to relocate to Midland to oversee their plant so they can bring additional production on-line, which is where the bulk of their job creation comes from.

For completeness, TRACE may not have to hire Licensed Professional Engineers to oversee their plant, due to government and industry exemptions to licensure. This is why I cite Petroleum and Chemical Engineers for comparison, since these fields, like aerospace have lots of engineers who are exempt from licensure. If we have trouble getting enough petroleum engineers in West Texas, imagine how hard it is to find aerospace engineers when the pool of qualified individuals is about 200 times smaller.

Here are some figures pulled from the latest campaign finance filings regarding each candidate's Midland-based donors:

MyWestTexas.com has more here.

A new bumper sticker from the Tennessee Republican Party.

From the Midland Development Corporation July 25 Agenda:

Consider a motion authorizing the President of the Midland Development Corporation to negotiate and execute an amendment to the existing economic development agreement between the Midland Development Corporation and Trace Engines, L.P.; said amendment may modify or reduce the employment and/or letter of credit obligations of Trace Engines, L.P. under said agreement or other terms of the agreement.

This agenda item is kind of vague, and could mean anything.

Which brings up an interesting point, why aren't potential changes to an existing economic development agreement publicized before the meeting? It isn't like there is some "potential economic deal" to protect. In essence, the MDC is considering a material change to a public funding agreement and it would be nice to know what the potential change is and what precipitated that change.

From MyWestTexas.com:

Burning carcass of electrocuted squirrel cited as cause of blaze

Three structures were destroyed and one firefighter sent to the hospital after an electrocuted squirrel started a grassfire Tuesday evening.

Fire crews found the squirrel's body below the power line's transformer in the 2800 block of West County Road 116 and said the burning carcass likely ignited the grass when it fell to the ground.....

[Midland Fire Department Battalion Chief Ken] Whiting said electrocuted animals start more grassfires than people are aware of and that the heat, wind and overgrown brush helped propel this fire to a higher level than most started by animals.

I wonder if all those dry tumbleweeds over at Eric's new place were placed by Squirrels waiting for the right moment to use their new tactics?

I am awaiting, with bated breath, the 3G iPhone that I ordered. You'd think that they'd be able to find the odd few thousand Chinese to make them, so that I wouldn't be inconvenienced. I realize that most people are saner than I am and don't abandon a perfectly serviceable iPhone for one with so few extra tweaks, but if you play with Google maps using GPS and WiFi, you will be hooked. And who knows? The satnav on my car might go out. Again.

Now the worry. If you've not used the iPhone, it has a wonderfully intelligent method of typing, with a virtual keyboard. It's small, perforce, and it makes guesses, often right ones, of the word that you meant, even when you don't hit the right keys but their neighbors. If it makes a guess you have the ability to reject its correction, and it learns. It will also autocomplete a word for you if it sees no alternative.

I was so pleased this morning to learn that it has embraced the word "moonbat."

Now. Will I have to train the new one?

According to MyWestTexas.com, the Midland City Council denied a specific use permit to some investors who wanted to open a bar in the Village Shopping Center at Garfield & Wall.

As one of the first developments to start the retail/office exodus from our City Center, this intersection is suffering like other parts of our fair community, with the large, empty Folgers/HeartPlace building, empty store fronts, and the abandoned bank building across the street.

From the quotes, it appears the Council was not deterred in its efforts to validate every study, focus group and wish list that has the development of entertainment and night life as a high priority for the Community as a whole. I'm sure the project would have gone forward in one of our economic opportunity zones like Downtown, ClayDesta/MC or the Airport. Since it wasn't in one of those, I suppose the 70% response of people opposed who received notice and the 90 petition signatures to block the permit had weight.

"While we are denying it, I strongly recommend that you do not halt your efforts to open your business," Councilman Michael Trost said. "We need entertainment like yours."

Councilman John James said downtown Midland would be a better location for something like this.

The developers seemed nonplussed about the idea:

However, the businesses partners, who intend to still open their venue at another location, said they are setting their sights somewhere in north Midland where "their target clientele live." (Emphasis mine)

I wonder if somebody forgot to dangle a check to help the developers change their plans? If they did, does that mean no amount of money will spur nightlife development in Downtown Midland?

Maybe the developers could have taken the tact the Blue Ridge Apartment complex did with Whitman/Plantation Hills residents and just keep submitting and submitting forcing the council to turn down key components of the community development and master plan again and again and again.

By now you've heard that Senator Phil Gramm said

You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession

We have sort of become a nation of whiners, you just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.

To my mind this so banal and obvious that it needs no remark. But it of course became a campaign issue and Senator Obama weighed in, in his featherweight way, stating that we already had a Dr. Phil. This is more evidence, not that evidence was lacking, that Obama really is a nullity--a luxury brand sold to the shallow and the self-righteous who want a talking mirror of themselves on the television for four or eight years.

Obama's response is proof that Gramm hit the nail on the head, or as Jeeves said, "Rem acu tetigisti." Even the completely evanescent stories of P. G. Wodehouse seem as deep as Spinoza when compared to the utterance of He Who Would Be President, conflating a professor of economics, one of the most sensible senators we've had, with that bumptious charlatan, that television mind quack with the glutinous voice.

America is a nation of whiners, and it is the direct result of the politics of personal fulfillment and radical individualism. It is the result of the left's relentless politicization of everything--"Render unto Caesar" is a wise statement because it implies that some things just aren't in Caesar's purview and are our own responsibility. The modern political animal expects there to be a political solution to everything. Have a bad hair day? President Obama will set up a department for Bad Hair Days. This is the Nanny state writ large.

UPDATE: Welcome! arrivals from Michelle Malkin and HotAir.com. Be sure and click on the t-shirt to see the larger version of the image. It is easy to miss a lot of the gag by just viewing the small image.

Michelle Malkin is holding a "Design the Obama World Tour T-Shirt" contest and since I am a sucker for just such contests here is my entry.

Click on the T-Shirt for a larger image.

In the comments section of this post it is observed that Craig Anderson devoted a good portion of his morning radio show to the costs associated with the operation of the Midland Horseshoe...a story broken here on Jessica's Well...but that he never would go so far as to mention us by name, rather he would merely refer to "a local website."

So how does one go about the problem of being referred to only as "a local website" or "a local blog" instead of by our proper name?

Simple. You can't change what they call you, but you can make them correct in what they are saying.

Ladies and germs, I give you....

There is no web link yet for today's Reporter-Telegram article on the losses being incurred by the Midland Horseshoe, but I was struck by two back-to-back paragraphs.

"While we never expected the complex to make money, we have taken steps to bring in more revenue," Commissioner Randy Prude said Tuesday.

This includes the county's move to collect hotel and motel taxes that it began to receive this year. As of April, the county collected nearly $74,000, according to the data.

Uh, guys? Taxes are not really revenues. They are just expenses borne directly by the public rather than borne indirectly by the public through the county.

The Reporter-Telegram has an article today on the campaign finance filings in the Craddick/Dingus race for the state legislature.

The article did not list any of the donors so if you are curious as to who they might be you can have a look at the Craddick filing here or the Dingus filing here.

Most Interesting Donor Prize goes to candidate Dingus who lists Fess Parker as a donor.

For whatever reason the County Auditor's office has begun including in its monthly financial reports a separate page for the financial performance of the Midland Horsehoe.

Financial reports for the county can be found on their website here and they go back as far as October, 2007.

The two most recent reports (March, 2008, and April, 2008) are the only reports that have the Horseshoe numbers shown separately.

This is what they show:

March, 2008
Income: $186,117.94; Expenses: $505,106.55; Net Loss: $318,988.61

April, 2008
Income: $207,404.81; Expenses: $610,088.88; Net Loss: $402,684.07

The total net loss for just this two month period totals $721,672.68.

(IMPORTANT UPDATE BELOW)

There is included in these financial statements a line item called "Capital Outlay - Equipment" that makes up about one-half of the loss for the two month period ($348,225) and I would like to see Ospurt's opinion on what those costs would comprise....but even if you completely removed those charges that still leaves around a $373,000 loss for just the two month period.

With all of the hand-wringing about the ongoing losses incurred by the Scharbauer Sports Complex we may be missing the real story which is that the Midland Horseshoe is making the sports complex look like a sweet deal.

BIG, IMPORTANT, MONSTER UPDATE: Word has gotten to us that the losses set out in the County Auditor's report is a cumulative figure for the fiscal year and not a monthly figure.

I guess that when the official logo of the Scharbauer Sports Complex is a sucking vortex we should have seen this coming. According to this article the sports complex will raise its use fees significantly in an attempt to keep from hemorrhaging cash.

I am not altogether sure that the solution to a problem created by a near total lack of demand for the facility is to decrease demand even further by raising prices but apparently something had to be done.

So why beat a dead horse here? We can't tear it down. It's there. It is a done deal. We built it and (dash it all!) they did not come.

Simple. For the same reason that I would like to see the cost of ongoing operations remain on the city's books rather than getting shuffled over to a 4A Corporation. Because mistakes like this need to be painful. Otherwise we will just make them over and over again.

And there will come a time when people begin to realize that their local chambers do as much to increase local taxes than any Democrat in Austin or Washington when they unfailingly support and promote these "civic projects".

(Hat Tip: Newsroom Stew. And thanks to Nat for the Flash graphic.)

Tony Snow, the former White House press secretary and conservative pundit who bedeviled the press corps and charmed millions as a FOX News television and radio host, died Saturday after a long bout with cancer. He was 53.

Top right of a three column layout. Jessica's Well has had Tony Snow's smiling face in that prominent position for quite a while. His "Hat Tip" meant a lot to the Site Admin, and the long time writers on this blog.

I had always admired Tony Snow, and loved his radio show.

I was so looking forward to his upcoming visit to Midland for the "Evening With" charity dinner for the Centers for Children and Families.

America has lost a great guy, and his family has lost a great husband and father.

R.I.P.

Nobody says giving away public money for economic development is easy. For what it is worth, the MDC has been fairly fortunate that, so far, their blunders and bad bets on incentees (don't get me started on their real estate ventures) haven't amounted to large financial losses.

Yeah Dean Baldwin, Countrywide and others became PR nightmares, but those deals either didn't happen, or most of the funds were returned in what is commonly called a "clawback."

One of the early MDC incentees, W Power and Light, a retail electric service provider, was promised $210,000 over three years for agreeing to create 23 jobs, back in 2004. Shortly after receiving their first $70,000 installment, they defaulted on their ED contract. W Power and Light gave back $35,000 of the original payment.

Now, according to multiple business wire sources, W Power and Light is no more:

Amen Properties (NASDAQ:AMEN) today announced that its Board of Directors has approved a plan to discontinue operations of the company's retail electricity provider, W Power and Light. Management recommended the shut-down of W Power to the Board based on the unfavorable conditions in the Texas electricity market which have been exacerbated by heightened volatility in recent months.

W Power and Light we hardly knew thee.

Tonight is the last night at The Boulders in Scottsdale, Arizona. The fine-dining restaurant is closed during the week during the off season but the lesser one is very worthwhile, and tonight I had, owing to the slack business, a fascinating conversation with Livia, the waitress, who is 26 and who came from Brazil. Where, we may guess from her name, they didn't see I, Claudius or they wouldn't have named a girl after that wife of Augustus. Or any other of his wives, come to think of it.

If memory serves, during one of the Clinton election campaigns, Algore was put in charge of the naturalization process ("Get us votes, Al, did Jimmy Carter take all the Cuban murderers?") and I read that during one of the ceremonies in Boston the people were asked to swear allegiance to the flag, and not necessarily in English, and were then immediately given voter-registration cards, a new wrinkle that the Goracle came up with.

Livia told me that at first she was very excited to engage in the citizenship process. Five years is a long time, she said, to learn about a country and its culture. She went for her exam, and had conned the exam book forward and backward: there were a hundred questions that she had down cold.

The examiner told her that she would be asked ten questions and had to get three right. And she was asked to write something in English: "The White House is painted white." And she could have had her test administered in Spanish or English at her discretion. This was in Boston, and she was given a voter-registration card.

I spent the night in Roswell en route to Denver. While there I did my usual driving about town and was intrigued to find that main street had several shops with little green men in the windows, and which sold UFO oddments. The UFO incident happened on July 7, 1947. Al Gore was born, or hatched, on March 31, 1948, 268 days after whatever it was happened. The normal human gestation period is 280 days. You do the math.

And speaking of Al Gore, I saw him polishing a green (of course) flying saucer, but after the photo op was over and the reporters had gone, he threw the rag to a man and said, "You finish this, Jose. If you work hard you won't wind up like those Secret Service people over there."

What follows below the fold is a dirty joke. The Site Administrator did not bless this one, and I know that he happens to be absent now. I waited until three days before he gets back so that he'll some say about it. Now if you are offended by a dirty joke, do not click on the rest.

Things have been kinda quiet around the Well lately. I guess everyone is using their new found oil money to take a nice two-week vacation.

I guess we'll be spared all the pap that goes with the current 5 person scrum for Bill Dingus' former At-Large Council seat.

(...or we're saving it all up for Craddick v. Dingus and McCain v. Obama)

I'm in Las Vegas now, for the first time, staying at the Wynn on the recommendation of a childhood friend who lives here now. He's the friend who, I never tire of gloating, is the major author of the Starr Report although when he goes back to events at his Alma Mater Harvard he has to go into the closet about it. They sneer at anyone who might point up the fact that Bill Clinton is an adulterous perjurer. And George Bush is an idiot?

I don't gamble and barely drink and so the vices of Vegas are not for me, but I did want to see some place where there was no possibility of anyone saying, "Er, do you think that's a bit much?" And for a connoisseur of kitsch like me, it's heaven.

By the way, the Penn and Teller show literally does a great deal of flag waving, and they boast of how wonderful it is to be an American, after working in China and India. And there are six Chinese channels at the Wynn, and the new middle class in China can afford to come, and they do, they do. Penn rolled up a replica of the Bill of Rights and they pretended to burn an American flag in it, saying that if the flag were burned, it wouldn't matter for the Bill of Rights remains. They then rolled up a clear sheet of acetate, the Chinese bill of rights, which doesn't exist in a totalitarian system--which they're very quick to point out--and showed how they did not burn the flag and then tore the blank Chinese bill of rights into pieces. There were many Chinese in the audience. Go Penn and Teller.

The Spectator has several blogs, and I like reading them. I'd like to draw your attention to a certain Melanie Phillips, whose work reminds me of Mark Steyn's--without the double entendres and other word play. One of the newest outrages in Britain, other than the fact that people are still pretending that the Spice Girls have talent, is the Archbishop of Canterbury, a fool named Rowan Williams, who stated that he saw no problem with a two-tier legal system in Britain--Sharia for Muslims, and real law for the rest of Britain. Now the Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips (I swear that's how they say it) has jumped on board, braying more of the same pernicious nonsense. And here's her take on it.

She's worth reading.

I guess anything can make a good reason to improve the transportation infrastructure in Western Texas:

"We're creating a four-lane divided highway linkage of the four major metropolitan areas in West Texas -- Amarillo, Lubbock and Midland-Odessa. It will also help with University Interscholastic League competitions and college kids going back and forth. It just makes sense."

Uhhhhh....right. I don't think the 349 reliever route is going to make the trip to Amarillo any shorter, or easier on the pocketbooks of our local school districts.