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

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

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

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

We're happy for the Hat-Tip.

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

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

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

89.6%.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I am being too harsh on the whole idea.

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

What could possibly go wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Steyn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hillary needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The constraints of reality have intervened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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