On the same peregrination, I also heard on Fox News about the execution of Anwar al-Awlaki. Many were saying that the American's Fifth Amendment rights were being violated, since he was executed, and I chose the word just right, without a trial.

Rubbish. He was an insurgent. Charles Krauthammer, easily the most perceptive pundit of all, ridiculed that idea based on the idea of the Civil War, and he's right. Since the North won the war, a consistent application of this theory is that each Union soldier should have been tried for murder or attempted murder for trying to kill a Confederate soldier, who was after all, still an American citizen. One owes no Fifth Amendment niceties to anyone who takes up arms against America.

This to me is unremarkable, or only remarkable in being remarkable by the usual suspects. But what was remarkable was some of Awlaki's history. He was, I found, expelled by a mosque for being too radical.

Why hadn't I heard that? Why hadn't I heard a single tale of any Muslim group disciplining someone for being too extreme? On 9/10/2001 I had no opinion really of Muslims; a different religion I knew little about and if it let me alone, I'd let it alone. Didn't care.

On 9/11 I was, along with the rest of the world, shocked. That same day I saw Palestinian grandmothers giving sweetmeats to children jumping for joy in the street because Americans were dead. I will forever have that image burned into my mind and the Palestinians are very lucky indeed that I have no say over their fate at all.

But I counseled myself to wait. Surely, surely, there would be denunciations by many Muslims. This was so utterly dreadful. But I had to wait for over a decade to find one single incidence of a Muslim group, as opposed to a single, brave apostate, often in fear for his life, who expelled someone for being too radical.

I very much hope that there were many more that I missed. Still, it's very good to know of one. Even just one.

On one of my long and pointless, near-vatic, drives around West Texas and Southeast New Mexico, I heard Chris Wallace interview Herman Cain, the black Republican presidential candidate, on Fox News.

I have given money to Herman Cain before and will do so again. I like what he says the most and I was very impressed by his communication.

The best since Reagan.

Janeane Garofalo, in another apogee of witlessness, claimed that Republicans who were for Cain were hiding the party's residual racism. She really needs to get her bridgework fixed; the messages from Saturn are getting garbled, even for her. A generic Haldol, perhaps, is the problem?

It would be delightful for many reasons to elect Cain, and not least would be the tooth-gnashing rage of the progressives, who feel betrayed that a black man, a member of a captive grievance group to their minds, refuses to be their pet and instead owing entirely to his ability, and owing nothing to them, managed to rise to being the most powerful person on earth. And without them. Despite them. Ah, this sends a tingle up my leg. Hear that, Chris Matthews?

Instinctively I like all his positions more than Rick Perry's, who seems already a spent force. And let me muse that Governor Perry is not the brightest person I've ever seen. I predict we shall hear Mitt Romney parsing his words in the best Clintonian fashion about Romneycare. And he's just, er, too slick by half. Bachman is imploding. I like a lot of what Ron Paul says but get his tongue on international things, and I fear. Governor Johnson I'm very fond of indeed but he has Hillary's chance of being Miss America. With me as one of the pageant's judges.

I almost concluded with, "Herman's my boy," but all things considered, I shall not go down that road even if I mean it entirely fraternally and with great respect. Unlike the current President, he's actually achieved something worthwhile.

Cain's my man. And it's time to cross his palm with silver. Again.

Go, Herman, go.

An illegal alien, a Muslim and and a Communist go into a bar.

The bartender asks, "What can I get you, Mr. President?"

-----------

On thinking, I don't want any reader, if there be any, to think that I'm a birther. Since nothing about Baby Barry seemed forthright, I wondered about that. But it seems that well is dry.

I have enjoyed Morgan Freeman over the years; he has a certain dignity. And it was such that even while narrating a new series on cosmology he sounds dignified, rather than smug. To be frank, any white man so orotund would not be hired, but he is Morgan Freeman, and so he gets a pass.

However, as you have heard, Mr. Freeman has claimed that the Tea Party is racist.

Rubbish. The accusation of racism is the last refuge of the morally bankrupt, a slur applied with a shotgun, and the drive-by media loves it. And they agree too, because they cannot understand anyone who isn't "enlightened" as they are. It is mental laziness which enables the moral narcissism of the Progressive.

Ali Akbar, a black American, wrote a thoughtful letter to Mr. Freeman.

Oh well. Mr. Freeman has been lionized, justifiably, for some good work, but now we see that he's just like almost any other Hollywood actor. A lazy, dim bulb.

A scorpion wanted to cross a stream but could not. He asked the frog for a lift across.

"If I give you a ride, you'll sting me and kill me."

"No, I won't. I promise I won't."

This went on until the frog assented, and let the scorpion on his back. Midway, the scorpion stung the frog, who cried, "Why did you sting me? Now we will both die!"

The scorpion said, as they both started to drown, "It is in my nature."

Do not expect Baby Barry Bama to renounce socialism.

Most people have seen this site--it contains pictures of some of the grotesque shoppers at WalMart in America. Featuring fat people of course, showing things they shouldn't. I know it's snarky about Walmart and it's fashionable to look down on WalMart but I fail to see why. WalMart has arguably done more to help people get reasonable goods at decent prices than any other store in the history of the planet. They are to dry goods, and sometimes groceries, what Amazon is to books.

Here's one picture though that is not a sneer at WalMart:

To our betters in the elite media it is all theoretical and far removed from their own existence.

From Ace of Spades HQ (regarding, in this case, David Brooks...but it applies just as well to the Noonans, Dionnes, etc. of the world):

While you may have opinions about economics, you can afford to prioritize such matters below worries about "tone," because you are altogether immune from economic misery.

Your job is set, guaranteed for life (virtually), with few competitors for it. You're a one-man operation, an employee; your only interaction with the realities of business life is cashing a check, meeting with investment advisers, and occasionally pitching a book to a publisher.

You do not particularly fear a reduction of wages or an increase in taxes, because you're already making as much money as a writer could reasonably expect to make. Plus, there is not (yet) any way to tax the non-pecuniary benefits of your job -- influence, fame, respect, easiness of it all -- which far outstrip the pecuniary ones you have to give the government a piece of.

In short, you are someone whose interest in politics is chiefly a theoretical matter. You have no skin in the game. You can afford to be dispassionate about Obama's $500 billion cut to Medicaid, because in all likelihood you'll be an employed writer into your seventies and will have private insurance and even when retired will have enough money to opt out of the system. You can afford to have an intellectual's distance from Obama's choking regulatory overreach, because your only "business" is writing seven hundred words twice a week; you have no employees, no mandates, no regulations to comply with. You can gamely defend your cultural brother-from-another-mother Obama even as his policies do nothing to decrease (and probably in fact increase) grinding unemployment of levels of misery not seen since the Great Depression, since your job is effectively pink-slip-proof and even the friends you know who've lost their jobs are largely rich and therefore have plenty of cushion for three or four lean years.

In short, you can afford to give Obama a pass on all of his destructive policies, the policies which really hurt regular people who are not so fortunate as to have comfortable, bulletproof berths at the New York Times, and focus laser-like on childish frettings about "tone" and its alleged "elevation" because you're as removed from the vigor and scuffle of the scrum that is the working world as the palest, dottiest tenured professor.

Brooks literally admits to being an "Obama Sap". Which is the truth. He most certainly is an Obama Sap.

And since that is the case, then of what use is he to consumers of news and opinion?

I don't agree with Jake Tapper all that much, but one Jake Tapper is worth five hundred maleable twits like David Brooks or Peggy Noonan, however eloquent they are.

Yes, I know; that's such a large, obvious charge that it doesn't preclude anything. Still, I've found another way in which the progressives are deliberately trying to turn us into progressive automata. They've found even another way to indoctrinate children.

In Britain children of three are being entered into a database for "hate speech." I am not kidding. Toddlers, who are one presumed not yet entirely secure in their bowel control, are being written up if they say that something is gay. Well, I'm gay and I don't think they mean anything bad. They are parroting a young argot. When I was in high school in the early 70s, the kids had two sorts of adjectives: good and bad. Something bad but not repellent was "queer"; after a while time the meaning shifted, as it did with "bitchin,'" in the 80s, to being strange in a good sort of way. And it meant nothing, just as a toddler saying that some subject was gay means nothing.

It gets even more insane, in a way which only a statist would not find absurd. One child called another a "broccoli-head" and that was written up. As hate speech. Against whom? Against vegetables? Perhaps Bush I should be so indicted; he famously hated broccoli. There is no universe in which this makes sense. This is nothing more than the viciousness of petty people given unaccountable authority.

Britain's schools are also urging urban urchins to rat on their parents, or perhaps they're urging the children of middle-class people to rat on their parents; it is after all much more satisfying to épater la bourgeoisie although perhaps these wannabe Stalinists want to do more than shock. Come to think of it, so did the French.

I find it interesting that the behaviors of the "underserved" classes are of no importance whereas the feelings of the law-abiding, and tax-paying, classes are nothing but fodder for being traduced. A vulnerability to be exploited. It is very gratifying to people of no ability other than being incorporated into a faceless, irresponsible, unaccountable government to be able to tell people who have actually taken risks that their responsibility means nothing.

Children are being primed in Britain to hector their parents to be "greener," and I have seen this in America too and in commercials. They have that spooky totalitarian flavor of the children singing a hymn to Baby Barry Bama. Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm. How bracing to pay huge amounts of money to institutions which are rewarded by failure, run utterly for the benefit of the teachers and administration and not at all for the children, to have those those overpaid and underworked people act like the STASI and inform on your children, to give them a de-facto criminal record, without trial, without conviction, and which will follow them for all their lives.

The Catholics said give them a child until he is five, and he will be theirs forever. Not quite true but close. I that that lesson has not been lost on the left.

But then it never was. Remember that Hitler had in effect breeding camps for the production of ideal Aryans. Our public schools are become indoctrination campuses for cultivating "progressive" values. That is, values which hate personal responsibility, which is understandable because so much of public education is insulated from the responsibility of its employees. The only way to statism is to reject personal responsibility and replace it with political responsibility.

This is why the left can act the Spanish grandee: no matter what he does, his pedigree insures him immunity. So with the PC crowd. If there ever was a get-out-of-jail card, it is being politically correct.

It absolves you from the responsibility of empathy with others, to let you focus more and more on your own precious self.

A recent Reason-Rupe Poll discloses that a huge majority of the Tea Party and large majorities of the conservatives and libertarians believe that the most important thing to getting wealthy is hard work. These are also the people who believe that wealth can grow. It will be no shock to find that most Democrats believe that people get rich at someone else's expense and I find it disheartening that most independents do too.

Let me dispose of the idea that the pie is only of one size and that people only get rich at others' expense.

If this were true, then all the world's population would be living in caves. Farming, houses, cities, are all accretions of wealth. Plentiful food is an accretion of wealth and it is brought about entirely by hard work. If, as the Democrats and I'm afraid a lot of Independents believe, wealth is stolen, then I would like to find out where it came from. Perhaps space aliens? Did the cavemen steal all the wealth in the world from say space aliens? I thought that the loonies believed that the space aliens were superior beings, but to be fleeced for the untold trillions of wealth in the world now means the space aliens were pretty stupid.

Let's look at this quite plainly. If man had not done hard work, we would still be in caves, and life would be truly poor, brutish, nasty and short by necessity, instead of headed that way under the direction of Little Barry by his own intention.

What sort of personality do these people have? Passive, certainly and if you watch any union gathering, you find nothing so much as resentment, if the thuggishness is kept off camera. There is no sense of personal agency and they are looking for a redeemer. No sense of, "Get out of the way, and let me do something!" but plenty of threats and demands for overpaid and underworked people. If you have Jimmy Hoffa talking, then you can have downright incitement of violence. But under Mr. Holder, I do not believe that Mr. Hoffa would be prosecuted if he were shown on HD television setting fire to the CEO's house. Remember that utterly corrupt man's refusal to believe that the New Black Panthers could intimidate white voters?

If you feel that wealth is stolen, then perhaps that's justification for accepting thuggish behavior. By definition your work is for nothing honorable, if you take a single dollar more than you need to get by. If you thought that wealth was created by hard work, then you would not be as passive as a liberal in expecting things to be done for him. Again, see the YouTube video Democrats on an Escalator.

If you think that wealth is stolen rather than created, which conveniently saves you the trouble of responsibility for yourself, then everything that you have is in some way stolen. Because again, we did not come down out of the trees to vacation at Martha's Vineyard. Someone had to create wealth, and if you think it's stolen, then you're a fence for stolen goods. "I'll get mine." You also get to use class-warrior rhetoric to demand things from people who are responsible for their lives to be delivered to you, who are not responsible, at least not any more than you must be.

No wonder liberals are so nasty. Their entire portfolio would be a reproach to honesty as they see it.

I was in El Paso on vacation when I woke and turned on the television and saw a picture of Princess Diana, revoltingly called, "The People's Princess," with nothing but sombre Brit music. This was before the Internet was common, of course; still I knew that she had died.

I groaned, "It hasn't been long enough for me to recover from the hideous, self-flattering, self-abasing Elvis worshipers," I thought over and over.

I will hand it to the Brits though: as the anniversaries of her death have rolled around, the hysterical sentimentality that I thought would be glommed onto simply didn't come.

She wore clothes better than anybody else. She had the best hair on earth. And despite her saying that she was a thick as two planks, which was true, she had great charm. Still, I was always reminded of her grandmother, once a lady-in-waiting for Queen Elizabeth, who said later on that she wished she'd called on the Queen to tell her that the girl was unstable and unsuitable for the royal family.

This is not to say that her work about disused minefields was in any way bad, and she popularized the term, "emotional intelligence," which was of course a way to paper over the fact that she had no real intelligence but looked warm and understanding. Which she well may have been. I do not know.

Still, I have never been one of her worshipers.

As so often happens, the best word was had by Christopher Hitchens, who told the joke that Diana was like a minefield: easy to lay and difficult and expensive to get rid of.

We are seeing the delicious rannygazoo over the Solyndra fiasco. Did you know that quite unusually the government renegotiated the loan to provide that private investors got paid first? I wonder at the connections of the private investors.

No I don't. One of them is a Bundler for Obama. Obama has shown us many things and first and foremost is that he's a Chicago thug politician.

Anyone who has suffered through my mewlings knows that I am not a fan of Rick Perry; it's the cronyism which bothers me the most. It seems that Governor Rick has about $150 million in a Texas fund which is apportioned to technologies which the governor thinks might make good.

Hayek has shown that the power of capitalism and the market is the information that is exchanged with every transaction and he understood, as no liberal can or will--emphasis on the latter--that this has to be between consenting parties and that they are the only ones who are important. And that's why it works.

Some years ago Apple spent nearly a quarter billion buying a semiconductor-design firm, one without a fabrication plant. For that they hire Intel or Samsung. Applologists, who are in many cases retired Kremlinologists, thought that this meant a foray into wireless devices since the maker was noted for low-power devices.

Apple knew perfectly well what it was doing for it ignored all counsel but its own. Years later it is by no means the largest cell-phone maker, but it makes over half of all cell-phone profits, which is the Holy Grail, and has revolutionized every single smart phone, except the BlackBerry, which is struggling. (BTW, I find that with iOS5, Apple will combine SMS with IM, which had been the single thing which RIM could boast of.)

The Cupertino gang also develops technology, like the Retina display and unibody aluminum cases of unparalleled rigidity, lightness and elegance, and negotiated exclusive deals for a while and low prices thereafter. Apple knew, and its business partners, knew what was important and there is no possible way that a government which is proving over and over that it cannot deliver the mail cannot choose technologies.

Japan in the 50s had an industrial-policy ministry, which controlled utterly what technologies that Japanese companies could invest in, buy, or license.

They denied a corporation the right to license an American invention. The corporation was Sony and the license? The transistor.

So yes. By all means let's trust billions of other people's money to socialist politicians who are doing nothing at best but acting godlike but more realistically rewarding cronies. Like Obama and I'm afraid Mr. Perry, if what I hear is true.

He completely rejects the title of hero, but then I have never seen a true hero cotton to the title. Truly heroic people never do heroic things for their own consideration. They are quite simply impelled to; danger and risk just do not enter into it. They utterly must. There is no grandstanding, no showboating. They seem genuinely bemused by the accolade given them. Why? They simply had to, as we all have to breathe. Perhaps one definition of a hero is someone who refuses the title.

The Marine thinks that somehow he failed because some of them died and I do not detect any disingenuousness in him at all. He wouldn't take the first call from the White House; he was working in a civilian job and said that if he didn't work, he wouldn't get paid. Obama joked that they called him during his lunch break. Yeah. They called his boss who read him the riot act.

This week and the last we have been hearing Barack Hussein Obama shouting over a hundred times, "Pass this plan!" and once, "If you love me, you'll pass this plan!" A plan which no one believes in anymore except the hardened socialists and they don't believe in it; they know it's an avenue of more total control.

Marine Meyer refuses to think of himself as a hero; Obama begs people to petition Congress to pass a plan which would be more lethal, homeopathic medicine for an economy he's ruined as much as possible, couching it in terms of his sex appeal and lovability. I really am beginning to wonder where the axes of solipsism, arrogance and stupidity intersect. Or now that they've intersected, just where he will go to thrill us next.

Perhaps the greatest respect I have ever seen toward the office of the president is when Marine Meyer said he wanted to have a beer with Obama. The office is due immense respect.

From today's MyWestTexas.com:

The Downtown Midland Management District agreed Thursday to its share in hiring a coordinator who would work to spur downtown development. Jim Nichols, assistant city manager, told the board those who've been meeting through a downtown consortium group believe having someone who's completely dedicated to downtown will make the difference in seeing projects realized.

"We believe hiring that one person whose sole focus is downtown is going to be critical to our success," Nichols said.

Some questions: How many projects attempted by these various agencies have gone unrealized for lack of dedicated coordinator? How many projects are on the shelf, right now and ready to go, that cannot move forward for lack of dedicated coordination? And if the answer is zero, is the new Dedicated Sole Coordinator-in-Chief expected to conceive and develop that great catalyst project themselves?

"The advantage we have right now within this window is the rest of the country is still coming out of the recession and we've kicked the door wide open," he said.

I don't even know what this means. Plus, if the window was already open was it really necessary to kick the door down? Maybe this is what proper coordination is meant to prevent.

Board members wanted to ensure whoever is hired reports to them, as well as to the city and other entities. If the position is established, it will be run out of the city manager's office, which Nichols said will provide them quick access to code enforcement and planning and development staff as they work through projects.

A taxpayer funded position that reports to multiple bosses and whose charge is to become the catalyst for a catalyst. Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

Say, here is an idea to help spur development, not just downtown, but everywhere: Make is so that you don't have to work out of the city manager's office in order to have quick access to code enforcement and planning and development staff when working through a project.

(Sorry for the snark, City of Midland Code Enforcement and Planning and Development staffers. It couldn't helped. I've never found you to be unresponsive, but apparently the powers that be do. Otherwise, why would they say such a thing? Well, other than to rationalize the creation of this new position.)

Luckily, safeguards are in place to protect the taxpayers:

It's not going to be 'give us your money and we'll go do whatever we want with it,'" he [Nichols] said.

No, that would be the Midland Development Corporation.

A serious question: In principle, what is the difference between the MDC/Midland City Council taking money from the taxpayer and handing it over to Trace Engines and the Obama administration taking money from the taxpayer and handing it over to Solyndra?

But the adminstration's Neo-Stasi web site has turned into the laughing stock of the internet. Just follow the Twitter hashtag #attackwatch.

From "somegal" in the comments section of the MyWestTexas.com article on the Midland Development Corporation/Midland City Council $500,000 Valentine to Baker-Hughes:

"Desperate" is the perfect word to describe MDC actions. MDC officials know they can't justify their existence with quantifiable results. And when companies default, they just amend the contract so the company can keep the money anyway. (The MDC dictionary inexplicably describes this occurrence as "being a good steward of taxpayer money.") Heck, they don't even crow about the completely bogus "jobs created" and "return on investment" numbers like they used to.

When an entity (in this case, gov't-run "charity") gets desperate and is singularly focused on creating some pretense for its continued existence, you get increasingly poor decisions. That is where the MDC currently resides. Desperate spending followed by spin to the local media.

There is more and more of this all the time. And why shouldn't there be? Half of a million dollars in tax money just handed over to a private enterprise so that the MDC can add 64 more jobs to their totally bogus "jobs created" number.

Ospurt has already hit on this but if I don't type something about this...and I mean right now...my head is literally going to explode.

The best case scenario is that the MDC is paying Midland's newest rent-seeker corporate welfare queen economic incentee $500,000 so that MDC officials can appear in a photo op with Baker Hughes bigs and claim some sort of credit for "64 jobs to be created" in Midland.

Which, of course, is a lie. Just as it is a big lie that the $250,000 in taxpayer funds that the MDC gave over to Apache had any sort of causal relationship with Apache's decision to expand into it's Midand office.

At the time of the Apache "incentive" deal we were told that we were at risk of losing Apache to Andrews (or some other area burg) without the MDC's deal-saving largesse. It is alarming that these officials, both elected and appointed, felt comfortable enough to insult our intelligence in such a manner. Andrews? Seriously? It was all Apache could do to get the Apache spouses to Midland, much less Andrews. And where in Andrews would they have lived? One look at the housing inventory in Andrews at the time will tell you that Andrews could not have been in play.

But as alarming as it is it that these High Priests of Economic Development feel comfortable passing off obvious b.s. as fact it is more alarming to think that they are saying it because they actually believe it to be true. Because if we have in place people with access to a pile of other people's money and who believe...actually believe...that throwing this money at Apache and now Baker-Hughes actually changed anything then things could get really expensive.

It has been almost ten years now since the 4A Economic Development Sales Tax was placed on the back of Midland's taxpayers and in that time absolutely nothing has been accomplished that was promised by it's proponents at the time. The landscape is littered with one failed deal after another. What economic development money that has been spent that can't be chalked up to outright failures is the money they have handed over to corporate sweethearts like Apache and now Baker Hughes to "incent" them to expand into the teeth of a boom. In short, the MDC has been reduced to paying "incentives" into deals that can't fail. Which of course means that no incentive was needed or required in the first place, only requested.

Again, this is why I am not optimistic for the financial future of the country as a whole. This mind-numbingly insane process of handing public funds over to private entities is not happening in machine-controlled Chicago or Philadelphia. It is happening right here in Midland, Texas. Midland, Texas, theoretically the reddest of areas in the reddest of states.

If elected officials in this town can look at $500,000 in taxpayer funds being handed over to a multi-national corporation with a $23 billion dollar balance sheet and which earned $408 million in the 2nd Quarter alone this year, knowing....yes, knowing that the transfer of this money had/will have zero effect on that company's plan to expand here, then what hope is there?

At this point, there is little hope of an epiphany on the part of the elected officials. They have...um, progressed to the point where they really do believe that they have better uses for your money than you do. And for the City Council it is the best kind of money. It is money that they get to help spend but that is off of their balance sheet. Magic money! Which is why they readily accept the announcement of every new "fine-tuning" and "tweaking" and "change of focus" from the MDC that typically follows one their higher profile failures. Which is why that, ten years on, they actively defend a bureacratic nightmare that has paid itself more in administrative salaries than it has paid out in the "incentives" that were professed to be the only way to SAVE! MIDLAND!

The only solution now is to take away the money. It is time to rescind the Economic Development Sales Tax. It needs to be placed on the ballot. And not in some oddball, corner-shot, third-Saturday-in-March date selected precisely to attract the least amount of attention of anyone who isn't a Chamber employee.

Do you really want to know what the taxpayers think about this tax? Place it on the ballot on Tuesday, November 6, 2012.

They won't. It is their money now. Not yours. It has become to them an entitlement.

Herewith a link to an item on Hot Air. You might enjoy the video clip; it's a montage of late-night comedians making fun of His Splendiferousness.

Conan O'Brien mentions a speech on jobs, and the audience laughs.

It is perhaps one more sign of his lack of intelligence and his self-regarding arrogance that he thinks that he can enchant us with his words when he doesn't have the ability to make us stand at attention for hours in some People's Square. Given a choice, people are giving him the finger and no American politician ever deserved it more.

With luck we'll have an emetic in November of 2012 and reconsecrate the office of President by electing a president who doesn't think he's above the country.

The only thing missing in this picture is a podium from which he'll make three-hour speeches which people are afraid not to attend, and they collapse in the heat, hoping to wake up.