Another South By Southwest has come and gone. This is Austin's famous Springtime music festival. There is absolutely no music there that I would pay to see, but its worth an afternoon of wandering up and down sixth street just to gauge the turnout. This year was more tattooed. More pierced. More bruvvas and sistas than in the past.

Alejandro As A Troublemaker

Testing to see if I still can drive this thing. Where's the starter button again....?

Doug Ross's Manifesto of The Silenced Majority

• We believe that Barack Obama is a brilliant orator and a man possessed of more charisma than any politician since JFK.

• But we also believe that his philosophy of "spreading the wealth around" is an ill-disguised form of socialism that undermines everything America holds dear.

• We believe that a "tax cut on 95% of working Americans" when only 63% of Americans pay taxes is nonsensical.

• We believe that the Obama campaign's obfuscated funding for ACORN (originally described as "event planning") undermines the integrity of our elections and calls into question the legality of his tactics.

• We believe that Barack Obama's plan to form a "civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as our military is ill-considered at best.

• We believe that the Obama campaign's efforts to intimidate WGN (on two separate occasions) when it interviewed his political foes endangers free speech.

• We believe that Obama's choice of Joe Biden as VP runs counter to his twin aspirations of "hope" and "change".

• We believe that a man who could not otherwise receive a security clearance should not serve as Commander-in-Chief.

• We believe that Obama's 20-year relationship with his pastor, who he once described as his "spiritual adviser", displays a basic affinity for a racist ideology that runs counter to everything his candidacy should stand for.

• We believe that most of Obama's senate experience has been spent running for office; from the time he was sworn in as a U.S. senator to the time he formed a presidential exploratory committee, he logged only 143 days in the senate.

• We believe that Obama does voters a disservice by hiding his chairmanship of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (a $165 million dollar effort to improve Chicago's schools) when he used that service as his central experience in 2000 during his first run for Congress.

• We believe that Obama made a series of very poor choices by serving on boards and sharing an office with Bill Ayers (for three years); Ayers' organization killed three police officers, bombed numerous government facilities and nearly detonated a nail bomb at a Fort Dix Officer's Dance.

• We believe that, no matter Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, his evasive and ever-morphing answers about their work together smack of a coverup.

• We believe that anyone -- no matter their position on abortion -- who supports killing an infant that survived a botched abortion is on the wrong side of any moral code.

• We believe that Obama's advisers and contributors -- from Tony Rezko to Valerie Jarrett to Allison Davis -- cost taxpayers millions in development fees for failed (and often uninhabitable) apartment complexes.

• We believe that Obama's Illinois state senate experience was insubstantial: it was, by his own description, a "part-time position" and he maintained two offices (one at the state senate and one at his law firm).

• We believe that Obama's state senatorial experience was further diluted by his 129 "present" votes, which, as NPR observes , "There's a saying in Springfield that there's a reason why the present button is yellow... [but] I don't think that Barack Obama was necessarily a coward for voting present on those bills..."

• We also believe that Obama's experience as a community organizer and as a trainer for ACORN are not qualifications for the presidency.

• We believe that the candidate has not been forthcoming with his background and the key influencing forces during his formative years.

We therefore believe that Barack Obama is ill-prepared and ill-suited for the Presidency.

Mountain Time

Drove up to Roswell from Austin to visit my Uncle John last weekend. I took my Mom and my brother with me too. We spent four days up there with him. John is sick and I hadn't seen him in a long time. He's one of those geezers you see down on Main Street with the blue baseball cap that says "World War II Veteran" in gold writing. And he is one, too. 17th Airborne Corps, 82nd and 101st airborne divisions. Jumped in to France on D-Day. Battle of Ardennes Forest. Those guys are dying at the rate of 1500 a day. I've always wanted to ask him about it but, as a vet myself, I know its sometimes better not to be asked about it. The telling is never complete. Better to keep things sometimes.

I saw the sights in Roswell. All of 'em. The museum and research institute on Main. The proposed development north of town with the new curbs and framed schmancy houses just going up. Yellow D8s growling around in the dust, wheeling and spinning enfilade left. The James Mustang Ranch where my cousin works. Hard. Some other stuff. I had a beer at a joint on Main in the afternoon. There was a GI there sitting at a table by himself and I told the waitress he was flirting with to put his stuff on my tab. He thanked me for it but I'll never be able to do enough for those guys.

New Mexico is different than Texas. Its got more of an edge to it. You can feel it when you cross the Texas line north of Pecos on the way to Loving. The wind is sharper. People look at you. Everybody smokes. There are plenty of hard stories with corners on them that bump your shin and hurt when you walk into them.

Folks are folks though. Everybody helps if they can. I met John's neighbor Bobby in the front yard. He runs Search and Rescue in Roswell. They're busy in the mountains in the winter. Lots of tourists think they'd like to get off the trail and do some cross country skiing. He'd been out all night trying to organize local resources to find for two kids lost in Colorado. They were found about dawn so he didn't have to mobilize. He was shaking his head about a call he'd received from a woman who wanted him to search for her husband. She said he was last seen at The Boot Scooter about 2 in the morning before they had a fight and he'd left. Bobby said no.

Who's The Rube?

I received my monthly missive from the New York Tripe yesterday. They are searching further afield for that ever more elusive potential subscriber. I don't know. I probably won't subscribe again this time. This is the same "newspaper" that featured 146 front page articles about the humiliation suffered by prisoners at Abu Ghraib and not a single article about the humiliation suffered by my 8 year old nephew who was blindfolded, spun in circles and made to beat a paper donkey with a stick until candy fell out while his little friends laughted hysterically at him. Twenty nine front page articles about the United States Marine accused of murder in Haditha by John Murtha. When the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, it was reported by the NYT in a single paragraph on page 31.

They don't know very much about us hillbillys down here. We know everything about New York. So who's the rube?

As I always do, I opened the envelope and removed the postage-paid envelope from it. Then I stuffed their letter, their envelope and my latest golf scorecard into the postage paid envelope and put it back in the mailbox. They'll get it in a few days, courtesy of the efficient postal system we pay for. I wish more people would do what I do and return their unsolicited mail to the NYT. It is helpful and good for society on so many levels.

It keeps mailmen employed and out of trouble. Idle hands, you know.

It brings revenue in to Uncle Sam thru the Postal Service.

It contributes to the national recycling effort.

It helps keep Texas clean.

On the personal level it provides a sense of smugness you will find in no other beer at any cost.

Pols

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

As a rightist, I am only peripherally interested in the Democratic Party presidential campaigns and I have not dedicated much time or effort in studying them. This morning on the way into work however, I was surfing around the XM channels for something to listen to and came upon an interview with Bill Richardson on C-Span radio. The theme for the day was health care, something that I am perhaps as confused by as most Americans are but with nothing else to listen to I settled for the thirty minute in-depth treatment from The Man Who Would Be President.

I have to say I was surprised at the lack of intellectual depth of Governor Richardson. He seemed to have trouble understanding some fairly simple questions. Maybe he was distracted by something else. Maybe he was just tired.

He had some statistics memorized--the ones that fit his scenarios--and he had a littany of buzz-words at hand but when pressed to explain in greater depth some of the more difficult details: how he would propose funding the numerous initiatives he mentioned, or whether offering medicare benefits to everyone over 50 might lead to a overburden of the program by perennial sick people who could not otherwise get insurance, it seemed to boil down to "It's the right thing to do." or "Our children deserve better." or similar.

As I said, it was really a shock to see how very banal this fellow is and how very ordinary his intelligence is. I certainly expected more and now I wonder if all of them are so limited.

Still, I found this lengthy treatment very helpful in that my opinions are now informed (at least in the case of this particular candidate) by something more than the soundbite capture which seems to define virtually everyone on the current political stage.

I hope to hear more from other candidates.

I'm Back!

Revenge is wicked, & unchristian & in every way unbecoming, & I am not the man to countenance it or show it any favor. (But it is powerful sweet, anyway.)
- Mark Twain, Letter to daughter Olivia, 12/27/1869



Wow! Ages since I entered anything here. What? A year? More? Nevermind, I'm back again. Fun flies when you're doing time. I took the photo in the Aquarium in Corpus Christi, one of my favorite towns in Texas. We went down to catch the last of the summer surf. We drove down the east side on the back roads and it was relaxing and fun. The idea of getting to the destination as quickly as possible, like prison rape, is vastly overrated. It was fun seeing the little towns with their post offices on main street, the cotton fields and the coast line as we got nearer to town. I love Corpus but for the wrong reasons. Its the only major city in Texas that has lost population since the Second World War. It has an infrastructure to support twice the population it currently has so you drive down these big empty boulevards feeling sort of like you've come out of the mineshaft to discover the city is empty. The people are nice there too. Eat at the Water Street Oyster Bar. You'll go back again.

Hamasistan

...the size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider's measurement of it, but only by the measurement applied to it by the person specially affected by it. The king's lost crown is a vast matter to the king, but of no consequence to the child. The lost toy is a great matter to the child, but in the king's eyes it is not a thing to break the heart about.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography

There seems to be some hand wringing in Gaza these past few days. Hamas was voted in with an overwhelming majority but, as has frequently been the case in the past there, the electorate failed to evaluate all possible options from a balanced perspective. Somehow during all the fun, it was overlooked that Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by the European Community and The United States too, and actions have consequences. In this case the consequence is going to be no more mooching off Uncle Sugar.

So now as the celebratory gunfire fades and as they queue up for their daily handouts of rice, flour and powdered milk, courtesy of Uncle Sugar (380 million semolians a year) and the EU (another 300) the realization slowly dawns upon the primitives that the endgate for the gravytrain could be nigh. Secretary Rice has made it clear that they will have to look elsewhere for their handouts. Saudi Arabia would be a good start.

"There's no work here," says Mustapha Baqer in a recent interview with a eurosimp. Well, no, Mustapha, you're right. There aren't as many jobs in Gaza today as there were before the Israelis pulled out, leaving behind functioning greenhouses which previously had provided 3500 jobs for the primitives. The market for the produce from that enterprise was the Jewish settler community, now back in safer territory. The greenhouses were looted of everything that made them work the very day after the Israeli retrenchment. http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-09-13-mideast_x.htm

Let them eat their gelignite.