Category Archives: Scribbles

Slime time

Posted on December 2, 2011 | Comments Off on Slime time

The Leftist news media is happily predicting the demise of Herman Cain’s campaign for the Republican nomination. It’s what they do: Collect slime and spread it on and play it up like it was the most important thing. Then sit back and ballpark how effective it’s been.

Not that Cain hasn’t hurt himself. Despite insisting he’s going to hang in there, even as his principal Tea Party backers bail. He should have seen this stuff coming and prepared better. Always amazes me that any Republican candidate—especially a black man who presents an obviously stronger racial challenge to Obamalot than any white man—could imagine the Dem media would treat him/her fairly.

With or without hidden baggage, but especially with. Never has happened. And never will. As a surprised John McCain found out in 2008, objectivity and fairness are not the Fifth Column’s game.

UPDATE: Ann Coulter has a good take on this:  “[T]his is how liberals dirty you up when they’ve got nothing…”

And then, a day after I posted the above, Cain bailed out of the race.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Scribbles

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Thanks to all my ebook readers

Posted on December 1, 2011 | Comments Off on Thanks to all my ebook readers

I happily ended November with six more ebook sales for Alamo and Knoxville—including twice as many of the latter. Which brings that one to a total of 91 since its first month in April, 2010—finally edging in on breaking even for the cost of ebook formatting.

Hardly bestseller material here, these single-digit sales months. Haven’t had a double-digit month since 15 sold back in April. Record still 27 for Knoxville alone in August 2010, thanks to a plug from power-blogger Instapundit. It’s a nice lunch-money hobby, however.

Thanks to all my loyal readers, including those who promised reviews at Amazon but haven’t gotten around to it. Several have good excuses, including one in San Antonio who’s seriously ill. Best wishes to him, of course, for a recovery soon.

Still in the works: polishing a Vietnam War novel which loyal-reader Snoopy was kind enough to read and criticize, finishing a Civil War digital regimental still in blog form, and writing a memoir about growing up in the Cold War.

War-Is-Us, obviously. One of these days I may do something different. Meanwhile, coupled with new violin lessons and full-time parenting, I’m busier than before I retired.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Library, Mr. Boy, Rancho Roly Poly, Scribbles

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Violin lessons at age 67

Posted on November 29, 2011 | Comments Off on Violin lessons at age 67

I have rented a violin, embarking upon an effort to learn the instrument. Next is finding a teacher near the rancho. I have no illusions. It took me years to learn to play the trumpet and I was never very good at it. Likewise the acoustic guitar. Violin is just something I’ve been thinking about for a while. So, after a few weeks of Web wandering on the subject, I decided to give it a whirl.

Mrs. C. played viola in school, and we’ve talked about that, but my interest really grew when Mr. B. began playing the clarinet at the start of this school year. I’ve been helping teach him to read music and the sound of him playing everything from Ode to Joy to the Theme from Star Wars gave me the bug again. And I’ve also discovered the clarinet and violin are often paired.

Course having YouTube around is a great incentive: free intro lessons into the violin’s peculiar issues, and multiple chances to watch amateurs and professionals play what I think is going to be a very challenging instrument, indeed. Plus there’s the Violin Lab, part of Blackerby Violin Shop, the outfit I rented from. Adds up to enough instruction to make learning on my own feasible, if not necessarily successful. Have to wait and see about that.

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Posted in Mr. Boy, Mrs. Charm, Music, Rancho Roly Poly, Scribbles

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South Texas oil boom

Posted on November 28, 2011 | Comments Off on South Texas oil boom

Unemployment in the San  Antonio metro area already is down to 7.5 percent, compared to the official 9 percent of the rest of the country—thanks to a South Texas boomlet in the oil and gas industry.

This one also is bringing prosperity to the small towns of a 400-mile area that geologists call the Eagle Ford Shale, which is part of the Austin Chalk. Drilling companies are hiring truck drivers to computer techs, as well as the usual roughnecks and tool pushers for the oil and gas drilling rigs servicing a new pipeline in Hobson, southeast of San Antonio.

It’s part of a national boom in shale oil and gas recovery in North Dakota and Pennsylvania and, if the drillers get their way, even in upstate New York. And they might, if Obamalot and its anti-fossil fuel Green cronies can’t find a way to kill the whole thing. If they’re smarter than they’ve acted so far, they’ll back off and lay low until the 2012 election is over.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Science/Engineering, Scribbles, Texana

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Obama’s terrorist ghostwriter

Posted on November 27, 2011 | Comments Off on Obama’s terrorist ghostwriter

All politicians lie, that’s a given, but I can’t recall one who ever pretended that he wrote a book by himself, when he didn’t, and to compound the deception caused his name alone to be on the cover.

Except Barack Hussein Obama and his “Dreams From My Father,” the book that made some of the Democrat media (and, frankly, me as well) figure that here was a pol who really was a master of rhetoric. Of course his public speeches as president have put so many people to sleep no one is fooled any longer.

Yet the fiction of his solo authorship lives on, even though it’s been contradicted by celebrity author Christopher Anderson in his 2009 authorized (and fawning) “Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.”

Wherein the author demonstrates (do a search there on Ayers and Dreams) how unrepentant 1970s terrorist (and longtime Obama neighbor, crony and babysitter of the Obama children) William Ayers contributed substantially to the writing of Dreams.

I suppose the main reason for not bringing all this up now—in addition to making Obama look more of a lying phony than he already does—is Ayers. Just the mention of the name could be toxic as the burlesque Obamalot tries to get re-elected.

The only name that might be worse would be Jeremiah Wright, the One’s racialist Chicago pastor.

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Posted in Library, Obamalot, Scribbles

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Phuong Trinh: Rule 5

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Posted on November 26, 2011 in Rule 5, Scribbles, Viet Nam

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The Flea Party’s cheerleaders

Posted on November 25, 2011 | Comments Off on The Flea Party’s cheerleaders

Nothing is off limits to the Flea Party parasites, and their Leftist media enablers just cheer them on, even when it comes to frightening little children on their way to school. Their way to school went through Wall Street, where the tiny Flea Party of a few hundred unwashed, unskilled anarchists, socialists and other nanny-state lovers prattled on about “income inequality”—with their own palms out, of course.

And while they’re at it they’ll even try to damage the limping economy.

The most revealing thing about these lame Flea Party “occupations” of a mere one or two city blocks in several large cities has been the support they’ve had from Democrat politicians, up to and including the Obamalot White House, and especially Obamalot’s media lapdogs,  the WaPo and the NYTimes. All have inflated the significance of the Flea Party encampments on public land while minimizing the rapes, murders, disease and lack of potty training.

This media behavior underscores conservative Stanford economist Thomas Sowell’s old assertion that the Fourth Estate really is a propagandistic Fifth Column actively undermining the country. The same media ridiculed the much, much larger (many thousands more) middle-class Tea Party, despite their wholly-peaceful (and squeaky clean) demeanor.

Not to mention drawing the sneers of the Leftist politicians whose elite comfort is threatened by the TP’s continuing campaign (via politicians like Herman Cain) for smaller government, lower taxes and fewer handouts for the Flea Party & Friends. Only the TP is likely to influence the 2012 elections which will, indeed, be a national IQ test: are you stupid enough to vote for Obamalot again and four more years of this stuff?

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Posted in Obamalot, Scribbles

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