Category Archives: Texana

Election fraud in Texas

Posted on February 22, 2014 | 3 comments

Not that you would have heard much about it unless you read PJMedia and a few other outlets that take investigative journalist James O’Keefe for more than the “provocateur” the NYTimes calls him.

Provocateur means troublemaker. Trouble for the Democrat party.

“The media in Texas have done their dead-level best to ignore both of Project Veritas’ videos as long as they possibly could. When the media here do cover them, they have tended to downplay the videos’ potential significance. The [supposedly non-partisan] Texas Tribune even interviewed a Democrat election lawyer — but not a Republican one — to defend Battleground Texas’ actions seen in the Veritas video. The prevailing media opinion seems to be that, because leftwing outfits have often criticized Project Veritas, every story that it unearths is worthless or worse.”

Well, most of the reporters and editors in those outfits are leftists themselves, educated in leftist journalism mills elsewhere, who only came to Texas for a job. Their interest in the state is minimal. And, instead of competing with each other, most of the time they echo each other.

Instapundit calls them and most of their colleagues elsewhere “Democratic operatives with bylines.”

Via Instapundit.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Scribbles, Texana, The Culture

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Ray Brownfield, R.I.P.

Posted on February 20, 2014 | 1 comment

Another longtime family friend passed away this week, our good bud Ray Brownfield of Quicksburg, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. He had struggled for several years with pancreatic cancer.

Ray was a retired Army colonel, former commander of the Ranger School, and fellow Vietnam combat veteran. He was always especially interested in Mr. Boy on our infrequent visits to Reveille Vineyard, jointly operated by Ray and Mr. B.’s godfather Richard Torovsky, the last time in 2011.

Ray, an Army brat, was born in Washington, D.C. But home was Brownfield, a town in West Texas between Lubbock and Odessa that was named for one of his ancestors. He and Richard were Citadel graduates and Ray also had graduated in 1964 from the Staunton Military Academy, a Virginia prep school which closed in 1976. My Corsicana great grandfather was a graduate of Staunton’s first military class in 1890.

Ray was a prominent Shenandoah Valley Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for public office in the largely Republican area. We argued frequently about politics in email exchanges, but it never got in the way of the friendship. As Ray often said to folks he liked, you were a great American, Mr. Brownfield.

And we and the country will miss you.

UPDATE:  Ray’s obituary appeared in the Northern Virginia Daily on Feb. 26.

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Posted in Mr. Boy, Obituaries, Texana, Troops, Viet Nam

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Why Open Carry is a bad idea

Posted on February 20, 2014 | 18 comments

It’s not just because Abortion Barbie has come out in favor of it. She’s just matching AG Greg Abbott’s support for it in their campaigns for governor.

I think they’re both wrong, but especially Abbott, the only one of the two who has a prayer of being elected. Maybe he’ll wise up after he’s safely in the governor’s mansion. He’d have to convince the Legislature and they don’t meet again until 2015. They had an opportunity to do it in 2013 and didn’t take it.

The Texas Firearms Coalition favors it, but with a measure of concern:

“If open-carry does pass, it is incumbent upon those Texans exercising this option to be extraordinarily polite and courteous so as to allay the fears of those who, for the first time in their lives, will see people [other than police] openly carrying handguns.

“For sixteen years, our fellow Texans have been walking with, sitting next to, and eating among, hundreds of thousands of armed, law-abiding CHL’s [Concealed Handgun Licensees].  Those choosing to openly carry a handgun should view themselves as ambassadors for those Texans who chose to continue to conceal their self-defense handguns.”

The trouble is that not everyone displaying a pistol will be polite. Concealed carry doesn’t intimidate anyone. Open carry is automatically intimidating and that intimidation will cause trouble. Most likely a shootout on the street between two open-carry people who don’t like each other and seeing each other openly-armed will encourage them to get it all out in the open.

Late 19th century city marshals and police chiefs in Texas routinely required people (usually men) packing revolvers to leave them in their saddlebags or check them at the police office until they were ready to leave town. It saved a lot of problems, specifically deadly shootings.

I support concealed carry, which makes a lot of sense to me and apparently to many thousands of other Texans. Displaying handguns on the hip or in a shoulder holster on the street is a big difference and not a good one.

Hopefully, the Legislature will recognize that and refuse to allow it.

UPDATE:  Open carry draws a mixed response on the Texas CHL Forum, who say CHL is approaching 800,000 in Texas. They do seem to agree that carrying rifles into stores as some sort of 2nd Amendment demo is stupid.

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Posted in Guns, Texana

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Our winter almost over

Posted on February 17, 2014 | 1 comment

After four months of chilly-to-downright-cold, we finally have a week’s forecast ahead of daytime temps in the mid- to upper-70s. But LCRA meteor Bob Rose says below-normal temperatures will return for the last week of the month into the first week of March.

No precip in the offing, unlike the experience of a fellow 13th Mississippi descendant who recently bought a copy of our new book. She lives in Maine (of all places) and says they just finished shoveling eight inches of ice-crusted snow off walks and deck and had another three inches of snow over the weekend. Better them than me.

Now if the damn juniper pollen would just get the shuck out of the air. Going on eight weeks now of sneezing and nose-blowing from “cedar fever” is just too much.

If it happens again next year, I have told Mrs. Charm, I’m moving to West Texas—at least for the duration. Hole up in some boarding house (if I can find one; if they have them anymore) with WiFi until the all-clear.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Mrs. Charm, Rancho Roly Poly, Texana, Weather

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Austin’s burgeoning Jewish choices

Posted on February 16, 2014 | 4 comments

The black hats—or penguins if you want to be rude—are the ultra-Orthodox of Judaism, mostly found these days in New York and Jerusalem. But a growing number can be seen daily in our hilly neighborhood on the eastern slope of Austin’s northwest plateau. They’re the surface indications of a growing Jewish population and, therefore, Jewish choices hereabouts.

There’s the proximity to the Dell Jewish Community Center half a mile or so up the road from the rancho. It mainly offers a variety of secular, reform, and conservative services. All of which many of the Haredim lump with pagans and gentiles. Although there is at least one orthodox congregation there and an orthodox  Chabad-Lubbavitch center a mile or so farther north, as well as the student one a few miles down to the southeast of the neighborhood at the University of Texas.

The kosher meat market tucked into a corner of our local H.E.B is a nicety. And, who knows, the diamond merchants amongst whom the Haredim are said to be proliferating might like to congregate. Confirmed for me by a gentile friend hereabouts who is also in the diamond trade. An unassuming fellow devoid of identifying costume except for his diamond pinky ring and the small, belt-holstered 9mm whose outlines are occasionally visible under his shirt. Hard to imagine the Haredim going armed—they’d need a concealed-carry permit from the state of course—but their permanent choice of black suit jackets would provide appropriate concealment.

Whatever the draw for Jews and their burgeoning choices hereabouts, I find the black hats comforting. I see them every Shabbat escorting their long-skirted, hair-covered wives and young children in their Saturday best, all walking in the general direction of the community center and back home again to the rental duplexes on a street a few blocks east of the rancho. But I have always been among the god obsessed, even in our seemingly secular age.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Guns, Israel, Obsessions, Rancho Roly Poly, Texana, The Culture

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Scott’s memorial service

Posted on February 11, 2014 | Comments Off on Scott’s memorial service

The latest comment at The Fat Guy’s last post has the details:

“For the DFW area folks… From Scott’s mom: Continued update from our family to yours: Memorial services for our beloved son, brother, father & grandad, James “Scott” (Buck) Chaffin, will be held Sunday February 16th at 2PM at Casa View Christian Church, 2230 Barnes Bridge Road, Dallas 75228; we’ll welcome y’all to join us . . . Missy asks that we dress casual, your boots & jeans, Rangers shirt, Hawaiian shirt, your Converse Chucks, etc. (this is not a formal occasion) . . . we’ll cut off your tie if you wear one!”

I had no idea he was called Buck. But the prohibition on ties rings true.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obituaries, Texana

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Texas & Canada: similar GDP

Posted on February 10, 2014 | 1 comment

statesrenamed

Oregon? Israel. Illinois? Mexico. New York? Brazil. New Jersey? Russia.

“Gross Domestic Product = consumption + investment + government spending + (exports – imports). Although the economies of countries like China and India are growing at an incredible rate, the US remains the nation with the highest GDP in the world…”

How about that for some American exceptionalism?

(Click map to biggerize for easier reading.)

Via Strange Maps

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obsessions, Texana, The Economy

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