Love Where You Live? Wanna be a Texan?

From the Dallas News a fun story for the morning.
George Getschow: I'm a wannabe Texan

I'm sitting in Archer City's Dairy Queen, a place Larry McMurtry visits often for its chicken fried steaks and vanilla shakes. Above my head are covers of Horseman, Pass By, Cadillac Jack and Lonesome Dove.

In my hand is a signed copy of Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, McMurtry's autobiographical essay examining Big Oil's and Big Ranching's impact on Archer County's way of life. It seems like a good spot to reflect on Texas and Texans. I've lived in Texas for 30 years. My wife is a Texan. My kids are Texan. But my wife and kids like to remind me that I'm "not Texan." They're like a lot of people in Texas who feel if you're not born in Texas, you'll never be a Texan. Read the whole story, it's a good one.

Patients-forced-to-live-in-agony-after-NHS-refuses-to-pay-for-painkilling-injections.

This story is in The Telegraph from the UK

Tens of thousands with chronic back pain will be forced to live in agony after a decision to slash the number of painkilling injections issued on the NHS, doctors have warned.

The Government's drug rationing watchdog says "therapeutic" injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known.

Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy. Read the whole story.

Via the American Thinker
Framing, you need to know what it is

"Framing" refers to the employing of narratives, rather than facts, to describe an event or phenomenon. Its purpose is to contextualize a subject matter in a way that illustrates the validity of something the frame-maker wants to show. The theory behind framing, and the practice of the device in a political context, is put forward by University of California at Berkeley professor and Democratic Party strategist Dr. George Lakoff. Lakoff attends Party strategizing
sessions, including one in early 2005 that planned the successful Party
counteroffensives against Bush on Social Security reform and federal judges. President Obama's reaction in the Gates affair illustrates how Framing works, as well as the pitfalls attendant to its use.

This is a strategy being used against all Americans, we need to know how to combat it. READ THIS ARTICLE

Not Palin's last stand ?

Frank Miele in the Northwest Montana Daily Interlake has a very good article on what Sarah Palin actually said as opposed to what others seemed not to understand in her speech. I've often thought those people who just "didn't get it" were being intentionaly dumb or blinded by ideology.

He starts with this:

President Harry Truman, known as "Give 'em hell Harry," famously said, "I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell."That could aptly describe the relationship between Sarah Palin and the national media these days. Palin, the now former governor of Alaska, has a knack for stirring up the hornets' nest of the national press corps with her unambiguous, unvarnished, undying love for this country. Every time she talks, President Harry Truman, known as "Give 'em hell Harry," famously said, "I never give them hell. I just
tell the truth and they think it's hell."

That could aptly describe the relationship between Sarah Palin and the national media these days. Palin, the now former governor of Alaska, has a knack for stirring up the hornets' nest of the national press corps with her unambiguous, unvarnished, undying love for this country. Every time she talks, it seems like she's got a swarm of angry wasps on her tail.it seems like she's got a swarm of angry wasps on her tail. Click the link and read it.

Nation Review Online has a blog post by Mark Steyn commenting on a piece from Slate Magazine by Jacob weisberg. Since his is the original I am linking you to it, but suggest you read the Mark Steyn at NRO also.

Politicians, like generals, suffer from a tendency to fight the last war.
Having studied meticulously the mistakes of their predecessors, they take care to avoid repeating them—and make the opposite ones. They fortify Maginot lines. They overcompensate for past errors. They swing too far in the other direction.

It is difficult to think of a contemporary president who has not fallen
prey to this temptation. Jimmy Carter reacted against Richard Nixon's
ruthlessness and Lyndon B. Johnson's horse-trading by becoming both too nice and too disdainful of congressional politics. Carter's micromanagement encouraged Ronald Reagan's propensity for detachment. Bill Clinton came to Washington intent on reversing George H.W. Bush's excessive focus on foreign policy—and proceeded to neglect foreign policy for his first few years. George W. Bush compensated for his father's lack of vision and Clinton's indiscipline with his own excesses of grandiosity and punctuality. First ladies do it: Hillary Clinton tried to be the anti-Barbara Bush, while Laura Bush tried to be the anti-Hillary.

Even vice presidents do it: Blathering, peripheral Joe Biden is the excessive response to the silent, all-powerful Dick Cheney.
Barack Obama, too, seems to be caught in this dialectical rut. His early
difficulties with health care reform, which will probably be the defining domestic initiative of his presidency, are the consequence of over-learning Clinton's lessons.

Leon Panetta Seems to Have Learned a Lot Lately
Did he not understand why the "the concensus deteriorated?"

Last month, at a meeting overseas of intelligence service chiefs, one of my counterparts from a major Western ally pulled me aside. Why, he asked, is Washington so consumed with what the CIA did in the past, when the most pressing national security concerns are in the present? It was a very good question. In fact, I've become increasingly concerned that the focus on the past, especially in Congress, threatens to distract the CIA from its crucial core missions: intelligence collection, analysis and covert action.
In our democracy, effective congressional oversight of intelligence is important, but it depends as much on consensus as it does on secrecy. We need broad agreement between the executive and legislative branches on what our intelligence organizations do and why. For much of our history, we have had that. Over the past eight years, on
specific issues -- including the detention and interrogation of terrorists -- the consensus deteriorated. (ed. note: Gee I wonder how that happened?) That contributed to an atmosphere of declining trust, growing frustration and more frequent leaks of properly classified information.

English anyone?
Another from The American Spectator reavealing what they hoped would pass under the radar.
Obama DOJ Threatened Oklahoma Over English-Only Vote
By Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration believes that an inability to speak English is a civil right. It is even more distressing that the dministration, legally speaking, may be right.

In April President Obama's Department of Justice threatened to cut off federal funding to Oklahoma if that state's voters approve a state constitutional amendment making English Oklahoma's official language, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) revealed. The threat came in the form of a letter (PDF) from Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King to Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson. King wrote that "implementation of this amendment may conflict with Oklahoma's obligations to protect the civil rights of limited English proficient (LEP) persons."