Young Austin Gets Mixed Up With Shady Character
Young Austin Gets Mixed Up With Shady Character When the two men parted on Aug. 26, 1822, Stephen F. Austin asked Gen. Arthur G. Wavell to act on his behalf while in England. The polite and purely symbolic request was the young empressario
Living Without Electricity, Part 4
Living Without Electricity, Part 4 If you
Two Candidates
Two Candidates
How Old Are Those Chinese Gymnasts
How Old Are Those Chinese Gymnasts Numbers have been very important in the Olympic Games. The number eight is the luckiest number in the Chinese lore, so it was considered fortuitous to start this year
Legislators Must Stop Diverting Revenues From The Gasoline Tax
Legislators Must Stop Diverting Revenues From The Gasoline Tax What
Letters To The Editor
Dear Editor, In reaction to removing the age based ban on adult drinking, University of Iowa President Sally Masson says that it will not solve the problem. Brilliant, then stop treating high school graduates as something other than adults. Remove the non-effective infringement on their liberty, treat them and hold them responsible as adults, and expect them to act that way. If there is to be regulation of adults behavior that discriminates base on age, pass a law that requires 50-years-olds to act and look grown up. Who knows, it might finally shape me up. Mason says, “I believe significant cultural change is necessary to solve this problem.” That is why the nation repealed the Volstead Act that gave the nation prohibition and a period of provoked excess and rampant disregard for law that was called the Roaring Twenties. If an institution dedicated teaching and learning dose not know how to assist its students to beneficially thrive personally and socially, get out of the way and leave the good council to a friendly bartender. Sam Osborne, West Branch , IA
Mid-Summer Alert
Mid-Summer Alert
Chewing The Buddha
Chewing The Buddha
Lhasa, Tibet
In Texas Politics, Nothing Sells Like Ignorance
In Texas Politics, Nothing Sells Like Ignorance As Uncle Hugh used to say, “You can
Have-Not Demographics
Have-Not Demographics Ask your typical anglo-Texan whether he is racist, and he will say, “No.” Duh! Of course, he
Fromholz To Perform At Benefit Saturday At Bosque Bottoms — Steve Fromholz Featured On Cover Of Texas Horse Talk
Steve Fromholz Featured On Cover Of Texas Horse Talk
CLIFTON Steve Fromholz, who recently made the cover of Texas Horse Talk, will perform at 2 p.m. during the American Cancer Society benefit on Saturday, Aug. 30, at Bosque Bottoms in Meridian.
The article in Texas Horse Talk by Steven Long is a poignant look at Fromholz’s life from his early days in Kopperl, and his writing of “The Texas Trilogy” 41 years ago, to his multitude of adventures as a cowboy, singer, writer, trailrider guide, and whitewater guide.
Fromholz, who currently resides in Clifton with his sister, Angela Blair, has made a remarkable comeback from a deadly stroke in 2003, to regain his well-known stage presence and his love of both music and horses.
“The Texas Trilogy” was turned into a screen play, entitled Bosque County, Texas, which won numerous Omar Awards recently at the Tin Building Theatre in Clifton after its performances last fall on the local stage. Fromholz was on hand for both the opening performance of the play and the awards ceremony last week.
The article in Horse Talk highlights the youths who grew up on horseback in Bosque County, and who, to this day, love the freedom of a trail ride and the music that comes from Fromholz’s soul.
In closing, Long writes, “If Steve Fromholz doesn’t know Texas, well I guess nobody really does.”
Bass Masters Beware
EL PASO, Texas
Company Says One-Third Of Disaster Planned
GALVESTON, Texas
Jurors Confused By
HOUSTON, Texas
Sen. Biden Picked As Obama
WASHINGTON, D.C.
What’s Double Digits Between Friends? — Political Scientist Praises Lawsuit Against Diebold
Political Scientist Praises Lawsuit Against Diebold COLUMBUS, Ohio Bob Fitrakis is sitting beside himself these days because a Democratic state-office holder in Ohio is actually challenging the company whose electronic touch-screen voting machines cost Sen. John Kerry the 2004 presidential election. But as he applauded Ohio’s Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, for her moxie 90 days before this next presidential election, Fitrakis was also scratching his head; when voting irregularities happened in Ohio in 2004, his quarterly investigative journal, Free Press, was tipped off to them by none other than state Democratic officials. The week after election day 2004, Bill Anthony, chairman of the Franklin County Democratic Party in Columbus, told him about Warren County’s voting problems and literally begged Fitrakis to help him get lawyers to other counties where the elections were in question, the political scientist professor at Columbus State Community College said. “Then when Kerry said, ‘We’re not going to do anything here,’ they all sort of clammed up and went on the offensive against us. That’s the ultimate irony in all this,” Fitrakis told the Iconoclast in an exclusive interview. “A lot of our inital information all came from Democratic Party operatives who are now spending their time dismissing what we say even though we were intitally using some of their data in the analysis.” Now Secretary of State Brunner is seeking damages, including punitive damages, from Premier Election Solutions (formerly known as Diebold Election Systems) for faulty voting machines, breach of warranty and contract, and fraud that lead to missing votes across 11 Ohio counties the same counties that Free Press reporters had shed light on before being called “conspiracy theorists” themselves. “There were over 30,000 unexplained undervotes in Montgomery County. Dayton primarily. That’s going to hurt, as it usually does, the Democrats, These glitches seemed to predominately occur in the urban areas. In Franklin County, there was a variety of missing votes in 2006 as well,” Fitrakis explained. At the time, Democrats explained these discrepencies away with a number of strange theories and colorful jargon such as “calibration” and “the fat finger.” “The fat finger problem, it’s one of my favorites,” said Fitrakis, sarcastically. “It’s that you’re pushing the button lightly, but your finger has got to be twice as fat in order to actually record the vote.” Fitrakis noted that the DNC went out of its way to play junior partner in status quo politics with the Republicans. He called the DNC 2005 report on the Ohio election “one of the most bizzarest things you’ll see.” For example, the report calculated that the average white voter is taking 15 minutes to vote; the average black voter nearly an hour. But the DNC used the average of all black voters in the state including the Republican black voters in rural counties the 17 percent that tend to vote Republican. What DNC didn’t want to point out were the large urban areas. The average wait for black voters in Columbus, for instance, was three to seven hours. “In my analogy, if a to
Living Without Electricity, Part 3
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Reptilian Rule
Reptilian Rule Is anyone willingly to initiate the long-needed changes to our public education system, which includes providing adequate financing, correcting mismanagement, financial misappropriations, modifying and developing REAL learning outcomes and trimming the “fat” in each district to give every American child a quality education? Or do our leaders still want to keep the majority of our children uneducated and unemployable? While the American education system has been a long-time disappoint over the past several decades [under both parties] apparently <www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16776> legislators continue to decrease the state
The New Federal Deficit Cover Up
The New Federal Deficit Cover Up According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30, will end up with a deficit of $400 billion. While this figure is shockingly high, the truth is that the actually deficit is a lot higher. The $400 billion deficit is based on an accounting fraud called the Unified Budget, in which money borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund and which is added to the National Debt, is counted as income for the annual budget. This kind of trickery by Republicans and Democrats would land officers of publicly held companies in prison. When you take the $186 billion that is being borrowed from Social Security and add it to the $400 billion deficit that is being acknowledged, you get the real deficit of $586 billion. Raiding the Social Security Trust Fund to finance the general operations of the federal government is a direct attack on the financial security of senior citizens. Trying to cover it up through deception is unconscionable. As for Fiscal Year 2009, the Bush Administration projects a deficit of $482 billion, but that does not include $36 billion from the Housing Bill, $80 billion in war costs, and $227 billion borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund. The actual deficit next year will be $825 billion to $343 billion more than has been acknowledged. While the Housing Bill passed late and no one really is sure what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost, it is inexcusable to pretend that the $227 billion being borrowed from Social Security is an asset, rather than a debt that must be repaid. Republican and Democratic politicians should keep their hands off of Social Security surpluses. And they should start accounting honestly for the money borrowed from the Trust Fund. Richard A. Viguerie pioneered political direct mail and has been called “one of the creators of the modern conservative movement” (The Nation magazine) and one of the “conservatives of the century” (The Washington Times). His latest book is Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big-Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause (Bonus Books).
