Showing posts with label texas. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Patrick Swayze 1952 - 2009

Check out this great tribute to Patrick Swayze:

http://youhavetobethistalltogoonthisride.blogspot.com/2009/09/rest-in-peace-patrick-swayze-i-do.html

© Janet Crain

Click here to view all recent Sarah Palin in 2012 posts

Monday, August 31, 2009

Texas Boaters Make Us Proud!!!

These young men are so inspiring. I am so glad they were rescued!!! JC

James Phillips, right, one of three fisherman who were rescued after eight days adrift in the Gulf of Mexico hugs his daughter Laney Phillips, 7, as his wife Shane Phillips looks on Sunday, Aug. 30, 2009, in Blessing, Texas. (AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, James Nielsen)

Mon Aug 31, BLESSING, Texas – Three Texas fishermen who spent eight days stranded in the Gulf of Mexico atop their capsized boat endured hunger, blistering heat, scares from sharks and hallucinations, but they never gave up hope they'd be rescued.

"It was on a day-to-day basis that everybody had their breakdown," Tressel Hawkins told NBC's "Today Show" Monday. "The power of prayer had us feeling safe as far as knowing that we were going to make it out of it, but didn't know how long that we were going to have to endure this."

The men were reunited with their families early Sunday after they were found sitting on their 23-foot catamaran 180 miles from land. They were identified as Hawkins, 43, of Markham; James Phillips, 30, of Blessing; and Curtis Hall, 28, of Palacios.

"I knew we were coming home; I never had a doubt," Phillips, the boat owner, told the Houston Chronicle.

The crew of a sport fishing boat spotted the men waving their white T-shirts near Port Aransas and rescued them Saturday. The three were reported missing Aug. 22 after they left Matagorda, about 90 miles southwest of Houston, on a fishing trip and never returned. Port Aransas is about 130 miles from Matagorda.

The three were asleep that Friday night and were awakened by water coming in the boat, Hawkins said.

"Once we were awake and saw what happened, it flipped over in one minute," Phillips told the Chronicle. "Then us country boys went into survival mode. That's all we could do."'

The men rationed their salvaged bubble gum, crackers, beer and chips, and used a hose to suck fresh water out of the internal "washdown" tank. Fishermen often keep such a tank to wash fish slime off their boat when they are out in the salt water.

"We'd eat crackers one day, and then a handful of chips," Phillips said. "Everything tasted like gasoline and saltwater."

Hall and Haskins both said they saw U.S. Coast Guard helicopters and rescue planes fly over. The Coast Guard, which gave up the search after the men had been missing a week, never saw them.

Cont. here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090831/ap_on_re_us/us_boaters_rescued

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Chet Edwards Unbelievably Rude to Constituents

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Don't Mess With Americans...We've Had Enough!!!

by Janet Crain
How can people say the Tea Parties aren't about taxes? Taxation without representation is what started the American Revolution.

Somewhere, we lost our way.

We do not have representation when our taxes are used for purposes repugnant to us. Such as ABORTION. And pushing through a Socialist government when we the tax payers believe this is morally wrong and will not be successful. Doing away with Free Enterprise by bailing out businesses who did not deserve to be helped. Proposing a huge bloated stimulus plan that is stuffed with pork and very little to stimulate the economy.

Going abroad with a retinue of hangers on who served little purpose, unless one or two were needed to catch Barack Obama if he bend over backward too far or fell forward onto the King of Arabia's feet.

Bringing shame on a nation I love.

Wasting taxpayer money to do these things. Oh yeah, it's about taxes.

And a whole lot more....

Ted Nugent: Remember the Alamo, taxpayers

TED NUGENT Texas Wildman

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Here we go again, at the shrine of Texas.

Throughout our history, brave, defiant fighters have armed themselves to stop oppressors, slavedrivers, tyrants, despots and punks of every stripe.

It doesn’t really matter who these oppressors are. We stop them all — Redcoats forcing taxation without representation, British goons coming after our guns, rioting gangs burning down the neighborhood in the name of Rodney King.

Bring it.

We don’t really care about the origin of evil, but we know it when we see it. Free men know that it must be halted by whatever means necessary.

Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Col. William B. Travis and a ragtag cadre of courageous freedom fighters saw the steamroller of oppression metastasizing from Mexico those many years ago. They made their gallant stand at the Alamo. One hundred and eighty-six militia men, rough-and-tumble squirrel hunters and deer hunters, stood against thousands from Santa Anna’s army, crippling it just enough to be broken in the final showdown at San Jacinto.

Freedom was a bloody line drawn in the Texas sand.

Thank God that today the same intense, defiant spirit rages on in the belly of an otherwise soft, spoiled nation.

http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2009/04/12/04122009wacnugent.html?imw=Y

© Janet Crain

Click here to view all recent Sarah Palin in 2012 posts

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

It's Time to Talk About the Federal Constitution........

It's about time!!!
Hat Tip: Alamo City Pundit

http://governor.state.tx.us/news/press-release/12227/

© Janet Crain

Click here to view all recent Sarah Palin in 2012 posts

Monday, March 16, 2009

Populism; It's a Family Tradition

UPDATE: For an example of CNN's distortion of populism at yesterday's Tea Parties click here:
http://sarah-palin-2012.blogspot.com/2009/04/cnn-reporter-susan-rose-encounters.html

by Janet Crain

We hear that Sarah Palin is a Populist politician. And we are hearing about various Populism movements around the country such as "tea parties". But what does that really mean? What is Populism? Few know that Populism had its beginnings a few miles from where I live in 1878 in Lampasas county, TX. I am proud to state that I have a picture of two of my great grandfathers standing side by side at a Farmer's Alliance Meeting at Rockvale, Burnet county, TX in the early 1900's. The men, Henry Thomas Lewis and Meredith Holloway, were obviously friends although it would be almost a quarter century until their descendants (my parents) would forever unite the two families. And judging by the remarks my mother passed on to me made by her father, he too was a Populist. Needless to say some of this rubbed off on me.

The story belows shows a cabin still standing where the first Farmer's Alliance meetings were held and I don't doubt it had some connection. But I have also read that the little cabin where the Farmers Alliance was formed was taken apart and transported to the Chicago Worlds Fair, reassembled and put on display. At the conclusion of the Fair, the story goes, the cabin was parceled out in small pieces to those who wanted a memento of this historic cabin.

So I suppose you can take your choice.

Building a populist coalition in Texas, 1892-1896.

By: Miller, Worth Robert,Ulbig, Stacy G.
Publication: Journal of Southern History
Date: Thursday, May 1 2008

THAN A HALF CENTURY HAS PASSED SINCE C. VANN WOODWARD argued that the success of the People' s (or Populist) Party of the 1890s hinged on construction of three somewhat improbable coalitions of the dispossessed: southerners and westerners, farmers and laborers, and blacks and poor whites in the

South. (1) The rationale for such coalitions was that supposedly both the South and the West had colonial debtor economies in the 1890s, farmers and laborers shared a common status as producers, and blacks and poor southern whites frequently shared a marginal economic situation. But the counterinfluences of post-Civil War sectionalism, rural-urban jealousies, and racism also were particularly strong in the late-nineteenth-century South. Despite these impediments, Populists experienced substantial success in bringing Woodward's coalitions to fruition in Texas.

Building a movement of the dispossessed in the Lone Star State in the 1890s was fraught with many difficulties. Then as now, Texas was an exceptionally large and diverse state. It is more than eight hundred miles from Brownsville on the Mexican border to the northern edge of the semiarid expanses of the Texas Panhandle, and nearly as far from the Piney Woods of East Texas to El Paso

Of the ten major soil types commonly "recognized around the world, seven are found in abundance in Texas." (2) The state was nearly 85 percent rural in the 1890s. Yet cities as different as southern-white-evangelical-dominated Dallas and overwhelmingly ethnic San Antonio experienced significant growth in the late nineteenth century. (3) A mixture of whites from both the upper and the plantation South, as well as a significant black population, gave the state a southern ambience. But people of Mexican, German, Czech, and Polish heritage both mingled with the native-born population and formed distinctive cultural areas of their own. (4)

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http://www.articlearchives.com/humanities-social-science/history/974465-1.html

In the past, where the term populism originates, specifically in a rustic cabin in Pleasant Valley, Lampasas County, Texas, in the year 1877, populism was not yet populism, it was merely an aggregation of hard scrabble farmers in west Texas fed up with being exploited by the merchants, the bankers, and the rail roads. They weren’t going to take it anymore. They were going to bring to life again what seemed to them to be the dying promise of the Constitution that proclaimed a new government by and for “we the people” to establish Justice and promote the general Welfare, among other laudable intents.

Populist was not a term these sweaty, raw boned farmers applied to themselves. They called themselves “The Farmer’s Alliance”. They were driven by the desire to create what we call today a “level playing field”.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20068.htm

PHOTO BY DAVID LOWE Gordon and Judy Chapin recently donated a conservation easement on their Gravel Hill Ranch, home to numerous animal and native plant species and to a cabin built in the 1880s. The Chapins believe the first owner of the cabin participated in the Farmer Alliance, which began meeting near Donalson Creek (in Lampasas County, TX) in 1877 and evolved into the national Populist Party.

http://www.lampasasdispatchrecord.com/news/2008/0219/Front_page/001.html

Related:

http://tinyurl.com/c8q4l3

Monday, March 9, 2009

Texas Cities Setting for Drug Cartel Wars

by Janet Crain
The comments in the Houston Chronicle by some people who want to solve this horrible problem by legalizing drugs are really stupid, IMO. To those who feel we should just let all the illegals in and legalize drugs to solve this problem I would say:

Give me a break! In the first place it would not work. You would still have competing gangs killing each other. And we should not cave to bullies and terrorists because they will get worse. People want to rob banks and sometimes they do. What's the answer? Throw the doors open and hand out money? NO!!! Shut the borders and enforce the drug laws and illegal alien laws. Not enough personel? Hire some more with all that money pouring out of Washington. And/or use the National Guard.

Don't just give up!!!

What about the demand for hard dangerous drugs? Gonna legalize those too? Anybody can cook up Meth. It ruins lives. Turns parents into zombies.

We do not need a nation on drugs.

Get a grip. Sober up if necessary.

Help don't hinder.

Mexican cartels infiltrate Houston

Recent arrests in a mistaken killing point to the perilous presence of gangs

By DANE SCHILLER
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

March 7, 2009, 9:28PM

Family photo

Jose Perez was enjoying a night out with his wife, Norma, in 2006 when hitmen with a Mexican drug cartel mistook him for a rival trafficker and gunned him down.

But in a case of mistaken identity, Jose Perez ended up dead. The intended target — the Houston-based head of a Mexican drug cartel cell pumping millions of dollars of cocaine into the city — walked away.

Perez, 27, was just a working guy, out getting dinner late on a Friday with his wife and young children at Chilos, a seafood restaurant on the Gulf Freeway.

His murder and the assassination gone awry point to the perilous presence of Mexican organized crime and how cartel violence has seeped into the city.

Arrests came in December when police and federal agents got a break in the 2006 shooting as they charted the relationship and rivalries between at least five cartel cells operating in Houston. A rogue’s gallery of about 100 names and mug shots taken at Texas jails and morgues offers a blueprint for Mexican organized crime.

Houston has long been a major staging ground for importing illegal drugs from Mexico and shipping them to the rest of the United States, but a recent Department of Justice report notes it is one of 230 cities where cartels maintain distribution networks and supply lines.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6299436.html

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Remembering Horton Foote

by Janet Crain
Texas has lost its most brilliant screenwriter and story teller. Horton Foote was born in Wharton, TX and always considered Wharton his home. Wharton is one of my favorite Texas towns. The rich heritage of a populous composed of descendants of early settlers from Alabama, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia, and Mississippi, along with Jewish immigrants, arriving as early as the 1850s, soon joined by other settlers in the community including Swiss, German, Mexican, and Czech immigrants and descendants of plantation slaves supplied Horton Foote with much of his material.

His roots were deep in the South and Texas in particular. He understood the people and his work showed that.

Remembering Horton Foote

The son of a small-town Texas haberdasher and a piano teacher, Horton Foote headed to Dallas by train at age 16 to become an actor -- but even as he became a leading writer for the stage and screen he never really left home. Tiny little Wharton, Tex., and the stories his father picked up from his customers would fuel a remarkable body of work that included a Pulitzer-winning play (1995's The Young Man From Atlanta) and two Oscar-winning scripts (the 1962 classic To Kill a Mockingbird, adapted from Harper Lee's best-seller, and 1983's Tender Mercies, starring his long-time acting muse, Robert Duvall, as a down-and-out country singer).

Foote, who died March 4 in Hartford, Conn., at age 92, was a remarkable storyteller whose work, like William Faulkner's, was rooted in the ordinary struggles of ordinary people in the American South. After abandoning acting, he got his start as a writer during the golden age of television and adapted many of his stories for different media. The Trip to Bountiful -- about an old woman yearning to visit her hometown of Bountiful, Tex., one last time before her death -- began as an NBC teleplay in 1953 starring Lillian Gish, then became a stage play in 1962, and was later adapted into a 1985 movie that earned Geraldine Page an Academy Award for Best Actress (and another nomination for Foote himself).

There was something charmingly old-fashioned about Foote's prodigious body of work. He wasn't overtly political or experimental in form. He wasn't a flashy stylist. His works typically have a beginning, middle, and an end -- though often many diversions along the way to that end. And he took a Chekhovian approach to his characters, hardscrabble souls with deep family histories and endless depths of backstory.

cont.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpopwatch.ew.com%2Fpopwatch%2F2009%2F03%2Fremembering-hor.html&ei=8gCwSf3RN4qeMpqsxOYE&usg=AFQjCNEvrkj0XkEDiyNg2ZYcJx7mlJEOzA&sig2=ThIOfL_KgrfJ8adL_gTmMQ

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Bessie Coleman First African and Native American Female Pilot

(1892-1926)
Aviatrix

by Janet Crain

Bessie Coleman was the world's first black female pilot and the first woman to receive an international pilot's license. She flew in the United States 3 years before Amelia Earhart. But this triumph over circumstance came after many hard years of work and sacrifice.

Bessie was born in Atlanta, Texas to George and Susan Coleman, the twelfth of thirteen children or the 6th of 10 according to which resource you read. In any case, life was very hard in the little home four miles from Waxahachie, Texas that George built with his own hands, then left for Oklahoma to establish his Native American citizenship as a Choctaw-Cherokee with a small amount of African American ancestry. Susan declined to move the family with him. She eked out a living picking cotton and the children helped. In some manner Bessie was sent to one semester of College in Oklahoma, but had to return home when her money ran out.

She then became a self employed laundress, walking the four miles to Waxahachie in the morning to get the dirty laundry and washing all day when this meant carrying water and wood to burn for fuel. After four years of this, she vowed to improve her condition and moved to Chicago where her older brothers lived. She attended a manicurist school for about one month and was then installed in the window of the White Sox Barbershop where her good looks attracted the maximum attention and clientele.

One of her brothers who returned from France after the war told her the women in her neighborhood would never be able to fly planes like the women in France. That was all Bessie needed to hear. Flying had been a lifelong dream of hers. She began a campaign among her well heeled gentlemen friends, both black and white, to contribute to her receiving flying lessons in France. Apparently Bessie was persuasive, indeed as she was soon studying French and preparing for her trip.

She took lessons at the Federation Aeronautique Internationale and in 1921 she became the only black pilot in the world. A year later she became the first black woman to fly over American soil.

Bessie soon became a role model, not only for blacks and women, but for others who admired her tenacity and endurance. She barnstormed, performed sky stunts and flew crop dusters to earn money to establish her own flying school. Never adverse to publicity, Bessie designed a military costume and shaved 4 or 5 years off her real age.

At one performance she took up, free of charge, 75 different people in her plane, saying they may not be able to ride the train but they had flown in an airplane.

To fulfill her dream to own her own plane and start a school for African American students, she made a deal with a businessman to pay for a $400. Jenny, a plane that she would use to advertise his business to repay him.

When the mechanic flew the plane to her, they took it up for a check and for once she did not fasten her seat belt because sitting in the passenger seat she was too short to see out The engine stalled and the plane lurched, throwing her out. Her death was instantaneous and so was the mechanic's as the plane crashed and landed on top of him.

An investigation revealed a wrench left carelessly behind which became lodged in the controls.

And so a dream died for Brave Bessie. But not for her adoring public. 5,000 people attended her funeral and for many years afterward black pilots dropped flowers on her Chicago grave on her birthday.

Only after her death did Bessie receive the recognition she desired. Her dream of a flying school for African Americans was fulfilled when William J. Powell established the Bessie Coleman Aero club in Los Angeles. Influenced by the Aero Club, hundreds of black aviators -- including the Flying Blackbirds, the Flying Hobos, and the Tuskegee Airmen -- continued to make Bessie's dream a reality.

http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/bhm/bio/coleman_b.htm