Also, Texas loves to do food right. And I am not talking steak.

This year, the State Fair of Texas is just saying screw it and throwing your whole meal in the fryer. Yes, including your salad (a Fried Club Salad, specifically a 12” spinach wrap with ham, chicken, shredded iceberg, carrot, cherry tomatoes, sharp cheddar, and bacon that’s deep fried and served with fried croutons on a bed of romaine lettuce).

Also, your beer (in the form of a deep-fried beer-filled pretzel pocket). Deep-fried Frozen Margarita? Yep. And fried lemonade? Yes, that too. And how about a white chocolate and cherry stuffed brownie fried in chocolate cake batter for dessert? The annual submissions for the Sixth Annual Big Tex Choice Awards have really, truly outdone themselves this year. The full list, plus descriptions of each dish, below.

· Deep Fried S’mores Pop-Tart
· Fried Chocolate
· Deep Fried Frozen Margarita
· Fried Lemonade
· Fernie’s Fried Club Salad
· Texas Fried Caviar
· Fried Beer Texas
· Fried Frito Pie

God bless Texas, baby.

This column is one of the best and most succinct “Why Obama Must Fail” 101s I’ve read or heard.

President Obama has engaged in numerous high crimes and misdemeanors. The Democratic majority in Congress is in peril as Americans reject his agenda. Yet more must be done: Mr. Obama should be impeached.

He is slowly – piece by painful piece – erecting a socialist dictatorship…He is undermining our constitutional system of checks and balances; subverting democratic procedures and the rule of law; presiding over a corrupt, gangster regime; and assaulting the very pillars of traditional capitalism. Like Venezuela’s leftist strongman, Hugo Chavez, Mr. Obama is bent on imposing a revolution from above – one that is polarizing America along racial, political and ideological lines. …His policies are Balkanizing the country. It’s time for him to go.

He has abused his office and violated his oath to uphold the Constitution.

…Mr. Obama is waging a frontal assault on property rights.

…Mr. Obama’s multicultural socialism seeks to eradicate traditional America.

…To provide the shock troops for his socialist takeover, Mr. Obama calls for “comprehensive immigration reform” – granting amnesty…This would forge a permanent Democratic electoral majority. It would sound the death knell for our national sovereignty. Amnesty rewards lawlessness and criminal behavior; it signifies the surrender of our porous southern border to a massive illegal invasion.

…The common misperception on the right is that Mr. Obama is another Jimmy Carter: an incompetent liberal whose presidency is being reduced to rubble under the onslaught of repeated failures. The very opposite, however, is true. He is the most consequential president of our lifetime, transforming America into something our Founding Fathers would find not only unrecognizable, but repugnant. Like all radical revolutionaries, he is consumed by the pursuit of power—attaining it, wielding it and maximizing it. Mr. Obama’s fledgling thug state must be stopped.

Absolutely read the whole thing, remember what you read, and hold the facts in evidence against this man and his cronies who have as their goal the destruction of America, the ruination of her people, and the enslavement of her children.

How about we go back to 66? This is a bit dark coming from me, but I love it, love it:

On Black.

Opened in 1931, John’s Modern Cabins seemed to have begun life as a disreputable juke joint known as Bill and Bess’ Place (with a sweet name like that, it wasn’t known for the best apple pies and corn fritters in town? Really?).

At Bill and Bess’, where the dance hall was set between six little cabins, a murder took place, serving only to enhance the place’s reputation. Eighteen year-old Billie Duncan had separated from her husband, Eugene, almost two weeks before to live with her mother, and he simply wouldn’t stand for it. In 1935, on Halloween night, Eugene shot and killed Billie.

After denying the murder, Eugene entered a guilty plea just a week before the trial was supposed to start, and served thirteen years of a 50-year sentence. He died at 60 years old of a heart attack, after remarrying and living what we must presume was a fairly normal life for a Missourian. I wonder if Billie would have liked that opportunity?

Thanks again!

GO, GO ZENYATTA!!!!

Just as state schooling is not about education, but about the state, gun control is not about guns: It’s about control. A citizen who can fend for himself when the predators come or the schools fail is less inclined to look to the state for sustenance and oversight in other areas of life. …To the men who wrote the Second Amendment, it was a condition of citizenship in a free republic. It’s what free men did, and do.

~ Kevin Williamson

National Review first published this article by Kevin Williamson in its print edition before giving it the Steyn spot Saturday morning on their website. I’m very glad they did, because it’s an excellent article on many counts.

For one thing, the opening bit in particular is rather personal (all of it is, really, to a free people, but read on), because we’ve had coyotes in our neighborhood since the fall; in fact, they have slain not only at least one large deer, but a small neighborhood dog. That knowledge combined with the fact that there are plenty of small children running around their yards and streets, often after dusk, and that there is an elementary school a block behind us, makes me even more aware of the fact that the life my pistol save may not necessarily be my own. Consider, too, that some have spotted what appears to be a small pack of former canine pets—and that this past winter, several of these dogs went into pack-hunting mode against my own husband and my own large dog, in a quiet West Virginia suburb. Sometimes, waving arms and throwing rocks just won’t do.

Westchester County has a problem more often seen in rural, Republican-leaning jurisdictions: coyotes. These canine predators are a real menace, a fact that was dramatically illustrated in late June by the case of young Emily Hodulik, age six, who was attacked by a pair of coyotes on a leafy suburban street in the quaint town of Rye. …Miss Hodulik suffered serious bite wounds but escaped without life-threatening injuries. She’s undergoing a series of rabies shots, doesn’t like to sleep alone, and is afraid that there are coyotes in the basement of the family home.

…Coyotes like to attack the little ones, human or otherwise. That was the case for one unfortunate coyote that attacked a puppy out for a jog with his master in Travis County, Texas, in the suburbs of Austin, where coyotes have it a little rougher than they do in suburban New York. That particular coyote had the bad luck to set his gaze on a puppy owned by Gov. Rick Perry, who produced a laser-sighted .380-caliber automatic pistol, loaded with hollowpoints, and sent it to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

As Williamson notes, the left was predictably horrified by Perry’s audacity when it came to defending his pup, though of course the hysteria was most notable regarding Perry’s actually carrying a pistol (gasp!). This made me chuckle; typical lefty pansifists worrying about ‘why they hate us’ and even more terrified by the idea that law-abiding citizens are going about their daily business while fully armed. Armed, able, and willing to defend themselves and others from whatever may try to harm them.

Williamson quotes a WaPo writer who says he’s not worried about criminals having guns so much as he fears his law-abiding neighbors, co-workers, and family members being able to simply apply for a permit to own a gun, much less own one. Either the writer lives, works, and conducts all business in a suitably gentrified part of town where he needn’t worry about riffraff, or he thinks that the people who keep this country going are not intelligent enough to own and operate firearms. The mere idea of every citizen applying to own a gun (?!) that frightens him.

Thus we get back to that good, old-fashioned progressivism Hillary Clinton was so proud of, the eugenicists and administrators who know better than we do.

In matters ranging from financial derivatives to education to gun control, the Left believes that we face a choice between a masterful state and a Hobbesian war of all against all. For all of the smart set’s vaunted and self-congratulatory nu ance, it is this absolutist vision, this Manichean horror, that forms the foun dation of progressivism.

This, and not the threat of uncontrollable crime, is really at the heart of the subur ban progressives’ abomination of firearms. Coyotes may be an occasional menace, but the predators most commonly stalking Central Park, Westchester County, or the Austin suburbs go on two legs, not four. Just before the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in McDonald v. City of Chicago, there were in one weekend 50-odd shootings in the Windy City, at least ten of them fatal.

…But the idea that individuals might use firearms lawfully to defend themselves is either anathema to progressives or inconceivable to them.

Progressives, liberals, leftists, socialists, communists, fascists, call them what you like, but they ultimately want total control of your life, and that includes your ability to defend yourself, your family, and your property—an ability which they will take away from you if they can. Statists all, those bearing the labels above wish to be the ONLY ones capable, or at least allowed, to use lethal force (never mind the Almighty, they’re clearly not concerned with what HE thinks).

Violence is traditionally something upon which the state maintains a monopoly, and the application of lethal force is the state’s most jealously guarded prerogative. It is treated as a kind of holy office, which is one of the reasons that American executions are such strangely ritualized ceremonies.

…To use lethal force in self-defense is the ultimate declaration of independence, a kind of momentary secession from the authority of the government whose laws and prisons and police officers have, in that moment, failed the citizen. To acknowledge the right to self-defense — and the concomitant right to be forearmed against aggressors — is to acknowledge that some things are outside the state and its authority, or at least that some moments are outside the state and its authority.

To acknowledge this right and be armed against aggressors also means acknowledging that the state cannot and will not be everywhere “in time” (thank God). In the multiple minutes it will take for the local police squad to reach your home, should you be so lucky as to be able to get to the phone and actually call 911 (unlikely), your wife or daughters have been brutalized and possibly killed, the men of the house are dead, the house has been ransacked, the neighbors are groggily asking each other if that was screaming they heard. The police become nothing more than a well-dressed cleanup crew, and that is not the America God or our Founders intended. Yet, because they lust after control over every aspect of our lives, this IS the America the statists, including Barack Obama, want.

Chilled yet?

A tasty, gooey cheeseburger for lunch at St. Clair’s Lewis Cafe. It’s a down-home sort of restaurant, with a smidge of country flair, vintage-tiled ladies’ room, and about seven huge pies with mountains of meringue tempting everyone from behind the counter.

The side salad was a bit flat, but I got my veggies in (and they were generous with the cherry tomatoes, so who’d really whine about that?). The burger was good and satisfying. Not Polk-A-Dot Diner awesome, but still pretty good!

Oh. I was the one who squashed the bun in my eagerness to properly pose it.

Have a great weekend!