Song: I Like Guns

Merry Christmas To Everyone From The Westerner

Cowgirl Sass & Savvy

North Star, OnStar and the Christmas Star

Julie Carter

For centuries and long before time was recorded, our ancestors used the stars for their navigation around the globe.

Fixing the location of the North Star in the night sky, they would head out in that direction in the morning, slay a mastodon or two and return by evening.

The Vikings, and later Columbus, after Isabella sold her jewelry for him to get to America, navigated by sextants and the constellations to maintain a course on uncharted waters.

It could be speculated that the Indians that greeted the New World travelers on the eastern shores of America, had ancestors that got there by crossing the Alaskan land bridge following the migration of reindeer, using the North Star for a point of reference.

The new Americans followed the stars across the country from Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky and even some from Yankee territory, to the open ranges of Texas and the gold fields of California and the Rocky Mountains.

They came with dreams of riches and a new life on the frontier.

The estimated 13 million cattle driven from South Texas to Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas and Montana were guided by a cowboss' fixation on the North Star at night to give direction in the daylight.

Later cattle drives could simply follow the trail left by the earlier herds, but they were still capable of star navigation when the need arose.

Since the time of man, it has been known that in the winter, the run rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest.

In the summer, it rises in the northeast and goes down in the northwest, making the transition at the equinox. The stars shift slightly with the changing of the seasons.

Today, we have this wondrous invention for our most popular mode of transportation - the automobile. OnStar is the push-a-button technology that puts you in touch with a voice to tell you where you are, where you need to go, call for emergency help and a plethora of other options.

Recently, a member of the cowboy set partnered with the bank to own a new pickup truck that came fully loaded with gadgets, digital bells and whistles and, yes, even OnStar.

Manfully, he mastered the owner's manual and learned how to operate this wondrous vocal guide, determined to become a member of the modern generation.

One of the first opportunities to use it came when he ventured across the cattle guard and even a few county and state lines, to compete at the U.S. Team Roping Championships in Oklahoma City.

He purposed to use for the first time his new navigational system.

His wife, not so sure about the technology, brought her along her worn, but trusted Rand McNally.

The new Onstar was activated at departure time, and gave vocal directions at every highway change, telling the cowboy which direction and highway number to take.

He later reported that the helpful instruction by the insistent voice was wrong at each and every turn.

"It was like having my mother-in-law in the back seat," he said.

When he turned into the parking lot of the arena in OKC, the Onstar voice told him, "go 12.2 miles east and you will be there."

The cowboy didn't bother to turn on the OnStar guide for his trip home. He decided the stars and Rand McNally would get him there just fine.

Wise cowboys in all seasons are known to be guided by the stars. In this season, we are a reminded of the navigational star that led some other wise men, mounted on camels, along with a few sheepherders, to Bethlehem.

The Star of Bethlehem was the miraculous sign that told the world of the birth of the Christ and led the magi to the stable where they presented Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

It was not the only navigational tool in the history of the world, but surely the most important one.

May you all have a blessed Christmas season and keep your eyes on the heavens.

Julie, who is frequently lost in thought and beyond the help of OnStar, can be reached for comment at jcarter@tularosa.net.

Christmas on the Frontier

By U.S. Sen. John Cornyn

It’s not every day that men are asked to check their spurs at the door before they can enter a party or social gathering. But for three nights every December in the small West Texas town of Anson, checking your spurs is a must-do if you want to gain admission to one of the region’s oldest and most celebrated festivities – the Cowboys’ Christmas Ball.

The frontier dance, held in Anson as early as 1885, earned its title after New York poet Lawrence Chittenden visited Anson in the late 1880’s. Chittenden stayed at the Star Hotel which was the site for an annual Christmas dance held by hotel operator M.G. Rhodes in appreciation of the region’s ranchers and cowboys. Chittenden was inspired by the colorful scene and traditional dances to later write a poem: “The Cowboys’ Christmas Ball.”

Anson’s Texas Western published Chittenden’s poem on June 19, 1890, after the Star Hotel was demolished in a fire. Though the dance was shelved for several years after the hotel fire and during Prohibition, its legacy was preserved by Chittenden’s poem, which slowly gained wider recognition. In 1893, it was published in the first volume of Ranch Verses, and also in the book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910.

More than 40 years after the Star Hotel was destroyed, local teacher Leonora Barrett revived the Christmas Ball and hosted a reenactment of the original dance in a high school gymnasium. In 1940, Pioneer Hall was constructed as a project under the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, and the dance has been hosted at Pioneer Hall ever since.

It wasn’t until 1946 that “The Cowboys’ Christmas Ball” was set to music by Gordon Graham, a cowboy folklorist from Colorado. He sang it at the 1946 ball and it became a tradition to have the ballad sung before the ball every year. Grammy-award-winning cowboy singer Michael Martin Murphey, who recorded the song “The Cowboys’ Christmas Ball” in 1985, has sung the ballad at the dance nearly every year since 1993.

Today no detail is forgotten in the effort to reenact the 19th Century ball. The 22-member Texas Cowboys’ Christmas Ball Association, which sponsors the dance and owns Pioneer Hall, strives each year to create a setting that transports guests back to the frontier days from the moment they enter Pioneer Hall. Men bow and women curtsy. The hall is decorated with quilts and cedar boughs. Association members don matching outfits with the men in black vests and cowboy attire, and the women in Victorian blouses and taffeta skirts over hoop petticoats. There is a strict no-jeans policy for women, and men are still required to check their hats, spurs and guns at the door.

This year marks the 75th consecutive re-enactment of the original dance. From December 17-19, families will gather to dance, enjoy pot luck dinners, and socialize at Pioneer Hall. The ball is commenced each night with the traditional Grand March, led by a newlywed couple. There are seven approved original dances: the waltz, Paul Jones, Cotton-Eye Joe, polka, Virginia reel, Schottische, and square dance.

Thanks to the enthusiasm and dedication of Anson men and women spanning more than a century, the Texas Cowboys’ Christmas Ball is a unique Texas tradition that has been preserved with great detail and is sure to be enjoyed for years to come.

Song Of The Day #207

Ranch Radio started our Christmas Season with Gene Autry and that's who'll bring it to a close for us. Here he is performing Merry Christmas Waltz.

Ranch family honored

The Frost family, Duane and Shelly Frost, and their sons Dal and Rankin, from Claunch, N.M., and formerly of Grant County, was named the 2009 New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau Family of the Year at the organization's 92nd annual meeting in Albuquerque.

The Frosts manage the Surratt Ranch, a cow/calf operation that covers portions of Lincoln and Torrance counties. They have been active in Farm Bureau for more than four decades.

Farm Bureau President Michael White, of Dexter, said the Frost family represents "the gold standard" in the areas of leadership and volunteerism.

"Duane and Shelly were raised with the strong values taught by their parents who were ranching and mining pioneers in our state," he said. "They, in turn, have passed these ethics on to their two children who are also pursing careers in agriculture."

The couple grew up on opposite sides of the Continental Divide in Grant County and met at a sheriff's posse dance where Shelly played fiddle in the band "Girl Country." Duane graduated from Cobre High School in 1975 and Shelly from Cliff High School in 1976. They were married in 1976 and Duane went to work for the Flying A Ranch. Shelly then began her college career at Western New Mexico University. She graduated from WNMU in 1979 with a minor in music and a major in accounting.

They began their Farm Bureau career in their county and statewide Young Farmers and Ranchers Committees. Duane was later elected to the Cliff/Gila/Grant County Farm and Livestock Bureau Board of Directors and Shelly served on the Farm Bureau Women's Committee and was one of the founders of the Frisco Cowbelles in Catron County in 1981. After Shelly graduated from college, the couple moved back to her family ranch at Big Dry Creek to help run that operation, which covered portions of Catron and Grant counties.

In 1989, the family moved the ranching operation to Ramon, N.M., and got involved with the Lincoln County Farm and Livestock Bureau, where Duane served on the board of directors and later was elected president of the organization. He currently serves on the state board of directors for the N.M. Farm and Livestock Bureau. Shelly is active in the Crown Cowbelles and is a volunteer at Corona High School. She also runs the post office at Claunch. Duane serves on the board of directors of the Central New Mexico Telephone Cooperative and the Lincoln County Natural Resources Advisory Committee. In addition, he was a New Mexico Beef Council director in 2003-2004.

For more than 50 years the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau has recognized a family each year that epitomizes the goals and ideals of the state's largest private agricultural organization.

No Substitute For Fossil Fuels

Earlier this year, Congress approved a scheme to pour $80 billion — on top of the tens of billions already spent — into renewables. A government report released last week indicates the money will be wasted. Renewable energy is the shiny gem that everyone wants but no one can have. Not even a president. Campaigning last year in Lansing, Mich., President Barack Obama said that it was his goal for the U.S. to generate 10% of its electric power from renewable sources by 2012 and 25% by 2025. But he cannot, by the force of will or executive order, change the laws of physics and economics. America has long relied on fossil fuels to power its economy. Oil, natural gas and coal provide about 84% of the nation's energy. And for good reason. They are plentiful and typically easy to retrieve, and, consequently, cheap. At the other end of the spectrum are renewable sources such as solar, wind, biomass and geothermal. They supply only about 4% of our energy, the remainder coming from hydro and nuclear power. t's clear that renewables, which have benefited from government subsidies far in excess of what fossil fuels have received, can't compete in today's market and won't be faring much better a quarter century from now, according to the government's own reckoning...read more

Song Of The Day #206

Our Christmas songs today are by Eddy Arnold and Tennessee Ernie Ford.

US gives Mexico 5 helicopters to aid drug war

U.S. officials delivered five helicopters to Mexico on Tuesday to help the country in its fight against drug cartels. The aircraft are part of more than $604 million worth of vehicles and equipment that the U.S. plans to give Mexico in the coming months. In addition to the more than $1.1 billion worth of aid the U.S. has pledged to provide Mexico, Brennan said U.S. and Mexican officials are planning new programs to help Mexico professionalize its police forces and strengthen its justice system. U.S. officials are fighting drug cartels on both sides of the border, he said...read more

And Senator Bingaman wants to designate 560 square miles of DA County as wilderness, where low flying aircraft are banned.

Give them to Mexico and outlaw them here - sounds like a great policy.

Cartel ‘spies’ infiltrate U.S. customs agency

But, early last year, after just a few months as a customs inspector, he was waving in trucks from Mexico carrying loads of marijuana and illegal immigrants. He pocketed some $200,000 in cash that paid for, as far as the government could tell, a $15,000 motorcycle, flat-screen televisions, a laptop computer and more. Some investigators believe that Mr. Alarid, 32, who was paid off by a Mexican smuggling crew that included several members of his family, intended to work for smugglers all along. At one point, Mr. Alarid, who was sentenced to seven years in federal prison in February, told investigators that he had researched just how much prison time he might get for his crimes and believed, as investigators later reported, that he could do it “standing on his head.” Mr. Alarid’s case is not the only one that has law enforcement officials worried that Mexican traffickers — facing beefed-up security on the border that now includes miles of new fencing, floodlights, drones, motion sensors and cameras — have stepped up their efforts to corrupt the border police. They research potential targets, anticorruption investigators said, exploiting the cross-border clans and relationships that define the region, offering money, sex, whatever it takes. But, with the border police in the midst of a hiring boom, law enforcement officers believe that traffickers are pulling out the stops, even soliciting some of their own operatives to apply for jobs...read more

U.S. drug cartel crackdown misses the money

Every day, criminals shove proceeds from U.S. drug sales in their shoes, tape it to their torsos, stash it under dashboards — or just wire it electronically to Mexico. It all adds up to $25 billion a year. A highly touted U.S. Treasury Department program aimed at starving Mexican drug cartels of that cash is currently blocking just $3 million, an Associated Press investigation has found. That's in addition to $58 million seized under a new initiative at the U.S.-Mexico border. The figures suggest that $99.75 of every $100 the cartels ship south is getting through — money that is fueling a brutal war that has killed 14,000 people in three years...read more

Raid violated privacy rights of alleged illegal immigrant

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday that a 2008 raid of a local tax preparer's office aimed at building identity-theft cases against hundreds of suspected illegal immigrants violated their Fourth Amendment right to privacy. The 4-3 ruling was the latest and most devastating legal blow against Operation Numbers Game, an investigation launched by Weld County Sheriff John Cooke and District Attorney Ken Buck that aimed to use tax returns to identify and prosecute illegal immigrants. The raid on Amalia's Tax and Translation, a business that caters to Spanish-speaking clients, led to the seizure and review of some 4,900 tax returns. Deputies said they found about 1,300 suspects in identity-theft and criminal-impersonation cases. Prosecutors around the country have been watching the case closely, reportedly the first in the United States in which law enforcement sought to use tax returns — generally considered confidential under federal law — to take suspected illegal immigrants to criminal court...read more

State lawmakers to seek ban on sales of semi-automatic weapons

In response to recent shooting deaths, three state lawmakers say they want to ban the sale of military-style semi-automatic weapons in Washington. The lawmakers intend to propose the ban in the state legislative session that begins next month. The legislation, called the Aaron Sullivan Public Safety and Police Protection Bill, would prohibit the sale of such weapons to private citizens and require current owners to pass background checks. It is named for Aaron Sullivan, 18, who was fatally shot last July in Seattle's Leschi neighborhood, allegedly with an assault-style weapon. Supporters say they also are motivated by the Oct. 31 slaying of Seattle Police Officer Timothy Brenton and the wounding of his partner. Police believe a .223-caliber semi-automatic rifle was used then. The bill is backed by Seattle's police department, spokeswoman Renee Witt said. Also pushing it is Washington Ceasefire, a nonprofit that seeks to reduce gun violence...read more

A discordant accord

It was an extraordinary sight: the leaders of more than 20 countries, including US president Barack Obama and the heads of most of the world's other biggest economies, herded with an adviser or two each into a small room on Friday morning, poring over a short piece of prose with red pens. The atmosphere grew tense as they sweated over amendments to a text they hoped would form the basis of a new climate change agreement. If they succeeded, it would be a historic deal: the first to bind both developed and developing nations to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Failure would mean political humiliation at home and ultimately a potentially disastrous rise in the world's temperature. The unscheduled meeting took place upstairs at a Copenhagen conference centre where, for the previous fortnight, the leaders' senior officials and ministers had engaged in increasingly fractious arguments. What emerged late on Friday night, after hours of hard bargaining, including a showdown between Mr Obama and the leaders of China and the other big developing economies, was a document to be known as the Copenhagen accord. The three-page declaration by the biggest developed and developing countries made tentative commitments to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and proposed financing from the rich to poor countries to help them do likewise. Mr Obama said it was the first time in history all the leading economies had come together to take action on global warming, but even proponents had to admit the accord fell well short of what they had hoped for after years of negotiation...read more

Beyond debate?

Is belief in global-warming science another example of the "madness of crowds"? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible "authority". Could it indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality? After all, how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to "save electricity", while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on ... electricity? How rational is it to pay the Russians once for fossil fuels, and a second time for permission (via carbon credits) to burn them? And how rational is it to suppose that the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere take between 200 and 1,000 years to be felt, but that solutions can take effect almost instantaneously? Whether rational or not, global warming theory has become a political orthodoxy. So entrenched is it that those showing any resistance to it are described as "heretics" or even likened to "Holocaust deniers"...read more

Desert Vistas vs. Solar Power

Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region. But before the bill to create two new Mojave national monuments has even had its first hearing, the California Democrat has largely achieved her aim. Regardless of the legislation’s fate, her opposition means that few if any power plants are likely to be built in the monument area, a complication in California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy. “This is arguably the best solar land in the world, and Senator Feinstein shouldn’t be allowed to take this land off the table without a proper and scientific environmental review,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist and a partner with a venture capital firm that invested in a solar developer called BrightSource Energy. In September, BrightSource canceled a large project in the monument area. Union officials, power industry executives, regulators and some environmentalists have also expressed concern about the impact of the monument legislation, but few would speak publicly for fear of antagonizing one of California’s most powerful politicians. The debate over the monument encapsulates a rising tension between two goals held by environmental groups: preservation of wild lands and ambitious efforts to combat global warming...read more

Federal stimulus funds to improve seismic monitoring in Yellowstone

With funding made available for the installation of 10 new seismic monitoring stations over the next two years, the Yellowstone super volcano will soon be the best monitored hot spot in the world, according to Bob Smith. “We should have a fantastic network, probably the best in the world over an active volcano,” said Smith, a University of Utah geology and geophysics professor and member of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. The observatory is jointly operated by the U.S. Geological Survey, Yellowstone National Park and the University of Utah. Funding for the project will come from a portion of $950,000 in Recovery Act money given to the observatory...read more

Obama & the congress are putting Old Faithful to shame, belching money all over the country.

Big DOE grant will help western states plan for new energy transmission

The U.S. Department of Energy today handed $12 million to the Western Governors' Association to help 11 states, including Oregon, prepare for new transmission while dealing with future demand for energy, resources, environmental concerns and energy efficiency. The states are developing and evaluating potential new transmission and how it could affect water supplies, wildlife, landscapes and state economies. Money for the project is from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The grant will support the Western Renewable Energy Zones Initiative. The first phase of the initiative identified areas within the Western Interconnection that have the greatest potential for large scale development of renewable resources, without causing harm to the environment. The grant will help state and public utility officials examine the strengths of different transmission options...read more

More belching.

Fight to keep Asian carp out of Great Lakes reaches Supreme Court

The fight to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes reached the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, as Michigan's attorney general filed a lawsuit seeking closure of two shipping locks near Chicago. Claiming Illinois officials have been lax, Michigan Atty. Gen. Mike Cox asked justices for immediate action to seal off the most direct route for fish entering Lake Michigan, in hopes of protecting the region's $7-billion fishing industry. "We don't want to have to look back years later . . . and say, 'What was the matter with us? We should have done something,' " Cox said. Closing the locks, he said, was "the easiest, the most reliable and the most effective" short-term step officials could take. In addition to closing the locks, the lawsuit seeks creation of barriers to prevent carp from escaping the Des Plaines River or neighboring waterways during flooding. Cox also called for a study of Chicago's water system to understand the size and scope of the Asian carp population. The lawsuit comes during a period of heightened anxiety over recent DNA research that hinted the voracious fish may have bypassed an underwater electric barrier system -- and could now be within six miles of Lake Michigan...read more

Study shows 'Green' shoppers more likely to cheat

If buying an organic apple instead of one caked in pesticides eases your conscience, there's a good chance that your next ethical decision might not be a good one. According to the results of a University of Toronto study, participants who assigned more social value to 'green' shopping were more likely to cheat and steal in subsequent tests than those with less stringent shopping habits. The study, to be published in the new year in the journal Psychological Science, is the latest in a growing field of research called "moral licensing."...read more