Concert Review: The Gaslight Anthem at the Music Hall of Williamsburg

By Lorraine Schwartz
http://www.examiner.com/
May 17, 2012

View slideshow: The Gaslight Anthem at Music Hall of Williamsburg

Wednesday night the Music Hall of Williamsburg (MHOW) became an international hangout between The Gaslight Anthem, fans filling the Brooklyn venue and the rest of the internet world. The concert, which was broadcast live on livestream.com, was billed as an official rehearsal show for the band's upcoming tour in support of their album "Handwritten", which will be released July 24th.

The initial show announcement was great news for Gaslight diehards, as the only shows they've played as a band since 2010 were at last year's Bamboozle in May and their December show at Convention Hall in Asbury Park. However, many were disappointed as ticket scalpers hijacked the pre-sale and public on-sale, scooping up and reselling a bunch of the reasonably priced tickets for double the face value. Infuriated that their fans were shut out and being ripped off, singer Brian Fallon announced at the MHOW show (and on the band's Tumblr) that a plan for a fan club with a "stupidly cheap" fee was in the works to prevent the ticket vultures from getting to the goods before real fans.

It's that kind of connection and dedication shared between The Gaslight Anthem and their fans that keeps everyone coming back for more. It's also what helped the band rise very quickly to fame, from being "that band that played Jersey basements" a few short years ago (the band formed in 2006) to headlining Radio City Music Hall in the Fall of 2010. After last year's large gigs, the group's followers were in dire need of a fix and a small intimate show. The 550-capacity hall was a perfect opportunity for the local band and its local fans to reconvene before the next chapter of the band's career begins with "Handwritten", their first release through a major label (Mercury Records).
The evening kicked off with Tim Barry performing to the crowd as they continued to file in for the headliner's set. Barry is one of the most sincere, authentic performers out there right now and appeared very grateful to those who showed up early to catch his set (check out my review of his recent CD Release Show here). Opening with "Driver Pull", performed on the venue's floor at eye level with concertgoers, and closing with "Avoiding Catatonic Surrender", Barry made a great impression on those who have been missing out on his music up until Wednesday night.

Making their entrance to Beastie Boys' "Sabotage", The Gaslight Anthem took the stage as cameras began filming for the internet broadcast. Opening with "Great Expectations", the band burned through a setlist that included fan favorites "I'da Called You Woody, Joe", "Film Noir", "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues", "Wherefore Art Thou, Elvis", "We Came To Dance", "The Diamond Church Street Choir", and "Here's Looking At You, Kid" along with popular singles "American Slang" and "The '59 Sound." Fans were also treated to a live performance of the new single "'45" and "Biloxi Parish", both of which appear on the upcoming album, as well as a rocking cover of The Who's "Baba O'Riley."

Joining the band on the Brooklyn stage was guitarist Ian Perkins, who fans fell in love with when he released "Elsie" along with Brian Fallon as The Horrible Crowes, a side project who only performed live twice (once in NYC, once in L.A.). Perkins was previously a crew member for The Gaslight Anthem who occasionally played guitar on the American Slang tour while Brian focused on vocals during songs like "Old Haunts." Perkins had not officially been added to the group's live show until now as a touring guitarist. Given that smiles were constantly flashed between Perkins and the band all night, it's clear he's a natural fit with the Gaslight Anthem and that he'll have a great time backing them up full time on tour this summer.
The Gaslight Anthem will be playing at this Sunday's Bamboozle Fest in Asbury Park, NJ. To find out more info about purchasing tickets and traveling to the show, check out the Bamboozle's official site. They are also set to play Webster Hall on July 24th. Tim Barry will be heading back to NYC next month when he plays Santos Party House on June 16th.

Check out my Examiner slideshow of photos from the concert here, with additional shots from the show here. Follow me on Twitter at @ConcertExaminer!

The Gaslight Anthem at Music Hall of Williamsburg

Photo credit:

Lorraine Schwartz

Video: The Gaslight Anthem perform "'45" at Music Hall of Williamsburg

Related topics:

• The Gaslight Anthem

Suggested by the author:

• The Gaslight Anthem's Benny Horowitz discusses "Handwritten", Mercury signing
• Concert Report: The Gaslight Anthem at Wellmont Theatre
• Concert Review: The Gaslight Anthem at Convention Hall; Springsteen Surprise
• Concert Review: Day 2 of Bamboozle 2011

Today's Tune: The Gaslight Anthem - 45 (Acoustic)

Wisconsin labor fight started ugly, ended ugly

by Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent
The Washington Examiner
http://washingtonexaminer.com/
June 5, 2012

For some so-called progressives in Wisconsin, the threat posed by Gov. Scott Walker's policy limiting the collective-bargaining powers of some public employees has justified almost any response.

Democratic lawmakers fled the state rather than allow a vote on Walker's proposal.

Some teachers and other public employees abandoned their jobs to protest in the streets.

Some doctors violated ethics standards by issuing medical excuses for protesting teachers who walked out on students.

Unions threatened boycotts against businesses that declined to publicly side with organized labor.
AFL-CIO officials equated the cause of comfortable and well-paid unionized employees with the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and striking Memphis garbage collectors.

Anti-Walker forces set off an astonishing controversy amid a state Supreme Court election when they alleged that one justice had physically attacked another.

Unions successfully pushed for recall elections against several Republican lawmakers, resulting in two losing their seats.

And finally, the intense, lasting anger on the union side led to a recall election for Walker himself. And in the final hours before that vote, anti-Walker activists have spread ugly and baseless rumors that Walker is about to be indicted and -- in perhaps the lowest and most ridiculous point of the entire spectacle -- that Walker fathered an illegitimate child in college.

The indictment rumor was the work of the lefty television network Current, relying on what appears to be guesswork and supposition. Walker called it "100 percent wrong." But the report shot through a liberal blogosphere desperate for anything to use against Walker.

Then, over the weekend, an organization called the Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-op, which bills itself as "a group of citizen journalists who began covering the Wisconsin Uprising in February, 2011," posted an article on its website recounting the story of a woman who said her roommate had been Walker's girlfriend at Marquette University. The woman said her roommate became pregnant by Walker in the 1980s, that Walker had encouraged the roommate to have an abortion, and that when she chose not to abort the child, Walker denied paternity and took off.

None of it is true. The actual mother in question told a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter that Walker was not the father of her child, and it appears the accusers may have confused a 1980s paternity case involving a Scott A. Walker with the governor, who is Scott K. Walker.

Never mind. Like the indictment tale, the "Walker love child" story raced around the left-wing Web world.

"This is another attempt to find an issue that will distract voters from Walker's record," says Rep. Jim Steineke, a conservative Republican lawmaker who represents Wisconsin's 5th Assembly District. "They keep trying to shift the message. First, it was about collective bargaining. Then it was about jobs. Then it was about the 'war on women.' They've been desperately trying to find a message that resonates with voters, and they haven't found it."

The indictment and love child stories might strike outside observers as off the wall, but for many Wisconsinites, those tales are just two more episodes in a long, exhausting drama.

"[The anti-Walker forces] are sensing it slipping through their fingers," says Matt Batzel, who is organizing Tea Party support for Walker through a group called American Majority. "They realize that all they've worked for in the past 14 months, and the millions of dollars labor has spent, is almost all for naught."

Despite much talk about the polls "tightening" in the past few days, Walker has held a consistent, if narrow, lead over Democratic challenger Tom Barrett. Perhaps even more discouraging for organized labor are polls showing that voters not only support Walker -- they support the heart of Walker's reforms.

Requiring unionized public employees to pay more for their pensions and health coverage? Seventy-five percent public support, according to a new Marquette Law School poll. Limiting collective bargaining for most public employees? Fifty-five percent support. And when the Marquette pollsters asked whether Wisconsin was better off or worse off as a result of Walker's changes, voters said better off, 54 percent to 42 percent.

So it's no wonder the anti-Walker movement, an effort that started with elected lawmakers literally fleeing the state rather than do their jobs, is ending with one last show of ugliness and rancor. Walker knew making fundamental changes would be hard. He probably didn't think it would be this hard. But if the polls are correct, he is about to enjoy a final vindication.

Photo: Bob Segal/Flickr

Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on washingtonexaminer.com.

Bloomberg's Soda Ban

Mayor Bloomberg isn’t the first person to think he can mandate changed behavior.

By John R. Lott Jr.

http://www.nationalreview.com
June 5, 2012

Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to ban sugary soft drinks larger than 16 ounces. He believes that by this measure he can reduce obesity. But plenty of evidence indicates that he will fail. The ban will inconvenience people and waste their time, but it will not make them thinner.

Bloomberg didn’t originate this type of idea. Public schools, which hold their students captive for much of their day, have tried a similar approach to making students lose weight. And some have gone further than Bloomberg’s limit on cup size and have banned such drinks completely. But even complete bans haven’t worked. Students simply drink more sugary drinks after school. According to an article in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior analyzing data for Maine, “keeping such drinks out of teenagers’ reach during school hours may not be enough.”

Another study, published in the journal Sociology of Education, examined school bans of junk food and found the same result: “Whether or not junk food is available to them at school may not have much bearing on how much junk food they eat.”

There are many ways to eat or drink “too many” calories. Will Bloomberg’s ban push people to switch from large soft drinks to large milkshakes? What is next? Limits on portion size in restaurants? Police monitoring people’s behavior in their homes?

It is really very difficult to force people to live more healthily than they want. The federal government has mandated safer cars, but research has consistently shown that such mandates lead people to drive more recklessly. (See also this study from the Review of Economics and Statistics.) The number of accidents actually increases after safety features such as seat belts are mandated for cars. True, the occupants of a car are more likely to survive an individual accident, but generally the number of accidents increases by enough to offset the safety benefits. In addition, more pedestrians and bicyclists are struck by cars.

This finding also applies to NASCAR drivers. And bicyclists are more likely to get hit by cars when they wear safety helmets.

This phenomenon is so pervasive that economists have even given it a name: the Peltzman effect, after the University of Chicago economist who first discovered it in 1975.

And it hasn’t been noticed just for automobile safety and food. The effect has shown up in childproof medicine bottles, where the childproof tops result in parents’ storing medicine in places that children find easier to reach, thus offsetting the benefits of the tops.

Possibly most relevant for Mayor Bloomberg, Peltzman recently noticed the result again in research showing that even great medical breakthroughs have little long-run effect on mortality rates. One of the most significant medical breakthroughs in human history was the development of antibiotics and other anti-infective drugs. Today, people no longer face a high risk of dying from past scourges like scarlet fever or tuberculosis. But these health benefits were offset when people began taking more risks, which led to more accidents, or when they changed their diet and exercise habits.

But Bloomberg’s proposed regulations are worse than just ineffective. Some people simply find it convenient to buy a large drink and nurse it for hours. Soft drinks are cheap compared to the value of people’s time, so why not buy a little extra instead of having to stop later to refill the cup? Bloomberg sarcastically dismisses this point: “Your argument, I guess, could be that it’s a little less convenient to have to carry two 16-ounce drinks to your seat in the movie theater rather than one 32-ounce.”

New York City during Bloomberg’s tenure has been on a tear trying to regulate people’s lives: banning trans fats and mandating calorie labeling on food in restaurants, pressuring restaurants to reduce the salt in their food, and restricting outdoor smoking.

Michael Bloomberg isn’t the first to think that he could simply mandate that people lose weight. But like other central planners, he is going to learn, no matter how much he dislikes it, that people have their own desires about how to run their lives.

— John R. Lott Jr. is a FOXNews.com contributor. He is an economist and co-author of Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future.

The 5th Avenue to Serfdom

Nobody thought about taking away your Big Gulp until the government began to pay for everyone's health care.

By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
June 2, 2012

Mike Bloomberg's move to regulate the size of sodas sold in his city illustrates why it's a good thing he is a mayor of New York and not the czar of all the Russias. American big cities tend to be one-party states to begin with, but at least their totalitarian impulses end up being merely cute because they're so easy to evade.

Under the Bloomberg plan, any cup or bottle of sugary drink larger than 16 ounces at a public venue would be verboten, beginning early next year. You'll still be able to buy as much Coke as you want in a supermarket. Go home and pour yourself a bucketful. As Mr. Bloomberg himself was the first to note, you'll also still be free to buy two medium drinks in place of today's Big Gulp at ballgames, theaters, delis and other venues where the ban would be in effect.

"New York City is not about wringing your hands; it's about doing something,'' added Mr. Bloomberg, peculiarly.

Half of the city's residents allegedly are obese or overweight—a stat seemingly belied by the ladies who lunch and the impression on the subway that New York remains one of the few places in America where people have not ballooned to supersize. But by the state's own estimate, it spends $8 billion annually treating obesity-related ailments under Medicaid, which is how 40% of city residents now get their health care.

Here is the ultimate justification for the Bloomberg soft-drink ban, not to mention his smoking ban, his transfat ban, and his unsuccessful efforts to enact a soda tax and prohibit buying high-calorie drinks with food stamps: The taxpayer is picking up the bill.

Call it the growing chattelization of the beneficiary class under government health-care programs. Bloombergism is a secular trend. Los Angeles has sought to ban new fast-food shops in neighborhoods disproportionately populated by Medicaid recipients, Utah to increase Medicaid copays for smokers, Arizona to impose a special tax on Medicaid recipients who smoke or are overweight. New York itself, with private money, some of it from Mr. Bloomberg's own pocket, has also tried the carrot approach, dangling direct payments to encourage beneficiary families to adopt healthier habits.

So perhaps the famous "broccoli" hypothetical during the Supreme Court ObamaCare debate was not so fanciful after all. It flows naturally from the state's fiscal responsibility for your health that it will try to regulate your behavior, even mandating vegetable consumption.

As we never tire of pointing out, the unlikely roots are found in the 1998 tobacco settlement. Those cases weren't filed on behalf of smokers, whom courts ruled repeatedly accepted the risks of smoking. Under an even more ancient principle, known as subrogation, courts long held that if a customer doesn't have a case against a product that injured him, his insurer doesn't have a case either.

In 1994, Florida legislators bulldozed these principles so the state Medicaid agency could sue cigarette makers for the cost of treating sick smokers. When the state is the insurer and can change the rules to suit itself, after all, why brook any limitation on its ability to pass the buck? Law is a convenience for our rulers only when it gets them off the political hook of having to mediate purely private disputes between their cranky subjects. The one thing the state has no interest in using the law to restrain is itself.

Yes, we're still a long way from tyranny in America. The right to smoke in a bar; the right to snarf a transfat-soaked french fry; the right to lug a 32 oz. tub of Grape Nehi into the movie theater—these are not precious rights. But it's also true that nobody thought of taking them away until the government itself became responsible for our runaway health-care spending.

To many liberals, ObamaCare was overdue. Other advanced societies long ago recognized an obligation to provide universal health-care guarantees. The U.S. needed to catch up.

Yet it's a mistake not to root political actions, even those based on "universal" principles, in their time. Two generations ago, the impetus was to extend health care to those who didn't have it. The entire industrial world is at the opposite end of an arc of government growth and sustainability today. The new impetus inevitably will be to deny health care to those whom it is not cost-effective to treat. That's a side of Bloombergism the body politic may one day find harder to swallow.

A version of this article appeared June 2, 2012, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The 5th Avenue to Serfdom.

Review: Tom Jones - Spirit in the Room

By Neil McCormick
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
18 May 2012

“It’s all about the voice,” is Tom Jones’s repeated catchphrase as a judge on BBC’s singing competition, The Voice. But is it really? At 71, the former Welsh pub singer has enjoyed an extraordinary run for an interpretative pop vocalist. He’s always been strong on lung-busting volume, gritty tone and fluid delivery, but it is a more unclassifiable quality of earthy, masculine drive that made him iconic, a raw sexuality connecting his easy listening oeuvre to the swinging grooves of the Sixties and beyond.

With advancing years, you might imagine that strutting appetite to be waning but Jones has skilfully negotiated the late phase of his career with a shift towards autumnal rumination and pathos.

Usually a singer for whom bigger is better, on 2010’s superb Praise & Blame Jones tackled spiritual blues and gospel with a stripped back, roots-rock flavour. For the follow up, producer Ethan Johns adapts the formula to understated arrangements of contemporary and classic Americana.

The obvious reference point is Johnny Cash’s late-period recordings with Rick Rubin. The same tone of weary, hard-won wisdom runs through Spirit in the Room, yet Jones’s connection to the material is sometimes tenuous. As impeccable as the song choices are, from obscure Americana artists like Joe Henry ("All Blues Hail Mary") and the Low Anthem ("Charlie Darwin"), I’m willing to bet they come from his producer’s record collection, rather than his own.

Jones’s interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s "Tower of Song" misses layers of irony, humour and humility, stretching Cohen’s bone dry “I was born with the gift of a golden voice” into a defiant boast. Adding a superfluous “babe” to the declaration “there’s a mighty judgment coming” has the unfortunate effect of conjuring images of Jones being eternally pelted by women’s knickers.

I am being harsh, though. This is a beautiful album of great songs performed with taste and sung with tender resonance by one of the most distinctive voices of British popular music. Straining at his producer’s leash, Jones seems to most enjoy himself hamming it up on Tom Waits’s "Bad as Me" and Vera Hall Ward’s "Travelling Shoes".

When Jones really connects with the material the results have undeniable emotional heft, with an elegiac delivery of Paul McCartney’s "(I Want to) Come Home" and a brooding interpretation of Blind Willie Johnson’s dark blues "Soul of a Man". The album has to be judged a
late-period triumph, even if I am not entirely convinced The Voice’s avuncular judge is quite as deep as the material demands.

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Today's Tune: Tom Jones - Tower Of Song

Romney’s Syria Problem

His support for “opposition groups” is misplaced.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com

June 2, 2012

Syrian al-Qaeda-linked rebels (file photo)

Congratulations to Mitt Romney. In calling for “opposition groups” to be armed and trained for their ongoing jihad against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, the GOP’s presidential contender has managed to align himself with al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri and Muslim Brotherhood icon Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Like the legacy media, the McCain wing of the Republican party, and the rest of Washington’s progressive, Islamophilic clerisy, Governor Romney is reacting to a regime-engineered massacre last week. Assad’s forces reportedly killed 108 Syrians in Houla, a rural enclave outside the “opposition” city of Homs. Victims included women and children shot at close range, in summary-execution style.

There is no gainsaying that Assad is despicable or that the Houla episode was barbaric. Neither can it be denied, however, that Romney and his advisers have had little to say about the similarly barbaric attacks carried out by the “opposition.” About two weeks before Houla, for example, a car bomb killed 55 people in Damascus — targeting a regime intelligence building, but detonated at rush hour, in the al-Qaeda fashion, for maximum civilian carnage. A few days later, nine more people were killed when a suicide bomber exploded his device in a parking lot near a military compound in Deir ez-Zor, a notorious jihadist hub from which thousands of terrorists crossed into Iraq to fight against Western forces.

Yes, Assad’s minority Alawite Muslim regime is a key ally of Iran’s revolutionary Shiite-supremacist government. That does not alter the stubborn fact that the anti-Assad “opposition groups” are dominated by Sunni supremacists. Stubborn facts cannot be evaded by clever labeling — “opposition groups” in Syria having become the euphemism du jour that “rebels” was in Libya, “peaceful protesters” in Egypt, “uprisings” in Tunisia, and so on. Nor can we confidently assert any longer that what is bad for Iran must be good for us. Threats are dynamic, and much has changed in the last decade. The Iranian regime is not the only virulently anti-American revolutionary movement realistically threatening to enslave the Middle East in its version of totalitarian sharia and implacable anti-Semitism.

The Muslim Brotherhood, leader of the Sunni supremacists, has a hammer-lock on the Syrian National Council (SNC), the main opposition group the Obama administration has been courting — with the McCain wing cheering from the sidelines. Meanwhile, as trumpeted on the Brotherhood’s website, Sheikh Qaradawi has been organizing Syria’s Islamist revolt for months, reprising the starring role he is playing in Egypt. Al-Qaeda — whose help the Brotherhood is happy to have when it is expedient, as it was in Libya — put its muscle into the Syrian revolt months ago. As the invaluable John Rosenthal reported here at NRO, Obama’s national intelligence director, James Clapper, has acknowledged al-Qaeda’s infiltration of the Syrian opposition. The terror network’s hand in the recent string of bombings is obvious, even to the Associated Press. Its presence and influence at opposition rallies are also patent.

Washington can idealize the Syrian “opposition” into liberty-loving freedom-fighters; to Syrian Christians, they are the jihad. With churches being torched, families being terrorized by kidnappings and murders, and thousands of believers being put to flight, Christian are now suffering the same fate “Islamic democracy” held for the Christians of Egypt and Iraq. (Jews face no such problem; after decades of humiliating dhimmitude, they have long since been driven out of Syria.)

Yet, here comes Romney, jumping with both feet into the Islamist camp. This week, he slammed President Obama for purportedly failing to work with our two fabulous “allies,” the Brotherhood-tied Islamist regime in Turkey and the jihad-propagating Wahabist regime in Saudi Arabia, in order to oust Assad. Obama’s temporizing, according to Romney, had “merely granted the Assad regime more time to execute its military onslaught.”

This is a specious critique. Put aside that Romney is wrong — the administration should stay on the sidelines. The reality is that Obama has been working behind the scenes with the Saudis and the Turks. The administration is supporting the Brotherhood-controlled SNC — just as it threw its weight behind Islamists in Egypt and Libya. What Obama has been smart enough to do, at least to this point, is refrain from direct military aid, undoubtedly realizing that he would be blamed when, inevitably, it became clear that American arms went to America’s enemies. But McCain and the Brotherhood goaded the president into using force in Libya — where the victorious “rebels” quickly installed sharia law and parceled out Qaddafi’s arsenal to Hezbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. Another misadventure in Syria, it seems, is only a matter of time.

In their anxiety over our nation’s future, conservatives see the upcoming November election as a make-or-break crossroads. Thus, the Right’s indifference to Mitt Romney, the only alternative to Obama’s reelection, is striking. But it is not bewildering, and stories like Syria’s go a long way toward explaining it. Desperation to avoid the third Carter term does not translate into enthusiasm over the specter of the third Bush administration.

It was during George W. Bush’s second term that the original Bush doctrine of eradicating terror networks and their supporting regimes was fully superseded by the revised Bush doctrine of “Muslim outreach” and Islamist empowerment — gussied up as “democracy promotion.” It was during the second Bush term that the coherent, completed anti-terrorist mission of dislodging Saddam Hussein gave way to the incoherence of the “freedom agenda.” That was policy made of the pretense that Islamic hearts and minds could be won over by a kinder, gentler style of war-fighting, one that elevated the safety of hostile Muslim populations over the security of our troops and the vanquishing of our enemies. It was under Bush, not Obama, that the executive branch began indulging Islamist demands that the government purge references to Islamic doctrine in discussions of jihadist terror. It was Bush’s State Department, not Obama’s, that first sustained the Clintonian approach of appeasing Iran: a blind eye to the mullahs’ facilitation of terror against our troops and a blind faith in the capacity of sanctions to bring them to heel.

These policies were not merely unwise; they were immensely unpopular. Americans strongly favored military action against jihadists and their enablers. They never supported nation-building schemes and never agreed with the ruling class that propping up sharia states disguised as democracies was an appropriate use of our armed forces. And while official Washington lauds leaders of Islamist organizations as “moderates” who are willing to seek “change” through the political process rather than violence, Americans see them as extremists trying to sow sharia principles into our law and institutions. Thus, despite an unrelenting smear campaign by which Islamists — abetted by leftists — seek to silence their critics with accusations of bigotry and “Islamophobia,” Americans continue to support state initiatives to bar courts from relying on sharia law, to oppose provocations such as the Ground Zero mosque, and to applaud initiatives such as Senator Rand Paul’s worthy proposal to cut off U.S. aid to Pakistan because of its enforcement of such sharia strictures as the death penalty in blasphemy cases.

So unpopular was the second Bush term that it gave us, first, the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006, and then, in 2008, the Obama administration. The Republican establishment sloughed these electoral thumpings off to the country’s being “war weary.” But the country has never been war weary — when we are threatened, we want the threats dealt with decisively. What we are is Islam weary.

Americans are not predisposed against Muslims — in sharp contrast to mainstream Islam’s animus toward the West. We welcome with open arms anyone, of any creed, who is willing to assimilate to our culture of liberty — to the outrage of Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who regards asking Muslims in the West to assimilate as a “crime against humanity.”

We are exhausted, though, from defending ourselves against Muslim mass-murderers while walking on eggshells for fear of offending tender Muslim sensibilities. We are tapped out, emotionally and financially, from making enormous sacrifices on behalf of ingrate Muslim peoples, who gravitate to our enemies even as we labor to improve their lot. And we are sick to death of the suggestion that we need to apologize for our country when most of the violence that currently besets the world — a great deal of which is Muslim-on-Muslim savagery — is directly traceable to Islamic culture. We have never been at war with Islam, and we have no desire to conquer or occupy Muslim territory; but neither do we want any more entanglement with Islamic countries than is absolutely necessary. We hope Islam reforms, we hope Muslims stop killing each other. But we’re tired of that being our problem — especially since it’s a problem we can’t fix.

By refraining from American involvement in Syria — or, at least, overt American involvement — we have deprived the competing factions of the opportunity to unify around the superpower they love to hate. As a result, they are fighting among themselves. Hamas has pulled up stakes from Syria, its longstanding partnership with the Assad regime and Iran in tatters because of its support for the Syrian “opposition” (i.e., the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch). Relations between Hamas and Hezbollah, a key Assad ally, have frayed. Assad is increasingly crippled, which deeply wounds Iran. Erdogan’s honeymoon with Assad is over, and Turkey must tend to the strains in its formerly cozy relations with Iran and Iraq (while quietly replacing Iran as Hamas’s sugar daddy — proving, yet again, it is no ally of ours). The Saudis, who have bankrolled the Muslim Brotherhood’s global promotion of Islamic supremacist ideology, are panicked by the Brotherhood’s ascendancy, frosting their relations with Egypt and complicating their efforts to aid Syrian Islamists.

If we had tried to come up with a plan for simultaneously weakening all the anti-American, anti-Western players in the region, we’d never have been able to come up with something this effective. And it needn’t cost us a single American life or a single American dollar. All we need to do is stay out of it.

In Egypt, just across the sea from Syria, after the first “democratic” election yielded overwhelming Islamist control of the legislature, the next “democratic” election has produced a standoff between the Muslim Brotherhood candidate and the Mubarak regime candidate (to be decided in a runoff election later this month). That didn’t happen because of the United States. It happened because, in the Middle East, there is no freedom culture: The authentic democrats are vastly outnumbered by the Islamic supremacists. The only thing that prevents the tyranny of the Islamists is the tyranny of the strongmen — which is why 23 percent of Egyptians, deathly afraid of the former, voted for the latter.

As in Egypt, there is no good outcome for us in Syria. There is the atrocious dictator or the atrocious Islamists. There is no “better” side for Romney to choose. By throwing in his lot with the Islamists, he signals that he has failed to learn the hard lessons of the last decade. Americans do not want four more years of an administration that looks at enemies and sees friends. We don’t want “outreach”; we want out.

Romney’s support for the Syrian “opposition” will undoubtedly play well inside the Beltway. But the groan you hear is from the rest of the country, where elections are won and lost.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Wisconsin’s Peter Pan progressivism

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
June 3, 2012

I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up.

No sir,

Not I,

Not me,

So there!

— “Peter Pan” the musical, 1954


WAUWATOSA, Wis.

This state, the first to let government employees unionize, was an incubator of progressivism and gave birth to its emblematic institution, the government employees union (in 1932 in Madison, the precursor of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) — government organized as a special interest to lobby itself to expand itself. But Wisconsin progressivism is in a dark Peter Pan phase; it is childish without being winsome.

Wisconsin has produced populists of the left (Robert La Follette) and right (Joe McCarthy). On Tuesday, in this year’s second-most important election, voters will judge the attempt by a populism of the privileged — white-collar labor unions whose members live comfortably above the American median — to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

In this Milwaukee suburb, a pro-Walker phone bank is conducting mobilization, not persuasion. Is any voter undecided? For 16 months, Wisconsin, normally a paragon of Midwestern neighborliness, has been riven by furious attempts to punish Walker for keeping his campaign promise to change the state’s unsustainable fiscal trajectory driven by the perquisites of government employees. His progressive adversaries have, however, retreated from their original pretext for attempting to overturn the election Walker won handily just 19 months ago.

He defeated Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. A recall is a gubernatorial election, and the Democrats’ May primary was won by . . . Barrett.

In 2010, government employees unions campaigned against Walker’s “5 and 12” plan. It requires government employees to contribute 5.8 percent of their pay to their pension plans. (Most were paying less than 1 percent. Most private-sector workers have no pensions; those who do pay, on average, much more than 5.8 percent.) Walker’s reform requires government employees to pay 12.6 percent of their health-care premiums (up from 6 percent but still less than the 21 percent private-sector average). Defeated in 2010, the unions now are demanding, as frustrated children do after losing a game, “Let’s start over!”

Like children throwing tantrums against the rules of a game going badly, in 2011 petulant Wisconsin Democratic legislators fled to Illinois to disrupt the Legislature. Walker’s reforms included restricting the issues subject to collective bargaining. This emancipated school districts from buying teachers’ health insurance from a provider entity associated with the teachers union. Barrett used Walker’s reform to save Milwaukee $19 million.

In justifying a raucous resistance to, and then this recall of, Walker, the government employees unions stressed his restriction of collective bargaining rights. But in the May primary, these unions backed the candidate trounced by Barrett, who is largely ignoring the collective bargaining issue, perhaps partly because most worker protections are embedded in Wisconsin’s uniquely strong civil service law. Besides, what really motivates the unions and elected Democrats is that Walker ended the automatic deduction of union dues from government employees’ pay. The experience in Colorado, Indiana, Utah and Washington state is that when dues become voluntary, they become elusive.

So, Barrett is essentially running another general-election campaign, not unlike that of 2010 — except that the $3.6 billion deficit Walker inherited has disappeared and property taxes have declined. By re-posing the 2010 choice, Wisconsin progressives’ one-word platform becomes: “Mulligan!”

The emblem displayed at some anti-Walker centers is an outline of Wisconsin rendered as a clenched fist, with a red star on the heel of the hand. Walker’s disproportionately middle-aged adversaries know the red star symbolized murderous totalitarianism, yet they flaunt it as a progressive ornament. Why?

Because it satisfies the sandbox socialists’ childish pleasure in naughtiness, as does their playground name-calling (Walker is a “Midwest Mussolini”) and infantile point-scoring: When the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel endorsed Walker, Wisconsin’s Democratic Party chair fulminated that six decades ago the Sentinel (which merged with the Journal in 1995) supported McCarthy.

Also, many backward-looking baby boomers want to recapture their youthful fun of waving clenched fists in the face of privilege. Now, embarrassingly, they are privileged.

A January poll found that even 17 percent of Democrats think that recalls are justified only by criminal behavior, not policy differences. If, however, Walker loses, regular Wisconsin elections will henceforth confer only evanescent legitimacy. If he wins, progressives will have inadvertently demonstrated that entrenched privilege can be challenged, and they will have squandered huge sums that cannot finance progressive causes elsewhere. So, for a change, progressives will have served progress.

georgewill@washpost.com

Barack Obama: Drone Warrior

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
June 1, 2012

A very strange story, that 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles “baseball cards” with the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses who shall die by drone strike. He even reserves for himself the decision of whether to proceed when the probability of killing family members or bystanders is significant.

The article could have been titled “Barack Obama: Drone Warrior.” Great detail on how Obama personally runs the assassination campaign. On-the-record quotes from the highest officials. This was no leak. This was a White House press release.

Why? To portray Obama as tough guy. And why now? Because in crisis after recent crisis, Obama has looked particularly weak: standing helplessly by as thousands are massacred in Syria; being played by Iran in nuclear negotiations, now reeling with the collapse of the latest round in Baghdad; being treated with contempt by Vladimir Putin, who blocks any action on Syria or Iran and adds personal insult by standing up Obama at the latter’s G-8 and NATO summits.

The Obama camp thought that any political problem with foreign policy would be cured by the Osama bin Laden operation. But the administration’s attempt to politically exploit the raid’s one-year anniversary backfired, earning ridicule and condemnation for its crude appropriation of the heroic acts of others.

A campaign ad had Bill Clinton praising Obama for the courage of ordering the raid because, had it failed and Americans been killed, “the downside would have been horrible for him. “ Outraged vets released a response ad, pointing out that it would have been considerably more horrible for the dead SEALs.

That ad also highlighted the many self-references Obama made in announcing the bin Laden raid: “I can report . . . I directed . . . I met repeatedly . . . I determined . . . at my direction . . . I, as commander in chief,” etc. ad nauseam. (Eisenhower’s announcement of the D-Day invasion made not a single mention of his role, whereas the alternate statement he’d prepared had the landing been repulsed was entirely about it being his failure.)

Obama only compounded the self-aggrandizement problem when he spoke a week later about the military “fighting on my behalf.”

The Osama-slayer card having been vastly overplayed, what to do? A new card: Obama, drone warrior, steely and solitary, delivering death with cool dispatch to the rest of the al-Qaeda depth chart.

So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills, has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.

A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge, jury and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.

This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle, they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear civilian clothes, hide among civilians and target civilians indiscriminately. But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.

Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead terrorists can’t talk.

Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.

One capture could potentially make us safer than 10 killings. But because of the moral incoherence of Obama’s war on terror, there are practically no captures anymore. What would be the point? There’s nowhere for the CIA to interrogate. And what would they learn even if they did, Obama having decreed a new regime of kid-gloves, name-rank-and-serial-number interrogation?

This administration came out opposing military tribunals, wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights and trying mightily (and unsuccessfully, there being — surprise! — no plausible alternative) to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them in their beds.

You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no prisoners. The morality is perverse. Which is why the results are so mixed. We do kill terror operatives, an important part of the war on terror, but we gratuitously forfeit potentially life-saving intelligence.

But that will cost us later. For now, we are to bask in the moral seriousness and cool purpose of our drone warrior president.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

U.S., Europe on different paths to same place

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
June 2, 2012

The Eurovision Song Contest doesn't get a lot of attention in the United States, but on the Continent it's long been seen as the perfect Euro-metaphor. Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype pan-European institution and predicated on the same assumptions. Eurovision took the national cultures that produced Mozart, Vivaldi and Debussy, and in return gave us "Boom-Bang-A-Bang" (winner, 1969), "Ding-Ding-A-Dong" (winner, 1975) and "Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley" (winner, 1984). The euro took the mark, the lira and the franc, and merged them to create the "Boom-Bang-A-Bang" of currencies.

How will it all end? One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb: "Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra," cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahović. "The string section and the wood section all sit together." Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV's head of "war information" programming.

Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe itself is very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting for the German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week's Eurovision finale in Azerbaijan, The Daily Mail in London reported that the Spanish entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the competition "because the cash-strapped country can't afford to host the lavish event next year," as the winning nation is obliged to do. In a land where the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and two-thirds of the country's airports are under threat of closure and whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military intervention to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse, the pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a poignant symbol of how total is Spain's implosion. Ask not for whom "Ding-Ding-A-Dong" dings, it dings for thee.

One of the bizarre aspects of media coverage since 2008 is the complacent assumption that what's happening is "cyclical" – a downturn that will eventually correct itself – rather than profoundly structural. Francine Lagarde, head of the IMF, found herself skewered like souvlaki on a Thessaloniki grill for suggesting the other day that the Greeks are a race of tax evaders. She's right. Compared to Germans, your average Athenian has a noticeable aversion to declaring income. But that's easy for her to say: Mme Lagarde's half-million-dollar remuneration from the IMF is tax-free, just a routine perk of the new transnational governing class. And, in the end, whether your broke European state has reasonably efficient tax collectors, like the French, or incompetent ones, like the Greeks, is relatively peripheral.

Likewise, on this side of the Atlantic: Quebec university students, who pay the lowest tuition rates in North America, are currently striking over a proposed increase of $1,625. Spread out over seven years. Or about 232 bucks per annum. Or about the cost of one fair-trade macchiato a week. Which has, since the strike, been reduced further, to a couple of sips: If you're wondering how guys who don't do any work can withdraw their labor, well, "strike" is a euphemism for riot. The other week, Vanessa L'Écuyer, a sexology student at the Université du Québec à Montréal, was among those arrested for smoke-bombing the subway system and bringing the city's morning commute to a halt. But, as in Europe, in the end, whether you fund your half-decade bachelor's in sexology through a six-figure personal debt or whether you do it through the largesse of the state is relatively peripheral.

In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different but only to this extent: They've wound up taking separate paths to the same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death panels, whether higher education is just another stage of cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars' worth of personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec.

That's to say, the unsustainable "bubble" is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called "adolescence" that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a desultory half-decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you're 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents' health insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called "retirement" that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or one third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend.

The bit in between adolescence and retirement is your working life, and it's been getting shorter and shorter. Which is unfortunate, as it has to pay for everything else. This structural deformity in the life cycle of Western man is at the root of most of our problems. Staying ever longer in "school" (I use the term loosely) leads to ever later workplace entry, and ever later (if at all) family formation. Which means that our generation is running up debt that will have to be repaid by our shrunken progeny. One hundred Greek grandparents have 42 Greek grandchildren. Is it likely that 42 Greeks can repay the debts run up by 100 Greeks? No wonder they'd rather stick it to the Germans. But the thriftier Germans have the same deathbed demographics. If 100 Germans resent having to pick up the check for an entire continent, is it likely 42 Germans will be able to do it?

Look around you. The late 20th century Western lifestyle isn't going to be around much longer. In a few years' time, our children will look at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that came from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in the early 21st century the Western world thought it entirely normal that vast swathes of the citizenry should while away their youth enjoying what, a mere hundred years earlier, would have been the leisurely varsity of the younger son of a Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.

I was sad to learn that Helga Vlahović died a few weeks ago, but her central metaphor all those years ago wasn't wrong. Any functioning society is like an orchestra. When the parts don't fit together, it's always the other fellow who's out of tune. So the Greeks will blame the Germans, and vice-versa. But the developed world is all playing the same recessional. In the world after Western prosperity, we will work till we're older, and we will start younger – and we will despise those who thought they could defy not just the rules of economic gravity but the basic human life cycle.

©MARK STEYN

President Obama Shuns Lech Walesa

The Polish Solidarity leader is “too political” for the administration.

By Rory Cooper

http://www.nationalreview.com

June 1, 2012

Lech Walesa was once a trade-union activist. He was often arrested for speaking his mind against Communist oppression behind the Iron Curtain in Poland and for defying the Soviet Union. He was an electrician who, with no higher education, led one of the most profound freedom movements of the 20th century — Solidarity. He became president of Poland and swept in reforms, pushing the Soviet Union out of his homeland and moving the country toward a free-market economy and individual liberty. And President Obama doesn’t want him to set foot in the White House.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Polish officials requested that Walesa accept the Medal of Freedom on behalf of Jan Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who was being honored posthumously this week. The request makes sense. Walesa and Karski shared a burning desire to rid Poland of tyrannical subjugation. But President Obama said no.

Administration officials told the Journal that Walesa is too “political.” A man who was arrested by Soviet officials for dissenting against the government for being “political” is being shunned by the United States of America for the same reason 30 years later.

Meanwhile, one of the recipients of the Medal was Dolores Huerta, the honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. So socialist politics are acceptable, but not the politics of a man who stood up and fought socialism.

This revelation follows an eruption of outrage in Poland after President Obama referred in his remarks at the Medal of Freedom ceremony to “Polish death camps,” a phrase that Poles have battled since the end of the Cold War. The phrase suggests that Poles were complicit in Nazi concentration camps, which of course is not the case. In fact, Poles were exterminated in the camps.

The White House’s flippant response to the uproar caused the Polish president and prime minister to demand more thoughtful and personal reactions. But White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that the president has no plans to reach out to his Polish counterparts and has shrugged off the outrage in Poland.

Few observers are suggesting that President Obama’s written remarks noting “Polish death camps” were intentionally malicious. The comment was more likely a result of historical ignorance and careless inattention. This is the same ignorance and carelessness that would cause a president to turn away Lech Walesa and label him as “too political.”

Ironically, Lech Walesa shares a distinction with President Obama: They both won Nobel Peace Prizes. Walesa earned his in 1983 after years of fighting for peace and freedom, and being monitored, harassed, and jailed for it. President Obama received his award in 2009. Some may think that this would be enough of a bond for President Obama to set aside political differences for the greater good. But instead, President Obama treated Walesa the same way he treated the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, who was ushered out the White House kitchen past piles of garbage in 2010.

The likelihood is that President Obama didn’t want Walesa in the White House because Walesa has made critical remarks toward the president’s policies and in 2010 warned that the United States was slipping toward socialism. But rather than taking the mature and diplomatic path and respecting Walesa’s right to have a differing perspective, Obama chose to shun his lifetime of achievements.

Congratulating Walesa on his Nobel Prize in 1983, President Ronald Reagan said: “For too long, the Polish government has tried to make Lech Walesa a non-person and destroy the free trade-union movement that he helped to create in Poland. But no government can destroy the hopes that burn in the hearts of a people. The people of Poland have shown in their support of Solidarity, just as they showed in their support of His Holiness Pope John Paul II during his visit to Poland, that the government of that nation cannot make Lech Walesa a non-person, and they can’t turn his ideas into non-ideas.”

The White House should not treat President Walesa as a non-person, and they cannot turn his ideas into non-ideas.

— Rory Cooper is director of communications at the Heritage Foundation. You can follow him on Twitter @rorycooper.

New McGarrity book set in Tularosa Basin

By Elva K. Osterreich, Associate News Editor
Alamogordo Daily News
http://www.alamogordonews.com/
May 19, 2012

Michael McGarrity, an author well liked in the Tularosa Basin, has changed the direction of his writing talent from crime mystery to historical fiction.

Over the years, The New York Times bestselling author has written gritty, smart mystery stories around the main character Kevin Kerney, a New Mexico rancher/police officer who was born in the Tularosa Basin.

Now, McGarrity has brought together the "back story" of Kerney's family and their migration west into Texas and New Mexico. The book "Hard Country" is the first installment of an epic Western trilogy, according to a press release about the recently released book.

"McGarrity fictionalizes the history of the American Southwest from 1875 to 1918," the release says.

McGarrity said he lived in the Tularosa Basin, where much of the story takes place, many years ago. He got to know the area encompassed by White Sands Missile Range well as an enlisted man in the Army.

"I spent much time there," McGarrity said. "It became a place I love and embrace warmly."

Becoming enthralled with the landscape, history and people of the area, McGarrity created the Kerney character with his experience in the Basin.

"When I wrote my debut novel, I picked an protagonist with a deep and pervading connection with the land," he said. "I have been researching and researching and researching."

Initially, McGarrity went to his publisher with the idea to write a single book about the history of the Kerney family, but he soon realized there was too much he wanted to include and asked to write a trilogy. Fortunately, McGarrity said, his publisher knew him well enough and had seen enough of the new project that he agreed.

"I have this unique opportunity to create a trilogy with four generations of a fictional family," he said. "I don't know of any other writer who has accomplished a trilogy of a back story."

McGarrity said reviews coming out about "Hard Country" are already being compared to classics such as "Lonesome Dove," "Sea of Grass" and "Big Rock Candy Mountain."

"If those comparisons hold, in terms of the general public, I'm going to be very happy," he said.

While McGarrity had an idea of where he wanted the book to go when he started, he had a lot of research to get it done.

"I had to immerse myself in a historical era I could only begin to imagine," he said. "I had to learn the language of the period I was writing about. Even the physical landscape looked a lot different."

Not one to carefully plan out his books, McGarrity said he did have to start with an outline to present to his publisher.

"I had to do an outline but once I started writing I kind of threw that out," he said. "I kind of get a springboard idea and take off from there. Careful, cautious outlines are not the kind of storytelling I can do. I have to kind of follow my instinct."

When McGarrity was in the Army in the late 1950s and early '60s, he had no thought of becoming a writer.

The era was a very busy time at WSMR and many of the missile programs were in full swing at that time, he said. The world was in the midst of the Cold War.

"At that point I was considering a military career," He said. "But then I chose going to college."

But McGarrity always did a lot of professional writing and describes him self as a voracious reader.

In his late 40s, McGarrity had the chance to take a summer off and write a book.

"I wrote a novel," he said. "It was very bad, but a lot of fun. I found it fulfilling and kept doing it."

When McGarrity was 56 years old, his novel "Tularosa" came out. Today, after 12 bestselling Kevin Kerney crime mystery novels, "High Country" takes a new turn.

"I am very excited about 'Hard Country,'" he said.

At McGarrity's first "Hard County" signing in Albuquerque, the great-granddaughter and great-great-granddaughter of Albert J. Fountain came to meet him and have their books signed.

"To have them come to a book signing in Albuquerque, and have me sign books, was wonderful," McGarrity said. "I think if the folks of the Basin -- from Lincoln to Mayfield to Las Cruces -- will like this book, I am going to be totally delighted."

McGarrity will visit Alamogordo with two events during his southern New Mexico tour this week. On Thursday, he will present a Lunch and Learn program at the First National Bank Atrium beginning at 11:30 a.m. Reservations are required for this free event. Call 437-4880.

On Sunday, May 27, he will sign books at Hastings Books, Music and Video beginning at 3 p.m.

Contact Elva K. Osterreich at eosterreich@alamogordonews.com.

Copyright 2012 Alamagordo Daily News. All rights reserved.

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