The Wonderful and Talented Me

The '94 SRC has nothing to do with this tale, and the tube full of 170-grain jacketed RNs was not meant for pesky inspectors coming around to see if I rehabbed my deck to current building code whims. I just put it there for the picture because I think it looks pretty leaning against the rustic seat framed with old-growth redwood four-by-fours.

It rests on the brand new planking which, in turn, is spiked to three railroad ties which have been underfoot for years. The project and the cleanup occupied a very long Saturday. It is a measure of my stalwart character that I decided to do the deck rather than attend a nearby auction of 200 guns and lots of ammo and accouterments.

Visiting here never actually put you in jeopardy of crashing through the old deck as you waited for my orderly to grant admittance to my quarters. But you could be forgiven for entertaining the fear. It was getting a little wobbly. A few observations:

--Wrestling railroad ties is, ideally, a job for husky young privates, but mine are all on leave.

--Tearing out the old planks exposed some teary nostalgia triggers. I'd forgotten that JJ, the tri-lingual black lab (RIP), would occasionally lose tennis balls and Frisbees under there, further back than I could retrieve with the rake. And then there was Dad's blaze orange practice golf ball.

--After a certain point, hammering large nails requires arm-muscle endurance beyond what I have. You lose that little snap at the end of the stroke. So you go to the shop and retrieve a two-pound ball peen hammer, and that gets you through the project.

You should all come and visit. I'll bask in the knowledge that you will return to your own commands and make me famous throughout the Service: "Wow. That TMR fellow really has a solid deck now! What a guy!"

The Daily Iowan (or Brahm's Gullaby)

The DI (in my opinion a one-time grace to university journalism) decided it needed to whack us gun creeps up 'longside the haid. It assigned the honor to a Lisa Brahm. Clearly en route to a stellar career in modern newspapering, Lisa decided the lede should be:

"Johnson County Sheriff Lonny Pulrabek said he’s worried about the implications of a gun-permit bill awaiting Gov. Chet Culver’s signature."

So, we have here a measure of considerable Constitutional importance, and a communicant of the University of Iowa journalism school thinks the nexus of concern is whether a local elected creature is worried about its requirement that "sheriffs in Iowa’s 99 counties follow certain criteria when issuing gun permits."

Oh my Gawd! Criteria trumping the sherf's best guess?

And maybe Lisa hasn't actually read the bill. She writes; "If signed, the bill would also allow Iowa gun owners to openly carry their weapons, carry long guns...

Which just isn't true. Open carry is a different subject in Iowa, covered under a different code section.

Also: "The National Rifle Association proposed the bill in an effort to have Iowa join the roughly 20* other states with “shall issue” laws.

No, Lisa. The NRA favored the bill, but many like it have been proposed for years. Your best reference here is probably Rep. Clel Baudler.

Back to the sheriff: “All sheriffs support people’s right to own and bear arms,” Pulkrabek said. “But what we don’t support is the right for everyone to carry them out in public.”

Parse that one for logic if you dare. Sheriff Pulkrabek, claiming to speak for all his colleagues, endorses the right to bear arms except that you can't actually bear them. Well, in your bedroom, maybe.

"Pulkrabek said he’s worried the new law would take away sheriffs’ discretion in issuing permits."

Yes sir. It would. That is precisely the point.

You might like to read the article and savor some other oddities of linear logic and the approach to reporting which is deemed acceptable at major universities these days.

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EDIT: The actual number of shall-issue states, Lisa, is about 37, not 20. Let's hear it for multiple layers of fact checking and editorial oversight.

Spreading wealth across the realm

The last I heard it cost only twenty or thirty bucks to send a wire transfer from Washington to the Heartland. Sending a cabinet critter with check in hand kicks that up to something in the four figures.

Neverttheless, let the record show that the Peoples' Republic of Iowa City yesterday welcomed a a high emissary from His Obamaness of Washington.

Now, you guys probably thought the secretary of commerce was supposed to stick around the White House and Capitol Hill, handing out xeroxed copies of the Interstate Commerce Clause in case anyone had forgotten it and thereby missed a chance to regulate something else from Pennsylvania Avenue and K Street.

Wrong. Secretary Locke had a check for us, so he flew in to personally hand most of the $30 million to Iowa City politicians for a new sewer plant.

(Attention. Smith, Winston: I know what you're crimetinking, and this is your final warning. Stop it.)

The trip had nothing to do with politics in the city which gave his Obamaness his earliest caucus momentum, in a state where Obama pal Gov. Culver is poised to lose his job to a mediocre Republican, and where some newly elected congress critters who just love Obamaism are worried about their seats.

No, Gary came to town instead of sending a wire transfer just because he likes to be close to sewer projects.

I know. It happens all the time. So what? It's still a cynical theft of your money to buy someone's vote.

Fretting and fussing shall-issue

I can't shake a dismal feeling about Iowa shall-issue which still needs the signature of Gov. Chester "Ya Big Lug" Culver. This is a politician of parts.

One part is the governor as a man who needs the salary and the show of presumptive respect. No one has ever suggested he's anything other than a lucky spermer, son of a former senator who got that way by kissing considerable Kennedy butt.

Another part is the practical campaigner who knows signing the bill is, on the face of it, a net vote getter which will, on the other hand, irritate his aging backers among what is left of the heavy-money New York/Washington/Hollywood bed-wetting axis. If he wants to veto, and he does, he needs a scheme to offset the lost pro-gun votes with extra and offsetting nods from the dripping diapers in our larger cities and in the three university SSRs (Ames, Cedar Falls, Iowa City.)

The bill, passed overwhelmingly, is a two-parter -- a rather straight-forward shall issue policy and CCW reciprocity language.

If I were a statist bungstopper of a political operative and getting paid to create a sure-fire anti-gun demagoguery package for Chet, I'd concentrate on the reciprocity section. Aside from pandering to our general rural xenophobia, it wouldn't be hard to play the race card. There's all kinds of available code for stirring up fear that the bill will open our gates to a bunch gun-slinging minorities from the ghettos.

Don't flame me for giving the Chet crowd the idea. They've thought of it since the bill passed, and they're morally capable of doing it. Will they? I don't know. They're probably still commissioning polls.

Every well-connected pol and cop I know tells me I'm fruitcakey to worry about a veto. May Providence prove them correct.