Captain America for President? Iowa Caucuses 2012

Gary Johnson has made it official. He'll spend a little less time bicycling and ciimbing Mt. Everest and a little more running for president. He's hobnobbed among us rustics and promises to return.

Johnson is a contractor turned New Mexico governor where he performed some libertarian acts, notably wearing out a few pens vetoing  spending bills.  He thinks the war on drugs is a crazy spoof of logic, that the reach of the tax man is too broad and too deep, and that a nation can get in trouble tailoring its laws to the demands of the teevee preachers.

He's treading Ron Paul turf, though Paul is hugging our evangelical right on the abortion issue this time around.

Johnson's entry brings number of aspirants  to at least 18  20, and your handy list of caucus candidates has been updated.
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A departed friend

Chuck Brugman was too young to enlist. So he told a patriotic lie and became a decorated Marine veteran of the Pacific War, a dive-bomber gunner.

In 1946 he mastered the brass hard hat and earned an international reputation as the man to call when things went bad under the seas. He early took to the crazy  Gagnon/Cousteau inventions, moved to  American Samoa, and was THE diver and divemaster of   those Polynesian islands from 1970s through the1990s.  Chuck died in Tutuila last week at 86, depriving us of a gentle friend, a  bona fide hero who had every justification for macho boasting but who never did.

He was my personal connection to sanity for one long  island-bound, office-chained year. Whether aboard his stout  little catamaran Manu Sina, or too deep off Step Rock, or at the Pago Pago Yacht Club after the dives, he was a man with much to teach. Which he did, quietly and gently; if any Chuck tale had a butt, he made very sure it was Chuck.

May there be there be untouched reefs in your new home.

Inkpadutah's Revenge* and Indian Motorcycles

I haven't owned a bike for years, but the taste for old machines remains in my mouth.  When I was a lad I was occasionally privileged to borrow a couple of the veteran  Indians which were still around, held together with shade-tree contrivances  which permitted them to keep running after a fashion.

So there a nostalgic pleasure in learning that someone else is interested in the "Indian" marque -- namely Polaris Industries (ATVs, Victory motorcycles made just a few miles from Camp J).  They'll certainly be as over-gadgeted, over-lawyered, and over-priced as the other crap we're we're offered by vehicle makers, but maybe they'll at least preserve the neat old logo.

It's probably futile to hope they'll re-create anything as elegant as this.

It hurts my head to calculate the number of owners of the Indian bike name over the decades, certainly a number greater than Liz Taylor's husband tally.

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*This is unreasonably obscure for anyone not a serious scholar of  the Plains  Indian Wars. Nevertheless, I have suggested to Polaris that it should be the name of its first model.

Professor Ellen Lewin to students: "F--k Off!"

Ellen teaches gender studies and suchlike at the University of Iowa.  In her spare time she supplements her $94,000 salary writing lefty things, especially (and I assume approvingly) about gay dads and lesbians. So far, no problem as far as I'm concerned. They don't call it Marxist U for nothing, and we've always been willing to grin and bear the Ellens of the lecture halls.

But I wonder why she was on the college Republican kids' mailing list. She was and received an invitation to their "Conservative Coming Out." Her two-word eff off response got around and is creating pockets of both outrage and giggles around the campus. Read about it here.

She finally decided she had to make some sort of apologia and did, emphasizing, however,  her horror at those damned GOPer kids for mentioning the picnic would include an  "animal rights barbecue" and profaning the "coming out"  phrase.

In other words, "I shouldn't have emailed you to fuck off, but you deserved it."

We have to accept that because everyone knows it's only the gun-clinging, tea partying rubes of the right --  and libertarians -- who use indelicate language in political discourse.

EDITS:

(1) -- Later reports confirm the kid Republicans' email was approved by the official university censors and sent to everyone with campus email account.

(2) -- Ellen used three words, not two. She said: "F--k Off Republicans."