Morning after

We're within a few hours of "The WHERE caucuses?"

But right now the frat party continues with the cable networks crawling around on the carpet, scarfing up the pizza crusts with a little red sauce left on them, draining the Bud Lite cans abandoned by coeds who passed out early, and wondering who left her bra around the nerdy pledge's neck.

New Hampshire, it's your turn, and welcome to it. Meanwhile, if you'll pardon it,  I need to think about those lacy step-ins someone pinned to my toga.

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While I'm doing that, feel free to gather your own group and rehearse a hymn of thanksgiving to Iowa for awarding you two big winners, a pair of small-government conservatives dedicated to civil liberties, the rule of rational law, restrained government spending, and federally mandated teaching of both creationism and the Lammanite theory in America's public schools. Oh, and plenty of earmarked pork for   the Pennsylvania Black-Lung zone.

Crazy old Grandpa Paul?  Well, about one out of five Republicans opined that he might have a point or two, a moral victory. It must be comforting to the statist wing of the GOP that moral victories correspond to peeing in your blue serge suit.  They can't end ethanol mandates. They can't phase out Uncle Sam bent over, grasping his ankles, inviting one and all, foreign and domestic, to work their will on our personal wallets.







  

FLASH ... Romney Captures SoL, Newt nabs second, Paul pales

Freedom did not shake her lovely tresses in my village of Smugleye-on-Lake. Our good Dr. Paul captured 11 votes of the 77 cast for 14.28 per cent.

The SoL tab:

Romney 22
Gingrich 20
Santorum 17
Paul 11
Perry 4
Bachmann 1

Further reports as they become available should your reporter remain awake. Being with that many people (about a thousand; it was a county-wide doin's) makes his butt tired, and the sensation often rapidly disseminates itself thoughout the other bodily parts.

Caucus morn on my electric teevee

They're all here. The cameras are on. I am siamesed to my new flat screen, listening to Them tell Me what I am like.

I am beginning to feel like one of Margaret Mead's Ta'u village girls.

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Armed Iowa, one year later

Happy Birthday. One year ago yesterday, "shall-issue" became Iowa law. You've read of  the resultant carnage, so there's no need to repeat it here.

Our largest newspaper -- the anti-gun Des Moines Register* --  decided it needed a year-end retrospective and produced what was presumably the most horrifying summary it could print without generating a collective horse laugh from the Mississippi to the Missouri. It headlined the "Unbelievable" number of new ccw permits in 2011.

Turns out the unbelievability head is based on this quotation:

“ 'It’s unbelievable,' (Cerro Gordo Sheriff Kenneth Pals) said. 'It hasn’t slowed. The permits used to be one-year permits. Now they are good for five years'.”

But try as it might, the Register couldn't dredge up enough to cite even one case of a CCW holder misusing a weapon. (I found one early in the year. Some CCW guy got  tight and waved his piece around in a bar. He's now, rightfully, a former CCW holder. That's all the mayhem I could find, so I suppose shall-issue hasn't  stacked corpses in our schools, orphanages, and  Burger Chef's.)

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And then there's the nation's Capital where they store, but rarely read, the Constitution, where gore was to clog the sewers after the Heller decision a little more than two years ago. Err, the  Washington murder rate is down.

If you decide to read that report you may savor the reasons given by Mayor Gray and Police Chief Lanier. They explain that homicides fell because of the excellent work of Mayor Gray and Police Chief Lanier. I'm sure that's true because there is no possibility that armed thugs might think twice about  throwing down on a victim who might shoot back.


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*I rag on the Register quite often, sometimes unairly so.  I found its coverage of the shall-issue debate last year pretty objective, and I can find little to fault in its news coverage of the Ron Paul campaign