My Vacation, sidebar

The cultural heritage.

My Vacation

Permit me to introduce a small portion of the Laramie Range, an area of the United States where calling 911 is not part of the cultural heritage.

Mrs. Nobel Obama

Exclusive. Michelle's immediate reaction:

"For the first time in my adult life I am proud of Norway."

The Nobel Barack Obama

Speechless. Stuttering, foaming, half-gargling, half-screaming speechless.

Not even the flash-frozen brains of a bunch of Norwegian academics and politically connected others should be capable of this.

Why couldn't Barry Goldwater have invented dynamite?

You Will Learn to Love Big Brother

"The 'heartbeat' of the city consists of elected and appointed officials...Collectively these officials come and offer time and talents for public service. Each and every one takes the opportunity to represent the City of (Smugleye-on-Lake) with integrity, professionalism and making all decisions based on what is best for out community."

So says the lead article in the quarterly newsletter I get from the Leaders of SoL, along with the water and garbage dun.

I take great comfort in knowing that the motives of the folks I pay to regulate me are as pure as those of any living human since c. 32 A.D. -- and that they are as omnicompetent as -- well, sheesh, I dunno. Maybe one of Plato's men of gold.

Yet it is disheartening to learn that my government is the heartbeat of my community life. I always thought my heart beat pretty happily in Smugleye because I spend about 100 per cent of my time dealing with folks whom I don't pay to regulate me. Together we create private and uncoerced arrangements, and we're just pretty damned disappointed to find out City Hall figures this is trivial compared to its over-riding role in heart beatery.

Oh well. I suppose I'll just let this statist bullshit ride,* but I shouldn't. The tyranny of the nanny state rests on countless repetitions of such pap so that it will, in accord with Goebbels dicta, in due course assume the status of settled truth.

---

*Or maybe not. There are some highly rantable restrictions here. How about a zoning reg that requires a building permit to replace a window?

Television

Giada's neckline has been rising recently, making it less likely I'll hang around for the final reveal of her apple pie with capers, salami, and a nice cilantro garnish.

Going to Cowboy Country- South Dakota

The world contains too many smartasses who think it's funny to crack stuff like the main industry in South Dakota is Mount Rushmore. This is unfair, even for a joke. The SD economic mainstay is Interstate 90, assuming the billboards are econometrically included. (I think the Jinglebob Leather Works may run a close second.)

Somewhere in South Dakota, the West begins. You start your trek in Sioux Falls which is faux West. You see vast seas of corn along the highway, so you know you're still in the Midwest. As you cross the silted ponds that used to be the Missouri River, the corn thins out, and what you do see will exist only at the suffrage of giant spidery assemblies which look like steroidal versions of one of those new species of bugs they're always finding in Papua New Guinea.

Eventually even the irrigated corn gives way to grass and badlands -- and larger signs reminding you that you're getting awful close to Wall Drug where ice water is still free, coffee just five cents, and there is parking for about six thousand senior-citizen tour buses. Here (or just beyond, depending on which nitpickey buddy you're explaining all this to), is The West, and it is now permissible to doff your Topsiders and gimme cap in favor of your Tony Lamas and Stetson. Also to say howdy instead of hello.

Powder River, Let 'er Rip

There's nothing like a week or so in the Mountain West to clear a fellow's head of all the cobwebby nonsense that accumulates in the semi-civilized environment of the Internet, the mainstream media, the daily arrival of third-class mail, and your occasional surprise visitor who wants to sell you something -- a siding job, a new and improved politician, or a better crack at bliss beyond the grave.

I'll report an item or two of possible general interest, but you'll be spared a What I Did on My Vacation deal. Even in cowboy country, even in the mountains when an early winter storm hits, only a few things are interesting enough for comment.

I guess maybe one of those things might be the blonde with the green parrot at the Three Forks State Park campground. Or maybe not.

Land of the Morning Scam

Didn't we already pay for the 108,000 Garands and carbines Seoul wants to sell us for about $100 million? Not to mention a few other favors for the Land of the Morning Calm -- to the tune of some 50,000 American warriors who died too young.

My Uncle Gene was there over a freezing winter, top-kicking a battalion aid station. His summary take: "The Communists just shot at us. The ROKs stole us blind."

Good Morning, Senator Kirk

So whaddawe got here?

Insurance lawyer, insurance lobbyist, long-time crony of Teddy Kennedy, leader of pragmatic (get mine first!) pols as DNC chairman, super-delegate backer of B. Obama, favorite of Ted's kids, and, incidentally of the aforesaid Mr. Obama himself.

Hope and change arrives, cleverly disguised as just one more matinee by those venerable Vaudeville tappers Tip O'Neill and Joe Kennedy.

-----

An addendum.

The AP reports; "Patrick planned to send a letter to the secretary of state to declare an emergency, allowing him to override a legislative vote that defeated his administration's effort to make the bill take effect immediately. Normally, legislation faces a 90-day waiting period. "I recognize the gravity of this decision and I will make it very soon, and tell you just as soon as I do," the governor told reporters Wednesday night.

If feeding Obama the rubber-stamp vote he wants now rather than in December is handling an "emergency," then what word will Gov. Patrick use when, say, Obama bin Laden is discovered on the bridge of a hijacked destroyer, steaming into Boston Harbor at flank speed?

Poor Planning (Reloading Division)

Killing some time until the truck is repaired, I processed a couple hundred .38 Special and a few .357 cases yesterday. There were nicely polished, sized, and belled. Then I reached into the primer drawer and came up with jiggety-teen different varieties of caps; right, everything except small pistols. So, checking Midway, I learn that everything in that line is "Out of stock. No back orders."

Grump.

A local bulletin board is polluted this week with one of those beneath-stupid arguments about coaching football -- for third-graders. (I'd be pleased to post the url if I thought this corner of the Blogopolis SMSA held anyone dull enough to care about parents' opinion on whether the "win!" or "let-em-all-play" philosophy should prevail in coaching pre-pubes.)

However, it occurs to me that in about 20 years a good many alumni of this third-grade football mania will be shocked to discover that the world economy has too few insurance-selling jobs to accommodate all the disappointed young men who planned a lush living in the NFL . The brighter among them would gladly trade a working knowledge of Chinese or Arabic for all memories of the ass-pats they earned by not falling down too much.

If you can teach a kid the off-tackle slant when he's nine you can sure as Hell get him started on something likely to be useful.

Full disclosure: I personally played third-grade football if one of us could find the needle to blow up David Stouffer's leaky football and if the mean big kids weren't using the vacant lot and if it really seemed like more fun than walking down to the river with a cane pole. What a waste. If my community had had an organized youth football league and a few dozen daddies who were, themselves, frustrated athletes, why, heck, me and Joe Namath would have been team mates and drinking buddies. I guarantee it, and just writing about it deeply saddens me about my deprived childhood.

The Natural Perversity of Inantimate Objects

Today's little trip is a seven-mile run to the Ford dealership to determine if the F150 clutch transplant is completed. Then I can obey Horace Greeley. I shouldn't be here in Smugleye-on-Lake today. I should be approaching Three Forks. Yeah, maybe I should have seen it coming, but before I loaded the camper there wasn't the slightest hint of slipping.

Meanwhile, I submit that you don't read Reason magazine often enough. Me either, but I resolve to go there more often for things like this explanation of why the trouble with America is an excess 0f civility.

See You Later Allig ... (ZAP)

I'm sure Corb is a nice kid, a credit to rock and rollers everywhere, and fully deserving of his new scholarship. But I wish he'd explained the conundrum to the doowhackadoo photographer and editor. Solid body guitars need to be plugged in. Plugging them in while seated seaward of the waterline could result in a very short set.

L'etat, c'est WTF?

Read this and wonder how President Barack Obama could make this guy a czar of anything, much less of the regulatory function of the United States government -- even after we make allowance for the source, World Net Daily.

Cass Sunstein either means it or he doesn't when he writes: "There is no reason to believe that in the face of statutory ambiguity, the meaning of federal law should be settled by the inclinations and predispositions of federal judges. The outcome should instead depend on the commitments and beliefs of the President and those who operate under him."

Imagine how smoothly everything would work if President Obama and Regulatory Czar Sunstein sat down over a beer and decided how the Commerce Clause and the "general welfare" language of the Preamble should be interpreted.

For one thing it would save all that expense of the judicial branch of government. And maybe the legislative. If this nincompoop thinks Obama ought to be permitted to interpret the law, he might as well let the new Sun King make it in the first place.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the active governing class: This is why you scare us shitless, off our writing chairs and into the shops where ballistics in the lingua franca.

To put it as plainly as possible, Cass, we have a Constitution for the express purpose of keeping humans such as yourself where you belong, in a dim attic, unwashed, contemplating your navel, shunned in the full Mennonite manner by all to whom liberty is an idea not yet dead and monarchy is not the ideal to be desired.

(H/t to John of the GMA)

Royal Succession to Teddy Kennedy

It is a custom of monarchs to name their own successors, and most of they time they get away with doing so.

So it almost is in Massachusetts where the final act of hypocrisy in one of American history's most hypocritical political lives is underway.

You can read the AP link, but you probably already know the salient facts. Five years ago Sen. Edward M. Kennedy told the folks back home to repeal the law permitting the governor to name a replacement for a senator who dies. And of course, the people obeyed, Teddy being, after all, a Kennedy.

This summer, a dying Senator Kennedy had an epiphany and told the folks back home that his state deserved two voices in the Senate, therefore the governor must be permitted to name the successor to a senator who dies.

And so this morning the folks back home, speaking through a legislature dominated by the Joe Kennedy/Tip O'Neill Democratic machine, plan to "debate" the Kennedy deathbed edict.

Some lonesome and honest soul in that lawmaking body will certainly be rude enough to wonder aloud if the late senator's call from the grave might have the teeniest motivation of a Republican governor in 2004 and a pliant machine Democrat in 2009.

That Bay State Diogenes will then be attacked as a right-wing toady to Rush Limbaugh. He will be pilloried for sullying the Kennedy legacy which, as everyone knows, exemplifies the American virtues of selflessness, decorum, and modesty in all facets of their lives, public and private.

And if that isn't the truth I'll kiss your arse on the quarterdeck of the U.S.S. Constitution and foot the bill for a video uplink to the teevee satellite of your choice.

Domestica redux

Before the hour of eleven this morning a friend I see too seldom came for coffee, the city maintenance man appeared with a load of firewood which he help me unload and stack, a neighbor delivered a quart of Jack Daniels as a bon voyage offering, and best looking woman in this end of town popped in for a visit. So much for the loneliness of bachelorhood, though I concede this was a considerably more social weekday than I'm accustomed to .

The new underarm stuff, maybe?

Veritable Arsenal

This jaunt is not overly planned, but I suspect we're looking at about two or three thousand miles through the barren waste lands of the great American desert. My bestiaries report a land of vipers and sagebrush, grizzly bears and wolves; ethnographic studies reveal a populace quick to retaliate against violent provocation.

So I feel pretty good about things and don't really see a need to be armed to the extent necessary for an excursion down South Halstead Street in Chicago. And since guns get kicked around severely on my camping trips, the prettier ones stay home.

For what it is worth, here's one man's concept of a well-stocked arms locker for a few days on the great prairie and in the Rockies when no hunting is planned.

--For general pleasure and common pest control, the Smith 59, just because I'm comfortable with it, like having 28 rounds easily available in its two magazines, and a few more dings aren't going to set my tear ducts flowing. This will be a fine chance to shoot up all the remaining ancient reloads. I don't worry about the pipsqueak caliber because I figure the odds of trouble are slim.

--In case I'm wrong about that last point, the 20-inch Mossberg 500 with with five rounds of 12 gauge 00 buck in the magazine and five more in the stock band.

--A .22LR semi, maybe the Winchester 74, maybe one of the 10-22s. There is no place like the Wyoming/Montana plains for just plain plinking fun.

That arsenal should be veritable enough, though I'm beginning to flay myself for not planning on a Winchester 94 or a single six. How can a self-respecting man go to the shadow of the Big Horns without a cowboy gun?

The trip starts when you begin stocking the book locker with appropriate reading and research matter. So. for everyone who has been in my house in the past two years: Where are the rest of my Rocky Mountain fur trade books? I warn you that I can be a mean SOB when aroused.

Cash for Clunkers reckoning

This is about the time the first or second car payments are due from the citizens who bit on the cash for clunkers deal. Listen sharply for the first whinings that the gummint ought to step in and restructure the auto loans.

Well, Hildy Johnson would have understood

Someone on a military radio net says "bang, bang, bang" and CNN/Fox News defecate all over themselves trying to scoop the world on a "shots fired on the Potomac" drama.

Virtually every elevision " journalist " involved in this fubarathon holds a college degree in journalism. Among people with even the slightest sense of what reporting and editing should be, such a degree has come to command the same level of respect as a certificate of attendance at an Arkansas institute of cosmetology.

There are enough projects going on around here to challenge my mind all I care to, so the current reading is light. I pulled Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies from the shelf and rediscovered how much fun that C.S. Forester series is. Also, it's a painless way to to refresh your memory on the Napoleanic Wars and assorted other European tomfoolery at the cusp of of the 18/19th centuries.

John D. MacDonald - Science Fiction

John D. wrote so much that it's dangerous to make categorical statements about his work, but it's generally thought he wrote only two science fiction novels, Wine of the Dreamers in 1951 and Ballroom of the Skies in 1952.

Yesterday, at one of those semi-permanent garage sales, I found both of them, side by side in undated Fawcett Gold Medal printings. It's stuff like that that keeps me wasting time going to auctions and yard sales. This pair is shelf-worn but obviously unread. Since I can't recall reading either work, I think I'll tuck them in the camper for roadie use.

(Fifty cents each -- same price the sale guy was charging for Harlequins.)

The Grave-Spinning Lord Baden-Powell

Alternate title: Speechless.

Roberta reports that Adult (uh huh) Leaders have made Britain safer by ordering Boy Scouts to quit carrying their pocket knives.

Dang! And Free Whiskey!

By actual count it has been 22 days since TMR laid a 2x4 between the eyes of the man who at the moment occupies the office of President of the United States. I agree with you that this is unforgivable.

I'll listen in tomorrow as he lectures his captive audience of public school inmate-educatees. I understand he has been shamed out of telling them to write themselves a letter ruminating on what each could do to "help President Obama." So I'll be watching for an identical message couched in other words.

And, by the way, I am announcing the First Occasional TMR Liberty Prize. This one goes to the first history teacher credibly reported to this blog as having created and used a related lesson to follow the Obama speech -- reviewing history's official personality cults, including but not limited to Mao, Stalin, Hitler, the KorCom Kims, and the ayatollahs.

The prize is a fifth of Wild Turkey, and I ain't kidding.

EDIT: Times being what they are, and the national literacy level being what it is, I suppose this is necessary: We are referring here to a metaphorical 2x4, and TMR recommends against initiating physical violence against any person, including those who, at any given moment, occupy the office of President of the United States. The jug of Wild Turkey offer, however, remains decidedly literal.

How to buy a gun by mail order:

Sign this. Send it along with your order.

I am a citizen of the United States, over 21 years old, of sound mind, not a drug addict, not a habitual drunkard, not a fugitive from justice. I am not under indictment for a crime punishable by a year or more imprisonment. I have never been convicted of a crime of violence. There is no law in my state, county, or city that prohibits this order being shipped.

Date____________ Signed_________________________

The date had to be before the 1968 Panicked-Over-Guns Act, in other words, during the era of American history when the default condition of government was one of trusting its citizens.

(H/T again to Turner Kirkland. RIP)

The Courteous Dixie Gun Works

What a gray world we've become since the days when Turner Kirkland was in his prime. I just ran across one of his 1967 Dixie Gun Works catalogs. On the kraft mailing envelope is:

"Dear Postman: This Fascinating Catalog has cost our customer $1.00. Please deliver with HASTE and ACCURACY."

Imagine. A time of quaint and touching confidence in the efficacy of polite language.

Turner could also send you a modern gun via Railway Express.

Black Hills Rancher

I don't know if Jinglebob carries openly, but he is the dead-certain cinch to be the only blogger I know who could walk into the general store with a .45 Peacemaker on his his hip and appear 100 per cent natural -- as if buckling on was as routine as buttoning the shirt.

Besides, he slings a mean camera and can handle a dutch oven.

Welcome to the blogroll.

The Free State of Montana

A near-new Texsun camper followed me home the other day, and I decided to keep it. With a little luck, in another week or so it will be back on the 150, pointed westward toward the fur trade country with a stop at the Little Big Horn to honor the military genius of Lt. Col. Custer.

A routine part of any trip is a check of the state firearms laws along my route.

As you'd guess, the Regulators of South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Utah aren't likely to get pantywadded over my veritable arsenal and cache of ammunition, but in checking Montana I was reminded of something wonderful. It is the Montana Firearms Freedom Act which, in essence, tells DeeCee to go regulate up a rope about guns and accessories made in and kept in Montana.

I probably need to be back home before Oct. 1 when it becomes effective. Too bad. I envision buying a Bozeman Trail Silencer for my Bridger Big Rifle, Cal. One Hundred Fifty. I would post a picture here of them and me, defended against the feds by the entire Montana polity, maybe even including the Big Sky National Guard. Damn!! Course I'd have to stay there if I wanted to keep my goodies, but there are worse places to hang out.

(John Steinbeck in "Travels with Charley:" "If I could live away from the sea I would live in Montana.")

Let's hear it for Montana, not afraid to bell the federal pussy. They'll lose in the courts, of course, but the point will be loudly made that some Americans still give a serious damn about the principle of federalism and about Amendments 2, 9, and 10.

No court can change the other pleasant result - the soiled-linen state of the Kalispell liberals -- Redford, Sarandon, that bunch.

Travis McGee in Los Angeles

"...Other ridge areas, lower and brushier, were clotted thick with houses, According to demand, I could imagine each of those far houses was taking up at least a million dollars worth of of barren real estate. In a sane world it would be worth fifty cents an acre, but there it is, status symbol land, rock and brush, ridges and galleys, fires and mud all the way to Pacific Palisades. The highest houses get to see pizza signs and the night sea beyond. ... When San Andreas gives a good belch, they can start again at fifty cents an acre. "

"A Deadly Shade of Gold," P. 305 of the Fawcett Crest printing, a late one, c. 1995. Travis is observing the view from near Cal Tomberlin's mansion high in the western LA county hills.

---------

Enough fires like this week's and we won't have to wait for the tectonic burp. Assuming sentient beings really need to live in the tinder zone, I suggest they tell the green freaks to pee off, that they're going to clear the brush even at the cost of inconveniencing your occasional rattlesnake and degrading the habitat of whatever sand rat happens to be fashionable lately.

Quote of the Day

"I'm starting to think that Jefferson would look at the current state of affairs and say, "What are you waiting for?"

By reflectoscope over at Tam's place in reference to the government crackdown on an old Korean woman bent on undermining our society with undocumented kimchee.

A Franken-Gun

Miscegenation may produce the most beautiful human beings imaginable.* The same does not apply to firearms.

Its minor caliber notwithstanding, the purebred Mini-14 is a fine and sightly representative of the battle rifle as we understood it ca. 1939-1963. It stands tall in its Class As of walnutite and steel. It is a pleasure to shoot, an aesthetic adornment on any wall.

But mate it to the various Buck Rogers wet dreams, and it becomes ugly -- oily ugly, like the bald guy with the pencil mustache slipping out of the XXX theatre and stabbing you with an inviting leer.

---

*Honolulu offers luscious examples, but you do not want to go there anyway unless you lust for cynical services at Tokyo prices.

Travis McGee, futurist

" I get this crazy feeling. Every once in a while I get it. I get the feeling that this is the last time in history when the offbeats like me will have a chance to live free in the nooks and crannies of the huge and rigid structure of a an increasingly codified society. Fifty years from now I would be hunted down in the street. They would drill little holes in my skull and make me sensible and reliable and adjusted.

"I am, to put it as bitterly as possible, a romantic. I know a windmill when I see one, by God...".

The Quick Red Fox, p.96 of the early Fawcetts

...and another thing about Europe:

A European sorting his nuts and bolts and wrenches is engaging in only the most rudimentary forms of thought -- eight millimeters comes before nine millimeters so this goes here. (Places wrench appropriately.) Indeed, Diane Fossey's buddies could do as well.

An American engaged in rationalizing his workshop is a tour de force of complex calculation. Lessee, the 5/8 is here so I need a the 11/16 on the next peg, no, wait, i probably better save room for the 21/32 I use on the Kubota thurble bypass and....

Maybe that's why as kids we could always pick up a little change following Brit sports car down the road, collecting parts.

It's little wonder that dullard Europe is defined as that place which screws things up badly every generation or two and whistles for Uncle to come on across the Atlantic and pull its metric nuts out of the fire.

I am typing this with greasy fingers, by jingo.

"Kennedy to Lie in Repose in Boston..."

No, actually. Not in Boston. Not anywhere else. Nor, for that matter, in any bodily position.

(It's a current AP headline on a piece that draws on Lincolnesque imagery to further sanctify a Massachusetts politician who recently died.)

Sen. Ted Kennedy, RIP

May we memorialize and inter Senator Kennedy with more dispatch and greater dignity than is usual when celebrities die. In due course, when the ceremonies are behind us, will come the time for objective evaluation of the man's actual accomplishments and sins. Meanwhile, we can do worse than try to observe Mark Twain's etiquette for funerals.

"Do not criticize the person in whose honor the entertainment is given...

"Listen, with as intense an expression of attention as you can command, to the official statement of the character and history of the person in whose honor the entertainment is given; and if these statistics should seem to fail to tally with the facts, in places, do not nudge your neighbor, or press your foot upon his toes, or manifest, by any other sign, your awareness that taffy is being distributed.

"If the official hopes expressed concerning the person in whose honor the entertainment is given are known by you to be oversized, let it pass -- do not interrupt...

"Do not bring your dog."

You mean I can't have the Kimber right this second?

I credit the peelegs over on one of the sillier Yahoo message boards for alerting us to this encouraging report on the tempering of instant gratification.

The word "layaway" is emerging from the linguistic graveyard, and those of us who've been around for a while can remember our parents in the pre-credit-card days putting things on "layaway." You fork over part of the cost and the store holds your item until you pay it off. This frustrates the infantile demand to get what you want when you want it, but it also yields the sublime grown-up satisfaction of owning things which are paid for before they get inside your house.

Course, the PAbs over at the ACG board find all this frightening. Credit, even if used stupidly a la Bush and Obama, increases the value of their investments which depends on easy credit and circulating pieces of paper which they can, for a time, pretend to be money.

Fa'a Samoa* -- Tales of the South Pacific

As my buddy John says, "Oh, this will end well." (John has been known to express himself sarcastically on rare occasions.)

The government of Samoa has decided to shift from U.S.-style driving to the abominably wrong-sided, wrong-headed, left-wing British system as also employed in New Zealand and Australia.

A Samoan citizen who just bought a new car with the steering wheel where it belongs opposes the switch and has formed a new political party to challenge the national government in Apia. (As a lawyer, wouldn't he just?)

It is, of course, vital that His Obamaness the President and Dame Hillary ("I Ain't Bill") the Secretary of State quickly map out a United States strategy on this crisis in the South Pacific. We cannot afford to wait. At a minimum the Pentagon should rev up the complex to again produce all those wonderful jungle-war toys we knew and loved in Nam.

---

*A Samoan phrase trotted out ad nauseum to explain to Westerners that Samoa doesn't give a good goddam about what anyone else thinks.

Domestica

1. On the south shore of the big lake is an ancient restaurant called the Gingham Inn. We do not eat there often enough, and when we do I keep forgetting to order the right thing. Last night we fixed that, and I am again reminded that a proper chicken fried steak is undoubtedly what God has for dinner.

2. The Dog Days of summer are a sultry misery to all Midwesterners. Except this year. For the eighth or tenth time in the Premier Summer of the Obama, I am burning wood.

3. Hedge apples do, in fact, repel spiders. Science be damned.

DHA, fish oil, and American geniuses

High-level thinkers have ranked the states for braininess.

Washington, D.C. is included in the study and, lo, is the brainiest because Washingtonians eat lots of fish to achieve DHA-enanced status.

So ends my lifelong awed admiration of high-level thinkers.

DeeCee fish-oilers elected Eleanor Holmes Norton to Congress. Prosecution rests.

Trading with the Enemy

I'm invested in a company which just signed a hefty ($60 million-plus) contract to "upgrade" the California driving license process. The market hasn't reacted, and everyone is asking why.

Hell, it's obvious. California is going to pay us with warrants, bales of medical pot, and autographed pictures of Maria Shriver.

Trained Professional at Work

The sheriff of Polk County is very sorry that a departmental policy was "not well understood" and led to the wounding of a 3-year-old girl.

A deputy took his shiny cop car to a community gathering in a Des Moines park, threw open the doors, and invited all the little kids to crawl around in it. PR and community relations, dontcha know?

The sheriff said the deputy just didn't understand that leaving leaving a shell in the chamber of his racked shotgun, in plain view and easy reach of the tykes and pre-pubes, might be considered slightly stupid in addition to violating departmental policy.

I love it. Maybe it reads: "It is the policy of this department that no shotgun placed in the reach of tiny playful hands shall have a live round in the chamber."

Witnesses say the deputy was chatting with someone while a pre-teen boy was fooling with the gun just before the toddler fell. The boy disappeared. The toddler was not too badly hurt and is out of the hospital. The cop is on administrative suspension with pay. The sheriff is leaning toward lenience for Deputy Friendly because he's a "a very good employee; long-term, senior person, ... who feels terribly about what happened."

My butt hurts.

Obama's Grandma

A politician gets even more revolting when he hauls out personal tragedy to illustrate his Christ-like nature.

President Obama raises his Grandma Toot to prove he is too compassionate to back a health-care provision requiring "death panels." He says the death brought him searing pain. I believe him and empathize. However:

Item: No one believes, Sir, that you're backing unsubtle death panels as an immediate goal, so stop diddling the straw man, eh?

Item: To dip a maudlin toe into the story of your grandmother's death simply reminds us that you are credibly thought to believe euthanasia is useful economic tool, just one whose time has not yet come.

Item: Everyone understands you would oppose death panels for your loved ones. The question is, what might you do about ours? Rulers do tend to spare their own, don't they?

May I refer you to a Congress which finds itself horrified at the thought of having to live under the laws it passes for the peasantry. You have your boys on The Hill write themselves specifically in to your new health care scheme, and I'll rethink my opposition.

Cowboy Obama in Montana

The AP did a preview of the Obama Montana trip and included a description of the locals for him. There's a tone here of people-whose -existence-is-to-be-regretted."

"Democrats have made recent election inroads in the (mountain west) by successfully courting independents, Republican crossovers and conservative-to-moderate loyalists in their own party. But it's these very voters — gun owners, civil libertarians, private property advocates — who seem to be turning away from the president across the country because of deep-seated concerns about expanding government and soaring budget deficits."

About 233 years ago a little strip of geography along the eastern coast of North America spawned a population of gun owners, civil libertarians, and private property advocates. They tried a small experiment in limited government which grew and worked out quite well for a long time.

I wonder what sort of experiment lurks in the collectivist heart of those those who would demonize, or at least marginalize, such individualists.

His Holiness Rick Santorum

Santorum is bringing his sanctified self to my state this fall. He claims it's just a howdy-do visit and has nothng to do with the sweet strains of Hail to the Chief coursing through his aural equipment.

Rick, I can't be there. That's the week I Armor-All the lawnmower tires. Besides, I've pretty much decided not to support anyone who routinely reminds me he has God's unlisted number.

Town Hall

She's an English teacher in New Hampshire and she decided to slip the President a softie: "If we had better mental health care, what would our society be like?"

And His Obamaness lacked the wit and the truthfulness to respond: "Well, there would certainly be a different kind of people in public office."

Self awareness

You're a gun freak so all your ice picks have been converted to firearms assembly aides by bending them into weird shapes. So you abuse a knife in order to chip ice for a couple of Sunday Cuba libres.

This post comes with an added bonus attraction

Gun pron and good guys

Kevin reports that the good guys have outflanked the hoplophobic FeyPal, meaning you can enter the raffle for a dandy 1911 clone on line. The details are at The Smallest Minority, where you'll also find some graphic images of a Para in various stages of dress. Viewer discretion is advised.

So is buying a ticket or two. It's a Soldier's Angels project.

Better men

I wonder if the texting dotcomers of twittering America could produce even ten divisions of men of this caliber from the mill run of its citizens.

This D-Day collection has a number of June 6, 1944 photographs most of us have never seen.

These things are moving. I especially like picture number 44, a D-Day anniversary shot that captures the irony of which mid-century Americans were capable even after ten years of depression and three of slaughter.

We owe the MSM, specifically the Denver Post, for putting this collection together, and my buddy Al in Rhode Island for alerting some of us to it.

...its ugly head

Senator Martinez tosses in the towel, and Governor Crist gets to name a replacement.

The guv is getting plenty of advice, including this:

"U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said she hoped Crist would appoint a Hispanic to follow in Martinez's footsteps...". (AP)

What a racist, bigoted thing to say, Ileana. You imply that Hispanics need opportunistic appointments because they are too dumb or too lazy to get out there and lie, cheat, and steal their way into office, just like the pallid politicians.