Roger Clemons

Roger played baseball. If he took steroids, he violated a private agreement with his boss. Not a crime.

He told Congressman Waxman's nosy committee he didn't take steroids. Congressman Waxman disagreed, and Roger is about to go to trial for lying to Congress,  a crime that could send him to federal prison for 30 years.

Please do not let this confuse you about federal law. Lying to Congress is  felony. Lying in Congress is a hallowed American tradition.

Even if he did take muscle juice, all Mr.Clemon's had to do was first get elected, Then he and his congressional collagues could have rubbed Pinocchio noses to their hearts' content.

Dear Blanche,

You must be smarter than that, having a BA and all, so we assume  you think Joe Bob is too dumb to understand how earmarks work and will vote for you because you got Washington to pretend it was giving New Hope free money -- $13,811 for a nice new police car.

Heaven hep y'all  if Joe Bob figures out that somebody had to send that $13,811  to President Obama and Senator Lincoln before they could send it to  New Hope.

And the guys who paid will be humping to get it back from their Sen. Santa Claus.  So if Joe Bob does get that job over at the turpentine plant, the feds will be nicking his paycheck, dime by dime, week by week, piling up some more free money to buy a new cruiser for Barney over there in Mayberry.

Senator, why don't  y'all  just stick  it in your earmark?

BAD Geek. Bad. Go to your Kennel!

Eschewing scatology is noble, but some things demand strong language.

First the USNA decides American naval officers don't need to practice celestial navigation. Then Morse Code is declared a quaint historical relic. But the OED?

This shit has got to stop.
.

Otherwise at the loophole...

A buddy got a fine deal on a Marlin Model 92 offered as a "parts" gun. It was missing only the butt plate, and you make a mistake to underestimate this man's stock-making and general restoration skills.

I was less lucky and settled for a good Lyman 358495 mold (147 -grain wadcutters), a GI . 1911 magazine, and a funky old .22 gun belt,  solid, but  missing its buscadero style holster. It  looks keen hanging next to the spurs.

---

If I ever decide  to reload 9mm Eurowimp,  the  Lyman bullets will let me enter the caliber wars about whether 9mm Parabellum  using 147 grainers is a "good defense load." I will undoubtedly  straddle the fence and prove it is OK in Europe, but not here. Then I'll get to quote Colonel Cooper again. "If you shoot a European he will sit down on the curb and cry. If you shoot an American he will shoot back."

Adrenalin Rush

A guy I know fondly  went to a loophole today where a serious collector of arms of the American Revolution inspected an oddball  $130 flintlock pistol  my pal  had sloppily hung on a wall for five or six years.  Just another neat-looking old gun.

Gee, he never noticed that Schuylkill Arsenal mark on the wood and had forgotten that arsenal  got out of the small arms business in 1812  after assembling and staging the possibles that  Captain Lewis and Captain Clark requisitioned for their march on behalf of early U.S.imperialism. 

A direct L and C connection all but certainly doesn't exist. For one thing, it is a sea service design.  On the other hand,  a connection to the  era and place is all but a lock, and the Schuylkill mark, if validated, would also prove U.S. martial/naval connection. 

Just before swooning he confided to me that the old .69 smooth bore beater goes directly to the vault while he makes enquiries of  those auction houses where the auctioneer wears a dinner jacket.  

Last thing he said before hitting the fainting couch was, "Hey Jim, Go over there and ask them girls what color cars they want."

Even the remote possibility is fun.

He said.

Roseholme Cottage

I swear,  the stuff coming out of that place qualifies it for a place on the National Registry of Historic Sites, Freedom and Good Sense section.

Always good for us libertarian pests, but Roberata scores 100/10x  on this one.

Show Time

We'll be in Sioux Falls tomorrow for one of the better loopholes in the country -- the Dakota Territory Gun Collectors Association Loophole. This is not  their biggest show of the year, but it's always an interesting one with hundreds of classic levers and SAAs along with more modern shootery. I have no plans to loophole anything, though I really should  because my recent efforts to annoy Senators Harkin and Schumer haven't been effective,, i.e., no subpoenas whatsoever in the mail lately.

Maybe I'll find a a beat up 12 gauge double  I can bubba up like the single that came out of the shop last week. That should be twice as provocative, raving dangerous,anti-gummint  gun fanatic-wise.

It is just so hard these days  to be recognized as a leader in the counter-revolution.

Understanding politics

Government: A milk cow with 320 million tits.

Sleeping with the Enemy

The time came recently to adjust my financial risk tolerance upwards.

The exchequers of His Obamaness have finally abandoned all but the most pro forma pretense that the American dollar still represents a significant unit of actual value.  One result is that a still marginally solvent man has watched his interest income decline to zero or so near as to make no difference. 

Why should banks and businesses  pay 5 or 6 per cent interest on (once) safe CDs and notes when Ted and Ben are there at the Federal Reserve window, cheerfully  shoveling out free greenbacks to every dense dingbat with a corporate business card?

So it's back to working the market with the modest goal of replacing a  few hundred dollars a month lost in the bubble, a cauldron aided and abetted, if not  almost totally caused, by idiotic decisions on the Potomac. A smirking nod to the clowns  who  believed they could afford McMansions on a McSalary.

-- 

If you're going to invest, you study. You become slavish to the protracted fairy tale usually known as the  "financial press." Part of this morning's work is research on an evil companion to statism, Cogent Communications, COGT, NYSE, $8.74.

This investment  service has a spiel on COGT and a couple other "underpriced" stocks which reads in part:

Facing another day of red ticker symbols, I went looking for some stocks that appear to be trading well below any sort of logical level. When the market stabilizes and logic returns, it's these oversold names that are often some of the strongest rebounders. It happened in 2002 and again in 2008, when many stocks traded below book value or for not much more than the cash on their balance sheet. Increasingly, the summer of 2010 is feeling like one of those blue market periods. So let's look at some of these ultra-cheap stocks. (My emphasis.)

So here we have a published financial advisor who ignores two painful realities  any battle-scarred investor understands deep in his bones.

(A) Published corporate balance sheets often contain lies that make a politician look like Diogenes.  One stock in which I am interested, ID, claims a book value of several dollars a share. Read the actual balance sheet, strip out the "good will" and the "intangibles"  and you're left with a piece of paper representing a negative value.

(B)  That cash on the balance sheet is tissue paper merely superficially resembling the money we used to have in our wallets. Thank you Ben. Thank you Tim. Et al.

---

However, it's my view that COGT, for other reasons, can be bought now and profitably traded. After all, it's a growth industry --  fingerprinting citizens to help government keep track of the evil you do, such as making fun of congress and presidents, past and present. 

(Looking in mirror: "Hi, ho.")

If it will help you think less harshly of me, I promise to continue investing in today's version of the French peasants' gold horde -- primers, lead, powder, bricks of .22, and "value packs" of 12 gauge. I already have a lot  of canned tuna and chicken.

Bloggery note

The Unwanted Blog has been added to theTMR blog roll. It is worth your time.

Root Hog or Die

Most of us, even my fellow raving libertarians, are somewhat more compassionate than that toward  unfortunate people -- at least the poor who give productive living a diligent shot.

The Unwanted Blog offers a suggestion. We end the food stamp program on grounds that it is routinely abused. (I venture to add that it is also part of the federal and state Full  and Lucrative Employment  Program for  otherwise unemployable bureaucrats.)

He suggests we offer actual food instead, namely the "meal loaf" made famous by Lockup for bad guys who won't behave even in prison. It is a complete meal all done up in a blender. Think of ham hocks, peas,  bread, a spud, and your dessert brownie  all happily homogenized and served at  armpit temperatures. Your coffee is poured over the whole shebang.  Why not? The Hope is to Change hunger to good nutrition, and the meal loaf will do it.

Which provides the peg for a story.

-0-

Marv M.and I were undergraduates at a northeast Iowa university*  where we pursued BAs while always working at at least two jobs.  I tended bar, worked in the college electrical shop and made a pittance teaching scuba. Still, tuition, books, rent, interminable fees, and the cost of keeping my '56 Ford on the road kept me broke. OK, so the occasional coed played her pocket-emptying part, but, hey, a man must be part of the passions and actions of his times, right?

So I can't imagine that one spring day I trotted on down to Olson's Sporting Goods on the bank of the Cedar River and bought a WW2 Polish Radom for about $30  (sigh). **  I suppose I was motivated by being, for one of the few times in my life,  a walking gun-free zone.

Mr. Olson was a kindly soul who made a fair living  is his sprawling river bank shop selling hunting, fishing, and camping gear. He also rented boats and had a scuba compressor.  The benches along his sea wall were routinely occupied by bank fishermen, trying out his bait, drinking his beer and pop and tossing the empties into the black water. All this began to coalesce to our benefit  when he grumped that one of his rental customers, trying to replace a shear pin, dropped a ten-dollar prop into the Cedar. (Why didn't the a**hole row back and let me fix it here?" )

He wondered if  I'd be willing to dive for it for half the value, my 15 minutes as Travis McGee. Sure.

I didn't find it, but mucking around in the silt revealed the most amazing trove of pop  and beer bottles, worth a solid  five cents each anywhere fine beverages are sold.  Air was a dollar tank,  and at depths involved -- around ten feet -- a tank lasted well over an hour. So the the profit margin was good. We mined that lode four or five times, Marv tending a line for me and hauling up booty, me working the rocks and mud by feel.

A typical dip yielded 100 bottles and  more, call it five bucks after air expense. Five dollars would swap for a couple pounds of fat  hamburger, a can of tomatoes, a big onion,  and two boxes of Creamettes, with a little beer change left over.***  That was the year I learned to cook Hungarian. That was another year  in which we didn't often go hungry.

---

If this sounds like a BS pitch for retroactive nobility, so be it. It happened, and I have taken the lesson seriously to heart. In fact, it colors  my views on social justice to this day, even to modifying my opinion about  meal loaves for the poor.

Anyone who goes diving for deposit  bottles in order to make  goulash can still get food stamps.

---

* -- Actually, it was a pretty good college with pretensions and eventually  became a half-assed university.

** -- Buying a 9mm in those days carried the perceived risk that you might have trouble finding ammunition for that oddball Eurocaliber.

*** --  For those who find this unbelievable, remember that it was in the days before Lyndon Johnson read John Maynard Keynes and learned he could hide the cost of the Vietnam War and his Great Society by installing a Borg-Warner overdrive unit in the presses. Later presidents have, of course, giggled with delight at their inprovisations on the theme.

Strictly personal: Sadly, a good dog has been taken from a loving family down Texas way.  RIP, Pup.
.

"Just a piece of paper"

Do you suppose Bush II actually said that?

Never mind. He's gone, replaced by worse.

I wonder what His Obamaness  will have  to  say in about three weeks -- on Sept. 17 --  in commemorating the  signing of the Constitution of the United States.  I'm pretty sure he regards it as a starting point for negotiating his ambitions, but of course he can't say that, can he?

---

A Republic, Sir, if you can keep it.
.

Save the MSM, keep pot illegal

1. Using pot is usually  one of the stupid things people do, and I personally oppose it.

2. This does not mean sucking a joint should be a matter of concern to our elected masters.

3. However, I must withdraw my endorsement of de-criminalizing pot use on grounds that it would destroy the news operation of a nearby radio station. The penny-ante pot busts are about all that happens within the station's reporting competence and/or journalistic ambitions

4. It is tempting to wheel out a line at the expense of the cops who  get off on issuing these breathless press releases every time they  find a kid with a baggie of ditch weed, but they are, in fact, doing what they're paid to do.

One shot

You begin with a  $30 junker, sound but showing the scud of a half-century living on spikes driven into the barn beams and rattling around in trunks.  Who knows what meals it put on a plank table? What thugs it deterred? It has earned its makeover.

Just a couple of hours later you have a nice, clean handigun with an ideal barrel -- just long enough to be legal, plenty short enough to annoy  Senator Harkin. The stock finish is Johnson's Paste Wax over the steel-wooled original. The metal  is tacticool, smoothed with  100 emery and coated with flat black Krylon. Okay, it is still a $30 gun, but it's a non-ugly $30 gun of greater usefulness than before. It will probably live semi-permanently in the F150, along with the Cattaraugus 2250, a handful of 00 buck, and a box of No. 4s.

Rust

We're amidst a summer that makes Papua New Guinea look arid, and it is trying to take its toll of  my knives, most of which live in a wood case in the loading shack.  I got tired of wiping them down daily and tried a coat of engine fogging oil from a spray can. It seems to be working excellently.

The stuff dries to a rather  stiff coat, so I would be reluctant to use it on the working parts of firearms unless I wanted to bench strip them when Autumn brings drier weather.

The Inevitabilites

I don't know anything about death except that it's claimed too many people I love.

About taxes I know a little more, starting with my forced study of economics as it was understood by Keynes speaking through Paul Samuelson as taught by an academic  drone too dense to know why you pour piss out of a boot and too lazy to do it if he did. My education continued as a taxpayer who also had the professional  fortune to rub elbows with politicians, high and low.   To a man and woman  they loved the power to tax. They differed only in the power groups they wished to buy off.

Until an unlikely libertarian utopia flourishes, they're necessary to a limited extent. Defend what borders are needed. Support a court system of final resort. Enforce laws prohibiting the  initiation of violence including the  intellectual equivalent of violence, which is fraud. (You'll note the steal from Ayn Rand on the last point. No apologies; it is a thought too little discussed)

If there is one economic point to be drilled into the still educable  souls we run across, it is this:  Somewhere between most and all of our troubles result from the decision of governments that their taxing powers should not be limited by actual utility, that they should use their extortion  power to create social justice.

Pass this along to some statist redistrbutionist you know. If he can identify the politicians qualified to define "social justice," I shall recant.

Quick Take on the Zombie Threat

I am not sure we do our libertarian selves a great favor in perpetuating and laboring the Zombie metaphor. If and when TSHTF,  the enemy will be healthy and well-dressed hordes (three regiments per horde) of  lively anti-Constitutionalists.

It was fun for a while, like knock-knock jokes.
.

The Lethal Leaden Stash

(That's the book John D. never got around to writing.)
---

The pot has been hot off and on for two days, and a couple buckets of wheel weights are now potential lethality. This pile is the last of about 120 one-pound ingots produced in time swiped from catching up on mowing and trimming after the two solid weeks of rain.

Combined with the pre-existing inventory, this new batch represents enough processed metal to take care the bullet needs around here for years, so  I can stop being a  foundry monkey. It is well worth the effort, but it is unpleasant work. Actual bullet making is more fun.


The WW mix is laced with linotype and 50/50 bar solder to  approximate Lyman No. 2 alloy.

The first few bullets cast from it look pretty good; they're 230-grain RNs  from a Lee mold and some Lyman 200-grain SWCs that I've always liked.

Wildlife in the Heartland

Froggy Went  Courtin' and He did Ride...

If you're old enough,  that will make you think of Burl Ives. So stop humming and ponder  this  endangered species  --  once endangered, at least, according to one of our senior local ecological worriers.

About four years ago Miss Jayne spent the better part of a summer enhancing her reputation for rilly rilly caring  by ragging us  unmercifully about the fate of the little jumpers.   It seems she discovered that we mere humans were driving them to the fate of the Dodo.

In the first place there weren't many of them any more. Worse, we were turning them  into mutants. Frogs with two heads, or five legs, or the back ones misplaced so they bumped their butts on landing.

That sort of  horror. She pleaded with us to "do something." Or stop doing something. She didn't say exactly what, so we were confused.

(Well, yeah, Miss Jayne's dire warnings moved me to quit running  them down and injecting them individually  with PCBs and  DDT and farm chemical residues. But that hadn't  been all that much fun lately anyway, and advancing age meant I wasn't quick enough to catch all that many of them.)

Something bigger did occur, though, because neither she nor anyone else has been publicly bemoaning the death of the leopard frog population recently, and today I can personally testify  Camp J is flush with spotted hoppers.*

I swear that I am severely slowed in lawn trimming by having to shoo the little jumpers out of the mower path.  This one landed in a leaf pile under the  old burr oak on the east fence line. He held still for the picture, and I suppose that's his way of showing gratitude for the part I  played in saving him from the  great Jaynestinction. However we did it.

I feel so proud. I almost feel like kissing one and seeing if it turns into a senator from California.

---

*Or, as we sometimes call them, "bass bait."

Self suffficiency

Insight from Joel on owning your own soul and the limitations on personal independence.


The  old Mother Earth News  would have sought his writing and printed it in the department it called "Report from  Them That's Doing."

Quote of the Day

Tam:

It's often been joked that you can ascertain someone's politics by asking them how they feel about prayer in public schools. If they say (1) "I'm against it!" you have a liberal; (2) if they say "I'm in favor of it!" you have a conservative; (3) and if they say "Public schools?!?" you have a libertarian. (Enumeration  added.)


No. 3 may be wrongheaded (though I agree with them),  but at least the view reflects thoughtful observation. Nos. 1 and 2 are from zippitydoodahs who just like to hear their knees jerk 

Me and Matt Helm

Me and Matt won the Cold War, he with his pre-war Colt Woodsman, me with my Rollei  spy camera.  He used Winchester Super Speeds. I used Tri-X pushed to 1000.  Matt covered me while I  gathered the secrets of Lubyanka and  vanquished the Red Foe. The reason we haven't whipped the Islamonazis yet is the unobtainability of  proper film.

The local energy level is about equal to the Rangle ethical quotient.

With temperatures around 90, humidity often 95 per cent, and rain every 18 hours,  a man just isn't inclined to violent exertion.

So y'all just go on ahead and mock His Obamaness and ridicule the posturing apes in public office all by yourselves. I'll join you later.
 

Irritate authoritarians, read Staghounds

It's here, a very nice, very entertaining,  explanation of why the "ballot whores" and their hired hands almost always make a mess of things.

If nothing else it will remind you of a  Supreme Court decision yclept  Kelo. Like the Korean War, it's a case -- a lesson -- too easy to forget.

But there's a lot more, including a cheerful vision of challenging  Barack and Michelle to estimate their annual toilet paper consumption.

Stephen Slater

Okay, so he's an effeminate effup. It's still hard not to sympathize with him and to engage in the futile hope that someone will horse whip the woman who set him off.

On the other hand, I've met more than a few stews who made +me+ want to hit the slide.

The main downside here is that this guy is likely  to go on Maddow, impress a producer somewhere,  and proceed to a long career as a media pest.

Uff duh, such an auction.

If my head weren't so sweaty I'd have someone take a picture of me in my brand new Stetson, the  "Duke" model, and I'll be damned if it ain't, Pilgrim.

If I weren't so tired I'd go out in the shop and saw some more wood on my  big old cast-iron, 14-inch Delta band saw, which definitely isn't brand new, except to me. Which is good because it is a Delta. Let me explain:

There are two kinds of Delta tools. There are those, like this one,  from a generation-plus ago when the company still competed with a few other American tool makers to see who  could build the sturdiest, most trouble-free, most easily repaired, most elegant and straight-forward machines in the world.  The other kind come from the same firm which, in  about the 1980s,  discovered that "Delta" was  also an oriental slang term meaning  "built with celerity out of toad shit and tinfoil" -- and decided to bow to the Wisdom of the Mysterious East.

(The saw needs a cleaning after a few years in a barn, but with the barn swallow spoor brushed off and plugged in for a test, she ran quiet and straight and true. Errr, $55 with a couple spare blades,  if you must know.)  T'   hee.

Or if I weren't so tired I would go unload and stow the 200 pounds or so of lead and (no-kidding) Linotype metal.  Runs about ten cents pound out here in Bucolia.

Winchester and Federal primers were about a buck a deck, and Winchester Silvertip bullets in .308 and 125 grains were similarly given away. Not to mention the  Lyman mold handles I mentioned needing in a bleg a while back.

I feel so blessed. :)

Crime Fighting (Oregon Style)

The health cops and their elected bosses are on the ball in Portland where they found a seven-year-old girl assaulting the public health with an unlicensed lemonade stand.  An inspector tried to close her down.  Some nearby citizens reacted antisocially. The germ-fighting Dick Tracy had to get on his wrist radio and call for backup.

Much later, one of Portland's  elected scum detected a certain popular discontent with the idiocy. He  apologized to the little girl and her mother, but he was careful to defend his Microbian Knights for just "following the rule book."

I wonder how much open carry might do to encourage our masters' little minions to get their goddam noses out of the rule books and exercise a little common sense; to think  before opening their  noxious, gaping, tax-fed, mouths to harass seven-year-old girls who will  contribute  more to the world  before they are old  enough to vote than the bureaucrats will in a long lifetime of  tax-trough slurping.

The rule book needs a little help  itself, a good man or woman with a gross of blue pencils.

(Try to simply read through the sophomoric, fatal,  search for the cute in the AP piece.)

Not a dry heat

It's been several days since I unlocked the gun place and ran an  eye over blue steel and walnut. Too long; a scuzzy white fungus was getting a good start on the oil-finished stocks,  leather slings, and knife sheaths.

I caught it in time to avoid damage, and the lesson is learned.  Since Providence chose to make us live in a perpetual steam bath up here this summer,  a weapons wipe every couple of days is on the schedule.

How humid? Day before yesterday 94 per cent.

The Internet is Safe

I've always worried about the internet gnomes knowing all about my private stuff and thoughts and what I want to buy and like that.

Never happen. Amazon is an alpha gnome of "targeted" advertising,   and he or she just sent me a long pitch for "college essentials."  i-Thises and e-Thats.

The last time I bought a college essential it was made by Smith Corona and I got it in a store where the owner knew my name and threw in a little kit of stuff to clean the keys.

Stupid internet. Almost got a notion to post my SS as a gesture of contempt.

Second Warning

The AP is again reporting the annual compilation of  auto thefts by model. The top of the list is the "blinged-out Cadillac Escalade SUV, a favorite of A-listers like Tiger Woods...".


I have previously, in this space, recorded my decision that bling is a silly and unnecessary word which should be avoided. I now note that I have already spoken sharply to the mainstream media about this, and my patience is not  inexhaustible.

We are supposed to be comforted?

In Atlanta today President Barack Obama tells the VFW: ""But make no mistake, our commitment in Iraq is changing — from a military effort led by our troops to a civilian effort led by our diplomats."


If I were one of the tens of thousands left in uniform in that godforsaken hole, I would be petrified because I can name the supreme leader of dipomats in one bar: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Many things  are now very clean here at NEF Headquarters, particularly the  command van and outside decks. The Plan of the Day includes squeaky cleaning the truck transport section, along with a portion of the base maintenance/administration building prior to exterior painting.

This makes your Commandante feel good, but PsyOps cautions him that the novelty of the new power washer will, in due course, wear off.

Gung Hay Fat Choy

And that pretty much exhausts my fund of Chinese language skills. Oh, I know a few Cantonese words that are supposed to request a package of cigarettes, but they were taught to me by an impish Russian/Chinese girl in Hong Kong who was not above a little joke. For all I know she was having me tell the shopkeeper that I desired a bowl of bat feet garnished with navel lint.

These quirky memories were triggered by the morning news report that China has become the world's No.2 economy -- our chief competitor. For the sake of my grandsons'  future, I hope we are keeping track of the dragon with an appetite for lebensraum. I hope we are carefully watching the the strange machinations of the Communist capitalists in the Forbidden City and the Capitalist communists down  around Shanghai.

But I wonder.  Do what ever you want with these fun facts:

China's GDP now exceeds every nation but our own. Spain and Latin American aren't even in the running.  Spanish is,  by millions of students, the most studied foreign language in the United States.

And then there's France,  and when's the last time you heard of a French accomplishment except  the annual public relations  explosion celebrating their successful sale of another year's worth  of pre-nubile Beaujolais to American naifs? French is the second most studied language here.

Students of Chinese don't  make a blip on the charts.

Mon Dieu! I thought this was the kind of disconnect between the real world and the publik skul classroom we'd never have to worry about once we got a cabinet-level Department of Education.

You can show Gotham your rear  cleavage if you want. A judge in New York has thrown out a case against a guy wearing baggie low slungs. Good. It's  decision on the side of liberty.

Now, pull up your pants. You look like an idiot.

Score

Tam nails one center mass when a copeaucrat says every  gun in someone's hand is  a potential homicide. She invites one and all to play the game. Okay:

Every net connection in someone's hand is a case of potential sedition.

I'll drink to that.
.

An Immigration Side Note

One more time, just to head off disparaging comments about my libertarian purity: I hate having to defend cops running around demanding "your papers, quickly!"

May my Maker forgive me for hiding behind the Jesuitical saw about ends justifying means. If He requires atonement via an extended stay in Purgatory or New Jersey, so be it.

Arizona and the Feds

And so the judge says "no" to Arizona. By extension,  the denial of local authority here  also applies to at least eight other states who are in one stage or another of doing as Arizona tried to do.

It's tempting to get off a line or two about Judge Bolton as a Clinton appointee, but she was nominated by John Kyl, who sports the sanity of a Midwest upbringing. His dad even performed  as an Iowa congresscritter  (R) and was not indicted.   

The lawsuit will proceed at a boring pace now, but there is a lively battle for public opinion worth our attention.   The AP, and others, speculate this morning that Judge Susan is telegraphing a message that that the Obama Administration will not tolerate uppitiness from the states. The item cautions that her suspension of all that really matter in the Arizona immigration law will chill similar sentiments on other states.

Could be, Could also not be. It depends on how serious we slathering freedom-freak libertarian types are about nullification, and here I stand on the brink of  a dangerous position.  Nullification  has an ugly  ring of facile nostalgia for the days of black slavery. So does its cousin, interposition. Neither doctrine justifies defending a  massa-servant relationship of one class of American citizens to another nor of the old Jim Crow laws, nor of government-mandated racial segregation. Nullification, as the term is used here, is not a means of attacking a race; it is an ambition to protect a nation.

It may bring life to a theoretical dispute about the the right of a political subdivision of the United States to protect its citizens from a serious local threat, even though the peril may result from politically inspired federal action, or inaction.

---

Citizens of basket-cases posing as countries flee their thug-ridden homes to places like The United States because they are driven by economic desperation, and because they lack the will to organize for the redemption of their own home lands.  They find it more convenient to follow the coyote across the border to a place where the natives have already made the necessary sacrifices to create a land of relative freedom and opportunity. 

The crossing is, of course, illegal. National law makes it so.  We were told repeatedly that the people of Arizona enacted a border control measure which mirrors the federal statutes only because Obama and his predecessors, hand-in-hand with rabbitty national legislators, lacked the courage to enforce the laws they, themselves, enacted to re-assume control of our southern boundary.

As the case oozes  through the court system, perhaps the Arizona body politic could instruct its law enforcers to suspend dwelling on the statute Judge Susan finds wanting.

Enforce the national law.

Can do? Sure:

the law on this question is quite clear: arresting aliens who have violated either criminal provisions of the INA or civil provisions that render an alien deportable "is within the inherent authority of the states."

The first difficulty I see with this form of practical nullification is perhaps one hundred thousand criminal complaints making an untidy mess in the office of the federal attorney for Arizona between now and Labor Day. If this happens, I will lose no time in sending him a card expressing my profound sympathy.

Let's Make a Deal

So Congressman Rangel is now thinking about making a deal. His previous offer was to admit being just a little bit corrupt, but not very much. The usual inside sources now say he's thinking of admitting he is quite a bit corrupt, but that, really now,  he did not steal quite as much as he is accused of stealing. This would permit the attention span of the voting public -- such as it is -- to be diverted before the re-election campaigns heat up.

Laboring the obvious, the  victim of whatever theft he committed was the Republic he has sworn to serve, term after term after term.

One of the questions this raises is how this opportunistic octogenarian got away with it for so long. I'm sure it could have nothing to do with a New York (et al.) press corps slavishly devoted to any politician adored by a substantial and monolithic sub-culture satisfied to be, economically, little more than well-slopped hogs.

In case you missed a recent little essay here, this is the fellow who thinks he is qualified to write a law ordering your children into two years of lightly sugar-coated slavery.

The American Brown Shirt Act of 2010

This perennial  is back under the name of the  "Universal National Service Act" of 2010.  As usual its time has not yet come, but that doesn't keep our home-grown authoritarians from trying. When they get their way, every young American (up to the somewhat un-young age of 42) will be conscripted for service to The American Crown. It restores the military draft, and adds a novel feature -- erasing that language of the 14th Amendment barring involuntary servitude.

If you can't or won't pick up a gun,  Uncle Sam will put you to work enforcing the law, rooting out terrorists  (a term conveniently undefined in the bill), or laboring on public works projects.

It is a relic of the enchantment of our senior elected statists for the1920s and 30s when the  USSR persuaded our intellectual elite of the beauty of an entire national population marching in lockstep toward a glorious future under a Glorious Leader. Skeptics, and especially individualists,  were not excepted, and the posters of the period continue to inspire the likes of Charlie  (I didn't steal nothin') Rangel.

Congressman Rangel, Democrat of Harlem, heir to the toolbox of Adam Clayton Powell, is the sponsor of this bill, just as was been for  its 2006 and 2008 incarnations. His co-sponsors in previous years have included congress critter Yvette Clark who is widely known as the Democrat from Flatbush who has a great deal of trouble remembering if she graduated from college and, if so, which one,  Oberlin or Medgar Evers.  (The answers are "no" and "neither one.")


Another earlier sponsor is our old pal James Mc Dermott, Democrat from the twee side of Seattle.  You may know him as Baghdad Jim for his 2002 trip to Iraq where Babylonian delights were said to paid for by Saddam Hussein's spies.

Look, there are 535 men and women in Congress, and only a handful are mentioned here in relationship to the universal service scheme which serves as the factual basis for accusations  that His Obamaness wants a massive corps of civilians under his personal command. In fact, not enough of the 535 buy into this putative New American Order enough to pry the bills out of committee.

But there are enough of them to frighten any thinking citizen out of his wits.

Rangel  -- this year's lone sponsor of H.R. 5741 -- may,  but probably won't,  be booted for public  malfeasance beyond the tolerance of even his Capitol colleagues. He may leave voluntarily when the heat is turned up.  But even if he somehow departs,  the statist dream remains alive and well on the miasmic Potomac banks.

It may be that we are just one more economic implosion away from having universal serfdom start looking pretty good to the folks who want a chicken in the pot and the trains to run on time.

Adventure in Breakfast

I'm making a stuffed pepper for  breakfast* and needed only a half-can of diced tomatoes for the  filling. I dumped the other half into the blender  for  juice. Then my eye fell on a few leftover bacon slices from last night's snack. Hmmm. Tossed them  in.

I am here to tell you, friends and neighbors, that this is well worth doing, a sort of bacon and tomato sandwich in  glass. Next time I will see what happens if I add ice, the tiniest dribble of Tabasco, celery salt, and an adequate  measure of vodka.

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*Because there's was a nice fresh one ready to pick, that's why.

The First Casualty

We should  always applaud the men and women who make it harder for governments to lie through  their teeth,  but I find no sympathetic characters in the leak of classified documents on the Afghanistan cluster up.

Assange and his whistle blowers seem to belong to that  gentle school of tender souls who want us all to believe that casualties are an unnecessary result of war.

They would think it peachy keen if  each SOF squad included a lawyer, a sociologist, a cultural anthropologist, and an ethicist in general practice to determine if our riflemen have a moral justification for shooting back.  Plus, of course,  Geraldo Rivera with a camera crew to make sure everyone is an honest as he is about what really happened in the firefight.

On the other hand, why is it immoral or unpatriotic for Americans to learn that our presumptive  ally, Pakistan, and our putative enemy, the Taliban, seem to be spending a good deal of time conspiring against us? Or that the government we are propping up with young American lives is studded with moral cretinism?

Does the American Republic fall dead of shock to learn that  its high military command is occasionally guilty of asinine  decisions?  Is there any chance at all that if political administratons leveled with their people that fewer idiocies would be committed in the peoples' name?

Pistol to my head and ordered to cheer one side or another, I guess it would be: "Go Wikileak."

(But, Mr. Assange, hire a good retired Marine Corps gunny to vet your releases and keep yourself from sounding quite so Disneyesque.)

Shooting

It's a simple game. You load the gun. You shoot the gun. Sometimes you hit. Some times you miss, and sometimes it malfs.

Inspired by a MSM denizen discussing one of her favorite movies.

Gun dream

Bet the farm that every serious gun enthusiast  has a fantasy of walking into a thrift store or garage sale and finding a  box of shooting goodies marked $5. Couple of 1911s, most of an artillery Luger,  a Pederson device.  The best that has happened to me in the past few years is a pretty good WW2 issue shoulder holster for the S&W Victory (Model 10) from a DAV shop over on the Mississippi River. Three bucks including  a second non-descript holster.

So imagine the joy if the  Goodwill employees had just put this stuff out, tagged at  10 cents on the buck. Instead, the spoilsports called the law.

Alphecca suggests that "safe disposal" meant the cops stashed them  away in their personal closets. Probably.

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I'm adding Jeff to the blog roll. Who can resist a Vermont libertarian gun writer?

Paging Noah again

The latest rain -- in yesterday's wee hours -- dumped just under five inches on us.  We are saturated, and even 80 degrees is a little uncomfortable in the energy-sapping clammy air.

Poor little me. Poor, poor, me.

A word of thanks

In the year 1763:

1. The man whose surname I bear, and whose direct descendant I am,  was born in Kilkinney. He was in the colonies in time fight the King with the Virginia Continental Line.

2. Across the Irish Sea from G+/Grandpa John's birth place, William Pitt the Elder, First Earl of Chatham, wrote  a mighty paragraph.

"The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail - its roof may shake - the wind may blow through it - the storm may enter - the rain may enter - but the King of England cannot enter."  

Thank you both.

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(Simply reading the Pitt dicta is well enough, but for the full impact you should find a recording of that old ham actor Sam Ervin declaiming it during the Watergate Hearings.) 

Civics lesson from The AP

In its morning report of Boss Rangel's plan to proclaim himself ethically pure, AP segues over to the effect of the ethics charges on House Democrats' re-election campaigns. The wire service then enlightens us with:

"Democrats will have to defend their party's conduct. If enough of them lose, the party could cede control of the House."


Man, you just can't fool an AP writer.

I write like David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, and/or Ian Fleming. So says the meme going around. Three inputs. Three answers. One great silliness.

Better spent paring toenails  the time could have been.

Storm shots

The top picture is a Wahpeton street early Sunday morning. The others were taken about 10 a.m. Sunday at Terrace Park (South end of Brown's Bay, West Lake Okoboji, Iowa) (c.)

(Click image to enlarge.)

Weekend Blog Bleg (4) - Shooty Stuff

This feature is late this week, so,   by way of apology, a twofer is on the block.

You can use the XP 100 barrel to make a pistol -- or a rifle that will incite the BATF to tax you and Nancy Pelosi to denounce you.  It is hand-stamped  ".223."  I suppose we're talking about a  .223 Remington rechambering job, but I  actually know nothing, not even why or where I picked this thing up.

The other vintage gun iron is  a well-patina-ed old Flaubert action which actually still does everything it was designed to do. You can make a parlor rifle. Or a  super-sneaky pest gun. (Most of these things were designed for .22  caps only.) Or hang it on your wall until you're as tired of looking at it as I am.

Swaps only,  No money.  See the rules here and previous offerings by clicking on the "Swap Me"  label  below.

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It would be nice to have a set of Lyman mold handles (small)  around here, not to mention some Lee double-cavity molds for .38/.357.