Bitch Bitch Bitch

It's been a little negative around here lately. No apologies, the provocation has been extensive, even without mentioning the thieving admirals and generals.  I even got to thinking I was wimping by saying only once that the shutdown revealed the puerile pettiness of Obama and all who wield power in the federal zoo.

But everyone needs a breather, so herein is one of the constructive solutions which will be the hallmark of my campaign to be your president.

My first legislative proposal from my Oval Office will be a resolution to repeal the 26th Amendment. With too few exceptions to mention, young citizens who have not reached their 21st birthday continue to confuse their procreative urges with ratiocination.

I expect the first tweet will hit the air within three seconds and moan "If'n I'm old enuf  to fite i Am old enuf to Vot."

I'm ready:

 "By golly Joe Bob that's a good point. Thank you, and as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States, I hereby issue then following order: "No person under the age of 21 shall serve in United States armed forces."

It's a start.

Obama's Headline; Obama's Woman

The headline -- Obama: "No Excuses" -- for the Mack Sennett comedy of  his Obamacare signup is easy to dissect. It's Keystone Kops because you and your unicorns are running it with a primary aim of making yourselves feel good because you have "done something." I suggest you turn the web site design and administration over to the next random geek kid you see walking past 1600 Penn.

The woman in your morning speech is more profound and a better analytical tool. Among other things, it relieves us of ever again having to apologize for attacking you with no better evidence than a personal anecdote, made up or otherwise.

His Ineptness  claimed he "got a letter from a woman" who is just shy of orgasmic delight that he solved all her problems. She says her kid has ADHD and the "meds" (his word, the situation being too urgent for the full three syllables) cost $250 a month, plus frequent doctor visits. Then there's her own tendinitis, cost unspecified by the Obama teleprompter. But she did gush her gratitude to the president for insuring her for only $169 a month.

Figure it out. $250 plus doctor bills plus tendon treatment plus whatever other ills to which she may fall prey will be the responsibility of an insurance company which, on the face of it, begins its relationship with her (a) at the point of a federal gun and (b) with an assured loss of $81 dollars per month, plus....

If the Obama tale is true, and since you never heard of a medical insurance company going broke,  you may wonder how it works, who picks up the rest of the tab for this giddy woman's problems. Got a mirror handy?  

Eric Holder, Defender of Freedom

Eric Holder has decided to be  a nice guy and let a fellow publish part of his book.

Or maybe Eric figured the ACLU would win, making the AG look even more like a statist fool.

President Obama's top cop said BATFEE Agent John Dodson "may publish the book but that a few parts of will be redacted for law-enforcement reasons. The book, "The Unarmed Truth," is scheduled for publication in December by Threshold, a conservative imprint of Simon and Schuster."

It's about Fast and Furious,of course. Only a slobbering anti-government libertarian would offer to bet that redacting some parts serves the law enforcement function of  making General Holder look good. Or not so bad, anyway.

---

And in a late-breaking development, one of the teevee networks is saying "we" let some guy take a lot of hand grenades over the border for the Mexican drug bosses. Very possible, of course, given our weak grenade control laws -- the loophole allowing unrestricted frag traffic at American gun shows.

It's not shut down enough

Washington creatures of the green paycheck are supposed to be home playing canasta and and writing indignant letters to the editor of the New York Times.

(The Tea Party won't let me keep on doing good for my fellow Americans and, besides, I haven't been able to afford any Nouvelle Beaujolaise ever since Paul Ryan laid me off.") Or some variation on that theme.


There must be a loophole though, and I don't mean the one for gun shows.

We've just learned that  Washington, approaching its third closed week, is still taxing you and announcing more free money for farmers. Specifically, the Potomac Powers are forking over a quarter-million to help pay for alcohol pumps for our private gas stations.They'll let you -- and in time force you -- to run 30 per cent corn squeezings through your Honda.

Quarter-Million? "Peanuts," you say.  Well, maybe you're right. Chicken feed like that wouldn't even pay for the first five minutes of Michelle's next vacation.

---

"Free money?" Sure. If Klem makes a product and Barack tells his potential customers they *must" buy it, an artificially high price is set. The difference between that price and what the customers would willingly pay constitutes free money for the producer. Sorry to seem condescending, but a number of people don't seem to grasp the point. c.f.:"ethanol mandate."

EDIT TO CLARIFY: The quarter-million is for Iowa only; other states will be similarly blessed, so maybe the total will be enough to get Michelle to Hawaii, although it probably won't cover her greens fees.

Enduring the gun show loophole

It's hard to be bored at a gun show. but we're managing it. Maybe the fine weather is keeping people outdoors. Maybe the promoter didn't promote well. Maybe folks already have all the guns they want.

Dunno, but my entire gross proceeds so far are represented by a single-action .22 from Germany -- better than an RG but a couple of parsecs shy of a Colt.

(Pretty enough and only forty-five bucks because it wouldn't stay cocked and the cylinder wouldn't rotate. Putting the trigger spring back where it belonged fixed the cock problem, and a new hand spring will put the rest in order. It will still be a POS, but a functional POS, and for the price that's about all a guy can ask. I see it living in an old sock under a front seat, like a spare Linus blankie.)

---

My co-conspirators at our three tables had just about the same level of excitement. Our traffic averaged four or five tire-kickers an hour, but Sundays are usually slower so perhaps we won't have to keep up the frenetic pace today.

The real disappointment is the dearth of anything very interesting. A guy gets tired of being surrounded by professional FFLs trying to move Glockszenklones and plastic assault rifles all dolled up in pretty pastels.

And I'm really getting tired of my junk boxes. I just threw a bunch of plastic grocery bags in the van. They'll rest beside the over-flowing totes with a notice that you can fill one up for, I dunno, ten bucks, maybe five, certainly less in the final hour. Or maybe some other hobbyist is as bored with his miscellaneous goodies as I am. We could exchange stuff on a pound-for-pound basis.

---

I knew this government shutdown would lead to tragic times.

Berry beer lovers unite

I suppose libertarian readers agree that the wrong side won the Whiskey Rebellion, and just maybe they'll suggest that a new one -- about  beer this time  -- would not be amiss.

It's that durn gummint shutdown, again. Bad enough that most of the "essential workers"  still on the job seem to be the ones carrying guns and given the power to haul your sorry hooligan butt off to jail for taking an unsupervised -- and therefore illegal -- walk in the woods.

But now they're screwing around with your constitutional right  to an on-demand growler of gooseberry ale touched by a dash of dandelion pollen and a smidgen of Gatorade. That is, "craft" beer hustlers are facing their own barricades. Because there's evidently only one employee left in the TTB, a surly sort whose job it is to tell reporters it's closed and slam down the receiver.

The TTB? I'd never been very aware of it either. Thanks to the shutdown I learn it is the special Treasury Department bureaucracy in charge of giving permission to make beer, including stupid beer marketed to gushing neo-hippies who think a handful of sugar-steeped nettle leaves might improve a pint of Harp.

You will have gathered that I am less than thrilled with berry beer and all other variations which might be devised by Rachael Ray, but I will defend to the death Brucie's right to brew it and your right to drink it, even when the TTB agents of Eric Holder and Barack Obama are taking a paid vacation and therefore can't issue permission slips.

The job of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau is detailed here, and you may be amused to learn your congress has given it the powers -- among many others -- to deny a boutique beer license if it doesn't like the label attached to the bottle.

If someone will endorse taking a Claymore to this tentacle of our squid government, I shall editorialize in favor.

Welcome, Janet

I see by the news His Ineptness is anointing you as the new Ben Bernanke. Savor it.  I am Janet Yellin Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System of the United States of America. 

Rolls trippingly from the tongue and carries a nice salary, $199,700 per annum, about a 20 grand raise from your current gig as second banana to Ben. Plus, I hear, the servant will wheel a silver service of fresh orange juice into your office each morning promptly at ten.

So I'm happy for you. It is much more promising than your rumored backup ambition to be corporate spokeswoman for Victoria's Secret.

TBC on a more serious note, but I wanted to lose no time at all in tendering  congratulations and wishing you every success.

Jim Chee, policy analyst

You don't go to Tony Hillerman's Sgt. Jim Chee for your political insights, at least not on purpose. So it's fun when you just happen to run across one.

Jim is working on a homicide on the Navajo reservation. The FBI is claiming jurisdiction and getting in the way of honest police work. He explains it as a life lesson to his young and lovely deputy, Ms. Bernadette Manuelito:

"It is a political law. Like physics. ... When a federal agency gets into something, the number of tax-paid people at work multiplies itself by five, raw number of hours taken to get it done multiplies by ten, and the chances of a successful conclusion must be divided by three."

Shutdown side bar -- Mrs. Obama is more equal that others

Not all .gov sites are dark.

Michelle's is up and running. It's a must read. Where else can you see her as sexy hip-hop stunner in one frame, then gushing about healthy federal chow (which the kids won't eat) in the next.

I'm gonna take your ball and go home

It is the soul-sliming pettiness of the thing, the "shutdown."

A paid vacation for a million bureaucrats has consequences, some of them probably bad, some perhaps good, but most as unremarkable as that bland tan paint you slap on the wall because you can't decide on a real color.

Beige is too neutral for fun television, so you have to create drama. 

"No, goddammit, you may not walk up to the Vietnam wall and shed a tear for your dad who died there because the Tea Party closed America." 

"And stop whining about all the black dot.gov sites.  Can you fools not see that permitting access to historical data bought and paid for years ago corrupts the nation?"

When a national administration spends hugely to erect steel barriers long the sidewalks meandering through open-air memorials, you know you are being governed by snit-fits. The teevee loves it. So do grandstanding politicians from the left, right, and muddle.

The same occurs when the world's greatest wire service defines the impact by caterwauling with a Kansas farmer who doesn't know what to do because he isn't getting the latest breathless crop-yield predictions from the USDA. Should he go short or long on wheat futures? He doesn't know because his vacuum head has no mental resources other than the federal government's guess about how much grain will be grown in America, Argentina, Greece, and Tierra del Fuego.

It has gone beyond the silliness of the absent park tour guide -- the kid in the Smokey hat in front of Lincoln's statue, explaining that cuddly ol' Abe freed the slaves.

It has become the dangerous confluence of a leader's snake-handling pentecostal oratory wedded to power on a national stage populated by chanting citizenoids massed in front of the Department of Treasure edifice. "Whadda we want? MORE. When do we want it. "NOW."  And forevermore.

---

Making all necessary allowances for "studies," does this help explain it?

Sixty bucks worth of gun porn, anyone?

Okay, let's start with Asian.











Ho-hum. Another old Jap. However:

A Type 99 or 38/99 with three kanji but no mum, ground off or otherwise. Smooth bore. A  school-boy trainer, never meant to fire live rounds except perhaps as an overly complicated seppuku tool.  It came my way for $40 at an auction two weeks ago, and since it isn't a "gun" I feel free to loophole it out at the local show next weekend. Maybe an even-up swap for a SW 25? Naah, probably not that much.



Switching to mature Americans:


















Boooooring. Old Winchester 1897 12-gauge tubes. But wait!

The little word on the right, just forward of the 20-incher's extension -- "cyl" -- spells factory original r-i-o-t.  Numrich would sell me one for about $275 if they had one. The other barrel, 26-inch full, would be upwards of $150, again if Mr. Numrich had one.

The Winchester tubes came at five bucks each, so if you are keeping track, I'm ten dollars shy of the $60 mentioned above. That's accounted for by:

--A take-off Remington 700 barrel in .222 Remington, with sights, grading somewhere between "damned good" and "near mint."  I'll put it out, but finding a reasonably priced 700 short action would be more pleasing than a sale. That was an excellent round, and I forgive it for grand-siring the .223 McNamara-Stalemate.

--The world's ugliest Mossberg .22 barreled action which I'll price at three or four times cost and probably sell. If you have ever been on the vendor side of the table, you may have been asked, "Gotta bolt for ________ ?" Often enough, it's a Mossy.

Sometimes going to an auction brings out my venality. No, actually I mean my spirit of entrepreneurship, my patriotic desire to stimulate the economy.

Shortest shutdown question yet:

If the government is closed, have we furloughed the Presidential Protection Detail of the U.S. Secret Service?

---

Edit to add on Thursday evening:  With the fracas in the White House/Capitol corridor today, the comment above may seem ill-advised. This blog has no Memory Hole, so I'm letting it stand as the off-the-cuff mockery intended. I add only that the TMR has a long history of opposing unprovoked violence against politicians and people.  
.

Another shutdown horror; Smoky Bear goes silent

It's a sane report on our October drama. It includes this line:

"The shutdown will keep park rangers from giving tours at America’s national parks, monuments and historical sites. "

That is true, but if it is important we are truly screwed.

I've listened to my share of  government ranger talks, often enjoyed them, occasionally learned something.  It is difficult, however, to view their absence as a signal that all is lost.

Let's consider Yellowstone, the, errr, icon, of our natural beauty bureaucracy. The ranger will tell you it's a big volcano still deciding when to erupt. That explains the geysers and natural hot tubs and the pretty lake's habit of sloshing water from one end to the other, as when you tilt a dish pan.

He'll also get to the wildlife lecture. Buffalo are big and hairy and can be dangerous. The grizzly might prefer a peanut butter sandwich but gladly settle for a bite of your privates. If you hear a buzz it's a good idea to look for a snake. Throwing rocks at the marmots is considered declasse.

In other words, he offers information which is new to the illiterate or, more likely, the bleating sheep dependent on being led to green grass by an all-knowing government shepherd, those ignorant of public libraries or the lacking foresight to type "y-e-l-l-o-w-s-t-o-n-e  w-i-k-i" into the search box.

Mr. Ranger is, therefore, a special needs instructor for those Americans who spent their classroom time doodling duckies and hot rods and -- having learned from President Clinton that he wears briefs -- spend the rest of the hour speculating what kind of undies the teacher is wearing. And I submit to you, kind reader, that stilling ranger's remedial tongue is not be confused with the final collapse of the Republic.

---

It is a tiny pebble, of course, in the big debate which is generating all the frantic  (mostly) teevee bloviation. Glue together enough little rocks, however, and you begin recognizing a  mountain, sculpted to look like an over-reaching, over-bearing government.

A coprolite by any other name...

The Affordable Health Care Act is to be preferred over Obamacare. Jimmy Kimmel proved it.

Would it be vulgar to observe that self-government doesn't work very well unless the governed take their heads out of their asses from time to time?

ETA: --   H/T to my man in the MSM

I'm ruined.

The markets have been open for merely 17 minutes, and already my net worth has plunged by $117.59. There go my life necessities such as  ammunition, nicotine, and Twinkies. Only a half-quart of Jim Beam and a 33-ounce can of Folgers stand between me and utter destitution.

It's all because at 0001 tomorrow the United States becomes an autopsy photo. Without a supply of Federal Reserve Cartoons, my president will no longer have the means to sustain my happiness. Puppies will die, the Washington Monument will be locked up, and all the pretty ballerinas financed by the National Endowment for the Arts will fall prone, to dance no more.

Dang that mean old George Bush, anyway.

Waiting for the varnish to dry

Turning rough oak planks into an acceptable floor has its interesting challenges. They end about the time your patience with sanding exhausts itself -- or when you get tired of blowing through sanding belts at two bucks a crack. But the project  really loses all charm after the first coat of fake varnish ("polyurethane," which I believe is Latin for "the product of many urethrae").

The instructions are clear: Wait six hours, then recoat. Then wait six more hours and recoat, a step I ignored. Then wait 24 hours , at which point the floor is ready for "light use."   Try explaining "light use" to a frisky lab bitch. She won't get it, so get her out of town.

What I understand is these days called a "bio-break" became necessary en route.  We took it  down a long lane to nowhere, amidst the autumn brome, hard by the handsome grain which will soon -- by order of the commissars in Washington -- be distilled into motor fuel as a sound and healthy alternative to sour mash bourbon and prime beef.

En route where?

Ingham Lake, about 40 miles distant, a quiet little water said to harbor lunker northerns. You couldn't prove it by my catch, one runt bullhead, released. New Dog Libby seemed to enjoy things, however, specially steel-eyed, tail-up stalking.

The prey:

"I love it when my human spills cheese curls. Also when he understands that even spent pyrotechnics have their uses."

And that is how you spend 36 hours waiting for your varnish to dry.

A tough way to get flush

A reporter with even a few years in the racket thinks he's seen about everything. Wrong, Jim. You never even imagined the criminal mind that would conceive ...

--stuffing something non-flushable down a WalMart toilet

--arranging yourself on the commode

--hitting the lever

--enduring the chilly flow on your back side

--complaining to store management

--demanding and getting new clothes plus cash for the merchandise you were planning to return but couldn't because the  backup destroyed the receipt.

---

It would be entertaining to be in court to hear Ms. Cannon explain this; even more fun to hear top-flight WalMart managers detail how she got away with it several times.

True, it would tempt a journalist to write it up with all the obvious, sophomoric puns. Of course I would resist any such non-professionalism.

Bidet as it may, it would still be fun.

Dancing with the Tsars

At the Obama-led grave dance, it was again determined that a self-willed gun killed a group of people. More precisely,  His Ineptness blamed "a bullet from a gun," demonstrating again his absolute mastery of turning a solemn occasion into a photo-op captioned with sound bites.

I assume it was merely an oversight that he neglected to mention that his -- and I mean his --  security services decided it was dandy to award a "secret" clearance and easy naval-base access to an admitted tinfoil hatter who heard voices and had a history of shooting off guns when ever he felt a little frustrated.

Perhaps his advisers will alert him to the omission, and he will shortly go back on the teevee to add that he has been commander-in-chief for some five years and hence might bear some buck-stops-here responsibility for a Three-Stooges  security performance.

Still, I'm reserving most of my scorn for a guy a little lower on the public pay scale, our old buddy duh mare.  

"Washington Mayor Vincent Gray also called for action, saying "our country is drowning in a sea of guns."

Look, you nincompoop, the nation is not drowning in a sea of anything except debt and devalued money. Otherwise it's actually in drought. We're bone dry of politicians capable of addressing the point at hand which, in this case, is a security bureaucracy with Curly in charge, advised by Moe and Larry.
.

A Sunday Sermon; Obama as Socialist?

The context here is a life-long discussion with an old and cherished friend who has lately called me out for alleging that President Obama is a socialist and leader of the nation's current crop of socialists. My friend the professor insists he is something else, sometimes using the term "pragmatist," and seems to insist that socialism must assume the classic form theorized by Marx and Lenin, among others.

The latest chapter from my end of the internet:

Dear ----,


You are my oldest and dearest friend, so it is with affection and respect I say you're being a trifle obscure here. Unless, of course, you are replaying that old 33 1/3 LP we've spun before -- enough times that it is getting scratchy.

I am well aware that the classical definition of "socialism" is "state ownership of the means of production." Of course we're not there yet. Furthermore, however, you are the last person in the world who needs reminding that socialism, like all the ideologies I can think of,  creeps.

The socialist ideal is not "state ownership of the means of production." That is simply one of the mechanistic devices -- usually late in the theoretical revolutionary game -- to achieve the actual desired end. I summarize that aim as total control of individuals by a tiny cadre who combine four qualities: (1) a thirst for power; (2) a not necessarily accurate belief that they know better than the individual what is good for him; (3)  another sincere -- but accurate  -- belief that they know what is good for themselves; (4) the political astuteness -- demagogic and Machiavellian -- to achieve their ends.

It makes no difference to Barack Obama who holds the deed to General Motors. If he can control its products, income, wages, working conditions, and degree of competition, he has satisfied his political goals.

Neither he nor anyone else on what we call the "left" cares who owns the shares of my bank. So long as they control the interest I pay and receive, decisions about who shall and shall not be entitled to loans,  and the degree of privacy afforded my banking transactions, they have all the authority they desire.

In fact, I suspect sophisticated socialists rather fear actual ownership. It would burden them with responsibility for the results of their industry. With the softer sorts of statism, which this administration promotes daily, they are always, always, free to argue that the robber barons violated Title 10, Chapter 12,  Section 69, Paragraph 1238,  Subparagraph 13,  Lines 3 and 3c.

"... and that's why the People's boots fall apart in the rain and cost a month's wages. "

---

The issue is not one of ownership. It is of who shall be permitted to make decisions. Just as a little thinking exercise, let's try to recall the cases in the past five years when Mr. Obama demanded that some decision-making authority be taken away from the state and returned to a private citizen

Jim

The Woody Hayes Memorial Armageddon Wagon

Remember the good old days when we were beginning to worry about  merely PARAmilitarizing big city cops by dressing them tactical and giving them assault rifles to rein in the kids with nickel bags and round up hard-working girls on the street corner?


Things have advanced.  Now, even the college division of the Barney Fife Drum and Bungle Corps can have a cute killer on its TOE. To be fair, though, the junior colleges will have to wait for their MRAPs . So far they seem reserved for NCAA Division1 "schools."  Ohio State for instance.

Reason reports the Buckeyes are being pretty cagey about  "why?" -- not to mention apparently lying through their teeth.

If they need a weapon of mass destruction (14 tons, 11 mpg, drivable only by a trained expert) to dissuade the kids from parking in the faculty lot, why don't they just say so?

---
H/T my man in the military-industrial complex

Big Money: Guns just Fine and Dandy

This clown makes a point.

He eyed Ruger and SW stocks after the Navy yard shooting by a guy with a Bidengun. They rose, and he declared, ergo,  the gun debate is over. He couldn't report without taking a few shots as us, however. For example:

"Sturm, Ruger has been one of the best performing stocks on Wall Street since America elected a black Democrat president five years ago, and the tinfoil-hat brigade rushed out to stock up on guns."

Making us racist while skipping mention that the Navy shooter was black.

Making us the pulp Sci-Fi gobblers while ignoring the murderer's own terror at microwaves taking over his tortured brain.

Let him have his fun, even:

"Despite the news coverage, events like Monday’s aren’t really so remarkable. People with guns kill about 30 people (other than themselves) every day in America...

Which is an approximately correct number. it works out, according to the feds, to some 3.6 gun homicides per 100,000 persons living in America, per year.  But it is  revealing to do the arithmetic. Divide 3.6 by 100,000 and get .000036 per cent. Then toss out all of the slain young urban men with a criminal record and you can walk down most American streets with a cheery attitude.*

 "Yet investors on Wall Street are betting that, despite all the hand-wringing and pious talk, no one will do anything. They are probably right."

Yep. Grin.

It is pleasant to have confirmation from our "markets" that those of us who endorse the moral right to self-preservation are -- so far --  occupying tenable political ground, no matter what sort of goof brings the message to us.

---

Whee, we get to stay on the Tilt-a-Whirl

The Kwee* ride continues and Wall Street orders up another container load of silk skivvies scented with tulip bulbs.

Since the money is  to remain free -- if you already have some in mega-billion quantities -- why not buy a zillion shares of the latest Lehman Bros. iteration and  send the Dow up another 150-plus points? The ball is ever so much fun. Do not worry your pretty little head about the guy in the masque.

While there's not much to grin about on Wiemar Road, at least the CNBC report produces a wry grimace. It says Pope Bernanke will keep floating $85 billion a year of hot checks to buy the bills run up by  President Clinton Bush Obama. For that pittance I'd hardly bother to bitch. It is 85 bill a month, Sidney.

----


*"Quantitative Easing," -- Fed Geek-Speak for turning pixie dust into money to buy loans which can never be repaid.

I hear voices, too.

Nagging, insistent, they keep yammering, "Write. You're supposed to a writer, so make with some words."

Unfortunately, that's just one voice. Another lately assaults, "Finish the damned floor!"

It has been  half-carpet, half oak for years. Finally the carpet became too toxic even for my relaxed housekeeping standards. Replacing it would have been cheap and easy, but I've come to detest the stuff, especially when sharing a home with a high-shed lab. Besides, I've accumulated a some planking, and I always overestimate how long ambition will endure for any given project. So:

That was Monday. There's been a little progress since, three more planks laid (exhausting the oak inventory), all pegs driven, and 40-grit rough sanding. But between me and elegance lies another series of sandings from 60 grit  down to the (xxx) level of smoothness.*  Then, of course, the miracle varnish, whatever seems most miraculous when I go shopping. And is on sale.

It occurs to me that this report is so far devoid of any public service. Because I really care, let me correct that with a graphic depiction of an invention for tightening the seams between the strips of renewable, natural, recyclable, material. (Another way to describe all that is "not quite straight.")

You screw the block to the old floor and drive wedges to jam the new board tight. Works well, but I believe I am unable to receive a patent.

When it's all done I'll return to keeping an eagle eye on the state of the Republic. No, wait. There's another voice: "Big northerns are biting over at Ingham Lake. Load up the dog and the camper. Go fishing. Go fishing." 

Damned old voices.

---

*A professional would go to about 120 grit or even finer. Jimmy the Tweak has learned of the project and established an  over-under of 81. Bet the under. I mean, Hell, I'm  just going to walk on it.

It is true. Global cooling is icing up the Northwest Passage, and Exxon Tankers will have no more luck passing the Bering Straits than Captain Cook's little Endeavor did in 1778.

I wanted to soberly report this for two reasons. One is the smart-alecky post a few days back attributing the same facts to the Mail, a Brit tab best known for overuse of modifiers and some of the best cleavage shots in the business. It later occurred to me that depending on the Mail might mar the TMR reputation for rigorous academic citation.

The other is American public television which is in the middle of a multi-part report on the melting of the Arctic Ocean. It is all in the can, being doled out periodically on the PBS nightly slightly newsish program, so I tend to doubt it will be diluted with the latest from the federal-trough ice scientists who confirm it may be unwise to compete for a Sandals resort franchise near Prudhoe.


The public teevee segment might have gone in one ear and out the other except for the presenter's lead: "Due to climate change...".  She could have just said: "And now, let us beg the question."*

A little more amusement ensued as she focused on a melting glacier and a commercial captain lamenting that this made the "new water" more treacherous to  navigate.

I couldn't resist shouting, "Look, you Queeg ninny, stay in the channels proven safe since, errrr,  about 1788, I guess."  I had to apologize upon learning that his lot in the life of high seas adventuring was to ferry gaping tourists as close to the glaciers as possible so they could get nice cell phone shots of medium blue ice,  highlighted by lighter blue ice. This is yet another dramatic tragedy resulting from your refusal to buy a Volt.

Elsewhere in politics -- young comers division

They may have been the giddiest moments of his life so far. I refer to Julian Castro, the telegenic mayor of San Antonio and a man on the make. When a young pol gets invited to Indianola, Iowa, he begins wondering if there's room for one more on Mt. Rushmore.

In this age of image, he stands a chance because he shared the stage with Joe Biden and Tom Harkin, at Tom's annual steak fry. The event is one of the teasers for that three-ringer known as the Iowa Caucuses.

It doesn't matter what he said, of course, although what I heard was a lukewarm parroting of ancient liberal cant about spending more with the teachers union so we can compete globally.

Julian doesn't rate the CIA full-court press earrned by the other Castro, but if someone wants to put itching powder in his wet suit, I'll probably forget to editorialize against it.

It's a matter of soil balance

His Ineptness goes to the Rose Garden today. The purpose? To tell us all what a wonderful president he really is.  The occasion is the fifth anniversary of the fall of  Lehman Brothers, a one-time leader in organized crime. He will report that his wisdom saved the nation and the world from economic collapse, that he has ushered us to the portal of peace and prosperity. He. Himself.

This speech is good news for the nation to the extent that the National Park Service can cancel it's rose fertilizer orders for several months.

The bye-bye elections

(1) I was going to write that Weiner and Spitzer have been retired to stud, but that might strike some readers as distasteful, so I won't.  I report merely that New Yorkers now have the opportunity to be ruled by a man who may not know how to take a cell phone self-portait and another one who doesn't need to buy it.

(2) Everyone who cares already knows about the Colorado recall, but so far  I have seen no remark about a side benefit. When you boot an antigun leftist hand-wringer you also eliminate a  more generalized pest. Coloradans have reduced by two the number of legisthings likely to screw around with their lives in other ways -- creative new taxes and fees, business regulation, that sort of thing.

The perils of old age

Sometimes you have to feel sorry for frustrating the healers. I visited them today for the first time since about 2010. They greeted me like a team of Draculas. Fresh meat. Certainly this dude needs treatment for something.

An hour later, the patient  chemically analysed, questioned, poked, prodded, and palpated, they reached their scientific conclusion. "(Sigh)  Come back and see us in a year."

The secret of course is vigorous daily exercise, a strict vegetarian diet, and, as I have mentioned a time or two, dynamic virtue and uncommon purity of thought.

Say, Tipper, is that the ice man I hear coming?

Or, There Goes the Northwest Passage Again as the Arctic freezes over in blatant defiance of the wishes of former Vice President Gore and clueless climate alarmists everywhere.

The "Mail" -- a British tab -- gets a big laugh from printing that it's stogy competitor, the BBC, carried reports that the Arctic Ocean would be ice free by the summer of 2013.

This is all very satisfying, but it plays havoc with my water ski franchise on Point Barrow. Besides, it means New York City will continue to exist.
.

Why did the chicken cross the ocean twice?

TMR has not mentioned Tom Vilsack for a long time. That's a shame even though he is easy to ignore if you don't care much about your money, your food, your automobile fuel, or the quality of politicians making the rules you must live by,

Tom is my Iowa compatriot, from Mt. Pleasant where he was a renowned agrarian. Nobody could grow a cherry tomato plant in a five-gallon bucket like he could. In between trips to the porch with a watering can, he found time to get elected mayor, then governor of the whole state. A few years later, after copiously fertilizing the first Obama campaign, he was elevated to the national stage where he settled in for a nice long gig as Secretary of Agriculture.

And where, lately, he's decided the USDA should approve a scheme to qualify  your Sunday grilled chicken breast for frequent flyer miles.   

It works this way:  Klem and Wanda of Phartenholler, Arkansas, raise a half-dozen Rhode Island Reds. Comes time, they kill them and put the carcasses on a boat bound for China. The diligent orientals "process"  the corpses and put them on an eastbound junk.  In due course, fair winds waft them back to America, to the meat case of  a Safeway near you.

(Hush, please. I am not making this up. Couldn't if I wanted to.)

Some reporters, among others, eventually stopped giggling long enough to question Secretary Vilsack's chicken safety geniuses. They wore out a word processor or two explaining that it's safe even though we all know a dead chicken on your counter top turns to foul purple mush in about the time it takes you to nuke the spuds and stir up a batch of Johnnie cake batter.  

Maybe so, what with modern freezing techniques made possible through our newly free energy which results from Tom's ethanol mandate.  But a guy still is agog at the economics, and this one is going to take a lot of convincing that there isn't a billion-buck subsidy or tax break hidden somewhere.

---

As a matter of diligent research, your author turned to Google and began his search with "Chinese Chicken." This is what he found:

And then he sort of got sidetracked into old dragon movies. Maybe that's wong, but it happened.

Barack Obama: Man of Destiny

Here's part of his recent oral output in quest of a heroic place in history.*


"These kinds of interventions, these kinds of actions are always unpopular because they seem distant and removed," Obama said. "I'm not drawing an analogy to World War II, (Then why the Hell do you bring it up, Sir?) --

--other than to say, you know, when London was getting bombed, it was profoundly unpopular, both in Congress and around the country, to help the British."

Mr. President,  Lend Lease was lopsidedly approved by congress months and months before Pearl Harbor and after a Gallup poll showed a majority of 1941 Americans approved "help(ing) the British" so long as our aid did not drag us into their war.

Did you, you know,  like skip all your history classes to practice up on your organizing neighborhoods skills south of the Blackstone Hotel?

---

*Apparently he's given up on Obamacare as his ticket to Mt. Rushmore.

One Syrian, One Vote; No Americans Need Apply

His Ineptness the president demands that your "representatives" vote their "conscience" no matter what you think.

(1)  The presidential argument is, therefore, that his cherished democracy must be abandoned in the United States in order to create it in Syria.

(2) Asking a congress critter to vote his conscience is like asking Diane Feinstein to vote her balls.

.

Last Burro to Bombay

It's a point for our side,  wookie-suiters who keep harping about Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, even in the face of our war on terror or drugs or whatever else polls badly this week.

You'll all recall the federal "keep your sorry arse out of my sky"  edict creating the infamous no-fly list which you get on for good reasons, or silly ones, or none at all.

Washington said it violated no rights because if you wanted to get from Amarillo to Hong Kong you could always begin horseback and catch a clipper out of Frisco. Voila! Right protected. Your freedom of travel is preserved.

Comes now federal Judge Anna Brown who utters our favorite word to the bureaucracy: No. A burro does not equal a Boeing.

She said: "in light of the realities of our modern world," travelers "have a constitutionally-protected liberty interest in traveling internationally by air, which is affected by being placed on the no-fly list (and she) ... rejected the idea that "all modes of transportation must be foreclosed before an individual's due-process rights are triggered." 

It is an interim decision while she's learning more about the TSA appeal system for getting off the NFL.

H/T Author of the World's Greatest Travel Blog.

Dissection of the Day: The Only Ones

What happens when you let highly trained personnel go camping with their guns? Joel knows, and it's a hoot.

Place holder with adult language and light porn

My crack internet provider, Mediacom,  was back again today after a 36-hour outage. The technicians are adept at fixing things other than the root problem which is an important and f*cked-up something somewhere between Camp Jiggleview at some yet-to-be-discovered point  along Co-ax/Fiber trail.

I am promised that a higher-paid technician will deepen the investigation this afternoon.

Meanwhile, only because the narrative has taken us to La Belly France:

The Internet and Sexual Identity Crises

Sometimes I worry about me.

Who's the hippie chick of "Clouds Got in My Way?"  Can't remember and don't care enough to look it up.

But I'm like that, God save me. Jake could have been comforting me with a slight adaptation, "A Focus is a Sometime Thing."

---

I was up, coffeed, and ambitious at sunrise. Goal-oriented, ya might say. Get that durned shop straightened up for Phase Two of the kitchen beautification project  and, at a decent hour when the neighbors are up, put the screaming diamond blade to the slate.  For 30 minutes I was Mr. Achievement. Hell, Babbitt would have approached me about joining Rotary.

Then I got to the cluttered bench where I usually do crude metal work. In a far corner, on top of some chain hooks, shone the Combat Commander hammer with strut.  I was happier than Betty Furness with a really white wash. Been looking for it ever since I brought the new Commanderish project home, looking in all the wrong places, like the room where I keep gun parts.

A true Rotarian would have smiled, pocketed the hammer assembly, and continued methodically accomplishing the Main Thing, checking off the shop titivation achievements one-by-one on his carefully prioritized list.

Damned clouds. Two minutes later I was at the gun room bench with the Commander parts spread out. It seemed wrong because the other half of my attention was locked on the ugly holes in the kitchen wall. But what pretty steel parts...

I was the starving donkey between two hay stacks. Clearly a decision was called for. So I came in and wrote it up for the furshlugginer internet.

Dear Secretary Kerry

Hi,

Just caught your speech about Syria. You're probably right that President Assad gassed a few  thousand of his fellow Syrians and it was horrible.

Sorry to say that after that part, you got a little gassy yourself. Part that I had the toughest time understanding is that Assad is the guy who did it but
you and your boss want to bomb somebody or something else. If you said who or what, I missed it.

I figure Bashir needs punishing, but it seems to me that since he gassed Syrians, Syrians ought to do the punishing. I listened to you say it was really our job (this was your gassy part I mentioned a sec ago), but I didn't hear anything more than about  Saddam Hussein's old Weapons of Mass Destruction that will be shot  at us pretty soon. You remember. Bush and those guys.

Seems to me if your boss reallly needs attention that bad, you might just go ahead and have somebody shoot Assad. Geez, with all the money we give you guys, how hard can it be to keep another Matt Helm on the payroll? Or maybe Nicolai Hel if you don't mind working with foreigners.

The CIA could pay a pretty handsome hit fee out of its petty cash drawer. 'course, you'd want to find a different bunch of guys to actually find Bashir.

And you'd have to make your staff write a speech for your boss full of plausible dunnowhodunnitability, but with a wink and a nudge everyone will know he's the hero. You too.

Anyway, just my 2 cents. Have a nice day.

Jim

Introducing Audra J. Wolfe

I suppose some readers already know of this young scholar, but she is new to me. I found her on my electric teevee a few minutes ago, on  C-Span's American History channel.

She is mentioned here for one reason only.  In discussing pre-Vietnam Pentagon funding for basic academic research, she said usually anti-militarist universities rationalized taking defense money because (a) they assumed military goals and general state goals to be one and the same and (b) they assumed state goals to be proper.

I read into her comment that she has vast doubts about a goal being proper simply because it is a policy result desired by the high federal establishment.

Her book on the subject,  Competing with the Soviets, will be my next serious read. She says of it:

"... a short, accessible introduction to the special role that science and technology played in maintaining state power during the Cold War, from the atomic bomb to the Human Genome Project."

Maybe I'll find us another credentialed libertarian thinker who does her home work. Hope so.

The Innkeeper's Daughter

(Lest anyone think I snicker at all  the French.)

Inspired by brief channel surfing trying to evade  the 50th rerun of the annual canonization of MLK.

"What Price Glory" flashed by and triggered a memory.

Squeaky's 1911

Other than the locals reporting that I'll be hot today, only three electric teevee news flashes stirred my parts this morning. Miley's undies, of course, followed by Team Obama's decision to Cruise missilize those Syrian Islamists whom we currently dislike.  War is fun, so let's make something go bang.

Like  -- and this is story three -- Squeaky Fromme. Thirty-eight years ago she tried and failed to kill Jerry Ford in a pique of annoyance that he was polluting things and killing all the redwood trees.

Poor little Squeaky idiot, no better at making guns discharge than anything else in her incompetent life. "Fromme managed to say a few sentences to the on-scene cameras, emphasizing that the gun "didn't go off."   That often happens when would-be assassins neglect to chamber a round.

Now, to quickly dispose of the moral issues, a guy shouldn't pollute or chop down redwoods unless he needs to make some nice patio furniture or something like that. And, in general, one should avoid pointing pistols at people, even politicians.

Forget all that. Assuming that this is the actual Fromme pistol,* "Gee, what a nice piece."




















It appears to be an honest 1911, unbubbaed, unarsenaled, never converted to to  A1.  Grips, mainspring housing, grip safety, and long trigger point to an as-issued 1911, issued to (and quite possibly stolen by) a Yank officer  who went Over There in 1917.  The magazine catch looks newer, but that could be an honest repair

The Colt has lived actively and shows bluing wear and freckles. Nevertheless, it would be a pricey item without any historical significance at all. Given that Lynette Fromme made it  famous, I wonder if it might be the world's most valuable 1911?  When I finish my new kitchen window treatment, I think I'll scrabble around for its provenance since 1975.

Edit to add: Nothing  complicated on provenance. The prosecutors gave it to the Ford library where it is still on display.

---

*Historiography note: To claim the pictured gun is the actual Fromme weapon puts a certain amount of faith in a number of people and agencies -- cops, Secret Service, the news and image archive industries,  and Wikipedia. It rings true to me, but I leave open the chance that some frenzied breaking-news editor  screamed to his staff, "Hey, I need a picture of an Army gun!", and things just went on from there.

Achtung! Part Two

The Luger was a vast disappointment, ground and polished. Still someone, neither of us, decided it was worth about $800.The others:

P-38 (AC44 code) 9MM-Nazi proofed

Rough wartime product, honest and not badly used. $400.

P-38 BYF/44 Code 9MM Nazi proofed

A  Mauser gun,  a little nicer than the Walther above, $450

DWM LUGER-7.65MM Nazi Commercial  Eagle proofed

(sob) 

Mauser Broomhandle MDL.1896 .7.63 (circa 1931)

Personally urinated upon by Himmler and left out in the weather for several years.. $900.

Mauser Broomhandle MDL..1896 -7.63 (circa 1928) 

Only a little worse than the other one. $600.

But first, an ammo check, et al.

1 -- Discounting shotgun shells, I own more ammunition than the local WalMart.   Quite a lot more.

2. --  The "value packs" of 100 cheap 12-gauge shells are back at just under $27, about 25 per cent more than the the early 2012 price.

3. --  The variety of shotgun ammunition is staggering. You can have your bird meat flavored with lead, steel, bismuth, copper, and probably a few other compounds I didn't notice.  The marketing psychology is apparent. The closer you get to one dollar per round, the better your chances of consistently splashing Canadas at 235 yards.

4. --  Chairman Bernanke's "tame" inflation to the contrary notwithstanding, a pound of Milk Bones for New Dog Libby costs $5.35 with the tax. Or would have had I not recalled that this was the price of prime beef about 18 months ago. Sorry, Sweetheart. Generics.

Achtung!

We're off to Rembrandt this Sunday morning to commune with others lusting for WW2-ish Teutonic blastenscheutzens.

Five of them, to be exact.


P-38 (AC44 code) 9MM-Nazi proofed
P-38 BYF/44 Code 9MM Nazi proofed
DWM LUGER-7.65MM Nazi Commercial  Eagle proofed
Mauser Broomhandle MDL.1896 .7.63 (circa 1931)
Mauser Broomhandle MDL..1896 -7.63 (circa 1928)


My partner in crime wants to bring home the Luger.

Probably because  Mom used to read "The Ugly Duckling" to me,  I've always always had a soft spot for P-38s. I suspect the prices will be prohibitive, but we'll see.

Lots of other shooty stuff being sold, most of it boring. I'll try to record and post hammer prices of the better items.

The Bastard King of Handguns*

It was time for a chore, pawing through the parts inventory of a deceased friend. Little on the planet will humiliate a man more. You amble through life thinking you're a pretty savvy firearms enthusiast. Then you start examining box after box and find you can confidently identify perhaps one part in 100. Toward the end you babble about whether this gizmo is for a Daisy Red Ryder or a Holland and Holland .577 Nitro Express.

I did okay on the .45 ACP stuff and actually carried away two projects. One is simple enough, a small tray of  parts which I'll try to sell for the family. The other may constitute a career.

It appeared to be about three-fourths of an AMT-frame-based  Colt Commander clone. I brought it home half-minded to try to sell it with the other parts, half-inclined to finish it up and buy it myself. That's still the unsettled state of my ambition, but the build is looking iffier and iffier.

The new aluminum frame is cut for a 4 1/4-inch barrel. The slide is a butchered reblue of  an unmarked something for a 4 and 1/4 inch barrel. Among other issues, the slide safety cut is 1/8-inch to far aft, meaning the safety can be engaged only with the gun out of battery that much. Not to mention the the barrel is .38 Super and the slide .45.

If I decide to take on the project, I'll report the geekery with photos -- not in hopes of  acquiring your admiration, merely to illustrate that there are still men who like to audition for the role of Sisyphus.

---

Advertisement:   If any blog buddies are interested, the parts box holds a few GI:

triggers ... recoil spring plugs ... thumb safeties ... grip safeties ... and new  Coltish checkered walnut grip panels.  Also that barrel marked "Colt  .38 Super Match" looking lightly used.

Pricing: Check Brownell's. Knock off 40 per cent. Add about $5 for the USPS. Pay by  personal check made out to the family member, not me. Email me at  --   alongfordmick aht yahoo daught kahm.

---

*Referring only to the Commanderish project, not the sainted JMB's concept and execution of the world's only really necessary center-fire handgun.

Happy Birthday, Crazy Horse

I have decided that Crazy Horse, of the Oglala Lakota people, was born in 1843.  The historians' best guesses place the year as early as 1838, as late as 1846, with the general drift in the middle of that range.  So I choose 1843 because that makes this year one of those newspaper fillers announcing a birthday ending in the "iconic" zero, in this case his 140th.

Furthermore, I have designated the precise day to be my own birth anniversary. It isn't too much of a stretch. Things got dreary in the buffalo hide lodges out in Powder River country in the Moon of the Deep Cold. After you heard the same coup-counting tales for the third time since autumn raid on the Crows, there wasn't much to do other than crook a finger at one of your wives and settle in under the sleeping robes. Nine  months later, in the Moon of the Yellowing Cottonwood, Sioux camps reverberated with papoose squalls.

I have no physical gift to offer to Curly (later Crazy Horse, also called Strange Man). Murdered at age of 34, he's beyond need of powder and lead and three-point blankets, so probably something symbolic will be appropriate.

Something honoring his memory as a three per center of his people, just as  some of us try to be among ours. Something noting that he fully accepted  and fought for the traditional libertarian life of the Teton nations. Something lamenting that it got him killed by timid and traitorous friends, even though the instrument was a blue-coat bayonet at the door of the Iron House at Fort Robinson.

Maybe I'll publish it; maybe I won't. If I do I'll title it "The Man Who Was Not a Savage."

Alert; Old Fart with Gun

Now that's cool and might start a trend . Cap the home-invading bastard and then call 911. "No hurry guys. He's bleeding out on the linoleum.We'll have a snack  for ya' when ya" get here."

--

Life is fairly  forgiving. You can make some whopping mistakes without becoming dead on a nice old lady's kitchen floor. Rodney Long managed it though.

He was in trouble, of course, for breaking jail, shooting a deputy sheriff, stealing the patrol car, crashing it, and leading Iowa  cops on a merry chase through the woods and fields . Had his misjudgements ended there, he might have survived to metabolize at citizen expense for decades to come.

His deanimating mistake was waking Mr. and Mrs. Mauderly in their rural home last evening and waving his pistol around for a few hours. First reports say  71-winter Jerome did the shooting. Then Carolyn, 66, made the phone call, and, if she plays true to our hospitable form,  some nice cookies for the nice young officers who had been traipsing around the section for about four days.

Today's debate resolution: Resolved: That a private citizen should never take the law into his or her own hands.

I will defend the negative.

---

(Lots of details still unreported.)

Tattoo a warning on the little bastards?

An Iowan who is quite likely to be an eligible voter went to the doctor requesting a tapeworm removal. He (she?) bought it online and popped it down, hoping to get skinny. Perfect logic. The worm would eat the excess calories from the daily triple bacon burger with extra cheese, fries, and a large chocolate shake, for breakfast.

The healer called the official state doctor who tsk-tsked to the press that eating tapeworms is a sub-optimal idea and suggested that stricter regulation may be necessary.

“I’ve heard that say 150 years ago, the proverbial snake oil medicine people would go around and, indeed, sell tapeworms as a weight loss remedy back then,” she says. “Those were the days before there was any government regulation on these things.”

Couple of things:

--The doc misses the larger problem which could, and should, henceforth be known as tapeworm.gov.

--A supremely apt Internet gag hit my inbox a day or two ago: "I don't say we should kill all the stupid people. Just take all the warnings off all the labels and let the problem sort itself out."

A Pound, a Pound, My Kingdom for a Pound

Things are tough in Merrye Olde Theme Parke these days, and at first I thought this was a made-up deal -- Parliament looking for ways to stimulate the economy, specifically the enterprises of barristers, solicitors, Her Majesty's royal judges, and, probably only indirectly, the powdered wig industry.

It occurs that I was wrong, or mostly so, because the English have discovered an avid interest and much controversy in the dug-up bones of Richard III. 

I dunno, but probably, if you had asked him, he was sufficiently content to continue resting under the Leicester church  (later a parking lot) for 538 years, until some busybodies (busier than his, anyway) dug him up for a DNA swab. Yes, it was  White Rose himself. That settled, it was time to replantegenet him, and here the issue got thorny.

His relatives, including a  -- get this -- 17th great-grand-nephew* demand he be sent to York for his final resting place; or maybe just semi-final given the English propensity to seize any excuse to relieve boredom.

The issue went to a judge who said the relatives could, in fact, sue, but he really wished they wouldn't. He asked them to get together over a nice cup of tea and work it out to avoid a trail which would be, shudder, "unseemly, undignified and unedifying...". 

Just so. And there it stands for the moment, bearing in mind that we have not yet addressed the question of why Leicester wants so badly to keep the majestic bones. AP to the final-paragraph rescue:

Leicester is hoping for a tourism boost from its association with the king, and is building a 4 million-pound ($6.3 million) visitor center near the spot where his remains were found.

Gee, so it is about money. In which case may your American cousin, suggest something? Thank you.

Stuff him. Put him on a flatcar and roll him around the countryside, charging a few pence a peek. Every week you can count the take; dole out a little here, a little there. You know, something like Jumbo.

White man speak with forked tongue; Red man, too

If you're visiting Mt. Rushmore from the east or south, and if you enjoy pale blue highways, you could easily wind up in Whiteclay, Nebraska where the population is in danger of seriously declining.

Whiteclay and its 14 citizens exist to sell booze to the Indians, specifically to the Pine Ridge Lakota-Oglala people. Federal law makes the huge South Dakota scrub land dry. Thirsty descendants of the Crazy Horse days must cross the southern border of the reservation (and the South Dakota-Nebraska boundary) for legal fire water.

And do they ever. Is there any other world population center of 14 which sells 13,000 cans of beer a day?   However, if Whiteclay were a corporation, speculators would be selling it short. The Oglala people have just voted the reservation wet, which Washington "gives" them the right to do.

(It's as though the northern forest Indians in 1800 or so had finally decided to distill their own whiskey, sending the beaver-hungry Hudson Bay Company  English and John Jacob Astor scurrying for new trade goods. Astor, in fact, did quite well smuggling opium.)

The contentious election offered not one original idea. The arguments would have been instantly familiar to the white eyes of a century ago: Who should run the country, Carry Nation or the East Boston Kennedys? The undertones were also hoary. "Indians can't handle booze" is no more than an iteration of the19th Century  "Back people can't...".

Even the politics of the Pine Ridge vote owe a nod to the Chicago Machine. Disputed ballots outnumbered the counted vote margin, and when tribal officials reviewed them, they adjudged a sufficient number valid to, ta-da, ...

...Take the booze profits away from those 14 interlopers down in Whiteclay and transfer them to, (again a fanfare) ...

Tribal officials.

That body of politicans promises to use profits from its new and exclusive booze franchise to improve education and perform other notable miracles to make reservation life wonderful at last.

Of course the  Pine Ridge Paradise will be delayed for a few months or so.  After all, it takes a while to appoint new firewater bureaucrats and form up the several fresh official committees to maladminster the transition from lamentable drunkenness in Whiteclay to socially useful intoxication in Pine Ridge.

---

I accept that this will be construed by a semi-literate few as racist. No personal problem here because I've said for years that when my fantasies aren't urging me to be Henry Morgan, they compel me to be Crazy Horse, himself.

The point addresses political power as a club to enforce someone else's personal morals. It suggests that if scientists placed a random sample of red politicians and white politicians under the most powerful electron microscope, they would be hard-pressed to find one iota of difference, either in hypocritical motivation or in methods.