Cowboy Confessional

Well, there went another part of my childhood … and in one of my family’s home towns to boot!

Let me tell you about Driggs, Idaho. Last time I visited my cousin Lauren there, the town’s population was measured in three digits. Local industry consistsed of farmers and a relatively unknown ski resort that the locals would like to keep unknown.

I would never have experienced Driggs unless my cousin — busily writing medical text books in his well deserved retirement — had not chosen to grab a large hunk of land there to stare dreamily at the Grand Teton (”big boobs” for the under educated reader) mountains.

In other words, ain’t much a’happin’ in Driggs.

Until Hollywood starlets appear. Regardless of their past or current status, actors seem to have the innate ability to bring excitement with them, often involving drugs and law enforcement.

Even the “innocent” ones.

For those of you old enough to consider “rap music” an oxymoron, you will likely recall a Miss Dawn Wells, though in your television addicted childhood knew her as Mary Ann on the perfectly mind numbing sitcom Gilligan’s Island. Of the castaways, the character Mary Ann was the epitome of small town American sweetness (which only goes to show how corruptingly convincing Hollywood really is). She had that fresh scrubbed, girl next door appeal that caused the average adolescent to envision profane fantasies about her, and immediately feel very guilty about them.

Well boys, she may be 69 years old now, but your childhood pixie now has an arrest record … and for narcotics none the less.

Which between you and me makes her a bit sexier.

Seems while visiting the throbbing metropolis of Driggs, the cops found a little weed in Miss Mary Ann’s automobile after a episode of reckless driving. Idaho is not California, much less Hollywood, and the local constabulary still view pot as a gateway drug that leads to immoral sexual excess, a life of crime, and voting Democrat (the last being a capital offense in Idaho).

So they busted her, and she is serving six months of unsupervised probation.

Dawn, step back from the ledge before you go down that long, dark, drug addled road to Driggs. That is no place for you, or anyone who still draws breath. If corruption and debauchery are what you crave, then come to my house. It’s closer and my long lingering thoughts of you could produce more decadence than you could handle.

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I promised myself I would not gloat when the news broke that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught with his pants down in a virtual brothel.

So I break a promise. Horsewhip me. Which may be what Spitzer asked various chippies to do to him.

Spitzer has long been the bane of people who favor fair play. In roles as attorney general, Spitzer conducted prosecutorial blackmail, using hordes of taxpayer funded lawyers to intimidate companies (guilty or not) into massive settlements. His evidence was typically weak, but his PR machine was strong. He played the role of “defender of the people” with populist overtones, while portraying companies that created jobs and paid salaries (including his) as robber barons and common criminals.

Seems Spitzer was with one with “common” traits.

The feds busted a hook shop in the District of Columbia. While pouring through the prostitution ring’s records, they stumbled across his cell telephone number and it was tied to a client ID — “client #9″ to be specific.

You must a long-term client, or a frequent fornicator to get a low client number like that.

Entertaining as it is when the mighty fall, it is ever more enjoyable when they have painted themselves in sanctimonious hues. But in Eliot’s case it is not surprising. Spitzer has long been a man for whom ruthless exercise of power fed his ego. Getting his way and doing what he damned well pleased only inflated his self-importance, and led him into an endless spiral. Like any other junkie, his power jones had to be sated, regardless of the risk.

Here is what I don’t get. His wife is a good looking woman, and from all accounts a likable person. A man who cheats on a good woman is despicable. A man who cavorts with courtesans and brings associated sins social diseases into his matrimonial bed is beneath contempt.

And a politician sleeping with prostitutes is merely redundant.

I could be amused by this for days were it not for his children. His wife bore him three adorable daughters, who like Chelsea Clinton before them, must now live with the shattered image of a father who is nothing more than a horn dog — an overgrown frat boy with an expense account. Daughters have a special relationship with their father’s that can endure the ages, but these young ladies have been robbed of that, and their father is the thief. They will never see him the same way again.

Spitzer only cared for his own self-image and power. His ego caused him to disgraced his office and destroy his family. This is another argument for reducing government, for it makes madmen who always need a fix … who always need more power.

So much for a self-described “progressive.”

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Liberalism has been called the politics of wishful thinking.

In actuality it is the politics of hope above reality, which gives and entirely new dimension the Obama brand.

A tragic case in point is the latest squandering of scratch this side of Congressional salaries. In my silly city of San Francisco, the government has sought to house the homeless. A noble ideal and one grounded in the same ruthless, rational logic of any Monty Python skit.

The Mayor — a locally grown Bill Clinton, replete with his own trouser problems — last year predicted his pet project and election gimmick would provide “healthy, affordable housing for 106 formerly homeless individuals.”

Affordable it is given that the bill is footed by people with homes, jobs, incomes, kids to raise, and a larger than ever tax bill. “Healthy” it might be if it weren’t for secondhand crack cocaine smoke in the hallways. In San Francisco’s Plaza Apartments, you don’t even need a “contact high” — respiration is sufficient.

As with Federal public housing projects before, The Mayor was oblivious to the mechanics of crime and poverty. Ignoring decades of research into why people become homeless, Frisco conceptualized a simple (and thus simplistic) solution of giving homes to the homeless. This assumed that homelessness was the cause, and not merely a symptom of another and larger problem.

A government flunky, in a rare moment of lucidity, noted “80 to 90 percent of the people we have are struggling with drug use. We know when we bring those people indoors those issues do not go away.”

He later said the sky was blue, bunnies are cute, and that Gavin Newsom in no way deserved the salary he receives.

Various surveys of homeless hominids claim that between 68% to 90% have become full time sidewalk campers due to drug and alcohol abuse. Interviewing these folks shows that they were born with better options. None started life with a crack pipe in the infant lips and begging for spare change from other babies. They descended the societal ladder one drink or rock at a time.

Much like Paris Hilton’s panties.

This is the norm of criminality as well as self destruction. Crime does not cause criminal behaviour. The poor tend to be victims of criminals because a life of crime leads to poverty and thugs descend into poor neighborhoods. You don’t have to take my word on this. Throughout the rural South are good, decent, hard-working people still farming the forty acres their ancestors were awarded. These people are about as poor as you could fear becoming, and yet are not innately prone to committing crimes. Nor are they routinely victimized since criminals tend to light in cities where their targets are more numerous and thus their trade is more profitable.

Then they run for office.

This why public housing projects are deadly districts of maddening malfeasance. Once the poor were warehoused into centralized locations, criminals drifted into the projects, bringing their life-long habits with them. When the government made single motherhood possible, if not profitable, gang games became even more lucrative. Mobile sperm donors, unshackled from the bonds of marriage and raising their offspring, could continue their felonious existence. Crime became a lifestyle.
The same systematics apply to San Francisco’s Homeless Hilton. Take a population of people — 70% or more of whom cannot keep bottles from their lips and needles out of their veins — and stack them like corpulent cordwood into a central facility. One must expect the root cause of their low lifestyle to follow. Thinking that providing a roof and a stipend would change decade long addictions requires the special insanity reserved for politicians.

“[P]ermanent supportive housing solves homelessness,” is what Mayor Newsom said when the program received federal funding.

Nothing in the known universe (i.e., reality) can make a boozer sober except the discipline to say “no”. The same applies to junkies and loco politicians with taxing authority.

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There is an interesting fellow running about the country, peculiar for his academic precision and prototypical academic personality.

His name is John Lott, a man I’ve had the pleasure of meeting twice. Lott is an almost cartoonish depiction of what he is — and university bound economist, more comfortable with crunching numbers than he is with idle chat. If you ever have the need to feel intellectually inferior, engage Professor Lott in discussion on the topic of statistics as they pertain to time-series analysis on 32 variables. You will either marvel at his depth of understanding, his utter geekishness, or fall asleep after your eyes cross and your brain implodes.

Which also explains his unfortunate decision a while back to adopt a false persona to publicly debate his detractors. Geeks will be geeks. Not that his arguments were wrong, but adopting a Second Life type guise for intellectual jousting is a bit seamy. It could be argued that our founding fathers did the same as they penned their entries into the Federalist Papers and the Letters from a Federalist Farmer, but in our uncivil age this was fodder for tangent attacks that detracted from his work.

Lott’s systematic analysis of complex problems has impressed me as much as his command of statistical analysis. I have read many academic critiques of his work, none of which were robust or conclusive, including a rather mind-numbing treatment by John Donohue, a man whose prose is only slightly more turgid than IRS tax regulations.

(Oh, and Donohue’s analysis had a fatal flaw, and one that could be assumed to be a rigging of the data)

So when Lott wrote on the topic of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), I took notice like a man watching a short skirt walk past.

Being an economist, he is mainly worried about the effects on your and my wallets if the Church of Global Warming overtakes our otherwise secular governments and impose their apocalyptic prophylactic politics upon us. He feels a bit of unpassionate analysis is required before making the masses more subservient to government edicts than they already are.

What really caught my attention was his approach to simplifying the analysis, by asking four simple questions. This approached closely matched mine, which is forever enshrines in a YouTube video. Two of our questions are identical, though Professor Lott pondered if a little warming is necessarily bad, and if so should the government regulate and tax us into submission.

It is good to see minds like Lott’s entering the debate, even lightly as he has. Alarmists are now getting push-back, and if they relent to reasoned debate, then we might not have to club them like so many baby seals.

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Prepare for Election 2000, the Democrat Sequel.

Assuming your recreational narcotics permit, you may recall the hilarity of the 2000 presidential election. Eight years ago there was a close vote, and one party (the Democrats) tried to change the rules of the game in order to win/steal the results.

(I don’t care if you are a Republican or a Democrat. I’m neither, and call things as they are and were. Gore and his team tried every way they could to subvert standing election law and recount procedures to find 400+ votes that didn’t exist. He deserved to lose for being a conniving lout.)

Fast forward to 2008 and we see Hillary and Barack running neck and neck with the very probable outcome being that neither will have the necessary number of delegates to secure their party’s nomination. In the absence of a clear winner, there are three ways this dead heat could be settled:

Super-delegates: These are party chieftains who do not represent any voters, and will align with whomever they can extract the largest number of post-election favors — or in the case of super-delegates from Chicago, cash bribes.

Open convention: This is where the party ignores the will of its own members, and frees every delegate to vote for whomever has the most liquor at their hospitality suite. Teddy Kennedy, the Lady Killer of Chappaquiddick, called for an open convention in 1976 when he failed to beat a toothsome peanut farmer for the Democrat nomination.

Redos: Some folk suggest that Florida and Michigan to redo their voting. Both states moved their primaries up in the calendar against party will, and were rewarded by having their delegates dismissed. Now the party may be willing to subvert their own rules to forestall an ugly showdown.

Three options, all of which change the rules to the detriment of the average Joe. The little guy. The union man and rural rube. The poor dupe who believed his vote actually counted.

Redos and open conventions are obvious rule reversals. Open conventions simply dismiss all votes casts, as if the plebs never stood in the pouring rains or suffered through a night of caucusing. Redoing the votes in Florida and Michigan (where Obama was not even on the ballot) reverses Howard Dean’s iron-fisted edict, showing that even he can admit a mistake … silently and to himself alone.

More subtle is the super-delegate sham. Contrary the the basic premise of democracy — one (wo)man, one vote — the party name after the word itself long ago dispensed with proletarian privileges. In a previous contested primary, the Party of Pravda assured the fix would always be in, and now they are ready to exercise it.

I have a lot of Democrat friends, and none of them are happy tonight. The inevitable electoral fistfight will result in a candidate selected by someone other than the voters. In November, a lot of Democrats are going to sit-out the final vote, disgusted that their first vote never counted.

And the Republicans will win again … and Howard Dean, no doubt, will blame Karl Rove for the loss.

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