Primary Concerns

          We were watching to see if Nebraskans fell for that stupid argument that Pete Rickets was the one to choose for Governor if we wanted a balanced budget. I am proud to say we didn’t. Pete got only 26.5% of the Republican votes cast for Governor, an estimated 9% of Republicans eligible to vote. Meanwhile, 73.5% of Republicans voting for Governor chose somebody else. Who knows what outcome a respectable turnout would have produced. And yes, less than 75% participation is an abandonment of civic duty and a slap in Lady Liberty’s face.  If Republicans prevail in Nebraska in November, just under 58,000 people will have chosen our next Governor. Warms the heart to know so many people care.

           Now the Senate race—that was like the Battle of New Orleans. Sasse had the competition runnin’ thu the briars. It’s good to have the Club for Growth on your side, although I think it is mis-named. Bludgeon for Growth is more like it. Now, Think Progress is carrying a story about Sasse and religious freedom that seems a little unsettling.

           Across the aisle, Domina dominated with 67.5% of the Democratic votes cast for Senator. Pretty good for a lawyer in a hat, but once again the turn out was abysmal.

           Around here we still think a respectable voter turn out, primary and general, gets the working poor, the middle class, and the unemployed back in the game. And to them we say, suit up, show up, and do your duty.

Campaign Diaries 2014

           5/11 As we near the primary, many candidates are standing on Obama’s shoulders, trying to out-conservative each other. Their hench-PACs and C4 committees, buzzing like turbines in the bowels of a great dam, are laying on the dark money in an attempt to criminalize rational thought. If the governing these office seekers will provide is anything like the campaigning they’ve inflicted upon us, we don’t deserve most of them.

Wiley Stinks Assumes the Position

           Now that we have a butler, I interviewed several chefs to ease Ducky Bumps’ culinary burdens. I selected Wiley Stinks as our new gourmet slop slinger.

           Interviewing is messy—irrelevant questions from people who don’t understand the work, posed to those who do. Plus that nonsense about dress-for-success, body language, and poise. And legally sanitized stupidity like, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” or squirrel bait like, “If you were a salad, which part of yourself would you eat first?”!! Since the questions are silly, applicants’ responses are usually contrived. So I invented the walk-and-talk Interview. I don’t micro-scrutinize anybody, and you’ll never hear me ask, “Is there any reason why your criminal convictions would prevent you from doing this work?”!

           Being frugal, I did ask Wiley about water in cooking. He said you could use a paper or a cloth towel, or if needed, a wet/dry vac. I was expecting something about soup, you know, baptizing the gumbo? It was by a similar miscommunication that I glimpsed Wiley’s checkered past.

           To discover his salary needs, I asked as we walked and talked, “Assume the position—“ The words spun no faster through the air than he did, leaping to a leaning position against a nearby car, with his feet planted apart. “What are you doing,” I demanded? He apologized and I started over: “Assume the position is minimum wage minus meals, would that be OK?”

           He nodded, smiling, and proffered his card, which I read aloud: Wiley Stinks—His cooking is great!

Campaign Diaries 2014

          5/08 It is a testament to the plum that is election as a US Senator—the extremes to which candidates will go to puff themselves and smear their competitors. We are observing real down-and-dirty street fighting by the image peddling hopefuls and the scalawags who place attack ads on their behalf. And disconcerting to know that the elected winner will fight just as tenaciously for whoever paid the tab.

Tell Me I’m Wrong

           Listen to “social experts” on combat veteran suicides. In interviews they magically turn into drivel merchants overflowing with haute-speak and silly conjecture. The first thing out of today’s horrible example was the problem of Vets being reluctant to ask for help. The biggest problem was the stigma attached to needing help.

It’s just sad. The big problem is the abandonment of these Vets by the military and the failure of the VA to treat them effectively. I’m sorry, Chuck. The military is constrained by congressional budget issues, and it dishonorably discharges many problem Vets instead of diagnosing their mental issues and getting them help. This cuts costs because they are then denied expensive help to which honorably discharged Vets are entitled (and often don’t get). The VA is short-changed and understaffed and can’t properly treat the Vets needing help.

           Veterans deserve better than wet-eared retail pop psych from the denizens of public media. Last month, no combat deaths in Afghanistan; 700 Vet suicides. Congress and the military are failing by omission and commission to deal with the new realities of combat, and to adequately train soldiers to spot symptoms, and to motivate soldiers to follow up, and to train, motivate, and staff the hierarchy to assess and comprehensively treat causes. And then follow up to make damn sure the treatment is done. We can't just cut people loose.         

          Sure the stigma is part of it—the retail part of it, out in front of a systemic wholesale problem.

Campaign Diaries 2014

           5/06 Imagery, iconic visions of an exceptional America, and lampooner after lampooner assuring us that only he really cares. Parades of others who love the way they care, and know their candidate’s plan will make the world a better place. Wow. If there was any actual substance there, I’d be wetting my pants with excitement. Oh well, at least one thing is clear—the reason why so few people bother to vote.

The Butler Takes A Break

           Bainwarble and I were sitting on the terrace, obtrusively rendering a few choruses of “..I wanna go home with the armadillo, the music of Amarillo and Abilene..” when an apparently annoyed raccoon tipped over the Sanitation Nation outhouse in the alley. You laugh, but an angry forty pound raccoon, using the fence for leverage, and having his way with a hundred and eight pound plastic pooper…well that’s something you just can’t unsmell.

           Bainwarble was upset. He threw a tumbler of good scotch at the beast, and chased his offering with a steamy stream of Welsh word work that I never want to learn. The tumbler bounced off of his camper and rattled to the ground unbroken. (All our stuff is plastic. Fortune smiled on us when we learned that good libations are unspoiled by humble surroundings.) Meanwhile I called the cops for animal control.

           They said they already knew about the problem—the neighbors had called—and then gave me some nonsense about it being 3:30 in the morning and a disturbing time of day even for Gary P. Nunn. I’m sure Ducky Bumps would have told me, but she was sound asleep on the next chaise with a Gloc a few inches from her fingertips, darkening her pretty summer dress.

          I noticed the neighbors gathering by the gate with flashlights, probably concerned about what must have seemed a highly toxic spill. Heartwarming thing, I thought, for a butler who speaks little English to see—neighbors coming together like that.

Campaign Diaries 2014

           5/02 It’s pretty convincing that most of the candidates will adhere to a national agenda prescribed by others. Not so clear, despite the finely spun discourse, how they will actually add value for voters. Less government? What government work will no longer be done? We learned the hard way that just farming it out doesn’t save anything and can cause significant harm. We all remember the Health and Human Services fiasco. Government that shirks is not the answer.

Taking America Back

           The world is becoming more volatile. Weather is tagging along. The flaws that produced worldwide economic disaster remain untouched by those who could fix them. The stage is set for the next trickle down bailout and congress is dithering—punching all the emotional buttons it can in order to avoid solving problems. It’s all reminiscent of Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” with Mickey in his little pointy hat, furiously waving his wand, while the world swirls out of control around him. What’s a poor boy to do?

           Around here, we have to consider the possibility that congress is doing exactly what its owners want it to do—mostly spending its time seeking their money and promising those little inconsequential “adjustments” and “omissions” that have brought America from the 1970’s to today’s brink of squalor. To the place where two jobs are no longer enough to provide for families. Where some among congress feel secure claiming that a minimum wage is not needed. And where poverty wage employers routinely steal from their workers.

           But the present owners of congress are not unstoppable. They can be beaten. When we see candidate Osborn say, “Let’s take it back,” we can’t help thinking that a 90% turn out in primary and general elections might just do the trick, albeit not in the way he probably meant. It could be the opening salvo in an evolutionary change to truly conserve America’s core values. That’s what a poor boy should do, become a REAL conservative.

Campaign Diaries 2014

          4/30 Despite all the wet-hankie dinsdaling about government regulation, the chilling thought is that the Environmental Protection Agency may be the only thing between us and the environmentally catastrophic robber baronage of yore. Or another Dust Bowl. Recent pollution accidents are instructive. There is a difference between liberty and abandon.

Bainwarble Gets Caught

          I asked our butler, Bainwarble, while he was pressing my pants if Tom Jones had once been a stone mason or a brick layer. I assumed he would hear, “Blah blah blah Tom Jones blah blah blah.” He picked up the iron and waved it wildly as he fired off a five minute fountain of foreign words. I was glad he picked up the iron—those were $8 pants, part of my favorite leisure suit.

           Of course, I learned nothing by asking the question. Ducky Bumps suggested I follow the modus operandi of the political season and just make up whatever suited me, but I'm no longer a political person—the last politician I bought wasn’t trustworthy. Besides, something else was bothering me. What exactly did Bainwarble hear that produced such a lava-flow of linguistic largess?

           Later on, I noticed Bainwarble muttering, so I stole closer and eavesdropped. He was quietly singing Buddy Holly (“...a well a hel a hel the little things you say and do...”). “Aha,” I screamed so loudly that Ducky Bumps dropped the revolver she was cleaning in the kitchen! “You speak English!”

           “First of all Buddy Holly is not English,” he spat.

           “You see, I told you it was ridiculous,” said Ducky Bumps who came to investigate my shouting, “he does know English.”
           “I'm off-the-clock!”

           “Wait,” I grinned, “Know any Gary P. Nunn?” Ducky Bumps spun the cylinder and snapped her revolver shut.

           “I saw a rat in the basement,” she exclaimed, and wandered off.

Campaign Diaries 2014

4/28 At what point did the Congressmen who hated Social Security stop taking repeal votes and get on with the work of government? Certainly the Affordable Health Care foes have reached that point with Obamacare, after wasting millions of our tax dollars on failed repeal votes. Why is anybody still damp-tissue shaning and dinsdaling about it, instead of talking about jobs, infrastructure, public education, voter disenfranchisement, renewable energy, etc etc etc.

Redistribution of Wealth

          There is a lot of moaning in the fringe media about redistribution of wealth—about the government taking our money in taxes to give away to slackers. These tax scolds seem to want you to think our country pays for defending itself by selling candy apples on street corners. Of course, like most of what they say, that's ridiculous. 

          The Department of Defense is run on money that is redistributed from us taxpayers, not by selling ship wax and striped paint to surplus stores. States are subsidized with huge amounts of money redistributed from us taxpayers. Food and fuel production (including lucrative corporations): same deal. We honor our fallen heroes in national cemeteries supported by taxes. We take care of our veterans with tax money. We should do a better job of that. We collect taxes and prevent tax evasion with tax money (more fodder for the fringe feeders). Thus the principle of redistribution of wealth through taxation is the legitimate way we do the things we do as a country.

           So it is easy to recognize when someone is jerking our chain by complaining about redistribution of wealth. Only the certifiable social orangutans in our economy believe that is the problem. Still, it is such an ingrained part of the litany against government that it is guilty by association with various programs and policies at issue throughout our society.

           Around here, we're not fooled by this “rope-a-dope” tactic. What the government does makes us think, for ourselves, instead of succumbing to the “Liar Choir.”