Make Idaho Great Again

 The rump polity that is Oregon's GQP has a brilliant new idea: secede from lib'rul commie hippie dope-smoking latte-sippin' Oregon and join the Real America of Idaho.

The plan, if you want to call "something that appeared to me in a vision after a long afternoon stting in the garage and huffing several spray-cans of Rust-Oleum" a "plan", is to take the unpaved portions of Oregon - effectively everything east of the Cascades and south of Eugene and spot-weld it onto Idaho. Oh, a couple of the more deserty bits of northern California are included, too.

Having lived with these people for thirty years now, I won't even try and argue about this. It would be like trying to teach German irregular verbs to a cat. Let me just point out a couple of teensy little issues with this cunning plan.

The parts of Oregon involved are the least populated and poorest parts of the state. At least one of them - I want to say Gilliam County, but it could be any one of the damn dryland parts - tried to dissolve itself some time back because it was so fucking poor it couldn't pay for stuff like courts and roads and tax assessors.

These places can't survive economically without the engine that is Portland and the Willamette Valley. Oh, and you'll notice that these teatards cut out Bend, too, that immigrant-infested Sanctuary City, so as to prevent even the tiniest hint of solvency from intruding on their White American Dream.

I don't know how Boise feels about this, but if I was an Idaho legislator, wingnut or not, I'd be terrified to see these gomers shambling up to my statehouse doors like so many walking brain-dead under a red MAGA ballcap. If they get their wish the whole fucking place would look Kyrgystan in a week or two.

The complaint that these rural chucklefucks have is that they have no voice now in Oregon. And they're right; the Oregon GOP has become so utterly toxic that it retains only a handful of seats in the lower house. The upper house Republicans have enough warm bodies to deny a quorum, which is their only hope of...well, not really "doing anything" but preventing the rest of the Oregon lege from doing anything, which is why every session now they run and hide. They have no "agenda". All they can do is try and fuck up the rest of the system.

And why is that?

Because back in the 90s - I've told you this before - a couple of fucksticks called Don McIntyre and Bill Sizemore formed something called "Oregon Taxpayers United".

Yep. They were the Original Oregon Tax-Revolters.

The managed to con Oregonians to passing something called Ballot Measure 5 in November 1990. It gutted the property tax system, saving Nonna and Poppy a couple of hundred bucks a year and Intel and Flav-R-Pac untold billions.

But they went beyond that.

The Oregon Republicans became teabaggers before there were teabaggers, and Trumpkins before there were Trumpkins. They went all-in on queer-bashing, immigrant-hate, plutocrat-fluffing, open-carry, sovereign-citizen nonsense before going utterly batshit for Trump. They made the Republican brand so utterly toxic that they managed to lose the fat suburban enclaves of Washington County.

When you're too insane to pander to a Beaverton car dealership owner? You're waaaayyyyy too insane.

Yet somehow, they managed it.

Now this is their desperation play; they hope to leave the fleshpots of Sodom and join the arid manly men of rural Idaho in a MAGAt paradise where men really ARE men (and not he-shes in logging drag), God is in His Heaven, and women are barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

You can see how that would appeal to a 21st Century Oregonian!

Anyway, this nonsense isn't going anywhere just for purely procedural reasons. But the mere fact that these nitwits actually want it tells you something about how utterly desperately looney these people are.

And, as I keep saying; a republic cannot function with this level of insanity. At about 30% of the population the pure noise generated by these crazies will drown out everything else.

We can be a republic.

Or we can be Republicans.

But given their current level of insanity we cannot be both.

Even in our own private Greater Idaho.

All hat, no head

His Fraudulency has pardoned the two arsonists, poachers, and thieves whose criminal careers were the ostensible cause for which the Malheur Moron Mulisha justified their treason in arms back in 2016. Undoubtedly because these "fine people" will vote for his ass (as will the others who love these skeevy bastards; the lunatic "sovereign citizens", Tenthers, ammosexuals, and "wise use" nutcrackers that seem to begin where the Clackamas County sidewalk ends).

This is unsurprising but still immensely irking. For one thing, both of these people are fairly worthless shitheels, welfare ranchers of the worst sort, whose careless stupidity makes it harder for other people who try to make a living out of the hard land in Harney County.

Here's what the Wikipedia entry says about them:

"Two months later, Hammond and his son Steven obstructed the completion of a refuge boundary fence intended to keep their cattle out of the refuge's protected marsh and wetland, prompting their arrest by federal agents. The fence was needed to stop the Hammonds' cattle from moving onto the refuge after the ranchers had repeatedly violated the terms of their special permit, which limited those times when they could move their cattle across refuge property. Officials also reported that Dwight had made death threats against refuge managers in 1986, 1988, 1991, and 1994; and that Steven Hammond also made incendiary remarks against them. In 1999 Steven started a fire, intending to burn off juniper trees and sagebrush, but the fire escaped onto BLM land. The agency reminded him of the required burn permit and that if the fires continued, there would be legal consequences.

Both Dwight and Steven Hammond later set more fires, one in 2001 and one in 2006, that would lead to eventual convictions of arson on federal land. The 2001 Hardie-Hammond fire began after hunters in the area witnessed the Hammonds illegally slaughtering a herd of deer. Less than two hours later, a fire erupted, forcing the hunters to leave the area but also intending to conceal evidence of the deer herd slaughter. Steven's nephew Dusty Hammond testified his uncle told him to "light the whole countryside on fire," and that he was "almost burned up in the fire," having to flee for his life. The 2006 Krumbo Butte fire started out as a wildfire, but several illegal backburns were set by the Hammonds with an intent of protecting their winter feed. The backfires were set under the cover of night, without warning the firefighters they knew were camped on the slopes above. The fires threatened to trap four BLM firefighters. One of those later confronted Dwight Hammond at the fire scene after he had moved his crews to avoid the danger. Two days later, Steven Hammond threatened to frame a BLM employee with arson if he didn't terminate the investigation."

Fine, fine people there.

The other is that this crap really needs to be crushed, because it harms all of us. The GOP encourages people like these idiots because it knows that they're worthless except as cannon fodder, the enfants perdus of the plutocrats' assault on the public lands. The rich men who own the GOP know perfectly well that these gomers and the people like them, like the Bundys, can and will threaten and bully everyone else off the lands that belong to all of us for their own greedy purposes. They will strut and preen, king shits in their own little turdhills...

...until the really big boys come along and take them out behind the barn and put two bullets in the back of their heads. There will be no public weal to care about, no government to push back. The big animals will just eat the little animals, chew up their sad little cow farms and shit out the residue, and then do whatever mining or drilling or whatever the hell they want. The Hammonds will have already taken the public lands for them; it will simply be big thieves taking from little thieves.

If these Hammond idiots are lucky they'll get jobs working as porta-potty suck-truck operators for the mining operation. Careful with the shitty end of that hose, there, boys.

When all the Malheur moronity went down two years ago I was furious because people like these Hammond scum, seditious bastards whose entire life is a massive poke in the public eye, would get off easy. Back in 2016 I wrote:

"I will make two predictions now, and remember them;

These people will pay no price for their treason, and

We, the rest of us, will rue that we did not crush this seditious villainy when it was but small and could be crushed.

The law should have been pressed on the Bundys and was not. The law will not be brought to bear on these swine. Instead they will walk away, boasting, and the poison they bear will spread.

And so it will."

And so it did.

Final Fantasy IV; Malheur Moron Mulisha Edition

This article talks about the Malheur Moron Metal Mulisha and how their cunning plan was to Free the Federal Lands! from the oppression of the Evil Empire of the BLM and then a thousand Make America Great Again flowers would bloom in Harney County.

(h/t to Nancy Nall who linked to it today)

There was only one teensy-tinsey little problem with that; geography and topography. Which is to say...reality.

Because Harney County – just like every other deserted shithole part of rural America – is WAY the hell out in the middle of nowhere; it’s almost perfectly equidistant from anywhere in the Northwest where people live and people want to live; the population centers of Oregon to the west, Nevada and Utah south, Idaho and Washington north and east. Shipping anything to market is punitive, given that wetter places (better for timber, grain, and livestock) are closer to those markets.

Badtux the Rural-travelin' Penguin encountered a similar sort of place out in the Mojave, of which he notes:

"These people are stranded, like so many other Americans, stranded in the desert of what was once the American Dream but now is just a hardscrabble existence in a harsh and brittle place. I haven’t looked around to see if I can see lots of red caps. But I bet I’ll find plenty of them there. Because where the American Dream has died, something evil this way comes."

Harney was homesteaded back in the 19th Century and an overwhelmingly large number of those operations failed. The distances were too large, the transportation grid too poor, and the water too scarce. The place is scenic as all hell…but not great for small farming or ranching without serious white-people welfare (a.k.a “farm subsidies” and below-market-low grazing fees).

What makes it even more fucked-up is that the collapse of places like Harney County wasn't a mistake or an accident. It was engineered by a combination of greed, stupidity, and unscrupulousness.

The “great plains” and the intermontane deserts of eastern Oregon were shrub- and grassland steppe for a reason and the Plains tribes and the high desert outfits like the Northern Paiute weren’t horse nomads because they were easily bored with the local scenery.

Without large-scale irrigation the bulk of the lands West of the Mississippi and east of the Sierras/Cascades are too arid to support tilth agriculture. Even pastoralism (for European cattle, anyway...) was fairly iffy in a lot of places.

But “real estate developers”, manifest destiny floggers, and grifters – the 19th Century Trumps – conned tens of thousands of proto-Trumpeters into believing nonsense like “rain follows the plow” (the theory that tilling semiarid grasslands releases soil moisture that then returns as rain. Seriously; I shit you not people believed that stuff…). Plus the U.S. government wanted white farmers to replace the Dangerous Savages.

So what would happen is that every couple of decades North America would get a change in the ENSO (the “El Nino/La Nina” variation) and the Plains would have a couple of wet years or five...enough to get a bunch of sodbusters through the winter. And the homesteaders would proliferate; suddenly Harney County was Great Again!

Aaaaand…then the climate would return to the semiarid norm, crops would fail, cattle starve, the homesteaders go bust. The bank would foreclose, everybody would move on...until the next wet cycle.

Wash, rinse, repeat; this happened something like 3-4 times between 1865 and the beginning of widespread irrigation in the Fifties - a change that was hugely supported by those damn imperialists of the BLM and the U.S. government irrigation programs.

As P.T. Barnum would have said; there’s one born every minute…

IF the federal drylands were opened the only real claimants would be the big timber and big ag outfits, if them, simply because only those deep-pocketed corporate entities would have any hope of making a go in Harney County and that only because of their ability to cover bad years and their economy of scale.

Nope.

The fantasies nourished by Bundys across the West (the so-called “Sagebrush Rebellion”) and the people in these dying places are as invasive, useless, and destructive as the tumbleweed that we mistake for authentically Western but are, in fact, a pernicious Russian weed…much like our new President-elect...

The Law in its Impartial Majesty

Way back in January of this year I wrote:

"I can think of no better response, no better description of the response that is needed and should be applied to the treasonous bastards than those of the man who flayed the last rebellious treason in this country:

"My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom."

I had a blissful moment imagining a modern Bill Sherman staring at the gaggle of dirty, hangdog prisoners standing under guard as the old stone building burns behind them, removing the cigar from his mouth to spit;

"Shoot them, major? Shoot them? I think not."

He would pause for a moment before jerking the stogie towards the big trees standing nearby, and growling;

"Rebels taken in arms aren't honorably shot. Rebels, major, are hung like the criminals they are."

"See to it."

It was a good idea at the time that looks even better now.

And I also said at the time:

"I will make two predictions now, and remember them;

These people will pay no price for their treason, and

We, the rest of us, will rue that we did not crush this seditious villainy when it was but small and could be crushed.

The law should have been pressed on the Bundys and was not. The law will not be brought to bear on these swine. Instead they will walk away, boasting, and the poison they bear will spread."

And so it will.

Sometimes I hate it when I'm fucking right.

Calling it Treason

I note in passing - and with great pleasure - the ongoing incarceration and impending trial of the Malheur Moron Mulisha for their hijinks in Harney County but with some irritation that a passel of their enablers remain not just free of the sneezer but in position to do considerable damage to republican government:

"Harney County Judge Steve Grasty thanks the group for their concern, but asks them to stay away from the refuge. Grasty said the militants were showing signs of fatigue and defeat, and worried that a visit from lawmakers would reinvigorate Ammon Bundy and the rest of the occupiers.

“If we’re getting close (to a resolution), and you embolden Bundy by your presence, and this runs on for weeks and months, it will be awful in this community,” Grasty said.

The FBI agent also asked the lawmakers not to visit the refuge.

Those pleas fell on deaf ears. And Grasty’s prediction came true.

COWS representatives visited the refuge, which was closed to the public. The lawmakers acknowledge they fed the militants information gathered from that meeting, and militant leaders talked openly about what they learned from those disclosures."

I've already said my piece on the idiot wingnut Fiore (who shouldn't be trusted with a Lucky Strike and a Mint Milano, IMO...) but the other seditious bastards have no more business continuing to hold elective office under the United States Constitution than does Kim Jung Un.

Two-gun Fiore continues to spout her treasonous defiance of her own government.

"Meanwhile, the arrest of the militants appears to be strengthening the Coalition of Western States, or at least helping its cause. Although she wouldn’t provide names, Fiore said the coalition has new members, including from the East Coast.

The GOP-controlled Congress is also considering legislation that would remove the Bureau of Land Management’s ability to enforce the law.

“We are not going away,” Fiore said. “We are dug in, and we will fight until this tyranny is defeated.”

Tyranny? Tyranny, you ignorant ass? Like armed seditionists seizing public property and standing off their fellow citizens at gunpoint?

Fear. Fear is the beginning of wisdom with the goddamn people. All's I'm saying.

Worth a thousand words

This pretty much says it all.

Look at this fathead; standing on his beater-ass Dodge p-up on a road in eastern Oregon, all camo'ed up with what looks like his ballistic vest, boots and K-pot like he was going in to clean out Fallujah.

The American in me wants to take a piece of dimension lumber upside his helmet for being a dumbass seditionist supporting armed treason.

The drill sergeant in me wants to lock his friggin' heels.

"Sweetbabyjesussonofabitch what fucking dumpster did you dive in to get that outfit, precious? Did you wanna play Army like the big kids, or were they just our of warm clothes down at the Rescue Mission? And who taught you how to lace those boots, hero, your baby sister? Have you ever SEEN a can of boot-polish, slick, or was your plan always "Rub my boots in the dirt"? Or did you rub them on your ass, since you look as dark and dirty as a fuckin winter day?

Fasten that goddamn chinstrap, you sorry oxygen-thief, and what did you shave with, a cue-tip? Have you EVER shaved, or did your mommy teach you not to play with sharp objects? I've seen less hair on my dog's ass, sweetheart, and unless you feel like finding my boot in yours I suggest you get a goddamn shave, lace and polish those boots, and square that helmet away and all in about ten picoseconds or you are likely to have a fucking close encounter with a fucking cattle prod..."

Honestly. These people.

A cigarette and a cookie

Well.

The Malheur Moron Mulisha is finally all either in the sneezer, run away, or in one case biding safe in a ditch, food for worms.

The last of these heroes chieu-hoi'ed after asking for a coffin-nail and a cookie. From snacks to smokes, at least these jokers were true to their Constitutional cravings for cheap thrills and snack foods to the last.

The bonus round, however, goes to the original armed seditionist and welfare moocher Cliven Bundy, who flew the Friendly Skies right into federal custody. Seems you ain't the sharpest barb on the wire, Cliven, ol' shoe. You may have thought you were done with the feds but they sure as hell ain't done with you.

And that's goddamn good.

Because the Stupid, it's still out there. It continues to live, free and wild, even as these sad bastards will hopefully begin meeting their new Aryan Brotherhood friends for their long occupation of a very different sort of federal facility.

It even continues to arrive here, in eastern Oregon, even now - the latest import of this nonsense coming in from Nevada in the form of one Michele Fiore, elected representative of Clark County and wanna-be U.S. Congresswoman. Michele's quite the piece of work, and here she is on the subject of our latest outbreak of armed sedition:

"Fiore promised that the cause for which they fought – defending citizen rights under the Constitution – would go on even if they were arrested."

Citizen rights, my sweet rosy-red ass.

If these damn traitors were "defending" anything other than their own goddamn greed and stupidity then I am the goddamn Dragon King of Bhutan.

This, this is the exact sort of thing that should be throttled in the throat of any seditious liar that utters it. This is the sort of thing the sows these Cadmus traitors, a sort of Cheeto-shaped mental eyetooth that awakens their hunger for power (and snacks, and maybe a Marlboro, but, hey..."defending citizen rights under the Constitution" can't be done on C-rations.

Wait. What?)

For all their irritating rhetoric and seditious treason these morons are just the cannon fodder. The meat waiting for a bullet so it can be finally put to a useful purpose to fill in the fosse. Only the (rather low-hanging) fruit of the poison tree.

Fiore. Fiore is the fucking tree.

It is her beliefs - the guns trump ballots, that traitors are "patriots", that the commons are for the taking of anyone armed enough and selfish enough and greedy enough to take it - and her spouting those beliefs, and the public post she has been given to spout those damn deadly treasonous beliefs that is the root and branch that bears this bitter (albeit perhaps smoky and Oreo-tasting) fruit of treason.

And government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall perish from the earth if We the People do not take the axe to her, to people like her, and cut them down at the ground, dynamite the fucking stumps, and salt the earth to ensure that no more like them will spring from it no matter how many American Spirits and Doritos and .45ACP rounds seditious bastards like Bundy and Finicum and, yes, like Fiore sow there.

"Just walk away, Cletus..."

Dear remaining traitors in arms.

No. Not just no, but fuck no.

The only place you get to be a heroic rebel and then use your awesome Jedi mind powers to force the Evil Stormtroopers that you're not the rebellious fucksticks they're looking for is in George Lucas' head.

So when you say:

"We are willing to leave peacefully...if the FBI will let us leave without arrest or forcing us through the checkpoint, we will all go home."

you're talking complete nonsense. It don't work that way, Cletus.

And CNN? When traitors in arms tell you that they will either walk away without facing the consequences of their armed sedition or they will make the earth and sky red with blood? That's not "saying they're ready to leave peacefully". That's demanding that they escape the consequences of their armed sedition and giving the rest of us peaceful citizens the big ol' rebel-in-arms finger.

Figure it out, goddamn.

But you...you're going to get a wonderful choice, my dear traitors.

You are going to get to surrender without being hung out of hand as has been the traditional fate of traitors in arms. You will get an expensive and public trial in which you are very likely to be given a ridiculously vast amount of privilege to spout your idiotic, treasonous nonsense and justify your greedy and selfish seizure of our public patrimony. And, even if you are convicted of the crimes you have so self-evidently committed, you will have careful and relatively benign jailers who will ensure that you are released unharmed to resume your deluded and delusional defiance of both republican government and common sense which I know you will because...well, you're you and can no more stop being you than a howler monkey can stop flinging its poop.

In short, you are some seriously lucky sonsofbitches and you need to accept that and go quietly to the lawmen and surrender.

Before your fellow traitors find out why the snacks were gone.

Because, looking at you?

It's not that hard to guess where all the Cheetos went, genius, and no matter how slow your pals are they'll figure it out eventually and then who's gonna save you when they go all Second Amendment Solution on your porky ass?

Just sayin'.

18 U.S. Code § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy

It appears tonight that at least part of the armed seditionists and traitors in arms are dead or in federal custody.

Good.

Hopefully the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of the remainder will follow swiftly.

Because these people are not simply traitors. They are madmen and idiots who would invoke their insane concept of "common law" to destroy our republic for their own benefit. It is also worth noting that the shootout and arrests occurred as the traitors-in-arms were on the road to spread their treason to neighboring Grant County, Oregon, where the county sheriff is another whackadoodle seditionist and wanna-be sovereign-fucking-citizen.

My only regret is that they will not, as they should be, as their predecessor traitors typically were, speedily and publicly hung as a warning to those who are tempted to follow in their path; thus perish all traitors.

Because in order to not lose the Whiskey Rebellion, as Bill Sherman said; fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Joo keep using dat word...

From Sunday's edition of the World's Worst Newspaper:

So. Let's see. "Free federal lands" is Oregonianspeak for these douchenozzles' expressed intention; "take what public land we want, pay nothing for it, and we have guns, so, freedom!"

What a shock!

It turns out that a group of armed traitors to their government believes that their "...government has no constitutional authority to hold vast land tracts" and, instead, think that "freeing" these lands means that they should be able to take them for themselves and do with them what they want.

Free the lands!

Well, okay, free them until I can take them, fence them, and run my cattle all over them.

But oh, you whacky Oregonian editors and your "free"! Are you joshing me, you pranksters, or do you really think that "free" means what these goddamn traitors say it means? Next thing you know you'll be expecting me to believe that "free" means what the North American Man-Boy Love Association says it means; that men should be free to poke young lads up the backside!

Free!

What's infuriating about this - beyond confirming the overall spinelessness of the response to this fucking armed insurrection - is the World's Worst Newspaper being a willing accomplice to these traitors' vomiting their nonsense all over the public record.

The only remotely-nice thing about Oregon's Paper of Record bending over for the Bundy Bandidos like a debutante at a NAMBLA key-drop party is that it allowed my own personal favorite Oregonian Ursula LeGuin to come out swinging her Big Battle Axe of Fuck Your Stupid Bullshit and lop off the empty gourd that this idiot Payne uses to keep his cowboy hat off his shoulders:

Ammon Bundy and his bullyboys aren't trying to free federal lands, but to hold them hostage. I can't go to the Malheur refuge now, though as a citizen of the United States, I own it and have the freedom of it. That's what public land is: land that belongs to the public — me, you, every law-abiding American. The people it doesn't belong to and who don't belong there are those who grabbed it by force of arms, flaunting their contempt for the local citizens. Those citizens of Harney County have carefully hammered out agreements to manage the refuge in the best interest of landowners, scientists, visitors, tourists, livestock and wildlife. They're suffering more every day, economically and otherwise, from this invasion by outsiders. Instead of parroting the meaningless rants of a flock of Right-Winged Loonybirds infesting the refuge, why doesn't The Oregonian talk to the people who live there?

Get some, Ursula!

Erik Loomis over at Lawyers, Guns & Money has some more on this, but for Oregon's only daily newspaper to act as the butt-trumpet for these fetid droppings of the Right Wing fever swamps is unacceptable and beyond a mockery of journalism. But that's why it's the World's Worst Newspaper, after all.

Meanwhile, we're still fucking losing the fucking Whiskey Fucking Rebellion.

Dear wingnut...(an open letter to "conservatives" on the Malheur Morons)

I've been reading your responses to the outpouring of anger and vitriol that has greeted the news that a bunch of self-identified pals of yours had "occupied" the vacant headquarters building at Malheur NWR out in the lesser paved portions of my home state.

You were angry yourselves, and scornful, that the "libtards' heads were exploding" over this. You seemed incredulous that these scruffy seditionists had aroused such ire on the Left, apparently as much because it is the Left as the subject of that furor. After all, we're supposed to be all "tolerant" and "squishy" about taking stands, except when we nag you about your hatred for things like homos marrying and Muslims...well, being alive...as "intolerant" and "rigid". You don't get it. Why are we so fucking pissed off about a handful of patriots exercising the Constitutional Second Amendment right to protest gummint tyranny?

So let me try and explain why this particular incident got up our collective wick so quickly and so badly.

First, a lot of it is the cumulative hammering you've been doing since...well, it feels like forever but at least the fifteen years since 9/11. We got used to - not okay with, but used to - being called "traitors" and "cowards" and "pussies" because we questioned your excitement about bombing and/or shooting the shit out of the public enemy de jour. We grew to expect that you would call anything we supported, whether it was abortion or freedom from theocracy or using cunning (or economics, or diplomacy, or pretty much anything) instead of bullets, "foolish", "impractical", "cowardly", and "anti-American".

We got used to hearing you describe our belief that taxes are the price of civilization as "stealing" and our conviction that regulation of the commons helped prevent the sort of greed and selfishness that got these Hammond people in trouble as "tyranny".

We didn't like it. Oh, hells, no. But we pretty much gave up trying to unscrew your heads on that subject, figuring that this was just your default setting.

We also got used to the big media outlets giving your whackadoodle ideas equal time just like they were actual human thoughts. So when we tried to discuss things like heading off climate change or not going all Operation Wetback or treating women as women and not as life-support systems for wombs and you started shrieking "Liar!" and "Babykiller!" we just sighed. Forget it, Jake, it's Wingnuttown, we would mutter. It's not worth the aggravation.

We especially gave up trying to warn you, and the newspeople, about the fire you were fucking with your fondness for wild talk about "Second Amendment solutions" to "government is the problem". See, we kept saying, We the People ARE "the government"; that's the idea, anyway.

Right? Kinda baked into the pie back in 1789?

That the problem with "Second Amendment solutions" pretty much led to the sort of "solutions" proposed by the western Pennsylvania whisky distillers and Dan Shays and Jeff Davis. And that those "solutions" were the kind of solutions that led to "solutions" like burning down your kitchen to get the roaches out of the oatmeal bin; ugly and violent and not really "solutions" at all.

Because every time we'd bring that up you'd start shrieking about "gungrabbers!" and "tyranny!".

Sigh.

So. Here we are.

A bunch of your pals - or, at least, people who claim to be your pals - have taken their bullet launchers and their energy drinks (but not enough jerky or cheeze doodles, apparently...) and done, in effect, what Shays and Davis and the whisky rebels did; taken a patch of ground that the U.S. government claims and broken rules the U.S. government has made and are defying the U.S. government to come and make them behave.

And are you guys ashamed about this, this armed sedition? Are you angry that these stupid jamokes are saying the quiet parts of Tentherism and "Second Amendment solutions" out loud? Are you out there with a bullhorn telling these screwheads to knock it the fuck off?

Hells, no. Once again, we're left to remind you that part of "a republic, if you can keep it..." is not losing the fucking Whisky Rebellion.

And, once again, the news media is fucked up like a football bat about this and giving your screwhead pals all sorts of free airtime to blarb their nonsensical screeds and, once again, you're giving, and going to give, us nothing but shit about it.

And we're really, really, really fucking sick and tired of it.

But since we've long figured out that arguing with you about this stuff is like trying to teach German irregular verbs to a cat we're reduced to screaming at these HeeHawsbullah morons and at our federal government to quite treating them like they have a point other than on their fucking heads so's we don't lose the fucking Whisky Rebellion.

Will that work? Doubtful. It hasn't so far. Christ, you're on the verge of electing Donald Fucking Trump your presidential candidate, forcryinoutloud, and the feds have let these goddamn screwhead VanillaISIS teahadis off the hook before. It's not like we're really hoping to get you knuckleheads to try a taste of realism for once.

It's just that sometimes the bullshit gets to the point where a liberal's just gotta fucking vent.

Dare call it treason

I was genuinely surprised yesterday at the incandescence of my anger when I read about the rebel militia seizing the Malheur NWR headquarters building.

Partly, I suspect, because that lonely stone structure has many fond memories associated with it. It is a "desert oasis", disproportionately attractive to the passerine migrant through the deserts of Malheur County. The notion of a passel of gunlicking Tenther rebels lolling about the place where I whiled many happy hours birding was infuriating, to be sure.

But the most part is the degree to which none seem to dare call these treasonous bastards what they are.

Traitors.

Worse; traitors in arms. They fulfill perfectly the definition of the enemies I swore to defend the Constitution of my nation from, foreign and domestic; defying the laws and regulations of the duly-elected government of the United States and bearing arms against the officers of the same.

For a mad moment I wanted - wanted so badly that it made my throat tighten - to take up my old rifle and rise on my bad leg and hobble down to the federal courthouse in Portland city and volunteer to follow the colors out to the sagebrush wastes south of Burns to shoot down the traitorous enemies of my country. Suddenly I understood how so many other men stood up in 1861 to do the same. The hatred and loathing of these rebel traitors burns within me still, banked but glowing like a balefire in the night.

The news agencies, the current crop of candidates, Oregon politicians...they need to call this what it is. It is black, dirty treason; rebellion in arms against our nation, and I can think of no better response, no better description of the response that is needed and should be applied to the treasonous bastards than those of the man who flayed the last rebellious treason in this country:

"My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom."

I had a blissful moment imagining a modern Bill Sherman staring at the gaggle of dirty, hangdog prisoners standing under guard as the old stone building burns behind them, removing the cigar from his mouth to spit;

"Shoot them, major? Shoot them? I think not."

He would pause for a moment before jerking the stogie towards the big trees standing nearby, and growling;

"Rebels taken in arms aren't honorably shot. Rebels, major, are hung like the criminals they are."

"See to it."

Losing the Whisky Rebellion

One of the more irritating ammosexual traits is their man-crush on fucking Tenthers and "sovereign citizens" and the other assorted douchenozzles that populate the far-right wing of the anti-government crowd.

The last time we saw this was when welfare rancher Cliven Bundy got all rampant about not paying his fucking debts and a crowd of Second Amendment jihadis showed up at his moochateria to face down the Feds.

The really fucking irking part about that was that it worked. Bundy's young welfare-buck ass stayed out of the sneezer and the Federal claws stayed out of his wallet and the guntards walked away with a swagger and the win.

And now they're at it again, out in the lesser-paved part of my own state.

Largely because, in my biased opinion, the Feds punked out at the Bundy crib. Here's one of the fucking rebels in arms talking about how their jihad would have succeeded had the Feds tried to enforce the law:

"We had counter-sniper positions on their sniper positions. We had at least one guy—sometimes two guys—per BLM agent in there," Payne told a Montana weekly, the Independent. "If they made one wrong move, every single BLM agent in that camp would've died."

Nice. You do that in a black ski mask, Abdul, and Donald Trump is gonna carpet bomb your and your whole family's asses. But do it with a "Don't Tread On Me" flag and you're a GOP Congressman.

What a goddamn mess.

Anyway, the point is that, while irritating, this is nothing new. It's happened before, back in the early days of the Republic. And the then-leader of the Federal government knew precisely how to deal with this sort of fucking idiot:

"Washington organized a militia force of 12,950 men and led them towards Western Pennsylvania, warning locals "not to abet, aid, or comfort the Insurgents aforesaid, as they will answer the contrary at their peril."

Now THAT's the way you deal with fucking Bundys.

That's how the Feds should have dealt with the last one. And how they should deal with these newest Oregon ones, too.

So far no Federal agencies have done anything about the Oregon rebels, and I have no idea whether, or how, they plan to deal with them. But I can at the very least give them one little bit of helpful advice.

The First Rule of Keeping a Republic: Don't Lose the Fucking Whisky Rebellion.

The Second Rule?

If You Want To Be A Good Citizen, Don't Start The Fucking Whisky Rebellion.

Honestly. These fucking people...

Oregon Asshole Award (January 2013): Greg Walden

Seems that the little man from Oregon's 2nd Congressional District has his little panties in a twist about the dreaded platinum coin:

"My wife and I have owned and operated a small business since 1986. When it came time to pay the bills, we couldn’t just mint a coin to create more money out of thin air. We sat down and figured out how to balance the books. That’s what Washington needs to do as well."

Well.

Isn't that special?

Except - unlike a "small business" (which are liable to fail and often do) - the collapse of the federal government because some asshole wants to play tiddlywinks with the "debt ceiling", a business utterly adrift from both the letter and the spirit of the entire magilla, would be more than a trifle irking (As Charlie Pierce notes, "It would be a substantial inconvenience to the rest of us if the U.S. government closed down and was replaced in the strip mall by a Jiffy Lube outlet or a tattoo parlor.")

Not to mention "balancing the books" in the tag-end of the Great Recession...

Not to mention the notion that a Republican can say the word "debt" without blushing..

Not to mention the notion that a Republican, any Republican, who voted for the Bush tax cuts can open his piehole about "debt", or "balancing books", or, well, pretty much ANY fiscal issue and be taken seriously.

Ever.

Again.

Not to mention...

Fuck that. Let's stop mentioning other things and take a little closer squint at this asshole, shall we?

First of all, this fuckstick didn't "own and operate a small business" like he was some sort of gritty little entrepreneur or the guy who built up the hardware store from scratch and sweat.

He was gifted a group of radio stations by his daddy, Paul Walden, who had bought up a bunch of radio outlets in Oregon shitkicker country back when it was really shitkicker country. Sonny started sweeping the floor in Daddy's station KIHR and then moved up in the family business (then Columbia Gorge Broadcasters, Inc. now Bicoastal Media Licenses IV, LLC) until daddy-o "sold" him the outfit back in the Eighties.

He was the owner of this five-station "empire" until the middle Oughts, when he unloaded it to prevent a conflict-of-interest problem.

This guy wasn't exactly the lovable local druggist or menswear shop owner. He was the Mister Carlson of the dry side of Oregon, running a business that made nothing other than sound and consumed nothing other than electricity and advertising.

But let's let Jon Chait take the asshole's "small business" farrago to its logical conclusion:

"Suppose the problem is that we’re a business whose expenses are outstripping our income. We propose some measures to correct it — say, cutting expenses when possible and also working some longer hours. But we have a business partner who listens to a lot of Rush Limbaugh and has some different ideas. He says increasing revenue by working longer hours — even a single longer minute when we have customers waiting in line at closing time — is totally off the table. He says the answer is to cut our employees’ pay and ban them from taking bathroom breaks. And he also informs us that, unless we approve the savings ideas he wants, with none of the savings ideas we want, he’ll refuse to pay vendors who have already delivered things to us, thereby ruining our credit rating forever.

That would be terrible! You would probably stop thinking about optimal ways to run your business and start looking for back-door solutions to prevent your crazy business partner from permanently ruining your credit rating."

Y'think?

I was mildly irked over the entire debt ceiling kabuki before, but the part this Oregon asshole is playing has really got my back up. Fuck you, Walden, and your redneck pals in West Gepip, OR.

We've got millions of people out of work, people who WANT work, people who are at the end of their string, unable to stay in their homes, unable to hold their heads up...and, yet, there you are, as fatheaded and clueless as a junkyard goat and as worthless as a tampon in a typhoon, getting paid a handsome wage to sit in a comfortable office on Capitol Hill and come up with nothing better than this ignorant, poop-flinging monkey shit to deal with the mess that your incontinent Republican pals are making?

You are one of the most worthless excrescences ever to emerge from Oregon, and I wouldn't spit on you for the disrespect to my own spit.

Asshole.

In the burned forest...

...the Lewis' Woodpecker still forages in the charcoal of the standing deadfall.
I've had quite the week, beginning in the desert around Simnasho, in the dry hills of the Warm Springs Reservation...
...and ending in the rainy mountains of the Coast Range north of the mouth of the great Columbia River, the River of the West, just east of the hardscrabble little town of Chinook, Washington.

It's been good, hard work, and an interesting journey, but what it hasn't left me time for is blogging. I'm trying this when I should be sleeping, because I have a 0330 first call tomorrow.

But I wanted to share these with you, the images of a warm Wednesday in the high desert, with the purple and yellow wildflowers shining from the green grass sea, and the liquid song of the meadowlark and the rasp of the vermillion-breasted woodpecker the only sounds above the endless sough of the wind.

There are times when I feel tired of life; then my legs and my hip hurts, when the usual pack of troubles comes to visit, when I look up grimly to see the old griefs and fears that sit at the top of the steps leading to the small room in the back of my head where my daughter Bryn's old crib still lies empty.

But this is not one of them.

But I do need to sleep. So back this weekend with more.

There and Back Again

U.S. Highway 26 was almost free of snow on the high saddle at Government Camp.That's not usual for early January, and it wasn't what I was expecting.

I had made a special journey out to the office in Beaverton to pick up the big Chevy lift-gate pickup because it had the snow tires on. For all that the big bastard drives like a barge in a heavy surf I didn't want to drive over the Big Hill in my usual little Ford Ranger which, in contrast, skitters and slides like a Gresham hootchie-mama's CFM pumps over a patch of black ice when the roads turn slick.

But the snow didn't even start until well past Rhododendron, and all up the western slope of the Cascades I could see rock and soil exposed along the roadcuts, and even inside the woodline beyond only a dusting of snow lingered in the shadow, a reminder of the warm and cloudless days we'd enjoyed in November and December.

So I rumbled along with the steel-spiked tires doing God-knows-what to the poor bare pavement all the way over the crenulations of the Cascade crest; past the big shoulder of Mount Hood at Government Camp and the thinly-visited ski areas there with their skeletal chairlifts creaking and swaying emptily up and down in untenanted procession, past the junction where 26 begins its long descent and Highway 35 turns north and east to the valley of the Hood River, and then up over the Blue Box and Wapinita passes that guard the gate to the Deschutes River plateau.

I've driven this way many, many times. I've driven it in the height of summer when the forests are lush and green all about me, in autumn down corridors of vinemaple red as lust, red as jealousy, in the winter through a covered way of snowbanks stratified by the glacial passage of the plows, in spring with rain slashing the mists that blow through the deep firs and dark hemlocks like smoke from some unquenchable fire.

I've always loved the moment when, like an unexpected special effect in some nature film the hunter-green of the Cascades forest pales, the trees shrinking and thinning, until suddenly you're driving through the gray-green sage short through with golden lodgepole pine and field-gray juniper.

It's the rainshadow desert of the Cascades, and it never fails to delight me. Vistas are suddenly measured in miles instead of feet and inches, landmarks are mountains and valleys instead of individual trees. The poverty of the Warm Springs reservation is invisible in the barren deserts and rangelands between the climopause and the canyon of the Deschutes River so the pleasant illusion of unspoiled wild lands can beguile the traveler until the long descent through the eons and the conquest begins.Warm Springs is the usual huddle of neglect and indifference; the dilapidated prison-camp huts of a Stalag for a civilization. I note that the Tribes are building a new casino along the highway; clearly the Grande Ronde's big money-spinner on the road from Portland to Lincoln City is proving to be too much for the old Kah-nee-tah - too far off the highway, too much work for lazy, greedy white-eyes to travel off the main road to lose their pension checks. The shiny new walls and gleaming metal eaves seem to sneer at the dumpy houses nearby.

Even the Rez has its winners and losers.It's been some time since I was in Madras. The old farm town is the usual curious mixture of death and rebirth; big new Safeway and Sonic drive-in north of town, but in the old downtown newly-empty windows. The Salvadorian place has failed; too bad, I liked their food. I note that the China Palace, home to chow mein that would embarrass the Safeway just up the road, is still here. No accounting for Chinese in a land where the only Chinese are working in the restaurant; it's just lucky there's no fucking Panda Express.

Somehow the road between Madras and Redmond manages to combine the worst of Eastern Oregon driving; never interesting enough to keep you alert, never straight and simple enough to make drowsiness safe. The short winter day is ending as I loop around central Redmond, noting that the parking lot of the ginormous new WalMart "superstore" is full to bursting. The mere existence of that WalMart always irks the shit out of me (not because of any special WalMart evil; my feeling is that Americans have every opportunity to take their trade elsewhere and don't - I never shop there if I have any alternative - so the success of these places is our own choice) because I know that the old WalMart south of town still stands empty and will for decades. The Bentonville bastards preferred to pave over a perfectly good farm field rather than re-use their old site. The good people of Redmond have chosen to enrich them, and that's their choice. But I can't forget, or forgive, that cold, empty expanse of wasted asphalt and now-worthless concrete sliding into the early night ahead of me.The black bean beef at Cindy's is savory and good, and my travel-read has taken an unexpected turn for the better; you never know with Prachett whether you're getting twee-but-challenging or just-fucking-twee and this one is turning out to be T-B-C.

The oolong tea is smoky, and the Sunday evening service is prompt and friendly. The takeaway box has a smiley face and the legend "Have a Nice Day" embossed on it.

I mean to call my family, but after reading several chapters and deciding to close my eyes "just for a moment" I fall soundly asleep in the hard Motel 6 bed and wake, confused and still wearing my reading glasses, at midnight.

I'm a little surprised that my left hip isn't acting up; I haven't taken a painkiller and shake it a bit experimentally but it refuses to attack. I find myself asleep again in mid-shake.

I am walking along a broad porch in a sunny white house. Fine sand scuffs beneath my bare feet, and I can feel rather than see the iron heat of the tropic sun on my skin. Far away surf booms and sighs.

Ahead of me is a high, white room where a woman lies on a white chaise-lounge. Her dark hair is unbound and sprawls across the white pillow, and the hot wind stirs her white chemise. Her lips are red as lust, red as jealousy.

I sit down beside her and a white wave of tenderness sways over me. I lift her hand, and press my lips to her palm; the center is soft and warm, but the pads at the heel and the base of her fingers are slightly rough with work. She opens her eyes, and the red lips curve up in a slow smile, and her long feet point and her toes spread as she arches her back.

The brangling of the phone wakes me to chill darkness.

It's only after I step into the shower I realize that there are no towels in the room. The terrycloth "bathmat" is rough and barely big enough to cover a Congressman's probity. The feeling of being not-quite-dry-under-my-clothes surfaces unpleasant memories from Army days.

There always seems to be a man sitting alone in a Shari's drinking bad coffee and staring at a computer.

The one in Redmond is short, and blonde, and his machine is a white Macintosh. A brief glimpse at the screen suggests that he is looking at some sort of spreadsheet, and the irked expression he's giving it suggests that it is not telling him something he enjoys hearing. He sits and sips and looks irked all through the time it takes me to order and finish my breakfast. He's still sitting there as I leave. He may still be sitting there for all I know.The work site is located in a semi-derelict strip mall wedged between a busy Fred Meyer store and the mess of streets that complicates the south side of Redmond. The pavement is deteriorating, the siding looks faded, and the little computer repair business that was going in Unit C has closed.

We're doing "open pit" infiltration tests in the sparse landscape planter between the east side of the parking lot and Canal Boulevard, and there's something rather sad about the scraggle of juniper and pines that have grown up around the perimeter of the lot. Someone took the time to carefully arrange roughly similar blocks of vesicular basalt around the edge of the low-growing junipers but time and neglect have displaced many of them; they now straggle and weave like a New Year's conga line in a Forties movie, raffish and half-dressed, careless knowing that no one watching it cares.Unlike the restless lands to the west the bones of Earth lie shallow here, and the unfruitful rock and sere, sandy soils are unwilling to accept water more than grudgingly. I suspect that the client will not be pleased with our results.

Although the day turns warm as the sun transits overhead the hour after sunrise feels colder than the pre-dawn dark. I've always wondered why, or whether it's just the effect of having less insulation; since losing weight everything feels colder now. I need some hot coffee so trudge across the street to the Starbucks kiosk in the grocery store.

I'm in line behind a little knot of high-school girls; it's a cliche but we might as well be two different species - homo geezerensis and homo juvenalis or something like that. I'm filthy and layered against the cold, they are barely dressed warmly enough for their classroom and spend much of their time fiddling with their cell phones. The barista is moving speedily to prepare their choices, all of which seem to require multiple pumps of this and cups of that. She seems to be relieved that I want no more than a cup of drip coffee. We agree that it's a nice day. The coffee tastes of earth, and sun, and I warm my hands around the thin paper cup. I smile at the girls who look back at me with neutrally not-unfriendly expressions.

Different species meeting at the waterhole; not in the same herd, not predator-and-prey, not competitors...so different from each other that there is no real connection between them at all.

When I was in grade school one of the janitors in my elementary school had a short leg. I remember being fascinated by his shoe, which had a sole that must have been two inches thick, and his deliberate way of walking so deliberate that seemed like a parody of walking, with each foot planted firmly as if each step required thoughtful care. I realize now that what seemed like deliberation was probably nothing more than pain.

It occurs to me that I can't remember the last time I ran fleet and careless, unencumbered by pain, untroubled by dysfunction.

Walking back to my work I think perhaps I should find someone to make stacked soles for my right shoe, now that my right leg is like his was forty-something years ago.

Someone working in the insurance office across the drive aisle has called our Seattle office to complain that I am parked in one of "their" stalls, Seattle has called my engineer in Portland, my engineer has called me. I move the Barge, noting that of the five parking spaces on that side of their building only two had been occupied all morning, one of them with the Barge. Territorial instinct? Boredom? Why bother?

On the way back north another engineer calls. Can I go to John Day and look at a site where someone wants to raise their earth dam. I can; it's two hours east but not impossible on a sunny day not long past noon. But we don't have access, and the engineer is calling but has not had a reply. I dawdle slowly back to Madras, checking in, wait in the parking lot outside the handsome new Safeway. No reply. The sun is lowering, and I make a last call. Still nothing. Sometimes it's like that - first there's some work, then there isn't, or there might not be, or there's no way of knowing. The effect of not being privy to the business decisions that drive the technical work I do is that sometimes technical choices are made for reasons I will never know. It's a lot like being a private soldier in that way.

The late afternoon roads across the passes are wet with meltwater. Another warm day, a little less snowpack, another inch closer to a drought-summer; a worry for a distant day.

I am pleased that I was able to cross back over the Big Hill before nightfall; the sheeting runoff will be nasty in a couple of hours as night and cold turn it into black ice.A single sunray glides across Cathedral Rock, high up the south face of Mount Hood, gilding the white with gold, then orange, then red; red as lust, red as jealousy.

Then to purple, and then on into the dark.

The Caves of Altamira

Late to the post with this, but we spent several days in eastern Oregon over the Memorial Day weekend. Nothing spectacular, but a pleasant little mini-break from the cold rain of the west side. The original idea was camping, but the cool temperatures and the threat of drizzle followed us over the hill, so we stayed in hotels and spent the day rambling the high desert.

One part of the sagebrush country I hadn't tried before was the lava caves; turns out there's something like 300 of the rascals scattered around Bend, Oregon, and one of the longest and most complex is here, Boyd Cave, just ouhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftside Bend.We were painfully unprepared for the cave, which was chilly and dark in the particularly inky fashion of places utterly shut off from the sun. The sad little hand flashlight just managed to make it more creepy, and we were headed back out when we were lucky enough to encounter some true cavers complete with Coleman lantern.With the light from this portable daylight we were able to get probably 2-300 feet into the lava tube, and could see and enjoy the molten stalactites on the roof and the flow ledges (or "curbs") along the walls, all the classic lava tube features.It WAS chilly, though, and the littles grew more and more claustrophobic and colder as we went on, so we stopped relatively early and turned back. I think we made the right decision; it seems that not far from our turnaround point were several ceiling collapse piles that required a crawl or squeeze through to pass, and that would have been a problem for the kiddos.And for me, if we're being honest. I'm not exactly the lithe and sinuous type. So we returned to the evening daylight and the promise of delicious popovers and honey-butter at the Pine Tavern.It was part of a lovely trip, of which I'll post a bit more later.

Home from the Hill

Just a brief note to mark our return from our second real "family" vacation, a short Memorial Weekend trip over the Cascades to the Bend region of the Oregon High Desert.The kiddos said that of all the things we saw and did they liked the hot tub in the room at the Riverhouse in Bend the best. So much for the grandeur of Nature.But they agreed that the lava cave and the volcano and the hawks and Smith Rocks were the second-most awesomest after that.More later, plus the End of Perfection in the House of Pane.