Just another day in the Big 12 10 9

Sorry, but if you're not from around these parts, you have absolutely no idea how much we Nebraskans are enjoying the continuing implosion of the Big 12 Conference.

Uh . . . 10.

Uh . . . 9?

Anyway, let's just say we told you so.

President of where?

So, of which country does Rick Perry want to be president? Tejas or los Estados Unidos?

The present gobernador de Tejas hasn't exactly been clear in his documented remarks on the subject, according to The Texas Tribune (La Tribuna de Tejas):

“He has said many times that we have a great union, and he believes it should stay that way,” Miner said. Miner reviewed the YouTube clip and said it was clear Perry was speaking to people in his office but that he could not “verify the audio or the video that was put together.”

However, well-known tech blogger Robert Scoble told The Texas Tribune on Tuesday that he remembers the meeting with Perry in the governor’s office in 2009. It's clear from interviews, blogs and Twitter postings that the remarks were recorded nearly a month before the April Tea Party gathering, which helped launch Perry’s successful 2010 re-election effort.

In the meeting, Perry can be heard speaking to the group of tech bloggers about the founding of Texas in 1836. A slideshow shows Perry pointing to a painting of the dramatic fall of the Alamo, artifacts in his office and the “Come and Take It” logo on his own boots.

Texans have a “different feeling about independence,” Perry told the group.

“When we came into the nation in 1845, we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation,” the governor can be heard saying. “And one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.”

JUST WHAT we need -- another damn Texan as president, this time one who'd turn America into a bigger, meaner manifestation of the feuding Big 12 Conference . . . which has dwindled to 10 schools and counting down toward oblivion.

Tell you what. If Perry were to become president (in which case we could be absolutely sure divine judgment was upon us), we in the northern Plains states might just secede and hook up with Canada.

Just us and a great big chunk of the formerly United States' nuclear deterrent.

Somebody thought they'd never find him there

Uh . . . rocks aren't the only thing the surviving Mars rover found at the edge of that big crater after a three-year drive.

Don't NASA and The Associated Press even bother to look at the pictures the little feller's taking?

NASA's surviving Mars rover Opportunity has reached the rim of a 14-mile-wide crater where the robot geologist will examine rocks older than any it has seen in its seven years on the surface of the red planet, scientists said Wednesday.

The solar-powered, six-wheel rover arrived at Endeavour crater after driving 13 miles from a smaller crater named Victoria.

The drive, which took nearly three years, culminated Tuesday, when Opportunity signaled it had arrived at the location dubbed Spirit Point in honor of the rover's twin, which fell silent last year.

"We're there," said project manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Opportunity and Spirit landed on opposite sides of Mars in 2004 and used their instruments to discover geologic evidence that the cold and dusty planet was once wet.

Craters can provide windows into the planet's past because layers of material from long-ago eras are exposed. Endeavour crater is more than 25 times wider than Victoria.

MAYBE WE should just turn over the space program to the Mafia.

Lullaby for the working class

Dear Democrats:

No matter what asshats Republican politicians might be (and they are), ordinary Americans still hate you worse. This is Tuesday's lesson from the Wisconsin recalls . . . and from numerous other elections across America the past four decades.

I have opinions on why this is.

One, you hate Joe Six-Pack just as much as the GOP pols, basically. You'll go to the wall for the eugenicist swells of Planned Parenthood in ways you'd never consider going to the wall on behalf of -- for lack of a better word -- the proletariat.

In a world of political priorities, you know and I know that you think it's more important to abort babies (many of them poor and brown) than it is to fight like hell for jobs, education, social services and basic f***ing human dignity for the poor, working and middle classes. Many of these people can't articulate it that way, but they know it just the same.

And this is why so many of them either stay home on Election Day or go out and vote against their own economic and class interests by filling in the oval or pulling the lever for tea-party nutwagons, bomb-throwers and (oftentimes) your average, modern-day "conservative" protofascist.

This is the lesson from Recall Tuesday in Wisconsin. No matter how outrageous the GOP's sins against the poor and working class, regular folk think their chances are better going with their enemies than with their "friends."

Good luck with that paradigm in 2012, Democrats. And God help us all.

This . . . is London

Somewhere in hell, Adolf Hitler is kicking himself right now for wasting all that time and effort on the Blitz.

This works just about as well and proves to be much more demoralizing for the British public than Luftwaffe air raids.


FOLKS, THIS IS what it looks like when people have no morals, no taboos and no hope for the future. The Brits are no more or no less virtuous than we in the States, and now we're entering the Age of Austerity, too, with fewer jobs, fewer social services, less welfare, less hopefulness, more materialism and more nihilism.

Take a hard look. This is the next new thing, coming soon from Austerity Britain to Tea Party America.


P.S.: I agree with the British public. Mark Stone has two of them.

It takes a beetle

Listen to Jon Bruning when he tells stories about highways and burrowing beetles and welfare raccoons; the Nebraska attorney general knows his beetles.

After all, he is one. For a long time now, Nebraskans who have better things to do than drool at demagogues' red meat at "political meetings" have pegged Bruning as the sort of sniveling little opportunist who'll do just about anything to get elected to something. This is much like the sort of beetle we used to call "tumble turds" when I was a kid in Louisiana.

The similarities between Bruning and a tumble turd -- otherwise known as a dung beetle -- are striking. The man deals in excrement; excrement is his life's blood. In cattle country, we know what kind of excrement a "Bruning beetle" is most likely to deal in.

SO WE HAVE the state AG, who wants to be a U.S. senator, carefully crafting all his precious bulls*** into a neat little ball, which he then rolls around from town to town for "tea party patriots" to eat up.

Here's an example from the TPM website:

He describes a requirement that workers at a construction project gather up endangered beetles by luring them into a bucket with a dead rat in order to release them elsewhere. But the plan is thwarted when hungry raccoons then eat them straight out of the rat-infested bucket. Which, according to Bruning, is a perfect image to illustrate how welfare recipients receive their benefits.

"The raccoons figured out the beetles are in the bucket," Bruning said. "And it's like grapes in a jar. The raccoons -- they're not stupid, they're gonna do the easy way if we make it easy for them. Just like welfare recipients all across America. If we don't send them to work, they're gonna take the easy route."

BEING AN exceptional tumble turd, though, Bruning has figured out how to make his precious wad of poo self-replenishing. It's kind of like hitting it big on Wall Street -- simple in theory but requiring some skill to practice.

What the attorney general (and I just threw up in my mouth a little typing "attorney general") does is invest a little bit of his ball of bulls*** in hopes that Bubba and Vi will deposit their nest eggs in his wad. Soon enough, the nest eggs mature and go out to collect more material for the effort.

This is called the "s***ball effect," which is like the "snowball effect," except browner and smellier, and Bruning is just the latest in a long line of demagogues who can spin a little bulls*** into a whole lot of ugly. Welfare recipients . . . raccoons . . . 'coons . . . get it? Wink wink, nudge nudge.

Would that trapping and disposing of such political "tumble turds" were as easy as plopping a cow pie in the bottom of a bucket and waiting for suppertime.

Fox 8, you have a headline-writing problem

I'll bet the president's not fazed, either.

I can see enraged Republicans in New Orleans, though, bombarding Fox 8 with outraged protests of bias, being the GOP has been trying to paint Barack Obama as being 180-degrees out of phase with the American public for years.

Increasingly, it seems to me that local TV is becoming out of phase with literacy and basic journalistic competency. After all, it was just July 29 that Fox 8 sent this lulu out onto the Interwebs.

Sometimes, I wonder why I don't just do this blog as a series of grunts, yelps and belches.

The next big thing

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

When I was young, the wave of the future rolled in from the east across the North Atlantic.

The British Invasion, it was called. First, the Beatles . . . then everybody and everything. That's where we got "mod." That's where we got New Wave, too.

Now, from NBC News' World Blog is a foreshadowing from Austerity Britain about what may well be coming to Austerity America.

Again.

As political and social protests grip the Middle East, are growing in Europe and a riot exploded in north London this weekend, here's a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

The TV reporter from Britain's ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. "Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

The truth is that discontent has been simmering among Britain's urban poor for years, and few have paid attention. Social activists say one out of two children in Tottenham live in poverty. It's one of the poorest areas of Britain. Britain's worst riots in decades took place here in 1985. A policeman was hacked to death. After these riots, the same young man pointed out, "They built us a swimming pool."

Police and local leaders in Tottenham made real progress in improving community relations in the intervening years and that's true about all of Britain. The best way to prevent crime, the theory goes, is to improve the lot of the people, then they won't need to commit crimes. But caught in a poverty and joblessness cycle, young people in many British urban areas have little hope of a better life.

So when a local 29-year-old father, described by police as a gangster, was shot dead by an officer, the response came quickly.

AS AN ANCIENT GREEK philosopher once wrote, "When the people lose hope, the fit hits the shan . . . but good."

Sadly, causing the people to lose hope is something American government and society have learned to do very, very well.

3 Chords & the Truth: So tired . . . muddling along

Ladies and gentlemen . . . The Beatles.

With the theme song for this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth.

Which I was too tired to work into this week's edition of the Big Show.

So here it is:

I'm so tired, I haven't slept a wink
I'm so tired, my mind is on the blink
I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink
No,no,no.

I'm so tired I don't know what to do
I'm so tired my mind is set on you
I wonder should I call you but I know what you would do

You'd say I'm putting you on
But it's no joke, it's doing me harm
You know I can't sleep, I can't stop my brain
You know it's three weeks, I'm going insane
You know I'd give you everything I've got
for a little peace of mind . . . .

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ . . . snorf . . . grrbfnl.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

And keep it down, will 'ya? I'm going to try to get some shuteye.

Never judge a mag by its cover

When I saw the magazine in the racks while picking over the carcass of our local Borders last weekend, my first thought was whether I could pull off a credible northern Minnesota accent while laughing at "those people."

Actually, that's a lie. My first inclination upon spying Garden & Gun amid our Borders death watch, was "Hey. y'all! Look at this!"

I suppressed it. That would have given me away as one of "those people."

Garden & Gun. Can't be good. Sounds like my redneck childhood in south Louisiana.

IT SOUNDS . . . it sounds . . . it sounds so damn "Hey, y'all! Look at this!"

I mean, it sounded about right in describing the South I knew in my youth, but still. . . . You know?

Of course, in the midst of working up a good snark, I made the horrible mistake of picking up the damned thing. Pssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhew. That was all the air going out of my smugness and superiority.

Sure, you have some of your self-congratulatory "moonlight and magnolias" clichés about the superiority of all things Southrun . . . like the Southern belle. (As a longtime resident of the Midwest and husband of an Omaha belle, I can tell you the Yankees can hold their own). But you also have elegant design, an impressive stable of writers like Clyde Edgerton, Roy Blount, Jr., and Julia Reed . . . and a publisher who used to run The New Yorker.

Don't tell Bubba that last thing.

AND IN THE the archives, in the June/July 2010 issue of Garden & Gun, you also have one of the truest things ever written about the region that birthed me and formed me. The thing -- if you're a Southerner inclined toward introspection -- that also haunts you and makes you think about things that still can get you in a lot of trouble in many quarters of America's peculiar quarter.

Alice Randall wrote it. She herself got in a lot of trouble in many quarters of America's peculiar quarter for taking on The Myth . . . and The Book that so perpetuates it, Gone With the Wind.

In an article by the name of A Letter from Harper Lee, she says this:

Back in the late nineties, I suggested Mockingbird for a mother-daughter book group that my daughter and I helped found. Together an integrated group of five mothers and five daughters discovered and rediscovered the truths of Lee’s pages: that Lee realized that black men could be desirable, that white women could be liars, and that girls were bold and curious. We noted how much more intelligent the domestic servant in Mockingbird was than Mammy in Gone with the Wind. We noted that the town drunk only pretended to be drunk so he could get away with loving a black woman. We learned that having a daddy who practices civil rights law can be terrifying.

When we had finished, my daughter wrote a series of poems in homage to Lee. One of the mothers baked a Lane cake. We started dreaming of a field trip. I will never know what Harper Lee would have done if we had shown up uninvited on her doorstep with a Lane cake and five eleven-year-old girls. I know that when I showed up in her life as an accused plagiarist, she stepped into the hullabaloo that engulfed me to stand by my side.

I will always be in her debt. Not because she wrote to the court and then exchanged six letters with me over a decade. Before she knew of my existence, I knew of hers. Her words made me braver than I might have been from near to my very beginning.

I was born in 1959. Mockingbird was published in 1960. I read it for the first time not long after reading Gone with the Wind. I have long divided the world into Scouts and Scarletts—and I have always wanted to be Scout.

And for every year of my life but the first, Mockingbird’s very existence, reader by reader, thirty million strong, has made the world a better place for me and for mine, just as before I was born and for every single year of my life Gone with the Wind has made the world more difficult for people like me.

I WAS BORN in 1961 into a world of people with less polish than Scarlett but with souls just as arrogant. Souls just ugly enough to see every blessed thing through the dirty lens of the South's original sin.

I, too, always have wanted to be Scout, because Atticus might be a bridge too far. God give me the strength to overcome my Southern upbringing of a certain age.

And you'll always walk alone. . . .

Erasing the "Jerry" out of "Help Jerry's Kids" is a work in progress.

It took just a two-paragraph press release Wednesday evening to erase Jerry Lewis from both the Muscular Dystrophy Association and the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon, but it seems the MDA website is going to take a while.

The browser-window title on the MDA home page now is a simple "Welcome to MDA | Muscular Dystrophy Association." Click on a subject header, though, and the comedy great still has top billing -- "Welcome to MDA | Muscular Dystrophy Association Helping Jerry's Kids."

IT'S LIKE going to the Facebook page of a dead friend. What was still is, a memory so close you can almost touch it . . . trapped, still past perfect in electronic amber, defying the present just as our heart denies the new equation of loss. The MDA telethon without Jerry Lewis? How can this be?

Four and a half decades of Labor Day telethons -- more than 60 years with MDA -- ended in four sentences, without even the previously announced fond farewell come September? Really?

Then again, looking at last fall's tea leaves, it was pretty clear he was getting the ol' heave-ho even then, wasn't it? As John Katsilometes wrote last October in the Las Vegas Sun . . .

Jerry Lewis’ name has been synonymous with the “MDA Labor Day Telethon” for 45 years. Can we agree on this?

We can, until we scan a news release issued last week by the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Unexpectedly, the MDA has lopped a good measure of the telethon – 21½ hours, total. As a result, the 2011 telethon will run just six hours, which is a lot like shaving a marathon down to a 7K run and still calling it “a marathon.”

Even more startling was the wording of the MDA news release sent to media members last Wednesday. The words “Jerry Lewis,” were not to be found until the third of four pages in the release, and only after we read several lively quotes from MDA President Gerald C. Weinberg. We happen upon Jerry Lewis just once, under the headline: “Rich MDA Telethon History.”

"RICH MDA telethon history," they said. As in, "You're history, Jerry!"

Either there's a hell of a story here, or loyalty is more of a one-way street than even I thought. And I'm a confirmed cynic.

It couldn't have had anything to do with Jerry telling a little too much truth about the state of television today, could it? About perhaps making the wrong corporate enemies? About scaredy-cat professional fundraisers getting nervous about what the old man might say on live television during his last rodeo . . . which he didn't want to be his last rodeo?

Most likely there's a hell of a story here about loyalty being a one-way street. And about how Jerry's kids suddenly became orphans.

Not bad, Harvard and Yale. . . .

I guess when you have professors from Harvard and Yale thinking along the same lines you are, that ain't too bad.

Well, for the country it kinda is, but now you can't tell me I'm nuts here and here.

Have fun the last month? Just wait.

4:48.

That's where you need to go in the above video.

At 4:48, we find Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., confirming that, yes, congressional Republicans are, too, a bunch of extortionists and political terrorists.

4:48. That's the point, at the end of Monday's interview with CNBC's Larry Kudlow, where McConnell vows there never again will be a "clean" debt-ceiling bill.

IN OTHER WORDS, Republican legislative policy now is to hold the government and the economy hostage -- just like what we've witnessed the last excruciating month or so -- in order to ram savage spending cuts down Americans' throats while ensuring tax rates increase not a whit for the rich or big business.

"What we have done, Larry, also is set a new template. In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore. This is just the first step. This, we anticipate, will take us into 2013. Whoever the new president is, is probably going to be asking us to raise the debt ceiling again. Then we will go through the process again and see what we can continue to achieve in connection with these debt ceiling requests of presidents to get our financial house in order."

WHEN YOU TELL an entire nation that you are perfectly willing to let the government default in 2013 as a means of getting your fiscal way (because if you aren't, you don't have a bargaining chip), you are announcing you are a terrorist. Or, to be polite about it, an extortionist on a global scale.

If a group makes demands, then plants a nuclear bomb in an American city, then announces that if the United States doesn't commit to policies X, Y and Z, there will be a mushroom cloud to pay, no one would hesitate to use the T-word to describe what was going on.

Likewise, if a political party makes demands, then says that if the United States doesn't commit to policies X, Y and Z, it will make sure the country defaults, thereby blowing up the stock market, shutting down most of the government and causing all manner of economic carnage . . . how exactly would that not be political terrorism? This is what a top GOP officeholder has just publicly stated will happen if his party still holds a majority in at least one house of Congress in a year and a half.

History is showing signs of repeating itself. Last time, it took a mountain of corpses -- nearly 700,000 of them -- to finally crush the life out of an earlier era's extortionist politics and moral and political dysfunction.

St. George Santayana, pray for us.

The dimpled menace

Click on the poster, print and distribute widely.
Help Coralville bring this criminal to justice!

There's a criminal afoot in the great state of Iowa.

This brigand preys on innocent bicyclists who wander onto the road less traveled, plying the pedalists with potentially poisonous potions and betting that the bootleg hooch will bring in a backdoor bounty of contraband cash.

In Coralville, Iowa, the official vendors for the RAGBRAI rendezvous couldn't catch a break for all the illicit dealings of fly-by-night criminals such as Abigail Krutsinger. It was well past time to call on the long arm of the law to safeguard the spirit of Adam Smith, the free flow of commerce and the American Way.

The threat was grave. The rule of law was in tatters.

The perp was 4.

In the joint, they just call her "Dimples."

DEAR READER . . . capitalism-loving American patriot, heed this cautionary tale from The Gazette of Cedar Rapids, Iowa:

According to Dustin Krutsinger of Coralville, police shut down his 4-year-old daughter’s stand after just 30 minutes. Krutsinger said the officer told his wife “this isn’t the first time I’ve had to do this.”

Krutsinger said his daughter was selling lemonade for 25 cents a glass, and had made less than $5. According to the city of Coralville, 4-year-old Abigail Krutsinger was in violation of a two-day ordinance that required all vendors to have permits when RAGBRAI rolled into town.

Josh Schamberger, president of the Iowa City/Coralville Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the ordinance was passed to protect riders from possible health risks. Similar ordinances have been adopted in other host towns for years, he said. Now Schamberger said he fears that the work of 500 volunteers may be forgotten, and lemonade stand shutdowns will be remembered.

FEAR? FEAR? He'd better pray the lemonade-stand shutdowns are remembered.

After all, you know what they say: Kill one, teach a hundred.

Besides, they need to learn young.

Hail to the conquering hero

For a brief moment, one woman lifts Capitol Hill from the muck, and humanity reasserts itself. Now I'm going to have to go and read twice as many political comment threads to regain equilibrium.

Embarrassing moments in journalism

If you're over 30 and still toiling away at a one-lung TV station in Hastings, Neb., there's probably a good reason for that.

Barack Hussein Buchanan

The first-term Democratic president faced a dilemma. A radicalized political faction had threatened to wreck the whole nation if he did not accede to its surrender-or-else political demands.

Facing a choice between the merely catastrophic and Armageddon, the president caved. Political terrorism had triumphed.

Barack Obama vs. the Tea Party in the 2011 debt-limit crisis?

No, James Buchanan vs. the Southern secessionists, 1857. The Kansas Territory had just, in a sham vote by a small band of hoodlums, approved a pro-slavery constitution in defiance of the president's demands for a free, fair and representative political process.

Here's how Columbia University history professor Allan Nevins described the scene in the August 1956 issue of American Heritage:

For a brief space in the spring of 1857 Buchanan seemed to stand firm. In his instructions to Governor Walker he engaged that the new constitution would be laid before the people: and “they must be protected in the exercise of their right of voting for or against that instrument, and the lair expression of the popular will must not be interrupted by fraud or violence.”

It is not strange that the rash proslavery gamesters in Kansas prosecuted their designs despite all Buchanan’s lair words and Walker’s desperate efforts to stay them. They knew that with four fifths of the people already against them, and the odds growing greater every year, only bra/en trickery could effect their end. They were aware that the South, which believed that a fair division would give Kansas to slavery and Nebraska to freedom, expected them to stand firm. They were egged on by the two reckless southern Cabinet members, Howell Cobb and Thompson, who sent an agent, H. L. Martin of Mississippi, out to the Kansas convention. This gathering in Lecompton, with 48 of the 60 members hailing from slave states, was the shabbiest conclave of its kind ever held on American soil. One of Buchanan’s Kansas correspondents wrote that he had not supposed such a wild set could be found. The Kansas News termed them a body of “broken-down political hacks, demagogues, fire-eaters, perjurers, ruffians, ballot-box stuffers, and loafers.” But before it broke up with the shout, “Now, boys, let’s come and take a drink!” it had written a constitution.

This constitution, the work of a totally unrepresentative body, was a devious repudiation of all the principles Buchanan and Douglas had laid down. Although it contained numerous controversial provisions, such as a limitation of banking to one institution and a bar against free Negroes, the main document was not to be submitted to general vote at all. A nominal reference of the great cardinal question was indeed provided. Voters might cast their ballots for the “constitution with slavery” or the “constitution without slavery.” But when closely examined this was seen to be actually a piece of chicanery. Whichever form was adopted, the 200 slaves in Kansas would remain, with a constitutional guarantee against interference. Whenever the proslavery party in Kansas could get control of the legislature, they might open the door wide for more slaves. The rigged convention had put its handiwork before the people with a rigged choice: “Heads I win, tails you lose.”

Would Buchanan lay this impudent contrivance before Congress, and ask it to vote the admission of Kansas as a state? Or would he contemptuously spurn it? An intrepid man would not have hesitated an instant to take the honest course; he would not have needed the indignant outcry of the northern press, the outraged roar of Douglas, to inspirit him. But Buchanan quailed before the storm of passion into which proslavery extremists had worked themselves.

The hot blood of the South was now up. That section, grossly misinformed upon events in Kansas, believed that it was being cheated. The northern freesoilers had vowed that no new slave state (save by a partition of Texas) should ever be admitted. Southerners thought that in pursuance of this resolve, the Yankees had made unscrupulous use of their wealth and numbers to lay hands on Kansas. Did the North think itself entitled to every piece on the board—to take Kansas as well as California, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Oregon—to give southerners nothing? The Lecompton delegates, from this point of view, were dauntless champions of a wronged section. What if they did use sharp tactics? That was but a necessary response to northern arrogance. Jefferson Davis declared that his section trembled under a sense of insecurity. “You have made it a political war. We are on the defensive. How far are you to push us?” Sharp threats of secession and battle mingled with the southern denunciations. “Sir,” Senator Alfred Iverson of Georgia was soon to assert, “I believe that the time will come when the slave States will be compelled, in vindication of their rights, interests, and honor, to separate from the free States, and erect an independent confederacy; and I am not sure, sir, that the time is not at hand.”

Three southern members of the Cabinet, Cobb, Thompson, and John B. Floyd, had taken the measure of Buchanan’s pusillanimity. They, with one northern sympathizer, Jeremiah Black, and several White House habitués like John Slidell of Louisiana, constituted a virtual Directory exercising control over the tremulous President. They played on Buchanan’s fierce partisan hatred of Republicans, and his jealous dislike of Douglas. They played also on his legalistic cast of mind; after all, the Lecompton constitution was a legal instrument by a legal convention—outwardly. Above all, they played on his fears, his morbid sensitiveness, and his responsiveness to immediate pressures. They could do this the more easily because the threats of disruption and violence were real. Henry S. Foote, a former senator from Mississippi and an enemy of Jefferson Davis, who saw Lecompton in its true light and hurried to Washington to advise the President, writes: “It was unfortunately of no avail that these efforts to reassure Mr. Buchanan were at that time essayed by myself and others; he had already become thoroughly panic-stricken; the howlings of the bulldog of secession had fairly frightened him out of his wits, and he ingloriously resolved to yield without further resistance to the decrial and villification to which he had been so acrimoniously subjected.”

And the well-informed Washington correspondent of the New Orleans Picayune a little later told just how aggressively the Chief Executive was bludgeoned into submission: “The President was informed in November, 1857, that the States of Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and perhaps others, would hold conventions and secede from the Union if the Lecompton Constitution, which established slavery, should not be accepted by Congress. The reason was that these States, supposing that the South had been cheated out of Kansas, were, whether right or wrong, determined to revolt. The President believed this. Senator Hunter, of Virginia, to rny knowledge, believed it. Many other eminent men did, and perhaps not without reason.”

Buchanan, without imagination as without nerve, began to yield to this southern storm in midsummer, and by November, 1857, he was surrendering completely. When Congress met in December his message upheld the Lecompton Constitution with a tissue of false and evasive statements. Seldom in American history has a chief magistrate made a greater error, or missed a larger opportunity. The astute secretary of his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, wrote: “I had considerable hopes of Mr. Buchanan—I really thought he was a statesman—but I have now come to the settled conclusion that he is just the damndest old fool that has ever occupied the presidential chair. He has deliberately walked overboard with his eyes open—let him drown, for he must.”

As Buchanan shrank from the lists, Douglas entered them with that gaudium certaminis which was one of his greatest qualities. The finest chapters of his life, his last great contests for the Union, were opening. Obviously he would have had to act under political necessity even if deaf to principle, for had he let popular sovereignty be torn to pieces, Illinois would not have sent him back to the Senate the following year; but he was not the man to turn his back on principle. His struggle against Lecompton was an exhibition of iron determination. The drama of that battle has given it an almost unique place in the record of our party controversies. “By God, sir!” he exclaimed, “I made James Buchanan, and by God, sir, I will unmake him!” Friends told him that the southern Democrats meant to ruin him. “I have taken a through ticket,” rejoined Douglas, “and checked my baggage.” He lost no time in facing Buchanan in the White House and denouncing the Lecompton policy. When the President reminded him how Jackson had crushed two party rebels, he was ready with a stinging retort. Douglas was not to be overawed by a man he despised as a weakling. “Mr. President,” he snorted, “I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead.”

As for the southern leaders, Douglas’ scorn for the extremists who had coerced Buchanan was unbounded. He told the Washington correspondent of the Chicago Journal that he had begun his fight as a contest against a single bad measure. But his blow at Lecompton was a blow against slavery extension, and he at once had the whole “slave power” down on him like a pack of wolves. He added: “In making the fight against this power, I was enabled to stand off and view the men with whom I had been acting; I was ashamed I had ever been caught in such company; they are a set of unprincipled demagogues, bent upon perpetuating slavery, and by the exercise of that unequal and unfair power, to control the government or break up the Union; and I intend to prevent their doing either.”

After a long, close, and acrid contest, on April i, 1858, Lecompton was defeated. A coalition of Republicans, Douglasite Democrats, and Know-Nothings struck down the fraudulent constitution in the House, 120 to 112. When the vote was announced, a wild cheer rolled through the galleries. Old Francis P. Blair, Jackson’s friend, carried the news to the dying Thomas Hart Benton, who had been intensely aroused by the crisis. Benton could barely speak, but his exultation was unbounded. “In energetic whispers,” records Blair, “he told his visitor that the same men who had sought to destroy the republic in 1850 were at the bottom of this accursed Lecompton business. Among the greatest of his consolations in dying was the consciousness that the House of Representatives had baffled these treasonable schemes and put the heels of the people on the neck of the traitors.”

The Administration covered its retreat by a hastily concocted measure, the English Bill, under which Kansas was kept waiting on the doorstep—sure in the end to enter a free state. The Kansas plotters, the CobbThompson-Floyd clique in the Cabinet, and Buchanan had all been worsted. But the damage had been done. Southern secessionists had gained fresh strength and greater boldness from their success in coercing the Administration.

The Lecompton struggle left a varied and interesting set of aftereffects. It lifted Stephen A. Douglas to a new plane; he had been a fighting Democratic strategist, but now he became a true national leader, thinking far less of party and more of country. It sharpened the issues which that summer and fall were to form the staple of the memorable Lincoln-Douglas debates in Illinois. At the same time, it deepened the schism which had been growing for some years between southern Democrats and northwestern Democrats, and helped pave the way to that disruption of the party which preceded and facilitated the disruption of the nation. It planted new seeds of dissension in Kansas—seeds which resulted in fresh conflicts between Kansas free-soilers or jayhawkers on one side and Missouri invaders or border ruffians on the other, and in a spirit of border lawlessness which was to give the Civil War some of its darkest pages. The Lecompton battle discredited Buchanan in the eyes of most decent northerners, strengthened southern conviction of his weakness, and left the Administration materially and morally weaker in dealing with the problems of the next two and a half critical years.

For the full measure of Buchanan’s failure, however, we must go deeper. Had he shown the courage that to an Adams, a Jackson, a Polk, or a Cleveland would have been second nature, the courage that springs from a deep integrity, he might have done the republic an immeasurable service by grappling with disunion when it was yet weak and unprepared. Ex-Senator Foote wrote later that he knew well that a scheme for destroying the Union “had long been on foot in the South.” He knew that its leaders “were only waiting for the enfeebling of the Democratic Party in the North, and the general triumph of Free-soilism as a consequence thereof, to alarm the whole South into acquiescence in their policy.” Buchanan’s support of the unwise and corrupt Lecompton constitution thus played into the plotters’ hands.

The same view was taken yet more emphatically by Douglas. He had inside information in 1857, he later told the Senate, that four states were threatening Buchanan with secession. Had that threat been met in the right Jacksonian spirit, had the bluff been called—for the four states were unprepared for secession and war—the leaders of the movement would have been utterly discredited. Their conspiracy would have collapsed, and they would have been so routed and humiliated in 1857 that the Democratic party schism in 1860 might never have taken place, and if it had, secession in 1861 would have been impossible.

BAD THINGS HAPPEN when American presidents get bullied by political extremists up to no good.

For good reason, the U.S. government, as a matter of policy, refuses to negotiate with terrorists, much less acquiesce to their demands. The theory behind that is as simple as it is obvious -- if terrorists' extortionist tactics prove successful, they'll keep doing what works.

Give us what we want, or the little lady . . . the children in the schoolhouse . . . the jetliner full of passengers . . . the hostages in the American embassy . . . the city of New York . . . the economy and government of the United States of America gets it.

Look where caving into the politics of extortion led us a century and a half ago. Over the past day, several national commentators have rightly noted the bloody obvious -- it's back. They have stared the obvious in the face and acknowledged what cannot be denied, that President Obama's monumental collapse in the face of legislative terrorism will lead to the repeated use of a tactic as effective as it is despicable.

If it's true that war "is the continuation of politics by other means," the safety is now off.

We suspect we now are a nation as divided as we've been since 1861. We know what happened then and how we got there. Historians look at James Buchanan's actions, and inaction, in the runup to the Civil War and proclaim him one of the worst presidents in American history -- likely the worst.

SO . . . what do we do? Naturally, we do exactly as Buchanan did.

You do know what the definition of insanity is, right?

3 Chords & the Truth: Music. End. Wits.

In a democracy, we generally get the government we deserve.

Now look at what's going on in Washington, D.C., right now and be afraid. Be very afraid.

As Congress lurches toward Debtpocalyse and we lurch toward the poorhouse, we find the American empire lurching toward an end. And as I reflect on these years of doing 3 Chords & the Truth, it occurred to me that the Big Show is what historians call "primary source material."

In other words, future generations could pull up these things called "MP3s" of the program, cobble together something to read such an obsolete format, and then get an idea of how we reacted to the mayhem around us.

How we dealt with decline and "interesting times."

MAYBE they'll listen to this episode of 3 Chords & the Truth and tag it "Music for the End of Their Wits." Heck, I'll beat those future historians and archaeologists to it. I'll call this episode of the Big Show "Music for the End of Our Wits."

I know, looking at the news every day, I'm at the end of mine -- and I'll bet you're near the end of yours, too.

So, this week's episode of the Big Show will feature exactly that -- music for the end of our wits.

My first take on it was "the Hair-Pullin', Teeth-Gnashin', Congressional Debt-Limitin' Blues," but I think the present title is much more elegant.

And that's the deal with the Big Show this week. Venting through music, and then some sweet jazz to calm us down.

AFTER ALL, we're going to need all the serenity we can muster for the foreseeable future.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Headline of the year

I'm thinking up tons of dirty jokes and bon mots right now. Unfortunately, I can't use any of them.

I'll bet Channel 8 in New Orleans posted this item using Internet Explorer 6.

Look away, look away, look away, Teabagland

You know what John Boehner's problem is in getting his debt-ceiling bill through the U.S. House? Pell Grants.

Tea Party lunatic leges are furious, saying there's too much money set aside for helping poor kids attend college. Pell Grants, to a certain subset of the Republican Party, are this decade's "welfare Cadillac."

Now we know why the speaker of the House often needs a drink and a smoke.

Me, I'm pretty much just speechless. This takes some doing, and the Tea Party jihadists just did it.

I'll merely say the whole thing really reminds me of this.

I'M TURNING it over to The Hill newspaper now:

Legislation crafted by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to raise the debt limit by $900 billion would directly appropriate $9 billion for Pell Grants in 2012 and another $8 billion in 2013.

This has shocked some conservative House freshmen who say they were elected to cut spending, not increase it. Some House Republicans think of it as being akin to welfare.

“I really don’t understand why we’re increasing spending in a bill supposed to be cutting spending,” said Rep. Andy Harris, a freshman Republican from Maryland. “It was negotiated without the input of a lot of members.”

Harris has indicated to The Baltimore Sun that he will vote no.

House Republican leaders say they included concessions to Democrats in efforts to forge a compromise that could pass both chambers.

(snip)

The inclusion of the extra money for Pell Grants could cost Republican votes.

Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) has compared Pell Grants to “welfare”.

"So you can go to college on Pell Grants — maybe I should not be telling anybody this because it’s turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century," Rehberg told Blog Talk Radio in April. "You can go to school, collect your Pell Grants, get food stamps, low-income energy assistance, Section 8 housing, and all of a sudden we find ourselves subsidizing people that don’t have to graduate from college.”

DEAR LORD, we humbly beseech Thee . . . HELLLLLLLLP!

From the More $$$ Than Sense department. . . .

Never, ever pay $999,900 for a creepy mask of some notorious person whose name we won't remember in 20 years. And whose name I won't mention now.

Given the way things are going in Washington, I'd think you'd want to place that kind of money in a safe place, not on a gigantic bet that fools bigger than oneself will have money from which they can be parted.

Death by irony

Just in to the newsroom, this important message for all Louisianians living south of Baton Rouge.

Move.

This was made necessary by a bit of mutual exclusivity not easily grasped in a state where lots and lots of people don't even make it through high school -- a state unusually dependent on the kindness of strangers that tends to go whole-hog for politicians who just aren't all that generous. In 2010, Louisiana voters turned out whole-hog for whole-hog.

Now their congressmen are part of the charge to pauperize Uncle Sam by cutting up his credit cards, which House Republicans already had been hiding from him. All this has left the Whole-Hog State -- the one with the vanishing coastline and hurricane-ravaged city -- doing its Blanche DuBois routine to a fusillade of rotten tomatoes and tea bags.

WVUE television reports from New Orleans:

Near the heart of the city, where a cypress forest once thrived, a visitor will find only skeletal remains-- the trunks of hundreds of dead trees jutting from the water bottom like tombstones.

The central wetlands of New Orleans' lower ninth ward are dead, but only miles away the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built some of the world's most elaborate flood defenses.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Washington lavished $14 billion dollars on Greater New Orleans-- new flood walls, levees, barriers and storm gates designed to provide the city 100-year storm protection.

Four years ago, Congress also authorized $6-$8 billion in coastal restoration projects, only to leave the projects unfunded dreams on paper.

"Leaving folks in a vulnerable situation is simply not an option," said Garret Graves, Chairman of Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

Twice in the month of July, Congress has shot down money aimed at rebuilding Louisiana's coastline.

First, the House rejected $36 million in restoration money that had been included in President Barack Obama's original budget proposal.

Then, last Thursday, a Senate Committee debated a proposal to grant Louisiana and other coastal states 37.5% of royalties from offshore oil and gas wells in federal waters.

The plan never came up for a vote after supporters, realizing they lacked the required votes for passage, bolted the room and denied the committee a quorum.

"All we're asking for is our fair share," said Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal at a gathering last week in Thibodaux, where he announced a series of small projects designed to bridge some of the funding gap.

WELL, BOBBY, the Tea Party manufactured a debt crisis, and now Washington is throwing your "fair share" into the rising waters. They can't help themselves -- it's what lunatics do, with the full support of yourself and most of your subjects constituents.

So, is Bobby Jindal that cynical, or is he the dumbest Brown graduate ever?

Now excuse me while I explain to the Louisiana electorate that the last sentence was referencing Jindal's alma mater and not his skin color. Natural selection, you see, is a bitch.