‘I’m an Indian, too

The Christian Science Monitor has some thoughts about Gambling on the Reservation:

Gambling dollars have unfortunately become a main source of revenue for most native American tribes. In California, for instance, the state’s 54 Indian gaming casinos bring in some $6 billion a year.

The lure of easy money has caused Indian casinos to proliferate to more than 330, and the opportunity for more has many native Americans working side by side with gambling interests to gain federal recognition as tribes (a prerequisite for opening a casino). Indian tribal offices have been flooded with “I’m an Indian, too” calls.

Members of tribes are embroiled in disputes over just who is a tribe member (and thus, who can share in the bounty). In California, one fifth of the 61 tribes there with gambling agreements are in membership disputes. (The more members, of course, the less casino profit per person.) One band in Kansas is even considering DNA testing to cull its membership. …

But getting Congress to tighten up the recognition process no doubt is stymied by the fact that gambling interests have thrown millions into congressional campaign coffers.

There are a number of links to related stories in the Monitor sidebar.

War dead photo story continues

The flag-drapped coffin story is in both The New York Times

The Pentagon’s ban on making images of dead soldiers’ homecomings at military bases public was briefly relaxed yesterday, as hundreds of photographs of flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base were released on the Internet by a Web site dedicated to combating government secrecy.

The Web site, the Memory Hole (www.thememoryhole.org), had filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year, seeking any pictures of coffins arriving from Iraq at the Dover base in Delaware, the destination for most of the bodies. The Pentagon yesterday labeled the Air Force Air Mobility Command’s decision to grant the request a mistake, but news organizations quickly used a selection of the 361 images taken by Defense Department photographers.

The release of the photographs came one day after a contractor working for the Pentagon fired a woman who had taken photographs of coffins being loaded onto a transport plane in Kuwait. Her husband, a co-worker, was also fired after the pictures appeared in The Seattle Times on Sunday. The contractor, Maytag Aircraft, said the woman, Tami Silicio of Seattle, and her husband, David Landry, had “violated Department of Defense and company policies.”

and the Los Angeles Times

A website dedicated to publishing censored pictures and documents released dozens of photographs of coffins containing American war dead, which caused the Pentagon on Thursday to renew its ban on releasing such images to the media.

Pictures of flag-draped coffins filling aircraft cargo bays and being unloaded by white-gloved soldiers were obtained by Russ Kick, a 1st Amendment activist in Tucson who won their release by filing a Freedom of Information Act request.

Update on flag-draped coffins photograph

The contract employee who took this photo

Coffins-thumb.jpg

was fired Wednesday for violating U.S. government and company regulations. Fair enough, rules are rules.

But NewMexiKen’s question is — why was she the only source of coverage for this side of the war?

Update: The Memory Hole has 361 USAF photos of coffins from Iraq arriving at Dover Air Force Base. The photographs were acquired through the Freedom of Information Act.

Problems ahead

From AP via the Los Angeles Times, State Panel Urges Ban on 15,000 Voting Machines:

California should ban the use of 15,000 touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems from the Nov. 2 general election, an advisory panel to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley recommended today.

By an 8-0 vote, the state’s Voting Systems and Procedures Panel recommended that Shelley cease the use of the machines, saying that Texas-based Diebold has performed poorly in California and its machines malfunctioned in the state’s March 2 primary election, turning away many voters in San Diego County. …

[Chairman and CEO Walden W.] O’Dell said the … company remains confident the machines are safe and secure.

California panel members, however, disagreed. They cited a litany of alleged problems with Diebold in recent months, including its sale of machines to the four counties without federal and state certification, last-minute software fixes before the March election, installing uncertified software in voting machines in 17 counties and still lacking federal approval for its newest voting machines for the November election. They also expressed fears the systems are vulnerable to security breaches.

“In my view we need a clean slate with this vendor,” said panel member John Mott-Smith, chief of the state’s elections division. “Most of the big problems in the March election came with Diebold equipment. People did not get to vote because these things did not function and that’s not acceptable.”

I’m shocked, just shocked

E! Online’s Ask the Answer B!tch has the lowdown on The Apprentice:

The B!tch suspects … that plenty of what goes down on reality-TV shows involves some sort of doctoring–deceptive editing, sinister voice-over work or other such studio magic.

How accurate is my hunch? Consider the latest quasi-real sensation The Apprentice. Bowie Hogg, the jolly Texas contestant, dished me up some lowdown on the show. That feller loves ever-body, but he ain’t afraid o’ spillin’ the chili beans about what really went on at Trump Tower.

Here are just a few facts:

• The boardroom and the suite both lie on the fourth floor, not on separate floors, as all those elevator rides suggest. Contestants rode up and down the elevators to give the behind-the-scenes folks time to move equipment between shoots, which allowed them to use fewer camera crews. “It was just [producer Mark] Burnett trying to save some money,” Hogg says.

• Fired Apprentices never crawled straight from the boardroom to a taxi waiting on the street. Instead, at the beginning of the contest, producers filmed each contestant walking out to the street and into a taxi. That way, the pesky press couldn’t camp outside Trump Tower every day and see who was getting axed.

• Some contestants never actually heard the scathing criticisms Trump seemed to spit at them in the boardroom.

For instance, in the episode where Trump fires Hogg, the Combover Mogul blasts the young cowhand for failing at the black, black art of marketing. When Trump delivers that sting, the camera captures not Trump’s lips but Hogg’s reaction. The reason: Trump actually delivered the critical bitch-slap later–in a sound booth.

Apprentice to American Idol, our Reality Checkpoint is the place for tales of true TV Hogg says that during his actual firing, no one explained why he was booted, and he hasn’t had a chance to ask Mr. Trump about it since.

Okay, halt. Before you dash off that indignant letter to NBC honcho Jeff Zucker about his wanton diddling with the time-space continuum, know that pretty much all reality-TV shows pull similar stunts:

The Answer B!tch continues about other reality shows.

‘Fuller disclosure’ — that would be ‘yes’ rather than ‘no’

Update from The Santa Fe New Mexican on the state senate candidate who failed a true-false test Monday.

State Senate candidate Letitia Montoya on Tuesday apologized for “not making a fuller disclosure” about a past drunken-driving conviction when asked at a political forum this week whether she had ever been arrested for driving while intoxicated.

Montoya said she knows her answer “raises an integrity issue for me, especially with voters who do not know me personally.”

Using written questions from the audience, a moderator asked all District 25 candidates whether they had ever been arrested for DWI. All candidates, including Montoya, said no.

Truly the Indians have well-named Oklahoma the ‘beautiful land’

The preceding post provides the historical context — that is, to say, the lifeless background — for the Oklahoma land rush. NewMexiKen urges you to read The Rush to Oklahoma by William Willard Howard, an article from Harper’s Weekly published less than a month after. To entice you to click, I provide the following excerpt:

In its picturesque aspects the rush across the border at noon on the opening day must go down in history as one of the most noteworthy events of Western civilization. At the time fixed, thousands of hungry home-seekers, who had gathered from all parts of the country, and particularly from Kansas and Missouri, were arranged in line along the border, ready to lash their horses into furious speed in the race for fertile spots in the beautiful land before them. The day was one of perfect peace. Overhead the sun shown down from a sky as fair and blue as the cloudless heights of Colorado. The whole expanse of space from zenith to horizon was spotless in its blue purity. The clear spring air, through which the rolling green billows of the promised land could be seen with unusual distinctness for many miles, was as sweet and fresh as the balmy atmosphere of June among New Hampshire’s hills.

As the expectant home-seekers waited with restless patience, the clear, sweet notes of a cavalry bugle rose and hung a moment upon the startled air. It was noon. The last barrier of savagery in the United States was broken down. Moved by the same impulse, each driver lashed his horses furiously; each rider dug his spurs into his willing steed, and each man on foot caught his breath hard and darted forward. A cloud of dust rose where the home-seekers had stood in line, and when it had drifted away before the gentle breeze, the horses and wagons and men were tearing across the open country like fiends. The horsemen had the best of it from the start. It was a fine race for a few minutes, but soon the riders began to spread out like a fan, and by the time they had reached the horizon they were scattered about as far as eye could see.

The Oklahoma land rush…

was on this day in 1889. Encarta, the Microsoft encyclopedia, has the background.

By the 1880s most of the arable, well-watered land west of the Mississippi had been settled by whites, and land-hungry settlers began to argue that the Indian Territory should be opened to white settlement. Treaties and federal laws protected the ownership rights of Native Americans there, but railroads, homesteader associations, and other business interests initiated a campaign to eliminate the legal obstacles to white settlement. In 1879 professional promoters, called boomers, organized so-called Oklahoma colonies, or communities of home seekers, in northern Texas and southern Kansas and illegally entered Indian Territory. Although ejected each time by U.S. Army patrols, white attempts to settle in the Indian Territory won national attention. President Rutherford B. Hayes even issued proclamations in 1879 and 1880 forbidding settlement in the territory. Violations occurred frequently, and agitation for the opening of the lands to whites increased.

In early 1889 the U.S. Congress finally yielded to the settlers’ demands and opened 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) in central Indian Territory known as the Unassigned Lands. The number of home seekers far exceeded the available land, so the government decided to have settlers line up at the border and simply run to claim land after the signal was given. Many settlers, called sooners, snuck into the Unassigned Lands ahead of time. Many were ejected; but others avoided discovery. On April 22, 1889, 50,000 home seekers gathered on the borders of the Unassigned Lands. At the signal the race for claims began with a burst of speed, and by evening nearly every homestead and town lot in the settlement zone had been taken.

Has he seen the map?

The always thoughtful Billmon points out that by simply looking at a map of the Middle East:

you’d be hard pressed not to conclude that defending [Iraq] against external threats would be extremely difficult, and probably impossible, and that a breakdown of political and military control within its borders would create enormous security risks both for its occupiers and for its neighbors. …

This chain of thought left me with a joke, dating from World War II, which I picked up somewhere. It seems a German general and his mistress are indulging in a little pillow talk one night, when he lets slip the fact that the Fuehrer has decided to invade the Soviet Union — Operation Barbarossa.

The mistress, who’s no smarter than she needs to be, is a little vague on the details of European geography. So the general takes her into his study and shows her his wall map. He points out the enormous red expanse of the USSR, and the smallish brown patch that is Germany.

The mistress examines the map with dismay, then worriedly asks her paramour: “But liebling, has the Fuehrer seen this map?”

Court Halts Yosemite Park Plans

From The Washington Post:

A federal appeals court has ordered the National Park Service to halt its ambitious plans to reshape public access in Yosemite Valley after concluding that some construction projects underway could harm the Merced River.

The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which was issued late Tuesday, has thrown a long-delayed $441 million blueprint designed to transform the visitor experience in Yosemite National Park into turmoil, again.

After decades of contentious debate, park officials had just embarked on the new master plan, which they a call a back-to-nature campaign to limit or change human activity in ways that better protect Yosemite’s many natural wonders.

But some environmental groups contend that the proposed renovations would imperil, not enhance the natural splendor of, Yosemite and the Merced River, which runs through the park. The groups filed a lawsuit to stop the valley plan but were rebuffed last month in federal court. Their appeal of that decision led to Tuesday’s ruling.

Should improve service

From the Arizona Daily Sun:

The [Arizona] House of Representatives voted Wednesday to repeal laws which prohibit people who are armed from going into bars, restaurants and other places where alcoholic beverages are sold.

Wednesday’s 32-17 preliminary vote came after Rep. Randy Graf, R-Green Valley, agreed to a provision which says that those who have weapons cannot drink. He said that should satisfy foes who insist that guns and alcohol do not mix.

Did NewMexiKen misunderstand something or wasn’t there a long struggle in the west in the late 19th century to keep guns out of businesses? Could it be that they learned then that there were problems with guns and groups of people in public places?

Tribal question: Who is a Navajo?

From The Arizona Republic:

The Navajo tribe is considering making it easier to be a Navajo.

A proposal to lower the minimum blood requirement from one-quarter to one-eighth is being debated this week in the Navajo Nation Council, the governing body of the largest tribe in the United States. If approved, membership could double, increasing to more than 600,000 from about 310,000. …

Tribal membership across the country has become controversial as some people clamber to join to get in on per capita casino payments.

“For those highly successful tribes, with new riches of gaming, people want to enroll,” said Peterson Zah, former chairman and president of the Navajo Nation.

But the tribe has no casino, no individual payments to members, and Zah said he believes this proposal is more about recognizing successive generations of those who have married outside the tribe and making sure all community voices are counted in votes.

“This is a response to so many of our tribal members who are intermarrying with other nationalities,” said Zah, an adviser on American Indian affairs to the president of Arizona State University. “We are in the same situation as many other tribes that have had to redo their qualifications.”

The article from The Arizona Republic continues, discussing both sides of the Navajo issue and providing the larger historical context for Indian tribal membership.

iPods and TurboTax

Mossberg’s Mailbox has some useful information today in response to these two questions:

I have ordered an Apple iPod music player, and now need to convert my song files, which are in a format called WMA that the iPod can’t play. All of these files came from CDs I own and were created with Windows Media Player. How can I convert them to a format the iPod can handle?

How do I remove TurboTax for Windows from my computer?

Mossberg also has a buyer’s guide for new PCs.

Jack Nicholson…

is 67 today.

Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award 12 times, eight times for best actor in a leading role and four times for best actor in a supporting role. He won for best actor for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1976) and As Good As It Gets (1998). He won for best supporting actor for Terms of Endearment (1984). Nicholson has been nominated for an Oscar for films made in the 60s (Easy Rider), 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s (About Schmidt).

The best actress Oscar went to a co-star each time Nicholson won — Louise Fletcher for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Shirley MacLaine for Terms of Endearment and Helen Hunt for As Good As It Gets.

According to IMDB, Nicholson “was raised believing his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his older sister. The truth was revealed to him years later when a Time magazine researcher uncovered the truth while preparing a story on the star.”

Wrongful-death update

From the Albuquerque Tribune:

A federal judge ruled [Wednesday] that the government was negligent on two of three counts in a wrongful-death case involving a drunken U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs worker who killed four people in a head-on car wreck.

But U.S. District Judge William “Chip” Johnson ruled in favor of the government on one count and said he needed up to 30 days to rule on what monetary damages, if any, to assess.

In his ruling in the non-jury trial in Albuquerque, Johnson said the BIA was negligent for entrusting a vehicle to Lloyd Larson, and for keeping him on the job when he should have been fired.

But the judge also ruled that Larson was not acting within the scope of his employment when he crashed his government-owned pickup truck head-on into a car on Interstate 40 on Jan. 25, 2002. Larson, who inspected construction projects on Indian reservations, had a blood-alcohol level of more than 2 1/2 times the state’s legal limit several hours after the crash.

See previous NewMexiKen posts on this case here and here.

Deadwood death count

After eight killings in the first episode and two in the second, the death count on Deadwood has slowed considerably. There was only one killing in Episode 3 and one more (Wild Bill Hickok) in Episode 4. No one was killed in the most recent show.

At this rate they’ll be drinking milk and building a church in a few more weeks.

Deadwood nugget

From the HBO series Deadwood web site:

Rumor has it that the tradition of spreading saw dust on the floors of bars/saloons started in Deadwood due to the amount of gold dust that would fall on the floor. The saw dust was used to hide the fallen gold dust and was swept up at the end of the night.

More on wrongful-death case

The Albuquerque Tribune continues its coverage of the wrongful-death lawsuit involving an intoxicated government employee in a government-owned vehicle. Four people were killed in the accident that resulted when the truck driven by the employee went east on westbound I-40. Testimony in the trial is nearing completion.

(The employee is already serving a 20-year prison term; this case is an attempt to recover damages from the government.)

According to the Tribune report, the government’s attorneys claim that the employee avoided work the day of the accident because he knew the penalty if he showed up intoxicated. Here is what he did instead that day (January 25, 2002):

6:55 a.m.: Lloyd Larson checks out of Super 8 Motel at I-40 and Coors exit. Calls in sick; work begins at 7 a.m.

7 a.m.: Calls Albuquerque girlfriend Lucy Apache.

7:30 a.m.: Arrives at Apache’s daughter’s home near Marquette Avenue and Tennessee Street Northeast. Uses Apache’s cell phone to call job site to say he’s sick and won’t be in. Plaintiff’s attorneys say he may have added he’d be in later.

10 a.m.: Apache leaves; Larson sleeps in his government truck outside her apartment.

11 a.m.: Calls Apache.

11:24 a.m.: Gets cash from ATM at 5600 Lomas Blvd. N.E.

11:55 a.m.: Purchases 12-pack of Bud Light at Smith’s on Coors Boulevard. Clerk reports he does not appear intoxicated.

Noon hour: Orders food to go at Laguna Travel Center Dairy Queen. Cashier says he smells of alcohol and is staggering.

12:30 p.m.: Arrives at To’hajiilee home of Martin Yazzie, asks for home of “Alonzo.” Yazzie gives directions.

After 12:30 p.m.: Leonard Platero Jr. veers off to miss Larson driving in center of road in To’hajiilee, attempts to report to local police. No one is at substation.

1:45 p.m.: Platero sees Larson at Canoncito Grocery Store in To’hajiilee. Larson appears “wobbly” and smells of alcohol, he says. Platero tries again to report Larson to police – again, no one is there.

1:53 p.m.: Larson drives west on eastbound lanes of Interstate 40 near Laguna Pueblo, nearly hitting 37 oncoming vehicles before slamming head-on into Cadillac containing Edward “Bud” and Alice Ramaekers and Larry and Rita Beller.

Source: Testimony, court records in Ramaekers wrongful death lawsuit.

Look here to see what Larson and his bosses had been up to for the preceding 16 years.

Well, there goes the Pottery Barn vote

From the St. Petersburg Times:

Could invading Iraq really have anything in common with sending a wine glass crashing to the floor while browsing at Pottery Barn?

Absolutely not, say the folks at Pottery Barn, who are miffed by a metaphor attributed to Secretary of State Colin Powell in a new book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. The book debuts in bookstores today.

Supposedly Powell warned Bush that if he sent U.S. troops to Iraq, “you’re going to be owning this place.” That was based on what Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage called “the Pottery Barn rule” of “you break it, you own it.”

The real Pottery Barn has no such rule. And it’s a bit weary of Powell’s remarks being quoted in newspaper and television reports the last few days.

“This is very, very far from a policy of ours,” said Leigh Oshirak, public relations director for the brand, owned by Williams-Sonoma Inc. of San Francisco. “In the rare instance that something is broken in the store, it’s written off as a loss.”

Link via Wonkette.

Viewing the world

On Saturday, March 20, more than 180 photographers in 40 countries around the world celebrated the Equinox by creating QuickTime VR Panoramas. The World Wide Panorama web site lets you see the results.

A VR panorama (VR for virtual reality) is a specially created computer image that goes all the way around the viewer. It is a revolutionary way to document a particular place and — the next best thing to being there.

VR panoramas are interactive. Use the mouse to rotate the panorama, use Shift and Control to zoom in and out. Some VR panoramas are cylinders, 360° around but with limited vertical view. Others are cubic (or spherical), with a view that can go straight up and straight down, as well as all the way around. There are also VR objects, where the viewer circles around an object of interest.

To view the panoramas on this site you will need QuickTime. If QuickTime is not already installed on your computer you can obtain it (free, versions for both Windows and Macintosh) from Apple Computer.