Since this week Rod Grams complained that Rep. Oberstar has spent too much time in Washington lately, I decided to look at where Rod the dairy farmer has been the last few years. Now I have a question....How does one do barn chores from K Street in Washington D.C. ? : http://sopr.senate.gov/cgi-win/m_opr_viewer.exe?DoFn=3&LOB=GRAMS,%20RODNEY%20R.&LOBQUAL==Rod....Dairy farmer and lobbyist? I personally like the fact he was lobbyist for Brown and Williamson tobacco. Maybe next week he'll show up at an American Lung Association picnic and talk about health care reform. He lobbied for Patton Boggs, famous for its push for oil drilling on the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge( Anwr for short). So Rodney....apparently you need to be reminded of where you have been the last few years. The best part is one of his hacks went on a local radio show to complain about this...Brad Bennett's show to be specific. Brad portrays himself as protector of the taxpayers, but his record...hmmm :http://www.snowbizz.com/ExcessLevy/carwreck.htm. After this I am going to start a new fund for republican memory research. I'll make sure it doesn't use embryonic stem cells so they can feel reassured.

Tony Lourey is running for senate down in Minnesota's 8th district. A good guy....here's his website: http://www.tonyloureyforsenate.org/.

Foolish "Sportsmen for Bush". I still see those fading bumperstickers occasionally, though it seems more and more of them are scraped off. I wonder if they realize now what they were voting for. It seems two years ago I was surrounded by these things, almost always on a pick up. Whenever I'd talk to someone who had these things, often a buddy, it would get murky. Why do you have it?, I would ask. Because the democrats always want gun control....So have you looked at their platform?...no....So how do you know this?..the deer in the headlights look would come over them ( I know it well, having taken out five deer with vehicles). Next would come some drivel they had almost always picked up in a magazine or from a radio show. They actually never had an idea on what a candidates actual record and policies were. Bush likes to hunt they would say....Then I would point out it was canned hunts, on his private lands in Texas, where they have no public lands...mostly him getting out of a truck and shooting at birds chased up by someone else paid to do the job. I would bet them fifty dollars he had never cleaned an animal in his life. They always shagged off the bet. Still they would go on....it was more or less a continuation of ignorance, stuff I have heard all my life. (Being a hunter and fisherman, and working in the natural resources field have taught me much about our school system's failures when it comes to basic biology. Let me say this to everyone: There is no such animal called a black panther, especially in the midwest, and don't call the office to report it anymore) Ranting and raving about liberal volvo drivers drinking lattes and saving wolves, anecdotes about vegetarians, the evils of government and the inherent goodness of any pickup driver with a gun.


I was once more critical of my fellows, but now I realize they are often just stupid or gullible, most often the latter.

The first complaint you will often hear is about the lack of game. whether its a proponent of quality deer management ( called the "we want bigger horns" party) with their cult like obsessions, or a call in guy complaining about the Indians taking all the big walleyes out of Mille Lacs, what you almost always hear is sincere delusion or the zenith of neanderthal reasoning. There is only so much habitat. There are only so many duck producing wetlands. When there are ten thousand boats on a lake during opening morning, it is going to take a slice out of the population. When a lake is entirely surrounded by cabins, and the weed beds and shorelines are disrupted, not as many northerns will be spawning. And when 20 percent of those are removed in a year by overfishing.....well, there are are only so many; next year, there will be less northerns and more stunted bluegills. That is the law. You can't avoid it. Biological laws are as stern as the laws of physics. Jump off a 600 foot cliff, I guarantee you will impact at close to 160 miles an hour. Degrade and overfish a 300 acre lake, and you will go from northerns and walleyes to stunted sunfish and bullheads. It will happen. Somehow, strangely, it seems most people, including sportsmen, don't see that. Somehow someone else is always to blame. Wolves. The DNR. Indians. It is never me and my buddies, using atv's in habitat already degraded by logging roads ( roads do influence and degrade habitat...don't even try to deny it) taking an extra deer, my buddy down the road poaching, the new housing development abutting the formerly duck producing wetland, the pollution we make....I can go on and on.

I do most of my fishing by canoe....all my hunting is done on foot, without an atv ( as do most of my friends and cousins), and more often than not without a stand. Two years ago I shot three deer in sixteen hours, on foot, all with black powder. I am still fairly young, but often I feel like an anachronism. There are no special gimmicks...it is all hard work and knowledge of things like wind, animal habits and observing the landscape. It is knowing the water and the fish. And it is expectations, which I consider the most important. And this is what I see that lies behind the Sportsmen for Bush" stickers.

Today I drove by two places selling ready-made camouflaged stands on sale for over a thousand dollars. This fall, I will watch as highway 53 loads up with hunting parties carrying and using enough fuel and equipment for a company of troops. There will be scent trapping ghillie suits, rifles sighted in repeatedly for 300 yard shots, four atvs and enough liquor to overwhelm the crew of a destroyer. Grunt calls. Apple licks. Areas arrayed with cameras and special clover food plots. Stands built to seal out the weather.

This is what hunting and fishing have become for most people. A reflection of their lives as collectors of things, not of experiences. Of technological obsession, and not of learning new skills and acquired knowledge. Of McDonald's type instant gratification rather than the patience and skill that hunting and fishing require. It is in this disconnect that the republicans have learned to exploit. Rather than deal with shrinking and degraded habitat, we will manipulate their macho by talking about guns. Rather than acknowledging that we are destroying habitat everyday by sprawl, we will blame the Indians. And we will tell you we won't take your guns away. Just be prepared to be rich enough to pay to hunt on a private preserve, because that is all that will be left.


So my fellow sportsmen, think deeply. What kind of a world do you want? A world of canned hunts? Of streams without trout because developers were allowed to build next to them and atv'ers are allowed to pass through any way they wish?. These are choices we must make. Ducks cannot breed on a shopping mall parking lot. They need cattails and sedge grasses and populations of small predators limited by wolves. Their nesting habitat can't be disturbed by tractors and atv's. It is just like physics.

The republican record on conservation issues is a horror story. Whether pollution, wetlands, public lands ( they wish to sell everything off to the rich), water quality, oil leases or development, their policies are a disaster. They won't take your guns away, but you won't have a place to use them unless you are a member at a private club.

So think...Please think.

And take off that stupid bumpersticker.

Here's a good one :http://www.gramsforcongress.com/News/08.30.06%20Spying.htm. Someone videotaping a public campaign event is now an act of aggression. They accuse Oberstar of sending campaign staffers to "intimidate and bully the public" according to their public feedback. This is good stuff. I hear things like this everyday from people wearing aluminum foil hats. I like the public feedback part....I will assume that by the public they mean camera shy republicans. I'd be camera-shy too with whack job stuff like this coming out of a campaign. (I'll just mention the results of the last six years while they've been running things, the one big reason they should crawl into a hole somewhere). I like the part about Rod not being intimidated about being in front of a camera. Now there's bravery. I'm impressed. I'll tell the local teenagers how brave they are for filming themselves tomorrow ( Maybe then they'll stop trying to get me to watch their goofball bike crashes).

This is also part of the rightwing's pattern the last two decades. Indignancy. A good fancy word. Say it with an english accent. Really what they do is whine over things that aren't happening because in their world, they are always oppressed. They are oppressed in college because someone tells them they might be wrong. They are oppressed by senior citizens who actually dare question them on social security and call them liars. Any questioning of them is seen as oppression. I'll remind them that reality exists. Now they are oppressed because someone actually films them at a public campaign event.

I'm going to make a suggestion to the Grams campaign. Stop trying to create false controversy. This is a great old republican tactic: We know we are losing on actual issues like wages and health care so we'll create something the press will latch onto, like this. It'd be good if it wasn't so incompetent and pathetic. They are truly getting desperate.