Rand Paul had some trouble getting on a flight in Nashville because he didn’t want his junk checked:

The T.S.A. said that Mr. Paul had been screened by a version of its millimeter-wave body imaging device that uses a generic image of a passenger and, if it detects any anomaly, puts a yellow box on the body area that requires greater scrutiny. An alarm was triggered when he was in the machine, which – under administration procedures – required a “targeted pat-down” to see what caused it. But Mr. Paul refused to submit to the pat-down, the agency said.

Last time I flew, on Christmas Day, nearly everyone who went through the body scanners in Tulsa had to get additional screening, including me. I don’t know why everyone else was stopped, but the buttons on my jeans did me in. After the screener was done frisking me, I wished him a Merry Christmas and thanked him for protecting us from jean buttons. He didn’t like that very much.

ProPublica with more on the numerous false positives from the machines.

There are three types of the genus vagrant: the hobo, the tramp, and the bum. The hobo works and wanders, the tramp dreams and wanders and the bum drinks and wanders.

-Ben Reitman in Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West by Mark Wyman.

“It’s a complicated issue of jurisdiction over a Muscogee Creek allotment and procedures to obtain gaming on that allotment while maintaining a good working relationship with our Oklahoma neighbors,” Tiger said.

Video of the whole statement:

Essentially Tiger is opposed to the casino currently because the Kialegees have not applied for or been granted the authority to open a casino on the property under Creek Nation laws. However, he doesn’t have an opinion for or against the casino should it comply with all the regulations.

The Tulsa World story includes this humorous bit on Tiger’s meeting with John Sullivan:

U.S. Rep. John Sullivan, R-Okla., has been publicly opposed to the casino project. Tiger said that a conversation with Sullivan on the topic was like “Indian 101″.

Tiger indicated he did not mean to sound “insulting” but said he talked through several tribal issues with Sullivan, who left the conversation more educated.

From last night’s meeting to oppose the Kialegee casino in Broken Arrow:

In the long-term, Sullivan said, he is considering drafting legislation. “We want to make sure we don’t allow casinos to be built next to neighborhoods, churches and schools,” he said. “We have to fight, fight, fight – get everyone involved – because if we don’t, it will set a precedent” for expanded gaming.

“There’s allotted land all over our community,” he said. “It’s going to open a Pandora’s box all across our great community, all across our great state.”

Doesn’t this attack on the casino ignore basic principles of supply and demand? The Tulsa market already has three major casinos in the immediate area and others within reasonable driving distance, so what benefit would tribes have to opening more casinos in the Tulsa area? If it’s the Creeks, Osages, or Cherokees, any new casinos would only draw people away from the casinos they already operate, and any new tribe that wants to get into the business will have a hard time entering a full market.

Fox 23 asked the Creek Nation about the groundless rumors to build a casino on the site of an Indian smoke shop and the tribal Chief of Staff flatly denies the rumors saying the tribe plans to focus on their RiverSpirit Casino at 81st and Riverside.

Nevertheless Lakin continues to peddle fear about the site while denying it’s fear mongering:

When asked if the rumors circulating earlier this week about a casino being built here was fear mongering, Lakin said, “I don’t know if you can call it fear mongering because what we have in Broken Arrow is something that is actually happening.”

Like the fight in Broken Arrow, Lakin doesn’t think this is the last we’ll hear about possible casino development plans on that eight acre plot of land.

“Oh. I don’t think it’s over.”

The land is now zoned residential and could go to the highest bidder according to Lakin.

“It’s almost casino shopping where a landowner is going out and trying to get a different tribe, a smaller tribe, to put something on a piece of property that’s not even zoned commercial.”

The one thing that’s annoyed me more than anything about the growing controversy over the planned casino by the Kialegee tribe in Broken Arrow is the completely unfounded rumors about casinos spreading across Tulsa once the Kialegees open theirs. The theory goes that once the Kialegees open their casino–which would be on individually held Creek land leased to the tribe–anyone with allotment land will be able to put a casino on the land. The theory is pretty far-fetched and stupid, but the rumors have been flying around Tulsa in the last two weeks and no one’s done more to fuel the rumors than new city councilor Phil Lakin.

Last week, Lakin said he was receiving calls from constituents about a property in South Tulsa that currently hosts an Indian smoke shop. At that time Lakin argued that

“It’s just scary to think that the zoning laws we have in place, and the way the public has set out their neighborhoods, that what they think they’re building their homes and businesses next to is not necessarily what it’s going to be.”

The Tulsa World called the smoke shop and the clerk said there were no plans for a casino on the property. Yesterday, Lakin stepped up his statements, arguing that there were “solid rumors” circulating around South Tulsa about the property, while at the same time admitting he hasn’t talked to the property owners. Later that day Lakin told KOTV’s Emory Bryan that the rumors were coming from a variety of sources–a land owner, an attorney associated with an unnamed LLC, and another unnamed source. The story, which is one of the most hideous pieces of “reporting” I’ve seen in a while, includes a comment by an area resident that she “can’t believe they would allow a casino to be built around an elementary school because when you have a casino you have everything that goes with it like the drinking and the crime.”

The rumors hold about as much credibility as the rumors that other groundwork in Broken Arrow was for a casino. That groundwork turned out to be for a new fire station. It’s sad to see the rumors flying around Tulsa, but it’s even worse that a city councilor is willing to peddle unfounded and stupid rumors.

Sensibility from Dannel:

…Malloy added, Connecticut is not close to landing an NHL franchise. “I don’t lie awake at night wondering how that’s going to happen,” Malloy said. “Because, it’s not going to happen in the short run.”

I attended a game over Christmas break and the crowd was a decent size, but the team is averaging less than 4,500 fans a game. Hartford needs a new arena, but the NHL isn’t going to be part of it.

Someone finally answers why Tulsa has such a big problem with meth “labs:” ¹

Woodward attributed the low number of meth labs found there to a steady supply of methamphetamine from Mexico and elsewhere into Oklahoma City. The meth manufacturers in Tulsa know the process for one-pot labs, making the cheap drug even cheaper for them, he said.

Without combatting the underlying reasons for why people use meth, who thinks drug gangs will simply replace the shake-and-bakers populating Tulsa at the moment?

New York Yankees catcher Jorge Posada is planning to retire, a source told ESPN The Magazine’s Buster Olney.

The source told Olney that Posada, 40, is trying to determine the right time to make an announcement, which is expected to be in the next two weeks.

New Principal Chief George Phillip Tiger on the proposed Kialegee casino in Broken Arrow:

He told members of the media that there is “a lot of misinformation out there.”

The Nation is currently conducting a study on the proposed casino and won’t discuss the issue until that study is finished, Tiger said.

Sounds like the new administration may take a softer line than the previous administration of A.D. Ellis, who vocally opposed the casino before he left office at the end of last year, arguing that the casino would harm the Creek’s RiverSpirit Casino.

The Kialegees are a federally recognized tribe, but also hold citizenship in the Creek Nation.

Dewey makes it into a war:

“What they are attempting to establish in Broken Arrow is a beachhead and we will not stand by and allow developments of this type to happen in our city and across our state,” he said. “Should we have to deal with a similar situation in Tulsa, I believe we would agree this is not a good thing for the city and its respective citizens.”

To make matters worse people are getting paranoid:

Rumors of other potential casinos in south Tulsa and Broken Arrow were plentiful Friday, though none of them could be confirmed.

Tulsa’s meth problem isn’t getting any better:

Nearly half of the 843 meth labs reported to the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 2011 were found within the Tulsa city limits, officials said.

The number of discarded or active labs located by law enforcement set new records for both the city and the state.

The answer to the problem is of course “more tools” (read: prescriptions) and not trying to answer why Tulsa has such a bad problem in the first place.

The opposition to a proposed casino in Broken Arrow has been kicked up a notch:

The company working on the property on which the Kialegee tribe wishes to build the casino says someone cut the fuel truck locks and poured some kind of liquid into the tanks.

The issues surrounding the casino are pretty complex, but a lot of the protests boil down to standard NIMBYism

Maybe:

The delay in refinancing fiscal 2012 maturities is among conditions that “raise substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern,” the Uncasville, Connecticut-based casino operator said today in a regulatory filing. Mohegan said it received a default waiver from its bank lenders yesterday.

Foxwoods also has substantial amounts of debt and the introduction of casinos to Massachusetts isn’t making things any better.

Link via Indian Country Today

The Oklahoman with a truly grim Christmas morning read:

Other workers at the state Department of Human Services have been caught physically abusing children in shelters, taunting mentally disabled adults, stealing from the elderly or sexually harassing co-workers.

These people are the upstanding citizens we employ in the State of Oklahoma:

One worker was disciplined for instigating fights between teenage girls at a group home.

Workers at the state’s two centers for the mentally disabled have been disciplined for cruelly teasing residents, falling asleep on the job, showing up drunk to work and spending time on a state computer looking up porn.

Oh, and sexting:

One employee was having an affair with a co-worker and misusing the state computer to send her sexually explicit messages. He was caught when he emailed a sex message to a supervisor by mistake.

The story doesn’t include this photograph of Serenity Deal that’s included in the Tulsa World’s copy of the article:

The picture was taken after Deal was returned to foster care by her father after an overnight visit. Both the father and Serenity said the injuries came because he dropped her. DHS eventually placed Serenity with her father full time, leading to her death.

Forgive me for linking to Deadspin, but it’s a decent article on putting so much energy into keeping fans apart from one another and not enough keeping them away from the players.

Interestingly, Tulsa had a similar incident this year.

Amazing

Wake up and fight

Pat Forde at Yahoo:

When I was working for ESPN.com in 2008, we arranged an all-access piece with Tulsa for its game at Arkansas. Graham was the coach at Tulsa and the Golden Hurricane were undefeated and ranked 19th in the country at the time – largely because Gus Malzahn was orchestrating an explosive offense. I had full access to Tulsa starting about 24 hours before kickoff – team walk-through at the stadium, meetings at the hotel, on the sideline during the game, in the locker room both pregame and postgame.

Leading up to the game, Graham made multiple mentions of his faith. He led the team in the Lord’s Prayer before taking the field. And when a defensive back blew an assignment on the first series, Graham F-bombed him as viciously as any coach I’ve seen since Bob Knight.

OK, so he’s hardly the first coach to play both sides of the piety-profanity line. What happened postgame is where I lost respect for him. When Tulsa lost a game it should have won (30-23), I was stopped at the entrance to the locker room by a nervous graduate assistant.

“You can’t come in,” he said.

“Yes, I can,” I said. “We already worked this out. Win or lose, I’m in the locker room.”

“No,” the GA said. “Coach Graham doesn’t want you in here.”

The whole thing is a devastating must-read.

Only a year after making his dream to coach at BCS program come true, Todd Graham is bolting for another “dream,” coaching Arizona State. Kicker? He broke the news to his team and staff via text message:

“I have resigned my position at Pitt in the best interest of my family to pursue the head coaching position at Arizona State,” Graham said. “Coaching there has always been a dream of ours and we have family there. The timing of the circumstances have prohibited from telling you this directly. I now am on my way to Tempe to continue those discussions. God Bless. Coach Graham.”

I’m sure having to confront recruits and assistants he lured to Pitt and tell them he was leaving after a year is the more realistic reason for why he sent the text message.

Campus Crime Watch report:

While on routine patrol, an officer observed a vehicle parked in a fire lane and issued a citation. The student returned and got into the car and drove aggressively behind the officer. The student revved his engine and excessively accelerated from a stop sign squealing tires. Due to the erratic driving, the officer was not able to make contact with the student, however the vehicle information was documented and the vehicle was confirmed to be a students. A copy of this report has been sent to the Office of Student Affairs.

If TheNextWeb wants to look on the bright side of this post by Jon Gruber it’s the fact that they got page views from me they never would have gotten if I didn’t want to gape at their “shit-ass site.”

For fairness’s sake, I loaded the site and it only sent 191 requests and 194.11KB of data taking one minute to load. The first two are pretty comparable for any site that bogs itself down with loads of crap (Huffington Post for instance) but the load time is pretty terrible.

For comparison, this site sent 17 requests and 85.22 KB of data taking 1.13 seconds to load.

Great editorial demanding Randy Edsall be fired before he does anymore damage:

Here’s the real reason Edsall should be fired: He doesn’t get it.

He didn’t get it a year ago, when he didn’t have the class to tell his Connecticut players in person that he was leaving. He didn’t get it when he started spouting off about rules as if he had invented the idea of discipline.

Read the rest, it’s brutal and made me so, so happy.

Two packages shipped to me were delivered to the University of Tulsa’s mail room this morning at 9:46, since then they have been held against their–and my–will. While I have been notified I can claim one package tomorrow morning, the other one still remains in the purgatory mail services subjects deliveries to on a regular basis.

If you live in any on-campus housing, whether its a dorm, greek housing, or apartment, all packages are required to be routed through mail services. Once mail services takes delivery of your package, they have to process it and send you can email, only then can you claim your package from them. This process usually only takes a few hours, but on certain occasions the process can spill over into the next day, if not longer. For instance, one of the packages currently in mail services went undelivered from last Wednesday until today because mail services was closed for Thanksgiving. In other words, one package has been held hostage for half a day, the other has sat around in purgatory for five days.

The draconian and stupid policy that bars packages from being delivered directly to on-campus apartments (while pizzas, chinese food, newspapers, and unsolicited phone books get delivered) stems from the previous package delivery anarchy. Before two years ago, deliveries sometimes came to the apartments, some times they didn’t. Some times the delivery person left a note, some times they didn’t. If they left a note, or if you had a tracking code, you invariably showed up at mail services to claim your package only to be told they hadn’t processed it yet and you’d have to check back. The lack of control created headaches for everyone, so instead of coming up with a sensible policy the University went all in, creating the current mess. Now apartment residents, who could easily take deliveries at their residence and reduce the backlog in mail services, are forced to sit around waiting.

So what’s a sensible alternative? Instead of routing all packages through mail services, the University should treat package deliveries to the apartment the same way they treat regular mail. Unlike the dorms on campus, the apartments have their mail delivered directly by USPS, with any packages too big for the mailboxes being delivered to mail services for processing. Deliveries by UPS and FedEx should be handled in a similar vein. Both companies should attempt one delivery to an on-campus apartment before surrendering the package to mail services. If the resident isn’t home to take possession of the package, mail services accepts the package and the student has to wait for the email. The policy would not only increase delivery speed to on-campus apartments, but would reduce the volume of mail mail services needs to process, especially when they return from vacation or an unexpected closing (like last February’s snow storm that shut down the University for a week).

“My pants don’t fit. Look at this bear!” And yes you can actually buy it.

This video pretty much encapsulates the conflicting issues I have with all the Occupy/99% videos to come out over the last few weeks. It ends with cops ambushing a protester from behind and threatening to tase him when he hasn’t shown any violence or willingness to resist (that we can see).

Yet, the protest itself is idiotic. I get the movement hates big corporations and wants them driven out of existence, but can’t we admit Walmart has done a lot of good for the people Occupiers profess to help? Some mom and pop businesses do indeed close when Walmart comes to town, but Walmart and all the other big box retailers haven’t destroyed the small business environment. Plus, Walmart’s low prices not only help lower class families save money, but it also allows people to spend money elsewhere in town.

Reason.tv has a good video on the “war on Walmart” that’s worth checking out.

Let this be a lesson for everyone: Twilight is bad for your health.

Someone alert Don Quixote! Crawford in an interview with the Canadian paper The Intelligencer:

“Toronto could handle another NHL team — probably two more,” said Crawford. “But there are three NHL teams within 90 minutes of Hartford, plus basketball, football and baseball. Winnipeg proved they were a viable market with quite a few sellouts for their AHL team.

“Here, it would be a tough call. The AHL team (the Connecticut Whale) is averaging about 4,000 and their tickets are 10 bucks. For the NHL to come back, you’d need 15,000 people playing 80 to 100 bucks.

The kicker? Crawford manages rinks in the area and helped organize last year’s outdoor Whalers Hockey Fest. Something tells me Crawford’s off the Christmas card list this year.

1970 marked the 350th anniversary of the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock and like usual the residents of Plymouth, Massachusetts were planning the annual Pilgrim’s Progress festival. The festival included a parade and feast, complete with residents in period clothes. The whole affair was a celebration of American progress. Empire, if you will.

Frank James, a Wampanoag Indian, decided to change the agenda for that year’s Thanksgiving. James and other Indians, including the Narragansets and Passamaquoddies, planned to demonstrate in a “dignified and responsible manner” about the repression and poverty endured by American Indians. ¹

Yet the protest wasn’t going to attract much attention without some theatrics. To help bring more attention to the protest, James invited the American Indian Movement (AIM)–a Minneapolis-based Native rights group that had protested on Mt. Rushmore the same year–to join the protest. By the time the protest started at the foot of Massasoit’s statue, over 200 Indians had assembled. James decried the pilgrims that “stole our corn,” and added, “all that love and brotherhood stuff between Indians and white settlers is a lie!” ² Russell Means, a charismatic leader of AIM, implored the white men to listen

Listen. Listen to us, white men. Plymouth Rock is red. Red with our blood. The white man came here for religious freedom and he has denied it to us. Today you will see the Indian reclaim the Mayflower in a symbolic gesture  to reclaim our rights in this country. ³

Sure enough the group retook the replica Mayflower II moored in the harbor. Once on the ship the group lowered the flag of St. George and symbolically raised an upside down American flag. In a “new kind of Boston Tea Party,” only with real Indians, the group dumped pilgrim mannequins into the harbor. ⁴ After being cleared off the ship by local police officers, the group crashed the feast, overturning tables full of food, and dumped sand on Plymouth Rock. The protests concluded that night with another group sneaking back into the area and painting the Rock red.

One little boy, while watching the Pilgrim procession during the festivities that day, turned to his mother and asked, “Where did all the Indians go?” “They’re not part of this,” the mother replied ⁵

Celebrate Thanksgiving and count your blessings, but remember the cost at which your blessing came.

So asks everybody’s favorite religious idiot Pat Robertson.