My two days at Harrah’s Joliet were awesome, so much so that I intend to go there whenever I need to get away for a bit.

When I lived in Nevada and worked in a casino, gaming establishments became a run-of-the-mill sort of thing, nothing special, day-to-day, etcetera, etcetera.

Since then (over ten years ago), I’d only gone into casinos during a two week visit to Atlantic City back in 1998. It was still pretty much same-old, same-old, except I enjoyed the Boardwalk and the Jersey shore atmosphere, falaffel and funnel cakes (yum!). If you’ve never had a funnel cake, you have no idea!

However, visiting Harrah’s in Joliet nine years later was another story entirely.

First, I have to say that having stayed in a gazillion hotels over the last few years, I found the staff at Harrah’s to be the friendliest, most customer oriented I’ve ever met, folks who really bend over backwards (figuratively, don’t start!) to make sure a guest has a flawlessly fantastic time.

It turned out that the only room service they provide is for alcoholic beverages, but if a guest wants to dine in the room, people who work strictly behind desks would be more than glad to deliver a meal from any restaurant in the house (I didn’t take them up on it, but the offer was there).

Even the pit bosses are outgoing and affable, and all employees make a point of learning your first name and interacting on a friendly basis. They all remember all the customers’ names, even at a crowded bar or craps table, it’s amazing.

Speaking of craps, here’s a bit of history: The game, originally called “galloping dominoes”, was invented in New Orleans in the late 1800s by a Frenchman. The slang for Frenchman was crapeaux, meaning “toad-frog”, and that name became the popular name for the game, then was eventually shortened to simply “craps”.

Between visits to the dice tables, I spent some time drinking at a long bar at the back of the casino that had multi-game slots built into the bar. Whenever I was there, I played $1.00 video bonus poker, and sort of lucked out by finding a good machine at the first stool I occupied — no royals, but lots of playing longevity between inserting C-notes in the slots ($5.00 max bets per hand). It’s not the same as it was during my last visit to a casino, instead of coins filling a tray when you cash out, you get a validation slip that can either be inserted in other machines for play or redeemed for folding money at a cashier’s window. I must admit that it’s weird to me to be in a casino without hearing the cacophony of thousands of coins clattering incessantly into hundreds of slot trays.

“Progress” marches on…

I didn’t get to try their best restaurant, I felt my time was better spent gambling, though I did do the buffet the first day. It was adequate, but unfortunately it was an inordinately slow Wednesday evening and the food had gotten a bit old, and tasted such. Bummer. The steam tables are divided into several different types of cuisines, and of all, I enjoyed maybe two items.

However, Ace’s, a cafe/snack bar located in the casino itself puts out a good roast beef and peppers sub, and is open 24 hours. They have free coffee ’round the clock, but alas, it tastes almost as cardboardy as the coffee bags provided with the in-room coffee maker. However, there is a Starbuck’s on the premises, and being the improviser I am (staying at beaucoups hotels teaches one many useful things) as well as a lover of coffee, I had them grind me a pound of “house” and absconded with a stack of their “official” napkins which, properly applied, double well as filters for said in-room coffee makers. Housekeeping, as customer service intensive as the rest of the staff, provided me with a sufficient number of condiment packets to make it work.

If you want a decent cup of coffee in the casino proper, get it at the above mentioned bar.

Anyone who’s read my blog for a couple of years knows of my travails with hotel Internet access. Well, after a few minor problems at first (no fault of Harrah’s, the outside ISP they use mistakenly classified my room as a meeting room rather than a guest room, and once the error was addressed it was smooth sailing), their wireless access was impeccable, on a par with that flawless access I experienced at the Lenox in Boston some time back. I was majorly impressed.

Among the differences between Nevada casinos and Harrah’s Joliet are that at the latter there are no live poker or keno parlors and there is no race and/or sports book. I was told that these are not approved by the Illinois state gaming board. State law also forbids them from serving free alcoholic beverages (wow!), period, and they have to stop serving alcohol altogether at 3:30 a.m. on weekdays and 4:00 a.m. on weekends. The casino itself is closed from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. daily for cleaning. I laughed when a bartender in the casino told me that, thinking that in Nevada, they’ll clean and even do carpentry around you rather than make you stop gambling.

Despite any shortcomings described above, I would profoundly recommend Harrah’s Joliet as a great place for a hotel/casino getaway. The staff there, from gaming to hospitalty, are so exceptional that they make it an awesome experience.

Being as ultra-suburban as they are, they enjoy a large local trade, and at the tables and bars one meets all kinds of down-to-earth, friendly people who frequent the casino as a social focal point. I never felt at all “lonely” at the bars, conversation was consistantly animated and enjoyable.

For the days leading up to my 52nd birthday, I have to give a zillion star rating and now, at going on 5 a.m. on the day, I will say that my visit to Harrah’s Joliet was the best 48 hours I’ve enjoyed for as long as I can remember.

At the moment, I’m kicking back with some coffee and brandy (one of my favorite combinations these days) and listening to some “oldies” ie The Zombies, The Guess Who and The Doors, and contemplating the next couple of days’ activities.

My birthday is coming up (yeah, I’m a Leo, who would’ve guessed?) very shortly, and I want to do something different. The problem, lately, has been that too many people seem to object to my self-imposed semi-retirement, and as a result I’m constantly being drawn into time consuming, mostly pro-bono projects and so forth that dominate hours and days I’d otherwise spend partaking of leisure activities that range from vegetating or bicycling for hours to working on my novel, researching political issues, blogging and visiting the sites of fellow bloggers.

So I have decided to make good my escape for a couple of days to celebrate my birthday a tad in advance, on the spur-of-the-moment — and I do mean spur!

I was just sitting here listening to music when I abruptly (impromptu, whatever) picked up the phone and made reservations for two days/nights at Harrah’s in Joliet, starting this coming afternoon. I haven’t enjoyed the casino atmosphere and played craps for some time, so it should be a lot of fun and nostalgic to boot. I’ll stop at my bank before I leave and pick up some cash for gaming, then head to Joliet.

Joliet is a drab, ugly town that once hosted a prison (remember The Blues Brothers?), but their Harrah’s seems to be an oasis of sorts — though to read the casino hotel’s hype, the droll municipality is “picturesque”, but at least the interior of Harrah’s will prove to be the bastion of perceived resort luxury one finds in all of their establishments, and I see little reason to exfiltrate its perimeters except to return to Chicago on Friday, anyway.

The reservations lady assured me that a) I will have dependable wireless Internet in my room, b) there is good room service, and c) their dice tables pay the same percentages as Nevada casinos do (in some places, payouts on certain games are less).

I’m pretty excited about it all, and though I’m not a habitual gambler, I do love to gamble in a casino on rare occasions. Unless you’ve spent some time at a dice table, you have no idea how adrenalized and fun it can be. Having worked in a casino, I’m also well schooled, having witnessed too many idiots in action and learned from their “mistakes”, in the area of responsible gambling — phase one on that score is not to let the cocktail waitresses get you drunk. Order coffee or soft drinks when you’re at the table, if you plan to play for a few hours. Trust me on this one.

At any rate, I may or may not be online over the next couple of days, time will tell.

Cheers!

…about the price of gas being over $3.00 a gallon at the pump, the cost of heating a home in winter and water year round with natural gas, and the cost of electricity going up as consumption increases, Democrats and Republicans alike. I’ve heard a vicious, nasty, ugly rumor that many on the left blame George Bush. Can you believe that? I mean, Democrats blaming Bush for something. Preposterous!

How could they? It is, after all, the Democrats who are responsible for the lion’s share of our dependence on greedy, terrorist producing countries for oil. They’re the culprits behind energy resources and capabilities laying fallow within the boundaries of U.S. territory and good old American know-how.

I ran across this spot-on commentary by Pete Du Pont in yesterday’s (30 July 07) Opinion Journal, titled Just Drill, Baby that literally brims over with information.

America’s domestic oil production is declining, importation of oil is rising, and gasoline is more expensive. The government’s Energy Information Administration reports that U.S. crude oil field production declined to 1.9 billion barrels in 2005 from 3.5 billion in 1970, and the share of our oil that is imported has increased to 60% from 27% in 1985. The price of gasoline has risen to $3.02 this month from $2 in today’s dollars in 1985.

Washington politicians will tell you this is an “energy crisis,” but America’s energy challenges are far more political than substantive.

First, we are not running out of oil. In 1920 it was estimated that the world supply of oil was 60 billion barrels. By 1950 it was up to 600 billion, and by 1990 to two trillion. In 2000 the world supply of oil was estimated to be three trillion barrels.

I can testify, personally, on the heady days of the late 1970s, when I worked in the offshore “oil patch” for awhile out of Louisiana. I say “heady” because every other week was seven days of party time on “the beach” (in Nawlins) between weeks on the rigs. Back then there was an oil boom in the Gulf of Mexico. Somewhere in the very early 1980s, the oil companies capped most of the wells in favor of keeping our domestic oil in reserve and buying from the Arabs.

Depending on the Mooslims for our main sources of energy and transportation fuel is pretty dumb when there are alternatives. Lately, OPEC went so far as to cap the amount of oil they produce in order to keep prices up.

And there are alternatives.

The U.S. has substantial supplies of oil and gas that could be accessed if lawmakers would allow it, but they frequently don’t. A National Petroleum Council study released last week reports that 40 billion barrels of America’s “recoverable oil reserves are off limits or are subject to significant lease restrictions”–half inshore and half offshore–and similar restrictions apply to more than 250 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. (We consume about 22 trillion cubic feet a year.)

Access to the 10 billion barrels of oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve has been prohibited for decades. Some 85 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas exist on the Outer Continental Shelf, but a month ago the House again, as it did last year, voted down an amendment that would have allowed the expansion of coastal drilling for oil and natural gas. All of which leaves the U.S. as the only nation in the world that has forbidden access to significant sources of domestic energy supplies.

Just as we’re the only country on earth that permits rampant violation of our borders and permits our immigration laws to be made a mockery of, we are the only nation in the world that has forbidden access to significant sources of domestic energy supplies.

Then there are all the other energy ideas Congress wishes to adopt–better energy efficiency for washers, driers, boilers, motors and refrigerators; greater fuel efficiency for cars; and more use of wind, solar and geothermal power generation. Good ideas all–especially more fuel-efficient automobiles–but not substantively or immediately very helpful in meeting the challenge of increasing America’s energy supplies to keep our economy, jobs and prosperity increasing.

To do that we must build many more nuclear power plants and increase our drilling for oil and gas. The NPC report says it takes 15 to 20 years from exploration until production begins, and it costs $3 billion to build an average 120,000-barrel-a-day oil refinery. That is just the opposite of the current congressional policy of reducing oil use, blocking access to existing domestic oil reserves, not increasing nuclear power generation, and touting ethanol as another subsidy for farmers.

Ah, ethanol, ahem…

I’ve already posted on the reality behind the ethanol lie in the past. Evidently, Mr. Du Pont feels the same way I do about it.

Oil, natural gas and nuclear power are the indispensable energy resources to insure the prosperity of America’s economy. But that is not what the congressional leadership thinks. So if we mustn’t drill offshore for oil or natural gas, or build nuclear power plants, what is the politically correct action Congress intends to take?

Increasing ethanol subsidies for farmers is at the top of the list. Ethanol is a politically hot energy substance produced from crops like corn, soybeans, sunflowers and switch grass. Current law requires 7.5 billion gallons to be produced by 2012; the new Senate bill would increase that to 36 billion by 2022.

But ethanol is not a good gasoline substitute. It takes some seven gallons of oil to produce eight gallons of corn-based ethanol–diesel fuel for the tractors to plant and harvest the corn, pesticides to protect it, and fuel for trucks to transport the ethanol around the country. So there is not much energy gain, nor with all the gasoline involved does it help with global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. And ethanol yields one-third less energy per gallon than gasoline, so that mileage per gallon of ethanol-blended auto fuel is less than gasoline mileage.

Ethanol is a politically popular subsidized product. Producers get a 51-cent-a-gallon subsidy and are protected from international ethanol imports by a 2.5% tariff and an ethanol import duty of 54 cents a gallon. These subsidies have brought more than 100 American ethanol refineries into operation, and another six dozen are going to be built, which has nearly doubled the price of corn, raised the cost of beef and other corn-fed livestock, and increased the cost of milk and corn syrup for soft-drink manufacturers.

(Above emphasis mine, though I will add that I disagree with Mr. Du Pont’s intimation regarding man’s activities having any effect on climate change, ie nor with all the gasoline involved does it help with global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, though the Goremongers might give it some thought)

It’s quite obvious that the reason a large number of these people we elect to the Senate and the House pursue lifelong careers in politics is because they wouldn’t last a week in the private sector…at least as businessmen and businesswomen. Corporate shareholders wouldn’t stand for being bankrupted by incompetents the way we Americans tolerate these idiots bankrupting our country, creating unnecessary inflation and squandering our taxes.

this is very definitely the way to go — as a state project, not a federal affair.

When Louis Brandeis praised the 50 states as “laboratories of democracy,” he didn’t claim that every policy experiment would work. So we hope the eyes of America will turn to Wisconsin, and the effort by Madison Democrats to make that “progressive” state a Petri dish for government-run health care.

This exercise is especially instructive, because it reveals where the “single-payer,” universal coverage folks end up. Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is “free” health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.

Employees and businesses would pay for the plan by sharing the cost of a new 14.5% employment tax on wages. Wisconsin businesses would have to compete with out-of-state businesses and foreign rivals while shouldering a 29.8% combined federal-state payroll tax, nearly double the 15.3% payroll tax paid by non-Wisconsin firms for Social Security and Medicare combined.

Talk about ruthless mathematics…

Given the trial and error (hit or miss?) process that seems to accompany the regular dose of Murphy’s Law whenever government descends and the inevitable resulting demand for additional funding via taxes collected from We, the People, I am reminded for some reason of dominoes.

In countries whose citizens “benefit” from socialized medicine, taxes are well beyond oppressive by American standards — and all too much of that is due to the cost of their government administrated health care.

By the time a healthy taxpayer is done being taxed, he/she will have been charged more of his/her hard earned pay by the government than it might have cost for a private HMO — or because he/she is in satisfactory or better physical condition, been, quite simply, ripped off: Perhaps he/she hasn’t felt the need for medical coverage just yet. But he/she must be protected whether he/she likes it or not.

Hmmm…that sounds awfully like a personal choice that belongs exclusively to said taxpayer, not unlike to wear or not to wear a motorcycle helmet, strap on a seat belt, order a blood-rare burger, etc, etc…

But it doesn’t strike me as anything the framers of the U.S. Constitution would have endorsed.

But…back to the issue at hand –

What we have here is a state experimenting with socialized medicine. While I brook none of that bullshit on a federal level, I am a fervent believer in states’ rights; If a collection of idiots living within the confines of their own political subdivision exercise their voting rights to elect leaders of the socialist persuasion, so be it. Look at California.

For that matter, look at what the left is trying to do in Wisconsin (damn, I’d love to deliver a “cheesy” pun, but who wants to kick a state when it be about to be “down”?).

Moving right along,

There’s absolutely no mystery why our greatest complaints are in the arena of government-delivered services and the fewest in market-delivered services. In the market, there are the ruthless forces of profit, loss and bankruptcy that make producers accountable to us. In the arena of government-delivered services, there’s no such accountability. For example, government schools can go for decades delivering low-quality services, and what’s the result? The people who manage it earn higher pay. It’s nearly impossible to fire the incompetents. And, taxpayers, who support the service, are given higher tax bills.

Oh — kay!

Before we buy into single-payer health care systems like Canada’s and the United Kingdom’s, we might want to do a bit of research. The Vancouver, British Columbia-based Fraser Institute annually publishes “Waiting Your Turn.” Its 2006 edition gives waiting times, by treatments, from a person’s referral by a general practitioner to treatment by a specialist. The shortest waiting time was for oncology (4.9 weeks). The longest waiting time was for orthopedic surgery (40.3 weeks), followed by plastic surgery (35.4 weeks) and neurosurgery (31.7 weeks).
As reported in the June 28 National Center for Policy Analysis’ “Daily Policy Digest,” Britain’s Department of Health recently acknowledged that one in eight patients waits more than a year for surgery. France’s failed health care system resulted in the deaths of 13,000 people, mostly of dehydration, during the heat spell of 2003. Hospitals stopped answering the phones, and ambulance attendants told people to fend for themselves.

So now, we have problems on both the buy side and the sell side of government run healthcare.

Bummer.

I don’t think most Americans would like more socialized medicine in our country. By the way, I have absolutely no problem with people wanting socialism. My problem is when they want to drag me into it.

That has got to be the single most perfect definition of belief in the rights of Americans that I’ve ever seen. What happens to we believers in the Constitution once that great document has been violated and pissed upon by our very Congress?

The long and the short of it should be that we can thank our lucky stars that this entire exercise is as it should be, a single state event. The only problems I can envision there are the inevitably tragic probable results for Wisconsin taxpayers and what they would invite: FAILURE.

Failure attracts today’s liberal-ruled Democrats — while socialism has long since proven itself a blatant mistake, these so-called intellectual elites, followers of eco-socio-economic theories based solely on Utopian fantasies, want to repeat this same failure.

On the other hand, ownership of immense bureaucracies also attracts the Democrats, and the number of bureaucracies that would emanate from a parasitic healthcare core would constitute tax money negligently flushed down the commode of liberalism. So what’s new?

…or wait ’til later?

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Thursday blamed the Republican minority for sinking congressional approval ratings, calling recent poll results “a referendum on Republican obstructionism.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) blamed President Bush.

Schumer told reporters that Republicans - who earlier this week blocked a Democratic amendment that would have mandated a troop withdrawal from Iraq, and who in June blocked a comprehensive immigration reform bill - are frustrating Americans who are hungry for change.

That is hilarious!

From the time George W. Bush took his first oath of office as President of these here United States, the Democrats have aggressively obstructed his every agenda, with the notable exception of the amnesty bill a couple of weeks ago, a shared interest of the White House and the Democrats. Even now, they’re in hot pursuit of his nominee for Surgeon General, fighting any chance of confirmation tooth and nail — the Surgeon General for G-d’s sake, an almost entirely ceremonial position!

And all this purely in the name of partisan politics, screw the interests, will and even the safety of the American people.

Since winning the Congressional majority, they’ve thrown almost every iota of effort into continuing to attack Bush and the Republican Party, seeking subpoenas and indictments at every turn for invented transgressions, and continuously hammering away at their cut-n-run ambitions for Iraq. Otherwise, they have made little effort to do the job they are payed to do, that of governing the nation.

Now that their chickens have come home to roost in the form of performance poll results that border on a no-confidence vote, they have the chutzpah to whine that the Republicans (and of course Bush, for whom they always save some blame) are “obstructing” them. It’s all the GOP’s (and Bush’s) fault!

They cite two cases:

The Republicans’ steadfast refusal to support the Democrats’ Iraq surrender agenda and the Republicans’ steadfast refusal to grant amnesty to twenty million criminals who are trespassing in our country.

“The American people are demanding change,” Schumer said. “The one thing standing in the way is the Republicans in the Senate.”

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Idiot!

I can’t caution enough against the successful propagandizing power of the liberal mainstream media, which never stops working to misinform the public on every issue that can be politicized to make George Bush the Snidely Whiplash of global politics.

Now the Democrat controlled Congress, which is running on fumes in the perceptions of American voters, is also fair game, because they’re not browbeating hard enough to convince their Republican colleagues to support the Iraq Cut and Run agenda.

Here’s some hydro-Couric acid courtesy of Newsbusters, for example.

In my opinion, the most WTF!!!?-earning line in the entire article is,

As Couric pointed out how “nearly three out of four Americans say the troop surge is not working, that it’s having no impact, or actually making matters worse,”

…citing “a CBS/NYT opinion poll”.

The operative question here is, of course, how the hell do three out of four Americans know anything about what the troop surge is doing?

The answer is they don’t, but the media is feeding them the usual liberal political disinformation which, for three out of four Americans, is probably the only source of news in town. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NPR, NYT, etc, etc…, and they think they know. And of course, what they think they know but don’t forms their opinions.

It really sucks big green donkey… well, suffice it to say that it is somewhat frustrating when one realizes that the lion’s share of U.S. public opinion is compiled via the process of lying to the people and then polling them based on the same lies. Garbage in, garbage out.

There’s a disturbance in the Force First Amendment. It has been created by unscrupulous political partisans taking fraudulent advantage of a perfectly wonderful Constitutional right in an effort to engender opinions among the American public without giving us all the facts. This is not reporting, it is marketing.

In many ways, it’s like news being replaced by spam.

For a breath of fresh air, however, regarding the troop surge, Kimberly Kagan weighed in on the subject in a WSJ Opinion Journal piece back on 11 July, which I had been saving to spring when I thought we’d heard enough defeatist MSM/ Congressional Democrat mallarkey re “the surge”.

In Washington perception is often mistaken for reality. And as Congress prepares for a fresh debate on Iraq, the perception many members have is that the new strategy has already failed.

This isn’t an accurate reflection of what is happening on the ground, as I saw during my visit to Iraq in May. Reports from the field show that remarkable progress is being made. Violence in Baghdad and Anbar Province is down dramatically, grassroots political movements have begun in the Sunni Arab community, and American and Iraqi forces are clearing al Qaeda fighters and Shiite militias out of long-established bases around the country.

This is remarkable because the military operation that is making these changes possible only began in full strength on June 15. To say that the surge is failing is absurd. Instead Congress should be asking this question: Can the current progress continue?

Read the entire article here.

The very idea of Mexico reclaiming the U.S. southwest is one of the dumbest I’ve ever heard –

La reconquista, a radical movement calling for Mexico to “reconquer” America’s Southwest, has stepped out of the shadows at recent immigration-reform protests nationwide as marchers held signs saying, “Uncle Sam Stole Our Land!” and waved Mexico’s flag.

– nothing to do with the possibility or lack thereof of its eventual success, but what could be expected if these ambitions ever did come to fruition.

To figure that out, we need look no farther than Mexico’s history and the track records of their political leadership from the beginning until now.

If these idiots had their way, our southwest would only join the rest of Mexico, inheriting, eventually, its profound corruption and widespread poverty.

Then the usual suspects would resume sneaking in across the altered borders, and the same old immigration debate would once again be recycled, seeking any solution that doesn’t involve enforcing the law.

On another note…

In the event that any readers decide they would like their own geographic change of pace, Brenda has emailed me a novel way to go.

Whenever I read or hear of a hole in our national security network, I tend to rant about it here, sometimes, depending upon its level on the stupidity scale or the negligence index, rather spiritedly. Often when the flaw involves both the Transportation Security Administration and the protection managers employed by U.S. airports, I can’t help but express some grim humour and/or make sarcastic remarks.

I’ve spoken my piece on chemical plants being located inside population centers, the lackluster realities of nuclear power plant security, airport security vulnerabilities due completely to incompetence and irresponsible management, idiots with federal licenses to possess explosives yet no seriously enforced obligations to ensure the security of same, therefore no security, period, and quite frankly, I can only opine that neither the government nor key private sector firms care even a fraction about security compared to their concerns about the “bottom line”.

One thing I’ve learned on my journey through life is that you can never honestly, or at least accurately, say that you’ve “seen it all”. Just as you utter the words, something rather unexpected comes along.

Unfortunately, this same rule applies to the respective depths of human imperfection. I’d say that this unmitigatedly stupid, negligent, unbelievably boneheaded state of affairs proves that just when you think you’ve seen government incompetence at its worst, you’re proven wrong.

Undercover congressional investigators posing as West Virginia businessmen obtained a license with almost no scrutiny from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that enabled them to buy enough radioactive material from U.S. suppliers to build a “dirty bomb,” a new government report says.

Isn’t that nice to know!

Using a post-office box at Mail Boxes Etc., a telephone and a fax machine, the undercover investigators from the GAO obtained the license “without ever leaving their desks,” the report says.

After counterfeiting copies of the license, the GAO undercover agents ordered portable moisture density gauges, which contain radioactive americium-241 and cesium-137 and are commonly used at construction sites to analyze the properties of soil, water and pavement. The investigators ordered 45 gauges — enough to build a bomb with enough radioactive material to qualify as a level-3 threat on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the most hazardous.

3, on a scale of 1 to 5. At least we’ve achieved the middle ground, here. Whew!

The GAO undertook the sting operation at the request of Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), the top minority member of the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, which since 2003 has been examining security gaps at the NRC and other federal agencies that could leave the country vulnerable to biological or nuclear attack.

Thank you, Senator Coleman. It’s good that we have a few Republicans around to mind the shop while all the Democrats in Congress are too busy serving subpoenas and pushing a multitude of Constitutional envelopes in their single-minded endeavors to indict Republicans, from the President to the guy who sweeps, for anything they can sneak through the realms of truth and logic, to donate a few minutes of their time to doing what they’re paid to do and governing the country.

Coleman and other critics say the NRC essentially has ignored warnings for years and has done too little to remedy problems that would make it easier for someone to make a dirty bomb. Coleman called the NRC’s efforts since June 1 “baby steps” that are insufficient and particularly outrageous because the agency has taken so long to act despite having been warned of serious flaws for more than four years.

Not to be outdone,

NRC commissioner Edward McGaffigan Jr. said in an interview yesterday that the agency, while concerned about any security weakness, has had to allocate finite resources to what it thinks are the biggest potential threats to public safety. He said terrorists have looked for relatively simple ways to cause massive death and damage. Devices such as the moisture gauges, he said, pose a relatively low-level risk because they require a vast amount of work to fashion into a dangerous weapon.

The pitiful excuse that “Devices such as the moisture gauges pose a relatively low-level risk because they require a vast amount of work to fashion into a dangerous weapon” is indication enough that the man is nothing more than a career bureaucratic cockroach.

Al-Qaeda has long since proven that it is capable of long-term precision planning (see 11 Sep 01) and more recently we’ve learned that terrorist organizations belonging to the Religion of Peace® are well staffed by professionals with advanced degrees. Applying logic to this, we must conclude that there are also plenty of people in the ranks of the Pedophile’s Disciples who know how to use a soldering iron to technological advantage and/or possess other high-tech skills that can be used, through double or triple staffing and a concentration of combined expertise, to render the “vast amount of work” required a short term job.

Speaking as a security professional (semi-retired), I am most alarmed by the lie — yes, and I mean lie, that has emerged from the mouth of a government agency.

“My sole concern, our sole concern, has been the safety of the American people,” he said.

Bullshit! His sole concern has been keeping his expenses down in order to please the beancounters whose backsides he must sample in order to maintain his own career momentum.

When 50,000 or so of his fellow Americans vaporize and a few hundred thousand more succumb to the horrors of radiation sickness, perhaps he’ll be one of the lucky people who are outside the radius of the event. Good for him. On the other hand, maybe he and his family will be dwelling within the hot-zone.

A little gambling, there…with our lives.

Our own government is going to get us killed.

Although minor amounts of spam comments and trackbacks sometimes make it through, I must register my profound thanks to Akismet, which in the last few hours denied access to its 100,000th (ONE HUNDRED THOUSANDTH!) spambot attack over a period of a mere 6 1/2 months!

I lived in New York during the summer described in this article.

At the time, I was employed in the Loss Prevention Department of a national discount department store chain, working directly for the comptroller of loss prevention, a man named Murray. I spent most of my time travelling out of state, but I happened to be in New York at the time of the blackout, and Murray called me at home the morning after the lights went out to ask me to head over to our South Bronx store and see what kind of shape it was in after the looting of the night before.

I called a co-worker and asked him if he’d like to join me, and the two of us drove over to see what we could see.

The store in question was a three storey building that had contained $16,000,000.00 worth of merchandise (this was 1977, so you may well imagine the dollar value back then vs the amount of inventory involved).

When we arrived, we found that the looters had been quite thorough, they had absconded not only with every last piece of merchandise, but they’d also taken the cash registers, the display racks, the mannequins… in fact, the only screw-up we could ascertain was that they had forgotten to take one shoe from one mannequin (we didn’t sell shoes, but where there was one, there was a pair).

We spent the next several hours in the home office dealing with the paperwork necessary to officially close the store — if those animals had to rip us off like that, we certainly weren’t going to restock the store and carry on with “business as usual”.

Then there was the Son of Sam, of course. Some cops stopped me on the way home from work one night — I was doing a week’s relief for the manager of our Fordham Road store, who was on vacation — for a search of my briefcase and I — and I was somehow required to visit Queens Central Homicide the next day, which was based in the Ozone Park precinct, to talk to one of the detectives on the Son of Sam case and look at composite sketches. Yay! One closely resembled a friend of mine who couldn’t possibly have been the psycho SOB, so I kept my own counsel. Good thing, as he wasn’t David Berkowitz.

The NYPD folks were pretty desperate to catch the mutt, and it was indubitably a day of rejoicing for many when they snatched him up on something so mundane as a parking ticket. But at least they got him, and thank G-d for that.

But all in all, it was a summer we New Yorkers won’t completely forget — at least those of us who are old enough to remember…